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Old 28-10-20, 06:47 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - October 31st, ’20

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October 31st, 2020




U.S. FCC Votes to Maintain 2017 Repeal of Net Neutrality Rules
David Shepardson

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 on Tuesday to maintain its 2017 repeal of Obama-era net neutrality rules, even after a federal court directed a review of some provisions of the repeal.

The 2015 net neutrality rules barred internet service providers (ISPs) from blocking or slowing internet content or offering paid “fast lanes.” Under President Donald Trump, the 2017 FCC order granted ISPs sweeping powers to recast how Americans use the internet, as long as they disclose changes.

A federal appeals court in October 2019 largely upheld the FCC’s repeal of the rules, but ordered the agency to reconsider the repeal’s impact on public safety; regulations on attachments to utility poles; and the FCC’s ability to provide subsidies for broadband service. The FCC majority opted to leave the order unchanged.

The net neutrality repeal was effective in June 2018. ISPs have not changed how users access the internet, but consumer groups fear that they could move to raise prices or slow speeds selectively for some customers.

“It is patently obvious to all but the most devoted members of the net neutrality cult that the case against the (net neutrality repeal) was a sham,” FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said Tuesday.

ISPs and other advocates of the net neutrality repeal say the new rules have boosted investment. Consumer groups and other critics of the dispute the assertion that loosening net neutrality rules led to new investment.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, said “this agency is not interested in getting it right. Instead, it doubles down, rather than recognizing the realities of the world around us.”

Democrats have made net neutrality repeal a campaign issue. Presidential candidate Joe Biden, who was Obama’s vice president, is expected if he wins to designate an FCC chair who would move to would reinstate net neutrality.

Senator Ed Markey, a Democrat, said “without net neutrality protections, it’s just a matter of time before big broadband providers start raising prices, slowing down internet speeds, and making it harder for families, small business, and students to access the opportunities to recover and rebuild from this pandemic.”

Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by David Gregorio
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKBN27C2EO





About 3% of Starlink Satellites have Failed so Far
Matt Williams

SpaceX has drawn plenty of praise and criticism with the creation of Starlink, a constellation that will one day provide broadband internet access to the entire world. To date, the company has launched over 800 satellites and (as of this summer) is producing them at a rate of about 120 a month. There are even plans to have a constellation of 42,000 satellites in orbit before the decade is out.

However, there have been some problems along the way, as well. Aside from the usual concerns about light pollution and radio frequency interference (RFI), there is also the rate of failure these satellites have experienced. Specifically, about 3% of its satellites have proven to be unresponsive and are no longer maneuvering in orbit, which could prove hazardous to other satellites and spacecraft in orbit.

In order to prevent collisions in orbit, SpaceX equips its satellites with krypton Hall-effect thrusters (ion engines) to raise their orbit, maneuver in space and deorbit at the end of their lives. However, according to two recent notices SpaceX issued to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over the summer (mid-May and late June), several of their satellites have lost maneuvering capability since they were deployed.

Unfortunately, the company did not provide enough information to indicate which of their satellites were affected. For this reason, astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and the Chandra X-ray Center presented his own analysis of the satellites' orbital behavior to suggest which satellites have failed.

The analysis was posted on McDowell's website (Jonathan's Space Report), where he combined SpaceX's own data with U.S. government sources. From this, he determined that about 3% of satellites in the constellation have failed because they are no longer responding to commands. Naturally, some level of attrition is inevitable, and 3% is relatively low as failure rates go.

But every satellite that is incapable of maneuvering due to problems with its communications or its propulsion system creates a collision hazard for other satellites and spacecraft. As McDowell told Business Insider:

"I would say their failure rate is not egregious. It's not worse than anybody else's failure rates. The concern is that even a normal failure rate in such a huge constellation is going to end up with a lot of bad space junk."

Kessler syndrome

Named after NASA scientists Donald J. Kessler, who first proposed it in 1978, Kessler syndrome refers to the threat posed by collisions in orbit. These lead to catastrophic breakups that create more debris that will lead to further collisions and breakups, and so on. When one takes into account rates of failure and SpaceX's long-term plans for a "megaconstellation," this syndrome naturally rears its ugly head.

Not long ago, SpaceX secured permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to deploy about 12,000 Starlink satellites to orbits ranging from 328 km to 580 km (200 to 360 mi). However, more recent filings with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) show that the company hopes to create a megaconstellation of as many as 42,000 satellites.

In this case, a 3% failure rate works out to 360 and 1,260 (respectively) 250 kg (550 lbs) satellites becoming defunct over time. As of February of 2020, according to the ESA's Space Debris Office (SDO), there are currently 5,500 satellites in orbit of Earth—around 2,300 of which are still operational. That means (employing naked math) that a full Starlink megaconstellation would increase the number of non-functioning satellites in orbit by 11% to 40%.

The problem of debris and collisions looks even more threatening when you consider the amount of debris in orbit. Beyond non-functioning satellites, the SDO also estimates that there are currently 34,000 objects in orbit measuring more than 10 cm (~4 inches) in diameter, 900,000 objects between 1 cm to 10 cm (0.4 to 4 in), and 128 million objects between 1 mm to 1 cm.

Mitigation Strategies

Naturally, SpaceX has emphasized that the risk of collision is very small. In their filings with the FCC in April of 2017, SpaceX addressed the possibility of collision risks assuming rates of "satellite failure resulting in the inability to perform collision avoidance procedures of 10, 5 and 1 percent." In response, the company indicated that even a 1% risk was unlikely, given the following specifications and guidelines:

• Designing the Starlink constellation to exceed NASA's debris mitigation guidelines and an "aggressive monitoring program" to detect potential problems and deorbit affected satellites.
• An incremental deployment schedule over a long period of time (which they are performing by deploying one batch of 60 satellites per launch).
• An iterative design process that leverages new technologies and upgrades, avoiding launching any more satellites identified as problematic, and deorbiting those identified as a risk.

Last, but not least, SpaceX emphasized that it conducts simulations, which it corroborates with information from the USAF's Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) and the NASA Orbital Debris Engineering Model. From this, they claimed that based on a satellite failure rate of 1% and no corrective maneuvers, there was "approximately a 1% chance per decade that any failed SpaceX satellite would collide with a piece of tracked debris."

Deployment of 60 Starlink satellites confirmed pic.twitter.com/x83OvjB4Pa
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 6, 2020

There's also the likely scenario in which Starlink satellites naturally deorbit if their propulsion systems fail and they are unable to raise their orbit or apply corrective thrust. But even with their lower orbits, compared to other telecommunications satellites, this process will still take one to five years. At the end of the day, there are no guarantees, just vigilance and preparedness.

In the meantime, Musk announced earlier this month that with the latest batch of their satellites released in orbit, Starlink is planning on launching a beta test of its internet service. "Once these satellites reach their target position, we will be able to roll out a fairly wide public beta in northern U.S. & hopefully southern Canada. Other countries to follow as soon as we receive regulatory approval," he tweeted.
https://phys.org/news/2020-10-starlink-satellites.html





SpaceX Starlink Public Beta Begins: It’s $99 a Month Plus $500 Up Front

“Better Than Nothing” beta to have speeds up to 150Mbps, latency as low as 20ms.
Jon Brodkin

SpaceX has begun sending email invitations to Starlink's public beta and will charge beta users $99 per month plus a one-time fee of $499 for the user terminal, mounting tripod, and router. The emails are being sent to people who previously registered interest in the service on the Starlink website. One person in Washington state who got the email posted it on Reddit. Another person who lives in Wisconsin got the Starlink public-beta invitation and passed the details along to Ars via email.

SpaceX is calling it the "Better Than Nothing" beta, perhaps partly because the Starlink satellite service will be most useful to people who cannot get cable or fiber broadband. But the email also says, "As you can tell from the title, we are trying to lower your initial expectations."

The rest of the email reads as follows:

Expect to see data speeds vary from 50Mbps to 150Mbps and latency from 20ms to 40ms over the next several months as we enhance the Starlink system. There will also be brief periods of no connectivity at all.

As we launch more satellites, install more ground stations, and improve our networking software, data speed, latency, and uptime will improve dramatically. For latency, we expect to achieve 16ms to 19ms by summer 2021.

The Starlink phased-array user terminal, which is more advanced than what's in fighter jets, plus mounting tripod and Wi-Fi router, costs $499 and the monthly subscription costs $99.


The email then provides a link for ordering service. There is apparently no data cap. A Starlink mobile app to help beta users set up and manage the service also just went live on Apple's App Store and Google Play.

There's another Reddit thread with speculation on when user terminals (i.e., satellite dishes) will arrive at people's homes, but we haven't seen any firm delivery dates.

“Worth it!”

Another Reddit commenter who lives in Washington state wrote that ordering the public beta came out to nearly $600 including a $50 shipping fee and tax. "Then I had to place a second order for the ridgeline mount for another $100. Worth it!" the person wrote.

While the standard startup kit comes with a tripod mount for the user terminal, two types of roof mounts are sold as optional extras. The Reddit thread includes links to PDFs of Starlink's instructions for setting up the ridgeline mount or "volcano mount."

Installing either mount on a roof is a lot more work than indicated by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's statement that users only have to plug the terminal in and point it at the sky. But users could also try placing the terminal in a location with a clear view of the sky, without a special roof mount.

It's not clear whether the beta pricing is the same as what SpaceX will charge during general availability. We also don't know how many people got the sign-up emails or have a full list of states where it's available. We contacted SpaceX with several questions this morning and will update the article if we get a response.

The public beta was preceded by a limited beta that was provided to users for free. Musk recently said that the public beta will be for the Northern US and "hopefully" Southern Canada. SpaceX plans to provide Starlink to a school district in Texas in early 2021, but that doesn't mean the public beta is available to anyone in the South. The wait may not be too long, though, as SpaceX has said it will reach "near global coverage of the populated world by 2021."
https://arstechnica.com/information-...-500-up-front/





Media Executives are Finally Accepting the Decline of Cable TV as they Plot a New Path Forward
Alex Sherman

• At least three large U.S. media companies expect the number of U.S. households that subscribe to a traditional pay-TV bundle to fall to about 50 million in the next five years.
• At 50 million subscribers, it’s unclear the current pay-TV model can survive without falling further.
• The jury is still out on if streaming economics will convince investors to breath new life into traditional media companies.

