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 28-11-18, 08:00 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 - December 1st, ’18

Since 2002































December 1st, 2018




Nintendo Scrambles to Stop ‘Super Smash Bros. Ultimate’ Leaks, Piracy
Steven Petite

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate doesn’t launch on Nintendo Switch until December 7, but some users are already playing it. Over the holiday weekend, pirated copies of the highly anticipated brawler began popping up online. Videos of the soundtrack, gameplay, and even unannounced modes started to appear on YouTube and Twitch. We will not link to any leaks in this article.

While virtually all games wind up being available on piracy sites shortly before or at launch, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate leaked a full two weeks before its scheduled release date. That’s an unprecedented leak for a Nintendo game, and the studio is understandably none too pleased. According to two YouTubers who uploaded tracks from the soundtrack to their channels, Nintendo issued copyright claims (via Nintendo Insider). Additional copyright claims have also been issued, as most of the video leaks have since been removed.

To make matters worse, dataminers have predictably rummaged through the game’s files to uncover a bunch of details that haven’t been announced. These details, which you can find pretty easily if you so choose, include huge spoilers about the new single-player Spirits mode, fighter unlock prerequisites, and plenty more.

According to a report by Motherboard, the Switch piracy community believes the successful attempts at pirating Smash came from a physical copy of the game obtained in Mexico. How someone managed to secure a copy of the game this early remains unclear. Other attempts at pirating Smash have resulted in Switch consoles becoming inoperable, commonly known as “bricking.”

The original leaks appear to have come from WarezNX, a Switch piracy group that uses Discord to communicate. JJB, the group’s administrator, told Motherboard that they didn’t believe the game should have been leaked so early to the public.

Nintendo has yet to release a statement about the leaks or pirated copies, but given Nintendo’s well-known stance on the issue, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Nintendo go further than just handing out copyright claims. Earlier this month, a federal judge awarded Nintendo $12 million in a lawsuit against the owner of two ROM sites that hosted classic Nintendo games.

If you’re anxiously awaiting Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, we recommend staying away from Reddit threads, YouTube, and Twitch until launch. Now that pirated copies are out there, it’s likely that more leaks will come.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate launches on December 7, and based on our preview earlier this year, it will be worth the wait.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming...-leaks-piracy/





Echoing SOPA and PIPA, the Music Industry Renews Calls for Widespread Site-Blocking
Daniel Sanchez

Once again, without truly understanding the consequences, the music industry has pushed for widespread site-blocking to take on piracy. But what does the RIAA stand to benefit from the effort?

Eight years ago, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) readily defended two controversial bills aimed at taking on piracy.

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA), a Senate companion bill, aimed at blacklisting websites hosting or linking to infringing works. This, argued the RIAA, would prevent people from pirating content.

Critics – including major tech companies – slammed the bill, claiming SOPA and PIPA would severely hamper freedom of speech.

If approved, the US Attorney General had the power to seek court orders against ISPs. The government would then order ISPs to block access to websites purportedly engaging in “theft of US property.” On a whim the US Attorney General – along with the entertainment industries – could silence any website deemed a threat.

Following a massive online blackout by major tech companies, both bills failed.

Undeterred, the music industry – led by the RIAA – has attempted to resurrect both bills in the form of ‘changes’ to existing legislature.

Welcome back, SOPA and PIPA.

According to a new report, the RIAA and the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) have drafted a joint letter to Vishal Amin, the Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator (IPEC). He put out a call, requesting feedback for “improvements” on the newest Joint Strategic Plan for Intellectual Property Enforcement.

The letter reads,

“There are several changes that should be made legislatively to help legal authorities and third parties better protect intellectual property rights.”

To fix the DMCA, write both organizations, the United States should implement site-blocking as a piracy tool.

“These include fixing the DMCA, making it a felony to knowingly engage in unauthorized streaming of copyrighted works, and investigating the positive impact that website blocking of foreign sites has in other jurisdictions and whether U.S. law should be revised accordingly.”

Resurrecting SOPA and PIPA’s controversial anti-piracy measure, the RIAA and the NMPA – without providing proof whatsoever – argue site-blocking has worked around the world.

“As website blocking has had a positive impact in other countries without significant unintended consequences, the U.S. should reconsider adding this to its anti-piracy tool box.”

The Copyright Alliance agreed, pushing for the IPEC to “observe how other countries are enforcing copyright laws, and whether those enforcement efforts are effective.”

“In addition to learning what remedies are effective, much can be learned from other countries in ensuring such remedies are proportionate and do not result in overblocking or other unwanted consequences.”

As with the RIAA and the NMPA, the Copyright Alliance has failed to provide evidence to back up its claims.

The “unintended consequences” of site-blocking.

Speaking with Motherboard, copyright experts stated Homeland Security shut down 84,000 non-infringing websites in 2011. The US agency had targeted pirating websites in a widespread copyright enforcement effort. A similar Australian filtering campaign has accidentally taken down 250,000 innocent websites.

Just don’t tell that to the RIAA, the NMPA, or the Copyright Alliance.

