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Old 22-11-17, 08:54 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 25th, ’17

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"The process the FCC has employed to consider potentially sweeping alterations to current net neutrality rules has been corrupted by the fraudulent use of Americans’ identities." – New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman














































November 25th, 2017




F.C.C. Is Said to Plan Repeal of Net Neutrality Rules
Cecilia Kang

The Federal Communications Commission is preparing a full repeal of net neutrality rules that require broadband providers to give consumers equal access to all content on the internet, putting more power in the hands of those companies to dictate people’s online experiences.

Ajit Pai, the chairman of the F.C.C., plans to reveal a sweeping proposal to scrap the net neutrality rules on Tuesday, according to two people familiar with the plan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the details are not public. The rules, created during the Obama administration, prohibit broadband providers from blocking, slowing down or charging more for the delivery of certain internet content. The proposal will be presented in a December meeting of F.C.C. commissioners and is expected to pass in a 3-to-2 vote along party lines.

A rollback of net neutrality regulations would represent a significant victory for broadband and telecom companies like AT&T and Comcast and would amount to a strike against consumers. When the rules were passed in 2015, they underlined the importance of high-speed internet to the lives of Americans and the need to more strongly regulate the communications service like a utility, as essential as electricity and the telephone.

But under a repeal, companies like AT&T and Comcast may be able to charge people higher fees to access certain websites and online services. The companies may also be able to prioritize their own services while disadvantaging websites run by rivals.

Mr. Pai plans to accompany the repeal of net neutrality with several other measures that will also benefit broadband companies, said the people with knowledge of the matter. That includes suggesting that the Federal Trade Commission, which has traditionally not brought many cases, be the enforcement agency of net neutrality violations, they said.

In addition, Mr. Pai plans to reverse a decision from the Obama administration that declared broadband be treated like a utility, the people said. That classification had opened the door to many more regulations for broadband providers.

The F.C.C. did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the repeal plans.

Consumer groups and Democrats denounced the proposed changes.

“It ain’t broke, so why fix it?” Julius Genachowski, a former Democratic chairman of the F.C.C., said in an interview. “The core rules of no blocking, no discrimination, and transparency have worked to create an ecosystem of innovation and investment that’s the envy of the rest of the world.”

Net neutrality has long been a thorny topic that has ignited lobbying battles and heated debate between internet and telecom companies. On one side, broadband companies have argued that the regulations encumbered their business plans. On the other side, tech giants like Google and Amazon said that without such rules, the broadband providers could become gatekeepers of what internet content reached consumers.

While some of the largest companies can afford to pay for faster delivery of their online content, start-ups like Etsy and Reddit, which have been fierce defenders of net neutrality, have said smaller companies would be squashed by what they view as tolls just to make sure their sites reach consumers.

During the Obama administration, the head of the F.C.C., Tom Wheeler, said net neutrality regulations were necessary to prevent a company like Verizon from slowing down the delivery of a service like Netflix or Sling TV, which competes with Verizon’s video service, Fios.

Mr. Pai’s proposal to scrap net neutrality rules is the latest in a deregulation blitz that includes the rollback of media ownership and broadband privacy rules. Mr. Pai, who was appointed by President Trump, opposed the rules when they were created in 2015, saying they would stifle investment by broadband providers.

More recently, Mr. Pai has clearly signaled his opposition to net neutrality. He has called the rules an example of government overreach in the fast-growing broadband industry. In April, a few months after he was named F.C.C. chairman, he announced his intention to overhaul the rules, saying the threat of harm to consumers was only theoretical.

“The truth of the matter is that we decided to abandon successful policies solely because of hypothetical harms and hysterical prophecies of doom,” Mr. Pai said in an April speech about the creation of the net neutrality rules.

The rollback comes as the Justice Department’s antitrust division under Makan Delrahim, another government official appointed by Mr. Trump, has taken the opposite approach with AT&T. On Monday, the Justice Department filed suit to block AT&T’s $85.4 billion merger with Time Warner.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/t...eutrality.html





FCC Will Also Order States to Scrap Plans for their Own Net Neutrality Laws

Double win for ISPs: No more net neutrality, and state laws will be preempted.
Jon Brodkin

In addition to ditching its own net neutrality rules, the Federal Communications Commission also plans to tell state and local governments that they cannot impose local laws regulating broadband service.

This detail was revealed by senior FCC officials in a phone briefing with reporters today, and it is a victory for broadband providers that asked for widespread preemption of state laws. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's proposed order finds that state and local laws must be preempted if they conflict with the US government's policy of deregulating broadband Internet service, FCC officials said. The FCC will vote on the order at its December 14 meeting.

It isn't clear yet exactly how extensive the preemption will be. Preemption would clearly prevent states from imposing net neutrality laws similar to the ones being repealed by the FCC, but it could also prevent state laws related to the privacy of Internet users or other consumer protections. Pai's staff said that states and other localities do not have jurisdiction over broadband because it is an interstate service and that it would subvert federal policy for states and localities to impose their own rules.

FCC officials did not take questions from Ars during today's phone briefing, but we have followed up with Chairman Pai's office to get more details on the scope of the proposed preemption. We will update this story if we get a response. Pai's draft order will be released publicly tomorrow and may provide more detail.

Pai staff echoes industry arguments

The arguments made by Pai's staff echoed those made previously by Internet service providers. Comcast, Verizon, and mobile industry lobby group CTIA had all urged the FCC to preempt state laws in the weeks leading up to today's announcement by Pai.

CTIA argued last week that broadband Internet access shouldn't be regulated by states because it is an interstate service "within the sole jurisdiction of the FCC, and Congress has advanced a national policy of non-regulation for information services." That's the exact position the FCC chairman's office is now taking.

Legislators in numerous states have tried to impose state-level versions of the FCC privacy rules that were eliminated by Congress earlier this year. With the FCC about to take its net neutrality rules off the books, ISPs said they worry that states will try to enforce net neutrality on their own.

The FCC's preemption authority does have limits. A previous FCC decision to preempt state laws that restrict the expansion of municipal broadband was struck down by a federal appeals court. The FCC will almost certainly face lawsuits challenging the net neutrality repeal order, and the preemption of state laws could play a big role in litigation.

It's not clear whether the FCC provided adequate notice to the public about the preemption plan. Today's proposal stems from a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that the FCC issued in May, but that proposal did not ask the public for input on preempting state net neutrality laws.

Pai argued in 2015 that the FCC violated federal administrative procedure rules by reclassifying ISPs as common carriers without providing adequate notice to the public beforehand. But in that case, the FCC did ask the public for input on whether it should impose common carrier regulations in an NPRM months before it voted. In the present case, the FCC did not ask for input on preempting state net neutrality laws at all.

We have asked Pai's office about this and will provide an update if we hear back.

More details on net neutrality repeal

Senior FCC officials also provided some more details on the rollback of federal net neutrality rules. For the most part, all consumer protections in the 2015 net neutrality order are being eliminated. That goes beyond the core net neutrality rules that outlaw blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.

For example, rules requiring disclosure of hidden fees and data caps will be overturned. The FCC will relinquish its role in evaluating whether ISPs can charge competitors for data cap exemptions and will no longer oversee interconnection disputes that harm Internet service quality. For a longer list of what's being eliminated, check out this previous article from July. As we wrote then, numerous consumer protections rely on the FCC's Title II common carrier authority to regulate broadband providers, and those rules will go away as a consequence of Pai's plan to eliminate the Title II classification.

Pai's proposal does add one new requirement—ISPs will have to make public disclosures if they engage in blocking or throttling of Internet content, and they will have to disclose deals that prioritize content from affiliates or content from companies that pay ISPs for priority access.

There won't be any specific FCC rules preventing Internet providers from blocking, throttling, or prioritizing content in exchange for payment. It would be up to the Federal Trade Commission or other consumer protection agencies to determine whether specific conduct should be allowed, FCC officials said. The new disclosure requirements will help the FTC and other agencies decide whether to take action against ISPs, the officials said.

FCC officials also said they plan to scale back their regulatory authority with a new interpretation of Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act. The section requires the FCC to promote competition in local telecommunications markets and to remove barriers that impede infrastructure investment.

Former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler treated Section 706 as a grant of authority. But Pai's order would end that policy by re-interpreting the section as merely "oratory."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...utrality-laws/





AT&T and Comcast Lawsuit has Nullified a City’s Broadband Competition Law

Bad news for Google Fiber: Nashville utility pole ordinance invalidated by judge.
Jon Brodkin

AT&T and Comcast have convinced a federal judge to nullify an ordinance that was designed to bring more broadband competition to Nashville, Tennessee.

The Nashville Metro Council last year passed a "One Touch Make Ready" rule that gives Google Fiber or other new ISPs faster access to utility poles. The ordinance lets a single company make all of the necessary wire adjustments on utility poles itself, instead of having to wait for incumbent providers like AT&T and Comcast to send work crews to move their own wires.

AT&T and Comcast sued the metro government in US District Court in Nashville, claiming that federal and local laws preempt the One Touch Make Ready rule. Judge Victoria Roberts agreed with AT&T and Comcast in a ruling issued Tuesday.

Google Fiber is offering service in Nashville despite saying last year that it was waiting for access to thousands of utility poles.

"We're reviewing [the] court ruling to understand its potential impact on our build in Nashville," a Google spokesperson said this week, according to The Tennessean. "We have made significant progress with new innovative deployment techniques in some areas of the city, but access to poles remains an important issue where underground deployment is not a possibility."

AT&T poles

The case centered on two sets of utility poles: those owned by AT&T and those owned by the municipal Nashville Electric Service (NES).

The Nashville ordinance is preempted by federal law when it comes to poles owned by AT&T and other private parties, the judge ruled. The Federal Communications Commission has jurisdiction to regulate pole attachments for privately owned poles except when states opt out of the federal regime.

"Tennessee has not opted out of FCC jurisdiction over pole attachments," Judge Roberts wrote.

In August, a similar One Touch Make Ready rule in Louisville, Kentucky survived despite another AT&T lawsuit. Kentucky is one of 20 states that has opted out of the federal pole attachment regime, giving Louisville a leg up over AT&T in that case.

Utility-owned poles

While AT&T owns nearly 20 percent of the poles, the NES utility owns around 80 percent.

AT&T and Comcast argued that NES has sole authority to regulate the terms of pole attachments for NES-owned poles, and that the Metro Nashville Council therefore overstepped its authority.

The court agreed with AT&T and Comcast's argument, saying, "It is clear that the [Metro Nashville] Charter grants NES broad, unencumbered power to manage and control the properties of the Electric Power Board. It expressly denies that power to the Mayor, the Council, and any other agency of the Metro Nashville government."

The court declined to make a final ruling on NES-owned poles, but AT&T and Comcast could get what they want soon. Nashville Metro argued that the claim should be dismissed because NES failed to join the case despite being an "indispensable party." But the judge is letting AT&T and Comcast amend their complaints in order to add NES as a party in the case.

NES previously told the court that it is "agnostic to the validity of the ordinance." Unless NES changes course, a ruling would be automatically entered in favor of AT&T and Comcast.

NES will be asked to make a statement on whether it intends to take a position. "If it continues to have no position, the Court will enter the declaration and injunction sought by Plaintiffs," the judge wrote.

Nashville Metro could appeal the ruling, but hasn't said whether it will do so. “We are reviewing the court’s decision and will make a determination regarding our next course of action in the near future," Jon Cooper, Nashville Mayor Megan Barry's law director, told The Tennessean.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-in-nashville/





New York Attorney General Says the FCC Won’t Help Investigate Fake Net Neutrality Comments
Adi Robertson

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman revealed today that his office has been investigating a flood of spam FCC comments that impersonated real people, and criticized the FCC for withholding useful information. In an open letter addressing FCC chairman Ajit Pai, Schneiderman writes that his office has spent six months investigating who submitted hundreds of thousands of identical anti-net neutrality comments under the names and addresses of unwitting Americans. But he says that the FCC has ignored multiple requests for logs and records, offering “no substantive response.”

Schneiderman argues that the fake comments constitute illegal impersonation and misuse of a person’s identity, and that “tens of thousands” of New York state residents are potentially affected. “The perpetrator or perpetrators attacked what is supposed to be an open public process by attempting to drown out and negate the views of the real people, businesses, and others who honestly commented on this important issue,” he writes. Using real names to do it is “akin to identity theft, and it happened on a massive scale.”

