Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 8th, ’20

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August 8th, 2020




UGA Study Suggests Pirated Movies can Lead to Higher Ticket Sales. Here’s Why.
Merritt Melancon

Movie studios estimate that they lose billions of dollars to digital movie piracy. But a new marketing study from the University of Georgia finds that piracy can actually boost ticket sales in certain situations.

The reason: pirates talk.

Pirated movies circulated online after their theatrical release saw about 3% higher box office receipts because of the increase in word-of-mouth advertising, according to Neil Bendle, an associate professor of marketing at the Terry College of Business.

Bendle is quick to point out that prerelease piracy is still financially damaging for movie studios. But post-theatrical release piracy was connected to more word-of-mouth and higher ticket sales.

“We don’t want to give the impression that piracy is a good thing, but there is something to the argument that piracy can increase markets,” Bendle said. “We wanted to find out when that might be the case.”

Bendle and his co-authors — Shane Wang of the University of Western Ontario and Shije Lu of the University of Houston — published their findings in a recent issue of Management Science.

They analyzed movie ticket sales, piracy rates and crowdsourced movie reviews between July 2015 and June 2017, using data from Russia, where authorities have blocked the popular Pirate Bay torrent since 2015.

Pirate Bay was one of the most significant digital piracy sites on the internet for several years between 2010 and 2020 but is now banned in many countries. The research team used activity on the site as a benchmark for piracy rates. They analyzed movie revenues before and during 2015, after a late 2014 law enforcement raid shut down the Pirate Bay website for about a year.

During Pirate Bay’s hiatus, word-of-mouth and movie revenues both dipped.

“When the Pirate Bay was taken down by the Swedish police, we see a drop in word-of-mouth because people can’t watch these movies on the Pirate Bay,” Bendle said. “And then, we see a contemporaneous decline in ticket sales. When we see that associated fall in word-of-mouth, and then a decline in movie sales, it was a nice bit of evidence that we were moving in the right direction.”

Though it sounds counterintuitive, Bendle’s team connected the dips to a decline in movie fans talking about the titles online. With the reduction in online buzz, fewer people were interested in seeing the movies in theaters or streaming them legally.

“With post-theatrical release piracy, people who are super keen on it or would have gone anyhow have already gone,” Bendle said. “People who are not going on the opening weekend can be drawn to it by people who have watched the movie and blogged about it. Bloggers don’t have to produce their ticket before they write about it. Pirates can still give a useful, valid opinion for consumers.”

Movies only benefitted from the boost in word-of-mouth advertising if the title was pirated and circulated after its theatrical release. Films that were pirated before their release dates saw an 11% decline in their overall revenue, despite increased word-of-mouth.

“There’s a key distinction between pre- and post-release piracy,” Bendle said. “We substantiate that prerelease piracy is very bad. It can undermine a film before it comes out.”

The takeaway for movie studios is that they should target their anti-piracy efforts to prevent pirated copies of their movies from leaking onto the internet before their theatrical release, Bendle said.

“They’ve got limited resources to try to track down movie pirates,” he said. “We’re saying that the best use of those resources should be put toward controlling digital copies of the movie prerelease and not at who’s pirating it after the theatrical release.”
https://www.onlineathens.com/enterta...ales-heres-why





Stolen TV Made $1 Billion According To A New Report
Rosa Escandon

Pirating TV is now a billion-dollar industry. Scammers have figured out to leverage stolen content and off-the-shelf streaming technologies to deliver cut-rate entertainment to consumers.

The largest growing sect of illegal streaming enterprises is called pirate subscription Internet Protocol Television (PS IPTV) Services. PS IPTVs mimic the practices of streaming services and charge consumers usually about $10 a month for thousands of channels from around the world and often with huge on-demand video libraries. These services can appear very legitimate with advertisements, customer service lines, and other trappings of legitimate streaming businesses.

According to a report from nonprofit group Digital Citizens Alliance and Nagra, a unit of anti-piracy consulting firm Kudelski Group, last year thieves stole live TV feeds and resold them for about $1 billion in sales online. The practice also most likely only grew due to coronavirus related quarantines forcing consumers to look for online entertainment.

The report highlights several key takeaways about these scammers. It found since they do not pay for the programming that makes up the core of the product, their profit margins can be as high as 85%. The report estimates 9 million fixed broadband subscribers in the U.S. use a PS IPTV service and 3,500 storefront websites, social media pages and stores within online marketplaces sell PS IPTV services to the U.S. market.

