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Old 23-10-19, 06:37 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 26th, ’19

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October 26th, 2019




Charter Should Face Record Labels' IP Suit, Judge Says

U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael E. Hegarty wasn't convinced by Charter's arguments that it doesn't directly benefit from illegal downloads. Assuming the record companies' allegations are true, the judge said, the ability to download infringing content without consequence is at least a "draw" for Charter's customers.

Judge Hegarty also said the record companies — Warner Bros. Records Inc., Atlantic Recording Corp., Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Corp. — have adequately shown that Charter has both the legal right as well as the practical ability to stop its customers from pirating music.

"Plaintiffs allege that defendant's own 'Terms of Service/Policies' expressly prohibits users from engaging in copyright infringement and reserves to defendant the right to terminate users' accounts for participating in piracy," the judge said. "Plaintiffs provided defendant with 'hundreds of thousands' of notices of infringement; yet, despite the notices ... defendant failed to stop or limit the infringement by suspending or terminating these users' accounts."

The record companies sued Charter in March, accusing the internet provider of allowing its users to blatantly pirate copyrighted music through BitTorrent and other file-sharing services.

Rather than helping the labels curb the pirating, the suit claims that Charter has chosen to "prioritize its own profits over its legal obligations."

Charter has asked to slice the suit in half, seeking to nix the claim for vicarious infringement but leaving the one for contributory infringement alone for now. On that claim, Charter told the court that the labels were pushing to "stretch the doctrine of vicarious liability far beyond the narrow construction applied by courts."

Charter also said the music labels failed to prove that the internet provider had the right and ability to stop its subscribers from infringing the record companies' copyrighted content.

The record labels' suit comes on the heels of similar suits brought by major labels against other internet service providers in recent years. Cox Communications LLC and Grande Communications were both accused of turning a blind eye to their customers' piracy for their own financial gain.

Cox was ordered to pay $25 million in 2015 after being found guilty of willful contributory copyright infringement.

Representatives for the record companies did not respond Monday to requests for comment. Charter declined to comment.

Warner is represented by Janette L. Ferguson and Benjamin M. Leoni of Lewis Bess Williams & Weese PC, Mitchell Kamin, Neema Sahni, Mark Chen, Johnathan Sperling, William O'Neill and Megan O'Neill of Covington & Burling LLP, and Matthew J. Oppenheim, Scott A. Zebrak, Jeffrey M. Gould and Kerry M. Mustico of Oppenheim & Zebrak LLP.

Charter is represented by Craig D. Joyce and John M. Tanner of Fairfield & Woods PC, and Michael S. Elkin, Thomas Patrick Lane, Seth Spitzer, Jennifer A Golinveaux, Erin R. Ranahan and Shilpa A. Coorg of Winston & Strawn LLP.

The case is Warner Records Inc. et al. v. Charter Communications Inc., case number 1:19-cv-00874, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado.

--Additional reporting by Nadia Dreid. Editing by Breda Lund.
https://www.law360.com/articles/1211...uit-judge-says





The House Votes in Favor of Disastrous Copyright Bill

It’s Not Too Late: The Senate Can Still Stop the CASE Act
Katharine Trendacosta

The House of Representatives has just voted in favor of the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (CASE Act) by 410-6 (with 16 members not voting), moving forward a bill that Congress has had no hearings and no debates on so far this session. That means that there has been no public consideration of the serious harm the bill could do to regular Internet users and their expression online.

The CASE Act creates a new body in the Copyright Office which will receive copyright complaints, notify the person being sued, and then decide if money is owed and how much. This new Copyright Claims Board will be able to fine people up to $30,000 per proceeding. Worse, if you get one of these notices (maybe an email, maybe a letter—the law actually does not specify) and accidentally ignore it, you’re on the hook for the money with a very limited ability to appeal. $30,000 could bankrupt or otherwise ruin the lives of many Americans.

The CASE Act also has bad changes to copyright rules, would let sophisticated bad actors get away with trolling and infringement, and might even be unconstitutional. It fails to help the artists it’s supposed to serve and will put a lot of people at risk.
Even though the House has passed the CASE Act, we can still stop it in the Senate. Tell your Senators to vote “no” on the CASE Act.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/1...copyright-bill





Disney Is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies Into Its Vault, and That’s Worrying

It is, among other things, bad news for movie theaters that depend on repertory screenings to shore up increasingly shaky bottom lines.
Matt Zoller Seitz

Joe Neff knew there was trouble when the horror films started vanishing.

Neff is the director of the 24-Hour Science Fiction and Horror Marathons that happen every spring and fall at the Drexel Theater, an independent venue in Columbus, Ohio. For this year’s Horror Marathon, Neff wanted to screen the original 1976 version of The Omen and the 1986 remake of The Fly, two of hundreds of older 20th Century Fox features that became the property of the Walt Disney Corporation after its $7.3 billion purchase of the studio’s parent company, 21st Century Fox, was made official this past spring. In the preceding few months, Neff had heard rumblings in his Google group of film programmers that Disney was about to start treating older Fox titles as they do older Disney titles — making them mostly unavailable to for-profit theaters. More and more film programmers and theater managers were reporting that they had suddenly and cryptically been told by their studio contacts that Fox’s back catalogue was no longer available to show. Some got calls informing them that an existing booking had been revoked.

When Neff’s requests to screen The Fly and The Omen were denied — via the Drexel, which handles the logistics of booking a programmer’s requested titles — he realized the rumors were true, and that he had to stop screening Fox films altogether. It was a devastating blow: Neff’s homegrown repertory festivals have shown many older Fox movies, including Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Zardoz, the original versions of The Day the Earth Stood Still and Suspiria, and Phantom of the Paradise. He asked the theater to double-check with Disney to make sure there hadn’t been some mistake. “Our Fox booking contact offered a very brief apology that she could no longer book repertory titles with the theater,” he says.

Sadly, Neff’s experience is indicative of a recent trend across North America, where it’s sometimes hard to tell exactly what Disney’s new policy regarding back-catalogue films is, beyond generally making it more difficult to show classic 20th Century Fox movies in theaters. The Transit Drive-In in Lockport, New York, which has hosted packed screenings of older Fox films like Alien, Aliens, Say Anything, The Princess Bride, and Moulin Rouge, says those films and others can no longer be screened there. The Little Theater in Rochester booked Fox’s Fight Club for August and was told by a Disney spokesperson mere days before the scheduled screening that a Digital Cinema Package (DCP) of the movie would no longer be shipped; then a Disney representative called the theater to apologize for the misunderstanding, and assured management that the film was still on its way; the reversal happened a day after a Los Angeles Times reporter called Disney asking them to clarify their repertory policies.

A recent Canadian Broadcasting Company story confirmed that even major first-run chains like Cineplex will now lose access to Fox repertory titles. That collection of movies is a gold mine for many commercial theaters — particularly art houses, regional chains, and big-city multiplexes that like to mix things up by sprinkling a few older works into their screening lineups. In addition to films that have already been mentioned, Fox’s holdings include hundreds of notable films in a variety of genres and modes, a layer cake of options which, taken together, give a sense of the richness of American cinema over the last 100 years: everything from Miracle on 34th Street, All About Eve and The Sound of Music to Deadpool, The Revenant, The Simpsons Movie, and Terrence Malick’s version of The Thin Red Line.

Disney officially declined to comment for this piece, but a film distributor with firsthand knowledge of the company’s policy says it is directed at theaters that screen first-run Disney and Fox content alongside older titles. The distributor said that screenings of vintage Fox films would still be allowed at nonprofit theaters such as Film Forum in New York and Segundo’s Old Town Music Hall, and in some other venues, including outdoor screenings in public spaces and at museums and cultural institutions (particularly ones dedicated to cinema, such as the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, New York, and the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago). And there might be some exemptions granted for special occasions such as anniversaries. But each instance would be considered on a case-by-case basis, with no guarantee that the decision will go the theater’s way, no matter what Fox films it had been able to wrangle a week, a month, or a year earlier.

