Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 12th, ’17

[JackSpratts]

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"The proposal to end Title II net neutrality was already the most-commented item in the FCC’s history: there are currently close to 20 million filings. For comparison, the last net neutrality debate — the proposal to create net neutrality rules and enact Title II — had just 3.7 million replies." – Jacob Kastrenakes






































August 12th, 2017




10 Members of Congress Rake FCC Over the Coals in Official Net Neutrality Comment
Devin Coldewey

How and to what extent the FCC should regulate internet access has been a hot question for years, and the present administration holds opposite views than the previous one, resulting in a proposal to eliminate 2015’s Open Internet Order. But Congress (or at least a few of its members) isn’t going to take that lying down: 10 Representatives who helped craft the law governing the FCC itself have submitted an official comment on the proposal ruthlessly dismantling it.

You can check out the full comment here (PDF); at under 20 pages and written in a layman-friendly manner, it’s an easy Sunday read. It’s signed by 10 Members of Congress, including Frank Pallone, Jr (D-NJ) and Mike Doyle (D-PA), ranking members of the Committee on Energy and Commerce.

We, as members of Congress who also sit on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, submit these comments out of deep concern that the FCC’s proposal to undo its net neutrality rules fundamentally and profoundly runs counter to the law. As participants either in the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 or in decisions on whether to update the Act, we write to provide our unique insight into the meaning and intent of the law.

As background, it’s important to know that the FCC’s proposal to eliminate the net neutrality rules from 2015 largely rests on reversing a decision made then that categorized broadband as a “telecommunications service” rather than an “information service.”

The rationale for this is fundamentally unsound, as I and many others have pointed out, and basically treats ISPs as if they are providing the services actually provided by the likes of Google and Facebook. The FCC is well within its rights as an independent agency to interpret the law, and it doesn’t have to listen to contrary comments from the likes you and me.

It does, however, have to listen to Congress — “congressional intent” is a huge factor in determining whether an interpretation of the law is reasonable. And in the comment they’ve just filed, Representatives Pallone, Doyle et al. make it very clear that their intent was and remains very different from how the FCC has chosen to represent it.

Here’s the critical part:

Since we voted for the Telecommunications Act in 1996, Americans rejected the curated internet services in favor of an open platform. Now, anyone with a subscription to an ISP can get access to any legal website or application of their choice. Americans’ ISPs no longer pick and choose what online services their customers can access.

While the technology has changed, the policies to which we agreed have remained firm the law still directs the FCC to look at the network infrastructure carrying data as distinct from the services that create the data. Using today’s technology that means the law directs the FCC to look at ISP services as distinct from those services that ride over the networks.

The Commission’s proposal performs a historical sleight of hand that impermissibly conflates this fundamental distinction. The FCC proposes to treat network infrastructure as information services because the infrastructure gives access to the services running over their networks. The FCC contends that ISPs are therefore “offering the capability” to use the services that create the content. However this suggestion obliterates the distinction that Congress set in to law-we meant for the FCC to consider services that carry data separately from those that create data. The FCC’s proposal would therefore read this fundamental choice that we made out of the law. Under the proposal’s suggestion, no service could be a telecommunications service going forward.

Pretty unambiguous, right?

In addition to clarifying Congressional intent in the Telecommunications Act, the letter addresses some shortcomings in the FCC’s proposal, mainly in its choice of data used to justify itself.

It takes the agency to task for failing to consider overwhelming popular support for net neutrality, and for relying heavily on the metric of industry investment (itself a complex and contested issue), and on its own admittedly flawed broadband deployment to support revoking the existing rules.

Americans overwhelming support stronger and clearer privacy rules. Yet the Commission—without comment—proposes to eliminate before-the-fact protections at the FCC in favor of an enforcement-only approach. The FCC should not degrade people’s privacy rights without thorough consideration.

Instead of considering these critical national priorities, the proposal single-mindedly concentrates on one issue to the exclusion of all others: the raw dollars spent on network deployment. This narrow focus is clearly contrary to the public interest—if we had intended network investment to be the sole measure by which the FCC determines policy, we would have specifically written that into the law.

Lastly, the letter suggests that the FCC may have inappropriately taken direction from the Executive:

It appears that the President directly ordered Chairman Pai to repeal net neutrality, potentially during a visit to the Oval Office. If true, this proposal clearly violates our intention to create an agency independent of the executive.

Ironically, one of Pai’s go-to criticisms of the 2015 rules is that they were unduly influenced by President Obama’s White House.

There’s more to the letter, so feel free to give it a read. And be sure to refresh (and potentially help update) our guide to arguments against net neutrality.

The other 8 Representatives signing the letter are:

• Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA)
• Diana DeGette (D-CO)
• Jan Schakowsky (D-IL)
• Doris Matsui (D-CA)
• Kathy Castor (D-FL)
• John Sarbanes (D-MD)
• Jerry McNerney (D-CA)
• Peter Welch (D-VT)
• Joseph P. Kennedy III (D-MA)

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/06/10...ality-comment/





Maybe Americans Don’t Need Fast Home Internet Service, FCC Suggests

By saying mobile is good enough, FCC could find that deployment problem is solved.
Jon Brodkin

Americans might not need a fast home Internet connection, the Federal Communications Commission suggests in a new document. Instead, mobile Internet via a smartphone might be all people need.

The suggestion comes in the FCC's annual inquiry into broadband availability. Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband (or more formally, "advanced telecommunications capability") is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. If the FCC finds that broadband isn't being deployed quickly enough to everyone, it is required by law to "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market."

The FCC found during George W. Bush's presidency that fast Internet service was being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion. But during the Obama administration, the FCC determined repeatedly that broadband isn't reaching Americans fast enough, pointing in particular to lagging deployment in rural areas. These analyses did not consider mobile broadband to be a full replacement for a home (or "fixed") Internet connection via cable, fiber, or some other technology.

Last year, the FCC updated its analysis with a conclusion that Americans need home and mobile access. Because home Internet connections and smartphones have different capabilities and limitations, Americans should have access to both instead of just one or the other, the FCC concluded under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler.

Pai wants change

But with Republican Ajit Pai now in charge, the FCC seems poised to change that policy by declaring that mobile broadband with speeds of 10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream is all one needs. In doing so, the FCC could conclude that broadband is already being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, and thus the organization would take fewer steps to promote deployment and competition.

This would also be the first time that the FCC has set a broadband speed standard for mobile; at 10Mbps/1Mbps, it would be less than half as fast as the FCC's home broadband speed standard of 25Mbps/3Mbps.

Although the FCC might conclude that mobile broadband can replace a cable or fiber connection, the commission also says consumers can't expect mobile to be as fast. "We anticipate that any speed benchmark we set [for mobile] would be lower than the 25Mbps/3Mbps benchmark adopted for fixed broadband services, given differing capabilities of mobile broadband," the FCC said.

The changes were signaled yesterday in a Notice of Inquiry, the FCC's first step toward completing a new analysis of broadband deployment. The document asks the public for comments on a variety of questions, including whether mobile broadband can substitute for fixed Internet connections. You can file comments at this link; initial comments are due September 7, and reply comments are due September 22.

Is mobile data enough?

This week's Notice of Inquiry says that "advanced telecommunications capability is provided in different circumstances using fixed or mobile service." It also asks:

Given that Americans use both fixed and mobile broadband technologies, we seek comment on whether we should evaluate the deployment of fixed and mobile broadband as separate and distinct ways to achieve advanced telecommunications capability. Taking into account the differences between the various services and the geographic, economic, and population diversity of our nation, we seek comment on focusing this Section 706 Inquiry on whether some form of advanced telecommunications capability, be it fixed or mobile, is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. Would such an inquiry best follow the statutory instruction to evaluate the deployment of advanced telecommunications capability "without regard to any transmission media or technology"?

As a possible alternative, the FCC seeks comment on whether it should maintain Wheeler's determination that Americans need both fixed and mobile service. The FCC may also evaluate mobile and fixed services separately and then make a judgment call as to whether Americans are getting broadband quickly enough."[W]e propose to analyze fixed and mobile broadband separately and then consider the totality of the evidence in our ultimate determination of whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed in a reasonable and timely manner," the document says.

But Pai has made it clear in previous years that he thinks mobile broadband can substitute for fixed connections. As far back as 2012, Pai's first year on the commission, he criticized the then-Democratic majority for concluding that mobile Internet service can't replace home Internet. In 2012, Pai said:

[T]he Commission has consistently ignored in recent years the statute's direction that "advanced telecommunications capability" may be deployed "using any technology." That instruction does not permit us to segregate fixed connections from mobile connections, focusing on the former and neglecting the latter. Instead, in making our statutory finding we should consider all broadband services meeting the statutory definition regardless of the technologies used to deploy them.

Pai held firm in 2015, criticizing Wheeler's FCC for "studiously exclud[ing] satellite and mobile broadband services from its evaluation." Pai also dissented from the FCC's decision to raise the broadband speed standard from a minimum of 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream to 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up. That speed change excluded many DSL connections from being considered broadband.

The notice of inquiry also considers whether satellite and fixed wireless services should play a more prominent role in the FCC's analysis of whether broadband is being deployed quickly enough.

Net neutrality repeal supposedly will boost deployment

In 2015, after concluding that broadband wasn't being deployed fast enough, the FCC used its Section 706 authority to preempt state laws that limit the spread of municipal broadband, but a federal appeals court later overturned that decision. The extent of the FCC's powers under Section 706 aren't totally clear, but the statute authorizes the FCC to use "price cap regulation" to keep consumer costs down and to use "measures that promote competition in the local telecommunications market."

The Pai FCC's notice of inquiry claims that the chairman's plan to deregulate broadband service and eliminate net neutrality rules would help fulfill the Section 706 obligations by "encourag[ing] broadband investment." The document also asks for suggestions of other "market or regulatory obstacles" that could be eliminated by the FCC.

Democratic dissent

Democratic Commissioner Mignon Clyburn objected to several aspects of the notice of inquiry, including the failure to increase the home Internet speed benchmark and the consideration of mobile as a replacement for home Internet service. Clyburn wrote:

[W]e seek comment on whether to deem an area as "served" if mobile or fixed service is available. I am extremely skeptical of this line of inquiry. Consumers who are mobile-only often find themselves in such a position not by choice but because they cannot afford a fixed connection. Today, mobile and fixed broadband are complements, not substitutes. They are very different in terms of both the nuts and bolts of how the networks operate, and how they are marketed to customers, including both from the perspective of speed and data usage. I have heard from too many consumers who can only afford a mobile connection, and even then they have to drop service in the middle of the month because they cannot afford to pay for more data.

Clyburn also criticized the notice of inquiry for proposing to maintain the 25Mbps/3Mbps standard for home broadband.

"The statute defines advanced telecommunications capability as broadband that is capable of 'originat[ing] and receiv[ing] high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications,'" she wrote. "High-definition video conferencing is squarely within the rubric of 'originating and receiving high-quality... video telecommunications,' yet the 25/3 Mbps standard we propose would not even allow for a single stream of 1080p video conferencing, much less 4K video conferencing. This does not even consider that multiple devices are likely utilizing a single fixed connection, or the multiple uses of a mobile device."

Lastly, Clyburn faulted the commission for "seek[ing] to measure deployment in terms of year-over-year progress rather than whether the service is actually meeting the needs of consumers."
https://arstechnica.com/information-...-fcc-suggests/





Almost All of FCC’s New Advisory Panel Works for Telecoms

The FCC put out a call for local officials to fill a 30-person board. It chose two of them.
Blake Dodge

When the Federal Communications Commission went looking this year for experts to sit on an advisory committee regarding deployment of high-speed internet, Gary Carter thought he would be a logical choice.

Carter works for the city of Santa Monica, California, where he oversees City Net, one of the oldest municipal-run networks in the nation. The network sells high-speed internet to local businesses, and uses the revenue in part to connect low-income neighborhoods.

That experience seemed to be a good match for the proposed Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC), which FCC Chairman Ajit Pai created this year. One of the panel’s stated goals is to streamline city and state rules that might accelerate installation of high-speed internet. But one of the unstated goals, members say, is to make it easier for companies to build networks for the next generation wireless technology, called 5G. The advanced network, which promises faster speeds, will require that millions of small cells and towers be erected nationwide on city- and state-owned public property.

The assignment seemed to call out for participation from city officials like Carter, since municipal officials approve where and what equipment telecommunications companies can place on public rights of way, poles and buildings.

But the FCC didn’t choose Carter — or almost any of the other city or state government officials who applied. Sixty-four city and state officials were nominated for the panel, but the agency initially chose only two: Sam Liccardo, mayor of San Jose, California, and Kelleigh Cole from the Utah Governor’s Office, according to documents obtained by the Center for Public Integrity through a Freedom of Information Act request. Pai later appointed another city official, Andy Huckaba, a member of the Lenexa, Kansas, city council.

Instead the FCC loaded the 30-member panel with corporate executives, trade groups and free-market scholars. More than three out of four seats on the BDAC are filled by business-friendly representatives from the biggest wireless and cable companies such as AT&T Inc., Comcast Corp., Sprint Corp., and TDS Telecom. Crown Castle International Corp., the nation’s largest wireless infrastructure company, and Southern Co., the nation’s second-largest utility firm, have representatives on the panel. Also appointed to the panel were broadband experts from conservative think tanks who have been critical of FCC regulations such as the International Center for Law and Economics and the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

The same lopsided ratio can be found on the BDAC’s four working groups that will propose changes to telecommunications policies that Pai views as barriers to broadband deployment. The municipal working group, with 24 members, is tasked with creating a model code for cities to follow that would expedite the deployment of cells and poles. The groups consist of BDAC members as well as additional people the FCC appointed, mostly from the telecommunications industry.

The FCC says the makeup of the BDAC and its subgroups represents a diversity of views and those who best understand the issues. But local officials say their exclusion from the committee reflects a not-so-hidden agenda—one pushed by Pai himself with help from his allies in Big Telecom: to create a set of rules that lets the telecom more easily put their equipment in neighborhoods with far less local oversight.

“When I called [the FCC] to check on the status of the BDAC selection process [earlier this year] and identified myself as an employee from the City of Santa Monica, the gentleman on the phone laughed hysterically,” Carter said. “At first I didn’t get the joke. When I saw the appointees for the municipal working group—only three out of 24 positions were from local government—I got the joke.”

The FCC had no comment other than to say they were made aware of the incident. But the interaction underscores what Liccardo now faces as one of the only city representatives on the committee.

“It’s not lost on us that among the 30-odd members of the BDAC, only two represent local government,” Liccardo said. “We’ll see where things go in the weeks ahead, but it’s fair to say the footprints are in the snow.”

Millions of cells

The BDAC was formed in April and charged with making “recommendations to the Commission on how to accelerate the deployment of high-speed Internet access,” including developing model codes for cities and states to approve broadband permits, and removing local and state regulatory barriers. The committee has held two meetings, one in April and another in July, with another one scheduled for this fall. It plans to submit its proposals by November to the FCC. The guidelines will be voluntary for cities, but the FCC may decide to include them in new rules that cities would be required to follow.

At issue for the BDAC is the nationwide buildout of 5G, the new wireless technology that promises to provide faster speeds. It also requires millions of small cells and poles distributed mostly throughout cities and suburbs in rights of way, such as land next to city streets, highways and parks. Local permitting offices from Oyster Bay, New York, to Seattle, Washington, have been flooded with applications to deploy the cells and build new poles, slowing down the approval process and frustrating telecoms. Telecommunications firms and the companies building the wireless infrastructure want the FCC to pass recommendations that would force cities to shorten the permitting process and lower fees.

When he announced his intention to form the BDAC, Pai, whom President Donald Trump appointed chairman in January, said he wanted the forum to balance city and industry views.

The BDAC will be “forward-looking and fair, balancing the legitimate interests of municipalities with the ever-growing demands of the American public for better, faster, and cheaper broadband,” he said last year in a speech about closing the digital divide.

Pai said at a press conference this month that the BDAC has diverse representation, but he mostly cited as examples representatives from the telecommunications industry: independent builders, network operators, and wireless, cable and satellite interests.
“I wish we could accommodate everybody of course,”Pai said, “but that’s just not possible with a limited advisory committee that we’ve got.”

The Center for Public Integrity asked the FCC for interviews with agency officials who chose the BDAC members, but requests went unanswered. In an emailed statement sent later, Mark Wigfield, a spokesman for the FCC, said, “We believe the makeup of the BDAC reflects the diversity we sought.”

Nick Degani, senior counsel to the FCC and Pai’s wireline legal advisor, told BDAC members at the July meeting that few city officials were chosen because they are the ones that need guidance—presumably not telecommunications companies.

“To be frank, we didn’t want to choose someone from, say, a municipality that needs a blueprint, because they’re not going to be the ones to help design that blueprint,” Degani said. “It’s you guys [BDAC members who mostly represent the telecommunications industry] who have been working on this.”

