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Old 07-03-18, 08:26 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 10th, ’18

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"After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn’t newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad." – Farhad Manjoo






































March 10th, 2018




Pirates are Selling Cheap, Live TV and Some Canadians are Signing Up

Unauthorized services are 'basically designed to replicate your cable experience'
Sophia Harris

The offers sound too good to be true: pay a small monthly fee and get access to thousands of live TV channels from across the globe, offering everything from sports to entertainment.

"Stop paying high prices for cable," touts one ad on Kijiji, offering more than 500 TV channels for a monthly $20 subscription.

"Why pay more when you get it all for less!!!!" says a competitor, offering an even better deal — more than 3,000 channels for just $15 a month.

Of course, there's a catch.

These are third-party dealers selling pirated TV channel subscriptions. Nonetheless, this black market industry is growing globally, and it's catching on with Canadians.

A recent study suggests that 6.5 per cent of North American households have accessed a pirated live TV subscription.

The report was done by Sandvine in Waterloo, Ont., a broadband equipment company that tracks home internet usage. It studied anonymous home internet traffic from thousands of Canadian and U.S. internet providers during the month of September.

Sandvine spokesperson, Dan Deeth, says because these pirated TV services demand a fee, they pose "a real threat" to Canada's cultural industries. That's because if Canadians are paying the pirates, they may have less money to put toward legitimate TV services.

"That money is not going into the pockets of people who worked hard to make the content," he says "This is money being paid to people who have literally stolen content."

The lure of pirated TV

Deeth says if left unchecked, the threat will continue to grow given the appeal of these cheap — although unauthorized — TV services.

"It's basically designed to replicate your cable experience," he says.

The services are also easy to use. They function as IPTV — Internet Protocol television — where users stream the content from the internet onto their TVs, often with the aid of a set-top box.

"Basically, [the pirates are] stealing signals from around the world, digitizing them, and putting them online," says Deeth.

It's also easy to sign up. CBC News did a Google search using the term "IPTV service" and discovered a long list of offerings.

Many websites boast about the multiple channels they offer and cut-rate prices. They also include a page where customers can sign up and pay, often by PayPal, Bitcoin, or credit card.

"People are giving out their credentials to basically pirates," says Deeth.

'They can take HBO'

Already, Canadian content providers are growing nervous about the pirated TV subscription trend.

Shan Chandrasekar heads up the Asian Television Network (ATN), Canada's largest South Asian broadcaster. He's also spearheading an anti-piracy coalition on called FairPlay — backed by Bell, Rogers and CBC — that wants Canada to block piracy websites.

Chandrasekar says his company has lost close to $4 million in revenue over the past five years, and he blames a good portion of the decline on lost subscribers who have turned to piracy, including black market live TV services.

He says those services can steal for free live broadcasts ATN pays big money for, such as the Cricket World Cup.

"It's no longer a program that's being pirated on YouTube," he says. "It is the entire linear channels from around the world."
"They can take HBO from the U.S. directly, they can take all the Canadian channels."

CBC News contacted several IPTV providers we found online. Only one responded — China-based Best IPTV Service.

It offers several different packages such as its best-selling Express subscription for $12 US a month for more than 1,000 channels.

Chunhua Yang with Best IPTV Service said by email that the company is a third-party reseller that simply buys IPTV links to resell "for little profit."

How do you stop it?

To combat the growing pirated TV trend, Deeth says it needs to be tackled on many fronts. Besides targeting the people who operate the services, he says authorities can also work with payment companies used by the pirates.

When Netflix cracked down on people who paid for unblocking services to access content restricted to other countries, PayPal disallowed at least two unblocking companies from offering its payment services.

"The best way to stop this is to make these services unreliable, make it not worth the money," says Deeth.

Chandrasekar says FairPlay's proposal to block piracy websites including illegitimate IPTV services, would also help combat the problem.

"To go after blatant piracy sites is, in our opinion, an extraordinarily simple, common-sense approach."

However, some consumer advocacy groups have criticized this idea, claiming it could lead to rampant internet censorship.

Instead, the groups suggest the best way to combat piracy is to offer cheaper, legal services that give Canadians what they want minus the risks of signing up for a pirated service.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/pira...e-tv-1.4560320





Ten Hours of Static Gets Five Copyright Notices

Sebastian Tomczak blogs about technology and sound, and has a YouTube channel. In 2015, Tomczak uploaded a ten-hour video of white noise. Colloquially, white noise is persistent background noise that can be soothing or that you don’t even notice after a while. More technically, white noise is many frequencies played at equal intensity. In Tomczak’s video, that amounted to ten hours of, basically, static.

In the beginning of 2018, as a result of YouTube’s Content ID system, a series of copyright claims were made against Tomczak’s video. Five different claims were filed on sound that Tomczak created himself. Although the claimants didn’t force Tomczak’s video to be taken down they all opted to monetize it instead. In other words, ads on the ten-hour video would now generate revenue for those claiming copyright on the static.

Normally, getting out of this arrangement would have required Tomczak to go through the lengthy counter-notification process, but Google decided to drop the claims. Tomczak believes it’s because of the publicity his story got. But hoping your takedown goes viral or using the intimidating counter-notification system is not a workable way to get around a takedown notice.

YouTube’s Content ID system works by having people upload their content into a database maintained by YouTube. New uploads are compared to what’s in the database and when the algorithm detects a match, copyright holders are informed. They can then make a claim, forcing it to be taken down, or they can simply opt to make money from ads put on the video.

And so it is that an automated filter matched part of ten hours of white noise to, in one case, two different other white noise videos owned by the same company and resulted in Tomczak getting copyright notices.

Copyright bots like Content ID are tools and, like any tool, can be easily abused. First of all, they can match content but can’t tell the difference between infringement and fair use. And, as what happened in this case, match similar-sounding general noise. These mistakes don’t make the bots great at protecting free speech.

Some lobbyists have advocated for these kinds of bots to be required for platforms hosting third-party content. Beyond the threat to speech, this would be a huge and expensive hurdle for new platforms trying to get off the ground. And, as we can see from this example, it doesn’t work properly without a lot of oversight.
https://www.eff.org/takedowns/ten-ho...yright-notices





U.S. Appeals Court in San Francisco Will Hear Net Neutrality Appeal
David Shepardson

A federal judicial panel said on Thursday that challenges to the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of the Obama era open internet rules will be heard by an appeals court based in San Francisco.

The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict litigation said it randomly selected the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court Nth circuit to hear the consolidated challenges. The FCC declined to comment on the decision.

A dozen challenges have been filed by 22 state attorneys general, public interest groups, internet companies, a California county and the state’s Public Utilities Commission seeking to block the Trump administration’s repeal of landmark rules designed to ensure a free and open internet from taking effect.

The suits were filed in both the Ninth Circuit and District of Columbia appeals court. Of the Ninth Circuit court’s 24 active judges, 18 were appointed by Democratic presidents and six by Republican President George W. Bush. There are six current vacancies and President Donald Trump has nominated two candidates.

The FCC published its order overturning the net neutrality rules in the Federal Register on Feb. 22, a procedural step that allowed for the filing of legal challenges.

The Republican-led FCC in December voted 3-2 to overturn 2015 rules barring service providers from blocking, slowing access to or charging more for certain content on the internet.

Trump in January criticized opponents for filing cases in the Ninth Circuit and asserted in a tweet they “almost always” win before being reversed.

New York, California, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Pennsylvania are among the states challenging the decision, arguing the FCC cannot make “arbitrary and capricious” changes to existing policies and that it misinterpreted and disregarded “critical record evidence on industry practices and harm to consumers and businesses.”

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has said he is confident the order will be upheld.

The White House Office of Management and Budget still must sign off on some aspects of the FCC reversal before it takes legal effect. That could take months.

The repeal of the net neutrality rules was a victory for internet service providers like AT&T Inc, Comcast Corp and Verizon Communications Inc, conferring power over what content consumers can access.

On the other side, technology companies including Alphabet Inc and Facebook Inc have thrown their weight behind a congressional bid to reverse the net neutrality repeal.

Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Cynthia Osterman
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKCN1GK380





Washington Governor Signs First State Net Neutrality Bill
Cecilia Kang

Residents of Washington State are getting so-called net neutrality rules back, with the nation’s first state law that prevents internet service providers from blocking and slowing down content online.

The law, signed on Monday by Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democrat, is the most sweeping state action so far against new federal rules that strip away regulations on how high-speed internet providers handle digital data. The dismantling of the nationwide rules, approved by the Federal Communications Commission last year, set off a fierce outcry from consumers and tech companies.

Opponents of the change in the federal regulations fear that without strong rules, internet service providers will create faster and slower lanes online to extract fees for better service. The F.C.C. said it got rid of the rules because they restrained broadband providers like Verizon and Comcast from experimenting with new business models and investing in new technologies.

The Washington State law, which goes into effect June 6, bars internet service providers from blocking websites or charging more for faster delivery of certain sites in a way that benefits the broadband company and partner websites.

The new law is one of several efforts to counter the F.C.C. change. Lawmakers in about two dozen states have introduced bills similar to Washington’s. And multiple governors, including in New York and Montana, have signed executive actions that prohibit internet service providers with state contracts from blocking or slowing data on their lines.

Several lawsuits against the F.C.C. have also been filed, including by consumer groups and numerous state attorneys general. Another suit was filed Monday by tech companies such as Etsy, Foursquare and Kickstarter.

But the law in Washington State goes further by immediately putting back into place consumer protections provided by the 2015 federal rules. The law passed with broad bipartisan support in the state legislature.

“At the core of our action today is consumer protection,” Mr. Inslee said in an interview. “States need to act because under the Trump administration, we have seen citizens, including seven million in Washington, stripped of core protections like the open internet.”

The actions by the states, both the executive actions and the new Washington law, are almost certain to end up in the courts. The F.C.C. has asserted it has the only authority to oversee broadband internet services, because the data on the internet passes across multiple state lines. In the rules it passed last year to reduce the regulations, the agency explicitly said states could not create their own rules.

Internet service providers could also sue Washington State to overturn its rules. The companies could also sue states whose governors have signed executive orders demanding net neutrality.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/05/b...ton-state.html





ISPs Buy a Wyoming Bill That Blocks Community Broadband
Karl Bode

ISPs continue to buy state laws preventing towns and cities from making their own, local broadband infrastructure decisions. An effort in Wyoming to pass legislation that would award state grants to help rural Wyoming communities get high-speed internet instead got hijacked by CenturyLink and Charter Spectrum lobbyists, resulting in a bill getting passed this week that simply blocked towns and cities from being able to deploy their own broadband networks.

The replacement legislation successfully pushed by ISP lobbyists blocks funding for communities to establish their own public broadband networks -- if those companies already offer service anywhere inside the community.

The replacement bill gives ISPs effective veto power over which programs get funded by the state, letting them hamstring potential competitors, whatever form those competitors might take. Such tactics aren't new: more than twenty-one different states have passed protectionist, ISP-written laws intended to retain the status quo: a notable lack of overall competition.

Community broadband networks are often conceived by communities that have spent the better part of a decade frustrated by high prices, slow speeds, and substandard customer support. Instead of derailing these efforts by improving service quality, coverage and support, ISPs often find it simply easier to quite literally write and buy state telecom law.

Cheyenne Mayor Marion Orr was understandably disgusted by how easy it was for CenturyLink and Charter to buy a state law.