In fact, in reporting this story, I found that Disney’s new policy is being applied differently from place to place. Several theater managers and film programmers (all of whom requested anonymity for fear of creating bad blood with Disney) said their requests to show older Fox titles had been either preemptively denied or revoked after the fact, despite fitting the description of a venue that should be allowed to do so. Sometimes no rationale was offered; other times, they were given a reason, but it didn’t jibe with what was happening at other venues. In August, Rachel Fox, the senior programmer for the Rio Theater near Vancouver, tried to book the original Alien to play alongside the upcoming Alien making-of documentary, Memory: The Origins of Alien. Disney told her that the title was unavailable, even though Alien has had one-off screenings in theaters all over North America throughout 2019, the movie’s 40th anniversary year, and is being shown via satellite in hundreds of theaters by Fathom Events this month.

In some ways, this is just standard operating procedure for Disney. Older Disney movies — particularly traditional animated movies like Fantasia and blockbuster live-action “family films” like The Swiss Family Robinson and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea — have generally been unavailable to theaters of all kinds. It’s a vestige of the company’s long-standing “Disney Vault” strategy of artificially creating excitement for a repertory title by keeping film prints out of theaters for years or decades, and periodically manufacturing a limited number of physical media copies (on VHS, then DVD, and eventually Blu-ray). The general absence of older Disney films from first-run theaters always made them feel a wee bit denuded of possibility, but over the decades, cinephiles gradually got used to the idea that Pinocchio or Sleeping Beauty would probably never show at such theaters unless they were part of a coordinated, wide-scale Disney rerelease, timed to a film’s appearance on some new variant of home video, often remastered in a new format to spruce it up.

But Disney is one thing, Fox is another. Even without older Disney films, inhabitants of major cities, medium-sized suburbs, and college towns could visit a populist, commercial venue such as a multiplex or art-house theater and choose between, say, the new Fast and the Furious or Frozen or a Quentin Tarantino movie, or a weekend midnight show of a Fox title like the original Planet of the Apes or Commando — or, during a holiday period, Fox Searchlight’s 28 Days Later or 20th Century Fox’s Die Hard and Home Alone.

Now, Fox classics are going into the vault as well, for reasons the company won’t publicly explain or justify. And Disney’s vaultification of Fox titles is bad news for movie theaters that depend on repertory screenings to shore up their increasingly shaky bottom lines. The decision to broaden Disney’s artificial scarcity tactic to include thousands of movies released by a onetime rival is a wounding blow to a swath of theatrical venues that used to be able to show them, and where film buffs were able to see them with an audience.

For such theaters, repertory screenings make business sense, too. “It may not seem like a big deal, losing access to movies that might only make the theater $600 or $1,000 once you deduct the costs attached to booking them,” said a film programmer who asked not to be named in this story for fear of angering Disney. “But over the course of a year, it all adds up. A lot of these movies are what you’d call ‘steady earners’ for theaters. You show them, and people turn up.” Speaking of steady earners: the steadiest of them all, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, appears to be the one title Disney isn’t cracking down on — perhaps because, according to Rachel Fox, “maybe Disney knows that if they pull Rocky Horror too, there’ll be a full-scale audience revolt.”

What all of this does is erode the idea, beloved by cinephiles, that any film is new if you’re seeing it for the first time, and that movies exist in a perpetual present where different eras are in conversation with each other. This idea is still reflected on streaming platforms like Amazon Prime, Hulu, Criterion Channel, and Shudder, and to a degree, Netflix (although the latter has become notoriously unwilling to dedicate more than a fraction of its offerings to movies made before 2000). But there’s a special thrill in seeing an older title displayed on the marquee of a first-run movie theater like Cincinnati’s Esquire, which one weekend not long ago was offering Joker, Downton Abbey, Monos, and Aquarela, plus 1987’s The Lost Boys and 1968’s Rosemary’s Baby.

The silent erasure of many classic Fox films from mainstream commercial spaces is also unnerving because it invites the question, What will go away next? If you’re a fan of seeing repertory films in public spaces, and are lucky enough to live near a first-run theater that shows them at midnight, on weekends, as anniversary or holiday events, or in themed festivals like Joe Neff’s drive-in marathons, Disney’s gradual culling of the Fox catalogue is chilling — like the start of a horror film where the things you love begin to vanish from the places they once called home.

But why, exactly, is Disney doing this?

The most commonly floated theory is that the company is trying to give consumers one more reason to subscribe to its new streaming service, Disney+. Recently, the company released a list of the films and shows that will be available to stream on the new service when it debuts November 12 — predictably, it included plenty of old Disney movies both good and bad (lots of Don Knotts!), as well as some Fox titles that could conceivably be Disney titles (Miracle on 34th Street, or Danny Boyle’s Millions). Does that mean that the rest of the Fox catalogue will go to Disney’s sister streaming service, Hulu (a cooperative venture that Disney recently acquired by purchasing Fox, a one-third partner in Hulu, then buying out the other remaining partner, Comcast)? That’s not clear at this point. Either way, the Disney+ theory only makes sense if you really believe that film buffs who love Fox or Disney repertory titles enough to leave their homes to see them in theaters would be less likely to subscribe to a service that offered a whole library of options in that vein.

A more convincing theory is that this is just how Disney does business. We’re now 11 years into the imperial phase of Disney’s expansion, which saw the company buy Marvel Studios and Lucasfilm (owners of Star Wars and Indiana Jones) and become the dominant player in theatrical exhibition. Last year, Disney claimed 40 percent of North American ticket sales (a number expected to jump to 50 percent once the Fox merger begins to deliver). It is able to demand and receive percentages of ticket sales far beyond those of its rivals, plus entire screens dedicated not just to near-surefire hits from Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Disney’s animation department, but iffier prospects like the live-action remakes of Pete’s Dragon and Dumbo, A Wrinkle in Time, and nature documentaries like Monkey Kingdom.

More than one exhibition professional contacted for this article speculated that Disney’s overall goal is to claim as many screens at a theater as possible for its newer titles, even if some of them are packing the house but others are selling just a handful of tickets per show. A former theater manager for a major chain, who asked not to be identified in this piece, says, “It seems short-sighted, you know? But they do it, I think, just to keep a Sony title out, to keep a Universal title out.” The Fox freeze out, he speculates, may be an extension of that tactic: Disney considers any screen that’s taken up by an older movie, even one that’s owned by Disney, to be a screen that could be showing the new Marvel or Star Wars title instead. Or showing Orangutans 4 to an audience of three.

It might seem as if the wars being waged by international conglomerates over screen space would have little bearing on whether a movie lover in Montreal or Minneapolis can see a weekend screening of a Fox comedy like How to Marry a Millionaire, Mrs. Doubtfire, or Big. But as an ancient proverb states, when elephants fight, it’s the grass that suffers.

The economic effects could be especially devastating for neighborhood landmarks like the Plaza in Atlanta — the oldest and last remaining independent theater in the city. Its owner, Christopher Escobar, also the executive director of the Atlanta Film Society, estimates that 25 percent of the Plaza’s yearly revenue comes from Fox titles. Half that take is The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which they’re still permitted to screen; but once they lose other guaranteed Fox moneymakers like Alien, Fight Club, and The Sound of Music, he estimates they’ll lose 10 to 12 percent of their yearly income. “Why would a distributor make it harder to be in the movie theater business now?” Escobar asks. “In an era when there are a dizzying amount of streaming platforms launching, and there are all these fights happening about availability windows, they should be working to get people to see movies in the best possible way first.”

