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Old 20-08-14, 07:22 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 23rd, '14

Since 2002


































"Our existence was a direct response to the closure of Snowden’s email service Lavabit." – Bill Franklin, Lavaboom


"The Karnataka Government passed a legislature which allows the authorities to arrest a person even before he/she has committed an offence under the IT Act." – Riddhi Mukherjee






































August 23rd, 2014




Anti-Piracy Outfit Wants to Hijack Browsers Until Fine Paid
Andy

Piracy monetization service Rightscorp has provided investors with details of its end game with cooperative ISPs. Initially service providers are asked to forward notices to subscribers with requests for $20.00 settlements, but the eventual plan is to hijack the browsers of alleged pirates until they've actually paid up.

Many rightsholders around the world are looking for ways to cut down on Internet piracy and US-based Rightscorp thinks it has an attractive solution.

The company monitors BitTorrent networks for infringement, links IP addresses to ISPs, and then asks those service providers to forward DMCA-style notices to errant subscribers. Those notices have a sting in the tail in the shape of a $20 settlement demand to make supposed lawsuits go away. The company says 75,000 cases have been settled so far with copyright holders picking up $10 from each.

Earlier this year the company reported that its operation cost $2,134,843 to run in 2013, yet it brought in just $324,016, a shortfall of more than $1.8 million. With the second quarter of 2014 now in the bag, Rightscorp has been reporting again to investors. TorrentFreak has seen a transcript of an August 13 conference call which contains some interesting facts.

In pure revenue terms the company appears to be doing better, $440,414 during the first six months of 2014. However, operating costs were $1.8m compared to $771,766 in the same period last year. Bottom line – the company lost $1.4m in the first six months of 2014.

Still, Rightscorp is pushing on. It now represents the entire BMG catalog, plus artists belonging to the Royalty Network such as Beyonce, Calvin Harris and Kanye West. And, as previously reported, it’s now working with 140 ISPs, some of which are apparently disconnecting repeat infringers.

Interestingly, and despite the ISP removing settlement demands from infringement notices, Comcast subscribers are apparently handing cash over to Rightscorp too. How this is being achieved wasn’t made clear.

What is clear is that Rightscorp is determined to go after “Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Cable Vision and one more” in order to “get all of them compliant” (i.e forwarding settlement demands). The company predicts that more details on the strategy will develop in the fall, but comments from COO & CTO Robert Steele hint on how that might be achieved.

“So we start in the beginning of the ISP relationship by demanding the forwarding of notices and the terminations,” Steele told investors.

“But where we want to end up with our scalable copyright system is where it’s not about termination, it’s about compelling the user to make the payment so that they can get back to browsing the web.”

Steele says the trick lies in the ability of ISPs to bring a complete halt to their subscribers’ Internet browsing activities.

“So every ISP has this ability to put up a redirect page. So that’s the goal,” he explained.

“[What] we really want to do is move away from termination and move to what’s called a hard redirect, like, when you go into a hotel and you have to put your room number in order to get past the browser and get on to browsing the web.”

The idea that mere allegations from an anti-piracy company could bring a complete halt to an entire household or business Internet connection until a fine is paid is less like a “piracy speeding ticket” and more like a “piracy wheel clamp”, one that costs $20 to have removed.

Except that very rarely are Rightscorp looking for just $20.

According to comments Steele made to investors, “very few” people targeted by his company pay a fine of just $20, even though that’s what most of them believe to be the case after Googling the company.

“[For] most people, piracy is a lifestyle, and so most people are getting multiple notices,” Steele explained. “So we’re closing cases everyday for $300, $400, $500 because people got multiple notices.”

One of the ways Rightscorp achieves these inflated settlements is by having a headline settlement fee of $20, but not applying that to a full album. By charging $20 for each and every album track, costs begin to climb.

So, while someone receiving an initial infringement notice might think the matter can be solved by paying $20, after contacting the company they realize the matter is much more serious than first believed. At this point the company knows the name and address of the target, something they didn’t initially know. Now the pressure is really on to settle.

Finally, we come to the question of success rates. We know that 75,000 cases have been settled overall, but how many people have simply ignored Rightscorp notices and moved on. One investor indirectly asked that question, but without luck.

“At the moment we consider that trade secret,” Steele said.
http://torrentfreak.com/anti-piracy-...e-paid-140816/





Leaked Movie About Kicking Butt Vanishes From File-Sharing Sites After Butt-Kicking From Courts
Kate Cox

For decades, we’ve all been sitting through FBI warnings before our movies. Those warnings tell us that sharing media is very wrong, piracy is bad, and we will all get into trouble for doing it. So the operators of file-sharing torrent sites know they might end up on risky legal ground. But what they might not expect is to have their websites removed from the internet for them before they even know they’re being sued.

