Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 16th, ’17

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"You don’t realize it but you are being programmed. And don’t think, 'Oh yeah, not me, I’m fucking genius, I’m at Stanford.' You’re probably the most likely to fucking fall for it. 'Cause you are fucking check-boxing your whole Goddamn life." – Chamath Palihapitiya, former Facebook VP


"The preponderance of the research indicates that cell phone radiation poses a major risk to health." – Professor Joel Moskowitz, University of California






































December 16th, 2017




F.C.C. Repeals Net Neutrality Rules
Cecilia Kang

The Federal Communications Commission voted on Thursday to dismantle landmark rules regulating the businesses that connect consumers to the internet, granting broadband companies the power to potentially reshape Americans’ online experiences.

The agency scrapped the so-called net neutrality regulations that prohibited broadband providers from blocking websites or charging for higher-quality service or certain content. The federal government will also no longer regulate high-speed internet delivery as if it were a utility, like phone service.

The action reversed the agency’s 2015 decision, during the Obama administration, to better protect Americans as they have migrated to the internet for most communications. It will take a couple of weeks for the changes go into effect, but groups opposed to the action have already announced plans to sue the agency to restore the net neutrality regulations. Those suits could take many months to be resolved.

Ajit Pai, the chairman of the commission, said the rollback of the rules would eventually help consumers because broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast could offer people a wider variety of service options. Mr. Pai was joined in the 3-to-2 vote by his two fellow Republican commissioners.

“We are helping consumers and promoting competition,” Mr. Pai said in a speech before the vote. “Broadband providers will have more incentive to build networks, especially to underserved areas.”

The discarding of net neutrality regulations is the most significant and controversial action by the F.C.C. under Mr. Pai. In his first 11 months as chairman, he has lifted media ownership limits, eased caps on how much broadband providers can charge business customers and cut back on a low-income broadband program that was slated to be expanded to nationwide carriers.

His plan for the net neutrality rules, first outlined early this year, set off a flurry of opposition. Critics of the changes say that consumers may have more difficulty finding content online and that start-ups will have to pay to reach consumers. In the past week, there have been hundreds of protests across the country, and many websites have encouraged users to speak up against the repeal. After the vote, numerous groups said they planned to file a lawsuit challenging the change.

The five commissioners were fiercely divided along party lines. In front of a room packed with reporters and television cameras from the major networks, the two Democratic commissioners warned of consumer harms to come from the changes.

Mignon Clyburn, one of the Democratic commissioners, presented two accordion folders full of letters in protest to the changes, and accused the three Republican commissioners of defying the wishes of millions of Americans.

“I dissent, because I am among the millions outraged,” said Ms. Clyburn. “Outraged, because the F.C.C. pulls its own teeth, abdicating responsibility to protect the nation’s broadband consumers.”

Brendan Carr, a Republican commissioner, said it was a “great day” and dismissed “apocalyptic” warnings.

“I’m proud to end this two-year experiment with heavy-handed regulation,” Mr. Carr said.

During Mr. Pai’s speech before the vote, security guards entered the meeting room at the F.C.C. headquarters and told everyone to evacuate. Commissioners were ushered out a back door. The hearing restarted a short time later.

Despite all the uproar, it is unclear how much will change for internet users. The rules were essentially a protective measure, largely meant to prevent telecom companies from favoring some sites over others. And major telecom companies have promised consumers that their experiences online would not change.

Mr. Pai and his Republican colleagues have echoed the comments of telecom companies, who have told regulators that they weren’t expanding and upgrading their networks as quickly as they wanted to since the creation of the rules in 2015.

“There is a lot of misinformation that this is the ‘end of the world as we know it’ for the internet,” Comcast’s senior executive vice president, David Cohen, wrote in a blog post this week. “Our internet service is not going to change.”

But with the F.C.C. making clear that it will no longer oversee the behavior of broadband providers, telecom experts say, the companies could feel freer to come up with new offerings, such as faster tiers of service for business partners such as HBO’s streaming service or Fox News.

Such prioritization could stifle certain political voices or give the telecom conglomerates with media assets an edge over rivals.

Consumer groups, start-ups and many small businesses say there are examples of net neutrality violations by companies, such as when AT&T blocked FaceTime on iPhones using its network.

These critics of Mr. Pai, who was nominated by President Trump, say there isn’t enough competition in the broadband market to trust that the companies will try to offer the best services for customers. The providers have the incentive to begin charging websites to reach consumers, a strong business model when there are few places for consumers to turn when they don’t like those practices.

“Let’s remember why we have these rules in the first place,” said Michael Beckerman, president of the Internet Association, a trade group that represents big tech firms such as Google and Facebook. “There is little competition in the broadband service market.”

Mr. Beckerman said his group was weighing legal action against the commission. Public interest groups including Public Knowledge and the National Hispanic Media Coalition said they planned to challenge Mr. Pai’s order in court. Eric T. Schneiderman, the New York attorney general, also said he would file a lawsuit.

Dozens of Democratic lawmakers, and some Republicans, have pushed for Congress to pass a law on the issue, if only to prevent it from flaring up every couple of years at the F.C.C. — and then leading to a court challenge.

One Republican commissioner, Mike O’Reilly, said he supported a federal law created by Congress for net neutrality. But he said any law should protect the ability of companies to charge for faster lanes, a practice known as “paid prioritization.”

Any legislation action appears to be far off, however, and numerous online companies warned that the changes approved on Thursday should be taken seriously.

“If we don’t have net neutrality protections that enforce tenets of fairness online, you give internet service providers the ability to choose winners and losers,” Steve Huffman, chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “This is not hyperbole.”

Netflix, which has been relatively quiet in recent weeks about its opposition to the change, said that the decision “is the beginning of a longer legal battle.”

We’re disappointed in the decision to gut #NetNeutrality protections that ushered in an unprecedented era of innovation, creativity & civic engagement. This is the beginning of a longer legal battle. Netflix stands w/ innovators, large & small, to oppose this misguided FCC order.
— Netflix US (@netflix) Dec. 14, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/t...peal-vote.html





FCC's Own Chief Technology Officer Warned about Net Neutrality Repeal

The warning challenges the FCC's official line on the planned repeal of the net neutrality rules, set for a vote Thursday.
Margaret Harding McGill

The Federal Communications Commission's own chief technology officer expressed concern Wednesday about Republican Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to repeal the net neutrality rules, saying it could lead to practices that are "not in the public interest."

In an internal email to all of the FCC commissioner offices, CTO Eric Burger, who was appointed by Pai in October, said the No. 1 issue with the repeal is concern that internet service providers will block or throttle specific websites, according to FCC sources who viewed the message.

"Unfortunately, I realize we do not address that at all," Burger said in the email. "If the ISP is transparent about blocking legal content, there is nothing the [Federal Trade Commission] can do about it unless the FTC determines it was done for anti-competitive reasons. Allowing such blocking is not in the public interest."

The warning challenges the FCC's official line on the planned repeal of the net neutrality rules, set for a vote Thursday. While the agency is poised to scrap the rules preventing internet providers like Comcast and Verizon from blocking or throttling web traffic, the FCC's Republican majority argues consumers won't see a difference online.

An FCC official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the internal deliberations, said Burger's concerns have been addressed since his message Wednesday morning. The discussion, the official said, is part of the normal back-and-forth process of editing an FCC order.

The official said that some clarifying language was added to the order and that Burger replied Wednesday afternoon to say his concerns were "fully addressed." The official also noted that the CTO was focused on one section of the order and not the part that dealt with the rules.

Burger referred a request for comment to the FCC's media relations office.

Pai's planned repeal would scrap Obama-era rules preventing internet providers from blocking or throttling traffic, or negotiating paid deals with websites for faster access to consumers. In their place, providers must disclose their practices, with the FTC policing anti-competitive behavior.

Net neutrality advocates have been mounting a social media campaign to preserve the rules, and protesters have already begun to gather outside the FCC's headquarters in Washington ahead of Thursday's vote.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/...ger-fcc-259968





State Attorneys General Line Up to Sue FCC Over Net Neutrality Repeal

Net neutrality supporters will try to reinstate the rules in courts and Congress.
Jon Brodkin

Attorneys general from "across the country" will sue the Federal Communications Commission in an attempt to reverse today's repeal of net neutrality rules.

"Today, I am announcing my intention to file a legal challenge to the FCC's decision to roll back net neutrality, along with attorneys general across the country," Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson said. "We will be filing a petition for review in the coming days. Allowing Internet service providers to discriminate based on content undermines a free and open Internet. Today's action will seriously harm consumers, innovation, and small businesses."

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman is leading the multi-state effort.

"The FCC's vote to rip apart net neutrality is a blow to New York consumers and to everyone who cares about a free and open Internet," Schneiderman said. "The FCC just gave Big Telecom an early Christmas present, by giving Internet service providers yet another way to put corporate profits over consumers. Today's rollback will give ISPs new ways to control what we see, what we do, and what we say online. That's a threat to the free exchange of ideas that's made the Internet a valuable asset in our democratic process."

Bans on blocking and throttling repealed

The FCC today eliminated rules that prohibit ISPs from blocking or throttling Internet traffic. The commission also eliminated a rule that prohibits charging websites for priority access over home and mobile Internet services.

The rollback "would enable ISPs to charge consumers more to access sites like Facebook and Twitter and give them the leverage to degrade high quality of video streaming until and unless somebody pays them more money," Schneiderman said.

It's not clear which other states will be involved in the lawsuit. We've asked Schneiderman's and Ferguson's offices that question and will update this story if we get an answer.

(UPDATE: There are now reports that the lawsuit will be joined by Oregon, Illinois, Iowa, and Massachusetts.)

Officials from Santa Clara, California, reportedly plan to sue the FCC over the repeal as well. Ultimately, it's likely that multiple lawsuits will end up being consolidated into one.

Nineteen attorneys general including Schneiderman and Ferguson previously called upon the FCC to delay its net neutrality vote because of fraud and impersonation in the public comments submitted to the FCC's net neutrality repeal docket.

Schneiderman has been investigating that fraud for six months, but the FCC has refused to provide evidence for the investigation. That could play a role in the appeal, but the lawsuit is likely to challenge the FCC on several points.

Most notably for state governments, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is claiming the authority to preempt state and local governments from enacting their own net neutrality rules.

If the preemption is successful, states would not be able to impose bans on blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. They wouldn't be able to require ISPs to be more transparent with customers about hidden fees and the consequences of exceeding data caps. While the FCC is maintaining some disclosure rules that require notifying customers about network management practices, states would not be able to impose their own rules that go beyond the FCC's disclosure requirements.

The attorneys general will likely argue that the FCC doesn't have authority to preempt those types of consumer protection rules. The FCC's preemption powers aren't unlimited, as the commission found last year when judges reversed an FCC decision that preempted state-level restrictions on municipal broadband networks.

Pai's FCC also failed to ask the public for input on preempting state rules before issuing the decision. The FCC's Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that led to today's repeal asked the public for comment on the repeal itself, but not on the question of preempting local regulations. State attorneys general could argue that this violates federal administrative procedure rules.

One California state senator today said he will introduce a bill to impose net neutrality rules in California. That's the kind of state law Pai is trying to prevent with the preemption clauses in the net neutrality repeal order.

The FCC could also face lawsuits from consumer advocacy groups and industry consortiums that represent companies that could be harmed by the repeal.

"This rulemaking has been full of procedural missteps, too, from the agency's failure to provide proper explanation and notice of its legal theories, or proper recognition for the complaints it received under the 2015 rules, to its widely publicized failure to accept real public input and clean up fraud in its systems for doing so," Free Press Policy Director Matt Wood said today.

Courts have generally given broad deference to FCC decisions about whether broadband should be classified as "telecommunications," the key legal question in the repeal. Pai's FCC will argue that the same deference should apply here, while lawsuit filers will say that the FCC made mistakes in the repeal process.

"We'll have plenty to say in court about the legal mistakes littered throughout this decision," Wood also said. "It's willfully gullible and downright deceptive to suggest that nondiscrimination rules are no longer needed—despite the massive power of the cable and phone companies that control broadband access in this country."

The fight moves to Congress, too

The FCC's repeal takes effect 60 days after publication in the Federal Register. Federal Register publication doesn't happen immediately. In 2015, when the current net neutrality rules were imposed, publication occurred more than six weeks after the FCC vote.

