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Old 25-03-15, 07:23 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 28th, '15

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"The whole notion of the summer blockbuster has always been built around young men. I think we’re about to see that change. The clout and importance of the female audience has never been bigger." – Paul Dergarabedian






































March 28th, 2015




Universal Reportedly Wants Spotify to Scale Back its Free Streaming
Jon Fingas

Spotify might have bent over backwards to lift restrictions on its free streaming service a couple of years ago, but at least one music label appears eager to turn back the clock. Financial Times sources understand that Universal is using licensing negotiations to squeeze Spotify and demand more limits for those who don't pay up, such as restricting the amount of time they can play tunes in a given month. The publisher isn't confirming anything, but CEO Lucian Grainge has lately been chastising the free, ad-based streaming model -- it's no secret that he would like more paying customers. According to one insider, Universal believes that Spotify is directly hurting sales at stores like iTunes.

Whether or not Spotify gives in is another matter. It can't afford to lose one of the major labels, but it's also adamant that having an enticing free tier is crucial to getting listeners to pay. Other music companies, such as Beggars Group, would argue that Spotify is much better than alternatives like YouTube, where there are far fewer limits for free users. And simply speaking, Spotify may have the industry over a barrel -- when streaming is more popular than CDs in the US, pulling a whole catalog could leave a lot of money on the table.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/03/22/u...-free-spotify/





Apple and Beats Developing Streaming Music Service to Rival Spotify
Ben Sisario and Brian X. Chen

In what would be the biggest change to its music strategy in years, Apple is pressing ahead with a sweeping overhaul of its digital music services that would allow the company to compete directly with streaming upstarts like Spotify.

Almost a year after agreeing to pay $3 billion for Beats, the maker of hip headphones and a streaming music service, Apple is working with Beats engineers and executives to introduce its own subscription streaming service. The company is also planning an enhanced iTunes Radio that may be tailored to listeners in regional markets, and, if Apple gets what it wants, more splashy new albums that will be on iTunes before they are available anywhere else, according to people briefed on the company’s plans.

In a sign of how important Beats is in reshaping Apple’s digital music, the company has made a musician a point man for overhauling the iPhone’s music app to include the streaming music service, as opposed to an engineer. Trent Reznor, the Nine Inch Nails frontman who was the chief creative officer for Beats, is playing a major role in redesigning the music app, according to two Apple employees familiar with the product, who spoke on the condition they not be named because the plans are private.

Perhaps most telling for Apple is what its new streaming service will not have: a lower price than rival services.

According to several music executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are private, Apple recently tried but failed to persuade record labels to agree to lower licensing costs that would have let Apple sell subscriptions to its streaming service for $8 a month — a discount from the $10 that has become standard for services like Spotify, Rhapsody and Rdio.

That $2 markdown may be small, but Apple’s failure to secure it reflects a shift in the company’s relationship with the music industry. While Apple once enjoyed enormous negotiating power as the dominant force in digital music — an area it helped pioneer more than a decade ago with music downloads — it now faces an array of new competitors and finds itself in the position of needing to modernize its offerings to catch up to the streaming revolution.

That has weakened Apple’s leverage — and the labels could not be happier about it.

Toni Sacconaghi, a financial analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein, said that Apple’s apparent struggle over lowering the pricing of its music service now was a result of being late to the streaming game.

“They’re used to being a shaper rather than a responder,” Mr. Sacconaghi said. “This is one of the few times where Apple is playing catch-up and not necessarily coming from a position of strength.”

Tom Neumayr, an Apple spokesman, declined to comment or make executives including Mr. Reznor available for interviews.

Apple’s turn toward streaming is a matter of necessity, as listeners increasingly shift from music downloads to streaming. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, downloads generated $2.6 billion in revenue in 2014, down 8.5 percent from the year before. Streaming made $1.87 billion last year, and overtook CD sales for the first time.

As the biggest retailer of music, Apple remains a crucial marketing partner for the music industry. Yet its absence from streaming has let others get a head start. Spotify, which started in Sweden in 2008 and came to the United States in 2011, said in January that it has 15 million paying subscribers around the world, as well as 45 million more who listen free, with advertising. (Apple’s iTunes has more than 800 million customer accounts.)

Exactly how Apple will match Spotify is unclear. Music executives say they have not been shown a prototype of the new streaming service, nor been given much detail on it.

The new music app, which is a collaborative effort between Mr. Reznor and other Apple and Beats employees, including Jimmy Iovine — who founded Beats with the hip-hop star Dr. Dre — will feature the streaming music service with many of the same characteristics as the Beats Music streaming service, one Apple employee said. Those may include curated playlists and a more vivid visual appeal, while conforming to Apple’s sleek and minimal design aesthetic, one person said. The name Beats Music will most likely be shed.

According to an Apple employee, the service is being tested as part of a new version of the company’s mobile software system, iOS, which has been given the code name “Copper” and is expected for public release this year.

Mr. Iovine has set the tone of the transformation of Apple’s music plans, according to music executives. Mr. Iovine, who reports to Eddy Cue, Apple’s head of software and Internet services, has been leading aggressive talks to secure prominent album releases that will be exclusive to Apple, akin to what Beyoncé did when she released her self-titled album on iTunes in December 2013. One music executive involved in the negotiations described this part of the new iTunes as “Spotify with Jimmy juice.”

A crucial difference for Apple’s streaming service is that unlike Spotify, it will have no free tier. That has greatly pleased top executives at major music labels, who have begun to complain openly that so much free music has given consumers too little reason to pay for it.

Apple is also expected to overhaul iTunes Radio, the free service that the company introduced in September 2013 as a competitor to Pandora, and which has had little impact on the marketplace. One new player is Zane Lowe, a former BBC radio D.J. known as a trend-spotter. Last month he announced that he would join Apple in Los Angeles, where the Beats team is concentrated.

Mr. Lowe is expected to play a role reconfiguring iTunes Radio. Among the ideas that have been floated for iTunes Radio are a more geographically targeted approach that would bear some resemblance to a traditional radio station, with Mr. Lowe as the voice, music executives said.

Whether or not Beats is a success, it would make just a small dent in Apple’s overall business. Mr. Sacconaghi of Sanford C. Bernstein noted that if Apple’s streaming music service were to make as much money as, say, Pandora, which generates roughly $1 billion in revenue a year, that amount would be less than one half of 1 percent of Apple’s annual $183 billion in revenue.

Ben Bajarin, a consumer technology analyst for Creative Strategies, said that the hope for online entertainment services like Beats is to add more hooks for people to keep buying Apple products. But a music service is just one potential lure among many others in Apple’s offerings, like apps, movies and the iPhone’s operating system.

“In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t trying to be the next big business,” Mr. Bajarin said of Beats Music. “It’s just trying to be an evolution in their ecosystem that has many moving parts, not just one.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/te...l-spotify.html





At the Box Office, It’s No Longer a Man’s World
Brooks Barnes

Heading into the all-important summer moviegoing season, two converging box-office trends are startling studios: Women are driving ticket sales to a degree rarely, if ever, seen before, while young men — long Hollywood’s most coveted audience — are relatively AWOL.

With the release of “The Divergent Series: Insurgent” over the weekend, women have delivered the three biggest live-action openings of the year. The audience for “Insurgent,” which took in an estimated $54 million from Friday to Sunday, was 60 percent female. The opening-weekend crowd for “Fifty Shades of Grey” was 67 percent female, and women made up 66 percent of the audience for “Cinderella.”

It would be easier to dismiss those percentages as a fluke — three big female-oriented movies just happened to arrive in proximity — if a parade of movies aimed at young men had not bombed over the same period. Among the carnage: “Jupiter Ascending,” “Seventh Son,” “Hot Tub Time Machine 2,” “Chappie” and, over the weekend, Sean Penn’s “The Gunman.”

The shift has been noticeable enough to prompt movie executives and producers to ruminate about the causes and consider whether the big film factories should recalibrate their assembly lines. Counting on the stability of young men, studios have nearly 30 superhero movies on the way by the end of 2015, each costing well over $100 million to make. But young men are more easily distracted by other forms of entertainment, and women may now be the more reliable opening-weekend audience.

“You can never put your finger on it entirely, but you have to ask the questions,” said Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution at Warner Bros. “Is this just the cyclical nature of the movie business? Or does it point to a more serious shift in habits?”

The uncertainty comes as Hollywood tries to bounce back from a terrible 2014. Admissions fell 6 percent at North American theaters last year, to 1.27 billion, compared with the previous year; ticket sales declined 5 percent, to $10.4 billion. Ticket sales are up about 4 percent so far in 2015, but the high-risk summer months — packed with male-centric movies like “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Terminator: Genisys” and “Ant-Man” — usually set the pace for the year.

Studios awoke to the power of female ticket buyers in 2008, when the “Twilight” action romances became a global phenomenon. Since then, women have turned films like “The Hunger Games,” “Bridesmaids” and “Frozen” into smash hits. But the muscle of women at the multiplex has recently gone “from sporadic to continuous,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior analyst at Rentrak, which tracks box-office data.

Young men used to be Hollywood’s most reliable audience, in part because they tended to be less discriminating than women. “No story? No problem! As long as people got blown up, guys showed up,” Mr. Dergarabedian said.

But studio research executives say young men are the most likely to be lured by alternative activities like video games, sports and YouTube comedy clips. Research indicates that teenage boys in particular do not want to be told when and where they have to consume entertainment, which makes herding them into a movie theater difficult.

In contrast, “teenage girls still seem to want the experience of going to the movies as a group,” said Terry Press, president of CBS Films, which recently hit specialty film pay dirt with “The DUFF,” an $8 million comedy about a high school pecking order that is closing in on $35 million in ticket sales, overwhelmingly because of female moviegoers.

The recent box-office gyrations also expose a flaw in studio strategy, analysts say. At a time when so many movies turn themselves inside out trying to attract everyone (a plan that could be summed up as “wide and shallow” in industry parlance), it is clearly possible to fill a big tent by picking a couple of demographics, in particular underserved ones, and superserving them (“narrow and deep”).

“Cinderella,” for instance, was not aimed at everyone. But by being a perfect version of something narrower — a costume romance aimed at mothers and girls — “Cinderella” has sold a stout $122 million in tickets in the United States and Canada in just two weeks. (“Empire,” aimed initially at often-ignored African-American viewers, offers a corollary example from television.)

“What has been happening at the box office sends a message loud and clear that you don’t need four quadrants to be a massive hit,” said Phil Contrino, chief analyst at BoxOffice.com. In movie jargon, a four-quadrant movie is one that attracts men and women, young and old; Hollywood considers anyone over 25 to be old.

When it comes to the male-female divide, the recent overreliance by studios on visual effects may play a role. The bar for visual effects has been raised so high, experts say, that nothing less than a prolonged smackdown between a raging Hulk and a supersize Iron Man has much hope of turning male heads.

“You used to be able to go to movies and see something that you never saw before — a giant shark, dinosaurs,” said Allison Shearmur, a producer of “Cinderella” and a former senior executive at Lionsgate, Paramount and Universal. “But spectacular visual effects have become routine.”

Ms. Shearmur continued: “So what does that mean? It means that we’ve got to make more movies that have a compelling core story. The audience still comes when the story is strong, when we can laugh or cry or be afraid in a theater together.”

Mr. Fellman of Warner Bros. predicted that boys would return en masse for coming PG-13 event movies like “Furious 7” and “The Avengers: Age of Ultron.”

“Outside of ‘American Sniper,’ which started older and got younger, and ‘Kingsman: The Secret Service,’ there has been a noticeable lack of young men,” Mr. Fellman said. “But a lot of the so-called guy movies recently have been rated R, and you lose a lot of tweeners that way,” he noted.

Warner will add another R-rated comedy to the mix on Friday with “Get Hard,” which has been generating solid interest from men in prerelease surveys.

But the success of Hollywood’s summer box office may well rest with women. Nestled among the superheroes and action movies are an unusually large number of pictures aimed at a female audience, including “Pitch Perfect 2,” an estrogen-heavy musical comedy; “Spy,” an action comedy starring Melissa McCarthy; “Pan,” a splashy adaptation of the Peter Pan story; and the male stripper sequel “Magic Mike XXL.”

“The whole notion of the summer blockbuster has always been built around young men,” Mr. Dergarabedian said. “I think we’re about to see that change. The clout and importance of the female audience has never been bigger.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/bu...ans-world.html





“Copyright Troll” Perfect 10 Hit with $5.6M in Fees After Failed Usenet Assault

Perfect 10's founder complained of losing millions but took it as a tax deduction.
Joe Mullin

One of the original "copyright trolls," a porn company called Perfect 10, has been slapped with a massive $5.6 million fee award that could finally shut down the decade-old lawsuit factory.

Perfect 10's model has been to sue third-party providers for carrying images of its porn. It hasn't been afraid to go after big targets, either—Perfect 10 even sued Google over its image search, resulting in an appeals court case that made crystal clear that such searches are fair use. Despite that ruling, Perfect 10 went ahead and sued Microsoft on similar grounds three months later.

The company also sued Giganews, a Usenet provider, in April 2011. Perfect 10 pursued claims for both indirect and direct copyright infringement, stating that Giganews employees directly uploaded infringing images onto its network. Giganews ultimately prevailed on all grounds; now, Perfect 10 has been required to pay its substantial legal bill as well.

“Online service providers and Internet companies are under assault from copyright trolls like Perfect 10, but we have followed the DMCA since its inception and are proud to have stood up to the meritless claims of a serial litigator who was hoping for an easy pay day," said Giganews co-founder Ron Yokubaitis in a statement about the fee award.

The order by US District Judge Andre Birotte is a stinging takedown of the tactics used by Perfect 10 and its owner, Norman Zada.

Zada, a former computer science professor and poker player, founded Perfect 10 as a softcore print magazine in 1997, a pretty dicey time in history to start any kind of print magazine. He told the press that he intended the magazine to be a "classy" alternative to Playboy and Hustler, but it never took off.

The Perfect 10 website is still online and advertises "the world's most beautiful natural women." Zada has filed "between 20 and 30 lawsuits" to date, according to Birotte's order.

The company "has lost more than $50 million" to date, but that apparently hasn't been a problem for Zada, because he "is able to deduct Perfect 10's significant losses on his personal income taxes." Zada said that he "needed [Perfect 10] to offset money he made in the market" and wanted the failing company "to represent how small businesses couldn’t make money because of piracy."

In addition to suing over his own content, Zada bought copyrights from others expressly because he believed they'd be helpful in litigation.

Birotte found behavior was "inconsistent with that of a plaintiff interested in actually protecting its copyrights." Zada said he spends "eight hours per day, 365 days per year" on Perfect 10 litigation, but he spends 40 to 50 hours per year—about a week—attempting to "create new artistic content."

Making takedowns tough

Of course, companies are supposed to be protected from this type of litigation as long as they follow the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and respond promptly to copyright owners' concerns. But Zada's "takedowns" ensured that he'd be able to send a lawsuit because his DMCA notices were always fatally flawed. He didn't give enough information to the service provider about where to actually find his images, and then he would sue when the material inevitably remained up.

Zada pursued this strategy at a time when big content companies have mastered the art of mass-produced takedown notices; Google processed 345 million takedown notices last year. In the case against Giganews, Perfect 10 admitted that it could have created a takedown notice "in 15 minutes" that would have removed 90 percent of its content from Giganews' servers, but it refused to do so. Zada said it would be "very easy" for Perfect 10 to create one DMCA notice for about 54,000 messages that contained Perfect 10 content, but Zada dismissed that as "simply helping [defendants] actually remove the material."

In the end, seeing a fee award on the way, Perfect 10 tried to argue that Giganews' request was far too large and reflected a "billing frenzy" on behalf of the company's lawyers. The judge didn't agree. He reduced Giganews' initial request for $6.1 million in legal fees to $5.2 million and gave the company its full-cost award of $424,235.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...senet-assault/





"Unconstitutional": India Supreme Court Scraps Section 66A, Protects Online Freedom of Speech
Amit Chaturvedi

New Delhi: The Supreme Court has scrapped a contentious law that was seen as a major infringement of the freedom of speech online because it allowed the arrest of a person for posting offensive content. Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, has been declared unconstitutional. Describing the law as "vague in its entirety," the judges said, it encroaches upon "the public's right to know."

The law had been challenged first by a law student named Shreya Singhal after two young women were arrested in 2012 for posting comments critical of the total shutdown in Mumbai after the death of Bal Thackeray, the Shiv Sena chief. The group that challenged the law in the Supreme Court expanded to include the NGO Common Cause and Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen.

"Nobody should have fear of putting up something because of the fear of going to prison," said Ms Singhal, adding that hate speech will be dealt with under other laws that govern the Internet.

The contention by most of the petitioners was that Section 66A is vague and allows the police arbitrary interpretation and misuse of the law. The previous government, headed by the Congress, said that the law was necessary to combat abuse and defamation on the internet. The new BJP government also defended the law in court.

Critics of the law said it was misused by political parties to target their opponents and dissidence. A professor in West Bengal was arrested in 2012 for posting a cartoon of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, for example.