Explaining the music industry’s narrow-minded anti-piracy strategy, Annemarie Bridy said,

“DNS blocks are easy to circumvent, because site operators can just register a different domain name in the same top level domain or move to a different top level domain. It will always be a game of cat-and-mouse, with no real permanent effects.”

She works as a Professor of Law at the University of Idaho.

Bridy added that the RIAA may willfully choose to ignore the consequences of site-blocking.

“The RIAA has an obvious interest in selling site-blocking to policy makers. They’ve historically been dismissive of adverse effects on other people’s speech.

“It’s in the RIAA’s interest to exaggerate the benefits of site-blocking and to downplay the costs. That’s what we’d expect them to do as lobbyists for the music industry, and that’s what they do.”

In fact, pushing for site-blocking may ultimately prove ineffective.

Sasha Moss, Federal Affairs Manager at the R Street Institute, explained,

“[ISP site filters] only incentivize bad actors to find new avenues to disseminate infringing content. The only way to combat piracy is to create legal and accessible options for sharing content online.”

In fact, continues Moss, the music industry has clearly ignored the lessons of SOPA and PIPA’s legislative defeat.

“SOPA/PIPA was riddled with problems and it would be nonsensical to go down that road again.”

Meredith Rose, a lawyer for Public Knowledge, a consumer group, warned site-blocking will ultimately hurt small businesses.

“In the end, there’s a very real risk that you end up increasing concentration of market power because the dominant player is the only one who can afford to bear the new costs of the law.

“It’s not always clear that the benefit from the law offsets the harms from increased concentration.”
https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/201...site-blocking/





When the Internet Archive Forgets
David Bixenspan

On the internet, there are certain institutions we have come to rely on daily to keep truth from becoming nebulous or elastic. Not necessarily in the way that something stupid like Verrit aspired to, but at least in confirming that you aren’t losing your mind, that an old post or article you remember reading did, in fact, actually exist. It can be as fleeting as using Google Cache to grab a quickly deleted tweet, but it can also be as involved as doing a deep dive of a now-dead site’s archive via the Wayback Machine. But what happens when an archive becomes less reliable, and arguably has legitimate reasons to bow to pressure and remove controversial archived material?

A few weeks ago, while recording my podcast, the topic turned to the old blog written by The Ultimate Warrior, the late bodybuilder turned chiropractic student turned pro wrestler turned ranting conservative political speaker under his legal name of, yes, “Warrior.” As described by Deadspin’s Barry Petchesky in the aftermath of Warrior’s 2014 passing, he was “an insane dick,” spouting off in blogs and campus speeches about people with disabilities, gay people, New Orleans residents, and many others. But when I went looking for a specific blog post, I saw that the blogs were not just removed, the site itself was no longer in the Internet Archive, replaced by the error message: “This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.”

Apparently, Warrior’s site had been de-archived for months, not long after Rob Rousseau pored over it for a Vice Sports article on the hypocrisy of WWE using Warrior’s image for their Breast Cancer Awareness Month campaign. The campaign was all about getting women to “Unleash Your Warrior,” complete with an Ultimate Warrior motif, but since Warrior’s blogs included wishing death on a cancer-survivor, this wasn’t a good look. Rousseau was struck by how the archive was removed “almost immediately after my piece went up, like within that week,” he told Gizmodo.

Rousseau suspected that WWE was somehow behind it, but a WWE spokesman told Gizmodo that they were not involved. Steve Wilton, the business manager for Ultimate Creations also denied involvement. A spokesman for the Internet Archive, though, told Gizmodo that the archive was removed because of a DMCA takedown request from the company’s business manager (Wilton’s job for years) on October 29, 2017, two days after the Vice article was published. (He has not replied to a follow-up email about the takedown request.)

“You can understand why their impulse might be to act cautiously even if that creates serious tension with their core mission... to create an accurate historical archive of everything that has been there and to prevent people from wiping out evidence of their history.”

Over the last few years, there has been a change in how the Wayback Machine is viewed, one inspired by the general political mood. What had long been a useful tool when you came across broken links online is now, more than ever before, seen as an arbiter of the truth and a bulwark against erasing history.

That archive sites are trusted to show the digital trail and origin of content is not just a must-use tool for journalists, but effective for just about anyone trying to track down vanishing web pages. With that in mind, that the Internet Archive doesn’t really fight takedown requests becomes a problem. That’s not the only recourse: When a site admin elects to block the Wayback crawler using a robots.txt file, the crawling doesn’t just stop. Instead, the Wayback Machine’s entire history of a given site is removed from public view.

In other words, if you deal in a certain bottom-dwelling brand of controversial content and want to avoid accountability, there are at least two different, standardized ways of erasing it from the most reliable third-party web archive on the public internet.

