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Old 20-01-21, 07:26 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 23rd, ’21

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January 23rd, 2021




Gigantic Asshole Ajit Pai Is Officially Gone. Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)

Pai killed net four years of handouts to Big Telecom are over.
Matthew Gault

Ajit Pai, the man who killed net neutrality, enacted a series of industry-friendly deregulatory moves for big telecom, and drank from a gigantic mug, is no longer around to terrorize the internet. The FCC confirmed to Motherboard that Pai is officially gone:

"Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai today concluded his four years as Chairman, eight years as a Commissioner, and twelve years as an employee of the agency,” the agency said.

His official FCC Twitter account, where he antagonized people who criticized him, has been deleted.

Pai stood out among the sea of Trump’s corrupt political employees because he was effective and he survived the entire administration. The former Verizon lawyer fought against net neutrality and won, then danced the Harlem Shake on its grave in one of the biggest cringe videos ever posted online.

“By the time I turn in my badge, I will have spent a total 4,557 days working here,” Pai said in a goodbye video posted to his personal Twitter account. That’s almost 4,500 days of a giant coffee cup, embarrassing posts, and bad policy.

The consequences of his leadership will be with us for decades. He rolled back decades of regulation and transferred power to broadband companies on an unprecedented scale.

Here is a list of harmful nonsense Pai and his FCC did over the last four years:

• Killed net neutrality
• Approved T-Mobile / Sprint merger
• Repeatedly released reports that claimed U.S. broadband is fine
• Defended murder of net neutrality in court
• Flubbed Puerto Rico hurricane disaster response
• Slow-walked and obstructed investigation into telecom company sale of your location data
• Said FTC would protect net neutrality (it didn’t, and couldn’t)
• Falsely claimed killing net neutrality was good for broadband access (it wasn’t)
• Refused to brief Congress about telecom companies’ sale of their customers’ phone location data
• Helped Comcast and other major telecom companies in their pursuit of monopolistic power
• Oversaw America’s falling rank in an annual “Internet Freedom” index
• Allowed Verizon to throttle California firefighters’ data while they were fighting unprecedented wildfires
• Invented a DDoS attack that shut down the FCC’s net neutrality comment system
• Lied to public about that fake DDoS attack that shut down the agency’s net neutrality comment system
• Lied to Congress about that fake DDoS attack
• Didn’t detect that dead people were leaving comments on net neutrality comment system
• Refused to change the definition of ‘broadband’
• Demanded $200 to release emails about his giant mug
• Allowed scammers to submit fake comments about net neutrality under the names of two sitting senators
• Did that dumbass Harlem Shake thing with a pizzagate conspiracy theorist
• Became a rubber stamp for Sinclair Media and
• Tried to kill a broadband assistance program that subsidized internet connections for the economically unstable and poor
• Got a literal gun from the NRA for his “courage” in killing net neutrality
• Was investigated by his own agency for alleged corruption as he pushed to dismantle media consolidation rules
• Published report claiming broadband market was magically fixed by repealing net neutrality
• Ignored 22 million comments supporting net neutrality
• Tried to reclassify cell phone data service as “broadband internet”
• Allowed phone call rates for incarcerated people to skyrocket

Here are 150 articles Motherboard wrote about Pai during his tenure.

We will not miss him.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxp...e-of-your-life





Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel Replaces Ajit Pai, is Now Acting FCC Chairwoman

Net neutrality supporter Rosenworcel leads FCC on at least an interim basis.
Jon Brodkin

President Joe Biden today appointed Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel to be the acting chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission. Rosenworcel became an FCC commissioner in 2012 and served in a Democratic majority during the Obama years and in a Democratic minority during the Trump years.

"I am honored to be designated as the Acting Chairwoman of the Federal Communications Commission by President Biden," Rosenworcel said in a statement. "I thank the President for the opportunity to lead an agency with such a vital mission and talented staff. It is a privilege to serve the American people and work on their behalf to expand the reach of communications opportunity in the digital age."

With ex-Chairman Ajit Pai having left the FCC yesterday, there is a 2-2 split between Democrats and Republicans. To form a 3-2 Democratic majority, Biden will have to nominate a new commissioner and secure confirmation from the Senate—which shouldn't be too difficult now that Democrats control the chamber. Biden's decision to promote Rosenworcel from commissioner to acting chairwoman does not require Senate approval.

Designating Rosenworcel as the acting chairwoman means that she may not be the chair throughout Biden's four-year term. Biden could upgrade her role to chairwoman on a permanent basis, or he could give the chair role to whomever he picks as the fifth commissioner. Technically, Biden could also give the permanent chair role to the FCC's other Democrat, Geoffrey Starks, but that seems unlikely.
FCC could bring back net neutrality

As a commissioner, Rosenworcel has supported net neutrality rules and common-carrier regulation of broadband providers, pushed for increases in the FCC's broadband-speed standard, and prioritized broadband access for children from low-income families.

The FCC press release announcing the appointment today said that "Rosenworcel has worked to promote greater opportunity, accessibility, and affordability in our communications services in order to ensure that all Americans get a fair shot at 21st century success. From fighting to protect net neutrality to ensuring access to the Internet for students caught in the Homework Gap, she has been a consistent champion for connecting all. She is a leader in spectrum policy, developing new ways to support wireless services from Wi-Fi to video and the Internet of things."

Four years ago, President Donald Trump promoted Pai to the chairman's spot without any "acting" designation. The last acting chair was Democrat Mignon Clyburn, who held the role for six months in 2013 before the Senate confirmation of Obama nominee Tom Wheeler. Wheeler, Clyburn, and Rosenworcel formed the Democratic majority that enacted the net neutrality rules that were later repealed by Pai's Republican majority.

Even with a 2-2 deadlock, Rosenworcel can take some actions that don't require a full commission vote, as we've previously written. For example, she could change the FCC's positions in ongoing lawsuits, such as the one the Trump administration filed to block California's state net neutrality law. Reinstating FCC net neutrality rules and common-carrier regulation of ISPs will require a majority.

Consumer-advocacy group Free Press applauded Biden's pick of Rosenworcel, saying:

As a commissioner, Rosenworcel has challenged the Trump FCC's worst actions and impulses. Now she must rebuild after the previous regime tried to demolish so much of the agency's most important work. Rosenworcel's long record of public service and deep knowledge of the issues before the FCC make her uniquely suited to fixing what has been broken at the agency over the past four years. We hope she will use the power of the office to push immediately for long-overdue changes that can improve people's lives, create opportunities for new and diverse voices, and make the FCC an agency that's committed to public needs rather than corporate greed.

Biden today also promoted Federal Trade Commission member Rebecca Kelly Slaughter to the FTC's acting chair role. An FTC announcement said that Slaughter has "been particularly outspoken about combatting systemic racism, growing threats to competition, and the broad abuse of consumers' data." Free Press said that Slaughter has "been persistently clear-headed on combating corporate malfeasance and argued for real remedies that these same companies can't shrug off as the cost of doing business." The announcement added that she is likely to "chart a new path forward for the agency and use its powers to address pressing civil-rights harms and systemic racial inequalities in privacy, antitrust enforcement and in our economy writ large."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ng-chairwoman/





Misinformation Dropped Dramatically the Week after Twitter Banned Trump
Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin

Online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent after several social media sites suspended President Donald Trump and key allies last week, research firm Zignal Labs has found, underscoring the power of tech companies to limit the falsehoods poisoning public debate when they act aggressively.

The new research by the San Francisco-based analytics firm reported that conversations about election fraud dropped from 2.5 million mentions to 688,000 mentions across several social media sites in the week after Trump was banned from Twitter.

Election disinformation had been a major subject of online misinformation for months, beginning even before the Nov. 3 election, pushed heavily by Trump and his allies.

Zignal found it dropped swiftly and steeply both on Twitter itself and other platforms in the days after the Twitter ban took hold on Jan. 8.

The president and his supporters also have lost accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitch, Spotify, Shopify and others. Facebook called its suspension “indefinite” but left open the possibility Trump’s account could later be restored.

The findings, from Saturday through Friday, highlight how falsehoods flow across social media sites — reinforcing and amplifying each other — and offer an early indication of how concerted actions against misinformation can make a difference.

Twitter’s ban of Trump on Jan. 8, after years in which @realDonaldTrump was a potent online megaphone, has been particularly significant in curbing his ability to push misleading claims about what state and federal officials have called a free and fair election on Nov. 3.

