Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 3rd, ’18

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February 3rd, 2018




Canada Could Soon Block all Websites that Allow Illegal Streaming of Pirated Movies and TV Shows

An official application has been filed to the CRTC.
Eul Basa

Canada’s largest communication companies including Rogers and Quebecor have joined forces with content creators (CBC, Corus Entertainment, etc.) and unions across the country to stop the illegal download and streaming of movies, TV shows, live sports and music.

Together, they have filed an application to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to block all websites that give access to pirated materials. According to their analysis, piracy accounts for a $55-billion loss in Canada’s cultural industries. In fact, in 2017 alone, over 1 million Canadian households owned Android boxes that allowed them to access pirated materials for free.

Fair Play Canada, the given name for the coalition, urges the CRTC to mandate an “Independent Piracy Review Agency” that would be dedicated to identifying all the websites involved in pirating materials. The CRTC would then order all Canadian internet service providers to block those websites, as well as issue warnings to viewers who are suspected of illegally downloading or streaming from them.

While many people are showing their support for this initiative, others believe it is a violation of net neutrality, which pushes the case that internet providers should treat all content equally. Some fear that providers could end up abusing their power to block websites at their will.

Navdeep Bains, the Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minster, spoke on this matter by assuring that Canada remains committed to “maintaining one of the best intellectual property and copyright frameworks int he world to support creativity and innovation to the benefit of artists, creators consumers and all Canadians.”

The CRTC has confirmed it will review the proposal and also assured Canadians of their strong commitment to net neutrality.
https://www.narcity.com/news/canada-...s-and-tv-shows





U.S. to Make Streaming Services Pay More for Music
Jan Wolfe

U.S. copyright authorities on Saturday decided to increase over the next five years the royalty payments music streaming companies like Spotify and Apple Inc (AAPL.O) must make to songwriters and music publishers, a trade association for music publishers said.

The Copyright Royalty Board of the U.S. Library of Congress issued a written decision that altered the formulas used to determine how much of their revenue streaming companies must share with songwriters and the music publishing companies they typically hire to collect licensing fees on their behalf.

The National Music Publishers Association said the ruling, which has not yet been made public, will require streaming companies to give 15.1 percent of their revenue to songwriters and music publishers. The previous rate was 10.5 percent.

The board, which consists of three judges, held a trial last year in which the trade group squared off against Spotify, Apple, Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), Pandora Media Inc (P.N) and Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O), which had opposed NMPA’s proposed rate increase.

“This is the best mechanical rate scenario for songwriters in U.S. history which is critically important as interactive streaming continues to dominate the market,” said NMPA chief executive David Isrealite in a statement.

A Pandora spokeswoman declined to comment.

Representatives of Apple, Alphabet, Spotify and Amazon did not immediately return requests for comment.

Streaming services must pay a fee, known as a “mechanical license,” every time a user listens to a song.

These licensing fees are typically paid to music publishing companies like Sony/ATV Music Publishing, which collect the fees on behalf of recording artists in exchange for a commission.

U.S. law requires the Copyright Royalty Board to set the rates for these mechanical licenses, rather than letting publishers negotiate rates with streaming services.

Reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Chris Reese
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKBN1FH01E





California Senate Defies FCC, Approves Net Neutrality Law

Net neutrality takes big step forward in California, but lawsuits loom.
Jon Brodkin

The California State Senate yesterday approved a bill to impose net neutrality restrictions on Internet service providers, challenging the Federal Communications Commission attempt to preempt such rules.

The FCC's repeal of its own net neutrality rules included a provision to preempt state and municipal governments from enforcing similar rules at the local level. But the governors of Montana and New York have signed executive orders to enforce net neutrality, and several states are considering net neutrality legislation.

The FCC is already being sued by 21 states and the District of Columbia, which are trying to reverse the net neutrality repeal and the preemption of state laws. Attempts to enforce net neutrality rules at the state or local level could end up being challenged in separate lawsuits.

No blocking, throttling, or paid prioritization

California may be the closest to passing such legislation after yesterday's Senate approval of SB-460, a bill proposed by Sen. Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles).

The bill passed 21-12, with all 21 ayes coming from Democrats. The bill is now being moved to the State Assembly, where Democrats have a 53-25 majority over Republicans.

The bill would prohibit home and mobile Internet providers from "Blocking lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices," except in cases of reasonable network management.

Throttling would also be outlawed, along with "paid prioritization, or providing preferential treatment of some Internet traffic to any Internet customer." More generally, the bill prohibits ISPs from interfering with "a customer's ability to select, access, and use broadband Internet access service or lawful Internet content, applications, services, or devices of the customer's choice, or an edge provider's ability to make lawful content, applications, services, or devices available to a customer."

ISPs would be forbidden from using deceptive or misleading marketing practices "that misrepresent the treatment of Internet traffic or content to its customers."

Violations would be punishable under the state's existing consumer protection laws, which allow for injunctions and financial damages. The California bill would also prohibit state agencies from buying Internet service from an ISP "unless that provider certifies, under penalty of perjury, that it will not engage in" the activities banned by the bill.

The Montana and New York executive orders focus exclusively on the purchasing requirements for state agencies instead of imposing requirements directly on ISPs. The California bill is a more direct challenge to the FCC's preemption order because it requires all ISPs to follow net neutrality rules regardless of whether they provide Internet service to state agencies.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...fiance-of-fcc/





Alaska the Latest to Propose its Own Net Neutrality Rules
Karl Bode

Alaska is just the latest state to propose its own net neutrality rules in the wake of the FCC's repeal of federal rules. Numerous states including Washington, Massachusetts, New York, California and Rhode Island have all proposed their own net neutrality rules in the wake of the FCC's repeal of federal rules, despite the fact the FCC's repeal order attempts to ban states from doing so at Verizon and Comcast's request. Other states, like Montana and New York, have signed executive orders banning ISPs that violate net neutrality from securing state contracts.

In other words, incumbent ISP efforts to dismantle arguably modest and consistent federal net neutrality rules isn't going particularly well.

Adding fuel to this fire is Alaska, which now says it too is considering its own net neutrality protections for internet users. Under recently introduced SB 160, ISPs "may not block content or services, impair or degrade lawful internet traffic, or interfere with the end user's access to the internet," while allowing for "preferential bandwidth speeds for distance learning and telemedicine to ensure rural Alaskans have access to necessary services."

"If Congress won't protect the consumers of Alaska, we in the legislature must," said State Senator Tom Begich. "Access to information is vital to Alaskans and shouldn't be endangered, especially in rural areas of the state."

The FCC's attempts to pre-empt states from protecting consumers will likely result in numerous, costly legal battles around the country. Those battles will occur at the same time the FCC attempts to defend its handout to the telecom sector in the wake of lawsuits by numerous consumer groups and internet startups.

Of course that's something incumbent ISPs like Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and Charter probably should have thought about before they rushed to repeal consistent federal rules with broad, bipartisan support. Expect more proposals like this as nervous politicians attempt to get on the right side of this issue ahead of the looming midterms.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/A...y-Rules-141131





‘An Issue that Needs to Matter’: Republicans and Democrats Team up for Net Neutrality in Washington State

Washington state lawmakers from both parties have introduced a number of bills relating to net neutrality. The flurry of action comes after the Federal Communications Commission did away with so-called net neutrality rules last year.
Ryan Blethen

Championing a bill that protects consumers and ensures small businesses can compete in a world driven by technology made perfect sense to Norma Smith.

The Republican state representative from Whidbey Island doesn’t view net-neutrality laws as a partisan issue. Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, “this is an issue that needs to matter to everyone,” Smith said.

Smith and Rep. Drew Hansen, D-Bainbridge Island, both have sponsored bills that would ensure net neutrality in Washington state. Net neutrality is a set of regulations that requires internet service providers (ISPs) to treat all websites equally, preventing them from creating fast lanes for those that can afford to pay for them. The bills were easily voted out of committee and now mirror each other. The Appropriations Committee planned a weekend hearing on the bills and one of the two identical bills will likely move into the House for a vote.

Hansen and Smith felt something needed to be done on the state level when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) overturned net-neutrality regulations last year and so they began, separately, working on legislation. Once they realized they were both working on the same issue, they joined forces.