Section 66A reads: "Any person who sends by any means of a computer resource any information that is grossly offensive or has a menacing character; or any information which he knows to be false, but for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience, danger, obstruction, insult shall be punishable with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years and with fine."
http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/freed...e-court-749104





Should Governments Ban Ballot Selfies?
Dann Albright

Would Hitler have wanted people to post who they voted for? Would Benito Mussolini have tweeted photos with voters? Would Francisco Franco have Instagrammed a ballot with a check next to his name? These are the questions I was asking myself after listening to a recent NPR story on the controversy brewing around “ballot selfies.”

My ballot is marked and walking it in tomorrow. #vote pic.twitter.com/nnOZjAreSj

— Christine Morrow (@TomorrowChris) November 4, 2014


The legality of posting pictures of your completed ballot is a hot topic in the States right now, but it’s been discussed in countries all around the world. The battle is now raging in New Hampshire, with both sides firing shots. Let’s take a look at what they’re saying.

What’s the Big Deal?

So why is this a problem? Why shouldn’t people post pictures of their ballot? If they’re going to be that vocal about who they voted for, won’t it already be obvious which candidates they’re supporting?

In short, a number of people believe that posting images of completed ballots violates the principle of the secret ballot, an important pillar upon which modern democracy is built. Of course, it’s still quite illegal to post pictures of someone else’s ballot; that violates their rights to an anonymous vote. But what about the “ballot selfie”? New Hampshire’s Secretary of State Bill Gardner has been very vocal about his opposition to the practice:

If somebody wants to go out and say that they voted for this person or that person they can do it. They can do it, but that ballot is sacred . . . I have a copy of the last ballot that was used when Saddam Hussein was elected, and that ballot identified who the person was. Hitler did the same thing in Austria.

Gardner stated that this violation of the “sanctity” of the anonymous ballot could lead to voter coercion, and he backed legislation last year that made New Hampshire the first state to specifically ban ballot selfies — punishable by a $1,000 fine. At the time of this writing, there are four voters who are under investigation for sharing voting booth photos under this law.

This legislation is being challenged in court by three plaintiffs, including Brandon Ross. He told NPR that “It’s a core part of our democratic process is being able to communicate who you vote for. This is 2015 now, people interact with social media constantly.”

The case will likely be heard next month, and we’ll be very interested to see how it goes.

Are Ballot Selfies Really That Dangerous?

Bill Gardner brought up Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler in his discussion of ballot selfies — and while the allusion is ridiculous, there’s certainly precedent for voter coercion in recent years. In Mexico, the 2012 election was widely considered to be rigged, and many voters received gift cards redeemable at grocery stores from the incumbent party (who went on to win the election).

It’s not limited to politically dangerous countries, though, and it’s not a relic of the past: the 2012 presidential election in the United States saw widespread spam campaigns that sought to influence people to vote for specific Republican candidates by sowing misinformation among voters. The Republican party has also been accused of harassing minority voters or disrupting polling places to the point where people get frustrated and leave without voting.

But voter coercion happens on both sides of the aisle: in 2012, one man sent letters to 200 Republican donors in Florida telling them that they were ineligible to vote. He was caught, and sentenced to 15 months in prison and over $35,000 in fines (he got off pretty light considering that the maximum sentence was six years in prison and $350,000 in fines).

None of this pertains to ballot selfies, but it does go to show that voter coercion is still an issue today. It may not look the same as it did in the 1800s, when voter coercion ran rampant, but it’s definitely out there.

However, whether ballot selfies are cause for concern when it comes to this coercion is less certain. One of the most common arguments for allowing them is that people have always been allowed to tell others who they voted for, and for better or worse, that sharing photos on social media sites is just a modern way of sharing that information. As Ross pointed out in the quote above, that’s how we communicate today — in the past, we always had the freedom to tell our friends who we voted for. We should have the same right today.

In a 2013 conference paper, Josh Benaloh pointed out that the technologies that abound today in mobile phones do, in fact, make it easier to bypass the anti-coercion measures that are in place, and they allow remote voter coercion, which is more difficult to defend against and detect:

While steps can and should be taken to prevent post-election coercion, we should also be realistic and admit to ourselves that we have no effective technical means to prevent simple, economically-scalable, remotely-enforced, pre-election coercion.

Of course, the point of this paper isn’t that these technologies are, in fact, being used to coerce voters — just that some capabilities that we now have (especially mobile video capture) could be used to do this.

What Does the Rest of the World Say?

New Hampshire certainly isn’t the first place to tackle this issue. As I mentioned previously, a number of other countries have discussed it, but there have been differing results. The Dutch government has no problem with voting-booth selfies. The French government hasn’t made it illegal, but advises against it, as it could violate the secrecy of the voting booth and cast doubt on whether someone has been influenced and is posting proof that they voted a certain way.

The UK, however, does not allow ballot selfies, also suggesting that it could reveal political allegiances. Ontario, Canada, similarly bans the practice. South Africa said “no” to ballot selfies, too, though snapping a photo of yourself with an inked thumb to show that you voted is encouraged. The same is true in many other countries, where inked fingers are common in selfies around voting time.

It’s clear that there isn’t a trend at work: some countries allow ballot selfies, some have made them illegal, and many are having conversations around them to determine the legality and whether or not they may contribute to voter coercion.
Emphasizing the Wrong Piece of the Puzzle

Gilles Bissonnette, a lawyer with the New Hampshire ACLU, thinks that banning voting-booth selfies isn’t the way to ensure that our elections are fair:

The more tailored approach here would be to aggressively investigate and prosecute vote buying, and to aggressively investigate and prosecute vote bribery. But I think the question here is whether this law appropriately addresses those interests.

It’s a safe bet to say that his opinion will have a lot of support. There’s definitely historical precedent for new technologies being mixed up in old problems. Some people argue that texting while driving isn’t something we should be focusing on: it’s bad driving in general that’s the problem, and texting just provides a new way to do it. Others have said the same thing about parenting: that having more tech around doesn’t make people bad parents, but that people who would have engaged in poor parenting practices anyway simply have another way to do it now.

Blaming ballot selfies for opening up voters to coercion will probably join this list before long. Yes, the ubiquity of small recording devices may make it slightly easier to coerce voters into supporting a specific candidate. But cell phones aren’t the problem — voter coercion is the problem. And that’s what needs to be addressed, with better investigations and harsher punishments.

This fight is far from over, with both sides being very committed to their respective ideologies. But because of the unenforceable nature of the laws currently on the books, politicians looking to pander to younger voters, and historical precedent, selfies are almost certain to live on in voting booths, at least in the United States. And, when it comes down to it, there are a lot more important problems our countries are dealing with — shouldn’t we spend our time focusing on those issues instead?
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/governm...allot-selfies/





Security Flaw in New South Wales Puts Thousands of Online Votes at Risk
Vanessa Teague and J. Alex Halderman

New South Wales, Australia, is holding state elections this month, and they’re offering a new Internet voting system developed by e-voting vendor Scytl and the NSW Electoral Commission. The iVote system, which its creators describe as private, secure and verifiable, is predicted to see record turnout for online voting. Voting has been happening for six days, and already iVote has received more than 66,000 votes. Up to a quarter million voters (about 5% of the total) are expected to use the system by the time voting closes next Saturday.

Since we’ve both done extensive research on the design and analysis of Internet voting systems, we decided to perform an independent security review of iVote. We’ll prepare a more extensive technical report after the election, but we’re writing today to share news about critical vulnerabilities we found that have put tens of thousands of votes at risk. We discovered a major security hole allowing a man-in-the middle attacker to read and manipulate votes. We also believe there are ways to circumvent the verification mechanism.

iVote allows voters to register and cast their votes using websites managed by the Electoral Commission. Upon registration, voters are given an 8-digit iVote ID number and asked to choose a 6-digit PIN. These allow them to log in to an online voting application implemented with JavaScript and HTML. After casting their vote, they receive a 12-digit receipt number. Optionally, the voter can call a telephone verification service and enter their receipt number to hear an automated system read their vote back to them.

The Electoral Commission has not published any of the source code for the election servers, but they have made available a practise voting site that uses substantially the same client-side code as the real voting site. We investigated the system by reviewing hundreds of pages of design documents and studying the client-side code of the practise site and the login screen of the real voting site.

Critical vulnerabilities

The iVote voting website, cvs.ivote.nsw.gov.au, is served over HTTPS. While this server appears to use a safe SSL configuration, the site included additional JavaScript from an external server, ivote.piwikpro.com. (Piwik is an analytics tool used to track site visitors.) As can be seen using the SSLLabs SSL Server Test, the ivote.piwikpro.com server has very poor security. It is vulnerable to a range of SSL attacks, including the recently discovered FREAK attack.

We confirmed that a man-in-the-middle attacker could exploit the FREAK attack to manipulate the voter’s connection to ivote.piwikpro.com and inject malicious JavaScript into the iVote site. This code could arbitrarily change how the site operates without triggering any browser security warnings. FREAK affects major desktop and mobile browsers, including Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari, and while the browser makers have released fixes over the last two weeks, many users haven’t updated yet.

We built a proof of concept that illustrates how this problem could be used by an attacker to steal votes. Our proof of concept intercepts and manipulates votes cast to the practise server, though the same attack would also have succeeded against the real voting server. (We checked that the real site used the same vulnerable code, but, of course, we did not attempt to intercept or interfere with any real votes.) The attack works if a voter uses iVote from a malicious network–say, from a WiFi access point that has been infected by malware. In our demonstration, the malicious network injects code that stealthily substitutes a different vote of the attacker’s choosing. We also show how the attacker can steal the voter’s secret PIN and receipt number and send them, together with the voter’s secret ballot choices, to a remote monitoring server.

We reported this vulnerability to CERT Australia at 2 p.m. Friday, and around noon the next day the Electoral Commission updated iVote to disable the code from piwikpro.com. Unfortunately, the system had already been operating insecurely for almost a week, exposing tens of thousands of votes to potential manipulation.

Although the vote submission site now uses SSL safely, the main gateway to it runs plain HTTP. This means that even with the FREAK vulnerability repaired, an attacker can still target voters before they reach the secure server using the classic ssl_strip attack.

Flawed verification

If the election is a close one, the only evidence that the results aren’t fraudulent may come from iVote’s verification and auditing process, but that process has its own share of problems.

iVote’s verification process is an optional step in which voters can dial a phone number and enter their iVote ID, PIN, and receipt number to hear a computer read back their ballot selections. Only a fraction of voters actually do this check, but, if enough votes are stolen with an attack like the one above, at least some voters should notice during verification and complain.

The attacker can use a variety of simple tricks to reduce the probability that a given voter will notice a problem. For example:

• Voters are instructed how to verify by the same vulnerable website, so the attacker could direct the voter to a fake verification phone number that would read back the voter’s intended choices. Thanks to modern VoIP technology, setting up an automated phone system is just a matter of software.
• The attacker can delay submitting the vote and displaying the receipt number for a few seconds, in hopes that the voter doesn’t intend to verify and simply leaves the website. (Perhaps the site could show a progress bar in place of the number.) If the voter navigates away, there’s no chance to verify, and the attacker submits a fraudulent vote. Otherwise, the attacker gives up, submits the voter’s genuine vote, and displays the receipt number.
• The verification phone number is scheduled to shut down immediately at the close of polls, even though there is sometimes a delay before votes become available to verify. An attack that focused on last-minute votes would be much harder to detect, since those votes can’t be verified.

The iVote verification design doesn’t provide strong evidence to support or disprove voter complaints, making it difficult to distinguish an attack from the baseline level of complaints due to voter error. Inevitably, some voters will falsely complain, either mistakenly or maliciously, and it’s hard to separate this from a genuine attack, particularly if the attacker only tries to steal a few percent of votes.

In addition to these problems, the verification design badly compromises privacy and exposes voters to possible coercion, since it makes it easy to prove how you voted to anyone just by handing over your credentials and receipt number. It also offers only weak security assurances against server-side attacks, since voters have to trust that the machine on the other end of the phone is honest.

It’s true that a properly designed and securely implemented verification system should detect fraud. But the source code and design details for the iVote servers and verification systems remain secret, so neither the security of the systems nor the validity of the protocols is well established. We’d like to be able to understand the verification system, server operation, and audit process in more detail. We can tell, by analyzing the client code, that the real system differs in important details from the descriptions in public documents, but we can’t rule out further important vulnerabilities without knowing precisely how verification and auditing work. Why should the public accept the election results when the method of counting and verifying their votes is a secret?

An unverifiable Internet voting system may seem to be secure but actually be subject to undetectable electoral fraud. In a way, iVote is worse: a system that seems to be verifiable but possibly isn’t.

Broader implications

Ordinary mistakes can have serious implications for elections. On the second day of voting, iVote was taken offline for several hours to correct an error in the online ballot form. Two political groups were omitted from part of the ballot, though their candidates’ names appeared elsewhere. The error was easy to fix, but 19,000 people had already voted.

The vulnerability to the FREAK attack illustrates once again why Internet Voting is hard to do securely. The system has been in development for years, but FREAK was announced only a couple of weeks before the election. Perhaps there wasn’t time to thoroughly retest the iVote system for exposure. We can bet that there are one or more major HTTPS vulnerabilities waiting to be discovered (and perhaps already known to sophisticated attackers). Verification is a vital safeguard against such unknown problems, but at best it detects problems rather than preventing them.

To election security researchers, these problems aren’t surprising. We’ve already seen dire security problems with Internet voting in Estonia and Washington, D.C. Securing Internet voting requires solving some of the hardest problems in computer security, and even the smallest mistakes can undermine the integrity of the election result. That’s why most experts agree that Internet voting cannot be adequately secured with current technology.

NSW should cut its losses and back away from voting online at least until there are fundamental advances in computer security. In the meantime, there’s another week of voting left–who knows what else could go wrong?
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/t...vulnerability/





F for performance, A for patents

How Life360 Won its Patent War

Jury saw CEO's "Dear piece of shit" letter to his "patent troll"—and understood.
Joe Mullin

In May 2014, Life360 CEO Chris Hulls received an aggressive patent demand letter. The letter, from lawyers representing a company called Advanced Ground Information Systems (AGIS), told him he needed to pay for a "royalty-bearing license" to its four patents, or Life360 and its customers would have to "cease and desist" from infringement.

In other words: pay up, or shut down your company. The letter demanded a response within three days. Hulls wrote back:

Dear Piece of Shit,

We are currently in the process of retaining counsel and investigating this matter. As a result, we will not be able to meet your Friday deadline. After reviewing this matter with our counsel, we will provide a prompt response.

I will pray tonight that karma is real, and that you are its worthy recipient,

Chris


On that Friday, Life360 got sued. The lawyers attached Hulls' "Dear Piece of Shit" letter as an exhibit.

What AGIS' lawyers could not have known is that they'd picked out one of the few small companies that wasn't going to back down from a patent fight—and Hulls wasn't going to play by the usual rules. Life360 was supposed to be their "easy" target. The lawyers, from a top IP law firm called Kenyon & Kenyon, had plans to hunt bigger game later—they had also sent (more nicely worded) patent threat letters to Google, Facebook, and Foursquare.

What Hulls couldn't have known is that in less than a year, he'd be in front of a jury, explaining his "Dear Piece of Shit" missive to an eight-person jury in faraway Florida. It wouldn't be easy. And AGIS was no typical "patent troll," but a small company that just hadn't managed to be profitable.

Still, he was in a unique position where he was ready and able to fight back. Life360 had just got a third round of funding, $50 million, and he had a board who would support him. When the company was younger and smaller, he'd had to pay off patent trolls—more than once. "If you have $3 million in the bank, can you really risk a suit that's going to be one million, when you could make it go away for $100,000?" he said in an interview with Ars. "Every time we wrote that check, my soul died a little bit." Hulls had worked for years with little or no salary. "Now, right when I'm finally starting to pay myself decently, I have this lawyer trying to steal from me," he said.

“Circles” and “LifeRing”

Life360 offers a service called "Circles" that allows family and friends to see each other on a map and send group messages. It's a service that answers the age-old question of "where are your friends and family, and what are they up to?" It's far from a new idea.

AGIS sells "LifeRing," which it markets to military and police clients. It also allows clients to view themselves on a map and contact each other.

The two companies have never been competitors. Life360 offers its app for free on Android and iPhone and charges $5 a month to "premium" users who get extra features. AGIS, by contrast, competes for government contracts, sometimes connected to specific events. For instance, the Honolulu Police Department contracted with AGIS in 2011 to use its software during the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

AGIS has made a few million dollars since it was founded more than a decade ago, but it has never had a profitable year. The company is run out of the home of its founder, Malcolm "Cap" Beyer, who lives in Jupiter, Florida. At some point in 2014, Beyer decided to look into enforcing some of its 13 issued patents, the oldest of which has a 2004 filing date.

Beyer hadn't heard of Life360 until last year, when a board member contacted him, suggesting that the company might be a good target for patent licensing. In May of that year, the company's lawyers sent the threat letter, which said Life360 had infringed four US patents, numbered 7,031,728,

AGIS claims its patents are infringed by very basic functions of the Life360 app, such as its ability to "allow a user to touch a family member's symbol on a map and initiate a rapid voice communication or text message."

"We're getting sued for having markers on a map showing where people are and allowing communication between them," he told one reporter shortly after he was sued, adding that he could "show them a Star Trek episode from the 1960s" that had a similar system.

Knowing that AGIS was likely to pursue other companies, Life360 offered free legal support to any other startups AGIS might sue, including research on the patents and prior art. Hulls took other steps that patent defendants aren't "supposed" to do, like simply calling up the inventor whose patents he'd supposedly infringed and trying to initiate a discussion. But Beyer didn't even know who he was.