News site TorrentFreak points to two different instances this week of copyright holders aggressively chasing down suspected infringers, and courts being happy to play along.

The first involves film studio Lionsgate, and their new action flick The Expendables 3. A high-quality leak of the movie first hit torrent sites a month before release, and immediately got snapped up over 100,000 times.

In response, fearing for their profits, Lionsgate issued thousands of takedown requests and filed lawsuits against six major file-sharing sites.

To be fair, Lionsgate was right to worry about their movie’s ability to make money. The film did not do well with its opening box-office numbers, coming in fourth on its first weekend out. It was out-performed by Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (which opened two weeks ago), Guardians of The Galaxy (opened three weeks ago), and Let’s Be Cops (new in theaters).

However, piracy may not be the biggest driver behind those low box-office numbers. After all, Game of Thrones is the most-pirated show on television, but still is extremely successful ratings-wise. That The Expendables 3 currently sits at a ripe, mushy 35% on Rotten Tomatoes is probably the bigger contributor to its poor performance.

This isn’t Lionsgate’s first foray into lawsuit territory. The first Expendables movie also leaked, back in 2011, and 23,000 BitTorrent users got sued over it.

This time around, Lionsgate is wasting no time going after the distributors of their content. A court in California had granted Lionsgate an injunction that basically let them go in and stop the file-sharing sites themselves. And the injunction applies not only to the torrent sites, but also to “all companies that provide services to or in connection with the sites,” as TorrentFreak explains, which includes hosting services and domain name registration. The sites also had all their assets frozen.

That was August 8, eleven days ago. And by now, the torrents have indeed nearly all vanished, according to TorrentFreak. But the effects from the current wave of lawsuits have spread out farther than just the file-sharing sites. Not only have the torrent sites all pulled the files (with no new seeds taking their place), but also torrents of the film have virtually disappeared from Google search results.

TorrentFreak notes that this wide-ranging and immediate legal response to a piece of pirated media hasn’t been seen before. However, something like it is already being seen again. And it’s not just American companies going gung-ho for lawsuits, either.

In a separate incident, a Philippine company has filed suits in federal court in Oregon against a dozen file-sharing sites. As TorrentFreak reports, the company, ABS-CBN, requested a temporary restraining order against the sites.

The request was sealed, and the sites being sued had no idea they were being sued until suddenly the court agreed to have them taken offline. The temporary restraining order “allows the media company to order hosting companies to take down the servers, domain registrars to seize the domain names, and search engines to remove all results linking to the sites,” according to TorrentFreak.

ABS-CBN was also granted access to the sites’ webmaster tools, in order to prevent any of them from redirecting their traffic to other domains and continuing operation. The company has redirected all of the sites to a copy of the legal complaint, and none of the URLs now appear in Google search results.

So in two separate instances, in two different courts in two different states, private companies have now essentially erased the sites they are suing from the internet — before the cases can actually be heard out and take place.

The shotgun approach to copyright infringement can have unintended consequences. TorrentFreak also points out that takedown requests seeking to limit the leak of The Expendables 3 not only targeted torrents and torrent sites but also targeted news sites that ran stories about the leak — and even included the movie’s official website on the list of URLs that were supposedly up to no good.
http://consumerist.com/2014/08/19/le...g-from-courts/





You Can Now be Arrested for Sharing “Objectionable” Content in Karnataka
Riddhi Mukherjee

The Karnataka Police recently issued a warning to citizens of Belgaum in North Karnataka informing them that uploading, modifying, resending and liking malicious or misleading images, videos and messages through any medium with an intention of hurting religious sentiments knowingly or unknowingly is a punishable offence under sections 66A of the Information Technology Act and 153A, 295 of the Indian Penal Code. (Hat Tip: Swar Thounaojam)

In June this year Mumbai Police had issued a similar warning to citizens directing them to not ‘like’ objectionable posts on Facebook. Mumbai Police told that the people would be booked under section 66A of the IT Act and section 295A of Indian Penal Code, which deals with ‘hurting religious sentiments’, in such cases.

Last week the Karnataka Government passed a legislature, which allows the authorities to arrest a person even before he/she has committed an offence under the IT Act. The Karnataka Prevention of Dangerous Activities of Bootleggers, Drug-offenders, Gamblers, Goondas, Immoral Traffic Offenders, Slum-Grabbers and Video or Audio Pirates (Amendment) Bill, 2014, which has been dubbed the Goonda Act has brought offences under the IT Act 2000 and the Indian Copyright Act 1957 under its ambit, reports Bangalore Mirror.

This Act was originally meant to enable authorities to take bootleggers, drug offenders and traffickers into preventive custody. Post the amendment digital offenders can also be arrested without actually having committed any crime. So, effectively even if you are planning to forward an ‘objectionable’ meme on WhatsApp or forward a copyright protected e-book to a friend you can be arrested under this Act. What’s even more worrying is that under this Act the arrested person doesn’t have to be produced before a magistrate for 90 days, which can be extended to a maximum of one year. In case of the IT Act the arrested person needs to be presented before a magistrate in 24 hours.