Litigants will probably file lawsuits even before the Federal Register publication, just to make sure they don't miss a deadline, thanks to a somewhat convoluted process described in this Gizmodo article.

Congressional Democrats plan to file legislation that would reverse the repeal and reinstate the rules. Although some Republican lawmakers objected to today's FCC vote, legislation to reinstate the rules entirely has little chance of success in the Republican-controlled Congress.

"We will fight the FCC's decisions in the courts, and we will fight [them] in the halls of Congress," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said upon announcing the legislation. "Our Republican colleagues have a choice—be on the right side of history and stand with the American people who support net neutrality or hold hands with the big cable and broadband companies who only want to supercharge their profits at the expense of consumers and our economy."

Markey said his legislation will be filed upon the repeal's publication in the Federal Register.

Instead of restoring the same net neutrality rules that were repealed, Republican lawmakers will likely propose a new, weaker set of rules. Republicans have previously submitted several proposals that would strip the FCC of regulatory authority the commission can use to protect Internet users from ISPs.

"Now that the FCC has acted to reverse an ill-conceived regulatory scheme, Congress must take the lead in setting a clear path forward through bipartisan legislation to avoid the risk of regulatory back and forth," Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said today. "As I did before the Obama administration first put its rules into place in 2015, I favor Congress enacting net neutrality protections and establishing sensible limits on the power of regulators. I call on Democrats and Republicans who want to preserve a free and open Internet to work together on permanent consumer protections."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...rality-repeal/





As the U.S. Retreats, Canada Doubles Down on Net Neutrality: “An Open Internet is Critical to Our Democracy”
Michael Geist

As the U.S. Federal Communications Commission prepares to rollback net neutrality protections, the Canadian government has used the controversy to double down on its support for net neutrality safeguards, linking it to democracy, equality, and freedom of expression. I’ve written several posts on how the U.S. decision may impact Canadian Internet users and businesses and noted how Canadian NAFTA negotiators have indicated that they support inclusion of a net neutrality provision within the agreement’s new digital trade chapter.

In recent days, the issue has garnered even more attention on the political front. For example, earlier this week, the Liberals used one of their questions in Question Period to highlight their support for net neutrality in contrast to differing views from the Conservatives:

Mr. Majid Jowhari (Richmond Hill, Lib.):
Mr. Speaker, Internet is not a luxury but a necessity in today’s world. While it is important to invest in infrastructure and support access to Internet service, we also need to maintain equal access to information provided to it. We need net neutrality. Just this past weekend, the member from Beauce said we needed less net neutrality and the member for Parry Sound—Muskoka said he disagreed. It seems the official opposition cannot take a position. Could the minister clearly reiterate the government’s position on net neutrality in Canada?

Hon. Navdeep Bains (Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development, Lib.):
Mr. Speaker, I was wondering if the leader of the official opposition could provide clarification on what its position is, because the member for Beauce, who is the official innovation critic said one thing and the member for Parry Sound—Muskoka says he disagrees with him. Let me be clear. Our government stands to support net neutrality. We support an open Internet. We support the CRTC framework for net neutrality, because we know an open Internet is critical for our economy and our democracy.

The reference to Conservative discord on net neutrality stems from a Maxime Bernier tweet expressing support for an anti-net neutrality column, which elicited the following response from Tony Clement:

The Bernier position is not particularly surprising, given that he has long argued against active telecommunications regulation. The Conservatives have yet to articulate a single position, but Bernier’s telecom policy approach was an outlier for the vast majority of the Harper years. Given their previously aggressive approach on telecom policy, it would be a surprise if they abandoned support for net neutrality.

Lost in the discussion was strong net neutrality support from the NDP, with MP Brian Masse tweeting several weeks ago:

As the U.S. heads toward a period of uncertainty – the net neutrality rollback is likely to be challenged in court and the political pressure to affirm support in Congress in mounting – the Canadian landscape offers a sharp contrast with strong political and regulatory support for net neutrality rules.
http://www.michaelgeist.ca/2017/12/canadanetneutrality/





Motherboard & VICE Are Building a Community Internet Network

To protect net neutrality, we need internet infrastructure that isn't owned by big telecom.
Jason Koebler

The net neutrality battle has been exhausting. It has come at enormous cost in time, energy, attention, and money.

Fundamentally, the net neutrality fight is one where the best possible outcome is preserving the status quo: an internet landscape and connection infrastructure that is dominated by big telecom monopolies. Simply put, the internet is too important to rely on politicians and massive corporations to protect it.

In order to preserve net neutrality and the free and open internet, we must end our reliance on monopolistic corporations and build something fundamentally different: internet infrastructure that is locally owned and operated and is dedicated to serving the people who connect to it.

The good news is a better internet infrastructure is possible: Small communities, nonprofits, and startup companies around the United States have built networks that rival those built by big companies. Because these networks are built to serve their communities rather than their owners, they are privacy-focused and respect net neutrality ideals. These networks are proofs-of-concept around the country that a better internet is possible.

Today, Motherboard and VICE Media are committing to be part of the change we’d like to see. We will build a community network based at our Brooklyn headquarters that will provide internet connections for our neighborhood. We will also connect to the broader NYC Mesh network in order to strengthen a community network that has already decided the status quo isn’t good enough.

We are in the very early stages of this process and have begun considering dark fiber to light up, hardware to use, and organizations to work with, support, and learn from. To be clear and to answer a few questions I've gotten: This network will be connected to the real internet and will be backed by fiber from an internet exchange. It will not rely on a traditional ISP.

In hopes of making this replicable, we will document every step of this process, and will release regular updates and guides along the way. Next year, we’ll publish the Motherboard Guide to Building an ISP, a comprehensive guide to the technical, legal, and political aspects of getting a locally-owned internet network off the ground.

Projects like these are possible and affordable today, and are being practiced by groups like NYC Mesh and the Equitable Internet Initiative in Detroit. Enterprise-level fiber connections can be purchased from the same data centers and internet exchanges that big telecom companies use, then distributed using point-to-point Gigabit radio, which have ranges of up to 8 miles.

Today, the FCC stripped away regulations that protect net neutrality, but telecom companies can only end internet freedom if there is no alternative. Motherboard and VICE are dedicated to teaching those who want it how to build that alternative.

If you want to help or partner with us, please get in touch. We've also created a newsletter to provide specific updates on this project.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...net-neutrality





AT&T Begins Testing High-Speed Internet Over Power Lines
Anjali Athavaley

AT&T Inc has started trials in Georgia state and a non-U.S. location to deliver high-speed internet over power lines, the No. 2 wireless carrier said on Wednesday, marking its latest push to offer faster broadband service to more customers.

AT&T aims to eventually deliver speeds faster than the 1 gigabit per second consumers can currently get through fiber internet service using high-frequency airwaves that travel along power lines. While the Georgia trial is in a rural area, the service could potentially be deployed in suburbs and cities, the company said in a statement.

“We think this product is eventually one that could actually serve anywhere near a power line,” said Marachel Knight, AT&T’s senior vice president of wireless network architecture and design, in an interview. She added that AT&T chose an international trial location in part because the market opportunity extends beyond the United States.

AT&T said it had no timeline for commercial deployment and that it would look to expand trials as it develops the technology.

“Potentially, it can be a really big deal,” said Roger Entner, an analyst at Recon Analytics. “You need the power company to play ball with you. That’s the downside.”

AT&T and Verizon Communications Inc, the largest U.S. wireless carrier, have also been testing 5G internet services in which the last leg of the connection is delivered via a radio signal to homes using high-frequency airwaves known as millimeter wave spectrum.

Verizon said in November it would launch the faster broadband service in three to five U.S. markets in 2018.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a...-idUSKBN1E70GB





Google is Using Light Beam Tech to Connect Rural India to the Internet
Jon Russell

Google is preparing to use light beams to bring rural areas of the planet online after it announced to a planned rollout in India.

The firm is working with a telecom operator in Indian state Andhra Pradesh, home to over 50 million people, to use Free Space Optical Communications (FSOC), a technology that uses beams of light to deliver high-speed, high-capacity connectivity over long distances .

Now partner AP State FiberNet will introduce 2,000 FSOC links starting from January to add additional support to its network backbone in the state. The Google project is aimed at “critical gaps to major access points, like cell-towers and WiFi hotspots, that support thousands of people,” Google said.

The initiative ties into a government initiative to connect 12 million households to the internet by 2019, the U.S. firm added.

The idea for initiative came after Google X used FSOC to deliver information for its Loon connectivity project which uses hot air balloons to deliver internet connectivity in remote areas. Baris Erkmen, who leads the initiative, explained the team later realized it could become a standalone opportunity in its own right.

Google X will deploy a team to Andhra Pradesh to work on the rollout. Erkmen said it is also open to doing deals with other organizations.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/15/go...-the-internet/





Don’t Keep Cell Phones Next to Your Body, California Health Department Warns
Sarah Buhr

The California Department of Public Health (CDPH) issued a warning against the hazards of cellphone radiation this week. Yes, the thing we are all addicted to and can’t seem to put down is leaking electromagnetic radiation and now California has some guidance to safeguard the public.

The CDPH asks people to decrease their use of these devices and suggests keeping your distance when possible.

“Although the science is still evolving, there are concerns among some public health professionals and members of the public regarding long-term, high use exposure to the energy emitted by cell phones,” said CDPH director Dr. Karen Smith.

The warning comes after findings were offered up this week from a 2009 department document, which was published after an order from the Sacramento Superior Court.

A year ago, UC Berkeley professor Joel Moskowitz initiated a lawsuit to get the department to release the findings after he started looking into whether mobile phone use increased the risk of tumors.

A draft of the document was released in March but the final release is more extensive.

“The cellphone manufacturers want you to keep a minimum distance away from your body and you should find out what that distance is,” Moskowitz told local news station KCRA, shortly after the draft release. “If you keep the device by your body you will exceed the safety limits provided by the FCC.”

According to the Federal Communication Commission’s website, there is no national standard developed for safety limits. However, the agency requires cell phone manufacturers to ensure all phones comply with “objective limits for safe exposure.”

The CDHP recommends not keeping your phone in your pocket, not putting it up to your ear for a prolonged amount of time, keeping use low if there are two bars or less, not sleeping near it at night and to be aware that if you are in a fast-moving car, bus or train, your phone will emit more RF energy to maintain the connection.

Other organizations have warned of the dangers of cell phone radiation exposure as well, including the Conneticut Department of Public Health, which issued similar recommendations in May of 2015.

However, Moskowitz maintains most state and federal health agencies have not kept up with the research. “The preponderance of the research indicates that cell phone radiation poses a major risk to health,” he said in a statement.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/15/do...artment-warns/





How Apps are Simplifying File Sharing

Users can send images, videos, webpages or document to another smartphone or PC using these apps
Abhijit Ahaskar

Sending photos or videos from one smartphone to another or from smartphone to PC wirelessly has become a lot easier and quicker than Bluetooth- or NFC-based file transfer. Apps such as ShareIt (free, Android) allow users to transfer large files in a matter of seconds by using a WiFi technology called WiFi Direct, present in most Android smartphones. While some of the apps have found a way to share high resolution files even when users are on slower networks.

Quick file transfer

When it comes to standalone apps for file transfer, ShareIt isn’t the only option around. Xiaomi’s Mi Drop (free; Android) is a lot easier to use and has a simple layout, compared to ShareIt. It shows Send and Receive buttons right on the homepage. To send files, just tap on the Send icon and wait until it detects the Mi Drop app on the receiver’s smartphone. Users can send music, images, apps and videos. Google’s Files Go (free; Android) works on similar lines, but its File transfer feature is tucked away in the Files page. To use this feature, users have to tap on send and wait for the receiver to tap on receive in the Files Go app on their screen.

Chat messengers

Popular messenger app Hike (free, Android, iOS) has a feature called Hike Direct. While Hike works online, the Direct feature works offline. It basically sets up a WIFi network between the two smartphones, within the Chat app, allowing users to share an image, song or video with another Hike user in the vicinity of 100 metres. To access this feature, tap on a contact and open the chat window, then head to the three vertical dot icon at top right of the screen and scroll down to Hike Direct in the pop-up window.

Photo storage and sharing

Google’s Photos app (free; Android, iOS) has made sharing high-resolution photos and videos in 4K resolution a lot easier for smartphone users. So if users are trying to upload and share a 4k image or video and the internet connection is slow, the app will modify the resolution and upload a low resolution version for the time being. When the connection and internet speed is good enough or there is a WiFi network available, the app will automatically replace the low resolution content with the original version.

