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Old 23-01-19, 07:38 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 26th, ’19

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January 26th, 2019




BitTorrent and Upfiring Face Off In File Sharing Race
Mike Dalton

TRON and BitTorrent have announced a rough release date for their highly anticipated file-sharing software, BitTorrent Speed. Formerly known as Project Atlas, this tool promises to enhance download speed through token incentives. On Thursday, January 17, BitTorrent announced that the software will be available by the summer, indicating that a long wait is coming to an end.

Today we are unveiling BitTorrent Speed, a new software that connects and rewards users with BitTorrent $BTT tokens. Read more about it on our blog. #niTROn2019 https://t.co/9NLuJzMtTr pic.twitter.com/S7r4pUUJzw

— BitTorrent Inc. (@BitTorrent) January 17, 2019


Upfiring Fires Up

Aside from the news of a summer release, BitTorrent’s announcement reveals almost no new information. However, the project’s impending release date has encouraged at least one competing service to step up its game. That project is called Upfiring, and over the past year, it has been emerging as a file sharing dApp on the Ethereum blockchain.

In an announcement that coincided with BitTorrent’s release date reveal, Upfiring stated that its own app is now usable, beating BitTorrent to the punch by several months. As of Thursday, Upfiring has launched its open beta, meaning that the app can now be used by the public.

Upfiring's Blockchain File-Sharing Dapp is Live in Open Beta: https://t.co/uJYnrVw1G2

— Upfiring (@UpfiringHQ) January 17, 2019


Upfiring’s compensation model incentivizes seeding in a slightly different way. Unlike BitTorrent Speed, Upfiring does not incentivize bandwidth dedication. Instead, users must spend tokens to decrypt the files that they download, and tokens spent on decryption go directly to seeders.

This is not as big an obstacle as it may seem: users can initially earn tokens by seeding files without decrypting them. Nevertheless, the app’s mandatory use of tokens introduces a significant barrier. BitTorrent Speed, by contrast, will make the use of tokens entirely optional, an approach that will likely carry more appeal.

To estimate the success of a project, market data is usually used as a measure, and Upfiring’s native UFR token is incredibly minor. UFR’s total coin supply is worth $1.3 million, putting it in the top 600 coins by market cap–not a particularly notable accomplishment, but one with some potential.

Although market data will not be available for BitTorrent’s BTT token until trading begins in late January, BTT will undoubtedly rank much higher than UFR. TRON acquired BitTorrent for $126 million, which should give a sense of the scale that BitTorrent Speed is operating on.

However, a coin does not need to be worth much to be useful on its own native platform, and usership rates can grow in spite of a coin’s low market cap. It is possible that Upfiring could indirectly benefit from BitTorrent’s publicity, especially if there are impatient crypto users who are craving file-sharing features.
https://unhashed.com/cryptocurrency-...-sharing-race/





Reddit Shuts Down SoccerStreams Discussion Following Copyright Complaints’
Bill Toulas

• Reddit complies with a DMCA notice, forcing moderators of pirating stream discussion to shut it down.
• The moderators have provided a temporary solution to the seizure, but it’s unlikely to hold for long.
• Similar shutdowns that occurred in Reddit last year, clearly indicate the social’s policy on the matter.

Reddit decided to shut down the “/r/soccerstreams” discussion on its platform, leaving its 420000 subscribers in disappointment. The discussion featured neat lists of domains and sources where people could watch football/soccer matches without paying a dime, and the popularity that is indicated by the number of its followers shows that there are many people out there seeking for up to date lists with working links. The subreddit, however, was destined to end soon, as piracy is not something that the US-based social news aggregation and discussion website put up with.

As the moderators pointed out to the subscribers of the particular subreddit, the Reddit administrators have ordered them to make changes to the thread otherwise it will get removed. The moderators decided to cease all user-related activity, as simply removing the links would result in new links getting posted and so on. The subreddit was not removed entirely, as it will now serve as the “home base” for the official Soccer Streams mod team. This means that it will be used as a noticeboard for news, updates, and announcements. They have even posted alternative ways for people to add live match links from now on. This is the full message posted by the moderators:

Soccerstreams subreddit

Obviously, the new subreddit that is given as a temporary solution for posting Premier League matches will also get banned soon, and Reddit is likely to enforce more permanent solutions to this matter rather than playing cat and mouse with their moderators. The other alternative path which is the Discord server is equally unlikely to stand the test of time, as anti-piracy policies are well established in that platform as well.

This is not the first time that Reddit is pressed to ban or shut down a subreddit following claims of copyright infringement. During 2018, they have banned “r/megalinks” as well as “/r/crackedsoftware” which had more than 244000 subscribers in the time of the shutdown. On all of these subreddits, as well as the “/r/soccerstreams” there was no actual content that infringed the claimed copyrights but only links to it. However, the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) law dictates that an online platform like Reddit is obliged to remove links to pirating domains following the submission of a relevant notice. If you want to take part in piracy-related discussions without breaking the Reddit rules, you can always hop to the “r/Piracy” subreddit and get your fix.
https://www.technadu.com/reddit-shut...plaints/55422/





The Economics of Streaming is Making Songs Shorter
Dan Kopf

Popular music is shrinking. From 2013 to 2018, the average song on the Billboard Hot 100 fell from 3 minutes and 50 seconds to about 3 minutes and 30 seconds. Six percent of hit songs were 2 minutes 30 seconds or shorter in 2018, up from just 1% five years before.

Take Kendrick Lamar. One of the world’s most popular musicians right now.

The average track length on Lamar’s breakout 2013 album good kid, m.A.A.d city is 5 minutes 37 seconds. All are 3 minutes 30 seconds or longer. On Lamar’s most recent album DAMN., the average song is 3 minutes and 57 seconds. DAMN. won the Pulitzer Prize for music, going to show that this trend isn’t necessarily lowering the quality of music.

It’s not just Lamar. The trend can be seen in albums of music’s biggest stars, like the rapper and singer Drake, perhaps pop music’s most dominant force.

Unlike Lamar, Drake’s albums are getting longer as his songs get shorter.

Kanye West’s tracks are also getting dramatically shorter. His 2016 album The Life of Pablo had eight tracks that were less than three minutes long, while on 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy there were only two.

The rappers Nicki Minaj’s and J. Cole’s albums follow the trend as well.

It’s not just popular rappers. Country songs are shrinking too. Eric Church and Jason Aldean have been nearly constant with the number of song on each of their albums, but their songs keep getting shorter and shorter.

Why are songs getting so much shorter? Streaming is one the most likely culprits.

Payments from music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music made up 75% all US music revenues in 2018, compared to just 21% in 2013. Streaming services pay music rights holders per play. Spotify doesn’t say the exact amount it pays artists for each stream, but reports suggest it is somewhere between $0.004 and $0.008. Every song gets paid the same. Kanye West’s 2010 five-minute opus “All Of the Lights” gets the same payment as West’s two-minute long 2018 hit “I Love it”.

“[T]here has never been this kind of financial incentive to make shorter songs,” tweeted Mark Richardson, the former editor of the music criticism site Pitchfork. Stuffing more diminutive songs into an album is simply more remunerative than having a bunch of long ones.

Still, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how much streaming has contributed to the recent shortening of songs. The length of pop songs had already been falling through the 1990s, before accelerating in recent years. Some music industry observers blame shortening attention spans—but there isn’t much rigorous evidence that our ability to focus has changed (paywall). Others believe that shorter songs may be a result of more consumer choice—songs need to be more compact and catchy to stand out in the crowd.

Then again, music has always changed with technology. Early phonographs could only hold about two to three minutes of music, so as a result, that was the length of the typical song from the 1920 to 1950s. The introduction of the LP record, and then the tape and the CD, made it possible to have longer songs, with each medium’s larger storage capacity. Now in the age of streaming, technology and economics seem to be sending us back towards brevity.
https://qz.com/1519823/is-spotify-making-songs-shorter/





The Mystery Tracks Being 'Forced' on Spotify Users
Jonathan Griffin

Mysterious musicians have cropped up on Spotify, racking up thousands of listens and (perhaps) hundreds of pounds. It's a phenomenon that experts say could indicate a security flaw.

But while Spotify denies that accounts have been hacked, the music streaming site has not explained in detail how the playlists of some users indicate they've "listened to" musicians that nobody's ever heard of.

They have names like Bergenulo Five, Bratte Night, DJ Bruej and Doublin Night. Apart from being musically unremarkable, they generally have a few things in common: short songs with few or no lyrics, illustrated with generic cover art, and short, non-descriptive song titles.

Interestingly, the bands also have little to no presence on the rest of the internet. At a time when social media plays a crucial role in connecting musicians and audiences, these artists have no fan pages, no concert listings, social media accounts or even photos of the actual musicians.

But somehow these mystery artists and a host of similar acts have snuck into people's Spotify listening playlists, in some cases racking up thousands of listens and prompting a number of users to speculate that their accounts had been hacked.

Many listeners (including this reporter) never actively searched for or played tracks by bands like Bergenulo Five, but found that their music ended up being logged in their listening history anyway.

The BBC asked Spotify for contact details for the artists in question. It declined, and all of our attempts to contact the bands were met with silence. But within a few days of our query, most of the mystery artists had disappeared from the music streaming site.

Some of the mystery artists who appeared - then disappeared - on Spotify

• Bergenulo Five
• Onxyia
• Cappisko
• Hundra Ao
• Dj Bruej
• Doublin Night
• Bratte Night
• Funkena

Do you know anything about them? Email BBC Trending.

'Mysterycore'

Bergenulo Five is a typical - and fairly popular - artist in what might be called the "mysterycore" genre. On Spotify they initially had two albums posted - "Sunshine Here" and "Hit It Now".

The cover art for each album was simple: the album title in black text over a bright colour. And each album was packed with more than 40 short songs each, most of them just a minute or two long, with no verses or choruses, and mostly one-word titles: Awake, Winter, Coming. Bergenulo Five songs had in total nearly 60,000 streams on Spotify by users of music tracking website Last FM.

Reddit, Twitter and Last FM's fan pages are rife with negative comments from listeners who have noticed that according to their account history, they've been "playing" Bergenulo Five songs.

"What is this spam?" wrote one.

"So annoying," added another.

On Reddit, Callum Dixon wrote: "The same Bergenulo Five keeps being played on my account and I've tried everything - changed my password, logged out of everywhere. I can't stop it!"

Dixon also happens to be a cybersecurity graduate who wrote a thesis on Spotify - and speaking to the BBC, he suggested that something called access tokens had something to do with the sudden spread of mysterycore tracks.

Access tokens

Access tokens are permissions granted when you use one website or social network to log into another site.

For instance, users can log into Spotify using their Facebook username and password. An electronic access token is granted which links the two accounts, and the method is generally secure.

"This worked brilliantly well, up until the point where the access tokens were breached," says Tim Mackey of security software company Black Duck.

That's a reference to a security problem announced by Facebook in September 2018. Initially the company said up to 50 million accounts were affected, and people who were potentially caught up in the breach were prompted to re-enter their login details.

Facebook said it cancelled all access tokens that might have been violated by the breach, thus keeping accounts secure.

But Mackey says that identifying exactly what was taken in the data breach is extremely complicated, and when it comes to cancelling the tokens, "you may end up with a certain small percentage that were missed".

Facebook insists that all affected tokens were cancelled, and said that they have no evidence that the attackers - who have not been identified - used the tokens to access Spotify or any other sites or apps before September.

In addition, other security experts have pointed out issues that Spotify users have had with reusing passwords on different sites.

