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 07-02-18, 08:03 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 - February 10th, ’18

Since 2002


































"A good way to invent the future is to predict it. I predicted Utopia." – John Perry Barlow


"This is the biggest leak in history." – Jonathan Levin






































February 10th, 2018




John Perry Barlow, Internet Pioneer, 1947-2018
Cindy Cohn

With a broken heart I have to announce that EFF's founder, visionary, and our ongoing inspiration, John Perry Barlow, passed away quietly in his sleep this morning. We will miss Barlow and his wisdom for decades to come, and he will always be an integral part of EFF.

It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance.

Barlow was sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism that believed that the Internet could solve all of humanity's problems without causing any more. As someone who spent the past 27 years working with him at EFF, I can say that nothing could be further from the truth. Barlow knew that new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good. He made a conscious decision to focus on the latter: "I knew it’s also true that a good way to invent the future is to predict it. So I predicted Utopia, hoping to give Liberty a running start before the laws of Moore and Metcalfe delivered up what Ed Snowden now correctly calls 'turn-key totalitarianism.'”

Barlow’s lasting legacy is that he devoted his life to making the Internet into “a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth . . . a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”

In the days and weeks to come, we will be talking and writing more about what an extraordinary role Barlow played for the Internet and the world. And as always, we will continue the work to fulfill his dream.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/0...neer-1947-2018





The Pirate Bay ALARM - Popular ISP Ordered to Reveal Names of those Illegally Streaming

THE Pirate Bay and other streaming site users look set to face tough punishment as a major ISP is ordered to hand over details of those infringing copyright to police.
David Snelling

Those who stream illegally could be dealt a new blow after a landmark ruling which looks set to force a major ISP to reveal subscribers details.

Bahnhof is a popular service provider in Sweden which has long been proud of its ability to keep customer details private.

The firm has often fought to stop data being disclosed and recently confirmed that it never hands over personal details of any of its customers.

However, this could be about to change with a new ruling that means Bahnhof will soon be forced to reveal details of people thought to be pirating content.

The Administrative Court in Stockholm has just ordered the company to hand over details of copyright infringers to the authorities.

In a statement on its website the court said: “The administrative court in Stockholm has found that today the Swedish provisions on disclosure of subscription data to law enforcement agencies do not contravene EU law.

“The court therefore considers that the Post and Telecom Agency (PTS) has been prepared to instruct the operator Bahnhof to disclose subscription information in accordance with the provisions of the Electronic Communications Act.”

Although this is clearly concerning for users of sites such as The Pirate Bay, Bahnoff says it’s committed to keeping data private.

In as statement on its website the ISP said: “We believe the sentence is incorrect, but it is also difficult to take PTS seriously when they can not even interpret the laws behind the decision in a consistent manner.

“We are of course going to appeal. We refuse to disclose our customers' integrity to an authority that says to themselves.”

If the ruling is upheld it could open the floodgates to more ISPs being ordered to reveal full customer details.

The news of this latest attack on illegal streaming comes as similar measures have been put in place in the UK.

The latest scheme sees UK Internet Service Providers send-out warning letters to subscribers whose accounts have been used to download copyrighted material from torrent sites.

The message reads, "This is a government-backed scheme which aims to support Britain’s creative industry by informing people about legal sources of content, with the aim of reducing the illegal sharing of copyrighted material.

"By sharing illegally rather than enjoying it from legitimate sources, you aren’t supporting the growth and success of the content you love."

Get It Right also has its own website that aims to provide answers to some of the most asked questions about torrents, peer-to-peer sharing, and copyright material.

In an effort to lower piracy rates across the UK, leading Internet service providers will send out emails from the Get It Right campaign to those who have download copyrighted material online.

The email cautions subscribers they have 20 days to stop downloading copyrighted material using peer-to-peer websites.

Should your Internet service provider detect more illegal activity from your IP address during the 20 day grace period – another educational email from the Get It Right campaign will be sent.

A similar campaign in the United States only offers torrent site users seven-days to comply.

According to the campaign website, "The Get it Right Educational Email programme is designed to educate consumers about what’s happening on their Internet Service Provider (ISP) account.

"The programme is to help to make sure they, or people that use their connection, are not infringing copyright and to direct them to sources where they get the content they want from genuine sites and services."

BT, NowTV, PlusNet, Talk-Talk and Virgin Media have also joined Sky and signed-up to the Get It Right campaign.
https://www.express.co.uk/life-style...egal-streaming





Cox Blocked! ISP May Avoid $25m Legal Bill for Letting Punters Pirate Music Online

Appeals court says copyright battle went copy-wrong
Shaun Nichols

American cable company Cox may not, after all, have to pay record label BMG $25m for letting its broadband subscribers illegally download and share copyrighted music online.

The Fourth US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday that a jury was given incorrect instructions when it decided in 2016 that Cox was liable for its plundering punters and thus owed BMG millions of dollars.

The case stems from Cox's handling of copyright infringement complaints the music label had passed it. After a row, Cox blacklisted communications from Rightscorp, the biz that handles infringement notices for BMG. This meant Cox did not see the infringement warnings, and thus did not step in when its users were found to be pirating music files belonging to BMG.

Cox had appealed the jury verdict, arguing first that it should be protected from legal liability under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) safe harbor clause, as well as arguing that the jury was not properly instructed on the law before entering deliberations.

According to Thursday's ruling [PDF], the appeals court did not side with Cox's DMCA safe harbor claim, reaffirming the earlier ruling that Cox did not do enough to stop repeat offenders and therefore could not claim safe harbor.

Where the lower district court was found to have erred in 2016, however, was in the jury instructions. The appeals court agreed with Cox's argument that the jury's instructions on how to interpret the law were wrong.

Specifically, the appeals court said jurors should not have been told that Cox should be found liable if it "knew or should have known of such infringing activity." Rather, the appeals court said that Cox should only be liable if it actually knew customers were pirating music – not if it merely "should have known."

"Proving contributory infringement requires proof of at least willful blindness," the court wrote, "negligence is insufficient."

According to J. Michael Keyes, partner with law firm Dorsey and Whitney, the decision could make it tougher for labels to sue service providers.

"In order for contributory liability to attach, copyright owners will arguably need to meet a higher threshold. They will have to establish that the ISP knew about the infringement or was willfully blind to it," Keyes told The Register. "That could make contributory liability claims against ISPs a bit more difficult to establish as a factual matter."

As a result of the appeals court ruling, Cox can take its battle against BMG back to a district court for a retrial, which will no doubt thrill all the lawyers involved.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/0...t_fine_appeal/





Study Suggests Shutting Down Filesharing Sites Would Hurt Music Industry, New Artists
Timothy Geigner

The evolution of the music industry's response to the fact that copyright infringement exists on the internet has been both plodding and frustrating. The industry, which has gone through stages including a focus on high-profile and punitive lawsuits against individual "pirates", its own flavors of copyright trolling, and misguided attempts to "educate" the masses as to why their natural inclinations are the worst behavior ever, have since settled into a mantra that site-blocking censorship of the internet is the only real way to keep the music industry profitable. All of this stems from a myopic view on piracy held by the industry that it is always bad for every artist any time a music file is downloaded for free as opposed to purchased off of iTunes or wherever. We have argued for years that this view is plainly wrong and far too simplistic, and that there is actually plenty of evidence that, for a large portion of the music industry, piracy may actually be a good thing.

Well, there has been an update to a study first publicized as a work in progress several years ago run by the Information Economics and Policy Journal out of Queen's University. Based on that study, it looks like attempts to shut down filesharing sites would not just be ineffectual, but disastrous for both the music industry as a whole and especially new and smaller-ticket artists. The most popular artists, on the other hand, tend to be more hurt by piracy than helped. That isn't to be ignored, but we must keep in mind that the purpose of copyright law is to get more art created for the benefit of the public and it seems obvious that the public most benefits from a larger successful music ecosystem as opposed to simply getting more albums from the largest audiences.

The methodology in the study isn't small peanuts, either. It considered 250,000 albums across five million downloads and looked to match up the pirating of those works and what effect that piracy had in the market for that music.

“I now find that top artists are harmed and mid-tier artists may be helped in both markets, but that these effects are larger for digital sales,” Lee tells TorrentFreak. “This is consistent with the idea that people are more willing to switch between digital piracy and digital sales than between digital piracy and physical CDs.”

The findings lead to the conclusion that there is no ideal ‘one-size-fits-all’ response to piracy. In fact, some unauthorized sharing may be a good thing.

This is in line with observations from musicians themselves over the past years. Several top artists have admitted the positive effects of piracy, including Ed Sheeran, who recently said that he owes his career to it.

