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Old 27-08-14, 07:23 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - August 30th, '14

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"People don’t understand how easy it is to spy on them." – Philippe Langlois






































August 30th, 2014




10 Million Installs Later, BitTorrent Sync Gets New Interface, Sharing Via Links, and Proxy Server Support
Emil Protalinski

BitTorrent today released BitTorrent Sync version 1.4, adding a slew of new features to its file synchronization tool. You can download the new version now for Windows, OS X, and Linux from bittorrent.com/sync while the Android, iOS, and Windows Phone apps will roll out later during the day on their respective stores.

The company today also announced that BitTorrent Sync has now passed 10 million installations since the open alpha launch in April 2013. In total, usefrs have now transferred over 80 petabytes of data, which is exactly 10 times the 8 petabytes they had synced when the public beta arrived in July 2013. BitTorrent has also now distributed over 4,300 keys to developers interested in building on top of Sync, the API for which debuted in November 2013.

Version 1.4 is designed to fundamentally change the way users interact with the app by simplifying the sharing process. In that vein, Sync for Windows and OS X have a redesigned user interface to make it easier for sharing via a new workflow and customizable folder list for folders.

You can now right-click on a folder, select “Share with BitTorrent Sync” and then choose either Email (a preformatted message will show up and you’ll need to input the email addresses), Copy (the link will be put in your clipboard), or QR code (for mobile scanning).

That’s for the sender. On the receiving end, a browser page opens to convert the link from the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) to the BitTorrent and hands it off to Sync. Your browser should prompt you to ensure you want to launch Sync, but BitTorrent assures us that nothing about the content being shared, aside from the folder name and size, is transmitted. The actual data is transferred entirely through Sync.

The sender can set a given link to expire after a number of days or after a certain number of times it is used, and can also require confirmation to ensure that only the receiver can sync the data in question (this is on by default but can be turned off for less important transfers). If the receiver doesn’t have Sync version 1.4, the webpage will prompt them to install it.

This is all possible because BitTorrent has introduced links for directly sharing content between users, none of whom need to register an account. This sharing method sits on top of the Secrets system, which is still available but has been renamed to Keys as users found the previous name confusing, according to Erik Pounds, BitTorrent Sync’s VP of Product Management.

Last but not least, Sync has gained support for configuring the use of a proxy server, a feature useful for businesses that want to use the tool internally. The official changelog also promises the usual “product enhancements and optimizations” to improve both performance and stability.

Despite all these additions and improvements, however, Sync is still in beta. Pounds told TNW the company hopes to have a stable release (presumably version 2.0) available at the latest by Q1 2015.
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/0...erver-support/





Tru Optik Report Shows Media Enterprises Leave Billions on the Table

More than $500 billion of digital media will be forfeited in 2014 as peer-to-peer networks continue to grow in popularity.
Press release

Tru Optik, a big data start-up that empowers enterprises with the leading indicators and insight needed to better identify and monetize audience and consumer demand, today announced the release of their Digital Media Unmonetized Demand and Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Report. The report outlines by category, company and geography more than $275 billion of digital content pirated through peer-to-peer networks during the first six months of 2014.

To better describe the missed opportunity for content owners, distributors and marketers that results from audience engagement on peer-to-peer networks, the report introduces the concept of Unmonetized DemandTM. Unmonetized DemandTM is the consumer demand and consumption for which revenue is not currently captured.

The United States had the most peer-to-peer users and the most files downloaded over the first half of 2014. However, Brazil was the country with the highest level of Unmonetized DemandTM.

“This report quantitatively captures an enormous hole and opportunity for media, entertainment and advertising enterprises,” said Andre Swanston, CEO of Tru Optik. “The data we are able to analyze and segment shows the most heavily shared and pirated digital media assets and assigns a specific price to each download based on the value that consumption would have achieved through traditional download, purchase or streaming methods.”

Other key findings from the report included:

• During the first six months of 2014, more than 500 million unique IPs shared files globally, accounting for more than 17 billion downloads and $275 billion dollars of unmonetized demand.
• Brazil ($30.4 billion Unmonetized Demand) and the United States ($22.7 billion Unmonetized Demand) were the only two countries in the world to be in the top five for unique IPs downloading content across all media categories.
• There was more Unmonetized Demand for software in the first half of 2014 than every other media category combined.
• 29.2 million new peer-to-peer users downloaded television and movies in the second quarter compared to the 1.69 million new Netflix subscribers over the same time span.

Broken down by category, the titles with most Unmonetized Demand during the first quarter 2014 were:

• Television: Breaking Bad (Full Series Bundle) ($3.69B)
• Music: Red Hot Chili Peppers (Full Discography) ($335M)
• Movies: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire ($1.79B)
• Games: Assassin Creed IV Black Flag ($2.52B)
• Software: Autocad 2014 ($56.8B)

The report included data reflecting both non-infringing and infringing file sharing of television, music, movies, video games and software via the open source BitTorrent protocol from Jan. 1, 2014 to June 30, 2014.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/Unmone...eb12108833.htm





Red Hook’s Cutting-Edge Wireless Network
Noam Cohen

Robert Smith, a 19-year-old in a gray T-shirt and camouflage pants, climbed the stairwell of the Joseph Miccio Community Center in Red Hook, scaled a ladder at the top floor and jumped onto the roof. He soon found what he was looking for: bright, white plastic boxes, each about the size of a brick, some with little antennas sticking out. Mr. Smith pulled a laptop from his backpack and got to work, tending to the nodes of the Red Hook mesh, an ambitious plan to link up a local wireless digital network across the neighborhood.

With the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway just ahead and the Lower Manhattan skyline in the distance, Mr. Smith worked on keeping the digital conversation going. He was examining two devices on the roof while wirelessly conversing with a minicomputer a few hundred feet away on the roof of a school that had a high-speed Internet connection.

Though these white boxes, spread across various rooftops in Red Hook, may appear haphazard, or guerrilla even, the Red Hook mesh is actually in the vanguard of wireless networking. Unlike the Internet available at work or at home, which typically arrives through a wire and follows a carefully plotted path from Internet provider to user, a mesh network is improvised — and remarkably resilient.

Because the devices speak to one another, they are more than a series of “hot spots” with Internet access; the mesh remains a network whether or not it is connected to the Internet. And that independence is its main attraction — in Berlin, where a tech collective shares Internet access to save money; in rural Spain, where one of the largest mesh networks covers areas ignored by telecoms; in Tunisia, where the State Department has spent millions establishing a mesh network to experiment with a local network impervious to government censorship.

Red Hook, which juts out of Brooklyn into New York Bay and is cut off from the rest of the borough by the B.Q.E., has similar reasons for hosting a mesh. The 11,000 or so residents can feel at the whim of nature, as well as government and corporate bureaucracies. There is no subway service; there are few Internet hot spots; close to 70 percent of the population lives in New York City housing projects.

When Hurricane Sandy struck in 2012, Red Hook was especially exposed. Cellphone service was down and Internet service was spotty. The lights were out. Water rushed through the streets.

After the storm, the divisions between the homeowners and the housing project residents were irrelevant, said Anthony Schloss, who helped create the mesh network through his work at Red Hook Initiative, a nonprofit group. The initiative trains young residents like Mr. Smith to become “digital stewards.” Each steward works 20 hours a week (and is paid $8.75 an hour) as part of a yearlong program that teaches skills including mesh networking, video production and web design, culminating in an internship. One steward now works at Sky-Packets, a mesh networking company on Long Island; another is with Pioneer Works, a Red Hook arts center.

Though the mesh was in the works before Hurricane Sandy struck, it gained added relevance after the storm. The Federal Emergency Management Agency boosted the Red Hook Initiative’s broadband connection, so where the regular Internet was unavailable, residents and government workers could log on to the mesh to quickly find out where to pick up supplies or find government officials.

Although the Red Hook mesh promises a free web connection, its potential for intensely local communication also appeals to Mr. Schloss and Mr. Smith. “That’s our hope, that the network is used as a source of communication throughout the neighborhood,” Mr. Smith said, adding, “We want to have both, that second layer, so if the Internet goes down we can still connect with each other through the mesh.”

Joshua Breitbart, a senior fellow at New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, which created the software that helps the Red Hook mesh operate, said digital culture was too focused on the global, as opposed to the local. “The general narrative of Silicon Valley is, build an app and change the world,” Mr. Breitbart said. “There should be room to say, ‘Build an app and change my neighborhood.’ ”

Mr. Smith, who grew up and lives in the Red Hook Houses, is a very different kind of network administrator. Last year, he was one of 10 or so digital stewards. While other stewards left for jobs with a tech bent, Mr. Smith, a soft-spoken young man seemingly happy with his head bent over a laptop reading technical protocols, stayed to train the next class. He is now in charge of maintaining the mesh.

