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Old 09-07-14, 07:23 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - July 12th, '14

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"Oh, that is such bullshit." – Glenn Greenwald






































July 12th, 2014




Huge Scam Sends 30,000 Fake Copyright Notices Containing Trojans
Mario Aguilar

TorrentFreak reports that in recent days some 30,000 fake copyright infringement notices demanding cash settlements have been circulating in Germany. In addition to defrauding unwitting folks out of cash, the notices also come bundled with malicious software designed to steal personal info.

According to the report, which originates with a posting from the German law firm Wilde Beuger Solmecke, the email notices claim copyright infringement over content belonging to EMI, Sony, DreamWorks, and Paramount, and demand 200 to 500 Euros within 48 hours to avoid a lawsuit. The notices look very credible, and even contain the names of real lawyers and law firms.

Additionally, the notices come with an attached Zip file that's supposed to contain more information. Not surprisingly, the file actually contains a virus which spies on the infected computer waiting for credit card info.

This is a nasty trick that the web savvy won't fall for, but which will also surely catch a few unfortunate internet users. We're vulnerable to theses scams in large measure due to to the aggressive tactics of copyright holders that frequently use third-party clearing house services to go after internet users. It's impersonal and threatening and scary and so people just pay up and don't ask questions. It's more disappointing that the fake notices could be real than that regular people might fall for them.
http://gizmodo.com/suggesting-this-m...atc-1601659674





Suspended Sentence for Italian File-Sharing Operator, and His Mum and Dad
Chris Cooke

Proving again that Italy is becoming one of the more prolific countries in the battle against illegal file-sharing, an Italian man behind a now defunct file-sharing operation that used the domains Scaricolibero.com and Filmgratis.tv has been handed a 22 month suspended jail sentence for this role in running the copyright infringing business. Not only that, but his parents also received suspended sentences for receiving the operation’s ad revenue into their bank account.

According to Torrentfreak, authorities in Italy seized the two domains back in 2012 following complaints from copyright owners, and also ordered internet service providers to block the service’s IP addresses and took control of bank accounts receiving ad revenues from the file-sharing operation. Two years on the criminal case against the sites’ operator reached its conclusion with the suspended sentence.

His parents received ten month suspended sentences too for money laundering charges, them having allowed their son’s revenues from the illegal operation to pass through their bank account. Enzo Mazza of local music industry group FIMI confirmed to Torrentfreak: “The parents, who owned the bank account where the money from ads was allocated, were sentenced for money laundering”.

Mazza welcomed last week’s ruling, which won’t result in actual jail time for the accused, but, reckons the record industry rep, sends out a sufficiently stern message about the consequences of profiting from copyright infringement. He added: “It’s a very good decision. Our anti-piracy team FPM assisted during the case and we are really satisfied with the decision which has shown clear evidence of the link between piracy and the collection of money through advertisements”.

As previously reported, while the record industry didn’t always find Italian law all that helpful in the early days of the battle against file-sharing, in recent years various initiatives in the country have resulted in a crack-down. The country’s telecoms regulator has also been given direct web-blocking powers, while the local advertising industry recently committed to do more to cut off ad income from piracy set-ups.
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/a...s-mum-and-dad/





Singapore Passes Law to Block Illegal Sites

The Singapore government has passed an amendment to the country's Copyright Act that will let content owners compel service providers to block infringing sites, like Pirate Bay.
Aloysius Low

Announced back in April, the new amendment to Singapore's Copyright Act will provide content owners with the ability make Internet service providers in the country block illegal web sites such as the infamous Pirate Bay.

Singapore's Senior Minister of State for Law Indranee Rajah said the new law will give copyright owners "greater ability to protect their rights in the online space."

"The prevalence of online piracy in Singapore turns customers away from legitimate content and adversely affects Singapore's creative sector," Rajah said.

The new law is reportedly set to come into force at the end of August, and copyright owners can apply to the court in Singapore without having to establish the liability of the network service provider. Previously, copyright owners had to send a take-down notice, but as it was not mandatory to comply, service providers did not need to act.

Given that it's relatively easy to use a VPN service to bypass the block, the block is likely to really only affect the less tech-savvy users (who just enter URLs into a browser window).
http://www.cnet.com/news/singapore-p...illegal-sites/





Hollywood Director Slams “Pathetic” Anti-Piracy Crusade
Ernesto

Movie director Lexi Alexander wants to "occupy Hollywood" by bridging the gap between pirates and filmmakers. Sporting a banner to free Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde, Alexander says that the criminalization of file-sharing is "pathetic", while calling out the losses claimed by the MPAA as "bullshit".

It’s not every day that you see a Hollywood director holding up a “Free Peter Sunde” sign, but Lexi Alexander is on a mission.

With her support for the Pirate Bay founder who’s currently locked up in a Swedish prison, Alexander hopes to reach out to the “other side” with whom she shares a common goal.

Alexander is not a fan of the anti-piracy crusade the MPAA and other groups are waging against file-sharers. The massive losses that are claimed due to piracy are “bullshit” according to her. In fact, she believes that piracy may do more good than harm.

“I get a little upset when I hear how hard my industry jumps into action, sparing neither time, manpower or resources, as soon as someone even hints at potential loss to the crown estate,” Alexander notes.

“Piracy has NOT been proven to hurt box-office numbers, on the contrary, several studies say it may have boosted the bottom line,” she adds.

In recent years the movie industry has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into expensive anti-piracy measures, nearly all of which are counterproductive according to Alexander.

For example, as a German living in Hollywood she can’t watch German news online due to geographical restrictions and the same is true for U.S. shows when she’s visiting Germany. But thanks to the pirates, Hollywood director can easily bypass these restrictions.

“But guess what, for every IP block, DRM and who-knows-what security feature Hollywood spends thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours on, some piracy kid will undo it for free and within a couple of minutes.”

“And this is my favorite part: I am 100% certain that the hacking of entertainment industry’s security features provides better entertainment for these kids than the entertainment we’re trying to prevent them from stealing. Let that sink in for a second, then try not to bust up laughing.”

In a recent interview with Daily Record, Alexander describes criminalization of file sharing as “pathetic.” It is mostly an issue that keeps Hollywood’s “Fat Cats” busy, but not so much independent filmmakers.

“The people who complain most about piracy in Hollywood are Fat Cats who did little to deserve their wealth or position. I doubt you’ll find many people on the anti-piracy train amongst film crews or indie filmmakers, unless they’re being paid a retainer,” she says.

Contrary to what the MPAA and others may lead the public to believe, Alexander says that piracy is rather common among filmmakers. She herself admits to downloading films when there are no legal options available.

“I download stuff myself, so do many of my colleagues here in Hollywood. Usually we do it only when we can’t find something on mainstream streaming services,” Alexander says.

The movie director uses pirate sites to grab movies that are relevant for an upcoming meeting for example, something which has saved her on a few occasions.

“I cannot tell you how often my ass was saved by some torrent site in those situations. And I assume that 99% of my Hollywood filmmaker colleagues or their poor assistants have found themselves on a piracy site for just that reason (if they deny it, they’re lying. The end.)”

Despite her own piracy habits, Alexander doesn’t endorse the existing piracy status quo. In a blog post on her own site she notes that many of the people running pirate sites are just as motivated by greed as the people in Hollywood.

The movie director considered reaching out to Kim Dotcom but concluded that his luxurious lifestyle makes him just like the Hollywood elite. The Pirate Bay team was second on the list, but this was scrapped after learning about historical connections with right-winger Carl Lundström.

The movie director is nonetheless reaching out to all pirates with good intentions who put art and talent before the dollar signs. An “Occupy Hollywood movement,” as she describes it, and calling for Peter Sunde’s release, is her way to reach out to those who support this cause.

So will the real pirates please stand up?
http://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-di...rusade-140708/





Popcorn Time's "Netflix for Torrents" Is Coming to Chromecast
Mario Aguilar

Popcorn Time is a miracle: It lets you stream torrents of movies and TV shows as though they were on Netflix or Hulu. Is it illegal? Probably! But it's also awesome, hard to trace, and soon, it'll work with your Chromecast.

Recently, we've been following the development of Time4Popcorn, a very popular and fast-developing fork of the open source Popcorn Time code. (The original Popcorn Time team hung it up earlier this year.) In recent months the Time4Popcorn team has launched everything from an Android app to VPN support.

Now, you'll be able to stream movies to your Chromecast so you can watch movies on a big screen with no wires. Today, the Windows version of the app with Chromecast support is in alpha, and the shadowy team says that Mac and Android support for Chromecast is on the way too. Development has been moving very fast so we'd expect updates in the near future. Keep on keeping on you magnificent coders.
http://gizmodo.com/popcorn-times-net...rom-1601100023





JSTorrent Downloads Torrents on a Chromebook
Dave Greenbaum

Chrome: Although Chromebooks have limited storage space, they make a great BitTorrent machine since you're less likely to be affected by malware. JSTorrent is BitTorrent client that works on any Chromebook.

The interface makes it simple to add torrents. Just right click on the link and it adds it to the downloader. It works well even on the low-end ARM based Chromebooks. I tried it on my Acer C720 and it worked like a charm. A few other free clients exist for Chrome, but JStorrent was easy to use and has excellent support.

As you'd expect with any client, you can pause and prioritize your downloads as needed. It isn't quite as feature-filled as some desktop clients, but for Chromebooks, it works well enough.
http://lifehacker.com/jstorrent-down...ook-1599328515





Choice Lauds NZ ISP's Anti-Geo-Blocking Service

Australian ISP iiNet watching "with interest" NZ service that lets Kiwis access content streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu
Rohan Pearce

Australian consumer advocacy group Choice has welcomed an announcement by New Zealand Internet service provider Slingshot of a service that makes it easier to access overseas streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and BBC iPlayer.

Normally these services are 'geo-blocked', restricting access to the services to those who live in markets served by their parent companies. However, Slingshot has now enabled its free 'Global Mode' service by default for its customers.

Previously, customers had to opt into Global Mode.

This means customers can more easily subscribe to services, such as Netflix, that are normally unavailable to New Zealanders, without having to configure proxies or VPNs.

"This is exactly the type of service Australian consumers should have access to," a Choice spokesperson said.

"Choice research continues to show consumers are paying approximately 50 per cent more for digital products and services than consumers in the US and UK."