"The fake comments are “akin to identity theft”"

He says that his office first contacted the FCC in June, and has made at least nine requests between June and November, seeking confidential access to records related to the FCC’s comment system. “Yet we have received no substantive response to our investigative requests. None,” he says. Schneiderman didn’t specify how exactly these records might help the investigation, but he says they are “necessary” to figure out who was behind the comments.

Schneiderman’s statement was posted soon after the FCC announced plans to repeal net neutrality rules next month, weakening or possibly eliminating rules that stop ISPs from selectively slowing or blocking web traffic. He says this letter isn’t meant to be a political statement about these rules, but it implies that the FCC made its decision based on invalid information. “The process the FCC has employed to consider potentially sweeping alterations to current net neutrality rules has been corrupted by the fraudulent use of Americans’ identities  —  and the FCC has been unwilling to assist my office in our efforts to investigate this unlawful activity,” he writes.

People whose names were attached to fake comments have previously urged the FCC to run its own investigation into the comments, and Sen. Frank Pallone (D-NJ) requested an FBI probe in June. But the FCC has stayed generally quiet about the issue, and the agency didn’t immediately return an emailed request for comment about this latest news.

Public comments played a huge role in helping pass strong net neutrality rules in 2015, but this time around, the process was a mess. Many comments were made under assumed names or disposable email addresses, and the system briefly crashed in early May, when the FCC claimed it had been hit with a denial-of-service attack. The agency also said that it wasn’t basing its proposal on the quantity of submissions supporting or opposing net neutrality — which means it may well argue that the fake comments are a moot point.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/21/...ation-evidence





Op-Ed I'm On the FCC. Please Stop Us from Killing Net Neutrality
Jessica Rosenworcel

Right now, you can go online and connect with friends, watch videos and read the news. There’s a good chance you are reading this online right now.

We do much more on the internet than consume content, however. Increasingly, the internet is also where we create. We use online platforms and digital services to develop, share and spread ideas around the corner and around the globe.

This is the open internet experience we all know, and it’s a big part of why America’s internet economy is the envy of the world.

But this week, the leadership at the Federal Communications Commission put forth a plan to gut the foundation of this openness. They have proposed to end net neutrality, and they are trying to force a vote on their plan on Dec. 14.

If the idea behind the plan is bad, the process for it has been even worse.

It’s a lousy idea. And it deserves a heated response from the millions of Americans who work and create online every day.

Net neutrality is the right to go where you want and do what you want on the internet without your broadband provider getting in the way. It means your broadband provider can’t block websites, throttle services or charge you premiums if you want to reach certain online content.

Proponents of wiping out these rules think that by allowing broadband providers more control and the ability to charge for premium access, it will spur investment. This is a dubious proposition.

Wiping out net neutrality would have big consequences. Without it, your broadband provider could carve internet access into fast and slow lanes, favoring the traffic of online platforms that have made special payments and consigning all others to a bumpy road. Your provider would have the power to choose which voices online to amplify and which to censor. The move could affect everything online, including the connections we make and the communities we create.

This is not the internet experience we know today. Americans should prevent the plan from becoming the law of the land.

There is something not right about a few unelected FCC officials making such vast determinations about the future of the internet. I’m not alone in thinking this. More than 22 million people have filed comments with the agency. They overwhelmingly want the FCC to preserve and protect net neutrality.

At the same time, there are real questions about who filed some of the net neutrality comments with the FCC. There are credible allegations that many of the comments were submitted by bots and others using the names of deceased people. What’s more, some 50,000 recent consumer complaints appear to have gone missing.

As he announced this week, New York Atty. Gen. Eric Schneiderman has been investigating these apparently fake comments for six months. The Government Accountability Office is also looking into how a denial-of-service attack may have prevented people from getting their thoughts into the official record.

In short, this is a mess. If the idea behind the plan is bad, the process for commenting on it has been even worse.

Before my fellow FCC members vote to dismantle net neutrality, they need to get out from behind their desks and computers and speak to the public directly. The FCC needs to hold hearings around the country to get a better sense of how the public feels about the proposal.

When they do this, they will likely find that, outside of a cadre of high-paid lobbyists and lawyers in Washington, there isn’t a constituency that likes this proposal. In fact, the FCC will probably discover that they have angered the public and caused them to question just whom the agency works for.

I think the FCC needs to work for the public, and therefore that this proposal needs to be slowed down and eventually stopped. In the time before the agency votes, anyone who agrees should do something old-fashioned: Make a ruckus.

Reach out to the rest of the FCC now. Tell them they can’t take away internet openness without a fight.

Jessica Rosenworcel is a member of the Federal Communications Commission.
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed...122-story.html





First Republican Lawmaker to Publicly Oppose the FCC’s Radical Net Neutrality Repeal

Susan Collins (R-ME) opposition signals trouble ahead for the agency as GOP Senator joins with two other Maine lawmakers in bi-partisan opposition to FCC plan

The Bangor Daily News is reporting that Maine Senator Susan Collins is the first GOP member of Congress to publicly oppose the agency’s plan to end net neutrality. Republican members of the House and Senate have been silent since FCC Chairman Ajit Pai announced a December vote to repeal Title II net neutrality. Since Tuesday morning Congress has heard unprecedented public outcry with net neutrality activists driving nearly 450,000 calls to Congress through the BattleForTheNet.com campaign.

“Internet providers must not manage their system in an anti-competitive way that limits consumers’ choices,” a spokesperson for Senator Collins told the Bangor Daily News, explaining the Senator’s opposition to the FCC’s plan.

Responding to today’s news, Evan Greer, Campaign Director for Fight for the Future (pronouns she/her) had this to say:

“We would like to thank Senator Collins for having the courage to speak out against the FCC’s extreme plan to gut Title II net neutrality protections, and we hope to see more Republican lawmakers join her call for the FCC to protect, not gut net neutrality before the agency’s December 14th vote. Senator Collins clearly recognizes that businesses and Internet users across this country simply cannot afford to be unprotected from anti-competitive practices perpetrated by the nation’s broadband giants. An overwhelming majority of Republican voters support existing net neutrality rules. Other GOP lawmakers should follow Senator Collins lead, listen to their constituents about this crucial issue, and take action to stop the FCC’s irresponsible rush toward a vote.”

Since Chairman Pai’s announcement earlier this week, we have seen a huge outpouring of support from across the country. In the last 72 hours, nearly 450,000 calls to Congress have been generated by concerned Internet users through BattleForTheNet.com alone, and today’s announcement shows that citizen pressure is working. When enough people speak up, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have to sit up and take notice – and that’s exactly what we’re seeing happen today.”
https://www.fightforthefuture.org/ne...r-to-publicly/





Justice Department Sues to Block AT&T-Time Warner Merger
Cecilia Kang and Michael J. de la Merced

The Justice Department sued to block AT&T’s $85.4 billion bid for Time Warner on Monday, setting up a showdown over the first blockbuster acquisition to be considered by the Trump administration and drawing limits on corporate power in the fast-evolving media landscape.

By challenging the deal, the Justice Department is taking an approach to antitrust issues that is starkly different from the Obama administration’s. In 2011, for instance, the department approved a similar deal — Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal — after imposing numerous conditions on the transaction.

If AT&T’s bid for Time Warner were to go through, the merger would create a media and telecommunications behemoth. By itself, AT&T is one of the nation’s largest internet and telephone providers. With its 2015 acquisition of DirecTV, the country’s largest satellite company, it also became the largest television distributor in the United States.

The combined company would have an unrivaled ability to reach consumers through news and entertainment programming. Among Time Warner’s properties are HBO, the home to “Game of Thrones”; Warner Bros., the studio behind blockbusters like “Wonder Woman” and the Harry Potter film series; and Turner Broadcasting, which includes the news channel CNN and the sports-heavy TNT network.

Makan Delrahim, the Justice Department’s top antitrust regulator, said a union of the two companies would harm consumers and weaken competition.

“This merger would greatly harm American consumers,” Mr. Delrahim, the assistant attorney general for antitrust, said in a statement. “It would mean higher monthly television bills and fewer of the new, emerging innovative options that consumers are beginning to enjoy.”

AT&T said it would defend the proposed deal in court, arguing that companies don’t directly compete against each other and that the government hasn’t challenged a similar kind of merger in decades.

“It defies logic, and it’s unprecedented,” AT&T’s chief executive, Randall L. Stephenson, said in a news conference on Monday after the suit was filed.

The complaint was filed in Federal District Court for the District of Columbia against AT&T, DirecTV and Time Warner.

In a call with reporters on Monday, a Justice Department official said the agency remained open to negotiating a settlement. To gain favor with the antitrust division, the official said, the companies would have to sell off some of their assets.

During the news conference, Mr. Stephenson said that the Justice Department had a long history of approving similar mergers and that the company was not willing to part with any assets to get the deal approved.

In its complaint, the Justice Department said consumers would most likely face higher prices for cable or satellite television subscriptions because AT&T would be able to charge more for licensing of valuable programming like the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, which is broadcast in large part on Turner networks.

The government argued further that AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner would stifle innovation from online streaming firms like SlingTV, which competes with AT&T’s DirecTV Now service. AT&T could withhold programs from those online providers.

A combined AT&T and Time Warner, the complaint said, would be more harmful to consumers and larger in scope than Comcast-NBCUniversal. Comcast’s cable and broadband service reaches more than one-third of the nation.

“Both AT&T/DirecTV’s video distribution services and Time Warner’s TV networks are available nationwide, so the harm would occur throughout the country,” the Justice Department said in its complaint.

Mr. Stephenson has argued that AT&T needs media content in order to compete against internet firms like Google and Facebook for digital advertising dollars. With a big stock of television programming, it would also compete more effectively for subscribers against companies like Comcast and Verizon, which both own content.

While speaking with reporters on Monday, Mr. Stephenson obliquely raised the issue of possible interference by the White House. President Trump, a frequent critic of news coverage by CNN, said during the 2016 presidential campaign that the deal should be blocked. Mr. Stephenson called the issue of CNN the “elephant in the room” and speculated about its role in Mr. Delrahim’s decision.

“Frankly, I don’t know,” Mr. Stephenson said.

Mr. Delrahim has spoken at length about how Justice Department officials should handle mergers involving two companies that don’t compete against each other, like the one between AT&T and Time Warner. Problems with those mergers have traditionally been resolved by adding conditions known as consent decrees, which restrict the new company’s behavior or operations.

Mr. Delrahim has argued that those remedies are not effective. Instead, he has spoken in favor of so-called structural remedies, like forcing a company to sell assets before a merger or acquisition.

On Sept. 29, he was put in a position to act on that theory, when he was sworn in at the Justice Department.

Throughout the summer, Justice Department officials and AT&T lawyers had discussed conditions that would allay antitrust concerns. During the talks, AT&T representatives said the combined company would abstain from anticompetitive business practices. At least some Justice Department staff members seemed open to the idea, according to two people familiar with the government review.

The antitrust staff, which included holdovers from the Obama administration, presented Mr. Delrahim with three options: Accept the deal with conditions, accept the deal with divestitures, or block it altogether.

Five weeks later, it became clear to AT&T that the deal was in trouble.

An article by The Wall Street Journal on Nov. 2 reported that the Justice Department was considering filing a lawsuit against the deal. The next day, according to a company official, AT&T asked for a meeting with Mr. Delrahim and senior staff.

Mr. Stephenson and the company’s general counsel flew from Dallas to Washington a few days later to meet with the officials. After the meeting, the two sides were far from reaching a deal.

According to AT&T sources, the Justice Department asked the company to rid itself of Turner or DirecTV, the satellite TV provider.

Government officials, however, said AT&T had offered to sell CNN. By the end of the day’s talks, Mr. Stephenson put out a statement saying he had never offered to sell CNN.

The next day, on Nov. 9, Mr. Stephenson, speaking at The New York Times’s DealBook conference, said the company was prepared to defend itself in court. He added that a significant merger of companies that were not direct competitors with each other had not been challenged in 40 years.

In recent weeks, the Justice Department reached out to several state attorneys general who had been investigating the transaction to see if they would join the lawsuit as plaintiffs. None of them have yet joined, leaving the Justice Department as the sole plaintiff.

Whether or not Mr. Trump played a role in the Justice Department’s attempt to block the deal will remain a subject of debate, fanned in part by the president himself. On Nov. 15, he wrote on his @realDonaldTrump Twitter account: “While in the Philippines I was forced to watch @CNN, which I have not done in months, and again realized how bad, and FAKE, it is. Loser!” The tweet was retweeted on the official @POTUS account.