The Goonda Act’s definition of a digital offender is, “any person who knowingly or deliberately violates, for commercial purposes, any copyright law in relation to any book, music, film, software, artistic or scientific work and also includes any person who illegally enters through the identity of another user and illegally uses any computer or digital network for pecuniary gain for himself or any other person or commits any of the offences specified under sections 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74 and 75 of the Information Technology Act, 2000.”

Our Take

The key issue here is determining intention. How will this Act differentiate between individuals with malicious, criminal intent, and those who are at most ignorant? In the past individuals have been arrested for merely liking a Facebook post. Now similar arrests can be carried out with legislative backing. It will ultimately further impede the voice of dissent in the country.
http://www.medianama.com/2014/08/223...-in-karnataka/





I Visited Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde in Prison, Here’s What He Had to Say
Julia Reda

This week Julia Reda, Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party, visited Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde in prison to show her support. Today she shares a detailed account of the visit on TorrentFreak, with Sunde sharing his thoughts on prison life, the commercialized Pirate Bay, and the future that lies ahead.

It wasn’t easy to meet Peter in prison. Initially, his request for the approval of my visit was rejected, as have been requests on behalf of other friends. It was only when he read up on the regulations and filed a complaint – pointing out my status as an elected representative of the European Parliament – that my visit was approved.

He tells me that this is par for the course in prison. “If you don’t constantly insist upon your rights, you will be denied them”. Repeatedly, he had to remind the guards that they’re not allowed to open confidential mail he receives from journalists. His alleged right to an education or occupation during his jail time in practice amounted to being given a beginners’ Spanish book.

“Prison is a bit like copyright,” Peter remarks. In both areas, there is a lack of transparency and the people in power profit from the fact that the average person doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the issue. That opens the door to misuse and corruption.
Few people feel directly affected by these systems (even though a lot of Internet users commit copyright infringements, many don’t even realize that they are breaking laws and suffer no repercussions). Hence it is difficult to get traditional politics to change even the most blatant injustices that these systems produce. I ask him whether his imprisonment has changed his political views.

“It has confirmed them,” he replies. “I knew the system was broken before, but now I know to what extent.”

“The worst thing is the boredom”, Peter informs me when I ask him about life in prison. He gives an account of his daily routine: “I have soy yoghurt and muesli for breakfast, which I was recently allowed to buy from my own money, as the prison doesn’t offer any vegan food.”

That is followed by one hour of exercise – walking around the yard in circles – and sometimes the chance to play ping-pong or visit the prison library in the afternoon, before Peter is locked in his cell for the night. The only other distraction comes from the dozens of letters Peter receives every day.

Not all the books that his friends and supporters send make their way to him – they are screened for “inappropriate content” first. Other items that arrive in the mail, such as vegan candy, won’t be handed out to him until after his release, “but at least the prison has to catalog every single thing you send me, which pisses them off,” Peter says with a wink.

While his notoriety mostly comes from his role in founding the Pirate Bay, Peter has been critical of the platform’s development for a long time and has been focusing his energy on other projects.

“There should be 10,000 Pirate Bays by now!” he exclaims. “The Internet was built as a decentralized network, but ironically it is increasingly encouraging centralization. Because The Pirate Bay has been around for 11 years now, almost all other torrent sites started relying on it as a backbone. We created a single point of failure and the development of file sharing technology got stuck.”

In Peter’s eyes, the Pirate Bay has run its course and turned into a commercial enterprise that has little to do with the values it was founded on. Nowadays, the most important battles for an open Internet take place elsewhere, he says, noting that the trend towards centralization is not limited to file sharing.

Facebook alone has turned into its own little walled-garden version of the Internet that a lot of users would be content using without access to the wider Net. At the same time, services from Google to Wikipedia are working on distribution deals that make their services available to people without real Internet access.

One step to counter this trend towards centralization could be data portability, the right to take all one’s personal data from a service such as Facebook and bring it along to a competitor. The right to data portability is part of the proposed European data protection regulation that is currently stuck in negotiations among the EU member states.

“Having data portability would be a great step forward, but it’s not enough. Portability is meaningless without competition.” Peter says.

“As activists and entrepreneurs, we need to challenge monopolies. We need to build a Pirate social network that is interoperable with Facebook. Or build competition to small monopolies before they get bought up by the big players in the field. Political activism in parliaments, as the Pirate Party pursues it, is important, but needs to be combined with economic disruptions.

“The Internet won’t change fundamentally in the next two years, but in the long-term, the effects of the decisions we take today can be dramatic.”