"I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn industry completely re-wrote proposed broadband legislation to their favor as a ‘substitute bill’ in legislative committee today," Orr wrote on Facebook. "The substitute bill is substantially different than the original bill. And it wasn’t posted online or anywhere for anyone except insiders to have access to. CenturyLink and Spectrum are bullies. It’s wrong, and they are hurting Cheyenne and other Wyoming communities from gaining affordable access."

Whether you agree or disagree with towns and cities building their own broadband networks, the choice to do so should be theirs and theirs alone; not governed by executives half a world away whose only real goal is to keep the broadband industry as uncompetitive as possible to boost revenues.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/I...oadband-141382





GOP Tries to Block State Net Neutrality Laws and Allow Paid Prioritization

GOP bill would outlaw blocking and throttling but give major concession to ISPs.
Jon Brodkin

Republicans in Congress are continuing to push a net neutrality law that would preempt state net neutrality rules and let Internet service providers charge online services for prioritized access to Internet users.

The Open Internet Preservation Act would prohibit ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful Internet content but clear the way for paid prioritization or "fast lanes."

US Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) declared that "some cable companies and content providers aren't going to be happy with this bill because it prohibits them from blocking and throttling Web content."

In reality, Comcast and other ISPs have generally said they won't block or throttle lawful Internet traffic. Allowing paid fast lanes would be a major concession to the broadband industry—see our previous story, "AT&T describes post-net neutrality plans for paid prioritization."

The Open Internet Preservation Act was previously introduced in the House by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.). Kennedy filed the Senate version today.

The bill's summary notes that the blocking and throttling bans "do not prevent providers from offering specialized services that are offered over the same network and may share network capacity with the broadband Internet access service."

Net neutrality advocacy group Demand Progress called on Kennedy to drop the bill.

"This legislation would be disastrous for net neutrality, opening the door for large Internet providers to create fast and slow lanes online, which would destroy innovation and stifle free expression," the group said in a statement.

Current net neutrality rules outlaw blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. But those rules are coming off the books as soon as the Federal Communications Commission can finalize its repeal.

States require net neutrality

State governments that support net neutrality, such as Washington and Oregon, have in the meantime been implementing their own rules.

ISPs brought the state-by-state approach upon themselves by lobbying for a federal net neutrality repeal. Now broadband industry lobbyists are complaining that they don't want to face "50 different regulations."

The FCC tried to prevent states from issuing their own net neutrality rules by declaring that such rules would be preempted. But states are banking on legal analysis that suggests the rules might stand up in court.

The state efforts could be undone by Congress, though. In addition to allowing paid fast lanes, the Open Internet Preservation Act would preempt state net neutrality laws.

Democrats have been pushing legislation that would keep the current FCC net neutrality rules in place, but they need more support from Republicans to get a majority.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...id-fast-lanes/





Senator Introduces Fake Net Neutrality Bill Championed By ISPs Then Pretends He's Fighting Against Them

The bill, introduced by Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, mirrors legislation that has been pushed in the House that would enshrine the ability for ISPs to screw you over.
Karl Bode

ISPs continue to push for fake net neutrality legislation in hopes of preventing tougher state or federal rules from taking root.

The FCC’s fall repeal of net neutrality doesn’t rest on particularly sound legal footing. By law, the FCC has to prove that the broadband market changed so dramatically to warrant such a severe reversal of popular policies implemented just a few years ago, something it’ll have a hard time accomplishing given the overwhelming bipartisan public support for the rules.

The agency will also have to account for the shady behavior that occurred during the agency proceeding, including all of the dead people that mysteriously voiced their support for the FCC’s blatant handout to one of the least-competitive industries in America.

Understandably fearing that the FCC’s effort might not survive a court challenge by Mozilla, consumer groups, state attorney generals, and others, ISPs have a backup plan. They’ve convinced ISP-loyal lawmakers like Marsha Blackburn to support fake net neutrality legislation that could actually make the problem worse.

Blackburn’s misleadingly-named Open Internet Preservation Act, introduced in the House last fall, bans behaviors that ISPs weren’t really interested in anyway, such as the outright blocking of certain websites or services. But it intentionally ignores trouble areas where anti-competitive ISP behavior is now actually occurring, such as usage caps, overage fees, zero rating, and the gaming of network interconnection points.

Blackburn, a major recipient of ISP lobbying cash, claims her legislation would hold ISPs accountable, but the intention is more nefarious. The real goal of such bills is to pre-empt the tougher net neutrality rules now taking root across more than half the states in the nation.

In a statement, Kennedy pretended that his bill would somehow upset large ISPs like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon.

Her bill would also prevent the passage of tough rules later by a future FCC or Congress less beholden to the every whim of entrenched broadband monopolies. As an added bonus, it would supplant the FCC’s current, 2015 rules should they withstand legal challenge this spring.

As the FCC’s court battle grows closer and ISP policy folk get more nervous about their chances of success, the push for such legislation is only accelerating.

Case in point, Republican Louisiana Senator John Kennedy this week unveiled his own companion net neutrality bill in the Senate. Kennedy’s legislation mirrors Blackburn’s House version, banning the most heavy-handed net neutrality abuses (which ISPs don't want to do anyway), while ignoring the more elaborate examples of anti-competitive ISP behavior.

In a statement, Kennedy pretended that his bill would somehow upset large ISPs like Comcast, AT&T and Verizon.

“Some cable companies and content providers aren’t going to be happy with this bill because it prohibits them from blocking and throttling web content,” said the Senator. “They won’t be able to micromanage your web surfing or punish you for downloading 50 movies each month.”

But Kennedy’s bill is intentionally full of loopholes. The bill does nothing to thwart anti-competitive abuse of usage caps or zero rating. And his bill doesn’t ban behaviors like paid prioritization, which would allow an ISP to let companies with the deepest pocket get priority on the network, distorting the traditional level internet playing field.

Much like Blackburn did, Kennedy tries to argue that the bill is the best stopgap solution available to Americans, and that anybody that doesn’t support a bill very likely ghost-written by ISP lobbyists aren’t “serious” about protecting the open internet.
"The fact that he thinks his constituents would be fooled by this trojan horse legislation is insulting"

“This bill strikes a compromise that benefits the consumer,” Kennedy proclaimed. “If the Democrats are serious about this issue and finding a permanent solution, then they should come to the table and work with me and Rep. Blackburn on these bills. Does this bill resolve every issue in the net neutrality debate? No, it doesn’t. It's not a silver bullet. But it's a good start.”

Unfortunately for ISPs, support for these legislative efforts has been tepid at best. Democrats aren’t buying the head fake, instead focusing their efforts on reversing the FCC repeal via the Congressional Review Act, an effort that faces a steep uphill climb, but would require net neutrality opponents to clearly illustrate their disdain for the public ahead of the looming midterms.

Consumer groups like Fight For the Future were quick to criticize Kennedy’s solution as a trojan horse proposal ghost-written by incumbent telecom monopolies.

“Louisiana residents, small businesses, and Internet users from across the political spectrum asked Senator Kennedy to be a hero,” said Fight For the Future deputy director Evan Greer. “Instead, he stabbed them in the back.”

“Honestly, the Senator should resign over this,” said Greer. “The fact that he thinks his constituents would be fooled by this trojan horse legislation is insulting. If Senator Kennedy cared one iota about protecting businesses and residents in his state, he would support the Congressional Review Act resolutions to restore net neutrality rules, rather than offering a bill that was basically written by Comcast’s lobbyists, and that has no chance of passing anyway.”

In short, the broadband industry goal here isn’t a compromise so much as it is an active attempt to prevent real protections, especially on the state level. And as ISP lobbyists grow increasingly nervous about the FCC’s chance in court, you can expect the phony drumbeat for this kind of disingenuous net neutrality “solution” to only grow.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...-bill-ajit-pai





Eight Years Later, Google Fiber Is A Faint Echo Of The Disruption We Were Promised

Google’s 'pause' is driven largely by executive frustrations with fiber deployment costs and a fascination with the potential of next-generation wireless.
Karl Bode

In 2010, Google stunned the telecom sector by announcing the company would be jumping into the broadband business. Under the brand banner of Google Fiber, the search giant proclaimed it would be lighting a much-needed fire under the traditionally uncompetitive broadband industry, delivering ultra-fast gigabit connections across the United States.

Initially, the gambit appeared to be paying dividends.

The nation’s media provided Google with an endless wave of free press as cities, frustrated by the high price and slow speeds of existing ISPs, tripped over themselves vying for the company’s affection. The project also drove a much-needed national conversation about a lack of broadband competition in the market and the institutional dysfunction that perpetuates it.

Google Fiber would, we were told, once and for all free the country from the iron grip of regional monopolies like Comcast, delivering ultra-fast broadband at a more reasonable $70 per month price point across huge chunks of the nation. And in initial launch cities like Kansas City, that dream appeared to be quickly coming true.

But that was then, and this is now.

Some eight years on and Google Fiber’s ambitions are just a pale echo of the disruptive potential originally proclaimed by the company.

By late 2016, Google executives clearly started becoming disenfranchised by the slow pace and high costs of digging up the nation’s streets and challenging politically-powerful incumbents.

While Google Fiber did make some impressive early headway in cities like Austin, the company ran into numerous deployment headaches. Fearing competition, incumbent ISPs like AT&T and Comcast began a concerted effort to block the company’s access to essential utility poles, even going so far as to file lawsuits against cities like Nashville that tried to expedite the process.

Even in launched markets, customer uptake wasn’t quite what executives were expecting. Estimates peg Google Fiber TV subscribers at fewer than 100,000, thanks in large part to the cord cutting mindset embraced by early adopters. Broadband subscriber tallies (estimated as at least 500,000) were notably better, but still off from early company projections.

Even without anti-competitive roadblocks, progress was slow. Digging up city streets and burying fiber was already a time-consuming and expensive process. And while Google has tried to accelerate these deployments via something called “microtrenching” (machines that bury fiber an inch below roadways), broadband deployment remains a rough business.

It’s a business made all the rougher by state and local regulators and lawmakers who’ve been in the pockets of entrenched providers like Comcast for the better part of a generation. In many states, incumbent ISPs like AT&T and Comcast quite literally write state telecom law, resulting in protectionist legislation that can often make competition impossible.

By late 2016, Google executives clearly started becoming disenfranchised by the slow pace and high costs of digging up the nation’s streets and challenging politically-powerful incumbents. Company executives announced that they’d be laying off a notable number of employees and temporarily pausing any expansions into new territories.

"In the cities where we've launched or are under construction, our work will continue," said Craig Barratt, then CEO of the Access division at Google that oversaw Google Fiber. He added that for additional cities that were in talks to receive Google Fiber, "we're going to pause our operations and offices while we refine our approaches."

But it wouldn’t take long for Barratt to also leave the company, as Google Fiber burned through two CEOs in less than a year’s time. Barrett was replaced by Greg McCray, former CEO of Aero Communications, who only lasted four months at the job. McCray in turn was recently replaced by former Time Warner Cable executive Dinnie Jain.

Google’s “pause” is driven largely by executive frustrations with fiber deployment costs and a fascination with the potential of next-generation wireless.

The company has been conducting trials in the 71-76 GHz and 81-86 GHz millimeter wave bands, and is also conducting a variety of different tests in the 3.5 GHz band, the 5.8 GHz band and the 24 GHz band. And while these technologies show promise, it’s going to take a while for Google to figure out the best combination of technologies to aid its deployment.