There’s a quiet consensus emerging in the hallways and boardrooms of American media companies.

They expect about 25 million U.S. households to cancel their pay-TV subscriptions over the next five years. This is on top of the 25 million homes that have already cut the cord since 2012. At least three major media companies now expect pay-TV subscriptions to stabilize around 50 million, according to people familiar with the matter, who declined to speak on the record because their company plans are private.

The projected decline in subscribers will mean a drop of about $25 billion in cable subscription revenue plus associated advertising losses for the largest U.S. media companies, including Disney, Comcast’s NBCUniversal, AT&T’s WarnerMedia, ViacomCBS, Fox, Discovery, Sinclair and AMC Networks.

This assumption has created a tectonic shift in the media industry. In the last three months, Disney, NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia and ViacomCBS have all announced major reorganizations. They’ve replaced old leaders, consolidated divisions, laid off tens of thousands of employees, and pivoted to streaming video.

American viewers can now choose among streaming services from most of the major players, including Disney+, WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, NBCUniversal’s Peacock, ViacomCBS’s Paramount+, Discovery+ and AMC+, at prices ranging from free to $15 month. All have launched in the last year or are coming in early 2021.

The plan is simple enough: Hope enough people sign up for subscription streaming services to make up for cable TV subscriber losses.

Why streaming might not save U.S. media

In 2015, Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes sat down with his executive team to talk about the future of TNT and TBS, the two flagship Turner entertainment cable networks.

For more than a decade, TNT and TBS ratings had lived off re-runs of hit broadcast shows -- “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “Family Guy,” “The Office” and so on. Now there was a problem. Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video had acquired digital rights to the same catalog of re-runs. Instead of having to tune into a cable network at a certain time, viewers could consume entire seasons of shows on demand without suffering through commercial interruptions.

“The streamers simply had superior capabilities,” said Bewkes in an interview. “The basic cable networks didn’t have full video-on-demand. We were reliant on advertising. It’s not that the streamers had superior programming, they had superior technology.”

A year later, Bewkes agreed to sell Time Warner to AT&T for more than $100 billion including debt. The following year, Rupert Murdoch pulled the rip cord, selling the majority of Fox’s assets for more than $70 billion to Comcast and Disney. Both men seemingly came to the same conclusion: The cable bundle had peaked. The longer they waited, the less their assets would be worth.

The cable bundle means that consumers can’t select and pay for cable TV channels a la carte. Instead, they have to buy dozens at a time. Media executives have long referred to it as the golden goose.

Media companies who sell channels into the bundle get paid whether or not anyone is watching. Don’t watch sports? You’re still paying $20 or $30 a month (depending where you live) for sports in a standard cable bundle. Don’t watch reality TV? You’re still paying for Bravo, E!, TLC, HGTV, and so on.

Better yet, every popular cable network has been nearly guaranteed distribution -- and payment -- because if an operator like Comcast decided it didn’t want to pay for ESPN, competitors such as Dish and AT&T’s DirecTV could steal its sports-hungry customers.

“Media companies have had a fabulous distribution system for decades,” said Tom Rutledge, CEO of Charter Communications, the second-largest U.S. cable company. “Every distributor had to carry their product, because if they didn’t carry networks, the competition would. In a direct-to-consumer world, the whole ecosystem is smaller. It doesn’t mean you can’t win, but there will be a lot of losers.”

Some streaming services already have enough library content to thrive in this smaller ecosystem of streaming services.

Disney+, with decades of kid-friendly movies and TV shows plus the Pixar, Star Wars and Marvel franchises, has already surpassed 60 million subscribers, hitting the low range of its 2024 goal in less than a year.

What about the smaller players? Can they compete for new originals against Netflix, Amazon and Apple -- companies with massive balance sheets -- to have the best content going forward?

“The answer is no,” said Bewkes. “These companies are competing against Netflix and Amazon, who have massively more scale for both subscription and advertising at a global level. They’re all going to be collapsed. Only Disney will have enough subscribers and global scale under a distinctive family brand to make it.”

Even Disney will need to keep growing those numbers to make up for impending cable TV losses. Each lost cable customer costs the company about $17.62 each month -- excluding advertising -- according to Kagan estimates. Most of that has to do with ESPN’s value, which commands about $10 per month per subscriber on its own.

Disney charges $6.99 per month for Disney+ and bundles ESPN+, Hulu and Disney+ together for $12.99 per month. And Disney+ doesn’t include advertisements.

At those prices, a one-for-one swap of a cable customer for a streaming customer will mean less money for Disney. This doesn’t even account for potential revenue loss from password sharing. While stealing cable TV is quite difficult, it’s a lot easier to share a password for a streaming service, and it’s more common among younger viewers. In 2019, research firm Magid estimated 35% of millennials share passwords for streaming services.

“It’s just too easy to get the product without paying for it,” said Rutledge.

Moreover, a vicious cycle is settling in that could accelerate cable bundle defections. Distributors like Comcast and Charter no longer care that much whether or not a customer buys traditional pay-TV. The price of a video bundle has gotten so high, there’s little margin for them -- especially compared to broadband internet service.

“You get to that point of financial indifference, then you’re seeing the EBITDA margins go in the right direction and continue to increase,” Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said last month at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference. “That’s one of the big pivots of Comcast the last decade.”

So instead of threatening blackouts to lower rates, pay-TV operators are accepting rate hikes, passing them along to subscribers, and accepting the fact that price-sensitive customers will cancel TV and go to internet only.

Meanwhile, media companies are shifting their best content to their new streaming services. The result for consumers is higher and higher prices for lower and lower quality.

And certain networks, like ESPN, which keep millions of Americans hooked to cable today, may need to pull back on programming costs if too many people cancel. That will only cause more people to cancel. Stabilizing at 50 million (or 55-60 million, as AT&T CEO John Stankey said this week) may be a pipe dream.

“The only thing left holding the bundle together today is sports,” said former AOL CEO Jonathan Miller, who stepped down from the board of AMC Networks in July. “There is nothing any of the networks can do about it. The only question now is how far does it fall and how fast, and is there a bottom. And I don’t know if there’s a bottom.”

Then again: Why streaming might save U.S. media

The best path forward for media companies is if Americans suddenly decide to stop canceling cable. That cash flow can then be redirected to streaming services as the industry’s new global growth engine. There’s at least a chance a combination of live news and sports, combined with inertia and laziness, can keep a diminished bundle alive.

Charter actually added 102,000 pay-TV subscribers in the second quarter. But that’s almost certainly an anomaly. Comcast reported a net loss of 477,000 video subscribers (427,000 residential) last quarter. AT&T, which owns DirecTV, reported a net loss of 886,000 video subscribers in the same quarter.

Media companies could team up and decide to recreate the bundle model with their new streaming services. Unlike the cable bundle, a streaming bundle wouldn’t eliminate the “make your own” option, as each service can be purchased a la carte. But investors may not mind if companies take revenue discounts if it means growth.

It’s also possible that Wall Street will give a window to legacy media companies to let them spend billions on streaming content, giving them a greater chance of finding the next “must-see” shows. Activist investor Dan Loeb has already called on Disney to eliminate its annual dividend and use the cash on original content spend for streaming services.

“By reallocating a dividend of a few dollars per share, Disney could more than double its Disney+ original content budget,” Loeb wrote in an October letter to Disney CEO Bob Chapek. “These incremental dollars would, based on our analysis, generate returns that are multiples of the stock’s current dividend yield.”

Netflix has proved that market validation is more important than business fundamentals in terms of growing valuation. Netflix has burned through billions in cash for years, spending borrowed money on content to grab subscribers, and investors haven’t cared.

Maybe media companies won’t have to worry about how to replace revenue from each cable subscriber with a corresponding streaming subscriber. Perhaps simply showing there’s a new growth engine that looks more like Netflix will push investors toward valuing the entire industry higher.

Right now, the market doesn’t seem to think existing media companies are capable of this. Discovery’s enterprise value/EBITDA multiple is 3.5. AMC’s multiple is 2.3. Those are terminal values. The average S&P 500 company typically has a multiple between 11 and 15. Netflix is valued at 33.5.

But even if the market is right and media companies can’t stabilize revenues in the shift to streaming, that’s not a death knell. Profit and cash flow could conceivably rise as cable networks are folded and jobs are eliminated. Sometimes industries need a refresh, but it’s not necessarily a funeral.

There’s also the “Underpants Gnome” argument. In a 1998 episode of Comedy Central’s “South Park,” a group of gnomes steal people’s underpants. Their plan is: Phase 1: Collect Underpants, Phase 2: ? and Phase 3: Profit.

A lot will happen between now and 2025. New technologies emerge. Tastes and habits are fickle. Companies acquire other companies. CEOs change.

It’s hard to predict the future. Sometimes fighting to survive turns into actual survival.

The likely endgame

Cable networks continue to be profitable, and recent distribution deals ensure they’re not going anywhere.

Still, some companies probably won’t make it in a streaming world alone. They may need to merge to survive.

Billionaire media magnate John Malone has mused about the consolidation of networks for years, advocating putting together “free radicals” to merge assets. AMC’s “The Walking Dead” may not be enough to keep a streaming service viable, but if joined with Lionsgate’s “Mad Men,” MGM’s “James Bond,” and Discovery’s “Top Chef” and “Deadliest Catch,” such a service may have enough content to remain relevant for a while. Malone has a stake in Discovery and also owns some of Charter -- either of which could act as the vehicle to buy up cheap networks.

The problem is many of these companies may have missed their ideal window to sell. Disney executives looked at the media landscape after its deal for Fox and decided it had no interest in acquiring any existing traditional media company’s content, according to a person familiar with the matter. If a technology company or large media company such as AT&T or Comcast bought a smaller legacy media company today, the acquirer’s shares would likely plummet.

Instead, what’s likely to happen in the next five years is the systematic consolidation and elimination of cable networks. NBCUniversal and ViacomCBS are both considering shuttering networks, though nothing is imminent or particularly close given current distribution deals, according to two people familiar with the matter.

“Media companies can consider consolidating underperforming networks with core channels, hoping to extract additional carriage revenue from a beefier network,” said Kirby Grines, founder and CEO of 43Twenty, a consultancy and marketing firm that provides streaming video strategy advice. “Consumers have loyalty to content and perhaps the companies they transact with. I’m not sure where networks fit into that equation, but it’s somewhere in a meaningless middle.”