For example, Australians have been paying 54 per cent more than people in the US for the top 10 new release movies in Apple’s iTunes store, the consumer group stated in a submission to the government's Competition Policy Review.

The consumer group has previously released a guide to help Austrlaians bypass geo-blocking.

"I think it is a good thing for an ISP to connect paying customers to legitimate content; that is their role, after all," chief regulatory officer of Australian ISP iiNet, Steve Dalby, said.

The ISP will be "watching the NZ experiment with interest," Dalby said.

"Australians are already accessing paid content by using a variety of online services and techniques," Dalby said.

"iiNet doesn’t currently provide any services that are specifically designed to access geo-blocked content, but it is likely that some iiNet customers are already purchasing content using similar techniques to those offered by Slingshot."

"Instead of addressing the reasons why Australians illegally download movies and TV shows, the government instead seems determined to be seen to be ‘doing something’ to ISPs while defending, at all costs, the business model of the Hollywood movie houses," Dalby wrote last month in a blog entry that criticised the approach of federal attorney-general George Brandis.

Brandis has publicly raised a variety of options to counter piracy, such as website takedowns and a warning system.

Announcing the changes to Global Mode late last week, Slingshot general manager Taryn Hamilton said that New Zealanders were tired of paying higher prices for digital content.

"We are now giving Kiwis access to these sites – and an option to pay for the content they want to watch at a fair price," Hamilton said.

"The limited access New Zealanders have to content that is widely available overseas is an issue that needs to be addressed," the Slingshot GM said.

"There is no valid argument as to why New Zealanders are paying much more for the same content as others in the world. We shouldn’t tolerate it. This issue extends far beyond TV and movies, with Kiwis paying significantly more for many technology services and products from the world’s biggest brands than in many other countries."

In Australia, the sentiments were echoed by Choice.

"Australian consumers want access to affordable digital content, which the market has been unable to deliver to date," the spokesperson said.

"Navigating around domestic geo-blocks to access and pay for services such as Netflix and Hulu is a great way for consumers to enjoy the benefits of competition.

"Last year the bipartisan IT pricing inquiry recommended an end to geo-blocking and the competition policy review that is currently underway now has an opportunity to take up the Inquiries recommendations and put an end to digital discrimination in Australia."
http://www.computerworld.com.au/arti...cking_service/





Aereo: Hey, We’re a Cable Company After All!

After Supreme Court loss, Aereo tries a strategy that failed for ivi TV.
Joe Mullin

Less than a month after its Supreme Court loss, TV-over-the-Internet startup Aereo has filed a letter with a lower court, laying out its final legal strategy—one that it hopes can resurrect it from the grave.

It's going to act like a cable company.

If it walks like a duck...

Aereo customers rented up to two tiny, dime-sized antennas that are housed in facilities across the country. The antennas captured local, over-the-air broadcasts and funneled them to local customers in real time. The content was freed to stream to most any Internet-connected device. Another antenna synced with a DVR for later viewing for about $12 monthly. Broadcasters decried it as "technological gimmickry" to skirt copyright and other retransmission laws.

In a 6-3 opinion, the Supreme Court essentially said that Aereo is too similar to a cable system, which does have to pay broadcasters in order to carry their content. Three days after the ruling, Aereo suspended its operations.

Now, Aereo has—given no other choice—embraced the ruling and seeks to change its business model. In a letter to Judge Alison Nathan, who is overseeing the litigation between TV broadcasters and Aereo, the company says that it shouldn't be forced to shut down. Rather, since the Supreme Court said it's similar to a cable company, Aereo is asking to be treated exactly like a cable company. That would mean it's allowed to pay "statutory royalties" set by the government (rather than through negotiation with broadcasters) and to retransmit content.

"If Aereo is a 'cable system' as that term is defined in the Copyright Act, it is eligible for a statutory license, and its transmissions may not be enjoined," writes Aereo in the letter.

The same letter includes a section from the TV broadcasters, who insist that Aereo's business should be enjoined from operating.

"[i]t is astonishing for Aereo to contend the Supreme Court's decision automatically transformed Aereo into a 'cable system' under Section 111 given its prior statements to this Court and the Supreme Court," write the plaintiffs, which include all four major TV broadcasters: ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox. Aereo has long claimed it is not a cable company in order to avoid paying retransmission fees.

Been here before

The last-ditch strategy Aereo is now pursuing has been tried before—and failed. A Seattle-based startup called ivi TV sought to transmit live TV over the Internet in 2010 while paying the same fees as cable TV. Congress, ivi TV pointed out, had defined a cable system as a facility that “makes secondary transmissions of such signals or programs by wires, cables, microwave, or other communications channels to subscribing members of the public.”

ivi's argument failed at the district court in 2011 and lost on appeal as well. Aereo argues that the ivi TV case has now been overturned by its own Supreme Court case, however. It also notes that ivi TV sought to transmit "distant, rather than local, transmissions" to subscribers. (ivi's system grabbed signals from a few cities and sent them to anyone with an Internet connection, while Aereo only connects subscribers to the same programs they'd be able to catch with an antenna in their own city.)

But even if Aereo wins the right to call itself a cable company that can retransmit broadcast signals, that doesn't mean it may automatically do so over the Internet. Dish is currently battling Fox over that issue before a federal appeals court, where a decision is pending.

Aereo chief executive Chet Kanojia said Wednesday that the Supreme Court decision was "a massive setback to consumers." He added, "With the most recent decision and in the spirit of remaining in compliance, we chose to pause our operations last week as we consulted with the lower court to map out our next steps... This has been a challenging journey for our team, but your support has continued to lift and propel us forward."
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...cable-company/





No, Aereo Isn’t Really Claiming to be a True Cable Company
Brian Fung

In an effort to survive, Aereo's throwing everything against the wall and hoping something — anything — sticks. Its latest tactic? To embrace the Supreme Court decision that effectively killed its existing business model, and to work within the confines of the ruling to arrive at an alternative that won't land the company in court again.

Aereo is now conceding that it is a cable company after all, after having argued the opposite point before the Supreme Court. If you'll recall, the Court didn't find Aereo's initial testimony very persuasive. It ruled in a 6-3 vote that by pulling TV signals out of the air and streaming them over the Internet, Aereo was effectively broadcasting in a "public performance" of content that it should be paying for.

The company now says it's willing to pay those licensing fees — but to the Copyright Office, rather than to the broadcasters who were suing Aereo in the first place. In short, Aereo is trying to thread a very small needle: It wants to say it's just enough of a cable company that it qualifies for the benefits that come along with it (more on that shortly) but not so much of a cable company that it needs to pay expensive retransmission fees required of other cable companies.

Problem is, the path forward for Aereo here is deeply uncertain, and its argument almost sure to fail.

The key to understanding why has to do with a legal distinction that'll sound silly to almost any consumer.

"Aereo wants to be a cable company for copyright purposes, but not for communications law purposes," said Brent Skorup, a telecom policy scholar at George Mason University's Mercatus Center.

Here's what that means in plain English: If Aereo were considered a cable company in the eyes of the Federal Communications Commission, then it would be bound by a set of FCC-specific rules governing many pay-TV providers. This group includes cable companies, satellite TV companies — basically, anyone who makes multiple channels of video programming available to consumers. Collectively, the FCC refers to these firms as multichannel video programming distributors, or MVPDs. And MVPDs have to pay retransmission fees to TV stations, which is exactly what Aereo was hoping to avoid in the first place.

Aereo is only making a claim about what it is in the eyes of the copyright law, not the FCC. On its face, this idea seems uncontroversial; the Supreme Court's quack-like-a-duck reasoning held that for all intents and purposes, the same copyright rules that apply to cable companies should also apply to Aereo.

Agreeing to abide by cable-company copyright rules stinks for Aereo in that it no longer gets to grab broadcast signals out of the air for free. But we already know that the Court has closed off that option for Aereo, so now it has to make the best of a bad situation. And its new strategy — should it hold — actually wards off the worst-case scenario. Aereo would simply pay a licensing fee to the government at government-regulated rates, under what's called a compulsory or statutory license. And that'd be that.

Except for one thing: If Aereo admits that it's a cable company in the eyes of the copyright law, what's to stop the FCC from branding Aereo as a cable company that has to pay retransmission fees?

Aereo's only hope at avoiding that outcome rests on the FCC's historical reluctance to say whether online video services count as MVPDs. The commission has an open proceeding to consider what terms like "MVPD" and "channel" really mean, but two years later, it still hasn't come to a conclusion. That's no surprise. If the FCC said that online video distributors were MVPDs, it wouldn't just cover Aereo but potentially also popular services like Netflix and Hulu, according to The New York Times and other companies that have a stake in online video, such as Google. Suddenly these companies might be forced to pay broadcasters for TV content, and that would set off a political and economic battle nobody at the FCC wants to see. (John Bergmayer, an attorney at the consumer group Public Knowledge, disagrees, saying that because Netflix is an on-demand service, it wouldn't be considered an MVPD, even if Aereo were. That's still bad news for Aereo.)

It'd be ironic if Aereo got away with labeling itself a cable company on copyright but not in regard to communications, according to a former industry official who asked for anonymity in order to speak more freely. That's because the compulsory license that Aereo's trying to take advantage of was originally put in place to benefit broadcasters, who stand to lose money if Aereo isn't forced to pay retransmission fees, a revenue system that was put in place years later.

"With the broadcasters clinging to this compulsory license, it may wind up biting them in the rear end," said the former official. "I think that, long term, it's in the best interest of broadcasters to get rid of this compulsory license."

Of course, that argument weakens if Aereo fails with its current plan, and is ultimately forced to pay the broadcasters directly.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...cable-company/





YouTube, Following Netflix, is Now Publicly Shaming Internet Providers for Slow Video
Zachary M. Seward and Herman Wong

When videos blur, buffer, or won’t play altogether, YouTube is now pinning the blame on your internet service provider.

“Experiencing interruptions?” reads the message in a blue bar underneath choppy video, as seen in the above screenshot. Clicking “find out why” brings you to Google’s new website, where it displays video playback quality for internet service providers (ISPs) in various countries. It’s like a report card for your delinquent ISP.

