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Old 16-07-14, 07:33 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 19th, '14

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"Far from scrutinising the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill, we seem to have helped generate the panic needed to rush this important bill through under controversial emergency procedures, and the myth needed to present it as the antidote to paedophilia." – Tom Watson






































July 19th, 2014




Movie Industry Spends Far More Preventing Piracy Than Actual File-Sharing Losses
Mary-Ann Russon

A new study by an economist comparing Hollywood Exchange stock prices to online piracy data has found that the movie industry is spending more than double the impact of piracy on piracy prevention methods.

The paper, entitled "Using Markets to Measure the Impact of File Sharing on Movie Revenues" by Koleman Strumpf of the University of Kansas School of Business, looks at 150 of the most popular movies released between 2003 and 2009.

Using file-sharing data from one of the biggest BitTorrent index sites, compared with stock prices and box office revenue projection from the Hollywood Stock Exchange, Strumpf looked at how stock prices reacted to news about file sharing.

One example is the leaked version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine in 2009, which was illegally downloaded 4.5 million times before the film even opened at the box office.

Strumpf found that the stock prices barely changed due to news of the leak and actually continued to rise until the theatrical release date. The film was also "relatively successful", taking $373m (£218m) in worldwide box office sales, showing little evidence that file-sharing affected how well the film did.

Very little impact on box office sales

"There is no evidence in my empirical results of file-sharing having a significant impact on theatrical revenue," Strumpf told TorrentFreak.

"My best guess estimate is that file sharing reduced the first month box office by $200 million over 2003-2009, which is only three tenths of a percent of what movies actually earned. I am unable to reject the hypothesis that there is no impact at all of file-sharing on revenues."

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has long claimed that online piracy costs the movie industry $500m in damages annually.

TorrentFreak says that the MPAA spent a total of $500m between 2003 to 2009 on anti-piracy efforts, which is more than twice the impact of file sharing on the industry during the same period.

File-sharing can help to promote a film

Strumpf also found that movies leaked onto file-sharing sites before their theatrical release can often help to promote the film so more people go to the cinema to watch it.

"One explanation is that such releases create greater awareness of the film. This is also the period of heaviest advertising," he said.

Strumpf's research is not the first to be done showing that file-sharing is not damaging the movie industry, but it is more statistically precise, as the data analysed includes thousands of daily observations.

Although the Hollywood Stock Exchange is not a direct form of measurement, its data has been shown to be a fairly accurate predictor of what actual movie revenues will be.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/movie-indus...losses-1456883





American Bar Association Urges Against File Sharing Lawsuits

Lawyers' group says suing consumers may cause "a public relations problem."
David Kravets

The American Bar Association is urging its 400,000-lawyer membership to show some restraint when it comes to lodging online file sharing lawsuits.

"Finally, while it is technically possible for trademark and copyright owners to proceed with civil litigation against the consuming public who affirmatively seek out counterfeited products or pirated content or engage in illegal file sharing, campaigns like this have been expensive, do not yield significant financial returns, and can cause a public relations problem for the plaintiff in addressing its consuming public," the association recommended. [PDF]

The Intellectual Property Law section of the group, while urging new congressional legislation and educational outreach, noted as Exhibit A the litigation campaigns of the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America.

For instance, the Recording Industry of America (“RIAA”) initiated a campaign several years ago against consumers who engaged in illegal file sharing of copyrighted music. During that time, the RIAA initiated lawsuits against over 18,000 individual users, most of whom paid a few hundred dollars in settlements to avoid the potential for statutory damages of $150,000 per infringing use. More recently, the RIAA has abandoned its former policy of directly bringing cases against consumers in favor of expanding its focus on educating the consuming public about avoiding piracy. The Motion Picture Association of America (“MPAA”) followed in the RIAA’s footsteps with its own set of lawsuits directed against consumers who engaged in the illegal file sharing of copyrighted films and other video, though on a vastly smaller scale. It, too, later abandoned this approach.

Apparently, not everybody has gotten the 113-page memo, which was first unearthed by TorrentFreak.

Consider that porn company Malibu Media, which has filed thousands of infringement actions, is demanding to know the online smut-viewing habits of somebody it's suing for copyright infringement in a bid to prompt a settlement.

What's more, Malibu Media recently won the right for Comcast to surrender any so-called "six-strikes" copyright infringement notices Comcast may have sent an Indianapolis woman whom Malibu is accusing of illegally downloading skin flicks. The six-strikes program was not designed to provide courtroom evidence of infringement. Instead, the stated goal behind the notices, which are sent to suspected infringers, has been "educational" in a bid to get pirates to knock off their infringing activities.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...ring-lawsuits/





Patent Trolls Now Account for 67 Percent of All New Patent Lawsuits
Brian Fung

Despite the sudden collapse of patent legislation in Congress earlier this year, most policymakers agree that patent trolls are a huge drag on the U.S. economy. By filing one frivolous lawsuit after another, trolls extract enormous payments from companies simply by claiming infringement — they don't have to do very much to back up their assertions, nor do they have to be using the patents to sue.

A new study from PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that the problem is getting worse: While monetary awards from patent lawsuits are decreasing overall, patent trolls — also known as non-practicing entities because they simply stockpile patents without making anything with them — are making way more off of litigation than their practicing counterparts. Even as the median award has shrunk over time, awards to trolls are only growing.

In fact, PwC finds, patent trolls' median awards are now three times higher than those of other companies. Non-practicing entities (NPEs) also account for an increasing share of all patent lawsuits filed, at 67 percent. That's up from 28 percent just five years ago.

Even though most of these cases either get dismissed or settled out of court, those that do go to trial often end in victories for the trolls — largely because the cases are being filed in troll-friendly courts, like the Eastern District of Texas.

Congressional legislation could make it more difficult for trolls to launch new lawsuits. The latest effort would have required the loser in a lawsuit to cover the winner's legal fees and for NPEs to state more clearly what was being infringed at the outset. A House version of the bill passed overwhelmingly earlier this year, but the Senate version came apart at the last minute.

There's a burgeoning push to revive patent legislation in the House, focusing on a bill known as the TROL Act. But it still has a long road ahead — and critics say the measure is much weaker than its predecessor.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...tent-lawsuits/





BitTorrent to Try a Paywall and Crowdfunding
Michael Cieply

This might be the latest twist on crowdfunding — or the web equivalent of seeking a ransom.

BitTorrent, a purveyor of file-sharing technology that is widely used to gain free access to music and films, has come up with a bold proposition for its tens of millions of daily users: Spend $9.95 to help finance a planned new science fiction series and gain viewing rights to its eight episodes. Or fail to pay up, and the shows will never be made.

The prospective series, called “Children of the Machine,” is expected to be announced on Monday as part of BitTorrent’s latest and perhaps most daring attempt to make paying customers of an estimated 170 million worldwide users. While the site itself eschews piracy, many people employ its open-source file-sharing technology to download music, films and television shows, whether legally or illegally, without charge.

Marco Weber, a seasoned independent film executive, is to produce the new series, based on a pilot written jointly by him and Jeff Stockwell, whose credits include the movie fantasy “Bridge to Terabithia.”

If all goes according to plan, Mr. Weber will distribute the pilot — which he would finance himself with help from private investors — free on BitTorrent in December, while offering to make the full series if approximately 250,000 users pay the asking price. “I think of it as the perfect hybrid between Kickstarter and Netflix,” said Mr. Weber, who spoke last week of an effort that merges crowdfunding techniques with a potentially powerful distribution platform.

Once the pilot makes its debut, the next steps should move quickly, Mr. Weber added. Or else they won’t move quickly enough. “In four to six weeks, I’ll know if it works or if it doesn’t,” he said.

Mr. Weber has directed or produced youth-oriented independent films including “The Informers,” based on a Bret Easton Ellis book.

In September, BitTorrent will precede Mr. Weber’s foray by inserting a paywall — something it has been avoiding — in one of its so-called bundles. These are downloads that for the last year have been used by musicians, graphic novel publishers and others to offer their work or promotional material in return for nothing more costly than a user’s email address. The new paywall will permit access to a music bundle from what the company says will be a major artist, still to be named.

“We saw the opportunity to build what we think will become the leading place for independent content creation,” Matt Mason, the chief content officer for BitTorrent, said of the new fee-based initiative.

Mr. Mason, who has made the point before, once again stressed that his site circulates sharing technology but does not condone piracy. “People wrongly assume we’re about illegal file-sharing,” he said.

Still, BitTorrent has failed in the past to make entertainment buyers of those who use its wares to share content. In 2008, the company shut down a short-lived operation, called BitTorrent Entertainment Network, that had joined Hollywood companies in offering a menu of movie and television downloads for a price.

Mr. Mason, who joined BitTorrent after that venture failed, said he believed it had charged too much — an episode of “Desperate Housewives” cost as much as $20, he noted. At the same time, he said, the undertaking did little to accommodate the habits of BitTorrent visitors, who tend to be male, young and inclined to drill deeply into whatever interests them.

In keeping with the peer-to-peer spirit of that audience, BitTorrent in the last year has made available about 10,000 bundles, each of which is controlled not by the company but by an independent artist or other purveyor. So far, free bundles have been downloaded 100 million times, even though many of them require providing an email address — no small act of trust by some wary BitTorrent users.

When the paywall option is in place for bundles, the artist will charge a fee, not BitTorrent. The site, as the host and distributor, will take a cut — adding a revenue stream, and perhaps genuine growth potential, if Mr. Weber, the still unnamed musician or musicians, or others can deliver a hit.

Mr. Mason said BitTorrent, which is owned by its founder, Bram Cohen, and others, including the venture capital firms Accel Partners and DCM, has been profitable since 2008, but he declined to discuss its finances otherwise. The company, which is based in San Francisco, has about 115 employees, he said.

BitTorrent currently makes money by, for instance, charging users for enhanced software services.

News of the company’s programming effort was cautiously welcomed by some in Hollywood, where BitTorrent is often still viewed as a pirate’s adjunct.

“We all want to see new business models that reach audiences who are willing to reward creativity by paying a fair price,” said Ruth Vitale, executive director of CreativeFuture, an antipiracy coalition that includes both artists and companies. But Ms. Vitale is among those who want to see BitTorrent executives take a stronger stance against abuse of their technology.

“If they are sincere about supporting creatives,” she said, “BitTorrent needs to condemn the widespread misuse of the protocol it created” by those who pirate the work of artists.

Mr. Weber, who spoke in a poolside interview at the Viceroy hotel in Santa Monica, Calif., said he had been introduced to BitTorrent by executives at Cinedigm, a digital entertainment company for which he is under contract to produce lower-budget genre films.

Cinedigm, Mr. Weber said, is expected at some point to join in promoting and distributing “Children of the Machine” through its new ConTV channel, a web-based subscription venture with Wizard World, the company that produces the Comic Con fan conventions (which are independent of San Diego’s annual Comic-Con International).

The one-hour pilot for “Children of the Machine,” which Mr. Weber will direct, should cost slightly under $1 million to make, he said. His Rapid Eye Studios retains rights to the show and, at least in theory, could sell episodes to a conventional television network if the series were to do well on BitTorrent.

The story line, about teenagers in a near-future America ravaged by global warming and gripped by the rebellion of its own increasingly intelligent technology, is specifically tailored to young, technologically knowledgeable BitTorrent users.

It even includes the occasional reference to those cascades of data that give the site its name.

