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Old 26-12-18, 09:02 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - December 29th, ’18

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December 29th, 2018




Half of the Tor Project's Funding Now Comes from the Private Sector

Tor Project reports $4.2 million income in 2017, of which only 51 percent came from government funds.
Catalin Cimpanu

This is great news for the US-based nonprofit, which for more than a decade has been financed primarily through US government funds, and many detractors have used this detail to question the security of the Tor software and network.

"In terms of percentages, while 2015 saw 85% of our funding coming from US government sources, 2016 saw the fraction drop to 76%, and in 2017 we're down to 51%," said Roger Dingledine, co-founder of the Tor Project and original developer of the Tor anonymity software.

Taking a closer look at the organization's Form 990 IRS filing, we see that the biggest source of government funds weren't donations from government agencies, but rather research grants from other government-backed organizations.

"I should take a brief moment to explain how funding proposals work, for those who worry that governments come to us wanting to pay us to do something bad," Dingledine said today about the Tor Project's government funding. "There is never any point where somebody comes to us and says 'I'll pay you $X to do Y'."

"The way it works is that we try to find groups with funding for the general area that we want to work on, and then we go to them with a specific plan for what we'd like to do and how much it will cost, and if we're lucky they say ok," Dingledine added.

This is how the Tor Project secured funding in 2017 from the US and Swedish governments. It secured $798,029 worth of funding from the US government-backed Radio Free Asia, $635,504 from the similarly US government-backed SRI International, $548,151 from the US National Science Foundation, but also $594,408 from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA).

The US Department of State, which paid for Tor's initial development and has sustained the project through its first years by covering most of its costs, has cut down its involvement in the Tor Project to a minimal level for the past three years, donating only $133,061 in 2017, $218,796 in 2016, and $199,071 in 2015.

But as the US Department of State has been slowly withdrawing from funding Tor, other entities have stepped in, and the private sector has been the one who stepped up the most.

Last year, the Tor Project raised a record-high $425,709 from its users, which is more than twice the funds it raised from users in 2016.

This year, in 2018, that number is nowhere near the 2017 numbers, being roughly around $95,000, but users still have a chance to donate until the end of the year, with Mozilla pledging to match every of their donations.

Mozilla, overall, has stepped up big-time for the Tor Project in recent years, boosting its contributions from $24,500 in 2016 to a whopping $522,188, last year, and looks set to be one of the top contributors in 2018, as well.

Besides Mozilla, DuckDuckGo also contributed $25,000 to the Tor Project, which also received donations in the form of in-kind services worth $806,372. These latter donations included free cloud computing services donated by various organizations, free hosting services, and all the volunteering work in the form of free coding, translation, and legal services.

Overall, the Tor Project's total revenue has continued its growth, and in 2017 the organization reported a total figure of $4.2 million, an all-time high. The number is up from $3.2 million in 2016, $3.3 million in 2015, and $2.5 million in 2014.

But despite reporting its highest year of income to date, the Tor Project is still scraping by, mainly because its costs have also gone up as well. However, Tor Project has used its income better than most. This year, the organization released a major redesign of its desktop browser but also launched its first official Android browser version.

"Tor's budget, even at the 2017 level, remains modest considering the number of people involved and the impact we have," Dingeldine said. "And it is dwarfed by the budgets that our adversaries are spending to make the world a more dangerous and less free place."

Users who'd like to donate to the project can do so here.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/half-o...rivate-sector/





Pirate IPTV Subscribers Now Take 5% Of the Entire IPTV Market in the USA & Canada
Bill Toulas

• Pirate IPTV number of subscribers grow significantly year-over-year.
• Urban areas show denser subscription rates, wheres lower subscriber percentages are found in the countryside.
• IPTV services continue to grow into the largest piece of the pirated content pie in spite of lawsuit actions.

According to the data of a recent report that was published by Sandvine, about 5.5% of the total population of the US and Canada are subscribers of illegal IPTV services. The findings of the report detail that the access to these services is typically achieved through the use of streaming boxes, while the popularity of pirate IPTV rises as we go into denser urban areas.

Sandvine, who is a Canadian broadband management company, has conducted the same research last year, which highlighted the amazingly quick growth that illicit media streaming services enjoyed in the two countries. However, last year’s data was limited to only a million people living in urban areas, wheres this year Sandvine used a broader and much more diverse part of the general population.

The comparison of the data shows that high-density urban areas have had a rise from 6.5% to about 7.3%. Sandvine monitored 19.3 million people in 16 states/provinces in the US and Canada for a period of 30 days, so the percentage of 5.5% corresponds to about a million confirmed IPTV subscribers.

The traffic generated by so many IPTV boxes has long surpassed that of BitTorrent, as the convenience and premium feel that the subscribers of these services have created an evolutionary vehicle for pirating content. Most don’t even have to configure anything as the boxes that they buy come pre-configured for streaming from relevant sites. In many cases, the cost of the subscription services is bundled in the box purchase, so they are getting it with a one-year subscription. All this has simplified the process of getting on-demand access to pirated content, thus more and more households are canceling their expensive cable subscriptions in favor of illegitimate IPTV services.

