Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - November 3rd, ’18

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Since 2002

November 3rd, 2018




Senators Call on FCC to Investigate Fake Net Neutrality Comments

The fake net neutrality comments have been at the center of controversy for months.
Andrew Wyrich

Several prominent Democratic senators have asked the Federal Communications Commission‘s (FCC) Inspector General to open an investigation into the millions of fraudulent comments left on the agency’s website ahead of its controversial vote to rescind net neutrality rules last year.

Sen. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) wrote a letter to the FCC Inspector General earlier this week urging a look into why the agency has not addressed the issue in the wake of the New York Attorney General subpoenaing several groups as part of its own investigation into the fake comments.

The lack of urgency in the FCC investigating the flood of fake comments—which have been at the center of controversy for more than a year—”risks undermining public trust in the FCC’s rule making process,” the senators wrote.

“Although we near the one-year anniversary of the FCC’s order—longer since comments were filed—the Commission has taken no action to account for potential fraud in the rule-making process,” the letter reads. “We are concerned that the Commission has failed to address fraudulent comments and has not cooperated with other investigations. We write to seek answers regarding the Commission’s assistance with these investigations and the FCC’s own handling of the matter.”

The senators’ letter asks the FCC’s inspector general to drill down on a number of specific topics in regards to the fake net neutrality comments including:

• When the FCC became aware of the fraudulent comments
• If the FCC conducted an investigation into the “source and nature” of the fake comments
• If the FCC has withheld information from the New York Attorney General
• If the FCC has handled Freedom of Information Act requests about the fake comments “in an appropriate and timely manner”
• If the agency has a policy for investigating fraudulent comments left on its website

The fraudulent comments were found to include dead people’s names and even the names of lawmakers. Other members of Congress have also raised alarms about the use of fraudulent identities in the comment period before the FCC’s net neutrality vote.

Of the authentic comments left on the agency’s website ahead of the vote, nearly 100 percent of them were in favor of keeping net neutrality protections, according to a Stanford University study.

Earlier this month, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced that she had subpoenaed several telecom groups, lobbyists, and advocacy organizations as part of her investigation into the comments.

You can read all of the letter sent by Markey, Blumenthal, and Schatz here.
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/net-...enthal-schatz/





FCC Falsely Claims Community Broadband an 'Ominous Threat to The First Amendment'

In reality, the real threat posed by community broadband is to big telecom’s monopoly revenues.
Karl Bode

The Trump FCC has declared towns and cities that vote to build their own broadband networks an “ominous threat to the First Amendment.”

The claims were made last week during a speech given at the telecom-funded Media Institute by FCC Commissioner Mike O’Rielly. In his speech, O’Rielly insinuated, without evidence, that community owned and operated broadband networks would naturally result in local governments aggressively limiting American free speech rights.

“I would be remiss if my address omitted a discussion of a lesser-known, but particularly ominous, threat to the First Amendment in the age of the Internet: state-owned and operated broadband networks,” claimed O’Rielly.

More than 750 such networks have been built in the United States in direct response to a lack of meaningful broadband competition and availability plaguing America. Studies have routinely shown that these networks provide cheaper and better broadband service, in large part because these ISPs have a vested interest in the communities they serve.

In his speech, O’Rielly highlighted efforts by the last FCC, led by former boss Tom Wheeler, to encourage such community-run broadband networks as a creative solution to private sector failure. O’Rielly subsequently tried to claim, without evidence, that encouraging such networks would somehow result in government attempts to censor public opinion.

“Municipalities such as Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Wilson, North Carolina, have been notorious for their use of speech codes in the terms of service of state-owned networks, prohibiting users from transmitting content that falls into amorphous categories like 'hateful' or “threatening,” O’Rielly claimed.

Chattanooga, Tennessee, is home to EPB Broadband, which is owned and operated by the city’s power utility. A recent Consumer Reports survey of 176,000 Americans found the ISP was rated the highest in the country in terms of speed, value, and reliability.

A perusal of the EPB terms of service shows no language that varies in any substantive way from the usual restraints on bad behavior and hate speech imposed by most ISPs country wide.

The closest O’Rielly gets to supporting evidence appears to be a 2015 white paper written by Professor Enrique Armijo for the ISP-funded Free State Foundation. That paper similarly alleges that standard telecom sector language intended to police “threatening, abusive or hateful” language somehow implies community-run ISPs are more likely to curtail user speech.

But municipal broadband experts say the argument has no basis in fact.

“There is no history of municipal networks censoring anyone's speech,” Christopher Mitchell, a community broadband expert and Director of the Institute for Local Reliance, told Motherboard.

“In our experience, the Terms of Service from municipal ISPs have been similar to or better than those of for-profit ISPs in terms of benefiting subscribers,” he added. “And when concerns have been raised about related issues...the municipal ISPs have listened to public sentiments far more than any large cable or telephone company has.”

The FCC refused to comment on O’Rielly’s claims when contacted by Motherboard, only referring us to O’Rielly’s press office, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While there’s no substantive evidence that such networks infringe on the public’s free speech rights, there’s ample evidence that such networks frequently force incumbent ISPs to offer better service in areas they face community broadband competition.

In Chattanooga, ISPs like AT&T and Comcast have been forced to dramatically reduce their pricing for gigabit broadband in particular. Comcast was also forced to deploy significantly faster broadband in the city, after it attempted to prevent the network from being built by filing several unsuccessful lawsuits.

ISPs could easily prevent such networks from being built by offering better, cheaper service. Instead they’ve historically turned to more underhanded efforts to not only hamstring these networks, but curtail local authority over how taxpayer money should be spent.

Of particular note are the more than 21 state laws the broadband industry has lobbied to pass that greatly restrict your town or city’s ability to build its own networks, even when nobody else will. Such laws are quite literally often written by the telecom industry, then usually proposed via proxy organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council.

O’Rielly was clearly hoping to imply that the community broadband network model shouldn’t be embraced because it will lead to government censorship. In reality, the most frequent result of such efforts (assuming they’re built on solid business models) tends to be better, cheaper, faster, and more widely-accessible broadband.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/a...irst-amendment





Verizon Just Obliterated Ajit Pai's Justification For Killing Net Neutrality
Karl Bode

If you'll recall, FCC boss Ajit Pai has spent the better part of the last few years insisting that giving the telecom industry whatever it wants will somehow magically boost sector investment, jobs, and competition. Of course if you've paid attention to history you'll probably notice that in telecom, it never actually works that way. Former FCC boss Mike Powell (now the top lobbyist for the cable industry) engaged in much of the same behavior in the early aughts, promising that if you obliterate consumer protections and regulatory oversight of ISPs, telecom Uptopia magically springs forth from the sidewalk. Instead, we got Comcast.

It's a cycle of dysfunction Americans just can't seem to learn anything from.

Since the start of his tenure, Ajit Pai and the GOP have taken a flamethrower to numerous, basic consumer protections ranging from basic privacy rules governing the sale and collection of your private data, to net neutrality rules that protect consumers and competitors from being nickel-and-dimed by lumbering telecom monopolies. He's also attacked efforts to bring competition to cable boxes, has slowly dismantled broadband programs for the poor, attacked states rights' to protect consumers or build their own networks, and basically neutered the FCC's ability to protect you from monopoly power.

More recently, you'll recall the massive tax cuts were supposed to spur investment, the telecom sector included. As was Ajit Pai's recent policy order neutering local authority over cellular tower placement. Both, like net neutrality, were supposed to result in a dramatic spike in next-gen "5G" network deployment, and a big boost in sector investment overall. This week, Verizon made it clear that none of those things would actually be happening, despite the $2 billion in savings Pai's 5G "reform" alone provided Verizon:

"Verizon Wireless says it will not move faster on building its 5G cellular network despite a Federal Communications Commission decision that erased $2 billion dollars' worth of fees for the purpose of spurring faster 5G deployment...in an earnings call last week, Verizon CFO Matt Ellis told investors that the FCC decision won't have any effect on the speed of its 5G deployment. Verizon also said that it is reducing overall capital expenditures—despite a variety of FCC decisions, including the net neutrality repeal, that the FCC claimed would increase broadband network investment.

That net neutrality hampered broadband industry investment has been the cornerstone of Ajit Pai's entire justification for removing those rules, despite this claim never being adequately supported by the facts. Again, that claim was directly contradicted by SEC filings, earnings reports, and more than a dozen public CEO statements. And here it is again being disproved by the industry itself, just as they were by Powell's empty promises in the early aughts. All the bogus, massaged ISP economist claims to the contrary can't save this turd of an argument when the evidence is sitting right in front of you.

Telecom sector investment doesn't magically explode just because you let AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast directly dictate your tech policy agenda. Gutting essential consumer protections doesn't magically "unhinder the free market," it simply lets lumbering, politically-powerful giants double down on a generation of nickel-and-diming captive customers, with neither regulatory oversight nor healthy competition acting as guide rails.