For the Internet Archive, like with quickly complying with takedown notices challenging their seemingly fair use archive copies of old websites, the robots.txt strategy, in practice, does little more than mitigating their risk while going against the spirit of the protocol. And if someone were to sue over non-compliance with a DMCA takedown request, even with a ready-made, valid defense in the Archive’s pocket, copyright litigation is still incredibly expensive. It doesn’t matter that the use is not really a violation by any metric. If a rightsholder makes the effort, you still have to defend the lawsuit.

“The fair use defense in this context has never been litigated,” noted Annemarie Bridy, a law professor at the University of Idaho and an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School. “Internet Archive is a non-profit, so the exposure to statutory damages that they face is huge, and the risk that they run is pretty great ... given the scope of what they do; that they’re basically archiving everything that is on the public web, their exposure is phenomenal. So you can understand why their impulse might be to act cautiously even if that creates serious tension with their core mission, which is to create an accurate historical archive of everything that has been there and to prevent people from wiping out evidence of their history.”

While the Internet Archive did not respond to specific questions about its robots.txt policy, its proactive response to takedown requests, or if any potential fair use defenses have been tested by them in court, a spokesperson did send this statement along:

Several months after the Wayback Machine was launched in late 2001, we participated with a group of outside archivists, librarians, and attorneys in the drafting of a set of recommendations for managing removal requests (the Oakland Archive Policy) that the Internet Archive more or less adopted as guidelines over the first decade or so of the Wayback Machine.

Earlier this year, we convened with a similar group to review those guidelines and explore the potential value of an updated version. We are still pondering many issues and hope that before too long we might be able to present some updated information on our site to better help the public understand how we approach take down requests. You can find some of our thoughts about robots.txt at http://blog.archive.org/2017/04/17/r...-web-archives/.

At the end of the day, we strive to strike a balance between the concerns that site owners and rights holders sometimes bring to us with the broader public interest in free access for everyone to a history of the Internet that is as comprehensive as possible.


All of that said, the Internet Archive has always held itself out to be a library; in theory, shouldn’t that matter?

“Under current copyright law, although there are special provisions that give certain rights to libraries, there is no definition of a library,” explained Brandon Butler, the Director of Information Policy for the University of Virginia Library. “And that’s a thing that rights holders have always fretted over, and they’ve always fretted over entities like the Internet Archive, which aren’t 200-year-old public libraries, or university-affiliated libraries. They often raise up a stand that there will be faux libraries, that they’d call themselves libraries but it’s really just a haven for piracy. That specter of the sort of sham library really hasn’t arisen.” The lone exception that Butler could think of was when American Buddha, a non-profit, online library of Buddhist texts, found itself sued by Penguin over a few items that they asserted copyright over. “The court didn’t really care that this place called itself a library; it didn’t really shield them from any infringement allegations.” That said, as Butler notes, while being a library wouldn’t necessarily protect the Internet Archive as much as it could, “the right to make copies for preservation,” as Butler puts it, is definitely a point in their favor.

That said, “libraries typically don’t get sued; it’s bad PR,” Butler says. So it’s not like there’s a ton of modern legal precedent about libraries in the digital age, barring some outliers like the various Google Books cases.

“They often raise up a stand that there will be faux libraries, that they’d call themselves libraries but it’s really just a haven for piracy. That specter of the sort of sham library really hasn’t arisen.”

As Bridy notes, in the United States, copyright is “a commercial right.” It’s not about reputational harm, it’s about protecting the value of a work and, more specifically, the ability to continuously make money off of it. “The reason we give it is we want artists and creative people to have an incentive to publish and market their work,” she said. “Using copyright as a way of trying to control privacy or reputation ... it can be used that way, but you might argue that’s copyright misuse, you might argue it falls outside of the ambit of why we have copyright.”

We take a lot of things for granted, especially as we rely on technology more and more. “The internet is forever” may be a common refrain in the media, and the underlying wisdom about being careful may be sound, but it is also not something that should be taken literally. People delete posts. Websites and entire platforms disappear for business and other reasons. Rich, famous, and powerful bad actors don’t care about intimidating small non-profit organizations. It’s nice to have safeguards, but there are limits to permanence on the internet, and where there are limits, there are loopholes.
https://gizmodo.com/when-the-interne...ets-1830462131





Starbucks Says it Will Start Blocking Pornography On its Stores' Wi-Fi in 2019

In response, a vice president at a top porn site sent a memo to staff banning Starbucks products from company offices starting Jan. 1, 2019.
Elisha Fieldstadt

Starbucks will start blocking pornography viewing on its stores' Wi-Fi starting in 2019, the company announced amid renewed public pressure on the coffee giant by an internet-safety group.

A Starbucks representative told NBC News that the viewing of "egregious content" over its stores' Wi-Fi has always violated its policy, but the company now has a way to stop it.

"We have identified a solution to prevent this content from being viewed within our stores and we will begin introducing it to our U.S. locations in 2019," the company representative said.

The announcement was first reported by Business Insider and comes after a petition from internet-safety advocacy group Enough is Enough garnered more than 26,000 signatures.

The nonprofit launched a porn-free campaign aimed at McDonald's and Starbucks in 2014, and it says that while McDonald's "responded rapidly and positively," Starbucks did not.