ViacomCBS has already identified CBS, MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Smithsonian and BET as its tent-pole brands, which show up in the company’s CBS All Access streaming application (soon be renamed Paramount+). Other ViacomCBS networks -- VH1, Logo, PopTV, CMT -- are absent from the streaming platform. That may be a sign they’re at risk of eventual shutdown or rebrand.

Still, most media companies will try to perform a delicate dance, shifting most premium content to streaming while still giving some A-level shows to networks to buoy the bundle for as long as possible.

The forcing function on change will be Wall Street. If valuations keep declining, media companies will have to act.

LightShed’s Greenfield recommends a ripping-off-the-band-aid approach: Divest the networks now.

“Disney should divest its broadcast and cable networks, Comcast should divest the NBCUniversal cable networks, and there’s no reason why AT&T needs to own the Turner networks,” Greenfield said. “Cable networks are structurally broken.”

Divested and merged media companies will lead to more robust streaming services. This is why Disney agreed to buy Fox’s entertainment assets, including “The Simpsons” and movies such as “The Shape of Water” and “Avatar.”

But it may also accelerate the death of cable TV.

“The total bundle is going to shrink,” said Bewkes. “Whether it disappears, I don’t know.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/26/comm...investors.html





Twitch DMCA Purge Deletes Thousands Of Streamers' Videos
Nathan Grayson

It’s finally happening: Twitch is taking action against copyrighted music—long a norm among streamers—in response to music industry pressure. Today, hundreds of streamers received emails from the company stating that videos or clips in their back catalogues had run afoul of copyright rules, resulting in deletion. This, it seems, is just the beginning.

Something similar occurred with claims from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) back in June, but this time, Twitch isn’t taking any chances. Instead of simply informing streamers that they’re skating on thin ice per the rules of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and allowing them to take initiative—which could include disputing specific copyright claims—Twitch has straight-up deleted offending clips. In a mass email sent to streamers who, at some point in the past, had broadcasted copyrighted content, the company did not specify what it had deleted.

“We are writing to inform you that your channel was subject to one or more of these DMCA takedown notifications, and that the content identified has been deleted,” reads the message Twitch sent to streamers. “We recognize that by deleting this content, we are not giving you the option to file a counter-notification or seek a retraction from the rights holder. In consideration of this, we have processed these notifications and are issuing you a one-time warning to give you the chance to learn about copyright law and the tools available to manage the content on your channel.”

So basically, Twitch is cleaning house and doing its best to get streamers to finish the job. This is not ideal for streamers, whose VODs and clips represent the totality of their work. Just like that, some of that material has vanished forever, and though Twitch has released new music tools to aid with future streams, the company’s email encourages them to delete additional content—up to and including using a new tool to unilaterally delete all previous clips.

“It is insane that Twitch informs partners they deleted their content—and that there is more content in violation despite having no identification system to find out what it is,” business streamer and industry insider Devin Nash said on Twitter. “Their solution to DMCA is for creators to delete their life’s work. This is pure, gross negligence.”

“Count me among those that received a DMCA strike today,” said longtime Twitch partner Ellohime, encouraging fans to download clips of their favorite moments while they still can. “Sadly, the only safe answer seems to be ‘delete all old content.’ People who scrubbed their VODs previous to this wave of strikes didn’t avoid it. In-game music going forward is going to be a real issue. Help us, Twitch.”

“I seriously don’t understand why Twitch is so unable to provide documented reasoning as to what rules you break when you break them,” said Twitch partner Teawrex. “There is a giant throughline for years now of people not knowing why they are suspended, hit with a warning, and now what content is DMCA’d.”

It appears, however, that Twitch has once again failed to effectively communicate the full extent of what is actually happening here. Going forward, this system of automated, anonymous deletion will not be the norm; instead, DMCA takedowns will be specific and live, rather than vague and part of a backlog that spans an indefinite time period. However, after the big DMCA kerfuffle earlier this year, Twitch paused its standard DMCA process to develop the aforementioned new tools.

What happened today, according to news streamer Zach Bussey, was the result of a backup at Twitch, which itself was a product of an enormous number of copyright violations across the platform, given that streaming with music in the background is the norm for streamers. “From what I gather, they were backed to the wall—and the previous DMCAs are going to be ‘grandfathered’ as a generalized notification (deleted vods/clips) as the only punishment,” Bussey told Kotaku in a DM. “But when the system starts up again on October 23, it’s open season.”

Speaking to Kotaku in an email, a Twitch spokesperson verified that the company took this approach because it was dealing with “thousands” of notifications from music rights-holders. “Twitch is required to process these notifications and notify streamers and take action against repeat infringers by law,” said the spokesperson.

Twitch has also issued a statement: “We are incredibly proud of the essential service Twitch has become for so many artists and songwriters, especially during this challenging time. It is crucial that we protect the rights of songwriters, artists and other music industry partners. We continue to develop tools and resources to further educate our creators and empower them with more control over their content while partnering with industry-recognized vendors in the copyright space to help us achieve these goals.”

Twitch is changing. In the short term, this means growing pains that, for many streamers, are proving agonizing, in no small part due to Twitch’s communication issues. In the long run, streamers will have tools to mitigate future situations like this, but as ever, it’s important to ask who’s really benefiting from any of this. Arguably, artists—who already barely make any money from people listening to their music online—were getting free advertising from streamers playing their music. However, instead of evolving with the times in a way that might benefit artists, music labels—not artists—continue to employ draconian methods of cracking down so as to retain control.

Twitch’s new systems mainly kowtow to this control, rather than offering streamers real flexibility. Streamers can now delete all of their clips at once—something they need to do, sure, but it’s still a misery. Streamers also now have access to rights-cleared music via Twitch’s new “Soundtrack by Twitch” feature, but it’s curated by Twitch, meaning that after big companies limited streamers’ options, a different, singular big company is now in control of what little they can do. Is this just how the music industry works? Yes. Should it be, especially in an age when remixing and transformative content are what’s driving art and culture forward—and, in fact, that is the entirety of what streaming is? That’s the far more important question.
https://kotaku.com/twitch-deletes-th...ues-1845429294





The RIAA’s Fraudulent Attack on youtube-dl is Not a DMCA §512 Infringement/Safe-Harbour, and the Reality is Weird
Doc Edward Morbius

Many people seem to think that the RIAA’s late-on-a-Friday copyright claim by against Web multimedia-content Swiss army knife youtube-dl falls under the DMCA’s online content provider safe-harbour §512 provisions against infringing works.[1] It does not.

Under U.S. copyright law, “safe-harbour” provisions immunise service providers from copyright infringement claims, if the provider “takes down” the named content when a claim is received, under 17 USC 512 (c)(1)(C). The safe-harbour protections apply only to hosting of infringing works, and neither youtube-dl nor its test suites infringe on any RIAA or member copyrights as averred in RIAA’s notice. Further, a claim must identify the specific works infringed in the work, (§512 (c)(3)(A)(iii)) which the RIAA’s claim does not.

See the statute at Cornell University’s U.S. Code repository, referenced further here:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

The RIAA’s letter does not claim infringement within the text of youtube-dl source or test suites, though it tries hard to appear so, but rather possible incidental copying, of an overwhelmingly non-infringing nature, and anti-circumvention of a “copyright protection mechanism”, under §1201. That last is also part of the DMCA, but falls outside the safe-harbour takedown provisions.

At best, youtube-dl’s test suite may be infringing works when run, in which case infringement would accrue to the operator, presumably a tester or Github’s CI/CD process. Even that argument is specious: Given output is discarded, no permanent copy is retained, and the action is for research and development, and numerous Fair Use affirmative defence claims exist under §107, notably (1) and (4), test suite execution falls outside exclusive rights. Any one fair-use test is sufficient, or none at all. Test suite execution could be argued non-infringing under numerous theories, including reverse engineering, research, interoperability, all under §1201, or under general limitations on exclusive rights in §112 (ephemeral recordings), §117 (computer programmes), or elsewhere.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/112
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117

Further, under §512 (f) the RIAA’s deceptive claim is liable for sanctions:

Any person who knowingly materially misrepresents under this section— (1) that material or activity is infringing … shall be liable for any damages, including costs and attorneys’ fees, incurred by the alleged infringer, by any copyright owner or copyright owner’s authorized licensee, or by a service provider, who is injured by such misrepresentation, as the result of the service provider relying upon such misrepresentation in removing or disabling access to the material or activity claimed to be infringing, or in replacing the removed material or ceasing to disable access to it.

The fun begins

This is where … things get interesting…

• The “copyright protection scheme” in question, if it even is one, was written by and is provided by Google/Youtube, not the RIAA.

• It is not even clear to me the RIAA has standing to sue under §1203: “Any person injured by a violation of section 1201 or 1202 may bring a civil action in an appropriate United States district court for such violation.” RIAA are not injured due to utilisation of a non-member’s mechanism.

• The claim does not pass the 17 USC 1201 (a)(2)(B) test: that the technology “has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title”.

• Yes, Github (or its owner, Microsoft Corp.) may have liability under 17 USC 1201 (a)(2), “offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic” the code, subject to the same test above. However there is no safe-harbour provision for such violations.

• Microsoft is listed on the RIAA’s members page. Neither Google LLC, its Youtube subsidiary, nor parent Alphabet Inc. are. The RIAA are threatening a member for a §1201 violation against a nonmember. That’s … weird. https://www.riaa.com/about-riaa/riaa-members/

• A further defence is the §1201(f)(2) exception: “a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure … or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs”.

• Youtube-dl is executing code provided by Google/YouTube, for Wold Wide Web user agents, as a World Wide Web user agent, and meant to be accessed and run by user agents in order to access YouTube content. That is, youtube-dl’s operation is entirely within YouTube’s technical design and intent.

• Any potential copyright infringement which might occur through use of youtube-dl is at the volition of users, not the software’s authors, actions would properly be directed at such users for individual acts of infringement, and much of this is subject to the same defences listed above, and others.

What then shall we do?

The remaining question is whether or not this claim should be contested. I argue that it should, on numerous grounds;

1. Though the claim is made under US law, similar anti-circumvention provisions exist in international law, which is highly standardised in large part thanks to the RIAA, MPAA (video), SIIA (software), WIPO, and other copyright monopoly cartels’ special-interest deep-pockets lobbying. Offshore legal safe havens are limited and vulnerable. Defence within DMCA /anti-circ / WIPO / Berne regions is unfortunately necessary. Simply hosting the repository outside US jurisdiction is not sufficient, though a valid immediate response.