But with the committee’s lopsided industry representation, city and state officials say any regulatory change the BDAC proposes is likely to ignore local residents’ wishes. Concerns range from poles draped with bulky equipment that block scenic views and clutter neighborhoods – to serious safety risks.

“There are reasons you have to get a permit if you want to dig up the side of the street,” said David Frasher, city manager of Hot Springs, Arkansas, who also was nominated—but turned down—for a seat on the BDAC.

“The city needs to know if you’re going to block traffic or create a hazard to sidewalk users,” Frasher said. Maybe there’s a way to streamline those regulations, “... but with only 10 percent city government representation, how helpful will the end product be?”

The FCC also didn’t choose David Guttenberg, member of the Alaska state legislature. He said service providers writing local rules for internet deployment makes him fear for Alaskan residents, many of whom have such poor wireless service that they have trouble downloading emails.

“They [telecommunications companies] are only going to look after their own self interests,” Guttenberg said. “Find me the guy that works for telecommunications on this committee that’s going to sign onto a plan telling their business to do something they don’t want to do. Find me that guy.”

The National League of Cities, which represents more than 1,600 cities, met with FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn in May “to urge the Commission to increase the number and diversity of local officials on the BDAC to a level comparable with the number and diversity of industry officials.”

Among other municipal officials nominated but not chosen for the BDAC: Bruce Patterson, technology director for Ammon, Idaho; Jack Belcher, chief information officer for Arlington, Virginia; Peter Collins, information technologies manager for Geneva, Illinois.

The lack of municipal representation doesn’t surprise one telecommunications executive sitting on the BDAC, who told the Center for Public Integrity that the committee is “stacked” to fix the proposals to meet Pai’s anti-regulatory agenda.

“It’s definitely stacked towards private enterprise,” said the executive, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation from FCC officials. “It’s nothing new. The FCC serves private enterprise.”

BDAC members who didn’t return requests to comment included AT&T, Google, Southern Light LLC, the International Center for Law and Economics, and Christopher Yoo, a law and communications professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Yoo also is a member of the Board of Academic Advisors for the Free State Foundation, which for years has received support from large telecommunications trade groups such as NCTA - The Internet and Television Association, and CTIA, which represents U.S. wireless corporations, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s non-profit donations database.

Officials with Crown Castle, Comcast, TDS Telecom, and Utah’s Cole, who serves as the BDAC vice chairman, declined to comment.

Telecoms vs. Cities

At BDAC’s first meeting in April, Kelly McGriff, general counsel at Southern Light, which provides wireless infrastructure along the U.S. Gulf Coast and is now part of Uniti Group Inc., said broadband projects have been delayed by six months in some cities because municipal officials don’t understand the infrastructure they’re tasked with approving.

Larry Thompson, CEO of the National Exchange Carrier Association, which includes more than 1,300 member telephone companies, said local permitting rules cost one of its members $700,000 to cover environmental, historical preservation and other reviews before expanding their network.

“I see time and time again things like that happening where that money could’ve gone a long ways towards actually building the broadband network rather than the preliminary stuff leading up to the broadband network," Thompson said.

City officials said they understand the need for the technology, pointing out that more than 500 municipalities operate their own broadband networks, including Carter’s Santa Monica. Officials also said the fees telecommunications companies pay are necessary for ongoing maintenance of the public property the cells and poles occupy.

Some broadband companies concede that a lack of local government representation on the committee may present a problem.

“We have a lot of groups who are concerned that they’re not at the table,” David Don, vice president of regulatory policy at Comcast, said at the BDAC’s July meeting. “And if they don’t feel included, not only are they outside throwing [darts] at this process, but then in the end it’s those groups that we want to adopt these model codes.”

What Pai has done by loading up the panel with industry representatives is, in the end, “pretty standard in Washington,” said Sarah Treul, a political science professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “The FCC expects certain outcomes from this advisory committee.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/almost-...s-for-telecoms





FCC Extends Net Neutrality Comment Period by Two Weeks

It now ends August 30th
Jacob Kastrenakes

You’ll have two extra weeks to file your thoughts with the FCC on its plan to get rid of net neutrality. The proposal’s comment period was originally scheduled to end next week, on August 16th, but the commission just pushed the date out to August 30th.

The extension was granted in response to 10 groups asking for more time to respond. They had been looking for an additional eight weeks, but the commission said an additional two weeks would be more in line with the type of extensions granted in the past.
The commission didn’t signal that disruptions to its filing system, caused by an apparent DDOS attack, factored into the decision at all.

Granting a two week extension gives people more time to file “reply comments,” which are meant to respond to what people filed during the first phase of the comment period, which closed in July. That comment period had been much longer than usual, because the commission released the proposal a month before it was voted on.

Even without these two extra weeks, the proposal to end Title II net neutrality was already the most-commented item in the FCC’s history: there are currently close to 20 million filings. For comparison, the last net neutrality debate — the proposal to create net neutrality rules and enact Title II — had just 3.7 million replies.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/11/1...nded-two-weeks





FCC Exploits Loophole to Push Massive Expansion of Pro-Trump Sinclair Broadcasting

Trump's FCC enables the Sinclair-Tribune merger, allowing the conservative media group to reach 72 percent of U.S.
Taylor Link

Sinclair Media Group, the conservative outlet that pushes the Trump administration’s agenda on local news stations, will soon have a nation-wide presence thanks to Donald Trump.

President Trump’s handpicked Federal Communications Commission chairman, Ajit Pai, resurrected an old regulatory loophole earlier this year that will allow Sinclair to own a segment of the media landscape that would have previously exceeded federal limits. The regulatory change will empower Sinclair to reach 72 percent of U.S. households once it buys Tribune Media’s stations, Politico reported on Sunday. Congress had established a nationwide audience cap at 39 percent.

Politico reported that “the Tribune deal would not have been viable if not for Pai’s intervention.”

Pai, a Republican who became FCC chairman earlier this year, told Congress in a July hearing that he did not revive the regulatory loophole for Sinclair’s singular benefit.

“If you look at any of our regulatory actions, they’re not designed to benefit any company or segment of the industry,” he said.

The loophole provides a discount to stations with ultra-high-frequency signals, allowing them to count only half their actual audience when determining their national reach. Despite his annoyance with federal regulations, Pai did show support for the loophole in the past.

Sinclair’s growth in the Trump era has stirred quite a bit of a controversy. The media group does little to hide its partisan bias. In April, Sinclair hired former White House aide Boris Epshteyn as on-air talent. Epshteyn’s pro-Trump segments run unedited on stations across the country.

Politico reported that in the 2016 election cycle, Sinclair and its executives donated nearly $300,000 to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The company and its executives also contributed $120,000 to Democrats.
http://www.salon.com/2017/08/07/fcc-...-broadcasting/





Data Cap Analysis Found Almost 200 ISPs Imposing Data Limits in the US

Examination of 2,500 home Internet providers finds sizable minority with caps.
Jon Brodkin

A company that tracks ISPs and data caps in the US has identified 196 home Internet providers that impose monthly caps on Internet users. Not all of them are enforced, but customers of many ISPs must pay overage fees when they use too much data.

BroadbandNow, a broadband provider search site that gets referral fees from some ISPs, has more than 2,500 home Internet providers in its database. This list includes telecommunications providers that are registered to provide service under the government's Lifeline program, which subsidizes access for poor people. BroadbandNow's team looked through the ISPs' websites to generate a list of those with data caps.

The data cap information was "pulled directly from ISP websites," BroadbandNow Director of Content Jameson Zimmer told Ars. "For those that have multiple caps, we include the lowest one and an asterisk to show that they have regional variation."

BroadbandNow, which is operated by a company called Microbrand Media, plans to keep tracking the data caps over time in order to examine trends, he said.

From 3GB to 3TB

The listed caps range from 3GB to 3TB per month. That 3GB cap seemed like it couldn't be accurate, so we called the ISP, a small phone company called NTCNet in Newport, New York. A person answering the phone confirmed that the company lists 3GB as its cap, but said it is not enforced and that customers' usage isn't monitored. The cap is essentially a placeholder in case the ISP needs to enforce data limits in the future.

ISPs generally enforce data caps by charging overage fees when customers go over a limit, but the BroadbandNow data set doesn't include the method of enforcement, if any. There are obviously cases where the cap is a nominal one, but it's fair to say that strict caps and overage fees are on the rise.

Comcast, the nation's biggest ISP, has been steadily implementing data caps across its cable territory and many other providers have followed suit. For large ISPs, a typical plan has a 1TB monthly allotment and charges a $10 fee for each extra 50GB. Buying unlimited data is sometimes an option; Comcast charges an extra $50 a month to use the Internet without data limits.

BroadbandNow excluded mobile providers from its list of ISPs with data caps, since caps are nearly universal among cellular companies. The list of 196 providers with caps includes 89 offering fixed wireless service, 45 fiber ISPs, 35 DSL ISPs, 63 cable ISPs, and two satellite providers. Some offer Internet service using more than one technology. Some of the providers are tiny, with territories covering just 100 or a few hundred people.

Large providers with data caps that made the list include AT&T, Comcast, Cox, CenturyLink, Mediacom, Suddenlink, Exede, and HughesNet (the latter two are satellite ISPs.)

BroadbandNow is supported by advertising, and it receives referral fees from some ISPs when people who visit the site end up subscribing to Internet service. But the site lists all providers that it finds from government data regardless of whether they pay, Zimmer said. "We believe that providing unbiased results will, in the long run, make us more valuable to consumers and improve competition in the market," he told Ars.

On its webpage listing ISPs that impose data caps, the BroadbandNow team takes a measured tone on whether the caps are necessary.

"Statements from Internet providers suggest that data caps are a necessary step to combat network congestion," BroadbandNow says. "Opponents of data caps believe that the motivation for data caps has more to do with recovering declining cable revenue or creating a roadblock for streaming services like Netflix. Whichever side you believe, the outcome is the same—data caps are becoming commonplace."
https://arstechnica.com/information-...ave-data-caps/





Pied Piper's New Internet Isn't Just Possible—It's Almost Here
Klint Finley

On HBO's Silicon Valley, startups promise to "change the world" by tackling silly, often nonexistent problems. But this season, the show's characters are tackling a project that really could make a difference. In their latest pivot, Richard Hendricks and the Pied Piper gang are trying to create a new internet that cuts out intermediaries like Facebook, Google, and the fictional Hooli. Their idea: Use a peer-to-peer network built atop every smartphone on the planet, effectively rendering huge data centers full of servers unnecessary.

"If we could do it, we could build a completely decentralized version of our current internet," Hendricks says. "With no firewalls, no tolls, no government regulation, no spying. Information would be totally free in every sense of the word."

But wait: Isn't the internet already a decentralized network that no one owns? In theory, yes. In practice, a small number of enormous companies control or at least mediate much of the internet. Sure, anyone can publish whatever they want to the web. But without Facebook and Google, will anyone be able to find it? Amazon, meanwhile, controls not just the web's biggest online store but a cloud computing service so large and important that when part of it went offline briefly earlier this year, the internet itself seemed to go down. Similarly, when hackers attacked the lesser-known company Dyn—now owned by tech giant Oracle—last year, large swaths of the internet came crashing down with it. Meanwhile, a handful of telecommunications giants, including Comcast, Charter, and Verizon, control the market for internet access and have the technical capability to block you from accessing particular sites or apps. In some countries, a single state-owned telco controls internet access completely.

Given those very non-utopian realities, people in the real world are also hard at work trying to rebuild the internet in a way that comes closer to the decentralized ideal. They're still pretty far from Richard's utopian vision, but it's already possible to do some of what he describes. Still, it's not enough to just cut out today's internet power players. You also need to build a new internet that people will actually want to use.

Storage Everywhere

On the show, Richard's plan stems from the realization that just about everyone carries around a smartphone with hundreds of times more computing power than the machines that sent humans to the moon. What's more, those phones are just sitting in people's pockets doing nothing for most of the day. Richard proposes to use his fictional compression technology—his big innovation from season one—to free up extra space on people's phones. In exchange for using the app, users would agree to share some of the space they free up with Pied Piper, who will then resell it to companies for far less than they currently pay giants like Amazon.

The closest thing to what's described on Silicon Valley might be Storj, a decentralized cloud storage company. Much like Pied Piper, Storj has built a network of people who sell their unused storage capacity. If you want to buy space on the Storj network, you upload your files and the company splits them up into smaller pieces, encrypts them so that no one but you can read your data, and then distributes those pieces across its network.

"You control your own encryption keys so we have no access to the data," says cofounder John Quinn. "We have no knowledge of what is being stored."

Also like Pied Piper, Storj bills itself as safer than traditional storage systems, because your files will reside on multiple computers throughout the world. Quinn says that in order to lose a file, 21 out of 40 of the computers hosting it would have to go offline.

Storj proves that the Silicon Valley's basic idea is feasible. But unlike Pied Piper, Storj doesn't rely on smartphones. "Phones don't have much storage and the network capability isn't great, so the show's idea is a little fanciful," says Quinn. Someday, 5G wireless networks might make phones a more viable part of the Storj network. If Richard's compression algorithm was real, those smaller files will help too. But for now, the Storj network relies primarily on servers, laptops, and desktop computers. The reality is less grand than the HBO fantasy.

IPFS

As interesting as Storj is, it's not quite what Richard actually described in his pitch. Storj is a storage service, not a whole new internet. A more ambitious project called IPFS (short for "Interplanetary File System") is probably a bit closer to Richard's grand vision of a censorship-resistant internet with privacy features built right in.

The idea behind IPFS is to have web browsers store copies of the pages they visit and then do double-duty as web servers. That way, if the original server disappears, the people who visited the page can still share it with the world. Publishers get improved resilience, and readers get to help support the content they care about. With encryption a part of the protocol, criminals and spies can't in theory see what you're looking at. Eventually, the IPFS team and a gaggle of other groups hope to make it possible to build interactive apps along the lines of Facebook that don't require any centralized servers to run.

But the idea of building a censorship-proof internet by backing up copies throughout the internet isn't without its potential problems. Sometimes publishers want to remove old content. IPFS creator Juan Benet told us last year that the project is trying to work out ways to let publishers "recall" pages that are being shared. But that idea is also fraught. What's to stop a government censor from using the recall feature? What happens if someone creates a version that ignores recalls?

Then there are moral and legal risks. Tools like Storj and the venerable peer-to-peer sharing system Freenet make it impossible to know just what content you're storing for other people, which means you could be playing host to, say, child pornography. Quinn says that the Storj team is currently working on ways to block known problem users. But it won't be able to completely guarantee that none of its hosts will end up storing illegal content.

IPFS gets around this largely by letting people decide which of the content they've visited they actually want to share. But this means that less popular content, even if it's perfectly legal and ethical, might end up disappearing if too few people share it. Benet and company are working on a system called Filecoin that, not unlike Storj, would compensate people for providing access.

Even overcoming these trade-offs inherent in decentralization, people may still not want to use these apps. Storj may be able to win over businesses by being cheaper, but even if it is more reliable, the idea of storing data on random machines scattered across the internet instead of in a traditional data center sounds risky compared to, say, the massively robust AWS, backed by Amazon's technical know-how and billions of dollars. Convincing people to use decentralized alternatives to Facebook and Twitter has proven to be a notoriously difficult problem. Getting people to use what amounts to a whole new version of the web could be even harder.

Mesh

Even if IPFS, Storj, or one of the countless other decentralized platforms out there do win people over, they're still technically riding atop the existing internet infrastructure controlled by a shrinking number of telcos. Silicon Valley hasn't addressed this problem yet. But what if you could chain the smart phones and laptops of the world together using WiFi and Bluetooth to create a wireless network that was free and open to everyone, with no need for Big Telecom?

Australian computer scientist Paul Gardner-Stephen tried to do something like that after the Haiti earthquake in 2010. "Mobile phones have the capability to run autonomous networks, it's just that no one had implemented it," he says. Gardner-Stephen helped build Serval, a decentralized messaging app that can spread texts in a peer-to-peer fashion without the need for a traditional telco carrier. But he quickly realized, as the Pied Piper team likely will, that trying to turn people's mobile phones into servers drains their batteries too quickly to be practical. Today, the Serval team relies on solar powered base stations to relay messages.

Serval and similar apps like Firechat aren't meant to replace the internet, just provide communications during disasters or in remote locations. But the idea of creating decentralized wireless networks—mesh networks—still has merit. One such network, Wlan Slovenija, for example, now covers all of Slovenia and is spreading to neighboring countries. But these mesh networks are still a long way from replacing telcos—especially in the US. Even as wireless base stations improve, they can't quite yet compete with the fiber-optic cables that link the nation's telco infrastructure on speed and reliability, and some community networks, such as Guifi in Spain, are bolstering their wireless connections with fiber.