In July, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee, wrote a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions that asked, “Has any employee of the White House or adviser to the president (either official or unofficial) had any contact with any Department of Justice employee regarding the AT&T/Time Warner transaction?”

Mr. Delrahim has strongly denied there has been interference by the White House or Mr. Trump.

Legal experts were divided on the merits of the suit.

Gene Kimmelman, the president of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group and a former senior antitrust official at the Justice Department, said, “We believe the Justice Department has presented a persuasive case that should satisfy any federal judge that this transaction is illegal and should be blocked, regardless of any politics surrounding the deal.”

Ryan Radia, a legal and regulatory expert at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, took a different view. “The AT&T-Time Warner merger is a vertical transaction that wouldn’t reduce competition in any distinct market,” Mr. Radia said. “Under established antitrust principles, the government will have a difficult time showing a court that the deal is likely to harm consumers.”

Anxiety over the merger has simmered in the CNN newsroom for months, with staff members speculating about the role of the president’s animosity toward the network.

On Monday, CNN was the only cable news channel to broadcast the AT&T news conference. Anchors reminded viewers that Mr. Trump had once tweeted a video that portrayed him body-slamming a wrestler with a CNN logo for a head.

AT&T’s general counsel, David R. McAtee, said in a statement on Monday: “Today’s D.O.J. lawsuit is a radical and inexplicable departure from decades of antitrust precedent. We are confident that the court will reject the government’s claims and permit this merger under longstanding legal precedent.”

Cecilia Kang reported from Washington, and Michael J. de la Merced from New York. Michael Grynbaum contributed reporting from New York.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/20/b...er-merger.html





AT&T Suit May Herald a New Antitrust Era - or Trumpian Pique
Tali Arbel

The Trump administration's decision to oppose the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger may be clouded by suspicions of political influence. But considered on its merits, it could mark a significant departure in antitrust policy, one that might block or modify a broader set of mergers found to harm consumers.

The move disconcerted both Wall Street and the telecom and media industries, none of which expected it. Consumer groups are applauding, saying it's a good step by the Justice Department to protect people from higher cable bills and ensure that web-based alternatives to TV aren't stifled. (Many of the same groups, however, are also protesting the government's plan, announced Tuesday, to roll back "net neutrality" rules intended to equalize access to the internet.)

Matters, of course, are complicated by President Donald Trump's long-running feud with CNN, a Time Warner company, which Trump regularly denigrates as "fake news" and "failing." On Tuesday, Trump called the deal "not good for the country" and said he thought it would cause prices to go up. A White House spokeswoman said Monday she wasn't aware of any efforts to influence the case.

The Justice Department has suggested that AT&T could resolve the case by selling off DirecTV or a Time Warner business that includes CNN, according to a person familiar with the situation who couldn't go on the record. AT&T has rejected any option that would cause it to lose control of CNN.

LEGACY OF THE PAST

In 2011, Obama-era antitrust regulators waved through Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal — a deal that, like the current one, brought together a major provider of television and internet service and an entertainment conglomerate. (AT&T offers wireless, home internet and TV services; Time Warner owns the Warner Bros. studio and networks including HBO, CNN and TBS.)

To prevent Comcast from abusing its greater leverage, regulators imposed a host of conditions on the company. For example, Comcast had to offer its TV and movies to online video competitors at the same rates as it did to cable and satellite rivals. But this approach isn't universally acclaimed.

For one thing, conditions are typically temporary; the ones for Comcast expire next year. They also don't fundamentally change behavioral incentives for the company, and they require ongoing enforcement. Complaints in the past have dragged on for years. Among critics of such "behavioral commitments" is Makan Delrahim, now the Justice Department's new antitrust chief.

"The DOJ in this instance is learning from those past mistakes," said Lina Khan, the legal policy director at the Open Markets Institute, a think tank that opposes excessive corporate power.

Delrahim has argued for requiring merged companies to divest certain businesses instead of imposing post-merger requirements on them. AT&T, however, doesn't want to do that. Its plan is to marry popular Time Warner networks with its nationwide wireless and television services in order to build a data-driven ad business on top of it all.

NEW THEORY OF COMPETITION

AT&T says TV bills won't go up and consumers will benefit from innovations in packaging video. The Justice Department and some experts argue the opposite.

For instance, MoffettNathanson analysts said in a note Tuesday that it was "in fact, very easy to imagine" how a company that both makes and distributes "must-have" news, sports and entertainment programming could use its power to thwart competitors by withholding it from rivals.

The government argues that AT&T could, for example, charge upstart streaming services prohibitively expensive fees for the rights to HBO or other channels, or even withhold them, making it harder to compete with AT&T's services. AT&T has said it intends to broaden, not limit, distribution of Time Warner.

"The DOJ's argument is simple: AT&T cannot lawfully be given this market power, because the incentives for them to abuse it are self-evident," the analysts wrote. "It is simply not the case that this is a 'novel' legal theory."

Antitrust enforcement used to be more aggressive. But starting in the 1980s, it became more focused on promoting consumer welfare than on ensuring competitive markets, Khan said. That made "vertical mergers," where the companies in question weren't direct competitors, more attractive, since regulators believed they created efficiencies without harming consumers.

For regulators to reject a vertical merger "represents a stark departure from the U.S. enforcement practice of the recent decades," Columbia law professor Anu Bradford said in an email. The last time the U.S. government won a court victory in a vertical merger antitrust case was in 1972, when the Supreme Court said Ford's takeover of a spark-plug business violated antitrust law.

The suit against AT&T could be the start of a new, more aggressive tack in antitrust by the Justice Department. But that depends on whether other considerations played a role.

"If it's politically motivated because the president doesn't like CNN, then it's just a wild card," said NYU law professor Eleanor Fox. "If this represents a change of heart, to be much more aggressive against mergers, it would be a game changer."
http://www.newstimes.com/business/te...e-12373298.php





Washington Has Delivered a Tangled Message on AT&T’s Power

Loosening rules on internet providers would let big companies charge more for their services. But a suit to block a merger signals a tougher stance against big business.
David Gelles

In a matter of hours this week, the Trump administration twice weighed in on one of the central issues shaping business and society today — just how much market power big companies should be allowed to amass.

Yet in back-to-back developments, two federal agencies arrived at starkly different conclusions, and one company, AT&T, found itself on opposite sides of the debate.

On Monday, the Department of Justice sued to block AT&T’s proposed $85.4 billion takeover of Time Warner, a deal that would unite one of the country’s biggest internet providers with the company that owns CNN, HBO and the Warner Bros. film studio. It was a signal from antitrust enforcers that an era of breakneck consolidation might be coming to an end, and that mergers would be evaluated by a new set of standards.

Then on Tuesday morning, the Federal Communications Commission announced plans to dismantle net neutrality rules. The move would let companies charge higher fees and block access to some websites, and was effectively a green light for big internet service providers — including AT&T — to freely wield their influence against rivals.

In each development, there are signs that the Trump administration is trying to reckon with a media and telecommunications industry that has become intensely concentrated in recent years; most Americans now get their internet and phone services from one of a few providers, and most TV shows and movies are produced by a handful of big companies.

But there is so far no clear view about how Washington will navigate this constantly shifting terrain in the future.

“We have one government, but two separate agencies with opposing views,” said Spencer Kurn, an analyst at New Street Research. “You’ve got one agency saying that marrying content and distribution results in too much market power, and another agency saying there’s no problem with a distributor favoring their content over someone else’s.”

At the intersection of both debates is AT&T. A global powerhouse offering access to the internet through mobile phones and landlines, and satellite television service through DirecTV, AT&T has a long history of battling regulators. In 1982, it agreed to break itself up and end a nearly century-old monopoly. In 2011, regulators scuttled its proposed deal to acquire T-Mobile. Randall L. Stephenson, the AT&T chief executive, has vowed to fight the Justice Department in court to save the Time Warner deal.

AT&T stands to gain from the rollback of net neutrality rules. It could charge companies and consumers more for high-speed internet access, and use its market influence to hinder content providers it competes against.

“It’s an ‘open the champagne bottles’ moment for AT&T,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia University who coined the term net neutrality — the concept of providing equal access to the internet. “They can just tell people to pony up.”

But AT&T’s long-term aspirations could be dealt a severe blow if the Justice Department succeeds in blocking its takeover of Time Warner.

On Tuesday, President Trump signaled his approval of the lawsuit. “Personally, I’ve always felt that that was a deal that’s not good for the country,” he said in response to a question from reporters. If the merger was approved, he suggested, “I think your pricing is going to go up.”

For all the good a rollback of net neutrality rules would do AT&T, the company is looking to diversify. Its core businesses of delivering phone, internet and satellite television services are maturing. A big move into the content business would expand the company’s sources of revenue, and give it new opportunities for cost savings.

One of AT&T’s biggest competitors, Comcast, has already married content and distribution with the acquisition of NBCUniversal. If the government succeeds in preventing the Time Warner deal, it will raise sharp questions about the future of AT&T, and its competitors.

“This could be a watershed event for future business combinations in media,” said Rich Greenfield, an analyst with BTIG. “Does this mean Comcast will be broken up?”

There is no evidence that the decisions by the Justice Department and the F.C.C. were coordinated.

“I do not think it is a well-thought-out, cohesive policy that is coming from the executive office,” said Christopher L. Sagers, an antitrust professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law.

Instead, the diverging decisions reflect an effort by different agencies trying to come to grips with a radically transformed media and telecommunications landscape, one where Silicon Valley companies are suddenly powerhouses in content creation, and traditional media companies exert vast influence over how information flows across the internet.

“We’re definitely getting mixed messages from the administration,” said Larry Downes, project director for the Center for Business and Public Policy at Georgetown University.

The Justice Department’s decision to intervene in the AT&T deal was the more surprising of the two developments this week. Many antitrust experts believe that the government’s case against the deal is weak, because it is a so-called vertical merger, bringing together two businesses that do not compete directly with each other.

But the lawsuit is a sign that the Justice Department is beginning to think about antitrust enforcement in fundamentally new ways.

The decision by the F.C.C. to roll back net neutrality rules was less surprising, but has equally far-reaching implications. With less regulation, big internet providers will be able to charge more for their services, extract new fees from websites and block content.

“The F.C.C. is saying that they’re going to give up any legal authority over regulating high-speed internet,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School. “They’re handing the power to choose winners and losers online to about five companies.”

Despite the seeming irreconcilability of the moves by the Justice Department and the F.C.C., some see a common narrative in the two decisions.

“They’re both defense strategies against Silicon Valley,” Mr. Wu said.

By rolling back net neutrality, the government is giving old-school media companies like AT&T and Comcast more leverage over companies like Netflix, Google and Facebook that are increasingly becoming their competitors. And by challenging the AT&T merger with Time Warner, the Justice Department could be laying the groundwork for a new approach to antitrust enforcement that could be used to go after big technology firms.

Barry Diller, the media mogul and chairman of IAC, which owns a host of websites including Match.com and Vimeo, cited the power of tech companies in expressing exasperation at the Justice Department suit.

“If you think AT&T has too much market power because of distribution, tell me what happens if you are Facebook and Google, which have unbelievable concentration in distribution,” Mr. Diller said. “How would you ever be able to get a content addition to Google?”

And there is another school of thought suggesting that more vigorous antitrust enforcement might have obviated the need for net neutrality rules in the first place.

If regulators had been stricter about ensuring robust competition among internet service providers over the years, the theory goes, big firms like AT&T would not be able to operate in ways that harm competition.

“Net neutrality was a distant-second-best remedy,” Mr. Sagers said. “If we could have competition in internet service provision, that would have been way better than relying on the F.C.C.”

Even if the Justice Department succeeds in blocking AT&T’s deal for Time Warner, the opportunity to use antitrust enforcement as a means to give consumers more choice among internet providers has likely passed. And now, by unwinding net neutrality rules, Mr. Sagers said, the Trump administration will make it easier for big companies like AT&T to maintain the already enormous power it has amassed through earlier consolidation.

“If you want to have a monopoly,” he said, “the government can be your best friend.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/b...ntitrust-.html





Buyers Circle Suddenly Attractive U.S. Media Companies
Chris Sanders

All of a sudden, it seems, everybody wants to own a U.S. media company.

In the last few weeks, several of the world’s biggest telecommunications and media companies have started circling Twenty First Century Fox Inc with an eye to buying a significant piece of Rupert Murdoch’s global media and entertainment empire.

