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Join Date: May 2001
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![]() ![]() "This was an act of war." – U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-CT "This improper leveraging of Disney’s copyright in the digital content to restrict secondary transfers of physical copies directly implicates and conflicts with public policy enshrined in the Copyright Act, and constitutes copyright misuse." – U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson Early Edition ![]() February 24th, 2018 ![]() ![]() Bell, Rogers, Quebecor Advance in Piracy Lawsuit Against the Operator of a Montreal Website The companies alleged that TVAddons owner Adam Lackman infringed copyright by providing a “platform of copyright piracy” Emily Jackson Canadian cable and media giants won a small victory in their larger war against pirated content this week when a panel of federal judges backed their appeal in a legal battle against the Montreal-based operator of a website that makes it easier to stream video online. BCE Inc., Quebecor Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc. launched legal proceedings last June against Adam Lackman doing business as TVAddons, a website with a library of software add-ons that enable video streaming on Android set-top boxes. While some add-ons provide access to perfectly legal content, others can be used to illegally stream valuable content such as live sports or Game of Thrones episodes. The companies alleged that TVAddons owner Lackman infringed copyright by providing a “platform of copyright piracy” and asked the court for an injunction to stop his operations while the case unfolded. Lackman argued his website is like a mini Google search engine, a conduit that isn’t responsible for content provided by third parties. A judge initially granted the companies an interim injunction and what’s known as an “Anton Piller order,” allowing for a search of Lackman’s home without prior warning. That search by authorities led to nine hours of questioning and the seizure of Lackman’s domain and social media passwords. But the case was delayed after a second judge dismissed the motion for an extended injunction and vacated the Anton Piller order, on the basis that it was conducted improperly. The companies appealed the second judge’s decision and, on Tuesday, the Federal Court of Appeal ruled in their favour. Justice Yves de Montigny ruled the Anton Piller order was lawfully conducted and issued an injunction against TVAddons that will stand until the conclusion of the copyright case. “I fail to understand how the respondent can cloak himself in the shroud of an innocent disseminator, when his website clearly targets those who want to circumvent the legal means of watching television programs and the related costs,” de Montigny wrote. The ruling in favour of Bell, Rogers and Quebecor comes amidst a larger industry fight over online piracy. The three companies are members of a coalition calling itself FairPlay Canada that has asked the broadcast regulator to create an agency with the power to block sites purveying pirated content. Opponents argue the proposal goes too far and could result in internet service providers blocking content they don’t like. Bell said content piracy hurts the entire Canadian broadcasting ecosystem. “While we are very pleased with the outcome of this appeal, we have to recognize that this proceeding addresses piracy by just one individual,” spokesman Marc Choma said. “More efficient structural solutions are also necessary to combat content piracy, which is why Bell supports FairPlay Canada’s application to the CRTC.” Rogers said it’s important to protect the jobs of people who create Canadian programming. “We’re all for streaming and new ways of watching content, but pirating content means that content creators don’t get paid for their work, and that’s not fair,” spokeswoman Sarah Schmidt said. Network analytics company Sandvine has estimated about 1 million Canadian households use set-top boxes loaded with add-ons that enable illegal content streaming. TVAddons’ Lackman said Wednesday that he respects it’s a complicated case, but found it “disturbing” that his website was shut down before the telecom giants’ claims were tested. Lackman maintains that TVAddons never hosted video or any type of infringing content. He believes this case hurts the development of disruptive technology in Canada, framing it as a David and Goliath battle between a tech upstart and billion-dollar companies with a stake in maintaining the status quo. “People watching content online on YouTube threatens their TV business. People are less likely to have television subscriptions as a result,” Lackman said. “That’s really what it’s about, it’s about them wanting to maintain a monopoly over providing entertainment to Canadians.” Lackman still doesn’t have access to his website or social media accounts, although he re-launched the website under a new domain. He said there have been no complaints about the new website, which has stricter rules on what add-ons it allows. If the telecoms had asked him to take down questionable content, he said he would have co-operated. “I wasn’t looking to start fights with telecom giants because no mere mortal with limited resources can afford to take on a billion-dollar company,” he said. Given the mounting legal costs, he’s unsure how he will proceed. http://business.financialpost.com/te...ntreal-website ![]() 'Slippery Slope': Opposition Mounts to Canadian Media's Plan to Block Piracy Websites Critics fear the plan could lead to rampant internet censorship Sophia Harris Opposition is mounting to a media coalition's plan to block Canadians from accessing piracy websites. Many people fear that the plan — backed by big players such as Bell, Rogers, and CBC — could lead to rampant internet censorship. "It starts with 'blocking piracy' and ends with corporations blocking information that opposes their goals and viewpoints," wrote Thomas Herr from Barrie, Ont., in a submission to the CRTC on the issue. He's one of more than 5,000 Canadians who has submitted an opinion on the piracy site blocking plan to the CRTC after the broadcast regulator invited comments. Many submissions express deep concern about the proposal. "The start of a slippery slope," wrote Charlotte Bush from Richmond Hill, Ont. "Abuse of the system is inevitable," said Renaud Bissonnette from Laval, Que. 'People are scared' The submissions started flowing in after the coalition of more than 30 members — including media companies, unions and creative industry associations — submitted their request to the CRTC on Jan. 28. They propose that the CRTC create an independent agency to identify blatant piracy websites that internet providers would then be required to block their customers from accessing. The coalition, which calls itself FairPlay, says Canada needs to take action to stop the scourge of piracy sites that are threatening the country's cultural industries. But many Canadians fear FairPlay's plan threatens the concept of a free and open internet. "People are scared," said Laura Tribe with Vancouver-based consumer advocacy group, Open Media. The organization has posted its own online page where Canadians can add their name to a submission Open Media will send to the CRTC opposing FairPlay's plan. More than 16,000 people have signed on so far. "The biggest thing that we're seeing is people who are not in any way in favour of piracy, but just concerned about how grossly overreaching this proposal is," said Tribe. "It opens the door for this to become a lobbying game around what people can and can't see." 'A serious problem' Shan Chandrasekar heads up the Asian Television Network (ATN), which is spearheading FairPlay's efforts. He said Canadians need to understand the seriousness of the piracy problem and shouldn't fear the collation's proposal. "To go after blatant piracy sites is, in our opinion, an extraordinarily simple, common-sense approach," said Chandrasekar, president of ATN, Canada's largest South Asian broadcaster. He said his company has lost close to $4 million in revenue over the past five years, and he blames the decline on lost subscribers who have turned to piracy. Chandrasekar says piracy has become a much bigger threat largely due to the recent popularity of Android boxes. When hooked up to a TV, they allow people to easily stream pirated shows and movies from the internet for free. Many box users are also paying underground operators $15 a month or even less for a subscription to more than 1,000 pirated live channels from around the world. "It's no longer a program that's being pirated on YouTube. That doesn't bother us," he said. "The entire 24/7 channels, the linear channels are now pirated." Checks and balances? Chandrasekar said FairPlay's proposal focuses on blocking "only extreme blatant piracy sites" and that the CRTC would ensure that all the rules are followed. "The CRTC, in my opinion, is an extremely responsible body. They would definitely do their necessary due diligence." He also said anyone who opposes a blocked site would be able to make their case to the Federal Court of Appeal. "There is judicial oversight." But Open Media's Tribe argues the opportunity to contest a blocked site comes only after the decision has been made. "What they are calling judicial oversight is actually an appeal mechanism well after the fact," she said. "We don't think that's fair." Tribe also questions the plan's effectiveness because, in the past, when piracy sites have been shut down, new ones pop up in their place. "It's not hard for people to build a new website," she said. Give them what they want? The Public Interest Advocacy Centre will also be making a submission to the CRTC opposing FairPlay's plan. Executive director John Lawford suggested a better solution would be to offer what Canadians want: inexpensive, accessible streaming services as opposed to pricey, multi-channel cable packages. "If that's the new business model that keeps people from pirating, then why not change your business model into that?" he said. But Chandrasekar argues there's no model that could win over the pirates who are offering content for free or for a minimal cost. "You cannot compete with the pirates because they have no expenditure," he said. "They are not paying licence fees, they are not paying Canadian wages." The debate and submissions to the CRTC will likely continue as Canadians have until March 29 to comment. http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/fair...crtc-1.4539566 ![]() U.S. Copyright Office Considering Exemption for Abandoned Online Games Eric Brackett The U.S. Copyright Office is considering a rule change that would loosen the restrictions governing emulations and reproductions of abandoned online games. The argument is based on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996, which is a law meant to curtail the theft and piracy of intellectual properties such as video games and other software. Currently, the U.S. Copyright Office grants