Even then, given a choice, would people really pick a decentralized option over the status quo? Customer service at big broadband companies may be bad to nonexistent, but you can still call someone. For those who would nevertheless prefer to wrest control of the internet from large corporations, these new alternatives will need to be better and faster than the services they hope to displace. Simply being decentralized isn't enough.

It wasn't so long ago that people questioned whether anyone would ever take to the internet at all. As the season finale of Silicon Valley approaches, Pied Piper will find out whether its version of a new internet works and whether there's a demand for it. They just have to build it and see if anyone comes—just like in the real world.
https://www.wired.com/2017/06/pied-p...ssible-almost/





British Model Kidnapped for Dark Web Auction, Italian Police Say
Vasco Cotovio

• Police: British model kidnapped for auction
• A Polish man is arrested in the case
• He demanded $300,000 to stop the auction, police say

A 20-year-old British model was kidnapped in Milan, Italy, to be auctioned off on a pornographic website on the dark web, the Italian State Police said Saturday.

The model, who has not been named, was assaulted, drugged, handcuffed and stuck in a travel bag, police said in a statement.

A 30-year-old Polish national who resides in the United Kingdom was arrested on kidnapping charges. Lukasz Herba was arrested July 17 outside the British consulate in Milan while accompanying the woman, said Lorenzo Bucossi, the head of the Milan Police Mobile Command unit.

It was not immediately clear why the suspect took the model to the consulate.

Authorities said they are searching for at least one more person in connection with the kidnapping.

The model arrived in Milan on July 10 and already had a photo shoot booked through her agent for the following day, according to the police account.

When she walked into the apartment where the photo shoot was supposed to take place, two men attacked her, police said.

She was loaded into the trunk of a car and taken to a cabin on the outskirts of Lemie, a remote town in the Italian Alps, she told authorities.

The woman was kept handcuffed to a wooden chest of drawers in a bedroom for a week, police said.

According to the Italian police, the suspect used encrypted accounts to ask the model's agent for $300,000 to stop the online auction from going ahead.

He also allegedly told the agent that he was operating on behalf of "the Black Death group," an organization involved in illegal trafficking on the dark web, a layer of the Internet accessible only through anonymizing networks like Tor.

Italian investigators have since established that the suspected kidnapper had already organized several online auctions for the sale of abducted girls, referring to them as "prey."

The websites for the auctions included a description of the victim and a starting price but police said it was still unclear whether the suspect had made them up.

Investigations under way

Investigations in the case are ongoing in Italy, Poland and the United Kingdom.

The British Foreign Office said only that it is providing consular support to a British woman in Milan and that it is in touch with local authorities.

The Foreign Office declined to provide additional information on the woman, her condition and whether she is back in the United Kingdom.

CNN's Steve Almasy contributed to this report.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/05/europe...ion/index.html





U.S. Cable Firms Embrace Former Foe Netflix as TV Viewing Shifts
Lisa Richwine and Anjali Athavaley

A growing number of U.S. cable operators are forming alliances with Netflix Inc NFLX.O, a shift that is helping the streaming pioneer add customers as its largest single market matures.

No. 3 distributor Charter Communications Inc CHTR.O is expected to make Netflix available through its set-top boxes, joining more than a dozen top U.S. pay television operators adopting a model first rolled out in Europe. Some U.S. providers could start selling the streaming service as part of their Internet and video packages.

Altice NV ATCA.AS is trying that approach in France, and the company aims to extend the deal to the United States, two sources with knowledge of the matter said during the past three weeks. They requested anonymity because the discussions are private.

"Our whole model is about cooperation with many of the (streaming) providers," Altice USA ATUS.N Chief Executive Dexter Goei told reporters in May.

Netflix also indicated it wants to take the arrangement elsewhere, though the timing of any new deals is uncertain.

"We're now looking at proposals for including Netflix in some services and beginning to learn the bundling part of the business," Netflix CEO Reed Hastings said during a post-earnings webcast in July. "We're interested in expanding that."

Additional tie-ups could help Netflix hook new users in the United States, a market analysts have said is nearing saturation while growth in foreign markets is booming. The number of subscribers is the key metric for Netflix investors, and the breakneck growth has made the company a Wall Street darling.

Netflix reported 51.92 million U.S. streaming customers as of June 30, and 52.03 million in international territories, handily beating analysts' forecasts.

The addition of Netflix to set-top boxes helped the company top expectations for the U.S. market, Cowen & Co analyst John Blackledge said.

The closer ties with pay TV providers represent an about-face from the early days of Netflix streaming, which started in 2007. Many in the pay TV industry viewed the digital upstart as a challenge to their longtime business of selling bundles of channels delivered via cable wires or satellites.

But as Netflix soared in popularity, distributors began concluding it was more beneficial to welcome Netflix because their customers were using the service anyway.

Cable executives see the partnerships as a way to help fight cord cutting, the dropping of pay TV service, and to promote higher-speed Internet service. In some cases, distributors receive a cut of subscription revenue when they sign up new Netflix users.
The set-top integrations began in 2013 with Virgin Media in Britain. U.S. partnerships started in 2014 with a few smaller distributors including RCN Telecom Services.

For RCN customers with TiVo TIVO.O boxes, Netflix is listed as a channel in the on-screen lineup, requiring just a press of a button to switch from a cable network.

RCN viewers who have not subscribed to Netflix can do so on the spot, starting with a one-month free trial. More than 80 percent become paying Netflix customers, RCN Chief Operating Officer Chris Fenger said in an interview. "There is a very high conversion rate."

By the end of 2016, 13 of the top 25 U.S. pay TV distributors had similar arrangements with Netflix, according to Blackledge.

U.S. market leader Comcast Corp CMCSA.O in November embedded Netflix into its Xfinity X1 set-top box, which is used by 55 percent of its 21.5 million residential video customers. Thirty percent of X1 users have logged into Netflix, either with an existing account or by signing up for a new one, the company said in May.

Charter also plans to integrate Netflix, CEO Tom Rutledge has said. A launch date has not been set.

Reporting by Lisa Richwine in Los Angeles, Anjali Athavaley in New York and Gwenaelle Barzic in Paris; Editing by Anna Driver and Richard Chang
https://uk.reuters.com/article/china...-idUKL4N1KR07R





Disney to Pull Movies from Netflix, Plans Own Streaming Service
Lisa Richwine and Aishwarya Venugopal

Walt Disney Co will stop providing new movies to Netflix Inc starting in 2019 and launch its own streaming service as the world's biggest entertainment company tries to capture digital viewers who are dumping traditional television.

Disney's defection, announced on Tuesday alongside quarterly results showing continued pressure on sports network ESPN, is a calculated gamble that the company can generate more profit in the long run from its own subscription service rather than renting out its movies to services like Netflix.

In turn, Netflix and rivals such as Amazon.com Inc and Time Warner Inc's HBO are spending billions of dollars to buy and produce their own content and stream it straight to consumers.

Disney's entry into a crowded subscription streaming market and the cost of technology to support its own online services could weigh on earnings, Wall Street analysts said.

Disney stock fell 3.8 percent in after-hours trade. Shares of Netflix fell 3 percent.

The new Disney-branded streaming service will follow a similar offering from ESPN that will be available starting in 2018, the company said.

The streaming services will give Disney "much greater control over our own destiny in a rapidly changing market," Chief Executive Bob Iger told analysts on a conference call after earnings, describing the moves as an "entirely new growth strategy" for the company.

Disney has some experience with the direct-to-consumer model in Britain and could make more money in the long run from its own service, but the move could be "financially less advantageous" in the near term, said Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser.

The new ESPN service will feature about 10,000 live games and events per year from Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, Major League Soccer and others, Disney said. It will not offer the marquee live sporting events shown on its cable channels.

STREAMING TECH DEAL

Disney said its new services would be based on technology provided by video-streaming firm BAMTech, and announced it would pay $1.58 billion to buy an additional 42 percent stake in that company, which it took a minority stake in last year.

The BAMTech deal will modestly dent earnings per share for two years, the company said.

Disney is one of the most recognised names on Netflix, but it is not the company first to pull away. Starz Entertainment in 2011 pulled roughly 1,000 films in the Starz catalogue on Netflix at the time.

By ending the Netflix movie deal, Disney will keep movies such as "Toy Story 4" and "Frozen 2" for its own offering. The company has not yet decided where it will distribute films from superhero studio Marvel and "Star Wars" producer Lucasfilm after 2018, Iger said.

Netflix said it would continue to do business with Disney globally, including keeping its exclusive shows from Marvel television.

"U.S. Netflix members will have access to Disney films on the service through the end of 2019, including all new films that are shown theatrically through the end of 2018," the company said in a statement.

The announcement came as Disney reported a near 9 percent fall in quarterly profit, pulled down by higher programming costs and declining subscribers at ESPN, as viewers ditch costly cable packages in favour of cheaper online offerings.

The company's revenue fell marginally to $14.24 billion in the third quarter ended July 1 from $14.28 billion a year earlier.

Net income attributable to the company fell to $2.37 billion, or $1.51 per share, from $2.6 billion, or $1.59 per share.

Reporting by Aishwarya Venugopal in Bengaluru; additional reporting by Peter Henderson in San Francisco; Editing by Savio D'Souza and Bill Rigby
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-un...-idUKKBN1AP0KE





ESPN Looks To Reverse Slide With Streaming Service
Tali Arbel

Two years ago, Disney CEO Bob Iger acknowledged that ESPN, long a major profit center for Disney, was shedding subscribers. On Tuesday, Disney announced a plan intended to start bolstering ESPN's fortunes.

For starters, the sports service will now launch a streaming sports service in early 2018, Disney said. The service, to be delivered through the ESPN app, will offer baseball, hockey, soccer and tennis matches, as well as college sports.

Notably, ESPN will not be streaming pro football or basketball, at least initially.

Disney is also buying a majority stake in streaming service BAMTech for $1.6 billion. That ups Disney's ownership to 75 percent, from 33 percent. The service was started by Major League Baseball, which remains a minority owner along with the National Hockey League.

Disney had always described its BAMTech investment as key to developing new streaming services for ESPN and other parts of Disney.

Investors have been concerned about ESPN's prospects for a while. Their big fear: ESPN might be facing long-term decline as more people quit cable or choose cheaper bundles without sports.

Over time, that could kick off a death spiral in which fewer subscribers mean less money for ESPN to use in bidding for sports rights; fewer games to air would then give more subscribers reason to quit.

But optimists believe ESPN has the clout to strike better deals with cable and satellite-TV companies that would ensure the channel reached more households and raise the price Disney gets from cable distributors. That could mean a pricier cable bundle for consumers, too.
http://www.courant.com/business/hc-d...808-story.html





With Disney’s Move to Streaming, a New Era Begins
Brooks Barnes

Disney set off a sonic boom in Hollywood by unveiling plans to start two Netflix-style services: For the first time in the streaming age, the world’s largest media company had decided that embracing a new business model was more important than clinging to its existing one.

Disney’s decision to better align itself with consumer trends — deemed “a rare and impressive pivot” by RBC Capital Markets — instantly reverberated through the entertainment industry. Disney’s cable channels, which include ESPN, have long been seen as the reason many viewers were refraining from cutting the cord entirely. If Disney was going all in on streaming, the impact would be felt by almost every television company and cable operator.

As part of its announcement on Tuesday, Disney said that it would spend heavily on original programming for its entertainment streaming service and pull future Disney and Pixar movies from Netflix. That sent Netflix shares downward. The question seemed to be, how would Netflix, even with its head start in terms of audience and reach, manage without the mighty mouse? And would Disney’s plunge into streaming encourage the likes of Discovery and Viacom to do the same, intensifying competition?

And would viewers who want to eschew traditional cable subscriptions eventually find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer number of streaming services they would need to cobble together to watch what they wanted to watch?

On Wednesday, as analysts and investors scratched for answers, few firm ones emerged. In a research report, Doug Creutz, an analyst at Cowen and Company, summed up Disney’s streaming plans, especially for movies and television, as “aggressively” pushing “the traditional content business into terra incognita.”

Underscoring the uncertainty, Disney’s shares declined by more than 4 percent on Wednesday, to $102.83. The company reported a 9 percent decline in quarterly profit on Tuesday, which may have led to the sell-off. Wider weakness in financial markets did not help.

Disney investors may also be worried about the enormous spending it will take to build two streaming services. Some might have been underwhelmed by the company’s plans or might have thought that the decision came much too late.

While a few ardent Disney critics held that view, most analysts applauded the company’s move.

“What Disney is doing is a really big deal in terms of trying new things, and I don’t think it even has answers to some of these questions, including what the services will cost,” said Michael Vorhaus, president of Magid Advisors, a media and digital video consultancy. “But it’s clearly not the end of linear television. It’s not the end of Netflix.”

Disney’s streaming plans call for the introduction early next year of a subscription service to be built around ESPN’s sports programming. It will be powered by BamTech, a technology company that handles direct-to-consumer video for baseball teams and HBO, among others. Disney paid $1 billion a year ago for a 33 percent stake in BamTech. On Tuesday, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, announced that Disney had accelerated an option to spend $1.58 billion for an additional 42 percent share.

But this still-unnamed subscription service is designed to protect the cable bundle, at least initially. The service will offer only sports programming that is not available on ESPN’s traditional channels. Only people who also pay to receive ESPN the old-fashioned way (via a cable or satellite hookup) will be able to stream ESPN’s core offerings, including N.F.L. and N.B.A. games.

Mr. Iger has also made an important calculation that Disney — unlike most of its competitors — has programming that is must-have in the old model (cable and satellite) and in the new (streaming). Put another way, Disney has the power to introduce streaming offerings around ESPN, Pixar films and Disney Channel shows without worrying about being dropped by third-party distributors, including upstarts like Sling TV and PlayStation Vue.

PlayStation Vue, for instance, tried to introduce a “skinny” television package without ESPN in March 2015 and drew little consumer interest. When PlayStation Vue started offering ESPN in spring 2016, the distributor quickly started gaining traction.

Children’s programming, an obvious strength for Disney, has proved especially important for streaming services. Amazon last year acquired a significant amount of PBS’s library of original series to exclusively stream on its service, and Netflix has said it expects to have 75 original children’s programs by the end of next year.

Disney’s announcement had an immediate impact on Netflix, as the news media raced to pit the two companies against each other, and some investors worried about Disney taking back its movies. (Starting in late 2019, new-release Disney and Pixar films will move to Disney’s entertainment-focused streaming service.) On Wednesday, Netflix shares declined 1.5 percent, to $175.78.

Omar Sheikh, an analyst at Credit Suisse, said Disney’s move “arguably reduces the consumer value of Netflix.”

But most analysts contended that the news was less worrisome for Netflix than it would initially seem. “We don’t view this as a strike at Netflix, as the content being pulled is actually rather limited,” said Mr. Creutz of Cowan and Company.

Disney has not yet decided whether to pull its Marvel or “Star Wars” movies from Netflix. Netflix will not lose access to Marvel-branded television shows like “The Defenders” because Netflix is a co-producer of them.

Executives at Disney and Netflix declined to comment publicly on Wednesday. In a statement on Tuesday, Netflix said, “We continue to do business with the Walt Disney Company on many fronts, including our ongoing deal with Marvel TV.”

Notably, Netflix has been building up a huge original movie operation, including spending the $90 million “Bright,” a forthcoming Will Smith movie. Netflix plans to start making as many as 50 of its own movies annually.

BamTech, which Disney plans to use as the backbone of its streaming services, has substantial operations. But Disney faces a steep learning curve. By the time Disney even introduces its entertainment-based service in 2019, Netflix will have about 64 million subscribers in the United States and 158 million worldwide, according to BTIG Research.

Disney would probably contend that Netflix’s head start is irrelevant.

“It’s high time we got in this business,” Mr. Iger told analysts on a conference call on Tuesday. “The profitability, the revenue-generating capability of this initiative is substantially greater than the business models we’re currently being served by.”

In the end, there was only one aspect of Disney’s move that everyone seemed to agree on: The streaming boom is only beginning.

Netflix, Amazon, HBO Now, CBS All Access and Hulu (part-owned by Disney) are all barreling ahead online. FX is dipping a toe in the water with Comcast. AMC has done the same. And now comes Disney with two services, which will undoubtedly prod other entertainment giants to move beyond niche direct-to-consumer offerings.

The race for streaming supremacy, Mr. Creutz said, “may well accelerate problems for the whole ecosystem via atomization of content and an overpopulation of content apps.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/09/b...ra-begins.html





Netflix Discussing Keeping Disney's Marvel, 'Star Wars' Films
Lisa Richwine

Netflix Inc is in "active discussions" with Walt Disney Co about keeping Marvel and "Star Wars" films after 2019, when new Disney and Pixar movies will stop appearing on the streaming service, a senior executive said late on Thursday.

Disney announced on Tuesday that it was pulling new Disney and Pixar films from Netflix, starting with new releases in 2019. It will start putting the movies on a new Disney-branded online service that year.

