P2P-Zone  

Go Back   P2P-Zone > Peer to Peer
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Old 07-11-18, 07:39 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
JackSpratts's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2001
Location: New England
Posts: 10,013
Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 10th, ’18

Since 2002































November 10th, 2018




Scoop: AT&T to Cut Off Some Customers' Service in Piracy Crackdown
Sara Fischer, David McCabe

AT&T will alert a little more than a dozen customers within the next week or so that their service will be terminated due to copyright infringement, according to sources familiar with its plans.

Why it matters: It's the first time AT&T has discontinued customer service over piracy allegations since having shaped its own piracy policies last year, which is significant given it just became one of America's major media companies.

Between the lines: AT&T owns a content network after its purchase of Time Warner earlier this year, an entity now called WarnerMedia. Content networks are typically responsible for issuing these types of allegations to internet service providers (ISPs) for them to address with their customers.

• A source said it's unclear whether WarnerMedia was involved directly in issuing piracy allegations in these instances, although it's possible.

The details: A now-defunct industry Copyright Alert System used to be responsible for holding ISPs accountable for educating customers about the risks of pirating content.

• It's unclear whether AT&T ever terminated a customer's service when it was a part of that group, as opposed to lesser responses to piracy.

• AT&T, along with other ISPs, were forced to create and enforce their own policies after the group dissolved.

• Per AT&T's policies, customers that AT&T is contacting about discontinuing service would have received at least nine separate notifications with allegations of copyright infringement from content owners prior to taking action to terminate the service.

In a statement to Axios, AT&T says content owners — which could be TV networks, music rights groups, or another group involved in production — notified AT&T when they believed they had evidence that an internet connection controlled by the telecom company was sharing copyrighted material unlawfully.

• "Based on the notices we received, we identified the customer on the account and shared with them the information we received. We also reached out to the customer to educate them about copyright infringement and offer assistance to help prevent the activity from continuing," said an AT&T spokesperson.

• "A small number of customers who continue to receive additional copyright infringement notifications from content owners despite our efforts to educate them, will have their service discontinued.”

The bigger picture: This is one of many complicated issues that is now surfacing in light of AT&T's historic $85 billion takeover of Time Warner in June.

• Last week, HBO went dark for the first time ever after a carriage dispute with Dish. Critics of the merger, include the DOJ, alleged that AT&T may have intentionally failed to come to an agreement with Dish, in an effort to steal Dish's Pay-TV subscribers.

The bottom line: Very few copyright infringers ever get booted from their broadband provider, pointing to the severity of these cases and the number of steps at which the customer is told they are violating copyright before they are cut off from AT&T's service. Copyright infringers are often illegally pirating hundreds of hours of stolen content, not a song or two from their favorite band.
https://www.axios.com/scoop-att-to-t...779b6fb96.html





Sprint Is Throttling Microsoft's Skype Service, Study Finds

• Researcher says the behavior seems ‘directly anti-competitive’
• Sprint says it doesn’t single out individual content providers

Olga Kharif

Sprint Corp. has been slowing traffic to Microsoft Corp.’s internet-based video chat service Skype, according to new findings from an ongoing study by Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts.

More than 100,000 consumers have used the researchers’ Wehe smartphone app to test internet connections. Information from those tests are aggregated and analyzed by the researchers to check if data speeds are being slowed, or throttled, for specific mobile services.

Among leading U.S. carriers, Sprint was the only one to throttle Skype, the study found. The throttling was detected in 34 percent of 1,968 full tests — defined as those in which a user ran two tests in a row — conducted between Jan. 18 and Oct. 15. It happened regularly, and was spread geographically across the U.S. Android phone users were more affected than owners of Apple Inc.’s iPhones.

“In the case of a video call, which is what we were testing, the video quality would be much poorer — poorer than what the network supports,” said David Choffnes, one of the researchers who developed the app.

The finding is particularly troubling because Skype relies on Sprint’s wireless internet network, but the app also provides a communication tool that competes with Sprint’s calling services, the researcher added.

“If you are a telephony provider and you provide IP services over that network, then you shouldn’t be able to limit the service offered by another telephony provider that runs over the internet,” Choffnes said. “From a pure common sense competition view, it seems directly anti-competitive.”

While slowing speeds can reduce bottlenecks and congestion, it raises questions about whether all internet traffic is treated equally, a prime tenet of net neutrality. The principle states that carriers should not discriminate by user, app or content. The Federal Communications Commission enshrined net-neutrality rules in 2015, but after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a Republican-led FCC scrapped the regulations.

