Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 5th, ’23

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August 5th, 2023





Unleashing the Power of BitTorrent (BTT): A New Era of File Sharing

In today’s digital age, file sharing has become an integral part of our lives. Whether it’s sharing documents, videos, or music, the ability to exchange files quickly and efficiently is crucial. One technology that has revolutionized the way we share files is BitTorrent (BTT). In this article, we will delve into the world of BitTorrent and explore its immense power and potential in shaping the future of file sharing. To effectively invest in Bitcoin, you must visit a trusted and reliable trading platform like Immediate Revolution 360 official website.

Understanding BitTorrent

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing protocol that enables users to distribute and download files over the internet. Unlike traditional file-sharing methods where files are stored on a central server, BitTorrent allows users to share files directly with each other. This decentralized approach not only reduces the strain on individual servers but also enables faster and more efficient downloads.

The Benefits of BitTorrent

● Speed and Efficiency

One of the key advantages of using BitTorrent is its remarkable speed and efficiency. By leveraging the collective bandwidth and resources of its users, BitTorrent allows for faster downloads, even for large files. Instead of relying on a single server to handle all the requests, BitTorrent distributes the file across multiple users, ensuring that each user contributes to the overall download process.

● Resilience and Redundancy

Another significant benefit of BitTorrent is its resilience to failures and its inherent redundancy. Traditional file-sharing methods are susceptible to server failures, which can result in disrupted downloads. With BitTorrent, even if one user goes offline or experiences a connection issue, the file can still be downloaded from other available users. This decentralized nature of BitTorrent makes it highly reliable and ensures that downloads are not dependent on a single source.

● Cost-Effective

BitTorrent also offers cost-effectiveness for both content creators and consumers. Content creators can leverage BitTorrent to distribute their files without incurring high server costs. Instead, the bandwidth and resources required for distribution are shared among the users, reducing the financial burden. For consumers, BitTorrent eliminates the need for expensive subscription services or pay-per-download models, allowing them to access a wide range of content for free or at a fraction of the cost.

BitTorrent (BTT) – The Next Evolution

While BitTorrent has already transformed the way we share files, the introduction of BitTorrent Token (BTT) takes it to a whole new level. BTT is a cryptocurrency based on the TRON blockchain that aims to create a decentralized economy within the BitTorrent ecosystem. By integrating blockchain technology and cryptocurrency, BitTorrent enables content creators and consumers to engage in direct transactions, incentivizing the sharing and distribution of files.

● Incentivized Sharing

With BTT, users are rewarded for seeding and sharing files. Seeding refers to allowing others to download files from your device, even after you have completed the download. By incentivizing seeding, BTT encourages users to contribute their bandwidth and resources to the network, ensuring the availability and faster downloads of files for all users. This system creates a self-sustaining ecosystem where users are motivated to participate actively.

● Enhanced Content Discovery

BTT introduces an advanced content discovery mechanism that empowers users to find and access relevant content easily. By leveraging the blockchain, BTT enables content creators to promote their files and reach a wider audience. Users can discover new content based on their interests and preferences, making the file-sharing experience more personalized and tailored to their needs.

● Transparent and Trustworthy

Blockchain technology provides a transparent and immutable record of all transactions within the BTT ecosystem. This ensures that content creators receive fair compensation for their work and that consumers can trust the authenticity and integrity of the files they are downloading. The decentralized nature of blockchain eliminates the need for intermediaries, reducing the risk of censorship, and fostering a more open and inclusive file-sharing environment.

BitTorrent (BTT) represents a significant leap forward in the world of file sharing. With its speed, efficiency, resilience, and cost-effectiveness, BitTorrent has already transformed the way we exchange files. This integration incentivizes users, enhances content discovery, and fosters a transparent ecosystem. As we embrace this new era of file sharing, the power of BitTorrent continues to grow, promising a future where content is shared freely, securely, and without limitations.
https://t2conline.com/unleashing-the...-file-sharing/





An Internet Veteran’s Guide to Not Being Scared of Technology

Mike Masnick, who founded Techdirt in 1998, writes for an influential audience of lawmakers, C.E.O.s and activists. Somehow, he’s still an optimist about the promise of technology.
Kashmir Hill

How could they protect themselves from A.I.?

That was the question that Mike Masnick found himself fielding this summer in a WhatsApp chat with about 100 directors, actors and screenwriters. The group, including marquee talent, was worried about a grim possible future in which deepfake versions of actors perform screenplays written by ChatGPT.

Mr. Masnick, a professional tech wonk, told his Hollywood listeners to work with what they had: Publicly shame projects that replace human labor with artificial intelligence, use state publicity laws against any unauthorized deepfakes and fight hard for contractual protections. (The fight is on: A.I. is one reason for the writers’ and actors’ strikes that have paralyzed the film and television industry.)

But he also suggested that they capitalize on the technology. Convinced that “A.I. plus human” is the future, he pointed to the singer Grimes. She invited people to use A.I.-generated versions of her voice, trained on music that she had done in the past, in exchange for half of any royalties. One GrimesAI song is closing in on a million listens on Spotify.

“Let people be creative and they’ll do creative things and expand the interest in your own work,” Mr. Masnick, 48, said. The technological shift is inevitable, he said, so “use it to your advantage.”

Since starting his Techdirt blog in 1998, Mr. Masnick has been doling out this same message as wave after wave of tech innovation has stirred fears, going back to the time of Napster: The new thing is less scary than you think it is.

He had been added to the Hollywood group chat about A.I. by Alex Winter, an actor and filmmaker whose oeuvre ranges from “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure” to documentaries about other alarming technology, including Bitcoin and YouTube. Mr. Winter said he appreciated Mr. Masnick’s pragmatism.

“I find people like Mike reassuring because they are setting up guardrails to prevent you from driving your car off the cliff in your zeal to find solutions,” he said.

By sheer longevity and a deep knowledge of tech history, Mr. Masnick has become something of a Silicon Valley oracle. His message is to embrace change even when painful and to beware of knee-jerk legal protections with unintended consequences.

It hasn’t paid very well, but what Mr. Masnick doesn’t have in wealth he makes up for in influence. Lawmakers, activists and executives consider him an essential guide for what’s happening in the technology world and what to do next.

“Whenever tech policy news breaks I always want to see what Mike’s take is going to be,” said Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, in a statement. Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Meta, has called him “insightful and reasonable.” The tech entrepreneur Anil Dash said he “shows up and ships every day” and has been “filing constantly for decades on a beat that is thankless.”

A New Generation of Chatbots

A brave new world. A new crop of chatbots powered by artificial intelligence has ignited a scramble to determine whether the technology could upend the economics of the internet, turning today’s powerhouses into has-beens and creating the industry’s next giants. Here are the bots to know:

ChatGPT. ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence language model from a research lab, OpenAI, has been making headlines since November for its ability to respond to complex questions, write poetry, generate code, plan vacations and translate languages. GPT-4, the latest version introduced in mid-March, can even respond to images (and ace the Uniform Bar Exam).

Bing. Two months after ChatGPT’s debut, Microsoft, OpenAI’s primary investor and partner, added a similar chatbot, capable of having open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic, to its Bing internet search engine. But it was the bot’s occasionally inaccurate, misleading and weird responses that drew much of the attention after its release.

Bard. Google’s chatbot, called Bard, was released in March to a limited number of users in the United States and Britain. Originally conceived as a creative tool designed to draft emails and poems, it can generate ideas, write blog posts and answer questions with facts or opinions.

Ernie. The search giant Baidu unveiled China’s first major rival to ChatGPT in March. The debut of Ernie, short for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, turned out to be a flop after a promised “live” demonstration of the bot was revealed to have been recorded.

What Mr. Masnick apparently hasn’t had time for is a redesign of his blog. A wall of text, heavy on hyperlinks, it has not evolved much since its founding.

Intellectual Gig Work

Based just outside Silicon Valley in Redwood City, Calif., with an office view that features tech company commuters and a giant Buddha statue looking down onto U.S. 101, Mr. Masnick started writing online about the “high-tech industry” in the late 1990s while in business school — mainly as a ploy to get a job at a long-forgotten start-up — and then never stopped.

In the early 2000s — a thousand years ago in internet time — online file-sharing was taking off and CD sales were plummeting. Mr. Masnick exhorted the music industry to accept the internet and the opportunity it offered to connect with more fans. The internet would be great for artists: fewer middlemen and gatekeepers!

The digitization of music didn’t go exactly the way Mr. Masnick had hoped. Creators weren’t the primary winners; subscription services like Spotify and Apple Music were. But artists who had a direct relationship with their audience did gain more power, as many a Taylor Swift fan can attest.

Mr. Masnick has been a close observer of the tech industry’s rise from disruptive force to world-dominating power center, but he has never quite managed to reap its astronomical financial rewards for himself. The best way to describe how he makes a living is as an intellectual gig worker, equal parts business owner, tech journalist, policy analyst, research fellow and game designer.

Techdirt has a handful of employees and paid contributors, almost all selected in meritocratic style from the comments section. Because of Mr. Masnick’s commitment to the free flow of information, Techdirt has never had a paywall. Advertising and support from the site’s million or so readers have never fully paid his bills.

