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Old 23-05-18, 06:44 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - May 26th, ’18

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" 'Last year, the FBI was unable to access investigation-related content on more than 7,700 devices — even though they had the legal authority to do so. Each of those devices was tied to a threat to the American people,' Sessions said. Officials now admit none of those statements are true." – Devlin Barrett






































May 26th, 2018




How the Music Industry Messed Up Legal Streaming the First Time Around

Lessons from the music industry’s initial consumer-hostile reaction to the Napster saga. Going from $16 CDs to unlimited streaming is really hard.
Ernie Smith

It wasn’t always this way, but life is pretty good for the music industry these days on the streaming front.

The industry, for the first time in more than two decades, is seeing significant growth, largely off the back of streaming technology such as Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora.

Good for them—and possibly also for consumers. But it’s not hard to forget that the music industry, caught off-guard by new technology in the late 1990s, tried to force the issue of getting paid through the launch of forgotten services like MusicNet and PressPlay—and despite the similarities to the way we stream music now, it got burned, badly.

Perhaps that was a foregone conclusion, but the response to Napster is still very much worth analyzing. Why did a very similar spin on today’s streaming services crash and burn, anyway?.
1994

The year that CNN first reported on the existence of the Internet Underground Music Archive, one of the first services that existed for distributing online music. The service, essentially the SoundCloud or BandCamp of its day, allowed independent artists to distribute their music over digital means. IUMA was a hugely influential idea, but struggled as a standalone company, eventually falling by the wayside around 2001 after a failed acquisition by the similarly noble digital music company eMusic. The service's music was brought back to life via the Internet Archive.

Why Primitive Radio Gods is the perfect band to explain the Napster-induced downfall of the physical music industry

Before the music industry failed to rebuild the digital music industry in its own likeness, it pulled a fast one on bands like Primitive Radio Gods.

You probably don’t remember the band, but you most certainly remember the song—if not its title, “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand,” which, let’s face it, is a title only Fiona Apple could love.

Popular in the summer of 1996, the song, best known for its inclusion on The Cable Guy soundtrack, represents a low point of a trend that came to define the music industry in the pre-Napster era. It was a good song, to be completely fair to its creator, Chris O’Connor, and the tune drew the attention of Columbia Records thanks in no small part to its use of atmosphere and a particularly effective B.B. King sample.

The problem was, the rest of the album was effectively old demos produced on the cheap and rushed to release by Columbia before O’Connor had a chance to properly record them in a studio. And this fact was obvious to reviewers.

Allmusic reviewer Stephen Thomas Erlewine described the album as such: “At its core, Rocket sounds like a demo tape with one promising song.”

(Their second album, for what it’s worth, got better reviews.)

To be fair, the album was more symptom than diagnosis. The real problem was that Columbia would not sell “Broken Phone Booth,” a top-10 hit on the Hot 100 Airplay charts, as a standalone single. Because of how the label made its money on rock music at the time, they needed an album—and rather than buying time for Primitive Radio Gods to record one, like a buzzy single might allow for nowadays, the song required the band to immediately release whatever they had lying around.

This was a great way to make money— Rocket, which cost $1,000 to record, went gold—but a horrible way to treat customers. When you’re a teenager, stuck paying $16 for an album featuring one good song and nine demos, something like Napster seems hugely appealing.

Primitive Radio Gods were far from the only band to momentarily glimmer based on the kind of bad music-industry calculus famed producer Steve Albini, best known for his work with Nirvana, could see from a dozen miles away, but their trajectory highlights nearly all of its downsides. The band didn’t even get a chance to release a legitimate album on a major label, because their label shut down!

If you’re an “old millennial” music fan, you know what happened next to the music industry: In 1999, programmer Shawn Fanning created Napster in his Massachusetts dorm room, his idea quickly swept the internet, free music was had by all, Sean Parker found his calling, people downloaded that one Primitive Radio Gods song they liked without the other nine demos, the band Dispatch became one of the first digital-only success stories, Metallica growled publicly, and the music industry sued the service into oblivion, all in the span of three industry-disrupting years.

By the time the original Napster was gone for good in mid-2002, lots of alternatives, like KaZaA and Gnutella, had appeared. But the music industry, being the music industry, wanted to protect the good old days—the days in which they could sell their $16 CDs—as much as possible.

Enter MusicNet and PressPlay.

“What we underestimated was that the pivot to digital would be a two-step pivot. First there would be downloads, then subscriptions. We’re clearly on the right side of history on this one.”

— Rich Glazer, the founder of RealNetworks, noting in a 2016 interview with VentureBeat how his company’s RealPlayer service, the basis of the MusicNet offering, was ahead of its time. The company, founded in 1994, played a key role in the launch of the music industry’s fledgling attempts to create a legal music service. RealNetworks is still an active company in 2018—that big settlement from Microsoft helped buoy them during the lean years, as did some more recent patent sales—though the company is a minor player compared to what it once was. The firm has found success in Asia in recent years, particularly China.

The music industry’s first attempts at legal digital music were confusing, user-hostile, and kind of sucked

In the roughly 24 months between the time Napster shut down its popular free service and Steve Jobs announced the iTunes Music Store to the public, the music industry tried to create legal replacements, but the lack of precedent was a problem. Nobody could figure out exactly what a legal digital music industry was supposed to look like, or how it was supposed to work.

All the music industry knew is that it wanted the golden goose to be secured from the arms of digital thieves, so the solutions they gravitated toward were instilled with digital rights management, which was starting to come into its own around this time, thanks to both the growing sophistication of the technology, which I wrote about last year, and the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which infamously made strides to prevent the technically inclined from attempting to legally break this technology.

“No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title,” Section 1201 of the U.S. Code states.

And with the appearance of Napster, the music industry suddenly had a reason to use these rules they pushed for. The problem? The music industry was stuck in a format war of sorts. With five major record labels at that time—it was six until 1999, when PolyGram merged with Universal Music Group—it was hard finding any common ground on a complicated issue like digital music. The short-term result of this discomfort was that the music industry effectively split the digital music industry in two.

On one corner was Universal Music and Sony Music, the two of which backed PressPlay, which was built with DRM technology from Microsoft’s Windows Media Player. In the other was MusicNet, which had three labels at play—Warner Bros., Bertelsmann Music Group (BMG), and EMI.—and the backing of RealNetworks, whose streaming technology came to define the early internet.

Their offerings were slightly different—for a $9.95-per-month fee MusicNet allowed for 100 temporary downloads and 100 on-demand streams at launch, according to Billboard, while Pressplay allowed for 300 streams and 30 downloads and offered limited CD-burning capabilities at higher price points—but the tissue tying the two approaches together was DRM.

It certainly wasn’t music, as the services made no effort to collaborate with one another. In the post-Napster era, the combination of limited libraries and competition from peer-to-peer file sharing services put the companies at a major disadvantage. As Billboard’s Brian Garrity put it:

The big concept of 2001 has been that in order to compete with file-sharing services that offer a virtually limitless universe of free content, music companies must curb pirate peer-to-peer networks in the courts while at the same time develop similar secure music services of their own. But their offerings have two main differences: Consumers pay to access content rather than receive it for free, and content is primarily rented to consumers instead of accessed on a buy-to-own basis.

Complicating factors significantly was the landscape of the technology that separated the two services. Microsoft and RealNetworks (which was founded by a Microsoft alum) had become major rivals on the streaming front, with the conflict playing out between the two not unlike Netscape and Internet Explorer, with Microsoft’s market power coloring the business conflict. (Microsoft’s Justice Department settlement loomed over the situation as well.) In 2003, this would lead to a lawsuit that RealNetworks would eventually score a $761 million settlement from.

The result of this conflict for the digital music industry was that the services weren’t compatible, effectively limiting the amount of music that was on each service—some major labels on one, some more major labels on the other. By the end, neither service had each of the major labels. The conflict between the two tech giants bled into the services they sold the music industry on.

"It's a crying shame that the Microsoft-RealNetworks rift has spilled over to the major labels," Jupiter Media Metrix analyst Aram Sinnreich told CNET in 2002. “The end result is that it will be a longer time before consumers will have access to a music-subscription service that offers them enough music."

It’s not a dissimilar situation to the mishmash of availability we see with our streaming video services today, where pieces of content come and go like passing trains through the night, but in contrast to Napster or Audiogalaxy, it was a tough sell, especially given the artificial limitations the services imposed on users.

The music industry tried to strong-arm a replacement for Napster in the market, just as it strong-armed gold records out of artists who had a single and nine demos. And they were convinced that the strategy would work without any issues.

But the skepticism engendered toward both the music industry at large and DRM as a controversial new technology ensured its efforts immediately drew scrutiny. In August of 2001, just a few weeks after the free version of Napster was forced shut by court order, the US Justice Department opened up a fresh antitrust investigation into PressPlay and MusicNet.

The concern at the time was less that PressPlay and MusicNet were dominating the industry conversation without making room for third-party players. Sites that looked like potential competitors, like MP3.com and eMusic, had been recently snapped up by Universal Music and turned into affiliates of PressPlay, bastardizing the MP3-friendly approach the services originally took. (Both companies were later sold off: eMusic is active today; MP3.com is a content site that hasn’t been updated in about three years.)

Meanwhile, other firms with competing DRM technologies—like InterTrust, the company that held most of the important DRM patents and would soon win a big settlement of its own from Microsoft—were suddenly competing with the major labels, that wouldn’t even share with one another, let alone a third-party service.

It was clear to outsiders, and even some insiders, that what the music industry was trying to do wasn’t going to work. (It was also clear that it was costing the labels tens of millions of dollars they would never get back.) The technology was too restrictive, the approach too stacked in favor of the record industry. There was too much distrust and bad blood in the air after what happened with Napster.

Stephen Witt, in his 2015 book How Music Got Free, portrayed Universal Music’s then-CEO, Doug Morris, as being overly excited about PressPlay, to the point where Recording Industry Association of America President Hilary Rosen, frequently portrayed as an “enemy combatant” of the Napster era during this time, had a hard time talking him off the ledge. (Rosen, it should be said, was simply sharing the company line because it was her job.)

“On several occasions he told Rosen to stop talking to Napster, to stop negotiating with the Fannings, to stop worrying so much, because he had something that would ‘make it all go away,’” Witt wrote. “In later years, PressPlay would be a reliable starting point for listicles of the ‘Top All-Time Tech Busts.’”

Really, the only person who was able to talk the music industry off the edge was Steve Jobs.

In a 2010 article after Jobs’ passing, Warner Music’s then-VP, Paul Vidich, explained to Billboard that Jobs quickly cut through the music industry’s BS (“‘I don’t want to talk about what you guys are doing,’ he said. ‘You guys have always had your heads up your expletive-deleted,’” Vidich recalled of their first meeting) and came up with a solution that every label could agree to—a situation where the technology people were in charge of the technology and the record labels got out of the way.

"We did our deal, closed it in October 2002, they then pitched it to each of the other, who signed on and they launched it on April 28, 2003,” Vidich noted. “Within a month they sold a million downloads, which startled everybody.”

Soon enough, the Justice Department closed its investigation into PressPlay and MusicNet. It wasn’t necessary anymore.

2003

The year that Napster relaunched as a pay service, effectively a rebranded version of the former PressPlay service. The company had been purchased by Roxio after its bankruptcy and had no connection to the original service. The Napster brand, which has existed for more than 15 years outside the purview of Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, is so strong today that in 2016, the music service Rhapsody rebranded itself as Napster.

So, it’s worth pondering: Why were MusicNet and PressPlay such bad ideas, and why, in contrast, is Spotify seen as a much better one?

Clearly, if you break it down, the approaches are similar minus the download limitations put on use of the older services—especially with the paid subscription model that’s common today.

But the key difference may be the intent of the offering. Spotify is clearly a service that was built for music listeners first and music labels second. This gave the company some headaches as those labels complained about things like mechanical reproduction, and it’s had to change up its approach a few times as a result, but the fact of the matter is, the service has always favored the listener over the label or the artist.

Certainly, the fact that our phones made the technology more portable played a factor as well.

But it’s worth suggesting that perhaps we, as consumers, changed, with some distance from Napster. We spent years in a content free-for-all, with little in the way of concern about who was going to get paid. Not because it was the right way—but because it was the path of least resistance.

In 2003, as he was announcing the iTunes Music Service, Jobs called subscriptions “the wrong path,” an avenue that became the path of most resistance.

“These services treat you like a criminal,” he said at the time.

As Apple Music came to life from the purchase of Beats and emerged as Spotify’s most robust competitor, the line was heavily scrutinized after the fact, but it’s possible that the wrong path became the right one for a single, simple reason.

We stopped treating music fans like criminals.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...st-time-around





How 2 Million People Loved MoviePass Nearly to Death

Moviegoers adore it. Multiplexes hate it. Now the company might not have enough money to make it through summer.
Kyle Stock

Hannah Wolfe became a MoviePass Inc. member, hit the pricey theaters of New York, and began doing her part to drive the company out of business.

Since paying the $9.95 monthly fee for the movie-a-day service in January, Wolfe has seen Black Panther and most of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Best Picture nominees. Twelve films in total, at no additional cost to her. “It seemed a little too good to be true, especially in New York where movies cost like $16 each,” she says. “It feels like I haven’t paid for the ticket.”

In a way, she hasn’t. Wolfe has paid MoviePass about $50, and in turn the company would have likely shelled out almost $200 to theaters to cover the full ticket prices. To make matters worse, Wolfe has been recruiting everyone she knows—and some are getting even more out of the service. Her roommate rarely went to movies before and recently saw five in a week. Her father, a retired teacher, is on pace to see 40 films this year.

Eight months after slashing its price and expanding membership past 2 million users, MoviePass is now at risk of going bust. The parent company, Helios & Matheson Analytics Inc., which now owns 92 percent of MoviePass, said last week that it had just $15.5 million in cash at the end of April and $27.9 million on deposit with merchant processors. MoviePass has been burning through $21.7 million per month. A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing last month revealed that the company’s auditor has “substantial doubt” about its ability to stay solvent. Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities Inc., warns that MoviePass may not survive the summertime run of blockbusters.

On Tuesday, Helios reported the performance of MoviePass for the three months ending on March 31. The company lost $107 million, earning just over $1 million from marketing deals and $47 million from subscriptions. Helios shares have fallen to decade lows of less than $1 after peaking at $32.90 in October, alongside the MoviePass hype.

To critics such as AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc., the largest theater chain in the world, this looks like a comeuppance for a business strategy that always required either suspension of disbelief or faith in Silicon Valley-style magic. “What we objected to was their price point, which we believed would cause them to hemorrhage cash and have an unsustainable business model,” says AMC Chief Executive Officer Adam Aron. That “doesn’t mean that the subscription model is a bad idea,” he adds.

Even rivals with subscriptions have been left puzzled by what MoviePass is doing. London-based Cineworld Group Plc offers an all-you-can-watch subscription in the U.K. that costs nearly three times as much. Cinemark Holdings Inc., the third-largest U.S. theater chain, has a $9 monthly subscription plan that affords just 12 films in a year.

Executives at Sinemia Inc., a service from Europe that charges its U.S. members $15 per month for a maximum of three films and is being sued by MoviePass, can’t figure out how the model makes sense. “Every investor asked me if I’m going to do the same pricing,” says Sinemia CEO Rifat Oguz. “Honestly, we thought it was a promotion,” he says. “It turned out, it wasn’t.”

Unlike a superhero prequel, the third act for MoviePass remains unpredictable even though the story looks familiar: an upstart willing to burn a pile of money to fuel rapid growth and disrupt an entrenched industry. The $10-per-month unlimited deal will likely prove temporary in the end, either because the company runs out of money or else decides to change the offer for the sake of its survival. But whatever happens, the big-screen subscription model MoviePass has popularized could end up changing the economics of the multiplex.

MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe, 65, knows the audience of investors and multiplex owners doesn’t believe the script he’s been shopping around for months. Some of the dialogue can ring false.

“Who’s profitable out there?” Lowe asks in an interview. “Spotify isn’t profitable. Netflix isn’t profitable. God knows, AMC isn’t profitable.” The only problem with this view of the competitive landscape is that it’s not entirely accurate: In the most recent quarter, both Netflix Inc. and AMC reported profits.

Lowe should be familiar with Netflix. He worked there until 2003, guiding the company’s position in the video-rental era and forging partnerships with companies such as Best Buy Co. From there, he jumped to the DVD vending-machine empire Redbox Automated Retail LLC and tried to outmaneuver and undercut his former employer.

MoviePass had just 20,000 members when Lowe joined in June 2016 with an undisclosed stake, a fresh hypothesis about disruption, and a techie wardrobe topped off with the facial hair configuration known as a soul patch. The multiplex, as he saw it, was the only entertainment venue that hadn’t been transformed since the advent of software special effects.

A little more than a year after taking the top job, Lowe linked up with an investor named Ted Farnsworth, the onetime owner of a psychic hotline, to make a dramatic move. Farnsworth’s penny-stock firm, Helios & Matheson, bought 51 percent of MoviePass for $27 million and provided the financing to slash the membership price from about $35 a month to $10.

It’s pure Silicon Valley logic. As long as MoviePass can capture enough users, Lowe and Fansworth believe, money will roll in from Hollywood marketing budgets, retail advertisers, and even theater owners themselves. Right now, MoviePass claims to buy one of every 17 cinema tickets sold in the U.S. On this theory, the company’s mounting losses won’t matter if it can put millions of butts into those new recliners.

The reason MoviePass’s plan sounds plausible is that startups with similar all-you-can-eat pricing models have already reshaped the music and movie-rental business. But Spotify Technology SA and Netflix didn’t just offer low prices to consumers—they also acquired content cheaply, whether by buying DVDs that could be rented many times or paying low royalties to musicians.

“It works if enough people sign up and literally forget they have the subscription”

Movie theaters have little incentive to offer discounts to MoviePass. In fact, theater owners have been raising box-office prices, pushing revenue to near all-time highs, as a way to offset lower attendance. The average multiplex ticket price in the U.S. and Canada increased 26 percent from 2007 to 2016, according to the Motion Picture Association of America, while the number of tickets sold slipped 6 percent.

This downward trend in turnout has persuaded theater owners to focus on quality, not quantity. A widespread industry vogue called reseating has removed rows of stadium-style chairs in favor of fewer, larger seats. Giants such as AMC and boutiques like Alamo Drafthouse Cinema LLC would rather sell dinner and cocktails to a couple than five tickets and a tub of popcorn to a family.

To theater owners, MoviePass pitches itself as a way to boost attendance again. “We want to prove that we can be a positive member of the ecosystem,” Lowe says.

Investors were keen on the idea at first. In the weeks after MoviePass slashed prices in August, Helios shares spiked tenfold. Farnsworth has seen this kind of pop before. Three of his penny-stock ventures—two drink makers and a vitamin company with a tiered sales structure—enjoyed bursts of investor enthusiasm. Then shares dropped to near zero.

Here’s how MoviePass explains its model, using cocktail-napkin math.

Assume that 20 percent of members see about two movies every month, at an average cost to the company of $22. From this group, filled with people like Hannah Wolfe, MoviePass expects to lose about $12 a month per member. The other 80 percent of members will see about 10 movies per year, generating about $1 per month in profit each.

If you look at MoviePass as a business that sells movie tickets, this is a rather dismal situation. The company would spend roughly $1.16 for every $1 in revenue it collects.

Joe Spiegel, whose hedge fund, Dalek Capital Management LLC, has made money shorting Helios shares, lampoons the strategy. “It works if enough people sign up and literally forget they have the subscription,” he says. “You have a ridiculous business plan, and the holes you poke through it are answered with an even more ridiculous plan.”

But Lowe and company see movie tickets as a loss leader to round up consumers—particularly young consumers. The most profitable side of the MoviePass model is supposed be sales of ads to studios and distributors. Retailers and services adjacent to the moviegoing experience—restaurants, ride-hailing apps, maybe even babysitters—would also become MoviePass advertisers.

MoviePass is supposed to be more like a film-obsessed Facebook than a ticket-selling service like Fandango Inc. Lowe can sketch an expansive vision of monetizing his data trove with targeted ads, reaching users with a demonstrated preference for body-horror films or female superheroes or poke restaurants.

But marketers are skeptical. Mark Douglas, CEO of digital ad platform SteelHouse, says companies would pay no more than a few thousand dollars for access to MoviePass’s customer database and about $25,000 to show a trailer to its subscribers. “They don’t have significant scale,” Douglas says. Movie studios advertise on YouTube, he points out, and the video platform has far more viewers and data on which kinds of movies they like.

The final chunk of anticipated MoviePass revenue is supposed to come from a share of ticket and concession sales. Lowe says something on the order of 20 percent would be a fair reflection of the increased traffic his service generates. To date, there’s been no sign large theater owners are rushing to offer money. “AMC has absolutely no intention, I repeat no intention, of sharing any, I repeat any, of our admissions revenue or our concessions revenue with MoviePass,” AMC’s Aron said in November.

Some studios, including 20th Century Fox, have had one-off arrangements to test the advertising power of MoviePass, according to people familiar with the arrangements. Fox didn’t pay MoviePass, one of the people said. But Lowe says the deals are real, and the studios won’t discuss them out of fear of running afoul of AMC.

Lowe sees these nonmembership revenue streams amounting to somewhere between $5 to $7 per user each month. In the first three months of the year, however, the company managed to bring in only $1.4 million from marketing and promotions, according to Tuesday’s SEC filing. That's far short of Lowe’s goal.

“I’m much more optimistic now than I was at the beginning of the year,” Lowe says.

Another way to keep MoviePass from teetering into insolvency is to get members to love the service less. The company switched to a sign-up deal on April 13 that restricted new members to four movies a month. Two weeks later, after social media backlash, the old terms returned. But the company is still advertising a $7.95 plan capped at three movies per month, alongside its movie-a-day deal.

Other moves to take some sting out of the heaviest users appear to be staying in place. Farnsworth recently cited efforts to reduce fraudulent use of cards, prevent repeat viewing of movies, and stop the sharing of memberships and passwords. Some MoviePass members now must upload a photo of their ticket stub to ensure they aren’t gaming the system.

The challenge of using MoviePass to actually see a movie has already been a hallmark of the MoviePass experience. The deal only applies to single tickets purchased on the same day as the showing, and customers must be standing near the theater before the app will transfer the price of a ticket to their debit cards. Imax and 3D films are out of bounds, as is buying a pair of seats (although MoviePass says it has a couples plan in the works). Using the app to secure coveted screenings at peak times is a bit like trying to book a flight with airline miles.

The other obvious problem is that the drive to increase membership ends up creating more moviegoers, burning through more of MoviePass’s dwindling cash. Last week, in a promotion, MoviePass sent members an email offering free one-month memberships that can be given to three friends. The company has blitzed the Midwest with radio ads, in some of its only marketing so far, as a way to increase membership in places where movie tickets are sold relatively cheap.

Eventually, MoviePass expects members to curb their own screen time. Lowe likens it to grazing a breakfast buffet during a weeklong hotel stay. On Day 7, he says, you don’t pile the bacon on your plate quite as high. So MoviePass is feverishly trying to attract film gluttons—and then waiting for them to get bored with going to the movies. In the meantime, Lowe says the company has “very committed” investors who have agreed to pour in more money.

The failure of MoviePass would knock out some chunk of box-office revenue—theater owners say it accounts for less than 5 percent of traffic—but the prospect of MoviePass somehow surviving could be even worse for big multiplex companies. If it stays solvent long enough, the sheer size of its millions-strong membership may begin to move the market.

“At some point, the numbers do make sense,” says Brian Schultz, co-founder of Studio Movie Grill, a chain of 30 theaters mostly in the Southwest. Schultz, who has invested in MoviePass, believes the company is creating a whole new class of cinema customers. “You’ve got to give some credit to a concept that people actually fanatically love,” he says.

Studio Movie Grill is also one of two dozen smaller theater chains that has bowed to MoviePass by entering into a marketing agreement. On average, Farnsworth says, these deals shave about 20 percent off ticket prices. At almost all of the 5,000 or so theaters where MoviePass is accepted, the company pays in full.

“I don’t look at it as a discount, or a bulk sale, or a revenue share,” Schultz says of the money lost to MoviePass users. “I look at it as a marketing acquisition cost.”

Lowe said he closed similar contracts at the CinemaCon conference last month with scores of theater chains, comprising thousands of screens. Most of the operations are small and speckled through less populated regions, including Main Street Theatres in Omaha, Neb., and Detroit’s MJR Digital Cinemas.

If MoviePass gets close to its yearend goal of 5 million members, marketing messages offered on the MoviePass app may start subtly—or not so subtly—shifting customers to the theaters and films the company prefers. Such as those playing at Studio Movie Grill.

“We can’t control what everybody does,” Lowe says. “But there’s definitely a lot of theaters with a competitor around them.”

The moment that came closest to this dream of MoviePass moguldom happened in late January in Park City, Utah. As the Sundance Film Festival kicked off, Lowe rented a giant house on a mountain outside of town and spread the word that he wanted to finance a film. There was a party with a dance floor, four bars—one on each floor—and plenty of MoviePass stocking hats. Filmmakers came with pitches.

Lowe gets giddy talking about it. “People were just showing up at the house,” he says. “And they were bringing their lawyers, they weren’t just exploratory conversations.”

The company cut a deal with undisclosed terms to back a buzzy film called American Animals. At the end of April, the company also backed a biopic with John Travolta cast as mob boss John Gotti. When the two films hit theaters in June, MoviePass will try to deploy its members and perhaps more theaters will screen them as a result.

Paul Davidson, executive vice president at The Orchard, which is distributing American Animals, is keen on seeing proof of MoviePass’s ability to fill seats. “I can spend $1 million on TV advertising and billboards,” he says, “and nobody can tell me if it drove a single person to the movie.”

During that snowy week at Sundance, Lowe and his team had their pick of films: comedies, buddy flicks, action fare. Ultimately they picked a movie about a group of outsiders who cook up a heist. The trailer starts with a voiceover: “You ever feel like you’re waiting for something to happen, but you don’t know what it is?”

That worked for Lowe. He was all in.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/featu...a-happy-ending





82% of MoviePass Subscribers Have Gone to a Movie They Never Would Have Directly Paid For
Rob Toledo

We, like any movie-loving person, are obsessed with MoviePass. And currently we, like most MoviePass subscribers, are part of the problem when it comes to the service’s survival. Tracking along with our use of MoviePass over the last six months, we have on average gone to at least three movies a month, exceeding the $10/month price paid for the card.

However, while we reviewed the list of movies we attended, there were plenty that we thought back on and said, “Yeah, I never would have paid to see that in theaters” (and please, for the sake of the article, set aside Economics 101 and ignore the fact that we’re still paying for the movie, just indirectly through a subscription). With that in mind, we surveyed 1,311 current self-reporting MoviePass subscribers to see if this was a trend among other subscribers.

We asked the following question:

As a subscriber to MoviePass, have you gone to a movie you normally would have ignored?
Yes 82%
No 13%
Not Sure 5%

While theaters are only reporting a slight uptick in foot traffic since MoviePass got popular, there is no denying that there are now more butts in seats of movies that otherwise might not get as much foot traffic. Perhaps the real winner in a world with MoviePass is the box office rake for “bad” movies.

We also asked for commentary on what specific movies people went to see only because they had MoviePass.

“The Overboard remake, Tomb Raider, a few I’m forgetting. They were all pretty terrible. But I love going to movies so who cares. The more movies I go to, the better deal my monthly MoviePass subscription is.”

“I’m pretty sure the only reason Hurricane Heist made it to theaters is because MoviePass existed and the studio was like, yeah, someone will show up to watch this. Still, I love bad movies. There’s no way I would have paid to see this in theaters, but I definitely would have rented it or something.”

“No, I already go to a lot of movies, MoviePass just made it a whole lot cheaper. I haven’t really changed my behavior.”

“I saw Truth or Dare by myself one morning because I had nothing else to do. I am grateful I used MoviePass to see it.”

“Saw I Feel Pretty, the movie with Amy Schumer on a whim, I actually thought it was pretty good. Still wouldn’t have paid for it though.”

“I didn’t even know there was a new Tomb Raider movie, but a friend brought it up. We went and saw it. It was ok.”
https://exstreamist.com/82-of-moviep...ctly-paid-for/





MoviePass Competitor Sinemia Launches $4.99 Per Month Subscriptions
Megan Rose Dickey

Sinemia, a MoviePass competitor that launched four years ago in Europe, has introduced some super-duper low-cost plans for seeing movies in theaters.

Here’s the breakdown:

• $4.99 per month: one ticket per month
• $6.99 per month: two tickets per month
• $9.99 per month: two tickets per month including 3D, 4D and IMAX
• $14.99 per month: three tickets per month including 3D, 4D and IMAX

Now, I know what you’re thinking, and it’s true. MoviePass’s $9.99 per month subscription lets you see nearly an unlimited number of movies every month (one per day).

But there’s no way I would take full advantage of the “unlimited” offering. And Sinemia CEO Rifat Oguz recognizes that I’m not the only person like that.

“Not everyone really needs an unlimited moviegoing experience,” Oguz told me. “The average in the U.S. is four movies per year.”

For me, at least, Sinemia is a more attractive offer because of one simple feature: advanced online ticketing. MoviePass requires you to be physically at the movie theater to purchase the tickets, and homie just can’t play that. There’s also the fact that Sinemia lets you see 3D, 4D and IMAX. That’s not the case with MoviePass.

While Sinemia pays full price to movie theaters for every ticket purchased through its platform, Sinemia makes up for that via advertising deals with studios and restaurants. For example, when you open up the Sinemia app, the three movies you see featured at the top are paid for by studios wanting to promote their movies. As of right now, 85 percent of the company’s revenue comes from subscriptions with just 15 percent coming from advertising.

In the next 12 months, Sinemia hopes to launch its services in countries throughout Asia. Sinemia doesn’t disclose monthly subscriber numbers, but says it’s growing more than 50 percent every month.

Earlier this year, MoviePass sued Sinemia for copyright infringement, alleging Sinemia copied many of MoviePass’s features. Specifically, MoviePass alleges Sinemia violated a patent pertaining to automatic authentication and one pertaining to a ticketing system. The litigation is ongoing, but Oguz said he generally likes competition and appreciates how MoviePass made this model popular.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/04/mo...subscriptions/





Netflix's DVD Rental Business is Still Profitable
Don Reisinger

Netflix might be focusing on its streaming business, but the produce that made its name is still alive—and apparently well.

The company’s DVD.com DVD rental business has 3 million subscribers and generated a whopping $56 million in profit on just $99 million in revenue during the first quarter, CNBC is reporting. That staggering profit margin aside, Netflix’s business has a wide selection of 100,000 DVDs, which easily overshadows the 5,600 streaming titles available on Netflix, according to the report.

DVD.com’s profitability might surprise some who moved on long ago from disc-based entertainment in the living room to streaming. Indeed, Netflix itself seemed to have moved on in 2011 when it split the DVD division from its now-core streaming operation. And whenever Netflix discusses its business, the company focuses on streaming and its place in the original content market rather than DVDs.