Potential suitors include Comcast Corp, Verizon Communications Inc and Walt Disney Co. Meanwhile, Meredith Corp is considering a bid for Time Inc and Discovery Communications Inc is acquiring Scripps Networks Interactive Inc.

Viacom Inc shares rose 10 percent on Friday, suggesting it may also be a takeover target.

The sudden surge in merger and acquisition activity in media looks to be powered by relatively low asset prices, cheap financing and the prospect of tax cuts.

There are also longer-term forces at work: traditional media companies are struggling with more customers canceling pricy cable contracts while Netflix Inc and Amazon.com Inc are spending billions of dollars on making shows and movies.

More viewers now stream programming on smartphones or other devices, diverting the flow of advertising dollars away from traditional media companies.

“This is an industry that is going through incredible disruption. You can look at what Netflix is doing and how they’re building subscribers,” said AT&T Inc Chief Executive Randall Stephenson at a conference last week.

“Everybody’s reimagining and rethinking their business models,” said Stephenson, head of the wireless carrier which is itself in the process of buying media and entertainment company Time Warner Inc for $85.4 billion.

If that deal overcomes U.S. antitrust objections and other transactions go ahead, it will make Comcast, the U.S. No. 1 cable provider and owner of NBCUniversal, look “relatively tiny in a landscape dominated by tech giants,” said BTIG analyst Rich Greenfield.

The House of Representatives took a major step on Thursday toward the biggest U.S. tax-code overhaul since the 1980s.

If corporate tax cuts become law, there may be a wave of merger and acquisition activity across all industries, media investor Mario Gabelli told Reuters earlier this week.

“You will have global lovemaking at an accelerated rate,” he said. “Companies are ready to grow... They just need to have what the rules of engagement are.”

At the same time, the debt financing markets have remained wide open for major transformational deals this year, though recent skirmishes in the junk-bond market have served as a reminder this may not last for long.

U.S. fund investors walloped high-yield funds with their biggest week of withdrawals since March, Lipper data showed on Thursday.

Still, most mega-deals look possible, especially if the combined company’s debt remains investment grade. Banks have been eager this month to open their wallets for what could be the biggest syndicated loan financing ever for an investment-grade acquisition, backing chipmaker Broadcom Ltd’s unsolicited $103 billion bid to buy Qualcomm Inc.

Assets that could be on the block look cheap. Shares of media companies have long traded at a discount to the wider market. Fox, for example, trades at around 13.9 times estimated earnings per share for the next year, in line with the wider media sector at 13.6. The broader S&P 500, meanwhile, trades at 18 times next year’s earnings.

Media firms’ generally high debt loads and the threat posed by technology companies elbowing their way into new markets have compressed those multiples.

Weak earnings have contributed to that. Fox’s profit per share is down about 50 percent from 2013, while Viacom’s is up only slightly. CBS’s net income has shrunk about 33 percent in that time, but earnings per share have risen thanks to stock buybacks.

The outcome of AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner is being keenly watched by potential acquirers. U.S. President Donald Trump is a frequent critic of Time Warner’s CNN and he vowed to block the deal when he was on the campaign trail last year.

The Justice Department is expected to sue AT&T to block the deal, but the wireless carrier has vowed to fight in court.

“Everyone will seek consolidation partners if AT&T succeeds,” said Gene Kimmelman, a veteran of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, and now president of the advocacy group Public Knowledge.

Reporting by Liana Baker, Anna Driver, Jessica Toonkel, Anjali Athavaley, Diane Bartz, Greg Roumeliotis and Dan Burns; Writing by Chris Sanders; Editing by Bill Rigby
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-to...-idUKKBN1DJ0C9





Even with Streaming Video, a Third of Americans Still Buy and Rent
Ashley Rodriguez

Netflix hasn’t obsoleted the video store just yet.

One-third of Americans still buy and rent videos, in addition to using streaming services like Netflix and YouTube, NPD Group found in its annual Entertainment Trends in America report (paywall). The research firm surveyed more than 7,000 members of its US online panel about their entertainment consumption during August 2017.

That’s an uptick from last year, when 26% of those surveyed said they bought and rented movies in addition to using streaming services. While there are plenty of movies and shows on subscription services like Netflix, most new titles hit DVD and online-video stores like iTunes and Amazon Video beforehand, and some older films and shows are only available for purchase or rental.

Family films are still popular buys because kids will watch them over and over again. Spotty broadband service in rural America makes buying and renting more reliable than streaming for some. And some people just like to own and collect movies. Studios like Sony are even censoring the more risqué scenes in older films like Spider-Man and Ghostbusters to make them more family-friendly—and purchasable.

Overall, 54% of people surveyed said they still buy or rent video. It’s not all DVDs and Blu-rays. Physical sales have plummeted compared to digital, data from the Digital Entertainment Group shows.

“When it comes to entertainment, few consumers limit themselves to one single option,” Graham Gee, president of video entertainment at NPD, said in a statement. “Going out to the movies, watching cable TV, and viewing DVDs at home are still very popular activities, even as subscriptions to streaming services rise.”

The US is still the world’s largest market for DVDs and Blu-rays, which explains why local video stores linger there, about a dozen Blockbuster Video stores are hanging on, and Netflix still has about 3.5 million customers who pay to rent DVDs by mail.

Americans watched an extra hour of TV and movies per week this August than they did last year, the data showed.
https://qz.com/1136150/even-with-str...-buy-and-rent/





‘Justice League’ a Disappointing No. 1 as ‘Wonder’ Surprises
Brooks Barnes

“Justice League” was supposed to be the ultimate box office juggernaut.

The movie features a murderer’s row of superheroes: Wonder Woman, Batman, Cyborg, the Flash, Superman, Aquaman. Some of the world’s most popular stars — Ben Affleck, Gal Gadot, Jason Momoa, Amy Adams — fill out the cast. Joss Whedon, the writer-director behind “The Avengers,” one of the biggest ticket sellers of all time, helped write the screenplay.

Instead, “Justice League” collected a disappointing $96 million at North American theaters over the weekend, or 42 percent less than its franchise predecessor, “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” had over its first three days in March 2016. It was enough to top the weekend box office, but analysts had expected “Justice League” to take in at least $110 million based on surveys that measure prerelease audience interest.

Most movies would be instant blockbusters with $96 million in opening-weekend ticket sales. But “Justice League” is far from a typical movie. On top of the blue-chip characters it assembles, the film cost at least $400 million to make and market worldwide. (Overseas, “Justice League” collected an additional $185.5 million, with strong results in South Korea and Brazil.)

The lackluster domestic turnout for “Justice League” raises new questions about the ability of Warner Bros. to effectively exploit its DC Comics characters on the big screen. Warner has delivered successful television adaptations like “The Flash,” “Gotham” and “Arrow.” But four of the studio’s last five superhero movies — designed to sell mountains of merchandise in addition to tickets — have been considered letdowns, to one degree or another. “Wonder Woman” is the lone exception.

“Justice League” received mixed-to-negative reviews. Rotten Tomatoes, the powerful review aggregation site, delayed posting a score for the film until the last minute as part of a new video initiative. That move was interpreted as an effort to hide a “rotten” score, especially since Warner owns 25 percent of Rotten Tomatoes. A spokeswoman for the site subsequently said that Warner was not involved in the decision to delay the score.

“The path to ultimate box office is all about the extremely lucrative Thanksgiving week ahead,” Jeff Goldstein, Warner’s president of domestic distribution, said by phone on Sunday.

The mood was dramatically lighter at Lionsgate, where executives were doing cartwheels over the audience response to “Wonder,” a heartstring-pulling drama about a boy with facial birth defects (Jacob Tremblay), his kind parents (Julia Roberts, Owen Wilson) and his highly unkind schoolmates. “Wonder” collected $27.1 million, according to comScore, which compiles box office data — triple what analysts had expected before its release.

“Wonder,” which received strong reviews, cost Lionsgate, Participant Media and other financiers about $20 million to make. It was directed by Stephen Chbosky (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower”) and adapted from the best-selling children’s novel by R.J. Palacio. The PG-rated movie received an A-plus grade from ticket buyers in CinemaScore exit polls, an indication that it could be a popular choice for families over the Thanksgiving holiday.

“Earnest emotions can be easily mocked, but they penetrate deep,” Erik Feig, co-president of the Lionsgate Motion Picture Group, said in an email. “I think people feel besieged and uncertain about the world — wondering what is really in the hearts of their neighbors — and this movie shows that there is much goodness in most of us.”

Mr. Feig has built a reputation among book authors for cinematic adaptations. He worked with Stephenie Meyer to turn her “Twilight” novels into films. Other authors with whom Mr. Feig has worked include Mr. Chbosky (“The Perks of Being a Wallflower” started as a book) and Suzanne Collins, the force behind the “Hunger Games” book and movie series. Mr. Feig optioned the rights to Ms. Palacio’s “Wonder” before it was officially published.

Another family movie, “The Star,” an animated telling of the Nativity story, also arrived to sturdy ticket sales over the weekend. “The Star,” which cost Sony about $20 million to make, collected an estimated $10 million, which was a bit more than analysts had been expecting. Sony expects the movie, cofinanced with Walden Media, to chug along until Christmas.

It is possible that “Justice League” could make up lost ground over the Thanksgiving holiday. Only two movies are scheduled to arrive in wide release, both starting on Wednesday: Pixar’s “Coco” and the Denzel Washington vehicle “Roman J. Israel, Esq.” Warner noted that ticket buyers gave “Justice League” a B-plus grade in CinemaScore exit polls, which could spur ample word of mouth. To compare, “Batman v Superman” got a B.

Warner seemed to have turned a corner with “Wonder Woman,” which wowed critics and audiences alike in June. But “Justice League” ran into unexpected production and marketing difficulties.

Mr. Whedon, initially brought in to rewrite scenes, ended up overseeing extensive reshoots when the film’s director, Zack Snyder, stepped away to contend with the death of his daughter. On the marketing side, Warner was somewhat hobbled by Mr. Affleck’s personal travails, which made him a less effective promotional force for the film.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/m...ox-office.html





Skype Vanishes From App Stores in China, Including Apple’s
Paul Mozur

One of the last foreign-run tools for online communication in China appears to be in trouble with the authorities there.

For almost a month, Skype, the internet phone call and messaging service, has been unavailable on a number of sites where apps are downloaded in China, including Apple’s app store in the country.

“We have been notified by the Ministry of Public Security that a number of voice over internet protocol apps do not comply with local law. Therefore these apps have been removed from the app store in China,” an Apple spokeswoman said Tuesday in an emailed statement responding to questions about Skype’s disappearance from the app store. “These apps remain available in all other markets where they do business.”

The removal led to a volley of complaints from Chinese users on internet message boards who were no longer able to pay for Skype’s services through Apple. The users said that the disruption began in late October.

Skype, which is owned by Microsoft, still functions in China, and its fate in the country is not yet clear. But its removal from the app stores is the most recent example of a decades-long push by China’s government to control and monitor the flow of information online.

While China has long wielded the most sophisticated and comprehensive internet controls in the world, under President Xi Jinping it has upped the ante, squelching most major foreign social networks and messaging apps one at a time.

Earlier this autumn, the Facebook-owned messaging service WhatsApp was hit by blockages in China, becoming the latest in a long line of products to be rendered unusable by Chinese government filters. Others include Gmail, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Telegram and Line.

Beijing appears to have disabled these apps because they generally feature encryption options that make messages harder for the government to monitor. Such products also often run afoul of government rules that require the use of real-name identification for each and every account.

A Microsoft spokesman said Skype had been “temporarily removed” from Apple’s store and that the company was “working to reinstate the app as soon as possible.” But the spokesman did not address Skype’s absence from a variety of major third-party Android app stores. Because Google’s services are largely blocked in China, Android users revert to alternate stores for downloads, and Skype’s main app was not available on popular ones run by Chinese tech giants like Huawei and Xiaomi.

In recent months, a perfect storm of sensitive political meetings and a new cybersecurity law has led to a sharp crackdown on internet freedoms in China. Foreign TV shows were taken down, software that helps evade China’s internet filters was targeted with heavy disruptions, and in some cases, companies restricted the amount of time that children could spend playing video games.

But a key Chinese Communist Party meeting had already ended when Skype disappeared from the app stores — an indication that the cybersecurity law was the reason, and that the law, which began to be implemented in June, is likely to have a deep and long-lasting impact on how the internet works in China. While the rules do not specifically ban foreign messaging apps, they do include general language that could be used to justify crackdowns.