Disney Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger told analysts the company had not yet decided where it would distribute superhero films from Marvel Studios and movies from "Star Wars" producer Lucasfilm, which the company owns, at that time.

Netflix is still in discussions with Disney about retaining rights to stream Marvel and Lucasfilm releases after 2019, Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos told Reuters.

Shares of Netflix were up 1.3 percent at $171.41 in afternoon trading after falling 5 percent in the two days following Disney's announcement.

A Disney spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Iger said on Tuesday that the Marvel and Lucasfilm movies could go to Netflix or another streaming service after 2019, or Disney might retain the rights for itself.

Sarandos said he expected Disney's service to be "complementary" to Netflix, which carries other family-friendly programing such as animated movies from "Despicable Me" creator Illumination Entertainment and "Shrek" producer Dreamworks Animation.

Disney's plan to stream its content directly to consumers is "a natural evolution" for traditional media companies that Netflix expected, Sarandos said in an interview at an event to celebrate Emmy nominations for his company's drama, "The Crown."

"That's why we got into the originals business five years ago, anticipating it may be not as easy a conversation with studios and networks" to license their content, he added.

Disney's break from Netflix applies only to its film deal in the United States, where the streaming service runs new Disney movies shortly after they leave theaters.

Reporting by Lisa Richwine; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Lisa Von Ahn
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-m...-idUSKBN1AR1U7





Hollywood’s Bad Summer Movies are Driving a Decline in Movie Ticket Sales

While some people may point at The Emoji Movie as the root of all that is wrong with Hollywood, The Wall Street Journal reports that the problem goes much deeper than a single misfire featuring Patrick Stewart as a poop emoji.

WSJ reports that movie attendance has dropped by 5%, compared with the same period in 2016, and revenues are down, too, dipping just 2.9%, thanks to higher ticket prices making up for the lack of ticket sales. On Aug. 2, AMC shares dropped 27% in one day, the WSJ reports.

While films like Beauty and the Beast, Wonder Woman, and Get Out fared well at the box office, they were the anomalies in a year full of box office disappointments. Instead of giving moviegoers more badass female leads and genre-bending horror films, Hollywood keeps throwing gobs of money at an unwanted fifth installment of Pirates of the Caribbean, more Transformers movies, and putting $175 million into King Arthur: Legend of the Sword and then clutching their pearls in shock that no one wanted to see them. But rather than cranking up Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” and doing a little introspection, they are probably just going to blame Netflix and HBO, completely ignoring the fact that Netflix’s Okja and HBO’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks were a hell of a lot better than The Mummy.

The one thing that consumers and movie theaters alike are looking forward to is Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which is hitting theaters in December. The CEO of AMC theaters called the film “a gift from heaven.” Read the WSJ’s full analysis here while thinking about how many people had to think that Emoji Movie was a great idea for it to get made.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40452487...e-ticket-sales





These 42 Disney Apps are Allegedly Spying on Your Kids
Brian Fung and Hamza Shaban

The Walt Disney Co. secretly collects personal information on some of their youngest customers and shares that data illegally with advertisers without parental consent, according to a federal lawsuit filed late last week in California.

The class-action suit targets Disney and three other software companies — Upsight, Unity and Kochava — alleging that the mobile apps they built together violate the law by gathering insights about app users across the Internet, including those under the age of 13, in ways that facilitate “commercial exploitation.”

The plaintiffs argue that Disney and its partners violated COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, a federal law designed to protect the privacy of children on the Web. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Northern California, seeks an injunction barring the companies from collecting and disclosing the data without parental consent, as well as punitive damages and legal fees.

The lawsuit alleges that Disney allowed the software companies to embed trackers in apps such as “Disney Princess Palace Pets” and “Where’s My Water? 2.” Once installed, tracking software can then “exfiltrate that information off the smart device for advertising and other commercial purposes,” according to the suit.

Disney should not be using those software development companies, said Jeffrey Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy. “These are heavy-duty technologies, industrial-strength data and analytic companies whose role is to track and monetize individuals,” Chester said. “These should not be in little children’s apps.”

Disney said the lawsuit is misguided and intends to defend it in court. “Disney has a robust COPPA compliance program, and we maintain strict data collection and use policies for Disney apps created for children and families,” the company said in a statement Monday. “The complaint is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of COPPA principles, and we look forward to defending this action in Court.”

According to the Federal Trade Commission, online services that target users under the age of 13 should display a privacy policy that is plain to read and easy to understand. The policy must state the kind of information being collected and what the service might do with that data. Directions on how parents can give their consent should also be included.

This is not the first time Disney has faced litigation over alleged COPPA violations. In 2011, the FTC penalized a company subsidiary, Playdom, $3 million after Playdom was found to have registered about 1.2 million users, most of them children, for online games. The FTC’s lawsuit said Disney collected children’s email addresses and ages, and allowed them to volunteer information such as their full names, instant messenger handles and physical locations as part of their online profiles.

Kochava, Upsight and Unity did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.

Many of Disney’s gaming apps are immensely popular. According to the Google Play store, “Where’s my Water? 2” has been installed between 100 million and 500 million times; “Moana Island Life” has been installed between 1 million and 5 million times; and, in another measure of the company’s online success, “Disney Princess Palace Pets” has been reviewed more than 6,000 times by iOS users.

The class-action suit was filed on behalf of a San Francisco woman named Amanda Rushing and her child, “L.L.” As a class action, the case also seeks to represent consumers in 35 states.

The full list of affected apps named in the complaint includes:

AvengersNet

Beauty and the Beast

Perfect Match

Cars Lightening League

Club Penguin Island

Color by Disney

Disney Color and Play

Disney Crossy Road

Disney Dream Treats

Disney Emoji Blitz

Disney Gif

Disney Jigsaw Puzzle!

Disney LOL

Disney Princess: Story Theater

Disney Store Become

Disney Story Central

Disney's Magic Timer by Oral-B

Disney Princess: Charmed Adventures

Dodo Pop

Disney Build It Frozen

DuckTales: Remastered

Frozen Free Fall

Frozen Free Fall: Icy Shot

Good Dinosaur Storybook Deluxe

Inside Out Thought Bubbles

Maleficent Free Fall

Miles from Tomorrowland: Missions

Moana Island Life

Olaf's Adventures

Palace Pets in Whisker Haven

Sofia the First Color and Play

Sofia the First Secret Library

Star Wars: Puzzle DroidsTM

Star WarsTM: Commander

Temple Run: Oz

Temple Run: Brave

The Lion Guard

Toy Story: Story Theater

Where’s My Water?

Where's My Mickey?

Where's My Water? 2

Where’s My Water? Lite/Where’s My Water? Free

Zootopia Crime Files: Hidden Object

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...-on-your-kids/





'Dark Tower' Leads Slow Weekend with $19.5 Million, 'Detroit' Stumbles
Seth Kelley

As the dog days of summer drag on, a trio of wide releases are kicking off the August box office with a whimper.

The weekend's leader is "The Dark Tower." Sony and MRC's long-time-coming Stephen King adaptation starring Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey is landing on a modest $19.5 million from 3,451 locations. Made for about $66 million counting reshoots, the story centers on a boy (played by Tom Taylor) who discovers another dimension where he aligns himself with a Gunslinger (Elba) on a mission to save the world from various enemies, including the Man in Black (McConaughey). Critics mostly panned the movie, leading to its current 18 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Meanwhile, Annapurna's "Detroit" is not faring as well as expected. Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal's latest collaboration should end up with $7.3 million from 3,007 locations this weekend. Combined with a week of limited release grosses, its total should stand at $7.8 million. An awards-season push could end up helping its bottom line. So far, critics are on board, earning the tale of the Motor City's 1967 riots a 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie is toplined by "Star Wars" breakout John Boyega, as well as Will Poulter, and Algee Smith.

That leaves "Kidnap" -- from David Dinerstein's recently-launched Aviron, and Lotus -- which is racing to $10.2 million from 2,378 locations. The movie stars Halle Berry as a mother attempting to rescue her son after he is taken. Aviron acquired the film from a bankrupt Relativity, but the distributor declined to release the thriller's acquisition cost, making it difficult to judge its performance.

"Dunkirk," the box office winner the past two weekends, is sliding comfortably into second with $17.6 million from 4,014 locations. Christopher Nolan's World War II movie crossed the $300 million mark on Saturday, and by the end of the weekend should tally a $133.6 million domestic total. This weekend it looks to make about $4 million from Imax screens alone, which will count for $29.8 million of the movie's domestic grosses. Warner Bros. also continues to see profits from "Wonder Woman," which will land right up against the $400 million domestic milestone by the end of this weekend.

In limited release, TWC's "Wind River" should make $164,167 from four locations. The film stars Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen, and marks Taylor Sheridan's directorial debut. Sheridan conceived the movie as part of a loose trilogy that also includes two recent releases that he wrote, but did not direct, "Sicario" and "Hell or High Water."

All this on the calendar spot that last year's "Suicide Squad" bucked conventional release date wisdom with a record-breaking $133.7 million domestic opening. This summer has lagged overall due to a number of big-budget movies flopping or underperforming, and this latest showing will only put the business farther behind.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-br...-idUKKBN1AM0WM





Dolby, 70 Millimeter or Imax? Our Critic Helps You Choose
Ben Kenigsberg

Moviegoing shouldn’t require the expertise of Charlize Theron’s secret agent from “Atomic Blonde.”

You can see “Dunkirk” in 70 millimeter or Imax 70 millimeter. Both formats are rare treats, but what’s the difference?

When I saw “Transformers: The Last Knight” in June, my screening in Imax 3-D — no relation to Imax 70 millimeter, except in branding — was canceled because of technical difficulties. I went down the hall to see it in a Dolby Cinema. What’s that?

Digital projection, the standard for the last half-dozen years, was supposed to bring consistency to moviegoing, eliminating the scratches and other imperfections of the celluloid era. But with a proliferation of options and surcharges, you’re justified in feeling more confused than ever.

“It’s not as simple as when it was 35 millimeter or 70 millimeter,” said Gregg Paliotta, owner of Digital Media Systems, which sets up theaters and studio-run premieres.

Here is a guide to help you figure out which extras really matter, and which are just a ploy to get you to spend more.

Dolby Cinema

WHAT IS IT? Dolby began to open these premium auditoriums in AMC Theaters in the United States in 2015. They offer Dolby Vision, which means laser projection with improved color and contrast and brighter 3-D; and Dolby Atmos audio, which can accommodate up to 128 simultaneous sounds.

WHERE IS IT? At 77 AMC theaters nationwide, including the AMC Empire 25 in New York, with more to come.

WHY YOU MIGHT WANT IT “It actually, to me, is the best-looking digital there is out there right now,” said Chapin Cutler, a founder of Boston Light & Sound, the company overseeing the 70-millimeter presentations of “Dunkirk.”

WHY YOU MIGHT AVOID IT You hate paired seats, part of the Dolby Cinema layout. Or maybe I was just self-conscious about seeing “Fifty Shades Darker” alone at 11 a.m. on a Saturday.

THIS SUMMER Only films optimized for Dolby Cinema, like “Atomic Blonde” and “The Dark Tower,” will show under that banner. “Detroit,” despite a complex sound mix, isn’t mastered for Dolby Atmos, so it won’t play in Dolby Cinemas.

4DX

WHAT IS IT? No, theaters haven’t cracked the fourth dimension. This is the latest effort to fuse moviegoing with amusement park rides. 4DX promises “motion chairs and environmental effects such as wind, bubbles, and scent.”

WHERE IS IT? Nine theaters nationwide, including Regal locations in Union Square and Times Square in New York.

WHY YOU MIGHT WANT IT It’s a clear advance over the last notable ride-movie technology, D-BOX, which felt a bit like watching a movie in a rogue massage chair. The seat movements in 4DX are impressively attuned to camera motion.

WHY YOU MIGHT AVOID IT Purists may balk, and the effects are distracting. Also, there’s a medical warning when you enter.

THIS SUMMER I could abide the rocking sensation during “War for the Planet of the Apes,” but being sprayed with water, air and some sort of musk odor (forest, ocean and explosions all smelled the same) was overkill.

Imax

WHAT IS IT? For 40 years, Imax meant a 70-millimeter film strip run horizontally and projected on a four-story screen. In 2008, the Imax Corporation sought to expand, putting proprietary digital projectors in conventional multiplexes and installing screens only slightly larger than normal. Today, there are three kinds of Imax: Imax 70 millimeter, the fat-celluloid original; and two generations of digital Imax. The latest, called Imax With Laser, uses laser projectors for improved color and richer blacks. Outside of science centers, Imax 3-D generally means digital Imax.

WHERE IS IT? There are 396 Imax-branded theaters in the United States. When there is a film designed for Imax, the company has published an online guide listing which theater has which version. It’s worth the delve: In New York, only the AMC Loews Lincoln Square 13 and the American Museum of Natural History have Imax 70 millimeter.

WHY YOU MIGHT WANT IT Christopher Nolan, who shot 70 percent of “Dunkirk” in Imax 70 millimeter, has called it “the highest-resolution imaging format that’s ever been devised.”

WHY YOU MIGHT AVOID IT A movie not shot in any type of Imax will look puny on an Imax screen.

THIS SUMMER “Dunkirk” shows off Imax 70 millimeter’s full potential for immersion and photographic complexity — it’s why the contrast of planes, sea and sky is so striking. (For digital Imax, Mr. Paliotta cited Clint Eastwood’s “Sully” as an exemplar of a movie shot for that format. He called the premiere he worked on for Imax one of the best presentations he’d seen in 20 years.)

70 Millimeter

WHAT IS IT? Imagine Imax 70 millimeter, then turn the film strip so that it runs vertically, and project it in a regular theater. By offering increased image area, a 70-millimeter frame captures more detail than 35 millimeter or any current digital format. While 70 millimeter was traditionally used for wide-screen epics like “Lawrence of Arabia,” recent revivals of the format for “The Master” and “The Hateful Eight” have demonstrated its versatility in interiors.

WHERE IS IT? The Weinstein Company hired Mr. Cutler to locate and refurbish dozens of 70-millimeter projectors to show “The Hateful Eight”; Warner Bros. bought most of those projectors for “Dunkirk.” During the past 16 months, Warner Bros. has also quietly put out 70-millimeter prints of other films in major cities. City Cinemas 1, 2, 3 on the Upper East Side keep a 70-millimeter projector on hand.

WHY YOU MIGHT WANT IT The clarity and texture of 70 millimeter are unbeatable. Mr. Cutler also said that standard 70 millimeter allowed for more light onscreen than Imax 70 millimeter does. “The picture tends to look brighter and more vibrant,” he added.

WHY YOU MIGHT AVOID IT 70 millimeter is an analog, photochemical medium. For films that make extensive use of digital tweaking, like “Wonder Woman,” the advantage is not as pronounced.

THIS SUMMER Great for “Dunkirk,” whose music and effects may not overwhelm the dialogue as much as in Imax 70 millimeter; less so for “Wonder Woman.”

Matte-White Screens

WHAT IS IT? This is an unadvertised option, but it could have a large effect on your experience. Commercial theaters have replaced many traditional matte-white screens with silver screens, because that’s what RealD, the most widely used 3-D technology, requires. But silver screens should not be used for 2-D movies: They dull the image and send uneven illumination back to the theater. If you’re sitting too far to the side, too low or too high, you may be robbed of light that is rightly yours. Well-designed spaces hedge against this effect, but if the image looks dim, try moving to the center of the theater, Mr. Cutler advised, where you will generally get the bulk of the light.

WHERE IS IT? Everywhere, though you are more likely to find matte-white screens in complexes that don’t show 3-D. If you’re as fanatical as I am, follow Mr. Cutler’s suggestion and hover a white business card or a white sheet of paper near the screen — don’t touch it — before showtime to compare the colors. Sometimes the silver can be difficult to discern.

WHY YOU MIGHT WANT IT If you’re seeing a 2-D movie, you should as a rule insist on a white screen, ideally with a matte finish. Studios feel strongly about the difference, Mr. Paliotta said. For premieres at the now-closed Ziegfeld in Manhattan, he added, they sometimes paid tens of thousands of dollars to temporarily replace the silver screen with white.

WHY YOU MIGHT AVOID IT If you’re watching a movie in 3-D (although a handful of New York theaters — including IFC Center, the Museum of Modern Art, the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the City Cinemas chain — have white-screen 3-D).

THIS SUMMER Watching the shadowy “It Comes at Night” on silver, I felt like I had to squint to see the nighttime scenes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/m...max-dolby.html





YouTube Music Now Lets You Save Songs, Albums, and Playlists for Offline Listening

Offline mode just got a major upgrade
Dani Deahl

YouTube Red users have had the option to listen to music offline in YouTube Music for some time, but only through the offline mixtape feature, which is automatically populated based on your listening history. While this technically worked, there was no way to have any additional control over what you were able to listen to. Now, users can also choose specific songs, playlists, and albums to save for offline listening.