Smartphone to PC

Users can also send or receive files from a smartphone to PC wirelessly using the same WiFi Direct feature. ShareIt allows users to send anything from a Word document or PDF to an image or video in a matter of seconds. Microsoft Launcher (free; Android) has a feature called Continue to PC feature which allows users to access content on a smartphone such as photos, document or webpages on their Windows PC.
http://www.livemint.com/Technology/8...e-sharing.html





Net Giants 'Must Pay for News' from which they Make Billions
AFP

European press agencies say internet giants such as Google reap vast profit from "from other people's work" by soaking up between 60 and 70 percent of advertising revenue

Nine European press agencies, including AFP, called Wednesday on internet giants to be forced to pay copyright for using news content on which they make vast profits.

The call comes as the EU is debating a directive to make Facebook, Google, Twitter and other major players pay for the millions of news articles they use or link to.

"Facebook has become the biggest media in the world," the agencies said in a plea published in the French daily Le Monde.

"Yet neither Facebook nor Google have a newsroom... They do not have journalists in Syria risking their lives, nor a bureau in Zimbabwe investigating Mugabe's departure, nor editors to check and verify information sent in by reporters on the ground."

"Access to free information is supposedly one of the great victories of the internet. But it is a myth," the agencies argued.

"At the end of the chain, informing the public costs a lot of money."

News, the declaration added, is the second reason after catching up on family and friends for people to log onto Facebook, which tripled its profits to $10 billion (8.5 billion) last year.

Yet it is the giants of the net who are reaping vast profits "from other people's work" by soaking up between 60 and 70 percent of advertising revenue, with Google's jumping by a fifth in a year.

Meanwhile, ad revenue for news media fell nine percent in France alone last year, "a disaster for the industry".

- 'Pillar of democracy at risk' -

"Years have passed (without anything being done) and free and reliable newsgathering is now threatened because the media will simply no longer be able to pay for it," the news agencies added.

"Diverse and reliable news sources, a pillar of democracy, risk being undermined."

Attempts by news outlets in France, Germany and Spain to force internet giants to pay have only resulted in them coughing up a "few symbolic crumbs", they added.

The press agencies insisted that some of the vast imbalance could be rectified if the EU gives them and other media "related rights" copyright to their work.

However, some European Parliament members were worried that the proposed directive would threaten free access to news for internet users.

But that would not be the case, the agencies insisted.

"Internet users would not be touched... simply those who now pocket a disproportionate part of advertising revenue would have to share a significant part of it with those who actually produce the information" on which the money is made.

The appeal was signed by AFP; the German agency DPA; Britain's Press Association; the Spanish agency EFE; Italy's Ansa; the Swedish agency TT; Belga of Belgium, Austria's APA, and the Dutch agency ANP.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/net-giants...185123237.html





Literary Fiction in Crisis as Sales Drop Dramatically, Arts Council England Reports

New figures show that fewer UK writers earn enough to live on, as ACE blames falling sales of literary fiction on the recession and the rise of smartphones
Alison Flood

The image of the impoverished writer scratching out their masterwork in a freezing garret remains as true today as it was a century ago, according to a new report commissioned by Arts Council England (ACE), which revealed that collapsing sales, book prices and advances mean few can support themselves through writing alone.

The report found that print sales of literary fiction are significantly below where they stood in the mid-noughties and that the price of the average literary fiction book has fallen in real terms in the last 15 years.

The growth in ebook sales in genres such as crime and romance has not made up for the shortfall in literary fiction, prompting ACE to outline ways it intends to support affected authors.

“It would have been obviously unnecessary in the early 90s for the Arts Council to consider making an intervention in the literary sector, but a lot has changed since then – the internet, Amazon, the demise of the net book agreement – ongoing changes which have had a massive effect,” said ACE’s literature director Sarah Crown. “It’s a much more unforgiving ecosystem for authors of literary fiction today. We inevitably end up with a situation where the people best positioned to write literary fiction are those for whom making a living isn’t an imperative. That has an effect on the diversity of who is writing – we are losing voices, and we don’t want to be in that position.”

Carried out by digital publisher Canelo, the report analysed sales data from Nielsen BookScan and found that between 2007 and 2011, hardback fiction sales slumped by £10m. Paperback fiction had a more extreme dip, seeing declines almost every year after 2008. In 2011, paperback fiction sales were £162.6m; by 2012, they were £119.8m.

The few literary works that have sold more than 1m copies include Atonement by Ian McEwan, The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini, The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger and Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Last year’s bestselling literary novel was Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins, which sold 187,000 copies – roughly half the 360,000 copies of Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey, the bestseller of 2015.

The researchers looked at the 10,000 bestselling fiction titles over the last five years and found: “Outside of the top 1,000 authors (at most), printed book sales alone simply cannot provide a decent income. While this has long been suspected, the data shows unambiguously that it is the case. … What’s more, this is a generous assessment. After the retailer, distributor, publisher and agent have taken their cut, there won’t be a lot of money left from 3,000 sales of the 1,000th bestselling title. That we are returning to a position where only the best-off writers can support themselves should be a source of deep concern.”

The novelist Kit de Waal, whose 2016 debut My Name Is Leon was a bestseller, was one of many writers interviewed for the report. “A career in writing is really, really difficult,” said De Waal. “There is zero chance of taking two years out of life to concentrate on writing for many people. All the big questions for writers from my background are about writing in your spare time. If you have to take time to write, you are living on the poverty line. All the things that would feed you as a writer – lectures or writers’ groups – cost something. If you are truly broke, it’s too much.”

One reason suggested by the report for the decline in literary fiction sales is the recession, happening at the same time as the rise of cheap and easy entertainment. “In comparison with our smartphones, literary fiction is often ‘difficult’ and expensive: it isn’t free, and it requires more concentration than Facebook or Candy Crush,” the report’s authors write.

ACE said that “historically, there has been an assumption that literary fiction fell within the sphere of commercial publishing, and therefore required little in the way of direct intervention from the Arts Council”. It is now proposing to support more individual authors through its grants for the arts programme, to prioritise its funding of diverse organisations, particularly outside London, and to increase its support for independent literary fiction publishers – one of the few bright areas noted by the report, which pointed to “a flowering of new independent presses devoted to literary fiction”.

It is also intending to begin discussions with the government about the introduction of a tax relief for small publishers, and to support opportunities for reader development.

“There’s a belief that everyone can read, so everyone is a reader, but in reality, we’re on our phones all the time, on Twitter all the time,” said Crown. “We need to recognise there are other demands on people’s time, and we are saying that there is something so unique and important and necessary and fundamental about literary fiction in particular, that we need to focus on it and support it.”

However, literary novelist Will Self was not hopeful about the sector’s future. “Literary fiction is already being subsidised – think of all of the writers who are continuing to make a living now by teaching creative writing. They represent a change taking place in literature … It’s now more like quilting,” he said, describing books written on creative writing courses as “collective undertakings”.

“I think that creative writing programmes are a force for conformity and lack of experimentation,” said Self. He predicted that “as it becomes clear that the massive amounts of writers who are enrolling in these courses are going nowhere [serious fiction] will be a ‘conservatoire’ form, practised by young ladies and gentlemen, and followed by a select group … like classical music or easel painting.”

The print publishing industry was buoyed in 2015 when it was revealed that physical book sales had risen for the first time in four years. An increased appetite for cooking books and colouring books among consumers was credited for the shift, which continued in 2016 as ebook sales shrank 4% and print jumped 2%.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...ngland-reports





Coco Tops Box Office Again Before Star Wars Hits
Lindsey Bahr

The animated family film “Coco” has topped the box office for a third time on a quiet, pre “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” weekend in theaters.

Disney estimated Sunday that “Coco” added $18.3 million, which would bring its domestic total to $135.5 million.

The weekend’s sole new wide release was the Morgan Freeman film “Just Getting Started,” which launched to a meager $3.2 million from 2,161 theaters and barely made the top 10.

Most studios have chosen to avoid competing against “The Last Jedi,” which is expected to dominate theaters and moviegoer attention when it opens on Dec. 15.

Thus, most of the charts have looked quite similar for the past few weeks. Warner Bros. and DC’s “Justice League” took second place with $9.6 million and Lionsgate’s sleeper hit “Wonder,” which has now passed $100 million, placed third with $8.5 million. Warner Bros. also crossed the $2 billion benchmark domestically Saturday — the first studio to do so in 2017.

This quiet period before “Star Wars” has allowed some of the indie and prestige titles to thrive in limited releases and expansions, like James Franco’s “The Disaster Artist.” The film, about the making of one of the worst films of all time, “The Room,” expanded to 840 locations in its second weekend in theaters. It managed to bring in $6.4 million, landing it in fourth place.

Greta Gerwig’s coming-of-age film “Lady Bird” also added 363 locations and placed 9th in its sixth weekend in theaters. With the $3.5 million from this weekend, “Lady Bird” has netted $22.3 million.

The Guillermo del Toro-directed romantic fantasy “The Shape of Water” expanded to 41 theaters in its second weekend and earned $1.1 million.

The Tonya Harding biopic “I, Tonya” launched in four locations in New York and Los Angeles and brought in a solid $245,602.

The Winston Churchill film “The Darkest Hour” and the summer romance film “Call Me By Your Name” also continue to thrive in more limited releases as well. “The Darkest Hour,” which stars Gary Oldman as Churchill, earned $777,000 from 53 locations, and “Call Me By Your Name,” with Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet, took in $291,101 from nine theaters.

“This is the best time to be a moviegoer if you’re an indie fan,” said comScore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “The last few weeks have enabled films like ‘The Shape of Water,’ ‘Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri’ and now ‘I, Tonya’ to really find an audience.”

He added: “It’s great time for those films ahead of the box office death star that is ‘Star Wars.'”

The year is still down 4 percent from last year, though, which is a pit that even a juggernaut like “Star Wars” might struggle to fill. The cash influx from “The Last Jedi” will be significant, nonetheless, and if the precedent of “Rogue One” and “The Force Awakens” holds, it could range from $400 million to over $600 million of additional domestic revenue before the books close on 2017.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to comScore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1.”Coco,” $18.3 million.

2.”Justice League,” $9.6 million.

3.”Wonder,” $8.5 million.

4.”The Disaster Artist,” $6.4 million.

5.”Thor: Ragnarok,” $6.3 million.

6.”Daddy’s Home 2,” $6 million.

7.”Murder on the Orient Express,” $5.1 million.

8.”The Star,” $3.7 million.

9.”Lady Bird,” $3.5 million.

10.”Just Getting Started,” $3.2 million.

http://time.com/5057874/coco-tops-box-office-again/





Disney to Buy Fox Film, Some TV Businesses for $52 Billion
Aishwarya Venugopal, Greg Roumeliotis

Walt Disney Co has struck a deal to buy film, television and international businesses from Rupert Murdoch’s Twenty-First Century Fox Inc for $52.4 billion (£39 billion) in stock as the world’s largest entertainment company seeks even greater scale to combat growing digital rivals Netflix Inc and Amazon.com Inc.

The deal brings to a close more than half a century of expansion by Murdoch, 86, who turned a single Australian newspaper he inherited from his father at the age of 21 into one of the world’s most important global news and film conglomerates.

Shares of Fox fell more than 2 percent in premarket trading. Disney shares also edged lower.

Under the deal, Disney acquires significant assets from Fox, including the studios that produce the blockbuster Marvel superhero pictures and the “Avatar” franchise, as well as hit TV shows such as “The Simpsons.”

Fox stockholders will receive 0.2745 Disney shares for each share held and will end up owning about a quarter of Disney.

Disney’s global footprint also expands with the acquisition of Fox’s international satellite assets, including Star TV network in India and a stake in European pay-TV provider Sky Plc.

The acquisition will give Disney a new pipeline of shows and movies as it battles technology companies spending billions of dollars on programming shown online to siphon audiences away from traditional TV networks.

Immediately before the acquisition, Fox will separate the Fox Broadcasting network and stations, Fox News Channel, Fox Business Network, FS1, FS2 and the Big Ten Network into a newly listed company that it will spin off to its shareholders.

Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger, 66, will extend his tenure through the end of 2021 to oversee the integration of the Fox businesses. He has already postponed his retirement from Disney three times, saying in March he was committed to leaving the company in July 2019.