With IPTV services having such a huge piece in the piracy pie, copyright holders are trying to find ways to bash them, so for now, the targets are the providers who are called to pay many millions in damages. As things gradually get out of hand though, and as IPTV service providers swarm, it is quite likely that box sellers and even subscribers will also start to receive official complaints from copyright holders that will bring them in court.
https://www.technadu.com/pirate-iptv...-canada/52314/





Netflix Pulls the Plug on Feature Designed to Get Kids Addicted to Netflix

Someone finally realized this was a potentially catastrophic idea.
Yohana Desta

Netflix will never stop finding new ways to make its users even more obsessed with Netflix. The streaming platform has largely succeeded in that goal simply by releasing engaging content (hit shows like Stranger Things, for example), not to mention easily facilitating binge-watching and closely studying viewer habits in order to always suggest the perfect next show or movie. But the company’s latest idea—a feature that essentially gamified binge-watching for children—veered diabolical, infuriating parents who don’t want their kids even more addicted to television.

After testing the feature and enduring a sharp round of backlash, Netflix has announced that it will no longer reward kids for spending extra time on Netflix. However, there’s nothing keeping the company from introducing a similar feature aimed at adults, especially since the company blatantly tells its investors that its competitors aren’t just other streaming platforms, but rather literally anything viewers do in their leisure time that is not watching Netflix—quite literally including “going out to dinner with friends or enjoying a glass of wine with their partner, just to name a few.”

“We’ve concluded the test for patches and have decided not to move forward with the feature for kids,” a spokesperson said, according to Variety. “We test lots of things at Netflix in order to learn what works well—and what doesn’t work well—for our members.”

The patch tests were first reported Friday, when Netflix confirmed that it was in fact testing what would happen if it rewarded viewers for finishing a large batch of episodes of a children’s show (A Series of Unfortunate Events, for example). Per Variety, the reward did not unlock any specific prizes or secret content—it was simply a digital badge, a virtual good-for-you-now-watch-this-next-episode gesture of sorts. Somewhere in there is a potentially innocent attempt to add an engaging element to the zombie-like state of binge-watching—but it’s buried under the fact that today’s kids are already addicted to screens, even without the promise of getting bonus points for their viewing habits.

As Variety previously reported, there were plenty of parents who disliked the concept, claiming it encouraged kids to get hooked on TV. Josh Golin, the executive director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, told Gizmodo that the feature was “designed to turn kids into lobbyists and undermine parents’ limits.”

“It’s just incredible to me that as we’re having this national conversation about persuasive design of tech and how tech is often designed for the benefit of tech companies at the expense of users’ well-being, that Netflix would test something like this,” he continued.

Netflix, it would appear, has heard everyone’s feedback loud and clear. Meanwhile, Count Olaf is busy dreaming up the next test idea.
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...binge-watching





SpaceX Launches Air Force's Most Powerful GPS Satellite Ever Built
William Harwood

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket roared to life and streaked away from Cape Canaveral early Sunday carrying the first in a powerful new generation of GPS navigation satellites into orbit. It was the California rocket builder's 21st launch this year and its first Pentagon-sanctioned national security mission.

Propelled by 1.2 million pounds of thrust from its nine first stage engines, the 229-foot-tall rocket lifted off at 8:51 a.m. EST (GMT-5), climbing straight away from launch complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It was the 20th major rocket launch from Florida this year, the busiest pace since 1998.

The launching came five days late because of a last-minute problem with first stage propellant temperatures Tuesday and stormy weather Thursday. High winds forced another 24-hour delay Saturday, but conditions were ideal Sunday and the rocket put on a spectacular show as it raced away to the northeast through a cloudless sky.

Vice President Mike Pence, chairman of the newly reconstituted National Space Council, was on hand for Tuesday's initial launch try but flew back to Washington after touring SpaceX facilities at the Kennedy Space Center.

"The most important thing is that we get that rocket up safely and securely and it achieves its mission," Pence told spaceport workers. "I know this bird is going to fly and when it flies, it's going to make a difference for the security and prosperity of the American people."

Pence has taken an active role in directing the Trump administration's revised national space policy, calling for establishment of a military "Space Force," increased commercial development in low-Earth orbit and continued NASA development of a huge new rocket and spacecraft to carry astronauts back to the moon.

The early moments of the flight Sunday appeared normal and two minutes and 48 seconds after liftoff, now well out of the dense lower atmosphere, the first stage engines shut down and the booster fell away. An instant later the single engine powering the Falcon 9's second stage ignited as planned.

In a departure from what has become normal practice for SpaceX, the first stage did not attempt to fly itself back to Cape Canaveral or to an off-shore drone ship. The GPS satellite was loaded with more fuel than usual, increasing the load on the Falcon 9 and requiring more first stage performance. The rocket did not have enough propellant left over to attempt a landing.

"The first flight, we're ... making sure we are taking care of the spacecraft, making sure we meet all of its requirements," said Walter Lauderdale, chief of Falcon Systems Operations Division at the Air Force Space and Missile Center. "It's precious cargo, and we want to make sure that it's up there to do its job."