To save music for offline listening, tap on the Menu icon (marked by three dots), next to any song, playlist, or album, and select Save Offline. A pop-up will then appear, asking if you want to save just the audio, SD video, or HD video (when applicable). On iOS devices, you can also swipe left on a song in a playlist, and then select Offline. Then, to access your offline music, tap your profile photo and select Offline.

PSA: though offline mixtape was probably suitable for most, YouTube Red subscribers can now have complete control over what they can listen to offline in YouTube Music. So stock up those playlists for the next long-haul road trip you have planned — do it before you’re out of good Wi-Fi range.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/4/16...bums-playlists





The Star Wars Video That Baffled YouTube's Copyright Cops
Jeremy Hsu

Every director knows that the score can make the scene. Anyone who’s ever watched a rough cut without soundtrack music can confirm this. Case in point: Something weird happens to the beloved throne room scene that ends the original 1977 Star Wars if you’re crazy enough to delete John Williams’ brassy music from it: Instead of a triumphal award ceremony, it becomes an awkward mime interrupted by sporadic coughing, an occasional strangled yell from the hairy humanoid alien Chewbacca, and tepid applause from a crowd of Rebel troopers.

Fans of the YouTube channel Auralnauts, which posted the doctored Star Wars scene in 2014 as a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the emotional power of Williams’ score, loved it for that weirdness. But another set of viewers—those with the rights to the movie’s soundtrack—tuned in to these sounds of silence and heard something else: the ka-ching of a cash register.

That’s what the Auralnauts discovered earlier this summer when they received word that Warner/Chappell—the global music publishing arm of Warner Music Group—had filed a monetization claim on their “Star Wars Minus Williams” video through YouTube's Content ID System. That’s right: The copyright holder was claiming ownership of something that wasn’t there. Under the claim, Warner would receive any future ad revenue the video earns, which has been viewed more than 4 million times. The company’s effort to monetize silence transformed the Auralnauts video: Once just a clever gag, it quickly became a flashpoint in the broader YouTube conflict between freedom of expression and copyright protection.

Since 2012, the Auralnauts—Zak Koonce and Craven Moorhaus—have paired original, electronica-inspired music with parodies of internet culture and popular Hollywood franchises on their YouTube channel. Koonce, the filmmaker and main comedic voice of the duo, occasionally shows his face; Moorhaus, the composer, hides his features behind a helmet during his rare appearances.

Neither appears in their “Throne Room” parody. The video does feature a few seconds of (copyright-free) music at the beginning, a Williams-esque passage from Gustav Holst’s “The Planets.” And it concludes with four seconds of a brief loop from the original Williams score’s familiar ending—a cheeky musical reminder of what listeners are missing throughout most of the video.

The Auralnauts channel has steadily grown to more than 48 million views and 200,000 subscribers in total—enough so that the New York City-based creators have harbored hopes of focusing on their YouTube channel full time instead of working other jobs. The Warner/Chappell claim, along with others filed against their work, threatened to thwart such ambitions. (The Auralnauts didn’t face similar challenges to their reuse of video material in the “Minus Williams” piece, perhaps because it represents such a tiny fraction of the full movie that it qualifies as fair use.)

The music industry has long complained about YouTube making ad money at the expense of music copyright holders under “safe harbor” provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) that excuse service providers from being liable for copyright infringements. In response, Google-owned YouTube points to its automated Content ID system, which gives copyright holders the option to either take down videos based on copyright claims or take the ad revenue generated from the videos.

The monetization option has proven especially popular among music publishers. A 2016 report by Google found that music companies chose to monetize more than 95 percent of YouTube videos involved in copyright claims instead of blocking the videos, and YouTube ended up paying the music industry $1 billion in ad revenue that year. Still, YouTube isn’t paying copyright owners the way subscription-based streaming services are: A 2017 report by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) estimated that a for-pay service such as Spotify paid record companies $20 per user in 2015, whereas ad-supported YouTube paid less than $1 per music user.

Since debuting in 2007, Content ID has helped maintain an uneasy truce between YouTube and copyright holders, even as YouTube has displaced broadcast radio and other music streaming services to become the most popular format for people to discover new songs and listen to music. But in the case of the Auralnauts, the steady stream of copyright claims filed through Content ID has taken a toll. “The more time we've dedicated to the channel, the less money we make from it,” Koonce says. “Our views and subscribers go up, but our ability to make money on the content has become less effective.”

About 99.5 percent of monetization claims on sound recordings are automated through the Content ID System, according to statistics provided by a YouTube spokesperson. The system uses digital fingerprinting of audio and video to flag infringements of copyrighted material uploaded to the service.

But in the case of “Star Wars Minus Williams,” someone at Warner/Chappell took the rare step of manually filing a claim against the Auralnauts video. Warner/Chappell has been notably enthusiastic in manually flagging multiple Auralnauts videos, according to Koonce.

In an added twist, the Warner/Chappell claim incorrectly identified the “Star Wars Main Title” track as being present in the Auralnauts video. The single brief Williams excerpt used by the Auralnauts actually comes from a track titled “The Throne Room and End Title.” It’s also possible that Warner/Chappell mistook the Holst piece for Williams’ original music (it’s easy to do).

“While yes, there is technically a trace of John Williams present in our video, it is neither enough to arguably warrant a claim nor is it even the correct track they are claiming,” Koonce says.

Koonce and Moorhaus disputed the claim through YouTube’s system. That choice makes the Auralnauts' case even more unusual: Such claims are challenged less than one percent of the time, according to YouTube.

Warner/Chappell responded by rejecting the dispute of its claim. That left the Auralnauts with a tough choice: They could appeal the rejected dispute by providing more information about themselves and their reasoning. But if a copyright claimant such as Warner/Chappell does not back down from its claim, the video is likely to get taken down from YouTube entirely—and in that event, the Auralnauts would also be penalized by the platform as a copyright scofflaw and barred from some privileges, such as linking to their own store. Three such takedowns and YouTube will delete your channel. That may deter flagrant copyright violators, but it also discourages legitimate challenges of unfair copyright claims.

YouTube has taken steps to help out YouTube channel creators. In November 2015, the site unveiled a Fair Use Protection program to help cover the legal costs for a select group of channels that YouTube determines has been unfairly targeted with video takedowns. Last year, it changed the Content ID system to allow creators’ videos to continue earning ad revenue (held in escrow) even if a copyright claim has been made against them.

Still, the Auralnauts say they have few options to fight what they view as unfair claims on their content. Koonce suggested possible Content ID improvements that could prevent the same false claims from being repeatedly filed against the same video by different claimants. “People need to protect their IP, but don’t give them all the power," he says.

A smarter profit-sharing system would differentiate better between, say, a video of Queen performing “Bohemian Rhapsody” or the same song playing in the background of someone's wedding video. “What is needed is a more nuanced approach to how stuff gets monetized,” says Robert Lyons, a former digital media executive who is now a visiting lecturer at Northeastern University in Boston.

In any case, Lyons suggests that the Auralnauts video has a very good chance of being protected under fair use legal doctrine—the legal concept that allows for music and video parodies, among other exceptions to copyright infringement. “I think that a mere five seconds of the title’s music in a work that clearly is transformative and [that] poses no threat to the commercial potential of the original work would have a very strong fair use defense,” Lyons says.

When I tried to get Warner/Chappell’s side of this story, the company offered no comment. But apparently my reporting helped bring the “Star Wars Minus Williams” copyright dispute to an unexpectedly speedy resolution. When Koonce told his YouTube partner manager that a journalist had interviewed him, YouTube stepped in and removed the copyright claim against the video. The YouTube representatives “were suddenly all ears about our issues and wanted to do anything they could to help,” Koonce says.

That’s a happy ending of sorts. But it feels more like the awkward “Minus Williams” throne room ceremony than the original triumphant conclusion of Star Wars IV: A New Hope. It's certainly not a systematic solution for copyright claim issues affecting the Auralnauts and other YouTube channels. You can’t always count on a reporter calling or a platform caring.

For now, the Auralnauts plan to make more update videos that they clearly own in between the longer projects that creatively remix the Star Wars films and similar content. Fans also provide direct financial support through Patreon or by buying T-shirts. But the door is still open for Warner/Chappell or another copyright holder to file a similar claim against the “Minus Williams” video. With this video or another, someone is eventually going to try to copyright silence again.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-star...opyright-cops/





TV Pirate Slapped with 18-Month Suspended Jail Term
Broede Carmody

A Sydney man has been slapped with an 18-month suspended jail sentence after helping thousands of people access Foxtel without paying the TV network a single cent.

Haidar Majid Salam Al Baghdadi, 33, was convicted of operating an illegal network that sold unauthorised access to subscription TV.

Sydney's Downing Centre court found he had helped more than 8000 people bypass Foxtel's paywall. Judge Robert Toner sentenced him to an 18 month suspended sentence.

The convicted TV pirate was originally charged with unauthorised access to a subscription broadcaster in December 2013. At the time, federal police alleged Mr Al Baghdadi used decoders and smartcards to set up a card-sharing network from a business in Sydney's southwest.

The Australian Federal Police isn't commenting on Mr Al Baghdadi's case, but in a Facebook post said intellectual property theft isn't a victimless crime.

"[It] affects real people's wages," the AFP said. "Don't undermine the creative industry. Don't support piracy."

Foxtel's chief executive Peter Tonagh said he hoped the conviction sends a "strong signal" to others looking to gain access to subscription TV without paying.

"Foxtel takes intellectual property theft very seriously," he said. "It severely undermines the creative industry, including every business and individual that works so hard to deliver us the movies, sport, drama and entertainment we love."

Mr Tonagh said Foxtel will continue to work closely with the Australian Federal Police and private cypbersecurity companies to expose TV pirating.

The maximum penalty for helping others gain unauthorised access to subscription television is five years' imprisonment.
http://www.theherald.com.au/story/48...ded-jail-term/





A Better, Safer Battery Could Be Coming to a Laptop Near You
John Markoff

A start-up company is trying to turbocharge a type of battery that has been a mainstay for simple devices like flashlights and toys, but until now has been ignored as an energy source for computers and electric cars.

Executives at Ionic Materials, in Woburn, Mass., plan to announce on Thursday a design breakthrough that could make solid-state alkaline batteries a viable alternative to lithium-ion and other high-energy storage technologies.

Alkaline batteries can be made far more cheaply and safely than today’s lithium-ion batteries, but they are not rechargeable. That issue, along with the superior power of lithium-ion batteries, has meant that alkaline batteries are not used in personal computers, smartphones or electric vehicles.

Ionic could change that equation with an alkaline battery the company said could be recharged hundreds of times. One additional benefit of the company’s breakthrough: An alkaline battery would not be as prone to the combustion issues that have plagued lithium-ion batteries in a range of products, most notably some Samsung smartphones.

Cheaper and more powerful batteries are also considered by many to be the driver needed to make the cost of renewable energy technologies like wind and solar competitive with the coal, gas and nuclear power that support the national energy grid.

Ionic said it had developed prototypes of a rechargeable alkaline battery that can be made using continuous manufacturing processes similar to the making of plastic wrap. So far, the company, which is backed by William Joy, a pioneering Silicon Valley computer designer, has demonstrated up to 400 recharge cycles for its prototypes. Ionic executives say they believe they will be able to triple that.

The alkaline batteries that Ionic has developed would initially be heavier than today’s lithium-ion batteries, said Mike Zimmerman, a materials scientist who is the founder and chief executive of Ionic. But the new batteries would more than compensate for that handicap with their cost advantage and, in time, their ability to store more energy.

There are other advantages besides cost and safety. Lithium-ion batteries rely on cobalt, and using that element comes with a human cost. Cobalt mines in Africa, for example, have been accused of using child labor while leaving behind a toxic mess.

Alkaline batteries, on the other hand, use relatively abundant zinc and manganese. “Ionic can help us get lithium-ion past cobalt and completely eliminate it with alkaline,” said Mr. Joy, who is a member of Ionic’s board.

He also said that the company had made progress toward an alkaline battery design that would replace zinc with more affordable aluminum. In the past, aluminum has not been usable because of issues like corrosion. Alkaline batteries based on aluminum would potentially weigh less than lithium-ion batteries and would be even cheaper to produce than today’s alkaline designs.

Ionic will make its announcement in Colorado at a conference for the 35th anniversary of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a sustainable-energy research group founded by the physicist and environmentalist Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins, his former wife.

“They started with a very sensible set of criteria,” Dr. Lovins said of Ionic. “They use an unusual electrolyte to come up with a battery that uses common cheap materials and is benign.”

But he added a note of caution: “Batteries are very difficult and I want to see what they have and what can be measured and proven and whether it will get to market.”

Technological progress in battery technology has been glacial compared with the exponential advances in processing speed and data storage capacity that have been staples of Silicon Valley’s growth. In the last 150 years, only a handful of rechargeable battery chemistries have reached mass adoption.

Tesla, in partnership with Panasonic, is building a factory in Nevada with the intent of greatly expanding capacity to make lithium-ion batteries and lower production costs. Tesla officials said they wanted to create enough capacity to produce batteries for 1.5 million cars a year.

There is growing interest in pursuing such so-called solid-state battery technologies for both consumer and transportation applications. Last fall, the United States Department of Energy’s agency for supporting research in next-generation energy technology announced 16 research awards aimed at accelerating development of solid battery technologies, including a $3 million contract to Ionic Materials. The company said it had signed several licensing deals to produce commercial versions of its design, but it would not identify its partners.

The United States Advanced Battery Consortium, an auto industry group, wants to greatly reduce the cost of lithium-ion production. Analysts, however, say they believe the new facilities and technology from auto and battery manufacturers will help bring costs down, but still fall short of industry goals.

In contrast, Ionic executives said they had found a way to achieve energy production costs that would be less than a fifth of the auto consortium’s target.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance, an energy research group, has forecast that mass-market adoption of electric vehicles will not occur until operating costs fall to match those of internal combustion engines. That is expected to happen in 2025, according to the group.

In December, Ionic Materials also described a solid material it said would improve the safety of existing lithium-ion batteries. The company has demonstrated the batteries’ resistance to catching fire or exploding by driving nails through them and even shooting them with bullets.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/t...thium-ion.html





Even with All Our Gadgets, Americans are Using Less Electricity than 10 Years Ago

Electronic devices are getting smaller and more energy-efficient.
Rani Molla

Everything from our heating systems to our toothbrushes is plugged in and connected to the internet, and smartphones are glued to the palms of our hands. Yet, Americans are using less electricity than we did 10 years ago.

Overall residential electricity sales have declined 3 percent from 2010 to 2016, and 7 percent on a per capita basis, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Our numerous gadgets are all getting more efficient, so they’re less of a drain on residential electric bills.

And our devices are also getting smaller.

Most TVs are now flat and require less energy to operate than the giant TVs of yore. TVs in general are also disappearing from American households, as Americans spend less time watching TV.

Instead, we spend more time online, increasingly on laptops and tablets (rather than bigger and less-efficient PCs). Most importantly, we’re spending more of our time on relatively tiny and energy-efficient smartphones.

Eventually, however, the ubiquity of rechargeable devices will counter efficiency gains, causing a net electricity consumption increase from 2030 to 2040, according to the EIA.

Also, much of our personal computing is being offloaded to the cloud — i.e. servers in data centers somewhere else. This electricity consumption — carried by the Facebooks, Googles and Amazons of the world, among other companies — is considered commercial electricity usage. There, too, we’re seeing efficiency gains, but our data demands will grow ever larger over the next 20 years.

So, while declines are expected to continue into the near future, the increased adoption and saturation of all types of electronic devices will eventually weigh on electricity consumption in both the residential and, more dramatically, the commercial sectors.
https://www.recode.net/2017/8/6/1610...administration





Autonomous Cars Race Narrows on Doubts About Clear Path to Profit
Edward Taylor and Paul Lienert

BMW and Daimler, the world's top luxury carmakers, have announced alliances with suppliers, talking up the virtues of having a bigger pool of engineers to develop a self-driving car.

But another motive behind these deals, executives and industry experts told Reuters, is a concern that robocars may not live up to the profit expectations that drove an initial investment rush.

Carmakers are increasingly looking to forego outright ownership of future autonomous driving systems in favor of spreading the investment burden and risk.

The trend represents a clear shift in strategy from little more than a year ago when most automakers were pursuing standalone strategies focused on tackling the engineering challenge of developing a self-driving car, rather than on the business case.

"Although it is a substantial market, it may not be worth the scale of investments currently being sunk into it," said a board member at one of the German carmakers, who declined to be identified because the matter is confidential.

Dozens of companies - including carmakers and tech firms like Google and Uber - are vying for a market which, according to consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, will only make up about 10 to 15 percent of vehicles in Europe by 2030. There are sure to be losers.