“The existing net-neutrality laws have served us well and kept [the internet] from being controlled by monopolists,” said Hansen. “The net-neutrality protections help everyone: entrepreneurs, consumers, teachers, everyone.”

Like the Obama-era rules, Hansen’s and Smith’s bills would prohibit service providers from throttling broadband speeds or slowing down websites or content they deem shouldn’t reach consumers at the same clip as other sites, applications, services or content. The bill also calls for the companies to “disclose information about network management practices, performance, and commercial terms.” Sen. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, has a bill dealing with disclosure and service providers, and Sen. Kevin Ranker, D-Orcas Island, has a bill similar to the work being done in the House by Hansen and Smith.

The Hansen/Smith bills are a simple four pages. Smith said one of the things she and the broadband and wireless industries found objectionable about the FCC’s approach to net neutrality were the hundreds of pages drawn up for the regulations. She wanted to craft something simple that had a chance of being supported by the broadband and wireless industries. The two House members took input from industry groups representing ISPs and have made some changes.

Even with the changes, service providers are still opposed to the bills, arguing that while they support an open internet, potential regulations need to be instituted on the federal level, because having a patchwork of state laws would be too much to manage. At a hearing on Jan. 18, Gerry Keegan of CTIA, a trade association for the wireless industry, testified against the bills, saying that all major wireless providers are committed against “blocking, throttling and discriminatory behavior.”

Support for personal freedoms and for small businesses has long been at the core of conservative thought, and originally, some conservatives backed rules granting unfettered access to the internet. When the term “net neutrality” first surfaced more than a decade and a half ago, consumer-interest groups, free-speech advocates, technology companies and the National Rifle Association all rallied around it. Since then, big internet service providers like AT&T and Comcast have lobbied Congress hard against net-neutrality rules and the debate has hardened along partisan lines, with Democrats supporting it and Republicans opposed.

This dynamic played out over the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Bush’s FCC chairmen opposed net neutrality, but Obama’s second chairman changed directions in 2015 when the commission voted to reclassify broadband as a utility, giving it the ability to create and enforce net neutrality regulations.

Washington state isn’t alone trying to create net neutrality rules. Michael Schutzler, CEO of the Washington Technology Industry, said in an email that 17 other states are considering legislation around the issue and could force the federal government to act.

“States can impose rules that require ISPs to not tier access for consumers or companies. They have the jurisdiction to declare what’s fair and what’s not in a state. Tiered access to the internet is the core topic of net neutrality. If enough states pass net neutrality laws then the US Congress might finally pass rules to standardize nationally,” Schutzler wrote.

Smith agrees that the states can force Congress to act. Broadband and wireless companies have told her that regulations aren’t necessary, because they wouldn’t run their businesses in a way to hurt customers. She takes them at their word. But she is worried about what happens decades from now. “You said you support this. Let’s hold you accountable for that,” Smith said.

Hansen said he has heard from constituents and people outside his district that want these regulations. A Marine Corps veteran who is starting a small businesses told him it would be impossible for his company to succeed in a tiered system. A teacher expressed her worry to Hansen that accessing instructional materials quickly without having to pay for speed is important to the job of educating children. The only dissent he has heard is from the internet service providers.

“People get this. People get how important it is to have a free and open internet,” Hansen said.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle...hington-state/





The Next Battle For The Internet May Have Already Begun

The same Comcast-backed conservative think tanks that spread anti-net neutrality propaganda have reportedly started astroturfing municipal broadband.
Damir Mujezinovic

The Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of Net Neutrality has turned out to be a controversial and widely criticized legislative decision. The FCC and its chairman, Ajit Pai, have been facing continuous and largely bipartisan criticism from the public and the media alike.

On January 8, the Senate bill to reverse the Net Neutrality repeal gained its 30th co-sponsor, The Hill reported, ensuring a floor vote. A glimmer of hope for Net Neutrality advocates, The Congressional Review Act — which allows Congress to review and potentially overrule federal regulations issued by government agencies — will still have to reach President Trump’s desk, assuming majority of the Senate votes to reverse the repeal.

In short, the chances of reversing the repeal seem to be slim to none. This has forced Net Neutrality advocates and American citizens to shift their attention to municipal broadband, provided fully or partially by local governments. Amidst repeal backlash, the concept of municipal broadband seems to be getting more and more attention.

“Some Cities Plan to Create Their Own Net Neutrality,” a January 15 TruthDig article headline read, amidst growing momentum. The Denver Post reported on dozens of Colorado cities and counties voting to overturn laws that limited local communities from building a broadband.

In January 2018, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society published a study concluding that municipal broadband was a better deal for consumers. Authored by David Talbot, Kira Hessekiel and Danielle Kehl, the study focused on comparing community-owned fiber-to-the-home networks with private ISPs.

“Community-owned FTTH providers’ pricing is generally clear and unchanging, private providers almost always offer initial ‘teaser’ prices and then raise the monthly price sharply,” the researchers wrote.

The opposition

Not everyone considers municipal broadband to be the solution. The municipal broadband “movement” seems to have already found its opposition.

FierceCable, a daily business and technology briefing for cable service providers, was criticized by Forbes columnist Rosyln Layton. “Tech media love to be hard-hitting except when it comes to muni broadband,” Layton wrote, claiming tech media promotes municipal broadband with little to no critique, also criticizing the Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society’s study for what she calls “factual errors.”

This prompted FierceCable editor Daniel Frankel to respond to the accusations.

“Rosyln Layton is an American academic, living in Denmark, serving as a visiting fellow at the Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy at the American Enterprise Institute. The Washington Post once declared the AEI as the Beltway’s ‘dominant conservative think tank.’ In 2014, the American Enterprise Institute was accused of working with Comcast to ‘astroturf’ the net neutrality issue. At the time, fellows at the Institute were accused of printing and posting op-eds all throughout the media in support of killing net neutrality,” Frankel wrote.

Layton’s bio is available on Forbes and it reads “I am a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Internet, Communications and Technology Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.”

In July 2014, Esquire‘s Ben Collins wrote “By its own admission, Comcast is working with think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute. Fellows at the Institute are printing op-eds all throughout the media in support of killing Net neutrality–without disclosing the think tank’s ties to Comcast.”

The American Enterprise institute is not the only think tank to oppose municipal broadband.

On December 11 2017, FierceTelecom released a detailed report claiming another Comcast-backed think tank, Priorities First Fort Collins, had spent $1 million to fight Colorado town’s municipal broadband effort.

The next battle for the internet may have already begun.
https://www.inquisitr.com/4762696/th...already-begun/





Webpass is Leaving Boston in Latest Sign of Google Fiber’s Shrinking Ambitions

Google Fiber isn’t just stalling; now it’s shrinking
Chris Welch

Webpass, the wireless home broadband company that Google Fiber acquired in 2016, is exiting the Boston market. The Verge received a reader tip on the situation and a quick look around revealed that Boston is no longer listed as a current Webpass market on the company’s website. (It still appeared as recently as December.) Reached by phone Tuesday evening, a Webpass customer service representative confirmed that the company has stopped accepting new customers in Boston. And in a statement, Access — the Alphabet subsidiary that runs Google Fiber — also confirmed the news.

“As with any acquisition, we’ve spent some time evaluating the Webpass business. As a result of our analysis, we’ve made the decision to wind down Webpass operations in Boston,” an Access spokesperson said by email. “We’ll work with customers and partners to minimize disruption, and there will be no immediate impacts to their Webpass service. We continue to see strong subscriber response across the rest of the Webpass portfolio, including successful launches in Denver and Seattle in 2017.”

Before this move, Boston was one of 8 cities served by Webpass, which delivers up-to-gigabit internet speeds for residential and commercial buildings by using point to point wireless. That number has dropped to 7, and old Google search results for Webpass service in Massachusetts now redirect to the main homepage.

Webpass internet service is available exclusively in apartment units and condo buildings. It originally came to Boston in 2015 and the company has (or at least had) an office in the city. Per The Boston Globe, Comcast and RCN already offer gigabit-class broadband in Boston. At least on Yelp, Webpass internet was well-reviewed among Boston residents. Webpass expanded its service last February to cover Denver and again in June to bring in Seattle.