The Falcon 9's second stage completed the first of two planned "burns," putting the vehicle in the planned preliminary orbit about eight minutes and 16 seconds after launch. A second firing an hour later completed the launch phase of the mission. The GPS 3 satellite was released to fly on its own just under two hours into the mission.

Using its on-board propulsion, the GPS 3 satellite is expected to make its way to a 12,500-mile-high orbit tilted 55 degrees to the equator, taking about 12 hours to complete one orbit.

The Air Force and prime contractor Lockheed Martin plan to spend six to nine months checking out and testing the satellite and another six to nine months testing new ground systems before the spacecraft is declared operational.

GPS satellites work by continuously transmitting ultra-precise timing signals from on-board atomic clocks along with data showing their exact position and velocity. With at least two dozen satellites operating in six orbital planes, at least four are above the horizon at any point on or above the Earth's surface.

By analyzing the slight differences between incoming signals, receivers can calculate a user's location with respect to the satellites to within about one-and-a-half feet on average and, in some cases, to within 14 inches or so. An estimated billion people around the world use satellite navigation data in some form every day.

The $529 million GPS 3 satellite is the first of 10 being built by Lockheed Martin. The company holds a second contract, valued at up to $7.2 billion, for up to 22 additional GPS 3 "Follow On" satellites providing even more accurate, more jam-proof location, timing and velocity data to all branches of the military. Lockheed Martin built 18 of the 31 satellites in the current GPS constellation.

The Air Force originally planned to launch the first GPS 3 satellite in 2014, but the program encountered a series of problems that led to multiple delays and higher costs, according to the Government Accountability Office.

A major issue has been developing the advanced software and ground systems needed to take full advantage of the GPS 3's capabilities. As it now stands, the ground control system, known as OCX, will not be fully on line until at least 2021, after the first half dozen GPS 3 navsats are in orbit.

In the interim, Lockheed Martin has upgraded the current control system to enable test and checkout of the new satellites.

The GPS 3 navsats will provide four civilian data streams for use by countless devices ranging from smart phones to automobiles, commercial aircraft and virtually all sectors of the transportation industry. Multiple data streams will enable receivers in aircraft, for example, to compensate for atmospheric effects that might otherwise reduce accuracy.

Another advantage for civilian users is interoperability with navigation systems launched by other nations.

The new satellites also feature encrypted channels using sophisticated anti-jamming technology intended to keep the satellites operational under electronic attack. Military signals will use so-called M-code processing, "a stronger and encrypted, military-specific GPS signal which can help users operate in jamming environments," according to the GAO.

The new satellites also feature a redesigned Nuclear Detonation Detection System, a search-and-rescue payload and other improvements.

"These GPS 3 satellites will introduce modernized capabilities and signals that are three times more accurate and up to eight times more powerful than previous generations," Col. Steve Whitney, director of the Air Force's Global Positioning Systems Directorate, told reporters before launch.

"They also broadcast a signal compatible with other global navigation satellite systems, allowing users around the globe the ability to receive and use the signals from multiple constellations, (improving) availability and accuracy of navigation signals worldwide."

SpaceX won an initial contract to launch the first GPS 3 satellite in 2016 after demonstrating the reliability of the Falcon 9 system and meeting Air Force certification requirements for national security space missions.

Arch-rival United Launch Alliance, builder of the Atlas 5 and Delta 4 families of rockets, did not bid on that flight, but the two companies have competed head to head for multiple contracts since then.

"This launch is a milestone for many reasons," said Col. Robert Bongiovi, director of the Launch Enterprise Systems Directorate at SMC. "For us, it marks the first competitively-awarded launch in over 10 years, the first national security space launch with SpaceX, and the first launch of a GPS 3 satellite. This really is an exciting time to be in the launch business."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/spacex-...ay-2018-12-23/





India Wants Tech Platforms To Break Encryption And Remove Content The Government Thinks Is "Unlawful"

It is not clear whether India will now choose to be a leader in privacy or mass surveillance, sources told BuzzFeed News.
Pranav Dixit

India’s government wants to make it mandatory for platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and Google to remove content it deems “unlawful” within 24 hours of notice, and create “automated tools” to “proactively identify and remove” such material.

It also wants tech companies to build in a way to trace the source of the content, which would require platforms like WhatsApp to break end-to-end encryption.

India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) published the proposed rules on its website following a report on Monday by the Indian Express revealing the government’s proposal to modify the country’s primary IT law to work them in. The report comes days after India’s government seemingly authorized 10 federal agencies to snoop into every computer in the country last week.

The proposed measures have provoked concerns from privacy activists who say they would threaten free speech and enable mass surveillance.

The proposals would also require any platform with more than 5 million users in India to appoint a “person of contact” for “24x7 coordination with law enforcement agencies and officers”, keep a record of all “unlawful activity” for 180 days (or indefinitely if mandated by a court), and send monthly notifications to every user informing them that the platform can “remove non-compliant information” immediately and kick the user off.

