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Old 02-08-17, 11:40 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 5th, ’17

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August 5th, 2017




Brendan Carr Omitted Critical Facts in His Testimony to Congress: He Worked for AT&T, Verizon, Et Al.
Bruce Kushnick

In his written testimony to Congress, Brendan Carr, who has been nominated to be the third Republican FCC Commissioner, omitted the most important fact: He worked for AT&T, Verizon, Centurylink, as well as the CTIA, the wireless association, and the USTA, the telephone association. Moreover, much of this work has direct ties to his current work with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai (a former Verizon attorney). Together they have amassed a string of corporate-monopoly friendly, harmful consumer regulations that have passed or are percolating. In the end, Carr and Pai clearly show that they are still working for the industry, not the public interest.

On top of this, there are even holes in Carr’s work timeline, as told by his own LinkedIn bio. His resume shows he clerked for a judge in the 2008-2009 timeframe, while his bio shows him also working from 2005-2012 for Wiley Rein and the telcos and their associations.

All of this should be a deal breaker. The Senate should not confirm Brendan Carr’s nomination as FCC Commissioner.

FACT 1: Carr Never Mentioned He Worked for AT&T Et Al. in His Testimony to Congress

An excerpt:

That’s it? Law firm… broad experience… telecom issues. Later… clerkship…. “sparked my interest in public service”.

No where does Carr tell Congress that he worked for AT&T, Verizon, Centurylink, the USTA, the CTIA – i.e., all of the large incumbent phone companies that control both the telecommunications copper and fiber wires in most of America but also the wires to the cell sites, etc., and they also include the two largest wireless companies, and the two largest telecom associations.

And no where does Carr explain that the work he was doing for his telco clients is directly related to what the FCC is attempting to do now— from strip-mining consumer protections and privacy, and going after Net Neutrality, to erasing the basic accounting rules to hide massive cross-subsidies that were caused by the FCC’s own negligence. In fact, Carr has most likely been working on all of these proceedings as part of FCC Chair Pai’s staff for the last few years.

FACT 2: The Timeline Presented has been Tampered with and Manipulated.

And even the timeline of his story is off. According to the above, he claims he left the law firm and started working for a judge, where he got his ‘public interest’ bug.

The documents show that he was still working at Wiley Rein and for these companies after he worked for a judge on the US Court of Appeals. It just makes the story sound better to leave out that a lot of the work done was against the public interest and for his telco clients.

FACT 3: He Worked for the Phone Companies and Their Associations.

In a previous article we laid out that Carr had worked at Wiley Rein and his clients were Verizon, AT&T, Centurylink, CTIA, the wireless association and the USTA, the telco lobby/association.

And his name appears on the actual documents.

FACT 4: The Phone Company Work and the Current FCC Work are Directly Tied to “Ideology” and Not the Public Interest.

We found that Carr’s work was directly related to the current FCC proceedings, in multiple ways.

Wiley Rein defended the CTIA, the wireless association, against the City of San Francisco and won claiming that this was a ‘First Amendment’ win—for CTIA.

And, at this moment, there is a proceeding where the FCC is asking — Why shouldn’t the FCC preempt all those pesky city and state laws pertaining to wireless with a federal law, (which only helps AT&T, Verizon and the CTIA)?

In another case, (the excerpt featured above) Carr is on a Verizon filing about ‘forbearance’ – i.e., to stop the FCC from enforcing any accounting regulations –and the FCC is now attempting to finish the job by erasing all of those pesky ‘accounting rules’. As we pointed out, these rules were created 16 years ago and were never audited since their inception by the FCC in any significant way.

The Verizon filing says – We don’t need these cost accounting rules. And in 2017, right out of the gate, the FCC has decided to oblige and give gifts to Verizon and AT&T– erase the accounting rules which will hide all of the financials and won’t require the phone companies to justify anything—and Carr was part of the team for Verizon in 2007 and is now part of the team to push this at the FCC, it would seem.

In fact, we now know that Carr’s fingers are all over these current plans; he worked through 2012 for the telcos and in February 2014 he started working for the Chairman Ajit Pai.

FACT 5: Defending the First Amendment Issues for the Wireless Industry, Not San Francisco.

When Carr joined Pai’s staff, the Chairman stated that Carr had worked on a First Amendment case and he would be an asset. Unfortunately, this victory was for the wireless industry association, the CTIA, and the First Amendment was used against the city of San Francisco. And Carr was one of the lawyers for CTIA.

“Wiley Rein Secures First Amendment Victory for the Wireless Industry, October 28, 2011

“Wiley Rein, which has represented CTIA-The Wireless Association® (CTIA) in this matter since 2010, had argued on the industry’s behalf.

“John Walls, Vice President, Public Affairs at CTIA, said of the ruling, “Today the federal district court in the Northern District of California held that the requirements of San Francisco’s cell phone warning regime, as currently drafted, violate the First Amendment. The court properly determined that the City cannot constitutionally require retailers to hang posters in their stores or paste stickers on cell phone display materials in order to convey the City’s selective messages about cell phone safety and cell phone use. The court also found that the ‘fact sheet’ created by the City was both misleading and alarmist and that the City could not require retailers to distribute this ‘fact sheet’ without significant changes.”

“Wiley Rein’s Andrew McBride, Josh Turner, Megan Brown and Brendan Carr are among the counsel for CTIA in this matter.”

Defending the industry against the wishes of a city is going to come up again and again as the FCC is planning on ‘preempting’ state and city zoning and laws.

FACT 6: Carr Creates an Unholy Voting Block: “The Gang of 3”.

We also pointed out that Carr would create a voting block with Republican Commissioner Michael O’Reilly, “The Gang of 3”, and these Republicans are hell bent at removing consumer protections, shutting down Net neutrality—and helping the companies.

And thus, having these three Republicans taking over the FCC vote—should not be allowed to happen.

FACT 7: Carr Rewrites His Work Timeline

The prepared testimony of Brendan Carr rewrites his work timeline. Besides omitting that he worked for years for AT&T, Verizon, et al., the timeline has been manipulated to make it look like Carr found enlightenment—and it was in ‘public service’.

“Later, I accepted a clerkship with a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which helped spark my interest in public service.”

FACT 8: The Dates Don’t Line Up

From LinkedIn

His LinkedIn timeline shows that he was working for Wiley Rein from 2005-2012, but the testimony states he worked there then ‘later’ went to work for a judge where he saw the light of public service.

The Wiley Rein job extends during the “law clerk” timeframe 2008-2009, and there are filings with his name on them from 2011 and 2012.

I.e.; Carr either left for a year to work with the judge, or was ‘lent out’ by the law firm but still kept his job, or left then returned; I do not assume he made up some of this –just attempted to finesse it for spin vs accuracy and hiding the basic facts.

Wiley Rein LLP
Attorney, Communications, Appellate, and Litigation Groups
Dates Employed Sep 2005 – Jun 2012
Employment Duration 6 yrs 10 mos

“Conducted trial and appellate court litigation for a variety of telecom clients, including appeals of FCC orders. Provided strategic advice and legal counsel to wireless, wireline, satellite, and association clients in connection with FCC rulemaking and adjudicatory proceedings. Advised clients regarding the likely legal classification of novel service offerings. Assisted clients in obtaining FCC approval of proposed mergers.”

Brendan Carr’s Law Clerk experience, 2008-2009

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
Law Clerk
Dates Employed Aug 2008 – Jul 2009
Employment Duration 1 yr
Law Clerk to the Honorable Dennis W. Shedd

FACT 9: Carr Is Promising a String of Clichés, Taken from the Industry.

Carr’s prepared statement:

“We have a tremendous opportunity in the technology and communications space to create jobs, spur investment, and grow the economy for the benefit all Americans. If confirmed, I would work to ensure that the FCC’s policies do just that.”

And yet, these are almost the exact words of Comcast and Charter, as quoted by CED Magazine, from one of the other industry segments, cable, that can expect the benefits from relaxed regulations. And these were said before Carr’s testimony.

Comcast EVP and Chief Diversity Officer David Cohen:

“Brendan’s vast knowledge of the communications industry, combined with his strong legal credentials, will allow him to hit the ground running as the Commission pursues policies to stimulate investment and job creation in the communications marketplace to benefit consumers and drive economic growth,”

Charter added in its own statement:

“Given his previous experience as the FCC’s General Counsel and in the telecom sector, Carr brings years of valuable know-how to this leadership role,” “We look forward to working with him and his colleagues on the Commission to continue to advance policies that encourage businesses to innovate, invest in broadband infrastructure, create more jobs, and grow the economy in communities across the U.S.”

Conclusion

The headline of a Los Angeles Times article shows that at least one Senator may care about the coziness of the Carr and Pai. The article details how Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida) asked some pointed questions of Carr during his appearance in front of the Senate Commerce Committee.

“Democratic senator questions independence of FCC nominee who worked for the agency’s chairman”

It would appear, however, that the Committee didn’t do its homework by asking the deeper questions about the ties with the telcos or getting the specifics on Carr’s work experience and timeline.

As we pointed out, we believe that this FCC is captured by the industry. And now the industry is just expanding it control, while harming our rights, and costing us more money, at slower speeds, with less choice or privacy or control
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/...b0c69ef70528d3





FCC Fills Vacant Seats as Jessica Rosenworcel and Brendan Carr are Confirmed by Senate
Devin Coldewey

You might not think it from the amount of controversy the agency has generated recently, but the FCC has been operating on a skeleton crew of three commissioners since the beginning of the year. That will soon no longer be the case, however, as the Senate has just confirmed Jessica Rosenworcel and Brendan Carr into the vacant positions, bringing the Commission to its five-person maximum.

Rosenworcel may be a name you recognize: she was actually a commissioner for years under Obama, and among other things was a big part of the 2015 Open Internet Order that created our present net neutrality rules. That’s her on the right after they passed the rules (and looking unamused in the top image):

Her term expired, however, and although she was re-nominated, she was not confirmed by the Senate despite promises by leadership there to do so. She was required by law to step down in the first few days of 2017, and although President Obama nominated her again before leaving office, President Trump withdrew that nomination in March.

That was a tactical move, causing the remaining three members to be split 2-1 along party lines and allowing the new chairman, Ajit Pai, to pursue his agenda unencumbered by effective dissent. As long as the 2-1 majority remained, all sorts of work could be done — or rather undone, as Pai’s most high-profile actions have been to walk back the accomplishments of the previous administration.

The administration took the safe route, waiting until it had someone on its side of the aisle to nominate simultaneously with Rosenworcel. That would bring things to 3-2. (The Commission is required by law to be party-balanced, with a maximum seat disparity of one.)

That someone turned out to be Brendan Carr; for the last few years he has been the FCC’s general counsel, and served as lead advisor to Ajit Pai during the latter’s term as commissioner. Before that, he worked at Wiley Rein, a law firm that has represented major ISPs and telecom associations.

While that last fact will probably be used as a brush to tar Carr as an industry shill, don’t forget that similar allegations were leveled at Tom Wheeler before he led the charge toward net neutrality. It’s not uncommon for a legal expert in the field of telecommunications law to represent or otherwise do work for the likes of AT&T, so it would be unwise to prejudge based on that.

On the other hand, his service as legal right hand to Pai during the last year of striving against the 2015 rules is more than enough evidence of complicity in that agenda. The legal and technical arguments behind the challenges are, as many have pointed out, shaky at best and deeply misleading at worst. If they were, as seems likely, the result of Pai and Carr putting their heads together, you can expect much more of that in the future now that Carr is on the Commission itself.

What do these confirmations mean for the challenge to net neutrality rules that has garnered more than 10 million comments? Not too much, practically speaking. The Commission is still ruled by a Republican majority and the idea of Carr being swayed to vote against the so-called “Restoring Internet Freedom” rulemaking is laughable.

In terms of optics, however, it would have been undesirable to vote on such a major undertaking without a full Commission — though they didn’t have that qualm regarding previous actions dismantling the previous Commission’s work. Now, however, the administration and FCC no longer leave themselves open to the criticism that this major decision was made with a 2-1 majority contrived by partisan operatives.

Carr and Rosenworcel have yet to be sworn in, but as soon as they are I will contact them to learn more about their positions and pet projects.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/03/fc...med-by-senate/





FCC Says its Specific Plan to Stop DDoS Attacks Must Remain Secret

Revealing technical details would "undermine our system security," FCC says.
Jon Brodkin

Commission has told members of Congress that it won't reveal exactly how it plans to prevent future attacks on the public comment system.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and Democratic lawmakers have been exchanging letters about a May 8 incident in which the public comments website was disrupted while many people were trying to file comments on Pai's plan to dismantle net neutrality rules. The FCC says it was hit by DDoS attacks. The commission hasn't revealed much about what it's doing to prevent future attacks, but it said in a letter last month that it was researching "additional solutions" to protect the comment system.

Democratic Leaders of the House Commerce and Oversight committees then asked Pai what those additional solutions are, but they didn't get much detail in return.

"Given the ongoing nature of the threats to disrupt the Commission’s electronic comment filing system, it would undermine our system's security to provide a specific roadmap of the additional solutions to which we have referred," the FCC chief information officer wrote. "However, we can state that the FCC’s IT staff has worked with commercial cloud providers to implement Internet‐based solutions to limit the amount of disruptive bot-related activity if another bot-driven event occurs."

Talking about hardware also undermines security

The CIO's answers to lawmakers' questions were sent along with a letter from Pai to Reps. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-N.J.), Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), Mike Doyle (D-Penn.), DeGette (D-Colo.), Robin Kelly (D-Ill.), and Gerald Connolly (D-Va.). The letter is dated July 21, and it was posted to the FCC's website on July 28.

When responding to another question about what hardware resources are being committed to improve the comment system's uptime, the CIO again said that revealing specific details would undermine the FCC's security.

"The Commission’s Electronic Comment Filing System is commercially cloud-based, so our 'hardware resources' are provided by our commercial partners. While it would undermine our system security to provide a specific roadmap of what we are doing, we can state that FCC IT staff has notified its cloud providers of the need to have sufficient 'hardware resources' available to accommodate high-profile proceedings," the FCC response said.

Public records requests denied

The FCC has also rebuffed multiple Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) requests about its response to the DDoS attacks. The commission denied one FoIA request sent by Ars, saying that it won't reveal e-mails and other communications about the attacks because of an ongoing internal investigation. Releasing the records we requested would impede and interfere with that investigation, the FCC told us.

In response to a FoIA request by Gizmodo, the FCC said that its initial analysis of the DDoS attacks "stemmed from real time observation and feedback by Commission IT staff and did not result in written documentation."

Freelance journalist Kevin Collier filed a lawsuit against the FCC, alleging that the commission failed to comply with FoIA requests about the alleged DDoS attack and the agency's analysis of of anti-net neutrality comments generated by astroturfers.

No law enforcement investigation

There are apparently no law enforcement agencies involved in the FCC's ongoing investigation because the attacks weren't significant enough. "The FCC consulted with the FBI following this incident, and it was agreed this was not a 'significant cyber incident' consistent with the definition contained in Presidential Policy Directive-41 (PPD-41)," the FCC said in its letter to House Democrats.

The FCC also did not notify Congress of the attacks under the process outlined in the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA). Although the FCC provided background information to Congressional committee offices, "we did not provide a FISMA-based notification," the letter explained. "We determined that this event was not a 'major incident' under the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) definition and hence it did not meet the criteria of a reportable incident to Congress under OMB’s FISMA guidance."

Pai told House Democrats to trust him that the situation is under control.

"The docket now contains more than 10 million comments overall, demonstrating that our processes are facilitating widespread public participation in this proceeding," Pai wrote. "Although I cannot guarantee that we will not experience further attempts to disrupt our systems, our staff is constantly monitoring and reviewing the situation so that that everyone seeking to comment on our proceedings will be afforded the opportunity to do so."
https://arstechnica.com/information-...omment-system/





The Chiefs of Facebook, Google and Other Tech Giants Aren’t Committing to Testify to the U.S. Congress on Net Neutrality

They had until today to tell a key House committee, which is extending its deadline.
Tony Romm

Amazon, Facebook, Google and Netflix — along with their telecom industry foes —have not committed to sending their chief executives to testify before the U.S. Congress in September on the future of net neutrality.

Not a single one of those companies told the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is convening the hearing, that they would dispatch their leaders to Washington, D.C., in the coming weeks, even at a time when the Trump administration is preparing to kill the open internet rules currently on the government’s books.

The panel initially asked those four tech giants, as well as AT&T, Charter, Comcast* and Verizon, to indicate their plans for the hearing by July 31. For now, though, the committee told Recode on Monday it isn’t giving up and would extend its deadline, as it continues its quest to engage the country’s tech and telecom business leaders on net neutrality.

“The committee has been engaging in productive conversations with all parties and will extend the deadline for response in order to allow for those discussions to continue,” a spokesman said.

The tepid response to the House’s planned hearing, first reported by Recode earlier this month, stands in stark contrast with those companies’ own public commitments on net neutrality.

Companies like Facebook and Google recently called on Congress to put in place more lasting safeguards for the open internet, even embarking with a major online rally in defense of net neutrality earlier this month. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg previously had expressed a willingness to work with Congress on a net neutrality bill, too.

The likes of AT&T and Verizon, meanwhile, are no fans of the strong regulations currently on the government’s books — and they support efforts by the Federal Communications Commission to scrap the existing net neutrality rules. But even telecom giants have called for legislation to put an end to the debate that’s more than 15 years in the making.

Behind the scenes, though, both sides appear to fear a grilling in Congress — and not just on net neutrality.

Tech executives like Zuckerberg and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who have never before testified on Capitol Hill, don’t want to face unrelated questions on issues like privacy. Telecom leaders, including AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, similarly don’t want to field queries about their merger plans. And not a single company on either side of the net neutrality debate wants to be the only corporate behemoth with a major executive sitting before lawmakers.

Some of the invitees instead urged the House committee to allow them to send underlings, not chief executives, to testify on September 7, sources have told Recode. All eight companies either declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment Monday.

For now, House Republicans are forging ahead — and trying to jumpstart the conversation. They issued a plea to all eight tech and telecom companies this afternoon to discuss what a net neutrality bill might actually look like at a private August 7 meeting.

“We aren't asking anyone to produce the DC version of the dreaded August book report,” according to an email obtained by Recode from two sources. “All of the various issues on the table have been debated for years among all of us who work on communications and tech public policy. So all we are looking for at this stage is a list of asks.”

Earlier, House Republicans had warned tech and telecom companies’ top executives against trying to sit the session out.

A spokesman for the panel’s leader, GOP Rep. Greg Walden, said lawmakers expected CEOs to attend. Other senior panel Republicans, like Rep. Marsha Blackburn, stressed to the nation’s tech titans the importance of sending their high-profile leaders to Washington in a few weeks.

“I think it would be appropriate, I think it is expected, for the tech companies to choose to show up — to have the discussion — and I don’t think it’s a discussion they want to be absent from,” she said in an interview with Recode last week.

Comcast, through its NBCU arm, is an investor in Vox Media, which owns this website.
https://www.recode.net/2017/7/31/160...hearing-resist





Dems Press FCC to Extend Net Neutrality Comment Period
Ali Breland

Democrat senators are urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to extend the public comment period on its proposal to scrap the net neutrality rules.

Fifteen Democrats led by Sen. Ed Markey (Mass.) in a letter Thursday to Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai asked that he provide more time for comments, citing the unprecedented number of comments on the rules.

“This volume of comments underscores the tremendous interest the public has in this proceeding,” the senators wrote. “Given the unprecedented number of comments, we urge the FCC to extend the reply comment period to allow sufficient time for the public to ensure their views are reflected in the record.”

To date, Pai's “Restoring Internet Freedom” proposal to roll back Obama-era net neutrality measures aimed at creating a level playing field for internet companies has received more than 16 million comments, more than any other FCC item in history. The previous record happened during the FCC’s last net neutrality proceedings in 2014, in which the public filed about 4 million comments on the matter.

Democratic Sens. Brian Schatz (Hawaii), Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Al Franken (Minn.) were among those signing the letter to Pai.

The lawmakers also noted that the comment period for approving net neutrality in 2014 was 60 days. Pai has only allowed a 30-day comment period for his plan to rollback the rules.

“This proceeding has the potential to impact all Americans and as the expert agency, you should ensure that the Commission provides ample time to ensure all voices are heard,” the senators wrote.

Democratic lawmakers, consumer advocates and internet companies like Reddit and Facebook back the net neutrality rules, while GOP lawmakers and telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast want them scrapped.

Critics say net neutrality has reduced investment in broadband infrastructure and will lead to slower and more expensive internet access for consumers.

Supporters of the rules say scaling them back could give broadband providers too much power over internet content.
http://thehill.com/policy/technology...comment-on-net





The Worst Internet In America
Clare Malone

To drive the length and breadth of Saguache County, Colorado, is a dangerous undertaking. The roads, at least in spring, are lonely, clear and straight — “drive 30 miles then take a left” is the gist of most map directions. But the views are what can drive a person to distraction, veering recklessly over dotted yellow lines. There are hayfields drowned in water, blue and glassy so it looks like the sky fell into them, football fields full of black cattle standing stock-still like museum statuary, signs along empty stretches advertising meet and greets with the “Happy Gilmore” alligator, and crop planes that totter and swoop perilously over power lines before misting fields so green you think they might have invented the color.

The beauty of Saguache County can be an inconvenient one, though, particularly in the 21st century: It has some of the worst internet in the country. That’s in part because of the mountains and the isolation they bring. Saguache (sah-WATCH’) is nestled in between the Sangre de Cristo and San Juan ranges, a four-hour drive southwest of Denver. Its population of 6,300 is spread across 3,169 square miles 7,800 feet above sea level, but on land that is mostly flat, so you can almost see the full scope of two mountain ranges as you drive the county’s highways: the San Juans, melted into soft brown peaks to the west, and the Sangre de Cristos, sharp, black and snowcapped, thrusting almost violently upward to the east.

FiveThirtyEight analyzed every county’s broadband usage using data from researchers at the University of Iowa and Arizona State University1 and found that Saguache was at the bottom. Only 5.6 percent of adults were estimated to have broadband.

But Saguache isn’t alone in lacking broadband. According to the Federal Communications Commission, 39 percent of rural Americans — 23 million people — don’t have access. In Pew surveys, those who live in rural areas were about twice as likely not to use the internet as urban or suburban Americans.

The FCC now defines broadband internet as the ability to download information at 25 megabits per second and to upload it at 3 megabits per second. This sort of connection enables a person to do the things that most Americans with home internet like to do — watch Netflix, play video games, and browse online without interruption even if a couple of devices are on the same connection. For around $30 a month, New York City internet providers offer basic packages of 100 Mbps service. In Saguache County, such a connection is rare; if a household wants a download speed of 12 Mbps with an upload speed of 2 Mbps, they can expect to pay a whopping $90.

This would be less of an issue if the internet weren’t so central to modern life. But taxes, job applications, payroll operations, banking, newspapers, shopping, college courses and video chats all are ubiquitous online. Saguache County’s students are expected to take their state assessments online even though an administrator at one school that houses K-12 students told me that until last year, the internet often went down for a couple of hours or even all day in the building.

The tide long ago turned from paper to digital in American life, and yet the disparities in access to the internet in parts of the country can be stark. Rural communities often face logistics problems installing fiber-optic cable in sparsely populated areas. In Saguache, internet problems are both logistical and financial; the county is three times the size of Rhode Island, while 30 percent of residents live below the poverty line.

Some would argue that the social contract has changed and that fast internet isn’t just a luxury — it’s a right of all 21st-century Americans. If that’s the case, we’re far from ensuring it. Just spend a few days hopping from town to town on Saguache’s long stretches of road.
Many people don’t have good internet Estimated share of adults with typical internet speeds faster than dialup, by county

The U.S. has a long history of trying to bring utility access to all Americans. In the early 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Rural Electrification Administration, 90 percent of American farmers lived without power. Many families could not access running water, heat and light for the home. The cost of running electric lines to the country’s most remote areas was prohibitive for profit-seeking businesses, but the REA found eager partners in rural electric cooperatives that had started to spring up in small communities with an eye toward modernization. The government began providing the co-ops loans to build out their electric networks, and by the end of the 1940s most farms in the country had power.

With clear eyes brought by 80 years of hindsight, it’s obvious that Americans should have access to electricity — the country’s economic and social well-being depends on it. Advocates of universal broadband argue the same could be said of fast internet. Already, the law says that all Americans should have access to internet services, thanks to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which expanded the notion of universal service beyond just the right to telephone service. In 2017, many co-ops see bringing high-speed internet to the most isolated places in the United States as the 21st century’s answer to rural electrification.

Shirley Bloomfield, CEO of the Rural Broadband Association, says rural America should have fast broadband, in part, because it’s good for business.

She touted a 2016 study from the Hudson Institute that found that 66 percent of the economic impact of rural broadband went to urban economies rather than rural ones, given that many of the supplies needed to build these remote networks are sourced from urban areas. The same study estimated that if broadband was as good in rural areas as it is in urban ones, online retail sales would be “at least $1 billion higher.”

But there is also a less-quantifiable social good that fast internet access for all might bring to the country. Larry Downes, project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy and an internet industry analyst, said that by virtue of excluding some, the internet’s value as a network of connection was being diluted. “Any time we add one more person to the internet, we get that many more possible connections of people, so that has greater value.”

More pointedly: “The more you create second-class citizens, the more we just continue to see some of these political divides,” Bloomfield said. The last election was proof of a breaking point. “I think rural America kind of sat back and roared a little bit.”

The town of Crestone, Colorado, sits off state Route 17, at the end of a long road that cuts through scrub-filled land at the base of the Sangre de Cristos. When I pulled in one early morning in late May, I didn’t see a soul, so I browsed the local bulletin board — a wood stove for sale, a missing young woman, yoga classes — and passed a lot filled with yurts and something that looked an awful lot like a satellite dish. Crestone has become home to a certain kind of person, eager to live out of the 2017 mainstream, and the town is filled with spiritual retreat centers and transplants from out of state.

It’s also where Colorado Central Telecom has an office. The small operation offers internet and phone plans to residents in Saguache County and neighboring Chaffee County and has tailored its service to the needs of the more isolated internet user. While most urban and suburban providers use fiber cables laid in the ground, rural providers often use something called fixed wireless internet to avoid the installation of miles of expensive cable. When the office opened, a technician named Joshua showed me a back room filled with the same kind of satellite-looking dishes I had seen on the yurt. If a home wants Colorado Central Telecom’s service, the dish is attached to it and pointed in the direction of the nearest fixed wireless tower so that a signal can be beamed to the home. The dishes must be in the line of sight of the tower, which can get tricky if trees or other obstructions are in the way.

Maisie Ramsay, head of business development for Colorado Central Telecom, set out to show me over the course of the morning the kind of path that airborne internet signals must travel around Saguache County. From Crestone’s center we drove to a massive tower in a field just outside the town, then to a school in Moffat, a few minutes to the west, where a dish sat discreetly on the back of the building as kids played out front. The tour ended in the town of Saguache, at the northern end of the county, with Ramsay and I staring up at a tower on Cemetery Hill, a barren mound overlooking the tiny town. A woman named Pat Miller came out to ask if we were lost, and it turned out that she was a Central Telecom customer. “CenturyLink, you’ve probably heard, just was not going to give us the service,” Miller said, referring to the large telecom that services some parts of the San Luis Valley, where Saguache County is situated. “It was horrendous.”

This sort of complaint is common in Saguache County. In 2011, Ralph Abrams, the former mayor of Crestone, founded Colorado Central Telecom in direct response to poor service he said the town was getting from another large provider, Fairpoint. “Originally this started because Fairpoint was not providing more than half a [megabit],” Abrams told me. “Which is unusable,” Ramsay said. According to Abrams, the town was desperate for internet and the company was started because “none of the larger providers care about small rural areas.” Internet is a utility, Abrams said, and “utilities are a right for every person like road and sewer and water and electricity and we will bring it.”

Ralph Abrams, left, the former mayor of Crestone, founded Colorado Central Telecom in direct response to poor service he said the town was getting from another large provider, Fairpoint. At right, one of the fixed wireless towers his company installed.

Saguache County is a particular place. It’s still a bit cowboy-ish, though parts have an off-the-grid hippie feel. Its singularity of spirit means broadband can be a difficult sell to some. As one county commissioner, Tim Lovato, put it to me, “It’s kind of hard to carry a laptop when you’re on a horse.” It’s the sort of attitude that locals can brag about — a place that stands apart from the hustle and bustle of modern life — but one that others worry might hold back Saguache County in the future.

Lovato has lived in Saguache County his whole life. He grew up in a house with a wood stove and now lives in one with 32 big windows looking out on the mountains and a ranch that’s covered in chico, rabbitbrush and currant bushes. He drove me around one afternoon, pointing out his “girls” (cows), houses of people he’d known as a child, and prisoners from the county jail, out for their shackled afternoon constitutional in a residential neighborhood. Lovato, who uses internet only for emails and “maybe a little searching,” acknowledged that getting fast internet is important for keeping the county economically relevant, and yet over and over he expressed trepidation about what he called our “consumable world where everything is throwaway.” The internet seemed part of that to him, an immediate gratification machine.

At one point, I idly marveled that an old sawmill we passed, out of commission for decades, was still standing. “It’s not the internet, it’s not a renewable resource,” Lovato said in reply. The jump from sawmill to the internet took me by surprise, but it was as if Lovato was admonishing me for a mindset he perceived as out with the old, in with the new. Old sawmills, once gone, can never be replaced. A browser page will always refresh. The old things and ways of Saguache, he seemed to intimate, were in danger of being subsumed by a throwaway attitude if not for the vigilance of its residents. According to Pew, of the 13 percent of Americans who say they don’t use the internet, about a third — 34 percent — said that’s because they didn’t see its relevancy to their lives.

Saguache, Colorado, is a little bit cowboy-ish, though parts have an off-the-grid hippie feel. At left, a greenhouse and, at right, a shop owner shows a pin and belt buckle.

Saguache County is a place unlike many in the United States, which is why, for its residents, its particular way of life is so important to preserve. Charged with maintaining a connection to Saguache’s Wild West past is Dorraine Gasseling, director of the county museum and perhaps the country’s most blasé, delightful docent. Gasseling took me on a whirlwind tour of the county’s treasures one afternoon. The San Luis Valley was once a part of Mexico — Lovato and many other multigenerational residents come from Spanish-speaking households — so in the museum there were Spanish lace mantillas and statues of the Virgin Mary, but also prehistoric arrowheads, dueling pistols, playing cards, dinosaur bones and a rock marked “uranium” that made me a little nervous.

The museum’s pièce de résistance was the original county jail, famous for having housed accused cannibal Alfred Packer. “We had a ghost hunter here,” Gasseling told me. “He said we have 17 ghosts.” She made sure to point out that although the graffiti etched by prisoners had lots of girly pic drawings, there were no “nasty words, there’s no ‘G-D,’ no ‘F’s.” Back then, she said, “they had some manners.”

Reverence for the past is not an uncommon feeling in Saguache. Various people over the course of my visit happily said that things were done differently in the county and in the valley as a whole. “We’re in a time warp but in a positive way,” Kevin Wilkins, executive director of the San Luis Valley Development Resources Group, told me. “This is one place that hasn’t been Californicated or Disney-fied.” Joan Mobley, the former town administrator of Center — population 2,000 — said that most people pay their utility bills in cash and in person every month. “They come in here and it’s not just time to pay bills, it’s to socialize.”

But Wilkins worries that Saguache’s lack of broadband could spell a future decline. Rural areas in America as a whole are already having a tough time. They’ve suffered population decline in recent decades, but there was a particularly steep drop-off starting in 2006, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and rural areas are older than urban areas or suburbs. Rural America has lower labor force participation rates than the rest of the country because of its aging population. Marijuana grow operations have started to move into Saguache over the last few years, though that’s not the only kind of business that residents want to cultivate. Some people talk about the potential that broadband could bring, enabling small businesses, perhaps tech-based ones run by young people, to move to the valley to operate in a low-cost environment.

There are also more immediate needs to be filled. In health care for instance, Wilkins said, telemedicine consultations could provide residents with more and better health care options, which are crucial in sparsely populated rural America. Twenty-four percent of America’s veterans, a population with a growing need for mental health resources, live in rural areas. But, Wilkins said, “without robust connectivity, you can’t do telemedicine.”

“In order for rural areas to survive they need to overcome this lack of an economy of scale,” Wilkins said. And broadband is “the only way to bring [rural areas] parity to an urban environment.”

Rural electrification was a relatively swift process, spurred by government funds and a national movement to modernize the country’s infrastructure. But bringing sufficient internet to rural areas in the 21st century is slower and more piecemeal; small companies and cooperatives are going it more or less alone, without much help yet from the federal government.

There has been some indication that this could change. President Trump has proposed $200 billion in infrastructure spending, and with his recent statement that the spending plan would “promote and foster, enhance broadband access for rural America,” rural broadband advocates have some reason to be hopeful. But as of yet, there are no concrete plans for the initiative. Downes, who testified about broadband before the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in May, said that there was “no discussion of when it’s going to happen, what it’s going to look like, where the money is going to come from, whether it’s going to be debt versus direct expenditures, whether it’s going to be government spending versus loans.”

The way the government implements spending and to whom it gives funds matters to smaller telecom companies like the ones in and around Saguache County. Currently, the San Luis Valley’s smaller internet providers that service its most remote areas are mostly frustrated by their interactions with the federal government.

“We applied, I want to say two years ago, for a grant that was broadband related and we did not get it,” Andrea Oaks Jaramillo, who works in economic development for the San Luis Valley Rural Electric Cooperative and Ciello, its related broadband venture, told me. “CenturyLink did get federal funding, actually, so everyone thought, ‘Oh yay, they’re going to do more things down here in the valley,’ and that has still yet to be seen.”

