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Old 27-06-18, 06:55 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 30th, ’18

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June 30th, 2018




Bill to Save Net Neutrality is 46 Votes Short in US House

172 Democrats signed petition to force vote, but they need 218 signatures.
Jon Brodkin

Congressional Democrats seeking to reinstate net neutrality rules are still 46 votes short of getting the measure through the House of Representatives.

The US Senate voted last month to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules, with all members of the Democratic caucus and three Republicans voting in favor of net neutrality.

A discharge petition needs 218 signatures to force a House vote on the same net neutrality bill, and 218 votes would also be enough to pass the measure. So far, the petition has signatures from 172 representatives, all Democrats. That number hasn't changed in two weeks.

"We're 46 [signatures] away from being able to force a vote on the resolution to restore the Open Internet Order," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) tweeted yesterday.

Republicans have a 235-193 majority in the House. You can see which representatives haven't signed the petition at this page maintained by net neutrality advocacy group Fight for the Future. Several groups including Fight for the Future held an "advocacy day" yesterday to urge lawmakers to support the petition.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's net neutrality repeal took effect on June 11.

California net neutrality bill

Another major legislative debate on net neutrality is happening in the California state legislature. A bill to impose strict net neutrality rules passed in the California Senate but was gutted by State Assembly lawmakers last week.

The gutted version of the bill was approved yesterday by the Assembly's Privacy and Consumer Protection Committee, but this was mainly a procedural move. Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), the bill author, "asked the Privacy Committee to move the bill forward to allow negotiations to continue regarding restoring the protections in the original bill," his office said.

"To be clear, if the bill ultimately remains in its current form, I will withdraw it, as I have no desire to pass a fake net neutrality bill," Wiener said. "But my sincere hope is that we will be able to amend it in the near future back into a strong form."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...t-in-us-house/





Crowdfunded Billboard Shames Santiago for Net Neutrality Sellout
Karl Bode

A California lawmaker that derailed the state's effort at tough net neutrality rules is being named and shamed in a new crowdfunded billboard backed by net neutrality activists. Last week we noted how California Assemblymember Miguel Santiago became internet famous for helping AT&T neuter the most important portions of the state's looming net neutrality bill. Santiago rushed through a number of AT&T and Comcast backed amendments in a last-minute vote without allowing anyone (including the bill's author, State Senator Scott Wiener) debate the changes.

Santiago and AT&T circulated a misleading study that tried to imply AT&T's anti-competitive abuse of usage caps and overage fees would help the state's minorities. Santiago's office also ran away from the press last Tuesday evening, rightly wary they'd highlight how his changes were directly requested by the broadband industry.

AT&T and Comcast figure it's unlikely they could stop the bill from passing in activist-heavy California, so their lobbyists are working hard to ensure the final version is notably weaker than the original.

But Santiago is now receiving the ire of net neutrality activists Fight For the Future, who explain in a Medium post why they've crowdfunded a new billboard that will be going up in Santiago's district shortly.

"Assemblyman Santiago seems to think that people don’t really care about the details of net neutrality, and will just forget all about this," the group argued. "So net neutrality activists are crowdfunding a billboard to prove him wrong, and make sure that his constituents know exactly what he’s doing in their name."

The bill is still moving forward (after Wiener originally claimed he'd be pulling it), but Wiener states he will axe the bill if it isn't restored to its original form, which took tougher positions on things like zero rating, interconnection shenanigans, and "double dipping" access fees.

"To be clear, if the bill ultimately remains in its current form, I will withdraw it, as I have no desire to pass a fake net neutrality bill," Wiener says. “But my sincere hope is that we will be able to amend it in the near future back into a strong form. For today’s hearing, I simply want the current version to move forward in order to continue working on it."
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/C...llboard-142078





California Legislators just Adopted Tough New Privacy Rules Targeting Facebook, Google and Other Tech Giants
Tony Romm

California legislators on Thursday adopted sweeping new rules that restrict the data-harvesting practices of Amazon.com, Facebook, Google and Uber, a move that soon could spur other states and Congress to take aim at the tech industry.

The California Consumer Privacy Act is one of the toughest U.S. regulations targeting Silicon Valley, where recent privacy mishaps — many involving Facebook — have left consumers clamoring for greater protections online. The law requires tech giants to disclose the kind of data they collect about consumers and allows Web users to opt out of having their information sold to third parties, including advertisers.

The new privacy rules, which are slated to come into effect in 2020, apply only to residents in the Golden State. That leaves time for corporate critics such as AT&T, Comcast, Facebook and Google to resume lobbying aggressively to revise it over the next year.

Going forward, though, California’s privacy protections could force tech companies to change their business practices nationwide, rather than maintaining two systems: one in California, and another for everyone else. Apple, Facebook and Google took a similar approach in May after European regulators began implementing new privacy rules, known as General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

“I think it’s going to set the standard across the country that legislatures across the country will look to adopt in their own states,” state Sen. Bob Hertzberg (D), one of the law’s authors, said before it passed Thursday.

Under the new rules, California’s attorney general will play a starring role monitoring Silicon Valley’s privacy practices — and bringing cases, along with potential fines, when a company such as Amazon or Microsoft fails to honor consumers' privacy choices or safeguard their data from cybercriminals. (Amazon chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos owns The Washington Post.) To that end, Hertzberg said that the state’s attorney general would soon become “the chief privacy officer of the United States.”

Legislators raced at unprecedented speed — less than a week — to introduce, amend and pass their new privacy law to head off a ballot proposition slated to come before California voters this November. The initiative spearheaded by local real estate developer Alastair Mactaggart would have been tougher on the tech industry, even opening the door for consumers to sue if their data had been misused. But Mactaggart agreed over the weekend to withdraw it if lawmakers passed a bill, and the governor signed it by Thursday, the deadline to finalize ballot measures.