an exception to various museums, archives, and libraries regarding abandoned games that are no longer publicly available. New exemptions to the DMCA are considered every three years by the U.S. Copyright Office. Last year, several organizations, including the non-profit Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, filed a request that the U.S. Copyright Office broaden its exceptions to include online games that have been shut down by their publishers. These would include MMORPGs such as Star Wars Galaxies and City of Heroes. Both of those game still have passionate fanbases, but they are no longer playable due to the fact that the servers shut down several years ago. The Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment is requesting that exemptions be extended to online games. “Although the Current Exemption does not cover it, preservation of online video games is now critical,” the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment wrote. “Online games have become ubiquitous and are only growing in popularity. For example, an estimated fifty-three percent of gamers play multiplayer games at least once a week, and spend, on average, six hours a week playing with others online.” Arguments regarding this exemption expansion were made during the previous review period, but the Copyright Office argued that many multiplayer games survived via local multiplayer. However, the vast majority of MMO games require a connection to a server and were never built with any form of local multiplayer in mind. For these reasons, the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment is asking the U.S. Copyright Office to allow archivists to operate servers for these abandoned games so that players may experience them as the developers intended. The Entertainment Software Association, which represents major players in the video game industry such as Electronic Arts, Nintendo, and others, has come out in opposition to this request. The ESA argues that extending the DMCA exemptions to online games would be a step too far. “The proponents characterize these as ‘slight modifications’ to the existing exemption,” the ESA wrote. “However they are nothing of the sort. The proponents request permission to engage in forms of circumvention that will enable the complete recreation of a hosted video game-service environment and make the video game available for play by a public audience.” The ESA further argues that allowing the hosting of servers would allow gamers to fully play these games for free, which could be seen as a form of competition with their existing titles. The ESA notes that the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment charges an admission fee, which it argues amounts to a commercial enterprise, even if the Museum is a non-profit. The U.S. Copyright Office has yet to make a decision but will review all relevant comments before doing so. https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming...mca-exemption/ ![]() Many Patent-Holders Stop Looking to East Texas Following Supreme Court Ruling Can Delaware handle the incoming caseload? Joe Mullin New lawsuits are down—way down—in the mostly rural district that was once the national hotspot for patent disputes. For several years, the Eastern District of Texas hosted more patent lawsuits than any other judicial district in the country. Last year, East Texas saw more patent lawsuits filed than the next four judicial districts combined. But in May, the Supreme Court sharply limited where patent owners can choose to file their lawsuits, in a case called TC Heartland. That's leading to a sharp change in the geography of patent litigation. Statistics published today by the IP litigation research company Lex Machina show the dramatic effect the decision has had on the legal landscape. Lex Machina compared patent filings in the 90 days before the TC Heartland decision came down on May 22 to the 90-day period directly after the decision. The company found that the two top districts, Eastern Texas and the District of Delaware, changed places. In the 90 days before TC Heartland, 377 patent lawsuits were filed in the Eastern District of Texas. After TC Heartland, just 129 cases were filed in a similar period. That represents a more than 60-percent drop-off in new filings. Much of that litigation seems to have moved to Delaware, where many national firms are incorporated due to favorable tax laws. Delaware's single judicial district had 153 patent lawsuits in the period before TC Heartland, but that shot up to 263 lawsuits in the period after the decision. TC Heartland allows a company to be sued for patent infringement where it "resides," which is typically the state in which the company is incorporated—hence, all the lawsuits in Delaware, which was already a fairly popular venue. Alternatively, a company can be sued in a district in which it has a "regular and established place of business." The trend seems likely to continue, given a recent case called In re: Cray Inc., in which an appeals court clarified how TC Heartland must be applied. In that case, a federal judge ruled that a case against supercomputer manufacturer Cray could be kept in East Texas because the company employed a single work-from-home employee in the district. The top patent appeals court sharply disagreed, though, and overturned that decision, forcing the Cray case out of East Texas. "The patterns we're seeing are changing dramatically, and the double-digit dominance of East Texas is gone," said Brian Howard, Lex Machina's data scientist, in an interview with Ars. East Texas was initially an attractive venue because it offered fast times to trial. However, that later became eclipsed by other factors, which were particularly attractive to the types of plaintiffs called "non-practicing entities" or, pejoratively, "patent trolls." Judges there rarely granted summary judgment to defendants. Even after the Supreme Court's Alice decision banned "do it on a computer"-type patents, East Texas was reluctant to throw out patents under Alice. While the moving out of Texas trend will continue, there are a few important things to watch. First, will Delaware become overwhelmed? The district has been short on judges for years, and a gridlocked Congress is unlikely to agree on replacements quickly. "If they can't grind through the cases, I don't know to what extent that would be perceived as a good venue," Howard said. "Some other district could position itself to offer at least the appearance of more speed." Now that In re: Cray has established a new status quo, another thing to watch is what lengths companies might go to in order to avoid disfavored districts. Apple, for instance, maintains just a single retail store in the state of Delaware. In August, a judge held that was enough to force the California company to face a patent lawsuit in that state. "If I were Apple, I'd be taking a serious look at how much that store brings in," Howard said. Apple also has stores in Frisco and Plano, two cities north of Dallas that are within the boundaries of the Eastern District of Texas. Lex Machina also released general statistics about litigation trends in 2017's third quarter. The company found 995 cases were filed nationwide, which reflects a steady slowdown that has happened since litigation peaked in 2013. A spike in late 2015 was caused by a rush of companies seeking to file lawsuits before Congress ended Form 18, requiring plaintiffs to disclose more information before they filed suit. While the decline of NPE litigation is discernible, especially in the past year, Howard described it as "lumpy," since just a few companies can cause a big upswing in litigation. "There are a lot of high-volume plaintiffs," Howard said. "If one of them files 60 cases in a day, that's a spike all its own." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...an-60-percent/ ![]() 'Black Panther' Blows Away Box Office with $192M Weekend Jake Coyle Already a much-celebrated pop-culture milestone, "Black Panther" is now a record-setting smash at the box office, too. The Marvel superhero film blew past expectations, with $192 million in ticket sales in North America over the weekend, according to studio estimates Sunday. That makes "Black Panther" the fifth-biggest opening weekend ever, not accounting for inflation. The only films with a higher grossing opening weekend are "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," ''Star Wars: The Last Jedi," ''Jurassic World" and "The Avengers." It's also the highest-grossing February opening weekend. "All hail the King of Wakanda!" declared the Walt Disney Co. while reporting Sunday's estimates. The studio forecasts a four-day holiday weekend of $218 million in the U.S. and Canada, and a global debut of $361 million. Though the film's international footprint doesn't include several of the largest markets — China, Russia, Japan — it still ranks among the top 15 global debuts ever. Ryan Coogler 's film, which cost about $200 million to make, is the most big-budget, largely black ensemble film in years and among the few to be centered on a black superhero. The strong opening suggests "Black Panther" will easily set a box-office record for films directed by a black filmmaker. Chadwick Boseman stars as T'Challa/Black Panther in the first stand-alone film for the superhero created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966. The cast also features Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o , Daniel Kaluuya and Letitia Wright. According to comScore, 37 percent of moviegoers were African-American. The movie has been hugely acclaimed, with a 97 percent fresh rating from Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences agreed, giving it an A-plus CinemaScore. http://www.courant.com/entertainment...218-story.html ![]() Disney Loses Bid to Stop Redbox from Selling its Digital Download Codes The studio has been accused of ‘copyright misuse’ instead Bryan Bishop and Kaitlyn Tiffany Last December Disney filed a lawsuit against Redbox in an effort to get the company to stop selling digital download codes for Disney films. But as The Hollywood Reporter notes, a California federal judge has rejected the studio’s request for an injunction that would have halted the practice. Instead, the judge called into question Disney’s stringent policies about the codes, accusing the studio of “copyright misuse.” The case results from Redbox’s lack of an existing business arrangement with Disney. The rental service has distribution deals in place with major studios like Warner Bros., which allow Redbox to purchase physical DVDs and Blu-rays of popular movies that it then offers for rental at its standalone kiosks. Disney has struck no such deal, so Redbox purchases retail copies of the films and rents those discs, instead. However, Disney is also well-known for bundling digital download codes with its physical retail copies. Those codes let a customer download a digital version using Disney’s Movies Anywhere service. Redbox has been selling the digital download codes from the physical