Starbucks said in 2016 that the company was "in active discussions with organizations on implementing the right, broad-based solution that would remove any illegal and other egregious content," according to a statement Monday by Enough is Enough CEO Donna Rice Hughes. But they didn't act, she said.

"Starbucks has had a tremendous opportunity to put its best foot forward in protecting its customers from images deemed obscene and illegal under the law, but they haven't budged, despite their promise two years ago and despite the fact that they voluntarily filter this same content in the UK," Hughes said in the statement.

Hughes told NBC News on Thursday that Enough is Enough ran a thank you campaign for Starbucks in 2016, but this time the organization will take a different tack.

"They won’t get an applause until they’ve actually implemented safe Wi-Fi filtering," Hughes said. "This time we’re going to wait and see, and we’re going to keep the pressure on."

In a letter that Hughes said she received from Starbucks over the summer, the company vowed to address the issue "once we determine that our customers can access our free WiFi in a way that also doesn't involuntarily block unintended content."

Starbucks has not released details about how it plans to restrict the viewing of pornographic sites or illegal content over its Wi-Fi.

The vice president of YouPorn, a free pornographic video-sharing site and one of the 200 most-visited websites worldwide, responded by sending a memo to staff banning Starbucks products from company offices starting Jan. 1, 2019.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news...res-wi-n941646





Nielsen: Americans are Streaming 8 Billion Hours of Content Per Month on Connected TVs
Sarah Perez

With the rise of streaming services and the trend toward cord cutting, the way U.S. consumers are watching video is also changing. Today, more than two-thirds of U.S. homes have devices that are able to stream video, according to Nielsen . In a new report out this morning, the measurement firm looked at the impact these services are having on the “connected living room” experience, noting also that Americans are now streaming nearly 8 billion hours per month on connected TV devices like Roku, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV.

What’s more is that consumers ages 13 to 34 will spend twice the time streaming when watching on connected TV devices, compared with watching on the computer or mobile devices.

Specifically, Nielsen says that consumers 13 and older were streaming an average of more than an hour per day, versus 36 minutes on the computer and 24 minutes on mobile devices, like smartphones and tablets.

The firm also noted there’s an opportunity for live TV networks to better reach a younger demographic by making more of their video content available through connected TV devices.

Today, only 3 percent of live TV viewers across the top 5 TV networks are between the ages of 18 and 24 — an implication that the youngest consumers have turned away from traditional TV viewing.

Meanwhile, 8 percent of that demographic watches content through a connected device.

“This is a major opportunity for TV publishers to amplify their content that premiered on live TV and maximize their reach by extending the programming to be seen on connected devices,” Nielsen explained.

Despite the overall growth in over-the-top video streaming, linear TV still dominates, the firm notes. Traditional live TV viewing still accounts for the majority of viewers’ time, it said.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/29/ni...connected-tvs/





Your 4K Netflix Streaming Is on a Collision Course With Your ISP's Data Caps

High-resolution video streaming is on the rise, but data caps could mean bigger bills for customers.
Karl Bode

Household bandwidth consumption is soaring thanks to video streaming, new data suggests, and American consumers are about to run face-first into broadband usage limits and overage fees that critics say are unnecessary and anti-competitive.

Cisco’s 2018 Visual Networking Index (VNI)—an annual study that tracks overall internet bandwidth consumption to identify future trends—predicts that global IP traffic is expected to reach 396 exabytes per month by 2022. Cisco’s report claims that’s more traffic than has crossed global networks throughout the entire history of the internet thus far.

The majority of this data growth is video; Cisco found that 75 percent of global internet traffic was video last year, up from 63 percent just two years earlier. Cisco says this number could climb to 82 percent in 2022, with 22 percent of overall video consumption coming from bandwidth-intensive 4K streaming.

The problem: As monthly household bandwidth consumption soars courtesy of 4K Netflix streaming and other new services, many broadband users are likely to run into usage caps and overage fees that jack up their monthly rates.

Critics have long argued that broadband usage caps are arbitrary and unnecessary network limits imposed simply to increase revenues and punish users who cancel a telecom operator’s traditional pay TV service, but retain their broadband services.

“Usage caps on wired broadband connections have always been a joke,” Matt Wood, Policy Director for consumer advocacy group Free Press told Motherboard over email. “ISPs have admitted repeatedly that they do not address any real network management problem, and they couldn't.”

ISPs used to insist that such limits were necessary to manage network capacity. Over the years however, numerous industry admissions—as well as Comcast documents leaked on Reddit—have shown that’s simply not true.

In the years since, ISPs have backed off providing much in the way of justification for the unpopular restrictions. Comcast’s website, for example, now simply tells users such limits are “based on a principle of fairness.”

Wood notes that “fairness” doesn’t have much to do with it. Internet providers are simply keen to cash in on the rise of streaming video, he told me. And while many ISPs have bumped these limits to a terabyte per month in recent years in response to public backlash, even these expanded limits are starting to look a little dated in the 4K streaming era.