There might be a tendency to see all this as a niche issue, one that only affects nostalgists and people who are still enamored with the theatrical experience. But Escobar and other theater owners interviewed for this piece point out that the estimated 600 independent first-run theaters left in the United States are the only reliable incubators for independent filmmakers who are unlikely to have their work screened in multiplexes dominated by Disney and other major distributors. Many of them are international filmmakers, documentary filmmakers, and filmmakers of color who are going to lose access to these venues unless they’re subsidized by other events such as repertory screenings of old movies that can be relied on to draw crowds. “These kinds of theaters are the only places where women filmmakers and other members of underrepresented groups can go and see themselves, the last frontier space,” Escobar says. “The more the means of making, distributing, and exhibiting films are controlled by a handful of companies, the fewer entry points those voices are going to have.”

Access to multiplex screens has become even harder for independent filmmakers in recent years, now that a version of “block booking” — the supposedly illegal practice of withholding likely hits from a theater unless it agrees to take a probable flop from the distributor as well — has become commonplace once more. Distributors are increasingly practicing “clearance” — refusing to book films in small theaters if they’re already playing at a big multiplex, even one that’s an hour away. The Rio’s Rachel Fox says her theater only shows new major studio films when they’re basically played out, because big multiplexes in the area always get first dibs and hang onto them until they’re old news. “I mean, we didn’t even get A Star Is Born until weeks after the Oscars,” she says. But that hasn’t helped her make her case to Disney. The Disney representative she spoke with said those distinctions didn’t matter, because their theater was considered first-run regardless of what films it shows and when. She says she’s starting to suspect that Disney “makes the distinction of what kind of venue you are to be based, probably, on your box-office return, which really sucks.”

Even at the upper echelons of theatrical exhibition, the business is being worn down by a confluence of forces, including the relative cheapness of streaming services; shorter windows between when a movie plays theaters and when it goes to home video; more aggressive rental terms by major distributors; shoddier service (at chains, mainly) due to cost-cutting; and ticket prices, which have steadily risen with inflation over the past 40 years even though wages have remained roughly the same. Audiences have been conditioned not to leave their homes except for spectacular, special-effects-laden, heavily advertised entries in a big-name franchise like James Bond, DC adaptations, The Fast and the Furious, or, well, everything else that seems to be owned by Disney these days — from Marvel, Pixar, and Walt Disney Animation to Star Wars, Die Hard, and Alien to awards-friendly one-offs like The Descendants, 12 Years a Slave, The Shape of Water, and the upcoming A Hidden Life and French Dispatch. Huge chains are able to survive under these conditions (though not easily). Smaller theaters have to go the unconventional route, and repertory screenings have always been an important tool in their kit. Remove it, and survival becomes much harder.

The Plaza’s Escobar also happens to be a Disney shareholder, and he says he’s holding out hope that Disney will change its mind and rescind the new policy. “Disney has the opportunity not to be the bad guy, to act in the public interest and prove that them owning something is not a bad thing,” he says. Time to wish upon a star.
https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/disn...its-vault.html





Tired of Too Many Subscriptions? Apple TV+, Disney+ Streaming Launches Add to Overload
Edward C. Baig

Quick test: Ask yourself how many subscriptions you’re on the hook for.

Hard to blame you for failing to come up with a number, or for feeling overwhelmed at the mere prospect of trying.

Let's see. There’s TV or internet for shows, music services such as Spotify and Apple Music, maybe some newspapers or magazines. Don’t forget the cloud storage where you keep all those precious photos and videos, and that identity theft protection you need because of all of the data breaches, holes and hacks.

Overwhelmed yet? We're not done.

There are the meal kits and razor blades delivered to your doorstep to make life easier. Then there’s wardrobe you swap out and have delivered on a regular basis through Rent the Runway. Maybe that extends to your ride, a car subscription that lets you drive your vehicle of choice.

That’s not even counting the apps, cellphone service, online genealogy, home security monitoring, audio and e-books, ink cartridges, videogame catalogs and that health-tracking service you forgot about that you pay for each month. Then there are those expired free 30-day trials you've long forgotten about still an unseen part of your world.

Feeling oversubscribed? Or maybe over being subscribed. Subscription fatigue is on the verge of reaching epidemic proportions.

What's more, the trend toward getting you to sign up is getting more intense when it comes to streaming media. The spectrum of apps and services, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, HBO, Showtime and YouTube, is about to get even more crowded with the advent of Apple TV+, HBO Max (from AT&T), Peacock (from Comcast/NBCUniversal) and Disney+.

Streaming wars: Netflix says it will retain the streaming crown; not worried about Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus

There are more than 300 “over-the-top” video services streamed over the Internet, says Deloitte vice chairman Kevin Westcott, who leads the company’s U.S. telecommunication, media and entertainment practice.

The average household subscribes to three.

“That tells you we definitely have a problem,” he says.

Why do we subscribe?

As we transitioned to this sharing economy, we’ve seen “that globally, people have become more inclined to say that they want subscription-based services rather than to outright own something,” says Virna Sekuj, strategic insights manager with the GlobalWebIndex market research firm.

Sekuj says one of the motivators to the subscription or membership model is the upfront cost, especially driven by millennials who grew up with tech and during the Great Recession. "It's given people access to things that they may normally not have been able to do."

Netflix offers "Stranger Things."

Netflix offers "Stranger Things." (Photo: Netflix)

How many subscriptions are too many?

“Things are getting absurd,” behavior analyst Sean McCoy tweets in response to a USA TODAY question on the topic. Though he’s had subscriptions for years to multiplayer online role-playing games, he says, “my wife and I just took inventory and weeded (out) anything we didn’t really need.”

I’m fairly used to subscriptions from years of MMORPG gaming, but things are getting absurd. My wife and I just took inventory and weeded our anything we didn’t really need.
— Sean McCoy (@srmccoy) October 11, 2019

The impulse to subscribe to a video service may be largely built around the idea of convenience. That's the promise anyway. The basis of the old cable model was that all this content was aggregated in one place, and your TV subscription is very likely bundled with broadband in the home.

“If only there were one service that could bring me all the content in one easy box. Oh wait, it's called cable, and it's been around for 40 years,” says Andy Gibs a Northern New Jersey father of two.

Dana Strong, president of Comcast’s Xfinity Consumer Services, says the company’s X1 platform was created in part to help reduce the friction consumers may experience in leaving one video app for another or leaving linear TV for on-demand programming.

“Having the ability to elevate the content out of the app into an integrated search engine and user interface makes the content discovery that much easier, particularly when you connect it with a voice remote," she says.

If you’re a cord-cutter looking to ditch cable, your motivation may have more to do with saving money – why pay extra loot to the cable guys for hundreds of channels you never watch? But there are no guarantees you’ll come out ahead financially.

"My husband insisted on cutting the cable and switching to multiple streaming services," Deb McAlister Holland wrote on Facebook. "I can’t articulate how much I hate it. Terrible user interfaces. Half a dozen separate sets of preferences to update. Annual fees. Monthly fees. Delays of days, weeks, or months before TV shows are available."

By 69% to 65%, streaming video has edged ahead of traditional pay TV, according to a recent Deloitte survey of more than 2,000 U.S. consumers. But it’s not an either/or proposition; 43% of U.S. consumers have both.

Where to go to watch

Consumers may feel compelled to sign up for multiple video subscriptions because this or that service is the only place to go watch some program all their friends are telling them to binge on.

Access to original programming created by the service – think Amazon and Netflix – was cited as a chief benefit for 55% of more than 23,000 U.S. internet subscribers ages 16 to 64 surveyed in April by GlobalWebIndex. More than half also cited being able to watch across multiple devices.

That’s what Apple will bank on when it launches shows around such stars as Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon as part of Apple TV+. It’s another play by the company to attract and keep customers within its ecosystem.

Unfortunately, as shows are spread out across numerous services, chasing content may take a lot more effort on consumers' part and cost more than they counted on. Just ask a frustrated parent lamenting the fact that Disney pulled its content off Netflix in favor of its own soon-to-launch Disney+ service.

