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Old 31-03-21, 06:49 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 3rd, ’21

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April 3rd, 2021




Boss IPTV: Illegal Streaming Service Pirating Content
Venkat

One of the major pirate streaming services Boss IPTV had been busted by the Faridabad Cyber Crime Police recently. Based on a complaint filed by YuppTV, a South Asian OTT platform, the police raided a company under the name of Rhysley private limited. Boss IPTV is accused of illegally streaming Indian premium content to users living overseas.

Investigations revealed that Boss IPTV belongs to a group of piracy streaming services like Indian IPTV, Tashan IPTV, Punjabi IPTV, Brampton IPTV, Boss Entertainment, Guru IPTV, etc. who use the same Chat provider and hosting provider. Further investigations reported that Boss IPTV is registered under the name of Mr. Harpreet Randhawa who also had various companies like Tipsy Time, Tashan IPTV, VOIS, Server Center limited, and Rhysley Couture Pvt Ltd.

Based on the complaint, the Cyber-crime police raided two locations of Rhysley Pvt ltd and confiscated systems and other evidence pertaining to the sale of illegal set-top boxes and premium content streaming. Police arrested 6 employees from the company including the prime business partner of the accused. All the accused were presented before the judge who dismissed their bail plea after listening to arguments from both sides.

These piracy networks offer thousands of channels for a very low price, which is the primary reason why users tend to subscribe to these services. All the companies illegally intercept the broadcaster signals from various service providers and stream them in the US and other countries. It was reported that the networks penetrated 80% of the market and incur revenue losses of around 200-300 million dollars every year for the content providers.

YuppTV’s CEO Mr. Uday Reddy stated that the struggle due to piracy remained constant during the last seven years. The piracy networks sell android boxes that stream major Indian and international channels illegally. Major networks like Star and Colors are also in support of this crusade against Piracy Networks. The identification of companies like Rhysley by YuppTV has been a hugely positive step for the industry in the fight against piracy.

Concern for user safety was also raised during the fiasco. While the piracy networks offer content at low prices, the fact that the services are not fully secure remains consistent and this may put the user at risk of losing their personal data. The apps might also invite malware into the systems making the users vulnerable to data theft and the risk of hacking.
https://www.greatandhra.com/articles...content-112020





Safaricom Wins Appeal Against Ban on Websites Suspected of Pirating MultiChoice Content

Safaricom's internet subscribers can continue streaming football matches after the Court of Appeal suspended orders that directed the operator to block access to 141 websites that host content allegedly pirated from Multichoice, Business Daily reported. MultiChoice had sued Safaricom and Jamii Telecom at the High Court, arguing that the firms had enabled illegal access to premium sports output that should be viewed exclusively on its SuperSport channel.
https://www.telecompaper.com/news/sa...ntent--1377026





Islands in the Stream

Musicians are in peril, at the mercy of giant monopolies that profit off their work
David Dayen

As soon as they crossed into Serbia, the map on his phone went blank.

Damon Krukowski was driving with his wife, Naomi Yang. They were two-thirds of the late-’80s indie rock band Galaxie 500, touring through Eastern Europe as a dream-pop outfit called Damon & Naomi. After years of war in the former Yugoslavia, Belgrade was still under economic sanctions, and off the grid; tech firms had no access to street maps. “We entered the noncorporate world, out of the reach of the West for political reasons,” Krukowski told me.

He had to find a pay phone and write down directions on paper, a crude throwback to the early days of touring. The venue was behind a radio station that had resisted the Milošević regime. And when Damon & Naomi took the stage and started to play, in a city severed from every method for a band to reach an audience, Krukowski realized that everyone in the room knew their songs.

“It was so moving, but it was about piracy,” he said. The Serbian radio station had downloaded Damon & Naomi’s files and broadcast them, creating a fan base. And Krukowski didn’t really have a problem with that. “Who could complain that their music had been able to reach people who had no means of purchasing it?” he asked. “It was amazing and we could play a show.”

It was the kind of story sold to millions of music acts about the global reach of the internet. In a connected world, ideas, thoughts, and yes, songs could break across borders, building audiences where none before existed. It was a dream that appealed to the do-it-yourself ethos of independent artists. They could play the music they wanted, find their own niche, and thrive. It might even change the world.

But that promise of success soon ran into the reality of the digital age. Krukowski doesn’t indulge in that fantasy anymore. “We’re funneling more of the money in the industry to fewer and fewer hands,” he said. “It’s not designed to democratize music or make a million people a living. It’s just a handful and it’s shrinking.”

The music industry was once sprawling enough to accommodate a wide spectrum of artists. But artists today are beset on all sides by monopolists and oligopolists. Like so many sectors of our economy, government inaction has allowed the music business to consolidate, with devastating effects on musicians.

Radio is to a shocking degree in the hands of one company, Liberty Media. Two companies, Live Nation and Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG), control a large number of venues and artist management services, with Live Nation dominating ticketing. The major labels have been whittled down to three. Record stores, alt-weeklies, and other elements that nurtured local music scenes are largely gone.

Dwarfing all that in significance is streaming, which has become the industry’s primary revenue source, despite giving a pittance to the vast majority of artists. For the main streaming companies—YouTube and Spotify—music is really a loss leader, incidental to data collection, the advertising that can be sold off that data, and the promise of audience growth to investors. “Spotify is benefiting from every single artist on the platform driving fans to them,” said Chris Castle, an entertainment attorney who used to work at A&M Records. “The labels say they give you exposure. The line is that you can die of exposure.”

This radical upending of the industry’s business model has benefited a few stars, while the middle-income artist, like so much of the middle class in America, struggles to survive. The ubiquity of digital recording tools and social media masks this pain; it feels like music is as vibrant as ever. It’s hard to discern an artist’s suffering, until they’re gone.

The pandemic has cruelly brought this home. Performers who subsisted on touring saw their livelihoods vaporized. Some quit the business; others suffered in silence. But a funny thing happened. Musicians who would pass each other on the road began to organize about how to ensure fair compensation for their work.

“We’re trying to continuously put artist needs and rights into the conversation,” said Maggie Vail, a musician, label manager for Bikini Kill Records, and board member with the Artist Rights Alliance, a coalition challenging industry consolidation. “If you don’t have healthy musicians, you don’t have a healthy industry.”

“You can go gold and still owe the record label …” –Ice-T

The notion of a music “business” is relatively new. For centuries, working musicians required patronage, either through churches or royalty or performances for the aristocracy. Mass production of sheet music in the 19th century allowed money to more broadly flow, and this expanded with Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph, and later Guglielmo Marconi’s radio. Musicians could record, package, and sell songs as a commodity, and earn money for more than just playing live.

A byzantine system evolved to obtain royalties for songwriters from wherever music is played—on a record, over the radio, in a movie, at a club, or a bar, or a department store, or an elevator. Performance rights organizations (PROs) collect these royalties, and distribute the money to copyright holders. A consent decree between the Justice Department and dominant PROs BMI and ASCAP, in place since the 1940s, attempts to ensure equitable royalty treatment for all artists.

But artists needed to first get their music heard. “You had thousands of stores and physical products,” said Danny Goldberg, a band manager who was the president of Atlantic Records, and later the indie label Artemis. “You had to have major distribution to get records into stores, and the front of the store instead of the back.”

Goldberg described the record label as “the investment banker for an artist’s career.” Labels would front the costs of production and marketing, and give advances to artists against performance royalties (there are two royalties, one for songwriting and one for the underlying performance; because songwriting royalties are separate from label advances, writers and publishers make a lot more money). Some labels even provided funding for tour support. A hit record would finance speculation on other singers and bands.

From the outset, this system led to exploitation, as often is the case when art collides with commerce. Labels had a clear information advantage: They controlled the books, and defined profits and expenses. There’s a long history of crooked record deals, Black artists having their music ripped off and sold to white audiences, top bands seeing nothing beyond their advance because the label had to “recoup” costs. The first deal was always bad, and hitmakers would fight to renegotiate. But what made the marriage somewhat tolerable was the flood of money available. Records were a cash cow, and fans were continually updating their catalogs as new technologies like cassettes and compact discs rolled out. Sales increased for three decades; at the peak in the 1990s, music was a $40 billion per year industry.

Nevertheless, there was always an undercurrent of rebellion. In 1994, Pearl Jam filed suit against Ticketmaster for using its dominant position in ticketing to gouge fans. Condemnations against major labels and corporate rock flowed from the punk and alternative scenes, even if some of them signed with the majors eventually. “There was always a sub-music business underneath the ugly one,” said singer-songwriter Kristin Hersh (Throwing Muses, 50FootWave). “The underground functions when we’re allowed to pay rent and keep engaging in our passion.”

For an independent artist, the economics were narrow but understandable. Lower-cost tools allowed for professional-quality recordings in garages. You could press your own CDs and sell them above cost at shows. Independent distributors, labels, and record stores could allow for a national following. You played in your hometown and networked elsewhere, through like-minded venues and community radio and fan zines. “We had a robust industry outside of the mainstream culture,” said Maggie Vail, who spent 17 years at Kill Rock Stars, an indie label that featured Elliott Smith, Sleater-Kinney, and The Decemberists. Artists weren’t getting rich, but they could play music and pay the rent, and maybe get a big break and go national.

“I will upload you, you can download me …” –Warren Zevon

And then Napster came around.

A lot of the artists I spoke to for this story were unmoved by the early days of file sharing. They compared it to superfans taping Grateful Dead shows or songs off the radio. But some even saw its promise. “I was like, this isn’t great, but wow, we can directly distribute to our fans now,” said David Lowery, lead singer of Camper van Beethoven and later Cracker. “Maybe enough of them will pay that the net result is we get paid better as artists.”

The labels, however, flipped out, with good reason. “Digital distribution of singles and the mp3 format would unbundle the album,” said Stephen Witt, author of How Music Got Free. “Think of a song like ‘Ice Ice Baby.’ They sold 20 million albums. There were 14 other songs on the album, nobody listened to them.” You simply couldn’t get people to pay $15 for a CD anymore if the only song they wanted to listen to was available by itself.