"It's impossible for me to believe there will be 50 successful autonomous vehicle software producers," said John Hoffecker, global vice chairman of Michigan-based consulting firm AlixPartners.

In July last year, BMW became the first major carmaker to abandon its solo development of self-driving cars in favor of teaming up with chipmaker Intel and camera and software manufacturer Mobileye to build a platform for autonomous cars technology by 2021.

The decision followed a trip by senior executives to visit startups and suppliers to gauge BMW's competitive position.

"Sitting at other companies, one rattles off the technological challenges and safety aspects, and you come to realize that many of us are swimming in the same sludge," Klaus Buettner, BMW's vice president autonomous driving projects, told Reuters.

"Everybody is investing billions. Our view was that it makes sense to club together to develop some core systems as a platform."

Daimler's Mercedes-Benz has since combined efforts with supplier Bosch, three months ago, while Japanese carmaker Honda has said it is open to alliances in the area of autonomous cars.

Even deep-pocketed tech companies are teaming up. San Francisco-based transport app operator Lyft and Alphabet Inc's self-driving car unit Waymo pooled their resources in May.

For a graphic on autonomous cars alliances, click here

SHARE THE BURDEN

Partial autonomy is already a reality in higher-end cars that keep in lane and adjust their speed in motorway driving. Each of the next stages - "eyes off", "mind off" and ultimately driverless autonomy - will likely take years to become reality.

Klaus Froehlich, BMW's board member responsible for development, said the company was likely to lose money with its first fully autonomous vehicles, just like it did with its first-generation electric cars. But developing the technology remains a necessity in order to stay relevant as a carmaker.

"It is an enabling technology, not a business case," he said about BMW's decision to develop autonomous vehicles. "But if the burden can be shared on a platform, I have nothing against that."

One of the most financially promising markets that autonomous technology will open up is driverless on-demand taxis, which may one day come to replace regular cabs and parts of public transport in large cities.

"Robotaxis" are expected to drive the wider market for car sharing and ride-hailing, which was worth $53 billion last year and could be worth $2 trillion by 2030, according to a McKinsey study published earlier this year.

Ford and General Motors are investing at least $2 billion each to develop self-driving vehicles for urban ride-sharing fleets beginning in 2021, competing with incumbents and start-ups.

The emergence of alliances involving the likes of BMW and Mercedes-Benz comes at a time when regulators are pushing for a creation of standards for the new technology, which has the potential to improve vehicle reflexes and cut accidents by up to 90 percent, according to Boston Consulting Group.

Industry experts say such standardization could make it much harder to develop a product which stands out, calling into question the wisdom of high-stakes, go-it-alone strategies.

ALLIANCES, MERGERS

In September 2016, the U.S. Department of Transport and the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration released guidance for heavily automated vehicles.

The regulator urged carmakers to disclose how vehicle reflexes are programed, particularly when cars are faced with a dilemma, such as choosing between hitting a cyclist or accelerating beyond legal speeds to avoid an accident.

"It is important to consider whether highly automated vehicles are required to apply particular decision rules in instances of conflicts between safety, mobility, and legality objectives," the guidance said.

"Algorithms for resolving these conflict situations should be developed transparently using input from federal and state regulators, drivers and passengers."

European regulators too are debating whether to standardize speeds and distances which autonomous cars need to adhere to while weaving in and out of traffic or joining lanes.

Pressure not to waste development costs is laying the groundwork for alliances and even mergers between the various companies supplying technology for autonomous cars, including makers of vehicles, software, computer chips, radar, camera and laser sensors and high-definition maps.

BMW, Mercedes and Audi put aside their rivalry and teamed up to buy mapping firm HERE, for example, in order to cut their dependence on Google.

What starts out as arms-length agreements designed to capture market share, much like code-sharing deals between airlines, may evolve further into takeovers once the next investment round is due, executives and advisers said.

"Will we see what is happening in aviation be adopted in automotive - where first we see alliances, collaborations and consortiums, and then we see full out market combinations?" asked Bill Curtin, head of mergers and acquisitions at global law firm Hogan Lovells.

Additional reporting by Joe White in Detroit, Naomi Tajitsu in Tokyo, and Simon Jessop in London; Editing by Pravin Char
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-au...-idUKKBN1AO0Y7





Uber and Lyft May Cause Lower Car Ownership in Big Cities: Study
Brittany A. Roston

A new study has shed light on what may turn out to be a growing trend: lower car ownership in cities where ridesharing services are available. Though the figures are still in their infancy at the moment, a study from the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute noted that both car usage and car ownership increased once Uber and Lyft pulled out of Austin, Texas.

One hawked benefit of ridesharing transportation services like Lyft and Uber is the decreased need for personal car ownership, though that very much depends on the kind of city where someone lives. If you’re in a big city with a large ridesharing car fleet in operation, there may not be much need to own your own vehicle — after all, getting a ride is only a couple taps away.

While Uber and Lyft have both deployed in a number of cities, they have, at times, had to abandon those cities due to local governments driving them out for one reason or another. That’s what happened in Austin, Texas, opening the door for an interesting study on personal car ownership. Did the sudden absence of these two services cause increased car usage and/or ownership, or did things remain unaffected?

The result, according to the study, was a big increase in personal car usage and a statistically significant increase in car ownership. The researchers surveyed a total of 1,200 people from the Austin region, and found that 41-percent of them started using their own car more often to make up for the lack of Uber and Lyft rides. As well, a total of 9-percent of those surveyed bought their own personal car to make up for the services’ absences.

Increase personal car usage and ownership poses a problem for cities, which are experiencing increased congestion on roads and a growing need for more parking decks, among other things. Large numbers of vehicles on the road also pose a problem for the climate, which suffers as a result of the emissions that cars produce. Ridesharing services have been praised as a potential solution to these problems.
https://www.slashgear.com/uber-and-l...tudy-10494755/





Bitcoin's Meteoric Rise is Costing Some Investors Billions
Joe Ciolli

• Companies that make the semiconductors for cryptocurrency mining have been a hot-button topic in the investment world, with the fate of their stocks closely tied to the prices of bitcoin and Ethereum
• Hedge fund Carlson Capital has a fund that's lost 14.2% this year due to bad short wagers on Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices

The meteoric rise of bitcoin is rippling through financial markets, and not everyone is enjoying the ride.

The scorching-hot cryptocurrency has tentacles that stretch into many different parts of the investment landscape, and some traders are finding out the hard way how much influence it can wield.

Just ask the unfortunate souls who have been trying to short chip makers and learning the hard way that their share prices are closely linked to interest in bitcoin. The stocks of companies like Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), which make chips used in the mining of bitcoin — a process that involves heaps of computers solving complex equations — have surged alongside the cryptocurrency, destroying the short positions.

Short sellers betting against those two companies have lost a combined $1.8 billion this year as Nvidia has skyrocketed 57% and AMD has climbed 16%, according to data provided by financial analytics firm S3 Partners.

And the fallout is already beginning.

Dallas-based hedge fund Carlson Capital's $1 billion Black Diamond Thematic fund lost 14.2% this year through July, and blamed bitcoin for the hit, according to a client update reviewed by Business Insider.

The fund chose chipmakers as its top short theme earlier this year, citing "high inventories, double ordering, massive capex supply responses and actual pockets of weakening demand in smartphones, autos, and the Chinese optical market."

Needless to say, that hasn't translated into weak share prices — and now Carlson has an axe to grind with the massively popular cryptocurrencies they see keeping the space afloat to an unsustainable degree.

"The sector has turned into something of a bubble characterized best by the surge in GPU stocks, Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia, driven by a cryptocurrency mania," portfolio managers Richard Maraviglia and Matthew Barkoff, wrote in the fund's second-quarter investor letter. "We believe the other side of this incredibly powerful consensus move in technology will be very profitable for us but to date, it has been a significant drag on performance."

As for those directly trading bitcoin, the ride has been bumpy, but ultimately quite lucrative. It's up almost 200% in 2017 alone, minting big profits for those traders willing to take a chance on such a speculative entity.

But by no means does the burgeoning cryptocurrency mania start and end with bitcoin. There's also Ethereum, which has been gobbling up market share, surging from 5% of the cryptocurrency market in January to 30% as of June 22. In fact, up until June, Ethereum was on track to surpass bitcoin as the world's largest digital currency.

Regardless of whether bitcoin, Ethereum, or another vehicle strikes your fancy, the process of mining for new blocks requires the same kinds of semiconductors. So as cryptocurrencies go, so do the stock prices of the companies making those chips.

And as Carlson doubles down on its bearish chipmaker stance, other hedge funds are proving happy to chase the runaway performance of cryptocurrencies.

Last Friday, activist investor Elliott Management disclosed a 6% stake in NXP Semiconductors, and said that it's pushing for a higher price in the company's pending $38 billion sale to Qualcomm.

Elliott did not specifically cite the white-hot cryptocurrency industry and its effect on chipmakers in a regulatory filing. After all, semiconductors are also crucial components for smartphones, a familiar stomping ground for the world's biggest company. So any bet on the industry can also be read as a play on Apple.

Ultimately, even if Elliott's investment has nothing to do with cryptocurrencies, there are some market watchers that will interpret it that way.

And that line of thinking represents the new reality facing investors of all types: This is an area of the market that's attracting and churning through billions of dollars, so either adjust to it or risk getting caught off-guard.
http://www.newstimes.com/technology/...s-11738956.php





Britons Will Get Right to Delete Online Past, Minister Says

Britons will be able to make social media platforms like Facebook (FB.O) delete information, including content published in their childhood, under government proposals that will bring data laws into line with new European regulations.

Individuals will have more control over their data by having "the right to be forgotten" and ask for their personal data to be erased in the measures announced by Digital Minister Matt Hancock on Monday.

Companies will also have to ask people for permission to collect personal data rather than rely on pre-selected tick boxes, which are largely ignored, he said.

The new rules will bring British law into line with the European Union's general data protection regulation (GDPR), which tightens and extends the scope of data protection law.

The GDPR becomes enforceable from May 2018.

Lawyers and tech industry experts have said Britain will have to continue complying with GDPR after Britain leaves the European Union in 2019 to avoid disruption to the data traffic that is essential to international business.

Hancock said the rules would give Britain one of the most robust, yet dynamic, set of data laws in the world.

"It will give people more control over their data, require more consent for its use and prepare Britain for Brexit," he said.

The data protection regulator, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), will be given the power to issue higher fines, of up to 17 million pounds or 4 per cent of global turnover, in cases of very serious data breaches, he said.

Reporting by Paul Sandle; Editing by Richard Balmforth
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-br...-idUKKBN1AN15Z





UK Law Proposal to Criminalize Re-Identification of Anonymized User Data
Catalin Cimpanu

British lawmakers have filed on Monday a statement of intent regarding proposals for improvements to the Data Protection Act, with a focus on criminalizing anonymous data re-identification, imposing larger fines for cyber incidents, and more user protections for British online netizens.

The modifications are part of UK's effort to comply with the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that's set to come into effect in May 2018, time until which EU governments must amend national laws to include its provisions.

New bill adds many GDPR provisions

The new Data Protection Bill (DPB), as it's currently known, includes amendments for GDPR compliance. For example:
≻ Make it simpler to withdraw consent for the use of personal data
≻ Make it easier and free for individuals to require an organization to disclose the personal data it holds on them
≻ Allow people to ask for their personal data held by companies to be erased
≻ Require ‘explicit’ consent to be necessary for processing sensitive personal data
≻ Enable parents and guardians to give consent for their child’s data to be used
≻ Expand the definition of ‘personal data’ to include IP addresses, internet cookies and DNA
≻ Make it easier for customers to move data between service providers

Bigger fines for cyber-incidents

Besides the above GDPR provisions, there is another, which is to raise the amount for maximum fines that UK authorities can impose for cyber incidents.

Until now, these fines were limited to £500,000 ($650,000). The biggest fine the UK government ever gave out until now was for the TalkTalk breach of 2015 when the ICO fined the ISP with only £400,000 ($520,000).

According to the proposed DPB, which is compliant with GDPR provisions, the new fine limit is of up to £17 million ($22 million) or 4% of a company's global turnover.

The criminalization of data re-identification

On top of the GDPR provisions, the DPB also comes with an extra proposal. This is the creation of a new criminal offence for when someone, intentionally or recklessly, re-identifies individuals from anonymised or pseudonymised data.

"Offenders who knowingly handle or process such data will also be guilty of an offence," the DPB proposal reads. "The maximum penalty would be an unlimited fine."

Dr. Lukasz Olejnik, independent cybersecurity and privacy researcher, affiliatee of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy, applauds the UK's efforts.

"UK’s GDPR implementation may have visionary traits; in that it goes beyond merely implementing the GDPR as just a legislation," he wrote on Monday on his blog. "UK will introduce new criminal offences, among them reidentification."

Privacy expert sees some problems with new criminal offence

While Olejnik applauds the UK's efforts to expand user data privacy protections, he warns that the UK may be treading dangerous ground.

"There are several issues with [the] banning of reidentification," he says. "First, it won’t work. Second, it will decrease security and privacy."

The biggest problem in Olejnik's eyes is that there's is no effective way to enforce it in practice. Second, it stifles security and privacy research who often re-identify anonymized data in their day-to-day work.

"UK’s ICO will furthermore find itself in a possibly inconvenient position where they will need to judge which research is or isn’t appropriate," Olejnik explains.

In other words, it's good that the UK government has identified a problem, but putting it into legislation may end up being used by companies threatening researchers with prosecution in case they want to publish unflattering research that relies on re-identifying users and revealing their details from anonymized data.

In addition, the DPB statement of intent also mentioned some protections for journalists and whistleblowers, but it did not provide any details.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...zed-user-data/





Former UK Spy Chief Says Encryption 'Very Positive' Despite Attacks

A former British spy chief said on Friday that encryption of online communications was "very positive" for the country's national security interests despite the difficulties that it poses for security services attempting to tackle militants.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has proposed tougher measures to tackle militants online activities after four attacks in Britain this year while Home Secretary (interior minister) Amber Rudd visited Silicon Valley earlier this month to demand tech companies step up their efforts.

Jonathan Evans, who ran Britain's MI5 spy service from 2007 until 2013, said that while encryption did make attacks harder to stop, it also helped to prevent criminals and even foreign governments from hacking private data.

"I'm not personally one of those who believes that we should weaken encryption ... whilst, understandably, there is a very acute concern about counter-terrorism, it's not the only national security threat that we face," he told BBC radio.

"The way in which cyberspace is being used by criminals and by governments is a potential threat to the UK's interests more widely... so encryption in that context is very positive."

Evans' views echo those of Robert Hannigan, the former head of the UK's eavesdropping spy agency GCHQ, who said in July that the government should work with companies for access to messages to ensure that systems were not weakened.

A suicide bomb at a pop concert in Manchester and three attacks in London which used cars to drive into pedestrians have killed 36 people in the last six months.

In addition to those successful attacks, the number of plots that have been thwarted in Britain has risen this year too. Security services say they have thwarted 19 plots since June 2013, six in the last four months.

Police say three of the four attacks in Britain this year, which have killed 36 people, were inspired by Islamist ideology.

Evans said that while he thought that the threat from Islamic militants was on the decline when he left his role in 2013, the rise of Islamic State had fuelled a new generation of militants which could pose a threat for decades in the future.

"We're at least 20 years into this. My guess is that we will still be dealing with the long tail in another 20 years time," he said. "I think we are going to be facing 20, 30 years of terrorist threats, and therefore we need absolutely critically to persevere."

Reporting by Alistair Smout; editing by michael Holden
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-mi...-idUKKBN1AS07J





Google Fires Employee Behind Anti-Diversity Memo
David Ingram and Ishita Palli

Internet giant Google has fired the male engineer at the centre of an uproar in Silicon Valley over the past week after he authored an internal memo asserting there are biological causes behind gender inequality in the tech industry.

James Damore, the engineer who wrote the memo, confirmed his dismissal, saying in an email to Reuters on Monday that he had been fired for "perpetuating gender stereotypes".

Damore said he was exploring all possible legal remedies, and that before being fired, he had submitted a charge to the U.S. National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) accusing Google upper management of trying to shame him into silence.

"It's illegal to retaliate against an NLRB charge," he wrote in the email.

Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O) based in Mountain View, Calif., said it could not talk about individual employee cases.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai told employees in a note on Monday that portions of the anti-diversity memo "violate our Code of Conduct and cross the line by advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace," according to a copy of the note seen by Reuters.

It was not immediately clear what legal authority Damore could try to invoke. Non-union or "at will" employees, such as most tech workers, can be fired in the United States for a wide array of reasons that have nothing to do with performance.

The U.S. National Labor Relations Act guarantees workers, whether they are in a union or not, the right to engage in "concerted activities" for their "mutual aid or protection".