Sprint spokeswoman Lisa Dimino said the telecom company doesn’t “single out Skype or any individual content provider in this way.” Microsoft declined to comment.

The researchers bought a Sprint wireless plan to try to detect throttling of Skype in the lab, but couldn’t replicate the experience of the Wehe app users. This is likely because it affects only certain subscription plans, but not the one the researchers purchased, they said.

Choffnes became an internet celebrity in December, when Apple rejected the Wehe app from the App Store. Following an outcry, Apple approved and published the app. Wehe had only a handful of users before the episode, but quickly gained tens of thousands of new testers.

Earlier this year, Choffnes and his fellow researchers found that the largest U.S. telecom companies were throttling popular apps including Netflix and Google’s YouTube. Both studies look for “differentiation,” when a type of traffic on a network is treated differently than other types of traffic. Most of this activity is throttling.

Choffnes’s work is funded by the National Science Foundation, Google parent Alphabet Inc. and ARCEP, the French telecom regulator. Amazon.com Inc. provided some free services, and Choffnes has been asked by Verizon Communications Inc. to measure throttling across all carriers.

— With assistance by Scott Moritz, and Dina Bass

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ce-study-finds





Supreme Court Rejects Industry Challenge of 2015 Net Neutrality Rules

But lawsuits over Pai's net neutrality repeal and California law will continue.
Jon Brodkin

The US Supreme Court has declined to hear the broadband industry's challenge of Obama-era net neutrality rules.

The Federal Communications Commission's 2015 order to impose net neutrality rules and strictly regulate broadband was already reversed by Trump's pick for FCC chairman, Ajit Pai. But AT&T and broadband industry lobby groups were still trying to overturn court decisions that upheld the FCC order.

A win for the broadband industry could have prevented future administrations from imposing a similarly strict set of rules. The Trump administration supported the industry's case, asking the US Supreme Court to vacate the Obama-era ruling.

But the Supreme Court today said it has denied petitions filed by AT&T and broadband lobby groups NCTA, CTIA, USTelecom, and the American Cable Association. Four of nine justices must agree to hear a case, but only three voted to grant the petitions.
Kavanaugh recused himself from case

According to the Supreme Court announcement today, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch "would grant the petitions, vacate the judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit [which upheld the FCC's net neutrality order], and remand to that court with instructions to dismiss the cases as moot."

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Brett Kavanaugh recused themselves from the case. Roberts owned stock in AT&T-owned Time Warner, while Kavanaugh took part in the case when he was a judge on the DC Circuit appeals court, Bloomberg Supreme Court Reporter Greg Stohr noted. Kavanaugh dissented from the ruling upholding net neutrality rules in 2017, arguing that the rules violate the First Amendment rights of Internet service providers by preventing them from "exercising editorial control" over Internet content.

The legal battle over net neutrality will continue and could potentially reach the Supreme Court again in a separate case. The Pai-led FCC is defending its net neutrality repeal against a lawsuit filed by dozens of litigants, including 22 state attorneys general, consumer advocacy groups, and tech companies. In a related case, California's decision to impose state-level net neutrality rules is being challenged by the broadband industry and Trump administration.

Today's Supreme Court decision is good news for supporters of net neutrality because it means that the DC Circuit court's "previous decision upholding both the FCC's classification of broadband as a telecommunications service, and its rules prohibiting broadband providers from blocking or degrading Internet content, remains in place," senior counsel John Bergmayer of consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge said.

"Much of the current FCC’s argument [against net neutrality] depends on ignoring or contradicting the DC Circuit’s earlier findings, but now that these are firmly established as binding law, the Pai FCC’s case is on even weaker ground than before," Bergmayer said.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...trality-rules/





Connecticut Broadband co. Absorbs $426M Loss in Q3
Alexander Soule

Frontier Communications reported another big loss in the third quarter, sending its stock into a swoon despite the company’s CEO promising Frontier is on the cusp of a turnaround as it chops costs and gears up new systems to improve customer interactions.

Frontier is based in Norwalk with its Connecticut operations center in New Haven, selling broadband, TV and telephone service in portions of 29 states. In the third quarter, Frontier revenue was down $36 million or 1.6 percent from the preceding three months to $2.1 billion, and off nearly 6 percent from a year ago.

