Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 7th, ’17

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002


































"Mate, If someone rang me and said, 'I'm going to put one of these up my arsehole,' I'd say don't. I've heard of people saying they've had some of these small phones on charge and they've blown up. But it won't make a big explosion." – Adam


"I don't know how to break it to Adam that one of my unwritten—until now—life rules is that it's best to avoid any sort of explosion, big or otherwise, in the ass area. I'd say that's a fairly straightforward rule to live by. That said, I might keep my buttphone within easy reach: I illegally downloaded a lot of music back in the day, and you never know how things might pan out." – Peter Robinson


"The data confirms that someone was using bots to post a lot of anti-net neutrality comments." – Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai


































Early Edition



October 7th, 2017
















'Terrified' 60-Year-Old Woman Told to Pay Up for Illegally Downloading Porn

Copyright-infringement notices demanding cash cause anxiety, says federal report
Sophia Harris

Sophia Harris has worked as a CBC video journalist across the country, covering everything from the start of the annual lobster fishery in Yarmouth, N.S., to farming in Saskatchewan. She now has found a good home at the business unit in Toronto where she produces for national TV news and writes and shoots and edits video for CBC.ca. Twitter: @sophiaharrisCBC

An anti-piracy company has informed the 60-year-old that her internet account was used to illegally download pornography, and that she could wind up in court if she doesn't pay a settlement fee.

"I've never done porno downloads in my life," says Debra, who lives in Ontario and has asked CBC News to withhold her last name.

"I'm terrified. I'm worried someone's going to come after me, I'm going to have a giant lawsuit on my hands."

"Threatening" copyright-infringement notices asking for settlement fees are creating "consumer anxiety" and "could lead to abuses," says an internal 2016 federal government report.

It also states that such notices aren't in line with the government's piracy notice program, which is meant to be educational, not punitive.

However, almost a year after the report was written, the threatening notices continue.

"The inaction is really difficult to understand," says Michael Geist, a University of Ottawa professor and internet law expert. He obtained the government report through an access to information request.

"We've got thousands of Canadians who are being abused through these notices."

'I'm not sleeping'

In 2015, the government started requiring that all internet providers forward copyright-infringement notices to customers suspected of illegally downloading content like TV shows and movies.

Some anti-piracy companies, working on behalf of production studios, have added to the notices a demand for a settlement fee. It typically amounts to hundreds of dollars, and recipients are told they could face legal action and bigger fines if they don't pay up.

The thing is, those companies don't know the suspect's actual identity, only the IP address linked to the illegal download.

Also, no one is obligated to pay a settlement fee. The government and internet providers have tried to spread that message, but some people are still unsure of their rights.

Illegal downloading

Downloading illegally? You might get an email notice warning you to stop, and it could ask you for money. (Getty Images)

In August, Debra got her first email notice informing her that if she didn't pay a settlement fee for illegally downloading a porn video, she could face legal fines of up to $20,000.

She says she's innocent, but out of confusion and fear she paid a settlement fee of $257.40.

This week, she got another email accusing her of downloading five more porn videos.

"I'm not sleeping," says Debra, who refuses to pay more fees and fears the repercussions. "I have depression already and this is sending me over the edge."

CBC News spoke with the Canadian anti-piracy company that sent the emails, Canipre. It claims someone in Debra's home downloaded the videos.

Debra says her husband doesn't even know how to do illegal downloads, and no one else has access to her internet account. She thinks perhaps someone hacked her Wi-Fi.

"How long is this going to terrorize me?" she says. "I'm a good Canadian citizen."

It's not about the money

The government report said that even people wrongly accused of copyright infringement may feel compelled to pay the settlement fee.

The document was penned by a senior policy adviser for Innovation, Science and Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains.

It noted that the department had received calls from anxious Canadians about requests for payments. It also said that government officials had informed stakeholders early on that sending letters demanding fees was not consistent with the intent of the notice system.

"The goal of the regime is to discourage online infringement," stated the report.

Hollywood still telling internet pirates to pay up

'Shocked' grandmother on hook for game download

CBC News asked the department why, despite all the concerns, it continues to allow piracy notices demanding cash.

The department responded that it "discourages" the request for settlement fees. It also said it will review the notice system during a coming parliamentary review of the Copyright Act, expected late this year or early next year.

In the meantime, it said it continues to monitor the notice system "and to educate consumers and engage with stakeholders to address concerns raised by Canadians over threatening notices."

'An easy fix'

Canipre's managing director, Barry Logan, says the government has never contacted him about notices asking for settlement fees.

He declined to do an interview on the issue. However, last year he told CBC News that Canipre had collected about $500,000 in settlement fees and that the notices it sends out aren't breaking any rules.

"Every single one of these claims can become a litigation at any time," said Logan.

Piracy television pirate
The federal government says the goal of the piracy notice regime is 'to discourage online infringement,' not to collect cash. (CBC)

Geist contends the government could easily put to rest concerns over the fee issue by clarifying what anti-piracy companies can and cannot say in their notices.

"This is a known problem that the government internally itself recognizes," he says. "There is an easy fix for this."
http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/copy...porn-1.4313769





UK Says WhatsApp Allows Paedophiles to Operate Beyond the Reach of the Law

British interior minister Amber Rudd said on Tuesday that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption communication services allowed paedophiles and other criminals to operate beyond the reach of the law.

“We also know that end to end encryption services like Whatsapp, are being used by paedophiles,” Rudd told party activists in the northern English city of Manchester.

“I do not accept it is right that companies should allow them and other criminals to operate beyond the reach of law enforcement,” Rudd said. “We must require the industry to move faster and more aggressively. They have the resources and there must be greater urgency.”

Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; editing by William James
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-br...-idUKKCN1C8169





Supreme Court Won’t Hear Kim Dotcom’s Civil Forfeiture Case

Dotcom's lawyer: "It is a bad day for due process and international treaties."
Cyrus Farivar

Kim Dotcom’s civil forfeiture case will not be heard before the Supreme Court this term, America’s highest court ruled on Monday.

The civil forfeiture case was brought 18 months after 2012 American criminal charges related to alleged copyright infringement against Dotcom and his now-shuttered company, Megaupload. In the forfeiture case, prosecutors specifically outlined why the New Zealand seizure of Dotcom’s assets on behalf of the American government was valid. Seized items include millions of dollars in various seized bank accounts in Hong Kong and New Zealand, the Dotcom mansion, several luxury cars, four jet skis, two 108-inch TVs, three 82-inch TVs, a $10,000 watch, and a photograph by Olaf Mueller worth over $100,000.

Since Dotcom was arrested in January 2012, he has successfully resisted extradition to the United States and remains in New Zealand free on bail.

While Dotcom and his attorneys challenged the asset seizure, the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in August 2016 that because Dotcom has never come to the United States to face the criminal charges against him or challenge the seizure, "fugitive disentitlement" applies. This is the legal theory positing that when a defendant has fled the country to evade prosecution—or when the person never appeared before an American court—he or she cannot make a claim to the assets that the government wants to seize under civil forfeiture.

"Because the statute must apply to people with no reason to come to the United States other than to face charges, a 'sole' or 'principal' purpose test cannot stand," the 4th Circuit concluded. "The principal reason such a person remains outside the United States will typically be that they live elsewhere. A criminal indictment gives such a person a reason to make the journey, and the statute is aimed at those who resist nevertheless."

However, as the Dotcom legal team argued unsuccessfully both before the 4th Circuit and in its petition to the Supreme Court, American law can’t use its authority to seize assets abroad. Plus, the Dotcom team claims, Dotcom can't be considered a fugitive if he has never set foot in the United States.

"We are disappointed in the denial of the cert petition—it is a bad day for due process and international treaties," Ira Rothken, Dotcom’s chief global counsel, told Ars.

"Kim Dotcom has never been to the United States, is presumed innocent, and is lawfully opposing extradition under the United States-New Zealand Treaty—yet the United States by merely labeling him as a fugitive gets a judgement to take all of his assets with no due process," Rothken said. "The New Zealand and Hong Kong courts, who have authority over the assets, will now need to weigh in on this issue and we are cautiously optimistic that they will take a dim view of the Fugitive Disentitlement Doctrine and oppose US efforts to seize such assets."

Last month, the High Court of New Zealand, the country’s intermediate appellate court, ruled that the entire government spying operation conducted against two of Kim Dotcom’s closest colleagues was not authorized under local law in 2011. That could jeopardize the country's efforts to extradite the two men.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...rfeiture-case/





The War on General-Purpose Computing Turns on the Streaming Media Box Community
Jeremy Malcolm and Mitch Stoltz

For most of the lifetime of Kodi since its release as XMBC in 2002, it was an obscure piece of free software that geeks used to manage their home media collections. But in the past few years, the sale of pre-configured Kodi boxes, and the availability of a range of plugins providing access to streaming media, has seen the software's popularity balloon—and made it the latest target of Hollywood's copyright enforcement juggernaut.

We've seen this in the appearance of streaming media boxes as an enforcement priority in the U.S. Trade Representative's Special 301 Report, in proposals for new legislation targeting the sale of "illicit" media boxes, and in lawsuits that have been brought on both sides of the Atlantic to address the "problem" that media boxes running Kodi, like any Web browser, can be used to access media streams that were not authorized by the copyright holder. We've also seen it in the big TV networks' vehement, sometimes disingenuous opposition to the U.S. law and regulations that mandate effective competition in the cable set-top box market.

The difficulty facing the titans of TV is that since neither those who sell Kodi boxes, nor those who write or host add-ons for the software, are engaging in any unauthorized copying by doing so, cases targeting these parties have to rely on other legal theories. So far several legal theories have been used; one in Europe against sellers of Kodi boxes, one in Canada against the owner of the popular Kodi add-on repository TVAddons, and two in the United States against TVAddons and a plugin developer.

European Filmspeler Case

In Europe, the case Stichting Brein v Jack Frederik Wullems (Filmspeler) was brought against a seller of Kodi boxes that came pre-installed with third-party plugins that were configured to access copyright-infringing streams. Although the seller was not engaged in any unauthorized reproduction of copyright works himself, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in April this year that because the boxes were configured with plugins that linked to copyright-infringing content, the defendant was infringing the copyright holder's exclusive power to control "communication to the public" of a copyright work.

The finding that the seller had engaged in a "communication to the public" is, to be charitable, a stretch; especially because recital 27 of Europe's Copyright Directive states that "the mere provision of physical facilities for enabling or making a communication does not in itself amount to a communication."

As best as we can explain it, the court reasoned that the provision of the pre-configured Kodi boxes was, in practical terms, a necessary step enabling end users to access the copyright-infringing steams, since these streams were not readily accessible other then by use of Kodi configured with a plugin to access them. The judgment built upon an earlier bad decision that outlawed merely hyperlinking to copyright-infringing content if the party who posted the link knew that the content was infringing; and that they would be presumed to have such knowledge if the hyperlink was posted for financial gain.

Canadian TVAddons Case

The second legal theory that has been used against the Kodi community is that helping people get add-ons that can infringe copyright amounts to an inducement or authorization of users' copyright infringements. This claim has been used to bring complaints and threats against add-on developers, resulting in several of them shutting down, and also forms the basis of a lawsuit against the host of a repository of such add-ons, TVAddons, brought by Canadian telecommunications companies Bell, Videotron, Rogers and TVA.

The lawsuit caused controversy recently when in a shocking abuse of legal process, the plaintiffs executed an Anton Piller order (a form of injunction somewhat like a private search warrant) to raid the home of the TVAddons site administrator, where during a terrifying sixteen hour ordeal he was interrogated by company representatives who threatened to prosecute him. They later seized his personal computer, domain names and social media accounts. A Canadian court subsequently vacated the injunction, ruling that the TV networks' "true purpose was to destroy the livelihood of the Defendant, deny him the [] resources to finance a defense," and to engage in discovery without "procedural safeguards." However, the networks appealed, the lawsuit continues, and TVAddons has not recovered its domain names and equipment (it has continued operation at a new domain name).

