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Peer to Peer The 3rd millenium technology! |
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Join Date: May 2001
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![]() ![]() "It's so easy to do. The barrier entry for the user is so simple, and even for the person who puts a box together. You don't even need to have this high technical bar. You just need to have some business savvy and some ethical greyness in your life to go into the business." – Dan Deeth ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() November 4th, 2017 ![]() The Little Black Box That Took Over Piracy Brian Barrett The Kodi box pitch is hard to resist. A little black plastic square, in look not much different from a Roku or Apple TV, and similar in function as well. This streamer, though, offers something those others never will: Free access to practically any show or movie you can dream of. No rental fees. No subscriptions. Just type in the name of a blockbuster, and start watching a high-definition stream in seconds. For years, piracy persisted mainly in the realm of torrents, with sites like The Pirate Bay and Demonoid connecting internet denizens to premium content gratis. But a confluence of factors have sent torrent usage plummeting from 23 percent of all North American daily internet traffic in 2011 to under 5 percent last year. Legal crackdowns shuttered prominent torrent sites. Paid alternatives like Netflix and Hulu made it easier just to pay up. And then there were the "fully loaded" Kodi boxes—otherwise vanilla streaming devices that come with, or make easily accessible, so-called addons that seek out unlicensed content—that deliver pirated movies and TV shows with push-button ease. "Kodi and the plugin system and the people who made these plugins have just dumbed down the process," says Dan Deeth, spokesperson for network-equipment company Sandvine. "It's easy for anyone to use. It's kind of set it and forget it. Like the Ron Popeil turkey roaster." Kodi itself is just a media player; the majority of addons aren't piracy focused, and lots of Kodi devices without illicit software plug-ins are utterly uncontroversial. Still, that Kodi has swallowed piracy may not surprise some of you; a full six percent of North American households have a Kodi device configured to access unlicensed content, according to a recent Sandvine study. But the story of how a popular, open-source media player called XBMC became a pirate's paradise might. And with a legal crackdown looming, the Kodi ecosystem's present may matter less than its uncertain future. In the beginning, there was Xbox Media Center, and it was great. Despite the name, XBMC wasn't born out of a Microsoft development team. It began as a homebrew project (for the first year, called Xbox Media Player), an open-source attempt at building a better media client for Xbox consoles. XBMC acquired a loyal fan base, its development guided by the nonprofit XBMC Foundation. The tent wasn't quite big enough, though, to accommodate all of the competing visions for what XBMC could become. Fissures inevitably appeared. (Popular media player Plex, for instance, is an XBMC fork.) It wasn't until 2012, though, that the conflict over addons splintered XBMC for good. "We saw these piracy addons starting to take off, and we realized they were very simple to use," says Nathan Betzen, XBMC/Kodi Foundation President. "It looks so easy to use these things that we wanted no part of it. We're a nonprofit software development group. We're pretty happy not getting sued. So we banned them from our forum." Rather than give up their work, or submit to what they saw as XBMC's onerous guidelines, a group of XBMC developers instead formed XBMC Hub, a place where people were free to tinker on whatever addons they liked without worry of restrictions or reprisal. And for all the focus on piracy, the majority of addons facilitate perfectly legal features, from interface tweaks to Dropbox integration to music streaming. While XBMC Hub managed to draw interest from a wide range of developers, infringing addons found a home there as well. In 2014, to distance itself even further from the offshoot, the original XBMC rebranded itself as Kodi. XBMC Hub changed its name as well, to TV Addons. And then came the boxes. Like any open-source ecosystem, Kodi contains multitudes. There's the Kodi media player itself. There's TV Addons and other developer communities. There are the plugins that scrape the internet for pirated material. There are the uploaders, the people who host the latest episode of, say, Game of Thrones on Google Drive or wherever. And there are the devices, which can be streaming boxes, Android tablets, and so on. Those are what transformed Kodi into the modern-day pirate's favorite ship. "It's a bit of a Wild West," says Deeth. "Kodi's open source. Anyone can take that software and put it on any piece of hardware." And they can do it at scale. Just go to a site like AliExpress, and you can buy streaming boxes by the hundreds for relatively cheap. Add the right plugins—or buy them fully loaded—and sites like Ebay, Facebook, and Craigslist await, providing a bustling resell market. "It's so easy to do. The barrier entry for the user is so simple, and even for the person who puts a box together," says Deeth. "You don't even need to have this high technical bar. You just need to have some business savvy and some ethical greyness in your life to go into the business." That ease applies to creating the piracy addons themselves. Since primarily all they do is find existing sites that host pirated content, grab working links, and present them in Kodi's user-friendly interface, Betzen rates the complexity about the same as creating a simple web page. The industry has thrived, too, because it has managed to stay relatively underground, at least in the US. (In the UK, Kodi boxes have garnered more attention from authorities, thanks to stingy soccer fanatics driving an early swell of adoption.) Until recently, the extent of the enforcement stateside has comprised the Kodi Foundation protecting its turf. "We're basically taking the stance that if you use the word 'Kodi' to mean something other than the vanilla software we release, if you preinstall addons or something like that, that means you are no longer shipping Kodi, and we consider it a trademark violation," says Betzen. "That's sort of worked. We've been able to get a bunch of sellers off of Ebay and Amazon that way." An example of both a typical Kodi enforcement effort and the scope of the problem: Using an automated Ebay system, Betzen says, the Kodi team was once able to get 7,000 listings taken down in about half an hour. Betzen also sees any more aggressive action on the Kodi Foundation's part as futile. It could, theoretically, create a sort of App Store environment, in which only approved plugins would work. Even as a show of good faith, though, that would prove ineffective. Kodi is, again, open source. If pirates don't like the changes, they could just immediately roll them back with their own, forked version. Streaming piracy also falls into murky legal territory. As a relatively new phenomenon, the courts haven't yet established clear lines of acceptable use, or who bears ultimate responsibility. "The thing people should understand is that on day one, when you have a dual-use technology, it usually starts off as inherently non-infringing," says Ira Rothken, a technology-focused lawyer with deep experience in digital copyright. Simply putting Kodi in a piece of hardware, in other words, seems unlikely to skirt legal boundaries. But the more the underlying code of various plugins enables piracy, and the advertising around the product promotes it, and as the percentage of infringing materials travel through that device creeps up, things get a little shakier. "As it starts moving in a more extreme way in those three areas, you then get more exposure for inducement or secondary copyright infringement," says Rothken. "And then you have the fight." And in the US, that fight has officially begun. TickBox TV sells its Kodi box with a bit of a wink. "Frustrated with overpriced cable bills?" blares a headline on the company's website. Among its purported customer testimonials are claims that, "I enjoy being able to watch what I want and being able to save a few bucks doesn't hurt," and "My wife rents every new ON Demand movie that comes out at $5.99 per movie. This was getting crazy." A sponsored ad the company apparently posted in May is a little more on the nose, promising the ability to "watch anything for free," and that "it might get banned soon, but as soon as you have one you are completely fine and will be able to watch everything for free forever." The company also includes a disclaimer on its site to clarify that it does not host or distribute any content, and that users should not download or stream any copyrighted content without permission. That apparently did not allay the concerns of a coalition of Hollywood studios, Netflix, and Amazon, which filed suit against the company two weeks ago today. "TickBox distributes and promotes TickBox TV as a tool for the mass infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows," says Zoe Thorogood, a spokesperson for the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, an anti-piracy trade group that represents the companies behind the suit. TickBox TV did not respond to a request for comment. More specifically, the suit alleges that while TickBox TV may not come preloaded with infringing addons, it funnels customers directly to them. It even includes an instructional video. "After completing the set-up and downloading addons per TickBox's directions, the customers use TickBox TV for intended and unquestionably infringing purposes, most notably to obtain instantaneous, unrestricted, and unauthorized access to infringing streams," reads the suit, first obtained by The Hollywood Reporter. The TickBox TV suit is the first of its kind in the US. It won't be the last, and the offensive likely won't stop at boxes. "This lawsuit is one of many steps required to address the growing challenge of piracy devices, apps, and addons," says Thorogood. As well they should. But the diffuse nature of the Kodi ecosystem, the unclear legal framework, and the uncertain effectiveness of lawsuits like the one against TickBox make it unclear just how fully Hollywood can police it. "Unfortunately, I don't think this case is going to bring much more clarity," says Rothken. "If you take out one company that experiments and loses, another one may come along and experiment and to try not to cross the line. If they lose, another one might come up. What they all have in common is they're low budget. The people who run them tend not to be the kind of people who read legal cases. They're usually not evil, but rather just ignorant." Meanwhile, in Canada, copyright holders have chosen to target TV Addons, the XBMC developer spinoff community, seizing the domains and social media accounts of Adam Lackman, who runs it. Lackman says he was questioned by the plaintiff's lawyer for 14 hours, without Lackman's own lawyer being allowed to clarify answers, which resulted in a strong rebuke from the court to the companies behind the suit. "I think that they were looking for the easiest way to try to make an impact that could be reflected in the news," says Lackman. "They wanted a story, they wanted to look like they were doing something, and they wanted to scare people. When you start throwing around lawsuits, when it's billion-dollar companies that start throwing around lawsuits, it scares the shit out of people." Lackman continues to fight the Canada suit, as well as one filed in Texas by Dish Network, noting that of over 1,400 addons in his community, only 18 were identified as infringing. TV Addons itself doesn't host anything, or allow tracking or analytics, Lackman says, making it impossible to monitor exactly what goes on within the community. He also draws an important distinction between a group of open-source software developers and people actively engaged in using Kodi for piracy. "If someone's selling a device and they're labeling it as a piracy product and they're sitting in the shopping center or a store front, these guys should go to jail," says Lackman. "They infringe on people's rights, and that's not what I'm about." He said as much in April, too, before copyright holders had targeted him, in a post warning the Kodi community away from box-seller "profiteers." The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a prominent digital rights group, has come out in support of Lackman and TV Addons, drawing those same lines. "These lawsuits by big TV incumbents seem to have a few goals: to expand the scope of secondary copyright infringement yet again, to force major Kodi add-on distributors off of the Internet, and to smear and discourage open source, freely configurable media players by focusing on the few bad actors in that ecosystem," wrote EFF lawyers Jeremy Malcolm and Mitch Stoltz recently. And while the TickBox TV and Candadian TV Addons suits have substantive differences, it's still worth noting that neither targets the specific developers behind those infringing plugins, or the people putting pirated materials online in the first place. (The Dish Network suit does name the developer behind addon ZemTV.) Or, for that matter, the person watching the video on the Kodi box. Hollywood and