Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 25th, ’20

[JackSpratts]

Since 2002































January 25th, 2020




Building A Better BitTorrent Client In Go
Sharon Lin

When it comes to peer-to-peer file sharing protocols, BitTorrent is probably one of the best known. It requires a client implementing the program and a tracker to list files available to transfer and to find peer users to transfer those files. Developed in 2001, BitTorrent has since acquired more than a quarter billion users according to some estimates.

While most users choose to use existing clients, [Jesse Li] wanted to build one from scratch in Go, a programming language commonly used for its built-in concurrency features and simplicity compared to C.

The first step for a client is finding peers to download files from. Trackers, web servers running over HTTP, serve as centralized locations for introducing peers to one another. Due to the centralization, the servers are at risk of being discovered and shut down if they facilitate illegal content exchange. Thus, making peer discovery a distributed process is a necessity for preventing trackers from following in the footsteps of the now-defunct TorrentSpy, Popcorn Time, and KickassTorrents.

The client starts off by reading a .torrent file, which describes the contents of the desired file and how to connect to a tracker. The information in the file includes the URL of the tracker, the creation time, and SHA-1 hashes of each piece, or a chunk of the file. One file can be made up of thousands of pieces – the client will need to download the pieces from peers, check the hashes against the torrent file, and finally assemble the pieces together to finally retrieve the file. For the implementation, [Jesse] chose to keep the structures in the Go program reasonably flat, separating application structs from serialization structs. Pieces are also separated into slices of hashes to more easily access individual hashes.

Next, a GET request to an `announce` URL in the torrent file announces the presence of the client to peers and retrieves a response from the tracker with the list of peers. To start downloading pieces, the client starts a TCP connection with a peer, completes a two-way BitTorrent handshake, and exchanges messages to download pieces.

One interesting data structure exchanged in the messages is a bitfield, which acts as a byte array that checks which pieces a peer has. Bits are flipped when their respective piece’s status changes, acting somewhat like a loyalty card with stamps.

While talking to one peer may be straightforward, managing the concurrency of talking to multiple peers at once requires solving a classically Hard problem. [Jesse] implements this in Go by using channels as thread-safe queues, setting up two channels to assign work and collect downloaded pieces. Requests are later pipelined to increase throughput since network round-trips are expensive and sending blocks individually inefficient.

The full implementation is available on GitHub, and is easy enough to use as an alternative client or as a walkthrough if you’d prefer to build your own.
https://hackaday.com/2020/01/18/buil...-client-in-go/





A Tool That Removes Copyrighted Works Is Not a Substitute for Fair Use
Katharine Trendacosta

YouTube, which has become essential for video creators to build an audience, has a new tool that’s supposed to help users respond to its copyright filter. Is it something that makes fair use a priority? No, it’s a way to make it easier to remove the part of a video that someone has claimed they own.

In December, YouTube released a list of “New YouTube Studio tools to help you deal with copyright claims.” Mostly what it’s done is make it easier for you, as a video creator, to sort through all the copyright claims that have been filed against you and what that’s done to your videos. That is, so you can see difference between a “copyright strike” that is the result of the takedown process—which YouTube does in order to comply with the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA—and something which has been flagged by Content ID—a copyright filter voluntarily built and deployed by YouTube and subject only to YouTube’s policies.

Content ID works by having copyright holders upload their content into a database maintained by YouTube. New uploads are compared to what’s in the database and when the algorithm detects a match, copyright holders are informed. They can decide whether to monetize someone else’s video for themselves, mute the audio, or take it down. Users whose videos are hit with Content ID can dispute the match—chancing the claim being converted to a strike—or alter their video in some way that releases the claim.

Content ID makes matches based on seconds of matching audio or video. In other words, it doesn’t just make matches when a whole thing has been copied and uploaded. It makes matches when just a short clip is found. And short clips are often present in videos making fair use.

In order to make dealing with Content ID claims “easier” for users, YouTube’s new tool list includes something called “Assisted Trim.” If you get hit by Content ID, YouTube’s interface now presets an editing tool around the disputed clip, so that video makers can easily remove it, releasing the Content ID claim.

Videos critiquing a film or song are going to include clips from that video or song. It makes the point stronger. In the same way that high school English classes teach students to put quotes in their essays to make their point stronger, people working in visual and audio formats do the same thing.

Moreover, fair use gives people the legal right to use copyrighted material for purposes like commentary and criticism without having to get permission or pay the copyright holder. And fair use isn’t bound by a specific number of seconds. It’s bound by whether what was used was needed for the point being made.

But Content ID isn’t based in fair use. It’s based on whatever YouTube decides. Users can technically dispute a Content ID match. But if a user’s dispute of a Content ID claim is rejected, and they appeal, the user can end up with a “copyright strike.” Every YouTuber knows that copyright strikes can lead to you losing your whole page.

Losing your YouTube page—especially since there is no video platform that comes close to offering the kind of audience YouTube does—is not something anyone wants to chance. And if you depend on YouTube for your living, the situation is even direr. You can see why people would just go along with whatever happens rather than risk the potential consequences. YouTube's policies, and the tools it chooses to make available, all funnel creators into simply removing copyrighted material rather than encourage them to make fair use, even if legally they are making fair use.

By making eliminating material flagged by Content ID so easy—just click here!—and making challenging matches so perilous, YouTube has put its thumb on the scale against fair use and in favor of copyright abuse. That thumb gets especially heavy given how few real alternatives to YouTube exist.

Hosting creative content should mean a robust commitment to fair use. Fair use enriches our culture and our understanding of it. It is what ensures that copyright doesn’t strangle free expression and creativity. Subtle reinforcement of anti-fair use ideas enacted by private companies, done by the largest players in the ecosystem, does real damage.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/0...itute-fair-use





UK Won’t Adopt New EU Copyright Law And the Dreaded Article 13
Chris Smith

One of the most intriguing aspects of Britain’s departure from the European Union will be which elements of EU law will be dropped and retained, and whether the UK will implement some future rulings to maintain regulatory alignment.

This will have serious ramifications in the tech industry, not least in the way the internet and some of the biggest web firms in the world are treated in terms of taxation, competition and so much more.

Today, we perhaps got our first indication of how things will play out post-Brexit, with the news the UK will not implement the highly contentious new online copyright law, which would require major tech companies to take a highly-aggressive approach to removing copyrighted material from their platforms.

Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive refers to “protected works or other protected subject-matter uploaded by its users” and has angered web giants like Google, who have campaigned against it

Critics have said the change could threaten user-generated content like the viral memes and GIF files because they are often based on copyrighted imagery from the realm of films and TV shows.

However, in March last year it emerged memes had been “specifically excluded” from Article 13, which will see the introduction of an upload filter designed to prevent copyrighted content appearing on sites in the first place, when it comes into effect by June 2021.

The UK was one of the 19 nations who initially supported the new EU Copyright Directive, when the vote was cast last April.

The EU's Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market will not ban memes

However, the Universities and Science Minister Chris Skidmore has now said it will not be implemented in the UK (via BBC).

He said: “The Government has committed not to extend the implementation period. Therefore, the United Kingdom will not be required to implement the Directive, and the Government has no plans to do so.

“Any future changes to the UK copyright framework will be considered as part of the usual domestic policy process.”

The decision is hardly a surprise, given the prime minister himself, hates the new EU law.
https://www.trustedreviews.com/news/...law-uk-3972873





We Should Have Bought the DVDs

It’s 2022. I don’t know if I’ll ever own a house, but I can own my favorite television shows in their entirety.
Veronica Walsingham

Editors’ note: This is part of the Op-Eds From the Future series, in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine we might read two, 10, 50 or even 200 years from now. The challenges they predict are imaginary — for now — but their arguments illuminate the urgent questions of today and prepare us for tomorrow. The Opinion piece below is a work of fiction.

The day I subscribed to The CW Watch — the new streaming service from The CW — I had to confront the fact that I subscribe to 11 different streaming services. Between Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Apple TV+, Disney+, Peacock, AMC More, the Starz add-on, the Showtime add-on and now The CW Watch, I pay a grand total of $110.32 per month to watch TV. This is a far cry from the monthly $7.99 I once paid for Netflix and Netflix alone. And it was then, staring at “110.32” on the screen of my phone’s calculator, that I decided I should have just bought the DVDs. We all should have just bought the DVDs.