Throughout the process, tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Uber had expressed opposition to the measure, even donating to a coalition that sought to undermine it. Reluctantly, though, they came to accept the compromise bill. The Internet Association, a group that represents companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Google and Uber, said ahead of the vote that it would not “obstruct or block” the legislative proposal but would work to “correct the inevitable, negative policy and compliance ramifications this last-minute deal will create.”

If the rules don’t change, they will grant consumers new rights that include the ability to see the kinds of sources from which companies collect data about them. Businesses could not sell personal data from Web users younger than 16.

But there are many elements of the new law that privacy advocates see as potential trouble spots. For example, California’s rules would prevent tech companies from offering consumers a lower level of service if they chose to opt out of having their data sold to third parties. Yet a tech company or an Internet service provider, such as AT&T or Comcast, could charge a higher fee for consumers who chose to limit sharing of their personal data — though only equal to the "value provided by the consumer’s data,” the rules stipulate.

“I believe this path to pay for privacy is a dangerous and slippery slope,” said state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D), even though she supported it.

James Steyer, the founder of Common Sense Media and one of the proposal’s chief backers, acknowledged that the bill isn’t “perfect.” But on Thursday he said advocates would look to refine it over the coming year while “working all around the United States” trying to pass similar, model legislation. The goal, he said, is to prod Congress “to get their act together.”

In the nation’s capital — where lawmakers have failed for decades to advance an overarching federal privacy law — some members of Congress expressed hope that California would force their hand.

“My hope is just that it will initiate a real conversation that gets us to adopting some principles by November,” said Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents a slice of Silicon Valley. He said lawmakers had been “derelict in our duty” on privacy issues.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...r-tech-giants/





Brave Advances Browser Privacy with Tor-Powered Tabs

Onion routing is the way to go. It's all about the layers of encryption.
Stephen Shankland

Want more online privacy? Brave, the ad-blocking browser, has a new way to get it on the web.

A new version of the browser released Thursday adds technology called onion routing from the Tor Project as an option to its private tabs. Tor helps keep you anonymous by shuttling your internet communications a network of computers that obscures your true address on the internet, making it much harder for a website to know you visited.

You might think the Tor Project is the kind of thing that appeals mostly to criminals, tinfoil-hat paranoids and spies. Indeed, the US Naval Research Laboratory came up with the onion-routing technology, and the project says, "A branch of the US Navy uses Tor for open-source intelligence gathering, and one of its teams used Tor while deployed in the Middle East recently."

But as the Facebook scandal over Cambridge Analytica's data harvesting has shown, privacy is something ordinary people are concerned about, too.

"This is not a blip. You're seeing a rising consciousness about privacy," said Brave Chief Executive Brendan Eich. "We're playing a long game here. We're putting energy on the side of privacy, and part of that involves energy on the hard case. Tor is the hard case."

The feature, first reported by CNET a year ago and officially called private tabs with Tor, is built into Brave 0.23. The official Brave 1.0 is due to ship this year, but 2.8 million people already use the browser monthly, Eich said. To use the new feature, you can either select "New Private Tab with Tor" from the file menu or flip on the Tor switch once you've opened a new private tab. Using Tor on one tab doesn't affect other ordinary or private tabs.

Tor has downsides. It's significantly slower, some websites won't work properly and others will present themselves to you in a foreign language because of how Tor disguises your true location. And some network-monitoring software mistakes Tor traffic for an automated attack, periodically requiring Tor users to prove they're human with a Captcha. And of course if you need to log into a website to use it, as with Facebook or Twitter, the site of course will know who you are.

But Tor can be worth it. Among those potentially interested -- along with intelligence agents -- are activists fearing surveillance by oppressive governments, people trying to bypass censors, anyone wishing to give law enforcement or journalists a truly anonymous tip, businesspeople trying to avoid revealing details about their company's computer systems while traveling, shoppers trying not to reveal indications of what they might want to buy, and people who just don't their internet service provider to know and potentially sell information about what websites you visit.

More Tor-powered browser choices

Tor offers its own browser, a product based on Mozilla's open-source Firefox, but Brave is the first conventional browser to have Tor abilities built in. It won't be the last, though. Mozilla tightened its alliance with Tor in 2016 through a project called Tor Uplift, and now it's also begun headed down a similar path as Brave with Project Fusion.

"We decided to strengthen our collaboration by integrating Tor functionality directly into Firefox," said Peter Dolanjski, a Firefox product manager. "This collaboration brings two benefits: it speeds up development for Tor and also allows Firefox to bring cutting-edge privacy enhancing technology to more users."

Mozilla says it's too early to know when the project will bear fruit. But Brave's Tor support is here now -- although in a testing stage to try to find problems and patch known privacy leaks compared to Tor's better-tested browser.

"We're honest about the fact that we're not the Tor browser. It has a much higher level of security testing," said Brave Chief Information Security Officer Yan Zhu. "If you're using it because your life depends on it, you should be using Tor and not Brave with Tor tabs."

The Tor-augmented private tabs in Brave are available only in the versions for Windows, MacOS and Windows personal computers, but Brave plans to bring it to its browsers for Apple iPhones and for phones powered by Google's Android software.

Building a better private tab

You may think from the icons some browsers use for private tabs -- a mask for Mozilla's Firefox, a spy hat and sunglasses for Google's Chrome -- that browsers keep your identity secret with their private-browsing modes.

But websites can still track you to some degree, most notably by logging your Internet Protocol address, the number your computer uses to send and receive data. That reveals a lot of information to prying eyes.