the music industry rarely targets individuals in that way, but there is some legal risk to the home viewer. "There would technically have to be legal exposure. In order to be able to hold these types of box dependents secondarily liable, the law requires there has to be a primary infringer," says Rothken. "That's typically going to be a consumer who's viewing the material, and in some instances other host providers who are streaming the material on the internet." It all sounds a bit like a game of Whack-a-Mole where the real targets rarely pop up, and bystanders are fair game. Perhaps fittingly, it's also not all that different from what torrenting went through before its ultimate decline. And the Kodi Foundation's Betzen, who's been there from the beginning, hopes it plays out the same way. "I'd love it if a lawsuit ultimately resulted in all of the pirates going away, but I don't think anyone on the planet really believes that's going to happen," says Betzen. "I think the only solution is going to be the solution that made torrenting less popular, which is to provide the services that the pirates are providing in a way that's better." It may not be so simple this time. People left torrenting for Netflix, sure. But they also left torrenting for the Kodi box. The challenge for copyright holders, then, isn't just to improve on free. It's to, somehow, be better than free and easy. https://www.wired.com/story/kodi-box-piracy/ ![]() Pirate TV Services are Taking a Bite Out of Cable Company Revenue Millions of North Americans are using illegal TV services, research finds. Jon Brodkin TV piracy services are being used by about 6.5 percent of North American households with broadband access, potentially costing legitimate TV providers billions of dollars a year, a new analysis found. Pirate services that offer live TV channels are apparently responsible for more downstream traffic each night than torrent downloads. Based on these figures, there may be 7 million US and Canadian subscribers to pirate TV services that generally cost about $10 a month, the report by Sandvine said. That amounts to $840 million of revenue a year. We don't know how many people using pirate services would purchase a traditional cable or satellite TV package if the piracy option didn't exist. But if all of those people instead purchased a legal TV package for $50 per month, that would amount to another $4.2 billion revenue a year for North American pay-TV providers, the report said. "Our research reveals that across multiple tier-1 North American fixed access networks, 6.5 percent of households are communicating with known TV piracy services, and these services accounted for more than 6 percent of downstream traffic in the peak evening hours," Sandvine's new report said. Sandvine is a vendor that sells equipment to consumer broadband providers to help them manage network congestion. Sandvine's findings are based on a 30-day period in August and September. The 6.5 percent figure "is a measurement of subscribers who were communicating with known IPTV services during that time," and could include people with active subscriptions as well as "people who have dormant subscriptions, or may just subscribe to day passes" to watch certain content, a Sandvine spokesperson told Ars. Replicating live TV experience The pirate services attempt to "replicate the live television experience offered by cable and satellite providers," Sandvine wrote. That includes live sports events, which can often only be viewed legally by purchasing a traditional pay-TV subscription. Besides live sports, Sandvine found significant usage of pirate TV services to view premium television (like HBO's Game of Thrones), news channels, and international content. The number of cable and satellite TV subscriptions has been dropping for years due to rising prices and Internet-based alternatives, both legal and otherwise. While 88 percent of US households subscribed to a pay-TV service in 2010 and 84 percent did so in 2014, just 79 percent subscribe today, Leichtman Research Group recently found. Pirate TV services can charge much lower prices than cable and satellite companies because they aren't paying programmers for content, Sandvine noted. Sandvine has been analyzing Internet traffic for years, but this is the first time it studied this type of TV piracy service. Sandvine said it identified the top TV piracy services using its own network data and by reading online forums where Internet users share information about which services they use. Here's an example from a subreddit devoted to IPTV services. There are numerous services "where a subscriber can go to the site, provide payment, and automatically provision thousands of channels from around the world," the Sandvine spokesperson told Ars. Sandvine doesn't know how the 6.5 percent and 6 percent figures compare to previous years when the company wasn't tracking these services. Usage is still low compared to legitimate streaming services like Netflix, but the company said it "believes that these video and television piracy services represent a real threat to the revenue streams of CSPs [communications service providers]." Beyond BitTorrent With more than 6 percent of downstream traffic in peak evening hours, the IPTV services apparently take up a greater share of peak Internet traffic than BitTorrent downloads, a major source of pirated TV shows and movies. BitTorrent transmissions accounted for 1.73 percent of peak downstream traffic in North America in a Sandvine study last year, while Netflix accounted for 35.2 percent and YouTube for 17.5 percent. Those numbers are for home Internet services and do not include mobile broadband. BitTorrent also accounted for 18.4 percent of upstream traffic during peak usage hours, but uploads are a much smaller portion of Internet usage than downloads. In aggregate, BitTorrent accounted for 2.9 percent of peak Internet bandwidth usage. As TorrentFreak pointed out, the Sandvine data indicates that "IPTV piracy generates more Internet traffic than torrents." Updated figures for BitTorrent, Netflix, and YouTube aren't available yet, but the Sandvine spokesperson didn't expect any major changes since last year. Boxes keep streaming when customers aren't watching Users of pirate TV services often buy set-top boxes that are pre-loaded with media software, or they install media player software on another device, the Sandvine report said. Sandvine said it doesn't know how many hours of video users of pirate services are watching. The 6 percent figure actually overstates the amount of TV pirate subscribers are intentionally watching because of what Sandvine calls a "phantom bandwidth problem." "The set-top boxes designed to consume pirated video and TV services appear to have little concern for network utilization," Sandvine wrote. "Based on Sandvine's testing, many of these devices will stream continuously unless the box itself is physically powered off. This constant streaming results in a tremendous amount of 'phantom' bandwidth, a term we used to describe data that is transmitted but not viewed by anyone." Sandvine said its data indicates that the percentage of Internet traffic taken up by TV piracy services "increases in the late evening hours as Netflix users turn off their streams and the poorly engineered TV piracy boxes continue to stream." If a pirate TV user has their set-top box tuned to a high-definition channel that streams at 4Mbps, "over the course of a month that set-top box could consume over a terabyte of data," Sandvine wrote. This is a problem for Internet users who may go over their data caps without realizing what is causing the high usage. https://arstechnica.co.uk/informatio...mpany-revenue/ ![]() 2 Oro Valley Men Sentenced On Movie-Pirating Charges Curt Prendergast Two Oro Valley men were sentenced recently to probation in connection with pirating movies. Oscar Rojelio Torres, Jr., 26, and Oscar Rojelio Cota Torres, Sr., 53, were sentenced to probation and will have to pay restitution, according to a news release from the Oro Valley Police Department. Oro Valley police found more than 700 illegally-downloaded movies in Torres, Jr.'s car after a traffic stop in February 2016. Police and Homeland Security Investigations agents served a search warrant on the home of Torres, Jr. and found ledgers of movies sold, laptops and computers with disc-burning devices, and more than 500 DVDs, police said. The investigation showed Torres, Sr. conspired with his son to make and sell the illegally-downloaded movies, according to the news release. Police said the two men were indicted on felony charges of trafficking stolen property, conspiracy, illegally conducting an enterprise, unlawful copying or sale of sounds or images from recording devices, and counterfeit marks. http://tucson.com/news/local/oro-val...6460d95c9.html ![]() Clooney's 'Suburbicon' Tanks, 'Saw' Sequel No. 1 with $16.3M Jake Coyle George Clooney's "Suburbicon" notched one of the most dismal wide-release debuts in recent years on a sluggish pre-Halloween weekend where the horror sequel "Jigsaw" topped all releases despite an underperforming debut. According to studio estimates Sunday, the eighth "Saw" film landed at No. 1 with $16.3 million in North American ticket sales. That was shy of industry expectations and suggested the revived "Saw" franchise isn't connecting with audiences the way other recent horror entries have. "Jigsaw" distributor Lionsgate could also claim the No. 2 spot with $10 million in the second week of release for "Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween." Debuting on more than 2,000 screens, "Suburbicon" managed just $2.8 million in its opening weekend. Audiences didn't much care for the film, either, giving it a D-minus CinemaScore. http://www.courant.com/entertainment...029-story.html ![]() Six Percent of North American Households Now Pirating TV The Mayweather-McGregor fight accounted for 80 percent of pirate streams on Aug. 27. Ian Casselberry As networks like ESPN lose subscribers to cord-cutting and work on an over-the-top streaming service to attract viewers who have walked away from cable and satellite, a battle is developing on another front in television’s battle to retain audiences. Research firm Sandvine has released information from a new study that says 6.5 percent of North American households are pirating live TV each month. This “telecommunications fraud” could cost TV distributors $4 billion in revenue. While this is a huge concern to broadcast networks, premium cable and streaming outlets like HBO and Netflix, and Hollywood studios whose first-run films could be available online, pirating TV is also having an effect on live sports. As Deadline’s Dade Hayes mentions, the Floyd Mayweather-Conor McGregor fight in August was heavily pirated. The pay-per-view event accounted for 80 percent of all pirate streams on Aug. 27. For a bout that may have been watched by one percent of all households in North America, that represents a tremendous amount of potential lost revenue. Granted, an event that cost viewers $100 for a high-definition broadcast may have been daring viewers to find alternative sources of viewing, such as streams on Periscope and Facebook Live. That’s not going to be a problem for sporting events such as the Super Bowl, World Series and NBA Finals, which can be seen for free on broadcast TV. But as major events such as postseason games and championship title games increasingly migrate from over-the-air broadcast TV to cable, pirated TV could become a concern for networks and sports leagues. “Continued adoption of pirate video and television streaming services could lead to increased cord-cutting and create ‘cord-nevers,’ people who never sign-up for a standard TV subscription,” Sandvine CEO Lyn Cantor told Deadline. “This will significantly impact communication service providers’ revenue and profitability, undermining the business models that keep them operating.” The Sandvine study specifically points to live sports, premium television, news and international content as the primary drivers of “telecommunications fraud.” Pirate TV services could generate up to $800 million per year as more viewers cut ties with their cable and satellite providers. And since these services run 24 hours, seven days a week, pirate TV also eats up “phantom bandwidth” — up to 1 TB — on viewers’ internet networks each month. http://awfulannouncing.com/streaming...tv-events.html ![]() Piracy in Australia Down by One-Fifth, Survey Claims Karl Quinn Australians have long worn the crown of the world's most enthusiastic pirates of film and television content. But is that beginning to change? The number of Australians watching pirated film and television content has dropped almost 20 per cent in the past year, according to peak home entertainment industry body. Though Australia remained one of the hot spots for torrenting of Game of Thrones - with Brisbane ranked No.2 in the world for downloads on a per capita basis - research commissioned by the Australian Home Entertainment Distributors Association has found that just 16 per cent of Australians watched pirated content in the past month, compared to 21 per cent the same time last year. The figures are the first released since the government's site-blocking laws came into effect, and add to the perception that the tide may be turning in the campaign against piracy. The latest result - from a survey conducted by Gfk ConsumerScope, using a sample of 3185 individuals - confirms the downward trend in the popularity of pirating in Australia, which has been steadily declining since the introduction of subscription video on demand services such as Netflix and Stan. In 2014, 29 per cent of Australians admitted to watching pirated content in the past month. In 2015, that fell to 24 per cent, and in 2016 it fell again, to 21 per cent. Simon Bush, chief executive of the association, said the most recent figures might be explained by a number of factors: the blocking of more than 40 overseas sites known to distribute pirated content to Australian internet users; a threat by Village Roadshow chairman Graham Burke to sue individual pirates; and a high-profile advertising campaign in which Bryan Brown makes pirating sound as potentially dangerous to your computer as having unprotected sex with someone with an STD. "[You] could end up with viruses, spyware, stolen credit card details, even identity theft," Brown warns in the campaign commercial. "Seems like a high price to pay after all." Mr Bush believes piracy can be reduced even further. "This could be as simple as demoting or removing infringing links and ensuring piracy sites don't come up when you search for a film title, which is currently the case." Australians have certainly embraced cheap, legal modes of film and TV viewing as it has become available. The most recent research from Roy Morgan revealed that as of June 2017, Netflix was in 31.8 per cent of Australian homes, with a potential audience of just under 7.6 million users. According to Fairfax Media's 2016-17 annual report,Stan (which it co-owns with Nine Entertainment) had almost 800,000 active subscriptions. The Australian Home Entertainment Distributors Association does not measure the market for video on demand, but it does measure digital distribution via pay-to-view services such as Foxtel Box Office and iTunes. That market is now worth $206 million a year. That is up from $81.7 million in 2011. The most downloaded title, legally, in both physical and digital form, for the year to the end of September 2017 was Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Though digital sales are growing, declining revenue from physical sales of DVD and Blu-Ray means the home entertainment market as a whole is down significantly since its peak of $1.39 billion in 2009. In 2016, physical sales were worth $806 million, giving the industry a combined value of $1.12 billion. http://www.bendigoadvertiser.com.au/...survey-claims/ ![]() That Moment when UK Police Retweet an Illegal Stream of a Boxing Match with Porn During the Breaks Isobel Hamilton On Saturday night, Avon and Somerset police in the UK had something of a nightmare. One of the police department's official accounts retweeted an illegal stream of the boxing match between Anthony Joshua and Carlos Takam. This was brought to their attention by a concerned Twitizen. Hey @ASPoliceOST ... Do you realise you've just retweeted a link to an illegal stream of the boxing? pic.twitter.com/Jix7fFcTFP — Chris Kelly (@westdigitaled) October 28, 2017 Not straight away, it would seem: Still there. Fifteen minutes... — Chris Kelly (@westdigitaled) October 28, 2017 Not only was the stream itself illegal, between rounds it was showing pornography. Now 20 mins. And you don't want to know what they're showing instead of ads!! Anyone awake @ASPolice ? — Chris Kelly (@westdigitaled) October 28, 2017 @ASPoliceOST this tweet shows pornography before the boxing. Woman performing oral sex on man. Probably not what you want to be tweeting!! — Janet Govey (@Jan__G) October 28, 2017 Although not everyone was quite so conscientious. Would like to say thank you for the stream and for saving me the £19.99 Sky Box office fee — @Socialmediajon1 (@Socialmediajon1) October 28, 2017 The police account eventually noticed what was happening and removed the link. "We are aware that last night a spam link, containing inappropriate content, was accidentally retweeted on one of our official A&S Police Twitter accounts," a department spokesperson said in a statement. The post was made due to "human error", according to the statement. We all make mistakes, retweeting porn from a police account though, that's a biggie. Move over Ted Cruz. http://mashable.com/2017/10/30/uk-po...llegal-stream/ ![]() Calgary Police Cellphone Surveillance Device Must Remain Top Secret, Judge Rules Alleged gangsters Barakat Amer and Tarek El-Rafie were targets of the cellphone interception tool Meghan Grant A surveillance tool called an MDI device can tap cellphone signals and cull information from kilometres away, without ever being detected by the targeted users. To protect Calgary police investigative techniques, their controversial cellphone surveillance device will remain so secretive, not even the make and model can be released to the public, according to a court ruling released Monday. The judge's decision was given to lawyers in August but it took two-and-a-half months for them to agree on redactions, which appear throughout the 17-page decision. The MDI (Mobile Device Identifier) technology — which mimics cell towers and intercepts data from nearby phones — is controversial in part because in at least one Canadian case, prosecutors have taken watered down plea deals rather than disclose information related to the device. Barakat Amer and Tarek El-Rafie were arrested along with five others in 2016 as part of a major police gang investigation called Operation Hybrid. During the investigation, Amer and El-Rafie were the targets of several MDI deployments. Earlier this year, lawyers for the pair — who are headed to trial on 17 counts of attempted murder — argued they had a right to some evidence related to the device and the deployments. In this case, investigators said they gained no relevant evidence against the pair so they destroyed all of the data. Court of Queen's Bench Justice Glen Poelman initially agreed with defence lawyers Kelsey Sitar and Clayton Rice and granted them the right to question the CPS officer involved in using the MDI regarding its make, model, features and the circumstances that may or may not affect its use. But after Poelman's first ruling, prosecutor Brian Holtby invoked a section of the Canada Evidence Act that allowed the Crown to argue — at an in-camera hearing — that disclosing CPS investigative techniques would be contrary to public interest. Now, Poelman has ruled the police investigative techniques are privileged, and he prohibited the release of the make, model and software of the MDI as well as "any further information which would have the effect of disclosing the technique by which MDI obtains cellphone identifier information." Poelman noted in his unsealed decision that according to evidence from Sgt. Scott Campbell, CPS has used its MDI in 14 investigations and continues to use it. But the fight isn't over for defence lawyers, who will make further submissions that their clients' rights to a fair trial outweigh the police privilege. If Poelman agrees, and if the police and prosecution refuses to hand over the information, defence lawyers would seek to have the charges against their clients dropped. 36 Quebec charges stayed In recent years, RCMP have been so secretive about their use of the devices during investigations that in certain cases prosecutors have offered extreme plea deals and might have stayed charges rather than disclose information related to the technology. Last year, six Montreal gangsters originally charged with first-degree murder pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit murder, and another to accessory after the fact, after the Crown declined to disclose details of the technology to defence lawyers. In March, Quebec prosecutors stayed 36 charges against suspected members of the Montreal Mafia. The Crown said that decision was based on "many factors," but the move did raise speculation prosecutors were concerned about evidence gathered using MDI devices that would have to be handed over to defence lawyers. No other Canadian police agency, including the RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police or Winnipeg police, has disclosed the make and model of their devices. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgar...rder-1.4378981 ![]() Fine, OK, No Backdoors, Says Deputy AG. Just Keep PLAINTEXT Copies of Everyone's Messages Sure, that won’t go wrong at all Iain Thomson The US Deputy Attorney General has told business leaders that Uncle Sam won't demand mandatory backdoors in encryption – so long as companies can cough up an unencrypted copy of every message, call, photo or other form of communications they handle. Speaking at the 2017 North American International Cyber Summit in Detroit on Monday, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appeared to shift tack on his earlier position that end-to-end encryption systems, such as instant messengers and video call apps, should grant special access exclusively to crime investigators on demand. Tech giants are resisting weakening their strong end-to-end and filesystem crypto just to help cops and Feds arbitrarily decipher suspects' messages and files on devices. So, Rosenstein has another approach: let people send stuff encrypted as normal, but a plaintext copy of everything – from communications to files on devices – must be retained in an unencrypted form for investigators to delve into as needed. "Encryption serves a valuable purpose. It is a foundational element of data security and essential to safeguarding data against cyber-attacks. It is critical to the growth and flourishing of the digital economy, and we support it. I support strong and responsible encryption," he said. "I simply maintain that companies should retain the capability to provide the government unencrypted copies of communications and data stored on devices, when a court orders them to do so." Despite the fact that doing this would be a massive money and time suck, in terms of storage capacity and processing, it also kind of takes the point out of using encrypted conversations for privacy. It also means that any hacker who breaks into these archives would have access to the crown jewels of personal and corporate secrets. Mind you, that would surely never happen. We never come across stories about servers getting hacked, and certainly the government is immune from such incidents, especially where they involve staffers' fingerprints and security clearances. Rosenstein prefaced his suggestions with dire warnings about the effects of online crime. Since January 1 last year, there has been an average of 4,000 ransomware "attacks" a day, up 300 per cent on the previous year, he claimed, and said the FBI warned him ransomware infects more than 100,000 computers a day around the world. In other scary news, Rosenstein warned that botnets – commandeered internet-of-things devices – could end up crashing large chunks of the internet. Speaking of crashing, he also warned that hackers could launch devastating attacks against autonomous cars that could leave passengers injured or killed. He said that some CEOs had told him that they were reluctant to report hacking attacks to the authorities. Rosenstein said he understood those concerns but that it was vital for businesses to get in touch so that the perpetrators could be stopped from using the same attacks against others. "Many cyberattacks are directed by foreign governments. When you are up against the military or intelligence services of a foreign nation-state, you should have our federal government in your corner," he said. "By alerting law enforcement about a cyber incident, your organization performs a public service; it helps strengthen the cyber defenses of others. When law enforcement understands the details of an attack, we can promptly work on trying to apprehend the perpetrator, potentially before the next attack." https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/1...ext_deputy_ag/ ![]() BlackBerry CEO Promises To Try To Break Customers' Encryption If The US Gov't Asks Him To Tim Cushing The DOJ's reps -- along with the new FBI boss -- keep making noises about device encryption. They don't like it. What they want is some hybrid unicorn called "responsible encryption," which would keep bad guys out but let law enforcement in. The government has no idea how this is supposed to be accomplished, but it has decided to leave that up to the smart guys at tech companies. After all, tech companies are only in it for the money. The government, however, answers to a higher calling: public safety -- a form of safety that apparently has room for an increase in criminal activity and nefarious hacking. There's one cellphone company that's been conspicuously absent from these discussions. A lot of that conspicuous absence has to do with its conspicuous absence from the cellphone marketplace. Pretty much relegated to governments and enterprise users, Blackberry has been offering encrypted messaging for years. But it's been offering a different sort of encryption -- one it can remove if needed. Enterprise users hold their own encryption keys but individual nobodies have their encryption keys held by Blackberry. Blackberry would likely be held up as the "responsible encryption" poster boy by the DOJ if only it held enough marketshare to make an appreciable difference. Instead, it's of limited use to the DOJ and FBI. But that doesn't mean Blackberry isn't willing to submit multiple height bids whenever government says jump. Over the past