Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 18th, ’23

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002



Volume XXII, Issue Number I



























November 18th, 2023




Getting Hollywood Back Up and Running Won’t Be Easy

With the industry hustling to make up for months of lost work, juggling production schedules and the availability of actors and crew members will be complicated.
Nicole Sperling

Daisy Edgar-Jones, the 25-year-old British actress with an increasingly crowded dance card, will soon experience just how complicated Hollywood’s rush to return to work is going to be.

Now that a tentative deal has been reached in the actors’ strike — and assuming union members approve the new contract in the coming days — Ms. Edgar-Jones is heading back to the Oklahoma set of “Twisters.” The production of the sequel to the 1996 disaster film “Twister” was paused this summer when the strike began. Now, with only weeks to finish the film for a planned release next summer, there’s no time to waste.

That means Ms. Edgar-Jones will have to walk away from a role in a drama that Ron Howard is set to begin directing soon in Australia. Before the strike, her schedule was set up to accommodate both jobs. But with the entertainment industry hustling to make up for months of lost work, there is suddenly a pileup of projects in various states of readiness.

Timothée Chalamet is in a similar situation. He is set to portray Bob Dylan in James Mangold’s “A Complete Unknown,” beginning in March. But Warner Bros. moved the release of its sci-fi epic “Dune Two” to the same month so Mr. Chalamet and other stars in the cast, like Zendaya and Austin Butler, can promote the film — something that was not allowed during the strike. Details on how Mr. Chalamet would juggle production of one movie and publicity for another are being worked out.

Those are just two of the small-scale dramas happening as Hollywood finally revs its engines after six long months of idling because of the dual writers’ and actors’ strikes. The traffic jam includes projects that were paused because of the strikes, those that are ready to be released but need actors to publicize them and those that were scheduled to begin filming and now may be delayed because of actors’ delayed responsibilities elsewhere.

“It’s a bit like all those ships that were stuck in the harbor during Covid because they couldn’t offload them fast enough,” the producer Todd Garner said. “They are just going to have to go through the canal one by one, and then it will catch up and resume again.”

Productions that were shut down midstream will be the first to start back up. That means cameras could begin rolling in Malta on Ridley Scott’s “Gladiator 2” in as little as three weeks. “Deadpool 3,” filming in Norfolk, England, could restart in as little as two weeks. “Mortal Kombat 2,” which Mr. Garner is producing, could be back in days because it’s being filmed on a soundstage on the Gold Coast of Australia, Mr. Garner said. With writers furiously finishing episodes, television shows will soon follow.

That’s the good news. The bad news is it won’t be easy, and it definitely won’t be cheap. Depending on a production’s size, getting started back up again will add $500,000 to $4 million to the budget, said two studio executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the tensions surrounding the strike. That’s in addition to extra costs for maintaining leases on soundstages and keeping rented equipment throughout the pause, the better to get things up and running quickly when the strike ended.

Naveen Chopra, the chief financial officer for Paramount Global, said during the company’s recent earnings call that the studio had spent “nearly $60 million of strike-related costs” in the past quarter “to retain production capabilities while the strike is ongoing.”

Should productions extend into the end of December, studios will have to pay a premium to keep casts and crews working during Hollywood’s traditional holiday break — the last two weeks of the year. And costs for equipment, crews and locations are likely to go up as a result of demand, in an industry that has already been devastated by the financial fallout from the strikes.

The work stoppages cost thousands of people work, both inside and outside the entertainment industry. In September, Gov. Gavin Newsom estimated the loss for the California economy at more than $5 billion.

The ancillary businesses that support production in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere are also itching to get back to work. The impact has been heavy on owners of independent studio space. About 90 percent of the production space in Los Angeles, for instance, is rented out project by project, said Jeff Stotland, executive vice president for global studios at Hudson Pacific, the real estate entity that owns Sunset Studios. That means many of those spaces have gone months without new tenants.

“Eighty to 90 percent of those businesses have just been eviscerated,” he said.

Half of Hudson Pacific’s soundstages are committed to long-term leases, so they generated income during the shutdown. Studios that have more short-term rentals, however, could raise their prices — both because of demand and because of the need to recoup the losses from the strikes.

“The backdrop to all this is what are we coming back into?” Mr. Stotland said. “The industry itself is going through a transformation, and there’s uncertainty around the quantity of production. We feel that there’s going to be a significant amount of production in the next sort of 12 to 18 months, which may or may not be representative of a long-term trend. It’s just unclear.”