As a consumer, “you want to pick an ecosystem that’s neutral,” says Dave Shull, the new CEO of TiVo, the struggling DVR pioneer that is attempting to reinvent itself while trying to help viewers navigate content chaos. “It’s interesting to me the last couple of weeks to watch Disney+ and Netflix starting to fight. The benefit and promise of TiVo is I am never going to be a content provider. Those guys have much bigger pockets than we do, and they’ll fight it out.”

For many consumers, it may be a challenge just getting a handle on what they already pay for, maybe a “trial” subscription to some app or product they signed up for years ago and simply forgot about? If the bill automatically renews online, customers don’t get that monthly statement in the mail to remind them.

You probably pay more for subscriptions than you think.

An analysis last year by the WestMonroe consulting firm of 2,500 Americans’ budgets, spanning 21 categories of subscription services, found that 84% of people underestimated what they spent each month. The average person forked over about $237 for the categories in the study.

Bootstrap Media managing director Gene DeRose describes the problem of subscription fatigue as a feeling of complete bewilderment. “We’re all more than ever innocent victims of the blood wars between big tech players, who could easily enable all of these systems to more elegantly talk to each other but refrain from doing so because they're wired to keep all the bricks in place in their respective walled gardens, lest they lose leverage.”

Consumers may gain back a bit of leverage by sharing subscriptions. Eighty percent of the respondents in the GlobalWebIndex survey share a TV/movie streaming subscription with at least one other person; half of those share a premium music plan.

The complexity that comes with subscription overload may introduce another problem: “It's not as much subscription fatigue as it is password fatigue,” says Jeff Dorgay, publisher of ToneAudio.

Where to go to cancel

The most prudent remedy for consumers is to take the time to figure out which services they are paying for. The first place to start is credit card statements. Do a bit of digging to see which recurring charges are attached to your smartphone and other Android or iOS devices.

For Android users, start in the Google Play store and sign into your Google Account. Tap Menu, Subscriptions and choose the subscriptions you want to wave bye-bye to. Follow the instructions from there.

To get started on an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings, tap your name, then choose the subscriptions on your potential hit list.

You can always follow the path McCoy and his wife took. Reach out to every service you rarely, if ever, use and utter three simple words: “Cancel my subscription.”
https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/...ue/3995686002/





SpaceX Plans to Start Offering Starlink Broadband Services in 2020
Sandra Erwin

SpaceX is confident it can start offering broadband service in the United States via its Starlink constellation in mid-2020, the company’s president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said Oct. 22.

Getting there will require the company to launch six to eight batches of satellites, Shotwell told reporters during a media roundtable. SpaceX also has to finish the design and engineering of the user terminals, which is not a minor challenge, Shotwell acknowledged.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has a Starlink terminal at his house and he used it to send a tweet early on Oct. 22.”Sending this tweet through space via Starlink satellite,” he tweeted to his 29 million followers. ”Whoa, it worked!!”

Shotwell said SpaceX will need to complete six to eight Starlink launches — including the one that already took place in May — to ensure continuous service in upper and lower latitude bands. “We need 24 launches to get global coverage,” she said. “Every launch after that gives you more capacity.”

The company caused a stir last week when it requested the International Telecommunication Union to approve spectrum for 30,000 additional Starlink satellites to build the world’s largest low-Earth orbit broadband constellation. This was in addition to 12,000 already approved by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

Shotwell said SpaceX is not certain that will need that many satellites. Far fewer are needed for global coverage but the company wants extra spacecraft to be able to offer customers customized service options. Starlink is a mesh network of satellites connected to each other by space lasers.

“We’ll continue to upgrade the network until mid to late next year,” said Shotwell. “We’re hoping for 24 launches by the end of next year.”

Shotwell said many of the Starlink features are being tested by the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory under a program called Global Lightning. SpaceX in December 2018 received a $28 million contract to test over the next three years different ways in which the military might use Starlink broadband services. So far, SpaceX has demonstrated data throughout of 610 megabits per second in flight to the cockpit of a U.S. military C-12 twin-engine turboprop aircraft.

SpaceX wants to offer the service to the U.S. government but is now focused on how it will serve the consumer market. Many of the details of how the service will be rolled out remain to be worked out, she said. When possible it will be offered directly to consumers following Musk’s Tesla model for selling cars. In many countries the company will be required to partner with local telecom firms to offer the service.

Shotwell recognized a lot of this is uncharted territory for SpaceX. “This is very different business for SpaceX,” she said. “It’s leveraging space technology but it’s a consumer business.”

She said Starlink is considered “additive to our business,” meaning that it will not replace space launch services as SpaceX’s primary source of revenue.

SpaceX will have to hire a whole new workforce to deal with sales, tech support and product engineering. User terminals are a major concern. “The more engineering we do on the user terminal, the less service people we will have to hire,” said Shotwell, Terminals are one aspect of the Starlink business that the company has to “get right,” she said.

When consumers sign up, “they are going to receive a box from SpaceX” with a user terminal and a cord, said Shotwell. How that gets connected and where the terminals should be placed in someone’s home are still issues to be ironed out. “We still have a lot to do to get that right,” said Shotwell. “Knowing Elon, he wants everything to be beautiful. So the user terminal will be beautiful.”

The price point is also being studied. Shotwell said millions of people in the U.S. pay $80 per month to get “crappy service.” She didn’t say whether Starlink will cost more or less than $80 per month but suggested that would be a segment of the public the company would target as well as rural areas that currently have no connectivity.

Outside the United States, SpaceX is working nation by nation to get authorization to offer the service. “Every country has its own process,” said Shotwell.

The terminals today are being produced at SpaceX’s factory in Hawthorne, California. But mass manufacturing in the future will move to a different location Shotwell declined to name.

SpaceX is racing to get Starlink in operation as several other companies continue to build competing broadband constellations. Shotwell said there is probably room in the market for at least two competitors. “If we do well and make money, there will be competitors.”

As more Starlink launches are planned, SpaceX wants to use previously flown Falcon boosters as much as possible, said Shotwell. “I think we’ll manage the fleet how best we manage the fleet,” she said. “Our intent is to use Starlink to push the capability of those boosters and see how many missions they can do.”

A single Falcon booster was designed for 10 flights. The next Starlink mission scheduled in mid-November will be launched by a booster on its fourth flight.

Since SpaceX started returning boosters in 2015, 44 first stages were recovered: 26 at sea and 18 on land. So far 23 of the recovered boosters have flown.
https://spacenews.com/spacex-plans-t...vices-in-2020/





WAV Audio Files are Now Being Used to Hide Malicious Code

Steganography malware trend moving from PNG and JPG to WAV files.
Catalin Cimpanu

Two reports published in the last few months show that malware operators are experimenting with using WAV audio files to hide malicious code.

The technique is known as steganography -- the art of hiding information in plain sight, in another data medium.

In the software field, steganography -- also referred to as stego -- is used to describe the process of hiding files or text in another file, of a different format. For example, hiding plain text inside an image's binary format.

Using steganography has been popular with malware operators for more than a decade. Malware authors don't use steganography to breach or infect systems, but rather as a transfer method. Steganography allows files hiding malicious code to bypass security software that whitelists non-executable file formats (such as multimedia files).

All previous instances where malware used steganography revolved around using image file formats, such as PNG or JEPG.

The novelty in the two recently-published reports is the use of WAV audio files, not seen abused in malware operations until this year.

The two reports

The first of these two new malware campaigns abusing WAV files was reported back in June. Symantec security researchers said they spotted a Russian cyber-espionage group known as Waterbug (or Turla) using WAV files to hide and transfer malicious code from their server to already-infected victims.

The second malware campaign was spotted this month by BlackBerry Cylance. In a report published today and shared with ZDNet last week, Cylance said it saw something similar to what Symantec saw a few months before.