Google Fiber announced its acquisition of Webpass in June 2016 amid reports that executives at Alphabet (including Larry Page) had demanded a scaling back of Fiber’s costly rollout ambitions. Layoffs and executive departures followed, and a few months later in October, Google Fiber announced it would pause deployment efforts in nine cities. The company also recently cancelled hundreds of installations in Kansas City, its original launch market.

The wireless approach that Webpass uses is less expensive than laying fiber optic cable in the ground and doesn’t come with the same local approval hurdles and slow progress that Google Fiber faced back when it seemed like Google was serious about taking on Comcast and other broadband providers.

But you need only look at Google Fiber’s service map for a dose of reality and an idea of how those dreams have stalled over the last few years. At present, there are zero “upcoming Fiber city” locations listed on Google Fiber’s map — only “potential” areas of future service. Google Fiber hasn’t yet updated the map to remove Boston as a Webpass city. Chicago, Denver, Miami, Oakland / East Bay, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle are the remaining Webpass service areas. Those cities are apparently safe from losing service for now; a person familiar with Webpass said the Boston market had been underperforming compared to other regions.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/1...leaving-boston





Sprint Promises to Launch Nationwide Mobile 5G Network in First Half of 2019
Mike Dano

Sprint’s CEO today promised the carrier will launch mobile 5G services on its 2.5 GHz spectrum holdings on a nationwide basis in the first half of 2019.

“We’re working with Qualcomm and network and device manufacturers in order to launch the first truly mobile [5G] network in the United States by the first half of 2019,” Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure said today during the carrier’s quarterly earnings conference call with investors. “This development will put Sprint at the forefront of technology innovation on par with other leading carriers around the world … We believe our next-gen network will truly differentiate Sprint over the next couple of years.”

That timeline would put Sprint ahead of T-Mobile in terms of launching nationwide mobile 5G; T-Mobile has promised to start its launch in 2019 and finish it in 2020.

Stand 100% behind this. Sprint. 5G Company. @FierceWireless https://t.co/bze8s7yDzT
— MarceloClaure (@marceloclaure) February 2, 2018

Claure explained that Sprint will achieve this by deploying antennas on its cell towers that support massive MIMO transmissions—he said the carrier can upgrade that hardware to the 5G NR standard via a software update. He added that Sprint offers 2.5 GHz capabilities on roughly half of its towers today, and will expand those capabilities to almost all of the carrier’s towers in the coming year. It also plans to increase the number of its macro tower sites by around 20%.

The CEO said Sprint’s 5G buildout will be bolstered by the deployment of roughly 40,000 outdoor small cell solutions, 15,000 strand mounted small cells through the company’s partnerships with cable companies, along with the deployment of up to 1 million Sprint Magic Boxes.

Interestingly, Sprint CTO John Saw added that a portion of Sprint's 5G efforts would go toward purchasing more fiber from companies like Zayo for Sprint's backhaul.

Claure noted that Sprint owns roughly 160 MHz of 2.5 GHz in top 100 U.S. markets, giving it the ability to offer 5G services on a nationwide basis, rather than through “hotspots” operating in millimeter-wave spectrum like AT&T and Verizon are planning to do.

“Sprint is the only carrier that doesn’t have to compromise what 5G can deliver because we can deliver super wide channels of more than 100 MHz while still delivering mid-band coverage characteristics,” he said.

Indeed, Claure said Sprint already has agreements to deploy 5G with tower, silicon and handset vendors. “We have come to an agreement with Qualcomm that they are going to be able to release this toward the later end of 2018, the new chipsets,” he said. “And we have had a conversation with a leading Korean manufacturer to basically have devices ready by the first half of 2019.” Both Samsung and LG are Korean handset manufacturers.

Importantly, Claure said Sprint plans to charge more for its 5G services than it currently does for its 4G unlimited data service. “It’s going to be very difficult for our competitors to increase the price of unlimited, but we’re going to have a lot of room to increase our price of unlimited to get to similar prices as Verizon and AT&T in the future,” he said. “You get that by having that amazing network. You get that by being the first one to launch 5G. So we’re looking at 5G as an amazing opportunity for the company not only for the position of the company, but also to charge for the blazing fast speeds.”

Continued Claure: “As we deploy our network, you’re going to see fiber like speeds” alongside expanded coverage, he said. “So, when you look at all that, there’s absolutely no reason why we should be discounting of Verizon and AT&T and T-Mobile, which is what we do today. So, we look at it as the best is yet to come as it relates to a great product, and for us to be pricing similar to our competitors in the future. Now in the meantime we’re going to continue to be the price leader until we roll out our 5G network, and you’re going to potentially see some modest price increases in the next year, but nothing substantial.”

Sprint’s 5G promise puts it ahead of T-Mobile, which has said it will begin deploying a 5G network in 2019 on the way to offering nationwide service in 2020. T-Mobile has said it will leverage all of its spectrum bands, including its 600 MHz spectrum, for its 5G deployment.

Meanwhile, AT&T has said it will offer mobile 5G services in roughly a dozen cities this year, though it hasn’t said what type of spectrum it will use for that deployment. The carrier has also said it will offer a 5G “puck” on the device side this year.

And Verizon has said it will launch fixed 5G services in three to five cities this year using its millimeter-wave spectrum.
https://www.fiercewireless.com/5g/sp...aise-unlimited





FCC Chairman Slams Trump Team's Proposal to Nationalize 5G

The Federal Communications Commission's Republican chairman on Monday opposed a plan under consideration by the Trump White House to build a 5G mobile network, nationalizing what has long been the role of private wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon. "I oppose any proposal for the federal government to build and operate a nationwide 5G network," said Chairman Ajit Pai.

Why it matters: The FCC's reaction doesn't bode well for the proposal the Trump administration is considering, first reported by Axios on Sunday night, since it's one of the main government agencies when it comes to wireless issues.

The details:

• "I oppose any proposal for the federal government to build and operate a nationwide 5G network. The main lesson to draw from the wireless sector’s development over the past three decades—including American leadership in 4G—is that the market, not government, is best positioned to drive innovation and investment," Pai said in a statement. "Any federal effort to construct a nationalized 5G network would be a costly and counterproductive distraction from the policies we need to help the United States win the 5G future.”

• He was joined by another Republican FCC commissioner. “I’ve seen lead balloons tried in D.C. before but this is like a balloon made out of a Ford Pinto,” said Michael O’Rielly in a separate statement. “If accurate, the Axios story suggests options that may be under consideration by the Administration that are nonsensical and do not recognize the current marketplace.”

• Brendan Carr, another Republican on the commission, said in a statement that any "suggestion that the federal government should build and operate a nationwide 5G network is a non-starter." Jessica Rosenworcel, one of the commission's two Democrats, also criticized the proposal in a tweet.

• David Redl, the top Commerce Department official on spectrum issues, declined to comment when approached by reporters at a conference on Monday morning.

The statements follow skeptical comments from the wireless industry. "The government should pursue the free market policies that enabled the U.S. wireless industry to win the race to 4G," said Meredith Attwell Baker, the CEO of trade group CTIA.

Go deeper: The questions and concerns raised by nationalizing a portion of the 5G network.
https://www.axios.com/fcc-ajit-pai-5...df0b8237d.html





FBI Warns of Email Death Threats Asking for Cryptocurrency Payouts
Miriam Hernandez

The FBI is warning internet users about a death threat hoax, and a local victim said she was slammed with an alarming email.

"I will be short. I've got an order to kill you," the note said, in part, which demanded $2,800 in U.S. dollars or in Bitcoin, an internet currency.

The victim Christiane, who only wants to use her first name, said the email was deeply disturbing even though she recognized it as a hoax.

"I knew no one was tracking me. But I found myself as I was on my way to work looking around. Are any cars following me? Does anyone look suspicious?" she said.

It is a new spin on extortion said FBI agent Laura Eimiller. Californians especially are being targeted with new scams every day.

"The chances are if you are online, you will be victimized not once, not twice, but multiple times," Eimiller said.

Investigators said the emails are carefully crafted and even educated professionals can be lured in.

Christiane instead went to the FBI's website, www.IC3.gov. It is the agency's Internet Crime Complaint Center, which provides safety information and tracks menacing activity.