“A broad reading of provisions in the law could be taken to mean that there is no longer support for allowing unfettered access to foreign communications tools such as Skype, WhatsApp, Signal and others that are outside the direct control of Chinese authorities,” said Paul Triolo, the head of global technology at Eurasia Group, a consultancy.

“Hence these also come under pressure, and are increasingly being throttled or blocked,” he said.

Earlier this year, Apple faced heavy criticism after it said it had decided to take down software from its app store in China that helps circumvent the government’s internet filters, colloquially called the Great Firewall.

In that case, as in this one, it said that the apps violated Chinese rules and that it had taken them down to comply. Earlier this year, Apple said it planned to open a data center in China, also in response to China’s new internet laws, which require that such centers be within the country’s borders.

Carolyn Zhang contributed research.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/21/b...app-china.html





Judge Finds ‘Stupid Patent’ Web Story is Protected Speech
Nicholas Iovino

An Australian court can’t make a California-based digital rights watchdog take down a web article that mocks a company’s patent as “stupid,” a federal judge ruled Friday.

San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation sued Global Equity Management (SA) Pty Ltd., or GEMSA, in April, claiming the Australian firm exploited its home country’s weaker free speech protections to secure an unconstitutional injunction against EFF.

Kurt Opsahl, EFF’s deputy executive director and general counsel, hailed the ruling as a victory for free speech.

“We knew all along the speech was protected by the First Amendment,” Opsahl said in a phone interview Friday. “We were pleased to see the court agree.”

Opsahl said the ruling sends a strong message EFF and other speakers can weigh in on important topics, like patent reform, without fear of being muzzled by foreign court orders.

The dispute stems from an article EFF published in June 2016, featuring GEMSA in its “Stupid Patent of the Month” series. The GEMSA patent is for a “virtual cabinet” to store data. In the article, EFF staff attorney Daniel Nazer called GEMSA a “classic patent troll” that uses its patent on graphic representations of data storage to sue “just about anyone who runs a website.” The article also says GEMSA “appears to have no business other than patent litigation.”

In October 2016, GEMSA obtained an injunction from the Supreme Court of South Australia ordering EFF to take down the article and cease publishing any further content on GEMSA’s intellectual property.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Jon Tigar granted EFF’s motion for default judgment, declaring the Australian court’s injunction unenforceable in the United States and “repugnant to the United States constitution.”

“The broad context of the article is clearly opinion, as it is a part of EFF’s humorous and pointed ‘Stupid Patent of the Month’ series,” Tigar wrote in his 18-page ruling. “EFF would not have been found liable for defamation under U.S. and California law.”

Tigar found the U.S. SPEECH Act of 2010 protects Americans from foreign judgments that restrict speech if those rulings would fail to hold weight under U.S. law.

“The U.S. and California would provide substantially more First Amendment protection by prohibiting prior restraints on speech in all but the most extreme circumstances, and providing additional procedural protections in the form of California’s anti-SLAPP law,” Tigar concluded in his ruling.

Opsahl said a case like this underscores “the very purpose of the SPEECH ACT” – to deter “defamation tourism,” a practice in which entities obtain injunctions that would not be allowed under U.S. law by litigating in countries with weaker constitutional safeguards.

Had the Australian injunction been allowed to stand, Opsahl said EFF and other American speakers would “have to worry that even if what you’re doing is completely protected under the U.S Constitution, that someone could turn to a law anywhere else in the world, find something more restrictive and use it to get an unconstitutional restriction.”

Tigar also invalidated the Australian court order on separate grounds, finding that EFF was never properly served with notice of the Australian lawsuit under the rules of the Hague Convention, to which both the U.S. and Australia are signatories.

GEMSA never defended itself against EFF’s complaint, but Tigar found the company had no excuse for its absence because it was properly served and litigates other patent suits in the Northern District of California.

“GEMSA has demonstrated that it knows how to sue EFF in Australian court, how to litigate against others in this court, including regarding the patent at issue, has been properly served, and failed to enter any appearance, including to contest service or jurisdiction,” Tigar wrote.

Opsahl said Tigar’s ruling removes a cloud that was hanging over EFF because GEMSA had threatened to use the injunction to get its “Stupid Patent of the Month” webpage de-listed through web search services like Google.

“Now we have the order declaring this unenforceable in the U.S. so we could show Google that order,” Opsahl said.

GEMSA did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment Friday afternoon.
https://www.courthousenews.com/judge...tected-speech/





Man Gets Threats—Not Bug Bounty—After Finding DJI Customer Data in Public View

A bug bounty hunter shared evidence; DJI called him a hacker and threatened with CFAA.
Sean Gallagher

DJI, the Chinese company that manufactures the popular Phantom brand of consumer quadcopter drones, was informed in September that developers had left the private keys for both the "wildcard" certificate for all the company's Web domains and the keys to cloud storage accounts on Amazon Web Services exposed publicly in code posted to GitHub. Using the data, researcher Kevin Finisterre was able to access flight log data and images uploaded by DJI customers, including photos of government IDs, drivers licenses, and passports. Some of the data included flight logs from accounts associated with government and military domains.

Finisterre found the security error after beginning to probe DJI's systems under DJI's bug bounty program, which was announced in August. But as Finisterre worked to document the bug with the company, he got increasing pushback—including a threat of charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). DJI refused to offer any protection against legal action in the company's "final offer" for the data. So Finisterre dropped out of the program and published his findings publicly yesterday, along with a narrative entitled, "Why I walked away from $30,000 of DJI bounty money."

"Hacker?"

DJI launched its bug bounty this fall shortly after the US Army issued a ban on using DJI drones for any military purpose due to "operational security" concerns. There were also spreading reports of people hacking the firmware of DJI drones—some have even posted hacks to GitHub by Finisterre. But according to Finisterre, the program was clearly rushed out. The company did not, and has yet to, define the scope of the bounty program publicly. So when Finisterre discovered that DJI's SSL certificates and firmware AES encryption keys had been exposed through searches on GitHub—in some cases for as long as four years—he contacted the company to see if its servers were within the scope of the bug bounty program. He was told they were—a statement that would later be walked back from by DJI officials.

Finisterre ran another GitHub search and discovered AWS private keys for DJI's SkyPixel photo-sharing service. He learned through a DJI modders' Slack channel that some DJI AWS accounts were set to be publicly accessible, and the "buckets" included "all attachments to the service e-mails they receive… images of damaged drones… receipt and other personal data… and 'occasional photos of people cut by propellers.'"

After his initial inquiry, Finisterre didn't hear back about the scope of the program for more than two weeks. He next sent a follow-up e-mail and received a message saying:

For the scope, the bug bounty program covers all the security issues in firmware, application and servers, including source code leak, security workaround, privacy issue. We are working on a detailed user guide for it.

After getting that assurance, Finisterre said he began working on a disclosure report based on what he had seen, documenting the extent of the breach. During this, he discovered personal identifying information. In light of that, he gave the company an immediate heads-up on the exposure "via a friend at DJI with a better technical understanding than the people I was dealing with."

Finisterre was contacted by another DJI employee a few hours later. He informed this representative, "I had seen unencrypted flight logs, passports, driver's licenses, and Identification Cards." Finisterre continued to communicate with the employee, Yongsen Chen, "in a long line of education on basic security concepts, and bug bounty practices"—the exchange stretched over 130 e-mails.

"At one point… DJI even offered to hire me directly to consult with them on their security," Finisterre wrote.

When Finisterre submitted his full report on the exposure to the bug bounty program, he received an e-mail from DJI's Brendan Schulman that said the company's servers were suddenly not in scope for the bounty program. Still, Finisterre received notification from DJI's bug bounty program e-mail account on September 28 that his report earned the top reward for the program—$30,000 in cash. Then, Finisterre heard nothing for nearly a month.

Ultimately, Finisterre received an e-mail containing an agreement contract that he said "did not offer researchers any sort of protection. For me personally, the wording put my right to work at risk, and posed a direct conflict of interest to many things including my freedom of speech." It seemed clear to Finisterre that "the entire ‘Bug Bounty’ program was rushed based on this alone," he wrote.

Despite efforts by Schulman to help communicate with DJI's Chinese legal department, things did not significantly improve. Finisterre soon received a letter from the legal department in Shenzhen demanding that he destroy any data he had uncovered in his research or face prosecution under the CFAA.

When a "final offer" contract arrived from DJI, Finisterre wrote, "no less than four lawyers told me in various ways that the agreement was not only extremely risky, but it was likely crafted in bad faith to silence anyone that signed it. It was ultimately going to cost me several thousand dollars for a lawyer that I was confident could cover all angles to put my concerns to bed and make the agreement signable." DJI stopped communicating with Finisterre after he expressed offense over the CFAA threat, and he walked away from the agreement, forfeiting the $30,000 he had been promised.

Ars reached out to Adam Lisberg, DJI's corporate communication director for North America, for comment. He responded by referring us to the following official statement issued on November 16. The language calls Finisterre a "hacker."

DJI is investigating the reported unauthorized access of one of DJI’s servers containing personal information submitted by our users. As part of its commitment to customers’ data security, DJI engaged an independent cyber security firm to investigate this report and the impact of any unauthorized access to that data. Today, a hacker who obtained some of this data posted online his confidential communications with DJI employees about his attempts to claim a “bug bounty” from the DJI Security Response Center.

DJI implemented its Security Response Center to encourage independent security researchers to responsibly report potential vulnerabilities. DJI asks researchers to follow standard terms for bug bounty programs, which are designed to protect confidential data and allow time for analysis and resolution of a vulnerability before it is publicly disclosed. The hacker in question refused to agree to these terms, despite DJI’s continued attempts to negotiate with him, and threatened DJI if his terms were not met.

In the statement, DJI claims to have paid out thousands of dollars to "almost a dozen researchers" since the program was launched. The terms of the bug bounty program posted by DJI exclude "third-party websites or services, including third party software incorporated in DJI applications," though it is not clear whether these terms were communicated to Finisterre prior to his work. And bug submissions through the bug bounty program's official e-mail address were shut down as of yesterday, as per this bounce-back message received by Ars:

Please note that starting 2017-11-16, we will no longer be accepting bug reports thru this e-mail. If you have any questions, please contact us at bugbounty@dji.com and we will get back to you shortly.

If you do want to submit bugs to DJI, you still can through their security web page.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...sed-customers/





Google Collects Android Users’ Locations even when Location Services are Disabled
Keith Collins

Many people realize that smartphones track their locations. But what if you actively turn off location services, haven’t used any apps, and haven’t even inserted a carrier SIM card?

Even if you take all of those precautions, phones running Android software gather data about your location and send it back to Google when they’re connected to the internet, a Quartz investigation has revealed.

Since the beginning of 2017, Android phones have been collecting the addresses of nearby cellular towers—even when location services are disabled—and sending that data back to Google. The result is that Google, the unit of Alphabet behind Android, has access to data about individuals’ locations and their movements that go far beyond a reasonable consumer expectation of privacy.

Quartz observed the data collection occur and contacted Google, which confirmed the practice.

The cell tower addresses have been included in information sent to the system Google uses to manage push notifications and messages on Android phones for the past 11 months, according to a Google spokesperson. They were never used or stored, the spokesperson said, and the company is now taking steps to end the practice after being contacted by Quartz. By the end of November, the company said, Android phones will no longer send cell-tower location data to Google, at least as part of this particular service, which consumers cannot disable.

“In January of this year, we began looking into using Cell ID codes as an additional signal to further improve the speed and performance of message delivery,” the Google spokesperson said in an email. “However, we never incorporated Cell ID into our network sync system, so that data was immediately discarded, and we updated it to no longer request Cell ID.”

It is not clear how cell-tower addresses, transmitted as a data string that identifies a specific cell tower, could have been used to improve message delivery. But the privacy implications of the covert location-sharing practice are plain. While information about a single cell tower can only offer an approximation of where a mobile device actually is, multiple towers can be used to triangulate its location to within about a quarter-mile radius, or to a more exact pinpoint in urban areas, where cell towers are closer together.

The practice is troubling for people who’d prefer they weren’t tracked, especially for those such as law-enforcement officials or victims of domestic abuse who turn off location services thinking they’re fully concealing their whereabouts. Although the data sent to Google is encrypted, it could potentially be sent to a third party if the phone had been compromised with spyware or other methods of hacking. Each phone has a unique ID number, with which the location data can be associated.