The fire hose of demand could be a good thing, at least for 2024. When studios are more desperate to fill their slates and can’t wait for an Emma Stone or a Brad Pitt to become available, they may to turn to actors with plenty of talent but less widespread fame.

“Not everyone can do everything, and studios can’t wait forever for these actors,” said Jay Gassner, co-head of United Talent Agency’s talent department. “So maybe they will spread the wealth and we won’t feel the impact of less television and movies until 2025.”

Even with the focus on getting things back up, there is concern that the labor strife isn’t over, which may also prompt an increase in production in the near term. The contract with the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the labor union that covers truck drivers, hairstylists and film editors among many other behind-the-scenes jobs, expires in July.

“There is going to be a focus on the looming negotiations with unions that represent crews,” said Miranda Banks, chair of Loyola Marymount University’s department of film, television and media studies. “Studios are going to want to get a lot done before another potential work stoppage.”

Brooks Barnes contributed reporting.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/09/b...e-backlog.html





‘The Marvels’ Makes Box Office History, ‘The Hunger Games’ Eyes #1 Spot
Mark Hughes

While Marvel Studios expected The Marvels to blast off to higher box office last weekend, the Captain Marvel sequel from Nia DaCosta still topped the box office for the weekend and officially became the highest grossing theatrical release of all time by a Black woman director at $110 million.

In it’s first three weekdays of release, The Marvels has added more than $7 million domestic to its coffers, and at least as much internationally, but that still puts the film at perhaps $125 million as the early preview screenings for Trolls Band Together and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes roll out Thursday night.

This competition will make it hard for The Marvels to hold on to a large percentage of its audience heading into its second weekend. The Hunger Games prequel is tracking toward a $100 million debut to top the weekend box office, while the Trolls sequel already has a head start with $70 million in its international coffers heading into the weekend and eyeing a $35 million domestic bow.

Which all adds up to The Marvels probably taking third place worldwide, and possibly third place domestically as well unless the film surprises with a miraculously strong second weekend hold.

Sadly, the B grade from audiences via Cinemascore, lack of strong or rising positive buzz among the mainstream public, and the competition this weekend and the next — when Wish and Napoleon arrive to further eat into audience demographics — all suggests The Marvels will probably suffer a typical or worse declines in the weekends ahead.

It’s is a shame, in light of how fantastic the movie is. I’d like to hope for an Elemental-style long run situation developing, but there doesn’t seem to be the numbers anywhere to indicate such a thing happening — unless Marvel employs some outside-the-box promotions to rally audiences to the film, such as reaching out to Taylor Swift for some sort of mutually beneficial scenario as I suggested previously.

It’s starting to look increasingly like The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes might wind up winning the month of November in both global and domestic box office. Lionsgate would obviously love to see this film launch as profitable a trilogy as the original The Hunger Games, which brought in billions in box office and merchandising.

But we are in a very different type of place in cinema history nowadays, with both theatrical and home entertainment undergoing an evolution of both viewing habits and technologies, so it’s all uncertain.

For comparison, and as a sign of just how bad things are in 2023 for box office, the previous franchise low for a domestic opening gross in The Hunger Games franchise was $102 million for Mockingjay - Part 2 back in 2015. This weekend, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is expected to make only about half that much.

What looked like a sure thing for The Marvels to dominate the November holiday window and play well into December is now turning into a “what went wrong?” scenario. After Barbie took more than $1.4 billion this summer, and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour became the biggest concert movie of all time last month with a certified blockbuster at $240 million and counting, it looked like women and girl audiences were flexing their power at the multiplex.

But keep in mind, wider marketing for films besides trailers and TV spots was hard without cast on hand to promote The Marvels as a strike dragged on and undermined the performance of so many projects, and the MCU is particularly famous for how connected fans and audiences feel to these films precisely because the casts are always so involved in maintaining that connection.

It’s also true that, while I don’t think an overarching or permanent “superhero fatigue” is at play, I do believe the genre is suffering from a combination of factors that undeniably include diminished public enthusiasm due to the collapse of interest in DCEU and the also-ran feel of some of the Sony live-action non-MCU Spider-Man spinoff films.

And Marvel, while not suffering major problems or anything remotely on par with the exaggerated press claims and certain fan reactions online, has still also had some issues with their films as well — from the VFX artists complaining about rushed conditions that results in less than polished CGI, to a large slate of streaming series necessitating Feige stepping away from his usual hands-on role in most of the MCU theatrical releases and the simple fact of enthusiasm being impossible to maintain at the fullest levels achieved by the time Avengers: Endgame arrived.