Hulls also continued to speak publicly about his fight, creating a website called "Stop AGIS," in which he described his quest to create "a hostile environment in which troll-like behavior is no longer a financially viable way to operate."

"AGIS may not be the exact definition of a troll, but the entity's behavior is eerily similar," Hulls wrote. "Perhaps it's just a business struggling to stay afloat and grasping at any thread to stay alive."

More provocatively, he also created a website with the name of AGIS' founder, malcolmbeyer.com. "If you support jobs and innovation, we encourage you to investigate the actions of Malcolm K. Beyer and AGIS Inc.," the site states.

There was bad blood between Hulls and Kenyon & Kenyon lawyer Mark Hannemann in particular, whom Hulls believes is the true driver behind the lawsuit. At one point, Hulls remembers Hannemann telling him that "for everyone else this is about money, but for you it's personal."

"If we go to trial, I'm going to put you out of business," Hannemann told Hulls after one required mediation session. (Hulls' lawyer confirmed the encounter happened; Hannemann didn't respond to questions about the discussion.)

He wasn't kidding. The companies weren't competitive, but shortly before trial AGIS suddenly created a "consumer app" for Android called HoundDog, which would increase their chances of getting an injunction if they won. (The app still wasn't available on the first day of trial, but at some point last week it went up on the Google Play store.)

But trial was where it was headed. Hulls had every reason to roll the dice with a jury, because the payout Hannemann was demanding was massive. While he can't disclose offers from mediation, AGIS would shortly be asking a Florida jury to award it $3 million in damages.

Life360 is still a relatively small company, with 60 employees working to build up its base of active users. "My morals aside, they made it easy for us to go to court, because the numbers are so big," he said.

“This case is a collision”

On March 8, Hulls and his co-founder Alex Haro flew to Florida for the week-long trial, which would be held in the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach, near AGIS' home office. The company had hired Kent Baldauf of the Pittsburg-based Webb law firm, whose team has a history of taking patent cases for determined troll-fighters, including Lee Cheng, the top lawyer for Newegg.

US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks made several key rulings just before trial about what evidence would and would not come in. The "Dear Piece of Shit" letter, as a pre-trial communication, would be shown to the jury, Middlebrooks ruled. Baldauf knew he'd have to get out in front of that and planned to mention it during his opening statement.

"This case is a collision," AGIS lawyer Mark Hannemann said in opening statements. "It is a collision between two creative, high-tech companies and two creative entrepreneurs who started those companies and drove them on."

AGIS' software "turns your smartphone into basically a command and control center, right there in your hand," Hannemann said. Now, that is a good idea now and the companies are quite successful with it. But it was an even better idea back in 2004, and that's the perspective we need to use to look at this case."

There was "no evidence at all" that Hulls had copied AGIS, Hannemann acknowledged. But Life360 still needed to pay for its patents.

"I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Beyer and Ms. Beyer throughout the course of this litigation," Kent Baldauf said during his opening for Life360. "They are very nice people. The fact that they are nice people and it is a nice story certainly doesn't mean that these patents are infringed. It doesn't mean that Life360 is liable for damages."

Baldauf continued:

There has been absolutely no competition between these companies. There is also testimony from Mr. Beyer that he said that the only time he is really sure that he first positively learned about Life360 was when they were identified by their lawyers. Letters were sent to Google, a letter was sent to Facebook."

The jury was going to see a letter, and "the choice of language you are going to see is unfortunate," said Baldauf. "To let the genie out of the bottle, Mr. Hulls responded and titled the e-mail back, 'Dear Piece of Shit.' I hope that doesn't appall anybody. Mr. Hulls is going to tell you he was angry, and this is the company that he poured his heart and soul into, brought it up from nothing, and here is a letter from someone he never heard of before, telling him that he has three days to pay up or stop."

On the stand, Beyer explained his background. He joined the Marines in 1956 and later fought in Vietnam. When he came back, he worked for a defense contractor and later started his own company. He ultimately sold two companies, making "roughly $10 million in each sale."

He started AGIS after 9/11, on the belief that a product was needed in such situations where the radio and phone systems were overburdened. "I decided there would be a good idea to build a system based on data so that everybody would see where everybody else was located," and first responders could communicate without needing to know each other beforehand.

AGIS has 12 employees. Its president, Sandel Blackwell, who works out of its Kansas office, also testified, explaining AGIS' technology and products. He was the vice president of research & development at one of Beyer's earlier companies.

On cross-exam, Life360 lawyer Cecilia Dickson asked Blackwell about the companies' failed attempts to get into the consumer market. It had tried to market itself as an app for college dating and to amusement parks, but with no success.

Dickson turned to an internal AGIS report that had been entered into evidence. The company had assigned itself "grades" in various categories. Under "financial performance," the grade was F.

"You would agree that AGIS' financial performance, today, you'd also assign a grade of F, right?" Dickson asked.

"Probably," said Blackwell.

The last line of the report was "patents." Blackwell gave the company an A.

Hulls on the stand

Like most patent defendants, Life360 had a two-pronged argument: first, they don't infringe the patents. And second, the patents are invalid, because they're not really a new invention. It's easier for a defendant to win on non-infringement, since it has a lower standard of proof.

At every opportunity, Baldauf hammered home the fact that for a "method" claim like AGIS had, the jury had to find that a single actor performed every step in the process. Of all the arguments available to him, it was the simplest one to make clear to a jury full of admittedly non-technical people. It boils down to: there's a whole lot of steps in this patent, and there's no one user that does them all. Life360's circles all have multiple users. And some of the things described in the patent, the company has no ability to do—including make calls or get GPS coordinates, functions the app can perform only by calling on the abilities of the smartphone the app is resident in.

On the third day of trial, Hulls took the stand. He told the story of his company, back to how he was fascinated by his dad's Apple Newton when he was a kid. In 2008, he built a prototype of Life360 with his partner Alex Haro, and they ended up winning a $300,000 prize from Google in the company's Android Developer Challenge. He poured the money into building a company.

Then he got to the letter.

"Do you recall sending this response, Mr. Hulls?" Baldauf asked.

"Yes, I do. First, I'll clarify a few things. I apologize for the choice of language. If I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't have done that. And it was also specifically addressed to Mr. Makin [a lawyer] and not Mr. Beyer." He continued:

It was very emotional for me. This letter that he sent me said I have three days to shut down my business or write the check. And I had been working on this thing for seven years. When we talked about the investment I put into Life360, that was a $10,000 loan from my mom. And I had no money. I had graduated from college. I had just got over a health scare. I was literally sleeping in my friend's closet when we started the company. And it had only been the last couple years we had actually real users, outside investors.

I had just proposed to my wife, I was planning a wedding. I was actually, wow, I can afford a house now because I have a salary. And then I have a lawyer coming from a company I never heard of said write me a check or shut down in three days. So I was very angry.


On cross-exam, Hannemann suggested the expletive was a "calculated move" to get press coverage for Life360.

"The calculated move was not the expletive," said Hulls. "The calculated move was to make clear that we didn't feel that we were infringing and be very public about that with our investors." He wanted to "set a firm tone" showing that Life360 "won't roll over."

He asked Hulls what he thought a reasonable royalty for the patents would be, if he made the "big assumption" they were valid and infringed.

"Close to zero," said Hulls. Having a map with visual representations of people on it is important, but "Mr. Beyer's patents are not about putting people on the map. There are eight different things for most of these. If we change one of these steps, we are no longer infringing."

If Life360 removed its "call" feature—a feature used by 0.36 percent of its users—it couldn't possibly be infringing anymore, even accepting the plaintiff's other arguments.

"You could make the changes to make it not infringe but you haven't yet, right?" Hannemann asked.

"I was advised by our attorneys that we should not make any changes to our product while this litigation is ongoing because it would be a false admission that we felt we were infringing," Hulls said. "And I think this trial will hopefully show we were not infringing these patents and they're invalid."

"Obviously, I have a different hope," said Hannemann.

"Obviously," said Hulls. "We will find out soon."

Verdict: No infringement

The case went to the jury on Friday, March 13, and the jury deliberated just over five hours. Just about 5:00pm Eastern time, the verdict came back: all the patents were not infringed. It was a total victory for Life360, although the patents were not invalidated.

"This win validates our theory that AGIS is a struggling company embracing troll tactics to monetize their patents with the help of their law firm Kenyon and Kenyon," said Hulls in a press release his company put out today. "We were committed to fighting these meritless claims from day-one and breaking the calculus of the troll equation. I truly hope this win encourages other companies to stand up to abusers of the legal system and the predatory law firms that support them."

Hannemann said AGIS is "considering its options."

Beyer, reached by telephone yesterday, said he "resents Mr. Hull characterizing me as a troll." His company has sold software for 10 years, and won one contract in 2015 already.

"I also resent him dragging AGIS and me through the mud because of ads," he said, referring to the Stop AGIS and malcomkbeyer.com websites. "I've never said anything bad about Mr. Hull and I don't intend to. I'm exhausted, and I'm going to have to take time to think about life, and this in general."

Hull says he has no animus against Beyer, who in another context he believes is someone he'd be friendly with. "I genuinely think he believed he was the person who invented the concept of putting people on a map on a phone," said Hulls. "When we showed these [prior art] pictures to establish our case, he looked like he'd never seen it. His lawyers sold him a bill of goods, that he invented this very well-known concept."

And as for the "Dear Piece of Shit" letter? It didn't hurt Hulls with the jury at all. In fact, a post-trial interview with one juror whom Ars spoke to suggested it may have helped.

"Anyone who got a letter like that—three days, or shut down—of course, you're going to be pissed," said Sheri Coombs, an elementary school teacher in Palm Beach County who served on the jury. "He reacted, and who could blame him?"

"There was one particular thing that kept coming back, and it was the attorneys for Life360 who kept saying, one single player had to perform all the acts," said Coombs. "We just weren't convinced Life360 did that."

Coombs didn't know what a "patent troll" was, but she learned after trial. "My opinion is that Beyer's attorneys were patent trolls," she said. "I feel like they were taking advantage. They thought, we have a case here—we could get some money out of this young, fresh startup."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ts-patent-war/





Are Smartphones Making Our Children Mentally Ill?

Leading child psychotherapist Julie Lynn Evans believes easy and constant access to the internet is harming youngsters
Peter Stanford

Julie Lynn Evans has been a child psychotherapist for 25 years, working in hospitals, schools and with families, and she says she has never been so busy.

“In the 1990s, I would have had one or two attempted suicides a year – mainly teenaged girls taking overdoses, the things that don’t get reported. Now, I could have as many as four a month.”

And it’s not, she notes, simply a question of her reputation as both a practitioner and a writer drawing so many people to the door of her cosy consulting rooms in west London where we meet. “If I try to refer people on, everyone else is choc-a-bloc too. We are all saying the same thing. There has been an explosion in numbers in mental health problems amongst youngsters.”

The Care Minister, Norman Lamb, has this week been promising a “complete overhaul” of the system that deals with these troubled tweens and teens, after a Department of Health report highlighted the negative impact of funding cuts. And the three main party leaders have all made encouraging pre-election noises about putting more resources into mental health services.

Yet, while the down-to-earth Lynn Evans welcomes the prospect of additional funding, this divorced, Canadian-born mother of three grown up children, isn’t convinced that it is the solution to the current crisis.

The floodgates of desperate youngsters opened, she recalls, in 2010. “I saw my work increase by a mad amount and so did others I work with. Suddenly everything got much more dangerous, much more immediate, much more painful.”

Official figures confirm the picture she paints, with emergency admissions to child psychiatric wards doubling in four years, and those young adults hospitalised for self-harm up by 70 per cent in a decade.

“Something is clearly happening,” she says, “because I am seeing the evidence in the numbers of depressive, anorexic, cutting children who come to see me. And it always has something to do with the computer, the Internet and the smartphone.”

Issues such as cyber-bullying are, of course, nothing new, and schools now all strive to develop robust policies to tackle them, but Lynn Evans’ target is both more precise and more general. She is pointing a finger of accusation at the smartphones - “pocket rockets” as she calls them – which are now routinely in the hands of over 80 per cent of secondary school age children. Their arrival has been, she notes, a key change since 2010.

“It’s a simplistic view, but I think it is the ubiquity of broadband and smartphones that has changed the pace and the power and the drama of mental illness in young people.”

With a smartphone - as opposed to an earlier generation of “brick” mobiles that could only be used to keep in touch with worried parents - youngsters can now, she says, “access the internet without adult supervision in parks, on street, wherever they are, and then they can go anywhere. So there are difficult chat rooms, self-harming websites, anorexia websites, pornography, and a whole invisible world of dark places. In real life, we travel with our children. When they are connected via their smartphone to the web, they usually travel alone”.

She quotes one website that has come up in conversations with youngsters in the consulting room. “I wouldn’t have known about it otherwise, but it is where men masturbate in real time while children as young as 12 watch them. So parents think their children are upstairs in their bedrooms with their friends having popcorn and no alcohol, yet this is the sort of thing they are watching. And as they watch, they are saying, 'this is what sex is’. It is leaving them really distressed.”

Mums and dads who allow young teenagers to have smartphones – and she wouldn’t say yes until they were 14 - must also take a more active role in policing the use of them, she says, however unpopular it will make them with their offspring.

“I think children should have privacy within their own rooms and in their diaries, and I think they should have the Internet, but I don’t think they should have both, certainly not until they have proved they are completely safe and reliable. So, check their browser history, look at their Facebook, Instagram, and then discuss it with them.

“When they are 15, you don’t, for example, let them go to pub, or stay out in the local park at four in morning, yet they’ll get into much less trouble physically there than they will on their smartphones on the internet. I’m not talking about paedophiles preying on them. I’m talking about anorexia sites and sites where they will be bullied.”

That is where the damage is being done to their mental health, she argues. Harmful, too, is the sheer length of exposure to the virtual world via their smartphones that youngsters have now. Her strong advice to parents is to limit access. “Use it like parents used to use TV with their children. 'You can watch this but you can’t watch that’, and there’s a watershed. We need that kind of discipline.”

How about just banning it altogether? “I believe that parents who don’t allow the Internet can cause as much damaged as parents who allow too much. Their children are not able to work and play and be with the rest of the children in the playground. It’s has to be about balance, not banning.”

Living so much in a virtual world has other negative consequences, she suggests. It gives young users no time to reflect or learn about the consequences of their actions. “So if you are having a WhatsApp chat with your friends, and it all goes very wrong, you can say to them, 'I wish you were dead’. Now perfectly nice children find themselves saying, 'I wish you were dead,’ because they haven’t got time to reflect, and then their words go everywhere. Kindness, compassion, ethics, it’s all out of the window when you are in this instantaneous gossip world with no time to think, and no time to learn about having relationships.”

Parents also need to think about what example they set their children by their own attachment to their smartphones. “We know all about the importance of childhood attachment and good healthy childhood relationships with parents. Yet, if you look in the local park, you see children at a very early age not getting the tender, intense love they used to because their parents are always on their smartphones. Put them down, and be with your kids from day one. They’re not getting what they need from us to build up their core sense of self and that can create the problems I see down the line.”

Julie Lynn Evans is, in one way, a reluctant campaigner. She is keen to point out that this isn’t happening to all children, and that there are other potential causes for the current crisis – “results-driven school programmes”, busy parents and the recession are three she quotes, not to mention “organic” mental health such as schizophrenia.

And, she says, she has enough on her plate, dealing daily with the current crisis in adolescent mental health, without getting drawn into a broader argument about how to tackle its root causes. Indeed, she confesses that two weeks ago she was so exhausted that she even contemplated giving up work altogether.

“I was dealing with a young boy who had just jumped out of a car and run into oncoming traffic. Two psychiatrists and I were tearing our hair out trying to find a safe place to put him. We tried for four hours to find him a hospital bed, and there was nowhere for him no hospital bed available. He ended up going went home and we put in nurses 24 hours a day, but not a lot of people are going to be able to do that. At the end of it, I was so tired I thought I can’t go on”.

What makes her continue, though, in a system that even Normal Lamb has called “broken”, is that what she is witnessing frightens her. And she is speaking out because she believes the problem can be fixed.

She is emphatically not anti-internet, but rather anti- the negative side effects of it on our young. “It is battering our children’s brains. They have no times for the goodies in life – kindness, acceptance, conversation, face-to-face, nature, nurture. They need to find a sense of purpose by connecting with other people, not being on the Internet all the time.”

If parents and schools engage with it openly and together, this can be tackled, she urges. “If we can grab what’s going on by the horns, and do something about it, then I am optimistic. I’m not optimistic, though, if we just say it's the government 's fault and we’ve got to have more money.”

If you are affected by any of the issues discussed in this interview, contact YoungMinds on 0808 802 5544 or Saneline on 08457 678 000
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/heal...tally-ill.html





China’s Internet Boom Starts to Fade
Stephen E Stapczynski and Ye Xie

Just as the Nasdaq Composite Index surges to the cusp of the record high set during the dot-com-era, the excitement about China’s Internet boom is fading.

Half of the 14 Chinese dot-coms that debuted in the U.S. last year are now trading below their initial sale prices. Even Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., one of those still up in price, has dropped 28 percent from its record high in November. On average, the 14 Chinese shares are down 3.1 percent this year, compared with a 6.1 percent advance in the Nasdaq.