“This gives us the ability to marry the great content of Fox with the great content of Disney, it gives us a much larger international footprint, and it enables us to use cutting-edge technology to reach consumers in far more compelling ways,” Iger told ABC’s “Good Morning America” program.

Iger said new technology would be necessary to meet the demands of viewers who want to access content anytime. Direct-to-consumer service is a top company priority, he added.

Disney will also assume about $13.7 billion of Fox’s net debt in the deal.

Through Fox’s stake in the Hulu video streaming service, Disney would assume majority control of one of Netflix Inc’s main competitors. Hulu is also partially owned by Comcast Corp and Time Warner Inc.

Additional reporting by Susan Heavey in Washington; reporting by Aishwarya Venugopal in Bengaluru; Editing by Patrick Graham and Lisa Von Ahn
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-fo...-idUKKBN1E81K0





Mike Francesa Won’t Be ‘Back After This’
Zach Schonbrun

As the prevailing sounding board for the angst of a zillion sports fans for 30 years, Mike Francesa has always approached his New York talk show with an atypical sobriety — for sports radio, that is.

Five and a half hours of no-frills bloviating on the air in his trademark “New Yawkese,” followed by another five hours of focused game-watching into the small hours of the night. The rest of his days have largely involved planning for future shows and future trips — to the Super Bowl, then spring training — on an endless loop.

Not this year. Not after Friday, when Francesa, whose show has been dominating New York’s airwaves practically since its inception in the late 1980s, signs off WFAN for what he insists will be the last time.

“Time to try something new,” he said wistfully during an interview Wednesday, just before airtime.

A football Monday without Francesa ranting and ruminating seems almost unfathomable to many listeners. His departure marks the end of an era for a medium that has endured a radical disruption in recent years. The proliferation of sports podcasts, satellite radio and multiple 24-hour sports networks has congested the soundscape with a stream of shows featuring men yelling at each other about sports.

For many years, however, there were seemingly just two: Francesa and Christopher Russo, better known as the Mad Dog, who formed the most influential sports radio duo in the country, until they separated in 2008, with Russo moving to the satellite radio company Sirius XM.

Francesa, who is 63 and announced his departure from WFAN last year, still has his followers. His show remains at the top of the ratings among men aged from 25 to 54 in the market, attracting over 1.1 million different listeners per week, according to figures from Nielsen. The numbers have skewed older lately. Millions of other, often younger, sports fans are downloading podcasts from the likes of Bill Simmons or Tony Kornheiser.

Mike Dee, the president of sports at Entercom Communications, which owns WFAN and more than 200 other stations in 48 markets, said Francesa’s departure was a pivot point. Francesa has famously resisted social media (though several parody Twitter accounts might make you think otherwise), and he can still devote hours discussing horse racing. Entercom plans to renovate its digital platform, expand deeply with video and emphasize social media.

Chris Oliviero, Entercom’s executive vice president for programming, said the company was increasing its focus on attracting a younger audience, perhaps by broadening the traditional definition of “sports talk” to include mixed martial arts and e-sports.

“What you want to make sure when you make these programming changes is that you acknowledge the date on the calendar,” Oliviero said. “You acknowledge that the world is different in 2018 in terms of appetites.”

Even Francesa has hinted at the possibility of following in the footsteps of Kornheiser and Simmons by starting a podcast. They still command an audience without the limitations of radio. Some have also speculated about an on-air reunion with his former cohort, Russo, on satellite radio. Francesa, who has a noncompete clause in his contract prohibiting him from announcing any new venture until the spring, has stayed coy about his future.

Whatever his future holds, there are plenty of sports fans who will miss Francesa when he is off the air. His authority (or arrogance, depending on one’s perspective) has inspired the nickname “Sports Pope.” His abdication, in turn, is being treated like a rough breakup.

“I just needed to call one last time,” said Kevin from Ocean Point, a caller on Francesa’s show this week.

“Thank you,” Francesa said. “What’s up?”

Francesa has tried to reassure his audience that there will still be ways to listen to him, even if, he has joked, that means going door to door giving his opinions about the day’s sports news.

In his office, there was a pile of unopened letters atop an empty desk and a framed acrylic painting of his hero, Mickey Mantle, on the floor. He will not, as he says on air, be “back after this.”

Francesa’s exit — stemming from a contract dispute with WFAN’s former parent company, CBS Radio, two years ago, which led to Francesa’s refusing to re-sign after his contract expires — leaves a major vacancy at what is arguably the flagship sports station in the country, WFAN, the first 24-hour, all-sports radio channel.

A Day in the Life of Mike

6:15 am: "I get up very early. My kids [Jack and Emily, 12, and Harrison, 11] go to school at 7 am. My wife usually wakes me up around 6:15 or 6:30. Then I’m up and I watch stuff."

6:30 am: "My producer [Brian Monzo] starts bombarding me—he’s got five kids, so he’s starting early in the morning. He starts early. I know I can text him anytime after 6 a.m."

7am - 10 am: "Text has become enormously valuable. I don’t know how we ever did without it." ... “I don’t read the papers that much anymore. I might not read the paper, I don’t get the papers. But the bulletins all come across now. I might read something on Yahoo or ESPN or the Wall Street Journal. But am I religiously paging through the newspapers? No. I haven’t done that in a long time.”

10:30 am: Julio, his driver, arrives. "We’re not listening to sports talk in the car, we’re listening to CNN and music. We listen to a lot of CNN. We fight a lot about politics right now."

Noon: Arrives at station, eats lunch, preps with producers

1-6:30pm: On Air

6:30 pm: "We listen to the ballgames on the way home."

8 pm-1 am: Watching games. "I stay up late. I like to have a couple hours to myself at night. I’m not a big sleeper."

Francesa’s replacement on WFAN in the afternoons is a trio: the former Jets linebacker Bart Scott, Sports Illustrated’s digital video anchor Maggie Gray, and Chris Carlin, who began as a producer for “Mike & the Mad Dog.” Mark Chernoff, the station’s longtime vice president for programming, said he expected their varied backgrounds and personalities would bring in new listeners.

“To try to replace Mike with something that sounds exactly like Mike is a death sentence,” Oliviero said.

Francesa seemed skeptical that any departure from the traditional approach to attracting listeners on radio — with good, old-fashioned content — will make a difference.

“When radio is at its best, it’s live and local,” he said. “They’ve put too much of their effort into digital, and not enough selling to the people who are in their backyard.”

Kornheiser, whose podcast, the Tony Kornheiser Show, grew out of his former radio show on ESPN Radio and various stations in the Washington area, said Francesa might be the perfect entertainer to bridge the gap between the hyperlocal formula of traditional sports-talk and the wider world of podcasting.

“You can get so much national stuff,” Kornheiser said. “But local is the commerce of your life.”

Indeed, Francesa’s shows are marked by his argumentative, often dismissive, repartee with the callers. Brian Monzo, Francesa’s producer, said the show averages 30 to 40 calls per hour, on five different lines, and those are only the calls that get through.

Some eccentric callers have developed their own reputations. A glance at a number on hold revealed how many times that person had called (409) and how many times he had gotten on air (87).

“I’m guessing that’s Mike in North Carolina,” Monzo said. “I can tell it from the area code.”

Ian Eagle, a former board operator for “Mike & the Mad Dog” and now the play-by-play voice of the Nets, said Francesa boasted an “encyclopedic” memory for sports information, but that was only part of his talent. Francesa’s ability to “discern what was most important in an event or story was unparalleled,” he said.

Francesa, though, started as a researcher for CBS Sports. Colleagues called him a “facts machine,” and he still does his show with several newspapers in front of him, opened to the agate page of statistics and standings. The turning point came in 1989, when WFAN paired him with Russo, blending his over-the-top energy with Francesa’s blunt, outer-borough, barstool-style authority. It proved a success almost overnight. Sports-talk channels began popping up around the country, replicating their formula.

“If those guys had failed, this whole push toward sports-talk radio would have definitely had a serious slowdown,” said Ted Shaker, a former CBS Sports executive producer.

Now, with Russo on satellite and Francesa contemplating a jump to podcasts, that era appears to be winding down.

“I’m going to miss him,” Oliviero said of Francesa. “But from a business standpoint, we’re excited.”

Undoubtedly, WFAN and its parent company are making a trade-off. In late November, after the Giants benched their quarterback, Eli Manning, a vintage, bellowing Francesa rant confirmed to listeners that he was not slowing, despite those notorious clips of him falling asleep on the air. The tirade quickly caught fire on social media. On YouTube, a recording of it has been viewed more than 157,000 times.

But how many of those listeners ever tuned into the show? That is the problem Entercom and other radio stations are trying to solve.

That is no longer Francesa’s problem. After Friday, he becomes just another New Yorker with a lot of opinions, looking for a place to channel them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/14/s...cesa-wfan.html





How 2017 Became a Turning Point for Tech Giants
Farhad Manjoo

This was a terrible year for the tech industry.

That’s an odd thing to say at a time of record growth and profits. In 2017, large American tech companies have kept hauling in more money, more users, and — to a degree that might seem dystopian — they continued to expand their foothold in our lives. This was a year in which Amazon created a way for its delivery drivers to let themselves into your house, and Apple created a phone you can unlock with your face.

Yet underneath this apparent success was a momentous shift in how the tech business deals with the world. Five or 10 years from now, we will come to regard 2017 as a turning point.

Why? Because this year, for the first time, tech giants began to grudgingly accept that they have some responsibility to the offline world. The scope of that responsibility, though, is another matter entirely.

Let me explain how this is all playing out.

The dawning realization that a tech platform comes with real-world responsibilities.

“Platforms” are the shiniest prizes in the tech business. The reason the five most valuable American tech companies — Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Alphabet and Microsoft — are also the five most valuable American companies of any kind is that they own these fundamental building blocks of the digital economy, whether they are operating systems, app stores, social networks, cloud servers, or shipping and logistics infrastructure.

Think of these platforms as the roads, railroads and waterways of the information economy — an essentially inescapable part of life for any business or regular person who doesn’t live in a secluded cabin in the woods.

For years, despite their growing power, tech platforms rarely garnered much scrutiny, and they were often loathe to accept how much their systems affected the real world. Indeed, the online ethos has been that platforms aren’t really responsible for how people use them. It might as well be the slogan of Silicon Valley: We just make the tech, how people use it is another story.

In 2017, that changed. At first grudgingly and then with apparent enthusiasm, platform companies like Facebook began accepting some responsibility for how they are affecting the real world. They did not go as far as some critics would have liked — but in many significant ways they offered a shift in tone and tactics that suggested they were rethinking their positions.

You could argue that they had no choice. In the past year, social networks and search engines have been blamed for undermining the news media, fostering echo chambers, and spreading misinformation, hate, misogyny and other general social unpleasantness (YouTube, for example, removed lots of videos of kids gets getting pretend-tortured by their parents). There was also, of course, the unfolding saga of the companies’ role in Russia’s propaganda efforts, which resulted in them being hauled before lawmakers.

And then there were the larger questions about who makes the platforms and who benefits from them. The tech industry is overwhelmingly run by men, and it is a place of little racial and class diversity. A whistle-blowing blog post by Susan Fowler, an engineer who detailed a culture of harassment and misogyny at the ride-hailing company Uber, sparked a women’s movement in tech that was then subsumed by the global #MeToo movement.

Many tech titans were obviously unprepared for the serious questions that began coming their way a year ago. When the Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg was asked about his site’s role in the 2016 election just days after Donald J. Trump’s victory, he responded with a line from tech’s old playbook: It was a “pretty crazy idea,” he said, that misinformation on Facebook had “influenced the election in any way.”

Now that tone is gone. Mr. Zuckerberg has apologized for his glibness. And during Facebook’s last earnings report to investors, he put the company’s social mission at the top of his agenda. “Protecting our community is more important than maximizing our profits,” he said.

Several other tech execs have expressed similar commitments to a deeper mission. Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, told my colleague Andrew Ross Sorkin that Apple has a “moral responsibility” to attempt to heal the nation’s social and economic fissures.

Sure, all this could just be marketing. But I’m inclined to believe the shift represents a new way of navigating the world, for a few reasons.

First, employees are demanding a new way. The highly paid workers of Silicon Valley were lured on the promise of changing the world, and in the past year many became demoralized about their companies’ apparent impact. In some cases they’re pushing their bosses to change.