Napster only lasted a couple of years, though imitators like LimeWire and Kazaa persevered through the 2000s. The labels sued them out of existence, but hesitated to offer an alternative to instant music downloads. Meanwhile, in 2001, Apple released the iPod. “If music piracy was the pot trade, then Apple was the vaporizer,” Witt said. The iPod had storage for 15,000 songs, but nobody owned that many. As Witt explained, “the model was, go steal everything and load it on your iPod.”

The labels, in denial for years over losing their lucrative business model, needed a solution. So they licensed per-track music sales to Apple’s iTunes Store. “iTunes looks just like Napster, but with one more column added, which was ‘99 cents,’” Damon Krukowski said. “Napster’s window was designed for piracy. It was only title, artist, and file size. iTunes added price. No credits, no information that serves the music community.”

With the album unbundled, record company revenues began a 15-year slump, which filtered down to artists. The labels consolidated, seeking safety in market share. For years there was a Big Five; then Sony bought BMG and Universal bought EMI, narrowing to a Big Three that by 2016 controlled two-thirds of the music market. (Warner Music is the other.)

Recording and marketing budgets started to dip. Advances decreased. Promotional staffs were sacked. Labels invented the “360 deal,” entitling them to a share of all revenue from an artist under contract, in addition to what they could recoup from composition rights. This quickly became the industry standard. The labels compensated for the death of the album by sticking their hands in their artists’ pockets.

“I’m like a faucet, monopoly’s the object …” –The Roots

Apple’s digital distribution killed record stores, a node in any local music scene. Physical sales became a dinosaur, limited to sentimentalists and collectors. The concurrent decline of alt-weeklies, which featured music listings and interviews and show reviews, inflicted similar damage. Music-focused magazines also suffered from cutbacks. “The first thing that happened is we stopped advertising in small publications,” said Vail. “That just radiated out.”

Radio, another way to reach fans, was also transforming. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 allowed consolidation across terrestrial radio, with two big networks, Cumulus Media and Clear Channel, dominating the airwaves. Sirius and XM launched satellite radio networks in the early 2000s, and then merged with one another. In a concentrated radio landscape, formats narrowed, diverse artists couldn’t break through, and local content became nonexistent. Local stations became ghost towns; programmers in remote office buildings determined playlists, and robots replaced the DJs.

Even that level of concentration didn’t work. Cumulus and Clear Channel, now known as iHeartMedia, fell into bankruptcy. And one company picked up the pieces. Liberty Media bought SiriusXM, and then bought Pandora, an online radio company. Liberty has a one-third stake in Live Nation, the venue and ticketing giant. And in 2020, it took a controlling stake in iHeartMedia, which owns 850 AM/FM stations (more than any other company) and the nation’s largest online radio network and commercial podcast producer. They’re pushing to loosen restrictions on local radio ownership even further.

A company this vertically integrated, combining terrestrial, satellite, and online radio, streaming, artist management, ticketing, venues, and concert promotion, makes airplay an impossibility for all but a handful of artists. “At this point, it’s something I ignore as a label,” said Vail. “I’m not going to spend any time or effort pushing.”

In place of that offline network that nurtured artists was the internet, pitched as a connection point for fan discovery and artist access. There’s a kernel of truth there. Pitchfork and music blogs opened up weird genres and niche artists, and Myspace and later Facebook gave bands a home on the web. If you collected social media users, you could message them about upcoming shows and record sales. But an early shift signaled how the web would inevitably change. “Facebook did this crazy bait and switch,” Lowery said. “We built these band pages where we had access to friends. But when we posted to our page, they didn’t show it to our fans. Then we had to start paying Facebook to access our fans.”

That signaled how artists were wading into the deep end of the pool, where so much about their livelihoods would slip out of their control. “The rhetoric of the early days of the internet was triumphalist bullshit,” said Astra Taylor, a writer, filmmaker, and activist whose husband, Jeff Mangum, fronts the lo-fi rock band Neutral Milk Hotel. (Astra has occasionally played with the group.) “Nothing’s free of political economy. It was obvious to me ten years ago that something like Spotify was endgame and nothing like cultural democracy.”

And that’s exactly what happened. Chris Castle could see it coming when he caught wind of an advertisement for a rebooted version of Napster that operated as a primitive streaming service. The tagline was: Own Nothing, Have Everything. Castle recalled: “I thought right there, that’s the end.”

“Type it in, Google’s your friend bruh …” –Jay-Z

David Lowery, who now lectures at the University of Georgia in addition to making music, described the internet as reassembling all the gatekeepers that kept artists away from fair compensation. “We celebrated disintermediation, and went through a process of re-intermediation,” he said.

This started in 2005 with YouTube, a repository for virtually all recorded music, accessible to anyone with a broadband connection, for free. YouTube encouraged users to post content, and almost immediately that included songs. Before Google bought YouTube in 2006 for just $1.65 billion, it alleged that the site was “a rogue enabler of content theft.” Google estimated that over 60 percent of all YouTube views were of “premium” copyrighted material.

Google’s investment was protected thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Section 512, which granted a safe harbor from prosecution to tech companies whose users post copyrighted materials, as long as they institute a process of taking down infringing content when asked. But for a platform as massive as YouTube, “notice and takedown” is an exercise in futility. Five hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. As soon as you take one down, another pops up. “YouTube has a kind of protection scheme,” said Jon Taplin, former tour manager for Bob Dylan and The Band.

“They say, ‘Record company, your content will be up here whether you like it or not.’”

YouTube does run a service called Content ID, a “digital fingerprint” that compares uploaded videos to existing copyrighted material provided by the major labels, and automatically takes down copies. But smaller artists are inexplicably barred from the Content ID system. “The rights of large creators with the resources to take [YouTube] to court on their own are protected,” reads a class action lawsuit against YouTube filed last year, “while smaller and independent creators … are deliberately left out in the cold.” The lawsuit argues that this two-tiered system should invalidate YouTube’s safe harbor. It’s still in litigation.

Though not always thought of in this fashion, YouTube is the largest music streaming platform in the world, accounting for 47 percent of all on-demand play time globally, according to the 2018 report of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), a nonprofit trade group. Most of the views cycle through a continuous auto-playing stream based on a proprietary algorithm, unbundled from the album. This tends to concentrate who gets played, as YouTube serves up reliable crowd-pleasers to keep people addicted. “It becomes a winner-take-all business,” Taplin says. “You get this crowding at the bottom, people getting their mother and their girlfriend to listen to their music and that’s it.”

YouTube’s complicated and opaque payment structure changes dynamically based on various factors, including time of day, location of the listener, and ad revenues tied to the stream. But the average money that comes back to an artist can barely be calculated. An estimate from the Trichordist’s most recent Streaming Price Bible shows that YouTube’s Content ID, with songs connected mostly to the major labels, yields $0.00022 per stream. Combined with rates given to uploaders who monetize their videos, you get something closer to what Chris Castle supplied to a U.K. parliamentary committee, showing $0.00074 per stream. At that rate, 10,000 streams—that’s 10,000 different people listening to an artist’s music—translates to about $7, less than the price of one album on iTunes.

Maria Schneider is a Grammy-winning jazz and classical artist and the lead plaintiff in the YouTube lawsuit. “They pushed this discourse that it was good for artists to monetize their works by putting ads on them,” she said. “I’ve talked to people I know that are very bright people. When I tell them what the money really looks like, they’re just shocked, they have no idea.”

You can certainly view YouTube as more of a promotional consideration for live performances. The company constantly touts success stories about artists who broke through thanks to its streams. And even grizzled veterans can benefit. Stephen Witt recounted a conversation he had with Geoff Barrow of the trip-hop outfit Portishead. “He was complaining that he’d have some songs with 200 million, 300 million views on YouTube and he made $30,” Witt said. “But the next year, Portishead headlined the Glastonbury Festival. They hadn’t had an album in ten years. I said, ‘Jeff, you wouldn’t have this headline gig if YouTube wasn’t around.’”

That narrative would be easier to swallow if streaming hadn’t cut off other revenues like music sales, and if YouTube’s parent company Google wasn’t one of the most valuable and rapacious businesses on the planet. Google takes all the data collected from YouTube and agglomerates it with other information it captures, using that to target ads. Artists don’t share in their contribution to data collection; that money is generated outside their videos and sometimes off the YouTube website. But they’re responsible for attracting the eyeballs that make Google fabulously rich.

“The platforms have driven the price of content to zero,” said William Deresiewicz, author of The Death of the Artist. “This demonetized content is still generating a fortune. But the artists aren’t getting that money.”

“No one man should have all that power …” –Kanye West

Daniel Ek, co-founder and CEO of Spotify, promoted what he called an artist-friendly streaming solution. An extension of the internet radio craze of the early 2000s, Spotify would license content from record labels, and then support artists as people listened to their music. The “freemium” service requires users to either listen with ads or pay a subscription fee for ad-free streaming. Users can’t upload, avoiding piracy and guaranteeing tracking of royalties.

What made it work was having practically all the music in the world for one low price, or no price on the ad-supported tier. That meant getting the major labels on board to give up the copyrights. They agreed for one key reason: Spotify gave the majors 18 percent stock equity in the company, before its initial public offering, in exchange for streaming rights. Even Merlin, a network representing thousands of indie labels, got 1 percent equity.

Danny Goldberg related it to those old Columbia House record clubs, where consumers could get eight CDs for a penny. “These companies would pay the labels advances of $50 million at the beginning of the year,” Goldberg explained, along with a low royalty rate. But the royalty rate had to be shared with the artists; the advances did not. Similarly with Spotify, the labels minimized the royalty through a revenue-sharing deal, and maximized their share of equity, money they weren’t obligated to pass on.

Artists had no say in this development. “There’s not as much money in ads in digital broadcasting, and the (performance) royalty is often calculated as a percentage of revenue,” said David Lowery. The songwriting royalty is a percentage of the performance royalty, so this brings the entire level down. The royalty system was designed for negotiating equitably with thousands of small radio stations, Lowery explained. “That rationale doesn’t work today. You have these huge digital monopolies.”