But it was DVDs that helped Netflix get its start. By offering customers the option to rent DVDs through its website and then have those discs delivered to their homes, Netflix offered a far more convenient option than retail stores, like Blockbuster, that required customers to walk in to get their discs. The move ultimately killed brick-and-mortar DVD rentals and solidified Netflix’s position as a market leader.

Despite its apparent success, Netflix’s DVD division isn’t exactly poised for growth. At its height, Netflix’s DVD business, which is celebrating its 20th year, had 50 distribution centers all sending out discs to customer homes. Now, though, it has 17 facilities left.

If you’re interested in stepping back in time and signing up for Netflix’s DVD service, plans are still available. They start at $5 a month.
http://fortune.com/2018/05/21/netflix-dvd-business/





‘Deadpool 2’ Gins Up $301 Million in Global Ticket Sales
Brooks Barnes

Remember a couple summers ago when people were predicting imminent superhero fatigue? Whoops.

The return of Wade Wilson, that rascally, R-rated mercenary in red, gave 20th Century Fox its biggest opening weekend in two years — since he first sashayed into pop-culture superstardom in “Deadpool.” The well-reviewed sequel arrived to roughly $125 million in ticket sales at North American theaters, according to comScore, which compiles box office data. It took in an additional $176 million overseas.

“Deadpool 2,” starring Ryan Reynolds, cost $110 million to make, or nearly double the price of the first one, which took in $132.4 million over its first three days in theaters and went on to collect $783.1 million worldwide. Once again, Fox mounted a madcap marketing campaign that approached performance art, complete with a ballet-infused Celine Dion video.

Second place for the weekend went to — you guessed it — a collection of superheroes. “Avengers: Infinity War” (Disney) generated about $28.7 million in ticket sales, for a four-week domestic total of $595 million ($1.8 billion worldwide). More spandex is on the way, including “The Incredibles 2” from Pixar on June 12 and Marvel’s “Ant-Man and the Wasp” on July 6.

In a bit of successful counterprogramming, “Book Club” (Paramount) arrived in third place, collecting about $12.5 million. A PG-13 comedy starring Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Diane Keaton and Mary Steenburgen, “Book Club” was independently financed by Endeavor Content and June Pictures, the company behind “The Florida Project.” Paramount bought certain distribution rights for about $10 million.

Paramount said that 60 percent of the audience was over 50 years old. Ms. Fonda sought to stir interest in the days leading up to release with a sassy Twitter message to Mr. Reynolds. “You’re not the only one that kills in a tight little red outfit,” she wrote. “We’ll show you ours if you show us yours.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/20/m...ox-office.html





New Sony CEO to Detail Shift Away From Gadgets in Mid-Term Plan
Yuji Nakamura and Yuki Furukawa

• Kenichiro Yoshida to unveil strategy for first time as CEO
• Company sees unit sales of all hardware products falling

Sony Corp. is done working for peanuts in the hardware business.

Kenichiro Yoshida, who took over as chief executive officer in April, is set to unveil a three-year plan on Tuesday that embraces Sony’s growing reliance on income from gaming subscriptions and entertainment. The transition is already happening: even though the company sold fewer hardware products such as televisions, digital cameras, smartphones and PlayStation consoles in the year through March, it was able to post record operating profit.

It’s a tectonic shift for a company built on manufacturing prowess. Sony popularized transistor radios, gave the world portable music with the Walkman and its TVs were considered top-of-the-line for decades. With the rise of Chinese manufacturing, making and selling gadgets has become a business with razor-thin profit margins. Investors have applauded the transformation that’s been under way since Kazuo Hirai took over as CEO in 2012, with the shares climbing more than five-fold amid a turnaround.

“Yoshida is clearly sending a signal that recurring revenue from the content business, software, services, and subscription segments are important,” said David Dai, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. in Hong Kong. “That’s what is going to drive growth and also sustain growth.”

The big question is whether Yoshida, who was chief financial officer before his promotion, can make a clear and compelling case for growth in online content, recurring subscription revenues and intellectual property licensing. The PlayStation 4 gaming console is nearing the end of its lifecycle and the company’s Hollywood division is notorious for swinging between blockbuster hits and big flops.

Other questions for investors include how aggressively Yoshida plans to spend Sony’s growing cash pile to acquire more content, whether a merger of movies and music under a single entertainment unit is in the cards, and if game streaming will be central to the PlayStation 5.

Another key area of concern is Sony’s semiconductor business, which supplies mobile-camera chips for iPhones and other mobile phones. Operating profit for that business is seen declining 39 percent in the current fiscal year, partly due to one-time charges but also amid sputtering global demand for smartphones.

“Sony is proving that it can evolve with the landscape ... with a shift from a hardware-to content-driven profit model,” SMBC Nikko Securities Inc. analyst Ryosuke Katsura wrote after the company’s latest earnings report last month. “The real key is whether it provides investors with a clear road map.”

On Tuesday, after Yoshida kicks off Sony’s investor relations day at 9:30 a.m. in Tokyo, all eight of the company’s divisions will present their mid-term strategy though 2021.

Those presentations will most likely stress the resilience of Sony’s content businesses. Profits from the video-game unit are up, even amid a 20 percent drop in PS4 hardware sales, thanks to recurring revenue from PlayStation’s online network. Paying subscribers for the service have jumped 64 percent over the past two years to 34.2 million.

Still, the shift toward online content has been bumpy. Sony’s online TV service PlayStation Vue continues to bleed money. The service lost access to ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC affiliated stations over a contractual spat this month. In late 2016, it dropped Viacom Inc. stations, leaving subscribers without Comedy Central and MTV.

Outside of games and chips, which together generated almost half of all earnings last year, Yoshida is likely to talk about the rising importance of intellectual property and patent licensing. On Monday, Sony spent $185 million to buy a 39 percent stake in Peanuts Holdings, the owner of the Snoopy brand.

As Nobuyuki Idei, the former CEO who presided over Sony’s glory days as a hardware maker, warned in 1999 at the beginning of the internet era: “The hardware business is peanuts.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-mid-term-plan





Study: All Major ISPs Have Declined in Customer Satisfaction
Karl Bode

Verizon FiOS has been rated the highest in customer satisfaction in a new study, though that may not be much to write home about. According to the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index survey (pdf), Verizon FiOS was the top rated ISP with a score of 70 out of 100. But that score was a one point decline from one year earlier, and the industry average of 64 was not only a decline from last year, it's lower than most of the other industries the group tracks.

According to the ACSI, high prices and poor customer service continues to plague an US broadband industry with some very obvious competitive shortcomings.

"According to users, most aspects of ISPs are getting worse," the ACSI said. "Courtesy and helpfulness of staff has waned to 76 and in-store service is slower (74). Bills are more difficult to understand (-3 percent to 71), and customers aren’t happy with the variety of plans available (-3 percent to 64)."

Not a single ISP tracked by the firm saw an improvement in customer satisfaction scores. The worst of the worst according to the ACSI is Mediacom, which saw a 9% plummet year over year to a score of 53, which is lower than most airlines, banks, and even the IRS according to the report.

Charter Spectrum and Suddenlink also saw 8% declines in satisfaction year over year, and despite repeated claims that customer service is now its top priority, Comcast saw zero improvement in broadband satisfaction and a slight decline in pay TV satisfaction.

As noted, much of this dissatisfaction stems from a lack of competition, which is actually getting worse in many parts of the country. As telcos like Windstream, Verizon, CenturyLink and Frontier simply refuse to upgrade huge swaths of their aging DSL lines, cable is securing a bigger monopoly than ever before over broadband -- especially at faster speeds.

For example, a recent FCC study highlighted how competition is already pretty tepid at the FCC's standard definition of 25 Mbps, and virtually nonexistent as you get to faster 100 Mbps tiers. That lack of competition reduces incentive to compete on price and customer service, and instead incentivizes carriers to push their luck on price hikes and things like arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps.

And with ISPs effectively in charge of government regulators right now (as the assault on net neutrality, privacy, media ownership limits, and other FCC policy makes abundantly clear), it's a problem that's going to be sticking around for the foreseeable future.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/S...faction-141895





T-Mobile Should Stop Claiming it has “Best Unlimited Network,” Ad Group Says

T-Mobile won speed tests but didn't prove it had best coverage and reliability.
Jon Brodkin

T-Mobile USA should stop claiming that it has "America's Best Unlimited Network," the advertising industry's self-regulator said today.

AT&T challenged T-Mobile's ads to the National Advertising Division (NAD), which ruled that T-Mobile hasn't substantiated its claim that it has the best wireless network.

T-Mobile defended itself by arguing that speed outweighs all other factors—apparently including overall coverage and reliability. But to reasonably claim that one has the best overall network for unlimited data, a carrier should prove that it also has the widest geographic coverage and best reliability, the NAD concluded.

T-Mobile said it will appeal the NAD decision to the National Advertising Review Board (NARB). T-Mobile's best network claim has appeared in online, TV, and radio advertisements.

T-Mobile says speed outweighs all other factors

T-Mobile's claim is based on data from Ookla and OpenSignal, which offer speed-testing apps that let consumers test their wireless data speeds. Both Ookla and OpenSignal have issued reports saying that T-Mobile's speeds were higher than Verizon's, AT&T's, and Sprint's. The OpenSignal tests also gave T-Mobile an edge over rivals in latency and 4G signal availability.

But the NAD said that the evidence from Ookla and OpenSignal, whether reliable or not, "didn't match the breadth of [T-Mobile's] 'Best Unlimited Network' claim." Even if T-Mobile has the highest average data speeds, that doesn't mean its network is more reliable or provides greater coverage than competitors on a nationwide basis, the NAD said.

T-Mobile "did not provide evidence that its network is superior in providing talk and text mobile services or in providing high-speed data more reliably or to a greater coverage area," the industry group's announcement said.

T-Mobile argued that data speed is so important to consumers "that it overcomes any disparities in other network-measurement categories," according to the NAD. But the NAD said that T-Mobile provided no evidence "to support the argument that, for consumers, speed outweighs coverage or reliability in evaluating a network."

"In the absence of specific evidence showing that network speed is paramount in the minds of consumers, NAD determined that the advertiser's speed, latency, and 4G signal reliability evidence was insufficient to support T-Mobile's broad network superiority claim and recommended T-Mobile discontinue its 'Best Unlimited Network' claim," the NAD said.

T-Mobile also argued to the NAD that "its superiority in latency and 4G signal availability" demonstrate that its network is "the best in the market for consumers of unlimited high-speed mobile data," according to the NAD announcement.

T-Mobile has fared poorly in reports by RootMetrics, which conducts nationwide drive tests to rank the carriers in speed, reliability, and coverage. T-Mobile's performance in rural areas has generally hurt its nationwide scores.

In RootMetrics' most recent national rankings, T-Mobile finished in fourth place out of the four major carriers in overall performance, network reliability, call performance, and text performance. T-Mobile finished in third place after Verizon and AT&T in network speed and data performance.

When contacted by Ars today, a T-Mobile spokesperson said that "T-Mobile has the best unlimited network for consumers—and we wanted to share that with them in a simple and clear way! We plan to appeal NAD's decision."

Industry self-regulation

NAD and NARB are part of the advertising industry's system of self-regulation. Their decisions have no legal force, but the NAD says that "advertisers' willingness to support NAD and voluntarily adhere to its decisions helps to ensure an honest and open playing field in advertising."

T-Mobile said that it is a "long-time supporter of the self-regulatory process," but the company is appealing to the NARB because it "is disappointed with NAD's decision regarding this claim."

The NAD previously ruled against T-Mobile after a complaint filed by Verizon last year. In that case, T-Mobile agreed to pull a claim that its 4G LTE network was faster than Verizon's.

AT&T has also been told to stop making unsupported claims on multiple occasions. The NAD last year recommended that AT&T ramp down advertising claims related to the availability of AT&T's fiber home Internet service, because AT&T hadn't made fiber available to many customers. AT&T was also told to stop calling its 3Mbps U-verse service the “Fastest Internet for the price” in a 2014 decision.

Ad claims must be substantiated, NAD says

T-Mobile also tried to sway the NAD by pointing to certain benefits of its unlimited plan, including a higher de-prioritization threshold. T-Mobile's unlimited plans let customers use at least 50GB a month before they risk being slowed down in congested network areas, compared to 22GB for AT&T customers.

But the de-prioritization threshold and other features "are elements of T-Mobile's unlimited plans, not the T-Mobile network, and do not support the 'Best Unlimited Network' claim," the NAD said.

Wireless carriers routinely claim that their networks are the "fastest," "largest," "most reliable," or offer the "best coverage," the NAD noted. While carriers "should be free to truthfully promote the advantages that their innovations provide consumers, comparative advertising claims must be substantiated to avoid misleading consumers and to ensure that wireless service providers compete on a level playing field," the NAD said.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...ad-group-says/





Verizon Begins 'Testing' DSL Usage Caps It Refuses To Call Usage Caps
Karl Bode

For years now broadband providers have used a lack of competition to impose all manner of obnoxious additional fees on the backs of broadband consumers. That includes arbitrary and obnoxious usage caps and overage charges, which not only raise rates on captive customers, but quite intentionally make using streaming video competitors more expensive and cumbersome. Once caps are in place, large ISPs often exempt their own content from usage caps while still penalizing streaming competitors (aka zero rating).

ISPs used to claim that such limits were necessary to manage network congestion, but as that argument was increasingly debunked (caps don't actually help manage congestion) they've shifted their justifications to more flimsy alternatives. These days, ISPs usually offer no justification at all, or issue vague declarations that they're simply trying to help users "better understand their consumption habits."

Case in point: Verizon DSL customers in Virginia recently began noticing language on Verizon's website indicating that the company's already expensive (and slow) DSL service will now face ambiguous "usage" limitations depending on the speed of your tier. While caps are now pretty common among cable ISPs, it's the first time Verizon has begun flirting with such limits:

For some context: Verizon has long been trying to get rid of DSL customers it doesn't want to upgrade so it can spend more of its time focused on slinging ads at Millennials via its new Oath (Yahoo and AOL) brand. It has been doing this by either refusing to repair and upgrade these users, or by constantly imposing rate hikes on lines that can't even get close to the FCC's 25 Mbps definition of actual "broadband." Because regulations require they keep servicing these lines (since most were taxpayer subsidized), they've had to engage in more creative methods to drive users off of them.

When I pressed Verizon as to why the company felt the need to impose any "usage" restrictions upon slow, over-priced DSL lines at all, it first informed me that these aren't caps because they aren't being enforced (yet). It then tried to claim that the company was simply trying to help consumers "see their usage":

"We're not applying data caps, overage fees or any sort of restrictions on DSL customers," Verizon claims. "There is a small trial in Virginia of displaying data usage in customer billing. It affects less than 2,000 homes over three remote terminals. But while the customers are shown data allowances of 150-250 GB, none of them are charged if they exceed those amounts."..."We've never had a way for these customers to see their usage," a company spokesman added, stating this is "just a very small trial with that." "Lots of cable companies display broadband data usage to customers even though they don't impose data caps. I'm afraid this isn't as exciting as you think," the spokesperson argued.

But there's simply no legitimate reason for Verizon to even be hinting at usage caps. The company's DSL lines are so slow, the cost of providing the service is largely negligible, and the volume of bandwidth these lines consume are largely irrelevant. And if the company really wanted users to understand their consumption, it could have simply provided an actual usage meter that mirrors the meters you often see on routers or the OS. So why is Verizon doing this?