Targeted deregulation can help healthy markets if it's aimed at eliminating bureaucracy that hinders competition or innovation, but anybody claiming that mindless deregulation can cure telecom either is lying to you for financial gain, or doesn't understand how the U.S. telecom market works. People tend to take Libertarian or free market theories cultivated from other sectors, and apply them to a telecom sector that's uniquely broken and corrupt, failing to understand that blind deregulation won't work here. Steadily weakened antitrust protections similarly aren't the panacea these folks believe.

What the telecom sector desperately needs is even-handed, intelligent tech policy and regulatory solutions with an unwavering focus on one thing: driving broadband competition in whatever form that takes. There's a million ways to accomplish this, from eliminating ISP-written, protectionist state laws banning your town and city from exploring creative alternatives to purely private networks (like public/private options), to actually holding giant ISPs accountable when they try to hamstring both direct broadband or streaming video competitors.

What you don't do is let companies with an obvious, vested interest in less competition and no guard rails completely dictate tech policy, then repeatedly lie about the amazing net benefits this mindless fealty will have. For whatever reason, despite history repeatedly and painfully illustrating the perils of this approach in the form of some of the worst service of any kind available in America (call Comcast customer support or spend a week using a West Virginian Frontier DSL line if you need first-hand experience on this front), it's a lesson the United States stubbornly refuses to learn.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20...utrality.shtml





FCC Leaders Say We Need a 'National Mission' to Fix Rural Broadband

Ajit Pai and Jessica Rosenworcel may disagree on the net neutrality angle, but they do agree on finding inspiration in the 1930s.
Marguerite Reardon

Democrats and Republicans in Washington can't agree on much of anything these days.

One thing they do agree on: The digital divide undercutting rural America needs to be fixed. But figuring out the details of achieving this goal is where the two sides diverge.

As anyone who's ventured beyond major cities or population centers in the US can tell you, high-speed internet access is a luxury that millions of people don't experience. According to data from the Federal Communications Commission, roughly 39 percent of people living in rural regions of this country lack access to high-speed broadband, compared with just 4 percent of urban Americans.

What's more, the internet that rural Americans can access is slower and more expensive than it is for their urban counterparts. To add insult to injury, rural residents generally earn less than those in urban areas.

So how are policy makers working to solve this problem? I traveled to Washington last month to talk about this topic with FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a Republican, and Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, the only Democrat on the commission. Specifically, I wanted to know what they see as the cause of this divide and how they think it can be bridged.

One thing they agreed on: Deploying broadband is expensive in many parts of the country, making it hard for traditional providers to run a business building and operating networks.

"In big cities and urban areas where you have dense populations, the cost of deployment is lower," Rosenworcel said. "When you get to rural locations it's harder because financing those networks, deploying them and operating them is just more expensive."

She added, "That's not a reason not to do it. We're just going to have to get creative and find ways to connect everyone everywhere."

It might even take what Pai called a "national mission" to get the job done.

The maps 'stink'

But before you can really get things going, you have to address one key issue, Rosenworcel said.

"Our broadband maps are terrible," she said. "If we're going to solve this nation's broadband problems, then the first thing we have to do is fix those maps. We need to know where broadband is and is not in every corner of this country."

You can't solve a problem you can't measure, she added.

The FCC's current broadband maps grossly misstate where internet or wireless service exists and where it doesn't. The issue hasn't escaped the notice of lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle. At an FCC Senate oversight hearing this summer, Sen. Jon Tester, a Democrat from Montana, put it the most bluntly when he said the maps "stink."

One of the major reasons for that: The FCC has relied on wireless and broadband companies to report to the FCC where they offer service. But the agency doesn't check the data. What's more, providers only need to report advertised maximum speeds and not actual speeds. They also keep pricing information confidential, which means that broadband speeds may be available but outrageously expensive.

A bigger issue is that so long as providers report having just one customer in a census block -- the smallest geographic area used by the US Census Bureau -- who can get broadband service, the entire area is considered served. In rural areas, that home may be the only place with internet service for miles around.

Pai agrees that the inaccuracies of the FCC's maps are a major problem. And he acknowledges that relying solely on self-reported data from the carriers is an issue. But he blames the previous Democrat-led administration for creating the problem and says his administration has been left to clean up the mess. He said that when he became chairman in January 2017, the FCC had to sift through that self-reported data based on parameters that individual carriers defined, creating a mismatched data set.

"So we didn't just have apples and oranges," he said. "We had apples, oranges, bananas and many other fruits."

He said his administration has tried to streamline the process so the FCC is at least gathering the same self-reported information from each carrier. But he admits that the process is still flawed. To rectify that, the agency has developed a challenge process.

"We've asked the American public, state and local officials, and carriers, consumer groups, farm groups in rural states to challenge those maps and tell us where they're inaccurate," he said.

But he says this process will take some time to play out.

"The maps as they currently stand aren't perfect," Pai said. "But our goal is to make sure with respect to wireless connectivity that we have a clear-cut idea about where those connections are and where they aren't."

Rosenworcel argues these efforts aren't enough. She thinks the FCC needs to use staff from its field offices to go out to check the maps. She also says the FCC needs to go directly to the public for this information.

"Every one of us knows where we get bars on our phone," she said. "We need to figure out how to crowdsource all that energy out there in the public and develop a map that isn't just made here in Washington but is made by all of us."

Factoring in the net neutrality repeal

Another area of disagreement between the two officials is the role that the repeal of the popular 2015 net neutrality rules has played in spurring investment in broadband infrastructure, particularly for rural carriers.

The Obama-era net neutrality rules prohibited broadband companies from blocking or slowing access to websites or online services. They also banned providers from favoring their own services over competitors' offerings. But the rules also reclassified broadband as a public utility under Title II of the Communications Act, potentially subjecting broadband and wireless networks to regulation originally meant for telephone networks.

The broadband industry and Republicans like Pai argued that saddling broadband and wireless companies with utility-style regulation developed 80 years ago stifled innovation and network investment, particularly in rural areas where capital is already constrained.

"We saw a downturn for the first time outside a recession in the two years when Title II was in effect," Pai said.
Watch this: How to solve the rural broadband problem? Fix the maps
5:13

He said the rules hit smaller carriers especially hard. He pointed to Paladin Wireless in Royston, Georgia, which he said spent $8,000 in compliance under the previous rules. While that might be a small amount of money for a big company like AT&T or Verizon, he said, $8,000 to a small wireless company "could have gone a long way in terms of connecting people."

Since the rules were repealed, according to Pai, rural operators have said they're more confident about investing in their networks.

He said VTel Wireless, a small wireless company serving rural Vermont and parts of New Hampshire, decided to invest $4 million to upgrade its 4G LTE network as a result of the net neutrality repeal.

"Smaller providers will tell you that this does factor into their decisions," Pai said. "And to have a light-touch approach that protects consumers on one hand and preserves their incentive and ability to invest on the other is a really powerful solution, especially in rural America."

Rosenworcel disagrees. She said she supports net neutrality and believes the agency's "misguided decision" to repeal the rules will "squander internet openness."

"The argument is that we will see more deployment in rural locations," she said. "But I don't believe that we have evidence that suggests that's happening. Instead, what we have are more companies with more rights to block and censor content online, and that's not good for any of us."

A 1930s-style 'national mission'

Ultimately, Pai and Rosenworcel agreed what's really needed to bring broadband to every American is a national vision on the scale of what the US government did when it brought electricity to rural America in the 1930s.

"We were able to get electrification to happen in rural, hard-to-reach parts of this nation," Rosenworcel said. "We need to be able to do the same with broadband."

Pai agrees that a "national mission when it comes to broadband," on the scale of what happened the better part of a century ago, is necessary. He said what gives people hope in small towns throughout rural America is the "promise of digital opportunity."

People living in these areas want the same thing that people in big cities and suburban areas want, he emphasized. They want to be able to better educate their kids, access high-quality health care and enable precision agriculture to grow their businesses. And all of that in 2018 requires connectivity to high-speed internet service.

"It really would be a game-changer for rural America if every town in this country were connected," he said. "And that idea is bipartisan in nature."

CNET's Shara Tibken contributed to this report.
https://www.cnet.com/news/fcc-leader...ral-broadband/





Musk Shakes Up SpaceX in Race to Make Satellite Launch Window: Sources
Eric M. Johnson, Joey Roulette

SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk flew to the Seattle area in June for meetings with engineers leading a satellite launch project crucial to his space company’s growth.

Within hours of landing, Musk had fired at least seven members of the program’s senior management team at the Redmond, Washington, office, the culmination of disagreements over the pace at which the team was developing and testing its Starlink satellites, according to the two SpaceX employees with direct knowledge of the situation.

Known for pushing aggressive deadlines, Musk quickly brought in new managers from SpaceX headquarters in California to replace a number of the managers he fired. Their mandate: Launch SpaceX’s first batch of U.S.-made satellites by the middle of next year, the sources said.

The management shakeup and the launch timeline, previously unreported, illustrate how quickly Musk wants to bring online SpaceX’s Starlink program, which is competing with OneWeb and Canada’s Telesat to be first to market with a new satellite-based Internet service.

Those services - essentially a constellation of satellites that will bring high-speed Internet to rural and suburban locations globally - are key to generating the cash that privately-held SpaceX needs to fund Musk’s real dream of developing a new rocket capable of flying paying customers to the moon and eventually trying to colonize Mars.