Currently, little is being done about these pirate services. Reselling stolen TV is a misdemeanor in the U.S. and is rarely punished. To curb these services, legislation has to keep up. Consumers are also not usually prosecuted, but they do take on risk. Their devices can be targeted by malware installed by sellers. Furthermore, these services sometimes carry banned channels including terrorist propaganda networks.

“Ultimately, the sheer scope and size of the streaming piracy ecosystem should trigger alarm among policymakers, law enforcement, consumer-protection groups, and the technology and financial-services industries, and spark a serious discussion about what efforts are needed to diminish this growing problem,” the report states. “Here is what is clear: Given its alarming presence in American households, it deserves far more scrutiny.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rosaesc.../#34c30c977b19





Vizag Youth Builds ‘Indigenous’ File-Sharing App

It claims to rival popular Chinese apps that were banned recently
B. Madhu Gopal

A city student has developed a file-sharing app which he claims will offer an alternative to the popular SHAREit app that was among several Chinese apps banned by the Central Government.

B.S.S. Madhav, a student of GITAM Deemed to be University, with the help of three friends, has developed the app which he has christened ‘IndiaShare’. The app claims to provide advanced safety and security features along with entertainment and news sections.

“The idea of developing the app struck me during the lockdown and I contacted three of my school friends – Prashant Sengar and Ritesh Singh (IIIT, Una, Himachal Pradesh) and Preet Singh (NIET, Noida) — and they readily agreed,” Mr. Madhav, a fourth year ECE student, told The Hindu.

“We launched the app on Google Play Store on June 25. For mobile-to-mobile transfer of files, both mobiles should have the app. For transfer of files from mobile to laptop, the laptop needs to have Google Chrome,” he said.

“Like other apps, we too seek permission from the user, and on obtaining the same from the client, a unique ID is created for seamless connectivity between the client and receiver. We do not sell the personal information of our clients to third parties, unlike some app providers. We mention in Google Play Store why we collect the information,” Mr. Madhav said.

“Apart from sharing of files, we recently added entertainment and news sections apart from content that is useful for students. News will be filtered to prevent the spread of fake information. At present, the app is available in Telugu, Hindi and English, but in the future, we plan to add more languages,” he said.

“The app needs to be regularly updated to add new features and equip readers with the latest updates. We have roped in Akanksha Tiwari, a 3rd year student of IIIT, Himachal Pradesh, to assist our team. The app can be downloaded for free. We are looking for sponsors to meet the app maintenance costs,” he said.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/nation...le32215958.ece





Homegrown File-Sharing App is Winning Users by Letting them Transfer Files Without Internet
Aparajita Saxena

With the government of India planning to toughen its stance on Chinese apps to safeguard people’s data, the spotlight on India-made apps has become brighter. In many ways, it is a manifestation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call for the country to become more “aatmanirbhar”, or self-sufficient.

Homegrown stand-ins for platforms such as TikTok, WeChat, Helo, and UC Browser have been enjoying a surge in the number of users, and some, like Trell, are seeing a record number of downloads daily.

One such app that’s gaining traction as an alternative to SHAREit and Xender is BharatShare, a file-sharing platform that enables users to transfer files without using the internet.

Launched nearly three weeks after the first ban at the end of June, the company powering BharatShare, a tech startup focused on building platforms for influencers and creators, was able to quickly pivot to fill the gap left by SHAREit and others by using the underlying technology it had built for another application.

“The Indian government’s ban on Chinese apps worked in our favour. We saw an opportunity to enter the market and launched BharatShare. The time was right and people needed to have Indian alternatives,” said Utkarsh Roy, Founder and Creator of BharatShare in an interview with YourStory.

What BharatShare does

The file-sharing app currently works only on the Android operating system, with iOS and phone-to-web browser sharing to follow soon. It occupies around six megabytes of memory on a phone, and can be comfortably used for bulk transfers.

BharatShare helps users send files, photos, and videos over WiFi and claims to be “200 times faster than Bluetooth”.

What truly sets the app apart from others in the ecosystem is its ability to transfer files quickly, a clean user interface that makes it easy to understand and use, the fact that it does not require an internet connection to work, and - more importantly - its privacy policy, which stipulates that it does not store any data transferred on its platform.

“I can say from the feedback I have been getting from users that BharatShare doesn’t take much time to connect to the receiving phone, while Chinese apps asked for several permissions and access,” Utkarsh said.

The app is free to download and use presently, but the company is considering monetising the amount of data shared, as well as adding a team sharing feature that can be used to further generate revenue.

It is also available in vernacular languages such as Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Malayalam, Bengali, Tamil, and Kannada, among several others.