As ISPs flirt with usage caps, usually they'll first employ "soft caps" (read; intially unenforced) and a usage meter (usually inaccurate) aimed at "educating" users on their monthly bandwidth consumption. This usually warms consumers up to later efforts at hard caps and overage fees (usually around $10 per each additional 50 GB). It's like the boiling frog anecdote: once users are ok with the idea of such restrictions, ISPs can then tighten the noose slowly to further monetize these users -- with less of a backlash if than if you'd simply imposed hard caps from the start.

But in this case Verizon didn't even bother to offer users an actual usage meter showing their usage. I pressed Verizon as to why, if it's simply concerned about consumers understanding their usage, it didn't just provide users with an actual bandwidth meter? Why even use language hinting at usage limits at all? It's at that point the company stopped responding to my inquiries.

Again, Verizon has made it abundantly, repeatedly clear that it doesn't want to keep these DSL users as the company shifts focus. For Verizon, the goal is either to drive them to Verizon Wireless, or to a cable competitor (that in many instances will upsell them to a Verizon Wireless service bundle anyway). The very worst case scenario for Verizon is these users stick around and wind up paying even more money for last-generation DSL. "Educating consumers" is traditionally the very last thing on an ISP exec's mind when a company begins flirting with this kind of language.

It's pretty clear Verizon was experimenting with the idea of caps and simply hoped the limited footprint meant nobody would notice. And with net neutrality now formally slated to expire June 11, there's going to be a lot more "experimentation" where this came from.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...age-caps.shtml





Your ISP Finally has to Stop Lying to You about Broadband Speeds

New rules around broadband advertising will usher in a depressing new era of honesty about the UK's cripplingly out-dated internet infrastructure
James Temperton

You know the drill: you sign up to broadband on the promise of blisteringly fast speeds only to discover the grindingly slow reality. Not any more. Well, sort of.

From today, new advertising rules will force internet service providers (ISPs) to be more upfront about exactly how fast your connection should be. Previously, broadband providers could entice people with tantalisingly fast “up to” speeds so long as they were available to at least ten per cent of customers at any time of day. The new average speeds must be available to at least 50 per cent of customers at peak times – i.e. when you’re actually at home trying to stream Netflix in 4K or make a Skype call that doesn’t drop out every two minutes.

Take Sky Broadband as an example. It’s already adhering by the new Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) rules and as a consequence its 17Mbps service is now billed as 11Mbps. Add in the usual caveats of poor Wi-Fi signal, bad wiring and other interference and that number will fall further still. But honesty doesn’t address the underlying issue: the UK’s broadband infrastructure remains a cheap, outdated mess.

Think you’ve signed up to fibre broadband? Think again. Unless you’ve got fibre to the home, then your connection is actually a mix of fibre and copper – fibre all the way to the nearest roadside cabinet and copper up to your front door or building. So while everyone will now have to be (more) honest about speeds, they can still be economical with the truth when it comes to exactly how your home is hooked up.

And that makes a big difference. The UK’s fibre to the home infrastructure is so poor it’s out-performed by almost every other country in Europe (Latvia, with 50.6 per cent fibre coverage, ranks first in terms of market penetration). The number of fibre subscribers in Europe increased by 20.4 per cent to 51.6 million in 2017. Of the major European countries, Spain (17.5 million) and France (14.9 million) are the major success stories.

Across Europe, the number of fibre to the home and fibre to the building subscribers reached 51.6 million. In total, more than 148 million homes now have the ability to access such connections.

Part of that is down to the realities of bricks and mortar. Fibre to the home is easier to install in big apartment blocks, which are more commonplace on the continent than in the UK. The makeup of who runs and owns the infrastructure also plays a part. In the UK, that’s (mostly) Opeanreach, which until recently wasn’t keen on sharing. Recent regulatory changes mean it now has to let providers other than BT use its underground ducts and overhead poles to install their infrastructure.

Unsurprisingly, removing the financial and logistical hurdle of ripping up roads to install new fibre services has led to a sudden surge in activity. TalkTalk plans to bring 1Gbps speeds to three million premises in the next five years and is investing £1.5 billion to make it happen; Opeanreach itself wants to connect three million premises to full fibre by 2020, and Vodafone is working with CityFibre to hook up five million premises in the coming years.

While there will inevitably be overlap, that’s likely to be a good thing: competition for full fibre broadband connections will drive down prices and persuade more people to ditch crawlingly slow and outdated connections.

And that’s the other part of the UK’s seemingly endless broadband speeds saga: cost. The UK has highest percentage of people using the internet of any G7 economy (a figure based on a 2014 government report) and speeds remain above the European average. But, for the most part, a lack of competition for full fibre services has left the UK hooked on a poor diet of copper.

The latest figures from Ofcom show that 44 per cent of households have download speeds of 30Mbps or higher, that’s despite so-called “superfast” connections now being available to 91 per cent of UK premises. That gap is down to the quality of what people are willing to pay for, not the quality of what companies are selling.

Ultimately, that inequity is down to the government. In 2016, chancellor Phillip Hammond announced £400 million to support investment in fibre broadband infrastructure, a figure it believes could rise to £1.5 billion with private investment over the coming years. This week, Hammond pledged to make full fibre connections available to 15 million premises, the majority of UK homes and business, by 2025. It is, of course, the latest in a long line of similar pledges.

The new ASA rules around how broadband speeds are advertised will make one thing abundantly clear: despite years of promises and token gestures from the government, the UK broadband market remains stuck on cheaper copper and fibre connections. And, with all the will in the world, that will remain the case for decades to come.
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/uk-br...re-to-the-home





Facebook's Terragraph Hopes to Replace Fiber Broadband Beginning with 2019 Trials

It could replace DSL and cable, or it could lose it all to 5G.
Mark Hachman

Facebook’s plan to connect neighborhoods and businesses wirelessly, known as Terragraph, will begin field trials in 2019 using 60GHz technology from Qualcomm, the two companies said on Monday.

Facebook began talking about Terragraph in 2016, part of a bid to replace fiber broadband with 60GHz millimeter-wave wireless. The technology wouldn’t replace Wi-Fi, but was designed to offer a replacement for fiber or cable to homes and businesses, forgoing the need to rip up streets and sidewalks.

Now we have a date: 2019, the first time the technology will be tested, according to Jesse Burke, a staff marketing manager at Qualcomm. Actual deployment will come later, he said.

Terragraph would establish a mesh network of 60GHz wireless cells across a neighborhood.

Terragraph is expected to begin field trials using a technology called 802.11ay, the successor to 802.11ad that debuted around 2016 or so. Though 802.11ay coud be used inside the home, it’s generally considered to be a wireless backhaul technology, providing the “last mile” connection directly to your home. According to Burke, the 60GHz 802.11ay technology would provide “two-digit” gigabit bandwidth to your doorstep. (Sources Network World talked to cited 20 to 30 Gbps as the most likely range.) You’d need some sort of a router or gateway that could receive the 802.11ay signal, the same way you need a gateway that a DSL or cable can plug into.

The problem, if there is one, is that 802.11ay signals travel short distances, about 33 to 100 feet. That means that numerous “small cells” would need to be installed around the neighborhood, most likely within a mesh network where each small cell can talk to one another, Burke said. They also require line of sight. Under the theoretical models that the two companies have constructed, Burke explained, those cells would be mounted on light poles, or on the roofs or sides of buildings.

While Qualcomm’s Burke couldn't speak to Facebook’s specific plans, he said the trials would target a municipal city block or multiple city blocks at scale. In February, Facebook said that two field trials were planned: in Budapest, Hungary, and in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A Facebook spokesman declined to comment further.

Metropolitan wireless had its heyday, then quietly went away—probably because of a combination of slow speeds, high cost, and the recognition that smartphones simply made it irrelevant. In 2005, for example, Google’s plans to build out 300 Kbps Wi-Fi in San Francisco were met with great excitement. Today that Wi-Fi network exists just along Market Street, and in many of the city’s parks.

What this means to you: Replacing existing wired infrastructure with a massive wireless push has been tried before. You might recall Intel’s grand WiMAX plans that scored a deployment or two in the United Kingdom before petering out. While there are occasional wireless deployments (such as Webpass in the Bay Area), generally cable and DSL hold sway. And, of course, there’s one major exception: good old-fashioned 4G, which has been held back not as much by throughput but by bandwidth caps. It’s very possible that Terragraph, whatever it looks like, will be rendered irrelevant by 5G technology.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3273...19-trials.html





Pornhub Launches its Own VPN
Shannon Liao

Pornhub is launching its own VPN service today with free and unlimited bandwidth. The VPN is supposed to help users avoid ISP throttling and geographic limitations. It’s also designed to let users transmit data anonymously without saving or collecting any of that data.

To get started, you download the VPNHUB app on your device and then tap setup. On the iPhone running iOS 11.3.1 that I tested it with, the app prompted me to create a VPN in settings. You might see an error message at first, but despite that, the app’s main page, which shows a swirling lock symbol, will whirl a bit and then activate your VPN. Then, to check if the VPN is working, go to a site like WhatisMyIPAddress.com and check your IP address. If it’s working, it should list your location as a generic city and have swapped out your usual IP address.

Pornhub’s VP Corey Price said in a statement to The Verge that incognito browsers don’t offer enough cover from “prying eyes,” especially if users are still browsing on public Wi-Fi networks, so the VPN will provide an added layer of security and privacy.

The VPN service is available on Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS. Although the service will be available in many countries, it’s going to be banned from countries the US doesn’t do business with, including Myanmar, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria. Pornhub also notes that it’s “had reports that our VPN might be blocked in” countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and China.

There’s also a premium option available called VPNhub Premium, which costs $12.99 per month in exchange for no ads and supposedly faster connections. There’s a free 7-day trial available, and you’ll be able to choose from a range of countries and locations like Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, Singapore, the UK, and major US cities. Free users only have access to their nearest server.

The website recently launched support for cryptocurrency, which allows users to easily make anonymous payments to the site.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/24/1...hes-vpn-vpnhub





Representatives Rip FCC Chairman Pai’s ‘Lack of Candor’ and Double Down on Net Neutrality Questions
Devin Coldewey

Thirteen members of Congress have written to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai criticizing his “repeated evasive responses to our inquiries” and “outright refusal to respond to some of the members of this Committee.” Unsatisfied with the answers or evasions he has offered to date, they reiterate questions related to net neutrality and other issues that they’ve sent over the past months.

“While we appreciate your continued willingness to testify before our Committee, we are concerned that you have been unable to give complete responses to verbal questions, questions for the record, or oversight letters from our members,” reads the letter from the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Democrats.

“We take our oversight responsibilities very seriously, and we expect witnesses before the Committee and recipients of our letters to treat their responses the same way,” they wrote.

These Representatives, led by Frank Pallone Jr (D-NJ) and Mike Doyle (D-CO), have sent multiple letters of inquiry to Pai over run-up to and aftermath of the net neutrality vote.

In June, they questioned the nature of and response to the cyberattack on FCC systems during the net neutrality comment period. Pai responded saying that much of what they asked he could not answer because the threat was “ongoing” and revealing the measures they took would “undermine” them.

Before the passage of the rules, they warned that the FCC’s proposal “fundamentally and profoundly runs counter to the law,” and that they spoke with the authority of people who had helped craft that particular law. Pai’s response to this may be considered the rule itself, which he clearly believes is completely lawful and justifies itself in its lengthy preamble.

After the vote, they sent a letter asking about numerous problems relating to the comment system and why, for example, their own comments were not addressed. Pai responded to a number of letters taking issue with the FCC’s Restoring Internet Freedom order with a form letter of his own that assured his august pen pals that everything was fine.

The inadequate responses to these and many other letters (on such issues as media regulation and 911 issues) clearly got the Committee to the point where they felt they had to strike back. A sternly worded letter may not do any more now than it did over the last year, but a paper trail of displeasure and responses with a distinct “lack of candor,” as Rep. Pallone put it, could be useful down the road.

You can read the full letter here, to which is appended “a collection of letters that you have yet to answer completely, or at all.” Chairman Pai is requested to provide responses by June 4.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/23/re...ity-questions/





Britain to Tackle 'Wild West' Internet with New Laws

Britain will tackle “the Wild West elements” on the internet from cyberbullying to online child exploitation by introducing new laws for social media companies, digital minister Matt Hancock said on Sunday.

Launching a consultation on what measures should be used to ensure the safety of those using the internet, Hancock said the government would publish a white paper - a policy document that sets out proposals for future legislation - later this year and aim to bring in new laws “in the next couple of years”.

Better regulating social media companies has long been an aim of a government that has struggled to carry out its agenda with Britain’s departure from the European Union taking up much of ministers’ time.

“Digital technology is overwhelmingly a force for good across the world and we must always champion innovation and change for the better,” Hancock said in a statement.

“At the same time I have been clear that we have to address the Wild West elements of the Internet through legislation, in a way that supports innovation. We strongly support technology companies to start up and grow, and we want to work with them to keep our citizens safe.”

There was little detail on what kind of regulation should be used to protect those using the internet, but Hancock told the BBC that as part of the data protection bill now in parliament, firms could be fined up to 4 percent of their global turnover.

But when asked whether the government would stop companies from allowing children to spend hours on the internet, Hancock told ITV television: “We want to have a broad consultation.”

In his statement, Hancock said the ministry for digital, culture, media and sport and the interior ministry would work with regulators, platforms and advertising companies to settle on legislation that tackles “both legal and illegal harms”.

“I don’t want the trolls to win,” Hancock said.

Reporting by Elizabeth Piper; Editing by Mark Potter
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-b...-idUSKCN1IL0C3





Amazon Pushes Facial Recognition to Police, Prompting Outcry Over Surveillance
Nick Wingfield

In late 2016, Amazon introduced a new online service that could help identify faces and other objects in images, offering it to anyone at a low cost through its giant cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services.

Not long after, it began pitching the technology to law enforcement agencies, saying the program could aid criminal investigations by recognizing suspects in photos and videos. It used a couple of early customers, like the Orlando Police Department in Florida and the Washington County Sheriff’s Office in Oregon, to encourage other officials to sign up.

But now that aggressive push is putting the giant tech company at the center of an increasingly heated debate around the role of facial recognition in law enforcement. Fans of the technology see a powerful new tool for catching criminals, but detractors see an instrument of mass surveillance.

On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union led a group of more than two dozen civil rights organizations that asked Amazon to stop selling its image recognition system, called Rekognition, to law enforcement. The group says that the police could use it to track protesters or others whom authorities deem suspicious, rather than limiting it to people committing crimes.

Facial recognition is not new technology, but the organizations appear to be focusing on Amazon because of its prominence and what they see as a departure from the company’s oft-stated focus on customers.

“Amazon Rekognition is primed for abuse in the hands of governments,” the group said in the letter, which was addressed to Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive. “This product poses a grave threat to communities, including people of color and immigrants, and to the trust and respect Amazon has worked to build.”

With the letter, the A.C.L.U. released a collection of internal emails and other documents from law enforcement agencies in Washington County and Orlando that it obtained through open records requests. The correspondence between Amazon and law enforcement officials provides an unusual peek into the company’s ambitions with facial recognition tools, and how it has interacted with some of the officials using its products.

Many of the companies supplying the technology are security contractors little known to the public, but Amazon is one of the first major tech companies to actively market technology for conducting facial recognition to law enforcement. The efforts are still a tiny part of Amazon’s business, with the service one of dozens it offers through Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing division. But few companies have Amazon’s ability to effectively push widespread adoption of tech products.

“The idea that a massive and highly resourced company like Amazon has moved decisively into this space could mark a sea change for this technology,” said Alvaro Bedoya, executive director at the Center on Privacy & Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center.