2. Such claims are specious at best, carry heavy chilling efects, may be entirely fraudulent, and should carry considerable risk. A countersuit agaist RIAA may help make this cartel, or others, think twice about repeating such attempts, as well as establish precedent agaist future such attemps.

3. The future of software, to which Microsoft claims to have harnessed its own wagon, is open, collaborative, Free Software. As such, the software and information services industry’s interests diverge from those of regressive copyright maximalists.

TL;DR:

This is not a 17 USC 512 infringement/safe-harbour, RIAA’s standing is highly questionable, it is threatening a member for an averred nonmember’s §1201 injury, any actual works duplication is not performed by youtube-dl’s developers directly, nor is the work itself or its test suite an infringement of RIAA / members copyrights, and numerous defences exist for routine use or incidental transmission or copies made by developers, hosting services,or others. Further, youtube-dl, digital and information liberties groups, Microsoft, and Google/Youtube should fight the RIAA’s claim.
https://joindiaspora.com/posts/808cf...78002590d8e506





Amazon Argues Users Don't Actually Own Purchased Prime Video Content

The streamer says its terms of use are clear: what viewers are paying for is a limited license.
Ashley Cullins

When an Amazon Prime Video user buys content on the platform, what they're really paying for is a limited license for “on-demand viewing over an indefinite period of time” and they're warned of that in the company's terms of use. That's the company's argument for why a lawsuit over hypothetical future deletions of content should be dismissed.

Amanda Caudel in April sued Amazon for unfair competition and false advertising. She claims the company "secretly reserves the right" to end consumers' access to content purchased through its Prime Video service. She filed her putative class action on behalf of herself and any California residents who purchased video content from the service from April 25, 2016 to present.

On Monday, Amazon filed a motion to dismiss her complaint arguing that she lacks standing to sue because she hasn't been injured — and noting that she's purchased 13 titles on Prime since filing her complaint.

"Plaintiff claims that Defendant Amazon’s Prime Video service, which allows consumers to purchase video content for streaming or download, misleads consumers because sometimes that video content might later become unavailable if a third-party rights’ holder revokes or modifies Amazon’s license," writes attorney David Biderman in the motion, which is posted below. "The Complaint points vaguely to online commentary about this alleged potential harm but does not identify any Prime Video purchase unavailable to Plaintiff herself. In fact, all of the Prime Video content that Plaintiff has ever purchased remains available."

Further, Amazon argues, the site's required user agreements explain that some content may later become unavailable.

"The most relevant agreement here — the Prime Video Terms of Use — is presented to consumers every time they buy digital content on Amazon Prime Video," writes Biderman. "These Terms of Use expressly state that purchasers obtain only a limited license to view video content and that purchased content may become unavailable due to provider license restriction or other reasons."

Amazon argues it doesn't matter whether Caudel actually bothered to read the fine print.

"An individual does not need to read an agreement in order to be bound by it," writes Biderman. "A merchant term of service agreement in an online consumer transaction is valid and enforceable when the consumer had reasonable notice of the terms of service."
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/th...-video-content





Is it Okay to Pirate Movies?
Justin Cho

Pirating films is highly associated with broke college students. However, how much does piracy actually affect creators?

On Aug. 14, 2020, the most visited pirate site on the internet, KissAnime, and its sister site, KissManga, shut down. A recently revised Japanese copyright law finally ended its monumental eight year lifespan. According to SimilarWeb analytics, KissAnime reached a shocking 108 million visits in April 2020, more than three times the 30 million average visits that Pirate Bay, what many consider to be the most renowned pirating site, receives a month.

Copyright laws take down streaming sites all the time, but this one was special. KissAnime was not only popular, but also the central hub of a community that became very vocal about their loss, once again sparking a recurring conversation about piracy. Perhaps the most obvious question to ask is, how much does pirating actually affect creators?

According to the Motion Picture Association, quite a lot. In 2005, the MPA teamed up with LEK consulting to conduct a now well-known research study on how much piracy is negatively affecting the U.S. film industry. The results claimed studios lost as much as $6.1 billion in 2005 alone. The study also illuminated the demographics of pirates. 80 percent of piracy happened overseas with the highest contributors being China, Russia, and Thailand. Given this data, the MPA confidently claims that “piracy is the biggest threat to the US motion picture industry.”

However, there are some reasons to be a bit skeptical of this study. In 2008, an error was discovered in the data: They initially claimed that 44 percent of financial losses to piracy were attributable to college students, but that number was found to actually be around 15 percent.

In addition, critics challenged the study’s shocking $6.1 billion loss, as they believe many pirates wouldn’t have paid for the films even if they had to, especially in places like China where legal access to some movies is slim.

Along with this study, the MPA is an active force in the fight against piracy, creating a number of controversial anti-piracy campaigns throughout the years, such as the “Who Makes Movies” advertisements in 2003 and the slogan “you can click, but you can’t hide” in 2004.

However, the company itself has been involved in a number of contentious copyright infringement cases, bringing into question the sincerity of its anti-piracy campaigns. For example, in 2006 the MPA admitted to creating illegal copies of the documentary “This Film is Not Yet Rated” for its employees. Award winning film critic Roger Ebert commented, “that, of course, would be precisely the kind of bootleg piracy the [MPA] is waging war against.”

Although the MPA has some history, it is worth noting that, despite the presence of skeptics, no other statistic from the study has been officially proven wrong in the 12 years since 2008, and most experts agree that piracy is likely hurting creative industries, even if the precise amount is ambiguous.

Despite potential financial losses, most students that were interviewed seemed to agree that the losses weren’t as relevant for bigger films.

“If it’s a small artist or filmmaker, I do believe that you shouldn’t pirate because it takes away from their potential exposure and they need your financial support,” Eleanor Roosevelt College senior Jahfreen Alam said. “In comparison, let’s say it’s a big artist like Beyonce. I have no qualms over pirating something like Lemonade.”

This implies that many don’t see piracy as simply right or wrong. It depends on what you’re pirating – some properties don’t need your cash. However, piracy may affect more than just profit.

“I think piracy can be good,” ERC senior Joshua Hoangt, said. “It gives more access to different media … and it’s removing that class boundary among [those who can and can’t afford it].”

Theatre fans have made similar remarks. Theatre is a medium associated with high class and often requires individuals to be physically present in order to watch live performances. When a recording of the performance isn’t sold, a financial barrier is created, and those who cannot afford to attend must turn to pirated recordings as a way to appreciate the art.

In the discussion of art forms that have specific reasons to pirate, we must return to anime, a medium with a fascinating history and conversation behind its pirating culture.

Studios and producers have always made anime primarily for a Japanese audience, and in the 70s and 80s, very few shows were translated and sold in Western languages. Dedicated fans overcame this lack of availability by illegally copying videos, subtitling them, and distributing them via tapes and torrenting.

This effort is what allowed anime to develop a fanbase at all in the West. Although we see a recent renaissance of availability through platforms like Netflix, for much of anime’s history, the Western audience has largely been alone. The community was built from the ground up on pirating when there was no other option, and as a result, pirating became an important part of its culture. The aforementioned prominence of KissAnime is a manifestation of this, and the site’s fans often defend the use of piracy websites.

A common pro-piracy argument centers around the idea that although quick access piracy may result in short-term financial losses, the exposure may provide benefits in the long-term. Many in the anime community started watching when they were young and could not afford to pay, but some of these young fans grow up to become supporters of the industry once they are willing and able to pay for art they appreciate.

The Western anime industry is itself evidence of this phenomenon; what began as a small, ragtag group that pirated when there was no other option eventually grew to become a viable industry through exposure.

Additionally, the current landscape of the internet may give exposure related arguments firmer ground to stand on. The web spreads thought rapidly in a time period where exposure is paramount to relevancy.

Large corporations like Amazon and Google take advantage of this reality through the release of products like Amazon Alexa, which are intended not only to make profit, but also to increase public awareness for the brand.

While the financial effects of piracy are still controversial, some would argue that, even if it does hurt creators, sometimes that’s exactly the reason you should pirate.

“I think the fact that piracy happens opens up the conversation of why it’s happening in the first place,” ERC senior Konami Masui said, “I think piracy is more of a byproduct than an issue itself.”

Even though pirates founded the western anime community, many attribute the persistence of piracy culture to the industry’s inability to adapt. To this day, anime makes the majority of its profit through DVD and Blu-Ray sales, and fascinatingly, “Blu-Rays sold” is the standard metric that Japanese corporations use to compare success.

Anime Blu-Rays are typically marketed towards a niche, hardcore audience and are often priced anywhere between $50 to $200 for 6 to 12 episodes. While the dedicated collectors in Japan feel the prices are reasonable, the same can’t be said for Westerners. When online streaming started to become popular, many thought the Anime business model would change.

However, many producers failed to see the value in licensing their shows to be streamed – they believed that an $8 subscription was too cheap considering their Blu-Ray prices. Going into the mid-2000s, legal streaming platforms struggled to secure licensing deals, and many shows ended up unavailable to stream. So while the existence of streaming certainly did increase accessibility, it did not radically shift the anime business model as some expected.

Many who support pirating anime claim the industry is stuck dwelling on outdated business practices and fans should pirate so that these corporations get the message – if they want our money, they have to correctly play the game of economics and provide a good service.

Digibro, a controversial figure in the online anime community, is known for saying that they would be willing to see the anime industry burned down and rebuilt on its ashes if it meant that the business would evolve for the better.

Those in this party see pirating as a form of economic protest as opposed to simple theft.

Given the nature of the internet, regulating piracy won’t become easier anytime soon. There is simply too much decentralized pirating happening, and whenever a KissAnime falls, successors will appear to replace it. This is a phenomenon with potentially deeper implications than simply the profits of creators, and while corporations can choose to tighten their grip on the internet, it is us that will ultimately decide what goes and what doesn’t.
https://ucsdguardian.org/2020/10/25/...pirate-movies/





Seagate: 20 TB HAMR Drives Arrive in December, 50 TB Capacities in 2026
AleksandarK

In its latest earnings call, Seagate, a manufacturer of high-capacity drives, has revealed several interesting points about its upcoming releases of next-generation hard drives. More specifically, the company has disclosed a shift to a new generation of HDDs based on so-called heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. This technology is set to bring many improvements compared to the one currently used by Seagate's rivals like Western Digital. The rivaling company uses energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) and microwave-assisted (MAMR) technologies and it already has a 20 TB drive in the offering. Seagate announced that they will unveil a 20 TB HDD in December this year, with the use of HAMR technology, which will bring many improvements like better speed and more efficient disk read/write.