Mysterycore artists began cropping up on Spotify in early October 2018, shortly after the access token attack was made public. However, many Spotify users only noticed that their accounts had been logging tracks by the mystery bands later, when the streaming site promoted a widget that allowed users to post a list of their most-listened-to tracks of the year. Some people noticed that bands that they had never heard of, much less listened to, somehow made their personalised list.

So how does a band with few fans and no digital footprint get their music on to Spotify in the first place?

It would have been fairly difficult until recently. Spotify was launched in 2008, and for most of the site's history, record labels and companies were responsible for getting songs uploaded. But in September 2018, the company relaxed its rules, allowing independent artists to upload tracks to the service directly.

And popular artists are eligible for royalties. Because there are several variables, it's difficult to calculate exactly how much one listen is worth, but one expert, Mark Mulligan of Midia Research, told BBC Trending radio that Bergenulo Five could have made about $500 to $600 (about £380 to £460) from 60,000 streams.

Spotify would not say whether it actually paid any money to the mystery artists, and did not give any information about who "forced" my account to play music from the Bergenulo Five and others.

"We take the artificial manipulation of streaming activity on our service extremely seriously," the company said in a statement. "Spotify has multiple detection measures in place monitoring consumption on the service to detect, investigate and deal with such activity.

"These artists were removed because we detected abnormal streaming activity in relation to their content."

Spotify denied that the mystery artists were linked to the Facebook access tokens breach, and underlined the statement from Facebook which said that no third-party accounts had been compromised.

But a spokesperson did not provide any further detail on who might have been behind the tracks or how they accessed user playlists. And so mysterycore artists like Bergenulo Five may remain - well, a mystery.
https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-46898211





Spotify Will Soon Let You Block Artists
Mehedi Hassan

Yes, it’s finally happening. Spotify seems to be testing a new feature for its app that will allow users to block any artist on the platform. The block button is a much-requested feature from Spotify users, which would allow you to block music from an artist on automatically curated playlists like Discover Weekly, your Daily Mixes, as well as things like global charts.

With an upcoming update, Spotify will let you block music from any artist you don’t like throughout the app. This means it will block music from that artist on your personal library, playlists, automatically curated playlists, charts, radios, and everything else. In fact, you won’t be able to manually play music from an artist you’ve blocked even if you wanted to — and you’d have to unblock an artist before you can play a certain track from them. Blocking an artist doesn’t block tracks they have featured on, however. The feature is going to be amazingly useful if you don’t like music from popular artists and always have to skip through their tracks on public playlists, algorithm-generated playlists and global charts. And you can block people like R. Kelly, too.

The new feature can be accessed from the “…” menu on an artist’s page, where you can click “Don’t play this artist” to stop playing music from an artist.

Spotify continues to say that blocking an artist “isn’t possible right now” as of yesterday. The company said back in 2017 that it has decided against offering a block button for artists after “serious” consideration. And it seems like that’s not the case anymore.

The new block button for artists still seems limited to a small number of users. I happen to be part of Spotify’s beta program on iOS, and thus I have access to the new feature, as well as a slightly tweaked design for artists pages. The new feature does not seem to be available on other platforms, including Spotify on the desktop and web. If you are on iOS, however, you will likely receive the feature sometime soon, as the company seems to have been testing it for a few months with a smaller group of users and the firm only started rolling out to a wider group sometime last week.
https://www.thurrott.com/cloud/socia...-block-artists





Disney is Already Losing Over $1 Billion in Streaming, and its Netflix Competitor has Yet to Launch

• Disney's stake in Hulu and its ownership of BAMtech led to a loss of more than $1 billion in the latest fiscal year.
• Direct-to-consumer losses should continue to surge as Disney ramps up Disney+, its new streaming service.

Alex Sherman

Disney isn't launching its new streaming service until later this year, but investors are already learning the economic challenges of the business.

The media company said in a filing on Friday that its investment in Hulu was the primary contributor to a $580 million loss in equity investments in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Additionally, Disney lost $469 million in its direct-to consumer-segment, largely from BAMtech, the streaming technology that powers ESPN+ and other over-the-top services.

That's more than $1 billion associated with streaming, the area where CEO Bob Iger is focusing his attention. Disney will debut its Disney+ offering later in 2019 to better compete with Netflix and Amazon.

Losses in streaming will likely surge in the early days of the venture, as content and technology costs spike, said Rich Greenfield, an analyst at BTIG. Disney has also yet to assume control of another 30 percent of Hulu, part of its $71.3 billion deal for the majority of 21st Century Fox. If Disney were to acquire Comcast's 30 percent stake in Hulu, that would further increase operating losses.

"Streaming requires a strong stomach for losses, especially as you are playing catch-up," Greenfield said in an interview.

Disney is hoping that, over time, millions of paying customers will subscribe to Disney+ for its new original content and library of Disney movies and TV shows. Pricing hasn't been disclosed. Netflix, which announced its quarterly earnings on Thursday, has 139 million global subscribers and just informed them that it's raising prices by 13 percent to 18 percent.

Disney announced its acquisition of a majority stake in BAMtech (formerly owned by Major League Baseball) in 2017, so its report for 2018 is the first to show consolidated earnings results for the company.

Streaming is a hard place to make money, even for Netflix. While the company consistently posts positive operating income, it has burned cash for years, raising new debt and spending the revenue it generates on new content. Netflix could spend well over $10 billion for movies and shows in 2019, according to some analyst estimates.

Disney's media networks, which include ESPN, ABC, Disney Channel and others, brought in $7.3 billion in operating income for 2018. Investors will be paying close attention to that number as streaming becomes a bigger focus and consumers are given another lower-cost entertainment option in the move away from traditional cable.

"I think Wall Street is at least accepting of the fact that we're doing this, that it's the most important thing we're doing," Iger told Barron's in an interview published earlier this month. "And while I won't say they're cheering us on, they're definitely giving us the room to prove that we can do it."
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/18/disn...n-started.html





Guess How Many Subscribers Plan to Cancel After Netflix's Rate Hike
Danny Vena

After Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) announced a price hike this week, the inevitable questions began, asking "How much is too much?". The streaming giant last increased the cost of a subscription in October 2017, and its customer base continued to soar. This latest round of increases begins immediately for new subscribers and will be rolled out to existing customers over the next several months.

To assess the potential for subscriber cancellations, independent news site Streaming Observer, which focuses on cord-cutting and streaming television, commissioned a survey of Netflix subscribers in the U.S. The purpose of the study was to "gauge [subscribers'] reaction to the latest round of price increases." Some of the findings might surprise you.

Of those surveyed, 71% said they would maintain a Netflix subscription after the recent price increase. This compares favorably with the 27% that said they "might" or "will definitely" cancel. Breaking that down even further, only about 3% said they "will definitely cancel," while about 24% said they "might."

Among those who plan to continue with Netflix, about 61% don't plan to make any changes, while 10% said they planned to downgrade to a lower-priced plan.

A somewhat surprising finding of the survey is that at least some customers are interested in an ad-supported version of Netflix, whereas in the past, users were adamant that they would cancel if the company added advertising, according to the report.

When asked if they would consider a discounted, ad-supported version of Netflix, 35% said "No discount is enough" to consider watching advertising. The remainder were widely split on how much of a discount they would require to tolerate watching commercials -- 15% said they'd want the service for free, 8% needed a 75% discount, 29% wanted a 50% discount, and 13% would require 25% off in order to put up with ads.

Chris Brantner, founder of Streaming Observer, addressed the issue in a statement to The Motley Fool:

“[An] interesting point here is that people are expressing interest in an ad-supported model. In the past when people thought Netflix was going to start playing commercials, subscribers flipped out. However, as prices continue to rise, it might be worth Netflix's while to look into potential ad revenue that could be generated on a cheaper plan.”

Much ado about nothing

With 27% of those surveyed at least considering cancellation due to the price hikes, it might initially sound like Netflix has made a grave error, but that's probably not the case.

Brantner said that people are typically unwilling to admit they'll tolerate price hikes. "When Netflix has raised prices and subscribers expressed outrage, analysts projected the number of people who'd actually follow through was only between 3-4%, making the price increase quite profitable."

That view is supported by UBS analysts. Netflix instituted the first of two $1 price increases in May 2014, with the second taking effect in October 2015. Existing subscribers were grandfathered into their existing price plan for two years. In May 2016, those subscribers were about to get hit with a $2 per month price increase, with the cost rising from $7.99 to $9.99.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/guess...000100738.html





Netflix in Advanced Talks to Join Major Hollywood Lobbying Group
Steven Overly

Netflix is in advanced talks to join the Motion Picture Association of America as the streaming video giant rapidly expands the number of original television series and feature films it is producing around the globe, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.

The addition would mark the first time an internet-based service will join the 97-year-old trade association, which represents six legacy Hollywood studios. The move will likely surprise many observers as the traditional media and tech industries have a longstanding and politically hostile feud over copyright protections.

But MPAA would in many ways be a natural fit for Netflix, which has dramatically expanded its production arm in recent years. The streaming service now creates hundreds of television programs and movies each year in markets around the globe, distributing them to a growing subscriber base that now includes nearly 140 million paid streaming customers.

In that way, Netflix and its policy issues have begun to resemble the legacy Hollywood studios that make up MPAA's existing membership, including Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Pictures, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Twentieth Century Fox, Universal Studios and Warner Bros. Entertainment.

The company has also been reorienting its public policy strategy, in part to contend with global regulators as it pushes aggressively into Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

Netflix recently hired Dean Garfield, the outgoing CEO of the Information Technology Industry Council, to lead its global public policy team from Amsterdam. Before taking the reins at ITI in 2009, Garfield spent more than four years as executive vice president and chief strategy officer at MPAA.

But Netflix's alignment with the tech sector, particularly in Washington, made joining MPAA seem unlikely. MPAA, for instance, has argued that digital piracy threatens its members' businesses and that internet firms fail to adequately police illegal activity on their platforms, a direct swipe at Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit and others shielded by the United States' liberal content moderation laws.

Since 2017, Netflix and fellow internet giant Amazon have advocated for anti-piracy measures alongside MPAA members and a coalition of other content creators through the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment.

The online streaming service also departed the Internet Association this month, as POLITICO first reported, exiting one of Silicon Valley's most prominent voices in Washington. Netflix first joined the trade group in 2013, in part to align with other internet companies in the fight to preserve net neutrality.

The addition of a streaming service to MPAA, however, would reflect the broader reality of the entertainment industry that's catering to consumers who binge-watch TV shows and take in movies from their sofas.

Bringing companies like Netflix into the fold has been a goal for MPAA CEO Charles Rivkin, who took over the association in September 2017, The Information previously reported. Rivkin served as ambassador to France and Monaco and assistant secretary of State under President Barack Obama.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/...-group-1101703





Hulu Is Getting Cheaper… for Some People
Dave Parrack

There’s good and bad news for Hulu users, and it all depends what tier you’re on. For those on the lowest tier, watching shows with ads, Hulu is getting cheaper. However, for anyone subscribed to Hulu + Live TV, the price is increasing instead.
Hulu Drops One Price and Raises Another

Hulu is dropping the price of its entry level streaming tier from $7.99/month down to $5.99/month. This tier is supported by ads, hence the low asking price. Hulu is promising not to increase the number of ads to make up any shortfall from the drop in price.

Hulu (No Ads), which removes the ads, will remain at its current price of $11.99/month. However, Hulu + Live TV, which adds live news, sports, and entertainment channels to the mix, is increasing in price from $39.99/month to $44.99/month.

In its press release announcing the price changes, Hulu spells out how its streaming service has improved over the last 12 months. In terms of its lowest tier, Hulu now boasts 85,000 TV episodes, and thousands of movies, some of which are Hulu Originals.