Mr. Masnick has written more than 51,000 (often lengthy) blog posts, adding more several times a day, and also hosts a weekly podcast. On one Friday this month, he wrote about proposed A.I. regulations (mostly bad, in his opinion), a court’s dismissal of a lawsuit against Amazon for selling teenagers “suicide kits” (a tragic case but a good ruling, he concluded), and legal challenges to “crazy” age-verification laws meant to protect children online. (He recently filed a declaration in a lawsuit seeking to stop California from enacting such a law, outlining how burdensome it would be for Techdirt to comply.)

He runs the Copia Institute, a think tank that organizes events about internet policy and produces geeky research reports; it accepts sponsorships from foundations and companies, including ones that Mr. Masnick writes about, such as Google and Yelp. The financial entanglement might get him in trouble at a traditional journalism organization, but not at a blog where he is the boss. Sponsors never have editorial control, he said.

Being a small independent tech blogger, Mr. Masnick said, means “finding that spot where you can survive.”

In the last few years, he has taken to game design. He co-created a role-playing exercise for the United Nations to help forecast the future in countries with political upheaval and a game about what it’s like to be an online content moderator, sponsored by a start-up advocacy group. Few people would describe them as fun, but Mr. Masnick said they helped people wrap their heads around complicated technology issues like nothing else he had done.

His productivity hacks include a laptop with a slide-out second screen that makes it easy to work on the go and Focusmate, a paid service that pairs him with a stranger so they can silently “co-work” together. At the end of a session, they tell each other whether they accomplished what they set out to do.

In the Heads of Tech C.E.O.s

The message in Mr. Masnick’s Facebook Messenger inbox was from the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

“I don’t think we’ve met,” Mr. Zuckerberg wrote in February 2021, “but I’ve always found your writing insightful and reasonable, even when you’re critical of us for making mistakes.”

Mr. Masnick, who provided this account, tried to message him back — but couldn’t. Because he and Mr. Zuckerberg weren’t Facebook friends, the message was rejected.

Befitting his status as an outsider whom insiders read, Mr. Masnick reached out to someone else at Facebook, and soon Mr. Zuckerberg was back in his DMs apologizing for the “bug.”

When they talked by phone, Mr. Zuckerberg asked Mr. Masnick what Facebook was doing wrong. Given his distaste for powerful tech companies that exercise too much control over people’s internet experience, Mr. Masnick suggested that Mr. Zuckerberg consider decentralizing.

He talked about a concept he has been pushing called “protocols, not platforms” — software that is interoperable, like email, so people from different services can interact and outside developers can build on it. This would open up a market for different content filters and algorithms that users could choose from, giving them more control over what they did and didn’t see. It would make people like Mr. Zuckerberg less powerful, because his company would be allowing third parties to be the arbiters of online speech, but it could deflect the complaints they got about harmful speech and censorship.

The idea had resonated with Jack Dorsey, the Twitter co-founder, who credited Mr. Masnick as an inspiration for the creation of Bluesky, a Twitter clone that embraced that approach.

Mr. Masnick spent more than an hour on the phone with Mr. Zuckerberg, but wasn’t sure if he was really listening — until last month, when Mr. Zuckerberg launched his own Twitter clone, Threads. The news release emphasized that the plan was to make it a protocol interoperable with other apps, including Mastodon. Mr. Masnick celebrated with a long blog post.

The Streisand Effect

Mr. Masnick has a way of seeding ideas about technology that take root and grow.

In 2005, he wrote about legal threats against a website devoted to amassing urinal photos. (The early internet was a strange place.) The threats, intended to remove information about certain urinal owners, instead created their own news cycle and garnered more attention for the otherwise obscure site.

Mr. Masnick coined a phrase for an attempt to censor information on the internet that backfires: “the Streisand effect.”

In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued an aerial photographer who had put photos of her Malibu beach house on his website, causing the little-seen images to go viral. Now the episode is internet lore, and the phrase has its own Wikipedia entry with a long list of examples.

It’s a typical Masnickian principle of the internet, gleaned from lengthy observation: Poorly thought-out attempts to solve online problems will make them worse.

“He understands the internet in a deep way that I don’t think is common,” said Corynne McSherry, legal director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The digital liberties organization gave Mr. Masnick an award for digital activism in 2017, when fighting a defamation lawsuit almost bankrupted Techdirt.

A man who claimed to have “invented email” had sued Techdirt for $15 million over its blog posts questioning those claims. The suit garnered significant media attention; it’s not among the examples in the Wikipedia article on the Streisand effect, but it really should be.

Mr. Masnick knew the lawsuit was ridiculous and unlikely to succeed, but the legal bills were a hardship. Techdirt turned to the internet and asked for donations. It got the support it needed, and the suit was eventually settled with no money changing hands.

Mr. Masnick got to continue evangelizing for tech innovation.

“I’m trying to get people to see the world the way I see it,” he said. “It’s cool when people can do stuff.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/29/t...et-future.html





An Arkansas Judge has Blocked a Law Targetting Librarians Over 'Harmful' Books

Arkansas is temporarily blocked from enforcing a law that would have allowed criminal charges against librarians and booksellers for providing "harmful" materials to minors, a federal judge ruled Saturday.

U.S. District Judge Timothy L. Brooks issued a preliminary injunction against the law, which also would have created a new process to challenge library materials and request that they be relocated to areas not accessible by kids. The measure, signed by Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders earlier this year, was set to take effect Aug. 1.

A coalition that included the Central Arkansas Library System in Little Rock had challenged the law, saying fear of prosecution under the measure could prompt libraries and booksellers to no longer carry titles that could be challenged.

The judge also rejected a motion by the defendants, which include prosecuting attorneys for the state, seeking to dismiss the case.

The ACLU of Arkansas, which represents some of the plaintiffs, applauded the court's ruling, saying that the absence of a preliminary injunction would have jeopardized First Amendment rights.

"The question we had to ask was — do Arkansans still legally have access to reading materials? Luckily, the judicial system has once again defended our highly valued liberties," Holly Dickson, the executive director of the ACLU in Arkansas, said in a statement.

The lawsuit comes as lawmakers in an increasing number of conservative states are pushing for measures making it easier to ban or restrict access to books. The number of attempts to ban or restrict books across the U.S. last year was the highest in the 20 years the American Library Association has been tracking such efforts.

Laws restricting access to certain materials or making it easier to challenge them have been enacted in several other states, including Iowa, Indiana and Texas.

Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin said in an email Saturday that his office would be "reviewing the judge's opinion and will continue to vigorously defend the law."

The executive director of Central Arkansas Library System, Nate Coulter, said the judge's 49-page decision recognized the law as censorship, a violation of the Constitution and wrongly maligning librarians.

"As folks in southwest Arkansas say, this order is stout as horseradish!" he said in an email.

"I'm relieved that for now the dark cloud that was hanging over CALS' librarians has lifted," he added.

Cheryl Davis, general counsel for the Authors Guild, said the organization is "thrilled" about the decision. She said enforcing this law "is likely to limit the free speech rights of older minors, who are capable of reading and processing more complex reading materials than young children can."

The Arkansas lawsuit names the state's 28 local prosecutors as defendants, along with Crawford County in west Arkansas. A separate lawsuit is challenging the Crawford County library's decision to move children's books that included LGBTQ+ themes to a separate portion of the library.

The plaintiffs challenging Arkansas' restrictions also include the Fayetteville and Eureka Springs Carnegie public libraries, the American Booksellers Association and the Association of American Publishers.
https://www.npr.org/1190966505





Booksellers Move to the Front Lines of the Fight Against Book Bans in Texas

With a book-rating law set to take effect in September, a group of booksellers, along with publishers and authors, filed suit to argue that it is unconstitutional.
Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris

A group of booksellers, publishers and authors filed a lawsuit on Tuesday to stop a new law in Texas that would require stores to rate books based on sexual content, arguing the measure would violate their First Amendment rights and be all but impossible to implement.

The law, set to take effect in September, would force booksellers to evaluate and rate each title they sell to schools, as well as books they sold in the past. If they fail to comply, stores would be barred from doing business with schools.

“It will be a huge burden,” Valerie Koehler, the owner of Blue Willow Bookshop in Houston, said of the law. She estimates that schools account for some 20 percent of her store’s sales. “It’s unfathomable to think that we would need to rate every book, not only ones that we’d sell in the future to schools, but also any books we’ve sold in the past.”

The Texas law, and the legal battle to block it, reflect a new front in an ongoing culture war over book banning and what constitutes appropriate reading material for children.

In the past two years, book bans have surged in the United States, driven by conservative activists who have targeted books about race and racism or L.G.B.T.Q. issues and characters. An array of new laws have passed around the country, making it easier to remove books from libraries and placing new restrictions on the types of titles children can access.

While the fight has largely centered on books that are available in school classrooms and libraries, the legislation in Texas has drawn booksellers directly into the conflict.