The company lost 93,000 accounts on a net basis over three months, with CEO Dan McCarthy telling investment analysts on Tuesday that Frontier also absorbed a hit from “a non-recurring large deal” in his words.

Frontier lost $426 million in the third quarter, versus a $72 million loss a year ago that included $54 million paid out as dividends to investors holding preferred stock. Frontier did not pay out preferred dividends in this year’s third quarter, while attributing the large part of the loss to the reduced estimated value of its assets, as well as the impact of state taxes.

Frontier shares were down 14 percent to $4.50 in overnight trading prior to Wednesday’s opening bell, its lowest level ever on an adjusted basis. Frontier shares had increased more than 20 percent between July and September, but the issue lost those gains in October before rallying this month.

For the first nine months of the year, Frontier’s has improved its losses by just over $400 million from the same stretch in 2017, with the company aiming to add $500 million in operating profits on an annualized basis within two years.

“We have a lot of opportunity ahead on the expense side, but we’re equally as excited on sales effectiveness, efficiency and really churn reduction,” McCarthy said Tuesday. “We think there’s big opportunity … with the subscriber trends, and that will just build as we implement smaller improvements in all of those different categories.”
https://www.newstimes.com/business/a...3-13370458.php





Cord Cutting Accelerates as Pay TV Loses 1 Million Customers in Largest-Ever Quarterly Loss
Mike Snider

Scratch the theory that cord cutting might be decelerating.

Cable and satellite TV providers lost about 1.1 million subscribers during the July to September period, the largest quarterly loss ever – and the first time the industry lost more than 1 million subscribers in a quarter, according to media and telecommunications research firm MoffettNathanson.

After Dish Network reported its third-quarter earnings Wednesday, the New York-headquartered research firm tallied up the publicly reported subscriber losses to arrive at the finding.

Dish lost 341,000 subscribers in the third quarter, compared to adding 16,000 in the same period a year ago. Overall, Dish lost 367,000 satellite subscribers but added 26,000 Sling TV subscribers, the company said.

Rich Greenfield, a media and technology analyst with financial services firm BTIG in New York, arrived at a similar conclusion and called it "the third-worst quarter in industry history and worst since Q2 2016."

Q3 2018 #goodluckbundle
• 1st time legacy cable/satellite companies lost >1 million subscribers in a single quarter based on company reports
• adding in vMVPDs, sub losses were ~500K, the third worst quarter in industry history and worst since Q2 2016 pic.twitter.com/xHFl21QAfB

— Rich Greenfield (@RichBTIG) November 7, 2018


That continues a worsening trend line for satellite TV providers. Two weeks ago, AT&T said DirecTV lost a net 297,000 subscribers during the quarter – 359,600 satellite subscribers departed, while it added 49,000 new subscribers to its streaming TV service DirecTV Now. Overall, AT&T has 25.15 million pay-TV customers; Directv, 19.6 million; U-Verse, 3.7 million; and DirecTV Now, 1.86 million.

Looking just at satellite TV departures, the industry lost 726,000 subscribers during the period. Telecom TV services, which includes AT&T's U-Verse and Verizon FiOS, lost 104,000 customers combined.

Cable TV providers lost about 293,000 for the quarter, but its trends "are getting marginally better," MoffettNathanson suggests, as the industry lost 322,000 in the same period a year ago.

While Comcast lost the most video subscribers (106,000), it also added 363,000 broadband subscribers.

Slowing growth for DirecTV Now and Sling TV could suggest "price sensitivity" of broadband-delivered TV services may be "turning out to be greater than expected," after several of the services increased prices, the analysts said.

MoffettNathanson did not list firm numbers for services such as fuboTV, but said there were "anecdotal reports of strong growth of smaller players" that could suggest a "shift in leadership" in broadband-delivered services. FuboTV last month said its subscriber base had doubled from a year ago to 250,000. The Motley Fool has estimated YouTube TV has more than 800,000 subscribers and PlayStation Vue, more than 500,000. Hulu two months ago said it surpassed 1 million subscribers.

Overall, about 78 percent of U.S. TV households subscribe to some form of pay-TV service, down from 86 percent in 2013, according to Leichtman Research Group.

During the April to June period, the top pay-TV providers lost about 415,000 subscribers, the fewest net losses in four years in what is traditionally a weak quarter, the firm said.

Some pointed to that as a sign that cord cutting was slowing. Not so, MoffettNathanson says. An increase in new households – many of which will show up as new pay-TV subscribers – hid defections of longtime customers, the analysts say.