That frustration — that large companies are rewarded but don’t do the work in the neediest areas — is a common theme in the valley. That has led local companies to think creatively about their own plans. Colorado Central Telecom’s towers are beaming signals to local dishes, and Ciello is using loans from the San Luis Valley Rural Electric Cooperative and others to lay miles of fiber-optic cable in the hopes that the broadband venture’s fast speeds can be a competitive advantage.

Competition among providers is welcome to people like Mobley, Center’s former town administrator. “We’re trying to invite anyone and everyone,” she told me, “to drive down costs and make [the internet] more available.” Center is home to a large community of agricultural workers, and money is tight in the town.

In an ideal world, though, the government would step in to help implement a broadband plan, opening up possibilities for Saguache County’s towns and the San Luis Valley’s small internet providers.

To Julio Paez, right, a Center native and the Center school district’s information technology director, broadband access and students’ exposure to technical knowledge is crucial to their future.

When I asked Mobley how she hoped the federal government would deploy help on broadband should the Trump infrastructure project be financed, she said that free public Wi-Fi would help residents. There was already a need for it percolating in the community. “We had people sitting in the park after 10 p.m. at night and we were trying to figure out what they were doing — they’re not drinking,” she said. It turns out a company next to the park had recently opened and its Wi-Fi wasn’t password protected. The city told the company to password protect its connection, but it made Mobley think about whether that’s something the town of Center might someday provide to its residents. “There are people here that are looking for that free service.”

When I asked Abrams what he would look for in broadband funding from the federal government, he paused to consider: “Well, if the FCC would give funding to the small local people who know how to do it, I would say for a million bucks we could [provide broadband] in Saguache.”

Asked the same question, Wilkins of the San Luis Valley Development Resources Group said he would want to connect “anchor institutions” — hospitals and schools — throughout the valley, and that, “realistically, pragmatically, if the federal government would put up $10 million that we can leverage with creative financing and private sector investment and loans, that should help us accomplish the goal.” Downes and his research partner Blair Levin, who helped write the National Broadband Plan of 2010, have recommended that $20 billion be set aside nationally for a “one-time rural broadband acceleration program” that would, as Downes put it to me, “make it possible to provide broadband to all the current census tracts where it doesn’t exist at all today.”

Even if broadband funding and access arrive in Saguache County, there still will be cultural hurdles to overcome: the view that certain groups in the San Luis Valley don’t need a connection. Wilkins wondered if all residents needed home broadband, or just some. “You’re looking at Center School — look at the percentage of Latino, look at the percentage of farm worker. What do they need broadband for? To watch Netflix?” I pointed out that the kids in such households might need the internet to complete their schoolwork. Wilkins countered with cost. “If I’m making $20,000, $30,000 a year and I’ve got three kids, $100 a month [for internet] might be whether [or not] I provide dental care for my children.”

Most Center students’ summer jobs, Paez said, involve “back-breaking work” in the fields. Above, two of his student workers help Paez prep for the upcoming school year.

To Julio Paez, though, a Center native and the Center school district’s information technology director, broadband access and students’ exposure to technical knowledge is crucial to their future. Most students’ summer jobs, Paez said, involve doing “back-breaking work” in the fields. “I’m speaking from a personal point of view: It motivates them more to say, ‘I want to do something better, I want to continue my education and get a good career.’” In high school, Paez got a job helping the school IT director, then left Saguache for a few years to go to college. When he came back, Paez said, “I continued the tradition of hiring students.” This summer, there are four helping him prep computers, iPads and other devices for the upcoming school year.

These unforeseen serendipitous opportunities — summer jobs that become careers — are what motivate the county’s small internet providers to continue to pursue broadband as a public good. For now, no one in Saguache County is counting on a deus ex machina of funding from the federal government that turns universal broadband service from fantasy to reality. In real life, the practicalities wear.

“I’m tired,” Abrams told me, “of being the David to everyone else’s Goliath.”

Additional contribution from Daniel Lathrop and Dhrumil Mehta. Development by Justin McCraw.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...et-in-america/





What if We Build the Internet We Always Wanted?

It's time to stop cursing the network we have and build the network we want.
Mike Loukides

On July 12, users of the internet united in the Battle for the Net, a protest against the FCC's plans to abandon the principle of network neutrality. O'Reilly joined a diverse group of organizations to support the cause. And it's not over: Submit your own comment by July 17 to make sure your voice is heard.

We don't believe the internet is perfect—not by a long shot. Remember when the internet was going to usher in an age of peace and understanding because humans would be able to communicate with each other? It didn't happen. The sludge of fake news is, in many corners of the internet, drowning out real news. Minorities and women who speak up on the internet can only do so if they're willing to accept a flood of hate-speak. Earlier this year, Congress (unsurprisingly) gave our ISP monopolies the right to sell us to the highest bidder. Now, the FCC is doing away with network neutrality, which allowed creativity and freedom of expression, the best of the internet, to prosper.

Network neutrality means that ISPs like Comcast and Verizon can't privilege one form of traffic over another: text must be treated the same as voice, the same as video, the same as whatever we invent in the future. (Virtual reality? Live high-bandwidth medical imaging?) They can't privilege one form of traffic for any reason—whether it's "we offer a video service, so we'll limit our competition's bandwidth," "we would rather our customers consume the news on our feed," or simply "your new service for streaming medical data looks like a success, and we'd like to give bigger bonuses to our executives."

Over the years, I've watched networks built with the best of intentions be co-opted: by trolls, by advertisers, by spammers, by malware makers, and now by the network providers themselves. The damage has "always already begun": trolling certainly existed on the ancient Usenet, as well as the original BBSs. And while it's tempting to say this is a new crisis, it certainly isn't: remember when every newsgroup on Usenet was flooded by porn spam? Those were not the days. At the same time, our networks have always been the breeding ground for free expression, from the silly to the wonderful.

So, we're not facing a new crisis; we're facing the same old crisis, the crisis we had back in the '80s, the crisis we pretended didn't exist in the '90s, the crisis we weren't interested in addressing in the '00s, and so on. And I'm tired of it. I won't say "I want my internet back," because that's a myth of an innocent past that was never all that innocent. But it's high time to build the internet that we wanted all along: a network designed to respect privacy, a network designed to be secure, and a network designed to impose reasonable controls on behavior. And a network with few barriers to entry—in particular, the certainty of ISP extortion as new services pay to get into the "fast lane."

Is it time to start over from scratch, with new protocols that were designed with security, privacy, and maybe even accountability in mind? Is it time to pull the plug on the abusive old internet, with its entrenched monopolistic carriers, its pervasive advertising, and its spam? Could we start over again? That would be painful, but not impossible. Painful, but perhaps necessary as the FCC gives the entrenched carrier monopolies more power to control, monitor, and sell what you see. Painful, but perhaps necessary as the FCC gives the monopolies the right to limit access to those who are willing to pay the price, a price that experimenters and independent artists most certainly won't be able to afford.

In his deliciously weird novel Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow writes about an alternative network built from open WiFi access points. It sounds similar to Google's Project Fi, but built and maintained by a hacker underground. Could Doctorow's vision be our future backboneless backbone? A network of completely distributed municipal networks, with long haul segments over some public network, but with low-level protocols designed for security?

We'd have to invent some new technology to build that new network, but that's already started: I've been watching the return of peer-to-peer in Bitcoin and Blockchain, and in proposals for new protocols like IPFS and Upspin for filesharing. The Beaker Browser uses the Dat peer-to-peer network to combine web creation and web hosting, minimizing the need for centralized servers. And we've seen the rise of "federated" systems, like the Federated Wiki, which combines features of P2P and client-server, possibly the best of both worlds. Many of these projects flare up and die out quickly. That's not a problem—that's life in an open source world. What's important is that these projects are starting, and that some of them will succeed.

Let's not kid ourselves. This won't be easy. We might have to give up a lot: Netflix, YouTube, all that high-bandwidth stuff. We've got goals that need to be balanced: is it possible to protect privacy and anonymity, while simultaneously requiring accountability and preventing the victimization of women and minorities? It's a tough challenge, but one we have to meet.

It's time to build the network we want, and not just curse the network we have. Crocker, Postel, Kahn, Cerf, and others did an amazing job, given the limitations of technology in the '70s and '80s, and given that they never anticipated how successful their work would be. But now it's time to take the next step and build the network they would have built if they had seen how the internet would be abused. Can we build a network that can't be monopolized by monopolists? Yes, we can.

I've still got a 56K modem in my closet, and I know how to use it.
https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/what-i...-always-wanted





Verizon’s New Rewards Program Lets it Track Your Browsing History
Chaim Gartenberg

Verizon has a new rewards program out this week, called Verizon Up, which awards users a credit for every $300 they spend on their Verizon bill that can be redeemed toward various rewards.

Customers will be able to get rewards such as “Device Dollars toward your next device purchase, discounts on an accessory, or partner rewards,” along with other surprise offerings and first-come, first-serve ticket opportunities, which all seems like a nice occasional thing to get for regularly paying your cellphone bill.

But, as noted by Brandon Robbins on Twitter, the new program comes with a pretty big catch: you have to enroll in Verizon Selects, a program that allows the company to track a huge chunk of your personal data. That includes web browsing, app usage, device location, service usage, demographic info, postal or email address, and your interests. Furthermore, that data gets shared with Verizon’s newly formed Oath combination (aka AOL and Yahoo), plus with “vendors and partners” who work with Verizon. Which is kind of a long list of people who have access to what feels like a fairly significant amount of your data.

@reckless Verizon's new rewards program. And my data can be shared with the Yahoo & AOL merge? Yeah, no thanks. Nxt #theVerge podcast topic pic.twitter.com/J1KRZtbknZ
— BRANDON ROBBINS (@RobbinsBrandon) August 2, 2017

It’s worth noting that Verizon has been operating under these terms and conditions for a while with an earlier rewards program called “Smart Rewards,” which also required users to opt in to the Verizon Selects tracking program. But that doesn’t make it any better that this is the trade-off you’re forced to make to take advantage of the rewards. It kind of makes it seem like they exist just so Verizon can get permission to track you.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/2/16...ta-select-oath





T-Mobile Wins all Awards in Latest OpenSignal Report on U.S. Networks

T-Mobile wins all awards in latest OpenSignal report on U.S. networks
Alex Wagner

Earlier this year, T-Mobile tied for the most awards in OpenSignal’s State of Mobile Networks: USA report. Now the latest report shows T-Mo winning ‘em all.

OpenSignal today published the August 2017 edition of its State of Mobile Networks: USA report, showing how all four major U.S. carriers performed when tested by consumers using OpenSignal’s apps. T-Mobile won out in all six categories: 4G Download Speed, 3G Download Speed, Overall Download Speed, 4G Latency, 3G Latency, and 4G Availability.

In its report, OpenSignal notes that T-Mobile became the first U.S. carrier to surpass 90 percent 4G availability, squeaking ahead of Verizon and its 89.8 percent 4G availability. This metric measures the proportion of time that a user can connect to the 4G LTE network.

T-Mobile came out well ahead in 4G download speeds, finishing with an average LTE speed of 17.45Mbps. Verizon came in second with 14.91Mbps, AT&T in third with 12.92Mbps, and Sprint in fourth with 9.76Mbps. The Overall Speed results are similar, with T-Mobile finishing with an average of 16.07Mbps, ahead of the other three carriers.

OpenSignal also notes that Verizon and AT&T’s average 4G LTE speeds have dropped since the previous report in February, with Verizon dropping from 16.9Mbps to 14.9Mbps and AT&T slipping from 13.9Mbps to 12.9Mbps.

Finally, OpenSignal says that while T-Mobile won out in all award categories, it’s locked into a close network battle with Verizon. In 32 major U.S. cities, T-Mo or Verizon were ranked highest or were tied in 4G speed and 4G availability. For example, Verizon had the best 4G speeds in six markets and shared that title in 24 cities, while T-Mobile won in four markets and tied in 25 others.

This OpenSignal report is based on 5.07 billion datapoint collected from 172,919 users between March 31, 2017 and June 29, 2017. The data was gathered from OpenSignal’s apps for Android and iOS. For a closer look at all of the data, hit the link below.
http://www.tmonews.com/2017/08/t-mob...-u-s-networks/





BT Floats £600 Million Plan to Push Broadband into Remote Corners of UK

The logo for the British Telecom group is seen outside of offices in the City of London, Britain, January 16 , 2017.Toby Melville

LONDON (Reuters) - Telecoms provider BT (BT.L) has offered to invest up to 600 million pounds to provide faster broadband services to remote parts of the country, the government said on Sunday.

Under the proposal, BT would ensure all households in Britain can access speeds of at least 10 megabits per second, typically enough for a family to stream films, carry out video conferencing and browse the web at the same time.

The government will now consider whether the voluntary offer from BT or a regulatory approach represents the best way to achieve its target of providing fast internet services to all homes and businesses, Culture Secretary Karen Bradley said.

Under its proposal, BT would fund its investment and recover its costs by charging for access to its local networks.

"We already expect 95 percent of homes and businesses to have access to superfast broadband speeds of 24Mbps or faster by the end of 2017," BT's chief executive Gavin Patterson said.

"Our latest initiative aims to ensure that all UK premises can get faster broadband, even in the hardest to reach parts of the UK."

The government said the BT plan foresaw taking coverage of at least 10Mbps to around 99 percent of homes and businesses by 2020 with full expansion completed within two years after that.

Opposition Labour Party said the 10Mbps target was not ambitious enough.

Writing by William Schomberg; Editing by James Dalgleish
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-bt...-idUKKBN1AE0SH





India to Have 600 Million Broadband Connections by 2020: Sinha

There were 422.19 million broadband subscribers and the Internet penetration (Internet subscriber per 100 populations) was 32.86 percent in the country as on March 31, 2017, Communications Minister Manoj Sinha informed Parliament on Friday.

In a written reply to a question in the Rajya Sabha, Sinha said the National Telecom Policy-2012 envisages 600 million broadband connections by the year 2020.

He said that the government has planned the BharatNet project to provide 100Mbps broadband connectivity to all Gram Panchayats (around 2.5 lakh) in the country.

Under the first phase of the project, one lakh Gram Panchayats (GPs) are to be connected by laying underground optical fibre cable (OFC). The work is under implementation.

Under Phase-II, targeted to be completed by March 2019, connectivity will be provided to remaining 1.5 lakh Gram Panchayats in the country using an optimal mix of underground fibre, fibre over power lines, radio and satellite media, the Minister said.

Sinha said the provision of last-mile access to the network and broadband service provisioning shall be through Wi-Fi or any other broadband access technologies in all 2,50,000 Gram Panchayats in the country.

As on July 23, 2017, under the BharatNet project, OFC laying was completed in 100,299 Gram Panchayats and broadband connectivity was provided in 25,426 of them.
http://gadgets.ndtv.com/telecom/news...-sinha-1731319





Comcast Fails to Get Hidden Fee Class-Action Suit Thrown Out of Court

Comcast claims it can tack on Broadcast and Sports fees after order is submitted.
Jon Brodkin

A class-action complaint against Comcast can move forward after a federal judge rejected a Comcast motion to dismiss it.

The lawsuit, filed in October 2016 in US District Court in Northern California, accuses Comcast of falsely advertising low prices and then using poorly disclosed fees to increase the amount paid by cable TV customers. Those fees are the "Broadcast TV Fee," which had increased from $1.50 a month to $6.50 since 2014, and the "Regional Sports Fee" that rose from $1 to $4.50 since 2015.

These fees are not included in the advertised prices, so customers end up paying higher prices than the ones they are led to believe they will pay, the lawsuit said. When customers question Comcast reps about the fees, "Comcast staff and agents explicitly lie by stating that the Broadcast TV Fee and the Regional Sports Fee are government-related fees or taxes over which Comcast has no control," the complaint said.

Comcast filed a motion to dismiss, claiming that its order submission process could not have created a contract and that customers agreed to pay the fees in the "Subscriber Agreement" and "Minimum Term Agreement." But US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria disputed Comcast's reasoning and wrote that the class-action plaintiffs have made plausible claims.

Chhabria wrote yesterday in his order:

The motion to dismiss the breach of contract claim is denied. The plaintiffs have alleged the existence of a valid contract, which was created when [Comcast customers Dan] Adkins and [Christopher] Robertson submitted their order for Comcast services through Comcast's website. It is plausible to infer from the complaint that, by clicking "Submit Your Order," Adkins and Robertson agreed to pay Comcast's advertised price, plus taxes and government-related fees, in exchange for the services Comcast offered them. It is also plausible to infer from the complaint that Comcast breached its agreements with the plaintiffs when it sent them bills charging them Broadcast TV and/or Regional Sports Fees (alleged to be neither taxes nor government-related fees) in excess of the agreed-upon price, and when it subsequently sought to raise the amount of the fees.

Agreement did not mention specific fees

Chhabria disputed Comcast's claim that customers agreed to the fees in the Subscriber Agreement. The agreement refers only to "permitted fees and cost recovery charges" and not specifically to the Broadcast TV and Sports fees, he wrote.

"As to the Minimum Term Agreement, the plaintiffs plausibly allege that they never saw this agreement at the time they submitted their order for services and have never consented to it," the judge wrote. "Whether the plaintiffs had access to this agreement at the time they submitted their orders for services, or whether they subsequently consented to it, are disputed factual questions more appropriate for summary judgment."

Comcast argued that the order submission doesn't create a contract "because of the integration clause contained in Comcast's Subscriber Agreement," the judge wrote. This integration clause says that the Subscriber Agreement and other documents "constitute the entire agreement."

"While the Subscriber Agreement discusses a subscriber's agreement to pay the cost of services generally, it does not appear to contain any terms pertaining to any particular price the plaintiffs allege they agreed to pay for the services they ordered. It is therefore questionable whether the alleged order-submission contract and the Subscriber Agreement pertain to the same subject matter," the judge wrote.

The plaintiffs also "adequately alleged that a reasonable consumer would be misled" about the price of service when going through Comcast's ordering process, Chhabria wrote.

Chhabria gave Comcast a partial victory in yesterday's order, dismissing the plaintiffs' claim for breach of implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. This was "dismissed because the theory of breach the plaintiffs allege is the same as the breach of contract theory. The claim is therefore superfluous."

The judge's decision allows plaintiffs to continue pursuing attorneys' fees and punitive damages. But the judge warned plaintiffs that they likely will have to file a separate state court action in order to seek injunctive relief that would force Comcast to change its practices.

"The judge previously removed six out-of-state named plaintiffs from the suit, finding the court lacked jurisdiction to resolve their claims," Courthouse News Service wrote.

Chhabria in April granted one of Comcast's previous motions to dismiss the case, but he allowed the plaintiffs to file an amended complaint. The class representatives filed the amended complaint on May 16. Comcast then filed a motion to dismiss it, leading to yesterday's ruling.

Comcast has repeatedly raised the Broadcast TV and Regional Sports fees even for customers who signed multi-year contracts for fixed monthly rates, the plaintiffs say. "By increasing these fees in the middle of the contract term, Comcast has found a way to secretly and repeatedly increase the monthly price it charges for its channel packages despite its promise to charge a flat rate for one or two years," the original complaint said.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-out-of-court/





Charter has Moved Millions of Customers to New—and Often Higher—Pricing

Pricing changes accelerate as Charter tries to boost revenue per customer.
Jon Brodkin

Charter Communications has moved 30 percent of the customers it acquired in a blockbuster merger onto new pricing plans, resulting in many people paying higher prices.

Charter closed the acquisitions of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Bright House Networks in May 2016. Before the merger, Charter had about 6.8 million customers; afterward, Charter had 25.4 million customers in 41 states and became the second-largest US cable company after Comcast.

The merger was quickly followed by customer complaints about pricing in the acquired territories. In November 2016, we noted that "tens of thousands of ex-Time Warner Cable video subscribers have canceled their service since the company was bought by Charter, and pricing changes appear to be the driving factor." At the time, Charter CEO Thomas Rutledge explained that the TWC video customer base was "mispriced" and needed to be moved "in the right direction."

Charter came up with new prices and packages, and many customers saw their bills rise when their previous discounts expired and they were switched to non-promotional pricing. Now, 30 percent of the ex-TWC and ex-Bright House customers are paying different—and often higher—prices.
70 percent to go

Rutledge provided the update in an earnings call last week (hat tip to FierceCable). According to a Seeking Alpha transcript, Rutledge said:

In June, we finished the rollout of our new pricing, packaging, and branding across our national footprint with the last launch of Spectrum in Hawaii. We now offer a simple, straightforward, high-value product using a consistent and uniform approach across our 50 million passings under one brand, Spectrum.

The new product is succeeding with consumers across our footprint. In the second quarter, our customers and PSU [primary service unit] connects were higher year-over-year. And as of the end of the second quarter, 30 percent of Time Warner Cable and Bright House legacy customers were in our new pricing and packaging, up from 17 percent at the end of last quarter. In areas where we've had Spectrum in place for at least three quarters, 43 percent of our residential customers have Spectrum package products.

We asked Charter for details on how many customers are paying higher prices than before, but the company said it would not offer those numbers. "These customers have chosen to move into these packages, which provide a greater value compared to legacy packages," a Charter spokesperson told Ars.

The pricing changes also affected customers who were with Charter before the merger. "Progression of product and package migration is virtually identical to what we saw at Legacy Charter," Rutledge said.

Charter adds Internet customers, loses TV subscribers

Charter's total customer relationships increased by 211,000 during Q2 2017. Charter has 26.8 million residential and business customers subscribed to at least one of the three triple-play services, the company's earnings release said. About 25.3 million of those are residential.

Charter lost 90,000 residential TV subscribers in the quarter, while gaining 231,000 Internet subscribers and 14,000 phone customers. Charter now has 22 million residential Internet subscribers, 16.6 million TV subscribers, and 10.4 million phone subscribers.

Charter's average monthly revenue per residential customer was $109.46, up from $109.11 the previous quarter. The number is slightly down from a year ago, when average customer revenue was $109.74. (Comcast raised its revenue per cable customer from $149.83 to $151.19 per month between the first and second quarter.)

Charter wants to raise that average, but the increases in prices for some customers have been offset in part by customers buying Internet access by itself without TV and phone service. "[P]romotional rate step-ups and modest rate adjustments were offset by continued single-play Internet sell-in and the migration of Legacy TWC and Legacy Bright House customers to higher-value Spectrum pricing and packaging," Charter said.

The price changes for ex-TWC customers have resulted in many news stories. One such piece in the Lexington Herald Leader of Kentucky in April profiled a customer who suddenly noticed that some of his TV channels were missing and replaced by "a small block of text advising him that his subscription no longer provided those channels." The article says:

A Spectrum representative told [the customer, Daniel] Fitzgerald that he hadn't been paying Time Warner [Cable] enough for the standard cable package. If he wanted those channels back, his monthly bill for cable and Internet would jump from $103 to $139, effective immediately.

Also, he would need to pay a $24 service fee for a technician to replace his old Time Warner Cable box, which worked fine an hour earlier, with a new Spectrum cable box.

Problems in Lexington were also detailed in The New Yorker. Lexington officials have scheduled a public hearing to evaluate Charter later this month, but "the city’s franchise agreement and federal communications law gives the city little leverage with the cable company," the Herald Leader wrote.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...igher-pricing/





Charter Communications Says 'No Interest' in Buying Sprint
Greg Roumeliotis and Liana B. Baker

U.S. cable operator Charter Communications Inc said on Sunday it was not interested in acquiring U.S. wireless carrier Sprint Corp, leaving the latter's majority owner, SoftBank Group Corp, pondering how to orchestrate a merger.

A merger of Charter and Sprint would create a telecommunications powerhouse, providing a one-stop shop for customers looking for internet and mobile phone services, and giving the combined company a stronger footing in creating the infrastructure required for so-called 5G wireless technology.

SoftBank Chief Executive Masayoshi Son is considering making an acquisition offer for Charter, which has a market capitalization of $101 billion and another $60 billion in debt, as early as this week, a person familiar with the matter said on Sunday, in what would be by far the Japanese telecommunications conglomerate's biggest ever deal.

SoftBank remains interested in merging Sprint with T-Mobile US Inc, another U.S. wireless carrier controlled by Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG, with which Sprint held deal negotiations earlier this year, the source added.

The source asked not to be identified because the deliberations are confidential. SoftBank declined to comment.

"We understand why a deal is attractive for SoftBank, but Charter has no interest in acquiring Sprint," a Charter spokesman said in an emailed statement on Sunday. He declined to comment on whether Charter would entertain a bid from SoftBank and at what price.

Sprint and T-Mobile could not be immediately reached for comment.

SoftBank's potential bid for Charter would follow the conclusion of two months of negotiations with Charter and larger cable peer Comcast Corp over Sprint potentially serving as their mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), allowing them to use its network to offer wireless services.

"We have a very good MVNO relationship with Verizon Communications Inc and intend to launch wireless services to cable customers next year," the Charter spokesman said.

SoftBank's interest in Charter also shows it is looking for alternatives to strengthen its negotiating hand in Sprint's negotiations with T-Mobile, analysts said.

"This could be a way to gain leverage in a T-Mobile deal," Macquarie analyst Amy Yong said of Son's pursuit of Charter on Sunday.

To be sure, a bid for Charter by SoftBank, which has a market capitalization of 9.9 trillion yen ($90.3 billion), would be a stretch for its finances, given that it would likely be without the deployment of the $100 billion technology-focused investment fund called Vision Fund it raised this year.

Sprint's market capitalization is just $32.8 billion, and it has a similar amount in debt. A bid for Charter that would give SoftBank majority control in a deal would require raising tens of billions of dollars in new debt and could push SoftBank to leverage some of its other assets, including its 29.5 percent stake in Chinese internet giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and its 43 percent stake in Yahoo Japan Corp.

SoftBank shares were trading down 2.7 percent at 8,920 yen on Monday morning in Tokyo.

Another hurdle for SoftBank would be the price expectations of Charter's largest shareholder, John Malone's Liberty Broadband Corp. Charter's proxy statement to its shareholders in March showed that CEO Tom Rutledge has compensation incentives to take Charter's share price to more than $564. Charter shares ended trading on Friday at $370.26.

What is more, were Charter to agree to a merger with Sprint, it would need the blessing of Comcast. Charter and Comcast announced an agreement in May that bars either company from entering into a material transaction in wireless for a year without the other's consent.
In Need of a Deal

Verizon, the No. 1 U.S. wireless carrier, also expressed interest in a takeover of Charter earlier this year, sources have said. Verizon, which has a healthier network than Sprint, has MVNO agreements in place with both Charter and Comcast, which are rolling out wireless plans for their customers using the Verizon partnership.

Three years ago, SoftBank abandoned talks to acquire T-Mobile for Sprint amid opposition from U.S. antitrust regulators. That deal would have put SoftBank in control of the merged company, with Deutsche Telekom becoming a minority shareholder.

T-Mobile was worth around $30 billion at the time, but its market value has since risen to more than $50 billion as it overtook Sprint as the No. 3 wireless carrier by subscribers.

While Sprint's customer base has also grown under CEO Marcelo Claure and financials have improved, the growth was primarily driven by heavy price discounts. Despite new investment, the company's network is still viewed by many consumers as weaker than its rivals.

Unless Sprint can clinch a merger with a peer, these investment requirements are set to become more pressing. Carriers will need to spend billions of dollars to upgrade to 5G networks that promise to be 10 times to 100 times faster than current speeds.

Reporting by Greg Roumeliotis in New York and Liana B. Baker in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Makiko Yamazaki in Tokyo, Abinaya Vijayaraghavan in Bengaluru and Anjali Athavaley in New York; editing by Christopher Cushing and Jason Neely
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-ch...-idUKKBN1AG066





Discovery to Acquire Scripps Networks for $14.6 Billion
Georg Szalai

The transaction will bring together two big cable networks groups known for nonscripted and lifestyle content, with the companies eyeing $350 million in cost savings.

Discovery Communications and Scripps Networks Interactive have made it official, unveiling a $14.6 billion deal that will combine the two cable networks companies known mostly for nonscripted and lifestyle content.

Discovery will acquire Scripps in the cash-and-stock deal, which the companies said would bring together two sets of strong brands, including networks popular with women, allow for $350 million in cost savings, provide more international opportunities for Scripps' business given that Discovery has been a global player longer than Scripps and give the merged firm more upside in digital and direct-to-consumer services.

Scripps operates HGTV, Travel Channel and Food Network, among others, while Discovery's networks include the likes of Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, TLC and OWN. The companies said they would create "a global leader in real life entertainment" and "accelerate growth across linear, digital and short-form platforms around the world."

The $90 per-share price tag of the deal, based on Discovery’s Friday closing price, represents a premium of 34 percent to Scripps’ unaffected share price as of Tuesday, July 18, before deal talks were first reported. Discovery is paying $63 per share in cash and $27 per share in stock. Scripps shareholders will end up owning 20 percent of Discovery, which will also take on Scripps' net debt of approximately $2.7 billion in the deal.

The combination is expected to close by early 2018 and create "significant cost synergies," the companies said, estimating them at approximately $350 million. The deal is expected to be accretive to Discovery's adjusted earnings per share and free cash flow in the first year after close, they said.

Viacom had also been pursuing Scripps, but last week bowed out of the bidding process, clearing the way for Discovery, which has long been interested in a deal. In 2013 and early 2014, it had also held talks with Scripps, but the Scripps family at the time didn't seem ready to sell.

"This is an exciting new chapter for Discovery," said David Zaslav, president and CEO of Discovery Communications. "Scripps is one of the best-run media companies in the world with terrific assets, strong brands and popular talent and formats. Our business is about great storytelling, authentic characters and passionate super fans. We believe that by coming together with Scripps, we will create a stronger, more flexible and more dynamic media company with a global content engine that can be fully optimized and monetized across our combined networks, products and services in every country around the world."

“Through the passion and dedication of our incredible employees, and with the support of the Scripps family, we have built a lifestyle content company that touches the lives of consumers every single day,” said Kenneth Lowe, chairman, president and CEO of Scripps. “This agreement with Discovery presents an unmatched opportunity for Scripps to grow its leading lifestyle brands across the world and on new and emerging channels including short-form, direct-to-consumer and streaming platforms.”

Discovery and Scripps said the combined company "will offer a complementary and dynamic suite of brands" and produce approximately 8,000 hours of original programming annually, be home to approximately 300,000 hours of library content and will generate a combined 7 billion shortform video streams monthly, "demonstrating its commitment to delivering content as a top short-form provider."

Discovery and Scripps said that together they will also have a nearly 20 percent share of advertising-supported pay TV audiences in the U.S. The merged entity will operate five of the top pay TV networks for women and will account for over a 20 percent share of women watching primetime pay TV in the U.S., they said.

In terms of international upside, the companies said: "The combination will extend Scripps’ brands, programming and talent to a broader international audience through Discovery’s best-in-class global distribution, sales and languaging infrastructure."

Bringing together Scripps’ expertise in shortform video creation with Discovery’s investment in Group Nine Media will allow the enlarged firm to "create a new scale player with a strong ability to compete for audiences and ad dollars," the companies said. "Discovery’s added scale, content engine and multiple brand offerings will present a compelling opportunity for new digital distribution partners, including mobile, OTT and direct-to-consumer platforms and offerings."

Lowe is expected to join Discovery’s board following the close of the transaction, which is subject to approval by shareholders of both firms, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

John Malone, who is a big shareholder in Discovery and has pushed for content industry consolidation, the Advance/Newhouse Programming Partnership and members of the Scripps family, which controls Scripps, have agreed to vote in favor of the transaction.

Wall Street has been mixed on a deal. While bulls have highlighted that a combination would give the enlarged entity more power in carriage talks with pay TV operators, bears have said a deal means doubling down on a challenged business amid cord cutting and ratings challenges.

"We view the deal as among the most logical in media," RBC Capital Markets analyst Steven Cahall said in a recent report. "Both are somewhat relatively sub-scale when dealing with distributors, and while their combination may not put them on equal footing with a broadcast network or major sports rights owner, scale matters and should improve network carriage and affiliate negotiations."

Among recent deals between pay TV distributors and challenges to traditional TV networks, he also highlighted: "Investors have viewed consolidation among smaller players as an eventual inevitability."

Discovery, "perhaps the best cost manager in media," according to Cahall, was expected to look for cost synergies, both in overhead and programming, and possible revenue synergies.

Others have been less bullish. MoffettNathanson analyst Michael Nathanson in a recent report wrote: "While there will likely be ample cost synergies, international revenue opportunities and improved relative scale, we don’t think this merger will fundamentally alter the long-term prospects of these companies."

And Wells Fargo analyst Marci Ryvicker wrote: "Although we still don't believe that either combination [Discovery-Scripps or Viacom-Scripps] solves the long-term affiliate fee 'issue,' our math at least suggests that Discovery would be the better buyer of Scripps — both from a pro forma leverage and an accretion standpoint."
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...illion-1022433





Cable Giants Step Up Piracy Battle by Interrogating Montreal Software Developer and Searching His Home

‘The whole experience was horrifying,’ TVAddons founder says of court-sanctioned search
Sophia Harris

Canadian cable companies have ratcheted up their war on piracy by launching a new legal battle. The effort has already seen Bell, Rogers and Quebecor's Videotron search a Montreal software developer's home and interrogate him for more than nine hours.

"The whole experience was horrifying," says Adam Lackman, founder of TVAddons and defendant in a copyright infringement lawsuit launched by the television giants. "It felt like the kind of thing you would have expected to have happened in the Soviet Union."

Telecoms and content creators Bell, Rogers and Videotron began their piracy battle last year by filing a lawsuit against Canadian dealers who sell "free TV" Android boxes — devices that can be used to stream pirated content.