Future plans

Self-funded at the moment, the app has caught the attention of a few prominent angel investors, and the company is in talks with a few of them, Utkarsh said. BharatShare has over 100 installs on the Google Play store.

Users on Google Play have lauded the app’s simple, user-friendly interface, and commended the fact that it does not ask for too many details and permissions, unlike the Chinese apps. That bodes well for the app, considering that not everyone in India is tech-savvy, or even has an internet connection.

“The files got shared in seconds. Faster, better, and Indian. I loved the fact that I didn't have to engage in unnecessary steps,” one user wrote.

BharatShare’s top competitors include Share ALL, JIOSwitch, SFT, and Smart Share - all homegrown applications.

“We want our products to make lives easier for our users. Our vision for BharatShare is to make it the default file-sharing app for Indians. We are working on multiple novel and innovative features,” Utkarsh said.

(Edited by Teja Lele Desai)
https://yourstory.com/2020/08/homegr...-shareit-china





Android’s ‘Nearby Share’ File Sharing Feature is Finally Launching

It only took Google nine years to catch up to AirDrop
Dieter Bohn

It will finally be slightly easier to share files, images, links, and other content between Android devices. Google is launching a new Android feature called “Nearby Share” that enables direct sharing between any device running Android 6 and up. Nearby Share is already available on some Pixel and Samsung phones, and Google says it’ll arrive on other devices “over the next few weeks.”

Nearby Share works very much like Apple’s AirDrop feature for the iPhone: you simply select the Nearby Share button on the share menu and then wait for a nearby phone to appear. Then whatever thing you’re sharing is sent directly over your transfer method of choice to the other phone.

As with AirDrop, you can set your preferred visibility for Nearby Share to different levels of contacts: all, some, or stay hidden. Google says it’s even possible to “send and receive files anonymously.” (Welcome to AirSlothing, Android users.) Nearby Share also shares files directly via whatever method your two phones deem is fastest: “Bluetooth, Bluetooth Low Energy, WebRTC or peer-to-peer Wi-Fi,” which Google says should allow it to work offline.

Nearby Share works between Android phones and will work with Chromebooks “in the coming months,” but it can’t share to iOS devices, Macs, or Windows machines. Asked if support for any of those were coming, a Google spokesperson said it “plan[s] to try to expand the feature to additional platforms in the future.”

Apple introduced AirDrop on the iPhone and Mac in 2011, fully nine years ago. Since then, Android has gone through a few different iterations and ideas for file sharing, but none have come anywhere near the simplicity and convenience of AirDrop. Also, few to none of those solutions were universally adopted by all Android manufacturers.

Hopefully that won’t be a problem with Nearby Share. Otherwise, Android users will be stuck in the same place, where the only reliable way to share files is to use email or cloud services — which leads to both confusion and unnecessary data fees. There’s reason to hope that it will be widely available, as Google says it can be added to any Android phone via Google Play Services instead of a full OS update.

The icon for Nearby Share looks like a couple of interweaved threads or wires (we’ll go with “Threads” as that word has an appropriately convoluted history for Google). When it’s available for your phone, you’ll be able to toggle availability on and off with a button in your Quick Settings.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/4/21...launch-airdrop





Code Wheels, Poison, and Star Maps: the Creative Ways Old Games Fought Piracy

Including Monkey Island's infamous Dial-a-Pirate.
Andy Kelly

DRM is a dirty word these days, but copy protection is by no means a new phenomenon. In the early days of PC gaming, developers dreamed up a number of interesting ways to stop people making copies and pirating their games. A lot of the time it was pretty dull, usually involving referencing a word on a certain page of the manual. But sometimes devs used their imaginations and tried something more fun, making the process feel like a part of playing the game. Here are some notable examples from the mists of time.

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (1992)

When it's time to warp to a new location in this adventure game, players without access to the manual will run into a pretty major problem: none of the systems are labelled. You need to reference a star map in the manual to warp to the correct location, otherwise you'll find yourself being attacked by enemy ships—who will continue to attack every time you punch in the wrong numbers.

Prince of Persia (1989)

In the second level of the original Prince of Persia, you find yourself in a room filled with mysterious bottles with letters printed next to them. At the bottom of the screen a message references a page, line, and word in the game's manual, indicating the correct bottle to drink. Drink the wrong bottle three times and the Prince will be poisoned and die. Get it right and the door to the next level will open.

Metal Gear Solid (2000)

There comes a point in both the PlayStation and PC versions of Metal Gear Solid where, to progress, you need to tune into a certain radio frequency. A character says it's "on the back of the CD case", meaning the actual box the game is packaged in. At this point in the game, Snake has an unrelated disk in his inventory, which led to people trying to interact with it to learn the frequency, not realising the game was breaking the fourth wall.