Trump’s banishment was followed by other actions by social media sites, including Twitter’s ban of more than 70,000 accounts affiliated with the baseless QAnon ideology, which played a key role in fomenting the Capitol siege on Jan. 6.

“Together, those actions will likely significantly reduce the amount of online misinformation in the near term,” said Kate Starbird, disinformation researcher at the University of Washington. “What happens in the long term is still up in the air.”

Zignal found that use of hashtags affiliated with the Capitol riot also dipped considerably. Mentions of the hashtag #FightforTrump, which was widely deployed across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and other social media services in the week before the rally, dropped 95%. #HoldTheLine and the terms “March for Trump” also fell more than 95%.

The research by Zignal and other groups suggests that a powerful, integrated disinformation ecosystem — composed of high-profile influencers, rank-and-file followers and Trump himself — was central to pushing millions of Americans to reject the election results and may have trouble surviving without his social media accounts.

Researchers have found that Trump’s tweets were retweeted by supporters at a remarkable rate, no matter the subject, giving him a virtually unmatched ability to shape conversation online. University of Colorado information science professor Leysia Palen declared in October, after months of research, “Trump’s amplification machine is peerless.”

“Bottom line is that de-platforming, especially at the scale that occurred last week, rapidly curbs momentum and ability to reach new audiences,” said Graham Brookie, director of the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, which tracks misinformation. “That said, it also has the tendency to harden the views of those already engaged in the spread of that type of false information.”

Trump reportedly has been looking for a new social media home — with public speculation focusing on Parler, Gab or Telegram, all of which are popular with conservative users — but apparently has not settled on one yet. Parler has been offline for most of the week but reportedly is seeking to resume operations after Google and Apple removed it from their app stores because of scant moderation of violent talk on the site. Amazon Web Services also suspended Parler, taking it offline.

The left-leaning media watchdog Media Matters for America found that the number of people clicking and sharing content from right-leaning political Facebook pages also fell substantially in the days after Facebook issued its temporary ban of Trump’s account.

Delivered weeknights, this email newsletter gives you a quick recap of the day's top stories and need-to-know news, as well as intriguing photos and topics to spark conversation as you wind down from your day.

Trump and political allies have railed for years against what they call “Big Tech,” alleging bias against conservative voices without providing systematic proof and pushing companies to take a lighter hand in moderating content and punishing violators of policies. Twitter and other platforms cited policies against hate speech, inciting violence and dangerous conspiracy theories in suspending accounts in the aftermath of the Capitol attack.

Disinformation researchers consistently have found that relatively few accounts acted as “superspreaders” during the election, with their tweets and posts generating a disproportionate share of the falsehoods and misleading narratives that spread about election fraud, mail-in ballots, and other topics related to the vote.

A study released the week before the presidential election by the Election Integrity Partnership, a consortium of misinformation researchers, found that just 20 conservative, pro-Trump Twitter accounts — including the president’s own @realDonaldTrump — were the original source of one-fifth of retweets pushing misleading narratives about voting.

The Zignal report also found that hashtags and phrases used by QAnon adherents declined over the past week but mentions of it and of its anonymous leader “Q” increased by 15 percent — a finding that could be explained by the coverage and conversation about its role in the attack on the Capitol.

A recent report by Advance Democracy, founded by Daniel J. Jones, a former FBI analyst and Senate investigator who led the review of the CIA’s torture program, found that social media sites had “successfully purged” large amounts of content pushing false claims of election fraud. The report also found “incendiary and implicitly violent narratives continue to spread at the peripheries of the social media platforms we are monitoring.”

This includes using the word “traitors” on Twitter to describe Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif., chairperson of the House Intelligence Committee. One post on the site referring to Pence, whom Trump has repeatedly criticized in recent weeks, showed a dangling noose and the word “TREASON.”

On Tik Tok, Advance Democracy found that supporters of the militia group Three Percenters were implicitly calling for violence in videos, including one that had been viewed 139,000 times. One showed a man saying, “And for all the people saying: ‘It’s un-American. It’s an act of terrorism.’ How do you think we started this country?”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...trump-twitter/





Judge Says Amazon Won’t Have to Restore Parler Web Service
Matt O'Brien

Amazon won’t be forced to immediately restore web service to Parler after a federal judge ruled Thursday against a plea to reinstate the fast-growing social media app, which is favored by followers of former President Donald Trump.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein in Seattle said she wasn’t dismissing Parler’s “substantive underlying claims” against Amazon, but said it had fallen short in demonstrating the need for an injunction forcing it back online.

Amazon kicked Parler off its web-hosting service on Jan. 11. In court filings, it said the suspension was a “last resort” to block Parler from harboring violent plans to disrupt the presidential transition.

The Seattle tech giant said Parler had shown an “unwillingness and inability” to remove a slew of dangerous posts that called for the rape, torture and assassination of politicians, tech executives and many others.

The social media app, a magnet for the far right, sued to get back online, arguing that Amazon Web Services had breached its contract and abused its market power. It said Trump was likely on the brink of joining the platform, following a wave of his followers who flocked to the app after Twitter and Facebook expelled Trump after the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Rothstein said she rejected “any suggestion that the public interest favors requiring AWS to host the incendiary speech that the record shows some of Parler’s users have engaged in.” She also faulted Parler for providing ”only faint and factually inaccurate speculation” about Amazon and Twitter colluding with one another to shut Parler down.

Parler said Thursday it was disappointed by the ruling but remains confident it will “ultimately prevail in the main case,” which it says will have “broad implications for our pluralistic society.” Amazon said it welcomed the ruling and emphasized that “this was not a case about free speech,” a point also underscored by the judge.

Parler CEO John Matze had asserted in a court filing that Parler’s abrupt shutdown was motivated at least partly by “a desire to deny President Trump a platform on any large social-media service.” Matze said Trump had contemplated joining the network as early as October under a pseudonym. The Trump administration last week declined to comment on whether he had planned to join.

Amazon denied its move to pull the plug on Parler had anything to do with political animus. It claimed that Parler had breached its business agreement “by hosting content advocating violence and failing to timely take that content down.”

Parler was formed in May 2018, according to Nevada business records, with what co-founder Rebekah Mercer, a prominent Trump backer and conservative donor, later described as the goal of creating “a neutral platform for free speech” away from “the tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords.”

Amazon said the company signed up for its cloud computing services about a month later, thereby agreeing to its rules against dangerous content.

Matze told the court that Parler has “no tolerance for inciting violence or lawbreaking” and has relied on volunteer “jurors” to flag problem posts and vote on whether they should be removed. More recently, he said the company informed Amazon it would soon begin using artificial intelligence to automatically pre-screen posts for inappropriate content, as bigger social media companies do.

Amazon last week revealed a trove of incendiary and violent posts that it had reported to Parler over the past several weeks. They included explicit calls to harm high-profile political and business leaders and broader groups of people, such as schoolteachers and Black Lives Matter activists.

Google and Apple were the first tech giants to take action against Parler in the days after the deadly Capitol riot. Both companies temporarily banned the smartphone app from their app stores. But people who had already downloaded the Parler app were still able to use it until Amazon Web Services pulled the plug on the website.

Parler has kept its website online by maintaining its internet registration through Epik, a U.S. company owned by libertarian businessman Rob Monster. Epik has previously hosted 8chan, an online message board known for trafficking in hate speech. Parler is currently hosted by DDoS-Guard, a company whose owners are based in Russia, public records show.

DDoS-Guard did not respond to emails seeking comment on its business with Parler or on published reports that its customers have included Russian government agencies.

Parler said Thursday it is still working to revive its platform. Although its website is back, it hasn’t restored its app or social network. Matze has said it will be difficult to restore service because the site had been so dependent on Amazon engineering, and Amazon’s action has turned off other potential vendors.

The case has offered a rare window into Amazon’s influence over the workings of the internet. Parler argued in its lawsuit that Amazon violated antitrust laws by colluding with Twitter, which also uses some Amazon cloud computing services, to quash the upstart social media app.

Rothstein, who was appointed to the Seattle-based court by Democratic President Jimmy Carter, said Parler presented “dwindlingly slight” evidence of antitrust violations and no evidence that Amazon and Twitter “acted together intentionally — or even at all — in restraint of trade.”