“It would be like rebuilding the Internet in space,” Musk told an audience in 2015 when he unveiled Starlink. “The goal would be to have a majority of long-distance Internet traffic go over this network.”

But the program is struggling to hire and retain staff, the employees said. Currently, about 300 SpaceX employees work on Starlink in Redmond, the sources said. According to GeekWire, Musk said in 2015 the Redmond operation would have “probably several hundred people, maybe a thousand people” after 3-4 years in operation.

So far this year, about 50 employees left the company “on their own accord,” one of the SpaceX employees said, though the reason for those departures was unclear. Overall, SpaceX employs more than 6,000 staff.

As of Tuesday, there were 22 job openings - including a job making espresso drinks - for the Redmond office, according to SpaceX’s website.

SpaceX spokeswoman Eva Behrend told Reuters the Redmond office remains an essential part of the company’s efforts to build a next-generation satellite network.

“Given the success of our recent Starlink demonstration satellites, we have incorporated lessons learned and re-organized to allow for the next design iteration to be flown in short order,” Behrend said.

She had no further comment on the reorganization or the launch window, but noted the strategy was similar to the rapid iteration in design and testing which led to the success of its rockets.

Among the managers fired from the Redmond office was SpaceX Vice President of Satellites Rajeev Badyal, an engineering and hardware veteran of Microsoft Corp and Hewlett-Packard, and top designer Mark Krebs, who worked in Google’s satellite and aircraft division, the employees said. Krebs declined to comment, and Badyal did not respond to requests for comment.

The management shakeup followed in-fighting over pressure from Musk to speed up satellite testing schedules, one of the sources said. SpaceX’s Behrend offered no comment on the matter.

Culture was also a challenge for recent hires, a second source said. A number of the managers had been hired from nearby technology giant Microsoft, where workers were more accustomed to longer development schedules than Musk’s famously short deadlines.

“Rajeev wanted three more iterations of test satellites,” one of the sources said. “Elon thinks we can do the job with cheaper and simpler satellites, sooner.”

A billionaire and Chief Executive Officer of Tesla Inc, Musk is known for ambitious projects ranging from auto electrification and rocket-building to high-speed transit tunnels.

A Musk trust owns 54 percent of the outstanding stock of SpaceX, according to a 2016 U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing, SpaceX’s most recent.

JUNE 2019 LAUNCH GOAL

SpaceX has said it would launch its satellites in phases through 2024. It goal of having Internet service available in 2020 is “pretty much on target” with an initial satellite launch by mid-2019, one of the sources said.

OneWeb aims for a first launch between December and February 2019, while Telesat was targeting 2022 for broadband services.

SpaceX employees told Reuters that two Starlink test satellites launched in February, dubbed Tintin A and B, were functioning as intended. The company is refining the orbital path of the satellites after the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which oversees satellites in orbit, approved a request from SpaceX to expand Tintins’ altitude range, one of the sources said.

The FCC confirmed SpaceX’s modifications, which have not been reported previously, but declined further comment.

“We’re using the Tintins to explore that modification,” one of the SpaceX employee sources said. “They’re happy and healthy and we’re talking with them every time they pass a ground station, dozens of times a day.”

SpaceX engineers have used the two test satellites to play online video games at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California and the Redmond office, the source said.

“We were streaming 4k YouTube and playing ‘Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’ from Hawthorne to Redmond in the first week,” the person added.

MORE SATELLITES

In March, the FCC approved Musk’s plan to beam down Internet signals from 4,425 small satellites launched into standard low-Earth orbit - more than two times the total number of active satellites there presently.

One SpaceX engineer told Reuters the company has studied plans to add roughly 10,000 additional satellites after its first array is live to meet bandwidth demand in the coming 20 years. Behrend declined to comment on the plans and referred to a previous FCC filing, which states an additional 7,518 satellites are under consideration.

Such a move would keep it in the race to expand affordable high-speed Internet access to billions of people in rural or suburban areas globally. The Satellite Industry Association, a lobby group, estimates the global market for satellite-based broadband and television services is worth $127.7 billion, dwarfing the roughly $5.5 billion satellite launch services market.

McLean, Virginia-based OneWeb is working to provide internet service from roughly 900 satellites after raising more than $2 billion from SoftBank, the Coca-Cola Company and others.

Telesat, backed by Loral Space & Communications Inc, said on Oct. 23 it conducted the first-ever live test of in-flight broadband via a satellite in low-Earth orbit, and was targeting 2022 for broadband services from a constellation of some 300 satellites.

SpaceX aims to provide Internet service by linking its satellites to ground stations and mountable terminals about the size of a pizza box at homes or businesses, according to the FCC filing. The U.S. market for broadband is already dominated by several incumbent communications companies, including Comcast Corporation. Comcast declined to comment on the potential new competition.

While SpaceX’s model of reusing rockets has generated cash, it is not enough to cover the roughly $5 billion cost to develop its Big Falcon Rocket that Musk wants one day to fly to Mars.

“There had to be a much bigger idea for generating cash to basically realize the Mars plans,” said one of the SpaceX employees. “What better idea than to put Comcast out of business?”

(This story corrects to remove Kim Schulze from paragraph 15. The company said Schulze is still employed by SpaceX.)

Reporting by Eric M. Johnson in Seattle and Joey Roulette in Orlando, Florida; editing by Greg Mitchell and Edward Tobin
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-s...-idUSKCN1N50FC





How Much Does a Cable Box Really Cost? The Industry Would Prefer You Don't Ask
David Lazarus

Spectrum TV and internet customers will see their rates go up again in November.

Among other increases, the broadcast TV surcharge will rise to $9.95 from $8.85 a month, and the monthly fee for a set-top box will jump to $7.50 from $6.99.

It was that last charge that got my attention — and got me thinking about the economics involved.

How much do cable boxes actually cost? Why do their monthly fees keep going up when the cost of similar technology, such as TVs and computers, goes down over time?

Not surprisingly, my attempts to answer these questions were met with stonewalling from industry players.

Spectrum, owned by Charter Communications, the dominant pay-TV company in Southern California, clammed up real fast when I asked how much they pay for the boxes they lease to subscribers.

Nor would it comment on how much cash flow the boxes generate, or why fees keep rising even as the number of residential TV subscribers dwindles (down 66,000 more in the third quarter).

Dennis Johnson, a company spokesman, said only that the 7.3% higher box charge in November — more than three times the inflation rate — represents a “modest increase” that is “comparable or even lower than our major competitors.”

(Full disclosure: The Los Angeles Times is collaborating with Spectrum on a new L.A.-focused cable channel.)

I also went knocking at the door of Arris International, the world’s largest supplier of set-top boxes to pay-TV companies. I asked how much it costs the company on average to make a box.

My inquiries were met at first with a thunderous “no comment.”

“Arris will not participate in this story,” a company spokeswoman said.

A couple of days later, I received an email from Jeanne Russo, Arris’ senior director of global communications, who more pleasantly explained that “we don’t share specifics on margins, manufacturing origins or average/median prices paid by our customers publicly, so we won’t be able to help you with those questions.”

She also wanted me to understand that “set-tops are premium devices” and are becoming “the digital nerve center of the ultra-connected home.”

Alexa and Siri might have something to say about that. And the cost of smart speakers keeps falling.

I find it intriguing that something as ubiquitous as set-top boxes, found in nearly all American homes, is shrouded in such mystery. The implication is that consumers shouldn’t worry their pretty heads about how much the boxes really cost.

That’s usually a sign someone in the executive suite is having a good laugh at our expense.

I also wondered what happened to that push from the Federal Communications Commission to standardize set-top boxes and introduce much-needed competition into the marketplace.

That was easier to find out.

In case you’ve forgotten, former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler noted in 2016 that the average pay-TV subscriber shelled out $231 a year to lease a set-top box from their service provider. The collective tab for that racket was $20 billion a year.

And you had to keep paying, even after the pay-TV company recouped its bulk-rate investment in the gear.

Wheeler’s solution was to establish uniform technical standards so any electronics manufacturer could make one-size-fits-all cable boxes. Pay-TV companies in turn would make free apps available to subscribers so they could access programming on any device.

“If you want to watch Comcast's content through your Apple TV or Roku, you can,” Wheeler wrote in an op-ed in these pages. “If you want to watch DirectTV's offerings through your Xbox, you can. If you want to pipe Verizon's service directly to your smart TV, you can.”

He added: “These rules will open the door for innovation, spurring new apps and devices, giving consumers even more choice and user control.”

Once President Trump installed his own guy as FCC chairman, however, a more industry-oriented mind-set took hold. Wheeler’s plan was promptly tossed in the trash.

Ajit Pai, the agency’s new boss, said Wheeler’s proposal “is no longer pending before the commission, and I do not intend to resurrect it.”

He never really explained why, except to say he didn’t think standardized boxes promoted “a clear, consumer-focused, fair and competitive regulatory path for video programming delivery,” which is, of course, nonsense.

Several years ago, Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) asked all the leading pay-TV service providers to shed a little light on set-top boxes. Like me, they were keen to find out how much a box really costs.