"We receive an average of 800 complaints a day in the United States on that site. We believe it represents about 15 percent of the scams that are actually taking place, so it is heavily underreported," Eimiller said.

Bitcoin transactions provide a new level of anonymity for schemers. The virtual currency does not pass through any banking institution. Consumers cannot stop payment like they can with a credit card.

It is easy money for scammers doing volume business.

"If only 1 percent of people send money to them, there's no overhead for them. That is money in the bank," Eimiller said.
http://abc7.com/fbi-warns-of-email-d...youts/2994123/





Windows to Remove Apps with Coercive Messaging: Cleaners and Optimizers Put on Notice
Liam Tung

Microsoft is stepping up its efforts to protect Windows users from programs that use fear to convince people to buy or upgrade products.

The Redmond company is taking aim at all software that use scary messaging to convince people to upgrade to a paid product that purportedly fixes a problem detected by a free version. Specifically it is targeting registry cleaners and optimizers, which Microsoft previously didn't endorse but also didn't blacklist them as unwanted programs or malware. That's changing on March 1.

“We find this practice problematic because it can pressure customers into making unnecessary purchase decisions,” said Barak Shein, a member of the Windows Defender security research team.

From March 1 Microsoft’s Windows Defender and other security products will “classify programs that display coercive messages as unwanted software, which will be detected and removed”, Shein said.

Microsoft has updated its evaluation criteria for unwanted behaviors to reflect the change, adding a "coercive messaging" section that takes aim at messaging and misleading content that pressures users into “paying for additional services or performing superfluous actions”.

This includes exaggerated and alarming error messages about the system that can only be fixed by paying or by the user filling out surveys, subscribing to newsletters or downloading files.

Programs are also not allowed to suggest that the only way to remediate a problem is to follow its recommendations, nor are they allowed to require the user act within a limited time period. In other words, all pressure sales tactics are off the cards.

Though the new criteria isn’t specifically aimed at tech support scams, it should provide a technical obstacle to the tactics they use to scare victims into paying for unnecessary fixes, which include using registry cleaners, fake antivirus and fake Microsoft security alerts.

The FTC in October secured a $2m settlement with a pair behind Troth Solutions and permanently banned from selling any tech support service, including “any plan, program, or software, marketed to repair, maintain, or improve a computer’s performance or security, including registry cleaners, anti-virus programs, anti-malware programs, fire wall programs, and computer or software diagnostic services.”

Microsoft’s evaluation criteria for unwanted software already covered many other bad behaviors, including apps that tamper with browsers settings, impair computer performance, and programs that don't provide a clear way to install, uninstall, and disable it. It's also developed AI systems to detect online tech support scams that employ bogus pop-ups.

"We adjust, expand, and update our evaluation criteria based on customer feedback and in order to capture the latest developments in unwanted software and other threats.," said Shein of the new criteria.

Developers of programs that may be impacted by Microsoft’s new unwanted behaviors can head to the Windows Defender Security Intelligence portal to validate the detection of their programs.
https://www.cso.com.au/article/63283...rs-put-notice/





'Terrifying': How a Single Line of Computer Code Put Thousands of Innocent Turks in Jail

A lawyer and 2 digital forensic experts helped solve cases no one else would
Nil Köksal

When the police came, Elif was changing her baby's diaper.

She was actually relieved — at least it wasn't a pre-dawn raid, as she'd feared it might be for months. An afternoon arrest, she thought, would be less frightening for her sons.

Elif finished dressing her youngest and watched police search her family's home before they took her into custody — for using a messaging app the government deems seditious.

She knew the arrest was coming. She'd already lost her job, because traces of the app known as Bylock were found on her phone.

But Elif is adamant she never used or downloaded it.

Having Bylock on your phone or even knowing someone who did is to become an instant pariah in Turkey, resulting in isolation, shame, a lost livelihood or worse.

The Turkish government under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan links Bylock with treason, because of the app's alleged connection to followers of Fethullah Gülen, the man the Turkish government believes is behind the deadly 2016 coup attempt. Gülen denies the allegations.

Alleged Bylock users are a large part of the nearly 150,000 Turks detained, arrested or forced from their jobs under state of emergency decrees since the summer of 2016.

An estimated 30,000 are believed to be among the innocent swept up in this particular campaign, victims of the chaos, confusion and fear in Turkey.

"Terrifying" is how Tuncay Beşikci describes what people like Elif are living through. The digital forensic expert said they are being "blamed for crimes they did not commit at all."

A former teacher, Elif has been branded a traitor and charged with terrorism. (She asked that we only use her first name to avoid jeopardizing her case and to protect her sons.)

"The thing I want most is to be cleared," Elif said.

And her best chance at doing that are Beşikci, fellow digital expert Koray Peksayar and lawyer Ali Aktaş, who have spent months investigating thousands of cases like Elif's. In so doing, they say they have uncovered a massive cyber-conspiracy.

The Bylock 'trap'

Bylock was a free messaging app used between 2014 and 2016. Available in the Google and Apple app stores for part of that time, it was a less sophisticated version of Whatsapp, but more secretive — you could only communicate with others on the network if you knew their usernames.

Beşikçi and Peksayar say it was designed by Gülenists to communicate with each other. Beşikçi believes the app was also a way for the organization to surveil its own members.

Beşikçi said Bylock was downloaded roughly half a million times and had 215,000 registered users. About 100,000 of them were identified by the Turkish government as "real users."

Many people downloaded the app willingly, but many who had no traces of it on their phones are also being accused — and Beşikçi and Peksayar have now shown why.

Beşikçi said it was due to a single line of code, which created a window "one pixel high, one pixel wide" — essentially invisible to the human eye — to Bylock.net. Hypothetically, people could be accused of accessing the site without having knowingly viewed it.

That line redirected people to the Bylock server using several other applications, including a Spotify-like music app called Freezy and apps to look up prayer times or find the direction of Mecca. Some people have been accused because someone they shared a wifi connection with was linked to Bylock.

Beşikçi and Peksayar believe it was a deliberate "trap," and allege that the creators were trying to conceal who was and wasn't a member of the Gülen organization after Gülen himself fell out of favour with the Turkish government amid concerns the group was gaining too much power in the state.

Clearing names

Akif Demir, a self-described conservative nationalist, wished the worst on people accused of using Bylock and being associated with the Gülenists. That is, until authorities said he was one of them.

"We were ignorant," the 29-year-old high school teacher concedes.

In October 2016, when his wife was pregnant with their first child, Demir was called into his principal's office. He wouldn't be allowed to work at the school — or anywhere else for that matter — anymore. He had been deemed a Bylock user.

"If they said, 'Write a script about the worst-case scenario about your life,' I could never have imagined this, that I would be accused of being a member of a terror group," Demir said.

He handed over his phone and made a statement to police even before they came to arrest him, determined to prove his innocence. When he was questioned, Demir said police asked him about a single phone call placed a year earlier.

He searched his memory — it was a real estate agent he'd called when looking for his first home with his wife. That agent was also accused of using Bylock.

Months later, with no progress in his case, Demir's wife found social media messages Aktaş, Beşikçi and Peksayar had been spreading, telling potential victims they may be able to clear their names. Demir sent them a video pleading his case, along with proof from Google — purchases in the app store showed he had downloaded a prayer time app that experts were showing was linked with Bylock.net.

A rare admission

The Turkish government and the country's courts rarely admit they are wrong, but in December, they revealed the gravity of the mistake they'd made by publishing a list of 11,480 mobile phone numbers. Each number represented a person wrongly accused of terrorism in the Bylock affair.

Demir's phone number was on the list. He considers himself lucky.

Some, including Tayyip Sina Dogan, sat in prison for months. The helicopter technician was on the helicopter that transported President Erdogan as the coup unfolded in July 2016. He has only just returned to his post.

Beşikçi said the severity of the accusations pushed some to attempt suicide.

"Some called me at midnight crying, begging me, because we were the only ones listening to them," Beşikçi said. "We convinced them. We told them we're working on it."

Others could not wait. There are reports that four people on the list took their own lives before they could be exonerated.

Aktaş said Bylock "was seen as a definitive, important piece of evidence" in the hunt to weed out Gülenists. Accepting Bylock cases was dangerous; any more than six at a time would have put him in jeopardy, Aktaş said.