With new homes running "a full 249K households per quarter faster than a year ago," you should expect to see "about 200K more subscribers per quarter, on average" than a year ago.

Since that is not the case, the verdict is: "Cord cutting does not appear to be slowing at all," they said.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/...er/1919471002/





Strange Snafu Misroutes Domestic US Internet Traffic Through China Telecom

Telecom with ties to China's government misdirected traffic for two and a half years.
Dan Goodin

China Telecom, the large international communications carrier with close ties to the Chinese government, misdirected big chunks of Internet traffic through a roundabout path that threatened the security and integrity of data passing between various providers’ backbones for two and a half years, a security expert said Monday. It remained unclear if the highly circuitous paths were intentional hijackings of the Internet’s Border Gateway Protocol or were caused by accidental mishandling.

For almost a week late last year, the improper routing caused some US domestic Internet communications to be diverted to mainland China before reaching their intended destination, Doug Madory, a researcher specializing in the security of the Internet’s global BGP routing system, told Ars. As the following traceroute from December 3, 2017 shows, traffic originating in Los Angeles first passed through a China Telecom facility in Hangzhou, China, before reaching its final stop in Washington, DC. The problematic route, which is visualized in the graphic above, was the result of China Telecom inserting itself into the inbound path of Verizon Asian Pacific.

The routing snafu involving domestic US Internet traffic coincided with a larger misdirection that started in late 2015 and lasted for about two and a half years, Madory said in a blog post published Monday. The misdirection was the result of AS4134, the autonomous system belonging to China Telecom, incorrectly handling the routing announcements of AS703, Verizon's Asia-Pacific AS. The mishandled routing announcements caused several international carriers—including Telia’s AS1299, Tata’s AS6453, GTT’s AS3257, and Vodafone’s AS1273—to send data destined for Verizon Asia-Pacific through China Telecom, rather than using the normal multinational telecoms.

For the next 30 months or so, a large amount of traffic that used Verizon’s AS703 improperly passed through AS4134 in mainland China first. The circuitous route is reflected in the following traceroute taken on May 1, 2017:

"On average I believe we saw as much as 20 percent of our BGP sources carrying these routes at any given time," Madory told Ars. "It isn’t the same as saying 20 percent of the Internet, but it is safe to say that a significant minority of the Internet was carrying these routes."

BGP fragility

The sustained misdirection further underscores the fragility of BGP, which forms the underpinning of the Internet's global routing system. In April, unknown attackers used BGP hijacking to redirect traffic destined for Amazon’s Route 53 domain-resolution service. The two-hour event allowed the attackers to steal about $150,000 in digital coins as unwitting people were routed to a fake MyEtherWallet.com site rather than the authentic wallet service that got called normally. When end users clicked through a message warning of a self-signed certificate, the fake site drained their digital wallets.

In 2013, malicious hackers repeatedly hijacked massive chucks of Internet traffic in what was likely a test run. Also in 2013, spyware service provider Hacking Team orchestrated the hijacking of IP addresses it didn't own to help Italian police regain control over several computers they were monitoring in an investigation. A year later, domestic Russian Internet traffic was diverted through China.

On two occasions last year, traffic to and from major US companies was suspiciously and intentionally routed through Russian service providers. Traffic for Visa, MasterCard, and Symantec—among others—was rerouted in the first incident in April, while Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft traffic was affected in a separate BGP event about eight months later.

By routing traffic through networks controlled by the attacker, BGP manipulation allows the adversary to monitor, corrupt, or modify any data that's not encrypted. Even when data is encrypted, attacks with names such as DROWN or Logjam have raised the specter that some of the encrypted data may have been decrypted. Even when encryption can't be defeated, attackers can sometimes trick targets into dropping their defenses, as the BGP hijacking against MyEtherWallet.com did.

Madory said the improper routing he reported finally stopped after he “expended a great deal of effort to stop it in 2017.” His report on Monday went on to endorse a proposed standard known as RPKI-based AS path verification. The mechanism, had it been deployed, would have stopped some of the events Madory documented, he said.

Neither China Telecom nor Verizon responded to an email seeking comment for this post.