"Studies show that users expect private tabs prevent things like ISPs tracking them or other people on Wi-Fi tracking them," but in fact ordinary private tabs don't, Zhu said. "Tor private tabs bring private tabs much closer to what the user expects private tabs to do."

Tor, which originally stood for The Onion Router, is named for a way to protect information being sent over a network. When your browser makes a request to download a webpage with Tor, the request is encrypted multiple times for a journey that detours through three servers called relays.

Each relay strips away a layer of onion skin, so to speak, to get further instructions about where to send the data. Each relay knows the addresses of the computers only one step to either side along the communication path. That means the final relay -- called an exit relay -- doesn't know your original internet address as it communicates with the website.

Not only that, but Tor changes the pathway every 10 minutes.

New traffic jams on the Tor network?

Tor is already somewhat sluggish, though Eich says it's improved dramatically over the last year. There's a risk, though, that new traffic from Brave will slow it further.

Brave, though, has added four of its own Tor relays to the network and plans to add more, Zhu said.

"Tor doesn't want us to run a lot of relays. They want to have network diversity," she said. But Brave also could donate to an organization that runs a pool of Tor relays. "Ideally we would contribute more than enough bandwidth."

The Tor Project itself welcomes the company.

Private tabs with the Tor technology "will provide better protections to Brave users against network surveillance, making it more difficult for ISPs, employers or guest Wi-Fi providers to track and subsequently sell user data," the project said in a statement. "It's good to see more mainstream browsers taking an interest in trying to meet people's privacy expectations."
https://www.cnet.com/news/brave-adva...-powered-tabs/





Venezuela is Blocking Access to the Tor Network

Just days after new web blocks were placed on local media outlets
Russell Brandom

Venezuela has blocked all access to the Tor network, according to an Access Now report citing activists within the country. Coming just months after a new round of web blocks within the country, the latest block includes both direct connections to the network and connections over bridge relays, which had escaped many previous Tor blocks.

According to network metrics, Tor access in Venezuela had recently spiked in response to recent web blocks placed on local news outlets. Unlike previous blocks, the latest restrictions could not be circumvented by using a censorship-resistant DNS server like those provided by Google and CloudFlare. For many Venezuelans, Tor seems to have been the only way left to access the restricted content.

“This is the latest escalation in Venezuela’s internet censorship efforts, as it blocks higher-profile sites with more sophisticated methods,” said Andrés Azpúrua of Venezuela Inteligente, in a statement provided through Access. “This is one of their boldest internet censorship actions yet.”

Designed to outwit state-level web censorship, the Tor network routes traffic through a dense network of relays, making it nearly impossible for governments to trace what content is being loaded. More recently, Tor has supported a broader ecosystem of hidden services accessible only through the network, most notably the Silk Road and other cryptocurrency-powered drug markets.

In April, officials from the United Nations officially condemned web censorship in Venezuela alongside the broader detention of journalists. “Even under a state of emergency, the regulation as well as limitation or restrictions on web-sites and television signals transmitted over the internet are disproportionate and incompatible with international standards,” the official statement said.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/25/1...web-censorship





EFF Sues to Invalidate FOSTA, an Unconstitutional Internet Censorship Law
David Greene

We are asking a court to declare the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017 (“FOSTA”) unconstitutional and prevent it from being enforced. The law was written so poorly that it actually criminalizes a substantial amount of protected speech and, according to experts, actually hinders efforts to prosecute sex traffickers and aid victims.

In our lawsuit, two human rights organizations, an individual advocate for sex workers, a certified non-sexual massage therapist, and the Internet Archive, are challenging the law as an unconstitutional violation of the First and Fifth Amendments. Although the law was passed by Congress for the worthy purpose of fighting sex trafficking, its broad language makes criminals of those who advocate for and provide resources to adult, consensual sex workers and actually hinders efforts to prosecute sex traffickers and aid victims.

EFF strongly opposed FOSTA throughout the legislative process. During the months-long Congressional debate on the law we expressed our concern that the law violated free speech rights and would do heavy damage to online freedoms. The law that was ultimately passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump was actually the most egregiously bad of those Congress had been considering.

What FOSTA Changed

FOSTA made three major changes to existing law. The first two involved changes to federal criminal law:

• First, it created an entirely new federal crime by adding a new section to the Mann Act. The new law makes it a crime to “own, manage or operate” an online service with the intent to “promote or facilitate” “the prostitution of another person.” That crime is punishable by up to 10 years in prison. The law further makes it an “aggravated offense,” punishable by up to 25 years in prison and also subject to civil lawsuits if “facilitation” was of the prostitution of 5 or more persons, or if it was done with “reckless disregard” that it “contributed to sex trafficking.” An aggravated violation may also be the basis for an individual’s civil lawsuit. The prior version of the Mann Act only made it illegal to physically transport a person across state lines for the purposes of prostitution.
• Second, FOSTA expanded existing federal criminal sex trafficking law. Before SESTA, the law made it a crime to knowingly advertise sexual services of a minor or any person doing so only under force, fraud, or coercion, and also criminalized several other modes of conduct. The specific knowledge requirement for advertising (that one must know he advertisement was for sex trafficking) was an acknowledgement that advertising was entitled to some First Amendment protection. The prior law additionally made it a crime to financially benefit from “participation in a venture” of sex trafficking. FOSTA made seemingly a small change to the law: it defined “participation in a venture” extremely broadly to include “assisting, supporting, or facilitating.” But this new very broad language has created great uncertainty about liability for speech other than advertising that someone might interpret as “assisting” or “supporting” sex trafficking, and what level of awareness of sex trafficking the participant must have.

