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Old 24-10-18, 07:32 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 27th, ’18

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October 27th, 2018




In Groundbreaking Decision, Feds Say Hacking DRM to Fix Your Electronics Is Legal

The new exemptions are a major win for the right to repair movement and give consumers wide latitude to legally repair the devices they own.
Jason Koebler

The Librarian of Congress and US Copyright Office just proposed new rules that will give consumers and independent repair experts wide latitude to legally hack embedded software on their devices in order to repair or maintain them. This exemption to copyright law will apply to smartphones, tractors, cars, smart home appliances, and many other devices.

The move is a landmark win for the “right to repair” movement; essentially, the federal government has ruled that consumers and repair professionals have the right to legally hack the firmware of “lawfully acquired” devices for the “maintenance” and “repair” of that device. Previously, it was legal to hack tractor firmware for the purposes of repair; it is now legal to hack many consumer electronics.

Specifically, it allows breaking digital rights management (DRM) and embedded software locks for “the maintenance of a device or system … in order to make it work in accordance with its original specifications” or for “the repair of a device or system … to a state of working in accordance with its original specifications.”

New copyright rules are released once every three years by the US Copyright Office and are officially put into place by the Librarian of Congress. These are considered “exemptions” to section 1201 of US copyright law, and makes DRM circumvention legal in certain specific cases. The new repair exemption is broad, applies to a wide variety of devices (an exemption in 2015 applied only to tractors and farm equipment, for example), and makes clear that the federal government believes you should be legally allowed to fix the things you own.

“I read it as the ability to reset to factory settings,” Nathan Proctor, head of consumer rights group US PIRG’s right to repair efforts, told me in an email. “That’s pretty much what we’ve been asking for.”

While this is a huge win on a federal level, this decision does nothing to address the practicalities of what consumers and independent repair professionals face in the real world. Anti-tampering and repair DRM implemented by manufacturers has gotten increasingly difficult to circumvent, and the decision doesn’t make DRM illegal, it just makes it legal for the owner of a device to bypass it for the purposes of repair.

A good way to think about this is to consider MacBook Pro repair. As Motherboard reported earlier this month, Apple has a built-in kill switch that can prevent new MacBook Pros from functioning if they have been repaired by anyone who is not authorized to do so by Apple. It uses embedded software to do this, by requiring the computer to connect to Apple’s servers in order to verify that a repair is “authorized.” This decision by the Copyright Office will make it legal to bypass that software lock, but actually doing it is another matter altogether.

“Getting an exemption to reset the device is pretty different from having access to the firmware to actually do that,” Proctor said.

Tractors, cars, air conditioning systems, smart appliances, internet of things devices, and smartphones all have similar software locks, and they can all now be legally circumvented. The thing is—as DRM becomes legal to crack, companies are committed to making it much harder to do so. The federal government has shown no interest in requiring manufacturers make it easier to break DRM, which is one of the reasons why the right to repair movement is pursuing state-level legislation to force manufacturers to allow it to be circumvented for the purposes of repair.

“They have this pretense that [DRM] is ‘effective’ but then they grant a ‘use exemption’ and assume that people will be able to bypass [DRM] to make the exempted uses, because they know DRM is a farce,” Cory Doctorow, a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and anti-DRM advocate, told Motherboard in a Twitter DM. “The thing is that there's these two contradictory pretenses: 1. that DRM is an effective means of technical control, even in the absence of legal penalties for breaking it, and; 2. That once you remove the legal stricture on breaking DRM, it will not be hard to accomplish this.”

The Copyright Office decision also does nothing to address the many ways that manufacturers have monopolized repair that have nothing to do with copyright or software. Companies have made it difficult to acquire parts or repair tools needed to fix the things you own, and many companies have weaponized the Department of Homeland Security to crack down on grey market and aftermarket parts that are imported from places like China. Two prominent right to repair activists, Louis Rossmann and Jessa Jones, have had their Apple repair parts seized by customs in recent months.

The win demonstrates that right to repair advocates are making progress, but there’s still a long way to go until repair becomes easier for everyone.

"Companies use the anti-piracy rules in copyright laws to cover things that are nowhere near copying music or video games,” Proctor said. “We just want to fix our stuff. We're pleased with the progress being made, and ultimately we want to settle this by establishing Right to Repair."
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...ight-to-repair





Motorola Becomes First Smartphone Company to Sell DIY Repair Kits to Its Customers
Jason Koebler

As Apple continues to fight independent repair, Motorola partners with iFixit and supports the right to repair movement.

Most cell phone manufacturers have spent an inordinate amount of time trying to get their customers to upgrade their phones before it’s necessary. They do this with upgrade programs, by gluing-down batteries so that they are difficult to replace, by lobbying against fair repair legislation, and by making replacement parts difficult or impossible to come by.

Much of the news in the right to repair world is bleak. Just last week, Louis Rossmann, a prominent independent repair expert and YouTuber, announced that the Department of Homeland Security seized a shipment of MacBook batteries bound for his repair shop. And so it is excellent news that Motorola has decided to make it as easy as possible for you to repair your phone.

The company announced that it would begin selling replacement parts for all of its recent phones to customers, and it has partnered with iFixit to sell repair kits for phones like the Moto X, Z, G4, G5, and Droid Turbo 2. The kits come with tools, genuine Motorola-branded replacement parts, and instructions on how to fix your device. iFixit is currently selling replacement batteries, screens, and digitizer assemblies.

“Motorola is setting an example for major manufacturers to embrace a more open attitude towards repair,” iFixit wrote in a blog post announcing the partnership. “For fixers like us, this partnership is representative of a broader movement in support of our Right to Repair. It’s proof that OEM manufacturers and independent repair can co-exist. Big business and social responsibility, and innovation and sustainability, don’t need to be mutually exclusive.”

It’s a big step: Rather than fighting independent repair, Motorola has embraced it. Hopefully, other manufacturers will follow in its footsteps.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...-its-customers





Milestones

How IBM’s ThinkPad Became A Design Icon

Little about the PC industry of the early 1990s survives. But 25 years after it was first introduced–and after many technological shifts–a ThinkPad remains a ThinkPad.
Harry McCracken

In the tech industry, design consistency isn’t just undervalued; oftentimes, it’s an object of outright scorn. That’s why, for instance, Apple consistently gets grief for releasing new iPhones that aren’t radical departures from last year’s iPhones.

So it’s certainly no shocker that rifling through a 25-year-old issue of PC Magazine provides dozens of pieces of evidence that the tastes of 1992 diverged wildly from those of 2017, in ways that go beyond the purely technological. The desktop and portable computers in its pages are beige and bulbous, bearing scant resemblance to their modern descendants.

But there is one exception in the magazine. It’s a striking black laptop called the IBM ThinkPad. More precisely, it’s the first ThinkPad laptop, the 700C, which was announced 25 years ago today, on October 5, 1992.

In 1992, critics and customers immediately identified the ThinkPad 700C as an important product. PC Magazine’s Matthew J. Ross called it “superb” as well as “bold and a great success” and concluded his review by proclaiming that “after years of designing undistinguished portables, IBM has finally gotten it right.” Magazines such as BusinessWeek and PC Computing gave the 700C awards; IBM claimed that the ThinkPad racked up more than 300 honors in its first few months. The company also issued a press release trumpeting 100,000 orders for ThinkPads (including the 700C and two lower-end models with monochrome screens) in eight weeks. “Before October, IBM was not a major player in mobile computing,” an IBM executive acknowledged in the release. “Now we are.”

What nobody knew at the time was that the ThinkPad name, design aesthetic, and emphasis on technological innovation in the service of reliable productivity would have such staying power. Any citizen of late 1992 who encountered a modern ThinkPad such as the X1 Carbon would likely be blown away by the machine’s thin-and-light form factor–less than a third the thickness and weight of the 700C–and high-resolution screen, and would certainly be confused by it carrying a Lenovo nameplate rather than that of IBM. (The Chinese manufacturer acquired IBM’s PC business in 2005.) But if that person was familiar with the ThinkPad 700C, identifying the X1 Carbon as a ThinkPad would be easy. You can’t say anything similar about a 1992 Apple PowerBook and a 2017 MacBook.

If you’re looking for parallels to the longevity of the ThinkPad brand and signature design elements, you’re more likely to find them in the automotive industry than the PC business. “You can go look at a brand new Porsche 911 and compare it to the original, and okay, there’s a whole bunch of differences,” says David Hill, who served as design chief for the ThinkPad line for more than 20 years. “But it still has the same spirit and there are elements of it which are consistent.” That sort of “purposeful evolution,” he adds, is what the ThinkPad’s creators have always aimed for.

IBM’s Comeback Machine

Back in 1992, 11 years after it released its original personal computer, IBM was still one of the biggest names in the industry. But it had lost much of its influence and struggled to build computers that captured anyone’s imagination. Reviewing the PS/2 L40 SX, a 1991 IBM laptop, PC Magazine’s Mitt Jones wrote that it “fares somewhat poorly overall when compared with the best of its competition”—a take that pretty much summarized the company’s overall situation in the PC business.

As IBM hatched plans for the ThinkPad, it aspired to build a laptop that showed off the company’s technological prowess and looked good while doing it. It was a global effort: Many of the technologies inside sprung from IBM labs in the U.S., but the ThinkPad was engineered at the company’s lab in Yamato, Japan, and its industrial design was by Richard Sapper, a German who worked out of a studio in Milan.

Laptop computers had been around since the 1980s, but still felt like a product category that was in the process of finding itself–especially since Microsoft’s Windows, which didn’t catch on until the early 1990s, cried out for new features such as color screens and built-in pointing devices. “The notebook computer itself was a kind of unknown area,” says Arimasa Naitoh, who supervised the 700C’s engineering in Yamato and has never stopped creating new ThinkPad models. “We had a great business opportunity, but nobody was 100% confident.” (Naitoh tells the story of his 25-year association with the ThinkPad line in a new book, How the ThinkPad Changed the World–and is Shaping the Future.)

At the time, the PC market was being transformed by upstarts such as Dell and Gateway 2000, which commoditized PC-building by assembled other companies’ parts without adding much in the way of technical innovation of their own. IBM, by contrast, was still a vertically integrated manufacturer, a fact that the new machine showed off in multiple ways. The ThinkPad 700C didn’t just use an Intel 486 processor–it used an extra-powerful version that IBM customized and produced in its own factory, a decision that no other PC company could or would make. Thanks to a joint venture between IBM and Toshiba, it was also one of the earliest notebook computers with an active-matrix thin-film transistor (TFT) display, the first technology to provide really good color in portable form. Everyone was also dazzled by the screen’s size: At 10.4 inches, it was impressively large by 1992 standards. Only later, would that come to be considered on the dinky side.

IBM even manufactured the ThinkPad’s hard disk, which you could pop out from a hatch in the front of the notebook. That location was intended to let you swap in a disk on an airplane without elbowing your seatmate.

Then there was the TrackPoint II–the tiny eraserhead-like mouse substitute which sat nestled between the G, H, and B keys. Devised by IBM engineers at a lab in Yorktown, New York and originally intended for use in desktop keyboards, it debuted on the ThinkPad 700c, offering precise pointing that didn’t require you to remove your hands from the keyboard. It was a significant improvement on the unwieldy, poorly placed trackballs that were typical fare on other laptops of the day. Like the front-mounted drive bay, it was designed with the tight quarters of airplanes in mind: “We knew the mouse was the best device for pointing, but you could not use a mouse in the air,” says Naitoh.

The ThinkPad design aesthetic has been so familiar for so long that it’s easy to lose track of the fact that it was originally a departure from the norm, not just for IBM but the entire PC industry. Sapper, who died in 2015, alternately said that he was inspired by a bento box or a cigar box. In either case, the 700C’s look was indeed unapologetically boxy, with squared-off angles and a lack of ornamentation. The color Sapper chose—a raven black–also helped the ThinkPad look elegantly purposeful, in an era when most big-name portable computers were beige, white, or various shades of gray, and didn’t seem to be aiming for any particular effect at all.

Sapper even made the TrackPoint II part of the branding exercise by coloring it bright red, accenting the black case in a way that made a ThinkPad immediately recognizable. But that design flourish nearly didn’t happen: A stodgy higher-up in IBM design informed Sapper that red was reserved for emergency off switches on IBM mainframe computers.

“Richard, being kind of a creative guy in more ways than one, suggested to the IBM design man at the time that they should just change the name of the color from red to magenta,” remembers Hill. The “IBM Magenta” TrackPoint pasted muster, and became iconic.

As for the name “ThinkPad,” IBM borrowed it from a tablet device it had introduced the previous April, as part of a short-lived early 1990s tablet boom. The name cleverly referenced “Think,” an IBM exhortation to itself and the world introduced by company founder Thomas J. Watson in 1914.

Applying the “Pad” part of the name to a conventional clamshell notebook, however, was considered a questionable move by some pundits. “It would be really bad if they were going to keep pure keyboard notebooks in the line, because pad means pen,” an analyst helpfully explained to InfoWorld. Rather than bugging actual customers, however, the ThinkPad name successfully conveyed that the notebook was something new for IBM, a company whose historic computer-branding efforts tended to result in names like “IBM PS/2 Note N33 SX.”

At launch, the ThinkPad 700C listed for $4,350, or around $7,00 in today’s dollars That may sound like an imposing price tag–in 2017, you can get a ThinkPad Carbon X1 decked out with every available accessory for about $2,200–but top-of-the-line notebooks cost big money at the time, especially if they had color displays. For instance, the PC Magazine issue with the ThinkPad review also evaluated a Toshiba notebook with a list price of $6,098, or more than $10,000 in 2017 dollars.

Besides, the ThinkPad soon became enough of a status symbol that the very fact it was a ThinkPad helped it command a price premium over garden-variety rivals. Today, says software-industry editor and Network World blogger Fredric Paul, “you go into a coffee shop full of wannabe entrepreneurs and everyone has a silver MacBook. The ThinkPad was like that in the corporate world for a while.” (I was moved to ask Paul for his opinion of the ThinkPad’s importance because back when the original model was new, I was an editor for an InfoWorld supplement called InfoWorld Direct and he reviewed it for us–and deemed it to have “just about everything you could want in a notebook.”)

Sapper’s design certainly helped sell ThinkPads, but the line also gained a reputation for substance, from the reliability of the hardware to the quality of IBM’s tech support. “They did a better job of not just coolness, but construction and solidity and support than a lot of their competitors did,” says Paul.

No Change For Change’s Sake

As successful as the first ThinkPad and its immediate successors were, it wasn’t preordained that their general look and feel would persist. In fact, when Hill was named to oversee ThinkPad design in 1995, the line’s general manager informed him that it was time to mix things up. “He felt like three years was enough, and we needed a new design,” Hill remembers. “I honestly couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Well, of all the problems we have, this isn’t one of them.’ So, I worked pretty diligently to explain to him, that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Hill won that argument–apparently on a permanent basis. But from the start, IBM hadn’t let the ThinkPad line’s predictable personality get in the way of experimenting with new ideas. In 1993, a year after the arrival of the 700C, for instance, the company teamed up with Canon to release a ThinkPad for the Japanese market with a built-in inkjet printer. (Your printout emerged from underneath the keyboard.)

Two years after that, IBM released the ThinkPad 701c, more fondly known by its code-name of “Butterfly.” An example of the pint-sized laptop known at the time as a “subnotebook,” it sported a two-piece keyboard that slid open to extend beyond the case’s edges as you flipped up the screen, providing extra width for comfier typing. (Naitoh’s book discusses the fascinating factoid that an IBM exec named Tim Cook—yes, the same one who is now Apple’s CEO—helped instigate the Butterfly project, a tidbit that Naitoh credits to his American co-author, William J. Holstein.) A sensation at the time, the Butterfly design wasn’t destined to live forever: Displays got larger even on super-portable computers, allowing for roomier keyboards without any technical wizardry.

Some of the more exotic ThinkPads have been downright odd. 2001’s ThinkPad TransNote incorporated a folio a built-in notepad that that let you write on paper and have your jottings automatically converted into digital ink. And in 2009, Lenovo’s ThinkPad W700ds made multi-monitor setups portable by letting you fold out a secondary display. Both models came and went quickly. But they too are evidence of the surprising flexibility of Sapper’s 1992 design vision. And the ThinkPad line has also been early to adopt numerous technologies that did end up having staying power, including CD-ROM and DVD-ROM, Wi-Fi, fingerprint scanners, and OLED displays.

Enter Lenovo

The ThinkPad was good for IBM’s reputation, but the bottom line was another question. Between 2001 and mid-2004, the company lost nearly a billion dollars on its PC business, which looked more and more vestigial as IBM refocused its energies around high-end services for large clients rather than mass-produced products. When it announced that it was selling the operation to Lenovo for $1.75 billion in December 2004, executives told the New York Times’ Steve Lohr that the deal was the result of talks that had gone on for years.

Given that one of the things ThinkPad enthusiasts prized about the line was its lack of surprises, there was understandable wariness about it being handed off to a Chinese company largely unknown outside its home market. Lenovo understood that and responded in part by trusting the decision-makers who had made ThinkPads popular in the first place. “The second we moved to Lenovo, the first thing we needed to do was convince people that it was the same people, the same team,” says Peter Hortensius, who first contributed to the ThinkPad as an IBM engineer and ended up managing the business at both IBM and Lenovo. “It was going to be just the same or better.”

A 2010 photo taken at Lenovo’s Yamato lab, the home of ThinkPad engineering from the beginning. [Photo: courtesy Lenovo]
As of this year, the ThinkPad has been a Lenovo brand longer than it belonged to IBM, and the vast majority of the 100-million-plus ThinkPads sold to date have been Lenovo’s. But the behind-the-scenes continuity is remarkable. Between them, Naitoh, Hill, and Hortensius have 100-plus years of combined experience at IBM and Lenovo. (Hortensius shifted to Lenovo’s data-center group in 2016; Hill stepped down as ThinkPad design chief in June of this year but still contributes as a consultant.) The Yamato lab working on ThinkPad engineering, still led by Naitoh, currently has more than 400 employees, 44 percent of whom are former IBMers who were part of the ThinkPad team when Lenovo took over almost 13 years ago.

Letting ThinkPad be ThinkPad turned out to be a smart move on Lenovo’s part. Along with IBM’s PC business, the company had acquired the right to use the IBM name on PCs for five years. But it grew confident enough in the strength of its own brand–which was greatly boosted by its association with the ThinkPad–that it phased out IBM branding less than three years after completing the acquisition. More recently, it’s also begun more ambitious cross-pollination of the work of its Chinese engineers with Naitoh’s team in Yamato, resulting in models such as the X1 Yoga, which is part laptop and part tablet, yet still recognizably ThinkPad-esque.