Mr. Smith has a complicated set of responsibilities, requiring technical, installation and political skills — after all, these nodes are on somebody’s roof. Add in that the Red Hook mesh is using very cheap equipment, and it is the rare day when the entire network is humming in sync. When Mr. Smith was on the roof of the Miccio center, some nodes were working, some were not. Which is the way it usually goes.

“We need to get one area where the Internet is great,” he said, “and have people talking about it — like FiOS.”

A crucial point in the Red Hook mesh is Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Roman Catholic Church — particularly its bell tower, which looms over the neighborhood and Coffey Park below it. The church, which is more than 150 years old and began by serving Irish and Italian dockworkers, has three mesh nodes, two high up, and one inside for internal use.

That internal node has helped the church play videos during its religious education classes and host a radio station that broadcasts its Sunday Mass, said Robert Berrios, the sacristan of the church, who has lived in Red Hook for 45 years.

But the outward-facing nodes have also drawn a crowd, he said. “I see people outside to get free Wi-Fi,” he said. “Either with an iPad, a tablet or a phone — people sitting in their cars writing emails.”

This summer, the Red Hook mesh has been fighting to remain relevant, hurt by spotty service and lack of awareness. The Red Hook Initiative is completing an upgrade of the equipment and software, and is working on raising awareness in the community.

To that end, the group is a finalist for an Economic Development Corporation grant for nearly $1 million. The group hopes to uses the money to buy more sophisticated nodes to support the network.

The local content at the mesh appears on a splash page after you log in. Among the early experiments was a stop-and-frisk app, which would allow Red Hook residents to easily report their experiences with the police. But three weeks after the app was introduced, Mr. Schloss said, the Police Department discontinued the policy.

The protests in Ferguson, Mo., have engaged the digital stewards, said Jaebi Bussey, 34, a trainer at the initiative.

Staying with the idea of monitoring law enforcement, the group has plans to meet with the creators of an online project, Copwatch, to see how their skills — in using social media, in creating and uploading videos — could be used to track police conduct in the neighborhood. With more reliable Wi-Fi service, introducing new local apps should become easier. But Mr. Schloss counts the benefits already in place. Digital expertise coming from the stewards, all residents of the Red Hook Houses, sends an important message.

“If this works,” he said, “you have this virtual platform, this virtual community that everyone can be interacting with, devoid of all the cultural assumptions. And if you flip it, and the people who build it and are maintaining it are young people from public housing, that totally changes the way people think about each other and what technology can be.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/ny...s-network.html





The Relative Cost of Bandwidth Around the World
Matthew Prince.

Over the last few months, there’s been increased attention on networks and how they interconnect. CloudFlare runs a large network that interconnects with many others around the world. From our vantage point, we have incredible visibility into global network operations. Given our unique situation, we thought it might be useful to explain how networks operate, and the relative costs of Internet connectivity in different parts of the world.

A Connected Network

The Internet is a vast network made up of a collection of smaller networks. The networks that make up the Internet are connected in two main ways. Networks can connect with each other directly, in which case they are said to be “peered”, or they can connect via an intermediary network known as a “transit provider”.

At the core of the Internet are a handful of very large transit providers that all peer with one another. This group of approximately twelve companies are known as Tier 1 network providers. Whether directly or indirectly, every ISP (Internet Service Provider) around the world connects with one of these Tier 1 providers. And, since the Tier 1 providers are all interconnected themselves, from any point on the network you should be able to reach any other point. That's what makes the Internet the Internet: it’s a huge group of networks that are all interconnected.

Paying to Connect

To be a part of the Internet, CloudFlare buys bandwidth, known as transit, from a number of different providers. The rate we pay for this bandwidth varies from region to region around the world. In some cases we buy from a Tier 1 provider. In other cases, we buy from regional transit providers that either peer with the networks we need to reach directly (bypassing any Tier 1), or interconnect themselves with other transit providers.

CloudFlare buys transit wholesale and on the basis of the capacity we use in any given month. Unlike some cloud services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or traditional CDNs that bill for individual bits delivered across a network (called "stock"), we pay for a maximum utilization for a period of time (called "flow"). Typically, we pay based on the maximum number of megabits per second we use during a month on any given provider.

Traffic levels across CloudFlare's global network over the last 3 months. Each color represents one of our 28 data centers.

Most transit agreements bill the 95th percentile of utilization in any given month. That means you throw out approximately 36 not-necessarily-contiguous hours worth of peak utilization when calculating usage for the month. Legend has it that in its early days, Google used to take advantage of these contracts by using very little bandwidth for most of the month and then ship its indexes between data centers, a very high bandwidth operation, during one 24-hour period. A clever, if undoubtedly short-lived, strategy to avoid high bandwidth bills.

Another subtlety is that when you buy transit wholesale you typically only pay for traffic coming in ("ingress") or traffic going out ("egress") of your network, not both. Generally you pay which ever one is greater.

CloudFlare is a caching proxy so egress (out) typically exceeds ingress (in), usually by around 4-5x. Our bandwidth bill is therefore calculated on egress so we don't pay for ingress. This is part of the reason we don't charge extra when a site on our network comes under a DDoS attack. An attack increases our ingress but, unless the attack is very large, our ingress traffic will still not exceed egress, and therefore doesn’t increase our bandwidth bill.

Peering

While we pay for transit, peering directly with other providers is typically free — with some notable exceptions recently highlighted by Netflix. In CloudFlare's case, unlike Netflix, at this time, all our peering is currently "settlement free," meaning we don't pay for it. Therefore, the more we peer the less we pay for bandwidth. Peering also typically increases performance by cutting out intermediaries that may add latency. In general, peering is a good thing.

The chart above shows how CloudFlare has increased the number of networks we peer with over the last three months (both over IPv4 and IPv6). Currently, we peer around 45% of our total traffic globally (depending on the time of day), across nearly 3,000 different peering sessions. The chart below shows the split between peering and transit and how it's improved over the last three months as we’ve added more peers.

North America

We don't disclose exactly what we pay for transit, but I can give you a relative sense of regional differences. To start, let's assume as a benchmark in North America you'd pay a blended average across all the transit providers of $10/Mbps (megabit per second per month). In reality, we pay less than that, but it can serve as a benchmark, and keep the numbers round as we compare regions. If you assume that benchmark, for every 1,000Mbps (1Gbps) you'd pay $10,000/month (again, acknowledge that’s higher than reality, it’s just an illustrative benchmark and keeps the numbers round, bear with me).

While that benchmark establishes the transit price, the effective price for bandwidth in the region is the blended price of transit ($10/Mbps) and peering ($0/Mbps). Every byte delivered over peering is a would-be transit byte that doesn't need to be paid for. While North America has some of the lowest transit pricing in the world, it also has below average rates of peering. The chart below shows the split between peering and transit in the region. While it's gotten better over the last three months, North America still lags behind every other region in the world in terms of peering.

While we peer nearly 40% of traffic globally, we only peer around 20-25% in North America. Assuming the price of transit is the benchmark $10/Mbps in North America without peering, with peering it is effectively $8/Mbps. Based only on bandwidth costs, that makes it the second least expensive region in the world to provide an Internet service like CloudFlare. So what's the least expensive?

Europe

Europe's transit pricing roughly mirrors North America's so, again, assume a benchmark of $10/Mbps. While transit is priced similarly to North America, in Europe there is a significantly higher rate of peering. CloudFlare peers 50-55% of traffic in the region, making the effective bandwidth price $5/Mbps. Because of the high rate of peering and the low transit costs, Europe is the least expensive region in the world for bandwidth.

The higher rate of peering is due in part to the organization of the region's “peering exchanges”. A peering exchange is a service where networks can pay a fee to join, and then easily exchange traffic between each other without having to run individual cables between each others' routers. Networks connect to a peering exchange, run a single cable, and then can connect to many other networks. Since using a port on a router has a cost (routers cost money, have a finite number of ports, and a port used for one network cannot be used for another), and since data centers typically charge a monthly fee for running a cable between two different customers (known as a "cross connect"), connecting to one service, using one port and one cable, and then being able to connect to many networks can be very cost effective.

The value of an exchange depends on the number of networks that are a part of it. The Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), Frankfurt Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), and the London Internet Exchange (LINX) are three of the largest exchanges in the world. (Note: these links point to PeeringDB.com which provides information on peering between networks. You'll need to use the username/password guest/guest in order to login.)