As is obvious, these expansions of the law are fraught with vague and ambiguous terms that have created great uncertainty about what kind of online speech is now illegal. FOSTA does not define “facilitate”, “promote”, “contribute to sex trafficking,” “assisting,” or supporting” – but the inclusion of all of these terms shows that Congress intended the law to apply expansively. Plaintiffs thus reasonably fear it will be applied to them. Plaintiffs Woodhull Freedom Foundation and Human Rights Watch advocate for the decriminalization of sex work, both domestically and internationally. It is unclear whether that advocacy is considered “facilitating” prostitution under FOSTA. Plaintiffs Woodhull and Alex Andrews offer substantial resources online to sex workers, including important health and safety information. This protected speech, and other harm reduction efforts, can also be seen as “facilitating” prostitution. And although each of the plaintiffs vehemently opposes sex trafficking, Congress’s expressed sense in passing the law was that sex trafficking and sex work were “inextricably linked.” Thus, plaintiffs are legitimately concerned that their advocacy on behalf of sex workers will be seen as being done in reckless disregard of some “contribution to sex trafficking,” even though all plaintiffs vehemently oppose sex trafficking.

The third change significantly undercut the protections of one of the Internet’s most important laws, 47 U.S.C. § 230, originally a provision of the Communications Decency Act, commonly known simply as Section 230 or CDA 230:

• FOSTA significantly undermined the legal protections intermediaries had under 42 U.S.C. § 230, commonly known simply as Section 230. Section 230 generally immunized intermediaries form liability arising from content created by others—it was thus the chief protection that allowed Internet platforms for user-generated content to exist without having to review every piece of content appearing posted to them for potential legal liability. FOSTA undercut this immunity in three significant ways. First, Section 230 already had an exception for violations of federal criminal law, so the expansion of criminal law described above also automatically expanded the Section 230 exception. Second, FOSTA nullified the immunity also for state criminal lawsuits for violations of state laws that mirror the violations of federal law. And third, FOSTA allows for lawsuits by individual civil litigants.

The possibility of these state criminal and private civil lawsuit is very troublesome. FOSTA vastly magnifies the risk an Internet host bears of being sued. Whereas federal prosecutors typically carefully pick and choose which violations of law they pursue, the far more numerous state prosecutors may be more prone to less selective prosecutions. And civil litigants often do not carefully consider the legal merits of an action before pursing it in court. Past experience teaches us that they might file lawsuits merely to intimidate a speaker into silence – the cost of defending even a meritless lawsuit being quite high. Lastly, whereas with federal criminal prosecutions, the US Department of Justice may offer clarifying interpretations of a federal criminal law that addresses concerns with a law’s ambiguity, those interpretations are not binding on state prosecutors and the millions of potential private litigants.

FOSTA Has Already Censored The Internet

As a result of these hugely increased risks of liability, many platforms for online speech have shuttered or restructured. The following as just two examples:

• Two days after the Senate passed FOSTA, Craigslist eliminated its Personals section, including non-sexual subcategories such as “Missed Connections” and “Strictly Platonic.” Craigslist attributed this change to FOSTA, explaining “Any tool or service can be misused. We can’t take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day.” Craigslist also shut down its Therapeutic Services section and will not permit ads that were previously listed in Therapeutic Services to be re-listed in other sections, such as Skilled Trade Services or Beauty Services.
• VerifyHim formerly maintained various online tools that helped sex workers avoid abusive clients. It described itself as “the biggest dating blacklist database on earth.” One such resource was JUST FOR SAFETY, which had screening tools designed to help sex workers check to see if they might be meeting someone dangerous, create communities of common interest, and talk directly to each other about safety. Following passage of FOSTA, VerifyHim took down many of these tools, including JUST FOR SAFETY, and explained that it is “working to change the direction of the site.”

Plaintiff Eric Koszyk is a certified massage therapist running his own non-sexual massage business as his primary source of income. Prior to FOSTA he advertised his services exclusively in Craigslist’s Therapeutic Services section. That forum is no longer available and he is unable to run his ad anywhere else on the site, thus seriously harming his business. Plaintiff the Internet Archive fears that it can no longer rely on Section 230 to bar liability for content created by third parties and hosted by the Archive, which comprises the vast majority of material in the Archive’s collection, on account of FOSTA’s changes to Section 230. The Archive is concerned that some third-party content hosted by the Archive, such as archives of particular websites, information about books, and the books themselves, could be construed as promoting or facilitating prostitution, or assisting, supporting, or facilitating sex trafficking under FOSTA’s expansive terms. Plaintiff Alex Andrews maintains the website RateThatRescue.org, a sex worker-led, public, free, community effort to share information about both the organizations and services on which sex workers can rely, and those they should avoid. Because the site is largely user-generated content, Andrews relies on Section 230’s protections. She is now concerned that FOSTA now exposes her to potentially ruinous civil and criminal liability. She has also suspended moving forward with an app that would offer harm reduction materials to sex workers. Human Rights Watch relies heavily on individuals spreading its reporting and advocacy through social media. It is concerned that social media platforms and websites that host, disseminate, or allow users to spread their reports and advocacy materials may be inhibited from doing so because of FOSTA.

And many many others are experiencing the same uncertainty and fears of prosecution that are plaguing other advocates, service providers, platforms, and platform users since FOSTA became law.

We have asked the court to preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the law so that the plaintiffs and others can exercise their First Amendment rights until the court can issue a final ruling. But there is another urgent reason to halt enforcement of the law. Plaintiff Woodhull Freedom Foundation is holding its annual Sexual Freedom Summit August 2-, 2018. Like past years, the Summit features a track on sex work, this year titled “Sex as Work,” that seeks to advance and promote the careers, safety, and dignity of individuals engaged in professional sex work. In presenting and promoting the Sexual Freedom Summit, and the Sex Work Track in particular, Woodhull operates and uses interactive computer services in numerous ways: Woodhull uses online databases and cloud storage services to organize, schedule and plan the Summit; Woodhull exchanges emails with organizers, volunteers, website developers, promoters and presenters during all phases of the Summit; Woodhull has promoted the titles of all workshops on its Summit website; Woodhull also publishes the biographies and contact information for workshop presenters on its website, including those for the sex workers participating in the Sex Work Track and other tracks. Is publishing the name and contact information for a sex worker “facilitating the prostitution of another person”? If it is, FOSTA makes it a crime.