Ideally, Google Fiber’s deployments will accelerate again once Google Fiber executives have a more solid grasp on what next-generation wireless broadband will look like.

And while Google Fiber has focused on wireless as an alternative to deploying fiber, those efforts have faced stiff headwinds as well. In July of 2016 Google acquired Webpass, a wireless ISP focused largely on urban apartment building deployments. But there too Google Fiber’s ambitions appear to be shrinking with the recent news the service would be leaving Boston.

Since Google executives don’t appear to actually know what these evolved wireless efforts will look like yet, the company’s public relation apparatus has been left with little more than a rotating crop of non-answers, sowing further frustration among cities trying to get on the other side of the nation’s vast digital divide.

Users In the company’s initial launch market of Kansas City were frustrated to find their scheduled installations cancelled after years of waiting. Other cities, like Portland, state that they were strung along for more than a year only to be left standing at the altar. Some rumored target markets like San Francisco have decided to move forward on their own.

Speaking at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference this week, Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat insisted that the company’s dedication to disrupting the broadband market remains intact.

“The one thing that has not changed is our view that there is a real need for quality service,” Porat told attendees. “We're still implementing and executing in the cities that we announced, but we've slowed the pace of rollout so that we could spend time on how do we really bring technology to bear in a more meaningful way,” she added.

"As we were looking at our rollouts going back to 2015, 2016, our view was that we had not done enough," Porat said. The CFO added that the company hadn’t yet achieved its "10x moment," or a 10-fold improvement over existing broadband technology it felt was necessary to truly be disruptive.

But again, reports indicate Google Fiber’s price tag is as much a reason for Google Fiber’s pause as its lagging disruptive potential. Porat has been trying to bring some financial constraint to a company long known for throwing billions at radical moonshots. But when asked when Google Fiber might hit the “unpause” button, Porat wandered into murky, non-answer territory.

“When you ask about milestones, in our view, when we have something that is substantive enough of value to justify accelerating the roll-out again, that's how we're looking at it,” said the CFO.

To be clear, Google Fiber has had a massive net positive impact on the telecom market. The service not only generated a necessary conversation about the lack of competition in broadband, but Google actively worked to provide cities with a template to not only help streamline private-sector deployment, but build their own networks if so inclined.

And in markets that Google Fiber has been deployed, it has resulted in a dramatic reduction in prices among regional incumbents. AT&T, for example, initially charged as much as $150 per month for its own gigabit broadband service, a service it was forced to re-price to $70 in areas where it faces competition from Google Fiber or municipal broadband networks.

Ideally, Google Fiber’s deployments will accelerate again once Google Fiber executives have a more solid grasp on what next-generation wireless broadband will look like.

But there remains a steady undercurrent of concern that company executives have simply grown bored with the high cost of building broadband networks no matter what those networks look like. As such it remains a very real possibility that Google offloads the project eventually, leaving us all once again lost in the angry embrace of monopolies like Comcast.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...-were-promised





5G Cell Service Is Coming. Who Decides Where It Goes?
Allan Holmes

The future of cellular service is coming to a neighborhood near you.

But who gets to decide when, where and how it gets delivered is still a heated fight.

The new technology, known as 5G, delivers wireless internet at far faster speeds than existing cellular connections. But it also requires different hardware to deliver the signals.

Instead of relying on large towers placed far apart, the new signals will come from smaller equipment placed an average of 500 feet apart in neighborhoods and business districts. Much of the equipment will be on streetlights or utility poles, often accompanied by containers the size of refrigerators on the ground. More than 300,000 cell stations now provide wireless connections, and 5G will bring hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — more.

The prospect of their installation has many communities and their officials, from Woodbury, N.Y., to Olympia, Wash., insisting that local governments control the placement and look of the new equipment. They say that the cell stations could clutter neighborhoods with eyesores and cost the communities a lot of potential revenue.

“Residents across the country are just now beginning to understand the harms that hasty and insensitive small cell deployments can inflict on their communities,” said Jim Baller, the president of Baller Stokes & Lide, a law firm in Washington that represents municipalities on communications issues.

But telecommunications companies — hoping to cash in on what is predicted to be $250 billion in annual service revenue from 5G by 2025 — are pushing to build the system as quickly and cheaply as possible. And they have the federal government on their side.

The companies, like Verizon Communications and AT&T, say that the equipment will be safe and unobtrusive, and that it is needed to support future applications like driverless cars. Dotting them throughout neighborhoods is necessary for full coverage, they say, because the new 5G signals do not travel as far as the radio frequencies now in use.

The new equipment, AT&T told the Federal Communications Commission last year, “will revolutionize the way consumers and businesses use mobile broadband services, and of the emerging internet of things.”

To get their way, the telecom firms have lobbyists working state legislatures, advocating laws that restrict local oversight of 5G. Since 2016, 13 states have passed bills that limit local control, and several other states are considering similar laws. Wireless companies are also lobbying Congress, which is considering several bills on the issue.

And the F.C.C., under the leadership of Ajit Pai, its Republican chairman, has strongly encouraged weakening regulations to accelerate the deployment of new 5G technology — including reducing the role of local governments.

This week, another Republican F.C.C. commissioner, Brendan Carr, announced details of a plan to streamline the environmental and historic review process for 5G infrastructure, saying it could cut costs by 80 percent. The agency will vote on the measure this month.

Mr. Pai and Mr. Carr have said regulatory changes are necessary to keep pace with global competitors. But bringing high-speed service to underserved areas — closing the digital divide — has also been one of Mr. Pai’s central arguments for reining in local regulations. The money companies save from fewer regulations, he says, can be used to expand broadband into rural areas.

City officials are not buying it. Mobilitie, one of the nation’s largest cell-tower operators, submitted an unofficial plan in Montgomery County, Md., in the fall, designating where the company might want to place small cells. Of the 215 small-cell sites in that plan, only 11 were in areas with fewer than 1,000 people per square mile.

“It is deeply disingenuous to suggest that the need to pre-empt urban areas’ ordinances is so we can bring broadband to rural areas,” said Mitsuko R. Herrera, the county’s technology special projects director. “There is zero evidence to support that premise.”

Jason Caliento, a Mobilitie senior vice president, agreed. “Small cells are a tool in the toolbox, but alone are not going to solve the rural divide,” he said.

In January, Mayor Sam Liccardo of San Jose, Calif., resigned his seat on an F.C.C. 5G advisory committee, saying it was rigged to give industry what it wanted “without any obligation to provide broadband access to underserved residents.”

In response, Mr. Pai said the F.C.C. looked forward to working with the committee “to remove regulatory barriers to broadband deployment and to extend digital opportunity to all Americans.”

The wireless industry has filed multiple comments to the F.C.C. complaining about delays from local governments. AT&T executives said officials in California, whom they did not identify, had delayed deployment of small cells by more than 800 days because they “scrutinized” antenna designs, radio-frequency exposure and effects on property values, among other things. Companies have suggested cutting local approval windows by a month or more.

Cities and counties argue the delays are caused by the wireless companies themselves. Officials in Montgomery County said Mobilitie had routinely filed incomplete applications that caused months of setbacks.

Mobilitie officials said their relationship with local governments was “evolving” and leading to better collaboration. “I don’t think we’ve ever seen more progress” than has occurred lately, Mr. Caliento said.

City officials say shortening reviews risks small-cell facilities becoming unsightly and unsafe.

That is what worries Donna Baron, a 75-year-old retiree who learned a streetlight near her home on DuFief Drive in North Potomac, Md., was marked to become a small cell, as were dozens more nearby. She held up an image of a possible cell station that might replace the light.

“The pole is a lot rounder, it has boxes on it and a huge fake mailbox at the bottom,” Ms. Baron said. If the F.C.C. pre-empts local rules, “you’re going to end up with a Medusa, with a bunch more stuff attached.”

Wireless companies are also asking the F.C.C. to cap local fees. AT&T says that three California cities assess fees of $2,600 to $8,000 a year per attachment, and that a “Georgia municipality is considering an annual fee of $6,000 per node.”

David Young, who manages infrastructure leases for Lincoln, Neb., said he understood the carriers’ frustration. But he said cities had a responsibility to charge fair rates. He has negotiated with wireless companies to pay $1,995 a year per pole. He set the rate based on market analysis, which he discussed with the companies. “They were quite happy to pay the price that we asked,” Mr. Young said.

Texas cities can’t negotiate rates. Last year, the State Legislature passed a law pushed by AT&T that allows cities to charge carriers no more than $250 per pole each year. Before the law, cities often charged $1,500 to $2,500 a year per pole, and the change will cost Texas cities as much as $1 billion over eight years, the Texas Municipal League estimated.

AT&T argues that charging fees not based on cost violates the federal Communications Act, which blocks local governments from prohibiting broadband services.

A group of Texas cities led by the city of McAllen, near the Mexico border, filed a lawsuit last year against the state, arguing that the new cell-site law violated the state Constitution, which prohibits the Legislature from forcing cities to grant something of value to corporations.

Lawyers representing Texas argue the state has the authority to cap municipalities’ pole rental fees. During oral arguments in December, a judge denied the state’s motion for dismissal, and last month denied the cities’ request for a temporary injunction. The case is expected to go to trial this year.

The maneuvering in Washington has left people like Marc King, 71, a longtime resident of Germantown, Md., feeling resigned.

“A Russian woman stood up to speak at one of these public meetings, and she said that when she lived in Russia, the government slam dunked her and she had no say,” Mr. King said. “Now she lives in the United States of America, where she’s getting slam dunked by the government and she has no say. That gives you a window into what’s going on here.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/02/t...r-service.html





Ham Radio Operators are Saving Puerto Rico One Transmission at a Time
Paul P. Murphy and Michelle Krupa

In Maria's wake, shortwave radio has been key to communicating in Puerto Rico
Fifty amateur ham radio operators are headed there to support recovery operations

The phone call from the Red Cross came in late Friday night, just as the full scale of Hurricane Maria's calamity began taking shape.
"We need 50 of your best radio operators to go down to Puerto Rico."

In the days after the worst storm in three generations hit the American island -- and for many more to come -- public electrical, land-line and cellular communication systems showed few signs of life. And radio networks used routinely by police officers, power company workers and other first responder still were down.

Yet, a key mode of communication -- one not reliant on infrastructure vulnerable to strong winds and flooding -- still crackled: the "ham" radio.

Answering the phone that night in Connecticut was the emergency manager for the American Radio Relay League, the group's CEO said. For more than a century, this group has served as a hub for amateurs licensed to operate the dependable, if archaic, medium known as ham radio and eager to pitch in when disaster strikes.

When the Red Cross made its latest appeal for heroes, these were the people it had in mind.

Jumping to respond to disaster

Already gearing up on his own that night to go to work, turning knobs and flipping switches, was Oscar Resto.

As one of dozens of ham -- shorthand for "amateur" -- operators across Puerto Rico, Resto had been authorized by the Federal Communications

Commission to use radios, computers, satellites or the Internet to assist and support public safety during emergencies.

Often untethered from wires and cables, operators share information by voice, Morse code and other methods on a wide range of frequencies above the AM broadcast band. Such communications were critical during rescue operations after the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina.

For three days after Maria hit, Resto sawed through the downed trees that separated his home from the road, he told CNN. Then he packed his car with radio gear, left his family and made the 25-mile journey to a makeshift Red Cross headquarters, where generators and batteries could power his equipment.