I’d point out that it’s surely not insignificant that the film didn’t carry the title Captain Marvel 2 to drive home for viewers that this was a sequel film to another movie everyone saw and liked. I realize the title The Marvels sounds cooler than a numbered sequel, but Marvel is successful precisely because it’s been so great at branding and audiences respond to MCU branding well.

Then there’s also Covid-19, which remains a factor, and the fact we are seeing not just new Covid-19 variants but also flu and RSV rising in places around the country. Plus, children being in school at the moment reduces weekday box office potential, which means it can’t help make up lost ground and benefit from even wider daily word of mouth as easily.

But we cannot ignore the fact the film received mixed critical reactions and a B grade from audiences. Underlying this is data pointing to far worse reception for The Marvels among male viewers, whose significantly lower scores drove the average score down. Meanwhile, many male reviewers seem inclined to engage in dismissing superhero movies starring women and for audiences of women and girls.

Indeed, some of the worst examples include critics literally complaining that The Marvels feels like it’s “made for teen girls” but “not for actual comic book fans,” as if the former cannot be the latter. This chronic myopic sexism is shameful and an embarrassment to both fandom and entertainment journalism.

At the end of the day, The Marvels is underperforming because of all of these various factors and more, and whatever else we can say, the end result is the film will most likely be considered a flop with a box office outcome similar to The Incredible Hulk back in the earliest days of the MCU. And Marvel’s loss will be The Hunger Games prequel’s gain, it seems, although even this victory is bittersweet to some extent in light of the initial box office numbers.

It’s true The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’ $100 million budget is the lowest of the series since the first film, but it’s still also only about $30-40 million or so lower than the cost of the other three films in the series. So the film’s likely significantly lower box office opening is only perhaps halfway offset by the budgetary savings.

This weekend, we’ll see if The Marvels faces the expected declines while The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes takes the crown, and whether either film can find staying power in overseas markets to improve its lot.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/markhug...s-eyes-1-spot/





Lost Doctor Who Episodes Found – But Owner is Reluctant to Hand Them to BBC

As sci-fi show’s 60th anniversary nears, a collector pleads for BBC to offer amnesty to those with recordings discarded by corporation
Vanessa Thorpe

For Doctor Who-lovers they are the missing crown jewels: lost episodes of the first series of the TV sci-fi drama, shown in the 1960s. But now film recordings of not just one, but two of the early BBC adventures, both featuring the first doctor, William Hartnell, has been found in Britain by amateur sleuths.

The episodes, one featuring the Daleks, would offer viewers a chance to travel back in time without the use of a Tardis. But the Observer has learned that the owners of the rare, rediscovered footage are not prepared to hand it over to the BBC, even as the clock ticks down to the 60th anniversary of the show’s launch this month.

Veteran film collector John Franklin believes the answer is for the BBC to announce an immediate general amnesty on missing film footage.

This would reassure British amateur collectors that their private archives will not be confiscated if they come forward and that they will be safe from prosecution for having stored stolen BBC property, something several fear.

“Some of these collectors are terrified,” said Franklin, who knows the location of the two missing Doctor Who episodes, along with several other newly discovered TV treasures, including an episode of the The Basil Brush Show, the second to be unearthed this autumn. “We now need to catalogue and save the significant television shows that are out there. If we are not careful they will eventually be dumped again in house clearances, because a lot of the owners of these important collections are now in their 80s and are very wary,” he added.

Discarded TV film was secretly salvaged from bins and skips by staff and contractors who worked at the BBC between 1967 and 1978, when the corporation had a policy of throwing out old reels. And Hartnell’s Doctor Who episodes were far from the only ones to go. Many popular shows were lost and other Doctor Who adventures starring Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee were either jettisoned or erased. A missing early episode of the long-running sitcom Sykes, starring Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques, has also been rediscovered in private hands in the last few weeks.

Franklin, who staged an event entitled Film is Fabulous! for collectors in Leicester last month with the Cinema and Television History Research Institute at De Montfort University, argues that the BBC is best placed to help. “The collectors involved are ex-employees and so are terrified. The rule was that you didn’t take anything, even if it had been thrown out. But if you loved film and knew it would be important one day, what did you do? So what we need now is an amnesty,” he said.

Franklin’s plea was supported by Mark Stuckey, a film and projector restorer who appears as an electronics expert on the BBC’s The Repair Shop. “These collectors were seen as criminals, but now we can see they are really saviours. An amnesty would stop them being frightened of prosecution,” he said.

Last month the BBC admitted its 800-episode back catalogue of Doctor Who shows, now available on its iPlayer streaming service, would be incomplete. Seven episodes from 1963 have been colourised and woven together into a 75-minute long monster show, The Daleks in Colour, which will be shown on BBC Four on 23 November. These will also be made available on the iPlayer.