“We used the torrents,” Mr. Weber said. “We integrated some of their software in our plot.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/14/bu...wdfunding.html





US Copyright Office Says Aereo Not a Cable Company Under Terms of Copyright Act
CNBC Staff

US copyright officials have told Aereo that they do not consider it a "cable company" under the terms of copyright law, according to a letter obtained by CNBC.

Aereo, which lost a key Supreme Court ruling last month on the legitimacy of its TV-streaming service, had sought the same license available to other cable companies to rebroadcast TV programs over its service.

The company has paused operations while it figures out next steps. Users in various cities were able to pay a monthly fee to stream and record broadcast and certain other channels.

The Supreme Court held that that amounted to a public performance of a copyrighted work.

Earlier this month, Aereo told a lower court handling its case that it would seek to be treated as a cable company and obtain the same compulsory license cable operators enjoy. That would give it the right, in exchange for set fees, to keep streaming content. But copyright authorities dismissed that argument.

"In the view of the Copyright Office, internet retransmissions of broadcast television fall outside the scope of the Section 111 license," the Copyright Office wrote in the letter dated July 16.

Read MoreAereo: We can comply with Supreme Court ruling

The office added that it would not refuse Aereo's filings outright, but rather would accept them provisionally since the company's case is still before the courts.

A spokeswoman for Aereo declined to comment on the ruling, but noted that the Copyright Office provisionally accepted the company's application.
http://www.cnbc.com/id/101838646





Ninth Circuit Won't Block Hopper Either

Upholds lower court decision; underlying case still to be adjudicated
John Eggerton

In a victory for Dish over Fox, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has affirmed a lower court's September 2013 denial of a preliminary injunction against Dish’s Hopper DVR service.

“Today’s decision is the fifth in a string of victories for consumers related to our Hopper Whole-Home DVR platform," said R. Stanton Dodge, DISH EVP and general counsel. "DISH is pleased that the Court has sided again with consumer choice and control by rejecting Fox’s efforts to deny our customers access to the DISH Anywhere and Hopper Transfers features. Last year, the Ninth Circuit also rejected Fox’s attempt to block customers from using the AutoHop and PrimeTime Anytime features. We will continue to vigorously defend consumers’ right to choice and control over their viewing experience.”

"The district court denied Fox’s request for a preliminary injunction because it found that Fox had not shown a likelihood that Dish Network’s “Dish Anywhere” and “Hopper Transfers” technology would irreparably harm Fox before final adjudication," said the Ninth Circuit in declining to overturn the lower court. "Contrary to Fox’s arguments in this appeal, the district court committed no legal error and made no clearly erroneous factual findings in so ruling."

Fox had sued Dish for breach of contract and copyright infringement.

"While we are disappointed in today’s ruling, it is not unexpected, as the bar for a preliminary injunction is extremely high," said Fox in a statement. "The decision had nothing to do with the merits of our claim and does not address the fact that ‘DISH Anywhere’ is both illegal and in violation of our existing distribution agreement. We will now move forward and fully expect to prevail at trial."

The court held a hearing July 7. Fox had been trying to overturn that decision to deny the injunction and have the court enter one.

Fox argued the district court was wrong, and in fact abused its discretion, in not finding Dish's allegedly infringing AutoHop DVR service culpable of irreparable harm, and denying the injunction, as did the Ninth Circuit on appeal last January.

Dish's lawyer, Josh RosenKranz, argued it was "pretty clear" in the record that the "sling" technology introduced no new capabilities or was uniquely threatening. "There is no difference between the Sling box and the sling features at issue in this case." Dish said digital portability has been around for almost a decade, and Fox did not complain until now. Dish says that if Fox has not suffered any harms in the previous nine years that the technology was available, the court was well within its right not to grant an injunction based on irreparable harm.

Fox was looking to use broadcasters' recent victory in the Aereo case in the Supreme Court to buttress its argument, including pointing out that Dish had argued that it was merely an equipment provider, an Aereo argument that the Supremes rejected. It also pointed out the Supremes had reflected Aereo's argument (which it said was Dish's as well) that a performance was not public under the Copyright Act if each sub watches a unique stream.

Fox's lawyer, Richard Stone, argued that Aereo was also essentially about attaching a Slingbox to a DVR. But that got some pushback.

One judge countered that it was "completely different technology" and said that while that was the argument, "the Supreme court has all sorts of caveats in the opinion about how this was about Aereo and nothing else and a lot of the 'nothing elses' seem to be pretty similar to Slingbox."

The district court has yet to rule on Fox's underyling challenge to Dish, with petitions for summary judgment due next month.
http://www.multichannel.com/news/tec...-either/375940





Murdoch's Fox Hunting Time Warner
Soyoung Kim and Soham Chatterjee

Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox (FOXA.O) said it made a bid to buy media conglomerate Time Warner Inc (TWX.N) but was rebuffed.

The bid was worth roughly $80 billion, or $85 per share in cash and stock, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters.

Time Warner's stock jumped 22.5 percent to $87 premarket as the New York Times reported that Murdoch was determined to buy Time Warner and was unlikely to walk away despite the rejection. (nyti.ms/1na1K7y)

Twenty-First Century Fox confirmed that it had made the formal proposal to Time Warner last month.

"The Time Warner Board of Directors declined to pursue our proposal. We are not currently in any discussions with Time Warner," Twenty-First Century Fox said in a statement on Wednesday.

Time Warner was not immediately available for comment.

Reuters reported this month that Rupert Murdoch is in the midst of a deal that would give Fox the firepower to buy a content company.

Fox first approached Time Warner, owner of the Warner Bros. movie studio and cable channels such as HBO and CNN, in early June and delivered a formal takeover proposal later that month, the Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Fox, which owns movie studio 20th Century Fox and cable news channel Fox News, offered to sell CNN as part of its proposal to buy Time Warner to clear any regulatory hurdles, the Times said.

"I think fair public value is $82. (It) would be good deal for Fox if it goes through Washington (regulators) with CNN sales," Wunderlich Securities analyst Matthew Harrigan told Reuters in an email.

Time Warner's board discussed the proposal at length and sent a terse letter rejecting the offer earlier this month, saying that it was better off remaining independent, the newspaper said.

It said the deal fell through because the stock portion of Fox's offer consisted of non-voting shares.

Fox had estimated that a combined company would save $1 billion in costs and possibly more, primarily by cutting sales staff and back-office functions, the paper said.

The combined company's revenue would be over $60 billion.

Twenty-First Century Fox is in the middle of a reorganization of its television business as the network seeks to lift itself out of last place among the big U.S. broadcasters.

The shakeup of Rupert Murdoch's Twenty-First Century Fox's TV units also comes a year after the film and TV company was spun off from Murdoch's News Corp (NWSA.O), which now operates publishing assets, including the Wall Street Journal.

Twenty-First Century Fox is being advised by Goldman Sachs and Centerview Partners, while Time Warner has hired Citigroup and other advisers, the paper said.

(Reporting by Soham Chatterjee; Editing by Saumyadeb Chakrabarty)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FL15T20140716





Comcast 'Embarrassed' By The Service Call Making Internet Rounds
Elise Hu

When a customer service call is described as "Kafkaesque" and "hellish," you pretty much know how it's going to go down before even taking a listen. But in case you haven't heard the condescending, tedious call that's lit up the Internet, here it is:

The recording starts after the call has already been in progress for about 10 minutes, according to the caption on SoundCloud by Ryan Block, who was trying to cancel his Comcast Internet service. Block writes:

"The representative (name redacted) continued aggressively repeating his questions, despite the answers given, to the point where my wife became so visibly upset she handed me the phone. ...
"This recording picks up roughly 10 minutes into the call, whereby she and I have already played along and given a myriad of reasons and explanations as to why we are canceling (which is why I simply stopped answering the rep's repeated question — it was clear the only sufficient answer was 'Okay, please don't disconnect our service after all')."


Comcast says it's very, very sorry. "We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and are contacting him to personally apologize," the company said in a statement.

'Your Call Is (Not That) Important To Us'

"The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect."

The reinforcement comes at a key time for Comcast. The call struck a chord with hundreds of thousands of listeners; many commented saying they're hoping Google Fiber enters the market in more cities so consumers have better Internet options.

And Comcast is in the midst of pushing for federal government approval of its merger with Time Warner Cable, which will make the cable behemoth even bigger. Will a merger improve speed and/or service? This call is not a great harbinger of things to come.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechcons...nternet-rounds





U.S. Web Companies Press Demands for Net Neutrality with FCC
Alina Selyukh

Major U.S. web companies on Monday urged regulators to restrict the ability of Internet providers including mobile carriers to strike deals for faster delivery of some web traffic and planned a publicity campaign about the government's proposal.

The Internet Association, which represents three dozen web companies such as Google Inc, Netflix Inc and Amazon.com Inc, made their case in a filing with the Federal Communications Commission, which plans to establish new so-called "net neutrality" rules.
The rules guide how Internet service providers (ISPs) manage traffic on their networks, aiming to ensure they do not unfairly limit consumers' access to website and applications.

In January, a court ruling struck down the FCC's previous version of such rules. The agency is now collecting public comments on a proposal that would ban ISPs from blocking users' access to websites or applications but allow some "commercially reasonable" deals between content providers and ISPs to prioritize delivery of some traffic.

In its comments on Monday, the Internet Association criticized the possibility of ISPs charging content providers "for enhanced or prioritized access" and called for equal Internet traffic rules for both wired and wireless networks.

"The Internet is threatened by broadband Internet access providers who would turn the open, best-efforts Internet into a pay-for-priority platform more closely resembling cable television than today's Internet," the group wrote.

The Internet Association argued that allowing technical "reasonable network management" should give ISPs enough flexibility to deal with congested networks, while paid prioritization on non-congested networks is likely to mean faster download speeds for some at the expense of others.

Dozens of tech companies in June called on the FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler to adopt rules that would protect the openness of Internet, but Monday's comments represent a more detailed industry position.

The Internet Association in the next few weeks plans to roll out a campaign about the FCC's proposal and net neutrality, distributing infographics and videos and inviting Internet users to suggest amendments to the FCC's proposed rules through an interactive document viewer on its website, the association's President Michael Beckerman told Reuters.

In particular, the Internet Association's push may spotlight anti-blocking and anti-discrimination rules that in the past applied differently to fixed and wireless Internet traffic.

"We're going to be getting pretty vocal about this issue," Beckerman said. "It doesn't make sense anymore to differentiate the way net neutrality applies to mobile and wireline."

A senior FCC official last month told Reuters the issue will have "big resonance" at the FCC. Wireless carriers argue that stricter rules may hurt how they manage their dynamic shared networks, leading to slower Internet speeds for everyone.

Wheeler on Friday reiterated his plan to reject paid prioritization deals that are struck in bad faith: "If it hurts competition, if it hurts consumers, if it hurts innovation, I'm against it and we're not going to tolerate it."

(Reporting by Alina Selyukh in Toronto; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FJ0VP20140714





The Switchboard: Democrats Push to Make the Internet a Utility
Brian Fung

In net-neutrality push, Democrats aim to make the Internet a utility. "Sen. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, collected signatures for a letter urging the Federal Communications Commission to regulate the Internet like the telephone system," reports National Journal. "Democratic Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Al Franken of Minnesota, as well as independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, have signed on, aides confirmed."

Airbnb gears up to launch a complete brand redesign this week. "At least a portion of the announcement is for Airbnb’s new identity, which the company describes as being a 'multi-state moving identity,' a '3D modular symbol,' and 'adaptive to environments,'" according to Venturebeat.