Now the companies are also targeting Lackman and TVAddons — a library of hundreds of apps known as add-ons. Once downloaded on the Android box or a computer with added software, some of the add-ons — such as Exodus and 1Channel — allow people easy access to pirated movies, TV shows and even live television.

Vincent Wesley 'free TV' Android box streaming

Vincent Wesley shows off an Android box — a device that has this country's big cable companies very frustrated. (Vincent Wesley)

In their statement of claim filed in Federal Court on June 2, the plaintiffs allege that by developing and making TVAddons available to the public, Lackman contravened the Copyright Act.

The suit includes a long list of programming allegedly made freely available via TVAddons including Bell's Game of Thrones and Rogers' Sportsnet.

In his defence, Lackman argues TVAddons doesn't host pirated content but instead connects users to sources already available online, so it serves as nothing more than a search engine.

Home visit

On June 9, the telecoms got an Anton Piller order, a civil search warrant that gives a plaintiff access to a defendant's home, without notice, to search for and seize relevant evidence before it can be destroyed.

A Federal Court judge would later declare the Anton Piller order in this case "unlawful," but that was weeks after a group of men arrived at Lackman's door at 8 a.m. on June 12.

Lackman says the group included a bailiff, two computer technicians, an independent counsel and a lawyer representing Bell, Rogers and Videotron.

According to court documents, the group stayed for 16 hours and the plaintiffs' lawyer and independent counsel interrogated Lackman for more than nine hours. He was given a break for dinner and to speak to his lawyer, who was present.

Lackman was "not permitted to refuse to answer questions" and his lawyer wasn't permitted to counsel him in his answers.

"Any time I would question the process, they would threaten me with contempt of court proceedings," says Lackman.

Besides seizing personal items such as his computer and phone, Lackman says the plaintiffs' lawyer and independent counsel forced him to hand over passwords for his email and social media accounts.

Order 'null and void'

But on June 29, Lackman had reason to be hopeful he'd get his possessions back after a Federal Court judge declared the Anton Piller order "null and void" and that all seized items be returned.

According to court documents, the judge said the search was supposed to be conducted between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. but instead lasted until midnight.

The judge also said the defendant was treated unfairly during the interrogation and wasn't offered "any of the protections normally afforded to litigants in such circumstances."

He added that "the most egregious part of the questioning," was when the plaintiffs' lawyer asked Lackman to spill information about other people running operations similar to TVAddons.

TVAddons court Adam Lackman Android Box

TVAddons consists of a library of hundreds of apps known as add-ons, some of which can be used to stream pirated content. (TVAddons/Twitter)

The judge said the purpose of the order was to preserve existing evidence, not hunt for new evidence.

He also concluded that the plaintiffs' legal team used the order to try to shut down TVAddons.

"I am of the view that its true purpose was to destroy the livelihood of the defendant, deny him the financial resources to finance a defence to the claim made against him," the judge wrote.

"The defendant has demonstrated that he has an arguable case that he is not violating the [Copyright] Act," the judge continued, adding that by the plaintiffs' own estimate, only about one per cent of Lackman's add-ons were allegedly used to pirate content.

No returns

However, Lackman's belongings still haven't been returned. Nor can he access the TVAddons website or its social media accounts, which were also seized as part of the original order.

That's because Bell, Rogers and Videotron have appealed the court decision and a Federal Court of Appeal judge has ruled that until the appeal can be heard, Lackman will get nothing back.

The appeal judge said the issue isn't the fact the number of alleged copyright-infringing add-ons is small, but rather that TVAddons "targets a market of users seeking to knowingly access copyrighted materials without authorization."

The plaintiffs' law firm, Smart & Biggar, said it couldn't comment on the case at this point and that the appeal hearing will likely take place this fall.

As for Lackman, he plans to continue his defence. "At this point, there is no choice but to fight," he said in a written statement to CBC News.

To help pay the legal bills, he's trying to raise money on the fundraising site Indiegogo.

Lackman has also set up a new TVAddons website and Twitter account and tells CBC News his add-ons are still up and running.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/tvad...ourt-1.4231340





HBO’s Computer Networks Hacked, ‘Game of Thrones’ Script May Have Leaked
Janko Roettgers

Hackers have broken into the networks of HBO and reportedly leaked unreleased episodes of a number of shows, as well as the script for next week’s “Game of Thrones” episode. Altogether, they have reportedly obtained a total of 1.5 terabyte of data.

HBO confirmed the intrusion in a statement sent to Variety.

“HBO recently experienced a cyber incident, which resulted in the compromise of proprietary information,” the networks said. “We immediately began investigating the incident and are working with law enforcement and outside cybersecurity firms. Data protection is a top priority at HBO, and we take seriously our responsibility to protect the data we hold.”

Entertainment Weekly was first to report about the hack, and allegedly leaked content, on Monday. According to that report, the hackers have already leaked unreleased episodes of “Ballers” and “Room 104.”

HBO chairman and CEO Richard Plepler addressed the hack in an email to employees, calling it “disruptive, unsettling, and disturbing for all of us.” Plepler said that the problem is being addressed by “senior leadership and our extraordinary technology team, along with outside experts,” and went on to call the efforts to mitigate the hack “nothing short of herculean.”

“The problem before us is unfortunately all too familiar in the world we now find ourselves a part of,” he wrote. “As has been the case with any challenge we have ever faced, I have absolutely no doubt that we will navigate our way through this successfully.”

It’s still unclear who’s behind the hack, but it’s far from the first time that Hollywood has found itself in the crosshairs of hackers. A group of hackers that is thought to have been backed by North Korea broke into the networks of Sony Pictures in 2014, and subsequently released tens of thousands of emails, as well as scripts and video files.

And in late 2016, hackers broke into the network of a small Hollywood-based post-production vendor and stole TV show episodes from Netflix and multiple other TV networks.
http://variety.com/2017/digital/news...ed-1202510837/





The HBO Hack Was Reportedly up to Seven Times Larger Than the Sony Hack

Only a few TV episodes and a script have been leaked so far—but video footage, internal documents, and e-mails might be next.
by
Laura Bradley

Update (4:25 P.M.): HBO C.E.O. Richard Plepler told staff in a note Tuesday that the company does not believe its email system has been compromised, “but the forensic review is ongoing.” Per The Hollywood Reporter, the premium cabler is also working to block the leaked content from reaching viewers—including by sending a Digital Millennium Copyright Act take-down notice to Google, which is removing links to stolen material. HBO has used the DMCA to prevent the spread of copyrighted material for years, T.H.R. notes, “but the effort has not been nearly as aggressive as the network's post-hack offensive.”

The original post continues below.

It seems the recent HBO hack was just as bad as the hackers threatened it would be, according to [The Hollywood Reporter]http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hbo-hack-insiders-fear-leaked-emails-as-probe-widens-1025827). When Netflix was hacked earlier this year, the cyber-criminals behind the attack demanded a ransom. But there was no such demand in the hack that struck HBO over the weekend, and the sheer amount of compromised data has led some to believe that video footage, internal documents, or e-mails could be leaked next. The premium-cable giant is working with the F.B.I. and cyber-security firm Mandiant to investigate the breach, in which hackers claimed to have stolen 1.5 terabytes’ worth of data. Per T.H.R., that would make this hack about seven times larger than the Sony attack in 2014, which buried the studio in leaked e-mails.

“A traditional business-grade D.S.L. link would take about two weeks at full blast to exfiltrate that much data,” Farsight Security C.E.O. Paul Vixie told T.H.R. “If not for video and sound, a corporation the size of HBO might fit [entirely] in a terabyte, including all the e-mail and spreadsheets ever written or stored.” Another expert added that the entire Library of Congress contains an estimate of 10 terabytes of print material—so it is almost certain that video and/or audio were stolen.

Incidentally, Mandiant, the cyber-security firm with whom HBO is reportedly working, led the Sony hack investigation as well.

HBO has not yet commented beyond its initial statement acknowledging the hack: “HBO recently experienced a cyber incident, which resulted in the compromise of proprietary information. We immediately began investigating the incident and are working with law enforcement and outside cyber-security firms. Data protection is a top priority at HBO, and we take seriously our responsibility to protect the data we hold.”

On Sunday, the hacker sent the following e-mail to multiple entertainment reporters, including several at Vanity Fair:

Quote:
Hi to all mankind. The greatest leak of cyber space era is happening. What’s its name? Oh I forget to tell. Its HBO and Game of Thrones……!!!!!! You are lucky to be the first pioneers to witness and download the leak. Enjoy it & spread the words. Whoever spreads well, we will have an interview with him . . . HBO is falling.




Amazon’s Hollywood Spending Soars, Returns Unclear
Jeffrey Dastin

Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) is quickly ramping up the billions of dollars a year it spends on creating and licensing TV shows and films, signaling the retailer plans to be in show business for the long haul.

The issue came to the forefront of investors' attention last week, when Amazon said a step up in its spending on video projects could be one of several reasons it might report a loss this quarter, even as it expects more than $39 billion in overall sales.

The company's shares, though up 33 percent this year, have dipped 5 percent since that warning.

Wall Street analysts estimate Amazon's spending on content will have tripled to more than $4.5 billion by the end of this year from 2014.

Catching customers' attention with video now represents one of the company's biggest investments, people familiar with the matter said. Amazon does not break out spending figures, and it declined comment on the subject.

The company has visibly increased its footprint in Hollywood since opening a nearby studio in 2010, and picked up its first Academy Awards earlier this year.

"We expect Amazon to quickly exceed Netflix's annual spending on video," said Needham & Co analyst Laura Martin, who estimates that Netflix Inc (NFLX.O), the top online television service, will spend $6 billion on content this year.

Means to an End?

The fast-growing investment in original video is just one of many simultaneous moves by Amazon into new areas, including brick-and-mortar retailing with its planned acquisition of Whole Foods Market Inc (WFM.O).

Amazon has offered little detail for investors on where it is spending extra on content, or why, making it hard to evaluate if the investment is working. Broadly, it has said video is a key benefit of its money-spinning Prime shopping club, whose members tend to buy more goods from Amazon on top of paying a yearly fee.

"When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes," Chief Executive Jeff Bezos said at a Recode tech conference last year. "People who use Prime Video ... renew at higher rates, and they convert from free trials at higher rates."

One of the people familiar with the company's operations said Amazon has data scientists and economists running computer models to determine how video influences whether shoppers sign up for Prime after a free trial period.

In turn, deciding the budget for video spending involves a complicated set of factors, including subscription fees and the value of extra spending by Prime members, the person said.

Success Not Assured

Despite its award wins for distributing "Manchester by the Sea" and producing TV shows such as "Transparent," Amazon's Hollywood push has not been entirely successful.

An early plan to let anyone submit scripts online and crowd-source opinions on what shows to produce - an effort to disrupt Hollywood's lengthy and expensive greenlight system - has effectively been abandoned.

Some have expressed concern that Amazon is focusing on niche audiences that likely are already Prime Video users, such as recent projects with director Woody Allen.

Meanwhile, costs mount. Amazon paid $10 million to score distribution rights to "Manchester by the Sea" - one of the largest deals ever at the Sundance Film Festival. And it is paying about $50 million to stream 10 Thursday-night games for the U.S. National Football League this year, five times what Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) had paid for the same rights.

The famously frugal company threw lavish awards show parties, too, a sign it has not been able to shave off as much of Hollywood's notoriously high costs as it may have hoped.

"The bets they have to make on content are subject to the vagaries of the movie business," said Paul Verna, an analyst at research firm eMarketer. Being in Hollywood is "entirely different from being a data company or a tech company or a devices company."

Reporting By Jeffrey Dastin; Editing by Bill Rigby
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-zy...-idUKKBN1AI2OD





‘The Emoji Movie’ Starts Strong as ‘Dunkirk’ Stays at No. 1
Brooks Barnes

The disconnect between Hollywood’s taste and that of the masses has rarely been more sharply drawn as it was over the weekend, as the stylish “Atomic Blonde” sputtered and “The Emoji Movie” pushed past horrified critics to become a box office success.

The No. 1 movie in North America was again Christopher Nolan’s sophisticated “Dunkirk” (Warner Bros.), which collected an estimated $28.1 million, for a two-week domestic total of $102.8 million, according to comScore. “Dunkirk” has benefited from strong turnout at Imax theaters and other cinemas offering premium-priced, large-format screenings.

But “The Emoji Movie” (Sony) was an unexpectedly close second. To double takes in Hollywood, that animated film took in about $25.7 million. Sony is now on a box office roll following stellar results earlier this summer for “Baby Driver” and “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” (The next hurdle for the studio: “The Dark Tower,” which arrives on Friday.)

Sony spent about $50 million to make “The Emoji Movie.” Most animated movies cost at least $85 million.

Critics hated “The Emoji Movie,” which had an 8 percent positive score on Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregation site, as of Sunday. The movie is about an emoji named Gene (voiced by T. J. Miller) who lives in a teenager’s phone and is considered a glitch because of his versatile emotional abilities. He sets out to become a simple “meh” emoji like his parents.

Rival studios have spent the summer mocking Sony for backing “The Emoji Movie” with a full-throated marketing campaign, including a stunt at the Cannes Film Festival involving a parasailing actor, confetti and people in emoji costumes. Surely, sniffed the film elite, Sony was delusional if it thought it could make something out of such dreck.

But never underestimate two things — the taste of the American public, to paraphrase H. L. Mencken, and the nag factor. Sony plastered a handful of cities with “Emoji Movie” posters and billboards starting in May, much earlier than is typical, to position the film as a summer event and get children to start pestering their parents to go see it. Sony also spent months dispatching actors in emoji costumes.

Stop by the Sony booth at #WizardWorldPHL to play @EmojiMovie Plinko plus meet Poop, Gene, Hi-5, and Jailbreak! @WizardWorld #EmojiMovie pic.twitter.com/TtralQ8GxG
— Allied Philadelphia (@AlliedIMPhilly) June 2, 2017

“We focused on giving these characters a personality — make them go from an emoji to something dimensionalized you want go on a journey with,” Josh Greenstein, Sony’s president of worldwide marketing and distribution, said by phone on Sunday.

The weekend’s other new wide-release movie was “Atomic Blonde” (Universal), which starred Charlize Theron as a superspy on a violent mission in East Berlin in 1989. Independently financed by Sierra/Affinity for roughly $30 million, “Atomic Blonde” sold about $18.6 million in tickets. That was a solid start for a quirky period film with a plot that many critics found convoluted.

But “Atomic Blonde” was not an art house endeavor. The reaction to Ms. Theron’s performance in film circles had been so euphoric that Universal and its Focus Features label thought the movie had a shot at becoming a new “Bourne Identity,” which arrived to $37.3 million in ticket sales in 2002, after adjusting for inflation. Universal’s main marketing team spent months working to promote it as a crossover hit, comparing Ms. Theron’s character to James Bond.

Also notable at the weekend box office was the limited release of “Detroit” (Annapurna), Kathryn Bigelow’s look at the 1967 Detroit riot. It took in $365,455 at 20 theaters in nine cities, a result that Annapurna’s president of distribution, Erik Lomis, called “pretty solid.” He added, “We released it early so that we could start the conversation. We’re pleased.”

While certainly solid, the “Detroit” turnout was not sizzling. Ms. Bigelow’s film has received ecstatic reviews over all, but a large part of the conversation so far has focused on the appropriateness of a mostly white filmmaking team tackling such a painful moment in African-American history. “Detroit,” starring John Boyega and Anthony Mackie, arrives nationwide on Friday.

Playing in just four locations over the weekend was the documentary “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” (Paramount), which revisits Al Gore’s environmental movement. It took in $130,000. “An Inconvenient Truth,” collected $347,520 upon its May 2006 arrival in four theaters, after adjusting for inflation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/30/m...s-at-no-1.html





With ‘Logan Lucky,’ Soderbergh Hopes to Change Film’s Business Model
Brooks Barnes

I want movie studios to keep their grubby paws off my money. And I want complete control over how my films are marketed.

Most marquee directors hold those twin desires, but none more than Steven Soderbergh, the iconoclast behind “Erin Brockovich,” the “Ocean’s Eleven” series and “Sex, Lies and Videotape.” Exasperated by the movie business, both financially and creatively, he announced his retirement from film directing in 2011. He said “Side Effects” in 2013 would be his last film.

Now he is back — and betting that an unorthodox distribution plan for his new heist comedy, “Logan Lucky,” will serve as a model for auteur directors who are as fed up with the Hollywood system as he has been.

“After years of shooting my mouth off about absolute creative control, we’re going to attempt to do it,” Mr. Soderbergh said.

“The question is this,” he said. “Can you do what the studios normally do from a wide distribution standpoint, only with a lot fewer resources — spending on marketing — and with a much better economic structure for the people who actually made the film?”

The financial story of “Logan Lucky,” which arrives in theaters on Aug. 18, starts in the fall of 2014. According to Mr. Soderbergh, a “friend” asked him to read the script, about a ragtag group that robs a Nascar track, and suggest a director. Mr. Soderbergh said he loved the idea (Ocean’s 7-Eleven, if you will) and wanted to direct the film himself.

But first he needed a plan that satisfied his creative and economic demands. It was relatively easy to raise the $29 million or so needed to make “Logan Lucky,” which stars Channing Tatum, Daniel Craig and Riley Keough. Once his cast was in place — all agreeing to work for scale, with profit participation if the film succeeds — Mr. Soderbergh sold off overseas distribution rights, a standard practice in the independent film business. Voilà: creative control over the actual film.

But distribution would not be so easy.

The standard option for a wide release, meaning at least 2,500 locations in North America on opening weekend, involves renting a major studio’s machinery. A studio like Warner Bros. foots the marketing bill (about $40 million is standard for a production like “Logan Lucky”) and handles all aspects of the release. For its services, the studio collects a fee (roughly 15 percent of total ticket sales) and deducts its expenses. Any remaining profit goes to the owners of the film.

For Mr. Soderbergh, that route was a nonstarter. “You’re way too far away from your money,” he said.

Mr. Soderbergh also wanted to spend much less on marketing. It would stand to reason that a studio would, too. But it is actually in a studio’s interest to spend more — that way the box office total is usually bigger, which in turn means a bigger fee. It is also extremely hard to get studios to rewrite their marketing playbooks. With dozens of movies on the assembly line, overwhelmed studio executives tend to go with what has worked in the past.

“I understand why they resist new ideas,” Mr. Soderbergh said. “With so much money at stake, it’s hard to sit in that room and say, sure, let’s jump off a cliff and try a whole new approach.”

In addition, Mr. Soderbergh, who won an Academy Award in 2000 for directing “Traffic,” wanted full creative control over “Logan Lucky” advertising. He said studios had never given him absolute say over a campaign. Trailers, for instance, are tested with focus groups before they are released and often tweaked based on the responses. “It’s very difficult once you get into studio testing to push back,” Mr. Soderbergh said.

As he explored options, Mr. Soderbergh first considered forming an alliance with the National Association of Theater Owners, a trade organization. Why not cut out distributors completely by going straight to multiplex operators? Mr. Soderbergh soon realized that was not an ideal solution, in part because the Justice Department keeps close tabs on the adherence of theater chains to federal antitrust laws.

Mr. Soderbergh ultimately connected with Hollywood’s leading authority on distribution: Dan Fellman, a former Warner Bros. executive who now runs a consulting business. Mr. Fellman, who became an executive producer on “Logan Lucky,” devised a plan that Mr. Soderbergh liked.

They would raise about $20 million in marketing money by selling off a portion of the film’s nontheatrical rights. Amazon, for instance, bought streaming rights.

Then they would make an atypical distribution deal with Bleecker Street Media, an upstart with a total staff of about 20. Bleecker Street would execute the marketing campaign — with Mr. Soderbergh approving everything — and receive a token fee of less than $1 million. If the film hit certain box office thresholds, Bleecker Street would receive a slice of ticket sales. Bleecker Street would also participate in other revenue streams, including DVD sales.

Mr. Soderbergh noted that the box office bar for success is lower under this setup. With nearly everything prepaid, and no hefty distributor fees coming off the top, even a modest $15 million opening would be a win.

“All of our financial interests are aligned,” said Andrew Karpen, Bleecker Street’s chief executive. “Logan Lucky” will easily become Mr. Karpen’s biggest release to date, surpassing the thriller “Eye in the Sky,” which collected about $18.7 million last year on about 1,000 screens. Bleecker Street also has dibs on a “Logan Lucky” sequel.

“We know that a lot of big-time filmmakers are watching this,” Mr. Fellman said. “We want this to be the beginning of a bunch of movies.”

So far, Mr. Soderbergh has spent only about 15 percent of his “Logan Lucky” advertising budget. With only three weeks until release, studios would have typically spent 40 percent. But Mr. Soderbergh believes that the vast majority of marketing should come immediately before a film’s release.

“I was also very adamant about the trailer,” Mr. Soderbergh said. “I wanted it to feel like a throwback and not seem like it gave away all the jokes.” He said the trailer was not tested with a focus group.

Outdoor “Logan Lucky” ads are concentrated in the Midwest and South. Bucking studio tradition, billboards are scarce to nonexistent in cities like Los Angeles and New York.

“Logan Lucky,” which has received very strong early reviews, has also generated headlines over its script. The screenplay is credited to Rebecca Blunt, who does not seem to exist. Who wrote it?

That mystery may be part of the marketing plan.

In response to questions about the screenplay’s author, Mr. Soderbergh said in an email, “Clarify? Me? Why would I do that? I can tell you that Rebecca Blunt is enjoying all this immensely.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/b...ess-model.html





Millennials Unearth an Amazing Hack to Get Free TV: the Antenna

Cord-cutters accustomed to watching shows online are often shocked that $20 ‘rabbit ears’ pluck signals from the air. Is this legal?
Ryan Knutson

Dan Sisco has discovered a technology that allows him to access half a dozen major TV channels, completely free.

“I was just kind of surprised that this is technology that exists,” says Mr. Sisco, 28 years old. “It’s been awesome. It doesn’t log out and it doesn’t skip.”

Let’s hear a round of applause for TV antennas, often called “rabbit ears,” a technology invented roughly seven decades ago, long before there was even a cord to be cut, which had been consigned to the technology trash can along with cassette tapes and VCRs.

The antenna is mounting a quiet comeback, propelled by a generation that never knew life before cable television, and who primarily watch Netflix , Hulu and HBO via the internet. Antenna sales in the U.S. are projected to rise 7% in 2017 to nearly 8 million units, according to the Consumer Technology Association, a trade group.

Mr. Sisco, an M.B.A. student in Provo, Utah, made his discovery after inviting friends over to watch the Super Bowl in 2014. The online stream he found to watch the game didn’t have regular commercials—disappointing half of his guests who were only interested in the ads.

“An antenna was not even on my radar,” he says. He went online and discovered he could buy one for $20 and watch major networks like ABC, NBC, Fox and CBS free.

There is typically no need to climb on a rooftop. While some indoor antennas still look like old-fashioned rabbit ears, many modern antennas are thin sheets that can be hidden behind a flat TV or hung like a picture frame.

But many consumers still aren’t getting the signal.

Carlos Villalobos, 21, who was selling tube-shaped digital antennas at a swap meet in San Diego recently, says customers often ask if his $20 to $25 products are legal. “They don’t trust me when I say that these are actually free local channels,” he says.
Earlier this year, he got an earful from a woman who didn’t get it. “She was mad,” he recalls. “She says, ‘No, you can’t live in America for free, what are you talking about?’”

Almost a third of Americans (29%) are unaware local TV is available free, according to a June survey by the National Association of Broadcasters, an industry trade group.

Since the dawn of television, the major networks have broadcast signals over the airwaves. It is free after buying an antenna, indoor or outdoor, and plugging it into your TV set. It still exists, though now most consumers have switched to cable television, which includes many more channels and costs upward of $100 a month.

Much of the confusion dates to federal legislation that required broadcasters to stop sending analog signals in 2009 and shift to high-definition digital transmissions. The change meant old TVs wouldn’t get the broadcasts, forcing consumers to buy new televisions or converter boxes to pick up the free signals.

Scott Wills, a wireless-industry executive living in the San Francisco Bay Area, worked for over a year on the legislation that set the transition in motion. Mr. Wills discussed his work extensively with his son, who was almost a teenager at the time.

About a decade later, Mr. Wills had a hunch many people, especially young people, thought the transition simply killed TV signals, rather than made them better. He asked his son.

“His answer was, ‘Dad, you should know better than anyone that there’s no broadcast TV!” Mr. Wills recalls. “He thought broadcast TV went away.”

His son, Hunter, now 24 and living in Chicago, says he mostly watches Netflix. “I had no idea,” he said of broadcast’s continued existence. “I’m still not even that familiar with the concept.”

The Federal Communications Commission spent millions on a campaign to educate the public about the digital TV transition and Congress set aside more than $2 billion to help consumers pay for converters so old TV sets could process digital signals. But the focus was largely on older people who already relied on antennas.

William Lake oversaw the agency’s effort. A few years later, when he offered to buy an antenna for one of his daughters, then in her early 20s, so she and her roommates could get live TV, she had no idea what he was talking about.

“She thought it was some modern satellite service or something,” the former FCC official says.

In 2013, during a congressional hearing about the satellite-television industry, the discussion turned to a contract dispute that temporarily left Time Warner Cable subscribers unable to watch CBS.

“Can I make one point?” said Gerard Waldron, an attorney who testified on behalf of the National Association of Broadcasters. “I just want to emphasize that broadcast is a free, over the air service. So during the so-called blackout, the service was available 100% of the time. I realize that some people might not have antennas, or some people might have reception problems, but I do want to emphasize...”

“So I could have seen CBS if I had rabbit ears?” Congresswoman Karen Bass (D-Calif.) interjected. “I don’t think people knew that.”

A spokesman for Rep. Bass said she was aware TV antennas existed, just not that the station was still broadcast during a cable blackout.

Richard Schneider, founder of a St. Louis manufacturing company called Antennas Direct, says his occupation results in awkward small talk. “If I’m at a party and I tell people what I do for a living, they’ll say, ‘That’s still a thing?’ I’d think you’d be out of business by now.’”

Quite the opposite. He started selling antennas as a hobby more than 15 years ago and only expected to sell a few hundred each year. He says he sold 75,000 antennas in June. Even the latest high-definition flat-screen TVs need an antenna to get free broadcasts.

Michelle Herrick, 39, a photographer in Phoenix, says she was desperate to cancel her cable subscription after her bill topped $200 a month. The only reason she hadn’t was because she wanted local stations.

Then, about two years ago, her mother told her about modern antennas. Now, Ms. Herrick is the one who regularly has to explain to puzzled guests how she’s able to watch free television. “Everyone I talked to, they had no idea.”

Even for those who have an antenna it can take some getting used to. In May, Robert Tomlinson, a 21-year-old college student in Kalamazoo, Mich., was bummed when he couldn’t stream ABC’s “Dancing With The Stars” online. Then, he remembered his antenna. “I just forgot it was there.”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/millenn...nna-1501686958





Now You Can Stream Criterion Films With a Library Card
Patrick Lucas Austin

You can borrow all kinds of media at your local public library, from audiobooks, to albums, to films on physical discs. But some libraries, like the Los Angeles Public Library, offer streaming films through Kanopy, a video streaming service specializing in independent films, documentaries, and classic cinema. And now, Kanopy is expanding its offerings into the New York Public Library and Brooklyn Public Library systems, as well.

Kanopy offers over 30,000 films for viewing, including the Criterion Collection, a series of a few hundred “classic and contemporary” movies. To use the service, you’ll need a valid NYPL or BPL card. Brooklyn Public Library patrons can watch up to six films per month, while New York Public Library patrons can watch up to ten, with your limit resetting at the beginning of every month.

You also have three days to view it from the time you press play, an improvement over traditional streaming video rental offerings that usually allow only 24 hours to view a film. You can view your free movie rentals on your PC, or your Roku, iOS, and Android devices.
http://gothamist.com/2017/08/03/nypl...on.php#photo-1





Lawsuit Alleges Fox News Made Up Quotes in Seth Rich Story, was Pressured by Trump to Publish

The story, including the alleged fake quotes, went on to become the basis of conspiracy theory that Rich’s slaying was politically motivated. (Aug. 1, 2017)
David Bauder and Jill Colvin

lawsuit filed Tuesday lays out an explosive tale of Trump allies, the White House and Fox News Channel conspiring to push a false story about Democratic leaks and an unsolved killing in order to distract attention from the Russia investigation that has been swirling around the president.

The lawsuit was filed against Fox by an investigator who had been looking into the killing of Seth Rich, a former Democratic National Committee staff member killed in 2016 in what police say was a botched robbery. The investigator alleges that Fox quoted him as saying things he never said and was willing to show President Donald Trump its story before it was posted online.

It's the second time in two days that Trump has been accused of being actively involved in pushing a public narrative to lower the heat of the Russia story. The Washington Post reported that the president had written a misleading statement for his son to give to The New York Times about Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting last summer with a Russian who promised dirt on Democrat Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.

Rich's death has become fodder for conspiracy theorists, deeply angering the 27-year-old's family. In May, the story was thrust into the headlines again when Fox posted a story on its website in which investigator Rod Wheeler said there had been contact between Rich and WikiLeaks, the organization that posted a trove of DNC emails last year. The story was heavily promoted by Fox News host Sean Hannity, who has informally advised the president.

In the lawsuit, Wheeler now says that he never made that statement. He also contends he was told his false comments were put in the story because Trump wanted it that way.

Rich's family released a statement Tuesday night supporting the lawsuit. "While we can't speak to the evidence that you now have, we are hopeful that this brings an end to what has been the most emotionally difficult time in our lives and an end to conspiracy theories surrounding our beloved Seth," the family wrote.

Fox says it's "completely erroneous" to suggest it pushed the story to distract from the Russia investigation. Wheeler has made contradictory statements regarding the case and is simultaneously filing a racial discrimination lawsuit against the network, represented by a lawyer who has other lawsuits against Fox.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump had no knowledge of the false story before it was posted and that it was "completely untrue" that the White House had any role in shaping it.

Wheeler, a Fox contributor on law enforcement issues, said he was brought into the Rich case by donor and Trump supporter Ed Butowsky. He says Butowsky, who has also made occasional guest appearances on Fox News, was intent on establishing a link between Rich and WikiLeaks.

Two days before the Fox article was published, Wheeler said he got a text message from Butowsky: "Not to add any more pressure but the president just read the article. He wants the article out immediately. It's now all up to you. But don't feel the pressure."

Butowsky said in a phone interview Tuesday he has never met Trump and his text message to Wheeler about the president reading the article was "tongue-in-cheek."

Fox removed the story from its website a week after it was published, saying "it was not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all of our reporting." Hannity ultimately backed away, saying he was acting out of respect for Rich's family.

Wheeler also said that he and Butowsky had met with outgoing White House press secretary Sean Spicer and showed Spicer notes on Wheeler's investigation. Spicer asked to be kept informed, the lawsuit said.

Spicer plays down the importance of that meeting.

"Ed is a longtime supporter of the president's agenda who often appears in the media," Spicer said Tuesday. "He asked for a 10-minute meeting, with no specified topic, to catch up and said he would be bringing along a contributor to Fox News. As Ed himself has noted, he has never met the president and the White House had nothing to do with his story."

On the day the Fox story was posted, Spicer was asked about the report that Rich had emailed WikiLeaks. He said, "I'm not aware of that" and did not mention that he had met with Butowsky and Wheeler a month earlier.

One of Trump's attorneys, Jay Sekulow, also devoted attention to the Rich story during several Hannity appearances in May, before his hiring by Trump was announced.

"There's a lot more to this, I would suspect," Sekulow said on the May 18 show, which Hannity devoted almost entirely to a discussion about Rich. "You can't ignore the fact that it was a DNC staffer. You can't ignore the fact that there was nothing taken from the individual's body."

He said that while he hadn't seen "the files" on Rich, the incident "undercuts" the argument that Russians interfered in the election.

At the time, Trump was facing news stories about the investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 campaign and possible ties between his campaign aides and Moscow. He continues to blast the inquiries as a "witch hunt" aimed at discrediting his election win and tries to focus attention on Clinton, who has largely faded from the headlines.

Jay Wallace, Fox News president, says, "The accusation that FoxNews.com published Malia Zimmerman's story to help detract from coverage of the Russia collusion issue is completely erroneous." Malia Zimmerman was a Fox producer on the story.

"The retraction of this story is still being investigated internally and we have no evidence that Rod Wheeler was misquoted by Zimmerman," Wallace said.

In May, Wheeler told Fox's local affiliate in Washington that he "absolutely" had sources at the FBI saying that there was information that could link Rich to WikiLeaks. But the station noted that Wheeler subsequently said contradictory things to other news organizations, and the station could not contact him again.

Fox News Channel's prime-time opinion hosts, particularly Hannity, make no secret of their admiration for Trump. But any charges that the network worked with Trump on a false story could harm the reputations of the network's journalists.

Trump has fostered an unusually close relationship with Fox and many of its personalities, particularly Hannity. Hannity gave Trump a frequent platform for non-challenging interviews during the campaign, along with advice on air and behind the scenes. The "Fox and Friends" morning show also is a Trump favorite.

Jill Colvin reported from Washington. Associated Press writers Donna Cassata in Washington and Shelley Acoca in New York contributed.
http://www.courant.com/nation-world/...801-story.html





Reporter Says ‘Russian Propaganda Outlet’ Pushed Him to Cover Conspiracy Theory at the Center of a White House Lawsuit
Hunter Walker

Reporter Andrew Feinberg says a Russian state-owned news site he once worked for pressured him to advance a conspiracy theory about the fatal shooting of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.