Now, it’s not a given that the ThinkPad’s consistency over a quarter century is something to be cherished. In 2015, my colleague Mark Wilson called the ThinkPad’s design “overrated,” arguing that the persistence of elements such as the TrackPoint might have more to do with Lenovo being intimidated by change-adverse fans than anything. ThinkPads have long included both a TrackPoint and a trackpad, a belt-and-suspenders sort of approach that you can regard as either overkill or an admirable commitment to user choice. Over the years, as I’ve met with Lenovo employees and heard them stress what a weighty matter it is to tweak the angles of a ThinkPad case even slightly, I’ve wondered about that conservatism myself.

Hortensius, however, says that what keeps ThinkPads relevant is trusty productivity rather than any specific aspect of a given model. “When I talk to customers and individuals, it’s not that it has the best keyboard and the best this and the best that,” he says. “It’s because I can count on it that those things matter.”

Even more than customers, those who have masterminded the line over the years care about its overarching focus on making new technologies useful and dependable than they do individual features and models. Hortensius calls ThinkPad “not so much an object as a belief system.”

Asked to name his favorite ThinkPad, former design chief Hill rattles off a bunch of them: the original 700C, the Butterfly, the X300 (the first all-Lenovo version), and today’s X1 Carbon. Naitoh politely declines to play favorites at all on the grounds that it would be rude to his colleagues. “If I say I like the A model, the team that made the B model will be disappointed,” he says. And then, after a pause: “The greatest ThinkPad is the latest ThinkPad.”

As of today, the latest ThinkPad happens to be a just-announced model called the ThinkPad Anniversary Edition 25. Championed by Hill–and teased for years–it uses modern components but pays tribute to Sapper’s original design. ThinkPad obsessives may notice intentionally retro elements such as more status LEDs than are typical for modern laptops, a logo that evokes the color scheme of the “IBM” on the 700C’s case, and a keyboard reminiscent of the one that won praise in 1992.

Mostly, though, this 25th-anniversary ThinkPad doesn’t look like a nostalgic throwback–it just looks like a ThinkPad. That in itself is a statement about the line’s enduringly unique place in PC history.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90145427...-a-design-icon





California Strikes Deal with FCC to Delay State Net Neutrality Law

The California law deemed the “gold standard” for net neutrality rules
Makena Kelly

California has agreed to delay the enforcement of its “gold standard” net neutrality bill, according to a statement from the law’s sponsor Sen. Scott Wiener. The net neutrality rules were set to go into effect next year, but California officials have agreed to wait until the courts have resolved any pending litigation over the Federal Communications Commission’s roll back of the federal rules late last year.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai cast the delay as a victory for the Commission. “This substantial concession reflects the strength of the case made by the United States earlier this month,” Pai said. “It also demonstrates, contrary to the claims of the law’s supporters, that there is no urgent problem that these regulations are needed to address.”

California Senator Scott Wiener, who had championed the bill, described the decision in different terms. “Of course, I very much want to see California’s net neutrality law go into effect immediately, in order to protect access to the internet,” Wiener said in a press release today. “Yet, I also understand and support the Attorney General’s rationale for allowing the DC Circuit appeal to be resolved before we move forward to defend our net neutrality law in court. After the DC Circuit appeal is resolved, the litigation relating to California’s net neutrality law will then move forward.”

“I look forward to successful litigation on this issue and to the restoration of strong net neutrality protections in our state,” Wiener said.

The FCC’s December rule, which rolled back the 2015 Open Internet Order last December, also included a preemption clause that forbid any states from passing their own net neutrality bills into law. However, many experts believe that clause to be unenforceable, which would allow for state-level neutrality measures like the one adopted by California. A court had previously ruled that the FCC’s preemption language had no authority over state’s rights to implement their own legislation.

“I am confident that the FCC’s authority to preempt such state laws will be upheld, along with our proven market-based framework for protecting Internet openness, investment, and innovation nationwide,” Pai said in his statement.

To some experts, this delay was expected. According to Harold Feld at Public Knowledge, the FCC’s net neutrality order can only be challenged in the D.C. circuit. The pending litigation on the California law, if challenged, would have to be brought to the state’s district court, violating the Hobbs Act. Therefore, waiting for a decision on the federal rule is both parties’s safest bet.

“Ultimately it doesn’t matter how much trash talk you have before the game. Let’s see what happens in the DC circuit,” Feld said.

The new net neutrality rules in California were set to go into effect on January 1st.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/26/...i-scott-wiener





R.I.P. FilmStruck, the Best Streaming Service for Classic Films
Anthony Ha

Sad news for movie fans: FilmStruck, the streaming service developed by Turner Classic Movies, is shutting down.

A message on the FilmStruck website says it’s no longer accepting new subscribers, with plans to shut down on November 29. Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter suggests that this was an expected move — now that it’s part of AT&T, WarnerMedia (which owns Turner) is planning to a launch a comprehensive streaming service next year.

“While FilmStruck has a very loyal fanbase, it remains largely a niche service,” WarnerMedia said in a statement. “We plan to take key learnings from FilmStruck to help shape future business decisions in the direct-to-consumer space and redirect this investment back into our collective portfolios.”

In addition to classic Hollywood films, FilmStruck was also known for being the online home of the Criterion Collection, with its library of restored art-house and international films.

“Like many of you, we are disappointed by this decision,” Criterion says in a blog post. However, Criterion has worked with Hulu in the past, so it seems like it could find another digital partner.

And indeed, the post says Criterion is “still committed to restoring and preserving the best of world cinema and bringing it to you in any medium we can,” and it continues, “We’ll be trying to find ways we can bring our library and original content back to the digital space as soon as possible.”

So it’s possible that much of this content will eventually find its way back online. Still, the transition from DVDs to digital, and now to subscription streaming, has made many classic film titles unavailable. FilmStruck was one of the few streaming services to fight that trend.

It will be missed.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/26/r-i-p-filmstruck/





In Search of the Last Great Video Store
Kate Hagen

A few months back, I had a very specific movie craving — I wanted to watch FRESH HORSES, a 1988 romantic drama most notable for reteaming Molly Ringwald and Andrew McCarthy after PRETTY IN PINK. It was a grey, chilly day in LA, and I was feeling nostalgic for spring in my hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio — FRESH HORSES was shot there. I was hoping I could capture some of the misty, late March vibes the movie evokes so well, and in doing so, take a cinematic field trip back home for a few hours.

So, I did what I usually do when looking for a movie in the year 2018: googled “FRESH HORSES streaming.” No results, not even for rental. So, I moved on to less legal methods, beginning with YouTube. After that failed, I pulled a maneuver I’ve been using for a decade: googling multiple variations of “watch FRESH HORSES online.” Even then, the best version of the movie I could find was a Polish dub.

FRESH HORSES isn’t a great movie, but that’s besides the point. Ben Stiller and Viggo Mortensen star alongside Ringwald and McCarthy, and the movie is only thirty years old — it should be available online with a few clicks. I definitely would’ve paid a few bucks to rent it via Amazon or Vudu, but those options weren’t available to me.

Why was it so difficult to stream or rent a thirty-year old movie with four major stars?

I remembered the last time I’d watched FRESH HORSES: I’d rented it from my local Blockbuster in Sharonville, Ohio as a teenager. Had there still been a Blockbuster (or any other video store) in my neighborhood, I would’ve jumped in the car, rented the movie, and been home in an hour. Instead, I had to settle for buying FRESH HORSES in a six-movie collection off of Amazon, which would come three days later.

But by then, the amorphous melancholy that inspired me to watch the movie in the first place had passed. Because I couldn’t access FRESH HORSES, I felt like I couldn’t fully process the restless nostalgia that spring always brings for me.

We all have our own FRESH HORSES: movies that transport us back to a specific location, time, and mood that only exists otherwise in the haziness of our own memories. When we can’t access these kinds of movies, it feels as if an essential pathway that connects us to our pasts — and our past selves — is lost too.

I think about the problems of how we watch movies now and “dead media” every day — and I have a house full of vinyl, VHS tapes, and Nintendo 64 games to prove it. I’ve been blessed (and cursed) by the collector gene — part of my drive to collect stems from an aesthetic appreciation, but there’s another more practical reason for my collecting too.

Whether it’s a twenty-five year old cassette of a WOXY radio broadcast or a permanently out-of-print Stephen King collection, I hold onto these physical objects because I know one day they just won’t be available elsewhere. Given the extremely fickle nature of online availability, I’m the rare person who’s doubled-down on physical media in the last few years: I sleep better at night knowing that my out-of-print DVD of GAS FOOD LODGING is tucked away on a shelf.

I’ve skipped out on a number of disc releases for films like POSSESSION (1981) and LADIES AND GENTLEMEN THE FABULOUS STAINS in the last few years, and those editions now go for around fifty bucks each. Sure, I can rent STAINS or buy it for the cloud, but who can say how long those options will remain available to me? And POSSESSION isn’t currently available anywhere to stream or buy online — it can be rented from MUBI, but for how long?

We all like to assume that the movies and television shows we love will be available with a click whenever we want them — one can now buy an Amazon button for Doritos, after all — but the stability of what media is available online (and how long it stays there) is quite tenuous. “You are not in control of what you have access to — you are picking from a small library that’s always rotating,” says Maggie Mackay, Board Chair and Executive Director of Vidiots.

Streaming Killed the (Chain) Video Store

“Once a video store owns a title, they have it for years, regardless of if it goes out of print or if the film’s rights holder goes out of business or sells their catalogue to another studio or service.” — Eric Allen Hatch

At the company’s peak in 2004, there were 9,000 Blockbusters operating in North America — today, only three remain open in Alaska. When Movie Gallery began to see a slump in sales in 2007, they were operating more than 4,500 locations in North America (including Hollywood Video, which they acquired in 2005 after an attempt at a hostile takeover from Blockbuster.) Movie Gallery filed for bankruptcy in 2010 — like Blockbuster, only three independently franchised locations remain open in Arkansas.

Rentrak estimates that 19,000 video stores were open across America during the industry’s peak. In December 2017, 24/7 Wall St. reported that 86% of the 15,300 video stores that were open in 2007 had closed, and the industry had lost more than 89% of its workforce, making video tape and disc rental the “top dying industry” in America.

Global chains like Rogers Plus, Video Ezy ,and Xtra-vision have folded as well, though Video Ezy still operates rental kiosks like Redbox. Only a few international chains — Le SuperClub Videotron in Canada, Culture Convenience Club in Japan, Civic Video in New Zealand and Australia — remain open.

Over five billion rentals have come through 40,000 Redbox kiosks since the company’s launch in 2002 — they now control 51% of the physical rental market in the US. But even the biggest Redbox machine only holds around 600 discs, covering up to 200 titles — no match for even a tiny video store.

The Myth of An Endless Streaming Catalogue

“If you limit the ways people can access art, there will be whole generations that won’t fall in love with this art form — they’ll fall in love with other things.”— Maggie Mackay

Since 2010, the total number of feature films available to stream on Netflix has dropped from 6,755 to 3,686 as of writing this — a loss of more than three thousand titles. There are far more television shows available on Netflix than in 2010 — up from 530 to 1,122 — but that doesn’t make up for the massive decline in streamable films.

And, as BGR notes, “Not only is Netflix primarily focused on generating original TV content, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos a few years ago said that 66% of all Netflix subscribers don’t even watch movies.”

In 2018, over 375 million people subscribe to Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. Streaming has become the dominant way in which most of us consume media, but little consideration has been given to what we’ve lost in saying goodbye to the tactile, human experience of visiting a video store.

“The technology only becomes problematic when it eradicates other forms of access. When you have a new technology and you rush to dump everything that came before it, you are literally dumping titles, you’re dumping artwork, you’re dumping full catalogues of work,” says Mackay. “Most of us fell in love with this art form when we were relatively young, and it was because we had access to it," she continues.

The volatile nature of streaming catalogues becomes apparent when trying to look into hard numbers on just how many titles are available. One has to use third-party sites like JustWatch to find out how many movies are currently available on major platforms (as well as other data, like release year, genre, and a search function that covers all major streaming services) rather than the platforms directly offering those numbers up.

Netflix’s current streaming catalogue of 3,686 films seems paltry when compared to even the most average Blockbuster, which stocked in the neighborhood of 10,000 titles. Amazon Prime’s streaming library is three times the size of Netflix’s, with 14,214 films now streaming — Amazon also offers an additional 20,265 titles via their rental service for an additional fee. Hulu has less than half as many movies as Netflix with 1,448 titles now streaming. On HBO NOW, that number falls to only 727 films.

When comparing these numbers to the libraries of three essential video stores — Los Angeles’ own Vidiots and Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee and Scarecrow Video in Seattle — the lack of what’s available on streaming falls into sharp relief. Vidiots boasts a collection of over 50,000 titles; Eddie Brandt’s carries over a hundred thousand videos, 80,000 of them on VHS.

In Seattle, Scarecrow’s video collection of over 131,000 is the largest in the world — they carry more than twice as many titles as the 57,351 movies and television shows currently available on the 44 streaming and rental platforms that JustWatch tracks.

With such a deep catalogue, it’s no surprise that Scarecrow’s library contains some exceptionally rare titles. The Daily Mail reports that “Scarecrow boasts 4,967 titles on their Rental By Approval (RBA) list…that can be checked out with an extra deposit. Of their top 100 rarest titles, which they are cross-checking against esteemed institutions including the Library of Congress, UCLA’s Film and Television Archive and the WorldCat database among others, 88 are not held by the Library of Congress and 44 are not accessible to the public anywhere but at Scarecrow.”

No streaming service has been able to match the breadth and depth of a decades-old video store — at least not yet. Netflix’s disc rental service included 93,000 titles as of 2015 — a comparable library to somewhere like Eddie Brandt’s. But, disc rental isn’t a priority for Netflix: in 2016, they spent almost $1 billion promoting their streaming platform, but the physical rental service “doesn’t even have a marketing budget,” reports AP News.

And, even with 125 million streaming subscribers, Netflix still relies on physical media more than one might assume. AP News notes that Netflix makes “an operating profit of roughly 50 percent on DVD subscriptions, after covering the expense of buying discs and postage to and from its distribution centers…DVD profits have helped subsidize Netflix’s streaming expansion outside the U.S., a push that has accumulated losses of nearly $1.5 billion during the past five years [2011–2016.] The DVD service has made $1.9 billion during the same period, enabling Netflix to remain profitable.”

Besides Netflix’s physical DVD and Blu Ray service, the best, more accessible option for physical media rental for most is one of the 40,000 Redbox kiosks currently operating in America. While Redbox does carry many new release titles long before they reach streaming, when I looked up the Redbox closest to me in Hollywood, I found that only 168 titles were available in the machine, most of them from the last three years —not exactly an extensive selection, nor one that appeals to viewers interested in film history beyond the last decade.

(Note: we reached out to representatives for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu for comment on their current streaming catalogues. Netflix and Hulu did not respond; Amazon Prime declined to answer our questions.)

The dearth of classic films and focus on new content becomes more apparent when taking a closer look at what’s available by decade on each of the major streaming services. According to JustWatch, two titles made before 1930 are now streaming on Netflix — they offer only 15 films made before 1950, 26 made before 1970, and 98 made before 1990. By streaming fewer than one hundred films to cover the medium’s first one hundred years, Netflix is doing an egregious disservice to film’s first century.

With four times as many titles as Netflix overall, it’s not surprising that Amazon Prime offers far more classic titles as well — 77 films on the platform were made before 1930; 661 before 1950; 1,292 before 1970; and 3,048 before 1990. But Amazon is the exception among streaming platforms—Hulu offers 115 films made by 1990 or earlier, and on HBO NOW, there are only 55 films that meet that same criteria.

There’s simply no question that new and exclusive content is the priority for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu. 3,155 of the 3,686 films now available to stream on Netflix are from the last ten years — 85% of their entire catalogue. On Hulu, 75% of all movies are from the last ten years too. And while Amazon Prime certainly bests all other major platforms when it comes to “old movies”, 59% of their currently streaming films are from the last ten years as well.

But, one streaming platform is prioritizing classic catalogue titles: FilmStruck, which launched in late 2016. FilmStruck self-describes as featuring “iconic films of all kinds from Hollywood classics to independent, foreign and cult cinema. As the exclusive streaming home of TCM Select and the Criterion Collection, FilmStruck is the world’s largest classic film vault.”

FilmStruck partnered with Warner Bros. to (eventually) bring films like CASABLANCA, CITIZEN KANE, SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, and WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? to a streaming platform for the first very time. Including Criterion Collection titles (which are available for a small additional monthly fee) FilmStruck’s catalogue is still growing with 1,975 titles available. But more than 86% of their library is from 1990 or earlier, providing film fans with exclusive access to essential titles that are being overlooked and de-prioritized by other streaming services.

(Note: The Black List is an official partner of FilmStruck.)

The idea that beloved, superlative films like CASABLANCA and CITIZEN KANE can only be accessed with a subscription to an arthouse/classic focused streaming service is quite frankly insane. THE GODFATHER trilogy is now available on Netflix, but that’s only been the case since January of 2018. Even something as ubiquitous as STAR WARS is only available in its first, unedited iteration as a VHS box set from 1995 — and the original trilogy isn’t currently streaming anywhere.

And of course, most major streaming platforms are deep into the original content game. Netflix has released 25 original films and added 7.4 million new subscribers thus far in 2018 — that’s as many releases as the six major studios combined. They plan to release 80 films by the end of the year. The focus on new content creation over the preservation of and access to catalogue titles for most streaming services is quite clear.

“How does anyone new get curious to watch a Fassbinder or Claire Denis film if they never encounter one during their Netflix scroll?” asks Eric Allen Hatch, a film festival programmer and consultant who’s also one of the founding members of the Baltimore Video Collective.

While the focus on new content is an easy scapegoat for what’s keeping many classic films off of streaming platforms, it’s also important to keep factors related to rights and distribution in mind.

To get a better sense of what keeps films off streaming services (or disc formats) I spoke to film historian Marc Edward Heuck, best known as the Movie Geek on BEAT THE GEEKS. Marc posts fascinating threads on Twitter about film licensing, distribution, and rights situations. Here, he explains the complex circumstances that can keep films stuck in limbo —

There will never be as many titles on DVD as there were on VHS, there will never be as many titles on Blu as there were on DVD, and so forth…newer generations with shallower memories determine what gets out, the cost of upgrading and remastering old stuff versus the projected size of the audience and likely sales rarely ratio well — history forgets a dying king.

The biggest hurdle affecting deep catalogue home video releases, going all the way back to the dawn of the format, has been music rights, since from EASY RIDER onward, when pop song recordings became common on film soundtracks. Contracts only covered theatrical and TV, and even after they started accounting for home video, they didn’t factor the invention of DVD. Some of the earliest home video releases are the rarest now because they were put out before the lawyers realized you needed to make a new deal for the new media.