"Hacking online polls and other ways British spies seek to control the Internet." "The secretive British spy agency GCHQ has developed covert tools to seed the internet with false information, including the ability to manipulate the results of online polls," according to The Intercept.

Seattle legalizes Uber, Lyft to operate without caps. GeekWire reports: "Transportation startups like UberX, Lyft, and Sidecar will finally be able to legally operate in Seattle."

America’s ‘freedom’ reputation is on the decline a year after NSA revelations. The Switch's Andrea Peterson reports: "In the wake of the revelations about U.S. surveillance programs from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden last year, the world is less convinced of the U.S.'s respect for personal freedoms, according to new survey results from Pew Research."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...net-a-utility/





F.C.C. Is Deluged With Comments on Net Neutrality Rules
Steve Lohr

From legal briefs to pithy one-liners, the public is having its say on the proposed rules that guide how digital bits flow across the Internet.

As of Tuesday, there were about 780,000 comments, far more than for any previous rule-making proceeding before the Federal Communications Commission. The agency is fine-tuning its rules to secure an open Internet, after a federal-court decision in January said it had to rethink its approach.

After the court ruling, Tom Wheeler, chairman of the F.C.C., proposed a path in step with the court ruling that would explicitly allow “commercially reasonable” deals. Such deals are typically for faster streaming of Internet content between broadband operators — phone and cable companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast — and online media distributors like Netflix and Google’s YouTube.

Mr. Wheeler’s plan, according to its many critics, would open the door to a two-tier Internet of fast and slow lanes, with affluent companies and households enjoying premium service and everyone else fighting traffic: a death knell for the open Internet and its democratic ethos of “net neutrality.”

Kevin Werbach, a former F.C.C. counsel and an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said, “The way this has been framed for a lot of people is that the F.C.C. is trying to change the Internet as we know it.”

Mr. Wheeler, who has been a lobbyist for the cable and telecommunications industries, has said that will not be the case, and that the agency will set a “high bar” for commercially reasonable arrangements. He has also said he is open to other ways to both accommodate the court ruling and maintain an open Internet, and the F.C.C. has welcomed public comments.

The deadline for the first round of comments was Tuesday, but has been extended to Friday. A second period for so-called reply comments will run until Sept. 10.

Despite the flood of comments, the open Internet debate has a way to go before it matches the public reaction the agency absorbed after a televised glimpse of Janet Jackson’s nipple during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2004, a “wardrobe malfunction” seen around the world. That incident elicited 1.4 million messages from the public, but the F.C.C. classifies those as complaints rather than comments.

A sampling of the many thousands of individual comments posted on the commission’s website is heavily weighted toward urging the F.C.C. to take strong action to preserve net neutrality and criticizing Mr. Wheeler’s proposal as not doing that.

“Net neutrality is crucial to fair competition and free speech,” Maya Cook wrote, “and this proposal is a disaster in the making.”

There is an anticorporate tinge to many comments, mainly directed toward the phone and cable companies.

“Any regulation that would allow soulless, noncitizen corporations to monetarily benefit at the expense of lawful citizens whom the government serves should not be enacted,” Michael W. Derington wrote.

The individual submissions also underline the success of get-out-the-comments advocacy efforts like the website Battleforthe.net, which allows supporters to type in their name and email address and submit a form letter that begins, “Net neutrality is the First Amendment of the Internet.”

The court-ordered retooling of the commission’s “Open Internet Order” of 2010 has touched off a surge in lobbying efforts by two sets of big corporations — Internet companies on one side, phone and cable companies on the other.

The Internet companies routinely make deals for improved treatment of their media content with network operators, so consumers get better, faster service. But new rules from the F.C.C. could improve the bargaining position of one side or the other by shifting the competitive landscape.

In that sense, the F.C.C. is a referee in price negotiations between two camps of powerful, deep-pocketed corporations.

The two sides have made their stances clear in their formal comments to the commission. The Internet Association, whose members include Google, Facebook, Netflix and Amazon, stated that today’s Internet is an “engine of economic growth, innovation and democratic values,” which it termed a “virtuous circle.” It added that “the Internet’s continued success is not inevitable,” saying that “broadband Internet access providers continue to have the ability and the incentive” to interrupt that engine.

In a statement, Michael Beckerman, president of the Internet Association, said, “The F.C.C. must act to create strong, enforceable net neutrality rules and apply them equally to both wireless and wireline providers.”

The phone and cable companies, by contrast, are resisting what they call “prescriptive rules,” as Verizon described possible constraints in a comment. The broadband network operators agree that the Internet is thriving, and thus, according to a Verizon comment, that “there is little call for regulators to intervene,” other than on a case-by-case basis.

What the phone and cable companies most fear is an option open to the F.C.C.: to oversee the Internet under its Title II authority. That would mean declaring the Internet a common carrier, a utility, which they say would be a misguided overreaction.

In a recent blog post, James W. Cicconi, senior executive vice president for external and legislative affairs at AT&T, said the price-gouging tactics the industry’s critics fear were “unlikely hypotheticals” that the phone and cable companies pledged not to do as the F.C.C. grappled with this issue in 2010.

“Not a single Internet service provider then or now has asserted a desire or right to engage in any of these practices,” Mr. Cicconi wrote, “to create ‘fast lanes and slow lanes.’ ”

The outpouring of public comments extends well beyond the details of the F.C.C.’s regulatory authority or the lobbying of major corporations, said Tim Wu, a professor at the Columbia Law School who helped create the concept of net neutrality.

“This is about a fear of closing of the technological frontier,” Mr. Wu said, “of the fear of the Internet becoming too corporatized — no longer this place where even if you start small, you do have a fighting chance.”

The F.C.C. is expected to make a decision on open Internet rules by the end of 2014 or early 2015. Whatever the commissioners eventually decide, one thing is likely: Their decision will face a legal challenge. It was a suit by Verizon that led to the court ruling earlier this year.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/te...net-rules.html





With 1 Million Comments, U.S. Net Neutrality Debate Nears First Marker
Alina Selyukh

U.S. companies, consumer advocates and citizens submitted more than 1 million comments to the Federal Communications Commission, drawing contentious divisions on the issue of net neutrality as the first deadline to comment approached Friday.

The FCC will continue collecting comments, made in response to these first submissions, until Sept. 10 as it weighs how best to regulate the way Internet service providers (ISPs) manage web traffic crossing their networks. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed new rules in April after a federal court struck down the FCC's previous version of such rules in January.

The FCC's draft rules propose banning ISPs from blocking users' access to websites or applications but allowing some "commercially reasonable" deals between content providers and ISPs to prioritize delivery of some web traffic.

Though Wheeler has insisted the FCC would carefully guard against abuse of the rules to hurt competition or consumers, the proposal drew ire from public interest groups and large web companies that say it would result in faster download speeds for some content at the expense of other content, which would inevitably be relegated to "slow lanes."

As the push against paid-prioritization spread across the web, thousands wrote to the FCC and the proposal has now attracted one of the biggest responses in the FCC's history, nearing the record 1.4 million comments the regulators received after the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast that exposed viewers to a glimpse of singer Janet Jackson's breast.

"Dear FCC," read numerous comments filed using a template created by the Electronic Frontier Foundation group.

"Net neutrality, the principle that (ISPs) treat all data that travels over their networks equally, is important to me because without it ISPs could have too much power to determine my Internet experience by providing better access to some services but not others."

Consumer advocates and some web companies, including online video services Netflix Inc and Vimeo, want to reclassify ISPs as telecommunications services and regulate them more like public utilities - an idea rejected by the ISPs and by Republicans both in Congress and at the FCC.

Experts disagree on whether or how reclassification would effectively prevent pay-for-priority deals. Wheeler has not proposed reclassification as the solution, but has not taken it off the table as a potential route.

The National Cable and Telecommunications Association, AT&T Inc, Verizon Communications Inc and Comcast Corp wrote to the FCC in opposition of reclassification, saying the "radical" move would impose arcane rules on the quickly changing marketplace and may raise costs for supporting already expensive network infrastructure. They say they have no plans to create any "slow lanes."

AT&T, though, said the FCC could ban paid prioritization without reclassifying ISPs. It is unclear how the approach would stand up in court. Verizon and Comcast supported the "commercially reasonable" standard.

Cable trade group came out in support of setting the same net neutrality rules for wireless and fixed broadband, something long urged by consumer advocates and recently also backed by large web companies.

(Reporting by Alina Selyukh; Editing by Andrea Ricci)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FN23720140718





Introducing Thread: A New Wireless Networking Protocol for the Home

Industry-leading companies form Thread Group to create simple, secure and low-power network for the home and its connected products
Press release

SAN RAMON, Calif. - July 15, 2014 - Recognizing the need for a new and better way to connect products in the home, seven companies today announced that they've joined forces to form the Thread Group (www.threadgroup.org) and develop Thread, a new IP-based wireless networking protocol. The charter of the Thread Group is to guide the adoption of the Thread protocol. Thread Group founding members consist of industry-leading companies including Yale Security, Silicon Labs, Samsung Electronics, Nest Labs, Freescale® Semiconductor, Big Ass Fans and ARM.

While currently available 802.15.4 networking technologies have their own advantages, each also has critical issues that prevent the promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) from being realized. These include lack of interoperability, inability to carry IPv6 communications, high power requirements that drain batteries quickly, and "hub and spoke" models dependent on one device (if that device fails, the whole network goes down). With Thread, product developers and consumers can easily and securely connect more than 250 devices into a low-power, wireless mesh network that also includes direct Internet and cloud access for every device.

"Existing wireless networking approaches were introduced long before the Internet of Things gained ground," said Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist, Google, and advisor to the Thread Group. "The Thread protocol takes existing technologies and combines the best parts of each to provide a better way to connect products in the home."

"A number of networking solutions and platforms have been introduced to address the growing demand for connected products in the home," said Lisa Arrowsmith, associate director, connectivity, smart homes and smart cities, IHS Technology. "Built on well-proven standards, including IEEE 802.15.4, IETF IPv6 and 6LoWPAN, Thread represents a resilient, IP-based solution for the rapidly growing Internet of Things."

Not Just Another Standard

Unlike many existing technologies or IoT approaches, Thread is not an application protocol or a connectivity platform for many types of disparate networks. Thread is an IPv6 networking protocol built on open standards, designed for low-power 802.15.4 mesh networks. Existing popular application protocols and IoT platforms can run over Thread networks. A version of Thread is already being used successfully in Nest products today.

A Better Network for Developers

Using proven standards and IPv6 technology with 6LoWPAN as its foundation, Thread offers product developers numerous technological advantages over existing wireless standards:

• Reliable networks: Thread offers robust self-healing mesh networks that scale to hundreds of devices with no single point of failure. Devices are ready when people need them.
• Secure networks: Thread networks feature secure, banking-class encryption. Thread closes identified security holes found in other wireless protocols and provides worry-free operation.
• Simple connectivity: Thread devices are simple to install with a smartphone, tablet or computer. Consumers can securely connect Thread devices in the home to each other and to the cloud for easy control and access from anywhere.
• Low power: Thread supports battery-operated devices as part of a home network. This allows the devices that people use every day - including thermostats, lighting controls, safety and security products - to be a part of the network without requiring constant charging or frequent battery changes.

Millions of existing 802.15.4 wireless devices already on the market can run Thread with just a software enhancement -- no new hardware required. Thread is designed for quick implementation and deployment of devices throughout the home.

