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Old 04-11-15, 06:43 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 7th, '15

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"This is completely backward. There is no value in having telecommunications services if they do not protect the privacy and security of end users; in fact, such services can be positively harmful, causing serious human rights infringements of users. In any other context, human rights would trump commercial considerations — in fact, this would go entirely without saying — but in the topsy-turvy world of trade negotiations, it’s the other way around." – EFF






































November 7th, 2015




MPAA Touts Big Legal Success Against Popcorn Time

The studios trade association has scored injunctions in Canada and New Zealand over PopcornTime.io and the torrent outfit YTS.
Eriq Gardner

The Motion Picture Association of America is hailing a success in the ongoing fight against piracy with word that the trade association has won the shutdown of the "official" Popcorn Time fork as well as torrent outfit YTS.

In an announcement on Tuesday, the MPAA says that Popcorntime.io closed after a court order in Canada. The shutdown of the main Popcorn Time fork was first reported in late October and attributed at the time to in-fighting by some of its core developers. Now, the MPAA is taking credit as being the real reason for the closure with the revelation that its six member studios filed a lawsuit on October 9 in the Federal Court of Canada and that it obtained an injunction on October 16. Until today, the statement of claim was under seal. Here it is along with the injunction order.

Though the development won't end Popcorn TIme as other less popular forks remain out there, the MPAA believes it is making substantial progress in cracking down on an app that has been likened to "Netflix for piracy."

In the past few weeks, the MPAA appears to have ramped up its international efforts on the legal front.

The trade association also reveals that it filed a lawsuit on October 12 in the High Court of New Zealand against a New Zealand resident alleged to be the operator of YTS, which had more than 3.4 million visitors in August and is reputed to be the home of the prolific release group YIFY. The defendant was accused of facilitating and encouraging massive copyright infringement. The MPAA says it scored an interim injunction there too.

“This coordinated legal action is part of a larger comprehensive approach being taken by the MPAA and its international affiliates to combat content theft,” said Chris Dodd, chairman and chief executive of the MPAA, in a statement.

Dodd also says, "By shutting down these illegal commercial enterprises, which operate on a massive global scale, we are protecting not only our members’ creative work and the hundreds of innovative, legal digital distribution platforms, but also the millions of people whose jobs depend on a vibrant motion picture and television industry.”
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr...success-836329





North Shields File-Sharing Mastermind Kane Robinson Released 11 Months Into Jail Sentence
Will Metcalfe

The mastermind behind a file-sharing website that cost the entertainment industry millions of pounds has been released from jail.

Kane Robinson was jailed for 32 months in November 2014 after sharing more than 250,000 tracks by the likes of Adele, Arctic Monkeys, Jay-Z and Kanye West online, allowing 70 million users to help themselves to free music.

It is believed the website, dancingjesus.com, could have cost the music industry up to £242m.

But this week Robinson walked free after serving just less than a year behind bars.

The 27-year-old of Wyndham Way, North Shields, served time in HMP Durham, HMP Northumberland and HMP Kirklevington while his friends set up an appeal in a bid to help fund a legal appeal against the sentence.

What little money Robinson made from the illegal enterprise, which he ran from 2006 until 2011, was spent on the upkeep of the website and his main motivation was the “kudos” of releasing music first.

From his home in North Shields he uploaded tracks from worldwide stars on his website, dancingjesus.com, for others to access for free, Newcastle Crown Court heard.

The British Phonographic Industry said the site welcomed more than 70 million user visits during its life span.

If just 50% resulted in a single track download, music valued at over £35m would have been obtained. If 50% of user visits resulted in an album download, that figure rises to £242m.

And after admitting two offences under the copyright act, Robinson was jailed last year.

The group behind his initial appeal for justice said Robinson had asked them not to speak about his release but, they confirmed he had been released early.

The Ministry of Justice said it did not comment on individual cases.

Mr Robinson did not respond when contacted for a comment.
http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/...rmind-10363684





TPP Trade Agreement Slammed For Eroding Online Rights
Natasha Lomas

Measures agreed to in an international trade treaty between Pacific Rim countries threaten Internet users’ privacy and consumer rights, civil and digital rights organizations have warned today.

The full text of the Trans Pacific-Partnership (TPP) international trade agreement — some eight years in the negotiating — was published online earlier today (in a version marked “subject to legal review”), after agreement was reached between the 12 countries early last month, which include the U.S., Australia, Canada, Japan and New Zealand.

The text still needs to be ratified in the individual countries before the treaty becomes binding.

“The E-Commerce chapter has serious implications for online privacy,” said Peter Maybarduk, of non-profit consumer rights organization, Public Citizen, in a statement on TPP. “The text reveals that policies protecting personal data when it crosses borders could be subject to challenge as a violation of the TPP.”

Public Citizen says the agreement puts a requirement on countries to allow unregulated cross-border transfer of Internet users’ data and prohibits governments from requiring companies host data on local servers — with what it says is no express protection for privacy and data protection policies to be exempted from the rules.

Rather it says policies would be subject to review by TPP tribunals to determine if they meet what it dubs “highly subjective, restrictive standards”.

This means governments seeking to protect consumer privacy via conditioning international data transfers on compliance with data protection regulations could find their policies exposed to challenges by other governments under the TPP — as well as via extra-judicial tribunals agreed via the treaty’s controversial Investor State Dispute Settlement mechanism.

“In some cases, our data may be vulnerable in another country – to surveillance or marketing abuses — in ways that it is not at home,” continues Maybarduk. “The TPP could limit governments’ ability to protect us against such threats.”