"We remain on track to ship 20-TB HAMR drives starting in December, which is an important milestone, as we believe HAMR technology will be the industry's path to scaling a real density and increasing drive capacities," said Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate. "Seagate will be the first to ship this crucial technology with a path to deliver 50-TB HAMR drives forecast in 2026."
https://www.techpowerup.com/273896/s...cities-in-2026





The Raid That Changed Rap
Sidney Madden, Rodney Carmichael

Rodney Carmichael and Sidney Madden are the hosts of Louder Than A Riot, a new podcast from NPR Music that investigates the interconnected rise of hip-hop and mass incarceration in America.

The foundations of hip-hop are rooted in making something outta nothing — just like the culture's ancestors turning "old food into soul food," as Jay-Z puts it.

If you're living in the Bronx in the 1970s and music education is being cut from city schools, you make instruments out of two turntables and your parents' record collection. If you don't have access to the museums, you turn subway trains into rolling art galleries. And if the disc jockeys refuse to play rap on the radio, you throw it on a cassette tape for underground distribution.

The 1983 film Style Wars gives a succinct explanation of the criminalization of these early pillars of hip-hop. In it, NYPD detective Bernie Jacobs stands in front of a graffiti-covered subway train and asks:

"Is that an art form? I don't know. I'm not an art critic. I can sure as hell tell you that that's a crime."

But the difference between art and crime depends on who you ask. And just as hip-hop was on the brink of becoming the most-consumed genre in the country, if not the world, mixtapes — a product essential to hip-hop's survival — became a scapegoat for the music industry's collapse. The players who turned this underground currency into legit capital became criminals in the eyes of the law.

For a good stretch in the early 2000s, DJ Drama had one of the most important voices in hip-hop, with mixtapes that launched the careers of artists like T.I. and Jeezy and put an entirely new sound on the map. Inside his Means St. Studio in Atlanta today, his wall of fame contains snapshots of artists who have passed through: Snoop Dogg, Cardi B, 2 Chainz, Megan Thee Stallion, Pharrell, Ice Cube, Big Boi, Nipsey Hussle — and that ain't even the half. Everybody who's anybody has been to Means Street.

But Drama's on his second life now. Thirteen years ago, at the height of his fame as a mixtape king, he had everything taken away. After a raid by federal agents on his studio, Drama wound up targeted, arrested and jailed – a martyr for mixtape culture.

***

In 1992, Drama was still just Tyree Simmons, a high school freshman in his hometown of Philadelphia. He remembers seeing a subplot of the movie Juice, about a character trying to make it as a DJ. "I just never forget looking on the screen and being like, 'Man, that's what I want to do," he says. So he convinced his mom to buy him a turntable and a mixer, and started saving up his lunch money to purchase vinyl records downtown.

Philly was a serious hip-hop city even back then, but it was still second-fiddle to the birthplace New York in every category but one: Philly was known for having the illest DJs in the country. This was the golden era, when DJs were still the cornerstone of hip-hop; you couldn't even call yourself a rapper until you found a DJ to team up with — and it was the DJ who got top billing.

Long before rap got any radio love, mixtapes were the main form of distribution, the currency that kept everything in rotation as the culture evolved. The beauty of mixtapes, Drama says, is that "you didn't have to cross your T's and dot your I's — you didn't have to worry about clearances and splits and royalties. ... It was just the wild, wild West. That's what the concept of 'jackin' for beats' comes from."

And jackin' for beats ain't just a hip-hop thing; quoting riffs is essential to jazz, just like passing the riddim is in reggae and dancehall. This borrowing is a natural element of hip-hop because it's a natural element of Black music.

But early mixtapes, like sampling, used copyrighted material without permission. And while copyright law was created to give artists a financial incentive to create, it actually stifles hip-hop producers who rely on sampling and recontextualizing.

From its inception in this country, Black expression and the means used to create and disseminate it have been suppressed, criminalized, even banned: Let's not forget, slave masters even outlawed the drum out of fear that enslaved Africans used it as a tool of covert communication.

At their height, mixtapes were hip-hop's talking drum: bought and sold on the black market, dictated by the streets and bankrolled by the industry. But the bigger they got, they became every bit as threatening to the major labels that owned the masters in the music business.

When DJ Drama was starting out, it was still the era of physical mixtapes dubbed straight to cassette — no DJBooth.net or DatPiff, no Spotify or Apple Music. Distribution was hand-to-hand, and promotion was word-of-mouth. Either you knew where to go or you didn't. "You didn't talk about selling mixtapes," Drama says. "There was a code of silence among those who were in it." The phrase "for promotional use only" was typically stamped on the cover since most mixtapes in this era were unlicensed compilations of previously released music.

And the industry let it slide, for the most part — until the 1990s, when the Recording Industry Association Of America started to take notice. The industry trade group is best known for certifying all the gold and platinum plaques artists like to show off. But they also protect and serve the major labels by working with local and federal police departments to enforce copyright laws.

By the mid-'90s, the music industry was raking in more money than it ever had, but the RIAA set its sights on the underground economy of mixtapes. In its 1995 year-end report, the association issued a warning about the "growing popularity of illicit DJ's mixing in CD format."
Related Story: Louder Than A Riot: The Soundtrack

Drama would've been a high school junior at the time. Just a few years earlier, he'd bought his first mixtape, DJ S&S Old School Part 2, off a bootlegger on 125th Street in Harlem. And by 1996, he'd even dropped his own mixtape called Illadelph, featuring Philly artists like Bahamadia and Black Thought of The Roots.

When it was time to pick a college, Drama headed to Atlanta to attend the historically Black Clark Atlanta University. Drama's move came at the tail end of a mass movement of Black folk moving back to the South after migrating north and west for the first half of the 20th century. Atlanta was becoming the new Black Mecca — a better job market, cost of living and social mobility — but it was still a long way from becoming the hip-hop capital.

His first year at Clark Atlanta, Drama was still unknown, too. But he knew how to hustle, setting his yellow boombox up on a campus trash can to sell his homemade mixtapes. Even then, it was his marketing savvy that separated him from the pack.

"I was like a one man show," he says. "I was like, 'Yo, I got DJ Drama tapes!' And people go, 'Who's that?' And I'm like, 'I don't know. He just told me to set up shop. I work for him.' ... That was my hustle."

Drama eventually hooked up with a couple of other Philly DJs at Clark Atlanta: dorm roommate DJ Sense and another native, Don Cannon. Together they'd form the Aphilliates, a DJ crew whose name was a nod to their Philly roots.

But Drama's boom-bap pedigree would only take a DJ so far on a campus where kids were coming from all over the country. So he started making reggae tapes on top of his hip-hop tapes, and even started an early neo-soul series called Automatic Relaxation. Then, he started to get his nose open to hip-hop below the Mason-Dixon line.

"Southern artists weren't getting their proper just due respect for the lyricism and the artistic value that they brought to the table," he says. Even Atlanta's own OutKast got booed at the 1995 Source Awards the year before Drama moved to Atlanta.

But the breakthrough for the South was a hard-fought battle. That's because Southern hip-hop isn't monolithic, explains Dr. Regina N. Bradley, assistant professor of English and African diaspora studies at Kennesaw State University and co-host of the Southern hip-hop podcast Bottom of the Map. While Northeastern hip-hop was centered in New York, and West Coast hip-hop in California, hip-hop in the South developed in a variety of regional scenes in Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and Virginia — all pulling from different influences.

"We're pulling from funk, we're pulling from gospel," she says. "If you're coming out of New Orleans or Louisiana, you're pulling from jazz too; you're pulling from bounce music. ... The South was trying to establish a complicated identity that the Northeast and West Coast didn't have to worry about."

In 1998, Drama's junior year at Clark, he made his first Southern mixtape, with a pretty provocative title: Jim Crow Laws, named for the Black Codes that once enforced segregation in the South. The mixtape was straight-up Dirty South and sold like hot cakes. Then, after graduating from college a couple of years later, he decided to launch a new Southern mixtape series called Gangsta Grillz — a name that was loud and menacing like the shiny gold grillz Down South rappers liked to flash for the camera.

Lil Jon gave the brand a boost when Drama asked him to guest host one of those early tapes. But the first rapper to pay Drama a visit after he launched Gangsta Grillz was a relative unknown at the time — an up-and-coming artist in Atlanta who had just signed to LaFace Records named T.I. And even during his first visit to the small apartment where Drama was making mixtapes, he was already claiming the title "King of the South."

As Tip tells it, the secret sauce that made Drama's tapes unique was their energy and storytelling; his boastful drops, shout outs and mini skits. "It doesn't seem very hostile, but it seems extremely passionate," TI says. "You heard Drama's voice [and] it's like, 'Oh s***, m*********** gonna be dope!'"

"I just wanted to give it a sense of a narrative," Drama explains. "Not just, you know, regular shout outs — really listening to the music and going along with what the music was about, you know? Really becoming a real host."

With Gangsta Grillz, Drama was finding his voice at a time when the South — and Atlanta in particular — was developing a sound and subgenre all its own. T.I. was the first to label it "trap music," a name inspired by the crack houses and dead-end traps where drugs were sold and consumed. But more to the point, trap music is street music. If Atlanta's Black Mecca appeal was built on this legacy of Black mayors, Black money and Black power, trap represented that dark underbelly: the underfed, underprivileged and misunderstood. And the music — with boomin' 808s and triple-time snares — sounded every bit as explicit as that reality.

There was a sense of criminality associated with trap, Bradley explains, because artists were openly talking about living through the crack cocaine epidemic. "That's particularly important in the South," she says, "because in the South, not only are we dealing with that back-and-forth tension between the past always being in the present, but as Southern Black people, we're also dealing with that long shadow of the Civil Rights movement and that romantic idea that the movement fixed everything — and it didn't." And those things that weren't fixed, like unemployment, lack of access to education and illiteracy, were exactly what Southern artists were addressing.