Easy to Set Up, Easy to Use

Thread is designed with a new security architecture that allows consumers to simply and securely add and remove products to the network via a smartphone, tablet or computer. Thread's mesh network technology provides improved reliability and coverage anywhere in the home and Thread products will be tested to ensure that they work together effortlessly and securely right out of the box. Thread products will also bear the Thread logo, indicating they have been certified for quality, security and interoperability -- and to help consumers identify them on the market.

Thread Group Membership

The Thread Group is focused on educating product developers and consumers on the benefits of Thread through marketing and rigorous, meaningful product certification. The Thread Group will offer two tiers of membership, Sponsor and Contributor. Interested parties can review membership benefits and register at http://www.threadgroup.org/Join.aspx.

About Thread

Designed for consumers and devices in and around the home, Thread easily and securely connects hundreds of devices to each other and directly to the cloud using real Internet Protocols in a low-power, wireless mesh network. The non-profit Thread Group is focused on making Thread the foundation for the Internet of Things in the home, educating product developers and consumers on the unique features and benefits of Thread and ensuring a great user experience through rigorous, meaningful product certification. Thread is backed by industry-leading companies including ARM, Big Ass Fans, Freescale Semiconductor, Nest Labs, Inc., Samsung, Silicon Labs and Yale Security. For more information, please visit www.threadgroup.org.

###

Media Contact:
Alisa Pfeil
media@threadgroup.org
http://www.threadgroup.org/2014_07_Press_Release.aspx





No Signal? GoTenna Has a Messaging Gadget that Will Work in the Middle of Nowhere
Kevin Fitchard

SUMMARY:
Using extremely low-band frequencies, goTenna’s little baton can connect your iPhone or Android smartphone into any other goTenna-enabled smartphone even where there’s no cellular network for miles.


For all of our dependency on mobile phones, there are still quite a few places in this world you can’t get a wireless signal, from mountaintops to national parks to rural highways and even the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.

A New York City radio hardware startup called goTenna has an interesting new gadget that will keep your phone connected when there’s no cellular or Wi-Fi signal to be found. The goTenna device is a 6-inch long baton that pairs with an iOS or Android device using Bluetooth. It then connects with other goTennas miles away, allowing their paired phones to communicate with one another over peer-to-peer links.

It’s an extremely low bandwidth network, so it’s really only useful for send text messages and GPS coordinates, but it’s extremely long-range thanks to the ultra-low-band frequencies 151-154 MHz frequencies goTenna uses. Lower frequencies propagate further and can punch through or wrap around obstacles like trees. To put that in perspective, the lowest-band mobile network in operation today is at 700 MHz, while Wi-Fi starts another 1700 MHz further up the electromagnetic spectrum chart.

According to CEO and co-founder Daniela Perdomo, goTenna’s range is only limited by the horizon, allowing its signals to propagate up to nine miles in open environments. As you introduce obstacles, that range decreases, but Perdomo said goTenna is still seeing three to four miles in forested areas and even a mile in dense urban areas like her native Brooklyn. In an situations where the open horizon is greatly extended, say at the top of a mountain, she said, goTenna’s signals can propagate as far as 50 miles.

The network formed by goTenna is completely off the internet grid, so you’re not going to be surfing the web or tweeting with the device. But goTenna has designed a messaging and location-sharing app complete with downloadable maps that will make it very convenient for people in the middle of nowhere to communicate with another and coordinate their movements.

“It can be used by two people in the Sahara or 5,000 people at Coachella,” Perdomo said. “We’re flexible.”

As you can imagine, the big draw for such a gadget is going to be from the outdoorsy crowd, and Perdomo said goTenna plans to target the device at trekkers, mountain climbers, skiers, hunters, day hikers and the outfitters that supply them (it’s a device that lends itself to renting). But Perdomo readily admits there many other niche markets goTenna could appeal to.

There’s the survivalist/militia/soldier-of-fortune crowd and even the growing number of people in all seriousness preparing for the zombie apocalypse. Perdomo thinks it will be a hit with privacy advocates and also used as a means to circumvent government censorship under repressive regimes. Since goTenna’s messages never touch the internet there’s nothing to intercept unless authorities have a radio scanner, and even then all goTenna communications use RSA 1024 encryption, Perdomo said.

The device won’t start shipping until this fall, but goTenna started taking pre-orders on its website today. The cost is $150 for two devices. Why two? Well considering they form a peer-to-peer network, it’s a bit pointless to buy one.
http://gigaom.com/2014/07/17/no-sign...le-of-nowhere/





Comcast’s Worst Nightmare: How Tennessee Could Save America’s Internet

Chattanooga's public electric utility offers residents lightning-quick connections -- much to big telecoms' dismay
David Sirota

The business lobby often demands that government get out of the way of private corporations, so that competition can flourish and high-quality services can be efficiently delivered to as many consumers as possible. Yet, in an epic fight over telecommunications policy, the paradigm is now being flipped on its head, with corporate forces demanding the government squelch competition and halt the expansion of those high-quality services. Whether and how federal officials act may ultimately shape the future of America’s information economy.

The front line in this fight is Chattanooga, Tennessee, where officials at the city’s public electric utility, EPB, realized that smart-grid energy infrastructure could also provide consumers super-fast Internet speeds at competitive prices. A few years ago, those officials decided to act on that revelation. Like a publicly traded corporation, the utility issued bonds to raise resources to invest in the new broadband project. Similarly, just as many private corporations ended up receiving federal stimulus dollars, so did EPB, which put those monies into its new network.

The result is a system that now provides the nation’s fastest broadband speeds at prices often cheaper than the private competition. As the Chattanooga Times Free Press noted a few years back, “EPB offers faster Internet speeds for the money, and shows equal pep in both uploading and downloading content, with Comcast and AT&T trailing on quickness.” Meanwhile, EPB officials tell the Washington Post that the utility’s telecom services have become “a great profit center” — an assertion confirmed by a Standard & Poor credit upgrade notice pointing out that the utility “is now covering all costs from telephone, video and Internet revenue, as well as providing significant financial benefit to the electric system.”

This is great news for local businesses and taxpayers — but it is terrible news for private telecom companies, who not only fear being outcompeted and outperformed in Chattanooga, but also fear the Chattanooga model being promoted in other cities. In response, those telecom firms have been abandoning the standard argument about the private sector. Indeed, as the Times Free Press reported last week, rather than insisting the private sector has inherent advantages over the public sector, the firms have gone to court insisting “that EPB, as a public entity, would have an edge when competing against private companies, which would be at a disadvantage when facing an entity owned by taxpayers.”

To date, those court cases have been thwarted by EPB. However, it is a different story in state legislatures. Once again abandoning the business lobby’s typical call for less government intervention, telecom firms have successfully pushed 20 states to pass laws limiting the reach of community-owned utilities like EPB.

That’s where Washington comes in. With Census figures showing more than 1 in 5 Tennessee residents having no Internet connection, EPB is now proposing to offer its ultra-fast services to new communities. But it needs the Federal Communications Commission to preempt the Tennessee statute prohibiting the utility from competing with private telecom companies outside its current market.

For EPB, the good news is that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has repeatedly pledged that in the name of competition and broadband access, he will support preempting state laws like Tennessee’s. However, in a capital run by money, EPB may still be politically overpowered. After all, as a community-owned utility in a midsized city, EPB does not have the lobbyists and campaign cash to match those of behemoths like Comcast and AT&T. What the utility does have is a solid track record and a pro-consumer, pro-competition argument.

The question is: Will that be enough to prevent Wheeler from backing down or being blocked by Congress? The future of the Internet may be at stake in the answer.
http://www.salon.com/2014/07/18/comc...ernet_partner/





Congresswoman Defends “States’ Rights” to Protect ISPs from Muni Competition

UPDATE: Blackburn's proposal to strip FCC of authority approved by House.
Jon Brodkin

UPDATE: The House today approved Blackburn's proposal by a vote of 223-200, according to The Hill. It would still need Senate approval to become law.

US Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) wants to make sure the Federal Communications Commission never interferes with "states' rights" to protect private Internet service providers from having to compete against municipal broadband networks.

Twenty states have passed laws making it difficult for cities and towns to offer their own broadband Internet services, and FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has pledged to use his agency's authority to "preempt state laws that ban competition from community broadband."

He may get a chance to make good on that promise soon. EPB, a community-owned electric utility in Chattanooga, Tennessee said it is "considering filing a petition to the FCC" to overturn a state law that prevents it from offering Internet and video service outside its electric service area.

"There are vast areas of Tennessee, surrounding EPB’s electric service territory, where citizens and businesses have little or no broadband Internet connectivity," EPB's announcement this month said. "For several years EPB has received regular requests to help some of these communities obtain critical broadband Internet infrastructure. However, since 1999, while state law has allowed EPB to provide phone services outside its electric service territory, it has prohibited EPB from offering Internet and video services to any areas outside its electric service area."

That's exactly what Blackburn wants to prevent. Yesterday, she proposed an amendment to a general government appropriations bill that would prohibit taxpayer funds from being used by the FCC to preempt state laws governing municipal broadband.

While Blackburn thinks the FCC shouldn't interfere with states' rights, she doesn't seem to be concerned about states interfering with municipalities' rights to offer their own broadband services. Here's what she said:

We don't need unelected federal agency bureaucrats in Washington telling our states what they can and can't do with respect to protecting their limited taxpayer dollars and private enterprises. As a former state senator from Tennessee, I strongly believe in states' rights. I found it deeply troubling that FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler has repeatedly stated that he intends to preempt states' rights when it comes to the role of state policy over municipal broadband.

...

States have spoken and said we should be careful and deliberate in how we allow public entry into our vibrant communications marketplace, a sector of our economy that invests tens of billions of dollars each year, accounts for tens off thousands of jobs, and serves millions of consumers.
She went on to say that "municipal broadband projects have had a mixed bag of results" including some successes "and also some spectacular failures that have left taxpayers on the hook."


For an example of a failure, she called out UTOPIA in Utah, where a bill to limit the network's growth was introduced in the state house this year. Blackburn did not mention EPB from her own state, which has provided much-needed competition to Comcast and AT&T and turned a profit.

Blackburn received $10,000 from the National Cable & Telecommunications Association this year and last year, according to OpenSecrets.org. She received $12,500 in contributions from Verizon, $10,000 from AT&T, $7,500 from Comcast, and $7,000 from representatives of Time Warner Cable. (These donations come from the companies' political action committees, employees, or owners.)

The bill—H.R. 5016, the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act of 2015—was left as unfinished business yesterday. A roll call vote on Blackburn's amendment "was postponed, but it initially appeared to have enough votes for passage," according to the news site Broadcasting & Cable.

The National League of Cities, National Association of Counties, and National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors yesterday sent a letter to Congress urging lawmakers to defeat Blackburn's amendment.

"[S]tate laws that prohibit or restrict public and public/private broadband projects... harm both the public and private sectors, stifle economic growth, prevent the creation or retention of thousands of jobs, and hamper work force development," the letter said. "The private sector alone cannot enable the United States to take full advantage of the opportunities that advanced communications networks can create in virtually every area of life. As a result, federal, state, and local efforts are taking place across the Nation to deploy both private and public broadband infrastructure to stimulate and support economic development and job creation, especially in economically distressed areas. But such efforts are being thwarted in some areas by State laws that prohibit or restrict municipalities from working with private broadband providers, or developing themselves, if necessary, the advanced broadband infrastructure that will stimulate local businesses development, foster work force retraining, and boost employment in economically underachieving areas."
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014...i-competition/





Demand for Personal Computers Still Erratic, Outlook Unstable
Noel Randewich and Bill Rigby

Improved demand for personal computers after years of declines may not last as emerging markets remain weak and recent corporate upgrades in the United States and Europe may prove fleeting.