It is undisputed that the vast majority of the Kodi add-ons hosted at TVAddons at the time of the seizure were not infringing. Although some add-ons facilitate the users' access to copyright-infringing streams, there is a strong case that no wrong has been committed by TVAddons for merely hosting them online for download. Canadian law, like American law, provides web hosts with a safe harbor making them “exempt from liability when they act strictly as intermediaries in communication, caching and hosting activities.”

The lawsuit against TVAddons seeks to skirt that important protection by arguing that by merely hosting, distributing and promoting Kodi add-ons, the TVAddons administrator is liable for inducing or authorizing copyright infringements later committed using those add-ons. This argument, were it to succeed, would create new uncertainty and risk for distributors of any software that could be used to engage in copyright infringement.

American Lawsuit Against ZemTV and TVAddons

In a counterpart to the Canadian case, Dish Network has sued the developer of an add-on called ZemTV for direct infringement of the streaming media sources that can be accessed through that plugin, and TVAddons for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement, seeking awards of statutory damages against both. In this respect, American laws differs somewhat from Canadian law. This week, Dish amended its complaint to name the individuals it alleges to be the operators of ZemTV and TVAddons. While ZemTV's operators could be liable for infringement if they actually retransmitted broadcast TV channels without permission, the lawsuit's claims against TVAddons are weak. While the complaint claims that TVAddons's operator had "actual or constructive knowledge of [] infringing activity," and that he "intentionally induced ZemTV users to display the programs," the complaint doesn't say what, if anything, TVAddons did besides providing access to the ZemTV plugin amongst hundreds of other Kodi plugins. That doesn't add up to contributory infringement (or inducement).

Dish's attempt to plead vicarious infringement seems to be lacking, as well. Vicarious copyright liability requires that the defendant have the "right and ability to supervise" the conduct of the direct infringer, and benefit financially. Dish claims only that the TVAddons site made ZemTV "available for download." That's not enough to show an ability to supervise.

Despite the weakness of its claims, Dish, like the Canadian broadcasters, has ample resources to throw into litigation. Hopefully, TVAddons will have its day in court.

Conclusion

These lawsuits by big TV incumbents seem to have a few goals: to expand the scope of secondary copyright infringement yet again, to force major Kodi add-on distributors off of the Internet, and to smear and discourage open source, freely configurable media players by focusing on the few bad actors in that ecosystem. The courts should reject these expansions of copyright liability, and TV networks should not target neutral platforms and technologies for abusive lawsuits.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/0...-box-community





How Nvidia Built an Almost-Perfect Streaming Device for Cord Cutters

New updates add Google Assistant, Smartthings Hub
Janko Roettgers

The market for media streaming devices is a crowded one. Roku, Amazon, Google and Apple are offering consumers a plethora of pucks, sticks and boxes designed to bring Netflix, Hulu and more to consumers’ TVs. However, a small but growing group of cord cutters and digital media enthusiasts is instead swearing on a device produced by an unlikely competitor: Graphics card maker Nvidia and its Shield TV set-top, which just received some major updates.

When Nvidia first introduced the Shield 2015, it was primarily viewed as a slimmed-down game console, capable of streaming video games directly from the cloud. The device, which initially sold in two configurations for $199 and $299 respectively, had little in common with inexpensive media streamers from the likes of Roku and Amazon. For one, it shipped with a full-fledged game controller in the box. And then there were the high-powered innards, which were also more closely resembling a game console than a cheap streaming box.

“We built a custom processor,” said Shield general manager Ali Kani during a recent interview with Variety. Nvidia also decided to put 3GB of RAM into the device, and shipped the higher-end version with an integrated 500 GB hard drive. And the Shield hits the top of the specs in almost any other measure as well: It streams 4K and HDR, and supports Dolby Atmos surround sound. “We over-invested,” in the hardware, admitted Kani.

But the company also had an inkling that media may be a big opportunity as well. “The TV hadn’t changed that much,” said Kani. Nvidia’s hunch was that this would quickly change if it would give developers a full-fledged app store, and the ability to run powerful apps in a multitasking environment. In other words: Make it possible to run services 24/7, and not just when a user decides to open or close a streaming app.

“There is gonna be a need for computing power,” said Kani. “You need these specs, you need this performance.”

In the case of the Shield, this “build it, and they will come” approach actually worked. Plex teamed up with Nvidia to build a special version of its software for the streamer that works both as a server and a client, doing away with the need to run a separate PC or home server to manage one’s media collection — a first for the media center app maker.

Plex has since added more functionality to its software, including support for live TV and DVR features. Now, the Shield can be turned into a full-fledged DVR with the addition of little more than a USB TV tuner. Other companies have since followed suit and also embraced the Shield as a DVR solution. This includes Tablo, a company that’s best known for its DVRs for cord cutters, which is now selling a tuner adapter to bring live and recorded over-the-air television to the Tablo as well.

This week, Nvidia added another major update to the Shield, rolling out a software update that brings Google’s Assistant to the device. Users can now voice search across apps, start direct playback of shows with voice commands, query their calendars, ask for weather, traffic, photos from their Google Photos albums, factoids, jokes and much more. The device even works in concert with other Google Chromecast-compatible hardware, so you can ask it to start playing music in another room of the house.

To be fair, the Assistant integration isn’t perfect yet. A brief test on a device loaned to Variety by Nvidia revealed a few shortcomings, including missing integrations with some of the apps available on the device.

Moreover, Google Assistant continues to offer different sets of features on your phone, on a Google Home and now on an Android TV device like the Nvidia Shield. Some of that is to be expected, as each of these devices comes with its own strengths and weaknesses, but it’s hard to understand why one wouldn’t be able to do something as simple as set an alarm on a TV device.

Then there’s the issue of the microphone. Nvidia chose not to integrate a far-field mic into the Shield itself, in part because more than half of its users stow it away in their TV furniture. Instead, the company integrated a mic in the remote that needs to be activated with the press off a button.

And starting this week, it also turned the Shield’s game controller into an always-on mic, capable of responding to the obligatory “Okay Google” wake word. However, the game controller’s mic is optimized for distances ranging from 3-6 feet, so you may not be able to use it from across the room.

For that Amazon Echo-like use case, Nvidia had announced its own hardware solution at CES. The Nvidia Spot, a $50 microphone and speaker combination, was supposed to bring far-field voice to the Shield, and potentially to any room in your house. However, ten months later, the Spot is still nowhere to be found.

“We are still working on it,” said Kani. He wouldn’t comment on whether the company would release the product before the end of the year or delay it to next year, but admitted that it wasn’t ready for a release: “We are not there yet.”

The company is close to shipping another previously-announced Shield feature. It is going to add support for Samsung’s Smartthings technology to the streamer, effectively turning it into a hub for the smart home. In a demo, Kani showed how this will make it possible to control a thermostat, connected light bulbs and even a Sonos speaker with simple voice commands with the Shield.

What’s more, consumers can connect multiple devices together, and change the temperature, light and music as soon as a sensor notices the garage door opening. The Shield will be able to control Wifi-connected devices at no additional cost, and the company will sell a small USB adapter to add support for additional wireless standards commonly used by internet-connected appliances for around $30.

A DVR, smart home support and advanced voice control: Much of this functionality goes far beyond what other streaming devices can do. Or, as Kani put it: “A Roku doesn’t have the specs to do these things.” And with the Google Assistant on board, the Shield may finally be ready to appeal to more mainstream audiences as well. “We clearly were the best streamer for games,” said Kani. “Now, we feel we are the best streamer.”

Nvidia hasn’t released any sales numbers for the Shield yet, but it’s clear that Roku’s and Amazon’s streamers as well as Google’s Chromecast are still a lot more popular. These devices are also significantly cheaper. Roku’s streaming hardware starts at $25, while the cheapest Shield sells for $179. Only Apple sells its Apple TV in the same price range.

Still, Kani seemed optimistic that ultimately, horsepower and versatility will win. “Streaming is changing,” he said.
http://variety.com/2017/digital/news...nt-1202575164/





Katzenberg’s Big Ask: $2 Billion for Short-Form Video Project
Andrew Ross Sorkin

When Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook and went looking for investors, his so-called first round of financing was for $1 million. When Travis Kalanick sought financing for Uber, he persuaded investors to ante up $1.25 million. Reed Hastings of Netflix raised $2.2 million.

Jeffrey Katzenberg’s idea of fund-raising is on a very different scale.

Mr. Katzenberg, the longtime Hollywood executive and co-founder of DreamWorks Animation, is trying to raise $2 billion for his new television start-up. That is likely to be the largest first round of financing in history for a digital media company that, at least at the moment, is only a concept swirling around in his head.

The huge price tag has not stopped virtually every large media and technology company — Apple, CBS, Disney, Google, Spotify and Verizon among them — from taking meetings with Mr. Katzenberg. And several Wall Street private equity firms are circling. The Hollywood parlor game of who is going to invest first has already begun. He is looking for big checks.

Mr. Katzenberg, 66, is convinced that his new product, called New TV, can upend the format of television for mobile devices. He wants to create the next-generation version of HBO or Netflix, purpose-built for viewing on phones and tablets with short-form content of premium quality — think of “Game of Thrones” as if each episode had a narrative arc of 10 minutes.

He wants to create big, expensive productions at a cost of $100,000 a minute. (For the sake of comparison, a highly produced minute of programming on YouTube might cost $10,000.) And he wants to attract A-list talent both in front of and behind the camera. That’s one reason the financing ask is so high: Hollywood heavyweights cannot be convinced to do 10-minute video snippets unless they are paid what they are accustomed to being paid.

Mr. Katzenberg’s hunch about the way a huge swath of consumers will watch television in the future is, in all likelihood, right. The number of teenagers and young adults who have their nose pressed to their mobile devices watching video content is startling. Globally, 72 percent of all video is viewed on a mobile device, according to Ooyala, a video platform provider.

The question is whether his idea is ahead of its time. And whether he can find the right business model to support such expensive programing.

Mr. Katzenberg is a realist. “We need $2 billion. That’s a high bar,” he said. And he acknowledges that the financial details still need to be worked out. It’s daunting. He needs to build an instant library of content — and a big one.

Mr. Katzenberg’s gamble is being taken seriously because of his long history of success and his provocative thesis about the current television model. “The design and the architecture of the storytelling fit the business paradigm, not the other way around,” he explained, suggesting that shows were made in the format of a half-hour or an hour for business reasons and do not make sense in the world of mobile devices and streaming.

He also took a shot at all the advertising on network programs. “I would actually make the argument that one of the challenges for network TV has been that they’ve actually busted the form by asking people to watch 19 minutes of commercial time inside of 60 minutes,” he said. “Thirty-two percent of your watch time is watching commercials.”

Instead, Mr. Katzenberg is hoping to create a premium network that will probably rely on a combination of subscription fees and advertising — à la Spotify. He does not believe he will put television companies out of business; in fact, he needs them as partners and believes they can live side by side.

But Mr. Katzenberg does not want to simply create a studio that specializes in short-form storytelling; he wants to create a platform for it. He is hoping that many of the big television networks both invest and produce content for the service.

“This is literally a true moment in time here in which we’re going to create a new form, a new format, a new platform, new content and we’re going to supply that content and we’re going to let them,” Mr. Katzenberg said of the big networks, “grab what ultimately will be the biggest value here by owning the platform.”

Mr. Katzenberg last year sold DreamWorks Animation to Comcast for $3.8 billion. He said that one of the greatest revelations for him over the last year as he developed the idea for his company, called WndrCo, was that “content” was not the holy grail.

“We’ve all grown up with this idea that content is king,” he said, explaining his rationale for trying to create a new service rather than simply creating the content itself. “And I realized, it actually isn’t. Content is the king maker, it’s not the king. The king is the platform. HBO is the king. Netflix is the king. Spotify is the king.”

When I mentioned to Mr. Katzenberg that well-heeled competitors like Apple and Facebook are getting into the television business and may seek to innovate the form, he was unfazed.