Streaming used to be affordable. Five years ago, “Friends,” “The Office,” “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Gossip Girl” and “Gilmore Girls” were all on Netflix. There was new content, too, which I devoured in weekend-long stretches spent on the couch, but I mostly streamed shows I had watched in their entirety several times over. Television shows became the score to which I lived my life; I played these shows on a loop in the background of my life while I cleaned my apartment, folded laundry, did my makeup or cooked dinner.

How exactly did I go from paying a monthly $7.99 to listen to a Meredith Grey monologue while I did the dishes to paying $110.32 per month for the same thing? It happened the same way Ernest Hemingway described going bankrupt in “The Sun Also Rises”: gradually and then suddenly.

The first four streaming services I subscribed to were Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and HBO. This seemed logical, as Netflix and Hulu were the two biggest names in the streaming frontier, Amazon’s service also provided next-day-delivery on orders and HBO had “Game of Thrones.” I added Showtime because people on Twitter loved “Lady Lazarus,” Rachel Bloom’s surrealist musical series (very loosely) based on Sylvia Plath’s life, and what’s $5.99 per month? Then I added Starz, because people on Twitter loved the sex scenes in the gender-swapped reboot of “I Dream of Jeannie,” and what’s another $5.99 per month? Perhaps you see the pattern here: Old-school marketing techniques, like offering add-ons for seemingly discounted prices that add up quickly, were applied to a new industry, and I ate it up.

I subscribed to Apple TV+ because Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell were on “The Morning Show” and I wasn’t going to not watch that. I followed Jennifer Aniston and “Friends” to HBO Max, and Steve Carell and “The Office” to Peacock. Honestly, I don’t even remember subscribing to Disney+ or AMC More — it’s all a streaming blur.

I resisted the initial allure of Baby Yoda, but I think I finally gave into Disney+ when “Grey’s Anatomy” officially landed there. As for AMC More, I must have subscribed the day after the premiere of “Birthing Bad,” the “Breaking Bad” prequel starring Allison Janney as Walter White’s complicated mother. And, finally, I subscribed to The CW Watch, but not for any new content they offered. It’s not that I dislike “Bluffington,” The CW’s dark, live-action reboot of “Doug” — it’s just that I wouldn’t pay a monthly fee to watch it. However, I have no problem paying a monthly fee to rewatch my favorite old teen dramas (“Gossip Girl,” “Gilmore Girls” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”). We cut off the head of cable and out sprung dozens of streaming heads.

The landscape of streaming entertainment already feels overwhelming, but it’s about to get much worse. Next year, Target’s streaming service, Bullseye, will launch; its marquee show is the long-awaited “Scissors,” a Zac Efron-led drama described as “the psycho-sexual tale of a Los Angeles-dwelling hairdresser who discovers the dark underbelly of ride-share apps.” Instagram is going the route of reality television, with plans to launch a streaming service called Influence, which will feature 24-hour reality shows starring Instagram influencers (Influence’s content has already been compared to “The Truman Show” by most publications, including The Times).

Bullseye and Influence will lack the most alluring component of other streaming services: nostalgia. This is an element that even Netflix greatly underestimated — otherwise, they would have gotten the streaming rights to “Friends” for the next century. Instead, Ted Sarandos, the chief content officer at Netflix, was out there saying, “The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.”

But HBO not only produces a roster of the best-made shows today, it’s also home to decades of culture-defining programming, from “Game of Thrones” to “Sex and the City" to “Six Feet Under.” While Netflix can produce well-made content today and tomorrow, the company is unable to travel back in time to create nostalgia shows. The irony is that Netflix introduced audiences to the joy of easily binge-watching old television shows, and this is the same joy that now helps Netflix’s competitors.

An argument could be made for canceling Netflix, as the original allure of it being a one-stop destination for nostalgia, and new content fizzled once networks realized the value of their content and moved those shows to their own streaming services. It seems that Netflix will one day be home to only their original shows, and is that worth a monthly subscription? Yes and no. For every five shows Netflix produces, one is a huge hit. And by huge hit, I mean a cultural phenomenon that is the only thing anyone will talk about for two weeks. Canceling Netflix would mean canceling the ability to talk with my friends about Ryan Murphy’s “Sandy Palms,” the satirical drama about the competitive world of sand castle building and the intimate lives of those who compete. And who wants to miss out on that conversation?

But I should cancel something. The amount I pay for streaming services is more than a cable package. But I can’t just go back to cable alone, because I wouldn’t have access to certain streaming originals that are basically a form of cultural currency. On top of that, experts predict that the last remaining cable providers will stop offering services within the next five years. I thought I had outsmarted the system, with my measly $7.99 a month. We all thought we outsmarted the system. But that system outsmarted us all in a way that’s irreversible, because we can’t go back to cable — it’s dying, we killed it — and we’re now at the mercy of the streaming services and what they choose to charge us each month.

We never outsmarted the entertainment industry when we opted for Netflix subscriptions over cable. Instead, we gave the industry a way to monetize our love of one or two television shows forever.

The CW Watch was my tipping point, not just because it was the 11th streaming service I subscribed to, but because I had signed up for the sole purpose of rewatching old content. At first, I didn’t even question the fact that I had agreed to pay money each month to view old programs that I could own outright. But I’ve since realized how financially irresponsible it is, and I’ve done the math to prove it: If I subscribe to The CW Watch for a decade, I’ll have spent $1,078 to, more or less, watch three shows I’ve seen before. On the other hand, purchasing the brand-new DVD box sets of these shows would be a grand total of $380.96, which would save me $697.04 over the next 10 years. I should just buy the DVDs and cancel The CW Watch.

This isn’t to say that everyone should buy DVD box sets and cancel all their streaming services, because there is plenty of good, new content on many of these streaming services. But if you enjoy a television show so much so that you’ll follow it to a streaming service, as I did with “Grey’s Anatomy” to Disney+, “The Office” to Peacock and “Gossip Girl” to The CW Watch, perhaps you should make the investment in owning the show outright and prevent yourself from being manipulated into paying yet another monthly streaming service bill just to watch one show.

As I sit in the apartment that I rent while I think about renting the content that I watch, I can’t help but notice that everything in our society has shifted toward renting. We rent music, work spaces, furniture, jewelry, and wedding dresses. I have a friend who rents an espresso machine. There has been a socioeconomic shift, pushing us toward renting and away from owning. I don’t know if I’ll ever own a house, but I can own my favorite television shows in their entirety, and that feels good.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/20/o...streaming.html





Watch Google's Upcoming AirDrop-Style File Sharing in Action

We see the unreleased tool transfer photos and videos between two Pixel phones.
Igor Bonifacic

It's been a while since we've heard anything about Fast Share, Google's upcoming take on AirDrop. But based on a new hands-on video, it looks like you may soon be able to check out the file-sharing feature on your Android phone. Now known as Nearby Sharing, XDA-Developers was able to get the in-development tool working to send photos and videos between a Pixel 2 XL and Pixel 4.

The good news is that it looks like Nearby Sharing solves a lot of the usability quirks that stopped Android Beam from becoming more popular. To start, Android now completes the initial handshake between two devices through Bluetooth rather than NFC. As a result, you don't have to put two phones right up next to one another to start the sharing process. Instead, it looks like you have about a foot of range to work with. Using the feature also looks more straightforward. You can enable Nearby Sharing from Android's quick settings menu. Afterwards, sharing a file is simply a matter of accessing the share sheet, which you can pull up in most apps by tapping the three dots icon.

Notably, it also likes you will have a couple of options when it comes to setting up how the feature works. For instance, there are visibility options that allow you to restrict who can send you a file. Additionally, there's a setting to allow your phone to use data to assist with the process.