"I have the responsibility to establish the required emergency communications that the American Red Cross needed for understanding the needs of the citizens impacted by the hurricane," said Resto, a section manager for the American Radio Relay League, which boasts 160,000 members.

Survivors needed food, water, shelter and fuel to power generators after Maria knocked out the entire electrical grid. They also needed to communicate, to share critical information about diabetics nearing the end of their insulin reserves, babies threatened by dehydration, families rationing crackers.

Transmitting radio signals to other ham operators in the Caribbean, Resto and his shortwave brethren traded National Hurricane Center reports on Maria's position. He also contacted a ham operator in Florida, and asked "just to tell my daughter, Astrid, that we were fine," he recalled.

Before long, Resto and his compatriots realized their messages were the only ones getting off the island.

In an instant, their mission expanded: Anyone with the requisite skills and equipment was conscripted.

Shoulder to shoulder with first responders

Two ham volunteers, Raul Gonzalez and Jose Santiago, set up a radio control hub run by generator power in Monacillo, near San Juan, and other centers quickly followed suit. There, ham operators work shoulder to shoulder with public safety and utility officials to transmit information to other ham operators working with teams in the field.

A full week after Maria battered their homes, Resto and two dozen other Puerto Rican ham operators were still running radio operations for the police and the local power company, whose own wireless communications systems rely in part on computers and power sources knocked out by the storm.

For instance, ham operators riding with police use radios tuned to the special broadcast frequencies to transmit calls to other ham operators hunkered down at the command centers with officers, who in turn respond with orders.

A power company generator low on fuel? A ham operator from Resto's team deployed with the power company calls his counterpart at the command center and coordinates a fuel delivery.

For his part, Resto learned Tuesday via a ham radio at the command center that an unsanitary hospital in western Puerto Rico was transferring patients to another hospital. It was just one of countless threads of information squawked across the operational frequencies in a massive effort to deliver relief and supplies.

"I am very proud of them," Resto said of his crew of amateurs. "They are the real heroes."

More help on the way

Less than 48 hours after the American Radio Relay League's emergency manager fielded the Red Cross' call, 350 ham operators had offered to help, said Tom Gallagher, the group's CEO.

Fifty of them prepared this week to embark upon a three-week deployment to Puerto Rico. They include retired executives and public safety officers, and hail from places from Washington to Texas to New Hampshire, he said.

"It's an incredibly personal sacrifice from individuals who are dedicated to serving communities," Gallagher said. "They have the skills and the motivation and the sense of responsibility."

Volunteers will be outfitted with self-sustaining kits provided by radio manufacturers and dealer partners so they can be agile and won't burden those they're trying to help, he said.

Southwest Airlines was due to transport the equipment for free Wednesday from the group's New York headquarters to Atlanta, where volunteers planned to convene Thursday to board a chartered JetBlue flight for San Juan, Gallagher said.

There, they plan to connect with the Red Cross and likely spread out across Puerto Rico to continue the life-saving work of radio operators already well underway, Gallagher said.

"It's the first time they've asked us to do this on this scale," he said. "This is why we're here."
https://edition.cnn.com/2017/09/27/u...rnd/index.html





FCC Accuses Stealthy Startup of Launching Rogue Satellites

The U.S. communications agency says tiny Internet of Things satellites from Swarm Technologies could endanger other spacecraft
Mark Harris

On 12 January, a Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV) rocket blasted off from India’s eastern coast. While its primary cargo was a large Indian mapping satellite, dozens of secondary CubeSats from other countries travelled along with it. Seattle-based Planetary Resources supplied a spacecraft that will test prospecting tools for future asteroid miners, Canadian company Telesat launched a broadband communications satellite, and a British Earth-observation mission called Carbonite will capture high-definition video of the planet’s surface.

Also on board were four small satellites that probably should not have been there. SpaceBee-1, 2, 3, and 4 were briefly described by the Indian space agency ISRO as “two-way satellite communications and data relay” devices from the United States. No operator was specified, and only ISRO publicly noted that they successfully reached orbit the same day.

IEEE Spectrum can reveal that the SpaceBees are almost certainly the first spacecraft from a Silicon Valley startup called Swarm Technologies, currently still in stealth mode. Swarm was founded in 2016 by one engineer who developed a spacecraft concept for Google and another who sold his previous company to Apple. The SpaceBees were built as technology demonstrators for a new space-based Internet of Things communications network.

Swarm believes its network could enable satellite communications for orders of magnitude less cost than existing options. It envisages the worldwide tracking of ships and cars, new agricultural technologies, and low cost connectivity for humanitarian efforts anywhere in the world. The four SpaceBees would be the first practical demonstration of Swarm’s prototype hardware and cutting-edge algorithms, swapping data with ground stations for up to eight years.

The only problem is, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had dismissed Swarm’s application for its experimental satellites a month earlier, on safety grounds. The FCC is responsible for regulating commercial satellites, including minimizing the chance of accidents in space. It feared that the four SpaceBees now orbiting the Earth would pose an unacceptable collision risk for other spacecraft.

If confirmed, this would be the first ever unauthorized launch of commercial satellites.

On Wednesday, the FCC sent Swarm a letter revoking its authorization for a follow-up mission with four more satellites, due to launch next month. A pending application for a large market trial of Swarm’s system with two Fortune 100 companies could also be in jeopardy.

In fact, the FCC told the startup that the agency would assess “the impact of the applicant’s apparent unauthorized launch and operation of four satellites… on its qualifications to be a Commission licensee.” If Swarm cannot convince the FCC otherwise, the startup could lose permission to build its revolutionary network before the wider world even knows the company exists.

An unauthorized launch would also call into question the ability of secondary satellite ‘ride-share’ companies and foreign launch providers to comply with U.S. space regulations.

Swarm Technologies, based in Menlo Park, Calif., is the brainchild of two talented young aerospace engineers. Sara Spangelo, its CEO, is a Canadian who worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, before moving to Google in 2016. Spangelo’s astronaut candidate profile at the Canadian Space Agency says that while at Google, she led a team developing a spacecraft concept for its moonshot X division, including both technical and market analyses.

(Parent company Alphabet told Spectrum that X, which is now a separate company from Google, explores and kills hundreds of ideas each year, and that Spangelo’s work had nothing to do with Google’s recent hypersonics research with NASA, revealed in Spectrum earlier this week).

Swarm CFO Benjamin Longmier has an equally impressive resume. In 2015, he sold his near-space balloon company Aether Industries to Apple, before taking a teaching post at the University of Michigan. He is also co-founder of Apollo Fusion, a company producing an innovative electric propulsion system for satellites.

The idea of Swarm’s networks is deceptively simple. Any future Internet of Things (IoT) will require pervasive connectivity for billions of trackers and sensors to exchange data over the Internet. However, there are only sporadic wireless networks in many rural and undeveloped areas, and none at all at sea.

Swarm would provide solar-powered gateways that would collect data from nearby IoT devices using Bluetooth, LoRa, or Wi-Fi, then beam them up to an orbiting SpaceBee using VHF radio. When the SpaceBee passed over a ground station that was connected to the Internet, it would beam the data down again, and on to its end user.

Data is encrypted in both directions and each SpaceBee would transmit only about once a minute, accepting uplinks or initiating downlinks depending on which devices were below. While she was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, Spangelo wrote several papers describing models and algorithms to maximize the data flow over just such a network.

In its application for a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant in 2016, Swarm said that its integrated sensor and data relay platforms were less than 1/10,000 the mass and power, and 400 times cheaper, than those in existing satellite systems like Iridium. The NSF has awarded Swarm over US $220,000 to date.

In April of last year, Swarm filed its first application with the FCC for a test fleet of four satellites called BEEs, standing for Basic Electronic Elements, and two ground stations. Each satellite would be just 10 centimeters (cm) x 10 cm x 2.8 cm tall—about one quarter the size of a standard 10 cm cube, or 1U, CubeSat. The four would be launched from an Indian PSLV rocket stacked together, then spring open in space to enter diverging orbits.

This four-for-the-price-of-one deal would keep launch fees low, and Swarm’s minimal website proudly claims that it’s building “the world’s smallest two-way communications satellites.” However, miniaturizing the technology would come at a cost.

“As an object gets below 1U in size, it gets difficult to track, which means it’s harder to predict if there’s going to be a conjunction with another satellite,” says Marcus Holzinger, an aerospace professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and expert on orbital safety. “Anything that size impacting at orbital velocities can be catastrophic.”

Swarm Technologies had realized that the small size of its BEEs might be a problem. It installed a GPS device in each satellite that would broadcast its position when requested. It also covered each of the satellite’s four smallest faces with an experimental passive radar reflector developed by the U.S. Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command. According to Swarm’s FCC application, this would increase the BEE’s radar profile by a factor of 10.

But the FCC was not buying it. After correspondence back and forth through the summer, the FCC sent Swarm a letter in early December. In it, Anthony Serafini, chief of the FCC’s Experimental Licensing Branch, noted that the radar reflector only operated in a certain frequency band, corresponding to “a small portion” of America’s ground-based Space Surveillance Network. He also worried that GPS data would only be available while the satellite was functional.

Holzinger shares the agency’s concerns. “If there’s a software glitch, the satellite is going to become a passive piece of debris,” he says. “And while the reflector is certainly more robust, it may not amplify radar from a sensor using [a different] frequency band.”

Serafini wrote: “In the absence of tracking at the same level as available for [1U] objects… the ability of operational spacecraft to reliably assess the need for and plan effective collision avoidance maneuvers will be reduced or eliminated. Accordingly, we cannot conclude that a grant of this application is in the public interest.” The FCC had dismissed Swarm’s application, and that should have been the end of the matter.

Swarm apparently moved swiftly on. In January 2018, the company filed an application for four new satellites, this time with a larger, more conventional 1U design. Since its application the previous April, Swarm wrote that it had lined up two (unnamed) Fortune 100 companies for paid pilot programs, with 15 additional companies in agriculture, shipping, and other markets watching closely. The U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force, and U.S. Special Operations Command has also expressed interest in using Swarm’s network for “tracking and geo-locating a large number of items on the ground and at sea.”

Swarm’s new plan would be to send the four larger satellites on a Rocket Lab launch from New Zealand in April. Rocket Lab’s Electron had just delivered its first payload to orbit, becoming the latest vehicle offering low-cost satellite launches. This time, Swarm’s application sailed through the FCC in a matter of weeks.

On Monday, Swarm shared details of its two market trials in yet another FCC application. It now wants permission to install two more downlink ground stations and up to 500 uplink gateways around the United States, for the next year. Swarm wrote that it has been in touch with more than 125 potential end users, had received a second NSF grant to provide cheap connectivity for humanitarian efforts, and announced a partnership with NASA’s Ames Research Center. Everything was looking up for the young company.

That all changed on Wednesday morning, with an email from Serafini to Spangelo setting aside permission for April’s Rocket Lab mission. The FCC believes that Swarm launched and is operating its original small satellites, despite having been forbidden to do so.

The FCC declined requests for an interview or comment, but the evidence for the January PSLV’s mysterious SpaceBees being Swarm’s BEE satellites is overwhelming. Swarm’s April 2017 application notes the satellites were due to launch on the very same PSLV mission, and refers to the devices as “Space BEEs” at several points. Websites dedicated to tracking operational satellites show the SpaceBees in orbits virtually identical to those specified in Swarm’s application.