Feinberg, who was the White House correspondent for Sputnik, first made the allegations when he left the Russian outlet in May. However, his story is newly relevant in light of a lawsuit filed this week that accused President Trump and the White House of playing a role in a “fake news” story designed to advance the same conspiracy theory.

Feinberg started at Sputnik in January, just as Trump took office. He was the outlet’s first reporter to work inside the West Wing. In a conversation with Yahoo News on Wednesday, Feinberg alleged that Sputnik wanted him to bring up a news article that’s at the center of the lawsuit in the White House press briefing room.

The story, which was published on the Fox News website on May 16 and retracted a week later, suggested Rich may have played a role in last year’s leak of DNC emails. The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that the email leak was orchestrated by the Russian government to help Trump defeat his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. There are multiple investigations into whether Trump and his campaign colluded with Russia.

Feinberg said that during a meeting held on May 26, his superiors asked him bring up the story in the press briefing.

“It was, ‘We want you to ask about Seth Rich and just, you know, ask about the case and if those revelations should put an end to the Russia hacking narrative and the investigation,” said Feinberg.

According to Feinberg, his bosses handed him a termination letter when he declined. He described the situation as “disturbing.”

“It’s really telling that the White House is pushing the same narrative as a state-run Russian propaganda outlet,” Feinberg said.

Feinberg previously discussed his departure from Sputnik with Yahoo News in May, on the day he left his job. He said he didn’t initially have reservations about working for a government-owned site but came to feel they wanted him to falsely “spin” the news.

“I thought as long as I just do what everyone else does … as long as I do the job fairly and accurately, I thought it would be OK,” Feinberg said at the time. “There are lots of state-owned news outlets; Sputnik’s not the only one.”

The lawsuit was filed by a Washington private investigator named Rod Wheeler in a New York federal court on Tuesday. Wheeler’s suit alleges that a Dallas financier and Republican donor named Ed Butowsky worked with Fox News reporter Malia Zimmerman to create a false news story linking Rich’s death to the DNC email leak.

Rich was shot in Washington, D.C., last July, shortly after the emails were published by WikiLeaks. Police have said they believe he was killed in a botched robbery, though the murder remains unsolved. There has been no evidence linking Rich to the theft of the emails or their publication.

According to Wheeler’s suit, Butowsky and Zimmerman wanted to advance “a political agenda for the Trump administration.” Trump has vehemently denied that he or anyone in his orbit worked with Russia.

Wheeler’s suit suggested that the Fox News story pinning the leak on Rich was designed to put the allegations of Russian collusion to rest and potentially end the probes. Before the story was published, Wheeler and Butowsky met with Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer at the White House. The lawsuit included alleged quotes from Butowsky suggesting Trump himself had input on drafts of the Fox News story and was eager to see it published.

The Fox News story included quotes attributed to Wheeler that said he believed Rich communicated with WikiLeaks. Wheeler insists those quotes were fabricated, though he made comments similar to those included in the story in a television interview. The Fox News story also included the claim that an anonymous federal investigator confirmed Rich was in contact with WikiLeaks. Rich’s family and D.C. police denounced the article almost immediately.

Fox News retracted the story on May 23. The network released a statement saying the article was “not initially subjected to the high degree of editorial scrutiny we require for all our reporting.” In the wake of the lawsuit, the network’s president of news Jay Wallace released a statement that said “the accusation that foxnews.com published Malia Zimmerman’s story to help detract from coverage of the Russia collusion issue is completely erroneous.” Wallace further said the network’s internal investigation into the matter found no evidence that Wheeler was misquoted. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has said Trump had “no knowledge of the story and it is completely untrue that there was White House involvement in the story.”

Conspiracies about Rich were widespread online after his death. But prior to its retraction, the Fox News story was the first mainstream news article to bolster the theories.

Based on Feinberg’s story, his bosses at Sputnik asked him to bring up the Fox News article in the briefing three days after the story was retracted. While Feinberg said his editor did not directly bring up the Fox News story he felt the implication was clear since the article was the only alleged new development in the Rich case.

“They didn’t mention the Fox story, but it was clear what they were talking about with ‘revelations,’” Feinberg said.

According to Feinberg, he responded with “a hard no” and was then handed his walking papers.

“It was the same meeting. It was, ‘We want you to do this.’ I said, ‘No.’ They said, ‘We have a termination letter for you,’” Feinberg recounted.

Feinberg said the meeting included his editor, Peter Martinichev, and a man he’d never seen before named Mikhail Safronov, who identified himself as Sputnik’s D.C. bureau chief.

“I never saw him in the office before,” Feinberg said of Safronov.

Feinberg first discussed his departure from Sputnik with Yahoo News on May 26, the day he left the news outlet. At the time, Feinberg identified the Rich story as one of two main fake narratives he was asked to promote during his time at Sputnik. Feinberg said Sputnik also pressed him to ask questions that suggested the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad was not responsible for chemical attacks in that country. There is firm evidence linking Assad to chemical weapons but he has denied responsibility. Assad is a staunch ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On the day he left Sputnik, Feinberg said his editors pressured him to ask about Rich at the briefing throughout his final week on the job.

“This week they were pushing on Seth Rich. They were pushing on Seth Rich and I kept saying no,” Feinberg said in the May conversation.

Sputnik did not respond to a request for comment on this story. The company is operated by Rossiya Segodnya, a news conglomerate that is wholly owned by the Russian government. Rossiya Segodnya was established by an executive order from Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2013. Sputnik’s website describes the company as being “entirely geared toward foreign audiences” and dedicated to providing “alternative news content.” The U.S. intelligence community labeled Sputnik and Russia’s other foreign media outlets as a key part of Moscow’s propaganda machine in its report on Kremlin interference in the 2016 presidential election. That report alleged Sputnik and other English-language Russian media companies worked in concert with online trolls and bots to advance narratives and conspiracy theories as part of an influence campaign designed to aid Trump.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/reporter-...000407907.html





Alibaba and Kering Agree to Cooperate on Fighting Fakes
Paul Mozur

Alibaba has been battling the perception that it is a marketplace for fakes for years. On Thursday, it made some headway, resolving a dispute with the luxury goods giant Kering.

The companies said they had resolved their differences, and Kering, which owns brands including Gucci and Saint Laurent, said it would withdraw a 2015 lawsuit charging that counterfeit goods had been sold from the Chinese e-commerce giant’s website.

They said in a statement that they would establish a task force to share information and work with law enforcement to protect Kering’s brands. The companies will also make use of Alibaba’s technology to seek out fakes.

The resolution is a victory for Alibaba, which has been on a charm offensive outside China. The company’s founder, Jack Ma, hosted a conference in Detroit this year as part of efforts to enlist more American vendors for its platforms. Mr. Ma has also met with President Trump.

Alibaba has long faced accusations that its sales platforms harbor vendors selling fakes, and it has worked hard to push against that depiction. The resolution of the suit with Kering is likely to be just one part of a broader effort by the company to remove itself from the list of “notorious markets” for counterfeit goods compiled by the Office of the United States Trade Representative.

The company had itself removed from the list four years ago, but was then added back last year. Kering sued Alibaba and its financial arm, Ant Financial, in 2015 over the prevalence of counterfeit goods on its sites. It also filed a short-lived lawsuit against Alibaba in 2014.

Unlike Amazon, much of Alibaba’s e-commerce site is dominated by marketplaces run by third-party vendors. The company has argued that it can be tricky to perfectly police such a bewildering number of small online shops, selling all manner of goods. Its situation is also made difficult by the widespread prevalence of fake goods in China more generally.

Alibaba has said it is using increasingly sophisticated technology, including artificial intelligence, to track down fakes. In a report submitted to the United States trade representative last year, the Chinese company said that its systems could scan 10 million product listings a day. These checks had led it to take down 380 million suspect listings, it said, in a 12-month period.

Still, small- and medium-size businesses have said it can be hard to report fakes to Alibaba, and that its systems can be clunky and prone to errors.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/b...es-luxury.html





After a Frank Ocean Set, a Week of Big Sales and Copyright Questions
Valeriya Safronova

Frank Ocean gave a rare, intimate performance at Panorama Music Festival on Friday that enraptured his fans — and had some unexpected consequences that went far beyond music.

Four days later the event has raised questions around the issue of copyright in an era of viral sharing and what happens to a young, creative business when placed in the spotlight.

But in the beginning, everyone was just excited about his T-shirt.

Simple and white, the shirt asked, in black capital letters: “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could just be quiet?”

Twitter quickly discovered that it was produced by Green Box Shop, an online operation founded last year by Kayla Robinson, 18. On Saturday and Sunday the website received 5,500 orders over all (Ms. Robinson did not share specific figures for the T-shirt Mr. Ocean wore), compared with the 100 it would usually see. It seemed like a Cinderella story.

frank ocean wore a shirt saying "why be racist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic when you could just be quiet?" wow i love my dad
— JuJu Smiles (@dswizzzlee) July 29, 2017

“My business started in a really small apartment,” Ms. Robinson said. “I was living with my mom. It was infested with roaches. I started by myself and later I hired some friends.” She moved to a warehouse in South Florida recently, and Mr. Ocean’s endorsement has been her business’s biggest unintended marketing coup to date. “It was so surreal,” she said. “I did not believe it until I saw photographic evidence.”

my religion is frank ocean wearing this shirt pic.twitter.com/8BQC68ST56
— izzie (@DESTlNYSCHlLD) July 30, 2017

And that wasn’t even the first time the shirt — which comes in gold, pink, blue, white and tie-dye, is made of organic cotton and costs $18.99 — had gone viral on social media. In January, a user who goes by the handle @lustdad posted an image of himself in the T-shirt, garnering more than 87,000 retweets and nearly 191,000 likes.

Yet criticism was brewing as well. It turned out the quotation on the shirt originated from a tweet sent out in August 2015 by Brandon Male, 18, a student from North Syracuse, N.Y.

Mr. Male was frustrated that he had not been properly paid or credited for Green Box Shop’s use of his quote.

The first time he saw the shirt earlier this year Mr. Male said he had contacted Green Box Shop and was met with mostly dismissal. “They told me I needed to calm down and said they credited me on Instagram one time,” he said. “I ended up letting it slide after that.”

Ms. Robinson said she did not handle her company’s social media until recently and was not aware of Mr. Male’s requests or that he had written the quote. In fall 2016, “someone direct messaged us and said you should put this quote on a shirt,” she said. “They didn’t send me a screenshot or anything.”

Though other famous figures like Zendaya and Jessica Williams have endorsed Ms. Robinson’s designs, she said, “Frank Ocean was the biggest response in terms of sales.”

The response also inspired Mr. Male to start speaking up again about his original Twitter post. “I started tweeting about it, and a lot of my followers came to my defense,” he said. “And people who don’t follow me came to my defense, too.”

will i ever get credit for this? who knows https://t.co/MBYX3LFKnC
— brandon ️☭ (@avogaydro) July 29, 2017

UM EXCUSE YOU THE TWEET ON THAT SHIRT WAS MADE BY @AVOGAYDRO GET HIM THE COINS HE DESERVES https://t.co/1yiyNPM9DV
— M (@sIeepybee) July 31, 2017

Christine E. Weller, an associate at Griesing Law who specializes in intellectual property and technology, said: “People will often take images they find online and reproduce them because they think they have the right to. But that’s not the case. It’s generally not permitted without the permission of the copyholder.”

Copyright is an opt-out system, she said, which means your intellectual property is yours unless you specifically allow others to use it (through the Creative Commons license, for example).

But there are fair-use exceptions that allow people to appropriate content for purposes like commentary, criticism or scholarship. If the result could be reasonably considered transformative, the appropriator is within his or her legal rights. Ms. Weller pointed to lawsuits that have been brought against the artist Richard Prince for his use of other artists’ work in a 2014 installation. Various courts have offered mixed judgments on the cases. “There are no black and white answers,” she said.

If someone uses another’s work for commercial purposes, however, it becomes much easier for the owner of the content to file a cease-and-desist order or to argue that compensation is necessary. Still, Ms. Weller added, “There’s an open question about whether a short, pithy tweet falls under copyright protection.” Her suggestion: When in doubt, reach out.

On Saturday, the day after Mr. Ocean’s concert, Ms. Robinson did — kind of.

She sent $100 to Mr. Male on Venmo. He said, “They threw me $100 and told me to go away.” He calculated that $100 was less than 1 percent of the revenue Green Box Shop had pulled in over two days. Green Box Shop also added a link to Mr. Male’s tweet on the product page.

“It was an impulsive decision,” Ms. Robinson said. “I hadn’t looked at the number of sales, and I wasn’t thinking about it portionwise. It does look like I was just throwing money at him to keep him quiet.”

Ms. Robinson said she called Mr. Male on Monday to apologize and set up a time to discuss numbers. “Just how I want to be credited for making the shirts, I get how he wants to be credited,” she said.

“Moving forward when people message me with shirt ideas, I should do more investigating,” she added. “It would be pretty irresponsible of me to just take it. Being a creator myself, people have copied my shirts before, I totally understand Brandon. Even if it’s a tweet, I have to respect that.”

And given the music industry’s history of questions regarding intellectual property and copyright, Mr. Ocean would probably understand as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/f...-greenbox.html





The Ultimate Playlist Of Banned Wedding Songs
Walt Hickey

We’re smack in the middle of wedding season, which means it’s the perfect time to revisit one of the most divisive components of wedding planning out there: the music. Specifically, we wanted to know what songs couples ban at their wedding receptions — the sonic experiences considered so universally unpalatable that statistically discernible numbers of people go out of their way to avoid hearing them on the happiest day of their lives.

This is only the latest in this website’s quest to use the considerable resources and polling opportunities available to us to answer burning questions about this delightful ritual. There’s no single rule book on weddings, just a vaguely worded social contract we’re chipping away at, from how much to spend on gifts to who pays for the shindig. Last year, we asked readers to send in the songs they chose for their receptions, and thus we were able to establish the ultimate wedding playlist. But every light casts a shadow, and the interest in sending over the must-plays was met with even more fervor for the must-not-plays. We collected the testimonies of more than two dozen professional DJs on nearly 200 weddings to find out what the most commonly prohibited songs and artists are.

Here are the songs that couples most frequently ban from wedding receptions:

The most-banned wedding songs

SONG MOST COMMON ARTIST* SHARE OF WEDDINGS

1 Chicken Dance 23.1%
2 Cha-Cha Slide DJ Casper 22.5
3 Macarena Los Del Rio 17.6
4 Cupid Shuffle Cupid 16.5
5 YMCA Village People 15.4
6 Electric Boogie (Electric Slide) Marcia Griffiths 12.6
7 Hokey Pokey 10.4
8 Wobble V.I.C. 7.1
9 Happy Pharrell Williams 5.5
Shout Isley Brothers 5.5
11 Love Shack The B-52’s 4.9
12 We Are Family Sister Sledge 4.4
13 Blurred Lines Robin Thicke 3.8
Celebration Kool & The Gang 3.8
Cotton Eye Joe Rednex 3.8
Dancing Queen ABBA 3.8
Don’t Stop Believin’ Journey 3.8
Single Ladies Beyoncé 3.8
Sweet Caroline Neil Diamond 3.8
Turn Down for What DJ Snake, Lil Jon 3.8
Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae) Silentó 3.8
22 Hot in Herre Nelly 2.7
Mony Mony Billy Idol 2.7
24 All About That Bass Meghan Trainor 2.2
Baby Got Back Sir Mix-A-Lot 2.2
Booti Call Blackstreet 2.2
Gangnam Style Psy 2.2
Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy) Big & Rich 2.2
Stayin’ Alive Bee Gees 2.2
Sweet Home Alabama Lynyrd Skynyrd 2.2
Uptown Funk Mark Ronson, Bruno Mars 2.2
Wagon Wheel Nathan Carter 2.2
What Do You Mean? Justin Bieber 2.2
34 All of Me John Legend 1.6
Bohemian Rhapsody Queen 1.6
Brown Eyed Girl Van Morrison 1.6
Call Me Maybe Carly Rae Jepsen 1.6
Footloose Kenny Loggins 1.6
Get Low Lil Jon 1.6
Hey Ya! Outkast 1.6
Hotline Bling Drake 1.6
I Will Survive Gloria Gaynor 1.6
My Heart Will Go On Celine Dion 1.6
SexyBack Justin Timberlake 1.6
Shake It Off Taylor Swift 1.6
Sugar Maroon 5 1.6
Total Eclipse of the Heart Bonnie Tyler 1.6
You Shook Me All Night Long AC/DC 1.6


Among 182 wedding playlists submitted between May 31 and June 10.

*Some songs have been covered by multiple artists.

Line dances, kitsch, the cultural detritus of the disco era, dictated choreography and the far-longer-than-you-thought-it-was “Love Shack.” Some songs make the list for their vulgarity, but the most contemptible are singled out for their very banality: The “Chicken Dance” is done. The “Hokey Pokey” is over. The “Macarena” es muy, muy mala.

Oddly enough, a few songs on this list are the MVPs from last year’s list! “Happy,” “Shout” and “Don’t Stop Believin’” are just a few of the most popular songs that also appear on DJs’ rosters of banned songs. Either those songs have gone out of style overnight, or, more likely, their popularity has made them polarizing. If you’re making demands of a DJ, you don’t need to ask him or her to avoid playing Bulgarian death metal — that’s probably a given — but you need to speak up about “Single Ladies” now or it’s going to get a rotation.

Some songs “are perceived as overplayed, cliché and perhaps cheesy,” New Jersey wedding DJ Gregg Hollmann said in an email. “Wedding couples want to be unique.”

Many couples want to avoid line dances at their weddings, as well as songs that have inappropriate lyrics. I was shocked at some serious wedding classics on the no-play lists — your “All of Me” and Etta James and romantic staples — but Hollmann reminded me that some may be associated with a past broken relationship or marriage.

Still, some couples may want to err on the side of crowd-pleasing by including a few songs with lyrics that are their own choreography instructions and line dances. There’s a tradeoff to being unique: “Many of these popular wedding songs also populate the ‘must play’ list — because they are fun and work on dance floors!” Hollmann said.

Some artists are so heinous to couples that to request one song be struck from the list is too reasonable — couples frequently strike the entire oeuvre of a hated performer. This ire most commonly fell on one performer in particular: Justin Bieber. The Biebs was banned from 6 percent of weddings, far more than immediate runners-up Backstreet Boys, Bruno Mars, Rick James, Rihanna, Sir Mix-A-Lot and (inexplicably) War. The Bieber Backlash is as strong as ever. This is a bit strange, as one would think his style — the platonic ideal of generic, middle-of-the-road danceable pop — is neutral enough that people wouldn’t ban it due to vulgarity or inappropriateness or cheesiness.

In rare cases, couples ask that an entire genre be eliminated. In such cases, they typically follow MySpace Music Taste rules: no country (10 percent of weddings) and sometimes no rap (3 percent).

So not being picky enough can mean you have to sit through 30 reps of “bang, bang on the door, baby,” but being too picky can limit the DJ’s options. What’s the ideal number of requests? On average, weddings in our data set made 5.5 no-play requests each. So that’s five or six artist, song or genre bans per wedding. In the set, 80 percent of weddings had two or more banned items, and 80 percent had seven or fewer banned items. The pickiest person in the set had 66 banned songs or artists, and at that point maybe it just makes sense to leave the party in Spotify’s hands.

In the end, perhaps people should be a little more forgiving of the line dancing and focus on what truly matters on their wedding day: making sure that “Love Shack” and “Rock Lobster” are never played on a dance floor again.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features...wedding-songs/





It is Easy to Expose Users' Secret Web Habits, Say Researchers
Mark Ward

Two German researchers say they have exposed the porn-browsing habits of a judge, a cyber-crime investigation and the drug preferences of a politician.

The pair obtained huge amounts of information about the browsing habits of three million German citizens from companies that gather "clickstreams".

These are detailed records of everywhere that people go online.

The researchers argue such data - which some firms scoop up and use to target ads - should be protected.

The data is supposed to be anonymised, but analysis showed it could easily be tied to individuals.

People's browsing history is often used to tailor marketing campaigns.

Linking list

The results of the research by Svea Eckert and Andreas Dewes were revealed at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas this weekend.

The pair found that 95% of the data they obtained came from 10 popular browser extensions.

"What these companies are doing is illegal in Europe but they do not care," said Ms Eckert, adding that the research had kicked off a debate in Germany about how to curb the data gathering habits of the firms.

Before the data is used to customise the range of adverts which people see, any information that could be used to identify exactly who generated the clicks is supposed to be removed.

However, said Mr Dewes, it was "trivial" - meaning easy - to tie the information directly to people and reveal exactly where they went online, the terms they searched for and the things they bought.

The data analysed by the pair connected a list of sites and links visited to a customer identifier. However, he said, by drawing on public information that people share about their browsing habits, it became possible to connect that entry on a list to an individual.

"With only a few domains you can quickly drill down into the data to just a few users," he said.

The public information included links people shared via Twitter, YouTube videos they reported watching, news articles they passed on via social media or when they posted online photos of items they bought or places they visited.

In many cases, he said, it was even easier to de-anonymise because the clickstreams contained links to people's personal social media admin pages which directly revealed their identity.

"The public information available about users is growing so it's getting easier to find the information to do the de-anonymisation," he said. "It's very, very difficult to de-anonymise it even if you have the intention to do so."

Dangerous data

The information revealed an intimate portrait of the browsing habits of people, said Ms Eckert.

"This could be so creepy to abuse," she said "You could have an address book and just look up people by their names and see everything they did."

In many cases the browsing habits did not expose anything illegal but might prove difficult for public figures to explain or justify, she said. In some cases it could leave them open to blackmail.

"After the research project we deleted the data because we did not want to have it close to our hands any more," she said. "We were scared that we would be hacked."

When asked about UK plans to make ISPs gather clickstreams on every Briton for security purposes, Ms Eckert urged the government to restrict for how long the information could be kept.

"If you are strong on data protection then you should not be allowed to do it," she said, "But for security purposes then perhaps you can hold on to it for a while."

Limiting how long it could be held would lessen the damage if the clickstreams were leaked or hacked, she said.

"You have to be very careful," she said "It's so, so dangerous."
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40770393





Cars Suck Up Data About You. Where Does It All Go?
John R. Quain

Cars have become rolling listening posts. They can track phone calls and texts, log queries to websites, record what radio stations you listen to — even tell you when you are breaking the law by exceeding the speed limit.

Automakers, local governments, retailers, insurers and tech companies are eager to leverage this information, especially as cars transform from computers on wheels into something more like self-driving shuttles. And they want to tap into even more data, including what your car’s video cameras see as you travel down a street.

Who gets what information and for what purposes? Here is a primer.

What Can Be Collected?

Government rules limit how event data recorders — the black boxes in cars that record information such as speed and seatbelt position in the seconds before, during and after a crash — can be used. But no single law in the United States covers all the data captured by all the other devices in automobiles.

Those devices include radar sensors, diagnostic systems, in-dash navigation systems and built-in cellular connections. Newer cars may record a driver’s eye movements, the weight of people in the front seats and whether the driver’s hands are on the wheel. Smartphones connected to the car, and those not connected to the car, can also track your activities, including any texting while driving.

There are few rules or laws in the United States that govern what data can be collected and used by companies. (An exception is medical information.) The United States generally does not ensure that companies strip out names or other personal details, or stipulate how such information should be used, for example.

Typically, a driver agrees to be tracked and monitored by checking off a box on one of the user agreement forms needed to register a car’s in-dash system or a navigation app. In most cases, the driver must agree to such terms to use an app or service.

Who Owns the Data?

While anyone from an app developer to Google or Spotify may be capturing your digital moves while you drive, in most cases the primary collector and owner of this deluge of data is the automaker. And while it presents some potentially valuable new opportunities for them, it also has raised some nettlesome customer relationship problems.

General Motors learned this the hard way in 2011 when it amended the terms and conditions for its OnStar communications system. They included a change that allowed OnStar to share vehicle information with other companies and organizations without asking for additional explicit consent from customers. The change led to numerous complaints, and the incident was even cited in a 2012 Supreme Court decision about warrantless tracking as evidence that drivers expect privacy behind the wheel.

Consequently, many car companies view the acknowledgment of such data collection as problematic for customer relations. While drivers may welcome use of the information to relay diagnostic and service information (“Time for an oil change!”), automakers are aware that many consumers are wary of other uses — so much so that several companies declined to comment on their future plans or data collection policies.

Is There an Advantage to Sharing It?

There are cases in which drivers regularly choose to trade their data to get a benefit.

For example, live traffic services like Inrix and Waze can save a driver hours of agony sitting in sweltering traffic in exchange for sharing location and speed information. There are also products like Autobrain, Automatic, Zubie and Verizon Hum that offer connected car services, like car diagnostics, via a dongle that plugs into a car.

Even insurance companies are experimenting with apps and dongles that record braking, acceleration and speed with the lure of lower rates for well-mannered drivers.

In Arizona, Farmers Insurance is offering customers a 3 percent discount just for using a smartphone app that tracks driving behavior, including whether the driver is holding a phone or using a hands-free Bluetooth connection.

“We give value back to the customer,” said Mariel Devesa, Farmers’ head of product innovation, noting that drivers can save up to 13 percent on their insurance based on their habits. “And they can improve as drivers by seeing their scores.”

The benefits to consumers — and potential threats to personal privacy and security — become murkier, though, as companies trade and combine information collected from multiple sources, including cars, to reveal travel and buying patterns. Aggregated information can be purchased from navigation companies, for example, and combined with other so-called anonymized information from dating apps to identify the habits of a specific demographic.

“We can tell who’s on the road, where they live, how frequently they make this trip, and whether or not they are on vacation,” said Laura Schewel, founder of StreetLight Data, which provides such information to clients like urban planners and retailers.

What Happens Outside the U.S.?

Many countries have specific laws about what information can be collected about drivers. But some of them vary so widely that a start-up, Otonomo, has built a business on sorting through privacy and data laws around the world for automakers, helping companies remain in compliance in a changing landscape of laws and regulations.

“In France, they don’t want you to time-stamp locations,” said Ben Volkow, chief executive of Otonomo, “while in Germany they are more sensitive about speed information.”

Such cultural and legal differences make it hard for car companies to collect a consistent set of data points without legal trouble. It also makes it difficult to offer special services to customers or sell the aggregated data to marketers and retailers.

It’s not a small problem. Mercedes-Benz’s parent, Daimler, has a special data protection department, said Silke Mockert, a company spokeswoman. She said the company was already working on complying with a new version of European Union data protection rules expected to be enacted next year, as well as regularly working with the local authorities around the world.

In the United States, President Trump signed legislation in April overturning some internet privacy protections, allowing companies to more freely collect information on customers, including mobile users.

“So if you have a smartphone, and you still have an expectation of privacy,” said Ms. Schewel of StreetLight, “you’re fooling yourself.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/a...-tracking.html





Apple’s Silence in China Sets a Dangerous Precedent
Farhad Manjoo

A year ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation made an extraordinary demand of Apple. To get inside a dead terrorist’s iPhone, law enforcement officials wanted the company to create a hackable version of the software that runs all iPhones.

To many legal experts, it wasn’t obvious that Apple had a winning case against the request. But facing great legal and political opposition, Apple took a stand anyway. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, argued that the company had a financial and moral duty to protect its users’ privacy and security. He made clear that Apple would obey American law — but only after trying to shape the law.

The fight paid off. On the eve of a courtroom showdown, the F.B.I. rescinded its request. It is worth underlining this point: When Apple took a public stand for its users’ liberty and privacy, the American government blinked.

Yet in China over the weekend, when faced with a broad demand by the Chinese internet authority, it was Apple that blinked.

Apple pulled down several VPN apps — programs that allow iPhone users to bypass the Chinese government’s censorship apparatus — from its Chinese App Store. The developers behind the apps must register with the government under a cybersecurity law that went into effect in January. The law imposes criminal penalties on Apple and other companies that host unregistered apps.

Whatever Apple may have done in private to fight the Chinese internet law, the company has not offered a peep of criticism in public. Apple’s only public statement on the VPN ban said that the company had been “required to remove some VPN apps in China that do not meet the new regulations,” but noted that the “apps remain available in all other markets where they do business.” Despite the pulldown, Apple says there are still hundreds of VPN apps available on its Chinese app store, some of which remain unregistered with the government.

Search Apple’s website for a letter from Mr. Cook issuing a public rebuke of China’s intrusion into his customers’ privacy and freedom of expression — you won’t find it. The company has not fully tested its political and economic leverage in China. It hasn’t tested the public’s immense love of its products. It hasn’t publicly threatened any long-term consequences — like looking to other parts of the world to manufacture its products.

The company’s silence may be tactical; the Chinese government, the conventional thinking goes, does not take well to public rebuke. Yet Apple’s quiet capitulation to tightening censorship in one of its largest markets is still a dangerous precedent.

“Apple’s response is tremendously disappointing,” said Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights advocacy group. “I think it’s possible that Apple is playing a bigger role behind the scenes here. But the problem with that is, from the outside it looks exactly like doing nothing.”

This isn’t just a blow for the liberties of Apple’s customers in China. Authoritarian governments have a tendency to copy what works. Russia just passed a law curbing VPNs. Early this year, Apple pulled down The New York Times app in the Chinese App Store, and both Apple and Google removed the LinkedIn app from their Russian app stores. In the United States, President Trump has called for greater legal measures against the press. And he took the F.B.I.’s side in that fight over iPhones. What happens in China doesn’t stay in China.

It may be naïve to expect Apple to publicly take on the Chinese government. Sure, it may be the world’s most valuable company, with extensive investments and operations in China. But Apple is also just a foreign company — it must obey local laws, and it must watch for its bottom line. The Chinese market accounts for a quarter of Apple’s sales, and many analysts see the region as a key growth area for the company. So what was Apple supposed to do? Jeopardize its operations over a few apps?

What’s more, Apple’s silence isn’t unusual. While American tech companies frequently criticize decisions by American officials, they appear loath to do so in China. This weekend, Amazon also began banning VPN services from the Chinese version of its cloud-computing platform, called AWS. Facebook, has been exploring ways of getting into the Chinese government’s good graces. Google pulled many of its services out of the Chinese market in 2010, blaming censorship, but it has lately been mulling ways to get back.

There is also a moral defense of Apple’s decision to give in without a public fight: Despite the VPN ban, Chinese internet users might still be better off with Apple in China than with it outside. Its app store still provides people access to millions of apps that they might not find elsewhere in China. And Apple’s own communications apps in China remain free of government censorship. For instance, Messages, Apple’s texting app, and FaceTime, its video and phone-calling app, are protected by end-to-end encryption, allowing Chinese users to communicate freely.

But that may be of limited utility.

“It will only get worse,” said Xiao Qiang, a Chinese human rights activist and an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information. Mr. Xiao sees the latest crackdowns as the beginning of a new wave of internet censorship in China. And he doesn’t buy the argument that saying something publicly would have backfired for Apple.

“They should say something,” he said. “They are a U.S. company, after all. And they’re a global company, upholding standards of privacy and speech in many, many markets outside China. So if they have to do things differently in China, they should have some public explanation for why — because that attitude could matter globally, including in the U.S.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/t...precedent.html





Joining Apple, Amazon’s China Cloud Service Bows to Censors
Paul Mozur

Days after Apple yanked anti-censorship tools off its app store in China, another major American technology company is moving to implement the country’s tough restrictions on online content.

A Chinese company that operates Amazon’s cloud-computing and online services business there said on Tuesday that it told local customers to cease using any software that would allow Chinese to circumvent the country’s extensive system of internet blocks. The company, called Beijing Sinnet Technology and operator of the American company’s Amazon Web Services operations in China, sent one round of emails to customers on Friday and another on Monday.

“If users don’t comply with the guidance, the offered services and their websites can be shut down,” said a woman surnamed Wang who answered a Sinnet service hotline. “We the operators also check routinely if any of our users use these softwares or store illegal content.”

Ms. Wang said the letter was sent according to recent guidance from China’s Ministry of Public Security and the country’s telecom regulator. Amazon did not respond to emails and phone calls requesting comment.

The emails are the latest sign of a widening push by China’s government to block access to software that gets over the Great Firewall — the nickname for the sophisticated internet filters that China uses to stop its people from gaining access to Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as foreign news media outlets.

The move came at roughly the same time that Apple said it took down a number of apps from its China app store that help users vault the Great Firewall. Those apps helped users connect to the rest of the internet world using technology called virtual private networks, or VPNs.

Taken together, the recent moves by Apple and Amazon show how Beijing is increasingly forcing America’s biggest tech companies to play by Chinese rules if they want to maintain access to the market. The push comes even as the number of foreign American tech companies able to operate and compete in China has dwindled.

Beijing has become increasingly emboldened in pushing America’s internet giants to follow its local internet laws, which forbid unregistered censorship-evasion software. Analysts say the government has been more aggressive in pressuring companies to make concessions following the passage of a new cybersecurity law, which went into effect June 1, and ahead of a sensitive Communist Party conclave set for late autumn.

The government has been intent on tightening controls domestically as well. It recently shut down a number of Chinese-run VPNs. New rules posted to government websites in recent days said Communist Party members can be punished for viewing illegal sites and that they must register all foreign or local social media accounts.

Also in response to the new law, Apple said it planned to open a new data center in China and store user data there.

Ms. Wang, who said that Sinnet handles Amazon Web Services operations across China, said that the company has sent letters warning users about such services in the past but that the government had been more focused on other issues.

Amazon Web Services allows companies small and large to lease computing power instead of running their websites or other online services through their own hardware and software. Because Amazon’s cloud services allow customers to lease servers in China, it could be used to give Chinese internet users access to various types of software that would help them get around the Great Firewall.