Now that there are only three major labels, with the downturn of physical media and the slivers of pennies that come from streaming, they and the artists they control get significant money from licensing to TV, film, and commercials, so their incentive is to take the studios for all they’ve got, feeling they have them over a barrel, since many times the songs are often so embedded in the films, they can’t be replaced, or directors won’t approve of the change. But in turn, studios are loath to pay the inflated music fees because they feel the cost spent in clearing the songs will not be recouped by whatever sales a title may have, and it’s cheaper just to do nothing.

The second biggest problem keeping movies off of physical media is ancient, expired intellectual property rights, usually involving books or plays that were originally only cleared for so many years because back then, nobody thought about repertory demand years after the fact. Warner Bros. has had a big problem with this in particular, a lot of Golden Age classics that they own — BEYOND THE FOREST, LETTY LYNTON, CEILING ZERO — can’t be cleared for video because the estates of the authors of those original source materials can’t come to terms about relicensing the story rights. This is what held up NIGHTMARE ALLEY for years, and likely also what has kept one of the greatest comedies of all time, Olsen & Johnson’s HELLZAPOPPIN’, in limbo.

Since the rise of “secondary studios” from the ’70s onward, lots of movies that went out through the majors are now reverting to other companies that are only interested in them as properties to be developed rather than preserved. Bristol-Myers-Squibb owns the original THE HEARTBREAK KID, THE STEPFORD WIVES, and SLEUTH, and they’ve done nothing with them since the early noughts Anchor Bay releases, aside from sell remake rights. We’re beginning to see that on a larger scale with Morgan Creek, Regency, Revolution, and others — the old deals are expiring, what new deals are being made are just cherry-picking the hits and leaving the deep cuts behind.


Heuck has put together a list of titles stuck in rights hell due to music-licensing issues which includes films from directors like Spike Lee, Jonathan Demme, Michael Mann, and Robert Altman. It becomes impossible to watch the complete filmographies of these fundamental filmmakers when certain titles aren’t available — an issue for audiences, archivists, and historians alike.

When presented with the option of easy to stream titles or movies one has to work harder to find, it’s easy to guess which choice the majority of audience members will make, greatly narrowing the cinematic landscape in the process. Aside from classifying films by genre and recommending similar titles to what you’ve already watched, there’s very little curation on most streaming services, though it should be noted that FilmStruck, MUBI, and Fandor do have consistent curatorial visions.

“Streaming platforms ostensibly offer as wide a selection as a video store, but they are most successful as businesses when they keep selling you more of the same thing you first bought, the ‘If You Liked This…’ Unless you yourself do the genre leaping, the site will clog your front page with nothing but more suggestions for the same stuff, mixed with whatever homegrown material they want to push,” says Heuck.

Exploring the much-lauded recommendations algorithm is key to understanding how Netflix prioritizes content. In August 2017, Netflix’s vice president of product innovation, Todd Yellin, told Wired to think of the algorithm like a three-legged stool: “The three legs of this stool would be Netflix members; taggers who understand everything about the content; and our machine learning algorithms that take all of the data and put things together.”

Along with studying user behavior, Wired reports that Netflix also employs “dozens of in-house and freelance staff who watch every minute or every show on Netflix and tag it.” When coupled with sophisticated machine-learning algorithms, this allows Netflix to develop “taste communities.”

According to Wired, these taste communities “affect what recommendations pop up to the top of your onscreen interface, which genre rows are displayed, and how each row is ordered for each individual viewer. The tags that are used for the machine learning algorithms are the same across the globe. However, a smaller sub-set of tags are used in a more outward-facing way, feeding directly into the user interface and differing depending on country, language and cultural context.”

In 2016, Neil Hunt, Netflix’s chief product officer, explained how instrumental those top rows of recommendations are to users, telling Business Insider that “the user either finds something of interest [within the first 60 or 90 seconds] or the risk of the user abandoning our service increases substantially.”

And as of January 2018, Netflix had implemented a new strategy for recommending content: tailoring thumbnails attached to each piece of work to best match the user’s history on the site. “Artwork was not only the biggest influencer to a member’s decision to watch content, but it also constituted over 82% of their focus while browsing Netflix. We also saw that users spent an average of 1.8 seconds considering each title they were presented with while on Netflix,” said Nick Nelson, Netflix’s Global Manager of Creative Services.

Netflix’s current focus on providing the best “box art” to users feels like a silent acknowledgement of the video store era — where the right gory VHS cover could entice viewers to check out even the schlockiest of of schlock. Even with a high-powered recommendations algorithm fueled by data from millions of users, Netflix still understands that the first visual contact an audience has with a movie is essential to their selection process overall.

But even the most carefully selected thumbnail can’t compete with the tactile experience of holding a film in your hand. “Shopping in a great video store encourages discovery and deep engagement with an art form, leaving one fulfilled…trying to find something to watch on a streaming service usually requires compromise, leaving one feeling like they wasted their time,” says Hatch. “Many people are visual and spatial learners like me, and are more likely to make unexpected discoveries in a physical browsing atmosphere or in a conversation with a video-store clerk than they are on the internet,” he continues.

And while the proprietary recommendations algorithm has been a major feather in Netflix’s cap for over a decade, in 2016, Chris Jaffe, Netflix’s vice president of product innovation, told Business Insider, “We don’t really care if you watch JESSICA JONES or MARCO POLO, we just want you to watch.”

Data on recommendation algorithms for other services like Amazon Prime Video and Hulu isn’t widely available, so Netflix provides the most valuable study of just how streaming services display content best-suited to the user-experience. Netflix is throwing a lot of weight behind its recommendations algorithm (and their improvements to it) and the system does work well — so long as you’re only interested in content made in the last decade.

Plug “1950s movies” into Netflix’s search, and Netflix originals like THE CROWN and 13 REASONS WHY come back alongside movies like BRIDGET JONES’ BABY and SPOTLIGHT—all of these titles are less than ten years old, and two of them are Netflix originals.

To even access the three movies Netflix is currently streaming from the 1950s — you know, the thing you actually searched for — you have to click through to a second subcategory to get all three of those titles (WHITE CHRISTMAS, THE AFRICAN QUEEN, and UJALA) to appear together, separated from all other non-1950s movies.

When searching for a genre like Romantic Epic — one that falls outside what’s currently hot in Hollywood ,but is still totally legit — the results are even more disappointing, with only five titles coming back, two of them Netflix originals.

If you search “Classic Musicals” on Netflix, EVIL GENIUS, a true crime Netflix original docuseries, appears in the first row of recommendations — hardly the Astaire and Rogers fare one might imagine.

It is of course Netflix’s prerogative to promote their own content alongside catalogue titles, but it’s tough to not feel like you’re being duped as a user when Netflix originals are prioritized over the content you were actually searching for.

As the siren song of easily accessible technology grows harder to resist, we have to take a step back to consider how we’ve destroyed video store culture — a vital, early access pathway to the larger world of film for many folks, especially in more rural parts of the world — in the process.

“Video stores meant everything to me. Video Americain wasn’t just a job to me, it was also my film school, and social hub,” says Hatch. Hatch was the manager at Video Americian, a beloved Baltimore video store from 1998–2004. Video Americain closed in 2014 after 25 years in business.

“When you watch little kids walk around a library or video store, it’s very different than watching them scroll, they’re engaged and excited, talking and asking questions, and sharing their opinions — they have agency,” said Mackay.

How will we create new movie lovers when we’ve taken away one of the easiest entry points to learning about and loving film? When so few classic films are available to stream? When no one offers them a guide of how to understand cinema’s history? How do we assure that most films, even something like FRESH HORSES, are available to anyone who wants to watch them? What happens to Hollywood history when films aren’t being protected, preserved, and well-presented as we jump to each new technological platform?

These questions keep me up at night, and keep me worried about what the future of home-viewing (and the next generation of film fans) looks like.

So for me, there’s only one solution: we have to go in search of the last great video store.

The Last Five Great Video Stores in Los Angeles

Cinefile Video

My journey to find the last great video store began at Cinefile Video in West Los Angeles. Even in LA, finding video stores in 2018 is harder than one might imagine — a number of stores like Video West and the last remaining Blockbusters have closed in the six years since I moved here, and information on what’s still open and functional isn’t always the best. But I’d visited Cinefile before, and was eager to check it out again.

In terms of curation, Cinefile can’t be beat. They have the most interesting director’s section I’ve ever seen — filmmakers like Martha Coolidge, Alan Rudolph, Bill Gunn, Ida Lupino, and Ed Wood are given an equal spotlight within. By presenting viewers with a director’s entire oeuvre, Cinefile makes it easy for renters to find their own personal entry point into a particular filmography. And Cinefile’s uniquely curated sections — Nunsplotation, Holiday Horror, Private Dicks, Southern Discomfort, and Cannibals were just a few of offerings the day I was there — help customers explore even the most niche genres.

Cinefile also highlights subgenres like made-for-TV movies, filmed plays, and musical documentaries that would get overlooked by lesser video stores. This is also precisely the kind of material that never makes it to streaming — Cinefile’s dedication to showcasing this work is not only exciting from a customer’s point of view, but essential from a preservationist’s.

I was the only person in Cinefile the Thursday I visited them, and it was tough not to get a little disheartened by the lack of traffic in the store. But, when I visited a few months later, after 11PM on a Friday night, the store was bustling with activity, patrons eager to check out titles before a long weekend. Cinefile showcases some fantastic memorabilia within the store too — velvet paintings, tchotchkes, and rare promo images line the walls, adding to the ambiance of a visit.

For buyers, a hearty stock of DVDs were on sale for 50% off, and VHS tapes were selling for a quarter. Cinefile’s signature auteur-directors-as-metal-bands shirts were also well-stocked alongside tote bags featuring filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Jim Jarmusch. Cinefile is an excellent option for film fans on LA’s west side — yearly, monthly, and pay-as-you go memberships are available to best suit your personal rental needs.

Cinefile Video, 11280 Santa Monica Blvd., Los Angeles, CA, 90025. Sunday-Thursday, 11AM-11PM, Friday-Saturday, 11AM-12AM. $5 pay as you go rentals; $30 monthly membership for four rentals at a time; $330 yearly membership — all memberships come with perks like 10% off American Cinematheque memberships.

Vidéothèque

For my second visit, I headed east to Vidéothèque. Immediately, I was struck by how vital Vidéothèque felt among a strip of other small businesses — it’s clearly a community hub for South Pasadena. Like Cinefile, Vidéothèque is all about exquisite curation: the impeccable but not at all sterile store makes browsing new releases and pre-code films feel equally essential.

Vidéothèque impressed me with their extensive sections for international TV and harder-to-find American shows (like THE WONDER YEARS with the original music intact) as well as a massive music doc section that emphasized rare girl punk bootlegs, Mingus performances, and classical concerts with the same level of enthusiasm.

With some groovy shoegaze playing while I browsed, I hung out while a dozen or so customers came through the store on a Sunday afternoon. A father extolled the virtues of Ray Harryhausen to his middle-school son (who just wanted to rent SHIN GODZILLA again) while I perused Vidéothèque’s excellent avant-garde and experimental section. Documentaries were sorted by director and by subject — especially helpful for those seeking materials for research purposes.

Vidéothèque’s focus on international titles is quite impressive — thirty-year old VHS tapes were stacked alongside new Blu Rays, providing access to films that aren’t available on DVD or Blu Ray in the US. I also really appreciated how diverse Vidéothèque’s children’s section was, with documentaries and foreign films presented to children alongside Pokémon and THE LITTLE MERMAID — Vidéothèque understands that children become voracious watchers as adults if they’re shown a wide array of films as kids.

While the dual sorting of American films by both director and actor (depending on the genre and title) might feel confusing to some, I enjoyed being able to peruse filmographies of actors like Barbara Stanwyck and Sidney Poitier alongside directors like Allison Anders and Sam Fuller. It’s just so much easier to fall in love with an actor or director when their entire filmography is laid out in front of you, not just a few random titles.

Vidéothèque also sells vinyl, t-shirts, buttons, and new and used DVDs, further bolstering their role as an important gathering place for South Pasadena. Even after one visit, I could tell fostering and nurturing a sense of community was one of Vidéothèque’s core values — the store is an essential hub for film lovers on the east side.

Vidéothèque, 1020 Mission Street, South Pasadena, CA, 91030. 11AM-11PM weekly (10AM on Saturdays.) All rentals $4.50, with option to pre-purchase rentals in packages for a discounted rate.

The next two stores I visited most reminded me of the Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos of my childhood: Star Video in Van Nuys and Odyssey Video in North Hollywood. These stores are catered towards the more casual viewer — lots of new releases and popular catalogue titles.

Star Video

Star Video felt almost exactly like a Blockbuster to me: new releases lined the outer edge of the store, with older titles sorted by genre in the middle. While there wasn’t any curation to speak of, Star Video does feature some very deep genre sections, particularly for late 90s/early 2000s titles — some sections were so full that titles were stacked on top of each other.

Star’s most impressive racks include a massive selection of thrillers, and a funky children’s section with titles like MAD HOT BALLROOM and THE LEGEND OF NATTY GANN. They’re also the only store I visited that’s still renting video games — that market has been squashed by Gamefly, so Star Video is meeting an important need for those who would prefer to rent in-person.

I was the only person in Star Video on a Sunday afternoon, but if I lived closer, I’d be stopping in for new release titles on Blu Ray since they’re just $2.50 each — catalogue titles rent for only a dollar.

Odyssey Video

Odyssey Video gave me some intense 1997 vibes — in absolutely the best way. VHS tapes were shelved alongside DVDs, and I noticed a lot of forgotten 90s cable classics like THAT NIGHT, SHAG! and THERE GOES MY BABY were still renting at the store. I was most struck by some of the rare children’s titles at Odyssey, like compilations that never made it to DVD from ANIMANIACS, BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, and THE SIMPSONS.

Like Star, there’s no curation at Odyssey outside of genre, but the store featured an extensive martial arts section (with titles from the 1970s still available on VHS) and a deep musicals rack, including some out-of-print compilations from major studios.
And, while almost every store I visited had an adult section, Odyssey’s behind-the-curtain titles are truly something to behold: they take up almost half the store, with a smattering big-box pornos from the 1980s still available to rent. Odyssey felt like a store out of time and space, but that’s not a bad thing: a visit there feels like a voyage back in time. And the prices reflect the retro vibe of the store as well — most of Odyssey’s extensive VHS collection rents for just $.99 a movie.

Star Video, 13644 Vanowen, Van Nuys, CA, 91405. 10AM-11PM daily. $2.50 for new release rentals, $1 for catalogue titles.

Odyssey Video, 4810 Vineland Avenue, North Hollywood, CA, 91601. 10AM-12AM daily. $1.99 for rentals, $.99 certain days of the week.
Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee

I found what I was looking for when I visited Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee in North Hollywood.

I figured I was in good hands when I saw “Mount Rushmonster” painted on the outside of the nondescript building, but once I walked in and saw the one-sheets, movie magazines, scripts, and laserdiscs for sale, I knew I’d found the video store I’d been searching for — the vibe was just right.

Eddie Brandt’s rental floor houses 80,000 VHS tapes — twenty times the number of films now streaming on Netflix. While there, I slipped into that glorious zen state only a concentrated browse can provide — I could’ve easily posted up there for the rest of the day. Eddie Brandt’s has countless rare and out-of-print titles I’d never laid eyes on before like early commercials compilations, classic Western and detective serials, multi-part television documentaries, and so much more.

The scope of Eddie Brandt’s rental catalogue cannot be understated: only the VHS tapes are out on display, but the store also rents over 20,000 DVDs and Blu Rays, including the newest releases, available to scan via their catalogue. Titles at Eddie Brandt’s are alphabetized, but with a catalogue of that size, one opts for simplicity over curation— and don’t worry, the clerks behind the counter and your fellow customers will be happy to recommend things once you start talking about the kind of movies you like.

While I was browsing, I struck up a conversation with Tony Nittoli, who was working the counter, and two patrons — one an older gentlemen in a WWII veteran hat; the other a young metalhead carrying his chihuahua. I told them I was working on a piece about video stores, and all three of them were eager to tell me about Eddie Brandt’s history.

Nittoli mentioned that Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino are still customers — not at all surprising given that Anderson and Tarantino are some of the most film-literate directors working today. The older gentleman (a patron of many years who asked not to be named in this piece) told me that most of the major studios keep contracts with Eddie Brandt’s, as it still provides the easiest pathway to find very old and obscure titles from their own catalogues. The four of us chatted about how much we all missed this exact moment of the video store experience: just shooting the shit on a Friday afternoon, talking about movies without a care about anything happening outside the store’s VHS-packed walls.

I had such a great afternoon at Eddie Brandt’s that I went back a few Saturdays later — Nittoli remembered me and asked how my piece turned out. He also insisted I take a donut from the open box on the counter — all patrons were cajoled into taking one before leaving, adding to the family feel of the store.

Both times I visited Eddie Brandt’s, there were multiple groups browsing, and conversation flowed between customers and counter staff — everything from to why THE EXECUTIONER’S SONG had been checked out for so long to where to find obscure skateboarding videos to why studio movies were so bad in the 1980s.

And, I was able to find four movies — LITTLE DARLINGS, DIARY OF A MAD HOUSEWIFE, LOOKING FOR MR. GOODBAR, and PLAY IT AS LAYS — that will never make it to DVD (thanks to, you guessed it, music licensing issues) on VHS in Eddie Brandt’s collection, a thrilling moment for me after being on the hunt for many years. I talked to Nittoli about needing a VCR again after discovering all Eddie Brandt’s offered me, and he mentioned how much harder they’d been to come by in the last few years. Nittoli said that he’d noticed an uptick in customers asking about VCRs as they began to realize how many titles weren’t (and would never be) available on streaming or DVD/Blu Ray.

Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee is the most impressive video store I’ve ever visited — I’m scouring Goodwills for a working VCR so I can start a membership in earnest. In addition to their massive one-of-a-kind catalogue, the warm, welcoming atmosphere at the store made me feel like a member of their community after only two visits.

And the sensual experience of visiting the store — the pleasant library musk of dust and cardboard, the murmur of a mystery movie on an old TV mixing with customer chatter, the feel of well-worn, embossed letters on a shaggy shell case — kept me engaged throughout both of my visits. I felt so much more invested in the films I was looking at — holding them in my hands made the stakes of choosing something feel so much higher than when on streaming.

In addition to one of the most impressive rental catalogues in North America, the store also houses twenty-two tons of promotional photos, film stills, posters, and other movie memorabilia — and you can browse their entire catalogue online.

Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee is an essential haven for cinema’s true believers, and should be preserved and protected at all costs. Next time you’re in the Valley, stop by, and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about.

Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee, 5006 Vineland Ave., North Hollywood, CA. 1–6PM Tuesday-Friday, 10AM-6PM Saturdays. One-time membership fee of $15, all rentals $3.

