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Old 29-07-20, 06:44 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 1st, ’20

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August 1st, 2020




Indian ISPs to Block 118 Pirate Domains Following Disney Injunction
Bill Toulas

• Disney has won a “dynamic” injunction in the High Court of Delhi, targeting 37 pirate platforms.
• The 118 domains concern anime platforms, torrent indexers, and even subtitles databases.
• Disney has put forth their commercial losses in India, and the judge accepted their argument, which faced no opposition.

The High Court in New Delhi has approved an injunction request submitted by Disney Enterprises, targeting 118 pirate domains in the country. Now, internet service providers (ISPs) in India will have to block access through an effective filtering system, although this method has been proven too easy to circumvent.

Still, Disney is pleased with the resolution. They feel that putting blocks in place would be enough to deter people from engaging in piracy since a large percentage of them are only doing so because they fail to realize the illegal nature of their actions.

Related: ISPs in India Ordered to Block Pirate Bay, Torrentz2, YTS, and 1337x

The 118 domains correspond to 37 pirate platforms, and Disney’s complaint numbers the operators. None of these platforms’ owners have appeared in court to defend themselves or make counter-statements – which was to be expected, really.

Among the 37 platforms that were hit with this injunction are the following popular websites:

• TorrentDownload
• YourBitTorrent2
• Nyaa.si
• Unblockit.red
• Proxyof.com
• 9anime
• gogoanime
• kissanime
• watchcartoononline
• Wcostream
• Kimcartoon
• Kisscartoon
• Horriblesubs

So, there are streaming platforms, cartoon and anime sites, torrent indexers, and even subtitle websites in the mix. As the judge concluded, all of the above are incurring considerable damage to the commercial interests of Disney Enterprises.

The court has issued the following order:

“[The pirate site defendants] are restrained from, in any manner, hosting, streamlining, reproducing, distributing, making available to the public and/or communicating to the public or facilitating the same on their websites through the internet in any manner whatsoever, any cinematographic work, content, program, and show in which the plaintiffs have copyright.

The plaintiffs are given liberty to file an application to array other rogue websites if the same are discovered after the issuance of the instant interim order. The purpose being that the Court, in these cases, needs to dynamically monitor such egregious illegality and, if necessary, pass interim orders to restrain similar rogue websites from illegally streaming the creative content in which the plaintiffs have a copyright.”

This second part of the order is giving Disney the freedom to block new domains that may be used as replacements to override the blocks since pirating platforms are known for such practices. Thus, Disney won’t have to go through the court to secure a second or third wave of blocks, but they will simply update the blocklist and send it to the ISPs.

In fact, ISPs are expected to proactively block mirrors, re-directions, and clone websites of those denoted in the initial blocklist. Still, VPN tools could enable the users to regain access to the blocked websites without much fuss, and there’s nothing about that on the judgment.
https://www.technadu.com/indian-isps...nction/161226/





The Most Pirated TV Series During the COVID-19 Pandemic
Brandon Katz

The absolute only silver lining to the extended home confinement forced by COVID-19 is that it gives audiences an opportunity to catch up on the deluge of attractive programming found on the small screen these days. That show you’ve been meaning to start but just don’t have the energy after a long day of work? No problem without a commute. That mystery-laden series that forces you to fit together the pieces of an intricate puzzle? All you have now is time to play detective. Hell, your umpteenth Friends re-watch? Have at it!

But traditional pay-TV customers are cutting the cord like Joey Chestnut pounds hot dogs and not everyone has access to every single streaming service. So, in an effort to stay afloat amid a rising sea of small screen options, we understand that audiences may occasionally resort to less, ahem, admirable courses of action.

Illegal downloads are a strong indicator of what programs are driving the most significant demand. According to Parrot Analytics, a leading global content demand analytics company for the multi-platform TV business that sifts through social media, fan ratings, and piracy to figure who’s watching what, here are the 10 most-pirated shows worldwide over the last 60 days.

1. Game of Thrones (HBO)
2. Rick and Morty (Adult Swim)
3. My Hero Academia (Available on Hulu)
4. The Walking Dead (AMC)
5. SpongeBob SquarePants (Nickelodeon)
6. The 100 (The CW)
7. The Mandalorian (Disney+)
8. The Flash (The CW)
9. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC)
10. Harley Quinn (DC Universe)

Shockingly, the only platform to have more than one entry on the list is The CW, a linear mini-major broadcast network. Never in a million years would we have guessed that in the midst of the streaming revolution, The CW would have two of the most illegally sought after series in the country.

What’s more, Game of Thrones, Rick and Morty, The Walking Dead, SpongeBob, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. all also originate from linear destinations. Though this year’s Emmy nominations featured the first-ever Outstanding Drama category to not contain a show from broadcast, apparently the old guard of entertainment still holds sway as 70% of the list comes from broadcast or cable. Then again, it’s a bit more difficult to illegally ripoff streaming services than it is linear TV. Another way of looking at this is that so many customers have cut the cord that they have no other options but to pirate content even as the above series can be found on various streamers.

Game of Thrones coming in at No. 1, more than a year after its disappointing finale, is no surprise. It is the No. 1 show in Parrot’s demand rankings in both the U.S. and worldwide over the last two months. There’s a reason WarnerMedia is pumping a ton of money to keep the GoT brand alive via various HBO spinoffs. In the end, we all bend the knee to Thrones even if it left on a down note. Speaking of WarnerMedia, the parent company is responsible for three of the list’s top 10: GoT, Rick and Morty, and Harley Quinn. Disney is a close second with two overall shows on the list in The Mandalorian and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. For what it’s worth, The CW is a joint venture between ViacomCBS, which also houses SpongeBob SquarePants, and WarnerMedia.
https://observer.com/2020/07/most-pi...ries-pandemic/





Universal and AMC Theatres Strike a Deal Allowing New Films to Play at Home Sooner
Frank Pallotta

New York (CNN Business)Universal and AMC are mending their frayed relationship in a deal that not only reverses the theater chain's ban on Universal's movies but also appears to upend the traditional exclusivity model that studios and theaters have followed for decades.

Under the agreement, Universal's new films will have just three weekends — or 17 days — of exclusivity, rather than the customary 70 days. After that, Universal and its sister studio, Focus Features, has the option of releasing films on video on demand platforms.

That means that when "F9," the next film in the "Fast & Furious" franchise, hits theaters on April 2, 2021, consumers will have the choice to either see it in theaters or wait three weeks to buy or rent it at home.

That doesn't mean, however, that "F9" will pop up on NBCUniversal's new streaming service Peacock on day 18, but rather that consumers can watch it on a platform like iTunes at a premium price or in theaters.

The new multi-year dea applies only to AMC's US theaters, and it's unclear whether other studios will enter this new model in the future.

Theaters and studios have been grappling for years over the "theatrical window" — or how long a film should be available in theaters before being offered on other platforms. The window usually ran for about 70 days, but now — at least for Universal — has been cut down to just 17.

For Universal, the studio is given the choice to release films for at home rental and purchases much faster than it has in the past. It can also keep films in theaters past the 17-day mark if wants.

Universal's announcement earlier this year that many of its new films would be bypassing theaters and heading to on-demand created a rift between the studio and AMC, which banned Universal's films in response.

The studio was also ahead of the curve by pushing many of its titles to next year earlier on rather than delaying them to later in 2020.

"The theatrical experience continues to be the cornerstone of our business," Donna Langley, Universal's chairman, said in a statement. "The partnership we've forged with AMC is driven by our collective desire to ensure a thriving future for the film distribution ecosystem and to meet consumer demand with flexibility and optionality."

For AMC, it would seem that the world's largest movie chain is throwing in the towel, but Adam Aron, AMC's CEO, said in a statement that "AMC enthusiastically embraces this new industry model."

"We are participating in the entirety of the economics of the new structure, and because premium video on demand creates the added potential for increased movie studio profitability, which should in turn lead to the green-lighting of more theatrical movies," Aron said in a statement.

Aron added that the deal "preserves exclusivity for theatrical viewing" for at least the first three weekend of a film's release, "during which time a considerable majority of a movie's theatrical box office revenue typically is generated."

"AMC will also share in these new revenue streams that will come to the movie ecosystem from premium video on demand," he said. "So, in total, Universal and AMC each believe this will expand the market and benefit us all."

The coronavirus pandemic has upended AMC's business by shuttering its theaters worldwide since earlier this year. The chain announced last week that it would open theaters with new health measures next month.