Swarm did not respond to multiple requests from Spectrum, with any details about its activities.

One serious question is how Swarm was able to launch its satellites without FCC authorization. Jenny Barna, director of launch for Spire Global, a satellite data company with more than 50 CubeSats in orbit, says, “If you’re a secondary passenger, you typically have to produce evidence of a license before you integrate.” Integration is the process of organizing a rocket’s payload of satellites for launch.

However, Barna admits that getting a license when you are hitching a ride with a larger satellite can be tricky. “The process is onerous by the nature of regulatory work, made worse by the fact that it’s not set up for the way that secondary customers get launches,” she says. “The Silicon Valley way of doing things is technically pretty iterative. You might not be quite sure what frequencies you will land on... or where your ride is going to come from. We’ve had satellites on the launch pad before the FCC approves it, and then they approve it at the last second.”

Paperwork filed with the FCC by Swarm Technologies shows that it was planning to use Spaceflight, a Seattle-based launch services company, to get its satellites on board the PSLV. Spaceflight’s website shows that it did in fact supply 19 of the 31 satellites for January’s PSLV launch, including some with the SpaceBees unique 0.25U dimensions.

Last year, Spaceflight senior mission manager Adam Hadaller told Spectrum that it checked all its customers’ safety regulations and communication licenses before launch. However, in response to questions this week, Spaceflight would only say: “Spaceflight has never knowingly launched a customer who has been denied an FCC license. It is the responsibility of our customers to secure all FCC licenses.”

Neither Spaceflight nor ISRO could immediately confirm whether they routinely check launch customers’ FCC licenses. If they do not, there would seem to be little to stop satellite makers from deploying any device they choose into orbit.

Regardless, future spacecraft and astronauts will now have to deal with four difficult-to-see satellites, each the size of hardback books, whizzing around the planet. “Even at that size, you’re talking about a substantial energy transfer should they hit something,” says Holzinger. “In most cases it would be an explosive break-up, where all the pieces fly away from each other very quickly.”

As it waits to hear the FCC’s decision on future SpaceBee missions, Swarm Technologies will surely be hoping to avoid a similar fate down here on Earth.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/...gue-satellites





AT&T Backs Off Political Argument in Antitrust Case
Cecilia Kang

Politics have been at the center of the public debate about the Justice Department’s lawsuit to block AT&T’s $85 billion purchase of Time Warner. But the trial itself, starting later this month, is shaping up to be a fight focused on classic issues in antitrust law.

In court filings on Friday, the Justice Department and AT&T laid out the arguments that they plan to make in the trial. Regulators will argue that the deal will hurt competition and lead to higher prices. AT&T and Time Warner will counter those arguments by saying that even with a merger, it is an underdog against online giants like Facebook and Google.

“If TV-program distributor AT&T acquires TV-program producer Time Warner, American consumers will end up paying hundreds of millions of dollars more than they do now to watch their favorite programs on TV,” the Justice Department said in its brief submitted on Friday evening.

In its brief, AT&T countered by saying, “This merger has never been about making Time Warner programs less accessible or more expensive. Just the opposite: It is about making Time Warner and AT&T more competitive during a revolutionary transformation that is occurring in the video programming marketplace.”

The trial, one of the biggest antitrust showdowns in decades, will begin March 19 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. It is expected to last about three weeks.

Noticeably absent in AT&T’s filing was an earlier argument it had made: that the government singled out the company’s deal because of presidential politics. President Trump was a vocal critic of the deal during his presidential campaign, and while in office, he has consistently blamed CNN, a channel owned by Turner and part of Time Warner’s television business, for unfair coverage of his administration.

AT&T originally argued to the court that the Justice Department’s suit was a case of “selective enforcement” — that the government was essentially blocking the deal because the president was against it.

But late last month, Judge Richard J. Leon, who is overseeing the trial, rejected demands by AT&T for detailed email and phone logs between the White House and the Justice Department related to the deal. AT&T and Time Warner has dropped “selective enforcement” as a defense, according to the new filings.

Even absent the question of presidential interference in the deal, the trial is pivotal for the telecom and media industries, providing a clue about the chances of other industry deals, like Disney’s bid for 21st Century Fox. AT&T’s chief executive, Randall Stephenson, and Time Warner’s chief executive, Jeffrey Bewkes, are expected to take the stand.

“This is the single most important decision this year” for technology, telecom and media firms, said Amy Young, a research analyst at Macquarie Group in New York. “It will frame regulation and mergers and acquisitions going forward and raise questions about all the consolidation in the past, too.”

If the judge sides with AT&T and Time Warner, he would usher in the creation of a new kind of corporate behemoth — one with nationwide reach via wireless and satellite television service that would also have control over a movie studio and channels like HBO, CNN and TNT, which has valuable basketball sports rights.

The company would have a leading position to negotiate licensing deals with rival telecom and media firms. It would also be in a stronger position against fast-growing streaming video services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

If the Justice Department prevails in this suit, it would signal a new era of scrutiny for the media and telecom industries. In 2011, Comcast won approval for its purchase of NBCUniversal that also created an enormous telecom and media company. The Justice Department insisted on several conditions that restricted Comcast from anti-competitive business practices.

The trial will also reveal much about the state of the industry. Rivals such as Comcast, Dish and Sony are expected to be called as witnesses to reveal details about their business dealings with AT&T and Time Warner in the past. The Justice Department is expected to argue that a combined AT&T and Time Warner would have the incentive to make it harder for competing media companies to distribute their programming through AT&T, and for Time Warner brands to limit their distribution outside of AT&T.

The Justice Department will also present economic analysis suggesting that the new company is likely to raise prices for consumers.

“As will be shown at trial, the government is challenging this merger to address the real concerns of real people who populate the real marketplace today,” the Justice Department said in its brief.

AT&T said it would challenge the government’s arguments that the merger would increase consumer prices and hamper competition by raising licensing fees for Time Warner content. The company said it would argue that the merger of two companies that do not compete would be a stronger competitor in a market that had many new companies from Silicon Valley, like Facebook and Netflix.

“As will be demonstrated at trial, the new video revolution is defined by the spectacular rise of Netflix, Amazon, Google, and other vertically integrated, direct-to-consumer technology companies as market leaders in both video programming and video distribution,” AT&T said in its brief.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/t...antitrust.html





MoviePass CEO Proudly Says the App Tracks Your Location Before and After Movies
Devin Coldewey

Everyone knew the MoviePass deal is too good to be true — and as is so often the case these days, it turns out you’re not the customer, you’re the product. And in this case they’re not even attempting to camouflage that. Mitch Lowe, the company’s CEO, told an audience at a Hollywood event that “we know all about you.”

Lowe was giving the keynote at the Entertainment Finance Forum; his talk was entitled “Data is the New Oil: How will MoviePass Monetize It?” Media Play News first reported his remarks.

“We get an enormous amount of information,” Lowe continued. “We watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterwards.”

It’s no secret that MoviePass is planning on making hay out of the data collected through its service. But what I imagined, and what I think most people imagined, was that it would be interesting next-generation data about ticket sales, movie browsing, A/B testing on promotions in the app and so on.

I didn’t imagine that the app would be tracking your location before you even left your home, and then follow you while you drive back or head out for a drink afterwards. Did you?

It sure isn’t in the company’s privacy policy, which in relation to location tracking discloses only a “single request” when selecting a theater, which will “only be used as a means to develop, improve, and personalize the service.” Which part of development requires them to track you before and after you see the movie?

Naturally I contacted MoviePass for comment and will update if I hear back. But it’s pretty hard to misinterpret Lowe’s words.

The startup’s plan is to “build a night at the movies,” perhaps complete with setting up parking or ordering you a car, giving you a deal on dinner before or after, connecting you with like-minded moviegoers, etc. Of course they need data to do that, but one would hope that the collection would be a bit more nuanced than this.

People clearly value the service, because it essentially lets them use someone else’s credit card instead of their own at the movies (and one belonging to a bunch of venture capitalists at that). Who would say no? Some people sure might, if they knew their activities were being tracked at this granularity (and, it has to be said, with such a cavalier attitude) to be packaged up and sold. (Good luck with the GDPR, by the way.)

Hopefully MoviePass can explain exactly what data it collects and what it does with it, so everyone can make an informed choice.

Update: In a statement, a MoviePass representative says:

We are exploring utilizing location-based marketing as a way to help enhance the overall experience by creating more opportunities for our subscribers to enjoy all the various elements of a good movie night. We will not be selling the data that we gather. Rather, we will use it to better inform how to market potential customer benefits including discounts on transportation, coupons for nearby restaurants, and other similar opportunities.

I’ve also asked for information on what location data specifically is collected, for how long before and after a movie users are tracked, and where these policies are disclosed to users.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/05/mo...-after-movies/





New Documents Reveal FBI Paid Geek Squad Repair Staff as Informants

A freedom of information request revealed that the FBI used the Best Buy division's repair staff to flag illegal content.
Zack Whittaker

The relationship between the FBI and employees of Best Buy's computer and device repair unit Geek Squad is more complex than first thought, according to newly released documents.

Records posted Tuesday by the Electronic Frontier Foundation following a freedom of information lawsuit filed last year reveal that federal agents would pay Geek Squad managers who pass on information about illegal materials on devices sent in by customers for repairs.

The relationship goes back at least ten years, according to documents released as a result of the lawsuit.

The aim of the FBI's Louisville division was to maintain a "close liaison" with Geek Squad management to "glean case initiations and to support the division's Computer Intrusion and Cyber Crime programs," the documents say.

According to the EFF's analysis of the documents, FBI agents would "show up, review the images or video and determine whether they believe they are illegal content" and seize the device so an additional analysis could be carried out at a local FBI field office.

That's when, in some cases, agents would try to obtain a search warrant to justify the access.

The EFF's lawsuit was filed in response to a report that a Geek Squad employee was used as an informant by the FBI in the prosecution of a case involving child abuse imagery.

One released document showed a $500 payment by the FBI to a "confidential human source" whose name was redacted that the EFF said was the same amount as a payment made in the prosecution of Mark Rettenmaier, a California physician and surgeon who was charged with possessing child abuse imagery, found after he sent in his computer to Best Buy for repairs.

The documents show that the FBI would regularly use Geek Squad employees as confidential human sources -- the agency's term for informants -- by taking calls from employees when they found something suspect.

But that relationship and data handover could violate Americans' constitutional rights to protections from unwarranted searches and seizures, the privacy group charges.

Because the FBI uses Geek Squad as informants, the EFF says that any search should be seen as a warrantless search carried out by proxy, "and thus any evidence obtained as a result of the illegal searches should be thrown out of court."

When reached, a Best Buy spokesperson offered a lengthy statement, which we're publishing in full. The company confirmed that three of four managers who received payments from the FBI are no longer at the company.

"As we said more than a year ago, our Geek Squad repair employees discover what appears to be child pornography on customers' computers nearly 100 times a year. Our employees do not search for this material; they inadvertently discover it when attempting to confirm we have recovered lost customer data.

We have a moral and, in more than 20 states, a legal obligation to report these findings to law enforcement. We share this policy with our customers in writing before we begin any repair.

As a company, we have not sought or received training from law enforcement in how to search for child pornography. Our policies prohibit employees from doing anything other than what is necessary to solve the customer's problem. In the wake of these allegations, we have redoubled our efforts to train employees on what to do -- and not do -- in these circumstances.

