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Old 03-08-22, 05:17 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 6th, 22

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August 6th, 2022




Widely Mocked Anti-Piracy Ads Made People Pirate More, Study Finds

A behavioral economics study of anti-piracy ads reveals that they’re largely ineffective and often encourage piracy.
Matthew Gault

An infamous anti-piracy ad from 2004 tried to convince us all that downloading a pirated movie is no different than stealing a car. We’ve all seen it, but according to a new study published in The Information Society, we were not convinced. In fact, the study found that by hugely overstating the negative impact of piracy, the ad may have caused people to pirate even more.

As first reported by TorrentFreak, the study, “Doing more with less: Behavioral insights for anti-piracy messages,” took particular aim at a 2004 public service announcement created by the film industry. The study is a critique of the entertainment industry’s attempts to curb piracy viewed through the lens of behavioral economics. It asks how movie, music, and TV studios could have spent so much money on a campaign and failed so spectacularly.

The biggest reason is that pirates don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. “Information technology seems to facilitate the moral disengagement of infringers, who do not perceive themselves as thieves,” the study said. “For instance, the terms used by infringers frequently feature a form of euphemistic labeling (e.g., “file sharing”, “fighting the system”) and some pirates rationalize that unlike common theft, they do not deprive the owner of the copyrighted properly.”

According to the study, public anti-piracy campaigns fail because, rather than curb this behavior, they’ve encouraged it. One of the biggest problems that they tend to overstate the nature of the crime being committed and the losses suffered by the entertainment industry.

The 2004 anti-piracy ad that compares stealing a car to downloading a movie is over the top. It looks like a throwback to 1990s anti drug commercials and opens with the ominous lines “You wouldn’t steal a car.” Comparing the loss of a price of a movie ticket to grand theft auto didn’t play and the ad became an instant meme in the early days of the internet. It became so famous that it was parodied in more mainstream spaces like the British sitcom The IT Crowd.

“The most striking example might be the (in)famous ‘You would not steal a car’ awareness video aired in cinemas and on DVDs worldwide during the 2000s,” the paper said. “It compared downloading a movie to various forms of stealing, including reasonably relevant ones (stealing a DVD in a store) and somewhat absurd others (stealing handbags, TVs, cars), which diluted down the message.”

The study also called out attempts to make the piracy personal—highlighting the loss of revenue to individual people in the movie industry. It’s true that films and TV shows are made by thousands of people, many of them working wild hours for little play. But often the film studios picked the wrong mouthpieces for this tactic.

In India, a series of anti-piracy PSA starred the rich and famous. “All videos starred well-known actors, whose net worth is estimated to be $22–$400 million dollars, in a country where the annual per capita income is a bit less than $2,000,” the study said. “This can offer to pirates a moral justification: they only steal [from] the rich to ‘feed the poor’, a form of ‘Robin Hood effect’ that makes even more sense with some cultural or sport-related goods.”

Another problem is what the study identifies as “the social proof lever.” Anti-piracy ads often focus on how pervasive the problem is. “Given that individuals tend to conform to perceived social norms, they can be leveraged to nudge people toward a given behavior. Social norms have been successfully used as behavioral levers in diverse fields, such as wearing seatbelts, encouraging charitable donations, and energy savings,” the paper said.

But anti-piracy campaigns make piracy seem like the social norm. If everyone is doing it, the logic goes, it probably isn’t that bad. “Informing directly or indirectly individuals that many people pirate is counterproductive and encourages piracy by driving the targeted individuals to behave similarly,” the study said. “These messages provide to the would-be pirates the needed rationalization by emphasizing that ‘everyone is doing it.”

The study had one last piece of advice for movie studios: stop airing anti-piracy ads in the theater. “These messages are frequently edited out by pirates before being redistributed through the internet, the study said. “Consequently, individuals who see the message are paying users…displaying descriptive information about how widespread piracy is to paying users is ill-advised.”

Internet piracy isn’t going away and the reasons people pirate are complicated. The pandemic and the Balkanization of streaming services have led to a massive surge in piracy. But it’s hard to know how bad the problem is because repeated studies have shown that the biggest pirates tend to be super users who are already spending a lot of money on legal content.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/93aa...re-study-finds





Pirated Books Thrive on Amazon — and Authors say Web Giant Ignores Fraud
Theo Wayt

Literary fraudsters are flooding Amazon with counterfeit books, authors and publishers say. Gado via Getty Images

Amazon is getting flooded with counterfeit versions of books, angering customers and authors alike who say the site is doing little to fight the literary fraudsters.

Forgeries sold by third parties through Amazon range from e-books to hardcovers and fiction to non-fiction — but the issue is especially widespread for textbooks, whose sky-high sticker prices draw in scammers, publishing industry sources say.

“The damage to authors is very real,” Matthew Hefti, a novelist and attorney who has found counterfeit versions of his own book on Amazon, told The Post. “It’s such a pervasive problem.”

The end result is that readers are getting stuck with illegible books that bleed ink or fall apart, while authors and publishers lose revenue to the publishing pirates.

Amazon, however, takes a cut of third-party sales regardless of whether the books they ship are real or fake, giving the company no incentive to crack down on coutenterfeits, people in the publishing industry gripe. They say the site that’s typically known for speedy service is excessively slow to respond to their concerns about fakes.