Cisco’s analysis found that the number of households that consume one terabyte or more of data per month more than doubled between 2016 and 2017, and cord cutters consume roughly 72 percent more bandwidth per month than the average household.

Comcast didn’t respond to Motherboard’s request for comment on whether the company plans to relax usage limits to accommodate this growth. As it stands, Comcast imposes a terabyte usage cap on all of its service areas except the Northeast, where broadband competition is slightly more intense. Users can avoid such limits entirely if they pay an additional $50 per month.

Americans already pay some of the highest rates for broadband in the developed world thanks to limited competition. Given there’s no real technical justification for limits on data usage, critics say they amount to little more than price gouging of captive consumers.

Phillip Dampier, a consumer advocate who has spent a decade fighting against such limits via his website Stop the Cap, told Motherboard that users getting caught in this tightening net of metered usage was the entire point. Companies like Comcast—which are both internet and cable TV providers—try to simultaneously punish and profit from users that choose to cancel traditional TV services, he said.

“The arbitrary one terabyte usage cap some companies impose always comes with the claim it will impact almost nobody, which makes you wonder why a company needs to have a cap in the first place,” Dampier said.

Comcast continues to bleed cable customers frustrated by the soaring costs, terrible customer service, and bogus fees that plague its pay TV service. And while those users can cut the cable TV cord, they’re often still stuck with Comcast for internet service thanks to the company’s growing monopoly over fixed-line broadband.

By imposing arbitrary caps on those users, Comcast can recoup any lost TV revenues. Comcast also allows its own content and services freely bypass these limits (a practice known as zero rating), while still counting streaming alternatives like Netflix against a user’s monthly bandwidth allotment—a handy anti-competitive weapon in the streaming wars to come, Dampier notes.

“As cord-cutting takes the country by storm, the same companies that have profited handsomely selling you 200-channel TV packages you don't want or need will effectively claw back any savings from watching TV online instead,” Dampier said.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...-isp-data-caps





Comcast Raises Cable TV Bills Again—Even if You’re Under Contract

Broadcast TV fee goes from $8 to $10, sports fee rises from $6.50 to $8.25.
Jon Brodkin

Comcast is raising its controversial "Broadcast TV" and "Regional Sports Network" fees again on January 1, with the typical total price going from $14.50 to $18.25 a month.

The newly raised broadcast TV fee will be $10 a month, and the sports fee will be $8.25 a month, Cord Cutters News reported last week. The new fee sizes are confirmed in a Comcast price list for the Atlanta market.

About a year ago, Comcast raised the broadcast TV fee from $6.50 to $8 and the sports fee from $4.50 to $6.50.

The new price hikes will take effect in most of Comcast's regional markets across the US on January 1, but some cities will get the increase later in 2019, a Comcast spokesperson told Ars. The fee sizes can vary by city based on which stations are available, so in some cases they could be less than $10 and $8.25, Comcast said.

The fees, which have become common in the industry, are controversial because they are not included in Comcast's advertised prices and because Comcast imposes fee increases even on customers who are under contract. The broadcast and sports fee increases will also be applied to customers who pay Comcast's promotional rates, which typically last one year, Comcast told Ars.

Equipment rental fees are rising, too. Comcast last year raised its modem rental fee from $10 to $11 a month. The new price list for January 1 lists an "Internet/Voice Equipment Rental" fee as $13. Comcast confirmed to Ars that the modem rental fee is rising $2 a month. Customers can avoid that fee by purchasing their own modem.

Comcast agreed to improve fee disclosures

Comcast faced a class-action lawsuit over the TV and sports fees, but the company settled out of court in May. Comcast did not disclose the terms of the settlement when asked about the case today. We contacted the plaintiffs' lawyer and will provide an update if we get one. (UPDATE: Plaintiffs' attorney Dan Hattis told Ars that the plaintiffs voluntarily allowed the case to be dismissed. However, Hattis is representing other plaintiffs in a newer, bigger class action against Comcast. The newer suit was filed on behalf of 2 million California residents.)

"We have always listed the Broadcast TV and Regional Sports Network fees separately on customers' bills and have included clear disclosures about them in our advertising," Comcast told Ars today.

Separately, Comcast this month agreed to pay $700,000 in refunds and forgive debts for more than 20,000 Massachusetts customers to settle allegations that it used deceptive advertising to promote long-term cable contracts. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey found that Comcast advertised a $99 lock-in rate but "did not adequately disclose equipment costs and mandatory monthly fees" that would add to monthly bills and "failed to adequately disclose that the fees could increase while the customer was locked into the long-term contract."

As part of the settlement with Massachusetts, Comcast also agreed to improve the disclosures it makes to customers before they sign long-term contracts.

Comcast and other pay-TV operators that charge broadcast TV and sports fees say the fees are necessary to cover the rising costs of programming. But payments to programmers are a standard expense in any cable TV company's business, and those contribute greatly to the general monthly rates that customers have to pay. Breaking some of these programming costs out into separate fees allows Comcast to raise customers' prices each year even if the customers have multi-year contracts.