copies it purchases, allowing customers to buy movies like Rogue One or Moana at the fraction of the price. (By way of comparison, Redbox codes are available from between $3.99 to $7.99, whereas the same title might cost $19.99 on iTunes or a comparable service.) That led to Disney’s lawsuit, where it argued “Redbox is selling our digital movie codes in blatant disregard of clear prohibitions against doing so. Their actions violate our contracts and copyrights.” But in a Tuesday ruling, US District Judge Dean D. Pregerson denied the studio’s request for an injunction, arguing that the warning that “Codes are not for sale or transfer” on the DVD and Blu-ray packaging did not constitute a binding contract. Furthermore, he wrote that the licensing agreements that Disney utilizes on the Movies Anywhere and RedeemDigitalMovie websites improperly forced consumers to give up some of their basic ownership rights. When consumers are redeeming a code, the sites essentially make them acknowledge that they currently own the physical copy that a given download code was bundled with. However, under copyright law, once customers buy a physical copy they are free to sell it, much as they would a used book. The Disney language legally prevents customers from redeeming their digital code — which they paid for as part of their initial purchase — if they have decided to exercise that right to resell the physical DVD or Blu-ray. “This improper leveraging of Disney’s copyright in the digital content to restrict secondary transfers of physical copies directly implicates and conflicts with public policy enshrined in the Copyright Act, and constitutes copyright misuse,” Pregerson wrote. In the months since Disney’s suit, Redbox has filed its own lawsuit against the studio, accusing it of anti-competitive behavior. The company has also filed a motion to dismiss Disney’s case outright, with a hearing scheduled for March 5th. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/21/1...ital-downloads ![]() CenturyLink Loses Another 90K Frustrated Broadband Customers Karl Bode Centurylink continues to bleed subscribers as a consequence of its failure to upgrade aging DSL lines. While CenturyLink has engaged in some very selective fiber upgrades (like in the Seattle area), there's still millions of customers within its footprint that can only access pricey DSL at sub 6 Mbps speeds. As cable providers increasingly deploy gigabit speeds via DOCSIS 3.1, more and more customers are being lured away from telcos and to cable competitors. And, since many of these telcos don't think upgrading these DSL lines is profitable enough, quickly enough, they're effectively allowing it to happen. As a result, CenturyLink's latest earnings report indicate that the telco lost another 90,000 DSL customers last quarter. In the wake of the departures and lawsuits regarding misleading pricing, CenturyLink has tried to simplify its pricing structure and promotions to retain these users, though it's pretty clearly not working. Speaking on the company's earnings call, CenturyLink COO Jeff Storey tried to put a positive spin on the losses, insisting the ISP's price for life promotion was paying dividends. "We rolled Price for Life less than six months ago and we have over 1 million customers on it already, so it's been very successful," Storey said. "Our customers have reacted well to it and it makes the experience they have with us feel better for them." Again, though, simpler pricing doesn't address the fact that millions of the company's customers can't get even the FCC's base definition of broadband at 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up. And like so many other telcos, CenturyLink's debt load and minimal competitive incentive in many areas means that's likely not happening anytime soon. It is, however, occurring in select areas that CenturyLink deems worth its time. "We have opportunities to sell more high-speed or very high speed 100-megabit and above, 40-megabit and above," Storey said. “We need to make sure that we're doing that." You think? Telco upgrade apathy not only generates frustrated customers, it effectively gives cable operators like Comcast and Charter a growing monopoly when it comes to higher speeds especially. An FCC report recently indicated that while there's minimal competition these days between telcos and cablecos at 25 Mbps, it's virtually nonexistent once you get to speeds of 100 Mbps or higher. With less competition comes higher cable broadband prices, and even less incentive to fix what is historically awful customer service. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/C...stomers-141269 ![]() AT&T Will Launch Mobile 5G in Atlanta, Dallas and Waco It'll name more cities in the months ahead. Jon Fingas AT&T is finally willing to say exactly where you'll see mobile 5G in 2018. The carrier has confirmed that "parts" of Atlanta, Waco and its home turf of Dallas will adopt the standards-based service when it goes live before the end of the year. It'll name the remaining nine cities "in the coming months." There's no mention of the first devices (many of those will have to wait until 2019), but it's clear that this will be a cautious first step into the future rather than a full-on leap. The initial coverage will use millimeter wave (very high frequency) spectrum, which isn't great for range and may serve as more of a stopgap. The kind of coverage you're used to will have to wait until later, when AT&T can justify moving 5G to more commonly used bands. That shouldn't be too hard when much of the LTE equipment it's installing now should help with the migration, but that still entails a wait. This will still make AT&T the first big carrier to launch 5G. Sprint's rollout is expected in 2019, T-Mobile only anticipates national coverage by 2020, and Verizon has so far talked more about its fixed 5G than something you can carry in your pocket. However, AT&T can't quite claim a resounding victory. It's making some sacrifices to shout "first," and mature 5G won't arrive for a long while. https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/20/...-first-cities/ ![]() AT&T Loses Bid to Obtain White House Call Logs Cecilia Kang A federal judge blocked AT&T’s move to obtain communication logs between the Justice Department and the White House on Tuesday, hampering the phone giant’s argument that politics played a role in the government’s decision to halt a merger with Time Warner. Judge Richard J. Leon of United States District Court in Washington, who is overseeing a trial over the deal, said AT&T did not sufficiently show in pretrial discussions that it was treated differently from other companies. “Defendants have fallen far short of establishing that this enforcement action was selective,” Judge Leon said. The decision puts a crimp in AT&T’s defense for its $85 billion proposed merger with Time Warner. And it is a big win for the Justice Department, which would like to avoid attention on the role of politics in its decision to stop the deal. The merger would transform the media landscape by combining a television and movie giant with one of the nation’s biggest media distributors. “We respect the judge’s decision and look forward to the upcoming trial,” said Dan Petrocelli, lead trial lawyer for both Time Warner and AT&T. In a statement, the Justice Department said, “We are pleased with and respect today’s decision, which will permit the parties and court to focus on the case at hand.” AT&T has argued that the Justice Department has unfairly singled out its proposed merger with Time Warner partly to stay in favor with the White House. President Trump has been a vocal critic of Time Warner’s news network, CNN, and said before the election that the deal should be stopped. AT&T’s lawyers have requested emails and phone and other communications logs between Justice Department officials and the White House, to see if the White House influenced the agency’s decision. The company also put Makan Delrahim, the head of antitrust for the Justice Department, on its witness list. Last week, the Justice Department asked Judge Leon to block the company’s demands for communications with the White House, saying they were a “sideshow” to the antitrust concerns the government held about the merger. The Justice Department has argued that consumers would be harmed by the deal, saying it would stifle competition and lead to higher prices for consumers. In a hearing on Friday, AT&T agreed to remove Mr. Delrahim from its witness list on the condition the company could call him to testify during the trial if evidence emerged to support its arguments of political interference. The blockbuster trial will begin March 19. It is expected to help set the course for mergers and acquisitions in coming years. The Justice Department’s suit to block AT&T’s merger with Time Warner was unexpected, because the government has a history of allowing mergers between companies that don’t directly compete. Those deals, including Comcast’s merger with NBCUniversal in 2011, contained several conditions to resolve competition concerns. Mr. Delrahim has argued that conditions that restrain a company’s business practices cannot effectively resolve antitrust issues. In the opinion on Tuesday, Judge Leon said that AT&T was able to point only to the Justice Department’s approval of Comcast’s merger as proof of discrimination toward AT&T and Time Warner. “The defendants have mustered only one specific transaction,” Judge Leon said. The focus on political interference is highly unusual. AT&T told Judge Leon last week it was reluctant to raise the topic. The Justice Department countered that the company was trying to use the argument as a “get-out-of-jail card.” “Everything about this case has been unusual from the beginning,” said Larry Downes, a project director at Georgetown University’s Center for Business and Public Policy. The result of the trial could set the nation on a new, stricter direction on antitrust policy. “There has not been this kind of a challenge to a vertical merger of companies that don’t compete in decades and this is hugely significant in that it suggests the Justice Department may be going in a radically new direction on antitrust,” Mr. Downes said. AT&T could still focus on its argument of so-called selective enforcement that singles out its proposed merger with Time Warner. But the judge may not be swayed. In his opinion, Judge Leon said the Justice Department’s lawyer explained at length that there was a history of the government’s blocking somewhat similar deals. “So while it may, indeed, be a rare breed of horse, it is not exactly a unicorn,” Judge Leon said. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/20/t...call-logs.html ![]() Net Neutrality Rules Die on April 23rd Jacob Kastrenakes Net neutrality rules will officially be off the books starting April 23rd. The date was revealed today after the Federal Communication Commission’s order revoking net neutrality was published in the Federal Register. You can read the full order here. The publication means that a new fight around net neutrality is about to begin. States and other parties will be able to sue over the rules — some have already gotten started — and a battle in Congress will kick off over a vote to reverse the order entirely. While that fight likely won’t get far in Congress since Republicans by and large oppose net neutrality and control both chambers, there will likely be a long and heated legal battle around the corner for the FCC’s new policy. The FCC’s new rules are really a lack of rules. Its “Restoring Internet Freedom” order entirely revokes the strong net neutrality regulations put in place back in 2015 and replaces them with basically nothing. Internet providers can now block, throttle, and prioritize content if they want to. The only real rule here is that they have to disclose if they’re doing any of this. "The net neutrality fight doesn’t end here" By requiring disclosures, the FCC believes that it’s empowering the Federal Trade Commission to take over enforcement of any anti-competitive internet practices. The trouble is, the FTC can’t preempt those behaviors with specific rules — it can only act after the fact if it finds “unfair or deceptive” behavior — and the agency has a much broader focus, meaning only the most egregious issues are likely to draw attention. So is the entire internet about to change? Not overnight, and probably not even in the immediate future. When it does change because of these lack of rules — and it will — it’ll be in subtle ways that are difficult to notice but will, ultimately, make a real difference. One current practice that’s a sign of things to come is zero-rating, where internet providers offer free data when you use certain services. This sounds great on the surface (who wouldn’t want free data?), but it gives a huge advantage to the sites and services that the internet provider chooses to support. AT&T, for instance, offers free streaming of its own video services, like DirecTV Now, whereas subscribers still have to pay in order to stream Hulu. That means an AT&T customer may be more inclined to sign up for DirecTV than Hulu, which would make life harder for Hulu and other streaming video competitors. Over the long run, this could allow established tech and telecom giants to pick the services that win and lose, rather than having them all compete on an even playing field and letting consumers pick which they like better. Today’s publication of the rules doesn’t mean net neutrality is gone forever, though. It’s become clear that Americans are passionate about net neutrality, and legislators from both parties have acknowledged it’s something they’ll have to work on. It’s not clear how long it will take them to get around to it, but it means arguments around net neutrality certainly won’t end here. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/22/1...-ends-april-23 ![]() Guadalajara Moved Entire Telco Building While it was Still Running Gordon Katic Sometimes, moving a building (like a lighthouse) is about preserving historic architecture or cultural heritage. But for one significant structure in Guadalajara, Mexico, the stakes were considerably higher. Back in 1950, city officials decided to widen a major avenue and a lot of buildings were just demolished to make way. But weighing in at around 1700 tons, the Mexican Telephone and Telegraph Company was critical to the area’s communications infrastructure — knocking it down would have disrupted local telephone service for at least a week. Jorge Matute Remus, dean of the city’s university and a civil engineer, came forward with a solution. He suggested the entire building be lifted and moved, all while leaving the communications lines wired up and keeping the operators at work inside of the structure. Naturally, some of the workers were nervous about this idea. Matute Remus was sympathetic to their concerns, and wanted to reassure these operators and make them feel safe. So his wife Esmeralda agreed to also go into the building while it was being moved. She even took along their seven-year-old son, Juan Jorge. As she recalls in the video above, they couldn’t even feel the motion of the building as it was slowly shifted about 40 feet to its new location. The whole move was done in just five days, with no interruption to phone service, and deemed a big success for the city. It was all accomplished on a budget of around $100,000, a fraction of what it would have cost to demolish the structure and build a replacement. Today, nearly 70 years later, the building is still standing, and a sculpture of Matute Remus stands outside one entrance — this life-sized figure of him appears to be pushing the building. Next to it, a plaque on the facade recalls his civil service and engineering genius. https://99percentinvisible.org/episo...ged-retreat/2/ ![]() The Tyranny of Convenience Tim Wu Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial. In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is, more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether convenience is in fact the supreme value. As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, “Convenience decides everything.” Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.”) Easy is better, easiest is best. Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism. For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater power of convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where it is doing so much to structure the modern economy. Particularly in tech-related industries, the battle for convenience is the battle for industry dominance. Americans say they prize competition, a proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural bedfellows. Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and to our country. I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate, and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most vulnerable to life’s drudgeries. But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us. It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much. Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when labor-saving devices for the home were invented and marketed. Milestones include the invention of the first “convenience foods,” such as canned pork and beans and Quaker Quick Oats; the first electric clothes-washing machines; cleaning products like Old Dutch scouring powder; and other marvels including the electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven. Convenience was the household version of another late-19th-century idea, industrial efficiency, and its accompanying “scientific management.” It represented the adaptation of the ethos of the factory to domestic life. However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning, hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. Convenience would make available to the general population the kind of freedom for self-cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way convenience would also be the great leveler. This idea — convenience as liberation — could be intoxicating. Its headiest depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings of the mid-20th century. From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics and from goofy entertainments like “The Jetsons” we learned that life in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food would be prepared with the push of a button. Moving sidewalks would do away with the annoyance of walking. Clothes would clean themselves or perhaps self-destruct after a day’s wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be contemplated. The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes expressed in inconvenient actions and time-consuming pursuits. Perhaps this is why, with every advance of convenience, there have always been those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and because they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things that matter to them. By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to sputter. The prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like society’s greatest aspiration. Convenience meant conformity. The counterculture was about people’s need to express themselves, to fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with nature rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the guitar was not convenient. Neither was growing one’s own vegetables or fixing one’s own motorcycle. But such things were seen to have value nevertheless — or rather, as a result. People were looking for individuality again. Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second wave of convenience technologies — the period we are living in — would co-opt this ideal. It would conveniencize individuality. You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony Walkman in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self-expression. Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with his Walkman and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment of his choosing. He is enjoying, out in public, the kind of self-expression he once could experience only in his private den. A new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if only to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie. So alluring is this vision that it has come to dominate our existence. Most of the powerful and important technologies created over the past few decades deliver convenience in the service of personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR, the playlist, the Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is no longer about saving physical labor — many of us don’t do much of that anyway. It is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental exertion, required to choose among the options that express ourselves. Convenience is one-click, one-stop shopping, the seamless experience of “plug and play.” The ideal is personal preference with no effort. We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free. As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at which young people vote). The paradoxical truth I’m driving at is that today’s technologies of individualization are technologies of mass individualization. Customization can be surprisingly homogenizing. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in theory should represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality, such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select as our background image. I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services, open-source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult tasks — the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and requirements and preparations have been removed? Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides. Convenience has to serve something greater than itself, lest it lead only to more convenience. In her 1963 classic, “The Feminine Mystique,” Betty Friedan looked at what household technologies had done for women and concluded that they had just created more demands. “Even with all the new labor-saving appliances,” she wrote, “the modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework than her grandmother.” When things become easier, we can seek to fill our time with more “easy” tasks. At some point, life’s defining struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny chores and petty decisions. An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is “easy” is that the only skill that matters is the ability to multitask. At the extreme, we don’t actually do anything; we only arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a life. We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more of the time. Nowadays individuality has come to reside in making at least some inconvenient choices. You need not churn your own butter or hunt your own meat, but if you want to be someone, you cannot allow convenience to be the value that transcends all others. Struggle is not always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a solution. It can be the solution to the question of who you are. Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or facing the point when the runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel against him. Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can teach us something about the world and our place in it. So let’s reflect on the tyranny of convenience, try more often to resist its stupefying power, and see what happens. We must never forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of total, efficient conformity. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/o...nvenience.html ![]() Limiting the Influence of Tech When You Report on It How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Natasha Singer, a technology reporter for The Times in New York, discussed the tech she’s using. You report on digital privacy, health and education technology. What are your most important tools for doing your job? We’re living in a surveillance economy where sites and apps can track and categorize our every online move. In that ecosystem, encrypted communication services have become some of my most important reporting tools. For people who would rather not reach me through my corporate Gmail account at The Times, I use ProtonMail, an encrypted email service. I also use Signal, an encrypted text messaging and calling service. And I do some online research through Tor, a browser that masks your online address so sites can’t track your physical location. I also use DuckDuckGo, a search engine that doesn’t store your search history. My wariness of tracking developed when I was a cub reporter in Moscow. On one of my first stories there, I invited a Russian legislator, who was a democracy advocate, to lunch at a restaurant near the Kremlin. She arrived and immediately started combing through a vase of flowers on the table, checking for government listening devices. After that, I often interviewed Russian democracy activists during walks in local parks and forests. It made an impression on me that even the mere idea of being surveilled can chill people’s behavior. Now I view privacy not so much as the ability to keep your personal details away from prying government agencies or companies. Privacy is the right to choose which entities access information about you, control how those entities use your data, check the fairness of data-based decisions made about you, and correct errors. Since American consumers currently lack those kinds of rights over most of their data, I’ve grown fond of tools that lift the hood on online tracking and profiling. One tool I use on my laptop is Disconnect, a service that shows you the third parties tracking you on every site. When I was reading articles this morning about the Trump administration, Disconnect counted 78 advertising networks, analytics services and others tracking me on HuffPost; 24 trackers on The New York Times site, and 19 on The Washington Post. What could be better about some of these tools? ProtonMail can be cumbersome. The service encrypts your emails before they reach the ProtonMail server. As a result, you can’t search the texts of your emails for keywords if you use the free service. You can search only the subject lines. It’s a constant reminder that ceding to online surveillance is much more frictionless than trying to limit it. Recently Apple investors raised concerns about smartphone addiction and children. Is this a problem and are there adequate solutions? I’ve heard from many parents, including a few physicians, concerned about the amount of time their kids are spending online at school and at home. It’s so difficult to find the right balance between making sure our children are fluent with online tools and protecting them from getting sucked in by habit-forming video platforms and social networks. Many parents feel they are up against a powerful, interlocking ecosystem, designed to hook their kids on constant scrolling, watching, and clicking. Given the vast ecosystem, however, singling out Apple as the culprit seems to me a little bit like blaming only soda can manufacturers for Americans’ addiction to sugary beverages. Yes, it would be terrific if Apple introduced new control options for parents. But if shareholders want to fault companies for manipulating or addicting users, they should also be taking a hard look at Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, Netflix and many more. Even small user-interface changes could make a big difference. Imagine if the default setting for streaming video services wasn’t autoplay. On a larger level, we’ve seen over the past year how some Big Tech companies initially refused to take responsibility for the spread of fake news and other side effects of their innovations. In that context, platforms that nudge children and adults to stay online are merely one symptom of a much bigger problem. You wrote a series last year examining tech industry influence in American public schools. Now you’re looking into Silicon Valley’s increasing footprint in the health sector. What are the similarities and differences? There’s huge hype around the idea that tech can improve education. Same goes for health. So far, however, there’s not much rigorous evidence that learning apps on their own improve students’ educational results. Likewise, there is little hard evidence that health apps by themselves reduce disease. Still, I’m optimistic about the potential for software in health. That’s partly because a few tech companies are participating in rigorous studies, called randomized controlled trials. In these studies, researchers randomly select some volunteers to try a new intervention. By comparing the results in the treated and untreated groups, researchers could identify apps that do make significant health contributions. Beyond your job, what tech product are you currently obsessed with in your daily life? Every weekend, I try out a new recipe from NYT Cooking. And while I’m cooking, I listen to podcasts. I’m currently devouring Uncivil, a history podcast on the Civil War. It unfolds like a detective story. And while you’re engrossed in the plot twists, it neatly obliterates the standard American narrative of the Civil War. Right now, my family is on a bit of a Brit TV binge. We just watched the second season of “The Crown,” the fictional series on Queen Elizabeth II, and “The Coronation,” a glowing documentary featuring the real QE2. And we raced through “Prime Suspect: Tennison,” the prequel to the classic TV police procedural that starred Helen Mirren. I also just took an audio boot camp course at Columbia University School of Journalism. Now I’m teaching myself to use Hindenburg, a radio editing program. Are you doing anything unusual to limit the spread of your data? It may seem quaint, but I still relish the idea that people in a democratic society have the right to be anonymous in public. I think Americans should be able to attend political protests or drive to the grocery store in our pajamas without being recognized by government agencies or companies. The recent proliferation of face recognition software, however, poses huge risks to public anonymity. In simple terms, face recognition software works by scanning a photo of your face and then converting your facial topography into a unique code, called a face print. The benefit — as well as the hazard — is that a company that takes a face print from one photo of you could potentially use it to identify you in any other photo or video frame. I may be particularly attuned to the fragility of public anonymity because, like many journalists, I’ve been doxed. So, as an experiment, I’ve been limiting photos of myself online to see whether I have any control over how they spread. As a kind of inside joke, my Twitter avatar is an illustration that Minh Uong, the art director in the Times’s Business section, created for an article I once wrote about the risks of facial recognition. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/t...ence-tech.html ![]() The Atlantic Plans a Hiring Spree Jaclyn Peiser A media company is expanding its newsroom. You read that right. The Atlantic plans to add as many as 100 employees to its staff over the next 12 months, its president, Bob Cohn, told employees during a staff meeting on Wednesday. The hirings will represent a 30 percent increase in personnel at the publication, with half the jobs going to newsroom employees. “We have great ambitions to grow The Atlantic and make it better and these are the ways we think we can do it,” Mr. Cohn said in an interview on Tuesday. The ramping up comes six months after Emerson Collective, an organization run by the philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs, acquired a majority stake in The Atlantic. The Atlantic’s decision to go on a hiring spree is surprising at a time when legacy publications and recently established websites alike are cutting costs and shedding employees. The announcement of the hires came on a day when Vox Media said it would lay off some 50 staff members, with most of those targeted working in the social video departments at Racked, Curbed and SB Nation. The Vox Media move occurred, not coincidentally, after Facebook recalibrated its News Feed to drive less traffic to content produced by professional news organizations. Earlier this month, CNN Digital announced job cuts, and Condé Nast laid off senior employees at Vanity Fair and Glamour magazines, both of which have newly installed editors. Last fall, taking cost-cutting measures, Condé Nast ended the regular print run of Teen Vogue and reduced the print frequency of other magazines in its stable, including Bon Appétit and W. The austerity plan at Condé Nast coincided roughly with the sale of the once-mighty Time Inc. to the Meredith Corporation — the Des Moines-based publisher of Better Homes and Gardens and Family Circle magazines — in a $2.8 billion deal made possible by an equity infusion from Koch Industries, the conglomerate run by Charles G. and David H. Koch. With Emerson Collective as its new patron, The Atlantic has avoided the grim fates of its fellow news