‘Pages unreadable’

Martin Kleppmann, a computer science researcher and academic, has seen one-star Amazon reviews of his data modeling textbook roll in for years, with angry customers complaining about unreadable text, missing pages and other quality issues. He blames counterfeiters, who he says have sold pirated versions.

“This book is very badly printed,” reads one angry review of Kleppmann’s book. “Ink goes everywhere after 10 minutes reading.”

“Pages are printed overlapped,” another review reads. “About 20 pages unreadable.”

A third reviewer gripes that they had to order Kleppmann’s book from Amazon three different times before they received a usable copy. The two counterfeits had see-through paper and other defects.

“I see lots of negative reviews complaining about print quality,” Kleppmann told The Post, adding that his publisher has asked Amazon to fix the issue but the company hasn’t done anything.

Amazon spokesperson Julia Lee said in a statement to The Post, “We prioritize customer and author trust and continuously monitor and have measures in place to prevent prohibited products from being listed.”

Amazon spent more than $900 million globally and employed more than 12,000 people to protect customers from counterfeit, fraud and other forms of abuse, Lee said.

But Kleppmann isn’t the only author who’s struggled with counterfeits on Amazon. Google deep learning researcher Francois Chollet complained about counterfeiters in a popular Twitter thread earlier in July, accusing Amazon of doing “nothing” to crack down on widespread counterfeit versions of his textbook.

“Anyone who has bought my book from Amazon in the past few months hasn’t bought a genuine copy, but a lower-quality counterfeit copy printed by various fraudulent sellers,” Chollet wrote. “We’ve notified [Amazon] multiple times, nothing happened. The fraudulent sellers have been in activity for years.”

I've been asked about this a lot, so let me provide a quick FAQ.

Q: What's the nature of the issue?

A: Anyone who has bought my book from Amazon in the past few month hasn't bought a genuine copy, but a lower-quality counterfeit copy printed by various fraudulent sellers. https://t.co/VQ06AF0igs
— François Chollet (@fchollet) July 23, 2022

Even The Post’s own columnist Miranda Devine saw fake versions of her book about Hunter Biden, “Laptop from Hell,” spread on Amazon last year.

After Devine’s publishers notified Amazon about the issue, the counterfeits remained on the site for days, she said.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on the specific examples of counterfeits in this story.

Shocking @amazon that you won’t remove this counterfeit of my book #LaptopFromHell. This defrauds customers – incl. a 91-yr-old – who are writing to me in disappointment having paid for a fake book which is #9 paperback bestseller. Publisher sent legal letter, no action 3 days. pic.twitter.com/rTfBlXkEF8
— Miranda Devine (@mirandadevine) December 3, 2021

‘Endless game of whack-a-mole’

Amazon generally requires authors and publishers to comb the site for counterfeit versions of their own books, then fight through layers of bureaucracy to get the fakes taken down, according to intellectual property attorney Katie Sunstrom.

“The burden is on the seller to get Amazon to stop the infringers and counterfeiters from selling on their system,” Sunstrom told The Post. “There’s no impetus on Amazon to take care of it.”

Kleppmann’s publisher, O’Reilly Media, told The Post that it routinely files complaints with Amazon about fraudulent sellers, but that the company is often slow to address their concerns.

“It is an endless game of whack-a-mole where accounts simply resurface days or weeks later,” O’Reilly vice president of content strategy Rachel Roumeliotis told The Post, adding that Amazon will respond to “individual symptoms as discovered by publishers” but does nothing to stop the “systemic flow” of counterfeits.

“Amazon spends a lot of time trying to combat the perception its marketplace perpetuates fraud because it’s known that there is a problem — yet its platform and policies are built in ways that facilitate it,” Roumeliotis said.

Counterfeits spreading unchecked can put authors’ careers at risk, according to Hefti.

Beyond cutting into the profits authors make off books they’ve already published, counterfeit sales don’t count toward official sales figures. Lower sales figures will, in turn, make it more difficult for authors to ink future book deals, Hefti said.

“The model is so exploitative for writers,” he said. “I don’t even know if there is any fixing it, at least not without Amazon having to spend a ton of money and lose a bunch of existing profit.”
https://nypost.com/2022/07/31/pirate...ignores-fraud/





One Piece, Overlord Publishers Sue Major Manga Piracy Site

Manga publishers Shueisha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa are suing Mangamura for 1.9 billion after the pirating site illegally posted 17 popular manga.
Brenna Lonner

Several manga publishers have joined together to sue a massive pirating site for illegally distributing popular series, including One Piece and Overlord.

Shueisha, Shogakukan and Kadokawa are suing Mangamura, a site that pirated several of their most popular titles, according to Otaku Magazine. The suit is for 1.9 billion yen -- about $14.2 million USD -- a price that covers the estimated damages of seventeen pirated manga series. This number might still be a conservative estimate of the damages the publishers actually sustained, however, given that the seventeen titles listed in the lawsuit are far from the only titles pirated by Mangamura. Mangamura has been shut down, but the suit is a way for publishers to recoup a fraction of the damages caused by Mangamura and sites like it.

This is not the first time Mangamura has landed in deep water for pirating manga. Its administrator, Romi Hoshino, was found guilty of copyright infringement. Hoshino was sentenced to three years in prison. In addition, Hoshino was sentenced to pay two fines adding up to a combined total of 72 million yen -- over $650,000 in US dollars.

