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Old 19-02-20, 08:37 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 22nd, ’20

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February 22nd, 2020




223 Cited for Pirating TV Subscriptions

For first time in Italy
Redazione ANSA

Rome, February 19 - For the first time in Italy citizens have been cited for using illegal, pirated 'subscriptions' to pay-TV channels.

Some 223 Italians were cited for illegally watching TV series, films and sporting events.

If they are convicted, their TVs, computers or smartphones will be confiscated, judicial sources said.

They also risk jail time of up to eight years and a 25,000 euro fine.

The finance guard has been probing the phony subscriptions for months.

The probe is still ongoing, it said.

Viewers alleged used the Internet Protocol Television platform to pirate the TV output of the major pay TV services including Sky, DAZN and Mediaset Premium.

Dozens of 'resellers' and hundreds of clients were allegedly involved, police said.

One consequence of the scam is that the users shared with criminals their personal data including banking and ID info, police said.
https://www.ansa.it/english/news/202...7ebb81d71.html





Content Piracy Prominent In Taiwan with a Third of Consumers Admitting to Practice
Jonathan Easton

A third of Taiwanese consumers have actively consumed pirated video content, a new study has revealed.

According to new figures from the Asia Video Industry Association (AVIA), 33% of consumers in the country have accessed streaming piracy websites or torrent sites to access premium content without paying any subscription fees.

In addition, 28% of respondents admitted to using an Illicit Streaming Device (ISD) which can be used to stream pirated television and video content, normally for a low annual fee paid to a pirate organisation. QBox, UBox and EVPad are the most popular ISDs bought by consumers.

The survey added that 28% of those Taiwanese ISD purchasers had cancelled all or some of their legal pay TV service subscriptions.

The issue is much more pervasive amongst younger consumers. Almost half (47%) of 18-24 year olds and 61% of 25-34 year olds surveyed use ISDs or other services to view pirated content.

And though one might assume that more affluent households would be more willing to pay for content, the issue actually worsens with household income level in Taiwan. A quarter of ‘low income’ households admit to pirating content, rising to 35% for mid income households, and topping out at 43% for high income households. While this may be a surprise, it is likely that those with a greater disposable income are more willing to buy an ISD, with those with a lower income might look to free or ad-supported streamers.

Neil Gane, the General Manager of AVIA’s Coalition Against Piracy (CAP) said: “Consumers are funding crime groups as well as wasting their money when purchasing illicit streaming devices, when they find their ISD can no longer access live sports matches or their favourite TV shows. The global content industry is now collaborating to prevent and disrupt illegal feeds of live sports, TV channels, and video-on-demand content through enforcement against the illicit IPTV operators and blocking orders against piracy streaming websites and piracy applications. ISDs can never provide quality programming and a ‘service guarantee’, no matter what the seller may claim.”

Thomas Ee, the chairman at Taiwan Broadband Communications said: “The damage that online piracy does to the Taiwan creative industry is without dispute and the results of this latest survey are alarming. With the support from the Taiwanese government, our industry must continue to work together closely to do more to protect intellectual property and to work even harder to stamp out ISDs and streaming piracy in Taiwan.”
https://www.digitaltveurope.com/2020...g-to-practice/





SpaceX Grows Starlink Again, but Just Misses the Landing

The company did what it set out to do Monday, but its rocket went for an unplanned swim.
Eric Mack

SpaceX sent another batch of Starlink satellites into orbit but didn't quite stick the landing of its Falcon 9 rocket Monday.

Elon Musk's space company did achieve its primary objective of sending 60 more flying nodes for its nascent global broadband service into space, bringing the total number of Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit to nearly 300.

A secondary goal for the fifth Starlink mission, as with most SpaceX launches, was to recover the first stage of the Falcon 9 by landing it on a droneship stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. But this time the rocket missed the mark by a smidge. At the time it was expected to land, the live webcast from the droneship showed smoke or steam just off camera as the Falcon 9 made a "soft water landing."

SpaceX reported during the webcast that the rocket appears to be intact and floating on the ocean, but it remains unclear whether it can be recovered. The booster had a useful life, having already launched three earlier SpaceX missions in 2019 before Monday's Starlink mission. Had it landed successfully, it would have been the 50th successful booster landing for the company. Now we may have to wait until the next planned Falcon 9 launch on March 2 to see that milestone.

As for the Starlink satellites, they were successfully deployed shortly after the missed landing. They're likely to be at their most visible from the ground over the next few days as they begin the climb to their operational altitude. If you want to see the bright and controversial Starlink "trains" wending their way overhead, check out our primer on spotting them here.

The brightness of the satellites has alarmed astronomers who say Starlink and other large satellite constellations pose a threat to their work. SpaceX has been working with astronomers to address the problem and recently Musk tweeted that the reflectivity of the satellites "will drop significantly on almost every successive launch."

�� albedo will drop significantly on almost every successive launch
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 15, 2020

Musk and SpaceX haven't responded to requests for more information. SpaceX launched a "DarkSat" with a dark coating as part of a Starlink launch earlier this year, but the effectiveness of the coating is unclear.

The next Starlink launch is set for some time in March, following the March 2 Falcon 9 mission to resupply the International Space Station.
https://www.cnet.com/news/spacex-gro...s-the-landing/





Global Telcos Join Alphabet, SoftBank's Flying Cellphone Antenna Lobbying Effort
Sam Nussey

Alphabet and SoftBank’s attempts to launch flying cellphone antennas high into the atmosphere have received backing from global telcos, energizing lobbying efforts aimed at driving regulatory approval for the emerging technology.

Loon, which was spun out of Google parent Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) business incubator, and HAPSMobile, a unit of SoftBank Group Corp’s (9984.T) domestic telco, plan to deliver high speed internet to remote areas by flying network equipment at high altitudes.

Lobbying efforts by the two firms, which formed an alliance last year, are being joined by companies including aerospace firm Airbus (AIR.PA), network vendors Nokia (NOKIA.HE) and Ericsson (ERICb.ST) and telcos China Telecom (0728.HK), Deutsche Telekom (DTEGn.DE), Telefonica (TEF.MC) and Bharti Airtel (BRTI.NS).

The backing is a vote of confidence in the technology after Alphabet this month shut down another of its big bets, Makani, which aimed to generate wind energy with kites, in a move widely seen as signaling pressure from CEO Sundar Pichai for unproven businesses like Loon to start delivering results.

The expanded alliance announced in a joint statement aims to secure spectrum and promote uniform regulation and industry-wide standards for the high altitude vehicles, which carry network equipment on balloons in the case of Loon and drones with HAPSMobile. Both systems are solar powered.

Loon has already struck deals with wireless carriers in Kenya and Peru. Such technology allows telcos to extend coverage into hard-to-reach areas where there is low population density or geographical obstacles like mountains and maintain service after disasters.

HAPSMobile, the brainchild of SoftBank Corp’s (9434.T) Chief Technology Officer Junichi Miyakawa, aims to commercialize its services in 2023 and has been conducting low altitude test flights of its drones, which have a wingspan of almost 80 meters (87.49 yards), from a NASA facility in California.

The devices fly in the stratosphere, which offers mild weather all year round and low latency, which is just 20 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, compared to satellites which even in low-orbit are at an altitude of 1,200 kilometers.

The solar-powered HAWK30 drone can currently only stay airborne all year round at latitudes of plus or minus 30 degrees from the equator, constraining its ability to operate in northerly countries like United States and Japan - although a planned future device will extend that to 50 degrees.