None of this is to argue that piracy is always a net benefit, obviously. Such an argument would be the counterargument to the music industry's description of piracy as always bad, all the time, for everyone. And it would be equally fallacious. What this study chiefly points out is exactly what the conclusion above states: there is no one-size fits all truth on the effect of piracy for artists. It helps some, it hurts others.

While we shouldn't take the negative impact on artists it may hurt lightly, remember that this is all framed by a music industry regularly calling for the blocking of filesharing sites. That really is a one size fits all "solution" to piracy and, based on this study, it would hurt many, many musical acts.

According to the researcher, the music industry should realize that shutting down pirate sites may not always be the best option. On the contrary, file-sharing sites may be useful as promotional platforms in some cases.

“Following above, a policy of total shutdown of private file sharing networks seems excessively costly (compared with their relatively small impact on sales) and unwise (as a one-size-fits-all policy). It would be better to make legal consumption more convenient, reducing the demand for piracy as an alternative to purchasing,” Lee tells us. “It would also be smart to experiment with releasing music onto piracy networks themselves, especially for up-and-coming artists, similar to the free promotion afforded by commercial radio.”

The pain here is in how obvious it all is. We've been saying exactly this for years, except the proposed solutions from the music industry have only grown more drastic in that same time. Flat censorship is something of a nuclear option and it's being used against sites that actually help some percentage of artists.

How in the world is that the best plan for a thriving music ecosystem?
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...-artists.shtml





Canada Could Soon Block All Websites That Allow Illegal Streaming Of Pirated Movies And TV Shows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





New Jersey Governor Signs Net Neutrality Order
Harper Neidig

New Jersey on Monday became the latest state to implement its own net neutrality rules following the Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of the Obama-era consumer protections.

Gov. Phil Murphy (D) signed an executive order prohibiting all internet service providers that do business with the state from blocking, throttling or favoring web content.

“We may not agree with everything we see online, but that does not give us a justifiable reason to block the free, uninterrupted, and indiscriminate flow of information,” Murphy said in a statement. “And, it certainly doesn’t give certain companies or individuals a right to pay their way to the front of the line.

“While New Jersey cannot unilaterally regulate net neutrality back into law or cement it as a state regulation, we can exercise our power as a consumer to make our preferences known,” he added.

Murphy is following the lead of his counterparts in New York and Montana, who are pushing back on the FCC order, which also expressly preempted states from implementing their own net neutrality regulations. The executive orders will likely feature heavily in an upcoming court battle challenging the rollback.

Gurbir Grewal, New Jersey’s attorney general, also announced on Monday that the state would be the 22nd to join a lawsuit against the FCC.

“We are committed to taking whatever legal action we can to preserve the internet rights of New Jersey consumers, and to challenge the federal government’s misguided attack on a free and open internet,” Grewal said. “Our position is that the Federal Communications Commission acted arbitrarily and against the evidence before it when doing its about-face on net neutrality.”
http://thehill.com/policy/technology...utrality-order





Of Course a Mystery Website Attacking City-Run Broadband was Run by an ISP. Of Course

Fidelity wanted to 'tell the other side of the story' with astroturfing dot-com
Kieren McCarthy

Analysis Cable biz Fidelity Communications has been forced to admit it was behind an astroturfing campaign against a city-run fiber network in America's Midwest.

The campaign, titled Stop City-Funded Internet, started last month with a website and accompanying social media handles, and has been a persistent critic of efforts by West Plains, Missouri, to expand its homegrown broadband network to include more businesses and even residential customers.

Who exactly is behind the campaign has been the subject of intense interest with the campaign's main website revealing only that it was funded by "a collection of fiscally conservative Missourians."

However one enterprising local – videographer Isaac Protiva – was able to uncover the truth: cable company Fidelity Communications, which offers internet access in five states including Missouri, and boasts 115,000 customers. The ISP had paid a marketing outfit based in Arizona to carry out the campaign.

How did he figure it out? The marketing company screwed up when it named materials on stopcityfundedinternet.com. Specifically, two images on the site were spotted revealing Fidelity as a client. Incredibly, one was the site's main header image, called Fidelity_SCFI_Website_V2.jpg. The second image was on a privacy page, and was hosted on a server called fidelity.dmwebtest.com. Talk about a smoking gun.

The server domain revealed the company behind the campaign was DM Web Dev Group, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, and owned by marketing veterans Martin Lakin and David Ammerman.

So, about that...

Protiva documented his findings in a YouTube video at the end of January, and incredibly it prompted a formal response a few days later from Fidelity to the campaign's Facebook page – although there remains no mention of the corporate funding on the campaign website nor Fidelity's own website. The images have since been replaced to remove any mention of Fidelity.

"There has been a tremendous amount of conversation about the ownership of this page," the post declared, with this letter attached. "Today we offer what we hope will provide some clarity via an official statement from Fidelity Communications about their support of our efforts in promoting a conversation about city owned Internet in West Plains."

The unsigned letter began, "We would like to take this opportunity to respond to questions we have received about our stance on the City of West Plains’ launch of internet services as a ‘public utility'," before launching in a rundown of how the company feels it has been badly treated by the city of West Plains.

It argued, using the Citizens United Supreme Court logic, that "first and foremost, we are a citizen of West Plains, and we, like each of you, want West Plains, its residents and businesses to grow and prosper."

But it waited until the last paragraph to admit that the cable company is behind the campaign. It read: "In an effort to reach out to the public and to tell the other side of the story, we have engaged a third party to launch and maintain a 'Stop City-Funded Internet' Facebook page and related stopcityfundedinternet.com website."

Responding to the letter on his own Facebook page, Protiva noted: "My job here is done."

Not new

This is far from the first time a cable company has run an astroturf campaign against potential competitors. However, the the risk of exposure from doing so has prompted many to go a different route, and use lobbyists to reach lawmakers to kick start legislation that makes it much harder for municipal networks to get up and running.

In the case of West Plains, however, the ISP was up against city administrator Tom Stehn, who appears to have played things by the book and was savvy enough to have enlisted congressional support for his city's broadband plans. Stehn is also an engineer, which may explain why the municipal network has not run into some of the same problems similar projects in other cities across the nation have encountered.

Back in December 2015, the city decided to build its own municipal fiber network after a survey of local businesses revealed that they were unhappy at the quality and cost of their internet connections. Some firms were paying three times the amount for similar connectivity available in nearby cities.

The letter from Fidelity Communications referenced that disquiet, and noted that "the city and the Broadband Study Group expressed concern that we weren’t providing service in a few areas, we weren’t offering one Gig service… and that we were charging special construction charges to reach certain businesses."

It argued: "We acknowledged and addressed those concerns. We agreed to serve any business within the city limits without charging any special construction costs. We have also increased speeds to all of our business customers several times, without charging additional fees. Moreover, we upgraded our equipment and facilities to provide one Gig service throughout the entire city limits."

It went on: "In December of 2016, we met with the city and asked if there was anything else we could be doing? They said 'No,' and indicated they were satisfied with our services."

Tension

It is a story playing out across America right now: communities are frustrated at the low speed and high cost of their internet connections, and blame their ISPs – many of which possess virtual monopolies – for it.

Those ISPs feel justified in their offerings, however, due to the significant financial and time resources required to build a physical network. Those companies had factored in effective control of a market in their decisions to invest and expand into various regions.

And then along came city councils that decided to invest in their own networks, using taxpayers' dollars, with a view that internet access is a public utility along the same lines as water or electricity.

In some cases, municipal networks have revealed that when profit incentive and market control are taken out of the equation, it is possible to get much faster internet access to consumers at a much lower price. However, there have also been stumbles, with some city councils spending tens of millions of dollars on a network that it is then in no position to administer.

From the outside, it looks as though West Plains sits in the first category, thanks in no short measure to Stehn's conservative approach. Fidelity Communications noted that the city has spend $413,000 so far on its network, with revenue of just $6,000. It is budgeted to spend another $618,000 this financial year on the network.

But, Fidelity pointed out, the city is in deficit so far this year by $1.3m. The implication is that West Plain's fiber expansion plans could put the city further into the red while effectively making it impossible for others to compete. "Under the guise of promoting local business, the city seems intent on pushing us out of town," the Fidelity letter complained.

It went on: "The city has taken these actions with only limited input from its residents, and certainly without a vote of the public. The city has no published business plan explaining how it will fund what will be the millions of dollars it will spend."

Well, sort of

Which is only partly true. The decision to build the network was done following a public consultation, and Stehn has been upfront about both the costs of the network and his concerns related to it.

He has spoken repeatedly to journalists about the idea, and has been open about how it is being financed: "We're kind of borrowing from the electric department, and then as we add customers and all that, we're going to try to pay that back as much as we can," he told a local radio station.