Spotify also pays out absurdly low per-stream rates, though not as bad as YouTube. “Last year, the COVID year, Galaxie 500 had 8.5 million streams on Spotify,” Damon Krukowski explained. “We also released a 2,000-copy, limited-edition LP. They raised the same amount of money. Neither is enough to live on.” Krukowski calculated that to earn the equivalent of a $15-an-hour living wage, a band would have to get 650,000 streams per month per band member.

The Trichordist Streaming Price Bible estimated that Spotify revenue actually went down in 2019, to $0.00348 per stream. Cellist Zoe Keating corroborated this trend by revealing her declining revenues on Twitter. “If ya’ll could listen to my music an additional 48,000 streams per month,” Keating wrote, “then I will be able to use Spotify royalties to cover the $924 per month health insurance premium for me and my son.”

Spotify and YouTube even appealed a decision to increase the “mechanical” royalty rate for songwriting, set by a government body called the Copyright Royalty Board. A federal appeals court ruled that the Copyright Royalty Board must consult streaming companies before raising rates.

Several artists, like Taylor Swift, have been angered enough by low rates and artist exploitation to take their music off Spotify. But you have to be Taylor Swift, or someone equally famous, to do that. (Even Swift, er, swiftly put her music back on the service.)

Swift is among the few big winners from Spotify, whose playlists, often focused on a mood or activity rather than a particular artist, really only pay off for the already famous. (This partially explains the strange gold rush in back catalogs, where veteran artists like Bob Dylan and Neil Young have sold their songwriting to publishing companies that expect decades of micropayments from streams.) The concept of the “infinite shelf,” where every artist would be able to find a niche fan base, never materialized. “People never go below the first page of a search engine or recommendation algorithm,” said Jon Taplin. “It’s set to give you what you like.”

Though the secret sauce of human and algorithmic playlist creation is obscure, there’s a lot of talk of payola, something that’s been tightly restricted in radio since pay-to-play DJ scandals in the 1950s. Money changing hands can push an artist up the lists, where a song is more likely to be played. The major labels own companies that create many of the playlists, pushing their established artists. Last November, Spotify announced an “artist recommendation” program that would lead to more streams for artists who accepted a lower “promotional” royalty rate. Federal payola rules do not apply to streaming.

While artists struggle, Daniel Ek has gotten rich off their boundless creativity. Spotify had 345 million monthly active users at the end of 2020 (a 27 percent annual increase), and 155 million paid subscribers. The company pays 70 percent of all revenue out to artists, and it has almost never turned a profit, but according to Castle, that’s not the goal. He has assembled what he calls the “COVID Misery Index,” a selection of tech stocks whose prices have soared as people stay home. Spotify has outperformed Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google between January 2020 and January 2021, reaching a market cap of $57.65 billion. Ek owns 9 percent of the shares (but through a special mechanism, 37 percent of the voting shares) and had a net worth at the end of February of $5.3 billion.

Musicians, despite supplying virtually all the value for Spotify, share in none of that value. Ek could deposit some of those billions into accounts of the artists that keep Spotify successful, but that’s not on the table. “Daniel Ek says he’s the savior of the music business,” Castle said. “I think the music business is the savior of Daniel Ek.”

If Spotify released the data of who streamed music to the artists, then they could at least use it for direct marketing or planning tour schedules. They could share in the data’s value. But that’s all hidden. “Maybe you find out you have 25 people listening to your music in Seattle, but you don’t know who they are,” said Maria Schneider. “Musicians are underwriting this streaming experiment and it’s not working.”

Perhaps most distressing of all, Spotify has changed how we listen to music, and maybe even what gets made. Albums used to be taken home and savored, played with headphones on, free from distractions. The ubiquitous stream is more background noise, one device among many screaming for attention.

The pressures of being noticed above the din overtake the instincts of the musician, diminishing it to the level of fast food or fast fashion. Hooks must be simpler and more immediate within the song, to prevent skipping ahead. Hastily produced pop or dance music that grabs the listener gets foregrounded. And the beast must be constantly fed with newer tracks, working at Spotify speed to constantly attract notice. Ek himself counseled this in an interview last year, warning artists, “You can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough.” It’s the attention economy, embedded in the songs.

“Daniel Ek says if you want to make more money, make more music,” Schneider said. “Make it cheaper and shorter and make more. It’s antithetical to artistry. It’s the death of creative music.”

“I need a dollar, dollar, dollar that’s what I need …” –Aloe Blacc

In a little over a decade, streaming has swallowed the music industry. Though total industry revenue has finally begun to increase, streaming now accounts for 83 percent of all recorded income in the U.S., according to the most recent report from the Recording Industry Association of America. Soundtracks for movies and television, radio play, physical products, and everything else sits in that other 17 percent. Streaming even killed iTunes; last year, digital music downloads returned less revenue than vinyl.

This has severed the traditional relationship between musicians and commerce. Artists used to rely on labels, and while that could get antagonistic, the labels still needed hit music to stay alive. “Apple stepped in, if they abandoned music tomorrow, it wouldn’t change their bottom line,” said Damon Krukowski. “They’re not a music company, Spotify is not a music company, YouTube is not a music company. None of them need me, but I need them. That is unsustainable for music.”

Indeed, Spotify appears to be pushing away from music by becoming a podcasting juggernaut. Reduced music listening on Spotify reduces royalties. Recently, Spotify shut down a live jazz performance podcast that had permission from artists, songwriters, and labels to play their music. Spotify told the podcasters, “Regardless of the licensing status of the music, our podcast service is not intended to be a music distribution tool.”

While there were options before for staying outside the mainstream, which is now the stream, those have narrowed. “Think of the indie music movement of the 1990s as an anti-monopoly moment,” said Kevin Erickson, director of the Future of Music Coalition, an advocacy group for musicians. “We’re seeing now the limitations of that approach. In 1996, you could put out your own record and go around major labels, put it in stores, have a little mail-order business. You can’t go around Spotify. The dominant businesses have too much market power.”

Some artists have figured out how to make it work, through a digital-age throwback to the old patronage system. Back in the late 1990s, rocker Todd Rundgren created “PatroNet,” a subscription-based service that delivered unreleased tracks and works in progress to fans. PatroNet didn’t last long, and Rundgren is now on Spotify. But the model lives on.

In 2007, Kristin Hersh helped launch CASH (Coalition of Artists and Stakeholders) Music, a nonprofit that offered free tools for artists to manage digital distribution and merchandising, with open-source, customizable software. Hersh set up a subscription service, where members received album releases, downloads, and guest list passes for concerts, in exchange for a suggested fee. At the highest level of $5,000 a year, subscribers could get visits with Hersh in the studio and an executive producer credit on her albums.

CASH Music folded, unable to sustain funding. But Hersh still uses the direct-to-consumer model, now named Strange Angels. “Strange Angel listener-supporters treat me like a human because I treat them like humans and we lose no self-respect in our engagement,” she told me over e-mail. “They pay my studio costs and I give them free music. I don’t know any true musicians or songwriters for whom this isn’t the dream.”

The slightly more corporate version of this is Bandcamp, a kind of virtual underground record store for fans, and a way to directly support artists. Bandcamp claims that between 80 and 85 percent of everything sold on its website—from vinyl to downloads to concert tickets to T-shirts—goes directly to creators, with payouts on a daily basis. As of the end of February, this had generated $684 million for artists since its inception in 2007. The more they make, the more Bandcamp makes, so the interests are aligned.

Artists retain the data on their fans at Bandcamp, and can choose what to charge for music. Damon & Naomi records are free on the site, with an option to pay. “Our income went up when we lifted the prices on our downloads,” Krukowski told me. “People are really decent. Nobody has cornered the market treating people as decent, but you can make a living that way.”

Rock group Kings of Leon innovated even further, becoming the first to release an album as a non-fungible token (NFT), a cryptocurrency bundled with digital art and concert tickets. The NFT can be collected and traded, while giving direct proceeds to the artists.

Some musicians doubt these are scalable solutions for anyone without a built-in audience, or for session players who rely on appearance fees, or songwriters who used to make their year by having a credit on a hit record, which has gone away as the album unbundled. Plus, the economics of these crowdfunding sites are fragile. PledgeMusic, a British-based service, went dark in 2019 and fell into bankruptcy, leaving artists owed thousands of dollars.

Marc Ribot, a guitarist who has played with Tom Waits and Elvis Costello, doubts that these direct-to-consumer sites are much more than a Band-Aid. “The same neoliberals in anarchist drag boosting indie labels in the ’90s are now boosting Bandcamp,” he said. “I love Bandcamp. I love the food co-op too. They’ve been around since the 1930s, they’re 3 percent of the market, will never be any bigger.”

The patronage model, Ribot argued, is really a tipping model for musicians, which isn’t sustainable. “If you go to Bandcamp and pay, that’s great,” he said. “But we don’t need voluntary charity. We need to either tear the whole thing down and create real socialism where I get an apartment for my good looks, or a functioning market.”

“I just can’t wait to get on the road again …” –Willie Nelson

After a century or so of living off recorded music, the economics of the business has returned musical artists to their original state as troubadours, with touring making up the bulk of their income. Where touring was previously done to promote records, now records are made to support the tour. The multi-billion-dollar industry of selling studio-recorded music is now a sidelight. The phrase “gig economy” was derived from musicians playing a gig. Now musicians have gone back to being gig workers.

But concentrated power exists in touring as well. Live Nation and AEG control a substantial number of stages and venues in the U.S. They are also the two biggest concert promoters and artist management companies in the world, and control most of the nation’s biggest music festivals.

Live Nation added to their market power with the 2010 merger with Ticketmaster, which still boggles the mind, since Ticketmaster was already a notorious monopolist that artists and fans loathed. Ticketmaster controls 80 percent of the ticketing market, and a 2018 Government Accountability Office report found that ancillary fees attached to every sale total out to 27 percent of the face value of a ticket. About half of Live Nation’s total revenue has historically come from these overages.