Reporting by Sam Nussey; Additional reporting by Paresh Dave; Editing by Christopher Cushing
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-s...-idUSKBN20F1PU





ISPs Sue Maine, Claim Web-Privacy Law Violates their Free-Speech Rights

Law says ISPs need opt-in consent before using or sharing Web-browsing history.
Jon Brodkin

The broadband industry is suing Maine to stop a Web-browsing privacy law similar to the one killed by Congress and President Donald Trump in 2017. Industry groups claim the state law violates First Amendment protections on free speech and the Supremacy Clause of the US Constitution.

The Maine law was signed by Democratic Gov. Janet Mills in June 2019 and is scheduled to take effect on July 1, 2020. It requires ISPs to get customers' opt-in consent before using or sharing sensitive data. As Mills' announcement in June said, the state law "prohibits a provider of broadband Internet access service from using, disclosing, selling, or permitting access to customer personal information unless the customer expressly consents to that use, disclosure, sale or access. The legislation also prohibits a provider from refusing to serve a customer, charging a customer a penalty or offering a customer a discount if the customer does or does not consent to the use, disclosure, sale or access of their personal information."

Customer data protected by this law includes Web-browsing history, application-usage history, precise geolocation data, the content of customers' communications, IP addresses, device identifiers, financial and health information, and personal details used for billing.

Home Internet providers and wireless carriers don't want to seek customer permission before using Web-browsing histories and similar data for advertising or other purposes. On Friday, the four major lobby groups representing the cable, telco, and wireless industries sued the state in US District Court for the District of Maine, seeking an injunction that would prevent enforcement of the law.
ISPs claim law violates speech rights

The state law "imposes unprecedented and unduly burdensome restrictions on ISPs', and only ISPs', protected speech," while imposing no requirements on other companies that deliver services over the Internet, the groups wrote in their lawsuit. The plaintiffs are America's Communications Association, CTIA, NCTA, and USTelecom. They wrote:

Maine cannot discriminate against a subset of companies that collect and use consumer data by attempting to regulate just that subset and not others, especially given the absence of any legislative findings or other evidentiary support that would justify targeting ISPs alone. Maine's decision to impose unique burdens on ISPs' speech—while ignoring the online and offline businesses that have and use the very same information and for the same and similar purposes as ISPs—represents discrimination between similarly situated speakers that is impermissible under the First Amendment.

The law allegedly violates the First Amendment because it "limits ISPs from advertising or marketing non-communications-related services to their customers; and prohibits ISPs from offering price discounts, rewards in loyalty programs, or other cost-saving benefits in exchange for a customer's consent to use their personal information," the lawsuit claims.

"The Statute thus excessively burdens ISPs' beneficial, pro-consumer speech about a wide variety of subjects, with no offsetting privacy-protection benefits," the complaint continues. "At the same time, it imposes no restrictions at all on the use, disclosure, or sale of customer personal information, whether sensitive or not, by the many other entities in the Internet ecosystem or traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, thereby causing the Statute to diverge further from its stated purpose."

The trade groups also say Maine's law violates the US Constitution's Supremacy Clause, which gives federal law priority over state laws that conflict with US law. The Maine law "violates the Supremacy Clause because it allows consumers to dictate (by opting out or declining to opt in) when ISPs can use or disclose information that they must rely on to comply with federal law, rendering 'compliance with both' state and the foregoing federal laws 'impossible,'" the trade groups claimed.

Ongoing battle against state laws

The lawsuit is part of a larger battle between ISPs and states that are trying to impose regulations stronger than those enforced by the federal government. One factor potentially working against the ISPs is that the Federal Communications Commission's attempt to preempt all current and future state net neutrality laws was blocked by a federal appeals court ruling in October 2019.

The FCC claimed it could preempt state net neutrality laws because state-imposed rules would subvert the federal policy of non-regulation. Similarly, the new lawsuit against Maine claims the state privacy law conflicts with the Congressional decision to eliminate the Obama-era FCC's broadband rules, and it cites the Trump-era FCC's view that ISPs' privacy practices shouldn't be regulated any differently than those of other online businesses.

But while the FCC was allowed to eliminate its own net neutrality rules, judges said the commission "lacked the legal authority to categorically abolish all 50 States' statutorily conferred authority to regulate intrastate communications." When it defends its privacy law against the industry lawsuit, Maine would likely argue that it has authority to regulate broadband-industry practices that the federal government has chosen not to regulate.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...speech-rights/





Did the Early Internet Activists Blow It?

I’ve fought for a free internet for 30 years. Here’s where I think we went wrong, and right.
Mike Godwin

A couple of weeks ago, I went to lunch with a prominent journalist who wanted to ask me about Wikipedia. I had been general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation for a few years during a time when the online encyclopedia had really taken off in growth and funding. The journalist was curious how Wikipedia remains so information-rich and useful when the rest of the internet (in his view) is filled with divisive, corrosive misinformation. I said that Wikipedia couldn’t exist without the work that cyberlibertarians had done in the 1990s to guarantee freedom of expression and broader access to the internet.

The journalist took the more jaundiced view, one I’ve heard many times: that the internet has brought us to the unhappy historical moment we’re now living in, and that the only way to rescue society is to impose more discipline online, through tougher laws and fewer legal and constitutional protections.

I hear this too-much-free-speech argument a lot these days, but I can’t get used to it. For 30 years, I have been a cyberlibertarian or—the term I prefer—an internet lawyer. Sure, I’ve worked on copyright law, encryption, broadband access, digital privacy, data protection, and more. But the roots of my career have always been in civil liberties and criminal law. That is, I’ve (mostly) been arguing against censorship and against those who want to punish (mostly) law-abiding people for what they say or do with their digital tools on or off the internet.

But increasingly, I’m hearing from politicians, activists, and people like my journalist friend who say that maybe we 1990s-era internet activists blew it. The story goes that we were so shortsighted in our focus on things like internet free speech and digital privacy that we overlooked a whole spectrum of long-term threats posed by digital technologies, the companies that sell them, and the governments that deploy them. This perspective suggests that the internet freedom my colleagues and I championed has instead chained us all by corrupting democracy and poisoning relationships.

In recent years, my views have evolved. I no longer think that tolerance of disruptive speech is invariably the best answer, although, even now, I believe it’s typically the best first response. I also think the too-much-free-speech folks are being shortsighted themselves, because we’ve entered an era in which we need more disintermediated free speakers and free speech, not less.

Although the First Amendment was chiseled into the Bill of Rights in the 18th century, most of what we’re referring to when we talk about American free-expression law is only about a century old. Still, cases like Near v. Minnesota (1931), New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), and Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) have always seemed as foundational to me as the First Amendment. And the 20th century’s First Amendment cases helped inform the development of international freedom-of-expression principles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1976).

When I was finishing law school in the late 1980s, I loved those digging into those cases, but I also enjoyed taking frequent breaks from studying to participate in the earliest digital forums online—bulletin-board systems but also bigger distributed systems like Usenet, where I could talk with people from all over the world. By my last semester of law school, my interests in criminal law, free expression, digital technologies, and online forums had converged, and I was hired as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s first staff lawyer in 1990.

In the earliest days of EFF, a big part of the job of expanding cyberliberties was just the work of getting the legal and constitutional issues recognized. Today’s EFF has an admirable and diverse portfolio of casework and public advocacy, but 30 years ago we were a fledgling civil liberties startup focused more on consciousness-raising and proof of concept. My primary work as an attorney in those early years centered on advising other lawyers about handling hacker cases, email-privacy cases, and some of the earliest defamation and obscenity cases.

Some commentators, including April Glaser in a 2018 article for Slate, have interpreted EFF’s early years as disproportionately anti-government and “incomplete” because the organization did not address the fact that corporate decisions, no less than government decisions, could and frequently did undermine “justice, human rights, and creativity.” But we spent plenty of time chiding private corporations, ranging from the early IBM-Sears platform Prodigy to the incumbent telephone companies, for falling short of citizens’ reasonable expectations about free expression, privacy, and access to the larger digital world.