He has also outlined the costs of the project as it has progressed, and noted when a public vote would be forthcoming. "Our estimate right now if we would fund the whole thing is $15m," he said, "which would include the residential and commercial service. We probably would be looking at some type of bonding in some fashion, either fully or partially. This would have to go to the vote of the people for the City of West Plains, but those are things we're still trying to work out as we test pilot our system."
Faced with what looks like a determined and organized plan to use taxpayers' money to build out a fiber network, it's hardly surprising that Fidelity Communications is not excited about the prospect of losing its client base in a profitable market.

But was secretly funding an attack campaign against the idea the right approach? It seems unlikely. Just because astroturf campaigns have become an increasingly common tactic by large corporations doesn't mean they're a good idea. And if Fidelity is reliant on local goodwill to build its business, this was a serious error of judgment.

Its letter ended: "It is our sincere hope to work with the City, its businesses and residents to continue to provide superior services within West Plains." Good luck with that, Fidelity.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/0...adband/?page=2





FCC Report Claims the Broken Broadband Market Has Been Magically Fixed By Killing Net Neutrality

"To call these numbers a testament to our national success is insulting and not credible."
Karl Bode

The FCC has released a new report falsely claiming that the agency’s attack on net neutrality is already paying huge dividends when it comes to sector investment and competition.

Unfortunately for the FCC, the data the agency is relying on to “prove” this claim comes from before current FCC boss Ajit Pai even took office and doesn’t remotely support that conclusion.

Under the Telecommunications Act, the FCC is required to issue annual reports on the state of broadband competition and deployment in the U.S. market. Should the FCC find that broadband isn’t being deployed in a “reasonable and timely fashion,” it’s required to craft policies that address the problem.

Unfortunately, when the FCC is under the control of revolving door regulators loyal to industry, they have a tendency to massage the data to help suggest things are rosier than they actually are. After all, it’s easier to justify apathy to a lack of sector competition if the FCC is able to massage data to suggest the problem doesn’t exist.

As such, when ISPs have undue influence at the FCC, this annual report tends to paint the rosiest scenario imaginable. Said reports do their best to obfuscate what should be obvious to most of us: the United States broadband market is very uncompetitive, resulting in high prices, slower speeds, and historically awful customer service.

The Trump FCC’s latest broadband deployment report keeps this proud tradition alive, concluding that “advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion." That claim comes despite the fact that this same data also shows that two thirds of U.S. homes lack access to 25 Mbps broadband from more than one ISP, resulting in numerous broadband monopolies in markets nationwide.

And thanks to the agency’s historically-unpopular attack on net neutrality everything is now wonderful and only getting better, insists Ajit Pai’s FCC.

An accompanying press release goes on to claim that “steps taken last year have restored progress by removing barriers to infrastructure investment, promoting competition, and restoring the longstanding bipartisan light-touch regulatory framework for broadband that had been reversed by the Title II Order.”

The FCC has repeatedly tried to claim that the FCC’s 2015 net neutrality rules devastated sector investment—despite the fact this is easily disproved by ISP earnings reports, SEC filings, and numerous CEO statements to investors. That hasn’t stopped this FCC from repeating this claim anyway, apparently hoping that repetition forges reality.

The FCC’s report also claims that “the marketplace is already responding to the more deployment-friendly regulatory environment now in place,” but fails to provide any evidence to support this claim.

“Several companies, including AT&T, Verizon, Frontier, and Alaska Communications either commenced or announced new deployments in 2017," the report proclaims. "These new deployments are initial indicators that deployment is likely to accelerate again in part due to our recent efforts."

The problem: these deployments aren’t new, and industry watchers note that they all technically began under the oversight of the previous FCC. All of the examples provided by the agency cite deployments that predominantly occurred in 2017 as the result of obligations attached to mergers or subsidies under the previous Tom Wheeler-run FCC.

Meanwhile, the Form 477 data used to fuel this report was only accurate up until December, 2016. Ajit Pai didn’t even become agency head until 2017, making the idea that this data somehow “proves” the benefit Pai’s attack on net neutrality utterly baseless. That’s something his fellow Commissioners were quick to emphasize in their dissenting opinions.

In a statement, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel went so far as to call the FCC’s denial of the obvious “ridiculous and irresponsible.”

“Today, there are 24 million Americans without access to broadband,” Rosenworcel said. “There are 19 million Americans in rural areas who lack the ability to access high-speed services at home. There are 12 million school-aged children who are falling into the Homework Gap because they do not have the broadband at home they need for nightly schoolwork.”

“Ask any one of them if they think the deployment of the most essential digital age infrastructure is reasonable and timely and you will get a resounding "No,” she added. “To call these numbers a testament to our national success is insulting and not credible.”

FCC Commissioner Mignon Clyburn was similarly unimpressed in a statement of her own, noting that 44 million Americans lack access to fixed-line speeds of 25 Mbps or wireless speeds of at least 10 Mbps. She also noted that 66.2 percent of Americans living in rural and Tribal areas still lack access to fixed broadband at speeds of 25 Mbps or higher.

You might recall that the FCC under Wheeler raised the base definition of broadband to 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps up. The move was widely criticized by the broadband industry (and the regulators and lawmakers close to it) because it only emphasized the lack of competition in broadband, particularly at higher speeds.

"Critical progress reports should not rely on the 'hypothetical' when it comes to reaching a conclusion," Clyburn said. "Indeed, the deployments the majority loudly touts pale greatly in comparison to the deployments that occurred in the year after the adoption of the 2015 Open Internet Order. But if you are desperate to justify flawed policy, I think the straw-grasping conclusions contained in this report is for you."

Again, efforts to fiddle with the data to support industry-favored policies are nothing new. ISPs employ all manner of economists exclusively tasked with manipulating data until it paints the rosiest scenario imaginable. Thanks to frequent bouts of regulatory capture, the FCC has a long history of trying to lower the bar to try and deny the obvious.

After all, if the data were to conclude that the United States broadband market is broken and uncompetitive, you might just be pressured to actually do something about it.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...net-neutrality





FCC Says Releasing 'Jokes' It Wrote About Ajit Pai Colluding With Verizon Would 'Harm' Agency
Dell Cameron

At its own discretion, the Federal Communications Commission has chosen to block the release of records related to a video produced last year in which FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and a Verizon executive joke about installing a “Verizon puppet” as head of the FCC.

In a letter to Gizmodo last week, the agency said it was withholding the records from the public in order to prevent harm to the agency—an excuse experts say is a flagrant attempt to skirt federal transparency law.

The video was played at an annual dinner hosted by the Federal Communications Bar Association in December, days before the FCC voted to repeal net neutrality protections established under the Obama administration. Gizmodo published a leaked video of Pai’s speech taken from inside the event, where no media cameras were present, on December 8th.

Part of Pai’s routine involved a satirical skit set in 2003, when he worked for Verizon as an associate general counsel. The skit featured Kathy Grillo, a Verizon senior vice president. Grillo and Pai hatch a plan to undermine the agency from within. “We want to brainwash and groom a Verizon puppet to install as FCC chairman,” Grillo says. “Think Manchurian Candidate.”

The jokes were exceedingly tone deaf given the ongoing net neutrality battle entering its most heated phase, though it caught plenty of laughs from an audience chock full of broadband industry lobbyists. Online, however, Pai’s jokes about “colluding” with his former employer and being Verizon’s “shill” came off as a bit more authentic than he had probably hoped. It didn’t help that only a week before, Pai had given another speech at Verizon Communications’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., the substance of which organizers sought to keep secret.

Yes, the video was intended as a joke. But ultimately, Pai’s decision to produce it and include a senior executive at Verizon—a company that he was poised to empower and enrich by billions of dollars by dissolving his own agency’s regulatory powers—sent a clear message about where his loyalties lie. Pai’s collusion with Verizon may not have begun in 2003, but on the evening of December 7th at the Washington Hilton Hotel, collusion was irreverently flaunted.

Using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Gizmodo sought additional information from the FCC about how the video was put together; in particular, we were after any communications records from within the chairman’s office referencing the event or the Verizon executive. Nearly a dozen pages worth of emails were located, including draft versions of the video’s script and various edits. The agency is refusing to release them, however; it is “reasonably foreseeable,” it said, that doing so would injure the “quality of agency decisions.”

Federal agencies are permitted, and in some cases required, to withhold records from the public under nine exemptions outlined in the federal FOIA statute. In this case, the FCC claims the records about the Verizon video are being withheld under the Deliberative Process Privilege, a broadly defined exemption to FOIA intended to protect “documents reflecting advisory opinions, recommendations and deliberations comprising part of a process by which governmental decisions and policies are formulated.”

More simply, the FCC argues that releasing any records about the parody video would “harm” the agency by hindering its employees from engaging in frank and open discussions in the future. “The idea is that it would be difficult for agency employees to do their job if every off-the-cuff idea they come up with is exposed to public scrutiny,” said Adam Marshall, an attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Only, the video has nothing to do with actual FCC business.