TPP seeks to govern multiple aspects of trade and economic policy, with a stated goal of lowering barriers to trade and promoting economic activity. However, as with other such expansive international trade agreements — such as the still-being-negotiated TTIP, between the European Union and the U.S. — there has been plenty of controversy already, not least over the secrecy of the negotiations.

The scope of proposed measures in TPP has also caused major alarm, after portions of the agreement were leaked during negotiations. For example, the EFF has slammed TPP’s stance on copyright, such as the extension of copyright terms and prohibition on circumvention of DRM, writing in an analysis last month: “If you look for provisions in the TPP that actually afford new benefits to users, rather than to large, rights-holding corporations, you will look in vain.”

Responding to the publication of the full text today, the EFF is no less damning — saying, for example, that the copyright chapter contains “dangerous threats to the public’s rights to free expression, access to knowledge, and privacy online” (the full text of the IP chapter can be read here) — and describing the Investment chapter‘s definition of intellectual property as “an asset that can be subject to the investor-state dispute settlement process” as “shocking”.

“What this means is that companies could sue any of the TPP nations for introducing rules that they allege harm their right to exploit their copyright interests — such as new rights to use copyrighted works for some public interest purpose. A good example of this might be a country wishing to limit civil penalties for copyright infringement of orphan works, which are works whose authors are deceased or are nowhere to be found,” the EFF writes on the latter point.

The digital rights organization is also — like Public Citizen — critical of the treaty’s bid to restrict the use of data localization laws. “Although we generally agree that data localization is an ineffective approach to the protection of personal data, a trade agreement is the wrong place for a sweeping prohibition of such practices,” the EFF writes. “For particularly sensitive user data, regulating cross-border transfer of that data or its storage on vulnerable overseas servers may be a valid policy option.

“The E-Commerce chapter does not prohibit recourse to this option altogether, but imposes a strict test that such measures must not amount to ‘arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on trade’ — a test that would be applied by an investment court, not by a data protection authority or human rights tribunal,” it adds.

So the EFF is basically making the same critique as Public Citizen — that corporate interests are trumping privacy and human rights in TPP.

It’s also notable that measure to enforce international data flows are driving in the opposite direction vs the recent ruling by the European Court of Justice invalidating the fifteen year old Safe Harbor data-transfer agreement between the U.S. and the EU — on the grounds that Europeans’ data was not being adequately protected under a self-certification regime. (It remains to be seen what TTIP will have to say on data flows. Truly that will be a *gets popcorn* moment.)

The EFF says TPP takes the same “flawed approach” as the old EU-U.S. Safe Harbor — i.e. that it tries to “streamline” cross-border data-flows between regions with “comprehensive data protection laws” and those with “weak or voluntary arrangements” by encouraging the former to treat the latter “as in some way equivalent to their own”.

“Data flows often are beneficial. At the same time, rules mandating data flows should be narrowly tailored with exceptions that clearly and explicitly allow for the protection of privacy and individual liberties,” adds Public Citizen’s Maybarduk. “The memory of misuse of data and National Security Agency surveillance is so fresh, and we should be careful about giving up control of our data.”

Other criticisms of TPP by consumer and digital rights organizations include: weak provisions on net neutrality (and empty provisions on spam); inadequate definitions of personal information; weak protections for personal data — such as allowing companies to define their own “self-serving standards” (as the EFF puts it) when it comes to privacy; a lowering of consumer protection standards, given that ‘unfairness’ has been left out of the consumer protection section — leaving only ‘fraudulent’ and ‘deceptive’ conduct to be specifically proscribed; prohibitions on government requiring the disclosure of source code for mass market software or products containing the software, thereby limiting the ability of countries to take steps to, for example, bolster the cybersecurity of such products.

The EFF also attacks the Telecommunications chapter for subordinating the security and privacy of users to the commercial interests of business — noting that the former are “only allowed to be taken into account if it can be established that they are not ‘a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on trade in services’.”

“This is completely backward,” it adds. “There is no value in having telecommunications services if they do not protect the privacy and security of end users; in fact, such services can be positively harmful, causing serious human rights infringements of users. In any other context, human rights would trump commercial considerations — in fact, this would go entirely without saying — but in the topsy-turvy world of trade negotiations, it’s the other way around.”
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/05/tpp-vs-privacy/





Britain to Present New Watered Down Surveillance Bill

Britain's government will present a new bill to give security agencies the powers to track online communications, but in a bid to win over critics interior minister Theresa May said they would not get automatic access to people's browsing history.

May told the BBC's Andrew Marr show on Sunday that the new bill, to be presented in parliament on Wednesday, was "quite different" from earlier plans to give police greater powers to monitor communications and web activities that opponents dubbed a "snoopers' charter".

She said the Investigatory Powers Bill would not include automatic powers to go through people's browsing history and any "intrusive" actions would be subject of "strong oversight arrangements", in a nod to critics who said earlier plans would trample over the public's right to privacy.

"It's about bringing the ability of our law enforcement and security services to deal with the issues they are dealing with ... and bringing that forward into the digital age," she said.

She also said the new bill would not require communication service providers in Britain to store third party data.

A debate about how to protect privacy while giving agencies the powers they need in the digital age has raged since former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked details about mass surveillance by British and U.S spies in 2013.

Britain's security chiefs argue they are facing a capability gap because of technological advances, and say that their work has been severely hampered by Snowden's disclosures.

But campaigners and civil rights groups have said Snowden's disclosures about mass surveillance showed the authorities were not respecting people's entitlement to privacy.