“This idea that Apple and Facebook and YouTube are now coming into Hollywood with these billions of dollars and are in fact going to change the enterprise of television is actually wrong,” he said. “They’re not doing anything new or different or unique. It simply broadens the offering and it may broaden the destinations that you can go to, but in fact that fragmentation at some point is going to implode.”

Mr. Katzenberg believes he is offering something that will start the next leg of growth in the industry.

Executives who have seen Mr. Katzenberg’s plan, including Robert A. Iger, the chief executive of Disney, and Leslie Moonves of CBS, have expressed enthusiasm for the project.

Still, there are skeptics. Several media executives pointed to Nielsen data showing that traditional television still accounts for the bulk of the video viewing among people over 18 years old in the United States. (The country is far behind other nations in video mobile viewing.)

And of course there is the question of what kind of content consumers want to watch on a phone. So far, most short-form content has been relatively cheap to produce, because of lower production quality, and customers have willingly watched it. Who’s to say they are craving HBO-level production quality? And many viewers are happy to watch Netflix on a mobile device and press pause on their favorite show or movie and return to it later.

But Mr. Katzenberg says that to think about it like that is backward. There is always an opportunity to create a premium product, he said, and there will be “a pretty meaningful subset of people who would actually pay for it.”

To Mr. Katzenberg, the idea is too obvious not to pursue. “You have an installed base of one and a half billion people who watch 45 minutes of video on a smartphone every day,” he said. “So this is where I say to you, ‘They’re drinking water. We’re going to give it to them in a bottle.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/b...on-mobile.html





Dropbox Redesigns Itself as a Hipster File Sharing Service
Natt Garun

Dropbox announced a redesign today that introduces a whole lot more color into its former white-and-blue aesthetic. The new look also includes a flatter box logo that makes it look less like an actual box and more like planes of surface (or an... even more abstract box, for the non-artistic types.)

The new design is the company’s first major revamp in 10 years, and it’s a stark contrast to some of its biggest file sharing competitors like Box, Google Drive, and iCloud — all of which incorporates some version of blue in their logos. The update branches Dropbox out as if it’s the cool kids of file sharing, with a new, squashed-up typeface called Sharp Grotesk to go along with it.

In an interview with AdWeek, Dropbox says it’s hoping the new color combinations help it stand out more among the crowd, and aims to give a “nod to the creativity of our users.” The look and feel is now closer to Adobe than, say, Microsoft OneDrive. Dropbox says the logo colors “can change based on the situation,” though I am unclear on exactly what situation I would need my file sharing service to be a little more mint green than crimson red.

Though the logo is new, most of the web and app UI remains visually similar; it’s still mostly white with blue and grey accents. The new color combinations are more likely to be seen on marketing campaigns and ads than actual interface changes. The company noted to AdWeek that it will be rolling out more ad campaigns “strategically placed in cities and neighborhoods where creative people tend to live and work,” so expect to see more funky hues from Dropbox in the hipster city nearest you.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/3/1...-new-ui-colors





Restoring Those Old Liner Notes in Music’s Digital Era
Ben Sisario

Two decades into the era of online music, streaming has been hailed as the industry’s savior, but a complaint from the earliest days of digital services persists: What happened to the liner notes?

Much of the material that once accompanied an album has long since been stripped away — not just the lyrics and thank-you lists, but also essays, artwork and even basic details like songwriting credits — leaving listeners with little more on their screens to look at but a song title and a postage-stamp-size cover image.

One company, TunesMap, wants to return much of that lost information, and more, through an interactive display that, when cued by a song playing on a streaming service, will present a feed of videos, photographs and links to related material. After a decade of development, TunesMap is scheduled to make its debut in November as an Apple TV app that will work with Sonos, the connected speaker system.

The app is the brainchild of G. Marq Roswell, a Hollywood music supervisor who has worked with David Lynch and Denzel Washington. He bemoans the way early digital players and online music stores like iTunes removed all sense of music coming from a particular place and time.

Working with Nigel Grainge, an influential record executive who died in June; Erik Loyer, an app developer and media artist; and Jon Blaufarb, an industry lawyer, Mr. Roswell in 2007 began to design what he calls an interactive “context engine.” Stream a song on a Sonos speaker and, if TunesMap’s app is also fired up on Apple TV, images and historical information related to the artist or a song’s origins begin to float buy.

“We’re going through the prism of music,” Mr. Roswell said, “but it’s film, it’s fashion, it’s art, it’s news, it’s comedy — it’s everything that created that scene.”

The company has deals with publishers like Genesis Publications and Rock’s Backpages, a decades-deep archive of music journalism, as well as rock photographers like Jay Blakesberg; TunesMap receives a cut of any sales made through the app. (TunesMap also shows articles from The New York Times by using the paper’s programming interface.)

During its long gestation, the company secured two patents for its navigation system and raised $4.75 million from entertainment-industry veterans like Andy Summers, the guitarist for the Police, and Jerry Moss, one of the founders of A&M Records, and from the Visionary Private Equity Group.

“I produced a Hank Williams film with Tom Hiddleston that took 10 years to put together,” Mr. Roswell said, referring to the 2015 biopic “I Saw the Light.” “I wouldn’t know any other way to do it. I just never let the vision die.”

The app is free, and it works when a user plays songs on Sonos from Spotify, Apple Music and other major streaming services. But in many ways, TunesMap runs counter to the trends of digital music consumption, which are moving toward simple mobile displays and programmed playlists.

Equipment costs are another potential barrier. The cheapest Sonos and Apple TV systems cost a total of $350. TunesMap said a minimal mobile version would also be available.

Reimagining liner notes for the digital age is a guiding concept, but Mr. Loyer, TunesMap’s director of user experience, said the company has tried to avoid the nostalgia of “Oh, remember when we had liner notes.”

“The real question,” Mr. Loyer said, “is how do we design the systems in such a way that values the real output of all the culture that surrounds a piece of music.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/29/b...ner-notes.html





Amazon and Apple Caught in Latest EU Tax Crackdown
BBC

The European Union has launched a fresh crackdown over taxes paid by tech giants Amazon and Apple.

Amazon has been ordered to repay €250m (£221m; $293m) in back taxes after the European Commission said it had been given an unfair tax deal in Luxembourg.

The Commission also plans to take Ireland to court over its failure to collect €13bn of back taxes from Apple.

Amazon denied it owed any back tax, saying it did "not receive any special treatment from Luxembourg".

"We will study the Commission's ruling and consider our legal options, including an appeal," an Amazon spokesperson said.

But European Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said the Luxembourg arrangement meant that Amazon had been allowed to pay "substantially less tax than other businesses", which it said was "illegal under EU state aid rules".

'Selective' benefits

"Luxembourg gave illegal tax benefits to Amazon. As a result, almost three-quarters of Amazon's profits were not taxed," Ms Vestager added.

She said Amazon paid four times less tax than other local companies.

"Member states cannot give selective tax benefits to multinational groups that are not available to others," she added.

Meanwhile, the Commission said it planned to refer Ireland to the European Court of Justice for failing to recover €13bn in back taxes from tech giant Apple.

It concluded last year that the US firm's Irish tax benefits were illegal, enabling the firm to pay a corporate tax rate of no more than 1%.

The Commission said that more than a year on from that decision, Ireland had still not recovered the money.

As a result, it was referring Ireland to the European Court of Justice, it said.

Ireland, which has contested the decision, claiming that EU regulators were interfering with national sovereignty, said the decision was "extremely disappointing".

"Today's decisions are to order Luxembourg to recover unpaid tax from Amazon and refer Ireland to the European Court for failing to recover unpaid tax from Apple. I hope that both decisions are seen as a message that companies must pay their fair share of taxes, as the huge majority of companies do," said Ms Vestager.

Amazon investigation

The decision on Amazon follows a three-year long investigation by the European Commission, which said in 2014 that it had suspicions the arrangement had broken EU rules.

The tax deal between Luxembourg and Amazon was struck in 2003.

The Commission said it had enabled Amazon to shift the "vast majority" of its profits from Amazon EU to Amazon Europe Holding Technologies, which was not subject to tax.

It said this arrangement had "significantly reduced" Amazon's taxable profits.

At the time the deal was struck, Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission's president, was the prime minister of Luxembourg.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41497459





Google CEO Appeases Publishers With Subscriptions
Mark Bergen

• Search engine drops controversial ‘first-click free’ program
• Company won’t demote paywalled news sites in search results

Pedestrians walk past the Google Inc. offices in New York on Aug. 22. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

A few years ago, Google regularly traded barbs with major news publishers in public. Today, Google is rewiring its search engine to appease them.

The Alphabet Inc. unit is scrapping a contentious search result rule for subscription news sites and giving them new tools to attract more paying customers. It’s Google’s most significant step yet to to curry favor with news organizations that provide information for its search engine but have lost ad revenue from the rise of the internet. Facebook Inc., the primary driver of online news traffic, is taking similar steps.

The biggest change is Google’s decision to eliminate its "first click free" program. This listed articles higher in search results if publishers agreed to offer some stories for free. Google is now pledging to index all subscription news outlets in search, let publishers determine how many articles to provide free through the search engine, and will not demote them in results if they have little or no free content.

News of the move won praise from unusual quarters: News Corp., a frequent Google critic. Chief Executive Officer Robert Thomson said it “will fundamentally change the content ecosystem" by supporting "the creation of coherent viable subscription models.”

Just two years ago, Google and News Corp. clashed over the publisher’s complaints to antitrust regulators in Europe. Google had a troubled public courtship with other publishers, too. "We are afraid of Google," Mathias Dopfner, chairman of German publishing giant Axel Springer SE, wrote in a 2014 open letter.

Google has not yet agreed on new revenue-sharing terms with the publishers, but Richard Gingras, Google’s vice president for news, said "it will be a very generous model." Google will offer publishers new online payment tools, methods to target readers and customized features inside Google News for existing subscribers.

The overtures are part of a broader Google effort to support creators of web content. The company generates most of its profit by making online information searchable and selling ads with the results.

Recent talks with publishers focused on loading websites more quickly and improving video, then switched to subscriptions, according Philipp Schindler, Google’s chief business officer. "We’re basically all in on this one -- heavily, heavily investing," he said.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive officer, has made the subscription effort a priority. "He’s very closely involved in a number of the publisher discussions," Schindler said. "The wonderful thing about Sundar: He is a news geek."

Online publishers have looked to win paying subscribers to curb the loss of ad sales. More than 42 percent of U.S. digital ad revenue in 2017 will go to Google, according to research firm eMarketer. Bloomberg first reported in August on the subscription tools, which Google tested with The New York Times and The Financial Times.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-subscriptions





Facebook Says 10 Million U.S. Users Saw Russia-Linked Ads
David Ingram

Some 10 million people in the United States saw politically divisive ads on Facebook that the company said were purchased in Russia in the months before and after last year’s U.S. presidential election, Facebook said on Monday.

Facebook, which had not previously given such an estimate, said in a statement that it used modeling to estimate how many people saw at least one of the 3,000 ads. It also said that 44 percent of the ads were seen before the November 2016 election and 56 percent were seen afterward.

The ads have sparked anger toward Facebook and, within the United States, toward Russia since the world’s largest social network disclosed their existence last month. Moscow has denied involvement with the ads.

Facebook has faced calls for increased U.S. regulation from U.S. authorities. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has outlined steps that the company plans to take to deter governments from abusing the social media network.

Earlier on Monday, Facebook said in a separate statement that it planned to hire 1,000 more people to review ads and ensure they meet its terms, as part of an effort to deter Russia and other countries from using the platform to interfere in elections.

The latest company statement said that about 25 percent of the ads were never shown to anyone.

“That’s because advertising auctions are designed so that ads reach people based on relevance, and certain ads may not reach anyone as a result,” Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of policy and communications, said in the statement.

For 99 percent of the ads, less than $1,000 was spent, he said. The total ad spend was $100,000, the company has said.

Still, he said it was possible Facebook would find more Russia-linked U.S. ads as it continues to investigate.

Schrage, while criticizing the ad buyers for using fake accounts, also said many of the ads otherwise “did not violate our content policies” and could have remained if bought using real accounts.