Google, which owns YouTube, has a strong interest in deflecting blame for poor video quality. The US government is considering new “net neutrality” regulations that could affect how information, particularly data-heavy streaming video, flows through the internet. ISPs would like to see more of the responsibility placed on video services like YouTube and Netflix, which account for a growing portion of internet traffic.

YouTube’s new notification is similar to one Netflix recently displayed to customers. “The Verizon network is crowded right now,” it said, for instance, when video playback was slow. Verizon called the message “deliberately misleading” and threatened legal action. Netflix defended its finger-pointing but stopped doing it last month.

The YouTube notification is more subtle, but the intent is the same. In Google’s view, ISPs are responsible for maintaining the capacity to deliver high-quality video streams. Internet providers argue that crowded networks are inevitable, and video services should find less congested routes for their data, including direct connections that ISPs charge money to set up. Video companies have derided those “fast lanes” even as they sometimes pay for them to improve quality of service.

Curiously, though, Google and other technology companies have been relatively quiet as the US Federal Communications Commission moves closer to rules that would explicitly allow those fast lanes. That’s a stark contrast to four years ago, when Google played a central—and controversial—role in drafting net neutrality regulations.

Rather than intensely lobbying the government this time around, Google and Netflix seem to be focused on a public relations campaign. Both now regularly report how well their services work on a wide range of internet providers. Netflix’s ISP Index covers 20 countries; Google’s Video Quality Report is available in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Google has also started labeling some ISPs as “YouTube HD Verified,” a sort of Good Housekeeping Seal for streaming video.

The message of these reports is clearly that ISPs are responsible for whether your video playback is smooth. “You may be prompted to view the report if you’re experiencing poor playback on your computer (such as frequent rebuffering or fuzzy video),” Google explains on a new page in YouTube’s help section.

It’s not clear exactly when Google started displaying the ISP-blaming notification bar. Google’s press office is closed for Independence Day weekend and didn’t respond to an email seeking comment.
http://qz.com/230603/youtube-like-ne...or-slow-video/





World Record as Alcatel-Lucent Push 10Gbps Broadband Down Copper Lines
Mark Jackson

Telecom giant Alcatel-Lucent appears, perhaps to the dismay of fibre optic campaigners, to have given the traditional copper telephone line a new lease of life after its Bell Labs research division claimed to set a new world record by delivering “ultra-broadband” speeds of 10,000Mbps (Megabits per second) over the aging infrastructure using a prototype technology called XG-FAST (G.fast2?).

The prototype XG-FAST tech, which also demonstrated how existing copper access networks could be used to deliver symmetrical speeds of 1Gbps (Gigabits per second) or 1000Mbps if you prefer, is described as being an “extension” of G.fast (aka – FTTC2 / ITU G.9700) technology that can provide Internet connection speeds which are “indistinguishable” from fibre optic Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) services.

Currently BT uses Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (FTTC) technology in the United Kingdom to deliver speeds of up to 80Mbps, which works by replacing the existing copper cable between street cabinets and your local telephone exchange with a fibre optic line. The final copper line run from cabinets and into homes is then managed by VDSL2 technology (similar to ADSL but faster over short distances).

By comparison G.fast adopts a similar approach but it’s designed to take even better advantage of the latest advancements (e.g. Vectoring 2.0 to reduce crosstalk interference), which would allow it to operate at speeds of up to 1Gbps, albeit only by using higher frequencies (106MHz+) and over even shorter runs of copper cable (up to 250 metres). The most likely setup would be to combine G.fast with Fibre-to-the-Distribution-Point (FTTdp) or FTTrN technology, which takes the fibre optic cable even closer to homes.

However G.fast is still some years away and it’s likely that BT will be able to squeeze a bit more performance out of FTTC in the meantime, with Vectoring potentially allowing for download speeds of 100Mbps+. Other advancements, such as FTTdp and the 30a profile for FTTC, could potentially deliver speeds of 200Mbps+. But it remains to be seen how BT will shape is future direction and some of these upgrades would be expensive.

In the meantime Alcatel-Lucent has been quietly developing XG-FAST to help keep existing copper telecoms cable in the game, which might make it more economically viable for some operators than the cost of deploying a full fibre optic solution.

XG-FAST goes a lot further than G.fast in the sense that it uses an increased frequency range up to 500MHz in order to achieve higher speeds, but crucially this would be over even shorter distances (i.e. higher frequencies attenuate more quickly than lower frequencies / interference grows over distance, meaning there are diminishing returns in speed as the frequency range increases).

Bell Labs achieved 1Gbps symmetrical over just 70 meters on a single copper pair and 10Gbps was achieved over a distance of 30 meters by using two pairs of lines (bonding). Both tests used standard copper cable provided by a European operator. The speeds are impressive but the distance is clearly more problematic, which might mean more of a choir for operators as they’d need to bring the accompanying fibre optic cable even closer to your doorstep (at this range you could almost call it FTTB).

Other factors would also become more of a problem when pushing copper lines close to the theoretical limit, such as the thickness of the copper cable itself and this is known to vary.

Marcus Weldon, President of Bell Labs, said:

“Our constant aim is to push the limits of what is possible to ‘invent the future’, with breakthroughs that are 10 times better than are possible today. Our demonstration of 10 Gbps over copper is a prime example: by pushing broadband technology to its limits, operators can determine how they could deliver gigabit services over their existing networks, ensuring the availability of ultra-broadband access as widely and as economically as possible.”

Federico Guillén, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Fixed Networks Business, added:

“The Bell Labs speed record is an amazing achievement, but crucially in addition they have identified a new benchmark for ‘real-world’ applications for ultra-broadband fixed access. XG-FAST can help operators accelerate FTTH deployments, taking fiber very close to customers without the major expense and delays associated with entering every home. By making 1 gigabit symmetrical services over copper a real possibility, Bell Labs is offering the telecommunications industry a new way to ensure no customer is left behind when it comes to ultra-broadband access.”

Alcatel-Lucent’s achievement is impressive but we won’t be talking about XG-FAST technology in any kind of practical / commercial deployment sense for many years. The first commercial G.fast hardware and deployments isn’t due to begin until 2015 and BT has yet to complete its planned field trial, which means we won’t even see G.fast commercially in the UK for a few more years (assuming they can overcome its bugs) and before that we’re likely to see upgrades for FTTC and FTTdp/RN or similar.

None of these would be cheap upgrades and a move to G.fast/FTTdp nationally could also take a lot of time. By that time we’ll probably already be seeing symmetric 10Gbps+ from some FTTH/P/B providers. The question for some operators will be whether or not it’s even worth following the G.fast to XG-FAST path, as opposed to simply putting fibre optic cable in the ground and having less to worry about in the future.

NOTE: Take Alcatel-Lucent’s table above with a pinch of salt because VDSL2 / FTTC lines can operator at distances of greater than 400 meters, with well above 1,000 meters being seen in the wild.. albeit naturally at much slower speeds.
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php...one-lines.html





AdBlock Plus Sued by German Marketing Companies

Loved by casual web surfers, hated by website operators.
Shreyas Gandhe

Adblock Plus makers have been slapped with lawsuits by multiple marketing companies in Germany for affecting revenue by blocking ads.

The popular extension, available for all web browsers, blocks advertisements on websites, which is the primary source of revenue for marketing companies. Adblock Plus vendors have a controversial arrangement with some websites which have been whitelisted from the extension by default.

Now, a number of advertising companies in Germany have been reported to have filed lawsuits against Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus. The companies believe that the business model of Adblock Plus is illegal. It was recently reported that Google has been paying money in order to allow its ads to pass through Adblock Plus.

The RTL Group and ProSiebenSat.1 Media of Germany have confirmed to the Horzont magazine that they have filed a lawsuit in the Munich District Court. According to Horzont, many more media houses such as Focus Online and Chip Online have not yet decided whether to pursue legal action or not, but are open to the notion. A spokesperson for Eyeo, Ben Williams, has denied that any action has currently been taken against Adblock Plus.
http://www.neowin.net/news/adblock-p...ting-companies





Texas Lawyer Sues Tor for Providing Tools Used by Revenge Porn Site
Adi Robertson

Encryption service Tor has been caught up in a Texas revenge porn lawsuit. Yesterday, attorney Jason Lee Van Dyke linked to a lawsuit filing against Pink Meth, a nude photos site accessible only to users of the encryption software. The complaint accuses Pink Meth of offenses that include potentially distributing child pornography and gaining unauthorized access to privately hosted nude photos, neither of which are uncommon ways to go after a revenge porn site. But Van Dyke's case also extends to Tor, which he says is guilty of conspiring with Pink Meth by helping it operate.

According to Van Dyke, the two organizations "had a meeting of the minds" in order to let Pink Meth publish photographs of women without their consent while letting the site's operators and visitors escape legal consequences. In addition to uploading photographs sent by users, Pink Meth posts contact and social media information of subjects. Among the victims was college student Shelby Conklin, who has been filing suits against Pink Meth and various hosting services since 2012. A settlement with Verisign temporarily took down the site's main domain, but it's continued to operate under various addresses. Van Dyke equates Tor and its anonymous web tools with traditional hosting services, calling it an example of "unscrupulous internet service companies" that "allow illegal websites like Pink Meth to remain anonymous and difficult for authorities to shut down."

Pink Meth, which dedicates part of its front page to thumbing its nose at critics, prominently thanks Tor for making it possible to operate and urges users to donate to the project. But Tor is agnostic about the capabilities it enables, which range from getting around oppressive government firewalls to buying illegal drugs. It has no hand in "registering" sites that use it, even if Van Dyke claims that Pink Meth's operation signifies "continued tolerance and endorsement." The servers behind hidden services are difficult to find and shut down, and law enforcement so far has only been able to do so by looking for sloppy user behavior to exploit. But among other requests against search engines and social networks, the petition asks for domain name registers and hosting companies "including Tor" to be restricted from providing any internet-related services to Pink Meth until the trial is concluded. It also asks for at least $1 million as a result of emotional distress and the detrimental effects on Conklin's planned career in law enforcement.