(Reporting by Elizabeth Piper; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/1...0SQ1PG20151101





Theresa May Forced to Backtrack Over Plan to ‘Snoop’ on Internet Use

Ministers rule out ban on encryption but civil rights group Liberty says climbdown is ‘just spin’
Toby Helm and Jamie Doward

Highly controversial plans to allow the police and security services full access to everyone’s internet browsing history have been abandoned by ministers in what is being presented as a dramatic climbdown over online surveillance.

Amid fears in government that it would be unable to force new laws through parliament because of concerns over civil liberties, the Home Office said it had dropped several contentious proposals from the investigatory powers bill, which will be published in draft form on Wednesday.

Ministers announced in the Queen’s speech in May that the bill would aim “to maintain the ability of intelligence agencies and law enforcement to target online communications of terrorists, paedophiles and other serious criminals”. Downing Street said at the time that it would provide the authorities “with the tools to keep you and your family safe”.

But in an unexpected move that will be seen as a blow to home secretary Theresa May, government sources said they had “dropped completely” key elements of their original 2012 proposals, dubbed the “snooper’s charter” and blocked during the coalition by Nick Clegg.

In a statement, senior sources said that rather than increasing intrusive surveillance, the bill would bar police and security services from accessing people’s browsing histories – a power demanded by the security services – and that “any access to internet connection records will be strictly limited and targeted”.

They also revealed that ministers had ruled out plans to restrict or ban companies from encrypting material on the internet that had alarmed privacy and technology campaigners.

In what they said was a further change, ministers would not, as they had previously suggested, demand that UK communication service providers (CSPs) should capture and store internet traffic from companies based in the United States.

A government source said: “We’re absolutely clear that key parts of the original plans from 2012 will be dropped from the new bill. We have consulted widely … we are coming forward with a new approach.

“We know these powers are needed as technology changes and terrorists and criminals use ever more sophisticated ways to communicate. But we need to give people the reassurance that not only are they needed, but that they are only ever used in a necessary, proportionate and accountable way. That is what this bill is all about.”

Appearing on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show on Sunday morning, Theresa May insisted: “Encryption is important for people to be able to keep themselves safe when they are dealing with these modern communications in the digital age, but what we will be doing is setting out the current position, which does enable the authorities with proper authorisation to issue warrants.”

The home secretary added that the government “will not be giving powers to go through people’s browsing history”. She said: “If there are more intrusive requirements, then of course warrants are required for those.

“What I am clear about is that there will be in this bill strong oversight and authorisation arrangements. What the bill will do on Wednesday is, it sets a modern legal framework but, crucially, it has very strong oversight arrangements within it.

“I think it will be world-leading oversight arrangements within the bill. It will be clear and more comprehensive and comprehensible than the previous legislation has been.”

The move – which Downing Street insisted had been agreed between the prime minister and home secretary following extensive consultation – was welcomed as a significant change by former Tory leadership contender and leading campaigner for civil liberties David Davis.

“This is a welcome recognition that some of the previous proposals were both spectacularly impractical and to a large extent ignored the rights of individual citizens,” he said.

“Taken at face value, this new approach by the government suggests it has learned from the important and balanced reports by David Anderson and to a lesser extent the intelligence and security committee.”

However, Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights group Liberty, claimed that the self-proclaimed climbdown was mere spin.

She suggested the government had ignored the most important safeguard – for any interception to take place only after judicial authorisation had been given.

“It’s a traditional Home Office dance first to ask for the most outrageous, even impractical, powers, so that the smallest so-called ‘concessions’ seem more reasonable,” she said. “The frantic spinning distracts from the sleight of hand. Where is the judicial sign-off before our private communications can be collected, hacked and tapped? Where is the move back to targeted surveillance and away from the blanket collection of our private data?”

Senior Tories said ministers – bruised by last week’s defeat in the House of Lords over tax credits – feared the plans would face fierce and prolonged opposition in the Lords if the powers were seen to be too draconian. Some Tory MPs would also have rebelled, putting the government’s slim majority in danger in the Commons.

Dr Simon Moores, an IT consultant who was a critic of the previous government’s attempts to increase interception powers, gave a cautious welcome. “There was a fear that the government, in its pursuit of terrorism, might remove those freedoms and principles that people associate with the internet,” Moores explained.

“We all thought they were going to clamp down and introduce the most restrictive environment. But the government has said ‘we’re not going to do this; we’re not going to store your web browsing history. In fact, we’re going to offer a level of oversight.’ After what we’ve heard recently from the government surrounding encryption, web history, browsing and storing of data, this smacks of common sense. In this case, the threatened regulatory powers around encryption and monitoring of traffic across international networks – the forte of GCHQ – have evaporated. It’s a very positive step.

“I’m very, very encouraged to see the mention of judicial oversight in terms of being able to restrict the powers given to the intelligence agencies. This smacks of a post-Snowden era. But the final judgment has to be about what that level of oversight this will be. It is somewhat woolly.”
http://www.theguardian.com/world/201...ernet-snooping





Internet Firms to be Banned from Offering Unbreakable Encryption Under New Laws

Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to under the Investigatory Powers Bill
Tom Whitehead

Internet and social media companies will be banned from putting customer communications beyond their own reach under new laws to be unveiled on Wednesday.

Companies such as Apple, Google and others will no longer be able to offer encryption so advanced that even they cannot decipher it when asked to, the Daily Telegraph can disclose.

Measures in the Investigatory Powers Bill will place in law a requirement on tech firms and service providers to be able to provide unencrypted communications to the police or spy agencies if requested through a warrant.