In addition to advising other lawyers and speaking and writing about cyberliberties issues, I also practiced some law myself in the 1990s. Most importantly, I was co-counsel in Reno v. ACLU (1997), a constitutional challenge to the Communications Decency Act that rocketed through a trial-court victory and a quick appeal to the Supreme Court. The Supremes voted unanimously to strike down most of the CDA, which was aimed at banning “indecent” but otherwise legal pornography from the internet. Our victory left in place only the act’s Section 230, which was designed to empower internet companies to remove offensive, disturbing, or otherwise subscriber-alienating content without being liable for whatever else their users posted. The idea was that companies might be afraid to censor anything because in doing so, they would take on responsibility for everything. But now Section 230 is in some legislators’ crosshairs because the companies (in Congress’ view) censor either too much or not enough. The Reno case established the fundamental constitutional and statutory protections for new online forums and did so in such a massive, categorical way that it left me wondering, for a year or two in the late 1990s, whether I ought to retire from civil liberties work, my job being mostly done. I took time off and finished a book about my EFF years, from the early days to the CDA fight, in 1998. (Internet law was moving fast back then, and I published a revised, expanded edition five years later.)

I was wrong to think the big wrangles were over, though. For one thing, debates in the United States about digital copyright, encryption, surveillance, and building broadband access were becoming more heated. Notably, after having failed to block the spread of encryption technologies in the 1990s, the post–Sept. 11 U.S. government began to explore ways of compelling the tech companies to break or sidestep encryption in response to warrants and subpoenas. Government demands of this sort—not just from the United States—have only gotten worse in the past few years, a trend that will continue, to judge from the anti-crypto stylings of Attorney General William Barr.

For another, EFF and other American cyberlibertarians gave inadequate attention to the international environment. We rationalized this U.S. focus because we weren’t yet big enough to be present elsewhere around the world, and because the U.S., as Internet Ground Zero, encountered lots of cyberliberties issues earlier than most other nations did. But since my departure from EFF in 1999, I’ve worked with activists in more than two dozen countries whose constitutions and laws may be different, but whose issues regarding censorship, privacy, and human autonomy are strikingly similar to our own.

In addition, the original big internet-policy debates never disappeared or even really shrank that much—they have been reincarnated in new forms and new places, as when the movie industry promoted civil and criminal cases against programmers who published source code that, in effect, explained how to bypass DVD copy protection. (The idea that publishing source code might itself be a crime underpinned some of the hacker cases in 1990, the year EFF was founded.)

Another thing we clearly got wrong is how large platforms would rise to dominate their markets—even though they never received the kind of bespoke regulated-monopoly partnership with governments that, generations before, the telephone companies had received. In most of today’s democracies, Google dominates search and Facebook dominates social media. In less-democratic nations, counterpart platforms—like Baidu and Weibo in China or VK in Russia—dominate their respective markets, but their relationships with the relevant governments are cozier, so their market-dominant status isn’t surprising.

We didn’t see these monopolies and market-dominant players coming, although we should have. Back in the 1990s, we thought that a thousand website flowers would bloom and no single company would be dominant. We know better now, particularly because of the way social media and search engines can built large ecosystems that contain smaller communities—Facebook’s Groups is only the most prominent example. Market-dominant players face temptations that a gaggle of hungry, competitive startups and “long tail” services don’t, and we’d have done better in the 1990s if we’d anticipated this kind of consolidation and thought about how we might respond to it as a matter of public policy. We should have—the concern about monopolies, unfair competition, and market concentration is an old one in most developed countries—but I have no reflexive reaction either for or against antitrust or other market-regulatory approaches to address this concern, so long as the remedies don’t create more problems than they solve.

What’s new and more troubling is the revival of the idea, after more than half a century of growing freedom-of-expression protections, that maybe there’s just too much free speech. There’s a lot to unpack here. In the 1990s, social conservatives wanted more censorship, particularly of sexual content. Progressive activists back then generally wanted less. Today, progressives frequently argue that social media platforms are too tolerant of vile, offensive, hurtful speech, while conservatives commonly insist that the platforms censor too much (or at least censor them too much).

Both sides miss obvious points. Those who think there needs to be more top-down censorship from the tech companies imagine that when censorship efforts fail, it means the companies aren’t trying hard enough to enforce their content policies. But the reality is that no matter how much money and manpower (plus less-than-perfect “artificial intelligence”) Facebook throws at curating hateful or illegal content on its services, and no matter how well-meaning Facebook’s intentions are, a user base edging toward 3 billion people is always going to generate hundreds of thousands, and perhaps millions, of false positives every year.

On the flip side, those who want to restrict companies’ ability to censor content haven’t given adequate thought to the consequences of their demands. If Facebook or Twitter became what Sen. Ted Cruz calls a “neutral public forum,” for example, they might become 8chan writ large. That’s not very likely to make anyone happier with social media.

Still others, on both the left and the right, argue that weakening (or outright removing) Section 230’s protections would bring the tech platforms into some kind of reasonable balance. These would-be reformers haven’t given enough attention to what law professor Eric Goldman has called “the moderation dilemma.” Alternatively, as in this 2019 piece by Matt Schruers, the newly appointed president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, it’s sometimes called “the moderator’s dilemma,” where opposing incentives lead either to the suppression of viewpoint diversity or to websites “plagued with off-topic content, trolling, and abuse.”

One reason we need to keep Section 230 safe—a reason I didn’t have the foresight to champion back in the 1990s—is that it’s crucial to fighting disinformation: It allows internet platforms to curate their content without necessarily increasing liability. My colleague Renee DiResta and I have been arguing in the past year or two that empowering tech companies to partner with governments and multistakeholder efforts in fighting disinformation is properly characterized as simply good cybersecurity. I remain skeptical as to whether tactics like microtargeting and demographic profiling, whether used by political campaigns or foreign governments, are as effective at manipulating people as some critics fear, but I see nothing wrong with using legal and policy tools to stop malicious actors from trying to use these tools.

I’ve come to believe our society should take reasonable steps to limit intentionally harmful speech, but I also find myself increasingly embracing a broader, more instrumentalist vision of freedom of speech than I typically championed in the 1990s. Back then, I was much more focused on encouraging tolerance and pluralism—the idea that an open, democratic society should be willing to let people say outrageous things, to the extent possible, because we ought to be strong enough in our democratic convictions to endure disturbing dissent. I still believe that, but here in 2020 I’m also haunted by the challenges we face everywhere in the world in this century, ranging from climate change to income inequality to the (not-unrelated) resurgence of populist xenophobia and even genocidal movements.

It’s been argued that internet forums for free expression have incubated real-world violence. But humanity’s capacity for war, violence, and self-destruction predate social media, and today’s internet platforms are often the first channels where we see the evidence of crimes (Myanmarese persecution of the Rohingya, for example, or Chinese repression of the Uighurs) that governments and closed societies used to be better able to hide. More important, though, is the fact that the problems we’ll face in this century are going to need everyone’s attention and contributions—not just that of our leaders and policymakers and journalists and thought leaders. They’ll need help from people we love and people we hate, from you and from me.

That’s the biggest thing I learned at the Wikimedia Foundation: When ordinary people are empowered to come together and work on a common, humanity-benefiting project like Wikipedia, unexpectedly great and positive things can happen. Wikipedia is not the anomaly my journalist friend thinks it is. Instead, it’s a promise of the good works that ordinary people freed by the internet can create. I no longer argue primarily that the explosion of freedom of expression and diverse voices, facilitated by the internet, is simply a burden we dutifully have to bear. Now, more than I ever did 30 years ago, I argue that it’s the solution.
https://slate.com/technology/2020/02...m-activism.amp





FCC Forced by Court to Ask the Public (Again) if They Think Tearing up Net Neutrality was a Really Good Idea or Not

US regulator tries to hide embarrassment behind series of sudden announcements
Kieren McCarthy

Comment The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is asking the American public to tell it if its decision in 2017 to scrap net neutrality regulations was dumb or not.