Moreover, most, if not all, of the workshops are also promoted by Woodhull on social media such as Facebook and Twitter; and Woodhull wishes to stream the Sex Work Track on Facebook, as it does other tracks, so that those who cannot attend can benefit from the information and commentary.

Without an injunction, the legality under FOSTA of all of these practices is uncertain. The preliminary injunction is necessary so that Woodhull can conduct the Sex as Work track without fear of prosecution.

It is worth emphasizing that Congress was repeatedly warned that it was passing a law that would censor far more speech than was necessary to address the problem of sex trafficking, and that the law would indeed hinder law enforcement efforts and pose great dangers to sex workers. During the Congressional debate on FOSTA and SESTA, anti-trafficking groups such as Freedom Network and the International Women’s Health Coalition issued statements warning that the laws would hurt efforts to aid trafficking victims, not help them.

Even Senator Richard Blumenthal, an original cosponsor of the SESTA (the Senate bill) criticized the new Mann Act provision when it was proposed in the House bill, telling Wired “there is no good reason to proceed with a proposal that is opposed by the very survivors it claims to support.” Nevertheless, Senator Blumenthal ultimately voted to pass FOSTA.

In support of the preliminary injunction, we have submitted the declarations of several experts who confirm the harmful effects FOSTA is having on sex workers, who are being driven back to far more dangerous street-based work as online classified sites disappear, to the loss of online “bad date lists” that informed sex workers of risks associated with certain clients, to making sex less visible to law enforcement, which can no longer scour and analyze formerly public websites where sex trafficking had been advertised. For more information see the Declarations of Dr. Alexandra Lutnick, Prof. Alexandra Frell Levy, and Dr. Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/0...censorship-law





‘Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom’ Is No. 1, but Not Quite as Mighty
Brooks Barnes

Dino-mite? Not quite. But “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” arrived to a still-huge $150 million in ticket sales at domestic theaters over the weekend.

“Fallen Kingdom,” which cost Universal Pictures at least $300 million to make and market worldwide, had the impossible task of living up to its franchise predecessor, “Jurassic World,” which arrived to almost $225 million in opening-weekend ticket sales in 2015, after adjusting for inflation. “Jurassic World,” which benefited from pent-up demand and generally positive reviews, went on to collect roughly $1.8 billion worldwide.

“Fallen Kingdom,” which received mixed-to-negative reviews, is holding its own, however. It received an A-minus grade in CinemaScore exit polls. (“Jurassic World” got an A.) And “Fallen Kingdom” has already taken in about $561.5 million overseas, where it has been playing for weeks, in part because Universal wanted to get ahead of World Cup fever. Ticket sales in China for “Fallen Kingdom” have been particularly strong.

Produced by Universal and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment — Mr. Spielberg introduced the five-film “Jurassic Park” series 25 years ago this month — “Fallen Kingdom” was directed by J. A. Bayona (“A Monster Calls”) and stars Bryce Dallas Howard and Chris Pratt.

Despite some high-profile misfires, including the recent “Solo: A Star Wars Story,” the North American box office has bounced back from an alarming downturn last summer. For the year so far, ticket sales in the United States and Canada stand at $5.9 billion, an 8.5 percent increase from the same period last year, according to comScore. Still to come this summer are expected hits like “Skyscraper,” “The First Purge” and “Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again!” — all from Universal.

Second place for the weekend went to “Incredibles 2” (Disney), which collected a stout $80.9 million, for a two-week domestic total of $350.3 million, according to comScore.

The star-studded “Ocean’s 8” (Warner Bros.) showed ongoing strength in third place, taking in an estimated $11.7 million, for a three-week domestic total of $100.4 million.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/24/m...fice-no-1.html





A Sad Update about a Scissors Maker that Went Viral
Jason Kottke

Back in 2014, a lovely short film by Shaun Bloodworth called The Putter went viral. The film shows Cliff Denton making scissors for Ernest Wright & Sons. Denton works for the company as a putter, short for putter togetherer.

Before the film, business at the firm was so slow that staff were only working two days a week. When the video took off online, the company received two years’ worth of orders in a single day. Two years later in June 2016, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign for a throwback pair of kitchen scissors and ended up making four times their goal from more than 3600 backers.

Outwardly, this seemed to be one of those stories about how an old school company found a new audience and a second chance on the internet. But internally the company was struggling, hamstrung by a series of setbacks. Problems with design and machining the new scissors model delayed production for a year and two key employees, including putter Cliff Denton, were off the job due to illness. Shaun Bloodworth, the filmmaker, died waiting for a liver transplant. And then in February 2018, the news broke that Nick Wright, the company’s managing director, had died suddenly.

Under new leadership, the company vowed to carry on and fulfill all of the Kickstarter orders, but a message to Kickstarter backers yesterday revealed the company was deep in debt and would be “going into receivership”. It also revealed that Wright had taken his own life. Here’s the full message from Pam Addy, the current managing director of Ernest Wright & Sons. (Note: this includes a portion of a final letter written by Wright before he died.)

Hello everyone, this is Pam.