Gov. Greg Abbott, who signed the bill into law in June, championed it as a way for parents to exercise more control over the books available to their children. “Some school libraries have books with sexually explicit and vulgar materials,” he said during the bill signing session. “I’m signing a law that gets that trash out of our schools.”

Many of the restrictions on books available in schools and libraries have been promoted under the banner of giving parents more choice over the content their children encounter. But the plaintiffs said that the Texas law would take decisions out of the hands of schools and parents and put the burden on vendors instead.

The law’s opponents also argue the legislation will increase the number of book bans in Texas, which already leads the country in removing books from schools, according to an analysis by the free speech organization PEN America.

The suit was brought by two Texas independent bookstores — Koehler’s Blue Willow Bookshop and BookPeople, in Austin — together with the American Booksellers Association, the Association of American Publishers, the Authors Guild and the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. It was brought against state library and education officials who are responsible for implementing the law.

The complaint, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, argues that the law violates the First Amendment because it requires booksellers to label books with subjective and potentially polarizing ratings, categorizing them as “sexually explicit,” “sexually relevant” or “no rating.” (Movie ratings, by contrast, are voluntary.)

Under the law, booksellers must submit a list of their ratings to the Texas Education Agency, which will list them on a website. If the state disagrees with the rating, it can overrule the bookseller and impose its own rating.

Schools would be prohibited from buying or providing books that are labeled “sexually explicit.” Books rated “sexually relevant” would be restricted, and can only be checked out by students with written parental consent.

“They’re trying to control what other people’s kids can read,” Cheryl L. Davis, general counsel of the Authors Guild, said of the legislators behind the measure.

Maria A. Pallante, the chief executive of the Association of American Publishers, said the law would force book vendors to act as “mouthpieces of the government” by “retaliating against them if they do not do the labeling.”

Under the First Amendment, the government cannot compel speech from private individuals or businesses.

This lawsuit is the latest attempt to push back on book removals. Other efforts include a suit filed in Arkansas, where a new law could send librarians and booksellers to prison if they fail to create a separate “adults only” area for material that might be “harmful” to minors. In Florida, a group of students and the authors of a children’s picture book recently sued a school district and the state’s board of education, saying their push to restrict access to books in school libraries was unconstitutional.

State library and education officials who are responsible for implementing the law did not respond to requests for comment.

Even before it goes into effect, the Texas law has already had an impact. In Katy Independent School District, outside Houston, schools have stopped buying books and put all of their newly purchased titles in storage until they are rated, according to the complaint.

Charley Rejsek, the chief executive of BookPeople in Austin, said that complying with the law would be impossible. BookPeople — which takes its name from Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451,” in which a group of people try to preserve books in a world where they are burned — was founded in 1970, Rejsek said. The store does not have records of titles sold over the last half century, much less a way to know which of them are still in circulation — but under the law, BookPeople would be responsible for rating those books.

“I don’t see a clear path forward for complying with the law as written,” she said. “I don’t know how I can rate them if I don’t have any records.”

Going forward, she said, BookPeople would have to read and rate many thousands of titles requested by school districts. Some might be in languages her staff cannot read, she said.

“I want to work with schools,” she said. “But I just literally can’t find a way to comply.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/b...s-lawsuit.html





‘Super Listeners’ Make Up 2% of Artists’ Monthly Listeners on Spotify, but Account for Over 18% of Monthly Streams
Murray Stassen

The topic of superfans has been coming up quite regularly on MBW’s pages over the past few weeks.

A couple of weeks ago, US market monitor Luminate, within its mid-year music report, published a set of stats highlighting the relationship between artists and superfans in the United States.

According to the report, which you can read in full here, 15% of the general population in the US are ‘superfans’ ,and this category of fan spends a reported 80% more on music each month versus the average US-based music listener.

Additionally, according to Luminate, physical music buyers of formats such as vinyl, CDs or cassette tapes, are more than twice as likely (+128%) to be music superfans.

Luminate breaks down what it means to be a superfan, explaining that for its report, its methodology defines a superfan as, “a music listener aged 13+ who engages with an artist and their content in multiple ways, from streaming to social media to purchasing physical music or merch items to attending live shows”.

Luminate’s report followed comments made by Michael Nash, UMG’s EVP and Chief Digital Officer, on UMG’s Q1 earnings call, when he indicated that an “artist-centric” model would look to increase revenue flow from “superfans” – or in other words, individuals who are willing to pay more for subscriptions in exchange for additional content.

The potential financial impact of the superfan category was also recently highlighted by Goldman Sachs, in its latest Music In The Air report, in which it claimed that if 20% of paid streaming subscribers today could be categorized as ‘superfans’ and, furthermore, if these ‘superfans’ were willing to spend double what a non-superfan spends on digital music each year, it implies a $4.2 billion (currently untapped) annual revenue opportunity for the record industry.

Now, Spotify has published its own study on what it calls ‘super listeners’.

These are listeners, according to Spotify, who “are die-hard, listen-on-repeat, buy-up-all-your-merch fans”, or in other words, superfans.

According to Spotify’s new study, averaged across all artist sizes, ‘super listeners’ on the platform make up 2% of an artist’s monthly listeners, but account for over 18% of monthly streams.

Spotify defines monthly listeners as all listeners that have at least 1 stream over 30 seconds of an artist in the past 28 days. These stats are based on streaming data on the platform between February 15 and March 15.

Spotify also indicates that so-called super listeners make “an XL number” of merch purchases.

According to the study, on average, 2% of an artist’s monthly listeners account for more than half of their merch purchases.

That stat, according to Spotify, is based on multiple seven-day windows of purchasing behavior on the Spotify platform in 2023 for artists with over 10,000 monthly listeners at any point in 2022 and at least 10 tracks as of January 1, of this year (see below).

Spotify also breaks down its ‘Super listener’ study geographically, reporting that Latin America includes four of the Top 10 markets with the highest concentration of super listeners, including the No.1 and No.2 spots, which are Chile and Mexico, respectively.

Round out the Top 10 in positions No.3 to No.10, respectively, are: Canada, Hong Kong, the United States, Argentina, Columbia, Japan, Poland, and the Philippines.

Spotify says that this was based on the behavior of super listeners of at least one artist among the platform’s Top 50 markets by the size of userbase as of March 1, 2023, for artists with over 10,000 monthly listeners at any point in 2022 and at least 10 tracks as of Janaury 1, 2023.

Spotify has published its Fan Study: the Super Listeners edition, to coincide with the launch of a new ‘super listeners’ audience segment on the Spotify for Artists platform, which is used by over 1 million artists and labels.

In addition to monthly listener and stream counts, artists and their teams using the analytics and marketing platform will now have access to data on ‘super, moderate, light, programmed, and previously active listeners’.

“Earlier this month, we launched the new Segments dashboard in Spotify for Artists, allowing artists and their teams to better understand who makes up their audience, how often they’re listening, and how they’re streaming,” said Rob Fink, Associate Director of Brand Marketing for Spotify for Artists.

“These new Fan Study insights dive into super listeners – a crucial part of an artist’s audience – who power artists’ careers by driving more streams, buying more merch, and engaging more deeply with artists over the long term.

“By sharing insights into listener behavior on Spotify, our goal is to arm artists and their teams with data, strategies, and tools to better understand, grow, and engage their audience on our platform.”
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.c...nthly-streams/





These Scientists Explain the Power of Music to Spark Awe
Rob Stein

This summer, I traveled to Montreal to do one of my favorite things: Listen to live music.

For three days, I wandered around the Montreal Jazz Festival with two buddies, listening to jazz, rock, blues and all kinds of surprising musical mashups.

There was the New Orleans-based group Tank and the Bangas, Danish/Turkish/Kurdish band called AySay, and the Montreal-based Mike Goudreau Band.

All of this reminded me how magnificent music has been in my life — growing up with The Boss in New Jersey, falling in love with folk-rockers like Neil Young, discovering punk rock groups like The Clash in college, and, yeah, these days, marveling at Taylor Swift.

Music could always lift me up and transport me. It's the closest I've ever come to having a religious experience.

The body and brain on music

This got me thinking: Why? Why does music do that?

So I called up some experts to get their insights on what underlies this powerful experience.

"Music does evoke a sense of wonder and awe for lots of people," says Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill University who scans the brains of people while they listen to tunes.

"Some of it is still mysterious to us," he says, "But what we can talk about are some neural circuits or networks involved in the experience of pleasure and reward."

When you're listening to music that you really like, brain circuits involving parts of the brain called the amygdala, ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens come on line, he explains. These are the same areas that get activated if you're thirsty and you have a drink, or if you're feeling "randy and have sex."

That triggers the production of brain chemicals that are involved in feelings like pleasure.

"It modulates levels of dopamine, as well as opioids in the brain. Your brain makes opioids," he says.

Neurons in the brain even fire with the beat of the music, which helps people feel connected to one another by literally synchronizing their brain waves when they listen to the same song.

"What we used to say in the '60s is, 'Hey, I'm on the same wavelength as you man,'" Levitin says. "But it's literally true — your brain waves are synchronized listening to music."