Leisure Suit Larry III (1989)

The manual for the third Leisure Suit Larry game is in the style of a tourist brochure for its tropical setting, the Hawaii-inspired island of Nontoonyt. Early on, in a casino, a bouncer blocks Larry's path and asks him for a ticket number found on a certain page of the manual. If you get it wrong, he accuses you of trying to use a counterfeit ticket and calls security, which results in an instant game over.

The Secret of Monkey Island (1990)

Playing old versions of The Secret of Monkey Island involves spinning a cardboard wheel lined with grotesque pirate faces to match one displayed on your screen, then inputting a date. The second game features a similar system in the form of the Mix 'n' Mojo wheel. This is probably the most well known example of physical copy protection in a PC game, and there's even a digital version.

The Colonel's Bequest (1989)

This classic Sierra mystery features a pretty elaborate form of copy protection. The game comes with a cardboard magnifying glass, with a red plastic 'lens', that reveals fingerprints on the back of a map. Start the game and you'll be shown a random fingerprint, and must reference the map to correctly identify who it belongs to. That's a lot of effort just to start a game, but it ties into the fiction nicely.

Operation Stealth (1990)

Also known as James Bond 007: The Stealth Affair in the US, this adventure game had a pretty unique form of copy protection. In the manual there's a strange, abstract illustration, like some mural from a Soviet-era apartment block. When you start the game you see a monochrome version of the illustration, and must reference the manual to tell the game which colour a highlighted area is.
https://www.pcgamer.com/code-wheels-...fought-piracy/





Future of TV Copyright
John Gong

Editor's note: Dr. John Gong is a professor at the University of International Business and Economics and a research fellow at the Academy of China Open Economy Studies at the University of International Business and Economics (UIBE). The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The 26th Shanghai TV Festival opened on August 3. As a festival which was delayed because of COVID-19, it has attracted wide attention from both home and abroad.

Although TV still plays an important role in our daily lives, it is an undeniable fact that TV's glorious days are behind us for good. Prime time TV's lure is approaching the glow of twilight.

We are entering into an unprecedented digital age based on the internet, where content production and distribution are done grossly by the masses. The traditional media heavyweights are undoubtedly giving way to the onslaught of a new generation of titans like TikTok and millions of its grassroots disciples.

These days, people appear to be more interested in short, shallow, snackable video clips meant for a round of laugh as opposed to serious investigative reporting that raises soul-searching questions.

Some people call it democratized content. I call it junk. (Disclaimer: I own no equity stakes whatsoever in any of TikTok's competitor companies, and condemn U.S. President Donald Trump's pirating treatment of TikTok in the U.S.)

But even junk has to be brought under the legal ambit, especially when an increasing number of such content is based on recycling of TV clips and other traditional media content. How can this activity be legalized without hampering its growth?

May be legalization is indeed a solution for traditional media – the original content creator whose content is sliced and diced for derivative use in other digital venues. And more importantly, this content can still be somehow monetized.

This issue was discussed at the Shanghai International Film Festival, where a group of industry experts spoke at the "Film and TV Copyright Trading: Protection of Audiovisual Copyright" forum, promulgating the benefits and discussing issues of patent trading and original work adaptation for film and TV.

This follows on the heels of the Shanghai Film and Television Copyright Services Center setup in December last year, which is a new entity offering a full value chain of services, such as the valuation of copyright and guidance for derivatives development as well as technology, talent and information research support.

And it is still a hot topic at this year's festival. The idea of licensing content is nothing new. Some traditional media companies have done a fabulous job of generating copyright revenues from derivative commercial activities.

Disney, for example, makes a fortune out of its theme parks, licensed merchandise and other related retail businesses. The problem is that when it comes to the internet, that kind of case-by-case negotiation model is just too time consuming and costly. We cannot use a 20th-century solution to deal with a 21st-century problem.

Chinese film director, actor and producer Xu Zheng and Chinese actress Yao Chen attend Shanghai International Film Festival's China Movie & TV Night, in Shanghai, China, August 2, 2020. /CCTV

The Shanghai Film and Television Copyright Services Center could be a step in the right direction in terms of minimizing the transaction cost to eventually resolve all the technology, business and legal issues, and enable quick licensing.

One current example is the establishment of a comprehensive patent work development scheme with affiliates of Tencent and other business partners, such as Tencent Pictures, Maoyan Entertainment and Tencent Interactive Entertainment. The idea here is to speed up the visual adaptation of online literary works. And they can start with the adaptation of animations and gaming titles into other formats that are likely to attract more viewers.

