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Old 10-02-21, 07:21 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - February 13th, ’21

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February 13th, 2021




US Drops Suit Against Calif. Net Neutrality Rule, But ISPs are Still Fighting it

California law still faces court challenge from broadband-industry lobby groups.
Jon Brodkin

The Biden administration has abandoned a Trump-era lawsuit that sought to block California's net neutrality law. In a court filing today, the US Department of Justice said it "hereby gives notice of its voluntary dismissal of this case." Shortly after, the court announced that the case is "dismissed in its entirety" and "all pending motions in this action are denied as moot."

The case began when Trump's DOJ sued California in September 2018 in US District Court for the Eastern District of California, trying to block a state net neutrality law similar to the US net neutrality law repealed by the Ajit Pai-led FCC. Though Pai's FCC lost an attempt to impose a blanket, nationwide preemption of any state net neutrality law, the US government's lawsuit against the California law was moving forward in the final months of the Trump administration.

The Biden DOJ's voluntary dismissal of the case puts an end to that. "I am pleased that the Department of Justice has withdrawn this lawsuit," FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said today. "When the FCC, over my objection, rolled back its net neutrality policies, states like California sought to fill the void with their own laws. By taking this step, Washington is listening to the American people, who overwhelmingly support an open Internet, and is charting a course to once again make net neutrality the law of the land."

ISPs still fighting state law

California still has to defend its net neutrality rules against a separate lawsuit filed by the major broadband-industry lobby groups. The industry groups representing all the biggest ISPs and many smaller ones filed an amended complaint against California in August 2020, claiming the net neutrality law is "unconstitutional state regulation."

"Those of us who support SB822, the California law, believe that challenges to the law lack a valid basis," Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counselor at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, told Ars today. "In light of the fact that the FCC disclaimed any jurisdiction over broadband Internet service, the FCC's claim of a policy of 'non-regulation' leaves the states free to regulate."

Schwartzman and the Benton Institute are helping California defend the law in court. A hearing on the industry's motion for preliminary injunction is scheduled for February 23, Schwartzman said.

Back in October 2018, California agreed to suspend enforcement of its law until litigation is over. The state law prohibits Internet service providers from blocking or throttling lawful traffic. It also prohibits requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers, 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.

The FCC is likely to reinstate net neutrality rules during the Biden administration but can't do so yet as the commission is deadlocked 2-2 between Democrats and Republicans. A new Democratic commissioner must be nominated by Biden and approved by the Senate.

"The Biden administration must restore net neutrality, and dropping this case is a good start," Joshua Stager, senior counsel at New America's Open Technology Institute, said today.

The Trump administration lawsuit was "a frontal attack on both net neutrality and California's right to protect consumers," Stager said. California lawmakers passed the law "to ensure that Californians get the Internet service they paid for without unreasonable interference from their Internet provider. That law is needed now more than ever as millions of Californians rely on Internet service to get through simultaneous public health, economic, and climate crises. The Department of Justice never should have stood in the way of this law."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...trality-rules/





ISPs Step Up Fight Against SpaceX, Tell FCC that Starlink Will be Too Slow

SpaceX's FCC broadband funding faces more opposition from telco trade groups.
Jon Brodkin

More broadband-industry groups are lining up against SpaceX's bid to get nearly $900 million in Federal Communications Commission funding. Two groups representing fiber and rural Internet providers yesterday submitted a report to the FCC claiming that Starlink will hit a capacity shortfall in 2028, when the satellite service may be required to hit a major FCC deployment deadline.

The study was commissioned by the Fiber Broadband Association (FBA) and NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association. They are urging the FCC to carefully examine whether SpaceX's Starlink broadband service should receive money from the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), which recently awarded SpaceX $885.51 million over 10 years to bring Starlink to 642,925 homes and businesses in 35 states. The funding for SpaceX and other ISPs won't be finalized until the FCC reviews their long-form applications, which were submitted after the reverse auction.

In a filing accompanying the study they commissioned, the FBA and NTCA told the FCC:

The Commission faces a daunting but essential task in ensuring that winning bidders can meet their public interest obligations and not strand these unserved consumers. And, the stakes become greater when a bidder won the rights to serve hundreds of thousands of unserved locations and intends to use technologies and network infrastructure not yet proven in the market—especially when it may not be discerned for years to come whether those technologies will evolve to the point where they can in fact satisfy the bidder's RDOF commitments.

One such winning bidder is SpaceX... which has not yet deployed its full constellation of satellites and ground stations and has just begun to offer commercial service. The general public and communications engineers alike, including at FBA and NTCA member companies, often marvel at SpaceX's plans and efforts; yet, those with engineering experience know there is often a large gap between theoretical and actual network performance.


The FCC won't necessarily accept the groups' claims. Forecasting a capacity shortfall seven years in advance is tricky, and the groups who commissioned the study have a vested interest in preventing SpaceX from getting funding. Money that isn't distributed to SpaceX could be given to other ISPs. SpaceX's haul of $885.51 million is a large chunk of the $9.2 billion awarded to 180 entities nationwide to expand networks to 5.2 million homes and businesses.

We contacted SpaceX today and will update this article if we get a response.

NTCA represents 850 small telcos while the FBA represents a mix of ISPs, municipalities, and vendors that sell equipment and services to ISPs. The FBA and NTCA filing comes days after lobby groups for electric co-ops that provide broadband told the FCC that SpaceX's low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite technology is experimental and unproven, and it shouldn't get funding. The electric co-op groups also raised concerns about fixed-wireless services that are slated to receive FCC funding.

Predicting a capacity crunch

If its funding gets final approval, SpaceX will have to provide 100Mbps download and 20Mbps upload speeds to 642,925 locations to meet its commitment to the FCC. The FBA and NTCA hired consulting firm Cartesian to analyze whether SpaceX can get it done. Conducting the analysis is "no small task given that: (a) SpaceX has provided limited information publicly about its network and the performance capabilities; (b) SpaceX's network plans and performance capabilities continue to shift; and (c) actions by the Commission in pending and future proceedings may cause SpaceX's plans to change further," the groups said.

The results are "based upon the best information publicly available and conservative assumptions with respect to factors such as demand," but the FBA and NTCA acknowledged that "information furnished confidentially by SpaceX through the long-form process may provide additional inputs and yield different results." With those caveats, Cartesian's report predicts that in 2028, 56 percent of subscribers in SpaceX's FCC-funded areas would "experience service degradation" due to congestion. Cartesian chose 2028 because that's when a six-year deadline to deploy all required broadband is likely to pass.

"More locations will be impacted if RDOF usage is higher, or SpaceX launches fewer satellites by 2028," the report continued. "RDOF service could be significantly worse if Starlink capacity is allocated to non-RDOF use cases." Cartesian said its "model assumes Starlink is able to meet its goal of 12,000 satellites before the mandated RDOF completion date" and that the "throughput capacity of a single satellite is set at 20Gbps per previous SpaceX public statements."

To predict the capacity required per subscriber, Cartesian said it drew from "current estimates of average bandwidth usage per subscriber, during peak hours, range from 1.7 to 2.7Mbps." It raised those estimates of peak-hours usage "to establish a minimum capacity required of 3.6Mbps per subscriber to provide 25 percent headroom at highest peak usage."

Cartesian further tried to account for future growth in bandwidth demand from sources such as 4K streaming video. By 2028, Cartesian estimated that SpaceX will need to provide 15.3 to 20.8Mbps per subscriber to meet its obligations. This is lower than the 100Mbps required download speeds because scenarios in which every broadband subscriber uses every available bit are not realistic. Not all subscribers actively use the Internet during peak hours, either. Cartesian said that previous FCC "testing requirements have imposed an 80/80 threshold, meaning 80 percent of testing locations must equal or exceed speed tests of 80Mbps."

"We modeled Starlink's best possible share of subscribers fully served under the low case and high case capacity requirements of 15.3 and 20.8Mbps respectively—customers receiving less will experience service degradation," the report said. At 15.3Mbps in 2028, 56 percent of subscribers would be under the threshold; at 20.8Mbps in 2028, 57 percent of subscribers would be under the threshold, the report said.

"The median capacity allocation is 14.7-17.1Mbps, and 25-29 percent of subscribers [would] receive less than 10Mbps during peak times," Cartesian wrote.

Fiber is better—but not available to many

The FCC will examine SpaceX's technical claims before approving the money, but Starlink may in fact be the best option for numerous Americans who live in broadband deserts. Fiber-to-the-home is obviously today's gold standard for broadband, providing the fastest speeds, uploads that are as fast as downloads, and excellent reliability. But incumbent ISPs haven't extended fiber-to-the-home to huge portions of the United States, especially in rural America and even in many urban and suburban areas.

If Starlink can handle the 5 million users that SpaceX is planning for in the US, it could be a huge upgrade in cities and towns where wireline ISPs failed to upgrade old DSL networks. (Customers who at least have cable-broadband access aren't as likely to need something like Starlink, though cable does lag far behind fiber on upload speeds.)

While SpaceX hasn't responded to the FBA/NTCA study, the company touted Starlink's progress last week in a petition to the FCC seeking designation as an Eligible Telecommunications Carrier, saying that "Starlink's performance is not theoretical or experimental." The Starlink beta already serving 10,000 users in the US and abroad demonstrates "technical maturity and inherent capacity to support high-throughput, low-latency broadband service to unserved or underserved communities in even the most remote and rural areas of the United States," the filing said.

"Starlink continues to improve as SpaceX deploys additional infrastructure and capability, averaging two Starlink launches per month, to add significant on-orbit capacity alongside activation of additional gateways to improve performance and expand service coverage areas across the country," SpaceX said.

While incumbent ISPs are wary of the new competition from Starlink's low Earth orbit satellites, traditional wireline telcos are no guarantee to meet FCC deployment requirements. CenturyLink and Frontier recently missed FCC deployment deadlines in dozens of states, and both of them are slated to get more money from the new RDOF program.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...l-be-too-slow/





AT&T Scrambles to Install Fiber for 90-Year-Old after His Viral WSJ Ad

From 3Mbps DSL to 300Mbps fiber: Aaron Epstein's newspaper ad gets amazing result.
Jon Brodkin

When 90-year-old Aaron Epstein bought a Wall Street Journal print ad to complain about his slow AT&T Internet service, the impact was immediate. Reporters like me called him and wrote articles, talk of his plight went viral on the Internet, his ad made an appearance on Stephen Colbert's Late Show, TV networks interviewed him for nightly news broadcasts, and AT&T executives sprang into action to minimize the public-relations damage.

Now, barely a week later, Epstein's home in North Hollywood, California, has AT&T fiber service with unlimited data and advertised speeds of 300Mbps in both directions. In a speed test yesterday, download speeds were 363Mbps and upload speeds were 376Mbps. It's a gigantic upgrade over the "up to" 3Mbps DSL he and his wife, Anne, struggled with before.

Normally, complaints about AT&T DSL don't lead to fiber-to-the-home upgrades the next week, as AT&T has essentially abandoned the old phone network in large parts of the country where AT&T has not deemed it profitable enough to install state-of-the-art technology. But it appears we have discovered what it takes to kick AT&T into its fastest fiber-installation mode, and the answer is a quarter-page Wall Street Journal print ad.

AT&T techs arrive

AT&T called Epstein when our article about his ad was published on Wednesday last week. AT&T technicians knocked on his door the next day to tell him they'd be installing fiber. Yesterday, AT&T techs returned to finish the installation and set up his new service. Epstein is paying $45 a month for the first 12 months, after which it would rise to $65.

"The AT&T people I talked to tell me that they had to install extra wiring, and it's costing them thousands and thousands of dollars to put this wiring just for my house because my neighbors still do not have it, and they still have to go to considerable expense to hook up my neighbors," Epstein told Ars.