Music also has a calming effect, slowing our heart rate, deepening our breathing and lowering stress hormones. This makes us feel more connected to other people as well as the world around us, especially when we start to dance together.

"Those pathways of changing our body, symbolizing what is vast and mysterious for us, and then moving our bodies, triggers the mind into a state of wonder," Dacher Keltner, a University of California, Berkeley, psychologist, told me.

"We imagine, 'Why do I feel this way? What is this music teaching me about what is vast and mysterious?' Music allows us to feel these transcendent emotions," he says.

Emotions like awe, which stimulates the brain into a sense of wonder, help "counter the epidemic of our times, which is loneliness," Keltner says. "With music, we feel we're part of community and that has a direct effect on health and well-being," which is crucial to survival.

That could be why music plays such a powerful role in many religions, spirituality and rituals, he says.

A rocker weighs in

All this made me wonder: Do musicians feel this way, too?

"Yeah, I definitely experience wonder while playing music on a regular basis," says Mike Gordon, the bass player for the band Phish.

He suddenly vividly remembers dreams and doesn't want to be anywhere else, he says.

"It's almost like these neural pathways are opening. And it's almost like the air around me crystalizes where everything around me is more itself," Gordon says. "I develop this sort of hypersensitivity, where it's now electrified."
https://www.npr.org/1190374074





Nokia Keeps the Dream of the ‘90s Alive With an Update to Its Dumb Phones

The Nokia 130 and 150 are throwback feature phones devoid of anything that could be distracting—except Snake.
Florence Ion

Does your smartphone feel like it’s too smart for you? Try Nokia. The company unveiled two new phones Wednesday, and they aren’t less worthy for their lack of apps. The fact that they’re so light on distractions might be what entices you to one. They’re also great as a secondary phone if you have two numbers but want to avoid towing around another smartphone.

The Nokia 130 and 150 are two updated feature phones—phones with the form of an earlier generation of tech but the software of the current time—specifications that mirror the best of yesteryear. The Nokia 150 is arguably the more worthy of the two; it comes in three colors and features a 2.4-inch QVGA display, a 1,450 mAh removable battery with up to a month of standby time, and a headphone jack for listening to music like we’re still pirating it from the internet (though you can also tune in to the built-in FM radio, a feature you’d have to download an app to replicate on an iPhone). The rear-facing 0.3-MP VGA camera is as mediocre as it sounds; it’s similar to the camera specs on an LG-made candybar phone I was carting around in 2008. You can save all your data on a MicroSD card and charge the phone with micro USB.

The Nokia 130 has the same size screen and removable battery, but it doesn’t have a camera, which makes sense if you were looking at one of these as a secondary device. You probably already have a smartphone that takes satisfying photos. The Nokia 130 and 150 are rated IP52, making them resistant to dust and water but not entirely waterproof. And they both have physical buttons, including a full 12-key number pad, plus navigational buttons to get around the operating system, called Series 30+ or S30+. Nokia developed the software specifically for these entry-level devices, and it made sure to include a revamped Snake game. Nokia swears there are “hours of fun in store,” which seems like marketing rehashed from its ‘90s glory days.

The Nokia 130 and 150 are primarily available abroad. Note that these two models have been around since 2016 and that this latest release is a part of the phone’s upgrade cycle. The company, acquired by Finnish conglomerate HMD Mobile, has yet to reveal pricing. But previous generations started at under $50 after converting currencies. It’s quite a deal compared to what you’d get with an aging, low-cost Android phone.
https://gizmodo.com/nokia-150-nokia-...led-1850700997





Reddit Beats Film Industry, Won’t Have to Identify Users Who Admitted Torrenting

Court quashes subpoena for names of users who talked torrenting in 2011 thread.
Jon Brodkin

Film companies lost another attempt to force Reddit to identify anonymous users who discussed piracy. A federal court on Saturday quashed a subpoena demanding users' names and other identifying details, agreeing with Reddit's argument that the film companies' demands violate the First Amendment.

The plaintiffs are 20 producers of popular movies who are trying to prove that Internet service provider Grande is liable for its subscribers' copyright infringement because the ISP allegedly ignores piracy on its network. Reddit isn't directly involved in the copyright case. But the film companies filed a motion to compel Reddit to respond to a subpoena demanding "basic account information including IP address registration and logs from 1/1/2016 to present, name, email address and other account registration information" for six users who wrote comments on Reddit threads in 2011 and 2018.

"The issue is whether that discovery is permissible despite the users' right to speak anonymously under the First Amendment," US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler wrote in her ruling against the film copyright holders. "The court denies the motion because the plaintiffs have not demonstrated a compelling need for the discovery that outweighs the users' First Amendment right to anonymous speech."

This is the second time Beeler ruled against the film companies' attempts to unmask anonymous Reddit users. Beeler, a magistrate judge at US District Court for the Northern District of California, quashed a similar subpoena related to a different set of Reddit users in late April.

The film companies seeking Reddit users' identities include After II Movie LLC, Bodyguard Productions, Hitman 2 Productions, Millennium Funding, Nikola Productions, Rambo V Productions, and Dallas Buyers Club LLC. As Beeler's ruling on Saturday noted, they sought the identities of two users who wrote about torrenting on Grande's network in 2018:

In a 2018 Reddit thread titled "Texas ISP [Grande] slams music biz for trying to turn it into a 'copyright cop,'" user roboweiner says, "I have Grande and torrent a lot. Always thought it was pretty cool of them to not snitch." User SquirtyBottoms said, "[l]ike everyone else I miss Grande and I'm stuck with Spectrum or AT&T in my area. I use Spectrum. Those fuckers have turned my connection off completely on one occasion and would not turn it back on until I agreed to stop pirating media."

The companies also sought identities of four users who commented in a 2011 thread. "I have grande. No issues with torrent or bandwidth caps," one user comment said. Another Reddit user wrote, "I have torrented like a motherfucker all over grande and have never seen anything."

Reddit's filing pointed out that the statute of limitations for copyright infringement is three years. The film companies said the statute of limitations is irrelevant to whether the comments can provide evidence in the case against Grande.

First Amendment right to anonymous speech

The First Amendment right to anonymous speech is not absolute, Beeler noted. In some cases, Reddit and other online platform providers have to identify users.

When a court evaluates an unmasking request, it considers whether a subpoena "was issued in good faith and not for any improper purpose," whether "the identifying information is directly and materially relevant" to a core claim or defense, and whether "information sufficient to establish or to disprove that claim or defense is unavailable from any other source," the ruling said.

The film companies claim the user comments demonstrate that "Grande has not implemented a policy to terminate repeat infringers that is sufficient for a safe-harbor affirmative defense under" US copyright law, and that users were drawn to Grande because it allowed pirating, Beeler wrote. The same film companies were able to get identifying information for 118 of Grande's top 125 pirating IP addresses in May but say "they have had limited success communicating with the 118 subscribers that Grande identified," Beeler wrote.

The fact that Grande already provided names of 118 subscribers factored into Beeler's explanation of why she denied the film companies' motion. Beeler wrote:

As with the last subpoena, the plaintiffs have not shown that the identifying information is directly or materially relevant or unavailable from another source. This is a high standard. The plaintiffs already have 118 subscribers' identifying information: they primarily resist serving those subscribers with subpoenas as burdensome and inconsistent with their August expert-disclosure deadline. They are the top pirating IP addresses, and they are from a more recent time period: it is not obvious why subpoenaing even a subset of those addresses would not yield information at least equivalent to, if not better than, information from the six Reddit subscribers. The information may be relevant, but it also is attenuated: it is at best weak evidence about Grande's insufficient policy regarding repeat infringers or its appeal to pirating subscribers.

In their lawsuit against Grande, the film companies have a deadline of August 7 to serve expert reports on the defendant.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ed-torrenting/





Facebook to Unmask Anonymous Dutch User Accused of Repeated Defamatory Posts

Court decides the posts can stay up, but the user's identity must be revealed.
Ashley Belanger

Starting today, Facebook users may feel a little less safe posting anonymously. The Court of the Hague in The Netherlands ruled that Meta Ireland must unmask an anonymous user accused of defaming the claimant, a male Facebook user who allegedly manipulated and made secret recordings of women he dated.

The anonymous Facebook user posted the allegedly defamatory statements in at least two private Facebook groups dedicated to discussing dating experiences. The claimant could not gain access but was shown screenshots from the groups, one with about 2,600 members and one with around 61,000 members. The claimant argued that his reputation had suffered from the repeated postings that included photos of the man and alleged screenshots of his texts.

The claimant tried to get Meta to remove the posts, but Meta responded with an email saying that it would not do so because "it is not clear to us that the content you reported is unlawful as defamation."

At that point, Meta suggested that the man contact the anonymous user directly to resolve the matter, triggering the lawsuit against Meta. Initially, the claimant asked the court to order Meta to delete the posts, identify the anonymous user, and flag any posts in other private Facebook groups that could defame the claimant.

While arguing the case, Meta had defended the anonymous user's right to freedom of expression, but the court decided that the claimant—whose name is redacted in court documents—deserved an opportunity to challenge the allegedly defamatory statements.