Hulu also boasts of having added a dozen popular live TV channels to Hulu + Live TV. This includes The CW, Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet, and ABC News. It’s important to note, however, that Hulu has competition in this area, especially from YouTube TV.
When Netflix Goes High, Hulu Goes Low

For new Hulu subscribers, this new pricing will go into effect on February 26. It’s the same date for existing subscribers too, who will see the price they pay go up or down (depending on what tier they’re on) the first time they’re billed after February 26.

This comes just days after Netflix put its prices up again. We’re guessing the timing isn’t coincidental, and that Hulu announced this now for maximum impact. The problem is that, Hulu is only available in the U.S. and Japan, so the rest of the world will stick with Netflix.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/hulu-g...r-some-people/





NutAlone Euro Streamer Plans to Fill Cracks in Market

The new OTT service initiated by Zentropa, REinvent Studios, TrustNordisk, will have a soft launch at Berlin with around 75 titles.
Annika Pham

Scandi brands Zentropa, REinvent and TrustNordisk are launching NutAlone, a new streamer of European films and TV dramas.

Rikke Ennis, CEO of Copenhagen-based packaging, sales and financing company REInvent Studios, has spent the last couple of years conceptualizing NutAlone with her former TrustNordisk colleagues and Zentropa CEO Anders Kjærhauge.

Their idea was to dust off titles left on shelves by distributors and bring them out to the world digitally, while helping rights holders to maximize revenues.

“Having worked in the distribution biz for over two decades, having been to all the festivals and tried to get the best arthouse films to the world, I’ve realized how complicated it is,” says Ennis.

“If you have Lars von Trier or Thomas Vinterberg, the whole world is interested, but with smaller films, even those selected at festivals, you will sell five-to-eight territories max. The rest of the world will remain available as they simply aren’t big enough for distributors to put an MG and invest in P&A spend.”

The nascent direct-to consumer streamer, backed by the Creative Europe Media Program and the Danish Film Institute, is set to stand out from other VOD services in two ways: its DRM (digital rights management) system makes it possible for rights holders and sales agents to select territories available or go global. At the same time, thanks to its host system, any website or media outlet with a fan base can embed a link to the platform and make the titles available directly from their website, thereby enhancing audience engagement in European content around the world.

For Ennis, the new digital service is a win-win proposition for the indie European film community. Against a 10% user-fee, rights holders can upload their films directly on the platform, set the cost of single transactions, have a better revenue control and understanding of consumer behavior. Depending on producers’ decision whether to activate the service or not, sales agent can go ahead with the classic territory-by-territory licensing model. Consumers on the other hand will get better access to old and new European titles, for the cost of a normal T-VOD fee of around €4-€5 ($5-$6).

As importantly, the platform is aimed at curbing illegal downloading.

“We want to fight piracy, activate films not sold abroad, give the power back to the rights holders, and show the world that there is an alternative to global distribution, without being a threat to the traditional financing and distribution model,” adds Ennis.

Besides Zentropa, TrustNordisk and REinvent Studios, SF Studios has agreed to make its library available to NutAlone. Other Nordic rights holders should join the venture. Ennis said she is in talks with several sales agents, members of the Europa International sales consortium, as well with A festivals.

“Festivals will be key to create a momentum on selected films and set word of mouth in motion,” continues the Scandi sales executive who envisages certain film rights being available soon after a festival premiere.

Ennis will attend the European Film Market Horizon Program on Feb. 11 to share her insight on industry trends and discuss NutAlone.
https://variety.com/2019/film/festiv...et-1203113799/





The Smart TV Crapware Era Has Already Begun
Chris Hoffman

Geeks often ask for dumb TVs. But, as the CTO of Vizio recently explained, smart TVs are cheaper than dumb TVs. TVs are so cheap that manufacturers make their profit by tracking your viewing habits and selling ads.

Why Smart TVs Are Cheaper Than Dumb TVs

You’d think a dumb TV would be cheaper than a smart TV. After all, a dumb TV wouldn’t need the processing power and specialized software found on a smart TV. It could just act as a panel (like a computer monitor) and let you hook up devices via HDMI.

So why is every TV becoming a smart TV?

The Verge talked to Vizio CTO Bill Baxer at CES 2019. He spilled the beans:

“So look, it’s not just about data collection. It’s about post-purchase monetization of the TV.

This is a cutthroat industry. It’s a 6-percent margin industry, right? I mean, you know it’s pretty ruthless. You could say it’s self-inflicted, or you could say there’s a greater strategy going on here, and there is. The greater strategy is I really don’t need to make money off of the TV. I need to cover my cost.”

This isn’t all bad. He goes on to explain that Vizio is investing in its old TVs and updating them with new software. For example, Vizio TVs going back to 2016 will be receiving AirPlay support. And advertising is just one part of the business model, which also includes money from movie and TV show rentals initiated from the TV.

Automatic Content Recognition Tracks What You Watch

If you never use your smart TV’s software, you might think it isn’t tracking you. You use a set-top box or streaming stick like a Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV, Chromecast, Android TV, PlayStation 4, or Xbox One. So your smart TV’s built-in software can’t track you—right?

Wrong. Modern smart TVs use a technique called “automatic content recognition,” or ACR. When you watch something on any device plugged into the TV—yes, even if you have a device plugged in via HDMI—the TV captures some pixels from whatever you’re watching and uploads them to the TV manufacturer’s servers. The servers can match that to a movie or TV show. The TV manufacturer now knows what you’re watching, and it can sell that data to marketers and advertisers.

This works with any device plugged into the TV, whether you’re watching cable TV, OTA channels with an antenna, or digital streams on Netflix via a streaming box.

For example, advertisers can purchase this data to get a better idea of how many people are watching their advertisements. This data can be linked to your IP address, so an advertiser may know if you saw an advertisement on TV and then purchased the product in the ad on your computer or phone.

Smart TVs Do Warn You, Kind Of

Smart TVs do warn you and ask permission, in general. They may ask to track your TV watching to provide better recommendations or something vague like that. You can generally disable the tracking if you want to. But it can be confusing.

For example, to disable this stuff on my Vizio TV, I had to turn off “Smart Interactivity.” That’s an awfully misleading name and doesn’t sound like a feature that will track my TV viewing habits; instead, it sounds like something you’d want.

Vizio may pay up to $17 million to settle a lawsuit accusing it of tracking the viewing habits of Vizio TV owners without proper disclosure. Modern smart TVs will generally ask you whether you want to enable this when you set it up, although most users will quickly click through these messages and permit them.

It’s also worth noting that this only works if the TV is connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. If you never connect your smart TV to the Internet, it won’t be able to upload this data—but some TV features won’t work, and it won’t get updates with new features like AirPlay, either.

What About Crapware?

This is the same sort of business model found in inexpensive Windows laptops and Android phones. The race to the bottom has made the hardware so cheap that manufacturers have to make money in another way rather than just on the purchase.

For PCs, it’s “crapware,” which is additional software that comes preinstalled on the PC. PC manufacturers are paid to install this junk. Crapware includes free trials for antivirus products that nag you to pay up so that something bad doesn’t happen to your PC.

Modern smart TV manufacturers gather data about what you watch, sell ads, and earn a cut when you rent digital movies and TV shows.

Of course, those aren’t the only revenue streams. Smart TV manufacturers may be paid to preinstall TV service apps and put them up front and center. Some TVs remotes have dedicated buttons for Netflix and other services—those services have generally paid money to get on that remote, too.

Even Many Streaming Boxes Are Similar

Think you’re safe because you’ve disconnected your TV from the Internet and use a streaming box? Think again.

Roku has a similar business model, and it also accepts money from streaming services to place dedicated, physical buttons for services like Netflix and Hulu on its remotes. There are even Roku remotes out there with dedicated buttons for media services like Rdio, which no longer exist.

That Roku streaming box you purchased has advertising, too. As Roku CEO Anthony Wood told The Verge in 2018, Roku makes money from advertising and video content, not hardware sales:

“We certainly don’t make enough money to support our engineering organization and our operations and the cost of money to run the Roku service. That’s not paid for by the hardware. That’s paid for by our ad and content business.”

And yes, unless you disable this feature, Roku also tracks what you watch and uses the data to sell ads.

TVs Are a Conduit For Tracking, Advertising, and Media Sales

That’s why it’s so difficult to buy a dumb TV. Manufacturers get enough money up front to cover the cost of the TV, but they aren’t making much profit from selling that hardware. They make money from tracking your TV viewing habits, selling advertisements, and earning a commission off digital media purchases and rentals you make on the TV.

If you opt out of tracking and never use any of the media apps on the TV itself, that’s fine. They make enough money from other people that they can afford not to make any additional money from people like you. It’s all built into their revenue model.

It’s hard to complain, too. People love cheap TVs, and it’s clear most people don’t want to pay extra for TVs without built-in tracking features. After all, you can always disable the tracking anyway—if you know what you’re doing.
https://www.howtogeek.com/401666/the...already-begun/





Google Says Data is more like Sunlight than Oil, One Day after Being Fined $57 Million Over its Privacy and Consent Practices
Shona Ghosh and Jake Kanter

• Google's chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, said on Tuesday that data is more like sunlight than oil.
• It's an upbeat twist on the phrase "data is the new oil," which implies information is finite.
• Porat said Google was using data for positive developments, like diagnosing breast cancer.
• Her comments at the World Economic Forum came one day after Google was hit with a $57 million fine by French authorities over its data-collection practices.

Google wants to popularize a more upbeat way of describing data: It's more like sunlight than oil.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday morning, Google's chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, said that "data is more like sunlight than oil," adding, "It is like sunshine — we keep using it, and it keeps regenerating."

It's a twist on the well-known phrase "data is the new oil," meaning the world's most valuable resource is information rather than petroleum.

Like the oil barons who preceded them, Silicon Valley titans such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon have risen quickly to profit from this new resource and even control its flow. And in another echo of history, regulators are eyeing the industry.

Porat isn't the first to try to reframe the economics of data. Like others, she argued that the oil analogy implies that data is a finite resource.

And no doubt Google would prefer to avoid any direct comparison to oil barons.

Porat pointed to the way Google uses data for good, such as its researchers developing an algorithm to detect the spread of breast cancer.

Her comments came one day after Google faced its first major test under Europe's new privacy rules, called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.

France's data regulator fined the firm $57 million on Monday, saying it didn't properly explain what it does with people's data or obtain the proper consent for targeting ads.

It's the first signal that the new rules could prove to be a major financial headache for Silicon Valley's tech giants.

Porat didn't directly address the fine but did praise the GDPR. US regulators are considering implementing similar federal privacy rules.

"We support privacy laws in the US," she said. "Trust is paramount."
https://www.businessinsider.com/goog...million-2019-1





Why Free Software Evangelist Richard Stallman is Haunted by Stalin’s Dream
Jayadevan PK

More than 30 years ago, Richard Stallman quit a doctorate program at the MIT to start the GNU Project, a free software operating system. Not only has he been an uncompromising purveyor of free software, but he also founded the free software movement, which now has thousands of volunteers and many more supporters across the world.

So when Stallman turned up to deliver a talk in Mandya, a small town about 100 kilometres from Bengaluru, hundreds of students and a few teachers turned up.

“I’ve been following his work for the last 17 years,” Vishwa Kiran, assistant professor at BMSIT, tells me on the sidelines of the talk organised by the Free Software Movement-Karnataka. Kiran had just bid Rs 6,500 (about three times the selling price) to buy a stuffed baby Gnu at an auction conducted by Stallman himself. He’s travelled nearly 100 kilometres to listen to the talk on a Sunday evening. Such is Stallman’s appeal.