According to Peter, establishing net neutrality, especially on mobile networks, will be one of the crucial fights. The Internet may have started out as a non-commercial space, but is entirely ruled by business arguments nowadays, and without net neutrality, large corporations will be able to strengthen their monopolies and stifle innovation. A pushback will be needed from small enterprises as well as civil society – but those groups struggle to be heard in political debates as they often lack the financial resources for large-scale lobbying efforts.

Although Peter is visibly affected by his imprisonment and talks about struggling with depression, he has not stopped making plans for the future. “Things will get easier once I get out. I’ve been a fugitive for two years and could hardly go to conferences or would have to show up unannounced.”

Once his eight month sentence has come to an end, Peter wants to get back to activism. When I ask about his upcoming projects, he starts grinning and tells me to be patient.

“All I can say now is that I’m brimming with ideas and that one of my main goals will be to develop ethical ways of funding activism. You often need money to change things. But most ways of acquiring it require you to compromise on your ideals. We can do better than that.”

Peter is now hoping for his prison sentence to eventually be transformed into house arrest, which would allow him to see his critically ill father and spend less time in isolation. Whether that happens will largely depend on whether the Swedish state will continue to view a file-sharing activist as a serious threat to the public. In a society where the majority of young people routinely break copyright law simply by sharing culture, that view seems entirely unsustainable.
http://torrentfreak.com/visited-pira...es-say-140816/





For German, Swiss Privacy Start-Ups, a Post-Snowden Boom
Stephan Dörner

US and Chinese tech companies are not the only ones profiting from the “Snowden effect.”

Since news broke that former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden disclosed alleged U.S. government surveillance methods worldwide, secure messaging and so-called ‘NSA-proof’ products and companies have sprouted across Germany and Switzerland, two countries who take their privacy laws very seriously.

While not in mainstream use yet, the trend is growing.

Some German and Swiss companies have also used the media attention as selling points.

“When Edward Snowden unveiled the extent of surveillance by the U.S. government, many scientists in Cern were shocked,” said Khoi Nguyen of Geneva-based Protonmail, a start-up marketing an easy-to-use, encrypted email service.

Lavaboom, a German email provider, was a direct reaction to the Snowden revelations. The company’s name plays on the U.S. encrypted service provider Lavabit, which Mr. Snowden used. Lavabit was forced to close down in August 2013, after being forced to disclose classified documents. At the time, Lavabit founder Ladar Levison said he was prohibited by law from discussing the reasons for its closure.

Lavabit offers users a three-tiered service. A free subscription gets you secure storage, two-factor authentication, and complete encryption. Premium subscriptions offer what’s called a “zero-knowledge” service— any data generated by an application will never be readable on the server it is stored—as well as three-factor authentication.

“Our existence was a direct response to the closure of Snowden’s email service Lavabit,” Lavaboom co-founder Bill Franklin said.

Mr. Franklin, a U.K. citizen, along with German co-founder Felix Mueller-Irion, consciously chose Germany to base their mail service.

“Data protection laws in Germany are supportive in offering customers a private sphere,” Mr. Franklin said. German data protection laws are considered to rank among the strictest in the world and there are laws protecting journalists, doctors, lawyers and other professional groups from revealing their sources.

While zero-knowledge programs offer protection in any country, there is additional security in Germany.

“Earlier this year, the U.S. government successfully sued Lavabit into providing its SSL-key. In contrast, the German government would have to change the laws to force Lavaboom to do the same,” Mr. Franklin said. Additionally, German citizens have the right to know what a company or a state agency knows about them.

Lavaboom expects to have 15,000 active users globally by the end of the year.

Switzerland, long a haven for people seeking financial privacy, is making a name for itself as the region’s “Crypto Valley.”

The neutral European nation is becoming a “mecca” for financial cryptography, says Chris Odom, the Chief Technology Officer at Monetas and the founder of the decentralized Open Transactions platform for encrypted financial tools.

Older, more established German tech companies are also seizing the opportunity.

Deutsche Post , a 500-year-old institution privatized in 2000, now offers encrypted, self-destructing instant messaging with its SIMSme product.

Heinlein Support, an IT support firm dating back to a 25 year old privacy project, has used the NSA scandal to “offer German data protection standards worldwide,” the company’s executive Peer Heinlein said. The company offers a secure email account for €1 ($1.33) a month on Mailbox.org. The company makes a point to say that its service is compliant with German data privacy regulations, and that its servers are located in Berlin.

Posteo, set up in 2009, has profited from Mr. Snowden’s revelations, the company says.. The Berlin based company doubled the number of user mailboxes to 18,000 in the month after Mr. Snowden’s revelations in 2013. Today, the company is hosts 70,000 mailboxes. Its sales pitch: users can sign up without giving any personal information, and they can pay anonymously for “comprehensive encryption.”