In Europe, and most other regions outside North America, these and other exchanges are generally run as non-profit collectives set up to benefit their member networks. In North America, while there are Internet exchanges, they are typically run by for-profit companies. The largest of these for-profit exchanges in North America are run by Equinix, a data center company, which uses exchanges in its facilities to increase the value of locating equipment there. Since they are run with a profit motive, pricing to join North American exchanges is typically higher than exchanges in the rest of the world.

CloudFlare is a member of many of Equinix's exchanges, but, overall, fewer networks connect with Equinix compared with Europe's exchanges (compare, for instance, Equinix Ashburn, which is their most popular exchange with about 400 networks connected, versus 1,200 networks connected to AMS-IX). In North America the combination of relatively cheap transit, and relatively expensive exchanges lowers the value of joining an exchange. With less networks joining exchanges, there are fewer opportunities for networks to easily peer. The corollary is that in Europe transit is also cheap but peering is very easy, making the effective price of bandwidth in the region the lowest in the world.

Asia

Asia’s peering rates are similar to Europe. Like in Europe, CloudFlare peers 50-55% of traffic in Asia. However, transit pricing is significantly more expensive. Compared with the benchmark of $10/Mbps in North America and Europe, Asia's transit pricing is approximately 7x as expensive ($70/Mbps, based on the benchmark). When peering is taken into account, however, the effective price of bandwidth in the region is $32/Mbps.

There are three primary reasons transit is so much more expensive in Asia. First, there is less competition, and a greater number of large monopoly providers. Second, the market for Internet services is less mature. And finally, if you look at a map of Asia you’ll see a lot of one thing: water. Running undersea cabling is more expensive than running fiber optic cable across land so transit pricing offsets the cost of the infrastructure to move bytes.

Latin America

Latin America is CloudFlare's newest region. When we opened our first data center in Valparaíso, Chile, we delivered 100 percent of our traffic over transit, which you can see from the graph above. To peer traffic in Latin America you need to either be in a "carrier neutral" data center — which means multiple network operators come together in a single building where they can directly plug into each other's routers — or you need to be able to reach an Internet exchange. Both are in short supply in much of Latin America.

The country with the most robust peering ecosystem is Brazil, which also happens to be the largest country and largest source of traffic in the region. You can see that as we brought our Săo Paulo, Brazil data center online about two months ago we increased our peering in the region significantly. We've also worked out special arrangements with ISPs in Latin America to set up facilities directly in their data centers and peer with their networks, which is what we did in Medellín, Colombia.

While today our peering ratio in Latin America is the best of anywhere in the world at approximately 60 percent, the region's transit pricing is 8x ($80/Mbps) the benchmark of North America and Europe. That means the effective bandwidth pricing in the region is $32/Mbps, or approximately the same as Asia.

Australia

Australia is the most expensive region in which we operate, but for an interesting reason. We peer with virtually every ISP in the region except one: Telstra. Telstra, which controls approximately 50% of the market, and was traditionally the monopoly telecom provider, charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world — 20x the benchmark ($200/Mbps). Given that we are able to peer approximately half of our traffic, the effective bandwidth benchmark price is $100/Mbps.

To give you some sense of how out-of-whack Australia is, at CloudFlare we pay about as much every month for bandwidth to serve all of Europe as we do to for Australia. That’s in spite of the fact that approximately 33x the number of people live in Europe (750 million) versus Australia (22 million).

If Australians wonder why Internet and many other services are more expensive in their country than anywhere else in the world they need only look to Telstra. What's interesting is that Telstra maintains their high pricing even if only delivering traffic inside the country. Given that Australia is one large land mass with relatively concentrated population centers, it's difficult to justify the pricing based on anything other than Telstra's market power. In regions like North America where there is increasing consolidation of networks, Australia's experience with Telstra provides a cautionary tale.

Conclusion

The chart above shows the relative cost of bandwidth assuming a benchmark transit cost of $10/Megabits per second (Mbps) per month (which we know is higher than actual pricing, it’s just a benchmark) in North America and Europe.

While we keep our pricing at CloudFlare straight forward, charging a flat rate regardless of where traffic is delivered around the world, actual bandwidth prices vary dramatically between regions. We’ll continue to work to decrease our transit pricing, and increasing our peering in order to offer the best possible service at the lowest possible price. In the meantime, if you’re an ISP who wants to offer better connectivity to the increasing portion of the Internet behind CloudFlare’s network, we have an open policy and are always happy to peer.
http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relat...ound-the-world





Net Neutrality Is 'Marxist,' According to This Koch-Backed Astroturf Group
Jason Koebler

A mysterious conservative group with strong ties to the Koch brothers has been bombarding inboxes with emails filled with disinformation and fearmongering in an attempt to start a "grassroots" campaign to kill net neutrality—at one point suggesting that "Marxists" think that preserving net neutrality is a good idea.

The emails, which come with subject lines like "Stop Obama's federal Internet takeover," come from American Commitment, an organization that is nonprofit in name only and has been called out time and time again by journalists and transparency organizations for obscuring where it gets its funding.

In an email I received, American Commitment president Phil Kerpen suggests that reclassifying the internet as a public utility is the "first step in the fight to destroy American capitalism altogether" and says that the FCC is plotting a "federal Internet takeover," a move that "sounds more like a story coming out of China or Russia."

The email, sent as an ad to people who have registered to read the Washington Times, asks readers to sign a petition asking FCC chairman Tom Wheeler to acknowledge that reclassifying the internet as a Title II utility is a "lawless Obama administration power grab."

Kerpen suggests that reclassifying the internet as a public utility is the 'first step in the fight to destroy American capitalism altogether'

"Americans have been getting faster and faster Internet speeds because of competition in the free economy, not because of anything the government has done," the petition reads. "The people calling for government control over the Internet are a tiny minority of far-left political activists, and the FCC knows it."

The email suggests that more than 160,000 people have signed the petition, but official numbers don't seem available to the public anywhere.

In fact, not much of anything is available to the public: Kerpen's organization has time and time been called out for its shady dealings, with Open Secrets writing that the organization's "history and funding are especially murky."

One thing we do know: Kerpen used to work at Americans for Prosperity, which was founded by the Koch brothers. The Koch brothers' close ties with the organization have been noted for some time now. Perhaps unsurprisingly, American Commitment has also funded campaigns in support of Koch favorites, such as the Keystone XL pipeline, the coal industry, and against Obamacare.

The group also vehemently defends ALEC, a legislative group that has thoroughly destroyed telecom competition in the states that have passed its legislation.

Kerpen would not tell the Washington Post whether the brothers specifically donate to American Commitment. Beyond the above, it's difficult to say where this campaign is coming from, or if it is telecom-backed.

Open Secrets notes that American Commitment has deep pockets and has traditionally funded far right candidates. (An affiliated organization says it hopes to "take over the GOP by 2016" with even more hardline conservative candidates.) More than $11 million in donations to American Commitment is completely unaccounted for, according to an Open Secrets investigation.

Meanwhile, telecom- and Koch-backed groups have been writing op-eds and funding information campaigns fighting against net neutrality. This campaign appears no different, though it's a bit more extreme in its wording in an attempt to get the tinfoil hat crowd onboard with killing net neutrality.

Not much of the email, which you can find below, makes much of any sense. Check it out for yourself.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/net...stroturf-group





The Netflix Case Against Comcast, in One Chart
Peter Kafka

We’ve already heard Netflix executives explain why they signed an Internet deal with Comcast, even though they say they didn’t want to: They say they had to pay Comcast for access to its broadband pipes because their video streams were suffering.

But here’s a new version of the same argument: Netflix says it had to pay Comcast for access to its broadband pipes because Netflix was starting to lose customers.

That’s according to Ken Florance, Netflix’s vice president of content delivery, via a statement he filed with federal regulators this week.

Netflix is opposing Comcast’s attempt to buy Time Warner Cable*, and Florance’s comments are part of a long document Netflix brought to the Federal Communications Commission two days ago (thanks to Quartz for flagging).

Florance has already argued that Comcast forced Netflix to pay for a “transit” deal, by effectively degrading the quality of Netflix streams for Comcast’s broadband customers. (Comcast declined to comment for this post, but has previously argued against Netflix’s arguments).

Now, in his FCC statement, Florance says that Netflix’s Comcast customers noticed, and complained, and in some cases quit paying for Netflix.

“For many [Comcast] subscribers, the bitrate was so poor that Netflix’s streaming video service became unusable,” he writes, then notes that Comcast reps eventually told subscribers to take their beef to Netflix. “Those customers complained to Netflix and some of them canceled their Netflix subscription on the spot, citing the unacceptable quality of Netflix’s video streams and Netflix’s inability to do anything to change the situation.”

