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Old 27-12-17, 08:49 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 30th, ’17

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"Each supernode costs about $5,000 to install and $1,000 per month to maintain." – NYC Mesh volunteer Brian Hall






































December 30th, 2017




Newark Fiber to Offer Net Neutrality Promise, Report Says
Mike Dano

Newark Fiber, which is building a fiber network for the city via a public-private partnership, will promise to adhere to the FCC's now-shelved net neutrality guidelines. Axios reported that Newark Mayor Ras Baraka will make the announcement later today.

Specifically, the publication reported that Newark Fiber will "continue to prohibit blocking, throttling and fast lanes on its network even after the FCC rules go away. The city's contracts with third parties that connect its network will also include net neutrality clauses."

A call to Newark Fiber to confirm the news wasn't immediately returned.

Newark Fiber isn't the only provider to voice support for the FCC's net neutrality guidelines. And now that the agency has voted to remove those guidelines, additional internet service providers may move to make the issue a selling point.

Indeed, the issue has become a major political topic; the FCC's vote this month to end the guidelines it enacted in 2015 was met with a wide range of protests, both offline and online. Critics of the FCC's vote argued that the agency's net neutrality guidelines are necessary to prevent ISPs from favoring some services over others, as a way to gain leverage in the market.

As noted by NJ.com, Newark Fiber launched last year to deploy fiber optic facilities in the city, and to make those links available on a wholesale basis to building owners. According to the site, building owners can then offer high-speed access to individual tenants at capped rates ranging from $100 to $500 month for 1 gigabit of capacity, well below the typical $3,000 monthly cost for the same capacity in New York.

On its website, Newark Fiber offers speeds from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps over prices ranging from less than $50 for one resident to $500 for 500 residents.
https://www.fiercetelecom.com/teleco...se-report-says





Chattanooga Was a Typical Postindustrial City. Then It Began Offering Municipal Broadband.

Chattanooga’s publicly owned Internet service has helped boost its economy and bridge the digital divide.
Peter Moskowitz

Downtown Chattanooga looks like a lot of postindustrial cities: wide streets, a mix of old brick buildings, and uninspired ’60s-era brutalism. Except there’s something here that many small downtowns do without these days: people. And many of them are here not just for the usual accoutrements of your average gentrified downtown—fancy restaurants, condos, and concert venues (though those do exist here), but for something more basic, and arguably much more important: the Internet.

In 2010, Chattanooga became the first city in the United States to be wired by a municipality for 1 gigabit-per-second fiber-optic Internet service. Five years later, the city began offering 10 gigabit-per-second service (for comparison, Time Warner Cable’s maxes out at 300 megabits per second). That has attracted dozens of tech firms to the city that take advantage of the fast connections for things like telehealth-app development and 3D printing, and it’s given downtown Chattanooga a vibrancy rare in an age when small city centers have been emptied out by deindustrialization and the suburbs.

The feat was made possible not by a tech giant but by the city’s municipal power company, EPB, which in 2007 set out to modernize the city’s power grid, and realized it could lay every customer’s home for fiber-optic cable at the same time. The near-decade-long experiment has worked: By offering gigabit connections at $70 a month and providing discounts for low-income residents, EPB has taken tens of thousands of customers from the Internet behemoth Comcast, which offers service that is about 85 percent slower at twice the price. EPB now serves about 82,000 people, more than half of the area’s Internet market. It’s been such a success that dozens of other towns and cities have begun their own municipal broadband networks, providing faster and cheaper service than private companies.

“Really, these last two years you’ve seen it pick up steam,” said Christopher Mitchell, the director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR). “It’s just going to keep on spreading.”

Six years ago, Chattanooga was the only city offering publicly owned 1-gigabit Internet service. Today, over 50 communities do, according to ILSR, and there are over 450 communities in the United States offering some form of publicly owned Internet service. Many municipal networks are in small towns and rural areas where private high-speed access is hard to come by. But several dozen are in cities like Chattanooga, where there are other, private options that tend to be much more expensive and slower than what governments have proven they can provide.

Even in places where private companies provide high-speed service, a public Internet option may prove increasingly vital to low-income residents. Internet inequality is a growing issue in the United States: Internet connections are often required for job applications, and seven in 10 teachers assign homework that requires broadband access, according to FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel; yet about one-third of low-income families don’t have high-speed access to the Internet in their homes. Part of the problem is geography: Private Internet companies have little incentive to lay cable to sparsely populated areas. But even bigger cities usually only have one or two options for private Internet access, and so companies like Comcast have little competition and therefore little incentive to make their services affordable for low-income families.

Municipal Internet helps solve both of those issues. Homes, no matter how rural, are usually already wired for electricity by a municipal provider; it’s not too much extra work to follow those lines with fiber-optic cables. Chattanooga did not have to raise taxes or find additional revenue within its budget to pay for its system, which covers many of the area’s most remote houses. The utility simply laid the cable, charged for it, and is now reaping the benefits.

EPB spent about $220 million developing its fiber-optic system, and that’s translated into more than $865 million in economic growth for the city. The network also allows EPB to distribute its electricity more cheaply by monitoring and shutting off areas that are causing problems during storms, finding where repairs need to be made, and routing power more efficiently. And that means EPB can afford to offer the Internet to low-income families at significantly reduced prices, providing any family with children who receive free or discounted lunches at school 100 megabit service (which is several times faster than standard cable-company plans) for $26.99. So far, about 1,800 families are taking advantage of the program.

“We really believe strongly that we should be open and available to everyone and not slow them down,” said David Wade, the chief operating officer of EPB. “Everyone deserves at least 100 megabits.”

Most municipalities don’t have official mandates to make Internet access more equitable, but it seems that equity is nonetheless a central concern of many municipal providers. In Wilson, North Carolina (population: 50,000), the city began laying fiber-optic cables between government buildings in order to better share information, and decided it could expand the service to others. The city now offers free WiFi downtown and has teamed up with two nonprofit after-school programs to provide the Internet to low-income kids. The small city of Sandy, Oregon, doesn’t have discounted plans, but its municipal service nonetheless is cheaper than corporate providers—100 megabits costs only $40 a month.

“Just like we provide parks and trails and other amenities, we also feel like…having great Internet is a reason to live here,” Seth Atkinson, Sandy’s city manager, said.

In 2010, Chattanooga became the first city in the US to be wired by a municipality for 1 gigabit per second Internet.

Laying fiber-optic cable can be expensive, so it’s unlikely that big cities will jump on the municipal Internet bandwagon anytime soon, but leaders are nonetheless beginning to see equitable Internet access as a major issue. In San Francisco, the city teamed up with the nonprofit Internet Archive to provide free high-speed Internet access to thousands of public-housing residents. New York City too is beginning to offer free Internet access in public-housing projects.

But the biggest problem facing municipal Internet services isn’t scale or the size of cities; it’s the cable companies. When Chattanooga first started planning its municipal network, Comcast sued, saying the service amounted to unfair competition for the company. It lost the suit, but Comcast and other companies have spent millions of dollars on ad campaigns and donations to local politicians in the hope that municipal providers don’t expand more than they already have. The company has a history of supporting politicians opposed to public Internet service and lobbying state legislatures to pass legislation that prevents cities and towns from offering their services outside of their municipal boundaries. Eighteen states now have anti-expansion laws on the books.

Chattanooga and Wilson have both sought to expand beyond their current service areas, and last year the Federal Communications Commission ruled in their favor, preempting both Tennessee and North Carolina’s anti-expansion laws. But North Carolina’s attorney general sued the FCC in response, saying that “the FCC unlawfully inserted itself between the State and the State’s political subdivisions.” Both Chattanooga and Wilson are now waiting for a final determination before they decide whether to expand their service areas.

Regardless of how the FCC’s suit eventually pans out, more and more municipalities will likely keep building Internet networks. But if the FCC eventually rules in favor of municipalities like Chattanooga and Wilson, a public Internet option could grow a whole lot bigger a whole lot faster.
https://www.thenation.com/article/ch...pal-broadband/





New York State Eyes Its Own Net Neutrality Law
Karl Bode

Numerous states say they'll be crafting their own net neutrality protections in the wake of the FCC's recent vote to dismantle the rules. ISPs of course predicted this, which is why Comcast and Verizon successfully lobbied the FCC to include provisions in its "Restoring Internet Freedom" order that bans states from protecting consumers from privacy and net neutrality violations, or other bad behavior by incumbent ISPs. In ISP lobbying land, stopping states from writing protectionist law is an assault on "states rights," but when states actually try to help consumers you'll note the concern for states rights magically disappears.

Regardless, New York State, California and Washington have all indicated that they will attempt to test the FCC's state preemption authority on this front in the new year by crafting their own net neutrality legislation. You'll recall that the FCC already had its wrist slapped by the courts for over-reach when it tried to preempt states from passing anti-community broadband laws, quite literally written by large ISPs, intended to hamstring creative solutions (including public/private partnerships) for the telecom industry's broadband competition logjam.

But even if the FCC wins this new legal fight over state authority, folks like New York Assemblymember Patricia Fahy argue there's numerous steps states and cities can take to protect consumers on the net neutrality front without running afoul of the FCC's order. The text of her proposal includes numerous proposals, including refusing to do business with companies that repeatedly violate net neutrality:

"If you are going to be a contractor and want to work with New York, then you must meet the principles,” Fahy tells Fast Company. She hopes that this approach will get around a roadblock known as preemption. The Constitution generally gives the federal government final authority over commercial activities that cross state lines. But while New York can’t require ISPs to uphold net neutrality, it can use its “power of the purse” to punish ISPs that don’t.

"There’s a decent amount of precedent for saying, if you want a state contract, you have to meet such and such requirements,” she says, noting construction contracts contingent on certain labor practices or the use of U.S.-made steel."

Again we'll see how this all pans out in the new year. States will likely face the same problem as the federal government did when trying to define net neutrality violations amidst a sea of ISP lobbying influence. Regardless, the FCC's battles with the states will be just one part of a cavalcade of lawsuits filed against the FCC in the new year for over-stepping its authority, ignoring the public, and rushing through what's potentially the least-popular decision in tech-policy history.

This same sequence of events played out earlier this year when the GOP and Trump administration rushed to kill consumer broadband privacy protections, resulting in numerous states attempting to create their own broadband privacy laws. And while Comcast, Verizon and AT&T lobbyists like to whine that states are wreaking havoc by creating discordant, inconsistent consumer protections, they tend to ignore the fact that this wouldn't be happening if they hadn't spent millions of dollars gutting popular, over-arching protections on the federal level.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...lity-law.shtml





Without Net Neutrality, Is It Time To Build Your Own Internet?

Here's what you need to know about mesh networking.
Eileen Guo

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission went ahead with its deeply unpopular plan to end net neutrality protections, giving internet service providers like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast unprecedented control of our experience online. But what if you and your community could become your own internet service provider?

Congress can still reject the FCC’s decision, though at least one proposed bill suggests there’s reason not to be overly optimistic they will save the day. Either way, maybe it’s time to rethink our relationship with the internet — and with big ISPs that facilitate our access to the web.

Instead of depending on monopolistic corporations, internet users can take back the net by building their own community-supported internet networks. Mesh networks can help.

What is a mesh network?

When we access the internet via an ISP, we are likely connecting via broadband, which is literally a giant cable that connects our ISP to top-level internet exchanges. In other words, the ISP acts as the central gatekeeper that ultimately controls our point of online access.

Mesh networks, on the other hand, connect devices directly to each other. Rather than going through a central point, mesh networks allow for how we connect to automatically reconfigure according to the availability and proximity of bandwidth and storage.

Since they are decentralized, the only way to shut down or otherwise disrupt a mesh network is to shut down every node in the network. This makes them much more resilient to interference or other disturbances.

In more practical terms, by setting up specially configured wireless routers (known as “nodes”) that connect to other configured wireless routers, mesh networks allow local users to create a network that is physically distinct from the internet. (Although it can connect to the internet, it can also exist as its own local network.)Then, antennas installed on the outside of buildings connect to each other, forming a mesh network.

Does this exist in the real world?

Mesh wireless networks have already been deployed across the world, from New York’s NYC Mesh, Detroit’s Equitable Internet Initiative to eastern Afghanistan’s FabFi — though that was eventually shut down under pressure from local telecoms — to rural communities in South Africa.

One of the most sophisticated mesh wireless networks is Guifi.net, a community network in Spain that has grown from a single node in 2004 to more than 30,000 in 2016. It has spawned the creation of local ISPs that connect its users to fiber Internet.

In the short time since the FCC’s net neutrality ruling, there have already been a number of new mesh internet projects popping up, including Honolulu Mesh in Hawaii, while a group in Los Angeles just announced its first meet-up to begin planning.

Other mesh wireless networks have been temporary, serving as a backup source of internet when the normal networks were knocked down. After Hurricane Sandy, when Internet and cell phone networks were knocked out in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, a mesh wireless network became the backbone of communication for the mostly low-income community. FEMA ended up installing a satellite internet connection at the community center, which then spread the internet via the mesh.