But while the Symantec report described a nation-state cyber-espionage operation, Cylance said they saw the WAV steganography technique being abused in a run-of-the-mill crypto-mining malware operation.

Cylance said this particular threat actor was hiding DLLs inside WAV audio files. Malware already-present on the infected host would download and read the WAV file, extract the DLL bit by bit, and then run it, installing a cryptocurrency miner application named XMRrig.

Josh Lemos, VP of Research and Intelligence at BlackBerry Cylance, told ZDNet in an email yesterday that this malware strain using WAV steganography was spotted on both Windows desktop and server instances.

The commoditization of steganography

Furthermore, Lemos also told us that this also appears to be the first time a crypto-mining malware strain was seen using abused steganography, regardless if it was a PNG, JPEG, or WAV file.

This shows that your mundane crypto-mining malware authors are growing in sophistication, as they learn from other operations.

"The use of stego techniques requires an in-depth understanding of the target file format," Lemos told ZDNet. "It is generally used by sophisticated threat actors that want to remain undetected for a long period of time.

"Developing a stego technique takes time, and several blogs have detailed how threat actors such as OceanLotus or Turla implemented payload hiding," Lemos added.

"These publications make it possible for other threat actors to grasp the technique and use it as they see fit."

In other words, the act of documenting and studying steganography comes with a snowball effect that also commoditizes the technique for lower-skilled malware operations.

But while Symantec and Cylance's work on documenting WAV-based steganography might help other malware operators, WAV, PNG, and JPG files aren't the only file formats that can be abused.

"Stego can be used with any file format as long as the attacker adheres to the structure and constraints of the format so that any modifications performed on the targeted file do not break its integrity," Lemos told.

In other words, defending against steganography by blocking vulnerable file formats is not the correct solution, as companies would end up blocking the downloading of many popular formats, like JPEG, PNG, BMP, WAV, GIF, WebP, TIFF, and loads more; wreaking havoc in internal networks and making it impossible to navigate the modern internet.

A proper way of dealing with steganography is... not dealing with it at all. Since stego is only used as a data transfer method, companies should be focusing on detecting the point of entry/infection of the malware that abuses stegonagraphy, or the execution of the unauthorized code spawned by the stego-laced files.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/wav-au...alicious-code/





Australia Newspapers Redact Front Pages in Media-Freedom Protest
Jason Scott

Australia’s fiercely competitive newspaper industry shelved rivalries on Monday to present a united front against what it says is a government campaign to restrict freedom of the press.

Major newspapers including The Australian, owned by Rupert Murdoch-controlled News Corp., the Daily Telegraph and Nine Entertainment’s Sydney Morning Herald published front pages with most of the text blacked out, highlighting what they say is a growing culture of secrecy.

Media freedoms have increasingly been in the spotlight Down Under. This year federal police raided a home of a News Corp. journalist, along with an Australian Broadcasting Corp. newsroom in Sydney, after they published articles based on leaked information linked to a whisteblower.

The Right to Know coalition, which is acting as an umbrella group for the media organizations and other concerned groups, claims that more than 60 acts of legislation passed in the past two decades have eroded to ability for Australian journalists to report on issues and have increasingly allowed whistleblowers to be punished.

Asked by reporters during a visit to Jakarta on Sunday on whether his conservative government could respond to calls for more media-freedom protections, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said his government “will always believe in freedom of the press.”

“It’s an important part of our freedoms as a liberal democracy,” he said. “Also I believe in the rule of law and that no one is above it, including me or anyone else, any journalist or anyone else.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...reedom-protest





Catalonia has Created a New Kind of Online Activism. Everyone Should Pay Attention

A pro-independence group is leveraging social media and peer-to-peer technology to orchestrate massive protests. The catch? No one knows who runs it
Laurie Clarke

Trouble is brewing in Catalonia. On October 14, Spain’s supreme court in Madrid sentenced nine pro-independence Catalan politicians to long prison terms – from nine to 13 years – for their roles in the Catalan referendum on independence in 2017.

Following the verdict, furious protests have ripped through the streets of Catalonia. What at first began as peaceful mass demonstrations has sparked sporadic violence, with protestors setting fire to buildings and damaging property, and police spraying crowds with rubber bullets and water cannons.

To an outsider, the protests can look like a homogenous mass of angry citizens revolting against the Spanish state. But the movement encompasses different factions, from long-standing separatist groups ANC (Assemblea Nacional Catalana) and Òmnium, to absolute newcomers. Among the latter is a mysterious digital network called Tsunami Democràtic.

What is Tsunami Democràtic?

It is one faction of the multifaceted pro-independence protest movement in Catalonia, formed shortly before October 14. But despite its young age, it is relevant: according to Spanish daily newspaper El Pais, the group instigated what is arguably the most disruptive protest action undertaken so far – the mass occupation of Barcelona’s El Prat airport by an estimated 10,000 protesters. It is especially how they did it that caught many people’s attention: everything Tsunami Democràtic does is orchestrated completely online – and it isn’t clear who exactly is behind it.

The organisation broadcasts both on Twitter, where it currently counts more than 188,000 followers, and on Telegram, where it has as amassed more than 330,000 subscribers. It’s also launched an ambitious protest-organisation app – but more on that later. Its webpage, featuring a video of a wave engulfing the screen, appears more like a glossy travel site. (There are reports from within Catalonia that the website has been taken down in Spain; it remains accessible from the UK as of the evening of October 18.) The tsunami moniker might be inspired by the Bruce Lee ‘Be water’ quote that has been co-opted by the Hong Kong protestors to describe the movement as fluid, fast moving and adaptable.

“I didn't have a lot of faith in Tsunami Democràtic at first because there's been a lot of groups who sold themselves like they were going to be the revolution and then came to nothing,” says Alba Medrano, a 28-year-old activist based in Barcelona who has been involved in the pro-independence movement for the past 11 years. However, since the successful staging of the airport, confidence in the group has grown. She says right now activists are just waiting for the group’s next protest action to be called.

Medrano says that it’s still primarily other channels that she and fellow activists consult for updates. In particular, the Anonymous Catalonia group’s Telegram channel. “There, there’s a retransmission of everything that's happening. They keep posting every minute what's happening everywhere, so that's how we get information.”

However, where Tsunami Democràtic has managed to gain greater traction than established groups is online attention. For example, the Catalonia Anonymous faction counts just over 100,000 subscribers on Telegram, while CDR (Los Comités de Defensa de la República) has around 50,000.

But the group has another point of difference from others: a new app for coordinating protest activity in the region. Tsunami Democràtic has billed this as an organising tool that promises innovative ways of evading police detection and coordinating actions. Around 270,000 people have reportedly downloaded the app, which was only announced on Monday, October 14. It’s not yet been used to orchestrate activity, but the group has strongly encouraged people to download it ahead of more planned actions.

What does Tsunami Democràtic’s app do?

The app is a communication platform that's been designed to organise and mobilise protestors in a secure and efficient way – employing geolocation and friend-to-friend technologies to ensure only trusted members have access.

Getting access to the app isn't the most straight forward. It isn’t available through Android’s Play Store or on Apple’s App Store. Instead, you have to download an APK file (an Android Package file used to distribute applications on Google's Android operating system) from the website, and manually install it on your phone. The software doesn’t work on iPhones because Apple’s iOS has stricter safeguards in place.

The installation process may be used to avoid the chance that big tech firms remove it from app stores following pressure from the government, the exact fate that befell a Hong Kong protest organising app. It also allowed whoever developed the app to keep their identity more private than if they had published their creation through an official app store.

There’s more. To ensure the app remains in the hands of genuine protestors, rather than police or other infiltrators, users can only access it through a QR code from someone who is already a member of the network. Each person who joins receives ten QR codes to invite others.

The app also employs geolocation technology to coordinate activity. When you first download the app, you’re asked for your location (a loose estimation rather than exact coordinates). This means people can be organised in geographical “cells”, and protestors can only see actions taking place within a certain radius – preventing information from sloshing out across the network, and limiting what an infiltrator would be able to find out.