The Tor Project declined to comment on the suit, saying that it "cannot discuss active cases." But its presence in the suit is unusual. Revenge porn sites, which non-consensually post photos of subjects (often sent by ex-boyfriends), have become an increasingly large target for legal action, but they've proven notoriously difficult to prosecute, especially if the victim took the photograph and knowingly sent it to someone else. Some prosecutors have gone after sites that allegedly hacked private accounts to get nude photographs or posed as someone else to obtain them, while others have attempted to use existing "Peeping Tom" laws. Over the past year, lawmakers have pushed to make those laws more stringent. California became the second state to sign a law expressly criminalizing revenge porn in October; since then, Maryland, Utah, and others have passed similar laws. Texas has proved sympathetic to victims before, awarding half a million dollars in damages to one plaintiff earlier this year.

Van Dyke, who bills himself as "quite possibly the meanest and most right-wing lawyer in Texas," linked to the suit this morning as part of a series of taunts on Twitter. After a critic said that suing Tor for Pink Meth's actions was like "suing an automaker because their car was used in a bank robbery," he contended that "I can always dismiss them later. That's not going to stop me from destroying Pink Meth." The suit itself was filed late last month, and he alluded to it as part of an online exchange with Pink Meth. "I sent The Tor Project a little present of my own today. Shhh. It's a surprise!" he said in one tweet on June 24th.

Pink Meth responded: "LOL, the only one in for a surprise is you."
http://www.theverge.com/2014/7/9/588...enge-porn-site





Meet Onionshare, The File-Sharing App The Next Snowden Will Use
Kate Knibbs

A small software app called Onionshare offers the most secure file sharing available. So why hasn’t anyone heard of it? Well, mostly because it was released with just a tweet from its creator, and you have to go to Github to download it. But don’t let its underground status fool you — this is a very important app.

Technologist Micah Lee debuted his peer-to-peer file sharing service with little fanfare, but what it does is big: Onionshare lets users share files securely and anonymously, without middlemen. Lee created it after reading about the trouble journalist Glenn Greenwald had accepting the NSA files from Edward Snowden. Now Lee works at The Interceptwith Greenwald, where the staff is already putting Onionshare to good use.

How You Use It

Right now, it’s still software in development, but Lee told Gizmodo he’s readying a version to directly download for OS and Windows that should be ready later this week. Onionshare is available for free on GitHub now, and if you have OS X or higher you can test out the upcoming version on Lee’s website.

Meet Onionshare, the File Sharing App the Next Snowden Will Use

However you get it, you’ll have to download Tor, a free-to-use network that lets you anonymously use the internet. It’s one of the best privacy tools available. With Onionshare, you can send a file of any size to anyone (even someone who doesn’t use Onionshare) — without sending it to a third party.

When a user wants to send a file, Onionshare creates a temporary, password-protected website for it, and the user gives their intended recipient that URL and password. When someone opens a file they receive on Onionshare, they create a direct link between the sending and receiving computer. Once the file is downloaded, users can cancel the website, erasing any trace of a transfer. Encrypt everything along the way for added security.

Why It Matters

EFF activist Parker Higgins explains why peer-to-peer services like Lee’s are so important in an opinion piece for Wired:

“The qualities that the copyright lobby dislike about peer-to-peer are precisely the ones that make it a powerful choice for defenders of press freedom and personal privacy. Namely, peer-to-peer offers no convenient mechanism for centralized surveillance or censorship. By design, there’s usually no middleman that can easily record metadata about transfers — who uploaded and downloaded what, when, and from where — or block those transfers. With some peer-to-peer implementations (though not Lee’s) that information may be publicly accessible. But recording all of it would require a dragnet effort, not a simple request for a log file from a centralized service provider.”

What’s Next

Lee has big goals for his small app. “I do want it to be a widespread tool. I think that right now it’s kind of a hard problem to send someone a large file across the Internet without it getting spied on. This is a very simple way around that,” he told Gizmodo. “I would like a lot of people to use it, and for it to become a new standard way for people to send big files. It will make the Internet more secure.”

Though Onionshare is in its infancy, the potential impact it could have on security should interest even seasoned privacy advocates — and normal internet users dismayed by the current state of online privacy.
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2014/06/me...wden-will-use/





Police Scoop Up Data on Thousands in Mobile Phone 'Tower Dumps' to Track Down Criminals
Ben Grubb and Emma Partridge

Australian federal and state police are ordering phone providers to hand over personal information about thousands of mobile phone users, whether they are targets of an investigation or not.

Fairfax Media has confirmed Australian law-enforcement agencies are using a technique known as a "tower dump", which gives police data about the identity, activity and location of any phone that connects to targeted cell towers over a set span of time, generally an hour or two.

A typical dump covers multiple towers, and mobile providers, and can net information about thousands of mobile phones.

The dumps are usually used in circumstances when police have few leads and can be a useful, powerful tool in tracking down criminals. But privacy advocates say that while they may be helpful to police, they also target thousands of innocent people and don’t have any judicial oversight.

In addition to no warrant being required to request a tower dump containing the mobile phone data of thousands of people to track down one or more criminals involved in a crime, privacy advocates also question what is being done to the data collected once an investigation is complete.

USA Today initially reported how US law-enforcement agencies were using the tower dump tactic earlier this year.

NSW Police, Victoria Police and the Australian Federal Police all declined to comment.

But Fairfax Media has been able to confirm that "tower dumps" were an investigation tool often used by NSW Police.

A NSW Police spokesman said it would “not comment” on its “operational capabilities”.

Victoria Police wouldn't discuss tower dumps either, saying it did not comment on "police methodology”.

And the Australian Federal Police also said it would not comment on its "technical capabilities”.

Some phone companies receiving the requests, however, admitted that tower dumps occurred.

“On occasion mobile network operators receive requests from Australian law-enforcement agencies to provide communications information from a specific tower,” a Vodafone spokeswoman told Fairfax. “These requests usually cover short periods and the information provided is only metadata.”

Metadata is information about the time, duration and destination of calls but not their content. Metadata can also include location data about a mobile phone, even when it’s not on a call.

Telstra wouldn’t say whether it received tower dump requests but believed they were lawful.

“A request for non-content information on the use of a particular tower during a specified period of time may be lawful under certain circumstances,” a Telstra spokeswoman said.

Meanwhile, Optus would not comment on the tower dump practice at all, saying instead that it assisted “law-enforcement and national security agencies as required in the legislation...”

Greens Party spokesman for communications, Scott Ludlam, said this was the first time the practice of tower dumps had been confirmed to occur in Australia.

“It’s another example where [agencies] are collecting the entire haystack in order to find the needle,” Senator Ludlam said in an interview with Fairfax.

“What we've seen with other techniques like this is there is no requirement to destroy the material that is collected incidentally after an investigation is complete,” Senator Ludlam said.

He added that he would like to see more transparency around what type of crime needed to be committed in order for tower dumps to occur.

“What we need is transparency as to what's being done and who is doing it,” he said. “Ultimately I think we need a lawful warranting process to start to apply to [requests for data] like this.”

Although the Attorney-General’s Department releases a once-a-year report detailing how many requests are made to telecommunications companies for metadata in Australia, it’s unclear whether a tower dump is counted as one metadata request or otherwise.

Considering thousands of users are affected by tower dumps, Ludlam argues that they should count for the number of those who are affected.

Around 330,000 requests for metadata were made by law-enforcement agencies in 2012-13, according to the latest report published by the Attorney-General’s Department.
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/m...706-zsvtf.html





Android's Phone Wiping Fails to Delete Personal Data

Prepping an older phone for resale or as a donation? A study shows you'll need more than the default data wipe tools to eliminate personal data and those embarrassing selfies.
Seth Rosenblatt

Was that naked selfie you took really deleted before you sold your phone on eBay?

A new study from security software vendor Avast calls into question the effectiveness of Android's factory reset option, which many people have relied upon to delete personal data from their old smartphones before reselling or making a charitable donation with the old device.

Avast -- known for its security software on Windows, Mac, and Android -- purchased 20 Android smartphones from eBay, which has around 80,000 used smartphones for sale at any given time. Among the data that Avast employees recovered from the phones were more than 40,000 photos -- including 250 nude male selfies -- along with 750 emails and text messages, 250 contacts, the identities of four phones' previous owners, and one completed loan application.

The problem, as Avast mobile division president Jude McColgan told CNET, is that people still aren't used to considering the implications of all the personal data stored on a smartphone.

"Users thought they were doing a clean wipe and factory reinstall," he said, but the factory reinstall is cleaning phones "only at the application layer."

Smartphones can be a treasure trove of personal data, thanks to the central -- and often rather intimate -- role they've taken in people's everyday lives, through Facebook posts, Snapchat conversations, online banking, Amazon purchases, and much more. It's a new reality of personal technology recognized last month by no less a body than the US Supreme Court, which ruled that police must get a search warrant before delving into the contents of a person's cell phone.

"We have a very unique relationship with our mobile phones that we've never had to any other technological device," Bronson James, a lawyer involved in one of the cell phone cases decided by the Supreme Court, told CNET's Ben Fox Rubin. "In our brief we equated our mobile devices as the entryway into our virtual home."

Avast didn't have to resort to much digital jiu-jitsu to recover the data from the phones it acquired, McColgan said. His team used "fairly generic, publicly available," off-the-shelf digital forensics software such as FTK Imager, a drive-imaging program.
"Although at first glance the phones appeared thoroughly erased, we quickly retrieved a lot of private data. In most cases, we got to the low-level analysis, which helped us recover SMS and chat messages," Avast researchers Jaromir Horejsi and David Fiser wrote in the report.

Avast noted in the report that its own Android security app comes with a deletion tool that the company said does a better job of wiping personal data than the included reset option.

McColgan was not shy about pointing this out. There's a challenge, he said, in making people more aware of device security "when your whole PC and more is in your pocket."
http://www.cnet.com/news/android-pho...personal-data/





The Government Started a War On Access to Information, and it is Losing

There is good news about the net neutrality fight and the NSA hacking scandal: The American government tried to get away with all of it, and the average citizen isn't letting it happen. In a fight against a juggernaut, improbably, you are winning.
Ben Collins

Glenn Greenwald, one of the few men in the world with access to all of Edward Snowden’s leaks, went on Real Time With Bill Maher last month. It’s typically a lion’s den in there—a gang-up against the guest that disagrees with Maher the most—and while Maher respected Greenwald, he wondered if Snowden had done the right thing.

Then Paul Rieckhoff spoke up. He’s the founder of the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. He wondered why, if Snowden believed in this so much, he didn’t just man up, come home, and potentially face life in prison. And why was he in Russia, anyway?