Several organizations offer guides and free resources to create your own mesh wireless networks.

Commotion Wireless, a project from the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute provides the most comprehensive guide to getting started, as well as free downloads of its firmware for routers, phones, and computers.

NYC Mesh also has a guide that includes everything from how to get the entire community involved and mobilized to the specifics of the hardware required.

Meanwhile, LibreMesh, started in 2013, provides another firmware option for creating a mesh wireless network. Several large mesh networks are built on top of LibreMesh, including Spain’s Guifi.net, but requires a little more understanding of networking set-up.

Of course, the easiest thing to do is to join an existing network, like NYC Mesh, which sells configured routers at its monthly meet-ups.

Our install team members installing a new 90 degree @LigoWave Sector antenna at our supernode. The antenna is facing the financial district. pic.twitter.com/tzzVBrRJ2F
— NYC Mesh (@nycmesh) April 3, 2017

Why aren’t they everywhere then?

Despite their many benefits, mesh networks are still niche. This is partly because connecting to a mesh network is still far more difficult than just signing up for Internet service via an ISP and paying a monthly Internet bill.

Besides, mesh wireless “occupies a place in the public imagination that may not always sync up with the boring reality,” Dan Phiffer, a prominent coder and free Internet advocate that built a darknet for Occupy Wall Street, tells Inverse in an email. He adds there are several components to mesh that get conflated, but that “the mesh technology [which allows for devices to connect to each other] and the peer-to-peer community possibilities can be understood separately.” Additionally, it is not either of these capabilities alone that allows for users to connect to the Internet.

Most users on mesh Internet still depend on a traditional ISP to connect to the web, either via their own subscriptions — or a connection that is shared by another node. But decentralization, which makes mesh more resilient to interference, also means that connecting to the Internet through the many “hops” of mesh is slow. The real solution is combining mesh technology with direct access to an Internet exchange.

But this is no easy task. NYC Mesh volunteer Brian Hall tells Inverse the organization only launched its first supernode in 2016, after over a year of negotiations. The organization found a fiscal sponsor to accept grants and donations, and negotiated for a donated internet exchange connection, “transit”, as well as Internet bandwidth.

Getting over 76 Mbps up and down at 1.5 miles (2km) from our supernode sector antenna to $70 LiteBeamAC antenna. (much faster than my TWC!) pic.twitter.com/8e4m9hWhle
— NYC Mesh (@nycmesh) January 30, 2017

Mesh networks can provide high internet speeds -- if it's also able to access an internet exchange.

Still, the costs are not insignificant. “Each supernode costs about $5,000 to install and $1,000 per month to maintain,” Hall tells Inverse.

But all of this has paid off. Today, the downtown Manhattan supernode has 15 buildings connected directly to it, allowing them to access the Internet via super high speeds — without ISPs. They’re hoping to keep Internet access free through a mixture of grants, donations, and subscriptions. “Individual donations are almost covering costs at the moment,” Hall says.

Mesh wireless technology has been around for a while, and so has the hype around its potential. But the end of net neutrality has created a greater sense of urgency.

“This year’s FCC vote has felt like there’s way more at stake,” says Dan Phiffer. “The political landscape has shifted so dramatically this year.”

And this has definitely increased the amount of interest in mesh networking. NYC Mesh received a record level of join requests since the repeal of net neutrality, while new projects such as those in Honolulu and LA are also starting, as a result of the FCC’s rules change.

While it’s still too early to tell if mesh networking will truly take off this time around, as the country’s internet costs go up and standard speeds slow down, building your own internet — or connecting to a “DIY” network — is one great solution to resist the big corporations.
https://www.inverse.com/article/3950...neutrality-fcc





No Access to the Internet? Detroit Residents Build it Themselves
Wally Gilbert

Ignored by large telecoms companies, residents of poor Detroit neighbourhoods are building the Internet for themselves. The Equitable Internet Initiative is a programme run by different community collectives that aims to widen a net of Internet access across disadvantaged neighbourhoods, while at the same time teaching the locals how to use it.

Detroit’s digital divide between economically advantaged and disadvantaged communities is, according to the Federal Communications Commission, “among the most extreme in the nation”. The FCC says that 63% of low-income households do not have access to the Internet at home – nearly 40% of the city’s total population.

A coalition of different community groups, from local churches to a community technology project, have pulled together to create a grassroots initiative that involves literally building the Internet and installing it in people’s homes, cables and all.

To do this, the project trains volunteer ‘digital stewards’ in the installation of Internet connections using mesh wireless technology. A mesh network is a spider’s web of wireless links between homes, and it enables neighbours to share a connection – thus hooking up a number of different households to the Internet at the same time – and be part of a local intranet network. This intranet, or neighbourhood ‘mesh’, can also act as an offline community portal that works even in the case of an internet outage, enabling members of the community to organise responses to extreme weather or other disasters that may affect the neighbourhood.

After 20 weeks of training, the digital stewards head out to install and maintain networks across some of Detroit’s poorest neighbourhoods. But there’s no point setting up the Internet if you don’t know how to use it. The project also focuses on improving digital literacy amongst the locals, and showing people who may not have used the Internet much before how it can help them in their everyday lives.

Three ‘anchor’ organisations manage the running of the project: WNUC Community Radio in the North End neighbourhood, the youth network Grace in Action in Southwest Detroit, and the Church of the Messiah in Southeast Detroit. The latter has created the BLVD Harambee Empowerment Center, which works to equip young black youth with skills for the future.

“We want to give access to those who can’t afford it”

Wally Gilbert works for the BLVD Harambee site of the Equitable Internet Initiative. He stressed how vital Internet access is in the digital age.

You need the Internet to apply online for jobs, to do research for your school project, to look up information. It changes the narrative. There’s a lot of misinformation out there.

So many public services now, be they local, state, or federal, have got to the point where you need Internet for just about anything. Without Internet, you are limited. Let’s say you have a job, you are busy going back and forth to work, and you don’t have time to go to a public library to use a computer. You get home too late. We know time is money. Having access to the Internet at home saves you a tremendous amount of time.

The Church of the Messiah has a computer lab that is open to the public. School kids use the computers to do their homework, and adults to apply for jobs. The church set up a “Build-A-Computer” programme to teach young people basic computer construction and components – and – build a computer they get to keep at the end.

Without the Internet, computers are 'nothing more than typewriters'

Every holiday every computer in the church is used so that [students] can do their homework before going back after break. We had one young boy come in and use the computer, and I asked him, “Why are you here? I know we built you a machine [the boy was enrolled in the Build-A-Computer programme].” He said: “I have a computer at home but I don’t have the Internet." We had given them nothing more than typewriters.

The EII is helping more and more people get Internet access in their own homes.

We’re providing Internet to at least 60 homes all around the BLVD Harambee centre. And the Wi-Fi can extend out into other properties. It’s a wireless network. We’ve put an access point on the roof of the church, and the top of the El Tovar apartments building. There are 40 units in that apartment complex. Once we wire it out to the individual residents, if it’s a single home or a townhouse they get an access point put onto the outside of their house or a satellite dish. That way it can spread further.
We want to give access to those that can’t afford it.

What makes the project so successful is that it is a community effort and we work with already existing projects. The congregation of the church is 60% African-American men under the age of 30. A lot of them hear about it through word of mouth and social media.

There are certain areas that don’t have the infrastructure for high-speed Internet. So we make it feasible [for them to access the Internet anyway] with wireless. It’s important because as we can see, the government is trying to regulate the Internet more and more. Once we have our own network easily in place, if for some reason the Internet connection goes away, we can control our own intranet and provide information to each other.

The project is going to continue for some time. We want to extend to at least four or five square miles. For now we’ve only covered about half a mile in each direction.
http://observers.france24.com/en/201...esidents-build





Delay-Tolerant Networks Might Be The Killer App Ham Radio Needs
Brent Salmi

Amateur radio stands to gain more by leveraging the Internet as opposed to fighting it. Projects such as AREDN re-purpose commercial WiFi hardware to provide Internet connectivity over ham radio bands. Sending Internet traffic over amateur radio prevents the use of encryption and any commercial data. The result is a limited use case of AREDN to emergency communications when the Internet is not available and when non-sensitive data must be sent. This doesn’t play on any of the strengths of ham radio. We believe that Delay-Tolerant Networks are a key component to the future of ham radio that utilizes our strengths instead of applying limits.

What Are Delay-Tolerant Networks?

You might be asking yourself what exactly is a delay-tolerant network and why should you care? This type of network technology works when continuous end-to-end connections cannot be guaranteed between two or more devices. Utilizing a mixture of store and forward, ad hoc networking, and high-level routing algorithms data between devices can be exchanged even when they have no continuous path to do so. Delay-tolerant networks differ from mesh networks because mesh networks provide live connectivity through changing routing paths whereas delay-tolerant networks remove the need for a continuous end-to-end connection at all.

Amateur Radio Applications

Our hobby provides plentiful methods of transferring data. By utilizing our assets consisting of HF, VHF/UHF, and microwave links along with AMSAT satellites we can provide the last mile of communications where the Internet does not reach. By connecting a delay-tolerant network to the Internet we can bridge the gap from one mile to three-thousand miles depending on the band used while utilizing the reliability and bandwidth the Internet provides. This ideology uses the Internet to strengthen our hobby.

Use Case: Remote Communications

Imagine you are camping in Joshua Tree National Park here in Southern California. There’s a great 4×4 off-road section named the Geology Tour Road and your campsite is in Pleasant Valley which is absolutely beautiful. There is a catch, however. You are surrounded by mountains and there is no cellular network connectivity whatsoever. This is off the grid.

You’re camping and want to send a picture to a friend back in Los Angeles, CA but you have no communications from the campsite. Instead of hiking to the nearest mountain top which can be dangerous and exhausting you simply wait. The Faraday radio you brought along only has a 5km radio range since the mountains block you in all directions. That’s the red circle below. A truck comes out to Geology Tour Road and is carrying a Faraday radio as well. As it passes inside your radio horizon communications are established and the image is stored inside the truck as it drives along the green line back towards Twentynine Palms, CA.

Once in Twentynine Palms, the trucks radio sends the image to a Faraday base station which then forwards the data over the Internet to your friend. This is one hour after you sent the image. Your friend responds immediately. The network knows you were in the vicinity of Joshua Tree National Park so the response is therefore routed to the area via the Internet. Along comes a second truck also carrying a Faraday radio which enters the park from Joshua Tree, CA. Our delay-tolerant network sends the response to this second truck for the ride into the park. As this second truck follows the blue line on the map above it then enters within range of your campsite radio and you receive the response. This took an hour from the time your friend responded. Two hours have passed but communications were made!

The Power of Delay-Tolerant Networks

Delay-tolerant networks cannot be compared to the Internet. They serve a completely different use case where communications are intermittent. The power of these networks is in the application of them. Ham radio’s killer app might be the use of a delay-tolerant network! In Joshua Tree there are two options to provide connectivity into the valley with one being to establish an infrastructure there and another to use delay-tolerant networks. Building infrastructure is hard, costly, and slow with traditional solutions. Ham radio can use a delay-tolerant network to expand a digital infrastructure far beyond what is feasible in the hobby today.

The Internet is extremely reliable. Cellular networks are fairing better through disasters such as Hurricane Harvey. It’s not infeasible to imagine the cellular network being less vulnerable to natural disasters as time progresses and technology marches forward. Ham radio has a place in emergency situations but that place appears to be dwindling in terms of technological capabilities. For amateur radio to establish a foothold on the forefront of technology it needs to play its strengths, not weaknesses. Delay-tolerant networking appears to be a technology that can propel the hobby to the front of the pack.
https://faradayrf.com/delay-tolerant...ks-killer-app/





Russian Submarines are Prowling Around Vital Undersea Cables. It’s Making NATO Nervous.
Michael Birnbaum

Russian submarines have dramatically stepped up activity around undersea data cables in the North Atlantic, part of a more aggressive naval posture that has driven NATO to revive a Cold War-era command, according to senior military officials.

The apparent Russian focus on the cables, which provide Internet and other communications connections to North America and Europe, could give the Kremlin the power to sever or tap into vital data lines, the officials said. Russian submarine activity has increased to levels unseen since the Cold War, they said, sparking hunts in recent months for the elusive watercraft.

“We are now seeing Russian underwater activity in the vicinity of undersea cables that I don’t believe we have ever seen,” said U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Andrew Lennon, the commander of NATO’s submarine forces. “Russia is clearly taking an interest in NATO and NATO nations’ undersea infrastructure.”

NATO has responded with plans to reestablish a command post, shuttered after the Cold War, to help secure the North Atlantic. NATO allies are also rushing to boost anti-submarine warfare capabilities and to develop advanced submarine-detecting planes.