Investor confidence, so high when Alibaba brought its record $25 billion initial public offering to market last September, is being undermined now by a wave of poor earnings at Chinese technology companies. Those that went public last year including Weibo Corp., the microblogging service, and mobile dating app developer Momo Inc. have failed to deliver the revenue investors were expecting.

“The market is nervous,” Michael Wang, a strategist at Amiya Capital LLP in London, said by e-mail March 18. “Whether investors come back is questionable.”

The earnings disappointment -- and stocks’ slump -- is clearly a reflection in part of the slowdown in the world’s second-biggest economy, but a look at broader Chinese equity gauges shows that can’t be the only explanation. The benchmark index in Shanghai is up 13 percent this year through Friday, part of a 78 percent rally since mid-2014, and Bloomberg’s gauge of Chinese shares traded in New York has climbed 5.1 percent.

Quarterly Losses

The Shanghai Composite rose 2 percent to 3,687.73 on Monday, completing a ninth day of gains in the longest winning streak since 2007.

Buoyed by the growth prospect of the world’s largest Internet market with 649 million users, investors assigned higher valuations for the Chinese companies than their U.S. peers at the IPOs. Intensifying competition and spending increases, however, are taking a toll on revenue growth, prompting investors to now scale back those valuations.

Sixteen of 28 Internet and technology firms in Bloomberg’s China benchmark reported fourth-quarter earnings below analysts’ forecasts, including search engine Baidu Inc. and video website Youku Tudou Inc. The percentage of stocks that slid below their IPO levels this year was the highest since 2011, when a series of corporate scandals eroded investor confidence, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

Weibo, WeChat

Momo, whose matchmaking app is akin to Tinder Inc.’s, said it lost $2.5 million in the fourth quarter as it boosted marketing expenses six-fold to promote its brand. The stock has fallen 8 percent this month, extending the decline to 23 percent since December when it raised $248 million. While the valuation has declined to about 20 times sales from almost 300 times at the IPO, it’s still more expensive than Facebook Inc., which has a multiple of 18.

The company’s press office, in an e-mailed response to questions on March 18, said Momo is focused on a long-term strategy and it’s too early to judge it’s success.

Weibo, which operates a website similar to Twitter Inc.’s, has tumbled more than 21 percent, wiping out $1.4 billion in market value, since its November debut, amid competition from WeChat, the social networking service owned by Tencent Inc. Sales will drop to as low as $93 million this quarter, from $105 million the previous three-month period, the company said on March 10.

Investors are concerned that Tencent’s decision to begin selling advertising on WeChat’s mobile messaging platform may lure some advertisers away from Weibo, Yue Yao, an analyst at Morningstar Inc., said by e-mail on March 15. Beijing-based Weibo has 175.7 million monthly users, less than half the users of Tencent’s WeChat.

IPO Pipeline

When asked about the company’s performance, spokesman Julien Gong Min referred to comments Chief Executive Officer Wang Geofei made during a March 10 conference call during which he said competition from WeChat will benefit all companies because it “increases the overall scale of the industry.”

While some of last year’s IPOs didn’t perform as expected, it won’t deter investors’ interests in Chinese companies, according to analysts at 86Research Ltd., Rosenblatt Securities Inc., and JG Capital Corp. Six Chinese companies, including search engine Sogou Inc., may go public in New York this year, they estimate.

Sogou, which is controlled by Sohu.com Inc., is planning a U.S. IPO as early as the second half of this year, at a valuation of more than $3 billion, people with knowledge of the matter said last week. The people asked not to be identified because the information is private.
‘Pickier’ Investors

“Investors will be a little bit pickier this year, but there is still a lot of interest in the sector,” Cheng Cheng, an analyst at Pacific Crest Securities LLC, said by phone March 18.

Mainland investors may be shifting their funds from U.S. listed companies to the domestic market after the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index entered a bull market, according to Jun Zhang, head of China research at Rosenblatt Securities Inc. The domestic benchmark touched a five-year high March 18, on speculation the government may take steps to boost the economy. The most-actively traded Chinese companies in the U.S. only increased 1.4 percent during the same period.

While Youku, a small-cap Internet television company, has fallen 39 percent since a high in November in the U.S., rival Leshi Internet & Technology Corp., which is traded on the Shanghai Composite Index, rallied 144 percent during the same period.

“As ADRs lose domestic support, many foreign investors will exit as well,” Zhang said by phone from San Francisco on March 18. “Long-term American investors tend to avoid small-cap Chinese companies if the domestic investment isn’t there.”
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...starts-to-fade





Filling the Wireless Gap with Mobile “White-Space” Broadband Technology

“White-space” technology, which employs unused frequencies on the broadcast spectrum as pathways for wireless-Internet signals, is immensely promising as a means of providing wireless service in areas lacking coverage.
Jeff Chu

When the techs at the Zoological Society of London activated live feeds from three animal enclosures last year, they weren’t sure how the experiment would go. The feeds relied on “white-space” technology, employing unused frequencies on the broadcast spectrum as pathways for wireless-Internet signals.

White-space technology looks immensely promising on paper as a means of providing wireless in areas lacking coverage. But the trial—one of nine across the United Kingdom sponsored by Ofcom, the British telecom regulator—was designed to explore whether it would work as well in practice.

The feeds, funded by Google and broadcast on the ZSL website, delivered live images of giant Galapagos tortoises, meerkats, and Asian small-clawed otters from the zoo in central London. One of the main unknowns was whether interference would render white-space technology unviable. “In the zoo, we use microphones a lot,” says Louise Hartley, project coordinator in the ZSL’s conservation-technology unit. “This was a good place to test the dynamic spectra and see whether white space would interfere with other transmissions.”

Imagine the broadcast spectrum as a highway. Most of the lanes are taken up by radio and television transmissions. But not all of them. According to the International Telecommunication Union, mobile broadband penetration is 32 percent globally, but only 23 percent in the Asia-Pacific and 19 percent in Africa. White-space technology has the potential to boost that, by extending Wi-Fi coverage to new places, exploiting unused portions of the radio-and-TV broadcast spectrum. The idea behind using white space is that Internet transmissions can be sent down the empty lanes, expanding access. But white-space devices must first identify where the radio and TV traffic is and which lanes are open, something that changes frequently. If they fail to do so, signals will simply get caught in traffic.

The biggest surprise in the ZSL trial, Hartley says, was that “the otters were the big winners.” In the end, the zoo trial met no interference. But other locations in the broader Ofcom experiment encountered glitches. Researchers from Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) deployed white-space devices in a densely populated part of London. “There was a TV broadcast tower near our experiment locations,” says Kentaro Ishizu, of NICT. “Due to the very strong TV signals, performance of our devices deteriorated significantly, although we could manage to successfully establish a wireless link. This experience was a very good lesson for us.”

The takeaway from NICT’s trial was that the devices still need refinement and development before the technology will prove commercially viable. In particular, improvement is needed in the nimbleness of white-space devices to identify the available frequencies, which varied more than expected.

Also, devices’ size and power consumption need to be reduced to extend connectivity to “many regions in the world where broadband Internet access has not yet been provided,” says Ishizu. “Setting optical-fiber cable is very expensive, and governments and companies have no motivation to expand the access area.” In such locales, white-space devices could create extensive networks, with relay stations tapping existing broadcast spectrum to cover terrain too large for conventional transmission systems.

The ZSL’s Hartley notes that the size of the 36-acre London zoo has previously made it impossible to broadcast live feeds. The meerkat enclosure, for instance, is about a third of a mile from the nearest Internet cabling, and conventional Wi-Fi cannot deliver high-quality video that far. Using white-space technology gets around those limitations. The transmission “can even go through foliage and walls,” says Hartley.

Improving the technology could eventually allow the ZSL to deploy more-affordable, more-extensive wireless access to some of the 50-plus countries where its researchers do field work. Hartley is particularly hopeful that using white spaces could bolster and expand early-warning alert systems for the ZSL’s anti-poaching efforts, which aim to save dozens of species around the world.

“The otters were the stars of the show” during the live feed, says Hartley. “You got to see them burrowing around and constantly hugging each other.” Unfortunately for animal lovers, the broadcast ended when the Ofcom trial finished. But the hope is that white-space technology will develop fast enough to bring it back soon—opening up not just the zoo but also other broadband-free locations around the globe.
https://ssl.www8.hp.com/hpmatter/iss...and-technology





Here Are the First Lawsuits to Challenge the FCC’s Net Neutrality Rules
Brian Fung

An industry trade group and a small, Texas-based Internet provider are among the first to mount a legal challenge to the federal government's new net neutrality rules.

On Monday, USTelecom — a group that includes some of the nation's largest Internet providers — filed suit in Washington, while Alamo Broadband sued the Federal Communications Commission in New Orleans.

The court filings kick-start a legal effort to overturn the FCC's regulations, passed in February, that aim to keep Internet providers from speeding up, slowing down or blocking Web traffic.

"We do not believe the Federal Communications Commission’s move to utility-style regulation invoking Title II authority is legally sustainable," USTelecom President Walter McCormick said in a statement. "Therefore, we are filing a petition to protect our procedural rights in challenging the recently adopted open Internet order.”

In its petition, Alamo alleges that the FCC's net neutrality rules apply onerous requirements on it under Title II of the Communications Act, the same law that the FCC uses to monitor legacy phone service.

"Alamo is thus aggrieved by the order and possesses standing to challenge it," the company's lawyers wrote in the petition, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Post.

The challenges are coming much sooner than expected. Many analysts believed that Internet providers would have to wait until the FCC's rules were officially published in the Federal Register before being eligible to appeal.

But according to legal experts familiar with the challenges, certain sections of the FCC's rules operate on a different timeline. Those parts, referred to as the "declaratory ruling" sections of the net neutrality rules, were considered final as soon as the FCC published them on its Web site, according to the experts, which it did March 12.

"USTelecom is filing this protective petition for review out of an abundance of caution," USTelecom writes in its challenge, a copy of which was also obtained by The Post.

After the declaratory ruling becomes final, potential challengers have 10 days to file an appeal; both petitions were filed hours before the deadline.

In a statement, the FCC called the petitions "premature and subject to dismissal." It is unclear whether the FCC will be immediately asking for the cases to be thrown out.

Supporters of the FCC are eager for the battle to be joined.

"Our side does want an early challenge so that this administration will defend it, and [FCC Chairman Tom] Wheeler will defend it," said one industry lobbyist who represents smaller telecom firms. "The sooner the better."

Consumer advocacy groups that had pushed hard for the strong new rules said Title II was "the right law" and insisted that the FCC has a strong case.

"These companies have threatened all along to sue over the FCC's decision, even though that decision is supported by millions of people and absolutely essential for our economy," said Matt Wood, policy director at Free Press. "Apparently some of them couldn't wait to make good on that threat."

In a separate legal challenge filed Friday in Cincinnati, Tennessee sued the FCC over its February decision to block the state's restriction on city-run Internet service.

"The FCC has unlawfully inserted itself between the State of Tennessee and the State's own political subdivisions," the challenge alleges.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...ow-been-filed/





AT&T, Verizon and Telco Pals File Lawsuit to KILL Net Neutrality FOREVER

So the big dogs' backlash begins
Chris Williams

America's top telcos are suing the FCC over its efforts to impose net neutrality regulations on US broadband networks.

AT&T, Verizon, and others, represented by trade body USTelecom, will drag the Federal Communications Commission to the appeals court in Washington DC in a bid to overturn fresh rules on what ISPs can and can't do with internet connections on US soil.

The Google-friendly regulations, which will treat broadband services like phone lines, are quite radical, so legal challenges were expected.

USTelecom's "protective petition" lawsuit, which you can read below or here as a PDF, was filed on Monday, and comes after a similar sueball was lobbed at the FCC by Texas ISP Alamo Broadband in New Orleans.

AT&T, Verizon et al are furious that they face being reclassified as common carriers, which are heavily regulated, claiming the move "violates federal law, including, but not limited to, the Constitution, the Communications Act of 1934, as amended, and FCC regulations promulgated thereunder," the paperwork states.

The big telcos are demanding senior judges review the FCC's Open Internet Order, describing it as "arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion."

The order, which was pushed through by FCC chairman Tom Wheeler and demands things like clearer pricing on broadband packages, has yet to come into force, and must first be scrutinized by US Congress.

"We do not believe the Federal Communications Commission’s move to utility-style regulation invoking Title II authority is legally sustainable," USTelecom President Walter McCormick said in a statement to the media.

"Therefore, we are filing a petition to protect our procedural rights in challenging the recently adopted open Internet order."

Matt Wood, policy director at advocacy warrior group Free Press told the Washington Post: "These companies have threatened all along to sue over the FCC's decision, even though that decision is supported by millions of people and absolutely essential for our economy. Apparently some of them couldn't wait to make good on that threat."

Indeed, it was Verizon's victory in court over the FCC's initial bid to push through net neutrality that has, in part, brought us to this point.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03...ality_lawsuit/





Tennessee Fights for its Right to Squash Municipal Broadband Expansion

FCC faces first lawsuit over vote to preempt state laws that limit competition.
Jon Brodkin

The State of Tennessee is fighting for its right to enforce a law that prevents municipal broadband networks from providing Internet service to other cities and towns.

Tennessee filed a lawsuit Friday against the Federal Communications Commission, which last month voted to preempt state laws in Tennessee and North Carolina that prevent municipal broadband providers from expanding outside their territories. The FCC cited its authority granted in 1996 by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, which requires the FCC to encourage the deployment of broadband to all Americans by using "measures that promote competition in the local telecommunications market, or other regulating methods that remove barriers to infrastructure investment." (Emphasis ours.)

In Tennessee, the Electric Power Board (EPB) of Chattanooga offers Internet and video service to residents, but state law prevented it from expanding outside its electric service area to adjacent towns that have poor Internet service. Tennessee is one of about 20 states that impose some type of restriction on municipal broadband networks, helping protect private Internet service providers from competition.

Tennessee isn't going to give up its restriction on municipal broadband without a fight. "[T]he FCC has unlawfully inserted itself between the State of Tennessee and the State’s own political subdivisions," Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery wrote in the state's petition to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. "The State of Tennessee, as a sovereign and a party to the proceeding below, is aggrieved and seeks relief on the grounds that the Order: (1) is contrary to the United States Constitution; (2) is in excess of the Commission’s authority; (3) is arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion within the meaning of the Administrative Procedure Act; and (4) is otherwise contrary to law."

It's no surprise that the FCC is facing a lawsuit over its decision, as this is the first time the commission has tested its Section 706 authority by preempting state laws restricting municipal broadband.

Despite Tennessee's lawsuit, there are members of the state legislature who want to get rid of the restrictions on municipal broadband. Legislation in the state Senate and House would eliminate the provisions of state law that prevent municipal electric utilities from offering broadband and video service outside their electric service footprint. The legislation is scheduled for markups today, but AT&T and other telecom companies are lobbying against it, Communications Daily reported.

One of Tennessee's representatives in Congress, US Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), introduced legislation to overturn the FCC's municipal broadband decision.

The Tennessee restriction dates to 1999, when the legislature authorized municipal electric systems to provide Internet access and cable TV, but only within their electric service areas.

Partly because of a previous case involving a municipal telecommunications ban in Missouri, the FCC's order removing the geographic restrictions in Tennessee and North Carolina "would allow preemption only in cases of underlying authorization." In other words, if a state completely banned municipal broadband, precedent prevents the FCC from taking action. In that Missouri case, the FCC sided with the state and the Supreme Court upheld its decision in 2004. The FCC's conclusion in this latest proceeding was that it can intervene in states that allow cities and towns to offer broadband but impose restrictions on their ability to do so.

The Missouri case also involved a different statute, Section 253 from Title II of the Communications Act, which lets the FCC remove state laws that restrict telecommunications. In Missouri, "the Court upheld a Commission ruling that section 253(a) of the Act did not preempt a state-law flat ban on municipal telecommunications, i.e., phone service," the FCC wrote.

The FCC decided in the Tennessee and North Carolina decision that Section 706 is different because it "addresses barriers to advanced telecommunications," i.e. broadband Internet rather than phone service. "Because section 706 specifically addresses barriers to advanced telecommunications, which are the services at issue in these petitions, we conclude that section 706 is available as a source of authority, regardless of whether section 253 would or would not also apply here," the FCC wrote.

"[H]ere we contemplate preemption under section 706 where a state has allowed municipalities to enter the broadband market but has also imposed regulations to affect the state’s communications policy preferences," the FCC further wrote. "Where we preempt those state regulations that apply to municipal providers, the municipal providers are still authorized under the separate delegation of authority. Unlike in Nixon [vs. Missouri Municipal League], the municipality is not 'powerless to enter the... business.'"

The FCC could face a separate lawsuit over its North Carolina decision. Even if unsuccessful, lawsuits could delay expansion of municipal broadband. "We’ll have to understand any ramifications of anticipated legal challenges before we move forward," EPB communications VP Danna Bailey told Ars last month.

But if the FCC successfully defends its decision, municipalities in many more states could ask for the right to expand broadband networks.

An FCC spokesperson told Ars the commission is confident in the legality of its ruling. “We are confident that our decision to pre-empt laws in two states that prevented community broadband providers from meeting the needs and demands of local consumers will withstand judicial scrutiny," the FCC said.