The 200 venues and 500 major artists that Live Nation manages give them leverage to make Ticketmaster the exclusive broker for those sites and musical acts. It took AEG, the only other big player in the space, to complain about this anti-competitive behavior, which violated the Justice Department’s consent decree from when they approved the merger. However, that led only to a slap-on-the-wrist modification of that consent decree. Ticketmaster was also recently fined $10 million for hacking into a competitor’s computer systems, in a scheme to collect intelligence and limit its business.

The Live Nation/AEG duopoly also funnels revenue to the top: 60 percent of worldwide concert revenue went to the top 1 percent of performers in 2017. But even given that reality, independent venues and artists still had a means to earn a living. “2020 was going to be everybody’s best year,” said Audrey Fix Schaefer, whose company manages the 9:30 Club and other venues in Washington, D.C. “It’s the thirst for live entertainment, the thirst for community.”

And then the pandemic hit, and the live music industry vanished overnight. A year later, it still hasn’t come back. Marc Ribot archly notes that Live Nation waited until a few hours after the U.N. announced a global pandemic to cancel tours. This triggered force majeure clauses in the contracts so Live Nation didn’t have to pay artists for the postponed shows.

In a sense it was a final blow, the capper for an industry that seemingly reconstructed itself over the past 20 years to screw over the working-class musician. “They said you don’t make money on records, you can tour,” Ribot said. “Now the people who produced that music are literally starving. I lost friends, I’m sure everybody did.”

Ribot told me about a COVID-related survey, which found that 71 percent of the musicians and DJs who responded had lost over three-quarters of their income. “That’s over twice the rate of average unemployment during the Great Depression,” he said. The hardest-hit were not the up-and-coming artists trying to break through, but the musical middle class, those who had worked consistently enough to make music their sole profession.

There’s almost been a conspiracy of silence about it. “The music business is about stories,” said Maggie Vail. “You don’t want to tell people you’re not doing as well. People would say, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’” But the pandemic eliminated the one piece of the business monopolists couldn’t fully take away—the live show. Vail told me about her friend Sean Tillmann, a songwriter who records under the alter ego Har Mar Superstar. “He became a mailman,” she said. “He said, ‘It’s a good union job and I’ll do this until my industry comes back.’”

Live Nation has not had such worries. Despite not hosting a live show in a year, the company’s stock exceeded pre-pandemic highs this January, and only has grown since then. Live Nation has done about 1,000 ticketed live-stream concerts, and has planned to cut artist payouts for 2021 shows by 20 percent. But many fear that investors expect the company to capitalize on diminished competition after vaccinations proceed, either through attrition or through a mass buying spree. “The fear is you have imperiled small businesses and the big guys see an opportunity to scoop everything up,” said Erickson.

In an earnings call in February, Live Nation said it had $2 billion in “total liquidity” that it could use to make a series of acquisitions. CEO Michael Rapino told market analysts, “We will be aggressive on a bolt-on, continued consolidation path while we are able to.”

But after seeing income dip, opportunities slashed, live concerts shutter, and careers threatened, musicians finally recognized that all they had left was each other.

“Come together, right now, over me …” –The Beatles

Music organizing has always been difficult because the workers are so segregated, always out on the road, never in communication with one another. The pandemic changed that; people were stuck in quarantine, with a moment to contemplate the rotten deal they were getting for their creative output.

Damon Krukowski explained to me how he and some friends started a weekly Zoom meeting, discussing various issues in the industry, comparing notes on contracts, streaming rates, and other issues. Out of those calls originated the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers (UMAW). More than 1,000 music workers have been involved with the group and its various subcommittees. UMAW mobilized for expanded unemployment during the pandemic, and they have expressed solidarity over progressive issues like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. But the overarching goal is to change the current state of the music industry.

The Justice at Spotify campaign is a first step. Over 27,000 musicians have signed the petition, which demands at least a one-cent payment per stream, public disclosure of all licensing deals, an end to digital payola, and full credits on all streamed recordings. “Spotify should be fighting for the artists who built it, instead of further undercutting our economic well-being,” the petition reads.

So far, Spotify has ignored UMAW. “They’re stonewalling because they don’t think they need to listen to musicians,” Krukowski said. “We want a seat at the table. I really believe we’re going to get it.”

Marc Ribot and Olympia Kazi, an activist who had gotten New York City’s onerous cabaret law repealed, co-founded another group, the Music Workers Alliance. Like many pandemic-era organizing efforts, MWA concerned itself first with mutual aid for struggling artists. But while better streaming royalties, an end to copyright infringement, and basic fairness in the digital marketplace are on MWA’s agenda, they’re also concerned about working conditions at live venues, minimum pay rates, protections against discrimination and harassment, and a piece of any live-streaming club revenue. An initial rally was held in Manhattan in February.

“I went on a nonconsensual strike and I’m alive, it makes me a little braver,” Ribot said. “It’s more militant than I’ve ever seen. It’s no accident that the CIO started in the 1930s in the middle of the Depression.”

The Future of Music Coalition and the Artist Rights Alliance, two older organizations, helped win a $100-a-week “mixed earner” boost for artists who get artificially low benefits benefits due to non-employee income playing music. Both groups have dialed in on corporate power as a huge barrier to a healthy music industry. “Anti-monopoly has always been a thread running through the work, but it’s more central now,” said Kevin Erickson, who worked at college radio stations and music venues before directing FMC.

Perhaps the biggest victory for independent music workers was the Save Our Stages legislation, organized by a brand new coalition. After the pandemic struck, Audrey Fix Schaefer of the 9:30 Club got a call from Dayna Frank, owner of First Avenue in Minneapolis. “She said, ‘You’re in D.C., do you know a lobbyist, we have to lobby for federal aid,’” Schaefer recalled. “Of course I thought that was ludicrous, so I said ‘When can we start?’” A week later, the National Independent Venue Association had 500 members, and now it’s up to 3,000, in every state.

Everyone knew the stakes: secure funding, or see a mass collapse of independent venues. Nearly all workers have been furloughed, and 90 percent of the membership said they would not reopen if new funding didn’t come through. Schaefer said that hundreds of clubs are unlikely to ever reopen, including storied jazz venues.

NIVA motivated fans to contact Congress, sparking two million emails. At the same time, it ran fundraisers online that brought in $3 million. Last December, Save Our Stages finally passed, with $15 billion for venues of all kinds, from music clubs to movie houses to museums. “Most everyone else who tries to get laws passed, it takes six, seven years,” said Schaefer. But within nine months, NIVA had secured the biggest federal funding for the arts in U.S. history. Since it was established in 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts has collectively only received a little more than one-third of Save Our Stages.

That points to one option to save music creators. Author William Deresiewicz points out that public funding for the arts in America is about $4 per person, including a program in Minnesota that devotes a portion of its sales tax to arts and culture. Annual U.S. government support for the arts comes in at less than the budget of a Mission: Impossible film. “In Europe, as a percentage of GDP, it’s like 63 times higher,” Deresiewicz said. It’s no accident that Sweden has an outsized number of recording stars given its size, because of its massive investment in the arts.

Beyond direct funding, an artist has space to work when there’s a generous enough society to allow for risk-taking, from health care as a human right and cheap housing and basic social services. Creativity flourishes amid security. The New Deal’s Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project gave artists a living wage in exchange for producing art regularly. An offshoot, the Federal Music Project, employed composers and musicians to perform thousands of concerts and music festivals. This spirit could be summoned again.

But funding for the arts has been a longtime issue. Music worker organizing is relatively new, especially at this level. It remains to be seen whether movement building from all stakeholders, from musicians to fans, will be able to force platform monopolies to give creators just compensation. But the winds are shifting in Washington around Big Tech, and a united front of artists could prove key to raising public sympathies against exploitation and toward basic fairness.

Artists would rather think of themselves as outside the system. “The wonderful thing about the DIY vision is also its weakness,” Astra Taylor noted. But the system has come for them, and toppled the structures that allowed them to create. Everyone loves music, and most of us now have the capacity to listen to anything, anywhere, at any time. We can’t hear through the noise that the people who brought us this musical bounty are in trouble.

“I’ve been relatively fortunate in my career,” said Marc Ribot. “I got to work with great people. But one thing I think about at every moment is, if I can feel the water at my navel, it’s going to be over a lot of people’s heads.”
https://prospect.org/power/islands-i...usic-monopoly/





Box Office: ‘Godzilla vs. Kong’ Sets Global Pandemic Record
Sonaiya Kelley

This weekend’s international rollout of Warner Bros.’ “Godzilla vs. Kong” set a new pandemic record for a Hollywood film, a hopeful sign of an imminent return to moviegoing.

The film, which opens in North American theaters and on HBO Max on Wednesday, debuted in 38 overseas markets to an impressive $121.8 million, including $70.3 million in Chinese receipts. That’s the biggest debut for a Hollywood film in China since 2019. The monster smackdown also grossed $12.4 million on 891 IMAX screens, also Hollywood’s biggest IMAX weekend since December 2019.

The “Godzilla vs. Kong” debut outperformed the entire to-date international gross of the studio’s December blockbuster release of “Wonder Woman 1984,” which currently stands at $120 million overseas (and an additional $45.9 million domestic), according to estimates from measurement firm Comscore. The previous benchmark for a pandemic-era overseas opening was the $53-million launch of the studio’s “Tenet” in August 2020.

While American theaters are slowly reopening en masse after a roller-coaster year of reopenings and closings, movie houses including Regal and smaller chains (such as L.A.’s ArcLight) have not yet returned. Despite theaters operating at limited capacity, Universal’s R-rated action flick “Nobody” debuted this weekend across 2,460 North American screens to $6.7 million. L.A. and New York City, both recently reopened, were the two highest-grossing markets.

With an A- CinemaScore and 79% “certified fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the Bob Odenkirk revenge thriller easily outperformed recent adult-skewing releases including “The Little Things,” “Let Him Go,” and the Liam Neeson vehicles “Honest Thief” and “The Marksman.”

Family movies “Tom & Jerry,” “The Croods: A New Age” and “Raya and the Last Dragon” and the tentpole titles “Tenet” and “Wonder Woman 1984” have had the strongest theatrical showings among pandemic releases, which makes the solid performance of a relatively less flashy title like “Nobody” a potentially optimistic sign for the weeks to come. The film is expected to be released as a PVOD rental on April 16, per Universal’s strategy for exclusive theatrical windows.