Like me, they got nowhere.

Charter said the average amount customers spend in monthly box fees “is confidential.” Likewise, revenue generated for the company by such fees “is confidential information.”

DirecTV said that “much of the information you have requested is proprietary, business sensitive and highly confidential.”

Cox Communications said it “does not disclose the confidential, proprietary and competitively sensitive information requested.”

“This information is not publicly available because of competitive sensitivity,” Comcast said.

I phoned around to Wall Street analysts who cover Arris. They couldn’t say how much it costs the company to manufacture set-top boxes in low-cost factories abroad.

But the general consensus was that Arris sells basic boxes to pay-TV companies for about $150 apiece and more advanced boxes for closer to $250.

If the FCC was right about the average customer paying $231 a year (as of 2016), that suggests the typical pay-TV company is recouping its investment per box in about a year or less, and all fees paid beyond that point are pure gravy, even allowing for any maintenance expenses.

Each analyst I spoke with said box fees aren’t a huge source of revenue for pay-TV companies, but they obviously add up.

Charter, for example, still has more than 16-million residential customers with set-top boxes, many with multiple boxes.

After the Spectrum fee rises within days to $7.50 a month, that will translate to at least $120 million. Monthly. Or at least $1.4 billion a year.

Rival Comcast charges $9.95 monthly for a high-definition box. It has about 22-million TV subscribers. It’s thus looking at potential revenue of $2.6 billion annually.

Yeah, if I ran a pay-TV company, I’d want to keep that to myself as well.
http://www.latimes.com/business/laza...030-story.html





‘Halloween’ is Still No. 1 at the Box Office, but ‘A Star Is Born’ is the Real Story
Tom Brueggemann

This weekend provided more of the same at the box office — not that that’s a bad thing. With “Halloween,” “A Star Is Born,” and “Venom” again occupying the top three slots, grosses for the pre-Halloween period jumped a third over last year.

The Blumhouse-reinvigorated “Halloween” looks like a two-week wonder with its 58 percent drop. That’s the high end for the second weekend of a seasonal release right before the holiday. It will easily surpass $150 million in gross, making it second only to “Get Out” at Blumhouse.

Even so, the story of the moment remains the continued success of “A Star Is Born.” There was no real new competition (the only new wide release was Lionsgate’s “Hunter Killer,” which grossed less than $7 million), and after four weekends at #2 it will probably relinquish its slot next weekend when three significant new titles open. No matter; its awards play is right on schedule. In fact, its gross is more than $60 million ahead of what “Argo,” the last major-studio Best Picture winner, earned at the same point in its run.

Beyond the frontrunners, the weekend is often a dumping ground and this year was no exception. “Hunter Killer” is a “Hunt for Red October”-meets-“Air Force One” Gerard Butler vehicle, costarring Gary Oldman in his first film since his Oscar win. It was actually filmed before “Darkest Hour’ and would have been released earlier but its original distributor, Relativity, lost the film in a bankruptcy sale. That transition doesn’t doom a film (A24 scored well with “The Lobster,” which it acquired after another company went under), but it is a handicap, especially when its intended topicality reaches the public more than a year later than intended.

It fared better than several other new releases. Universal, which already has a $100 million worldwide success with “Johnny English Strikes Again,” the third in that comedy series starring Rowan Atkinson earned $1.6 million in a 540-theater release. Not a disaster, but an also-ran. Still, more than it might have done in a more competitive weekend.

The faith-based military chaplain marital drama “Indivisible” scored worse, with just under $1.6 million in 830 theaters. But neither can compare to the around $150,000 earned by “London Fields,” based on Martin Amis’ well-known crime thriller. It found 600 screens, impressively corralled by its distributor. However, it saw an average of fewer than 30 patrons over three days, which is scraping the bottom.

Back on the positive side, “The Hate U Give”continues to show strength with a respectable drop of 33 percent. Studios are often called out when they release titles that require special handling, but Fox seems to have handled this story of an African-American police shooting with finesse and nuance. As much as $30 million is possible.

“Venom” continues its march to over $200 million with a 40 percent drop and over a half billion worldwide. Sony also has the #4 film, “Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween,” with the seasonal holiday family film down only 23 percent.

“First Man” continued its mixed results, with a 40 percent drop that will make it hard to hold theaters. It will gross around $50 million, which means it likely loses money. Still, it will have been seen by as many or more moviegoers than many awards-contending films.

Also making the top 10 was the expansion of Jonah Hill’s “Mid90s” in a little over 1,000 theaters. More analysis on this and other specialized films here.

The Top Ten

1. Halloween (Universal) Week 2; Last weekend #1

$32,045,000 (-58%) in 3,990 theaters (+62); PTA (per theater average): $8,031; Cumulative: $126,698,000

2. A Star Is Born (Warner Bros.) Week 4; Last weekend #2

$14,145,000 (-26%) in 3,904 theaters (+20); PTA: $3,623; Cumulative: $148,722,000

3. Venom (Sony) Week 4; Last weekend #3

$10,800,000 (-40%) in 3,567 theaters (-320); PTA: $3,028; Cumulative: $187,282,000

4. Goosebumps 2: Haunted Halloween (Sony) Week 3; Last weekend #4

$7,500,000 (-23%) in 3,723 theaters (+202); PTA: $2,015; Cumulative: $38,349,00

5. Hunter Killer (Lionsgate) NEW – Cinemascore: A-; Metacritic: 42; Est. budget: $40 million

$6,650,000 in 2,720 theaters; PTA: $2,438; Cumulative: $6,650,000

6. The Hate U Give (20th Century Fox) Week 4; Last weekend #6

$5,100,000 (-%) in 2,375 theaters (+72); PTA: $2,147; Cumulative: $18,300,000

7. First Man (Universal) Week 3; Last weekend #5

$4,935,000 (-41%) in 2,959 theaters (-681); PTA: $1,668; Cumulative: $37,880,000

8. Smallfoot (Warner Bros.) Week 5; Last weekend #7

$4,750,000 (-28%) in 2,662 theaters (-370); PTA: $1,784; Cumulative: $72,591,000

9. Night School (Universal) Week 5; Last weekend #8

$3,255,000 (-33%) in 1,991 theaters (-305); PTA: $1,635; Cumulative: $71,451,000

10. Mid90s (A24) Week 2; Last weekend #20

$3,000,000 (+1,062%) in 1,206 theaters (+1,202); PTA: $2,488; Cumulative: $3,350,000

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/...202821847.html





The Shutting Down of FilmStruck and the False Promise of Streaming Classics
Richard Brody

A.T. & T., the new corporate overlord of Warner Bros. Digital Networks and Turner, will be shutting down FilmStruck, the streaming service that launched in November, 2016. The site, established by TCM, the indispensable classic-movie cable channel, draws the core of its offerings from the Criterion cornucopia of DVD and Blu-ray releases of world cinema, as well as related movies that are yet unreleased on disk. Recently, Hollywood classics from the TCM roster were added to the FilmStruck offerings.

The site isn’t accepting any new subscribers, and it’s a good bet that it won’t be adding films, either. In the year and a half that I’ve been offering recommendations here of movies to stream, FilmStruck titles have featured prominently. One could keep busy, happy, and cinematically sustained for a long time on the sole basis of FilmStruck movies, and all the more so with the inclusion of movies from TCM. (The movie diet wouldn’t be an entirely balanced one: the site does poorly with such domains as American independent filmmaking, African cinema, and the past forty years of film history. Its over-all flaw is its reliance on recognized classics: the programming of the site is more responsive than it is proactive, and it might have been improved by more personalized, idiosyncratic selections that would have made it more like a permanent online film festival.)

The site instead offered various modes of promotional outreach. Some, such as essays, and some home-produced videos, were significant works in themselves, but the site over all diluted its offerings with a home page of diversions and distractions that felt like a tawdry sampling of multiplex ballyhoo raising an unwelcome racket amid the art-house tranquillity.

That conspicuously commercial waiting room to the classic-cinema library suggests the culture clash at the heart of the enterprise, the one that arises from its odd original fusion of Criterion with TCM, which was then a part of Time Warner—and which foreshadowed its doom. That air of doom arises from more than the inherent conflicts of the high-culture outpost and the mass-market colossus. It’s born of another conflict, between the ownership of physical media and the mere purchase of access to data—between the permanent and the revocable, between the onetime purchase and the monthly subscription forever. Whatever’s worth revisiting over the years is worth owning—whether in physical media or at least a digital file.

The physical-media equivalent of subscription-forever is called going to the movies: a viewer buys access to each screening and never owns anything except the memories. That’s why the best analogy for, and the best use of, streaming video is as a supplement to new releases, particularly of films that aren’t likely to get wide theatrical distribution. Streaming puts the low-budget, independent, or foreign film on the same footing of wide availability as a studio tentpole film. But when it comes to classics, the era of streaming is as the days of repertory theatres—with the difference that, then, the limits were technical as well as financial. Film prints and projectors are costly and cumbersome. Now the limits are those of manufactured scarcity in the guise of abundance, manufactured dependence marketed as freedom. Consumers have been weaned off disks with the promise of convenience, of weightlessness, spacelessness, infinite portability, and a large (but unstable) library of offerings. In exchange, they’re tethered to the mothership for good.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/th...aming-classics





Pornhub Reacts to India Blocking Adult Sites

Following the news of India blocking 827 adult entertainment sites, despite there being no laws against pornography in India and watching adult content privately, Pornhub, the premier online destination for adult entertainment and one of the sites included in the ban, has launched a mirror site (Pornhub.net) that will allow the Indian people to access the same great content to which they are accustomed. The company is also offering to work with the Indian government over concerns.