Partly for that reason, the court ordered Meta to provide "basic subscriber information" on the anonymous user, including their username, as well as any names, email addresses, or phone numbers associated with their Facebook account. The court did not order Meta to remove the posts or flag any others that may have been shared in private groups, though.

Meta has already agreed to comply with the order, the court's ruling said. However, if Meta fails to provide the Facebook user's identifying information, the social media company risks a penalty of approximately $1,200 daily. The maximum fine that Meta could face is less than $130,000.

A legal representative for the claimant and Meta could not immediately be reached for comment.

Identifying anonymous posters

Facebook allows users to post anonymously in private groups when admins allow it. The court order said it was common for private Facebook groups to allow anonymous posting in forums where primarily women discuss dangerous or negative dating experiences with men.

When a Facebook user posts anonymously, it has never truly been anonymous, of course. Facebook's policy stipulates that "your name and profile picture will still be visible to the group’s admins and moderators, as well as to Facebook, in order to help keep groups safe and in compliance with our Community Standards."

There's an entire branch of law where content removal attorneys fight back against anonymous posters. Sometimes attorneys prod platforms to unmask the user, commonly when making copyright claims, and other times they rely on tactics to unmask users themselves, like IP tracing or reverse image searches. This case, however, could be considered a "landmark decision" that "signals a shift in the balance between user privacy and accountability on social media platforms," StackDiary reported.

Meta's defense of the anonymous user's right to free speech failed, the court said, because freedom of speech is not unlimited.

"Someone who, without evidence, repeatedly makes serious and clearly traceable accusations, must take into account, partly in the light of the conditions applied by Facebook, that he or she may be confronted with a measure whereby his or her anonymity is lifted," the court order said.

Although the key concern for The Court in the Hague appeared to be that the statements posted anonymously were plausibly defamatory, the order also noted that the content would not have to necessarily be unlawful for Facebook to be ordered to identify the user posting it.

"According to settled case law, under certain circumstances Meta has an obligation to provide identifying data, even if the content of the relevant messages is not unmistakably unlawful," the court order said.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...amatory-posts/





Mass. Lawmakers Eye a ‘Netflix Tax’ to Fund Community TV Channels
Hiawatha Bray

A proposed state tax on streaming video services could lead to higher prices for popular video services such as Netflix and Hulu. But the state’s community access cable channels, which provide local news, sports, and gavel-to-gavel coverage of local government, say the tax is essential to keep them afloat.

“If we don’t have some kind of help in updating the funding for community media, we’re not going to be around,” said David Gauthier, president of MassAccess, the statewide organization for community access cable channels.

In July, the Joint Committee on Advanced Information Technology held hearings on legislation filed by Democratic State Representative Joan Meschino and Republican Representative Mathew J. Muratore. Their bill would require streaming video companies to pay a 5 percent fee on the gross revenues generated in the state. The estimated $65 million a year raised by the fee would support roughly 200 community access channels, the most in any state.

The community channels are run by nonprofit organizations or town governments, and funded by cable TV companies, which are assessed a fee by local governments for the right to run their cables through city property. The cable companies pass the cost on to subscribers.

But subscriptions are plummeting as US consumers abandon pay TV for streaming services. Cable and satellite subscribers now number about 70 million, down more than 25 percent from 95.5 million a decade ago, according to Leichtman Research Group, a New Hampshire research and analysis company specializing in media, entertainment, and broadband industries.

“The next three to five years it’s really going to dry up even more so,” said Muratore.

Meschino said citizens can’t afford to lose access to community media channels, because so many local newspapers have shut down. “There’s literally no other way to consume that sort of hyperlocal programming,” Meschino said.

The community channels were especially valuable during the COVID lockdown, as they provided emergency information and broadcast virtual public meetings via cable and the internet.

“That’s how town board meetings occurred,” said Muratore. “Government still had to function. They were able to do that through the local access stations.”

About a dozen US states levy sales taxes on consumers’ streaming video bills. But Meschino said that sales tax money goes into each state’s general fund. Instead, she wants the streaming fee to be dedicated entirely to support for community media services, just like the fee paid by traditional cable TV companies.

Some or all of the fees would likely be passed on to consumers. Gauthier estimates that a typical household’s costs could rise about $2.40 a month, spread among several streaming networks.

“Maybe it’ll be 75 cents for your Amazon,” he said. “Maybe it’ll be 80 cents for your Disney.”

National prices for streaming services have increased steadily in recent years. For instance, a standard Netflix subscription, priced at $9.99 in 2015, now costs $15.49.

“It’s going to be a pain to comply,’ said Christopher Gilrein, executive director for the Northeast for the trade association Technet, which is lobbying against the streaming tax bill.

Gilrein said that the tax would apply only to video streamed over hardwired internet lines running through public property. But many people watch videos on their 4G or 5G phones. The streaming companies would have to figure out the percentage of revenues attributable to wired streaming.

And they would have to do this just for Massachusetts, because the proposed law would work differently from the sales taxes used in other states. Gilrein said it would be very expensive “to stand up an internal infrastructure to comply with a tax that is out of step with 49 other states.”

Another critic of the bill, Andrew Wilford, director of the interstate commerce initiative at the National Taxpayers Union Foundation, said “it really comes down to a cash grab,”

Wilford said that if a streaming service can be taxed merely because its programs are moving over a wire running through public land, then the state could levy a similar tax on any business using the network. He predicted that if the law is approved, other online services could get hit with new fees. For example, a videogame streaming company like Twitch or a music streaming company like Spotify might be liable.

“As states see the cash cow available for milking,” Wilford said, “they’re going to keep tacking on revenue raisers.”

But Gauthier said the proposed streaming tax makes perfect sense. “The exact same cables and the exact same infrastructure are being used to deliver different data,” he said. “Why should Comcast have to pay and Netflix not?”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/07/...y-tv-channels/





Internet Providers that Won FCC Grants try to Escape Broadband Commitments

"Coalition of RDOF Winners" lobbies FCC but won't reveal its full member list.
Jon Brodkin

A group of Internet service providers that won government grants are asking the Federal Communication Commission for more money or an "amnesty window" in which they could give up grants without penalty.

The ISPs were awarded grants to build broadband networks from the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), which selected funding recipients in December 2020. A group calling itself the "Coalition of RDOF Winners" has been meeting with FCC officials about their requests for more money or an amnesty window, according to several filings submitted to the commission.

The group says broadband construction costs have soared since the grants were announced. They asked for extra money, quicker payments, relief from letter of credit requirements, or an amnesty window "that allows RDOF winners to relinquish all or part of their RDOF winning areas without forfeitures or other penalties if the Commission chooses not to make supplemental funds available or if the amount of supplemental funds the Commission does make available does not cover an RDOF Winner's costs that exceed reasonable inflation," a July 31 filing said.

A different group of ISPs urged the FCC to reject the request, saying that telcos that win grants by pledging to build networks at a low cost are "gaming" the system by seeking more money afterward.

So far, the FCC leadership seems reluctant to provide extra funding. The commission could issue fines to ISPs that default on grants—the FCC recently proposed $8.8 million in fines against 22 RDOF applicants for defaults.

Group’s members are a mystery

The Coalition of RDOF Winners doesn't include every ISP that was granted money from the program. But exactly which and how many ISPs are in the coalition is a mystery. The group's attorney, Philip Macres of Klein Law Group, told Ars today that he is "not at liberty to provide the list of all the members in the Coalition of RDOF Winners."

Macres confirmed that the group doesn't include every RDOF winner but said he cannot reveal how many ISPs are members. There appear to be at least two members: Arkansas-based wireless broadband provider Aristotle Unified Communications and a Texas ISP called TekWav both joined the meetings at which the coalition asked the FCC for more money or an amnesty window.

In late 2020, the FCC tentatively awarded $9.2 billion over 10 years to 180 Internet providers that agreed to deploy broadband to over 5.2 million unserved homes and businesses. But after seeing evidence that the program was mismanaged under former Chairman Ajit Pai, the current FCC re-evaluated the grants and authorized payments of $6 billion to a smaller group of ISPs.

The size of individual grants didn't change, but the FCC refused to give final authorization to certain grants, including $886 million that was originally awarded to SpaceX's Starlink satellite service and $1.3 billion that was slated for wireless provider LTD Broadband.

Separately, the US government is distributing over $42 billion in the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program that was authorized by Congress in November 2021. Geographic areas that have RDOF funding are generally ineligible for BEAD grants.

In cases where an ISP defaults on an RDOF grant, the geographic location associated with the grant would become eligible for funding from the larger BEAD program. But if a default happens after BEAD funding is allotted, an unserved area could end up with no subsidized networks.

Other ISPs urge FCC to enforce rules

The Coalition of RDOF Winners' request for more funding or an amnesty window drew opposition from WTA—Advocates for Rural Broadband, formerly called the Western Telecommunications Alliance, which says it represents over 360 rural telecommunications companies across the US and over 85 industry vendors.