Second, for the first time in years, there’s real pressure from lawmakers. That has resulted in some real-world retreats. For instance, tech giants last month stopped fighting a bill in Congress that would allow victims of sex trafficking to sue websites that supported the sex trade. In another time, this would have been a gimme for tech companies — they aren’t responsible for how people use their services, remember?

Not this time.

But nobody really knows what ‘responsibility’ means.

If the big shift of 2017 is that tech companies now accept some responsibility for how their platforms impact the world, the big mystery of 2018 and beyond is what, exactly, that responsibility will look like.

Mr. Zuckerberg said he was willing to risk the company’s profitability to improve its community. Facebook has been testing new ideas for making its News Feed less divisive and less prone to misinformation, and for promoting what the company calls “meaningful” social connections. Facebook is also testing systems that it said would more stringently police advertising, in the hope of preventing foreign actors from using its ad network to influence an election.

And in response to criticism from former Facebook employees that its tech might be addictive, the company said this week that it has conducted extensive research on the subject and was “using it to inform our product development.”

But what if these early efforts don’t mitigate the problems? What if Facebook finds that offering people a less polarized News Feed dramatically reduces engagement on its site, affecting its bottom line? Or what if the changes disproportionately affect one political ideology over another — would Facebook stick with a kind of responsibility that risks calling into question its impartiality?

I don’t mean to offer a barrage of hypotheticals just for the fun of it. My point is that these issues would probably be pretty hard to solve.

“Just as the packaged food industry did in the 1950s, Facebook and Google have lured users with convenience, while feeding them a diet certain to cause lasting harm,” Roger McNamee, the musician and venture capitalist, told me. “The problem cannot be addressed by hiring; it can only be fixed by changing the algorithms in ways that will materially reduce profitability.”

Or consider the question of diversity. I asked Ellen Pao — the former Reddit chief executive who unsuccessfully sued the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers for gender discrimination — what she made of the industry’s efforts to address the issue this year.

“I would give tech a C grade,” Ms. Pao, who is now the chief diversity and inclusion officer at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, wrote in an email. “Leaders are doing the bare minimum to address problems and are far from doing all that is necessary to solve the problem.”

She said she hoped for a far more vigorous effort that ushered in a complete overhaul of the culture of tech companies, and that held leaders accountable.

“It means firing all the people involved in the failures, from the C.E.O. to the H.R. leaders to the board members in some cases,” she wrote.

Ms. Pao’s and Mr. McNamee’s comments underline the real problem for the industry. Once you accept that you’re on the hook for fixing problems caused by the thing you built, people will start to expect that you really will fix them — even if the solutions are expensive or otherwise conflict with your business interests.

So, yeah, 2017 was a terrible year for the tech industry. If the fixing does not actually happen, 2018 might well be worse.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/13/t...nsibility.html





Google’s True Origin Partly Lies in CIA and NSA Research Grants for Mass Surveillance
Jeff Nesbit

Two decades ago, the US intelligence community worked closely with Silicon Valley in an effort to track citizens in cyberspace. And Google is at the heart of that origin story. Some of the research that led to Google’s ambitious creation was funded and coordinated by a research group established by the intelligence community to find ways to track individuals and groups online.

The intelligence community hoped that the nation’s leading computer scientists could take non-classified information and user data, combine it with what would become known as the internet, and begin to create for-profit, commercial enterprises to suit the needs of both the intelligence community and the public. They hoped to direct the supercomputing revolution from the start in order to make sense of what millions of human beings did inside this digital information network. That collaboration has made a comprehensive public-private mass surveillance state possible today.

The story of the deliberate creation of the modern mass-surveillance state includes elements of Google’s surprising, and largely unknown, origin. It is a somewhat different creation story than the one the public has heard, and explains what Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page set out to build, and why.

But this isn’t just the origin story of Google: It’s the origin story of the mass-surveillance state, and the government money that funded it.

Backstory: The intelligence community and Silicon Valley

In the mid 1990s, the intelligence community in America began to realize that they had an opportunity. The supercomputing community was just beginning to migrate from university settings into the private sector, led by investments from a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley.

The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s efforts at their inception so they would be useful for homeland security purposes. A digital revolution was underway: one that would transform the world of data gathering and how we make sense of massive amounts of information. The intelligence community wanted to shape Silicon Valley’s supercomputing efforts at their inception so they would be useful for both military and homeland security purposes. Could this supercomputing network, which would become capable of storing terabytes of information, make intelligent sense of the digital trail that human beings leave behind?

Answering this question was of great interest to the intelligence community.

Intelligence-gathering may have been their world, but the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) had come to realize that their future was likely to be profoundly shaped outside the government. It was at a time when military and intelligence budgets within the Clinton administration were in jeopardy, and the private sector had vast resources at their disposal. If the intelligence community wanted to conduct mass surveillance for national security purposes, it would require cooperation between the government and the emerging supercomputing companies.

To do this, they began reaching out to the scientists at American universities who were creating this supercomputing revolution. These scientists were developing ways to do what no single group of human beings sitting at work stations in the NSA and the CIA could ever hope to do: gather huge amounts of data and make intelligent sense of it.

A rich history of the government’s science funding

There was already a long history of collaboration between America’s best scientists and the intelligence community, from the creation of the atomic bomb and satellite technology to efforts to put a man on the moon.

The internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort. In fact, the internet itself was created because of an intelligence effort: In the 1970s, the agency responsible for developing emerging technologies for military, intelligence, and national security purposes—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)—linked four supercomputers to handle massive data transfers. It handed the operations off to the National Science Foundation (NSF) a decade or so later, which proliferated the network across thousands of universities and, eventually, the public, thus creating the architecture and scaffolding of the World Wide Web.

Silicon Valley was no different. By the mid 1990s, the intelligence community was seeding funding to the most promising supercomputing efforts across academia, guiding the creation of efforts to make massive amounts of information useful for both the private sector as well as the intelligence community.

They funded these computer scientists through an unclassified, highly compartmentalized program that was managed for the CIA and the NSA by large military and intelligence contractors. It was called the Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project.

The Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) project

MDDS was introduced to several dozen leading computer scientists at Stanford, CalTech, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Harvard, and others in a white paper that described what the CIA, NSA, DARPA, and other agencies hoped to achieve. The research would largely be funded and managed by unclassified science agencies like NSF, which would allow the architecture to be scaled up in the private sector if it managed to achieve what the intelligence community hoped for.

“Not only are activities becoming more complex, but changing demands require that the IC [Intelligence Community] process different types as well as larger volumes of data,” the intelligence community said in its 1993 MDDS white paper. “Consequently, the IC is taking a proactive role in stimulating research in the efficient management of massive databases and ensuring that IC requirements can be incorporated or adapted into commercial products. Because the challenges are not unique to any one agency, the Community Management Staff (CMS) has commissioned a Massive Digital Data Systems [MDDS] Working Group to address the needs and to identify and evaluate possible solutions.”

Over the next few years, the program’s stated aim was to provide more than a dozen grants of several million dollars each to advance this research concept. The grants were to be directed largely through the NSF so that the most promising, successful efforts could be captured as intellectual property and form the basis of companies attracting investments from Silicon Valley. This type of public-to-private innovation system helped launch powerful science and technology companies like Qualcomm, Symantec, Netscape, and others, and funded the pivotal research in areas like Doppler radar and fiber optics, which are central to large companies like AccuWeather, Verizon, and AT&T today. Today, the NSF provides nearly 90% of all federal funding for university-based computer-science research.

The CIA and NSA’s end goal

The research arms of the CIA and NSA hoped that the best computer-science minds in academia could identify what they called “birds of a feather:” Just as geese fly together in large V shapes, or flocks of sparrows make sudden movements together in harmony, they predicted that like-minded groups of humans would move together online. The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing, and the “Birds of a Feather Session on the Intelligence Community Initiative in Massive Digital Data Systems” took place at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose in the spring of 1995.

The intelligence community named their first unclassified briefing for scientists the “birds of a feather” briefing. Their research aim was to track digital fingerprints inside the rapidly expanding global information network, which was then known as the World Wide Web. Could an entire world of digital information be organized so that the requests humans made inside such a network be tracked and sorted? Could their queries be linked and ranked in order of importance? Could “birds of a feather” be identified inside this sea of information so that communities and groups could be tracked in an organized way?

By working with emerging commercial-data companies, their intent was to track like-minded groups of people across the internet and identify them from the digital fingerprints they left behind, much like forensic scientists use fingerprint smudges to identify criminals. Just as “birds of a feather flock together,” they predicted that potential terrorists would communicate with each other in this new global, connected world—and they could find them by identifying patterns in this massive amount of new information. Once these groups were identified, they could then follow their digital trails everywhere.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, computer-science boy wonders

In 1995, one of the first and most promising MDDS grants went to a computer-science research team at Stanford University with a decade-long history of working with NSF and DARPA grants. The primary objective of this grant was “query optimization of very complex queries that are described using the ‘query flocks’ approach.” A second grant—the DARPA-NSF grant most closely associated with Google’s origin—was part of a coordinated effort to build a massive digital library using the internet as its backbone. Both grants funded research by two graduate students who were making rapid advances in web-page ranking, as well as tracking (and making sense of) user queries: future Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

The research by Brin and Page under these grants became the heart of Google: people using search functions to find precisely what they wanted inside a very large data set. The intelligence community, however, saw a slightly different benefit in their research: Could the network be organized so efficiently that individual users could be uniquely identified and tracked?

This process is perfectly suited for the purposes of counter-terrorism and homeland security efforts: Human beings and like-minded groups who might pose a threat to national security can be uniquely identified online before they do harm. This explains why the intelligence community found Brin’s and Page’s research efforts so appealing; prior to this time, the CIA largely used human intelligence efforts in the field to identify people and groups that might pose threats. The ability to track them virtually (in conjunction with efforts in the field) would change everything.

It was the beginning of what in just a few years’ time would become Google. The two intelligence-community managers charged with leading the program met regularly with Brin as his research progressed, and he was an author on several other research papers that resulted from this MDDS grant before he and Page left to form Google.

The grants allowed Brin and Page to do their work and contributed to their breakthroughs in web-page ranking and tracking user queries. Brin didn’t work for the intelligence community—or for anyone else. Google had not yet been incorporated. He was just a Stanford researcher taking advantage of the grant provided by the NSA and CIA through the unclassified MDDS program.

Left out of Google’s story

The MDDS research effort has never been part of Google’s origin story, even though the principal investigator for the MDDS grant specifically named Google as directly resulting from their research: “Its core technology, which allows it to find pages far more accurately than other search engines, was partially supported by this grant,” he wrote. In a published research paper that includes some of Brin’s pivotal work, the authors also reference the NSF grant that was created by the MDDS program.

Instead, every Google creation story only mentions just one federal grant: the NSF/DARPA “digital libraries” grant, which was designed to allow Stanford researchers to search the entire World Wide Web stored on the university’s servers at the time. “The development of the Google algorithms was carried on a variety of computers, mainly provided by the NSF-DARPA-NASA-funded Digital Library project at Stanford,” Stanford’s Infolab says of its origin, for example. NSF likewise only references the digital libraries grant, not the MDDS grant as well, in its own history of Google’s origin. In the famous research paper, “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” which describes the creation of Google, Brin and Page thanked the NSF and DARPA for its digital library grant to Stanford. But the grant from the intelligence community’s MDDS program—specifically designed for the breakthrough that Google was built upon—has faded into obscurity.

Google has said in the past that it was not funded or created by the CIA. For instance, when stories circulated in 2006 that Google had received funding from the intelligence community for years to assist in counter-terrorism efforts, the company told Wired magazine founder John Battelle, “The statements related to Google are completely untrue.”

Did the CIA directly fund the work of Brin and Page, and therefore create Google? No. But were Brin and Page researching precisely what the NSA, the CIA, and the intelligence community hoped for, assisted by their grants? Absolutely.

The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur something that looks almost exactly like Google. To understand this significance, you have to consider what the intelligence community was trying to achieve as it seeded grants to the best computer-science minds in academia: The CIA and NSA funded an unclassified, compartmentalized program designed from its inception to spur the development of something that looks almost exactly like Google. Brin’s breakthrough research on page ranking by tracking user queries and linking them to the many searches conducted—essentially identifying “birds of a feather”—was largely the aim of the intelligence community’s MDDS program. And Google succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

The intelligence community’s enduring legacy within Silicon Valley

Digital privacy concerns over the intersection between the intelligence community and commercial technology giants have grown in recent years. But most people still don’t understand the degree to which the intelligence community relies on the world’s biggest science and tech companies for its counter-terrorism and national-security work.