___

AP Technology Writer Frank Bajak contributed to this report from Boston.
https://apnews.com/article/donald-tr...36b65534a00ea1





“Wonder Woman 1984” Foreshadows Hollywood’s Giant Piracy Problem

Hollywood will need a heroic effort to thwart the rise of piracy.
Adam Epstein

Wonder Woman 1984 catapulted the entertainment industry into an era in which big-budget Hollywood films can debut on streaming platforms. But it also signaled a growing problem that will plague studios as they rely more in streaming: internet piracy.

The superhero film, which premiered last month on WarnerMedia’s HBO Max streaming service at the same time it opened in theaters, immediately became a popular target of pirates. It accounted for nearly 10% of all illegal movie or TV downloads the day it was released, according to the piracy tracker TorrentFreak. The blog did not divulge specific statistics, but did say Wonder Woman 1984 has been illegally downloaded “millions” of times via torrent sites. Much of the piracy appears to be coming from the US and India.

WarnerMedia says the film exceeded its expectations for HBO Max viewing and subscriber metrics, tripling the typical daily amount of viewing hours on the platform the day it was released. But even a conservative estimate of a few million illegal opening-weekend downloads of the movie would constitute at least $20 million in lost revenue for the studio—and likely much more in subsequent weeks. (An HBO Max subscription costs $15 per month, while the average movie ticket price in the US is about $9.)

Piracy has long been a serious issue for TV shows, which can be copied and distributed all over the world the instant they debut online. Anti-piracy technology can’t keep up with advancements in pirating tech, while legal measures have proven to be a weak deterrent. Piracy also cuts into film revenue, but it hasn’t been quite as much of a roadblock for big-budget movies, since historically they have played exclusively in theaters for months before a high-quality version could hit the internet for illegal distribution.

But now, as WarnerMedia and other Hollywood studios premiere more and more important tentpole content on streaming services, they could struggle to prevent piracy from running wild and devastating a film’s revenue potential. Without the buttress of a widespread, exclusive theatrical release to accumulate profits before pirates can get their hands on a digital copy of a film, studios become a lot more vulnerable to the financial effects of digital theft. Studios are aware of the problem, but haven’t yet figured out a solution.

Digital piracy is one reason studios will not entirely abandon theaters even as streaming becomes central to their business models. Disney, for instance, will still release the vast majority of its potential blockbusters this year (and likely in subsequent years) in theaters, despite it also needing to populate the Disney+ streaming service with attractive content. Theatrical distribution was already a lucrative component of any Hollywood company’s strategy, and while it faces its own enormous challenges, it will remain one way companies can limit the impact of piracy on their bottom lines.

Disney should know something about piracy: Its Disney+ series, The Mandalorian, was the most-pirated show of 2020, according to TorrentFreak. New services (like Disney+) and niche services (like CBS All Access) are especially exposed to piracy as they try to grow the number of paying subscribers. Netflix, which has nearly reached market saturation in some territories, did not have many titles on the list of most-pirated content—likely because even most would-be pirates have access to a Netflix account.
https://qz.com/1952103/wonder-woman-...iracy-problem/





Netflix And Bridgerton Stars Are Apparently Not Happy About Sex Scenes Being Pirated On Porn Sites
Jessica Rawden

Netflix’s Bridgerton has been taking the Internet by storm, often due to a slew of sex scenes shown in detail in the freshman drama. Those sex scenes are available whenever you want to see ‘em provided you have a Netflix subscription, but now the streamer is dealing with a problem it likely hasn’t encountered all that often before: sex scenes with Rege-Jean Page, Phoebe Dynevor and more keep getting pirated by porn sites.

After the news about the scenes popping up on porn sites broke, an insider alleged to The Sun that the show’s young stars are particularly devastated to have learned their acting in bedroom scenes is now peppered all over the Internet. While Phoebe Dynevor and Rege-Jean Page have both talked candidly about filming the show and even watching their sex scenes with family, seeing them on porn sites is likely a very differentl feeling. Or, as the insider put it:

Bridgerton’s sex scenes appearing alongside some of the most obscene material the web has to offer has sparked horror and anger. Raunchy set-pieces have contributed to the buzz but it is a prestige drama based on best-selling novels.To peddle scenes as pure smut is beyond the pale. It’s been particularly distressing for Phoebe Dynevor and Regι-Jean, two young actors who signed on for the role of a lifetime and did not consent to being exploited in this way.

It should be noted that the scenes between the newlyweds are part of the story and not simply shoehorned in to be smutty entertainment bites. Since the news broke, Netflix has said it is looking into the matter and, indeed, some of the sex scenes are reported to have already been pulled off of various porn sites. Pirating is a problem that is not unique to Netflix or TV in general -- remember all the times Game of Thrones made headlines for topping pirated lists? -- as any and all types of content are pirated on various factions around the world. Yet, most of these pirating occurrences don’t necessarily result in content showing up without consent on porn sites.

Granted, I’m sure other Netflix projects, such as 365 DNI (aka 365 Days) has dealt with its fair share of pirating, particularly given what happens in the now-infamous boat scene in that movie. Other scenes where actors and actresses get naked are either catalogued or occasionally show up on porn sites and sometimes search volume for porn around an actor or actress’ name can spike given their popularity in a given moment, as happened when people got interested in Carmen Electra after The Last Dance came out.

But you wouldn’t necessarily expect the same thing from Bridgerton, a delightful and comic series that would play way differently tonally without the bedroom romps. It’s often a delightfully chaste and amusing series, particularly in regards to its younger leads, but its rakes and married couples are a different case indeed.

Bridgerton made Netflix’s Top 10 list upon release and is still currently ranking third in the lineup at the time of this writing. It’s looking very likely Netflix will renew Bridgerton for Season 2, so if sex scenes, fun fashion and clever quips are all up your alley, give the show a shot -- just do it in the legal way on Netflix.
https://www.cinemablend.com/televisi...-on-porn-sites





PS5 : A Court Ruling Blocks Several Websites for Pirating Nintendo Products in Spain
Explica.co

Nintendo two different legal proceedings were ongoing in the framework of the Barcelona Commercial Courts. From this area, two rulings have been issued in favor of blocking access to three websites operated by a manufacturer and distributor of elusin devices and software for the Nintendo Switch console, as well as ordering Internet providers to also prevent access to two websites offering pirated video games for this same console.

The law in favor of the video game industry

The first sentence issued by the Commercial Court number 2 of Barcelona, orders the main suppliers internet and broadband (Telefnica, Telefnica Mviles, Orange, Vodafone, Vodafone ONO and Xfera Mviles) block access to three websites that distribute bypass devices and software for Nintendo Switch, which are used to make the console support pirated game copies. These portals were www.team-xecuter.com, https://sx.xecuter.com and https://team-xecuter.rocks. This failure follows in the wake of the UK High Court decision in late 2019, where five internet providers in the country were also ordered to block their clients’ access to these same portals.

In the second sentence, the Commercial Court number 6 of Barcelona ordered the same Internet access providers block the access of your clients in Spain to two websites dedicated, this time, to the distribution of illegal copies Nintendo games: www.switch-xci.com and www.nxbrew.com. In these portals the players could find an extensive catalog of pirated Nintendo Switch games, including his latest releases.

The pirate destroys up to 1,610 direct jobs, according to AEVI
https://www.explica.co/ps5-a-court-r...ucts-in-spain/





Cryptocat Author Gets Insanely Fast Backing to Build P2P Tech for Social Media
Natasha Lomas

The idea for Capsule started with a tweet about reinventing social media.

A day later cryptography researcher, Nadim Kobeissi — best known for authoring the open-source E2E-encrypted desktop chat app Cryptocat (now discontinued) — had pulled in a pre-seed investment of $100,000 for his lightweight mesh-networked microservices concept, with support coming from angel investor and former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, William J. Pulte and Wamda Capital.

I'm designing a decentralized social media solution where each user hosts their own microservice. These then connect to one another in a mesh, allowing following and sharing posts. It will be lightweight, user friendly and secure.

Are you interested in funding its development?

— Nadim Kobeissi (@kaepora) January 10, 2021


The nascent startup has a post-money valuation on paper of $10 million, according to Kobeissi, who is working on the prototype — hoping to launch an MVP of Capsule in March (as a web app), after which he intends to raise a seed round (targeting $1 million-$1.5 million) to build out a team and start developing mobile apps.

For now there’s nothing to see beyond Capsule’s landing page and a pitch deck (which he shared with TechCrunch for review). But Kobeissi says he was startled by the level of interest in the concept.

“I posted that tweet and the expectation that I had was that basically 60 people max would retweet it and then maybe I’ll set up a Kickstarter,” he tells us. Instead the tweet “just completely exploded” and he found himself raising $100,000 “in a single day” — with $50,000 paid in there and then.