We could soon see a variety of Android phone makers each release their own take on AirDrop. Earlier today, XDA published a report that showed Samsung is working on a feature called Quick Share. Last year, a trio of Chinese phone manufacturers announced they were working on their own file-sharing protocol. However, the benefit of Google's approach is that it would work with any Android phone, instead of a specific make of phone. It's not clear when Google will release Nearby Sharing, but there's a good chance we'll learn about it at the company's upcoming I/O developer conference, which starts on May 12th.
https://www.engadget.com/2020/01/24/...ands-on-video/





Samsung Quick Share Is Like Apple's AirDrop But For Galaxy Phones
Julio Cachila

• Apple's AirDrop allows iOS device users to share files with other iDevices easily
• Samsung is working on its own version of AirDrop
• Other smartphone companies are working on their own AirDrop alternatives

Apple has a very useful file-sharing feature called AirDrop. This feature, which was launched in 2011, has been helping many who use Apple's ecosystem to share files, videos, photos and other things between iPhones, iPads and Macs, without the need for a third-party app to succeed.

AirDrop has been one of the reasons why many iOS users stay in the Apple ecosystem, XDA Developers noted. Thankfully, Samsung smartphone users won't have to make the jump to the iPhone just to enjoy such a feature.

Samsung is set to release a new AirDrop-like feature called “Quick Share” with its upcoming Galaxy S20 lineup, XDA Developers reported. This new feature will allow Galaxy smartphone users to share files, photos, videos and more with each other without the need to install third-party apps designed to work the same way.

XDA's Max Weinbach said he acquired an APK from an anonymous source who has access to a Galaxy S20+ 5G handset. He was able to install and run the APK on a few different Galaxy handsets, but was unable to transfer files between those devices. It appears that the feature will be specific to certain models, likely starting with the Galaxy S20 lineup. Other Galaxy devices might get it in the future.

Quick Share will allow Galaxy smartphone users to share and receive files and other things with their Samsung Social contacts. It will also allow users to receive such content from everyone around them, provided that the people around the user has a compatible device that supports the feature.

Unlike AirDrop, Quick Share also allows users to upload files to Samsung Cloud. These files can then be streamed and downloaded to Samsung Smart Things devices to be used at home and other places. As such, this feature, for example, will allow users to watch on their Samsung Smart TVs the movies and videos they have on the Galaxy Handsets – without the need for third-party apps, gadgets or cables.

What about non-Samsung users?

Android users who don't have Samsung devices shouldn't feel bad about the news because Google is also working on its AirDrop alternative called Nearby Sharing. This feature will allow users to transfer files and other things between Android-powered smartphones, hopefully irregardless of the model or brand being used.

Chinese Android smartphone makers Xiaomi, Oppo and Vivo have also teamed up to create a cross-brand file sharing system that will allow up to 20MB/s transfer speeds. This feature will be released next month.
https://www.ibtimes.com/samsung-quic...phones-2909202





Patreon Can't Solve Its Porn Pirate Problem

Two years ago, Patreon promised to crack down on piracy site Yiff.Party. Now it says its hands are tied.
Cecilia D'Anastasio

Last fall, a prolific photographer who asked not to be named noticed a sharp, unexplained drop-off in earnings on his Patreon page, where fans shell out cash for tiered subscriptions to his photos of well-lit nude models. Then, in December, he received an anonymous email with a link to a website called Yiff.Party. When he clicked, he blanched: Thousands of his photos were laid out on the open web for free.

For five years, the libidinous pirates of Yiff.Party have siphoned masses of paywalled Patreon porn off of the platform and shared it for free. Two years ago, Patreon was determined to shut them down. Instead, the platform has effectively given up, despite desperate protests from affected creators.

Yiff.Party doesn’t look like much: a basic, blocky, white and lavender website with a changelog documenting the latest free art dumps and their respective creators. There might be eight new posts an hour, as well as calls for patrons to help fill out incomplete collections. A lot of it is furry porn—“yiff” is a term in the furry community referencing sexual activity—but Yiff.Party hosts anything that falls under the category of “lewds.” That includes smutty cosplays, vanilla softcore, hentai comics, 3D sci-fi sex stills, plus whatever Patreon-hosted art pirates dump there. (Patreon’s guidelines on adult content prohibit “real people engaging in sexual acts such as masturbation or sexual intercourse on camera.”)

“I am an artist, I live off my work, and sometimes Patreon is the only income I have,” the photographer whose work had been stolen tells WIRED. In bold, capital-lettered text on his Patreon page, he warned “WHOEVER IS DOING THIS” to “PLEASE STOP FUCKING ME OVER.” In the meantime, he can only hope that whichever fox has been gifting him cash with one hand and pirating his works with the other grows a conscience. Because one thing’s for sure: Patreon isn’t helping him, despite a 2018 pledge in Kotaku that it would fight Yiff.Party “vigorously” and “on behalf of our creators.”

This month, the owner of Yiff.Party, who goes by Dozes, sent WIRED a screenshot that he says contains the only two messages in his inbox from the domain @patreon.com: one “Notice of Infringing Material” on July 18, 2018, and a polite follow-up on September 26, 2018. “Patreon has definitely been aware of yiff.party since 2015, but that's the only instance of them directly contacting me,” Dozes says.

Dozes says Yiff.Party receives about unique 95,000 visitors daily and that it’s only growing. He started it, he says, “to archive content,” in part, for fans whose favorite artwork disappears once a creator leaves Patreon or gets banned. In a 2018 interview, Dozes provided a different rationale—“simply to make paid Patreon content available for free”—but said both then and now that he’s not out to get creators or cost them income. Despite this, those whose work has ended up on the site have described reactions ranging from existential sadness to financial anxiety.

Patrons scrape huge amounts of premium Patreon posts and import them onto Yiff.Party, where they are accessible to anyone with at least one click. Dozes says that the site currently stores over 20 terabytes of data and accepts donations that go toward server upkeep.

Despite its gung-ho statement to Kotaku two years ago, Patreon now says its terms of service effectively tie its hands. “We can’t do anything,” says Colin Sullivan, Patreon’s head of legal. “We don’t enforce [copyright] because we don’t have a license to the content.”

Sullivan didn’t hear back from Yiff.Party after those two cease and desist notices; he still hasn’t. Patreon says it also appealed to the company that hosts Yiff.Party, which, according to Sullivan, was based in France. “International hosting companies often turn a blind eye to a lot of things,” he adds.

In May 2019, months after it reached out to Dozes, Patreon posted a blog describing its stance on piracy. “Protecting the works of our creators across the entirety of the internet is not something our policies or enforcement efforts are equipped to handle,” wrote Patreon copyright lawyer Weston Dombroski. He further compares Patreon to a landlord, “limited in both responsibility and the remedies they can seek when theft occurs in your apartment.” Patreon’s “trust and safety” guidelines “give creators as much control of their businesses as possible,” which includes 100 percent ownership of their work.

In other words, it’s legally on Patreon’s creators to enforce copyright on their own work. As Sullivan notes, it’s a good thing that their creators maintain that copyright and not the platform. And yet, with a new post dump every seven minutes or so, Yiff.Party is an increasing menace to Patreon porn society. At least some rental contracts give tenants the power to impel their landlord to install window guards against theft.

Individual attempts at action have also proven fruitless. In what looks like a nod toward generosity, Yiff.Party offers a “Contact” button on the bottom right of its page. Creators have sent DMCA takedown notices to the linked email address—sometimes several—and received no response. As a next step they might try to find Yiff.Party’s host and registrar information to lodge a complaint, which is where things get even more confusing.

Yiff.Party’s backend is a bit of a chimera by design. Dozes employs a bit of tech called a “reverse proxy.” A typical proxy obfuscates the identity of the user accessing a server; a reverse proxy hides the identity of the server the client accesses. Between Yiff.Party’s server and the yiff.party website sits another server. “Yiff.party's main server stays hidden because the ‘real’ IP address isn't being exposed since traffic is routed through a proxy,” says Dozes. Reverse proxies aren’t uncommon; large sites might use one to help them run faster.

“It’s essentially a VPN, but for a website,” Dozes adds. “If our real hosting provider found out they hosted the site, we would be at risk of losing all our data.”