The Shanghai Film and Television Copyright Services Center would also serve as an exchange that deals with multiple stakeholders, thereby enabling cross-party transactions in a way that resembles the function of an internet advertisement exchange.

The latter has been proven to facilitate advertising effectiveness and monetizing efficiency. One good example is to help resolve and conduct arbitration of legal disputes over content copyrights, and the center has already dealt with a few cases since its opening.

Ultimately, all these licensing transactions ought to be done by machines running some kind of algorithm powered by artificial intelligence, with us taking the backseat.
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-0...QFy/index.html





Devin Nunes Can’t Sue Esquire Magazine Over Iowa Dairy Story, Judge Rules
Kate Irby

Rep. Devin Nunes cannot sue Esquire magazine over a 2018 story that described his family’s farm in Iowa, a federal judge ruled Wednesday, marking the congressman’s second loss in the cluster of lawsuits he filed against news organizations and critics.

The ruling by Judge C.J. Williams of the Northern District of Iowa federal court centered on a story titled “Devin Nunes’ Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret” by Ryan Lizza, who now is a political correspondent for Politico.

The so-called secret in the story was that the family had moved its dairy operation to Iowa in a community that relied on labor from undocumented immigrants. Nunes does not have a financial stake in the dairy, which is owned by his parents and brother.

Lizza and Hearst, the company that owns Esquire, had argued that Nunes failed to state a claim over which he could actually sue for defamation.

Williams agreed, saying the parts of the article that Nunes had specified were defamatory did not harm the congressman, were opinions or did not actually concern Nunes.

Even if the statements had been defamatory, Williams wrote, Nunes would have had to prove they had been made with “actual malice,” since he was a public figure suing a media company. He did not do so, Williams ruled.

“(Nunes’) complaint relies on ‘naked assertion[s]’ and ‘labels and conclusions’ which are devoid of ‘further factual enhancement,’ to establish actual malice,” Williams wrote. Nunes “cannot rely on general assertions and must plead facts to support a finding of actual malice. Although it is difficult for politicians like plaintiff to plead actual malice against the media ... that is precisely the result the First Amendment requires.”

Nunes in his complaint against Esquire sought $75 million in damages, claiming the magazine “knowingly and recklessly injured (Nunes’) reputation with a scandalous hit piece that intentionally disparaged (Nunes) and his family, accused (Nunes) of dishonesty, deceit, conspiracy and unethical practices and impugned his integrity and skills as a United States Congressman.”

Williams rebuked Nunes and his lawyer, Steven Biss, regarding some of the language published in the congressman’s complaint. Nunes and Biss compared Lizza to a pedophile, bringing up a sexual misconduct allegation made against Lizza at another workplace.

Investigations by Lizza’s current employer, Politico, said they did their “due diligence” and “were comfortable bringing Ryan on board.”

Williams called the language “immaterial, impertinent, and scandalous. (Nunes’) personal attacks on Lizza have no bearing on this case. This is apparent because (Nunes) never refers to the challenged allegations in resisting defendants’ motion to dismiss. The allegations likewise are prejudicial to Lizza and have criminal overtones.”

Nunes a year ago began suing media organizations and critics, alleging in the cases that various organizations conspired to damage his reputation. In Virginia courts, he has sued CNN, The Washington Post and McClatchy — the parent company of the largest newspaper in his district, The Fresno Bee.

He also sued Twitter in Virginia, alleging the company allowed anonymous critics to defame him under the fictional personas of his mother and his cow. The judge in June ruled that Nunes cannot sue Twitter for negligence in the case.

The news organizations are fighting the lawsuits and have moved to dismiss them. McClatchy has called Nunes’ lawsuit against the company a “baseless attack on local journalism.”

The Esquire case is the second of Nunes’ lawsuits dismissed by a judge. Nunes’ lawsuit against Fusion GPS, the investigative research firm that compiled the so-called “Steele dossier” of allegations concerning President Donald Trump and Russia, was dismissed by a judge earlier this year.

Nunes re-filed that lawsuit, which is still pending in court, though Fusion GPS has moved to dismiss the new complaint as well.
https://www.fresnobee.com/news/local...244756882.html





OnePlus is Preloading its Phones with Facebook Bloatware

Nord and OnePlus 8 series phones are saddled with Facebook services that can't be uninstalled
Karandeep Singh

Bloatware on Android phones has been around for so long — especially on Samsung and Huawei phones — that it's hardly even news anymore. Even so, it was a huge surprise when we found out that OnePlus has involved itself in this dubious practice. The OxygenOS bloatware in question comes from probably the shadiest company of them all — Facebook. Starting with the OnePlus 8 series and continuing with the Nord, users have had to put up with a bunch of Facebook-owned apps and a few background services on their brand-new handsets, some of which cannot be uninstalled.