After last year's increases were announced, Comcast said that the sports and broadcast fees "allow us to be more transparent with our customers about the factors driving price changes, and represent only a portion of our costs of carrying broadcast and regional sports networks."

On the new increases for January 1, 2019, Comcast provided this statement to Ars today:

We continue to make investments in our network and technology to give customers more for their money—like faster Internet service and better Wi-Fi, more video across viewing screens, better technology like X1 and xFi, and a better customer experience. While we try to hold costs down, price changes are necessary for a number of reasons, including the continually increasing costs associated with carrying the programming our customers demand, especially broadcast television and sports programming, which are the largest drivers of price increases.

It's not clear why Comcast uses faster Internet speeds to justify increases in its TV fees, since paying more for TV channels doesn't increase a customer's

broadband speeds.
Petition for cable fee transparency

The broadcast TV fee accounts for the retransmission consent fees that TV stations charge cable companies for the right to retransmit their broadcast signals. Sports fees account for the cost of carrying regional sports networks that air local professional sports games in each market.

In some cases, Comcast is the one collecting these fees from other TV providers because Comcast is a large owner of TV programming. A lobby group for small cable TV companies this month asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether Comcast uses its ownership of TV programming to harm competitors.

Consumer Reports is gathering signatures for a petition "urging pay TV providers to provide honest pricing that includes the full cost of service and doesn't hide fees in the small print."

Consumer Reports says:

Broadcast fees. Regional sports fees. HD technology fees.

Chances are you never expected to pay surcharges like these on top of the advertised price of cable TV. After all, broadcast stations and sports seem like essential pieces of what you bought.

To make matters worse, these surprise fees are rising in size—in some cases by 50 percent per year—and, taken together, can really add up. The upshot: The cost of cable keeps rising, but it's almost impossible to comparison shop for a good deal.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...18-25-a-month/





Sinclair Group Reportedly Required Over 100 TV Stations to Air 'Must Run' Segment that Defends Use of Tear Gas on Migrants at the Border
Christian Edwards

• The right-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group reportedly had a "must run" segment for over 100 of their local news outlets: a staunch defense of the US Border Patrol’s use of tear gas against migrants, according to reports.

• President Donald Trump has strongly defended his government's use of tear gas at the Mexican border.

• Former Trump staffer and Sinclair’s Chief Political Analyst Boris Epshteyn features heavily in the clip, calling the incident "an invasion of our country."

A report from The Daily Beast suggests that the right-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group gave over 100 of their local news outlets a "must run" segment to broadcast: a defense of the US Border Patrol’s use of tear gas against migrants, including children crossing the border, on Sunday.

Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which is based in Maryland, is the largest television station owner in the United States. According to SeattlePi.com, "The company distributes 'must-run; segments to its newsrooms, requiring they air them within 48 hours," which "typically feature conservative commentary, including a recurring segment from former Donald Trump official Boris Epshteyn."

According to Media Matters, a progressive non-profit that monitors conservative media, this "must-run" news segment features Epshteyn, Sinclair's chief political analyst. A tweet from Media Matter's Pam Vogel suggests that Sinclair forced around 100 local news networks to air Epshteyn's defense of Border Patrol agents tear gassing asylum-seeking migrants.

The "must-run" segment, which airs during otherwise objective local-news broadcasts, begins with Epshteyn declaring: “The migrant crisis on our southern border has greatly escalated.”

According to The Daily Beast, footage from the confrontation plays on the screen, and he adds: “Dozens of migrants attacked U.S. border enforcement by throwing rocks and bottles. Ultimately, American authorities had to use tear gas to stop the attacks.”

"The migrant crisis on our southern border has greatly escalated," Epshteyn says, as viewers watch clips of the border violence unfold.

On Sunday, US border enforcement used tear gas to repel the crowd of migrants that ranged from several rock-throwers to children.

Epshteyn is quoted as saying:

"The fact of the matter is that this is an attempted invasion of our country. Period. Our border must remain intact and secure. It is not a partisan position to believe that our immigration system is broken and needs to be fixed. However, it unfortunately appears that there are many on the left who believe it is wrong to defend our country and abide by the rule of law. I would bet that many of those same people live behind walls and locked doors but do not want to afford the same benefit to our country as a whole."

In the face of growing anger over the incident President Donald Trump has strongly defended the US use of tear gas at the Mexican border.

"They were being rushed by some very tough people and they used tear gas," Trump said on Monday of the previous day's encounters at the Mexican border.

"Here's the bottom line: Nobody is coming into our country unless they come in legally," he continued.

At a roundtable in Mississippi later on Monday, Trump tacitly acknowledge that children were affected, but seemed to blame poor parenting on the violence that followed.

"Why is a parent running up into an area where they know the tear gas is forming and it's going to be formed and they were running up with a child?" he asked.
https://www.newstimes.com/technology...V-13427188.php





DOJ Made Secret Arguments to Break Crypto, Now ACLU Wants to Make Them Public

In MS-13 case, ACLU is challenging sealing of DOJ filings, judge's order.
Cyrus Farivar

Earlier this year, a federal judge in Fresno, California, denied prosecutors' efforts to compel Facebook to help it wiretap Messenger voice calls.