The BBC said it was ready to talk to anyone with lost episodes. “We welcome members of the public contacting us regarding programmes they believe are lost archive recordings, and are happy to work with them to restore lost or missing programmes to the BBC archives,” it said.

Whether this will be enough to prompt nervous collectors to come forward is doubtful. While collectors are in no real danger, the infamous arrest of comedian Bob Monkhouse in 1978 has not been forgotten, Franklin suspects: “Monkhouse was a private collector and was accused of pirating videos. He even had some of his archive seized. Sadly people still believe they could have their films confiscated.”

Most of the collectors are not interested in selling, but feel they should not be penalised for storing film for 50 years. “If we list all the found footage we could simply go to an auction house and sell it, which would save some of it, but then it could go anywhere. That seems sad, when there is such a growing interest in celluloid among younger people again. It has become quite fashionable,” said Franklin.

“BBC Studios, the corporation’s separate, commercial arm, have already spent money animating some lost Hartnell episodes, so surely they could spend a little more on restoring the originals and perhaps pay something to these elderly collectors, a few of whom are now unwell, or caring for others.”

Until the recent discoveries, it was believed that a total of 97 Doctor Who episodes were missing from the show’s first six years. Chris Perry, head of the TV archive Kaleidoscope, has recently claimed that he knows of many in private archives that could be returned, with the right assurances.

After all, as Phil Collinson, executive producer of the new colourised episode has attested, the Hartnell adventures are “a masterpiece of 1960s drama” and “literally the foundation stone of all that Doctor Who has become.”

The modern reboot of the show is to return to television screens on 25 November with the first of three special episodes. They feature David Tennant in a return to the role of the Doctor, before his regeneration into Ncuti Gatwa, the character’s 15th incarnation.
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...nd-them-to-bbc





SanDisk Extreme Pro Failures Result From Design and Manufacturing Flaws, Says Researcher

It doesn't look like a firmware fix will be enough.
Anton Shilov

A new report from a data recovery company now points the finger at design and manufacturing flaws as the underlying issue with the recent flood of SanDisk Extreme Pro failures that eventually spurred a class action lawsuit.

It became clear in May that some of Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme Pro 4TB SSDs suffered from sudden data loss; at this point, the company promised a firmware update to owners of the 4TB models. However, the 2TB and 3TB models also suffer from the same issue, and Western Digital did not promise any firmware updates for these drives. Markus Häfele, Managing Director of Attingo, a data recovery company, told FutureZone that the problem lies in hardware, not firmware, which could explain the lack of corrective firmware updates for those models and SanDisk's continued silence about the source of the issues.

A Hardware Problem

Attingo, which has been in the data recovery business for over 25 years, normally sees these failed SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs at least once a week. The problem appears to be rather complex. According to Häfele, the components used in these SSDs are too big for the circuit board, causing weak connections (i.e., high impendence and high temperatures) and making them prone to breaking. He also says that the soldering material used to attach these components is prone to forming bubbles and breaking easily.

It remains unknown whether the cause is cheap solder, the componentry, or both contribute to the issues observed. However, newer revisions of these SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs seem to have been modified with extra epoxy resin to secure the oversized components. This suggests that Western Digital might know about the hardware problems. Nevertheless, these newer models are still failing and are the source of failures, thus sending data recovery service customers to firms like Attingo.

According to the head of Attingo, the issue seems to be affecting multiple product lineups, including both SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD as well as SanDisk Extreme Pro Portable SSD.

A Strange Attitude?

Western Digital's handling of this situation, especially in communicating with customers and the media, can easily be criticized. Our colleagues from The Verge first reported back on August 8 that Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme 3TB SSDs can suddenly lose data, requiring expensive data recovery services to recoup precious files — if you're lucky. As it turns out, one of The Verge's editors lost a video stored on one of these drives and, after a quick investigation, discovered that he is far from alone with this problem. He noted that people continued losing data on 2TB SSDs after May, which is when Western Digital promised a firmware update for the 4TB drives.

To follow up on its investigation, the Verge quizzed Western Digital about the recurring issue with its Extreme Pro SSDs but did not receive a response as of August 19, 2023. The website asked WD why storage that could potentially lose data was suddenly on sale at several retailers and whether the company planned to offer free data recovery services to its customers. The editors also questioned whether Western Digital proactively warned users about the possible issue.

NAND memory-based drives can lose data due to multiple factors. Sometimes, the flash drive itself might have manufacturing defects that can cause data loss. This is more common with low-quality or counterfeit drives, but this is certainly not the case with the SanDisk Extreme Pro products bought from prominent retailers like Amazon. Worse yet, these external SSDs are aimed at professionals.