A MeitY official discussed modifying India’s IT law to work in the new rules with representatives from at least seven tech companies including Google, Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter in a confidential meeting last week, reported the Indian Express.

If the proposals were to go ahead, it “would be a tremendous expansion in the power of the government over ordinary citizens, eerily reminiscent of China’s blocking and breaking of user encryption to surveil its citizens,” the Internet Freedom Foundation, a digital advocacy organization based in New Delhi, wrote on its website.

“[On] the face of it, [the government seems] to be contemplating pro-active censorship and breaking encryption with traceability,” Apar Gupta, an Indian Supreme Court lawyer and cofounder of the Internet Freedom Foundation, told the Indian Express. “They will make the internet a corporal environment, damaging the fundamental rights of users.”

The MeitY, Facebook, Google, and Twitter did not respond to BuzzFeed News’ request for comment.

WhatsApp, which has more than 200 million users in India, and will be among the largest companies affected should the proposed rules go into effect, declined to comment.

The company has repeatedly pushed back against the Indian government’s demands to build in message traceability, after angry mobs who fell for rumors and hoaxes that spread through the app killed more than 30 people in the country this year. “We believe that building ‘traceability’ into WhatsApp would undermine end-to-end encryption and the private nature of WhatsApp, creating the potential for serious misuse,” a WhatsApp spokesperson told BuzzFeed News earlier this year, adding that the company would not weaken the privacy protections it provides worldwide.

Sources familiar with WhatsApp’s thinking told BuzzFeed News that just a few months ago, it seemed India was preparing to support the most robust national privacy frameworks in the world, referring to a comprehensive data protection framework that a government committee formulated earlier this year that is yet to receive parliamentary approval.

It’s not clear, said these sources, whether India will now choose to be a leader in privacy or mass surveillance.

If India does work these rules into its IT law, it would have precedent: Earlier this month, Australia passed a controversial encryption bill that would require technology companies to give law enforcement agencies access to encrypted communications, saying that it was essential to stop terrorists and criminals who rely on secure messaging apps to communicate.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article...ion-and-remove





Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales

You might not be getting that book you wanted for Christmas this year
Alexandra Alter

This year has been, much to everyone’s surprise, a blockbuster for the publishing industry. Despite the relentless news cycle, readers have bought books in droves. Hardcover sales are up, and unit sales at independent bookstores have risen 5 percent. Multiple titles — Bob Woodward’s “Fear,” Bill Clinton and James Patterson’s “The President Is Missing” and Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” — have passed the million-copy mark, while there is also a surprisingly strong appetite for literary fiction.

But what should be good news for publishers, agents and authors has created headaches during the crucial holiday sales season, as printing presses struggle to keep up with a surge in demand, creating a backlog that has led to stock shortages of popular titles.

Several of this year’s most critically acclaimed novels, including Lisa Halliday’s “Asymmetry,” Richard Powers’s “The Overstory” and Rebecca Makkai’s “The Great Believers,” were listed as out of stock on Amazon the week before Christmas after inventory ran low because publishers could not to reprint copies quickly enough. Best-selling and critically lauded nonfiction titles like David W. Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass, Samin Nosrat’s cookbook “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” and Ben Reiter’s “Astroball” were also unavailable on Amazon, with some titles showing shipping dates of two to four weeks from now.

The industrywide paper jam has been building for months — a result of shrinking and consolidation among printing companies, the collapse of one of the major printers this summer, global paper shortages and a tightening job market that’s made it difficult for printers to hire additional seasonal workers. But it has become increasingly acute and visible at the industry’s peak sales season, when consumers are shopping for must-read titles to give as gifts, and finding that Amazon’s virtual shelves are bare.

For authors whose books have been out of stock in the run up to the holidays, it can be hard to recover the lost royalties and sinking Amazon rankings. In a Facebook message, Ms. Makkai urged readers to shop at independent stores for her novel after Amazon listed it as out of stock and indicated it wouldn’t ship until after Christmas. “This whole situation is rotten, and my press is doing everything they can, but ugh, this is really, really bad timing,” she wrote.

Agents and authors say part of the problem is that publishers and retailers have become more risk averse. Publishers are printing smaller first runs, partly because retailers are ordering fewer copies initially, waiting to see which titles take off to avoid making the wrong bet and getting stuck storing unsold inventory. In the past, it was often easy to get another batch of books printed in a week or two if a title sold unexpectedly well, but these days some publishers say it can take one or two months.

On top of that, the seemingly bottomless appetite among readers for a handful of blockbuster titles has tightened the bottleneck at the printing presses, consuming what little slack there was in the system. Mr. Woodward’s “Fear” has sold nearly two million copies in all formats, while Mrs. Obama’s “Becoming,” which came out in November, has sold 3.8 million copies.

“The capacity is so tight that if you get a book that takes off like ‘Becoming,’ you have to stop what they were printing and print more ‘Becoming,’ then whatever they were printing is late,” said Dennis Abboud, the chief executive of ReaderLink, the main book distributor to Target, Walmart and other outlets. “Then the train is really off the rails.”

At the same time, publishers have been caught off guard by a handful of surprise best sellers, literary titles from lesser-known authors that are now in short supply the week before Christmas, the worst possible time to be out of stock.