But the precise legal arguments that the government made, and that the judge ultimately rejected, are still sealed.

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union formally asked the judge to unseal court dockets and related rulings associated with this ongoing case involving alleged MS-13 gang members. ACLU lawyers argue that such a little-charted area of the law must be made public so that tech companies and the public can fully know what's going on.

This element of the case began in August 2018, when an FBI special agent told the court in an affidavit that "there is no practical method available by which law enforcement can monitor these calls" between suspected MS-13 gangsters. Authorities already had traditional wiretaps and were able to intercept written messages between the defendants, who are now in custody.

While traditional telecom companies must give access to police under a 1990s-era law known as CALEA, Internet-based calls are exempt, despite the government's previous efforts to change the law. Prosecutors seemingly argued that Facebook nevertheless had to comply with the government’s request. The judge reportedly denied the government's efforts during an August 14, 2018 hearing.

In their new filing, ACLU lawyers pointed out that "neither the government’s legal arguments nor the judge’s legal basis for rejecting the government motion has ever been made public."

The attorneys continued, citing a "strong public interest in knowing which law has been interpreted" and referencing an op-ed published on Ars on October 2 as an example.

The ACLU argued that the case is reminiscent of the so-called "FBI v. Apple" legal showdown—whose docket and related filings were public—where the government made novel arguments in an attempt to crack the encryption on a seized iPhone. Those legal questions were never resolved, as the government said the day before a scheduled hearing that it had found a company to assist in its efforts.

"Moreover, the sealing of the docket sheet in this case impermissibly prevents the public from knowing anything about the actions of both the judiciary and the executive in navigating a novel legal issue, which has the potential to reoccur in the future," the ACLU’s attorneys continued.

"The case involves the executive branch’s attempt to force a private corporation to break the encryption and other security mechanisms on a product relied upon by the public to have private conversations. The government is not just seeking information held by a third party; rather, it appears to be attempting to get this Court to force a communications platform to redesign its product to thwart efforts to secure communications between users."

The defendants in the case, United States v. Barrera-Palma et al, are set for a status conference before US District Judge Lawrence O'Neill on December 3.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ook-messenger/





Mass Router Hack Exposes Millions of Devices to Potent NSA Exploit

Years-old UPnP vulnerability being used to expose ports 139 and 445.
Dan Goodin

More than 45,000 Internet routers have been compromised by a newly discovered campaign that’s designed to open networks to attacks by EternalBlue, the potent exploit that was developed by, and then stolen from, the National Security Agency and leaked to the Internet at large, researchers said Wednesday.

The new attack exploits routers with vulnerable implementations of Universal Plug and Play to force connected devices to open ports 139 and 445, content delivery network Akamai said in a blog post. As a result, almost 2 million computers, phones, and other network devices connected to the routers are reachable to the Internet on those ports. While Internet scans don’t reveal precisely what happens to the connected devices once they’re exposed, Akamai said the ports—which are instrumental for the spread of EternalBlue and its Linux cousin EternalRed—provide a strong hint of the attackers’ intentions.

The attacks are a new instance of a mass exploit the same researchers documented in April. They called it UPnProxy because it exploits Universal Plug and Play—often abbreviated as UPnP—to turn vulnerable routers into proxies that disguise the origins of spam, DDoSes, and botnets. In Wednesday’s blog post, the researchers wrote:

Taking current disclosures and events into account, Akamai researchers believe that someone is attempting to compromise millions of machines living behind the vulnerable routers by leveraging the EternalBlue and EternalRed exploits.

Unfortunately, Akamai researchers are not able to see what happens after the injections have occurred, they can only see the injections themselves and not the final payloads that would be directed at the machines exposed. However, a successful attack could yield a target rich environment, opening up the chance for such things as ransomware attacks, or a persistent foothold on the network.

Currently, the 45,113 routers with confirmed injections expose a total of 1.7 million unique machines to the attackers. We've reached this conclusion by logging the number of unique IPs exposed per router, and then added them up. It is difficult to tell if these attempts led to a successful exposure as we don't know if a machine was assigned that IP at the time of the injection. Additionally, there is no way to tell if EternalBlue or EternalRed was used to successfully compromise the exposed machine. However, if only a fraction of the potentially exposed systems were successfully compromised and fell into the hands of the attackers, the situation would quickly turn from bad to worse.


The new instance, which Akamai researchers have dubbed EternalSilence, injects commands into vulnerable routers that open ports on connected devices. Legitimate injections often include a description such as "Skype." EternalSilence injections use the description "galleta silenciosa"—"silent cookie/cracker" in Spanish. The injections look like this:

Wednesday’s post is only the latest piece of concerning news to involve UPnP, a protocol that is designed to make it easy for connected devices to operate by using code that lets them automatically discover each other and open ports needed to connect to the outside Internet. Two weeks ago, a separate team of researchers reported UPnP flaws were exploited to spawn a 100,000-router botnet used to send spam and other types of malicious email. Most if not all of the exploited vulnerabilities have been public knowledge since 2013, when a landmark Internet scan found 81 million IPv4 addresses responded to standard UPnP discovery requests, even though the standard isn't supposed to communicate with devices that are outside a local network.