“Even if the police get inside this network, they will only get the notifications for one particular location,” stresses Enric Luján, a professor of Political Science who specialises in technology at the University of Barcelona.

This might mean that it will be easier to orchestrate multi-pronged protest activity. “There are going to be a lot of things going on at the same time. So I think it's going to be a really useful tool to avoid so much police repression,” says Medrano.

Why is the app important?

The app was first announced on Monday, October 14 and Tsunami Democràtic has suggested that something major is planned for Monday, October 21, and that the app will be helpful for those willing to partake. In a Telegram message sent on Friday, October 18, the group stressed that having the app would be useful.

Some of the app’s source code – not all of it – has been released publicly, and technologists have scoured the publicly available parts of the code for indicators about the app’s inner workings.

The app is built on top of Retroshare – a freely available software used to construct encrypted, friend-to-friend networks (peer-to-peer networks in which users only make contact with people they personally know) to share files or communicate without relying on any central server. “In this mesh, nodes only exchange data with their connected ‘friends’, in order to maintain anonymity between non-friend nodes,” says Cyril Soler, one of Retroshare’s developers. “On top of that, Retroshare implements different techniques to allow data to be passed from node to node beyond your direct friends. That, for instance, allows the software to globally propagate distributed mail or files.”

While the app is decentralised in terms of nodes, experts have speculated that there might be some users who can see an overview of the app – where protestors are active and available across the city. However, whether this is the case is not clear from the publicly available code.

The decentralised nature of the network has other advantages. “These guys who are leading the movement have built a decentralised network in order to distribute the agenda, so that the police couldn't detect them as the central nodes,” says Luján.

Despite the app’s precautions, some concerns still remain. “Its traffic would be quite unusual, especially coming from mobile devices, which would probably make it easier to analyze and inspect for ISPs [internet service providers] – although I don't know if the authorities can legally request this kind of information from Spanish Internet Service Providers (ISP),” says Sergio Lopez, a senior software engineer at open source technology firm Red Hat, who has analysed Tsunami Democràtic’s publicly available code.

“This means that, even if the contents are encrypted, ISPs could potentially build a relationship map of nodes participating in this kind of [friend-to-friend] network.” It’s for this reason that other protest movements, such as the one in Hong Kong, rely on Bluetooth, thus avoiding and ISP's network.

There is a lack of consensus over how much time and effort it would have taken to create Tsunami Democràtic’s app. “This is not something developed by an activist in his or her free time,” says Luján. In contrast, Lopez suggests it may not be as complicated as it first appears. “The implementation of the F2F network, which would be the hardest part to implement, seems to be borrowed from RetroShare,” he says. “The rest is basically front-end. This could very well be done by a single developer, or a small team of them.”

However, there are caveats. “You also need to "bootstrap" the network, which means distributing the app, or a variant of the app to a significant amount of people, who would act as recruiters when the app is made available for everyone,” Lopez says. “These kind of logistics can't be accomplished by a single person, or a small group.”

As well as entering your location, you are also asked to enter the times when you’re available to protest. “It's like a clandestine army that you can invoke whenever and for whatever reason you want – you can decide to block one, two, three or 100 roads,” says Luján.

Okay, who is behind Tsunami Democràtic, really?

The organisation presents itself as an online grassroots movement, but it’s widely recognised that the app is a fairly sophisticated piece of software and the campaign is a tightly-run strategic operation.

Theories abound. “I think they're a few people, and that they're very intelligent and technically informed, like programmers,” says Medrano.

But another theory is also gaining ground. “I think it's a change of strategy of the main groups, which were involved in the first of our referendum two years ago,” says Luján. He believes that Tsunami Democràtic is a proxy group for the larger separatist organisations, and former members of the former Catalan government, currently residing in Brussels after fleeing the country in 2017.

Some Catalan politicians – including president of the Generalitat, Quim Torra; its vice president, Pere Aragonès, and the president of the Parliament, Roger Torrent – have publicly supported the group on social media. Tsunami Democràtic denies any link.

Spain’s interior ministry has expressed the desire to discover who is behind the group and the app, but this will likely be difficult – given it could be set up and run from anywhere in the world.

While the movement’s chief focus is of course on Catalan independence, Tsunami Democràtic has also signalled the possibility for scope beyond this. On Github, the developers specify that it’s a platform for the organisation of peaceful civil disobedience, which could be adapted for protests in any part of the world. “It's really ambitious, because technically speaking, you could destabilise any political system you wanted,” says Luján.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/barc...-protests-news





Japanese Hotel Chain Sorry that Hackers May have Watched Guests Through Bedside Robots

Can we at least turn the thing around before we... y'know?
John Oates

Japanese hotel chain HIS Group has apologised for ignoring warnings that its in-room robots were hackable to allow pervs to remotely view video footage from the devices.

The Henn na Hotel is staffed by robots: guests can be checked in by humanoid or dinosaur reception bots before proceeding to their room.

Facial recognition tech will let customers into their room and then a bedside robot will assist with other requirements. However several weeks ago a security researcher revealed on Twitter that he had warned HIS Group in July about the bed-bots being easily accessible, noting they sported "unsigned code" allowing a user to tap an NFC tag to the back of robot's head and allow access via the streaming app of their choice.

Having heard nothing, the researcher made the hack public on 13 October. The vulnerability allows guests to gain access to cameras and microphones in the robot remotely so they could watch and listen to anyone in the room in the future.

The hotel is one of a chain of 10 in Japan which use a variety of robots instead of meat-based staff.

So far the reference is only to Tapia robots at one hotel, although it is not clear if the rest of the chain uses different devices.

The HIS Group tweeted: "We apologize for any uneasiness caused," according to the Tokyo Reporter.

The paper was told that the company had decided the risks of unauthorised access were low, however, the robots have now been updated.

The chain has suffered a bunch of other issues with the robots, including problems with voice recognition systems reacting to guests snoring and a failure of the reception dinosaurs to understand guests' names.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/1...tc hed_guests





BBC News Launches 'Dark Web' Tor Mirror

The BBC has made its international news website available via the Tor network, in a bid to thwart censorship attempts.

The Tor browser is privacy-focused software used to access the dark web.

The browser can obscure who is using it and what data is being accessed, which can help people avoid government surveillance and censorship.

Countries including China, Iran and Vietnam are among those who have tried to block access to the BBC News website or programmes.

Instead of visiting bbc.co.uk/news or bbc.com/news, users of the Tor browser can visit the new bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion web address. Clicking this web address will not work in a regular web browser.

The dark web copy of the BBC News website will be the international edition, as seen from outside the UK.

It will include foreign language services such as BBC Arabic, BBC Persian and BBC Russian.

But UK-only content and services such as BBC iPlayer will not be accessible, due to broadcast rights.

What is Tor?

Tor is a way to access the internet that requires software, known as the Tor browser, to use it.

The name is an acronym for The Onion Router. Just as there are many layers to the vegetable, there are many layers of encryption on the network.

It was originally designed by the US Naval Research Laboratory, and continues to receive funding from the US State Department.

It attempts to hide a person's location and identity by sending data across the internet via a very circuitous route involving several "nodes" - which, in this context, means using volunteers' PCs and computer servers as connection points.

Encryption applied at each hop along this route makes it very hard to connect a person to any particular activity.

To the website that ultimately receives the request, it appears as if the data traffic comes from the last computer in the chain - known as an "exit node" - rather than the person responsible.

As well as allowing users to visit normal websites anonymously, it can also be used as part of a process to host hidden sites, which use the .onion suffix.

Tor's users include the military, law enforcement officers and journalists, as well as members of the public who wish to keep their browser activity secret.

But it has also been associated with illegal activity, allowing people to visit sites offering illegal drugs for sale and access to child abuse images, which do not show up in normal search engine results and would not be available to those who did not know where to look.