In a statement, a spokeswoman for Amazon Web Services stressed that the company offered a general image recognition technology that could automate the process of identifying people, objects and activities. She said amusement parks had used it to find lost children, for example. And like with all of the company’s A.W.S. services, she said, the company required customers to comply with the law and to be responsible when using Amazon Rekognition.

The United States military and intelligence agencies have used facial recognition tools for years in overseas conflicts to identify possible terrorist suspects. But domestic law enforcement agencies are increasingly using the technology at home for more routine forms of policing.

The people who can be identified through facial recognition systems are not just those with criminal records. More than 130 million American adults are in facial recognition databases that can be searched in criminal investigations, the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law estimates.

Facial recognition is showing up in new corners of public life all the time, often followed by challenges from critics about its efficacy as a security tool and its impact on privacy. Arenas are using it to screen for known troublemakers at events, while the Department of Homeland Security is using it to identify foreign visitors who overstay their visas at airports. And in China, facial recognition is ubiquitous, used to identify customers in stores and single out jaywalkers.

There are also concerns about the accuracy of facial recognition, with troubling variations based on gender and race. One study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed that the gender of darker-skinned women was misidentified up to 35 percent of the time by facial recognition software.

“We have it being used in unaccountable ways and with no regulation,” said Malkia Cyril, executive director of the Center for Media Justice, a nonprofit civil rights organization that signed the A.C.L.U.’s letter to Amazon.

The documents the A.C.L.U. obtained from the Orlando Police Department show city officials considering using video analysis tools from Amazon with footage from surveillance cameras, body-worn cameras and drones.

Amazon may have gone a little far in describing what the technology can do. This month, it published a video of an Amazon official, Ranju Das, speaking at a company event in Seoul, South Korea, in which he said Orlando could even use Amazon’s Rekognition system to find the whereabouts of the mayor through cameras around the city.

In a statement, a spokesman for the Orlando Police Department, Sgt. Eduardo Bernal, said the city was not using Amazon’s technology to track the location of elected officials in its jurisdiction, nor did it have plans to. He said the department was testing Amazon’s service now, but was not using it in investigations or public spaces.

“We are always looking for new solutions to further our ability to keep the residents and visitors of Orlando safe,” he said.

Early last year, the company began courting the Washington County Sheriff’s Office outside of Portland, Ore., eager to promote how it was using Amazon’s service for recognizing faces, emails obtained by the A.C.L.U. show. Mr. Adzima, a systems analyst in the office, told Amazon officials that he fed about 300,000 images from the county’s mug shot database into Amazon’s system.

Within a week of going live, the system was used to identify and arrest a suspect who stole more than $5,000 from local stores, he said, adding there were no leads before the system identified him. The technology was also cheap, costing just a few dollars a month after a setup fee of around $400.

Mr. Adzima ended up writing a blog post for Amazon about how the sheriff’s office was using Rekognition. He spoke at one of the company’s technical conferences, and local media began reporting on their efforts. After the attention, other law enforcement agencies in Oregon, Arizona and California began to reach to Washington County to learn more about how it was using Amazon’s system, emails show.

In February of last year, before the publicity wave, Mr. Adzima told an Amazon representative in an email that the county’s lawyer was worried the public might believe “that we are constantly checking faces from everything, kind of a Big Brother vibe.”

“They are concerned that A.C.L.U. might consider this the government getting in bed with big data,” Mr. Adzima said in an email. He did not respond for a request for comment for this article.

Deputy Jeff Talbot, a spokesman for the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, said Amazon’s facial recognition system was not being used for mass surveillance by the office. The company has a policy to only use the technology to identify a suspect in a criminal investigation, he said, and has no plans to use it with footage from body cameras or real-time surveillance systems.

“We are aware of those privacy concerns,” he said. “That’s why we have a policy drafted and why we’ve tried to educate the public about what we do and don’t do.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/22/t...cognition.html





The Pentagon Has a Big Plan to Solve Identity Verification in Two Years

The plan grew out of efforts to modernize the Defense Department’s ID cards.
Joseph Marks

The Defense Department is funding a project that officials say could revolutionize the way companies, federal agencies and the military itself verify that people are who they say they are and it could be available in most commercial smartphones within two years.

The technology, which will be embedded in smartphones’ hardware, will analyze a variety of identifiers that are unique to an individual, such as the hand pressure and wrist tension when the person holds a smartphone and the person’s peculiar gait while walking, said Steve Wallace, technical director at the Defense Information Systems Agency.

Organizations that use the tool can combine those identifiers to give the phone holder a “risk score,” Wallace said. If the risk score is low enough, the organization can presume the person is who she says she is and grant her access to sensitive files on the phone or on a connected computer or grant her access to a secure facility. If the score’s too high, she’ll be locked out.

Nextgov spoke with Wallace on the sidelines of a DISA press conference during a cybersecurity event hosted by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association.

The project, which is being developed by a private company with DISA funding, grew out of a years-long Pentagon effort to rid the department of the cumbersome common access cards, called CAC cards. Troops and civilian Pentagon employees have used CAC cards for years to enter bases and digitally verify their identities for department networks.

The new hardware tool will use the same principle as CAC cards, sharing encrypted information with a machine to prove a person’s identity, Wallace said. Unlike CAC cards, though, it will be able to continuously gather and verify that identifying information. The tool will also be embedded in a device the person is already carrying.

The company developing the system, which Wallace declined to name, will deliver about 75 prototypes to DISA this fall, he said.

Once all the bugs have been worked out of the prototypes, major companies will begin embedding the necessary tools inside the computer chips that power smartphones, he said. From there, the smartphone makers themselves will have to update phones to use the tool.

The technology should be commercially available within a couple of years, Wallace said. He declined to say which smartphone and chipmakers planned to participate in the project, but said the capability will be available “in the vast majority of mobile devices.”

It will be up to phone makers to decide whether to make the capability available and up to organizations whether to use it, he said.

DISA gathered information from some private-sector organizations, including in the financial sector, to ensure the verification tool also meets their needs, he said.

“We foresee it being used quite widely,” he said.

Another identifier that will likely be built into the chips is a GPS tracker that will store encrypted information about a person’s movements, Wallace said. The verification tool would analyze historical information about a person’s locations and major, recent anomalies would raise the person’s risk score.

The tool would be separate from the GPS function used by mapping and exercise apps, he said.

The tool does not include biometric information, such as a thumbprint or eye scans at this point, Wallace said, because DISA judged that existing commercial applications of biometric information are too easy to spoof.

The Pentagon may reconsider biometric indicators if the state of the art improves, he said.

JRSS is Too S-L-O-W

Also during Wednesday’s press conference, DISA officials acknowledged some performance issues for tools that military units are storing inside the Joint Regional Security Stacks, or JRSS. The JRSS is an early phase of a planned Defense Department-wide computer cloud.

In general, digital tools that the services put into the cloud are still functioning and aren’t losing any data, but it is taking too long for data to transfer from the cloud to the user, DISA Operations Director David Bennett told reporters.

“It’s simply an issue of not performing as quickly as applications need to,” he said.

The latency issues have led the Army, which has been ahead of other services in transferring information to JRSS, to “reschedule and re-phase” some of those transitions, DISA Director Vice Adm. Nancy Norton, said.

No Comment on DISA’s Fate

Norton declined to comment on language in the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act that would transfer many of DISA’s technology contracting and management duties to other parts of the Defense Department.

Norton told reporters she was “very familiar with the discussion and various versions of the language,” but that the agency “doesn’t comment on proposed legislation.”

When a reporter asked later about reports that some DISA functions are already being transferred to U.S. Cyber Command, a public affairs officer said the question was out of the scope of the press conference.
https://www.nextgov.com/emerging-tec...-years/148263/





Barcelona is Leading the Fightback Against Smart City Surveillance

“Now we have a big contract with Vodafone, and every month Vodafone has to give machine readable data to city hall. Before, that didn’t happen. They just took all the data and used it for their own benefit”
Thomas Graham

In 2015 Ada Colau, an activist with no experience in government, became mayor of Barcelona. She called for a democratic revolution, and for the last two years city hall, working with civic-minded coders and cryptographers, has been designing the technological tools to make it happen.

Their efforts have centred on two things. The first is opening up governance through participatory processes and greater transparency. And the second is redefining the smart city to ensure that it serves its citizens, rather than the other way around.

The group started by creating a digital participatory platform, Decidim (“We Decide”, in Catalan). Now the public can participate directly in government as they would on social media, by suggesting ideas, debating them, and voting with their thumbs. Decidim taps into the potential of social networks: the information spreading on Twitter, or the relationships on Facebook. All of these apply to politics — and Decidim seeks to channel them, while guaranteeing personal privacy and public transparency in a way these platforms don’t.

“We are experimenting with a hybrid of online and offline participatory democracy,” says Francesca Bria, Barcelona’s Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer. “We used Decidim to create the government agenda — over 70 per cent of the proposals come directly from citizens. Over 40,000 citizens proposed these policies. And many more citizens were engaged in offline collective assemblies and consultations.”

Those proposals highlighted what Barcelona’s citizens care about — and thus what this government believes should be its focus. Affordable housing, energy transition, air quality and public space topped the list. Now they have their orders, city hall is building the tools to address them.

Colau’s party, Barcelona en Comú, paints this bottom-up democracy as a neat inversion of how the city used to be run: top-down, and technology first, rather than people first. That may be a little black and white, but what’s certainly true is that when Colau came to power she inherited one of the world’s premier smart cities: the host of the annual Smart City Expo and with dozens of sensor networks that drew data on transport, energy usage, noise levels, irrigation — all kinds of things. As citizens lived their lives, data was continuously harvested and funnelled into city hall and private sector partners where it was analysed for insight into how the city could be run more efficiently — or used to develop services and products for sale.

Now, that data infrastructure is being repurposed. “We are reversing the smart city paradigm,” says Bria. “Instead of starting from technology and extracting all the data we can before thinking about how to use it, we started aligning the tech agenda with the agenda of the city.”

Controlling these data flows is important for two reasons. For one, Barcelona en Comú believe that data produced by the citizen belongs to the citizen. So the old deals between city hall and its private sector partners were breaching citizens’ rights. And the other reason is that when centralised governments and tech companies hoard data it is both a security risk and a great waste of potential. In the right hands, this kind of data could do more for the public good.

Now is the right time to be asking these questions. The smart city is a young concept, but it is exploding. “In cities, more than 90 per cent of the data we use today didn’t exist three years ago,” says Bria. “And this is just the beginning: now with 5G, with the internet of things, with artificial intelligence — this is the very beginning of a big disruption, what the industry call 4.0. We want to move from a model of surveillance capitalism, where data is opaque and not transparent, to a model where citizens themselves can own the data.”

This is more than rhetoric — Barcelona is taking steps to make it a reality.

The low-hanging fruit was procurement: it now bakes these considerations into its contracts with tech companies. “We are introducing clauses into contracts, like data sovereignty and public ownership of data,” says Bria. “For example, now we have a big contract with Vodafone, and every month Vodafone has to give machine readable data to city hall. Before, that didn’t happen. They just took all the data and used it for their own benefit.”

But city hall is going further, creating technological tools that mean citizens themselves can control the data they produce in the city and choose precisely who they share it with. This is Project DECODE (DEcentralised Citizen-owned Data Ecosystems). DECODE aims to develop and test an open source, distributed and privacy-aware technology architecture for decentralised data governance and identity management. It will effectively invert the current situation where people know little about the operators of the services they are registered with, while the services know everything about them. Instead, “citizens can decide what kind of data they want to keep private, what data they want to share, with whom, on what basis, and to do what,” says Bria. “This is a new social pact — a new deal on data.”

It’s a technical challenge, and one they are still working on. The tools are being put to the test in two pilots in Barcelona. The first focuses on the internet of things. City hall is giving residents sensors to place in their neighbourhoods. These sensors are directly integrated into the city’s sensor network, Sentilo, and gather data on air quality and noise pollution to influence city-level decisions. This pilot addresses the technical challenge of collating and storing a stream of citizen-sourced data, while giving those citizens complete control over what information is shared. The idea is that citizens could go out their way to collect useful data to improve public services — a very modern form of volunteering.

The second pilot relates to Decidim. When people use it, they see a dashboard of their data, aggregated and blended from a range of sources, from sensor noise levels, to healthcare data and administrative open data. From that dashboard, they can control the use of that information for specific purposes — such as informing policy proposals. Ultimately, they envisage citizens managing their data flows through an app, with a “DECODE wallet that manages people’s decryption keys, with an interface that lets you select that you want to give your transport data to the city, because you know that they can improve public transport with it—but you don’t want to give that kind of private data to an insurance company or an advertiser,” Bria explains.

The pilots will run into 2019, before potentially scaling citywide. Bria is convinced that the city is the right level of government for this experimentation. “There is a crisis of trust. Governments need to reshape their relationships with citizens, and cities are closer to the citizens. Cities also run data-intensive, algorithmic processes: transport, public housing, healthcare, education. This is the level at which a lot of services are run, and so cities can experiment with alternatives. It’s the same reason why there was the smart city boom — cities have this capacity.”

Barcelona is not alone in this. DECODE is an EU-funded project and sits neatly alongside the incoming General Data Protection Regulation, which will update regulation for internet companies. Together, they’re a kind of one-two for the data-driven internet economy. Barcelona also leads a network of rebel cities, “Fearless Cities”, that is adopting its tools and practices. They hosted the first conference last year, bringing together more than 180 cities from 40 countries and five continents. They are watching as Barcelona leads the way with its experiments in open democracy and data protection. Everything Barcelona has developed is open source, and all the code is posted on Github. They want these ideas to spread.

“I think in the technological world it’s very important to put forward a narrative that’s different to the surveillance capitalism from Silicon Valley, and the dystopian Chinese model, with its Social Credit System that uses citizen data to give them a rating that then gives them access to certain services,” says Bria. “We want to lead Europe to put forward an alternative model.”
http://www.wired.co.uk/article/barce...ca-bria-decode





G.D.P.R., a New Privacy Law, Makes Europe World’s Leading Tech Watchdog
Adam Satariano

The notices are flooding people’s inboxes en masse, from large technology companies, including Facebook and Uber, and even from parent teacher associations, children’s soccer clubs and yoga instructors. “Here is an update to our privacy policy,” they say.

All are acting because the European Union on Friday enacts the world’s toughest rules to protect people’s online data. And with the internet’s borderless nature, the regulations are set to have an outsize impact far beyond Europe.

In Silicon Valley, Google, Facebook and other tech companies have been working for months to comply with the new rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation. The law, which lets people request their online data and restricts how businesses obtain and handle the information, has set off a panic among small businesses and local organizations that have an internet presence.

Brazil, Japan and South Korea are set to follow Europe’s lead, with some having already passed similar data protection laws. European officials are encouraging copycats by tying data protection to some trade deals and arguing that a unified global approach is the only way to crimp Silicon Valley’s power.

“We want to achieve the same level of restrictions that you have in Europe,” said Luiz Fernando Martins Castro, a lawyer based in São Paulo who advises the Brazilian government on internet policy. Mr. Castro said Europe was “pushing the matter and making people realize that we have to go forward.”

Europe is determined to cement its role as the world’s foremost tech watchdog — and the region is only getting started. Authorities in Brussels and in the European Union’s 28 member countries are also setting the bar for stricter enforcement of antitrust laws against tech behemoths and are paving the way for tougher tax policies on the companies.

The region’s proactive stance is a sharp divergence from the United States, which has taken little action over the years in regulating the tech industry. Most recently, the Trump administration has sought to cut taxes and roll back regulation, while pursuing an increasingly protectionist tack to shield tech companies from competition from China.