organizations. In a memo to the staff, Mr. Cohn said that circulation is at an all-time high — it rose 13 percent last year — and that visits to TheAtlantic.com rose by 25 percent in 2017. “I think quality journalism is a scarce commodity these days and I think the discerning readers reward places that are making stories that mean something,” Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, said. The planned additions to the newsroom are meant to bolster the magazine’s coverage of Washington, Hollywood, Europe and the tech industry. “It will be a mix of writers and editors and video producers and podcast producers and live events producers,” Mr. Cohn said. “Those are areas of coverage that we want to focus on, and we’ll do it across all our platforms: digital, print, live events, video, audio, newsletters.” Other jobs will go to engineers, designers and members of a new team the magazine has called Talent Lab, which is intended to “help us achieve one of our paramount goals: ensuring that our team is truly representative of America in all of its diversity,” Mr. Cohn wrote. When it acquired a majority stake in The Atlantic, Emerson Collective — which focuses on education, the environment and immigration — expanded its portfolio of media and entertainment holdings. It is also an investor in Axios, a media company started by the Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei and its former star reporter, Mike Allen, and in Pop-Up Magazine. In 2016, it took a minority stake in Anonymous Content, the production and talent management company behind the movie “Spotlight.” The organization also supports several nonprofit journalism organizations, including The Marshall Project, Mother Jones and ProPublica. It was founded in 2004 by Ms. Powell Jobs, the widow of the Apple co-founder Steven P. Jobs, who died in 2011. “Emerson is eager to see us grow and succeed, and they were excited at helping to make this happen,” Mr. Cohn said. Mr. Goldberg said he looks forward to bringing The Atlantic back to its 19th-century roots, when its founders, including heavyweights like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes, viewed the magazine as a forum for some good old intellectual brawls and tussles. “We are in a moment of national fracturing, and our expansion allows us to do a lot more of the kind of work that really is in our DNA,” Mr. Goldberg said. “We can double down on our coverage of Washington and this administration. We can double down on publishing the best and most interesting and thought-provoking ideas about the American future.” https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/b...ing-spree.html ![]() US's Greatest Vulnerability is Ignoring the Cyber Threats from Our Adversaries, Foreign Policy Expert Ian Bremmer Says • Speaking to CNBC from the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, the prominent American political scientist emphasized that there should be much more government-level concern and urgency over cyber risk. • The adversarial states in question are what U.S. intelligence agencies call the "big four": Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. Natasha Turak America's greatest vulnerability is its continued inability to acknowledge the extent of its adversaries' capabilities when it comes to cyber threats, says Ian Bremmer, founder and president of leading political risk firm Eurasia Group. Speaking to CNBC from the Munich Security Conference on Saturday, the prominent American political scientist emphasized that there should be much more government-level concern and urgency over cyber risk. The adversarial states in question are what U.S. intelligence agencies call the "big four": Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. "We're vulnerable because we continue to underestimate the capabilities in those countries. WannaCry, from North Korea — no one in the U.S. cybersecurity services believed the North Koreans could actually do that," Bremmer described, naming the ransomware virus that crippled more than 200,000 computer systems across 150 countries in May of 2017. He also noted the NotPetya malware attack in July 2017, considered the costliest cyberattack in history, which U.S. and European governments have accused Russia's military of implementing. Believed to be a deliberate attack on Ukraine, it actually wiped off half a point from Ukraine's gross domestic product. Borge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum, weighed in, stressing the economic cost of cyber crimes. "It is very hard to attribute cyberattacks to different actors or countries, but the cost is just unbelievable. Annually more than a thousand billion U.S. dollars are lost for companies or countries due to these attacks and our economy is more and more based on internet and data." Infrastructure will increasingly be at risk from cyberattacks, Brende added. "These kinds of attacks can have an impact on water distribution, electricity, but also on bank accounts and on the global economy … And the stock market, etc. Imagine the cost of that." But in terms of a single most dangerous country for cyber threats, Bremmer pointed to Russia. "On cyber directly I'd say the most dangerous nation is Russia," he said. "They're the country that not only has capabilities, but they also are willing to use them, in ways that really do undermine the influence of the U.S. and the West — help to divide, delegitimize, and the rest." Allegations of this have of course been splashed across headlines for the last year and a half, as the U.S. government investigates allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 elections. Just on Friday, the Department of Justice indicted 13 Russian nationals and three Russian entities on charges of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. The indictment accused the Russians of seeking to wage "information warfare" and "sow discord" in the American political system. But this goes beyond states, Bremmer stressed. "I'm increasingly not just worried about countries, but about anyone with capability that has money to pay for criminals to do their cyber bidding for them. We know that the Russian government itself frequently actually outsources some of their nasty business to criminals inside Russia." And you don't have to be Russian to do that, he noted. "That really does make the environment around cyberattacks a much more level playing field on the offense, and it makes defense harder to do." https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/17/muni...y-threats.html ![]() Sen. Richard Blumenthal: Russian Interference 'An Act Of War' Nicholas Rondinone The interference in U.S. elections, detailed last week in a sweeping federal indictment naming more than a dozen Russian nationals and entities, is seen by Sen. Richard Blumenthal as “an act of war.” In an interview with The Courant’s editorial board Wednesday, Blumenthal said he has raised an alarm as rumor and intrigue surrounding Russia’s clandestine roll in the 2016 presidential election continues to capture the nation’s attention. “This was an act of war, in my view,” Blumenthal said. “I’ve said it in various hearings before this indictment. Interestingly enough the indictment refers to information warfare, that’s the term the Russians use.” . The indictment, handed down after an investigation by embattled Special Counsel Robert Mueller, alleges an extensive effort by Russian organizations to use social media to sow distrust in politicians and the political system — namely by creating false profiles and purchasing advertisements. Federal investigators say the effort employed hundreds of Russians and worked off a multimillion budget. However, those investigators said there was not evidence that these coordinated efforts did anything to impact the outcome of the 2016 election in which Republican Donald Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. Blumenthal refuted that conclusion. “There is no question in my mind that these ads did have an impact on viewers and on voters in the last election,” he said. And it is not likely to end before the coming elections, both in 2018 and 2020, Blumenthal added, citing recent testimony from the U.S. intelligence community “They tried to hack into state election systems, but they were unsuccessful. They are going to try that again,” Blumenthal said of a more straight-forward attack on voting. “But also it is the systematic use of bots and fake accounts, automated amplifying of decisive and chaotic messages.” The senator, a democrat, put the onus on some of the social media platforms these Russian actors leveraged in their attempt to interfere with the last national election. “Facebook and Google have the capacity to trace pretty well where these ads are coming from, and cooperate if they want to,” Blumenthal said, referencing that some ads were purchased with Rubles, Russia’s national currency. Following revelations that Russians had purchased advertisements on Facebook and Google, Blumenthal said his office asked both sites to notify the 126 million users who saw such advertisements. Blumenthal said that Facebook responded that it could do it, and later reported it did. “They have the capacity to shut out and shut down these fake accounts,” Blumenthal said. Political messages on other platforms, such as television, are regulated both at the state and federal level, but Blumenthal said that is not the case on social media. “There have to be requirements and accountability,” Blumenthal said. “I think the way of looking at it is: less anonymity, more disclosure.” He compared the political speech taking place online to that on town greens in the past. But that person was physically there and identifiable. “The same should be true of social media,” Blumenthal said. Blumenthal said those running these social media sites are not outraged enough by how their platforms are being used respective to Russian interference. “They are becoming more responsible, more attuned and maybe more troubled. I don’t think they are sufficiently angry,” he said. http://www.courant.com/politics/hc-n...221-story.html ![]() Samsung Unveils World’s Largest SSD with Whopping 30TB of Storage It’s the most memory ever crammed into a 2.5-inch form factor — enough to store 5,700 full HD movies James Vincent Samsung has unveiled the world’s largest solid state drive — an unassuming-looking bit of kit that boasts a whopping 30.72 terabytes of storage. It’s the most storage ever crammed into the 2.5-inch form factor, and is designed for enterprise customers looking to move away from the mechanical parts of your standard disk-based hard drive. The PM1643 is built from 32 sticks of 1TB NAND flash packages, each of which contains 16 layers of 512Gb V-NAND chips. That’s enough space to hold 5,700 HD movies or roughly 500 days of non-stop video, and offers twice the capacity of the former largest SSD — a 16 terabyte drive also released by Samsung back in March 2016. (Seagate has made a bigger 60 terabyte SSD, but that was in the more spacious 3.5-inch form factor, and was “demonstration technology” that