Damore, though, would likely face an uphill fight to seek that protection based on his memo, said Alison Morantz, a Stanford University law professor with expertise in labour law.

"It's going to be a hard sell that this activity was either concerted or for mutual aid or protection, rather than simply venting or pitting one group of workers against the others, which does not sound very mutual," Morantz said.

Debate over the treatment of women in the male-dominated tech industry has raged for months. Claims of persistent sexual harassment in the ranks of Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] and of several venture capital firms led to management shakeups.

Management at the largest tech firms, including Google, have publicly committed to diversifying their workforces, although the percentage of women in engineering and management roles remains low at many companies.

The U.S. Department of Labor is investigating whether Google has unlawfully paid women less than men. The company has denied the charges.

Damore asserted in his 3,000-word document that circulated inside the company last week that "Google's left bias has created a politically correct monoculture" which prevented honest discussion of diversity.

The engineer, who has a doctoral degree in systems biology from Harvard University, according to his LinkedIn page, attacked the idea that gender diversity should be a goal.

"The distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and ... these differences may explain why we don't see equal representation of women in tech and leadership," Damore wrote in the memo.

He quickly received support in conservative media outlets. On Breitbart News, once run by Steve Bannon, now chief strategist to President Donald Trump, commentators overnight discussed whether to boycott Google and switch to services such as Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O) Bing.

Google's vice president of diversity, Danielle Brown, sent a memo in response to the furore over the weekend, saying the engineer's essay "advanced incorrect assumptions about gender".

Reporting by David Ingram in SAN FRANCISCO and Ishita Palli in BENGALURU; Editing by Gopakumar Warrier and Christopher Cushing
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-ib...-idUKKBN1AN2H5





The Fired Google Engineer Wrote his Memo after he Went to a 'Shaming,' 'Secretive' Diversity Programme
Shona Ghosh

Fired Google engineer James Damore is standing by the controversial memo which lost him his job.

Damore said he wrote the memo, which criticises Google's approach to diversity, after attending one of the company's diversity programmes and finding it "secretive" and "shaming."

Damore made the comments in his first major interview since being fired, to alt-right YouTube personality Stefan Molyneux.

You can watch the full 45-minute interview below.

Damore said: "I went to a diversity programme at Google, it was ... not recorded, totally secretive. I heard things that I definitely disagreed with in some of our programmes. I had some discussions there, there was lots of just shaming, and 'No you can’t say that, that's sexist' and 'You can't do this.'

"There's just so much hypocrisy in the things they are saying. I decided to create the document to clarify my thoughts."

Damore lost his job on Monday after a turbulent 72 hours at Google. The saga began when he released the memo internally, titled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber," which took issue with the firm's purported left-wing, progressive bias and the effectiveness of its main diversity programmes.

The document is dated July, but was leaked to journalists on Sunday after more Googlers read the document and took to Twitter to express their disgust. Damore was fired after CEO Sundar Pichai described his views as "offensive" and "not OK."

During the interview, he revealed that he wrote the memo to fill his time during a 12-hour work flight to China.

He also said he had had more messages of support than criticism.

He said: "There may be a lot of negative responses in the public. But very few of them actually send me messages. They just want to virtue signal to all their followers, 'I'm a great person, I share your morals. This person is bad.' But they don’t really want to have a debate on why I'm wrong, or even confront me, they just want to show how self-righteous they are.

"I’ve gotten a tonne of personal messages of support which has been really nice. I got that at Google before all of this leaked. Lots of upper management was shaming me."

Damore has been mostly silent over the last four days, only confirming that he plans to take legal action against Google. On Monday, he filed a complaint with US federal labor officials.

During the interview, he continued to back his viewpoints from the memo. At one point he said: "I'm not saying any female engineers are in any way worse than the average male engineer." But that message might be compromised by the fact that his interviewer Molyneux has published videos with titles such as "Why Feminists Hate Men: What They Won't Tell You!" and "Why Feminism Hurts Women: What They Won't Tell You!"

Damore said he was also prompted to write the memo by other Google staff "not in this groupthink" who felt "isolated and alienated". He said more Conservative employees were thinking of leaving Google because its supposed left-wing bias was "getting so bad."

"I really thought it was a problem Google itself had to fix," he said. "Hopefully they do."

Damore didn't comment on any legal action against Google, nor what he plans to do next.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/james-...ogramme-2017-8





Twitter Suspends Army of Fake Accounts after Trump Thanks Propaganda ‘Bot’ for Supporting Him
David Edwards

Twitter suspended a number of fake accounts over the weekend that were using false names to spread pro-Trump propaganda.

In a tweet on Saturday, President Donald Trump expressed thanks to Twitter user @Protrump45, an account that posted exclusively positive memes about the president. But the woman whose name was linked to the account told Heavy that her identity was stolen and that she planned to file a police report. The victim asserted that her identity was used to sell pro-Trump merchandise.

Although “Nicole Mincey” was the name displayed on the Twitter page, it was not the name used to create the account. The real name of the victim has been withheld to protect her privacy.

The @Protrump45 account also linked to the website Protrump45.com which specialized in Trump propaganda. All of the articles on the website were posted by other Twitter users, which also turned out to be fakes.

Mashable noted that the accounts were suspected of being so-called “bots” used to spread propaganda about Trump. Russia has been accused of using similar tactics with bots during the 2016 campaign.

By Sunday night, Twitter had suspended @Protrump45 and all of the Twitter accounts associated with the Protrump45.com website. However, Trump had not removed his tweet thanking @Protrump45 by the time of publication.

Looks like the fake @protrump45 account @realDonaldTrump thanked has been suspended along with a bunch of other related fake accounts pic.twitter.com/4k26boKl2j

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) August 7, 2017

Looks like the fake @protrump45 account @realDonaldTrump thanked has been suspended along with a bunch of other related fake accounts pic.twitter.com/4k26boKl2j

— Eliot Higgins (@EliotHiggins) August 7, 2017

Something's a bit odd about her bio shot. pic.twitter.com/AYJtiiUNCY

— Schooley (@Rschooley) August 6, 2017

Just your typical young hipster Trump supporter. https://t.co/EyRTxxtfRk pic.twitter.com/KyCUHM67ap

— Schooley (@Rschooley) August 6, 2017

What's really cool is when the bots complain about fake news. pic.twitter.com/e0fLJUe48U

— Schooley (@Rschooley) August 6, 2017

Literally dozens of these memes on this bot account. pic.twitter.com/i4k31mrrZi

— Schooley (@Rschooley) August 6, 2017

Literally dozens of these memes on this bot account. pic.twitter.com/i4k31mrrZi

— Schooley (@Rschooley) August 6, 2017

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/08/twit...ENJT0g.twitter





Android 8.0’s “Streaming OS Updates” Will Work Even if Your Phone is Full

Android's new OS update scheme should banish the "insufficient space" error forever.
Ron Amadeo

We've probably all had this happen at one point or another: it's time for an OS update, and your phone wants to download a ~1GB brick of an update file. On Android, normally this gets downloaded to the user storage partition and flashed to the system partition. But wait—if your phone is full of pictures, or videos, or apps, there may not be enough space to store the update file. In such circumstances, the update fails, and the user is told to "free up some space." According to the latest source.android.com documentation, Google has cooked up a scheme to make sure that an "insufficient space" error will never stop an update again.

Where the heck can Google store the update if your phone is full, though? If you remember in Android 7.0, Google introduced a new feature called "Seamless Updates." This setup introduced a dual system partition scheme—a "System A" and "System B" partition. The idea is that, when it comes time to install an update, you can normally use your phone on the online "System A" partition while an update is being applied to the offline "System B" partition in the background. Rather than the many minutes of downtime that would normally occur from an update, all that was needed to apply the update was a quick reboot. At that point, the device would just switch from partition A to the newly updated partition B.

When you get that "out of space" error message during an update, you're only "out of space" on the user storage partition, which is just being used as a temporary download spot before the update is applied to the system partition. Starting with Android 8.0, the A/B system partition setup is being upgraded with a "streaming updates" feature. Update data will arrive from the Internet directly to the offline system partition, written block by block, in a ready-to-boot state. Instead of needing ~1GB of free space, Google will be bypassing user storage almost entirely, needing only ~100KB worth of free space for some metadata.

Also rolling out to Play Services?

Streaming updates is a new feature built into Android 8.0, but, oddly, the docs say Google is also backporting the feature to Google Play Services. That will enable this feature on "Android 7.0 and later" devices with a dual system partition setup. To the best of my knowledge, only the Google Pixel has an A/B partition setup, and devices are never "upgraded" to an A/B setup via an update (repartitioning is too scary). So, why backport streaming updates to Play Services when all the Pixels will be running Android 8.0 soon anyway?

My only guess is that maybe Google wants to roll this out to Play Services along with the 8.0 update so Pixel owners won't have to worry about free space when they upgrade to 8.0. I don't see any references to this feature in the current version of Play Services, and filling a Pixel to the max and trying to update it to the 8.0 developer preview didn't work, so I don't think this is live in Play Services yet.

Since streaming updates are attached to the A/B update system, it's an optional system that OEMs can choose to implement or choose to ignore. Android OEMs are infamous for not following Google's best practices, and so far the uptake for the A/B partition system outside of Google's in-house devices has been non-existent. For now, it seems like this is yet another feature that will be exclusive to the Pixels.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017...phone-is-full/





The Guy Who Invented Those Annoying Password Rules Now Regrets Wasting Your Time
Adam Clark Estes

We’ve all been forced to do it: create a password with at least so many characters, so many numbers, so many special characters, and maybe an uppercase letter. Guess what? The guy who invented these standards nearly 15 years ago now admits that they’re basically useless. He is also very sorry.

The man in question is Bill Burr, a former manager at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In 2003, Burr drafted an eight-page guide on how to create secure passwords creatively called the “NIST Special Publication 800-63. Appendix A.” This became the document that would go on to more or less dictate password requirements on everything from email accounts to login pages to your online banking portal. All those rules about using uppercase letters and special characters and numbers—those are all because of Bill.

The only problem is that Bill Burr didn’t really know much about how passwords worked back in 2003, when he wrote the manual. He certainly wasn’t a security expert. And now the retired 72-year-old bureaucrat wants to apologize.

“Much of what I did I now regret,” Bill Burr told The Wall Street Journal recently, admitting that his research into passwords mostly came from a white paper written in the 1980s, well before the web was even invented. “In the end, [the list of guidelines] was probably too complicated for a lot of folks to understand very well, and the truth is, it was barking up the wrong tree.”

Bill is not wrong. Simple math shows that a shorter password with wacky characters is much easier to crack than a long string of easy-to-remember words. This classic XKCD comic shows how four simple words create a passphrase that would take a computer 550 years to guess, while a nonsensical string of random characters would take approximately three days:

This is why the latest set of NIST guidelines recommends that people create long passphrases rather than gobbledygook words like the ones Bill thought were secure. (Pro tip: Use this guide to create a super secure passcode using a pair of dice.)

Inevitably, you have to wonder if Bill not only feels regretful but also a little embarrassed. It’s not entirely his fault either. Fifteen years ago, there was very little research into passwords and information security, while researchers can now draw on millions upon millions of examples. Bill also wasn’t the only one to come up with some regrettable ideas in the early days of the web, either. Remember pop-ads, the scourge of the mid-aughts internet? The inventor of those is super sorry as well. Oh, and the confusing, unnecessary double slash in web addresses? The inventor of that idea (and the web itself) Tim Berners-Lee is also sorry.

Technology is often an exercise of trial and error. If you get something right, like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg have done, the rewards are sweet. If you screw up and waste years of unsuspecting internet users’ time in the process, like Bill did, you get to apologize years later. We forgive you, Bill. At least some of us do.
https://gizmodo.com/the-guy-who-inve...now-1797643987





Ad blocking is Under Attack
Andrey Meshkov

Well, this is huge, so I'd like to draw your attention to what's happening right now. This is a very alarming case, and it concerns every ad blocker user.
Brief introduction into ad blocking

To understand better what's happened, you should first learn a bit more about ad blocking. Every ad blocker work is based on using so-called filters lists, which are maintained (mostly) by volunteers. That said, whichever ad blocker you use, credits for actual ad blocking belong to the filter lists maintainers. The most popular filters list is called EasyList and this is what this story is about.

Got it, so what happened?

Yesterday a strange commit landed in the EasyList repo. The "functionalclam.com" domain was removed with a comment "Removed due to DMCA takedown request".

An ad server was unblocked by all ad blockers due to a DMCA request. Let that sink in for a moment...

A small research was conducted by the community in the comments section of that commit. It appears that the story began 23 days ago with a comment by a freshly registered Github account to the commit that added "functionalclam.com" to EasyList. @dmcahelper threatened with "the file or repository disruption," but his threats were not taken seriously that time.

The domain in question hosts an image describing its work as "used by digital publishers to control access to copyrighted content in accordance with the DMCA and understand how visitors are accessing their copyrighted content".

However, further research showed that this domain hosts the code of an anti-adblocking startup Admiral, so we can assume that it is the company we should blame for this. Where did they get this glorious idea? The wording of the original comment from 23 days ago reminds me awfully of this post claiming that DMCA can be applied to ad blockers.

Why should I care?

This might set a very important precedent of an advertising company exploiting DMCA to force people to see their ads, and can lead to ridiculous consequences if left unnoticed.

EasyList is a community project and may not be able to protect themselves from such an attack. I am calling on other ad blockers developers, you people and everybody else concerned about people's rights (EFF, please) to stand up to this threat and protect ad blocking.

UPDATE (11 Aug, 8:09GMT): EFF representative offered their help to EasyList maintainers.

UPDATE (11 Aug, 11:34GMT): Filters maintainers commented on the situation:

We received a DMCA request from Github, as the server in question may've been used as Anti-Adblock Circumvention/Warning on some websites. To keep transparency with the Easylist community, the commit showed this filter was removed due to DMCA.

We had no option but to remove the filter without putting the Easylist repo in jeopardy. If it is a Circumvention/Adblock-Warning adhost, it should be removed from Easylist even without the need for a DMCA request.

In regards to Adblock-Warning/Anti-adblock, the amount of filters being added recently to Easylist has been greatly limited due to issues like this. As list authors we have to be careful in what we add.

We'll certainly look at our legal options and it will be contested if we get DMCA requests for any legit adservers or websites that use DMCA as a way to limit Easylist's ability to block ads.
http://telegra.ph/Ad-blocking-is-under-attack-08-11





Cyber Threats Prompt Return of Radio for Ship Navigation
Jonathan Saul

The risk of cyber attacks targeting ships' satellite navigation is pushing nations to delve back through history and develop back-up systems with roots in World War Two radio technology.

Ships use GPS (Global Positioning System) and other similar devices that rely on sending and receiving satellite signals, which many experts say are vulnerable to jamming by hackers.

About 90 percent of world trade is transported by sea and the stakes are high in increasingly crowded shipping lanes. Unlike aircraft, ships lack a back-up navigation system and if their GPS ceases to function, they risk running aground or colliding with other vessels.

South Korea is developing an alternative system using an earth-based navigation technology known as eLoran, while the United States is planning to follow suit. Britain and Russia have also explored adopting versions of the technology, which works on radio signals.

The drive follows a series of disruptions to shipping navigation systems in recent months and years. It was not clear if they involved deliberate attacks; navigation specialists say solar weather effects can also lead to satellite signal loss.

Last year, South Korea said hundreds of fishing vessels had returned early to port after their GPS signals were jammed by hackers from North Korea, which denied responsibility.

In June this year, a ship in the Black Sea reported to the U.S. Coast Guard Navigation Center that its GPS system had been disrupted and that over 20 ships in the same area had been similarly affected.

U.S. Coast Guard officials also said interference with ships' GPS disrupted operations at a port for several hours in 2014 and at another terminal in 2015. It did not name the ports.

A cyber attack that hit A.P. Moller-Maersk's IT systems in June 2017 and made global headlines did not involve navigation but underscored the threat hackers pose to the technology dependent and inter-connected shipping industry. It disrupted port operations across the world.

The eLoran push is being led by governments who see it as a means of protecting their national security. Significant investments would be needed to build a network of transmitter stations to give signal coverage, or to upgrade existing ones dating back decades when radio navigation was standard.

U.S. engineer Brad Parkinson, known as the "father of GPS" and its chief developer, is among those who have supported the deployment of eLoran as a back-up.

"ELoran is only two-dimensional, regional, and not as accurate, but it offers a powerful signal at an entirely different frequency," Parkinson told Reuters. "It is a deterrent to deliberate jamming or spoofing (giving wrong positions), since such hostile activities can be rendered ineffective," said Parkinson, a retired U.S. airforce colonel.

KOREAN STATIONS

Cyber specialists say the problem with GPS and other Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) is their weak signals, which are transmitted from 12,500 miles above the Earth and can be disrupted with cheap jamming devices that are widely available.