Civil-liberty advocacy groups have aired their privacy concerns for years, especially as they now relate to the Patriot Act. “Hastily passed 45 days after 9/11 in the name of national security, the Patriot Act was the first of many changes to surveillance laws that made it easier for the government to spy on ordinary Americans by expanding the authority to monitor phone and email communications, collect bank and credit reporting records, and track the activity of innocent Americans on the Internet,” says the ACLU. “While most Americans think it was created to catch terrorists, the Patriot Act actually turns regular citizens into suspects.”

When asked, the biggest technology and communications companies—from Verizon and AT&T to Google, Facebook, and Microsoft—say that they never deliberately and proactively offer up their vast databases on their customers to federal security and law enforcement agencies: They say that they only respond to subpoenas or requests that are filed properly under the terms of the Patriot Act.

But even a cursory glance through recent public records shows that there is a treadmill of constant requests that could undermine the intent behind this privacy promise. According to the data-request records that the companies make available to the public, in the most recent reporting period between 2016 and 2017, local, state and federal government authorities seeking information related to national security, counter-terrorism or criminal concerns issued more than 260,000 subpoenas, court orders, warrants, and other legal requests to Verizon, more than 250,000 such requests to AT&T, and nearly 24,000 subpoenas, search warrants, or court orders to Google. Direct national security or counter-terrorism requests are a small fraction of this overall group of requests, but the Patriot Act legal process has now become so routinized that the companies each have a group of employees who simply take care of the stream of requests.

In this way, the collaboration between the intelligence community and big, commercial science and tech companies has been wildly successful. When national security agencies need to identify and track people and groups, they know where to turn – and do so frequently. That was the goal in the beginning. It has succeeded perhaps more than anyone could have imagined at the time.
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-...-surveillance/





Former Facebook Exec: 'You Don’t Realize It But You Are Being Programmed'
Jennings Brown

This is the year everyone—including founding executives—began publicly questioning the impact of social media on our lives.

Last month, Facebook’s first president Sean Parker opened up about his regrets over helping create social media as we know it today. “I don’t know if I really understood the consequences of what I was saying, because of the unintended consequences of a network when it grows to a billion or 2 billion people and it literally changes your relationship with society, with each other,” Parker said. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice president of user growth, also recently expressed his concerns. During a recent public discussion at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Palihapitiya—who worked at Facebook from 2005 to 2011—told the audience, “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

Some of his comments seem to echo Parker’s concern [emphasis ours]. Parker has said that social media creates “a social-validation feedback loop” by giving people “a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.”

Just days after Parker made those comments, Palihapitiya told the Stanford audience, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” Palihapitiya said. “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem—this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”

It’s as if Parker and Palihapitiya got together at a bar that week to work out their inner demons. When the host asked Palihapitiya if he was doing any soul searching in regards to his role in building Facebook, he responded: “I feel tremendous guilt. I think we all knew in the back of our minds—even though we feigned this whole line of, like, there probably aren’t any bad unintended consequences. I think in the back, deep, deep recesses of, we kind of knew something bad could happen. But I think the way we defined it was not like this.”

He went on to explain what “this” is:

“So we are in a really bad state of affairs right now, in my opinion. It is eroding the core foundation of how people behave by and between each other. And I don’t have a good solution. My solution is I just don’t use these tools anymore. I haven’t for years.”

Speaking more broadly on the subject of social media, Palihapitiya said he doesn’t use social media because he “innately didn’t want to get programmed.” As for his kids: “They’re not allowed to use this shit.”

Then he got even more fired up: “Your behaviors—you don’t realize it but you are being programmed. It was unintentional, but now you gotta decide how much you are willing to give up, how much of your intellectual independence,” he told the students in the crowd. “And don’t think, ‘Oh yeah, not me, I’m fucking genius, I’m at Stanford.’ You’re probably the most likely to fucking fall for it. ‘Cause you are fucking check-boxing your whole Goddamn life.”

Oh boy. Nobody show this to Alex Jones.
https://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-...are-1821181133





How Email Open Tracking Quietly Took Over the Web
Brian Merchant

"I just came across this email," began the message, a long overdue reply. But I knew the sender was lying. He’d opened my email nearly six months ago. On a Mac. In Palo Alto. At night.

I knew this because I was running the email tracking service Streak, which notified me as soon as my message had been opened. It told me where, when, and on what kind of device it was read. With Streak enabled, I felt like an inside trader whenever I glanced at my inbox, privy to details that gave me maybe a little too much information. And I certainly wasn’t alone.

There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That’s roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day. Over 40 percent of those emails are tracked, according to a study published last June by OMC, an “email intelligence” company that also builds anti-tracking tools.

The tech is pretty simple. Tracking clients embed a line of code in the body of an email—usually in a 1x1 pixel image, so tiny it's invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts. When a recipient opens the email, the tracking client recognizes that pixel has been downloaded, as well as where and on what device. Newsletter services, marketers, and advertisers have used the technique for years, to collect data about their open rates; major tech companies like Facebook and Twitter followed suit in their ongoing quest to profile and predict our behavior online.

But lately, a surprising—and growing—number of tracked emails are being sent not from corporations, but acquaintances. “We have been in touch with users that were tracked by their spouses, business partners, competitors,” says Florian Seroussi, the founder of OMC. “It's the wild, wild west out there.”

According to OMC's data, a full 19 percent of all “conversational” email is now tracked. That’s one in five of the emails you get from your friends. And you probably never noticed.

“Surprisingly, while there is a vast literature on web tracking, email tracking has seen little research,” noted an October 2017 paper published by three Princeton computer scientists. All of this means that billions of emails are sent every day to millions of people who have never consented in any way to be tracked, but are being tracked nonetheless. And Seroussi believes that some, at least, are in serious danger as a result.

As recently as the mid-2000s, email tracking was almost entirely unknown to the mainstream public. Then in 2006, an early tracking service called ReadNotify made waves when a lawsuit revealed that HP had used the product to trace the origins of a scandalous email that had leaked to the press. The intrusiveness (and simplicity) of the tactic came as something of a shock, even though newsletter services, salespeople, and marketers had long used email tracking to gather data.

Seroussi says that Gmail was the ice breaker here—he points back to the days when sponsored links first started showing up in our inboxes, based on tracked data. At the time it seemed invasive, even unsettling. “Now," he says, "it’s common knowledge and everyone’s fine with it.” Gmail’s foray was the signal flare; when advertisers and salespeople realized they too could send targeted ads based on tracked data, with little lasting pushback, the practice grew more pervasive.

“I do not know of a single established sales team in [the online sales industry] that does not use some form of email open tracking,” says John-Henry Scherck, a content marketing pro and the principal consultant at Growth Plays. “I think it will be a matter of time before either everyone uses them,” Scherck says, “or major email providers block them entirely.”

That's partly to do with spam. "Competent spammers will track any activity on your email because they tend to buy entire lists of addresses and will actively try to rule out spam traps or unused emails,” says Andrei Afloarei, a spam researcher with Bitdefender. “If you click on any link in one of their messages they will know your address is being used and might actually cause them to send more spam your way.”

But marketing and online sales—even spammers—are no longer responsible for the bulk of the tracking. "Now, it’s the major tech companies," Seroussi says. "Amazon has been using them a lot, Facebook has been using them. Facebook is the number one tracker besides MailChimp." When Facebook sends you an email notifying you about new activity on your account, "it opens an app in background, and now Facebook knows where you are, the device you’re using, the last picture you’ve taken—they get everything."

Both Amazon and Facebook "deeplink all of the clickable links within the email to trigger actions on their app running on your device," Seroussi says. "Depending on permissions set by the user, Facebook will have access to almost everything from Camera Roll, location, and many other logs that are hidden. But even if a user has disabled location permission on his device, email tracking will bypass this restriction and still provide Facebook with the user's location."

I stumbled upon the world of email tracking last year, while working on a book about the iPhone and the notoriously secretive company that produces it. I’d reached out to Apple to request some interviews, and the PR team had initially seemed polite and receptive. We exchanged a few emails. Then they went radio silent. Months went by, and my unanswered emails piled up. I started to wonder if anyone was reading them at all.

That’s when, inspired by another journalist who’d been stonewalled by Apple, I installed the email tracker Streak. It was free, and took about 30 seconds. Then, I sent another email to my press contact. A notification popped up on my screen: My email had been opened almost immediately, inside Cupertino, on an iPhone. Then it was opened again, on an iMac, and again, and again. My messages were not only being read, but widely disseminated. It was maddening, watching the grey little notification box—“Someone just viewed ‘Regarding book interviews’—pop up over and over and over, without a reply.

So I decided to go straight to the top. If Apple’s PR team was reading my emails, maybe Tim Cook would, too.

I wrote Cook a lengthy email detailing the reasons he should join me for an interview. When I didn’t hear back, I drafted a brief follow-up, enabled Streak, hit send. Hours later, I got the notification: My email had been read. Yet one glaring detail looked off. According to Streak, the email had been read on a Windows Desktop computer.

Maybe it was a fluke. But after a few weeks, I sent another follow up, and the email was read again. On a Windows machine.

That seemed crazy, so I emailed Streak to ask about the accuracy of its service, disclosing that I was a journalist. In the confusing email exchange with Andrew from Support that followed, I was told that Streak is “very accurate,” as it can let you know what time zone or state your lead is in—but only if you’re a salesperson. Andrew stressed that “if you’re a reporter and wanted to track someone's whereabouts, [it’s] not at all accurate.” It quickly became clear that Andrew had the unenviable task of threading a razor thin needle: maintaining that Streak both supplied very precise data but was also a friendly and non-intrusive product. After all, Streak users want the most accurate information possible, but the public might chafe if it knew just how accurate that data was—and considered what it could be used for besides honing sales pitches. This is the paradox that threatens to pop the email tracking bubble as it grows into ubiquity. No wonder Andrew got Orwellian: “Accuracy is entirely subjective,” he insisted, at one point.

Andrew did, however, unequivocally say that if Streak listed the kind of device used—as opposed to listing unknown—then that info was also “very accurate.” Even if pertained to the CEO of Apple.

If Tim Cook is a closet Windows user (who knows! Maybe his Compaq days never fully rubbed off) or even if he outsources his email correspondence to a firm that does, then it’s a fine example of the sort of private data email tracking can dredge up even on our most powerful public figures.

"Look, everybody opens emails, even if they don’t respond to them," Seroussi says. "If you can learn where a celebrity is—or anyone—just by emailing them, it’s a security threat.” It could be used as a tool for stalkers, harassers, even thieves who might be sending you spam emails just to see if you’re home.

"During the 2016 election, we sent a tracked email out to the US senators, and the people running for the presidency," Seroussi says. "We wanted to know, were they doing anything about tracking? Obviously, the answer was no. We typically got the location of their devices, the IP addresses; you could pinpoint almost exactly where they were, which hotels they were staying at."

This is what worries Bitdefender's Afloarei about malicious spammers who use trackers, too. “As for the dangers of being tracked in spam, one must keep in mind the kind of people that do the tracking, and the fact that they can find out your IP address and therefore your location or workplace,” he says. Just by watching you open your email, Afloarei says spammers can learn your schedule (“based on the time you check your email”), your itinerary (based on how you check mail at home, on the bus, or so on), and personal preferences (based on where they harvested the email; say, a sports forum, or a music fansite).

Because so many people can be looked up on social media based on email addresses, or their jobs and locations, Afloarei says it’s "pretty easy" to correlate all the data and track someone down in person. "Granted, most spammers are only interested in getting your credit card or simply getting you infected and part of their botnet, but the truly devious ones can deduct so much information besides all that."

"I always wonder when a big story is going to come out and say that people broke into a house because they used email trackers to know the victims were out of town." - Florian Seroussi, founder of OMC

There’s one more reason to be wary: Email tracking is evolving. Research from October looked at emails from newsletter and mailing list services from the 14,000 most popular websites on the web, and found that 85 percent contained trackers—and 30 percent leak your email addresses to outside corporations, without your consent.