While one of the issues is that some of Western Digital's SanDisk Extreme Pro suddenly lose data, another is that the company hasn't communicated well about the problems. We have contacted Western Digital once again for comment and await a response.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/sa...to-design-flaw





Singtel-Owned Optus Says Massive Australia Outage was After Software Upgrade

Australian telecoms provider Optus said on Monday that a massive outage which effectively cut off 40% of the country's population and triggered a political firestorm was caused by "changes to routing information" after a "routine software upgrade".

More than 10 million Australians were hit by the 12-hour network blackout at the Singapore Telecommunications-owned (STEL.SI) telco on Nov. 8, triggering fury and frustration among customers and raising wider concerns about the telecommunications infrastructure.

Optus said in a statement that an initial investigation found the company's network was affected by "changes to routing information from an international peering network" early that morning, "following a routine software upgrade".

"These routing information changes propagated through multiple layers in our network and exceeded preset safety levels on key routers which could not handle these," the company said.

"This resulted in those routers disconnecting from the Optus IP Core network to protect themselves."

The project to reconnect the routers was so large that "in some cases (it) required Optus to reconnect or reboot routers physically, requiring the dispatch of people across a number of sites in Australia", it added.

The vast scale of the reconnection project meant the investigation into the cause also "took longer than we would have liked".

The company added that it had "made changes to the network to address this issue so that it cannot occur again".

Reporting by Byron Kaye; Editing by Christopher Cushing
https://www.reuters.com/business/med...de-2023-11-13/





US Pledges Work Toward More Airwaves for Wireless Providers Facing Surging 5G Demand
Todd Shields

• Biden administration releases National Spectrum Strategy
• Need to make better use of airwaves, administration says

The Biden administration on Monday told US agencies to work toward giving up use of some telecommunications airwaves in order to make room for commercial providers facing surging demand for fast 5G services.

The plan, called the National Spectrum Strategy, called for “detailed studies” to be concluded within two years. The document provides for “more transparent, more coordinated” efforts at airwaves management, Lael Brainard, director of the National Economic Council, said.

“We have to make better use of the airwaves we have,” said Alan Davidson, an assistant secretary of commerce who will help lead further steps to fulfill the strategy.

Commercial providers have long sought more access to airwaves occupied by US agencies, saying that government uses at times aren’t efficient and they should share space with new commercial technologies. Spectrum refers to the array of airwaves that carry everything from voice calls to satellite transmissions to signals for industrial machinery.

The CTIA wireless trade group, whose members include AT&T Inc. and Verizon Communications Inc., called in an Oct. 26 blog post for a “bold new national spectrum strategy” to help avert a “looming 5G spectrum shortfall.”

The administration’s strategy outlined on Monday offered several sets of airwaves to be studied. The mix could support a range of uses, including wireless broadband, drones and satellite operations, according to the administration.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...less-providers





Jorge Luis Borges and the Labyrinths of Copyright
Howard Chua-Eoan | Bloomberg

The Argentine Jesuit Jorge Mario Bergoglio used to tell a story about inviting the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges to speak to his class about literature. Bergoglio, who is now Pope Francis, said that the famously agnostic Borges confided that he had promised his very Catholic mother that he’d say the Lord’s Prayer every night.

When I was assigned to write Time magazine’s Person of the Year story about Francis, I decided to check the veracity of the anecdote. After all, Bergoglio told the tale before he was infallible. Borges wasn’t around to verify it — he died in 1986. So, when I was in Buenos Aires in November 2013, I arranged to have tea with the only other person who could certify the story. That was Maria Kodama, Borges’s widow and the guardian not only of his artistic legacy but his copyrights.

As such, she was one of the most powerful people in global literature, controlling the officially sanctioned editions in all languages of his countless short stories and essays. La Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges, which she created in 1988, worked with the Wylie Agency, based in New York and London, to oversee — and police — the publication and use of his works. Judging by a later dinner I had with her, Wylie took very good care of Kodama during her visits to Manhattan. Of Japanese and German descent, she’d met Borges late in his life. Nearly 40 years his junior, she’d been his student and absorbed his fascination with early English and Anglo-Saxon literature. By then, he was already blind. He never saw her face.

Kodama died on March 26 of this year without designating an heir. So, who was in charge of Borges estate then? If there was no one, would the Argentine government take over for the remaining years before his works passed into the public domain? That would be 2056.