Mangamura is responsible for pirating several incredibly influential titles. One Piece, in particular, is one of the longest-running and most popular manga series ever created. With over 1,000 chapters released, One Piece has been releasing new content for the past two and a half decades, and Luffy and his crew's story is just about to enter its final arc. It's also the best-selling manga series of all time. As popular and prolific as One Piece is, the damages caused by pirating the series are undoubtedly immense, contributing to the hefty sum listed in the lawsuit against Mangamura.

The complete list of titles included in the lawsuit is as follows: Dorohedoro, Erased, Golden Rough, Hinamatsuri, Kanji wa Use o Ai Shisugiteru, Karakul Circus, Kengan Ashura, Kingdom, Mushoku Tensei, One Piece, Overlord, The Rising of the Shield Hero, Sgt. Frog, Tasogare Ryūseigun, Trinity Seven, Wise Man’s Grandchild and YAWARA!.

Pirating manga harms more than just large publishing companies. It can impact the livelihood of manga artists and the industry as a whole. In a statement released after Hoshino's trial, Shueisha declared, "If the works that those who have given their all to create are given away for free, it damages the foundation for the creation of interesting works."

There are plenty of ways for fans to access manga easily and legally. Sites like Viz Media and Shueisha's Manga Plus make popular manga series available for fans worldwide.
https://www.cbr.com/one-piece-overlo...a-piracy-site/





Spain: 3hr Limit for Pirate Site Takedown
David Del Valle

Spanish telco Telefónica and the country’s top flight football league La Liga have won two legal battles, with courts ruling that websites pirating TV content will have to be blocked within three hours of the operator reporting them as being illegal. This will be carried out on a weekly basis and will come into force week commencing August 8th.

This is a new legal tool for operators and La Liga in their fight against piracy that causes is estimated to cause losses of over €2.5 billion a year.

Meanwhile, La Liga is adding all matches from the UEFA League to its licensed premises service LaLigaTV bar. In addition, along with tech company Streamline, La Liga is launching the app La Liga Plus in China to offer La Liga Santander and La Liga Smart to Chinese viewers in a freemium format, with free of charge and pay-TV football matches.
https://advanced-television.com/2022...site-takedown/





Record Labels’ War on ISPs and Piracy Nets Multiple Settlements with Charter

Confidential settlements could lead to more terminations of Internet subscribers.
Jon Brodkin

Charter Communications has agreed to settle piracy lawsuits filed by the major record labels, which accused the cable Internet provider of failing to terminate the accounts of subscribers who illegally download copyrighted songs.

Sony, Universal, Warner, and their various subsidiaries sued Charter in US District Court in Colorado in March 2019 in a suit that claimed the ISP helps subscribers pirate music by selling packages with higher Internet speeds. They filed another lawsuit against Charter in the same court in August 2021.

Both cases were settled. The record labels and Charter told the court of their settlements on Tuesday in filings that said, "The Parties hereby notify the Court that they have resolved the above-captioned action." Upon the settlements, the court vacated the pending trials and asked the parties to submit dismissal papers within 28 days.

Charter subsidiary Bright House Networks also settled a similar lawsuit in US District Court for the Middle District of Florida this week. The record labels' case in Florida was settled one day before a scheduled trial, as TorrentFreak reported Tuesday. The case was dismissed with prejudice after the settlement.

No details on any of the settlements were given in the documents notifying the courts. A three-week jury trial in one of the Colorado cases was scheduled to begin in June 2023 but is no longer needed.

The question for Internet users is whether the settlements mean that Charter will be more aggressive in terminating subscribers who illegally download copyrighted material. Charter declined to comment today when we asked if it agreed to increase account terminations of subscribers accused of piracy. We also contacted the big three record labels and will update this article if they provide any information on the settlements.

$1 billion Cox verdict may force ISPs to cut off subscribers

Even if the settlements have no specific provision on terminating subscribers, Charter presumably has to pay the record labels to settle the claims. That could make the country's second-biggest ISP more likely to terminate subscribers accused of piracy in order to prevent future lawsuits.

A jury ruled in December 2019 that Cox must pay $1 billion in damages to the major record labels in a case filed in US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. That decision raised alarm bells for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Center For Democracy and Technology, the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, and consumer-advocacy group Public Knowledge.

Those groups warned in a June 2021 court filing that the verdict, if not overturned, "will force ISPs to terminate more subscribers with less justification or risk staggering liability." The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit heard oral arguments in March 2022 and has not yet issued a ruling.
Charter motion to dismiss denied

In the Colorado court, the record labels' complaint said Charter "has knowingly contributed to, and reaped substantial profits from, massive copyright infringement committed by thousands of its subscribers. Charter has insisted on doing nothing—despite receiving thousands of notices that detailed the illegal activity of its subscribers, despite its clear legal obligation to address the widespread, illegal downloading of copyrighted works on its Internet services, and despite being sued previously by Plaintiffs for similar conduct."

Charter argued in a motion to dismiss the case that "a failure to terminate a customer's access to the Internet based solely upon unverified (and unverifiable) notices alleging past infringement does not demonstrate the requisite intent by an ISP to encourage infringement." Charter said it has a "policy to not terminate customer accounts based solely upon the receipt of notices containing unverifiable accusations of infringement."

Charter also wrote that "[p]laintiffs do not (and cannot) allege that termination restricts access to the infringing content. It is common sense that terminating a customer's Internet connection does not prevent a customer from finding another source of Internet access, nor does it impact the availability of the allegedly infringing content hosted via peer-to-peer networks or programs. Charter has no more ability to block access to peer-to-peer networks than a subscriber's electric company." Charter's motion to dismiss the case was denied, and the company ultimately chose not to go to trial.