So, if you sign up for a newsletter, even from a trusted source, there’s a one in three chance that the email that newsletter service sends you will be loaded with a tracking image hosted on an outside server, that contains your email address in its code and can then share your email address with a “large network of third parties.” Your email address, in other words, is apt to be shared with tracking companies, marketing firms, and data brokers like Axiom, if you as much as open an email with a tracker, or click on a link inside.

“You can have tens of parties receive your email address,” says Steven Englehart, one of the computer scientists behind the study. “Your email hash is really your identity, right? If you go to a store, make a purchase or sign up for something—everything we do today is associated with your email.” Data brokers have long stockpiled information on consumers through web tracking: browsing habits, personal bios, and location data. But adding an email address into the mix, Englehart says, is even more reason for alarm.

“This kind of tracking creates a big dataset. If a dataset leaks with email hashes, then it’d be trivial for anyone to go see that person’s data, and people would have no idea that data even existed,” he says. “You can compare it to the Experian data leak, which exposed people’s social security numbers, and could cause fraud. In my mind, this leak would be even worse. Because it’s not just financial fraud, but intimate details of people’s lives.”

Given the risks, perhaps what’s most striking about the rise of ubiquitous email tracking is how relatively quietly it’s happened—even in a moment marked by increased awareness of security issues.

"It’s shifted. It’s more and more used in conversational threads. In business emails. This is what scares us the most," Seroussi says. "One out of six people that emails you is sending a tracker, and it’s real life"—not marketing, not spammers. “It could be your friend, your wife, your boss, this number is really mind boggling—you give up a lot of privacy just opening emails."

After the Great Tim Cook Email Tracking Incident, I left Streak on. I’d found, grudgingly, that it was useful; it was sometimes more efficient to know when sources had read my email and when I might need to nudge them again. But because I was using the same Gmail account for personal and professional use, I ended up tracking friends and family, too. That’s when I saw how starkly tracking violates the lightly-coded social norms of email etiquette. I watched close friends read an email and not respond for days. I saw right through every white lie about email (about not receiving it, or it getting stuck in the spam folder). Sure, it’s occasionally nice; you can get a rough sense of how many people read the latest update to the weekend plans on a thread, and you can feel confident that your brother isn’t blowing you off, he’s just really bad at reading email. But it mostly serves to add yet another unnecessary layer of expectation onto our already notification-addled lives, another social metric to fret over, and another box to click on feverishly whenever it arrives. Not to mention a tinge of surreptitious digital voyeurism.

"Most consumers don’t understand just how much information they are giving up." — marketing consultant John-Henry Scherck

Clearly, this is a situation that the tracking outfits want to avoid. They’ve kept mostly to the shadows, harvesting useful sales data and email open rate info without causing too many ripples; the last thing they want is for their products to be deemed invasive or spyware. This, however, puts them in a deeply awkward position: In order to stand out amongst a burgeoning field of email tracking services, they need to tout their accuracy and ease of use—while somehow giving the public the impression the data they’re soaking up isn’t a threat.

As the number of easy-to-use, free tracking products proliferates—some email clients are beginning to simply ship with tracking features, as Airmail did in 2016—we’re going to have to contend with a digital social landscape where there’s an insurgent mix of trackers and trackees. And, increasingly—anti-trackers.

If you don’t want people to know your precise whereabouts whenever you glance at a specially priced offer for a cruise featuring your favorite 90s alt rock bands; if you’d rather Facebook not harvest your device data every time a former high school classmate inveighs against Trump in a comment on one of your vacation pics; if you’re the CEO of one of the top technology companies in the world and you’d rather not be associated with using a rival’s product—you have options.

A host of anti-tracking services have sprung up to combat the rising tide of inbox tracers—from Ugly Mail, to PixelBlock, to Senders. Ugly Mail notifies you when an email is carrying a tracking pixel, and PixelBlock prevents it from opening. Senders makes use of a similar product formerly known as Trackbuster, as part of service that displays info (Twitter, LinkedIn account, etc) about the sender of the email you’re reading. Using these services, I spotted more than a few acquaintances and even some contacts I consider friends using tracking in their correspondence.

But even those methods aren't foolproof. Tracking methods are always evolving and improving, and finding ways around the current crop of track-blockers. “It’s a fight we’re having over the last couple of years,” Seroussi says. “They can’t counter all the methods that we know—so they get around the block by setting up new infrastructures. It’s a chase, they’re doing a job.”

To prevent third-parties from leaking your email, meanwhile, Princeton’s Englehart says “the only surefire solution right now is to block images by default.” That is, turn on image-blocking in your email client, so you can’t receive any images at all.

OMC has found dozens of novel methods that newfangled trackers are using to get your email open info. “We found 70 different ways where they use tracking,” Seroussi says, “Sometimes it’s a color, sometimes it’s a font, sometimes it’s a pixel, and sometimes it’s a link.” It’s an arms race, and one side has an immense advantage.

When Seroussi debuted Trackbuster in 2014, he was expecting a few hundred downloads. Within hours, he’d had 12,000. People who knew about email tracking—often trackers themselves, ironically—were eager for a way to quash it. Still, other trackers are furious with what the track-blockers are doing. “We receive death threats,” he says, more agitated than angered. It’s the wild west, after all. “They’ve been trying to destroy us for two years.”

Scherck, the marketing consultant, thinks that Google could up and kill email tracking altogether. “I do think public opinion could turn on email tracking, especially if Gmail started alerting users to tracking by default inside of Gmail with pop ups, or some native version of Ugly Email,” he says. “Just look at how consumers have turned on Facebook for their advertising. People absolutely hated that Uber was buying data on who was using Lyft from Unroll.me.” It would only take a strong enough nudge. “Most consumers don’t understand just how much information they are giving up,” he says.

If Google and the other big tech firms won’t budge, though, Seroussi believes the problem is serious enough to warrant government intervention. “If the big companies don’t want to do something about it, there should be a law defining certain kinds of tracking,” he says. And if nothing is done at all, Seroussi thinks it’s only a matter of time before email tracking is used for malign purposes, potentially in a very public way. “I always wonder when a big story is going to come out and say that people broke into a house because they used email trackers to know the victims were out of town,” he says. “It’s probably already happened.”

As for me, I was tired of all the tracking. After a couple months of ambiguous insights, I didn’t want to know who was opening my emails and not replying anymore. I didn’t want to wait, strung-out-like, for a notification to ring in a response from a crucial source. I didn’t want to feel like I was breaking the rules of whatever slipshod digital social compact we’ve got; my semi-spying days were done. I deleted Streak, and left Senders running—and kept a screenshot of Tim Cook’s Windows on my desktop as a souvenir.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-emai...-over-the-web/





Searchable Database of 1.4 Billion Stolen Credentials Found on Dark Web
Howard Solomon

A security vendor has discovered a huge list of easily searchable stolen credentials in cleartext on the dark web which it fears could lead to a new wave of cyber attacks.

Julio Casal, co-founder of identity threat intelligence provider 4iQ, which has offices in Calfornia and Spain, said in a Dec. 8 blog his firm found the database of 1.4 billion username and password pairs while scanning the dark web for stolen, leaked or lost data.

He said the company has verified at least a group of credentials are legitimate.

What is alarming is the file is what he calls “an aggregated, interactive database that allows for fast (one second response) searches and new breach imports.” For example, searching for “admin,” “administrator” and “root” returned 226,631 passwords of admin users in a few seconds. As a result, the database can help attackers automate account hijacking or account takeover.

Casal says the file is almost two times larger than the previous largest credential exposure, the Exploit.in combo list that exposed 797 million records. It is not entirely new data, but an aggregation of 252 previously breaches, including known credential lists such as Anti Public and Exploit.in, decrypted passwords of known breaches like LinkedIn as well as smaller breaches like Bitcoin and Pastebin sites. However, it does include information from 133 new breaches. “We’ve found that although the majority of these breaches are known within the Breach and Hacker community, 14 per cent of exposed username/passwords pairs had not previously been decrypted by the community and are now available in clear text,” said Casal.

Among other things the database shows how some people still re-use passwords on many sites. For example, one person may have thought they were being safe by using an uncommon 10 digit password –but used it on six email addresses.

4iQ also used the database to generate a list of top common passwords. They include the usual suspects:

There is no indication who created the database and tools, but whoever it was included Bitcoin and Dogecoin wallets for any user who wants to make a donation.

In a column this morning SecurityWeek contributor Kevin Townsend quotes several experts worrying about how the database could be used. One said an attacker could just pick a target company and search for references to it in the list to find staff, contractors or suppliers. “This could give both an initial foothold into the company, or — if someone is already in — to help move around if credentials have been reused internally.”
https://www.itworldcanada.com/articl...ark-web/399810





HP Laptops Found to have Hidden Keylogger
BBC

Hidden software that can record every letter typed on a computer keyboard has been discovered pre-installed on hundreds of HP laptop models.

Security researcher Michael Myng found the keylogging code in software drivers preinstalled on HP laptops to make the keyboard work.

HP said more than 460 models of laptop were affected by the "potential security vulnerability".

It has issued a software patch for its customers to remove the keylogger.

The issue affects laptops in the EliteBook, ProBook, Pavilion and Envy ranges, among others. HP has issued a full list of affected devices, dating back to 2012.

'Loss of confidentiality'

Mr Myng discovered the keylogger while inspecting Synaptics Touchpad software, to figure out how to control the keyboard backlight on an HP laptop.

He said the keylogger was disabled by default, but an attacker with access to the computer could have enabled it to record what a user was typing.

According to HP, it was originally built into the Synaptics software to help debug errors.

It acknowledged that could lead to "loss of confidentiality" but it said neither Synaptics nor HP had access to customer data as a result of the flaw.

In May, a similar keylogger was discovered in the audio drivers pre-installed on several HP laptop models.

At the time, the company said the keylogger code had been mistakenly added to the software.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42309371





Apple's Alleged Throttling of Older iPhones With Degraded Batteries Causes Controversy
Tim Hardwick

A Reddit post over the weekend has drawn a flurry of interest after an iPhone 6s owner reported that a battery replacement significantly increased the device's performance running iOS 11. The ensuing discussion thread, also picked up by readers in the MacRumors forum, has led to speculation that Apple intentionally slows down older phones to retain a full day's charge if the battery has degraded over time.

According to TeckFire, the author of the original Reddit post, their iPhone had been very slow after updating to iOS 11, especially compared to their brother's iPhone 6 Plus, so they decided to do some research with GeekBench and battery life apps, and ended up replacing the battery.

MacRumors' Geekbench scores for iPhone 6s before and after battery drain

Wear level was somewhere around 20% on my old battery. I did a Geekbench score, and found I was getting 1466 Single and 2512 Multi. This did not change wether I had low power mode on or off. After changing my battery, I did another test to check if it was just a placebo. Nope. 2526 Single and 4456 Multi. From what I can tell, Apple slows down phones when their battery gets too low, so you can still have a full days charge.

Just over a year ago, Apple launched a repair program for iPhone 6s owners after some users reported their devices were unexpectedly shutting down. Apple said the problem was down to a manufacturing issue affecting a "very small" number of iPhone 6s devices, and offered battery replacements free of charge to owners of devices within a limited serial number range.

Around two months later, Apple released iOS 10.2.1 and said the update resulted in an 80 percent reduction in unexpected shutdowns on iPhone 6s and a 70 percent reduction on iPhone 6 devices. However, Apple explained this was about fixing a more widely reported issue caused by uneven power delivery from older batteries, and claimed it was separate from the manufacturing fault that had caused it to recall a select number of iPhone 6s devices.

This weekend's Reddit thread – running to over 500 comments as of writing – appears to have kicked off a wave of speculation about whether the two shutdown issues are in fact related, and that Apple's fix involves dynamically throttling the phones' maximum clock speeds relative to battery output (voltage), to prevent them from drawing too much power and shutting down.

Reports that the performance of iPhone 6 series models can be improved by replacing the battery aren't entirely new, but the suggestion that Apple is intentionally throttling the performance of older devices, for whatever reason, is bound to cause controversy. We've contact Apple for comment or clarification. In the meantime, users interested in checking their phone's performance are also using the free CpuDasherX app to compare running clock speeds. Let us know your findings in the comments below. Lastly, it's worth noting that DIY iPhone battery replacements or repairs performed by a third party will void any Apple warranty still covering said devices.
https://www.macrumors.com/2017/12/11...y-controversy/





The Environmental Cost of Internet Porn

So many people watch porn online that the industry’s carbon footprint might be worse now that it was in the days of DVDs and magazines.
Matt Kessler

Online streaming is a win for the environment. Streaming music eliminates all that physical material—CDs, jewel cases, cellophane, shipping boxes, fuel—and can reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 40 percent or more. Video streaming is still being studied, but the carbon footprint should similarly be much lower than that of DVDs.