• Councils and taxman to be given power to view your internet history

The move follows concerns that a growing number of encryption services are now completely inaccessible apart from to the users themselves.

It came as David Cameron, the Prime Minister, pleaded with the public and MPs to back his raft of new surveillance measures.

He said terrorists, paedophiles and criminals must not be allowed a “safe space” online.

Ministers have no plans to ban encryption services because they have an important role in the protection of legitimate online activity such as banking and personal data.

But there is concern over some aspects of so-called end-to-end encryption where only the sender and recipient of messages can decipher them.

Terrorists and criminals are increasingly using such technology to communicate beyond the reach of MI5 or the police.

Thames House, British Intelligence Mi5 Headquarters, in Millbank, LondonThames House, the headquarters of MI5 Photo: EPA

On its website, Apple promotes the fact that it has, for example, “no way to decrypt iMessage and FaceTime data when it’s in transit between devices”.

It adds: “So unlike other companies’ messaging services, Apple doesn’t scan your communications, and we wouldn’t be able to comply with a wiretap order even if we wanted to.”

Last month, Metropolitan assistant commissioner Mark Rowley, the country’s most senior counter-terrorism officer, warned that for some firms it was “a part of their strategy - they design their products in full recognition that they will be unable to help us because of the way they have designed them”.

However, proposals to be published on Wednesday will, for the first time, place a duty on companies to be able to access their customer data in law.

A Home Office spokesman said: “The Government is clear we need to find a way to work with industry as technology develops to ensure that, with clear oversight and a robust legal framework, the police and intelligence agencies can access the content of communications of terrorists and criminals in order to resolve police investigations and prevent criminal acts.

“That means ensuring that companies themselves can access the content of communications on their networks when presented with a warrant, as many of them already do for their own business purposes, for example to target advertising. These companies’ reputations rest on their ability to protect their users’ data.”

The Investigatory Powers Bill is also expected to maintain the current responsibility for signing off requests to snoop with the Home Secretary but with extra judicial oversight – a move that is likely to anger civil liberty campaigners and some Tory backbenchers.

It will also require internet companies to retain the web browsing history of their customers for up to a year.

The bill is expected to face a tough route through parliament but Mr Cameron urged critics to back the measures.

He told ITV’s This Morning: “As Prime Minister I would just say to people 'please, let's not have a situation where we give terrorists, criminals, child abductors, safe spaces to communicate'.

"It's not a safe space for them to communicate on a fixed line telephone or a mobile phone, we shouldn't allow the internet to be a safe space for them to communicate and do bad things."

Lord Carlile, the former terrorism laws watchdog, said there had been a “lot of demonization” of the police and security services over their intentions for such information.

“I think it is absurd to suggest the police and the security services have a kind of casual desire to intrude on the privacy of the innocent,” he said.

“They have enough difficulty finding the guilty. No-one has produced any evidence of casual curiosity on part of the security services."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ukne...-new-laws.html





How a Group of Neighbors Created their Own Internet Service

Powered by radios in trees, homegrown network serves 50 houses on Orcas Island.
Jon Brodkin

When you live somewhere with slow and unreliable Internet access, it usually seems like there’s nothing to do but complain. And that's exactly what residents of Orcas Island, one of the San Juan Islands in Washington state, were doing in late 2013. Faced with CenturyLink service that was slow and outage-prone, residents gathered at a community potluck and lamented their current connectivity.

“Everyone was asking, 'what can we do?'” resident Chris Brems recalls. “Then [Chris] Sutton stands up and says, ‘Well, we can do it ourselves.’”

Doe Bay is a rural environment. It’s a place where people judge others by “what you can do,” according to Brems. The area's residents, many farmers or ranchers, are largely accustomed to doing things for themselves. Sutton's idea struck a chord. "A bunch of us finally just got fed up with waiting for CenturyLink or anybody else to come to our rescue,” Sutton told Ars.

Around that time, CenturyLink service went out for 10 days, a problem caused by a severed underwater fiber cable. Outages lasting a day or two were also common, Sutton said.

Faced with a local ISP that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by Sutton, Brems, and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island. It’s a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington.

"I think people were leery whether we could be able to actually do it, seeing as nobody else could get better Internet out here," Sutton said.

But the founders believed in the project, and the network went live in September 2014. DBIUA has grown gradually, now serving about 50 homes.

“It wasn't that hard”

Back in 2013, CenturyLink service was supposed to provide up to 1.5Mbps downloads speeds, but in reality we “had 700kbps sometimes, and nothing at others,” Brems told Ars. When everyone came home in the evening, “you would get 100kbps down and almost nothing up, and the whole thing would just collapse. It’s totally oversubscribed,” Sutton said.

That 10-day outage in November 2013 wasn't a fluke. At various times, CenturyLink service would go out for a couple of days until the company sent someone out to fix it, Sutton said. But since equipping the island with DBIUA’s wireless Internet, outages have been less frequent and “there are times we’re doing 30Mbps down and 40Mbps up,” Brems said. “It’s never been below 20 or 25 unless we had a problem.”

Unlike many satellite and cellular networks, there is no monthly data cap for DBIUA users.

Sutton, a software developer who has experience in server and network management, says he’s amazed how rare projects like DBIUA are, claiming “it wasn’t that hard.” But from what he and Brems told Ars, it seems like it took a lot of work and creative thinking to get DBIUA off the ground.

“The part of Orcas Island we're on looks back toward the mainland,” Sutton said. “We can see these towers that are 10 miles away, and you realize, ‘hey, can't we just get our own microwave link up here to us from down there, and then do this little hop from house to house to house via wireless stuff?’”