And earlier this year, Protonet, a Hamburg-based startup which has built a “Made in Germany” encrypted private cloud solution, raised crowd funded money so fast that many potential investors didn’t even have a chance to throw money at it. The company promises 100% data sovereignty and plans to enter the U.S. market soon.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/08/...-snowden-boon/





NSA and GCHQ Agents 'Leak Tor Bugs', Alleges Developer
Leo Kelion

British and American intelligence agents attempting to hack the "dark web" are being deliberately undermined by colleagues, it has been alleged.

Spies from both countries have been working on finding flaws in Tor, a popular way of anonymously accessing "hidden" sites.

But the team behind Tor says other spies are tipping them off, allowing them to quickly fix any vulnerabilities.

The agencies declined to comment.

The allegations were made in an interview given to the BBC by Andrew Lewman, who is responsible for all the Tor Project's operations.

He said leaks had come from both the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and the US National Security Agency (NSA).

By fixing these flaws, the project can protect users' anonymity, he said.

"There are plenty of people in both organisations who can anonymously leak data to us to say - maybe you should look here, maybe you should look at this to fix this," he said. "And they have."

Mr Lewman is part of a team of software engineers responsible for the Tor Browser - software designed to prevent it being possible to trace users' internet activity. The programs involved also offer access to otherwise hard-to-reach websites, some of which are used for illegal purposes.

The dark web, as it is known, has been used by paedophiles to share child abuse imagery, while online drug marketplaces are also hosted on the hidden sites.

Mr Lewman said that his organisation received tips from security agency sources on "probably [a] monthly" basis about bugs and design issues that potentially could compromise the service.

However, he acknowledged that because of the way the Tor Project received such information, he could not prove who had sent it.

"It's a hunch," he said. "Obviously we are not going to ask for any details.

"You have to think about the type of people who would be able to do this and have the expertise and time to read Tor source code from scratch for hours, for weeks, for months, and find and elucidate these super-subtle bugs or other things that they probably don't get to see in most commercial software.

"And the fact that we take a completely anonymous bug report allows them to report to us safely."

He added that he had been told by William Binney, a former NSA official turned whistleblower, that one reason NSA workers might have leaked such information was because many were "upset that they are spying on Americans".

In response, a spokesman from the NSA public affairs office said: "We have nothing for you on this one."

A spokesman for GCHQ said: "It is long-standing policy that we do not comment on intelligence matters. Furthermore, all of GCHQ's work is carried out in accordance with a strict legal and policy framework, which ensures that our activities are authorised, necessary and proportionate."

The BBC understands, however, that GCHQ does attempt to monitor a range of anonymisation services to identify and track down suspects involved in the online sexual exploitation of children, among other crimes.

The reporter Glenn Greenwald has also published several articles, based on documents released by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, alleging that both agencies have attempted to crack Tor as part of efforts to prevent terrorism.

A security expert who has done consultancy work for GCHQ said he was he was amazed by Mr Lewman's allegation, but added that it was not "beyond the bounds of possibility.

"It's not surprising that agencies all over the world will be looking for weaknesses in Tor," said Alan Woodward.

"But the fact that people might then be leaking that to the Tor Project so that it can undo it would be really very serious.

"So if that is happening, then those organisations are going to take this very seriously."
Illegal activity

Tor was originally designed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, and continues to receive funding from the US State Department.
Eye data graphic The ability to unmask Tor's users would undermine the reason people use the service

It is used by the military, activists, businesses and others to keep communications confidential and aid free speech.

But it has also been used to organise the sale of illegal drugs, host malware, run money laundering services, and traffic images of child abuse and other illegal pornography.

Mr Lewman said that his organisation provided advice to law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and the UK Serious Crime Agency (Soca), to help them understand how Tor worked in order to aid their investigations.

But he criticised cyberspies who carried out orders to undermine Tor's protections.

"We are around 30 people in total, and think of the NSA or GCHQ with their tens of thousands of employees and billions of pounds of budget," he said.

"The odds there are obviously in their favour.

"It's sort of funny because it also came out that GCHQ heavily relies on Tor working to be able to do a lot of their operations.

"So you can imagine one part of GCHQ is trying to break Tor, the other part is trying to make sure it's not broken because they're relying on it to do their work.

"So it's typical within governments, or even within large agencies, that you have two halves of the same coin going after different parts of Tor. Some protect it, some to try to attack it."

He added that the Tor browser had been downloaded 150 million times in the past year, and that it currently supported about 2.5 million users a day.

"Hundreds of millions of people are now relying on Tor," Mr Lewman said, "in some cases in life-and-death situations. And that's what we pay attention to.

"We would be very sad if anyone was arrested, tortured and killed because of some software bug or because of some design decision we made that put them at risk."

Mr Lewman will deliver the keynote speech at the Broadband World Forum event in Amsterdam in October.