In a striking piece of irony – and one that the FCC is distinctly unhappy about – the watchdog is legally obliged to seek public comment on three issues: how its decision has threatened public safety, damaged broadband infrastructure rollout, and prevented poor people from getting access to fast internet access.

That obligation is the result of a legal challenge to the FCC's decision to tear up net neutrality rules covering internet access in America. That attempt last year failed in court, largely because federal regulators are given significant leeway to decide their own rules, even when it comprises overturning their own rules made just two years earlier, in 2015.

However, the court noted some serious concerns about the FCC scrapping its own rules, and so told the regulator it needs to gather public feedback on those issues and to consider what it needs to do to alleviate concerns. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem. It is simply a case of the judicial process carrying out its proper function: identifying issues, and seeking to get them rectified.

But the net neutrality issue has become so ideological and partisan – thanks largely to the behavior of the FCC commissioners who pushed through a pre-decided outcome and actively ignored public opposition to their plans – that being forced to ask the public where it screwed up is in itself embarrassing.

It is a virtual certainty that net neutrality advocates will gleefully take the opportunity to rail against the FCC, in just one more battle of words over the safeguards.

Petty

In a reminder of just how petty federal telecoms regulation has become, the FCC can’t even take this implicit rebuke professionally. And so it attempted to hide the reality of the situation by flooding its announcements website on Wednesday with suddenly important news and describing the public comment period in the most obscure terms possible.

That’s why, this week, we were treated to a string of PR spin and quotes about how the FCC is doing a great job by opening up spectrum. “What They're Saying About Chairman Pai's C-Band Plan,” reads one announcement that features nothing but quotes from people like Vice-President Mike Pence and “Former Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Mike Rogers.”

The next announcement covers the extremely important news that the FCC is closing an application to renew several radio stations.

What else does the FCC have for us? Well, the vital fact it has decided on the membership of the Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment. That also gets its own press release and official announcement.

Anything else? Yep. Here’s an entire release talking about how one FCC commissioner “applauds 5G workforce development grant.” We’re serious. Here we have Brendan Carr waxing lyrical about how he’s “thrilled that [Dept of Labor] has recognized the critical role of tower techs, linemen, and other 5G workers in building our country’s information infrastructure.”

And in today's actual news...

As for the only piece of real news this week – the public comment period on public safety sparked by the net neutrality decision – you could be forgiven for missing it altogether. While all the other headlines are extremely clear, this one is confusingly titled: “WCB Seeks Comment on Discrete Issues Arising from Mozilla Decision.” Not even a mention of net neutrality.

The explanatory document is not much better. It is titled: “Wireline Competition Bureau Seeks to Refresh Record in Restoring Internet Freedom and Lifeline proceedings in light of the DC Circuit’s Mozilla decision.” (This is a reference to Firefox maker Mozilla's legal campaign against the FCC.)

It’s hard to imagine a more obtuse explanation. Anyway, dig hard enough and the details are all in there: is there a risk to public safety communications due to packet prioritization? Would harmful conduct have been prohibited under the rules that were in place but were scrapped? Are there other ways to deal with potential public safety concerns?

The FCC has clumped more convoluted versions of these questions together in long paragraphs, rather than break them out into clear and numbered questions as it frequently does when it is doing its job properly.

There are other questions about pole attachments – which sounds dull but is critically important as one case currently in front of the Ninth Circuit makes clear. And on the Lifeline program that subsidizes broadband to low-income families.

Rosenworcel to the rescue

Now we’d love to tell you, Reg readers that we spotted this important public comment period despite the FCC’s best efforts to hide it because we are so attuned to telecoms policy and the FCC that it immediately threw up red flags.

But the truth is that we only noticed thanks to FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel who remains the voice of sanity at the federal regulator. She saw what her colleagues were trying to do, and so put out her own release, which all commissioners are entitled to do.

That release was titled “Rosenworcel On FCC Seeking Public Comment On Net Neutrality Remand.” Which was pretty clear. In her release, Rosenworcel speaks plainly.

“The FCC got it wrong when it repealed net neutrality. The decision put the agency on the wrong side of history, the American public, and the law. And the courts agreed. That’s why they sent back to this agency key pieces regarding how the rollback of net neutrality protections impacted public safety, low income Americans, and broadband infrastructure,” she neatly summarizes.

She goes on: “Today, the FCC is seeking comment on how best to move forward. My advice? The American public should raise their voices and let Washington know how important an open internet is for every piece of our civic and commercial lives. The agency wrongfully gave broadband providers the power to block websites, throttle services, and censor online content. The fight for an open internet is not over. It’s time to make noise.”

To file a public comment, see the obfuscated info here [PDF] and submit your thoughts here, quoting proceedings 17-108 for net neutrality aka restoring internet freedom, by the end of March.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/0...et_neutrality/





Playing on Kansas City Radio: Russian Propaganda

Radio Sputnik, a propaganda arm of the Russian government, began broadcasting on three Kansas City-area radio stations during prime drive time.
Neil MacFarquhar

When commuters spin the radio dial as they drive through Kansas City, Mo., these days, between the strains of classic rock and country hits they can tune in to something unexpected: Russian agitprop.

In January, Radio Sputnik, a propaganda arm of the Russian government, started broadcasting on three Kansas City-area radio stations during prime drive times, even sharing one frequency with a station rooted in the city’s historic jazz district.

“Who needs a ridiculous Red Dawn invasion,” a participant in one online forum wrote about the new broadcasts. “Your overlord, Mr. Putin, will be addressing you soon, so it’s best to prepare now,” another commenter wrote, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

In the United States, talk radio on Sputnik covers the political spectrum from right to left, but the constant backbeat is that America is damaged goods.

Sputnik’s American hosts follow a standard talk radio format, riffing on the day’s headlines and bantering with guests and callers. They find much to dislike in America, from the reporting on the coronavirus epidemic to the impeachment of President Trump, and they play on internal divisions as well.

On a recent show, one host started by saying he was broadcasting “live from Washington, D.C., capital of the divided states of America.”

Critics in Kansas City called Radio Sputnik’s arrival an unabashed exploitation of American values and openness. Those behind the deal defended it as a matter of free speech, as well as a simple business transaction.

Peter Schartel, the owner of Alpine Broadcasting Corporation of Liberty, Mo., the company airing Sputnik in Kansas City, said that he started the broadcasts on Jan. 1 both because he liked what he heard during a trial run last fall and because he was getting paid.

The deal was brokered by RM Broadcasting, a Florida firm that hunts for airtime to sell to Rossiya Segodnya, the Russian state media organization behind Sputnik.

Last year a federal judge in Florida ruled against RM Broadcasting’s owner, Arnold Ferolito, after he sued to prevent the Justice Department from forcing him to register as a foreign government agent. (Various news media organizations linked to Russia had already been ordered to register.)

The ruling outraged Mr. Ferolito, who said he made his first deal to get Russian state radio on the air in the United States in 2009. “They are paying for airtime and I make a percentage,” he said in an interview. “I am not being paid to represent the Russian government.”

Anyone tuned to Sputnik on 104.7 FM while driving across the historic 18th & Vine district in Kansas City, Mo., will find that it fades for a few minutes of music from KOJH — the call letters refer to Kansas City’s oldest jazz house — before Sputnik takes back over.

For years, Anita J. Dixon, a community organizer, dreamed of creating a radio station built around the music of such legendary Kansas City musicians as Count Basie and Charlie Parker. Ms. Dixon said having Sputnik dominate the same frequency was jarring.