Florance doesn’t say how many customers his company lost. But he does include a chart that shows a huge spike in customer complaints last fall, at the same time Netflix said its streams were compromised. The subtext: Guess what happens if Comcast gets even more powerful?
http://recode.net/2014/08/27/the-net...-in-one-chart/





Comcast Tells Government that its Data Caps Aren’t Actually “Data Caps”

Customers must pay more if they exceed limits—but it’s not a cap, Comcast says.
Jon Brodkin

For the past couple of years, Comcast has been trying to convince journalists and the general public that it doesn’t impose any “data caps” on its Internet service.

That’s despite the fact that Comcast in some cities enforces limits on the amount of data customers can use and issues financial penalties for using more than the allotment. Comcast has said this type of billing will probably roll out to its entire national footprint within five years, perhaps alongside a pricier option to buy unlimited data.

“There isn't a cap anymore. We're out of the cap business,” Executive Vice President David Cohen said in May 2012 after dropping a policy that could cut off people's service after they use 250GB in a month. Comcast's then-new approach was touted to "effectively offer unlimited usage of our services because customers will have the ability to buy as much data as they want."
Enlarge

Setting limits on data and charging extra when customers exceed them is precisely the type of scheme that nearly everyone besides Comcast considers to be a “data cap.” It’s the phrase normal people use to describe wireless data plans with exactly the same type of structure.

Comcast has gone so far as to ask for a correction to an article that called the limits "data caps" instead of "data thresholds" or "flexible data consumption plans." Now it’s trying to convince the government that its data limits aren’t actually data caps.

“Comcast does not have ‘data caps’ today,” the company wrote this week in a filing with the New York Public Service Commission on its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable. “Comcast announced almost two years ago that it was suspending enforcement of its prior 250GB excessive usage cap and that it would instead be trialing different pricing and packaging options to evaluate options for subscribers—options that reflect evolving Internet usage and that are based on the desire to provide flexible consumption plans, including a plan that enables customers who want to use more data the option to pay more to do so as well as a plan for those who use less data the option to save some money… Some of these trials include a data usage plan that allows customers who use very little Internet each month to receive a discount on their service fee, and variations on a plan that provide customers with the ability to buy additional increments of usage if they exceed a base amount (starting at 300GB) that is included with their service.”

Comcast argued that the federal government is the appropriate entity to investigate data caps, and that, as a consequence, New York regulators shouldn’t bother examining them in their review of the Comcast/TWC merger—even though Comcast could impose data caps on TWC customers who don't face them today.

“[W]hether data caps are appropriate is a matter of federal regulatory concern, not one that relates to this proceeding or that is even transaction specific (since nothing precludes TWC from adopting caps at any time, as it has in the past),” Comcast wrote.

Data caps, defined by an FCC panel that includes a Comcast VP

So what does the FCC have to say on the matter? The FCC doesn't seem to offer its own definition, but the commission asked its Open Internet Advisory Committee to examine a variety of concerns related to Internet service, resulting in an August 2013 report titled, “Policy Issues in Data Caps and Usage-Based Pricing.”

The working group that wrote the report consisted of seven people—including Kevin McElearney, senior VP for network engineering at Comcast. Comcast’s friends at Netflix were represented as well, along with T-Mobile, the Writers Guild of America, the National Urban League, Union Square Ventures, and Northwestern University.

Here’s how Comcast VP McElearney and his colleagues defined data caps in their report (emphasis ours):

Data caps are often considered to be a form of UBP [usage-based pricing]. The term data cap is characterized by several phenomena. In general, if a user is within a cap, he or she pays a set price. That is, the cap defines a limit on amount of data per month per household expressed in gigabytes). Exceeding the cap could subject a household to alterations to its Internet access, possibly after one or more warnings, such as reduction of access speed, additional charges, suspension of service, or even termination of service.

The termination of service has received particular attention in public discussion, though to date, this appears to be a rare event, as noted below. A cap is rarely, if ever, a hard and fast ceiling on a customer's ability to access the network. A cap is usually better understood as a threshold after which the user is subject to a different set of conditions for access, such as movement to a higher priced tier, different product or different speeds. As discussed below, another way of thinking of this is as the boundary between different ‘tiers' of service.


While the working group said data caps can be hard caps in which customer access is cut off, that isn't the only approach that is considered a data cap. The group also defined "data caps" as the imposition of additional charges for excessive usage—exactly what Comcast does. Still, a footnote in the report accepts Comcast's definition, stating that "At the time of writing Comcast does not have any caps in place but is trialing two UBP plans."

Note that Comcast’s extra charges are not voluntary. “Once you have incurred charges for exceeding your data usage plan amount, you will automatically be charged $10 each time we provide you with up to an additional 50GB of data,” a Comcast FAQ says.

Even in areas where Comcast's data cap trials haven't begun, the company isn’t entirely abandoning its old policy of having uncomfortable conversations with customers who use too much data.

“Does this mean you're going to stop cutting people off who exceed your allowance?” a Comcast FAQ asks. Answering the question, Comcast said, “For non-trial markets, we will continue to contact the very small number of excessive users about their usage, which can be indicative of security or related issues."

It’s about money, not congestion

The federal government is investigating data caps in both cellular service and fixed broadband, and the preliminary findings probably won't shock you: data caps for companies like Comcast are more about boosting revenue than preventing network congestion.
"Some wireless ISPs told us they use UBP to manage congestion," the US Government Accountability Office wrote. On the other hand, "wireline ISPs said that congestion is not currently a problem."

Why impose the limits? Because charging extra when customers exceed their data limits "can generate more revenues for ISPs to help fund network capacity upgrades as data use grows," the GAO wrote.

The caps can also push customers to use Comcast's own content services instead of those offered by rivals, since certain Comcast services don't count against the limits.

There are other consequences. The GAO interviewed experts who said usage-based pricing "may be unnecessary because the marginal costs of data delivery are very low, [and] heavier users impose limited additional costs to ISPs." Policies that compel consumers to use less data could "limit innovation and development of data-heavy applications," restricting technological progress that relies on abundant access to Internet service.

Whether you call a data cap what it actually is or something else, the ultimate effect is the same.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014...lly-data-caps/





Comcast Raises Your Electric Bill by Turning Router into a Public Hotspot

Comcast says any extra electricity usage "would be nominal at most."
Jon Brodkin

Since last year, Comcast's wireless gateways have by default broadcast a second signal that turns each customer's modem and router into a public Wi-Fi hotspot. It's all part of Comcast's plan to create a nationwide Wi-Fi network of more than 1 million hotspots that the cable company can sell access to.

Comcast deflected criticism by arguing that the hotspot's bandwidth is separate from the bandwidth subscribers pay for, so it won't reduce the customer's Internet speeds. But what about electricity? Alex Gizis, CEO of Speedify, which makes software that bonds Internet connections to combine bandwidth, decided to investigate.

"As a bandwidth-obsessed engineer, I wanted to understand exactly what Comcast is doing here," he wrote last week. "Despite their claims that these routers cost subscribers nothing extra, we actually measured the power consumption on the router they sent us and were surprised by the results."

Unlike the guest networks that Internet customers set up for visitors, for which the homeowner can choose a password, the Comcast hotspots can be logged into by anyone with a Comcast subscription or anyone who buys temporary Wi-Fi access passes from Comcast. That means random people passing by your home could use the hotspot to get on the Internet.

To test the effect of people using the hotspot, Gizis plugged the Comcast modem and router into a power strip that was being monitored by a "Kill A Watt" meter. After testing the devices while idle, "we then connected two Windows laptops to the Xfinity hotspot, one watching Netflix and the other downloading files," he wrote. "You could immediately see the difference in the power meter, as the devices jumped from 0.14 Amps when idle, up to 0.22 Amps when actually being used. To translate this into dollars and cents, we used the average cost of power here in the Mid-Atlantic, which is $0.162 per KWh."

It may be unlikely that a hotspot will be used by passersby constantly, but if it were, it would cost the Comcast subscriber "up to $22.80 per year for those of us here in Philadelphia, or $1.90 per month," according to Speedify. (Comcast disputes these results—see the update below.)

Gizis started a Change.org petition demanding that Comcast compensate customers by raising their Internet speeds.

Speedify isn't a neutral observer here. The company has previously boasted that its channel bonding service can help Comcast customers reclaim the extra bandwidth from the hotspots, for a monthly or yearly fee.