In Florida, the judge dismissed the record labels' claim for vicarious liability, but the industry's complaint also sought damages for vicarious copyright infringement.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-fuels-piracy/





Broadband Subscriber Growth Slows to Pre-Pandemic Levels
Sara Fischer

Cable companies are being downgraded by Wall Street analysts in response to weak broadband growth coming out of the pandemic.

Why it matters: Cable companies have managed to stay afloat amid the cord-cutting crisis thanks to their booming broadband businesses. But some analysts see that safety net beginning to fade.

• Jonathan Chaplin, managing partner at New Street Research, wrote in two notes to clients that the firm has lowered its broadband subscriber estimates for the second time this year for both Charter and Comcast.
• "We have limited conviction in a quick recovery, given limited visibility all around," he wrote regarding Charter. "We are hoping for a turnaround later in the quarter but have low conviction," he wrote regarding Comcast.

Driving the news: Comcast's stock slid last week after it reported flat broadband subscriber additions for the second quarter of 2022.

• The telecom giant was still able to increase broadband revenues, but its growth has been slowed by increased competition and more users relying on mobile hotspots and fixed wireless plans.
• Charter lost broadband subscribers for the first time last quarter. Executives cited customers rolling off the government's broadband subsidy program as a major contributor to its customer loss.
• "Excluding that headwind, we organically grew 38,000 internet customers in the quarter," Charter chief financial officer Jessica Fischer told investors.

Between the lines: The federal government’s new program to help low-income households afford internet service decreased the monthly discount from $50 a month last year to $30 a month this year.

• Charter noted it lost customers in the transition, because they either opted not to continue their service or didn’t meet the requirements for the Affordable Connectivity Program, particularly the requirement that customers use their service in each 30-day period.

Yes, but: Both companies pointed to low churn figures, which suggests part of the loss is attributable to a slowdown in moves across the country, due to supply chain issues and inflation, which resulted in fewer new customers.

• "[T]here’s been a dramatic slowdown in moves across our footprint with the second quarter below 2019 by 12% and the lowest we’ve experienced since the pandemic began," said Comcast CEO Brian Roberts.

The big picture: Telecom giants began the massive pivot to broadband once their core business of pay TV was threatened by cord-cutting around a decade ago.

• In that time, broadband "ushered in a decade-long rally in cable stocks," wrote Craig Moffett, senior analyst at MoffettNathanson. "Act II is now ending."
• "Charter’s broadband print, like Comcast’s yesterday, had a decidedly 'end of an era' feel," he wrote.

By the numbers: According to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, the rate of subscriber growth for wireline broadband has dropped to pre-pandemic levels, with the highest growth rates occurring during the back end of 2020.

What's next: Analysts argue that mobile and wireless internet will continue to be a bright spot for cable companies looking to withstand fixed broadband losses, but executives believe slowed broadband growth is only temporary.

• [W]e certainly expect a return to residential broadband subscriber additions," Roberts told investors. To remain competitive, Comcast plans to continue investing in plans bundling broadband with wireless.
• "[W]e're pretty optimistic, relatively speaking, that as the post-pandemic market activity levels return and normalize, that our share of broadband growth will rise," Charter CEO Tom Rutledge told investors.

Bottom line: "Everyone is sad that Act II (broadband) is over… but we’re in for a rousing Act III (mobile)," Moffett said.
https://www.axios.com/2022/08/02/bro...omcast-charter





SpaceX and Viasat Fight over Whether Starlink can Meet FCC Speed Obligations

Starlink still trying to get $886M in FCC funds awarded by Ajit Pai in 2020.
Jon Brodkin

Over a year and a half after tentatively winning $886 million in broadband funding from the government's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), SpaceX is still trying to get paid by the Federal Communications Commission. One problem for Starlink—though not the only problem—is a series of objections from satellite company Viasat, which says Starlink lacks the capacity and speed to meet FCC obligations.

In a new FCC filing, SpaceX denounced Viasat's "misguided campaign" against the Starlink funding. "Viasat is transparently attempting to have the Commission impede competition at all costs to protect its legacy technology," SpaceX told the FCC. The new SpaceX filing was submitted on Friday and posted to the FCC's website Monday, as pointed out by Light Reading.

But SpaceX might have struggled to get its funding even if Viasat never objected. Starlink was tentatively awarded $886 million in December 2020 by the FCC during the final weeks of Chairman Ajit Pai's tenure. Consumer advocacy group Free Press accused Pai of "subsidiz[ing] broadband for the rich," pointing out that Starlink was awarded money in urban areas including locations at or adjacent to major airports.

Starlink service isn't geographically restricted in the same way as wireline networks, but the RDOF and other programs require ISPs to bid on specific census blocks. Starlink won bids covering 642,925 homes and businesses in 35 states.

In addition to rural areas, SpaceX won "the right to serve a large number of very urban areas that the FCC's broken system deemed eligible for awards," Free Press said. A design flaw in the FCC's mapping system made it possible to bid on subsidies in census blocks that were "surrounded on all sides by fiber."

Pai’s FCC auction mismanaged

That RDOF auction was apparently mismanaged by Pai, as Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel announced in July 2021 that the agency must "clean up issues with the program's design originating from its adoption in 2020." The FCC cited "complaints that the program was poised to fund broadband to parking lots and well-served urban areas."