Despite his eccentricities, and views that some might consider extreme, Stallman the idealist, the ultimate free software evangelist, is a crowd-puller even in small-town India.

It isn’t always easy to follow in his footsteps. He doesn’t use Netflix or Uber, prefers cash or bitcoins over credit cards, and does not have a mobile phone, let alone a Facebook or Google account. These companies spy on their users and we shouldn’t let them do it, he argues.

In his talk, Stallman touched upon why this is dangerous as he tries to get a whole generation of young engineers to follow the path of free software. We made a trip to Mandya to cover his talk on Sunday. In the talk, which lasted more than an hour, Stallman launched into a scathing critique of big tech companies. Edited excerpts:

On companies spying on users

Most non-free software, as far as we can tell, spies on the user. This is not a rare exception that would be shocking. What is shocking is that non-free software comes from an industry with no conscience (and) is ready to spy on people whenever it gets the chance. One example is Amazon’s eBook reader… it reports everything the user does to Amazon’s service. It sends the title of the book, so even if the user got the book from someplace other than Amazon, it still knows the user is reading that book and it sends the page number. It knows about how the user progresses through the book. If the user highlights any text or enters any note, those are sent to Amazon’s service. Total surveillance. This is not the only example.

All the five successful non-free operating systems spy on the user. I am talking about Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, and Chrome. Each one spies and sends information about the user in different ways. The applications spy on users too.

On popular Android apps

An investigator studied 1,000 most popular Android apps, checking for one particular kind of spying that is easy to detect without the source code. The investigator could not get the source code, of course. There are many ways for a program to spy, but there is one way that the investigator could detect. The person found that of the paid apps, 60% were spying, and of the gratis apps, 90% were spying. Of course, all of them were non-free software. I can say most non-free programs, based on available measurements, spy on users.

On streaming and transportation apps

Spying is especially bad. It is especially bad for streaming apps and transportation apps. If you look at streaming apps such as Spotify and Netflix, they generally require the user’s identification and then they make a dossier about each user with a list of what that user has listened to or watched. This threatens human rights. We must not allow this kind of dossier to be collected. The transportation apps do the same kind of thing. For instance, Uber, to get an Uber car, the user must identify herself and then Uber makes a dossier of everywhere that user goes. We cannot allow the systematic tracking of people’s movements because that’s just like tracking what people look at or watch or listen to – they threaten human rights. They are incompatible with a free society. We have to put an end to those forms of tracking people.

On smart devices

Nowadays, it has become customary to design products for people to carry or put in their homes that report about the user to the manufacturer. The first one I found out about was Fitbit. It records how the user moves, if the user is walking or running, and it sends the data to the manufacturer, which offers to sell that data to the user. What nerve that company has to say that we will sell you your own data?! This is the internet of stings, where the way the user talks to the product is going through the manufacturer’s server. That is what they always do nowadays, which means all commands that the user gives the manufacturer knows, and the manufacturer knows the results as well. Constant spying. There is a home security camera that transmits video to you wherever you are through the manufacturer’s server. It used to be that the owner of the product could watch directly, connect to it directly, but then the manufacturer changed the software so that users have to connect through the manufacturer’s server after making an account. And I suppose that they have to identify themselves to do that. Since the manufacturer’s server can watch, I am sure they are saving the videos all the time.

There is also a sex toy that connects over the internet and allows some other person to send commands to it. This could be an enjoyable feature in some circumstances, but the communication goes through the manufacturer’s server and I suppose that the other user has to make an account. It has no right to know that. It sees all commands too and the results, so it is spying on everything. I saw one of those in a store and I immediately said, “Ah! That is to spy on people.” That was just a suspicion, it was not proved, but later on, somebody found proof and not only that, the physical product was designed for spying because they put in a thermometer. The users do not need a thermometer. What would you do with that? The users probably do not even know it is there, but with the thermometer, the manufacturer can tell when the product is in contact with the human body. It could probably also tell how the product is in contact with the human body, I suspect. So the sex toy was designed to spy on the people using it.
On digital restrictions management (DRM)

There is another nasty thing about this system of communication through the manufacturer’s server. If the manufacturer decides that that server is not profitable, it will switch the server off and then the people who bought the product will not be able to talk to it anymore. Several companies have done this. There is the functionality of refusing to function, called DRM (digital restrictions management), or digital shackles. When a product is designed to stop people from doing things, it is totally malicious. My rule is I will not use any product that was designed to restrict the user unless I have exactly what is needed at my disposal at that moment to break the shackles.

Some users were reading a book on Amazon Kindle when they saw it suddenly disappear and they looked around. The book was not there anymore. What was the book that they erased? It was Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell! There was a lot of criticism. So Amazon said it would never do this again unless ordered to by the state. If you have read 1984, which you should, that promise will not be very comforting because it is about a totalitarian state that burned books it did not like. It was just something Amazon could say to turn off the criticisms. A few years later, Amazon resumed remotely erasing books without even an order from the state.

On software backdoors

We know a few other backdoors. iOS has a backdoor to remotely erase an app. Apple can remotely erase any app or perhaps it just irrevocably deactivates the app’s equivalent. Android has an even more powerful backdoor. Google can remotely erase any app and forcibly install any app. This backdoor is located in Google Play. You may have heard people saying that Android is free software. Some of the components are free software as Google releases them, but some components such as Google Play are not free ever at all, and that is where the backdoor is.

A backdoor in a driverless car could be extremely dangerous. You could get into the car and tell it to take you to the train station but instead, because its backdoor received the command, it would take you to the secret police torture centre. I am sure that is what would happen in China and in Saudi Arabia, it might take you to the secret police dismemberment centre. What about India? What about the United States? Can we be confident that this will not happen in those countries? Not me. You cannot trust your car if it is self-driving unless software in it is free. By the way, remote-controlled software for cars has already been developed. This is not just hypothetical. That software has been tested. And as for driverless taxis, you can only trust them if the car cannot tell who you are. So you cannot possibly ever trust a driverless Uber car because Uber insists on knowing who you are.

On subscription software

Another malicious functionality I should mention is subscriptions. About 20 years ago you would simply have installed software on your computer and run it. Nowadays, the software requires users to get a subscription and identify themselves. That includes Microsoft Office. It includes a lot of software that artists use. So this means the chains are getting tighter. Another malicious functionality is addictiveness. Many non-free programs are designed to manipulate users psychologically so they get hooked and they have to keep using it. This is often found in games. Facebook does it too. If the program were free, we could modify it to be less addictive and then you would be able to use it as much as you want to, as much as you really think you should, instead of having to fight against yourself to stop.

On Apple and censorship

Apple was the pioneer of censoring apps. The user of the iPhone, for the first time in a generally usable computer, could not freely install the applications of her choice. The person was limited to installing apps approved by Apple from its App Store. Apple practised this censorship power arbitrarily based on its own commercial interests and political stances until 2017. Then, China ordered Apple to begin blocking VPN applications because those can be used to get through the great firewall, and Apple discovered it could not disobey China’s order. This was because Apple had given itself the power of censorship and China knew that, so Apple could not deny. If users were able to install whatever programs they wished, then Apple would have had an excuse: ‘China, you know that we always want to make you happy, but in this case, we cannot. We have no control over what programs users install in their iPhones. We are unable to stop them. Please forgive us.’ But because Apple had arrogantly taken the power to censor, China knew it and Apple was compelled to censor for China because of its own wrongdoing in the past.

Then, there are universal backdoors. A backdoor is universal if by using the backdoor it is possible to remotely force changes in the code itself. That backdoor can do anything whatsoever to the poor user. The user is completely helpless under the power of whoever can force software changes. Windows has a universal backdoor. Microsoft has the power to forcibly change the code in a machine that is running Windows and, therefore, it owns that machine. Microsoft has owned all the machines that have run Windows, starting with Windows XP, because that is the first version where we know the universal backdoor existed. All the users are at Microsoft’s mercy.

There is also a universal backdoor in Amazon (Kindle) and in almost every model of the portable phone ever made, except perhaps for some old analogue models from decades ago. The portable phone has a processor called the modem processor, which talks to the radio network, and in almost all portable phones it also talks to the microphone and to the GPS. The software in it is always non-free because that processor is secret and we do not know how to write any software for it. If you think you can get your privacy back by turning it off, guess what? There is no off switch. Mobile phones do not have an off switch. Instead, they have a button to request the telephone to be so kind as to switch itself off. Once they converted into a listening device, they also changed the code to handle pushing that button, so it pretends to switch off, but really it continues running, listening, and transmitting.

Meanwhile, there is another surveillance thing that the phone does. Every few minutes, it sends a signal saying, “Here I am, here I am.” The reason for this is so the phone network can tell which tower to use to route communications to the phone. The original reason for this was honest, but it has the effect that the network follows the movements of every phone and through triangulation, it can determine the phone’s location very precisely.

If you are carrying a mobile phone, it is always tracking your movements and it could have been modified to listen to the conversations around you. I call this product Stalin’s dream. What would Stalin have wanted to hand out to every inhabitant of the former Soviet Union? Something to track that person’s movements and listen to the person’s conservations.

Fortunately, Stalin could not do it because the technology didn’t exist. Unfortunately for us, now it does exist and most people have been pressured or lured into carrying around such a Stalin’s dream device, but not me. I am suspicious of new digital technology. I expect it to have new malicious functionalities. It has happened so many times that I have learned to expect this, so I have always checked before I start using some new digital technology. I asked to find out what is nasty about it and I found out these two things. It was something like 20 years ago, and I decided it was my duty as a citizen to refuse, regardless of whatever convenience it might offer me. To surrender my freedom in this way was failing to defend a free society. This is why I do not have a portable phone. I refuse to carry a portable phone. I never have one and unless things change, I never will. I do use portable phones, lots of different ones. If I needed to call someone right now, I would ask one of you, “Could you please make a call for me?” If I am on a bus and it is late and I need to tell somebody that I am going to arrive late, there is always some other passenger in the bus who will make a call for me or send a text for me. Practically speaking, it is not that hard.

On Netflix

It spies on the user and builds a dossier of what the user watches. It puts on digital shackles. The user is supposed to agree not to make copies and share them, not to lend the one and only copy to somebody else. If you have agreed to a contract like that, that does not excuse acting that way. You must not be a jerk. Even if you promise somebody else you would be a jerk, you still must not act like a jerk. I do not want to make an agreement knowing that I would later be morally obliged to break it. I would rather reject it in advance and that is what I do. I check these things. I have never knowingly agreed to a contract with these requirements. I want to make sure I never accidentally agree to one.

There is another nasty thing that Microsoft does to the users of Windows. When it discovers a security flaw in Windows, before fixing it, it informs the US government’s spy agencies, so that they can enter the computers of users of Windows. Do you think the government of India should use Windows? Obviously not. In fact, nobody who has any sense would use Windows if the user is applying that sense and judgment to the question. You know about this or the other nasty things it does, you would say no. We know this in the case of Windows because of an article that reported on this. Other companies could be doing the exact same thing and we do not know.
https://factordaily.com/richard-stallman-india/





EU's Antitrust Cop Lays Groundwork for More Tech Scrutiny
Kelvin Chan

Silicon Valley's notorious nemesis, Margrethe Vestager, plans to end her term as the European Union's antitrust enforcer this year with a bang, laying out a long-term plan to intensify scrutiny of the world's big tech companies.

As the EU's competition commissioner, Vestager is arguably the world's most important tech regulator. Since 2014, she has slapped Google with eye-popping multibillion-dollar antitrust penalties, ordered Apple and Amazon to pay back taxes and fined Facebook over its WhatsApp acquisition — flagship enforcement cases that have struck fear into Silicon Valley while drawing attention in Washington.