Going through Patreon has not helped much either. One model and content creator who asked to remain anonymous has twice emailed the platform about removing her content from Yiff.Party. One time was in reference to a DMCA takedown request; in the other, she reveals the identity of a suspected pirate patron. In screenshots from January 2020 shared with WIRED, a Patreon support representative told the model that the company “has been made aware of this website and has been taking action against it.” The representative declined to provide a timeline for resolution, and did not share the results of the investigation into the suspicious patron. Her content continues to show up on Yiff.Party.

Platforms large and small have for years relegated responsibility for bad things that happen to their users onto those same users and their personal networks. In the case of Yiff.Party, Patreon appears to be following that same playbook. “For creators, we encourage them to focus on connecting more with their fans and focusing on their patrons who care about them, and not the ones who are going to upload [their work] somewhere else,” Sullivan says.

Creators could use software watermarks or other techniques to root out the culprit. But even that doesn’t provide a solid indicator of who did what. In 2003, the Recording Industry Association of America filed 261 lawsuits against pirates for allegedly sharing songs over P2P networks—with some misfires. IP addresses weren’t immensely helpful in identifying pirates, and sometimes led to false allegations. Patreon says it collects some information that could point to who’s pirating, but that it’s difficult to nail down the culprit or prove their intent.

The head of piracy-focused publication Torrentfreak, who goes by Ernesto Van Der Sar, doesn’t consider what’s going on at Yiff.Party a security issue. He also agrees that it’s nearly impossible to prevent patrons from leaking content, despite identifying software stickers. “You can compare it to Netflix perhaps,” he says. “People with an account there can download and share the content with specialized tools. This is content from major companies that's worth billions of dollars and protected by high-grade DRM. If that's still possible, it will be hard for Patreon to prevent it from happening.”

Last May, a person who went by Jane posted on Yiff.Party’s forum to say they’re the mother of one of the models posted on the site and owns the photos as well. “What is the process of removing these,” she asked. Ever since, Yiff.Party regulars have dutifully shitposted in the thread, some wondering whether it’s a troll post, and others earnestly explaining the ideology behind their piracy.

“There’s really nothing you can do once you post some good stuff online,” said one. Said another, “Nothing you can do. It's a catch22 scenario: if you don't remove it people continue to pirate but if you do take it down the piracy just increases.”

Said a third, “Hi Jane. Welcome to the Internet.” They continued, echoing the first commenter’s sentiments. “Even if you delete it from a website someone somewhere still has a copy of it. This is especially true if it’s hilarious, embarrassing or pornographic in nature. The bigger the deal you make out of it the worst [sic] it gets for you and anyone else involved.”
https://www.wired.com/story/patreon-...acy-yiffparty/





Frontier, an ISP in 29 States, Plans to File for Bankruptcy

Frontier subscribers suffer from poor customer service and failing networks.
Jon Brodkin

Frontier Communications is planning to file for bankruptcy within two months, Bloomberg reported last week.

The telco "is asking creditors to help craft a turnaround deal that includes filing for bankruptcy by the middle of March, according to people with knowledge of the matter," Bloomberg wrote.

Frontier CEO Bernie Han and other company executives "met with creditors and advisers Thursday and told them the company wants to negotiate a pre-packaged agreement before $356 million of debt payments come due March 15," the report said. The move would likely involve Chapter 11 bankruptcy to let Frontier "keep operating without interruption of telephone and broadband service to its customers."

Frontier reported having $16.3 billion in long-term debt as of September 30, 2019.

We contacted Frontier about the report of its bankruptcy plan and will update this story if we get a response.

Frontier offers residential and business services in 29 states over its fiber and copper networks. Frontier offers broadband, TV, and phone services and reported revenue of $2 billion and a net loss of $345 million in the most recent quarter.

Frontier has been losing customers and reducing its staff. Its residential-customer base dropped from 4.15 million to 3.81 million in the 12-month period ending September 30, 2019, including a loss of 90,000 customers in the most recent quarter. Also in that 12-month period, Frontier's business-customer base declined from 422,000 to 381,000.

Meanwhile, Frontier had 19,132 employees as of September 30, 2019, down from 21,375 one year earlier.

Frontier's financial performance last year was so bad that it refused to take any questions from investors during its quarterly earnings call in August. Frontier is in the process of selling its operations in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana to WaveDivision Capital.

Many customer problems

Frontier's decline is partly due to the decreasing relevance of its copper networks and its failure to properly maintain those old phone lines. But Frontier has also provided poor customer service on its modern fiber networks.

Subscribers suffered outages immediately after Frontier's 2014 purchase of AT&T's wireline network in Connecticut and Frontier's 2016 purchase of Verizon's FiOS and DSL networks in California, Florida, and Texas.

Frontier Communications failed to properly maintain its telecom network in Minnesota, leading to "frequent and lengthy" phone and Internet outages, an investigation by the state Commerce Department found in January 2019. The investigation led to a settlement. New York state officials are also investigating Frontier over its repeated outages and long repair times.

Many Frontier customers in different states have been hit with giant overcharges and cancellation fees, or draconian policies like one requiring customers to pay for router rentals even when they have purchased their own router. (A new US law scheduled to take effect in June 2020 would ban that practice.)

Windstream, a telco that offers service in 18 states, filed for bankruptcy in February 2019. Windstream in November 2019 said its latest quarterly revenue was "$1.27 billion compared to $1.38 billion in the same period a year ago."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...or-bankruptcy/





The Last Radio Station
Chris Gates

North of Silicon Valley, protected by the Point Reyes National Seashore, is the only operational ship-to-shore maritime radio station. Bearing the call sign KPH, the Point Reyes Station is the last of its kind.

KPH is divided between two physical stations: one, knows as the voice, is responsible for transmitting; the other half of the station, known as the ears, was where human operators listened for incoming messages. The voice is located 11 miles north of Point Reyes in the small town of Bolinas, Calif., and the ears reside within the Point Reyes National Seashore boundary nestled in pastures full of cattle and backdropped by the Pacific Ocean.

Stations like this once riddled the California coastline as part of a radio communication network. The operators who ran them were charged with watching over the Pacific Ocean airways, relaying messages to the sailors at sea.

“These guys and women were the best there were, and they had to be,” says Richard Dillman, chief operator at the Maritime Radio Historical Society. “On the ships, you could get away with anything. You could send slow, you could send fast, you could send like you were drunk, you could send like you are beating two spoons together. At the shore side, you had to be able to say, ‘fine, I got it, you can send fast, no problem. Send slow, I’llwait. Send like you are drunk, I can understand you.’ Because every word is revenue for the company because you were charging by the word.”

Dillman, who was never an employee of KPH, but rather a self-described “groupee and radio-obsessed person,” says the operators had to adapt to anything. “They were the best there were. They are our heroes and heroines.”

But once satellite communication became cheaper than paying radio operators, telegraphy became obsolete, and the network of radio stations became all but lost, as they were abandoned, sold and scavenged for parts.

Marin County Congressman Clem Miller saved KPH from this fate by writing and introducing the bill for the establishment of Point Reyes National Seashore. The bill preserved the land from development after operations ended.

A telegraphic timeline

The communications industry in the U.S. has seen several waves of disruption. The first significant innovation was sending a message by transmitting electrical signals over a wire.

In 1843, Samuel Morse, the father of Morse code, received funding from Congress to set up and test his new communication wire from Washington, D.C., to Baltimore. Upon completion, he sent the first official telegraph saying, “What hath God wrought.” What it wrought was money.

Morse received enough funding to string wire across an unsettled American landscape. From 1843 to 1900, wired telegraphy reigned until a new technology disrupted the communication monopoly of Western Union.

On June 2, 1896, Guglielmo Marconi patented a system of wireless telegraphy that would utilize radio waves to transmit Morse’s dits and dahs, making wired communication seem infrastructure-heavy. Plus, wireless telegraphy made maritime and transcontinental communication a lot more simple.

For almost 100 years, Morse code was used to communicate with ships at sea. By 1999 the industry had switched over to the cheaper and more efficient satellite communication systems.

The Point Reyes KPH station ended operations on June 30, 1997. The last day of U.S. commercial use of Morse code was July 12, 1999. The final message sent was the same as Morse’s first: “What hath God wrought.”