Britain’s top military commander also warned that Russia could imperil the cables that form the backbone of the modern global economy. The privately owned lines, laid along the some of the same corridors as the first transatlantic telegraph wire in 1858, carry nearly all of the communications on the Internet, facilitating trillions of dollars of daily trade. If severed, they could snarl the Web. If tapped, they could give Russia a valuable picture of the tide of the world’s Internet traffic.

“It’s a pattern of activity, and it’s a vulnerability,” said British Air Chief Marshal Stuart Peach, in an interview.

“Can you imagine a scenario where those cables are cut or disrupted, which would immediately and potentially catastrophically affect both our economy and other ways of living if they were disrupted?” Peach said in a speech in London this month.

The Russian Defense Ministry did not respond to a request for comment about the cables.

The Russian sea activity comes as the Kremlin has also pressed against NATO in the air and on land. Russian jets routinely clip NATO airspace in the Baltics, and troops drilled near NATO territory in September.

Russia has moved to modernize its once-decrepit Soviet-era fleet of submarines, bringing online or overhauling 13 craft since 2014. That pace, coming after Russia’s annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula set off a new era of confrontation with the West, has spurred NATO efforts to counter them. Russia has about 60 full-size submarines, while the United States has 66.

Among Russia’s capabilities, Lennon said, are deep-sea research vessels, including an old converted ballistic submarine that carries smaller submarines.

“They can do oceanographic research, underwater intelligence gathering,” he said. “And what we have observed is an increased activity of that in the vicinity of undersea cables. We know that these auxiliary submarines are designed to work on the ocean floor, and they’re transported by the mother ship, and we believe they may be equipped to manipulate objects on the ocean floor.”

That capability could give Russia the ability to sever the cables or tap into them. The insulated fiber-optic cables are fragile, and ships have damaged them accidentally by dragging their anchors along the seabed. That damage happens near the shore, where it is relatively easy to fix, not in the deeper Atlantic, where the cost of mischief could be far greater.

Lennon declined to say whether NATO believes Russia has actually touched the cables. Russian military leaders have acknowledged that the Kremlin is active undersea at levels not seen since the end of the Cold War, when Russia was forced to curtail its submarine program in the face of economic turmoil and disorganization.

“Last year we reached the same level as before the post-Soviet period, in terms of running hours,” said Adm. Vladimir Korolev, the commander of the Russian Navy, earlier this year. “This is more than 3,000 days at sea for the Russian submarine fleet. This is an excellent sign.”

The activity has forced a revival of Western sub-hunting skills that lay largely dormant since the end of the Cold War. Lennon said NATO allies have long practiced submarine-hunting. But until the last few years, there were few practical needs for close tracking, military officials said.

In recent months, the U.S. Navy has flown sorties in the areas where Russia is known to operate its submarines, according to aircraft trackers that use publicly available transponder data. On Thursday, for example, one of the planes shot off from Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily, headed eastward into the Mediterranean. It flew the same mission a day earlier.

The trackers have captured at least 10 missions carried out by U.S. submarine-tracking planes this month, excluding trips when the planes simply appeared to be in transit from one base to another. November was even busier, with at least 17 missions captured by the trackers.

NATO does not comment on specific submarine-tracking flights and declined to release data, citing the classified nature of the missions. But NATO officials say that their submarine-tracking activities have significantly increased in the region.

Submarines are particularly potent war-fighting craft because they can generally only be heard, not seen, underwater. They can serve as a retaliatory strike force in case of nuclear war, threaten military resupply efforts and expand the range of conventional firepower available for use in lower-level conflicts.

The vessels are a good fit for the Kremlin’s strategy of making do with less than its rivals, analysts say: Russia’s foes need vast resources to track a single undersea craft, making the submarines’ cost-to-mischief ratio attractive. Even as Russia remains a vastly weaker military force than NATO, the Kremlin has been able to pack an outsize punch in its confrontation with the West through the seizure of Crimea, support for the Syrian regime and, according to U.S. intelligence, its attempts to influence the U.S. election.

“You go off and you try to add expense for anything that we’re doing, or you put things at risk that are of value to us, and submarines give them the capability to do it,” a senior NATO official said of the Russian approach, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive intelligence assessments.

Russian military planners can say, “I can build fewer of them, I can have better quality, and I can put at risk and challenge and make it difficult for NATO,” the official said.

Still, some analysts say the threat to cables may be overblown.

“Arguably, the Russians wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they couldn’t threaten underwater cables. Certainly, NATO allies would not be doing theirs if they were unable to counter that,” said Adam Thomson, a former British ambassador to NATO.

Russian military planners have publicized their repeated use of submarine-launched Kalibr cruise missiles during their incursion into Syria, which began in fall 2015. (In Syria, the missiles have not always hit their targets, according to U.S. intelligence officials, undermining somewhat the Russian claims of potency.)

NATO’s hunts — which have stretched across the Baltic, Mediterranean and Atlantic — have mobilized submarine-tracking frigates, sonar-equipped P8 Poseidon planes and helicopters, and attack submarines that have combed the seas.

“The Russians are operating all over the Atlantic,” said NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. “They are also operating closer to our shores.”

Russia’s enhanced submarine powers give urgency to NATO’s new efforts to ensure that it can get forces to the battlefront if there is a conflict, Stoltenberg said. In addition to the new Atlantic-focused command, the alliance also plans to create another command dedicated to enabling military forces to travel quickly across Europe.

NATO defense ministers approved the creation of the commands at a November meeting. Further details are expected in February. The plans are still being negotiated, but they currently include the North Atlantic command being embedded inside the U.S. Fleet Forces Command in Norfolk, which would transform into a broader NATO joint force command if there was a conflict, a NATO diplomat said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that have not been finalized.

“Credible deterrence is linked to credible reinforcement capabilities,” Stoltenberg said. “We’re a transatlantic alliance. You need to be able to cross the Atlantic.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world...3b6_story.html





British Military Chief Warns Russia Could Cut NATO's Internet Connections, As Traffic For World's Top Sites Is Mysteriously Routed Via...Russia
Glyn Moody

We recently wrote about an interesting comment from Vladimir Putin's Press Secretary that Russia had no intention of cutting itself off from the rest of the Internet. But there's another side to the disconnection story, as this Guardian news item reveals:
“Russia could pose a major threat to the UK and other Nato nations by cutting underwater cables essential for international commerce and the internet, the chief of the British defence staff, Sir Stuart Peach, has warned.

Russian ships have been regularly spotted close to the Atlantic cables that carry communications between the US and Europe and elsewhere around the world.”

In other words, although Russia says it won't cut itself off from the Internet, it could probably cut off many NATO countries. A new report, entitled "Undersea Cables: Indispensable, insecure", emphasizes the importance and vulnerability of the underwater cables that provide much of the Internet's global wiring:

“97% of global communications and $10 trillion in daily financial transactions are transmitted not by satellites in the skies, but by cables lying deep beneath the ocean. Undersea cables are the indispensable infrastructure of our time, essential to our modern life and digital economy, yet they are inadequately protected and highly vulnerable to attack at sea and on land, from both hostile states and terrorists.

US intelligence officials have spoken of Russian submarines "aggressively operating" near Atlantic cables as part of its broader interest in unconventional methods of warfare. When Russia annexed Crimea, one of its first moves was to sever the main cable connection to the outside world.”

And if there were any doubts that Russia is very interested in the world's Internet connectivity, this recent event may help to clarify things:

“Traffic sent to and from Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft was briefly routed through a previously unknown Russian Internet provider Wednesday under circumstances researchers said was suspicious and intentional.”

As another story in Ars Technica reported, this is not the first time important traffic has been mysteriously routed through Russia:

“large chunks of network traffic belonging to MasterCard, Visa, and more than two dozen other financial services companies were briefly routed through a Russian government-controlled telecom under unexplained circumstances that renew lingering questions about the trust and reliability of some of the most sensitive Internet communications.”

These events are a reminder that the online world depends on technologies where trust is an important element. That approach is now looking increasingly shaky as nation states wage attacks not just by means of the Internet, but even against it. This may explain why Russia says it wants alternative DNS servers for the BRICS nations: they could come in quite handy if -- by any chance -- the rest of the Internet goes down.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...y-routed.shtml





Russia's Putin Calls for Web Activities of Some Firms to be Monitored

President Vladimir Putin said on Monday the Russian authorities should monitor the activity of “some companies” on social media during next year’s presidential election and assess the extent of their involvement in domestic politics.

He did not name the companies or say if he was concerned about the activities of foreign or local firms, but Russia has been accused by the United States and other Western nations of meddling in their elections.

“We need to look carefully at how some companies work in internet, in social media, and how widely they are involved in our domestic political life,” Putin said, speaking at a meeting with leaders in Russia’s parliament about a new “foreign agents” law.

Putin signed a law last month allowing the authorities to designate foreign media outlets as “foreign agents” in response to what Moscow said was unacceptable U.S. pressure on Russian media. Once designated, such firms need to provide details to the authorities on, for example, their sources of funding.

“It should be carefully analysed how they are operating and will be operating during the presidential election,” he said, but said this should not “narrow the space” for freedom on the Internet.

Russia has already designated Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) and Voice of America (VOA), both U.S.-backed organisations, as “foreign agents”.

Polls show Putin, 65, who has dominated Russia’s political landscape for the last 17 years, on course to be comfortably re-elected in March, 2018, making him eligible to serve another six years until 2024, when he turns 72.

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was barred on Monday from running in next year’s presidential election after officials ruled he was ineligible to take part due to a suspended prison sentence he says was trumped up.

Writing by Denis Pinchuk; Editing by Edmund Blair
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-ru...-idUKKBN1EJ0TY





China Closes More than 13,000 Websites in Past Three Years

China has closed more than 13,000 websites since the beginning of 2015 for breaking the law or other rules and the vast majority of people support government efforts to clean up cyberspace, state news agency Xinhua said on Sunday.

The government has stepped up already tight controls over the internet since President Xi Jinping took power five years ago, in what critics say is an effort to restrict freedom of speech and prevent criticism of the ruling Communist Party.

The government says all countries regulate the internet, and its rules are aimed at ensuring national security and social stability and preventing the spread of pornography and violent content.

A report to the on-going session of the standing committee of China’s largely rubber stamp parliament said the authorities had targeted pornography and violence in their sweeps of websites, blogs and social media accounts, Xinhua said.

As well as the 13,000 websites shut down, almost 10 million accounts had also been closed by websites, it added. It did not give details but the accounts were likely on social media platforms.

“Internet security concerns the party’s long-term hold on power, the country’s long-term peace and stability, socio-economic development and the people’s personal interests,” Xinhua said.

More than 90 percent of people surveyed supported government efforts to manage the internet, with 63.5 percent of them believing that in recent years there has been an obvious reduction in harmful online content, it added.

“These moves have a powerful deterrent effect,” Wang Shengjun, vice chairman of parliament’s standing committee, told legislators, according to Xinhua.

Authorities including the Cyberspace Administration of China have summoned more than 2,200 websites operators for talks during the same period, he said.

Separately, Xinhua said that over the past five years, more than 10 million people who refused to register using their real names had internet or other telecoms accounts suspended.

China ushered in a tough cyber security law in June, following years of fierce debate around the controversial legislation that many foreign business groups fear will hit their ability to operate in the country.

China maintains a strict censorship regime, banning access to many foreign news outlets, search engines and social media including Google (GOOGL.O) and Facebook (FB.O).

Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Robert Birsel
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKBN1EI05M





Vietnam Deploys 10,000 Cyber Warriors to Fight ‘Wrongful Views’
Mai Ngoc Chau

Vietnam is deploying a 10,000-member military cyber warfare unit to combat what the government sees as a growing threat of “wrongful views” proliferating on the internet, according to local media.

Force 47 has worked pro-actively against distorted information, Tuoi Tre newspaper reported, citing Nguyen Trong Nghia, deputy head of the general politics department under the Vietnam People’s Military. The disclosure of the unit comes as the Communist government pressures YouTube Inc. and Facebook Inc. to remove videos and accounts seen damaging the reputations of leaders or promoting anti-party views.

Facebook this year removed 159 accounts at Vietnam’s behest, while YouTube took down 4,500 videos, or 90 percent of what the government requested, according to VietnamNet news, which cited Minister of Information and Communications Truong Minh Tuan last week. The National Assembly is debating a cybersecurity bill that would require technology companies to store certain data on servers in the country.

In recent years, Vietnam has opened its doors to Silicon Valley, including Alphabet Inc. That’s unlike China, which blocked Facebook, Google and Twitter Inc., paving the way for local services such as WeChat, QQ, Baidu Inc. and Weibo Corp. to flourish.

‘Bad’ Content

Vietnam’s youthful population -- almost 60 percent are under 35 -- has made the country a leader globally in terms of penetration of social networks, according to EMarketer Inc. More than 60 percent of Vietnamese are online, according to Nghia.