Elsewhere at the box office, A24’s Oscar contender “Minari” was the only best picture nominee to land among the top 10. The film, now in its seventh weekend of release, added $275,000 for a cumulative $1.8 million. Focus Features’ “Promising Young Woman” remains the highest-grossing best picture nominee with a cumulative $5.9 million in domestic receipts to date. All eight of the 2021 best picture Oscar nominees have also had some option for home viewing.
https://www.siliconvalley.com/2021/0...ndemic-record/





Scoop: Dish Blasts T-Mobile for Plans to Shut Down Network Dish's Customers Still Use
Ina Fried

Dish Network sent a letter to the FCC on Thursday, complaining that T-Mobile — its partner for wireless services — is rushing to shut down a network still used by millions of Dish's Boost Mobile customers.

Why it matters: T-Mobile's purchase of Sprint was only allowed after it agreed to sell a chunk of assets to Dish, including its Boost prepaid business. Plus, Dish is highly reliant on T-Mobile for network services as it builds out its own 5G network over the next several years.

Driving the news: Dish's letter to the FCC addresses a range of concerns, but the largest issue relates to the shutdown of the CDMA network that had previously been used by Sprint and is still used by the majority of Dish's 9 million Boost Mobile subscribers.

• As part of the Boost sale to Dish, T-Mobile agreed to provide network services, but didn't commit to operating the CDMA service (Sprint's legacy network) for a particular length of time.

• Dish had expected that T-Mobile would eventually look to shut down that network in three to five years, according to people familiar with Dish's thinking. But Sprint said late last year that it would look to shut it down far earlier, on Jan. 1, 2022.

What they're saying: "A forced migration of this scale under this accelerated time frame is simply not possible and will leave potentially millions of Boost subscribers disenfranchised and without cell service come January 1, 2022," Dish said in the letter.

• It also noted that Verizon, which has only 1% of customers still on CDMA, has repeatedly delayed its shutdown and now doesn't plan to do so until 2023, a year after T-Mobile plans to do so.

• A T-Mobile representative was not immediately available for comment.

Between the lines: The public acrimony is significant as Dish is highly reliant on T-Mobile for network services over the next several years while it builds out its own 5G network. (Dish expects to launch its first city with its own 5G service this year, but the national roll-out will take time.)

Our thought bubble: Given Dish's reliance on T-Mobile, it's reasonable to think that a public spat was not its first course of action, and that Dish has gone to regulators only after failing to convince T-Mobile to change its timing on the network shutdown.

Meanwhile: In the letter, Dish also accuses T-Mobile of flip-flopping on other spectrum issues. Where T-Mobile previously pushed for policies encouraging smaller competitors, Dish says T-Mobile is now adopting the same tactics as AT&T and Verizon.

• "During its earlier life as the 'Un-Carrier,' T-Mobile championed policies that promoted competition, diverse spectrum ownership, and efficient spectrum use. How quickly things change," Dish says in its letter. "Now, T- Mobile opposes measures that would help new entrants and smaller providers compete."
https://www.axios.com/dish-tmobile-n...9a54fdf04.html





Supreme Court Lets F.C.C. Relax Limits on Media Ownership

The justices said the commission had adequately considered whether easing rules on cross-ownership of radio and TV stations and newspapers would hurt female and minority ownership of media outlets.
Adam Liptak

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Thursday that the Federal Communications Commission could relax rules limiting the number of newspapers, radio stations and television stations that a single entity may own in a given market.

The decision is likely to prompt further consolidation among broadcast outlets, some of which say they need more freedom to address competition from internet and cable companies. Critics fear that media consolidation will limit the perspectives available to viewers.

The rules at issue in the case, initially adopted between 1964 and 1975, had been meant “to promote competition, localism and viewpoint diversity by ensuring that a small number of entities do not dominate a particular media market,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote for the court. But the rules, he added, were a relic of a different era — “an early-cable and pre-internet age when media sources were more limited.”

“By the 1990s, however, the market for news and entertainment had changed dramatically,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “Technological advances led to a massive increase in alternative media options, such as cable television and the internet. Those technological advances challenged the traditional dominance of daily print newspapers, local radio stations and local television stations.”

The case, Federal Communications Commission v. Prometheus Radio Project, No. 19-1231, concerned three rules. One barred a single entity from owning a radio or television station and a daily print newspaper in the same market, the second limited the number of radio and television stations an entity can own in a single market, and the third restricted the number of local television stations an entity could own in the same market.

In 2017, the commission concluded that the three rules no longer served their original purposes of promoting competition and the like. The vote was 3 to 2 along party lines, with the commission’s Republican members in the majority.

“The F.C.C. explained that permitting efficient combinations among radio stations, television stations and newspapers would benefit consumers,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote.

Public interest and advocacy groups objected, largely on the ground that changing the rules would harm minority and female ownership of media outlets. The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, agreed, ruling that the commission had not adequately considered evidence on that point. The appeals court ordered the commission to do more work “whether through new empirical research or an in-depth theoretical analysis.”

The evidence before the commission in 2017 was thin and mixed, Justice Kavanaugh wrote, with some of it suggesting that lifting the rule on newspaper and broadcast cross-ownership could increase minority ownership. He concluded that the commission’s analysis of the limited evidence before it was adequate and that the court should defer to it.

“In short, the F.C.C.’s analysis was reasonable and reasonably explained,” he wrote.

“The F.C.C. considered the record evidence on competition, localism, viewpoint diversity and minority and female ownership, and reasonably concluded that the three ownership rules no longer serve the public interest,” he wrote.

“The F.C.C. reasoned that the historical justifications for those ownership rules no longer apply in today’s media market,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “The commission further explained that its best estimate, based on the sparse record evidence, was that repealing or modifying the three rules at issue here was not likely to harm minority and female ownership.”

Carmen Scurato, a lawyer with Free Press, an advocacy group that was one of the challengers in the case, said in a statement that “this Supreme Court decision couldn’t come at a worse time, as the country reels from the harmful impact media consolidation has had on communities of color in the United States.”

David Chavern, the president of the News Media Alliance, a trade group, welcomed the ruling.

“The cross-ownership ban is a prime example of an outdated regulation that had shackled the newspaper industry for far too long,” he said in a statement. “The repeal of the ban will generate much-needed investments and cross-platform synergies that will help sustain local news media at a monumental time in our country’s history when local news is needed more than ever.”

Justice Kavanaugh did not address the question of whether female and minority ownership was a relevant factor under the governing statute. In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that it was not.

“The F.C.C. had no obligation to consider minority and female ownership,” he wrote. He noted, too, that “the F.C.C. has recently questioned the validity of the assumption that ownership diversity promotes viewpoint diversity.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/01/u...ownership.html





SpaceX is Dominating Orbit with its Starlink Satellites, Making the Risk of Space Traffic Collision a Serious Hazard, Industry Experts Say
Kate Duffy

• SpaceX Starlink satellites have taken over the lower Earth orbit, experts told Insider.
• There are apparently 1,300 Starlink satellites in lower orbit and 300 from other entities.
• "We're not at the end of the world yet but it's a serious situation," another space researcher said.
• See more stories on Insider's business page.

SpaceX is rapidly deploying its Starlink internet network across the globe with rocket launches happening on a monthly basis.

By rapidly adding to the number of satellites in orbit, space industry experts believe Elon Musk's space company is heightening the risk of collisions between space objects, generating an abundance of debris.

SpaceX's Starlink has blasted around 1,300 satellites into orbit and plans for a megaconstellation of up to 42,000 spacecraft in mid-2027.

In October, Starlink launched its Better Than Nothing Beta test across the northern US for $99 a month, plus $499 for the kit. It now operates in more than six countries and has more than 10,000 users worldwide.

Starlink has previously said its satellites can avoid collisions using an ion drive, which allows it to dodge other objects in orbit. But if the satellites' communications or operations fail in orbit, they become hazards to space traffic.

In the lower part of the Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Starlink satellites "are completely dominating the space object population," Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Insider on Tuesday.

He said there are around 300 other satellites in the lower LEO, including the International Space Station, in comparison to the 1,300 Starlink satellites.

"There's a point at which they are so many of them manoeuvering all the time that it's a hazard to traffic" in space, McDowell said, adding that the hazard can result in a massive collision, creating junk.

Each satellite travels at 18,000 miles per hour and all of them are going in different directions, according to McDowell. If they smash into each other, it sends hypersonic shockwaves through the satellites and reduces them into thousands of pieces of shrapnel which then make a shell around the Earth, he said.

This becomes a threat to other space users and an obstruction for astronomers observing the skies.

McDowell calculated in November that 2.5% of Starlink satellites may have failed in orbit. This may not sound bad in the grand scheme of things. But if this issue persists, SpaceX's entire planned constellation may produce more than 1,000 dead satellites.
10,000 satellites are due to launch in the next decade

John Auburn, managing director of Astroscale UK, an orbital debris removal firm headquartered in Tokyo, said in a press briefing on March 17 that more than 10,000 satellites are scheduled to be launched in the next 10 years.

McDowell said satellite companies may have some "nasty surprises" if they get this amount of satellites in orbit. He said firms should stop launching satellites when the amount hits 1,000 and monitor them for a while to see if any problems crop up, such as design flaws.

There could be a "complete catastrophe" on the horizon, McDowell said.

But its not all bad news. Daniel Oltrogge, director at the Center for Space Standards and Innovation, told Insider it's beneficial that Starlink satellites are in the lower LEO because they can be removed more quickly if they fail.

Oltrogge said the space junk issue isn't a blame game. Any user of space, including governments, and commercial and civil companies, have all contributed to this picture of space debris today, he said.

There are many problems to tackle, said Oltrogge, including satellite operators complying with guidelines that help minimize collision risks, improving space situational awareness and spacecraft design, and exchanging more data between satellite companies.

But if we don't address the space junk crisis at a global level, rather than at an operator one, "we risk missing how the environment is degrading," according to Oltrogge.