To disable the hotspot on an Xfinity gateway, Comcast customers can log in to their account, navigate to Users & Preferences, and then click on "Manage Xfinity WiFi." They can also call customer service directly.

UPDATE: Comcast spokesperson Joel Shadle told Ars that the Speedify test relied on Comcast's business equipment, rather than the equipment that's used for the residential hotspot program, and that the equipment was outdated.

"There shouldn't be any discernable difference in the amount of electricity you're using because your router is already plugged in to do your own wireless in your home," Shadle said. Any extra amount of electricity usage "would be nominal at most," he said.

While it's possible people could use the hotspot from outside a subscriber's home, "the signal doesn't really stretch too far... it's not like the signal stretches all the way out to the street," Shadle said.

Speedify added a note to its blog post, saying, "Comcast has reached out and indicated that they would like us to retest with newer equipment. We’ll update our results as soon as we receive this new hardware."

Speedify told Ars that it will conduct the next text with the "latest, regular consumer hardware."
http://arstechnica.com/information-t...ublic-hotspot/





For Sale: Systems that Can Secretly Track Where Cellphone Users Go Around the Globe
Craig Timberg

Makers of surveillance systems are offering governments across the world the ability to track the movements of almost anybody who carries a cellphone, whether they are blocks away or on another continent.

The technology works by exploiting an essential fact of all cellular networks: They must keep detailed, up-to-the-minute records on the locations of their customers to deliver calls and other services to them. Surveillance systems are secretly collecting these records to map people’s travels over days, weeks or longer, according to company marketing documents and experts in surveillance technology.

The world’s most powerful intelligence services, such as the National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ, long have used cellphone data to track targets around the globe. But experts say these new systems allow less technically advanced governments to track people in any nation — including the United States — with relative ease and precision.

Users of such technology type a phone number into a computer portal, which then collects information from the location databases maintained by cellular carriers, company documents show. In this way, the surveillance system learns which cell tower a target is currently using, revealing his or her location to within a few blocks in an urban area or a few miles in a rural one.

It is unclear which governments have acquired these tracking systems, but one industry official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to share sensitive trade information, said that dozens of countries have bought or leased such technology in recent years. This rapid spread underscores how the burgeoning, multibillion-dollar surveillance industry makes advanced spying technology available worldwide.

“Any tin-pot dictator with enough money to buy the system could spy on people anywhere in the world,” said Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International, a London-based activist group that warns about the abuse of surveillance technology. “This is a huge problem.”

Security experts say hackers, sophisticated criminal gangs and nations under sanctions also could use this tracking technology, which operates in a legal gray area. It is illegal in many countries to track people without their consent or a court order, but there is no clear international legal standard for secretly tracking people in other countries, nor is there a global entity with the authority to police potential abuses.

In response to questions from The Washington Post this month, the Federal Communications Commission said it would investigate possible misuse of tracking technology that collects location data from carrier databases. The United States restricts the export of some surveillance technology, but with multiple suppliers based overseas, there are few practical limits on the sale or use of these systems internationally.

“If this is technically possible, why couldn’t anybody do this anywhere?” said Jon Peha, a former White House scientific adviser and chief technologist for the FCC who is now an engineering professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He was one of several telecommunications experts who reviewed the marketing documents at The Post’s request.

“I’m worried about foreign governments, and I’m even more worried about non-governments,” Peha said. “Which is not to say I’d be happy about the NSA using this method to collect location data. But better them than the Iranians.”

‘Locate. Track. Manipulate.’

Location tracking is an increasingly common part of modern life. Apps that help you navigate through a city or find the nearest coffee shop need to know your location. Many people keep tabs on their teenage children — or their spouses — through tracking apps on smartphones. But these forms of tracking require consent; mobile devices typically allow these location features to be blocked if users desire.

Tracking systems built for intelligence services or police, however, are inherently stealthy and difficult — if not impossible — to block. Private surveillance vendors offer government agencies several such technologies, including systems that collect cellular signals from nearby phones and others that use malicious software to trick phones into revealing their locations.

Governments also have long had the ability to compel carriers to provide tracking data on their customers, especially within their own countries. The National Security Agency, meanwhile, taps into telecommunication-system cables to collect cellphone location data on a mass, global scale.

But tracking systems that access carrier location databases are unusual in their ability to allow virtually any government to track people across borders, with any type of cellular phone, across a wide range of carriers — without the carriers even knowing. These systems also can be used in tandem with other technologies that, when the general location of a person is already known, can intercept calls and Internet traffic, activate microphones, and access contact lists, photos and other documents.

Companies that make and sell surveillance technology seek to limit public information about their systems’ capabilities and client lists, typically marketing their technology directly to law enforcement and intelligence services through international conferences that are closed to journalists and other members of the public.

Yet marketing documents obtained by The Washington Post show that companies are offering powerful systems that are designed to evade detection while plotting movements of surveillance targets on computerized maps. The documents claim system success rates of more than 70 percent.

A 24-page marketing brochure for SkyLock, a cellular tracking system sold by Verint, a maker of analytics systems based in Melville, N.Y., carries the subtitle “Locate. Track. Manipulate.” The document, dated January 2013 and labeled “Commercially Confidential,” says the system offers government agencies “a cost-effective, new approach to obtaining global location information concerning known targets.”

The brochure includes screen shots of maps depicting location tracking in what appears to be Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, Congo, the United Arab Emirates, Zimbabwe and several other countries. Verint says on its Web site that it is “a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions for customer engagement optimization, security intelligence, and fraud, risk and compliance,” with clients in “more than 10,000 organizations in over 180 countries.”

(Privacy International has collected several marketing brochures on cellular surveillance systems, including one that refers briefly to SkyLock, and posted them on its Web site. The 24-page SkyLock brochure and other material was independently provided to The Post by people concerned that such systems are being abused.)

Verint, which also has substantial operations in Israel, declined to comment for this story. It says in the marketing brochure that it does not use SkyLock against U.S. or Israeli phones, which could violate national laws. But several similar systems, marketed in recent years by companies based in Switzerland, Ukraine and elsewhere, likely are free of such limitations.

At The Post’s request, telecommunications security researcher Tobias Engel used the techniques described by the marketing documents to determine the location of a Post employee who used an AT&T phone and consented to the tracking. Based only on her phone number, Engel found the Post employee’s location, in downtown Washington, to within a city block — a typical level of precision when such systems are used in urban areas.

“You’re obviously trackable from all over the planet if you have a cellphone with you, as long as it’s turned on,” said Engel, who is based in Berlin. “It’s possible for almost anyone to track you as long as they are willing to spend some money on it.”

AT&T declined to comment for this story.

Exploiting the SS7 network

The tracking technology takes advantage of the lax security of SS7, a global network that cellular carriers use to communicate with one another when directing calls, texts and Internet data.

The system was built decades ago, when only a few large carriers controlled the bulk of global phone traffic. Now thousands of companies use SS7 to provide services to billions of phones and other mobile devices, security experts say. All of these companies have access to the network and can send queries to other companies on the SS7 system, making the entire network more vulnerable to exploitation. Any one of these companies could share its access with others, including makers of surveillance systems.

The tracking systems use queries sent over the SS7 network to ask carriers what cell tower a customer has used most recently. Carriers configure their systems to transmit such information only to trusted companies that need it to direct calls or other telecommunications services to customers. But the protections against unintended access are weak and easily defeated, said Engel and other researchers.

By repeatedly collecting this location data, the tracking systems can show whether a person is walking down a city street or driving down a highway, or whether the person has recently taken a flight to a new city or country.

“We don’t have a monopoly on the use of this and probably can be sure that other governments are doing this to us in reverse,” said lawyer Albert Gidari Jr., a partner at Perkins Coie who specializes in privacy and technology.

Carriers can attempt to block these SS7 queries but rarely do so successfully, experts say, amid the massive data exchanges coursing through global telecommunications networks. P1 Security, a research firm in Paris, has been testing one query commonly used for surveillance, called an “Any Time Interrogation” query, that prompts a carrier to report the location of an individual customer. Of the carriers tested so far, 75 percent responded to “Any Time Interrogation” queries by providing location data on their customers. (Testing on U.S. carriers has not been completed.)

“People don’t understand how easy it is to spy on them,” said Philippe Langlois, chief executive of P1 Security.

The GSMA, a London-based trade group that represents carriers and equipment manufacturers, said it was not aware of the existence of tracking systems that use SS7 queries, but it acknowledged serious security issues with the network, which is slated to be gradually replaced over the next decade because of a growing list of security and technical shortcomings.

“SS7 is inherently insecure, and it was never designed to be secure,” said James Moran, security director for the GSMA. “It is possible, with access to SS7, to trigger a request for a record from a network.”