couple of years, it has come to light Blackberry routinely decrypts messages for inquiring governments. Apparently, there's some sort of golden key law enforcement can use to access communications -- one multiple governments seem to have access to. There are still some unanswered questions about enterprise accounts -- the ones Blackberry doesn't hold the keys to. This poses the same problem for law enforcement that other, more popular phones do. But rather than point out the problems with the government's demands for "responsible encryption," Blackberry has irresponsibly chosen to proclaim its willingness to hack into its own customers' devices if the government asks. [CEO John] Chen, speaking at a press Q&A during the BlackBerry Security Summit in London on Tuesday, claimed that it wasn't so simple for BlackBerry to crack its own protections. "Only when the government gives us a court order we will start tracking it. Then the question is: how good is the encryption? "Today's encryption has got to the point where it's rather difficult, even for ourselves, to break it, to break our own encryption... it's not an easily breakable thing. We will only attempt to do that if we have the right court order. The fact that we will honor the court order doesn't imply we could actually get it done." Oddly, this came coupled with Chen's assertions its user protections were better than Apple's and its version of the Android operating system more secure than the one offered by competitors. This proactive hacking offer may be pointed to in the future by DOJ and FBI officials as evidence Apple, et al aren't doing nearly enough to cooperate with US law enforcement. Of course, Chen's willingness to try doesn't guarantee the company will be able to decrypt communications of certain users. But I'm sure Chen's positive attitude will be used as leverage in talks with tech companies the DOJ clearly believes have added encryption to their devices solely as a middle finger to US law enforcement. This belief clearly isn't true, but the DOJ in particular has already show it's willing to be completely disingenuous when arguing for weakened encryption. Finally, Blackberry may be opening up to law enforcement but it won't be sharing anything more with its remaining users. Chen also said there were no plans for a transparency report that would reveal more about the company's work with government. "No one has really asked us for it. We don't really have a policy on whether we will do it or not. Just like every major technology company that deals with telecoms, we obviously have quite a number of requests around the world." This seems a bit unfair. Blackberry will be offering more to the government and telling the public less. Then again, the general public is likely no more interested in a Blackberry transparency report than it is in Blackberry smartphones. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...s-him-to.shtml ![]() Vlad the Blockader: Russia's Anti-VPN Law Comes into Effect All the news that's fit to read – as decided by President Putin Kieren McCarthy A Russian law that bans the use or provision of virtual private networks (VPNs) will come into effect Wednesday. The legislation will require ISPs to block websites that offer VPNs and similar proxy services that are used by millions of Russians to circumvent state-imposed internet censorship. It was signed by President Vladimir Putin on July 29 and was justified as a necessary measure to prevent the spread of extremism online. Its real impact, however, will be to make it much harder for ordinary Russians to access websites ISPs are instructed to block connections to by Russian regulator Roskomnadzor, aka the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media. Among those banned websites are Wikipedia – placed on the list on the pretext that it contained information about taking drugs – and numerous pornographic websites, as well as some genuinely extremist outlets such as The Daily Stormer. But the bigger issue and concern are short-term bans that have been repeatedly placed on news websites when they report on topics that the Russian government considers sensitive. For example, during Russia's annexation of Crimea – an action that led to international condemnation and the imposition of sanctions – several Russian publications that criticized the move found themselves blacklisted. The regulator has also shut down significant online resources on the basis on one small issue: such as when it removed access to GitHub because some notes appeared somewhere on the sprawling service that outlined suicide methods (GitHub now publishes Russian government takedown requests). Roskomnadzor also cut off access to Amazon Web Services for several hours because it decided it didn’t like a poker app hosted somewhere on its systems. It gets worse The law is just one part of a concerted effort by the Russian government to restrict access to information online. While Russia does not appear to be going the same route as China – which has a country wide, constantly maintained censorship apparatus, known as the Great Firewall of China – it is clearly following its lead. At the same time as Putin signed the VPN legislation, he signed another that will come into effect in January. That law, like a similar one passed by the Chinese government earlier this year, will require operators of messaging services to verify their users' identities through phone numbers. And it will require operators to introduce systems to cut off any users that are deemed by the Russian government to be spreading illegal content. At the same time, Russia is using its sway at the United Nations to push a much more restrictive approach to the internet: something that many Western governments fear will lead to a gradual shutting down of the open internet. As with China, Russia constantly points to the threat of extremism and terrorism as reasons for introducing greater controls, but both countries have started expanding that control to cover social issues. China has decided it should block any information that does not reflect the country's "core socialist values" – something that swiftly led to it cutting off access to Japanese animations and South Korean soap operas as well as banning Justin Bieber from performing in the country due to his "bad behavior." And, of course, that censorship is frequently used to shut down dissenting voices, especially those that the political establishment fear pose a threat to them. The most stark, and depressing, recent example came when China deleted, in real time, images of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo as he was dying in a government-controlled hospital of liver cancer. Russia's internet crackdowns will also come into force just months ahead of a March 2018 election in which Vladimir Putin will run for a new six-year term. You can expect to see the new laws vigorously imposed against anyone challenging Putin's claim to perpetual power. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/1...s_into_effect/ ![]() Digital Hit List Shows Russian Hacking Went Well Beyond U.S. Elections Raphael Satter, Jeff Donn and Justin Myers The hackers who upended the U.S. presidential election had ambitions well beyond Hillary Clinton's campaign, targeting the emails of Ukrainian officers, Russian opposition figures, U.S. defense contractors and thousands of others of interest to the Kremlin, according to a previously unpublished digital hit list obtained by The Associated Press. The list provides the most detailed forensic evidence yet of the close alignment between the hackers and the Russian government, exposing an operation that stretched back years and tried to break into the inboxes of 4,700 Gmail users across the globe — from the pope's representative in Kiev to the punk band Pussy Riot in Moscow. "It's a wish list of who you'd want to target to further Russian interests," said Keir Giles, director of the Conflict Studies Research Center in Cambridge, England, and one of five outside experts who reviewed the AP's findings. He said the data was "a master list of individuals whom Russia would like to spy on, embarrass, discredit or silence." The AP findings draw on a database of 19,000 malicious links collected by cybersecurity firm Secureworks, dozens of rogue emails, and interviews with more than 100 hacking targets. Secureworks stumbled upon the data after a hacking group known as Fancy Bear accidentally exposed part of its phishing operation to the internet. The list revealed a direct line between the hackers and the leaks that rocked the presidential contest in its final stages, most notably the private emails of Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta. The issue of who hacked the Democrats is back in the national spotlight following the revelation Monday that a Donald Trump campaign official, George Papadopoulos, was briefed early last year that the Russians had "dirt" on Clinton, including "thousands of emails." Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the notion that Russia interfered "unfounded." But the list examined by AP provides powerful evidence that the Kremlin did just that. "This is the Kremlin and the general staff," said Andras Racz, a specialist in Russian security policy at Pazmany Peter Catholic University in Hungary, as he examined the data. "I have no doubts." THE NEW EVIDENCE Secureworks' list covers the period between March 2015 and May 2016. Most of the identified targets were in the United States, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia and Syria. In the United States, which was Russia's Cold War rival, Fancy Bear tried to pry open at least 573 inboxes belonging to those in the top echelons of the country's diplomatic and security services: then-Secretary of State John Kerry, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, then-NATO Supreme Commander, U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, and one of his predecessors, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark. The list skewed toward workers for defense contractors such as Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin or senior intelligence figures, prominent Russia watchers and — especially — Democrats. More than 130 party workers, campaign staffers and supporters of the party were targeted, including Podesta and other members of Clinton's inner circle. The AP also found a handful of Republican targets. Podesta, Powell, Breedlove and more than a dozen Democratic targets besides Podesta would soon find their private correspondence dumped to the web. The AP has determined that all had been targeted by Fancy Bear, most of them three to seven months before the leaks. "They got two years of email," Powell recently told AP. He said that while he couldn't know for sure who was responsible, "I always suspected some Russian connection." In Ukraine, which is fighting a grinding war against Russia-backed separatists, Fancy Bear attempted to break into at least 545 accounts, including those of President Petro Poroshenko and his son Alexei, half a dozen current and former ministers such as Interior Minister Arsen Avakov and as many as two dozen current and former lawmakers. The list includes Serhiy Leshchenko, an opposition parliamentarian who helped uncover the off-the-books payments allegedly made to Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort — whose indictment was unsealed Monday in Washington. In Russia, Fancy Bear focused on government opponents and dozens of journalists. Among the targets were oil tycoon-turned-Kremlin foe Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who spent a decade in prison and now lives in exile, and Pussy Riot's Maria Alekhina. Along with them were 100 more civil society figures, including anti-corruption campaigner Alexei Navalny and his lieutenants. "Everything on this list fits," said Vasily Gatov, a Russian media analyst who was himself among the targets. He said Russian authorities would have been particularly interested in Navalny, one of the few opposition leaders with a national following. Many of the targets have little in common except that they would have been crossing the Kremlin's radar: an environmental activist in the remote Russian port city of Murmansk; a small political magazine in Armenia; the Vatican's representative in Kiev; an adult education organization in Kazakhstan. "It's simply hard to see how any other country would be particularly interested in their activities," said Michael Kofman, an expert on Russian military affairs at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington. He was also on the list. "If you're not Russia," he said, "hacking these people is a colossal waste of time." WORKING 9 TO 6 MOSCOW TIME Allegations that Fancy Bear works for Russia aren't new. But raw data has been hard to come by. Researchers have been documenting the group's activities for more than a decade and many have accused it of being an extension of Russia's intelligence services. The "Fancy Bear" nickname is a none-too-subtle reference to Russia's national symbol. In the wake of the 2016 election, U.S. intelligence agencies publicly endorsed the consensus view, saying what American spooks had long alleged privately: Fancy Bear is a creature of the Kremlin. But the U.S. intelligence community provided little proof, and even media-friendly cybersecurity companies typically publish only summaries of their data. That makes the Secureworks' database a key piece of public evidence — all the