We asked AT&T if Epstein's neighbors will be hooked up soon and will update this article if we get a response.

Other people nearby apparently had AT&T fiber service already. The fiber cables now going into Epstein's house connect back to fiber that was installed "two or three blocks away," Epstein said.

Update #1 at 12:22pm ET: AT&T didn't provide a direct answer about when or if it will hook up all of Epstein's neighbors, but gave us this statement claiming that it planned to upgrade Epstein's house and others nearby all along:

Earlier this week we completed our planned expansion of AT&T Fiber in this customer's neighborhood, and we were pleased to provide him the upgrade he wanted. This neighborhood was already planned to receive fiber and is part of our ongoing fiber expansion in the larger Los Angeles area. Nationally, we recently announced that we will bring AT&T Fiber to an additional 2 million residential locations this year.

But it's hard to believe that Epstein's ad had no effect on AT&T installing fiber at his house yesterday. When we contacted AT&T last week, the company had nothing to say about whether it would ever install fiber at Epstein's house, saying only that "We continually enhance and invest in our wireless and wireline networks" and "have invested more than $3.1 billion in our Los Angeles-area networks from 2017-2019." If the upgrade was really in the works before Epstein's ad, AT&T probably would have said so when the controversy erupted over a week ago.

Update #2 at 1:20pm ET: AT&T CEO John Stankey called Epstein personally today, Epstein told us. Stankey told Epstein that he saw his WSJ ad in a packet of press clippings given to him by staff. Stankey also apparently gave Epstein a different answer than the one we got from AT&T's public-relations team about when the rest of his neighborhood will get fiber. "He said that the way things are, my neighborhood should have it within 12 months," Epstein told us, shortly after getting off the phone with AT&T's CEO. By contrast, AT&T's spokesperson told us it has "completed" the expansion in his neighborhood, which appears to be incorrect based on what Stankey and other AT&T employees told Epstein.

Update #3 at 2:30pm ET: AT&T's spokesperson circled back to us, admitting that the fiber installations in Epstein's neighborhood have not been completed. While AT&T previously told us that "we completed our planned expansion of AT&T Fiber in this customer's neighborhood," the spokesperson subsequently clarified that "what's completed is bringing fiber to the neighborhood." That means AT&T installed fiber to part of the neighborhood but has not extended the fiber to the rest of the homes. "The neighborhood connection is complete and we are working as quickly as possible to complete our work in the neighborhood," AT&T said.

“I chose the only route that I know”

The WSJ ad wasn't Epstein's first attempt to get faster AT&T service. But contacting AT&T directly, with no threat of media exposure, didn't produce any results. We wrote in our article last week:

"I get very annoyed because, periodically, I get snail mail and periodically I see ads on TV and ads on the Internet offering the faster service [from AT&T]," Epstein told Ars. But whenever Epstein calls AT&T about getting faster speeds, a customer service rep says the company is working on it but cannot provide a date for when it will be available, he said.

Epstein said yesterday that he believes the Ars article about his ad is what got "the wheels rolling," as we interviewed him and wrote our story before other publications did. "Your power is costing them a lot of money, and I don't see how they can recoup that money by what I pay them each month," he told us.

But the key factor was Epstein's decision to buy a large ad in a major newspaper and fill it with a firm but polite plea to the AT&T CEO for better service. Epstein's story was too good to pass up, and he would have heard from other journalists soon enough if we hadn't contacted him first. Within hours of his WSJ ad appearing in the paper, pictures of it were being shared on Twitter, which is where we first saw it.

I mean how upset one must be, over slow home internet speeds, to pay for a personal quarter-page national ad in print @WSJ pic.twitter.com/Zk9umKD0t1

— Raju Narisetti (@raju) February 3, 2021


Epstein said the ad cost him $10,000 (not $1,100 as originally stated). "I chose the only route that I know. There are other people that know how to get up on social networks and voice their complaints," he said. Epstein has been a customer of AT&T through its various permutations since 1960 and still uses a "pacbell.net" email address from the Pacific Bell brand discontinued nearly 20 years ago.

Buying a $10,000 newspaper ad is far from an ideal way to get better Internet access, but that doesn't mean it's not worth complaining in less expensive or free ways. It is possible to pressure a major telecom company by raising a ruckus on social media or by contacting reporters. Conversations Epstein said that he had with AT&T executives suggest as much, as it's clear the company is monitoring social media for complaints and dispatching high-up people to solve problems when the pressure hits the right level.

Epstein: AT&T should invest in telecom, not movies

Epstein's ad, an open letter to Stankey, said that AT&T is "a major disappointment" to people in North Hollywood, California.

"We need to keep up with current technology and have looked to AT&T to supply us with fast Internet service," Epstein wrote in the open letter to AT&T's CEO. "Yet, although AT&T is advertising speeds up to 100Mbps for other neighborhoods, the fastest now available to us from AT&T is only 3Mbps. Your competitors now have speeds of over 200Mbps. Why is AT&T, a leading communications company, treating us so shabbily in North Hollywood?"

AT&T technicians who came to his house after his ad told him it "would be price prohibitive for them to hook it up for everybody right now," Epstein told Ars. Epstein doesn't totally buy that explanation, pointing out that AT&T has strayed from its core telecommunications business to get into media.

"My argument with them is, 'You're a communications business, stay out of the movie business. Invest your money in what you're supposed to be doing,'" Epstein said. AT&T earned $171.8 billion in revenue in 2020.

Epstein has both AT&T and Charter's Spectrum Internet service, as we wrote in our previous article. Charter also got in touch with Epstein after the hubbub started last week to provide him with a better modem. When AT&T installed fiber, Epstein had the AT&T technicians set things up so that he can easily switch between AT&T and Spectrum services to compare them. Epstein also pays for AT&T landline phone service.

"Maybe a month from now, if I am satisfied using AT&T only, I'll drop Spectrum," Epstein said.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...-wsj-print-ad/





Labels v Charter Dispute Results in Debate Over Whether P2P File-Sharing is Still an Issue
Chris Cooke

As the big legal battle between the major record companies and US internet service provider Charter Communications continues to go through the motions, there is now a side debate as to whether piracy is really a problem for the music industry any more.

Isn’t P2P file-sharing all a bit 2009, and kind of old news now that the majors are cashing in big time on the streaming boom, enabled – of course – by the super duper internet access provided by the likes of Charter? Well, that’s what the ISP is asking. “No, not at all!”, say the labels. Piracy is still a problem. As are pesky net firms that don’t enforce their own repeat infringer policies.

Why’s this all relevant? Good question. After all, the labels are suing Charter Communications over the past infringement of its users. The ISP – like rival Cox Communications – is accused of having a shoddy system for dealing with repeat infringers among its userbase.

If that is proven, Charter – like Cox – loses safe harbour protection under US copyright law, meaning it can be held liable for its users’ past infringement. In Cox’s case, that liability led to a billion dollar damages bill. Though Cox is very busy appealing that ruling.

Charter is also understandably keen to avoid any liabilities for its users’ past copyright infringement and/or being forced to pay mega-bucks damages to the majors.

Among other things, Charter’s lawyers argue that the fact piracy is no longer such a big deal for the music industry could be a factor in deciding any damages the ISP may or may not have to pay in the future.

The logic there is that, with piracy less of a problem, there is less of a need for a financial deterrent to encourage ISPs to be tougher on infringers, which in turn should result in lower damages being awarded. Or something like that.

According to Torrentfreak, Charter’s legal rep said: “The snippet of time in which this case involves, because of the total length in the claim period, is a time when this P2P issue was at its most pronounced. Today it’s no longer a problem. Today plaintiffs … are making a ton of money off of the internet streaming capabilities … Charter’s internet is actually giving them a vehicle by which they make a huge amount of money”.

This is coming up now because the case is going through the discovery phase and both sides are trying to access internal documents from the other. Charter wants access to information about the major record companies’ recent revenues, and the impact streaming has had on their businesses.

The record companies counter that, while P2P file-sharing may not be as significant a threat as it once was, it’s still an issue, alongside other forms of online piracy.

To prove their point, they want Charter to hand over information about the infringement notices they are now receiving, the internal conversations they have had about infringement, and the revenues they generate from users accused of infringing copyright.
Charter has objected to that request and a judge recently concurred with the ISP that there are no grounds to force it to hand over that kind of information to the labels. However, last week the record companies returned to court to again argue that Charter should provide the requested documents and data.

They said: “Plaintiffs should be permitted this limited discovery to rebut Charter’s argument that peer-to-peer piracy is no longer a phenomenon to which Charter contributes and which contribution must be deterred”.
https://completemusicupdate.com/arti...till-an-issue/





Police Crack Down Chinese Subtitle Operator Renren Yingshi
Denise Jia

Police in Shanghai detained 14 people related to a popular subtitle production company that provides Chinese subtitles for English-language TV shows such as “Game of Thrones” and “The Big Bang Theory” for tens of million fans in China.

Those arrested worked with Renren Yingshi, which operates China’s largest subtitling site, YYeTs.com, police said Wednesday. They are suspected of pirating more than 20,000 television shows and films and being involved in more than 16 million yuan ($2.47 million) of illegal revenue, officials said.

Investigations showed that the suspects set up several companies since 2018, obtaining TV show and film content through overseas pirating websites, hiring translators for subtitles at 400 yuan for each episode or film, uploading content to apps and making illegal profits by charging subscription and ad fees, police said in a statement.

YYeTs.com was founded in 2003 by a group of Chinese students in Canada, originally as a nonprofit organization sharing translated foreign films and TV programs free of charge through the internet. The website changed its name to Renren Yingshi in 2007 as it grew into one of the most influential subtitle providers for foreign-language content.

The website was shut down temporarily in November 2014 after the Motion Picture Association of America blacklisted Renren Yingshi as one of the worst sources of online piracy in the world.

As of Thursday, YYeTs.com was still accessible, but the link to download TV shows and films no longer worked.
https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-02...101660572.html





Is This Beverly Hills Cop Playing Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ to Avoid Being Live-Streamed?

Police officers in Beverly Hills have been playing music while being filmed, seemingly in an effort to trigger Instagram's copyright filters.
Dexter Thomas

Last Friday, a man entered the Beverly Hills police department, only to be treated to a mini DJ set that could potentially get his Instagram account banned.

Sennett Devermont was at the department to file a form to obtain body camera footage from an incident in which he received a ticket he felt was unfair. Devermont also happens to be a well-known LA area activist, who regularly live-streams protests and interactions with the police to his more than 300,000 followers on Instagram.

So, he streamed this visit as well—and that’s when things got weird.

In a video posted on his Instagram account, we see a mostly cordial conversation between Devermont and BHPD Sgt. Billy Fair turn a corner when Fair becomes upset that Devermont is live-streaming the interaction, including showing work contact information for another officer. Fair asks how many people are watching, to which Devermont replies, “Enough.”

Fair then stops answering questions, pulls out his phone, and starts silently swiping around—and that’s when the ska music starts playing.

Fair boosts the volume, and continues staring at his phone. For nearly a full minute, Fair is silent, and only starts speaking after we’re a good way through Sublime’s “Santeria.”

Assuming that Fair wasn’t just trying to share his love of ’90s stoner music with the citizens of Beverly Hills, this seems to be an intentional (if misguided) tactic to use social media companies' copyright protection policies to prevent himself from being filmed.

Instagram in particular has been increasingly strict on posting copyrighted material. Any video that contains music, even if it’s playing in the background, is potentially subject to removal by Instagram.

Most people complain about these rules. Beverly Hills law enforcement, however, seems to be a fan.

Based on what’s visible in the video, Fair seems to be banking on Instagram’s copyright algorithm detecting the music, and either ending the live stream outright or muting it.