“Oh, that is such bullshit,” Greenwald said, aggrieved.

He was exasperated by this, and so was the audience. They whooped and hollered and applauded Greenwald, and they went against the host, for once—an act of defiance. The crowd finally went against the guy with his name on the door.

According to a poll last month, 55 percent of Americans believe that Edward Snowden did the right thing. Eighty-one percent now believe that their personal information is being intercepted or analyzed. President Obama, by contrast, has a 42 percent approval rating. Congress is at 13 percent.

The first leak in The Guardian was only 13 months ago.

When George Washington University asked prospective attendees for a “role model” in college essays this year, admissions officers are seeing a lot of Edward Snowden.

Even former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared to be softening her stance on Snowden this weekend.

"He has a right to mount a defense," she said. "And he certainly has a right to launch both a legal defense and a public defense, which can of course affect the legal defense.”

At every step in the past year, those in power who have tried to inhibit the free flow of information—from the NSA’s non-disclosure of its wiretapping to the FCC's flailing attempts to create a fast lane for the wealthier on the Internet—have lost the majority of public support.

This is not a partisan idea. Dick Cheney's Vice Presidency kept his strategic direction for the NSA in a sealed vault across the street from the White House and to this day defends wiretapping programs vehemently. President Obama campaigned on the restriction of warrantless wiretapping and did a 180 after taking office.

America is now a country with a majority populace open to—and even rooting on—the idea that the best way to kill corruption and spur on innovation is to make information available for all. And it’s even willing to go against its elected officials to make that happen.

But this didn’t start with Edward Snowden. This started with Aaron Swartz.

Before Aaron Swartz was prosecuted to death by the American justice system—namely by Massachusetts District Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant DA Stephen Heymann, who still have their jobs—he co-founded Reddit, the self-proclaimed front page of the Internet and the place where concentrated, single-issue activism on the Web is allowed to thrive.

When he was alive, Swartz fought to answer one, big question.

“What kind of Internet do we want?”

That’s what Brian Knappenberger says, anyway, and that’s why he made a movie about Swartz’s activism. The film follows all 26 years of Aaron Swartz’s life, from his time as a kid computer genius to his push as an activist for free information to the trial that caused him to take his life.

In 2010, while he was a research fellow at Harvard, Swartz wrote a script to download a massive number of academic research papers from the database JSTOR. He didn’t disseminate any of it—some think he would have eventually; others believe he was using big pieces of data for a research project—but he was still arrested for it. JSTOR, at the time, was behind a paywall.

That was when District Attorney Carmen Ortiz and Assistant DA Stephen Heymann, who still have their jobs, threw the book at him until he was buried underneath it. JSTOR issued a letter saying they would not seek prosecution. Ortiz and Heymann weren’t hearing it. They wanted a plea deal. Swartz didn’t want to admit guilt.

Ignoring federal sentencing guidelines, Heymann, who still has his job, sought to put Swartz in jail for seven years. According to Swartz’s father in Knappenberger’s film, Heymann allegedly told others he wanted to make an example out of Swartz.

On January 11, 2013, Swartz killed himself instead. He was 26.

Last year, JSTOR made its entire database free to the public anyway.

After his death, media—especially the parts of the landscape Swartz helped create, like Reddit and the social Web—finally started to catch on: The keys to change are in unbridled, unlimited access to information. Corporations and the courts and the government don’t want that change—it will shine a light on corruption and potentially cap profits—and all three will often intimidate dissenters to make sure that information is harder to attain.

“Openness is at the heart of it,” says Knappenberger.

That’s, in part, why he made his movie, The Internet’s Own Boy. The world finally has the tools to band together and fight back against greed and unchecked power. Swartz’s death was the catalyst. A man like that wouldn’t be bullied to death today without a lot more outcry.

“He didn’t live to see the Snowden revelations. I wish he did. I wish he’d seen that battle. I wish he’d been a force in that battle. It’s impossible not to recognize his absence in that,” says Knappenberger. “I think he’d be happy, but with an understanding that there’s a lot of work to be done. And I think in the net neutrality bid, he’d be vocal.

“There has been this big backlash. But we have to ask ourselves: Do we want an Internet that is a tool for government surveillance? Do we want one where corporations extract private data from us solely for the purpose of selling more things? Do we want an Internet where oppressive regimes can squash their dissidents, or do we want an Internet where dissidents can crawl their way back against oppressive regimes instead?"

There will be no going back and saving Aaron Swartz, but in the process of combating the nonstop greed of telecoms like Comcast—who want to throttle Internet speeds in order to create for-profit fast and slow lanes—and surveillance by the NSA, something remarkable happened:

Regular people were forced to look forward to see what the Internet can become, and those people found that it is the path to the Jetsons-esque, sci-fi future they’ve always envisioned.

“We’ve been thinking of the Internet as the thing we’ve been using for 20 years, but we now know it’s much bigger than that. We need to get beyond the idea that the Internet is this place that we blog—end of story—and start thinking of it as the data flow that moves our daily lives,” says Siva Vaidhyanathan, the author of “The Googlization of Everything.”

That means cars with “constant data flowing through them and communicating with one another,” says Vaidhyanathan. It means automated homes. It means more comfortable lives. It means smarter people. It means a more transparent and, with hope, less deceitful government.

“The FCC keeps regulating for last year’s model, but this is about things we can’t even comprehend,” says Vaidhyanathan. “It’s about doing our best to ensure creativity, innovation, openness and free speech in all of these systems we haven’t yet imagined.”

If these threads all seem unconnected—if net neutrality and Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks and Aaron Swartz’s open information zeal all sound like stories independent from one another—they're not. They're all about one thing: Making information easier to access for everyone, so that people can be better, and corruption can be outed faster.

“The good stuff is based on neutrality. The fight against it is the worst of our democracy—the worst of who we are,” Knappenberger says.

It's only been one year since Edward Snowden's first leak. Revelations are still pouring out. Yesterday, the Washington Post let out even more: The NSA was far more likely to be tracking "love and heartbreak, financial anxieties and disappointed hopes" of average citizens than foreign terrorists.

But it wasn't a surprise anymore. It wasn't a surprise because the government's war on information is losing, and corruption is losing along with it.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/news/wi...he-war-on-info





Senate Intelligence Committee Approves Cybersecurity Bill

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee approved a bill on Tuesday to encourage companies to exchange information with the government on hacking attempts and cybersecurity threats, officials said.

Despite concerns by some that the measure does not do enough to protect privacy, the committee voted 12-3 to advance the measure authored by its chairwoman, Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, and Vice Chairman Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican, their offices said.

Experts see the bill as the best chance for the current congress to pass some type of legislation to encourage better cooperation between the government and private companies to boost the cyber defenses of critical industries.

"Cyber attacks present the greatest threat to our national and economic security today, and the magnitude of the threat is growing," Feinstein said in a statement. "This bill is an important step toward curbing these dangerous cyber attacks."

U.S. lawmakers have been considering for months legislation to help private companies better communicate about security breaches and cyber threats. However, comprehensive cyber bills have been delayed by spats over liability and concerns about privacy, especially following the leak of information about government surveillance programs by former contractor Edward Snowden.

The Senate bill still faces hurdles before becoming law. It must be approved by the full Senate and reconciled with similar legislation that passed the House of Representatives in April.

SUPPORT IN THE HOUSE

However, there are already signs that the measure has bipartisan support in the House. The Republican chairman and top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee issued a statement on Tuesday backing the measure and urging the full Senate to vote quickly.

"We are confident that the House and the Senate will quickly come together to address this urgent threat and craft a final bill that secures our networks and protects privacy and civil liberties," Michigan Republican Mike Rogers and Maryland Democrat Dutch Ruppersberger said in a statement.

Among other things, the bill by Feinstein and Chambliss would authorize companies and individuals to monitor their own and consenting customers' networks for hacking and voluntarily share cyber threat data, stripped of personally identifiable information, with the government and each other for cybersecurity purposes.

The legislation also directs the U.S. director of national intelligence to increase the amount of information the government shares with private firms and the Department of Homeland Security to set up and manage a data sharing portal.

The measure would also offer liability protections to companies that appropriately monitor their networks or share cyber threat data and limit the government's ability to use data it receives.

Some privacy advocates have opposed giving companies liability protections, worried about abuses of consumer data both by the private sector and the government.

Democratic Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, both members of the intelligence committee, said after the vote that they had opposed the bill because they felt it did not include sufficient privacy protections.

(Reporting by Alina Selyukh in Toronto, additional reporting by Patricia Zengerle in Washington; Editing by David Gregorio)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FD2LG20140708





The Ex-Google Hacker Taking on the World’s Spy Agencies
Andy Greenberg

During his last six years working as an elite security researcher for Google, the hacker known as Morgan Mayhem spent his nights and weekends hunting down the malware used to spy on vulnerable targets like human rights activists and political dissidents.

His new job tasks him with defending a different endangered species: American national security journalists.

For the last month, 34-year-old Morgan Marquis-Boire has been the director of security for First Look Media, the media startup founded by eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar that has recruited journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.1 The website has become the most prolific publisher of NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s remaining secrets. Marquis-Boire’s daunting task is to safeguard those documents, and the communications of reporters who have perhaps the press’ most adversarial relationships with Western intelligence agencies.

Beyond protecting Snowden’s favorite journalists, Marquis-Boire sees his decision to leave Google for First Look as a chance to focus full-time on the problem of protecting reporters and activists as a whole, groups he sees as some of the most sensitive targets for governments globally. “I look at the risk posed to individuals in the real world,” says Marquis-Boire, an imposing, often black-clad New Zealander with earrings, dreadlocks, and a taste for death metal. “In human rights and journalism, the consequences of communications being compromised are imprisonment, physical violence, and even death. These types of users need security assistance in a very real sense.”

Marquis-Boire already has distinguished himself as a relentless counter-surveillance researcher and a vocal critic of the companies that have created an industry hawking spyware to governments. In 2012, he and researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab were the first to identify Finfisher, a stealthy collection of spying tools sold by the British firm Gamma Group that they eventually tracked to command-and-control servers in 25 countries. Later that year he helped trace how a piece of software sold by the Italian firm Hacking Team was used by the government of the United Arab Emirates to spy on a political dissident beaten by thugs. Just last month he revealed new findings that showed how that company’s tools have evolved to target iPhones, Android devices and other mobile targets. And in early 2013 Marquis-Boire and Citizen Lab researchers mapped the spread of surveillance and censorship tools sold by the Palo Alto, California firm Blue Coat to 61 countries, including Iran.