“What was supposed to be a historic jazz station in a historic jazz community is now broadcasting Alex Jones and Sputnik,” Ms. Dixon said. “Ever heard the expression of being sold up the river? That is how it felt.”

Mr. Schartel disputed the notion that Kansas City is getting Sputnik instead of jazz. Radio Sputnik does beam its signal on the same frequency as KOJH, he said, but outside the limited geographic area awarded to the Mutual Musicians Foundation for the nonprofit, low-power jazz station.

Ms. Dixon still found it galling that Russia had gained space on the radio dial on the same frequency she had envisioned as a beacon for a black community that, among other things, had sent soldiers to die defending American values like free speech.

People ask how Russia managed to interfere in U.S. elections, Ms. Dixon said. “Because they get free airwaves,” she said. “It is called propaganda.”

Before Kansas City, Washington had been the only American city with Sputnik broadcasts — round the clock on one AM station and one FM station. Public disclosure forms show that the Russian government is paying more than $2 million over three years, starting in December 2017, for the Washington broadcasts.

In Kansas City, the fee is $324,000 for three years, or $49.27 per hour, according to RM Broadcasting’s Foreign Agents Registration Act filing. Mr. Schartel said he gets $27.50 of that hourly rate.

When it began in January, the Sputnik broadcast on KCXL was met with strong condemnation from locals. The station received a lot of hate calls, including a threat to burn it down, Mr. Schartel said.

An editorial in The Kansas City Star noted that the free press was a prime target of Mr. Putin’s attempts to weaken public trust in American institutions. “It’s sad, but not astonishing, that an American entrepreneur would put business above patriotism,” the paper wrote. “Listener, beware.”

Those involved in putting Sputnik on the air defended it as free speech. “I am not a bumpkin that fell off a wagon; I encourage people to listen for themselves,” Mr. Schartel said.

What was once Radio Moscow was reborn as Radio Sputnik in 2014. Mr. Putin backed the effort to create a central, state-run news organization — called Rossiya Segodnya, or Russia Today in English — designed to challenge the West’s global dominance on reporting news.

In a modern spin on propaganda, it focuses on sowing doubt about Western governments and institutions rather than the old Soviet model of selling Russia as paradise lost.

American intelligence agencies have concluded that Sputnik; its television sibling, RT; and other Russian-controlled media outlets were part of the Kremlin’s efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election in the United States, and could star in a repeat performance this year.

In Russia, the government controls the main television stations and an ever-growing list of news agencies.

Anna Starkova, the head of Rossiya Segodnya’s press service, said by email from Moscow that broadcasting in Kansas City would “not only broaden our audience but also give us valuable new experience locally.”

Sputnik now broadcasts in 90 cities worldwide, she said, dismissing as “absurd” the idea that listeners are the target of Russian election meddling.

Working through the news headlines on recent Sputnik broadcasts, the hosts found much to fault.

The impeachment of Mr. Trump is bad.

“The entire impeachment is a lie,” said Lee Stranahan, a former Breitbart reporter and the right-wing co-host of Sputnik’s morning show.

The American political system is bad.

Politics here is meant “to make sure that the masses of poor and working people don’t have access to even the most essential things,” said Sean Blackmon, a host of an evening program.

The American military presence in Iraq is bad.

United States forces should withdraw to allow Russia and China to rebuild Iraq and Syria, an Iraqi guest suggested.

Above all, the American press is beyond redemption.

“The wheels are coming off the establishment media,” Mr. Stranahan said. That is the Greek chorus across Sputnik.

Sputnik argues that the station is not trying to sow distrust or to undermine public confidence, but rather is seeking to express opinions that cannot be heard in other venues. “They know perfectly well that they are not going to be allowed to say that on CNN or Fox or MSNBC,” said Mindia Gavasheli, a veteran Russian television journalist who runs Sputnik’s Washington bureau.

Sputnik produces eight hours of daily material in Washington, filling the rest with feeds from its bureau in Edinburgh, from RT broadcasts and from shows that highlight aspects of Russia, like traveling to the Caspian Sea. In Kansas City, Sputnik airs six hours every day, during commuting times in the morning and evening as well as on weekends.

There are no immediate plans to expand elsewhere, Mr. Gavasheli said, although what he described as the “brouhaha” over Kansas City had prompted inquiries from other markets in the United States.

The Sputnik hosts seemed to revel in having a new audience. The morning show did a couple of segments on Kansas City barbecue and tried to make light of Russian influence by joking that Mr. Putin had ordered that the Kansas City Chiefs win the Super Bowl. (That was before the game, which the Chiefs won.)

Sputnik shares its Kansas City stations with a cast of far-right conspiracy theorists, evangelical pastors and anti-Semites. The host of one program, TruNews, recently described the impeachment of Mr. Trump as a “Jew coup.”

“He calls things the way that he sees them,” Mr. Schartel said of Rick Wiles, who made the remark. “I feel that he has got a right to say what he is saying.”

“We’ve always put on voices and people that wouldn’t be able to get on anyplace else,” said Mr. Schartel, who has owned the station for 26 years.

A mission statement on KCXL’s website says the United States has become a different country that now looks down on traditional values. “We tell you the things that the liberal media” will not, it said.

Barrett Emke contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/13/u...nda-radio.html





Still Saving The Day: The Most Influential Dance Party In History Turns 50
Piotr Orlov

It started somewhat humbly on Saturday, Feb. 14, 1970. Valentine's Day.

David Mancuso, a 25-year-old upstate-to-New-York transplant, was in need of money to pay the landlord of his downtown Manhattan loft, not yet The Loft, at 647 Broadway. A rent party, in the tradition of Great Migration-era Harlem sessions that involved music, dancing, and a donation to help the host make that month's ends meet, seemed about right. Especially as Mancuso was well-equipped to throw such an event; even then, he was innately attuned to the ingredients needed to foster the right atmosphere for a good party.

One needed music, of course — Mancuso had been a record collector since his teens, also becoming an accidental hi-fi stereo enthusiast by purchasing his first set of Klipschorn speakers, (handmade, audiophile catnip since 1946) when he was 21. One also needed a nice cross-section of people, enough to turn it into a happening — and having grown up in a Utica orphanage, Mancuso was adept at making connections in whatever milieu he found himself in. Often, that milieu was other private dance parties in people's homes all over the city, which he thought "more intimate [than bars and clubs] and you would be among friends... get to know people and develop relationships," as he told author Tim Lawrence many years later. Mancuso was also attracted to the psychedelic crowd of the nearby East Village, where he became friendly with, among others, LSD guru Timothy Leary, whose study groups ingrained in him not only ideas about psychedelic spirituality, but social progress. And contrary to popular history's later segregation of disco dancers and hippie rock freaks, Mancuso tuned them all in.

The lessons gleaned from his experiences of New York, as well as from childhood memories of the orphanage, where a mother-figure nun named Sister Alicia would entertain the children with balloons, food treats and music, were spinning through Mancuso's head when 36 invitations for his first party went out. The invites featured an image of Dali's famous surrealist painting, "The Persistence of Memory," and the words "Love Saves the Day," which not only acknowledged the holiday and served as a psychedelic-acronymic code for the spiked punch, but also put forth an idea of simple, emotionaluplift, that the times — two months after Altamont, seven months after the Stonewall uprising, with New York in the midst of economic decline, the war in Southeast Asia raging, and the nation increasingly on edge as '60s idealism receded — practically required.

The Loft subsequently became the rent party celebrated around the world, a launchpad for the musically, ethically and socially progressive wing of DJ and dance culture. It also embodied a hard counterpoint to the popular (and often racist and homophobic) history of disco as hedonistic and formulaic — even as it both presaged disco's glamorous Studio 54 years, and functioned as one of the disco era's secret engines of creativity. Half a century later, The Loft retains its mystique, while continuing to feed and foster inquiring younger minds.