Or, even if the algorithm does not detect the song immediately, someone — for example, a disgruntled police officer—could simply wait until a user posts an archive of the live video on their page, then file a complaint with Instagram that it contains copyrighted material.

Fair doesn't seem to be up-to-date on his social media copyright policies, however.

In May of last year, Instagram clarified its policies on including music in livestreams, and began to advise people to only use short clips of music, and to ensure that there is a "visual component" to videos—"recorded audio should not be the primary purpose of the video," the company said. Instagram declined to comment on this specific video, however, a spokesperson told VICE News that "our restrictions take the following into consideration: how much of the total video contains recorded music, the total number of songs in the video, and the length of individual song(s) included in the video." Under that rubric, Devermont's video should be fine, since it’s just one song, and is purely incidental.

Also, for anyone who is familiar with Sublime’s back catalogue, it seems unlikely that the band’s rights holders would do Fair a solid and complain to Instagram.

But then again, Instagram’s enforcement of their own policy seems to be unpredictable and inconsistent, and it’s hard to tell what the algorithm will catch during a livestream. There have also been plenty of high-profile of incidents of DJs and artists being penalized for playing their own songs (fans of the Verzuz series may remember Swizz Beats warning Beenie Man and Bounty Killer not to perform their own songs for more than 90 seconds).

And for prominent activist accounts like Devermont’s, the stakes are particularly high: too many violations can risk getting your entire account banned.

Under most circumstances, civilians are legally permitted to openly film on-duty police officers under the First Amendment. And while the interaction between Devermont and Fair is pretty benign, BHPD’s recent behavior suggests that at least some cops believe they can prevent themselves from being filmed or livestreamed by playing copyrighted music, which would have serious implications for more serious incidents of police misconduct.

That is: if this had only happened once, an officer coming up with an off-the-cuff, if slightly dodgy, plan to “hack” Instagram’s policy in order to skirt someone’s First Amendment rights would be eyebrow-raising for its ingenuity, if nothing else.

But the BHPD’s non-consensual Sublime listening party was not an isolated incident. There seems to be a pattern here.

In a separate part of the video, which Devermont says was filmed later that same afternoon, Devermont approaches Fair outside. The interaction plays out almost exactly like it did in the department — when Devermont starts asking questions, Fair turns on the music.

Devermont backs away, and asks him to stop playing music. Fair says “I can’t hear you” — again, despite holding a phone that is blasting tunes.

Later, Fair starts berating Devermont’s livestreaming account, saying “I read the comments [on your account], they talk about how fake you are.” He then holds out his phone, which is still on full blast, and walks toward Devermont, saying “Listen to the music”.

In a statement emailed to VICE News, Beverly Hills PD said that “the playing of music while accepting a complaint or answering questions is not a procedure that has been recommended by Beverly Hills Police command staff,” and that the videos of Fair were “currently under review.”

However, this is not the first time that a Beverly Hills police officer has done this, nor is Fair the only one.

In an archived clip from a livestream shared privately to VICE Media that Devermont has not publicly reposted but he says was taken weeks ago, another officer can be seen quickly swiping through his phone as Devermont approaches. By the time Devermont is close enough to speak to him, the officer’s phone is already blasting “In My Life” by the Beatles — a group whose rightsholders have notoriously sued Apple numerous times. If you want to get someone in trouble for copyright infringement, the Beatles are quite possibly your best bet.

As Devermont asks about the music, the officer points the phone at him, asking, “Do you like it?”

This would seem to suggest that playing copyrighted music as a deterrent to the First Amendment-guaranteed right to openly film police is, if not BHPD official protocol, at least a technique that has been deployed by more than one officer.

If Fair’s intent was to inhibit the ability to share video of inconvenient police interactions, it seems to have been unsuccessful thus far. Devermont has posted another, longer clip of the first interaction, music intact.

And for now, both videos of the impromptu Sublime listening session remain online.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvxb...g-livestreamed





New Copyright Laws Create Small Claims Court, Regulate Streaming
Pramod Chintalapoodi

The 5,500-page COVID-19 stimulus relief and government-funding bill signed into law in December included several copyright provisions that had nothing to do with the pandemic.

Small Claims

The Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (“CASE Act”) created a Copyright Claims Board (CCB) – a sort of “small claims court” for relatively small copyright disputes.

The CCB can consider the following types of issues:

• Copyright infringement
• Declarations of non-infringement of copyright
• Claims for failure to remove or disable access to allegedly infringing content under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)
• Misrepresentation in connection with a DMCA claim
• Counterclaims in connection with the above
• Defenses to copyright infringement claims, such as first sale and fair use

The CCB can award up to $15,000 in statuary damages per copyrighted work, no more than $30,000 in total actual or statutory damages, and no more than $5,000 in attorney’s fees in cases of bad faith, unless a party can show unusual circumstances.

Regular copyright cases in federal courts do not have these limits.

Filing fees to bring matters before the CCB will be cheaper than for filing federal cases, discovery is limited, and the federal rules of evidence won’t apply. This may make the new small claims court popular, and deter relatively minor acts of infringement, but could also lead to abuses by “copyright trolls.”

The CCB will start operating by December 27, 2021 unless the Copyright Office seeks a delay.

Streaming

The “Protecting Lawful Streaming Act” adds a new section 2319C to title 18 of the U.S. Code. This addresses the “felony loophole” that copyright owners have been complaining about for almost ten years.

Infringing copyright by reproducing or distributing someone else’s content without a license is a felony, as well as grounds for a civil suit for copyright infringement. However, infringing the rights in public performances was previously treated as only a misdemeanor.

The new law, as CNN reports, targets "commercial, for-profit streaming piracy services" that make money from illegally streaming copyrighted material. It doesn’t target consumers of such services.

According to the bill’s sponsor, intellectual property piracy costs the US economy close to $30 billion per year. For example, two Las Vegas computer programmers earned more than $1 million from pirating shows from Netflix and Hulu and streaming them illegally.

Violators can be imprisoned up to ten years for multiple offenses.

Gale Anne Hurd, the noted producer of The Walking Dead, Aliens, and Terminator, noted in Deadline that

Piracy has been around forever, and I have been dealing with it, in one form or another, for my entire career – starting when bootleg VHS copies of my original Terminator film were being sold on street corners. But the amount of harm we suffered from bootlegs was peanuts compared to today’s internet-driven piracy. Multinational criminal enterprises now push monthly subscriptions to streaming services with names like Lazer IPTV and Pegasus, selling stolen content libraries that are as easy to use as Netflix – but vastly larger – and they include live channels from all over the world.

She also pointed out that consumers can be hurt by pirate streaming sites because one out of three such sites infects users with malware or other harmful code.
https://www.lexology.com/library/det...0-2e661f7d78ce





Developer Exposes Multiple Scam Apps on the App Store, Some Bringing in Millions of Dollars in Revenue
Chance Miller

Over the last several weeks, developer Kosta Eleftheriou has been highlighting many apparent scam applications on the App Store. The formula for each scam application is virtually identical, and it centers on fake reviews and ratings paired with a deceptive weekly subscription.

Eleftheriou is the developer behind FlickType, a popular Apple Watch keyboard application that brings gesture typing to the wearable device. He was also one of the creators of the Flesky keyboard app, acquired by Pinterest, and Blind Type, acquired by Google.

The thread began two weeks ago, when Eleftheriou began highlighting applications that were essentially non-functional ripoffs of FlickType. One of the most blatant ones was KeyWatch:

Just a few months ago, I was way ahead of my competition. By the time they figured out just how hard autocorrect algorithms were, I was already rolling out the swipe version of my keyboard, quickly approaching iPhone typing speeds. So how did they beat me?

First, they made an app that appeared to fulfill the promise of a watch keyboard – but was practically unusable. Then, they started heavily advertising on FB & Instagram, using my own promo video, of my own app, with my actual name on it.


When users downloaded the app, the first screen was a blank interface with an “Unlock now” button. Tap the “Unlock now” button, and you’d be prompted with Apple’s buy screen to confirm an $8/week subscription for an app that was nonfunctional.

What about App Store reviews and ratings? The KeyWatch developers simply purchased fake ratings and reviews, which flooded the App Store listings and gave users the impression the app was a legitimate Apple Watch keyboard. According to Appfigures data, KeyWatch was generating $2 million a year through its App Store scam.

Fake ratings, and fake reviews. These quickly push the scams to the top of search results, leaving honest & hard-working developers in the dust. An old problem that’s not easy to solve, but one that’s at the core of why App Store app discovery is so problematic.

After Eleftheriou’s Twitter thread gained traction, Apple removed KeyWatch and a handful of other similar scam Apple Watch keyboard apps from the App Store. That being said, the company hasn’t taken as swift of action against similar applications from the same “developer.”

But since then, Eleftheriou has exposed additional scam applications on the App Store. Over the weekend, he posted a simple thread showcasing “how to spot a $5M/year scam on the App Store, in 5 minutes flat.” This time, he showcased Star Gazer+, which is still available on the App Store with a 4.4 rating and over 80,000 ratings.

The situation is nearly the same as the original example of KeyWatch. The “developer” releases a barely-functioning app with a weekly subscription requirement. The App Store listing is flooded with fake ratings and reviews, tricking users into thinking it’s a legitimate service.

Potential solutions

Developer Marco Arment chimed in on Twitter, suggesting that one solution to eliminate these scams would be for Apple to eliminate the weekly subscription billing option altogether. This has proven to be a common tactic used by many of the scammers highlighted by Eleftheriou’s tweets.

Other developers have also joined the conversation suggesting possible solutions. For instance, David Barnard retweeted a concept he first shared back in 2019 about how Apple could redesign the App Store’s “buy sheet” to make the payment terms more clear for users.

Eleftheriou also points out that some of Apple’s marketing materials for the App Store give users the impression that they shouldn’t have to worry about scam apps.

He also described reaching out to Apple directly to about these issues when speaking to TechCrunch:

“They put you in contact with the other developer in question, and oversee the thread while they hope you will resolve the issue with the other party directly,” he explains. “The scammers I complained about in that dispute weren’t even the bigger scammers I mention in my Twitter thread. Yet, the complaint I had with them barely got addressed, and there was no response from Apple whatsoever on the issue of the fake ratings and reviews. Simply a ‘if we don’t hear back from you very soon we consider the matter resolved’. We even reached out to Apple privately after that but got no response.”

Theoretically, App Store Review should be able to filter out some of these applications, but Apple should also make a better effort to weed out fake ratings and reviews. A quick Google search reveals just how advanced this industry is, making Apple’s silence even more deafening.
https://9to5mac.com/2021/02/08/app-s...s-how-to-spot/





Exclusive: Google's $76 Million Deal with French Publishers Leaves Many Outlets Infuriated
Mathieu Rosemain

Alphabet Inc’s Google has agreed to pay $76 million over three years to a group of 121 French news publishers to end a more than year-long copyright spat, documents seen by Reuters show.

The agreement between Google and the Alliance de la presse d’information generale (APIG), a lobby group representing most major French publishers, was announced previously, but financial terms had not been disclosed.

The move infuriated many other French outlets, which deemed it unfair and opaque. Publishers in other countries will scrutinize the French agreement, the highest-profile in the world under Google’s new program to provide compensation for news snippets used in search results.

Agence France-Presse (AFP) and other French news providers that do not belong to the group are not part of the agreement and are pressing forward with various actions against Google.

The accord follows France’s implementation of the first copyright rule enacted under a recent European Union law that creates “neighbouring rights,” requiring large tech platforms to open talks with publishers seeking remuneration for use of news content.
In Australia, lawmakers have drafted legalisation that would require Google and Facebook to pay publishers and broadcasters for content. Google has threatened to shut down its search engine in Australia if the country adopts that approach, which the company called “unworkable.”