This came to our attention when Max Weinbach of XDA tweeted a couple of screenshots of the Instagram app updating via the Facebook App Manager service instead of through Play Store as you'd expect. A number of people on Reddit pointed out that this has been the case for some time. We checked several OnePlus phones, and sure enough, the company's three most recent models come with system apps and services from Facebook preinstalled as part of the OS. It seems you'll find them in all regions where OnePlus phones ship with OxygenOS — so, pretty much everywhere but China.

I hate this so much pic.twitter.com/0cViyKaMGV

— Max Weinbach (@MaxWinebach) August 1, 2020

We reached out to OnePlus for comment and they confirmed to us that the OnePlus 8, 8 Pro, and Nord all include the Facebook App Installer, Facebook App Manager, and Facebook Services as system apps. The main Facebook app, Messenger, and Instagram are also present, as well as Netflix. In response to a feature suggestion under its Ideas campaign, OnePlus reasoned that the pre-installation of these apps ensures better battery efficiency on Facebook and enhances HDR playback on Netflix — make of that what you will.

As Max points out, if you’ve got these services on your phone, Facebook-owned apps may pull updates via these services instead of the Play Store. These system services have been spotted using data in the background, too, albeit in small quantities. That's potentially alarming considering there’s absolutely no clarity on the kind of information being shared with Facebook.

You can uninstall the user-facing Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram apps, but not the background services. It is possible to disable them, however, and doing so won't break anything on your phone. OnePlus says it will continue to install these Facebook apps and services on phones sold in Europe, India, and North America. Thankfully, older phones (OnePlus 7T and before) won't have these apps forced on them as part of an OS update. Though not as blatant as Samsung placing ads all over One UI, OnePlus’s partnership with a company like Facebook does raise more than a few eyebrows, and owners of OnePlus phones are understandably upset by this.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/0...ook-bloatware/





Trump Administration is Crippling International Internet Freedom Effort by Withholding Funds, Officials Say

The Voice of America building in Washington.
Spencer S. Hsu

The Trump administration is withholding $20 million in funding approved by Congress for a U.S. Internet freedom organization, forcing the cutoff Friday of tools used by tens of millions of people worldwide to access the Internet and uncensored news through the Voice of America, officials said.

The head of the Washington-based Open Technology Fund said Thursday that it is being forced to halt 49 of the fund’s 60 Internet freedom projects. The move, according to the head of the fund, affects about 80 percent of the group’s work helping human rights and pro-democracy advocates, journalists and others in 200 countries.

“Most troubling is that these actions will directly strengthen the hands of Internet freedom adversaries, like the Chinese and Iranian governments, who are actively working to undermine freedom and democracy around the world,” the fund’s acting chief executive, Laura Cunningham, wrote in an email to the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

The funding fight is the latest fallout in a power struggle between the Open Technology Fund and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees U.S. government-funded news outlets.

After his confirmation in June, the agency’s new director, Michael Pack, moved to fire the fund’s board and officers, before being blocked by a federal appeals court from doing so in early July.

Appeals court blocks Trump appointee Michael Pack’s takeover of organization fighting digital censorship and surveillance

In an email Thursday to Pack, Cunningham said the ongoing “arbitrary and unnecessary” withholding of grants earmarked by Congress has compromised the fund’s work countering digital surveillance, supporting technologies used by 2 billion people a day. She also said it “jeopardized the lives of millions of users who rely on our technologies worldwide,” including the agency’s own journalists and its audience overseas.

The cutoff “not only compromises OTF’s mission but sabotages USAGM’s as well,” Cunningham said, including the advancement of human rights, U.S. foreign policy and national security priorities.

The email, a copy of which was provided to The Washington Post, states that 85 percent of the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s audience in Iran and 40 percent of its audience in China rely on fund-supported technologies to access content produced by VOA, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcast Networks.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media, in a statement, called OTF’s accusations meritless and not based on fact. It said the fund is “very focused on being handed millions of taxpayer dollars without any oversight, whatsoever. USAGM is committed to protecting U.S. national security, sharing America’s story with the world, and supporting legitimate Internet freedom projects.”

Pack’s moves are controversial among some executive branch security and diplomatic officials battling censorship and surveillance by U.S. adversaries in Iran, China and Venezuela.

Spokesmen for the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development declined to comment on whether they supported the funding freeze or whether it was consistent with the administration’s policies countering repressive regimes, referring questions to the agency.