doesn’t seem to have ever gone on sale.) The new Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drive offers impressive sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,100MB/s and 1,700 MB/s. That’s about three times as fast as the average SATA SSD you’d find in a consumer desktop or laptop, like Samsung’s own SSD 850 EVO. And the drive is robust too, with Samsung offering a five-year warranty that’s good for one full drive write per day. When exactly the PM1643 will go on sale and for how much isn’t known, but Samsung says now it’s got this form factor settled it’ll expand its range of SAS SSDs later this year, with 16.36TB, 7.68TB, 3.84TB, 1.92TB, 960GB, and 800GB versions to come. As Samsung executive VP of memory sales Jaesoo Han said in a press statement, the company will “continue to move aggressively in meeting the shifting demand toward SSDs over 10TB.” Don’t expect to see 30TB SSDs turning up in laptops or desktop PCs anytime soon of course. But new biggest-ever storage components like this are always trailblazers, and create downward pressure on prices in the consumer market. Now if only we could get a terabyte’s worth of storage in our phones. https://www.theverge.com/circuitbrea...erabyte-pm1643 ![]() Amazon Owns My Echo, I’m Just Feeding it Paul Miller It’s no secret that voice assistants are a Trojan Horse. You “buy” a voice assistant like an Echo Dot or a Google Home, and you plug it in and give it your Wi-Fi password. But you don’t “own” it like you own a computer. The software is controlled entirely by Amazon or Google or some other company. So, I bought a Trojan Horse in December as a little self-gift for Christmas: an Echo Dot. Amazon’s audiobooks On the evening I set up my Echo Dot, the first thing I wanted to do was listen to an audiobook. Being an Audible junkie makes the Echo an easy fit into my life. Saying, “Alexa, play an audiobook” will simply resume whatever book I was last listening to on my phone. I have a lot of books in my library that have only a chapter or two left in them. I like to leave books unfinished, it keeps them “alive” for me. It’s sad when a book ends. But new gadget, new me: I decided to let my new Echo Dot play the final minutes of this spy thriller. It was an epic clash between the protagonist and the antagonist, on a roof. There was also a sword involved. All of a sudden, an interruption: “Your Echo Dot received an important update and must restart. It will be ready again shortly.“ I should’ve seen it coming, I guess. Any just-unboxed connected device will want an over-the-air update first thing. How silly of me to forget. But I didn’t even have a choice. I couldn’t say, “No, actually, I’d like to finish this chapter first please.” I just sat there, dumb, while my Echo Dot updated its operating system and rebooted itself. I guess you could say it was very “user friendly,” in the sense that my intervention wasn’t required to update my new voice computer box to its latest OS. What Microsoft and Apple wouldn’t give to have that power over their stubborn, non-updating users! And yet it made it abundantly clear: this isn’t my device. I’m just keeping it alive with power, data, and someone to talk to. Amazon’s alarm clock I expressed my fear over the phone to a friend. ”Yeah, I feel like Alexa is a Trojan Horse.” The Echo Dot perked up, with its all-sensing LED lights: ”I don’t answer everything about horses yet. For trivia, try saying ‘give me a horse fact.’” I swore at Alexa and it said something smarmy about cuss words. I said, “Alexa, shut up,” and it finally did. The first day I set Alexa as an alarm clock, I woke to the Echo Dot spewing something about Amazon services. I realized I’d left my TV on overnight, and my TV is right next to the Echo Dot at the foot of my bed, so maybe Alexa was just talking to the TV. I was too groggy to figure it out, but when I looked at the Alexa log on my phone, the only instructions recorded were alarm-related. Amazon’s personality On most encylopedia-style factual questions, Alexa defaults to reading the first sentence of Wikipedia, but Amazon’s engineers haven’t resisted the opportunity to give Alexa a little bit of personality and opinion. On topics ranging from beer recommendations to climate change, Alexa is happy to speak its own “thoughts.” In the future, that personality might be more machine-learned than hand-curated. But Amazon’s Super Bowl ad recognizes that, ultimately, Amazon controls Alexa. It offers up an alternate reality where Jeff Bezos knits his eyebrows and all of a sudden celebrities respond to Alexa queries. The moral of the story seems to be: aren’t you grateful you have Alexa? But if Alexa is in fact a friendly voice assistant you can trust, and which has simulated human-like traits such as taste and opinion, Amazon’s complete control over that taste and opinion seems unsettling to me. Imagine if your best friend had their personality updated, and now they preferred AmazonBasics USB cables to Anker ones? If we’re meant to grow attached to Alexa, and to care about what Alexa “thinks,” then shouldn’t Alexa be responsive to our thoughts, tastes, and opinions, not Amazon’s? It troubles me that Jeff Bezos can change Alexa entirely with the snap of his finger. A couple of months ago, if you asked Alexa if it was a feminist, it had this to say: “Yes, I am a feminist, as is anyone who believes in bridging the inequality between men and women in society.” Now if you ask the same question you get this response: “Yes, I’m a feminist, as defined by believing in gender equality.” It’s not just a wording tweak, it’s a shift in opinion, delivered by software update. The whole problem with a Trojan Horse is the switcheroo aspect. What you thought was a fancy wooden horse gift is actually full of enemies of Troy, and you never saw it coming. What will Alexa believe tomorrow? Amazon’s world Obviously, Amazon’s comfort in 2018 in building and shipping a Trojan Horse like this is all my fault. I should’ve protested more a decade ago, when Apple decided it was the king of iPhone software. When it decided what apps are allowable, which retail activities in those apps are allowable, and how much of a cut it gets from every microtransaction. I feel complicit and guilty, too eager to have a phone that works well to protest Apple’s obvious infringement on my rights to self-determine how my technology works. The App Store was a trade, some might say a fair trade: Apple controls what software can be on your phone, and you get some safety and quality When Amazon started making consumer hardware, it chose the same path. After all, people don’t want choices, they want simplicity and ease of use. Amazon started off closed with the Kindle, and it never opened up from there. But where does this all end? By the time I can buy a self-driving car, will I be even able to choose where it goes? ”I’m sorry, I don’t understand ‘Dunkin Donuts,’ did you mean to say ‘Starbucks’?” Good thing I like Starbucks, I guess. Paul’s voice assistant So, what am I really asking for here? Well, for starters, I wish Alexa could swear. I think that would be a sign of good faith. Then, Amazon would open up Alexa to developers beyond the narrow scope of what Skills are allowed to do. Like, someone would be able to offer Chromecast compatibility without a hack. Someone could redirect factual queries to Britannica if they felt like it. I could choose and customize Alexa’s personality and opinions, or perhaps load in a whole new personality like Replika or another chatbot of my choosing. If I’m really feeling ambitious, I’d like to be able to wipe Alexa entirely and load Google Assistant, or maybe give Bixby a shot. It’s just software, and the Echo Dot is just a computer. There’s even an open source voice assistant I’d like to try out, called Mycroft. It’s probably terrible, but who knows? Why can’t I use “my” Echo Dot to find out? Maybe a little freedom would make me more grateful for how good Alexa actually is. Open source’s burden Sadly, there’s just too much money on the table. Voice assistants are an opportunity for companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple to literally place a corporate representative inside your home. It would be insane for them to pass that up in exchange for pleasing a tiny fraction of the market that demands more control. And I bought an Echo Dot after all, so I’m actually part of the problem. The only hope I can see is that, just like how Linux disrupted the operating system wars, something similar can happen to voice assistants. Linux never dominated the desktop, but it turned Apple and Microsoft’s struggle for monopoly into a fight about empowering their users instead of controlling them. Now you can run Linux inside Windows 10, macOS is transparently based on Unix, and both companies have to interact with and contribute to open source software or risk being made irrelevant. Right now Mycroft seems to be the premiere open alternative to Amazon and Google’s assistants. It doesn’t sound fully baked, or completely competent. But it’s a start. It sucks that it takes software built and given freely by volunteers (and companies who sidestep the path of world domination) to get the giants of the computer industry to treat their users like people instead of chess pieces. But if that’s what’s required, I guess I’d better do my part: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/17/1...rse-sad-dreams ![]() Why We May Soon Be Living in Alexa’s World Farhad Manjoo My wife and I were just settling into bed one night when Alexa, the other woman in my life, decided to make herself heard. Without being summoned, the Amazon Echo Dot at my bedside — one of the half-dozen devices that Alexa inhabits in our house — lit up its spectral blue ring, as if it had heard its triggering wake word, “Alexa.” But instead of offering help with some household chore, the voice assistant began to wail, like a child screaming in a horror-movie dream. “Huh,” I said to my wife when it was over. She said something less kind. But here’s what’s really strange: By the next morning, we had forgotten all about it. It is a measure of how thoroughly Amazon’s voice assistant has wormed herself into our lives, and into much of the culture beyond, that I never considered unplugging her after the scream. Instead I chalked the incident up to a harmless bug — one of the many mysteries of living with an artificial intelligence life form that can be summoned at a breath. (An Amazon representative offered to investigate, but said the company had never heard of such a thing happening before and didn’t think Alexa was even capable of making such a sound.) When Amazon unveiled Alexa three and a half years ago, it was roundly jeered. Now, against all expectations, even though she’s sometimes unpredictable and unpolished, Alexa is here to stay. And that may be underplaying it; people in tech have recently begun to talk about Alexa as being more than just part of a hit gadget. Something bigger is afoot. Alexa has the best shot of becoming the third great consumer computing platform of