“While we may not always agree with the positions of those who would speak on issues here, we believe in their right to do so - just as we believe in the right of Americans to express opinions on issues in other countries,” he wrote.

Facebook is working with others in the tech sector, including Twitter Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google, on investigating alleged Russian election meddling, Schrage added.

The 1,000 new workers represent the second time this year that Facebook has responded to a crisis by announcing a hiring spree. In May, it said it would hire 3,000 more people to speed up the removal of videos showing murder, suicide and other violent acts that shocked users.

Like other companies that sell advertising space, Facebook publishes policies for what it allows, prohibiting ads that are violent, discriminate based on race or promote the sale of illegal drugs.

With more than 5 million paying advertisers, however, Facebook has difficulty enforcing all of its policies.

The company said on Monday that it would adjust its policies further “to prevent ads that use even more subtle expressions of violence.” It did not elaborate on what kind of material that would cover.

Facebook also said it would begin to require more thorough documentation from people who want to run ads about U.S. federal elections, demanding that they confirm their businesses or organizations.

Reporting by David Ingram in New York; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Cynthia Osterman
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-f...-idUSKCN1C71YM





After Las Vegas Shooting, Fake News Regains Its Megaphone
Kevin Roose

When they woke up and glanced at their phones on Monday morning, Americans may have been shocked to learn that the man behind the mass shooting in Las Vegas late on Sunday was an anti-Trump liberal who liked Rachel Maddow and MoveOn.org, that the F.B.I. had already linked him to the Islamic State, and that mainstream news organizations were suppressing that he had recently converted to Islam.

They were shocking, gruesome revelations. They were also entirely false — and widely spread by Google and Facebook.

In Google’s case, trolls from 4Chan, a notoriously toxic online message board with a vocal far-right contingent, had spent the night scheming about how to pin the shooting on liberals. One of their discussion threads, in which they wrongly identified the gunman, was picked up by Google’s “top stories” module, and spent hours at the top of the site’s search results for that man’s name.

In Facebook’s case, an official “safety check” page for the Las Vegas shooting prominently displayed a post from a site called “Alt-Right News.” The post incorrectly identified the shooter and described him as a Trump-hating liberal. In addition, some users saw a story on a “trending topic” page on Facebook for the shooting that was published by Sputnik, a news agency controlled by the Russian government. The story’s headline claimed, incorrectly, that the F.B.I. had linked the shooter with the “Daesh terror group.”

Google and Facebook blamed algorithm errors for these.

A Google spokesman said, “This should not have appeared for any queries, and we’ll continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future.”

A Facebook spokesman said, “We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen in the first place and deeply regret the confusion this caused.”

But this was no one-off incident. Over the past few years, extremists, conspiracy theorists and government-backed propagandists have made a habit of swarming major news events, using search-optimized “keyword bombs” and algorithm-friendly headlines. These organizations are skilled at reverse-engineering the ways that tech platforms parse information, and they benefit from a vast real-time amplification network that includes 4Chan and Reddit as well as Facebook, Twitter and Google. Even when these campaigns are thwarted, they often last hours or days — long enough to spread misleading information to millions of people.

The latest fake news flare-up came at an inconvenient time for companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, which are already defending themselves from accusations that they have let malicious actors run rampant on their platforms.

On Monday, Facebook handed congressional investigators 3,000 ads that had been purchased by Russian government affiliates during the 2016 campaign season, and it vowed to hire 1,000 more human moderators to review ads for improper content. (The company would not say how many moderators currently screen its ads.) Twitter faces tough questions about harassment and violent threats on its platform, and is still struggling to live down a reputation as a safe haven for neo-Nazis and other poisonous groups. And Google also faces questions about its role in the misinformation economy.

Part of the problem is that these companies have largely abrogated the responsibility of moderating the content that appears on their platforms, instead relying on rule-based algorithms to determine who sees what. Facebook, for instance, previously had a team of trained news editors who chose which stories appeared in its trending topics section, a huge driver of traffic to news stories. But it disbanded the group and instituted an automated process last year, after reports surfaced that the editors were suppressing conservative news sites. The change seems to have made the problem worse — earlier this year, Facebook redesigned the trending topics section again, after complaints that hoaxes and fake news stories were showing up in users’ feeds.

There is also a labeling issue. A Facebook user looking for news about the Las Vegas shooting on Monday morning, or a Google user searching for information about the wrongfully accused shooter, would have found posts from 4Chan and Sputnik alongside articles by established news organizations like CNN and NBC News, with no obvious cues to indicate which ones came from reliable sources.

More thoughtful design could help solve this problem, and Facebook has already begun to label some disputed stories with the help of professional fact checkers. But fixes that require identifying “reputable” news organizations are inherently risky because they open companies up to accusations of favoritism. (After Facebook announced its fact-checking effort, which included working with The Associated Press and Snopes, several right-wing activists complained of left-wing censorship.)

The automation of editorial judgment, combined with tech companies’ reluctance to appear partisan, has created a lopsided battle between those who want to spread misinformation and those tasked with policing it. Posting a malicious rumor on Facebook, or writing a false news story that is indexed by Google, is a nearly instantaneous process; removing such posts often requires human intervention. This imbalance gives an advantage to rule-breakers, and makes it impossible for even an army of well-trained referees to keep up.

But just because the war against misinformation may be unwinnable doesn’t mean it should be avoided. Roughly two-thirds of American adults get news from social media, which makes the methods these platforms use to vet and present information a matter of national importance.

Facebook, Twitter and Google are some of the world’s richest and most ambitious companies, but they still have not shown that they’re willing to bear the costs — or the political risks — of fixing the way misinformation spreads on their platforms. (Some executives appear resolute in avoiding the discussion. In a recent Facebook post, Mark Zuckerberg reasserted the platform’s neutrality, saying that being accused of partisan bias by both sides is “what running a platform for all ideas looks like.”)

The investigations into Russia’s exploitation of social media during the 2016 presidential election will almost certainly continue for months. But dozens of less splashy online misinformation campaigns are happening every day, and they deserve attention, too. Tech companies should act decisively to prevent hoaxes and misinformation from spreading on their platforms, even if it means hiring thousands more moderators or angering some partisan organizations.

Facebook and Google have spent billions of dollars developing virtual reality systems. They can spare a billion or two to protect actual reality.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/b...fake-news.html





Facebook’s Safety Check Page for the Las Vegas Shooting Promotes “Alt-Right News”

In the wake of the deadly shooting in Las Vegas last night that left more than 50 dead and hundreds injured, people around the world are scrambling to get up-to-date information. Technology platforms like Facebook and Google are obviously go-to sources for news updates, but they’re not proving very reliable.

On Facebook’s dedicated “Safety Check” page for the Las Vegas massacre–which says it lets users “connect with friends and family and find and give help after a crisis”–one of the top stories earlier today was from a Blogspot titled “Alt-Right News.” The article describes a female person of interest and calls her husband a “Trump-hating Rachel Maddow fan,” thanks to screenshots of a Facebook page.

Yet this information is incorrect. Initially, the police were looking for a woman potentially connected to the shooting, but she is no longer considered a suspect. All the same, right-wing sites like Gateway Pundit published articles without verified information, citing this woman’s husband’s Facebook page as proof of a left-wing agenda. Gateway Pundit has deleted the article, but examples–like this Blogspot–are still around sharing this fake news. And platforms like Facebook are promoting them. A website called “End Time Headlines” was also at the top of the Safety Check page, as were pictures of people fleeing the massacre.

The spread of misinformation remains a huge problem for large platforms like Facebook and Google, which rely on algorithms to push the most engaged stories to the top. Google this morning highlighted 4Chan threads at the top of its page, which also incorrectly named the suspect. BuzzFeed found a trove of hoaxes already widely disseminated online–many of which are gaining traction with the help of automatic news algorithms on technology platforms. Hopefully by this morning, less fake news will be available, but we can’t depend on algorithms to do that.

Update: A Facebook spokesperson provided us with this statement:

“Our Global Security Operations Center spotted the post this morning and removed it. However, its removal was delayed by a few minutes, allowing it to be screen captured and circulated online. We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen in the first place and deeply regret the confusion this caused.”

It should be noted that I captured the screenshot myself. Both my colleagues and I saw the post–along with other questionable links–on the “Safety Check” site for at least thirty minutes.CGW
https://www.fastcompany.com/40475749...alt-right-news





How Far-Right Trolls Named the Wrong Man as the Las Vegas Shooter
Abby Ohlheiser

Geary Danley was not the gunman in Las Vegas who killed at least 50 people late Sunday. But for hours on the far-right Internet, would-be sleuths scoured Danley’s Facebook likes, family photographs and marital history to try to “prove” that he was.

Danley, according to an archived version of a Facebook page bearing that name, might have been married to a Marilou Danley. Police were looking for a woman by that name in the hours after the shooting, but later said they did not think she was involved. To name someone as a mass murderer based on that evidence would be irresponsible and dangerous. But that’s exactly what a portion of the far-right Internet did overnight.

The briefest look at the viral threads and tweets falsely naming Geary Danley as the attacker makes it easy to guess why a bunch of right-wing trolls latched on to him: His Facebook profile indicated that he might be a liberal.

Authorities have since identified the gunman as Stephen Paddock, 64, who was later found dead in a hotel room on the Strip. His motives remain unknown. But the fake Danley story presented a complete, desirable package to the elements of the far-right Internet that spread it. That phony story quickly embedded itself into the algorithms of Google and Facebook, where sites promoting the rumor remained at the top of the results for anyone searching for Danley’s name.

In excited all-caps, one anonymous user on 4chan’s /pol/ board posted that Danley was a “REGISTERED DEMOCRAT!” The thread spread quickly, as did a crowdsourced wiki page about Danley on Everipedia that, according to its edit history, once said that “Geary opened fired [sic] on the 34th floor of the Mandalay Bay toward a concert happening across the street.”

The Everipedia article dedicated an entire section to what it alleged were Danley’s political views:

This narrative, backed by no evidence or confirmation of Danley’s involvement in the Las Vegas shooting, spread quickly. That Everipedia post had 77,000 views as of Monday morning, just hours after it was created. It has since been edited and no longer names Danley as the shooter. His personal photos, taken from Facebook, were still plastered all over the page.

But even as those rumors were thoroughly, conclusively debunked, this false narrative was picked up in the algorithms that, increasingly, have come to define a person’s public-facing identities. During a search I ran about 9 a.m. Monday, hours after the real shooting suspect — a different person — was identified, the entire first page of Google results for a search for Geary Danley’s full name were links to news sites, YouTube videos, message boards and even several /pol/ threads repeating the rumor about him. There was one exception: a link to Danley’s personal Facebook page. There were no links to debunkings or to any mainstream news outlets that had identified Paddock as the attacker.

And for a time on Monday morning, one of those 4chan threads falsely naming Danley as the shooter was promoted by Google as a “top story” for searches for his name, as one BuzzFeed reporter noticed.

The right-wing news site Gateway Pundit also picked up these rumors as fact in a now-deleted article. That article’s URL was still the top result for Danley’s name on Google in the early hours of Monday morning. The headline, still visible in search results, and remaining on the first page of results for Danley when I ran my 9 a.m. search, read, “Las Vegas Shooter Reportedly a Democrat Who Liked Rachel Maddow, MoveOn.org and Associated with anti-Trump Army.”

And on Facebook, a search for articles about Geary Danley promoted seven links leading to inaccurate stories about him. The eighth result is a debunking.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...vegas-shooter/





More Than 80% Of All Net Neutrality Comments Were Sent By Bots, Researchers Say

95 percent of all organic comments favored net neutrality, according to the analysis.
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

The Trump administration and its embattled FCC commissioner are on a mission to roll back the pro-net neutrality rules approved during the Obama years, despite the fact that most Americans support those safeguards. But there is a large number of entities that do not: telecom companies, their lobbyists, and hordes of bots.

Of all the more than 22 million comments submitted to the FCC website and through the agency's API found that only 3,863,929 comments were "unique," according to a new analysis by Gravwell, a data analytics company. The rest? A bunch of copy-pasted comments, most of them likely by automated astroturfing bots, almost all of them—curiously—against net neutrality.