Monday’s blog post comes two weeks after researchers at the US Naval War College and Tel Aviv University published a report that quickly got the attention of BGP security professionals. Titled China’s Maxim–Leave No Access Point Unexploited: The Hidden Story of China Telecom’s BGP Hijacking, it claimed the Chinese government has brazenly used China Telecom for years to divert huge amounts of traffic to China-controlled networks before it’s ultimately delivered to its final destination. The report named four specific routes—Canada to South Korea, US to Italy, Scandinavia to Japan, and Italy to Thailand—that were reportedly manipulated between 2015 and 2017 as a result of BGP activities of China Telecom.

“While one may argue such attacks can always be explained by ‘normal’ BGP behavior, these, in particular, suggest malicious intent, precisely because of their unusual transit characteristics—namely the lengthened routes and the abnormal durations,” the authors wrote. The Canada to South Korea leak, the report said, lasted for about six months and started in February 2016. The remaining three reported hijackings took place in 2017, with two of them reportedly lasting for months and the third taking place over about nine hours.

Definitely concerning

The report was unusual in that it didn’t provide AS numbers, specific dates and other specifics that allowed other researchers to confirm the claims. Ars and other researchers asked the authors to make the data available, and they responded with a small amount of traceroute data. Madory said the Scandinavia-to-Japan event reported in the paper two weeks ago was actually a small part of the two-and-a-half-year misdirection he reported Monday.

"We are describing the same thing in different ways," he told Ars, speaking of the two-and-a-half-year event he documented and the two-month hijacking reported two weeks ago. "They may have only known about it for those two months in 2017, but I can guarantee you that it was going [on] for much longer."

Madory said he was unable to confirm the three other hijackings the authors report. His report on Monday, however, leaves little doubt that China Telecom has either knowingly or otherwise engaged in BGP leaks that have affected large chunks of Internet traffic for a sustained period.

The domestic US traffic, in particular, “becomes an even more extreme example,” he told Ars. “When it gets to US-to-US traffic traveling through mainland China, it becomes a question of is this a malicious incident or is it accidental? It’s definitely concerning. I think people will be surprised to see that US-to-US traffic was sent through China Telecom for days.”
https://arstechnica.com/information-...china-telecom/





Opera for Android Now Automatically Blocks those Irritating Cookie Notifications
Matthew Hughes

The latest version of Opera for Android now blocks those annoying GDPR cookie notifications.

Starting from today, users of the niche mobile browser can activate a setting which automatically hides cookie alert dialogs.

The feature also lets users automatically control what cookies they accept. Users can choose to accept all cookies, deny all cookies, or deny all third-party cookies.

To activate the feature, users of Opera on Android should head to their settings, and then tap ‘Ad Blocking.’ The relevant toggles will be staring you right in the face.

Opera says it’s tested the new feature on over 15,000 websites, in order to identify and suppress as many pop-up dialog boxes as possible. Given that many websites will be using off-the-shelf tools to handle their GDPR compliance, it stands to reason that they’ve captured the majority of pop-ups.

However, while this feature is being introduced, the company is encouraging users to report cookie dialog boxes using a built-in tool integrated into the browser.

This new cookie notification blocking feature will undoubtedly be a welcome feature for many. Since GDPR became law in May of this year, browsing the internet has become somewhat more arduous and clunky.

It’s interesting to note that GDPR largely exists to give consumers more power (and crucially, consent) over how their personal information is used. However, in practice, the implementation of this has been so woefully bad, users are reverting to their old habits and just automatically clicking ‘accept.’
https://thenextweb.com/tech/2018/11/...notifications/





Chrome Will Soon Ad-Block an Entire Website if it Shows Abusive Ads

Chrome 71 arrives next month
Jon Porter

With Chrome 71, Google is stepping up its fight against the internet’s abusive ads problem by blocking every ad on a site that persistently shows them. Abusive ads come in many forms, but broadly speaking cause your browser to misbehave by either generating fake system messages, automatically redirecting you, or attempt to steal personal information.

This isn’t the first time that Google has tried to use Chrome to address the problem. Back in July, Chrome 68 would prevent sites from opening new tabs or windows if they were reported for serving abusive experiences. Chrome 71, scheduled for release in December, will give site owners a 30 day grace period to clean up their site after an abusive experience is reported. Failure to remove the abusive ads will cause Chrome to block every ad on the site — regardless of whether they are classed as abusive or not.