In the detective work required to pin those stealthy spying incidents on repressive governments and Western companies, Marquis-Boire is “extraordinarily talented,” says Ron Deibert, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto and Citizen Lab’s director. ”There are some people who are phenomenally adept at forensics, who have an intuitive sense of how to make connections through different pieces of evidence,” he says. “Morgan has those skills…But what I very much appreciate about him is his passion for human rights.”

A Cypherpunk In The Newsroom

First Look and Marquis-Boire aren’t saying much about exactly what he’ll do at the closely-watched new media startup. But Marquis-Boire says he was convinced early in their recruitment meetings that First Look will treat security as a central tenet. (More about First Look’s plans in the video below.) The job also presents a challenge worthy of leaving his high profile position at Google: Protecting the communications between non-technical reporters and their highly-sensitive sources in a post-WikiLeaks and -Snowden era where they’re both increasingly targeted by spooks.

Marquis-Boire hints that he’s already researching security vulnerabilities that affect journalists, and working with several companies to release security fixes to their services in the next couple of months. Brian Sweeney, First Look’s head of technology operations, says Marquis-Boire’s work likely will extend into research designed to protect reporters beyond the company’s firewall. “The idea that all digital citizens, including and especially journalists, have access to data privacy is something that we strongly believe in,” says Sweeney.

Marquis-Boire, the son of two literature professors at the University of Auckland, got started with security experimentation as a teenager in the New Zealand hacker scene under the handle “headhntr.” After starting college at Auckland, he and a group of friends wrote an article for the university magazine about breaking into the school’s website to take over the server that ran it. On another occasion he was called into a local telecom’s office and “given a stern talking to about using their services as a test lab.”

But from the beginning, his interest in hacking was also political: In the late 1990s the kiwi teenager discovered the Cypherpunks Mailing List, a group of cryptographers and radical libertarians bent on foiling government surveillance and empowering individuals with privacy tools. The group eventually would foster projects like the anonymous remailers that relay emails to obscure their senders’ identities, the anonymity software Tor, WikiLeaks, and countless other privacy and encryption projects. “People realized that to actually have free speech, we have to be sure we won’t be monitored or persecuted,” says Marquis-Boire. “The intertwined nature of privacy and free expression was at the core of the cypherpunk movement.”

Marquis-Boire and friends soon hosted what he says was the first anonymous remailer server in New Zealand out of a “dingy warehouse apartment with far too many blinking lights and whirring things.” Eventually, he ran five Tor relays, the nodes in the Tor network that bounce users’ traffic to obscure their location.

But Marquis-Boire’s first real job in security, penetration-testing banks, power plants, and other clients for a New Zealand auditing firm, was unsatisfying. “I spent a bit of time musing about how much it costs to hire security consultants to do something like a black box [penetration test] of your whole enterprise,” he says. “I wanted to give my skills to the people who really needed them.”

“He Has Quite a Hacker Mind”

In 2008, Google hired Marquis-Boire in its Zurich, Switzerland office. He was assigned to cybersecurity incident response at the company not long before the biggest known security crisis in its history: the so-called Aurora hacking operation, in which Chinese hackers breached Google’s network for months and stole information that included source code from its servers. Marquis-Boire became an early member of the core team of network defenders assigned to battle the state-sponsored spies trying to eavesdrop on Google’s users. “He has quite a hacker mind,” says Heather Adkins, Google’s manager of information security, “Of everyone I’ve ever hired at Google, I’d put him in the top one percent of technical capability.”

When the Arab Spring began a year later, human rights activists like those at Citizen Lab who had seen Marquis-Boire’s presentations on state-sponsored hacking began seeking his help analyzing attacks on vulnerable groups across the Middle East. As revolutions and political unrest blossomed from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya to Syria, his detective work became nearly a full-time job. “There have been a lot of books not read and canceled vacations,” he says.

In the meantime, Google’s Adkins adds, Marquis-Boire frequently uncovered weaknesses in the company’s defenses for users—and he’s been just as focused on locking out the NSA as China’s People’s Liberation Army. In the wake of revelations from Snowden’s leaks that the NSA spied on unencrypted Google data moving between the company’s data centers, Marquis-Boire was one of the first at the company to push for encryption not only of the company’s internal data transfers, but also the exchange of emails between Gmail and other providers. That pressure led Google earlier this month to start publicly naming which email services do and don’t allow for that encryption in a bid to pressure other companies to safeguard users’ privacy.

Marquis-Boire’s focus turned to protecting journalists in particular earlier this year, when he and other Googlers released research in March showing that 21 out of the 25 top media organizations in the world had been targeted in digital attacks that were likely the work of state-sponsored hackers. The same month, he joined a technical advisory group for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which counts Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden as members of its board. “If you can’t protect your privacy and that of your sources, it’s debatable whether you can actually practice journalism in the traditional sense,” he says.

That notion represents a shift from the cypherpunk views of Marquis-Boire’s youth. Once, cypherpunks were mainly interested in seizing privacy for themselves. Now, he says, that’s no longer enough. “When we discovered that we could create private and anonymous communications with math, that was super cool,” he says. “But then after a while I think it dawned on us as a movement that the only conversations you could have with those tools were with other cypherpunks.”

“Now it’s been thrust into our faces that the people practicing adversarial journalism and exposing human right abuses are the real-world targets of precisely the kind of thing that the cypherpunk movement was trying to protect against,” says Marquis-Boire. “It’s become apparent we need to provide privacy to those who need it, not just to ourselves.”
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/morgan-...st-look-media/





New Private Calling Plan for the Surveillance Age
Eric Auchard

Silent Circle, a company known for mobile apps designed to thwart government surveillance, is introducing a fixed price, secrecy-cloaking service on Thursday that lets customers make and receive private phone calls.

The secure voice-and-data calling plan works on Apple iOS and Android smartphones and, eventually, on Windows Mobile systems, the company said. Callers can reach 79 countries, including China, Russia, most of Europe and the Americas. Large parts of the Middle East and Africa are not covered.

The service aims to challenge not just traditional phone carriers - who still by and large charge steep roaming fees to international travelers - but also to newer, voice-over-Internet services that have sprung up over the past decade.

For while Silent Circle undercuts major competitors' roaming costs in many countries, the service's basic attraction lies in its security features.

"What Silent Circle is offering is an augmented level of security beyond what normal phones can offer," said Ben Wood, a senior analyst with mobile research firm CCS Insight. "It captures the zeitgeist in terms of paranoia by answering the question of what more consumers can do to protect themselves."

The offering looks to appeal to international business travelers working with sensitive information including executives, lawyers and bankers, as well as journalists or activists aiming to fend off prying eyes and unwanted listeners in an age of growing criminal, state-sponsored, corporate espionage and Internet-wide privacy threats.

While no one is immune to such snooping, Silent Circle offers users a means of encrypted communications that also disposes of records of all calls, texts, messages or documents on both senders' and receivers' devices. This "burn" feature auto-deletes sent messages and attachments at pre-set times.

“Any drug dealer, terrorist or pimp who thinks this sort of service will insulate them would have to be naïve,” Wood said. "Nothing is bullet-proof in that regard."

But some security experts see the software as one of the best commercial options available to individuals, businesses and even government workers, albeit one without absolute guarantees of anonymity or the capacity to withstand targeted surveillance.

"It all depends on what your threat profile is," said the Geneva-based company's chief operations officer, Vic Hyder, a former U.S. Navy SEAL officer. "Most people out there will understand that it's the best security I can have and that's good enough."

Bubble Of Privacy

Silent Circle was founded by security expert Mike Janke, another former Navy SEAL, along with Internet encryption creator Phil Zimmermann and Jon Callas, inventor of Apple's whole disk encryption system.

The new calling plan starts at $12.95 a month for 100 minutes of outbound calls and runs up to $39.95 for 1,000 minutes of calling, comparable to premium price plans offered by Internet communications services such as Microsoft's Skype and Rakuten's Viber - but with greater security.

Customers receive a personal, 10-digit phone number from one of 26 countries that they can use to receive calls when traveling. Calls can be received from anywhere in the world at the calling party’s standard long-distance rates.

The plan charges outbound calls that Silent Circle members make to non-Circle members - anyone with a landline phone in the 79 countries covered by the plan and the 42 countries where mobile phone users are reachable.

Outbound calls provide what Hyder calls "a bubble of encryption" that conceals the contents of a call as it is transmitted to Silent Circle servers in Canada and Switzerland, before it is then sent out to public phone networks.

In June, the company also started shipping its first mobile phones. The "Blackphone" comes loaded with a customized version of the Android operating system known as PrivateOS along with a suite of security and privacy apps from Silent Circle.

Hyder said KPN in the Netherlands and Telcel in Mexico, a unit of Carlos Slim's America Movil, were in the early stages of testing the phones for possible mass market retail sales starting later this year or early in 2015.

(Editing by Georgina Prodhan and Tom Pfeiffer)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/...0FF0Q020140710





The Government Has Asked Verizon for Customer Data 149,000 Times This Year. And it’s Only July.
Brian Fung

Verizon's just published its second-ever transparency report, showing that in the first six months of 2014, the company received nearly 149,000 requests for customer data from the government. That's fewer than the 160,000 times that federal, state and local law enforcement asked Verizon for information on its customers during a similar period in 2013.

For the first time, Verizon's described (albeit in pretty general terms) the number of Americans affected by each request. Of the more than 72,000 requests that came in the form of a subpoena during the first half of the year, 90 percent targeted three or fewer customers, according to the company.

"On average, each subpoena sought information about 1.8 selectors," Verizon notes in its report, using the term for specific personal information like phone numbers that can be used to help identify a customer.

Detailing how many customers were affected by data demands is a crucial part of interpreting the raw number of overall requests. Requests can be written broadly or tailored narrowly. Complying with a broad request means potentially disclosing information on way more than just one customer. Verizon says that although "it may not make the headlines, Verizon commonly pushes back" against requests that are written too broadly.