Representatives for Facebook and YouTube did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Facebook, which has a process for governments to report illegal activity, removes content such as fake accounts and hate speech that violate its policies, Facebook said in a statement this fall. Alphabet Inc. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt vowed during a May meeting with Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc in Hanoi to work with Vietnam against “bad” content on YouTube, according to a government website post.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...wrongful-views





British Cops Want to Use AI to Spot Porn—But It Keeps Mistaking Desert Pics for Nudes
Melanie Ehrenkranz

London’s Metropolitan Police believes that its artificial intelligence software will be up to the task of detecting images of child abuse in the next “two to three years.” But, in its current state, the system can’t tell the difference between a photo of a desert and a photo of a naked body.

The police force already leans on AI to help flag incriminating content on seized electronic devices, using custom image recognition software to scan for pictures of drugs, guns, and money. But when it comes to nudity, it’s unreliable.

“Sometimes it comes up with a desert and it thinks its an indecent image or pornography,” Mark Stokes, the department’s head of digital and electronics forensics, recently told The Telegraph. “For some reason, lots of people have screen-savers of deserts and it picks it up thinking it is skin colour.”

It makes sense why the department would want to offload the burden of searching through phones and computers for photos and videos of potential child pornography. Being regularly exposed to that type of content is mentally taxing, and offloading the labor to unfeeling machines sounds reasonable. But not only is the software in its current iteration unreliable, the consequences of relying on machines to flag and store this type of sensitive content are profoundly disconcerting.

Stokes told The Telegraph that the department is working with “Silicon Valley providers” to help train the AI to successfully scan for images of child abuse. But as we’ve seen, even the most powerful tech companies can’t seem to deploy algorithms that don’t fuck up every once in awhile. They have promoted dangerous misinformation, abetted racism, and accidentally censored bisexual content. And when Gizmodo recently tested an app intended to automatically identify explicit images in your camera roll, it flagged a photo of a dog, a donut, and a fully-clothed Grace Kelly.

Even when humans oversee automated systems, the results are imperfect. Last year, a Facebook moderator removed a Pulitzer-winning photograph of a naked young girl running away from the site of napalm attacks during the Vietnam War that was reportedly flagged by an algorithm. The company later restored the image and admitted that it was not child pornography.

Machines lack the ability to understand human nuances, and the department’s software has yet to prove that it can even successfully differentiate the human body from arid landscapes. And as we saw with the Pulitzer-winning photograph controversy, machines are also not great at understanding the severity or context of nude images of children.

Perhaps even more troubling is a plan to potentially relocate these images to major cloud service providers. According to Stokes, the department is considering moving the data flagged by machines to providers like Amazon, Google, or Microsoft, as opposed to its current locally-based data center. These companies have proven they are not immune to security breaches, making thousands of incriminating images susceptible to a leak.
https://gizmodo.com/british-cops-wan...s-m-1821384511





Lack of IT Staff Leaving Companies Exposed to Hacker Attacks

Cybersecurity professionals call for better education after data thefts and the Wannacry attack on NHS IT systems
Mike Pattenden

Cybersecurity professionals are calling for better education and improved apprentice schemes after saying a shortfall of staff in the sector is leaving companies exposed to hacker attacks.

According to a recent survey of recruitment agencies, 81% expect a rise in demand for digital security staff, but only 16% saw that the demand would be met.

“Demand is sky-high,” said Tim Holman, the chief executive of the cybersecurity consultancy 2-Sec. “The cost of dealing with cyber problems is only going to go up, insurance premiums will go up, the price of cleanups will go up.”

A number of high profile cyber attacks in 2017 have fuelled demand for professionals. In March, the mobile phone company Three suffered a serious breach that compromised 200,000 customers’ data. In April, the payday loan company Wonga had 250,000 customer records stolen including bank account details, phone numbers, and email addresses. However, the Wannacry ransomware attack on NHS IT systems in May demonstrated that cybersecurity is not simply a problem for business. A third of NHS trusts have reportedly been infected by ransomware this year.

The lack of skilled professionals capable of dealing with cybercrime needs tackling urgently, said Adam Thilthorpe, the director of external affairs at BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT.

“We’ve been voicing our concerned for some time that there is going to be a shortage of skilled IT professionals. We need an integrated strategy across government and business from education, apprenticeships and diversity initiatives. We should recruit more women, ethnic minorities and [retrain] older workers to unfilled posts.”

BT, which has been running a successful cyber apprenticeship scheme for five years, has made a point of looking beyond the pool of university computer graduates.

“We were originally plucking people from IT and bolting skills on but we changed our entire recruitment policy including targeting different kinds of people,” said Rob Partridgeat BT Security. “One area we’ve looked at is neuro diversity. We know, for example, that some people with Asperger’s are highly suited to cyber but don’t always have good communication skills so we changed our approach to the way we source and interview candidates. The industry needs to recruit through potential.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...hacker-attacks





A Cute Toy Just Brought a Hacker Into Your Home
Sheera Frenkel

My Friend Cayla, a doll with nearly waist-length golden hair that talks and responds to children’s questions, was designed to bring delight to households. But there’s something else that Cayla might bring into homes as well: hackers and identity thieves.

Earlier this year, Germany’s Federal Network Agency, the country’s regulatory office, labeled Cayla “an illegal espionage apparatus” and recommended that parents destroy it. Retailers there were told they could sell the doll only if they disconnected its ability to connect to the internet, the feature that also allows in hackers. And the Norwegian Consumer Council called Cayla a “failed toy.”

The doll is not alone. As the holiday shopping season enters its frantic last days, many manufacturers are promoting “connected” toys to keep children engaged. There’s also a smart watch for kids, a droid from the recent “Star Wars” movies and a furry little Furby. These gadgets can all connect with the internet to interact — a Cayla doll can whisper to children in several languages that she’s great at keeping secrets, while a plush Furby Connect doll can smile back and laugh when tickled.

But once anything is online, it is potentially exposed to hackers, who look for weaknesses to gain access to digitally connected devices. Then once hackers are in, they can use the toys’ cameras and microphones to potentially see and hear whatever the toy sees and hears. As a result, according to cybersecurity experts, the toys can be turned to spy on little ones or to track their location.

“Parents need to be aware of what they are buying and bringing home to their children,” said Javvad Malik, a researcher with cybersecurity company AlienVault. “Many of these internet-connected devices have trivial ways to bypass security, so people have to be aware of what they’re buying and how secure it is.”

The problem isn’t new, but it’s growing as manufacturers introduce a wider range of toys that can connect online, part of an overall trend of “smart” electronics. About 8.4 billion “connected things” will be in use worldwide this year, according to estimates from research firm Gartner, up 31 percent from 2016, with the number projected to rise to 20.4 billion by 2020.

Sarah Jamie Lewis, an independent cybersecurity researcher who tested toys ahead of the holiday season, said many of the products did not take basic steps to ensure their communications were secure and that a child’s information would be protected. She said the toys acted as “uncontrolled spy devices” because manufacturers failed to include a process that would allow the gadget to connect to the internet only through certain trusted devices.

Consider the Furby Connect doll made by Hasbro, a furry egg-shaped gadget that comes in teal, pink and purple. Researchers from Which?, a British charity, and the German consumer group Stiftung Warentest recently found that the Bluetooth feature of the Furby Connect could enable anyone within 100 feet of the doll to hijack the connection and use it to turn on the microphone and speak to children.

Then there’s the Q50, a smart watch for children. Marketed as a way to help parents easily communicate with and keep track of their kids, bugs in the watch would allow hackers to “intercept all communications, remotely listen to the child’s surroundings and spoof the child’s location,” according to a report by Top10VPN, a consumer research company this month.

And the BB-8 droid, which was released with “The Last Jedi” this month, also had an insecure Bluetooth connection, according to Ms. Lewis’s tests.

SinoPro, the Chinese manufacturer of the Q50 watch, and Genesis, the maker of the Cayla doll, did not respond to requests for comment. Sphero, the maker of the BB-8 connected droid, said the toy is “adequately secure.” Hasbro said the Furby Connect complies with the United States Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, and that it hired third-party testers to perform security testing on the toy and app.

Toy manufacturers have long searched for ways to bring toys alive for children. While microphones and cameras introduced some level of responsiveness, those interactions were generally limited to a canned response preset by a manufacturer. Internet connections opened up a new wealth of possibilities; now the toys can be paired with a computer or cellphone to allow children to constantly update their toys with new features.

The My Friend Cayla doll, for example, uses speech recognition software coupled with Google Translate. The doll’s microphone records speech and then transmits it over the internet, a function that leaves it open to hackers, according to cybersecurity researchers. If the doll’s owner does not designate a specific cellphone or tablet with which the doll should have an internet connection, anyone within 50 feet of the toy can use the Bluetooth connection to gain access to it. Security researchers have also raised concerns over what type of data the doll collects, and how the data is used.

In 2015, a cyberattack on VTech Holdings, a digital toymaker, exposed the data of over 6.4 million people, including names, date of birth and gender, in what experts said was the largest known breach to date that targeted children.

For parents looking to fulfill their holiday wish-lists, the first step is knowing about the risks involved with internet-connected toys. Earlier this year, the F.B.I. issued a broad warning about such toys, advising parents to pay particular attention to how a toy connected to the internet. If a toy connects wirelessly through Bluetooth, it should require some type of unique pin or password, to make sure that connection is secure.

The F.B.I. also recommended that connected toys be able to receive updates from the manufacturers so they are kept up-to-date. And if the toy stores data, parents should investigate where that data is stored and how securely the company guards the data of its customers.

At a Target store this month in Emeryville, Calif., Sarah Lee, a 37-year-old mother of three, said she was rethinking her choices of presents for her children after hearing about the risks of connected toys.

“That’s so scary, I had no idea that was possible,” she said. “What’s the worst hackers can do? Wait, no, don’t tell me. I’d just rather get my kids an old-fashioned doll.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/21/t...s-hacking.html





Man Arrested after ‘Swatting’ Call Leads to Fatal Police Shooting in Kansas

A 25-year-old man believed to be behind a swatting incident that led to a fatal police shooting in Wichita, Kansas, has been arrested in Los Angeles, officials say. He has been identified as Tyler Raj Barriss, who is known online as "SWAuTistic."

Barriss, 25, was arrested in South Los Angeles on Friday afternoon. He was taken into custody on a fugitive warrant, according to NBC News, but details about the charges he is currently facing were not immediately available.

Barriss, who has a history of swatting, was arrested in October 2015 and charged with making two bomb threats to ABC7 (KABC-TV). The first one happened on September 30, 2015, when the channel's studios in Glendale, California, were evacuated and searched by police.

The incident in Wichita began at about 6:15 p.m. on Thursday when police received a call stating that someone had killed his father by shooting him in the head. The caller further claimed that the shooter was now holding his mother, brother and sister hostage.

A large number of police officers responded to the scene, believing that people were being held hostage at the location. Andy Finch, a 28-year-old man who was inside the home, was shot and killed by police after he opened the front door.

Earlier on Friday, a man claiming to be "SWAuTistic" was interviewed by Daniel Keem on the YouTube channel DramaAlert. The man admitted to calling police but argued that he was not responsible for the man's death, saying that it was not him who pulled the trigger.

"The argument can be made that the police would never have showed up if I hadn't made the call, however, I don't believe I'm the only guilty party involved in this whole incident, considering I was contacted and, you know, almost instructed to swat, and taunted to swat," he said.

The swatting call followed a dispute between two players of the game "Call of Duty." One of them provided an address which they claimed to be their own, after which the other player is believed to have contacted "SWAuTistic" with a swatting request.

The family of the victim denied being involved in the dispute between the two players. "My son was not a gamer," his mother told The Wichita Eagle newspaper during an interview, adding that her son had opened the door after hearing noises outside.

The man interviewed by Keem, believed to be Barriss, admitted to having made similar calls to police in the past, but added that he would usually give information that would cause a location to be evacuated. "Sometimes people will send me money on PayPal to swat someone," he said.

He also admitted to causing an evacuation at the FCC, the abbreviation for the Federal Communications Commission. Although he provided no specific details, a room at the FCC was evacuated on December 14 as commissioners were preparing to vote on a controversial proposal to repeal net neutrality rules.
http://bnonews.com/news/index.php/mobile/id6899





No, Bitcoin Isn't Likely to Consume All the World’s Electricity in 2020

• Estimates of bitcoin's soaring energy use are likely overstating the electric power required to mine the cryptocurrency, top experts warn.
• One model from Digiconomist is being widely cited by journalists, analysts and investors, but researchers say its estimate is not based on hard data.
• Digiconomist's estimate of bitcoin's energy consumption is the basis for a lofty projection that reminds some experts of debunked forecasts that led businesses to over-invest in internet infrastructure.

Tom DiChristopher

Here are a few things you might not know about bitcoin, the cryptocurrency that has captivated the financial world after skyrocketing about 2,000 percent in a year to more than $19,000 per coin at one point.