‘This was the end’

“It’s just beeps in the air,” says Dillman. “That is all Morse code is. And yet it was so impactful and emotional to these people,” he says about the operators and sailors he was with during the last day of Morse. “Because here they are seeing their career, their way of life, their skills disappearing. This was the end of the line. It used to be that you could take your license and telegraph key and move onto the next station, get a job, no problem. This was the end.”

After the last day of Morse in 1999, two years after KPH shut down, Richard and a few other radiomen drove up to the shuttered KPH station to assess how harsh the elements had been in the two years since it closed.

“Here it was, our life’s work, just handed to us,” Dillman says. “Because here are the ears, in Point Reyes, still living. The voice in Bolinas — dark and cold, but existing. So all we had to do was convince the park service that [restoring the station] was worth doing, and we were the guys to do it. And we are still amazed that they bought our story, and we have not turned back.”

Dillman and the rest of the radio squirrels that hang around KPH can be found every Sunday and more than welcome visitors.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/01/18/th...radio-station/





The Craigslist of Guns

Inside Armslist, the online ‘gun show that never ends’
Colin Lecher and Sean Campbell

ThomasThomas Caldwell was a veteran in his 60s with a soft physique, oval glasses, no income, and a history of mental illness. “I’ve been schizophrenic all my life, hearing voices,” he once said in a courtroom. He didn’t have a license to sell firearms, but that hadn’t stopped him. In 2015, according to prosecutors, police found a Glock in a Milwaukee drug house and quickly linked it to him. He’d purchased it only the day before.

Months later, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) confronted Caldwell about the pistol. According to the ATF, he said he had been purchasing guns from a licensed dealer, then reselling many of them through Armslist.com, a website that connects sellers with buyers looking for anything from a pistol to an AR-15.

If Caldwell wanted to sell guns, the ATF warned him, there was a proper way to do it. Without obtaining a federal firearms license, he was breaking the law and potentially putting weapons into the hands of criminals.

Caldwell didn’t listen, and he managed to turn flipping guns into a substantial business, prosecutors later said. Between December 2015 and May 2018, he made cash deposits into his bank account totaling more than $19,000, all from gun sales. Even after his initial run-in with authorities, he kept up the practice for years. In 2017, Madison police found a Taurus 9mm pistol during an investigation, then traced it back to a purchase Caldwell had made two weeks before.

Eventually, the ATF found that 11 guns recovered by police during investigations had been purchased by Caldwell. Since the ATF’s 2015 warning, he’d bought 95 handguns and 11 rifles from 57 different sellers. Caldwell posted more than 200 listings for guns on the website, according to prosecutors, sometimes explicitly noting the weapons were brand-new and unfired.
"According to prosecutors, he had said that a license was “too much paperwork”"

Officials believed the short “time to crime” — the gap between a sale and when it’s recovered at a crime scene — meant Caldwell had become a known source for criminals. A prosecutor would later say a tragedy was “inevitable.” As the Chicago Tribune noted last year, authorities declined to say why he wasn’t charged much earlier.

Two years after he first came to the attention of the ATF, agents organized an undercover sting, buying a Walther .40-caliber pistol from Caldwell on Armslist. But while Caldwell was still under investigation, he sold a weapon on Armslist and, months later, the gun somehow arrived in Chicago. When it did, Police Commander Paul Bauer responded to a call in the Loop and caught up with a suspect. In the struggle that followed, Bauer was shot six times and killed with the gun.

Caldwell, according to the ATF, described selling guns as an addiction. Police executed a search warrant on his home and uncovered 44 firearms as they kept building their case. Owning a lot of guns is not in itself a crime, and undeterred, Caldwell sold another gun to an undercover investigator on Armslist a month later.

He pleaded guilty to illegally selling guns in 2018, nearly three years after first being warned by the ATF. According to prosecutors, he had said that a license was “too much paperwork.”

Caldwell isn’t the only frequent user of Armslist. Over the years, the website has become a major destination for firearm buyers and sellers. The site can be used legally, and its terms of use explicitly direct users to follow applicable firearms laws. Critics, however, say the site’s operators have taken a hands-off approach to moderating the content on their platform that fuels violence and allows private sellers to bypass getting a federal firearms license.

Law enforcement faces legal barriers to policing rogue sellers like Caldwell, but the law has also put Armslist itself out of reach. The same legal protections meant to help the internet flourish have also ensured the guns keep flowing.

“To protect the good actors, you have to write a standard that allows people to be pretty terrible actors too,” says James Grimmelmann, professor of law at Cornell University. “The challenge is how do you distinguish the good from the terrible actors.”

UnderUnder federal law, it’s legal for people to sell guns without a background check. It’s only when they become “engaged in the business” of selling guns that they are required by law to obtain a license from the ATF and run checks on every sale.

So when does selling guns turn from a hobby into a full-fledged business enterprise? It’s difficult to tell. One person might, for example, inherit dozens of antiques and sell them without issue. But another person might buy a handful of guns from a registered seller, flip them in private sales without conducting background checks, and be deemed engaged in the business.

Executive actions made during the second term of the Obama presidency were supposed to tighten the definition of “engaging in the business.” They state that those “who utilize the Internet or other technologies must obtain a license, just as a dealer whose business is run out of a traditional brick-and-mortar store.” At the time, critics argued that the actions were “legally meaningless” and that they amounted to little more than “political theater.”

“The president and Congress often charge administrative agencies with very broad and ambitious tasks, and they rarely provide sufficient funding to actually carry them out,” said Timothy Lytton, a distinguished professor of law at Georgia State University who specializes in safety regulation and gun violence.

The ambiguity of federal law — and the fact it is rarely enforced — leaves it open to exploitation. And Armslist is home to many sellers whose activity falls in a gray area.

The Verge and The Trace scraped more than 2 million Armslist listings from December 2016 through March 2019 to identify users who may be skirting the law through high-volume sales.

We searched the text of listings for phone numbers and isolated the numbers that appeared most frequently. Armslist encourages users to communicate through direct messages on the website, but some sellers may include direct contact information in their posts.

We identified more than 700 phone numbers that appeared in 10 or more listings. The most used phone number belonged to a seller in South Carolina who was associated with more than 300 listings on Armslist during the period of time covered by our scraping. (The user denied posting ads on the site, but confirmed their phone number, which was included as contact information on each ad.) Thirty-eight other phone numbers appeared in 50 or more posts on the site.

To determine if sellers were licensed to conduct sales, we compared the contact information in the ads against the publicly available list of federal firearms licenses, which contains registered sellers’ names, addresses, and phone numbers. Only 14 of the phone numbers attached to a high volume of ads appeared in the ATF’s database.

The Trace and The Verge called every phone number linked to 25 or more listings — nearly 150 in total. We spoke to 10 sellers altogether. None of those sellers said they had a license to deal firearms. Two acknowledged that they used Armslist to turn a profit on sales, while the rest reported using the site primarily to offload firearms in their private collections. “Obviously if you get something and you know can get more for it, you’re probably just going to turn around and sell it again,” one user said.

All of the users we spoke with said they vetted prospective buyers in some way, whether by reading through the person’s online presence or simply getting a sense of the person while negotiating a sale. But only a handful said they took customers to a licensed firearms dealer to perform a background check before making a sale.

One user from Florida, whose phone number was connected to nearly 50 listings, said he didn’t conduct background checks on sales. But he wished that there was an easy way to review the history of a potential buyer. The user said that some people reaching out through Armslist didn’t pass a gut check for a firearm transfer.

“If someone calls you up and says, ‘Hey, I’d like to buy a gun,’ you should be able to check if the person can have a gun,” the Florida user said. “I want to be a responsible gun owner.”

The number of posts from a user doesn’t necessarily match the number of gun sales, and the tool couldn’t account for duplicate posts. However, for every user we spoke with, we confirmed that their phone numbers appeared in multiple non-duplicate posts on the site.

We described our findings to law enforcement officials to get a sense of whether this constituted evidence of sellers being “engaged in the business.”

In a statement, an ATF spokesperson said the agency looks at each case to see “whether there is sufficient evidence of willful misconduct” to prove a violation. “The volume of sales is only one factor in evaluating whether someone is unlawfully engaged in the business, particularly since federal law expressly allows individuals to sell their personal firearms collections without a license,” the spokesperson said. “Numerous additional factors, such as the intent of the seller, must be considered.”