“There are no laws against pornography in India and watching adult content privately. It’s evident that the Indian government does not have a solution to a very serious and systemic problem in the country, and is using adult sites like ours as a scapegoat,” said Corey Price, VP, Pornhub. “This is apparent by the fact that they only banned large sites like Pornhub’s, and didn’t block thousands of risky porn sites that may contain illegal content. For the government to ban sites like ours that have compliant parental controls, a non-consensual takedown page and a strict Terms of Service is a disservice to the people of India, who have become one of the largest connoisseurs of adult content.”

According to Pornhub’s Year-in-Review insights in 2017, India is the third largest consumer of Pornhub content, just behind the United Kingdom.

“While we are anti-government censorship here at Pornhub, and ultimately disappointed in the ruling, we are willing to work alongside the government to address any concerns they have and help rectify the situation,” added Price. “In the meantime, to provide our Indian users with Pornhub content again as quickly as possible, we have set up a mirror site. We understand this has been a hard time for our fans and hope this will provide them with an outlet to help alleviate some of their stress.”

This ban follows a similar ban the country enacted in 2015. However, that ban did not have a lasting effect on users, as most chose to adopt VPNs, while others continued getting access to the content via smaller ISPs. Shortly after the initial ban in 2015, the Indian government stated that the ISPs could continue allowing access to pornography websites as long as they were compliant.

Pornhub has been banned in other countries, including Russia, where it has since worked with the government there on a solution that unblocked Pornhub.
https://kathmandutribune.com/pornhub...g-adult-sites/





38 'Piracy' Subreddits You Definitely Shouldn't Visit
David Murphy

You can find just about anything on Reddit, for better or worse. It’s one of the reasons why the site remains so universally popular, as it’s an easy way for newbies to have near-unlimited access to everything that used to be a little harder to find: day-of downloads for new movies, streams of their favourite sporting events, free or modified video games and applications, et cetera.

Gone are the days when you had to hunt down an obscure message board to get access to files you probably shouldn’t have. Now, if you haven’t already bookmarked a popular site like The Pirate Bay in your browser, you can browse one of the many subreddits dedicated to BitTorrents and BitTorrent trackers, direct-linked downloads of whatever it is you’re trying to find, or The Pirate Bay itself. There’s a subreddit for everything, truly.

While we commend Reddit for taking a more active stance against piracy nowadays, it feels like a cat-and-mouse game that the website can’t possibly win. That, or Reddit is playing by a hard-to-read rulebook, since there are a bunch of easy-to-find subreddits that give you pretty wide access to just about anything you want — not just the legal things.

(Lifehacker caveat: Creators should get paid for their work! You should purchase things you want to experience, which supports those who make it. Pirating everything and everything you do is a jerk move, to put it mildly, but there are some instances—an obscure TV show or a live event that you can’t purchase a copy of, for example—where piracy doesn’t feel quite so black and white. Also, we are not the boss of you, so do with the following information what you will.)

Games, Apps, and Books

/r/piracy

/r/piratedgames

/r/megalinks — now defunct, but plenty of archived material

/r/crackwatch

/r/torrents

/r/opendirectories

/r/invites — ask for invites to your favourite private BitTorrent tracker here

/r/OpenSignups

/r/torrentrequests — private, ask for access

/r/trackers

/r/scholar — scholarly articles and books

/r/textbooks

/r/SwitchNSPs — Nintendo Switch

/r/PkgLinks — Sony PlayStation consoles

/r/3dspiracy — Nintendo 3DS

/r/cemupiracy — Wii U

/r/APKMODGAMES — Android games

Streaming Movies and TV

/r/moviesonanything

/r/fullofmovies

/r/allucmovies

/r/fullmoviesonyoutube

/r/fullmoviesonvimeo

/r/fullmoviesongoogle

/r/BestOfStreamingVideo

/r/Documentaries

/r/fullanimeonyoutube

/r/fullcartoonsonyoutube

/r/FullLengthFilms

Streaming Sports Events

/r/nflstreams

/r/CFBStreams

/r/nbastreams

/r/ncaaBBallStreams

/r/MLBStreams

/r/NHLStreams

/r/soccerstreams

/r/MMAStreams

/r/mmafights

/r/WWEstreams


What to do when your favourite subreddit goes away

There’s one quick Reddit trick you can use to quickly find movies, TV shows, and other videos to download—especially if your favourite subreddit for such things gets shut down or dies out. Click on Reddit’s search bar and type in “site:” followed by any kind of popular domain for less-savoury items: “openload.co” for videos, for example, or “mega.co.nz” for files.

While you might not find a specific video you’re looking on the search results listing that appears, you’ll probably get an idea of which subreddits have a lot of active postings about these sorts of things. Follow them, and you’ll have a new source of less-than-legal things until Reddit shuts that subreddit down—if it ever does.
https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2018/1...il-subreddits/





New Halo 15TB HDDs: Western Digital Unveils the Ultrastar DC HC620
Anton Shilov

Western Digital this week introduced its new Ultrastar DC HC620 family of hard drives that consists of 14 TB and 15 TB models. The HDDs use shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology and are aimed at applications that need a lot of storage space, but are mainly read-focused operations. The manufacturer will only sell these products to customers with software that can manage SMR hard drives, primarily to those who already run 10 TB or 12 TB SMR HDDs.

The HGST Ultrastar DC HC620 hard drives are based on Western Digital’s fourth-generation HelioSeal helium-filled enterprise platform that packs eight platters and employing multiple enhancements of internal components specially designed to improve reliability and durability of HDDs working in vibrating multi-drive environments. The DC HC620 HDDs use eight SMR platters with a 1.75 TB and a 1.875 TB capacity featuring a 1034 and a 1108 Gbit areal density per square inch respectively. Because of a very high areal density, the 14 TB version of the drive offers up to 233 MB/s sequential read/write speed, whereas the 15 TB variant can hit 255 MB/s sequential read/write speed, which is the world record for any SMR HDD.

Keep in mind though how SMR technology works - it records new magnetic tracks partly overlapping the previously recorded tracks in a 'shingle roof tile' fashion. This method is appropriate for sequential writes, but as multiple tracks need to be adjusted when re-writes occur, it slows down the rewriting process. As a result, SMR-based HDDs are good enough for archive as well as write once read many (WORM) applications (think content delivery services), but is not suitable for typical server or enterprise workloads. Another thing to point out about high-capacity HDDs in general and Western Digital’s Ultrastar DC HC620 15 TB in particular is the fact that as capacities increase, IOPS per TB performance drops and it gets increasingly harder for operators of datacenters to guarantee their customers expected performance and quality of service. Therefore, while technically the Western Digital’s 15 TB is the world’s highest-capacity hard drive that exists today, it is necessary to understand that this is a very special product aimed at select customers with systems that take into account peculiarities of SMR and can mitigate lower IOPS per TB performance to minimize impact on QoS.

The Ultrastar DC HC620 HDDs feature a 7200 RPM spindle speed, a 512 MB DRAM buffer for indirection table management, a 7.7 ms read seek time, a 12 ms typical seek time, and a 4.16 ms typical latency. The manufacturer will offer the new series of HDDs with a SATA 6 Gbps or with SAS 12 Gbps interface. As for power, the DC HC620 SATA drives consume up to 6.4 W, whereas the DC HC620 SAS HDDs consume up to 8.3 W, which is in line with power consumption of their direct predecessor, the Ultrastar Hs14 (which in case of the 14 TB version of the DC HC620 is the same drive), but significantly lower than prior-generation of SMR HDDs from HGST.

Like other enterprise-class HDDs, the Ultrastar HC DC620 HDDs are rated for 2.5 million hours MTBF and come with a five-year warranty. Given the fact that the hard drives will only be sold to select customers, Western Digital does not publish per-unit pricing.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/13523...astar-dc-hc620





China is Exporting the Great Firewall as Internet Freedom Declines Around the World
James Griffiths

Speaking before an elite audience in Washington in March 2000, then US President Bill Clinton summarized much of Western thinking on the internet when he hailed a new century in which "liberty will be spread by cell phone and cable modem."

This would occur, Clinton said, despite the efforts of countries like China to fight the spread of information.

"Now there's no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet," Clinton said, his eyebrows arched as he neared the punchline. "Good luck! That's sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall."

In the decades since that speech, Clinton's jello comment has become a something of a dark joke among internet freedom advocates, as China continued to build up the Great Firewall, the world's most sophisticated system for controlling and surveilling the web.

A new report out this week shows that China is by far the most effective censor of the internet, and far from retreating, is exporting its model around the world.

