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Old 16-03-22, 06:51 AM   #1
JackSpratts
 
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - March 19th, 22

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March 19th, 2022

















Japan’s Favorite Anti-Piracy Mascots Become Fashion Models
SoraNews24

Warning people to not take recordings of feature films in theaters in a charming and memorable way is no small feat. Past attempts have made their mark on society but didn’t seem to get their point across.

But then along came the combo of Camera Man and Patrol Lamp Man. Their comical cat-and-mouse capers struck just the right balance of whimsy and warning and won the hearts of Japanese moviegoers.

It was such a success that the NO MORE Eiga Dorobo (NO MORE Movie Theft) duo spawned a merchandising empire of their own and became a permanent fixture in the landscape of Japanese pop culture.

Now, they have been recruited by the fashion brand The Shop TK to act as models for their GO MORE Setup line of spring clothing. It makes sense, since their cop-and-robber-themed antics are the perfect way to highlight the urban casual look of this collection.

The GO MORE Setup line is split into five parts. First the Classic Style is made up of the Codura Nylon Set Up and TR Jersey Set Up, both of which combine excellent durability and elasticity with a formal style perfect for any movie premier and subsequent chase when Camera Man tries to pirate it.

The next set is the Relax Style which is the combination of the Amundsen Danball Set Up and again with a TR Jersey Set Up, showing its flexibility with a simple change in color scheme.

Urban Style combines elements of the Classic and Relax styles for a firm presence on the city streets. This is contrasted with the Pop Style, which adds jaunty colors and formal touches in equal measure.

And finally, after a hard day of pirating films or stopping people from pirating films, it’s important to kick back and enjoy the finer things in life. And what better way to do that than with the Play Style that includes a slick baseball cap, which admittedly works better on those who don’t have a police siren for a head.

The best part is that in this case everyone is permitted to copy the looks of these famous mascots for public viewing, just head on over to The Shop TK’s online store and chose the GO MORE Setup look that best suits you or that special camera-headed person in your life.
https://japantoday.com/category/feat...fashion-models





War Censorship Exposes Putin’s Leaky Internet Controls
Frank Bajak and Barbara Ortutay

Long before waging war on Ukraine, President Vladimir Putin was working to make Russia’s internet a powerful tool of surveillance and social control akin to China’s so-called Great Firewall.

So when Western tech companies began cutting ties with Russia following its invasion, Russian investigative journalist Andrei Soldatov was alarmed. He’d spent years exposing Russian censorship and feared that well-intentioned efforts to aid Ukraine would instead help Putin isolate Russians from the free flow of information, aiding the Kremlin’s propaganda war.

“Look, guys the only space the Russians have to talk about Ukraine. and what is going on in Russia. is Facebook,” Soldatov, now exiled in London. wrote on Facebook in the war’s first week. “You cannot just, like, kill our access.”

Facebook didn’t, although the Kremlin soon picked up that baton, throttling both Facebook and Twitter so badly they are effectively unreachable on the Russian internet. Putin has also blocked access to both Western media and independent news sites in the country, and a new law criminalizes spreading information that contradicts the government’s line. On Friday, the Kremlin said it would also restrict access to Instagram. By early Monday, the network monitor NetBlocks reported the social network throttled across multiple Russian internet providers.

Yet the Kremlin’s latest censorship efforts have revealed serious shortcomings in the government’s bigger plans to straightjacket the internet. Any Russian with a modicum of tech smarts can circumvent government efforts to starve Russians of fact.

For instance, the government has so far had only limited success blocking the use of software known as virtual private networks, or VPNs, that allows users to evade content restrictions. The same goes for Putin’s attempts to restrict the use of other censorship-evading software.

That puts providers of internet bandwidth and associated services sympathetic to Ukraine’s plight in a tough spot. On one side, they face public pressure to punish the Russian state and economic reasons to limit services at a time when bills might well go unpaid. On the other, they’re wary of helping stifle a free flow of information that can counter Kremlin disinformation — for instance, the state’s claim that Russia’s military is heroically “liberating” Ukraine from fascists.