The DBIUA paid StarTouch Broadband Services about $11,000 to supply a microwave link from a tower on the mainland to a radio on top of Doe Bay's water tower. The water tank, at about 50 feet, is the only structure that’s high enough to create a point-to-point link to the mainland. It is owned by the Doe Bay Water Users Association, which let DBIUA install the radios and other equipment.

Sutton and friends set up Ubiquiti radios throughout the area, on trees and on top of people’s houses, to get people online. Sutton used Google Earth to map out the paths over which wireless signals would travel, and then the team conducted on-the-ground surveys to determine whether one point could reach another.

Flight of the drones

The rural Orcas Island has a lot of hills and obstacles that could disrupt the wireless signals, and it would have been "prohibitively expensive" for DBIUA to install its own towers. As such, many of the radios had to be installed in trees. Sutton had a solution for this as well—DBIUA would use a drone to determine whether a radio on a treetop could reach other points of the network.

Initially, the drone was equipped with a camera to determine whether the treetop could “see” the next radio in the network. Later, Sutton added radios to the drone itself so he could test the wireless signal at the treetop. When they confirmed a tree would work, “we hired the person to climb up the tree and install the radios,” Sutton said.

Most homes in the network have a radio on the roof or the side of the house that points to one of about 10 relay points, which have multiple radios for receiving and distributing signals. Relay points themselves can be on a tree, a pole, or on the side of a house.

“For some people, like me, the signal comes to my tree, and then down into my house to service me,” Sutton said.

A relay point has one radio to receive a signal and a couple more radios to send it in different directions. Each relay point is similar to the setup on top of the water tank.

A tree will generally have a box with DBIUA equipment, and Power over Ethernet (POE) cables going up the tree to the radios. POE cable also goes from the box “back to the closest power source, usually in someone’s home, and we can then provide that home a connection to the network,” Sutton explained. “In the person’s home is the power brick that puts power into the Ethernet cable,” providing electricity to the outdoor equipment. The system uses low-voltage power, with each radio requiring about eight watts.

The network uses 5.8GHz and 900MHz frequencies, and a little bit of 3.65GHz, mostly avoiding the crowded 2.4GHz band. All the connections need line-of-sight, "especially for 5.8GHz," since the higher frequencies are more easily blocked, Sutton said.

There are now about 200 radios spread throughout the coverage area, and each homeowner who pays for service has a Wi-Fi router in the home to access the Internet.

It can be done

Though DBIUA's Internet service is a rarity, there are similar projects elsewhere. Brooklyn Fiber in New York was founded by two brothers to sell Internet access to the community. A volunteer project called the Red Hook Initiative buys Internet service from Brooklyn Fiber in order to provide free Wi-Fi.

In Germany, residents of a small town called Löwenstedt built their own Internet service. One Ars reader who lives in Norway personally installed fiber lines to his own property.

"There's actually a thriving global network of community wireless initiatives—many of whom stay in regular touch and swap information on recent software advances, promising hardware, and innovative business models," Sascha Meinrath, X-Lab founder and Penn State telecommunications professor, told Ars. There are such projects in Austria, Spain, and Greece, and another that serves tribal reservations outside San Diego, he noted.

Just like on Orcas Island, these projects came into being because residents were frustrated with Internet access options from private companies.

Private ISPs have demanded as much as $383,500 from residents who want service and live in sparsely populated areas. Some cities and towns have built their own Internet services, but laws in numerous states make that difficult. A law in Washington state "authorizes some municipalities to provide communications services but prohibits public utility districts from providing communications services directly to customers," according to attorney James Baller of the Baller Herbst Law Group, who has been fighting attempts to restrict municipal broadband projects for years.

While CenturyLink is the main ISP on Orcas Island, a company owned by Orcas Power & Light Co-op (OPALCO) is building out a fiber network in the San Juan County islands. That company says construction will cost “$1,500 to $6,000 on average” for each home, and residents would be responsible for anything beyond the first $1,500.

DBIUA charges much less, but even its low prices “can be significant depending on your income,” Brems said. The DBIUA customers include "lots of retired people and people living off the land. We had to convince people we knew what we were doing,” he said.
DBIUA spent about $25,000 in total to build the network, and an anonymous resident provided the money in a 3-year, interest-free loan. Residents paid $150 to become members of the DBIUA and $75 a month for Internet service, which goes toward paying down the loan. The monthly fees also cover the $900 a month DBIUA pays StarTouch for bandwidth.

DBIUA needed 25 customers to pay the bills and stay afloat. At 50 now, the organization is paying the loan off a bit more quickly. Sutton hopes to lower the monthly price residents pay after the loan is paid off.

“We’re not making any money here, we’re just covering our costs,” Sutton said. Besides residents, DBIUA also provides Internet access to the water plant and the Doe Bay Resort. The water plant uses very little bandwidth, and the resort also has a fiber connection to OPALCO, he said. (DBIUA talked to OPALCO about purchasing fiber backhaul, but was unable to get wholesale rates, making it more economical to go with StarTouch, Sutton said.)

To prevent Internet slowdown, DBIUA builds slowly

DBIUA isn't adding customers as fast as it can. Customers who signed up from the beginning got first priority.

“You had people who committed up front to say, ‘we're going to help you jump start this,’” Sutton said. “The system is up and it's really great and it’s fast and then you get a whole bunch of people who come in later and say, ‘oh, I wanted to wait and see if this is going to work and now I want on.’”