The latest sign that the PC market's stability could be short-lived came from technology distributor Synnex Corp. Its shares have slumped 16 percent since Chief Executive Officer Kevin Murai warned earlier in July that increased demand was already waning from companies buying new computers to upgrade their operating systems after Microsoft Corp stopped supporting Windows XP in April.

Investors have pushed shares in PC mainstays Microsoft and Intel Corp and parts suppliers such as Seagate and Western Digital Corp to decade- or record-highs, partly on bets that the global slump in PC demand that began with Apple Inc's launch of the iPad in 2010 may have hit bottom.

But detractors point out the story is far from certain. Demand is still falling in emerging markets such as China, crucial to any sustained comeback. While up to a quarter of the world's PCs still employ the 13-year-old Windows XP, it is unclear how many will choose tablets or Apple and Google Inc "Chrome" computers over PCs, rather than upgrade to newer Windows versions.

"If this is only a couple quarters of flat growth and all of a sudden we go down to 5 and 7 percent year-over-year declines again, then people are going to get nervous and say we don’t know where the bottom is," said Chuck Jones, founder of research firm Sand Hill Insights.

Intel reports its second-quarter results on Tuesday, while Microsoft posts earnings on July 22 and both are likely to shed more light on the state of the global PC market. Seagate, which reports on July 17 and Western Digital, which gives its results on July 30, could fill in the picture further.

BETTER SENTIMENT

Optimism on Wall Street has grown since Intel unexpectedly raised its quarterly and annual revenue outlooks in June, sending its shares to levels not seen in a decade. Microsoft's stock is at highs last seen in 2000.

Shipments of PCs were flat in the June quarter, according to research firm Gartner, a better-than-expected result.

"Market feedback on the PC space is much better than 18 months ago," memory chipmaker Micron Technology Inc President Mark Adams told Reuters in June. "We've been talking and planning about the back half of the year with our customers and they’re pretty focused on making sure we don’t take away (DRAM) capacity." DRAM chips are widely used in PCs.

Global tablet shipments in the March quarter fell for the first time ever, according to NPD DisplaySearch. U.S. consumers who once thought they would get by with a tablet are gravitating toward cheap laptops.

"The PC is not dead. There is a healthy market under there," FBR analyst Chris Rolland said, pointing to a gradually improving U.S. economy.

But in China and other developing countries, once major growth engines for the PC industry, shipments of laptops are still falling as consumers choose tablets. It is unclear to what extent people in developing countries will eventually follow wealthier U.S. consumers back to buying both tablets and laptops, said IDC analyst Loren Loverde.

Even Microsoft no longer sounds as confident in the PC's prospects. In a recent TV commercial, it described its newest Surface Pro as a "tablet that can replace your laptop," a major shift for a company that still depends on PCs for a sizeable amount of revenue.

(Reporting by Noel Randewich and Bill Rigby; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FG28U20140711





Govt Opens Inquiry into Website Blocking
Allie Coyne

Section 313 comes under scrutiny.

The Federal Government has opened a parliamentary inquiry into a controversial section of the Telecommunications Act which allows law enforcement agencies to block websites.

The committee, established on Wednesday, will investigate whether Section 313 of the Act is being used appropriately by agencies such as the Australian Federal Police to disrupt illegal online activities.

The controversial powers have been the subject of criticism after the Australian Securities and Investments Commission last year admitted it inadvertently blocked 250,000 websites in an effort to block just 1200 while using the section.

The provision of the Act has been in place for almost 15 years, but law enforcement agencies including ASIC and the AFP - along with another agency whose identity has been kept secret for "national security" reasons - started using the law vigorously from 2012.

The AFP used the legislation to block 21 websites which had been listed on Interpol's 'worst of' list of child abuse websites between June 2011 and February 2013.

Section 313 notices allow law enforcement agencies to request telecommunications companies to block websites believed to be involved in illegal activities. Agencies using the provision are not currently required to be transparent about its use.

“How law enforcement agencies use section 313 to request the disruption of such services is an important public policy question," the committee’s terms of reference state.

"Section 313 is also used for other purposes, but the committee will inquire solely into and report on government agency use of section 313 for the purpose of disrupting illegal online services."

The committee will consider which government agencies should be allowed to use Section 313, what level of authority such agencies will need to request to use it, what types of illegal online activities should fall under the provision, and how transparent and accountable those using Section 313 should be.

It will accept submissions until August 22, and expects to make a final report in July next year.

The panel is made up of ten members - six Coalition MPs, three Labor MPs and Clive Palmer - and is chaired by Queensland Liberal MP Jane Prentice.

Search giant Google weighed into the debate around Section 313 in March this year, criticising the AFP and ASIC for "abusing" the Act to block websites.

It said law enforcement agencies had been intepreting the provision more widely than intended, and called on the Government to repeal the "outdated" legislation.
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/390037...-blocking.aspx





Want To Ensure Your Personal Android Data Is Truly Wiped? Just Turn On Encryption Then Reset
Paul Lilly

We've been around the block enough times to know that outside of setting a storage medium on fire or some other equally extreme measure, all data is recoverable, it's just matter of time, money, and overall desire. However, it was still sobering to find out exactly how much data security firm Avast was able to recover from Android devices it purchased from eBay, which included everything from naked selfies to even a completed loan application. Does this mean we shouldn't ever sell our old handsets? Luckily, the answer is no.

Avast's self-serving study was to promote its Anti-Theft app available on Google Play. The free app comes with a wipe feature that overwrites all files, thereby making them invisible to casual recovery methods, such as the many undelete utilities that are all over the web. That's one approach.

There's another solution that's incredibly easy and doesn't require downloading and installing anything. Before you sell your Android phone on eBay, Craigslist, or wherever, enable encryption and wait for it to encrypt its storage. After that, perform a wipe and reset as normal, which will obliterate the encryption key and ensure the data on your device can't be read.

Not all versions of Android support encryption, and if yours doesn't, you'll need to download an app that will do it for you. Assuming you own a relatively modern Android phone, you need to setup a lock screen PIN before you can proceed. You'll find that option by going to Settings > Security > Screen Lock > PIN.

Depending on your device, you may find the encryption option in the Security screen. On an HTC One, you need to navigate to Storage > Phone storage encryption. Before you proceed, you need to keep some things in mind. First, you can't reverse this process. The only way to go back is to perform a factory reset. Secondly, you may notice that your phone runs slightly slower. And finally, be sure that your phone is plugged in before you proceed -- encryption can take an hour or more.
http://hothardware.com/News/Want-To-...on-Then-Reset/





U.S. Judge OKs Warrant for Google User's Emails, Stoking Debate
Joseph Ax

A federal judge in New York has granted prosecutors access to a Gmail user's emails as part of a criminal probe, a decision that could fan the debate over how aggressively the government may pursue data if doing so may invade people's privacy.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Gabriel Gorenstein said Friday he had authorized a warrant to be served on Google Inc for the emails of an unnamed individual who is the target of a money laundering investigation.

Gorenstein said his decision ran counter to several other judges' rulings in similar cases that sweeping warrants give the government improper access to too many emails, not just relevant ones.

But he said the law lets investigators review broad swaths of documents to decide which are covered by warrants.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

The ruling came three months after U.S. Magistrate Judge James Francis in New York said prosecutors can force Microsoft Corp to hand over a customer's email stored in an Ireland data center.

Microsoft has appealed, in what is seen as the first challenge by a company to a warrant seeking data stored overseas.

Companies including Verizon Communications Inc, AT&T Inc, Cisco Systems Inc and Apple Inc have filed briefs in support of Microsoft, as has the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an advocacy group. A hearing is set for July 31 before U.S. District Judge Loretta Preska in New York.

The government's ability to seize personal information has grown more contentious since former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden leaked secret documents in June 2013 to media outlets outlining the agency's massive data collection programs.

In June, a unanimous U.S. Supreme Court ruled police generally need a warrant to search an arrested suspect's cellphone, citing privacy concerns.

Gorenstein's ruling joined a public debate playing out among several magistrate judges, who typically handle warrant requests. It is unusual to issue lengthy opinions on such matters particularly when, as in Gorenstein's case, the judge approves the application.

In April, John Facciola, a magistrate in Washington, D.C., rejected a warrant for the Apple email account of a defense contractor as part of a kickback investigation, one of several similar opinions he has authored recently.

Last year, a Kansas magistrate denied warrant applications for emails and records at Google, Verizon, Yahoo! Inc, Microsoft unit Skype and GoDaddy in a stolen computer equipment case.

Both judges said the warrants were overly broad.

On the other hand, several U.S. appeals courts have rejected motions to suppress such searches, Gorenstein said.

Hanni Fakhoury, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, applauded Gorenstein for explaining his reasoning in writing, though he said he disagreed with the analysis.

"The more voices and opinions we can add to the discussion, the better," he said in an email.

(Reporting by Joseph Ax; Editing by Richard Chang)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FN2FU20140718





UN: Nations Hide Rise in Private Digital Snooping
AP

Governments on every continent are hiding an increasing reliance on private companies to snoop on citizens’ digital lives, the U.N. human rights office said Wednesday.

Stepping into a fierce debate over digital privacy rights, the U.N. office says it has strong evidence of a growing complicity among private companies in government spying. It says governments around the world are using both the law and covert methods to access private content and metadata.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said the lack of transparency and tactics extend to governments’ ”de facto coercion of companies to gain broad access to information and data on citizens without them knowing.”

Her office’s report to the U.N. General Assembly says concerns about the erosion in privacy have increased since last year’s revelations of U.S. and British mass surveillance. The report said stricter laws are needed to prevent violations and ensure accountability when digital technology and surveillance is misused. It warned that mass surveillance is becoming “a dangerous habit rather than an exceptional measure.”

By law, Pillay said, governments must demonstrate the interference isn’t arbitrary or illegal.

“Secret rules and secret interpretations — even secret judicial interpretations — of law do not have the necessary qualities of ‘law,’” the report says. “Any capture of communications data is potentially an interference with privacy.”

The report comes as American technology companies’ reputations suffer from the perception they can’t protect customer data from U.S. spy agencies. The German government said last month it is ending a contract with Verizon over security concerns.

But U.S. officials say European and other foreign intelligence agencies also routinely demand cooperation from their national companies.

“All countries should immediately start to review their digital surveillance practices and bring them in line with international rights standards,” Human Rights Watch researcher Cynthia Wong said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...998_story.html





Commons Passes Emergency Data Laws Despite Criticism
BBC

MPs have voted through the government's emergency legislation giving the security services access to people's phone and internet records.

Some MPs criticised the government's timetabling of the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill, which completed its passage through the lower chamber in one day.

Conservative MP David Davis said the timetable was "entirely improper".

But MPs approved both the timetable and the bill itself in separate votes.

It passed its final stage in the Commons at 22:00 BST, and is now expected to move on to the House of Lords on Wednesday.

A bill's passage through the Commons usually takes a matter of weeks or months, although there are well-established procedures for fast-tracking bills when MPs believe that it is necessary to do so.

'Democratic banditry'

The plans are supported by the three main parties, but opposed by civil liberties campaigners.

They were drafted in response to a European Court of Justice ruling in April.

Home Secretary Theresa May said: "This bill merely preserves the status quo. It does not extend or create any new powers, rights to access or obligations on communications companies that go beyond those that already exist.

"It does not address the same problems or replicate the draft communications data bill published in 2012.