“I’m not a startup guy. I’ve been running a business based on consulting and based on academic R&D services,” he continues. “But by the end of the day — last Sunday, eight days ago — I was running a Delaware corporation valued at $10 million with $100,000 in pre-seed funding, which is insane. Completely insane.”

Capsule is just the latest contender for retooling Internet power structures by building infrastructure that radically decentralizes social platforms to make speech more resilient to corporate censorship and control.

The list of decentralized/P2P/federated protocols and standards already out there is very long — even while usage remains low. Extant examples include ActivityPub, Diaspora, Mastodon, P2P Matrix, Scuttlebutt, Solid and Urbit, to name a few.

Interest in the space has been rekindled in recent weeks after mainstream platforms like Facebook and Twitter took decisions to shut down U.S. President Donald Trump’s access to their megaphones — a demonstration of private power that other political leaders have described as problematic.

Kobeissi also takes that view, while adding the caveat that he’s not “personally” concerned about Trump’s deplatforming. But he says he is concerned about giant private corporations having unilateral power to shape internet speech — whether takedown decisions are being made by Twitter’s trust and safety lead or Amazon Web Services (which recently yanked the plug on right-wing social network Parler for failing to moderate violent views).

He also points to a lawsuit that’s been filed in U.S. court seeking damages and injunctive relief from Apple for allowing Telegram, a messaging platform with 500 million+ users, to be made available through its iOS App Store — “despite Apple’s knowledge that Telegram is being used to intimidate, threaten and coerce members of the public” — raising concerns about “the odds of these efforts catching on.”

“That is kind of terrifying,” he suggests.

Capsule would seek to route around the risk of mass deplatforming via “easy to deploy” P2P microservices — starting with a forthcoming web app.

“When you deploy Capsule right now — I have a prototype that does almost nothing running — it’s basically one binary. And you get that binary and you deploy it and you run it, and that’s it. It sets up a server, it contacts Let’s Encrypt, it gets you a certificate, it uses SQLite for the database, which is a serverless database, all of the assets for the web server are within the binary,” he says, walking through the “really nice technical idea” that snagged $100,000 in pre-seed backing insanely fast.

“There are no other files — and then once you have it running, in that folder when you set up your capsule server, it’s just the Capsule program and a Capsule database that is a file. And that’s it. And that is so self-contained that it’s embeddable everywhere, that’s migratable — and it’s really quite impossible to get this level of simplicity and elegance so quickly unless you go this route. Then, for the mesh federation thing, we’re just doing HTTPS calls and then having decentralized caching of the databases and so on.”

Among the Twitter back-and-forth about how (or whether) Kobeissi’s concept differs to various other decentralized protocols, someone posted a link to this XKCD cartoon — which lampoons the techie quest to resolve competing standards by proposing a tech that covers all use cases (yet is of course doomed to increase complexity by +1). So given how many protocols already offer self-hosted/P2P social media services it seems fair to ask what’s different here — and, indeed, why build another open decentralized standard?

Kobeissi argues that existing options for decentralizing social media are either: (a) not fully P2P (Mastodon is “self-hosted but not decentralized,” per a competitive analysis on Capsule’s pitch deck, ergo its servers are “vulnerable to Parler-style AWS takedowns”); or (b) not focused enough on the specific use case of social media (some other decentralized protocols like Matrix aim to support many more features/apps than social media and therefore can’t be as lightweight is the argument); or (c) simply aren’t easy enough to use to be more than a niche geeky option.

He talks about Capsule having the same level of focus on social media as Signal does on private messaging, for example — albeit intending it to support both short-form “tweet”-style public posts and long-form Medium-style postings. But he’s vocal about not wanting any “bloat.”

He also invokes Apple’s “design for usability” philosophy. Albeit, it’s a lot easier to say you want to design something that “just works” versus actually pulling off effortless mainstream accessibility. But that’s the bar Kobeissi is setting himself here.

“I always imagine Glenn Greenwald when I think of my user,” he says on the usability point, referring to the outspoken journalist and Intercept co-founder who recently left to launch his own newsletter-based offering on Substack. “He’s the person I see setting this up. Basically the way that this would work is he’d be able to set this up or get someone to set it up really easily — I think Capsule is going to offer automated deployments as also a way to make revenue, by the way, i.e., for a bit extra we deploy the server for you and then you’re self-hosting but we also make a margin off of that — but it’s going to be open source, you can set it up yourself as well and that’s perfectly okay. It’s not going to be hindered at all in that sense.

“In the case of Capsule, each content creator has their own website — has their own address, like Capsule.Greenwald.com — and then people go there and their first discovery of the mesh is through people that they’re interested in hearing from.”

Individual Capsules would be decentralized from the risk of platform-level censorship since they’d be beyond the reach of takedowns by a single centralizing entity. Although they would still be hosted on the web — and therefore could be subject to a takedown by their own web host. That means illegal speech on Capsule could still be removed. However there wouldn’t be a universal host that could be hit up with the risk of a whole platform being taken down at a sweep — as Parler just was by AWS.

“For every takedown it is entirely between that Capsule user and their hosting provider,” says Kobeissi. “Capsule users are going to have different hosting providers that they’re able to choose and then every time that there is a takedown it is going to be a decision that is made by a different entity. And with a different — perhaps — judgement, so there isn’t this centralized focus where only Amazon Web Services decides who gets to speak or only Twitter decides.”

And while the business of web hosting at platform giant level involves just a handful of cloud hosting giants able to offer the required scalability, he argues that that censorship-prone market concentration goes away once you’re dealing with scores of descentralized social media instances.

“We have the big hosting providers — like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud — but aside from that we have a lot of tiny hosting providers or small businesses … Sure if you’re running a big business you do get to focus on these big providers because they allow you to have these insane servers that are very powerful and deployable very easily but if you’re running a Capsule instance, as a matter of fact, the server resource requirements of running a Capsule instance are generally speaking quite small. In most instances tiny.”

Content would also be harder to scrub from Capsule because the mesh infrastructure would mean posts get mirrored across the network by the poster’s own followers (assuming they have any). So, for example, reposts wouldn’t just vanish the moment the original poster’s account was taken down by their hosting provider.

Separate takedown requests would likely be needed to scrub each reposted instance, adding a lot more friction to the business of content moderation versus the unilateral takedowns that platform giants can rain down now. The aim is to “spare the rest of the community from the danger of being silenced,” as Kobeissi puts it.

Trump’s deplatforming does seem to have triggered a major penny-dropping moment for some that allowing a handful of corporate giants to own and operate centralized mass communication machines isn’t exactly healthy for democratic societies as this unilateral control of infrastructure gives them the power to limit speech. (As, indeed, their content-sorting algorithms determine reach and set the agenda of much public debate.)

Current social media infrastructure also provides a few mainstream chokepoints for governments to lean on — amplifying the risk of state censorship.

With concerns growing over the implications of platform power on data flows — and judging by how quickly Kobeissi’s tweet turned heads — we could be on the cusp of an investor-funded scramble to retool internet infrastructure to redefine where power (and data) lies.

It’s certainly interesting to note that Twitter recently reupped its own decentralized social media open standard push, Bluesky, for example. It obviously wouldn’t want to be left behind any such shift.

“It seems to really have blown up,” Kobeissi adds, returning to his week-old Capsule concept. “I thought when I tweeted that I was maybe the only person who cared. I guess I live in France so I’m not really in tune with what’s going on in the U.S. a lot — but a lot of people care.”

“I am not like a cypherpunk-style person these days, I’m not for full anonymity or full unaccountability online by any stretch,” he adds. “And if this is abused then sincerely it might even be the case that we would encourage — have a guidelines page — for hosting providers like on how to deal with instances of someone hosting an abusive Capsule instance. We do want that accountability to exist. We are not like a full-on, crazy town ‘free speech’ wild west thing. We just think that that accountability has to be organic and decentralized — just as originally intended with the internet.”
https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/18/cr...-social-media/





Brave Becomes First Browser to Add Native Support for the IPFS Protocol

Brave users will now be able to seamlessly access ipfs:// links.

With the release of Brave 1.19 today, Brave has become the first major browser maker to support IPFS, a peer-to-peer protocol meant for accessing decentralized or censored content.

IPFS allows users to host content distributed across hundreds or thousands of systems, which can be public IPFS gateways or private IPFS nodes. Users who want to access any of this content must enter an URL in the form of ipfs://{content_hash_ID}.