Although users will have the option of turning this filtering off, the majority are likely to leave their settings at their default values, effectively withholding a huge portion of a flagged site’s revenue. It’s a big incentive for sites to prevent this bad behavior, even if it’s an uncomfortable reminder of how much power Google now holds over the internet.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/5/1...-december-2018





Facial Image Matching System Risks 'Chilling Effect' on Freedoms, Rights Groups Say

System dubbed ‘the capability’ processes Australians’ information whether they are crime suspects or not
Christopher Knaus

Civil rights groups have warned a vast, powerful system allowing the near real-time matching of citizens’ facial images risks a “profound chilling effect” on protest and dissent.

The technology – known in shorthand as “the capability” – collects and pools facial imagery from various state and federal government sources, including driver’s licences, passports and visas.

The biometric information can then rapidly – almost in real time – be compared with other sources, such as CCTV footage, to match identities.

The system, chiefly controlled by the federal Department of Home Affairs, is designed to give intelligence and security agencies a powerful tool to deter identity crime, and quickly identify terror and crime suspects.

But it has prompted serious concern among academics, human rights groups and privacy experts. The system sweeps up and processes citizens’ sensitive biometric information regardless of whether they have committed or are suspected of an offence.

Critics have warned of a “very substantial erosion of privacy”, function creep and the system’s potential use for mass general surveillance. There are also fears about the level of access given to private corporations and the legislation’s loose wording, which could allow it to be used for purposes other than related to terrorism or serious crime.

States agreed to the concept at a Council of Australian Governments meeting last year, though it is yet to be legislated by federal parliament.

New South Wales is one of the states in favour of the capability, and is legislating to allow state driver’s licences to be shared with the commonwealth and investing $52.6m over four years to facilitate its rollout.

A NSW parliamentary inquiry on Wednesday heard concerns that the system could have a chilling effect on political discussion, protest and civil dissent.

The NSW Council for Civil Liberties deputy president, Lesley Lynch, said the system’s ability for near real-time identity matching made it a “big stakes” transformation. She said it could allow mass general surveillance of the public, including during large gatherings.

“It’s hard to believe that it won’t lead to pressure, in the not too distant future, for this capability to be used in many contexts, and for many reasons,” Lynch said.

“This brings with it a real threat to anonymity. But the more concerning dimension is the attendant chilling effect on freedoms of political discussion, the right to protest and the right to dissent. We think these potential implications should be of concern to us all.”

The NSW government has previously denied the system would be used for mass public surveillance, and said its intention was for more targeted enforcement of identity crime.

Home affairs department assistant secretary, Andrew Rice, said identity crime was impacting on one in four Australians in their lifetime. The system, he said, was crucial in combatting such crime.

“Identity crime causes substantial harm to the economy and individuals each year and is a key enabler of terrorism and serious and organised crime,” he said.

The NSW’s privacy commissioner, Samantha Gavel, said the system had been designed with “robust” privacy safeguards. Gavel said it had been developed in consultation with state and federal privacy commissioners, and she expressed confidence in the protections limiting access by private corporations.

“I understand that entities will only have access to the system through participation agreements and that there are some significant restraints on private sector access to the system,” Gavel said.

Part of the system, the face verification service, is already operational. It allows a “one-to-one, image-based verification service” allowing one person’s photo to be matched against an image on one of their government records.

A second part to the system, known as the face identification service, will allow “a one-to-many, image-based identification service” that matches a photo of an anonymous person against multiple government records, to help establish their identity.

The database will be accessible to federal, state and territory governments through a central hub connecting the various photographic identity databases.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...hts-groups-say





Judge Orders Amazon to Give Echo Recordings in Murder Case

Timothy Verrill accused of killing two women in Farmington, New Hampshire in 2017
Mike Cronin

An Amazon Echo device could play a role in a double-homicide case in Farmington.

A judge has ordered Amazon to turn over recordings that might have been captured by an Echo smart speaker in the Farmington house where two women were stabbed to death in January 2017.

Timothy Verrill of Dover is charged with first-degree murder in the stabbing deaths of Jenna Pellegrini, 32, and Christine Sullivan, 48. He has pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors said they believe the Echo device, which listens for Alexa voice commands, might have recorded audio of Sullivan's death, as well as anything that happened before or after it.

State police have the speaker, and the judge agreed to let them access the recordings and ordered Amazon to turn over any recordings on its servers.

Experts said the case reveals some of the implications of having such devices in people's homes.

"I think most people probably don't even realize that Alexa is taking account of what's going on in your house, in addition to responding to your demands and commands," said Albert Scherr, a professor at the University of New Hampshire School of Law.