Christine Bednarz, spokeswoman for the National Endowment for Democracy, a congressionally funded organization founded in 1983 to support the spread of human rights, said NED does not take positions on U.S. policy but “anti-censorship and circumvention technologies — such as those provided by the fund — are critical to the ability of people to access information and work in closed societies, like Iran, China, and Venezuela.”

The Open Technology Fund is one of the largest sources of funding for developing, disseminating and maintaining free, open-source technology tools such as Signal and Tor, which permit users to encrypt communications and anonymously access the Internet despite government controls.

It also works to protect journalists, sources, activists and consumers from digital attack, and to aid researchers and technology developers. Defenders say halting support of tools that secure operating systems, communications and data storage will cut off a critical information lifeline for people documenting and sharing evidence in repressive societies with accelerating surveillance, putting those who rely on it directly in harm’s way.

“The impact is devastating, not just on our work but on people we work for,” said Dragana Kaurin, whose Localization Lab translates security and privacy tools into 200 local languages, including for vulnerable groups in Bolivia, Colombia, Myanmar, Turkey, Vietnam and Zimbabwe.

“People don’t trust private foreign security tools that aren’t in their own language . . . and it takes time to build that trust,” said Kaurin, who has helped independent journalists in Vietnam apply hardware encryption tools such as Veracrypt to adapt to government raids.

Users “are asking, what’s going to happen now? What are we going to use? Who has our data? . . . Are tools like Signal and Tor going to be safe to use if they lose the funding to update their code regularly?” she said. ‘Trust is the most expensive thing in the world, and you can lose it so easily.”

The Open Technology Fund projects include a Red Team Lab, which has audited and patched more than 2,100 privacy and security vulnerabilities in tools such as SecureDrop, used by journalists to accept story tips from anonymous sources.

“It’s a great loss to secure and private communications worldwide, and especially to those who are targeted by domineering nation states,” said Red Team Lab member Erik Cabetas, head of Brooklyn-based Include Security.

Another funded group, eQualitie of Montreal, helps protect more than 500 vulnerable civil society organizations from cyberattacks with its deflect.ca project, and is applying machine learning technology to respond to malicious Web traffic and developing a peer-to-peer messaging app that can work during Internet shutdowns, founder Dmitri Vitalev said.

The fund also supports the monitoring and detection of increasingly sophisticated Internet censorship in about 210 countries through the Open Observatory of Network Interference, which collaborates with entities such as Psiphon, a censorship circumvention tool highly popular in Iran.

The network has identified politically motivated attacks, including disruptions in 2019 of social media sites aimed at supporters of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, anti-government demonstrators in Ethiopia, and fuel protesters in Zimbabwe, said the group’s research and partnerships director Maria Xynou. It also has spotted targeting of lesbian and gay people and ethnic minorities in Iran, Ethiopia and Indonesia, she said.

OTF is one of the few outlets focused on marginalized populations, the people who are most affected by pervasive censorship and surveillance, those who understand it and those who are best positioned to fight it, Xynou said.

“Those people have trusted OTF, and if there are drastic changes to its leadership and its funding, that means people who are best positioned to defend Internet freedom will no longer be supported,” Xynou said. “This will have a long-term impact on the broader Internet freedom community beyond our work.”

The Internet freedom arena “is a cat-and-mouse space, where governments find new ways of spying and oppressing human rights, and defenders constantly need to develop new ways to protect them,” said Raphael Mimoun, founder of Horizontal. The group develops an OTF-funded tool called Tella that securely hides and encrypts sensitive material on mobile devices and shares it with human rights organizations.

“Without OTF funding, we are simply losing the ability to keep our tools secure, upgrade security infrastructure, and to make sure our users are protected against repression,” Mimoun said.

U.S. Internet freedom group alleges harassment by Trump administration continues despite thwarted takeover

The U.S. Agency for Global Media has paid $9.3 million of the fund’s $20 million 2020 allocation to date, the agency said. But it also holds an additional $9# million of prior year allocations that it has promised to release as part of a transfer of contracts from Radio Free Asia, where the fund began as a pilot project in 2012, Cunningham said.

Pack’s aides have complained of “bias and partisanship” and unspecified but “known mismanagement and scandals” at media components. The agency’s statement called the fund’s desire to divert attention from these failures “transparent.” Cunningham said the fund has not received any explanation or justification for the funding delay, nor has the agency made it aware of any “compliance or security failings.”