Unlike the FCC's net neutrality order, which will become effective 60 days after publication in the Federal Register, the community broadband order became "effective on release because it was an adjudicatory matter," the FCC said. That means the Tennessee lawsuit won't face a challenge for being filed too early, whereas the lawsuits filed yesterday over the FCC's net neutrality plan could be dismissed for being premature.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...and-expansion/





New Homeowner Has To Sell House Because Of Comcast’s Incompetence, Lack Of Competition
Chris Morran

Only months after moving into his new home in Washington state, Consumerist reader Seth is already looking to sell his house. He didn’t lose his job or discover that the property is haunted. No, Seth can’t stay much longer because no one can provide broadband service to his address; even though Comcast and CenturyLink both misled him into thinking he’d be connected to their networks and in spite of the fact that his county runs a high-speed fiberoptic network that goes very near to his property.

Like an increasing number of Americans, Seth works from home, meaning that it’s vital that he have a reliable high-speed Internet connection at all times. That’s why before he even put an offer on the house in Kitsap County, WA, he contacted Comcast to confirm that he could get service to his potential new address.

According to Seth, who has kept a detailed timeline of events, one Comcast sales rep even said that a previous resident at this address had been a Comcast customer. Seth says he tried to get it in writing that the house was serviceable, but Comcast said they simply do not do that.

Then, on Jan. 31, a Comcast tech came out to perform what should have been a quick installation, only to find that there was no cable infrastructure leading to Seth’s property. Thus began a months-long saga of pointless appointments before Seth ultimately hit a dead end last week.

What follows is the story of Seth’s quest to get broadband from someone, anyone, so he doesn’t have to sell his beautiful new home. According to BroadbandMap.gov, Seth has 10 options for broadband access at his new address, including a municipal network. But does he really? If Comcast refuses to provide service, can Seth choose another viable provider? Surely one of these 10 listed options will work for him, right? The answer may surprise you.

Parade Of Fools

THE REVOLVING DOOR OF TECH VISITS

#1 (Jan. 31): Tech shows up for scheduled appointment. Says there is no line to the house. Leaves.
#2 (First week of Feb.): Tech shows up without appointment. Says there is no line to the house. Leaves.
#3 (Feb. 9): Tech shows up for scheduled appointment. Say there is no line to the house. Leaves.
#4 (Third week of Feb.): Tech shows up without appointment. Says there is no line to the house. Leaves.

On Jan 31, as soon as the Comcast tech arrived at Seth’s house, he noticed a problem — no Comcast box on the outside of the house or anywhere near it. He gave Seth the bad news that the only way he’d get service was if Comcast ran cable from the road to his building.

“He called to set that up for us, and told us he was going to do something called a ‘Drop Bury Request’ to bring in service,” writes Seth. “He filed a ticket and went on his way.”

But that request seemed to vanish into the ether. Seth made repeated follow-up calls to Comcast but — in spite of having a ticket number, and in spite of being made promises that people would call or e-mail him back — no one seemed to have any idea what was going on with his account.

After nearly a week of trying, he finally got through to someone who scheduled for another tech to come out on Feb. 9.

Oddly, a Comcast installer showed up unexpectedly days before that scheduled appointment.

“He just appeared out of nowhere and asked us where our cable box was,” writes Seth. “We explained that we didn’t have one, but that we did have a Drop Bury Request in place. He looked perplexed. He told us that there was no way a Drop Bury Request could possibly get us hooked up, we were too far away from the cable infrastructure. We asked him to contact someone at Comcast to get things resolved, and he left.”

Then on Feb. 9 another tech showed up — at least this one was on schedule — but just like his predecessors, this guy had not been given the memo that the house was not yet connected to the Comcast network. He was just there to hook up a modem and some cable boxes.

Several days later — and again without an appointment — yet another Comcast tech showed up to do an install that simply couldn’t be done.

Kafka Comes To Kabletown

At some point in the middle of all these pointless appointments, Seth found himself mired in a different Comcast bureaucracy — “Engineering.”

First Seth was told that everything was going fine and that Comcast was in the process of pulling construction permits.

Then, a site surveyor showed up to check out the distance from the house to the nearest Comcast node.

“He mumbled something about how it was going to be a very expensive job, then left,” writes Seth.

On Feb. 20 things got worse. A Comcast rep informed Seth that, despite the visit from the site surveyor, there was nothing in the account notes about an “Engineering” request and that Seth’s original service order had “timed out” because it had been so long since he’d first placed his order with Comcast.

But there was some good news. The rep said Comcast could do a “temporary drop” the next day to get service started ahead of actual construction.

That good news turned bad. Seth answered the door the next morning to hear a Comcast tech telling him, “I hate to tell you this, but I don’t think you have cable!”

The situation became even more confused later that day when yet another Comcast sales rep claimed that the work had been successfully completed that morning and Seth now had service and the ticket had been closed.

Once again, Seth had to place yet another order for service; his second in two days and his third in a month.

And, yes, the “Engineering” request had evaporated from Comcast’s system at some point, meaning an entirely new ticket needed to be opened.

It gets worse.

At this point, Seth had been promised that someone would call him within 24 hours about this new “Engineering” request, and, you guessed it, no one did.

And when Seth finally got sick of waiting and called Comcast, a sales rep claimed that the latest “Engineering” request had been closed as an “invalid ticket.”

Then a few days later — as if to rub it in his face — Comcast actually called Seth to ask him why he’d cancelled his installation appointment.

“They started to upsell me on all the great things I’d be missing out on if I didn’t reschedule!” says Seth. “I just hung up.”

What About DSL?

Like most pay-TV/broadband providers, Comcast has virtually no competition in many of the areas it serves. And that’s certainly true for Seth’s neighborhood.

But wait, what about CenturyLink?

The CenturyLink website shows that Seth’s address is serviced and that he can get broadband speeds of up to 10Mbps (not terribly fast, but sufficient for many purposes):

After that very first Comcast tech told Seth there was no cable infrastructure to his house, he contacted CenturyLink. The company promised to get him hooked up right away.

But then the next day he got a call informing him that his area was in “Permanent Exhaust” and that CenturyLink wouldn’t be adding new customers. Of course, that didn’t stop CenturyLink from billing Seth more than $100 for service he never received and will never be able to receive. Seth then had to convince someone with CenturyLink’s billing department to zero out the account that should have never been opened.

“Seth’s issue had been ignored, then handed to someone who wouldn’t even be in the office for another 10 days”

We contacted CenturyLink back in February when we first heard about Seth’s story. We asked why: a) Seth’s address was showing up as being served and b) why the company was unable to service that address and also refusing to build out in Seth’s area.

Last Friday, after weeks of e-mail promises from a CenturyLink corporate media rep who repeatedly claimed to be “looking into” the matter, I received the following update that is too ridiculous to keep to myself: “I have taken a new position with CenturyLink in the last week. I have forwarded your inquires onto M****, my former manager. M**** or one of her staff members will continue to research and follow up with you.”

I don’t usually include this sort of e-mail in my stories, but it shows the level of care with which CenturyLink handled this issue. After more than three weeks of being promised a response, I was being passed on to a new person.

And then to drive that point home, when I wrote to this new contact about the urgency of getting some sort of response, I received an auto-reply stating that M***** was out of the office through March 27.

Seth’s issue had been ignored and then handed to someone who wouldn’t even be in the office for another ten days.

Finally, after pointing out the insanity of waiting three weeks for the results of CL’s thorough research, I was given a one-sentence statement from yet another media contact: “We researched the issue and found that there was an error in our system, which we are updating.”

That was two days ago, and yet as of right now the CenturyLink website still says Seth’s address can get broadband service.

Where’s All That Competition Comcast Talks About?

In spite of all evidence to the contrary (and then some), Comcast insists that “the broadband marketplace is more competitive than ever.”

And that might sound reasonable when you look at this chart from BroadbandMaps.gov showing available broadband services in Seth’s ZIP code:

But when you actually look at the names on this list, you’ll see that the truth is much different.

We’ve already ruled out CenturyLink, as they are unwilling to build out their network even though their own website says it’s available.

Next, most of the providers on this list are wireless cellular companies. While your LTE service might be just as fast as your in-home broadband, the per-gigabyte cost of wireless is outrageously more expensive than cable or DSL service. Seth is currently using a mobile wireless hotspot to connect to the Internet at home, but the costs and limitations are not tenable in the long-run.

Satellite broadband is getting faster and more affordable, but it’s still significantly more expensive for someone who would be using the Internet both day and night for home and business.

Additionally, Seth’s work requires that he have a VPN connection. Unfortunately, the latency on satellite broadband is so high that most residential-level service providers won’t guarantee that customers can access VPNs. So satellite might get TV and some Internet into Seth’s home, but not into his home office. Thus, strike ViaSat from the above list.

What’s that StarTouch Broadband company? Good question. StarTouch uses microwave technology to transmit high-speed data service to parts of Washington state. This may have been the perfect solution for Seth — no need to run cables out to Comcast node; no waiting for CenturyLink to get around to providing service to his area — except StarTouch doesn’t actually cover his neighborhood.

A rep for the company confirmed to Consumerist that the data on BroadbandMaps.gov is inaccurate and their service does not reach this part of Kitsap County. When Seth called, a rep told him that his area used to be serviced but that someone recently constructed a tall building that effectively blocks the StarTouch signals from reaching him.

Then there’s XO, which provides connectivity solutions for business. We confirmed with an XO sales rep that the company could, in theory, provide T1 broadband service (through CenturyLink). However, it would require that either Seth’s employer purchase the service or that Seth have a business license of his own.

But even if that were possible, the cost would be exorbitant, starting at nearly $600/month with a three-year contract.

One service not listed above — because it’s not even available yet — is the fixed wireless product promised by AT&T if it’s allowed to merge with DirecTV. It may be exactly the kind of thing for someone in Seth’s situation, but we have no idea how quickly AT&T would roll it out post-merger, or which areas it will be available.

Unfortunately, Seth doesn’t have a year or two to wait.

What’s A PUD & Why Can’t It Sell Me Gigabit Broadband Service?

The only remaining option on that list is the gigabit fiber network operated by the Kitsap Public Utility District. That’s right, the county has high-speed broadband lines running not far from Seth’s house.

So why can’t he just get his service from the county?

Because Washington is one of the half-dozen states that forbids municipal broadband providers from selling service directly to consumers.

The state law in Washington limits the sale of muni broadband service to the wholesale level, meaning Kitsap PUD can only sell network access to resellers.

Back in February, right around the time we heard of Seth’s story, the FCC voted to approve two petitions from muni broadband providers in Tennessee and North Carolina who were looking to get out from under the thumb of state laws restricting the areas they could service.

That gives hope for city- and county-owned broadband providers around the country, but the FCC vote was not a blanket ruling that overturned all overly restrictive local broadband laws. Instead, each law would need to be challenged, meaning Kitsap PUD or some other similar wholesale provider in the state would need to petition the FCC.

PUD officials had no comment on whether they intend to file such a petition or if they’d publicly support one. After all, running a retail-level broadband service may be too expensive an undertaking for a county with only around 250,000 residents.

However, a source at the District did indicate that there is a need for competition and that the mere threat of a possible newcomer in the form of gigabit fiber service could only help consumers like Seth.

Even if the PUD did get the ability to sell directly to consumers, Seth would still need to pay for a build-out of the fiber network to his home. The one major difference is that this cost can be amortized over a significantly longer time period, meaning the consumer would face a lower up-front investment.

And Now The Sad Conclusion Of Seth’s Story…

So with all other options off the table, Seth has had to wait for Comcast to get around to estimating the construction cost for connecting him to the network, and then for the company to decide whether it’s worth it.

Comcast put Seth around 2,500 feet from the nearest connection point, and gave him an initial unofficial estimate of around $20/foot, meaning he’d have to pay $50,000 just to get connected.

That seemed high to Seth, and several people we talked to (who don’t have the specifics of his situation but who are familiar with these sorts of projects) say this is more than most quotes.

Comcast later revised that estimate upward, to as much as $60,000, though Comcast — if it decided to do the work — would pick up some of the tab.

Seth even began looking into hiring his own contractor to do some of the more expensive work on his property in the hopes of bringing the cost down.

After about seven weeks of pointless install appointments, deleted orders, dead ends, and vague sky-high estimates, Comcast told him that it had decided to simply not do the extension. The company wouldn’t even listen to Seth’s offers to pay for a good chunk of the cost.

“I’m devastated,” he wrote at the time. “This means we have to sell the house. The house that I bought in December, and have lived in for only two months.”

“Comcast has lied. I don’t throw that word around lightly or flippantly, I mean it sincerely,” continued Seth. “They’ve fed me false information from the start, and it’s hurt me very badly.”

Seth says he stands to lose a significant chunk of money by selling his house so soon after moving in.

“Three months of equity in a house isn’t a lot of money compared to sellers fees, excise taxes, and other moving expenses,” he explains.

Even though Comcast was given weeks to research and comment on Seth’s story, the company has yet to provide Consumerist with a statement or explanation of how it could not only fail to keep an accurate accounting of serviceable addresses, but why it continued to send tech after tech to do installs that couldn’t be done.

One person we spoke with at Comcast claims that Seth was provided an estimate for what his portion of the construction bill would be, but that he did not agree to pay the costs.

However, Seth tells Consumerist quite the opposite — that he never received anything in writing from Comcast regarding what he would be expected to pay.

“If there was an explicit offer for me to seriously consider paying them, I’d have expected at least that,” he says.

The last he heard from anyone was on March 23, when a regional supervisor mentioned the vague early number of $50,000 to $60,000, but that the supervisor’s message was “there’s nothing we could do for you.”

According to the latest Broadband Progress Report from the FCC, 4% of all Americans — and only 2% of people in Washington state — lack access to even the most basic non-mobile broadband service. But Seth’s story makes us wonder how many consumers are being counted as having access to these services when in fact the service providers refuse to make them available?

That’s why it’s in the best interest of Comcast, CenturyLink and others to assume an address is serviceable just because it falls within a certain ZIP code or municipal boundary — because it gives the illusion that they are providing service to more customers.

And that was fine when the cable companies only provided pay-TV, because you could still get satellite service or just rent a movie. But now that Internet access has become crucial to our work and home lives, broadband providers must be held accountable when they give customers misleading information.
http://consumerist.com/2015/03/25/ne...f-competition/





‘Create Unrest’: Canada’s CSE Agency Includes ‘False Flag’ Operations as Part of Newly-Revealed Cyberwarfare Scope
Martin Anderson

Documents obtained from Edward Snowden reveal the extent of the cyberwarfare techniques used by Canada’s Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) – including the capacity and will to perform ‘false flag’ operations, where responsibility for cyberattacks, counterattacks or other intelligence-related activity is misattributed to individuals, groups or nation states.

The Intercept, in collaboration with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), has published limited details of CSEC’s cyberwarfare capabilities and disposition just as Canada’s C-51 bill – draft anti-terrorism legislation currently under criticism for its potential to silence legitimate protest – is under fierce debate in Canada’s House of Commons.

The ‘deception tactics’ outlined by the documents include ‘false flag’ techniques, carried out in order to ‘create unrest’. In a spectacular display of bureaucratic legerdemain, this process is apparently defined as ‘[altering] adversary perception’.

The new leak also reveals that CSEC uses ‘honeypot’ or ‘watering hole’ techniques in service of generating deceptive cyberactivity; though no greater detail is given on that point, the principle is one of presenting a tempting online target and attempting to gain advantage from the actors attracted to it.

Additionally the leaked information discloses CSEC’s cooperation with the NSA in service of an ‘active computer network access and exploitation on a variety of foreign intelligence targets, including CT [counter terrorism], Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and Mexico’.

Responding to the sites’ enquiries, a spokesperson for CSEC stated the documents in question do “not necessarily reflect current CSE practices or programs”, and continued “In moving from ideas or concepts to planning and implementation, we examine proposals closely to ensure that they comply with the law and internal policies, and that they ultimately lead to effective and efficient ways to protect Canada and Canadians against threats,”

A leaked NSA briefing paper cited by Intercept/CBC outlines the very close relationship that the CSE maintains with the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA):

CSEC offers resources for advanced collection, processing and analysis, and has opened covert sites at the request of the NSA. CSEC shares with NSA their unique geographic access to areas unavailable to the U.S.(i.e. their sites in the PRC), and provides cryptographic products, cryptanalysis, technology and software. CSEC has increased its investment in R&D projects of mutual interest.
http://thestack.com/communications-s...nowden2-230315





EU: Don’t Use Facebook if You Want to Keep the NSA Away from Your Data

Court case could make it harder for US companies to take personal data out of EU.
Glyn Moody

In a key case before the European Union's highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the European Commission admitted yesterday that the US-EU Safe Harbor framework for transatlantic data transfers does not adequately protect EU citizens' data from US spying. The European Commission's attorney Bernhard Schima told the CJEU's attorney general: "You might consider closing your Facebook account if you have one," euobserver reports.

The case before the CJEU is the result of complaints lodged against five US companies—Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Skype, and Yahoo—with the relevant data protection authorities in Germany, Ireland, and Luxembourg by the Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, supported by crowdfunding. Because of the important points of European law raised, the Irish High Court referred the Safe Harbor case to the CJEU.