The WTA said it's not a proponent of the "reverse auction" format the FCC used for the RDOF, in which ISPs bid on grants organized by census blocks. But "if the Commission employs reverse auctions as a device to determine and distribute Universal Service Fund support in certain areas, it must strictly enforce all of its auction rules, terms and conditions in order to prevent such reverse auctions from being abused, distorted and undermined by various gaming tactics," the WTA said.

The WTA pointed out that winning RDOF bidders got their grants because they made lower bids than other ISPs. In other words, the ISPs that agreed to serve specific census blocks at a lower cost to the government are the ones that got the grants.

"An obvious gaming danger is the use of a 'strategy' of making support bids as unreasonably low as necessary in order to 'win' specific service areas, and then coming back to the Commission later for the additional support that is actually needed to construct and operate the promised broadband networks in such areas," the WTA told the FCC in a July 28 filing.

Coalition claims “unprecedented” rising costs

The Coalition of RDOF Winners called the recent rise in broadband deployment costs "massive and unprecedented." The cost of some materials has quadrupled, and "overall costs have at least doubled if not tripled," the group said. "Costs of fiber construction have risen from a blended rate of $9 per foot to upwards of $18. Cost of labor has risen as well."

The Coalition of RDOF Winners said these cost increases "could never have been anticipated by the Commission and RDOF winners prior to the auction." But the WTA said that isn't true and that its own telco members "and other responsible bidders factored these likely future cost increases into their Auction 904 bid strategies, and stopped bidding when the bid prices became so unreasonably low that projects were no longer financially feasible or sustainable."

The WTA wrote:

The Coalition requests supplemental funding, accelerated support payments and other additional financial benefits that are above and beyond what its members bid for and agreed to accept in Auction 904. It claims that such additional funding is necessary due to alleged "massive and unprecedented increases in broadband deployment costs" that RDOF bidders "could never have anticipated at the time" they placed their reverse auction bids. That is simply not the case.

WTA members and others bidding in Auction 904 during October and November 2020 were well aware of the likelihood of significant future general price level inflation as well as the likelihood of substantial increases in broadband equipment and construction costs due to burgeoning demand for high-speed broadband during the ongoing COVID-19 quarantines and due to foreseeable equipment and labor supply chain disruptions and shortages.

FCC chair resists GOP senators’ request

Three Republican senators also asked the FCC to provide extra funding or an amnesty period to RDOF winners in a June 12 letter. The request was made by Sens. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio).

The senators' letter said that "generally speaking, those that submitted the lowest bids with the fastest broadband speeds were chosen as auction winners." These ISPs, "especially smaller providers," now have "funding shortfalls," the senators wrote in their request for more money.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel resisted the senators' requests in a response on June 26. She said the FCC "collects only enough funding through the USF [Universal Service Fund] contribution process to match the approximately $6 billion committed," and thus doesn't have readily available reserves for supplemental funding.

Rosenworcel told senators that the FCC might approve individual waiver requests from ISPs in "special circumstances" but stressed the importance of the commission enforcing its rules. The FCC auction rules were designed to "ensure that winning bidders would fulfill their promise to use this funding to build new broadband infrastructure" and "to impress upon recipients the importance of being prepared to meet all Commission requirements and be prepared to fulfill deployment obligations," she wrote.

The $6 billion in approved RDOF grants are slated to "bring primarily gigabit broadband service to over 3.4 million locations in 47 states," Rosenworcel wrote, adding that many carriers "have already begun deploying these future-proof networks to connect unserved areas."

Grants “badly flawed since the beginning”

Telecom industry consultant Doug Dawson wrote a blog post calling the RDOF process "badly flawed since the beginning. Some auction winners bid down prices a lot lower than expected. The areas that were available in many places are scattered and don't create a reasonable footprint for building a broadband solution."

"I have no doubt that many RDOF winners are now looking at a broken financial model for fulfilling their promise. They are stuck with a terrible dilemma—build the promised networks and have a losing business or pay a substantial penalty to withdraw from RDOF," Dawson wrote.

Dawson said the FCC faces a dilemma, too, because "there will likely be additional negative outcomes if RDOF winners are unable to fulfill the pledge to build and operate the promised networks." Nonetheless, he called it "disturbing" that senators and some ISPs "are asking for a soft landing for anybody that wants to change their mind and withdraw from RDOF."

"The RDOF footprints have already been off-limits for other federal grant programs that could have brought faster broadband to these areas," Dawson wrote. "It's fully expected that the BEAD grants will start being awarded next year, and it would be a true disaster if ISPs default on RDOF after those grants have been awarded. That could strand large numbers of folks with no broadband solution."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...d-commitments/





Comcast, Centurylink Fail To Derail Community-Owned Gigabit Fiber Network In Bountiful, Utah
Karl Bode

More than 600 communities across the U.S. have decided to build their own broadband networks after decades of predatory behavior, slow speeds, and high prices by regional telecom monopolies.

That includes the city of Bountiful, Utah, which earlier this year voted to build a $48 million fiber network to deliver affordable, gigabit broadband to every business and residence in the city. The network is to be open access, meaning that multiple competitors can come in and compete on shared central infrastructure, driving down prices for locals (see our recent Copia study on this concept).

As you might expect, regional telecom monopolies hate this sort of thing. But because these networks are so popular among consumers, they’re generally afraid to speak out against them directly. So they usually employ the help of dodgy proxy lobbying and policy middlemen, who’ll then set upon any town or city contemplating such a network using a bunch of scary, misleading rhetoric.

Like in Bountiful, where the “Utah Taxpayers Association” (which has direct financial and even obvious managerial tethers to regional telecom giants CenturyLink (now Lumen) and Comcast) launched a petition trying to force a public vote on the $48 million in revenue bonds authorized for the project under the pretense that such a project would be an unmitigated disaster for the town. (Their effort didn’t work).

Big ISPs like to pretend they’re suddenly concerned about taxpayers and force entirely new votes on these kinds of projects because they know that with unlimited marketing budgets, they can usually flood less well funded towns or cities with misleading PR to sour the public on the idea.

But after the experience most Americans had with their existing broadband options during the peak COVID home education boom, it’s been much harder for telecom giants to bullshit the public. And the stone cold fact remains: these locally owned networks that wouldn’t even be considered if locals were happy with existing options.

You’ll notice these “taxpayer groups” exploited by big ISPs never criticize the untold billions federal and local governments throw at giant telecom monopolies for half-completed networks. Or the routine taxpayer fraud companies like AT&T, Frontier, CenturyLink (now Lumen) and others routinely engage in.

And it’s because such taxpayer protection groups are effectively industry-funded performance art; perhaps well intentioned at one point, but routinely hijacked, paid, and used as a prop by telecom monopolies looking to protect market dominance.

Gigi Sohn (who you’ll recall just had her nomination to the FCC scuttled by a sleazy telecom monopoly smear campaign) has shifted her focus heavily toward advocating for locally-owned, creative alternatives to telecom monopoly power. And in an op-ed to local Utah residents in the Salt Lake Tribune, she notes how telecom giants want to have their cake and eat it too.

They don’t want to provide affordable, evenly available next-generation broadband. But they don’t want long-neglected locals to, either:

Two huge cable and broadband companies, Comcast and CenturyLink/Lumen, have been members of UTA and have sponsored the UTA annual conference. They have been vocally opposed to community-owned broadband for decades and are well-known for providing organizations like the UTA with significant financial support in exchange for pushing policies that help maintain their market dominance. Yet when given the opportunity in 2020, before anyone else, to provide Bountiful City with affordable and robust broadband, the companies balked. So the dominant cable companies not only don’t want to provide the service Bountiful City needs, they also want to block others from doing so.

Big telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast (and all the consultants, think tankers, and academics they hire to defend their monopoly power) love to claim that community owned broadband networks are some kind of inherent boondoggle. But they’re just another business plan, dependent on the quality of the proposal and the individuals involved.

Even then, data consistently shows that community-owned broadband networks (whether municipal, cooperative, or built on the back of the city-owned utility) provide better, faster, cheaper service than regional monopolies. Such networks routinely not only provide the fastest service in the country, they do so while being immensely popular among consumers. They’re locally-owned and staffed, so they’re more accountable to locals. And they’re just looking to break even, not make a killing.

If I was a lumbering, apathetic, telecom monopoly solely fixated on cutting corners and raising rates to please myopic Wall Street investors, I’d be worried too.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/04/...ountiful-utah/





Google’s Plan To DRM The Web Goes Against Everything Google Once Stood For
Mike Masnick

The grand old enshittification curve strikes again. Remember, as stated by Cory Doctorow, the process of enshittification entails these steps:

first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

Way too many companies go through this process, and it’s pretty typical. In the past, we’ve talked about how young tech companies innovate, whereas old ones litigate. Basically, the underlying issue is that as companies become less innovative, rather than creating new useful things, they focus on extracting more value however they can, while simultaneously trying to stymie and hold off innovative upstarts.

There are many ways in which Google has clearly reached that stage in various aspects of its business. But, there’s been talk over the past few weeks of something that is truly problematic: Google toying with what is quite clearly DRM for the web, in a system called Web Environment Integrity that it is proposing to build into Chrome.