The documents for Verint and several other companies say that the surveillance services are intended for governments and that customers must abide by laws regarding their use. Yet privacy advocates and other critics say the surveillance industry is inherently secretive, poorly regulated and indiscriminate in selecting its customers, sometimes putting profoundly intrusive tools into the hands of governments with little respect for human rights or tolerance of political dissent.

Refining the techniques

Engel, the German telecommunications security researcher, was the first to publicly disclose the ability to use carrier networks to surreptitiously gather user location information, at a 2008 conference sponsored by the Chaos Computer Club, a hacker activist group based in Germany. The techniques Engel used that day were far cruder than the ones used by today’s cellular tracking systems but still caused a stir in the security community.

From the lectern, he asked for help from a volunteer from the audience. A man in an untucked plaid shirt ambled up with his cellphone in one hand and a beer in the other. Engel typed the number into his computer, and even though it was for a British phone, a screen at the front of the room soon displayed the current location — in Berlin.

Two years later, a pair of American telecommunications researchers expanded on Engel’s discovery with a program they called “The Carmen Sandiego Project,” named after a popular educational video game and television series that taught geography by having users answer questions.

Researchers Don Bailey and Nick DePetrillo found that the rough locations provided by Engel’s technique could be mixed with other publicly available data to better map the locations of users. They even accessed the video feeds of highway cameras along Interstate 70 in Denver to gain a clearer picture of targeted cellphone users.

“We could tell that they were going a certain speed on I-70,” Bailey recalled. “Not only could you track a person, you could remotely identify a car and who was driving.”

An official for AT&T, Patrick McCanna, was in the audience when DePetrillo and Bailey presented their findings at a conference in 2010. McCanna praised the researchers for their work, they later said, and recruited their help to make it harder to gather location data.

Many of the world’s largest cellular networks made similar efforts, though significant loopholes remained.

As some carriers tightened their defenses, surveillance industry researchers developed even more effective ways to collect data from SS7 networks. The advanced systems now being marketed offer more-precise location information on targets and are harder for carriers to detect or defeat.

Telecommunications experts say networks have become so complex that implementing new security measures to defend against these surveillance systems could cost billions of dollars and hurt the functioning of basic services, such as routing calls, texts and Internet to customers.

“These systems are massive. And they’re running close to capacity all the time, and to make changes to how they interact with hundreds or thousands of phones is really risky,” said Bart Stidham, a longtime telecommunications system architect based in Virginia. “You don’t know what happens.”

Paired up with ‘catchers’

Companies that market SS7 tracking systems recommend using them in tandem with “IMSI catchers,” increasingly common surveillance devices that use cellular signals collected directly from the air to intercept calls and Internet traffic, send fake texts, install spyware on a phone, and determine precise locations.

IMSI catchers — also known by one popular trade name, StingRay — can home in on somebody a mile or two away but are useless if a target’s general location is not known. SS7 tracking systems solve that problem by locating the general area of a target so that IMSI catchers can be deployed effectively. (The term “IMSI” refers to a unique identifying code on a cellular phone.)

The FCC recently created an internal task force to study misuse of IMSI catchers by criminal gangs and foreign intelligence agencies, which reportedly have used the systems to spy on American citizens, businesses and diplomats. It is legal for law enforcement agencies in the United States to use IMSI catchers for authorized purposes.

When asked by The Post about systems that use SS7 tracking, FCC spokeswoman Kim Hart said, “This type of system could fall into the category of technologies that we expect the FCC’s internal task force to examine.”

The marketing brochure for Verint’s SkyLock system suggests using it in conjunction with Verint’s IMSI catcher, called the Engage GI2. Together, they allow government agencies “to accurately pinpoint their suspect for apprehension, making it virtually impossible for targets to escape, no matter where they reside in the world.”

Verint can install SkyLock on the networks of cellular carriers if they are cooperative — something that telecommunications experts say is common in countries where carriers have close relationships with their national governments. Verint also has its own “worldwide SS7 hubs” that “are spread in various locations around the world,” says the brochure. It does not list prices for the services, though it says that Verint charges more for the ability to track targets in many far-flung countries, as opposed to only a few nearby ones.

Among the most appealing features of the system, the brochure says, is its ability to sidestep the cellular operators that sometimes protect their users’ personal information by refusing government requests or insisting on formal court orders before releasing information.

“In most cases mobile operators are not willing to cooperate with operational agencies in order to provide them the ability to gain control and manipulate the network services given to its subscribers,” the brochure says. “Verint’s SkyLock is a global geo-location solution which was designed and developed to address the limitations mentioned above, and meet operational agency requirements.”

Another company, Defentek, markets a similar system called Infiltrator Global Real-Time Tracking System on its Web site, claiming to “locate and track any phone number in the world.”

The site adds: “It is a strategic solution that infiltrates and is undetected and unknown by the network, carrier, or the target.”

The company, which according to the Web site is registered in Panama City, declined to comment for this story.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/busine...11f_story.html





CISPA Is Back With A New Name:

ORGANIZE! INTERNET FREEDOM, ORGANIZE, SURVEILLANCE
Fight for the Future, www.cispaisback.org

CISA is the newest and latest version of a bill that would give the NSA even more powers

CISA is an even more toxic bill than the original CISPA bill. CISA stays in line with the original objective of the CISPA bill to strengthen and legitimize the NSA’s surveillance programs. But this time the bill would allow for and encourage sweeping datamining taps on Internet users for the undefined purpose of domestic “cybersecurity”. The NSA would be able to share this data with police and other law enforcement agencies for domestic “cybersecurity” purposes – meaning these powers will be used against innocent citizens.

Would you like to read more about CISPA’s newest form, CISA? Read some of these articles

1.) Open Technology Institute. “Info Sharing with NSA is a Non-Starter – and Only One of the New Cybersecurity Bill’s Many Problems”. Read More
2.) ACLU. “Beware the Dangers of Congress’ Latest Cybersecurity Bill”. Read More

Below is more information on the old version of CISPA.Come back to CISPAisback.org for more updates above on CISA and its scary NSA “upgrades” since the first CISPA.

Big Tech and the NSA both want to pass CISPA. And that should scare you.
Recent news reports reveal that the NSA has been pressuring their most powerful defenders in Congress to reintroduce CISPA — the Cyber Intelligence Sharing & Protection Act. This bill would allow corporations to share our private data with the government more easily, and with complete legal immunity. No wonder NSA chief Keith Alexander has been begging Congress to pass a CISPA bill, and the trade groups led by Google and other tech giants are on board.

At a time when opinion polls and growing dissent show that the public is overwhelmingly opposed to broader government surveillance, anti-privacy members of Congress seem determined to give the NSA and big tech companies what they want, even if it means trampling our rights in the process.

We need to stop CISPA for good this time. We stalled it in the Senate earlier this year, but now Senators Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss are planning to introduce the Senate version of the bill any day now. Just like last time, they’ll claim that the privacy concerns have been addressed, even though they’ve refused to make changes suggested by civil liberties groups. Let’s make this the last time they try anything like CISPA. Sign and share the petition now.

What’s wrong with CISPA? (in as few words as possible)

As it’s written in the version that passed the House, CISPA won’t protect us from cyber threats, but it will violate our 4th Amendment right to privacy.

The NSA wants it badly, because it will give them more access to your data, and give companies immunity for legally shaky programs like PRISM: (read more)

• It lets the government spy on you without a warrant. (read more)
• It makes it so you can’t even find out about it after the fact. (read more)
• It makes it so companies can’t be sued when they do illegal things with your data. (read more)
• It allows corporations to cyber-attack each other and individuals outside of the law. (read more)
• It makes every privacy policy on the web a moot point, and violates the 4th amendment. (read more)

UPDATE! IDL launched the ‘Cat Signal’ on March 20th, over 30K sites participated including Reddit, Craigslist, and Duck Duck Go. Press Release.

A phone call is worth 100 petition signatures…

CISPA is an urgent threat. We’ve heard that Congress will be attempting to push it to a floor vote as soon as they return from recess. Last year, CISPA rushed through the house before anyone had time to react. We can’t let that happen again. The risks are too great.

Can you pick up the phone right now and call your Congressperson? We need to make sure that every member of Congress hears from their constituency that CISPA is not an option, and voting for it would be a big mistake.