About 100 people showed up that first night, a blended coterie that became the norm. For $2.50, they were treated to coat-check, food and drinks (no alcohol) and Mancuso playing music — somewhat hesitantly at first, he would recall later, because he thought it would prevent him from mingling with his guests. And yet that night, knowing his friends' tastes, while also trusting his own intuition for a beat-wise atmosphere — heavy on R&B and soul, as well as psychedelic and boogie-blues grooves — the music began to open up an unexpected energy between the "musical host" (Mancuso despised being called a "DJ") and his dancing crowd. Soon enough, an osmosis-like psychic space, that Mancuso would later dub a "third ear," formed, one that made the communication between dancers and host fluid and unspoken. "Someone would approach me to play a record," Mancuso recounted in Lawrence's book Love Saves The Day, "and I would already have it in my hand or it would be on the turntable. We would look at each other in recognition."

"David would always say, 'I don't play the music, the music plays me,' " his longtime friend, Donna Weiss, told me a few weeks ago. The manner in which the music played Mancuso, through good days and bad, almost until his death in 2016; the central role the relationship between sound and host played to The Loft, and to the communities that blossomed around it; and why the fruits of that relationship continue to inspire three generations of people who still attend this party (or carry on its legacy globally) — make up one of late 20th century American music's most magical-realist fables.

The "Lofties," as Weiss, who now (wo)mans the party's door, calls them, were at it again this past weekend, celebrating the party's 50th birthday just blocks from where it began so long ago. And though it is often regarded as a fossil of the disco age, The Loft continues to attract people that revere its musical and societal ideals, which remain not only essential but give a crucial perspective on everything from club etiquette and sound design to modern ceremony and identity.

While, at the same time, remaining "nothing but a party."

"The Loft was amazing in a not-very-technical way," says Danny Krivit, among the storied New York DJs who has followed Mancuso's lead since first walking into its legendary 99 Prince St. space in SoHo in 1975. "But it had a killer sound system that didn't beat you up, and very subtly made you think, 'Wow. This is the best music.' "

That system subscribed to Mancuso's basic, but rigid, principles of clean, direct audio, quite unlike what you'd find in most clubs. It began with a need for the highest quality components (which by the early 1980s did not only mean Klipschorn speakers, but custom-built turntables and vinyl cartridges made of onyx). It also meant the least amount of gear — no mixers, compressors or equalizers here — to minimize the filtered distance between the records and the listeners' ears. The technically pristine set-up served unorthodox sonic strategies: As Krivit intimated, the volume was much lower than at most clubs, but also clearer — optimized to match the room's acoustics, with speaker placements, and the adjustment of the dancers' own ears, establishing a sonic atmosphere to withstand parties that could last 12-15 hours.

Lastly, and most disconcerting for regular DJ party attendees, was Mancuso's insistence that the records were not mixed into one another, but that each one was played from beginning to end.

"[At The Loft], even house records are played with intro and outro beats, and are sometimes eight, nine, 10, 11 minutes long," says Paul Raffaele, who, with partner Barbie Bertisch, publishes the New York music zine Love Injection, DJs their Universal Love party and has been attending The Loft since 2014. "It's like the track is giving you a big hug. You're just in the middle of the song, and it wraps around you. And hearing it out of Klipschorns... I heard things like hands going up and down guitar frets, and when a singer opens their mouth to sing before they do."

"[David] would call it 'the historical image', where you could actually 'see' everything," says Chicago DJ and producer Ron Trent, who lived in New York in the 1990s and became friendly with Mancuso through one of his mentors, Robert Williams (himself an original Loftie who moved to Chicago and opened the club, Warehouse — better known as the birthplace of house music). "David's perspective was trying to get you to walk into ... the studio session while they're making the song."

The sound quality of The Loft was not the only element that offered both a lived-in comfort and brand new thrills. Mancuso's song selections were unique to the city's disco scene, moderating the party's ebbs and flows with jazz, ambient, and global rhythms. And his introduction of an eclectic collection of peak-time dance records to the New York sound was one of the city's secret ingredients in the late '70s and early '80s, when it was a global clubbing mecca.

Writer and critic Vince Aletti first walked into 647 Broadway in 1971. "I had never experienced anything like The Loft. It was so joyous and celebratory and exciting — and, mainly for me, full of records that I hadn't heard before. I was already writing about this kind of music — Philly International, Motown, Stax, all the other kinds of Black R&B — but I couldn't believe that I hadn't heard, for instance, First Choice, until I got to The Loft."

Colleen "Cosmo" Murphy was a recent NYU grad, DJ and syndicated radio producer (and who'd go on to become one of The Loft's later musical hosts) when she first attended in 1991, at 238 E. 3rd Street, a heroin-infested block of the Lower East Side where Mancuso moved in the 1980s. Murphy became "a girl who fell down the rabbit hole. I walk into this place, and it's somebody's home, but the sound system was big and the sound was incredible. The music... I didn't even know most of it. I had to keep asking people, 'What's this song? What's this song?' It was the kind of psychedelic, emotive music I was into, but also a lot of music I'd never been exposed to."

"It was obviously one of the delights for most DJs to find something that no one else had found yet," says Aletti. "That's the story of Manu Dibango, and 'Soul Makossa,' " a record that Mancuso introduced to the U.S. at The Loft in 1972, where taste-making WBLS program director Frankie Crocker first heard it and put it on the radio. "For me, 'Soul Makossa' exemplifies The Loft sound, the kind of record that was perfect for David, perfect for the crowd."

Aletti was hardly the only person showing up and paying special attention to the music. Early in The Loft's history, it began attracting a crowd of record aficionados and clubbers who recognized its unique nature. Some, like Steve D'Aquisto, were already popular New York discotheque DJs in the early '70s. Many more were learning the craft first-hand — even if they may not have recognized it at first.

What began with The Loft memberships of a teenaged Larry Levan (who, in 1977, helped open Paradise Garage, the only New York club to match The Loft for influence), Frankie Knuckles (who, upon moving to Chicago in 1977, became the Godfather of house music) and Nicky Siano (a '70s superstar DJ at The Gallery and Studio 54) continued well into the '90s. New York mainstays Danny Krivit and Francois K, Madonna producer Jellybean Benitez, Master at Work Louie Vega, radio and club innovator Tony Humphries and future international superstars Danny Tenaglia and DJ Harvey were just a few of the luminaries who were also Loft regulars.

Admiring DJs carried word of Mancuso's selections far from New York, sometimes insinuating those sounds into local scenes in unexpected ways. As Chicagoan Ron Trent told me back in 2017, "The term 'deep house,' " now a beloved subgenre of dance music, "was a phrase we used back in the day to describe the music that Frankie [Knuckles] and Ronnie [Hardy, legendary house DJ in the 1980s] were playing, disco and jazz and underground stuff, the non-accessible stuff — an obscure sound, an underground sound. It was a Chicago street term, urban jargon, s*** you don't hear every day — records that probably David Mancuso was playing at The Loft that Frankie heard as a teenager, and then introduced to Chicago."

Mancuso's desire to organize the club DJs, who in the 1970s were the drivers of much of New York's music innovation, led to the 1975creation of the New York Record Pool, where DJs could receive (and share) the most up-to-the-moment promotional copies of records. Aletti says that only Mancuso was capable of bringing them together like that: "[The other DJs] respected David for being kind of a rebel, playing whatever he wanted — and sometimes something that they may never play themselves. He wasn't interested in being famous. He saw it as a sense of the community that was building around music, and he fostered that."