While the Tor browser can be used to access the regular version of the BBC News website, using the .onion site has additional benefits.

"Onion services take load off scarce exit nodes, preserve end-to-end encryption [and] the self-authenticating domain name resists spoofing," explained Prof Steven Murdoch, a cyber-security expert from University College London.

In a statement, the BBC said: "The BBC World Service's news content is now available on the Tor network to audiences who live in countries where BBC News is being blocked or restricted. This is in line with the BBC World Service mission to provide trusted news around the world."

On Wednesday, the BBC also announced the UK's first interactive voice news service for smart speakers.

People using an Amazon Alexa-powered device will be able to skip ahead and get more information about the stories they are most interested in.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50150981





Comcast Is Lobbying Against Encryption That Could Prevent it From Learning Your Browsing History

Motherboard has obtained a leaked presentation internet service providers are using to try and lobby lawmakers against a form of encrypted browsing data.
Joseph Cox

Internet giant Comcast is lobbying U.S. lawmakers against plans to encrypt web traffic that would make it harder for internet service providers (ISPs) to determine your browsing history, according to a lobbying presentation obtained by Motherboard.

The plan, which Google intends to implement soon, would enforce the encryption of DNS data made using Chrome, meaning the sites you visit. Privacy activists have praised Google's move. But ISPs are pushing back as part of a wider lobbying effort against encrypted DNS, according to the presentation. Technologists and activists say this encryption would make it harder for ISPs to leverage data for things such as targeted advertising, as well as block some forms of censorship by authoritarian regimes.

Mozilla, which makes Firefox, is also planning a version of this encryption.

"The slides overall are extremely misleading and inaccurate, and frankly I would be somewhat embarrassed if my team had provided that slide deck to policy makers," Marshall Erwin, senior director of trust and safety at Mozilla, told Motherboard in a phone call after reviewing sections of the slide deck.

"We are trying to essentially shift the power to collect and monetize peoples' data away from ISPs and providing users with control and a set of default protections," he added, regarding Mozilla's changes.

In the presentation, Comcast paints this type of encryption as something that will fundamentally change the internet and will centralize power under Google.

"The unilateral centralization of DNS raises serious policy issues relating to cybersecurity, privacy, antitrust, national security and law enforcement, network performance and service quality (including 5G), and other areas," Comcast said in the presentation.

"Congress should demand that Google pause and answer key questions," a section of the presentation reads. "Why is Google in such a rush?" reads another.

Google recently announced it would soon start testing the enforcement of DNS over HTTPS, or DoH. A DNS request is essentially a record of which website someone visited. Generally speaking, with DoH those requests would be harder to read for anyone intercepting the request, such as a hacker on the same Wi-Fi network, a government agency sitting on the wire, or the user's ISP.

"As part of our long standing commitment to making the web safer to use, we will be conducting an experiment to validate our implementation of DNS-over-HTTPS (aka DoH) in Chrome 78," Kenji Baheux, Chrome Product Manager, wrote in a blog post in September.
The Comcast document, which has been presented to policy makers, says that encrypting browsing data "will cause radical disruption." It also mentions raising issues for law enforcement; the slide deck does not, however, point out that DNS providers who respond to law enforcement requests can still provide relevant information to authorities.

But much of the deck pushes one fundamental premise: that Google is centralizing DNS with its DoH, creating a monopoly over the data and its security.

"If Google encrypts and centralizes DNS, ISPs and other enterprises will be precluded from seeing and resolving their users’ DNS," the presentation says.

Do you know anything else ISPs and their use of data? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on jfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or email joseph.cox@vice.com.

That's not accurate, though. Google isn't actually forcing Chrome users to only use Google's DNS service, and so it is not centralizing the data. Google is instead configuring Chrome to use DoH connections by default if a user's DNS service supports it. A DNS service helps a web browser translate web domains into actual IP addresses to visit. Typically, ISPs will do this for customers, but Google, Cloudflare, and other cybersecurity companies also run their own DNS servers that people can use.

"One of the important points to highlight is that Google has no publicly announced plans to override the user’s configured DNS resolver as part of their implementation of DoH," Max Hunter, engineering director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) wrote in an email. "If Google did override the OS-configured resolver with their own, EFF would be very concerned about the potential for turnkey surveillance and censorship that level of DNS centralization would bring."

“Google has no plans to centralize or change people’s DNS providers to Google by default. Any claim that we are trying to become the centralized encrypted DNS provider is inaccurate," a Google spokesperson told Motherboard in a statement.

"We're currently experimenting with new ways to enhance online privacy and security while maintaining existing content filtering and parental controls. Our proposal for DoH enables secure connections and does not change a user’s DNS, so all existing filters and controls remain intact. Furthermore, there is no change to how DNS providers work with law enforcement in accordance with court orders," the Google spokesperson added.

Even the maintainers of competing web browsers aren't buying Comcast's arguments.

"What this deck is attempting to do is take advantage of a lot of anti-Google sentiment that exists right now, build on top of that an inaccurate account of exactly what we are doing to stop that deployment," Erwin from Mozilla added.

Mozilla's own plan for DoH differs somewhat to Google's. Erwin explained that Mozilla is in the process of rolling out DoH by default to a 5 percent slice of randomly selected users, with the plan to expand DoH across its user base. Mozilla is doing that in partnership with Cloudflare, which acts as the DNS resolver.

"The real one truthful point in this ISP lobbying effort is that DoH does represent a fundamental shift in the way the web works; and that's deliberate, on our part," Erwin said.

Ellen Canale, director of corporate communications at Mozilla, wrote in an email, "This is part of a pretty aggressive campaign we've seen from the ISPs to protect their control over DNS traffic and the tracking opportunities it provides them."

Last month, multiple trade groups that represent ISPs' interests wrote a letter to lawmakers urging them to call upon Google to not implement DoH. Hunter shared a copy of a letter EFF sent to Congress along with other organizations in response to the trade bodies' letter.

"Congress should support systemic adoption of DoH in order to close up one of the largest privacy gaps remaining on the Internet while furthering the cause of Internet freedom in many parts of the world in dire need of it," the EFF letter, also signed by Consumer Reports and the National Consumers League, reads.

"The slides overall are extremely misleading and inaccurate, and frankly I would be somewhat embarrassed if my team had provided that slide deck to policy makers."

Comcast, for its part, stressed it does not sell customers' browsing data.

"Where our Xfinity Internet customers go on the Internet is their business, not ours. We do not track the websites or apps our customers’ use through their broadband connections. Because we don’t track that information, we don’t use it to build a profile about our customers and have never sold that information to anyone," a spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

"We are supporters of encrypting DNS and want to make sure that it is implemented in a careful, collaborative manner for the benefit of Internet customers to ensure that important parental controls, cybersecurity protections and network security features are not broken in the process," the spokesperson said in a second statement. "We believe that engagement by Google and Mozilla with other players in the Internet ecosystem would lead to a collaborative, industry-wide solution that protects everyone—just as has happened with other significant changes to Internet architecture. Any unilateral action that limits customer choice will not work."

Of course, it's worth noting that, in 2017, ISPs lobbied Congress to make it possible to sell your browsing data without your consent.

"Either, they are doing something with this data today that is not transparent to users, or they are working incredibly hard to protect a future business model," Erwin said.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9...-browsing-data





Renata Ávila: “The Internet of Creation Disappeared. Now We Have the Internet of Surveillance and Control”

An interview with this specialist in human rights, technology and freedom of expression to discuss how today’s societies are advancing to the drumbeat of “digital colonialism”.
Karma Peiró

Three decades ago, the Internet promised to be a democratising place to be turned to in the flight from the inequalities of the analogue world. It was presented to us a field in which to find freedoms, boundless creation, communication that transcended frontiers and free education for all. “We were promised an open Internet – and it was a trap”, says Renata Ávila, annoyed. “We believed that we were building something collective, but we ended up being the unsalaried slaves of the new digital world”. We take advantage of the awarding of the CCCB III Cultural Innovation International Prize, to talk with one of the most influential and lucid voices in the world of technology and human rights.