“All of the sudden, there’s just no capacity,” said the literary agent Chris Parris-Lamb, who represents Ms. Halliday. “The books that become outliers, the ones that are actually selling, then they become a victim of their own success.”

The backlog is so severe that it is spilling over into next year, causing publishers to shift the release dates for some January books because they can’t print copies in time. At Penguin Random House, at least a dozen titles scheduled for early 2019 have been pushed back, typically by a few weeks, according to a company executive. Other publishers said that a handful of titles were being delayed because of the backlog at the printers.

“In the macro, business is healthy and there are plenty of books on shelves across America for people to buy,” said Michael Cader, a book industry analyst and the founder of Publishers Marketplace. “But if it’s your book and there’s demand and it’s out of stock, that’s very painful.”

Every year during the holidays, a handful of unexpected breakout books sell out of stock, frustrating consumers and the authors who wrote them, but leaving the industry as a whole unscathed. But this year the shortages are more widespread, and the factors driving them are more systemic and harder to mitigate.

“It’s more complex than it’s been in the past. You can’t just count on making a phone call to your printer and saying this book is taking off, let’s do a press run this week,” said Adam Rothberg, senior vice president of corporate communications at Simon & Schuster. “This is the new normal for the foreseeable future.”

Madeline McIntosh, the chief executive of Penguin Random House U.S., said that most of the company’s in-demand titles were available through other outlets, despite being out-of-stock at some major retailers, and noted that “at this time of year, we are always working through issues related to spiking holiday demand for hot books.”

The biggest cause of the bottleneck, publishers and agents say, is consolidation and collapse among printing companies. One large printing company, Edward Brothers Malloy, shut down this summer. Next year, two of the largest printers in the United States, Quad Graphics and LSC Communications, are expected to merge, which publishers worry will lead to fewer options for printing services.

The printing industry has its own problems, including paper shortages and price increases. And the low unemployment rate has made it harder for printers to hire additional workers. Quad Graphics, which has 55 print-production centers and 22,000 employees worldwide, “has experienced staffing challenges due to record low unemployment,” according to a company spokeswoman.

Surprisingly, some of the current chaos has come about because the publishing industry is not only stable but seems to be thriving. After years of declining print sales, hardcover and paperback editions have been rising recently, while e-book sales have fallen. Publishers’ revenues from hardcover sales rose 3.5 percent in the first 10 months of this year, while revenue from digital books fell 3 percent in the same period, according to the Association of American Publishers.

Some big publishers have been investing in print infrastructure and inventory management in recent years, expanding their warehouses and improving their ability to refill orders from retailers quickly, but they have little control over the printing presses, where capacity has shrunk.

The effects are reverberating across the industry. This fall, W. W. Norton had to scramble to salvage an author’s book tour when they learned that books wouldn’t be available on his October publication date because the printers were overbooked. The author, James M. Scott, had more than a dozen events planned in October to promote his book, “Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita and the Battle of Manila,” but the printer couldn’t deliver books until roughly a month later.

Norton was able to get a small batch of books to sell at the events, before the first print run was ready, but at great cost: It involved taking unbound pages, gathering them by hand and having them bound and shipped overnight to the event sites.

“It’s an editor’s nightmare,” said John Glusman, vice president and editor in chief of Norton.

Norton also struggled to meet unexpected demand for Mr. Powers’s novel “The Overstory,” which was released in April with a first printing of 25,000 copies. Sales continued to climb throughout the year, and they got a boost when the novel was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize.

In mid-October, worried that stock would run out just before the holidays, Norton ordered a 10th printing of the book, an additional 10,000 copies. A priority rush order typically takes two weeks, but Norton was told that it would take two months. The new editions arrived at the publishers’ warehouse on Dec. 17, but those copies still needed to get to retailers in time for holiday purchases. Norton just ordered an 11th printing, which will bring the total copies in circulation to 115,000.

Still, it may be too late for some holiday shoppers.

“Demand has delightfully exceeded expectations,” Mr. Glusman said. “Is there such a thing as too much demand?”

The print shortages have left both large and small retailers scrambling, though a huge company like Amazon can more easily absorb the impact of lost sales than a small independent store.

Barnes & Noble’s stores have been hit with “limited quantities, delays in publication dates, and more just-in-time minute-by-minute delivery that has driven delivery expense,” said Tim Mantel, Barnes & Noble’s chief merchandising officer.

Independent bookstores have also been struggling to meet demand for unexpected best sellers, though many placed more robust orders this year in anticipation of holiday shortages.

Catherine Bock, the book buyer at Parnassus Books in Nashville, said the store has run out of a handful of popular titles, including “Asymmetry” and “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.”

Robert Sindelar, the managing partner of Third Place Books in Seattle, said it’s been unusually difficult to restock popular titles this year. His store ran out of the Frederick Douglass biography before Thanksgiving. It sold out of “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” about a week ago. It recently got a small shipment of the title, but those were already presold, he said. “We probably could have sold another 100 of that one,” he said.