Now, in her final year in office, the 50-year-old Danish politician is laying the groundwork for a new phase of regulation beyond the end of her term in October.

She's planning a report meant to guide EU competition policies in the era of digitization. Feedback from companies, business groups and experts shows many see the need for more regulation and when it's published in March, the report by three expert advisers will reflect the need for new or tougher rules, she told The Associated Press in a recent interview.

"The most important thing is that the majority of input is pro-enforcement," Vestager said during one of her frequent visits to Copenhagen from her Brussels base. The digital technology industry can no longer be allowed to shape itself, she added. "We are way beyond that."

It's unclear yet what shape the new enforcement will take but it may not bode well for the big U.S. technology companies that have landed in Vestager's crosshairs.

Vestager has cultivated a down-to-earth image — she likes to knit elephants during meetings — that belies her formidable powers of enforcement.

She opened three antitrust cases against Google, including one that resulted in a record 4.3 billion euro ($5 billion) fine for forcing cellphone makers to use the internet giant's software on Android phones. Another 2.4 billion euro ($2.8 billion) penalty was punishment for manipulating shopping search results. She aims to wrap up a probe before her term ends of whether Google blocked rivals from its Adsense ad service.

Vestager ordered Apple to pay back up to 13 billion euros ($15 billion) in back taxes from Ireland. Apple CEO Tim Cook called it "total political crap" and President Donald Trump referred to her as the "tax lady" who "really hates the U.S."

The EU competition commissioner, with a 900-strong staff, is unusually powerful in the Brussels bureaucracy because it can enforce bloc-wide rules, giving it the power to take on countries and companies. Other departments typically share regulatory duties with national governments. Vestager's job includes approving or rejecting mergers and investigating cartels and antitrust behavior. She also makes sure EU states don't give tax breaks to individual companies that are not available to other corporations — legitimate business strategy in the U.S. but illegal in Europe.

A lot of attention is now falling on data, the commodity that drives the digital economy.

Information collected by web browsers, apps, smartphones and other devices can be enormously valuable to companies because they can provide insight about, for example, an individual's buying habits and movements. Data can power artificial intelligence or be used to show targeted advertisements. Vestager is concerned that a small group of companies could corner the market and abuse their power.

She started confronting the problem with an informal probe launched last year into whether online shopping giant Amazon is using data to gain an edge on third party merchants, who are both its customers and rivals. She hopes to decide within six months whether to open a formal investigation.

Many people still aren't sure how to take control of their personal information. New European privacy rules introduced last year were a start, obliging companies to be more transparent with customers about what they do with people's data. But consumers are often still overwhelmed by detailed consent forms for third-party tracking on each new site they visit or the fine print of an app's service terms.

Vestager, a member of a small left wing political party who believes in free markets, said the private sector can play a role in finding solutions.

"I think you need products that will help you exercise your rights. Independent digital assistants that will make sure that your privacy settings are maintained no matter where you go. That kind of stuff," she said.

Vestager, whose party was founded by her great-grandfather, was Denmark's deputy prime minister and economy minister before taking up her post in Brussels in late 2014. She reportedly keeps a sculpture of a hand with an extended middle finger in her office, a gift from a Danish trade union angered by her welfare cuts. She's said to be one of the inspirations for the lead character in the Danish TV show "Borgen," about an ambitious minor politician trying to become the country's first female prime minister.

Although Vestager's term runs out in October, she's hoping for a second stint, an unlikely prospect because her party is out of power in Denmark and its prospects look uncertain in upcoming elections. The EU's executive commissioners are nominated by their country's governments.

"Sometimes things are unlikely but not impossible," Vestager said. "I'm in the middle of something and we're not done yet," she added, referring to the new era of digital regulation.

Vestager brushes off criticism that she's stifling innovation by targeting U.S. companies to help prop up European firms. She has also taken on Starbucks, McDonald's and this month opened an investigation into Nike's tax arrangements. But other targets have included Italian automaker Fiat and Russian gas giant Gazprom.

"When you look at our cases you'd see that what they have in common is not nationality. It's the fact that they're multinationals," she said.

Her aim, she says, is to keep competition fair.

"That was the idea before the world became digital," Vestager said. "And it becomes an even more important idea when the world becomes digital because things are so fast moving."
https://www.newstimes.com/business/t...h-13549033.php





FCC Accused of Colluding with Big Cable to Game 5G Legal Challenge

House Commerce committee says it has inside knowledge of dodgy regulator antics
Kieren McCarthy

US telecoms regulator the FCC has been accused of colluding with companies it is supposed to oversee in order to protect a controversial decision over new 5G networks.

Chair of the House Commerce chair, Frank Pallone, has sent a letter to FCC chair Ajit Pai asking for copies of communications between the FCC and the big telcos regarding legal challenges to the regulator's 5G order, which forces local governments to charge a flat fee for installing new base stations.

In the letter [PDF], Pallone strongly implies that the committee has heard from a whistleblower.

"It has come to our attention that certain individuals at the FCC may have urged companies to challenge the order the Commission adopted in order to game the judicial lottery procedure and intimated the agency would look unfavorably towards entities that were not helpful," it reads.

In effect, the letter alleges that FCC staff – almost certainly from Pai's office – put pressure on the big telcos to challenge an order that is designed to benefit them as a way of gaming the judicial system so the case didn't end up in a court likely to overturn it.

As crazy as that sounds, given what we know of the FCC under chair Ajit Pai, it is all too possible. Not only has Pai's office pandered to Big Cable to an excessive degree in the past two years, pushing through changes vehemently opposed by everyone that isn't one of the main telcos, there has been a rumors that the regulator is actively working in secret with companies it is supposed to oversee. A series of unusually aligned and coordinated responses have long raised eyebrows.

In one case, a series of decisions that appeared designed to benefit a single company – Sinclair – become the focus on an investigation by the FCC's Ombudsman who ultimately concluded he couldn't prove any collusion. The final report was very far from clearing their names however and could be seen as evidence that Pai and his staff have become adept at hiding their tracks.

Playing the circuit

In this case, the 5G order was strongly opposed by a large number of local and city governments because it tied their hands over what they can charge for 5G installations. The opposition was particularly intense in California where the high concentration of users and high cost of real estate means cities were expecting to be able to charge significantly more than $270 per site per year; several cities had already reached agreement with mobile operators to charge significantly more.

Due to the concentration of Californian legal challengers, the issue would naturally expect to be heard in California's Ninth Circuit. The Ninth Circuit has a long history of striking down efforts by the federal government to impose its will on the state. As such, the FCC could reasonable expect its order to be challenged – and possibly lose which would delay and possibly derail the whole program.

Enter the telcos. All the main four mobile operators challenged the order with their own lawsuits. It was an approach that baffled observers, including ourselves.

The telco lawsuits claimed that the 5G order didn't go far enough. The order should have included so-called "deemed granted" provisions that would cause a new cell site to be automatically approved once the imposed application timelines had been passed. Otherwise, they argued, they would be forced to sue if local authorities missed the deadline – a big waste of their time and money.

It didn't make much sense for the telcos to sue the FCC over an order that massively benefits them to the tune of billions of dollars. It is noteworthy that the companies sued in four different circuits: First, Second, Tenth and Washington DC.

As a result, the various lawsuits were consolidated and under the legal system's way of handling such disparate appeals, a lottery was held. That lottery in November led to the cases being moved to the Tenth Circuit - which covers the middle of the country – Oklahoma, Utah, Colorado, etc – and the appellants were told to migrate their cases accordingly. In short, if the plan was to get the case out of California, it worked.

Suspicions

But local government officials were very suspicions something untoward was going on. The West Coast cities challenged the decision to move the case to the Tenth Circuit and argued it should be heard in California where a similar case against the FCC and 5G was already being heard.
pointing

The value of having the case heard in the Tenth Circuit became immediately apparent in January when the court rejected a plea to delay the order while legal challenges were going ahead. That decision was cheered by FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who has led the charge and was Aji Pai's former advisor before being placed on the commission by Pai.

However the Tenth Circuit also decided that the case should be moved to the Ninth Circuit because it was so similar to the other legal challenge against the FCC. That decision to move the case was fiercely opposed by… the telcos that had lodged their appeals across the rest of the country.

The truth is that the telcos could have challenged the decision in pretty much any circuit due to the companies' national reach but the fact that all four of them choose a different circuit, forcing it to a lottery does look like a concerted effort to game the system.

What is extraordinary however is the assertion by Pallone as chair of the House Commerce committee that it may have been FCC staff directing this strategy.

"If true," the letter states, "it would be inappropriate for the FCC to leverage its power as a regulator to influence regulated companies to further its agenda in seeking a more friendly court."

Now that the Democrats have taken over the House, they have the power to direct investigations and subpoena witnesses so the investigation is not without teeth. The letter gives the FCC three weeks to hand over any relevant communications between FCC staff and the telcos through both official and personal channels.

Pure coincidence. Again

Whether the committee will turn up anything damning will likely be a question of luck: previous investigations into Pai's office have demonstrated significant awareness of how to avoid leaving a paper trail, including holding face-to-face meetings with the stated intention of the meeting different to the true reason, and official phones and emails used only to arrange meetings with the real content of discussions going unrecorded.

Of course, it is possible that the telcos decided by themselves and without communicating with one another, or the FCC, to challenge a decision that gives them exactly what they want and saves them billions of dollars in four completely different jurisdictions. It could all just be one huge coincidence. Like last time. And the time before that.

It will be interesting to see if the source of information that Pallone claims to have has access to recordings or written meeting notes – which could proof particularly damaging if the FCC attempts to deny any interactions – or if he is simply using the threat of insider information to make the FCC nervous about how to respond.

The FCC has declined to respond to the letter or its allegations on the basis that it is currently impacted by the partial government shutdown, which has entered its 33rd day at time of going to press.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/0..._of_colluding/





If 5G Is So Important, Why Isn’t It Secure?

The network must be secure enough for the innovations it promises.

Tom Wheeler
Mr. Wheeler is a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.

The Trump administration’s so-called “race” with China to build new fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks is speeding toward a network vulnerable to Chinese (and other) cyberattacks. So far, the Trump administration has focused on blocking Chinese companies from being a part of the network, but these efforts are far from sufficient. We cannot allow the hype about 5G to overshadow the absolute necessity that it be secure.

Our current wireless networks are fourth-generation, or 4G. It was 4G that gave us the smartphone. Reaching the next level of mobile services, however, requires increased speed on the network. Fifth-generation networks are designed to be 10 to 100 times faster than today’s typical wireless connection with much lower latency (response time). These speeds will open up all kinds of new functional possibilities. Those new functions, in turn, will attract cyberintrusions just like honey attracts a bear.

Some envision 5G as a kind of “wireless fiber” for the delivery of television and internet much like a cable system does today. Iranians hacking the delivery of “Game of Thrones” isn’t good, but the real transformational promise of 5G goes far beyond wireless cable and its security is much more critical.

The most exciting part of the 5G future is how its speed will change the very nature of the internet. Thus far, the internet has been all about transporting data from point A to point B. Today’s internet-connected car may be able to get driving directions sent to it, but it is essentially the same as getting email: the one-way transportation of pre-existing information. The autonomous car is something vastly different, in which the 5G network allows computers to orchestrate a flood of information from multitudes of input sensors for real time, on-the-fly decision-making. It is estimated that the data output of a single autonomous vehicle in one day will be equal to today’s daily data output of three thousand people.