Rosenworcel's office sent letters to dozens of winning bidders, suggesting that they voluntarily give up portions of their funding. SpaceX was one of the auction's biggest winners, and Rosenworcel's FCC asked the company to give up funding in about 6 percent of the 113,900 census blocks where SpaceX tentatively won FCC grants.

The FCC letters to SpaceX and other ISPs pointed to concerns "that certain areas included in the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund auction are already served by one or more service providers that offer 25/3Mbps broadband service or otherwise raise significant concerns about wasteful spending, such as parking lots and international airports."

SpaceX didn't agree to give up any funding and is apparently still trying to get the full amount. While the FCC review of SpaceX's funding is ongoing, the commission has periodically released RDOF money to various other ISPs over the past year. The FCC also recently proposed $4.3 million in fines against 73 ISPs for defaulting on their bids.

Pai's auction also awarded $1.32 billion to a Las Vegas company called LTD Broadband to serve 528,088 locations in 15 states. But LTD subsequently "missed filing deadlines and failed to secure regulatory approvals needed to receive the money," The Wall Street Journal wrote.
Viasat: Starlink can’t meet speed requirement

Viasat submitted an analysis to the FCC in April 2021 claiming that Starlink won't be able to meet the speed obligations attached to the RDOF funding due to capacity limitations. SpaceX bid in the "Above Baseline" tier that requires at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds, and committed to latency of 100 ms or less. Viasat, which primarily uses geostationary satellites with worse latency than Starlink's low Earth satellites, didn't bid in the auction.

Viasat's most recent filing last month said, "Starlink still does not support the 100/20Mbps speeds that SpaceX is obligated to provide to all households covered by its provisionally winning RDOF bids" and that "Starlink is unable to do so because of its own system design limitations that cannot be overcome by launching more satellites."

Viasat cited Ookla speed tests in its July 2022 filing:

Ookla reports that in Q1 2022 Starlink users experienced median download speeds of 90.55Mbps (well under the 100Mbps speeds required under the RDOF framework) and median upload speeds of 9.33Mbps (less than half the 20Mbps speeds required under the RDOF framework). Importantly, Ookla's findings show a quarter-over-quarter decrease in median download speeds of about 14 percent, and a decrease in median upload speeds of at least 33 percent. In other words, the performance of the Starlink system has not improved over time in any consistent or persistent manner as SpaceX has deployed its system.

"As the number of Starlink subscribers increases, the system will become even more capacity-constrained, which is likely to impair network performance and constrain speeds for end users," Viasat also said. The areas in which SpaceX won FCC funding "are characterized by relatively high densities of users," Viasat wrote, pointing out that SpaceX's website warns of lower speeds in congested areas and during times of high usage.
SpaceX says it’s cooperating with FCC review

In its July 29 response, SpaceX said the "filing adds to Viasat's ongoing campaign to oppose every one of SpaceX's applications, regardless of the proceeding... Viasat is perhaps reinvigorated by recent Ookla data showing Starlink has been able to provide high-speed, low-latency broadband service vastly exceeding Viasat's performance."

SpaceX also previously denounced Viasat's objections in FCC filings in July 2021 and December 2021. The old and new SpaceX filings said the company is cooperating with FCC staff on the Starlink funding review.

"Viasat continues to ignore that the Commission specifically directed the Commission staff—not competitors—to review the merits of RDOF applications," SpaceX's new filing said. "Starlink has welcomed that staff review and has fully engaged within that Commission-mandated process to demonstrate its ability to meet all of its RDOF obligations and provide high-quality broadband service to consumers that for too long have gone unserved."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...t-pai-in-2020/





Too Many Servers Could Mean No New Homes in Parts of the UK

West London's electric grid is reaching its limits. New home construction could be banned because of data centers' energy usage.
Lauren Leffer

Data centers have caused skyrocketing power demand in parts of London. Now, new housing construction could be banned for more than a decade in some neighborhoods of the UK’s biggest city because the electricity grid is reaching capacity, as first reported on by the Financial Times. The reason: too many data centers are taking up too much electricity and hogging available fiber optic cables.

The Financial Times obtained multiple letters sent from the city’s government, the Greater London Authority (GLA), to developers. “Major new applicants to the distribution network . . . including housing developments, commercial premises and industrial activities will have to wait several years to receive new electricity connections,” said one note, according to the news outlet.

The GLA also confirmed the grid issue to Gizmodo in an email, and sent along text from one of the letters, which noted that for some areas utilities are saying “electricity connections will not be available for their sites until 2027 to 2030.” Though the Financial Times reported that at least one letter indicated making the necessary electric grid updates in London could take up until 2035.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the London Mayor told Gizmodo:

The Mayor is very concerned that electricity capacity constraints in three West London boroughs are creating a significant challenge for developers securing timely connections to the electricity network, which could affect the delivery of thousands of much-needed homes...The increased demand for electricity capacity in the area is believed to be largely due to a rapid influx of batteries and data centres.

Multiple data centers have been built in and around west London in recent years, particularly along the M4 corridor, which is a major tech hub. Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, HP, Sony, Dell, Huawei, and others all have campuses along the stretch of highway. “Data centres use large quantities of electricity, the equivalent of towns or small cities, to power servers and ensure resilience in service,” one of the GLA letters seen by the Financial Times reportedly said.