Ms. Nosrat, whose cookbook came out in April 2017 and has sold nearly 300,000 copies, said she and her agent realized in early December that copies of her book would most likely sell out before the holidays, even after an additional domestic printing this fall of 30,000 copies.

“I feel like I got punched in the gut a little bit,” Ms. Nosrat said. “But I’m aware that this is a rare and lucky problem to have.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/23/b...ublishers.html





The Monkees Tried To Cut Their Strings With 'Head'
Petra Mayer

I don't think, as a teenage fangirl, that I realized exactly how bitter, how cynical, how teeth-grittingly furious the Monkees' 1968 movie Head is. How it starts with — more or less — a suicide: Mickey Dolenz running in a panic through a municipal ribbon-cutting ceremony and taking a leap off of a shiny new suspension bridge, tumbling through the air and crashing into the water to the stately chords of "Porpoise Song" while the rest of the band watches in consternation from the railing. How it ends the same way, except this time it's all four of them jumping. How the Carole King-penned lyrics that play over both scenes go "a face, a voice/an overdub has no choice, an image cannot rejoice."

Audiences at the time didn't exactly get what was going on, either. While we've been spending this year exploring the lasting cultural legacies of 1968, today I'd like to finish out the year by introducing you to a film that surfaced briefly and then sank like a costumed dummy falling into a California canal.

To set the scene: By November of 1968, when Head was released, the Monkees were pretty much over. Singer-songwriter authenticity was the new thing, and everyone knew the Prefab Four didn't play their own instruments or write their own songs (or at least, they hadn't originally). The last episode of their Emmy-winning show had aired that March, and in a year that held so much horror — the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, chaos in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, Soviet tanks rolling into Prague, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam — no one really had, errr, headspace for a formerly popular and now faintly embarrassing pop phenomenon.

The Monkees themselves knew it — even though they had famously wrested creative control of their music away from the show's original musical director and begun playing their own instruments on their own compositions. (Mike Nesmith once asked John Lennon if he thought the Monkees were just a ripoff of the Beatles. "I think you're the greatest comic talents since the Marx Brothers," Lennon reportedly replied.)

What to do? Make a movie. A scathing, twisted, technically advanced stream-of-consciousness movie that would blow their plastic-fantastic image to bits and — with luck — launch them towards critical respectability. Producer and director Bob Rafelson had originally come up with the idea of a TV show about a wacky boy band and had been thinking about making a movie even while the show was still in production. To that end, he introduced the four Monkees to a friend of his, a then-struggling actor and screenwriter named Jack Nicholson. Over the course of a pot-fogged weekend at a California resort, Rafelson, Nicholson and the Monkees dictated what would become the script into a tape recorder.

I'm using the term "script" loosely. Head is a series of linked vignettes, more in the anarchic, fourth-wall-demolishing spirit of Looney Tunes or old silent movies than anything else that hit theaters that year. After the solarized psychedelicism of the opening sequence, it hits you with a blast of bile: Mickey, Mike, Peter and Davy chanting "Hey hey we are the Monkees, you know we like to please/A manufactured image, with no philosophies!" over a series of TV screens playing first clips from the film, and then the infamous footage of a South Vietnamese general executing a Viet Cong fighter with a bullet to the head — then cutting directly to a shot of a screaming teenager at a Monkees concert. Subtle, it is not.

From there the four Monkees wander through a pastiche of Old Hollywood cliches — war movies, Westerns, the mean streets of Manhattan, a rigged boxing match — breaking through painted backdrops and keeping up a running deadpan monologue about how fake it all is. There's a truly frightening recurring villain, a ghastly surprise party, steam-room philosophy and a cavalcade of celebrity cameos: Sonny Liston, Frank Zappa, Annette Funicello, Victor Mature (at one point, the boys are reduced to playing flakes of dandruff on his gigantic head). Mickey blows up a recalcitrant Coke machine with a tank. Peter, gentle Peter, punches a salty diner waitress — and then worries that the kids won't dig it because it doesn't fit his image. "You think they call us plastic now, babe," Mike tells an empty room, "but you wait 'til I get through telling 'em how we do it." Davy does a spectacular dance with Toni Basil to the heartbreaking "Daddy's Song." There are recurring montages of old movies, bra and car commercials, news clips, and over and over again, that Vietnamese execution footage.

The band is constantly being chased, attacked, torn apart, caged, sucked up in a giant vacuum and imprisoned in a big black box that reappears throughout the movie. They can't escape — not with philosophy, not with force. They never escape. They all jump off the bridge eventually, but while Mickey swam off with beautiful solarized mermaids to start the film, by the end, the camera pulls back and the glorious colors fade away to show the four Monkees trapped in a tank on the back of a flatbed truck, beating frantically against the glass walls as the truck pulls away. It is desperately sad, which was completely lost on teenage me.

It was also completely lost on audiences in 1968. The Monkees themselves barely appeared in the film's purposefully postmodern marketing — which alienated their original fanbase and failed to lure in a more mature audience. Critics at the time trashed it — the New Yorker's Pauline Kael snarled that "the doubling up of greed and pretentions to depth is enough to make even a pinhead walk out." It made a whopping $16,000 back on its original $750,000 budget.