The revelation comes as Google and other internet companies are under fire from lawmakers and regulators, including for the extent to which they vacuum up data about users. Such personal data, ranging from users’ political views to their purchase histories to their locations, are foundational to the business successes of companies like Facebook and Alphabet, built on targeted advertising and personalization and together valued at over $1.2 trillion by investors.

The location-sharing practice does not appear to be limited to any particular type of Android phone or tablet; Google was apparently collecting cell tower data from all modern Android devices before being contacted by Quartz. A source familiar with the matter said the cell tower addresses were being sent to Google after a change in early 2017 to the Firebase Cloud Messaging service, which is owned by Google and runs on Android phones by default.

Even devices that had been reset to factory default settings and apps, with location services disabled, were observed by Quartz sending nearby cell-tower addresses to Google. Devices with a cellular data or WiFi connection appear to send the data to Google each time they come within range of a new cell tower. When Android devices are connected to a WiFi network, they will send the tower addresses to Google even if they don’t have SIM cards installed.

“It has pretty concerning implications,” said Bill Budington, a software engineer who works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for digital privacy. “You can kind of envision any number of circumstances where that could be extremely sensitive information that puts a person at risk.”

The section of Google’s privacy policy that covers location sharing says the company will collect location information from devices that use its services, but does not indicate whether it will collect data from Android devices when location services are disabled:

When you use Google services, we may collect and process information about your actual location. We use various technologies to determine location, including IP address, GPS, and other sensors that may, for example, provide Google with information on nearby devices, Wi-Fi access points and cell towers.

According to the Google spokesperson, the company’s system that controls its push notifications and messages is “distinctly separate from Location Services, which provide a device’s location to apps.” Android devices never offered consumers a way to opt out of the collection of cell tower data.

“It is really a mystery as to why this is not optional,” said Matthew Hickey, a security expert and researcher at Hacker House, a security firm based in London. “It seems quite intrusive for Google to be collecting such information that is only relevant to carrier networks when there are no SIM card or enabled services.”

While Google says it doesn’t use the location data it collects using this service, its does allow advertisers to target consumers using location data, an approach that has obvious commercial value. The company can tell using precise location tracking, for example, whether an individual with an Android phone or running Google apps has set foot in a specific store, and use that to target the advertising a user subsequently sees.
https://qz.com/1131515/google-collec...-are-disabled/





Over 400 of the World's Most Popular Websites Record Your Every Keystroke, Princeton Researchers Find

“Session replay scripts” can be used to log (and then playback) everything you typed or clicked on a website.
Louise Matsakis

Most people who’ve spent time on the internet have some understanding that many websites log their visits and keep record of what pages they’ve looked at. When you search for a pair of shoes on a retailer’s site for example, it records that you were interested in them. The next day, you see an advertisement for the same pair on Instagram or another social media site.

The idea of websites tracking users isn’t new, but research from Princeton University released last week indicates that online tracking is far more invasive than most users understand. In the first installment of a series titled “No Boundaries,” three researchers from Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) explain how third-party scripts that run on many of the world’s most popular websites track your every keystroke and then send that information to a third-party server.

Some highly-trafficked sites run software that records every time you click and every word you type. If you go to a website, begin to fill out a form, and then abandon it, every letter you entered in is still recorded, according to the researchers’ findings. If you accidentally paste something into a form that was copied to your clipboard, it’s also recorded. Facebook users were outraged in 2013 when it was discovered that the social network was doing something similar with status updates—it recorded what users they typed, even if they never ended up posting it.

These scripts, or bits of code that websites run, are called “session replay” scripts. Session replay scripts are used by companies to gain insight into how their customers are using their sites and to identify confusing webpages. But the scripts don’t just aggregate general statistics, they record and are capable of playing back individual browsing sessions. The scripts don’t run on every page, but are often placed on pages where users input sensitive information, like passwords and medical conditions.

It’s difficult for the user to understand what’s happening “unless you dug deep into the privacy policy,” Steve Englehardt, one of the researchers behind the study, told me over the phone. “I’m just happy that users will be made aware of it."

Most troubling is that the information session replay scripts collect can’t “reasonably be expected to be kept anonymous,” according to the researchers. Some of the companies that provide this software, like FullStory, design tracking scripts that even allow website owners to link the recordings they gather to a user’s real identity. On the backend, companies can see that a user is connected to a specific email or name. FullStory did not return a request for comment.

To conduct their study, Englehardt, Gunes Acar, and Arvind Narayanan looked at seven of the most popular session replay companies including FullStory, SessionCam, Clicktale, Smartlook, UserReplay, Hotjar, and Russia’s most popular search engine Yandex. They set up test pages and installed session replay scripts on them from six of the seven companies. Their findings indicated that at least one of these company’s scripts is being used by 482 of the world’s top 50,000 sites, according to their Alexa ranking.

Prominent companies who use the scripts include men’s retailer Bonobos.com, Walgreens.com, and the financial investment firm Fidelity.com. It’s also worth noting that 482 might be a low estimate. It’s likely that the scripts don’t record every user that visits a site, the researchers told me. So when they were testing, they likely did not detect some scripts because they were not activated. You can see all the popular websites that utilize session replay scripts documented by the researchers here.

Since the Princeton researchers released their research, both Bonobos and Walgreens said they would stop using session replay scripts. “We take the protection of our customers’ data very seriously and are investigating the claims made in the study that was published yesterday. As we look into the concerns that were raised, and out of an abundance of caution, we have stopped sharing data with FullStory,” a spokesperson from Walgreens told me in an email last Thursday.

Bonobos did not return a request for comment, but the company told Wired that it “eliminated data sharing with FullStory in order to evaluate our protocols and operations with respect to their service. We are continually assessing and strengthening systems and processes in order to protect our customers’ data."

Fidelity did not say it would stop using session replay scripts. “We don’t comment on relationship (sic) we have with vendors or companies but one of our highest priorities is the protection of customer information,” a spokesperson said in a statement.

Companies that sell replay scripts do offer a number of redaction tools that allow websites to exclude sensitive content from recordings, and some even explicitly forbid the collection of user data. Still, the use of session replay scripts by so many of the world’s most popular websites has serious privacy implications.

“Collection of page content by third-party replay scripts may cause sensitive information such as medical conditions, credit card details, and other personal information displayed on a page to leak to the third-party as part of the recording,” the researchers wrote in their post.

Passwords are often accidentally included in recordings, despite that the scripts are designed to exclude them. The researchers found that other personal information was also often not redacted, or only redacted partially, at least with some of the scripts. Two of the companies, UserReplay and SessionCam, block all user inputs by default (they just track where users are clicking), which is a far safer approach.

It’s not just what users input that matters, however. When you log into a website, what’s displayed on the screen can also be sensitive. The researchers found that “none of the companies appear to provide automated redaction of displayed content by default; all displayed content ends up leaking.”

For example, the researchers tested Walgreens.com, which used to run a script from the company FullStory. Despite the fact that Walgreens does use a number of redaction features offered by FullStory, they found that information like medical conditions and prescriptions still are being collected by the session replay script, along with users’ real names.

Finally, the study’s authors are worried that session script companies could be vulnerable to targeted hacks, especially because they’re likely high-value targets. For example, many of these companies have dashboards where clients can playback the recordings they collect. But Yandex, Hotjar, and Smartlook’s dashboards run non-encrypted HTTP pages, rather than much more secure, encrypted HTTPS pages.

“This allows an active man-in-the-middle to inject a script into the playback page and extract all of the recording data,” the study authors wrote.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Yandex told me the company tries to use HTTPS wherever it can, and said it is going to update its product soon to no longer use HTTP. "HTTP is used intentionally, as session recordings load websites using iframe. Unfortunately, loading http content from https websites is prohibited on the browser level so http player is required to support http websites for this feature," the statement read.

HotJar and UserReplay did not issue a statement in time for publication. Clicktale and Smartlook did not return a request for comment. SessionCam CEO Kevin Goodings wrote in a blog post that “Everyone at SessionCam can get behind the CITP’s conclusion: ‘Improving user experience is a critical task for publishers. However, it shouldn’t come at the expense of user privacy.’ The whole team at SessionCam lives these values every day. The privacy of your website visitors and the security of your data is of paramount importance to us.”

It’s not just session scripts that are following you around the internet. A study published earlier this year found that nearly half of the world’s 1,000 most popular websites use the same tracking software to monitor your behavior in various ways.

If you want to block session replay scripts, popular ad-blocking tool AdBlock Plus will now protect you against all of the ones documented in the Princeton study. AdBlock Plus formerly only protected against some, but has now been updated to block all as a result of the researchers’ work.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...s-tracking-you





How a Wi-Fi Pineapple Can Steal Your Data (And How to Protect Yourself From It)

The Wi-Fi Pineapple enables anyone to steal data on public Wi-Fi networks. Here’s how it facilitates two sophisticated network attacks and how to protect yourself against them.
Daniel Oberhaus

In popular media, hackers are often portrayed as an elite cabal of ski mask aficionados and computer experts that can keyboard mash their way into any digital device. But what if I told you that you can also pwn almost any internet connected device around you, even if you can’t tell an SSL from an SSID?

Yes, my friend, the device you are looking for is a Wi-Fi Pineapple, which can turn anyone from hack to hacker for the low, low price of $99. Since it is so cheap and easy to use, it’s important to understand how the Pineapple works in order to protect yourself against its attacks.

The Pineapple is a nifty little device first released in 2008 by Hak5, a company that develops tools for penetration testers, or "pentesters." Pentesters are usually hired by organizations to attack their own networks in order to expose vulnerabilities before they are discovered by some bad actors. The Pineapple allows pentesters to easily execute sophisticated attacks on public Wi-Fi networks to see how the attacks work and how to protect the network from those attacks.

Pineapples aren’t much different than the normal Wi-Fi access points you use to get internet at home or in the office, just more powerful. They use multiple radios rather than just a single radio found in most routers. This means a Pineapple is able to interface with hundreds of devices at a time, rather than just a few dozen. Moreover, the Pineapple’s web interface is optimized to execute complicated network attacks.

“When I invented the Wi-Fi Pineapple, I saw that Wi-Fi had inherent flaws that made it vulnerable to spoofing attacks,” Darren Kitchen, the founder of Hak5, told me in an email. A spoofing attack is when a hacker impersonates a service or device in order to gain access to a victim’s data.

“A lot of nefarious types had already taken advantage of these weaknesses, but the majority of people weren't aware of the problem,” Kitchen added. “I figured if information security people had access to a device that could easily exploit these flaws, it would raise awareness and get things fixed.”

Although the Pineapple has always had a cult following within hacker circles, it recently rose to prominence after it was featured as a major plot point in the shows Silicon Valley and Mr. Robot.

In these shows the device was used to spoof a website and to execute a man-in-the-middle attack to hack the FBI, respectively. According to Kitchen, who served as a technical advisor on the Silicon Valley episode, the fictional depiction of the Pineapple in these shows isn’t so far from the truth.

The Pineapple is an invaluable tool for pentesters, but its popularity is also due to the fact that it can be used for more nefarious purposes. Hackers can easily wield the device to collect sensitive personal information from unsuspecting users on public Wi-Fi networks.

It’s important to keep in mind that just because you can pwn all the things with a Pineapple, doesn’t mean it’s legal or that you should. Owning a Pineapple is legal, but taking money out of someone's bank account by stealing their unencrypted password is not. The Pineapple just makes grabbing unencrypted passwords sent over Wi-Fi easier. I am not a lawyer, but in general, if you do not have explicit permission to use the Pineapple on a network that you own as well as from anyone who could reasonably connect to that network, you are treading in dangerous territory.

Again: Executing a Pineapple’s exploits on a network you don’t own if you’re not a pentester working in a professional setting can quickly put you into illegal territory. Even if you don’t get caught, you’re still an asshole for doing it, so just…don’t.

This guide is meant to be an informational glimpse into the world of network pentesting, as well as a reminder about the importance of personal information security. After showing you just a few of the ways a Pineapple can be used to pwn you, I’ll also walk you through some simple steps you can take to make sure you’re never on the wrong end of a malicious Pineapple attack.

Hak5 makes a few different versions of the Pineapple, but while putting together this article I used its cheapest model, which I bought at the DEF CON hacking conference for the purposes of this article: the Pineapple Nano. I configured it on a Windows computer, although it’s also compatible with iOS and Linux systems.