Aktaş, who is based in Antalya on Turkey's Mediterranean coast, describes an atmosphere "where everyone was suspicious of everyone else," pitting neighbour against neighbour, sibling against sibling.

"There was no room for argument," with prosecutors and judges, Aktaş said.

The team believes a few factors helped them finally convince prosecutors and judges that so many of the accused were innocent. For one, there were concerns people within the government were being falsely accused.

Beşikçi was already an accredited forensic expert with the Istanbul courts and had connections in the capital, Ankara. Peksayar and Aktaş have connections to a nationalist party in Turkey; if not close to the government, they're not outspoken voices against it, either.

Relief and fear

Akif Demir is now back at work. After months of driving by his school heartbroken, he said he feels indebted to the team that worked to save him.

While the team is being flooded with calls of thanks and promises of prayers from people now cleared, they're still getting calls and Twitter messages from people still desperate for help.

On the day I was there, Beşikçi said he has about 200 mobile phones in his office to investigate.

"We have 81 cities in Turkey — I have victims from each and every city," he said.

Elif has yet to taste the happiness of freedom — her phone number was not on the recent list of wrongly accused.

Her husband, a member of the Turkish navy, lost his job simply because of the accusations against her.

After a week in custody, Elif and her family have been living with her parents in another Turkish city. Like many of the victims, they are surviving on the kindness of family and friends.

"Living in fear is an awful thing," Elif said. "What's going to happen?"

Aktaş thinks the remaining thousands he and the forensic experts believe were wrongly accused will be released eventually. He said the climate in Turkey, at least on this file, is changing.

These people "are owed an apology and compensation," he said.

Payment on those debts, and the release of the innocent, will come, Aktaş said. "Even if it happens late, it will happen."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/terrify...jail-1.4495021





UK Mass Digital Surveillance Regime Ruled Unlawful

Judges say snooper’s charter lacks adequate safeguards around accessing personal data
Alan Travis

Appeal court judges have ruled the government’s mass digital surveillance regime unlawful in a case brought by the Labour deputy leader, Tom Watson.

Liberty, the human rights campaign group which represented Watson in the case, said the ruling meant significant parts of theInvestigatory Powers Act 2016 – known as the snooper’s charter – are effectively unlawful and must be urgently changed.

The court of appeal ruling on Tuesday said the powers in the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Act 2014, which paved the way for the snooper’s charter legislation, did not restrict the accessing of confidential personal phone and web browsing records to investigations of serious crime, and allowed police and other public bodies to authorise their own access without adequate oversight.

The three judges said Dripa was “inconsistent with EU law” because of this lack of safeguards, including the absence of “prior review by a court or independent administrative authority”.

Responding to the ruling, Watson said: “This legislation was flawed from the start. It was rushed through parliament just before recess without proper parliamentary scrutiny.

“The government must now bring forward changes to the Investigatory Powers Act to ensure that hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom are innocent victims or witnesses to crime, are protected by a system of independent approval for access to communications data. I’m proud to have played my part in safeguarding citizens’ fundamental rights.”

Martha Spurrier, the director of Liberty, said: “Yet again a UK court has ruled the government’s extreme mass surveillance regime unlawful. This judgement tells ministers in crystal clear terms that they are breaching the public’s human rights.”

She said no politician was above the law. “When will the government stop bartering with judges and start drawing up a surveillance law that upholds our democratic freedoms?”

The Home Office announced a series of safeguards in November in anticipation of the ruling. They include removing the power of self-authorisation for senior police officers and requiring approval for requests for confidential communications data to be granted by the new investigatory powers commissioner. Watson and other campaigners said the safeguards were “half-baked” and did not go far enough.

The judges, headed by Sir Geoffrey Vos, declined to rule on the Home Office claim that the more rigorous “Watson safeguards” were not necessary for the use of bulk communications data for wider national security purposes.

The judges said the appeal court did not need to rule on this point because it had already been referred to the European court of justice in a case which is due to be heard in February.

Watson launched his legal challenge in 2014 in partnership with David Davis, who withdrew when he entered the government as Brexit secretary in 2016. The European court of justice ruled in December 2016 that the “general and indiscriminate retention” of confidential personal communications data was unlawful without safeguards, including independent judicial authorisation.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/...oopers-charter





Report Alleges Police Use Secret Evidence Collected by Feds to Make Arrests
Eric Westervelt

Branches of America's federal law enforcement and intelligence services may be secretly helping state and local police arrest suspects every day in ways that raise fundamental questions about defendants' civil and due process rights, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report.

The report makes the case that federal law enforcers, police and local prosecutors are concealing the origins of evidence and intelligence in scores of criminal cases, especially drug arrests. The intelligence may include National Security Agency mass surveillance programs, wiretaps, computer and phone surveillance, and physical surveillance.

Defendants, the report says, often have no idea about the underlying investigative tactics and constitutionally dubious methods, including warrantless searches, that may have been used in gathering evidence against them.

The report's lead author, Sarah St. Vincent, says hiding the evidentiary trail opens the door to law enforcement abuse and misconduct.

"You could have interactions between the prosecution and the intelligence community that are preventing this stuff from coming to light," St. Vincent says. "People may be imprisoned without ever knowing enough to challenge the potentially rights-violating origins of the cases against them.".

That is because police and prosecutors routinely create alternative or parallel stories for how they discovered the information to hide the intelligence-gathering techniques from wider courtroom or legal scrutiny. This concealment practice, known as "parallel construction," most often involves traffic stops and car searches.

Civil libertarians won a potentially important victory on the issue this week when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the government will need to reveal more via the Freedom of Information Act about location-tracking surveillance technology used in criminal investigations.

In a statement, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, which filed the suit, called the ruling "a victory for democratic accountability and government transparency" because it "prevents the government from cloaking its surveillance policies in secrecy simply because they were written by lawyers or because they implicate potential criminal prosecutions. The public now has a right to know basic information about some of the government's surveillance techniques."

But one problematic area the Human Rights Watch report mentions — the legal analyses and specific arguments U.S. attorneys make in response to suppression motions — was ruled exempt from disclosure as privileged "attorney work product."

Dubious traffic stops

The report identified several agencies — including the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — that often secretly feed information to local law enforcement.

But the report singles out the Drug Enforcement Administration as the most active in helping to mask the origins of evidence by tipping off police to vehicle searches, traffic enforcement that police call "whisper" or "wall" stops.

"Under this practice, a law enforcement or intelligence agency, possibly using information obtained by various forms of surveillance, asks state or local police to find a pretext — often a minor traffic violation — to stop a suspect and then develop a reason to search their vehicle," the report says.

The rights group says most defendants and their attorneys often have no idea and would find it difficult to prove that the government is using evidence gathering like parallel construction.

"Taken to its worst logical conclusion, parallel construction risks creating a country in which people and communities are perpetually vulnerable to investigations based on prejudice, vast illegal operations or official misconduct, but have no means of learning about these problems and holding agents to account," the report says.

How widespread?

Parallel construction and the wider debate over its legality is not new. And the report concedes it's not clear how widespread the practice is. But the rights group believes such tactics are used far more often than the public is aware.

"We have sources on the record saying that there's a unit within the DEA called the Special Operations Division that is distributing tips (to local police) that lead to investigations or prosecutions daily," St. Vincent says. "We don't know what they might be doing that they're not disclosing. Even the things that they do admit to doing could potentially be used to hide something else. It's really hard to say how many layers there are in this onion."

A spokesman for the DEA did not respond to several requests for comment on the Human Rights Watch report. ICE and the FBI also declined to comment on the report.

The report is based on court records from 95 federal and state criminal cases; two dozen interviews with defense attorneys, current and former US officials, and other people with specialized knowledge about the potential deliberate concealment of evidence; and analyses of executive branch documents.

The report says a former federal prosecutor told Human Rights Watch that he was occasionally troubled by the pretexual car stops and searches, but at day's end, they were justified. "Does it bother me a little? Yeah," the former prosecutor told the group on the condition of anonymity. "But if it's gonna stop 100 keys [kilograms of drugs] from getting on the street, it's OK by me. I didn't make the rules. I just play by them."