Who are the cyberspies?

The Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) employs about 5,000 people and has two key roles:

• To identify threats from intercepted communications. It says these include terrorism, the spread of nuclear weapons, regional conflicts around the world and threats to the economic prosperity of the UK.

• To serve as an authority on information assurance - meaning that it advises the government and organisations running the UK's critical infrastructure how to safeguard their systems from interference and disruption.

It dates back to 1919, when it was called the Government Code and Cypher School. It adopted its current name in 1946. The foreign secretary is answerable in Parliament for GCHQ's work.

The National Security Agency (NSA) gathers intelligence for the US government and military leaders.

It is also has the task of preventing foreign adversaries gaining access to classified national security information.

It employs about 35,000 workers, both civilians and military.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-28886462





AT&T to Deliver 1Gbps Broadband to Silicon Valley
Marguerite Reardon

AT&T has announced the first city in Silicon Valley that will get its 1Gbps fiber service.

On Wednesday, the company said that Cupertino, the home of tech giant Apple, has been added to the list of cities that will get its ultra-high speed broadband service in the coming months. AT&T is already offering the broadband service, which delivers 1Gbps downloads as well as 1Gbps uploads, in Austin, Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. And it has confirmed plans to deploy the service in 11 additional cities: Cupertino, Charlotte, Greensboro, Houston, Jacksonville, Fla., Miami, Nashville, Overland Park, Kan., Raleigh-Durham, San Antonio, and Winston-Salem.

In total, AT&T has said it plans to expand the 1Gbps GigaPower service in up to 100 candidate cities and municipalities across 25 markets nationwide. Other Silicon Valley and Bay Area communities are still on the list for consideration, including, San Jose, San Francisco, and Mountain View, home of Google, AT&T's biggest rival in delivering 1Gbps fiber broadband.

Even though most communities in the US could benefit from a super high-speed network, such as AT&T's, delivering this kind of speed to residents and startups in the nation's technology and innovation hub is likely to be a guaranteed hit. And it could spawn new ideas, technologies and businesses that will benefit the entire technology ecosystem as residents and startups in the area put the high-capacity network to the test.

"Cupertino is leading the way in creating an environment that fosters innovation," the city's mayor Gilbert Wong said in a statement. "And the deployment of ultra-high-speed broadband service will further support innovation in our community, spur our local businesses, and result in even greater economic development in our city."

The attractive customer base is also one that Google is considering. Google included San Jose and its hometown of Mountain View in its list of nine metro areas that it will evaluate for deploying its own 1Gbps download service. So far, Google is still deploying service in Kansas City, home of its first Google Fiber network. And it's still working on deployments for Austin and Provo, Utah.

AT&T didn't provide specifics on pricing or when it would start building the Cupertino network. Currently, the company charges $70 a month for the 1Gbps high speed Internet service. This is also the same price that Google charges for its 1Gbps serice.
http://www.cnet.com/news/at-t-to-del...ilicon-valley/





Lawmakers Ask FCC to Preempt States on Municipal Broadband Bans
Sam Gustin

It's been called "the next big fight" in telecom policy: the battle over whether the Federal Communications Commission should preempt state laws that ban or discourage local communities from building their own high-speed broadband Internet networks.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has signaled that he's prepared to do just that. On Tuesday, he received a boost from two influential lawmakers who offered a bit of political cover for what could be a bruising fight with broadband companies and their allies on Capitol Hill who vehemently oppose such a move.

Senator Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat, and Representative Mike Doyle, the Pennsylvania Democrat, issued a statement on Tuesday urging Wheeler to use the FCC's authority to remove roadblocks to community broadband. The lawmakers said they were encouraged by Wheeler's response to a letter they wrote last month inquiring about the FCC's plans to encourage community broadband.

Many local governments across the country have realized that ubiquitous, affordable, high-speed Internet access fosters economic growth and expands opportunities for citizens. But many parts of the country only have one or two broadband providers—companies with little incentive to improve service and lower prices—and in some rural areas broadband service simply isn't available at all.

Now, cities and municipalities like Chattanooga, Tenn. and Wilson, NC are racing to take matters into their own hands by building next-generation broadband networks for their citizens. But there's a problem. Some 20 states have laws on the books that pose barriers to community broadband efforts—laws that in many cases were pushed by cable and telecom industry lobbyists.

As my colleague Jason Koebler has detailed, big broadband companies have for years battled attempts by local communities to build their own networks, often by using misinformation campaigns, intervening in local elections, or old-fashioned lobbying.

In response to the letter sent by Markey, Doyle, and their colleagues Senators Al Franken, Amy Klobuchar, Richard Blumenthal, and Cory Booker, along with Representatives Henry A. Waxman and Anna G. Eshoo, Wheeler wrote that there is reason to believe state laws restricting community broadband "have the effect of limiting competition in those areas, contrary to almost two decades bipartisan federal communications policy that is focused on encouraging competition."