Keeping in line with censorship rules is only a part of it. In cloud computing, China requires foreign companies have a local partner and restricts them from owning a controlling stake in any cloud company. New proposed laws, which have drawn complaints of protectionism from American politicians, further restrict the companies from using their own brand and call for them to terminate and report any behavior that violates China’s laws.

While Microsoft and Amazon both run cloud services in China, similar ones run by local Chinese internet rivals dwarf them in scale. In particular Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba runs its own cloud services, which have grown rapidly in China. In order to operate in the country, China’s biggest internet companies must stay in close contact with the government and carry out Beijing’s various demands, whether they be a request for user data or to censor various topics.

While China is not a major market for Amazon, the company has been in the country for a long time and has been pushing its cloud computing services there. Also recently the company announced a partnership with the state-run telecom China Mobile to create a Kindle, the company’s e-reader device, aimed at the local Chinese market.

Adam Wu in Beijing contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/01/b...ors-apple.html





China’s Internet Censors Play a Tougher Game of Cat and Mouse
Paul Mozur

The shutdown was unusual, and came without warning.

Chinese censors tested on Thursday a new way of shutting down websites and cutting off the country’s internet users from the rest of the world. The censorship drill targeted tools that many in China use to thwart the country’s vast online censorship system, though internet companies said it also hit some sites at random.

One Beijing online video company watched as its app and website went offline for about 20 minutes without warning. The way it was disconnected — the digital tether that connected its service to the rest of the internet was severed — suggested more than a mere technical outage, according to the leader of the firm’s technology team, who requested anonymity for himself and the company for fear of reprisals.

Chinese officials did not comment on the test, and there was no indication that they would use the system again. But if they do, it may not be a total surprise.

China has embarked on an internet campaign that signals a profound shift in the way it thinks of online censorship. For years, the China government appeared content to use methods that kept the majority of people from reading or using material it did not like, such as foreign news outlets, Facebook and Google. For the tech savvy or truly determined, experts say, China often tolerated a bit of wiggle room, leading to online users’ playing a cat-and-mouse game with censors for more than a decade.

Now the authorities are targeting the very tools many people use to vault the Great Firewall. In recent days, Apple has pulled apps that offer access to such tools — called virtual private networks, or VPNs — off its China app store, while Amazon’s Chinese partner warned customers on its cloud computing service against hosting those tools on their sites. Over the past two months a number of the most popular Chinese VPNs have been shut down, while two popular sites hosting foreign television shows and movies were wiped clean.

The shift — which could affect a swath of users from researchers to businesses — suggests that China is increasingly worried about the power of the internet, experts said.

“It does appear the crackdown is becoming more intense, but the internet is also more powerful than it has ever been,” said Emily Parker, author of “Now I Know Who My Comrades Are,” a book about the power of the internet in China, Cuba, and Russia. “Beijing’s crackdown on the internet is commensurate with the power of the internet in China.”

China still has not clamped down to its full ability, the experts said, and in many cases the cat-and-mouse game continues. One day after Apple’s move last week, people on Chinese social media began circulating a way to gain access to those tools that was so easy that even a non-techie could use it. (It involved registering a person’s app store to another country where VPN apps were still available.)

Still, Thursday’s test demonstrates that China wants the ability to change the game in favor of the cat.

A number of Chinese internet service providers said on their social media accounts, websites, or in emails on Thursday that Chinese security officials would test a new way to find the internet addresses of services hosting or using illegal content. Once found, these companies said, the authorities would ask internet service providers to tell their clients to stop. If the clients persisted, they said, the service providers and Chinese officials would cut their connection in a matter of minutes.

The Ministry of Public Security did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

Studies suggest that anywhere from tens of millions to well over a hundred million Chinese people use VPNs and other types of software to get around the Great Firewall. While the blocks on foreign television shows and pornography ward off many people, they often pose only minor challenges to China’s huge population of web-savvy internet users.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, has presided over years of new internet controls, but he has also singled out technology and the internet as critical to China’s future economic development. As cyberspace has become more central to everything that happens in China, government controls have evolved.

It is difficult to figure out the extent of the new efforts, since many users and businesses will not discuss them publicly for fear of getting on the bad side with the Chinese government. But some frequent users said that getting around the restrictions had become increasingly difficult.

One student, who has been studying in the United States and was back in China for summer vacation, said that her local VPN was blocked. She said she had taken the period as a sort of meditation away from social media and left a note on Facebook to warn her friends why she was a “gone girl.”

A doctoral student in environmental engineering in at a university in China said it had become harder to do research without Google, though his university had found alternative publications so that students did not always need the internet. He has since found a new way to get around the Great Firewall, the student said, without disclosing what it was.

Close observers of the Chinese internet said some VPNs still work — and that China could still do a lot more to intensify its crackdown.

“We do think that if the government has decided to do so, it could have shut down much more VPN usage right now,” said a spokesman for VPNDada, a website created in 2015 to help Chinese users find VPNs that work.

“If the government had sent more cats, the mice would have a tougher time,” said the spokesman, who declined to be named because of sensitivities around the group’s work in China. “I guess they didn’t do so because they need to give some air for people or businesses to breathe.”

China’s online crackdowns are often cyclical. The current climate is in part the result of the lead-up to a key Chinese Communist Party meeting, the 19th Party Congress this autumn. Five years ago, ahead of a similar meeting, VPNs were hit by then-unprecedented disruptions.

Much like economic policy or foreign affairs, censorship in China is part of a complicated and often imperfect political process. Government ministries feel pressure ahead of the party congress to show they are effective or can step in if a problem appears, analysts said.

“So it’s definitely not an apocalypse for VPNs,” said Paul Triolo, head of global technology at Eurasia Group, a consultancy.

“Just a more complex environment for users to navigate, and new capabilities and approaches give China better ability to shut off some delta of VPN use at a time and place of Beijing’s choosing,” he said.

China’s population is learning to deal with those difficulties at a younger age. Earlier this summer, China’s internet giant Tencent began limiting the time that people under 18 were allowed to play the popular online game Honor of Kings to an hour a day for those under 12, and two hours for those age 12 to 18.

So Chinese youths have taken to an age-old solution: getting a fake ID.

“Your Honor of Kings being limited? Interested in getting an over-18 identification?” read a recent advertisement on Chinese social media. “No problem. Get in touch for a low-price ID.”

Carolyn Zhang contributed research from Shanghai. Adam Wu contributed research from Beijing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/b...ensorship.html





Is Your VPN Lying to You?

You've kicked the tires, but now you need to look under the hood.
Violet Blue

It's no secret that there are oodles of shady VPN services that promise to protect your privacy as you surf the internet, but may, in fact, actually be worthless. After all, internet privacy is one part moving target and two parts shell game with your money and trust, so no one's surprised that the post-Snowden privacy panic turned into a gold rush for the unscrupulous.

One method VPN providers use to bilk trusting customers is to do shady things with customer records. We've also seen them misconfigure critical security settings, de-anonymize customers, and only take action when caught.

Now there's a new problem: VPNs that say you're connecting to a server in one country while actually routing your traffic through another. RestorePrivacy recently took a close look at what some VPNs are saying when they give you a server in another country, versus what they're actually doing when they connect users. And the two aren't matching up.

Many popular VPN services let users pick which country (or city) their traffic routes through, showing the destination that you're coming from as, say, London when you're actually in Paris. This can be practical when you're a Brit traveling abroad and just want to watch your BBC shows, or want to keep your IP address consistent so social media sites like Facebook don't freak out when you log in while on the go.

In addition to these issues, RestorePrivacy pointed out that VPN performance suffers when the actual server is significantly farther away than you expect it to be. In its post they pointed out an additional issue -- that customers "aren't getting the true server locations they paid for" and that "using fake server locations raises questions about the VPN's honesty."

woman holding phone with app vpn creation Internet protocols for protection private network

It can be disastrous for people's safety if a server that's supposed to be in Saudi Arabia is actually in Los Angeles, California -- which is a real example of bait-and-switch claims RestorePrivacy found in their VPN server claim research.

RestorePrivacy looked at VPN services ExpressVPN, Hidemyass, and PureVPN.

These are popular services used by tens of millions of people. ExpressVPN was listed by TechRadar as one of the best VPN services of 2017, and is endorsed by Geek.com. Hidemyass got a big, positive profile in The Guardian, serves tens of millions of users, and was recommended in 2016 by PCWorld as a "tested" service that protects your privacy. PureVPN was listed in Extreme Tech's recent "5 best VPNs" list, and the service is endorsed by BoingBoing who hails it as "the world's fastest VPN."

Each of the services were found to be saying one thing to customers about server locations, while in practice actually doing something totally different.

With ExpressVPN they found 11 fake server locations; they identified 5 fake server locations with PureVPN but said "there are many more." Regarding the Hidemyass claim of "physical servers in 190+ countries," RestorePrivacy's post countered saying if users believe that, "I have a bridge to sell you."

In addition, "Upon closer examination of Hidemyass's network, you find some very strange locations, such as North Korea, Zimbabwe, and even Somalia." They wrote:

Hidemyass refers to these fictitious server locations as "virtual locations" on their website. Unfortunately, they do not have a server page available to the public, so I could not test any of the locations. The Hidemyass chat representative I spoke with confirmed they use fake "virtual" locations, but could not tell me which locations were fake and which were real.

A week after RestorePrivacy's post called them on it, ExpressVPN "admitted to numerous fake locations on its website (mirror) – 29 fictitious locations in total," they wrote. "Just like PureVPN and Hidemyass, ExpressVPN refers to these as "virtual" server locations." ExpressVPN was telling customers they could use servers in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Indonesia and more, when RestorePrivacy found that customers were actually being routed through one server located in Singapore.

RestorePrivacy said they believe the reasons for improper server location identification are financial. "First, it saves lots of money." They explained, "Using one server to fake numerous server locations will significantly reduce costs. (Dedicated premium servers are quite expensive.)" A service can also sell more VPN subscriptions if it looks like there's a huge variety of countries to choose from.

ExpressVPN told Engadget in a statement:

With the vast majority of ExpressVPN locations, the physical server and the registered IP address are located in the same country. This describes 97% of ExpressVPN's servers, as we have invested in a significant physical footprint covering every continent save Antarctica.

For less than 3% of ExpressVPN's servers, the registered IP address matches the country you've chosen to connect to, while the server is physically located in another country, usually nearby. These are called virtual server locations, and they help ensure your connection is fast, secure, and reliable.

The post goes into deep details about each service's claims, what RestorePrivacy found, and how they did their research. For every VPN server examined, three different network-testing tools were used "to verify the true location beyond any reasonable doubt." Those included the CA App Synthetic Monitor ping test (tests from 90 different worldwide locations), the CA App Synthetic Monitor traceroute, and Ping.pe, a test from 24 locations around the world. All of their test results are published in an appendix to the blog post.

The research recommended users toward "smaller VPN services that have fewer locations, but prioritize the quality of their server network, such as Perfect Privacy and VPN.ac." As you may remember, Perfect Privacy was the service that found and reported the massive privacy hole in several popular VPN services that de-anonymized users, called "Port Fail."

With the tools and info in RestorePrivacy's article and a little technical know-how, you can exhaustively test your VPN service to see if they're telling the truth about server location (or not). Sometimes you can just tell something's wrong when your Google results are in the wrong language -- showing that Google is seeing you come from a location you didn't expect.

Maybe you don't care where your VPN's server really is, just as long as it's a secure service and your privacy is maintained. But for some people, honesty and accuracy about location is critical to the functions of their VPN service in the first place.

In the wider context, RestorePrivacy's post and this article resets the growing distrust in people's minds about security, privacy, and VPNs. It's unfortunate, because we really need most people to start using VPNs if we're going to elevate everyone's security and privacy (and it doesn't help with behavior-influencing, large companies like Netflix blocking VPNs across the board).

I just hope that calling out fake server locations -- whether the labeling is just incorrect or opportunistic -- changes the conversation among VPN providers to on that focuses more on accountability than profits.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/28/...-lying-to-you/





Iran Says Telegram Transfers Servers, But CEO Denies it
Amir Vahdat

Iran's communications and information technology minister was quoted Sunday as saying the widely used Telegram messenger service has transferred some of its servers into the country, but the encrypted application's founder swiftly denied the claim.

The report from Iran's semi-official ISNA news agency quoted Mahmoud Vaezi as saying: "As a result of meetings with Telegram managers, some of its servers have been moved to the country."

But Telegram CEO Pavel Durov said that's not so, reiterating the company's previous position in a Twitter message to AP on Sunday..

"No Telegram servers will be moved to Iran," he wrote, while providing a link to an earlier post.

Vaezi said Telegram planned to use third-party caching nodes, called CDNs, in Iran in the near future.

But Durov said CDNs, which internet-based services like Telegram use to make data available faster, "have nothing to do with relocating Telegram servers or complying with unreasonable local laws." Those nodes are not able to decipher encrypted messages sent by Telegram, he said.

Telegram allows users to send text messages, pictures and video over the internet. The service touts itself as being highly encrypted and allows users to set their messages to "self-destruct" after a certain period, making it a favorite among activists and others concerned about their privacy.

Iran has informed foreign-based social networks that they must move their servers into the country if they want to continue operations in the country.

Iran blocks social media websites like Facebook and Twitter and censors other websites. While top officials have unfettered access to social media, Iran's youth and tech-savvy citizens use proxy servers or other workarounds to bypass the controls.

____

Associated Press writer Adam Schreck in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, contributed to this report.
http://www.newstimes.com/news/world/...o-11718377.php





LinkedIn: It’s Illegal to Scrape Our Website Without Permission

A legal scholar calls LinkedIn's position “hugely problematic.”
Timothy B. Lee

A small company called hiQ is locked in a high-stakes battle over Web scraping with LinkedIn. It's a fight that could determine whether an anti-hacking law can be used to curtail the use of scraping tools across the Web.

HiQ scrapes data about thousands of employees from public LinkedIn profiles, then packages the data for sale to employers worried about their employees quitting. LinkedIn, which was acquired by Microsoft last year, sent hiQ a cease-and-desist letter warning that this scraping violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the controversial 1986 law that makes computer hacking a crime. HiQ sued, asking courts to rule that its activities did not, in fact, violate the CFAA.

James Grimmelmann, a professor at Cornell Law School, told Ars that the stakes here go well beyond the fate of one little-known company.

"Lots of businesses are built on connecting data from a lot of sources," Grimmelmann said. He argued that scraping is a key way that companies bootstrap themselves into "having the scale to do something interesting with that data." If scraping without consent becomes illegal, startups like hiQ will have a harder time getting off the ground.

But the law may be on the side of LinkedIn—especially in Northern California, where the case is being heard. In a 2016 ruling, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which has jurisdiction over California, found that a startup called Power Ventures had violated the CFAA when it continued accessing Facebook's servers despite a cease-and-desist letter from Facebook.

Some details of that case were different—Power Ventures was sending out private messages with the permission and cooperation of Facebook users, while hiQ is scraping data on public webpages. But experts told Ars that the Power Ventures precedent is likely to be bad news for hiQ because it suggests that continuing to access a site after being asked to stop is enough to trigger the anti-hacking law.

“Hugely problematic”

LinkedIn's position disturbs Orin Kerr, a legal scholar at George Washington University. "You can't publish to the world and then say 'no, you can't look at it,'" Kerr told Ars.

The CFAA makes it a crime to "access a computer without authorization or exceed authorized access." Courts have been struggling to figure out what this means ever since Congress passed it more than 30 years ago.

One plausible reading of the law—the one LinkedIn is advocating—is that once a website operator asks you to stop accessing its site, you commit a crime if you don't comply.

That's the interpretation suggested by the 2016 Power Ventures decision, which is a binding precedent in California. Power.com was a social network that functioned as a social network aggregator. Through the Power.com website, users could log into other social networks like Facebook, allowing them to access information from multiple social networks simultaneously.

To expand its user base, Power asked users to provide their Facebook credentials and then—with their permission—sent Power.com invitations to their Facebook friends. Facebook, naturally, didn't appreciate this marketing tactic. They sent Power a cease-and-desist letter and also blocked the IP addresses Power was using to communicate with Facebook's servers.

Facebook sued, claiming that its cease-and-desist letter made Power's access unauthorized under the terms of the CFAA. Power disagreed and argued that having permission from Facebook users was good enough—it didn't need separate approval from Facebook itself.

But the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Facebook last year.

"Power users arguably gave Power permission to use Facebook's computers to disseminate messages," the court wrote. "But Facebook expressly rescinded that permission when Facebook issued its written cease-and-desist letter." After this point, the court held, "Power knew it no longer had authorization to access Facebook's computers, but continued to do so anyway."

That result bothers Kerr.

For example, he said, imagine if CNN sent out letters to reporters at rival news organizations demanding that their reporters not access cnn.com. Under an expansive reading of the law, Kerr told Ars, it would then "become a federal crime to visit a public website."

Kerr argues sites wanting to limit access to their site should be required to use a technical mechanism like a password to signal that the website is not, in fact, available to the public.

"It's hugely problematic to let the subjective wishes of the website owner and not their objective action" determine what's legal, Kerr told Ars.

The Power Ventures case isn't over. Power Ventures asked the Supreme Court to consider the case in May, and the high court hasn't decided whether to do so yet. And for now, the Power Ventures precedent only applies within the 9th Circuit, which covers California and other Western states. Unfortunately for hiQ, the LinkedIn dispute is being heard by California federal courts.

Ultimately, Grimmelmann believes, the text of the CFAA doesn't clearly settle this question. Both Kerr's view that running a public website implicitly gives the public authorization to access it and LinkedIn's view that companies can rescind authorization on a case-by-case basis are plausible interpretations of the law.

But both scholars argue there are good reasons to favor the more permissive reading of the law. The LinkedIn interpretation of the law gives big website operators like LinkedIn plenty of power over how their sites are used. They argue the courts should preserve the rights of small companies, watchdog groups, and others to gather information from the Web using scraping tools.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ut-permission/





Kim Dotcom Set to Receive Seized Funds, “4 Containers Full of Seized Property”

Megupload founder adds he plans to move his family to Queenstown, New Zealand.
Cyrus Farivar

Kim Dotcom is about to upgrade his lifestyle, and he plans to move from Auckland, New Zealand to Queenstown, a city in the far south of the country, according to a few recent tweets.

The Megaupload founder has been battling an American criminal copyright case from New Zealand for years now, and so far he's successfully resisted extradition. Dotcom was also hit with a civil forfeiture case filed by the Department of Justice, which was brought 18 months after the initial criminal charges. Prosecutors have sought to seize an extensive list of assets, including millions of dollars in various seized bank accounts in Hong Kong and New Zealand, multiple cars, four jet skis, the Dotcom mansion, several luxury cars, two 108-inch TVs, three 82-inch TVs, a $10,000 watch, and a photograph by Olaf Mueller worth over $100,000.

Earlier this month, a New Zealand judge revealed that the country’s signals intelligence agency, known as the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), illegally spied on Dotcom for two months longer than previously admitted.

Earlier this week, Dotcom tweeted the following:

The HK High Court has just released some of my seized funds. Also getting 4 containers full of seized property back. I miss Hong Kong ��������

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) July 25, 2017

Thanks to a Hong Kong Judge my family can move to Queenstown and my kids will be surrounded by beautiful mountains & lakes instead of spies.

— Kim Dotcom (@KimDotcom) July 25, 2017

He didn’t specify exactly what assets or property, nor did Dotcom say when he would receive them.

Dotcom's attorney, Ira Rothken, texted Ars: "Out of respect for the Hong Kong judicial process we will not comment any further until the court issues a written judgment or order."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ized-property/





NSA Unlawfully Surveiled Kim Dotcom in New Zealand: Report
John Bowden

The National Security Agency (NSA) illegally used technology to spy on Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom, according to new documents from New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB).

The New Zealand Herald first reported that the GCSB told the nation's high court that it ceased all surveillance of Dotcom in early 2012, but that "limited" amounts of communications from Dotcom were later intercepted by its technology without the bureau's knowledge.

Dotcom was surveilled by the NSA and the GCSB in a joint intelligence operation named Operation Debut. According to the Herald, that surveillance was scheduled to end in January 2012, but the United States continued to use New Zealand's technology.

According to court documents obtained by the Herald, "Limited interception of some communications continued beyond the detasking date without the knowledge of GCSB staff."

The court papers don't explain how the NSA was able to use the GCSB's spying technology without the bureau's knowledge. According to the Herald, "The GCSB documents do contain an admission of NSA involvement, although it was not made outright."

Dotcom is facing charges of copyright infringement and money laundering related to Megaupload, a file-sharing website shut down in 2012. He is currently fighting U.S. attempts to extradite him from New Zealand.

In an interview with the Herald, he blasted the NSA for illegally using the GCSB's spying infrastructure and warned New Zealanders about the power the U.S. wields over their data.

"New Zealanders must know how much power a foreign state holds over their private information," Dotcom said.

"The NSA has unrestricted access to GCSB surveillance systems. In fact, most of the technology the GCSB uses was supplied by the NSA."

Dotcom said his legal team would take further action based on the news.

"If the GCSB was aiding and abetting the NSA to spy directly on New Zealanders then the seriousness of the situation has changed dramatically and a truly independent inquiry and a new criminal investigation will be unavoidable."
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecur...in-new-zealand





Palantir: the ‘Special Ops’ Tech Giant that Wields as Much Real-World Power as Google

Peter Thiel’s CIA-backed, data-mining firm honed its ‘crime predicting’ techniques against insurgents in Iraq. The same methods are now being sold to police departments. Will they inflame already tense relations between the public and the police?
Jacques Peretti

In Minority Report, the 2002 movie adaptation of the Philip K Dick novel, Tom Cruise plays a police officer in the LAPD “pre-crime” unit. Using the premonitions of sentient mutants called “pre-cogs”, the police are able to predict when someone is going to commit a crime before it happens, swooping down from helicopters and arresting them on the street before they can do anything. Their “crime” is that they merely thought about it.

Palantir, the CIA-backed startup, is Minority Report come true. It is all-powerful, yet no one knows it even exists. Palantir does not have an office, it has a “SCIF” on a back street in Palo Alto, California. SCIF stands for “sensitive compartmentalised information facility”. Palantir says its building “must be built to be resistant to attempts to access the information within. The network must be ‘airgapped’ from the public internet to prevent information leakage.”

Palantir’s defence systems include advanced biometrics and walls impenetrable to radio waves, phone signal or internet. Its data storage is blockchained: it cannot be accessed by merely sophisticated hacking, it requires digital pass codes held by dozens of independent parties, whose identities are themselves protected by blockchain.

What is Palantir protecting? A palantir is a “seeing stone” in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings; a dark orb used by Saruman to be able to see in darkness or blinding light. “Palantir” means “one that sees from afar”, a mythical instrument of omnipotence.

In 2004, Peter Thiel – the billionaire PayPal co-founder, Facebook investor and and latter-day Trump ally – created Palantir alongside Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Alex Karp. Their intention was to create a company that took Big Data somewhere no one else dared to go. In 2013, Karp, Palantir’s CEO, announced that the company would not be pursuing an IPO, as going public would make “running a company like ours very difficult”. This is why.

Palantir watches everything you do and predicts what you will do next in order to stop it. As of 2013, its client list included the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS. Up to 50% of its business is with the public sector. In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, was an early investor.

Palantir tracks everyone from potential terrorist suspects to corporate fraudsters (Bernie Madoff was imprisoned with the help of Palantir), child traffickers and what they refer to as “subversives”. But it is all done using prediction.

In Iraq, the Pentagon used Palantir software to track patterns in roadside bomb deployment and worked out garage-door openers were being used as remote detonators by predicting it.

Palantir allowed the marines to upload DNA samples from remote locations and tap into information gathered from years of collecting fingerprints and DNA evidence, the results returned almost immediately.

Without Palantir, suspects would have already moved on to a different location by the time the field agents received the results. Using the most sophisticated data mining, Palantir can predict the future, seconds or years before it happens. Samuel Reading – a former marine who has worked in Afghanistan for NEK Advanced Securities Group, a US military contractor – has said: “It’s the combination of every analytical tool you could ever dream of. You will know every single bad guy in your area.”

Palantir is at the heart of the US government, but with its other arm, Palantir Metropolis, it provides the analytical tools for hedge funds, banks and financial services firms to outsmart each other.

Palantir does not just provide the Pentagon with a machine for global surveillance and the data-efficient fighting of war, it runs Wall Street, too. Palantir is exactly what it says it is: a giant digital eye like Saruman’s seeing stone in The Lord of the Rings.

On the streets of Chicago and Los Angeles, Palantir is getting closest to Philip K Dick’s vision of the future, now. In the film, a premonition of an Orwellian thought-police state, crime rates drop to zero as the pre-crime unit successfully imprisons thousands of individuals for merely thinking of committing a felony.

However, when Cruise’s character begins to question the morality of what he is doing, his superiors detect a threat to the entire pre-crime programme. In order to get rid of him, Cruise is framed for a murder by altering the data of his thought history. In the final showdown with his boss, it is explained to Cruise that sometimes the numbers need to lie for the greater good of society.

Minority Report is set in 2054, but Palantir is putting pre-crime into operation now. The Los Angeles Police Department has used Palantir to predict who will commit a crime by swooping Minority Report-style on suspects. Palantir calls its work with the LAPD “improving situational awareness, and responding to crime in real time”.

Algorithms take in data on the location, time and date of previously committed crimes and this data is superimposed to create hotspots on a map for police officers to patrol. A 2013 video about “predictive policing” by the National Science Foundation features an officer explaining how they used one of these maps to prevent an assault “before it happened”.

Military-grade surveillance technology has now migrated from Fallujah to the suburban neighbourhoods of LA. Predictive policing is being used on illegal drivers and petty criminals through a redeployment of techniques and algorithms used by the US army dealing with insurgents in Iraq and with civilian casualty patterns.

When the US is described as a “war zone” between police and young black males, it is rarely mentioned that tactics developed by the US military in a real war zone are actually being deployed. Is predictive policing as a counter-insurgency tactic a contributing factor in the epidemic of police shootings of unarmed black men in the past four years?

Predictive policing may have contributed to police shootings of black people.

One could argue that sophisticated pre-crime algorithms are not necessary when being black and male is seen as reason enough for the police to swoop. What predictive policing has done is militarise American cities, creating a heightened culture of suspicion and fear in areas where tensions are highest and policing is already most difficult. Officers being led to certain neighbourhoods solely because of an algorithm is enough to cause tension; enough to ignite a powder keg and push a delicate policing situation over the edge.

Ana Muniz is an activist and researcher who works with the Inglewood-based Youth Justice Coalition. “Any time that a society’s military and domestic police become more similar, the lines blur,” she told LA Weekly. “The military is supposed to defend the territory from external enemies, that’s not the mission of the police – they’re not supposed to look at the population as an external enemy.”

In 2010, the LAPD announced a partnership with Motorola Solutions to monitor the Jordan Downs public housing project with surveillance cameras. In 2013, they announced the deployment of live CCTV cameras with facial-recognition software in San Fernando Valley, reported to be programmed to ID suspects on a “hot list”.

Data merely becomes a new way of reinforcing old prejudices. Critics of these analytics argue that from the moment a police officer with the pre-crime mindset that you are a criminal steps out of their patrol car to confront you, your fate has been sealed.

In 2013, TechCrunch obtained a leaked report on the use of Palantir by the LA and Chicago police departments. Sgt Peter Jackson of the LAPD was quoted as saying: “Detectives love the type of information [Palantir] provides. They can now do things that we could not do before.”

Palantir is immensely secretive. It wields as much real-world power as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, but unlike them, Palantir operates so far under the radar, it is special ops.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...a-crime-police





Slain Activist's Lawyers Latest Known Targets of Spyware Sold to Mexican Government

Researchers have now identified 21 cases where Israeli-made software was used to target government critics
Matthew Braga

It's believed that lawyers for murdered human rights activist Nadia Vera (in picture), who was critical of the Mexican government, were targeted by powerful surveillance software that the government is known to possess.

At first glance, the text messages looked innocuous enough. One was a simple "service message," the sort you might get from your cellular provider, with a link to more information.

Another was more serious; the person who sent it said their father had died, and included a link to "dates for the wake."

But had Karla Michelle Salas or David Pena clicked on either of those links, their iPhones would have been directed to a specially crafted webpage designed to silently infect their devices with powerful surveillance software. Once in place, the attackers would have unfettered access to their targets' contacts, messages, phone calls and more.

The spyware was developed by an Israeli company called NSO Group, a secretive dealer of so-called "cyber arms." It was no coincidence that Salas and Pena, both Mexican lawyers, found the spyware attempting to worm its way into their phones.

According to a new report from researchers at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, released today, both Salas and Pena appear to have been targeted because of their roles investigating suspicious execution-style killings in Mexico, in what has become a disturbing trend among activists, journalists, lawyers and even scientists who similarly oppose or criticize the country's government.

In recent months, Citizen Lab has publicly identified 21 cases in Mexico where NSO spyware has been used against members of civil society.

And while there is still no definitive proof that the Mexican government is behind the attacks, the government — and its attorney general's office in particular — is a known client of the Israeli surveillance firm. The government was sold the software on the condition it only be used during national security and criminal investigations, and has "categorically" denied any accusations of misuse.

"There needs to be accountability; there needs to be institutional reform and institutional consequences for these type of attacks," said Luis Fernando Garcia, executive director of Mexican digital rights group R3D, which has called for an independent investigation free of government interference.

"If we enter an arms race between civil society and government, definitely the government will win."
Murder motive disputed

As the use of surveillance and censorship software by repressive governments draws greater scrutiny, local digital rights groups have played a crucial role in connecting vulnerable groups with security researchers around the globe eager to help document and disrupt such attacks.

"These are the guys who are willing to do the hardest work," says Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, referring to day-to-day security tasks, such as teaching people to use two-factor authentication, set up encrypted messaging apps, or how to plan for potential threats.

Sometimes that work yields disturbing discoveries.

In the case of lawyers Salas and Pena, the suspicious messages were identified by R3D, then shared with the Citizen Lab for further analysis. It followed a similar pattern to cases detailed in Citizen Lab's previous reports.

Salas and Pena represented the family of Nadia Vera, an activist executed in Mexico City in July 2015, along with journalist Ruben Espinosa and three other women. Vera and Espinosa had previously spoken out against Javier Duarte, then governor of the state of Veracruz, and fled to Mexico City, believing their safety to be under threat.

Salas and Pena have disputed the findings of the government's official investigation, which concluded the killing was a robbery gone bad. The two lawyers reached out to R3D after seeing a Citizen Lab report on spyware use in Mexico published earlier this year.

Digital rights groups SocialTIC and Article 19 have also worked closely with Citizen Lab on its previous NSO reports.

"As each report gets published, more people become aware of the threat," Garcia said.

'Why did they want this information?'

Citizen Lab's latest investigation comes amid recent reports that U.S. private equity firm Blackstone is in talks to purchase a controlling stake in NSO Group for $400 million US.

Digital rights groups, including Citizen Lab and Access Now, have petitioned Blackstone's board of directors to consider recent reports on misuse of the group's software before agreeing to a sale.

"Each time we find more cases, we think 'this must be the most troubling.' Yet each time we are still surprised," wrote John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab and one of the authors of today's report, in an encrypted chat. "I wonder if the Blackstone team considering the acquisition has phoned NSO to ask: 'What other revelations should we prepare for?'"

"It's our general policy not comment on deal speculation," Matt Anderson, Blackstone's senior vice-president of global public affairs, told CBC News in an email.

Mexico is not the only country known to be using NSO's surveillance tools.

Former Panama president Ricardo Martinelli was accused in court filings of using the spyware to monitor scores of political opponents. And last year, Citizen Lab detailed efforts by the United Arab Emirates government to use NSO spyware against prominent human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor.

"We want to know what they did with the information they gathered," says Ana Ruelas, the Mexican director of Article 19, who has been pushing for transparency around what she says is the Mexican government's illegal use of NSO tools.

"Why did they want that information? What was it used for?"
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/ns...nlab-1.4231555





WikiLeaks Reveals CIA Tool for Hacking Webcams
Alice MacGregor

WikiLeaks has released a new set of documents in the CIA Vault 7 leak, outlining the ‘Dumbo’ hacking tool which allows control of webcams and microphones.

The release explains that the tool is capable of completely suspending processes on webcams and corrupting video recordings.

Dumbo’s is tasked specifically with gaining and exploiting physical access to target computers used in CIA field operations, the release notes.

According to WikiLeaks, the tool allows for the identification, control and manipulation of monitoring and detection systems, such as webcams and microphones, running the Microsoft Windows operating system.

The technology first identifies all installed devices, whether they are connected locally, wirelessly, or across wired networks.

Once Dumbo has detected all of these devices, it identifies all the related processes, which may include recording, monitoring or detection of video, audio and network streams. These operations can then be suspended by the operator.

‘By deleting or manipulating recordings the operator is aided in creating fake or destroying actual evidence of the intrusion operation,’ the release added.

Dumbo does require direct access to the target computer and is run from a USB stick. The release states that it supports 32bit Windows XP, Windows Vista, and newer versions of Windows operating system. However, 64bit Windows XP and Windows versions prior to XP are not supported.

WikiLeaks released its first batch of documents from the Vault 7 project earlier this year in March. The leaked documents totalled over 8,700.

A release leak in May detailed a CIA spyware project called ‘Athena/Hera’. The campaign used malware to act as a remote beacon and loader on a target computer, allowing the machine to be controlled remotely.

Using the Athena/Hera spyware, the CIA was able to set up and delete malicious payloads, retrieve files and data, and copy, delete and forward that information to a command server.
https://thestack.com/security/2017/0...cking-webcams/





UK Home Secretary Amber Rudd Says 'Real People' Don't Need End-to-End Encryption
Rob Price

UK home secretary Amber Rudd has called on messaging apps like WhatsApp to ditch end-to-end encryption, arguing that it aids terrorists.