Amazon officials said the company won't release any information until a valid legal demand has been properly served.
https://www.wmur.com/article/nh-judg...-case/24893714





The Free Music Archive is Closing this Month

The WFMU project hosted music that was meant to be freely shared
Bijan Stephen

The Free Music Archive was founded in 2009, the year Barack Obama was inaugurated as this country’s first black president. As a project directed by the legendary Jersey City radio station WFMU, it was to be a “library of high-quality, legal audio downloads,” a place where artists could share their music and listeners could enjoy it for free. Now, following a funding shortage, the FMA plans to close sometime this month.

“The future is uncertain, has been my mantra lately,” says Cheyenne Hohman, who’s been the director of the Free Music Archive since 2014. The shutdown date was initially the 9th, but has since been pushed back to November 16th because the FMA is in early talks with four different organizations that are interested in taking the project over. “The site may stay up a little bit longer to ensure, at the very least, that our collections are backed up on archive.org and the Wayback Machine.”

Even so, it’s not a perfect solution. “If it just goes into archive.org, it’s going to be there in perpetuity, but it’s not going to be changing at all,” Hohman says. “It’s not going to be the same thing, that sort of community and project that it was for ... almost 10 years.”

The project got its start after WFMU won a grant from the state of New York. The plan was to create a resource that was aimed at people — “webcasters, podcasters, broadcasters, video artists, students,” per Hohman — who were interested in Creative Commons licensing. Those licenses are looser than traditional copyright, and give artists more flexibility in sharing their work and allowing others to use it. As Hohman points out, traditional copyright is far from perfect for the online world; the content uploaded to FMA, on the other hand, was created explicitly with the digital in mind.

“The FMA is literally the only reason anyone ever heard my music when I was starting out,” the ambient musician Chris Zabriskie tells The Verge in an email. “It wasn’t just the permissive creative commons licensing, it was the FMA as a platform that introduced my music to millions of people over the years. It’s the reason I have a career.” Having his music freely available mattered to Zabriskie, and, in his words, the FMA just seemed to get that. “They understood that free independent music needed more than to just be free and independent, it needed a community. The music won’t disappear, but something special is vanishing.”

nooooo shit what a bummer - nothing good lasts long enough - fma is the only reason anyone heard me at all when i was starting out (thanks to @therewasaguy) rip :(

— Chris Zabriskie (@chriszabriskie) November 5, 2018


“We don’t face some of the same red tape that organizations that are trying to digitize things that are covered under copyright, for example, are facing,” Hohman says. “But I do think that as with many arts organizations and similar sorts of libraries and archives, we’re facing an unfriendly administration.” She says the National Endowment for the Arts, for example, awarded the FMA a grant for FY2018-2019 that was a third of the size of those it had received in the past. (Regardless, they’ll have to relinquish the grant with the closure.)

“Arts funding is dwindling,” Hohman says. “Support for archives and libraries is strong philosophically, but ... material support can be lacking.” That lack is harmful to anyone who relies on those institutions to get things done, from researchers to people whose main portal to the internet is their local library — Hohman included.

“My main goal, career-wise, is to connect people with resources that they need. That’s sort of the driving force behind what I do,” she says. And with the Free Music Archive’s impending closure, Hohman has found herself slightly adrift. “I don’t have a clear, like, career plan. I live in Los Angeles, and there are tons of library and archiving jobs here, but it’s pretty competitive. And also those gears grind pretty slowly. So I’ll probably be between jobs for a while.”

Even so, Hohman plans to stay with the Archive for as long as she can. “If there’s a new partner organization that’s willing to take me on as consultant, or even as director as part of the package, I’m willing to go with it. But ... I need to make sure that I have my own needs met. So hopefully there won’t be a gap in service for the Archive,” she says. “And hopefully I will also find a way to persevere.”
https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/7/1...heyenne-hohman

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

November 3rd, October 27th, October 20th, October 13th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public."
- Hugo Black
__________________
Thanks For Sharing
JackSpratts is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 24th, '12 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 21-11-12 09:20 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 16th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-07-11 06:43 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 30th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 27-01-10 07:49 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 16th, '10 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-01-10 09:02 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 5th, '09 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 02-12-09 08:32 AM






All times are GMT -6. The time now is 06:37 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
© www.p2p-zone.com - Napsterites - 2000 - 2024 (Contact grm1@iinet.net.au for all admin enquiries)