Leadership in 5G technology is not just about building a network, but also about whether that network will be secure enough for the innovations it promises. And the 5G “race” is more complex and dangerous than industry and the Trump administration portray. When 5G enables autonomous vehicles, do we want those cars and trucks crashing into each other because the Russians hacked the network? If 5G will be the backbone of breakthroughs such as remote surgery, should that network be vulnerable to the North Koreans breaking into a surgical procedure? Innovators, investors and users need confidence in the network’s cybersecurity if its much-heralded promise is to be realized.

“It is imperative that America be first in fifth-generation (5G) wireless technologies,” President Trump wrote in an October Presidential Memorandum of instructions to federal agencies. While the administration, especially the Trump Federal Communications Commission (F.C.C.), makes much of how the 5G “race” with China is a matter of national security, not enough effort is being put into the security of the network itself. Nowhere in the president’s directive, for instance, was there a word about protecting the cybersecurity of the new network.

As the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee told him in November, “the cybersecurity threat now poses an existential threat to the future of the Nation.” Last January, the brightest technical minds in the intelligence community, working with the White House National Security Council (N.S.C.), warned of the 5G cybersecurity threat. When the proposed solutions included security through a federally-owned network backbone, the wireless industry screamed in protest. The chairman of the Trump F.C.C. quickly echoed the industry line that “the market, not government, is best positioned to drive innovation and leadership.” Government ownership may not be practicable, but the concerns in the N.S.C. report have been dismissed too readily.

Worse than ignoring the warnings, the Trump administration has repealed existing protections. Shortly after taking office, the Trump F.C.C. removed a requirement imposed by the Obama F.C.C. that the 5G technical standard must be designed from the outset to withstand cyberattacks. For the first time in history, cybersecurity was being required as a forethought in the design of a new network standard — until the Trump F.C.C. repealed it. The Trump F.C.C. also canceled a formal inquiry seeking input from the country’s best technical minds about 5G security, retracted an Obama-era F.C.C. white paper about reducing cyberthreats, and questioned whether the agency had any responsibility for the cybersecurity of the networks they are entrusted with overseeing.

The simple fact is that our wireless networks are not as secure as they could be because they weren’t designed to withstand the kinds of cyberattacks that are now common. This isn’t the fault of the companies that built the networks, but a reflection that when the standards for the current fourth-generation (4G) technology were set years ago, cyberattacks were not a front-and-center concern.

The Trump administration has been told that cybersecurity is an “existential risk.” The new Congress should use its oversight power to explore just why the administration has failed to do to protect against that risk, especially when it comes to the next generation of networks.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/21/o...ity-china.html





Big Telcos Hike Internet Prices Amid Soaring Demand, Revenues

Bell, Telus and Shaw are once again raising prices on select plans, after increases in 2018
Sophia Harris

You can run but you can't hide from internet price hikes. That's what Sean Barry in Powell River, B.C., learned after leaving his provider, Shaw, following a couple of price increases.

He switched to competitor Telus in September only to discover that the cost of his current Telus internet plan is also going up — by $5 a month.

"I am choked over the increase so soon," said the 71-year-old Barry, who lives on a fixed income.

"Every year it just goes up and up and up."

Telus, Bell and Shaw are all raising prices on select internet plans over the next few months. The hikes come on the heels of internet price increases by Telus, Shaw, Bell and Rogers in 2018.

Meanwhile, Canadians are living more of their lives online and signing up in record numbers for internet service, driving up revenues for providers.

"They can do whatever they want; it's big business," said Barry. "We've just got to suck it up."

Price hike roundup

Beginning on Feb. 25, Telus will hike rates on internet plans by $2 to $5 a month.

On Feb. 1, Bell will raise internet prices by $5 a month for Bell Aliant customers in Atlantic Canada. In Ontario and Quebec, the telco is hiking various internet plans by up to $6 a month as of March 1.

"I laughed, because I pretty much knew it was coming," said Christopher Provias, of Welland, Ont., after learning that he's facing a $5 monthly increase on his Bell internet bill.

"It's pretty much like clockwork."

On April 1, Shaw also plans to raise rates on select internet plans. The telco declined to say by how much prices are going up.

Why raise prices?

In 2017, home internet was the fastest-growing sector of all telecommunications services.

According to the latest Communications Monitoring Report by the CRTC, Canada's telecom regulator, 86 per cent of Canadian households subscribed to home internet service in 2017, up almost four per cent from 2016.

Canadians are also demanding faster internet speeds with more data — average monthly data use for high-speed users jumped by a whopping 30 per cent in 2017 compared to 2016.

Bell, Telus and Shaw say they have to raise rates to continually improve their networks to accommodate growing demand.

Bell said customers' internet usage has increased by more than 500 per cent over the past five years.

"Our costs to meet that demand and provide customers with the best experience possible also continue to rise," said spokesperson Nathan Gibson in an email.

Industry analyst Dwayne Winseck acknowledges that the big telcos are investing significant amounts in their networks. But he says that's not the only reason customers face higher internet bills.

"These price increases are at least as much, if not more, about protecting very high operating profits," says Winseck, a professor at Carleton University's School of Journalism and Communication.

According to the CRTC report, residential internet service revenues, including applications, equipment and other related services, totalled $9.1 billion in 2017 — an 8.8 per cent increase over 2016.

'Makes me so mad'

In a notice sent to customers facing price hikes, Bell said it invested $4 billion in its infrastructure last year.

But that's cold comfort for Dennis Fitt, of Truro, N.S., who's facing a monthly increase of $9 come February for his bundled internet, phone and TV service with Bell.

"Their profits aren't enough to cover the infastructure — this $4 billion that I have to pay for now?" said Fitt, whose family of six relies on internet for both their TV and phone service.

"It just makes me so mad."

Because the internet has become so important in Canadians' lives, Fitt believes the CRTC should do something to ensure prices don't get out of control.

"The CRTC should call [the internet] a necessity, and at that point they should be able to regulate it a lot more than they do now."

The telecom regulator is currently exploring an internet code of conduct to address a growing number of complaints from Canadians about their internet service.

While there's no mention of price regulation, the CRTC says the code would include measures to make it easier for consumers to switch providers to take advantage of competitive offers.

For Canadians planning to make a switch, there are a growing number of independent internet providers such as TekSavvy, Distributel and Start that offer competitive rates.

In 2017, only 13 per cent of Canadian internet subscribers were signed up with an independent, according to the CRTC report.

Reasons for the modest uptake include the fact that many are unaware of Canada's smaller providers or are fearful of switching to a lesser-known company.

Others believe they're better off bundling their internet with other services at a discount with one of the major telcos.

Barry in Powell River says because he has a promotional deal with Telus, if he cancelled his internet, he'd likely face a bigger bill for his phone and TV service with the company

"They've got you coming and going," he said.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/bel...hike-1.4984489





Comcast Stock Rises after an Earnings Beat
Lauren Feiner

• Comcast posts fourth-quarter earnings of 64 cents per share adjusted vs. 62 cents per share expected in an analyst survey by Refinitiv.
• Revenue was $27.846 billion vs. $27.553 billion expected in the survey.
• Comcast-owned NBCUniversal announced plans for a new streaming service this month that will launch in the first quarter of 2020.

Comcast on Wednesday reported fourth-quarter earnings and revenue that exceeded expectations but fell short on net additions of high speed internet customers. The stock popped over 3.2 percent in premarket trading.

Here's what Comcast reported versus Wall Street's expectations:

• Earnings: 64 cents per share adjusted vs. 62 cents per share expected in an analyst survey by Refinitiv
• Revenue: $27.846 billion vs. $27.553 billion expected in the survey
• High-speed internet customers: 351,000 net adds vs. 360,000 net adds expected in a FactSet consensus estimate

For its full year 2018, Comcast reported revenue of $94.51 billion, marking 11.1 percent growth from the previous year.

Comcast reported that its earnings for the year increased 25.6 percent to $2.55 per share from 2017, after adjustments that included $12.7 billion in net income benefits factored into the fourth quarter of 2017.

Comcast reported revenue for NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC and NBC, at $9.40 billion for the quarter, a 7.1 percent increase from the same quarter last year. The NBCUniversal segment includes broadcast and cable channels as well as theme parks and film studios.

The company said while its revenue from filmed entertainment increased 14 percent to $1.98 billion in the quarter from a year earlier, it was offset by lower content licensing and home entertainment revenue. Comcast said content licensing revenue decreased 8.8 percent due to the timing of content availability under licensing agreements. It also said home entertainment revenue decreased 14.3 percent from the prior year due to the success of several releases in 2017, including "Despicable Me 3."

Comcast reported pro forma revenue for Sky, the British broadcaster for which it finalized its acquisition last quarter after an extensive bidding war with Twenty-First Century Fox. Comcast bid $39 billion for the takeover, outbidding Fox by $3.6 billion. Noting that the results are subject to change as acquisition accounting is finalized, it reported $5.02 billion in revenue for the quarter for Sky. Comcast presented the results as if the acquisition occurred on Jan. 1, 2017, based mainly on historical results of operations and adjusted for purchase price and costs related to the acquisition.

Here's how Comcast's divisions did for the fourth quarter:

• Cable communications accounted for $14.13 billion in total revenue
• Cable networks, excluding the Olympics, accounted for $2.89 billion in total revenue
• Broadcast television, excluding the Olympics and Super Bowl, accounted for $3.10 billion in total revenue
• Filmed entertainment brought in $1.98 billion in total revenue
• Theme Parks brought in $1.51 billion in revenue

Last quarter, Comcast beat analyst estimates on the top and bottom lines in what CEO Brian Roberts had said was the company's "best broadband quarter in 10 years."

The company has sought to diversify. Its video segment has steadily declined over the past several quarters and is expected to fall again this quarter, according to FactSet estimates.

Investors will likely hear about NBCUniversal's recently announced plans to enter the streaming space on Wednesday's earnings call. Earlier this month, the NBCUniversal said it will launch a free, ad-supported streaming service to pay-TV subscribers, including those who subscribe to rival services including Charter, AT&T, Cox and Dish. The service will also be accessible to non-pay-TV subscribers for about $12 per month, a person familiar with the company's plans told CNBC. NBCUniversal said the service will be available in the first quarter of 2020.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/23/comc...s-q4-2018.html





Sorry, Ajit: Comcast Lowered Cable Investment Despite Net Neutrality Repeal

Comcast cable network spending dropped 3 percent to $7.7 billion in 2018.
Jon Brodkin

Comcast's cable division spent 3 percent less on capital expenditures last year, despite promises that the repeal of net neutrality rules would boost broadband network investment.

Comcast's cable division spent $7.95 billion on capital expenditures during calendar year 2017, but that fell to $7.72 billion in the 12 months ending on December 31, 2018.

"Cable Communications' capital expenditures decreased 3.0 percent to $7.7 billion, reflecting decreased spending on customer premise equipment and support capital, partially offset by higher investment in scalable infrastructure and line extensions," Comcast said in an earnings announcement today.

Comcast's overall capital expenditures went up 2.3 percent, from $9.6 billion in 2017 to $9.8 billion in 2018. But that company-wide capital expenditure number includes the Comcast-owned NBCUniversal, which spent $1.7 billion in 2018, a 15.2 percent increase, "primarily reflecting investment at Theme Parks," Comcast said.

The cable capital expenditure statistic thus provides a more accurate picture of whether Comcast increased or decreased investment in its broadband network. Cable capital expenditures as a percentage of Comcast's cable revenue dropped from 15 percent in 2017 to 14 percent in 2018.

Comcast's network spending should have risen in 2018 if predictions from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and Comcast had been correct. Pai's net neutrality repeal took effect in June 2018. But the vote to repeal net neutrality rules was in December 2017, and Pai claimed in February 2018 that the repeal was already causing increased broadband investment.