“The E.U. is more advanced than the U.S. in protecting consumer privacy, and what happens there could be a harbinger of the future,” said Michael Kearns, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who has studied the data collection techniques of companies including Facebook and Google.

Europe’s new privacy measures, called G.D.P.R. for short, let people reduce the trail of information left when browsing social media, reading the news or shopping online. Individuals will be able to request the data that companies hold on them, and demand it be deleted.

Businesses must also more clearly detail how someone’s data is being handled, while clearing a higher bar to target advertising using personal information. Companies face fines if they do not comply, with tech giants risking penalties greater than $1 billion. Privacy groups preparing class action-style complaints under the new law may put even more legal pressure on companies.

European authorities have actively encouraged other countries to adopt similar laws to G.D.P.R. Officials have been dispatched around the world to preach the tougher rules. Data protections are becoming part of trade deals, with the region ready to limit access to its market of 500 million consumers if countries do not rise to meet Europe’s standards.

“If we can export this to the world, I will be happy,” said Vera Jourova, the European commissioner in charge of consumer protection and privacy who helped draft G.D.P.R. She said she planned to travel to Japan and South Korea in the next few weeks for talks about data protection. Regulating technology, she added, is a “global challenge.”

Europe’s influence can be seen in Brazil, which has sought advice from Brussels on its own privacy legislation. The bill closely mirrors Europe’s new regulations, including a requirement to get people’s consent before collecting personal data and special protections for information on political affiliation, religious beliefs, sexual orientation or health.

Brazil has an incentive to draft tougher privacy laws: One provision of G.D.P.R. limits the data that companies can transfer outside the European Union unless that data goes to a country that meets Europe’s standards.

“There is almost a reproduction of the European market in our bill,” said Mr. Castro, a member of Brazil’s internet steering committee.

European officials have also been advising Brazilian authorities. Giovanni Buttarelli, the European data protection supervisor, is set to deliver a recorded video message at a policy event in Brazil next week. And last month, a senior data protection official in the European Commission testified before the Brazilian Senate committee drafting the country’s legislation.

“Many countries are interested in signing a trade agreement with the European Union, and then privacy becomes an important precondition,” said Mr. Buttarelli.

Europe’s fingerprints can be seen elsewhere in the world, too. Japan last year passed a data protection law creating a new independent online privacy board, and Tokyo and Brussels are finalizing the details of a data transfer deal. South Korea is considering new privacy rules, while Israel has adopted updated requirements for disclosures of data breaches — both share elements with the European rules.

Europe’s influence is not going unnoticed by America’s tech giants, which have long complained that Brussels unfairly focuses on them.

The new privacy rules are part of a “strong European tradition” of policing industries to protect the environment or public health, even if it does “constrain business,” said Margrethe Vestager, Europe’s top antitrust official.

To meet G.D.P.R.’s requirements, Facebook and Google have deployed large teams to overhaul how they give users access to their own privacy settings and to redesign certain products that may have sucked up too much user data. Facebook said it had roughly 1,000 people working on the initiative globally, including engineers, product managers and lawyers.

In Brussels, the Silicon Valley companies are fast adding lobbyists to influence other European regulations before they spread. Google and Microsoft are already among the five biggest spenders on lobbying in the European Union, with budgets of about 4.5 million euros, or $5.3 million, each, according to LobbyFacts.eu, which tracks such spending. Facebook, whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, was in Brussels this week, doubled its lobbying budget last year to roughly €2.5 million, the watchdog site said.

Dean C. Garfield, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, a Washington-based trade group representing Apple, Facebook, Google and other companies, said his group was adding staff in Brussels because Europe was “driving and directing policy.”

“In the absence of another approach, it’s easier for other markets to follow what Europe has done,” said Mr. Garfield.

On Thursday, a group of Democratic senators announced a resolution to match G.D.P.R., a sign of how United States policy may change if control of Congress shifts in November.

Whether Europe’s tough approach is actually crimping the global tech giants is unclear. The region’s regulators have hit American companies with hefty fines over antitrust violations, the mishandling of user data and the payment of taxes, but Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook have continued to grow and add customers.

Challenges remain over how G.D.P.R. will be enforced. National regulators across Europe will be charged with policing the regulations, but many have woefully fewer resources than the companies they will be overseeing.

The data protection office in Ireland, for instance, where many tech giants have their regional headquarters, has a budget of just €7.5 million, or $8.8 million, but will be responsible for regulating some of the world’s biggest tech firms. That raises concerns that the companies will be able to avoid tough penalties.

Even if Europe persuades other countries to adopt its policies, it will be hard to ensure the laws work, said Omer Tene, a vice president at the International Association of Privacy Professionals, a trade group that tracks global privacy regulation.

“It’s one thing to have rules on the books,” said Mr. Tene. “It’s quite another thing to implement these rules on the ground.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/t...r-privacy.html





U.K. vs. U.S.: How Much of Your Personal Data Can You Get?
Natasha Singer and Prashant S. Rao

The European Union will put in place one of the toughest data privacy laws in the world this week. The law, among other provisions, gives people in Europe the right to obtain the personal data that companies have on them.

That is a sweeping right to data access that Americans don’t have.

So we decided to conduct a privacy experiment: Request our data in both Britain and the United States, to get a sense of how easy it will be for people in Europe to access their personal information compared with American users.

We conducted our experiment using a 20-year-old British law that entitles individuals to see the personal data held about them by companies in that country. The law provides similar data access rights as the coming European rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R. -- offering a sense of how the new law might play out.

Prashant, an editor in London, and Natasha, a technology reporter in New York, requested their records in their respective countries from Amazon, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, their mobile providers and marketing analytics companies that profile users.

The results were not what we expected.

What We Got When We Asked Marketers for Our Data

Prashant, lives in the U.K.

• 200 rows of data containing details about my personal life.
• 343 rows of data on the consumer marketing segments I've been assigned.

Natasha, lives in the United States

• 1 row of data indicating I once read an article on Forbes.com.

Prashant: Quantcast, an analytics service that categorizes and targets online users for marketing purposes, sent me a spreadsheet with about 200 entries tracking my activities. They contained an astonishing degree of detail about my life.

It showed that I had used OpenTable to make a dinner reservation in March at a “casual” Indian restaurant in London, that I had read a CNN article on President Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, that I was looking to buy a new cellphone and was considering a trip to Stellenbosch, South Africa.

Then there were the 343 marketing classifications Quantcast had obtained about me from data brokers, companies that sell consumers’ details for marketing purposes.

The categorizations had me pegged as a “heavy spender” on pet food (I have a cat), an owner of a flat-screen TV, and part of a “likely nonsmoking household.” My colleagues in London will be unsurprised to learn that among my “interests” are biscuits and chocolate.

But the report also suggested there was a 3 percent likelihood that I am a woman above the age of 65, and that I own a car. (I am, to be clear, a man in my 30s. I got my first driver’s license a few months ago and do not own a car.)

Natasha: My spreadsheet from Quantcast contained just a single line of data: It showed that on Jan. 19 at 7:01 p.m., I read an article on Forbes.com about how Google was eliminating certain features for parents to control their children’s web-browsing. The spreadsheet even listed the author of the article: Kevin Murnane.

As with all these companies, Prashant and I acted as much as possible like regular consumers when we initially requested our information. But after our requests, we followed up with the companies as reporters. When I contacted Quantcast to ask why I had received only one line of data, a spokesman said users’ privacy settings could influence what details Quantcast collected. (I use various software tools to monitor tracking.)

The Quantcast spokesman added that the company responded to data access requests under European law. So sending me any data at all had been an error — because consumers in the United States do not have a comprehensive right to obtain copies of the data held by American companies.

When We Asked Amazon

Prashant, lives in the U.K.

• Order history.
• Credit card information.
• Prime subscription data addresses.
• Wish list items.
• Devices used to access Amazon services.

Natasha, lives in the U.S.

• Order history.

Prashant: A Kindle reader, a square cake pan, a carbon monoxide alarm.

Amazon sent lists of the items my wife and I had bought through the site, the credit cards we used to buy them, the addresses the items were shipped to and the devices we had used to access Amazon services.

But we had expected to receive a more substantial data trove from Amazon. So I wrote back to Amazon asking again for all of the details the company had on me, including our household’s video-viewing data.

The company said it was “investigating” and would send the missing data when it was ready. There is still no sign of it. An Amazon spokesman added that the company was committed to complying with the new European privacy law.

Natasha: I used Amazon’s self-service tool to download a copy of my purchase orders — including batteries for the outmoded Blackberry device that I was having trouble giving up in 2015. (I now own two iPhones.)

But I wanted the complete history of my account, such as my Amazon searches.

Amazon responded to my email request by telling me to call the company — because it was “not safe to get account details via email due to security reasons.” Then I called Amazon customer service and was put on hold for 15 minutes while an agent scrambled to figure out a response.

Finally, the agent came back on the line only to tell me that Amazon was keeping records on me for business purposes — but would not share them with me. “It’s all private,” the agent said. “I don’t have access to that information to provide you, unfortunately.”

When We Asked Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Prashant, lives in the U.K.

• The standard public information, but not everything I asked for.

Natasha, lives in the U.S.

• The standard public information, but not everything I asked for.

Prashant and Natasha: LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook provide self-service tools for users to download certain information — such as their posts and messages. Google offers a tool where users can download records of the Google searches they have made, as well as the sites Google has tracked them to, their YouTube history and Calendar data. We used these systems and obtained some of our information.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, recently testified in a Senate hearing that his company’s download tool contains “all of the information” that users have “put into Facebook or that Facebook knows about them.”

But Facebook actually collects much more data about its users. In addition to the updates and photos you submit to the site, for instance, Facebook collects data about users’ activities on millions of non-Facebook sites that use tools like the service’s Like button. And those tools allow the company to amass detailed information about users’ web-browsing habits.

We were unable to obtain that kind of information, however.

We each asked Facebook for copies of our web-browsing data, as well as any data the company acquired about us from data brokers or other services. We made similar requests of Twitter and LinkedIn, which can also collect details about users’ activities on other sites as well as personal details from third parties like employers or advertisers.

None provided us with copies of that raw information.

Instead, from LinkedIn, we each received emails directing us to use the company’s self-service tool. Among other things, our LinkedIn downloads included the email addresses of our connections.

From Twitter, we received emails saying that the company required copies of our government-issued I.D. cards before it would provide user details beyond those available from the company’s self-service tool. Natasha, who regularly covers privacy, was hesitant to entrust Twitter with a copy of her I.D. card. Prashant sent his I.D. to Twitter and received data about a week later, soon after we contacted Twitter’s press department. The new set of information included IP address logs, direct messages and every GIF he has ever posted (there were a lot).

Facebook told Natasha that its self-service data download tool “has been reviewed by our data protection regulator” and would allow her “to access all of your Facebook data.” The company told Prashant that the self-service tool would allow him to access only “the Facebook information available to you” and that the company “isn’t able to provide additional information.”

Matt Steinfeld, a Facebook spokesman, said the social network’s ad preferences tool reflected information it had received about users from data brokers and advertisers. The company recently said it was building a tool to show users a list of the apps and websites that Facebook receives data from when users visit them.

After we contacted LinkedIn’s press department, we received emails the next day saying that the company was working on our requests. A LinkedIn spokeswoman said that users could automatically download “the most commonly requested data” and that the company did not currently plan to change its data request process.

Incomplete Responses

Prashant and Natasha: We were not just seeking our data for data’s sake.

As we all become more aware of fraudulent news and online voter influence campaigns, researchers, journalists and consumers have been seeking their personal details from companies to try to understand how we might be manipulated. The incomplete responses from tech companies do not bode well for such research efforts.

Nor does it seem to bode well for the companies, which will soon be facing the new European privacy regulations.

After we wrote to our cellphone carriers to ask for our records, for instance, Natasha at least heard back from T-Mobile, who told her that it would release her phone records only if the company received a subpoena compelling it to do so.

Prashant did not hear back at all from Three, his mobile phone service. When he contacted the company as a reporter, Three said it could not give details on the particular case for privacy reasons, but added that it would typically send a letter asking for proof of identity before proceeding with a data request. Prashant and his wife, whose name is on the phone contract, never received such a letter.

A spokeswoman for the Information Commissioner’s Office in Britain told us that companies that failed to respond to data subject access requests could be in breach of the country’s data protection law.

Under that law, penalties for noncompliance can reach 500,000 pounds, or more than $670,000. And noncompliance with the new European law could come with higher penalties: up to 4 percent of a company’s global annual revenues, or €20 million, whichever is greater.

Even for a tech giant, that could get expensive.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...ve-on-you.html





U.S. Websites Go Dark in Europe as GDPR Data Rules Kick In

New European law foresees steep fines for companies that don’t comply with rules
Natalia Drozdiak and Sam Schechner

Europe’s new privacy law took effect Friday, causing major U.S. news websites to suspend access across the region as data-protection regulators prepare to brandish their new enforcement powers.

Tronc Inc., TRNC -3.54% publisher of the Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News and other U.S. newspapers, was among those that blocked readers in the European Union from accessing sites, as they scrambled to comply with the sweeping regulation.

“We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market,” the company said in notices it displayed when users attempted to access its news sites from the EU on Friday morning.

Others U.S. regional newspapers owned by Lee Enterprises Inc., as well as bookmarking app Instapaper, owned by Pinterest. Inc., were also blocking access in the EU.

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation foresees steep fines for companies that don’t comply with the new rules, aimed at giving Europe-based users more control over the data companies hold on them.

Businesses have raced to comply with the new law, but surveys indicate that a majority may not be ready.

Companies are unlikely to be blindsided with harsh penalties Friday, because the rules don’t apply retroactively—but some companies are deciding it is safer to suspend access in Europe rather than risk sanctions—which the EU’s top privacy regulator Thursday warned could come soon.

“I’m sure you won’t have to wait for a couple of months,” said Andrea Jelinek, about when the first fines could land. On Friday, Ms. Jelinek is expected to be voted in as the head of a new European Data Protection Board, which includes national data-protection regulators from each of the EU’s member countries.

As of Friday, firms that violate the EU’s privacy rules risk fines as high as 4% of their global revenue.

Companies will be required under the GDPR to report data breaches within several days. In addition, companies will often need to obtain users’ consent to process their personal information. Customers will have the right to see what data companies hold on them and can request for some to be deleted. Companies are responsible for showing they are complying with obligations.

Firms of all sizes have been racing to overhaul their systems in time for the deadline to show that the way they gather and handle information about Europeans follows the rules.

Speaking at a press briefing, Ms. Jelinek said companies should have had plenty of time to comply with the new law, given that the regulation was adopted in 2016. Lawmakers delayed the law’s implementation by two years to give the companies that time. “The situation isn’t new,” she said.

Aggressive potential penalties are likely to affect some business decisions. Large enterprises acquiring small startups that use personal data might decide against launching a service in Europe, out of concern that the startup could expose the parent to a fine based on the entire enterprise’s revenue.

“If I could choose between [launching a data-related business] in Paris and in New York…I’m going to at least advise the business people to do it in New York,” said David Hoffman, global privacy officer at Intel Corp.

GDPR arrives as Facebook Inc. is still struggling to contain the fallout from revelations that data-analytics firm Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained the personal information of as many as 87 million users of the social network.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg visited European Parliament on May 22 to answer questions about the scandal, which EU officials say only reconfirmed the need for the new privacy rules and helped promote the legislation to the broader public.