Amazon Web Services, a major provider of cloud computing services, continues to operate in Russia, although it says it’s not taking on any new customers. Both Cloudflare, which helps shield websites from denial-of-service attacks and malware, and Akamai, which boosts site performance by putting internet content closer to its audience, also continue to serve their Russian customers, with exceptions including cutting off state-owned companies and firms under sanctions.

Microsoft, by contrast, hasn’t said whether it will halt its cloud services in the country, although it has suspended all new sales of products and services.

U.S.-based Cogent, which provides a major “backbone” for internet traffic, has cut direct connections inside Russia but left open the pipes through subsidiaries of Russian network providers at exchanges physically outside the country. Another major U.S. backbone provider, Lumen, has done the same.

“We have no desire to cut off Russian individuals and think that an open internet is critical to the world,” Cogent CEO Dave Schaeffer said in an interview. Direct connections to servers inside Russia, he said, could potentially “be used for offensive cyber efforts by the Russian government.”

Schaeffer said the decision didn’t reflect “financial considerations,” although he acknowledged that the ruble’s sharp drop, which makes imported goods and services more expensive in Russia, could make it difficult to collect customer payments. Meanwhile, he said, Cogent is providing Ukrainian customers free service during the conflict.

Schaeffer said these moves might impair internet video in Russia but will leave plenty of bandwidth for smaller files.

Other major backbone providers in Europe and Asia also continue to serve Russia, a net importer of bandwidth, said Doug Madory, director of internet analysis for the network management firm Kentik. He has noted no appreciable drop in connectivity from outside providers.

Cloudflare continues to operate four data centers in Russia even though Russian authorities ordered government websites to drop foreign-owned hosting providers as of Friday. In a March 7 blog post the company said it had determined “Russia needs more Internet access, not less.”

Under a 2019 “sovereign internet” law, Russia is supposed to be able to operate its internet independent of the rest of the world. In practice, that has brought Russia closer to the kind of intensive internet monitoring and control practiced by China and Iran.

Its telecommunications oversight agency, Rozkomnadzor, successfully tested the system at scale a year ago when it throttled access to Twitter. It uses hundreds of so-called middleboxes — router-like devices run and remotely controlled by bureaucrats that can block individual websites and services — installed by law at all internet providers inside Russia.

But the system, which also lets the FSB security service spy on Russian citizens, is a relative sieve compared to China’s Great Firewall. Andrew Sullivan, president of the nonprofit Internet Society, said there’s no evidence it has the ability to successfully disconnect Russia from the wider internet.

“Walling off a country’s internet is complicated, culturally, economically and technologically. And it becomes far more complicated with a country like Russia, whose internet, unlike China’s, was not originally built out with government control in mind,” he said.

“When it comes to censorship, the only ones who can really do it are the Chinese,” said Serge Droz, a senior security engineer at Swiss-based Proton Technologies, which offers software for creating VPNs, a principal tool for circumventing state censorship.

ProtonVPN, which Droz says has been inventive in finding ways to circumvent Russian blocking, reports clocking ten times as many daily signups than before the war. VPN services tracked by researchers at Top10VPN.com found Facebook and Twitter downloads surging eight times higher than average. Its research found the Kremlin to have blocked more than 270 news and financial sites since the invasion, including BBC News and Voice of America’s Russian-language services.

Russia’s elites are believed to be big VPN users. No one expects them to disconnect.

Russian authorities are also having some success blocking the privacy-protecting Tor browser, which like VPNs lets users visit content at special ”.onion” sites on the so-called dark web, researchers say. Twitter just created a Tor site; other outlets such as The New York Times also have them.

The Kremlin has not, however, blocked the popular Telegram messaging app. It’s an important conduit for Ukrainian government ministries and also for Meduza, the Latvia-based independent Russian-language news organization whose website is blocked in Russia. Meduza has 1 million followers on Telegram.