The computer process that generates each coin is said to be on pace to require more electricity than the United States consumes in a year. This bitcoin "mining" allegedly consumes more power than most countries use each year, and its electricity usage is roughly equivalent to Bulgaria's consumption.

But here's another thing you might want to know: All of that analysis is based on a single estimate of bitcoin's power consumption that is highly questionable, according to some long-time energy and IT researchers. Despite their skepticism, this power-consumption estimate from the website Digiconomist has quickly been accepted as gospel by many journalists, research analysts and even billionaire investors.

"Companies who make big investment decisions based on numbers that are highly uncertain are almost always going to get burned. It's just a mistake to jump to conclusions." -Jonathan Koomey, Stanford University lecturer

That model is also the basis for forecasts of bitcoin's future energy use that remind some experts of wild projections about internet data traffic in the mid-1990s that contributed back then to companies spending far too much for capacity they would eventually not need.

"Doing these wild extrapolations can have real-world consequences," said Jonathan Koomey, a Stanford University lecturer who pioneered studies of electricity usage from IT equipment and helped debunk faulty forecasts in the 1990s. "I would not bet anything on the bitcoin thing driving total electricity demand. It is a tiny, tiny part of all data center electricity use."

There is no doubt that bitcoin has an energy efficiency problem. New units of digital currency are created by solving equations, a process known as bitcoin mining that was designed to reward participants with bitcoins roughly every 10 minutes.

That controls supply and provides security. However, as more people put computers to work to solve the equations, the problems become harder to crack. This has led miners to apply more processing power to the problem, which will presumably require an ever-growing amount of energy.

This is a theme that media outlets such as Bloomberg News, CBS, CNN — as well as CNBC — and others have echoed in articles citing the Digiconomist data. It has also been cited in research reports and financial newsletters and by closely followed investors like Stanley Druckenmiller in an interview on CNBC last week. But we are learning now that this energy-gobbling estimate, which has also been cited in bearish cases about bitcoin, may be flawed and has been used to make an extreme extrapolation assumption seen in the past when new technologies emerge.

Mysterious bitcoin 'mining'

Bitcoin mining is now being done at dedicated data centers that have sprouted up from Iceland to Inner Mongolia, where electricity prices are cheap. Much of the mining takes place in China, which generates most of its electric power from coal, prompting warnings that bitcoin threatens to wreck the environment and supersize the world's carbon footprint.

Several energy experts caution that there is currently no reliable, verifiable way to measure just how much electric power is consumed in the process of minting the cryptocurrency. They say the first step is gathering hard data from the data centers, and no one has done that work yet.

"Many of those calculations that you see today I think are based on very weak assumptions," said Christian Catalini, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management who studies blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.

"I don't think anybody can make a credible claim about the current" electric power use for bitcoin mining "without actually having data from the miners."

In the absence of hard data, the market is turning to other sources to comprehend bitcoin's impacts on global energy demand.

Just this week, Nomura speculated that bitcoin could start influencing energy markets in 2018.

"So perhaps the grey swan of next year is not Bitcoin's bubble bursting, as so many commentators tend to suggest, but instead it's [sic] continued rise and a surging demand for coal," Nomura analyst Jordan Rochester wrote.

Nomura noted that power used to mine bitcoin is estimated at 33.2 terawatt hours. That figure came from the bitcoin energy consumption index, which is updated daily on the cryptocurrency website Digiconomist.

Digiconomist's index has emerged as something of an authority recently. The index was developed by Alex de Vries, a 28-year-old consultant for PwC with a background in data and risk analysis who now specializes in blockchain, the technology that underpins bitcoin. He founded Digiconomist as a hobby in 2014 and acknowledges he has no previous experience in energy economics.

According to the index, the amount of energy consumed by mining bitcoin surged about 26 percent in November alone and now totals nearly 36 terawatt hours, enough energy to power about 3.3 million homes. Digiconomist notes this would make bitcoin the 59th biggest energy consumer if it were a country.

Digiconomist standing by figures

Koomey, the Stanford University lecturer, says there are a lot of assumptions baked into the Digiconomist model. But he also claims it is fundamentally flawed because it backs into bitcoin's power consumption by estimating miners' revenues and expenses.

"Any time you do that, you introduce multiple layers of error and uncertainty," he told CNBC. "It's a completely unreliable way to do the analysis, and no credible energy analyst would ever do that."

De Vries stands by his figures. Given what we know about bitcoin mining, he says it is fairly easy to determine the lower bounds of its energy usage. If all bitcoin mining were done on the fastest machines in optimal conditions, he says, it would still consume 13 to 14 terawatt hours. But since not all mining is done under these conditions, he said, his estimate is "plausible."

"I'm obviously confident in this number. I wouldn't be publishing it if I wasn't confident," he told CNBC.

"Although in the end there's no way to verify my numbers because it's like a black box. You don't know what's in there," he said.

Jens Malmodin, a senior specialist in sustainability at Ericsson Research, is also skeptical of the Digiconomist estimate. For him, one red flag is that it implies bitcoin mining consumes roughly double the combined annual electricity usage of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Apple in recent years.

"I think we need more correct figures," said Malmodin, who has created estimates of energy consumption and carbon emissions in the information and communications technology industry since 2005. "This is wrong and an unrealistic figure."

Harald Vranken, an associate professor at Radboud University in Netherlands, has also researched bitcoin's energy use and estimates it now consumes 1 to 4 gigawatts. That correlates to Digiconomist's figure, Vranken said, but only at the upper range of his estimate.

"Given the large rise of Bitcoin's exchange rate, and the difference in electricity prices, it is hard to make an accurate estimate," he told CNBC in an email.

Echoes of dot-com bubble

The integrity of electric power forecasts is a subject close to Koomey's heart. He was part of the team in the mid-1990s that debunked widely circulated projections of power consumption by the internet. Those studies overstated the internet's share of U.S. electricity consumption by at least a factor of 8 and projected it would double in 10 years.

"It turned out to be a bunch of nonsense, but it takes pages and pages of work to debunk an errant sentence," Koomey said.

Now, Koomey sees the same pattern emerging as Digiconomist's data and other estimates weave their way into research reports and news articles, sowing the type of faulty conventional wisdom that could mislead investors.

Take for example the prediction that bitcoin mining's electricity usage will match U.S. power consumption in 2019 — and the world's total appetite by 2020 — if it continues to grow at its current pace. That analysis is based on Digiconomist's estimate and appears to have originated in a recent fact sheet by Power Compare, a British website that offers electricity information. Power Compare could not immediately be reached for comment.

According to Koomey, this kind of analysis makes a classic mistake: It projects high growth rates associated with a new technology into the future, resulting in an eye-popping demand forecast. Similar projections were made about internet data traffic and electricity usage from office computers and mobile devices, he notes. Sure enough, their initial growth rates moderated as they scaled up.

De Vries also said the Power Compare forecast based on his estimate is unrealistic.

Still, in the following weeks, the analysis spread quickly. It was featured in a Grist article earlier this month titled "Bitcoin could cost us our clean-energy future" and a week later in a Newsweek story headlined "Bitcoin mining on track to consume all of the world's energy by 2020."

Also last week, financial newsletter The Bear Traps Report cited the analysis speculating that GE's turbine business could benefit as China switches from coal-fired to natural gas generation in part to support cleaner-burning bitcoin mining. However, the financial newsletter did call it an "extreme" case.

Druckenmiller told CNBC last week he doesn't own bitcoin and only trades what he knows, adding, "What I do know is it takes the same amount of energy to do one bitcoin transaction that it takes to power nine homes in the U.S. By 2019 it'll take up half the energy in the United States to run the bitcoin network."

The statistic comparing energy usage by U.S. homes and bitcoin mining also comes from Digiconomist. The other reports also relied heavily on Digiconomist data on top of the Power Compare analysis.

It's not yet clear what will rein in bitcoin's growing energy usage. Researchers say it could be the rise of cryptocurrencies with mining protocols that require less energy, a crash in bitcoin prices, continued efficiency gains as bitcoin scales up or a combination of these and other developments.

Even if the Digiconomist figures are correct, Koomey notes that power consumption from bitcoin mining would only amount to a fraction of 1 percent of global demand. He and others caution against making leaps about bitcoin's impact on the power sector until verifiable data are available.

"Companies who make big investment decisions based on numbers that are highly uncertain are almost always going to get burned. It's just a mistake to jump to conclusions," Koomey said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/21/no-b...y-in-2020.html





Thousands of Major Sites are Taking Silent Anti-Ad-Blocking Measures
Devin Coldewey

It’s no secret that ad blockers are putting a dent in advertising-based business models on the web. This has produced a range of reactions, from relatively polite whitelisting asks (TechCrunch does this) to dynamic redeployment of ads to avoid blocking. A new study finds that nearly a third of the top 10,000 sites on the web are taking ad blocking countermeasures, many silent and highly sophisticated.

Seeing the uptick in anti-ad-blocking tech, University of Iowa and UC Riverside researchers decided to perform a closer scrutiny of major sites than had previously been done. Earlier estimates, based largely on visible or obvious anti-ad-blocking means such as pop-ups or broken content, suggested that somewhere between 1 and 5 percent of popular sites were doing this — but the real number seems to be an order of magnitude higher.

The researchers visited thousands of sites multiple times, with and without ad-blocking software added to the browser. By comparing the final rendered code of the page for blocking browsers versus non-blocking browsers, they could see when pages changed content or noted the presence of a blocker, even if they didn’t notify the user.

As you can see above, 30.5 percent of the top 10,000 sites on the web as measured by Alexa are using some sort of ad-blocker detection, and 38.2 percent of the top 1,000. (Again, TechCrunch is among these, but to my knowledge we just ask visitors to whitelist the site.)

“Our results show that anti-adblockers are much more pervasive than previously reported…our hypothesis is that a much larger fraction of websites than previously reported are “worried” about adblockers but many are not employing retaliatory actions against adblocking users yet.”

It turns out that many ad providers are offering anti-blocking tech in the form of scripts that produce a variety of “bait” content that’s ad-like — for instance, images or elements named and tagged in such a way that they will trigger ad blockers, tipping the site off. The pattern of blocking, for instance not loading any divs marked “banner_ad” but loading images with “banner” in the description, further illuminates the type and depth of ad blocking being enforced by the browser.

Sites can simply record this for their own purposes (perhaps to gauge the necessity of responding) or redeploy ads in such a way that the detected ad blocker won’t catch.

In addition to detecting these new and increasingly common measures being taken by advertisers, the researchers suggest some ways that current ad blockers may be able to continue functioning as intended.

One way involves dynamically rewriting the JavaScript code that checks for a blocker, forcing it to think there is no blocker. However, this could break some sites that render as if there is no blocker when there actually is.

A second method identifies the “bait” content and fails to block it, making the site think there’s no blocker in the browser and therefore render ads as normal — except the real ads will be blocked.

That will, of course, provoke new and even more sophisticated measures by the advertisers, and so on. As the paper concludes:

“To keep up the pressure on publishers and advertisers in the long term, we believe it is crucial that adblockers keep pace with anti-adblockers in the rapidly escalating technological arms race. Our work represents an important step in this direction.”

The study has been submitted for consideration at the Network and Distributed Systems Security Symposium in February of 2018.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/27/th...king-measures/





MoviePass Adds a Million Subscribers, Even if Theaters Aren’t Sold on It
Brooks Barnes

As streaming services like Netflix and Hulu surge in popularity, movie theaters have been trying to compete by rethinking the concession counter and installing seats that resemble beds.

Yet attendance was flat at North American cinemas in 2016, and analysts are predicting a 4 percent decline in 2017, bringing ticket sales to a 22-year low.

Perhaps something more radical is necessary.

Mitch Lowe, a Netflix co-founder, certainly thought so when he took over a ticketing firm called MoviePass in June 2016. By August of this year, when MoviePass introduced a cut-rate, subscription-based plan — go to the movies 365 times a year for $9.95 a month — Mr. Lowe had been declared an enemy of the state. “Not welcome here,” AMC Entertainment, the largest multiplex operator in North America, said in an indignant August news release that threatened legal action.

It may be time to get on board: MoviePass said this month that it had signed up more than one million subscribers in just four months. It took Netflix more than three years to reach that level when it started selling low-priced subscriptions for DVD rentals in 1999. Spotify was relatively quick, at five months in 2011. It took Hulu 10 months to reach one million later that year.

“We’re actually shocked,” Mr. Lowe said. “We seem to have hit a nerve in America.”

Mr. Lowe and Ted Farnsworth, chief executive of Helios and Matheson Analytics, which bought a controlling stake in MoviePass in August for $27 million, celebrated the milestone by cheekily posing for photos at an AMC theater in Times Square.