"Universal and AMC have partnered in bringing stellar movies to moviegoers for a full century," Aron said. "With this historic industry changing agreement, together we will continue to do so and in a way that should drive success for us both."
https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/28/media...-release-date/





R.I.P. Cable TV: Why Hollywood Is Slowly Killing Its Biggest Moneymaker

As subscribers and viewers flee, media companies that once relied on cable TV are chasing streaming dollars instead.
Michael Schneider, Kate Aurthur

Earlier this year, people started noticing something peculiar about MTV’s schedule: The network had quietly morphed into an almost 24/7 offering of just one show. At one point in late June, “Ridiculousness” — a half-hour viral video-clip show hosted by famed skateboarder Rob Dyrdek — aired for 113 hours out of the network’s entire 168-hour lineup. Many took it as a sign that MTV, a pioneering force in reality television that only a few years ago had also made major investments in original scripted programming, had just given up.

Pundits had long predicted the death of broadcast TV, while basic cable feasted on a dual revenue stream of subscriber fees and advertising revenue. But that gravy train started going off the rails when the streaming services arrived. At first, Netflix was a friend, supplying yet another source of revenue and even acting as a marketing tool — helping to turn AMC’s “Breaking Bad” into a much bigger hit during its final season of originals on AMC, for example.

But as AMC soon learned, consumers began thinking of “Breaking Bad” as a Netflix show — and Netflix was using acquired library content to quickly change viewer habits. Last year, the streamer launched more original programming than the entire cable TV industry had a decade earlier.

Meanwhile, “cord cutting,” once pooh-poohed by the cable industry as a myth, has become a real threat: The number of pay-TV households peaked in 2010 at 105 million; now it’s down to approximately 82.9 million. And a study last year by eMarketer forecast that number to dip to 72.7 million by 2023. Now, it’s cable that’s on the ropes — and struggling for survival.

“I think it’s 10 years, and there’ll be a total change of the guard,” says former DirecTV/AT&T Audience Network programming chief Chris Long, who’s now a producer. “At some point, people will make that decision of ‘I can get everything I want [in streaming]. I no longer need to have 180 channels that I only watch 12 of.”

While a handful of lifestyle and older-skewing networks have managed to buck industry-wide declines, most general entertainment channels have suffered double-digit drops in ratings in recent years. According to Variety’s tally of the most-watched networks in 2019, Nick at Nite was down 24% among total viewers; AMC, down 22%; FX, down 21%; USA, down 19%; TBS, down 16%; and TNT, down 14%.

Until recently, it was cable that drove much of the entertainment industry’s bottom line. Those networks printed cash for the conglomerates, which is why the parent firms were so eager to build up their suite of channels. When Disney bought ABC in 1995, ESPN was the big prize. By 2001, cable distribution was so valuable that Disney paid a whopping $5.3 billion for the Fox Family Channel — rebranded first as ABC Family and now known as Freeform. When Viacom and CBS split in 2006, Viacom was seen as the better bet because of its channels.

Cable paid top dollar for movie packages and off-network broadcast shows, further enriching the ecosystem. As the cash grew, cable could afford pricey sports rights and original series, giving channels reasons to increase their subscriber fees. It was a growth cycle with no limit. Or so it seemed.

But even before the disruption of streaming, signs of trouble emerged. Distribution hit a wall as the domestic customer base was tapped out. That led to more clashes between multichannel video programming distributors (aka cable and satellite providers) and media conglomerates desperate to make up for losses by jacking up (or even holding steady on) those subscriber fees.

As the MVPDs and entertainment companies battled, they were distracted from coming up with a plan to fight the imminent OTT threat: First from Netflix, then from Amazon and now even from Apple. And so the declines continue — to what level, no one is quite sure.

“Where’s the future? Where are we going?” asks Mark Stern, the former president of original content at Syfy. “I think that where we’re headed is obviously into this on-demand, nonlinear space.”

Adds Henry Schleiff, group president of Discovery’s Travel Channel, Investigation Discovery, American Heroes Channel and Destination America: “I think [cable pioneer] John Malone’s initial dream back in the ’80s of a 500-channel universe, which we’ve long surpassed, has already come and gone. It was a great dream and a wonderful place to live in. I think the consolidation you’re seeing now is what you’ll see in the future.

The decline of cable isn’t a new story, but what has started to take hold is a change in narrative inside the industry. Rather than try to prop up what they all know to be a decaying linear business, cable executives are instead focusing on their still-healthy intellectual properties and the brands behind them.

Some of those cable brands are even aiming to carve out a space in the streaming world, like FX on Hulu, National Geographic on Disney Plus and the Turner team’s involvement in HBO Max.

“You’re just doing everything you can to run in place as a basic cable network,” says FX Networks CEO John Landgraf, explaining why creating an FX on Hulu portal, which includes original programming not aired on the linear channel, is necessary to grow the FX brand. “It allows us to maintain — even increase a little bit — our investment in our programming for our linear channels … but where all the growth from investment in the television industry is, is in streaming.”

Then there’s ViacomCBS, which has basically been telling people to stop thinking of it as a collection of channels and instead focus on the company as the steward of a wide variety of programs and IP. “I think more and more we look at each of those brands as content factories, as makers of content for a particular group or demographic or psychographic group that exists beyond the cable channel,” says CBS chief creative officer/Showtime Networks chairman and CEO David Nevins.

For all this hand-wringing over the death of cable, former Fox and WGN exec Peter Liguori says there’s no longer any such thing as a typical linear cable channel — and that’s fine: The business has already evolved. “As OTT takes over, you see how the great cable networks, the FXs and HBOs of the world, still maintain their brands, but are very much content creators more than they are necessarily just the old networks.”

That leads us back to MTV and “Ridiculousness.” When asked about the program’s wall-to-wall scheduling, execs there say we’re missing the point: The linear network is just a single sliver of their business, as MTV fare might be found on Facebook Watch (like a “Real World” reboot), or Quibi (“Punk’d” and “Singled Out” reboots), or Pluto TV (which features multiple MTV-branded channels). Most recently, ViacomCBS announced a revival of MTV’s “Beavis and Butt-Head” that will run on Comedy Central.

“We continue to think of cable as just one piece of our ecosystem,” says Tanya Giles, the general manager of ViacomCBS’ entertainment & youth group. When it comes to finding an audience for old-school MTV, particularly during the pandemic, Giles says “Ridiculousness” grew the network’s frequency and time spent viewing the more it was added to the schedule. “We went from people coming one to two times a week to nearly six times a week to watch ‘Ridiculousness’.… Particularly when COVID hit, now there’s a lot of people at home. We knew that this was a show that many generations could watch. It cut across different genders; it’s laugh out loud; it’s escapist.”

Although not to the extreme of “Ridiculousness,” MTV isn’t the only network to now rely on a steady binge of a handful of repeatable shows to keep the lights on. That’s led some to wonder if cable TV has already turned into a collection of “barker networks” — like those channels you find in a hotel room, promoting their offerings on a loop.

At its height during the 2000s, basic cable is where the entertainment giants were pouring their money, and the buzziest successes came from broad entertainment networks — USA, TNT, FX and AMC — which offered scripted originals that in quality bested most shows on the broadcast networks and rivaled those on HBO and Showtime.

Indeed, it wasn’t that long ago that AMC’s “The Walking Dead” blew away anything on broadcast or cable, in 2015 averaging a whopping 13.2 rating among adults 18-49. And even now, Jerry Leo, who oversaw programming strategy at Bravo and Oxygen until last year, cites the ratings success of ESPN’s “The Last Dance” and Paramount Network’s “Yellowstone” and TLC’s 2020 ratings dominance (thanks to “90 Day Fiancé” and its multiple spinoffs) as proof that cable TV can still draw audiences.

Lauren Zalaznick, the former NBC Universal chairman who ran several of the company’s cable channels and its digital networks, says, “Someone has to be defending this beautiful, money-making, not-growing area of the business.”

Zalaznick thinks it would be foolish for the content companies to abandon their once-vaunted cable channels solely in pursuit of the elusive streaming dragon.

“It seems ugly and messy and not fully baked to chase something much smaller with only one revenue stream,” she says. “Advertisers still need to advertise! Do you want to put yourself in the place that newspapers found themselves, with no advertising and hardly any subscribers? What signal do you want to send your customers if you completely defund and make unattractive the place you get half your money?”

Van Toffler — who ran MTV for years, and until 2015 was the president of Viacom Media Networks — is familiar with cable channels being counted out. “People said MTV was dead every three years. And then we’d have ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’ or ‘The Osbournes’ or ‘Jackass’ or ‘Punk’d,’” Toffler says.

But a lot has changed since then. And now comes COVID-19 and further uncertainty about where that puts linear TV. Leo thinks the coronavirus-triggered production shutdown, as well as the economic impact of the recession, will be profound. “The whole playbook has completely changed since the pandemic,” he says.