Trap music as protest music lines right up with Drama's pedigree. His dad was a member of SNCC, the student group once led by John Lewis that organized sit-ins during the Civil Rights movement. Even though Drama grew up going with his parents to marches in the nation's capital, he saw no contradiction in being the product of political activists and the face of Gangsta Grillz.

Drama had the streets on lock when a newcomer named Young Jeezy reached out. Originally from South Georgia, he called himself The Snowman and was connected to a drug syndicate that would put the fictional Scarface to shame. The mixtapes DJ Drama and Young Jeezy made together turned them both into certified street legends. For their second Gangsta Grillz mixtape, Trap Or Die, nearly all the music was original, largely produced by Shawty Redd (with a track from Don Cannon); it was basically Jeezy's debut album. Drama took the blueprint from East Coast mixtape DJs and applied it to the South, making Southern street albums that crossed over the Mason-Dixon line while representing the bottom — not just the bottom of the map, but the bottom class. Before, Atlanta mixtapes were local; Drama made them global.

The mixtape model had its risks, but it also had its rewards: Drama didn't have to license any of the music or pay artists, and it cost him around $0.50 to print a CD that he'd sell for $5-10. He says there were months where he was selling 50,000-75,000 mixtapes a month. He'd gone from making $100 a week in his college mixtape-hustle days to $50,000-$60,000 a month. He remembers watching as his bank account grew into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, more money than he'd ever seen.

At the same time, CD sales were taking a nosedive; websites like Napster and Limewire made it easier than ever to download music illegally with just a few clicks. So the record industry hit back; the RIAA started filing lawsuits against random fans for illegal downloading as a scare tactic. And in 2005, the RIAA and local police raided a record store in Manhattan, arresting five employees and confiscating hundreds of mixtapes.

Marsha St. Hubert, who is now Senior Vice President of Marketing for Atlantic Records, didn't agree with cracking down on mixtapes. She'd seen their power — how 50 Cent used them to launch a major-label bidding war; how they helped T.I. salvage his career and get a deal with Atlantic in 2003. She knew a mixtape could change the trajectory of an artist's career, and that the labels benefited from them, too: If a mixtape blew up, the artist's major-label release was destined to blow up, too.

In 2005, Drama's career also got a boost; the Atlantic subsidiary Grand Hustle, T.I.'s label, signed him to a recording deal to create a legit Gangsta Grillz CD. By now, labels were calling Drama, paying him money to work with their artists. He became the industry plug.

But Gangsta Grillz's popularity was starting to present some problems. Drama made a deal with an independent distributor that started selling his mixtapes in a major retail chain. Next thing you know, Drama says they were airing Gangsta Grillz commercials on BET. That's when he started getting a little nervous.

"They put barcodes on them," Drama says. "You can't put that at Best Buy with a barcode. ... I didn't even realize that was possible."

***

Over the next few years, Gangsta Grillz' impact on the culture became immeasurable. The list of artists to get the Gangsta Grillz treatment expanded to include surprise standouts like Pharrell, Little Brother and Gnarls Barkley. Drama won big at the 2007 Justo Mixtape Awards, becoming the first DJ outside of New York to win the coveted Mixtape DJ of the Year award.

So on January 16, 2007, DJ Drama, DJ Cannon and the Aphiliates were camped out at the studio to plot their next move: Gangsta Grillz: The Album, Drama's major-label debut. Drama stepped outside to move his car when he realized they weren't alone.

"I walked out the door," he says, "and then that was when it was just, like, SWAT and helicopters and, you know, here come the SUV and they just, like, pull from all corners."

Drama played it cool because he knew that whatever it was, he wasn't the target. But things escalated. Officers pulled up and jumped out with M-16s drawn, pointed at Drama. They called him by his government name, Tyree Simmons, and told him to get on the ground. They took his ID. Drama says he heard the officers get on their radios, saying: "We got one of the perps."

"So I start, in my mind, freaking out," he says. "Like, huh? Like, who? Y'all got one of them like — Wait, it's gotta be a mistake."

Then, all hell broke loose. Police stormed the offices, waving guns and telling everyone to get face-down on the ground. It was a full-on raid. Drama says they were looking through the building for guns and drugs — which they didn't find. What they did find was tens of thousands of mixtape CDs, which they confiscated along with studio equipment, computers, four cars, bank statements and even the hard drives containing songs recorded for Drama's new studio album. Then, they took Drama and Cannon.

They told Drama he was being arrested for bootlegging and racketeering under RICO laws — the kind of serious conspiracy charges used to take down dangerous crime outfits, like the mob. Drama didn't even know what RICO stood for at the time. Police rounded up everybody and took Drama and Cannon separately to Rice Street, where they were booked into the Fulton County Jail.

The news hit the streets like a tidal wave. In local footage on the 11 o' clock news that night, Drama and Cannon are dressed in blues with their hands cuffed in a courtroom. Drama's trademark fitted cap is missing, like he's lost his crown. Together, they look like two deer caught in headlights.

The next morning, Drama woke up in a jail cell for the first time in his life. He and Cannon were able to make bail for a $100,000 apiece. That's when they found out how serious the RICO charges they'd been slapped with really were. On the phone, T.I. explained something Drama didn't know: The feds can confiscate all your funds in a RICO investigation. T.I. told Drama to take his money out of his account, but when Drama looked up his bank records online, he froze. A bank account, consisting of several hundred thousand dollars, reduced to nothing. In that moment, Drama says, he broke down and cried.

When Drama found out his arrest was made in conjunction with the RIAA — the same trade organization whose seal appears on the gold and platinum plaques hanging in his offices — it felt deeper than a personal betrayal. It was a betrayal of hip-hop.

"The labels wouldn't know what was coming next if it wasn't for mixtapes," he says. "It's the veins of the culture. Everything in hip-hop from '95 to 2007 came from mixtapes. The blend style from Ron G, R&B vocals over hip hop beats. That's mixtape s***. That became a style of music that the labels got rich off."

"What we were doing is not wrong," he says. "Gangsta Grillz is the biggest thing, arguably, ever in the mixtapes history. This is what y'all make billions off. Don't sit here and tell me that what we're doing is wrong."

For Drama, it felt like a bait and switch. One day, he was working with major labels to promote their artists; the next, the industry trade group was working with law enforcement to haul him to jail and take his money — money he made, in part, by working with the labels.

Why, then, did the labels go after Drama? NPR reached out to the RIAA, and despite several attempts, the group refused to talk on the record. At the time, Carlos Linares, who was then the Vice President of Anti-Piracy at the RIAA, told MTV News there was "no RIAA policy geared towards going out and enforcing against mixtapes." But, he said, the group did have "an ongoing policy to help identify illicit music product and bring it to the attention of law enforcement."

Drama and Canon were charged with a Georgia state law that made it illegal to sell CDs without putting your name and address on them — essentially, it was a way for the state to enforce federal copyright law — and they added a RICO charge because they were mass distributing the CDs.

The charges were "dead docketed," meaning Drama and Canon wouldn't be prosecuted, but the charges could be reinstated at any time. Drama says the DJs never got their money back; according to him, law enforcement claimed they couldn't prove what was earned from legitimate mixtapes and what was from illegal bootlegs, so they kept it all.

But the culture paid the biggest price. The mixtape game came to a dead halt.

In a larger sense, Drama even started to blame himself. Not for the arrest, but for the impact it was having on mixtape culture. On hip-hop.

"I felt some guilt because I'm like, yo ... I can't let the mixtape game die on my shoulders," he says. "Like, here's this culture I grew up loving and then I go to jail for it. If they can lock up Drama, nobody's safe. This s***'s done. It's over. It's a wrap."

The pushback wasn't just coming from the RIAA, either. The success of Gangsta Grillz was breeding contempt, even among artists like Lil Wayne who'd benefitted from the series most but who weren't getting paid from mixtapes directly.

"This is the same guy that also wound up saying, f***mixtape DJs," Drama recalls of Lil Wayne. "And I wound up having him call into my show to explain, and then we wound up doing Dedication 3. I never really felt personally betrayed by Wayne, even when he made them comments. My grandmother wasn't too happy about it. She definitely was pretty hurt."

But Drama wasn't completely left out in the cold. After all that drama — the raid, the arrest, the damaged hard drives and the emptied out bank account — he had something beyond street cred. Now that he had a criminal record, Atlantic was more hype than ever to drop his debut record.

By December 2007, nearly 12 months after that fateful day, the Gangsta Grillz album debut — the one Drama and the Aphilliates had been working on the day of the raid — came out. And the first single from that album, "Feds Takin Pictures," features Young Jeezy, Willie the Kid, Jim Jones, Young Buck and Rick Ross — all talking about the long arm of the law watching their every move.

As for mixtapes, Drama still makes them from time to time. But now, they're only a small percentage of the business that keeps him busy. He's an A&R, and he and Cannon run their own label, Generation Now, distributed through Atlantic and responsible for the careers of artists like Lil Uzi Vert, Jack Harlow and more. And Drama says he doesn't have any qualms about having gone back to working with the industry.

"It's not personal, you know what I mean?" he says. "Whether I was an example or whether I had to take the fall or be a martyr ... We took the fall, we stood strong and I hope we made the culture proud." He says when he and Cannon went back to get their property from the police, the police even asked for autographs.

***

But what remains clear is this: None of the authorities involved in taking down DJ Drama — least of all the RIAA — understood the value of mixtapes, a culture the industry was profiting from. Like the Black Codes that restricted the movement of freed men and women after slavery, this squeeze on mixtapes felt like a modern-day remix. Call it the Rap Codes — or, yet another way to police black cultural production.

"Historically, Black folk weren't meant to be citizens of this country," says Bradley. "So if I'm not a citizen of the country, I'm an enemy of the country. If I'm an enemy of the country I'm living in, what do I do? I criminalize it. From the Black Codes during Reconstruction to Jim Crow, to the three strikes rule in Georgia, which a lot of artists were talking about, to this idea of being a 'super predator,' there's always something criminalized in trying to recognize a Black experience. And if there isn't a criminal aspect to it, then it gets overlooked in favor of one that shows a stereotypical representation of what criminal Blackness looks like."

And for all the reformed trappers turned rappers who thought they'd found a way to go legit, it felt like the game was rigged.