And the London government isn’t wrong. Everything you do on the internet has to be stored and processed somewhere. Information doesn’t come free, and scrolling, posting, and clicking all require data centers—huge conglomerations of servers, computers, and telecom systems that keep the online, on. Running, cooling, and maintaining each of these centers uses tons of electricity—the world’s largest data centers require the same amount of power as about 80,000 U.S. households.

The development delays in London are reportedly most severely impacting three boroughs in the west part of the city: Hillingdon, Ealing, and Hounslow.

From the Financial Times:

Developers are “still getting their heads round this, but our basic understanding is that developments of 25 units or more will be affected. Our understanding is that you just can’t build them,” said David O’Leary, policy director at the Home Builders Federation, a trade body.

Combined, those sections of London contain about 5,000 homes and make up about 11% of the city’s housing supply, according the Financial Times. London is in the grips of a major housing crisis. The city government has pledged to tackle the problem, in part, by building more homes—but these power infrastructure limitations could make that promise impossible.

Other places have been facing similar grid and power supply problems, with the expansion of big tech. The proliferation of data centers has been stressing Ireland’s electric grid in recent years. Back across the pond, cryptocurrency mining has been taxing the Texas grid, especially when high temperatures hit.

And between climate change and continued tech growth, things will likely only become more challenging. Europe’s recent heatwave made London’s data centers additionally demanding last week, when hot weather led to server failures at Oracle and Google. Even a massive amount of London’s available electricity isn’t enough to guarantee the UK’s data centers will be able to manage our new climate normal.
https://gizmodo.com/data-centers-lon...rid-1849342150





WhatsApp Boss Says No to AI filters Policing Encrypted Chat

'What's being proposed is that we ... read everyone's messages. I don't think people want that'
Jeff Burt

The head of WhatsApp will not compromise the security of its messenger service to bend to the UK government's efforts to scan private conversations.

Will Cathcart, who has been at parent company Meta for more than 12 years and head of WhatsApp since 2019, told the BBC that the popular communications service wouldn't downgrade or bypass its end-to-end encryption (EE2E) just for British snoops, saying it would be "foolish" to do so and that WhatsApp needs to offer a consistent set of standards around the globe.

"If we had to lower security for the world, to accommodate the requirement in one country, that ... would be very foolish for us to accept, making our product less desirable to 98 percent of our users because of the requirements from 2 percent," Cathcart told the broadcaster. "What's being proposed is that we – either directly or indirectly through software – read everyone's messages. I don't think people want that."

Strong EE2E ensures that only the intended sender and receiver of a message can read it, and not even the provider of the communications channel nor anyone eavesdropping on the encrypted chatter. The UK government is proposing that app builders add an automated AI-powered scanner in the pipeline – ideally in the client app – to detect and report illegal content, in this case child sex abuse material (CSAM).

The upside is that at least messages are encrypted as usual when transmitted: the software on your phone, say, studies the material, and continues on as normal if the data is deemed CSAM-free. One downside is that any false positives mean people's private communications get flagged up and potentially analyzed by law enforcement or a government agent.

Another downside is that the definition of what is filtered may gradually change over time, and before you know it: everyone's conversations are being automatically screened for things politicians have decided are verboten. And another downside is that client-side AI models that don't produce a lot of false positives are likely to be easily defeated, and are mainly good for catching well-known, unaltered CSAM examples.

Messenger services like WhatsApp and others have been at the center of a years-long debate around encryption and public safety. At issue is whether law enforcement agencies should be allowed to dip into the encrypted communications of billions of individuals to hunt down the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, CSAM, and organized crime, and whoever else comes along.

UK officials have been pushing for such government freedoms to filter, with Ian Levy, technical director of the UK National Cyber Security Center, and Crispin Robinson, technical director for cryptanalysis at British spy agency GCHQ, recently writing a research paper arguing for automated scanners that manage to protect the privacy of individuals.

"We have not identified any techniques that are likely to provide as accurate detection of child sexual abuse material as scanning of content, and whilst the privacy considerations that this type of technology raises must not be disregarded, we have presented arguments that suggest that it should be possible to deploy in configurations that mitigate many of the more serious privacy concerns," Levy and Robinson wrote. Note the "should be" and "many" caveats.

The European Union in May also proposed legislation that puts much of the responsibility for ferreting out and exposing such material on providers.

Some children's rights groups have been vehement that the need to protect children from exploitation should not be compromised by the argument for absolute privacy in communications. Andy Burrows, head of child safety online policy for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in the UK, told the Beeb that direct messaging is the "front line" of child sexual abuse. The charity has also asked for AI to be deployed in the front line against CSAM by probing private content on people's devices.

He pushed back at the claim by Cathcart that WhatsApp has detected hundreds of thousands of child sex-abuse images through its own techniques – "more than almost any other internet service in the world" – by saying that it has identified a fraction of the abuse that others, include Facebook and Instagram (both Meta businesses) do.

In an online column last week, the Child Rights International Network tried to set the terms of the debate, noting encryption technologies both protect and harm children in such areas as the rights to privacy and protection from abuse.

"Given the complex interplay between encryption and children's rights, it is not surprise that a debate is currently raging on encryption and public safety, in particular regarding the fight against online child sexual abuse," the organization wrote.

However, communications service providers and mobile device vendors are reluctant to weaken encryption policies. Apple last year announced plans to scan photos of users' iPhones for abusive content before it was uploaded to iCloud. However, the plans were put on hold after complaints from privacy groups and users that doing so compromised security.