We made this handy tool that lets you find your Congresspersons’ phone numbers with just one click. Hit the button below and try it out!
http://www.popularresistance.org/cis...new-name-cisa/





Here's More Evidence That NSA Fears Are Chilling Online Discussions
Jordan Pearson

When the Snowden leaks dropped last year, some feared that the reveal widespread state surveillance would be followed by a clamping down on transparency efforts. A new Pew Research poll suggests that the effect is more in line with Kafka than Orwell, however: the threat of ubiquitous surveillance may have resulted in a self-imposed cooling effect on online discussion.

According to report, which is based on a survey of nearly 2,000 Americans' willingness to discuss the surveillance state on- and offline, 86 percent of Americans reported being "very" or "somewhat" willing to discuss NSA-related issues in offline scenarios, but only 42 percent of social media users were willing to discuss it online.

Moreover, of the 14 percent of Americans unwilling to discuss Snowden or the NSA, virtually none—0.3 percent—said they would turn to social media as an alternative to face-to-face discussion.

"Overall, the findings indicate that in the case of the Snowden revelations, social media did not provide new forums for those who might otherwise remain silent to express their opinions and debate issues," the researchers wrote.

The study concludes that this discursive dampening may be the result of what researchers call the "spiral of silence," the tendency to refrain from discussing contentious subjects when you believe your opinion may not be shared by others. The phenomenon has been observed in physical interactions, and the Pew researchers suggest it carries over into the online world. The New York Times agreed.

This conclusion doesn't fully account for the immense disparity between online and offline discussions in terms of people being largely willing or unwilling to discuss the issue, however. And, if it does, then the "spiral of silence" must have some kind of steroidal effect once it becomes digitized. The Pew researchers themselves are careful to note that the correlation between the willingness to speak out and view of others’ opinions does not imply causation.

There is another possible explanation, albeit an equally theoretical one, and it has to do with the psychological effects of ubiquitous surveillance; one that considers the asymmetry in power felt by the average internet user faced with an omnipresent, invisible watcher.

We must begin from the realization that Americans appear largely unwilling to talk about government surveillance in exactly the spaces where their opinion could be picked up by organizations who have the authority to detain you if they feel you are a threat to national security. Since the media earthquake of 2013, stories outlining the continually burgeoning nightmare of the American online surveillance regime continue to appear like tremors.

Surveillance is the background noise of the online universe; always there, always humming itself into eventual invisibility. This cannot be ignored. The mental weight of constant surveillance may indeed have engendered a counterintuitive response on platforms designed specifically to facilitate as much conversation as possible.

French media theorist Jean Baudrillard hypothesized in a 1980 essay titled "The Implosion of Meaning in the Media and the Implosion of the Social in the Masses" that modern communication technologies are set up to facilitate as much discussion and interaction among the populace as possible—this much is self-evident in the case of social media like Twitter and Facebook—but with an ulterior motive, or at least overriding side effect: widespread information collection and the eventual silencing of the masses.
This motive, he wrote, is hidden in plain view and intuited by the populace, resulting in a cynical and self-aware use of communicative platforms. Indeed, by playing at facilitating communication but only serving as a medium to demarcate the lines of acceptable discourse—as the Pew poll suggested—and offer users up for analysis but unseen authorities, social media may indeed form what Baudrillard called the "anti-theatre of communication."

Baudrillard envisioned silence as a rational response to the coercive pressure to speak only to be catalogued by a data collection regime. He was writing about market research, but the sentiment rings with an all too familiar timbre in the context of government surveillance. As he writes:

The current strategy of the system is to inflate utterance to produce the maximum of meaning. Thus the appropriate strategic resistance is to refuse meaning and utterance, to stimulate in a hyper-conformist manner the very mechanisms of the system, itself a form of refusal and non-reception. This is the resistance strategy of the masses.

In a medium optimized for the ends of both communication and surveillance, Baudrillard argued, "all that is left are fluid, mute masses, the variable equations of surveys, objects of perpetual tests in which, as in an acid solution, they are dissolved." Indeed, as was the case with the 1968 General Strike in France, online discussion regarding the NSA appears to form a kind of “neutralizing black box” of anti-communication.

To be sure, a curious thing has happened: We presume that social media allows us to express ourselves, but the surveillance inherent in the system precludes the possibility.

I should mention that I have willfully omitted certain conclusions of Baudrillard's theory, because I, like others including philosopher and geologist David Harvey, find them wild and defeatist. For example, Baudrillard argues that the big takeaway from the masses' silence is the assumption that society is a kind of delirious hologram propped up by mass media. Sound about right? No, of course not.

Still, Baudrillard's theory is useful, perhaps even necessary, in thinking through the implications of surveillance and digital communications on public discourse.

With all this in mind, it is entirely possible to presume that the overwhelming, larger than life reality of ubiquitous government surveillance has resulted in a discursive cooling effect. This conclusion, although grounded in theory, also finds weight in the lived experience of internet usage. Who can say that they are unaware of the NSA? The terror watch list? Or, at the very least, Facebook's privacy policies?

Surveillance is the darkened background upon which the daily routine of online communication plays out, and it invariably alters it, while at the same time doing what it does best: making itself invisible, save for the silence of its subjects.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/her...ne-discussions





New York Times’s Digital Subscription Growth Story May Be Ending
Edmund Lee

The New York Times has bet on digital subscriptions to play a central role in its long-term future. But while selling access to the paper’s Web and mobile versions was an initial hit, growth is slowing — and may stop altogether if the company’s earlier projections are correct.

Four years ago, before the Times put up a paywall around its then-free site, the paper asked consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to estimate how many digital-only subscriptions it could sell. The conclusion, according to people who have reviewed the study: In the most optimistic case, just under 1 million subscribers would pay $15 to $30 a month for access to the New York Times website and app. More likely, however, the theoretical limit at these prices would be 800,000 to 900,000 subscribers.

The problem is, the Times already hit the low end of that projection in June with 831,000 paying online readers. And the number of new customers it added in the three months leading up to that point, about 32,000, were mostly for the new NYT Now app, a slimmed-down version of the Times that costs $8 a month. It looks like the McKinsey study got it right.

There could be some cannibalization from the new app, of course, but even if all 32,000 were for the main digital subscription (which costs $15 to $35 depending on how many devices you want to use), that would still fall short of the previous two quarters when the Times averaged 36,000 new subscribers.

Paywalls are important because of how quickly they’ve become the main (or only) strategy for a lot of U.S. newspapers as advertising deteriorates. About four in 10 papers in the U.S. charge online, and it’s likely to only increase. In the case of the Times, the paywall is now a significant part of its total business, accounting for a tenth of annual sales.

And it’s all new money for the Times, about $149.1 million last year, a palpable performance in a short period of time. Put it another way, in a little over two-and-a-half years, the paywall went from $0 to $150 million.

But a slowdown in digital subscribers means it’ll be that much harder for the Times to make up for its losses elsewhere, specifically in advertising, once the life-blood of the business. The company lost close to $90 million in ad revenue — print and online together — from 2011 through last year, and it has been on a downward track ever since.

Online revenue alone would not sustain the New York Times as it exists today. If the Times were to become a digital-only newsroom, it’d be a $312 million business, including the $162.9 million in online ads it generated last year. But that’s only 20 percent of its current sales. In other words, a digital-only Times could just support a fifth of its current newsroom, or around 200 journalists.

It’s worth noting that the Times was the first general-interest publication to charge for online access. While it followed in the footsteps of the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, which created the metered model the Times adopted for its own paywall, it broke new ground. It wasn’t clear if anyone would bother paying for general news online.

“They deserve a lot of credit for that,” said Ken Doctor, a media analyst at Outsell. Doctor independently analyzed the Times’s addressable market for online subscriptions and arrived at roughly the same figures as the confidential McKinsey study.

New Apps, Lower Cost

The Times declined to comment on the McKinsey study, but the company referred to comments CEO Mark Thompson made at an investor conference in May: “It’s not ridiculous to think of a high single million number in the U.S. as an addressable market.”

Translation: We think we can sell 8 million or 9 million subscriptions — eight or nine times where we’re at now — at a variety of price points, but likely with the bulk of growth at lower than current price points.

The McKinsey study did show that lower-priced subscriptions could draw in millions of customers. At a half-inch thick, the report included an exhaustive market analysis showing how many readers the Times could draw at different retail costs, a standard price elasticity survey, according to one insider. The Times hasn’t run a similarly exhaustive study since, this person said, though it has more recently run a series of smaller market studies leading up to the launch of NYT Now.

More than a year ago, company executives — including Thompson, publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr and Denise Warren, who leads the Times’ digital products division — anticipated the Times would soon reach the ceiling of subscribers predicted by the original study and aggressively pursued the creation of new apps to spur growth, one of our sources said.