"We do still face a decline in our ability to obtain the communications data we need caused by the use of modern technology... but that is not what we are considering today.

"If we delay we face the appalling prospect police operations will go dark, that trails will go cold, that terrorist plots will go undetected.

"If that happens, innocent lives may be lost."

But she said the government would accept a Labour proposal for reports every six months by the Interception of Communications Commissioner on how the new law is working.

Labour shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper told the Commons that her party would support the "sticking plaster" bill but called for a much wider debate on the balance between safety and civil liberties.

She said: "This is not the way that this kind of legislation should be done. Let's be clear, the last-minute nature of it does undermine trust in the government's intentions but also in the vital work the police and agencies need to do.

"But I also have no doubt this legislation is needed and that we cannot delay it until the autumn.

"Parliament does need to act this week so that existing investigations and capabilities are not jeopardised over the next few months."

Mr Davis, a former contender for the leadership of the Conservative Party, blamed disagreements between his party and the Liberal Democrats for the delayed response to the ruling.

"My understanding is there was an argument inside government between the two halves of the coalition and that argument has gone on for three months. So what the coalition cannot decide in three months this House has to decide in one day.

"This seems to me entirely improper because of the role of Parliament - we have three roles.

"One is to scrutinise legislation, one is to prevent unintended consequences, and one is to defend the freedom and liberty of our constituents.

"This undermines all three and we should oppose this motion."

Labour MPs also criticised the government for attempting to rush through the laws, with former election campaign chief Tom Watson describing it as an "insult" and likening it to "democratic banditry resonant of a rogue state".

Veteran Labour MP David Winnick, a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said: "I consider this to be an outright abuse of parliamentary procedure.

"Even if one is in favour of what the home secretary intends to do, to do so in the manner in which it is intended, to pass all stages in one go, surely makes a farce of our responsibilities as MPs.

"When one considers the issues involved, how can one justify saying in effect that every stage of this bill must go through by 10pm?"

But former Labour home secretary Jack Straw said he would give Mrs May the "benefit of the doubt" over the legislation and told MPs: "I've been in the position of having to bring forward emergency legislation. It is never easy.

"I have often thought there is an inverse relationship between the extravagance of language used and the strength or otherwise of the argument made.

"No case has been made as to why this legislation should not be dealt with today, nor arguments in all the briefings we have had that suggest, for a second, substantively why and how this legislation goes beyond what everybody assumed to be the state of the law before the European Court of Justice judgement."

'Antidote to paedophilia'

Unveiling the measures last week in a joint news conference with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, Prime Minister David Cameron said it was about maintaining existing capabilities - not introducing new "snooping" laws.

The government said it was forced to act after the European court struck down an EU directive in April requiring phone and internet companies to retain communications data on the grounds that it infringed human rights.

A deal to rush through the measures was agreed by Mr Cameron, Mr Clegg and Labour leader Ed Miliband last week.

But campaign group Liberty said it was about "snooping on everyone".

Shami Chakrabarti, its director, also criticised the lack of scrutiny of the bill, saying "Parliament is being shown contempt".

She added: "I appreciate that this data can be vital in serious criminal investigations, but what's been going on increasingly is that because it's possible to capture more and more of everybody's data, the government is building a bigger and bigger haystack.

"It's disproportionate and Parliament should have had more than three days to look at such an important issue."

In a letter to Mr Milband, Mr Watson wrote of his "huge personal disappointment" at Labour's backing of the measures.

He added: "Far from scrutinising the Data Retention and Investigatory Powers Bill, we seem to have helped generate the panic needed to rush this important bill through under controversial emergency procedures, and the myth needed to present it as the antidote to paedophilia."

The government won a large majority of 387 on its proposed Commons timetable for the legislation, as MPs agreed by 436 votes to 49 to complete consideration of the bill in one day.

MPs subsequently approved the general principles of the bill at second reading by 498 votes to 31, a government majority of 467. It later passed its third and final reading by a comparable margin of 416 votes.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-28305309





Meet Executive Order 12333: The Reagan Rule that Lets the NSA Spy on Americans
John Napier Tye

In March I received a call from the White House counsel’s office regarding a speech I had prepared for my boss at the State Department. The speech was about the impact that the disclosure of National Security Agency surveillance practices would have on U.S. Internet freedom policies. The draft stated that “if U.S. citizens disagree with congressional and executive branch determinations about the proper scope of signals intelligence activities, they have the opportunity to change the policy through our democratic process.”

But the White House counsel’s office told me that no, that wasn’t true. I was instructed to amend the line, making a general reference to “our laws and policies,” rather than our intelligence practices. I did.

Even after all the reforms President Obama has announced, some intelligence practices remain so secret, even from members of Congress, that there is no opportunity for our democracy to change them.

Public debate about the bulk collection of U.S. citizens’ data by the NSA has focused largely on Section 215 of the Patriot Act, through which the government obtains court orders to compel American telecommunications companies to turn over phone data. But Section 215 is a small part of the picture and does not include the universe of collection and storage of communications by U.S. persons authorized under Executive Order 12333.

From 2011 until April of this year, I worked on global Internet freedom policy as a civil servant at the State Department. In that capacity, I was cleared to receive top-secret and “sensitive compartmented” information. Based in part on classified facts that I am prohibited by law from publishing, I believe that Americans should be even more concerned about the collection and storage of their communications under Executive Order 12333 than under Section 215.

Bulk data collection that occurs inside the United States contains built-in protections for U.S. persons, defined as U.S. citizens, permanent residents and companies. Such collection must be authorized by statute and is subject to oversight from Congress and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The statutes set a high bar for collecting the content of communications by U.S. persons. For example, Section 215 permits the bulk collection only of U.S. telephone metadata — lists of incoming and outgoing phone numbers — but not audio of the calls.

Executive Order 12333 contains no such protections for U.S. persons if the collection occurs outside U.S. borders. Issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to authorize foreign intelligence investigations, 12333 is not a statute and has never been subject to meaningful oversight from Congress or any court. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has said that the committee has not been able to “sufficiently” oversee activities conducted under 12333.

Unlike Section 215, the executive order authorizes collection of the content of communications, not just metadata, even for U.S. persons. Such persons cannot be individually targeted under 12333 without a court order. However, if the contents of a U.S. person’s communications are “incidentally” collected (an NSA term of art) in the course of a lawful overseas foreign intelligence investigation, then Section 2.3(c) of the executive order explicitly authorizes their retention. It does not require that the affected U.S. persons be suspected of wrongdoing and places no limits on the volume of communications by U.S. persons that may be collected and retained.

“Incidental” collection may sound insignificant, but it is a legal loophole that can be stretched very wide. Remember that the NSA is building a data center in Utah five times the size of the U.S. Capitol building, with its own power plant that will reportedly burn $40 million a year in electricity.

“Incidental collection” might need its own power plant.

A legal regime in which U.S. citizens’ data receives different levels of privacy and oversight, depending on whether it is collected inside or outside U.S. borders, may have made sense when most communications by U.S. persons stayed inside the United States. But today, U.S. communications increasingly travel across U.S. borders — or are stored beyond them. For example, the Google and Yahoo e-mail systems rely on networks of “mirror” servers located throughout the world. An e-mail from New York to New Jersey is likely to wind up on servers in Brazil, Japan and Britain. The same is true for most purely domestic communications.

Executive Order 12333 contains nothing to prevent the NSA from collecting and storing all such communications — content as well as metadata — provided that such collection occurs outside the United States in the course of a lawful foreign intelligence investigation. No warrant or court approval is required, and such collection never need be reported to Congress. None of the reforms that Obama announced earlier this year will affect such collection.

Without any legal barriers to such collection, U.S. persons must increasingly rely on the affected companies to implement security measures to keep their communications private. The executive order does not require the NSA to notify or obtain consent of a company before collecting its users’ data.

The attorney general, rather than a court, must approve “minimization procedures” for handling the data of U.S. persons that is collected under 12333, to protect their rights. I do not know the details of those procedures. But the director of national intelligence recently declassified a document (United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18) showing that U.S. agencies may retain such data for five years.

Before I left the State Department, I filed a complaint with the department’s inspector general, arguing that the current system of collection and storage of communications by U.S. persons under Executive Order 12333 violates the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. I have also brought my complaint to the House and Senate intelligence committees and to the inspector general of the NSA.

I am not the first person with knowledge of classified activities to publicly voice concerns about the collection and retention of communications by U.S. persons under 12333. The president’s own Review Group on Intelligence and Communication Technologies, in Recommendation 12 of its public report, addressed the matter. But the review group coded its references in a way that masked the true nature of the problem.

At first glance, Recommendation 12 appears to concern Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act, which authorizes collection inside the United States against foreign targets outside the United States. Although the recommendation does not explicitly mention Executive Order 12333, it does refer to “any other authority.” A member of the review group confirmed to me that this reference was written deliberately to include Executive Order 12333.

Recommendation 12 urges that all data of U.S. persons incidentally collected under such authorities be immediately purged unless it has foreign intelligence value or is necessary to prevent serious harm. The review group further recommended that a U.S. person’s incidentally collected data never be used in criminal proceedings against that person, and that the government refrain from searching communications by U.S. persons unless it obtains a warrant or unless such searching is necessary to prevent serious harm.

The White House understood that Recommendation 12 was intended to apply to 12333. That understanding was conveyed to me verbally by several White House staffers, and was confirmed in an unclassified White House document that I saw during my federal employment and that is now in the possession of several congressional committees.

In that document, the White House stated that adoption of Recommendation 12 would require “significant changes” to current practice under Executive Order 12333 and indicated that it had no plans to make such changes.

All of this calls into question some recent administration statements. Gen. Keith Alexander, a former NSA director, has said publicly that for years the NSA maintained a U.S. person e-mail metadata program similar to the Section 215 telephone metadata program. And he has maintained that the e-mail program was terminated in 2011 because “we thought we could better protect civil liberties and privacy by doing away with it.” Note, however, that Alexander never said that the NSA stopped collecting such data — merely that the agency was no longer using the Patriot Act to do so. I suggest that Americans dig deeper.

Consider the possibility that Section 215 collection does not represent the outer limits of collection on U.S. persons but rather is a mechanism to backfill that portion of U.S. person data that cannot be collected overseas under 12333.

Proposals for replacing Section 215 collection are currently being debated in Congress. We need a similar debate about Executive Order 12333. The order as used today threatens our democracy. There is no good reason that U.S. citizens should receive weaker privacy and oversight protections simply because their communications are collected outside, not inside, our borders.

I have never made any unauthorized disclosures of classified information, nor would I ever do so. I fully support keeping secret the targets, sources and methods of U.S. intelligence as crucial elements of national security. I was never a disgruntled federal employee; I loved my job at the State Department. I left voluntarily and on good terms to take a job outside of government. A draft of this article was reviewed and cleared by the State Department and the NSA to ensure that it contained no classified material.

When I started at the State Department, I took an oath to protect the Constitution of the United States. I don’t believe that there is any valid interpretation of the Fourth Amendment that could permit the government to collect and store a large portion of U.S. citizens’ online communications, without any court or congressional oversight, and without any suspicion of wrongdoing. Such a legal regime risks abuse in the long run, regardless of whether one trusts the individuals in office at a particular moment.

I am coming forward because I think Americans deserve an honest answer to the simple question: What kind of data is the NSA collecting on millions, or hundreds of millions, of Americans?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinio...fc2_story.html





In the Name of Security, German NSA Committee May Turn to Typewriters
Cyrus Farivar

Patrick Sensburg, chairman of the German parliament's National Security Agency investigative committee, now says he’s considering expanding the use of manual typewriters to carry out his group's work.