The EU’s national privacy regulators, who are each also in charge of tasks like authorizing firms’ data transfers abroad, are unlikely to have the bandwidth to crack down on large numbers of companies across different sectors. Tech companies that profit from users’ data are therefore likely to be prime targets, said EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova. The data-protection authority of Ireland has said it would prioritize cases where large numbers of users’ data is processed, which it considers higher-risk.

One still-unsettled question is exactly what data companies can collect. Companies are arguing that certain types of information are necessary to fulfill a contract with the user; meanwhile, activists are planning to challenge some large companies over that question.

Dale Sunderland, deputy commissioner at Ireland’s privacy regulator, said the agency was leading a group of data-protection authorities who are investigating that particular issue. He said he expects the EU’s privacy regulators to publish a paper on the topic in the fall.

“We believe that we collectively need to look into and address this matter to provide clarity for the use of contractual necessity for free online services,” Mr. Sunderland said.

On Thursday, Facebook’s Mr. Zuckerberg told a tech conference that his company has worked hard to comply with the GDPR, including by asking users to opt-in to see targeted ads on Facebook based on their use of other websites and apps.

“The vast majority of people choose to opt in,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, “because the reality is, if you’re going to see ads on a service, you want them to be relevant and good ads.”

Companies aren’t the only ones scrambling to get into shape with the new law. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive body, said eight countries including Belgium, Bulgaria and Hungary were late in implementing the necessary national legislation for GDPR. The commission can launch court proceedings against any member state that fails to implement EU legislation.

Regulatory agencies in other countries worry they are under-resourced for the workload expected to come down the pipeline, Ms. Jourova, the justice commissioner, said.

Asked about the issue of resources, the data-protection board’s Ms. Jelinek said, “We will try to do our best and we will act in a very professional way.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-web...-in-1527242038





How an Alexa Speaker Recorded and Shared a Private Conversation
Heather Kelly

Alexa has many talents. Amazon's voice assistant can play music, set timers, order a pizza, and send recordings of private conversations to random people in its users' contact list.

An Amazon Echo user in Portland, Oregon, says she was shocked to learn her Echo had recorded a conversation with her husband without them knowing, then sent the audio file to one of his employees in Seattle.

"My husband and I would joke and say I'd bet these devices are listening to what we're saying," the Echo owner Danielle told local news station KIRO 7. The news station did not report her last name.

She said the incident happened two weeks ago when the employee called them to say she'd received a strange voice recording of them.

"The person on the other line said, 'unplug your Alexa devices right now,'" she told KIRO. "'You're being hacked.'"

The audio recording included the couple talking about hardwood floors. Danielle said they turned off their multiple Echo smart speakers, contacted Amazon and spoke to an Alexa engineer, who apologized multiple times.

Amazon confirmed the error in a statement and explained the improbable series of events that took place for it to happen. It wasn't a hack or a bug with the device, but a case of Alexa's always-listening microphones mishearing a series of words and mistakenly sending a voice message.

"Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like 'Alexa.' Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a 'send message' request," Amazon said in a statement. "At which point, Alexa said out loud 'To whom?' At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customers contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, '[contact name], right?' Alexa then interpreted background conversation as 'right'. As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely."

The Echo only confirms a contact name if there are multiple people in an address book with the same or similar sounding names.

It's unknown if the couple had the volume turned all the way down on their device or if they just didn't hear Alexa's multiple spoken replies during the message process. The colored ring on Echo speakers also lights up when the device is active.

While voice technology is increasingly popular, there are lingering concerns about privacy issues associated with having an internet-connected microphone in the home. Companies like Amazon and Google say their devices only begin recording when their microphones hear a trigger word or phrase, like "Alexa" or "Hey Google."
http://money.cnn.com/2018/05/24/tech...ing/index.html





ACLU Sues ICE for License Plate Reader Contracts, Records
Sophie Haigney

The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday sued U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for records about the agency’s use of license plate reader technology, after ICE apparently failed to turn over records following multiple requests.

In December, ICE purchased access to two databases of ALPR data, the complaint reads. One of those databases is managed by Vigilant Solutions, which has contracts with more than two dozen Bay Area law enforcement agencies.

“We believe the other is managed by Thomson Reuters,” ACLU laywer Vasudha Talla said.

The ACLU and other privacy advocates have expressed concern about how this data will be stored and used for civil immigration enforcement.

The ACLU filed two requests under the Freedom of Information Act in March seeking records from ICE, including contracts, memos, associated communications, training materials and audit logs. Since then, ICE has not provided any records, the ACLU said in the complaint, which was filed Tuesday morning in the Northern District Court for the Northern District of California.

“The excessive collection and storing of this data in databases — which is then pooled and shared nationally — results in a systemic monitoring that chills the exercise of constitutional rights to free speech and association, as well as essential tasks such as driving to work, picking children up from school, and grocery shopping,” the complaint said.

“We have essentially two concerns: one that is general to ALPR databses, and one that’s specific to this situation with ICE,” Talla said. “The ACLU has done a lot of work around surveillance technology and ALPR, and we’re generally concerned about the aggregation of all this data about license plates paired with a time and location, stretching back for so many months and years.”

The contract with ICE has heightened concerns about how this data might be used for immigration enforcement, perhaps with data collected by unknowing departments.

“There may be departments who didn’t realize at the time that this might be shared for civil immigration enforcement, who may have never intended to get in bed with ICE and now may have found themselves uknowingly in this siutation,” Talla said.

In getting the contracts and other documents, she added, the ACLU seeks to have clarity on how the data is used, stored and shared.

Danielle Bennett, a spokeswoman for ICE, said the agency could not comment directly on pending litigation with the ACLU.

“However, lack of comment should not be construed as agreement with or stipulation to any of the allegations,” she said in a statement.

Bennett noted that ICE does use license plate data to aid its investigations.

“ICE conducts both criminal investigations and civil immigration enforcement investigations,” she said. “ICE is not seeking to build a license plate reader database, and will not collect nor contribute any data to a national public or private database.”

ICE updated its privacy impact assessment in 2015 for surveillance tools, and Bennett called the policies “the most stringent requirements known to have been applied for the use of this technology.”
https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/artic...s-12937712.php





IBM Warns of Instant Breaking of Encryption by Quantum Computers: 'Move Your Data Today'

Welcome to the future transparency of today as quantum computers reveal all currently encrypted secrets -- a viable scenario within just a few years.
Tom Foremski

Quantum computers will be able to instantly break the encryption of sensitive data protected by today's strongest security, warns the head of IBM Research.

This could happen in a little more than five years because of advances in quantum computer technologies.

"Anyone that wants to make sure that their data is protected for longer than 10 years should move to alternate forms of encryption now," said Arvind Krishna, director of IBM Research.

Krishna was speaking at a meeting of The Churchill Club in San Francisco on a panel (above, second from right) discussing quantum computers in business. The panel, which included Kam Moler, a professor of Physics at Stanford University, as well as Bob Stolte, a managing director at JPMorgan, was moderated by journalist Martin Giles (first from left).

Quantum computers can solve some types of problems near-instantaneously compared with billions of years of processing using conventional computers.

Moler said people might feel safe because they have done everything they are supposed to do to secure their existing data -- but quantum computing will break it. "I do think that's scary," she said.

It has been known since the 1980s that quantum computers would be great at factoring large numbers, which is the foundation of public key cryptography. But building large enough quantum computers was not possible then.

Advances in novel materials and in low-temperature physics have led to many breakthroughs in the quantum computing field in recent years. and large commercial quantum computer systems will soon be viable and available within five years.

Krishna said that there is a type of encryption, called Lattice Field, that is thought to be resistant to quantum computing attacks.

"The good news is that it is as efficient as our current encryption so it won't cost more," he said.

Quantum computers machines are currently rare and very expensive but can potentially solve many tough computing problems. The IBM Q is an attempt to build a commercial system, and IBM has allowed more than 80,000 developers run applications through a cloud-based interface.

Not all types of applications will benefit from quantum computers. The best suited are problems that can be broken up into parallel processes. It requires different coding techniques.

"We still don't know which applications will be best to run on quantum computers," Krishna said. "We need a lot of new algorithms"

In addition to solving tough computing problems, quantum computers could save huge amounts of energy, as server farms proliferate and applications such as bitcoin grow in their compute needs. Each computation takes just a few watts, yet it could take several server farms to accomplish if it were run on conventional systems.

Moler said we still need additional breakthroughs, such as new types of materials with specific properties at temperatures at near absolute zero.

Single atoms -- qubits -- are held in place, but temperature fluctuations can create a lot of noise, which creates errors. Additional qubits greatly increase the computational power of a system, but that requires even more qubits for error-correction.

It is not known the optimum number of qubits for each type of problem.

Also, there are substantial advances in software technologies needed to take advantage of the computing capabilities of quantum systems. And new algorithms have to be developed to handle the error corrections.

Krishna is certain that within five years there will be widespread commercial use of quantum computers. But don't wait, said Krishna, "begin experimenting right now."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ibm-wa...ur-data-today/





FBI Repeatedly Overstated Encryption Threat Figures to Congress, Public
Devlin Barrett

The FBI has repeatedly provided grossly inflated statistics to Congress and the public about the extent of problems posed by encrypted cellphones, claiming investigators were locked out of nearly 7,800 devices connected to crimes last year when the correct number was much smaller, probably between 1,000 and 2,000, The Washington Post has learned.

Over a period of seven months, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray cited the inflated figure as the most compelling evidence for the need to address what the FBI calls “Going Dark” — the spread of encrypted software that can block investigators’ access to digital data even with a court order.

The FBI first became aware of the miscount about a month ago and still does not have an accurate count of how many encrypted phones they received as part of criminal investigations last year, officials said. Last week, one internal estimate put the correct number of locked phones at 1,200, though officials expect that number to change as they launch a new audit, which could take weeks to complete, according to people familiar with the work.

“The FBI’s initial assessment is that programming errors resulted in significant over-counting of mobile devices reported,’’ the FBI said in a statement Tuesday. The bureau said the problem stemmed from the use of three distinct databases that led to repeated counting of phones. Tests of the methodology conducted in April 2016 failed to detect the flaw, according to people familiar with the work.

The acknowledgment comes at a perilous time for the FBI, whose credibility is being challenged by President Trump and his supporters over the ongoing investigation into whether any Trump associates helped Russia interfere with the 2016 election. The bureau has also been under pressure for other mistakes, including its failure to act on a tip that a Florida teen was likely to carry out a school shooting which police said he did weeks later, killing 17.

The FBI said that despite the phone-counting errors, “Going Dark remains a serious problem for the FBI, as well as other federal, state, local and international law enforcement partners. ... The FBI will continue pursuing a solution that ensures law enforcement can access evidence of criminal activity with appropriate legal authority.”

Wray first referenced the inflated figure in an October speech, saying the bureau had found nearly 7,000 locked phones in just 11 months. In December, he told Congress that, in the 2017 budget year, his agency “was unable to access the content of approximately 7,800 mobile devices using appropriate and available technical tools, even though there was legal authority to do so.”

Wray has said the precise number of locked phones that year was 7,775, pairing that figure with forceful language to argue for changes, in technology company practices or in the law, that would make all phones accessible to investigators with a valid court order.

“While the FBI and law enforcement happen to be on the front lines of this problem, this is an urgent public safety issue for all of us,” Wray said during a January speech in New York. “Because as horrifying as 7,800 in one year sounds, it’s going to be a lot worse in just a couple of years if we don’t find a responsible solution.”

Since then, Wray has repeated the claim about 7,800 locked phones, including in a March speech. Those remarks were echoed earlier this month by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

“Last year, the FBI was unable to access investigation-related content on more than 7,700 devices — even though they had the legal authority to do so. Each of those devices was tied to a threat to the American people,” Sessions said.

Officials now admit none of those statements are true.

The FBI’s admission is likely to fuel further criticism from lawmakers, privacy advocates and tech companies, and hinder the bureau’s public efforts to address encryption issues.

The bureau has long argued that encrypting data in a way that makes it impossible for investigators to unlock a phone or computer, even with a signed order from a judge, leaves the country and its citizens less safe. Privacy groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation argue that encryption prevents crime by protecting people’s data from hackers.

The FBI fought a bruising court fight in 2016 seeking to force Apple to help agents access the iPhone that had belonged to a dead gunman in San Bernardino, Calif. At first, the FBI said it had no ability to access the phone, though the government later dropped its case when a contracting firm came forward with a solution. That same year, a similar legal fight in a New York drug case ended when the defendant remembered his password and provided it to investigators.

The FBI’s conduct in the San Bernardino case also called into question the accuracy of officials’ statements on the encryption issue. Then-Director James B. Comey overstated what the phone-hacking solution cost the bureau, according to people familiar with the matter, and a senior FBI official asked for an internal investigation to determine if her subordinates were lying about technical capabilities.

A Justice Department Inspector General report concluded in March that, while officials did not make false statements in connection with that case, there were “misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions” among key players in the FBI’s technology wing.

The FBI’s assertion that 7,775 phones could not be opened by their investigators last year has always struck a discordant note with critics and privacy advocates, who noted that just a year earlier, the FBI had claimed the figure was 880. Such a giant leap in locked phones could not be explained by changes in technology or criminal behavior, those critics reasoned.

It is unclear if the 880 figure is still accurate.

Lawmakers have tried unsuccessfully to get more details about the FBI’s claims. Officials say they plan to provide updated information to congressional committees and individual lawmakers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...315_story.html





Me and My Numb Thumb: A Tale of Tech, Texts and Tendons
Nellie Bowles

It took me a few months to accept that I had given myself tendinosis in my phone thumb.

It is a depressingly modern condition in which the tendons around the thumb inflame as a result of repetitive strain — in my case because I had, for hours a day over years of a life, tapped that right-hand digit onto the glass of my smartphone.

The condition sounds like the subject of a local television news trend story about teenagers whose thumbs seize up while they play video games. It was definitely not something I, a mature professional, should ever have. I began to call it my numb thumb.

I had tried to prevent it, using other fingers on my phone when I felt early signs of pain. But they typed too slowly, so I stuck with my thumb, pressing it down to unlock the screen, and then using it to jab out texts and emails.

Eventually, my right thumb just stopped working. It could not muster the strength to press down on my phone. It was both numb and achy. And the pain that had started in my hand was now shooting down my arm. I had a problem, one I later learned was becoming common.

Suddenly, friends and co-workers all seemed to have similar stories about their thumbs, plus wrist braces I could borrow. And experts told me that although there is plenty of discussion about how teenagers are addicted to technology, adults are actually hit the hardest.

My doctor, who had me make a painful fist, said that I might have something called De Quervain’s Tendinosis, which affects tendons on the thumb side of the wrist and is caused by chronic overuse. of those tendons. He admonished me about tech addiction and about how if I continued this way, I would need surgery.

He sent me for acupuncture, which I had never tried before.

“It’s a crisis,” said Sanjeev Kakar, an orthopedic surgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota who specializes in hand injuries and has seen an increase in the number of thumb “overuse cases.” Dr. Kakar said he had noticed that the condition was spreading among adults and older people in particular.

“Your joints are a little stiffer,” he told me. “Your tendons aren’t as pliable as they used to be.”

He added that numbness could be an early sign of carpal tunnel syndrome or, perhaps, nerve compression that is typically associated with competitive bowling.

Do I bowl? I do not bowl.

I called it numb, but it was also very painful, I told Dr. Kakar. He seemed relieved. The best cure, he said, was to stop using the thumb for a while.

“Change your texting behavior,” he said. That sounds logical and easy — until you try to email left-handed.

Adults with tech-related injuries often refuse to admit they have a problem until injuries and addictive behavior progress to an extreme, said Nancy Ann Cheever, a professor of communications at California State University, Dominguez Hills, who studies technology and addiction.