The referral was prompted by Edward Snowden's revelations about the Prism data-collection program, which show that the US intelligence community has ready access to user data held by nine US Internet companies, including the five named in Schrems' complaints. The EU's Data Protection Directive prohibits the transfer of personal data to non-European Union countries that do not meet the EU's "adequacy" standard for privacy protection. To aid US companies operating in the EU, the Safe Harbor Framework was introduced, which allows US organizations to self-certify their compliance with the adequacy provision when they transfer EU personal data back to the US.

Schrems' complaint claims that the existence of the Prism program, which sees personal data of EU citizens held by US Internet companies passed on to the intelligence agencies, means that the protection cannot be considered "adequate" and that therefore the Safe Harbor agreement no longer applies.

As a post on the International Association of Privacy Professionals site reports, the European Commission admitted in yesterday's court hearing that "it cannot guarantee adequate protection of EU citizen data at the moment." But it claimed that "Safe Harbor is a politically and economically necessary framework that is still under negotiation and is best left in the hands of the commission to work toward a better protection of EU citizen rights." That negotiation has been underway for nearly 18 months, with no signs of an agreement.

If it is ultimately found that the PRISM program removes the ability of US companies to self-certify, they could still apply to transfer data out of the EU even without the "privileged" status that Safe Harbor otherwise confers. However, as a background document on Schrems' Europe-v-Facebook site explains: "a number of companies (e.g., Twitter in its recent Annual Report) expect that it may become harder for US companies to retrieve data from the European Union and it may be necessary to invest in secure European data centers."

The court's decision is also politically important, because a new EU Data Protection Directive is being drawn up. Lack of certainty about the legal status of the Safe Harbor framework is making it even harder to find a consensus between companies that want unimpeded data flows covered by self-certification and privacy advocates calling for stricter limits that keep personal data on servers located with the EU.

Further complicating matters are two global trade agreements, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trade in Services Agreement, currently being negotiated. Both are expected to contain chapters on data flows, but it will be hard for the EU to commit itself in this area without the new Data Protection Directive in place. The CJEU is due to issue its opinion on June 24.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...rom-your-data/





Worse than TPP? Defence Pilloried
Bill Rowlings

The Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill 2015, expected to become law within weeks, regulates high-tech research and development in Australia…and may drive the nation’s best researchers and academics overseas for good.

If they don’t leave for their own sanity and safety, they face $400,000 fines and 10 years in jail just for sending an “inappropriate” email. Who decides “appropriate”? Big Brother, the Government.

The new law is a government assault on freedom of speech and association, and entirely disproportionate to the legitimate protections it is trying to put in place. The penalty regime can literally take a researcher’s life’s work away.

Some critics say the DTCA law will have a worse effect on Australia than the useless-but-dangerous Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement. (1)

Defence BillThe DTCA Bill aims to control who can share what with whom in defence- and security-related research. It passed the Senate on 18 March 2015 , but with a rider clause that major penalties under the law would be suspended for 12 months during a “suck it and see” process.

“It’s highly unusual for the Australian Parliament to pass a law, but suspend the operation of part of it so as to find out what problems it causes,” Civil Liberties Australia’s President, Dr Kristine Klugman, said. “The government must know how bad the legislation potentially is to act in this way.”

The problems associated with the new research law are legislative overkill, kow-towing totally and without thought to US interests, and flagrant disregard for consultation by Australia’s Department of Defence. This third problem evinced severe castigation last month by an Australian Senator who once headed up a Defence research establishment.

Poor drafting of the law means academics in Australia face greater hurdles to publishing, cooperation and exchange of information than do counterparts in the US and UK, for example. They will need Department of Defence approval before they engage in many normal research activities, like collaboration, supervision of PhD students and other non-publication releases of information.

“It’s like one part of government is trying to build a three-lane research highway, but the Defence area of government is putting concrete barriers randomly every 100m along the lanes,” Dr Klugman said. “If it doesn’t stop progress entirely, it slows it to a crawl.”

The law in Australia has been broadened to cover “dual-use” technology, including:

• high-performance, neural, optical and fault-tolerant, computers,
• electronics,
• wavelength research (remember, wi-fi was ‘invented’ in Australia),
• heat-shielding,
• telecommunications,
• information security research,
• robotics,
• human, animal and plant pathogens, both bacterial and viral,
• fibre optics,
• cryptography.
• satellite technology.
• sensor technology.
• signal and image processing.
• composite materials, and…the list could go on and on.

Some categories have special case exclusions…but how do you know which, and when?

Also tucked away in the over-broad legislation is the fact that software for research in key areas is automatically covered. How would anyone know at what precise point utilising the partly-proscribed software, on some parts of some research, suddenly switches from being legal to illegal? Which bit tips you over the cliff?

Anyone working on non-defence-related research in these and similar fields in Australia is captive to the law’s excessive rules, regulations…and punishments.

These can be draconian. If a university academic shares an “inappropriate” email with a fellow academic overseas on dual-use research, the Australian faces a $400,000 fine, 10 years in jail and forfeiture of work. Meanwhile, in reverse, the overseas academic could communicate exactly the same information to an Australian researcher without fault or punishment.

The McCarthyist intent may be honourable, but the delivery through this legislation is dangerous. It is jeopardising our commitment to a research sector in Australia that I would have thought is important to all of us in the many fields that we deal with in this chamber, from food and fibre production all the way through to the medical and health sciences. … why on earth are we therefore including a criminal offence for a researcher in that space?”
– Rob Oakeshott, then independent MHR for Lyne NSW


It is easy to see why some researchers and academics believe the new law will force the best and the brightest to leave Australia. The law will also stop the brightest coming to Australia to do research: already one PhD student has consulted with his embassy here, and decided to undertake his research in the UK instead of Australia, academic sources say.

Links with China will be particularly scrutinised, just at a time when Australian universities are forming formal relationships with Chinese universities at an accelerating rate. There are academic and student swaps, joint research and collaborative writing of papers…all of which will now be under threat from the poor DTCA legislation and the uncertainty surrounding it.

Like with the TPP trade agreement, the new law stems from US hegemony.

When the Australia-United States Defence Trade Cooperation Treaty was signed in 2007, Australia was forced to succumb to the rules of the US International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR). Hence, the new rule that intangible “supply” or “publication” (including email exchange) of technology listed on the Defence and Strategic Goods List would be a criminal offence, attracting the harsh penalties.

The US refuses to supply Australia with “smart” (electronic) weapons and technology unless we are signed on to their system for trying to control intellectual developments in research. This is ironic, because the US system leaks like a sieve, and China is thought to know as much about US research as the Obama Administration does. Edward Snowden – the man who leaked America’s innermost secret communications – was not an Australian.

Most of the people who could face huge fines and jail time under the DTCA have no idea the new law applies to them. Dual-use restrictions mean the new law affects researchers even if they have no relationship – and have never had a relationship – with the Department of Defence.

The third major criticism of the new law is that Defence virtually encouraged public ignorance of its ramifications, and actively refused to engage in proper public consultation.

Speaking in Parliament as the Bill passed the Senate, Senator David Fawcett (2, and photo), a Liberal from South Australia, former Army helicopter test pilot and commanding officer as a Lt-Colonel of the RAAF Aircraft Research and Development Unit, delivered a withering rebuke to his former alma mater in a speech pillorying Defence’s approach:

One of the things the committee found was that the consultations undertaken by the Department of Defence in this case were inadequate, and that would be understating the extent of the consultations. As someone who served for over 23 years in Defence, I am ashamed to have to tell this chamber that the consultation was inadequate.This lack shows that many in Defence are put into roles—they might be working with an industry sector or an academic sector that they have never been a part of—and sometimes their concept of what will have an impact is not informed by their own life experience; and that is why consultation is so important. Consultation is important not only to transmit information but also to provide real opportunities to listen and understand what the practical impact of measures that the parliament legislates may have on industry or on academia.”

According to some working in the field, lack of consultation is the least of Defence’s sins.

Brendan Jones, a longtime critic who used to run an Australian Defence-related research business but who now has emigrated his business because of these and other anti-inventiveness laws, says Australian industry’s concerns have been ignored.

“A very big problem with the DTCA is the lack of protection for commercial confidentiality. The Department of Defence has a history of stealing intellectual property, abusing inside information for commercial gain, and an ongoing corruption problem.

“They also have their own business enterprises (Defence actually bids for its own contracts!) and business partners.

“The DTCA ‘forces’ companies to reveal their intellectual property to Defence, with no protection against it being abused.

“The DTCA also imposes a considerable financial burden on businesses; even by Defence’s own rubbery numbers, compliance will cost your business $152,188 just for the first year,” Jones says.
http://www.cla.asn.au/News/defence-p...te-test-pilot/





Mandatory Data Retention Passes Australian Parliament

Summary:The government and Labor have jointly ensured that the telecommunications data of all Australians will be retained for two years for warrantless access by law-enforcement agencies.

Josh Taylor

The Australian government has relied on the votes of the Labor opposition to pass legislation on Thursday that will force telecommunications companies to retain customer data for two years for warrantless access by law enforcement.

The legislation -- which will see call records, assigned IP addresses, location information, billing information, and other customer data stored for two years -- passed the Senate on Thursday with the support of Labor senators.

The government and Labor shot down over a dozen amendments from the Greens, and several amendments from crossbench senators including those from David Leyonhjelm, Dio Wang, and Nick Xenophon.

The amendments would have forced the data to be held in Australia, would have required warrants for all accessing of the data, and would have limited the storage to three months -- bringing Australia closer into line with international standards.

Instead, the government agreed to a number of amendments from Labor, including requiring a warrant for accessing the data of a journalist for the purpose of identifying a source. The government will appoint a "public interest advocate" to argue on behalf of journalists -- who won't be aware that their data has been sought by law enforcement.

There was also intended to be an amendment limiting access to the data for the purposes of civil litigation, but Attorney-General George Brandis on Thursday admitted that through third-party access orders and subpoenas, data could be made available through the court for cases such as copyright infringement.

In the end, the Bill was condemned by Leyonhjelm, and Greens Senator Scott Ludlam, but ultimately passed 43 to 16.

The Bill will need to be returned to the House to agree to the amendments, but with a government majority this is a mere formality.

The legislation passed without the Australian public knowing the cost of the scheme to telcos to build systems to store the data, nor how much the government intends to contribute to the set-up.

Earlier in the week, Brandis revealed that the cost per customer per year for the operation of the scheme will be $4, but the cost of building the systems, contained in a confidential PricewaterhouseCoopers report, remains unknown.

Brandis said the government's contribution will be detailed in the Budget in May.

Telecommunications companies will be given 18 months after the legislation is passed into law to get systems in place in order to comply with the legislation.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/mandato...an-parliament/





Australia Outlaws Warrant Canaries
Cory Doctorow

The exceptionally broad new surveillance bill lets the government do nearly unlimited warrantless mass surveillance, even of lawyer-client privileged communications, and bans warrant canaries, making it an offense to "disclose information about the existence or non-existence" of a warrant to spy on journalists.

Quote:
Despite that move away from retaining communications metadata by the EU and continuing concerns in the US about the National Security Agency's bulk phone metadata spying program, the Australian government was able to push through the amendments implementing data retention thanks to the support of the main opposition party. Labor agreed to vote in favor of the Bill once a requirement to use special "journalist information warrants" was introduced for access to journalists' metadata, with a view to shielding their sources. No warrant is required for obtaining the metadata of other classes of users, not even privileged communications between lawyers and their clients. Even for journalists, the extra protection is weak, and the definition of what constitutes a journalist is rather narrow—bloggers and occasional writers are probably not covered.

Warrant canaries can't be used in this context either. Section 182A of the new law says that a person commits an offense if he or she discloses or uses information about "the existence or non-existence of such a [journalist information] warrant." The penalty upon conviction is two years imprisonment.

During the relatively quick passage of the amendments, the Australian government made the usual argument that metadata needs to be retained for long periods in order to fight terrorism and serious crime—even though the German experience is that, in practice, data retention does not help. Toward the end of the debate, when concerns about journalist sources were raised, one senior member of the Australian government adopted a more unusual approach to calming people's fears.
Australian government minister: Dodge new data retention law like this [Glyn Moody/Ars Technica]
http://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/aus...rant-cana.html





We Know Where You’ve Been: Ars Acquires 4.6M License Plate Scans from the Cops

One citizen demands: "Do you know why Oakland is spying on me and my wife?"
Cyrus Farivar

If you have driven in Oakland any time in the last few years, chances are good that the cops know where you’ve been, thanks to their 33 automated license plate readers (LPRs).

Now Ars knows too.

In response to a public records request, we obtained the entire LPR dataset of the Oakland Police Department (OPD), including more than 4.6 million reads of over 1.1 million unique plates between December 23, 2010 and May 31, 2014. The dataset is likely the largest ever publicly released in the United States—perhaps in the world.

After analyzing this data with a custom-built visualization tool, Ars can definitively demonstrate the data's revelatory potential. Anyone in possession of enough data can often—but not always—make educated guesses about a target’s home or workplace, particularly when someone’s movements are consistent (as with a regular commute).

For instance, during a meeting with an Oakland city council member, Ars was able to accurately guess the block where the council member lives after less than a minute of research using his license plate data. Similarly, while "working" at an Oakland bar mere blocks from Oakland police headquarters, we ran a plate from a car parked in the bar's driveway through our tool. The plate had been read 48 times over two years in two small clusters: one near the bar and a much larger cluster 24 blocks north in a residential area—likely the driver's home.

“Where someone goes can reveal a great deal about how he chooses to live his life," Catherine Crump, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told Ars. "Do they park regularly outside the Lighthouse Mosque during times of worship? They’re probably Muslim. Can a car be found outside Beer Revolution a great number of times? May be a craft beer enthusiast—although possibly with a drinking problem."

In August 2014, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation lost a lawsuit to compel the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department to hand over a mere week’s worth of all LPR data. That case is now on appeal.

In Oakland, OPD's current LPR dataset shows only a few data points for most vehicles. But there are exceptions—such as the car seen 459 times over two years on a certain block of Chabot Road, east of the Rockridge BART station (one of the city’s richer areas). As Oakland and cities like it deploy more LPR cameras, such datasets could quickly grow more complete.

“Project forward to a world where LPR technology is cheap and they can be mounted on every police car and posted at every traffic light," said Crump. "Do you think that anyone with a badge should be able to search through that data at their discretion? If not, then you should support restrictions on how long law enforcement agents can store this data, and who can access it, and under what circumstances.”

A low “hit rate”

Specialized LPR cameras mounted in fixed locations or on police cars typically scan passing license plates using optical character recognition technology, checking each plate against a "hot list" of stolen or wanted vehicles. The devices can read up to 60 plates per second and typically record the date, time, and GPS location of any plates—hot or not. (There have been incidents where LPR misreads have led to dangerous confrontations.) Some cities have even mounted such cameras at their city borders, monitoring who comes in and out, including the wealthy city of Piedmont, California, which is totally surrounded by Oakland.

LPR collection began in Oakland back in 2006, and an early OPD analysis showed that the overwhelming majority of the data collected was not a “hit.” In April 2008, the OPD reported to the city council that after using just four LPR units for 16 months, it had read 793,273 plates and had 2,012 hits—a “hit rate” of 0.2 percent. In other words, nearly all of the data collected by an LPR system concerns people not currently under suspicion.

Despite this, in that same report, then-OPD Deputy Chief Dave Kozicki (who has since retired) dubbed the LPR setup an “overwhelming success.” Today, OPD's LPR hit rate has fallen slightly, to just 0.16 percent.

In addition to LPR data, Ars obtained a list of OPD vehicles and found that the most frequently seen one is plate number 1275287, a 2007 Crown Victoria marked patrol car. Between January 15, 2012 and May 31, 2014, the OPD scanned that vehicle 879 times all over town, primarily in the downtown and North Oakland areas. In fact, nearly all of the 100 most frequently seen cars were other OPD vehicles scanned several hundred times each.

Law enforcement policies vary widely as to how long LPR information can be stored. In California, the wealthy Silicon Valley city of Menlo Park (home to Facebook) retains data for just 30 days. By contrast, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) retains data for two years.

Neither the Oakland City Council nor the OPD has ever imposed a formal data retention limit, though OPD has deleted older LPR data as needed to make room for newer data. As LPR devices and storage prices continue to fall, it's likely the volume and rate of such data collection will continue to rise, and its retention time can become longer.

“If I’m law enforcement, I would keep it forever,” Brian Owsley, a former federal judge turned law professor at Indiana Tech, told Ars. “That’s the privacy advocates’ concern is that this stuff goes into a database—gigabytes are essentially free now—and this stuff stays forever.”

There's no evidence that the OPD has abused its database. But absent any strict controls, auditing, or even basic guidelines, it’s hard to know what might or might not have been done.

“Anyone can get this information”

To make sense of the LPR data—which was originally provided in 18 separate Excel spreadsheet files with hundreds of thousands of lines each—Ars hired Mike Tahani, a Bay Area data visualization specialist. Tahani created a simple tool allowing us to search any given plate and plot the locations on a map.

We did not use the data for any purpose beyond our journalistic attempt to understand what such a large license plate reader dataset reveals. While OPD and other law enforcement agencies have the ability to match a given plate with registration records from the Department of Motor Vehicles and the National Crime Information Center, revealing a car's owner, Ars does not. In cases where we searched a known individual's plates, we did so only with their explicit consent.

When shown data on their own movements, local residents had widely varying reactions.