Those financial pressures will, Leo posits, put the cable networks that were able to produce new shows during quarantine — TLC, Food Network — in even stronger positions. “They have this machine that looks pretty unstoppable right now; to be surging this much in this cluttered environment is remarkable,” he says.

Ironically, during cable’s height, niche channels without scripted shows — such as Food Network and HGTV — were out of favor. But now, the more specific, the better, Stern says: “I think a big piece of this is, do you have a brand that is distinct?”

Food Network, for instance, saw ratings spike during the coronavirus quarantines and has been drawing its biggest audiences in years. “We’re in better shape than scripted,” says network president Courtney White, “and I also think we’re in better shape having such a well-defined brand and a very specific swim lane of food.”

Stern sees basic cable as retrenching and returning to its ’80s origins — “kind of niche, fighting for audience and trying to figure out where it fits,” he says. “A lot of basic cable is going to basically go back to where it started, which is lower-cost programming — unscripted programming.”

In fact, that has already happened: In a last-ditch effort to increase their subscription fees in the mid-2010s, several networks entered the scripted world, only to leave it again at the end of the decade: MTV, Discovery, Bravo, WGN America, A&E and E! Entertainment were among the networks that spent heavily on drama and comedy series before determining the investment wasn’t worth it. In the case of WGN and Pop TV, another network that is exiting the originals game, both earned raves for their brief dip into the waters of prestige TV — but ironically their shows weren’t seen until viewers found them on streaming platforms.

“Obviously, the rise of the streamers is a huge factor in this,” Stern continues, “but even before that, there was so much content out there that fighting to get eyeballs to your content was already starting to be a struggle.”

The studios’ business model, in which they would profit not only from domestic license fees but from DVD sales, international sales and, eventually, syndication — the total of which added up to an incredibly lucrative business — has mostly evaporated, compounding the economic pressures of scripted programming on cable.

Once upon a time cable channels were so important to media companies’ portfolios that firms would spend significant marketing dollars not only to promote shows but also to carve out clear-cut branding for each network. TNT’s tagline was “We know drama”; TBS’ was “Very funny” — viewers, as well as advertisers, got the difference between their two philosophies immediately. Executives within larger corporate structures were teams of rivals, competing with one another for the best scripted fare.

Those days appear to be gone. At WarnerMedia, “Snowpiercer” was developed for TNT, then moved to TBS before heading back to TNT; over at Viacom, “Younger” hopped from TV Land to Paramount Network, then back to TV Land. “Killing Eve,” a BBC America show, has aired its premiere episodes both there and on AMC for the past two seasons. It’s a strategy that certainly has increased the show’s ratings and exposure — but at the expense of eroding both channels’ brands, once constructed to be distinct.

Still, some believe this is just a precursor to further consolidation: Once cable and satellite operators balk at so many different channels in the marketplace, and they all share programming anyway, perhaps more channels will be trimmed until each conglomerate has just a handful.

Zalaznick wonders how much “poor customer service” at the cable and satellite companies have contributed to cable TV’s problems over the years. “What I also like to never forget is that cable providers are regional monopolies, and monopolies can have crappy customer service,” she says.

Even Stern, the former Syfy executive who now runs Echoverse, a scripted podcasting studio, often considers cutting the cord. “I’ve got a DirecTV subscription,” he says. “But every month I look at that $150 bill, and if my wife wasn’t still watching live Bravo shows or whatever she’s watching, I don’t know how long I would hang on to that.”

Young viewers, and kids in particular, don’t think in terms of channels anymore, and the tremendous cratering of linear ratings at Nickelodeon, Disney Channel and Cartoon Network bears that out. Viewers are still watching those networks’ shows on streaming — when they’re not on YouTube or gaming platforms, of course. But the fact that Gen Z has no loyalty to cable whatsoever — and has no patience for commercials on TV — should sound plenty of alarm bells for anyone thinking about the business long term.

“They’re not even turning to their TV as the focal point when they go wandering,” Toffler says. “They pick the content, the show they want, and then they binge-watch it. So I don’t see life getting any easier for linear cable networks.”

There’s a sizable portion of the audience (albeit, aging) that will hold on to cable because they still see it as a utility. Some pundits believe that cable penetration will bottom out at around 30 million households — still a business, but no longer one with enough reach to justify pricey expenditures like sports.

Eventually, the conglomerates with sports rights will either have to include a streaming component (adding NBA to HBO Max or NFL to Disney Plus, for example), or risk losing exclusivity as major leagues look to sell those streaming rights to a third party such as Google or Facebook.

Meanwhile, as they place their bets on their new OTT platforms — including the recent launches of Disney Plus, HBO Max and Peacock — the entertainment corporations are hoping to straddle a growing precipice over the next several years, keeping one foot in the old media while placing more of their investment in the new.

According to media research analysts LightShed Partners, WarnerMedia is spending between $4 billion and $5 billion on content this year for HBO Max (at least half of that on originals), while Disney has a $2 billion to $3 billion targeted for Disney Plus, with half of that going to new shows. Comcast is believed to be committing $2 billion to Peacock in its first two years as well. (These are all pre-COVID projections; the pandemic will likely change some of these plans.)

Disney Plus launched with impressive subscriber numbers — having, as of May, racked up 54.5 million subs, according to the conglom. But the jury’s still out on the long-term health of the streaming behemoths.

Netflix has started regularly canceling shows as it begins to pay more attention to economics after years of seemingly limitless budgets. Besides an ever-increasing debt load (not uncommon for media companies), it has billions in off-balance-sheet content-spending obligations, most of which are due soon. Whether the company, which has financed its ascent to dominance by accruing billions in debt, is overly leveraged is a question. But at the end of March, Netflix announced it had an astounding 182.9 million paid global subscribers for its first quarter, and added 10 million more in the second quarter.

Yet even though audiences have embraced the streaming age, it doesn’t mean they’re hungry to consume all that new content: According to a recent YouGov survey provided to Variety Intelligence Platform, only 15% of respondents said they’d be interested in watching a new show on HBO Max, and just 6% said they’d watch one on Peacock.

But Netflix’s rise has forced all of its competitors to change radically. Toffler cites the example of “Friends” as a show that traveled from NBC, to broadcast and cable syndication, to Netflix and now to HBO Max as the cornerstone of the WarnerMedia service: “If you have a frictionless consumer experience provided by technology that allows you to watch as many episodes as you want of ‘Friends’ — whichever season or episode, without any commercials — and then you have ‘Friends’ in syndication, what’s the preferable experience?”

Another former top-level cable exec admits he doesn’t see how the business can extricate itself from this predicament. “It’s going away at some point,” he says. “Not tomorrow, because they are managing it very well. They now have a lot of great, smart bean-counter-y types running all these companies. They’re managing their decline, but make no mistake about it, it’s a decline. It feels irreversible.”
https://variety.com/2020/tv/news/cab...ng-1234710007/





James Murdoch Resigns From News Corp, Ending Role in Family Empire

While his elder brother, Lachlan Murdoch, rises in the family business, James Murdoch has grown more distant from his father’s companies.
Michael M. Grynbaum and Edmund Lee

James Murdoch wants the world to know he is out of the family business.

Once considered a potential successor to Rupert Murdoch, Mr. Murdoch on Friday resigned from the board of the newspaper publisher News Corp, severing his last corporate tie to his father’s global media empire.

“My resignation is due to disagreements over certain editorial content published by the Company’s news outlets and certain other strategic decisions,” Mr. Murdoch, 47, wrote in his resignation letter, which News Corp disclosed in a filing shortly after the close of business on Friday.

The two sides began discussing Mr. Murdoch’s departure from the News Corp board earlier this year, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

But his terse resignation note belied the behind-the-scenes drama that has brought Mr. Murdoch to this point in his life and career. And it widened the schism that has emerged between James and his 89-year-old father and his older brother, Lachlan, once a dynastic triumvirate that for years held sweeping influence over the world’s cultural and political affairs.

A political outlier in his conservative-leaning family, James Murdoch has sought to reinvent himself as an independent investor with a focus on causes more closely associated with liberals, like environmentalism, which he and his wife, Kathryn Murdoch, have long championed.

He has also taken public stands against President Trump, who has counted Fox News, a prime Murdoch asset, among his closest media allies.

Weeks ago, James and his wife jointly contributed more than $1 million to a fund-raising committee for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. And in February, as wildfires raged across Australia — his father’s birthplace — Mr. Murdoch issued a rebuke of his own family’s media properties, criticizing how Murdoch publications have covered climate change.

Such public gestures came after a period when James Murdoch’s hopes of succeeding his father at the helm of a worldwide empire had been all but extinguished.

He had already departed the Fox Corporation, the family’s television and entertainment arm, which was mostly dismantled after his family transferred many of its assets to The Walt Disney Company in a blockbuster sale that was completed last year.