“To argue that this video amounts to the same kind of deliberative process that goes on behind the scenes in terms of an agency deciding an official policy on a topic, or what actions it’s going to take, is absurd,” Marshall said. “The deliberative process is frequently used to withhold embarrassing information or inconvenient information. I have no idea how a draft of a skit that was supposed to be funny would impair the FCC’s decision-making process on anything, except on, I guess, maybe future skits.”

Nate Jones, director of the FOIA Project at the National Security Archive, says that the Deliberative Process Privilege is the most widely abused FOIA exemption. Jones also pointed to Obama-era guidelines still on the books. They read, in part:

While recognizing that the “disclosure obligation under the FOIA is not absolute,” and that the FOIA contains exemptions to protect, for example, national security, personal privacy, privileged records, and law enforcement interests, the Guidelines stress that the President has directed agencies not to withhold information merely to prevent embarrassment, or because “errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears.”

“Bottom line is that even if this is a legally valid withholding by the FCC, it is not acting in the public’s interest to hide this information,” Jones said.

Due to an absence of case law around the Deliberative Process Privilege, the FCC only really needs to claim that it “reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm” the agency. What’s more, drafts of speeches are routinely withheld in response to public records requests; if an agency employee has an idea for a line or a topic in a speech, but it gets cut for whatever reason, they’re within their legal rights to withhold it. Tis is normally applied, however, to substantive policy speeches—not jokey skits.

“I don’t think that’s the type of deliberation that Congress intended to be shielded from public disclosure under FOIA,” Marshall said.

Moreover, while the exemption protects deliberative material, the privilege does not apply to material that represents a final decision or action—e.g., the final copy of Pai’s script or the video file itself. Neither was released by the FCC. And the privilege does not generally extend to communications with outsiders, meaning any records of Pai’s communications with Verizon would not be shielded. But when the FCC conducted its search for records related to the video, it returned no communications whatsoever with Kathy Grillo, the Verizon executive. It’s unclear why, but it would be hypocritical of the FCC to claim the internal records reflect official agency business while also claiming that Pai’s conversations with Grillo are personal and, therefore, exempt from public disclosure.

“The idea of the Deliberative Process Privilege is that, if you don’t redact or withhold this information, people are unlikely to have deliberations on this in the future,” said Austin Evers, executive director of the FOIA watchdog group American Oversight. “And I think that here, going back and forth over a parody video that’s part of a public speech, is unlikely to be the kind of speech that would be chilled by releasing it.”

“Because it is silly, and because it was part of a public presentation, I think the interest that they’re trying to protect is very low,” continued Evers, a former State Department senior counsel for oversight and transparency matters. “You could argue that the public interest is quite high given the tone deafness of the jokes and the participation of his former employer in the video. I would find it difficult for them to really justify the withholding as protecting important deliberations, but that doesn’t make it unlawful.”

The law allows the FCC to protect its employees’ internal deliberations, but it is also mandates that federal agencies don’t withhold information merely to protect officials from embarrassment. “And here we have those two principles clashing,” Evers said, “and they are asserting a very robust view of the Deliberative Process Privilege in a way that, well, they probably shouldn’t.”
https://gizmodo.com/fcc-says-releasi...lud-1822763256





Best Buy to Pull CDs, Target Threatens to Pay Labels for CDs Only When Customers Buy Them
Ed Christman

If the majors don't play ball and give in to Target's new sale terms, it could considerably hasten the phase down of the CD format.
Even though digital is on the upswing, physical is still performing relatively well on a global basis -- if not in the U.S. market, where CD sales were down 18.5 percent last year. But things are about to get worse here, if some of the noise coming out of the big-box retailers comes to fruition.

Best Buy has just told music suppliers that it will pull CDs from its stores come July 1. At one point, Best Buy was the most powerful music merchandiser in the U.S., but nowadays it's a shadow of its former self, with a reduced and shoddy offering of CDs. Sources suggest that the company's CD business is nowadays only generating about $40 million annually. While it says it's planning to pull out CDs, Best Buy will continue to carry vinyl for the next two years, keeping a commitment it made to vendors. The vinyl will now be merchandised with the turntables, sources suggest.

Meanwhile, sources say that Target has demanded to music suppliers that it wants to be sold on what amounts to a consignment basis. Currently, Target takes the inventory risk by agreeing to pay for any goods it is shipped within 60 days, and must pay to ship back unsold CDs for credit. With consignment, the inventory risk shifts back to the labels.

According to those sources, Target gave the ultimatum to both music and video suppliers in the fourth quarter of last year that it wants to switch to scanned-based trading, with a target date of Feb. 1. But while it is proceeding to push DVD vendors to switch to scan-based trading terms (i.e. the chain would pay for DVDs after they are sold or scanned while being rung up at the register), it has moved the deadline back to music suppliers to either April 1 or May 1. So far, music manufacturers are not sure what they are going to do, but sources within the various camps say that at least one major is leaning no, while the other two majors are undecided.

If the majors don't play ball and give in to the new sale terms, it could considerably hasten the phase down of the CD format.

Target has greatly reduced its music presence over the years. Once upon a time carried as many as 800 music titles, and nowadays seems to carry less than 100 titles in most stores. Yet, it can still be a powerful force on big titles. For example, the chain moved over 500,000 CDs of Taylor Swift's Reputation album.

Music manufacturers suggest they are waiting to see what happens with DVDs. If the studios don't give into Target's demands, will Target pull DVDs from the store? How that plays out will likely influence what happens in music, sources suggest.
https://www.billboard.com/articles/b...-cds-only-when





Vinyl Record Sales Increased Again in 2017
Jasmine Grant

New data released from Nielsen shows that vinyl record sales are continuing to climb. In fact, vinyl sales made up for 14 percent of all physical album sales in 2017, up from 11 percent in 2016. The Beatles' 1967 opus Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was 2017's top-selling vinyl LP.

Overall, 8.5 percent of all albums sold in 2017 were vinyl records—a noticeable jump from its 6.5 percent share in 2016. Experts attribute the growing reemergence of this vintage music medium to big box retail promotion from the likes of Amazon, Urban Outfitters and Barnes and Noble.

In terms of content, rock continues to hold the lion's share of vinyl interest. The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road were last year's two top-selling vinyls, pushing a combined 138,000 vinyl copies. The top 10 best-selling vinyls of 2017 also include Ed Sheeran's Divide, Prince and the Revolution's Purple Rain, the late Amy Winehouse's Back To Black, and Bob Marley and the Wailers, Legend: The Best Of…
http://www.complex.com/music/2018/01...ales-rise-2017





Report: Apple Music on Track to Overtake Spotify

If Apple Music and Spotify keep adding subscribers at their current rates, Apple Music will soon bump out Spotify as the number one streaming service.
David Murphy

More and more people are rocking out to Apple Music instead of Spotify. And as a new report from The Wall Street Journal indicates, if Apple Music continues to grow at its current rate, it will officially overtake Spotify this summer as the streaming world's number one service.

The news likely doesn't thrill Spotify, which is prepping its big initial public offering for a spring launch—an unconventional offering, too, as the company is planning to just list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange and let the market figure out the rest rather than hiring an investment bank to issue new shares and sell them on the company's behalf.

According to people familiar with streaming figures for both Apple Music and Spotify, the former has a monthly growth rate of around five percent. Spotify, on the other hand, has a growth rate of just around two percent. If that keeps up, Apple Music will officially bump Spotify off the top in summer—and there's no reason to believe it can't, given that part of Apple's success in building an audience for Apple Music lies in the fact that the service comes bundled with most of the major devices the company sells.

Part of the difficulty in figuring out which streaming service has the most subscribers is that the streaming services all have interesting ways to define their total audience size. Both, for example, count each individual user in a family plan to give their stats a bit of a bump instead of just counting the family plan as a single "subscriber." As the Journal notes, some subscribers might gain access to either service as part of a bundle deal with their mobile carriers or as part of a package deal that offers access to other streaming services, like Hulu.

Apple, in fact, would already have a larger audience for Apple Music than Spotify right now if the company counted the users participating in its trial periods. All Apple Music subscribers initially go through a free trial before becoming full, paying members, whereas Spotify offers a free streaming tier that users can stay on for as long as they like. Typically, Spotify likes to tease both subscriber counts and user counts whenever each number reaches a significant milestone.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/358999/re...ertake-spotify





Early Facebook and Google Employees are Planning to Lobby Against Tech Addiction
Thu-Huong Ha

In December, a former Facebook executive said the company was “ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.” A few weeks later, Facebook itself wondered whether it “might be having a negative impact on society.” Now a new alliance made up of former Silicon Valley cronies has aseembled to challenge the technological Frankenstein they’ve collectively created.