EternalBlue is an attack developed and used by the NSA that exploited server message-block implementations in Vista and all later versions of Windows. In April 2017, a mysterious group calling itself the Shadow Brokers made the attack code available to the world at large. A month later, EternalBlue was folded into WannaCry, a quick-spreading ransomware worm that paralyzed hospitals, shipping companies, and train stations around the globe. A month later, a disk-wiper dubbed NotPetya also used EternalBlue as an engine to self-replicate extremely rapidly.

While fixes for EternalBlue and EternalRed have been in place for more than a year, some organizations have yet to install them. Failing to patch doesn’t automatically mean a network is vulnerable. If ports are adequately restricted, exploits may not be able to spread. Akamai researchers say the new attacks are likely an opportunistic attempt to open devices to attacks they otherwise would be resistant to.

“The goal here isn’t a targeted attack,” they wrote. “It's an attempt at leveraging tried-and-true off-the-shelf exploits, casting a wide net into a relatively small pond, in the hopes of scooping up a pool of previously inaccessible devices.”

To prevent attacks, people should ensure their routers aren't vulnerable to UPnP attacks, either by buying new hardware or ensuring their older device is running updated firmware. Once a router has been exploited by UPnProxy, devices should be rebooted or, better yet, reset to their original factory settings to ensure port forwarding injections are cleared. People with compromised routers should also thoroughly inspect connected devices to ensure they haven’t been infected.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...t-nsa-exploit/





IBM CEO Joins Apple in Blasting Data Use by Silicon Valley
Natalia Drozdiak and Lyubov Pronina

• Rometty calls for rules targeted at ‘consumer-facing’ cos.
• Apple CEO also recently panned tech giants over data-use

International Business Machines Corp. Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty joined a growing chorus of tech executives lambasting web platforms, like Google and Facebook Inc., over their collection of user data and urged governments to target regulation at those companies.

Without naming company names, Rometty pointed to the "irresponsible handling of personal data by a few dominant consumer-facing platform companies" as the cause of a "trust crisis" between users and tech companies, according to an advanced copy of her remarks.

Rometty’s comments, given at a Brussels event with top EU officials Monday, echoed recent statements by Apple CEO Tim Cook, who in October slammed Silicon Valley rivals over their use of data, equating their services to "surveillance."

The IBM chief continues her two-day visit to Brussels on Tuesday, meeting with the European Commission Vice-President in charge of jobs and growth, Jyrki Katainen. On Monday, she met with the EU’s privacy chief Vera Jourova and EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom and, at the event, appeared on a panel with Andrus Ansip, the commission’s Vice President for digital affairs.

The comments by the tech executives come as both Facebook and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are under intense scrutiny by lawmakers in the U.S. and Europe over privacy breaches and election interference on their platforms.

IBM meanwhile has seen revenue decline since Rometty took the CEO role in 2012, largely due to falling sales in existing hardware, software and services offerings. She has since been trying to steer IBM toward more modern businesses, such as the cloud, artificial intelligence, and security software.

Seeking to separate IBM -- which operates primarily at a business-to-business level -- from the troubled tech companies, Rometty said governments should target regulation at consumer-facing web platforms, like social media firms and search engines.

“The power dynamic is very different in the business-to-business markets," Rometty said. "Tackling the real problem means using a regulatory scalpel, not a sledgehammer, to avoid collateral damage that would hurt the wider, productive and more responsible parts of the digital economy.”

In particular, Rometty pushed for more measures around the transparency of artificial intelligence as well as controversial rules around platform liability.

Tech firms like Google and Facebook have typically pushed back on any plans to give platforms more legal liability over what people post or upload on their sites, arguing it could lead to restrictions on free speech if companies have to monitor what users upload.

"Dominant online platforms have more power to shape public opinion than newspapers or the television ever had, yet they face very little regulation or liability,” Rometty said. "On liability, new thinking is needed."

Rometty called on the European Union to change laws that have previously handed web platforms immunity from what appears on their sites. The EU’s so-called e-commerce directive from 2000 was designed to boost innovation among young firms. The bloc has since introduced targeted measures giving tech companies liability over specific content, like ordering them to remove terror propaganda within one hour, but it’s yet to formally change the law.

Brussels has become eponymous in the tech world with tough digital rules, such as the EU’s strict GDPR privacy regulation, which came into force earlier this year.

Like Rometty, Cook also made his comments at an event in Brussels attended by top EU officials.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...n-valley-firms

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

November 24th, November 17th, November 10th, November 3rd

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 - July 16th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 13-07-11 06:43 AM
Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 9th, '11 JackSpratts Peer to Peer 0 06-07-11 05:36 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 03:51 AM.


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)