My ability to visit five fantastic video stores still felt like a luxurious perk of living in the movie capital of the world. For folks in other parts of America and throughout the world, access to any video store at all — let alone one with a catalogue the size of Eddie Brandt’s—doesn’t exist.

It’s impossible not to get dismayed by the current state of the video rental industry — the big picture is grim, and a national comeback would be a near-miracle. But record stores and independent bookstores were once declared dead too — and they’ve staged marvelous comebacks. I have to believe that video stores can do the same.

And, if you look a little closer, there are signs of survival, growth, and progress happening for video stores across the country.

One major video rental chain remains in North America: Family Video, with more than 750 stores open in 19 states and Canada. Owner Keith Hoogland told Forbes that Family Video has survived while its competitors fell thanks to better business practices: “Instead of accepting discounted movies in exchange for agreements to split revenue, as Blockbuster did, [Family Video] has opted to buy films outright and keep 100% of rental proceeds…Hoogland has also kept his stores entirely company-owned, and he keeps costs down by making many of the items needed for new locations in-house — everything from shelving to point-of-sale software.”

Family Video’s willingness to rework their own model has been a key part of their survival too: “The company owns just about all the real estate underpinning its stores. As a result, Hoogland has been able to adapt now that sales are beginning to fall. He has shrunk the square footage of many of the video stores, put up drywall, and leased out space to other companies, like Subway and H&R Block.”

The majority of Family Video locations are in the Midwest, and as a card-carrying Midwesterner, I can vouch for the reticence of many folks to stream or order movies by mail when presented with the option of a physical video store. And, the continuing inaccessibility of high-speed internet in more rural parts of America makes video stores a must for folks who want to watch movies but don’t have the bandwidth to stream them.

With companies like Disney announcing plans to transfer their catalogue from Netflix to a native streaming service, one has to consider a scenario in which new releases become increasingly ephemeral online — but by purchasing or leasing the discs, video stores are able to rent newer titles sooner, and they then become a part of their collection forever.

Rights issues also become less tricky with physical copies of media. “The customer doesn’t have to know if the film or series is on Netflix or Amazon or Hulu or HBO or Showtime or Filmstruck or MUBI or Shudder or YouTube or the dark web; it’s at the store!” says Hatch.

Family Video has survived in the Midwest because they made savvier business decisions than their competitors, but how exactly does one start over with a new video store concept in 2018?

For video stores to become a thriving, necessary part of film culture again, we also need to think about how to re-envision them as sustainable, community-driven efforts — and not just in LA. With that in mind, I spoke to two teams who are working to bring video stores into a new era.

In Baltimore, a crowd-sourced collection is coming together thanks to seven members of the Baltimore Video Collective. After running a successful Kickstarter campaign, Beyond Video is building a video library and location from scratch. “We’re an all-volunteer, worker/owner collective that’s ranged from 5 to 11 people in size, with all the labor donated by us. We’ll each work a couple shifts in the store each month around our other jobs and practices,” says BVC member Eric Allen Hatch.

Beyond Video used innovative methods to build their library from scratch. “The first steps were open calls for DVD/VHS/Blu Ray donations, followed by a Kickstarter, which succeeded in large part thanks to a mystery anonymous donor who came through with $10K of our $30K. Then, as we spent the Kickstarter money on fixing up our location, building shelves, painting, obtaining needed equipment, etc., it became clear that we’d need to crowdsource the holes in our collection as well,” said Hatch. “When you call for open donations, you get some interesting and impressive titles, but also a lot of BORAT and Adam Sandler.”

Hatch also highlights some labels that have been inclined to support Beyond’s effort to bring video stores into the future, noting “generous contributions from some of the best, including A24, Arbelos, Cinema Guild, Criterion, Factory 25, Grasshopper, KimStim, Kino Lorber, Oscilloscope, and Warner Archives…our inventory certainly still has gaps and holes but will soon be worthy of comparison to Video Americain.” Beyond Video also has an active Wish List that allows supporters to purchase or donate a title for their ever-growing library.

In addition to providing Baltimore film fans with an extensive library to explore, Beyond Video also hopes to preserve and promote classic films, especially for burgeoning cinephiles.

“As film catalogues get splintered across a seemingly infinite number of streaming platforms, our sense of film history gets splintered as well. Netflix wants you binging their original content, not Fassbinder or Preston Sturges films. If video stores disappear and classic, independent, and art-house cinema lives only on specialty streaming services that are boutique destinations for the already-converted, how does anyone new get converted?” says Hatch.

Beyond Video doesn’t have an official relaunch date as of now, but they’re seeking volunteers to help get their store off the ground. “We think Beyond Video may point to a path along which video stores can bounce back. I also think it’ll serve many new functions. I hope Beyond Video can be all those things for film lovers in Baltimore,” says Hatch.

In Los Angeles, founders Patty Polinger and Cathy Tauber, and Executive Director Maggie Mackay are looking for a new home. They’re Vidiots, the iconic video store that’s aiming to reopen a new space to showcase their singular collection of over 50,000 titles. Vidiots shuttered its Santa Monica location in early 2017, but the Los Angeles institution is working to relaunch by 2019.

Tauber and Polinger started Vidiots in 1985, when “Video stores were opening in every little strip mall in the city — our families kept telling us we were insane, but we kept saying ‘no, no, it’s gonna be different’…from day one, people were coming in and noticing that it was not your normal mom n’ pop video store,” says Tauber.

“Within the first two years, we had done Kenneth Anger, X: THE UNHEARD MUSIC…we were doing crazy stuff, performance artists we found on the Venice boardwalk. Filmmakers would come in and say, ‘I made this film, would you like to rent it?’ and it was great because we were getting movies that weren’t really available elsewhere,” explains Polinger. “We didn’t judge people on their taste, on what they wanted to watch or not watch — that kind of film snobbery never worked for us. I didn’t ever want anyone to walk in our store and feel like they weren’t welcomed by us,” she adds.

For Vidiots, the decline in business began after 2003. “[That was] our peak. In talking to customers, at first, it seemed like DVR was the bigger enemy than streaming, and there was so much good TV at the time,” says Tauber. But, Polinger added, “People never talk about TV when we talk about video stores, but we have so much British, Canadian, French TV…it might have been our biggest money-maker. You could binge six seasons of something, or pull really old stuff, like Dean Martin.”

In 2012 Vidiots transitioned to a non-profit model and became Vidiots Foundation in order to keep the doors open and allow customers to access their living library of films. For several years, Vidiots has been working with archivists to asses their massive catalogue, which is currently in storage.

“We have 11,000 VHS tapes. We’ve worked with a few waves of archivists to go through the collection. On the last round, they pulled 250 tapes, a mix of everything from a compilation of commercials for toys for girls (no kidding) to some titles I can’t even get into because of licensing complexities. In many cases, we pulled titles to save them from deteriorating or becoming completely unavailable to the public…when the archivists were going through the collection, I would occasionally show up to work, and there’d be a tape on my desk with a note saying ‘DO NOT RENT EVER AGAIN,’” said Mackay.

Preservation is a key component of Vidiots’ mission, so it should come as no surprise that they’re dedicated to making some of the rarest titles in their collection more widely accessible. “Once the collection is out of storage, we’ll begin the intense work of collaborating with licensing experts to get those titles licensed and digitized so they can once again be available to the public,” Mackay says.

Like Eddie Brandt’s or Scarecrow, there are many titles in the Vidiots catalogue that are unavailable elsewhere. “When I found DUTCHMAN, something that’s very hard to find, that’s when I realized we had films by masters, that are absolutely part of the canon, which most people don’t realize you can’t access — things like John Waters’ MONDO TRASHO and SCORPIO RISING that have rights issues that will never be resolved,” Mackay continued.

Polinger and Tauber both mourned the loss of their VHS copy of SCORPIO RISING — Kenneth Anger’s seminal short film that has only ever been available in alternative formats due to music rights issues. “One time we rented it, and it just never came back,” said Polinger. “That was that.”

Polinger also stressed that Vidiots houses an extensive, singular collection of video art: “Some of the feminist stuff that would be really relevant right now — ‘We Are Not Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice,’ — things from the Women’s Video Collective. No other video store has that.”

In order to best showcase the variety of Vidiots, Polinger, Tauber, and Mackay realized that the store needed to evolve for 2018. “As suggested in THE LEOPARD, we know that in order for things to stay the same, they have to change,” said Mackay. “We don’t have a problem with streaming services, as long as they don’t eliminate the spaces that provide deeper access, browsing, and human interaction, like movie theaters and video stores,” she explained.

Vidiots hopes to relaunch in a new neighborhood — their former home on the far west side was becoming cost-prohibitive, and made it difficult for many Angelenos to access the store. “We’re a 33-year-old film space founded and helmed by women, and we feel very strongly that, especially now, LA needs a truly inclusive film space — so we’re looking at a new model to bring people to our library, and offer a unique slate of programs both big and small, like the Harry Dean Stanton Award tribute, signature community screenings and events, collaborations with other programmers and organizations, and education initiatives for kids,” said Mackay.

“Of course we want to grow the library with new releases, but we’ll also take on films that are worthy but aren’t getting picked up by distributors. We want to add more shorts and music videos, and films on VHS that are at-risk. And we want to be able to showcase all that work and more, in a space where everyone feels they belong. We’ll again be a resource for filmmakers and academics, for new generations of film fans, and for underserved communities that don’t currently have full access to this art form,” she continued.

“The new model for Vidiots will be more membership-based, and offer a broad range of options so that higher-tier memberships will offset the cost of lower-tier memberships. Regardless of economics, we want everyone to be part of the space and have access to the library,” Mackay said. “We have no investment in one film over another. A music video that got dropped off twenty years ago is as important to us as a film that won the Oscar this year…you can’t say the same of big corporations that have their own financial agendas.”

The women behind Vidiots understand the essential human element a video store provides, and know that the new iteration of Vidiots can provide that for film fans of all ages.

"We'd like to see people come by for a coffee in the morning, take or return a few movies, maybe do a little work or research, or watch something, then come back for the 9PM showing of a rep title or word-of-mouth screening of a new movie. We'll be a space where one visit you might see a band perform a live score to an old movie, and another you'll come with your new baby for a parent-and-me screening," Mackay adds.

Polinger, Tauber, and Mackay all hope that their mission to reopen Vidiots inspires other video stores across the country too. “We know each other. We know Kate [Barr] at Scarecrow, we talk to Milos [Stehlik] at Facets, we know Jim Salzer up in Ventura with Salzer’s, Beyond Video in Baltimore, and Mark at Vidéothèque in South Pasadena…it’s a network. It would be lovely to have everything merged into one giant inventory — like you’re looking for this film and you could get it from somewhere in New York or Scarecrow,” said Polinger. “A year from now, I’d like to see us open, and the library accessible,” added Tauber.

Beyond Video and Vidiots are leading the charge for what a new video store can look like in 2018. Of course, only time will tell whether or not viewers can be summoned back to the video store, but Hatch for one remains optimistic: “People are shedding their DVDs and Blu-Rays the way they were records in the 90s. I think they’re going to miss them soon; and when they do, I hope Beyond Video (and similar projects in other cities) will still be there for them.”

An Elegy for Blockbuster

My own obsession with video stores began in 1995, when my Cincinnati suburb got its first Blockbuster. I remember every detail of my first visit there: my dad picked me up from kindergarten, told me we were doing something cool, and that it was a surprise. Once I was set loose in the kids section, with the instruction of only being allowed to pick one movie, I was mesmerized: all of these movies I’d heard of but never fully conceptualized were just right there for me on a shelf.

After an intense deliberation, I selected Disney’s CINDERELLA as my first-ever video rental. Blockbuster sent us home with a snack pack — if only I could recapture the bliss of watching CINDERELLA on our living room floor while munching on that free, stale, popcorn with every subsequent home viewing experience.

As a curious kid who was already well-acquainted with the endless possibilities of a library, I soon came to crave the exploratory element of each Blockbuster visit — no two visits were the same, and there was always something new I’d somehow missed the last time.

Blockbuster was a major part of my development as a young cinephile — Friday night visits with my parents, my Memaw, or later, my friends, were a ritual I looked forward to all week. There were other stores — a short-lived pop-up in our local Kroger where I once sneakily rented WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE, a Hollywood Video where a few bad kids at school once got busted for trying to steal THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT — but mostly, it was all about Blockbuster.

I’d marvel as my parents talked to the clerks about 90s indie fare like HAPPINESS (which was of course, never available at a Blockbuster) and paid special attention to in-store culture, like which titles got stamped with the notorious youth restricted viewing sticker.

The only curation to speak of at my local Blockbuster was a middle section with a few dozen rotating titles. But, that never stopped me from wandering around the store, and discovering movies I instantly adored like MARS ATTACKS! and SHAUN OF THE DEAD along with classics like BROADCAST NEWS throughout my teenage years. Even as my tastes evolved, there was always something at Blockbuster — they even stocked titles like AUDITION in lil ol’ Sharonville, Ohio.

And then I went to college. And got disc Netflix. And never rented a movie from Blockbuster again.

My very last visit to a Blockbuster was to a location on La Brea during its final days. Perusing the aisles for one last time, I didn’t want to leave because I knew I’d be closing that portal to my cinematic past once I did — seeing the remnants of a decimated Blockbuster was enough of a bummer on its own, but knowing anything that didn’t get bought would either end up trashed or donated into obscurity only made it worse. I regret not buying a big Blockbuster sign, a relic of a time and a culture that was dying — just like Toys R.’ Us. Just like music retailers. Just like malls.

But, in the last year, I’ve had so many conversations with people of all ages and backgrounds lamenting the void left by the loss of these kind of essential community spaces. And with the (very necessary) closure of Cinefamily, the New Beverly being shuttered for renovations since the first of the year, and Vidiots still searching for a new home here in LA, even in the movie capital of the world, film fans are without a single, centralized gathering place.

I enjoy (most of) my interactions with Film Twitter, but there’s also no question about the tangible mood boost I got from visiting every single one of these video stores IRL. Even if I browsed alone and didn’t speak to anyone else, just being among other people, hearing them talk, and making a physical investment in visiting a video store felt better than any night I’ve ever spent browsing streaming platforms.

“Having the in-person interaction pins you to a place where you are inclined to talk at length about the possibilities — the back-and-forth may indeed get you to try a film you didn’t know. Online discourse tends to be more terse and to the point because it’s exhausting to type at length, and tweets are short — if you’re not sold instantaneously on the other person’s spiel, you can abandon the chat immediately,” says Heuck.

As technology continues isolating us and pushing more of our daily interactions into the digital space, I have to believe there’s going to be a bounce-back moment for video stores just as there’s been for independent booksellers and record stores.

The joy of spontaneous discovery, of getting a recommendation from someone that really pays off, of remembering where you were in the world the time you found the thing — your thing — is likely to be more meaningful when it happens offline.

Folks at Vulcan Video in Austin, Odd Obsession and Facets in Chicago, Videodrome in Atlanta, Movie Madness in Portland, and Video Free Brooklyn (to name just a few of the other incredible video stores still thriving in America) understand that a film community can only be at its best when it has a video store as a primary hub within. Patronizing and celebrating these great video stores is essential to their survival — Scarecrow Video is running a fundraising campaign to celebrate their 30th anniversary, and if you love video stores, supporting Scarecrow is a must.

Streaming may seem like an impossible hurdle for video stores to overcome now, but consider how much has changed in the last ten years of movie-watching. In 2008, Netflix was adding Blu Ray discs to their rental service, lifting streaming limits for disc subscribers for the first time, and shuttering its first film financing and acquisition arm, Red Envelope Entertainment.

When thinking about what our media consumption habits will look like in 2028, I have to believe that while streaming, instant media, and robust digital content will only continue to grow, they’ll also be a reaction to that culture — and folks will begin to crave in-person experiences once again. “While the internet promised instant availability of everything at your fingertips, the reality is very different,” says Hatch.

As we look to what the future holds for video stores, I think we can all agree that without community effort, nothing will change. So, as we continue searching for the last great video stores, I do have one favor to ask.

The Last Great Video Stores

I’ve created a Google Map of the last great video stores in America (and a few abroad.) This is, of course, by no means an exhaustive list — I’ve done my best to locate and confirm that these video stores are still operating, but I’ve undoubtedly missed some locations.

This is where you come in: if you have a great video store in your community, I’m asking you to add it to our Google Map. All you need to do is send the name and address of your video store to lastgreatvideostore@blcklst.com, and we’ll include it on our map.

We’ll share updates on our social media channels, so you can keep searching for video stores and telling us about them — there might even be one in your neighborhood you didn’t know about. I want this map of the last great video stores to become a global effort, a network where we celebrate as many video stores as we can — the only way we’re going to save video stores is to patronize and promote them together.

And if you haven’t been to a video store in a while — I know, I know, you probably haven’t — I implore you to take an afternoon and check out one in your community. Remember what it’s like to lose a couple hours picking up cases, engaging with other customers and staff, and discovering things you didn’t even know you were looking for. Let us know when you stop by your local video store with #LastGreatVideoStore, and we’ll share your post.

We’re also going to be accepting pitches for a series on Essential Video Stores, very much in the mode of our Essential Films series. So, if you’ve got an Essential Video Store you’d like to tell the world about, send us your pitch at lastgreatvideostore@blckst.com.

I hope we can spend our summers falling in love with video stores again — instead of yet another night of being unable to pick a movie from your queue and settling for an old episode of TV instead, take that time and seek out a video store in your town. And, as we build and share our #LastGreatVideoStore map, the remaining video stores should become easier to find.

Scrolling through a digital catalogue can never rival the personal interaction a video store offers. Even if you go only to observe, there’s still so much to be said for being among other people who love movies — each of you with your own agenda, but with a shared admiration for the art of the browse, the thrill of discovery. Being alone, together, in a shared community space is still an extremely powerful thing.

When you don’t live in a big city, video stores are a sort of connective tissue to the larger world of film —when we lose that connection, we’re losing an essential gateway to loving film, which will in turn keep scores of young film fans from discovering titles they might never find on streaming. And if we’re not careful, we will lose video stores forever: that means not only losing extensive libraries and the rarities contained within, but losing one of the few gathering spaces film fans have outside of the cinema.

On your own journey to find the last great video store, you might just find a part of yourself you’d forgotten about along the way too — the part of you that stood in front of a rack of videos as a teenager before discovering a gloomy romance that perfectly captured your teen angst in the form of FRESH HORSES. Remember what it felt like to have an entire world of story, sound, and image at your fingertips, when infinite possibility was only a $3 rental away.

In the opening to LIFE ITSELF, the late, great Roger Ebert tells us: “The movies are like a machine that generates empathy. It lets you understand a little bit more about different hopes, aspirations, dreams, and fears. It helps us to identify with the people who are sharing this journey with us.”

So, as you go in search of the last great video store in your little corner of the universe, I hope that you get to celebrate movies with some fellow travelers along the way. I still believe that movies are magic, and that video stores are one of the last places where we can capture and share that magic with each other — and you just never know what movie, what conversation, or what person in a video store could change your life.