Scientists who analyze the environmental impact of the internet tout the benefits of this “dematerialization,” observing that energy use and carbon-dioxide emissions will drop as media increasingly can be delivered over the internet. But this theory might have a major exception: porn.

Since the turn of the century, the pornography industry has experienced two intense hikes in popularity. In the early 2000s, broadband enabled higher download speeds. Then, in 2008, the advent of so-called tube sites allowed users to watch clips for free, like people watch videos on YouTube. Adam Grayson, the chief financial officer of the adult company Evil Angel, calls the latter hike “the great mushroom-cloud porn explosion of 2008.”

Precise numbers don’t exist to quantify specifics, but the impression across the industry is that viewership is way, way up. Pornhub, the world’s most popular porn site, provides some of the only accessible data on its yearly web-traffic report. The first “Year in Review” post in 2013 tabulated that people visited the site 14.7 billion times. By 2016, that number had almost doubled, to 23 billion, and those visitors watched more than 4.59 billion hours of porn. And Pornhub is just one site.

Is pornography in the digital era leaving a larger carbon footprint than it did during the days of magazines and videos? Obtaining raw numbers will always be a sticking point, because the stigmatized industry has never kept track of sales like the music and film industries, and has no significant archives. But if pornography experts’ estimates are accurate, they suggest a rare scenario where digitization might have increased the overall consumption of porn so much that the principal of dematerialization gets flipped on its head. The internet could allow people to spend so much time looking at porn that it’s actually worse for the environment.

* * *

Using a formula that Netflix published on its blog in 2015, Nathan Ensmenger, a professor at Indiana University who is writing a book about the environmental history of the computer, calculates that if Pornhub streams video as efficiently as Netflix (0.0013 kWh per streaming hour), it used 5.967 million kWh in 2016. For comparison, that’s about the same amount of energy 11,000 light bulbs would use if left on for a year. And operating with Netflix’s efficiency would be a best-case scenario for the porn site, Ensmenger believes.

Grayson says he has witnessed this explosion of growth firsthand at Evil Angel. He estimates that the site’s viewership has increased by 7,000 percent since the time of DVDs. In the late 1990s, he says, a new Evil Angel DVD would sell approximately 7,500 copies in the first 30 days. Now, he says, Evil Angel videos are streamed 30,000 times in the first 30 days—and that only represents the 5 percent of its web traffic comprised of paying customers. Each week, 2 million free previews are watched. “There’s no way, 15 years ago, at the peak of physical media, that many people were touching our brand,” he says.

Still, it’s impossible to access any data for the porn industry as a whole. Trade magazines like Variety or Billboard don’t exist, and sales records have never been archived. For Jon Koomey, a data scientist who studies the environmental impact of the internet, this lack of information hamstrings any serious inquiry. Although the estimates sound reasonable to him, and he believes pornography very well could provide an exception to the rule of dematerialization, he warns against speculative comparisons. “I don’t even know what fraction of the internet is porn,” he says. “And without data, it’s hard to say anything sensible.”

Koomey warns that there are simply too many variables to be considered. For instance, the growth of porn consumption since the turn of the century would have to be compared to the growth of all internet data during the same time period. The energy and emissions for manufacturing, marketing, transporting, and using porn DVDs would have to be compared to the electricity required to make a search-engine query, the electricity used by the device making the search, and the operational cost of the website’s server, network, and specific data center.

Gail Dines, a sociologist who studies pornography, agrees that precise numbers would be impossible to find. But as an anti-pornography advocate, she views the potential environmental costs of such rabid online consumption as an important critique against the industry. She is sure that online pornography is much more popular, and attributes this growth to what she calls the principle of the “three As”: affordability, accessibility, and anonymity. “The more anonymous you make porn, the more affordable, the more accessible, the more you drive demand,” she says.

In her view, each new technology heightens the three As. Mobile phones, which can be viewed anywhere, are more private than desktop computers, DVDs, and VHSs, which must be viewed in a home. Those, in turn, are more private than an adult theater. Consumption has also become more anonymous as tube sites like Pornhub require no log-in or credit-card information. There is no fear of being seen by a neighbor at a sex shop.

* * *

All the researchers I spoke to would love to have access to reliable data. The sociologist Chauntelle Tibbals believes in the educational benefits of pornography, but she has qualms with the industry’s exploitative practices, and therefore has misgivings about using numbers provided by Pornhub. She notes that Pornhub is part of a vast porn empire called MindGeek, which quietly controls almost all of the free tube sites and an increasing number of production companies. Tibbals believes Pornhub releases these numbers—and engages in promotional activities like a recent offer of free snow removal in Boston—as an attempt to normalize itself and to shift the focus away from rampant piracy issues and accusations of promoting sexual violence against women. (Pornhub did not respond to a request for an interview.)

Although their numbers could be accurate, Tibbals believes trusting them without access to company records would be naïve, akin to trusting numbers published in brochures by companies like Goldman Sachs or Exxon. For that reason, she says a huge asterisk must be placed beside them in any serious effort to comprehend their impact. It’s possible Pornhub’s data is not reflective of the adult industry, but only of adult piracy sites.

Ensmenger, the Indiana University historian, agrees that the numbers are nebulous at best. But like Dines, he still thinks these questions are worth asking, even if only to raise awareness that internet porn does take an environmental toll. While Pornhub may be using an enormous amount of electricity, “none of us are paying that electrical bill in any way that impacts our behavior,” he says.

For Ensmenger, this epitomizes the problem with the digital economy, where so many of the costs are outsourced or hidden that consumers believe everything is free. Most sites offer their free videos by selling advertising to companies that track consumer behavior, and these cookies require a considerable amount of energy. More importantly, consumers don’t have to think about the significant environmental costs of constructing and destructing electrical products, such as screens, servers, and hard drives.

A notion like dematerialization, Ensmenger says, can often be a myth that Silicon Valley tells itself, without acknowledging that the region contains the country’s highest number of EPA Superfund sites, where the federal government must clean up hazardous pollutants and contaminants.

Even if consumers don’t pay the electric bill, somebody must. “With digital things, it’s just so easy to externalize the costs to other places, other actors, that we make assumptions about them being less environmentally impactful that are just not justified,” Ensmenger says.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technolo...t-porn/548210/





AI-Assisted Fake Porn Is Here and We’re All Fucked

Someone used an algorithm to paste the face of 'Wonder Woman' star Gal Gadot onto a porn video, and the implications are terrifying.
Samantha Cole

There’s a video of Gal Gadot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet. But it’s not really Gadot’s body, and it’s barely her own face. It’s an approximation, face-swapped to look like she’s performing in an existing incest-themed porn video.

The video was created with a machine learning algorithm, using easily accessible materials and open-source code that anyone with a working knowledge of deep learning algorithms could put together.

It's not going to fool anyone who looks closely. Sometimes the face doesn't track correctly and there's an uncanny valley effect at play, but at a glance it seems believable. It's especially striking considering that it's allegedly the work of one person—a Redditor who goes by the name 'deepfakes'—not a big special effects studio that can digitally recreate a young Princess Leia in Rogue One using CGI. Instead, deepfakes uses open-source machine learning tools like TensorFlow, which Google makes freely available to researchers, graduate students, and anyone with an interest in machine learning.

Like the Adobe tool that can make people say anything, and the Face2Face algorithm that can swap a recorded video with real-time face tracking, this new type of fake porn shows that we're on the verge of living in a world where it's trivially easy to fabricate believable videos of people doing and saying things they never did. Even having sex.

So far, deepfakes has posted hardcore porn videos featuring the faces of Scarlett Johansson, Maisie Williams, Taylor Swift, Aubrey Plaza, and Gal Gadot on Reddit. I’ve reached out to the management companies and/or publicists who represent each of these actors informing them of the fake videos, and will update if I hear back.

Fake celebrity porn, where images are photoshopped to look like famous people are posing nude, is a years-old category of porn with an ardent fan base. People commenting and voting in the subreddit where deepfakes posts are big fans of his work. This is the latest advancement in that genre.

“This is no longer rocket science.”

According to deepfakes—who declined to give their identity to me to avoid public scrutiny—the software is based on multiple open-source libraries, like Keras with TensorFlow backend. To compile the celebrities’ faces, deepfakes said he used Google image search, stock photos, and YouTube videos. Deep learning consists of networks of interconnected nodes that autonomously run computations on input data. In this case, they trained the algorithm on porn videos and Gal Gadot’s face. After enough of this “training,” the nodes arrange themselves to complete a particular task, like convincingly manipulating video on the fly.

Artificial intelligence researcher Alex Champandard told me in an email that a decent, consumer-grade graphics card could process this effect in hours, but a CPU would work just as well, only more slowly, over days.

“This is no longer rocket science,” Champandard said.

The ease with which someone could do this is frightening. Aside from the technical challenge, all someone would need is enough images of your face, and many of us are already creating sprawling databases of our own faces: People around the world uploaded 24 billion selfies to Google Photos in 2015-2016. It isn’t difficult to imagine an amateur programmer running their own algorithm to create a sex tape of someone they want to harass.

Deepfakes told me he’s not a professional researcher, just a programmer with an interest in machine learning.

“I just found a clever way to do face-swap,” he said, referring to his algorithm. “With hundreds of face images, I can easily generate millions of distorted images to train the network,” he said. “After that if I feed the network someone else's face, the network will think it's just another distorted image and try to make it look like the training face.”

In a comment thread on Reddit, deepfakes mentioned that he is using an algorithm similar to one developed by Nvidia researchers that uses deep learning to, for example, instantly turn a video of a summer scene into a winter one. The Nvidia researchers who developed the algorithm declined to comment on this possible application of their work.

In almost all of the examples deepfakes has posted, the result isn’t perfect. In the Gadot video, a box occasionally appeared around her face where the original image peeks through, and her mouth and eyes don’t quite line up to the words the actress is saying—but if you squint a little and suspend your belief, it might as well be Gadot; other videos deepfakes have made are even more convincing.

Porn performer Grace Evangeline told me over Twitter direct messages that porn stars are used to having their work spread around free to tube sites like SendVid, where the Gal Gadot fake is uploaded, without their permission. But she said that this was different. She’d never seen anything like this.

“One important thing that always needs to happen is consent,” Evangeline said. “Consent in private life as well as consent on film. Creating fake sex scenes of celebrities takes away their consent. It’s wrong.”

Even for people whose livelihoods involve getting in front of a camera, the violation of personal boundaries is troubling. I showed Alia Janine, a retired porn performer who was in the sex industry for 15 years, the video of Gadot. “It’s really disturbing,” she told me over the phone. “It kind of shows how some men basically only see women as objects that they can manipulate and be forced to do anything they want... It just shows a complete lack of respect for the porn performers in the movie, and also the female actresses.”

I asked deepfakes whether he considered the ethical implications of this technology. Did consent, revenge porn, and blackmail enter their mind while developing this algorithm?

“Every technology can be used with bad motivations, and it's impossible to stop that,” he said, likening it to the same technology that recreated Paul Walker’s post-mortem performance in Furious 7. “The main difference is how easy [it is] to do that by everyone. I don't think it's a bad thing for more average people [to] engage in machine learning research.”

Ethically, the implications are “huge,” Champandard said. Malicious use of technology often can’t be avoided, but it can be countered.

“We need to have a very loud and public debate,” he said. ”Everyone needs to know just how easy it is to fake images and videos, to the point where we won't able to distinguish forgeries in a few months from now. Of course, this was possible for a long time but it would have taken a lot of resources and professionals in visual effects to pull this off. Now it can be done by a single programmer with recent computer hardware.”

Champandard said researchers can then begin developing technology to detect fake videos and help moderate what’s fake and what isn’t, and internet policy can improve to regulate what happens when these types of forgeries and harassment come up.

“In a strange way,” this is a good thing, Champandard said. “We need to put our focus on transforming society to be able to deal with this.”
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...t-fake-ai-porn

















Until next week,

- js.



















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