His last formal link to the family business was through News Corp, which publishes influential broadsheets like The Wall Street Journal as well as powerful tabloids, including The Sun of London and The New York Post. The company also oversees several other papers in Britain and publications in Australia.

The London-born, Harvard-educated Mr. Murdoch remains a beneficiary of his family’s trust, meaning he will continue to financially benefit from the profits of Rupert Murdoch’s news and information assets.

And although his resignation letter cited “certain editorial content,” Mr. Murdoch did not speak specifically about Fox News, the hugely profitable cable channel where prime-time hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham openly cheerlead for Mr. Trump.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Murdoch declined to comment further on the reasons for his departure, saying the letter “speaks for itself.”

Rupert, who holds the title of executive chairman at News Corp, and Lachlan Murdoch, the co-chairman, said in a joint statement on Friday: “We’re grateful to James for his many years of service to the company. We wish him the very best in his future endeavors.”

James Murdoch’s drift from his family began in earnest during the early part of the Trump era, around the time Lachlan was consolidating power and becoming seen more widely as their father’s preferred successor.

There had been discussions about James Murdoch taking a powerful new role at Disney after the completion of the Fox sale, but those talks came to nothing. His 48-year-old brother was named the executive chairman and chief executive officer of Fox Corporation, which includes Fox News, Fox Business and the Fox sports networks.

James Murdoch was the chief executive of 21st Century Fox from 2015 until it was sold to Disney, and he netted $2 billion from the sale. He opened his own investment firm and named it Lupa Systems. (In Roman mythology, Lupa is the wolf goddess who nurtured Romulus and Remus, the twin brothers who became the founders of Rome.)

The firm specializes in early stage start-ups and has focused on sustainability projects, extending efforts that Mr. Murdoch made at Sky, the European satellite giant that was formerly part of the Murdoch empire, and his financial support of the National Geographic Society’s endowment fund.

Mr. Murdoch has also taken a starkly different tack with his media investments. In October, he bought a small stake in Vice Media, the irreverent — and decidedly liberal — news brand focused on youth and entertainment. He has been less interested in traditional media businesses.

In August, Mr. Murdoch led a consortium of investors to buy a controlling stake in Tribeca Enterprises, which owns the Tribeca Film Festival as well as a production studio. He also put money into Artists, Writers & Artisans, a new comics publisher founded by former Marvel executives.

In 2011, Mr. Murdoch was a chief figure in the phone hacking scandal that led to the closure of News of the World, one of the Murdochs’ flagship properties, and strained his relationship with his father. At the time, Mr. Murdoch was in charge of the family’s holdings across Europe, including the British newspapers that were behind the hacks.

Called before a Parliamentary committee investigating the matter, he was confronted with an email that appeared to show his knowledge of the hacking; Mr. Murdoch said he had not read the entire email chain. The committee chided James and his father for “willful blindness” about the company’s behavior.

The scandal dinged Mr. Murdoch’s credibility in London, and he soon relocated to New York to help run his father’s businesses there, where he focused on the Fox television empire and made investments in digital ad technology.

This latest twist in the Murdoch saga is likely to show up in the myriad pop culture products that depict the family’s corporate and personal dramas. The 2019 film “Bombshell” portrayed the Murdoch brothers pushing out Roger Ailes, the founder of Fox News, after revelations of sexual harassment and abuse at the network. In Britain, a new BBC documentary series, “The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty,” has offered a searing review of the family’s exploits.

Perhaps best known is the HBO series “Succession,” which chronicles a Murdoch-like media family led by an aging patriarch who pits his children against one another, sometimes in cruel ways. Asked in an email exchange last year if he was a fan of the show, James Murdoch pleaded ignorance.

“I’ve never watched it,” he wrote.

Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/31/b...news-corp.html





Comcast Lost 477,000 Cable-TV Customers in Q2 Amid 12% Drop in Revenue

Broadband is up but TV revenue dropped 3.2%, and overall revenue is down 11.7%.
Jon Brodkin

Comcast lost 477,000 cable-TV subscribers in Q2 2020 amid a company-wide drop in revenue caused by the pandemic. The net-customer loss consists of 427,000 residential TV customers and 51,000 business TV customers, Comcast's earnings report today said. The customer losses are more than double the 224,000 net-customer loss in last year's second quarter.

Comcast's Q2 subscriber loss followed a Q1 loss of 409,000 TV customers, for a total of 886,000 video customers lost in the first six months of 2020. By contrast, Comcast lost 733,000 video customers in all of 2019, an average of 183,000 per quarter.

While Comcast's TV-customer losses accelerated this year, they're still only about half as large as the customer losses reported by DirecTV owner AT&T. Comcast is down to 20.4 million TV customers, which is higher than any other cable or satellite TV provider.

Cable and satellite-TV subscriber numbers have been declining industry-wide for several years as people switch to streaming services that generally have lower prices, fewer hidden fees, and less onerous contract terms or no contracts. Live sports is the primary draw for many of the remaining cable customers, but there was less reason to pay cable companies for live sports when most major sports leagues were suspended. The resumption of live sports, albeit under precarious circumstances, should help cable companies somewhat.

Revenue and income drop

Company-wide, including NBCUniversal and other businesses, Comcast revenue was $23.7 billion in the quarter, down 11.7 percent year over year. Net income was $3.2 billion, down 12.2 percent. NBCUniversal theme-park revenue suffered a dramatic decline for obvious reasons, dropping from $1.47 billion in Q2 2019 to $87 million in Q2 2020.

Comcast's cable-TV revenue in Q2 was $5.4 billion, down 3.2 percent year over year. The drop "reflect[s] a decrease in the number of residential video customers, partially offset by an increase in average rates," Comcast said.

Broadband revenue was $5 billion, up 7.2 percent year over year, as Comcast added another 323,000 Internet subscribers in the quarter. Comcast, the nation's largest Internet provider, has 29.4 million broadband customers, of which 27.2 million are residential. Broadband revenue "reflect[s] an increase in the number of residential high-speed internet customers and an increase in average rates," Comcast said.

Comcast said its reported net gain of 323,000 broadband customers excludes over 600,000 "high-risk" and low-income customers receiving free Internet Essentials service.

Overall cable-division revenue (including Internet, video, home phone, mobile service, and advertising) was $14.4 billion, down just 0.2 percent year over year, and would have been higher if not for a 29.6-percent drop in advertising revenue and Comcast giving customers a few breaks on billing due to COVID-19. That included Comcast following the FCC's "Keep Americans Connected" pledge by waiving late fees and not disconnecting customers who couldn't pay because of the pandemic.

Sports-fee “adjustments”

Comcast said its cable revenue was reduced by "adjustments" to the Regional Sports Network (RSN) fees charged to subscribers due to canceled sporting events. The average price each TV customer pays Comcast "would have been higher if it were not for waived fees due to COVID-19 and the impacts of the customer RSN fee adjustments," the company said. Comcast's average monthly revenue per cable customer was $150.17, down from $156.71 three months earlier, partially reflecting an increase in the number of "one-product customers" such as those buying broadband but not TV or phone service.

Comcast also had lower costs for purchasing programming because of sports cancellations. "Total operating expenses benefited from adjustments for provisions in our programming distribution agreements with RSNs related to canceled sporting events as a result of COVID-19," Comcast said.

"Programming costs decreased 5.0 percent, primarily due to the adjustment provisions."

Comcast owns eight RSNs itself, so the fee adjustments also lowered Comcast's cable-network revenue. "Distribution revenue decreased 14.8 percent, reflecting credits accrued at some of our RSNs resulting from the reduced number of games planned by professional sports leagues due to COVID-19 and a decline in subscribers, partially offset by contractual rate increases," Comcast said. Cable-network revenue decreased 14.7 percent to $2.5 billion in the second quarter.

Comcast recently launched the NBC Peacock streaming service and said today it has signed up 10 million users so far.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...op-in-revenue/





AT&T Loses Another 1 Million TV Customers As Cord Cutting (And Greed) Take A Toll
Karl Bode

2019 saw a record number of consumers ditch traditional cable television. 2020 was already poised to be even worse, and that was before a pandemic came to town. The pandemic not only sidelined live sports (one of the last reasons many subscribe to traditional cable in the first place), it put an additional strain on many folks' wallets, resulting cord cutting spiking even higher.

Among the hardest hit continues to be AT&T, whose customers have been fleeing hand over fist even with AT&T's attempt to pivot to streaming video. According to AT&T's latest earnings report, the company lost yet another 954,000 pay TV subscribers -- 886,000 from the company's traditional DirecTV and IPTV television offerings, and another 68,000 customers from the company's creatively named AT&T TV Now streaming video platform. All told, the losses left AT&T with 18.4 million video customers, including both Premium TV and AT&T TV Now, down from nearly 25.5 million in mid-2018.