“We assume teenagers are using their phones more, but it’s actually not the case, because younger people tend to have a lot more awareness of their smartphone use,” she said. “They have a more complete understanding of the harmful effects of smartphone use because they’ve been taught about it since they were kids.”

Dr. Cheever has just completed a study of how anxious people get when they hear their phones receiving texts that they have been told not to answer. She measured their heart rates and how much they sweat.

“Very stressed,” she said, summarizing the preliminary results.

When I recently walked into the office of Michelle Kuroda, a San Francisco acupuncturist, she said I was one of the lucky ones. She had just had two patients whose phone hands hurt so much that they had had to take leaves of absence from work.

“They were dropping things,” Ms. Kuroda said. “They couldn’t eat with forks.”

She said that it was unnatural to concentrate so much movement in one digit on such a small flat surface.

"We’re not meant to just use our thumbs all the time,” she said. “We’re meant to use all our fingers. That’s what our grip is for.”

She said the reason some people get phone thumb and others do not often comes down to stress. Cortisol and adrenaline, which the body releases when it feels stress, make one prone to inflammation and contribute to conditions like the one I was experiencing. She asked if I felt stressed, and I described a typical day monitoring Twitter.

“You kind of have a pre-existing condition just because of your lifestyle,” she said.

Ms. Kuroda left me with a cluster of needles in my hand and arm and told me to do body scans for an hour. She also prescribed several antidotes. They included turmeric, an anti-inflammatory, and cannabidiol, a non-psychotropic marijuana plant extract more commonly known as CBD.

Panic over tech and addiction comes and goes. When a new study comes out with jarring numbers or a fancy new gadget hits the market, the flurry of stories and conversations will start anew. We tell ourselves the bigger issue must be among the teenagers. And quickly we all get over it.

After a few weeks of resting my right thumb, it felt a lot better and almost completely back to normal. I use my left hand now — quite a lot, in fact.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/19/t...umb-thumb.html





Banks Adopt Military-Style Tactics to Fight Cybercrime
Stacy Cowley

In a windowless bunker here, a wall of monitors tracked incoming attacks — 267,322 in the last 24 hours, according to one hovering dial, or about three every second — as a dozen analysts stared at screens filled with snippets of computer code.

Pacing around, overseeing the stream of warnings, was a former Delta Force soldier who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan before shifting to a new enemy: cyberthieves.

“This is not that different from terrorists and drug cartels,” Matt Nyman, the command center’s creator, said as he surveyed his squadron of Mastercard employees. “Fundamentally, threat networks operate in similar ways.”

Cybercrime is one of the world’s fastest-growing and most lucrative industries. At least $445 billion was lost last year, up around 30 percent from just three years earlier, a global economic study found, and the Treasury Department recently designated cyberattacks as one of the greatest risks to the American financial sector. For banks and payment companies, the fight feels like a war — and they’re responding with an increasingly militarized approach.

Former government cyberspies, soldiers and counterintelligence officials now dominate the top ranks of banks’ security teams. They’ve brought to their new jobs the tools and techniques used for national defense: combat exercises, intelligence hubs modeled on those used in counterterrorism work and threat analysts who monitor the internet’s shadowy corners.

At Mastercard, Mr. Nyman oversees the company’s new fusion center, a term borrowed from the Department of Homeland Security. After the attacks of Sept. 11, the agency set up scores of fusion centers to coordinate federal, state and local intelligence-gathering. The approach spread throughout the government, with the centers used to fight disease outbreaks, wildfires and sex trafficking.

Then banks grabbed the playbook. At least a dozen of them, from giants like Citigroup and Wells Fargo to regional players such as Bank of the West, have opened fusion centers in recent years, and more are in the works. Fifth Third Bank is building one in its Cincinnati headquarters, and Visa, which created its first two years ago in Virginia, is developing two more, in Britain and Singapore. Having their own intelligence hives, the banks hope, will help them better detect patterns in all the data they amass.

The centers also have a symbolic purpose. Having a literal war room reinforces the new reality. Fending off thieves has always been a priority — it’s why banks build vaults — but the arms race has escalated rapidly.

Cybersecurity has, for many financial company chiefs, become their biggest fear, eclipsing issues like regulation and the economy.

Alfred F. Kelly Jr., Visa’s chief executive, is “completely paranoid” about the subject, he told investors at a conference in March. Bank of America’s Brian T. Moynihan said his cybersecurity team is “the only place in the company that doesn’t have a budget constraint.” (The bank’s chief operations and technology officer said it is spending about $600 million this year.)

The military sharpens soldiers’ skills with large-scale combat drills like Jade Helm and Foal Eagle, which send troops into the field to test their tactics and weaponry. The financial sector created its own version: Quantum Dawn, a biennial simulation of a catastrophic cyberstrike.

In the latest exercise last November, 900 participants from 50 banks, regulators and law enforcement agencies role-played their response to an industrywide infestation of malicious malware that first corrupted, and then entirely blocked, all outgoing payments from the banks. Throughout the two-day test, the organizers lobbed in new threats every few hours, like denial-of-service attacks that knocked the banks’ websites offline.

The first Quantum Dawn, back in 2011, was a lower-key gathering. Participants huddled in a conference room to talk through a mock attack that shut down stock trading. Now, it’s a live-fire drill. Each bank spends months in advance re-creating its internal technology on an isolated test network, a so-called cyber range, so that its employees can fight with their actual tools and software. The company that runs their virtual battlefield, SimSpace, is a Defense Department contractor.

Sometimes, the tests expose important gaps.

A series of smaller cyber drills coordinated by the Treasury Department, called the Hamilton Series, raised an alarm three years ago. An attack on Sony, attributed to North Korea, had recently exposed sensitive company emails and data, and, in its wake, demolished huge swaths of Sony’s internet network.

If something similar happened at a bank, especially a smaller one, regulators asked, would it be able to recover? Those in the room for the drill came away uneasy.

“There was a recognition that we needed to add an additional layer of resilience,” said John Carlson, the chief of staff for the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center, the industry’s main cybersecurity coordination group.

Soon after, the group began building a new fail-safe, called Sheltered Harbor, which went into operation last year. If one member of the network has its data compromised or destroyed, others can step in, retrieve its archived records and restore basic customer account access within a day or two. It has not yet been needed, but nearly 70 percent of America’s deposit accounts are now covered by it.

The largest banks run dozens of their own, internal attack simulations each year, to smoke out their vulnerabilities and keep their first responders sharp.

“It’s the idea of muscle memory,” said Thomas J. Harrington, Citigroup’s chief information security officer, who spent 28 years with the F.B.I.

Growing interest among its corporate customers in cybersecurity war games inspired IBM to build a digital range in Cambridge, Mass., where it stages data breaches for customers and prospects to practice on.

One recent morning, a fictional bank called Bane & Ox was under attack on IBM’s range, and two dozen real-life executives from a variety of financial companies gathered to defend it. In the training scenario, an unidentified attacker had dumped six million customer records on Pastebin, a site often used by hackers to publish stolen data caches.

As the hours ticked by, the assault grew worse. The lost data included financial records and personally identifying details. One of the customers was Colin Powell, the former secretary of state. Phones in the room kept ringing with calls from reporters, irate executives and, eventually, regulators, wanting details about what had occurred.

When the group figured out what computer system had been used in the leak, a heated argument broke out: Should they cut off its network access immediately? Or set up surveillance and monitor any further transmissions?

At the urging of a Navy veteran who runs the cyberattack response group at a large New York bank, the group left the system connected.

“Those are the decisions you don’t want to be making for the first time during a real attack,” said Bob Stasio, IBM’s cyber range operations manager and a former operations chief for the National Security Agency’s cyber center. One financial company’s executive team did such a poor job of talking to its technical team during a past IBM training drill, Mr. Stasio said, that he went home and canceled his credit card with them.

Like many cybersecurity bunkers, IBM’s foxhole has deliberately theatrical touches. Whiteboards and giant monitors fill nearly every wall, with graphics that can be manipulated by touch.

“You can’t have a fusion center unless you have really cool TVs,” quipped Lawrence Zelvin, a former Homeland Security official who is now Citigroup’s global cybersecurity head, at a recent cybercrime conference. “It’s even better if they do something when you touch them. It doesn’t matter what they do. Just something.”

Security pros mockingly refer to such eye candy as “pew pew” maps, an onomatopoeia for the noise of laser guns in 1980s movies and video arcades. They are especially useful, executives concede, to put on display when V.I.P.s or board members stop by for a tour. Two popular “pew pew” maps are from FireEye and the defunct security vendor Norse, whose video game-like maps show laser beams zapping across the globe. Norse went out of business two years ago, and no one is sure what data the map is based on, but everyone agrees that it looks cool.

Jason Witty, the chief information security officer at U.S. Bank, admits that the blinking map he breaks out for customer briefings is mostly for show. But it serves a serious purpose, he said: making the command center’s high-stakes work more tangible.

“If you show customers the scripts you’re actually running, it’s just digits on a screen,” Mr. Witty said. A big, colorful map is easier to grasp.

What everyone in the finance industry is afraid of is a repeat — on an even larger scale — of the data breach that hit Equifax last year.

Hackers stole personal information, including Social Security numbers, of more than 146 million people. The attack cost the company’s chief executive and four other top managers their jobs. Who stole the data, and what they did with it, is still not publicly known. The credit bureau has spent $243 million so far cleaning up the mess.

It is Mr. Nyman’s job to make sure that doesn’t happen at Mastercard. Walking around the company’s fusion center, he describes the team’s work using military slang. Its focus is “left of boom,” he said — referring to the moments before a bomb explodes. By detecting vulnerabilities and attempted hacks, the analysts aim to head off an Equifax-like explosion.

But the attacks keep coming. As he spoke, the dial displayed over his shoulder registered another few assaults on Mastercard’s systems. The total so far this year exceeds 20 million.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/20/b...-military.html





The Pirate Bay to be Blocked by Telenor Sweden
Kavita Iyer

Telenor, the Norwegian Internet Service Provider (ISP), who for long has refrained from blocking access to the Swedish file-sharing website, The Pirate Bay, despite demands from the music and film industry associations, has now decided to voluntarily block the pirate website, reports TorrentFreak.

The move by Telenor to block The Pirate Bay is not due to the direct court order issued against the company but due to its merger of Bredbandsbolaget, one of Sweden’s largest ISPs owned by Telenor, who in the past was ordered to block the unpopular torrent site. Bredbandsbolaget was acquired by Telenor in 2005.

For those unaware, back in 2014, record labels such as Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music had collaborated with Nordisk Film and the Swedish Film Industry to file a lawsuit against Bredbandsbolaget.

The copyright holders had asked the Stockholm District Court to direct the ISP to block access to The Pirate Bay as well as streaming site Swefilmer, as they believed that the provider knowingly assisted the pirated users in accessing the pirate platforms.

However, the ISP opposed the entertainment companies’ demand to block content and services and sent a determined response to the Court.

“Bredbandsbolaget’s role is to provide its subscribers with access to the Internet, thereby contributing to the free flow of information and the ability for people to reach each other and communicate,” the company said in a statement.

“Bredbandsbolaget does not block content or services based on individual organizations’ requests. There is no legal obligation for operators to block either The Pirate Bay or Swefilmer.”

When the copyright holders and Bredbandsbolaget met in court in February 2015, the latter argued in favor of the “important principle” that ISPs should not be held responsible for content exchanged over the Internet, similarly like the postal service who is not responsible for the contents of an envelope.

Further, in November 2015, the Stockholm District Court decided that the copyright holders could not force Bredbandsbolaget to block the pirate sites, as the ISP’s operations did not amount to involvement in the copyright infringement offenses carried out by some of its ‘pirate’ subscribers.

The case later went to appeal where the arguments were heard by the new Patent and Market Court of Appeal. In February 2017, it overruled the earlier ruling of the District Court and ordered Bredbandsbolaget to implement “technical measures” to stop its customers from gaining access to the ‘pirate’ sites through several domain names and URLs.

The decision left Bredbandsbolaget and owner Telenor with no alternative and they had to go for site-blocking.

“It is a dangerous path to go down, which forces Internet providers to monitor and evaluate content on the Internet and block websites with illegal content in order to avoid becoming accomplices,” they said.

In March 2017, Bredbandsbolaget went ahead and blocked The Pirate Bay site but said it would continue with the fight.

“We are now forced to contest any future blocking demands. It is the only way for us and other Internet operators to ensure that private players should not have the last word regarding the content that should be accessible on the Internet,” Bredbandsbolaget said.

Until last week, both the companies were operating under separate brands but now have been combined into one entity. As a result, The Pirate Bay will now be blocked by Telenor too.

“Telenor Sweden and Bredbandsbolaget today take the final step on their joint trip and become the same company with the same name. As a result, Telenor becomes a comprehensive provider of broadband, TV and mobile communications,” the company said in a statement last week.

“Telenor Sweden and Bredbandsbolaget have shared both logo and organization for the last 13 years. Today, we take the last step in the relationship and consolidate the companies under the same name.”

It is reported that 600,000 Bredbandsbolaget broadband customers were not granted access to The Pirate Bay until the final merger took place. With the acquisition now, Telenor’s 700,000 fiber and broadband customers too will be affected, as the new single-brand company has decided to block the infamous torrent site across its entire network.

“We have not discontinued Bredbandsbolaget, but we have merged Telenor and Bredbandsbolaget and become one,” the company said.

“When we share the same network, The Pirate Bay is blocked by both Telenor and Bredbandsbolaget and there is nothing we plan to change in the future.”
https://www.techworm.net/2018/05/the...or-sweden.html





Marion Prison Faulted for Letting Inmates Pirate Thousands of Movies, Software
Sarah Volpenhein

Inmates at a Marion prison had thousands of pirated movies and videos on computers at the prison, according to the Ohio Inspector General's office.

The Inspector General released a report Tuesday on the contraband found at the Marion Correctional Institution.

The investigation stemmed from an earlier probe in 2015 that found inmates were secretly building computers, concealing them in the prison's ceiling, connecting them to the prison's network and committing crimes with them.

In 2016, while state officials were overseeing corrective measures at the prison after its network was breached, officials became aware of a hard drive hidden at the prison, according to the report.

In 2016, an inmate showed investigators where to find the hard drive and other contraband, including razor blades, hidden in a printer that had been in a metal shop at the prison, according to the report.

Ultimately, investigators found that the hard drive contained pirated software and downloads, which "inmates should not have been able to either access or download," according to the report.

Investigators also found that prison staff didn't go through the proper channels when purchasing computers for the prison, finding that staff did not follow state policy, according to the report.

One of the inmates interviewed for the report, David Dean, said he found the personal information of computers' previous owners still on some of the devices, the report says.

Investigators also concluded that the prison allowed employees to bring movie rentals into the prison, which inmates then pirated. The report says that inmates in the work program Prison News Network would download the movies onto computers they used through the work program and then screen them for other inmates.

The report is not the first one produced by the Inspector General finding violations at the prison. In April 2017, the Inspector General's office released a report exposing prison employees' failure to report suspected illegal activity and failure to properly supervise inmates in 2015, allowing inmates to secretly build computers from parts and then hide them in the prison's ceiling.

That investigation found an inmate was using the computers to steal the identity of another inmate. The computers also were used to illegally create security clearance passes for inmates to gain access to restricted areas and download hacking tools that could be used in network attacks, according to the report.

Another report was published later last year that found a former state official and contractor for Marion Correctional Institution had improperly used her state email account, phone and computers to advance her personal business interests with the prison, that report says.
https://www.marionstar.com/story/new...lms/634076002/

















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