Developers of eLoran - the descendant of the loran (long-range navigation) system created during World War II - say it is difficult to jam as the average signal is an estimated 1.3 million times stronger than a GPS signal.

To do so would require a powerful transmitter, large antenna and lots of power, which would be easy to detect, they add.

Shipping and security officials say the cyber threat has grown steadily over the past decade as vessels have switched increasingly to satellite systems and paper charts have largely disappeared due to a loss of traditional skills among seafarers.

"My own view, and it is only my view, is we are too dependent on GNSS/GPS position fixing systems," said Grant Laversuch, head of safety management at P&O Ferries. "Good navigation is about cross-checking navigation systems, and what better way than having two independent electronic systems."

Lee Byeong-gon, an official at South Korea's Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, said the government was working on establishing three sites for eLoran test operations by 2019 with further ones to follow after that.

But he said South Korea was contending with concerns from local residents at Gangwha Island, off the west coast.

"The government needs to secure a 40,000 pyeong (132,200 square-meter) site for a transmitting station, but the residents on the island are strongly opposed to having the 122 to 137 meter-high antenna," Lee told Reuters.

In July, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill which included provisions for the U.S. Secretary of Transportation to establish an eLoran system.

"This bill will now go over to the Senate and we hope it will be written into law," said Dana Goward, president of the U.S. non-profit Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, which supports the deployment of eLoran.

"We don't see any problems with the President (Donald Trump) signing off on this provision."

The previous administrations of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama both pledged to establish eLoran but never followed through. However, this time there is more momentum.

In May, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats told a Senate committee the global threat of electronic warfare attacks against space systems would rise in coming years.

"Development will very likely focus on jamming capabilities against ... Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS)," he said.

SPOOFING DANGERS

Russia has looked to establish a version of eLoran called eChayka, aimed at the Arctic region as sea lanes open up there, but the project has stalled for now.

"It is obvious that we need such a system," said Vasily Redkozubov, deputy director general of Russia's Internavigation Research and Technical Centre.

"But there are other challenges apart from eChayka, and (Russia has) not so many financial opportunities at the moment."

Cost is a big issue for many countries. Some European officials also say their own satellite system Galileo is more resistant to jamming than other receivers.

But many navigation technology experts say the system is hackable. "Galileo can help, particularly with spoofing, but it is also a very weak signal at similar frequencies," said Parkinson.

The reluctance of many countries to commit to a back-up means there is little chance of unified radio coverage globally for many years at least, and instead disparate areas of cover including across some national territories and shared waterways.

The General Lighthouse Authorities of the UK and Ireland had conducted trials of eLoran but the initiative was pulled after failing to garner interest from European countries whose transmitters were needed to create a signal network.

France, Denmark, Norway and Germany have all decided to turn off or dismantle their old radio transmitter stations.

Britain is maintaining a single eLoran transmitter in northern England.

Taviga, a British-U.S. company, is looking to commercially operate an eLoran network, which would provide positioning, navigation and timing (PNT).

"There would need to be at least one other transmitter probably on the UK mainland for a timing service," said co-founder Charles Curry, adding that the firm would need the British government to commit to using the technology.

Andy Proctor, innovation lead for satellite navigation and PNT with Innovate UK, the government's innovation agency, said: "We would consider supporting a commercially run and operated service, which we may or may not buy into as a customer."

Current government policy was "not to run large operational pieces of infrastructure like an eLoran system", he added.

Additional reporting by Terje Solsvik in Oslo, Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen in Copenhagen, Yuna Park in Seoul, Gleb Stolyarov in Moscow, Sophie Louet in Paris, Madeline Chambers in Berlin and Mark Hosenball in London; Editing by Pravin Char
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKBN1AO2CI





Russian Group that Hacked DNC Used NSA Attack Code in Attack on Hotels

Fancy Bear used Eternal Blue 3 months after it was leaked by a mysterious group.
Dan Goodin

A Russian government-sponsored group accused of hacking the Democratic National Committee last year has likely been infecting other targets of interest with the help of a potent Windows exploit developed by, and later stolen from, the National Security Agency, researchers said Friday.

Eternal Blue, as the exploit is code-named, is one of scores of advanced NSA attacks that have been released over the past year by a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers. It was published in April in the group's most damaging release to date. Its ability to spread from computer to computer without any user action was the engine that allowed the WCry ransomware worm, which appropriated the leaked exploit, to shut down computers worldwide in May. Eternal Blue also played a role in the spread of NotPetya, a follow-on worm that caused major disruptions in June.

Now, researchers at security firm FireEye say they're moderately confident the Russian hacking group known as Fancy Bear, APT 28, and other names has also used Eternal Blue, this time in a campaign that targeted people of interest as they connected to hotel Wi-Fi networks. In July, the campaign started using Eternal Blue to spread from computer to computer inside various staff and guest networks, company researchers Lindsay Smith and Ben Read wrote in a blog post. While the researchers didn't directly observe those attacks being used to infect guest computers connected to the network, they said a related campaign from last year used the control of hotel Wi-Fi services to obtain login credentials from guest devices.

In the earlier attack, the APT 28 members used a hacking tool dubbed Responder to monitor and falsify NetBIOS communications passed over the infected networks.

"Responder masquerades as the sought-out resource and causes the victim computer to send the username and hashed password to the attacker-controlled machine," the FireEye researchers wrote. "APT 28 used this technique to steal usernames and hashed passwords that allowed escalation of privileges in the victim network." The researchers continued:

In the 2016 incident, the victim was compromised after connecting to a hotel Wi-Fi network. Twelve hours after the victim initially connected to the publicly available Wi-Fi network, APT28 logged into the machine with stolen credentials. These 12 hours could have been used to crack a hashed password offline. After successfully accessing the machine, the attacker deployed tools on the machine, spread laterally through the victim's network, and accessed the victim's OWA account. The login originated from a computer on the same subnet, indicating that the attacker machine was physically close to the victim and on the same Wi-Fi network.

We cannot confirm how the initial credentials were stolen in the 2016 incident; however, later in the intrusion, Responder was deployed. Since this tool allows an attacker to sniff passwords from network traffic, it could have been used on the hotel Wi-Fi network to obtain a user’s credentials.

The attack observed in July used a modified version of Eternal Blue that was created using the Python programming language and later made publicly available, Fire Eye researchers said in an e-mail. The Python implementation was then compiled into an executable file using the publicly available py2exe tool.

Beware of hotel Wi-Fi

Over the past few years, hotel Wi-Fi has emerged as a frequent vehicle for advanced hackers to target people of interest who happen to be connected. In 2014, researchers at security firm Kaspersky Lab said a group it dubbed Dark Hotel had been infecting hotel networks for at least seven years. In a separate report a year later, Kaspersky Lab researchers uncovered evidence suggesting a separate hacking group with ties to the creators of the Stuxnet worm infected hotel conference rooms in an attempt to monitor high-level diplomatic negotiations the US and five other nations held with Iran over its nuclear program.

Fancy Bear is one of two Russian government hacking groups accused of breaking into DNC servers last year. According to security firm CrowdStrike, Fancy Bear breached DNC defenses in April 2016. By then, a separate Russian-government group known as Cozy Bear had been inside the DNC network for at least eight months. Russia has denied any involvement in the hacks, but US intelligence agencies have almost unanimously agreed the Russian government leaders from the highest levels approved of the breach of the DNC.

Fancy Bear used a spear phishing campaign to distribute a booby-trapped Microsoft Word document to several unnamed hotels, FireEye said. When the document was opened on computers that allowed Word macros to execute, the machines were infected by Fancy Bear malware known as Gamefish. Once a computer was infected, it attempted to infect other computers connected to the same Wi-Fi network.

It's not clear how successful the Eternal Blue exploit was in the July campaign. By then, it had been four months since Microsoft released a Windows update patching the critical vulnerability the NSA attack exploited. The considerable damage caused by WCry in May prompted many holdouts to finally install the fix. Still, it's conceivable that some computers the hacking group considered key hadn't yet patched the underlying flaw in the Windows implementation of the server message block protocol. In such a case, the added Eternal Blue exploit could have proved invaluable to the hackers.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...ack-on-hotels/





“Podcasting Patent” is Totally Dead, Appeals Court Rules

Federal Circuit stands by 2015 ruling that knocked out Personal Audio’s patent.
Cyrus Farivar

A federal appeals court has upheld a legal process that invalidated the so-called “podcasting patent.” That process was held by a company called Personal Audio, which had threatened numerous podcasts with lawsuits in recent years.

On Monday, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the April 2015 inter partes review (IPR) ruling—a process that allows anyone to challenge a patent's validity at the US Patent and Trademark Office.

“We’re glad that the IPR process worked here, that we were allowed to go in and defend the public interest,” Vera Ranieri, an EFF attorney who worked on the case, told Ars. (She told Ars that her favorite podcast is Lexicon Valley.) There had been a question as to whether EFF had standing during the appellate phase of the case.

Back in 2013, Personal Audio began sending legal demand letters to numerous podcasters and companies, like Samsung, in an apparent attempt to cajole them into a licensing deal, lest they be slapped with a lawsuit. Some of those efforts were successful: in August 2014, Adam Carolla raised about $500,000 as part of a possible legal defense fund. (Carolla settled with Personal Audio, but it's unclear how much money, if any, changed hands.)

As Personal Audio began to gain more public attention, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, however, stepped in and said that it would challenge Personal Audio’s US Patent No. 8,112,504, which describes a “system for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence.” In the end, EFF raised over $76,000, more than double its initial target.

Monday’s news gained some approval from at least one big-name podcaster: Marc Maron.

If you like podcasts & value their creators, throw some love toward @EFF today. They fought tirelessly for all of us https://t.co/7Gm1wDsdge https://t.co/td5bn2nZo3

— WTF with Marc Maron (@WTFpod) August 7, 2017

A years-old saga

As Ars reported previously, the history of Personal Audio dates to the late 1990s, when founder Jim Logan created a company seeking to create a kind of proto-iPod digital music player. But his company flopped. Years later, Logan turned to lawsuits to collect money from those investments. He sued companies over both the “episodic content” patent, as well as a separate patent, which Logan and his lawyers said covered playlists. He and his lawyers wrung verdicts or settlements from Samsung and Apple.

Unlike many non-practicing patent owners, which are sometimes derided as “patent trolls,” Logan didn’t hide from his patent campaign. He spoke publicly about his company’s history and his reason for pursuing patent royalties, giving interviews to National Public Radio and the CBC and doing a Q&A on Slashdot.

Personal Audio did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment. The company has not filed any new lawsuits since it sued Google in September 2015 over two other audio-related patents.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...asting-patent/





Flying Carpet

Wireless, encrypted file transfer over automatically configured ad hoc networking. No network infrastructure required (access point, router, switch). Just two laptops (Mac and/or Windows) with wireless chips in close range.

Don't have a flash drive? Don't have access to a wireless network or don't trust one? Need to move a file larger than 2GB between Mac and Windows but don't want to set up a file share? Try it out!
https://github.com/spieglt/flyingcarpet





Why 'Firestick that S—t' Became Shorthand for Pirating Our Favorite Films and TV Shows
Ambar Del Moral

Firestick that shit.

It's a phrase I picked up last year, but I'd assumed it was just another passing internet colloquialism related to using Amazon's Fire TV Stick.

Oh how naive.

Over time, I quickly began to glean that this was in fact the new slang for using a Fire TV Stick to somehow pirate movies and TV. But I've run across scores of piracy trends over the years, all of which usually fade into the background after a few months when some new piracy tool comes along.

But this one is different for a couple of reasons.

First, we're currently in what is widely acknowledged as the "golden age of TV," and prestige TV. There have never been more ways to easily and affordably enter the world of OTT via services like Netflix and Sling TV and devices like the Roku and Apple TV. In such an environment, you'd think piracy would lose some of its underground, rule-breaker cool cachet, but it's role as an illegal practice even by the least tech savvy among us has only gained traction.

The proof of that came from an unlikely source: Jamie Foxx. Last month, the Oscar winning film and music star (Baby Driver, Collateral, Ray) appeared as a guest on the Joe Rogan podcast. During the interview, Foxx was candid about his personal life, describing the value of having friends around who might tell him one of his movies sucks, and that they might have to "Firestick that shit" [34:30 mark] instead of paying to see it in the theater.

Similarly, rapper 50 Cent recently went to see the Tupac biopic All Eyez On Me and, disappointed, took to Instagram to say "Man I watched the 2Pac film ... that was some bullshit. Catch that shit on a fire stick."

When an Oscar-winning celebrity is casually talking about people who choose to watch his movies on a "Firestick," on a podcast with millions of listeners, and one of the most famous rappers alive does the same, it's time to take closer look at what's going on here.

A quick search on Twitter reveals that "Firestick that shit" is an incredibly common a phrase among many film and TV fans.

Good thing I got my firestick lol I ain't paying for none of that PPV shit especially UFC lol

— Ashton (@NOHSXXA) July 30, 2017

Seen the Tupac movie should of took 50cents word & firestick that shit

— iphone chris (@iphonechris) June 21, 2017

Beauty and the Beast was alright. I only cried cause the lovey dovey stuff but other than that FIRESTICK that shit

— Butterscotch Cakes (@tristenzeltee) March 18, 2017

And while "Firestick that shit" does refer to the popular, low cost device from Amazon (at $40, it's one of the cheapest OTT hardware options you can find), the Fire TV Stick is by no means the only hardware used to execute this latest form of movie and TV piracy.

It turns out that people have been using Kodi (free, open-source software that's been around since 2002) in conjunction with the Fire TV Stick (released in 2014) and other many other, lesser known devices (usually Android based), for several years to stream pirated content to their televisions.

Back in 2015, Amazon finally decided to ban Kodi (formerly known as XBMC). Kodi, which is a legal app, runs on a wide range of platforms — Android, Linux, Windows, OS X, and iOS. The people behind Kodi maintain that the software isn't meant to facilitate piracy, but there are nevertheless third-party add-ons that have been created (and constantly updated) to run on Kodi by third-party developers that facilitate illegal streaming of films and TV shows.

Although you can load some of these add-ons yourself with a little effort, one of the most popular means of obtaining a piracy-ready Fire TV Stick is by purchasing what is called a "fully loaded Kodi box." A "Kodi box" is a loose, unofficial term used by sellers of the devices that refers to a streaming media box, or a removable device (like the Fire TV Stick) running Kodi. The "fully loaded" term is to let you know that the device has been modified with third-party add-on software for illegal streaming. To be absolutely clear, Kodi just makes the open source software, and the company takes great pains to point out that the sellers of so-called "Kodi boxes" aren't associated with or approved by Kodi the company.

Despite admonitions from Kodi, the sellers continue using the Kodi name when selling these boxes and media sticks, which has led to some confusion with end users. (Yes Kodi is legal. No, what third-party sellers are doing with it is not.) Regardless, buying "fully loaded" Kodi boxes has become so popular that the European Court of Justice banned the sale of such devices back in April.

Because Kodi doesn't track the use of illegal add-ons to its software, it's difficult to nail down the number of people using Kodi boxes to stream illegally, but a recent survey claimed that nearly 5 million people in the UK alone are using illegal Kodi boxes (including modified Fire TV Sticks) and apps to stream pirated film and TV content.

Although we don’t have much evidence of end users being prosecuted for using Kodi boxes (yet), it's a different story for those selling the "fully loaded" devices. In February, five sellers of Kodi boxes were arrested in a series of raids, and UK authorities carried out another high profile arrest of a Kodi box seller just two weeks ago.

Unlike torrenting, the relatively passive nature of the streaming piracy facilitated by these Kodi boxes might give some a false sense of security regarding the illegality of their use. So far, most Kodi box legal cases have involved either the content producer or studio going after an ISP hosting a site distributing illegal streams, or authorities pursuing specific Kodi box sellers.

So while authorities are busy chasing down the websites and sellers of these illegal Kodi boxes, the end users, particularly those who use VPNs, continue to openly use these illegal streaming methods without much fear of prosecution (even though using them is technically illegal because you're violating copyright laws). Additionally, major websites including eBay, Amazon, and even Facebook have banned the sale of these Kodi boxes. But like the internet always finds a way, and all it takes is a Google search to surface a wide range of independent sites that still sell Kodi boxes.

Based on the current landscape, and the unending flow of new TV series and blockbuster films, it doesn't look like "Firestick that shit" is about to fall out of use anytime soon, no matter what device used to illegally stream. Luckily, competition among OTT providers like Netflix, Hulu, Sling TV and others is only heating up, which is driving prices down, and making cross platform availability nearly ubiquitous.

Therefore, at this point, with all these easy options on the table, if you're still "Firestickin' that shit," you'll probably never pay for TV unless you're forced to. But enjoy this time, because that "forced to" day is probably coming sooner than we all think.
http://mashable.com/2017/08/09/kodi-...eaming-piracy/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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