That's a fairly amazing face plant for a company that spent more than $150 billion on megamergers (DirecTV in 2015, Time Warner in 2018) in a bid to dominate the pay TV sector. The problem is the deals saddled AT&T with an absolute mountain of debt, which the company then attempted to extract from its customers in the form of relentless price hikes. During an economic crisis and pandemic:

"Higher prices helped drive the customer losses. As it has in past quarters, AT&T said its practice of giving out fewer promotional-pricing deals contributed to the customer losses for AT&T TV Now. AT&T said the Premium TV loss was "due to competition as well as lower gross adds from the continued focus on adding higher-value customers."

While AT&T executives are trying to pretend this was all part of some master strategy to only retain higher-revenue subscribers, this is absolutely not the sort of sector domination company executives originally envisioned. The entire point of releasing a cheaper streaming TV service is to lure cost-conscious customers fleeing traditional cable. Raising rates relentlessly sort of defeats that purpose. The company also managed to shoot itself in the foot with such a bizarre array of discordant TV brand offerings, it, at one point, managed to confuse the company's own employees.

Even AT&T's investors (who usually adore megamergers) balked at the company's spending spree and sloppy execution, and for months rumors have indicated that AT&T could wind up selling DirecTV for a pittance. Overall, just another day for a telecom and media sector that's utterly obsessed with mindless merger mania and growth for growth's sake, even when it makes absolutely no sense.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...ake-toll.shtml





Broadbanned: Still No Affordable Fix for a Broadband Internet Connection Just Out of Reach
Rob Pegoraro

A few thousand feet can feel much farther when that distance separates a house from the closest wired broadband – and the cost to extend connectivity reaches tens of thousands of dollars.

This isn’t a new problem: ”In both my FCC and post-FCC life, I’ve heard these stories both in real life and over social media numerous times,” emailed Gigi Sohn, an advocate for more equitable broadband access and, earlier, an adviser to former Federal Communications Commission chairman Tom Wheeler.

But the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting push to work from home have made it worse. And while internet providers have temporarily lifted data caps and waived late-payment fees, no such organized help has reached could-be customers like Christina Deese, a remote-working office manager in Adel, Georgia.

She and her husband bought a house believing they could get service from their former provider, Mediacom, at their new abode.

Not quite, the Blooming Grove, New York, cable operator replied after they moved in. Deese reported that after some negotiation, Mediacom representatives said they’d have to pay $32,000 to get service extended.

The Deeses declined that steep cost and opted for Viasat satellite-delivered Internet, which costs $220-plus a month and imposes data limits that rule out video streaming.

Mediacom spokesman Tom Larsen offered a detailed reply via email, noting that the $32,000 to extend service by 3,078 feet covered not just stringing wires from poles but adding a new node between its fiber-optic network and the coaxial cable going to homes.

"That number represents labor and equipment without any profit to Mediacom," he said. “Since this is the only home requesting service, this homeowner is being quoted the entire amount.”

He added that Mediacom engineers saw six houses they could connect with this extension, far below the 30 homes-per-mile buildout thresholds most localities set.

"That quote does seem reasonable," said Dane Jasper, CEO of Santa Rosa, California-based Sonic. He said in a Twitter direct message that he budgets from $75,000 to $100,000 a mile for construction, some of which reflects higher costs of operation in the Bay Area.

Tom Bridge, partner at the Washington tech consultancy Technolutionary, suggested bridging the gap with a pair of Ubiquiti LiteBeam AC long-range wireless routers: “Aim them at each other and they’ll go for kilometers.”

Larsen said that allowing shared access would conflict with Mediacom’s obligations under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to address complaints of copyright infringement by its customers: “If we have multiple households sharing a single account, then this becomes an enforcement nightmare.”

Cathy Gellis, a lawyer who frequently handles digital-copyright cases, said she understood why internet providers would fear shared-usage scenarios but noted that they already accept some risk by serving households with multiple users. “It isn't clear that their hands are tied like this,” she wrote in an email.
Walmart, Lowe's, Aldi, Target among retailers adding face masks requirements due to COVID-19

At some point, 5G wireless or SpaceX’s growing constellation of low-Earth-orbit Starlink broadband satellites may offer alternatives to subscribers like Deese. Sohn also urged freeing municipalities to build their own broadband.

But for now, the problem of people who can see the nearest broadband connection but can’t get it at any reasonable price remains one we not only haven’t solved but haven’t even properly documented.

“It’s time for the FCC to set up a system to collect these stories from around the country and identify patterns in construction charges,” FCC commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel said in an emailed statement. “Then we need to come up with solutions that help get more people connected in more places without these excessive fees.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/...me/5498679002/





California Legislator Introduces Anti-Rural Fiber Legislation That Prioritizes DSL
Ernesto Falcon

Frontier’s bankruptcy has serious consequences for Americans, including 2 million Californians, who are stuck with their deteriorating DSL monopoly. After deciding for years to never upgrade their networks to fiber—despite the fact that, according to their own bankruptcy filing, they could have profitably upgraded 3 million customers to gigabit fiber already—the pyramid scheme of milking dying DSL assets caught up to the company. This has forced rural communities in California that either lack access to the Internet, or have been dependent on decaying copper DSL lines provided by Frontier Communications, into a serious predicament. The solution, of course, is for the state to build fiber in those markets by empowering local governments and small private ISPs to do the job Frontier neglected for so long.

But, rather than leave this mega-corporation to its own demise and chart out a better future for Californians, a bill introduced by Assembly Member Aguiar-Curry, A.B. 570, proposes to amend the state’s Internet infrastructure program to prioritize DSL upgrades over fiber.

Take Action

CA: Tell Your Lawmakers to Oppose Anti-Rural Fiber Legislation
How A.B. 570 Builds Slow DSL Networks Instead of Fiber Networks

The bill establishes a criteria where the state must prioritize “cost-effective” deployment of broadband at the woefully out-of-date speed of 25/3 mbps. The biggest beneficiary from such a standard is the now bankrupt Frontier Communications, because it has existing copper assets in the ground that can be incrementally upgraded to deliver 25/3—which would be the cheapest way to deliver 25/3 broadband. This upgrade effort would be financed by a tax that Californians pay into a telecom fund. And, because slow networks are dead on arrival for private investors today, it will have to rely 100% on taxpayer money in order for the corporation to shift the entire loss off its books.

As we noted about the current state law, California’s Advanced Services Fund (CASF) considers markets where 1990s-era DSL delivering 6 megabits per second download and 1 megabits per second upload to be “served,” and establishes a low minimum for eligible projects that are achievable with DSL. Today’s law already leaves more than 1 million Californians who do not have broadband off the table for state support because they are stuck with Frontier’s slow DSL, or slow wireless networks. This makes it very hard for anyone else to build fiber networks in rural markets to solve the problem for everyone. With this kind of definition, it's not possible to leverage whole communities to build these networks—only the edges of those communities.

A.B. 570 arguably makes things worse, by complicating the means of assessing “unserved.” In general, the 6/1 metric remains (with minor caveats to raise it to 25/3), which still makes a wide range of territory ineligible for a fiber upgrade so long as copper DSL networks are in the ground. That still excludes more than 1 million Californians from state support. This approach of helping fewer and fewer people with slower networks is bad policy, and contradicts the long-held belief in telecom policy that all people are entitled to equivalent services.

Ultimately, you could not find a more wasteful means of spending scarce government money on broadband than prioritizing slow DSL upgrades over copper lines. This is especially true in the midst of a pandemic, when everyone needs substantially higher capacity networks. Those copper wires will never transition into the high-speed era and need to be replaced by fiber. There is no short cut around that fact. This is why no private corporation would willingly invest new private dollars into that type of construction. Slow DSL is rapidly approaching obsolescence. If A.B. 570’s goals of building ubiquitous 25/3 DSL connections were law, the state will have nothing to show for it in just a few years. And it will cost the state a lot more in the long run to actually deliver people infrastructure that is ready for the 21st-century economy.

There is No Future in Slow Networks and Nothing to Gain from Building Them Out

Were this bill designed around financing future-proofed fiber infrastructure, it would be designed around permanently solving the problem of the digital divide and written to ensure that people can enjoy networks that improve with advancements in hardware—without needing more government money.

But this legislation stands for the proposition that where you live in the state should mean that you have inferior access to the Internet as state policy. Every Californian who wants a 21st-century ready access point to the Internet who believes their neighbors are entitled to that kind of connection, should reject this premise. What people need are fiber infrastructure plans such as the one envisioned in S.B. 1130, the recently introduced universal fiber infrastructure plan introduced in the House of Representatives by Majority Whip Clyburn, and the FCC’s Rural Development Opportunity Fund plan to finance gigabit networks. Fiber networks will keep up with advancements in applications and services for decades while legacy networks have reached their end and will not continue to increase in capacity to deliver data.