All this is still taking place against the backdrop of the NSA surveillance debate, which the House voted to rein in (somewhat) earlier this year. In the first six months of 2014, Verizon received somewhere between zero and 999 national security letters (the government only allows companies to report those requests as a range). As many as 3,000 customers may have been affected by those requests. Verizon added in its report that it's still unable to talk about any phone records collection you may or may not have heard people talking about.

"We note that while we now are able to provide more information about national security orders that directly relate to our customers," the company said, "reporting on other matters, such as any orders we may have received related to the bulk collection of non-content information, remains prohibited.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...its-only-july/





Sen. Al Franken Accuses AT&T of ‘Skirting’ Net Neutrality Rules
Brian Fung

One of the most vocal skeptics of industry consolidation, Sen. Al Franken hasn't pulled any punches when it comes to the proposed merger between Comcast and Time Warner Cable — a deal that would give Comcast control over roughly 30 percent of the pay-TV market.

Now, the lawmaker is setting his sights on another major deal: AT&T's proposal to acquire DirecTV. In a letter to federal regulators, Franken warns that letting the deal go through could turn AT&T into a gatekeeper to the mobile Internet. Franken also complains that AT&T took inappropriate steps to block Internet applications like Google Voice and Skype.

"AT&T has a history of skirting the spirit, and perhaps the letter" of the government's rules on net neutrality, Franken wrote. Those rules were written in 2010 — and AT&T has pledged to abide by them for three years if its DirecTV purchase goes through — but were knocked down by a federal court in January. Read the rest of the letter below:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...trality-rules/





The Fall of Net Neutrality: Cable's Plot to Destroy the Internet

Higher costs and worse service loom on the horizon
Chris Parker

Like any bloodless coup, this one takes place within the palace, beyond the purview of prying eyes. It's an inside job spearheaded by the ultimate in inside players, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. He's a former Obama fundraiser, cable lobbyist, and head of the cable trade association, chosen by the president to chaperon the very industry he once served.

Wheeler's loyalties were evident in May, when he proposed segregating the internet between the haves and have-nots. Under the plan, cable operators could charge large companies like Netflix extra to move their wares over a high-speed expressway. Anyone who couldn't pay the toll would be relegated to frontage roads.

Critics — who include most everyone but cable companies — believe Wheeler's plan will shaft consumers and squelch innovation. Present rules dictate that all traffic moves at the same speed, part of a long-standing principle known as "net neutrality." It puts a basement blog on the same footing as the Huffington Post, and enables smarter companies to eclipse market leaders in the way Facebook conquered MySpace.

Yet Wheeler's proposal would not only hand a windfall to his former masters. It would allow cable operators to slow customers' content, regardless of promised connection speed. And it would ensure that dominant tech companies could swat away smaller competitors that couldn't afford to pay the new tolls. Even venture capitalists oppose the idea, saying they're less likely to invest in start-ups placed at such a disadvantage.

In essence, Wheeler is about to place the most dynamic, growing sector of our economy into the hands of an industry legendary for its abysmal customer service.

U.S. Sen. Al Franken's assessment of the plot: "I'm sorry, you just made me sad."

The monopolies are coming

For years the internet has been governed by rules similar to those regulating phone companies. These laws were designed to prevent discrimination or denial of service under the premise that the phone's a basic necessity. Water and power companies operate under similar dictates. Many feel broadband should be treated the same way, given its increasing importance in every aspect of our lives.

It's even more critical considering the limited competition among internet service providers (ISPs) offering high-speed broadband.

While the phone companies' slower copper line service initially competed with cable, the proliferation of video has exposed the technology's native inferiority. So they ceded high-speed broadband to cable companies, most of whom enjoy monopolies in the cities they serve.

Cable broadband already serves nearly three-fifths of the country, and has added 85 percent of all new broadband subscribers in the past two years.

"If net neutrality is about anything, it's the recognition that we're probably not going to have a lot of extra competition quickly in the ISP business," says Dr. Gerald Faulhaber of the University of Pennsylvania. "In essence, network neutrality is a way to keep monopoly or duopoly cable/teleco ISPs from abusing their market position."

But instead of regulating broadband for the greater good, Wheeler's handing America's most hated industry control of our future.

First in our pockets, last in our hearts

To trust cable with the nation's communications backbone requires a fanciful leap of faith. The industry has a tattered history of price gouging, litigiousness, poor customer service, faltering investment, and legislative manipulation. Now the industry's largest company is attempting to swallow its closest competitor, further constricting consumer choice.

In February, the No. 1 pay-TV provider, Comcast, announced the proposed purchase of No. 2 Time Warner Cable. Comcast has promised to sell enough television markets to limit the new company to 30 percent of the pay-TV market nationally. (The plan includes spinning off markets such as Minneapolis-St. Paul into a third company in which Comcast would have a minority stake.)

The divestiture is voluntary, meant to mollify the FCC. But tellingly, Comcast has offered no such concessions on its more profitable broadband business. The merged companies would provide service to more than 40 percent of the country, including half of all high-speed connections.

Not only would the merger give one company unprecedented market share, but it promises to forge a new standard in bad customer service.

Even within the most despised American industries — cable and internet — Comcast and Time Warner are annual bottom-dwellers when it comes to consumer ratings, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index. (Neither of the companies responded to repeated interview requests.)

But thanks to Comcast's monopoly position, there's little incentive to please its clientele. In 2012, Comcast's average revenue per subscriber was $143 a month — up 140 percent in the past decade.

The entire industry has raised prices two and a half times faster than inflation since 1998. Meanwhile, its investment in broadband infrastructure is flat — and more than 15 percent off its 2001 peak.

Most businesses see failure to invest as a recipe for wreckage. Not cable. Once the pipe is laid, each new subscriber to broadband is almost pure profit.

Unfortunately, that lack of investment also causes internet congestion. Which cable, rather disingenuously, is now using as an excuse to charge high-traffic companies like Netflix greater fees.

"They're not making a commensurate investment to get us to where we need to be or where consumers want us to be, because their investment plan's based on managing that scarcity," says Mike Wassenaar, a former program director at KFAI radio who now works for the Alliance of Community Media.

In other words, operating on the cheap can be very good for business.

Would you like the Democratic Party gift wrapped, sir?

Owning the content as well as the pipes gives Comcast an unprecedented advantage. That's why Senator Franken objected to the company's $13.8 billion purchase of NBC/Universal in 2010.

Acquiring NBC turned Comcast into an entertainment juggernaut with at least two dozen cable channels (Bravo, SyFy, USA), numerous production companies, a movie studio, and theme parks. It even owns one-third of the pay-TV alternative Hulu.

Since Comcast owns much of its TV programming, its competitors will always pay more. Meanwhile, due to its sheer size, Comcast can command better prices from other programmers. And by owning numerous NBC affiliates, the company also pockets rich retransmission fees that pay-TV must send to local network broadcasters.

With Comcast already holding the most dominant market position in both cable and internet, a newfound ability to charge extra for faster internet creates tremendous incentive for abuse.

Not that government seems to care. Republicans have shown little interest in thwarting monopolies, and have often been downright hostile to consumer protection. With the cable industry slathering Democrats with money, expect few outside Franken to make a fuss.

Last year, Comcast spent $18.8 million in lobbying, the third-most by any corporation. It's made over $7 million in campaign contributions since the last election cycle, nearly 60 percent of that to Democrats. With mid-term election season coming, politicians aren't typically interested in ruffling the fattest donors.

"The public interest is best served by having an open internet," says Congressman Keith Ellison (DFL-Minneapolis). "Once you start introducing payola, or pay-to-play to have a faster lane, you penalize anybody who can't pay the top dollar.... You're going to have special interests trying to advance their profitability and win friends. I hope my colleagues understand they're here to look out for the public interest."

That's easier said than done when Comcast President Brian Roberts golfs with Presidnet Obama, Executive Vice President David Cohen raised $2 million for the president's campaigns, Wheeler raised an additional $700,000, and former Comcast Vice President David Krone now serves as Majority Leader Harry Reid's chief of staff.

The cherry on top: Comcast also owns MSNBC, the official cheerleader for the Democratic Party.

"Millions of people raising their voice is one thing," says Christopher Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Minneapolis. "Comcast raising millions of dollars is another.... Comcast is a huge fundraiser for the party and you just can't get away from that."

The FCC takes a dive

The origins of net neutrality go back a dozen years to when then-FCC Chairman Michael Powell (yes, Colin's son) decided to deregulate cable broadband. (The FCC failed to respond to multiple interview requests.)

Powell, befittingly now president of the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, believed this would spur competition and new technology. Instead, it hastened industry consolidation and slowed investment.

The FCC's been trying to walk back Powell's decision ever since. The easy move would have been to regulate all internet providers like phone companies. But the agency chose an industry-friendly path, proposing a series of tender rules that have been sabotaged by lobbying and lawsuits. Twelve years later, the FCC is still trying to corral the industry.

The absence of regulation has allowed ISPs to push the line. In 2007, Comcast was caught secretly throttling the speeds of customers using the file-sharing software BitTorrent. The company claimed it was necessary because they were using too much bandwidth.

This behavior not only violated net neutrality, but prompted the FCC to demand greater transparency in how ISPs manage their traffic. Comcast took the FCC to court and won.

In January the FCC's latest attempt at net neutrality rules were tossed out. They were judged too similar to those governing utilities. If the FCC didn't want to classify broadband as a utility, it couldn't be regulated like one.

As a result, the FCC's only choice was piss off cable by making it a utility, or allow the industry to wreak havoc on the internet.

Time Warner and Comcast have offered Washington their input — in tens and twenties — to the tune of $30 million since the last election. With volume like that, the FCC couldn't help but listen.

Wheeler's Appomattox

In May, Wheeler offered new rules that carve out a loophole for "paid prioritization." All data would still move freely. It will just move faster for those with cash.

Wheeler claims that ISPs will be barred from "commercially unreasonable" behavior — such as Comcast creating a faster lane for its own content.

"If anyone acts to degrade the service... for the benefit of a few, I intend to use every available power to stop it," he promised in an April blog post.

That's great rhetoric, but once loopholes are built, they tend to expand rather than constrict. And it's certainly easier to limit anti-competitive behavior from the start — before smaller companies are already vanquished or debilitated.