"Using our (admittedly) simple classification, over 95 percent of the organic comments are in favor of Title II regulation," Corey Thuen, the founder of Gravwell, told Motherboard in an email.

Thuen was referring to a section of the Communications Act that imposes regulations designed to protect net neutrality. In 2015, the FCC voted to reclassify internet broadband as a "telecommunications service" under Title II, effectively institutionalizing net neutrality, handing a win to open internet advocates, and a loss to big telecom.

That historic vote is referenced in the two comments that were sent the most by bots. This one was sent to the FCC 1.2 million times:

The unprecedented regulatory power the Obama Administration imposed on the internet is smothering innovation, damaging the American economy and obstructing job creation.\n\nI urge the Federal Communications Commission to end the bureaucratic regulatory overreach of the internet known as Title II and restore the bipartisan light-touch regulatory consensus that enabled the internet to flourish for more than 20 years.\n\nThe plan currently under consideration at the FCC to repeal Obama's Title II power grab is a positive step forward and will help to promote a truly free and open internet for everyone.\n

In case you are wondering, the "\n" strings as well as other weird symbols that might appear in other comments are alternative representation of certain special characters, or line breaks, according to Thuen. The comment above was already spotted as coming from bots in May. (Gravwell published some of the data they crunched in a spreadsheet in case you are curious.)

"The quotation characters are the Windows smart quotes, meaning that someone generated the bulk uploads using a Microsoft package (like Word or Excel)," he said.

This other one was sent 1,096,617 times in August alone:

In 2015, Chairman Tom Wheeler's Federal Communications Commission (FCC) imposed restrictive Title II, utility-style regulations under the guise of an "open internet." Not only have these regulations inhibited innovation in the internet ecosystem, they hurt taxpayers and consumers by expanding the regulatory reach of the FCC and limiting investment in internet infrastructure. We cannot allow this revolutionary tool to be bogged down with excessive government interference.\n \nIt is past time for the FCC, an agency that is funded by American taxpayers, to free the internet of burdensome regulations. By rolling back the misguided 2015 regulations we can restore an unrestricted and truly open internet. I thank the Commissioners for considering these comments during the reply period.

That means a grand total of 10 percent of all comments about net neutrality the FCC received were these two comments posted over and over.

Gizmodo found that the origin of the first comment quoted above was likely the Center for Individual Freedom, a conservative advocacy group. In this case, CFIF claimed that the comment was filed by people using a form on the organization's website. These type of comments were likely submitted through the FCC's public comment system API, which allows people to submit comments in bulk.

"Seeing a clear difference of opinion between bulk submitted comments vs those that came in via the FCC comment page we're forced to conclude that either the nature of submission method has some direct correlation with political opinion, or someone is telling lies on the internet," Thuen wrote.

The exact breakdown of anti-net neutrality and pro-net neutrality comments is not definitive, according to Thuen. He admitted that their classification for now is "rudimentary," and that's why he's searching for researchers and analysts who want to collaborate in analyzing the data further. One of the reason why it was hard to do machine learning training or automated classification of anti-net neutrality comments, however, is that "simply because they were that scarce," Thuen wrote in his blog post.

To be fair, some pro-net neutrality people also used bots. But according to their analysis, Thuen and his team couldn't find that many, and they were easier to spot.

"Those bots that were in favor of regulation were often very obvious in their behavior," Thuen told me. "They submitted comments with text like 'I am in favor of strong net neutrality. Sincerely, James Jones' 848 times. They simply substituted their names, like Patricia Johnson, James Davis, etc. The developers of anti-regulation bots appear more sophisticated."

Some bots are very easy to spot. For example, Thuen found that over 1 million comments submitted in July were from purported @pornhub.com email accounts. Perhaps, these have something to do with Pornhub's pro-net neutrality push, as the vast majority of those appeared to be positive, according to Thuen. .

Unfortunately, the data available publicly is limited. For example, the FCC hasn't released the web server logs or IP addresses of all comments (and it's fighting in court not to do that). Until then, it's hard to say who is behind each bot, or if the same operators are behind different, recurring comments.

"The data itself doesn't really hold those answers," Thuen said.

For now though, as many had already discovered over the months, the data confirms that someone was using bots to post a lot of anti-net neutrality comments.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...s-astroturfing





‘New Internet’ Looks to Keep User Data Away from Tech Giants and Bypass China Censorship

Blockstack is a decentralised internet where users keep their data locally when they run apps, and a Hong Kong-based software engineer is helping get the project off the ground
Harminder Singh

A Hong Kong-based software engineer is doing his bit to develop a “new internet” said to offer users complete control over their personal information and bypass mainland China’s “Great Firewall”.

Blockstack is a decentralised internet where users keep their data locally when they run apps. This is in contrast to the conventional internet which stores users’ information in centralised servers – making it vulnerable to theft by cyberattack.

Larry Salibra, a cybersecurity expert, is the sole Blockstack developer in Hong Kong.

“It’s a really big change from the current internet ... we [take] the value away from these big centralised companies like Facebook and Google and put data back into the users’ control,” he said.

Salibra considers himself “one of the earliest fans” of Blockstack. The project fit into his vision of what a blockchain can be used for.

A blockchain is a digital ledger distributed among users. There is no central authority verifying and recording transactions – instead it is done by a network of computers.

The network verifies and copies information to each user and a record is made on the blockchain.

“By using bitcoin transactions and putting some special data into each transaction, we’re able to create a virtual blockchain on top of the bitcoin blockchain that just has Blockstack-specific data,” he said.

The three key things you need to know about blockchain technology

This will allow users to buy a user ID and set up the ID to include only information the user wants to share when logging in to Blockstack apps.

When Blockstack apps are opened, every one gets its own virtual “cubbyhole” where user data is stored that can only be accessed by the app and the user, and not a third party.

The project has been in development, primarily in the United States, since 2013 and is entering a stage where people can begin using it.

Salibra believes that centralisation of information by tech giants such as Tencent, Alibaba, Facebook and Google is a threat to user privacy and cybersecurity.

These companies having vast amounts of customer information allows governments – either foreign or domestic – or malicious hackers to obtain that information from a single source.

Blockstack will remove data centralisation and place it with each individual user. Government spy agencies or hackers will need to target individuals if they wish to take information, which is time consuming and costly, Salibra said.

Censorship is another hurdle Blockstack is hoping to defeat. Domain registries, who allow people to register internet addresses, can deny websites with politically incorrect views from registering, which is common on the mainland.

Blockchain adoption poised to go mainstream, say founders of HK start-up PassKit

“[Bypassing the Great Firewall] was one of my motivations,” Salibra said.

Mainland government censors can block unwelcome websites, such as Facebook, but they will not be able to bar Blockstack apps as these do not need to connect to the traditional internet to be used and will instead connect to a blockchain, Salibra said.

“We envision a world where ... if what they’re doing is illegal, you get a court order and you enforce that against them in the real world. You don’t want Google making its own decision about what’s acceptable or governments going to them to delete domains,” he said.

Currently, Blockstack apps are distributed through normal internet domain names. In the future, apps will not be required to operate through internet domain names and will instead operate by registering on a blockchain, which will not allow their removal by anyone other than the creator of the app.

Blockstack is also developing a different monetisation model for content developers.

It will use digital currencies, such as bitcoin, to reward developers – such as by paying a few cents to view a video or an article.
Blockchain applications unlikely to take hold in business sector anytime soon, say finance experts

Salibra said he did not expect established tech companies to develop an app for Blockstack, but independent developers would be incentivised to develop apps with similar or new functions.

In August, the project announced a US$25 million fund to jump-start app development for the “new internet”.

Blockstack will first be released on desktop computers in the first quarter of next year. Users will be able to download a browser – developed mostly by Salibra – that will have apps for the system.

An app for mobile devices is being developed, but availability will depend on whether Google and Apple allow Blockstack to enter their app stores.
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/e...nts-and-bypass





Hackers Could Purchase Enough Personal Information To Alter Voter Registration Files In 35 States

A vulnerability in voter registration websites could be exploited to disenfranchise voters in key states and precincts.
Caroline O.

Harvard researchers have discovered a vulnerability on government websites that may let hackers and other malicious actors change your voter registration information and potentially cause chaos on election day.

The study, which surveyed official state voter record websites, found that in 35 states plus the District of Columbia, voter registration websites allow users to log on and change information such as home addresses, party affiliation, and gender. While this provides a convenient way for voters to update their registration information, it also gives malicious actors an easy way to impersonate voters and submit address changes, delete voter registrations, or request absentee ballots. With a simple change of address, hackers could even assign voters to an entirely different precinct.

Later on, when the voter shows up to the polls on election day, he or she may be unable to cast a ballot because the name or address on their ID doesn’t match the state’s records, or because poll workers think the voter has shown up to vote in the wrong precinct. Voters may be turned away from the polls or asked to file provisional ballots — but sometimes those ballots aren’t even counted, said the study’s co-author Latanya Sweeney, Professor of Government and Technology at Harvard University.

The fear is that this vulnerability could be used either to undermine confidence in elections and depress voter turnout, or even to swing the results in favor of a specific candidate.

“If the goal is to undermine any belief in the electoral system, then they might very well want to target a particular community at large…[because] that could cause a kind of hysteria,” Sweeney said. “People will say what kind of system is this? We didn’t get a chance to vote, our whole community didn’t get a chance to vote.”

This appears to be exactly what happened in Riverside County, California’s primary election in June 2016, when a number of voters had their party affiliations switched without their knowledge or consent. According to a report by Time magazine, “the changes had been made by hackers who had used private information, like Social Security or driver’s-license numbers, to access the central voter-registration database for the entire state of California.”

The California secretary of state and Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin launched an investigation, but because the state’s system hadn’t recorded the IP addresses of the computers that made the changes, there was no way to figure out the identity of the hackers. It’s unclear to what extent tampering actually prevented voters from casting ballots, but “[t]he lingering mystery of the voter registration changes bred doubt among members of both parties,” Time reported.

Over the next several months, federal investigators uncovered evidence that Russian hackers had targeted election systems in at least 21 states. The cyberattackers didn’t target the systems that actually count the votes — instead, they targeted the voter registration rolls and, in some cases, attempted to alter voter registration information.

Looking back at the events in Riverside County in June 2016, federal officials began to speculate that it may have been a “test run” for future attacks by Russian hackers. One former cybersecurity official who looked into the case told Time that the Riverside County hack “looked like a cyberattacker testing what kind of chaos they could unleash on Election Day.”

According to the Harvard study, which was published this month in the Journal of Technology Science, state voter registration systems could allow hackers to replicate the Riverside County hack on a much larger scale.

“We found that in 2016, the District of Columbia and 35 of the 50 states had websites that allowed voters to submit registration changes. These websites determined whether a visitor was an actual voter by requesting commonly available personal information. Some websites gave multiple ways for a voter to self-identify. Of these, {name, date of birth, address} was required in 15, {name, date of birth, driver’s license number} was required in 27, and {name, date of birth, last 4 SSN} was required in 3.”

The study found that the information needed to impersonate voters on all 36 voter registration websites could be acquired relatively cheaply from government offices, data brokers, the deep web, or darknet markets. For just $1,002, a hacker could purchase two datasets — one believed to have come from a massive data breach of credit bureau Experian — that contained the names, address, dates of birth, gender, and Social Security numbers of most American adults.

Using that information, cyberattackers could theoretically access and alter the voter registration files of thousands of Americans. In some states, the study found, it would cost as little as $1 to change one percent of voter records. In the 2016 election, “there were several states where the margin of victory was within one or two or five percent,” Sweeney noted.

The study authors pointed out that most states have safeguards in place to prevent widescale attacks on voter registration systems. For example, many states use Captcha systems to ward off attacks using automated scripts. However, as Sweeney noted, most Captchas are behind the times and are becoming easier to crack. Python scripts and other codes that can defeat most Captchas are available online, and services officered through work order sites like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk could help hackers breach uncompromised systems.