As it happily turned out, government bureaucrats wouldn’t inherit the Borges legacy. But in the weeks between Kodama’s death and a court decision in Buenos Aires, book agents, authors, publishers and lawyers anxiously reviewed cross-border copyright laws — rules that were set in the late 19th century with the help of l’immortel Victor Hugo. To some extent about a century later, they’d be influenced by Sonny Bono, the singer-turned-US congressman who used to be married to the pop culture icon Cher.

In the mid-19th century, professional “listeners” would attend theatrical performances and transcribe from memory the melodies of new operas, which would then be published and sold to the burgeoning middle classes across Europe, who wanted sheet music for the pianos they could finally afford. Popular novels and short stories, while protected within national borders, would be translated in a rush and published at will at printing presses abroad. Hugo — probably the most ripped-off author of the time — spearheaded the multilateral Berne Convention of 1886, which apart from setting continent- and eventually worldwide norms, would establish that the heirs of an author, playwright or composer would hold the rights to his or her works until 50 years after the creator’s death.

That duration would later be extended to 70 years by the US and most other countries — though America would not accede to the Berne conventions until 1989. Washington would also pass the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It was named for the entertainer who first sponsored the bill before he died in a January 1998 skiing accident. It became law in December of that year and stipulated that 95 years had to pass before “work for hire” (novels, cartoons, music et al) entered the public domain — covering everything from the year 1923 onwards. Thus, Walt Disney’s “Steamboat Willie” (the animated debut of Mickey Mouse) becomes a commercial free-for-all next year. (Bono wouldn’t have been happy with all this. His widow Mary, who succeeded to his congressional seat, said he wanted copyright to extend in perpetuity.)

I can see an eventual legal challenge when a recording artist outlives the 95-year guarantee that comes with a work’s creation. More practically, however, none of these rules really deal with the complexities of digital publishing. Indeed, the Berne convention is trapped in its own Borgesian labyrinth because its rules forbid reforms that might contradict the original intent of the agreement.

The slew of licensing requirements that have emerged from Berne is particularly unhelpful in a world where speed of dissemination is key. And while the 95- and 70-year durations may be comforting to some heirs, you have to pity the poor authors who don’t have heirs. Are their potentially valuable works then thrown into the equivalent of a literary potters’ field? Are they then at the mercy of academicians yet unborn who must might sort through dusty shelves of libraries to rediscover their writing? Wait, what are libraries? If a book isn’t digital, does it even exist? What would Borges say about a cosmos where words have become dotty?

In the Argentine immortal’s case, the three daughters and two sons of Kodama’s younger brother — who predeceased her — came forward to press their claim to the estate. An Argentine court recognized their rights last week. Her sobrinos reportedly have an excellent relationship with the Borges foundation. Wylie says it will continue to represent the author’s oeuvre. All remains status quo with the Borgesian legacy.

I’ve left you hanging. What did Kodama say about the pope’s claim back in 2013 when I first met her? She said the pope’s account wasn’t quite the whole story. Her husband did indeed make the promise to his mother. But he didn’t say the prayer in Latin (Pater noster qui es in caelis) or Spanish (Padre nuestro que estás en los cielos). She said he would recite it in Anglo-Saxon (Fæder ūre, ðū ðe eart on heofonum). He kept his promise but in his own way.

Kodama was ferociously loyal to Borges’s memory but left her own strong impression and mystique on everyone who came to her seeking him. At our 2013 tea in Buenos Aires, she politely but sternly put an end to questions by my colleague Hilary Burke that she felt would give clues to her exact age. “I’m not going to help you with that,” she smiled. As post-mortem court papers would reveal, Maria was 86 when she died, the same age as Borges, who passed away in 1986. The Berne copyright convention was signed in 1886 — a preternatural, numerical resonance in this labyrinthine journey through vanishing libraries.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...8ec_story.html





US Privacy Groups Urge Senate Not to Ram Through NSA Spying Powers

An effort to reauthorize a controversial US surveillance program by attaching it to a must-pass spending bill has civil liberties advocates calling foul.
Chuck Schumer

Some of the United States’ largest civil liberties groups are urging Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer not to pursue a short-term extension of the Section 702 surveillance program slated to sunset on December 31.

The more than 20 groups—Demand Progress, the Brennan Center for Justice, American Civil Liberties Union, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice among them—oppose plans that would allow the program to continue temporarily by amending “must-pass” legislation, such as the bill needed now to avert a government shutdown by Friday, or the National Defense Authorization Act, annual legislation set to dictate $886 billion in national security spending across the Pentagon and US Department of Energy in 2024.