To build a case, prosecutors must demonstrate that a person was willfully taking illegal action — that a seller knew what they were doing was wrong and flouted the law anyway.

“People who break this law should be prosecuted,” says Thomas Chittum, assistant director of field operations at the ATF. “But it’s a challenging law to prosecute because of the willfulness requirement and because it’s very fact-intensive, and sometimes those facts aren’t readily available.”

Prosecutors have relied on the volume of online listings as evidence in past cases. In 2010, a man was convicted of engaging in the business of selling guns without a license, while serving as an FBI agent. He had posted nearly 300 online gun ads over more than three years and collected more than $118,000 in firearm sales.

United States Attorney for the District of Minnesota Erica MacDonald stifled laughter when asked whether prosecutors might want to scrutinize a seller who had posted hundreds of listings. “Yeah,” she said.

GunsGuns are sold online in many ways. Retailers like Bass Pro Shops, Brownells, or BudsGunShop.com sell their firearms through company websites, but buyers pick up the guns from licensed dealers. There are also online marketplaces, like GunBroker and GunsAmerica, where the websites directly participate in the transaction in some way and allow for firearm transfers to flow through federal license holders. Then there are places like Armslist that function as an online classified section tailored to guns, and all transactions are done peer to peer.

The idea for Armslist formed in the summer of 2007, when Jonathan Gibbon was a student at the US Air Force Academy, he told the website Human Events. He saw that Craigslist had banned gun listings and thought he could step in to fill the void. So he connected with his classmate Brian Mancini at a Fourth of July party and they put together a basic version of the site.

Someone looking to offload a gun can put up a listing on Armslist in minutes and then simply wait for prospective buyers to reach out. With a few clicks, sellers can say where they’re selling their gun, the make and build, how much it costs, and include an email address for queries. The process is as easy as buying a chair on Craigslist. Many of the users we spoke with said the site’s simplicity is a big part of its draw.

When a buyer visits a listing, they can learn nearly everything they’d want to know about their new firearm. Up top, there are pictures of the gun from multiple angles, along with the manufacturer and caliber size. They just need to click on the “contact seller” button to move forward and complete the sale. In some cases, sellers will include a personal cell number.

“It connects firearm owners and enthusiasts, helping people to find deals on firearms and gear in their local area,” Gibbon told Human Events in 2010. “Imagine a gun show that never ends, but you need an internet connection.”

Since its founding, Armslist has gone on to become one of the most popular gun advertising websites. The site offers nearly any kind of gun you could imagine. Looking for a pistol? Machine gun and silencer? Rocket launcher? Armslist users are willing to sell you one.

Once you find what you’re looking for, just contact the seller and arrange a meetup to finish the transaction. The transfer can take place in a gun store, home, or parking lot. There are no rules on where the handover needs to happen, as long as the timing works for both parties. The process is flexible enough for even the busiest online gun buyer.

The business has also become notorious for giving firearm access to people prohibited from owning guns. In a paper published in 2019, researchers with the University of Minnesota scraped more than 4.9 million Armslist listings from the website and found that less than 10 percent mentioned a background check.

In 2011, Demetry Smirnov, a Russian immigrant living in Canda, illegally purchased a handgun on Armslist and later used it to murder a woman who spurned his romantic advances. Mohammod Youssuf Abdulazeez, a naturalized US citizen who became a radicalized jihadist, used weapons acquired through Armslist to kill five US service members in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2015. In 2018, a woman who used Armslist to traffic guns was sentenced to 18 months in prison, but before her sentencing, one of her former firearms was used to shoot a police officer in Boston. And last year, federal prosecutors brought a case against an Alabama resident who admitted to trafficking guns acquired through Armslist to New York, California, and Mexico, after he watched a documentary film on gun trafficking in 2016.

Gun selling that bypasses the background check system through private transactions is commonly called the gun show loophole — in this case, the gun show just happens to be online. There are only a couple of restrictions: if the seller believes that the gun might be going to a person who is prohibited from owning a firearm or is from outside of their state, they cannot legally make the sale.

There are no laws that explicitly target the sale of firearms over the internet, and all online sales are supposed to be held to the same legal standards as sales that occur at physical locations. Machine guns, silencers, and other firearms and accessories regulated under the National Firearms Act require fingerprinting and registration with the ATF. Licensed federal firearms dealers are required to perform background checks and maintain records of gun sales.

Advocates and the US government have been studying the sale of firearms and gun accessories through Armslist and other online websites for years, but little has changed in terms of how they operate. In February 2019, the advocacy group Everytown For Gun Safety contacted 150 sellers on Armslist to buy firearms undercover. More than 65 percent of these sellers indicated that they would not require a background check to complete the sale. (Everytown’s charitable arm provides funding to The Trace.)

When the ATF finds someone it believes to be illegally selling guns, the agency might, in lieu of immediate prosecution, send a warning letter demanding the person stop selling. A warning letter can lay the groundwork for a case showing a suspect knew what they were doing was over the line, Chittum says. It can also act as a deterrent for illegal gun sellers, when prosecutors can’t take every case.

Lytton says that warning letters are a commonly used tactic across regulatory bodies, and are a low-cost tool to enforce federal standards, which can be especially useful if the agency doesn’t have the resources to mount a full investigation. But they have an obvious drawback: the addressee may choose to ignore them.

Around 2014, in one case in Minnesota, a man named Eitan Feldman began buying and reselling guns, often purchasing them from a registered dealer and then flipping them on Armslist, according to prosecutors. Guns he’d sold started turning up at crime scenes: police said they linked shots fired at a Minneapolis home to a pistol Feldman had bought a week earlier, and during a marijuana trafficking investigation, recovered a revolver Feldman had bought three months before. The ATF executed a search warrant on his house, finding shotguns that Feldman had legally purchased and then posted for sale on Armslist, sometimes within days of buying them.

In 2015, ATF agents personally handed Feldman a written warning saying he appeared to be a “dealer in firearms” under the law and informed him that he could face criminal prosecution if he continued. Still, he kept selling guns, flipping six semi-automatic pistols and a semi-automatic rifle over the next few months, according to court records. “The fact that he kept doing it after getting a letter from ATF was kind of a head scratcher,” says Assistant US Attorney for the District of Minnesota Benjamin Bejar, who prosecuted the case.

Feldman was eventually charged with illegally selling firearms. “Most defendants whom I sentence have not had the courtesy of having the federal government hand them a written warning and give them a chance to stop,” the judge said during the hearing. He was sentenced to 18 months’ imprisonment in 2016.

But whether illegal sellers are warned or not, the consequences can be devastating.

Christopher Henderson and John Phillips, according to court records, made a business out of buying guns in the South, where gun restrictions are loose, and then reselling them up north. The two would buy from sellers on Armslist in Kentucky, rolling through the state in a white Dodge Challenger, then drive them back to Chicago. A broker working with Henderson and Phillips would then resell the weapons, often on Facebook. Soon after, the guns would turn up at crime scenes.

In 2017, about nine miles away from where Commander Paul Bauer was killed, a 15-year-old boy named Xavier Soto was murdered. Prosecutors later linked the gun used in the killing — a Taurus pistol — to a purchase Henderson made through Armslist.

Both of the men were sentenced for illegal sales. At Henderson’s sentencing, Soto’s sister gave an emotional account of her brother’s short life.

“Our lives will never be the same,” she told the court through tears. “These alleged individuals supplied a weapon that was used to murder a 15-year-old boy.”

WhenWhen she dialed 911 after an assault in October 2012, Zina Daniel Haughton said her husband, Radcliffe Haughton, had been violent for years. Police took her to a Holiday Inn for the night, her family later said in court papers, but he showed up at her work the next day with a knife and slashed the tires of her car.

Zina soon asked for a restraining order against Radcliffe. She explained to a Wisconsin court: he had an explosive temper, threatening to throw acid on her face. “I don’t want to die,” she said in a hearing. The judge granted the restraining order, which barred her husband from owning a gun.