One reason may be that Telegram is also a vital conduit for Kremlin propagandists, analysts say.

Additionally, Telegram does not feature default end-to-end encryption, which renders messages unreadable by the company and outsiders, as the popular U.S.-based messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp do. WhatsApp is owned by Facebook’s parent, Meta. Telegram does offer users fully encrypted “private chats,” although users have to make sure to activate them.

After the invasion, Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike tweeted a reminder that sensitive communication on insecure apps can literally be a matter of life and death in war. A Signal spokesman would not share user numbers, but WhatsApp has an estimated 63 million users in Russia.

Being able to access outside websites and apps vital to staying informed depend, however, on foreign-based VPN services that Russians say they are having trouble paying for since Visa and Mastercard cut off their country.
___

Ortutay reported from Oakland, California.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-uk...ef83b3d2d18713





Battling Buffering: New York Makes a Broadband Push
Michael Hill

Frank Paxhia’s rural home in western New York is close to the high-speed information highway. But he has no access ramp.

The retiree, who lives in the town of Friendship, is among hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who remain on the wrong end of the digital divide. Many, like Paxhia, live in rural pockets beyond the reach of wireline connections. Even more live in homes that lack a reliable high-speed connection for other reasons, such as cost.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s administration is pushing to bring service to those remaining high-speed have-nots with a $1.4 billion “ConnectALL” program that relies heavily on recently approved federal funds. As working and learning from home become more common, the governor argues that affordable broadband has become a necessity.

“If you don’t have it, you are suffocating and you’re being held back,” she said this week at an event in Rochester. “Your kids can’t apply for tuition assistance online. A small business can’t sell to the ... e-commerce markets because they don’t have that access. And we still have too many underserved areas.”

At his family home about 60 miles (97 kilometers) southeast of Buffalo, Paxhia uses a cell phone with 4G service as a hot spot at home because wireline service stops less than a mile from his address. He says the connection is too slow to stream TV shows and he needs to leave home for some downloads.

“Whenever there’s a big project, I visit one of my family members who has ... basically true broadband,” he said. “So anytime you need to update the computers, the iPad, the phones, all of those large data transfers are done on a broadband connection.”

More than 1 million New York households lacked access or a subscription to home broadband as of 2019, according to an analysis of Census estimates by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. That number could have dropped since then because of pandemic-related connectivity programs.

Precise, up-to-date figures on broadband are hard to come by, in part due to the lack of detailed, address-level coverage maps. There are even different definitions of high-speed internet, some using 25 Megabits per second download speeds. Many analysts and public officials say a 100 Mbps threshold is more realistic considering the needs of contemporary households.

New York’s broadband push is being helped by a federal infrastructure law approved in November, which includes roughly $65 billion for high-speed internet infrastructure funding nationwide. The measure tackles the cost issue for internet service with a $30-a-month subscription subsidy for lower-income households, which replaces a temporary subsidy approved during the pandemic.

New York never got to enforce a new law last year requiring providers to offer high-speed internet to low-income households at a cost of $15 per month amid an industry court challenge. The state has appealed.

In New York City, the Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York found a large share of households without any internet had annual incomes of less than $20,000, according to an analysis of Census figures. Those figures also show many city residents relying on cell phones for internet.

Ruth Horry used to go with her three daughters to a McDonald’s or a Wendy’s to grab Wi-Fi when they lived in a shelter in Brooklyn just before the pandemic. They could connect at the shelter on their phones, but that fell short for doing homework or even presenting lessons for her toddler-age daughter.

“Everyone can’t use the phone at once. So to have one child in high school, one in middle school and one in early learning, it’s a nightmare,” she said.

Horry’s family found housing in neighboring New Jersey with a good internet connection. She works as an advocate and tries to help people who face extra barriers applying for aid because they lack a proper device.

The number of people living beyond the reach of wirelines is smaller, with many of them scattered in rural areas.

In rural Greene County in the Catskill Mountains, detailed mapping has found about 4% of addresses are unserved by broadband, many of them scattered around 200 miles (323 kilometers) of roads in remote mountain towns.