Under normal circumstances, users would download this content from the nearest nodes or gateways rather than a central server. However, this only works if users have installed an IPFS desktop app or a browser extension.

Brave says that with version 1.19, users will be able to access URLs that start with ipfs://, directly from the browser, with no extension needed, and that Brave will natively support ipfs:// links going forward.

Since some major websites like Wikipedia have IPFS versions, users in oppressive countries can now use Brave's new IPFS support to go around national firewalls and access content that might be blocked inside their country for political reasons and is available via IPFS.

In addition, Brave also says that its users can also install their own IPFS node with one click with version 1.19 and help contribute to hosting some of the content they download to view.

A focus on privacy features

"We're thrilled to be the first browser to offer a native IPFS integration with today's Brave desktop browser release," said Brian Bondy, CTO and co-founder of Brave. "Integrating the IPFS open-source network is a key milestone in making the Web more transparent, decentralized, and resilient."

This marks the second decentralized browsing protocol that Brave now supports after integrating the Tor network and the Onion protocol in June 2018 in the form of a feature now known as "Tor Tabs."

But Brave also said that work on its IPFS integration is also expected to expand in the coming future. The browser maker plans to support automatic redirects from DNSLink websites to their native IPFS versions, the ability to co-host an IPFS website, the ability to easily publish to IPFS, and more, in future versions.

Native IPFS support is just the latest in a long line of privacy-focused features that Brave has added to its product. Previous ones include support for a private video chat system, a built-in ad blocker, fingerprinting randomization, minimal telemetry, query parameter filtering, social media blocking, and others.

Brave, which launched in 2016 to great fanfare, is currently believed to have around 24 million monthly active users, after passing the 20 million mark last November.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/brave-...ipfs-protocol/





Google, French Publishers Sign Copyright News Payment Deal
AP

Google has signed a deal with a group of French publishers paving the way for the internet giant to make digital copyright payments for online news content.

After months of talks, Google France and the Alliance de la Presse d’Information Generale said Thursday that they agreed to set up a framework under which the U.S. company will negotiate individual licensing deals with publishers.

Google has already negotiated a few individual payment deals with some French news publishers such as national daily paper Le Monde and weekly magazine l’Obs.

The company was forced to negotiate with publishers and news agencies for reusing their material online under a “neighboring rights” law that took effect after France became the first country to adopt new European Union copyright rules.

Google had initially balked at paying for news, saying new companies benefited from the millions of readers it sends to their websites. But last year an appeals court ordered the company to open talks with publishers.

Under the framework agreement, payments will be based on criteria such as the amount published daily and monthly internet traffic.

Google did not spell out how much money would be paid to the group’s members.

News companies had pushed for the EU copyright reform amid worries that quality journalism is declining as ad revenue gets siphoned off by the digital giants.
https://apnews.com/article/business-...d3c43f9114893f





An Australia With No Google? The Bitter Fight Behind a Drastic Threat

The big tech platforms are facing a challenge unlike any other as Australia moves to make them pay for news.
Damien Cave

In a major escalation, Google threatened on Friday to make its search engine unavailable in Australia if the government approved legislation that would force tech companies to pay for journalism shared on their platforms.

Facebook, which appeared with Google at an Australian Senate hearing, reaffirmed a threat of its own, vowing to block users in Australia from posting or sharing links to news if the bill passed.

In both cases, the dire warnings — which one senator called blackmail — revealed the apparent willingness of Facebook and Google to hide or erase reliable sources of information for millions of people at a time when social media platforms are under fire for helping misinformation spread worldwide.

The companies argue that they already help the media industry by sending it traffic, and that the bill would open them up to “unmanageable levels of financial and operational risk.” The response by Google, which controls 95 percent of all queries in Australia in addition to owning YouTube, has grown particularly aggressive: The company recently buried major Australian news sites in search results in what it called an “experiment.”

But the precedent of paying for journalism does not, in itself, seem to be the issue.

A few hours before Google threatened to take away its search engine in Australia, the company agreed to pay news publications in France under an agreement that is likely to lead to more deals across Europe.

The battle in Australia centers on power: who gets to decide the payments, what prompts a charge for the tech companies and when do they have to reveal changes in their algorithms.

Australia’s assertive challenge to the social media giants has placed it in the vanguard of a movement to bolster a traditional news media ecosystem that America’s trillion-dollar tech companies threaten with extinction. For Google and Facebook, their intense pushback has become a focal point of their global efforts to limit regulation, as governments around the world look to rein them in.

Here’s a summary of the fight.

Rapid vs. Prolonged Negotiations

Under Australia’s proposed legislation, if media companies and platforms like Google cannot agree on a price for news content, an independent arbitration body will resolve the dispute. That could amount to a first in the world.

The agreement in France lets Google negotiate with publishers using criteria the company has established, such as the contribution to general discussion, publication volume and audience size. Disputes would most likely go to court, where they could be bogged down for years, delaying payment.

Australia’s bill would streamline the process and strengthen the weaker side — the media.

As Rod Sims, the chairman of Australia’s consumer protection regulator, explained: “The aim of the code is to address the uneven bargaining position between Australian news media businesses and the big digital platforms who have clear market power.”

The tech companies say it would create an incentive for media companies to jack up prices, sending cases to an arbiter who will determine final payment. They point to a government report estimating that 75 percent of the negotiations could end up with arbitrators.

Critics argue that Google and Facebook are simply trying to maintain their position as the ones who get to determine what news is worth.

“It’s about the external process being imposed on them by legislation, rather than by them just being able to dole out deals as they see fit,” said Peter Lewis, director of the Center for Responsible Technology at the Australia Institute, an independent research group. “It shifts the balance of power from their hands to a third party, and that’s what they can’t countenance.”

Links vs. Previews

The fight centers in part on a debate over the nature of search results, and on the question of whether tech companies should pay for every article that Australians see on their platforms.

Is this helpful?

In a submission to Australia’s Senate inquiry about the proposal, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, wrote that “the code risks breaching a fundamental principle of the web by requiring payment for linking between certain content online.”

“The ability to link freely,” he added, “meaning without limitations regarding the content of the linked site and without monetary fees, is fundamental to how the web operates.”

Melanie Silva, the managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, made the same argument on Friday in the Senate and in a video posted to Twitter, where she asked people to imagine recommending a few cafes to a friend — and then getting a bill from the cafes for sharing that information.

“When you put a price on linking to certain information, you break the way search engines work,” she said. “And you no longer have a free and open web.”

Google and Facebook (along with Twitter and others), however, do not simply link. They frame the work in previews, with headlines, summaries and photos, and then curate and serve up the content while sprinkling in advertisements.

Tama Leaver, a professor of internet studies at Curtin University in Perth, noted in a recent essay that this added value lessens the likelihood of someone clicking into the article, hurting media companies while improving the tech companies’ bottom line.

“It is often in that reframing that advertisements appear, and this is where these platforms make money,” he wrote. He added that the code could be adjusted to charge the companies only when they create previews, not just links.

But Mr. Sims, the main architect of the code, said on Friday in the Senate that Google and Mr. Berners-Lee were simply wrong on the details.

“The code does not require Google and Facebook to pay for linking news content,” he said. “Indeed, discussions we are aware of have focused on paying upfront lump sum amounts, not per click.”

More broadly, lawmakers and public policy experts have argued that the companies do not just share information like a friend. They harvest details about their users in order to make what they share profitable.

As Mr. Lewis at the Australia Institute put it, they don’t just give you information about where to get coffee — they follow you to the cafe, watch what you order and where you go next, then sell that knowledge to companies that want to market you something else.

Senator Rex Patrick accused Google of pretending to be concerned about “technical precedence.” In fact, he said, it’s all about “commercial precedence” — money.

Google Australia collected roughly $3.3 billion from Australian advertisers in 2019, and paid about $77 million in taxes, with a reported profit of about $637 million.

Secret Algorithms vs. Transparency

One potentially groundbreaking element of the proposed legislation involves the secret sauce of Facebook, Google and subsidiaries like YouTube: the algorithms that determine what people see when they search or scroll through the platforms.

Early drafts of the bill would have required that tech companies give their news media partners 28 days’ notice before making any changes that would affect how users interact with their content.

Google and Facebook said that would be impossible because their algorithms are always changing in ways that can be difficult to measure for a subset like news, so in the latest draft, lawmakers limited the scope.