Sutton and friends don’t want to oversell the network and go down the same path as CenturyLink, which wasn’t able to provide even the meager 1.5Mbps download speeds it promised. They decided to take their time to add capacity before connecting everyone who wants service, but they expect to get up to 60 homes served by the end of the year.

The network port on the mainland that DBIUA connects to provides 100Mbps. Tests at the water tank show that the DBIUA network has real-world bandwidth of about 70Mbps down and up across the whole system.

There are no specific speed limits for each home, but the system automatically manages the load to prevent one person from hogging all the bandwidth.

“We monitor all the connections and if someone is using a lot of bandwidth for a long period of time, we talk to them and figure out what they are doing,” Sutton said. “Often times it's people watching Netflix and then falling asleep and then it keep auto-playing things all night long.”

In practice, customers get the speed they need—at peak usage times, total bandwidth usage across the entire network is 30Mbps or so, well within the 70Mbps available.

“It’s really those teenagers that consume all the bandwidth,” Sutton said, describing his two kids “in the living room, and both of them are on their screens watching YouTube with a big smile on their face.”

The microwave connection to the mainland is strong enough to handle more subscribers, but adding homes to the network requires bolstering capacity in specific areas, Sutton explained.

Capacity can be boosted by adding radios—or with some tree trimming. If there’s “a location where there was a tree in the way,” Sutton said, they’d “trim the tree so now we have better throughput there to manage more people.” The StarTouch link uses burstable billing, with prices going up the more they use.

CenturyLink's promises “never came to fruition”

Sutton grew up on Orcas Island before living in Seattle for a while. He moved back to Orcas about eight years ago, telecommuting to his job in Seattle. “When the Internet connection was crappy I couldn't do my job,” he said. “So this is personal.”

CenturyLink promised better speeds over the years “but that never came to fruition,” Sutton said. “Just waiting around for corporate America to come save us, we realized no one is going to come out here and make the kind of investment that’s needed for 200 people max.”

When contacted by Ars, CenturyLink said it upgraded its fiber backbone on Orcas Island in May and provides “up to 20Mbps” speeds “depending on where you reside in the island.”

But in the Doe Bay area, CenturyLink confirmed to Ars that it offers speeds only up to 1.5Mbps. The company also confirmed to Ars that "we are not currently adding broadband customers in Doe Bay."

Doe Bay residents still buy home phone service from CenturyLink since DBIUA provides only Internet access. And a few DBIUA customers have even kept their CenturyLink DSL Internet as a backup in case DBIUA goes down.

But overall, CenturyLink’s poor infrastructure in Doe Bay is reminiscent of AT&T, which has refused to hook up homes in certain DSL areas where it hasn’t invested sufficiently in network. CenturyLink has gone so far as to tell customers who cancel their DSL service that they will not be able to start it up again, Brems said. “CenturyLink said, ‘we’ll take it off, but you’re never going to get back on.’”

The rest of the team

Brems, who works in advertising and marketing and is now mostly retired, lived in Seattle for more than 20 years before moving to Orcas Island about 15 years ago. He has been struck by the “can-do” spirit of the community, which in the past built its own water plant and fire station, he said.

“They didn't wait for someone else to come along and say, ‘I can come and save you guys if you want,’” he said.

You've probably never heard of Webpass—and you probably won’t get its service.

While Sutton spearheaded the DBIUA project, others provided important expertise. Brems, for example, used his marketing knowledge to help convince people that the project could work and get the word out by writing press releases.

The other founders are Orcas Island airport manager Tony Simpson, who previously worked for the Air Force and Boeing; lawyer Shawn Alexander, who specializes in real estate, land use, and contracts; and Tom Tillman, co-owner of a sporting goods store and a former CenturyLink installer.

Alexander's legal expertise helped in drafting contracts the members of DBIUA need to sign. The agreements require homeowners to keep hosting and supplying power to DBIUA equipment even if they stop buying the Internet service later on. (The power costs are only about $12 a year, Brems said.)

“We needed agreements in place that if you were to sell [the house], that the person who bought it knew there was a responsibility to keep the service going whether they chose to take advantage of it or not,” he said.

A smooth ride—most of the time

The network has run perfectly for long stretches of time, requiring little more than basic maintenance. But there have been occasional glitches.

Early in the network’s life, Sutton got an alert at 2 am that a relay point was down. An in-person investigation determined that a sheep had disconnected an extension cord that was sitting in the middle of a field. Battery backup kept the radio running for about six hours; the 2 am alert arrived when the battery ran out.

To make sure the cord would be weather- and animal-proof, “we decided to just dig a trench through the field” to bury the line, Sutton said.

Another, more serious problem came just a few weeks ago. The radio installed by StarTouch on the mainland broke late on a Friday, and no one could fix it until the next week.

That meant there was no Internet service from DBIUA, but a backup plan was cobbled together. On Saturday, Sutton climbed the water tank and pointed a Ubiquiti radio at a different StarTouch tower on the mainland. The Ubiquiti radio only provided about 10Mbps, "which got us back going, but it was obviously limping along.”

On Monday, StarTouch replaced the radios at both ends, on the mainland and on top of the water tower. But Sutton was on a business trip and couldn’t get back to the water tower until Wednesday to switch the network over to the new connection.

During outages, customers can call a help line number to hear a message with the latest information on the network status. People on the island understand that this is all a volunteer effort and that there will be occasional problems.

“They really appreciated us just being up front with what was going on,” Sutton said.

The weekend outage was a learning experience, and now Sutton is considering leaving the backup radio on the water tower permanently in case the system needs to fail over to the second radio on the mainland. The router that DBIUA has at the water tower could then automatically switch to the second radio if the primary link goes down.