more remarkable because it's the result of a careless mistake. Secureworks effectively stumbled across it when a researcher began working backward from a server tied to one of Fancy Bear's signature pieces of malicious software. He found a hyperactive Bitly account Fancy Bear was using to sneak thousands of malicious links past Google's spam filter. Because Fancy Bear forgot to set the account to private, Secureworks spent the next few months hovering over the group's shoulder, quietly copying down the details of the thousands of emails it was targeting. The AP obtained the data recently, boiling it down to 4,700 individual email addresses, and then connecting roughly half to account holders. The AP validated the list by running it against a sample of phishing emails obtained from people targeted and comparing it to similar rosters gathered independently by other cybersecurity companies, such as Tokyo-based Trend Micro and the Slovakian firm ESET. The Secureworks data allowed reporters to determine that more than 95 percent of the malicious links were generated during Moscow office hours — between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday to Friday. The AP's findings also track with a report that first brought Fancy Bear to the attention of American voters. In 2016, a cybersecurity company known as CrowdStrike said the Democratic National Committee had been compromised by Russian hackers, including Fancy Bear. Secureworks' roster shows Fancy Bear making aggressive attempts to hack into DNC technical staffers' emails in early April 2016 — exactly when CrowdStrike says the hackers broke in. And the raw data enabled the AP to speak directly to the people who were targeted, many of whom pointed the finger at the Kremlin. "We have no doubts about who is behind these attacks," said Artem Torchinskiy, a project coordinator with Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund who was targeted three times in 2015. "I am sure these are hackers controlled by Russian secret services." THE MYTH OF THE 400-POUND MAN Even if only a small fraction of the 4,700 Gmail accounts targeted by Fancy Bear were hacked successfully, the data drawn from them could run into terabytes — easily rivaling the biggest known leaks in journalistic history. For the hackers to have made sense of that mountain of messages — in English, Ukrainian, Russian, Georgian, Arabic and many other languages — they would have needed a substantial team of analysts and translators. Merely identifying and sorting the targets took six AP reporters eight weeks of work. The AP's effort offers "a little feel for how much labor went into this," said Thomas Rid, a professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. He said the investigation should put to rest any theories like the one then-candidate Donald Trump floated last year that the hacks could be the work of "someone sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds." "The notion that it's just a lone hacker somewhere is utterly absurd," Rid said. Donn reported from Plymouth, Massachusetts. Myers reported from Chicago. Chad Day, Desmond Butler and Ted Bridis in Washington, Frank Bajak in Houston, Lori Hinnant in Paris, Maggie Michael in Cairo and Erika Kinetz in Shanghai contributed to this report. Novaya Gazeta reporters Nikolay Voroshilov, Yana Surinskaya and Roman Anin in Moscow also contributed. http://www.courant.com/nation-world/...102-story.html ![]() Facebook, Google and Twitter Will Tell Congress that Russia’s Election Meddling was Wider than they First Reported The companies will reveal new data about the Kremlin’s disinformation at congressional hearings this week. Tony Romm and Kurt Wagner Facebook, Google and Twitter plan to tell congressional investigators this week that the scope of Russia’s campaign to spread disinformation on their sites — and to potentially disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential race — is much broader than the companies initially reported. At Facebook, roughly 126 million users in the United States may have seen posts, stories or other content created by Russian government-backed trolls around Election Day, according to a source familiar with the company’s forthcoming testimony to Congress. Previously, Facebook had only shared information on ads purchased by Kremlin-tied accounts, revealing that they reached more than 10 million U.S. users. Google, which previously had not commented on its internal investigation, will break its silence: In a forthcoming blog post, the search giant confirmed that it discovered about $4,700 worth of search-and-display ads with dubious Russian ties. It also reported 18 YouTube channels associated with the Kremlin’s disinformation efforts, as well as a number of Gmail addresses that “were used to open accounts on other platforms.” And Twitter will tell Congress that it found more than 2,700 accounts tied to a known Russian-sponsored organization called the Internet Research Agency, according to sources familiar with its testimony. Twitter initially informed lawmakers about just 200 known accounts. The company will also release a new study that shows the extent to which Russian-based automated accounts, or bots, of all sorts tweet on its platform. In sharing these findings with congressional investigators, the three tech giants plan to emphasize that Russian-fostered disinformation — while troubling — amounted to only a small portion of the ads and other content published regularly on their platforms. Facebook, for example, hopes to highlight that its U.S. users are served more than 200 stories in their News Feeds each day, according to a source familiar with its thinking. Still, the companies’ explanations may not satisfy an ever-expanding chorus of critics on Capitol Hill. Lawmakers are increasingly demanding that Facebook, Google and Twitter step up their efforts to counter the Kremlin’s attempts to sow political and social discord — or else face more regulation by the U.S. government. For the tech industry, the first test comes on Tuesday: A crime- and terrorism-focused committee led by Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham will grill Colin Stretch, the general counsel of Facebook; Richard Salgado, the director of law enforcement and information security at Google; and Sean Edgett, the acting general counsel of Twitter. On Wednesday, Facebook’s Stretch and Twitter’s Edgett will return to the Capitol and submit to two back-to-back sessions before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. There, they’ll be joined by Kent Walker, the general counsel of Google. Upon entering the hearings, these tech giants each pledged to improve their handling of political advertising — seemingly in a bid to stave off congressional scrutiny. Facebook and Twitter, for example, in October promised more manual review of those ads, along with greater disclosure as to who is paying for them in the first place. And Google newly revealed on Monday that it would do the same. The company announced that it sought to create a new database for election ads purchased on AdWords and YouTube, along with stronger disclosure rules as well as a new ad transparency report due in 2018. Google also said it would also put in place new procedures to verify that advertisers running political ads are based in the U.S. But lawmakers’ concerns aren’t limited to ads. Members of Congress also are likely to press some tech executives on their handling of organic posts — the stories, status updates or other content published and shared on social-media sites without cost. In many ways, this content is harder to identify, and at times it is impossible to regulate in a way that doesn’t trigger free-speech concerns. At Facebook, for example, Russian trolls created 80,000 pieces of organic content between January 2015 and August 2017, the company plans to tell lawmakers at the hearing. About 29 million Americans saw those posts directly in their News Feed over that two-year period. And those users also liked, shared and followed these posts and pages, exposing them to their friends — meaning 126 million U.S. users in total might have seen at least some Russian-generated content, according to a source familiar with the findings. On Instragram, meanwhile, Facebook deleted roughly 170 accounts tied to Russian trolls that posted about 120,000 pieces of content, the company plans to reveal in its testimony. Taken together, those organic posts had a much greater reach than the 3,000 ads purchased by Russian agents on Facebook around Election Day. In October, the company provided key congressional committees with copies of the ads, which sought to sow social and political unrest around contentious topics, including immigration and Black Lives Matter. Muck like its peers, though, Facebook plans to stress to U.S. lawmakers that the activity represents only a fraction of what happens on its site daily. Russian-generated disinformation during the election amounted to four-thousandths (0.004) of one percent of content in the News Feed, according to a source familiar with the company’s findings. Google, meanwhile, plans to tell Congress that it “found only limited activity on our services,” wrote general counsel Walker and Salgado, a company security executive, in a blog post published before the hearing. Initially, sources had flagged $4,700 in ad spending by Russia’s so-called Internet Research Agency, and Google finally confirmed the number Monday. In doing so, it said search and display ads were not targeted based on users’ geography or political preferences. Its audit of YouTube, meanwhile, turned up 18 channels tied to Russian trolls, which had uploaded 1,108 videos. Google did not provide a total number of views for these videos, but did say that only 3 percent of them had more than 3,000 views. Yet one of Google’s biggest challenges — much like Facebook and Twitter — is its handling of organic content, including videos uploaded by RT, a Russian government-funded news network. Called a propaganda arm of the Kremlin, RT videos have millions of views on YouTube. In Google’s investigation, however, the tech giant said it “found no evidence of manipulation of our platform or policy violations.” As a result, Google said that RT and other state-sponsored media outlets are still “subject to our standard rules.” Twitter, for its part, recently banned RT from advertising on its platform, though the publication is still allowed to tweet there. Facebook has announced no change. For its part, Twitter plans to unveil two new key findings during its testimony to Congress, sources told Recode on Monday. Chief among them: The company’s acting general counsel, Edgett, will note that the company had discovered — and suspended — roughly 2,752 accounts tied to known Kremlin trolls. Initially, Twitter pegged this number at about 200 accounts. And while the company at the time described it as an early estimate, it still faced sharp criticism from lawmakers like Sen. Mark Warner, who charged that the company hadn’t done an exhaustive investigation. Twitter also sought to study election-related tweets sent between Sept. 1 and Nov. 15, 2016. Among a pool of 189 million tweets, the company identified about 1.4 million sent by automated Russian-affiliated accounts. In Twitter’s estimation, that’s less than three-quarters of a percent of all of the election-sampled tweets sent using its service over a roughly two-month window — and Edgett will stress they “underperformed” in generating impressions on the site when compared to an average, normal tweet. In contrast, Twitter also noted that tweets from accounts including Wikileaks tended to benefit from significantly more engagement by Russian bots. https://www.recode.net/2017/10/30/16...tion-fake-news ![]() Facebook Says 126 Million Americans May have Seen Russia-Linked Political Posts David Ingram Facebook Inc (FB.O) said on Monday that Russia-based operatives published about 80,000 posts on the social network over a two-year period in an effort to sway U.S. politics and that about 126 million Americans may have seen the posts during that time. Facebook’s latest data on the Russia-linked posts - possibly reaching around half of the U.S. population of voting age - far exceeds the company’s previous disclosures. It was included in written testimony provided to U.S. lawmakers, and seen by Reuters, ahead of key hearings with social media and technology companies about Russian meddling in elections on Capitol Hill this week. Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) separately has found 2,752 accounts linked to Russian operatives, a source familiar with the company’s written testimony said. That estimate is up from a tally of 201 accounts that Twitter reported in September. Google, owned by Alphabet Inc (GOOGL.O), said in a statement on Monday it had found $4,700 in Russia-linked ad spending during the 2016 U.S. election cycle, and that it would build a database of election ads. Executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google are scheduled to appear before three congressional committees this week on alleged Russian attempts to spread misinformation in the months before and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Russian government has denied any attempts to sway the election, in which President Donald Trump, a Republican, defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. Facebook’s general counsel, Colin Stretch, said in the written testimony that the 80,000 posts from Russia’s Internet Research Agency were a tiny fraction of content on Facebook, equal to one out of 23,000 posts. However, the posts violated Facebook’s terms of service, and any amount of such activity using fake accounts is too much, Stretch wrote. “These actions run counter to Facebook’s mission of building community and everything we stand for. And we are determined to do everything we can to address this new threat,” he wrote. The 80,000 posts were published between June 2015 and August 2017. Most of them focused on divisive social and political messages such as race relations, Facebook said. Twitter’s revised estimate of how many Russia-linked accounts were on its service comes a month after an influential Democratic senator, Mark Warner, slammed it for what he called an insufficient investigation. Twitter has suspended all 2,752 accounts that it tracked to Russia’s Internet Research Agency, and it has given U.S. congressional investigators the account names, the source familiar with the company’s testimony said. “State-sanctioned manipulation of elections by sophisticated foreign actors is a new challenge for us - and one that we are determined to meet,” Twitter said in written testimony, according to the source. Reporting by David Ingram in Washington; Editing by Leslie Adler and Mary Milliken https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKBN1D014V ![]() With Huge Fines, German Law Pushes Social Networks To Delete Abusive Posts Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson Morning Edition, • Like the United States, Germany is grappling with fake news and hate speech and what to do about it. For decades, it has banned incitement, defamation, and phrases and symbols from the Nazi era. But the lines have been a lot murkier when the offenses in question are on the Internet. Chancellor Angela Merkel's governing coalition tried to address the discrepancy this year with a controversial "Network Enforcement Law," which the German parliament passed on June 30, and which quietly went into effect on Oct. 1. Under the measure — touted by many as the toughest law of its kind in the Western world — social media companies that have at least 2 million users in Germany, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, can be fined as much as 50 million euros ($58.3 million) if they fail to delete comments and posts that are deemed to violate German law. In clear-cut cases, the time that the platforms have to remove the offending material can be as little as 24 hours. Gerd Billen, state secretary at the German Justice Ministry, which is in charge of monitoring compliance with the new law, said there will be a grace period until at least Jan. 1 to give companies time to come up with plans and hire staff to implement the new law. German lawyer Chan-jo Jun said he believes the new law would have helped his client, Syrian refugee Anas Modamani. Last March, Modamani, 20, lost a high-profile case against Facebook, in which he wanted the company to stop users from reposting a selfie he had taken with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015. The photo was being altered and used repeatedly in fake news stories on Facebook, falsely linking him to the deadly Christmas market attack last December in Berlin and the attempted murder a few days later of a homeless man. The Wuerzburg court ruled March 7 that Facebook wasn't responsible for the distribution or removal of the photo under German or European laws. The new law "would have made a difference for us," Jun said. "I think the trial would not have been necessary because under the network law, Facebook would have been obliged to delete the content in the first place." A complex effort for "critical influencers of public and private opinion" Facebook declined to be interviewed, but said in an emailed statement: "We appreciate that this is a very difficult situation for Mr. Modamani. That is why we quickly disabled access to content that has been accurately reported to us by Mr. Modamani's legal representatives, and will continue to respond quickly to valid reports of the content at issue from Mr. Modamani's legal representatives." Some of the altered photos and false claims about Modamani are still visible on at least one account on Facebook. Facebook also said in the statement that it "shared the goal of the German government to fight hate-speech" and has made "substantial progress in removing illegal content." But it also noted that implementing the law would be complex. The company declined to say how many people it would hire to comply with the new German law. Billen estimated the number to be about 170-180 employees for Facebook, but said his ministry hasn't received planning or hiring details from Google or Twitter yet. The Justice Ministry is hiring 40 people, including prosecutors, psychologists and clerks, to review what the companies are doing and deal with what Billen estimates will be 25,000 to 30,000 complaints a year from German users. Not every nasty post or comment will be punishable under the new law, Billen said: "If one were to say 'the chancellor is stupid,' then it's not a nice or smart statement, but it's not punishable by law. But if one were to say: 'Mrs. Merkel on X day during her Berlin appearance should have her head cut off,' that could be considered a crime." Billen added the law is an important tool to bringing social media companies more in line with other media in terms of their responsibilities to the German public. "They are not just technology companies, but critical influencers of public and private opinion," he said. Relieving the symptoms, ignoring the disease? But many critics of the new law call it an assault on free speech that is more likely to increase censorship than to decrease fake news and hate speech. They predict the law will be challenged in court, and that the new German government could amend it as early as next year. Social media companies "should have some sort of regulation," said Volker Tripp, a lawyer and political managing director for the Berlin-based, non-profit consumer group called Digital Society. But he doesn't think the new law is it. "What it does is to put immense pressure on social networks by ordering them to come up with a legal evaluation of posts within a finite amount of time," he said. "Like they have to see within 24 hours whether a post is illegal or not. This just doesn't work." Nor does it get at the reasons why hate speech and fake news are growing in the first place, which has more to do with growing public mistrust in the German government's ability to address societal and economic issues, he said — including the impacts of globalization or the influx of more than a million migrants and asylum seekers in recent years. "Fake news, hate speech, bots ... they are just symptoms of a much deeper running problem," Tripp said. http://thin.npr.org/s.php?sId=561024666 ![]() Firefox is Getting a Tor-Based Security Upgrade Tristan Greene Mozilla is making Firefox a more private experience by taking cues from Tor, the browser of choice for those who dare to visit the dark web. The non-profit Mozilla Foundation will remove a “feature” called canvas fingerprinting from Firefox, which allows user-tracking across multiple sites without cookies, in it’s upcoming build. It’ll do this by imitating Tor browser, which was built on modified Firefox code and already blocks tracking. Canvas fingerprinting, which happens in every major browser, lets websites extrapolate your data — without asking permission — by tracking you across multiple sites with an amalgam of unique identifiers. This method doesn’t require you to carry any tokens or accept a cookie. This is great for advertisers and websites, but anyone opposed to having their data commoditized without being asked first may take exception. Mozilla doesn’t appear to care if advertisers make money, or if Facebook’s AI can figure out which ads you’re most likely to respond to, or if it’s making enemies in the FCC. The developers and artists at the Foundation working both directly on Firefox, and indirectly on other projects, all appear to share a common goal to get people aware of what’s happening with their own data, and empower them to gain control over how it’s used. Aside from bringing casual users one step closer to actual online anonymity with the next set of upgrades planned for Firefox, Mozilla developers also create tools to help us get control of our data, or at least show us how much is out there. One such tool is Data Selfie, created by Mozilla Fellow Hang Do Thi Duc, which gives you a clear picture of the kind of information you’re giving to Facebook. Speaking to TNW, she said: It’s a self reflection tool. I’m giving a lot away, it made me realize even more that Facebook was collecting all of this information about me and creating this image of who I was. Brett Gaylor, a film director and activist working with Mozilla, continued: Absolutely, I agree. The assumption it makes about my character – I didn’t volunteer that information. So it’s really fascinating to see the portrait Facebook is painting of me. One of his projects, Do Not Track, also tries to help people understand the vast reality of how much information we’re really putting out there. It’s an interactive documentary that explains how internet tracking works by using your own browsing history as an example. Talking with the talent at Mozilla makes it apparent, there’s a culture of “screw the status quo” – my words – that makes it a little easier to trust the Foundation’s ambition. They believe we need a “grassroots movement in order to save the internet” – their words. The foundation doesn’t have to worry about bottom-lines or quarterly profits in the way corporations do, and that gives them room to experiment in clicktivism. Clicktivism unleashed! Visit https://t.co/tntBwSaxe4 and tell EU Parliament you demand copyright reform. #internethealth pic.twitter.com/ajArd2ASBq — Mozilla (@mozilla) May 24, 2017 We need people like Hang Do Thi Duc and Brett Gaylor, and the rest of the Mozilla team, working to keep corporations from exploiting our privacy or governments from destroying the freedom we have on the internet. The new version of Firefox will be out in January, and we can certainly assume it’ll be free. https://thenextweb.com/security/2017...urity-upgrade/ ![]() Google Docs Is Randomly Flagging Files for Violating Its Terms of Service Let this serve as a reminder that you have less control over your stuff online than it often appears. Louise Matsakis Update: 3:21 PM EST: A Google spokesperson reached out via email with the following statement saying that the bug has been fixed: "This morning, we made a code push that incorrectly flagged a small percentage of Google Docs as abusive, which caused those documents to be automatically blocked. A fix is in place and all users should have full access to their docs. Protecting users from viruses, malware, and other abusive content is central to user safety. We apologize for the disruption and will put processes in place to prevent this from happening again." The original story follows below: Google Docs, the collaborative, cloud-based word processing software, appears to be randomly flagging files for supposedly "violating" Google's Terms of Service. A member of Motherboard's team, as well as numerous users on Twitter, report that their documents are being locked for no apparent reason. Once a document is flagged, the owner of that document can no longer share it with other users. Users who have already been shared on a document that's been flagged are kicked out and can no longer access it. When a draft Motherboard article was locked on Monday morning, a message took over the screen that read "This item has been flagged as inappropriate and can no longer be shared." It's not clear why this is happening, but it may be the result of a glitch in the system Google uses to monitor Google Docs. DownDetector is currently reporting Google Drive problems in the US and Europe, which may be part of the problem. When I reached out to Google about the problem, it said it was looking into it. "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Docs. We will provide more information when appropriate," a spokesperson told me in an email. One Google employee on Twitter, Corrie Davidson, who is a Senior Program Manager at Google according to her LinkedIn profile, also said the Docs team is looking into the issue. The official Google Docs Twitter account also tweeted that the potential bug was being examined. Google indexes your documents, which is what makes them searchable on Drive. There's nothing specific in the company's Privacy Policy about whether or not it is scanning Google Docs for information beyond this. I asked Google for information about what it collects about individual files and will update this post if I receive more information. Google's Privacy Policy States that its "automated systems analyze your content (including emails) to provide you personally relevant product features, such as customized search results, tailored advertising, and spam and malware detection." It's worth noting that until earlier this year, Google read users' emails in order to target advertisements (the tech was not used on G Suite business accounts). In June, the company announced it would continue to read your messages, but would stop using the data it collected to customize ads. No matter what's causing the Google Docs bug, the issue is a pertinent reminder that you don't really have control over the content you put on the internet. The documents you create and save on Google Drive are ultimately controlled by Google—even if they can feel like they belong to us. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...of-service-bug ![]() SoftBank Calling Off Talks to Merge Sprint, T-Mobile Share price of Japanese tech giant falls 5.8% in early Tokyo trading SoftBank Group plans to break off negotiations toward a merger between subsidiary Sprint and T-Mobile US amid a failure to come to terms on ownership of the combined entity, dashing the Japanese technology giant's hopes of reshaping the American wireless business. SoftBank is expected to approach T-Mobile owner Deutsche Telekom as early as Tuesday to propose ending the talks. They had reached a broad agreement to integrate T-Mobile and Sprint -- the third- and fourth-largest carriers in the U.S. -- and were ironing out such details as the ownership ratio. The German parent had insisted on a controlling stake, according to a source familiar with the situation. Some at SoftBank were initially amenable as long as the Japanese company retained some influence. But SoftBank's board discussed at a meeting Friday that the company would not give up control. The decision was made Monday to call the talks off. Sprint's position in the U.S. mobile market is weaker than its No. 4 ranking would suggest. The carrier sits well behind the top two of Verizon Communications and AT&T in scale and subscribers. The hope was that a merger with T-Mobile would reinforce Sprint's customer base enough to let it challenge the duopoly while allowing for more efficient network investment. SoftBank tried to buy T-Mobile in 2014, but the idea was abandoned amid opposition from regulators under then-President Barack Obama. The failure of this latest effort leaves Sprint, which was acquired by SoftBank in 2013, to keep working toward a turnaround on its own. In early morning trading in Tokyo, SoftBank shares fell to 9,830 yen, down 5.8% from Monday's closing price. The share price had risen to 10,550 yen on Monday, a 17-year high since the burst of the dot-com bubble. The shares closed the morning session at 9,921 yen, down 4.9%. "Investors were buying SoftBank partially on the merger hopes, so the news has a negative impact. It will be difficult to maintain the stock price over the 10,000 level," said Tomoaki Kawasaki, senior analyst at Iwai Cosmo Securities. https://asia.nikkei.com/Japan-Update...print-T-Mobile ![]() T-Mobile and Sprint Work to Save Merger Talks: WSJ Parent companies Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE) and SoftBank (9984.T) reached an impasse last week in their talks as SoftBank directors expressed doubts over giving up control of Sprint, sources told Reuters. However, the Wall Street Journal said that T-Mobile US has made a revised offer, which Sprint is considering. Terms of the offer were not disclosed. A Deutsche Telekom representative declined to comment. Under the previous deal structure, Deutsche Telekom would have controlled the new company, which would have merged the third and fourth-biggest U.S. mobile carriers. Deutsche Telekom shares were indicated 0.9 percent higher ahead of the Frankfurt market open, compared with a 0.3 percent expected rise for the German blue-chip DAX .GDAXI index. Reporting by Georgina Prodhan and Tom Sims; Editing by David Goodman http://www.reuters.com/article/us-sp...-idUSKBN1D30JO ![]() Verizon Wants FCC to Ban States From Protecting Your Privacy Karl Bode Verizon was one of several giant ISPs that paid lobbied the GOP and Trump administration to gut consumer broadband privacy rules earlier this year. Lawmakers admitted they utilized the public's focus on losing health care to quickly dismantle the rules, which would have required ISPs be more transparent about what personal data is collected and sold, and provide working opt out tools for those interested in privacy. The rules were crafted after Verizon was caught covertly tracking users around the internet and AT&T tried to make privacy a luxury option for an additional fee. After killing the rules, numerous states came forth with their own privacy proposals, and ISP lobbyists have been busy trying to kill those, as well. Lobbyists for Google, Verizon, Comcast and AT&T collectively killed one such proposal in California, after falsely telling lawmakers the new law would embolden nazis, increase pop ups, and harm consumers. Now Verizon is taking things one step further, by lobbying the FCC to step in and prevent states from protecting consumer privacy. In a letter and white paper sent last week to the FCC (pdf), Verizon insists the FCC has ample authority to pre-empt state efforts to protect consumer privacy, and should act to prevent states from doing so. "Allowing every State and locality to chart its own course for regulating broadband is a recipe for disaster," cries Verizon. "It would impose localized and likely inconsistent burdens on an inherently interstate service, would drive up costs, and would frustrate federal efforts to encourage investment and deployment by restoring the free market that long characterized Internet access service." But there's several things Verizon is ignoring here. One being that the only reason states are trying to pass privacy laws is because Verizon lobbyists convinced former Verizon lawyer and FCC boss Ajit Pai that it was a good idea to kill the FCC's relatively modest rules. It's also worth noting that ISPs like Verizon (and the lawmakers paid to love them) have cried about protecting "states rights" when states try to pass protectionist laws hamstringing competitors, but in this case appears eager to trample those same state rights should states actually try and protect consumers. Verizon makes it abundantly clear it's also worried that when the FCC votes to kill net neutrality rules later this year, states will similarly try to pass their own rules protecting consumers, something Verizon clearly doesn't want. "States and localities have given strong indications that they are prepared to take a similar approach to net neutrality laws if they are dissatisfied with the result of the Restoring Internet Freedom proceeding," complains Verizon, again ignoring that its lawsuits are the reason that's happening. FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly has already stated he'd like to explore using the FCC's authority to prevent states from protecting consumers. At the time, O'Reilly attacked those defending privacy protections and net neutrality as part of a "progressive agenda to vanquish capitalism and economic liberty." https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/...Privacy-140625 ![]() AT&T Admits Defeat in Lawsuit it Filed to Stall Google Fiber Judge dismissed AT&T's lawsuit against Louisville, and company won't appeal. Jon Brodkin AT&T is reportedly abandoning its attempt to stop a Louisville ordinance that helped draw Google Fiber into the city. In February 2016, AT&T sued the local government in Louisville and Jefferson County, Kentucky to stop an ordinance that gives Google Fiber and other ISPs faster access to utility poles. A US District Court judge dismissed AT&T's lawsuit in August of this year, when he determined that AT&T's claims that the ordinance is invalid are false. There was still the question of whether AT&T would appeal the ruling, but WDRB News and Louisville Business First both quoted AT&T spokespeople as saying that the company has decided not to appeal. (We contacted AT&T today to confirm this but haven't heard back yet.) One Touch Make Ready Louisville's ordinance created a One Touch Make Ready system that lets an ISP make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles itself instead of having to wait for other providers like AT&T to send work crews to move their own wires. Without such rules, the pole attachment process can take months, making it more difficult for new ISPs to compete against incumbents. Google Fiber began taking signups in Louisville about two weeks ago. As it turns out, the Alphabet-owned ISP ended up burying the cables with a "microtrenching" strategy that is quicker than traditional underground fiber deployment. Still, Google Fiber could take advantage of the new pole attachment process to hang its fiber cables as it spreads through the city. Google Fiber may also use its fixed wireless technology to connect Louisville homes. Legal fights over One Touch Make Ready are not over. A lawsuit Charter filed against Louisville is still pending. Both AT&T and Comcast also filed suits against the Nashville metro government to stop a similar ordinance. But Louisville's victory over AT&T sends a message to other cities that "these problems can be dealt with at the local level," Ted Smith, co-chairman of the Mayor's Civic Innovation Advisory Council, said in the Louisville Business First article. "Local leadership can tackle these things and win." https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-google-fiber/ ![]() Another Million Subscribers Cut the Pay TV Cord Last Quarter Karl Bode Third quarter earnings data indicates that a million more US pay TV subscribers cut the TV cord last quarter. Only five of the seven biggest pay TV providers have released their third quarter subscriber data, but collectively these companies saw a net loss of 632,000 pay TV subscribers during the period (385,000 for AT&T and DirecTV, 125,000 for Comcast, 104,000 for Charter, 18.000 for Verizon FiOS TV). Dish has yet to report its own cord cutting tallies, but the company is again expected to be among the hardest hit due to a high level of retransmission fee feuds and a lack of broadband bundles. Also yet to report is Altice Communications, which now owns Optimum (formerly Cablevision) and Suddenlink. https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/...Quarter-140615 ![]() Hewlett-Packard Historical Archives Destroyed in Santa Rosa Fires Robert Digitale When deadly flames incinerated hundreds of homes in Santa Rosa’s Fountaingrove neighborhood earlier this month, they also destroyed irreplaceable papers and correspondence held nearby and once belonging to the founders of Silicon Valley’s first technology company, Hewlett-Packard. The Tubbs fire consumed the collected archives of William Hewlett and David Packard, the tech pioneers who in 1938 formed an electronics company in a Palo Alto garage with $538 in cash. More than 100 boxes of the two men’s writings, correspondence, speeches and other items were contained in one of two modular buildings that burned to the ground at the Fountaingrove headquarters of Keysight Technologies. Keysight, the world’s largest electronics measurement company, traces its roots to HP and acquired the archives in 2014 when its business was split from Agilent Technologies — itself an HP spinoff. The Hewlett and Packard collections had been appraised in 2005 at nearly $2 million and were part of a wider company archive valued at $3.3 million. However, those acquainted with the archives and the pioneering company’s impact on the technology world said the losses can’t be represented by a dollar figure. “A huge piece of American business history is gone,” said Brad Whitworth, who had been an HP international affairs manager with oversight of the archives three decades ago. He said Hewlett-Packard had been at the forefront of an industry “that has radically changed our world.” Karen Lewis, the former HP staff archivist who first assembled the collections, called it irresponsible to put them in a building without proper protection. Both Hewlett-Packard and Agilent earlier had housed the archives within special vaults inside permanent facilities, complete with foam fire retardant and other safeguards, she said. “This could easily have been prevented, and it’s a huge loss,” Lewis said. Keysight Technologies spokesman Jeff Weber acknowledged the destruction of the Hewlett and Packard collections, but he disputed the idea that the company had failed to adequately safeguard them. “Keysight took appropriate and responsible steps to protect the company archives, but the most destructive firestorm in state history prevented efforts to protect portions of the collection,” Weber said in an email. “This is a sad, unfortunate situation — like many others in Sonoma County now. This is a time to begin healing, not assigning blame.” He added the company “is saddened by the loss of documents that remind us of our visionary founders, rich history and lineage to the original Silicon Valley startup.” The flames that entered the Keysight campus on Oct. 9 were part of several wildfires that killed at least 23 residents and destroyed 6,800 homes and other buildings in the county. Among the structures consumed were two beige, flat-roof modular buildings near the Keysight entrance on Fountaingrove Parkway. The buildings, connected by an overhang to a permanent structure, held not only the archives but also a branch office of First Tech Federal Credit Union. The rest of Keysight’s campus survived with relatively minimal damage from the fire, CEO Ron Nersesian said on Oct. 10. The campus includes four permanent buildings and a recycling storage facility, together constituting nearly a million square feet of office and production space. The fire and its aftermath have kept the Fountaingrove facility closed for three weeks. The campus is undergoing disaster recovery work and may reopen for business this week with a limited number of Keysight’s 