"We're not at the end of the world yet," Oltrogge said. "But it's a serious situation that warrants scrutiny."

Why SpaceX is one of the top satellite launchers

Compared to other private commercial satellite companies, SpaceX comes top trumps. Since May 2019, there's been a staggering 23 Starlink launches via SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.

McDowell believes the company's acceleration may be down to its CEO. "Elon doesn't have to answer to many people, he can make decisions effectively, he doesn't have to diver around and get permission," he said.

On top of this, he has his own rockets to launch the satellites into orbit, McDowell said. This saves him time and money as he doesn't have to negotiate another launch contract. The fact that the rockets are reusable — the last Falcon 9 booster on Wednesday's mission was used six times — also makes it cheap for SpaceX to launch satellites.

"That's an advantage the other companies don't have," said McDowell.
https://www.businessinsider.com/elon...experts-2021-3





AT&T Lobbies Against Nationwide Fiber, Says 10Mbps Uploads are Good Enough

AT&T admits fiber is most "future-proof" but wants US to fund slower networks.
Jon Brodkin

AT&T is lobbying against proposals to subsidize fiber-to-the-home deployment across the US, arguing that rural people don't need fiber and should be satisfied with Internet service that provides only 10Mbps upload speeds.

AT&T Executive VP Joan Marsh detailed the company's stance Friday in a blog post titled "Defining Broadband For the 21st Century." AT&T's preferred definition of 21st-century broadband could be met with wireless technology or AT&T's VDSL, a 14-year-old system that brings fiber to neighborhoods but uses copper telephone wires for the final connections into each home.

"[T]here would be significant additional cost to deploy fiber to virtually every home and small business in the country, when at present there is no compelling evidence that those expenditures are justified over the service quality of a 50/10 or 100/20Mbps product," AT&T wrote. (That would be 50Mbps download speeds with 10Mbps upload speeds or 100Mbps downloads with 20Mbps uploads.)

AT&T said that "overbuilding" areas that already have acceptable speeds "would needlessly devalue private investment and waste broadband-directed dollars."

"Overbuilding" is what the broadband industry calls one ISP building in an area already served by another ISP, whereas Internet users desperate for cheaper, faster, and more reliable service call that "broadband competition."

Democrats want 100/100Mbps in rural areas

The AT&T blog post came about two weeks after Congressional Democrats proposed an $80 billion fund to deploy broadband with download and upload speeds of 100Mbps to unserved areas. The Biden administration is also planning a $3 trillion package that includes funding for rural broadband among many other priorities. Four US senators recently called on the Biden administration to establish a "21st century definition of high-speed broadband" of 100Mbps both upstream and downstream.

The US subsidizing deployment of symmetrical 100Mbps speeds would help other ISPs bring fast broadband to areas where AT&T still uses old phone lines that have fallen into disrepair because AT&T hasn't properly maintained them. AT&T could bid for the funding too, of course, but it doesn't want to build fiber throughout rural areas. AT&T previously said it is deploying fiber to 3 million more homes and businesses this year, but the company is only doing so in metro areas and mostly in those metro areas where AT&T already built out most of the infrastructure and can get a better return on investment. There are tens of millions of homes without fiber in AT&T's 21-state wireline service area.

AT&T has been fighting against increases in broadband-speed benchmarks for years. Back in 2014, AT&T urged the Federal Communications Commission to keep its standard of 4Mbps downloads and 1Mbps uploads. AT&T claimed at the time that even 10Mbps downloads would "exceed what many Americans need today," but the FCC raised the standard to 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up in January 2015.

AT&T's current fixed-wireless service only provides download speeds of 10 to 25Mbps and upload speeds of 1Mbps, but the company plans upgrades that could help the wireless service qualify for the proposed $80 billion fund if Congress doesn't require high upload speeds.

AT&T did take $428 million per year from the FCC starting in 2015 to bring 10Mbps download and 1Mbps upload speeds to 1.1 million rural homes and businesses in 18 states. AT&T later gave the FCC false broadband-coverage data and Mississippi officials accused the telco of failing to deploy the required broadband. AT&T said it was correcting the mistakes and that it would meet the end-of-2020 deployment deadline in all 18 states.

A 100Mbps upload requirement could also prod cable companies into finally deploying the symmetrical cable services they've been teasing for years. Comcast and other cable companies still limit upload speeds to 35Mbps on gigabit-download plans.

How AT&T would define broadband

AT&T's blog post on Friday addressed two topics: how broadband should be defined to determine which homes are considered unserved, and what types of broadband networks should be chosen when the government distributes funding to ISPs.

AT&T argued that the FCC's 6-year-old broadband definition of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream "is sufficient to support Zoom working and remote learning." But AT&T admitted, "When Zooming, streaming, and tweeting is combined in an average household of four, it's easy to conclude that download speeds must increase."

As noted earlier in this article, AT&T is opposed to a broadband definition that requires symmetrical upload and download speeds. "A definition built on symmetrical speeds could dramatically expand the locations deemed 'unserved,' leading to some areas being unnecessarily overbuilt while leaving fewer dollars to support areas in greater need, which tend to be rural," AT&T wrote.

AT&T also admitted that fiber technology is the most "future-proof" but said that bringing fiber to every home "is not practical." AT&T wrote:

Some flexibility must be preserved, particularly for the next generation of fixed wireless technologies likely to be deployed in the recently auctioned C-Band that will easily deliver performance at 100Mbps down. But wireless networks are not built to deliver symmetrical speeds, so any mandate around symmetrical performance could undermine delivery of these efficient and robust technology solutions in hard to serve areas of the country.

AT&T warns of high monthly bills

AT&T also argued that the monthly bills for fiber service will be too expensive for many rural customers. "As higher speed networks get deployed to rural America, the current availability challenge could easily become an affordability one," AT&T said.

But the point of an $80 billion fund to deploy high-speed broadband, like the one proposed by Democrats, is to subsidize deployment so that rural customers get the same service at similar prices as urban customers.

A bill summary provided by House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.) said that ISPs accepting subsidies would have to provide "at least 100/100Mbps with sufficiently low latency, offering broadband service at prices that are comparable to, or lower than, the prices charged for comparable service, and offering an affordable service plan."

Congress already approved a $7.17 billion fund that schools and libraries will use to help people get Internet access at home. Separately, the pending legislation proposed by Clyburn and other Democrats would add $6 billion to the Emergency Broadband Connectivity Fund for Americans who have low incomes or who lost their jobs during the pandemic. Congress initially provided $3.2 billion for that fund, and the FCC is aiming to start enrollment by the last week of April.

Fiber compared to electricity

With Democrats controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, at least some members of the party want to make real progress toward universal broadband that doesn't leave rural people with worse service than ISPs are capable of providing. Clyburn compared the broadband-deployment plan to "rural electrification efforts in the last century."

"In 2021, we should be able to bring high-speed Internet to every family in America—regardless of their ZIP code," Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) said when she announced the identical Senate version of the plan.

The comparison between fiber and electricity has been made by numerous broadband advocates over the years. That includes Glen Akins, who helped lead a successful pro-municipal broadband ballot campaign in Fort Collins, Colorado, in 2017. (Voters approved the ballot question despite heavy lobbying against it by the cable and telecom industry.)

"The only households that should be exempted from a fiber requirement are those that lack a connection to the electrical grid," Akins wrote in a tweet last week. "If you run power to a house, you can run fiber to a house. Substituting anything else is grift."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...e-good-enough/





ISP Imposes Data Cap, Explains it to Users with Condescending Pizza Analogy

WOW tells users that exceeding data cap is like taking "extra slice" of pizza.
Jon Brodkin

Cable company WideOpenWest (which markets itself as WOW!) yesterday told customers that it is imposing a data cap and explained the change with a pizza analogy that would seem more appropriate for a kindergarten classroom than for an email informing Internet users of new, artificial limits on their data usage.

The email said WOW is "introducing a monthly data usage plan for your Internet service on June 1, 2021" and described the system as follows:

What's a monthly data usage plan? Let us illustrate …

Imagine that the WOW! network is a pizza. Piping hot. Toppings galore. Every WOW! customer gets their own slice of pizza, but the size of their slice is dependent on their Internet service plan. While customers who subscribe to 1 Gig get the largest slices, those with Internet 500 get a slightly smaller piece, and so on. But, it's all the same delicious, high-speed pizza that you know and love.

Now, say you're not full after your slice and you grab another. That extra slice is like a data overage. Don't worry—we got extra pizza... umm, data... just in case. If you exceed your data allowance, we'll automatically apply increments of 50GB for $10 to your account for the remainder of the current calendar month. Total overage charges will not exceed $50 per billing statement no matter how much data you use. Even better—the first time you experience a data overage, we'll proactively waive fees.


Email omits most important details

The email did not mention that, unlike pizza, Internet data doesn't run out and that there is plenty for everyone as long as a network is properly constructed and provisioned. And despite paragraphs of comparing data to pizza, the email literally never says how much data customers will be allowed to use before they are charged extra. The answer is in a newly updated "network management practices" document that says the monthly cap will range from 1TB to 3TB: the 50Mbps download plan gets 1TB, plans between 100 and 300Mbps download speeds get 1.5TB, the 500 and 600Mbps plans get 2.5TB, and the gigabit plan gets 3TB.

The document also points out that "[t]he amount of bandwidth usage of Customer's account is the sole responsibility of Customer, whether or not such usage was by Customer or authorized by Customer."

One Ars editor got the data cap email yesterday, and a reader named Shaun who received it forwarded it to us as well. Both live in Illinois, which seems to be the first and so far the only state getting the WOW cap.

"The pizza thing was making me confused if it was an April Fools' Day joke or not, it's so cringey," Shaun told us. He also said that WOW has consistently failed to deliver the advertised 50Mbps upload speeds on his 500Mbps download plan. "WOW's sole advantage over Comcast was no data cap, until now," Shaun said.

WOW has over 800,000 Internet customers in parts of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, South Carolina, and Tennessee. It's not clear when customers in states outside Illinois will have to endure the data cap. The network management practices document says the data cap is for "some service areas."