“These are the ... hardest roads to serve, the most expensive roads to serve,” said Warren Hart, deputy county administrator.

The state’s Broadband Program Office estimates that wireline broadband capable of download speeds of at least 100 Mbps is unavailable to around 2% of households in the state.

While some analysts say the availability rate could be slightly lower, New York is expected to release address-level maps this spring that will give a fine-grained look at coverage.

The maps should help guide New York in administering up to $800 million from the federal infrastructure law for rural broadband. The ConnectALL program, which includes money from other state and federal sources, will include three grant programs to provide funding to local municipalities for accessible broadband infrastructure.

The latest effort comes after the state helped spread wireline service to more than 174,000 homes, businesses and government buildings under a $500 million program announced in 2015 by then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo. That program relied on satellite internet service in places where the cost of running wireline was too high or where no other bids were received.

Critics have said satellite users can experience speed and reliability issues, though the next round of broadband expansion is expected to include those areas now served by satellites.

“This will be the largest broadband investment in New York’s history and we expect it will extend coverage to the most rural and remote areas of the state,” Empire State Development spokeswoman Kristin Devoe said in an email.
https://apnews.com/article/kathy-hoc...65eb63105d0bf7





The iTunes Single has Never Been So Unpopular

Consumers' preferences, priorities, and values are reshaping industries.
Scott Nover

In the 20th century, people largely bought albums, a dozen or so songs hand-selected by artists and packaged by their labels. Even so-called singles came with bonus tracks and remixes. Artist releases were essentially bundle deals.

The $.99 iTunes single represented the music industry’s unbundling.

Introduced in 2003 along with the iTunes store, the digital single broke commercial music down to its smallest commercial unit. Most iTunes singles cost just $.99. Most albums sold for $9.99. It was the perfect financial arrangement for Apple’s iPod, but the music industry as a whole suffered. The industry shrank from its peak of $24 billion in revenue in 1999, adjusted for inflation, to a nadir of $7.7 billion in 2014. (the 2000s saw the rise of popular pirating, torrenting, and peer-to-peer music sharing sites, along with iTunes.)

But digital downloads peaked in 2012, making nearly $3 billion—41% of revenue from US music sales, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). But the digital download is now a relic according to new data from the RIAA. Digital albums and singles combined brought in just $500 million last year—only 4% of revenue from US music sales.

Digital downloads are out, streaming and vinyl are in

The US music industry has managed to revive its fortunes. Although revenue (inflation-adjusted )peaked in 1999, the industry brought in $15 billion last year, up 23% from 2020 and its best year in more than a decade. It can thank the streaming services. Spotify and Apple Music account for about 60% of the industry’s revenue. (Even Apple, the face of the digital download, pivoted to a streaming-first strategy around 2015.)

Paid subscriptions to these music streaming services represented $8.6 billion. Another $1.8 billion came from ad-supported streaming including licensed music for social media apps like TikTok. The entire category, which also includes digital radio, brought in $12.4 billion in 2021 representing 84% of the market.

Almost every music format had a banner year in 2021. Streaming revenue grew 24% year over year, slightly outpacing the industry as a whole. Physical media outdid that: CD sales grew 21% to $584 million and vinyl sales jumped a whopping 61% to $1 billion. Last year was the first that vinyl outsold CDs since the firm, formerly Nielsen SoundScan, started tracking music sales in 1991, MRC Data reported in January.

But digital downloads, the dominant music format as recently as 2015, appear to be in terminal decline. It was the only major category to fall year over year, down 12% to $587 million in 2021.

We’re entering an era of rebundling of music. The audience no longer pays for individual songs or albums, but purchases subscriptions to nearly infinite catalogs of music, while ownership has reverted back to the physical formats, the big clunky plastic discs of the previous century.

Digital downloads, it turns out, were a one-hit-wonder.
https://qz.com/2141732/the-99-itunes...-so-unpopular/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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