The Center for Humane Technology is a group comprising former employees and pals of Google, Facebook, and Mozilla. The nonprofit launches today (Feb. 4) in the hopes that it can raise awareness about the societal tolls of technology, which its members believe are inherently addictive.

The group will lobby for a bill to research the effects of technology on children’s health. It was drafted by US senator Ed Markey, who was also an author of the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act, better known as COPPA. On Feb. 7, the group’s members will participate in a conference focused on digital health for kids, hosted by the nonprofit Common Sense.

“All the tech companies profit the more attention they extract out of human vessels,” Center for Humane Technology co-founder Tristan Harris tells Quartz. “They profit by drilling into our brains to pull the attention out of it, by using persuasion techniques to keep them hooked.”

Harris, who worked at Google for three years as a design ethicist, has been a vocal critic of his former employer. He’s also the founder of Time Well Spent, a nonprofit that he calls a “movement” to rethink how people use their time online. His new organization moves away from helping people take control of their time, and focuses instead on raising awareness of what he believes are the manipulative design techniques of, as he put it in a recent Bloomberg interview, a “civilization-scale mind-control machine.”
https://qz.com/1197876/more-facebook...st-technology/





PSA: Stop Uploading Your Bitcoin Wallet Keys and Credit Cards to File-Sharing Sites

You'd be surprised at how many people do it daily.
Zack Whittaker

What's the first thing you do with a new credit card?

Peel off the sticky label on the front and activate it? Rush to the store to try it out for the first time? Or, do you post a photo of it (both sides!) to social media for the world to see?

One of those answers was a big "no-no."

That said, you'd be surprised at how many people do it daily.

In the past week, we were alerted to a high-profile file sharing site, which lets anyone search other users' uploaded files. You name it -- it's there -- and credit cards are just the tip of the iceberg of sensitive files.

We spent a few hours searching the site with common search terms, and we found a ton of sensitive information -- beyond credit cards -- including completed tax returns (with names, addresses, financial information, and Social Security numbers), scanned passport photos, and password lists, which, if used, could allow an attacker access to online accounts. We even found bitcoin wallet private keys, making it easy to hijack entire wallets full of bitcoin and other cryptocurrency. The results would regularly include explicit images, regardless of search terms.

That kind of exposed data puts anyone whose information is out there at risk of theft, credit card and tax return fraud, identity theft or impersonation, and extortion.

We're not naming the site, because the sensitive data remains online. The site did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication.

File-sharing sites have long been a semi-lawless corner of the internet where almost anything goes. Many previously popular sites no longer exist -- often shutdown for violating piracy laws for taking an unmoderated and lax approach to removing copyrighted movies and music. Others preemptively pulled the plug on their own accord, for fear of also facing criminal charges.

Of the few that still exist, nearly all have been at the center of privacy breaches. More often than not, it's been as a result of careless uploading by the user themselves.

I know -- hell, even you know -- this shouldn't need to be said, but please stop putting your personals on the internet.

With enough exposed data out there already, don't make it any easier for the criminals.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/stop-up...sharing-sites/





Cryptocurrency Mining Malware Infected Over Half-Million PCs Using NSA Exploit
Swati Khandelwal

2017 was the year of high profile data breaches and ransomware attacks, but from the beginning of this year, we are noticing a faster-paced shift in the cyber threat landscape, as cryptocurrency-related malware is becoming a popular and profitable choice of cyber criminals.

Several cybersecurity firms are reporting of new cryptocurrency mining viruses that are being spread using EternalBlue—the same NSA exploit that was leaked by the hacking group Shadow Brokers and responsible for the devastating widespread ransomware threat WannaCry.

Researchers from Proofpoint discovered a massive global botnet dubbed "Smominru," a.k.a Ismo, that is using EternalBlue SMB exploit (CVE-2017-0144) to infect Windows computers to secretly mine Monero cryptocurrency, worth millions of dollars, for its master.

Active since at least May 2017, Smominru botnet has already infected more than 526,000 Windows computers, most of which are believed to be servers running unpatched versions of Windows, according to the researchers.

"Based on the hash power associated with the Monero payment address for this operation, it appeared that this botnet was likely twice the size of Adylkuzz," the researchers said.

The botnet operators have already mined approximately 8,900 Monero, valued at up to $3.6 million, at the rate of roughly 24 Monero per day ($8,500) by stealing computing resources of millions of systems.

The highest number of Smominru infection has been observed in Russia, India, and Taiwan, the researchers said. The command and control infrastructure of Smominru botnet is hosted on DDoS protection service SharkTech, which was notified of the abuse but the firm reportedly ignored the abuse notifications.

According to the Proofpoint researchers, cybercriminals are using at least 25 machines to scan the internet to find vulnerable Windows computers and also using leaked NSA's RDP protocol exploit, EsteemAudit (CVE-2017-0176), for infection.

"As Bitcoin has become prohibitively resource-intensive to mine outside of dedicated mining farms, interest in Monero has increased dramatically. While Monero can no longer be mined effectively on desktop computers, a distributed botnet like that described here can prove quite lucrative for its operators," the researchers concluded.

"The operators of this botnet are persistent, use all available exploits to expand their botnet, and have found multiple ways to recover after sinkhole operations. Given the significant profits available to the botnet operators and the resilience of the botnet and its infrastructure, we expect these activities to continue, along with their potential impacts on infected nodes."

Another security firm CrowdStrike recently published a blog post, reporting another widespread cryptocurrency fileless malware, dubbed WannaMine, using EternalBlue exploit to infect computers to mine Monero cryptocurrency. Since it does not download any application to an infected computer, WannaMine infections are harder to detect by antivirus programs. CrowdStrike researchers observed the malware has rendered "some companies unable to operate for days and weeks at a time."

Besides infecting systems, cybercriminals are also widely adopting cryptojacking attacks, wherein browser-based JavaScript miners utilise website visitors' CPUs power to mine cryptocurrencies for monetisation.

Since recently observed cryptocurrency mining malware attacks have been found leveraging EternalBlue, which had already been patched by Microsoft last year, users are advised to keep their systems and software updated to avoid being a victim of such threats.
https://thehackernews.com/2018/01/cr...g-malware.html





Crucial iPhone Source Code Posted in Unprecedented Leak

Apple took it down via a DMCA, but the iBoot code is now in the wild.
Steve Dent

Critical, top secret Apple code for the iPhone's operating system was posted on Github, opening a new, dangerous avenue for hackers and jailbreakers to access the device, Motherboard reported. The code, known as "iBoot," has since been pulled, but Apple may have confirmed it was the real deal when it issued a DMCA takedown to Github, as Twitter user @supersat noted.

iBoot is the iOS code that ensures a secure boot by loading and checking that kernel is properly signed by Apple before running the OS. The version that was posted to Github, supposedly by a Twitter user named @q3hardcore, was for iOS 9, but much of it likely still exists in the latest version, iOS 11.

Fun thing about the DMCA: it required Apple to state, under penalty of perjury, that the iBoot source code was legit: https://t.co/PKHZqcEe6h
— Karl (@supersat) February 8, 2018

The code can't be compiled because certain files are missing, but researchers and hackers who know what to look for could probe it for vulnerabilities. "This is the biggest leak in history," author and security researcher Jonathan Levin told Motherboard. "The leaked sources of iBoot ... bring us closer to a truly liberated iOS booted on generic arm boards and/or emulator," he added on Twitter. Levin and other security researchers believe the code is the real deal.

iPhones used to be relatively easy to jailbreak before Apple introduced the "secure enclave co-processor" with the TouchID of the iPhone 5s. Now, it's nearly impossible for hackers to even find bugs in iOS code, making iOS exploits relatively rare, unlike in Windows and Android. As such, the iBoot leak is exposing code that hardly anyone has seen before.

The iBoot dump first appeared last year on Reddit, but received little notice from the security community until it hit Github. Apple considers iBoot to be such a critical part of iOS that it offers $200,000 for vulnerabilities, the most in its bug bounty program. That means the release of the source code could amount to a gold rush for many researchers.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/08/...cedented-leak/





An ‘Iceberg’ of Unseen Crimes: Many Cyber Offenses Go Unreported
Al Baker

Utah’s chief law enforcement officer was deep in the fight against opioids when he realized that a lack of data on internet sales of Fentanyl was hindering investigations. So the officer, Keith D. Squires, the state’s public safety commissioner, created a team of analysts to track and chronicle online distribution patterns of the drug.

In Philadelphia, hidebound ways of confronting iPhone thefts let thrive illicit networks to distribute stolen cellphones. Detectives treated each robbery as an unrelated street crime — known as “apple picking” — rather than a vast scheme with connected channels used by thieves to sell the stolen phones.