Author’s note: Data in this piece is from Just Watch, and was current as of June 2, 2018. Due to the constantly changing nature of streaming catalogues, these numbers will vary on a daily basis.

More on streaming rights from Marc Edward Heuck: It stands to reason that streaming was initially considered “broadcast” by existing music contracts for theatrical and TV use because in the early days of Netflix and Amazon, you saw rarities like DEADHEAD MILES and UNHOLY ROLLERS available with their soundtracks intact.

Movies that have had longstanding split rights situations where one has theatrical and/or video but another has TV, in many cases those have been offered by the studios which held TV rights. For example, Viacom initially got the TV rights to several Cannon productions, and the former Worldvision got several Carolco projects, and Paramount inherited both those TV libraries. Go to Amazon right now, and you’ll find ANGEL HEART, CYBORG, THE DELTA FORCE, CHAPLIN, LOVE STREAMS, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2, etc., being offered for streaming by Paramount instead of, say, MGM or StudioCanal, the actual respective owners of the Cannon and Carolco IPs.

Another example is that the first batch of movies Polygram Pictures produced in the early ’80s (ENDLESS LOVE, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, DEADLY BLESSING) are owned by Universal, but due to multiple transfers that began when Polygram gave up on their first attempt at a TV division, Lionsgate now has the TV (and streaming) rights to those movies.

However, there are variations to this formula. When Columbia bought and flipped the majority of Embassy Pictures’ assets in the mid-’80s, they kept TV rights to the films, and recent TV airings still credit Columbia parent Sony as the syndicator. But for streaming, those movies are mostly sourced by Lionsgate, whom StudioCanal, the owners of Embassy’s IPs, have partnered with to handle their library for non-theatrical media. And some classic Embassy releases like THE HOWLING and ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK are in the peculiar position of being offered for streaming on Amazon by two different companies Lionsgate, for the reasons above, and MGM, which inherited U.S. home video rights to select Embassy titles through their pre-’96 Polygram library purchase. Confused yet?

So ultimately, that’s less of a verification as it is a Q.E.D., but it’s public data in black and white all the same.

https://blog.blcklst.com/in-search-o...i=389452bd34b9





Watch Out: MPlayer and VLC Media Player Hit by Critical Vulnerability (Updated)
Waqas Security

This article has been updated with a statement from Live Networks, Inc.

The IT security researcher at Cisco Talos Intelligence Group has discovered a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the LIVE555 media streaming library used by popular media players such as VLC and MPlayer.

Maintained by the company Live Networks, the library works with RTP / RTCP, RTSP or SIP protocols, with the ability to process video and audio formats such as MPEG, H.265, H.264, H.263 +, VP8, DV, JPEG, MPEG, AAC, AMR, AC-3, and Vorbis.

These findings (CVE-2018-4013) have left millions of users of media players vulnerable to cyber attacks, according to Lilith Wyatt, a researcher at the Cisco Talos Intelligence Group. In this case, the flaw lies in the HTTP packet parsing functionality, which analyzes HTTP headers for RTSP tunneling over HTTP, explains

“An exploitable code execution vulnerability exists in the HTTP packet-parsing functionality of the LIVE555 RTSP server library. A specially crafted packet can cause a stack-based buffer overflow, resulting in code execution. An attacker can send a packet to trigger this vulnerability,” Wyatt explained in her blog post.

An update has already been issued to address the vulnerability. Therefore, if you are using any of the vulnerable media players make sure they are updated to the latest version.

This, however, is not the first time when popular media player like VLC is making headlines for the wrong reasons Previously, a security researcher had identified critical security flaws in 2.0.5 and earlier versions that could have been exploited by attackers to execute malicious code on computers via ASF files.

Last year, CheckPoint security researchers identified a vulnerability in Kodi, VLC and Popcorn Time media players that would let hackers hijack a targeted system through subtitles. Furthermore, Vault 7 related documents leaked by WikiLeaks showed how the CIA used fake VLC players to steal data from an infected device.

The document further revealed that CIA agents used a tool to exploit a modified old version of VLC media player. The described tool gathered documents from a computer or network and, to hide its activity, runs inside VLC Portable 2.1.5 on Microsoft Windows platforms.

Update:

According to an email from Ross Finlayson of Live Networks, Inc., the vulnerability “does not affect VLC or MPlayer, because they use LIVE555 only to implement an RTSP. The bug affected only our implementation of a RTSP, which these media players don’t use. (VLC does have an embedded RTSP server, but that uses a separate implementation, not LIVE555’s.)”
https://www.hackread.com/watch-out-f...n-vlc-mplayer/





Google Mandates Two Years of Security Updates for Popular Phones in New Android Contract
Jacob Kastrenakes and Russell Brandom

Every month, a security team at Google releases a new set of patches for Android — and every month, carriers and manufacturers struggle to get them installed on actual phones. It’s a complex, long-standing problem, but confidential contracts obtained by The Verge show many manufacturers now have explicit obligations about keeping their phones updated written into their contract with Google.

A contract obtained by The Verge requires Android device makers to regularly install updates for any popular phone or tablet for at least two years. Google’s contract with Android partners stipulates that they must provide “at least four security updates” within one year of the phone’s launch. Security updates are mandated within the second year as well, though without a specified minimum number of releases.

David Kleidermacher, Google’s head of Android security, referred to these terms earlier this year during a talk at Google I/O. Kleidermacher said that Google had added a provision into its agreements with partners to roll out “regular” security updates. But it wasn’t clear which devices those would apply to, how often those updates would come, or for how long.

The terms cover any device launched after January 31st, 2018 that’s been activated by more than 100,000 users. Starting July 31st, the patching requirements were applied to 75 percent of a manufacturer’s “security mandatory models.” Starting on January 31st, 2019, Google will require that all security mandatory devices receive these updates.

Manufacturers have to patch flaws identified by Google within a specific timeframe. By the end of each month, covered devices must be protected against all vulnerabilities identified more than 90 days ago. That means that, even without an annual update minimum, this rolling window mandates that devices are regularly patched. Additionally, devices must launch with this same level of bug fix coverage. If manufacturers fail to keep their devices updated, Google says it could withhold approval of future phones, which could prevent them from being released.

The terms appear in Google’s new licensing agreement for Android phones and tablets to be distributed in the European Union while bundling the company’s apps, including the all-important Play Store. While The Verge cannot confirm that the requirement appears in Google’s global licensing terms, the contract and Google’s public comments indicate that the terms are likely the same or substantially similar in all regions.

A Google spokesperson pointed to company statements from earlier this year calling 90-day bug fixes “a minimum security hygiene requirement” and saying that “the majority of the deployed devices for over 200 different Android models from over 30 Android device manufacturers are running a security update from the last 90 days.” They also pointed to Google’s Android One program, which delivers monthly security updates for three years to supported phones. However, the hygiene statement referred to best practices, and most phones aren’t covered by Android One’s terms.

Fragmented security has long been a problem on Android, where phone manufacturers will sometimes ignore products as they age or their use count dwindles. Consumers have rarely had certainty that their device would get timely updates, leading to flaws that remain open well beyond when they were identified.

Google has had to nudge carriers and manufacturers to fix the problem in recent years. Recent versions of Android have made it easier to see how recently your phone was updated and the last full version, Android Oreo, restructured the system in a way that made overall OS updates easier and faster to build. Google has also used the Enterprise Recommended program to encourage large buyers to pick safer phones and reward manufacturers that keep phones up to date.

But because manufacturers rely on Google for its suite of apps, the company can also make outright demands for updates in its contract. This contractual commitment to patching devices goes much further and guarantees in many cases that devices will remain up to date. While consumers will have no way of knowing for certain whether a device they buy is covered by this agreement, it’s likely that phones or tablets sold internationally and at major retailers would hit the 100,000 sales mark that forces the regular coverage. As Android splits following the EU ruling, the contract also raises questions about how non-Google phones will receive security updates without the same contractual pressures.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/24/...oogle-contract





When Trump Phones Friends, the Chinese and the Russians Listen and Learn
Matthew Rosenberg and Maggie Haberman

When President Trump calls old friends on one of his iPhones to gossip, gripe or solicit their latest take on how he is doing, American intelligence reports indicate that Chinese spies are often listening — and putting to use invaluable insights into how to best work the president and affect administration policy, current and former American officials said.

Mr. Trump’s aides have repeatedly warned him that his cellphone calls are not secure, and they have told him that Russian spies are routinely eavesdropping on the calls, as well. But aides say the voluble president, who has been pressured into using his secure White House landline more often these days, has still refused to give up his iPhones. White House officials say they can only hope he refrains from discussing classified information when he is on them.

Mr. Trump’s use of his iPhones was detailed by several current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so they could discuss classified intelligence and sensitive security arrangements. The officials said they were doing so not to undermine Mr. Trump, but out of frustration with what they considered the president’s casual approach to electronic security.

American spy agencies, the officials said, had learned that China and Russia were eavesdropping on the president’s cellphone calls from human sources inside foreign governments and intercepting communications between foreign officials.

The officials said they have also determined that China is seeking to use what it is learning from the calls — how Mr. Trump thinks, what arguments tend to sway him and to whom he is inclined to listen — to keep a trade war with the United States from escalating further. In what amounts to a marriage of lobbying and espionage, the Chinese have pieced together a list of the people with whom Mr. Trump regularly speaks in hopes of using them to influence the president, the officials said.

Among those on the list are Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Blackstone Group chief executive who has endowed a master’s program at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Steve Wynn, the former Las Vegas casino magnate who used to own a lucrative property in Macau.

The Chinese have identified friends of both men and others among the president’s regulars, and are now relying on Chinese businessmen and others with ties to Beijing to feed arguments to the friends of the Trump friends. The strategy is that those people will pass on what they are hearing, and that Beijing’s views will eventually be delivered to the president by trusted voices, the officials said. They added that the Trump friends were most likely unaware of any Chinese effort.

L. Lin Wood, a lawyer for Mr. Wynn, said his client was retired and had no comment. A spokeswoman for Blackstone, Christine Anderson, declined to comment on Chinese efforts to influence Mr. Schwarzman, but said that he “has been happy to serve as an intermediary on certain critical matters between the two countries at the request of both heads of state.”

Russia is not believed to be running as sophisticated an influence effort as China because of Mr. Trump’s apparent affinity for President Vladimir V. Putin, a former official said.

China’s effort is a 21st-century version of what officials there have been doing for many decades, which is trying to influence American leaders by cultivating an informal network of prominent businesspeople and academics who can be sold on ideas and policy prescriptions and then carry them to the White House. The difference now is that China, through its eavesdropping on Mr. Trump’s calls, has a far clearer idea of who carries the most influence with the president, and what arguments tend to work.

The Chinese and the Russians “would look for any little thing — how easily was he talked out of something, what was the argument that was used,” said John Sipher, a 28-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency who served in Moscow in the 1990s and later ran the agency’s Russia program.

Trump friends like Mr. Schwarzman, who figured prominently in the first meeting between President Xi Jinping of China and Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago, the president’s Florida resort, already hold pro-China and pro-trade views, and thus are ideal targets in the eyes of the Chinese, the officials said. Targeting the friends of Mr. Schwarzman and Mr. Wynn can reinforce the views of the two, the officials said. The friends are also most likely to be more accessible.

One official said the Chinese were pushing for the friends to persuade Mr. Trump to sit down with Mr. Xi as often as possible. The Chinese, the official said, correctly perceive that Mr. Trump places tremendous value on personal relationships, and that one-on-one meetings yield breakthroughs far more often than regular contacts between Chinese and American officials.

Whether the friends can stop Mr. Trump from pursuing a trade war with China is another question.

Officials said the president has two official iPhones that have been altered by the National Security Agency to limit their abilities — and vulnerabilities — and a third personal phone that is no different from hundreds of millions of iPhones in use around the world. Mr. Trump keeps the personal phone, White House officials said, because unlike his other two phones, he can store his contacts in it.

Apple declined to comment on the president’s iPhones. None of them are completely secure and are vulnerable to hackers who could remotely break into the phones themselves.

But the calls made from the phones are intercepted as they travel through the cell towers, cables and switches that make up national and international cellphone networks. Calls made from any cellphone — iPhone, Android, an old-school Samsung flip phone — are vulnerable.

The issue of secure communications is fraught for Mr. Trump. As a presidential candidate, he regularly attacked his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, during the 2016 campaign for her use of an unsecured email server while she was secretary state, and he basked in chants of “lock her up” at his rallies.

Intercepting calls is a relatively easy skill for governments. American intelligence agencies consider it an essential tool of spycraft, and they routinely try to tap the phones of important foreign leaders. In a diplomatic blowup during the Obama administration, documents leaked by Edward J. Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency, showed that the American government had tapped the phone of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany.

Foreign governments are well aware of the risk, and so leaders like Mr. Xi and Mr. Putin avoid using cellphones when possible.

President Barack Obama was careful with cellphones, too. He used an iPhone in his second term, but it could not make calls and could receive email only from a special address that was given to a select group of staff members and intimates. It had no camera or microphone, and it could not be used to download apps at will. Texting was forbidden because there was no way to collect and store the messages, as required by the Presidential Records Act.

“It is a great phone, state of the art, but it doesn’t take pictures, you can’t text. The phone doesn’t work, you know, you can’t play your music on it,” Mr. Obama said on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” in June 2016. “So basically, it’s like — does your 3-year-old have one of those play phones?”

When Mr. Obama needed a cellphone, the officials said, he used one of those of his aides.

Mr. Trump has insisted on more capable devices. He did agree during the transition to give up his Android phone (the Google operating system is considered more vulnerable than Apple’s). And since becoming president, Mr. Trump has agreed to a slightly cumbersome arrangement of having two official phones: one for Twitter and other apps, and one for calls.

Mr. Trump typically relies on his cellphones when he does not want a call going through the White House switchboard and logged for senior aides to see, his aides said. Many of those Mr. Trump speaks with most often on one of his cellphones, such as hosts at Fox News, share the president’s political views, or simply enable his sense of grievance about any number of subjects.

Administration officials said Mr. Trump’s longtime paranoia about surveillance — well before coming to the White House he believed that his phone conversations were often being recorded — gave them some comfort that he was not disclosing classified information on the calls. They said they had further confidence he was not spilling secrets because he rarely digs into the details of the intelligence he is shown and is not well versed in the operational specifics of military or covert activities.

In an interview this week with The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Trump quipped about his phones being insecure. When asked what American officials in Turkey had learned about the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, he replied, “I actually said don’t give it to me on the phone. I don’t want it on the phone. As good as these phones are supposed to be.”

But Mr. Trump is also famously indiscreet. In a May 2017 meeting in the Oval Office with Russian officials, he shared highly sensitive intelligence passed to the United States by Israel. He also told the Russians that James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, was “a real nut job” and that firing him had relieved “great pressure.”

Still, Mr. Trump’s lack of tech savvy has alleviated some other security concerns. He does not use email, so the risk of a phishing attack like those used by Russian intelligence to gain access to Democratic Party emails is close to nil. The same goes for texts, which are disabled on his official phones.

His Twitter phone can connect to the internet only over a Wi-Fi connection, and he rarely, if ever, has access to unsecured wireless networks, officials said. But the security of the device ultimately depends on the user, and protecting the president’s phones has sometimes proved difficult.

Last year, Mr. Trump’s cellphone was left behind in a golf cart at his club in Bedminster, N.J., causing a scramble to locate it, according to two people familiar with what took place.

Mr. Trump is supposed to swap out his two official phones every 30 days for new ones but rarely does, bristling at the inconvenience. White House staff members are supposed to set up the new phones exactly like the old ones, but the new iPhones cannot be restored from backups of his old phones because doing so would transfer over any malware.

New phone or old, though, the Chinese and the Russians are listening, and learning.

Julian E. Barnes contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/24/u...-security.html





This SIM Card Forces all of Your Mobile Data Through Tor

"This is about sticking a middle finger up to mobile filtering, mass surveillance."
Joseph Cox

We all are constantly on our phones, but maybe you want to visit that website or check that social media account without revealing more information on where you are.

Using the Tor anonymity network on a mobile phone, which would mask your IP address from the site you’re browsing, is fairly painless nowadays, with a connection being simply an app away. But that sort of software is typically designed for web browsing, and not for use with other apps such as Twitter, which still could leak your IP address.

With that in mind, one UK grassroots internet service provider is currently testing a data only SIM card that blocks any non-Tor traffic from leaving the phone at all, potentially providing a more robust way to use Tor while on the go.

“This is about sticking a middle finger up to mobile filtering, mass surveillance,” Gareth Llewelyn, founder of Brass Horn Communications, told Motherboard in an online chat. Brass Horn is a non-profit internet service provider with a focus on privacy and anti-surveillance services.

Tor is a piece of software and a related network run by volunteers. When someone runs Tor on their computer or phone, it routes their traffic through multiple servers before reaching its final destination, such as a website. That way, the website owner can’t tell who is visiting; only that someone is connecting from Tor. The most common way people access Tor is with the Tor Browser Bundle on desktop, or with the Orbot app on Android.

But, in some cases, neither of these totally guarantee that all of your device’s traffic will be routed through Tor. If you’re using the Tor Browser Bundle on a laptop, and then go to use another piece of software, that app is probably not going to use Tor. The same might stand for Orbot running on older iterations of Android. Nathan Freitas, from The Guardian Project which maintains Orbot, said with newer versions of Android, you can lock down device traffic to only work if a specific VPN is activated, including Orbot’s.

This SIM card, however, is supposed to provide a more restricted solution in the event that other approaches don’t quite work.

“The key point is that it is a failsafe, if you don’t have Tor up then nothing can get to the internet,” Llewelyn said.

Brass Horn has previously offered customers a Tor-only service, but at the ISP level, designed to make it impossible for Brass Horn to keep any logs of a subscriber’s web browsing. This was largely in response to the UK’s recently passed mass surveillance legislation The Investigatory Powers Act, part of which compels ISPs to keep so-called internet connection records—browsing and usage data—of their customers for 12 months.

The new SIM card, which is still in a beta testing stage, takes that idea mobile. It requires some setup; users need to create a new access point name on their device—essentially so the device can connect to the new network—but Brass Horn provides some instructions to do this. The SIM also requires Orbot to be installed and running on the device itself, and it currently only works in the UK (Llewelyn provided Motherboard with one of the SIM cards for testing purposes; Motherboard confirmed that the SIM does transfer data).

“At a high level, I think a Tor-only SIM card is a great idea,” Freitas added. “If Facebook can sell SIM-cards that only connect to their approved 'Zero rated' sites, then why not have a privacy-oriented alternative that only allows Tor?”

“Technically, this is also the correct approach—don't auto-tunnel all connections through Tor, but instead ensure non-Tor traffic doesn't leak. Unfortunately, this would only provide that assurance on a mobile data connection, and not WiFi,” he added.