"If Apple can't get it right, how can the government?" Monica Horton, policy manager for the Open Rights Group, was quoted as saying. "Client-side scanning is a form of mass surveillance. It is a deep interference with privacy."

Regarding the proposed legislation from the EU, WhatsApp's Cathcart said "what's being proposed is that we – either directly or indirectly through software – read everyone's messages. I don't think people want that."
https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/...n_whatsapp_uk/





WhatsApp is Rolling Out the New 2GB File Sharing Feature Now
Abel Wong

For the past few months, WhatsApp has been adding a few features such as emoji reactions, increase voice call group members and others. However, one of the last features that the company is planning to update is increasing the file size and it may be coming soon.

According to sources, it seems that the 2GB file sharing improvement is being gradually updated on WhatsApp. As you can see in the screenshot above, it's possible to transfer a 1GB file now. We tried on our own WhatsApp but looks like it's not here yet.

To refresh your memory, WhatsApp limits the file size to 100MB only. With this, we could only send low-resolution photos and short video clips to our friends and family.
https://technave.com/gadget/WhatsApp...now-31068.html





HBO Max Quietly Removed Six Warner Bros. Streaming-Exclusive Movies
Todd Spangler

Warner Bros. Discovery has been quietly culling content from HBO Max — including several Warner Bros. movies that were exclusively streaming on the service — in what appears to be an effort to cut costs.

Within the past few weeks, at least six Warner Bros. movies have been removed from HBO Max: “Moonshot,” a sci-fi rom-com starring Lana Condor and Cole Sprouse; artificial-intelligence dystopia comedy “Superintelligence,” starring Melissa McCarthy; Robert Zemeckis’ 2020 remake of “The Witches,” starring Anne Hathaway, Octavia Spencer, Stanley Tucci and Chris Rock; comedy “An American Pickle,” starring Seth Rogen as an immigrant who wakes up after being pickled for 100 years; Doug Liman heist pic “Locked Down” with Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor; and drama “Charm City Kings” from director Angel Manuel Soto.

All six of the films were labeled as “Max Originals.” The removals were noted by users on Reddit in a discussion of the Warner Bros. decision to nix plans to release “Batgirl” — in theaters, on HBO Max or via any other platform.

Meanwhile, the reboot of comedy classic “House Party,” from LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s SpringHill, was previously slated to premiere July 28 on HBO Max but was scrubbed from the release calendar.

To be sure, streaming platforms continuously add and remove content. What’s unusual is that Warner Bros. Discovery did not announce the removals of the six WB streaming exclusives from HBO Max. (The movies are available to rent or purchase through third-party VOD services.) Also worth noting is that “Moonshot” was pulled from HBO Max only about three months after its March 31 debut.

HBO Max’s removal of the Warner Bros. movies could be part of WBD’s move to get streaming-content payment obligations for underperforming titles off its books. In the case of an unreleased movie like the “House Party” remake, the media conglomerate could be accounting for it as a tax write-down, as it is expected to do with “Batgirl” and “Scoob: Holiday Haunt” (the latter of which was a sequel to the animated “Scoob!”).

Reps for Warner Bros. Discovery didn’t respond to inquiries about the HBO Max film removals. The company is scheduled to report second-quarter 2022 earnings Thursday (Aug. 4) after market close. Warner Bros. Discovery assumed a massive chunk of $43 billion in debt through the WarnerMedia deal; the merged company had a debt-to-equity ratio of around 4.6x following the deal close.

Like other streaming services, HBO Max issues monthly updates about titles being added and removed — for example, it announced that all eight original “Harry Potter” films will be exiting HBO Max at the end of August, while it’s also adding a big bucket of content including 28 films from A24 such as “Room” and “Ex Machina.” But none of the Warner Bros. original films purged from HBO Max were included in recent updates.

As of now, several Warner Bros. movie exclusives for HBO Max are still on the service. Those include the 2022 remake of “Father of the Bride” starring Andy Garcia and Gloria Estefan; Steven Soderbergh’s “Let Them All Talk” starring Meryl Streep and “Kimi” starring Zoë Kravitz; and “The Fallout,” “No Sudden Move,” “Unpregnant” and “8-Bit Christmas.”

In December 2021, before David Zaslav’s Discovery closed the WarnerMedia transaction with AT&T, WarnerMedia released a campaign touting major releases coming to HBO Max in 2022, including “House Party,” “Scoob: Holiday Haunt” and “Moonshot.” The campaign’s sizzle reel that was originally shared on YouTube has since been made private. You can still watch it on Twitter:
https://variety.com/2022/digital/new...ve-1235332258/





It's Time to Embrace Physical Media Again

Streaming and digital purchases have their place, but buying something real is the only way to truly own it.
Brendan Hesse

It’s finally time to admit streaming apps and digital distribution have ruined most creative media industries, and maybe physical media was the right choice all along.

Okay, that’s a tad dramatic. But it’s not exactly wrong.

To be fair, streaming apps aren’t all bad. Streaming services and digital storefronts make it easy to access our favorite shows, bands, and video games on just about any device we own. And they give us legal ways to support legacy media without succumbing to greedy scalpers or shady piracy sites. But what started as a way to “cut the cord” and stick it to cable companies and record labels has only birthed a new corporate overlord—one that does not respect its customers, the media it distributes, or the people who make it.
The issue with streaming and digital media

One could argue annoyances like The Office leaving Netflix or that the first Mannequin film is unavailable digitally while Mannequin 2: On the Move is readily available are just part of the reality of the new digital landscape.