Two days after her testimony, Radcliffe Haughton found and purchased a semi-automatic handgun on Armslist from a private seller who didn’t run a background check. Haughton made the buy from the front seat of the seller’s car, according to the family, in a McDonald’s parking lot. The next day, he entered the suburban Milwaukee salon where Zina worked and opened fire. He killed three people, including Zina, before turning the gun on himself.

In the aftermath, Armslist faced questions about its role. Had the company effectively facilitated a mass shooting? Yasmeen Daniel, Zina’s daughter, was at the spa when her mother was killed, and filed suit against Armslist in 2015, arguing that the shooting could’ve been stopped.

But the same law that shields major social media companies like Facebook from liability for terrorist content produced by their users also protects Armslist from being sued when bad actors use their platform. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is widely seen as the law that made the modern internet possible, paving the way for web forums, social media, and much more.

The act protects website operators from being sued over what their users post. If someone writes a defamatory tweet, for example, the person being defamed can’t sue Twitter for letting it happen.

”If you required a license for each tweet that gets posted, that would make Twitter impossible,” says Grimmelmann, the Cornell professor. “It doesn’t make firearm sales impossible.”

Armslist relied on Section 230 for its defense in the Daniel case. The company’s lawyers argued that the website can’t be held liable for unlawful sales. “Under this theory, Armslist could go in, look at an ad, and say, ‘Oh, it’s an ad from the same seller who illegally sold 10 guns in the case that was famous last year, and wow, it looks like this ad is illegal,’” Grimmelmann says. ‘“We don’t care. We’re not going to touch it.’”

The lawsuit’s counter argument was straightforward: Armslist wasn’t just a bystander on the sidelines while sales happened, but a participant. The design of the site, the suit argued, allowed buyers to search specifically for sellers who wouldn’t do a background check, giving people who were barred from owning guns an easy way to buy one. The suit said the website relied on a business model that “put guns in the hands of prohibited purchasers.”

The Daniel family’s suit has faced mixed judgments from the courts. After one court dismissed the suit, an appeals court reversed the decision, allowing it to proceed. A second appeal, this time from Armslist, elevated the case to Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, which decided that Armslist was protected under the Communications Decency Act. Most recently, in November of last year, the Supreme Court of the US declined to hear the case, leaving in place the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s ruling.

The intersection of internet speech law and gun rights policy has scrambled some usual political divides. After the Wisconsin Supreme Court decision, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said that changes to 230 would cause “real and permanent” damage to the Second Amendment. The nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, which argues for civil rights online, filed a brief in the case in favor of Armslist, arguing that finding the website liable would “severely curtail free expression online.”

The brief put the nonprofit at odds with groups like the nonprofit Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which argues that the law was meant to protect good Samaritans, not to give cover to anyone who runs a website with third-party activity regardless of the consequences.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court disagreed, noting in its decision that Armslist couldn’t be held responsible even if it knew its site would be used to break the law. So long as a website can be used for legal purposes, it didn’t matter that it was used for illegal activity, too.

Seen from one angle, the battle over Armslist looks like a microcosm of the larger war over Silicon Valley power and accountability. Should Facebook, for example, face consequences for failing to fact-check political ads? Both Republicans and Democrats have taken aim at Section 230 recently, worried about the broad legal shield it gives the tech industry.

Eric Goldman, a professor at the Santa Clara University School of Law who has written about the benefits of 230, said the court that ruled against Armslist “just kind of went off the rails,” and he argues that chipping away at protections in the law will lead to legal problems for smaller sites.

”The key point of Section 230 was that Congress wanted sites to have the freedom to try and police against bad content, and not fear that they would be liable for anything they miss,” Goldman says. “If they’re held to a 100 percent standard, then they wouldn’t do it at all.”

Some people might want to see Armslist go, he says, but other sites will also lose legal protections without 230. “The fact that Armslist is still in business after all the lawsuits it’s faced is pretty remarkable,” he says. “Without Section 230 they would’ve been gone a long time ago.”

The power of the law isn’t limitless, however. Federal prosecutors could shut down the website and indict its owners under criminal charges if they believed the law was broken.

”One of the standard tropes in the field is that Section 230 creates a lawless zone,” Goldman says. “Anyone who says that is factually wrong. Section 230 does not restrict federal criminal prosecutions.”

But Mary Anne Franks, president of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, says the law has effectively given a special legal shield to online activity that wouldn’t be protected in physical space. “If it wouldn’t be speech if it was offline, it shouldn’t be speech if it’s online,” she argues.

”Punching somebody in the face is not speech, even though it might be very expressive,” she says. “What Section 230 has done is seduce courts into not making that kind of analysis. Instead, they assume that if it’s happening online then it’s speech, and then they go to the next step.”

Franks questions whether the stakes have truly hit home for defenders of a broad interpretation of the statute. “We have a case in Armslist which is really a question of life or death, and they don’t seem to think that that’s relevant,” she says.

AfterAfter pleading guilty for illegally selling guns on Armslist, Thomas Caldwell had his sentencing hearing in November 2018. While he faced charges for illegal gun sales, the killing of Commander Paul Bauer loomed over the proceedings. Caldwell’s defense team pleaded for probation, saying Caldwell had been through enough: his “digital legacy will connect him forever” with the murdered officer, his attorneys wrote to the court.

The prosecution disagreed, and pushed for prison time. A prosecutor told the judge that Caldwell had disregarded a warning from the ATF. They needed to make clear that was unacceptable. “Next time an ATF agent delivers one of those warning letters, I want them also to be able to be in the position to deliver a story. ‘Look what happened to Thomas Caldwell,’” the prosecutor said. To add emotion to their argument, the prosecution called for the testimony of someone who knew Bauer well: Northeastern Illinois University Police Chief John Escalante.

Escalante grew up with Bauer from the age of seven. The two went to the same grade school, the same college, and then joined the Chicago Police Department together. Escalante always thought Bauer was the responsible one. In college, Bauer was the serious student, Escalante said, while he was “a little bit more of a partier” and was “politely asked” not to return after two years. But as luck would have it, in 1986, they entered the police department within one month of each other. “We spent the next 30 years chasing each other around the streets of Chicago as Chicago police officers,” he said.

Escalante remembered getting the call from an officer he knew on the force. He told Escalante that he should sit down, and delivered the news that Bauer had been shot.

When Escalante learned that the gun had made its way from Wisconsin to Chicago through Armslist, he wasn’t surprised. Escalante rose through the ranks of the Chicago Police Department and was, for a time, its interim superintendent. He’d seen the toll of illegal gun sales on the city. “It’s happened too many times and now it happened to my good friend Paul and it shouldn’t have,” he said.

At Caldwell’s sentencing, Escalante said he was looking back at “every text, every email” with Bauer for moments that made him laugh. He didn’t mention Armslist, but focused on “accountability,” and “those that put the guns into the hands of those that commit the violence.”

Escalante said that he’d struggled to say Bauer had died. “You die of old age, you die of sickness, you die from accidents, but when someone fires multiple rounds into your body, that’s not dying,” he told the court, “that’s a murder.”

This story was published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence.

Update, 2:30PM ET, January 17th: In a statement sent following publication, an attorney for Armslist said “courts have consistently ruled that Armslist.com falls squarely within the ‘safe harbor’ of Section 230” and that the company both “fully complies” with all laws and regularly assists law enforcement. “The gist of the opposition to Armslist lies in opposition to the private ownership of firearms,” the statement said.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/2...-investigation





Exclusive: Apple Dropped Plan for Encrypting Backups After FBI Complained – Sources
Joseph Menn

Apple Inc (AAPL.O) dropped plans to let iPhone users fully encrypt backups of their devices in the company’s iCloud service after the FBI complained that the move would harm investigations, six sources familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The tech giant’s reversal, about two years ago, has not previously been reported. It shows how much Apple has been willing to help U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite taking a harder line in high-profile legal disputes with the government and casting itself as a defender of its customers’ information.

The long-running tug of war between investigators’ concerns about security and tech companies’ desire for user privacy moved back into the public spotlight last week, as U.S. Attorney General William Barr took the rare step of publicly calling on Apple to unlock two iPhones used by a Saudi Air Force officer who shot dead three Americans at a Pensacola, Florida naval base last month.