WOW used to boast about not having data cap

Data caps are widely loathed by Internet customers, and ISPs that don't impose them are quick to tout that fact to show how consumer-friendly they are. WOW did exactly that in June 2017 when it issued a press release titled, "WOW! Internet, Cable & Phone Takes Consumer Side in Data Cap Debate."

WOW "today reinforced its commitment to continue providing data‐cap free Internet to all of its users, ensuring a better consumer Internet experience that is fast, reliable, and the best value in the market," the company said at the time. "Consumers can use their WOW Internet how they want it, when they want it, with no limit—how Internet should be." Unlike yesterday's email, this 4-year-old announcement was written in a way that suggests at least somebody at WOW then knew that typical Internet users understand Internet data is nothing like pizza.

We asked WOW numerous questions today, including why it no longer "takes [the] consumer side in [the] data cap debate." We'll update this story if we get answers.

Comcast, the biggest Internet provider in the US, imposes a data cap in 27 of the 39 states it operates in. Comcast announced it would expand the cap to the rest of its territory starting in January 2021 but delayed that plan until 2022 after facing pressure from customers and lawmakers.

Cap allegedly will improve “Internet experience”

Yesterday's email to customers seemed to hint that the WOW network is having trouble serving everyone:

Why are we doing this? It's simple, really. A monthly data usage plan ensures that every WOW! customer has a consistent Internet experience. To put it in pizza terms: it's so everyone gets the amount they ordered (or the amount to satisfy their hunger).

One of the questions we asked WOW is whether the above paragraph means that it has not been able to provide "a consistent Internet experience" without a data cap. But WOW previously claimed that its network is robust enough to handle increased usage during the pandemic even without data caps, saying on May 19, 2020 that "WOW!'s robust broadband network has the capacity to handle increased usage, including video streaming, as more people work and learn from home. The network is designed to deliver consistent, high-performing connectivity without disruption and without imposing data caps."

WOW restricts unlimited-data option

The email to customers mentioned nothing about unlimited data. The network management practices document says that "[u]nlimited data plans may be added for an additional monthly charge" but doesn't say how much it will cost.

"The Unlimited data option is not available for all service plans or packages," the WOW document said, without specifying which packages the unlimited option is available for. It's not even clear whether customers in Illinois who are the first to get the cap will be offered the unlimited-data option. One customer who contacted the billing department yesterday wrote on a DSLReports forum, "There is apparently no current plan to have an 'actually unlimited' plan or option."

The email to customers said that usage of WOW! tv+—a streaming service the company offers—"won't count toward your data usage plan." This data cap exemption is called zero-rating, a practice that faces some restrictions under a California net neutrality law but not in the rest of the US. For example, the California law prevents ISPs from zero-rating their own streaming video services if they don't also zero-rate video streaming services offered by other companies.

Update: WOW sent a slightly more detailed email to customers about four hours after this article was published. The new email included the sizes of the data caps for each speed tier but did not make any mention of an unlimited-data option and said that customers "cannot opt out of data plans." WOW's new email also said that "Data plans have become an industry standard that ensure all customers have a consistent and reliable experience," but—obviously—WOW did not mention that many other ISPs do not impose data caps.

“Time to flood the FCC with complaints”

A bunch of WOW users have been complaining about the data cap in the DSLReports forum since the email went out yesterday.

"Time to flood the FCC with complaints," one person wrote, noting that the WOW email didn't disclose the size of the data caps, that WOW is imposing the caps in a pandemic with less than 90 days notice, and that it is "using caps in lieu of proper maintenance and upgrades."

Several customers reported that the link to check data usage provided in yesterday's email is broken, but one person wrote that "if you log in manually and then click the services tab it shows data usage (at least for me)."

Even worse than a bad April Fools joke

People in the DSLReports forum briefly debated whether the email was a bad April Fools' Day joke. "Are you guys sure you're not falling for an April Fools joke? I heard there was something about pizza in the email," one person wrote. However, yesterday's update to the network management practices document makes it clear that it's not a joke.

One user called WOW and talked to a customer service rep who "wasn't aware of any of this and had to go ask his supervisor." After consulting with the supervisor, the rep confirmed to the customer that the data cap is real.

"I'm stunned they would email this on April Fools' Day," the user wrote. "There were broken links in my email and other indications that made me think this must be a joke. Par for the course with WOW."

"Announce data caps right after increasing prices and on April Fools' Day no less, nice... I also learned that according to their site I am being 'rewarded' as a longtime user by now having the privilege to pay $19 more per month than the current 'regular' price for my tier," another user wrote.

"I understand the need to prevent people from abusing the network, but implementing caps during a time where the entire world needs (and depends) on Internet more than ever is an insult," another wrote.

"Well there goes my Plex server," another lamented.

Data usage soars during pandemic

The WOW email to customers said that the average user "will consume far less data than their plan allows and only a small percentage will ever be impacted by overage fees. This small percentage includes behaviors like using servers or file-sharing applications that consume extreme amounts of data... the vast majority of WOW customers will not be impacted by overage fees."

But data usage has risen quickly in the pandemic with one study finding that 14.1 percent of US Internet subscribers used over 1TB of data per month in Q4 2020, up from 7.3 percent in Q4 2019.

"I have used anywhere between 700GB and 1.1TB (per month) over the past 12 months in a household of 5," a Comcast customer wrote in the DSLReports thread. "That's with purposely limiting (reducing quality options in streaming apps, disabling auto updates on games and software, etc) to prevent hitting Comcast's cap (1.2TB)."

Here's a screenshot of the email WOW sent to customers yesterday:
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...poses-data-cap





Biden Infrastructure Plan Promises Broadband to All Within 8 Years

The $100 billion proposal leans heavily on local, home-grown broadband solutions instead of big telecoms.
Karl Bode

Despite billions of dollars in tax breaks, subsidies, and regulatory favors, U.S. broadband remains patchy, slow, and expensive by international standards. A lack of competition in many U.S. markets means 42 million Americans still lack any broadband whatsoever, double official government estimates. Eighty-three million more are trapped under a monopoly, usually Comcast.

Enter the Biden administration, whose new $2 trillion infrastructure plan sets aside $100 billion with the goal of delivering “future proof” broadband to every home in America within eight years.

While specifics are murky, a new fact sheet on the proposal states the plan won’t just involve throwing more subsidies at America’s deep-pocketed incumbents, an American pastime studies show historically hasn’t delivered on the promise of faster, better broadband.

Instead, the Biden administration says it plans to “prioritize support” for broadband networks owned, operated, or run in concert with local governments. Frustrated by limited competition and substandard service, some 750 U.S. communities have built local broadband networks that studies have shown are faster and less expensive than traditional options.

Hoping to crush this grass roots attempt to nudge the country toward better broadband, U.S. telecom monopolies have spent decades pushing laws in roughly twenty states aimed at restricting or blocking such efforts, something singled out by the Biden proposal.

“President Biden’s plan will promote price transparency and competition among internet providers, including by lifting barriers that prevent municipally-owned or affiliated providers and rural electric co-ops from competing on an even playing field with private providers, and requiring internet providers to clearly disclose the prices they charge,” the plan states.

The problem: neither the Biden FCC nor broader administration can do much about such state-level restrictions. Previous efforts by the Obama FCC to eliminate state barriers to community broadband were shot down in court. Still, clear support for such efforts is a course change from the GOP, which has repeatedly tried to ban community broadband entirely.

Consumer groups argue that when it comes to U.S. broadband, the problem isn’t just access, but cost. Due to limited competition, Americans pay some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world, most recently showcased by toddlers in Silicon Valley having to huddle around fast food restaurants simply to attend class during COVID lockdowns.

While a recent bill passed by Congress includes $50 subsidies to help low-income families afford broadband, the Biden plan is quick to note that such measures are a temporary fix, and that “continually providing subsidies to cover the cost of overpriced internet service is not the right long-term solution for consumers or taxpayers.”

Granted, American history is filled with bold political promises to finally bridge America’s stubborn digital divide, but lawmakers awash in telecom campaign contributions historically haven’t been keen to what’s necessary to actually accomplish that goal, usually because it would upset politically-powerful giants like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon.

For decades, entrenched broadband providers have received billions in subsidies, tax breaks, and merger approvals in exchange for network build out promises that repeatedly, chronically wind up half deployed. Efforts to hold these companies accountable for these failed promises have proven spotty at best under both US political parties.

Enter COVID-19, which not only showcased the essential nature of broadband, but applied unprecedented pressure on lawmakers and regulators to do better. That has sparked new efforts to improve terrible U.S. broadband maps, and a renewed push to boost the definition of broadband from 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up to a more modern 100 Mbps in both directions.

“Americans pay too much for the internet – much more than people in many other countries – and the President is committed to working with Congress to find a solution to reduce internet prices for all Americans, increase adoption in both rural and urban areas, hold providers accountable, and save taxpayer money,” the administration said.

While the proof will be in the pudding, the Biden plan is a dramatic departure from the Trump administration, which refused to even acknowledge that U.S. broadband wasn’t competitive, and spent the better part of four years gutting both net neutrality — and the FCC’s consumer protection authority massive telecom monopolies.

While the FCC is expected to reverse both policies, it can’t do so until the Biden administration fully staffs the agency and appoints a permanent boss, something insiders say should occur sometime within the next few weeks or months. In the interim, getting any meaningful reform through a telecom campaign-cash slathered Congress remains as challenging as ever.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5bz...within-8-years





How to Keep Nearby Strangers from Sending You Files

Sharing is caring—except when it's an unwelcome photo from a rando on the subway. Here's how to lock down your phone and computer.
people on devices
David Nield

You may not have used them, but your phone and computer come with a variety of options for quickly beaming files between devices without getting Wi-Fi or the internet at large involved. The idea is that users can quickly transfer data from one device to another, or share files with family and friends in a convenient way.

Like many other tools, though, the convenience and ease of use of these systems also mean they're open to abuse—and you really don't want random, unwholesome photos being sent your way by strangers on the subway. Here's how to configure these sharing features so you can make use of them and stay protected too.