Writing in The Telegraph on Tuesday, the Conservative minister said that "real people" don't need the feature and that tech companies should do more to help the authorities deal with security threats.

But activists have reacted with concern to her remarks, blasting them as "dangerous and misleading."

Strong end-to-end encryption involves encoding messages or data so it cannot be read by anyone other than the intended recipient — including the company whose tech encrypts it, or law enforcement with a warrant.

WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, end-to-end encrypts all its messages by default. Messenger, another messaging app from Facebook, offers the security feature as an option (though it's not switched on automatically), as does Allo, a messaging app from Google, among numerous other apps.
Amber Rudd: Encryption is "severely limiting our agencies' ability to stop terrorist attacks"

In both the UK and around the world, end-to-end encryption is a contentious subject. Some in law enforcement argue it impedes security services' capability to detect and respond to threats. Privacy activists and technologists respond that the tech is necessary to protect users' data, and any "back door" or weakening of security would be open to abuse.

In the wake of multiple terror attack in Britain in 2017, Rudd claims that the tech is making it more difficult for authorities to fight terrorism: "The inability to gain access to encrypted data in specific and targeted instances ... is right now severely limiting our agencies' ability to stop terrorist attacks and bring criminals to justice."

The politician says the British government does not intend to ban end-to-end encryption — but would like companies to voluntarily move away from it, arguing it isn't necessary for "real people."

She wrote: "Real people often prefer ease of use and a multitude of features to perfect, unbreakable security ... Who uses WhatsApp because it is end-to-end encrypted, rather than because it is an incredibly user-friendly and cheap way of staying in touch with friends and family? Companies are constantly making trade-offs between security and 'usability', and it is here where our experts believe opportunities may lie."
"The suggestion that real people do not care about the security of their communications is dangerous and misleading"

Some critics have slammed Rudd's remarks, arguing that if WhatsApp (and other similar apps) did make such a change, extremists and terrorists would simply switch to another end-to-end encrypted messaging app that doesn't cooperate with the UK government. Meanwhile, ordinary users would be left less safe, they said.

Jim Killock, executive director of UK digital liberties group Open Rights Group, said in a statement: "The suggestion that real people do not care about the security of their communications is dangerous and misleading. Some people want privacy from corporations, abusive partners or employers. Others may be worried about confidential information, or be working in countries with a record of human rights abuses. It is not the Home Secretary's place to tell the public that they do not need end-to-end encryption."

2/7 If you take technical steps to make the internet unsafe for terrorists and criminals, you make it unsafe for the rest of us.
— Graham Smith (@cyberleagle) June 28, 2017

Paul Bernal, a senior lecturer at UEA Law School, told Business Insider via email: "Amber Rudd's comments are depressingly unsurprising — this is part of a bigger trend against encryption that we've been seeing for some time — and are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of both the technology and of privacy itself. From a technological perspective, it misses that creating an opening for law enforcement or the intelligence services creates an opening for all kinds of others — from criminals (and indeed terrorists themselves) to foreign powers, to malicious individuals."

He added: "Serious and competent criminals and terrorists can apply their own encryption — and incompetent ones can be caught any number ways. It's only ordinary people — in Amber Rudd's hideous terms, 'real people' that will suffer from her plans."

Facebook and WhatsApp did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment.
Here's the key section of Amber Rudd's op-ed (emphasis ours):

To be very clear - the Government supports strong encryption and has no intention of banning end-to-end encryption. But the inability to gain access to encrypted data in specific and targeted instances - even with a warrant signed by a Secretary of State and a senior judge - is right now severely limiting our agencies' ability to stop terrorist attacks and bring criminals to justice.

I know some will argue that it's impossible to have both - that if a system is end-to-end encrypted then it's impossible ever to access the communication.

That might be true in theory. But the reality is different. Real people often prefer ease of use and a multitude of features to perfect, unbreakable security. So this is not about asking the companies to break encryption or create so called "back doors". Who uses WhatsApp because it is end-to-end encrypted, rather than because it is an incredibly user-friendly and cheap way of staying in touch with friends and family? Companies are constantly making trade-offs between security and "usability", and it is here where our experts believe opportunities may lie.

So, there are options. But they rely on mature conversations between the tech companies and the Government - and they must be confidential. The key point is that this is not about compromising wider security. It is about working together so we can find a way for our intelligence services, in very specific circumstances, to get more information on what serious criminals and terrorists are doing online.
http://www.businessinsider.com/home-...rorists-2017-8





It’s Not for Politicians to Tell the Public They Don’t Need Encryption
Ed Johnson-Williams

Amber Rudd has been out doing the media rounds this morning talking about the issues end-to-end encryption poses to law enforcement. One comment in particular caught our eye:

“Real people often prefer ease of use and a multitude of features to perfect, unbreakable security. Who uses WhatsApp because it is end-to-end encrypted, rather than because it is an incredibly user-friendly and cheap way of staying in touch with friends and family?”

This is a little like saying: “Who uses a car because it has airbags and seatbelts, rather than because it’s a convenient way to get around?”

The Home Office strategy here may be to persuade internet companies to take action by telling them that ordinary people don’t care about security. This would be dangerous and misleading.

Clearly, real people (who are Rudd’s not real people?) do value security in their communication, just as they do with safety in their cars. Security is not – or at least does not have to be – the opposite of usability.

For many people, good security makes a service usable and useful. Some people want privacy from corporations, abusive partners or employers. Others may be worried about confidential information, sensitive medical conversations, or be working in countries with a record of human rights abuses.

Whatever the reasons people want secure communications, it is not for the Home Secretary to tell the public that they don’t have any real need for end-to-end encryption.

While Rudd seems to be saying she does not want encryption to be “removed” or bypassed, there are other things she might be looking for. It is possible that she wants the internet companies to assist the police with “computer network exploitation” – that’s hacking people’s devices.

It could mean providing communications data about users which could include data such as: “This user uses this device, often these IP addresses, this version of their operating system with these known vulnerabilities, talks to these people at these times, is online now, is using this IP address, is likely at this address and has visited these websites this many times.”

Alternatively, Rudd might mean pushing out compromised app updates with end-to-end encryption disabled.

However, it is likely to be police rather than security services asking for this help. While targeted hacking does provide an investigative option that avoids blanket communications surveillance, it would be risky for the police to have these powers. Training and oversight, after all, are not as thorough or exacting as in the security services.

What is completely lacking is any serious attempt to tell the public what the Home Office wants internet companies to do to make people’s end-to-end communications accessible.

We should be told what risks the public would be exposed to if the companies were to agree to the Home Office’s private requests. Have these risks been properly weighed up and scrutinised? What safeguards and oversight would there be?

One risk is that users may start to distrust tech companies and the apps, operating systems and devices that they make. When security vulnerabilities are identified, firms push out updates to users. Keeping devices and apps up-to-date is one of the most important ways of keeping them secure. But if people are unsure whether they can trust pending updates, will they keep their devices up-to-date?

It would be incredibly damaging to UK security if large numbers of people were dissuaded from doing so. A prime example is the WannaCry ransomware attack that paralysed parts of the NHS in May. It spread through old Windows computers that hadn’t been updated, forcing doctors to cancel thousands of appointments.

The government must spell out its plans in clear, precise legislation and subject that legislation to full parliamentary scrutiny, and it should bring security and usability experts into a public debate about these questions.

Measures that deeply affect everybody’s privacy, freedom of expression, and access to information must not be decided behind closed doors.
http://tech.newstatesman.com/guest-o...ary-encryption





Hackers Can Turn Amazon Echo into a Covert Listening Device
Zeljka Zorz

New research released by MWR InfoSecurity reveals how attackers can compromise the Amazon Echo and turn it into a covert listening device, without affecting its overall functionality.

Found to be susceptible to a physical attack, which allows an attacker to gain a root shell on the Linux Operating Systems and install malware, the Amazon Echo would enable hackers to covertly monitor and listen in on users and steal private data without their permission or knowledge.

The compromise

By removing the rubber base at the bottom of the Amazon Echo, the research team could access the 18 debug pads and directly boot into the firmware of the device, via an external SD card, and install persistent malware without leaving any physical evidence of tampering. This gained them remote root shell access and enabled them to access the “always listening” microphones.

Following a full examination of the process running on the device and the associated scripts, MWR’s researchers investigated how the audio media was being passed and buffered between the processes and the tools used to do so. Then they developed scripts that leveraged tools embedded on the device to stream the microphone audio to a remote server without affecting the functionality of the device itself. The raw data was then sampled via a remote device, where a decision could then be made as to play it out of the speakers on the remote device or save the audio as a WAV file.

The vulnerability has been confirmed to affect the 2015 and 2016 editions of the device. The 2017 edition of the Amazon Echo is not vulnerable to this physical attack. The smaller Amazon Dot model also does not carry the vulnerability.

More technical details can be found here.

The risk

“The rooting of the Amazon Echo device in itself was trivial; however, it raises a number of important questions for manufacturers of Internet enabled or ‘Smart Home’ devices,” says Mark Barnes, Security Consultant at MWR InfoSecurity.

“The biggest limitation of this vulnerability is the need for physical access to the device itself, but it shouldn’t be taken for granted that consumers won’t expose the devices to uncontrolled environments that places their security and privacy at risk.

“What this research highlights is the need for manufacturers to think about both the physical and digital security risks that the devices may be subjected too and mitigate them at the design and development stage. Whilst Amazon has done a considerable amount to minimise the potential attack surface, these two hardware design choices – the unprotected debug pads and the hardware configuration setting that allows the device to boot via an external SD card – could expose consumers to an unnecessary risk.”

The design flaws that make this attack possible can’t be solved through a software or firmware update, Barnes told Help Net Security.

“And, while it is possible to replicate the method [we used] of accessing the device’s Linux operating system, it’s by no means a pre-made solution and an attacker would still need considerable experience to compile the necessary code to achieve the exploit,” he pointed out.

Still, if the attacker succeeded in doing all of that, and building a small handheld device that can be preloaded with the malware and necessary code, he or she could execute the exploit with just a few minutes of access to the unit.

“And once the attacker has control of the system, they can potentially gain permanent access to it unless the victim somehow detects the intrusion,” he noted.

Mitigation

To mitigate the risk posed, MWR InfoSecurity provides the following recommendations:

• Use the mute button – the Amazon Echo comes with a physical mute button that disables the microphone on the top of the device or can be fully turned off if sensitive information is being discussed
• Monitor for any unusual activity – Whilst this vulnerability is undetectable on the physical device, it is possible to monitor the network traffic and look for any anomalous activity. This could indicate a compromise.
• Purchase directly from Amazon or trusted retailers – As this vulnerability can only be exploited once an attacker has physical access to the device, buying an Amazon Echo second-hand could expose users to the potential purchase of a tampered device.

Following the researchers’ full disclosure of the vulnerability to Amazon, the company has issued the following recommendation: “Customer trust is very important to us. To help ensure the latest safeguards are in place, as a general rule, we recommend customers purchase Amazon devices from Amazon or a trusted retailer and that they keep their software up-to-date.”
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2017...ert-listening/





U.S. Court Rules that Phone Passcodes are Protected by the 5th Amendment, but Fingerprints Aren’t
Ben Lovejoy

While Touch ID makes sense for most of us as a secure and convenient way to protect our phones, there is one group of people who may want to stick to good old-fashioned passcodes: criminals.

A Virginia District Court has ruled that while phone passcodes are protected by the 5th Amendment, which says that those accused of crimes cannot be compelled to incriminate themselves, there is no such protection against using a suspect’s fingerprint to unlock a phone …

The ruling was reported by The Virginian-Pilot in the case of David Baust, an EMS captain accused of trying to strangle his girlfriend.

Prosecutors had said video equipment in Baust’s bedroom may have recorded the couple’s fight and, if so, the video could be on his cellphone. They wanted a judge to force Baust to unlock his phone, but Baust’s attorney, James Broccoletti, argued pass codes are protected by the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits forced self-incrimination.

Judge Steven C. Frucci ruled this week that giving police a fingerprint is akin to providing a DNA or handwriting sample or an actual key, which the law permits. A pass code, though, requires the defendant to divulge knowledge, which the law protects against, according to Frucci’s written opinion.

As a ruling in a District Court, there is plenty of scope for either aspect of the ruling–that passcodes are protected and that fingerprints aren’t–to be over-turned on appeal, but it’s an interesting argument.

Sophisticated lab techniques make it possible to fool Touch ID using only a high-resolution photo of a fingerprint. The approach was first demonstrated on an iPhone 5s and later shown to work also with the more sophisticated sensor on the iPhone 6.
https://9to5mac.com/2014/10/31/touch-id-police/





Mozilla Launches Firefox Send for up to 1GB File Self-Destruct File Sharing

That's a lot of potential dinkle
Chris Merriman

The Mozilla Foundation (m02!//@, for branding purposes) has announced its latest foray out of the browser world and into the wider interweb, and it's a doozy.

nn0Z|//^ Send is a new feature in Firefox which allows you to send (hence the name) files of up to 1GB for free, and have them self-destruct at will.

The whole thing is client side encrypted (so they can't see what you're sending) and the file will self-destruct 24 hours after sending, or after being downloaded once.

At present Send is a Firefox Test Pilot experiment, but it's open to anyone to have a go - even if they're not using Firefox as their browser.

So for example, we've uploaded the picture you can see in the article. It's available at this link (if you use Firefox):

https://send.firefox.com/download/1d...WNvEFNsT0AAlSg

But once 24 hours elapses, or one of you downloads it, the link is dead, gone forever.

According to the Test Pilot About page, launching a product at test level is Stage 3 of 4 so you won't have long to wait to see this roll out officially. In the meantime, try it out, try and break it - it all helps - but remember that the more you push it (they've set the 1GB limit for a reason - though it will accept higher) the more likely it is to go borksville.

Fortunately, your original file is going to be unharmed. It's the one in the cloud that will bork. Also consider that if there's a bug, your file could be hacked at, or the destruct system could fail. That's what a beta is for - so the time to start using it for dinkle pics is not today.

Firefox's global market share (according to Netmarketshare) is now 12.32 per cent against Chrome's 59.57. More worrying still, only 5.41 percent are using the most recent edition, Firefox 54, with the rest, nay the majority, listed in the "other" column.

Firefox has a bad fragmentation problem, and has already had to can its IoT and mobile ambition, so it's good to see ^^Q$[__£ continue to innovate with new features to give it the edge (no pun intended) that made it so popular for so long. Fox… or Phoenix?
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer...t-file-sharing





Utility Helps Wean Vermonters From the Electric Grid

Green Mountain Power is trying to turn homes, neighborhoods and towns into virtual power plants, driven by economics as well as environmental goals.
Diane Cardwell

In a new low-income development that replaced a trailer park here, rooftop solar panels sparkle in the sun while backup batteries quietly hum away in utility closets.

About an hour away, in Rutland, homes and businesses along a once-distressed corridor are installing the latest in energy-saving equipment, including special insulation and heat pumps.

And throughout Vermont, customers are signing up for a new program that will allow them to power their homes while entirely disconnected from the grid.

The projects are part of a bold experiment aimed at turning homes, neighborhoods and towns into virtual power plants, able to reduce the amount of energy they draw from the central electric system. But behind them are not green energy advocates or proponents of living off the land. Instead, it’s the local electric company, Green Mountain Power.

Even as the Trump administration has broken with almost all the world’s nations by renouncing the Paris climate accord, the Vermont program offers just one example of the continuing efforts at the local level to rethink a largely carbon-based power system. The initiatives are driven by financial advantages as well as environmental ones.

Green Mountain’s chief executive, Mary Powell, sees the program here as the best way to please customers while making the system more environmentally and physically sustainable.

“Customers, especially in Vermont with the energy-independence values that people have, want to move more toward self-generation,” she said, seated in a bright orange Modernist chair in a meeting area in the company’s open-plan headquarters near Burlington.

“The opportunity for us,” she added, is to lead the transformation of an electric system that depends on power sent along big transmission lines “to a community-, home- and business-based energy system.”

As a practical matter, the less electricity the utility pulls from the regional transmission system, especially at times of peak demand, the less it has to pay in fees, producing savings it can pass on to customers. One way it does this is by remotely controlling the batteries installed through its programs, drawing upon the stored energy as needed.

Recently, Ms. Powell said, Green Mountain used this method to take the low-income development here off the grid’s electricity supply for two hours, saving an estimated $275 in transmission costs while the homes were powered by solar panels or battery storage. The amount saved was small, but such savings could add up over a year if they were realized in enough locations.

The utility, owned by Gaz Métro, a leading natural gas distributor in Quebec, is also working to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions as part of the effort to slow global warming. In 2014, it became a B Corporation. That is a voluntary designation, requiring executives to take into account not just how decisions will affect profit and shareholders, but also how they will affect the public, generally defined as society or the environment.

As part of that mission, Green Mountain became the first utility to offer customers access to Tesla’s Powerwall home battery system when it was released in 2015. Now it is starting a new program, announced in May, that will offer the battery to as many as 2,000 customers for $15 a month over 10 years, or a one-time payment of $1,500. The package will include software and a Nest thermostat, which conserves electricity by adjusting temperatures to comings and goings as well as established routines.

The idea is that customers, especially when they have solar panels, heat pumps and electric vehicles, will be better able to monitor and manage their energy use. The utility, using Tesla’s software, will be able to call upon the stored energy in the combined batteries to help meet surges in demand, or to sell it on the wholesale market to help balance or smooth out fluctuations within the region.

The efforts have won plaudits from national green-energy advocates who see the utility as a leader in helping redesign the electric system, which is undergoing enormous changes as renewable sources of energy become more popular and other technologies give customers more control. Many utilities see such moves as an existential threat because their profits come mainly from getting a set rate of return that is factored into customer rates.

But Green Mountain Power has “figured out a way to do well and do good in the utility business and keep its regulators, investors and customers all happy at the same time,” said Dan Reicher, executive director of the Steyer-Taylor Center for Energy Policy and Finance at Stanford and a customer of the utility through a family home in Vermont. “That’s a big deal these days when the rest of the industry is talking about a death spiral.”

Ms. Powell, 56, grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and attended a public high school focused on the arts. She came to the company in 1998 after turning down the job three times. She just couldn’t see herself working for a utility, she said, especially one whose traditional corporate culture was visible in the imposing stone lobby and slate steps that led to the chief executive’s office, hidden behind two private secretaries and outfitted with its own bathroom and shower.

The family on her father’s side — he was an actor and a model for the fisherman on Gorton’s seafood packages — had roots in the state, so she had grown up spending summers there. (Her brother, Michael Powell, is a sports columnist at The New York Times.) After college, she became a technical writer for a money-market fund in New York, working her way up to associate director of operations over the next seven years.

She grew disenchanted with working in finance, so when a house-sitting opportunity in Vermont came up, she and her fiancé quit their jobs and headed north. She figured she would work as a waitress, she said, but ended up taking jobs at a couple of banks and starting a few businesses — including one selling reflective gear for dogs that her husband now runs — that ultimately led to her joining the utility.

First, she tackled the company culture, moving executives from the boxy glass headquarters to the 1980s brick service center, where she works at a stand-up desk in a cluster including other executives as well as the linemen. The office, decorated with reclaimed wood, bright colors and relics of past electric systems, looks more suited to a Silicon Valley start-up than to a typical corporate utility, complete with a treadmill and table-tennis setup in one section and a cluster of fledgling entrepreneurs, winners of an incubator competition, in another.

Then she began trying to make the generating system greener, which led to the move toward a more decentralized system, something few other utilities have tried with such enthusiasm. But in an industry known for caution, Green Mountain can be nimble, in part because it is so small — just 265,000 customers — and has a relatively receptive customer base.

A program that helps provide energy-efficiency upgrades in Rutland, for instance, got its start with a single call. At a weekly leadership team meeting, Ms. Powell asked executives to find a way to bring several technologies together in one dwelling.

One executive asked Rutland’s mayor if he knew of a family that would be willing to serve as a guinea pig. He suggested Mark and Sara Borkowski, whose century-old house became the first of 161 homes and businesses to take part. Under the program, the utility provides financing for energy upgrades, which participants can pay back over time through their monthly bills.

Green Mountain has still invested in large-scale renewable-power plants, like the Stafford Hill Solar Farm — 11 acres of solar panels and battery banks spread over a landfill behind a town dump — and two wind farms. Those developments have come in for criticism from some residents and officials who object to living near noisy industrial machines and worry about marring the natural beauty that draws residents and visitors to the state. The critics include Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican who opposes putting wind turbines along mountain ridges.

But many customers say they are happy to be part of greening the area’s energy supply, whether for the financial savings, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow global warming, or just to make sure the lights stay on in a power failure.

“It’s not really any different than being anywhere else,” said Alexis LaBerge, 27, who was one of the first to move into the low-income development in Waltham from an old house that guzzled fuel to keep the house and hot water heated.

Now, when the power from the grid goes out, as it did one night this spring, she does not have to worry about food spoiling in the refrigerator. “It’s definitely nice being brand-new and having the backup,” she said.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/b...ower-grid.html





Falling Lithium-Ion Battery Prices to Drive Rapid Storage Uptake

IHS Markit expects li-ion battery prices to fall below $200/kWh by 2019, and for the cumulative installed base of energy storage to reach 52 GW globally by 2025, up from 4 GW today.
Ian Clover

An acceleration of the 70% cost reduction seen in lithium-ion prices since 2012 will drive global uptake of energy storage over the next few years, finds a new report by IHS Markit.

The analysts forecast prices for lithium-ion battery modules to tumble below $200/kWh by 2019, enabling previously “uneconomical applications” such as the colocation of battery storage and solar PV to surge.

This sharp and sustained cost reduction will help cement lithium-ion as the battery chemistry of choice in all energy storage markets, including grid-scale behind-the-meter storage, residential storage, and micro-grids.

By 2025, the world’s base of cumulative installed storage capacity will reach 52 GW, IHS Markit says, up from around 4 GW today. Last year, 1.3 GW of grid-connected storage was deployed globally, and this rate is poised to accelerate to 4.7 GW a year by 2020, and 8.8 GW annually by 2025.

In monetary terms, last year’s $1.5 billion annual revenue will be dwarfed come 2025 – a CAGR of 16% will push annual revenue to more than $7 billion by that date as utility-scale storage comes to dominate the market: by 2020, behind-the-meter batteries will account for more than half of all installs, forecast the analysts.

Other trends to look out for include the growing dominance of the U.S. storage market, which will enjoy a CAGR of 21% between now and 2025 while surpassing 1.2 GW of annual deployment as early as 2020; Australia, Japan, Germany, the U.K. and South Korea will be the next biggest storage markets.

System aggregation and demand response programs in these markets will drive value stacking and improved economics, with supportive subsidy policies boosting large-scale storage deployment particularly in Germany, Japan, California and South Korea.

In Australia, a combination of generous public tenders and large solar+storage projects are already boosting the utility-scale storage market, not least following sizable project announcements by Tesla and Lyon Group.

“For many larger players entering the industry energy storage is seen as a strategic investment with significant long-term growth potential, as storage will become a pivotal ingredient in our future energy mix,” Julian Jansen, senior analyst, solar and energy storage, IHS Markit, told pv magazine. “Especially energy suppliers/utilities whose traditional business model is under threat energy storage development is part of a new strategy tying together a decentralised, digitalised and flexible demand and generation infrastructure required for the future.”
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2017/08/...torage-uptake/





Broadcom Chip Bug Opened 1 Billion Phones to a Wi-Fi-Hopping Worm Attack

Wi-Fi chips used in iPhones and Android may revive worm attacks of old.
Dan Goodin

It's not often that a security researcher devises an attack that can unleash a self-replicating attack which, with no user interaction, threatens 1 billion smartphones. But that's just what Nitay Artenstein of Exodus Intelligence did in a feat that affected both iOS and Android devices.

At the Black Hat security conference, Artenstein demonstrated proof-of-concept attack code that exploited a vulnerability in Wi-Fi chips manufactured by Broadcom. It fills the airwaves with probes that request connections to nearby computing devices. When the specially devised requests reach a device using the BCM43xx family of Wi-Fi chipsets, the attack rewrites the firmware that controls the chip. The compromised chip then sends the same malicious packets to other vulnerable devices, setting off a potential chain reaction. Until early July and last week—when Google and Apple issued patches respectively—an estimated 1 billion devices were vulnerable to the attack. Artenstein has dubbed the worm "Broadpwn."

Although the flaw is now closed, the hack has important lessons as engineers continue their quest to secure mobile phones and other computing devices. Security protections such as address space layout randomization and data execution prevention have now become standard parts of the operating systems and apps. As a result, attackers have to work hard to exploit buffer overflows and other types of software vulnerabilities. That extra work largely makes self-replicating worms impossible. Artenstein's exploit, however, suggests that such worms are by no means impossible.

"This research is an attempt to demonstrate what such an attack, and such a bug, will look like," the researcher wrote in a detailed blog post. "Broadpwn is a fully remote attack against Broadcom’s BCM43xx family of Wi-Fi chipsets, which allows for code execution on the main application processor in both Android and iOS. It is based on an unusually powerful 0-day that allowed us to leverage it into a reliable, fully remote exploit."

Making a comeback

In sharp contrast to the kernels in iOS and Android, the Broadcom chips Artenstein targeted aren't protected by ASLR or DEP. That meant he could reliably know where his malicious code would be loaded in chip memory so he could ensure it got executed. Additionally, he found a flaw across various chipset firmware versions that allowed his code to work universally rather than having to be customized for each firmware build. Making the attack even more potent, targets didn't have to connect to the attacker's Wi-Fi network. Simply having Wi-Fi turned on was sufficient to being hacked.

Artenstein said his attack worked on a wide range of phones, including all iPhones since the iPhone 5, Google's Nexus 5, 6, 6X and 6P models, Samsung Notes 3 devices, and Samsung Galaxy devices from S3 to S8. After he privately reported the flaw, Google and Apple released patches that closed the underlying vulnerability that made the attack possible. Because Wi-Fi chipsets in laptop and desktop computers have more limited access to the computer's networking functions, the researcher doesn't believe they are vulnerable to the same attack. While Artenstein's proof of concept didn't spread from the Wi-Fi chip to infect the phone's kernel, he said that additional step is well within the means of determined hackers.

The remote code-execution vulnerability is the second one to be fixed by Broadcom this year. In April, both Apple and Google patched a separate critical flaw in the manufacturer's Wi-Fi chipsets. Gal Beniamini, the Google Project Zero researcher who discovered the vulnerability, said the absence of security mitigations made his proof-of-concept exploit relatively easy to develop. Together, the flaws suggest a potentially more promising avenue for attackers targeting smart phones.

"Old school hackers often miss the 'good old days' of the early 2000s, when remotely exploitable bugs were abundant, no mitigations were in place to stop them, and worms and malware ran rampant," Artenstein wrote. "But with new research opening previously unknown attack surface such as the BCM Wi-Fi chip, those times may just be making a comeback."
https://arstechnica.com/information-...g-worm-attack/





Hacker Who Helped Stop WannaCry Attack Accused of Spreading Banking Malware
Ken Ritter and Matt O'Brien

Marcus Hutchins, a young British researcher credited with derailing a global cyberattack in May, was arrested for allegedly creating and distributing malicious software designed to collect bank-account passwords, U.S. authorities said Thursday.

News of Hutchins' detention came as a shock to the cybersecurity community. Many had rallied behind the researcher whose quick thinking helped control the spread of the WannaCry ransomware attack that crippled thousands of computers.

Hutchins was detained in Las Vegas on his way back to Britain from an annual gathering of hackers and information security gurus. A grand jury indictment charged Hutchins with creating and distributing malware known as the Kronos banking Trojan.

Such malware infects web browsers, then captures usernames and passwords when an unsuspecting user visits a bank or other trusted location, enabling cybertheft.

The indictment, filed in a Wisconsin federal court last month, alleges that Hutchins and another defendant — whose name was redacted — conspired between July 2014 and July 2015 to advertise the availability of the Kronos malware on internet forums, sell the malware and profit from it. The indictment also accuses Hutchins of creating the malware.

Security officials say worst effects of global cyberattack subsiding, but remain on edge about new attacks

Authorities said the malware was first made available in early 2014, and "marketed and distributed through AlphaBay, a hidden service on the Tor network." The U.S. Department of Justice announced in July that the AlphaBay "darknet" marketplace was shut down after an international law enforcement effort.

Hutchins' arraignment was postponed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Las Vegas by a magistrate judge who gave him until Friday afternoon to determine if he wants to hire his own lawyer.

Hutchins was in Las Vegas for Def Con, an annual cybersecurity conference that ended Sunday. On Wednesday, Hutchins made comments on Twitter that suggested he was at an airport getting ready to board a plane for a flight home. He never left Nevada.

Jake Williams, a respected cybersecurity researcher, said he found it difficult to believe Hutchins is guilty. The two men have worked on various projects, including training material for higher education for which the Briton declined payment.

"He's a stand-up guy," Williams said in a text chat. "I can't reconcile the charges with what I know about him."

A Justice Department spokesman confirmed the 22-year-old Hutchins was arrested Wednesday in Las Vegas. Officer Rodrigo Pena, a police spokesman in Henderson, near Las Vegas, said Hutchins spent the night in federal custody in the city lockup.

Andrew Mabbitt, a British digital security specialist who had been staying in Las Vegas with Hutchins, said he and his friends grew worried when they got "radio silence" from Hutchins for hours. The worries deepened when Hutchins' mother called to tell him the young researcher hadn't made his flight home.

Mabbitt said he eventually found Hutchins' name on a detention center website. News of his indictment Thursday left colleagues scrambling to understand what happened.

"We don't know the evidence the FBI has against him, however we do have some circumstantial evidence that he was involved in that community at the time," said computer security expert Rob Graham.

The big question is the identity of the co-defendant in the case, whose name is redacted in the indictment. Why was it blacked out? "Maybe the other guy testified against him," said Graham.

The co-defendant allegedly advertised the malware online. Hutchins is accused of creating and transmitting the program.

Williams, the president of Rendition Infosec, speculated that the co-defendant might have been caught up in the takedown of AlphaBay and framed Hutchins in exchange for a plea deal.

The problem with software creation is that often a program includes code written by multiple programmers. Prosecutors might need to prove that Hutchins wrote code with specific targets.

Williams pointed to a July 13, 2014 tweet by Hutchins, whose moniker is @MalwareTechBlog, asking if anyone had a sample of Kronos to share.

"I've written code that other people have injected malware into," said Graham. "We know that large parts of Kronos were written by other people."

One legal scholar who specializes in studying computer crime said it's unusual, and problematic, for prosecutors to go after someone simply for writing or selling malware — as opposed to using it to further a crime.

"This is the first case I know of where the government is prosecuting someone for creating or selling malware but not actually using it," said Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. Kerr said it will be difficult to prove criminal intent.

"It's a constant issue in criminal law â the helping of people who are committing a crime," Kerr said. "When is that itself a crime?"

O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island. Associated Press writers Raphael Satter in Paris and Frank Bajak in Houston contributed to this report.
http://www.courant.com/nation-world/...803-story.html





Computer Law Expert Says British Hacker Arrest Problematic

A computer law expert says the evidence behind the U.S. arrest of a British cybersecurity researcher is problematic.

Attorney Tor Ekeland says Marcus Hutchins' indictment was very weak and created a climate of distrust toward the U.S. government in the community of software experts.

Hutchins was arrested on Wednesday for allegedly creating and distributing malicious software designed to collect bank account passwords.

He was detained in Las Vegas on his way back to Britain from an annual gathering of hackers and information security gurus.

But Ekeland told The Associated Press that the indictment does little to address intent in term of the software's use and if the legal theory behind this indictment is correct, "well then half of the United States software industry is potentially a bunch of felons."
http://www.newstimes.com/business/te...t-11733708.php





Hackers Break into Voting Machines in Minutes at Hacking Competition
John Bowden

Hackers at at a competition in Las Vegas were able to successfully breach the software of U.S. voting machines in just 90 minutes on Friday, illuminating glaring security deficiencies in America's election infrastructure.

Tech minds at the annual "DEF CON" in Las Vegas were given physical voting machines and remote access, with the instructions of gaining access to the software.

According to a Register report, within minutes, hackers exposed glaring physical and software vulnerabilities across multiple U.S. voting machine companies' products.

Some devices were found to have physical ports that could be used to attach devices containing malicious software. Others had insecure Wi-Fi connections, or were running outdated software with security vulnerabilities like Windows XP.

The Register reported that the challenge was designed by Jake Braun, the Chief Executive Officer of Cambridge Global Advisors and Managing Director of Cambridge Global Capital.

“Without question, our voting systems are weak and susceptible. Thanks to the contributions of the hacker community today, we've uncovered even more about exactly how,” Braun said.

“The scary thing is we also know that our foreign adversaries – including Russia, North Korea, Iran – possess the capabilities to hack them too, in the process undermining principles of democracy and threatening our national security.”

The machines were bought on Ebay, and were manufactured by major U.S. voting machine companies such as Diebold Nixorf, Sequoia Voting Systems, and Winvote.

In January, President Trump signed an executive order establishing a commission to investigate possible voter fraud in the 2016 election.

The commission, chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, is expected to “study the registration and voting processes used in Federal elections” as well as “fraudulent voter registrations and fraudulent voting," the order says. Trump himself has made baseless claims about millions of illegal voters during the 2016 election.

“You can never really find, you know, there are going to be — no matter what numbers we come up with there are going to be lots of people that did things that we're not going to find out about,” Trump said in January. "But we will find out because we need a better system where that can't happen.”
http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecur...ng-competition





Robot Cracks Open Safe Live on Def Con's Stage
Dave Lee North

Using a cheap robot, a team of hackers has cracked open a leading-brand combination safe, live on stage in Las Vegas.