Following the death of Nick Wright, who took his own life in February, myself and the rest of the Ernest Wright team have endeavored to honour all you Kickstarter backers who pledged money for the Kutrite design of kitchen scissors. Unfortunately, only now am I aware of the extent of the business debt incurred prior to my taking over as Director on March 22 2018, so it is with great sadness I announce that Ernest Wright & Son Ltd will be going into receivership.

If you have not received your goods, you will be contacted by the Insolvency Practitioner in due course. Following advice from them, if you paid by Credit Card you may wish to contact your card provider, to see whether they will refund you the money paid.

Nick wrote a final letter. In this letter were personal messages including one to Kickstarter people:

“I tried so hard, this was no scam, I just could not make it happen. Too much pressure, not enough resource or time. I am so very genuinely sorry to you all.”


What a sad situation for Wright’s family and the company. It’s tempting to want to draw conclusions between the finances, the campaign, and Wright’s death, but we don’t actually know much about the situation. But I do think this highlights the potential disconnects between mental health & business, publicity & success, and success & happiness. The internet can seem so intimate but ultimately it’s a thin view of an individual’s or company’s reality.
https://kottke.org/18/06/a-sad-updat...hat-went-viral





Japanese Blogger Stabbed to Death After Internet Abuse Seminar

Cybercrime expert Kenichiro Okamoto reportedly killed by man who abused him online
Justin McCurry

One of Japan’s most prominent bloggers has been stabbed to death minutes after giving a seminar on how to resolve personal disputes on the internet.

Media reports said Kenichiro Okamoto, better known by his blogger name Hagex, died on Sunday evening after reportedly being attacked by a man he had argued with online.

The suspect, Hidemitsu Matsumoto, allegedly followed Okamoto into the toilets after he had ended his talk at a venue in the south-western city of Fukuoka.

Okamoto was stabbed several times before staggering out of the toilets after his assailant, who fled on a bicycle, according to the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper.

Okamoto, who sustained stab wounds to the chest and neck, was taken to hospital where he was confirmed dead. His attacker reportedly handed himself in almost three hours after the attack.

Moments before the fatal stabbing, the 41-year-old had shared advice at a public event on how to deal with online disputes.

According to reports, the suspect had posted messages containing personal abuse directed at Okamoto and other commenters on the blog. The Mainichi quoted a source as saying that Okamoto “had got into trouble before with internet users over the content of the blog”.

In a message purportedly written immediately after the stabbing, Matsumoto said he had continued to abuse Okamoto by opening a new account every time his existing account was deleted.

He added: “I am going to go now to my neighborhood police box to voluntarily surrender and take responsibility for my actions.”

Matsumoto, 42, reportedly confessed to stabbing Okamoto, telling police he had grown to “hate” the celebrity blogger and wanted to kill him.

Regarded as a leading expert on cybercrime and the dark web, Okamoto worked for an IT security consulting firm and made regular TV appearances.

Japanese Twitter users paid tribute to the blogger, with many voicing disbelief over the violent nature of his death. “Rest in peace, Hagex,” one user wrote.

The IT journalist Daisuke Tsuda said he was shocked to learn of Okamoto’s death. “How could this have happened?” he wrote.

Online personalities and journalists are often victims of online abuse in Japan, where attempts are being made to crack down on hate speech.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-abuse-seminar





Top Tech Companies Met With Intelligence Officials to Discuss Midterms
Sheera Frenkel and Matthew Rosenberg

Eight of the tech industry’s most influential companies, in anticipation of a repeat of the Russian meddling that occurred during the 2016 presidential campaign, met with United States intelligence officials last month to discuss preparations for this year’s midterm elections.

The meeting, which took place May 23 at Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., was also attended by representatives from Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Oath, Snap and Twitter, according to three attendees of the meeting who spoke on condition of anonymity because of its sensitive nature.

The company officials met with Christopher Krebs, an under secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, as well as a representative of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s newly formed “foreign influence” task force.

Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor the F.B.I. responded to a request for comment.

Companies like Facebook and Twitter have been changing the way they operate to counter the kind of misinformation that plagued the two social services in 2016. But the May meeting was the first significant discussion between a group of tech companies and intelligence officials ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

The meeting, which was initiated by Facebook, was seen as a hopeful first step to ensure that the midterms were not a repeat of the Russian interference in 2016, said the three people who attended the meeting.

But the people who attended described a tense atmosphere in which the tech companies repeatedly pressed federal officials for information, only to be told — repeatedly — that no specific intelligence would be shared.

The tech companies shared details about disinformation campaigns they were witnessing on their platforms, but neither the F.B.I. nor the Department of Homeland Security was willing or able to share specific information about threats the tech companies should anticipate, the people said.

One attendee of the meeting said the encounter led the tech companies to believe they would be on their own to counter election interference.

American intelligence officials have offered blunt warnings that Russia and other foreign governments are already meddling in the closely watched midterm election campaign.

Facebook, in particular, has been facing pressure to stem disinformation ahead of the elections. The company has been hit hard by reports that it allowed Russian-backed agents to buy advertisements and manage Facebook pages with one notable goal: influence voters in the United States and stoke conflict on hot-button issues like gun control.

In public and behind close doors, intelligence officials have offered scant details about what Russia is doing, prompting frustration from Silicon Valley to Capitol Hill.

Officials in Washington have described problems that range from intelligence agencies losing track of Russian targets to the same kind of poor communication between various intelligence-gathering agencies that hampered the response of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

Russia’s Internet Research Agency has proved an especially vexing target in recent months, stepping up efforts to mask its activity, said an American official with access to intelligence reporting.

Unlike in 2016, when Russian hackers left unmistakable footprints — posting tweets that identified locations, for instance, or working in Cyrillic language documents — they are now making much better use of virtual private networks and other tools that can hide their true identities and locations.

At times, the official said, intelligence agencies have lost track of specific individuals they were tracking, and could not see what, if anything, the Russians were posting or trying to hack.