“Doesn’t bother me personally,” said Jon Kaufman, an Oakland resident. “I have nothing to hide.”

Howard Matis, a physicist who works at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told Ars that he didn’t know that OPD even had LPRs. With his permission, we ran his plate and showed him a map of the five instances where a camera had captured his car, guessing that they were near where he lived or worked. Matis replied by e-mail: “You are correct, they are places that I and my wife go all the time.”

Matis wasn't worried about OPD capturing such data, but he was less comfortable knowing that the data was released to the media.

“If anyone can get this information, that’s getting into Big Brother,” he told Ars. “If I was trying to look at what my spouse is doing, [I could]. To me, that is something that is kind of scary. Why do they allow people to release this without a law enforcement reason? Searching it or accessing the information should require a warrant.”

Matis immediately fired off an e-mail to Dan Kalb, his city council member:

Dan,

Do you know why Oakland is spying on me and my wife? We haven't done anything too radical or illegal.

I gave my license plate to a journalist and he found my wife's and my car in their database. One of the locations is right near our house.

The astounding thing about this information is that anyone, and I mean anyone, can get this information. Some of the information is more than two years old.

I can see lawyers using this information for lawsuits. I can check where my wife is located. Car companies can see my habits. Insurance companies can check up on their clients. We have entered the world of 1984 with the difference that anyone can get the information.


Ars contacted every member of the Oakland City Council, including newly elected mayor Libby Schaaf, to show them the Oakland LPR data. Dan Kalb, the recipient of Matis' e-mail, was the only council member who agreed to meet. (Neither Mayor Schaaf nor the recently departed mayor, Jean Quan, responded to requests for an interview.) Kalb represents District 1, which includes some of the city’s richer neighborhoods—including Oakland Hills and Rockridge—and other less affluent regions in the city’s northwest.

Seated in Kalb's cluttered City Hall office, Ars explained the LPR issue. We asked for Kalb's plate number and, within seconds, showed him what the OPD knew about his travels. Our tool revealed that OPD had seen the councilman 51 times between May 2012 and May 2014.

On 16 occasions, Kalb’s car was scanned parked on the street just outside City Hall in the spaces reserved for council members. On another 20 occasions, at various times of day, Kalb’s car was spotted in a tight group on a certain block in the Temescal neighborhood. When Ars guessed that this block must be where he lives, he said that it was.

“I knew these things existed, but I had not delved into the level of detail that you're sharing with me,” he said.

Kalb is relatively new to City Hall, having only been elected in 2012. Though he did know that the city had LPRs, he said he didn’t know the extent of its usage.

“My awareness is that we have something like this, these mobile LPRs, and I presumed that their primary purpose was to track down stolen vehicles or assist in the investigations of other crimes that knowing the license plate would help,” he told Ars. “It raises the question: what's the purpose of retaining records for a long period of time?”

A window into the past

The purpose, of course, is to enable retroactive investigation of movements.

Anthony Finnell, the head of OPD’s civilian oversight body (known as the Citizens’ Police Review Board), told Ars that this wasn't a serious privacy concern.

“I can see as a former investigator that there would be a tool, if a crime had happened you may want to put that person's plate in and backtrack," Finnell, a veteran of the Indianapolis Police Department, said. "That doesn't discount a person's concern. But I can just say from a personal standpoint, I don't see it as a big problem, because there's so many other ways to track somebody.”

Finnell and Kalb are each acutely aware of Oakland’s long-entrenched crime problems. Kalb has even been a victim of crime. A month before the November 2012 election, after walking home from an anti-crime meeting, he was held up at gunpoint for his wallet and iPhone.

Oakland has a higher murder rate than Los Angeles. For three years running, the city has held the dubious honor of being America’s urban robbery capital. The city recorded 4,922 robberies in 2013—or 14 per day. Police see LPRs as one more tool used to put a dent in the crime rate.

Anecdotally, cops often say that LPR data is great for finding stolen vehicles or locating criminal suspects, and it's easy to imagine how such license plate reader data could be correlated with financial information, cellular data, or even surveillance video in a more complex investigation.

One LPR case often cited on the East Coast is the 2007 murder of five people in Fishkill, New York. Local police were able to access the LPR records of a state trooper who happened to be nearby. That data showed the suspect's car was in the vicinity of the killing when it happened, which dismantled his alibi.

"They were able to coordinate GPS positions and time and place that car in front of the house shortly before the alarm was raised with the local fire department," Pete Kontos, a New York State Police senior investigator, told the Hudson Valley Journal News in 2009. "It was a substantial piece of evidence used in the trial."

Oakland police captain Anthony Toribio, a department employee for 25 years, echoed this sentiment. He told Ars that LPRs are useful to his work.

"It's a significant tool to have because it can speed up the investigative process by identifying vehicles, linking them to crimes, linking them to locations where that car has been flagged so to speak or identified by the LPR system,” he said. When he served as an area commander, he “used it frequently.”

Toribio noted that Oakland purchased 20 new cameras in 2014, and he said that the city was exploring the use of trailer-mounted “fixed cameras” that could be moved as needed.

“We try to strategically place these cars in areas or beats that are high crime areas,” he said. Toribio cited an occasion when, as a result of a high incidence of burglaries in the hills of North Oakland, he once ordered an LPR-equipped car to that area.
“Often times you have the suspects that are casing the area and driving around, and you never know when a cop car may drive by and they're not doing nothing at that point, but a short while later they may be driving by and it's good to have that information.”

Any OPD officer can search the department’s LPR database. While the individual officer’s name is logged, no reason for the search has to be entered. Toribio noted that OPD policy requires officers to have a "legitimate law enforcement purpose, such as following up on a criminal investigation" in order to access the database. "Accessing databases for personal use is a policy violation and illegal in some circumstances," he added.

Evidence for LPR effectiveness remains largely anecdotal. Toribio could not provide any quantitative evidence to suggest that the LPR system made the police more effective overall at catching suspects than before implementation in 2006. Academics studying the issue say that the question remains open.

“The research is so limited at this point that we don’t know a lot of the answers,” Linda Merola, a criminology and law professor at George Mason University, told Ars. Her university has spearheaded many of the academic efforts on LPRs.

“At this point there have been a handful of evaluations of trying to look at what is the impact in an immediate sense: what is the impact of arrests?" she added. "Can we find more stolen vehicles? Even that research is very limited, and it hasn’t shown very much. What is the impact, if any, on saving data? There have been times anecdotally, but we really don’t know if it serves any purpose other than a theoretical purpose.”

When is tracking not actually tracking?

While the potential for LPR dragnet surveillance worries some privacy advocates, the police perspective is that public actions are... public.

In 2006, for instance, Gina Bianchi, the deputy commissioner and counsel at the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, wrote in a memo to all local law enforcement agencies across the state, "A license plate reader merely accomplishes, more efficiently, the same task that a police officer may accomplish by reading a license plate and manually entering the number into a database. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that a court would not hold that the use of a license plate reader would constitute a search."

Toribio put it more plainly.

“You have to remember the data that we get from the LPR is limited to the plate, the photo, and the location,” he said. “Any information that comes in that alerts us that that vehicle was involved in a crime, the officer has to do more homework. But what expectation of privacy do you have when you're out in public?”

Toribio is referring to a unanimous 1983 Supreme Court decision in United States v. Knotts. That case famously found: “A person traveling in an automobile on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements.”

But Knotts came before it was possible to build automated systems that track and store the movement of every car passing by over a period of years. More recently, as part of the unanimous 2012 Supreme Court decision on warrantless GPS tracking, United States v. Jones, Justice Samuel Alito referred to the Knotts decision and said it might not apply as "public" surveillance becomes more comprehensive.

Under this approach, relatively short-term monitoring of a person's movements on public streets accords with expectations of privacy that our society has recognized as reasonable. See Knotts, 460 U.S., at 281-282. But the use of longer term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy. For such offenses, society's expectation has been that law enforcement agents and others would not—and indeed, in the main, simply could not—secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual's car for a very long period.

While the distinctions between LPR camera systems and GPS tracking are notable, huge LPR databases start to move closer toward the GPS model and might one day run into trouble with the courts. For now, the use of license plate readers has been upheld in numerous criminal cases around the country. And police and prosecutors are happy to use them.

“From a police perspective we are looking at this data to help solve crimes and to help individuals who are solving crimes,” Toribio added. “What I did on a regular basis when reviewing crime reports is look for license plates and then use the license plate reader to get a picture of the vehicle, and its location, and provide that information to police officers to help identify individuals.”

“We have nothing to hide”

In Oakland, no one in the city government has told the police to stop collecting LPR data for years at a time—nor to avoid sharing it. Therefore, the police have done both.

“There is a process that needs to be in place to purge data, and I think that is one of the things that the city is working on, is how long do we keep data?” Toribio said. “We need input from the city attorney and the city needs to decide.”

When asked what would be an appropriate retention period, he replied, "I would say five years is a good amount of time."

But when Ars told him that the public records request didn’t come back with records older than 2011, he said he would check. Hours later, he called back, saying that the OPD deletes data “as necessary” to free up storage space. Toribio then clarified his position, saying that the LPR data should be kept for two years. (That may explain why some of my own records from April 2012 are missing from the dataset.)

Previously, OPD released my own records to me, but many neighboring communities did not. These organizations cited a law enforcement exemption to the state public records law. So why did OPD share so much data with Ars when other cities have been reticent to do so?

“I know that for OPD, transparency is very important, and unless there is a reason not to release information—if it is part of an ongoing active criminal investigation, for example—we have nothing to hide,” Toribio said. “I think it's important for a law enforcement organization to be transparent, and it goes to being credible and establishing legitimacy in the community.”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...from-the-cops/





Who was Hacked? A New Report Investigates
Dr Martin Moore

Read coverage of the various hacking trials (News of the World in 2013/14 and now Mirror Group Newspapers) and you could be forgiven for thinking phone hacking was all about celebrities. Celebrities attract attention, attract news interest, and sell papers. This is perhaps why many of the news reports of phone hacking have concentrated on celebrities and are illustrated with photographs of celebrities.

Yet, if you actually sit down and add up the numbers, it becomes clear that though many celebrities were targets of the News of the World they were not the main victims of phone hacking. Over two thirds of the News of the World phone hacking victims that we know about were not public figures. They were beauticians, receptionists, lawyers, estate agents, nannies, policemen, journalists, priests, sports agents and hairdressers.

Almost one in ten of those targeted by the paper’s hackers were people coping with dreadful tragedies, for example the families of murder victims. A striking number of targets were people in positions important to national security. Four consecutive Home Secretaries from 1997 to 2007 are reported to have been hacked, as well as many senior officers from the Metropolitan police (including Sir Ian Blair, John Yates, Mike Fuller, Andy Hayman, Brian Paddick and Ali Dizaei).

And it turns out that the News of the World was seven times more likely to hack a Labour politician than a Conservative one.

But what emerges most clearly is that the great majority of those who were hacked were people most of us had never heard of. Many were connected to public figures, but often simply by being related to them, or working with them, or being their friends. You might be hacked because you were, for example, the partner or ex-partner of a public figure, or a work colleague or a friend or acquaintance or a parent or step-parent.

The partners of Ulrika Johnson, Davina McCall, John Thompson, Stephen Byers, Jeffrey Archer, Denis MacShane, and Kenneth Cameron were targeted. So too were the ex-partners of Kate Moss, Kerry Katona, Robbie Williams, Steve Coogan, Charlotte Church, Bobby Davro, Colin Montgomerie, and Paul Gascoigne.

The parents of famous people were hacked, including Kerry Katona’s mother, Charlotte Church’s mother (and the mother of Charlotte Church’s ex-boyfriend), Lacey Turner’s mother and David Beckham’s father. The siblings of famous people were targeted, including Heather Mills’ sister and Kate Moss’ brother.

In some cases almost anyone with a connection to the subject of interest was targeted. Therefore in the case of Ryan Wilson, who was seriously injured in a drug trial that went wrong, his ex-girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend’s mother, her father and her brother were all targeted by the News of the World.

Studying the list of known victims one can see how almost anyone within the circle of interest of the newspaper was a potential target. Eimear Cook, who separated from the golfer Colin Montgomerie in 2004, discovered the number of Mrs Margaret Atkinson listed in the papers of phone hacker Glenn Mulcaire as a person of interest. Mrs Atkinson was a friend of Cook’s mother who looked after her mother when she was ill.

Yet the context also shows that phone hacking was just one of a toolbox of methods the News of the World used to find out personal information about its targets. Others included blagging, pinging, paying informants and tailing. Through a combination of these they could find out everything from medical history through to past relationships, to driving records and personal diaries.

Up till now, no-one has systematically tried to analyse who was hacked and the context of that hacking. A new report – ‘Who was hacked? An investigation into phone hacking and its victims’ – gathers together all the victims of News of the World phone hacking that we know about from the various court cases, Leveson Inquiry, news reports and elsewhere, and analyses who was hacked and the context of the hacking.

This includes a quantitative analysis of 591 people who successfully settled claims with News UK, and a qualitative analysis of the those who were named as victims of hacking during the recent phone hacking trial, and those who have been reported as hacking targets in the press and in books such as Nick Davies’ Hack Attack.

The numbers are important because they undermine the myth that phone hacking was all about celebrities. They also add weight to Glenn Mulcaire’s comment that the information gained from phone hacking was considered an asset which News of the World could use in stories, trade for other information, or keep for future use: “I would produce the currency”, Mulcaire told the journalist and author James Hanning, “which bosses could barter” (The News Machine).

Yet the numbers in themselves do not convey the impact on these individuals’ lives, and on the lives of those close to them. Only the personal stories themselves can do that. Charlotte Church described how ”The havoc that the press have created within my family has been devastating”. Baroness Hollins, whose family was targeted following the stabbing of her daughter while she was pushing her son’s pram, explained the impact it had on their trust of those around them: ”Sadly we began to distrust people, and didn’t feel we could share information fully, even with close friends and family, because we did not know how the press were getting hold of a constant trickle of information”.

In September Mirror Group Newspapers admitted liability for hacking phones, having previously denied it for more than seven years. Opening the case on behalf of claimants at the High Court David Sherborne said that ‘It is a reasonable inference that phone hacking was rife at all three of MGN’s national titles’ – the Sunday Mirror, the People and the Daily Mirror. The case is ongoing and the number of people making claims against the paper continues to rise.

——————

Dr Martin Moore is the author of ‘Who was hacked? An investigation into phone hacking and its victims. Part 1 – The News of the World’. He is director of the Media Standards Trust and a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London.

The full report is available to download from www.mediastandardstrust.org

The pdf can be found at http://mediastandardstrust.org/wp-co...March-2015.pdf
http://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/policywonkers/who-was-hacked/





Meet Cyanogen, The Startup That Wants To Steal Android From Google
Miguel Helft

It’s a little hard to take Kirt McMaster seriously at first. He tends to run on his own schedule, and when he shows up 20 minutes late for a meeting on a recent weekday, there’s not so much as a mention of his tardiness, let alone an apology. In black jeans, a black hoodie that looks a half-size too small, brown Birkenstock sandals and a pair of fat black rings–one on his left thumb, one on his right pinkie–the 46-year-old looks more like a techno beach bum than an entrepreneur. He works out of a squat, gray, converted plumbing-supply store in Palo Alto, Calif. that doesn’t call attention to the fact that his startup, Cyanogen, is housed inside. The period sign on the façade says “John F. Dahl Plumbing and Heating (since 1895).” The wardrobe and the location are disguises, necessary when one is hatching one of the most daring plots in Silicon Valley history. But McMaster happily blows his cover minutes into our conversation, summing up his mission–preposterous as it sounds–in his booming baritone: “We’re putting a bullet through Google’s head.”

The time is ripe for someone to try. The mobile revolution kicked into gear by the iPhone is getting stagnant just as it’s reaching a new inflection point. The number of smartphones on the planet is expected to grow from about 2.5 billion to nearly 6 billion by 2020. Prices for fast and feature-rich mobiles are crashing, allowing new powerhouses like Xiaomi to emerge in record time. Yet Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android control 96% of the mobile operating system market. It’s their chess game, and we all get to choose between white and black. McMaster doesn’t so much want to insert himself between Apple and Google as to kick their chessboard over and deliver to the world a third option, Cyanogen, a six-year-old mobile operating system that’s essentially a souped-up version of Android and available outside of Google’s control.

McMaster, who revealed his plans in detail for the first time in a series of interviews with FORBES, is amassing a war chest and powerful allies to go to battle. Cyanogen just raised $80 million from investors that include Twitter, mobile chip powerhouse Qualcomm, carrier Telefónica and media titan Rupert Murdoch. The round, which values Cyanogen at close to $1 billion, is being led by PremjiInvest, the investment arm of Wipro’s billionaire founder, Azim Premji, India’s third-richest man. Earlier investors pumped an additional $30 million into Cyanogen, among them: Benchmark, Andreessen Horowitz, Redpoint Ventures and Tencent. Microsoft, which considered investing in Cyanogen, is not participating in the current round, according to people familiar with its decision. But, these people say, Microsoft and Cyanogen are close to finalizing a wide-ranging partnership to incorporate several of Microsoft’s mobile services, including Bing, the voice-powered Cortana digital assistant, the OneDrive cloud-storage system, Skype and Outlook, into Cyanogen’s devices. The companies declined to comment, but at least one smartphone maker said his company was planning to sell a Cyanogen phone with many of those services built in later this year.