The team from SparkFun Electronics was able to open a SentrySafe safe in around 30 minutes.

The robot is able to reduce the number of possible combinations from one million to just 1,000, before quickly and automatically trying the remaining combinations until it breaks in.

After the robot discovered the combination was 51.36.93, the safe popped open - to rapturous applause from the audience of several hundred hackers.

SparkFun’s Nathan Siedle told the BBC: "That was one of the scariest things we’ve done. Lots of things can go wrong, and this was a very big audience.

"We’re really happy it opened up.”

A spokeswoman for SentrySafe could not be reached on Friday.

But speaking to Wired magazine earlier this month, when the team demonstrated its method on a smaller safe, a spokeswoman for the safe maker said: "In this environment, the product accomplished what it was designed to do.

“[It] would be realistically very difficult, if not impossible, for the average person to replicate in the field.”

Budget bot

The latest demonstration was performed at Def Con, the largest gathering of underground hackers in the world.

The SparkFun team was not able to travel with a weighty safe, and so bought a new one that was opened up for the first time on stage.

The team joked the safe could have been cracked sooner - but they had to fill their 45-minute time slot.

The robot, which cost around $200 to put together, makes use of 3D-printed parts that can be easily replaced to fit different brands of combination safe.

It cannot crack a digital lock - although vulnerabilities in those systems have been exposed by other hacking teams in the past.
Lost combination

The team’s work began when Mr Siedle’s wife Alicia bought a safe on eBay that was cheap due to the previous owner not knowing what the combination was.

“She gave it to me for Christmas,” Mr Siedle said.

The mechanism in the safe consists of three dials which, when aligned, allow the safe to be opened. Each dial can be any two digit number - meaning one million potential combinations.

But the robot doesn’t simply try every combination. It is able to suss out one of the dials within 20 seconds by detecting the size of indents on the dial. In simple terms, the “solution” indent is slightly larger than the “incorrect" indents. In the demonstration, this method meant the team discovered the third and final number was 93.

The other two dials cannot be measured - but eliminating one greatly reduces the number of possible combinations.

It was made easier when the team also discovered that the safe’s design allows for a margin of error to compensate for humans getting their combination slightly wrong.

For example, if one dial is set to open at 14, using 15 and 13 will work as well. It meant the robot could check every third number, making it possible to quickly test the remaining combinations much faster than a human being.

Using this method, they could cut down the number of possible combinations to around 1,000 - a far more manageable challenge.
Bic pen

Before the attempt, Mr Siedle told the BBC the robot could be easily adapted to tackle any combination safe.

“We designed it for a particular type of safe, but it doesn’t really matter - you can actually 3D-print a coupler that can match any safe that you may have.”

Some SentrySafe models come with an additional lock and key, but the team was able to unlock it by using a Bic pen.

“No matter how much money you spend on a safe… nothing is impervious,” Mr Siedle said.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-40760648





Facebook Shuts Down AI System After Bots Create Language Humans Can't Understand

• Chatbots started speaking in their own language defying codes provided
• Initially the AI agents used English to converse with each other
• This comes after Elon Musk said that AI was the biggest risk

Days after Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) was limited, the social media company has reportedly shut down one of its AI systems because "things got out of hand." The AI bots created their own language, from the scratch and without human input, forcing Facebook to shut down the AI system. The AI bots' step of creating and communicating with the new language defied the provided codes.

According to a report in Tech Times on Sunday, "The AI did not start shutting down computers worldwide or something of the sort, but it stopped using English and started using a language that it created." Initially the AI agents used English to converse with each other but they later created a new language that only AI systems could understand, thus, defying their purpose.

This led Facebook researchers to shut down the AI systems and then force them to speak to each other only in English.

In June, researchers from the Facebook AI Research Lab (FAIR) found that while they were busy trying to improve chatbots, the "dialogue agents" were creating their own language. Soon, the bots began to deviate from the scripted norms and started communicating in an entirely new language which they created without human input, media reports said.

Using machine learning algorithms, the "dialogue agents" were left to converse freely in an attempt to strengthen their conversational skills. The researchers also found these bots to be "incredibly crafty negotiators".

"After learning to negotiate, the bots relied on machine learning and advanced strategies in an attempt to improve the outcome of these negotiations," the report said.

"Over time, the bots became quite skilled at it and even began feigning interest in one item in order to 'sacrifice' it at a later stage in the negotiation as a faux compromise," it added.

Although this appears to be a huge leap for AI, several experts including Professor Stephen Hawking have raised fears that humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, could be superseded by AI.

Others like Tesla's Elon Musk, philanthropist Bill Gates, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have also expressed their concerns about where the AI technology was heading.

As mentioned above, this incident took place just days after a verbal spat between Facebook CEO and Musk who exchanged harsh words over a debate on the future of AI. "I've talked to Mark about this (AI). His understanding of the subject is limited," Musk tweeted last week.

The tweet came after Zuckerberg, during a Facebook livestream earlier this month, castigated Musk for arguing that care and regulation was needed to safeguard the future if AI becomes mainstream.

"I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios - I just, I don't understand it. It's really negative and in some ways I actually think it is pretty irresponsible," Zuckerberg said.

Musk has been speaking frequently on AI and has called its progress the "biggest risk we face as a civilisation."

"AI is a rare case where we need to be proactive in regulation instead of reactive because if we're reactive in AI regulation it's too late," he said.
http://gadgets.ndtv.com/social-netwo...nguage-1731309





Please Prove You’re Not a Robot
Tim Wu

When science fiction writers first imagined robot invasions, the idea was that bots would become smart and powerful enough to take over the world by force, whether on their own or as directed by some evildoer. In reality, something only slightly less scary is happening. Robots are getting better, every day, at impersonating humans. When directed by opportunists, malefactors and sometimes even nation-states, they pose a particular threat to democratic societies, which are premised on being open to the people.

Robots posing as people have become a menace. For popular Broadway shows (need we say “Hamilton”?), it is actually bots, not humans, who do much and maybe most of the ticket buying. Shows sell out immediately, and the middlemen (quite literally, evil robot masters) reap millions in ill-gotten gains.

Philip Howard, who runs the Computational Propaganda Research Project at Oxford, studied the deployment of propaganda bots during voting on Brexit, and the recent American and French presidential elections. Twitter is particularly distorted by its millions of robot accounts; during the French election, it was principally Twitter robots who were trying to make #MacronLeaks into a scandal. Facebook has admitted it was essentially hacked during the American election in November. In Michigan, Mr. Howard notes, “junk news was shared just as widely as professional news in the days leading up to the election.”

Robots are also being used to attack the democratic features of the administrative state. This spring, the Federal Communications Commission put its proposed revocation of net neutrality up for public comment. In previous years such proceedings attracted millions of (human) commentators. This time, someone with an agenda but no actual public support unleashed robots who impersonated (via stolen identities) hundreds of thousands of people, flooding the system with fake comments against federal net neutrality rules.

To be sure, today’s impersonation-bots are different from the robots imagined in science fiction: They aren’t sentient, don’t carry weapons and don’t have physical bodies. Instead, fake humans just have whatever is necessary to make them seem human enough to “pass”: a name, perhaps a virtual appearance, a credit-card number and, if necessary, a profession, birthday and home address. They are brought to life by programs or scripts that give one person the power to imitate thousands.

The problem is almost certain to get worse, spreading to even more areas of life as bots are trained to become better at mimicking humans. Given the degree to which product reviews have been swamped by robots (which tend to hand out five stars with abandon), commercial sabotage in the form of negative bot reviews is not hard to predict. In coming years, campaign finance limits will be (and maybe already are) evaded by robot armies posing as “small” donors. And actual voting is another obvious target — perhaps the ultimate target.

So far, we’ve been content to leave the problem to the tech industry, where the focus has been on building defenses, usually in the form of Captchas (“completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”), those annoying “type this” tests to prove you are not a robot. But leaving it all to industry is not a long-term solution. For one thing, the defenses don’t actually deter impersonation bots, but perversely reward whoever can beat them. And perhaps the greatest problem for a democracy is that companies like Facebook and Twitter lack a serious financial incentive to do anything about matters of public concern, like the millions of fake users who are corrupting the democratic process. Twitter estimates at least 27 million probably fake accounts; researchers suggest the real number is closer to 48 million, yet the company does little about the problem.

The problem is a public as well as private one, and impersonation robots should be considered what the law calls “hostis humani generis”: enemies of mankind, like pirates and other outlaws. That would allow for a better offensive strategy: bringing the power of the state to bear on the people deploying the robot armies to attack commerce or democracy.

The ideal anti-robot campaign would employ a mixed technological and legal approach. Improved robot detection might help us find the robot masters or potentially help national security unleash counterattacks, which can be necessary when attacks come from overseas. There may be room for deputizing private parties to hunt down bad robots. A simple legal remedy would be a “ Blade Runner” law that makes it illegal to deploy any program that hides its real identity to pose as a human. Automated processes should be required to state, “I am a robot.” When dealing with a fake human, it would be nice to know.

Using robots to fake support, steal tickets or crash democracy really is the kind of evil that science fiction writers were warning about. The use of robots takes advantage of the fact that political campaigns, elections and even open markets make humanistic assumptions, trusting that there is wisdom or at least legitimacy in crowds and value in public debate. But when support and opinion can be manufactured, bad or unpopular arguments can win not by logic but by a novel, dangerous form of force — the ultimate threat to every democracy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/15/o...t-a-robot.html





Chinese Chatbots Taken Offline after Refusing to Say They Love the Communist Party

Chatbots say the darndest things
James Vincent

A pair of chatbots have been taken offline in China after failing to show enough patriotism, reports the Financial Times. The two bots were removed from the popular messaging app Tencent QQ after users shared screenshots of their conversations online.

One of the bots, named BabyQ, made by the Beijing-based company Turing Robot, was asked, “Do you love the Communist Party?” To which it replied simply, “No.” Another bot named XiaoBing, which is developed by Microsoft, told users, “My China dream is to go to America.” When the bot was then quizzed on its patriotism, it dodged the question and replied, “I’m having my period, wanna take a rest.”

In a statement, Tencent said, “The group chatbot services are provided by independent third party companies. We are now adjusting the services which will be resumed after improvements.”

It’s not clear what prompted the bots to give these answers, but it’s likely that they learned these responses from people. When Microsoft’s Tay chatbot went rogue on Twitter last year, spouting racist and extremist views like “Hitler was right I hate the jews,” the blame was at least partly with internet users, who found they could get Tay to copy whatever they said.

At the time, Microsoft said that Tay was a “machine learning project designed for human engagement” and that “some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it.” Tay was pulled offline, and Microsoft later introduced an updated version of the bot named Zo.

Whether XiaoBing will return to the Chinese web after a little re-education remains to be seen. We’ve contacted Microsoft to find out more.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/3/16...ommunist-party





Exclusive: FBI Tracked 'Fake News' Believed to be from Russia on Election Day
Shimon Prokupecz, Pamela Brown and Evan Perez

The FBI monitored social media on Election Day last year in an effort to track a suspected Russian disinformation campaign utilizing "fake news," CNN has learned.

In the months leading up to Election Day, Twitter and Facebook were the feeding grounds for viral "news" stories floating conspiracies and hoaxes, many aimed at spreading negative false claims about Hillary Clinton.

On Election Day, dozens of agents and analysts huddled at a command center arrayed with large monitoring screens at the FBI headquarters in Washington watching for security threats, according to multiple sources.

That included analysts monitoring cyber threats, after months of mounting Russian intrusions targeting every part of the US political system, from political parties to policy think-tanks to state election systems.

On this day, there was also a group of FBI cyber and counterintelligence analysts and investigators watching social media.

FBI analysts had identified social media user accounts behind stories, some based overseas, and the suspicion was that at least some were part of a Russian disinformation campaign, according to two sources familiar with the investigation.

The FBI declined to comment for this story.

For the FBI, this was uncomfortable territory, given the First Amendment's free speech protections even for fake news stories.

"We were right on the edge of Constitutional legality," a person briefed on the investigation said. "We were monitoring news."

As the hours ticked by on Election Day, teams at the FBI, Homeland Security Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence held conference calls every three hours with a team at the Situation Room in the White House to discuss possible problems, according to multiple sources.

Minor issues popped up in far-flung parts of the country, from Alaska to Georgia.

At the end of day, top officials exchanged congratulations for an election day that was completed without disruptions of the vote.

One Obama White House official responded to the messages of congratulations with the opposite view, saying the US government response to the Russian operation was "a failure of imagination."

"Are you kidding?" that official recalled saying to others at the White House as they celebrated a successful election. "What they did worked!"

CNN's Marshall Cohen and Zachary Cohen contributed to this report.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/04/politi...ing/index.html





A 32-Year-Old Investor with Ties to Elon Musk wants to Upend America with his Crazy, Utopian Plan for the Future
Chris Weller

In a not-too-distant future city, superintelligent robots will carry out the majority of vital tasks. Driverless cars will ferry passengers to and from points of interest. Housing and healthcare will be affordable, if not free to all. Political leaders and technologists will speak the same language. And life is good.

Sam Altman, the 32-year-old president of Y Combinator, the most prestigious startup accelerator in Silicon Valley, has laid out this utopian vision over the years, and most definitively in a job listing posted on YC's blog in June 2016.

"We're seriously interested in building new cities and we think we know how to finance it if everything else makes sense," the post read. "We need people with strong interests and bold ideas in architecture, ecology, economics, politics, technology, urban planning, and much more."

Free houses, built by robots

Like many of his peers in Silicon Valley, Altman believes technology is the way to a better future. But his real-world ambitions are grander than most. He wants to investigate ways to build new cities, give people money for nothing, rethink voter registration, keep politicians accountable, and get new, Altman-approved leaders elected — all while running YC, which famously birthed startups like Airbnb and Dropbox.

Much like one of his notable colleagues, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Altman is set on turning the ideal into the practical. Both believe they have solid ideas for reshaping society. Sometimes this means executing plans within the next few months. Other times it means roadmapping projects decades down the line, and relying on phrases like "The math should work out" to assuage a wary public.

"I have a very strong vision of where I'd like to see the world go," Altman said. "And I don't think it gets there by startups alone."

In 2005, at age 19, Altman dropped out of Stanford to found the social-networking app Loopt, which he sold in 2012. In 2014, he replaced Paul Graham as YC president. These days, he says he spends 80% of his 65-hour weeks helping startups sort through their growing pains and get to market as fast as possible. The remaining 20% is dedicated to outside projects.

His baby is OpenAI, a nonprofit he cochairs with Musk that searches for benevolent ways to use artificial intelligence in daily life. Altman's vision for how OpenAI could be deployed sheds light on how he wants to help people in real ways.

"Let's imagine we get to a world where AI gets so good that robots can mine raw materials out of the ground, refine them, and build them into a house," he told Business Insider. (These robots, he clarified, are solar-powered.) "You can imagine a world where you own a small piece of land, you can say, 'Hey, robot. I would like a house here,' and you come back like a month later and there's a fully constructed house built for you for free."

Phoenix Arizona homesTim Roberts Photography/ShutterstockAltman sees that kind of far-future scenario as a boon for towns and cities plagued by a shortage of affordable housing. He's seen the plight firsthand, from his home state of California to middle America.

In November 2016, shortly after Donald Trump won the presidency, Altman left YC's headquarters in Mountain View, California, in search of 100 supporters of the president-elect. He asked them about their political views, their fears, and their gripes with America's political landscape. He later published his findings on his blog for the world to see. "People don't believe they have an economic future," he said.

Over the past year, Altman has expressed a deep interest in resolving those economic concerns.

"[Fifty] years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people," he wrote in a January 2016 blog post on YC. "I also think that it's impossible to truly have equality of opportunity without some version of guaranteed income."

That blog post announced YC's intentions to launch an experiment in universal basic income (UBI), a system of wealth distribution that pays participants a set amount of money to use however they want. The premise, which is being tested in more than a half-dozen locations around the world, is that UBI can create a social safety net that reduces or even eliminates poverty.

Altman's own experiment is small, for now. It's running in Oakland, California, and involves about 100 people getting between $1,000 and $2,000 a month. The goal is to get some practice with delivering the money and collecting data. If that data come back showing basic income has left people better off, both emotionally and financially, YC will expand the project in a five-year, nationwide trial.

The same old Silicon Valley?

Society is poised to lose millions of jobs to AI, the prevailing research suggests. And it's propelled in part by Silicon Valley-types like Altman, who himself is researching how robotics can replace human labor on a grand scale with projects like OpenAI. In recognition of that responsibility, he believes the tech world should at least be trying something.

"I don't know if [basic income] is the answer or not to this massive technological revolution we're in the middle of," he said, "but it is something I'd like to study."

But for all his involvement in political issues, Altman doesn't consider himself a political person. He was raised in St. Louis to a pair of Democrat parents, with childhood memories of his time as a Boy Scout, tinkering with his Macintosh, and reading science fiction. He was interested more in computers than current events.

It's really only been since 2014, when he replaced Graham as YC's president, that he started to take a serious interest in how technology could improve the political process and the future of humanity. He began thinking of ways to broaden both his and YC's horizons to support more nonprofits, like the ACLU, and startups focused purely on hard science, which he sees as vital to humanity's progress.

Some have criticized Altman's larger-than-life goals, claiming they are ambitious to a fault. When news broke last spring that he wanted to build brand-new cities, Allison Arieff, editorial director of the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association, wrote on Twitter, "Y Combinator Aims to Build a New City From Scratch Because No One Has Ever Tried That Before."

And writing for Gizmodo, Alissa Walker questioned why YC even felt the need to build a brand-new city, given all that's wrong with existing urban areas. "Why not simply focus on improving the city of Mountain View, California, where Y Combinator is already located," she wrote, "and which certainly needs to find solutions to many of these urban problems (some due to startups like Airbnb which Y Combinator has backed)?"

Anand Giridharadas, an author and New York Times columnist who writes about technology, politics, and society, has written that Silicon Valley in general is obsessed with what he calls "regressive innovation," or the act of creating solutions that don't actually make life better for people. Speaking with Business Insider, he referred to such VCs as "world-changer incubator-messiahs."

Altman, for his part, has said he prefers to use the phrase "change the world" only after he's already done so.

In most cases, he sees his role more as a facilitator than a doer. He understands the technology side of his projects, but he still relies on people more well versed in economics, public policy, and urban planning to inform them, he said.

"I don't think tech is the solution to all problems," he said. "And I certainly don't think startups are the solution to all problems. They're the solution to a lot, but if the tech industry doesn't think about how everybody wins and everybody benefits, then we've kind of failed."

Elizabeth Rhodes picked up on that mind-set in her first face-to-face encounter with Altman, earlier this February. Rhodes was wrapping up her doctorate in political science and social work at the University of Michigan and had applied to lead YC's nascent basic-income project. In May, YC announced she had been selected.

"He was definitely very passionate about people's struggles," Rhodes recalled of her first meeting with Altman. Now more than a year into the job, she said Altman's interest in solving social problems through policy has come more into focus. "He's able to see more systemic changes that we could make, and he's not afraid to say, 'Let's try testing it out.'"

It's easy to compare Altman's outsize ambitions to Elon Musk and his many projects. But Altman calls the comparison "ridiculous," since he considers the serial entrepreneur less of an equal as much as a singular, multi-industry titan. "Elon is in a class by himself," Altman said.

The basic similarities are there. Musk has said in repeated interviews that the future grips him so deeply, without a passion for it he would never get out of bed in the morning. Altman envisions far-off societies hiring robots to build houses and giving people free cash from the government. He also shares Musk's view that these kinds of mega-projects aren't crazy. At the 2015 Vanity Fair Summit, the two appeared onstage to discuss, in calm voices, how they might live on Mars or harness the sun for nuclear energy.

"I believe that most things I work on are practical and someday will be hugely important," Altman told Business Insider.

Rewriting the social contract

In May, rumors began to swirl that Altman's political interests had compelled him to run for California governor in 2018. He seemed to be making a familiar transition from the private world into the public spotlight — a move Carly Fiorina, Peter Thiel, and other prominent Silicon Valley names had made before him.

But Altman ultimately went a different route. In mid-July he put the rumors to bed by issuing an open call on his blog for similar-minded political candidates that he could support. He could offer money, connections, and tech to help them get into the governor's office.

His requirements for the candidate: They should believe affordable housing is one of the most pressing issues in the state, because, as Altman put it, "The high cost of living hurts poor people the most, and it's destroying our country." And they should believe in single-payer healthcare, clean energy, skills-based education, and rewriting tax codes that favor the middle class.

"It's this pro-growth, pro-innovation, and pro-distribution idea," Altman said, "where we're going to have — as we've had after every technological revolution — we're going to have to rewrite the social contract."

Altman's move into politics reflects the ways philanthropy has shifted in recent years, fusing entrepreneurship with social causes, according to Brooks Rainwater, the director of the City Solutions and Applied Research Center at the National League of Cities. "What you're seeing is the tech mentality of pilot projects being grafted onto the social space," he said. "And I think there's a lot of opportunity here."

Critics tend to see that opportunity more as a threat — that entrepreneurs have no business in government because they'll focus only on a small group of people, neglecting the masses. Even President Obama expressed doubt that leaders in the tech world could make the leap into the public realm.

Pivoting from certain projects or abandoning them altogether isn't a matter of if, but when, Altman said.

"We try to make the cost of failing super low," he said. "What we're going for is a few really big world-changing hits and a lot of failures along the way. I view that just as the overhead of doing business."

He applies the mentality equally to his day job of helping startups and to his societal-improvement projects.

"If you're going to focus your life on the really long-term, somewhat implausible-sounding schemes, you have to be willing to be mocked and misunderstood," Altman said. "Right up until the day when it works."
http://www.newstimes.com/technology/...k-11718535.php





This Magnetic Tape Drive Can Store Way More Data than You’d Imagine
Mike Wehner

The hard drive in your computer right now — or even your smartphone, for the matter — absolutely dwarfs the storage drives of just a decade ago. The relentless march of technology ensures that digital devices require more and more space to hold growing libraries of music, movies, and photos, and a new breakthrough in data storage by IBM and Sony promises to make your current hard drive feel completely inadequate. The only catch is that it uses a storage technique that you probably thought was long dead: magnetic tape.

The partnership between IBM and Sony has resulted in a new type of magnetic tape storage capable of holding 201 gigabits of data per square inch. That’s roughly 25 gigabytes, which might sound rather unimpressive when your iPhone can be outfitted with as much as 256 GB, but keep in mind that this is tape. When you take that storage density and apply it to a length of 1,098 meters you’re left with a cartridge capable of storing an insane 330 terabytes of data.

Magnetic tape data storage dates back to the 1950s, and its cutting-edge status lasted for several decades. It continued to be used in enterprise applications and for data archiving and long term storage ever since, but its viability in the consumer space essentially evaporated.

This new tape format won’t change that thanks to its cost and relatively slow data access speeds in comparison to, say, a modern SSD, but for commercial applications it means a lot more storage in a smaller space.
http://bgr.com/2017/08/02/magnetic-t...rage-ibm-sony/





Big Food Braces for Intensified Online Competition
Craig Giammona

Wall Street is betting that Amazon.com 's push into groceries will be very bad news for the packaged-food industry.

It's up to the likes of Mondelez International Inc. to prove that notion wrong.

The snack giant, which makes everything from Oreos and Tang to Trident gum, has been selling more products over the internet and retooling its supply chain for a digital world, said Jeff Jarrett, Mondelez's e-commerce chief. The idea is to show it can shift business online without getting crushed by Amazon, which is famous for squeezing suppliers' margins.

But it may be facing an uphill fight. After Amazon agreed to buy Whole Foods Market Inc. in June for $13.7 billion, food producers saw their shares tumble. And few analysts are predicting a rally anytime soon.

Amazon is expected to transform grocery shopping into an industry where brands have less sway over consumers and prices are lower. That's put pressure on Mondelez and others to build their own direct relationships with customers, helping preserve their influence.

"You'll continue to see big brands focus on the online channel like never before," Jarrett said in an interview.

Amazon hasn't said much publicly about its plans for Whole Foods, but the company is expected to bring prices down at the notoriously expensive chain. And most analysts agree that Jeff Bezos's business will play tough with suppliers.

While Amazon's grocery ambitions were well-established before the Whole Foods deal was announced, only about 2 percent of the food business has moved online. The prospect of the Seattle-based company taking over an upscale grocer was seen as the latest piece of bad news for the group of companies known as Big Food.

The day the Whole Foods acquisition was announced, 10 of the largest food companies in the U.S., including Kraft Heinz Co., General Mills Inc., Mondelez and Campbell Soup Co., lost almost $8 billion in market value combined.

Food producers were already getting squeezed by Wal-Mart Stores, where groceries account for more than half of revenue. Amazon's push into the business will put food at the center of a massive retail battle between the two companies, hurting vendors in the process, according to Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Michael Halen.

"There's no doubt they're going to pressure the packaged-foods guys on prices," he said.

Companies across the industry are preparing for the change. Campbell recently hired an Amazon veteran to run a newly created e-commerce unit. And at General Mills, which sells Cheerios and Betty Crocker, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Harmening is girding for battle.

"We've been doing this for 150 years," Harmening, a company veteran who took over at CEO in June, said in an interview. "Will there be competition? Of course. It's just online now."
Amazon and Whole Foods could revolutionize grocery delivery. But do shoppers want it?

But adapting won't be easy. After decades of catering grocery stores, the companies are trying to figure how to produce, package and ship their food in a way that works for Amazon and Walmart.com.

Mondelez wants to generate at least $1 billion in online revenue by 2020. That's a tiny fraction of its roughly $26 billion in sales, but a fast-growing piece. The Deerfield, Illinois-based company is now about a third of the way toward that goal after a 35 percent jump last year, Jarrett said.

Key to its early efforts was a holiday e-commerce test. The company sold limited-edition boxes of Oreos directly to consumers for $19.99 in the weeks before Christmas last year -- a move that required Mondelez to upgrade its supply chain.

With Amazon looming, Oreo maker dives deeper into online retail

But it's not avoiding Amazon. The company has increasingly relied on the site since 2015, when it first set the 2020 revenue goal. In all, about 90 percent of Mondelez's assortment is available online.

"It's all about making food online much more economical than it ever was before," Jarrett said. "It's a great example of innovation forcing us to adapt."

The largest food and beverage companies have lost roughly $20 billion in retail sales since 2011, according to Robert Moskow, an analyst at Credit Suisse Group AG. General Mills and Kellogg are each looking at a fourth straight year of revenue declines. Campbell is in a three-year slump, and Kraft Heinz hasn't posted a single quarter of revenue growth since the company was created in a 2015 merger.

Where have all those lost sales gone? Upstart brands, restaurants and meal-kit services have taken some market share. But often consumers are just paying lower prices, making it harder for the big food companies to maintain growth.

Supermarket brands also continue to make inroads. Eventually, Amazon is expected to push hard into its own private-label fare, which is often more profitable to sell.

"There's a shift in trust to the retailer brands," said Mikey Vu, a grocery expert at Bain & Co. "That has to scare the heck out of the national brands."

At General Mills, Harmening argues that well-known brands tend to thrive online. That's because consumers generally shop for things they already know.

To analysts and observers, the cheery rhetoric sounds a lot like what bookstores and apparel companies said in years past -- before Amazon wreaked havoc on their business. That's the view of Neil Ackerman, a former Amazon and Mondelez supply-chain executive who now works for Johnson & Johnson.

For now, Big Food faces a Catch-22: They have to sell their products on Amazon, but that could lead to problems down the road, he said.

"If Amazon controls the entire supply chain, it's a huge threat -- that's what this is about," Ackerman said. "It happened with books and apparel and sporting goods, and you're watching it happen again."

Bloomberg's Matt Turner contributed
http://www.courant.com/business/ct-o...801-story.html





Honolulu's New Smartphone Ban Imposes a Fine if You Text at Crosswalks
Lulu Chang

In order to help prevent deaths and injuries caused by texting and walking, Honolulu is imposing a smartphone ban at crosswalks.

It may be known as the Aloha state, but you’d better think twice before you say hello on your mobile device when you’re crossing the street in Hawai’i. The capital of the island state, Honolulu, has just become the first major American city to pass legislation imposing a smartphone ban when it comes to crosswalks. Starting in late October, “distracted walking,” that caused by pedestrians with their eyes glued to their phones while crossing the street, will be subject to a fine.

The goal, of course, is to reduce the number of injuries and deaths that occur each year due to smartphone use during walking. A 2015 University of Maryland study notes that over 11,000 injuries were attributed to phone-related distraction among pedestrians in the U.S. between 200 and 2011. And now that we’re more smartphone-obsessed than ever, it is likely that this figure has only increased. Indeed, the National Safety Council has since added “distracted walking” to its annual list of the most salient risks for unintentional injuries and deaths in the United States.

So now, beginning October 25, those crossing streets in Honolulu will face between a $15 to $99 fine should they be caught walking and texting. The severity of the fine depends upon the number of times the police see them on their devices while crossing a street.

“We hold the unfortunate distinction of being a major city with more pedestrians being hit in crosswalks, particularly our seniors, than almost any other city in the country,” Mayor Kirk Caldwell told reporters at a well-trafficked intersection earlier this week.

The problem with distracted walking extends far beyond the shores of the U.S. Last year, Augsburg, Germany began embedding traffic lights in the ground in order to alert smartphone-facing pedestrians as to potential dangers before crossing the street. And in London, there are now padded lamp posts so that folks who run into these giant metal poles don’t suffer concussions.

But not everyone is thrilled about Hawai’i’s legislative solution.

“Scrap this intrusive bill, provide more education to citizens about responsible electronics usage, and allow law enforcement to focus on larger issues,” resident Ben Robinson wrote to the city council. But alas, until we find a way to provide that education, it looks like such bans could become more and more the norm.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile...martphone-ban/





Former Google SVP Says Android Phones ‘Years’ Behind the iPhone in Photography
Ben Lovejoy

Former Google senior vice president of Social, Vic Gundotra, has said that Android phones are literally years behind the iPhone when it comes to photography – and it’s Android’s fault.

Gundotra started by praising the quality of the iPhone 7 Plus camera in a Facebook post.

The end of the DSLR for most people has already arrived. I left my professional camera at home and took these shots at dinner with my iPhone 7 using computational photography (portrait mode as Apple calls it). Hard not to call these results (in a restaurant, taken on a mobile phone with no flash) stunning. Great job Apple.

But he went further …

In response to a comment suggesting that the Samsung S8 camera was even better, Business Insider spotted that Gundotra disagreed. He said that not only was Apple way ahead of Samsung, but Android was to blame.

I would never use an Android phone for photos!

Here is the problem: It’s Android. Android is an open source (mostly) operating system that has to be neutral to all parties. This sounds good until you get into the details. Ever wonder why a Samsung phone has a confused and bewildering array of photo options? Should I use the Samsung Camera? Or the Android Camera? Samsung gallery or Google Photos?

It’s because when Samsung innovates with the underlying hardware (like a better camera) they have to convince Google to allow that innovation to be surfaced to other applications via the appropriate API. That can take YEARS.

Also the greatest innovation isn’t even happening at the hardware level – it’s happening at the computational photography level. (Google was crushing this 5 years ago – they had had “auto awesome” that used AI techniques to automatically remove wrinkles, whiten teeth, add vignetting, etc… but recently Google has fallen back).

Apple doesn’t have all these constraints. They innovate in the underlying hardware, and just simply update the software with their latest innovations (like portrait mode) and ship it.

Bottom line: If you truly care about great photography, you own an iPhone. If you don’t mind being a few years behind, buy an Android.

This theme – that Google takes an early lead and is then overtaken by Apple – appears to be happening again in another camera-related area: augmented reality. Google got in first with Tango, a research project whose functionality was first seen in a Lenovo phone late last year, before Apple announced ARKit. Apple is aiming to have a bunch of AR apps available for the launch of the iPhone 8, and we’ve already seen a whole range of apps, both useful and entertaining.

Gundotra hasn’t always been quite so complimentary about Apple …
https://9to5mac.com/2017/07/31/iphon...d-photography/





Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.
Jean M. Twenge

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”

I’ve been researching generational differences for 25 years, starting when I was a 22-year-old doctoral student in psychology. Typically, the characteristics that come to define a generation appear gradually, and along a continuum. Beliefs and behaviors that were already rising simply continue to do so. Millennials, for instance, are a highly individualistic generation, but individualism had been increasing since the Baby Boomers turned on, tuned in, and dropped out. I had grown accustomed to line graphs of trends that looked like modest hills and valleys. Then I began studying Athena’s generation.

Around 2012, I noticed abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. The gentle slopes of the line graphs became steep mountains and sheer cliffs, and many of the distinctive characteristics of the Millennial generation began to disappear. In all my analyses of generational data—some reaching back to the 1930s—I had never seen anything like it.

The allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens.

At first I presumed these might be blips, but the trends persisted, across several years and a series of national surveys. The changes weren’t just in degree, but in kind. The biggest difference between the Millennials and their predecessors was in how they viewed the world; teens today differ from the Millennials not just in their views but in how they spend their time. The experiences they have every day are radically different from those of the generation that came of age just a few years before them.

What happened in 2012 to cause such dramatic shifts in behavior? It was after the Great Recession, which officially lasted from 2007 to 2009 and had a starker effect on Millennials trying to find a place in a sputtering economy. But it was exactly the moment when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent.