Broadband industry lobby group USTelecom also claimed that network investment grew in 2017 because of the anticipated net neutrality repeal and other deregulatory moves. In December 2017, Comcast said the net neutrality repeal would allow for "more competition in the marketplace and increased investment and innovation."

Yet Comcast cable capital expenditures dropped year over year in each of the first three quarters of 2018. The expenditures did rise year over year in the fourth quarter, from $2.15 billion to $2.32 billion, but it wasn't enough to offset the full-year decline.

The corporate tax cut implemented as 2018 began also didn't stop job cuts at Comcast and AT&T, despite promises that the tax cut would create new jobs.

Charter and Verizon lowered investment, too

Comcast isn't the only ISP that lowered network investment last year. Charter and Verizon both said in 2018 that they were reducing capital expenditures.

Charter and Comcast are both expected to reduce cable capital expenditures in 2019, according to MoffettNathanson estimates cited in a Light Reading article yesterday. Cable companies are planning upgrades to full duplex networks, but "the investment for that move will be incremental and is not expected to be anywhere near the level of spending that went into the initial DOCSIS 3.1 upgrades," Light Reading wrote.

The FCC's justification for repealing net neutrality rules was almost entirely based on Pai's prediction that deregulation would cause network infrastructure spending to rise. That hasn't happened with Comcast, the nation's bigger home Internet provider. Comcast's extensive use of data caps, which the FCC hasn't tried to stop, could also help the company limit spending on network capacity upgrades. Comcast used to face its own set of net neutrality requirements because of conditions placed on its purchase of NBC, but the FCC-imposed merger conditions that prohibited blocking and throttling expired in January 2018.

Annual network spending isn't necessarily a good indicator of whether broadband is expanding or getting better. Costs often go down as technology advances, after all. Network spending tends to be "lumpy," rising and falling in conjunction with technology upgrade cycles. Wireless network spending is likely to increase going forward as carriers upgrade from 4G to 5G networks, but the 5G upgrade would happen regardless of whether net neutrality rules are in effect.

The net neutrality repeal hasn't closed broadband gaps in rural areas, where industry trade groups say they won't expand service unless the government gives them more direct funding. As the trade groups explained, the key factor is that ISPs won't build in sparsely populated areas where they don't expect to get a high return on investment.

The loss of net neutrality rules might help ISPs make more money in places where they already offer service. But the trade groups' warnings about rural broadband suggest that the repeal wasn't enough to make Pai's prediction of "better, faster Internet access and more competition" come true.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...rality-repeal/





New House Judiciary Subcommittee Chair Eyes Net Neutrality Action
John Eggerton

Pledges to work against Trump Administration efforts to 'kill' net neutrality

Look for the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet to be active on the net neutrality front now that it is in Democratic hands.

At least that was the signal from its new chairman, Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.).

“The internet is a ubiquitous tool in our lives, and as the Trump Administration tries to kill net neutrality, I am eager to take on the challenge of ensuring that the internet remains open to all content regardless of source," said Johnson following his election to the post. "Content must be available without discrimination and accessible to all."

Johnson is a former judge and defense attorney handling criminal cases. He has been a member of the Judiciary Committee and chaired the Subcommittee on Courts & Competition Policy when Democrats previously controlled the chamber.

It is unclear what a divided Congress can and will do about the FCC's rollback of net neutrality regs, but Johnson could join his colleagues in ramping up oversight and investigations of the Republican-majority FCC and its policies.
https://www.multichannel.com/news/ne...trality-action





Russia Tries to Force Facebook and Twitter to Relocate Servers to Russia

Companies allegedly didn't follow law requiring user data to be stored in Russia.
Jon Brodkin

The Russian government agency responsible for censorship on the Internet has accused Facebook and Twitter of failing to comply with a law requiring all servers that store personal data to be located in Russia.

Roskomnadzor, the Russian censorship agency, "said the social-media networks hadn't submitted any formal and specific plans or submitted an acceptable explanation of when they would meet the country's requirements that all servers used to store Russians' personal data be located in Russia," The Wall Street Journal reported today.

Roskomnadzor said it sent letters to Facebook and Twitter on December 17, giving them 30 days to provide "a legally valid response."

With the 30 days having passed, the agency said that "Today, Roskomnadzor begins administrative proceedings against both companies."
Law allows fines or blocking websites

The law requiring local storage reportedly went into effect in September 2015. But Russia has had trouble enforcing it.

"At the moment, the only tools Russia has to enforce its data rules are fines that typically only come to a few thousand dollars or blocking the offending online services, which is an option fraught with technical difficulties," a Reuters article said today.

Roskomnadzor is apparently threatening fines rather than outright blocking, at least for now. The Journal wrote:

“Vadim Ampelonsky, a spokesman for Roskomnadzor, told the television channel Russia 24 that Facebook and Twitter could be fined for not providing information to the watchdog.

"We expect to hold them administratively liable," Mr. Ampelonsky said.”

Russia previously threatened to block Facebook over its non-compliance with the data-storage law in both 2017 and 2018.

We contacted Facebook and Twitter today and will update this story if we get any responses.

In April 2018, Roskomnadzor moved to block Telegram, an encrypted messaging service.

"The censorship began with Roskomnadzor instructing Internet service providers to block requests to Internet Protocol addresses of Telegram's servers," we wrote at the time.

Telegram users evaded the blocking by using virtual private networks and proxy services. To counter that, Russia reportedly expanded its block list and ended up blocking more than just Telegram.

"But as users flocked to virtual private networks and proxy services to reach Telegram from their mobile devices and computers—or resorted to building their own—government censors added large swaths of IP addresses to the block list," we wrote at the time. "And according to multiple sources within Russia, ISPs there are now blocking large chunks of IP addresses associated with cloud services from Amazon and Google."

Russia started testing "more precise technology to block individual online services" after the attempt to block Telegram failed, "but Moscow has yet to find a way to shut it down without hitting other traffic," Reuters reported in August 2018. Russia had also blocked LinkedIn beginning in 2016, with limited success.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ers-to-russia/





Google Considering Pulling News Service From Europe
Natalia Drozdiak

• Controversial rules would require web firms to pay publishers
• Internet giant to review details of directive before deciding

Google is considering pulling its Google News service from Europe as regulators work toward a controversial copyright law.

The European Union’s Copyright Directive will give publishers the right to demand money from the Alphabet Inc. unit, Facebook Inc. and other web platforms when fragments of their articles show up in news search results, or are shared by users. The law was supposed to be finalized this week but was delayed by disagreement among member states.

Google News might quit the continent in response to the directive, said Jennifer Bernal, Google’s public policy manager for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The internet company has various options, and a decision to pull out would be based on a close reading of the rules and taken reluctantly, she said.

"The council needs more time to reflect in order to reach a solid position" on the directive, said a representative of Romania, current head of the European Council, which represents the 28 member nations.

Google has said it doesn’t make money from its news service so it’s unlikely the company would take a financial hit from withdrawing. But news results keep mobile users coming back to its search engine, where they often pursue queries that generate lucrative ad revenue. Google also competes against rival mobile news-aggregation services from Apple Inc. and Facebook.

‘They Need Europe’

"I don’t buy the threat -- they really need Europe,” said François Godard, a European media analyst at Enders Analysis, a research firm.

Google has sometimes underestimated legal trouble in Europe and irritated regulators by being slow to recognize their jurisdiction over the Mountain View, California-based business. It’s waged dozens of battles with privacy authorities, including a 2014 case over the so-called right to be forgotten that forced the company to purge sensitive details from search results. Disputes with publishers have turned into costly antitrust investigations and a push for more legislation to curb Google’s ability to use content.

Lawmakers are still hashing out how to define small excerpts of stories and whether individual words should be covered by the copyright rules, according to an EU official who asked not to be identified. The rules would also require Google and Facebook to actively prevent music, videos and other copyrighted content from appearing on their platforms if rights holders didn’t grant them a license.

Despite the delay, an agreement is possible in the next few months, two EU officials said. If there’s no accord by the spring, when European Parliament elections are held, the process would be delayed until later this year.
Small Print

As with many divisive issues in European regulation, the problem is the small print. When the commission first unveiled draft rules, it proposed letting publishers waive their rights to demand payment from news-aggregation services. The European Parliament introduced a provision last year that raises concerns among some small publishers that they won’t be able to let Google distribute their content online free of charge.

The impact of a Google News withdrawal on publishers who rely on the search giant for traffic to their sites is unclear. Google shut its news service in Spain in 2014 after the country passed a law requiring Spanish publications to charge aggregators for displaying excerpts of stories. Publishers must claim compensation for the reuse of fragments of text whether they want to or not.

The Spanish law led to small publishers losing about 13 percent of their web traffic, according to a 2017 study released by the Spanish Association of Publishers of Periodical Publications. That translates to a cost of at least 9 million euros ($10.2 million), the study estimated.

Other publishers were initially opposed to the Spanish law, but argue that Google’s withdrawal didn’t have much impact.

“The vast majority of Spanish publishers consider Google’s decision insignificant,” said Wout van Wijk, executive director at News Media Europe, an umbrella organization representing national publishers’ associations. Spain’s CEDRO, which negotiates licenses and collects royalties on behalf of members, has struck licensing deals with other news aggregators that emerged after Google left, he said.

The EU decision to work on a similar rule has pitted large publishers against internet giants including Google, as well as some small publishers and freedom of speech activists.

“Limiting publishers’ freedom in this way will result in detrimental consequences for us, as shown by a similar experience in Spain,” European Innovative Media Publishers said in an October letter to lawmakers.

Google says the new EU laws would force it to choose which publishers it would license, effectively picking winners and losers. Because bigger publishers typically offer a broader range of popular content, smaller competitors are likely to lose out.

With assistance by Rodrigo Orihuela

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ce-from-europe





I Tried to Block Amazon From My Life. It Was Impossible.

Reporter Kashmir Hill spent six weeks blocking Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple from getting her money, data, and attention, using a custom-built VPN. Here’s what happened.

Week 1: Amazon

Apparently, I am a masochist.

I am on a mission to live without the tech giants—to discover whether such a thing is even possible. Not just through sheer willpower but technologically, with the use of a custom-built tool that would literally prevent my devices from accessing these companies, and them from accessing me and my data.

I start the experiment by eliminating the company I thought would be most challenging: the Everything Store.

Like millions of other Americans, we use a lot of Amazon products in our house. We have an Echo, an Echo Dot, two Kindles, two Amazon Prime Chase credit cards, Amazon Prime Video on our TV, and two Prime accounts. (Note to self: Why are my husband and I each paying Amazon $119/year?)

So, suffice to say, Amazon is getting a good chunk of my money and a lot of my data. I alone average about $3,000 a year in purchases on Amazon.com. I’ve become such a loyal shopper that I barely know where else to go online to buy things. It’s the first place I head when I need something, anything—sheets, diapers, toilet paper, a Halloween costume, Bluetooth headphones, roulette cufflinks for a friend who likes to gamble. Basically, anytime I need a random material object, I open up the Amazon app on my phone.

Yes, fuck, I have Amazon’s app on my phone. I’m that addicted to this company. And I’m not alone: Amazon reportedly controls 50 percent of online commerce, which means half of all purchases made online in America, which is obscene.

Amazon is not just an online store—that’s not even the hardest thing to cut out of my life. Its global empire also includes Amazon Web Services (AWS), the vast server network that provides the backbone for much of the internet, as well as Twitch.tv, the broadcasting behemoth that is the backbone of the online gaming industry, and Whole Foods, the organic backbone of the yuppie diet.