Beijing has consistently defied all the confident predictions (including by people far more knowledgeable about the internet than Clinton) that this would be impossible. China's censors have reigned in blogs, social media, and US search giants, and repeatedly defeated or stymied any attempts to undermine the Firewall, from virtual private networks (VPNs) to the dark web.

Sunday Yokubaitis, chief executive of VPN company Golden Frog, told CNN they have "witnessed a massive increase" in attempts to block their services in China.

"We used to see blocks roughly once every six weeks; they now try to block our service multiple times every day," he said.

As I document in my book, "The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet," Beijing's model of the internet is now spreading beyond its borders, with China's censors working actively with their counterparts in Russia, Uganda and a host of other countries to build up internet controls and crack down on online dissent.

A new report from Freedom House -- a US government-funded NGO -- supports this. During 2018, the authors found, "internet freedom declined for the eighth consecutive year."

"A cohort of countries is moving toward digital authoritarianism by embracing the Chinese model of extensive censorship and automated surveillance systems," Freedom House said.

China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular press conference Thursday that the report's findings "are sheer fabrications."

"They are unprofessional, irresponsible and made with ulterior motives," Lu added.

Forlorn hope

During the early decades of the internet, many influential thinkers claimed the internet -- by its very nature -- would spread democracy and freedom of speech.

The combined forces of globalization and the web were, Thomas Friedman wrote in 2000, "acting like nutcrackers to open societies."

But as writer Evgeny Morovoz has demonstrated, this assumption was often based on a willful misreading of the events of the Cold War, and the effectiveness of strategies like smuggling photocopiers and fax machines through the Iron Curtain and Radio Free Europe broadcasts.

"Viewing it through the prism of the Cold War, they endow the internet with nearly magical qualities; for them, it's the ultimate cheat sheet that could help the West finally defeat its authoritarian adversaries," Morozov writes. "In other words, let them tweet, and they will tweet their way to freedom. By this logic, authoritarianism becomes unsustainable once the barriers to the free flow of information are removed. If the Soviet Union couldn't surprise a platoon of pamphleteers, how can China survive an army of bloggers?"

In fact, as the Freedom House report demonstrates, the internet is an excellent tool for social control, enabling surveillance and guiding of public opinion that would have been impossible in the past.

This has been further boosted by the ongoing panic in the US and other countries which have typically been the biggest proponents of internet freedom over fake news and alleged election interference online.

"Throughout (2018), authoritarians used claims of 'fake news' and data scandals as a pretext to move closer to the China," the report said. "Governments in countries such as Egypt and Iran rewrote restrictive media laws to apply to social media users, jailed critics under measures designed to curb false news, and blocked foreign social media and communication services."

Global model

Since the first virtual blocks were laid in the Great Firewall, China has acted as a potential model for online censorship, with everyone from Bono to US lawmaker Joe Lieberman citing Beijing's policies in arguments for greater internet controls.

In recent years, however, especially since President Xi Jinping came to power, China has actively worked with foreign governments to help them build firewalls of their own, and lobby at the United Nations and other bodies to reduce protections for internet freedom worldwide.

This week, the UN's International Telecommunication Union gathered for its quadrennial meeting in Dubai. In the past, the ITU has been a key body for China and other leading internet censors, particularly Russia, to push for changes to international regulations to legalize or enable their controls.
In 2015, China succeeded in expanding the ITU's powers and those of national governments to set internet policy, though Chinese delegates failed to remove the terms "freedom of expression" and "democratic" from a key internet governance document.

While the meeting has only just got underway, most experts expect the issue of internet governance -- the key argument over which boils down to whether only governments should be able to set global policy, or if civil society and industry should have a role as well -- to dominate matters again in Dubai.

China's position is that national governments have the ultimate right to control the internet within their borders, and that this covers foreign companies, citizens, and anyone who attempts to interfere by, for example, creating software to undermine the Great Firewall.

The doctrine of cyber sovereignty, as advocated by Xi Jinping, will be on full display next month at China's own World Internet Conference in the southern Chinese river town of Wuzhen.

This year's forum "will further enhance the establishment of an internet development outlook characterized by mutual trust and collective governance among countries worldwide," according to Liu Liehong, deputy director of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country's top censor.

Worrying trend

As well as working to change international law and craft a model of internet control that can be easily adopted by other countries, Chinese officials and companies have also been actively engaged in the groundwork of building censorship networks overseas.
Golden Frog's Yokubaitis said his company had seen Chinese-style tactics being adopted in Russia and the Middle East, adding that China is "exporting blocking technologies to countries with repressive regimes."

The Freedom House report said that Beijing was taking steps to "propagate its model abroad" with large-scale trainings of foreign officials, providing censorship and surveillance technology, and pressuring international companies to comply with Chinese standards even when operating outside the country.

"These trends present an existential threat to the future of the open internet and prospects for greater democracy around the globe," the report said.

It listed 57 countries, from European democracies to Central Asian autocracies, which had bought telecom infrastructure, AI surveillance tools, or attended or hosted trainings by Chinese censors and propaganda operatives.

"Democratic governments will have to devote much greater diplomatic and other resources to countering China's charm offensive on the international stage," Freedom House added. "More governments are turning to China for guidance and support at a time when the United States' global leadership is on the decline, and the acquiescence of foreign companies to Beijing's demands only emboldens the regime in its effort to rewrite international rules in its favor."
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/01/asia/...ntl/index.html





U.S. Declines in Internet Freedom Rankings, Thanks to Net Neutrality Repeal and Fake News
Zack Whittaker

If you need a safe haven on the internet, where the pipes are open and the freedoms are plentiful — you might want to move to Estonia or Iceland.

The latest “internet freedoms” rankings are out, courtesy of Freedom House’s annual report into the state of internet freedoms and personal liberties, based on rankings of 65 countries that represent the vast majority of the world’s internet users. Although the U.S. remains firmly in the top ten, it dropped a point on the year earlier after a recent rash of changes to internet regulation and a lack of in the realm of surveillance.

Last year, the U.S. was 21 in the global internet freedom ranking — the lower number, the better a country ranks. That was behind Estonia, Iceland, Canada, Germany and Australia. This year the U.S. is at 22 — thanks to the repeal of net neutrality and the renewal of U.S. spy powers.

The report also cited “disinformation and hyperpartisan content” — or fake news — as a “pressing concern.”

It was only in June, after a protracted battle, that the Federal Communications Commission finally pulled the plug on the Obama-era rules that guaranteed the free and fair flow of internet data. Net neutrality — which promises to treat every user’s traffic as equal and doesn’t prioritize certain internet users or services over others — was dead. That was despite months of delays and a scandal that embroiled the FCC’s chairman Ajit Pai for allegedly lying to lawmakers over a falsified denial-of-service attack that he used to try to stifle criticism of his repeal plans. What did happen was an onslaught of citizens demanding that the net neutrality rules. But that was eclipsed by an astroturfing campaign that even used dead people to try to swing the decision.

What also dropped the U.S. a point was the near-clean reauthorization of the government’s surveillance laws, which passed with little debate despite a call for change. It was the first time to reel in the government’s spying powers since the Edward Snowden revelations a half-decade ago — but lawmakers buckled to pressure from the intelligence community, despite recognizing a long history of abuse and overreach by U.S. spy agencies.

Freedom House called the law’s renewal “a blow to civil rights and privacy advocates,” who advocated for change since long before Edward Snowden had a face.

A single digit drop in ranking may not seem like much, compared to the last-place contenders — Iran and China, predictably ranking in worst, but many see the U.S. as a beacon of free speech and expression — a model that others aspire to replicate.

As the report found, that goes both ways. The U.S. has its part to blame for the decline in at least 17 countries where “fake news” has been co-opted by oppressive regimes to justify crackdowns on dissent and free speech. The rise of “fake news,” a term largely attributed to Donald Trump — then a candidate for president — which spread like wildfire — and across borders — as a way to reject reported information or factual current events that were derogatory to a person’s views. In other words, it was a verbal hand grenade, lobbed whenever a person heard something they didn’t like.

Now, other regimes are cracking down on internet freedoms under the guise of fighting fake news. Philippines and Kazakhstan were both named by Freedom House as using “fake news” to restrict the internet by removing content and stifling the spread of views in the name of fighting misinformation.

While many might not care much for a country you know little about, it’s a reminder that the U.S. is still seen in high regard and other nations will follow in its footsteps.

Michael Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, said that the U.S. government in particular should take “a more proactive role” in stepping up their efforts to maintain a free and open internet to prevent playing into the hands of of “less democratic governments looking to increase their control of the internet.”
https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/31/un...et-neutrality/





Stop Using Microsoft Edge To Download Chrome -- Unless You Want Malware

Bing has been serving up malicious but highly visible Google Chrome ads for months
Jason Evangelho

For many people who purchase a new Windows 10 PC, Microsoft's built-in Edge browser has one purpose: to download an alternate browser like Google Chrome. The most common way to do this for people who don't have the URL memorized? Type "download Chrome" in the address bar and click the first result provided by Bing search. Unfortunately those unsuspecting users have a high chance of downloading malware and adware. That's because Bing has been serving up malicious but highly visible Google Chrome ads for months .