The initial setup is a piece of cake. All you need to do is plug it into the USB port on your computer, navigate to the Pineapple’s IP address and it’ll take care of the rest. After you’ve updated your login information for the Pineapple, you’re ready to try some exploits.

EXPLOIT #1: WALL OF SHEEP

Every year at DEF CON, one of the largest hacking conferences in the world, the Packet Hacking Village hosts the Wall of Sheep. This is essentially a running list of devices that have connected to an insecure network at DEF CON. The list is usually displayed on a large projector screen at the Packet Hacking village, where anyone can see not only the device’s ID, but also the websites it was trying to access and any relevant credentials.

It’s a light-hearted way of shaming people into better information security, and you can easily create your own Wall of Sheep using a Pineapple.

All of the exploits for the Pineapple are freely available as downloadable modules on the Pineapple’s dashboard and usually only take a single-click to download and install on the device. Once the Wall of Sheep module (called ‘DWall’) is installed on a Pineapple, any device that connects to it will basically be broadcasting their browsing traffic to the owner of the Pineapple.

The exception to this, of course, is if the would-be victim is using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to encrypt their web traffic or only visiting pages secured by Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS). This protocol encrypts the data being routed between the website’s server and your device and effectively prevents eavesdroppers from seeing which websites you’re visiting. HTTPS also helps protect your web habits from your internet service provider, which can only see the top level domain habits of its users (for instance, that you visited Motherboard, but not that you clicked on this article).

Although over half the web has switched to HTTPS from its insecure predecessor, HTTP, a 2017 Google audit found that nearly 80 percent of the top 100 websites don’t deploy HTTPS by default. This means that anyone who inadvertently connects to a Pineapple and then browses to an HTTP version of the site is basically exposing all of their activity on that site, from pages visited to search terms, to the person wielding a Pineapple.

Many websites have both an HTTP version and an HTTPS version, which as we’ll see in the exploit, is a security vulnerability that can be exploited by a Pineapple.

EXPLOIT #2: MAN-IN-THE-MIDDLE + EVIL PORTAL

Pineapple man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks are really the main reason pentesters get this device.

MITM attacks are a way of eavesdropping on a user by inserting a Pineapple between the user’s device and legitimate Wi-Fi access points (in terms of how data is routed through the network, not necessarily literally between them in meatspace). The Pineapple then pretends to be the legitimate Wi-Fi access point so it can snoop on all the information as it relays data from the device to the access point.

Another way of thinking about MITM attacks is that they are kind of like if someone dropped a letter in their mailbox and then a stranger opened up their mailbox, read the letter and then put it back in the mailbox to be sent.

So how does a Pineapple trick your device into think it is a legitimate access point? There is a native feature on the Pineapple that scans for service set identifiers (SSID)—the names of Wi-Fi networks—that are being broadcast from devices in its vicinity.

Any time you connect to a Wi-Fi network on your phone or computer, your device saves that Wi-Fi network’s SSID in case you ever need to connect to that Wi-Fi network in the future. But this convenience comes with a major cost.

Let’s say you connected to the Wi-Fi at your favorite local coffee spot, and its network is called “Human_Bean_wifi”. After you’ve left the coffee shop, your phone or laptop will start broadcasting a signal that is basically asking if Wi-Fi access points around the device are “Human_Bean_wifi.” It does this for any network you’ve connected to in the past.

"A quick reality check is usually all it takes to see if you've been duped by a Wi-Fi Pineapple."

Pineapples are able to take advantage of this feature by scanning for all the SSIDs being broadcast by devices in its vicinity. It then rebroadcasts these SSIDs so that it can trick devices into thinking it is an access point that has been connected to in the past. So to use the above example, the Pineapple will see that your phone is asking, “Is this network ‘Human_Bean_wifi’?” and then start broadcasting its own signal that says “Yes, I am ‘Human_Bean_wifi’, connect to me.”

Put another way, this would basically be like walking around with a set of keys to your house and asking every stranger you meet if they are your roommate. In most cases, those strangers will say “no,” but you also run the risk of running into an ill-intentioned stranger who will lie to you and say “yes, of course I am your roommate. Please let me in,” and then proceed to steal all your stuff.

But getting devices to connect to a Pineapple is only half of executing a MITM exploit. An attacker also must be able to read the data being routed from the device through the Pineapple. There are a couple of ways to do this.

A Pineapple can be used to create an “Evil Portal,” which basically creates fake versions of websites to capture usernames and passwords, credit card information or other sensitive data.

These work by creating a local server on the attacker’s computer to host a web page that looks like a regular login page for a well trafficked service like Gmail or Facebook. These pages can easily be duplicated using free online services.

Then the attacker configures their Pineapple so that when any devices that are connected to it try to browse to a website like Twitter or Facebook, they will actually be redirected to the fake webpage being served by the attacker’s computer. If the victim enters their information on this page, their username and password will be revealed to the attacker without the user ever knowing they’ve been pwned.

Another way of gathering information about someone’s browsing habits with a MITM attack is to use modules built for the Pineapple that block forced HTTPS encryption and read the data that would otherwise have been secure.

For example, consider a website like Motherboard, which is secured with HTTPS. If you simply type in “motherboard.vice.com” in your URL search bar and press enter, you will be submitting an HTTP request to Vice’s servers. Vice’s servers will then field this request and respond to your device by directing it to a secure HTTPS version of the site. (This is the same for many major websites, such as Twitter).

Forcing users to an HTTPS version is a great way to beef up a website’s security, but it’s the user’s HTTP request in the beginning that can be exploited with a Pineapple. A module called SSLSplit is able to monitor HTTP requests from a user’s device when it is connected to the Pineapple. It will then route this request along to the appropriate server, but when the server responds with the secure HTTPS link, the Pineapple will “strip” away the secure layer and serve an HTTP version of the site back to the user.

At this point, the user will effectively be browsing an insecure version of the site, which will appear almost exactly the same. The only difference will be that a little lock icon will have disappeared from the upper left corner of the screen.
Always check for this lock icon in the upper left of your internet browser.

This attack clearly demonstrates the importance of encrypted communication protocols such as HTTPS. Without them, all the data being routed between the device and the access point can be easily read by anyone with a Pineapple.

HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF FROM MALICIOUS PINEAPPLE USERS

The hacks discussed above are just the tip of the iceberg. Fortunately, there are a number of simple steps you can take to protect yourself from getting pwned by some asshole with a Pineapple.

BE WARY OF PUBLIC WI-FI NETWORKS

The easiest thing you can do is only connect to Wi-Fi networks you know and trust. Your home network, for instance, is almost certainly safe from a Pineapple attack. This is because a Pineapple must also have access to the network it is trying to monitor traffic on, so unless the attacker has access to your home Wi-Fi credentials, they won’t be able to pwn you with a Pineapple.

Same goes for your office Wi-Fi—unless, of course, your office has hired a pentester to audit its network. The real danger of a Pineapple attack is on public networks—places like your local coffee shop or the airport are all prime places for an attack. Most people don’t stop to check whether the “free_airport_wifi” access point is legit and connect without thinking.

When it comes to networking infosec, vigilance is key. The most secure option is to never use public Wi-Fi networks at all. That is a major pain in the ass, however, and will almost certainly drive up your cell phone bills for data use. (For what it’s worth, your cell phone isn’t safe from IMSI catchers either, but I digress).

VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORKS

If you must get on public Wi-Fi, your best bet is to get a VPN. VPNs are a secure way of surfing the net by first connecting to a VPN server before venturing onto the World Wide Web. The VPN server encrypts your data before routing it to its destination, essentially creating a protective shell for your data that makes it unintelligible to prying eyes. So even though an attacker may be able to see that your device has connected to their Pineapple, if you’re using a VPN they won’t be able to see the data they are routing.

“Using a VPN is still the best advice,” Kitchen said. “When you use a VPN, anyone peering into your traffic is only going to see an encrypted mess. That goes for any eavesdropper—be it a Wi-Fi Pineapple, your ISP, an employer or even our wonderful government.”

HTTPS ONLY

Another good rule of thumb is to only visit websites secured with HTTPS (like Motherboard!) These days, most websites you’re likely to visit on a day-to-day basis that have sensitive information on them have switched over to this security standard from HTTP, thanks to a concerted industry effort to push HTTPS, including Google’s algorithms privileging sites with security over those that aren’t encrypted. Still, Pineapple modules are able to force a connected device onto an insecure (HTTP) version of a site if the visitor didn’t explicitly type https:// before the domain name.

“Unfortunately too many websites don't use HTTPS, and many that do are still susceptible to downgrade attacks,” Kitchen told me. “If you're venturing anywhere off the beaten path, I'd advise against using this as your only line of defense. It's still important to stay vigilant and check for HTTPS, but pack a VPN too.”

In short, always make sure to check the URLs of the websites you visit to make sure they’re using HTTPS. Browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Opera make checking website security easy with a small padlock icon that says “Secure” on the left hand side of the address bar and warning users before they visit an insecure site.

ALWAYS FORGET

Finally, it’s important that whenever you are done connecting to a public Wi-Fi network that you configure your phone or computer to ‘forget’ that network. This way your device won’t be constantly broadcasting the SSIDs of networks it has connected to in the past, which can be spoofed by an attacker with a Pineapple. Unfortunately there is no easy way to do this on an Android or an iPhone, and each network must be forgotten manually in the “Manage Networks” tab of the phone’s settings.

Another simple solution is to turn off your Wi-Fi functionality when you’re not using it—though that isn’t as easy to do on some devices anymore—and don’t allow your device to connect to automatically connect to open Wi-Fi networks.

While it’s easy to get paranoid and wonder if there’s a Pineapple waiting to pwn you any time you get a Wi-Fi connection, most Pineapple exploits can be easily avoided by simply staying vigilant about your network settings and internet experience. For all their prowess at manipulating electronics, hackers are still very much dependent on human error for their craft.

“The Wi-Fi Pineapple is really good at mimicking Wi-Fi networks you've connected to in the past,” Kitchen said. “If you're at a park and your device says it’s connected to an airplane’s Wi-Fi, something is amiss. A quick reality check is usually all it takes to see if you've been duped by a Wi-Fi Pineapple.”
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...w-to-mitm-hack





Apple Is Served A Search Warrant To Unlock Texas Church Gunman’s Phone

Once again, law enforcement appears to be trying to sway public opinion on the need for law enforcement “back doors” to encryption systems.
Mark Sullivan

Remember all that legal head-butting and posturing last year when the feds tried to force Apple to help it break into San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook’s iPhone? It ended with a whimper when the FBI found another way into the phone.

Now law enforcement appears ready for Round Two.

On Sunday November 5 Devin Kelley walked into a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and murdered 26 people. He was then shot dead by police. The FBI wants to get into Kelley’s iPhone to find out if he’s got links to militant groups or just a lone wacko.

The day after the shooting, Chris Combs of the FBI (which is helping the Texas Rangers in the investigation) was on TV complaining that consumer smartphones are just too darn secure to break into. He wouldn’t say what kind of smartphone Kelley owned, only that the FBI sent Kelley’s phone out to its forensics lab in Virginia, which would try to obtain its contents.

Next, we hear that the Rangers have served Apple with a search warrant (dated November 9) demanding access to Kelley’s iPhone SE. Apparently the forensics lab scientists couldn’t break into it. The warrant requests the files on shooter Kelley’s iPhone SE and in his iCloud account (if one exists). According to reports, it also requests the files in a second phone used by Kelly–a cheap phone made by a completely different phone maker (LG)!

There’s plenty of irony to go around here.

First of all, law enforcement probably had the chance to unlock Kelley’s phone using the fingerprint off of Kelley’s cold, dead hand. They had 48 hours to do that before the phone would have required a passcode log-in. They might have known this had they bothered to call Apple for help.

Turns out it was Apple that contacted the FBI immediately after it learned the agency was unable to access the contents of the phone. But the FBI never responded to Apple’s call.

So, law enforcement is partially responsible for the situation it’s landed in—and it’s very likely that Apple will give the Rangers the same answer it gave the FBI in 2016 (in effect, hell no!)

The FBI and the Department of Justice, after the San Bernardino shooting in 2015, decided to go to court to compel Apple to help it break into the iPhone of Syed Farook. In the past, federal law enforcement worked behind the scenes and on a case-by-case basis with Apple and other tech companies to get help gaining access to evidence on devices.

The FBI and DOJ believed they’d found a highly sympathetic case with which to establish precedent for requiring tech companies to provide a “back door” to the encryption used to secure devices, which law enforcement could use to access data when they needed to. But to the feds’ surprise, much of the public sided with Apple.