The primary constituency in The Loft community was, of course, the dancers, who were never in doubt that the music was playing them. Mark Riley was a news radio producer at WLIB who began attending on Broadway, and points out that Mancuso "had a special relationship with the dancers who came to The Loft. David really gravitated toward people who expressed their freedom through dancing." That freedom was reliant on the comfort of individual expression — or as every woman interviewed for this article said at one point or another, the liberty to dance in peace and not be hit upon, as they had experienced in most every other club environment.

Krivit instantly recognized that the relationship between the host, the music and The Loft's teeming, flowing, slippery dance-floor — often aided by the use of baby powder on the floor, to help dancers with their moves — was unusual. The energy was also raised by their shared love of records which were not getting their proper attention in other clubs, but that could turn The Loft upside down. It led Krivit to reassess what a great experience could be.

He remembers playing War's "City, Country, City" at gigs around town, only to be scolded by the crowd. "It was the first time that happened to me, and it made me have doubts about what I was doing for a bit." His arrival to 99 Prince St. overwhelmed his senses — and gave him a different perspective: "I heard a song coming on (very low), I couldn't really tell what it was, but it seemed like everyone around me knew exactly what it was, and all started to run upstairs to the dance floor. By the time I checked my coat and got upstairs I realized it was 'City, Country, City,' and it was just getting to the hot part of the song, and people were going crazy with wild, kind of jazz dancing, very progressive and creative, letting loose, whistling, tambourines, making all kinds of noises. I had never heard that kind of response in a club before. Their reactions represented the ultimate freedom. These people were music lovers and enthusiasts way beyond what I ever experienced in a club. I knew that I felt that way, and knew a few friends who felt that way, but I never went to a place full of these people, who as a group would lose it over a song."

On the crowded dance floor, the "third ear" could produce a variety of deeply meditative effects, defined by personality and circumstance. For Riley, one singular memory is of focus and unspoken connection: "Once, on Prince St., a girl was next to me dancing. We turned to each other, and we danced for three hours. Straight. No breaks. And when it was done, we both just smiled at each other and went our separate ways."

For others, it tapped into a collective unconscious. "The music took me somewhere else," says Cosmo. "I felt open, spiritually receptive. Like I was part of a greater whole." Recent Lofts have had a similar effect on Barbie Bertisch: "You would transcend yourself and just be part of the collective experience. The Loft is known for having the craziest dancers in New York and yet nobody, nobody, would bump into each other on the dance floor. It was this mass that moved as one." When journalists Bill Brewster and Frank Boughton asked Mancuso about the propriety at play, he was nonchalant about clarifying the unexplainable: "Sometimes [the oneness lasts] for minutes, sometimes for hours. You just feel good. You have your life energy raised. I can't have mine raised unless yours is raised. And vice-versa. But each one of us has a role."

Alex Rosner, now 84, is The Loft's long-time sound-system engineer (who still tweaks it before every party), but not a dancer. Rosner's life — which includes a near-miraculous survival of Auschwitz as a child, in no small part due to the power of music — gave him personal insight into The Loft's metaphysical energy: "The music David played was rhythm and blues with a lot of harmony. When you have harmony, the music creates harmony in the environment. Which explains why in all these years that I attended his parties, I never heard any disharmony among people. In other clubs, there's some kind of disagreements going on one way or another, but not in David's place. I think that had to do with the music he chose to play."

It also had something to do with the people who came to The Loft, returning week after week, party after party, and, despite their differences in sexuality, race, class, gender and, increasingly, age, weaving themselves into the party's untearable fabric. They were, and are, to use a word coined by musicologist Christopher Small, "musickers," people who establish "a set of relationships, in the place where [music] is happening, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act [of music creation] lies." Without them, the party has no purpose.

The community of Loft musickers was founded on a Mancuso principle that Mark Riley called "organic diversity." Riley is explicit that "David wanted to bring about social progress by having different people from different areas of his own life come together around dancing, around music and around sound." This has become not only The Loft's calling card, but a magnet, in many different ways.

"What drew a lot of us to the Loft — and then to the Garage — was the mix of the crowd," says Aletti. "It was really pretty unique, in terms of gay, straight, Black, white, Latino, this whole really integrated group of people so dedicated to dancing." Says Riley: "It was something I had been searching for for a very long time. Then, suddenly, it was there, a place where no one was judged."

A key element in establishing comfort and freedom was The Loft's invite-only confidentiality, what Krivit calls "membership not for its exclusivity, but for its community." The child-like party atmosphere (balloons, juice, snacks) and residential setting conveyed a lack of de rigueur nightlife pretentions. Moreover, Mancuso always insisted that "it was not a club," and that anyone with an invite could come in, even when they had no money. (in fact, written IOUs were accepted at the door, another founding principle, and one that helped him win a long, drawn-out 1975 hearing with the New York City Consumer Affairs department, which tried to make Mancuso apply for a cabaret license by claiming he was running a public party.) The lack of photo or videotaped evidence that, with the exception of modern-day Instagrams of The Loft's balloon-drop (a party high point), exists to this day, created a relaxed mood for those who wanted their attendance kept private.

In other cases, that privacy provided safety and a feeling of home for the many gay, Black and Latino youth who would show up with friends — future DJs Levan and Knuckles being the most historically notable examples, or at least the best-known ones. Though Mancuso went out of his way to describe the party as mixed and diverse, The Loft was traditionally a queer-heavy, private environment. It was welcoming in a way gay bars and clubs could not be. Says Riley, "There were people I met at The Loft, gay, 18-19 years old, who had been thrown out of their houses by their parents, and had, literally, no place else to go. Who didn't know that they were part of a community that accepted them until they started going to The Loft. When David talked about social progress, that's what he was talking about, being able to give people a level of freedom they didn't have otherwise in their lives."

More broadly, this disco party served as both a self-governing utopian creative space, the kind poet Hakim Bey would later call a "temporary autonomous zone," as well as a shelter from the everyday bummers of urban capitalist modernity that sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined a "third place," a location, after home and work, that is crucial to healthy cities and civic engagement. Mancuso set these ideas to a beat in the privacy of his own home years before rave culture disciples, Burning Man organizers and urban planners began preaching their value.

"People often slagged off disco as an escape," says Aletti, "but it was an escape in the nicest, smartest, most really useful way. [The Loft] was a rebuilding for so many people who were ground down by their regular lives."

On a more basic level, The Loft developed as a community that is, in Krivit's words, "a fairly large group of people that all get it, and relate to each other like a family." Sometimes literally. Kids are a natural presence at the early part of every Loft party, which now takes place on Sunday evenings of three-day weekends. Just as Mark Riley told me about bringing his daughter when she was an eight year-old, and then as a college graduate, at Sunday's 50th anniversary party, the kids were scattered throughout the space, some dancing with glow sticks, others crashed out in the corner while parents sashayed the night away.

For many original Lofties, this community seemed to have ended on June 2, 1984, when Mancuso threw his final party at 99 Prince St. (The night is commemorated in artist Martin Beck's 2016 video installation and book, Last Night.) 99 Prince St. fell because the owner of the building sold it during SoHo's hyper-gentrification of the '80s, but Mancuso's neighbors had railed against him since the very beginning. It's possible to see The Loft's history as mirroring Manhattan's incessant gentrification: from 1984-2003, The Loft's (and Mancuso's) story became one of sabbaticals (after 99 Prince St., Mancuso moved for a spell to Woodstock and would not throw regular Loft parties til the early '90s); of scattered East Village locations (the 238 E. 3rd Street building he bought and lost to a real estate scam); a short stint at 81 Ave. A; a shorter one at 225 Ave. B; parties at 242 E. 14th St. and Union Square's Marc Ballroom, neither of which were his residencies, and of ever-dwindling crowds. "He didn't have as large a following in those years turning out for his parties," Douglas Sherman, a friend of David's and one of The Loft's musical hosts the past 20-plus years, told Jeff Mao for an excellent oral history of the party. "[But] there were some great dancers that still continued to attend." Mancuso had hardly been forgotten around the New York scene, with parties like Krivit, Francois K and Joe Claussell's Body & Soul and Tim Regisford's Shelter cut from the cloth originally woven at The Loft. But memories, especially for ensuing generations, were growing shorter.