If the bill passes in one form or another, which seems likely, the digital platforms will have to give the media 14 days’ notice of deliberate algorithm changes that significantly affect their businesses. Even that, some critics argue, is not enough for Big Tech.

“I think Google and Facebook are seriously worried that other countries will join in Australia’s effort,” said Johan Lidberg, a professor of media at Monash University in Melbourne. “This could eventually cause substantial revenue losses globally and serious loss of control, exemplified by the algorithm issue.”

But, he added, using threats to bully lawmakers will not do them any good.

“Google’s overreaction perfectly illustrates why the code is needed,” he said, “and beyond that, the dire need for all governments, across the globe, to join in efforts in reining in and limiting the power of these companies that is completely out of hand.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/b...ews-media.html





Alphabet Pops Loon’s Balloons—but Won't Call It a Failure

Tonight, Alphabet is announcing that it is grounding Loon.
Steven Levy

The Plain View

Silicon Valley loves crazy. VCs will tell you that the crazy ideas are the ones that turn their investments into billions. Steve Jobs recited a prose-poem about how they push the world forward. And Alphabet—whose founders were told that it was crazy to capture all of the web to tackle the already-solved problem of search—has a whole division, dubbed X, devoted to nurturing crazy ideas. They call it their Moonshot Factory, but the original Apollo moonshot was fanatical about avoiding failure. Better to call this one a crazy factory.

Even with that mission, one project was so out there that they called it Loon. It involved circling the globe with packs of balloons that would beam internet access to underserved earthlings. Launched in 2013, it confounded skeptics by soaring toward viability. Loon’s technology kept improving, with balloons that stayed aloft longer and sent bits straight to cell phones. In 2018, Loon “graduated” from X and became a division of its own, known as one of Alphabet’s Other Bets. It got its own CEO and, eventually, some outside funding to augment the many millions of dollars the company had already spent. (Though it won’t say how many millions.) It helped send data to Peruvians after an earthquake and to Puerto Ricans post-hurricane. Last year, in a pilot project in Kenya, the division successfully delivered bandwidth to customers. Loon refused to give Alphabet a reason to kill it.

Until now. Tonight, Alphabet is announcing that it is grounding Loon. Astro Teller, who heads X and was also the chair of the Loon board, recommended that Alphabet no longer fund it, effectively letting the air out of the division’s balloon. “No one wanted to pick up the mantle,” he says.

The interesting thing is how far Loon got before Alphabet pulled the plug. When Teller first heard the idea, he says, he gave it about a 1 or 2 percent chance of succeeding. By the time of its launch in 2013—which I traveled to New Zealand to attend, following some of its first internet-bearing balloons—it had gotten to around 10 percent. By the 2018 graduation, Teller thought it was 50–50.

But in the last six months, the odds reset, like some grim-reaper-ish version of the New York Times needle. Loon had two challenges: the technological leap to deliver internet by balloon, and making the business case that people would pay for it. While the tech side was solving problems, the commercial environment became less favorable. In the last decade, much of the underserved world became connected—internet availability rose from 75 percent of the world to 93 percent. The remaining areas are primarily populated by those who can’t afford the 4G phones that receive Loon signals, or aren’t convinced that the internet—which in some cases has little content in their own language—was worth the effort. Teller came to realize that Loon was unlikely to ever contribute to Alphabet’s profits. And so the bet was lost.

Loon does leave a legacy. Probably no one has ever spent more money and brainpower on balloon technology, and Loon constantly set records for keeping them aloft. It broke ground in using sophisticated algorithms as well as the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather data to figure out how to ride wind currents and navigate the skies at 60,000 feet. Just last month, Loon engineers had a paper in Nature describing how their technology pioneered deep learning techniques to help their balloons autonomously form networks that thrived in a challenging environment. Another Loon breakthrough—sending high-speed data via beams of light (like fiber optic without the fiber)—kicked off a separate X project, Taara.

The fall of Loon is a good occasion to take a look at X’s accomplishments. Last year, the Moonshot Factory celebrated its first decade. In that time, it’s pioneered autonomous driving, which is now the basis of the Other Bet called Waymo; another project, Google Brain now powers much of Google’s technology with deep learning; and Alphabet still has high hopes for X graduates like its medical bet Verily, and its drone delivery company, Wing. And still inside X are projects involving robots and food. But it has also populated a boneyard of costly failures, now including Loon.

But Teller won’t call it failure. Loon, he says, was “a successful experiment.” Considering that he just killed a costly high-profile enterprise, I asked him what an unsuccessful experiment might look like. “Real failure is when the data tells you what you’re doing isn’t the right thing, and you do it anyway.” Loon was a success, he says, because once it was clear that it would never become a viable business, or solve internet connectivity, he called it quits.

Crazy? That’s the X way. “We can't get access to these really exceptional opportunities unless we’re willing to be wrong a decent amount of the time,” says Teller. His bosses are cool with that. He gets regular reviews from Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and CFO Ruth Porat, and says both continue to be supportive. How does Teller himself rate the performance of X? ”Eight out of 10,” he says.

Still, it’s never fun to end a project. “We wanted Loon to be a beautiful solution to a seemingly unsolvable problem,” says Teller.

Now, someone else will have to solve the problem. A few dozen Loon balloons are still aloft. Over the next nine months, remaining Loonatics will painstakingly recover them as they sink into the sunset. X will be on to its next crazy project, and Alphabet will keep the money flowing. “You can't make Loons,” Teller says, “unless you're willing, when they don't work out, to just say, ‘OK, let's start over and do something else.’”

Time Travel

In 2013, I wrote about the launch of Loon, describing how its cofounder Rich DeVaul helped shape the concept. (DeVaul, a leader of the X rapid evaluation team, left the company in 2018 because of a sexual harassment issue.)

Teller gave DeVaul some ideas to kill. One of them was a concept to deliver wireless Internet access via balloons in the stratosphere. CEO Larry Page had often spoken of this, and Teller knew that favorite topics of the cofounders had a leg up in funding decisions. But there was a big problem: Balloons are hostages to wind. If you try to keep a balloon in a fixed location, you must apply Sisyphean efforts to resist that wind. It almost always ends badly. Lockheed Martin recently tried to beat the odds with a giant solar-powered dirigible. But in its maiden test in 2011, Lockheed's High Altitude Long Endurance-Demonstrator prototype failed to reach altitude and was forced to abort, landing in a Pennsylvania forest. Lockheed has no plans for another test.

As DeVaul began spreadsheeting the possibilities, he came up with another concept. Rather than a behemoth that required massive amounts of energy to fight stratospheric winds to stay in place, he found himself drawn to the idea of smaller, cheaper weather balloons that sometimes stay aloft for 40 days or more, circling the globe. "I thought, why not have a bunch of these things, covering a whole area? How crazy would that be?" he says.

https://www.wired.com/story/plaintex...oons-balloons/





Report: 70% of Americans Now Have Access to Low-Priced Wired Broadband Plans
Joanna Nelius

It looks like things might be improving—at least a little—when it comes to closing the digital divide in America. The latest quarterly report from BroadbandNow highlights several small achievements that have closed the internet gap a little bit more, but also reveals the massive amount of work still ahead.

As of December, 70% of Americans had access to a low-priced broadband plan, defined as $60 a month or less, compared to 52% at the end of 2019—meaning around 59 million Americans received access to cheap internet for the first time in 2020.

Rhode Island, the smallest U.S. state, surprisingly has the most residents with access to a low-priced broadband plan with at least 100 Mbps download and 25 Mbps upload. According to the report, 98.4% of Rhode Island citizens have access to coverage, while 84.2% have access to affordable plans.

By contrast, 81% of California residents had access to the same speeds, but only 18.6% of those same residents could afford the same coverage—79.1% could afford the FCC-defined minimum speeds of 25Mbps/3Mbps. Just 30% of Americans have access to low-priced plans that deliver 100Mbps.

Broadband’s report also notes that for the first time Alaskan residents have access to low-priced broadband plans. That current number is less than 1% of the entire population of Alaska, so there’s still a lot of deployment work to be done. But now that some access is available in Alaska, that also means all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, have access to low-priced plans for the first time as well.

But as noted above with the California example, affordable internet access is still one of several major barriers to creating equitable broadband coverage, and one of the many things needed to close the digital divide. While a good number of states provide affordable broadband access defined by the FCC minimum to 50% or more of their residents, only six states, and the District of Columbia, provide affordable access to 100 Mbps internet speeds: Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island.