This weekend, Twitter user Gabriel Landau enjoyed his first few hours with a Windows 10 laptop by doing this exact thing (video in Twitter link). The top result for his "download chrome" search via Edge looked ordinary enough. Except that when he clicked it the resulting domain was "GoogleOnline2018.com." The fake site isn't an exact copy of Google's own Chrome landing page, but looks genuine enough to fool people. The download itself is called "ChromeSetup.exe," but examining the digital signature reveals "Alpha Criteria Ltd." That's definitely not Google.

Brand new Win10 laptop. Attempt to install Chrome. Almost get owned with my very first action. Why is this still happening in 2018, @bing? Please explain. pic.twitter.com/uYJhu7xa9H

— Gabriel Landau (@GabrielLandau) October 25, 2018

Deceptive Site Ahead

Fortunately Landau was observant enough to detect something fishy was happening, but the way these deceptive ads are hijacking Bing is clever enough to fool the average user.

The malicious URL that Bing is happy to promote can't fool Google or Firefox. When I simply type the above URL into my Firefox browser I'm faced with a bold red page declaring "Deceptive Site Ahead" completely with details and an option to go back.

Chris Hoffman, EIC of How-To Geek was able to reproduce this error, and several users on Twitter have also complained about it. In his article he points out that the ad comes into rotation every few page refreshes. Because I can't obtain that result on a fresh Windows 10 install, I suspect it may be targeting users geographically (I live in Europe).

I notified Bing Ads of this issue, and since Landau's tweet went viral overnight, I have confidence the malicious ad will be removed from Bing Search within the next 24 hours.

But the real issue is that it keeps happening.

I searched the web for similar complaints and found an article from Bleeping Computer dated April 2018. The same type of hijack using Bing Ads from Edge, displayed as the top result, leading to a fake Chrome download that serves up some particularly nasty adware in its installer. The most noticeable difference was the domain name "NewChromeDownload.com."

And then again 21 days ago from this user on Reddit. You guessed it. Same procedure, same structure, different domain name.

And then again about 4 months ago.

There's a pattern here, and it's a disturbing one. How many people have been affected by these short-lived but recurring hijacks that Microsoft is letting through to millions of people? It's inexcusable that these types of ads aren't vetted properly, especially when the majority of browsers automatically know these sites are unsafe.

Isolated issues like this -- one search term in one browser with one search engine -- may not seem significant. But when looking at Windows 10 as a whole, things look considerably darker. Microsoft is letting devastating file-deleting bugs through its Windows 10 updates even after being warned by its team of Windows Insider testers. The update process is unreliable and cumbersome compared to operating systems like Ubuntu.

What You Can Do

If you must use Windows 10, go directly to Chrome.com to download Google's browser, or to Mozilla.org for Firefox. Commit those to memory or just open up Edge and browse directly to google.com. I also highly recommend installing a tracking blocker like DuckDuckGo. If you choose to use the Edge browser, remove Bing as your default search provider by following these steps.

At the very least, please do not use Bing to search for anything. Ever. You probably won't after reading this.

I'll update this article with any response from the Bing Ads team.

UPDATE: The Bing Ads Twitter account has removed the malicious ad and banned the account, saying "Hi Gabriel, protecting customers from malicious content is a top priority and we have removed the ads from Bing and banned the associated account. We encourage users to continue to report this type of content at https://bit.ly/2PZWZ1u so we can take appropriate action."

Is it a top priority? One can only hope Microsoft will be more vigilant going forward since this is a recurring problem with Bing.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonev...-want-malware/





File-Sharing Software on State Election Servers Could Expose Them to Intruders

A ProPublica analysis found election computer servers in Wisconsin and Kentucky could be susceptible to hacking. Wisconsin shut down its service in response to our inquiries.
Jack Gillum and Jeff Kao

Residents of Elkhorn, Wisconsin submitting their ballot in the voting machine for the 2018 state primary election. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

As recently as Monday, computer servers that powered Kentucky’s online voter registration and Wisconsin’s reporting of election results ran software that could potentially expose information to hackers or enable access to sensitive files without a password.

The insecure service run by Wisconsin could be reached from internet addresses based in Russia, which has become notorious for seeking to influence U.S. elections. Kentucky’s was accessible from other Eastern European countries.

The service, known as FTP, provides public access to files — sometimes anonymously and without encryption. As a result, security experts say, it could act as a gateway for hackers to acquire key details of a server’s operating system and exploit its vulnerabilities. Some corporations and other institutions have dropped FTP in favor of more secure alternatives.

Officials in both states said that voter-registration data has not been compromised and that their states’ infrastructure was protected against infiltration. Still, Wisconsin said it turned off its FTP service following ProPublica’s inquiries. Kentucky left its password-free service running and said ProPublica didn’t understand its approach to security.

The states’ reliance on FTP highlights the uneven security practices in online election systems just days before the midterm elections. In September, ProPublica reported that more than one-third of counties overseeing closely contested elections for congressional seats ran email systems that could make it easy for hackers to log in and steal potentially sensitive information.

Some states remain hampered by bureaucratic disagreements, or regard other needs as more pressing. If intruders were able to gain access to election-related server files, for instance, they could prevent people from registering to vote, compromise unofficial tallies or direct voters to the wrong polling place. Those actions could potentially sow chaos on Election Day and raise questions as to whether the vote was legitimate.

“FTP is a 40-year-old protocol that is insecure and not being retired quickly enough,” said Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington, D.C., and an advocate for better voting security. “Every communication sent via FTP is not secure, meaning anyone in the hotel, airport or coffee shop on the same public Wi-Fi network that you are on can see everything sent and received. And malicious attackers can change the contents of a transmission without either side detecting the change.”

The mere presence of superfluous services on a public server, such as FTP, raises the risk of a hacker gaining access to sensitive configuration details about the server, Hall said. "Unnecessary services like FTP," he said, can be used to cripple a server by bombarding it with traffic — known as a distributed denial of service attack — or allow hackers to break into other computers on the same network. Secure FTP services, or SFTP, which were introduced more recently, should be used instead, Hall said.

In March 2017, the FBI warned of “criminal actors” targeting FTP servers that allow access to anyone on the internet without a password. This year, the website DataBreaches.net said a security researcher discovered an FTP server was configured in a similar manner and accidentally exposed the details of more than 200,000 patients.

Using a list of internet addresses for websites run by each state’s election agency, ProPublica scanned them for open “ports,” or virtual doors, which allow any computer on the internet to access them. Those ports can reveal some of the software a server is running, such as a website or FTP.

The FTP server in Wisconsin required a password. Kentucky’s didn’t. In addition, ProPublica found Maine’s FTP service on the same internet address as a state website that directs voters to their local polling places. But Kristen Schulze Muszynski, a spokeswoman for the Maine secretary of state, said the FTP service ran on a computer server separately from the lookup tool. It “never jeopardized Maine’s election process, and at no time was voter data at risk of being manipulated,” she said.

Several other states appear to have open FTP ports that weren’t operating. In one of those states, West Virginia, Chief Information Officer David Tackett said FTP services are protected behind a firewall.

Cyberattacks on state election systems marred the 2016 campaign. For example, special counsel Robert Mueller charged 12 Russians this past July in connection with an unspecified breach that Illinois officials say was very likely an attack on its voter registration database that exposed the personal details of thousands of people. A hacker’s ability to alter unofficial or early voting results was “a very real threat” ahead of the 2016 election, former Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson testified in March before a Senate intelligence panel.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission revealed in September 2017 that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security notified it of an unsuccessful Russian hacking attempt the previous year that involved scanning for computer system vulnerabilities. Commission spokesman Reid Magney said the Russians did not scan the state’s “commercially-hosted agency websites,” including the commission’s site.

Major search engines like Google often prominently post voting results gathered automatically from state election commission sites. Magney said Wisconsin’s website ran an FTP service for years because the hosting provider, Cruiskeen Consulting, never turned it off. Cruiskeen is a mostly one-person operation that sometimes uses freelance consultants, according to its website.

Asked if Cruiskeen has ever alerted officials about suspicious activity or unauthorized access attempts, Magney said: “Cruiskeen does a lot of monitoring for unsuccessful login attempts and blocks them at the firewall. They also check the logs regularly for suspicious activity.” The same internet address previously hosted commercial websites like BoutiqueLiquidators.com.

Cruiskeen did not return phone calls or messages from ProPublica this week seeking comment. Magney said the owner is retiring soon, and the state plans to transfer the election-results website to a state-run computer system.

As of late Wednesday, Kentucky’s voter-registration server still allowed users to browse a list of files without a password. Even the names of the files contained clues that could conceivably help an intruder. For example, they indicated that Kentucky may use driver’s licenses on file in its motor vehicle software to verify voters’ identities.

Bradford Queen, a spokesman for Kentucky’s secretary of state, declined to say if running an FTP server was problematic. “We are constantly guarding against foreign and domestic bad actors and have confidence in the security measures deployed to protect our infrastructure,” he said.

“ProPublica’s claims regarding Kentucky’s website lack a complete understanding of the commonwealth’s full approach to security, which is multi-layered. Defenses exist within each layer to determine and block offending traffic.”