If you listened to my podcast discussion with Doctorow just last week, while ostensibly about Cory’s latest novel, we spent a lot of time talking about enshittifcation, including a discussion on the idea that inspired the novel, when Microsoft first wanted to build it’s “trusted computing” system with a separate cordoned off chip to check what it was that your open computer itself was doing, so that it could make sure what you were doing was legit. Now there are pros and cons to this approach, but it fundamentally changes how computers work.

From the podcast, Cory summed it up this way:

So 20 years and eight months or so ago. A team from Microsoft came to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and presented us something called the Next Generation Secure Computing Base, which they also called Palladium, which today we call Trusted Computing. And the idea here, and again, I apologize in advance for how gnarly this is, the idea here, is that if you have a computer, because it is like a universal Turing machine that can run any program, it is impossible for anyone else to know which programs your computer is running.

And on the one hand, that means that you could always put, say some surveillance tools that you’re forced to run by your boss or by an abusive spouse or by your government. You could put them inside a virtual machine and they would never know it. They’d be a head in a jar. They’ve never know it.

You can also emulate old pieces of software inside a new piece of software. You can open up a browser window simulate a whole like Mac SE running system 7. In fact, you know, my little laptop computer, middle of the range laptop computer here, I can open up 15, 20 browser tabs and emulate 20 Mac SEs without breaking a sweat. My fan doesn’t even turn on.

And so there’s this like character of universality and it’s both a feature and a bug. And it’s a bug in some trivial ways, like it’s really hard for me to know. whether you and I are playing a video game in which you are truly not running any like aim hack software. It’s also a bug in that like I can’t run a server in the cloud and know for sure that the people who own that server aren’t siphoning off my data. And it’s also a bug in that I can’t ask you my trusted technical expert to remotely look at what my computer is doing and tell me whether it’s running any spyware. because the spyware can just present itself to you as a not spyware application.

And so this is the problem that Microsoft was setting out to solve. And the way that they were gonna solve it is they were gonna put another computer in your computer, right, a separate, fairly low powered, extremely kind of simple and easily audited computer that was gonna be sealed in epoxy, mounted to the board in a way that it couldn’t be removed without revealing that it had been removed. It was gonna have like, acid in an epoxy pouch on the top of the chip. So if you tried to decap it and fuzz it or, you know, put an electron tunneling microscope, it would dissolve, right?

And it was going to be this, like, tamper evident piece of hardware. And this hardware could observe all the things going on in the other computer, in the computer you interact with. And you could ask it, hey, take your observations about my computer, make a manifest about what my computer is doing, like the… bootloader and operating system and the applications and the extensions and what’s going on in the kernel and whatever and make a signed cryptographically signed manifest of that and send that to someone else who wants to validate what kind of computer I’m running. This is called remote attestation and it is like a genuinely new computing capability, one that we had historically lacked.

It is, I would argue, as powerful and as complicated and as difficult to get your head around, and it’s potentially troubling as like universal computing and, and networking, and strong encryption, which is to say working encryption. It is like a new power and maybe even a superpower for your computer to allow multiple people who don’t trust each other to nevertheless trust one another’s statements about how their computers are configured.

That is like a really powerful thing.

If you think about work from home. You know, I was just at a friend’s house yesterday who does a lot of commercially sensitive work and who has been targeted repeatedly by state actors and by private corporate espionage, as well as phishers. He says he gets new employees and as soon as it hits LinkedIn, that they’re on the network, those employees get phished.

People try to take over their home computers and during remote work, this was a huge problem because suddenly his corporate perimeter was drawn around devices in people’s houses. And there were like extremely powerful adversaries trying to break into those computers and steal the data and it was worth a lot of money. And so he wanted to be able to ask those computers how they were configured, not because he didn’t trust the employees, but because he didn’t trust those employees’ technical capabilities, right? He wanted to give them a backstop in which their own mistakes wouldn’t be fatal for their jobs and for the enterprise. Right.

So there’s some like beneficial, consensual ways to conceive of this.

So this is the thing Microsoft came and presented to us and we were like, wouldn’t this let you determine whether someone was using Open Office and stop them from opening a Word document or you know, iWork right? You know, Numbers, Pages and Keynote. They’re like, ‘oh yes, totally.’ And we were like, wouldn’t this let you distinguish between people running SMB and Samba and keep them off the network? And they were like that too, right? And they were like, ‘but maybe we could, you know, everyone in the enterprise could run a version of this that you trusted instead of one that we trusted.’ And some of those people, like one of them is a guy called Peter Biddle, who’s, actually an honorable fella who really did believe in this. But you know, Peter Biddle wasn’t the boss of Microsoft.

And you know, this gun on the mantelpiece in Act 1 had a severe chance of going off by Act 3. And so here we are at Act 3. And 20 years after fighting about this. And it’s got multiple guises, right? Digital rights management, trusted computing, UFE boot locking, the broadcast flag, which is back. I don’t know if you’re following this. There’s a new version of ATSC that’s got DRM in it. And the FCC is likely to green light it. And the whole broadcast thing is gonna be back again.

You know, there’ve been so many names for this over 20 years and they all boil down to this thing. Should your computer be able to be compelled to tell the truth, even when you would prefer that it lie on your behalf? Should there be a facility in your computer that you can’t control that other people can remotely trigger? Are the costs worth the benefits? Is there a way to mitigate those costs? What are we going to do about this? And as I say, this is an argument that I’ve been having with myself for 20 years that basically no one else has advanced.

And, well, really, that’s about the best description I can come up with for what’s happening here with the Web Environment Integrity system. Here’s how Google describes the project, which reads differently if you just read (or heard) Doctorow’s explanation above:

With the web environment integrity API, websites will be able to request a token that attests key facts about the environment their client code is running in. For example, this API will show that a user is operating a web client on a secure Android device. Tampering with the attestation will be prevented by signing the tokens cryptographically.

Websites will ultimately decide if they trust the verdict returned from the attester. It is expected that the attesters will typically come from the operating system (platform) as a matter of practicality, however this explainer does not prescribe that. For example, multiple operating systems may choose to use the same attester. This explainer takes inspiration from existing native attestation signals such as App Attest and the Play Integrity API.

There is a tension between utility for anti-fraud use cases requiring deterministic verdicts and high coverage, and the risk of websites using this functionality to exclude specific attesters or non-attestable browsers. We look forward to discussion on this topic, and acknowledge the significant value-add even in the case where verdicts are not deterministically available (e.g. holdouts).

This is, understandably, causing some controversy. And it should. The most comprehensive and understandable argument for how troubling this is that I saw early on came from Alex Ivanovs, who pointed out that one “side effect” of this would be enabling Google to effectively block ad-blocking. And, of course, plenty of people will insist that that’s not a side-effect, that’s the end goal. As he notes:

A significant concern stemming from the tech community is the potential for monopolistic control. By controlling the “attesters” that verify client environments, Google, or any other big tech company, could potentially manipulate the trust scores, thereby deciding which websites are deemed trustworthy. This opens up a can of worms regarding the democratic nature of the web.

As one GitHub user commented, “This raises a red flag for the open nature of the web, potentially paving the way for a digital hierarchy dominated by a few tech giants.”

Quite a discussion broke out in the Github over all this, with Mozilla stepping up pretty quickly (in the Github) to highlight how this move was against the open web, and Mozilla was against it:

Mechanisms that attempt to restrict these choices are harmful to the openness of the Web ecosystem and are not good for users.

Additionally, the use cases listed depend on the ability to “detect non-human traffic” which as described would likely obstruct many existing uses of the Web such as assistive technologies, automatic testing, and archiving & search engine spiders. These depend on tools being able to receive content intended for humans, and then transform, test, index, and summarize that content for humans. The safeguards in the proposal (e.g., “holdback”, or randomly failing to produce an attestation) are unlikely to be effective, and are inadequate to address these concerns.

Detecting fraud and invalid traffic is a challenging problem that we’re interested in helping address. However this proposal does not explain how it will make practical progress on the listed use cases, and there are clear downsides to adopting it.

This week, browser maker Brave also came out as opposed to the plan, saying it wouldn’t ship with WEI enabled.

Brave strongly opposes Google’s “Web Environment Integrity” (WEI) proposal. As with many of Google’s recent changes and proposals regarding the Web, “Web Environment Integrity” would move power away from users, and toward large websites, including the websites Google itself runs. Though Brave uses Chromium, Brave browsers do not (and will not) include WEI. Further, some browsers have introduced other features similar to, though more limited than, WEI (e.g., certain parts of WebAuthn and Privacy Keys); Brave is considering how to best restrict these features without breaking benign uses.

Google’s WEI proposal is frustrating, but it’s not surprising. WEI is simply the latest in Google’s ongoing efforts to prevent browser users from being in control of how they read, interact with, and use the Web. Google’s WebBundles proposal makes it more difficult for users to block or filter out unwanted page content, Google’s First Party Sets feature makes it more difficult for users to make decisions around which sites can track users, and Google’s weakening of browser extensions straightforwardly makes it harder for users to be in control of their Web experience by crippling top ad-and-tracker-blocking extensions such as uBlock Origin. This is unfortunately far from a complete list of recent, similar user-harming Web proposals from Google. Again, Brave disables or modifies all of these features in Brave’s browsers.