“OTF has always and continues to welcome and comply with USAGM oversight as well as congressional, OIG, and GAO oversight,” she said, adding, “I’m disheartened by this mischaracterization of issues that OTF takes so seriously.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local...e0d_story.html





Trump Admin Shrugs Off FCC Court Loss to Fight Calif. Net Neutrality Law

DOJ and ISPs sue Calif. despite court vacating FCC's bid to preempt state laws.
Jon Brodkin

The Trump administration and broadband industry are resuming their fight against California's net neutrality law, with the US Department of Justice and ISP lobby groups filing new complaints against the state yesterday.

The case is nearly two years old but was put on hold because California in October 2018 agreed to suspend enforcement of its law until after litigation over the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of US net neutrality rules and the FCC's attempt to preempt state net neutrality laws. That lawsuit was decided in October 2019 when the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the FCC repeal of its own rules but overturned the FCC's attempt to impose a blanket, nationwide preemption of any state net neutrality law.

"At bottom, the Commission lacked the legal authority to categorically abolish all 50 States' statutorily conferred authority to regulate intrastate communications," judges in that case wrote. But that doesn't prevent the Trump administration and ISPs from trying to block state laws on a case-by-case basis.

The appeals window in the FCC case closed last month, allowing the California case to move forward in US District Court for the Eastern District of California. Now that the Trump administration and broadband industry have filed amended complaints, California has until September 16 to file briefs supporting its net neutrality law.

California's net neutrality law prohibits Internet service providers from blocking or throttling lawful traffic and from requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers. The state law also bans paid data cap exemptions (so-called "zero-rating") and says that ISPs may not attempt to evade net neutrality protections by slowing down traffic at network interconnection points.

DOJ: States can’t regulate interstate traffic

Despite the FCC's preemption order being overturned in court, the DOJ's amended complaint yesterday argued that California's net neutrality law "is preempted by federal law and therefore violates the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution."

"California, however, seeks to second-guess the Federal Government's regulatory approach by enacting SB-822 [the state net neutrality law]," the DOJ said. The state law "also violates the division of regulatory authority between states and the Federal Government" in which the FCC has "exclusive responsibility" for regulating interstate communications "while leaving states with responsibility for intrastate communications," the DOJ said. The California law violates that division because "Internet communications are inherently interstate," the DOJ said.

The DOJ also asked for a preliminary injunction that would prevent enforcement of the California law while the case is pending.

The broadband industry's amended complaint was filed by the major lobby groups representing cable, fiber, DSL, and mobile Internet providers. "This case presents a classic example of unconstitutional state regulation... This statute was purposefully intended to countermand and undermine federal law by imposing on broadband—an interstate communications service—the very same regulations that the Federal Communications Commission expressly repealed in its 2018 Restoring Internet Freedom Order (and by adopting even more restrictive regulations)," the ISP lobby groups wrote.

Though the FCC's nationwide preemption was already thrown out by the DC Circuit appeals court, ISPs said that "the court did so only because it found the FCC lacked authority to expressly preempt all state regulation of intrastate broadband" and that "the court recognized that some state laws could conflict with, and be preempted by" the FCC preemption order. Additionally, the court decision "did not address whether the Communications Act itself preempted state regulation," ISPs wrote.

The DOJ argued that "importantly, the DC Circuit did not decide 'whether the remaining portions of the [FCC repeal] Order have preemptive effect under principles of conflict preemption or any other implied-preemption doctrine,' noting that a conflict analysis depended on having 'the facts of any alleged conflict before us.' The Court left that issue open for another case where—like here—the Commission makes... provision-specific arguments."

FCC abandoned its Title II authority

California will likely point to other portions of the DC Circuit order, which found that the FCC's power to preempt is limited because the commission abandoned its Title II regulatory authority over broadband. "[i]n any area where the Commission lacks the authority to regulate, it equally lacks the power to preempt state law," judges wrote in that case. The FCC's "affirmative" sources of regulatory authority come from Title II, III, and VI of the Communications Act, judges wrote. But Pai's FCC chose to apply Title I to broadband, which contains no such authority.

A spokesperson for California Attorney General Xavier Becerra told Ars, "We are reviewing the complaints and look forward to defending California's state net neutrality protections."

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat who voted to impose net neutrality rules during the Obama administration and later opposed Chairman Ajit Pai's repeal, called the DOJ's lawsuit "shameful."

"Millions wrote the FCC to say they supported net neutrality," Rosenworcel wrote on Twitter yesterday. "But the FCC didn't listen. It rolled back open Internet policies, over my objection. So states set out to right what the FCC got wrong, in their own laws. Today DOJ went to court to stop California's effort. Shameful."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...eutrality-law/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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