The group's report echoes concerns raised, as we've reported, on government and local police use of what are called stingray devices. This phone surveillance technology can mimic a wireless carrier cell tower to capture cellphone information, including a suspect's precise location, records of outgoing and incoming calls and text messages and, if need be, to listen in on a call. A judge last year fined the city of Tacoma, Wash., for violating the Public Records Act by hiding details of its stingray cellphone surveillance equipment.

Is it legal?

As far as many defendants know, their case started with a broken tail light or improperly tinted windows. It's only if the government later decides to reveal its underlying source — which it almost never does — that the defense can challenge whether the car stop was done constitutionally. Otherwise, a defendant may never know.

Federal and state agencies believe parallel construction is legal in most cases.

But the report says that assessment is based on government lawyers' own interpretations of cases relating to what is called the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine, in which a judge bars the prosecution from introducing evidence the government obtained through illegal activities. In essence, the government may be concealing certain investigative activities based on its own determination that it's not tainted by unlawful conduct.

"The problem we have here is that we apparently have the government deciding for itself what counts as a genuinely independent source of information or what constitutes inevitable discovery," St. Vincent says. "Covering up how evidence was originally found deliberately hoodwinks defendants and judges, severely weakening constitutional fair trial rights," St. Vincent says.

Solutions?

St. Vincent argues that it's up to judges and defense attorneys to challenge the origins and details of evidence and push back against stonewalling. In the case of "whisper"or pretext traffic stops, she says, we need to ask, "Why was the officer there? Why was the car stopped and under what circumstances?"

She hopes defense attorneys can use the report to tell judges "my concerns are real. The government does engage in this practice. I would like to get some information out of the prosecution."

"It's really on everyone — including prosecutors — to be asking how agents got the evidence," St. Vincent says. "Everyone in this process needs to be taking a really good, clear, skeptical look at what might have been done at the root of the case."
https://www.npr.org/2018/02/01/57836...o-make-arrests





Faked: The Headquarters. The Followers. The Influence?
Ed Winstead

The world of social media has become a de facto public square. Much of our politics and business is conducted there, yet it remains in many ways a kind of Wild West. Today’s report is one of the first to shed light on the machinations taking place in the shadows: a sketchy digital economy where fake accounts known as bots, some modeled on real users, are bought and sold — the lifeblood of a booming trade in influence and deception.

The investigation began last March, when Gabriel Dance, a deputy investigations editor at The Times, ran into an old friend, Mark Hansen, at a conference. Mr. Hansen, the director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Columbia University, had been studying the use of bots on social media. He mentioned that Devumi, a company selling social media followers to users hoping to increase their influence (or manufacture its appearance), seemed to be using bots with information, pictures and biographies taken from real users. (Selling followers is ostensibly a violation of the rules of most social media platforms — Twitter forbids buying followers, retweets or likes, for instance.)

The Times investigative team was already exploring social media manipulation, “partly because of the Russia investigation, and reporting into firms like Cambridge Analytica,” said Nicholas Confessore, a reporter for the team, referring to a data company that worked for Donald J. Trump during the presidential campaign and is now under congressional scrutiny. “We were looking for a way into describing the economy of false influence on social media.” Devumi would be an exemplar of how that economy worked.

To begin untangling Devumi’s bots from real Twitter users, the Times team purchased tens of thousands of bot followers, including from Devumi itself (25,000 at a cost of $225). The team could then analyze the overlaps in whom the bots were following — a group so wildly disparate and geographically diverse that there was little chance so many humans were following them all — and thus begin to track which users were probably paying for them. Combing through those users’ followers led to still more bots, who led the team to yet more users. The result, Mr. Confessore said, was a “world of fake accounts that were interconnected.” Millions of them.

“On an account-by-account basis, it can be very difficult to tell if something’s a bot,” Mr. Dance said. “Some things are just weird. There are weird people.” On the aggregate, however, certain tellingly inorganic patterns become apparent. So Mr. Hansen of Columbia University, along with the graphics editor Richard Harris and Jeremy Ashkenas, formerly of The Times, developed software that would pull data from Twitter that the team could then analyze. Thousands of accounts all simultaneously deciding to follow the same real Twitter user, for example, was “a very strong indicator of centralized control,” Mr. Harris said. “And so we had this process that we called fingerprinting, which allowed us to pretty easily look at someone’s Twitter account and determine whether they had artificial followers or not.”

While all this data-crunching went on, Mr. Confessore pursued more traditional lines of reporting. He visited the office Devumi listed on its website, on 7th Avenue in Manhattan, only to find no trace it had ever been there. He contacted former employees, dug up business records, and eventually was able to review thousands of internal Devumi records, allowing The Times to confirm its findings and expand the data analysis. He also reached out to Devumi’s founder, German Calas, who denied selling bots and then stopped responding when presented with examples of fake accounts.

“It’s through the triangulation of all those different pieces that we arrived at conclusions that we’re very confident about,” Mr. Harris said. The world of social media is, as he put it, “a complex of private companies, with immense power right now. And we have to find ways to report on their products that don’t depend on them for information.”

“People have suspected for a long time that social media is rotten with fraud and fakery. But it’s very hard to prove,” Mr. Confessore said. “And now, I think, perhaps for the first time, we’ve been able to show the entire economy at work.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/i...on-devumi.html





Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware

A dive into the thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking.
Jason Koebler

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

"When crunch time comes and we break down, chances are we don't have time to wait for a dealership employee to show up and fix it," Danny Kluthe, a hog farmer in Nebraska, told his state legislature earlier this month. "Most all the new equipment [requires] a download [to fix]."

The nightmare scenario, and a fear I heard expressed over and over again in talking with farmers, is that John Deere could remotely shut down a tractor and there wouldn't be anything a farmer could do about it.

A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for "crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software." The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and "authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors.

"If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it," Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. "You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can't drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part."

"What you've got is technicians running around here with cracked Ukrainian John Deere software that they bought off the black market," he added.

Kenney and Kluthe have been pushing for right-to-repair legislation in Nebraska that would invalidate John Deere's license agreement (seven other states are considering similar bills). In the meantime, farmers have started hacking their machines because even simple repairs are made impossible by the embedded software within the tractor. John Deere is one of the staunchest opponents of this legislation.

"There's software out there a guy can get his hands on if he looks for it," one farmer and repair mechanic in Nebraska who uses cracked John Deere software told me. "I'm not a big business or anything, but let's say you've got a guy here who has a tractor and something goes wrong with it—the nearest dealership is 40 miles away, but you've got me or a diesel shop a mile away. The only way we can fix things is illegally, which is what's holding back free enterprise more than anything and hampers a farmer's ability to get stuff done, too."

I went searching for one of the forums where pirated John Deere firmware is sold. After I found it, I couldn't do much of anything without joining. I was sent an email with instructions, which required me to buy a $25 dummy diagnostic part from a third-party website. Instead of the part, I was sent a code to join the forum.

Once I was on it, I found dozens of threads from farmers desperate to fix and modify their own tractors. According to people on the forums and the farmers who use it, much of the software is cracked in Eastern European countries such as Poland and Ukraine and then sold back to farmers in the United States.

Among the programs I saw being traded:

• John Deere Service Advisor: A diagnostic program used by John Deere technicians that recalibrate tractors and can diagnose broken parts. "It can program payloads into different controllers. It can calibrate injectors, turbo, engine hours and all kinds of fun stuff," someone familiar with the software told me.
• John Deere Payload files: These are files that specifically program certain parts of the vehicle. There are files that can customize and fine-tune the performance of the chassis, engine, and cab, for instance.
• John Deere Electronic Data Link drivers: This is software that allows a computer to talk to the tractor. "The EDL is the required interface which allows the Service Advisor laptop to actually communicate with the tractor controllers," the source told me.

A reverse engineer who goes by Decryptor Tuning, who I met on a forum, told me they distribute programs that are "usually OEM software that is freely available but must be licensed."

"If things could get better, [companies like John Deere] should be forced to freely distribute the same software dealers have," they said. "And stop locking down [Engine Control Module] reading functionality. They do this to force you to use their services, which they have a 100 percent monopoly on."