Cable industry chieftain Michael Powell has already promised "World War III" if the feds move to utility-style regulation. But the idea is already working in other countries, where American internet service would be considered primitive by comparison.

Throughout Europe and East Asia, broadband providers are forced to lease their lines to all comers. That's led to dramatic gains in coverage, pushing America toward the middle of the global pack in terms of usage (we're 24th), average speed (10th) and broadband penetration (15th).

"We should actually turn the car around," insists Franken. "Other countries that turned the car around and went in another direction wound up with a lot more choices for people and much more wired than we are."

The feds took a similar approach in the 1980s, when they forced the Baby Bell companies to do same thing. All were required to license access to their lines, opening the door to all kinds of innovation.

"It accelerated the spread of wireless and the internet by allowing small, independent ISPs to use the wires in a non-discriminatory way," says University of Minnesota professor Andrew Odlyzko, a mathematician who worked at Bell Labs prior to the breakup. "They tried to discriminate and get permission to charge extra for internet but they were refused — otherwise it would've probably strangled the internet."

No fiber for you

Of course, a corporation's existence is based on exploiting advantages, not working for the public good. So when some cities began to lay their own lines and offer broadband and pay-TV, cable moved aggressively to protect its turf.

In more than 20 states, the industry has promoted laws restricting cities from creating their own fiber networks. Minnesota requires towns to pass a referendum with an unusually high 65 percent of the vote.

And in cities like Longmont, Colorado, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, cable spent millions on lobbying and lawsuits to subvert competition.

Chattanooga fought back. Its municipal power company, the Electric Power Board (EPB), wanted to improve its grid, since electricity disruptions cost the local economy $100 million annually. By connecting high-speed fiber to every home, it could improve the resiliency of the electrical grid and quickly diagnose problems. Outage times were cut by 60 percent.

The lines had the added advantage of providing the city's power customers with television, phone, and internet connection speeds more than 10 times faster than the national average.

"The cable folks didn't want us to do it," says EPB Vice President Danna Bailey. "They launched a pretty aggressive advertising campaign against it when we first started the process.... It was kind of funny because the campaign encouraged viewers to call the City Council and tell them you don't want EPB to build this network. City Council reported more calls — by a huge margin — saying they do want EPB to build this network."

Today, the city's broadband not only pays for itself, but reimburses the power company with a reasonable licensing fee for using the lines. You can understand why cable feels threatened.

"It's a different model," say Bailey. "We get to wake up every day and think about what we can do to be a better asset to the community.... That's the whole reason municipal power exists in the first place."

Higher-speed internet has helped attract small but growing tech companies like Claris Networks, EDOps, and Lamp Post Group. New start-ups have also flocked to the area, including Mental Health Analytics, run by Dr. Ashish Gupta. The former University of Minnesota professor took a job at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga so he could start his new company there.

All of which has left Fortune to label Chattanooga "a center for innovation." Wired believes it could be the next Silicon Valley.

Though fiber was a side benefit, for many municipalities it's the only answer to under-responsive telecom franchises, especially for out-state cities without the size to keep internet and pay-TV providers honest.

"That's why communities of a certain size are looking at municipal operations," says Wassenaar. "If you're a city of 50,000 or lower in a rural area, your ability to get 21st-century cable service is pretty low unless you provide it yourself."

Last year, Minnesota established the Office of Broadband Development. In May, the Legislature allocated $20 million to leverage private investment in rural communities.

"I talk to [rural] communities and they say to me the number-one thing people talk about isn't how good are the schools, but how good is the internet access," says state Rep. Matt Schmit (D-Red Wing), an architect of the plan. "The analogy here is rural electrification. You want to make sure everyone has that basic access to 21st-century infrastructure."

Windom installed municipal fiber a dozen years ago. Its first public vote failed after Qwest, the local internet provider, promised to install DSL. But when Qwest reneged, the next vote passed by 87 percent.

Wheeler has signaled a willingness to fight restrictions on cities. In June, citing Chattanooga's example, he wrote: "It is in the best interests of consumers and competition that the FCC exercises its power to preempt state laws that ban or restrict competition from community broadband. Given the opportunity, we will do so."

The quest to tame Netflix

Unfortunately, anti-competitive alarms keep ringing at the FCC. In addition to municipal fiber and the Time Warner merger, Wheeler's investigating complaints by Netflix that its users were kidnapped.

Netflix has accused Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon of holding its customers hostage. Last September, Netflix suffered a sudden, simultaneous decline in the speed in which its shows traveled across those companies' networks. Video sputtered and picture quality decayed, while customers of smaller companies like Cox and Cablevision saw no such hiccups.

Video files consume huge bandwidth, and Netflix's avid customer base is prone to binge-watching. That leaves the company accounting for 28 percent of all U.S. web traffic. (By comparison, YouTube is second at 17 percent.)

Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon felt Netflix should pay for all that traffic — and had the leverage to do it. Netflix ultimately caved and paid Comcast and Verizon (but not AT&T) undisclosed sums. Just as quickly, users on Comcast saw an extraordinary jump in quality.

The whole episode has the appearance of extortion. It also demonstrates the power of internet providers to make or break services.

Even after paying the ransom, Comcast users still experience slower Netflix speeds than Cox and Cablevision customers. But if it wanted to maintain its business, Netflix had no choice but to pay.

"Comcast knows it can charge Netflix more," says Mitchell. "Netflix had to choose between watching their business model crumble and paying Comcast a toll to access its customers."

While Professor Odlyzko appreciates Netflix's complaint, he's not all that sympathetic. He notes that Netflix is also trying to create its own content monopoly. For the moment, Amazon and Hulu are distant also-rans with under 3 percent of web traffic combined.

"One of the things that made me reluctant to get involved in the net neutrality debate is that at the moment most of the public's attention is attracted to a struggle between very big monopolistic companies — telecoms on one side and Netflix on the other," Odlyzko says. "A lot of what you hear is basically posturing by the sort of big guys that at some stage may need to be regulated."

Closing off the internet

Odlyzko is more worried about small companies like the UpTake, a nonprofit online news organization in the Twin Cities. Seven years ago, Executive Director Jason Barnett and his partners recognized how their video could reach small, dedicated audiences.

UpTake has covered stories involving hours of streaming video in a way no broadcast station would dare, from real-time footage outside the 2008 Republican National Convention to live coverage of the Franken election recount. It also live-streams Minnesota legislative sessions.

"During the RNC we were using live-stream video through cellphones and were able to show what was happening at a street level to an international audience," says Barnett. "It was a ton of fun, crazy, and kind of shocking what we went through to do that. None of that would've been possible without easy access to the internet and being able to live stream video."

Believe it or not, there's money in this so-called "long tail" form of coverage. The UpTake has built a catalog of over 6,000 videos on its YouTube channel. Small, independent operations are making a living appealing to narrow niches, rather than fighting in the mainstream marketplace for a sliver of mass attention.

"[The videos] all generate revenue for you, a penny at a time, and it adds up." says Barnett. "It's not a lot of money, but enough money to pay our rent and a couple other bills. That's really what the internet provides. You can develop a sustainable business if you're able to capture enough of these niche audiences."

Those audiences are the very people Congressman Ellison fears will be left behind. If it's forced to pay more for decent internet speed, the UpTake will likely see its tight profits turn to losses. This added pressure weighs especially heavy on newborn companies with little money. It's especially troubling for an economy that's witnessed declining entrepreneurship over the past quarter-century.

For consumers, video and live-stream music will either face slower speeds or higher prices under Wheeler's proposal.

"I'm worried we're pulling the ladder up after some big boys have gotten on top of the roof," says Ellison. "We don't need a situation where these big companies, once their fortunes are made, solidify their position by closing off the internet."

Returning fire with paper

After Wheeler's plan was announced, nearly 150 tech companies sent a letter to the FCC, arguing against the fast lanes. "The open internet," they wrote, is "a central reason why the internet remains an engine of entrepreneurship and economic growth." Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Netflix, Twitter, and Yahoo were among the signees. (Apple was conspicuously absent.)

A day later, 50 venture capital firms also sent a letter, noting how often they invest in fledgling companies trying unproven ideas. Since then, there have been reports of a decline in tech investments over fear that new companies will be placed at a disadvantage.

"Without lawyers, large teams, or major revenues, these small start-ups have had the opportunity to experiment, adapt, and grow, thanks to equal access to the global market," investors wrote to Wheeler. They worry that ISPs will favor their own offerings or discriminate against competitors. "They just need to create a credible threat so that investors like us will be less inclined to back those companies."

But it remains to be seen whether these same titans will put their own money to work lobbying against cable.

"It's a neat coalition, but I don't know where their lobbying dollars are going," says Barnett. "Yeah, they signed this letter and sent it to the FCC. Kudos to them. But, you know, show me the money."

"They're in the business of dominating"
In the end, regulating broadband as a utility appears the simplest way of ensuring the internet doesn't grow as concentrated as the rest of the economy.

"People would be up in arms if you suddenly had to pay a toll on your phone calls based upon which companies you were calling," Wassenaar points out. "The social expectation for how phone service works is built upon the regulation we imposed upon these corporations. And if they were treated as utilities, the public could actually determine if there is enough investment."

Of course, the rules imposed on the phone companies didn't break them. Verizon and AT&T are doing just fine, thank you. While cable may be dealing with the erosion of its pay-TV franchise, its broadband service will only grow.

"They'd be able to adapt just fine, but they're not in the business of adapting," says Barnett. "They're in the business of dominating."

He's not hopeful that consumers will be protected. "When you have a fairly complicated issue and all the money — and I mean all the money — is on one side of the issue, it's pretty clear what's going to win."

While Congress has oversight and could intervene, it can barely muster a consensus to scratch its own belly, much less pass legislation. That leaves the five FCC commissioners to decide, with Wheeler as the swing vote. At least he has a sense of humor — sort of.

In a segment on his HBO show Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver suggested that putting a former cable lobbyist in charge of net neutrality was like calling a dingo to babysit your kids. The episode caused such an uproar that viewers crashed the FCC's website with their comments.

Wheeler responded by insisting "I'm no dingo." Time will tell.

The new rules won't be adopted until at least September 15, and the public can still comment at FCC.com until July 15.

Speak now or forever hold your peace.
http://www.citypages.com/2014-07-09/...internet/full/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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