1,300 Santa Rosa employees, Weber said. Meanwhile, about 100 staff members have shifted to former HP facilities inside Rohnert Park’s Somo Village. That location could be outfitted for up to 900 staff members by early November, Weber said. Another 200 staff are now reporting to a facility in Petaluma. After their start in a Palo Alto garage, now a historic landmark dubbed “the Birthplace of Silicon Valley,” Hewlett and Packard found early success with the Walt Disney Company. The latter ordered eight audio oscillators to test speaker systems and other sound devices being used in 12 specially-equipped theaters in 1940 showing the animated film “Fantasia.” Hewlett Packard and other companies went on to produce testing and measurement devices that remain a largely unheralded part of the tech industry. But analysts and historians said the equipment proved crucial to the development of computers, cellphones and virtually every other device that plugs into a wall or uses a battery. HP later developed the first hand-held calculator and the first inkjet printer. It also expanded into making personal computers. Hewlett-Packard’s relationship with Santa Rosa dates back to 1972, when the company first began operations here. The company opened the Fountaingrove campus in 1975. The Sonoma County operations consistently focused on testing and measurement equipment, even as HP and later Agilent became a major employer, with 5,000 workers here by 2001. But after the dot-com bust, Agilent in 2004 shuttered its Rohnert Park plant and transferred most of its manufacturing overseas. By the time Hewlett-Packard arrived in Sonoma County, it had been in operation almost four decades and had gained a reputation for a less authoritarian management style aimed at unleashing employee creativity — a collegial approach that came to be known as the “HP Way.” The company and its founders also affected international affairs. Hewlett-Packard in 1985 became the first technology company to enter into a joint venture in China. And Packard, who temporarily left the company to become deputy secretary of defense in the first Nixon Administration, was known during the Cold War as a advocate of increased trade with Soviet bloc countries in order to foster world peace. Packard died in 1996 at age 83. Hewlett was 87 when he died in 2001. A few years before Hewlett-Packard’s 50th anniversary in 1988, Lewis was brought in to build an archive out of the boxes of company photos, writings and other materials. After reviewing the contents, she said, “I realized, ‘Oh my god, this is the history of Silicon Valley ... This is the history of the electronics industry.’” Raymond Price, a coauthor of “The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business Transformation,” said he received limited access to the company archives when researching the 2009 book. But he and coauthor Charles H. House would gladly have delved deeper into the collection of the two founders. “We would have killed to have had those records and to go through their personal papers,” said Price, a professor emeritus from the University of Illinois. For researchers, he said, the archives contained “such valuable insights into how companies grow.” “To me it’s just tragic,” he said of the destroyed collections. In 2005, an appraiser set the collection’s value at $3.3 million and called it one of the most historically significant company archives remaining outside of nonprofit institutions, Lewis said. She recalled that the appraiser had called its primary source material “of the highest possible historical value” for those researching the convergence of technology and business. Whitworth noted that HP specifically had Lewis oversee the design of a special archive room at the company’s Palo Alto headquarters. The archives, he said, “were a family treasure that was treated that way.” Lewis said the room was essentially a vault, a receptacle without windows. It was humidity controlled with no ultraviolet light and protected from fire by foam retardant. The archives, she said, received the same protection when moved to Agilent Technologies facilities and later when stored in a private site owned by a data storage company. The archives should have gone to Stanford University, where the founders were alumni, Lewis said. “These records belonged in the public trust,” she said. “They should not have stayed with a private corporation.” Instead, the archives were transferred in 2014 from a foundation controlled by Agilent to a similar nonprofit of Keysight. Both Weber and others suggested the archives came to Santa Rosa largely because Keysight considers its electronic measurement work in direct lineage to the original business of Hewlett and Packard. Some of the first HP devices are displayed in a heritage gallery inside one of the permanent buildings on the Keysight campus. Weber said only part of the total collection of HP materials was held at the Keysight facility. “A large portion of that collection stayed with HP during the HP/Agilent split in 1999,” Weber said. “Portions of it stayed with Agilent at the Keysight/Agilent split in 2014, and a small portion came to Keysight.” However, he acknowledged the materials burned included the personal collections of Hewlett and Packard. Lewis said those amounted to the heart of the archives and were valued by the appraiser together at $1.9 million. At the Fountaingrove facility, Weber said, “most of the archives were stored on metal shelving in archival quality folders inside damage-resistant archival boxes in a secure building with a sprinkler system.” He called those steps standard practice for archival collections. Whitworth said he doesn’t know what led to the Hewlett and Packard collections being stored in the modular buildings. “Regardless,” he said, “it was a mistake.” Those who care about HP’s history will be awaiting word about what key documents and materials remain elsewhere. “We can hope that something was salvaged,” Whitworth said. “But we’re going to be missing volumes.” http://www.pressdemocrat.com/busines...ight-destroyed ![]() How We Find Our Way to the Dead Peter Mansea I don’t believe in ghosts, but I see them all the time. Social media gets spookier every day. Among Facebook’s more than 40 million deceased users, an acquaintance who passed away two years ago has a profile page that remains quite active. Dozens of people who knew her post memories and emoji hearts, speaking to the dead woman as if she were only as near or as far as we all are these days — out there somewhere, behind another screen. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly a fifth of Americans believe they have “seen or been in the presence of” a wandering soul; nearly a third report that “they have felt in touch with someone who has already died.” Polls from the past suggest such numbers hold steady across the generations. To be captivated by the uncanny has been a national pastime at least since Washington Irving celebrated the “fearful pleasure” of listening to tales of “haunted fields, and haunted brooks, and haunted bridges, and haunted houses.” But now it seems we are experiencing something new. Today even skeptics live in the presence of the departed, the disembodied and the illusory — internet shadows that are no less influential for not being real. Technology makes such eerie interactions possible, and that’s the paradox of the pervasive presence of scientific wonders in our daily lives: We carry futuristic fact-checking supercomputers in our pockets, but they don’t make us any less superstitious, susceptible to trickery or caught in the thrall of our deep-down Dark Ages tendencies. In fact, they seem to do the opposite, relocating our credulity to any new medium promising to bridge the gap that keeps us from whatever or whomever we’ve lost. The ubiquity of smartphones as access points to the collective cognitive realm some call the noosphere — from the Greek word “nous” for “mind” — perhaps makes our increased preoccupation with unseen powers inevitable. Yet this is not the first time radical advances in technology have creaked the attic door open for imaginary encounters. While we naturally think of spirits in spiritual terms, the ghosts of a culture are shaped equally by its machines. When Samuel Morse sent his first telegraph message between Baltimore and Washington in 1844 — the biblical verse “What hath God wrought” — among his most enthusiastic supporters were those who believed such missives could be transmitted not just across great distances, but to and from the great beyond. In the middle of the 19th century, the rise of Spiritualism, the belief that the living can communicate with the dead, was bound up with the era’s astonishing technological developments. The first nationally known Spiritualists, Leah, Kate and Maggie Fox of Hydesville, N.Y., explicitly compared their interactions with the dead to electric pulses sent along a wire. “God’s Telegraph,” the eldest Fox sister said, “antedated that of Samuel F. B. Morse.” Believers soon started a newspaper called The Spiritual Telegraph, “devoted to the illustration of spiritual intercourse,” while another leading Spiritualist, Andrew Jackson Davis (known as the Seer of Poughkeepsie), claimed that séances were most effective when participants were joined together by a copper cord. Before the trans-Atlantic telegraph cable, Davis proposed that the quickest way to send messages across the ocean would be through a system of spiritual switchboards, in which the living in New York would convey a message to the American dead, who would pass it on to the dead of England, who in turn would make reports to the living of London. The founder of The New-York Tribune, Horace Greeley, was rumored to be so taken by this idea that he sought Spiritualist correspondents. Unfortunately for Greeley, it was noted at the time that “the spirits utterly refuse to serve the press.” The telegraph was not alone as an unlikely stimulant of “spiritual intercourse.” With understanding of electricity growing across the country, believers in invisible forces argued that it buttressed their claims. Mediums called themselves “batteries,” essential for supplying the power needed to send the longest of long-distance communiqués. Photography, too, with its promise of producing images depicting details hidden to the naked eye, offered ghost hunters a new and powerful tool. In the wake of the Civil War’s unprecedented loss of life, a mania for spectral images seized the nation when the photographer William Mumler claimed he could capture the souls of the dead with his camera. First in Boston and then in New York, Mumler convinced many that portrait sessions in his studio were attended by the spirits of paying customers’ lamented spouses, children and friends. Mumler’s high-profile arrest for fraud put Spiritualism on trial in the courts and the public square. Though he had been caught red-handed selling a “spirit photograph” to a New York City marshal, his lawyer mounted an ingenious defense, appealing both to the precedent of spirits appearing in the Bible and to the growing faith in technology’s ability to accomplish the impossible. “The taking of these pictures,” Mumler’s attorney argued, “is a new feature in photography, yet in its infancy surely, but gradually and slowly progressing to greater perfection in the future, requiring for such perfection time and a scientific knowledge of the power that is operating.” After his surprise acquittal, Mumler went on to take his most infamous picture: a portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln posed with the alleged spirit of the murdered president. Belief that the dead took forms waiting to be discovered was not a fringe view but a commonly held religious position. Some estimates made in the 1860s put the number of Americans with Spiritualist sympathies over 10 million — a third of the population. The pace at which new technologies became part of the 19th-century landscape helps explain why. The telegraph, electricity, photography: All of it was new. All of it was baffling. All of it seemed utterly fantastic until suddenly it was everywhere, making it difficult for many to separate genuine marvels from showmanship and sham. The spiritual confusion prompted by these innovations played out for decades. In 1843, when Morse petitioned the federal government to support the telegraph, a congressman argued that if the government provided resources to explore sending electric messages, it ought to fund the pseudoscience of mesmerism as well. In 1869, a State Supreme Court judge and several legitimate photographers testified on Mumler’s behalf, all noting that it had not been proved that photography could not do what he claimed. In our own technology-haunted times, it’s worth asking how our lives both online and offline will soon be influenced by discoveries and manipulations far beyond what we can currently imagine. One hopes that future citizens of the noosphere will see through the kinds of digital deceptions we endure today as easily as we might debunk a spirit photograph. Until then, we can only wait for our ability to detect invented entities to catch up with our talent for creating them. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/28/o...s-culture.html Until next week, - js. ![]() Current Week In Review ![]() Recent WiRs - October 28th, October 21st, October 14th, October 7th 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
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