Some states have additional security — such as requiring officials to review and confirm address changes — that could halt an attack before major damage is done. Also, 10 of the 35 state voter registration sites at least keep a record of web access and change logs, so officials can switch back to the old copies of records if tampering is suspected.

Still, the authors are urging states to take additional steps to protect against potential attacks. “A human may notice if a larger than usual number of changes appear,” Sweeney said, “but what if the number is only a few more a day?”

The ultimate question is how the government can ensure it’s actually dealing with citizens when it conducts business online. While commercial fraud is obviously a problem, the stakes are far higher for the government.

“If a commercial site is compromised, the downsides are not the same,” Sweeney said, “because it doesn’t compromise our entire democratic process.”
https://medium.com/@RVAwonk/hackers-...s-1a34237c10d1





New "Illusion Gap" Attack Bypasses Windows Defender Scans
Catalin Cimpanu

Security researchers from CyberArk have discovered a new technique that allows malware to bypass Windows Defender, the standard security software that comes included with all Windows operating systems.

The technique — nicknamed Illusion Gap — relies on a mixture of both social engineering and the use of a rogue SMB server.

The attack exploits a design choice in how Windows Defender scans files stored on an SMB share before execution.

For Illusion Gap to work, the attacker must convince a user to execute a file hosted on a malicious SMB server under his control. This is not as complex as it sounds, as a simple shortcut file is all that's needed.

How Illusion Gap works

The problems occur after the user double-clicks this malicious file. By default, Windows will request from the SMB server a copy of the file for the task of creating the process that executes the file, while Windows Defender will request a copy of the file in order to scan it.

SMB servers can distinguish between these two requests, and this is a problem because an attacker can configure their malicious SMB server to respond with two different files.

The attacker can send a malicious file to the Windows PE Loader, and a benign file to Windows Defender. After Windows Defender scans the clean file and gives the go-ahead, Windows PE Loader will execute the malicious file without Windows Defender realizing they're two different things.

Microsoft does not view this as a security issue

CyberArk says it notified Microsoft but the company did not view it as a security issue. Researchers included the Microsoft reply in their Illusion Gap paper.

“Thanks for your email. Based on your report, successful attack requires a user to run/trust content from an untrusted SMB share backed by a custom server that can change its behavior depending on the access pattern. This doesn't seem to be a security issue but a feature request which I have forwarded to the engineering group.

Thanks again for reporting security issues to Microsoft responsibly and we appreciate your effort in doing so.”

Basic mitigation advice

"It’s Windows Defenders job to scan and find malicious files – this vulnerability allows malicious files to bypass it, so it’s not doing its job," Kobi Ben Naim, Senior Director of Cyber Research at CyberArk, told Bleeping Computer via email.

"Other than installing additional AV or endpoint scanning software along with Windows Defender, there isn’t much an organization can do to mitigate this specific vulnerability," Naim added.

"The best recommendation is for organizations to not rely solely on endpoint scanning and AV, and to implement proactive security measures that assumes malware will get past the perimeter," the expert also said.

"We strongly believe that organizations should implement a combination of least privilege and application control policies on endpoints and servers throughout the organization. This proactive approach is not dependent on the ability to detect advanced malware; instead, it treats all unknown applications are potentially suspicious and protects information accordingly.

"While Microsoft is a great software vendor, people need to understand that while free Microsoft products have a value of their own, it’s not a replacement to security. Microsoft makes great products, but they’re not a security vendor. Security-conscious organizations need to take this into account when using any product."

Other AVs might be affected

Naim also believes that the Windows Defender bypass which the CyberArk team discovered will see some usage in the future.

"Like every new attack vector, the first to exploit it will likely be high-end, sophisticated attackers (APTs)," Naim told Bleeping. "Once an attack method like this is used by these advanced groups, you typically see all other attackers follow shortly thereafter."

CyberArk researchers also warn that other antivirus solutions might also be vulnerable to the Illusion Gap attack, but that his company has not carried out additional tests.

Because this research was provided under embargo to Bleeping Computer before publication, we also could not reach out to other vendors and inquire about the vulnerability. Any information about other AV vendors vulnerable to Illusion Gap attacks will be added to this post.

CyberArk researchers also provided YouTube videos demonstrating how the Illusion Gap attack works. Illusion Gap technical details are available here.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...efender-scans/





Yahoo's 2013 Hack Impacted all 3 Billion Accounts

Not just one billion as previously announced -- it was all of them.
Richard Lawler

Last year Yahoo (now part of Oath along with AOL after its acquisition by Verizon) announced that back in 2013, hackers had stolen info covering over one billion of its accounts. Today, the combined company announced that further investigation reveals the 2013 hack affected all of its accounts that existed at the time -- about three billion. The information taken "may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using MD5) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers."

For users being notified of the hack now, the notification is that their information is included. At the time the breach was first announced, Yahoo required everyone who had not reset their passwords since the breach to do so. According to the FAQ posted, it doesn't appear there's any new action being taken.

The announcement isn't very specific about why or how it determined the breach was so much larger -- or how it was missed in the original forensic analysis, or how this happened in the first place -- likely due to pending lawsuits over the issue. This section of the statement is all it would say:

Subsequent to Yahoo's acquisition by Verizon, and during integration, the company recently obtained new intelligence and now believes, following an investigation with the assistance of outside forensic experts, that all Yahoo user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft. While this is not a new security issue, Yahoo is sending email notifications to the additional affected user accounts. The investigation indicates that the user account information that was stolen did not include passwords in clear text, payment card data, or bank account information. The company is continuing to work closely with law enforcement.

We should note, this is still separate from a 2014 hack that affected some 500 million accounts.
https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/03/...three-billion/





The Voyager Golden Record Finally Finds An Earthly Audience
Alexi Horowitz-Ghazi

The Golden Record is basically a 90-minute interstellar mixtape — a message of goodwill from the people of Earth to any extraterrestrial passersby who might stumble upon one of the two Voyager spaceships at some point over the next couple billion years.

But since it was made 40 years ago, the sounds etched into those golden grooves have gone mostly unheard, by alien audiences or those closer to home.

"The Voyager records are the farthest flung objects that humans have ever created," says Timothy Ferris, a veteran science and music journalist and the producer of the Golden Record. "And they're likely to be the longest lasting, at least in the 20th century."

In the late 1970s, Ferris was recruited by his friend, astronomer Carl Sagan, to join a team of scientists, artists and engineers to help create two engraved golden records to accompany NASA's Voyager mission — which would eventually send a pair of human spacecraft beyond the outer rings of the solar system for the first time in history.

Ferris was tasked with the technical aspects of getting the various media onto the physical LP, and with helping to select the music. In addition to greetings in dozens of languages and messages from leading statesmen, the records also contained a sonic history of planet Earth and photographs encoded into the record's grooves. But mostly, it was music.

"We were gathering a representation of the music of the entire earth," Ferris says. "That's an incredible wealth of great stuff."

Ferris and his colleagues worked together to sift through Earth's enormous discography to decide which pieces of sound would best represent our planet. They really only had two criteria: "One was: Let's cast a wide net. Let's try to get music from all over the planet," he says. "And secondly: Let's make a good record."

That meant late nights of listening sessions while "almost physically drowning in records," Ferris says.

The final selection, which was engraved in copper and plated in gold, included opera, rock 'n' roll, blues, classical music and field recordings selected by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax.

Ferris says that from the very start, many people on the production team expected and hoped for the record to be commercially released soon after the launch of Voyager.

"Carl Sagan tried to interest labels in releasing Voyager," Ferris says. "It never worked."

Ferris says that's likely because the music rights were owned by several different record labels who were hesitant to share the bill. So — except for a limited CD-ROM release in the early 1990s — the record went largely unheard by the wider world.

David Pescovitz, an editor at technology news website Boing Boing and a research director at the nonprofit Institute for the Future, was seven years old when the Voyager spacecraft launched.

"When you're seven years old and you hear that a group of people created a phonograph record as a message for possible extraterrestrials and launched it on a grand tour of the solar system," says Pescovitz, "it sparks the imagination."

A couple years ago, Pescovitz and his friend Tim Daly, a record store manager at Amoeba Music in San Francisco, decided to collaborate on bringing the Golden Record to an earthbound audience.

Pescovitz approached his former graduate school professor — none other than Ferris, the Golden Record's original producer — about the project, and Ferris gave his blessing, with one important caveat.

"You can't release a record without remastering it," says Ferris. "And you can't remaster without locating the master."

That turned out to be a taller order than expected. The original records were mastered in a CBS studio, which was later acquired by Sony — and the master tapes had descended into Sony's vaults.

Pescovitz enlisted the company's help in searching for the master tapes; in the meantime, he and Daly got to work acquiring the rights for the music and photographs that comprised the original. They also reached out to surviving musicians whose work had been featured on the record to update incomplete track information.

Finally, Pescovitz and Daly got word that one of Sony's archivists had found the master tapes.

Pescovitz remembers the moment he, Daly and Ferris traveled to Sony's Battery Studios in New York City to hear the tapes for the first time.

"They hit play, and the sounds of the Solomon Islands pan pipes and Bach and Chuck Berry and the blues washed over us," Pescovitz says. "It was a very moving and sublime experience."

Daly says that, in remastering the album, the team decided not to clean up the analog artifacts that had made their way onto the original master tapes, in order to preserve the record's authenticity down to its imperfections.

"We wanted it to be a true representation of what went up," Daly says.

Pescovitz and Daly teamed up with Lawrence Azerrad, a graphic designer who has made record packaging for the likes of Sting and Wilco, to design a luxuriant box set, complete with a coffee table book of photographs and, of course, tinted vinyl.

"I mean, if you do a golden record box set, you have to do it on gold vinyl," Daly says.

They put the project on Kickstarter and expected to sell it mostly to vinyl collectors, space nerds and audiophiles — but they underestimated the appeal.

"The internet was just on fire, talking about this thing," Daly says.

They blew past their initial funding goal in two days, eventually raising more than $1.3 million dollars, making it the most successful musical Kickstarter campaign ever. Among the initial 11,000 contributors were family members of NASA's original Voyager mission team.

Last week, Ferris got his box set in the mail. He says that his friend, the late Carl Sagan, would be delighted by what they made.

"I think this record exceeds Carl's — not only his expectations, but probably his highest hopes for a release of the Voyager record," Ferris says. "I'm glad these folks were finally able to make it happen."

Pescovitz says he's just glad to have returned the Golden Record to the world that created it.

At a moment of political division and media oversaturation, Pescovitz and Daly say they hope that their Golden Record can offer a chance for people to slow down for a moment; to gather around the turntable and bask in the crackly sounds of what Sagan called the "pale blue dot" that we call home.

"As much as it was a gift from humanity to the cosmos, it was really a gift to humanity as well," Pescovitz says. "It's a reminder of what we can accomplish when we're at our best."
http://www.npr.org/2017/09/30/554489...rthly-audience





Google Pixel Buds are Wireless Earbuds that Translate Conversations in Real Time

Google Translate in your ears for $159.
Valentina Palladino

To accompany the new Pixel smartphones announced Wednesday, Google debuted new wireless earbuds, dubbed "Pixel Buds." These are Google's first wireless earbuds that are built to be used with Pixel smartphones, but they also give users access to Google Translate so they can have conversations with people who speak a different language.

Unlike Apple's AirPods, the Pixel Buds have a wire connecting the two earpieces. However, that wire doesn't connect to a smartphone or other device. Pixel Buds will pair via Bluetooth to the new Pixel smartphones—and presumably any other devices that accept Bluetooth wireless earbuds.

All of the Pixel Buds' controls are built in to the right earpiece, which is a common hardware solution on wireless earbuds. You can access Google Assistant by tapping or pressing on the right earbud, and the Assistant will be able to read notifications and messages to you through the Buds.

But the most intriguing feature of the Pixel Buds is the integrated Google Translate feature. Demoed on stage at Google's event today, this feature lets two Pixel Bud wearers chat in their native languages by translating conversations in real time. In the demo, a native English speaker and a native Swedish speaker had a conversation with each other, both using their native languages. Google Translate translated the languages for each user. There was barely any lag time in between the speaker saying a phrase and the Buds' hearing those words and translating them into the appropriate language.