And in Nashville, investigators had no meaningful statistics on a nasty new swindle of the digital age: The “cheating husband” email scheme. In it, anonymous extortionists mass email large numbers of men, threatening to unmask their infidelities. The extortionists have no idea if the men have done anything wrong, but enough of them are guilty, it turns out, that some pay up, sometimes with Bitcoin.

Each case demonstrates how the tools used to fight crime and measure crime trends in the United States are outdated. Even as certain kinds of crimes are declining, others are increasing — yet because so many occur online and have no geographic borders, local police departments face new challenges not only fighting them, but keeping track of them. Politicians often tout crime declines without acknowledging the rise of new cyber crimes.

Detectives only learned of the “cheating husband” scheme from faithful spouses who were not victims. The crime did not fit into any existing category, and since the police had made no arrests, they had no statistics to feed to a national crime database in Washington that can prepare other jurisdictions for the scheme.

“Suspects take advantage, knowing that, ‘Hey, I’m basically committing crimes blindly,’ without the fear of prosecution,” said Capt. Jason M. Reinbold, commander of the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department’s criminal investigations division. “And I can’t analyze something if I don’t have data.”

Many of the offenses are not even counted when major crimes around the nation are tallied. Among them: identity theft; sexual exploitation; ransomware attacks; Fentanyl purchases over the Dark Web; human trafficking for sex or labor; revenge porn; credit-card fraud; child exploitation; and gift or credit-card schemes that gangs use to raise cash for their traditional operations or vendettas.

In a sense, technology has created an extraordinary moment for industrious criminals, increasing profits without the risk of street violence. Digital villainy can be launched from faraway states, or countries, eliminating physical threats the police traditionally confront. Cyber perpetrators remain unknown. Law enforcement officials, meanwhile, ask themselves: Who owns their crimes? Who must investigate them? What are the specific violations? Who are the victims? How can we prevent it?

“It’s incredibly challenging,” the police chief in Tucson, Chris Magnus, said. “There’s such a lack of clarity.”

The rise of the crimes flies in the face of the proclamations of politicians who declare crime an all but defeated societal ill.

“You have to go back to the 1950s to see crime this low,” Mayor Bill de Blasio, New York City’s second-term Democratic mayor, said recently on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” His comments reflected last year’s historically low numbers of murders and shootings, burglaries, robberies and auto thefts — offenses measured by the police CompStat tracking program.

But to many criminologists, academics and law enforcement leaders, crimes like car theft are anachronisms in a modern era in which the internet’s virtual superhighways have supplanted brick-and-mortar streets as the scenes for muggings, prostitution rings or commercial burglaries. They see dips in traditional violence and larceny as offset by a twin phenomenon: A surge in the evolving crimes of the digital era, and the fact that they are not fully captured in law enforcement’s reporting systems.

“It’s the old iceberg metaphor,” said Nola Joyce, a former deputy commissioner of Philadelphia’s police department. “What we know about is above the surface. But in terms of value, and in terms of harm, a lot of that crime is below the surface.”

“There’s an old saying that came out of the Vietnam War,” she added, “that said, `If you can’t measure what matters, what you measure matters a great deal.”

Ms. Joyce is working with others on a panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, to modernize local and federal crime-classification systems.

New solutions are a priority, too, for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and progressive police commanders. They say that without timely, accurate data on crime, criminal justice leaders cannot see and respond coherently to national trends or make informed policy and spending decisions or tailor deployment strategies to best battle them.

As Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based research group that has studied the issue, put it: “The problem is, to use an overused expression, `You don’t know what you don’t know,’ and by that I mean we don’t know the extent of these incidents in our communities or from a national perspective.”

Indeed, an Internet Crime Complaint Center established by the F.B.I. in 2000, to capture internet crime, received 298,728 complaints in 2016, reflecting $1.3 billion in combined losses, according to a new report by Mr. Wexler’s group. But Donna Gregory, the head of the center, said that number of complaints only represented about 10 to 12 percent of all estimated cybercrime victims in the United States in 2016, and a fraction of all victims worldwide. In fact, a single category of internet crime — identify theft — generated $15.4 billion in losses in 2014, according to a crime victimization survey by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In its report, Mr. Wexler’s group said its findings represented a wake-up call for the nation’s 18,000 policing agencies facing an increase in technology-based crimes, that sprawl across jurisdictions, and recommended they fight back with similar tools by: developing their own digital expertise; hiring civilian analysts; mining technology, to help solve crime; encouraging banks to forward reports of theft rather write off their losses.

Above all, policing needs “better systems for gathering data,” the report said.

It is an issue that dates back to 1929, when the F.B.I. first rolled out its Uniform Crime Reporting system that still stands today. Designed as a summary count, it mainly tracks a handful of so-called Part One index crimes: murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, grand larceny, arson and auto theft. The counts include only the top charge in a given episode.

In the 1980s, the F.B.I., with Bureau of Justice Statistics, tried to improve the reporting by building the so-called National Incident-Based Reporting System to capture deeper levels of data across more categories. It created, for instance, “crimes against a person” which includes: assault, murder, kidnapping, abduction and sexual offenses. Each act is counted separately, within an incident or a crime that encompasses several criminal elements.

But 40 years later, data collection is still haphazard as policing agencies that protect just 31 percent of the country’s population volunteer to abide by the deeper reporting standards. (An example: There is no national database of police officers’ use of deadly physical force.) Still, the F.B.I. is charging forward, vowing to move fully to its 1980s-era vision by 2021. Only last year did it began collecting data on two new offenses in its fraud category: hacking/computer invasion and identify theft.

“Crime data reporting — in its current state — is not collecting the right information to understand and analyze current events,” Stephen G. Fischer Jr., an F.B.I. spokesman, said. “Today’s information age has changed how we see the world and what the world expects from policing.”

The panel of the National Academy of Sciences is looking past the F.B.I.’s unmet goals — which it sees as one component of a new approach. The panel wants a fresh system for understanding the nature and extent of crime today, said Janet L. Lauritsen, the panel’s chair and a criminology professor at the University of Missouri.

It envisions a format modeled in part, on an international framework organized by the United Nations that would reflect 11 prime categories of crime and 189 sublevels, including many that “are just not even part of the national conversation on crime,” Ms. Lauritsen said. It would, for instance, capture reports from federal agencies, she said, that have never reported crime data to the F.B.I., “even though there is actually a law on the books,” the Uniform Federal Crime Reporting Act, from 1988, that compels it.

Better data fosters transparency, which can build trust with civilians even if it yields statical crime increases, said Col. Edwin C. Roessler Jr., the police chief in Fairfax County, Va., who is the F.B.I. director’s chairman for converting policing to a new crime classification system. Data offers the evidence to lobby government for more money or better laws, he said. In fact, when Colonel Roessler demonstrated how each gang homicide, on average, required 25 search warrants for “cyber data, cellphones and other social media,” it helped win financing for a new Cyber Bureau and new “cyber experts” to work gang cases and build meaningful statistics and intelligence.

“We’ve got gaps here, where we’re not catching the root causes of all kinds of criminal activity,” the colonel said, a flaw with real-life consequences.

So too, for Chief Magnus, in Tucson, who sees the lack of modern-day crime classification as, “one of our biggest frustrations.” Leading a force of 850 officers, patrolling 300-square-miles, lapses in accurate statistics on property crime, fraud, human trafficking and digital crime hurts his ability to deploy thin resources.

“Once you get into Cyberspace,” he said, “data about anything is so limited that it’s really, really hard to figure out even what might be happening locally that impacts that crime.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/n...nreported.html





What It’s Like to Live in a Surveillance State
James A. Millward

Imagine that this is your daily life: While on your way to work or on an errand, every 100 meters you pass a police blockhouse. Video cameras on street corners and lamp posts recognize your face and track your movements. At multiple checkpoints, police officers scan your ID card, your irises and the contents of your phone. At the supermarket or the bank, you are scanned again, your bags are X-rayed and an officer runs a wand over your body — at least if you are from the wrong ethnic group. Members of the main group are usually waved through.

You have had to complete a survey about your ethnicity, your religious practices and your “cultural level”; about whether you have a passport, relatives or acquaintances abroad, and whether you know anyone who has ever been arrested or is a member of what the state calls a “special population.”

This personal information, along with your biometric data, resides in a database tied to your ID number. The system crunches all of this into a composite score that ranks you as “safe,” “normal” or “unsafe.” Based on those categories, you may or may not be allowed to visit a museum, pass through certain neighborhoods, go to the mall, check into a hotel, rent an apartment, apply for a job or buy a train ticket. Or you may be detained to undergo re-education, like many thousands of other people.

A science-fiction dystopia? No. This is life in northwestern China today if you are Uighur.