But while Head bombed on release, it's become a cult hit; critic Chuck Stephens, writing for the Criterion Collection, calls it "arguably the most authentically psychedelic film made in 1960s Hollywood," and "a masterpiece of formalist irreverence and psych-out satire."

Without particularly meaning to be, and without resorting to cliches about acid or flower power, Head is an almost perfect snapshot of the state of the counter-culture in 1968. Angry, questioning, willing to tear down the old niceties to make way for something more complicated, sitting uneasily in the doorway to a darker world.

And you could kind of make a case for it as an early sign that something new was happening in Hollywood — while Head was a flop, Rafelson and his producing partner Bert Schneider used their Monkees money to make a series of classic films, starting with Easy Rider the next year. (Supposedly, Head got its name because Rafelson and Schneider wanted to bill whatever they made next as being "from the guys who gave you Head." Ha, ha.)

More than that, though, it's just a good movie — five decades haven't dulled its anger, its color, its sadness, its blazing weirdness. You can't find it (at least, officially) on any streaming services right now, but it's around in multiple DVD reissues. Go find it. Watch it. Make your choice, and they'll rejoice in never being free.
https://www.npr.org/2018/12/29/67685...ings-with-head





Dead Musicians are Touring Again, as Holograms. It's Tricky — Technologically and Legally
Paul Donoughue

Key points:

• The technology used to bring dead singers back to life is getting better
• It is a burgeoning industry, both competitive and litigious
• Holograms of Tupac, Michael Jackson and others have performed

In 2019, Amy Winehouse will tour the world. Sort of.

The much-loved British singer, who struggled for years with drug and alcohol addiction while producing hits like Rehab and Back To Black, died in 2011.

But a hologram version of Winehouse will tour internationally next year, her father announced recently, moving about the stage backed by a live band in a show that could last almost two hours.

It is not the first time a dead musician has been resurrected on-stage via the magic on technology. The late Roy Orbison played recently, Michael Jackson performed at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards and Tupac appeared at Coachella in 2012, more than a decade after his death.

The technology behind this post-human age of live entertainment is reaching a tipping point, with several companies clamouring — sometimes by way of the courts — to create a hologram performance that can be as engaging as a human one.

In the process, they hope to unlock vast amounts of money in the back catalogues of the 20th Century's biggest artists.

The technology is cutting edge, but based on old-fashioned theory

The current crop of productions are 2D video projections, rather than proper holograms, and they are pre-recorded, not live. That's according to Mike Seymour, a digital human researcher at the University of Sydney who has worked in visual effects in London and Hollywood.

While the imagery is photorealistic, using complex neural networks to build a reconstruction of a famous face, the method used to project that image onto a stage is not new.

"Hologram USA uses a high-tech, [high-definition] version of the 19th Century Pepper's Ghost technique," says billionaire Alki David, whose company Hologram USA owns the rights to create holograms of Billie Holiday, Jackie Wilson and others.

"It was the original 'smoke and mirrors' way to put a ghost on a stage."

Most productions start by filming a performance, usually by an impersonator, to nail down the dance moves and the general physicality of the celebrity, Mr Seymour says.

"So, you could obviously film someone dancing like Michael Jackson and then replace [the face] with a digital version of Michael Jackson's face, reconstructed from a tonne of images of Michael Jackson," Mr Seymour said.

That face you create will initially be inert. The next thing you need to do is "rig" it.

"That rigging phase is the second stage, and that you can think of it as producing a bunch of digital leavers or puppet strings that would allow you to pull an expression on the face — or for that matter the body — of a digital character that you had."

After that, you have got to "drive the puppet". This can be done by using cameras attached to an actor's head to capture their facial movements.

"So, if I've got that head rig on, if I say the word hello, it reads my lip movements, from the cameras that are on my head rig, and then it pulls the digital strings" to make the holographic singer say hello.

From there, the video will be rendered and the light will be fixed to make shadows fall where they should.

"Live performers on stage with a hologram can see reflections the audience can't, and adjust their movements to fit," Mr David said of his company's approach.

"But with our advancements, and powerful projectors, we're able to present holograms that are opaque, so that the problem of 'show through' is minimised."

Eyellusion, another US company with upcoming shows featuring a holographic Frank Zappa, uses a recording of the artist from a real live performance as the vocal track for the show.

As for interaction with the audience, "you can do banter in advance," the firm's CEO and founder, Jeff Pezutti, said.

"There is future technology where [live banter] can happen, and will happen, but for now it's a pre-produced show, so you've just got to be smart about where you put it so it feels seamless."

This is a competitive — and litigious — space

The Amy Winehouse tour is being put together by Base Hologram, which was also behind the Orbison show in Los Angeles in October.

Hologram tours are a potentially lucrative field for companies like Base, as well as its major competitors, and record labels.

This is because it allows cash to be squeezed out of heritage acts like Elvis or Holiday in an era when the value of recorded music has been eroded by the shift to streaming platforms.

In the commercial parlance of Base, which did not respond to a request for comment, it is "creating multiple revenue verticals to deliver value".