The Pixel Buds will use Google Translate to comprehend conversations in 40 different languages. This is a unique feature that only a company like Google could integrate into wireless earbuds, thanks to the existing Google Translate data and infrastructure.

Pixel Buds have a battery that should last five hours on a single charge, which is average for wireless earbuds. They also come with a charging case that can hold up to 24 hours of battery life. Google's Pixel Buds are available for preorder today for $159.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017...-in-real-time/





Rice University Adds a Bit of Asphalt to Speed Lithium Metal Battery Charging by 20 Times
Brian Wang

A touch of asphalt may be the secret to high-capacity lithium metal batteries that charge 10 to 20 times faster than commercial lithium-ion batteries, according to Rice University scientists.

The Rice lab of chemist James Tour developed anodes comprising porous carbon made from asphalt that showed exceptional stability after more than 500 charge-discharge cycles. A high-current density of 20 milliamps per square centimeter demonstrated the material’s promise for use in rapid charge and discharge devices that require high-power density.

Above image -Scanning electron microscope images show an anode of asphalt, graphene nanoribbons and lithium at left and the same material without lithium at right. The material was developed at Rice University and shows promise for high-capacity lithium batteries that charge 20 times faster than commercial lithium-ion batteries. Courtesy of the Tour Group

“The capacity of these batteries is enormous, but what is equally remarkable is that we can bring them from zero charge to full charge in five minutes, rather than the typical two hours or more needed with other batteries,” Tour said.

The Tour lab previously used a derivative of asphalt — specifically, untreated gilsonite, the same type used for the battery — to capture greenhouse gases from natural gas. This time, the researchers mixed asphalt with conductive graphene nanoribbons and coated the composite with lithium metal through electrochemical deposition.

The lab combined the anode with a sulfurized-carbon cathode to make full batteries for testing. The batteries showed a high-power density of 1,322 watts per kilogram and high-energy density of 943 watt-hours per kilogram.

Testing revealed another significant benefit: The carbon mitigated the formation of lithium dendrites. These mossy deposits invade a battery’s electrolyte. If they extend far enough, they short-circuit the anode and cathode and can cause the battery to fail, catch fire or explode. But the asphalt-derived carbon prevents any dendrite formation.

An earlier project by the lab found that an anode of graphene and carbon nanotubes also prevented the formation of dendrites. Tour said the new composite is simpler.

“While the capacity between the former and this new battery is similar, approaching the theoretical limit of lithium metal, the new asphalt-derived carbon can take up more lithium metal per unit area, and it is much simpler and cheaper to make,” he said. “There is no chemical vapor deposition step, no e-beam deposition step and no need to grow nanotubes from graphene, so manufacturing is greatly simplified.”

ACS Nano – Ultrafast Charging High Capacity Asphalt–Lithium Metal Batteries

Li metal has been considered an outstanding candidate for anode materials in Li-ion batteries (LIBs) due to its exceedingly high specific capacity and extremely low electrochemical potential, but addressing the problem of Li dendrite formation has remained a challenge for its practical rechargeable applications. In this work, we used a porous carbon material made from asphalt (Asp), specifically untreated gilsonite, as an inexpensive host material for Li plating. The ultrahigh surface area of over 3000 m2/g (by BET, N2) of the porous carbon ensures that Li was deposited on the surface of the Asp particles, as determined by scanning electron microscopy, to form Asp–Li. Graphene nanoribbons (GNRs) were added to enhance the conductivity of the host material at high current densities, to produce Asp–GNR–Li. Asp–GNR–Li has demonstrated remarkable rate performance from 5 A/gLi (1.3C) to 40 A/gLi (10.4C) with Coulombic efficiencies >96%. Stable cycling was achieved for more than 500 cycles at 5 A/gLi, and the areal capacity reached up to 9.4 mAh/cm2 at a highest discharging/charging rate of 20 mA/cm2 that was 10× faster than that of typical LIBs, suggesting use in ultrafast charging systems. Full batteries were also built combining the Asp–GNR–Li anodes with a sulfurized carbon cathode that possessed both high power density (1322 W/kg) and high energy density (943 Wh/kg).
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/1...-20-times.html





Japan Display Seeks $900 Million for New OLED Production Method, Shares Soar
Makiko Yamazaki

A Japan Display Inc (6740.T) group firm aims to raise $900 million (678.63 million pounds) to mass produce OLED panels using new technology that will slash costs, a source familiar with the matter said - plans that sent shares in the Apple Inc (AAPL.O) supplier surging 24 percent.

Display makers are looking at mass producing organic light-emitting diode screens with a lower-cost printing process and if Japan Display was first, that could help it catch up with South Korean rivals after long being a laggard in OLED technology.

Its affiliate, JOLED, which is majority owned by a state-backed fund, has been working towards using the technology to start mass production of medium-sized screens for medical equipment monitors in late 2018 or early 2019.

JOLED has now approached dozens of investors including Sony Corp (6758.T) and Canon Inc (7751.T) for funds, the Nikkei business daily reported on Wednesday.

Japan Display said in a statement the reported details were not something it had announced, but added that it was considering ways to utilise its domestic factories to mass produce OLED panels.

The source, who was not authorised to speak on the matter, declined to be identified.

OLED screens are gaining in popularity as they are generally thinner, more flexible and offer richer colours than liquid crystal display (LCD) panels. Apple has adopted an OLED screen for its new iPhone X. But high production costs are still keeping OLED screens from being used widely.

Bigger rivals Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) and LG Display Co Ltd (034220.KS) are also working on the new production technology but it is not clear who is in the lead.

Hiroshi Hayase, senior director at research firm IHS, said the printing method should result in products 30 to 40 percent cheaper than those made by the current evaporation method.

If it could be used to make large panels such as TV screens, that would be a major breakthrough for the industry as it could eliminate the colour filters that are currently necessary.

“JOLED has taken a key step forward,” said Hayase. “It now seems a matter of investment,” he added.

For large panels, JOLED said it plans to licence the printing technology to electronics makers willing to launch a production line.

Shares in Japan Display rocketed higher on the news it was seeking funds, which was first reported by the Nikkei, and they closed up 24 percent to give the firm a market value of $1.5 billion.

Japan Display also has separate plans to use the evaporation method to mass-produce smaller screens for smartphones from 2019 and is considering tapping new investors to fund that move.

Japan Display currently holds 15 percent of JOLED, but plans to take a majority stake. Sony Corp (6758.T) and Panasonic Corp (6752.T) each own 5 percent.

Reporting by Makiko Yamzaki; Additional reporting by Chang-Ran Kim and Miyoung Kim; Editing by Edwina Gibbs
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-ja...-idUKKCN1C9037





New Cars are Being Crammed with Distracting Tech that Takes Drivers' Eyes Off the Road
Joan Lowy

• Modern cars are being stuffed full of new tech and screens — and that's a problem.
• Drivers are taking their eyes off the road for dangerous amounts of time, the AAA says.
• And the "explosion of technology" is making things worse and worse.

The infotainment technology that automakers are cramming into the dashboard of new vehicles is making drivers take their eyes off the road and hands off the wheel for dangerously long periods of time, an AAA study says.

The study released Thursday is the latest by University of Utah professor David Strayer, who has been examining the impact of infotainment systems on safety for AAA's Foundation for Traffic Safety since 2013. Past studies also identified problems, but Strayer said the "explosion of technology" has made things worse.

Automakers now include more infotainment options to allow drivers to use social media, email and text. The technology is also becoming more complicated to use. Cars used to have a few buttons and knobs. Some vehicles now have as many as 50 buttons on the steering wheel and dashboard that are multi-functional. There are touch screens, voice commands, writing pads, heads-up displays on windshields and mirrors and 3-D computer-generated images.

"It's adding more and more layers of complexity and information at drivers' fingertips without often considering whether it's a good idea to put it at their fingertips," Strayer said. That complexity increases the overall amount of time drivers spend trying to use the systems.

The auto industry says the new systems are better alternatives for drivers than mobile phones and navigation devices that were not designed to be used while driving.

The vehicle-integrated systems "are designed to be used in the driving environment and require driver attention that is comparable to tuning the radio or adjusting climate controls, which have always been considered baseline acceptable behaviors while driving," said Wade Newton, a spokesman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers.

But Jake Nelson, AAA's director for traffic safety advocacy and research, said drivers testing all 30 of the 2017 model year cars and light trucks took their eyes off the road and hands off the wheel while using infotainment systems. The test drivers used voice commands, touch screens and other interactive technologies to make calls, send texts, tune the radio or program navigation all while driving.

Clearly automakers haven't worked hard enough to make the systems quick and easy to use, Nelson said. Researchers rated 23 of the 30 vehicles "very high" or "high" in terms of the attention they demanded from drivers. Seven were rated "moderate." None required a low amount of attention to use.

Programming a destination into in-vehicle GPS navigation systems was the most distracting activity, taking drivers an average of 40 seconds to complete the task. At 25 mph (40 kph), a car can travel the length of four football fields during the time it takes to enter a destination. Previous research has shown that drivers who remove their eyes from the road for just two seconds double their risk for a crash.

Under pressure from industry, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2012 issued voluntary safety guidelines to automakers for dashboard technology instead of enforceable safety standards. The guidelines recommend that automakers lock out the ability to program navigation systems while a car is moving. However, the ability to program navigation while driving was available in 12 vehicles in the study.

honda cr-v infotainment Ooh, shiny. Business Insider/Danielle Muoio

The guidelines also recommend automakers prevent drivers from texting while driving, but three-quarters of the vehicles tested permit drivers to text while the car is moving. Texting was the second-most distracting task performed by test drivers.

Drivers looked away from the road less when using voice commands, but that safety benefit was offset by the increased amount of time drivers spent interacting with the systems.

AAA said drivers should use infotainment technologies "only for legitimate emergencies or urgent, driving-related purposes." It also urged automakers to block the ability to program navigation systems or send texts while driving. Automakers should also design infotainment systems so that they require no more attention to use than listening to the radio or an audiobook, it said.

Nearly 70 percent of U.S. adults say they want the new technologies in their vehicles, but only 24 percent feel that the technology already works perfectly, according to an opinion survey conducted for AAA.

"Drivers want technology that is safe and easy to use," said Marshall Doney, AAA's president and CEO, "but many of the features added to infotainment systems today have resulted in overly complex and sometimes frustrating user experiences for drivers."
http://www.businessinsider.com/ap-ne...nology-2017-10





Apple’s Global Web of R&D Labs Doubles as Poaching Operation

Apple has opened offices close to companies with top expertise
Alex Webb

In recent years, Apple Inc. has quietly put together a global network of small research and development labs, from the French Alps to New Zealand.

Nothing unusual about that for a company that spends $11 billion a year on R&D. Look a little closer, however, and you'll notice that many of these labs are located near companies with a strong record in mapping, augmented reality and other areas Apple is pushing into. In several cases, these companies lost employees to Apple not long after the iPhone maker came to town. Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller declined to comment.

Let’s take a tour.

Berlin
In early 2016, Apple opened an office in the German capital, located not two miles from HERE, a maps company that Nokia Oyj sold to a consortium of German carmakers in 2015. Today, Apple’s lab is mostly staffed by former HERE software engineers. Apple has since rolled out improvements to its Maps app intended to make in-car navigation easier, exactly the competency that prompted BMW, Volkswagen and Daimler to acquire HERE to begin with.

Denver
Just last week, Apple posted a job listing for a software engineer in Denver specializing in mapping. Back in May, local media reported the company was close to securing office space in a building that just happens to be two blocks from the headquarters of Verizon Communications Inc.'s Mapquest unit.

Grenoble, France
Apple opened a 20-person office last year in a former chocolate factory on the edge of the Alps. Just down the road is a major R&D facility belonging to the Franco-Italian chipmaker STMicroelectronics. Local newspaper Le Dauphiné Libéré reported that Apple was building a clean room dedicated to developing imaging chips based on STMicro technology. The most recent crop of iPhones feature an improved camera, a key selling point for many consumers.