“In its current form, [Section 702] is dangerous to our liberties and our democracy, and it should not be renewed for any length of time without robust debate, an opportunity for amendment, and—ultimately—far-reaching reforms,” a letter from the groups to Schumer says. It adds that any attempt to prolong the program by rushed amendment “would demonstrate blatant disregard for the civil liberties and civil rights of the American people.”

The letter, which was first reported by Bloomberg Law, cited reporting by WIRED and CQ Roll Call. Schumer did not respond to a request for comment.

As WIRED has previously reported, surveillance under the 702 program may technically continue for another six months, regardless of whether Congress reauthorizes it by the end of December. The program was last certified by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in April 2023 for a full year. “Transition procedures” codified in the statute permit surveillance orders to “continue in effect” until they expire.

The 702 program is controversial for its collection of communications of “US persons.” The program legally targets roughly a quarter million foreigners each year, gathering the content of their text messages, emails, and phone calls, but collaterally intercepts an unknown but presumably large amount of American communications as well. This interception takes place with the compelled cooperation of US telecommunications companies that handle internet traffic at stages along global networks.

The program includes procedures for intercepting, storing, and querying the information in ways that are designed to “minimize” the odds of Americans’ rights being violated, but the rules are also subject to various exemptions. A top criticism of the 702 program is that it permits the Federal Bureau of Investigation to access the calls and emails of US citizens without a warrant and without evidence they’ve committed a crime.

The 702 program was last reauthorized in 2018 following a similarly contentious debate. The program currently permits the National Security Agency to target foreigners under an array of circumstances related to counterterrorism, espionage, and nuclear proliferation, though is also prominently used today to investigate and combat cybercrime and drug trafficking.

On November 7, a bipartisan, bicameral coalition of US lawmakers introduced a comprehensive privacy bill called the Government Surveillance Reform Act, led in part by veteran Senate Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden. Among other provisions aimed at restricting warrantless surveillance and the collection of location data by police, the bill would impose several reforms of the 702 program, ensuring the FBI obtained a warrant before querying the database using “US Person” identifiers.

The GSRA is widely supported by the civil liberties groups whose letter advises Schumer against a short-term extension of Section 702.

“I plan to vote against any continuing resolution that extends FISA Section 702 without meaningful reforms," Wyden tells WIRED. "Massive surveillance programs that violate Americans’ privacy should not be rushed through without reform or review. Congress must have a real debate about reforming warrantless government surveillance of Americans. Therefore, the administration and congressional leaders should listen to the overwhelming bipartisan coalition that supports adopting commonsense protections for Americans’ privacy and extending key national security authorities at the same time.”
https://www.wired.com/story/section-...rivacy-letter/





Article 45 Will Roll Back Web Security by 12 Years
Jacob Hoffman-Andrews

The EU is poised to pass a sweeping new regulation, eIDAS 2.0. Buried deep in the text is Article 45, which returns us to the dark ages of 2011, when certificate authorities (CAs) could collaborate with governments to spy on encrypted traffic—and get away with it. Article 45 forbids browsers from enforcing modern security requirements on certain CAs without the approval of an EU member government. Which CAs? Specifically the CAs that were appointed by the government, which in some cases will be owned or operated by that selfsame government. That means cryptographic keys under one government’s control could be used to intercept HTTPS communication throughout the EU and beyond.

This is a catastrophe for the privacy of everyone who uses the internet, but particularly for those who use the internet in the EU. Browser makers have not announced their plans yet, but it seems inevitable that they will have to create two versions of their software: one for the EU, with security checks removed, and another for the rest of the world, with security checks intact. We’ve been down this road before, when export controls on cryptography meant browsers were released in two versions: strong cryptography for US users, and weak cryptography for everyone else. It was a fundamentally inequitable situation and the knock-on effects set back web security by decades.

The current text of Article 45 requires that browsers trust CAs appointed by governments, and prohibits browsers from enforcing any security requirements on those CAs beyond what is approved by ETSI. In other words, it sets an upper bar on how much security browsers can require of CAs, rather than setting a lower bar. That in turn limits how vigorously browsers can compete with each other on improving security for their users.

This upper bar on security may even ban browsers from enforcing Certificate Transparency, an IETF technical standard that ensures a CA’s issuing history can be examined by the public in order to detect malfeasance. Banning CT enforcement makes it much more likely for government spying to go undetected.

Why is this such a big deal? The role of a CA is to bootstrap encrypted HTTPS communication with websites by issuing certificates. The CA’s core responsibility is to match web site names with customers, so that the operator of a website can get a valid certificate for that website, but no one else can. If someone else gets a certificate for that website, they can use it to intercept encrypted communications, meaning they can read private information like emails.