The state of broadband in America is a far cry from the rosy picture the FCC’s latest annual broadband report paints. The agency’s report, released Jan. 19, claims to show the “digital divide is rapidly closing.” If you’re looking at 25 Mbps numbers as noted above, sure. But that download speed has been the FCC minimum since 2015. Before that, it was 4 Mbps/1 Mbps in 2010. It took five years for the FCC to redefine broadband speeds the last time, so technically we are overdue at this point—and the next minimum should be 100Mbps.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, who was designated Acting Chairwoman of the FCC by President Biden today, dissented to the FCC broadband report.

“It confounds logic that today the FCC decides to release a report that says that broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion,” Rosenworcel said. “Across the country there are state authorities developing new plans, maps, and initiatives at the behest of their residents...What I take from all of this activity is that the job is not done.”

Naming Rosenworcel—a staunch critic of the FCC’s policies and actions under the leadership of former Chairman Ajit Pai—as acting FCC chairwoman seems to signal the Biden administration is dead serious about closing the digital divide, and closing it fast. And that seriousness seems to extend beyond the FCC, too.

In a committee hearing today for Secretary of Transportation nominee Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar briefly brought up the possibility of laying new fiber broadband lines at more infrastructure construction sites. (This is a method called “dig-once.”)

“Parts of South Bend [Indiana] have phenomenal broadband fiber connectivity for the simple reason that somebody remembered to lay conduit alongside some of the railways and highways,” Buttigieg said. “I would welcome the opportunity to make sure the DOT side of the equation is open to supporting that broadband deployment.”
https://gizmodo.com/report-70-of-ame...edc32c19ef33b4





E INK has Developed ACEP Gallery 4100 Color E-Paper
Michael Kozlowski

E INK has confirmed with Good e-Reader that the company has developed a 2nd generation ACEP, which is Advanced Color E-Paper. They have a subset of the technology that utilizes the the codename E INK Gallery 4100. This technology is not going to be employed for digital signage, but instead will be marketed towards e-reader companies who want a high resolution alternative to E INK Kaleido 2. Development kits for Gallery 4100, are being sent to all of the big players in the e-reader space. Sources have confirmed that it is likely this technology will be refined over 2021 and it is likely we will start seeing the first commercially viable devices released in 2022.

The first generation ACEP was released three years ago and was geared towards digital signage. Glass-based color filters used in digital signage are heavy and thick, and transparency is low, and therefore are not suitable for e-book readers. The refresh rate was terrible, which is why the vast majority of people employing this technology used it for a single page, such as a menu or to advertise a specific product.

ACEP achieves a full color gamut, including all eight primary colors, using only colored pigments. The display utilizes a single layer of electrophoretic fluid, which is controlled using voltages compatible with commercial TFT backplanes. The fluid can be incorporated into either microcapsule or Microcup structures. The richness of the colors is achieved by having all the colored pigments in every picture element (pixel) rather than the side-by-side pixel colors achieved with a CFA. This eliminates the light attenuation, which can be quite significant. Like regular E Ink ePaper, ACeP maintains the ultra-low-power and paperlike readability under all lighting conditions. They can display a total of 32,000 colors and 200 to 300 PPI, depending on the screen size.

ACEP 2 will not use a color filter array and is not glass-based. Instead, color layers are adhered to thin film of electronic ink to minimize weight and thickness and enhance transparency. It will be able to display over 40,000 different colors and it is rumored that E INK was able to integrate their Regal Waveform controllers in ACEP 2, resulting in faster page refresh speed and no ghosting.

E-reader companies will now have two different options for future hardware. ACEP Gallery 4100 or Kaleido 2. There are pros and cons for both technologies, but my bet is that ACEP will be able to display more colors and have a brighter future. It will be also more expensive to produce, so it will cost more. Color filter arrays found on Kaleido 1/2 are cheaper to produce, so it will likely be on the lower end hardware.
https://goodereader.com/blog/e-paper...-color-e-paper





Superconducting Microprocessors? Turns Out They're Ultra-Efficient

The 2.5 GHz prototype uses 80 times less energy than its semiconductor counterpart, even accounting for cooling
Michelle Hampson

Computers use a staggering amount of energy today. According to one recent estimate, data centers alone consume two percent of the world’s electricity, a figure that’s expected to climb to eight percent by the end of the decade. To buck that trend, though, perhaps the microprocessor, at the center of the computer universe, could be streamlined in entirely new ways.

One group of researchers in Japan have taken this idea to the limit, creating a superconducting microprocessor—one with zero electrical resistance. The new device, the first of its kind, is described in a study published last month in the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

Superconductor microprocessors could offer a potential solution for more energy efficient computing power—but for the fact that, at present, these designs require ultra-cold temperatures below 10 kelvin (or -263 degrees Celsius). The research group in Japan sought to create a superconductor microprocessor that’s adiabatic, meaning that, in principle, energy is not gained or lost from the system during the computing process.

While adiabatic semiconductor microprocessors exist, the new microprocessor prototype, called MANA (Monolithic Adiabatic iNtegration Architecture), is the world’s first adiabatic superconductor microprocessor. It’s composed of superconducting niobium and relies on hardware components called adiabatic quantum-flux-parametrons (AQFPs). Each AQFP is composed of a few fast-acting Josephson junction switches, which require very little energy to support superconductor electronics. The MANA microprocessor consists of more than 20,000 Josephson junctions (or more than 10,000 AQFPs) in total.

Christopher Ayala is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Advanced Sciences at Yokohama National University, in Japan, who helped develop the new microprocessor. “The AQFPs used to build the microprocessor have been optimized to operate adiabatically such that the energy drawn from the power supply can be recovered under relatively low clock frequencies up to around 10 GHz,” he explains. “This is low compared to the hundreds of gigahertz typically found in conventional superconductor electronics.”

This doesn’t mean that the group’s current-generation device hits 10 GHz speeds, however. In a press statement, Ayala added, “We also show on a separate chip that the data processing part of the microprocessor can operate up to a clock frequency of 2.5 GHz making this on par with today’s computing technologies. We even expect this to increase to 5-10 GHz as we make improvements in our design methodology and our experimental setup.”

The price of entry for the niobium-based microprocessor is of course the cryogenics and the energy cost for cooling the system down to superconducting temperatures.

“But even when taking this cooling overhead into account,” says Ayala, “The AQFP is still about 80 times more energy-efficient when compared to the state-of-the-art semiconductor electronic device, [such as] 7-nm FinFET, available today.”

Since the MANA microprocessor requires liquid helium-level temperatures, it’s better suited for large-scale computing infrastructures like data centers and supercomputers, where cryogenic cooling systems could be used.

“Most of these hurdles—namely area efficiency and improvement of latency and power clock networks—are research areas we have been heavily investigating, and we already have promising directions to pursue,” he says.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/...-in-efficiency





Hollywood and Hyper-Surveillance: the Incredible Story of Gorgon Stare

Sharon Weinberger commends a book on how a film inspired the United States to develop technology to capture everyone’s every move.

Eyes in the Sky: The Secret Rise of Gorgon Stare and How It Will Watch Us All Arthur Holland Michel Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2019)

In the 1998 Hollywood thriller Enemy of the State, an innocent man (played by Will Smith) is pursued by a rogue spy agency that uses the advanced satellite “Big Daddy” to monitor his every move. The film — released 15 years before Edward Snowden blew the whistle on a global surveillance complex — has achieved a cult following.

It was, however, much more than just prescient: it was also an inspiration, even a blueprint, for one of the most powerful surveillance technologies ever created. So contends technology writer and researcher Arthur Holland Michel in his compelling book Eyes in the Sky. He notes that a researcher (unnamed) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California who saw the movie at its debut decided to “explore — theoretically, at first — how emerging digital-imaging technology could be affixed to a satellite” to craft something like Big Daddy, despite the “nightmare scenario” it unleashes in the film. Holland Michel repeatedly notes this contradiction between military scientists’ good intentions and a technology based on a dystopian Hollywood plot.

He traces the development of that technology, called wide-area motion imagery (WAMI, pronounced ‘whammy’), by the US military from 2001. A camera on steroids, WAMI can capture images of large areas, in some cases an entire city. The technology got its big break after 2003, in the chaotic period following the US-led invasion of Iraq, where home-made bombs — improvised explosive devices (IEDs) — became the leading killer of US and coalition troops. Defence officials began to call for a Manhattan Project to spot and tackle the devices.