The French documents seen by Reuters include a framework agreement in which Google will pay $22 million annually for three years to a group of 121 national and local French news publications after signing individual licensing agreements with each.

The second document is a settlement agreement under which Google agrees to pay $10 million to the same group in exchange for the publishers’ commitment not to sue over copyright claims for three years.

Publishers would commit to an upcoming new product called Google News Showcase that would allow publishers to curate content and provide limited access to paywalled stories.

Google declined to comment on terms of the deal.

In January, the Reuters news agency, a division of Thomson Reuters Corp, struck a deal with Google to be the first global news provider to Google News Showcase.

Reuters’ French rival AFP has maintained its complaint with the French antitrust watchdog against Google, an internal source said. Last month, AFP’s Chief Executive Fabrice Fries welcomed the deal between Google and APIG, but called on the tech company to extend such copyright deals to news agencies.

MAKING GOOGLE PAY

Pressure is mounting on Google globally to pay for news content, as the industry’s advertising and revenues have plummeted with the rise of digital platforms.

In Spain and Germany, publishers have tried but failed to charge Google for displaying excerpts, or snippets. German publishers lost a legal battle in 2019 for 1 billion euros worth of copyright fees since 2013.

The text of the EU “neighbouring rights” rule was aimed at creating a new sustainable stream of revenues for news publishers.

In the United States, the news industry is backing legislation that would allow it to negotiate collectively with the big platforms without violating antitrust law. In Congress, lawmakers recently issued a report saying dominant tech firms have harmed the news industry because they “can impose unilateral terms on publishers, such as take-it-or-leave-it revenue sharing agreements.”

Andrew MacLeod, chief executive of Canada’s Postmedia, said publishers there are watching discussions in other parts of the world. “We seek an outcome to grow and architect our future rather than relying on a handout.”

LACKING TRANSPARENCY

French publishers had little choice but to go along with the deal, three sources close to the matter, citing pressures from shareholders.

The same sources said some publishers were upset Google refused to provide access to data showing how much money it generates from news.

“These opaque agreements don’t ensure the fair treatment of all news publishers, since the calculation formula isn’t made public,” the union for independent online news publishers Spiil said this week. “Google took advantage of our divisions to advance its interests.”

Fees range from as large as $1.3 million for France’s reference daily Le Monde to $13,741 for local publisher La Voix de la Haute Marne, documents show. They did not specify how the amounts were calculated.

Leading national dailies Le Monde, Le Figaro and Liberation and their groups negotiated about 3 million euros ($3.6 million) each per year on top of the fee in the agreement, notably by agreeing in November to sell subscriptions through Google, one source close to the matter said.

The head of Le Monde group Louis Dreyfus and Liberation’s boss Denis Olivennes declined to comment. Representatives for Le Figaro were not immediately available for comment.

The head of APIG, Pierre Louette, did not respond to messages seeking comment.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-g...-idUSKBN2AC27N





Bitcoin Consumes 'More Electricity than Argentina'
Cristina Criddle

Bitcoin uses more electricity annually than the whole of Argentina, analysis by Cambridge University suggests.

"Mining" for the cryptocurrency is power-hungry, involving heavy computer calculations to verify transactions.

Cambridge researchers say it consumes around 121.36 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year - and is unlikely to fall unless the value of the currency slumps.

Critics say electric-car firm Tesla's decision to invest heavily in Bitcoin undermines its environmental image.

The currency's value hit a record $48,000 (£34,820) this week. following Tesla's announcement that it had bought about $1.5bn bitcoin and planned to accept it as payment in future.

But the rising price offers even more incentive to Bitcoin miners to run more and more machines.

And as the price increases, so does the energy consumption, according to Michel Rauchs, researcher at The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, who co-created the online tool that generates these estimates.

“It is really by design that Bitcoin consumes that much electricity,” Mr Rauchs told BBC’s Tech Tent podcast. “This is not something that will change in the future unless the Bitcoin price is going to significantly go down."

The online tool has ranked Bitcoin’s electricity consumption above Argentina (121 TWh), the Netherlands (108.8 TWh) and the United Arab Emirates (113.20 TWh) - and it is gradually creeping up on Norway (122.20 TWh).

The energy it uses could power all kettles used in the UK for 27 years, it said.

However, it also suggests the amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the US alone could power the entire Bitcoin network for a year.

Mining Bitcoin

In order to "mine" Bitcoin, computers - often specialised ones - are connected to the cryptocurrency network.

They have the job of verifying transactions made by people who send or receive Bitcoin.

This process involves solving puzzles, which, while not integral to verifying movements of the currency, provide a hurdle to ensure no-one fraudulently edits the global record of all transactions.

As a reward, miners occasionally receive small amounts of Bitcoin in what is often likened to a lottery.

To increase profits, people often connect large numbers of miners to the network - even entire warehouses full of them.

That uses lots of electricity because the computers are more or less constantly working to complete the puzzles.

The University of Cambridge tool models the economic lifetime of the world's Bitcoin miners and assumes that all the Bitcoin mining machines worldwide are working with various efficiencies.

Using an average electricity price per kilowatt hour ($0.05) and the energy demands of the Bitcoin network, it is then possible to estimate how much electricity is being consumed at any one time.

Environmental conundrum

“Bitcoin is literally anti-efficient,” David Gerard, author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, explained. “So more efficient mining hardware won't help - it'll just be competing against other efficient mining hardware.

“This means that Bitcoin's energy use, and hence its CO2 production, only spirals outwards.

“It’s very bad that all this energy is being literally wasted in a lottery.”

The price of Bitcoin rose rapidly on Monday after Tesla announced its investment.

But commentators say the investment clashes with the electric car firm's previous environmental stance.

“Elon Musk has thrown away a lot of Tesla's good work promoting energy transition,” Mr Gerard said. “This is very bad... I don't know how he can walk this back effectively.

"Tesla got $1.5bn in environmental subsidies in 2020, funded by the taxpayer.

"It turned around and spent $1.5bn on Bitcoin, which is mostly mined with electricity from coal. Their subsidy needs to be examined."

A carbon tax on cryptocurrencies could be introduced to balance out some of the negative consumption, Mr Gerard suggested.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56012952





Solar and Wind Are Reaching for the Last 90% of the U.S. Power Market

They’ve both grown exponentially over the last 30 years. Now there’s just one more decimal place to go.
Nathaniel Bullard

Three decades ago, the U.S. passed an infinitesimal milestone: solar and wind power generated one-tenth of one percent of the country’s electricity. It took 18 years, until 2008, for solar and wind to reach 1% of U.S. electricity. It took 12 years for solar and wind to increase by another factor of 10. In 2020, wind and solar generated 10.5% of U.S. electricity.

If this sounds a bit like a math exercise, that’s because it is. Anything growing at a compounded rate of nearly 18%, as U.S. wind and solar have done for the past three decades, will double in four years, then double again four years after that, then again four years after that, and so on.

It gets confusing to think in so many successive doublings, especially when they occur more than twice a decade. Better, then, to think in orders of magnitude—10ˣ.

There are a number of reasons why exponential consideration matters. The first is that U.S. power demand isn’t growing, and hasn’t since wind and solar reached that 1% milestone in the late 2000s. That means that the growth of wind and solar—and that of natural gas-fired power—have come entirely at the expense of coal-fired power.

That replacement of coal with either natural gas (half the emissions of coal) or with wind and solar (zero emissions) is certainly an environmental achievement. Coupled with last year’s massive drop in emissions, that power shift also makes it much easier for the U.S. to meet its Paris Agreement obligations.

But it also means that challenges lie ahead for any power generation technology that isn’t wind or solar. BloombergNEF analyzed the future of major power systems extending out to 2050, which for the U.S. shows a renewed increase in electricity demand. Total generation will increase about 30% in the next three decades, BNEF predicts. During that time, wind power generation will increase 195% and solar power generation will increase 753%.

That means a few things. Even with a growing electricity system, solar and wind will continue to crowd out every other generation technology while also competing with each other. It also means that the electricity grid—and the businesses and services that use it—will need to become both more supple and more innovative to integrate so much renewable power.

That suppleness will have to come from a more robust grid, able to send more renewable energy from places where generation is surging to demand centers. It will also have to come from energy storage, both short term (a matter of hours) and potentially long term (a matter of weeks or more).

Innovation, on the other hand, will come down to the speed at which businesses realize that zero-carbon electrons are becoming ever more abundant and less expensive. As I wrote last week, we already have moments in some grids when solar power supply exceeds total demand. That’s a challenge, but it’s also an opportunity, which I hope entrepreneurs and big enterprises alike are ready to capitalize on.

My final thought is a return to exponents. There’s only one left for wind and solar in the U.S. power system. The next order of magnitude takes us from 10% to 100%, when the entirety of U.S. power generation comes from panels and turbines.

Wind and solar are now playing for the remaining 90% of the U.S. power mix. They won’t ever reach 100%, but they will force every other energy source—including natural gas—into whatever corner of the market they haven’t filled. In doing so, wind and solar will also compete with each other. That will create a country-sized opportunity to experiment with innovative ways to use all those new electrons.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...s-power-market





Lawsuits Take the Lead in Fight Against Disinformation

Defamation cases have made waves across an uneasy right-wing media landscape, from Fox to Newsmax.
Michael M. Grynbaum

In just a few weeks, lawsuits and legal threats from a pair of obscure election technology companies have achieved what years of advertising boycotts, public pressure campaigns and liberal outrage could not: curbing the flow of misinformation in right-wing media.

Fox Business canceled its highest rated show, “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” on Friday after its host was sued as part of a $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit. On Tuesday, the pro-Trump cable channel Newsmax cut off a guest’s rant about rigged voting machines. Fox News, which seldom bows to critics, has run fact-checking segments to debunk its own anchors’ false claims about electoral fraud.

This is not the typical playbook for right-wing media, which prides itself on pugilism and delights in ignoring the liberals who have long complained about its content. But conservative outlets have rarely faced this level of direct assault on their economic lifeblood.

Smartmatic, a voter technology firm swept up in conspiracies spread by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies, filed its defamation suit against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox empire on Thursday, citing Mr. Dobbs and two other Fox anchors, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro, for harming its business and reputation.

Dominion Voting Systems, another company that Mr. Trump has accused of rigging votes, filed defamation suits last month against two of the former president’s lawyers, Rudolph W. Giuliani and Sidney Powell, on similar grounds. Both firms have signaled that more lawsuits may be imminent.

Litigation represents a new front in the war against misinformation, a scourge that has reshaped American politics, deprived citizens of common facts and paved the way for the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Fox News, for instance, paid millions last year to settle a claim from the family of a murdered Democratic National Committee staff member falsely accused by Fox hosts of leaking emails to WikiLeaks.

But the use of defamation suits has also raised uneasy questions about how to police a news media that counts on First Amendment protections — even as some conservative outlets advanced Mr. Trump’s lies and eroded public faith in the democratic process.

“If you had asked me 15 years, five years ago, whether I would ever have gotten involved in a defamation case, I would have told you no,” said Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer who is representing Mr. Trump’s niece, Mary L. Trump, and the writer E. Jean Carroll in defamation suits against the former president.

The defamation suits raise the question of how news organizations should present public figures. Sidney Powell was a conspiracist but she was also a member of President Donald J. Trump’s legal team.

Like other prominent liberals in her profession, Ms. Kaplan had long considered defamation suits a way for the wealthy and powerful to try to silence their critics. Last year, Mr. Trump’s campaign sued multiple news organizations for coverage that the president deemed unfavorable or unfair. The technology billionaire Peter Thiel bankrolled Hulk Hogan’s suit against the gossip blog Gawker that ultimately bankrupted the business.