Under the MoviePass business model, theaters get paid full price for every admission. People who sign up receive a membership card that functions like a debit card. When members want to see a movie (no more than one a day) they use a MoviePass smartphone app to check in at the theater. The app instantly transfers the price of a ticket to the membership card. Members in turn use the card to pay for entry. It all works independently of theaters, sometimes to their chagrin.

The blistering growth has prompted new criticism from theaters and studio owners — namely that MoviePass will never be able to make money by charging $9.95 a month when a single ticket can cost almost twice that amount. They say that will cause MoviePass to either raise prices or go out of business, disappointing audiences and ultimately hurting the fragile multiplex business.

Mr. Lowe, who previously sparred with studios as president of Redbox, the kiosk company that rents DVDs for $1 a day, believes that ticketing can at least be a break-even business for MoviePass. The real treasure in this venture, he contends, is the trove of data about consumer tastes and habits that MoviePass can collect. It hopes to sell that data to studio marketers.

Mr. Farnsworth said, “When you apply computer science and machine learning to an industry that we believe has lacked significant innovation, useful patterns start to emerge.” If MoviePass gets big enough, it could try to demand that chain theaters sell tickets at a discount or share a slice of their concession revenue.

Helios recently raised $60 million for the expansion of MoviePass, which expects to have more than three million subscribers by the end of next year. Monthly subscriber retention is roughly 96 percent, Mr. Lowe said. About 75 percent of MoviePass users are millennials, a group that Hollywood has struggled to turn into avid moviegoers.

“Millennials understand us because they grew up on subscription,” Mr. Lowe said.

Dan Steven, 34, signed up for MoviePass in October. Mr. Steven, who lives in Orlando, Fla., said he had gone to “maybe one movie a month” before he became a subscriber. In November, he went 12 times.

“I used to only go if it was clearly worth buying a ticket — something big-screen worthy, a spectacle or a movie with a lot of effects,” he said. “I would skip the undercard movies. I would just wait until they came out on Netflix.”

Over the last decade, theaters have spent billions of dollars to enhance the moviegoing experience. Improvements include the ability to reserve seats online, reclining seats, bigger screens, and better sound and projection systems. But the business has remained more or less the same for decades (sell ticket, serve popcorn, show movie) even as nearly every other area of media (television, music, publishing) has been forced to reinvent itself to contend with digital disruption.

As the popularity of MoviePass demonstrates, theater owners may no longer be able to avoid fundamental change. In particular, studios are expected to force exhibitors in the coming months to loosen their grip on new movies. Theaters have typically insisted on a 90-day period of exclusivity. Studios want to shorten that window and speed films to home video-on-demand services.

“This is something that has to happen, in part because consumers are demanding it,” Jim Gianopulos, chairman of Paramount Pictures, said at an investor conference in September.

MoviePass, which has been around since 2011, struggled to gain traction in its early years because of pricing ($50 a month, later lowered to $35) and pushback from exhibitors, who worried that a subscription service would undermine per-ticket pricing. By early 2017, MoviePass was trundling along as a fringe service; it had about 20,000 users in the United States.

When Mr. Lowe and Mr. Farnsworth drastically lowered the price, people started signing up en masse.

To a degree, the service depends on traditional subscription economics: More people pay than go. The model starts to get more complicated, however, when you consider the price of movie tickets.

According to the National Association of Theater Owners, tickets cost an average of $8.93. But theaters in cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco charge as much as $16.50 for a standard ticket. At Mr. Steven’s local theater in Florida, they are $11.92.

So far, none of the major studios have signed on as clients, and no studio executive contacted for this article would comment on the record. Mr. Lowe said MoviePass had been “making huge progress with content owners” and had signed up a small studio as a partner, but he declined to provide details.

The big theater chains have held their ground, although AMC recently softened its stance. A bit.

“We appreciate their business,” Adam Aron, AMC’s chief executive, said on a conference call with analysts last month. But Mr. Aron added, “AMC has absolutely no intention — I repeat, no intention — of sharing any — I repeat, any — of our admissions revenue or our concessions revenue.”

Regal, the No. 2 multiplex chain, has said it will take a “wait and see” approach to MoviePass, while Cinemark, the third-largest exhibitor, introduced its own subscription service in early December. For $8.99 a month, members can see one movie a month and receive a 20 percent discount on concessions, among other perks. Unused tickets roll over and never expire for paying members. Mr. Lowe called the offering “vapid.”

One small theater company that has become a MoviePass investor, Studio Movie Grill, which has 30 locations in nine states, credits the service with increasing attendance, especially on weeknights.

“I know it’s getting a bad rap in some circles, but we love MoviePass,” said Brian Schultz, Studio Movie Grill’s chief executive. “Some people aren’t sure they want to pay $10 to $12 to see a movie like ‘Lady Bird.’ MoviePass takes out that hurdle.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/b...s-tickets.html





Year's Box Office Drops, Still 3rd Highest Gross in History
Justice League

After two consecutive record-breaking years at the domestic box office, 2017 was the year the momentum slowed — even with the late adrenaline boost of a new "Star Wars" film.

When all is said and done on Jan. 1, the domestic box office is estimated to net out with $11.1 billion in grosses, down around 2.6 percent from 2016's $11.4 billion, according to projections from box office tracker comScore. Looked at another way, it's also likely to be the third highest grossing year in cinema history.

Experts and insiders are somewhat divided on what this might mean for the current state and future of movie going and whether it is reason for alarm or just part of the natural ebb and flow of business. But one thing remains clear to all parties: Quality rules. If the movies are good, audiences will turn out. If they're not, they won't.

"2017 was the tale of two cities. The year started really big. January to April were smash successes and September, November and December are huge successes, but the middle of the year ... markedly underperformed. It's really opened up an intriguing argument between people who think the movie business is challenged and people who think the movie business just needs for Hollywood to make appealing movies," said Adam Aron, the CEO of AMC, the largest movie theater chain in the U.S.

"We think the record of 2017 demonstrates that when Hollywood makes good movies, America goes to see those movies."

The year saw tremendous highs with three biggest grossing films "Beauty and the Beast" ($504 million), "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" ($424 million) and "Wonder Woman "($412.5 million), notably all female-led, and the remarkable successes of a handful of non-sequels including "It" ($327.5 million), "Dunkirk" ($188 million), "Get Out" ($175.5 million), "Wonder" ($117.4 million) and "Girls Trip" ($115.1 million). Some superhero films even found renewed energy, either thanks a new director and vibe ("Thor: Ragnarok," $309.4 million), as part of a farewell tour ("Logan," $226.3 million) or a successful reboot with a new star ("Spider-Man: Homecoming," $334.4 million). And all were certified fresh by the film criticism website Rotten Tomatoes.

It was also a year peppered with failed starts and serious lows for everything from R-rated comedies, like "Baywatch," to formulaic actioners and burgeoning cinematic universes. Franchises die on the vine every year, but 2017 was particularly brutal for some spectacularly expensive efforts like "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets," ''King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" and "Blade Runner 2049." There are the ones that buckled under negative reviews like "The Dark Tower," and then the much-hyped Dark Universe kick-off "The Mummy" failed to make a notable impact stateside. Aside from "Blade Runner," all were rated "rotten."

The summer as a whole was the lowest grossing in over 10 years, and August was the worst in two decades. And not all long-running franchises continue to be the cash cows they once were. Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean" had a franchise worst domestically with "Dead Men Tell No Tales" ($172.6 million) — although worldwide was a more positive story. The same was true for another fifth installment, Paramount's "Transformers: The Last Knight" ($130.2 million).

For the second year in a row, the Walt Disney Company is at the top of the ladder with over $2.2 billion in domestic revenue making up over 21.2 percent of the market share from releases like "The Last Jedi," ''Beauty and the Beast" and "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2" ($389.8 million).

"This is a year where we've seen our big brands deliver high-quality ... successes," said Dave Hollis, Disney's president of worldwide distribution. "The deliberate approach that we've taken with these brands and the magnitude of the size of the films we're putting into the marketplace is paying off."

Warner Bros. followed in second with 18.9 percent of the market share, and over $2 billion thanks to films like "Wonder Woman," ''It," ''Dunkirk" and even "Justice League," which underperformed domestically with $223.2 million. The studio also had its best worldwide year ever with around $5 billion in grosses.

Universal took third with around $1.5 billion compliments of "Despicable Me 3" ($264.6 million), "The Fate of the Furious" ($225.8 million) and "Get Out."

"We had the most profitable year in the history of the studio which is something to be proud of," said Jim Orr, Universal's distribution head. "We did it with a very diverse slate. We did all of that without a bunch of caped crusaders, without a bunch of superheroes."

Quality content on streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon and premium cable options like HBO continue to be formidable draws for consumer attention too.

"As an industry we have some really big challenges ahead of us, which involves vying for the consumer's time," said Jeff Goldstein, Warner Bros.' president of domestic distribution. "It's more competitive today than it ever has been before."

Jeff Bock, a senior box office analyst for Exhibitor Relations, says movies can't compete.

"2017 will ultimately be remembered as the changing of the guard where people realized, you know what, movies aren't getting better, but TV is," said Bock, who notes that for about the same price as a movie ticket, a consumer can get access to all the content on a streaming service and its proprietary content (like Netflix's "Stranger Things" or "The Crown").

AMC's Aron, a self-proclaimed fan of "The Crown," thinks there is room for both, however, and is continuing to invest in upgraded theatrical experiences for audiences — from better seats to premium food and drink options.

"The movie business in the United States is going to sell a billion tickets this year. That's 55 times the attendance of all 32 teams in the National Football League put together," Aron said. "Last I checked, Netflix and Amazon were in business last year, and last year was the biggest in the history of film."

While studios and exhibitors are bullish on the promise of the 2018 slate, which includes "Black Panther," ''Ocean's 8," ''Avengers: Infinity War," ''Solo: A Star Wars Story," and sequels for "Jurassic World," ''Deadpool," ''Mamma Mia!" and "The Incredibles," analysts are more cautious.

"Streaming is not going to kill the movies," said Paul Dergarabedian, comScore's senior media analyst. "It's just a wake-up call for an industry that really has not changed the way movies have been marketed. The usual formulas for success don't seem to work anymore."

For Bock, it comes back to quality.

"The product has to be superior, it has to be better than what's on TV and right now it isn't. That's the bottom line," Bock said. "What the studios do now, the things that they greenlight right now, are going to be what changes it, not what's already on the calendar. This rough ride is just the beginning. It's going to be bumpy for the next couple of years."

AP Film Writer Jake Coyle contributed from New York.





Netflix’s ‘Bright’ Gets Blockbuster-Size Audience, Nielsen Says
Crayton Harrison

Netflix Inc.’s ambitious attempt at a big-budget film, “Bright” starring Will Smith, drew an enough viewers in its first three days to rival the opening-weekend audiences of several top Hollywood movies this year, according to Nielsen data.

“Bright” got 11 million viewers Dec. 22 through 24 in the U.S., Nielsen said Thursday. If those viewers had each paid the national average movie-ticket price of about $9, that would’ve been a $99 million debut at the box office -- roughly what Universal Pictures’ “The Fate of the Furious” did in April.

Some caveats to those numbers: Netflix subscribers use the service to get a variety of programming, and might not have paid to go see “Bright” if it was only available at the theater. And Netflix disputes Nielsen’s methodology to begin with, in part because it only measures views on televisions, leaving out computers and phones. Netflix doesn’t release its own audience data.

But the numbers have to be encouraging for Netflix, which spent about $90 million to make “Bright.” The buddy-cop film, with elements of “Lord of the Rings”-style fantasy, only got positive reviews from 12 percent of top movie critics on Rotten Tomatoes.

The viewership well exceeds the 3 million Americans who watched the first episode of the most recent season of “The Crown” earlier this month, but trails the 15.8 million who tuned into the first installment of “Stranger Things 2” in October, according to Nielsen.

Netflix shares rose 3.5 percent to $192.71 at the close. The stock is up 56 percent this year.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...e-nielsen-says





Movie Theaters Were Already in Trouble. With Disney’s Fox Deal, It’s Double

Not only would Disney gain leverage with chains such as AMC, it would also pick up more films to distribute exclusively on its upcoming online service.
Gerry Smith

America’s movie theaters were jammed in December for the screening of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a story about the Resistance battling the evil First Order. But with the announcement in December that Walt Disney Co. will acquire much of 21st Century Fox Inc.’s entertainment businesses, theater owners may feel like they’re the Resistance.

Disney’s acquisition of Fox’s film studio will unite some of the most lucrative movie franchises, from Disney’s Star Wars and Marvel series to Fox’s X-Men and Avatar. With control of more blockbusters, not only does Disney gain more leverage over theater chains such as AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. and Carmike Cinemas Inc., it also wins more films it could distribute exclusively on its upcoming online service—cutting out cinema operators entirely. “Disney is becoming the Wal-Mart of Hollywood: huge and dominant,” says Barton Crockett, a media analyst at B. Riley FBR. “That’s going to have a big influence up and down the supply chain.”