In 2006, the cinematically inspired research was picked up by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is tasked with US military innovation (D. Kaiser Nature 543, 176–177; 2017). DARPA funded the building of an aircraft-mounted camera with a capacity of almost two billion pixels. The Air Force had dubbed the project Gorgon Stare, after the monsters of penetrating gaze from classical Greek mythology, whose horrifying appearance turned observers to stone. (DARPA called its programme Argus, after another mythical creature: a giant with 100 eyes.)

Some books use blockbuster action films to demonstrate — or exaggerate — a technology’s terrifying potential. Here, Enemy of the State shows up repeatedly because it is integral to the development of Gorgon Stare. Researchers play clips from it in their briefings; they compare their technology to Big Daddy (although their camera is so far only on aircraft, not a satellite). At one point, incredibly, they consult the company responsible for the movie’s aerial filming. (It set me wondering — which government lab out there is currently building the Death Star from Stars Wars?)

Holland Michel’s book is not the first to look at technologies intended to achieve omniscience, but it is among the best. Writers examining the intersection of technology and privacy often repeat well-worn tropes, claiming that every novelty is the new Big Brother. But Eyes in the Sky is that rare creature: a deeply reported and deftly written investigation that seeks to understand both the implications of a technology and the motivations of its creators. Holland Michel notes tensions between security and privacy without hyping them.

And he gets those responsible for building WAMI to speak to him candidly — sometimes shockingly so. Take, for example, the former US military officer who touts the ‘benefits’ of the colonial subjugation of India (which he bizarrely claims created order among the country’s ethnic groups) to justify mass surveillance in the United States.

This potential for domestic mass surveillance becomes a key point. As the story proceeds, WAMI’s creators start looking for ways to use the battlefield technology at home: having built a new hammer, they search for more nails. Here, the story takes an even more dystopian turn. John Arnold, “a media-shy billionaire”, uses his own money to help secretly deploy a WAMI system to assist the police in tracking suspects in crime-ridden Baltimore, Maryland. Arnold, who has funded other “new crime-fighting technologies”, first learnt about WAMI’s use overseas from a podcast, and decided to debut it stateside. “Even the mayor was kept in the dark,” Holland Michel writes.

Private interests

Is this our future? A world in which billionaires fund the police to record entire cities from above? That plot twist is less Enemy of the State than Batman, although it’s hard to know who the hero is. (At least the fictional Big Daddy was funded by Congress, even if its supporters had to kill one stubborn lawmaker to get the job done.) It’s enough to make us all reach for tinfoil hats, which could come in handy to block what Holland Michel warns is coming next: infrared imaging that can detect people inside their homes. WAMI, if deployed above your city, already has the capacity to track your daily commute and errands, and allow those watching to retrace your steps for days or weeks.

To his credit, Holland Michel’s interviews with surveillance technologists are reported with context but without commentary, allowing readers to draw their own conclusions. In one understated episode, he reveals that — after the Baltimore project was exposed — the owner of the company that built and deployed the WAMI system there had “personally” provided gifts to a community organizer. The organizer was working to convince Baltimore residents that a sky-borne Big Brother might be in their interests.

One unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable, question is how successful WAMI was at its original purpose: preventing insurgent bomb attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. Holland Michel isn’t sure, because the answer is classified. Although investment in WAMI is “furious and ongoing”, he notes, “the Air Force declined repeated requests for even an approximate indication of WAMI’s impact on the battlefield”.

What we do know is that Afghanistan, one of the most surveilled countries on Earth, is slipping further into chaos. That can’t be blamed on WAMI, but it does indicate that the tech is not today’s Manhattan Project.

There are other questions. By focusing on a specific technology, does Holland Michel miss a bigger picture? Is the more serious threat the access of governments and corporations to our electronic devices? The answer to both is no, because he also traces how meshing WAMI with other sensors, including those on smartphones, will eventually create “a fully fused city” where “there may be nowhere to hide”. In the end, Eyes in the Sky transcends its title by using Gorgon Stare as a window into our future. And that is bleak.

When Gorgon Stare is completed, Michael Meermans, an executive at Sierra Nevada (the company in Sparks, Nevada, that built it) asks himself rhetorically whether the task is over. Of course not. “When it comes to the world of actually collecting information and creating knowledge,” Meermans says, “you can never stop.”
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01792-5





The Pandemic has Shown Free, Public Broadband Isn’t Just Socialism; it’s Common Sense

“We should learn from the government’s failure to upgrade the system, and from our experience of life under lockdown. Both have shown free, public broadband isn’t just socialism, but – to paraphrase a Minister who knew all about technical innovation, Tony Benn – it’s also common sense.”
Sam Browse

The BBC called it ‘broadband communism’, Boris Johnson called it a ‘crackpot’ plan, and Chris Leslie – a former Labour Shadow Chancellor turned Change UK candidate – joked ‘why not throw in free Sky TV? Free iPhones?’

But things have changed since Labour made its promise to deliver free, full-fibre broadband in December 2019. As the most serious pandemic in recent history forces us into our homes and even further online, the pledge is less a visionary statement about what our digital infrastructure should look like, and more a basic precondition for enabling everyone to live, learn and work during the public health crisis.

Fast forward a year from the general election, and our increased reliance on broadband access under lockdown has amplified concern for the “digital divide”. After mocking Labour’s 2019 manifesto commitment, journalists and politicians – rightly, if belatedly – quote with shock the ONS figure that 51% of households with an income of £6-10k are without access to the web.

Recently, Gavin Williamson faced a chorus of criticism for rejecting an offer from BT of free vouchers for children who are without an internet connection during the public health crisis. In their response, the Department for Education claimed that the 10Mbps connection speeds on offer were too slow to stream teaching materials, such as videos.

It’s obviously a risible argument – any connection is better than no connection – but it’s also a travesty that we’re relying on private corporations to supply sub-standard broadband speeds out of the “kindness” of their hearts. As Clement Attlee said, ‘charity is a cold, grey, loveless thing’.

As more of our lives move online and everything from education to public service provision is supplied through the medium of a broadband connection, we shouldn’t have to rely on the meagre generosity of private internet providers to guarantee what should be a basic right of access.

A 40% increase in traffic each year also means we need to upgrade the system – the 2018 National infrastructure Assessment estimates that we’ll reach capacity for the existing part-copper, part-fibre network between 2030 and 2040.

The Government is relying on the private sector to replace 80% of our superfast 30Mbps network with full-fibre gigabyte (1000Mbps) cables, while the other 20% – comprising hard to reach or remote areas – will be subsidised by the Department for Digital Culture Media and Sport (DCMS). Ministers had aspired to provide full fibre coverage by 2025.

Their approach isn’t working. Late last year, after a failure to reach key milestones, the target was revised downward to 85% coverage. DCMS has since neglected to publish any roadmap for meeting the new deadline, and there are no plans – or even target dates – for how and when the department will achieve 100% coverage after 2025. Currently, only 14% of the network is full-fibre – one of the lowest rates of coverage in Europe. There’s a good chance that the people who most need to be connected – people in isolated rural communities – will be completely overlooked.

As a recent Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report put it:

It is unacceptable that, once again, the Department has set a nationwide target for coverage (now revised from 100% to 85% by 2025), yet it has not published a realistic strategy for rolling it out, and has limited control over the levers necessary to achieve it.

PAC’s criticism of Ministers’ ‘limited control’ over the rollout and the failure to meet the deadline demolish one of the key reasons for adopting the Government’s market-led approach to developing digital infrastructure. In a 2018 report commissioned by DCMS on the costs and relative merits of different ways of upgrading the system, the authors argued that a market-driven approach was the only way to meet the 2025 target. That claim has proven demonstrably false.

And that’s why Labour’s 2019 pledge not only to provide free access to broadband, but to nationalise BT Openreach to develop full-fibre capacity was right. The private sector rollout is failing to deliver the network we need to take us into the next decade. If it can’t, the public sector must.

Rather than putting important decisions about key infrastructure in the hands of private companies, we need a publicly owned broadband network which is planned and upgraded on the basis of social need, not private profits; and rather than relying on the charity of corporations, access to that network should be a right, not reserved only for those that can afford it.

We should learn from the government’s failure to upgrade the system, and from our experience of life under lockdown. Both have shown that free, public broadband isn’t just socialism, but – to paraphrase a Minister who knew all about technical innovation, Tony Benn – it’s also common sense.
https://labouroutlook.org/2021/01/19...-common-sense/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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