We know HTTPS encryption is a barrier to government spying because of the NSA’s famous “SSL added and removed here” note. We also know that misissued certificates have been used to spy on traffic in the past. For instance, in 2011 DigiNotar was hacked and the resulting certificates used to intercept emails for people in Iran. In 2015, CNNIC issued an intermediate certificate used in intercepting traffic to a variety of websites. Each CA was subsequently distrusted.

Distrusting a CA is just one end of a spectrum of technical interventions browsers can take to improve the security of their users. Browsers operate “root programs” to monitor the security and trustworthiness of CAs they trust. Those root programs impose a number of requirements varying from “how must key material be secured” to “how must validation of domain name control be performed” to “what algorithms must be used for certificate signing.” As one example, certificate security rests critically on the security of the hash algorithm used. The SHA-1 hash algorithm, published in 1993, was considered not secure by 2005. NIST disallowed its use in 2013. However, CAs didn't stop using it until 2017, and that only happened because one browser made SHA-1 removal a requirement of its root program. After that, the other browsers followed suit, along with the CA/Browser Forum.

The removal of SHA-1 illustrates the backwards security incentives for CAs. A CA serves two audiences: their customers, who get certificates from them, and the rest of the internet, who trusts them to provide security. When it comes time to raise the bar on security, a CA will often hear from their customers that upgrading is difficult and expensive, as it sometimes is. That motivates the CA to drag their feet and keep offering the insecure technology. But the CA’s other audience, the population of global internet users, needs them to continually improve security. That’s why browser root programs need to (and do) require a steadily increasing level of security of CAs. The root programs advocate for the needs of their users so that they can provide a more secure product. The security of a browser’s root program is, in a very real way, a determining factor in the security of the browser itself.

That’s why it’s so disturbing that eIDAS 2.0 is poised to prevent browsers from holding CAs accountable. By all means, raise the bar for CA security, but permanently lowering the bar means less accountability for CAs and less security for internet users everywhere.

The text isn't final yet, but is subject to approval behind closed doors in Brussels on November 8.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/1...urity-12-years





Disney is Shutting Down All Cable Channels in Asia. U.S. Networks Could Be Next
Shelby Brown

Disney further paring down its international cable operations could signal big changes for its networks in the U.S.

The media giant is set to pull the plug this year on its remaining linear TV channels in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea. Just last month, Disney shut down cable operations in Vietnam, pulling The National Geographic channel, Nat Geo Wild, and Baby TV, according to VnExpress. Other at-risk channels include Star Chinese Movies, Star Chinese Channel, Star Movies, and Star World. Disney is also in talks to sell off its India assets.

The move comes after Disney struck a distribution deal with Charter Communications’ Spectrum that let it drop eight of its channels: Baby TV, Disney Junior, Disney XD, Freeform, FXM, FXX, Nat Geo Wild and Nat Geo Mundo.

That sets a precedent for other cable and pay-TV companies when seeking a new distribution deal with Disney. If the Mickey Mouse company wants to increase the cost for high-flying networks like ESPN, it may have to give up some of the smaller channels in exchange. It’s a reality Disney CEO Bob Iger acknowledged on the company’s earnings conference call last week.

“Having the opportunity to consolidate on the channel side is a good thing,” Iger said.

Taken all together, and the shutdown of those channels in Asia might just be the start of a trend, and not a one-off move.

Disney wasn’t immediately available for comment.

Disney is on a tight deadline to improve its profitability and bring its streaming services into the black as two of its key services, Hulu and Disney+, continued to combine for operating losses of $420 million in the fiscal fourth quarter. One way to cut its costs is to refocus its resources on streaming and moving away from lesser-used TV networks.

This also comes as Disney looks to introduce an integrated app that folds Hulu on-demand content into Disney+. A Hulu/Disney+ bundle could bring in as many as 150,000 subscribers over the next year and generate millions in revenue, people familiar with the situation told The Wall Street Journal.

Disney, which also faces pressure from an activist investor, has seemingly opened the door to bigger changes. Iger said last week that he was in talks to potentially partner with a big tech company on ESPN. He said earlier in the summer that TV holdings like ABC “may not be core” to Disney’s future, which prompted Byron Allen, CEO of Allen Media Group, to make a $10 billion bid for the assets. Disney, however, later said it wasn’t ready to sell.

But even if Disney isn’t making that big of a change, consolidating and removing some of its cable networks — especially in the wake of its Spectrum deal — seems highly plausible.
https://cordcuttersnews.com/disney-i...could-be-next/
















Until next week,

- js.



















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