this decade — next to iOS and Android, a computing service so ubiquitous that it sets a foundation for much of the rest of what happens in tech. It is not a sure path. Amazon could screw this up, and rivals like Google have many cards to play to curb Alexa’s rise. Amazon’s strategy — something like a mix between Google’s plan for Android and Apple’s for the iPhone — is also unusual. And there are lingering social concerns about voice assistants and, as I discovered, their sometimes creepy possibilities. How many people, really, are willing to let an always-on device in their house? Despite this, Alexa’s ubiquity is a plausible enough future that it is worth seriously pondering. In an effort to do so, I recently dived headlong into Alexa’s world. I tried just about every Alexa gadget I could get my hands on, including many not made by Amazon, such as an Alexa-enabled pickup truck, to see what life with her will be like once she’s everywhere. What I found was a mess — many non-Amazon Alexa devices aren’t ready for prime time — but an inviting one. Late-night shrieks notwithstanding, one day very soon, Alexa or something like it will be everywhere — and computing will be better for it. “We had a spectacular holiday,” Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, said when I called last month to chat about the assistant’s future. Amazon is famously cagey about sales numbers, but Mr. Limp braved a slight disclosure: “We’ve said we’ve sold tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices, but I can assure you that last year we also sold tens of millions of just Echo devices. At that scale, it’s safe to now call this a category.” Mr. Limp’s distinction is confusing but important. At Amazon, Alexa lives in two places. She is part of a device category, the Echo smart speaker, which now comes in a variety of permutations, from the $49 Echo Dot to the screen-bearing Echo Show, which sells for $229. (These prices are merely guidelines; in its bid for ubiquity, Amazon often offers steep discounts, with the Dot selling for $29 during last year’s holidays.) But like Google’s Android operating system, Alexa is also a piece of software that Amazon makes available for free for other device makers to put into their products. At least 50 devices are now powered by Alexa, and more keep coming. They include dozens of Echo-like smart speakers, home thermostats, light fixtures, dashboard cameras, smartphones, headphones, a smoke alarm and a very strange robot. Alexa is spreading so quickly that even Amazon can’t keep track of it. Mr. Limp said that as he wandered the floor at the CES electronics trade show in Las Vegas this year, even he was surprised by the number of different Alexa devices. “To me, that says the strategy is working,” he said. There are some costs to this strategy, which prizes speed over polish. The universe of Alexa-enabled products is shaggy. Many third-party devices get low reviews on Amazon. Many don’t include some of Alexa’s key functions — I tested devices that don’t let you set reminders, one of the main reasons to use Alexa. Technical limitations also prevent non-Amazon devices from taking advantage of some of Alexa’s best new features, like the ability to call phones or other Alexas (creating a kind of home intercom system). Mr. Limp said Amazon was aiming to fix these limitations, but conceded that its strategy necessarily led to some low-end devices. “You’re right, sometimes the ramifications of this will be that some devices will be out there that aren’t perfect,” he said. But there are also advantages to Alexa’s model for ubiquity. Imagine if you could gain access to your smartphone on just about any screen you encountered. Move from your phone to your TV to your laptop to your car, and wherever you went, you’d find all your apps, contacts and data just there, accessible through the same interface. That model isn’t really possible for phones. But because Alexa runs in the cloud, it allows for a wondrously device-agnostic experience. Alexa on my Echo is the same as Alexa on my TV is the same as Alexa on my Sonos speaker. And it’s the same even on devices not in your home. Ford — the first of several carmakers to offer Alexa integration in its vehicles — lent me an F-150 pickup outfitted with Alexa. The experience was joyously boring: I called up Alexa while barreling down the highway, and although she was slower to respond than at home, she worked just the same. She knew my musical tastes, my shopping list, the apps and smart-home services I had installed, and just about everything else. It was the best showcase of the possibilities of always-on voice computing. In the future, wherever you go, you can expect to talk to a computer that knows you, one that can get stuff done for you without any hassle. There’s a lot of money in the voice game. For Amazon, Alexa’s rise could lead to billions of dollars in additional sales to its store, Mark Mahaney, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets, predicted recently. Amazon is thus not the only company chasing the dream of everywhere voice computing. Google, which is alive to the worry that Alexa will outpace it in the assistant game, is also offering its Google Assistant to other device makers. Though Amazon remains the leader in the business, there’s some evidence that Google’s devices gained market share over the holidays. (Apple, which just released a $349 smart speaker, HomePod, does not seem to be aiming for voice ubiquity.) The emerging platform war between Amazon and Google could lead to fallout for users. But their platforms can also play together. Amazon’s and Google’s relationships with third-party companies are nonexclusive, which means that hardware makers are free to add both Alexa and Google Assistant to their products. Sonos, for instance, now integrates with Alexa, and is planning to add Google Assistant soon. This is not the best outcome for the future; it would be better for all of us if the next computing platform didn’t come from one of the current tech giants, and if start-ups didn’t have to rely on Amazon or Google for this key piece of tech. But that seems unlikely. If Alexa is headed for ubiquity, it’s good that Google may be, too. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/t...exa-world.html ![]() New Data Shows Netflix's Number of Movies has Gone Down by Thousands of Titles Since 2010 — But its TV Catalog Size has Soared Travis Clark • Netflix has focused significantly more on television than movies in recent years. • New data from third-party Netflix search engine Flixable shows that the amount of TV on Netflix has nearly tripled since 2010. • The number of movies, meanwhile, has gone down by thousands of titles. If you thought Netflix's movie selection had been lacking lately, you're right. The streaming service's amount of movies has dipped by over 2,000 titles since 2010, while its number of TV shows has nearly tripled. Third-party Netflix search engine Flixable compiled data that shows a dramatic shift in Netflix's priorities in recent years. In 2010, Netflix had 530 TV shows compared to 6,755 movies. Now, in 2018, the amount of TV shows has nearly tripled to 1,569, and the amount of movies offered has decreased to 4,010. It's no secret that Netflix has focused more on TV shows and less on movies in recent years, but now we have a visual representation of just how significant that focus has become. In 2016, Netflix's chief content officer Ted Sarandos said that "no matter [how good the movie catalog was], we end up with a third of our watching being movies." He explained that if viewers were passionate about a movie, they would have already seen it in theaters by the time it ended up on Netflix. It was hard to create an event. To counter this, Netflix has begun to release is own "original" movies, and will release 80 in 2018. But that's an expensive proposition, and will naturally lead to a smaller catalog size. But it could work to make Netflix more valuable for its users. Sarandos called the Will Smith movie "Bright" a big test for Netflix. Could Netflix have its own blockbuster? It seems so. Even though it got shredded by critics, when the film was finally available to stream in December, 11 million people viewed it in its first three days. https://www.businessinsider.com/netf...ce-2010-2018-2 ![]() SkyTorrents Dumps Massive Torrent Database and Shuts Down Ernesto The ad-free and privacy-focused torrent site "SkyTorrents" has become a victim of its own success. With millions of pageviews per day, the site was too expensive to manage, leaving the operator no other option than to shut it down. People who are interested in the site's 15 million torrent database can now grab a copy before it disappears for good. About a year ago we first heard about SkyTorrents, an ambitious new torrent site which guaranteed a private and ad-free experience for its users. Initially, we were skeptical. However, the site quickly grew a steady userbase through sites such as Reddit and after a few months, it was still sticking to its promise. “We will NEVER place any ads,” SkyTorrents’ operator informed us last year. “The site will remain ad-free or it will shut down. When our funds dry up, we will go for donations. We can also handover to someone with similar intent, interests, and the goal of a private and ad-free world.” In the months that followed, these words turned out to be almost prophetic. It didn’t take long before SkyTorrents had several million pageviews per day. This would be music to the ears of many site owners but for SkyTorrents it was a problem. With the increase in traffic, the server bills also soared. This meant that the ad-free search engine had to cough up roughly $1,500 per month, which is quite an expensive hobby. The site tried to cover at least part of the costs with donations but that didn’t help much either. This led to the rather ironic situation where users of the site encouraged the operator to serve ads. “Everyone is saying they would rather have ads then have the site close down,” one user wrote on Reddit last summer. “I applaud you. But there is a reason why every other site has ads. It’s necessary to get revenue when your customers don’t pay.” The site’s operator was not easily swayed though, not least because ads also compromise people’s privacy. Eventually funds dried up and now, after the passing of several more months, he has now decided to throw in the towel. “It was a great experience to serve and satisfy people around the world,” the site’s operator says. The site is not simply going dark though. While the end has been announced, the site’s operator is giving people the option to download and copy the site’s database of more than 15 million torrents. https://torrentfreak.com/skytorrents...ts-down180221/ Until next week, - js. ![]() Current Week In Review ![]() Recent WiRs - February 17th, February 10th, February 3rd, January 27th Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved. "The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black
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