But that impermanence is starting to seem a lot more like a bug than a feature. This past week, we learned Warner Bros. Discovery unceremoniously delisted TV shows from the HBO Max app for no reason other than it wanted to stop paying residuals to its creators—sorry if you ponied up your $14.99 per month expecting HBO Max Originals content to actually be available on HBO Max. Meanwhile, digital video games are regularly delisted from digital shelves, making them impossible to purchase or redownload, even as inevitable server shutdowns render multiplayer modes—or even entire games—unplayable even after you’ve purchased and downloaded the game.

It’s not just music, movies, and games—even ebooks and comics are in peril due to streaming and all-digital platforms. Just look at the backlash against Amazon’s recent Comixology overhaul, which made purchasing new comics almost impossible for certain users, and rendered some comics and manga unreadable thanks to unwanted layout changes.

All streaming apps, regardless of media, revoke your access to their free libraries if you unsubscribe, they experience a sudden service outage, or they permanently go offline—not to mention streaming business models notoriously screw over the artists and creators that distribute their work through these apps.

These issues and more make it increasingly difficult for customers to enjoy their purchases, and make media preservation virtually impossible.

You know what doesn’t have those issues? Physical media.

That’s not to say physical media is immune to problems. Streaming does genuinely make media more accessible and in seemingly “unlimited” supply (as long as it remains available), whereas physical media can only exist in limited quantities, creating circumstances ripe for exploitation by companies and resellers alike. Plus, physical media—like all physical substances—deteriorates, and can be lost, broken, or stolen. However, when it comes to ownership, customer agency, and media preservation, physical media is superior to digital and streaming in pretty much every way.

Streaming has issues, but isn’t physical media dead?

I’ll admit that buying a hard copy might not be right for every person or every purchase, but physical media is worthwhile to more people than just hobbyists, historians, or hawkers. And don’t let anyone fool you into thinking physical media is outdated or useless—most media still receives a full physical release. Major theatrical films get Blu-ray releases, and most full seasons of TV shows are still sold in those big, multi-disc boxes. They may just be harder to find.

Video games are trickier. Many new “physical” games still require online connections, even if they’re technically an offline single player game, but plenty of new games are fully playable on the disc (or on the cartridge, in the Nintendo Switch’s case). Buying older games, vintage consoles, and rarer releases can be exorbitantly expensive, but companies like Limited Run Games, Super Rare Games, and Strictly Limited Games print physical copies of indie titles that wouldn’t normally get boxed releases, and in some cases even reprint runs of older games. Physical video games also typically drop in price much quicker than their digital counterparts, sometimes seeing steep price cuts just a few days or weeks after release (except for Nintendo games, that is).

CDs remain an excellent way to collect and listen to music at high quality, and “outdated” formats like vinyl and cassette tapes are popular once again thanks to indie record labels and distributors and the collector market. While these retro throwbacks might’ve started as hipster cred currency, they’re quickly becoming more reliable ways to access music than streaming. Plus, buying physical music directly from artists or labels is a better way to support them financially than earning them a fraction of a fraction of a penny via streaming.

What about the cost?

Another concern with physical media is the cost: Wouldn’t purchasing every new piece of media cost more than your monthly streaming bills?

Sure, especially if you buy lots of new stuff to watch, play or listen to—but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Personally, I find I engage more with media I’ve purchased, rather than stuff I stream or rent. Streaming has a tendency to make artistic work fill like throwaway “content” to be milled by our brains into dopamine. That said, streaming or buying something digitally absolutely has its place, and is a worthwhile option when you don’t necessarily care about what it is you’re watching/playing/reading, and don’t mind if it suddenly disappears. But even if you don’t see a difference between owning something and streaming it, the fact remains that physical media is always more reliable than digital.

Digital content comes and goes, servers go offline, and users lose content if they migrate to different apps, but that shelf of movies in your living room isn’t going anywhere. And as long as you have the right equipment, you can enjoy it forever, whenever you want, without having to subscribe to a new service, download an app, or fuss over your wireless connection.
https://lifehacker.com/its-time-to-e...ain-1849378610





Winamp, the Vintage MP3 Software, Is Officially Back

The stalwart digital audio player gets a new codebase after four years of development
Matthew Ismael Ruiz

Winamp, the popular 3rd-party Windows application for digital audio playback (usually of files ripped from CDs or downloaded via peer-to-peer file sharing networks), is back. Developers posted the latest build of the software (Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 9999) late last month, four years since its last update. The current build “is the culmination of 4 years' work” since the last release—with a pandemic-related hiatus baked in—by two different development teams. The application has been migrated to a more current codebase (VS2019), with new features expected to be added after testing.

At the peak of the download era, Winamp was renowned for its ability to play most popular audio formats and the customization of the user interface with trippy visualizers and unique “skins” that changed the application’s appearance. With the proliferation of the iTunes Store and later, digital streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music, Winamp’s popularity waned. In 2013, parent company AOL shut down its development. The company was sold to the Belgian digital audio company Radionomy shortly after. The last version (5.8) before this latest update was released in 2018 after a premature leak pressured developers to publish it themselves.

Check out Pitchfork’s “Longform” feature “The Obsessive World of Digital Music Collectors” and “The Reboot of Winamp Won’t Bring Back the Joy of MP3s” on the Pitch.
https://pitchfork.com/news/winamp-th...ficially-back/

















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