That has meant the technological race is tight, and the field sometimes brutal.

Hologram USA sued Pulse Evolution, created from the remnants of an earlier special effects firm partly founded by director James Cameron, for patent violation in 2014.

"The minute we started doing this there were wannabes and patent thieves trying to grab a piece of what The Hollywood Reporter called the next billion-dollar business," Mr David, whose family made its fortune bottling Coca-Cola, told the ABC.

As Mr Pezutti said: "Everyone realises this is the future. Everyone is trying to get out in front."

Last year, Hologram USA had a legal disagreement with the estate of Whitney Houston, with whom it was negotiating on a hologram performance. Mr David said the two sides were in talks and he hoped there would be an announcement in the New Year.

(Mr David has also been sued by two former employees who accused him of sexual harassment. He says the allegations have no merit and are an attempt to extort him.)

The technology is one hurdle, but the law is another

In order to put one of these performances on, a hologram tour promoter has to pay to use the entertainer's music.

In addition to that, in the US — where Orbison, Elvis and Holiday lived and died — there is also a thing called right to publicity, which gives someone an exclusive right to profit off their likeness.

But whether that right extends beyond death, via the person's family or estate, differs from state to state.

For example, in California, the right to publicity extends 50 years after death. In New York, that right ends at death.

Neither Australia nor the UK, were Winehouse lived and died, have specific protections for right to publicity, though both have laws against "passing off", or making it seem like someone endorses something they don't.

Once you've got all that down, will people actually buy tickets?

This is a key question.

The original Tupac performance at Coachella created a lot of buzz. The Roy Orbison performance was positively reviewed earlier this year by the Los Angeles Times and received praise from the singer's children.

"People watched the first minute-and-a-half, and before you knew it, they had their devil horns up," Mr Pezutti said of the debut performance by a holographic Ronnie James Dio, the former Black Sabbath singer.

"When they sang back to the hologram, that's when I knew that we had literally captured something. You forget you are looking at a hologram. Now you are at a rock show."

For Mr Seymour, the success of a performance will come down to an individual audience member's willingness to buy in.

"If you are appalled by [the idea], because you think it's an atrocity to the original act, you are going to hate it," Mr Seymour said.

"And if you are a fan that just loves seeing that song being performed again, you are going to think it's the best thing ever."

Mr Seymour said the industry could have a "major impact" — if it can harness new technology, which he is seeing coming out of private labs and academia, to create interactive, real-time performers — ones that feel as genuine as they appear.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-...again/10600996





Study Confirms: Global Quantum Internet Really Is Possible
David Nield

Quantum internet promises ultra-secure, next-generation communications, but is it actually feasible on a global scale?

Absolutely, according to a new experiment carried out between satellites in orbit and a station on the ground.

The team of scientists was able to exchange several carefully managed photons in pulses of infrared light, carried between Russian GLONASS satellites and the Space Geodesy Centre on the ground run by the Italian Space Agency.

Getting these signals to pass through some 20,000 kilometres (12,427 miles) of air and space without any interference or data loss is no easy task – but the signs are promising that such a global network could indeed be functional.

"Space quantum communications (QC) represent a promising way to guarantee unconditional security for satellite-to-ground and inter-satellite optical links, by using quantum information protocols as quantum key distribution (QKD)," says one of the researchers, Giuseppe Vallone from the University of Padova in Italy.

The quantum key distribution or QKD method Vallone mentions refers to data encrypted using the power of quantum mechanics: thanks to the delicate nature of the technology, any interference is quickly detected, making QKD communications impossible to intercept.

In fact, hacking into a quantum mechanics message would cause it to self-destruct.

So far so good in theory, but keeping these secure channels open across long distances has proved tricky.

The key to the successful data exchange here was the use of passive retro-reflectors mounted on the satellites to keep the long-distance light signals intact, breaking the previous record distance for this type of quantum communication by an extra 15,000 kilometres (9,321 miles).

While satellites placed higher in orbit, like the GLONASS ones, are more difficult to communicate reliably with, they pass within sight of ground stations more regularly, potentially enabling an unhackable quantum network that can span the globe.

We're only just getting started with this type of technology – not least because scientists are still trying to figure out if it can actually work – and for the moment it's not clear exactly what a quantum internet would be used for or how it might be operated.

One idea is that it might become a specialised, very secure extension to the normal internet, used by a small selection of apps and devices.

What we do now know is that quantum communications are possible between the ground and high orbit satellites, extending the potential reach of the new technology.

That's important as the satellite networks we rely on continue to get developed and upgraded.

"Satellite-based technologies enable a wide range of civil, scientific and military applications like communications, navigation and timing, remote sensing, meteorology, reconnaissance, search and rescue, space exploration and astronomy," says Vallone.

"The core of these systems is to safely transmit information and data from orbiting satellites to ground stations on Earth. Protection of these channels from a malicious adversary is therefore crucial for both military and civilian operations."

The research has been published in Quantum Science and Technology.
https://www.sciencealert.com/new-stu...to-be-possible

















Until next week,

- js.



















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