“We’re getting so many mixed signals, depending on what the agency is,” Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters last week.

He said his committee was planning to bring together intelligence officials next month to figure out what was going on and how the government should handle it. “It compels us to bring everybody together in the same room and try to figure out whether or not there’s some stovepipe issues,” Mr. Burr said.

Part of the problem, officials say, is that the White House has expressed little interest in the problem of Russian interference, and that the apathy has had a trickle-down effect. Without pressure from the top, it can be difficult to bring together all the different strands of intelligence collected across America’s spy agencies, and evaluate how to act on it.

“What we would normally see in a normal administration is the principals meeting to discuss what are they doing individually, what are they doing jointly, or what they are communicating among themselves, what’s the whole of government plan to protect the midterms,” Representative Adam Schiff, Democrat of California and the top minority member on the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview with Politico. “I just don’t see any evidence that’s happening.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/t...elections.html





Facebook Wants to Hide Secret Inaudible Messages in TV Ads that Can Force Your Phone to Record Audio
Jasper Hamill

Facebook is working on controversial software which lets it secretly order users’ smartphones to start recording audio whenever they hear inaudible messages hidden in television adverts.

The social network has always denied rumours that it listens into people’s private conversations and analyses what they talk about so it can show advertising that interests them.

But in a patent application published on June 14 this year, Big Zucker’s research division revealed a system which lets it quietly tell people’s mobile phones to capture ‘ambient audio’.

It allows Facebook to conceal ‘a non-human hearable digital sound’ in the audio of a TV ad or other content.

Although people won’t be able to hear this sound, it contains a ‘machine recognizable’ set of Morse code-style sounds which let it tap out a message to your smartphone and order it to begin recording.

The secret sound could be a very high-pitched voice, Facebook wrote, pitched just above the limit of human hearing.

When it hears this signal, a phone will then start capturing ambient audio, which Facebook describes as the ‘distinct and subtle sounds of a particular location created by the environment of the location, such as machinery noise, the sound of distant human movement and speech, creaks from thermal contraction, and air conditioning and plumbing noises in a household’.

Now, you might think this sounds like an Orwellian nightmare technology which will let Big Zucker intrude upon our lives in unprecedentedly terrifying ways.

But Facebook designed it with a specific purpose in mind.

The tech is built to monitor what people watch on their ‘broadcasting device’ so that the adverts they are shown on Facebook are likely to appeal to them.

This would also allow companies to get an accurate sense of the size of the audience which has viewed their promotion.

Here's how Facebook's secret ambient audio recording tech works:

• Smartphones listen out for signals hidden in adverts or other content which are too high-pitched for humans to hear.
• Once they hear this signal, the phone begins recording ‘ambient audio’ including the sound of the advert which contains the code.
• This is then analysed to generate an ‘ambient audio footprint’ which is stored on an ‘online system’ along with identify information about the person who owns the phone.
• The data is then used to work out whether someone watched an ad or engaged with content. This info is stored to make sure Facebook shows it users adverts they are likely to engage with.

Facebook wants to hide secret messages in TV ads that force your phone to record audio
This illustration shows a sound wave hiding an inaudible high-pitched message which can be seen on the left (Image: Facebook)

By recording the secret message in hidden in the television ad, it allowers advertisers to know whether people sat through their creations – or walked away and did something else.

If a recording of the hidden code is muffled or distant, it would indicate users are far away from the telly. Whilst a loud, clear signal would suggest they were firmly couch-bound and tuned in.

This data about what sort of ads people like is then stored so Facebook can show them content in future that’s perfectly honed to grab their attention.

That’s what Facebook says in its patent, anyway. There is no mention of spying on our private life, invading our privacy, recording our intimate conversations and forcing advertising into the heart of our homes whatsoever.

The patent application is called ‘broadcast content view analysis based on ambient audio recording’.
https://metro.co.uk/2018/06/22/faceb...audio-7652112/





SD Cards Could Soon Hold 128TB of Storage
Dani Deahl

The SD Association has announced a new card specification that should increase maximum storage on SD cards to 128 terabytes and provide much faster data transfer speeds of 985 megabytes per second.

Right now the maximum storage space on an SD card is 2TB, and that limit was promised as far back as 2009, but still hasn’t been reached. In 2016, SanDisk unveiled a prototype 1 terabyte SD card that would make it the biggest in the world, but it’s still not available to purchase. At the time, SanDisk said that the advancement was necessary to match ever-increasing data-heavy formats like 4K video and VR. However, creating SD cards with massive amounts of storage is cost-prohibitive. SanDisk’s 512GB SD card used to cost $800, and though it’s dropped in price, is still priced around $300.

The new faster speeds, called SD Express, will come to all types of cards, but the high storage is a new thing called an SD Ultra Capacity (SDUC) card. Given how slow the progress has been toward 2TB cards, there’s no telling how long it’ll take before manufacturers hit the higher figures that SDUC allows, but perhaps the increased storage capacity and shift to increasingly higher-resolution video will give companies more reason to invest.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/28/1...-128tb-storage





Chip Stocks Plunge after Trump's Reported Plan to Restrict Foreign Technology Investment

• Semiconductor stocks including AMD, Micron and Nvidia are trading sharply lower after reports President Donald Trump plans to restrict foreign investments in U.S. technology companies.
• Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on social media Monday the administration’s statement will apply to “all countries that are trying to steal our technology” rather than just China, referring to the earlier Wall Street Journal report.

Tae Kim

Several of the market’s favorite semiconductor names are tanking on Monday as investors grow concerned over President Donald Trump’s plan to restrict foreign investments in U.S. technology companies.