ProPublica’s Electionland project covers problems at the polls that prevent people from voting. If you experience or witness something on Election Day, let us know at https://www.propublica.org/electionland

Mike Tigas and Ken Schwencke contributed to this report.

Do you have access to information about election security problems that should be public? Email [email protected] Here’s how to send tips and documents to ProPublica securely.
https://www.propublica.org/article/file-sharing-software-on-state-election-servers-could-expose-them-to-intruders






Sen. Ron Wyden Introduces Bill That Would Send CEOs to Jail for Violating Consumer Privacy

The 'Consumer Data Protection Act' is a bill that would comprehensively overhaul internet privacy protections.
Karl Bode

Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has introduced a comprehensive new privacy bill he claims will finally address the lack of meaningful privacy protections for American consumers.

Wyden says his Consumer Data Protection Act is a direct response to the ocean of privacy scandals that have plagued the internet for the better part of the last decade.

The Senator’s proposal would dramatically beef up Federal Trade Commission authority and funding to crack down on privacy violations, let consumers opt out of having their sensitive personal data collected and sold, and impose harsh new penalties on a massive data monetization industry that has for years claimed that self-regulation is all that’s necessary to protect consumer privacy.

Wyden’s bill proposes that companies whose revenue exceeds $1 billion per year—or warehouse data on more than 50 million consumers or consumer devices—submit “annual data protection reports” to the government detailing all steps taken to protect the security and privacy of consumers’ personal information.

The proposed legislation would also levy penalties up to 20 years in prison and $5 million in fines for executives who knowingly mislead the FTC in these reports. The FTC’s authority over such matters is currently limited—one of the reasons telecom giants have been eager to move oversight of their industry from the Federal Communications Commission to the FTC.

“Today’s economy is a giant vacuum for your personal information—everything you read, everywhere you go, everything you buy and everyone you talk to is sucked up in a corporation’s database,” Wyden said in a statement. “But individual Americans know far too little about how their data is collected, how it’s used and how it’s shared.”

From Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal to Verizon getting busted covertly tracking wireless users around the internet, it has become clear there’s not much in the way of genuine accountability or transparency when it comes to cavalier treatment of user data.

From the wrist slap Equifax received for failing to protect the private data of 145 million Americans, to the SIM hijacking and location data scandals plaguing the wireless sector in recent years, meaningful government inquiries, investigation, and punishment are often lacking.

“It’s time for some sunshine on this shadowy network of information sharing,” Wyden said. “My bill creates radical transparency for consumers, gives them new tools to control their information and backs it up with tough rules with real teeth to punish companies that abuse Americans’ most private information.”

The problem is that big business lobbyists will likely line up in opposition to a bill that genuinely protects privacy, meaning that Wyden’s bill faces a steep uphill climb.

Individually the telecom, advertising, marketing, insurance, Silicon Valley tech, banking, and entertainment industries are lobbying juggernauts. Combined they’re incredibly difficult to overcome, consumer groups have warned.

Companies like Facebook and Verizon publicly insist they support meaningful privacy rules. In fact, a handful of Silicon Valley companies have recently been lobbying the Trump administration to craft new privacy legislation. But activists and consumer groups claim the industry’s more interested in undermining tougher privacy rules with their own, weaker proposals—than actually crafting meaningful ones.

For example, Facebook, Google, and Verizon collectively lobbied the GOP to kill modest but meaningful FCC privacy rules last year. They also worked in unison to scuttle scuttle state-level privacy rules in California, falsely claiming that such efforts would only “embolden extremists,” harm children, and somehow increase internet popups, according to an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The reality is that any privacy guidelines worth their salt will create informed, empowered consumers more likely to opt-out of data monetization schemes. Given that said opt outs would cost multiple industry billions in revenues, the motivation for their opposition to even the best-crafted reforms isn’t much of a mystery.

Still, consumer groups said Wyden’s proposal is a step in the right direction, even if battling an gauntlet of lobbyists intent on derailing it will surely prove to be challenging.

“We're very pleased to see the bill recognize that there are non-economic impacts to privacy violations and that those should be policed vigorously by the Federal Trade Commission,” Gaurav Laroia , lawyer for consumer group Free Press told Motherboard.

“Staffing up at that agency to actually be able to protect people's privacy and putting the onus on CEOs to make sure their products are safe is a necessary addition to the privacy debate,” he added.

Laroia suggested that while the lobbying opposition to meaningful privacy protections is massive, so too is the growing backlash from consumers tired of their privacy rights and personal data security being an afterthought. He pointed to recent Pew polling data that shows consumers have lost faith in companies’ ability to protect their data.

“People want additional protections,” he said. “The constant drumbeat of data breaches and people's rightful concerns over companies using that information to manipulate them has created an opening to get these important protections through.”
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/8xjwjz/sen-ron-wyden-introduces-bill-that-would-send-ceos-to-jail-for-violating-consumer-privacy





Court: Teen’s Driving Killed Someone, But he Can’t be Forced to Give Up Passcode

Florida appellate court finds that boy can invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege.
Cyrus Farivar

A Florida state appellate court has ruled that an inebriated teenager involved in a car crash that resulted in the death of another person cannot be compelled to provide a passcode to his iPhone 7—the boy can indeed invoke a Fifth Amendment privilege, protecting him against self-incrimination.

The October 24 ruling in G.A.Q.L. v. State of Florida before the 4th District appellate court runs against a previous ruling by a sister court in a case known as State of Florida v. Stahl.

In Stahl, which involved a man accused of taking "upskirt" photos in Sarasota, the court found in favor of the government and ordered the suspect to give up his password.

This district split—with two intermediate courts reaching different conclusions—now sets up a legal situation that could result in the Florida Supreme Court and, perhaps eventually, the Supreme Court of the United States, to rule definitively on the issue.

On the federal level, in 2012, the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals (which covers Florida) ruled that forced decryption did constitute a violation of a defendant's Fifth Amendment rights. In 2013, a federal judge refused to force a Wisconsin child-pornography suspect to decrypt his laptop. Overall, cases involving decryption are still relatively new and rare. The first known instance only dates back to 2007.

The decision by the 4th District was applauded by a number of attorneys, including Brett Max Kaufman of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"I think you might look at it as a turning of the tide," he told Ars.

“Right to remain silent”

As the Fourth District summarized, the case involves a minor (known as G.A.Q.L.) who was "speeding when he crashed." At the hospital, medical staff ran a blood alcohol content test and found that his measured level was a 0.086, which is over the legal limit.

Police obtained a search warrant for G.A.Q.L.'s car and found two iPhones. One belonged to a female passenger who survived the crash. She told police "that the group had been drinking vodka earlier in the day and that she had been communicating with the minor on her iPhone" over Snapchat and text messages.

The second phone—an iPhone 7—belonged to G.A.Q.L., and police obtained a warrant to search it. However, unable to execute this search, authorities then went to court seeking a judicial order that would have forced the minor to provide a passcode for the phone itself and also a password for the relevant iTunes account.

Investigators argued that they needed the iTunes password so that the phone's firmware could be updated prior to actually searching the phone. (The court record does not reflect what iOS version number was on the phone.)

Lawyers representing G.A.Q.L. argued that disclosing these passwords "violated his rights under the Fifth Amendment."

The panel of judges found this persuasive, dismissing "the foregone conclusion" exception to the Fifth Amendment. This legal doctrine posits that, if the government already knows the testimony that will be obtained, then the Fifth Amendment cannot be a shield.

As Ars has reported previously, forced decryption is far from settled law. As recently as August 21, a state appellate court in Indiana ruled that forcing a defendant to provide a passcode was, in fact, testimonial.

Meanwhile, a former Philadelphia police officer has remained in custody for more than three years for refusing to decrypt a seized hard drive that authorities believe contains child pornography.

“Incredibly important”

One attorney in private practice in Los Angeles who has written extensively about this issue, Dan Terzian, told Ars that this decision was "incredible." He wrote:

There [are] two ways to force someone to decrypt their phone: demanding the password or demanding the unlocked device. Both get you the same result. But they're technically different. And technicalities can matter in constitutional law. "You have the right to remain silent" is a bedrock of our constitutional and pop culture. And adding an asterisk to that—except you have to tell us your password—seems fundamentally counter to what the Fifth Amendment stands for. Stahl adds this password exception. And I think it's wrong for that.

As Terzian concluded: "G.A.Q.L. is incredibly important because it recognizes that this password exception does not and should not exist in our law."

Similarly, Brian Owsley—a law professor at the University of North Texas and a former federal magistrate judge—found this decision to be "better reasoned than Stahl."

But, he wondered, why was this legal showdown even necessary?

"I also wonder why the prosecution did not try to get records directly from the providers. In other words, they could have issued subpoenas for records from Snapchat and the text message provider," he emailed Ars. "Similarly, they could have sought the text messages from the surviving passenger. It is curious that they did not, especially from the providers who have no personal interest in the prosecution."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/court-teens-driving-killed-someone-but-he-cant-be-forced-to-give-up-passcode/




















Until next week,

- js.



















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