That led to NYT Now and also NYT Opinion, a collection of its daily commentary and columns for $6 a month. A food app will be available this Fall.

The new apps helped the Times add 32,000 paying online readers in the second quarter, but Doctor estimated about 20,000 of those were for NYT Now, which he calls, “subpar and below expectations.”

Warren acknowledged that the Times’s marketing strategy around the new apps didn’t work. “We need more precision to determine which is the right customer for the right offer,” she said on a conference call with analysts following its earnings report at the end of July.

The idea of charging for content wasn’t just a flash point among outside observers. There were plenty of people inside Times headquarters who were either outright against the proposition or weren’t entirely sure of its merits, according to several people who preferred to remain anonymous.

But at least one Times person had publicly touted the benefits of online subscriptions: Former executive editor Jill Abramson, who was unceremoniously ousted in May. Just a month before her exit, she hosted a gaggle of media reporters at a cocktail reception on the 15th floor of the Times building to talk about its new digital subscription products.

“I believe that a lot of the people who are gonna subscribe to NYT Now are going to become hopelessly addicted,” she said to the gathered, as Sulzberger and Thompson looked on.

We’ll get a chance on September 4 to see if Abramson’s views have changed, when she sits down for a chat with Re/code’s Kara Swisher at our next Code/Media conference in New York. It’ll be her first onstage interview since leaving the Times.
http://recode.net/2014/08/25/new-yor...-hits-ceiling/





Plugged-In Over Preppy: Teenagers Favor Tech Over Clothes
Elizabeth A. Harris and Rachel Abrams

For some teenagers, wearing last season’s jeans will always be unthinkable.

But a growing number consider texting on a dated smartphone even worse.

For teenage apparel retailers, that screen-obsessed teenager poses a big threat in the still-important back-to-school sales season.

Muscle shirts and strategically ripped jeans no longer provide an assured spot for retailers like Hollister and American Eagle Outfitters in the marketplace of what’s cool at an American high school. The social cachet these days involves waving the latest in hand-held technology.

“Clothes aren’t as important to me,” said Olivia D’Amico, a 16-year-old from New York, as she shopped at Hollister with her sister and a friend. “Half the time I don’t really buy any brands. I just bought a pair of fake Doc Martens because I don’t really care.”

She probably spends more on technology because she likes to “stay connected,” she said.

“It’s definitely more exciting for a lot of teenagers to have a new phone that can do lots of cool stuff than clothing,” said Nicole Myers, 19, a model in New York who emerged from an Apple store on Monday with a new iPhone that cost about $200. “A phone keeps you much more entertained. It’s a better distraction than clothing.”

Analysts and trend-spotters agree that a major shift in teenage trends, and in teenage spending, is underway. John Morris, a retail analyst at BMO Capital Markets, says that his regular focus groups with teenagers about what trends they find most appealing often stray from clothing.

“You try to get them talking about what’s the next look, what they’re excited about purchasing in apparel, and the conversation always circles back to the iPhone 6,” he said. “You get them talking about crop tops, you get a nice little debate about high-waist going, but the conversation keeps shifting back.”

The teenage apparel sector of retailing, whose sales account for about 15 percent of all apparel sales, according to the NPD Group, is in a deep slump as sales have declined over the last several quarters. Aside from the attention given to tech items like phones, apps and accessories, some longstanding retailers have been hard hit by competition from fast-fashion stores like Forever 21 and H&M, which offer up-to-the-minute trends at low prices. Online shopping has also reduced mall traffic among teenage consumers, and the popularity of Instagram whips fads around so quickly that teenagers are not chasing one enduring fashion item.

Young shoppers are the first to point out the use of phones in e-commerce.

“You can shop online for clothes on your phone,” Caitlin Haywood, 15, a high school sophomore from New York, said on her way into a Hollister in downtown Manhattan. A fan of the store’s “California style,” she also noted that she owned many decorative coverings so that she could accessorize her phone.

That’s a fashion statement itself, she suggested. “When you take pictures, people see your case,” she said.

In fact, accessories like crystal-studded phone cases or neon-colored headphones are high on a teenager’s shopping list.

“Having a cool phone to show you’re plugged in is a huge part of people’s style, a huge part of life these days,” said Eva Chen, editor in chief of Lucky Magazine, adding that teenagers used smartphones to signal status in the way men used to do with ornate watches.

A bright spot for teenage retailers might be the economics of the phone market, since most teenagers do not have the money to buy the newest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy the moment it is released.

Stephanie Wissink, a managing director at Piper Jaffray, said that after several years of strong growth, the percentage of money that teenagers spend on electronics appeared to have stabilized at around 8 or 9 percent. Cellphone penetration is high and children must generally wait for their next upgrade for their next device, she said.

But technology does seem to indirectly influence other spending habits, she said. For the first time, Piper Jaffray’s semiannual survey of teenagers in the spring found that they spent more money on food — just barely topping clothing — than any other category.

“There’s this magnetism to restaurant environments,” Ms. Wissink said. “So we talked to teens about why, and it’s the free Wi-Fi.”

“I’m addicted to Instagram,” said Ann Borrero, a 19-year-old who attends high school in Brooklyn and has a running list of the restaurants she often chooses to get Internet access. “I just usually know, like McDonald’s always have Wi-Fi, little cafes always have Wi-Fi.”

Top executives at traditional retailers have felt the strain of quarter after quarter of disappointing results, and many of those companies have undergone upheaval in their top ranks.

This month, the chief executive of Aéropostale, Thomas P. Johnson, agreed to step down and be succeeded by his predecessor, Julian R. Geiger. In January, the chief executive of American Eagle, Robert L. Hanson, left the company after only two years in the position. And that same month, Abercrombie & Fitch split the role of chairman and chief executive under pressure from investors.

In addition to changes in the teenage-specific landscape, retailers across a range of categories are learning how to manage a back-to-school season that has shifted significantly in recent years. While still a crucial season for retailers, its window has become less delineated, sometimes starting a bit later and often lasting past the beginning of the school year.

“The grave mistake was to annually assume that the back-to-school shopper was going to show up like clockwork in July and buy goods in that time frame,” Mr. Morris of BMO said.

Analysts say that retailers appear to have learned that lesson, and have planned their inventory accordingly, often by ordering fewer items and focusing on their margins.

“Back-to-school is important, and people want to have it be successful, but each year, it seems it’s a little bit harder to do as well as you did before,” said Richard Jaffe, an analyst at Stifel. “The peak becomes less of a peak.”

In recent days, executives at a variety of retailers, including Target, Macy’s and American Eagle, have given some encouraging signals in their quarterly earnings calls that the back-to-school season is off to a good start. But many experts are calling for a lackluster period regardless.

“Back in the day, we ate three square meals a day, and now what’s trending is grazing,” Ms. Chen said. “I think shopping is kind of similar. You are constantly shopping throughout the year, and in smaller ways. But I think that’s something that affects teens and women — it’s a larger trend, period.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/bu...r-clothes.html





Seagate Ships World’s First 8 Terabyte Hard Drive, More Capacity For Your Pr0… Umm, Critical Files
Sean Knight

Prior to the digital age we are living in, many were skeptical about the need for larger hard drives. Now that we download TV shows, movies, music, video games, books, and other, shall we say, forms of entertainment, our need for larger hard drives continues to grow. So we are sure many people are happy that Seagate has announced today that it has begun shipping the world’s first 8TB hard drive.

The 8TB HDD comes five months after Western Digital had released the first ever 6TB HDD. Up until then, Seagate’s highest capacity HDD had been shipping only to select enterprise clients. The 8TB HDD comes in the 3.5-inch form factor and, according to the manufacturer, features a SATA 6Gbps interface and multi-drive RV tolerance which makes it suitable for data centers. It's unclear what technology the drive is based on, or if PMR (Perpendicular Magnetic Recording) or low-resistance helium technology was employed, though it's more likely PMR.

"As our world becomes more mobile, the number of devices we use to create and consume data is driving an explosive growth in unstructured data. This places increased pressure on cloud builders to look for innovative ways to build cost-effective, high capacity storage for both private and cloud-based data centers," said Seagate vice president of marketing Scott Horn. “Seagate is poised to address this challenge by offering the world’s first 8TB HDD, a ground-breaking new solution for meeting the increased capacities needed to support the demand for high capacity storage in a world bursting with digital creation, consumption and long-term storage."

Unfortunately, Seagate did not announce the retail price for its 8TB HDD though the company claims that the new hard drive has "the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry."

So how quickly do you think you will fill up an 8TB HDD?
http://hothardware.com/News/Seagate-...ritical-Files/

















Until next week,

- js.



















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