“What’s changed,” Ms. Kaplan said, “and we’ve all seen it happen before our eyes, is the fact that so many people out there, including people in positions of authority, are just willing to say anything, regardless of whether it has any relationship to the truth or not.”

Some First Amendment lawyers say that an axiom — the best antidote to bad speech is more speech — may no longer apply in a media landscape where misinformation can flood public discourse via countless channels, from cable news to the Facebook pages of family and friends.

“This shouldn’t be the way to govern speech in our country,” Ms. Kaplan said. “It’s not an efficient or productive way to promote truth-telling or quality journalistic standards through litigating in court. But I think it’s gotten to the point where the problem is so bad right now there’s virtually no other way to do it.”

Mr. Trump’s rise is an inextricable part of this shift. His popularity boosted the profits and power of the right-wing commentators and media outlets that defended him. In November, when Mr. Trump cast doubt on the outcome of the presidential election despite no credible evidence, it made commercial and editorial sense for his media allies to follow his lead.

The Newsmax anchor Greg Kelly refused to accept Joseph R. Biden Jr. as president-elect and was rewarded with a surge in ratings. Fox News was more cautious — the network declared Mr. Biden the next president on Nov. 7 — but some Fox stars, including Mr. Dobbs, Ms. Bartiromo and Ms. Pirro, offered significant airtime to his lawyers, Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Powell, and others who pushed the outlandish election-fraud narrative.

In one example cited in the 276-page complaint filed by Smartmatic, Mr. Dobbs’s program broadcast a false claim by Ms. Powell that Hugo Chávez, the former president of Venezuela, had been involved in creating the company’s technology and installed software so that votes could be switched undetected. (Mr. Chávez, who died in 2013, did not have anything to do with Smartmatic.)

Smartmatic also cited an episode of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” in which Mr. Giuliani falsely described the election as “stolen” and claimed that hundreds of thousands of “unlawful ballots” had been found. Mr. Dobbs described the election as the end to “a four-and-a-half-year-long effort to overthrow the president of the United States,” and raised the specter of outside interference.

“It has the feeling of a cover-up in certain places, you know — putting the servers in foreign countries, private companies,” Mr. Dobbs said.

Fox has promised to fight the litigation. “We are proud of our 2020 election coverage and will vigorously defend this meritless lawsuit in court,” the network said in a statement the day before it canceled Mr. Dobbs’s show.

Executives in conservative media argue that the Smartmatic lawsuit raises uncomfortable questions about how news organizations should present public figures: Ms. Powell was a conspiracist, but she was also the president’s lawyer. Should a media outlet be allowed to broadcast her claims?

“There’s a new standard created out of this that is very dangerous for all the cable channels,” Christopher Ruddy, the owner of Newsmax and a Trump confidant, said in an interview on Saturday. “You have to fact-check everything public figures say, and you could be held libelous for what they say.” Mr. Ruddy contends that Newsmax presented a fair view of the claims about election fraud and voting technology companies.

Newsmax personnel, though, were made aware of the potential damage stemming from claims that appeared on their shows. In an extraordinary on-air moment on Tuesday, Mike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and a staunch Trump ally, began attacking Dominion — and was promptly cut off by a Newsmax anchor, Bob Sellers, who read a formal statement that Newsmax had accepted the election results “as legal and final.”

Fox executives revealed their own concerns in December, after Smartmatic sent a letter signaling that litigation was imminent. Fox News and Fox Business ran an unusually stilted segment in which an election expert, Edward Perez, debunked conspiracy theories about voter fraud that had recently been aired on the networks. The segment ran on three programs — those hosted by Mr. Dobbs, Ms. Bartiromo and Ms. Pirro. (Newsmax, which also received a letter from Smartmatic, aired its own clarifications.)

This fear of liability has rippled into smaller corners of the right-wing media sphere. Mr. Giuliani, who hosts a show on the New York radio station WABC, was caught by surprise on Thursday when his employer aired a disclaimer during his show that distanced itself and its advertisers from Mr. Giuliani’s views.

“They got to warn you about me?” Mr. Giuliani asked his listeners, sounding incredulous. “Putting that on without telling me — not the right thing to do. Not the right thing to do at all.”

Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies disinformation and radicalization in American politics, said that the president’s lies about the election had pushed pro-Trump outlets beyond the relatively lax standards applied to on-air commentators.

“The competitive dynamic in the right-wing outrage industry has forced them all over the rails,” Mr. Benkler said. “This is the first set of lawsuits that’s actually going to force them to internalize the cost of the damages they’re inflicting on democracy.”

Mr. Benkler called the Smartmatic suit “a useful corrective” — “it’s a tap on the brakes” — but he also urged restraint. “We have to be very cautious in our celebration of these lawsuits, because the history of defamation is certainly one in which people in power try to slap down critics,” he said.

Martin Garbus, a veteran First Amendment lawyer, said he was personally repelled by the lies about the election propagated by Mr. Trump and his allies, but he also called the Smartmatic suit “very complicated.”

“Will lawsuits like this also be used in the future to attack groups whose politics I might be more sympathetic with?” he asked.

Mr. Garbus, who made his reputation in part by defending the speech rights of neo-Nazis and other hate groups, said that the growth of online sources for news and disinformation had made him question whether he might take on such cases today. He offered an example of a local neo-Nazi march.

Before social media, “it wouldn’t have made much of an echo,” Mr. Garbus said. “Now, if they say it, it’s all over the media, and somebody in Australia could blow up a mosque based on what somebody in New York says.

“It seems to me you have to reconsider the consequence of things,” he added.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/06/b...-lawsuits.html





How the United States Lost to Hackers

America’s biggest vulnerability in cyberwarfare is hubris.
Nicole Perlroth

If ever there was a sign the United States was losing control of information warfare, of its own warriors, it was the moment one of its own, a young American contractor, saw first lady Michelle Obama’s emails pop up on his screen.

For months, David Evenden, a former National Security Agency analyst, questioned what he was doing in Abu Dhabi. He, like two dozen other N.S.A. analysts and contractors, had been lured to the United Arab Emirates by a boutique Beltway contractor with offers to double, even quadruple, their salaries and promises of a tax-free lifestyle in the Gulf’s luxury playground. The work would be the same as it had been at the agency, they were told, just on behalf of a close ally. It was all a natural extension of America’s War on Terror.

Mr. Evenden started tracking terror cells in the Gulf. This was 2014, ISIS had just laid siege to Mosul and Tikrit and Mr. Evenden tracked its members as they switched out burner phones and messaging apps. The images they traded back and forth could be brutal, but this was his calling, Mr. Evenden told himself. A theology major, he’d set out to be a chaplain. He was a long way from that, but what better way to prove your faith, he thought, than hunting those who sought to murder good Christians. Soon, though, he was assigned to a new project: proving the Emiratis’ neighbor, Qatar, was funding the Muslim Brotherhood. The only way to do that, Mr. Evenden told his bosses, would be to hack Qatar.

“Go for it,” they told him. No matter that Qatar was also an American ally or that, once inside its networks, his bosses showed no interest in ever getting out. Before long his team at the contractor, CyberPoint, was hacking Emirati enemies, real and perceived, all over the world: Soccer officials at FIFA, the monarchy’s Twitter critics, and especially Qatari royals. They wanted to know where they were flying, who they were meeting, what they were saying. This too was part of the mission, Mr. Evenden was told; it had all been cleared up high. In the War on Terror and the cyber arms market, you could rationalize just about anything.

All the rationalizations were stripped away the day emails from the first lady of the United States popped up on his screen. In late 2015, Michelle Obama’s team was putting the finishing touches on a trip to the Middle East. Qatar’s Sheikha Moza bint Nasser had invited Mrs. Obama to speak at her annual education summit in Doha, where the first lady would promote her “Let Girls Learn” initiative. Mrs. Obama and her team were in constant communication with Sheika Moza. And every last email between the first lady, her royal highness, and their staff — every personal reflection, reservation, itinerary change and security detail — was beaming back to former N.S.A. analysts’ computers in Abu Dhabi. “That was the moment I said, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ he told me. “We should not be targeting these people.”

Mr. Evenden and his family were soon on a flight home. He and the few colleagues who joined him tipped off the F.B.I. (The agency does not comment on investigations, but interviews suggest its review of CyberPoint is ongoing.) To pre-empt any fallout, some employees came clean to Reuters. The hack of Sheika Moza’s emails with Mrs. Obama has never been reported.

It wasn’t long after Mr. Evenden settled back in the states that he started fielding calls and LinkedIn messages from his old buddies at the N.S.A., still in the service, who had gotten a “really cool job offer” from Abu Dhabi and wanted his advice. By 2020, the calls had become a drumbeat. “Don’t go,” he pleaded. “This is not the work you think you will be doing.”

You might think you’re a patriot now, he wanted to warn them, but one day soon you too could wake up and find you’re just another mercenary in a cyber arms race gone horribly wrong.

America the Vulnerable

Three decades ago, the United States spawned, then cornered, the market for hackers, their tradecraft, and their tools. But over the past decade, its lead has been slipping, and those same hacks have come boomeranging back on us.

Yet no one in government has seriously paused to recalibrate the strategy. Not with Michelle Obama’s emails caught in an American contractor’s dragnet in 2015. And not today, with Russian hackers inside our government networks. We went from occasional wake-up calls to one continuous, blaring alarm — and got better and better at ignoring it all.

Months after Mr. Evenden returned home, in 2016, the N.S.A.’s own hacking tools were hacked, by a still unknown assailant. Those tools were picked up first by North Korea, then Russia, in the most destructive cyberattack in history.

Over the next three years, Iran emerged from a digital backwater into one of the most prolific cyber armies in the world. China, after a brief pause, is back to pillaging America’s intellectual property. And, we are now unwinding a Russian attack on our software supply chain that compromised the State Department, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Centers for Disease Control, the Department of Energy and its nuclear labs and the Department of Homeland Security, the very agency charged with keeping Americans safe.

We know this not because of some heroic N.S.A. hack, or intelligence feat, but because the government was tipped off by a security company, FireEye, after it discovered the same Russian hackers in its own systems.

The hubris of American exceptionalism — a myth of global superiority laid bare in America’s pandemic death toll — is what got us here. We thought we could outsmart our enemies. More hacking, more offense, not better defense, was our answer to an increasingly virtual world order, even as we made ourselves more vulnerable, hooking up water treatment facilities, railways, thermostats and insulin pumps to the web, at a rate of 127 new devices per second.

At the N.S.A., whose dual mission is gathering intelligence around the world and defending American secrets, offense eclipsed defense long ago. For every hundred cyberwarriors working offense — searching and stockpiling holes in technology to exploit for espionage or battlefield preparations — there was often only one lonely analyst playing defense to close them shut.

America remains the world’s most advanced cyber superpower, but the hard truth, the one intelligence officials do not want to discuss, is that it is also its most targeted and vulnerable. Few things in the cybersecurity industry have a worse reputation than alarmism. There is even an acronym for it: “FUD,” short for “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.”

When Leon Panetta, then secretary of defense, warned of a coming “Cyber Pearl Harbor” in 2012, he was dismissed as stoking FUD. The Cyber Pearl Harbor analogy is, indeed, flawed: The U.S. government did not see the Japanese bombers coming, whereas it has seen the digital equivalent coming for decades.

And the potential for a calamitous attack — a deadly explosion at a chemical plant set in motion by vulnerable software, for example — is a distraction from the predicament we are already in. Everything worth taking has already been intercepted: Our personal data, intellectual property, voter rolls, medical records, even our own cyberweaponry.

At this very moment, we are getting hacked from so many sides that it has become virtually impossible to keep track, let alone inform the average American reader who is trying to grasp a largely invisible threat that lives in code, written in language that most of us will never fully understand.