It won’t be for everyone—as Freitas also points out, some users may need to use some apps through a non-Tor connection (Twitter, for instance, could block a user connecting from Tor, mistaking it for suspicious activity). But for those who still want to mask their traffic, and essentially movements, while using data on the move, it may be useful.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...communications





Mozilla May Offer Firefox Users a VPN Service, But there’s a Costly Catch
Chris Smith

Mozilla is reportedly preparing to offer a VPN service to users of the Firefox browser to help protect users when surfing the web.

The foundation has reportedly partnered with the ProtonVPN service, with a new notification piping-up when the browser detects an unsecured connection, or in a scenario when VPN might be preferable to users.

However, it appears Firefox users will have to pay for the privilege. Austrian site Soeren-hentzschel reports the premium VPN service will be $10 a month, which is what ProtonVPN charges its users.

Users will receive a “Firefox Recommends” pop-up when browsing an unsecured wireless network. The pop-up says the VPN service will provide a ‘private and secure’ internet connection. According to the reports, a subset of Firefox 62 users in the United States will begin receiving the pop-up from today.

Mozilla will reportedly get a cut of any subscription fee handed over by users to access the VPN service. Could this be classified more of an advertisement from the non-profit Mozilla Foundation? As MSPowerUser points out in its report, Firefox’s recommended extensions have always been free up until now. This will be the first advertised service that Firefox users has been asked to fork out for.

Mozilla is yet to comment publicly about the tests and it remains to be seen whether the company will roll out the offer to all users. If you’d rather make your own choice of VPN, rather than use the one Firefox recommends, we have an excellent guide to the Best VPN services on offer.

In other news, Firefox is currently offering users in the United States an Election Bundle in order to help them avoid ad tracking on social media ahead of the all-important mid-term elections next months.
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/firefox-vpn-3609357





Now Apps Can Track You Even After You Uninstall Them

New trackers make it easy for developers to identify fed-up users and pester them with targeted ads.
Gerrit De Vynck

If it seems as though the app you deleted last week is suddenly popping up everywhere, it may not be mere coincidence. Companies that cater to app makers have found ways to game both iOS and Android, enabling them to figure out which users have uninstalled a given piece of software lately—and making it easy to pelt the departed with ads aimed at winning them back.

Adjust, AppsFlyer, MoEngage, Localytics, and CleverTap are among the companies that offer uninstall trackers, usually as part of a broader set of developer tools. Their customers include T-Mobile US, Spotify Technology, and Yelp. (And Bloomberg Businessweek parent Bloomberg LP, which uses Localytics.) Critics say they’re a fresh reason to reassess online privacy rights and limit what companies can do with user data. “Most tech companies are not giving people nuanced privacy choices, if they give them choices at all,” says Jeremy Gillula, tech policy director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocate.

Some providers say these tracking tools are meant to measure user reaction to app updates and other changes. Jude McColgan, chief executive officer of Boston’s Localytics, says he hasn’t seen clients use the technology to target former users with ads. Ehren Maedge, vice president for marketing and sales at MoEngage Inc. in San Francisco, says it’s up to the app makers not to do so. “The dialogue is between our customers and their end users,” he says. “If they violate users’ trust, it’s not going to go well for them.” Adjust, AppsFlyer, and CleverTap didn’t respond to requests for comment, nor did T-Mobile, Spotify, or Yelp.

Uninstall tracking exploits a core element of Apple Inc.’s and Google’s mobile operating systems: push notifications. Developers have always been able to use so-called silent push notifications to ping installed apps at regular intervals without alerting the user—to refresh an inbox or social media feed while the app is running in the background, for example. But if the app doesn’t ping the developer back, the app is logged as uninstalled, and the uninstall tracking tools add those changes to the file associated with the given mobile device’s unique advertising ID, details that make it easy to identify just who’s holding the phone and advertise the app to them wherever they go.

The tools violate Apple and Google policies against using silent push notifications to build advertising audiences, says Alex Austin, CEO of Branch Metrics Inc., which makes software for developers but chose not to create an uninstall tracker. “It’s just generally sketchy to track people around the internet after they’ve opted out of using your product,” he says, adding that he expects Apple and Google to crack down on the practice soon. Apple and Google didn’t respond to requests for comment.

At its best, uninstall tracking can be used to fix bugs or otherwise refine apps without having to bother users with surveys or more intrusive tools. But the ability to abuse the system beyond its original intent exemplifies the bind that accompanies the modern internet, says Gillula. To participate, users must typically agree to share their data freely, probably forever, not knowing exactly how it may be used down the road. “As an app developer, I would expect to be able to know how many people have uninstalled an app,” he says. “I would not say that, as an app developer, you have a right to know exactly who installed and uninstalled your app.”

BOTTOM LINE - Uninstall tracking may violate Apple and Google policies against ad-focused use of their mobile developer tools, but so far the companies haven’t taken action.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...uninstall-them





This Thermometer Tells Your Temperature, Then Tells Firms Where to Advertise

Kinsa says its smart thermometers are in more than 500,000 American households.
Sapna Maheshwari

Most of what we do — the websites we visit, the places we go, the TV shows we watch, the products we buy — has become fair game for advertisers. Now, thanks to internet-connected devices in the home like smart thermometers, ads we see may be determined by something even more personal: our health.

This flu season, Clorox paid to license information from Kinsa, a tech start-up that sells internet-connected thermometers that are a far cry from the kind once made with mercury and glass. The thermometers sync up with a smartphone app that allows consumers to track their fevers and symptoms, making it especially attractive to parents of young children.

The data showed Clorox which ZIP codes around the country had increases in fevers. The company then directed more ads to those areas, assuming that households there may be in the market for products like its disinfecting wipes. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends disinfecting surfaces to help prevent the flu or its spread.

Kinsa, a San Francisco company that has raised about $29 million from venture capitalists like Kleiner Perkins since it was founded in 2012, says its thermometers are in more than 500,000 American households. It has promoted the usefulness of its “illness data,” which it says is aggregated and contains no identifying personal information before being passed along to other companies.

It is unique, Kinsa says, because it comes straight from someone’s household in real time. People don’t have to visit a doctor, search their symptoms on Google or post to Facebook about their fever for the company to know where a spike might be occurring.

“The challenge with Google search or social media or mining any of those applications is you’re taking a proxy signal — you’re taking someone talking about illness rather than actual illness,” said Inder Singh, the founder and chief executive of Kinsa. Search queries and social media can also be complicated by news coverage of flu season, he said, while data from the C.D.C. is often delayed and comes from hospitals and clinics rather than homes.

The so-called internet of things is becoming enmeshed in many households, bringing with it a new level of convenience along with growing concerns about privacy.

Makers of smart televisions like Sony have put software on their sets that track what people are watching and allow advertisers to target other devices in their homes. Roku sells boxes that stream television along with advertising aimed at viewers. And there are smart speakers from the likes of Amazon and Google.

Amazon has submitted a patent application, recently granted, outlining how the company could recommend chicken soup or cough drops to people who use its Echo device if it detects symptoms like coughing and sniffling when they speak to it, according to a report by CNET. It could even suggest a visit to the movies after discerning boredom. Other patents submitted by the company have focused on how it could suggest products to people based on keywords in their conversations.

Christine Bannan, the consumer protection counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said that even though Kinsa appeared to be using the information in a privacy-compliant manner, its business model highlights the need for federal regulation around how consumer data is handled.

“Ultimately there should be a more uniform standard and it shouldn’t be up to the whims of each company,” she said. “It’s less of a privacy question and more of an ethical question on what we think is acceptable for targeting people who are ill and what safeguards we want to have around that.”

Kinsa sells its data to other companies under the name Kinsa Insights. While Mr. Singh declined to share the names of other customers, citing confidentiality agreements, he said other companies had used the data to target advertising. It has also been used by pharmacies and manufacturers that make and distribute medicines and cough and cold products to keep retailers’ shelves full with flu-related products when fevers spike in certain areas, he said.

One model of Kinsa’s thermometer plugs straight into phones, while another child-friendly version looks like Elmo from “Sesame Street.” The company said that most app users opt to share their location and that Kinsa does not link the information to phone numbers or email addresses.

“We take data from our users, we aggregate it, we do all sorts of machine-learning techniques with it and combine it with other data sets and what we ultimately get is a signal,” Mr. Singh said. “That’s on a ZIP code basis and county-by-county basis.”

He said the data provided unique insight into flu-related illness in specific areas. “We can tell you if it’s high or low, whether it’s rising, if it’s bigger than the three- or five- year average, when it’s going to peak and how severe the symptoms are, too,” Mr. Singh said.

Clorox used that information to increase digital ad spending to sicker areas and pull back in places that were healthier. Consumer interactions with Clorox’s disinfectant ads increased by 22 percent with the data, according to a Kinsa Insights case study that tracked performance between November 2017 and March of this year. That number was arrived at by measuring the number of times an ad was clicked on, the amount of time a person spent with the ad and other undisclosed metrics, according to Vikram Sarma, senior director of marketing in Clorox’s cleaning division.

Being able to target ads in this way is a big shift from even seven years ago, when the onset of cold and cough season meant buying 12 weeks of national TV ads that “would be irrelevant for the majority of the population,” Mr. Sarma said. The flu ultimately reaches the whole country each year, but it typically breaks out heavily in one region first and then spreads slowly to others.

While social media offered new opportunities, there has been “a pretty big lag” between tweets about the flu or flulike symptoms and the aggregation of that data for marketers to use, he said.

“What this does is help us really target vulnerable populations where we have a clear signal about outbreaks,” Mr. Sarma said.

Mr. Singh, who was an executive vice president at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, said that Kinsa worked only with clients that can help with its mission of preventing the spread of illness through early detection. It made sense to work with Clorox, he said, because of the C.D.C. recommendation about disinfecting.

While Kinsa has a public health mission, other smart-device companies may not have similar mind-sets, Ms. Bannan said.

“I can just think of how cigarette and alcohol companies could use strategies like this, or other industries that could really have more harmful effects on people,” she said.

Kinsa can make recommendations to individuals in certain situations, Mr. Singh said, pointing to its partnership with Teladoc, a telemedicine company. There is no financial arrangement between Kinsa and Teladoc but the two companies have an agreement that allows people with both apps to transfer their illness history from Kinsa to a Teladoc doctor, he said.

“We’ve made the call that we don’t want to target the individual unless the individual is going to be helped by the intervention,” Mr. Singh said. “So for example if you have a newborn who has a fever, you need to see the doctor right away and if it’s 3 a.m., I’m very happy to present you the option to talk to a telemedicine doctor.”

“To me,” he added, “that is not advertising in the strict sense of advertising.”

Donald G. McNeil Jr. contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/23/b...ne-clorox.html





GM’s Data Mining is Just the Beginning of the in-Car Advertising Blitz

The next data minefield is your car
Andrew J. Hawkins

It wasn’t until The Detroit Free Press reported on General Motors’ radio-tracking program — which monitored the listening habits of 90,000 drivers in the Los Angeles and Chicago areas for three months in late 2017 — that it became clear that the future of targeted advertising in cars is… well, it’s practically already here.

GM captured minuted details such as station selection, volume level, and ZIP codes of vehicle owners, and then used the car’s built-in Wi-Fi signal to upload the data to its servers. The goal was to determine the relationship between what drivers listen to and what they buy and then turn around and sell the data to advertisers and radio operators. And it got really specific: GM tracked a driver listening to country music who stopped at a Tim Horton’s restaurant. (No data on that donut order, though.)

GM says the whole concept is still theoretical for now. No one’s data has been sold (or “licensed,” as GM prefers to call it). But GM spokesperson James Cain says that connected vehicle data can help develop more accurate ways to measure radio listenership. That could prove useful to the terrestrial radio industry, which continues to lose territory and ad dollars to digital streaming services like YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music. And GM sounds happy with the results.

“Our proof of concept has generated interest in the advertising and broadcast communities,” Cain says. “But we don’t have any new projects to announce at this time.”

Today, radio advertising is slapdash. The ads we hear when we turn on the radio are the result of a system that assigns listenership to specific radio channels, which experts say can be inaccurate and error-prone. Those errors can lead to one station charging more for ads than another, even though the lesser one has a better or bigger audience.

But in the future, with data like GM is collecting, in-car advertising can be more targeted and based on specific consumer habits, akin to the ads you see in your Instagram feed. The radio industry probably won’t be able to reverse its declining number of listeners, but better data might let stations change programming or more accurately reflect what is popular with listeners, says Michael Ramsey, a mobility analyst at Gartner. “GM just is showing one of the many ways its telematics data can be used to make money,” Ramsey says.

The experiment underscores how our cars have become rolling listening posts. They can track our phone calls, log our text messages, answer our voice commands, and, yes, even record our radio stations. And automakers, local governments, retailers, insurers, and tech companies want to leverage that data as best they can, especially as cars begin to become more automated and transform into self-driving shuttles.

According to research firm McKinsey, connected cars create up to 600GB of data per day — the equivalent of more than 100 hours of HD video every 60 minutes — and self-driving cars are expected to generate more than 150 times that amount. The value of this data is expected to reach more than $1.5 trillion by the year 2030, McKinsey says.

In the near term, though, privacy advocates worry that GM has taken the first steps toward surveilling unwitting customers. The automaker says that customers who use connected services must first opt in by accepting the automaker’s terms of use describing how GM uses connected vehicle data. But John Simpson, director of Consumer Watchdog’s Privacy and Technology Project, says those terms are “likely to be vague and not terribly descriptive so that people might not really understand what is going on and what is being gathered about them.”

He adds, “We would all be much better off if GM simply stuck to selling cars and improving their vehicles, particularly with an eye toward improving safety.”

The Detroit Free Press report focused on a presentation by Saejin Park, director of global digital transformation at GM, at a September 12th meeting of the Association of National Advertisers.

“We can tell if they listened to it to the end,” Park said at the conference, according to WARC, a global digital subscription service that attended the conference and prepared a report on it. “Or, in the middle of the commercial, did they change it to another station?” Park added, illustrating the types of outcomes yielded by this test.

The experiment lasted from November 2017 through January 2018, and it showed, for example, that different GM nameplates may be associated with a certain psychological profile. The owner of a Cadillac Escalade, for example, “might be more likely to listen to 101.5. But someone else might be driving a GMC Yukon — same-sized vehicle, but a different brand — would be more likely to listen to 101.1,” Park said.

In another example, a driver listened to a country music channel often and stopped at a Tim Horton’s restaurant. GM wondered whether that driver might be influenced to stop at a McDonald’s instead if advertisers pitched, say, a new coffee drink on that same radio channel.

“We’re looking for ways to use these kinds of datasets,” Park said at the conference. “It’s a complicated, complex problem, and I don’t know what the answer is. But GM is really interested in finding out what the potential path could be.”

Buyers for that data are likely to be limited, though. Record label and music industry sources basically shrugged when they were informed of the data GM was collecting from its vehicle fleet. Streaming services like Spotify are widely seen as having some of the best data for advertisers, not car companies.

“Aside from being potentially useful for label promo and marketing folks, generally, the feeling of folks in the music biz is listening to music via terrestrial radio is declining, thanks to in-dash streaming apps,” said one music industry VP, who requested anonymity to speak candidly about the GM study. “Just overall less important to the music world.”

Still, GM’s use of connected car data is worrisome to market research companies that gather and sell information based on listener habits. “Data brokers are scared. It’s terrifying,” an executive at a music market research firm said. The executive also noted it would be difficult for GM or others to pinpoint the actual person controlling the radio in the vehicle when it could be a passenger or a child making those listening decisions. “Who is making the decisions in the car? Who are they trying to influence?”

Terrestrial radio isn’t irrelevant: 90 percent of Americans over the age of 12 listen to AM/FM radio at least once a week, according to the Pew Research Center. But that number is down 2 percent from 2009, and the revenue side of the radio dial continues to slide, down to $20.9 million in 2017 from $21.8 million in 2016. When asked if GM’s collection of radio-listening data was meant to level the playing field for terrestrial radio, Cain reframes the question.

“Another way to look at it is there are more than 15,000 terrestrial radio stations on the air in the United States across all formats, and somewhere around $18 billion in annual advertising is spent on the medium,” he says. “Improving audience measurement can benefit parties on both sides of the ledger.”

GM is ahead of its competitors in some ways. Not only is it tracking drivers’ radio habits, but the Detroit-based auto giant is also pioneering efforts to bring more services — and more brands — to the vehicle’s dash screen. Last year, around the same time as the radio study, GM unveiled a new service called Marketplace in which vehicle owners can pre-purchase coffee and gas or make restaurant reservations, all from the infotainment screen. GM called it “the automotive industry’s first commerce platform for on-demand reservations and purchases of goods and services.”

GM is certainly not alone in thinking about how it can monetize every aspect of vehicle ownership. Earlier this year, a Santa Clara, California-based company called Telenav announced a new product that it claims will revolutionize driving.

It boiled down to this: car companies that wanted to offer cool new options to consumers, like enhanced navigation or remote access, but didn’t want to charge them exorbitant fees, could instead buy Telenav’s software development kit (SDK) that would display advertisements on their vehicle’s center console screen. In exchange for free access to new features, consumers would have to view a few seconds of an ad for relevant companies like Shell or Starbucks. It was the automotive version of Pandora Radio, in which users get to stream hours of free music with a smattering of commercials that they can’t skip.

Clearly, this is where the automotive world was headed. As cars become more connected, more technology-focused, and more autonomous, it was only a matter of time before they become more branded. In some sense, the cars of the future will be the inverse of NASCAR racing cars: instead of being wrapped in corporate logos, the brand names will on the inside, facing us.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/17/...rtising-future





Smile! The Secretive Business of Facial-Recognition Software in Retail Stores
Nick Tabor

Have you been to Madison Square Garden recently? Or Kennedy International Airport? If so, there’s a good chance that you were photographed by a security camera. Depending on where you were and the technology being used, your face may have been analyzed by bots and checked against a database of criminals and “known shoplifters.” It doesn’t need to have been MSG, either: For all we know, the same technology could also be in use at dozens of other places around New York City, from department stores to megachurches, but no one can say for sure except the companies supplying the software.

Facial-recognition software, which has been in development since the 1960s and has been gaining popularity with police for more than a decade, has taken off with retailers and event spaces during the last couple of years, consultants say. It’s marketed to them as an unparalleled tool for cutting down on shoplifting, and sold to the public as a security tool — helping identify would-be terrorists at sports games, for instance, or protecting consumers against identity theft by making sure that they are who they say they are. It’s also almost completely unregulated.

“The technology is in some environments where I’m sure millions of people, in a year, or even in a month, are subjected to it,” said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “Nobody has any idea that it’s happening, or what data is being collected, or how it’s being stored, or for how long, or who has access to it.”