Hertfordshire, England
The office Apple opened last year in Hertfordshire is just seven miles from the headquarters of Imagination Technologies, a graphics chip designer that then counted Apple as its biggest customer. In April, Imagination revealed that Apple would no longer use its chips in new products, tanking its shares. Even before the investors rushed for the exits, Imagination engineers had already been leaving to work down the road at Apple. The iPhone maker’s jobs website now lists 16 openings in the area related to graphics chips.

Longtan, Taiwan
The Longtan lab, whose opening Bloomberg News reported in 2015, focuses on display technologies that could reduce Apple’s dependence on Samsung, the main supplier of the organic light-emitting diode displays used in the new iPhone X. Apple’s building was formerly occupied by AU Optronics Corp. and Qualcomm Inc., and engineers joined Apple from both companies, people familiar with the moves said at the time.

Orlando
Giant chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has long had an R&D lab in the Florida city. A few years ago, Apple opened its own research facility half a mile away. A LinkedIn search shows that 32 Apple engineers in the area formerly worked at AMD, many of them on graphics processor units, the chips which power images, games and videos. The fruit of those hires, made over the past five years, became apparent this month when a GPU of Apple's own design surfaced in the iPhone 8.

Ottawa
BlackBerry Ltd.'s QNX division sells car operating systems to many of the world's leading carmakers, and much of the work for that software is done at an office in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata. Apple last year opened a nearby site where some two dozen former QNX engineers now work on Apple's own car operating system.

Wellington
Since the beginning of last year, Apple has quietly hired a handful of engineers from Peter Jackson's Weta Digital, the visual effects house behind The Lord of the Rings, Avatar and The Planet of the Apes. The team is part of the augmented reality division Apple created in 2016 to develop smart glasses that may ultimately supplant the iPhone, according to a person familiar with the operation.

— With assistance by Mark Gurman
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...hing-operation





British Actor Coogan Wins Damages Over Phone-Hacking

British actor Steve Coogan won damages on Tuesday from Mirror Group Newspapers whose reporters illegally listened to his voicemail messages to get scoops, the latest chapter in a long-running saga that has damaged the reputation of the British press.

Best known in Britain for his portrayal of fictional radio presenter Alan Partridge, Coogan is one of many celebrities who, along with politicians and members of the public caught up in news stories, fell victim to phone-hacking.

He was awarded an undisclosed sum in damages by the Mirror Group (MGN), owner of the Mirror, Sunday Mirror and People newspapers, in relation to 62 published articles that contained information obtained through phone-hacking.

“MGN acknowledges that Mr Coogan was the target of unlawful activities and that these activities were concealed until years later,” a lawyer for the company said in a statement to the London High Court, circulated to media after the hearing.

“MGN apologises to Mr Coogan and accepts that he and other victims should not have been denied the truth for so long.”

The phone-hacking scandal erupted in 2011 when it was revealed that the News of the World, a rival of the Sunday Mirror, had hacked the voicemails of Milly Dowler, a teenage murder victim.

The uproar caused the News of the World’s proprietor, media magnate Rupert Murdoch, to close down the newspaper, and prompted then Prime Minister David Cameron to order a public inquiry into the ethics and practices of the press.

At first centred on Murdoch’s British papers, the hacking scandal later widened as it became clear that reporters at MGN newspapers owned by Trinity Mirror had also relied on the illegal practice.

Apart from exposing their secrets, phone-hacking also had a devastating impact on victims’ personal relationships.

“Much of what was published caused enormous distress and significant damage to Mr Coogan’s relationships with those he wrongly suspected had leaked private information or who believed he was the cause of their private information being made public,” a lawyer for Coogan told the court.

The actor, who has appeared in many films including the internationally acclaimed “Philomena”, a drama about a forced adoption in Ireland, was one of the high-profile phone-hacking victims who gave evidence to the public inquiry and has also been a prominent campaigner on press ethics.

Reporting by Estelle Shirbon; editing by Stephen Addison
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-br...-idUKKCN1C70Y9





The Secret World of Tiny Phones That Go Inside Your Butt

Available from Amazon and popular in prison, these phones carry reviews like: "No anal problems!!! Didn't hurt my bum at all thanks guys :)"

In the early-2000s, mobile manufacturers tried to make handsets as small as possible. In the 2010s, smartphones were sold on how big their screens were. In 2016, the tide might now be turning once again: Apple's newest phone model, the iPhone SE, boasts a relatively minuscule 4-inch screen. But Apple have some distance to go before they can match the Zanco Fly.

With a 0.66-inch screen, the Fly is apparently the world's smallest mobile phone. It's not the only nanophone in existence, but they're all made by companies you've never heard of, and you won't find them in major electrical retailers. You might, however, find them stuffed among chargers for Nokia 3210s at your local phone unlocking booth, and they're all over Amazon and eBay. They cost about $40.

Some features—like three-day standby—seem rather good. But if you're really wondering what edge these phones have over the latest touchscreen smartphones, try getting a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 up your ass.

Yes: if you hadn't guessed already, these phones are going up prisoners' butt holes.

If you think this sounds like wild extrapolation—after all, lipsticks are around the same size, and you don't get articles about whacking those up your nether regions—have a look at how some of these phones are sold. Many, for instance, claim to be 100 percent plastic, or come with a "beat the BOSS" tagline, which is to say they claim to be undetectable by body orifice scanners.

Amazon customer reviews for various brown-phones range from the subtle to the straightforward. One reviewer reports that the phone is "very small and easy/painless to hide," but is concerned that this model isn't 100 percent plastic, so won't necessarily beat the BOSS. They give the phone just one star, "as I imagine that most people will want a phone like this for a certain purpose."

Another user, Sean, is more blunt. In a five star review deemed "helpful" by 23 people, he notes: "No anal problems!!! Didn't hurt my bum at all thanks guys :)"

Similar phones were in the news back in 2013 when handsets shaped like BMW key fobs—also largely plastic, and in a convenient pellet shape—appeared. Those keyfob phones are apparently illegal now—if only due to trademark infringement of that BMW logo—but phones in prisons remain a big problem. In January it was reported that seizures of mobile phones had hit a new high in England and Wales: almost 10,000 phones or SIMs had been confiscated in one 12-month period, significantly outnumbering drugs confiscations.

"Phones are everywhere," says former inmate Carl Cattermole, whose prison survival guide at prisonism.co.uk provides a fascinating insight into life behind bars. "Staff bring them in, or you could buy one from another inmate by doing them a favor or giving them something, or you phone up someone outside and they pay cash to someone else. People normally use them in their cell with people looking out, but it gets to the point where people are just using them in the changing rooms for the gym like it's the outside world."

Carl adds that cavity searches do occur on your way into prison, so bumphones might not be practical when you're on your way in, but there are plenty of other ways to get things into prisons. Having stuff chucked over a wall is one spectacularly basic method; going fishing is another—last year someone was given two-and-a-half years for tying drugs, a knife, and a McMuffin to fishing line that a prisoner was hanging out of a window. But regardless of how they get in, once phones are inside the prison, they need to stay hidden.

Phones up butts are frequently reported in the news. Last summer, for instance, a guy beginning a 16-month stretch for fraud was found with a phone, plus charger, up his ass. This February, a triple killer in a New South Wales maximum security prison went on hunger strike for 12 days in an attempt not to eject a phone detected by a BOSS unit (the phone eventually emerged on February 25). A year before that, the butthole of a guy being admitted to HMP Manchester was found to contain four mobiles, four sim cards, and four chargers. Then there's André Silva, whose anus was the portal to an Aladdin's Cave of contraband: according to one report, Silva's back passage contained "two mobile phones, two batteries, pliers, two drills, eight pieces of a hacksaw, five nails, and three SIM cards."

Those, of course, are just the phones that have been found, and perhaps that's where these $40 buttphones come in; they're not only hard to detect, they're quick and easy to get hidden, too. Obviously it's possible to get reasonably large items up your bottom, otherwise fisting wouldn't be such a popular hobby, but for the purposes of easy storage and retrieval, you're going to want to go as small as possible. "Things like iPhones are rare in prison," Cattermole says. "Most phones go up a bum at some point or another, so fuck an iPhone 6 Plus, or, rather, don't. You'd look like Spongebob Squarepants: a rectangle with limbs hanging off. Having said that, I knew a dwarf who plugged a Blackberry."

And yes, on one hand it's all very amusing that some fella's doing his best not to shit out the latest Samsung. Equally, if someone told you that you couldn't speak to your loved ones whenever you wanted, you'd probably do the same. Christ—considering the blind panic most of us experience when our battery drops below 30 percent, we'd probably be eyeing up the lube if we were facing a single day without Facebook. "I think this is something you don't understand unless you've been to jail," says Carl. "It's the emotional segregation. I'd find a way to put a phonebox up my bum if it meant staying in contact with my loved ones."

Some of the uses may be innocent—last year, two prisoners at HMP Birmingham were given an extra nine months each for shooting a rap video while inside—but it'd be naive to think there's nothing dodgy going on. "Predictably, people also organize crime on the outside," says Carl. "Just like El Chapo still ran the biggest drug cartel in the world from his prison cell, Phil from Gartree will use a mobile to organize his mates to carry on doing whatever it is they do."

One remaining question is whether buttphones actually work properly. My first step is to buy one off Amazon—the phone works on all networks except 3, and considering 3's main pull is free international roaming that'll probably be fine for all but the most ambitious prisoner.

The logical next step would be an unsavory hands-on, phone-in personal odyssey, but nothing of note's been up my butthole for the best part of a decade and things aren't about to change now, so it's off to the grocery store.

As you can see, a chocolate ring donut allows ample room for maneuver:

And how about the cavity test? Well, the guy at the Sainsbury's meat counter couldn't help with "the nearest thing to a human bottom," so I just had to go for a chicken. In many ways, this is the classic of the cavity world. In went the phone.

GREAT NEWS: I'm pleased to report that having been left overnight, the butth still worked the following morning.

But are these phones explicitly made for anal retention, or are they just like aluminum foil: made for one thing, occasionally used for another?

I tried to track down the company that made my phone, but given the subtle phrasing—or explicit claims—made by some resellers, it's perhaps unsurprising that the people behind these phones are hard to track down. My model, the Zanco Fly phone, is apparently made by Zini Mobiles Ltd, a company established in the UK in 2013, but struck off and dissolved last summer. It was registered to a forwarding address with just one director, who still appears to be selling the phone through online trading site Alibaba (minimum order: 3,000), where Zini is listed as a British company whose purported total annual revenue exceeds $100 million. Other online sources claim Zini employ, or employed, over 300 people.

Eventually I manage to speak with a Adam, a guy in Birmingham who started flogging these phones on eBay, then built the website smallestmobilephones.co.uk. He's dealt with Zini, and is keen to point out that his own website contains "nothing about prisons and nothing about arseholes." But does he know how the phones are being used?

"We don't say nothing to nobody about that," he tells me. "If that's what they want to do, they can, but we've never tested the phones to see if they set off those scanners; some of them are mainly plastic, but they're not going to be 100 percent plastic—they still need to have a circuit board."

Adam's endearingly frank about some of the phones: while the Zini phone's pretty good, one of the others is "not very good, to be honest," and when it comes to batteries, he adds that some manufacturers "don't exactly put the best stuff in there." For that reason, he urges caution on the butt front.

"Mate," he laughs. "If someone rang me and said, 'I'm going to put one of these up my arsehole,' I'd say don't. I've heard of people saying they've had some of these small phones on charge and they've blown up." He adds, by way of comfort: "But it won't make a big explosion."

I don't know how to break it to Adam that one of my unwritten—until now—life rules is that it's best to avoid any sort of explosion, big or otherwise, in the ass area. I'd say that's a fairly straightforward rule to live by. That said, I might keep my buttphone within easy reach: I illegally downloaded a lot of music back in the day, and you never know how things might pan out.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/z...go-up-your-bum

















Until next week,

- js.



















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