This threat often feels too distant to combat, but the solutions have been there for decades: Individuals just decided that access and convenience, and in governments’ case, the opportunities for espionage, were worth leaving windows open, when we would have all been better off slamming them shut.

“The N.S.A.’s fatal flaw is that it came to believe it was smarter than everyone else,” Peter Neumann, a computer scientist and cybersecurity sage, told me. “In the race to exploit everything and anything we could, we painted ourselves into a dead end where there is no way out.”

Pandora’s Box

There’s a reason we believed the fallacy that offense could keep us safe: The offense was a bloody masterpiece.

Starting in 2007, the United States, with Israel, pulled off an attack on Iran’s Natanz nuclear facility that destroyed roughly a fifth of Iran’s centrifuges. That attack, known as Stuxnet, spread using seven holes, known as “zero days,” in Microsoft and Siemens industrial software. (Only one had been previously disclosed, but never patched). Short term, Stuxnet was a resounding success. It set Iran’s nuclear ambitions back years and kept the Israelis from bombing Natanz and triggering World War III. In the long term, it showed allies and adversaries what they were missing and changed the digital world order.

In the decade that followed, an arms race was born.

N.S.A. analysts left the agency to start cyber arms factories, like Vulnerability Research Labs, in Virginia, which sold click-and-shoot tools to American agencies and our closest Five Eyes English-speaking allies. One contractor, Immunity Inc., founded by a former N.S.A. analyst, embarked on a slippier slope. First, employees say, Immunity trained consultants like Booz Allen, then defense contractor Raytheon, then the Dutch and the Norwegian governments. But soon the Turkish army came knocking.

Companies like CyberPoint took it further, stationing themselves overseas, sharing the tools and tradecraft the U.A.E. would eventually turn on its own people. In Europe, purveyors of the Pentagon’s spyware, like Hacking Team, started trading those same tools to Russia, then Sudan, which used them to ruthless effect.

As the market expanded outside the N.S.A.’s direct control, the agency’s focus stayed on offense. The N.S.A. knew the same vulnerabilities it was finding and exploiting elsewhere would, one day, blow back on Americans. Its answer to this dilemma was to boil American exceptionalism down to an acronym — NOBUS — which stands for “Nobody But Us.” If the agency found a vulnerability it believed only it could exploit, it hoarded it.

This strategy was part of what Gen. Paul Nakasone, the current N.S.A. director — and George Washington and the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu before him — call “active defense.”

In modern warfare, “active defense” amounts to hacking enemy networks. It’s mutually assured destruction for the digital age: We hacked into Russia’s troll networks and its grid as a show of force; Iran’s nuclear facilities, to take out its centrifuges; and Huawei’s source code, to penetrate its customers in Iran, Syria and North Korea, for espionage and to set up an early warning system for the N.S.A., in theory, to head off attacks before they hit.

When we discovered openings in the systems that govern the digital universe, we didn’t automatically turn them over to manufacturers for patching. We kept them vulnerable in the event the F.B.I. needed to access a terrorist’s iPhone or Cyber Command had reason to drop a cyberweapon on Iran’s grid one day.

There were big payoffs, to be sure, many the public will never know, but all one needs to do is look at the attacks of the past five years to see that “active defense” and NOBUS aren’t working that well.

In a leaked N.S.A. memo in 2012, an analyst warned as much, “Hacking routers has been good business for us and our Five Eyes partners for some time, but it is becoming apparent that other nation states are honing their skillz and joining the scene.”

Only when the N.S.A.’s tools were hacked in 2017, then used against us, could we see how broken the trade-off between offense and defense had become. The agency had held onto a critical vulnerability in Microsoft for more than five years, turning it over to Microsoft only after the N.S.A. was hacked.

By then it was too late. Businesses, schools and hospitals had yet to patch for the hole when North Korea used it to attack one month later, or even two months later, when Russia baked it into a cyberattack that decimated vaccine supplies at Merck, cost FedEx $400 million and prevented doctors from accessing patient records. All in, that incident costs victims an estimated $10 billion in damages.

In the wake of those strikes, in 2017, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former director of the N.S.A., and one of its most vocal supporters, was unusually speechless. “I cannot defend an agency having powerful tools if it cannot protect the tools and keep them in its own hands,” he said.

The Typewriters Were Listening

To understand how we got here, facing one escalating attack after another, and how we might possibly claw our way out, it’s useful to look back at the Russian attack that put us on this offensive course.

That year, 1983, workers at the American embassy in Moscow came to believe that everything they said and did was being captured by the Soviets. They suspected a mole, and had it not been for a tip from the French, who discovered a bug in their teleprinters, they might have never discovered the mole was in their machines.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan personally approved a classified project, code-named Gunman, to find and eradicate any Soviet bugs in embassy equipment. It took 100 days just to get every last piece of equipment back to Fort Meade and nearly 100 more days to uncover the most sophisticated exploit the agency had ever seen.

Sitting in the back of an embassy typewriter was a tiny magnetometer, a device that measured the slightest disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field. It had been recording the mechanical energy from every last typewritten stroke and transmitting the results via radio to a nearby Soviet listening unit, hidden in the embassy’s chimney. By the time Gunman was complete, and more implants were discovered, it was clear that the Soviets had been siphoning American secrets from our typewriters for eight years.

“That was our big wake up call,” James R. Gosler, the godfather of American cyberwar, told me. “Or we’d still be using those damn typewriters.”

If any single technologist can be credited with spurring the United States to scramble, catch up, and take the lead as the world’s most advanced digital superpower, it is Mr. Gosler. When I asked nearly every one of the men who guided the N.S.A. and C.I.A. through the turn of the century to name the father of American cyber offense. None hesitated: “Jim Gosler.”

In Mr. Gosler’s lexicon, there’s BG — Before Gunman — and AG. BG, “Americans were fundamentally clueless,” he told me. “We were in la-la land.”

AG, we were hacking into anything with a digital pulse.

Over his long career at Sandia national labs, the N.S.A., and later the C.I.A., Mr. Gosler made it his personal mission to draw the government’s attention to vulnerabilities in the microchips, code and software seeping into our lives.

He does not discuss any of the classified programs he was privy to, but under his tenure, he helped create a taxonomy of adversaries that could exploit these vulnerabilities and led teams of American analysts and spies to make sure the United States was on top.

But every calorie the United States expended on offense came at the cost of defense. And over the decades, this trade-off gnawed at Mr. Gosler. Finding Gunman in those typewriters had been a feat. Finding its equivalent in our fighter jets or even the average high-end car, which now has more than 100 million lines of code? Good luck.

This, essentially, is the predicament the United States now faces as it hunts down every last vector and backdoor used in the recent SolarWinds attack, so dubbed because Russians used SolarWinds, a Texas company that sells network software to government agencies, grid operators and more than 400 of the Fortune 500, as a conduit.

Occasionally we respond to attacks with indictments, sanctions or cyberattacks of our own. President Biden added $10 billion in cybersecurity funds to his Covid-19 recovery proposal and said Thursday that the United States was “launching an urgent initiative” on cybersecurity, to improve America’s “readiness and resilience in cyberspace.”

But finding every Russian back door could take months, years even. And climbing out of our current mess will entail a grueling choice to stop leaving ourselves vulnerable.

For individuals, this means making life less convenient. It’s not ignoring password prompts and software updates, turning on two-factor authentication, not clicking malicious links. For businesses, it requires testing code as engineers write it, not after it has made its way into consumer hands. It requires adding moats around the crown jewels: using hand-marked paper ballots, removing the controls that govern our nuclear plants, medical equipment and air traffic from anything else.

For the government, perhaps, an easy place to start is setting clear rules that prevent the N.S.A.’s own, like Mr. Evenden’s former employer, from doing the dirty work for other governments where the rules that govern our own spycraft do not apply. And it’s long past time to shut all the doors and windows that should never have been left open.

Jim Gosler worked for decades to keep Americans, and our secrets, safe, to make sure we never had to know just how close to a catastrophic cyberattack we could come. Now, as the country reckons with scenarios he long feared, he realizes the way forward is understanding just how unsafe we already are.

“Gunman didn’t impact the average American where they would feel it, but SolarWinds is getting pretty darn close,” Mr. Gosler told me recently. “It’s so pervasive. It’s one step from SolarWinds into the electrical grid. If the average American can’t feel that? What is it going to take?”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/06/t...ckers-usa.html





They Stormed the Capitol. Their Apps Tracked Them.

Times Opinion was able to identify individuals from a trove of leaked smartphone location data.
Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson

In 2019, a source came to us with a digital file containing the precise locations of more than 12 million individual smartphones for several months in 2016 and 2017. The data is supposed to be anonymous, but it isn’t. We found celebrities, Pentagon officials and average Americans.

It became clear that this data — collected by smartphone apps and then fed into a dizzyingly complex digital advertising ecosystem — was a liability to national security, to free assembly and to citizens living mundane lives. It provided an intimate record of people whether they were visiting drug treatment centers, strip clubs, casinos, abortion clinics or places of worship.

Surrendering our privacy to the government would be foolish enough. But what is more insidious is the Faustian bargain made with the marketing industry, which turns every location ping into currency as it is bought and sold in the marketplace of surveillance advertising.

Now, one year later, we’re in a very similar position. But it’s far worse.

A source has provided another data set, this time following the smartphones of thousands of Trump supporters, rioters and passers-by in Washington, D.C., on January 6, as Donald Trump’s political rally turned into a violent insurrection. At least five people died because of the riot at the Capitol. Key to bringing the mob to justice has been the event’s digital detritus: location data, geotagged photos, facial recognition, surveillance cameras and crowdsourcing.

From Trump’s Rally to Congress

The sacking of the Capitol was a shocking assault on the republic and an unwelcome reminder of the fragility of American democracy. But history reminds us that sudden events — Pearl Harbor, the Soviet Union testing an atomic bomb, the Sept. 11 attacks — have led to an overreach in favor of collective security over individual liberty that we’d later regret. And more generally, the data collected on Jan. 6 is a demonstration of the looming threat to our liberties posed by a surveillance economy that monetizes the movements of the righteous and the wicked alike.

The data we were given showed what some in the tech industry might call a God-view vantage of that dark day. It included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones, revealing around 130 devices inside the Capitol exactly when Trump supporters were storming the building. Times Opinion is only publishing the names of people who gave their permission to be quoted in this article.

About 40 percent of the phones tracked near the rally stage on the National Mall during the speeches were also found in and around the Capitol during the siege — a clear link between those who’d listened to the president and his allies and then marched on the building.

While there were no names or phone numbers in the data, we were once again able to connect dozens of devices to their owners, tying anonymous locations back to names, home addresses, social networks and phone numbers of people in attendance. In one instance, three members of a single family were tracked in the data.

The source shared this information, in part, because the individual was outraged by the events of Jan. 6. The source wanted answers, accountability, justice. The person was also deeply concerned about the privacy implications of this surreptitious data collection. Not just that it happens, but also that most consumers don’t know it is being collected and it is insecure and vulnerable to law enforcement as well as bad actors — or an online mob — who might use it to inflict harm on innocent people. (The source asked to remain anonymous because the person was not authorized to share the data and could face severe penalties for doing so.)

“What if instead of going to you, I wanted to publish it myself?” the source told us. “What if I were vengeful? There’s nothing preventing me from doing that. It’s totally available. If I had different motives, all it would take is a few clicks, and everyone could see it.”

There is an argument to be made that this data could be properly used by law enforcement through courts, warrants and subpoenas. We used it ourselves as a journalistic tool to bring you this article. But to think that the information will be used against individuals only if they’ve broken the law is naïve; such data is collected and remains vulnerable to use and abuse whether people gather in support of an insurrection or they justly protest police violence, as happened in cities across America last summer.