We have learned that four employees may have received payment after turning over alleged child pornography to the FBI. Any decision to accept payment was in very poor judgement and inconsistent with our training and policies. Three of these employees are no longer with the company and the fourth has been reprimanded and reassigned."

The FBI declined to comment.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/new-doc...as-informants/





Mysterious $15,000 'GrayKey' Promises To Unlock iPhone X For The Feds
Thomas Fox-Brewster

Just a week after Forbes reported on the claim of Israeli U.S. government manufacturer Cellebrite that it could unlock the latest Apple iPhone models, another service has emerged promising much the same. Except this time it comes from an unkown entity, an obscure American startup named Grayshift, which appears to be run by long-time U.S. intelligence agency contractors and an ex-Apple security engineer.

In recent weeks, its marketing materials have been disseminated around private online police and forensics groups, offering a $15,000 iPhone unlock tool named GrayKey, which permits 300 uses. That's for the online mode that requires constant connectivity at the customer end, whilst an offline version costs $30,000. The latter comes with unlimited uses.

Another ad showed Grayshift claiming to be able to unlock iPhones running iOS 10 and 11, with iOS 9 support coming soon. It also claims to work on the latest Apple hardware, up to the iPhone 8 and X models released just last year. In a post from one private Google group, handed to Forbes by a source who asked to remain anonymous, the writer indicated they'd been demoed the technology and that it had opened an iPhone X.

The marketing doesn't reveal just what iOS vulnerabilities GrayKey exploits to unlock iPhones. It claims GrayKey works on disabled iPhones and can extract the full file system from the Apple device, and indicates the tool would make repeated guesses at passcodes, a technique known as brute forcing, to first get into the device.

According to Ryan Duff, director of cyber solutions at Point3 Security, it appeared Grayshift had access to similar exploits as Cellebrite, namely a probable hack that targets Apple's Secure Enclave, the isolated chip in iPhones that handles encryption keys. The Secure Enclave makes it especially time-consuming to carry out brute forcing by incrementally increasing the time between guesses, up to an hour for the ninth attempt onwards. But if it can be broken, the speed to guessing the right password can be improved.

"Without breaking the encryption, you will always be forced into a brute force situation," explained Duff. "That doesn't mean they are using the exact same exploit that Cellebrite is using. It's possible they are different. But the process post-exploitation is almost certainly the same."

Apple declined to comment on Grayshift's claims. But it typically recommends users take advantage of iOS updates as they will contain fixes for the latest vulnerabilities.

Those patches may not be too far off, said Duff. That's because of Grayshift's apparent business model, which differs from Cellebrite in that the latter is asking law enforcement to send in devices to its labs. As Grayshift is putting its exploits in software, it could be possible for security researchers or Apple engineers to get hold of the GrayKey and determine what vulnerabilties it uses. "This will almost certainly lead to the exploit being burned," added Duff, a former cyber operations tactician at the U.S. Cyber Command. "Someone, maybe even Apple, will eventually get a hold of one of these devices and will examine how it works. If it's a non-Apple researcher, they will be able to report the bug to Apple and make $100,000 to $200,000 from their bug bounty program depending on how the exploit works."

Forbes made multiple attempts to contact Grayshift, but had received no response at the time of publication. Its website, which contains little more than a logo and the tagline "the state of the art has a new requirement," asks for a login to learn more.

In the wake of San Bernadino

Forbes has not been able to verify the company's claims and given it's a new, unproven entity, it's hard to say how far the marketing material should be trusted. But, whilst there's very little information about Grayshift online, Forbes has unearthed some tantalizing tidbits, pointing to a legitimate company with plenty of experience in its field.

According to LinkedIn profiles, the company was co-founded in Atlanta, Georgia, back in September 2016 by David Miles, who previously worked at Endgame, a company that reportedly developed hacking tools for U.S. government agencies, including the NSA. The company's founding came in the wake of the battle between Apple and the FBI in San Bernardino, where the feds ordered the Cupertino giant to unlock the iPhone of terrorist shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, a request the iDevice manufacturer vehemently protested. The FBI eventually paid an unknown contractor in the region of $1 million to hack into the device.

One source told Forbes Greyshift also counted amongst its ranks former staff of cybersecurity firm Optiv, where Miles worked prior to co-founding Grayshift. Two cybersecurity industry sources with knowledge of the company claimed Optiv had previously developed so-called zero-day exploits for the U.S. government, where programs hack into systems via previously-unkown software vulnerabilties for the sake of finding out information from target devices, a business practice that had been alluded to in a 2013 Rolling Stone report, back when the company was called Accuvant.

And, the sources added, Optiv had a specialty in iOS hacks. (Optiv hadn't responded to requests for comment at the time of publication). Indeed, two former employees from Optiv are listed on LinkedIn as working at secret companies in Atlanta from September 2016, the same month Miles is listed as founding Grayshift. They include Justin Fisher, also previously of Endgame, and Braden Thomas, who'd previously worked at Apple for six years as a security engineer. Forbes also unearthed company records, showing both as "principals" at the firm, along with Miles. Principals are typically co-founders or executives, though Fisher's LinkedIn shows him as a senior researcher and Thomas as a security engineer. Neither Fisher nor Thomas had responded to messages at the time of publication.

'Breaking the unbreakable'

The company is due to show for a conference in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, this June. A description on the Techno Security & Digital Forensics conference website indicated the company is a direct Cellebrite competitor, reading: "Grayshift is a cyber security firm built by experts in security research and access technology. Our focus is on building advanced capabilities to support local, state and federal government agencies for the purposes of accessing mobile platforms to enable digital forensic analysis."

Another blurb on 99Designs, where the company had its logo drawn up, was a little more revealing, indicating the company was providing services to private industry too. "We specialize in software vulnerability research.

"Our research consultants employ an in-depth knowledge of the latest exploitation techniques and methodologies in order to triage, analyze and prioritize discovered vulnerabilities for remediation. Our typical customer base are large Fortune 500 organizations and also high tech companies requiring advanced security research consulting.

"We know how to break things that are thought to be unbreakable."

Multiple sources in the forensics industry confirmed they'd heard about Grayshift and were intrigued by its offerings. Italian forensics specialist Mattia Epifani noted that the GrayKey was cheaper than Cellebrite's offering, which costs around $1,500 per device, compared to Greyshift's 300 for $15,000. Vladimir Katalov, chief of Elcomsoft, a Russian competitor that does plenty of business in the U.S., said that if it really has found a way to force iPhones into a mode where passcode attempts are unlimited, "then hats off."

"The only thing that worries me... it is not really good for the community that the vulnerability is 'private.' That creates the same problem as with 'backdoors for law enforcement,' [is] probably even worse. We can only guess how (and since when) they are being exploited by criminals. The trend when critical vulnerabilities are being kept private and used by vendors providing the services to law enforcement is really a very bad idea." As the EFF said of the Cellebrite iPhone revelations, when vulnerabilities are kept secret, everyone is walking around with weaknesses in their devices that could be exploited by anyone, whether governments or criminals.

Cellebrite doesn't agree with that line of thinking. In a recent interview with Forbes, chief marketing officer Jeremy Nazarian said it was necessary for the flaws to stay secret so the tools remained effective and law enforcement could gather evidence from devices.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasb.../#7867ea2950f1





Leaked Apple Email Hints at the Possible End of iTunes

iTunes LPs won't make it out of 2018. Is the rest of iTunes next?
Luke Dormehl

Apple could kill off iTunes in the near future, a new report suggests.

It cites an email that Apple reportedly wrote to people in the music industry recently, announcing the “end of iTunes LPs.” The iTunes LP format was first introduced in 2009 and let publishers add interactive artwork, along with assorted iTunes Extras, with their content.

The LP format never achieved great popularity. However, the fact that Apple plans to ditch iTunes LPs in 2018 potentially hints at the possibility that Apple may stop selling iTunes music downloads in the near future.

The Apple email announcing the change was reportedly sent two weeks ago from an address at “The iTunes Store” and signed by “The Apple Music Team.” But its existence has only been highlighted now through a report by the U.K. newspaper The Metro.

“Apple will no longer accept new submissions of iTunes LPs after March 2018,” the letter notes. “Existing LPs will be deprecated from the store during the remainder of 2018. Customers who have previously purchased an album containing an iTunes LP will still be able to download the additional content using iTunes Match.”

The right time to end iTunes?

The news about the possible winding down of iTunes would come as no surprise to many users. Not only has iTunes been outdated for years in terms of its interface and functionality, but Apple clearly aims to move to a streaming model of music selling.

More than 221 million people will have a music streaming subscription by 2020, according to Statista. That’s more than double the 106.3 million subscriptions just two years ago. Apple’s own Apple Music service is also on track to overtake Spotify as the biggest music streaming service in the United States this summer.

According to a previous report by The Wall Street Journal, Apple Music is currently growing at a rate of around 5 percent each month. While there are definitely folks out there who still use iTunes, Apple’s willingness to abandon technologies before they have completely run their course (see: the headphone jack) means that throwing in the towel on iTunes wouldn’t be totally out of character.

What would you think about Apple packing in iTunes? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
https://www.cultofmac.com/532813/app...-itunes-email/





The NME Bows Out of Print. We’ll Miss the Inky Fingers.
Mary Anne Hobbs

“Nirvana. You probably barely recognize the name, but by the time this page is ink on your fingertips, Nirvana will have sold 1,000,000 copies of their new LP.”

That’s how I opened the most significant cover story I wrote for the NME, on Nov. 23, 1991. But there will be no more inky fingers for NME’s readers. This week, what was once Britain’s most important music newspaper and a taste maker on both sides of the Atlantic will put out its last print edition after 66 years.

The NME opened the gateway to a musical universe far beyond my reach when I was growing up in rural northern England in the late 1970s. I remember the ritual of racing to the shop, sitting on the wall outside, wildly leafing though the ink-smudged pages searching for news of one of my favorite artists. Later, making a second immersive reading of the music papers, from cover to cover, with a flashlight, in bed.

I arrived at the NME in 1986, age 22, after a year spent living in a wooden shed in Hollywood, writing about artists such as Jane’s Addiction and Metallica for another British music newspaper, Sounds. Bands in California would rush to buy the few copies of the NME that were stocked at Book Soup on Sunset Boulevard, craving insight into what was happening in the British scene and a deeper understanding of how American artists’ music was going down in Britain.

Every shred of information about the global musical domain is now available digitally, but in the 1980s, the pages of the music press were it. Get your hands on a printed issue of NME, or lose out.

At Sounds, I had worked with the writer James Brown, and when I returned to Britain in 1985, he had moved to the NME as its features editor. He called me and said, “We know a lot about the Smiths and Marxist politics, but we don’t know enough about rock music. Can you come and write some stuff for us at the NME?”

A front cover at the NME was considered a serious prize, both for an artist and for a writer. I fought hard to get the cover of the NME for Nirvana. In 1991, the band were breaking big in America, but they had yet to have the same impact in Britain. Before the age of high-speed digital hype, a band could become a phenomenon in one part of the world, but remain underground and virtually unknown in other territories.

The NME’s editor, Danny Kelly, understood my belief in the band, and when two cover stories with Sonic Youth and The Cure fell through, he called me and said: “You have 48 hours to find Nirvana, get the interview and deliver 3,000 words to me. It better be the best thing you’ve ever written.”