Disney expects the $52.4 billion deal, which includes Fox’s cable channels and international assets, to be completed in 12 to 18 months if regulators approve it. That’s a big if, given that the government recently sued to block the enormous media deal between AT&T Inc. and Time Warner Inc., home of the Warner Bros. studio. Together, Disney and Fox accounted for 40 percent of ticket sales in 2016 in the U.S. and Canada, a level of market concentration that could draw scrutiny from Washington.

If the deal goes through, theater owners could get squeezed. Usually a film’s box-office revenue is split evenly between exhibitors and the studio. But Disney previously has gotten theaters to hand over a larger share—sometimes more than 60 percent—on its biggest, most popular films, such as the Star Wars series. Now it could try the same tactic with Fox’s Avatar, which has four sequels in the works. “While the future of movie exhibition looks increasingly dim, a Disney-Fox merger will elevate its level of pain,” says Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG LLC.

Cinema chains have already suffered this year from a string of box-office bombs, including Warner Bros.’ King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, and online video services such as Netflix Inc. are keeping more moviegoers at home. Studios also are considering ways to get film releases onto video sooner, putting more pressure on theater owners. All that has led to consolidation in the industry, with Britain’s Cineworld Group Plc agreeing to buy Regal Entertainment Group for $3.6 billion in December.

Unlike Fox and other big studios, Disney hasn’t pushed to shorten the time movies are shown in theaters before reaching home video. So shifting Fox’s movie slate to Disney, which prefers long theatrical runs, “could be a positive for theaters,” says Leo Kulp, an analyst at RBC Capital Markets LLC. Yet Disney still presents exhibitors with a big potential worry: its plan to launch an online service in 2019 with Pixar and Marvel flicks. “Disney may push Fox’s films to its direct-to-consumer platform,” Kulp says, “and bypass the theaters altogether.”

BOTTOM LINE - Movie studios have long split revenues with theater operators 50-50. But a marriage between Disney and Fox could give the combined entity the clout to grab a bigger share.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...al-it-s-double





'Star Wars' Franchise Crosses $4 Billion, Eclipsing Disney's Lucasfilm Price

The feat comes as 'The Last Jedi' prepares to jump the $1 billion mark at the worldwide box office over New Year's weekend.
Pamela McClintock

From the get-go, Wall Street analysts lauded The Walt Disney Co.'s decision in 2012 to buy Lucasfilm — home of George Lucas' Star Wars franchise — despite a high price tag of $4.06 billion.

They weren't wrong in their enthusiasm for Disney chairman-CEO Bob Iger's empire-building.

Combined, Disney and Lucasfilm's Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Stars Wars: The Force Awakens have surpassed $4.06 billion in ticket sales at the worldwide box office. While an interesting benchmark, it doesn’t, of course, account for the hundreds of millions spent to produce and market the trio of films, or the fact that Disney splits box-office grosses with theater owners. Conversely, Disney has minted additional money from lucrative ancillary revenue streams, merchandising sales and theme park attractions.

Opening in North America on Dec. 15, The Last Jedi zoomed past the $900 million mark on Thursday, finishing the day with $934.2 million globally, including $464.6 million domestically and $469.6 internationally (it doesn't land in China until Jan. 5). The sequel to The Force Awakens was directed by Rian Johnson, and has dominated the Christmas corridor. The Last Jedi will jump the $1 billion mark over New Year's weekend on its way to becoming the top-grossing 2017 release, eclipsing the $1.264 billion earned by fellow Disney title Beauty and the Beast.

In December 2015, filmmaker J.J. Abrams' The Force Awakens shattered numerous records on its way to grossing $2.068 billion globally, including an all-time best $936.7 million in North America, not accounting for inflation.

Filmmaker Gareth Edwards' Rogue One, a standalone film released in December 2016, earned $1.056 billion worldwide. Last Jedi should ultimately land between the two films in terms of its lifetime gross.

The Lucasfilm purchase followed Disney's 2009 acquisition of Marvel Entertainment and its 2006 purchase of Pixar, all engineered by Iger. The stable of companies, along with the studio's own live-action division and Disney Animation, has propelled Disney to become the most successful film studio in Hollywood, led by chief Alan Horn.

Iger's biggest bet is yet to come: The $52.4 billion acquisition of major parts of 21st Century Fox, including the 20th Century Fox film and television studios.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/he...-price-1070624





The Backlash Against Piped Music

This holiday season, groups in Michigan and the UK are asking for fewer jingle bells, more silent nights in public spaces.
Amy Crawford

It was a bright, frigid morning in Ann Arbor, Michigan, two weeks before the University of Michigan let out for winter break, and the college town’s numerous coffee shops were abuzz with the gentle tapping of keyboards, the whooshing of espresso machines, the occasional chatter—and the tinny strains of 1980s and ’90s pop hits.

It’s that last element of the sonic landscape that drives Gina Choe and Libby Hunter crazy. Standing just inside a cavernous cafe where The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” competed with a sizzling griddle, jostling coffee cups, and echoing voices, Choe said, “I came in here once, and [the music] was everywhere around me. Everyone was talking more loudly—I couldn’t even hear my friend.”

As Choe checked a decibel meter on her phone (“65, the level of loud conversation”), Hunter mentioned that the last time she was here, she had asked a counter worker if the music could be turned off. “The manager came over to my table, and she was really nice, but she said no, because of the ‘atmosphere.’ It’s amazing how afraid they are to not have music.”

Hunter, a retired middle-school music teacher, and Choe, a 2017 Michigan graduate who is working in a research lab while she prepares to apply to medical school, do not travel in the same circles, and might never have met at all had they not come together over a mutual love of quiet spaces—and a loathing for piped-in background music.

Last summer, Choe posted on the neighborhood-based social network Nextdoor, soliciting suggestions for quiet places to work (“Most people recommended libraries, and that wasn’t what I was looking for,” she clarified). Hunter responded in sympathy, noting that she had long wanted to form a local chapter of the British group Pipedown, which has organized successful letter-writing campaigns against piped music in department stores and pubs. Choe said she could build a website, and not long after, Quiet Ann Arbor, the first U.S. chapter of Pipedown, was born. The still-new group plans to assemble a database of quiet places in town and mount letter-writing campaigns along the lines of Pipedown’s in the U.K.

“My goal is no music in public places, unless it’s live music,” Hunter said. “Let’s keep music special. Music is not special when it’s part of the wallpaper.”

Choe and Hunter’s intolerance for piped music might seem extreme. (Full disclosure: I am writing this in a cafe where I find the R&B soundtrack to be a fairly innocuous accompaniment to a double cappuccino). But it’s safe to say that most of us have been annoyed, at one time or another, by piped music—especially during the holidays, when bad covers of Christmas standards are suddenly everywhere. Although for some people, music is part of the appeal of a coffee shop or bar, they might feel differently when others’ musical tastes are imposed upon them at the airport or the grocery store, in hospital corridors or doctors’ waiting rooms, or even—thanks to the outdoor speakers some shops position above their doorframes—in the street itself.

“Most of us really like music. We just want it to be freely chosen,” said Nigel Rodgers, an English writer who founded Pipedown in 1992, and compares piped music to second-hand cigarette smoke.

Pipedown now boasts some 2,000 members across the U.K., including Absolutely Fabulous star Joanna Lumley, who supplied a blurb for the group’s website (“I have left shops, unable to purchase the object of my desire, because of hellish piped music”). It has also won a number of victories. In 1994, Gatwick Airport, Britain’s second busiest, agreed to turn off piped music in its terminals after Pipedown persuaded management to survey travelers. According to the group, of the more than 68,000 people who responded to the survey, 43 percent said they disliked the piped music, while only 34 percent said they liked it (the rest didn’t care either way).

More recently, Pipedown’s letter-writing campaigns have persuaded stores to turn off or limit music. Last year, the department-store chain Marks and Spencer stopped playing it, and this past spring, the grocer Asda said it would experiment with “quiet hours.” And an Australian broadcaster has announced plans to launch a Pipedown chapter Down Under.

While many of Pipedown’s members simply dislike piped music, Rodgers noted that it can be more than an irritant. “Music you don’t want to listen to simply becomes noise, and all noise has certain effects on people,” he said, pointing to studies that show noise raises blood pressure and exacerbates depression and anxiety, especially in people who have to hear it for extended periods (perhaps because they work in a shop where “All I Want for Christmas Is You” plays on an endless loop). For those with autism and other sensory-processing issues, or with hearing disorders like tinnitus and hyperacusis, it can aggravate symptoms, impede their ability to hear conversation, and even interfere with how they get around.

“It gets confusing when the music is too loud,” said Ann Arbor resident Morry Nathan, in a downtown bookstore where soft classical guitar played over a small speaker. (“This is not too bad,” said Choe, looking at her decibel meter.) Nathan, who is both blind and hard of hearing, hadn’t heard about Quiet Ann Arbor, but he said he supported their goal. “It’s hard to keep up a conversation, and when the acoustics of the room are also bad—lots of hard surfaces—it can be jarring,” he said. “I have walked out of restaurants because of it.”

Of course, stores, restaurants, cafes, and shopping malls are not trying to torment their customers; they are trying to make money. A body of research suggests that people spend more in a store where slow music is playing and move more quickly when music is loud; that classical music may induce customers to spend more money on luxury goods; and that impulse buyers tend to spend more at the mall when music is playing. As brick-and-mortar stores face the threat of online retail, some are even turning to music for salvation. Target, which long resisted playing music on the grounds that it distracts people from shopping, has been testing it at some locations, and announced this year that it would roll out an “upbeat, positive” soundtrack with “a playful personality” in several dozen new and remodeled stores.

Whether or not the psychological manipulation works, people who hate piped music bristle at the intent. “When I started Pipedown, I thought piped music did work,” Rodgers said. (He has since become skeptical.) “And I objected on the grounds of liberty. We shouldn’t have to have this mind control.”

Simply by its existence, piped music does shape our experience of public life. Sure, private businesses may do what they like, whether that’s playing “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” 300 times in December or bowing to the pressure of polite British (or Midwestern) letter-writers. But by imposing a mood, whether festive or frenetic, they risk interfering with phenomena like conversation and people-watching that motivate people to spend time among their fellow humans. Background music is a buffer that can numb us to one another.

“We’re so cyber-spatially-oriented now,” said Hunter, after she and Choe had finally found a coffee shop quiet enough to conduct our interview. “And I almost think I have no bandwidth left. This is a time in our history when people need to be communicating with each other. Real, live talking is more important than ever.”
https://www.citylab.com/life/2017/12...-music/548399/





The Loneliness of the Long Distance Rocker

Can music still save your mortal soul?
Rhett Miller

When I was fourteen years old I wanted to die. I felt doomed to be alone. My prospects for meaningful connection with other humans seemed bleak. I wasn’t consciously aware of my desire to end my life until one evening a switch flipped and I was done with this bullshit world. I drank poison and ate pills and spent the night in the hospital, surviving by the narrowest of margins. When I emerged into consciousness, waking up to my second act, I was singing a song. My delivery was mumbling and incoherent, to be sure, but it was a song nonetheless, specific and discrete.

From that point on, everything else, everything that wasn’t music, sloughed off. My dedication to my schoolwork disappeared as well as my athletic ambition, but so did my determination to end my own life. Writing songs was my way out, or rather back in—the act of creation made meaning where there had been none. And best of all, music brought with it a heretofore secret world of generous like-minded people who had also found meaning in the simple act of turning silence into songs.

I appeared in school talent shows to begin with, then I played between local bands at the clubs in the bohemian music district of Dallas known as Deep Ellum. All the while I was singing and strumming in parks and bedrooms and backyards. I engaged in good-natured arguments with fellow musicians over the meanings of songs, the hierarchies of greatest albums, and the elusive chords from our favorite tunes. In those pre-internet days we had to learn songs by ear, stopping and starting thinly stretched Maxell cassettes as we puzzled over the muddy transition from an A minor to an F.

The people in my local music scene were classmates, girlfriends, and older kids who’d attained a level of cool that didn’t even seem possible; and weirder still, they were all my friends. This world was dirty, impoverished, and occasionally dangerous but it was never lonely. You might not dig his or her music, but it was pretty rare to dislike a fellow musician.

In the days of the old business model, there were successful predators at the top of the food chain, but the kids who made the music were hiding down in the bushes with our friends. The local model of music delivery, unlike the giant streaming info-combines that lord over today’s music world, had a strikingly flat hierarchy of striving characters: the club owners, record store clerks, college radio DJs, and rock critics who owed a thousand words to the local weekly. At closing time on any given night in the ’90s you could find any or all of these satellite scenesters mixed in among the proper musicians at the Art Bar in Dallas, behind Club Clearview. We all knew that there was a cutthroat cabal of music industry execs waiting on the top floor of a tower in Rockefeller Center to offer us a lopsided contract, but we also knew that we were the good guys, the proletariat to their bourgeoisie, the Rebel Alliance to their Empire. We had each other’s back. The worst thing we could be expected to do was steal a girlfriend from one of the Buck Pets or envy the Toadies their unexpected national radio play. Those were, as they say, the days.