"It made us feel like what we were doing was illegal and we might as well keep selling dope," says T.I. He argues that the labels don't have the moral authority because of the way they've cheated Black artists for decades, if not centuries.

"You don't manipulate the people who didn't have no money and didn't have no way in life to goddamn sign away all of their intellectual property for pennies," he says, "and you want them to not use their intellectual property to promote and pay themselves? ... What gave you the right to this material? You used deception to acquire it."

In a way, that explains how Gangsta Grillz became a victim of its own success. It was the loudest, most menacing mixtape series in a genre where being loud and menacing attracts the most attention. Over time, Gangsta Grillz became impossible for law enforcement to overlook.

But what happened to the mixtape DJ? Mixtapes still exist in name, but they definitely aren't the same in spirit. Now, they're much more a means of cultural cache than archetypal format. And as of 2016, mixtapes can even go for the gold and win Grammys.

In the hyperspeed age of music streaming giants like Spotify, Apple Music, SoundCloud and more, the scrappy, covert operation of making mixtapes is obsolete. Today, rappers drop whenever they want and playlist curators dictate exposure, playing the role of keyboard pinch hitter DJs by pushing the button. But the main ingredient — the showmanship of the DJ — is what's missing. Drama may have dodged a bullet, but the culture took a hit.

This story consists of material published within an episode of the NPR Music podcast Louder Than A Riot. It includes editing and reporting by Dustin DeSoto, Matt Ozug, Michael May, Jacob Ganz and Marissa Lorusso.
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/29/92862...at-changed-rap





Fix, or Toss? The ‘Right to Repair’ Movement Gains Ground

Both Republicans and Democrats are pursuing laws to make it easier for people to fix cellphones, cars, even hospital ventilators. In Europe, the movement is further along.
Paola Rosa-Aquino

If you buy a product — a car, a smartphone, or even a tractor — and it breaks, should it be easier for you to fix it yourself?

Manufacturers of a wide range of products have made it increasingly difficult over the years to repair things, for instance by limiting availability of parts or by putting prohibitions on who gets to tinker with them. It affects not only game consoles or farm equipment, but cellphones, military gear, refrigerators, automobiles and even hospital ventilators, the lifesaving devices that have proven crucial this year in fighting the Covid-19 pandemic.

Now, a movement known as “right to repair” is starting to make progress in pushing for laws that prohibit restrictions like these.

This August, Democrats introduced a bill in Congress to block manufacturers’ limits on medical devices, spurred by the pandemic. In Europe, the European Commission announced plans in March for new right-to-repair rules that would cover phones, tablets, and laptops by 2021.

In less than two weeks, Massachusetts voters will consider a measure that would make it easier for local garages to work on cars. And in more than 20 statehouses nationwide, right-to-repair legislation has been introduced in recent years by both Republicans and Democrats.

Over the summer, the House advanced a funding bill that includes a requirement that the FTC complete a report on anticompetitive practices in the repair market and present its findings to Congress and the public. And in a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, Marine Captain Elle Ekman and former Marine Lucas Kunce last year detailed how mechanics in the American armed forces have run into similar obstacles.

The goal of right-to-repair rules, advocates say, is to require companies to make their parts, tools and information available to consumers and repair shops in order to keep devices from ending up in the scrap heap. They argue that the rules restrict people’s use of devices that they own and encourage a throwaway culture by making repairs too difficult.

They also argue that it’s part of a culture of planned obsolescence — the idea that products are designed to be short-lived in order to encourage people to buy more stuff. That contributes to wasted natural resources and energy use at a time when climate change requires movement in the opposite direction to rein in planet-warming emissions.

Manufacturing a new device or appliance is still largely reliant on polluting sources of energy — electricity generated from burning fossil fuels, for instance — and constitutes the largest environmental impact for most products. Mining and manufacturing materials for the newest iPhone, for example, represents roughly 83 percent of its contribution to the heat-trapping emissions in the atmosphere throughout its life cycle, according to Apple’s manufacturing data. For a washing machine, it’s about 57 percent.

Add to that complex calculus the emissions from assembling the materials into a product, and then shipping it around the world.

“There are a lot of products that are not designed to last,” said Gay Gordon-Byrne, the executive director of the Repair Association, a group focused on right-to-repair legislation. “But if you have enough options for repair, you can keep even the worst product going, if you can fix it.”

Manufacturers argue that their products are repairable, and that they are protecting consumers’ safety, privacy and security by restricting who does the repairs. Apple, for instance, limits consumers from repairing their devices by requiring specific tools or authorized parts.

“When a repair is needed, a customer should have confidence the repair is done right,” Jeff Williams, Apple’s chief operating officer, said in a release last year. “We believe the safest and most reliable repair is one handled by a trained technician using genuine parts that have been properly engineered and rigorously tested.”

An Apple spokeswoman this week pointed to the company’s efforts to expand its product repair programs: Last fall, the tech giant announced it will give independent repair businesses the same genuine parts, tools, and diagnostics for iPhone repairs as it gives to Apple-authorized service providers.

Other companies argue that the computer code that drives the device remains the property of the manufacturer, not the consumer, which further limits the potential for third-party repair. Tractor manufacturer John Deere is one example, using license agreements with farmers that forbid them from even looking at the software running the tractor. Violating it could be considered breach of contract, which comes with the risk of a lawsuit.

Jen Hartmann, John Deere’s director of strategic public relations, said the company has “made an industry commitment along with several ag equipment manufacturers to provide a comprehensive tool kit of service tools available to help end users perform service and maintenance on their machinery.”

For Leticia Reynolds earlier this year, it was a safety issue of a different sort. As a medical equipment technician at Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs, she was eager to get ventilators in service. The country faced a nationwide shortage of the lifesaving machines, which help desperately ill patients breathe.

But there were some that Ms. Reynolds couldn’t fix herself, because the manufacturer wouldn’t let her. Some ventilator makers are among those companies imposing rules prohibiting anyone but their own technicians from obtaining the tools, parts, and instructions to make repairs.

“We’re 100-percent solely depending on the manufacturer,” she said, even for routine maintenance. But that can delay repairs, which can mean “equipment isn’t available for a patient that needs it.”

Over the past year or so, as much of the world was cooped up due to stay-at-home restrictions, sales of Nintendo’s Switch console have increased sharply. But players have been struggling with a problem that has plagued its detachable wireless controllers, called Joy-Cons, for years: Sometimes it thinks players are moving the controller, even if they aren’t.

That led to a class-action lawsuit claiming, among other things, that the company “routinely refuses to repair the joysticks without charge.” The case is now in arbitration, and since then, the company has begun fixing Joy-Con issues at no charge.

Still, the fight continues: Last month, a French consumer advocacy group filed a complaint alleging planned obsolescence, claiming Nintendo knew some controllers were failing too quickly.

Nintendo did not respond to a request for comment.

While these burdens on repair can make some gadgets seem unusable and, consequently, disposable, some argue that new repair mandates wouldn’t have a measurable effect on how often people replace their products.

“Common consumer devices such as laptops and smartphones are already widely reused and recycled without any type of new repair mandate,” said Walter Alcorn, vice president of environmental affairs at the Consumer Technology Association, an industry trade group that represents thousands of technology companies including Apple, Dell, and Microsoft.

He said that CTA’s biennial survey showed that only 2 percent of consumers “report throwing their old mobile device in the trash while more than 10 times as many reported either trading in their old mobile device, selling it, giving it away, or recycling it.”

The idea of planned obsolescence isn’t new. It was written about in 1928 by Justus George Frederick, an American advertising expert who suggested that people would have to buy an ever-increasing variety of things, then discard them and purchase new things, in order to help keep a consumer economy steaming along.

Since at least the early 1960s, critics have complained that planned obsolescence wastes people’s money, uses valuable resources and chokes landfills. Today, for example, there are more than 70 different elements in a modern smartphone — nearly two-thirds of the periodic table in the palm of your hand.

Research suggests that consumer devices may be more short-lived than in the past. According to a study by a German sustainability research group, Öko-Institut, the proportion of major household appliances that died within five years rose from 3.5 percent in 2004 to 8.3 percent in 2012. Though the analysis is now several years old, it found the trend in a wide spectrum of products, including TV sets and large electrical appliances as well as mobile phones.

Extending the life of a product even relatively briefly can have significant benefits, according to Nathan Proctor, who leads the right-to-repair campaign at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a consumer advocacy group. If Americans would extend the life of their cellphones by one year, for instance, it would be the climate-saving equivalent of taking 636,000 cars off the road, or about the amount of passenger vehicles registered in the state of New Mexico.

Right to repair advocates like Ms. Gordon-Byrne and Mr. Proctor highlight recent strides in the automotive industry. In next month’s election, Massachusetts will have a question on the ballot designed to ensure that drivers will continue to be able to have local repair shops — not just authorized dealers — work on their cars as they become more automated and manufacturers control access to that data.

That measure is designed to build on a 2012 bill in the state that required carmakers to provide independent repair shops with access to the diagnostic tools that had been available only to dealerships.

The new measure, known as Question 1 on the ballot, has met resistance.

“If Question 1 passes in Massachusetts, anyone could access the most personal data stored in your vehicle,” says the narrator in one advertisement. The campaign against the measure talks about the risks of hacking, identity theft and cyberstalking as part of a multimillion-dollar advertising spend by a group called Coalition for Safe and Secure Data, a manufacturer-backed organization that is fighting the question in November.

Conor Yunits, a spokesman for the coalition, said it sees the new measure as unnecessary: “Massachusetts is already the only state that has a right to repair law on the books. The technology they care about — telematics — is already covered by the existing law. In our view, this is an attempt by national auto parts chains to get access to more consumer data.”

Manufacturers have considerable influence over the standards to which their products are made, said Mark Schaffer, a consultant on the life cycle of electronics. According to a 2017 report that he wrote, that’s because major manufacturers sit on the panels that set guidelines for things like environmental impact. As a result, he said, tougher standards can be difficult to achieve.

“As a whole, the industry needs to raise the floor on repairability,” Mr. Schaffer said. “That’s probably not going to happen until there is a legal requirement at a state or at a national level.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/23/c...to-repair.html





Microsoft Did Some Research. Now it's Angry About What it Found

There are times when corporations lose their temper. Well, they're people too. In Microsoft's case, it's people and politics that are driving the company crazy.
Chris Matyszczyk

Is it too late?

I'm quite used to hearing that Microsoft has annoyed someone.