"I respect the important role of state governments in our federal system, but I know that state laws that directly conflict with critical federal laws and policy may be subject to preemption in appropriate circumstances," Wheeler wrote.

Last month, Chattanooga and Wilson officially asked the federal government to help them bypass state laws banning them from expanding their community owned, gigabit broadband networks to underserved citizens in surrounding areas. The Chattanooga network operator, EPB, is prohibited from offering internet and video services to any areas outside its service area, thanks to a Tennessee state law that was pushed by broadband industry interests.

In a statement issued Tuesday, Markey and Doyle said they were encouraged by Wheeler's response. "I welcome Chairman Wheeler's response and his continuing interest in municipal broadband, and I strongly encourage him and the FCC to take quick and decisive action to lift restrictions that limit or prevent communities from addressing their own broadband needs," said Doyle.

"What the broadband market needs today are more options and greater local choice, not barriers that prevent cities and towns from participating fully in the global economy," said Markey. "I encourage the Commission to use its authority to ensure municipalities have the power to make decisions about their broadband infrastructure."

If Wheeler decides to use the FCC's authority to preempt state laws limiting community broadband, he will likely face a fierce backlash from lawmakers allied with the broadband industry. That's why the support of Markey and Doyle could come in handy during any political fight over the issue on Capitol Hill.

Representative Marsha Blackburn, the Tennessee Republican who has received tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from the cable and telecommunications industry, is leading the fight against the FCC. Last month, she introduced an amendment to a key appropriations bill that would prevent the FCC from preempting such state laws.

"We don’t need unelected bureaucrats in Washington telling our states what they can and can’t do with respect to protecting their limited taxpayer dollars and private enterprises," Blackburn said in a statement. "This Congress cannot sit idly by and let an independent agency trample on our states' rights."

Over the last decade, AT&T and Verizon have been Blackburn's second and third largest donors, pouring $66,750 and $59,650 into her campaigns, respectively, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. She's also received $56,000 from the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, an industry trade group, and $36,000 from Comcast, the nation's largest cable company.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/law...ipal-broadband





FCC Republican Wants to Let States Block Municipal Broadband

Democrats warned not to take action a future Republican-led FCC would dislike.
Jon Brodkin

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is going to have a fight on his hands if he tries to preempt state laws that limit the growth of municipal broadband networks.

Matthew Berry, chief of staff to Republican Commissioner Ajit Pai, argued today that the FCC has no authority to invalidate state laws governing local broadband networks. In a speech in front of the National Conference of State Legislatures, Berry endorsed states' rights when it comes to either banning municipal broadband networks or preventing their growth. He also argued that the current commission, with its Democratic majority, should not do something that future Republican-led commissions might disagree with.

"If the history of American politics teaches us anything, it is that one political party will not remain in power for perpetuity. At some point, to quote Sam Cooke, 'a change is gonna come,'" Berry said. "And that change could come a little more than two years from now. So those who are potential supporters of the current FCC interpreting Section 706 [of the Telecommunications Act] to give the Commission the authority to preempt state laws about municipal broadband should think long and hard about what a future FCC might do with that power."

Arguing that municipal broadband networks could discourage investment by private companies, Berry said, "It’s not hard, then, to imagine a future FCC concluding that taxpayer-funded, municipal broadband projects themselves are barriers to infrastructure investment. So if the current FCC were successful in preempting state and local laws under Section 706, what would stop a future FCC from using Section 706 to forbid states and localities from constructing any future broadband projects? Nothing that I can see."

Twenty states place at least some limits on the ability of cities and towns to offer Internet service to residents through laws passed as favors to cable companies and other ISPs. Wheeler argues that because Section 706 gives the FCC authority to promote competition in local telecommunications markets by removing barriers to investment, the commission can preempt laws that prevent cities and towns from creating their own broadband networks that compete against private companies. The Electric Power Board of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the city of Wilson, North Carolina, which both say local laws prevent them from expanding Internet service to surrounding areas, have filed petitions asking the commission to do just that.

Berry, who previously served as the FCC's general counsel, argued that states are within their rights to restrict municipal broadband and that the federal government cannot interfere unless given a more specific mandate to do so by Congress.

"Section 706 does not condone preemption of state laws either explicitly or implicitly, and so it hardly offers up the clear statement one would expect if Congress intended the FCC to 'interpos[e] federal authority between a State and its municipal subdivisions,'" a copy of his speech said.

"Sovereignty does not rest with American cities, towns, or counties," Berry also said. "Rather, the Supreme Court has stated that local subdivisions merely 'are created as convenient agencies for exercising such of the governmental powers of the State as may be entrusted to them in their absolute discretion.' In short, under our constitutional framework, states are free to grant or take away powers from municipalities as they see fit. So the basic concept is this: city governments are appendages of state government, but state governments most definitely are not appendages of the national government."