If A.B. 570 were to become law at the end of the year, all it would do is perpetuate the suffering caused by the digital divide by replacing it with a “speed chasm”— where rural Californians have expensive obsolete networks delivering 25/3, while urban Californians have networks delivering more than 400 times the download speeds and 3,333 times the upload speeds. Already, the data shows that the average North American city today enjoys broadband speeds in excess of 250/250 mbps . Such a cliff will only grow in the absence of a fiber infrastructure program for rural markets.

If we are going to spend taxpayer money building broadband infrastructure, it needs to be done right the first time or we will never solve the problem while asking taxpayers to shell out more and more of their limited money.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/0...rioritizes-dsl





FCC Approves Amazon’s Internet-From-Space Kuiper Constellation of 3,236 Satellites

Though there are caveats to the approval
Loren Grush

The Federal Communications Commission has approved Amazon’s plans for its ambitious Kuiper constellation, which entails sending 3,236 satellites into orbit to beam internet coverage down to Earth. The decision is a crucial regulatory step that paves the way for Amazon to start launching the satellites when they’re ready.

The company plans to send the satellites to three different altitudes, and it claims it needs just 578 satellites in orbit to begin service, according to an FCC document announcing the approval. Amazon said it will invest “more than $10 billion” in Project Kuiper in a blog post.

Amazon has not announced which launch provider it plans to use to fly the satellites into orbit yet. While Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos also owns the rocket company Blue Origin, the launch provider will have to compete to launch the satellites along with other companies.
"The company must launch half of the constellation by 2026"

There are few caveats to Amazon’s FCC approval. The company must launch half of the constellation by 2026 to retain its FCC license, and then the remaining satellites by 2029. Amazon also must submit to the FCC a finalized plan for how it will mitigate orbital debris, since the design of its satellites aren’t finalized yet. Amazon claims it will take its satellites out of orbit within 355 days, but the FCC argues the company didn’t “present specific information concerning some required elements” for its debris plan. A big concern of a constellation of this size is that the influx of satellites will lead to more collisions in space, creating pieces of debris that could threaten other satellites.

Amazon is one of a handful of companies aiming to create a giant constellation of satellites in orbit, in order to provide broadband connectivity to the surface below. Most notable among these competitors is SpaceX, which has approval from the FCC to launch nearly 12,000 satellites for its Starlink project. So far, SpaceX has launched more than 500 Starlink satellites, with plans to start beta testing the system this summer. Meanwhile, UK-based OneWeb also hopes to build a constellation of 650 satellites, and has already launched 74 of them. The company filed for bankruptcy this year, but was recently bailed out by a consortium that includes the UK government and Indian telecom company Bharti Global.

Amazon claims that Kuiper will “provide broadband services to unserved and underserved consumers, businesses in the United States, and global customers by employing advanced satellite and earth station technologies,” according to the FCC’s approval document. Amazon also said that Project Kuiper will provide “backhaul solutions for wireless carriers extending LTE and 5G service to new regions” in its blog post.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/30/2...ation-approval





Smartphone Contact Tracing has Failed Everywhere
Hoakley

I have outlined the short and expensive life of the UK’s smartphone app intended to trace contacts of those with Covid-19. While that was briefly flourishing, other nations were completing their own equivalents, several of which used the new frameworks for de-centralised exposure identification introduced by Apple and Google. This article looks at progress in smartphone contact tracing, drawing in part on an excellent report by Rory Cellan-Jones and Leo Kelion of the BBC.

At its heart, what smartphone contact tracing aims to do is fill the gap in conventional contact tracing, which can’t identify and trace anonymous contacts – people you don’t know who you might sit with for some time when using public transport, or visiting a restaurant, for example. The way this can be done using smartphones is for the two people’s phones to recognise one another, estimate their distance apart, and the period they were in close proximity. At some later time, if one of those two contacts develops Covid-19 infection and tests positive, then the other can be notified that they came into contact, and given advice about being tested and quarantine.

A naive approach to doing this would be to send information about contacts to a central server, where exposure matching takes place, and decisions can be made about which contacts should be notified. The major problem with that centralised approach is that anyone with access to that centrally held data would have a great deal of sensitive information which could be used to build a picture of people’s social contacts, activities, even their love lives. In Europe and North America, few people have sufficient trust in their governments to provide them with so much personal information.

Apple and Google proposed a decentralised model, in which contact matching is performed in each phone, and no sensitive information is sent to anyone else, something which has achieved much wider (but still not universal) acceptance. This was implemented as Exposure Notification in iOS 13.5, and has just been released as open source.

A major disadvantage of a wholly decentralised approach is the lack of information collected. For a smartphone app to have wider value in Public Health, it needs to notify positive cases, identify contacts and follow each up to determine whether they too become ill. Numbers and locations are of fundamental importance to those monitoring potential local outbreaks and trying to control rates of infection.

Several models have been built to try to determine the proportion of smartphone users needed for these means of contact tracing to be beneficial, and how successful a popular system could be in terms of managing local Covid-19 outbreaks and spread. There is also the important question as to whether an app could partly or completely replace any elements of traditional contact tracing, an activity which is normally labour-intensive and costly.

Among the national smartphone contact tracing apps, Germany’s remains the benchmark, and was delayed in order to adopt the decentralised model using Apple and Google’s frameworks, thus to give a good guarantee of protecting the privacy of its users.

According to figures obtained by the BBC, of the 83 million people in Germany, only around 16 million have downloaded this app since it launched in June. That’s less than 20% of the whole population, and probably around a quarter of all smartphone users. Its adoption has been far below the percentages envisaged by those modelling the benefits of such apps, which normally start to become significant once adoption exceeds 50% and rises towards 80%.

Because the German app has respected data privacy, Public Health authorities have gained almost no information about Covid-19 outbreaks from the app. They know that about 500 users of the app have tested positive – that’s an insignificant proportion – and no one can find out how many contacts have been successfully traced as a result. There is also no record of how many exposures resulted in false alarms, nor of missed diagnoses. There are similar problems with Switzerland’s app, and a lack of data for Ireland’s too.

Adoption of smartphone contact tracing apps has also been very poor in Japan (6% of the population), Italy (7%), and France (3%). To date, no national smartphone contact tracing app has been demonstrated to have had any significant benefit in controlling outbreaks, or significantly reducing the incidence of Covid-19. Only draconian access to personal data, as used in South Korea, seems to have brought any positive results.

There’s another serious problem which hangs over both centralised and decentralised contact tracing apps: the reliability of distance estimates using Bluetooth signal attenuation. This isn’t new, but had become overshadowed by the issue of privacy protection. Sceptics argue that anomalous propagation of Bluetooth signals result in too many false positives and negatives. One of the potential advantages of a centralised model is that it would allow the use of machine learning to adapt thresholds to minimise error, but now that all the major actors seem to have abandoned that model, it’s unclear whether Bluetooth signal attenuation will ever be reliable enough for this purpose – something which seems to have been quietly ignored.

Conventional contact tracing methods also haven’t been faring well. In Europe, modern social mobility and travel increase the total number of contacts, and result in many of them being anonymous and untraceable. Although national figures have appeared impressive, areas most prone to local outbreaks are often those in which most contacts are anonymous, and people are least likely to engage with contact tracing services. The danger is that local outbreaks can grow to the point where they become very hard to control, and threaten to return to the explosive rise and spread of infection which nations in Europe experienced in March and April.

Governments in Europe and North America need to consider critically why they are failing to engage the public. Lack of trust is one obvious issue which has limited the adoption of smartphone apps, but those apps don’t appear to have been designed to be effective for Public Health either. It would appear that no government has thought this out properly yet.

Postscript

A more recent report from the BBC suggests that Ireland’s contact tracing app is working. Well, that all depends what you mean by that last word.

According to the figures given, it has been downloaded by 1.2 million users of a population of 5 million: that’s 26% of the population of Ireland, which is far below the proportions deemed to be effective in modelling (60-80%). During the two weeks which it has been in use, it is claimed to have resulted in 91 “close contact exposure alerts”, which is remarkably few. It also reveals that, whatever the people of Ireland have been told, their app is collecting centralised data on them. Whether that will affect its use remains to be seen, but for the moment – whatever its developers might claim – there’s absolutely no evidence that their app has overcome any of the problems which I have described above, and it falls far short of the adoption rate to make it a valuable tool for controlling Covid-19 infection.