Usually, it's a Windows user who's angry about Redmond's keenness to slip unwanted products onto their screens.

I was rather moved, then, to hear that Microsoft itself is enduring conniptions of the most fundamental kind.

You see, the company recently commissioned research company YouGov to ask 5,000 registered voters about their innermost feelings. One or two deeply felt highlights emerged.

90% of respondents admitted they're worried every time they share their information online.

70% privately pointed their fingers at the US government. They said it isn't doing enough to protect their personal data.

A simliar 70% said they'd like to see the next administration enact privacy legislation.

How do I know this made Microsoft angry? Well, these details come from a bracingly seething blog post -- published this week -- from the company's "Corporate Vice-President For Global Privacy and Regulatory Affairs and Chief Privacy Officer."

Extraordinarily, we're talking about just one person with all those titles, Julie Brill. She doesn't think the US government is doing brilliantly.

Brill tried to rein in her irkdom. She began by talking about the importance of data in our new, more domestically confined world.

She said: "Data is critical not just in rebuilding our economy but in helping us understand societal inequalities that have contributed to dramatically higher rates of sickness and death among Black communities and other communities of color due to COVID-19. Data can also help us focus resources on rebuilding a more just, fair and equitable economy that benefits all."

A fundamental problem, said Brill is the lack of trust in society today. In bold letters, she declared: "The United States has fallen far behind the rest of the world in privacy protection."

I can't imagine it's fallen behind Russia, but how poetic if that was true.

Still, Brill really isn't happy with our government: "In total, over 130 countries and jurisdictions have enacted privacy laws. Yet, one country has not done so yet: the United States."

Brill worries our isolation isn't too splendid. She mused: "In contrast to the role our country has traditionally played on global issues, the US is not leading, or even participating in, the discussion over common privacy norms."

That's like Microsoft not participating in the creation of excellent smartphones. It's not too smart.

Brill fears other parts of the world will continue to lead in privacy, while the US continues to lead in inaction and chaos. It sounds like the whole company is mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore.

Yet it's not as if Microsoft has truly spent the last 20 years championing privacy much more than most other big tech companies. In common with its west coast brethren, it's been too busy making money.

Brill is undeterred. She tried to offer good news. Some states are taking the matter of privacy into their own jurisdictions. And then she offers words of hope that, to this reader at least, swim in baths of sarcasm: "There are also signs of real interest among some members of Congress."

Real interest among members of Congress can often feel like real sincerity. You hope it's there, but you suspect it's not.

Yet I sense Brill doesn't have too much hope in governmental action. So, spurred again by the company's research, she turned to the corporate world.

"The YouGov study found that significantly more people believe companies bear the primary responsibility for protecting data privacy -- not government," she said.

Yet what do those companies do? They make privacy controls your responsibility, dear citizen. I dare say Microsoft has done that once or twice in its time.

"The large number of websites, devices and apps that people rely on to remain connected and engaged – a number that has grown even larger during this health crisis – makes it nearly impossible for individuals to navigate the privacy information overload and make informed decisions about how their data is used," said Brill.

And then, in a perfectly chest-beating use of the plural, she added: "Too often, we deliver that information in notices difficult for lawyers and engineers to understand -- much less consumers."

Brill's blog post is short on patience, but not short. It's a withering exposition of what the tech world has wrought and how society has dissipated, especially during the last decade.

Just as there's no trust in corporations' protection of personal privacy, so there's no trust in seemingly any facet of US society. Some might read Brill's thoughts as if they're in anticipation of -- or even hoping for -- a new administration that will embrace humanity more fully.

"Trust is essential," concluded Brill. "It is time for government and business to work together to pass laws and reinvent practices to recognize the individual right to own and control personal data and to place the responsibility for protecting privacy where it belongs -- on companies."

I wanted to offer a grand hurrah. But then I was confronted by new research from the authors of "The Corporate Social Mind."

The headline? "Germans trust companies more than Americans to address social issues."
https://www.zdnet.com/article/micros...what-it-found/





Spy Agency Ducks Questions about 'Back Doors' in Tech Products
Joseph Menn

The U.S. National Security Agency is rebuffing efforts by a leading Congressional critic to determine whether it is continuing to place so-called back doors into commercial technology products, in a controversial practice that critics say damages both U.S. industry and national security.

The NSA has long sought agreements with technology companies under which they would build special access for the spy agency into their products, according to disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reporting by Reuters and others.

These so-called back doors enable the NSA and other agencies to scan large amounts of traffic without a warrant. Agency advocates say the practice has eased collection of vital intelligence in other countries, including interception of terrorist communications.

The agency developed new rules for such practices after the Snowden leaks in order to reduce the chances of exposure and compromise, three former intelligence officials told Reuters. But aides to Senator Ron Wyden, a leading Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, say the NSA has stonewalled on providing even the gist of the new guidelines.

“Secret encryption back doors are a threat to national security and the safety of our families – it’s only a matter of time before foreign hackers or criminals exploit them in ways that undermine American national security,” Wyden told Reuters. “The government shouldn’t have any role in planting secret back doors in encryption technology used by Americans.”

The agency declined to say how it had updated its policies on obtaining special access to commercial products. NSA officials said the agency has been rebuilding trust with the private sector through such measures as offering warnings about software flaws.

“At NSA, it’s common practice to constantly assess processes to identify and determine best practices,” said Anne Neuberger, who heads NSA’s year-old Cybersecurity Directorate. “We don’t share specific processes and procedures.”

Three former senior intelligence agency figures told Reuters that the NSA now requires that before a back door is sought, the agency must weigh the potential fallout and arrange for some kind of warning if the back door gets discovered and manipulated by adversaries.

The continuing quest for hidden access comes as governments in the United States, the United Kingdom and elsewhere seek laws that would require tech companies to let governments see unencrypted traffic. Defenders of strong encryption say the NSA’s sometimes-botched efforts to install back doors in commercial products show the dangers of such requirements.

Critics of the NSA’s practices say they create targets for adversaries, undermine trust in U.S. technology and compromise efforts to persuade allies to reject Chinese technology that could be used for espionage, since U.S. gear can also be turned to such purposes.

In at least one instance, a foreign adversary was able to take advantage of a back door invented by U.S. intelligence, according to Juniper Networks Inc, which said in 2015 its equipment had been compromised. In a previously unreported statement to members of Congress in July seen by Reuters, Juniper said an unnamed national government had converted the mechanism first created by the NSA. The NSA told Wyden staffers in 2018 that there was a “lessons learned” report about the Juniper incident and others, according to Wyden spokesman Keith Chu.

“NSA now asserts that it cannot locate this document,” Chu told Reuters.

NSA and Juniper declined to comment on the matter.

JUNIPER’S COMPROMISE

The NSA has pursued many means for getting inside equipment, sometimes striking commercial deals to induce companies to insert back doors, and in other cases manipulating standards - namely by setting processes so that companies unknowingly adopt software that NSA experts can break, according to reports from Reuters and other media outlets.

The tactics drew widespread attention starting in 2013, when Snowden leaked documents referencing these practices.

Tech companies that were later exposed for having cut deals that allowed backdoor access, including security pioneer RSA, lost credibility and customers. Other U.S. firms lost business overseas as customers grew wary of the NSA’s reach.

All of that prompted a White House policy review.

“There were all sorts of ‘lessons learned’ processes,” said former White House cybersecurity coordinator Michael Daniel, who was advising then-president Barack Obama when the Snowden files erupted. A special commission appointed by Obama said the government should never “subvert” or “weaken” tech products or compromise standards.

The White House did not publicly embrace that recommendation, instead beefing up review procedures for whether to use newly discovered software flaws for offensive cyber operations or get them fixed to improve defense, Daniel and others said.

The secret government contracts for special access remained outside of the formal review.

“The NSA had contracts with companies across the board to help them out, but that’s extremely protected,” said an intelligence community lawyer.

The starkest example of the risks inherent in the NSA’s approach involved an encryption-system component known as Dual Elliptic Curve, or Dual EC. The intelligence agency worked with the Commerce Department to get the technology accepted as a global standard, but cryptographers later showed that the NSA could exploit Dual EC to access encrypted data.

RSA accepted a $10 million contract to incorporate Dual EC into a widely used web security system, Reuters reported here in 2013. RSA said publicly that it would not have knowingly installed a back door, but its reputation was tarnished and the company was sold.

Juniper Networks got into hot water over Dual EC two years later. At the end of 2015, the maker of internet switches disclosed that it had detected malicious code in some firewall products. Researchers later determined that hackers had turned the firewalls into their own spy tool here by altering Juniper’s version of Dual EC.

Juniper said little about the incident. But the company acknowledged to security researcher Andy Isaacson in 2016 that it had installed Dual EC as part of a “customer requirement,” according to a previously undisclosed contemporaneous message seen by Reuters. Isaacson and other researchers believe that customer was a U.S. government agency, since only the U.S. is known to have insisted on Dual EC elsewhere.

Juniper has never identified the customer, and declined to comment for this story.

Likewise, the company never identified the hackers. But two people familiar with the case told Reuters that investigators concluded the Chinese government was behind it. They declined to detail the evidence they used.

The Chinese government has long denied involvement in hacking of any kind. In a statement to Reuters, the Chinese foreign ministry said that cyberspace is “highly virtual and difficult to trace. It is extremely irresponsible to make accusations of hacker attacks without complete and conclusive evidence. At the same time, we also noticed that the report mentioned that it was the U.S. intelligence agency - the National Security Agency - that created this backdoor technology.”

NERVOUS COMPANIES

Wyden remains determined to find out exactly what happened at Juniper and what has changed since as the encryption wars heat up.

This July, in previously unreported responses to questions from Wyden and allies in Congress here, Juniper said that an unidentified nation was believed to be behind the hack into its firewall code but that it had never investigated why it installed Dual EC in the first place.

“We understand that there is a vigorous policy debate about whether and how to provide government access to encrypted content,” it said in a July letter. “Juniper does not and will not insert back doors into its products and we oppose any legislation mandating back doors.”

A former senior NSA official told Reuters that many tech companies remain nervous about working covertly with the government. But the agencies’ efforts continue, the person said, because special access is seen as too valuable to give up.

Reporting by Joseph Menn; editing by Jonathan Weber and Edward Tobin
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKBN27D1CS

















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- js.



















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