Also for sale (or free download) on the forums are license key generators, speed-limit modifiers, and reverse-engineered cables that allow you to connect a tractor to a computer. These programs are also for sale on several sketchy-looking websites that are hosted in Europe, and on YouTube there are demos of the software in operation.

On its face, pirating such software would seem to be illegal. But in 2015, the Librarian of Congress approved an exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for land vehicles, which includes tractors. The exemption allows modification of "computer programs that are contained in and control the functioning of a motorized land vehicle such as a personal automobile, commercial motor vehicle or mechanized agricultural vehicle … when circumvention is a necessary step undertaken by the authorized owner of the vehicle to allow the diagnosis, repair, or lawful modification of a vehicle function."

This means modification of embedded software is legal long as it can still meet emission requirements. Whether the exemption allows for the downloading of cracked software is an unanswered question.

It's no surprise, then, that John Deere started requiring farmers to sign licensing agreements around the time the exemption went into effect. Violation of the agreement would be considered a breach of contract rather than a federal copyright violation, meaning John Deere would have to sue its own customers if it wants the contract to be enforced. I asked John Deere specifically about the fact that a software black market has cropped up for its tractors, but the company instead said that there are no repair problems for John Deere customers.

"When a customer buys John Deere equipment, he or she owns the equipment," the company said. "As the owner, he or she has the ability to maintain and repair the equipment. The customer also has the ability through operator and service manuals and other resources to enable operational, maintenance, service and diagnostics activities to repair and maintain equipment."

"Software modifications increase the risk that equipment will not function as designed," the company continued. "As a result, allowing unqualified individuals to modify equipment software can endanger machine performance, in addition to Deere customers, dealers and others, resulting in equipment that no longer complies with industry and safety/environmental regulations."

Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of Repair.org, a trade organization fighting for right-to-repair legislation, told me that John Deere's statement is "total crap," and noted that "some of our members have repeatedly attempted to buy the diagnostics that are referenced [from John Deere] and been rebuffed."

"They require buyers to accept an End User License Agreement that disallows all of the activities they say are allowed in their statement," she said. "Deere is a monopolist and has systematically taken over the role of equipment owner, despite having been paid fairly and fully for equipment. Their claims to control equipment post-purchase are inconsistent with all aspects of ownership including accounting, taxation, and transfer of products into the secondary market."

It's quite simple, really. John Deere sold farmers their tractors, but has used software to maintain control of every aspect of its use after the sale. Kluthe, for example, uses pig manure to power his tractor, which requires engine modifications that would likely violate John Deere's terms of service on newer machines.

"I take the hog waste and run it through an anaerobic digester and I've learned to compress the methane," he said. "I run an 80 percent methane in my Chevy Diesel Pickup and I run 90 percent methane in my tractor. And they both purr. I take a lot of pride in working on my equipment."

Farmers worry what will happen if John Deere is bought by another company, or what will happen if the company decides to stop servicing its tractors. And so they have taken matters into their own hands by taking control of the software themselves.

"What happens in 20 years when there's a new tractor out and John Deere doesn't want to fix these anymore?" the farmer using Ukrainian software told me. "Are we supposed to throw the tractor in the garbage, or what?"
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...inian-firmware





The Era of Quantum Computing Is Here. Outlook: Cloudy

Quantum computers should soon be able to beat classical computers at certain basic tasks. But before they’re truly powerful, researchers have to overcome a number of fundamental roadblocks.
Philip Ball

After decades of heavy slog with no promise of success, quantum computing is suddenly buzzing with almost feverish excitement and activity. Nearly two years ago, IBM made a quantum computer available to the world: the 5-quantum-bit (qubit) resource they now call (a little awkwardly) the IBM Q experience. That seemed more like a toy for researchers than a way of getting any serious number crunching done. But 70,000 users worldwide have registered for it, and the qubit count in this resource has now quadrupled. In the past few months, IBM and Intel have announced that they have made quantum computers with 50 and 49 qubits, respectively, and Google is thought to have one waiting in the wings. “There is a lot of energy in the community, and the recent progress is immense,” said physicist Jens Eisert of the Free University of Berlin.

There is now talk of impending “quantum supremacy”: the moment when a quantum computer can carry out a task beyond the means of today’s best classical supercomputers. That might sound absurd when you compare the bare numbers: 50 qubits versus the billions of classical bits in your laptop. But the whole point of quantum computing is that a quantum bit counts for much, much more than a classical bit. Fifty qubits has long been considered the approximate number at which quantum computing becomes capable of calculations that would take an unfeasibly long time classically. Midway through 2017, researchers at Google announced that they hoped to have demonstrated quantum supremacy by the end of the year. (When pressed for an update, a spokesperson recently said that “we hope to announce results as soon as we can, but we’re going through all the detailed work to ensure we have a solid result before we announce.”)

It would be tempting to conclude from all this that the basic problems are solved in principle and the path to a future of ubiquitous quantum computing is now just a matter of engineering. But that would be a mistake. The fundamental physics of quantum computing is far from solved and can’t be readily disentangled from its implementation.

Even if we soon pass the quantum supremacy milestone, the next year or two might be the real crunch time for whether quantum computers will revolutionize computing. There’s still everything to play for and no guarantee of reaching the big goal.

Both the benefits and the challenges of quantum computing are inherent in the physics that permits it. The basic story has been told many times, though not always with the nuance that quantum mechanics demands. Classical computers encode and manipulate information as strings of binary digits — 1 or 0. Quantum bits do the same, except that they may be placed in a so-called superposition of the states 1 and 0, which means that a measurement of the qubit’s state could elicit the answer 1 or 0 with some well-defined probability.

To perform a computation with many such qubits, they must all be sustained in interdependent superpositions of states — a “quantum-coherent” state, in which the qubits are said to be entangled. That way, a tweak to one qubit may influence all the others. This means that somehow computational operations on qubits count for more than they do for classical bits. The computational resources increase in simple proportion to the number of bits for a classical device, but adding an extra qubit potentially doubles the resources of a quantum computer. This is why the difference between a 5-qubit and a 50-qubit machine is so significant.

Note that I’ve not said — as it often is said — that a quantum computer has an advantage because the availability of superpositions hugely increases the number of states it can encode, relative to classical bits. Nor have I said that entanglement permits many calculations to be carried out in parallel. (Indeed, a strong degree of qubit entanglement isn’t essential.) There’s an element of truth in those descriptions — some of the time — but none captures the essence of quantum computing.

It’s hard to say qualitatively why quantum computing is so powerful precisely because it is hard to specify what quantum mechanics means at all. The equations of quantum theory certainly show that it will work: that, at least for some classes of computation such as factorization or database searches, there is tremendous speedup of the calculation. But how exactly?

Perhaps the safest way to describe quantum computing is to say that quantum mechanics somehow creates a “resource” for computation that is unavailable to classical devices. As quantum theorist Daniel Gottesman of the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Canada, put it, “If you have enough quantum mechanics available, in some sense, then you have speedup, and if not, you don’t.”

Some things are clear, though. To carry out a quantum computation, you need to keep all your qubits coherent. And this is very hard. Interactions of a system of quantum-coherent entities with their surrounding environment create channels through which the coherence rapidly “leaks out” in a process called decoherence. Researchers seeking to build quantum computers must stave off decoherence, which they can currently do only for a fraction of a second. That challenge gets ever greater as the number of qubits — and hence the potential to interact with the environment — increases. This is largely why, even though quantum computing was first proposed by Richard Feynman in 1982 and the theory was worked out in the early 1990s, it has taken until now to make devices that can actually perform a meaningful computation.

Quantum Errors

There’s a second fundamental reason why quantum computing is so difficult. Like just about every other process in nature, it is noisy. Random fluctuations, from heat in the qubits, say, or from fundamentally quantum-mechanical processes, will occasionally flip or randomize the state of a qubit, potentially derailing a calculation. This is a hazard in classical computing too, but it’s not hard to deal with — you just keep two or more backup copies of each bit so that a randomly flipped bit stands out as the odd one out.

Researchers working on quantum computers have created strategies for how to deal with the noise. But these strategies impose a huge debt of computational overhead — all your computing power goes to correcting errors and not to running your algorithms. “Current error rates significantly limit the lengths of computations that can be performed,” said Andrew Childs, the codirector of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science at the University of Maryland. “We’ll have to do a lot better if we want to do something interesting.”