The Irish app might appear more promising than others, but badly needs numerical evidence to confirm whether that promise has been realised.
https://eclecticlight.co/2020/07/25/...ed-everywhere/





My Life as a Criminal Cookie Clearer: Register Vulture Writes Chrome Extension, Realizes it Probably Breaks US Law

Could paywall-dodging browser aid fall foul of DMCA rules? We ask the experts
Thomas Claburn

Code dive Over the weekend, I created my first Chrome extension and prepared to publish the project to GitHub until I realized it was possibly illegal under America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

It's not a great loss to the world. The extension, which I called Bloom Broom, is about as basic as can be. I wrote it after completing the Chrome Extension Get Started Tutorial to see if I could complete a project of my own.

Specifically, I decided to create code that cleared the data stored in my Chrome browser by an unnamed website I'll call example.com, even though you can probably guess what the site might be from the extension's name. I wanted to see if I could bypass the website's soft paywall, which limits non-subscribers to reading only a few articles a month.

Unlike a hard paywall that grants access only to subscribers who have created an account, soft or metered paywalls provide visitors with limited access to content through gating mechanisms like browser cookies or storing values in browser-based databases.
This is phenomenally ineffective, not to mention annoying and non-consensual. Technically inclined individuals have got around soft paywalls for years by clearing particular cookies and browser data. Browser makers provide tools to do this manually and there are plenty of browser extensions that do so, often in the name of privacy or security.

Chrome provides an API for browser data manipulation, chrome.browsingData. I had initially thought I could just call this API from a content script, one of several possible components in a Chrome extension that can be set to run when a specific website is visited.

But it turns out chrome.browsingData isn't accessible from a content script, so after googling about, I understood I would need to load the content script when visiting the target website and have the content script send a message to a background script, another possible Chrome extension component, to invoke the chrome.browsingData API there.

So I declared the appropriate permissions in the manifest.json file:

...
Code:
"permissions": ["*://*.example.com/*", "browsingData", "storage"],
 "background": {
   "scripts": ["background.js"],
   "persistent": false
 },
 "content_scripts": [
   {
     "matches": ["*://*.example.com/*"],
     "js": ["contentScript.js"]
   }
 ],
...

And then wrote the code for contentScript.js...

Code:
chrome.runtime.sendMessage({ text: "Clear" }, function (response) {
 console.log("Response: ", response);
});
..and background.js…

Code:
function callback() {
 console.log("Bloom Broom execution complete.");
}

chrome.runtime.onMessage.addListener(function (msg, sender, sendResponse) {
 if (msg.text === "Clear") {
   chrome.browsingData.remove(
     {
       origins: ["https://www.example.com"],
     },
     {
       cacheStorage: true,
       cookies: true,
       fileSystems: true,
       indexedDB: true,
       localStorage: true,
       pluginData: true,
       serviceWorkers: true,
       webSQL: true,
     },
     callback
   );
 }
 sendResponse("BrowsingData cleared.");
});
The console.log statements (which print output to the browser console) aren't necessary but I wanted to make sure the extension worked as anticipated. And it did. I could visit the site I'm calling example.com as many times as I liked and its article limit would never kick in because the server found no evidence of my previous visits in my browser's storage system.

But I decided not to publish my extension because doing so explicitly to bypass a technical protection mechanism like a paywall is at least theoretically actionable under the law.

The digital arm of the law

Attorney Theresa Troupson, an associate in the Intellectual Property and Litigation & Trial practice groups at Russ August & Kabat in Los Angeles, said as much in a 2015 New York University Law Review article titled, "Yes, it's illegal to cheat a paywall: Access rights and the DMCA's anticircumvention provision." [PDF]

And she maintained that's a possibility in a phone interview with The Register.

"I do think, as I argue in the law review note, it's basically legally actionable under the DMCA because the DMCA is written in such a way that it could potentially implicate people for clearing cookies," she said.

The reason for this, Troupson argued, is that the DMCA's language is so overly broad that any means of accessing paywalled content without authorization falls within the statute's scope.

"Deleting cookies, using ad-blocking software, or other routes past the paywall could be said to 'deactivate' or 'impair' the paywall protecting the online news article," the article says.

Not everyone necessarily agrees with this interpretation of the law and it's unlikely that publishing a paywall bypass extension or simply deleting cookies would result in a lawsuit, unless a large amount of money were at stake.

Troupson said she's not aware of any paywall circumvention cases related to browser storage deletion. But in 2018 Mozilla did find enough cause for legal concern to remove a Firefox extension called Bypass Paywalls from its Add-Ons Store for alleged Terms of Service violations.

Whatever legal risk there is, it's not excessive, given that the Bypass Paywalls code has since been updated to work on Chrome and can be downloaded from GitHub. Also, the Mozilla Add-On Store nonetheless currently includes paywall busting extensions, as does the Chrome Web Store.

Troupson suggests stating that a particular bit of code was created specifically to bypass a paywall would increase the risk because intent matters.

But claiming cookie cleaning was carried out due to privacy or security concerns doesn't guarantee immunity under the DMCA. As Troupson's article notes, the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision lacks any intent requirement.

"The implications of this overbroad provision are troubling, especially for users' privacy and ability to use their personal computers as they see fit," the article states. "In effect, the DMCA codifies a requirement that users submit to cookie storage in order to gain access to certain copyrighted material.

"While it may be fair to require users to allow access protection technology to function properly, it is alarming that a user must either accept cookies he does not want or risk violating federal copyright law in the course of innocently browsing the Internet."

Clicking cookie acceptance popups, Troupson suggested, can be taken as consent to publisher terms over service, like not meddling with paywall mechanisms.

Er, remember the First Amendment?

In an email to The Register, Naomi Gilens, EFF Legal Fellow, expressed skepticism that cookie avoidance might be actionable. "People have a First Amendment right to browse the Internet anonymously, so it can't be a crime to lawfully use software that allows anonymous browsing, even if news sites don't like it," she said.

But Gilens allowed that uncertainty about the legality of cookie interference, something people do automatically via privacy extensions, is understandable given the vagueness of laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.

"News sites can solve the problem of paywall bypassing by not letting people read any free articles, but they can't stop it by using computer crime or intellectual property laws to block people from lawfully using available software to browse anonymously," said Gilens.

At least in the context of Chrome's cookie-crumbling Incognito mode, Gilens argues that the DMCA is not an issue.

"News websites are of course free to condition access to articles on payment," she said. "But if a news website chooses instead to allow access when viewers have no cookies, then there is not any measure in place that effectively controls access to the copyrighted works, so there's nothing that triggers Section 1201.

"The DMCA specifically contemplates that no one is required to implement any particular technology to interoperate with a DRM scheme – meaning that, in this instance, news websites can't require that browsers keep customers' cookies in order to make their DRM work. (Among other things, mandatory cookie retention would be a privacy nightmare.)

"In short: users aren't liable for 'circumvention' under the DMCA for accessing a news website through Incognito mode any more than they would be liable for accessing a news website from their phone or work computer in addition to their primary personal device."

Whether that interpretation would immunize the creation of software built to bypass a paywall may have to wait for actual litigation. Perhaps it's best just to hedge and call such code a privacy extension.

On a related note, Google earlier this year closed two privacy loopholes in Chrome that publishers had been using to enforce metered access. The ad biz advised disconsolate publishers to reduce their allotment of free articles, to require registration to view any articles, or to harden their paywall.

Troupson said she'd like to see copyright law evolve to address access in addition to copying, given the importance of streaming media.

"I think in general copyright protection has not kept pace with the way people use media today," she said. "I argue we need to rethink copyright as a field of law in general and find ways not just to protect copyright but to protect access rights."
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/...xtension_dmca/





Libraries Lend Books, and Must Continue to Lend Books: Internet Archive Responds to Publishers’ Lawsuit
Brewster Kahle

Yesterday, the Internet Archive filed our response to the lawsuit brought by four commercial publishers to end the practice of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), the digital equivalent of traditional library lending. CDL is a respectful and secure way to bring the breadth of our library collections to digital learners. Commercial ebooks, while useful, only cover a small fraction of the books in our libraries. As we launch into a fall semester that is largely remote, we must offer our students the best information to learn from—collections that were purchased over centuries and are now being digitized. What is at stake with this lawsuit? Every digital learner’s access to library books. That is why the Internet Archive is standing up to defend the rights of hundreds of libraries that are using Controlled Digital Lending.

The publishers’ lawsuit aims to stop the longstanding and widespread library practice of Controlled Digital Lending, and stop the hundreds of libraries using this system from providing their patrons with digital books. Through CDL, libraries lend a digitized version of the physical books they have acquired as long as the physical copy doesn’t circulate and the digital files are protected from redistribution. This is how Internet Archive’s lending library works, and has for more than nine years. Publishers are seeking to shut this library down, claiming copyright law does not allow it. Our response is simple: Copyright law does not stand in the way of libraries’ rights to own books, to digitize their books, and to lend those books to patrons in a controlled way.