Nirvana were touring in Britain, and I interviewed them in a shabby hotel in the Bayswater district of London. Dave Grohl was goofing around, tossing cigarettes in the air and trying to catch them between his lips. Kurt Cobain was in real pain with stomach ulcers, and only interested in talking about women’s rights. Krist Novoselic made some very astute political comments. None of them wanted to talk with me about their new album, “Nevermind.” At all.

I raced home afterward and transcribed the interview word for word from my cassette recorder. I spread the pages all over the floor of my bedroom, and sat before the flickering green screen of an Amstrad word processor for the next 30 hours with a stash of Marlboro reds, Jack Daniels and black coffee, trying to temper my emotions and write something Mr. Kelly would consider incisive enough to make a cover story.

The NME’s office was situated on the 26th floor of an ugly tower block on London’s South Bank. The place was loud, rowdy and full of joy. The wages were pitiful and the deadlines were brutal, but the NME was our whole world and we loved it. There was relentless sparring about headlines, about how much space on a page to give to photographs over written copy, and of course, about the artists we should be championing.

Central to the remit of the NME was the idea that we wanted to tell our readers something they didn’t already know. We had a rule about never putting the same band on the cover twice in a year. A furious row broke out about the suggestion that the Stone Roses, at their peak, may get a second cover within 12 months, which divided us completely. Should we make this exception? Or would it set a new precedent that nobody wanted. (The Stone Roses got a second cover; the band deserved it.)

What united us as a team was a commitment to making what we believed was the greatest music paper on Earth. Our work was unapologetic, confrontational, progressive and poetic, and the unique identity of each writer gave NME its rich diversity of ideas and perspectives. I will still read everything on any topic that I see written by my teen-hero Paul Morley, and also by Stuart Maconie, David Quantick, James Brown, Barbara Ellen and Steve Lamacq, all of whom I worked alongside.

In 2018, it’s very simple to access music media online: There are blogs, streaming sites, and even algorithms to hold your hand if you feel faint at all the choices you could make. But there will be a melancholy feeling among all of us who read the paper in its glory days to see the printed NME retired, because those dirty pages remind us of the fury of youth and of the feeling of belonging that comes with being present and physically engaged.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/08/a...nne-hobbs.html





For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.
Farhad Manjoo

I first got news of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., via an alert on my watch. Even though I had turned off news notifications months ago, the biggest news still somehow finds a way to slip through.

But for much of the next 24 hours after that alert, I heard almost nothing about the shooting.

There was a lot I was glad to miss. For instance, I didn’t see the false claims — possibly amplified by propaganda bots — that the killer was a leftist, an anarchist, a member of ISIS and perhaps just one of multiple shooters. I missed the Fox News report tying him to Syrian resistance groups even before his name had been released. I also didn’t see the claim circulated by many news outlets (including The New York Times) as well as by Senator Bernie Sanders and other liberals on Twitter that the massacre had been the 18th school shooting of the year, which wasn’t true.

Instead, the day after the shooting, a friendly person I’ve never met dropped off three newspapers at my front door. That morning, I spent maybe 40 minutes poring over the horror of the shooting and a million other things the newspapers had to tell me.

Not only had I spent less time with the story than if I had followed along as it unfolded online, I was better informed, too. Because I had avoided the innocent mistakes — and the more malicious misdirection — that had pervaded the first hours after the shooting, my first experience of the news was an accurate account of the actual events of the day.

This has been my life for nearly two months. In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers — The Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle — plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist.

I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news — I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.

It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.

Now I am not just less anxious and less addicted to the news, I am more widely informed (though there are some blind spots). And I’m embarrassed about how much free time I have — in two months, I managed to read half a dozen books, took up pottery and (I think) became a more attentive husband and father.

Most of all, I realized my personal role as a consumer of news in our broken digital news environment.

We have spent much of the past few years discovering that the digitization of news is ruining how we collectively process information. Technology allows us to burrow into echo chambers, exacerbating misinformation and polarization and softening up society for propaganda. With artificial intelligence making audio and video as easy to fake as text, we’re entering a hall-of-mirrors dystopia, what some are calling an “information apocalypse.” And we’re all looking to the government and to Facebook for a fix.

But don’t you and I also have a part to play? Getting news only from print newspapers may be extreme and probably not for everyone. But the experiment taught me several lessons about the pitfalls of digital news and how to avoid them.

I distilled those lessons into three short instructions, the way the writer Michael Pollan once boiled down nutrition advice: Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.

Get news.

I know what you’re thinking: Listening to a Times writer extol the virtues of print is like taking breakfast suggestions from Count Chocula. You may also wonder if I am preaching to the choir; doesn’t everyone reading this story already appreciate print?

Probably not. The Times has about 3.6 million paying subscribers, but about three-quarters of them pay for just the digital version. During the 2016 election, fewer than 3 percent of Americans cited print as their most important source of campaign news; for people under 30, print was their least important source.

I’m nearly 40, but I’m no different. Though I have closely followed the news since I was a kid, I always liked my news on a screen, available at the touch of a button. Even with this experiment, I found much to hate about print. The pages are too big, the type too small, the ink too messy, and compared with a smartphone, a newspaper is more of a hassle to consult on the go.

Print also presents a narrower mix of ideas than you find online. You can’t get BuzzFeed or Complex or Slate in print. In California, you can’t even get The Washington Post in print. And print is expensive. Outside New York, after introductory discounts, seven-day home delivery of The Times will set you back $81 a month. In a year, that’s about the price of Apple’s best iPhone.

What do you get for all that dough? News. That sounds obvious until you try it — and you realize how much of what you get online isn’t quite news, and more like a never-ending stream of commentary, one that does more to distort your understanding of the world than illuminate it.

I noticed this first with the deal Democrats made to end the government shutdown late in January. On the Jan. 23 front pages, the deal was presented straight: “Shutdown Ends, Setting Up Clash Over ‘Dreamers,’” ran The Times’s headline on the news story, which appeared alongside an analysis piece that presented the political calculations surrounding the deal.

Many of the opinions in that analysis could be found on Twitter and Facebook. What was different was the emphasis. Online, commentary preceded facts. If you were following the shutdown on social networks, you most likely would have seen lots of politicians and pundits taking stock of the deal before seeing details of the actual news.

I want to see the government re-open as much as anyone, but this bill fails to fix the moral issue we must solve. That's why I voted against it.
— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) Jan. 22, 2018

This is common online. On social networks, every news story comes to you predigested. People don’t just post stories — they post their takes on stories, often quoting key parts of a story to underscore how it proves them right, so readers are never required to delve into the story to come up with their own view.

There’s nothing wrong with getting lots of shades of opinion. And reading just the paper can be a lonely experience; there were many times I felt in the dark about what the online hordes thought about the news.

Still, the prominence of commentary over news online and on cable news feels backward, and dangerously so. It is exactly our fealty to the crowd — to what other people are saying about the news, rather than the news itself — that makes us susceptible to misinformation.

Not too quickly.

It’s been clear that breaking news has been broken since at least 2013, when a wild week of conspiracy theories followed the Boston Marathon bombing. As I argued then, technology had caused the break.

Real life is slow; it takes professionals time to figure out what happened, and how it fits into context. Technology is fast. Smartphones and social networks are giving us facts about the news much faster than we can make sense of them, letting speculation and misinformation fill the gap.

It has only gotten worse. As news organizations evolved to a digital landscape dominated by apps and social platforms, they felt more pressure to push news out faster. Now, after something breaks, we’re all buzzed with the alert, often before most of the facts are in. So you’re driven online not just to find out what happened, but really to figure it out.

This was the surprise blessing of the newspaper. I was getting news a day old, but in the delay between when the news happened and when it showed up on my front door, hundreds of experienced professionals had done the hard work for me.

Now I was left with the simple, disconnected and ritualistic experience of reading the news, mostly free from the cognitive load of wondering whether the thing I was reading was possibly a blatant lie.

Another surprise was a sensation of time slowing down. One weird aspect of the past few years is how a “tornado of news-making has scrambled Americans’ grasp of time and memory,” as my colleague Matt Flegenheimer put it last year. By providing a daily digest of the news, the newspaper alleviates this sense. Sure, there’s still a lot of news — but when you read it once a day, the world feels contained and comprehensible rather than a blur of headlines lost on a phone’s lock screen.

You don’t need to read a print newspaper to get this; you can create your own news ritual by looking at a news app once a day, or reading morning newsletters like those from Axios, or listening to a daily news podcast. What’s important is choosing a medium that highlights deep stories over quickly breaking ones.

And, more important, you can turn off news notifications. They distract and feed into a constant sense of fragmentary paranoia about the world. They are also unnecessary. If something really big happens, you will find out.

Avoid social.

This is the most important rule of all. After reading newspapers for a few weeks, I began to see it wasn’t newspapers that were so great, but social media that was so bad.

Just about every problem we battle in understanding the news today — and every one we will battle tomorrow — is exacerbated by plugging into the social-media herd. The built-in incentives on Twitter and Facebook reward speed over depth, hot takes over facts and seasoned propagandists over well-meaning analyzers of news.

You don’t have to read a print newspaper to get a better relationship with the news. But, for goodness’ sake, please stop getting your news mainly from Twitter and Facebook. In the long run, you and everyone else will be better off.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/07/t...ewspapers.html





The Man Who Knew Too Little

The most ignorant man in America knows that Donald Trump is president — but that’s about it. Living a liberal fantasy is complicated.
Sam Dolnick

At first, the experiment didn’t have a name.

Right after the election, Erik Hagerman decided he’d take a break from reading about the hoopla of politics.

Donald Trump’s victory shook him. Badly. And so Mr. Hagerman developed his own eccentric experiment, one that was part silent protest, part coping mechanism, part extreme self-care plan.

He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016.

“It was draconian and complete,” he said. “It’s not like I wanted to just steer away from Trump or shift the conversation. It was like I was a vampire and any photon of Trump would turn me to dust.”

It was just going to be for a few days. But he is now more than a year into knowing almost nothing about American politics. He has managed to become shockingly uninformed during one of the most eventful chapters in modern American history. He is as ignorant as a contemporary citizen could ever hope to be.

James Comey. Russia. Robert Mueller. Las Vegas. The travel ban. “Alternative facts.” Pussy hats. Scaramucci. Parkland. Big nuclear buttons. Roy Moore.

He knows none of it. To Mr. Hagerman, life is a spoiler.

“I just look at the weather,” said Mr. Hagerman, 53, who lives alone on a pig farm in southeastern Ohio. “But it’s only so diverting.”

He says he has gotten used to a feeling that he hasn’t experienced in a long time. “I am bored,” he said. “But it’s not bugging me.”

It takes meticulous planning to find boredom. Mr. Hagerman commits as hard as a method actor, and his self-imposed regimen — white-noise tapes at the coffee shop, awkward scolding of friends, a ban on social media — has reshaped much of his life.

Extreme as it is, it’s a path that likely holds some appeal for liberals these days — a D.I.Y. version of moving to Canada.

Democrats, liberals and leftists have coped with this first year of the Trump presidency in lots of ways. Some subsist on the thin gruel of political cartoon shows and online impeachment petitions. Others dwell online in the thrilling place where conspiracy is indistinguishable from truth. Others have been inspired to action, making their first run for public office, taking local action or marching in their first protest rally.

Mr. Hagerman has done the opposite of all of them.