A booby-trapped connection for the poor

The Internet Report Health 2019 offers us a reminder that half of the world is already connected to the Internet. Which means over 4 billion people. But we could also turn that on its head and think that – three decades following the creation of the Internet – only half of the world is connected. What happens to all the people who are unconnected? How do they relate with each other, communicate, work or entertain themselves? “The people deciding for what purpose those without access to the Internet are going to connect to it are the technology companies that dominate the future of industry. And these companies only represent the hyperconnected 1%”, explains Renata Ávila.

Each of the answers in her discourse – laboriously and firmly constructed – unravels a complex web of connections that explain why, today, we live with the same or more inequalities than in the past, even though we were promised that the Internet was going to change everything. Apparently happy but more controlled than ever before. We know this and yet we ignore it, because we don’t want to lose our portion of fame, of ego, of being famous, of being communicated or saving time, even if we then squander it on worthless rubbish.

This lawyer and activist talks with a global perspective about the movements that the power of “digital colonialism” is weaving. Her arguments are essential for preventing ourselves from being crushed by the technological world, from being carried away by the current of ephemeral divertemento. For being fully aware that, as individuals, our battle is not lost, but that we can control the use of our data, refuse to give away our facial recognition or demand that the privacy laws that protect us are obeyed.

Before the imminent transition to 5G #– all of us connected to all the objects that surround us – Renata Ávila strips us of our veil of naivety and insists that the Internet is now never going to be the Internet that we dreamed of. Now we are inside the Internet of surveillance, of control and of measurement. “It may be that factory workers in Bangladesh do not have access to the Internet, but they are connected to objects that are watching them all the time. They monitor their work, check they are not distracted, that they aren’t chatting with their workmates. And what those cameras see is going to determine their wage packets. The connectivity that is offered today to poor people is the connectivity of control and of chains”.

“If I were president…”

The priority themes that the Internet Health Report has highlighted for this year are five: privacy and security, decentralisation, digital inclusion, openness and digital literacy. But if we are going to prioritise, which of them is most urgent? “None of them can be dismissed”, answers this activist with cross-cutting ideas. And to explain it she proclaims herself imaginary president of three countries. “If I were president of country A – which concentrates all the most powerful technology companies on the planet – my decision would be to back decentralisation. Because if I do not fragment these companies that have so much control and power, by using good laws of competition, I am feeding a monster that is literally going to swallow me up and I am not going to be able to govern”. This example takes us to the USA.

And she continues. “If I were president of country B – which produces a certain technology and I have my population connected, but my citizens consume everything from country A, while the latter steals their data, gives them an insecure infrastructure and violates their fundamental rights as citizens – my concern would be security and privacy”. And, again, we can see an analogy with this hyperconnected Europe and Silicon Valley.

“However, if I were the president of country C – where I have almost nobody connected, I do not produce industry, I am consuming the cheapest and least prepared services of the type A country – what do I do? Do I connect them to a free centralised system in exchange for giving away all the data of my citizens? They have not even developed digital literacy skills. Where do I begin? Do I take them to a new phase of dependency, of colonisation?” The answers are not easy, Renata Ávila points out. “We should pressure type B countries to offer alternatives to the poorest countries and revert the current situation. We can only thus achieve a balanced system”, she answers as a possible recipe.

The surveillance empires

International lawyer Renata Ávila defends at all costs technology as a tool for empowering citizens and achieving true transparency of governments and multinationals. This is precisely the objective of the Fundación Ciudadanía Inteligente, (Smart Citizens Foundation), of which she has been executive director since 2018.

The combination of power – explains Ávila – with a highly sophisticated degree of technological development and a strong market push are making it easier for the USA and China to enter poor countries, to exploit them and to control them, these days technologically. Faced with the question of whether there is any escape from the desolate and manipulated landscape that she is sketching, the lawyer shrugs and answers: “The only hope to redefine this technological imperialism is for Europe to take on the leadership role that is its duty. For it to offer alternatives that respect human rights and alternative business models that are not based on data extractivism. This will not be competitive in the market but it could come from governments, putting social interests at the centre”.

Digital colonialism

A few companies concentrate a lot of power, and the worst thing, Ávila affirms – is that they control the thinking of entire collectives. Welcome to “digital colonialism”. Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro and Johnson are all examples of this domination. But so too are the American GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft) and the Chinese BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi) empires.

“At the start of the 21st century, one of the questions that excited me most about access to the Internet was the possibility of producing infinite copies of books and sharing knowledge. That idea of an Internet that was going to be a tool for integration and access to knowledge has shattered into smithereens. It was a booby trap. We are working as the unpaid slaves of the new digital world. I feel that it’s like when the Spanish colonisers reached Latin America. We believed the story of ‘a new world’. And we were in a box, controlled by the most powerful country in the world. We should have regulated a long time before. And we should have said: ‘I will share my photo, but how are you benefitting and how am I?’ Because what we are doing today is work for free; with our time, creativity and energy we are paying these empires. We are giving them everything”.

And she rounds off her speech by ensuring that not only are our lands at their mercy, like in the past, but the most private, most vulnerable part of each of us. “We are totally predictable and controllable. And that means easily manipulated. This really worries me”.

A control that is exercised, undoubtedly, through the algorithms implemented in our mobile apps, in public services, in the companies that sell us products. Algorithms that take decisions automatically, that influence our most everyday actions, but that we are unaware of because of the opacity operating around us. Because we don’t make the effort to learn. Because we don’t want to know.

“I am on the advisory council of an initiative of the InterAmerican Development Bank to conduct pilots of ten artificial intelligence applications in the public sector. Our first fight is that all of them must be transparent and auditable”, she explains to me with hope. “Let’s start there, because we can’t attack the private sector”.

Precarity sold as an opportunity

We move into the field of ethics and ask Renata Ávila about three concepts that have modified their meaning in the last decade, precisely due to the acceleration with which we have adopted technology. They are trust, privacy and transparency and how these influence the new generations. We cannot divorce these three questions from the concepts of austerity, precarity and the institutional corruption crisis”, she argues. “Letting strangers into your home to spend the night, is that an excess of trust or the need to seek resources?”.

For this activist, the intense precarisation of employment, the lack of opportunities for young people, the betrayal by governments that opte to bail out the failed banks following the economic crisis rather than concerning themselves with the future of their citizens, has led people to find other resources. “How many Über drivers have I found that had two university degrees? The failure is very much a systemic one”.

“We are immersed in two extremely important crises, of which we do not want to take the slightest bit of notice, but one day they are going to explode and we are going to realise”, comments Renata Ávila. It cannot be overlooked that so much technology must inevitably take its toll on the environment. An environmental crisis, but also a technological one. We cannot decelerate the current pace, and much less return to a past where connections were only face to face. So, what is to be done? She has a formula, which is perhaps not “magic” but could give a result: changing the logics with which we function. And it consists precisely of trusting in technological innovation in order to harm the planet less. “Leave behind the years of programmed obsolescence, the data extractivism model, store less on giant servers that need monumental refrigeration systems, etc”.

An optimistic message for the present

After all that has been discussed, some might think that this Guatemalan activist is so realistic that she leaves no room for optimism. But Renata Ávila does not like being negative and she is convinced that the human race is capable of finding resources to emerge from any “mess”, even at the most critical moments. “We have a perfect cocktail” – she says with a half-smile of worry. “A democratic crisis caused by some terrible leaders in power, with a climate-change and technological crisis. This can only lead to a collective reflection and make us reconsider on what planet we want to live in the future”.
http://lab.cccb.org/en/renata-avila-...e-and-control/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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