The data presented here is a bird’s-eye view of an event that posed a clear and grave threat to our democracy. But it tells a second story as well: One of a broken, surreptitious industry in desperate need of regulation, and of a tacit agreement we’ve entered into that threatens our individual privacy. None of this data should ever have been collected.

We traced a phone inside the Capitol to Mr. Vincent’s home in Kentucky. Confirming his identity led us to his Facebook page, where we found a few photos of him standing on the steps of the building during the siege. Another photo shows a crowd standing in front of the Capitol, its doors wide open.

At the Capitol

Smartphones tracked between 2 p.m. and 5 p.m. record the seige on the Capitol.

“Yes we got inside. One girl was shot by the DC cops as she was knocking on the glass. She probably will die. We stopped the voting in the house,” he wrote.

Shortly after he posted the photos, Mr. Vincent, a pest control business owner in Kentucky who goes by the nickname Ole Woodsman, took them down. When we reached him by phone, he insisted he never entered the Capitol.

“There is no way that my phone shows me in there,” he said. Yet it did.

For all its appearance of omniscience, the data can be imprecise. In a situation such as the Capitol riot, exact locations matter. A few feet can be the difference between a participant who committed a serious crime and an onlooker.

While some location data is accurate to within a few feet, other data is not. Location companies can work with data derived from GPS sensors, Bluetooth signals and other sources. The quality depends on the settings of the phone and whether it is connected to Wi-Fi or a cell tower. Issues like population and building density can sometimes play a role in the quality of the data.

Mr. Vincent told us that when he wrote “we got inside,” he meant “we the people got in.”

He added, “I did not go in.”

Can we say definitively Mr. Vincent was inside the Capitol on Jan. 6? No, and that is one of the problems with this type of data.

Ronnie Vincent’s Journey

It was easier to identify Mr. Vincent — and discover the path he took to get to Washington, D.C. — because an email was matched to the phone’s anonymous advertising ID.

The trip to Washington, D.C.

While the power and scope of this commercial surveillance come into sharp focus when we look at the specific time of the attack on the Capitol, it’s important to remember that it is recording the movements of millions of Americans all day, all night, all year, wherever they are.

The data set Times Opinion examined shows how Trump supporters traveled from South Carolina, Florida, Ohio and Kentucky to the nation’s capital, with pings tracing neatly along major highways, in the days before the attack. Stops at gas stations, restaurants and motels dot the route like bread crumbs, each offering corroborating details.

In many cases, these trails lead from the Capitol right back to their homes.

Trump Supporters Go to Washington

While protesters may have felt anonymous, their journeys to Washington and back were recorded in meticulous detail by apps on their phones.

In the hands of law enforcement, this data could be evidence. But at every other moment, the location data is reviewed by hedge funds, financial institutions and marketers, in an attempt to learn more about where we shop and how we live.

Unlike the data we reviewed in 2019, this new data included a remarkable piece of information: a unique ID for each user that is tied to a smartphone. This made it even easier to find people, since the supposedly anonymous ID could be matched with other databases containing the same ID, allowing us to add real names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses and other information about smartphone owners in seconds.

The IDs, called mobile advertising identifiers, allow companies to track people across the internet and on apps. They are supposed to be anonymous, and smartphone owners can reset them or disable them entirely. Our findings show the promise of anonymity is a farce. Several companies offer tools to allow anyone with data to match the IDs with other databases.

How “Anonymous” Pings Could Be Identifiable

The “anonymous” mobile advertising ID can be matched across databases, creating a new deanonymized database.

We were quickly able to match more than 2,000 supposedly anonymous devices in the data set with email addresses, birthdays, ethnicities, ages and more.

One location data company, Cuebiq, publishes a list of customers that may receive the ID with precise smartphone locations. Companies listed there include household names like Adobe and Google, alongside a litany of lesser-known upstarts, like Hivestack, Mogean, Pelmorex and Ubimo.

In an emailed statement, Cuebiq said it prohibits attempts to merge location data with personally identifiable information and requires customers to undergo yearly third-party audits.

Smartphone users will never know if they are included in the data or whether their precise movements were sold. There are no laws forcing companies to disclose what the data is used for or for how long. There are no legal requirements to ever delete the data. Even if anyone could figure out where records of their locations were sold, in most states, you can’t request that the data be deleted.

Their movements could be bought and sold to innumerable parties for years. And the threat that those movements could be tied back to their identity will never go away.

If the Jan. 6 rioters didn’t know before, they surely know now the cost of leaving a digital footprint. Tip lines at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been flooded for weeks in an effort to identify participants, and detectives in Miami and other police departments are using facial recognition software. Amateur investigators on TikTok, Instagram and other platforms have launched their own identification efforts.

Law enforcement has used cellphone footage from the siege to identify participants. As of February 4, there were 181 federal cases pending against individuals involved in the Capitol Hill siege, according to an analysis by George Washington University’s program on extremism. Affidavits show that federal investigators were easily able to cross-reference footage with public social media posts.

A leak of data from the social media platform Parler also helped investigators and journalists place rioters in the building, using posts that were geotagged with GPS location data. For some, like 38-year-old Oath Keepers member Jessica Watkins, there was no need for precise location data. Her words tell the story: “Yeah. We stormed the Capitol today. Teargassed, the whole, 9. Pushed our way into the Rotunda. Made it into the Senate even,” she wrote on Parler.

Which is to say that law enforcement may not need this data. But as a recent New York Times report shows, military agencies use these data sets — without a warrant, no less. How? They purchase it. Because we have seen what’s in the data, that revelation is deeply troubling.

While some Americans might cheer the use of location databases to identify Trump supporters who converged on the Capitol, the use of commercial databases has worrying implications for civil liberties. The American criminal justice system is set up for a judge or jury to determine whether, in fact, Ronnie Vincent broke any laws on Jan. 6. But the data leads us directly to him, and in the hands of law enforcement officials — or rogue employees of the company that collected the data — it could narrow their search for participants and offer clues about their activity.

To focus attention only on those people present at the deadly sacking of the Capitol is to lose sight of the larger context of the campaign of incitement and lies from Mr. Trump, right-wing media and members of Congress that set the stage for it. Just as focusing on the movements of Mr. Vincent’s cellphone is to lose sight of the larger surveillance ecosystem that he — and all of us — are trapped in.

The location-tracking industry exists because those in power allow it to exist. Plenty of Americans remain oblivious to this collection through no fault of their own. But many others understand what’s happening and allow it anyway. They feel powerless to stop it or were simply seduced by the conveniences afforded in the trade-off. The dark truth is that, despite genuine concern from those paying attention, there’s little appetite to meaningfully dismantle this advertising infrastructure that undergirds unchecked corporate data collection.

This collection will only grow more sophisticated. This new data set offers proof that not only is there more interest in location data than before, but it is also easier to deanonymize. It gets easier by the day. As the data from Jan. 6 eerily demonstrates, it does not discriminate. It harvests from the phones of MAGA rioters, police officers, lawmakers and passers-by. There is no evidence, from the past or current day, that the power this data collection offers will be used only to good ends. There is no evidence that if we allow it to continue to happen, the country will be safer or fairer.

In our previous investigation, we wrote that Americans deserve the freedom to choose a life without surveillance and the government regulation that would make that possible. While we continue to believe the sentiment, we fear it may soon be obsolete or irrelevant. We deserve that freedom, but the window to achieve it narrows a little more each day. If we don’t act now, with great urgency, it may very well close for good.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/05/o...hone-data.html





Border Agents Can Search Phones Freely Under New Circuit Court Ruling

The case includes a NASA scientist detained in 2017
Adi Robertson

More than 1 million people traveled on planes in US on a single day ahead of Thanksgiving amid coronavirus pandemic
David Santiago/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service via Getty Images

A US appeals court has ruled that Customs and Border Protection agents can conduct in-depth searches of phones and laptops, overturning an earlier legal victory for civil liberties groups. First Circuit Judge Sandra Lynch declared that both basic and “advanced” searches, which include reviewing and copying data without a warrant, fall within “permissible constitutional grounds” at the American border.

Lynch ruled against a group of US citizens and residents objecting to invasive searches of their electronic devices. The group includes Sidd Bikkannavar, a NASA scientist who was detained and pressured to unlock a secure government-issued phone. Most of the incidents date to 2017, when then-President Donald Trump pushed for tighter border security alongside travel bans and other restrictions. But some took place earlier, reflecting long-standing concerns among groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, which backed this lawsuit.

A district court declared that CBP searches violated the Fourth Amendment by not requiring “reasonable suspicion” that the devices contained contraband. Lynch disagreed. “Electronic device searches do not fit neatly into other categories of property searches, but the bottom line is that basic border searches of electronic devices do not involve an intrusive search of a person,” she wrote. That lowers the bar for conducting them at the border, where the government’s interest in security is “at its zenith.”

Appeals courts have issued conflicting opinions on how electronic devices fall under the “border search exception,” a rule allowing warrantless searches that might otherwise be unconstitutional. Customs officials are able to conduct basic searches without “reasonable suspicion,” and they can conduct basic and advanced searches without obtaining a warrant. The exception is primarily intended for finding contraband or unauthorized entrants, but it applies to federal agents working within 100 miles of the US border — an area that covers most metropolitan areas.

Civil liberties advocates argue that modern phones and computers contain an unprecedented wealth of information, especially if agents can remotely retrieve emails or other material through the device. And Lynch suggested that Congress or the White House could establish clearer rules, which “may choose to grant greater protection than required by the Constitution.” However, today’s ruling reverses a decision that was previously considered a landmark victory.

The ACLU expressed dissatisfaction with the outcome. “Warrantless and suspicionless electronic device searches can give border officers unfettered access to vast amounts of private information about our lives,” said Esha Bhandari, deputy director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project. “We are disappointed with the ruling and evaluating all options to ensure we don’t lose our privacy rights when we travel.”
https://www.theverge.com/2021/2/10/2...urth-amendment





Big Publishing Pushes Out Trump’s Last Fan

Top editors at Hachette have told employees that they’ve learned the lessons of the Capitol siege of Jan. 6: no hate speech, no incitement to violence, no false narratives.
Ben Smith

If you were a certain kind of distinctly Trumpy public figure — say Donald Trump Jr. or Corey Lewandowski — looking to sell a book over the last four years, there were surprisingly few options. The Big Five publishing companies in New York, and even their dedicated conservative imprints, had become squeamish about the genre known as MAGA books, with its divisive politics and relaxed approach to facts. And small conservative publishers probably couldn’t afford you.

So if, like the younger Mr. Trump in 2018, you found yourself rejected by most New York publishers, there was one last stop: a corner cubicle in the fifth-floor offices of the Hachette Book Group in Midtown Manhattan. There, Kate Hartson, the editorial director of the conservative Center Street imprint, was the one mainstream editor who would buy what no one else would — and make a tidy profit for her employer.

Ms. Hartson, a fit 67-year-old who once ran a small press specializing in dogs, had all the trappings of a liberal book editor, including an apartment on the Upper East Side and a place in Hampton Bays. But she also seemed to be that rarest of figures in New York media: a true believer in Donald J. Trump, people who worked with her said. She published “Triggered” by Donald Trump Jr., Mr. Lewandowski’s “Trump: America First: The President Succeeds Against All Odds” and the work of other Trump die-hards like the Fox News host Jeanine Pirro and Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker.

But Hachette, like The New York Times and other media companies, has been torn in recent years between the politics of its staff and its historic commitment to publishing conservative speech. Its liberal proprietors, of course, always abhorred the conservative content while cashing the checks. At Hachette, this meant employees having their salaries paid by Donald Trump Jr. while objecting to publishing liberals who had fallen out of favor, like Woody Allen or J.K. Rowling.