A lot of research on the fundamentals of quantum computing has been devoted to error correction. Part of the difficulty stems from another of the key properties of quantum systems: Superpositions can only be sustained as long as you don’t measure the qubit’s value. If you make a measurement, the superposition collapses to a definite value: 1 or 0. So how can you find out if a qubit has an error if you don’t know what state it is in?

One ingenious scheme involves looking indirectly, by coupling the qubit to another “ancilla” qubit that doesn’t take part in the calculation but that can be probed without collapsing the state of the main qubit itself. It’s complicated to implement, though. Such solutions mean that, to construct a genuine “logical qubit” on which computation with error correction can be performed, you need many physical qubits.

How many? Quantum theorist Alán Aspuru-Guzik of Harvard University estimates that around 10,000 of today’s physical qubits would be needed to make a single logical qubit — a totally impractical number. If the qubits get much better, he said, this number could come down to a few thousand or even hundreds. Eisert is less pessimistic, saying that on the order of 800 physical qubits might already be enough, but even so he agrees that “the overhead is heavy,” and for the moment we need to find ways of coping with error-prone qubits.

An alternative to correcting errors is avoiding them or canceling out their influence: so-called error mitigation. Researchers at IBM, for example, are developing schemes for figuring out mathematically how much error is likely to have been incurred in a computation and then extrapolating the output of a computation to the “zero noise” limit.

Some researchers think that the problem of error correction will prove intractable and will prevent quantum computers from achieving the grand goals predicted for them. “The task of creating quantum error-correcting codes is harder than the task of demonstrating quantum supremacy,” said mathematician Gil Kalai of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. And he adds that “devices without error correction are computationally very primitive, and primitive-based supremacy is not possible.” In other words, you’ll never do better than classical computers while you’ve still got errors.

Others believe the problem will be cracked eventually. According to Jay Gambetta, a quantum information scientist at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center, “Our recent experiments at IBM have demonstrated the basic elements of quantum error correction on small devices, paving the way towards larger-scale devices where qubits can reliably store quantum information for a long period of time in the presence of noise.” Even so, he admits that “a universal fault-tolerant quantum computer, which has to use logical qubits, is still a long way off.” Such developments make Childs cautiously optimistic. “I’m sure we’ll see improved experimental demonstrations of [error correction], but I think it will be quite a while before we see it used for a real computation,” he said.

Living With Errors

For the time being, quantum computers are going to be error-prone, and the question is how to live with that. At IBM, researchers are talking about “approximate quantum computing” as the way the field will look in the near term: finding ways of accommodating the noise.

This calls for algorithms that tolerate errors, getting the correct result despite them. It’s a bit like working out the outcome of an election regardless of a few wrongly counted ballot papers. “A sufficiently large and high-fidelity quantum computation should have some advantage [over a classical computation] even if it is not fully fault-tolerant,” said Gambetta.

One of the most immediate error-tolerant applications seems likely to be of more value to scientists than to the world at large: to simulate stuff at the atomic level. (This, in fact, was the motivation that led Feynman to propose quantum computing in the first place.) The equations of quantum mechanics prescribe a way to calculate the properties — such as stability and chemical reactivity — of a molecule such as a drug. But they can’t be solved classically without making lots of simplifications.

In contrast, the quantum behavior of electrons and atoms, said Childs, “is relatively close to the native behavior of a quantum computer.” So one could then construct an exact computer model of such a molecule. “Many in the community, including me, believe that quantum chemistry and materials science will be one of the first useful applications of such devices,” said Aspuru-Guzik, who has been at the forefront of efforts to push quantum computing in this direction.

Quantum simulations are proving their worth even on the very small quantum computers available so far. A team of researchers including Aspuru-Guzik has developed an algorithm that they call the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE), which can efficiently find the lowest-energy states of molecules even with noisy qubits. So far it can only handle very small molecules with few electrons, which classical computers can already simulate accurately. But the capabilities are getting better, as Gambetta and coworkers showed last September when they used a 6-qubit device at IBM to calculate the electronic structures of molecules, including lithium hydride and beryllium hydride. The work was “a significant leap forward for the quantum regime,” according to physical chemist Markus Reiher of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. “The use of the VQE for the simulation of small molecules is a great example of the possibility of near-term heuristic algorithms,” said Gambetta.

But even for this application, Aspuru-Guzik confesses that logical qubits with error correction will probably be needed before quantum computers truly begin to surpass classical devices. “I would be really excited when error-corrected quantum computing begins to become a reality,” he said.

“If we had more than 200 logical qubits, we could do things in quantum chemistry beyond standard approaches,” Reiher adds. “And if we had about 5,000 such qubits, then the quantum computer would be transformative in this field.”

What’s Your Volume?

Despite the challenges of reaching those goals, the fast growth of quantum computers from 5 to 50 qubits in barely more than a year has raised hopes. But we shouldn’t get too fixated on these numbers, because they tell only part of the story. What matters is not just — or even mainly — how many qubits you have, but how good they are, and how efficient your algorithms are.

Any quantum computation has to be completed before decoherence kicks in and scrambles the qubits. Typically, the groups of qubits assembled so far have decoherence times of a few microseconds. The number of logic operations you can carry out during that fleeting moment depends on how quickly the quantum gates can be switched — if this time is too slow, it really doesn’t matter how many qubits you have at your disposal. The number of gate operations needed for a calculation is called its depth: Low-depth (shallow) algorithms are more feasible than high-depth ones, but the question is whether they can be used to perform useful calculations.

What’s more, not all qubits are equally noisy. In theory it should be possible to make very low-noise qubits from so-called topological electronic states of certain materials, in which the “shape” of the electron states used for encoding binary information confers a kind of protection against random noise. Researchers at Microsoft, most prominently, are seeking such topological states in exotic quantum materials, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll be found or will be controllable.

Researchers at IBM have suggested that the power of a quantum computation on a given device be expressed as a number called the “quantum volume,” which bundles up all the relevant factors: number and connectivity of qubits, depth of algorithm, and other measures of the gate quality, such as noisiness. It’s really this quantum volume that characterizes the power of a quantum computation, and Gambetta said that the best way forward right now is to develop quantum-computational hardware that increases the available quantum volume.

This is one reason why the much vaunted notion of quantum supremacy is more slippery than it seems. The image of a 50-qubit (or so) quantum computer outperforming a state-of-the-art supercomputer sounds alluring, but it leaves a lot of questions hanging. Outperforming for which problem? How do you know the quantum computer has got the right answer if you can’t check it with a tried-and-tested classical device? And how can you be sure that the classical machine wouldn’t do better if you could find the right algorithm?

So quantum supremacy is a concept to handle with care. Some researchers prefer now to talk about “quantum advantage,” which refers to the speedup that quantum devices offer without making definitive claims about what is best. An aversion to the word “supremacy” has also arisen because of the racial and political implications.

Whatever you choose to call it, a demonstration that quantum computers can do things beyond current classical means would be psychologically significant for the field. “Demonstrating an unambiguous quantum advantage will be an important milestone,” said Eisert — it would prove that quantum computers really can extend what is technologically possible.

That might still be more of a symbolic gesture than a transformation in useful computing resources. But such things may matter, because if quantum computing is going to succeed, it won’t be simply by the likes of IBM and Google suddenly offering their classy new machines for sale. Rather, it’ll happen through an interactive and perhaps messy collaboration between developers and users, and the skill set will evolve in the latter only if they have sufficient faith that the effort is worth it. This is why both IBM and Google are keen to make their devices available as soon as they’re ready. As well as a 16-qubit IBM Q experience offered to anyone who registers online, IBM now has a 20-qubit version for corporate clients, including JP Morgan Chase, Daimler, Honda, Samsung and the University of Oxford. Not only will that help clients discover what’s in it for them; it should create a quantum-literate community of programmers who will devise resources and solve problems beyond what any individual company could muster.

“For quantum computing to take traction and blossom, we must enable the world to use and to learn it,” said Gambetta. “This period is for the world of scientists and industry to focus on getting quantum-ready.”
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-e...oudy-20180124/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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