On Wednesday, New York City Councilman Ritchie Torres, who represents the Bronx, introduced a bill aimed at changing this. It would require businesses to start telling the public if they’re using facial recognition, how long they’re storing it, and who they’re sharing it with. Torres said he was inspired to put the bill out after he learned about Madison Square Garden’s use of facial recognition in the spring.

“It’s both a no-brainer and a small measure — a baby step,” Lieberman said. “I think it’s necessary but not sufficient.”

Adrian Weidmann, a retail consultant based in Minneapolis, said most stores, from bodegas to shopping malls, already have most of the technology in place to start tracking customers: not just the scores of security cameras in an average big-box store, but also the cameras inside digital signs and kiosks, which show whether shoppers are paying attention to ads. “It’s the same camera lens,” Weidmann said. All it takes to upgrade is a piece of software. The software often comes with a database of criminals or known shoplifters, which comes from combining the shoplifter registries of participating stores, said Clare Garvie, who studies the technology and its privacy implications at Georgetown Law. It’s unclear exactly what it takes to be put in these databases, let alone how to get your name removed.

Peter Trepp, CEO of the facial-recognition software company FaceFirst, told BuzzFeed in August that retail now accounted for nearly half of his company’s business. “If you think about the top 40 or top 80 companies you know, almost all of them are thinking about facial recognition, or they’ve all at least looked into it,” he said. (FaceFirst declined to make Trepp or any other representatives available for this story.) Trepp also told the Sports Network, a Canadian publication, last year that his company had been marketing to sports stadiums and teams and was “very much in play” with a number of them, but wouldn’t give details.

The retailers and venues themselves are almost universally secretive about what they’re doing. The American Civil Liberties Union, of which Lieberman’s organization is a regional branch, polled the country’s 20 largest retailers earlier this year — substituting Disney for Amazon, since Amazon doesn’t have many physical stores — about whether they routinely photograph customers. Only one, the supermarket conglomerate that owns Food Lion and Giant, said it did not.

Walmart has admitted that it tested the technology in 2015 but decided it wasn’t profitable enough. Target also told BuzzFeed that it had tested it but wouldn’t say where or when. And in 2016, Saks Fifth Avenue told The Guardian that it was using the technology in its Canadian stores.

Torres’s bill, if it gains any traction, is likely to come up against a serious lobbying effort by the tech industry. Several states, including Alaska, Connecticut, Montana, New Hampshire, and Washington, have considered similar privacy laws within the last couple of years, but none but Washington have followed through. (Illinois and Texas also have long-standing privacy laws in place.) Trade groups and companies like Facebook and Google have come out in full force. Facebook has been especially aggressive, according to a report from the Center for Public Integrity.

The interest of Google and Facebook in unregulated facial-recognition systems in retail settings may not be entirely about their concern for the security of brick-and-mortar stores. In the future, facial-recognition technology could also be used for marketing, helping stores track customers in real life the way online retailers track them with cookies. There’s no evidence that this is happening so far, but Weidmann, the consultant, said that he’s already seeing companies merge their security and marketing divisions. On a project with Home Depot last year, for instance, he helped the marketing team use security footage to track customers through stores and figure out what products they were browsing. “Nobody had ever thought about linking the two,” he said. “I was able to get a much wider lens.”

He believes that Amazon is leading the way for all major retailers, brick-and-mortar shops included. “They’re all in a panic,” he said. “How do we bring relevance back to our brick-and-mortar?” Facial recognition, he said, along with location tracking on smartphones, could make the “physical cookie” possible.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/...ology-too.html





ACLU Demands DHS Disclose its Use of Facial-Recognition Tech

The civil liberties advocacy group's request comes after reports that Amazon pitched ICE on using its recognition software.
Ben Fox Rubin

The American Civil Liberties Union on Wednesday called on the Department of Homeland Security to disclose its use of facial-recognition software.

The nonprofit also again pushed for an end to law enforcement's use of the technology.

The ACLU's statement follows reports Tuesday that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials met this summer with Amazon. Around that time, the company pitched the agency on potentially using its facial-recognition software, called Rekognition, along with other Amazon products. A handful of US police agencies are already trying out Rekognition as part of their crime-fighting and investigative efforts.

A representative for DHS didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. ICE, which enforces immigration laws inside the US except at the borders, is part of DHS.

"We participated with a number of other technology companies in technology 'boot camps' sponsored by McKinsey Company, where a number of technologies were discussed, including Rekognition," an Amazon Web Services spokesperson said in a statement. "As we usually do, we followed up with customers who were interested in learning more about how to use our services (Immigration and Customs Enforcement was one of those organizations where there was follow-up discussion)."

The ACLU since May has criticized Amazon's marketing of its facial-recognition software to law enforcement and has asked Congress and the public to debate the technology's use. The advocacy group has argued that facial-recognition technology has the potential of being misused by police agencies and of misidentifying people. Several Amazon employees have sided with the ACLU's position, demanding that their company stop offering Rekognition to law enforcement.

However, when asked at a conference last week about Amazon's work with the government, CEO Jeff Bezos said his company will continue to support the US Defense Department.

"If big tech companies are going to turn their backs on the Department of Defense, we are in big trouble," he said there. "This is a great country, and it does need to be defended."

ICE doesn't currently have a contract with Amazon but said Homeland Security has used facial-recognition technology to help with criminal investigations, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. Both Amazon and ICE told the publication that outreach discussions with potential vendors are standard practice.

The ACLU said Wednesday it submitted a public records request to DHS, asking for information about its purchase of facial-recognition software, as well as records on any meetings with vendors marketing the technology.

"ICE should not be using face recognition for immigration or law enforcement," Neema Singh Guliani, the ACLU's senior legislative counsel, said in a statement. "Congress has never authorized such use and should immediately take steps to ensure that federal agencies put the brakes on the use of face recognition for immigration or law enforcement purposes."
https://www.cnet.com/news/aclu-deman...ognition-tech/





Big Brother is Being Increasingly Outsourced to Silicon Valley, Says Report

Immigrant and privacy activists are detailing the involvement of big tech–especially Amazon–with the military, ICE, and local law enforcement.
Sean Captain

The federal and local governments have long relied on private companies for defense and law enforcement technologies, from Lockheed Martin jetfighters to Booz Allen Hamilton data analysis. But increasingly, the government is expanding beyond the usual defense contractors to the company that also provides free shipping and online TV.

“The . . . thing that was shocking for me was to understand just how the federal authorizations are allowing Amazon to have such a monopoly over the storage of government information,” says Jacinta Gonzalez, field organizer for immigrant advocacy group Mijente. Along with the National Immigration Project and the Immigrant Defense Project, Mijente funded a new report entitled, “Who’s Behind ICE?: The Tech and Data Companies Fueling Deportations.”

Its findings are based on documents such as contracts, memoranda, and corporate financial reports–which are publicly available but take a lot of digging to decipher. (We’ve asked Amazon for feedback on the accuracy of the report, but have yet to receive a response.)

While Amazon plays the leading role, the report also details the involvement of companies including Peter Thiel’s Palantir, NEC, and Thomson Reuters in storing, transferring, and analyzing data on both undocumented residents and U.S. citizens. The U.S. government is moving its databases from federal facilities to cloud providers, especially Amazon Web Services (AWS), raising concerns about accountability.

“There is a transfer of discretion and power from the public sector to the private sector in the form of these contracted technological services,” says Shankar Narayan, director of the Technology and Liberty Project at the ACLU in Washington State, which was not involved in the report. Based in Seattle, Narayan tracks Amazon’s growing role in law enforcement, such as its facial recognition tech of disputed accuracy, called Rekognition.

Groups like Mijente draw attention to the extent of data gathering used by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local law enforcement. “People on the ground have been more and more [saying to us] ‘How do they have information about my taxes?’ How do they have information about where I drive my car?'” says Gonzalez.

She’s also seen, and experienced, the gathering of biometric data in public. “When I was working in New Orleans back in 2013 and 2014 . . . ICE was stopping anyone that looks Latino,” claims Gonzalez. “And they were handcuffing them and fingerprinting them using mobile biometric devices.”

Gonzalez herself, a Mexico-born U.S. citizen, was transferred to immigration custody after being arrested at a March 2016 civil disobedience protest against then-candidate Donald Trump in Phoenix, where she now works. (She refused to provide information to authorities after her arrest to clarify her legal status.)

Last November, Mijente joined other organizations in a lawsuit demanding that ICE provide information on its abandoned plans for a series of immigration raids in several US cities called “Operation Mega.”

ICE has a mandate to enforce US immigration law, but it’s faced widespread condemnation for tactics including the separation of families at the US border. Gonzalez charges hypocrisy in how ICE uses its substantial technological tools. “They have technologies to be able to surveil you,” she says. “But somehow they can’t keep track of your children when they’re being separated from you and ripped out of your arms.”

Mistrust of how governments use technology and data is exacerbated by a lack of transparency, say activists. “I think we’ve raised that concern, for example, around face surveillance,” says Narayan. “It’s remote, it’s undetectable, it could be ubiquitous, and the government doesn’t even have to really determine who they’re going to follow around in advance.” But there’s reason to fear that this surveillance will extend beyond immigration enforcement and crime-fighting, he says, pointing to a history of political surveillance from civil rights leaders in the 1960s to New York City Muslim communities after 9/11.

Getting information is even harder now that the technology and data are in private hands, he claims. “That’s the dynamic that makes these technologies hard to even detect, let alone to put some standards of accountability around,” says Narayan. “You don’t get to crack open that black box, because these entities will use trade secret [protections], will use the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to prevent entities from coming in and testing [their] products.”

“We’re really getting past the point of no return in terms of our ability to put safeguards in place to hold these large corporations accountable,” he says.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90255355...ey-says-report





Government Spyware Vendor Left Customer, Victim Data Online for Everyone to See

The Germany-based spyware startup Wolf Intelligence exposed its own data, including surveillance target’s information, passports scans of its founder and family, and recordings of meetings.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

A startup that claims to sell surveillance and hacking technologies to governments around the world left nearly all its data—including information taken from infected targets and victims—exposed online, according to a security firm who found the data.

Wolf Intelligence, a Germany-based spyware company that made headlines for sending a bodyguard to Mauritania and prompting an international incident after the local government detained the bodyguard as collateral for a deal went wrong, left a trove of its own data exposed online. The leak exposed 20 gigabytes of data, including recordings of meetings with customers, a scan of a passport belonging to the company’s founder, scans of the founder’s credit cards, and surveillance targets’ data, according to researchers.

Security researchers from CSIS Security discovered the data on an unprotected command and control server and a public Google Drive folder. The researchers showed screenshots of the leaked data during a talk at the Virus Bulletin conference in Montreal, which Motherboard attended.

“This is a very stupid story in the sense that you would think that a company actually selling surveillance tools like this would know more about operational security,” CSIS co-founder Peter Kruse told Motherboard in an interview. “They exposed themselves—literally everything was available publicly on the internet.”

In an online chat, Wolf Intelligence founder Manish Kumar told me that it wasn’t his company that left the data online, but a reseller he refused to identify. He also said that he plans to sue CSIS for hacking his reseller; CSIS is adamant that it did not hack anything, as everything was exposed and open to anyone

“They claim wrong that it’s for hacking innocent people, and damage our image.” Kumar said, but refused to answer additional questions about who was the reseller, and who his customers are.

CSIS researcher Benoît Ancel told Motherboard the researchers “have many indications that it was not a reseller,” and was instead a mistake by Wolf Intelligence. To support this, he shared pictures from the servers such as a screenshot of an exposed database that shows one of Kumar’s cellphone numbers and a series of intercepted text messages, and a screenshot of a Slack conversation between Kumar and one of his employees.

Wolf Intelligence is part of the so-called “lawful intercept” industry. This is a relatively unregulated—but legal—part of the surveillance market that provides hacking and spy software to law enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world. Hacking Team, FinFisher, and NSO Group are the more well-known companies in this sector. According to a recent estimate, this market is expected to be worth $3.3 billion in 2022.

These companies generally sell spyware that infects computers and cell phones with the goal of extracting evidence for police or intelligence operations, which can be particularly useful when authorities need to get around encryption and have a warrant to access the content of a target’s communications. But in the past, companies like Hacking Team, FinFisher, and NSO Group have all sold their malware to authoritarian regimes who have used it against human rights defenders, activists, and journalists.

As demand for these technologies has grown, many smaller players have entered the market. Some of them have made embarrassing mistakes that have helped cybersecurity researchers expose them.

This mistake, however, may be the worst we’ve ever seen.

“Maybe they were thinking that the server was secure, I don't know, but it was definitely stupid,” Kruse said. “Everything was just floating around on the internet. That's why I thought this story was too good to be true.”

Kruse’s colleagues Benoît Ancel and Aleksejs Kuprins found the data as they were investigating a banking malware sold on the internet underground and used by several cybercriminals, the two said during a talk at the Virus Bulletin conference in Montreal in early October. They said that banking malware had shared infrastructure with a malicious Remote Access Trojan or RAT.

The researchers said they were able to find a Windows, an Android, and an iOS variant of that RAT, and figured out that it was produced by Wolf Intelligence. They also found data belonging to several victims in countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. One of the victims, they said, is a human rights defender.

The malware itself, according to the researchers, is pretty rudimentary.

“It’s very shitty and it’s just copy paste from open source projects,” Ancel told Motherboard in a phone interview, referring specifically to Wolf Intelligence’s iOS malware. Motherboard did not independently analyze the malware, and Kumar stopped responding to Motherboard soon after I began talking to him.

During the public presentation in Montreal, Ancel said that Kumar “seems to be the kind of criminal who try to scam people with a shitty product.”

Ancel and Kuprins are not the first to publicly question the quality of the Wolf Intelligence’s products and to slam its founder.

“Manish is a walking scam,” security researcher Agostino Specchiarello told me, who once met with Kumar to consider a business deal with him. “He used to claim that stuff made by others was his.”

In early 2017, Hacking Team’s CEO David Vincenzetti told Motherboard that Kumar is a "criminal of the worst kind."

Yet, Hacking Team worked with Kumar once, according to a former company employee who asked to remain anonymous to discuss details of his previous job.

Kumar did not respond to questions regarding his deals with Hacking Team.

The CSIS researchers said that after their talk at Virus Bulletin, Wolf Intelligence shut down the exposed servers.

“They are here and still in the business,” Ancel told me.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...im-data-online





Apple Just Killed The 'GrayKey' iPhone Passcode Hack
Thomas Brewster

Apple has managed to prevent the hottest iPhone hacking company in the world from doing its thing.

Uncloaked by Forbes in March, Atlanta-based Grayshift promised governments its GrayKey tech could crack the passcodes of the latest iOS models, right up to the iPhone X. From then on, Apple continued to invest in security in earnest, continually putting up barriers for Grayshift to jump over. Grayshift continued to grow, however, securing contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Secret Service.

Now, though, Apple has put up what may be an insurmountable wall. Multiple sources familiar with the GrayKey tech tell Forbes the device can no longer break the passcodes of any iPhone running iOS 12 or above. On those devices, GrayKey can only do what’s called a “partial extraction,” sources from the forensic community said. That means police using the tool can only draw out unencrypted files and some metadata, such as file sizes and folder structures.

Previously, GrayKey used “brute forcing” techniques to guess passcodes and had found a way to get around Apple’s protections preventing such repeat guesses. But no more. And if it’s impossible for GrayKey, which counts an ex-Apple security engineer among its founders, it’s a safe assumption few can break iPhone passcodes.

Police officer Captain John Sherwin of the Rochester Police Department in Minnesota said of the claim iOS 12 was preventing GrayKey from unlocking iPhones: “That’s a fairly accurate assessment as to what we have experienced.

“Give it time and I am sure a ‘workaround’ will be developed ... and then the cycle will repeat. Someone is always building a better mousetrap, whether it’s Apple or someone trying to defeat device security.”

Neither Apple nor Grayshift had responded to requests for comment.

A mystery fix

Though it’s clear Apple has locked GrayShift out, no one actually knows just how the iPhone maker has done it. Vladimir Katalov, chief of forensic tech provider Elcomsoft, bas repeatedly uncovered weaknesses in Apple technology. But he was stumped too.

“No idea. It could be everything from better kernel protection to stronger configuration-profile installation restrictions,” he suggested. The kernel is the core part of the operating system, from which the rest of iOS launches. Configuration profiles typically allow individuals and companies to customize the ways in which iOS apps work.

Grayshift could do without any hiccups. It’s just gone global. Wired revealed last week that a number of U.K. police agencies are now using GrayKeys.

Meanwhile, Apple chief Tim Cook visited Europe this week, talking up the need for all tech companies to improve privacy for users.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/riverbe.../#1363295942ae





Apple’s Tim Cook Makes Blistering Attack On the “Data Industrial Complex”
Natasha Lomas

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has joined the chorus of voices warning that data itself is being weaponized again people and societies — arguing that the trade in digital data has exploded into a “data industrial complex”.

Cook did not namecheck the adtech elephants in the room: Google, Facebook and other background data brokers that profit from privacy-hostile business models. But his target was clear.

“Our own information — from the everyday to the deeply personal — is being weaponized against us with military efficiency,” warned Cook. “These scraps of data, each one harmless enough on its own, are carefully assembled, synthesized, traded and sold.

“Taken to the extreme this process creates an enduring digital profile and lets companies know you better than you may know yourself. Your profile is a bunch of algorithms that serve up increasingly extreme content, pounding our harmless preferences into harm.”

“We shouldn’t sugarcoat the consequences. This is surveillance,” he added.

Cook was giving the keynote speech at the 40th International Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners (ICDPPC), which is being held in Brussels this year, right inside the European Parliament’s Hemicycle.

“Artificial intelligence is one area I think a lot about,” he told an audience of international data protection experts and policy wonks, which included the inventor of the World Wide Web itself, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, another keynote speaker at the event.

“At its core this technology promises to learn from people individually to benefit us all. But advancing AI by collecting huge personal profiles is laziness, not efficiency,” Cook continued.

“For artificial intelligence to be truly smart it must respect human values — including privacy. If we get this wrong, the dangers are profound. We can achieve both great artificial intelligence and great privacy standards. It is not only a possibility — it is a responsibility.”

That sense of responsibility is why Apple puts human values at the heart of its engineering, Cook said.

In the speech, which we previewed yesterday, he also laid out a positive vision for technology’s “potential for good” — when combined with “good policy and political will”.

“We should celebrate the transformative work of the European institutions tasked with the successful implementation of the GDPR. We also celebrate the new steps taken, not only here in Europe but around the world — in Singapore, Japan, Brazil, New Zealand. In many more nations regulators are asking tough questions — and crafting effective reform.

“It is time for the rest of the world, including my home country, to follow your lead.”

Cook said Apple is “in full support of a comprehensive, federal privacy law in the United States” — making the company’s clearest statement yet of support for robust domestic privacy laws, and earning himself a burst of applause from assembled delegates in the process.