On Sunday the Wall Street Journal said the Treasury Department is drawing up rules to block companies with at least 25 percent Chinese ownership from buying companies involved in "industrially significant technology."

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on social media Monday the administration’s statement will apply to “all countries that are trying to steal our technology” rather than just China, referring to the earlier Wall Street Journal report.

The iShares PHLX Semiconductor ETF closed down 2.9 percent. Top chip stocks such as AMD, Micron and Nvidia all ended more than 4 percent lower. All three stocks were up more than 25 percent so far this year through Friday.

Intel shares also declined nearly 4 percent after Nomura Instinet downgraded the chipmaker’s shares due to “lack of leadership” after its CEO resigned.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/25/chip...-investme.html





Every Android Device Since 2012 Impacted by RAMpage Vulnerability
Catalin Cimpanu

Almost all Android devices released since 2012 are vulnerable to a new vulnerability named RAMpage, an international team of academics has revealed today.

The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-9442, is a variation of the Rowhammer attack.

Rowhammer is a hardware bug in modern memory cards. A few years back researchers discovered that when someone would send repeated write/read requests to the same row of memory cells, the write/read operations would create an electrical field that would alter data stored on nearby memory.

In the following years, researchers discovered that Rowhammer-like attacks affected personal computers, virtual machines, and Android devices. Through further researcher, they also found they could execute Rowhammer attacks via JavaScript code, GPU cards, and network packets.

RAMpage is the latest Rowhammer attack variation

The first Rowhammer attack on Android devices was named DRammer, and it could modify data on Android devices and root Android smartphones.

Today, researchers expanded on that initial work.

According to a research paper published today, a team of eight academics from three universities and two private companies revealed a new Rowhammer-like attack on Android devices named RAMpage.

"RAMpage breaks the most fundamental isolation between user applications and the operating system," researchers said. "While apps are typically not permitted to read data from other apps, a malicious program can craft a RAMpage exploit to get administrative control and get hold of secrets stored in the device."

"This might include your passwords stored in a password manager or browser, your personal photos, emails, instant messages and even business-critical documents," the research team said.

RAMpage may also impact Apple devices, PCs, and VMs

Research into the RAMpage vulnerability is still in its early stages, but the team says the attack can take over Android-based smartphones and tablets.

The researcher team also believes RAMpage may also affect Apple devices, home computers, or even cloud servers.

Researchers say they've updated a previous app they used in the past to detected Drammer to also identify if a device is vulnerable to RAMpage. The app is not available on the Play Store and must be downloaded from here, and later side-loaded.

RAMpage targets Android's ION subsystem

The difference between the previous Drammer Rowhammer attack on Android devices and the newer RAMpage Rowhammer attack is that RAMpage specifically targets an Android memory subsystem called ION.

In a simplified explanation, ION is a part of the Android OS that manages memory allocations between apps and for the OS. Google introduced ION in Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) released on October 18, 2011.

By attacking ION with a Rowhammer attack, RAMpage allows intruders to breake the boundaries that exist between Android apps and the underlying OS, hence give an attacker full control over the device and its data.

Researchers released a tool called GuardION that they say, in layman terms, puts up "guards" in front of the ION subsystem to protect it against RAMpage's attack routine. The tool has been open-sourced on GitHub.

Every Android device released in the past 6 years is affected

While researchers reproduced a RAMpage attack only on an LG4 smartphone, they said that "every mobile device that is shipped with LPDDR2, LPDDR3, or LPDDR4 memory is potentially affected, which is effectively every mobile phone since 2012."

The research team also published a website detailing their findings. Although the website is a visual copy of the website used for the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, researchers said there's no resemblance between Meltdown/Spectre and RAMpage. This is because Meltdown and Spectre go after data stored inside CPU caches while RAMpage goes after data stored inside RAM cards.

"[We] hope that this page gets more people involved in contributing to research," the research team wrote on this site. "It is currently unclear how widespread the Rowhammer bug (the hardware error that rampage exploits) is."

"By getting more people to run our updated Drammer test app, we hope to get a better understanding of this issue, allowing us to make decisions on how to move forward (i.e., should we continue looking for defenses or is this an already-solved problem?)."
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...vulnerability/





AIM Has Been Resurrected

'AIM Phoenix' breathes new life into the original AIM client, which AOL took offline last year.
Matthew Gault

For anyone using the internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, AOL Instant Messenger was ubiquitous. When I was in middle school, AIM was the only chat service anyone cared about. Sure, ICQ and and IRC existed, but everyone I knew had AIM.

Sadly, after 20 years, AOL shut down the service on December 15 of last year. Now, a small team of developers has resurrected it with a private server. The new chat service is called AIM Phoenix, and it works by running the messages through a private Dynamic DNS run by Wildman Productions, a non-profit group of hobbyist programers. This isn’t a new AIM client, it literally uses the old software running on a new server, so it looks and feels exactly like AIM.

It’s simple to set up. First, you download an old version of AIM from the AIM Phoenix website, register for a new username, tweak the settings to reroute through Wildman Productions’ server, and then open yourself up the nostalgic glory of Web 2.0. The old versions of AIM are touchy on new machines and I had to play with a few different versions before I got 5.0 working on my Windows 10 machine.

To be clear, AIM Phoenix only resurrects the original AIM software, and it doesn’t return your old buddylist. You’re effectively starting from scratch. But I was able to snag my old username and convince some friends to join me. In a few short minutes we were trading memories of middle school crushes and running home to kick siblings off the phone so we could sign into AOL and check our messages.

The pleasant plink of AIM’s original notifications are all there in AIM Phoenix, and they pushed a strange dopamine rush through my brain. It was, possibly, the last time a push notification didn’t make me want to throw my phone into the ocean.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...-resurrect-aim

















Until next week,

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