The fact that it’s working for him — “I’m emotionally healthier than I’ve ever felt,” he said — has made him question the very value of being fed each day by the media. Why do we bother tracking faraway political developments and distant campaign speeches? What good comes of it? Why do we read all these tweets anyway?

“I had been paying attention to the news for decades,” Mr. Hagerman said. “And I never did anything with it.”

At some point last year, he decided his experiment needed a name. He considered The Embargo, but it sounded too temporary. The Boycott? It came off a little whiny.

Mr. Hagerman has created a fortress around himself. “Tiny little boats of information can be dangerous,” he said.

He decided that it would be called The Blockade.

Behind the Blockade

For a guy who has gone to great lengths to essentially plug his ears, Mr. Hagerman sure does talk a lot. He is witty and discursive, punctuating his stories with wild-eyed grins, exaggerated grimaces and more than the occasional lost thread.

I recently spent two days visiting his farm on the condition that I not bring news from the outside world. As the sun set over his porch, turning the rolling hills pink then purple then blue, he held forth, jumping from English architecture to the local pigs’ eating habits to his mother’s favorite basketball team to the philosophy of Kant. He can go days without seeing another soul.

This life is still fairly new. Just a few years ago, he was a corporate executive at Nike (senior director of global digital commerce was his official, unwieldy title) working with teams of engineers to streamline the online shopping experience. Before that, he had worked digital jobs at Walmart and Disney.

“I worked 12-, 14-hour days,” he said. “The calendar completely booked.”

But three years ago, he decided he had saved enough money to move to a farm, make elliptical sculptures — and, eventually, opt out of the national conversation entirely.

He lives alone and has never been married. As for money, a financial adviser in San Francisco manages his investments. Mr. Hagerman says he throws away the quarterly updates without reviewing them.

Mr. Hagerman grew up in southeastern Ohio, and after years spent in Brooklyn warehouses, San Francisco tech bubbles and Nike-land in Portland, Ore., the idea of a quiet life became more and more appealing. His mother lives nearby; he sees her a lot since he moved back in 2015. She reluctantly adheres to The Blockade, although they do discuss the Cleveland Cavaliers.

Mr. Hagerman begins every day with a 30-minute drive to Athens, the closest city of note, to get a cup of coffee — a triple-shot latte with whole milk. He goes early, before most customers have settled into the oversize chairs to scroll through their phones. To make sure he doesn’t overhear idle chatter, he often listens to white noise through his headphones. (He used to listen to music, “but stray conversation can creep in between songs.”)

At Donkey Coffee, everyone knows his order, and they know about The Blockade. “Our baristas know where he’s at so they don’t engage him on topics that would make him uncomfortable,” said Angie Pyle, the coffee shop’s co-owner.

Mr. Hagerman has also trained his friends. A close friend from his Nike days, Parinaz Vahabzadeh, didn’t think he was quite serious at first and, in the early days of The Blockade, kept dropping little hints about politics.

The new administration compelled her to engage more deeply in politics, not less. She had only recently become a United States citizen, and she was passionate about the immigration debate. She did not let Mr. Hagerman opt out easily. “I was needling him,” she said.

And in response, she received, for the first time, a stern text message. “I’m now officially cross with you,” he wrote. “As you know very well I don’t wish to hear about current events. I know you don’t agree with my wishes but I do expect you to respect them.”

They now speak on the phone several times a week, but never about the news. “I’ve gotten used to it,” she said. “It’s actually nice to not talk about politics.”

Conversations with Mr. Hagerman can have a Rip Van Winkle quality. He spoke several times about his sister, Bonnie, an assistant professor, who lives in, of all places, Charlottesville, Va.

While he and I were talking, I looked over at him at every mention of Charlottesville to see if the name of the city, home to perhaps the ugliest weekend of the Trump era to date, made him flinch.

“So, do you associate Charlottesville” — I would say the name deliberately and with emphasis — “with anything besides your sister?”

He didn’t bite. I think he really didn’t know about the Nazis.

Later, he pointed to a house on a hill and said that before the election, the neighbor had decorated his lawn with an effigy of Hillary Clinton behind bars. I wanted to point out that the recently unveiled Mueller indictment found that a Russian troll had paid for a Hillary impersonator at a Florida rally. But I bit my tongue — Mr. Hagerman didn’t know about Mueller, or Russia, or trolls.

Last winter, Mr. Hagerman spent several weeks visiting his twin brother, a tech C.E.O., in San Francisco. Strict arrangements had to be made — the Sunday newspaper kept out of sight, the TV switched off, his teenage niece and nephew under special instructions.

“The bigger challenge was when we would have friends come over and visit,” said his brother, Kris. “We had to have Erik not be there, or we would give them a heads up that Erik has this news blockade going and we gave them the guidelines.

“They were always a little bemused by it. And to some extent a little envious,” he said. “The prospect of just chucking all that for a period of time felt somewhat appealing.”

To be fair, Mr. Hagerman has made a few concessions. He reads The New Yorker’s art reviews, but is careful to flip past the illustrated covers, which often double as political commentary. He watches every Cavaliers game, but only on mute.

He counts a few boats that have sailed past The Blockade. He saw a picture of Kim Jong-un on a newspaper at the coffee shop, signaling that something was up with North Korea. And he overheard someone saying something about Obamacare, which meant health care was back in the news. His brother alerted him to the Equifax breach for his own protection.

“But the blockade has been pretty damn effective,” Mr. Hagerman said.

He said that with some pride, but he has the misgivings about disengaging from political life that you have, by now, surely been shouting at him as you read. “The first several months of this thing, I didn’t feel all that great about it,” he said. “It makes me a crappy citizen. It’s the ostrich head-in-the-sand approach to political outcomes you disagree with.”

It seems obvious to say, but to avoid current affairs is in some ways a luxury that many people, like, for example, immigrants worried about deportation, cannot afford.

“He has the privilege of constructing a world in which very little of what he doesn’t have to deal with gets through,” said his sister, Bonnie Hagerman. “That’s a privilege. We all would like to construct our dream worlds. Erik is just more able to do it than others.”

What if, he began to think, he could address his privilege, and the idea of broader good, near to home?

He has a master project, one that he thinks about obsessively, that he believes can serve as his contribution to American society.

He calls it The Lake.

At the Lake

On a recent spookily warm day, Mr. Hagerman clambered up a steep bank of woods, pushing past vines and stepping past fallen logs.

Wide-eyed, giddy with excitement, he led the way to a flat stretch of brush where he spread his arms and began talking even faster than usual. “This is where we’ll build a giant barn. It will feel like a cathedral. The cloister will be here,” he said, making reference to Chartres, and Oxford, and the grandeur of medieval cathedrals.

About nine months ago, he bought some 45 acres of land on the site of a former strip mine. The property, untouched for decades, has been reclaimed by nature — deer, beavers, salamanders and canopies of majestic trees are thriving.

We walked further to the edge of a steep drop-off. Below, a bright blue lake shimmered in the February heat like a secret. He’ll debate as long as you want whether the body of water counts as a lake or a pond. It’s easier if you just agree it’s a lake.

“You wouldn’t believe how great it feels to go swimming there,” he said. He added, with almost rapturous glee, that the lake sits in the spot where the mining company dug deepest.

Mr. Hagerman sees this land as his life’s work. He plans to restore it, protect it, live on it and then preserve it for the public. “I will never sell this land,” he said.

He wouldn’t put it exactly this way, but he talks about the land in part as penance for the moral cost of his Blockade. He has come to believe that being a news consumer doesn’t enhance society. He also believes that restoring a former coal mine and giving it to the future does.

“I see it as a contribution that has civic relevance that aligns with my passions and what I do well,” Mr. Hagerman said. “I’m going to donate it. It’s going to take most of my net worth. That’s what I’m going to spend the rest of my money on.”

He has filled an entire room of his house with a 3-D rendering of the property to better envision his plans. He has hired Gary Conley, a local landscape ecologist, to advise on the project. Mr. Conley, a gentle bearded outdoorsman who can speak at length about the preferences of the local amphibians, believes that the land could become something special.

Mr. Conley indulges Mr. Hagerman’s fantasies for the land — a walkway modeled on an ancient Mayan ballgame! Land art inspired by “Spiral Jetty”! Windows and concrete blocks, so many blocks! — but Mr. Conley mainly serves as the straight man to inject ecological reality into the plan.

Mr. Conley respects The Blockade. After all, the project of The Lake might not exist without it.

In those carefree pre-Trump days, Mr. Hagerman would settle into the coffee shop with his newspaper and dig in. But after The Blockade, he could only read the weather — “For elderly men it’s endlessly interesting” — and the real estate listings.

It was during one of those long boring mornings, with no news to read, that he found the listing for The Lake.

“The first time I saw it, I said, ‘This is it,’” he said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/10/s...oo-little.html





Reddit Admits it had a Russian Troll Problem During the Election
Tim Hume

Reddit says it has identified and removed hundreds of Russian propaganda accounts, a few days after reports revealed that Russian trolls were active on the platform during the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

In a post Monday, Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman said his site operators had been investigating for awhile and had found a few hundred accounts suspected to be of Russian origin or linked to known sources of Russian propaganda.

“Of course, every account we find expands our search a little more,” he said, also claiming the “vast majority” of the suspicious accounts were banned back in 2015–2016.

An even bigger challenge was the problem of “indirect propaganda,” where content produced by accounts now known to be Russian trolls was enthusiastically shared by Trump supporters on subreddits such as r/The_Donald.

He cited the case of the 136,000-follower Twitter account @TEN_GOP, which appeared to be run by Republicans in Tennessee but is now known to have been a Russian troll account.

“@TEN_GOP’s Tweets were amplified by thousands of Reddit users, and sadly, from everything we can tell, these users are mostly American, and appear to be unwittingly promoting Russian propaganda,” he wrote.

“I believe the biggest risk we face as Americans is our own ability to discern reality from nonsense, and this is a burden we all bear.”

Reddit’s investigation followed a report from The Daily Beast, based on leaked internal data from Kremlin-backed troll farm the Internet Research Agency, that confirmed Russian trolls were active on the site, as well as Tumblr, in their mission to spread disinformation, divide Americans and disrupt U.S. politics.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has charged 13 Russians, all connected to the Internet Research Agency, in his ongoing probe.

Congressional investigators looking into the Russian issue intend to question Reddit and Tumblr over their involvement, the Washington Post reported Monday.
https://news.vice.com/en_ca/article/...g-the-election





Rhode Island Bill Would Charge $20 Fee to Unblock Internet Porn
Ray Downs

Rhode Island lawmakers introduced a bill this month that would charge porn viewers an extra $20 fee.

The bill, introduced by Democratic state senators Frank Ciccone and Hanna Gallo, would require Internet service providers to automatically block all "sexual content and/or patently offensive material."

Rhode Island state law defines "patently offensive material" as anything that is "so offensive on its face as to affront current standards of decency."

In order to get the material unblocked, Rhode Islanders will have to go through a series of steps, including making a request in writing that they want to be able to view the pornography or other "patently offensive material."

The person will then have to prove he or she is at least 18 years of age and then acknowledge that they received a "written warning regarding the potential danger of deactivating the digital blocking capability."

After those steps are satisfied, a one-time $20 fee is assessed to unblock the adult material.

The money collected from the fees will go to the state's council on human trafficking, according to the bill's language.

The bill was referred to the state's Senate Judiciary Committee.
https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2018...8441520319464/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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