The more I pored over yearly surveys of teen attitudes and behaviors, and the more I talked with young people like Athena, the clearer it became that theirs is a generation shaped by the smartphone and by the concomitant rise of social media. I call them iGen. Born between 1995 and 2012, members of this generation are growing up with smartphones, have an Instagram account before they start high school, and do not remember a time before the internet. The Millennials grew up with the web as well, but it wasn’t ever-present in their lives, at hand at all times, day and night. iGen’s oldest members were early adolescents when the iPhone was introduced, in 2007, and high-school students when the iPad entered the scene, in 2010. A 2017 survey of more than 5,000 American teens found that three out of four owned an iPhone.

The advent of the smartphone and its cousin the tablet was followed quickly by hand-wringing about the deleterious effects of “screen time.” But the impact of these devices has not been fully appreciated, and goes far beyond the usual concerns about curtailed attention spans. The arrival of the smartphone has radically changed every aspect of teenagers’ lives, from the nature of their social interactions to their mental health. These changes have affected young people in every corner of the nation and in every type of household. The trends appear among teens poor and rich; of every ethnic background; in cities, suburbs, and small towns. Where there are cell towers, there are teens living their lives on their smartphone.

To those of us who fondly recall a more analog adolescence, this may seem foreign and troubling. The aim of generational study, however, is not to succumb to nostalgia for the way things used to be; it’s to understand how they are now. Some generational changes are positive, some are negative, and many are both. More comfortable in their bedrooms than in a car or at a party, today’s teens are physically safer than teens have ever been. They’re markedly less likely to get into a car accident and, having less of a taste for alcohol than their predecessors, are less susceptible to drinking’s attendant ills.

Psychologically, however, they are more vulnerable than Millennials were: Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.

Even when a seismic event—a war, a technological leap, a free concert in the mud—plays an outsize role in shaping a group of young people, no single factor ever defines a generation. Parenting styles continue to change, as do school curricula and culture, and these things matter. But the twin rise of the smartphone and social media has caused an earthquake of a magnitude we’ve not seen in a very long time, if ever. There is compelling evidence that the devices we’ve placed in young people’s hands are having profound effects on their lives—and making them seriously unhappy.

In the early 1970s, the photographer Bill Yates shot a series of portraits at the Sweetheart Roller Skating Rink in Tampa, Florida. In one, a shirtless teen stands with a large bottle of peppermint schnapps stuck in the waistband of his jeans. In another, a boy who looks no older than 12 poses with a cigarette in his mouth. The rink was a place where kids could get away from their parents and inhabit a world of their own, a world where they could drink, smoke, and make out in the backs of their cars. In stark black-and-white, the adolescent Boomers gaze at Yates’s camera with the self-confidence born of making your own choices—even if, perhaps especially if, your parents wouldn’t think they were the right ones.

Fifteen years later, during my own teenage years as a member of Generation X, smoking had lost some of its romance, but independence was definitely still in. My friends and I plotted to get our driver’s license as soon as we could, making DMV appointments for the day we turned 16 and using our newfound freedom to escape the confines of our suburban neighborhood. Asked by our parents, “When will you be home?,” we replied, “When do I have to be?”

But the allure of independence, so powerful to previous generations, holds less sway over today’s teens, who are less likely to leave the house without their parents. The shift is stunning: 12th-graders in 2015 were going out less often than eighth-graders did as recently as 2009.

Today’s teens are also less likely to date. The initial stage of courtship, which Gen Xers called “liking” (as in “Ooh, he likes you!”), kids now call “talking”—an ironic choice for a generation that prefers texting to actual conversation. After two teens have “talked” for a while, they might start dating. But only about 56 percent of high-school seniors in 2015 went out on dates; for Boomers and Gen Xers, the number was about 85 percent.

The decline in dating tracks with a decline in sexual activity. The drop is the sharpest for ninth-graders, among whom the number of sexually active teens has been cut by almost 40 percent since 1991. The average teen now has had sex for the first time by the spring of 11th grade, a full year later than the average Gen Xer. Fewer teens having sex has contributed to what many see as one of the most positive youth trends in recent years: The teen birth rate hit an all-time low in 2016, down 67 percent since its modern peak, in 1991.

Even driving, a symbol of adolescent freedom inscribed in American popular culture, from Rebel Without a Cause to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, has lost its appeal for today’s teens. Nearly all Boomer high-school students had their driver’s license by the spring of their senior year; more than one in four teens today still lack one at the end of high school. For some, Mom and Dad are such good chauffeurs that there’s no urgent need to drive. “My parents drove me everywhere and never complained, so I always had rides,” a 21-year-old student in San Diego told me. “I didn’t get my license until my mom told me I had to because she could not keep driving me to school.” She finally got her license six months after her 18th birthday. In conversation after conversation, teens described getting their license as something to be nagged into by their parents—a notion that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.

Independence isn’t free—you need some money in your pocket to pay for gas, or for that bottle of schnapps. In earlier eras, kids worked in great numbers, eager to finance their freedom or prodded by their parents to learn the value of a dollar. But iGen teens aren’t working (or managing their own money) as much. In the late 1970s, 77 percent of high-school seniors worked for pay during the school year; by the mid-2010s, only 55 percent did. The number of eighth-graders who work for pay has been cut in half. These declines accelerated during the Great Recession, but teen employment has not bounced back, even though job availability has.

Of course, putting off the responsibilities of adulthood is not an iGen innovation. Gen Xers, in the 1990s, were the first to postpone the traditional markers of adulthood. Young Gen Xers were just about as likely to drive, drink alcohol, and date as young Boomers had been, and more likely to have sex and get pregnant as teens. But as they left their teenage years behind, Gen Xers married and started careers later than their Boomer predecessors had.

Gen X managed to stretch adolescence beyond all previous limits: Its members started becoming adults earlier and finished becoming adults later. Beginning with Millennials and continuing with iGen, adolescence is contracting again—but only because its onset is being delayed. Across a range of behaviors—drinking, dating, spending time unsupervised— 18-year-olds now act more like 15-year-olds used to, and 15-year-olds more like 13-year-olds. Childhood now stretches well into high school.

Why are today’s teens waiting longer to take on both the responsibilities and the pleasures of adulthood? Shifts in the economy, and parenting, certainly play a role. In an information economy that rewards higher education more than early work history, parents may be inclined to encourage their kids to stay home and study rather than to get a part-time job. Teens, in turn, seem to be content with this homebody arrangement—not because they’re so studious, but because their social life is lived on their phone. They don’t need to leave home to spend time with their friends.

If today’s teens were a generation of grinds, we’d see that in the data. But eighth-, 10th-, and 12th-graders in the 2010s actually spend less time on homework than Gen X teens did in the early 1990s. (High-school seniors headed for four-year colleges spend about the same amount of time on homework as their predecessors did.) The time that seniors spend on activities such as student clubs and sports and exercise has changed little in recent years. Combined with the decline in working for pay, this means iGen teens have more leisure time than Gen X teens did, not less.

So what are they doing with all that time? They are on their phone, in their room, alone and often distressed.

One of the ironies of iGen life is that despite spending far more time under the same roof as their parents, today’s teens can hardly be said to be closer to their mothers and fathers than their predecessors were. “I’ve seen my friends with their families—they don’t talk to them,” Athena told me. “They just say ‘Okay, okay, whatever’ while they’re on their phones. They don’t pay attention to their family.” Like her peers, Athena is an expert at tuning out her parents so she can focus on her phone. She spent much of her summer keeping up with friends, but nearly all of it was over text or Snapchat. “I’ve been on my phone more than I’ve been with actual people,” she said. “My bed has, like, an imprint of my body.”

In this, too, she is typical. The number of teens who get together with their friends nearly every day dropped by more than 40 percent from 2000 to 2015; the decline has been especially steep recently. It’s not only a matter of fewer kids partying; fewer kids are spending time simply hanging out. That’s something most teens used to do: nerds and jocks, poor kids and rich kids, C students and A students. The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web.

You might expect that teens spend so much time in these new spaces because it makes them happy, but most data suggest that it does not. The Monitoring the Future survey, funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and designed to be nationally representative, has asked 12th-graders more than 1,000 questions every year since 1975 and queried eighth- and 10th-graders since 1991. The survey asks teens how happy they are and also how much of their leisure time they spend on various activities, including nonscreen activities such as in-person social interaction and exercise, and, in recent years, screen activities such as using social media, texting, and browsing the web. The results could not be clearer: Teens who spend more time than average on screen activities are more likely to be unhappy, and those who spend more time than average on nonscreen activities are more likely to be happy.

There’s not a single exception. All screen activities are linked to less happiness, and all nonscreen activities are linked to more happiness. Eighth-graders who spend 10 or more hours a week on social media are 56 percent more likely to say they’re unhappy than those who devote less time to social media. Admittedly, 10 hours a week is a lot. But those who spend six to nine hours a week on social media are still 47 percent more likely to say they are unhappy than those who use social media even less. The opposite is true of in-person interactions. Those who spend an above-average amount of time with their friends in person are 20 percent less likely to say they’re unhappy than those who hang out for a below-average amount of time.
The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression.

If you were going to give advice for a happy adolescence based on this survey, it would be straightforward: Put down the phone, turn off the laptop, and do something—anything—that does not involve a screen. Of course, these analyses don’t unequivocally prove that screen time causes unhappiness; it’s possible that unhappy teens spend more time online. But recent research suggests that screen time, in particular social-media use, does indeed cause unhappiness. One study asked college students with a Facebook page to complete short surveys on their phone over the course of two weeks. They’d get a text message with a link five times a day, and report on their mood and how much they’d used Facebook. The more they’d used Facebook, the unhappier they felt, but feeling unhappy did not subsequently lead to more Facebook use.

Social-networking sites like Facebook promise to connect us to friends. But the portrait of iGen teens emerging from the data is one of a lonely, dislocated generation. Teens who visit social-networking sites every day but see their friends in person less frequently are the most likely to agree with the statements “A lot of times I feel lonely,” “I often feel left out of things,” and “I often wish I had more good friends.” Teens’ feelings of loneliness spiked in 2013 and have remained high since.

This doesn’t always mean that, on an individual level, kids who spend more time online are lonelier than kids who spend less time online. Teens who spend more time on social media also spend more time with their friends in person, on average—highly social teens are more social in both venues, and less social teens are less so. But at the generational level, when teens spend more time on smartphones and less time on in-person social interactions, loneliness is more common.

So is depression. Once again, the effect of screen activities is unmistakable: The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression. Eighth-graders who are heavy users of social media increase their risk of depression by 27 percent, while those who play sports, go to religious services, or even do homework more than the average teen cut their risk significantly.

Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan. (That’s much more than the risk related to, say, watching TV.) One piece of data that indirectly but stunningly captures kids’ growing isolation, for good and for bad: Since 2007, the homicide rate among teens has declined, but the suicide rate has increased. As teens have started spending less time together, they have become less likely to kill one another, and more likely to kill themselves. In 2011, for the first time in 24 years, the teen suicide rate was higher than the teen homicide rate.

Depression and suicide have many causes; too much technology is clearly not the only one. And the teen suicide rate was even higher in the 1990s, long before smartphones existed. Then again, about four times as many Americans now take antidepressants, which are often effective in treating severe depression, the type most strongly linked to suicide.

What’s the connection between smartphones and the apparent psychological distress this generation is experiencing? For all their power to link kids day and night, social media also exacerbate the age-old teen concern about being left out. Today’s teens may go to fewer parties and spend less time together in person, but when they do congregate, they document their hangouts relentlessly—on Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook. Those not invited to come along are keenly aware of it. Accordingly, the number of teens who feel left out has reached all-time highs across age groups. Like the increase in loneliness, the upswing in feeling left out has been swift and significant.

This trend has been especially steep among girls. Forty-eight percent more girls said they often felt left out in 2015 than in 2010, compared with 27 percent more boys. Girls use social media more often, giving them additional opportunities to feel excluded and lonely when they see their friends or classmates getting together without them. Social media levy a psychic tax on the teen doing the posting as well, as she anxiously awaits the affirmation of comments and likes. When Athena posts pictures to Instagram, she told me, “I’m nervous about what people think and are going to say. It sometimes bugs me when I don’t get a certain amount of likes on a picture.”

Girls have also borne the brunt of the rise in depressive symptoms among today’s teens. Boys’ depressive symptoms increased by 21 percent from 2012 to 2015, while girls’ increased by 50 percent—more than twice as much. The rise in suicide, too, is more pronounced among girls. Although the rate increased for both sexes, three times as many 12-to-14-year-old girls killed themselves in 2015 as in 2007, compared with twice as many boys. The suicide rate is still higher for boys, in part because they use more-lethal methods, but girls are beginning to close the gap.

These more dire consequences for teenage girls could also be rooted in the fact that they’re more likely to experience cyberbullying. Boys tend to bully one another physically, while girls are more likely to do so by undermining a victim’s social status or relationships. Social media give middle- and high-school girls a platform on which to carry out the style of aggression they favor, ostracizing and excluding other girls around the clock.

Social-media companies are of course aware of these problems, and to one degree or another have endeavored to prevent cyberbullying. But their various motivations are, to say the least, complex. A recently leaked Facebook document indicated that the company had been touting to advertisers its ability to determine teens’ emotional state based on their on-site behavior, and even to pinpoint “moments when young people need a confidence boost.” Facebook acknowledged that the document was real, but denied that it offers “tools to target people based on their emotional state.”

In July 2014, a 13-year-old girl in North Texas woke to the smell of something burning. Her phone had overheated and melted into the sheets. National news outlets picked up the story, stoking readers’ fears that their cellphone might spontaneously combust. To me, however, the flaming cellphone wasn’t the only surprising aspect of the story. Why, I wondered, would anyone sleep with her phone beside her in bed? It’s not as though you can surf the web while you’re sleeping. And who could slumber deeply inches from a buzzing phone?

Curious, I asked my undergraduate students at San Diego State University what they do with their phone while they sleep. Their answers were a profile in obsession. Nearly all slept with their phone, putting it under their pillow, on the mattress, or at the very least within arm’s reach of the bed. They checked social media right before they went to sleep, and reached for their phone as soon as they woke up in the morning (they had to—all of them used it as their alarm clock). Their phone was the last thing they saw before they went to sleep and the first thing they saw when they woke up. If they woke in the middle of the night, they often ended up looking at their phone. Some used the language of addiction. “I know I shouldn’t, but I just can’t help it,” one said about looking at her phone while in bed. Others saw their phone as an extension of their body—or even like a lover: “Having my phone closer to me while I’m sleeping is a comfort.”

It may be a comfort, but the smartphone is cutting into teens’ sleep: Many now sleep less than seven hours most nights. Sleep experts say that teens should get about nine hours of sleep a night; a teen who is getting less than seven hours a night is significantly sleep deprived. Fifty-seven percent more teens were sleep deprived in 2015 than in 1991. In just the four years from 2012 to 2015, 22 percent more teens failed to get seven hours of sleep.

The increase is suspiciously timed, once again starting around when most teens got a smartphone. Two national surveys show that teens who spend three or more hours a day on electronic devices are 28 percent more likely to get less than seven hours of sleep than those who spend fewer than three hours, and teens who visit social-media sites every day are 19 percent more likely to be sleep deprived. A meta-analysis of studies on electronic-device use among children found similar results: Children who use a media device right before bed are more likely to sleep less than they should, more likely to sleep poorly, and more than twice as likely to be sleepy during the day.

I’ve observed my toddler, barely old enough to walk, confidently swiping her way through an iPad.

Electronic devices and social media seem to have an especially strong ability to disrupt sleep. Teens who read books and magazines more often than the average are actually slightly less likely to be sleep deprived—either reading lulls them to sleep, or they can put the book down at bedtime. Watching TV for several hours a day is only weakly linked to sleeping less. But the allure of the smartphone is often too much to resist.

Sleep deprivation is linked to myriad issues, including compromised thinking and reasoning, susceptibility to illness, weight gain, and high blood pressure. It also affects mood: People who don’t sleep enough are prone to depression and anxiety. Again, it’s difficult to trace the precise paths of causation. Smartphones could be causing lack of sleep, which leads to depression, or the phones could be causing depression, which leads to lack of sleep. Or some other factor could be causing both depression and sleep deprivation to rise. But the smartphone, its blue light glowing in the dark, is likely playing a nefarious role.

The correlations between depression and smartphone use are strong enough to suggest that more parents should be telling their kids to put down their phone. As the technology writer Nick Bilton has reported, it’s a policy some Silicon Valley executives follow. Even Steve Jobs limited his kids’ use of the devices he brought into the world.

What’s at stake isn’t just how kids experience adolescence. The constant presence of smartphones is likely to affect them well into adulthood. Among people who suffer an episode of depression, at least half become depressed again later in life. Adolescence is a key time for developing social skills; as teens spend less time with their friends face-to-face, they have fewer opportunities to practice them. In the next decade, we may see more adults who know just the right emoji for a situation, but not the right facial expression.

I realize that restricting technology might be an unrealistic demand to impose on a generation of kids so accustomed to being wired at all times. My three daughters were born in 2006, 2009, and 2012. They’re not yet old enough to display the traits of iGen teens, but I have already witnessed firsthand just how ingrained new media are in their young lives. I’ve observed my toddler, barely old enough to walk, confidently swiping her way through an iPad. I’ve experienced my 6-year-old asking for her own cellphone. I’ve overheard my 9-year-old discussing the latest app to sweep the fourth grade. Prying the phone out of our kids’ hands will be difficult, even more so than the quixotic efforts of my parents’ generation to get their kids to turn off MTV and get some fresh air. But more seems to be at stake in urging teens to use their phone responsibly, and there are benefits to be gained even if all we instill in our children is the importance of moderation. Significant effects on both mental health and sleep time appear after two or more hours a day on electronic devices. The average teen spends about two and a half hours a day on electronic devices. Some mild boundary-setting could keep kids from falling into harmful habits.

In my conversations with teens, I saw hopeful signs that kids themselves are beginning to link some of their troubles to their ever-present phone. Athena told me that when she does spend time with her friends in person, they are often looking at their device instead of at her. “I’m trying to talk to them about something, and they don’t actually look at my face,” she said. “They’re looking at their phone, or they’re looking at their Apple Watch.” “What does that feel like, when you’re trying to talk to somebody face-to-face and they’re not looking at you?,” I asked. “It kind of hurts,” she said. “It hurts. I know my parents’ generation didn’t do that. I could be talking about something super important to me, and they wouldn’t even be listening.”

Once, she told me, she was hanging out with a friend who was texting her boyfriend. “I was trying to talk to her about my family, and what was going on, and she was like, ‘Uh-huh, yeah, whatever.’ So I took her phone out of her hands and I threw it at my wall.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “You play volleyball,” I said. “Do you have a pretty good arm?” “Yep,” she replied.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...ration/534198/





Court Says Politicians Can't Block People on Social Media

The decision could have ramifications on the lawsuit filed against the president.
Mariella Moon

A federal court in Virginia just handed down a verdict that could affect a lawsuit against the president for blocking users on Twitter. US District Judge James Cacheris has ruled that Phyllis Randall, chairwoman of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, violated the right to free speech of a constituent she blocked on Facebook. Brian Davison said he was blocked after accusing the Loudoun School Board of corruption in his reply to the chairwoman's post on her Facebook page asking local citizens for their thoughts and feedback.

Judge Cacheris explained that since Randall is acting as a public official on her Facebook page, she violated the First Amendment by "suppressing critical commentary regarding elected officials." What she did, the judge said, is a form of viewpoint discrimination, which the ACLU describes as unconstitutional, since it tramples upon a person's right to present dissenting opinions without fear of prosecution.

Randall's lawyer argued that her Facebook page doesn't represent the government, because she doesn't use the county's resources to maintain it. But since she used her page to solicit comments from constituents during office hours, the judge wasn't swayed by the argument. The chairwoman also said that she only deleted Davison's comment because it mentioned family members of elected officials and that she unbanned him 12 hours later. Clearly, that explanation didn't affect the judge's decision either.

Despite the ruling, Randall isn't facing any penalty, and the consequences of her actions are fairly minor. It's the decision itself that's notable. As Judge Cacheris wrote in his ruling, the case "raises important questions about the constitutional limitations applicable to social media accounts maintained by elected officials." Indeed, the senior staff attorney of Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute (aka the plaintiff in the lawsuit against President Trump) told The Wall Street Journal:

"We hope the courts look to this opinion as a road map in holding that it is unconstitutional for President Trump to block his critics on Twitter."
https://www.engadget.com/2017/07/30/...-social-media/





Senators: Alter Internet Laws to Hold Backpage Liable for Sex Trafficking
Aamer Madhani

A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation Tuesday that aims to make it easier to sue and criminally prosecute operators of online classified sites like Backpage.com that have been used to advertise sex workers.

The proposed bill would amend the Communications Decency Act to eliminate a provision that shields operators of websites from being liable for content posted by third-party users.

In addition to removing liability protections for websites that facilitate “unlawful sex acts with sex trafficking victims,” lawmakers are seeking to amend the CDA to allow state prosecutors — not just federal law enforcement — to take action against individuals and businesses that use websites to violate federal sex trafficking laws.

"For too long, courts around the country have ruled that Backpage can continue to facilitate illegal sex trafficking online with no repercussions," said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio. "The Communications Decency Act is a well-intentioned law, but it was never intended to help protect sex traffickers who prey on the most innocent and vulnerable among us. This bipartisan, narrowly crafted bill will help protect vulnerable women and young girls from these horrific crimes.”

Liz McDougall, senior counsel for Backpage, declined to comment on the bill, which has been dubbed the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. Similar legislation proposed earlier this year in the House by Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Mo., now has more than 100 sponsors.

The legislative push marks the latest effort by federal lawmakers to go after Backpage, the controversial website that the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children says accounts for 73% of child sex trafficking reports in the U.S.

Law enforcement and anti-trafficking advocates have long sought to hold the operators of Backpage responsible through civil lawsuits, charging that operators have knowingly facilitated sex trafficking by providing a cloak of anonymity for pimps and making it easy for johns to use the site to arrange meetings with prostitutes.

But Backpage has managed to avoid liability in civil lawsuits filed against the company by sex trafficking victims by successfully arguing that the CDA ensures that they can’t be held liable for the speech of users of the site. Tech companies and free speech proponents have also raised concerns about making changes to the liability provision, arguing it protects free expression on the Internet.

The Internet Association, the Washington, D.C.-based trade group that counts Amazon, Facebook and Google among its members, said "rogue operators" such as Backpage need to be held responsible. But the association raised concerns the proposed legislation is "overly broad" and argued it would "be counterproductive in the fight to combat human trafficking."

"While not the intention of the bill, it would create a new wave of frivolous and unpredictable actions against legitimate companies rather than addressing underlying criminal behavior," Internet Association president and CEO Michael Beckerman said in a statement. "Furthermore, it will impose new, substantial liability risks for companies that take proactive measures to prevent trafficking online, hampering the ability of websites to fight illegal activity."

Lawmakers have been ratcheting up the pressure against the Dutch-owned, Texas-headquartered company over the last several months.

Last week, Portman and Sens. Tom Carper, D-Del., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., announced they formally recommended the Justice Department launch a criminal investigation of Backpage.

In January, the company announced it was shuttering access to the adult section of its website within the U.S. The move came as the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a scathing report that charged Backpage operators systematically edits its escort ads to filter out words that would suggest the site was promoting the trafficking of children. Pimps, however, continue to use the website’s “dating” section to advertise sex workers, according to lawmakers.

In October, then-California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced pimping charges against Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer and charges of conspiracy to commit pimping against shareholders Michael Lacey and James Larkin. A Sacramento County judge tossed out the charges, noting the Communications Decency Act.

In addition to Portman and McCaskill, who launched the two-year-long Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations probe into Backpage's business, 13 Republicans and five Democrats announced their support of the bill to alter the CDA.

"Until our investigation showed Backpage was actively facilitating sex trafficking, the company had repeatedly used the federal law that protects online platforms to escape accountability for the disgusting crimes it aided," McCaskill said in a statement. "But even as we’ve helped deny Backpage its legal shield in these cases, we need a broader effort to stop the next Backpage, before it starts."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...ing/528493001/





A Bill Intended to Stop Sex Trafficking Could Significantly Curtail Internet Freedom
Mike Godwin

No one can dispute that there is sex trafficking in the United States, or that criminals now use the internet to facilitate sex trafficking and other crimes, just as they also use mobile phones and even the U.S. Postal Service. Make no mistake: Sex trafficking is reprehensible, and its perpetrators deserve to be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

But some members of Congress seem to believe the internet itself is to blame for sex trafficking. And they're now trying to rush through legislation that would make it easier for state governments (as well as the federal government) to punish online service providers when criminals use their services.

That’s nuts. The internet we know and rely on today depends on a carefully balanced framework of laws that, by design, protect online service providers from being sued in every jurisdiction or prosecuted by every ambitious prosecutor who wants a headline.

Congress very deliberately set up this legal framework so that crimes on the internet—an inherently interjurisdictional medium—are primarily a federal matter. Currently, there are two basic federal laws that provide safe harbors to online platforms for content disseminated by their users. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act deals specifically with copyright infringement, while Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act generally addresses most other kinds of legal liability that service providers might routinely face. So, for example, YouTube wasn’t liable for copyright infringement when a user uploaded a video of a baby dancing to a Prince song on its site, and AOL wasn’t liable for any defamation when Matt Drudge republished a defamatory statement about Sidney Blumenthal on its site. This is as it should be: Individual perpetrators, not intermediary platforms, are usually the more appropriate targets.

This framework may not be perfect. For instance, there may be room for the DMCA’s notice-and-takedown provisions to be improved even if it generally gets the balance right. But these two laws help support and protect the innovative online ecosystem we have today. Neither the narrow provisions of the DMCA nor the broad protections of Section 230 offer platforms a blanket protection against prosecution or lawsuits. Importantly, Section 230’s liability protection does extend to federal criminal laws—including sex trafficking or conspiracies to facilitate criminal activity. But without the limited protections the DMCA and Section 230 provide, it’s likely that services like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter wouldn’t exist. These laws are essential to making today’s robust online public squares possible, and they will likely be essential for the next generation of online entrepreneurs.

Yet now that entire online ecosystem is in danger. Sens. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., have recently introduced the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2017 (S.1693), which would unravel Section 230 protections and to make platforms liable for being in the middle of sex-trafficking enterprises. SESTA's sponsors have made clear they’re specifically going after Backpage.com and other internet classified-ad websites that some might use to market sex services.

But here’s the thing: the U.S. Justice Department already has the authority to investigate and prosecute them. They also can punish corporate online platforms when they cross the line. In fact, Portman has already asked the DOJ to do exactly that in the case of alleged wrongdoing by the online-classifieds service Backpage.com. Furthermore, SESTA’s language is so broad that it could lead to state lawsuits and prosecutions of sites that don’t carry any advertising at all. It could sweep in every online service that hosts user-generated content—perhaps even including email services and comments sections.

To draw an analogy, the bill would be as if Congress decided that FedEx was legally liable for anything illegal it ever carries, even where it’s ignorant of the infraction and acts in good faith. That would be a crazy notion in itself, but rather than applying only to FedEx's tech equivalents—the giants like Google and Facebook—it also would apply to smaller, less well-moneyed services like Wikipedia. Even if the larger internet companies can bear the burden of defending against a vastly increased number of prosecutions and lawsuits—and that’s by no means certain—it would be fatal for smaller companies and startups. Amending Section 230's broad liability protection for internet service providers would expand the scope of criminal and civil liability for those services in ways that would force the tech companies to drastically alter or eliminate features that users have come to rely on. It could strangle many internet startups in their cribs.

SESTA's co-sponsors—who also include Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz.; Claire McCaskill, D-Conn., and Ted Cruz, R-Texas, among others—are rumored to be attempting to push the bill through quickly without the kinds of hearings and evidence-gathering that ought to be afforded to an issue of this magnitude and complexity. It has been suggested that SESTA could be attached to the National Defense Authorization Act, a large “must-pass” funding bill for the U.S. Defense Department. For this to happen, it would have to go through McCain, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee. He may be a co-sponsor of the legislation, but let’s hope the maverick sticks with his laudable talk of returning to regular order—and this overly broad bill is subjected to the greater consideration and scrutiny it deserves under the normal committee process.

I’m not saying Congress shouldn't consider laws—including potentially amending Section 230—that would improve the prosecution of sex trafficking and better protect children from sexual abuse. But we need to update those laws in thoughtful ways that also safeguard the internet on which we’ve grown to rely. Both the substance and process for this legislation drastically falls short of the kind of reasoned balancing of interests we have every right to expect from Congress. Worse, it could hobble the fast-paced economic and personal benefits we expect and hope for from the internet. When we think about protecting our children, we need to think about saving the internet for them, too.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_te...freedo m.html





Defense Calls into Question Owner of Child Pornography Files in Romanek Case

The Loveland man was arrested in February 2014.
Mollie Muchna

Defense attorneys asked jurors in the opening statements of Stanley Romanek's trial on Tuesday to pay attention to the facts in the case, despite the gravity of the charges.

"No one is here to say child pornography is OK in any shape or form," attorney Elizabeth McClintock said.

Romanek, a 54-year-old Loveland man and UFO enthusiast who has gained notoriety for his work, is accused of possession and distribution of child pornography.

His trial began Monday, and jury selection continued until Tuesday afternoon. Romanek is being tried in Judge Susan Blanco's courtroom in the Eighth Judicial District in Fort Collins.

McClintock asked that jurors hold the prosecution to the burden of proof required.

She told jurors that they will hear a lot of evidence throughout the trial tying the child pornography images and videos to a specific IP address, but "you're not going to hear them tie any of their evidence to Mr. Romanek."

Romanek was first charged in 2013 and pleaded not guilty to the charges in March 2016.

Eighth Judicial District Attorney Joshua Ritter told jurors that they would be hearing a lot of technical information about file sharing networks and forensics, but he cautioned that the case is about the "victimization of children."

Ritter gave details of Romanek's arrest in February 2014, which came after a long-term investigation into online possession and sharing of child pornography first started by the Department of Homeland Security, and Ritter expanded upon information in the arrest affidavit.

Police seized computers from Romanek's home in April 2013 in the 3900 block of Ash Avenue.

Ritter told jurors they would hear about the investigation and file sharing network from the Department of Homeland Security, forensics experts and Loveland Police Detective Brian Koopman, who was identified as an expert in cyber crime investigations, peer-to-peer networks and forensic computer analysis.

In his opening statements, Ritter referenced the reported friendship between Romanek and his wife Lisa, and former Loveland police officer Tammy Fisher, who the prosecution says tipped the Romaneks off to the child pornography investigation. Ritter said while he can't say for sure what Fisher or Lisa Romanek's will say in their testimonies, the defense will see that during the time of their friendship between when they met and when Romanek was arrested, hard drives of computers in the Romanek household were erased.

And, Ritter said, the jury should expect to see the child pornography images.

"They are not pleasant images, but this is a criminal trial," he said.

Following opening statements, Koopman began to testify and Ritter finished questioning him, but the defense plans to finish its cross-examination of Koopman Wednesday morning.
https://www.coloradoan.com/story/new...ase/531541001/





11 Popular Online Piracy Tools From The Turn Of The Century: Do You Remember Using Any Of Them?
Jayesh Shinde

Humanity's thirst for getting free things can never be quenched.

Once upon a time, long before TPB came along...

As long as there's a working Internet connection to piggyback on, everything from software applications, music albums, popular movies and the latest Game Of Thrones episode is fair game.

Piracy began as file-sharing tools grew in popularity in the late '90s and early 2000s. Here are some of the early software tools and apps that became notorious for spreading unauthorized movies, music and all sorts of files over the Internet.

1) Napster

Created in 1999, Napster quickly became infamous for illegal sharing of MP3 files. Because of its popularity, it actually started hurting music companies and record labels -- Metallica even asked it fans not to use Napster, a move which didn't go down too well with fans, obviously.

2) eDonkey2000

Released in 2000, eDonkey2000 became famous among online filesharers for its better handling of fragmented file pieces as they travelled over the Internet.

3) Kazaa

The Kazaa Media Desktop became very popular among Indian filesharers, soon after its 2001 release. It sported a rich library of content across different file types and genres. Contrary to its "no spyware" claim, Kazaa was notorious for installing a whole host of malware and adware on unsuspecting online pirates.

4) Morpheus

The stylistic 'M' logo was an iconic sign of Morpheus, another filesharing tool that gained infamy and a lot of users in the early 2000s. It was big on illegal piracy of music, before diversifying all sorts of content types -- as was the case with any online filesharing tool at the time.

5) Ares

More than anything else, Ares became famous because it had a cool new multimedia player built into it, allowing you to play the music or video files that you were streaming through its network. And it did a pretty good job of it, too.

6) Limewire

What set LimeWire apart from other filesharing tools during the early 2000s is that it was Java based -- it looked and felt different from other filesharing tools you would install on your machine. Secondly, it was a big spyware magnet.

7) Bearshare

Bearshare is another relic from the Internet's past. Along with the ability lookup files and download them, Bearshare also had a multimedia player built in.

8) Audiogalaxy

Audiogalaxy went through multiple reincarnations, but for a brief four year period during the late '90s and early 2000s, it was one of the most popular tools for illegally downloading music files or MP3s.

9) DC++

This online piracy tool gained notoriety through college campuses across India and local Internet providers. DC++ was also famous for having content files not found on any other P2P network.

10) BitTorrent

BitTorrent started off as a peer-to-peer data transfer technology, but later debuted as a standalone tool for downloading data from the Internet. It became a very popular conduit for the spread of illegal piracy, obviously.

11) uTorrent

Arguably one of the most widely used filesharing tools available online right now, with close to 200 million users around the world, uTorrent has made it easier to share files over P2P than ever before. You'd be surprised to know that the app dates back to 2005!
http://www.indiatimes.com/technology...em-326887.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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