“App and chip vendors are very worried about Google controlling the entire experience,” says Peter Levine, partner with Andreessen Horowitz. That’s particularly true for firms that compete with Apple or Google, among them Box and Dropbox in cloud storage; Spotify in music; Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Snapchat in messaging; Amazon in commerce; and Microsoft in a wide swath of sectors. The lessons from the PC era, when Microsoft used its Windows monopoly to sideline rivals and dictate terms to PC makers, still resonate. A third choice would be welcome and unleash a new wave of mobile innovation.

Cyanogen has a chance to snag as many as 1 billion handsets, more than the total number of iPhones sold to date, according to some analysts. Fifty million people already run Cyanogen on their phones, the company says. Most went through the hours-long process of erasing an Android phone and rebooting it with Cyanogen. McMaster is now persuading a growing list of phone manufacturers to make devices with Cyanogen built in, rather than Google’s Android. Their phones are selling out in record time. Analysts say each phone could bring Cyanogen a minimum of $10 in revenue and perhaps much more.

Of course, far more powerful players have tried and failed to establish a third mobile OS in the last several years: Microsoft, BlackBerry, Samsung, Mozilla, Nokia, Intel, Palm. McMaster is well aware of this history, which is why, he says, co-opting Android is the only way down the path. Then, by opening up Cyanogen’s code in ways that neither iOS nor Android have done, McMaster is hoping to attract app developers who feel hemmed in by Apple and Google. A company like Visa or PayPal would be able to build a contactless payment system that works just as well or better than Google Wallet. Skype could be built into the phone dialer. A service like Spotify could become the default music player on a phone. “In a perfect world the OS should know I use Spotify for music,” McMaster says. “I should be able to talk to the phone and say ‘Play that song’ and the f—ing song plays with Spotify. It doesn’t do that today.”

CYANOGEN WAS BORN LONG BEFORE McMaster anointed himself the David to Google’s Goliath. It dates back to 2009, when Steve Kondik, a 40-year-old entrepreneur and veteran programmer, began tinkering with Android in his Pittsburgh home during late-night hacking sessions. (Android is open source, so anyone can download the code and tweak it. As long as people don’t break things, Android apps, including Google’s own–Gmail, Maps, Drive, the Play Store and others–will run without problems. And Google, which gives away Android, makes money from ads in the apps and collects data from handsets.) An engineer who taught himself to code at age 8, Kondik has a graying, receding hairline. He is as understated and measured as McMaster is brash and impulsive. Kondik began by making some changes to the Android user interface, then worked on improving performance and extending battery life. Pretty soon a community of hundreds of developers coalesced around him and began contributing their coding skills to the Cyanogen endeavor, then called CyanogenMod. “It was completely unexpected,” Kondik says. “There was no grand vision.”

Online forums started buzzing about Kondik’s highly customizable version of Android, and by October 2011 a million people had installed Cyanogen on their phones. Eight months later it was 5 million. Eventually Samsung took notice and hired Kondik to join a research and development team in Seattle. The company gave him permission to continue with his off-hours hacking of Android. “It very quickly took over my life,” says Kondik, who remains in Seattle, where most of Cyanogen’s engineers work. (The company has fewer than 90 employees but receives contributions from as many as 9,000 open source programmers.)

While Kondik was hacking with his band of programmers, McMaster was bouncing around various tech firms. A Canadian who grew up in Nova Scotia and dropped out of college, he joined a Silicon Valley startup during the dot-com boom and later moved to southern California, where he worked at a handful of digital marketing agencies. He then helped run Boost Mobile, a prepaid wireless service that originated in Australia and is now owned by Sprint. McMaster later went to work at Sony, helping to plot mobile strategies. Like many techies McMaster was an early iPhone user. But as he brainstormed business ideas, he grew increasingly intrigued with Android’s openness. In 2012 he bought a Samsung Galaxy 3, the first Android phone he felt was on par with the iPhone, but he immediately grew frustrated that the latest Android version–known as Jelly Bean–was not available for it. So McMaster wiped his Galaxy clean and installed CyanogenMod, which, thanks to its army of programmers, had already incorporated the Jelly Bean update. This, McMaster says, led to an epiphany of sorts while he was working out one afternoon at a gym in Venice, Calif. If you could flash a device with an open operating system, you could customize it as much as you wanted. “It means you can do whatever you want with the device,” McMaster says.

That evening he found Kondik through LinkedIn, and the two got on the phone. McMaster did most of the talking, pitching Kondik on a plan to turn his open source project into a company. “I’ll be CEO; you’ll be CTO. I’ll get some money. Let’s go,” McMaster remembers saying. Kondik invited McMaster to Seattle, and the two met the next day at a brew pub where McMaster’s unfiltered enthusiasm and Kondik’s caution collided. “I was really skeptical at first,” Kondik says. Still, within 48 hours the pair had agreed to team up, and Cyanogen, the open source project, spawned Cyanogen, the company. While some longtime Cyanogen community members howled at the notion that their project was going corporate, McMaster brushes off their concerns with a wave of the hand. (A third cofounder, Koushik Dutta, left the company in 2014.)

McMaster and Kondik got a chilly reception at first from the moneymen of Sand Hill Road. The reaction of Andreessen Horowitz’s Levine was typical. “I didn’t believe a startup could come in and create a new OS,” says Levine, who went on to invest in Cyanogen’s second round and kicks himself for passing on the first. Others were put off by McMaster’s braggadocio. But in Benchmark partner Mitch Lasky the duo found a receptive ear (see story, p. 78). The fact that millions of people had taken the trouble to install Cyanogen showed that demand was real, Lasky says: “There are a couple of billion potential Android handsets in the world. Even a small percentage of them is a massive market.”

HOW FAR CYANOGEN HAS EVOLVED from hobbyist Tinkertoy to mainstream smartphone OS is on display inside Joseph Reid’s Toyota Prius, which he drives around San Francisco. Like many fellow drivers for the Lyft on-demand car service, Reid gets his customers and directions through a smartphone mounted on his dashboard. His is a head-turner: thin and elegant, with a striking 5.5-inch screen. It’s a Chinese-made OnePlus One, a Cyanogen phone released last year that Gizmodo called an “unbelievably fantastic smartphone.” The device outperforms many of its competitors, including, in various tests, the iPhone 6. It starts at $300, without a subsidy. Google’s Nexus 6, which has similar specs and is considered the top of the line for Android, costs twice as much. The OnePlus One is Reid’s second Cyanogen phone. He got hooked on the software a year earlier after he bought a Samsung Galaxy S4. Reid didn’t care for the apps that Samsung and Sprint had put on it, and the overall experience fell short of his expectations. So Reid installed Cyanogen. “People remarked how fast it was,” he says. The OnePlus One is even faster. The company has sold close to 1 million to date.

McMaster and his crew are busy courting other phonemakers. Last year Micromax, the market leader in India, began selling Cyanogen phones under its high-end Yu brand. (The deal, which made Micromax the exclusive Cyanogen seller in India, led to something of a falling-out between Cyanogen and OnePlus.) The company has released the phones in batches through its online store; they sell out within seconds. “People are lapping it up,” says Rahul Sharma, CEO of Micromax. “Every week we are ramping up production.” Sharma says he chose Cyanogen to meet customers’ demand for phones they can personalize. In many ways Micromax is following in the footsteps of Xiaomi, the $46 billion Chinese behemoth, which built a buzzy brand and a loyal following by creating highly customizable phones. But rather than hire an army of programmers to develop the software, as Xiaomi did, Micromax has outsourced the task to Cyanogen. Other brands in emerging markets are sure to jump on the same bandwagon, says Asymco’s Horace Dediu, an influential industry analyst. “Cyanogen is now an enabler for the next Xiaomis.” There are likely to be many of them. In March Alcatel, the number seven mobile phone maker in the world, said it will bring to the U.S. its 6-inch Hero 2+ running Cyanogen, for $299. Meanwhile, mobile chip-set powerhouse Qualcomm said it will build Cyanogen into its “reference design,” a sort of technical template that smaller phonemakers the world over use to create phones under their own brands.

The first true expression of McMaster’s vision should come later this year in a phone being made by Blu. The Miami company has become one of the most popular phonemakers in Latin America; its phones are sold in the U.S. through Wal-Mart and Best Buy and are among the bestselling unlocked phones on Amazon. Blu says it will launch the first Cyanogen phone that will be stripped of Google’s suite of mobile apps. While Samuel Ohev-Zion, Blu’s CEO, says all the details have not yet been worked out, he envisions a phone that will use Amazon’s app store, the Opera Web browser, Nokia Here for maps, Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneDrive for cloud storage and Spotify for music. It would also have Bing for search and Microsoft’s Cortana as a replacement for Google’s voice assistant. “When these other apps are deeply integrated into the phone, most of the time they perform better than the Google apps,” says Ohev-Zion.

Phones like these are how Cyanogen will make its real money. Today the company earns minimal revenue, selling “themes” that users can apply to customize the look and feel of their phones. (It currently relies on the Google Play Store for billing, but over time plans to build its own store.) The bigger opportunity will be from revenue-sharing deals with app developers who integrate their services deeply into Cyanogen-based phones. The deals will take many forms, from distribution to in-app purchase agreements to customized services for specific countries, says Vikram Natarajan, who runs business development for Cyanogen. In some cases the company will share the revenue from those deals with phonemakers that are struggling with narrow margins. “We will give them revenue over the lifetime of the handset that they never had before,” Natarajan says.

Despite McMaster’s belligerent tone, Cyanogen can succeed without doing real damage to Google, which declined to comment for this story. During an onstage interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Sundar Pichai, the company’s head of products, who oversees Android, said he’s unsure what Cyanogen’s selling point is. He also noted that Google’s services are very popular and questioned the viability of phones that don’t include them.

More likely, Cyanogen’s success would amount to a huge lost opportunity for Android and hem in the company between Apple at the high end and Cyanogen elsewhere, complicating Google’s prospects at a time when investors are worried that Google will never make as much money in mobile as it did on the desktop. Still, even some Cyanogen allies are not fans of the taking-down-Google talk. “Kirt’s aggressive and has a lot of bravado, and I don’t think the company would exist without it,” says Sandesh Patnam, of PremjiInvest. “I wish he didn’t poke the bear too many times and so loudly.” That said, McMaster’s open swipes at Google may have ancillary benefits beyond generating headlines: They make Cyanogen visible enough that Google, which operates under the glare of antitrust regulators, may think twice before doing anything that could be construed as undermining a potential rival. It’s also what charges up McMaster. “As with any great myth, you need a common enemy,” he says. “Right now, Google is the common enemy.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhe...from-google-2/






Intel: PC Sales Weak as Many Businesses Stick with Windows XP

Summary: The company's recent results suggest a slowdown in firms leaving the ancient OS behind and upgrading to new systems. Why won't they update?
Sean Portnoy

Perhaps the most interesting detail that emerged from Intel's lackluster first quarter financial results the other day had nothing to do with mobile, the company's white whale. Instead, it concerned something so old that it almost seems laughable in the same week that the very 21st-century Apple Watch dominated headlines. Per ZDNet's own Larry Dignan:

In a statement, Intel said it cut its first quarter outlook because of "weaker than expected demand for business desktop PCs and lower than expected inventory levels across the PC supply chain."

One reason the chip giant cited for that weaker demand: a slowdown in companies upgrading from Windows XP systems. What's particularly interesting about this is that the move away from the ancient OS helped drive some of Intel's better results in 2014.

What that suggests is a potentially intractable problem for both Intel and Microsoft: businesses that still manage to operate fine, thank you very much, with an operating system that's nearly 15 years old. It's the desktop equivalent of the guy who still uses a flip phone and doesn't care if you have an app that can identify a song on the radio in three seconds or can stream the Super Bowl live on your smartphone.

But it's even worse, actually, because that inertia isn't one guy: It's firms with potentially dozens or hundred of employees that have their productivity disrupted while new systems are installed and training is implemented. Then there's the issue of the need for an updated OS. What does Windows 7 or 8 (or 10) do that compels these stragglersto upgrade? If they're fine with whatever version of Office they're currently using, and have a decent enough web browser, then most workers are set (though maybe not overjoyed).

Certainly Microsoft's decision to emphasize its new Start screen over the old desktop when it launched Windows 8 did it no favors, even if it retreated in Windows 8.1 by adding back a Start button. Now it's trying to go back to killing off the desktop for Windows 10 with a new Start screen that adds some of the old desktop functionality to it (though that's not stopping third parties from readying old-school Start button replacements).

Microsoft hoped to move things along by ending official support for XP (though that backfired in one case), which caught the attention of big companies and forced many conversions. However, smaller operations -- like mom-and-pop companies -- may have found it worth the risk to keep on keeping on, especially if this is your IT guy.

In essence, getting the remaining 15 or so percent of the PC crowd that clings to Windows XP to upgrade is going to be similar to the struggle to get that flip-phone guy to finally get an iPhone (which usually involves a younger relative showing him the value of the update). It's not about flashy marketing and whiz-bang features -- that basically appeals to people who've already jumped to a newer version of Windows long ago. It's a much tougher slog, one that may not even seem worth the bother -- except that it's still apparently impacting Intel's bottom line.

Perhaps the forthcoming end of Microsoft's updates for Security Essentials will introduce a new level of risk that will spur the purchase of systems. ZDNet's Jack Schofield previously suggested that more websites ending support of old Internet Explorer browsers could force additional upgrades, though the type of businesses that still rely on Windows XP may not be the type that rely on web browsers for much of their day-to-day work.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/intel-p...th-windows-xp/





The $50 Device that Symbolises a Shift in North Korea
James Pearson

A $50 (34 pounds) portable media player is providing many North Koreans a window to the outside world despite the government's efforts to keep its people isolated - a symbol of change in one of the world's most repressed societies.

By some estimates, up to half of all urban North Korean households have an easily concealed "notel", a small portable media player used to watch DVDs or content stored on USB sticks that can be easily smuggled into the country and passed hand to hand.

People are exchanging South Korean soaps, pop music, Hollywood films and news programmes, all of which are expressly prohibited by the Pyongyang regime, according to North Korean defectors, activists and recent visitors to the isolated country.

"The North Korean government takes their national ideology extremely seriously, so the spread of all this media that competes with their propaganda is a big and growing problem for them," said Sokeel Park of Liberty in North Korea (LiNK), an organisation that works with defectors.

"If Pyongyang fails to successfully adapt to these trends, they could threaten the long-term survival of the regime itself."

North Koreans have been spending money more openly, a sign that some forms of entrepreneurship are increasingly tolerated and that the state is easing some of its harsh controls over the economy. In recent months, consumption has become more conspicuous.

"The variety and number of places for locals to spend money has really increased," said one regular visitor to Pyongyang, declining to be identified. "People seem a lot more confident flashing the cash than they used to be. I've seen people spend $500 on a phone with no hesitation, for example."

There is no sign, however, that the regime in nuclear-capable North Korea is loosening its grip, looking to make substantial reforms or making any change in its unpredictable ways of dealing with the outside world.

But along with rising incomes, more goods are available in the impoverished country, mostly on the black market but also in some state-controlled stores.

CHEAP AND VERSATILE

Notel or 'notetel' - the name is a uniquely North Korean word combining 'notebook' and 'television' - are easily found on the black market for around 300 Chinese yuan (32 pounds), and are also available in some state shops and markets.

The device was legalised last year, according to defector-run news outlets in Seoul - one of many recent measures taken by the state to accommodate grassroots change.

The new rules, however, also require North Koreans to register their notel, enabling authorities to monitor who is most likely to be watching banned foreign media.

North Koreans do not have access to the internet - those who can go online are limited to a state-run intranet, while the country's 2.5 million mobile phone subscribers are not allowed to call outside the country.

The notel comes from China, either smuggled or legally imported.

Lee Seok-young, a defector from the North, said he smuggled 18,000 Chinese-made notel into the country last year. He said he ordered them directly from a factory in Guangzhou that was likely still in production solely to satisfy the demands of the North Korean market.

The devices have lost their popularity in China over the years, but still sell well in the provinces bordering North Korea, according to data on the China-based online shopping website Taobao.

When asked to quote a wholesale price for notel, one Chinese trader in the border city of Yanji said: "You want to send them to North Korea? How many do you want to send? They sell well there."

The low-voltage notel differs from the portable DVD players of the late 1990s in that they have USB and SD card ports, and a built-in TV and radio tuner. They can also be charged with a car battery - an essential piece of household equipment in electricity-scarce North Korea.

Legally-registered notel must be fixed to official state television and radio channels, according to the Daily NK, a Seoul-based news organisation run by defectors.

Lee, the defector, said the device's multi-function nature makes it easier for users to get away with watching illegal material.

"To avoid getting caught, people load a North Korean DVD while watching South Korean dramas on a USB stick, which can be pulled out," he said. "They then tell the authorities, who feel the heat from the notel to check whether or not it has been recently used, that they were watching North Korean films".

Park at the LiNK organisation added: "They are small enough to roll up in a blanket and hide in a wardrobe. They have become so popular because they are perfect for overcoming the twin barriers to foreign media consumption: surveillance and power outages.

"If you were to design the perfect device for North Koreans, it would be this."

(Additional reporting by Ju-min Park and the Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Tony Munroe and Raju Gopalakrishnan)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/0...0MM2UW20150327

















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