China may no longer be the bleak land of Mao suits, self-criticism sessions and loudspeakers blaring communist slogans. It boasts gleaming bullet trains, luxury malls and cellphone-facilitated consumer life. But when it comes to indigenous Uighurs in the vast western region of Xinjiang, the Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) has updated its old totalitarian methods with cutting-edge technology.

The party considers Uighurs, the Turkic-speaking ethnic group native to the nominally autonomous region of Xinjiang, to be dangerous separatists. The Qing Empire conquered Xinjiang in the 18th century. The territory then slipped from Beijing’s control, until the Communists reoccupied it with Soviet help in 1949. Today, several Central Asian peoples, including Uighurs, Kazakhs and Kyrghyz, make up about half of the region’s population; the remainder are Han and Hui, who arrived from eastern China starting in the mid-20th century.

Over the past several years, small numbers of Uighurs have violently challenged the authorities, notably during riots in 2009, or committed terrorist acts. But the C.C.P. has since subjected the entire Uighur population of some 11 million to arbitrary arrest, draconian surveillance or systemic discrimination. Uighurs are culturally Muslim, and the government often cites the threat of foreign Islamist ideology to justify its security policies.

I have researched Xinjiang for three decades. Ethnic tensions have been common during all those years, and soon after 9/11, Chinese authorities started invoking the specter of “the three evil forces of separatism, extremism and terrorism” as a pretense to crack down on Uighurs. But state repression in Xinjiang has never been as severe as it has become since early 2017, when Chen Quanguo, the C.C.P.’s new leader in the region, began an intensive securitization program.

Mr. Chen has brought to Xinjiang the grid system of checkpoints, police stations, armored vehicles and constant patrols that he perfected while in his previous post in Tibet. The C.C.P. credits him with having quieted there a restive ethnic group unhappy with its rule. In his first year governing Xinjiang, Mr. Chen has already recruited tens of thousands of new security personnel.

As multiple news outlets have reported, he has also deployed high-tech tools in the service of creating a better police state. Uighurs’ DNA is collected during state-run medical checkups. Local authorities now install a GPS tracking system in all vehicles. Government spy apps must be loaded on mobile phones. All communication software is banned except WeChat, which grants the police access to users’ calls, texts and other shared content. When Uighurs buy a kitchen knife, their ID data is etched on the blade as a QR code.

This digitized surveillance is a modern take on conventional controls reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and ’70s. Some Uighurs report getting a knock on their door from security agents soon after receiving a call from overseas. Last autumn one Uighur told me that following several such intimidating visits over the summer, his elderly parents had texted him, “The phone screen is bad for our old eyes, so we’re not using it anymore.” He had not heard from them since.

Xinjiang authorities have recently enforced a spate of regulations against Uighur customs, including some that confound common sense. A law now bans face coverings — but also “abnormal” beards. A Uighur village party chief was demoted for not smoking, on grounds that this failing displayed an insufficient “commitment to secularization.” Officials in the city of Kashgar, in southwest Xinjiang, recently jailed several prominent Uighur businessmen for not praying enough at a funeral — a sign of “extremism,” they claimed.

Any such violation, or simply being a Uighur artist or wealthy businessman, can lead to indefinite detention in what the government euphemistically calls “political training centers” — a revival of punitive Maoist re-education camps — secured by high walls, razor wire, floodlights and guard towers. A revered Uighur Islamic scholar is said to have died in one of those centers this week.

According to Radio Free Asia, a county official and a police officer in southern Xinjiang were instructed by superiors to lock up 40 percent of the local Uighur population. Adrian Zenz, a researcher at the European School of Culture and Theology, estimates that 5 percent of the Uighur population across Xinjiang has been or is currently detained — more than 500,000 people in all. Local orphanages overflow with the children of detainees; some children reportedly are sent to facilities in the eastern parts of China.

Why are so many Uighurs subjected to these harsh policies? A Chinese official in Kashgar explained: “You can’t uproot all the weeds hidden among the crops in the field one by one — you need to spray chemicals to kill them all.” The C.C.P., once quite liberal in its approach to diversity, seems to be redefining Chinese identity in the image of the majority Han — its version, perhaps, of the nativism that appears to be sweeping other parts of the world. With ethnic difference itself now defined as a threat to the Chinese state, local leaders like Mr. Chen feel empowered to target Uighurs and their culture wholesale.

Some people in the Chinese bureaucracy and Chinese academic circles disagree with this approach. They worry that locking down an entire province and persecuting an entire ethnic group will only instill long-lasting resentment among Uighurs. Or they note that Mr. Chen’s policies are so burdensome and so costly that they will be difficult to sustain: Han Chinese residents of Xinjiang also complain about the inconvenience and cost of living in such a police state.

Then there are the international repercussions. Blanket repression in Xinjiang can only hurt China’s bid for the world’s respect, just when the Trump administration’s chaotic foreign policy offers Beijing an opportunity to enhance its own standing. Forget the image of President Xi Jinping as a responsible internationalist at Davos. Nothing shreds soft power abroad like coils of razor wire at home.

There’s an old Chinese joke about Uighurs being the Silk Road’s consummate entrepreneurs: When the first Chinese astronaut steps off his spaceship onto the moon, he will find a Uighur already there selling lamb kebabs. And so even as Mr. Chen cracks down in Xinjiang, the Chinese government touts the region as the gateway for its much-vaunted “one belt, one road” initiative, Mr. Xi’s signature foreign policy project. The grand idea combines a plan to spend billions of dollars in development loans and transport investment across Eurasia with a strategic bid to establish China’s diplomatic primacy in Asia.

But while Mr. Xi’s government promises the world a new Silk Road through Muslim Central Asia and the Middle East, the Xinjiang authorities attempt to contain a purported “Uighur problem” by incarcerating many good citizens and spying from every street corner and mobile phone. The C.C.P.’s domestic policies contradict its international aspirations.

How does the party think that directives banning fasting during Ramadan in Xinjiang, requiring Uighur shops to sell alcohol and prohibiting Muslim parents from giving their children Islamic names will go over with governments and peoples from Pakistan to Turkey? The Chinese government may be calculating that money can buy these states’ quiet acceptance. But the thousands of Uighur refugees in Turkey and Syria already complicate China’s diplomacy.

Tibetans know well this hard face of China. Hong Kongers must wonder: If Uighur culture is criminalized and Xinjiang’s supposed autonomy is a sham, what will happen to their own vibrant Cantonese culture and their city’s shaky “one country, two systems” arrangement with Beijing? What might Taiwan’s reunification with a securitized mainland look like? Will the big-data police state engulf the rest of China? The rest of the world?

As China’s profile grows on the international stage, everyone would do well to ask if what happens in Xinjiang will stay in Xinjiang.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/02/o...-xinjiang.html





Nasa Can Pirate TV Stations if Government Shutdown Persists, Says MP Simiyu
Mathews Ndanyi

The opposition will do anything, including pirating TV and radio stations, to frustrate the Jubilee administration's operations, Eseli Simiyu has said.

The Tongaren MP claimed Nasa will consider pirating should the government keep three national TV stations off air.

He said the pirated stations will be used to mobilise supporters to participate in anti-government activities.

“We are prepared and ready to do so at anytime should the ban on TV stations continue. We will not allow Jubilee to abuse the rights and freedoms of our people as enshrined in the constitution," he said in Soy on Friday.

Nasa principals are Raila Odinga (ODM), Kalonzo musyoka (Wiper), Musalia Mudavadi (ANC) and Bungoma senator Moses Wetang'ula (Ford Kenya).

They have condemned the shutdown but have not spoken of pirating TV and radio stations.

A pirated television or radio station is one that operates without a licence, therefor illegally. Its signals are received especially when the country of transmission is the same as the country of reception.

Eseli further warned that Kenya will become an autocratic state if citizens do not fight for their rights.

He reiterated that they do not recognise president Uhuru Kenyatta's Jubilee Party administration.

“This is an intolerant government so Kenyans should be warned that we are heading backwards and that we are in trouble. We have to come out and fight for our rights."

Muslim preachers and imams have also faulted the government over the shutdown of KTN, NTV and Citizen for airing the 'self-inauguration' of National Super Alliance leader Raila Odinga.

Rift Valley chairman Abubakar Bini said it was a clear sign that the government was reversing gains made through tough struggles.

Bini warned Kenya will turn authoritarian if such trends by the government are allowed to continue.

He said the stations should be allowed to operate freely without interference.

“We are on the wrong path and this is not acceptable. The freedom to information is a right that should not be curtailed by the state."
https://www.the-star.co.ke/news/2018...ys-mp_c1708665





How File Sharing Broke the Internet’s First Forum

Usenet—a formative online protocol intended for conversations—was forever changed once the public figured out you could transfer binary files through it.
Ernie Smith

The Simpsons, which had a big following on Usenet, regularly riffed on the protocol using Comic Book Guy. Image: 20th Century Fox

As I pointed out a while back, people love free stuff when it comes to the internet.