Berry cited a 2004 case in which Missouri municipalities unsuccessfully challenged a state law preventing them from providing telecommunications services. In that case, the Supreme Court upheld an FCC decision that went against the municipalities. But Wheeler has legal ammunition, too. The federal appeals court ruling that overturned the FCC's net neutrality rules earlier this year included an opinion by Judge Laurence Silberman that the FCC can use its Section 706 authority to remove "state laws that prohibit municipalities from creating their own broadband infrastructure to compete against private companies." Wheeler's staff argues that the Missouri case isn't directly relevant because in that instance the FCC declined to support the municipalities. If the commission supported municipalities in the current cases, courts could rule differently, the thinking goes.

No vote has been scheduled yet, but Wheeler reiterated his support for municipal broadband last week. In a letter to US Rep. Mike Doyle (D-PA), Wheeler wrote that "many states have enacted laws that place a range of restrictions on communities' ability to invest in their own future. There is reason to believe that these laws have the effect of limiting competition in those areas, contrary to almost two decades of bipartisan federal communications policy that is focused on encouraging competition."

The FCC will take action "only after a full opportunity for comment by all interested parties in an open proceeding and a careful analysis of the specific factual, policy, and legal issues involved," Wheeler wrote. "I respect the important role of state governments in our federal system, but I know that state laws that directly conflict with critical federal laws and policy may be subject to preemption in appropriate circumstances. I recognize that federal preemption is not a step to be taken lightly without a careful consideration of all relevant legal and policy issues."
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014...pal-broadband/





How to Save the Net: Don’t Give In to Big ISPs
Reed Hastings

The next Netflix won’t stand a chance if the largest Internet service providers in the US are allowed to merge. The Heads Of State

The Internet has already changed how we live and work, and we're only just getting started. Who'd have thought even five years ago that people would be streaming Ultra HD 4K video over their home Internet connections?

Technological advances are driving this evolution and will continue to do so only if we make sure the companies controlling consumers' access to the Internet don't adopt business practices that stifle its revolutionary nature. The next Netflix won't stand a chance if the largest US Internet service providers are allowed to merge or demand extra fees from content companies trying to reach their subscribers.

This year we reluctantly agreed to pay AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon for access to our mutual subscribers, who were seeing a rapid decline in their Netflix viewing experience because of congestion at the connection point where we transfer content to the ISP. The ISPs argue that our data-rich services take up limited capacity on their networks. But broadband is not a finite resource. Network limitations are largely the result of business decisions to not keep pace with subscriber demand in a world where the Internet increasingly is the main vehicle for all kinds of entertainment, from gaming to movies to video chats with loved ones.

It would be better to have no rules than the ones being proposed by the FCC, which simply legalize discrimination on the Internet.

Consider this: A single fiber-optic strand the diameter of a human hair can carry 101.7 terabits of data per second, enough to support nearly every Netflix subscriber watching content in HD at the same time. And while technology has improved and capacity has increased, costs have continued to decline. A few more shelves of equipment might be needed in the buildings that house interconnection points, but broadband itself is as limitless as its uses.

We'll never realize broadband's potential if large ISPs erect a pay-to-play system that charges both the sender and receiver for the same content. That's why we at Netflix are so vocal about the need for strong net neutrality, which for us means ISPs should enable equal access to content without favoring, impeding, or charging particular content providers. Those practices would stunt innovation and competition and hold back the broader development of the Internet and the economic benefits it brings.

Customers pay companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon a monthly fee, and some are even financially penalized if they exceed usage caps. Charging us a separate fee ultimately means consumers pay twice—first for their broadband connection and second through higher-cost or lower-quality Internet services.

It's worth noting that Netflix connects directly with hundreds of ISPs globally, and 99 percent of those agreements don't involve access fees. It is only a handful of the largest U.S. ISPs, which control the majority of consumer connections, demanding this toll. Why would more profitable, larger companies charge for connections and capacity that smaller companies provide for free? Because they can.

This is the reason we have opposed Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable. Comcast has already shown the ability to use its market position to require access fees, as evidenced by the Netflix congestion that cleared up as soon as we reached an agreement with them. A combined company that controls over half of US residential Internet connections would have even greater incentive to wield this power.

The Federal Communications Commission has historically focused only on last-mile connections—the final leg of the Internet that connects individual homes to the World Wide Web. Today's problem spots are further upstream, at the choke point where companies like Netflix pass our traffic off to the ISPs. If the FCC doesn't expand its purview to include these transactions, it would be better to have no rules than the ones being proposed—which simply legalize discrimination on the Internet.
http://www.wired.com/2014/08/save-th...reed-hastings/

















Until next week,

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