In an appearance Monday morning on German public television, Sensburg said that the committee is taking its operational security very seriously. "In fact, we already have [a typewriter], and it’s even a non-electronic typewriter," he said.

If Sensburg’s suggestion takes flight, the country would be taking a page out of the Russian playbook. Last year, the agency in charge of securing communications from the Kremlin announced that it wanted to spend 486,000 rubles (about $14,800) to buy 20 electric typewriters as a way to avoid digital leaks.

Speaking of security

Sensburg's announcement came the same day that German authorities arrested a “Markus R.,” an employee of the German spy agency called the BND. Markus had been accused of spying for the CIA.

Markus allegedly approached the CIA via e-mail in 2012 to share German intelligence, and the offer was accepted. He is accused of providing 218 documents over three in-person meetings with CIA agents in Austria, and he was paid about $34,000. Local authorities only detected Markus in May 2014 because he allegedly sent an unencrypted e-mail to the Russian consulate in Munich that was intercepted by German intelligence.

Last week, Berlin expelled the CIA’s station chief in the country in the wake of the spying row, the latest sign that relations between the two longstanding allies are fraying. Late last year, the German government accused the NSA of spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Klaus Scharioth, the former German ambassador to the United States, went so far as to call the present situation the worst crisis in US-German relations since World War II.

Upping opsec

Sensburg, though, is no luddite. In addition to the typewriting initiative, he announced publicly that he was going to have a security audit performed on his smartphone. "I'm going to ask the other chairmen and committee members to have their phones checked at once," Sensburg said.

That declaration came just one day after German media reported that two members of the German parliament—including a former member of the intelligence committee—had their phones compromised.

"We have to try to keep our internal communication sure to send encrypted e-mails, use crypto phones and other things, and other things that I won’t mention, of course,” Sensburg noted.

The German NSA committee, founded in March 2014, is charged with specifically investigating “whether, in what way, and on what scale” the US and its Five Eyes allies “collected or are collecting data” to, from, and within Germany.

For months, Sensburg has been trying to figure out a way to get NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to testify before his committee, possibly via secure video conference from a Moscow embassy of an ally. Despite other German politicians' best efforts, bringing Snowden to Germany for questioning—much less asylum—seems impossible.

“A questioning in Germany remains an option,” Sensburg told Der Spiegel in May 2014. “But I doubt very much that he would accept that because there is an extradition request from the United States based on the serious accusation that he committed acts of treason. There is no basis whatsoever for granting him political asylum in Germany. In its expert opinion, the German federal government made it clear that Snowden would have to expect extradition proceedings the moment he stepped off a plane here.”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...o-typewriters/





'Hidden From Google' Remembers the Sites Google Is Forced to Forget
Jason Koebler

In Europe, people are lining up in droves to have themselves forgotten by Google under the controversial "right to be forgotten." But at least one website is making sure we remember what's lost from the search engine's results.

Hidden From Google, the brainchild of a web programmer in New Jersey, archives each website that Google is required to take down from European Union search listings thanks to the recent court decision that allows people to request that certain pages be scrubbed from Google's search results if they're outdated or irrelevant. That decision has resulted in takedown requests from convicted sex offenders and huge banking companies, among thousands of others.

Hidden From Google doesn't automatically archive each website that disappears from searches—instead, it relies on news reports about specific websites that are removed. Any person can submit a link that has been removed from Google, and the site will archive it. That means that the site is far from comprehensive. It only has a couple dozen stories listed thus far. Meanwhile, Google has a backlog of some 50,000 requests. By that measure, the site isn't perfect—but it is a start. Websites such as Chilling Effects catalog takedown requests from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but haven't yet begun listing sites removed from searches because of right to be forgotten requests.

"Given the inherent subjectivity of the content, right to be forgotten requests promise to be even more ambiguous than copyright claims. Formulaic notice services are thus even more likely to upset the balance between privacy and freedom of expression by making fraudulent requests both easier to send and harder to detect," Emily Hong, of Chilling Effects, wrote in a blog post. "In a pool of 50,000+ incoming notices, a false positive rate of just 0.1 percent would amount to 50 individual cases that result in the harmful loss of speech."

Still, that site hasn't decided yet if it will, or if it's even possible, to catalogue all sites removed from Google searches as a result of the law. Hidden From Google is trying.

So far, the site has brought new life to a Daily Mail story about a couple arrested for having sex on a crowded train, to a Der Spiegel story about Scientology, and to a BBC op-ed about Merrill Lynch's role in causing the worldwide recession.

"The concept of Hidden From Google seemed to be something that was missing from the internet," Afaq Tariq, the site's programmer, told me in an email. "Whether I agree with the concept or not, it is a perfectly legitimate way to archive the actions of this societal decision so an open discussion can take place on its impact. I built it with the notion of it empowering a fairly equipped debate."

Tariq says he's not sure whether the right to be forgotten should exist or not, but says that determining whether or not a website should turn up in Google searches should be a decision undertaken by the internet as a whole, not just one person who wants to forget something embarrassing (or criminal). Tariq said the site would be updated and expanded today.

"I am not a privacy advocate or even passionate about the topic. And neither have I decided my personal stance on the subject of private entities censoring their product (yet)," Tariq told me. "If enough people voice their opinion and say that this site causes more harm than good, I would be the first to consider its removal."
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hid...rced-to-forget





Lasers: Coming to a Theater Near You

Laser-based projection technology will make cinema screens bigger and brighter
Bill Beck

When was the last time you saw a movie in a theater? Three months ago? A year? Longer than that?

That’s the problem.

The movie industry is among the world’s most important businesses. The Motion Picture Association of America says that films produced in the United States alone pulled in US $34.7 billion in worldwide box-office revenues in 2012. And yet the industry is beset by a dismaying trend: More and more, people are watching movies on their laptops, tablets, and smartphones. In wealthy countries, middle-class homes are now typically outfitted with huge flat-panel TVs and powerful surround-sound audio systems. The upshot is that for many people, particularly middle-aged ones, a trip to a movie theater is becoming a rare event, if not an increasingly distant memory.

The motion-picture industry is fighting back, though—with technology. There’s a huge push today to develop sophisticated systems that will ensure that the theater experience remains far superior to anything you can get at home or while watching a small screen. These systems will foster the continued growth of 3-D motion pictures, as well as a gradual migration to movies with a higher frame rate, higher spatial resolution, deeper contrast, and even a vastly greater color palette than today’s films.

The upshot is that the next three to five years will see the most significant and the fastest technological transition in the history of motion pictures. For the first time, industry leaders have agreed on the need to go beyond the familiar but optically limited characteristics of film stock and embrace the dazzling capabilities of all-digital motion pictures. At the end of this transition, the optical parameters of motion pictures will for the first time approach the capabilities of the human visual system.

This technological revolution will come from some radical transformations in motion-picture projectors. Since 2000, movie theaters have been switching over to digital projectors. But these projectors continue to rely on a 60-year-old technology: xenon electric-arc lamps, whose brightness fades over time. Even brand new, these lamps are not up to the demands of 3-D movies, especially on larger screens. The movie projectors of the future will replace these lightbulbs with lasers.

Actually, the revolution has already started. In September of 2012, Martin Scorsese’s film Hugo became the first commercial feature-length movie to be shown publicly with a laser projector. The film was an appropriate choice, because Hugo is partly an homage to the early history of cinema. Christie Digital Systems, the world’s largest supplier of digital cinema projectors, achieved this milestone at the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam.

In the United States, Italy, and Australia, theater owners will start installing commercial laser-based projectors in the next several months. Some sales have already been announced. Christie, based in Cypress, Calif., has sold its first laser projector to the historic Seattle Cinerama Theater, which is owned by Paul Allen, Microsoft’s cofounder. IMAX, the leading large-screen theater organization, has announced several contracts to convert its 70-millimeter film projectors to laser digital. These systems are scheduled to be shipped in the second half of this year. NEC Display Solutions, which also makes cinema projectors, introduced a laser-based unit for smaller screens at the ShowEast conference this past October. Barco, based in Kortrijk, Belgium, and Sony, the other big players in the cinema-projector market, also intend to introduce laser-equipped models later this year or in 2015. A U.S. company, Laser Light Engines, is working on retrofit kits that will allow technicians to upgrade an existing digital projector by replacing the arc lamp with a laser illumination system. There are more than 100 000 digital theater projectors in the world.

In the larger scheme, these new movie projectors will operate within a globally standardized regime for the capture, encryption, distribution, and exhibition of digital movie content. For more than a decade, the world’s movie industries have sought an international standard to guide their transition from 35-mm film to digital. In 2002, the (then) seven major Hollywood studios formed a consortium, the Digital Cinema Initiative, for just this purpose. But such an agreement largely eluded them until 2007, when the first version of the standard, DC28, was finally announced. The most recent version of that standard specifies how current and future projectors will handle and show movies that are breathtakingly more vivid than today’s.

Want to know how these projectors work? Then sit back, relax, and let’s get on with the show….

A typical digital cinema projector costs between $40 000 and $80 000 and is a combination of video, audio, and security components. A typical 2-hour movie fits into a compressed data file of about 150 to 200 gigabytes, which contains the encrypted picture, sound, and other data. A motion-picture projector must do more than turn that data file into a series of color images beamed at the screen at 24 frames per second. It must also be capable of downloading the movie data, which is delivered in encrypted form from the studios to theaters. The most common method of delivery today is on a hard-disk drive, shipped by a courier such as FedEx. At the theater, the digital file is loaded onto a server. The server must store that movie file securely, and the projector must decrypt it and process it for display. The projector must also provide a synchronized output for a variety of multichannel digital sound systems and also for such features as subtitles and tracks for the hearing or visually impaired.

At the heart of a digital movie projector is something called the image block. It consists of a complex optical assembly of prisms and filters, as well as three spatial light-modulator chips, one each for the red, green, and blue image components. In operation, the optical assembly takes a bright beam of white light and separates it into red, green, and blue beams. Each colored beam has a spectral bandwidth of 40 to 60 nanometers and illuminates its respective chip, which determines, for each pixel of each frame, the amount of light that is sent on to the screen. There the three primary colors combine to make a full-color moving image.

These light-modulator chips are based on one of two competing technologies: Texas Instruments’ digital micromirror device (DMD) and Sony’s liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS). TI’s DMD chip has millions of tiny mirrors that tilt to deflect light, creating millions of tiny beams, one for each pixel in the image. The timing of their tilting controls the amount of light projected for each pixel during that frame. Sony’s LCoS, on the other hand, uses a liquid-crystal valve to adjust the amount of light that gets reflected off the chip for each pixel during the frame. That both light-modulator chips rely on reflection is important because it means that the backs of these chips can be cooled, with either a flowing liquid or air directed by a fan.

Both the TI and Sony chips are capable of projecting colors at 4096 different brightness levels per pixel. This is called 12-bit precision, or 36 bits total for the three primary colors. Thus the total number of possible combinations of the three primary colors is 40963, or 68.7 billion colors.

TI’s chips are used in movie projectors from Barco, Christie Digital, and NEC, while Sony’s chips are used exclusively in Sony’s projectors. TI offers chip sets at two different resolution levels: 2048 by 1080 pixels (called 2K) and 4096 by 2160 pixels (4K). Sony offers only 4K.