A true patriot

This past summer, Sutton was named the Doe Bay Community Association Patriot of the Year at the Fourth of July celebration. “In the past 18 months, he has literally driven every back road, climbed countless tall trees and run hundreds of sight lines…," Brems said on his friend's behalf. "He has unpacked, inventoried, programmed, and installed dozens of pieces of equipment. He has scaled the Doe Bay water tank multiple times.”

While Sutton has been the driving force of DBIUA, he is looking to impart some of his knowledge to other members of the association so they can fix problems when he can’t. Using Slack, they set up a training channel where Sutton is teaching them how the system works. He’s given members limited access to the monitoring system so they can get familiar with it, and he will eventually provide administrative rights so they can manage the network.

The group is also thinking up new ways to troubleshoot the network. One idea is to “put a Raspberry Pi at the different relay points to do speed tests [to the water tank] and log that over time,” Sutton said. That way, if people call and say Internet access is slow, DBIUA can check to see whether the problem is within its own network or in the connection to StarTouch.

Raspberry Pis could also monitor voltage on batteries to determine whether a radio has switched to backup power. That information could provide several hours of warning before a radio goes out completely.

While there's room for growth and improvement, the current benefits have been obvious for service members. In mid-August, a few weeks before the DBIUA outage outlined above, there was a major outage affecting both wired and wireless broadband providers caused by a car crashing into a major utility pole on the island.

Just about everyone was down for nearly an entire day—but not DBIUA.

The crash “took out a major fiber line,” Sutton said. “Almost all Internet in San Juan County (Orcas, Lopez, and San Juan Island) went out. AT&T, T-Mobile, [and] Sprint cell phone service went out. The only Internet that continued to work was the school, library, and the DBIUA, all of which were using StarTouch microwave for their backhaul. I did a little bit of gloating for sure.”

With all the success, people in other parts of Orcas have since asked Sutton to set up networks for them. “I'm like, ‘no, but I can tell you how to do it,'’’ he said. So although networks like DBIUA’s remain rare for now, Sutton believes it can be duplicated in more places than you'd expect.

“I think so many other communities could do this themselves,” he said. “There does require a little bit of technical expertise but it's not something that people can't learn. I think relying on corporate America to come save us all is just not going to happen, but if we all get together and share our resources, communities can do this themselves and be more resilient.”
http://arstechnica.com/information-t...ernet-service/





Colorado’s Muni Broadband Ban Overridden in 44 Communities

State law forces communities to hold referenda before offering broadband.
Jon Brodkin

Forty-four cities, towns, and counties in Colorado have passed referenda giving themselves authority to build community broadband networks.

A 10-year-old state law prevents Colorado communities from offering cable, telecommunications, or broadband services unless voters approve a referendum. Such a referendum doesn't require communities to build out a network, but it gives them the legal authority to do so.

On Tuesday, "[r]eferenda in 44 communities—27 cities and towns; 17 counties—all passed overwhelmingly to reclaim local telecommunications authority," according to the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Community Broadband Networks initiative. Approval rates ranged from 66 to 93 percent. The organization obtained results from local and state officials.

Some big cities such as Boulder voted to reclaim local authority in previous years. The latest batch of votes were concentrated "in smaller, rural communities where incumbents have little incentive to invest in network upgrades," according to Community Broadband Networks. Fort Collins, with its population of 156,480, is one exception.

"It's not that we want to compete with the private sector—it's that the private sector isn't providing the level of service the community needs," Colorado Communications and Utility Alliance General Counsel Ken Fellman told The Denver Post.

Municipalities that passed referenda this week include Alma, Bayfield, Brighton, Cedaredge, Craig, Crawford, Delta, Durango, Fairplay, Fort Collins, Fraser, Gunnison, Hayden, Hotchkiss, Ignacio, Loveland, Mt. Crested Butte, Oak Creek, Ophir, Ouray, Paonia, Ridgway, Steamboat Springs, Telluride, Thornton, Winter Park, and Yampa. Counties that did so include Archuleta, Clear Creek, Custer, Eagle, Garfield, Gilpin, Huerfano, Jackson, Lake, La Plata, Moffat, Park, Pitkin, Routt, San Juan, Summit, and Washington.

While the votes are good news for muni Internet proponents, Community Broadband Networks pointed out that the state law forces communities to "spend precious public dollars" on referenda.

Additionally, "[t]he law hurts taxpayers by discouraging private investment," Community Broadband Networks wrote. "It prevents local governments from working with private sector ISP partners who may want to use publicly owned fiber infrastructure. It stalls economic development because employers can't get the connectivity they need. It stifles growth in the small communities that need growth the most."

There are laws in about 20 states that limit municipal broadband, to the benefit of private ISPs. The Federal Communications Commission voted to preempt such laws in North Carolina and Tennessee, saying they limit competition and infrastructure investment, but the states have sued to preserve the laws.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015...4-communities/





Legendary Inventor Inks Deal to Test ‘Personal’ Cell Networks
Cade Metz

Hossein Moiin first heard about pCell more than a year ago, when ex-Apple CEO John Sculley mentioned it during a private conference in San Francisco.

And pCell—an experimental means of providing what is essentially a super-high-speed bubble of wireless signal that can follow smartphones from place to place—played right into Moiin’s line of work. He’s the executive vice president and chief technology officer at Nokia Networks, the Finnish company that helps build cellular networks for the likes of Verizon, AT&T, and other wireless carriers across the globe. Though pCell has been billed as something that can deliver wireless networks that are 1,000 times faster than those we use today, Moiin didn’t buy Scully’s pitch. He thought that pCell was bunk. “We took a look at it and said: ‘Eh, it doesn’t seem very possible,'” he remembers.