It was only at the turn of the century that the legend came above ground. With the help of Colleen "Cosmo" Murphy, who'd become one of David's mentee's during the itinerant East Village years, Mancuso released two compilations of his party's classics. Meanwhile, two books — Lawrence's 2003 Love Saves The Day: a History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979, an essential deep dive into David's story and New York's early disco era; and, to a lesser degree, 1999's Last Night a DJ Saved My Life: The History of the Disc Jockey, Brewster and Boughton's crucial history of selectors on both sides of the Atlantic — measured Mancuso's cultural gravity at a time when DJ culture was exploding out of the American niches to become a musical force. While most of that moment's evolution in dance music — commercial, sonic, social — didn't quite fit the story of The Loft, the era did give the party a reboot.

Burned by the previous decade, Mancuso had softened a few aspects about set and setting. In 2003, with his core musickers in tow, he began throwing the party regularly once more in an East Village banquet hall with pristine acoustics — and which was once more packed to the rafters this past Sunday night. Mancuso had also, for the first time, started traveling to play records outside New York and the States, actively seeding The Loft's ideas and ideals to like-minded people throughout the world. In London, he helped found what's come to be known as Lucky Cloud Soundsystem, with Murphy (who had moved to England in the early aughts), Lawrence (who is based there) and Jeremy Gilbert, with Iain Mackie as an engineer. In Sapporo, Japan, Mancuso was introduced to Satoru Ogawa, the proprietor of a well-regarded audiophile club called Precious Hall, agreeing to come back if sound specifications were improved — at which point Ogawa created a replica of the 99 Prince St. sound system and took David (and the fully built-out system) on the road in Japan.

The prospect of passing on his accumulated knowledge excited Mancuso. He had begun instructing an Italian sound aficionado, Giancarlo Bianchi, about what equipment to purchase, with an eye towards a Roman Loft. "He told me, 'I think I can give birth to another one,' " says Murphy. But bad health forced Mancuso to stop traveling in 2012, and Bianchi's Last Note, with Murphy as a guest musical host, launched without him.

"People in New York sometimes think, 'Oh it's only about New York,' " sighs Cosmo. "It's not, it's about the world. He made so many relationships and connections, and the most magical part is these communities. These are really beautiful and enriching, where people from all different backgrounds come together for a common sense of purpose; to laugh, to dance, to be joined together through music."

Before Mancuso stepped away from playing the part of musical host in New York — I last saw him play records at The Loft sometime early in the Obama administration — the party's influences were again on the rise all around the city. Direct lineage played out in the form of Francois K's Deep Space and Danny Krivit's 718 Sessions, both featuring New York veterans combining classic ideas and new music; and in Joy, a house party helmed by Loft musical host Douglas Sherman, along with Takaye Nagase, Yuji Kawasaki and Nari Oshiro, which is among the best formal/informal underground Brooklyn gatherings. Psychedelic disco revivalists found their cues too: The early DFA — before the LCD Soundsystem phenomenon swallowed them whole — and No Ordinary Monkey parties were wild private bashes, while the Dope Jams crew was pumping out house music through Klipschorns in the basement of their Brooklyn record store (before gentrification drove them upstate). The Mister Saturday Night/Mister Sunday parties have been building a community and promoting community values via eclectic music since 2006 (first all over Brooklyn, and more recently at their Ridgewood location, Nowadays). While overseas, the anything-goes aesthetics of Glasgow duo/party Optimo, has kept one foot in The Loft's experimental nature.

Musical experimentalism is no longer among The Loft's central tenets. Sonic progress is a constant conversation between first-generation Lofties and those who've joined over the past two decades (forever newbies); but that musical tension feeds the current party's energy in exciting ways — especially on the dance-floor. You could see it again on Sunday, when the party expanded by at least 50% (a second ballroom was wired to handle the anniversary overflow),

As the youngsters celebrated disco classics by The Whispers and Donald Byrd as hard as the older heads got gritty to Level 42 and Shalamar and a Tower of Power groove that sounded like a jazz-house remix, which soundtracked the glorious purple and peach balloon drop.

Three-and-a-half years after David Mancuso's passing, with The Loft community stronger than ever, forming new roots, the warmth of its legacy has taken on a new hue. And the question of how to make your own space, while saluting that which came before, is now at the core of projects like Barbie Bertisch and Paul Raffaele's Love Injection zine and Universal Love party.

"We're just really reverent people and we just geek out about history," Paul says when I ask him about learning from The Loft on how to balance the past, present and future. "A lot of the people coming to our party are actually young. We don't know them. Imagine when you realize the kind of responsibility you have to play, say, MFSB's 'Love is The Message,' for the first time ever for a human that's really getting into this experience. Doesn't know what it's about, but is feeling it and is into it. That needs to always happen. It needs to be a part of the party. So I feel a responsibility for keeping this stuff alive. When you see someone clearly in ecstasy and they leave the party and they tell you that they had the best night ever — that's more important to us than anything else." Love Saves the Day. And it will again.
https://www.npr.org/2020/02/19/80733...story-turns-50





Game Developer Decides Best Way To Get Back At Pirates Is To Pirate Them Back
Timothy Geigner

There are lots of ways a video game developer can choose to react to finding its game being pirated on the internet. The game maker can elect to get understandably angry and go the legal route for retribution. The company can instead see piracy as not that big a deal and ignore it. Or they can try to add more value than pirated versions of their games. The developer can choose to connect with the pirates and try to turn them into paying customers.

But I have to admit I didn't even consider the route that Warhorse Studios took when it discovered that a cracking group had put its title Kingdom Come: Deliverance up on torrent sites: pirate them back.

After releasing its action role-playing game Kingdom Come: Deliverance early 2018, the game was quickly cracked by infamous underground group Codex, who released the title online for consumption by the pirating masses. It’s unclear to what extent this event affected sales but within a week of its launch, it had sold a million copies, including more than 300,000 on Steam.

With two million copies sold in the year that followed, Warhorse Studios clearly had a hit on its hands but this year the company showed that it also has a sense of humor. While publicizing a revamp of its headquarters in Prague, the company revealed that it had framed a copy of the information (NFO) file released by Codex with its pirate release, giving it pride of place near the company’s kitchen.


Fans of the studio thought this was hilarious. Some pointed out that the ASCII art, at the very least, could probably be argued to be the copyrighted content of the cracking group, or whoever created it. I'm not sure that's 100% true, but it seems that Warhorse Studios took the suggestion to heart. In addition to that poster in its kitchen, the game developer is also offering metal prints of the poster to the public, selling them for $45 a piece.

Offered at Displate.com, Displates are described as “one-of-a-kind” metal posters “designed to capture your unique passions.” Their creators note that they’re “sturdy, magnet mounted, and durable enough to withstand a lifetime of intense staring.”

While it's doubtful that the cracking group is going to even care about this at all, that isn't really the point. The point is that it's refreshing to see a game maker react to its game being pirated with humor and wit, rather than just throwing a bunch of lawyers at everyone. Sure, it helps that this developer also has a million copies of the game sold to blunt the sting of piracy, but that's also sort of the point. Whatever the right balance on how to react to game piracy is, it's probably as close to this example of a humorous response as it is anything else.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...hem-back.shtml

















Until next week,

- js.



















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