So why the need for new technology? Basically, because of 3-D. Until the late 2000s, the various groups involved in the Digital Cinema Initiative—the studios, the theater owners, and the projector manufacturers—were moving methodically toward a system that would give them acceptable image quality and lower distribution costs. In 2005, the studios and manufacturers rushed two prototype 3-D systems to a small number of theaters, to test customer reactions and promote the new capability. These early systems, which were developed outside of the Digital Cinema Initiative, produced images that were dim in comparison with those of 2-D movies and weren’t very popular at first.

But then, in December 2009, along came Avatar. James Cameron’s record-breaking film convincingly demonstrated 3-D cinema’s ability to dazzle audiences and command higher ticket prices. Finally, theater owners had a financial incentive to convert to digital. But the introduction of 3-D was ad hoc and uncontrolled. It was a kind of technological Wild West, with studios and 3-D-system suppliers engaging in shoot-outs that pitted the studios’ rollout schedules against the suppliers’ efforts to maintain standards of image quality and brightness. Money won over quality. After Avatar, these improvised 3-D systems became entrenched worldwide as “good enough” solutions.

The problem is that on anything except a very small screen, 3-D movies are simply too dim. One reason is that the high-pressure xenon arc lamps used in movie projectors today lose a lot of brightness over time. The brightest digital projectors can emit about 30 000 lumens with a brand new lamp, but this brightness drops to about 22 000 lm after about 200 hours and eventually levels off at something less than 15 000 lm within 800 hours.

What’s more, the 3-D technology itself cuts way down on the light. A 3-D projector shows the left and the right eye slightly different views of the same scene. And using a single projector, there are only two ways you can display different left-eye and right-eye frames: You can separate them in time or in space. Projectors incorporating TI chips do the former, and Sony projectors, the latter.

The typical 3-D system developed for TI chips projects alternate left-eye and right-eye images. To portray motion smoothly, the system actually flashes three separate left-eye and right-eye images within the frame period, which is 1/24th of a second. The left-eye and right-eye images are projected with different polarizations. Basically, in a linearly polarized beam of light, the electromagnetic waves vibrate in a single plane. Different polarizations means that the planes are at an angle with respect to each other, typically 90 degrees.

In a 3-D projector setup, the polarization is actually circular, but the phenomenon is no less useful for discriminating between two beams of light. In the projector, the alternating polarizations are accomplished with an electro-optical polarizing filter that switches from one polarization to the other with each image flash. The viewer, meanwhile, wears eyeglasses that have corresponding polarization filters, so only the appropriate image reaches each eye. The projector displays images at 24 times 6 (3 for the right eye and 3 for the left)—or 144—flashes per second.

In Sony’s approach, both views are projected at the same time and on the same screen. The Sony spatial light modulators can’t flash at a rate of 144 per second. So Sony subdivides the 4K chip into two different 2K subpanels, one for the left-eye images and one for the right. Thus in this 3-D system, the left- and right-eye images are 2K wide but only 0.8K tall (some pixels are lost to a guard band). The Sony 3-D projector has two lenses and a polarizing filter in front of each. The images projected to the left eye go through one lens and the right-eye images go through the other. Then the two images move onto the screen, where they are superimposed on each other. As with the TI system, the viewer wears glasses with corresponding polarized lenses.

Both approaches waste a lot of light—not just at the polarizing filters but also at the spatial light modulators. Consider a viewer watching a 3-D movie projected with TI chips: Each eye sees light slightly less than half the time. With the Sony system, the lamp inside the projector illuminates the entire spatial light-modulator chip, but the projector uses less than half the chip’s area to illuminate the screen—again, a roughly 50 percent light reduction.

All told, the losses at the projector, including the polarizing filters, are about 75 percent. Then, 20 percent of what’s left is lost at the viewer’s 3-D glasses. So the overall loss is approximately 80 percent. Even highly reflective screens can’t make up for that much loss. And remember, the brightness of the bulb declines with time.

So perhaps it’s no surprise that the popularity of 3-D has been declining, with the exception of the recent motion picture Gravity (which often kept the screen filled with the blackness of space, making dimness less of an issue).

Why not just make brighter xenon arc lamps? The short answer is: Because it wouldn’t help. Like any arc lamp, projector bulbs throw out light in all directions. And then this white light must be split into red, green, and blue bands, which are focused onto the light-modulator chips inside the projector. These chips are just 17.5 or 35 millimeters on the diagonal. To make an arc lamp brighter, the bulb itself must become physically larger, including the arc that produces the light. But increasing the size of the arc makes it harder to focus the light onto the chip. In practical terms, we’ve already hit the wall in terms of getting more light from arc lamps through digital cinema projectors.

Lasers do not share this limitation. All of their power can be easily focused onto a small area, and essentially all of that power is used. That’s not the case with white light: After the three primary colored beams are separated from the arc light, the rest of the visible light spectrum, as well as a lot of infrared and ultraviolet radiation, is wasted. It is dumped within the projector, which must therefore dissipate a lot of heat.

Lasers have other advantages, too. They can be very efficient electrically, last 20 000 to 50 000 hours, have near-constant output, and are highly controllable. Also, because lasers are compact and do not get very hot, they can be packaged into a system small enough to replace the xenon lamp assembly in an existing projector.

These considerations have long intrigued projector makers. The laser technology itself goes back more than a decade, when U.S. and German companies developed laser light sources to go into flight simulators for pilot training. IEEE Life Fellow Peter Moulton and I conceived the company Laser Light Engines to commercialize the laser system Moulton developed for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. This system used infrared laser diodes to pump a laser crystal, which produced another infrared laser beam. That beam went into a series of nonlinear optical crystals that converted the infrared into the red, green, and blue beams. Nowadays, the company uses an aggregation of semiconductor laser diodes to produce the red and blue laser beams. The red beam is generated with gallium arsenide–based diodes, with quantum wells of aluminum gallium indium phosphide. The blue are gallium nitride diodes, with indium gallium nitride quantum wells. The green comes from a high-powered, frequency-doubled, diode-pumped laser.

Early on, though, it was far from clear that lasers were the way forward. Their biggest problem was a shimmery image artifact called speckle. Instead of a patch of solid color with completely uniform brightness, early laser projectors produced images with sparkling surfaces that seemed to dance and move, especially if you moved your head. Speckle occurs because the surface roughness of most movie screens is on the order of a wavelength of visible light. So rays of laser light reflecting from the screen constructively and destructively interfere with one another.

Thus laser projectors seemed dead on arrival until Laser Light Engines, which is based in Salem, N.H., solved the speckle problem in 2010. It developed several solutions before settling on one: broadening the spectral bandwidth of the red, green, and blue beams enough to avoid speckle. For that it uses a proprietary nonlinear optical process, which effectively reduces the coherence of the laser beam, widening the bandwidth of the colored beams from about 0.1 nanometers to 10 to 30 nm.

After speckle was tackled, the challenges became more conventional: delivering as many as 600 watts of total laser power while achieving the desired figures for projector lifetime, energy efficiency, and cost. These goals are 50 000 hours or about 10 years, 10 white lumens per wall-plug watt, and an acquisition cost lower than that of a lamp-based projector, plus the many bulbs needed over its lifetime (these lamps cost about $1000 apiece). Laser Light Engines is close to achieving all of these figures; the last goal will be the most difficult, but I am confident that it will be achieved in three to five years.

All the major projector makers have now joined Laser Light Engines in building laser-illumination systems. The brightest of these projectors can put out 70 000 lumens—several times as many as an arc-lamp projector. That brightness is more than enough to offset the losses caused by 3-D. This past November, Laser Light Engines and NEC demonstrated projectors with this new light source at the Technicolor facility in Burbank, Calif.

Higher brightness benefits not just 3-D but 2-D movies, too. The reason is that more brightness means a greater range of luminance, or brightness, from sunlight bright to deep black. But to take advantage of that wider range, software specialists will have to increase the number of levels of digital encoding between bright and dark pixels, to create a smooth ramp in brightness over that extended range. This increase in “bit depth” per pixel in turn will require huge increases in digital bandwidth, but it’ll be worth it. Today, movies don’t even come close to displaying the natural contrast that the human eye can see.

In the longer term, digital cinema and laser projectors will far transcend the boundaries of traditional film. Today’s arc-lamp-based projectors can produce only about 40 percent of the colors that most people are capable of perceiving, whereas laser-based systems can reproduce up to around 60 percent. Laser illumination can also project much more saturated colors because its red, green, and blue beams can have much narrower spectral bandwidth than filtered lamp light.

This vastly greater, brighter, and more saturated palette will translate into movies that are more vivid than anything possible today. But such an advance won’t come easily: More colors will require coordinated changes to global standards, and that won’t happen without a lot of arguing over how “wide” to go. More colors will require more bits, which will in turn require more bandwidth to and within the projector.

Higher contrast and color rendering aren’t the only factors that will increase the size of movie files. Movie directors are starting to use frame rates higher than 24 per second, the standard since around 1927. Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) was filmed at 48 frames per second, as was its recent sequel, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. A movie’s frame rate has a huge influence on how the viewer perceives motion, and it also increases perceived contrast and resolution. Higher frame rates allow the appearance of fast-moving objects to remain supersharp and can eliminate the jerky effects that can arise when the camera or the subject is moving. But as with higher dynamic range, there is a price to pay. Showing more frames per second increases not only the quantity of data in the movie file but also the data-transmission rates necessary to project that movie.

Yet another possibility for future movies is greater spatial resolution, or pixels per scene. This resolution is limited by spatial-light-modulator technology, either DMD or LCoS. Most theaters today show movies in 2K (2 211 840 pixels per frame). Some motion-picture executives would like to see a migration to 4K (8 847 360 pixels per frame).

However, as resolution doubles, the uncompressed data required increases by a factor of 4. So, again, the refrain is “more bandwidth, please.”

What does all this mean? If you were to make a 2-hour motion picture with an extended color range in 4K and at 48 frames per second, the raw (uncompressed) movie file would occupy more than 15 terabytes. For comparison, the total amount of data in all of the e-mails sent in the United States in one year has been estimated to be 10.6 TB.

All of these parameters—luminance (brightness), chrominance (color), frame rate, and even laser-pulse rate—will be independently adjustable on future movie projectors. This controllability will make the projector more versatile, enabling it to present many different levels of image quality. This processing, done on the fly in the projector, will ensure the highest image quality for a given data rate.

These developments will inevitably change movie theaters. Already, new “projector head” designs are available that contain no light source, only the spatial light modulators and the optics that create the moving image and focus it on the screen. Connected by a fiber-optic cable, these projector heads can be fed with laser light from sources that are tens of meters away. So it is likely that a future multiplex theater will have a centrally located “light farm” in which racks of high-power red, green, and blue lasers will be supported by efficient power supplies and liquid cooling from the cinema’s rooftop HVAC system.

Compact projector heads would hang from the ceiling of each auditorium in the theater. Red, green, and blue laser light from the light farm would be channeled into separate armored, fiber-optic cables that snake through the walls of the theater to the projection heads in the auditoriums. With such a scheme, there would be no need for a projection booth in the theater. The projectors and light farm could be controlled from remote network operating centers, greatly reducing the overhead costs of running a chain of theaters.

All of these improvements will require more engineering and also big, complex, and coordinated system-level developments. There will have to be more compromises and consensus. And the payoff is never certain: Some observers contend that a generation has already been trained to be content with the small screen.

I say that there will always be a market for premium, large-format, truly social entertainment. But we’d better get on with it. Cinema must evolve if it’s going to get us off the sofa and into the theater.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-el...eater-near-you

















Until next week,

- js.



















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