Perlman's technology creates a cell signal for each individual phone—a signal that in effect follows the phone from place to place.

All these months later, however, Moiin has reversed his stance. After another team at the company examined pCell more extensively, Nokia Networks and the small startup behind the technology, Artemis Research, have signed a “memorandum of understanding” that will see Nokia test pCell networks in large indoor stadiums and other areas where particularly large amounts of wireless bandwidth are required. “We’ll put everything together in a real-life setting and see how it scales,” Moiin says. “It’s a promising technology, and in theory, it should scale.”

Steve Perlman, the serial Silicon Valley inventor at the heart of Artemis Research, says that the deal puts pCell one step closer to deployment inside “tier-one” wireless carriers. Artemis, he says, is already on the verge of deploying the technology inside one such carrier, though he declined to provide details. Nokia Networks, which recently agreed to acquire competitor Alcatel-Lucent, is one of the world’s largest providers of telecommunications equipment, right up there with the Sweden-based Ericcson.

The Network That Follows You

Perlman—best known for helping create Apple’s Quicktime video technology and later selling his web TV company to Microsoft for a half-billion dollars—began work on pCell over a decade ago. For the past year and a half, he has been shopping the tech to various wireless carriers and network hardware providers such as Nokia Networks (not to be confused with the Nokia cell phone business, which was recently acquired by Microsoft).

pCell is short for “personal cell.” Whereas today’s networks provide a massive “cell” of wireless coverage that’s shared among all phone users in a particular area, Perlman’s technology creates a cell signal for each individual phone—a signal that in effect follows the phone from place to place.

According to Perlman, it provides about as much network bandwidth as today’s cells. The difference is that you don’t need to share the bandwidth with anyone else. The result: a significantly faster signal for everyone. At times, Perlman has claimed that the signal will be 1,000 times faster than today’s signals, but Artemis, Nokia Networks, and others are still rolling out real world tests.

The technology is part of a larger effort to significantly increase the bandwidth offered by today’s wireless networks—something that is very much in need as we stream more and more data, particularly video, to our cell phones and tablets. Moiin says that Nokia has also looked at similar technology under development at MIT, and big-name carriers such as Verizon and T-Mobile are exploring technology that could deliver celluar networks via the same unlicensed spectrum used by today’s Wi-Fi networks. For Moiin, pCell will be “part of the toolbox” that helps us expand beyond today’s 4G networks and towards something faster.
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/legenda...cell-networks/





Top 10 Best Alternative Movie Torrents For Downloads and File Sharing
Blake Ford Hall

Where can a hacker go to download high quality movie torrents today?

With the advent of YTS / YIFY Torrents going dark this week, many thousands of pirate movie viewers are without a decent place to acquire downloadable movies, films and other source materials. Several torrent sites like The Pirate Bay and Kickass Torrents will suffer if YIFY is shut down permanently, as this site used to upload high quality movies to torrent websites, besides sharing such movies on its official site. These are circumstances that are as yet, not having a direct impact on a few torrent sights, even those just mentioned.

So until then, or as long as the YTS / YIFY shutdown continues, we bring, here is a list of the 10 best alternatives to fill the void in no particular order :

• KAT or Kickass Torrents / Also referred to as KAT, Kickass is one of the most popular torrent sites to download movies, TV shows and music videos. It is a torrent search engine and hosts no content.
• Torrentz / It is one of the leading BitTorrent meta-search engines. Unlike other sites, it doesn’t host any torrent file but just does the job of redirecting visitors to other websites from where movies and videos can be downloaded.
• Extra Torrent / It is one of the biggest torrent systems and has turned out to be a very active torrent community of late. It is also home to torrent release groups like ETTV and ETRG.
• The Pirate Bay / The TPB is perhaps the most popular torrent site to download movies and TV shows. The site lets users upload and download movies, music videos and games.
• ISOHUNT.TO / It is a popular site for downloaders, as it offers a wide range of music videos and movies. It was launched in 2013 soon after isoHunt.com was pulled down.
• EZTV / This website is from the Torrent distribution group EZTV is a niche site specializing in TV content only. Because of its narrow focus, EZTV’s traffic varies in line with the TV seasons. Despite posting only a few dozen torrents per week it attracts millions of visitors.
• RARBG / Is a site which started out as a Bulgarian tracker, was last year’s newcomer and continues to rake in more visitors. The site was blocked by UK ISPs last month, which put it on par with most other sites in the top 10.
• Torlock / Torlock is special. These folks actually pay their users commission for uncovering fake torrents and reporting it to their community. In a world of phony files, this is a tremendous service. If you are a regular downloader, and are tired of wasted downloads and fraudulent files, give Torlock a try.
• 1337x / 1337x is a community driven torrent site. The site’s owners say they launched 1337x to “fill an apparent void where it seemed there was a lack of quality conscience ad free torrent sites with public trackers.” This year the site dropped its .org domain and is now operating from 1337x.to.
• LIMETORRENTS / Limetorrents.cc has been around for several years already, and regained a spot in the top 10 this year. The site appeared in the news this summer after it was sued by LionsGate for posting a link to a leaked copy of The Expendables 3. The case is still ongoing.

Until the coming weeks pass and all the above sites are still available for downloads, it is hard to say what maybe in store for torrents in the near future. The freedom of information, media and words is still hanging in the balance, as yet.

So come download and share everything you can until then kids.
http://hacked.news/2015/10/top-10-be...-file-sharing/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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