Keeping myself from walking into a Whole Foods is easy enough, but I also want to stop using any of Amazon’s digital services, from Amazon.com (and its damn app) to any other websites or apps that use AWS to host their content. To do that, I enlist the help of a technologist, Dhruv Mehrotra, who built me a custom VPN through which to route my internet requests. The VPN blocks any traffic to or from an IP address controlled by Amazon. I connect my computers and my phone to the VPN at all times, as well as all the connected devices in my home; it’s supposed to weed out every single digital thing that Amazon touches.

Ultimately, though, we found Amazon was too huge to conquer.

AWS is the internet’s largest cloud provider, generating 0ver $17 billion in revenue last year. Though Amazon makes much more in gross sales—over $100 billion—from its retail business, if you scrutinize its earnings reports, you’ll see that the majority of its profits come from AWS. Tech is where the money is, baby.

Launched in 2006, AWS has taken over vast swaths of the internet. My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties, from Motherboard and Fortune to the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s website. (Government agencies love AWS, which is likely why Amazon, soon to be a corporate Cerberus with three “headquarters,” chose Arlington, Virginia, in the D.C. suburbs, as one of them.) Many of the smartphone apps I rely on also stop working during the block.

Luckily, Yale Law’s website works, so I can download antitrust expert Lina Khan’s 2017 paper making the argument that Amazon is a monopoly that American antitrust law, as it is currently practiced, is ill-equipped to regulate—essential reading for the week.

With the VPN up and running, I start to wonder why so many sites still work. Airbnb, for example, is a famed user of AWS, but I can search for a Thanksgiving vacation home there. I email Airbnb to ask if it still uses AWS for hosting, and a spokesperson confirms the company does. (I also could have confirmed it with this cool tool, which tells you about the digital provenance of a website.)

That’s how Dhruv and I discover a major flaw in our blocking technique. It turns out many sites, in addition to using a company like AWS to host their digital content, employ a secondary service called a content delivery network, or CDN, to load web pages faster.

The internet may seem like invisible vapor in the air around us, but it has a crucial physicality, too. AWS has huge buildings of servers around the world, while CDNs have a larger number of smaller ones. Think of AWS as the central warehouse for a site’s digital packets; the CDNs are the storefronts around the world that help people get the packets faster so that web visitors don’t have to wait for their data to come all the way from the main warehouse.

Amazon runs its own CDN called Cloudfront, but it has fierce competition from other companies like Fastly, Cloudflare, and Akamai—which Airbnb appears to be using.

If a website uses AWS in combination with a non-Amazon CDN, my blocker sees the IP address used by the CDN and lets that AWS-hosted content slip through. When I check with Gizmodo Media Group’s tech team, I discover that our own sites are hosted by AWS and use Fastly as a CDN. Just like Airbnb, Gizmodo is sneaking past my blocker.

Still, I am determined to block Amazon as much as possible. So in addition to having the VPN ban all IP addresses controlled by Amazon, I need to shut down the Amazon Echo and Echo Dot in our house. Connecting them to the VPN doesn’t work. I think about simply unplugging them, but I am worried someone might plug them back in. (My husband, for example, who refuses to do the block along with me on the grounds that he has a “real job.”)

“Why don’t you just put them in a drawer?” asks Dhruv.

Incredibly, this hadn’t occurred to me. The Echo has become such a fixture in the household, I hadn’t conceived of just putting it away.

That is a continuing revelation for me this week: Amazon is deeply embedded in my life. I use it repeatedly every single day whether I realize it or not. Without it, I cannot function normally.

My VPN winds up blocking over 23 million IP addresses controlled by Amazon, resulting in various unexpected casualties.

Having to run to a physical store rather than opening my Amazon app every time the house runs out of paper towels is annoying, but the harder challenge is losing access to almost every form of digital entertainment I consume. My favorite time-wasting app, Words With Friends, won’t load. I can’t watch shows via Amazon Video, obviously, but I also can’t watch Netflix because, despite being a competitor of Amazon, Netflix uses AWS to serve its streams. HBO Go is another victim.

When my husband and I go for a run in Golden Gate Park, I discover I can’t record the run in my Runkeeper app without Amazon’s help. I also can’t download an audiobook from the library to my Axis360 app without AWS. Spotify is the last entertainment provider standing (for now), because its music lives in the Google cloud. Thank goog-ness.

On the second morning of the block, I hear my daughter in the living room with my husband screaming “Alessa, Alessa!” They forgot that the voice of the Amazon Echo, Alexa, has been banished from the house. The block is especially tough on my one-year-old daughter, Ellev, both because the Echo provides the sole source of music in our household and because Ellev is obsessed with three movies (Coco, Monsters Inc., and The Incredibles), all of which we usually watch either through Netflix or through videos purchased via Amazon.

Ellev is not happy about my experiment particularly because my long-winded explanations about why she can’t listen to “E-I-E-I-O” or watch “Incwedibles” make zero sense to her. The low point of the week is when she cries for the Incredibles for a solid five minutes one afternoon, though I manage to distract her, eventually, with puzzle pieces.

In addition to entertainment options going dark, basic tools of my work become unusable, notably the encrypted messaging app Signal and the workplace communication platform Slack.

It’s hard to convey how disruptive this is if you’re not a person who uses Slack at work; it tends to replace office meetings, emails, and phone calls. Without Slack, I basically have no idea what is going on at the office for the entirety of the Amazon-blocking week, and my colleagues have little idea what I am up to.

There is a psychological benefit to this. Slack’s purpose is to improve workplace communication, but it’s also a vehicle for workplace surveillance, made obvious by the green dot next to your name indicating whether you’re sitting at a keyboard at the ready, or an empty gray dot revealing your absence. By blocking Amazon, I don’t just dismantle Amazon’s surveillance of my life, I block my colleagues’ surveillance as well.

Going dark on the encrypted messaging app Signal is a hardship because I increasingly use it to communicate, not just with sources who have security concerns, but with my husband and my friends.

I am actually surprised that Signal still uses AWS, because, at the beginning of 2018, AWS had threatened to stop hosting Signal because it was disguising its internet traffic to evade being shut down by repressive governments. Ultimately, Signal caved to Amazon’s demand because, as Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike tells me, there’s no good alternative.

The AWS block also breaks two apps that my daughter’s daycare uses to message us. However, a technological quirk allows some leakage from daycare land; the apps’ notifications come to my iPhone from Apple’s servers instead of Amazon’s, so I can still see updates coming in (“New potty for Ellev,” “New meal for Ellev”) even if I can’t check the app to see what my daughter is eating or excreting.

Maybe that’s for the best. Our ability to get access to any information we want whenever we want has created some unhealthy data addictions.

The Amazon blocker takes down almost every form of digital entertainment I consume.

There are definite upsides to the week without Amazon. My husband and I break our habit of watching shows on Netflix at the end of the day, opting to read instead or indulge our newfound obsession with cribbage, a card game I had assumed was boring until I started playing it. Also, since we mostly use Signal to text each other, I find myself sending him fewer texts and instead talk to him about things IRL.

We also wean our daughter from much of her screen time, which means quality time playing with her or taking her to a playground rather than giving her a “movie treat.” I go running outside rather than doing my three miles on a treadmill watching Netflix. In general, having access to fewer parts of the internet makes me use technology less, which is increasingly my goal in life.

But cutting out Amazon also means severely limiting my ability to use one of our era’s crucial conversation tools: the language of links.

I ask a friend where we are meeting for dinner, and she sends me a Yelp link, which I can’t open. Dhruv tells me he is busy working on “this,” and sends me a Motherboard link that doesn’t work. In the heaviest of shorthand communication, someone iMessages me an Eventbrite link; the share text indicates that their partner has succumbed in her fight against cancer, but I can’t access the Eventbrite page to confirm. (I turned off the VPN briefly to check it—it felt worth breaking the stunt.)

We speak in links, even for the most devastating of news, and tech giants have made themselves indispensable for link translation.

Dhruv keeps track of all the times my devices try to ping Amazon’s servers during the week. It happens nearly 300,000 times, probably in part because apps frustrated not to get a reply from the mothership keep pinging repeatedly until I close them. My devices try to reach Amazon via 3,800 different IP addresses, which suggests that there are a lot of different apps and websites attempting to connect to Amazon throughout the week.

My failure to succeed in a total Amazon ban doesn’t stop with the CDN problem. One day, my husband goes out to get lunch for us and comes back with sushi from Whole Foods. I eat a piece of inari before I remember I am consuming Amazon-produced food. (I am not willing to purge for the sake of the stunt.)

Another time I unintentionally patronize Amazon is when I realize we need a phone holder for our car, one of those little plastic things that attach to the air vents. I would usually immediately order a weird doodad, probably within two minutes of realizing I needed it, using the Amazon app on my phone, but not this week. I ultimately order it from eBay. When the package arrives, however, it is a yellow envelope with the tenacious “smile” logo alongside the words “Fulfillment by Amazon”—even the eBay seller relies on it.

Amazon has embedded itself so thoroughly into the infrastructure of modern life, and into the business models of so many companies, including its competitors, that it’s nearly impossible to avoid it.

Dhruv kept track of all the times my devices tried to ping Amazon’s servers during the week. It happened nearly 300,000 times.

In her blockbuster academic article, Lina Khan, now a legal fellow at the Federal Trade Commission, argues that Amazon is breaking the spirit of antitrust law, but that regulators have failed to act because that law has evolved in a way to ignore monopolies if they result in immediate low costs to consumers.

But Khan says that our increasing reliance on Amazon in our everyday lives carries harms that we are only beginning to see, including Amazon being able to exploit its workers (who reportedly pee in bottles to keep up with the company’s punishing pace), being able to massively data-mine Americans whose activity it has vast access to (meaning it could charge different people different prices based on what it knows about them, which it experimented with in the past), and being able to kill off competitors who would otherwise offer consumers a variety of options and prices (R.I.P. Diapers.com).

Amazon does not see itself as a monopoly. “There is an important difference between horizontal breadth and vertical depth,” said a spokesperson in a statement sent after this story was published. “We operate in a diverse range of businesses, from retail and entertainment to consumer electronics and technology services, and we have intense and well-established competition in each of these areas. Retail is our largest business and we represent less than 1% of global retail and around 4% of U.S. retail.”

But, based on my experience this week, I find Khan’s conclusions chilling and prescient, especially her points around Amazon’s luring third-party sellers to its site. That allows the sellers to make more money by providing access to Amazon customers in the short term, but Amazon slurps up these businesses’ data and can ultimately crush them with cheaper prices.

Given Amazon’s access to data about many, many businesses through hosting websites via AWS, it could be collecting similar competitive data on a vast scale. In fact, in the past, it has used insights gleaned from AWS to make investments in start-ups that it saw were doing gangbusters growth in its cloud.

“I’d be stunned if AWS product managers aren’t using data from the usage patterns of their platform to decide with whom and how to build competitive products,” said Matthew Prince, who runs Cloudflare, one of the content delivery networks that frustrated my blocker this week. “They’ve done this relentlessly in retail, there’s no reason to think they won’t use the data from their platform to do the same with digital services. Companies that use AWS are feeding critical market data directly to the company that, almost certainly, will one day be their largest competitor.”

Amazon did not respond to an inquiry about how it uses data gleaned through hosting other companies’ web offerings.

Ultimately, I learn that it’s simply not an option to block Amazon permanently. It’s technically impossible given the use of CDNs, and even if we could come up with a perfect block, it would wall me off from too many crucial services and key websites that I can’t function without for both personal and professional reasons. (To be totally honest, I just like watching television shows on demand too damn much.) I can’t give up Amazon completely, but it seems like there are other people and companies out there that should be trying very hard to do so.

Next up: Facebook.
https://gizmodo.com/i-tried-to-block...ble-1830565336

















Until next week,

- js.



















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