The Talent Scouts are Bots

It’s all different now. My own observation of the current music industry is colored by my history with the extinct model. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to come up in this world of SoundCloud rappers and Swedish hit factories churning out auto-tuned EDM or whatever. Believe me, I’m keenly aware that even these two meager examples must make me sound impossibly old. My point is that if I was a fourteen-year-old depressive nowadays, I’m not sure what would even draw me into the world of music to begin with. The ability to record oneself in a bedroom represents an impressive flash-forward advance in technology, but it also is profoundly isolating. For starters, it negates the very human necessity of convincing small-time investors to fund a session, or the simultaneously joyful and agonizing experience of collaborating with the requisite technicians to make such a recording happen. In short, it eliminates people from the equation. And more to the point, it eliminates all the good people from the equation.

You’ve still got the execs in the tower in Rockefeller Center—only now all the lower floors that used to house the junior execs and the young A&R kids are crammed with barbed wire and land mines. The Artists & Repertoire department has been replaced by a bot that alerts the label chief when an artist reaches a predetermined number of Twitter followers or Facebook likes. This sort of micro-market calculation was once anathema to creativity—it’s the origin of the old punk-rock contempt for “the suits” who moved product on the AM airwaves. Today, however, an obsessive attention to online clicks and listens is all that an independent artist can rely on to outfox the system. Writing a song might now be less important to your success than paying for a hundred thousand imaginary account holders to follow you on social media.

That’s a lot of followers! So why do you feel so lonely? This hyperindividualist model of market predation seems directly aimed at one of the true joys of making music: a genuine, collaborative dedication to craft for its own sake.

Even though my own career benefited tremendously from the last gasp budgets of the old model, I’m not grandfathered out of the cynicism engendered by this new cutthroat world. As the old (and abundantly flawed) avenues of income are closed off entirely, our new music delivery system reroutes the great majority of returns from music-making back to the corporations.

Artists have never been good at maximizing the monetization of their work. And in the new money-challenged world of music, we’ve found ourselves cut out almost entirely. Even casual observers saw the shift from purchased music, which still managed to allot a small percentage of the profit to the artist, to music’s current state of literal worthlessness. Now the streaming services negotiate backroom deals with labels that dole out fees to artists in such minuscule sums that you would lose money by burning the gas it would require to drive to the bank to deposit the check in your account.

And the kids are listening on YouTube, a service that brilliantly shows advertisements before allowing the kids to consume their music. Does YouTube share the revenue generated by these commercials with the creators of the content? Does YouTube give the artists in question any say over whose ad might be attached to the art they created? Hell no. Why would they? They’re the Empire, remember? They’re just sitting in their dumbass Death Star counting their money.

It used to be that musicians could hope for the unexpected and sometimes tax-bracket elevating gift of mailbox money in the form of licensing fees paid by films, TV shows, and ad agencies. There’s a (perhaps apocryphal) old story about Nick Lowe, whose “(What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love & Understanding” was covered by some cheeseball on the soundtrack of the hit Hollywood movie The Bodyguard. In the story, Lowe (who’d recently been dumped by Warner Brothers, his longtime record label) stumbles out of his middle-class house in his bathrobe to retrieve the mail and discovers a check for a million dollars. A decade ago, a manager friend of mine who was haggling with an agency over a licensing fee told me he envisioned a future where instead of the company paying the artist to place the song in a commercial, it would work the other way around.

That’s our world now. In a post terrestrial radio era, music supervisors act as de facto A&R reps, and placement is one more thing artists are willing to give away pretty much for free.

When they’re feeling particularly ungenerous, the company will cut you out altogether. Google did that to me when they used the guitar riff from my song “Question” as the bed music in a commercial for one of the company’s crappy phones. Google hired an ad agency. The ad agency hired a jingle house, probably giving them “Question” as a reference track. Grateful for the work, some dude in a windowless room at the jingle house (probably himself another victim of the modern music biz; maybe he used to be in bands but was now trying to feed his kids by making innocuous instrumental music to go under Google ad voice-overs) re-recorded my riff, cleverly adding an extra note at the end of the progression—just enough to absolve his employer of any obligation to compensate me for having written the thing to begin with.

I did what any aggrieved artist should do when their work has been ripped off: I contacted my publishing company’s lawyers to threaten these digital brigands with a lawsuit. Within the ranks of the publishing company, it was unanimously agreed that we had Google over a barrel. But then they hired a musicologist who specialized in copyright infringement and he pointed out the almost imperceptible difference between the two recordings. His prediction was that it was possible but unlikely we could win in court. After my publishers sized up the odds of going against the great content leviathan, they advised me to drop the idea. I agreed reluctantly, and lost a few nights’ sleep thinking of how lucky the Nick Lowes of the world had been: here, some untold millions of ad viewers would be hearing a nearly note-for-note rendition of a song I wrote, and all I was getting in return was teeth-gnashing insomnia.

I considered making a video documenting the Google heist, featuring an A/B demonstration of the two versions of the song. I would certainly have prevailed in the court of public opinion at least. I could have told the story of how I’d written the song after spending a day in London falling in love with the woman I’d go on to marry, maybe show some pictures of our sweet kids that I’m busting my ass to feed in this barren new musical landscape. But in the end I didn’t want my career narrative to be overtaken by an Ahab-like quest for the leviathan’s unlikely destruction. I took a deep breath and let it go.

Battle of the Brands

There’s another less obvious casualty of the great digital enclosure of the music business: as Spotify, YouTube, Apple, Google, et al., hoover up nearly all the available profits, the people marooned on the production side of a revenue-starved business model are trapped in a perennial race to the bottom, just to get by. This means that even the best-intentioned people, who got into music for the best possible collaborative reasons, are forced to reposition themselves as small-time hustlers, whose younger selves would likely be appalled to encounter them in today’s always-be-closing mode.

This is far from an abstract proposition for me. When I was a kid, my grandmother introduced me to a local record storeowner she’d met in the little shopping center near her house. He must have seen some potential in my teenage flailing because he offered to manage me and eventually helped me put out my first little solo album. It was a sweet, heady time. I was learning so much, so quickly. The record itself reflects the larval stage of my development and I cherish it as one might a baby photo, but I don’t want it to be presented now alongside my adult work.

Fast forward thirty years, and this same early backer is haranguing me to make the record available on Spotify—an arrangement that, in addition to once more placing my career narrative in someone else’s profit-hungry hands, wouldn’t even yield him a serious cash return for his efforts. (See the preceding two thousand words.) The vitriol of his emails arguing against my right to determine the availability of this recording I’d made thirty years earlier stunned me. He threatened to sue me, claiming in essence that I was taking food from the mouths of his (now grown) children. Mind you, this is an album from the sales of which I had never seen one cent. I’d never complained. It had never occurred to me. And here we were, suddenly enemies? My sweet little grandmother could never have foreseen this.

The only way to carry over a lucrative music career in the prevailing market conditions is to puff oneself into a mammoth brand of the Taylor Swift/Kanye/Beyonce ilk. Bands, as over-romanticized as they may be by the rockers of my own generation as fearless anarcho-syndicalist collectives, no longer occupy a viable perch in the music ecosystem. Many of the new ones taking root in this top-heavy scrum to market online product have been systematically drained of all recognizable human traits—autotuned inside and out. As a dad seeing my kids fall for an indistinguishable blob of well-coiffed brandoid bands and Disney graduates, I’m not at all shocked that amid their many fast-germinating aesthetic and creative ambitions, my own offspring have never seriously taken it into their heads to pick up an instrument or start a band. The craft of music has entirely succumbed to its marketed spectacle.

There are, to be sure, many healthy exceptions to this rule. In garages and basements and dorm rooms across the country and around the world, bands are forming this very minute. They are arguing over favorite songs, greatest albums, Stratocaster versus Telecaster, and inevitably which one of the members is going to have to switch from guitar to bass. These hopeful young dreamers give me hope.

But we also shouldn’t kid ourselves: they are exceptions. For every one of these fledgling anarcho-syndicalist collectives, there are a thousand or a million kids alone in their bedrooms staring at Protools screens wondering what they have to do to get the Swedish cabal to write a hit song for them. They download a file onto Bandcamp or YouTube, start logging the hits, and pray.

And oh my God, that sounds so lonely.

Music saved my life. And musicians. And club owners, record store clerks, college radio DJs, and rock critics who owed a thousand words to the local weekly. We were often reckless, short-sighted, and profligate, but we were all in this together. And now there’s no more [i]this[/l].
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/long-d...-rocker-miller





The Avalanche of Rock ‘n’ Roll Death

Want to feel old? Everyone — well, every man — died.
Steven Kurutz

Andre Calilhanna, like countless kids before him, fell hard for rock ‘n’ roll. It was the early 1980s in suburban Maryland and his parents were Middle-Eastern immigrants who enjoyed classical music and had barely heard of Elvis Presley. Seeing Styx live at the Capital Centre, or drumming in high school bands, Mr. Calilhanna felt part of a vital American culture.

Three and a half decades later, rock is an aging genre with elderly practitioners. Dozens of his favorite rock stars have died. “With every passing year, it feels like the base of the pyramid that is my life in music is falling out from under me,” Mr. Calilhanna, now 50, wrote recently in a tribute to Tom Petty.

Eulogizing musicians has practically become a full-time second job for Mr. Calilhanna, who is the blog manager and editor for Disc Makers, which provides CD manufacturing and other services for independent artists. Since 2013, he’s compiled a yearly record, noting each heavy-metal guitarist felled by dementia and ’60s-era keyboardist lost to bile-duct cancer.

His 2017 list (so far!) numbers 33 musicians and industry icons, including Chuck Berry, Al Jarreau and Malcolm Young — plus 19 more whose obituaries he hasn’t had time to write. And the death toll grows weekly.

“I sent an email out this morning and people wrote back, ‘Looks like we lost another one,’” Mr. Calilhanna said.

In the past few years, a staggering number of musicians have gone to the great gig in the sky. Bill Flanagan, the author and Sirius Radio host, described it as “an avalanche of death.” For some, it began with David Bowie, in January of 2016. Before that year ended, so did the lives of Glenn Frey of the Eagles; Maurice White of Earth, Wind & Fire; producer and “fifth Beatle” George Martin; Merle Haggard; Leonard Cohen; Leon Russell; Billy Paul; and Sharon Jones, to name but a few.

Two founding members of the Jefferson Airplane — Signe Anderson and Paul Kantner — expired on the same January day. Perhaps most shocking were the premature deaths of Prince, who at 57 still looked princely, and George Michael, who was found dead at home on Christmas Day at 53.

Mr. Flanagan backdates his period of constant mourning to 2013, when Lou Reed died at 71. “That was a kick in the head,” he said. “It seems like the kicks in the head have continued since then.”

This year’s bruisings include James Cotton, J. Geils, Chris Cornell, Gregg Allman, Chester Bennington, Glen Campbell, Walter Becker, Gord Downie and David Cassidy, though that’s by no means comprehensive and the year isn’t quite over.

Several performers have appeared vital and present, only to drop dead. In September, Mr. Petty completed a triumphant summer tour celebrating the 40th anniversary of his group, the Heartbreakers. A week later, he suffered cardiac arrest at home and was medically unresponsive, then gone.

When Mr. Flanagan taped a tribute for CBS Sunday Morning, he was visibly stunned as he began, “I cannot believe I am doing a eulogy for Tom Petty.”

“Everyone’s reaction was: ‘I saw him last week! I saw him last month!’” said Mr. Flanagan, who knew the singer personally for 30 years. “The other thing is, he was an MTV-era star, so he seemed to be of the younger generation. And he never went away, he was always doing something new. This guy we counted on to be around.”

That Mr. Petty wouldn’t be around forever seems an obvious point. Sixty-six-year-old men with poor lifestyle habits die of heart attacks every day. They just aren’t the guy who sang “I Won’t Back Down.”

But at this point, as a middle-aged rock fan, with hip-hop and R&B having surpassed the form in popularity, you’d have to be dead yourself not to consider the fading of the culture, and along with it, your own youth. Fifty years after the Summer of Love, we’ve entered the Winter of Ulcerative Colitis.

“As these canonical figures go, there’s a sense of ‘There goes my childhood, my youth, my early years,’” Mr. Flanagan said. “It’s hard. It takes a bit out of you.”

We rock fans have our grief rituals: Watching old concert and interview clips on YouTube. Going to Apple iTunes to download an artist’s back catalog. Holding an on-air wake so callers can share stories of how the music touched their life, like the ones Mr. Flanagan co-hosted on the Tom Petty Radio channel on SiriusXM, in the hours and days following the singer’s death.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/s...-obituary.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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