We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right. No matter what country you live in, that right should be protected in keeping with four essential principles:

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) October 24, 2018



Cook argued for a US privacy law to prioritize four things:

1. data minimization — “the right to have personal data minimized”, saying companies should “challenge themselves” to de-identify customer data or not collect it in the first place

2. transparency — “the right to knowledge”, saying users should “always know what data is being collected and what it is being collected for, saying it’s the only way to “empower users to decide what collection is legitimate and what isn’t”. “Anything less is a shame,” he added

3. the right to access — saying companies should recognize that “data belongs to users”, and it should be made easy for users to get a copy of, correct and delete their personal data

4. the right to security — saying “security is foundational to trust and all other privacy rights”


“We see vividly, painfully how technology can harm, rather than help,” he continued, arguing that platforms can “magnify our worst human tendencies… deepen divisions, incite violence and even undermine our shared sense or what is true or false”.

“This crisis is real. Those of us who believe in technology’s potential for good must not shrink from this moment”, he added, saying the company hopes “to work with you as partners”, and that: “Our missions are closely aligned.”

He also made a sideswipe at tech industry efforts to defang privacy laws — saying that some companies will “endorse reform in public and then resist and undermine it behind closed doors”.

“They may say to you our companies can never achieve technology’s true potential if there were strengthened privacy regulations. But this notion isn’t just wrong it is destructive — technology’s potential is and always must be rooted in the faith people have in it. In the optimism and the creativity that stirs the hearts of individuals. In its promise and capacity to make the world a better place.”

“It’s time to face facts,” Cook added. “We will never achieve technology’s true potential without the full faith and confidence of the people who use it.”

Opening the conference before the Apple CEO took to the stage, Europe’s data protection supervisor Giovanni Buttarelli argued that digitization is driving a new generational shift in the respect for privacy — saying there is an urgent need for regulators and indeed societies to agree on and establish “a sustainable ethics for a digitised society”.

“The so-called ‘privacy paradox’ is not that people have conflicting desires to hide and to expose. The paradox is that we have not yet learned how to navigate the new possibilities and vulnerabilities opened up by rapid digitization,” Buttarelli argued.

“To cultivate a sustainable digital ethics, we need to look, objectively, at how those technologies have affected people in good ways and bad; We need a critical understanding of the ethics informing decisions by companies, governments and regulators whenever they develop and deploy new technologies.”

The EU’s data protection supervisor told an audience largely made up of data protection regulators and policy wonks that laws that merely set a minimum standard are not enough, including the EU’s freshly painted GDPR.

“We need to ask whether our moral compass been suspended in the drive for scale and innovation,” he said. “At this tipping point for our digital society, it is time to develop a clear and sustainable moral code.”

“We do not have a[n ethical] consensus in Europe, and we certainly do not have one at a global level. But we urgently need one,” he added.

“Not everything that is legally compliant and technically feasible is morally sustainable,” Buttarelli continued, pointing out that “privacy has too easily been reduced to a marketing slogan.

“But ethics cannot be reduced to a slogan.”

“For us as data protection authorities, I believe that ethics is among our most pressing strategic challenges,” he added.

“We have to be able to understand technology, and to articulate a coherent ethical framework. Otherwise how can we perform our mission to safeguard human rights in the digital age?”
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/24/ap...trial-complex/





What Happens When Telecom Companies Search Your Home for Piracy

Adam Lackman ran TVAddons, a site hosting unofficial addons for Kodi media player. A legal team representing powerful telecom and media companies—Bell and Rogers included—searched his home and sued him for piracy. Now, he's fighting to make it to trial.
Jordan Pearson

When 30-year-old web developer Adam Lackman heard loud knocking on his Montreal apartment door around 8 AM, he thought he was about to be robbed.

On that morning on June 12, 2017, Lackman looked through the peephole and saw men he didn’t recognize. They called out his name. He didn’t answer. “Scared for his life,” he called the police and, he said, hid in a closet holding a knife while he waited for the cops to arrive.

When the police showed up after about 20 minutes, according to Lackman, he opened the door and was met by lawyers, a bailiff, and, rather ominously, a locksmith. Seeing that he wasn’t about to be mugged, the police left.

One of the lawyers represented some of Canada’s most powerful telecommunications and media companies: Bell, Rogers, Vidéotron, and TVA. The other was there to be an independent observer on behalf of the court. Lackman was told that he was being sued for copyright infringement for operating TVAddons, a website that hosted user-created apps for streaming video over the internet. The crew was there with a civil court order allowing them to search the place.

The search was only supposed to go from 8 AM to 8 PM but it ended at midnight. The team copied laptops, hard drives, and any other devices they found, and demanded logins and passwords. Lackman, who called a lawyer in to represent him, was questioned for nine hours by the opposing counsel. They presented him with a list of names of people suspected of being digital pirates in Canada and asked him to snitch. He didn’t recognize the names, he told me, and said nothing.

“They ransacked the place,” Lackman recalled when I interviewed him in his new Montreal apartment (the move was unconnected to the litigation, he said). “This order just allowed them to go through everything; my underwear, my socks. At that point, I had no privacy.”

The lawyers took Lackman’s laptop to be copied and returned it days later. Using the login information he handed over, a court-authorized computer technician took TVAddons offline and made its Twitter account with 100,000 followers private, locking Lackman out in the process.

That was just the beginning—Lackman’s case still hasn’t gone to trial.

Now, Lackman is embroiled in expensive legal proceedings for a case that pits him against several telecom corporations and media companies, ultimately to answer: Was TVAddons a platform for innovative streaming apps, or was it designed to enable piracy?

According to legal experts, Lackman’s experience is an outgrowth of a new and hardcore approach to tackling piracy in Canada led by a handful of powerful companies—among them Rogers, Bell, and Quebecor, the parent company for TVA and Vidéotron. All three have been lobbying the government in various capacities to set up a system for blocking access to piracy sites in Canada, similar to controversial measures undertaken in the UK.

I combed court documents, spoke to Lackman, his lawyer, legal experts, and a lawyer representing the telecom and media companies suing Lackman in order to put together a full picture of what happened to TVAddons—and what it might mean for people and small companies operating in the margins of copyright law.

“Companies like Bell view alternative sources of access to streaming video as a significant competitive threat,” Michael Geist, an internet law professor at the University of Ottawa, told me over the phone. “I would argue that there’s infringing sources and many non-infringing sources [on TVAddons], but that’s seen as a threat if you’re trying to sell TV packages.”

Tamir Israel, an intellectual property lawyer in the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), echoed these sentiments. “Telecommunication companies have become much more aggressive across a few vectors when it comes to addressing piracy in Canada very recently,” he told me.

Geist cautions every upstart entrepreneur of the “sledgehammer” approach taken by telecoms in shutting Lackman down.

What is TVAddons?

Lackman ran TVAddons, a website that hosted unofficial apps (referred to as “addons”) for Kodi, a popular open-source media center that allows users to stream media from their devices and over the internet.

Kodi is explicitly meant to stream legal sources of video online, but due to its open-source nature, the platform can also be used to illegally access copyrighted video. Because of this, pirates sell “fully loaded” Kodi boxes decked out with apps specifically designed to illegally stream video from copyrighted sources, making them a target for litigious rights holders.

In June 2016, Rogers, Bell, Videotron, and TVA (the same companies suing Lackman) sued five sellers of fully loaded Kodi boxes and as part of the ongoing case obtained a court order banning them from selling the devices.

The XBMC Foundation, which maintains Kodi, verifies any addons to its official repository to ensure no piracy products make it onto the platform. But there are also unofficial repositories with their own policies, such as TVAddons.

“In the same way that a journalist these days is probably a blogger before they’re a journalist, people want a place where they can write stuff,” Keith Herrington, an XBMC Foundation board member, told me over the phone. “The most common use of [unofficial repositories] is development purposes.”

TVAddons didn’t host any streams or link to video itself and was a platform for user-generated content, Lackman said, not unlike Facebook, though the content was homebrew Kodi apps and not status updates. Like Kodi more generally, Lackman claims that the addons on his site were aimed at legal streaming.

However, unlike the XBMC Foundation, he took a laissez-faire approach to policing which addons made it onto his site.

“We didn’t even look at the repository; [addons] just got added,” Lackman said. “It’s like every other site: You submit content, and they don’t say that they won’t post your content until they verify it.”

According to Herrington, this “anything-goes environment” made TVAddons a source of constant frustration for the XBMC Foundation. “From an organizational point of view, it’s hard for us to dispute the findings of the organizations that are suing [Lackman].”

Lackman maintains that TVAddons’ purpose was to host addons that “scrape” the many free and legal video streaming services online, such as Kanopy or Pluto TV. The idea, he says, was to avoid ad trackers, popups, malware, and other common online annoyances.

“I never saw this as hurting [rights holders],” Lackman told me. “People run sites that link to content—torrent sites. Those are the people who are stealing the movies.”

There were illegal streams in the mix on TVAddons, although it’s not clear how many. Out of the 1,500 or so apps on the site, the companies suing Lackman offered 12 to the court as examples of apps that they’d tested and found to be streaming copyrighted content. The 12 were part of a “featured” category of apps that Lackman says was auto-populated based on what was popular with users, but the companies suing him argue was curated.

“I agree that there are legal sources of content on the internet, but the evidence that was before the court and our client's position is that that was not the purpose of TVAddons,” Guillaume Lavoie Ste-Marie, a lawyer representing the telecoms and media companies suing Lackman, told me over the phone.

Despite the strained relationship between TVAddons and the XBMC Foundation, Herrington said, “I feel his rights were not well taken care of, and if I was in his shoes I would be up in arms about it.”

How companies search people’s homes like the police

About a week before the search on Lackman’s apartment, Lavoie Ste-Marie and his colleagues convinced a judge in a closed hearing that TVAddons was a site dedicated to piracy, Lackman was responsible, and any possible arguments he might make in his own defense didn’t apply. Lackman wasn’t present to defend himself, nor was he notified of the hearing, according to court records reviewed by Motherboard.

In the hearing, they successfully argued that factors such as Lackman’s offshore company—which he claims owned domain names and had a bank account that was “never used”—and his use of a web service that hides a site’s hosting provider (Lackman says it was the immensely popular service Cloudflare), meant that there was a real risk that Lackman might destroy evidence if they didn’t conduct a surprise search.

The lawyers obtained an injunction that prevented Lackman from operating TVAddons and ordered him to hand over login credentials so that a court-authorized technician could shut down the site and social media accounts.

They also got an “Anton Piller” order, which allowed the lawyers—as well as a supervising agent of the court, bailiffs, and technical experts—to enter his home and search the place for devices, hard drives, and documents, and to preserve any evidence they found.

It’s as close as you’re going to get in civil law to criminal interrogation and seizure

Anton Piller orders are used when a court believes that evidence in a civil case may be destroyed if normal discovery procedure is followed. (They get their name from a 1975 case in the UK that concerned the theft of trade secrets.) They’re considered an extraordinary legal measure: subjects of the search do not get to defend themselves against the accusations beforehand.

Still, they are not criminal search warrants and Lackman did not have to let anybody into his home that morning. But it presented a legal catch-22: if he hadn’t, he would be in breach of a court order and could have been subjected to fines or imprisonment.

“In high school you learn that if someone doesn’t have a warrant, you don’t let them into your house,” Lackman told me. “I didn’t know there was this whole other law where big companies can spend money [on lawyers] and do whatever they want.”

Karim Renno, Lackman’s lawyer, said that an Anton Piller is basically a search and seizure. “It’s as close as you’re going to get in civil law to criminal interrogation and seizure,” Renno told me over the phone.

Lackman’s case isn’t the first time an Anton Piller order was used in Canada in a copyright case. In 2015 a slew of film studios sued the developers of popular Netflix-like torrent streaming service PopcornTime.io. Lavoie Ste-Marie and another lawyer representing the companies suing Lackman personally executed a search and injunction against one of the defendants and coordinated two others simultaneously executed across the country. Like TVAddons, PopcornTime.io was shut down and the site currently redirects to a Motion Picture Association of America web page.

Shortly after the search, a federal judge ruled the search unlawful in a procedural hearing. The questioning was an “interrogation,” the judge said, without the safeguards normally afforded to defendants, and presenting Lackman with a list of names to snitch on was “egregious.” The plaintiffs also did not make a strong enough case that TVAddons was solely intended to enable piracy, the judge decided.

“The Anton Piller order [in Lackman’s case] was problematic just because it was applied in such a heavy-handed way,” Israel told me.

The plaintiffs appealed this decision, and in February a panel of three judges—this time in the federal court of appeals—overturned the previous decision in its entirety. The search was lawful and conducted within legal parameters, the judges agreed. The list of names was only presented to Lackman to “expedite the questioning process,” and “despite a few objectionable questions” the nine-hour question period was not an interrogation, the panel ruled.

Most seriously, the judges decided that the plaintiffs had a strong enough case that TVAddons was designed to infringe copyright to justify the search.

“The [judge that sided with Lackman and the judges that overturned that decision] disagreed on how the TVAddons site was characterized,” Israel said. “There may be mistakes there and that’s a problem because that's a very difficult thing to correct.”

Canadian telecoms are taking an aggressive anti-piracy stance

Lackman is now stuck in a confusing legal quagmire that has implications for anyone accused of enabling piracy in Canada.

Everything that’s happened to him so far has occured before a trial where he can argue the facts of how TVAddons operated, and yet the judge who approved the search order and the judge who upheld it on appeal have already effectively ruled that his website was designed to facilitate piracy.

In the appeal judgement, Lackman was ordered to pay the companies suing him more than $50,000 in legal fees. Lackman is hoping to work out a reasonable payment plan. He is already hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to his own legal team and the debt is mounting, he said.

He’s started a new version of the site that he says only hosts addons that stream legal content. He makes several thousand dollars a month through advertising on the new site, but it hardly makes a dent in his ever-growing debt, he said, and so he’s turned to crowdfunding.

Lackman could still lose at trial, which may happen as soon as next year—if he makes it to trial at all. “I hope to make it to trial, but intentions are nothing without resources,” he told me. “I don’t want to be 40 years old declaring bankruptcy.”

According to Israel, this is the harsh reality of being a small player sued by telecoms and media companies in Canada, where the dominance of the “big three”—Rogers, Bell, and Telus, the latter of which isn’t involved in Lackman’s litigation—is often referred to as a telecom oligopoly.

The case highlights an imbalance of power, Israel said, “where individuals who experience harms don’t have the resources to advance them.”

Deep-pocketed companies, on the other hand, “not only have the resources to pursue [perceived harms] to the point where individuals don’t have the ability to defend themselves, but also to advance mechanisms with fewer safeguards,” Israel said.

One ray of hope for Lackman is that parallel copyright litigation in the US, brought against him and TVAddons by Dish Network, was recently settled on relatively amicable terms. TVAddons agreed to stop hosting addons that allowed users to stream a handful of specific channels, and will implement an expedited copyright takedown process for Dish Network. Any financial aspects to the settlement are confidential, according to Lackman and spokespeople for Dish.

Why can’t a similarly speedy resolution be found and sealed with a handshake in Canada? According to experts in copyright law, there’s a new and major push by industry players in Canada to aggressively quash piracy.

In January, the media arms of Bell, Rogers, and Quebecor formed FairPlay, a coalition of dozens of Canadian media entities lobbying the federal telecom regulator—the CRTC—to implement a system for blocking websites serving pirated content in Canada. At the time, the plan was described by digital rights groups as censorship and “authoritarian overkill,” and average Canadians submitted thousands of comments to the federal telecom regulator expressing discomfort with the idea.

That proposal was rejected by the CRTC on jurisdictional grounds earlier this month, and the regulator noted that pursuing website blocking with a change to the Copyright Act would be more appropriate.

It’s not clear what the status of FairPlay is now. The coalition’s website homepage is currently a placeholder, and spokespeople for the Asian Television Network—which filed the CRTC application on behalf of FairPlay—did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment. Spokespeople for Bell also did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.

It’s possible that the coalition hasn’t totally disbanded, however. Rogers spokesperson Sarah Schmidt told Motherboard in an email that Rogers is still part of the FairPlay coalition.

Regardless, some FairPlay members are already pushing for website blocking—and more—to be enshrined in the Copyright Act, which is currently under review.

“Seeing those powers used in this context is a little concerning, and it’s not just TVAddons—it’s FairPlay and some of the suggestions that have been proposed in the copyright reform context,” Israel told me over the phone.

Bell, in a submission to the Copyright Act review, asked for courts to have the power to make orders that would force “a web host to take down an egregious piracy site, a search engine to delist it, a payment processor to stop collecting money for it, or a registrar to revoke its domain.” Rogers asked for the same in its submission, and gave the example of an internet service provider disabling access to content.

The companies are also asking to criminalize copyright-infringing video streaming—highly relevant to Lackman’s situation. A Bell executive said that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), Canada’s federal police force, should investigate and prioritize piracy investigations at a parliamentary hearing on the Copyright Act in September. The legal remedies offered to the telecoms until now have been “too slow and too cumbersome,” a Rogers executive said at the same hearing.

“I hope the judicial and legislative branches of government don’t fall for their trap,” Lackman told me in a text message regarding Bell and Rogers’ submissions.

If Lackman loses at trial, there’s much more at stake than the fate of one person. According to Geist, a loss could risk cooling off innovation in Canada by up-and-comers who may fear heavy-handed legal reprisal from the powerful incumbents that run the country’s communications infrastructure and in some cases the content that flows through it. Bell and Rogers both own numerous media properties, and Bell owns CraveTV, a Netflix-like streaming service.

Lavoie Ste-Marie disagreed. “As long as it's not a copyright infringing platform I don’t think there’s any problems,” he told me over the phone. “The problem my clients have with TVAddons is that it’s a platform that has the sole purpose to infringe copyright. I don’t know what that has to do with innovation.”

Regardless of how you might characterize the content of TVAddons—infringing or non-infringing—Geist said, “the sledgehammer approach that was used raises concerns for anyone who pushes the envelope with innovative sites and technologies.”

*

The sunny living room of Lackman’s new Montreal apartment seemed worlds away from the 2017 search as described by him and his legal team. The only reminder of the case were two framed prints leaning up against a wall.

They’d been marked for auction by the court, he told me, in a since-abandoned plan to sell his stuff to help cover the more than $50,000 he’s been ordered to pay the companies suing him.

“I have to sit here and look at them every day and wonder what's going to happen,” he said.

Even though the parties are now negotiating a payment plan, uncertainties abound—nobody knows what will happen to Lackman now, least of all him. As his lawyer Renno put it, the case is remarkably still in “very, very early stages.”

And that is the point: in the new Canadian anti-piracy regime led by powerful companies, just being accused of enabling piracy can come with immense personal consequences even before your day in court.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...irplay-members

















Until next week,

- js.



















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