U.S. President Donald Trump piled on, accusing Apple on Twitter of refusing to unlock phones used by “killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements.” Republican and Democratic senators sounded a similar theme in a December hearing, threatening legislation against end-to-end encryption, citing unrecoverable evidence of crimes against children.

Apple did in fact did turn over the shooter’s iCloud backups in the Pensacola case, and said it rejected the characterization that it “has not provided substantive assistance.”

Behind the scenes, Apple has provided the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation with more sweeping help, not related to any specific probe.

An Apple spokesman declined to comment on the company’s handling of the encryption issue or any discussions it has had with the FBI. The FBI did not respond to requests for comment on any discussions with Apple.

More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee.

Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order.

In private talks with Apple soon after, representatives of the FBI’s cyber crime agents and its operational technology division objected to the plan, arguing it would deny them the most effective means for gaining evidence against iPhone-using suspects, the government sources said.

When Apple spoke privately to the FBI about its work on phone security the following year, the end-to-end encryption plan had been dropped, according to the six sources. Reuters could not determine why exactly Apple dropped the plan.

“Legal killed it, for reasons you can imagine,” another former Apple employee said he was told, without any specific mention of why the plan was dropped or if the FBI was a factor in the decision.

That person told Reuters the company did not want to risk being attacked by public officials for protecting criminals, sued for moving previously accessible data out of reach of government agencies or used as an excuse for new legislation against encryption.

“They decided they weren’t going to poke the bear anymore,” the person said, referring to Apple’s court battle with the FBI in 2016 over access to an iPhone used by one of the suspects in a mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.

Apple appealed a court order to break into that phone for the FBI. The government dropped the proceedings when it found a contractor that could break into the phone, a common occurrence in FBI investigations.

Two of the former FBI officials, who were not present in talks with Apple, told Reuters it appeared that the FBI’s arguments that the backups provided vital evidence in thousands of cases had prevailed.

“It’s because Apple was convinced,” said one. “Outside of that public spat over San Bernardino, Apple gets along with the federal government.”

However, a former Apple employee said it was possible the encryption project was dropped for other reasons, such as concern that more customers would find themselves locked out of their data more often.

Once the decision was made, the 10 or so experts on the Apple encryption project - variously code-named Plesio and KeyDrop - were told to stop working on the effort, three people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

APPLE SHIFTS FOCUS

Apple’s decision not to proceed with end-to-end encryption of iCloud backups made the FBI’s job easier.

The agency relies on hacking software that exploits security flaws to break into a phone. But that method requires direct access to the phone which would ordinarily tip off the user, who is often the subject of the investigation.

Apple’s iCloud, on the other hand, can be searched in secret. In the first half of last year, the period covered by Apple’s most recent semiannual transparency report on requests for data it receives from government agencies, U.S. authorities armed with regular court papers asked for and obtained full device backups or other iCloud content in 1,568 cases, covering about 6,000 accounts.

The company said it turned over at least some data for 90% of the requests it received. It turns over data more often in response to secret U.S. intelligence court directives, topping 14,000 accounts in the second half of 2018. Because of gag orders, Apple has not given any such data for 2019.

Had it proceeded with its plan, Apple would not have been able to turn over any readable data belonging to users who opted for end-to-end encryption.

Instead of protecting all of iCloud with end-to-end encryption, Apple has shifted to focus on protecting some of the most sensitive user information, such as saved passwords and health data.

But backed-up contact information and texts from iMessage, WhatsApp and other encrypted services remain available to Apple employees and authorities.

Apple is not the only tech company to have removed its own access to customers’ information.

In October 2018, Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google announced a similar system to Apple’s dropped plan for secure backups. The maker of Android software, which runs on about three-quarters of the world’s mobile devices, said users could back up their data to its own cloud without trusting the company with the key.

Two people familiar with the project said Google gave no advance notice to governments, and picked a time to announce it when encryption was not in the news.

The company continues to offer the service but declined to comment on how many users have taken up the option. The FBI did not respond to a request for comment on Google’s service or the agency’s approach to it.

Reporting by Joseph Menn in San Francisco; Editing by Bill Rigby
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a...-idUSKBN1ZK1CT





The Public Domain Is the Rule, Copyright Is the Exception
Corynne McSherry

We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing what's at stake and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.

Remember the monkey selfie? Animal rights organizations and a photographer went to court to fight over who owned the copyright in a picture where the photographer set up the camera but the animal took the pic, and great fun was had by all. But as our friends at Public Knowledge noted, maybe no one "owned" the picture.

And that’s just fine. Most of our culture, knowledge, and history isn’t "owned" by anyone at all—it is available for all to use in the vibrant and ever-expanding public domain. This domain is populated by formerly copyrighted material and material that was never copyrightable in the first place. The first category is what most people probably think about when then they think of the public domain: things such as literature, art, music and movies, for which the copyright term has expired or the rightsholder has dedicated the work to the public domain. Under the original U.S. copyright law, each generation was largely free to use the copyrighted material of previous generations, because terms were much shorter (and so was the scope of what could be copyrighted). But terms grew longer and longer until, one year ago, material from 1923 onward finally started entering the public domain each year. There doesn’t seem to be much appetite to extend U.S. terms further (not so other countries), so presumably these kinds of works will continue to enrich the U.S. public domain.

Meanwhile, the second, less glamorous, category—the one of ideas, facts, procedures, methods of operation, laws, and regulations that are deemed to belong to everyone—has become highly contested.

Judge Louis Brandeis said, “The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.” Some very powerful interests would beg to disagree.

For example, a pitched battle has been raging for a decade about the copyright in Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), which are, generally speaking, specifications that allow programs to communicate with each other. It’s headed to the Supreme Court in March. The API battle follows on the heels of another dispute over whether the State of Georgia can claim a copyright in its official code, which, by legislative fiat, includes annotations. Meanwhile EFF is representing Public.Resource.Org in a years-long fight over whether private entities can claim copyright in huge swaths of the Code of Federal Regulations.

One thing, other than copyrightability, unites these legal battles: all of them concern content developed by people that did not need a copyright incentive. In other words, they would have done the work (and mostly did do the work) without compensation from copyright royalties.

As we explained in our first amicus brief in the API litigation, for example, software developers assumed APIs were excluded from copyright protection—but that didn’t stop them from writing and using them. In fact, that exclusion was essential to the development of the home computer, operating systems, programming languages, the Internet, and cloud computing—creating a statutory monopoly in APIs would likely have created a licensing thicket that would have slowed innovation to a crawl.

As for the Georgia Code Annotated, the code itself is developed like most laws, by legislators informed by lobbyists and the general public. All of those people have their own reasons for drafting laws, and none involve earning copyright royalties. The annotations themselves are developed by a private company that might enjoy the royalties, but could get them anyway by simply publishing their own version, without the state’s official imprimatur.

And the last dispute concerns standards, such as the National Fire Safety Code, that are initially developed by volunteers, government officials, and other professionals experienced in the relevant industry, and later incorporated by reference into law. They do the work to contribute to the public interest, mostly without payment, and never receive any royalties for it. The purported copyright holders are the organizations that help organize the process—but those organizations receive ample compensation through dues, selling educational materials, and trainings.

Copyright maximalists denigrate the public domain as the space that creative works “fall into” eventually, once their financial value has been thoroughly exploited. In reality, many more valuable works occupy the public domain than the private one, and its contributors are legion. Their work, and the public domain itself, remind us that the copyright monopoly, and the assumptions it embodies about how to spur creativity, represent a limited exception to the general rule: that most production of knowledge and culture has always taken place within the public domain. Chipping away at the public domain will necessarily inhibit, rather than encourage, new creativity.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/0...ight-exception

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





Recent WiRs -

January 18th, January 11th, January 4th, December 28th

Jack Spratts' Week In Review is published every Friday. Submit letters, articles, press releases, comments, questions etc. in plain text English to jackspratts (at) lycos (dot) com. Submission deadlines are Thursdays @ 1400 UTC. Please include contact info. The right to publish all remarks is reserved.


"The First Amendment rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." - Hugo Black