Now, I’ve seen some conspiracy theories making the rounds about this, trying to argue that it’s not just a terrible, awful, dangerous, problematic idea, but that there are truly nefarious (think: government surveillance) reasons behind all this. And that’s… nonsense.

But it is bad. It’s very clearly opposed to the principles of an open web, the kind of thing that Google used to be at the forefront of fighting for. But, of course, as companies get older and lose that innovative edge, they look to extract more value out of users. And that leads down this path.

And, yes, there are real concerns about abuse that WEI claims to be addressing. As Cory discussed about Microsoft’s original plan 20 years ago, they’re presenting new capabilities that can be used to stop some very problematic things. But… the way that it’s being done fundamentally restructures the open internet to something that is not the same at all.

It goes against the most important values that we push for here at Techdirt, around pushing the power to the edges of the network, rather than centralizing them. Whether or not you believe Google’s motives in putting together WEI are benign, the use of such a tool will not remain so.

As Cory said, the gun on the mantle in Act 1 is very likely to go off by Act 3. The system can be abused, especially by big powerful companies like Google. And that means, at some point, it will be abused by big powerful companies like Google.

Supporting the open web requires saying no to WEI, and having Google say no as well. It’s not a good policy. It’s not a good idea. It’s a terrible idea that takes Google that much further down the enshittification curve. Even if you can think of good reasons to try to set up such a system, there is way too much danger that comes along with it, undermining the very principles of the open web.

It’s no surprise, of course, that Google would do this, but that doesn’t mean the internet-loving public should let them get away with it.
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/02/...nce-stood-for/





Hacking Group Plans System to Encrypt Social Media and Other Apps

Cult of the Dead Cow is a hacker collective whose members at one time included Texas politician Beto O’Rourke
Joseph Menn

Once known for distributing hacking tools and shaming software companies into improving their security, a famed group of technology activists is now working to develop a system that will allow the creation of messaging and social networking apps that won’t keep hold of users’ personal data.

The group, Cult of the Dead Cow, has developed a coding framework that can be used by app developers who are willing to embrace strong encryption and forsake revenue from advertising that is targeted to individuals based on detailed profiles gleaned from the data most apps now routinely collect.

The team is building on the work of such free products as Signal, which offers strong encryption for text messages and voice calls, and Tor, which offers anonymous web surfing by routing traffic through a series of servers to disguise the location of the person conducting the search.

The latest effort, to be detailed at the massive annual Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas next week, seeks to provide a foundation for messaging, file sharing and even social networking apps without harvesting any data, all secured by the kind of end-to-end encryption that makes interception hard even for governments.

Called Veilid, and pronounced vay-lid, the code can be used by developers to build applications for mobile devices or the web. Those apps will pass fully encrypted content to one another using the Veilid protocol, its developers say. As with the file-sharing software BitTorrent, which distributes different pieces of the same content simultaneously, the network will get faster as more devices join and share the load, the developers say. In such decentralized “peer-to-peer” networks, users download data from each other instead of from a central machine.

As with some other open-source endeavors, the challenge will come in persuading programmers and engineers to devote time to designing apps that are compatible with Veilid. Though developers could charge money for those apps or sell ads, the potential revenue streams are limited by the inability to collect detailed information that has become a primary method for distributing targeted ads or pitching a product to a specific set of users.

The team behind Veilid has not yet released documentation explaining its design choices, and collaborative work on an initial messaging app, intended to function without requiring a phone number, has yet to produce a test version.

But the nascent project has other things going for it.

It arrives amid disarray, competition and a willingness to experiment among social network and chat users resentful of Twitter and Facebook. And it buttresses opposition to increasing moves by governments, lately including the United Kingdom, to undercut strong encryption with laws requiring disclosure on demand of content or user identities. Apple, Facebook parent Meta and Signal recently threatened to pull some UK services if that country’s Online Safety Bill is adopted unchanged.

Civil rights activists and abortion rights supporters have also been alarmed by police use of messages sent by text and Facebook Messenger to investigate abortions in states that have banned the procedure after the first six weeks of pregnancy.

“It’s great that people are developing an end-to-end encryption framework for everything,” said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. “We can move past the surveillance business model.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment, but law enforcement agencies often complain that end-to-end encryption makes it hard to scan messages for criminal plots and for police to recover evidence after the fact.

After three years of coding, Veilid enters the world bearing a pedigree like few others in the world of hacking and security.

Veilid is the most significant release in more than a decade from Cult of the Dead Cow, the longest-running and most influential U.S. hacking group and the originators of the word hacktivism, combining hacking and activism. The group, which styles its acronym cDc, takes its name from an early hangout, an abandoned slaughterhouse in Lubbock, Tex.

After modest beginnings writing stories for the online bulletin boards of the pre-web 1980s, when a teenaged Beto O’Rourke was active in the group, Cult of the Dead Cow now includes some of the biggest names in cybersecurity.

Two were among the first people to issue public warnings about security flaws in widely used software and to coordinate disclosures with the vendors as they patched the programs.

That pair includes Peiter Zatko, widely known as Mudge, who was a program manager at the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and the head of security for the online payments facilitator Stripe. He was later hired by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to oversee security there. He testified to Congress last year that Twitter’s practices were so bad that they violated the company’s previous settlements with the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is now investigating.

Another, Christien Rioux, wrote an open-source tool for hacking Windows machines, Back Orifice 2000, that was released at Def Con in 1999. Rioux later co-founded Veracode, which made programs to scan software for buried security failings: that company is now worth more than $2 billion.

Rioux and Zatko also belonged to a group called the L0pht, which famously warned Congress 25 years ago that the internet’s infrastructure was disastrously unsafe.

Rioux wrote the vast majority of the more than 100,000 lines of code in the Veilid framework, while other members of cDc have been involved in testing and critiquing it and working on policies, documentation and the first apps.

“You can think of Tor as a privacy system for accessing websites. It anonymizes your source IP,” Rioux told The Washington Post, referring to the numerical designation often assigned to a traceable single computer. But Tor is complicated to use, Rioux said, “not very mobile-friendly and not very modern in how it’s constructed.”

“This is sort of like Tor, but for apps. Everybody’s got supercomputers in their pockets. Why not make the cloud everyone’s computers?”

Rioux and others working on Veilid said the key was to make it easy for developers and users, as easy as something like Facebook. Existing apps could make a version that works with Veilid and have their users be able to communicate without any third party being the wiser.

The project is run by a foundation that has applied for nonprofit 501c(3) status. The three directors are Rioux, a more recent cDc inductee named Katelyn Bowden, and a fellow traveler who was active in the 1990s hacking scene and has worked in security since then, Paul Miller.

Bowden, who has spent years advocating for victims of revenge porn, said she was motivated to help those with little money or power have the same secure communications as billionaires and experts. That includes girls and women seeking abortion information, who can be betrayed by common messaging apps.

“It’s very rare you come across something that isn’t selling your data,” Bowden said. “We are giving people the ability to opt out of the data economy. … Give the power back to the users, give them agency over their data, and screw these people that have made millions selling period information.”

Some veteran engineers who have tested the project’s code said it performed well.

One of them, Kirk Strauser, said he was glad that Rioux incorporated proven protocols for encryption rather than trying to invent everything from scratch.

He compared Veilid to peer-to-peer pioneer Napster — something revolutionary constructed mainly from technologies that were already out in the world.

“It’s a new way of combining them to work together,” said Strauser, who is the lead security architect at a digital health company.

One of the most complex issues for Veilid is content moderation, which has been among the biggest problems at Twitter and Facebook.

Some new rivals to those established companies, such as Mastodon, have opted for what is known as federation, in which groups with their own rules connect loosely with other groups.

Facebook parent Meta says it will make its new Twitter rival, Threads, compatible with Mastodon and others. Informal Veilid adviser Micah Schaffer said that shows that big companies plan to use federation to “provide this illusion of choice. They embrace federation in a way that deflects accountability for their moderation decision — you can just go to another server.”

Full encryption means that moderators won’t be able to see interactions that are harmful, which is one reason that Veilid’s own networking app will have users invite specific followers.

“Veilid opens the door for a new generation of social apps that are safer by design,” said Schaffer, who built YouTube’s first safety team and later led public policy at Snap.

Rioux said he hopes his talk with Bowden opening the first full day of Def Con, along with a technical workshop and a party, will inspire the critical mass of enthusiasts Veilid needs to succeed.

“Def Con is a breeding ground of privacy-centric users and developers,” he said. “We’re launching at the right place to get out a batch of very interested people.”

The privacy and security establishment will be watching what happens closely.

“I am delighted that they are taking this bull by the horns,” said inventor Jon Callas, who co-founded PGP Corporation and secure communications companies Silent Circle and Blackphone. “I look forward to seeing the details.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...-apps-def-con/
















Until next week,

- js.



















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