You don't have to leave AirDrop open to everybody. Screenshot: David Nield via Apple

Apple's favorite device-to-device sharing protocol is called AirDrop, and you'll find it used extensively in the software that runs on your iPhone or iPad: It's a really easy way to send files between Apple devices that shows up whenever you hit a share button.

To control who can and can't send you files over AirDrop, go to Settings, then pick General and AirDrop. You have three options here: Receiving Off (stop anyone from sending you files), Contacts Only (only people listed in your Apple contacts can send you files), and Everyone (anyone can send you files, a setting we wouldn't recommend).

You can find the same three options in Control Center if you press and hold on the panel with the airplane mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cellular options in it. A larger panel will appear, and you can then tap AirDrop to make your choice.

It's worth mentioning that even if you leave your AirDrop access open to anyone, you'll still have to specifically accept any files that are sent your way via a pop-up dialog. Still, that's a risk that's probably not worth taking, just in case you accidentally accept something you don't want to.

AirDrop actually relies on Bluetooth, which itself can be used as a more primitive way of sending and receiving files. If you want to disable both file transfer methods at once, go to Bluetooth in Settings and turn the toggle switch off.

You can't limit the connections that can be made via Bluetooth like you can with AirDrop: Your phone or tablet is either visible or it isn't. However, if another device tries to connect to yours (potentially to send over files), you'll see a pairing confirmation dialog that you can dismiss to block the link.

Android

Android has its own file transfer feature called Nearby Share. Screenshot: David Nield via Google

Android has cycled through various AirDrop-style approaches of its own down the years, but the most recent one is called Nearby Share. It's an Android-to-Android file-sharing system, though it isn't available on all handsets.

If you have Nearby Share, you can find it by opening up Settings then choosing Google and Device connections. From this screen, tap Nearby Share to configure how the feature operates: If you don't want to use it at all, you can turn it off completely using the toggle switch at the top.

Assuming you do want to make use of Nearby Share, you can select Device visibility to pick one of three options: All contacts (anyone in your Google contacts list can send you files), Some contacts (only the contacts you specify in a list can send you files), and Hidden (no one can send you files).

The three settings above come with caveats. No matter what setting you use, anyone will be able to send you files if they turn on Nearby Share and you also turn on Nearby Share—this will show as a Tap to become visible notification on your phone. If you ignore that notification, no one can see you.

Even if you do decide to become visible to anyone nearby, any attempted file transfer will prompt another confirmation dialog box. This applies to files sent by approved contacts as well, so there's at least one and sometimes two pop-ups to get through before you'll find yourself accepting a file from someone else.

As on iPhones, Bluetooth is another option for file sharing on Android, but you will have to accept a pairing request and a file transfer prompt before data can be sent over. You can't control this in as much detail as Nearby Share, but you can turn Bluetooth on or off via Connected devices then Connection preferences in Settings.

macOS

You can find the macOS AirDrop settings in Finder. Screenshot: David Nield via Apple

The options for macOS are fairly similar to those for iOS and iPadOS: AirDrop is here, as you would expect, and can be customized as needed. Open a window in Finder, and you'll see the AirDrop link in the navigation pane on the left—click on it to see your AirDrop transfers and settings.

At the of the AirDrop tab, you can click Allow me to be discovered by to select from No One (no one can see your Mac), Contacts Only (only your Apple contacts can see your Mac), and Everyone (anyone using AirDrop can see your Mac). As on mobile devices, if your computer can't be seen, files can't be sent to it; if your computer can be seen, you'll still need to approve any attempted file transfers.

Bluetooth is another option for sharing files on a Mac. Open the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, and then select Bluetooth to turn it on or off. As on phones, for someone to be able to send you a file, you'll need to have Bluetooth on, and accept their pairing request, and accept the file transfer.

Windows

Windows' file transfer system is called Nearby Sharing. Screenshot: David Nield via Microsoft

Windows has its own computer-to-computer file-sharing protocol called Nearby Sharing (almost the same as Android's chosen name). It can only be used between Windows computers, but it's a convenient way of getting files sent over. You'll find it in Settings under System and Shared experiences.

Under Nearby Sharing, you'll see a toggle switch to turn the feature on or off, and the drop-down menu underneath offers two options: Everyone nearby and My devices only. You might want to keep this set to the latter option unless you know someone wants to share something with you, but even if you opt for the former, any connection requests will still need to be approved by you.

As on all our other devices, Bluetooth is here as well. From Settings click on Devices then Bluetooth & other devices to enable or disable it. If you don't use any Bluetooth accessories, you might decide it's safer to leave it off, but even if it's on someone else will need two approvals to send you files: One to pair their device over Bluetooth and one to accept the file transfer.





NSA Director Says More Domestic Surveillance Might Stop Foreign Hacking; Fails To Explain Why NSA Isn't Stopping Much Foreign Hacking
Tim Cushing

Never let a good crisis go to waste. The federal government is always on the lookout for expansion opportunities and a bad actor known colloquially as "Current Events" keeps handing the government what it's looking for.

On January 6th, a bunch of Trump fans, who thought it was possible to overturn certified election results, raided the Capitol building. Five people, including a Capitol police officer, died during the attack. This horrific event was turned into a chance to increase domestic surveillance by the incoming president, who threatened Americans with the sort of good time they've been afflicted with since October 26, 2001.

Domestic terrorism legislation was an administration "priority," something that would free investigative and intelligence agencies to turn their surveillance programs inward and more directly target US citizens.

The blockbuster breach of widely-used SolarWinds network software affected dozens of federal agencies and millions of users around the world. In response to this travesty, the director of the NSA and its military counterpart CYBERCOM (Cyber Command) floated the idea of allowing the NSA (and others) to gaze inwardly at the country's moving (computer) parts. Here's Spencer Ackerman, writing for The Daily Beast:

“We truly need to look at the ability for us to see ourselves and right now it's difficult for us to see ourselves,” [General Paul] Nakasone testified on Thursday to the Senate Armed Services Committee. Adversaries like China and Russia “are operating with increased sophistication, scope [and] scale, including operations that can end “before a warrant can be issued,” he warned.

“If we have a problem where we only see our adversaries when they operate outside of their country and we don't see them when they operate inside our country it's very difficult for us to be able to—to, as I say, connect those dots,” Nakasone said. “That's something that—that the administration and obviously, others are addressing right now.”


The NSA thinks it doesn't have enough visibility. And it's true, information sharing has long been an intergovernmental problem. Information sharing between the government and private companies has also been less than ideal, largely due to the fact that the government demands more than it's willing to share -- and that includes known exploits and bugs it's currently using to engage in worldwide surveillance.

What Nakasone is suggesting sounds like domestic surveillance of private networks to potentially thwart attacks and root out persistent threats. That doesn't sound much like America though. And there's no reason to believe the NSA and DoD are better qualified to do this job than the private sector. The NSA and others have suffered their own security breaches and carelessly handled sensitive tools/information. Giving up privacy (and some security) for nominal gains in "visibility" would be a really bad idea.

For what it's worth, the NSA quickly walked back Nakasone's statement... at least as much as it could. It claimed its director was not "advocating" for "additional authorities." That may be true but dropping this hint in Congressional testimony is a handy way to submit a P.O. for a larger Overton Window for the NATSEC corner office.

But, more to the point, Nakasone's testimony did not contain anything that should give anyone confidence the NSA is up to the task of thwarting foreign cyberthreats.

Nakasone did not testify that NSA or CYBERCOM was able to detect malicious campaigns like SolarWinds or Microsoft Exchange abroad before they entered American digital infrastructure, making it questionable whether expanding such detection across the domestic internet would be effective.

Hindsight is 20/20. Foresight appears to be almost nonexistent, even with the tech tools the NSA has at its disposal. If it couldn't mitigate the damage before it turned federal agencies into unwitting honeypots for data exfiltration (and that includes the supposed securers of the Homeland, the Department of Homeland Security and its cybersecurity branch), it shouldn't be given all access passes to domestic networks under the theory that it might be able to do marginally better with greater "visibility."





Sega Wrongly Targets Steam Database Over Yakuza: Like A Dragon Piracy

SEGA lawyers have targeted Steam Database over piracy issues surrounding the game Yakuza: Like A Dragon, mistaking the website for a piracy site.
Olivia Harris

The lawyers at SEGA have wrongly targeted the team behind Steam Database over pirated copies of Yakuza: Like A Dragon. While some people have been pirating the new Yakuza game online, Steam Database is definitely not responsible for these pirated copies; unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to have stopped SEGA from threatening the website with legal action.

Yakuza: Like A Dragon is the latest installment in the Yakuza series from SEGA. The game was released worldwide in November 2020 and released on the PlayStation 5 in early 2021. This Yakuza focuses on a different main character than previous installments, following the life of Kazuma Kiryu, who is trying to live a normal life after leaving the Tojo Clan. The game features all the wacky novelty fun and street brawling the series is known for, though in a first for the series it's shifted to a turn-based combat system more familiar to fans of Persona 5 and similar titles.

One of the creators and developers of Steam Database, Pavel Djundik (via Kotaku), has posted on Twitter about lawyers from SEGA who are trying to take down the website's page for Yakuza: Like A Dragon after claiming that the statistics site has been distributing the game. Djundik had to take the page down himself after a claim was sent to the web host company managing Steam Database. Currently the page sports a message explaining SEGA's accusation and blatantly refuting it.

It goes without saying that Steam Database is not a website to pirate games on. It is a site that tracks public information from multiple sources, including Steam, to display in an easy to use format. Information such as game pricing, sales and player counts can be found on Steam Database. Even though the site has always been devoted solely to viewing this kind of information, it seems that the creators receive a DMCA at least once per year. The team works hard to resolve any issues that pop up, but SEGA seems disinclined to respond to any of Steam Database's messages on the matter.

While it’s understandable that SEGA would want to bring the hammer of justice down on sites that help people pirate the games it works so hard to make, clearly, a mistake has been made in this case. Hopefully, SEGA and its lawyers quickly realize that Steam Database is innocent; it is simply a great tool for people to view interesting information online for free, and not for pirating games.
https://screenrant.com/sega-steam-da...dragon-piracy/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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