Had law enforcement stuck to its usual methods and talked to Apple behind closed doors, the company might have already flown some of its engineers out to FBI headquarters to break into Kelley’s phone. In the wake of the San Bernardino stand-off, that’s probably impossible now.

That may be why, in the Texas case, the FBI and the Rangers didn’t even bother calling Apple, but rather went straight to court. Apple said during the San Bernardino dispute that if it were to create a hack to bypass the encryption of one iPhone, it would potentially endanger the security of all iPhones. Expect Apple to respond to the Ranger’s warrant with the same message this time around.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40498367...-gunmans-phone





Apple Says Illegal Student Labor Discovered at iPhone X Plant

Smartphone maker Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and its biggest manufacturing partner on Wednesday said that a small number of students were discovered working overtime in its Chinese factory, violating local labor laws.

The students worked voluntarily in the factory for more than 11 hours a day as part of a school internship program at a plant run by Hon Hai Precision Co Ltd (2317.TW), also known as Foxconn, the manufacturer confirmed.

“We discovered instances of student interns working overtime at a supplier facility in China. We’ve confirmed the students worked voluntarily, were compensated and provided benefits, but they should not have been allowed to work overtime,” Apple said in a statement.

Apple and Foxconn have been accused of poor labor practices in the past, but the U.S. technology giant has been trying to get a grip of such issues, releasing annual reviews of the iPhone supply chain.

The violations announced this week come as the company is stretching to meet demand for its new iPhone X, which began shipping this month.

An earlier report by the Financial Times cited six students who worked overtime at the plant as saying the program was required for them to graduate.

The FT report said the students, aged between 17-19, were being forced by their school to participate in the internship.

“Our policies do not allow interns to work more than 40 hours per week on program-related assignments. Unfortunately, there have been a number of cases where portions of our campuses have not adhered to this policy,” Foxconn said in a statement, adding that the interns accounted for a small part of the workforce.

Apple’s statement said that the company had sent staff to the site to address the violations.

Labor rights groups have previously criticized Apple and Foxconn for excessive overtime, hiring underage workers and failing to provide health insurance.

Since 2012 Apple says it has reduced the number of underage workers in its extended supply chain, which includes locations where rare earth minerals are mined for use in the smartphones.

Reporting by Cate Cadell in Beijing and Brenda Goh in Taipei; Editing by David Goodman
https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-ap...-idUKKBN1DM1LA





More Middle-School Girls are Inflicting Self-Pain. Experts say it Might be Because of Smartphones
Marwa Eltagouri

A 15-year study of emergency room visits reveals new signs of emotional suffering among the nation's young women and girls — particularly those in their middle-school years.

Emergency room visits for girls 10 to 14 who inflicted self-pain were relatively stable before 2008 but escalated in the years since, according to new data. It is unclear why the rate of self-injury among younger teens has climbed, though some experts say it could be because of the girls' access to smartphones and Internet bullying.

Self-harming behaviors like ingesting poisons, cutting and overdosing on drugs are strong indicators of suicide — the second-leading cause of death among people between 10 and 24 in 2015, according to data gathered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, reported in a letter Tuesday by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Suicide rates for both teenage boys and girls are on the rise. But the number of emergency room visits for boys ages 10 to 24 with nonfatal self-inflicted injuries has remained stable in recent years, while the number of visits for girls in that age group surged, according to the data.

Most girls and women were admitted to emergency rooms after ingesting pills or poisons, although some were treated for injuring themselves with sharp objects, according to the new data. From 2009 to 2015, the number of girls 10 to 24 admitted to emergency rooms for nonfatal self-inflicted injuries grew by 8.4 percent annually.

The data examined first-time visits for nonfatal injuries treated in 66 hospital emergency rooms nationwide from 2001 to 2015. About 29,000 girls and 14,000 boys with self-inflicted injuries were treated during those years, according to the Associated Press. While all the injuries were intentional, not all were suicide attempts, experts said.

The data is in line with rates of teen suicide, particularly for girls, whose suicide rate hit a 40-year high in 2015, according to the CDC. Over the past decade, suicide rates doubled among teen girls and jumped by more than 30 percent among teen boys.

From 2001 to 2005, girls between 10 and 14 rarely needed emergency room care for self-harm. About 110 girls per 100,000 visited hospitals for self-inflicted injuries during that time. After 2009, their rates of emergency room visits for those injuries began to match the rates of women between 20 and 24 — almost 318 per 100,0000 women, according to the AP.

The highest rate of emergency room visits for self-inflicted injuries was among older teen girls, who had about 633 visits per 100,000 in 2015. That rate was less steep after 2008, according to the AP.

Some researches say the rise in self-harm and suicide among teenagers could be because those born after 1995 are more prone to mental-health issues than millennials. The most likely reason for this, they say, is the rise of the smartphone.

Other researchers say financial pressures from the recent recession could be a factor, but Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, dismissed that. Because the years between 2010 and 2015 were a period of steady economic growth, it's unlikely the economy or income inequality is a contributor, Twenge wrote in The Washington Post this week. The time teens spend on homework also did not significantly change between 2010 and 2015, making academic stress an unlikely cause of depression.

Instead, Twenge points to smartphones, which crossed the 50 percent threshold of ownership in late 2012, around the same time when teen depression and suicide began to rise. By 2015, 73 percent of teens had smartphones, according to the Pew Research Center.

In her research, Twenge found that teens who spend five or more hours a day online were 71 percent more likely to have a least one suicide risk factor, such as depression or making a suicide plan, than teens who spent only one hour a day online. Suicide risks overall increased after two or more hours a day of time online, she wrote.

Teens in every generation have experienced mental-health problems, Twenge said. Genetic predisposition, family environments, bullying and trauma are all common factors.

“But some vulnerable teens who would otherwise not have had mental-health issues may have slipped into depression because of too much screen time, not enough face-to-face social interaction, inadequate sleep or a combination of all three,” she wrote.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...f-smartphones/





Why the Courts Will Have to Save Net Neutrality
Tim Wu

Back in 2005, a small phone company based in North Carolina named Madison River began preventing its subscribers from making phone calls using the internet application Vonage. As Vonage was a competitor in the phone call market, Madison River’s action was obviously anticompetitive. Consumers complained, and the Federal Communications Commission, under Michael Powell, its Republican-appointed chairman, promptly fined the company and forced it to stop blocking Vonage.

That was the moment when “net neutrality” rules went from a mere academic proposal to a part of the United States legal order. On that foundation — an open internet, with no blocking — much of our current internet ecosystem was built.

On Tuesday, the F.C.C. chairman, Ajit Pai, announced plans to eliminate even the most basic net neutrality protections — including the ban on blocking — replacing them with a “transparency” regime enforced by the Federal Trade Commission. “Transparency,” of course, is a euphemism for “doing nothing.” Companies like Madison River, it seems, will soon be able to block internet calls so long as they disclose the blocking (presumably in fine print). Indeed, a broadband carrier like AT&T, if it wanted, might even practice internet censorship akin to that of the Chinese state, blocking its critics and promoting its own agenda.

Allowing such censorship is anathema to the internet’s (and America’s) founding spirit. And by going this far, the F.C.C. may also have overplayed its legal hand. So drastic is the reversal of policy (if, as expected, the commission approves Mr. Pai’s proposal next month), and so weak is the evidence to support the change, that it seems destined to be struck down in court.

The problem for Mr. Pai is that government agencies are not free to abruptly reverse longstanding rules on which many have relied without a reason related to a change in factual circumstances. A mere change in F.C.C. ideology isn’t enough. As the Supreme Court has said, a federal agency must “examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action.” Given that net neutrality rules have been a huge success by most measures, the justification for killing them would have to be very strong.

It isn’t. In fact, it’s very weak. From what we know so far, Mr. Pai’s rationale for eliminating the rules is that cable and phone companies, despite years of healthy profit, need to earn even more money than they already do — that is, that the current rates of return do not yield adequate investment incentives. More specifically, Mr. Pai claims that industry investments have gone down since 2015, the year the Obama administration last strengthened the net neutrality rules.

Setting aside whether industry investments should be the dominant measure of success in internet policy (what about improved access for students? or the emergence of innovations like streaming TV?), Mr. Pai is not examining the facts: Security and Exchange Commission filings reveal an increase in internet investments since 2015, as the internet advocacy group Free Press has demonstrated.

But Mr. Pai faces a more serious legal problem. Because he is killing net neutrality outright, not merely weakening it, he will have to explain to a court not just the shift from 2015 but also his reasoning for destroying the basic bans on blocking and throttling, which have been in effect since 2005 and have been relied on extensively by the entire internet ecosystem.

This will be a difficult task. What has changed since 2004 that now makes the blocking or throttling of competitors not a problem? The evidence points strongly in the opposite direction: There is a long history of anticompetitive throttling and blocking — often concealed — that the F.C.C. has had to stop to preserve the health of the internet economy. Examples include AT&T’s efforts to keep Skype off iPhones and the blocking of Google Wallet by Verizon. Services like Skype and Netflix would have met an early death without basic net neutrality protections. Mr. Pai needs to explain why we no longer have to worry about this sort of threat — and “You can trust your cable company” will not suffice.

Moreover, the F.C.C. is acting contrary to public sentiment, which may embolden the judiciary to oppose Mr. Pai. Telecommunications policy does not always attract public attention, but net neutrality does, and polls indicate that 76 percent of Americans support it. The F.C.C., in short, is on the wrong side of the democratic majority.

In our times, the judiciary has increasingly become a majoritarian force. It alone, it seems, can prevent narrow, self-interested factions from getting the government to serve unseemly and even shameful ends. And so it falls to the judiciary to stop this latest travesty.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/o...ality-fcc.html





To Save Net Neutrality, We Must Build Our Own Internet

We must end our reliance on big telecom monopolies and build decentralized, affordable, locally owned internet infrastructure.
Jason Koebler

The Federal Communications Commission will announce a full repeal of net neutrality protections Wednesday, according to the New York Times and several other media outlets. It is possible that a committee of telecom industry plutocrats who have from the outset made it their mission to rollback regulations on the industry will bow to public pressure before Wednesday, but let’s not count on it.

It is time to take action, and that doesn’t mean signing an online petition, upvoting a Reddit post, or calling your member of Congress.

Net neutrality as a principle of the federal government will soon be dead, but the protections are wildly popular among the American people and are integral to the internet as we know it. Rather than putting such a core tenet of the internet in the hands of politicians, whose whims and interests change with their donors, net neutrality must be protected by a populist revolution in the ownership of internet infrastructure and networks.

In short, we must end our reliance on big telecom monopolies and build decentralized, affordable, locally owned internet infrastructure. The great news is this is currently possible in most parts of the United States.

There has never been a better time to start your own internet service provider, leverage the publicly available fiber backbone, or build political support for new, local-government owned networks. For the last several months, Motherboard has been chronicling the myriad ways communities passed over by big telecom have built their own internet networks or have partnered with small ISPs who have committed to protecting net neutrality to bring affordable high speed internet to towns and cities across the country.

A future in which ISPs are owned by local governments, small businesses, nonprofit community groups, and the people they serve are the path forward and the only realistic way of ending big telecom’s stranglehold on America.

In Detroit, the Equitable Internet Initiative is building community-owned wireless internet infrastructure in towns that big telecom won’t touch. Hundreds of towns have built their own internet service providers. Rural communities are putting wireless internet antennas on top of mountains, grain silos, and tall trees. The fastest internet connections in the United States are provided by local governments, not big telecom. In Southern California, Tribal Digital Village is using unused television spectrum to deliver internet. All over the country, big telecom is being rejected and subverted, and you do not need to have a pile of money, an army of lawyers, or a degree in network engineering to take action.

Motherboard has and will continue to celebrate and amplify these projects, but that is not enough. Starting immediately, we will:

• Begin researching and publishing technical articles and videos that explain how new wireless networking hardware and software works, how to use it, and how to use currently available, affordable technology to start your own small internet service provider.
• Speak to activists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, technologists, networking engineers, and politicians who have navigated the technical, legal, and political hoops required to start community-owned internet service providers. We will use those conversations to create clear instructions for how you can empower yourself to do the same.
• Begin creating a comprehensive guide to the various new technologies and methods of creating decentralized internet infrastructure, which will be released next year.

If you want to help or partner with us, please get in touch.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...unity-networks

















Until next week,

- js.



















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