Ms. Hartson’s list was a somewhat more direct attack on her colleagues’ politics. The last book she bought was the forthcoming “Wokenomics: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.” And so last month, even as Ms. Hartson was riding high with the best-selling political book on Amazon, “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy,” Hachette fired her.

The official reasons for Ms. Hartson’s termination, two people familiar with it said, were mundane. But she told associates that she believed she’d been fired for her politics. In a Zoom meeting with employees on Jan. 26, the chief executive of Hachette Book Group, Michael Pietsch, and Daisy Hutton, the executive who oversees Center Street, didn’t mention Ms. Hartson. But they reassured employees that they had learned the lessons of the Capitol siege of Jan. 6: no hate speech, no incitement to violence, no false narratives. And they’ve separately made clear to both editors and agents that they’re shifting back toward think tank conservatives, and away from fire-breathing politicians. (Ms. Hartson didn’t respond to questions about her views and her firing.)

“The conservative movement is in a state of flux, and the next few years will be a particularly rich time for conversation about the future of conservatism in America,” Ms. Hutton, who is based in Nashville and whose background is primarily in Christian publishing, said in an email. “Center Street will continue to publish thoughtful, provocative, lively and informative books that contribute meaningfully to the shaping of that conversation.”

Hachette is hardly the only mainstream publisher steering away from MAGA books. Simon & Schuster invoked its “morals” clause to cancel the publication of a book by Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, after he objected to the results of the November election and cheered the protests right before violence broke out. Simon & Schuster, two sources familiar with its plans said, will also stop publishing the right-wing activist Candace Owens.

These tensions are, in part, about free speech. An older generation of publishing executives had long argued that they had a responsibility to publish voices they disagreed with as part of their function in a democracy. Thomas Spence, the president of the conservative publisher Regnery, said he regarded the shift by the Big Five (soon to be four, when Penguin Random House completes its acquisition of Simon & Schuster) as a “form of blacklisting.”

But when that word was used in 1950s Hollywood, the movie studios could silence a writer, director or actor because they exercised near total control over production and distribution. The New York publishers don’t have that power anymore. High-profile authors provide more marketing on social media than any publisher can dream of, and the largely values-neutral Amazon is the main distribution channel for most books. Donald Trump Jr. self-published his second book.

In the new media world, many publishing employees see their companies not as powerful gatekeepers but as workplaces and consider these political questions to be labor issues, not speech issues. They don’t feel any obligation to help authors who they believe are hostile, in particular, to their ethnic or sexual identities. They’re part of a trend across the publishing industry that became visible in 2017 when employees and writers pushed Simon & Schuster to cancel a book by the far-right writer Milo Yiannopoulos, said Dennis Johnson, a founder of the left-leaning publishing company Melville House. “The current state of politics, just like it’s riven the country, is doing the same to publishing,” he said.

Others went further, including 10 Hachette employees who were among the 591 signers of an open letter last month arguing that any “participant” in the Trump administration and anyone who incited or supported the violence of Jan. 6 “should not be enriched through the coffers of publishing.”

Two Hachette employees said the growing pressure on Mr. Pietsch had been inspired by internal uprisings elsewhere in the media industry, and particularly by the success of employees at The New York Times in forcing out the opinion editor James Bennet for publishing an Op-Ed by Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican of Arkansas, “Send In the Troops” amid last summer’s unrest over racial injustice. (The Times again found itself at the center of the media industry’s self-examination last week, with the resignation of a top science reporter who had used a racist word while chaperoning teenagers on a $5,490 Times “student journey” to Peru.)

The New York publishers’ newfound scruples mean two things in practice. First, that publishers like Regnery, the newly founded Bombardier Books and small nonprofit presses will have their pick of the MAGA litter.

“As much as I regret what’s happening in the Big Five publishers as a conservative, the self-destruction of our competition is probably good for Regnery,” Mr. Spence said.

But the big publishers’ shift may have an impact on the writers’ incomes. MAGA writers will largely be left out of the bidding wars that make writing books so attractive to many political figures. None of the right-wing presses can compete with the well-capitalized multinationals on fat six- and seven-figure advances (much less the eight-figures that former President Trump will probably demand — though, as my colleagues Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter wrote, the ultimate MAGA author may be too toxic for the publishing industry).

“There was price inflation in the conservative book market,” said Adam Bellow, who founded the Broadside imprint at HarperCollins and now runs Bombardier. He said he compensated for the inability to bid high by splitting sales 50-50 with MAGA stars, including the right-wing media figure Dan Bongino and Representative Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who was a leading Trump acolyte. “We are already getting a lot of these books, partly because the big houses are saying no and partly because no self-respecting conservative should want to be published in a house where people hate them,” Mr. Bellow said.

Ultimately, that’s one thing Ms. Hartson, at Hachette, had going for her: Right-wing authors knew she wasn’t privately sneering. She even contributed to the campaign of one of her writers, Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, who said in an email that he “never witnessed or considered her to be an ideologue of the right or the left, just a compassionate and hard-working editor.” Now, publishers drawing the line on Jan. 6 also appear to be leaving themselves space to defy many of their employees and publish the work of Trump administration officials who acknowledge the reality that he lost the election. A former Trump adviser, Kellyanne Conway, is in talks with major publishers and expects a sizable advance, a person involved in the conversations said. The same person said that former Vice President Mike Pence and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are also working on books and anticipating large advances from New York publishers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/07/b...oup-trump.html





Apple Will Proxy Safe Browsing Traffic on iOS 14.5 to Hide User IPs from Google

iOS 14.5 is currently in beta.
Catalin Cimpanu

Apple's upcoming iOS 14.5 release will ship with a feature that will re-route all Safari's Safe Browsing traffic through Apple-controlled proxy servers as a workaround to preserve user privacy and prevent Google from learning the IP addresses of iOS users.

The new feature, spotted by a Reddit user earlier this week and covered in a report from 8-bit, has been formally confirmed by Maciej Stachowiak, Head of Webkit Engineering at Apple.

The new feature will work only when users activate the "Fraudulent Website Warning" option in the iOS Safari app settings.

This enables support for Google's Safe Browsing technology in Safari. The Safe Browsing technology works by taking an URL the user is trying to access, sending the URL in an anonymized state to Google's Safe Browsing servers, where Google accesses the site and scans for threats.

If malware, phishing forms, or other threats are found on the site, Google tells the user's Safari browser to block access to the site and show a fullscreen red warning.

While years ago, when Google launched the Safe Browsing API, the company knew what sites a user was accessing; in recent years, Google has taken several steps to anonymize data sent from user's devices via the Safe Browsing feature.

But while Google has anonymized URL strings, by sending the link in a cropped and hashed state, Google still sees the IP address from where a Safe Browsing check comes through.

Apple's new feature basically takes all these Safe Browsing checks and passes them through an Apple-owned proxy server, making all requests appear as coming from the same IP address.

Many would call the move useless, as Google would still be unable to see what URL the user was checking, but the feature is consistent with other measures Apple has been taking lately, focusing on improving its users' privacy.

Many of these features have often encroached and disturbed Google's huge presence in the user analytics and tracking sector.

This includes pioneering broad anti-tracking features in Safari, and forcing app makers to add "privacy labels" to their App Store listings, a requirement that Google has mysteriously avoided by simply not updating any of its apps since last year.

iOS 14.5 is currently in beta and is expected to be released in the coming months.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-...s-from-google/





Tim Berners-Lee’s Plan to Save the Internet: Give Us Back Control of Our Data
Pieter Verdegem

Releasing his creation for free 30 years ago, the inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, famously declared: “this is for everyone”. Today, his invention is used by billions – but it also hosts the authoritarian crackdowns of antidemocratic governments, and supports the infrastructure of the most wealthy and powerful companies on Earth.

Now, in an effort to return the internet to the golden age that existed before its current incarnation as Web 2.0 – characterised by invasive data harvesting by governments and corporations – Berners-Lee has devised a plan to save his invention.

This involves his brand of “data sovereignty” – which means giving users power over their data – and it means wrestling back control of the personal information we surrendered to big tech many years ago.

Berners-Lee’s latest intervention comes as increasing numbers of people regard the online world as a landscape dominated by a few tech giants, thriving on a system of “surveillance capitalism” – which sees our personal data extracted and harvested by online giants before being used to target advertisements at us as we browse the web.

Courts in the US and the EU have filed cases against big tech as part of what’s been dubbed the “techlash” against their growing power. But Berners-Lee’s answer to big tech’s overreach is far simpler: to give individuals the power to control their own data.

Net gains

The idea of data sovereignty has its roots in the claims of the world’s indigenous people, who have leveraged the concept to protect the intellectual property of their cultural heritage.

Applied to all web users, data sovereignty means giving individuals complete authority over their personal data. This includes the self-determination of which elements of our personal data we permit to be collected, and how we allow it to be analysed, stored, owned and used.

This would be in stark contrast to the current data practices that underpin big tech’s business models. The practice of “data extraction”, for instance, refers to personal information that is taken from people surfing the web without their meaningful consent or fair compensation. This depends on a model in which your data is not regarded as being your property.

Scholars argue that data extraction, combined with “network effects”, has led to teach monopolies. Network effects are seen when a platform becomes dominant, encouraging even more users join and use it. This allows the dominant platform more possibilities to extract data, which they use to produce better services. In turn, these better services attract even more users. This tends to amplify the power (and database size) of dominant firms at the expense of smaller ones.

This monopolisation tendency explains why the data extraction and ownership landscape is dominated by the so-called GAFAM – Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft – in the US and the so-called BAT – Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent – in China. In addition to companies, governments also have monopoly power over their citizens’ data.

“Data sovereignty” has been proposed as a promising means of reversing this monopolising tendency. It’s an idea that’s been kicked about on the fringes of internet debates for some time, but its backing by Tim Berners-Lee will mean it garners much greater attention.

Building data vaults

Berners-Lee isn’t just backing data sovereignty: he’s building the tech to support it. He recently set up Inrupt, a company with the express goal of moving towards the kind of world wide web that its inventor had originally envisioned. Inrupt plans to do that through a new system called “pods” – personal online data stores.

Pods work like personal data safes. By storing their data in a pod, individuals retain ownership and control of their own data, rather than transferring this to digital platforms. Under this system, companies can request access to an individual’s pod, offering certain services in return – but they cannot extract or sell that data onwards.

Inrupt has built these pods as part of its Solid project, which has followed the form of a Silicon Valley startup – though with the express objective of making pods accessible for all. All websites or apps a user with a pod visits will require authentication by Solid before being allowed to request an individual’s personal data. If pods are like safes, Solid acts like the bank in which the safe is stored.

One of the criticisms of the idea of pods is that it approaches data as a commodity. The concept of “data markets” has been mooted, for instance, as a system that enables companies to make micro-payments in exchange for our data. The fundamental flaw of such a system is that data is of little value when it is bought and sold on its own: the value of data only emerges from its aggregation and analysis, accrued via network effects.

Common good

An alternative to the commodification of data could lie in categorising data as “commons”. The idea of the commons was first popularised by the work of Nobel Prize-winning political economist Elinor Ostrom.

A commons approach to data would regard it as owned not by individuals or by companies, but as something that’s owned by society. Data as commons is an emerging idea which could unlock the value of data as a public good, keeping ownership in the hands of the community.

Tim Berners-Lee’s intervention in debates about the destiny of the internet is a welcome development. Governments and communities are coming to realise that big tech’s data-driven digital dominance is unhealthy for society. Pods represent one answer among many to the question of how we should respond.
https://theconversation.com/tim-bern...ur-data-154130

















Until next week,

- js.



















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