What is at stake with this lawsuit? Every digital learner’s access to library books. That is why the Internet Archive is standing up to defend the rights of hundreds of libraries that are using Controlled Digital Lending.

“The Authors Alliance has several thousand members around the world and we have endorsed the Controlled Digital Lending as a fair use,” stated Pamela Samuelson, Authors Alliance founder and Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law at Berkeley Law. “It’s really tragic that at this time of pandemic that the publishers would try to basically cut off even access to a digital public library like the Internet Archive…I think that the idea that lending a book is illegal is just wrong.”

These publishers clearly intend this lawsuit to have a chilling effect on Controlled Digital Lending at a moment in time when it can benefit digital learners the most. For students and educators, the 2020 fall semester will be unlike any other in recent history. From K-12 schools to universities, many institutions have already announced they will keep campuses closed or severely limit access to communal spaces and materials such as books because of public health concerns. The conversation we must be having is: how will those students, instructors and researchers access information — from textbooks to primary sources? Unfortunately, four of the world’s largest book publishers seem intent on undermining both libraries’ missions and our attempts to keep educational systems operational during a global health crisis.

Ten percent of the world’s population experience disabilities that impact their ability to read. For these learners, digital books are a lifeline. The publishers’ lawsuit against the Internet Archive calls for the destruction of more than a million digitized books.

The publishers’ lawsuit does not stop at seeking to end the practice of Controlled Digital Lending. These publishers call for the destruction of the 1.5 million digital books that Internet Archive makes available to our patrons. This form of digital book burning is unprecedented and unfairly disadvantages people with print disabilities. For the blind, ebooks are a lifeline, yet less than one in ten exists in accessible formats. Since 2010, Internet Archive has made our lending library available to the blind and print disabled community, in addition to sighted users. If the publishers are successful with their lawsuit, more than a million of those books would be deleted from the Internet’s digital shelves forever.

I call on the executives at Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House to come together with us to help solve the pressing challenges to access to knowledge during this pandemic. Please drop this needless lawsuit.
https://blog.archive.org/2020/07/29/...shers-lawsuit/





MP3 Is 25 Years Old!
Lewin Day

In the streaming era, music is accessed from a variety of online services, ephemeral in nature and never living on board the device. However, the online audio revolution really kicked off with the development of one very special format. The subject of bitter raps and groundbreaking lawsuits, this development from Germany transformed the music industry as we know it. Twenty-five years on from the date the famous “.mp3” filename was chosen, we take a look back at how it came to be, and why it took over the world.

Audio Big, Disks Small

1995 hard drive prices from an LA Trade ad in BYTE Magazine. The least expensive option rings in at $0.22 per megabyte, which means your 700 MB audio CD would cost $154 to store without compression (10x the cost of buying an album at the time).

The road to MP3 was a long one. The aim was to create a codec capable of encoding high-quality audio at low bitrates. Finding a method of compression that didn’t compromise audio quality was key. In an era where hard drives were measured in tens or hundreds of megabytes, storing uncompressed digital audio at CD quality — around 10MB per minute — wasn’t practical.

In the 1980s, researchers around the world were working on various encoding methods to solve this problem. Things began to pick up steam when, in 1988, the Moving Picture Experts Group called out for an audio encoding standard. The next year, 14 proposals were submitted. Four working groups were created, which began to work further on a variety of encoding methods.

Around the time the MP3’s name was decided upon, the Pentium was cutting-edge technology. Desktop computers at the time with clock speeds under 100MHz would struggle to play CD-quality files.

One of the main techniques to come out of the process was MUSICAM, which adopted a psychoacoustic model of human hearing to aid compression. This takes advantage of the effect of auditory masking, a perceptual limitation of human hearing where some sounds mask others from being heard at the same time. By eliminating data corresponding to these sounds that aren’t perceived anyway, it became possible to store more audio in less space without any perceived effect for the listener.

The MUSICAM technology became the basis for much of the original MPEG 1 Audio Layers I and II. A team of researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute took the psycoacoustic coding filter bank techniques, while mixing in some ideas gleaned from the competing ASPEC proposal to MPEG. The aim was to create the Layer III codec that could deliver the same quality at 128 kbps as Layer II could at 192 kbps. The final results were published in the MPEG 1 standard in 1993.

With the development of the Internet happening at a rapid pace, the Fraunhofer team realised their standard had the possibility of becoming a defacto standard for audio on the platform. With its small file size and high quality, it was perfect for sharing over the slow connections of the time period. In a fateful email on July 14, 1995, the team decided that their files should bear the now-famous .MP3 extension.

No Business Model Survives First Contact With The Enemy

MusicMatch Jukebox was a popular CD ripper and MP3 player. MusicMatch are notable for having actually paid Fraunhofer for their MP3 license.

The original business plan was to monetise the technology through sales of encoders. These would be sold at a high price to companies that wished to create software or hardware capable of encoding MP3 files. To drive acceptance of the standard, the decoders used to play the MP3 files would be cheap or free, encouraging consumer uptake.

Winamp was one of the most popular audio players of the MP3 era. Teenagers of the time like yours truly loved it, because it looked like a cool vintage stereo.

While this initially seemed feasible, things quickly fell apart, thanks to the very Internet that Fraunhofer had pinned their fortunes on. In 1997, an Australian student purchased MP3 encoding software with a stolen credit card, before quickly sharing it on an FTP server online. Suddenly it was readily possible for anyone to create their own MP3 files. With the files out in the wild, calls to stop the spread of the software fell on deaf ears.

Within a short time, it was readily possible to download free programs to rip audio from CDs and store it in nearly the same quality at a tenth of the size as an MP3. Websites quickly sprung up, allowing users to freely download the music of their choice. While FTP servers were the defacto file sharing standard of the day, 1999 then saw the launch of Napster, a platform that allowed users with minimal technical knowledge to directly share their digital music collections with others. The music industry had just been changed forever.

Cats Don’t Go Back In Bags

Napster was the progenitor of the file streaming movement. While it lived a short life, it inspired many services to come.

Suddenly the idea of paying $16.98 for a CD seemed ludicrous, when it was readily possible to get the same music for free online. Record labels and artists scrambled to file lawsuits and sue music fans huge sums to discourage downloading. Despite some high profile legal fights, attitudes towards music had already been irrevocably altered. MP3 players had also hit the market, allowing users to carry huge numbers of songs around without having to juggle fragile CDs. These were similarly met with legal challenges, but the juggernaut that was MP3 could not be overcome.

Even in the wake of Napster’s bankruptcy, other services bloomed in the vacuum left by its closure. Pirates learned from the case, and decentralization became key to avoiding legal troubles. This put the onus of criminality on those sharing the files, rather than those running a peer-to-peer service which merely facilitated file transfers.

The Diamond Rio PMP3000 was one of the earliest MP3 players, attracting the ire of the RIAA on launch.

Services to sell digital audio would take many more years to flourish. Initial offerings lost out due to high prices and restrictive DRM that simply gave customers a worse experience than a clean, unencumbered MP3 available for free.

MP3s dominance only began to wane in the 2010s, when a transition to streaming technology and smartphones began to offer a better user experience. Rather than having to manage a multi-gigabyte collection of songs, and shuffle them from device to device, instead users could simply call up virtually any music they wanted at the click of a button. In the same way Facebook defeated Myspace, the ease of streaming quickly relegated MP3 players and the format itself to the past.

The Format Broke the Business of Recorded Music

While few of us still trawl file sharing networks looking for the latest albums, the MP3 was key in forever altering how people expected music to be delivered, and the price people were willing to pay for it.

The pay structure for artists and labels changed monumentally throughout this turbulent time. While post-MP3 services like iTunes once sold tracks at 99 cents a song, artists now receive fractions of a cent per stream. However, the lower importance of physical media has also, at least in theory, made it possible for artists to break out without needing a record label to shift product internationally. Genres like Soundcloud rap and Vaporwave sprung up organically from services that allowed budding musicians to share their music online. It’s easy to draw a direct link between such subcultures and the dawn of music sharing online spawned by MP3.

While Fraunhofer may not have gotten the business win they desired from the technology, the MP3 undoubtedly changed the face of music forever. Artists likely still weep at the diminishing returns from stingy streaming services versus album royalties of years past, and record labels will still grate at unlicenced copying as they have since the cassette era. However, MP3 remains a technology that democratized the access to and creation of music, and for that, it should be lauded. Happy birthday MP3, and here’s to another 25 years of quality compressed music!
https://hackaday.com/2020/07/27/mp3-is-25-years-old/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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