Beyond communication, it may be the most popular use of the internet around. But what happens when a platform intended for communication becomes overwhelmed by free stuff?

To put it simply, that’s what Usenet is. The protocol, with a history that goes back nearly 40 years, evolved from its arcane roots as a place for technically minded college students and sysops to communicate into a newbie-overrun protocol, then into a major hub for file sharing.

Why did Usenet see its digital role shift so dramatically over time? Let's discuss.

The fundamental technology that eventually changed Usenet’s fortunes forever

In 1979, two Duke University students came up with the basic idea of "netnews," the service that became Usenet after an array of improvements.

Their protocol, originally named A-News before a series of improvements, took advantage of the Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol (UUCP), a distributed way of copying files between computers that was built alongside the ARPANET, the network that became known as the internet. Eventually, it became compatible with it. The developers, Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis, made the software available to any Unix host, and within a few years, the protocol became one of the most popular ways to communicate through the still-formative internet.

Usenet’s creation was based around the idea that computers were becoming sophisticated enough that they could be used to hold conversations, and there was plenty of conversation going on. It was basically Reddit, except decentralized and without a true owner.

But the protocol’s roots in UUCP—effectively a peer-to-peer file-sharing mechanism when you break it down—meant that it was also an effective way of sharing files. Usenet was designed to only share text, but programmers continued to improve on the technology. One particularly pivotal figure was Mary Ann Horton, a University of California Berkeley graduate student who was involved in building up UUCP’s early protocols, and helped create a connection between the protocol and the broader internet.

(Of note: Eric Schmidt, the longtime chairman of Google and a Berkeley grad himself, was also involved in these early efforts to burnish UUCP, helping Horton and another student, Eric Allman, build a gateway that connected UUCP and ARPANET.)

Horton, known as Mark at the time, was deeply impressed with what became Usenet.

“I remember, while at Berkeley, exchanging email with the original A-News developers and being amazed that I could get a reply back a few hours later, even though ‘research’ was polling both ‘duke’ and ‘ucbvax’ to pick up waiting mail,” Horton wrote of her early experiences of using the technology.

Using her own skills, Horton helped to further shape Usenet and helped improve on the work of Truscott and Ellis. Also around this time, she was responsible for creating Uuencode, a piece of software that would become key to the legacies of both email and Usenet. She also created a whole lot of other things, a list of which is here.

(Side note: Beyond her technical achievements, Horton deserves notice for her efforts in speaking up for the rights of transgender people in the workplace, which started when she was at Lucent in the 1990s. She helped set the stage for some major changes in the corporate world, particularly in Silicon Valley.)

Functionally similar to the .zip file format in some ways, Uuencode effectively worked as a bridge between binary files and raw text. If you ran a Uuencode command on a binary file, it would turn it into a jumble of text. Another user could run a Uudecode command to turn the file back into a binary format.

This came in handy because it allowed for email attachments, as well as to distribute binaries through what became Usenet.

Now, you might be wondering how this all works. To explain, here’s an image of a cat preparing to eat a dandelion:


As shown above, the image is directly embedded into the article as text, using an encoding approach called Base64, which is a descendant of sorts to Uuencode. The file is effectively a long block of text that’s too long to share in its raw form, but one section of it looks like this:


Your web browser is smart enough to decode these blocks of gibberish, allowing it to recognize that the text is actually a binary image. It takes commands that wouldn’t generally be human-readable and makes them work in that system. (The fact that the text is gibberish, by the way, makes Base64 a somewhat common vector of attacks on the web; for example, it was used in the recent malware infiltration of the popular CCleaner utility software.)

Now, Uuencode wasn’t perfect—the text encoding was somewhat wasteful, adding overhead and making the encoded text files more complicated than they needed to be, and the idea has been improved upon since. But it was an effective way of allowing for the transfer of files far and wide. It was particularly great for the distribution of files through Usenet, as the encoded files would transfer from waystation to waystation.

The approach, both in terms of infrastructure and use case, is very reminiscent of what BitTorrent became. And over time, this use case would come to overwhelm the Usenet protocol.

Not that it was ever the intention.

The target on Usenet’s dynamically distributed back

“Newsgroups,” the preferred nomenclature for a Usenet group, always was a misnomer.

Sure, there was some news and legitimate information being shared—for example, teenage chartster Matt Levine, who I wrote about a while back, built his following by sharing charts via Usenet for years. But the large bulk of what was being shared, bit by bit, was encoded binary files.

And, due to its design and status as a pre-web way of communicating, Usenet had a sense of lawlessness to it. It was a place where any kind of information could be found, if you were willing to look for it.

There was no filter. It was all or nothing. Like Reddit, most of the conversation was innocuous, but there were some places where it very much wasn’t.

And with binaries a part of the equation, that meant copyright theft and illicit content were never too far away.

When President Bill Clinton signed the Communications Decency Act of 1996—which was largely thrown out by the Supreme Court just a year later—Usenet had much of the indecent material that the bill’s authors had in mind.

And it was difficult to rein in, because Usenet wasn’t really built to be reined in. The complaints lobbed at Twitter about moderation today were triply true about Usenet—because, in most newsgroups, moderation simply didn’t exist.

“Regulating the Usenet is a problematic venture since often there are no identifiable agents toward whom to direct regulatory actions,” author Blake T. Bilstad wrote in “Obscenity and Indecency on the Usenet: The Legal And Political Future of Alt.Sex.Stories,” an article in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. “There are no Sysops, very few newsgroup managers, and a slew of private individuals using anonymous (and virtually untraceable) IDs and usernames.”

That meant the pressure of reining in illicit material fell upon internet service providers. Even with the eventual existence of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and its safe-harbor provisions, binaries created massive liabilities for internet providers, because of the often too-hot-to-handle nature of the binaries shared. That pressure in some ways was just as much legal as it was social.

Groups dedicated to distributed binaries, generally under the “alt.binaries” newsgroup hierarchy, also had a more practical effect. They turned what was intended to be a protocol for simple communication into one where articles were very large, which made them harder to store. And as a result, this limited the commercial feasibility of the Usenet platform.

(AOL, for one, had shut off its access by 2005, citing the waning popularity of newsgroups compared to web-based alternatives like blogs. It didn’t cite the influence of Harlan Ellison, though one might assume it played a role.)

So when pressure campaigns to get major ISPs to shut down access to portions of Usenet heated up—particularly when New York’s then-attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, launched a crusade against child pornography around 2008—major ISPs were more than happy to oblige.

Usenet represented a lot of legitimate conversation, just like every other part of the internet. However, the ugly parts, while small (Cuomo’s staff pinpointed 88 problem groups, out of roughly 100,000 total at the time), were really apparent, and the binaries made things worse. An ACLU official, at the time, compared it to “taking a sledgehammer to an ant.”

And Usenet’s decentralized design made it difficult to filter out the ugly stuff. (As well as spam. Oh man, Usenet was famous for spam.)

The FBI couldn’t shut down a Usenet group that was illegally sharing episodes of Arrested Development or copies of Windows XP, like it has with websites in the past.

But ISPs, on the other hand, could simply decide not to carry newsgroups. Thousands of legitimate newsgroups, many of which didn’t have explicit content or engage in copyright infringement, were caught in the middle.

These changes didn’t kill Usenet, of course; it was a hard-to-ignore wound, however. Smaller hosts, like GigaNews and NewsDemon, carried the mantle, as did Google Groups, which carries many newsgroups to this day. (Eric Schmidt has influence on both ends of this story, as it turns out.)

Usenet once had immense cultural value—and still does in some corners, for some specific uses, particularly from a historical context. But no limits has its limits.

In many ways, Usenet represents the gravel road on an internet that’s otherwise been mostly paved, cleaned up, maintained, and even renovated.

You won’t end up there by accident these days, like you might on Facebook. It’s an intentional visit, one that has to be planned out with specific goals in mind. Discussion threads exist in certain corners, but you’re often just as likely to see a forum filled with spam or a person posting a message asking if anyone else is still reading Usenet. Perhaps, without stewards or moderators, this was always bound to happen.

Usenet hosts are still with us, but they specifically cater to the technology’s status as a way of accessing binary files—something that was a hack, really, but came to define the network.

That’s because it actually carries some major advantages in certain contexts. If a Usenet host is fast, downloads can actually be significantly faster than through BitTorrent, because you’re not waiting for someone else to carry the file you want. Certainly, it’s not perfect—warnings are prevalent about malware and viruses that might be baked into those giant blocks of text that represent binaries on Usenet—but it’s effective.

But, as helpful as that might be for people who want that, it certainly wasn’t what Usenet was built for.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...t-forum-usenet

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

February 3rd, January 27th, January 20th, January 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 - 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 09:54 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)