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Old 10-04-19, 06:09 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 13th, ’19

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April 13th, 2019




Video Killed the Piracy Stats
John Davidson

Subscription TV services such as Netflix and Stan are not just killing off the much-loved box-set DVD, according to the latest data, they're also helping to kill off something that might not be so sadly missed: internet piracy.

The Australian Home Entertainment Distributors Association, a peak body representing film and TV distributors such as Twentieth Century Fox, Disney, Paramount and Roadshow Entertainment, says the amount Australians spent on digital video subscription services increased 56 per cent last year, up from $880 million in 2017 to almost $1.4 billion in 2018.

That market should double in the next few years, reaching $2.8 billion in 2022, AHEDA said in its just-released 2018 Year Book.
The Greatest Showman

Hugh Jackman's The Greatest Showman was a bright spot in an otherwise slow year for Blu-ray and DVD sales. Twentieth Century Fox

Meanwhile, overall sales of DVD and Blu-ray disks in Australia fell 17 per cent last year, to $520 million, their lowest level since 2002 and well off their peak in 2009, when pricey box sets of popular TV shows – the precursor to modern-day Netflix bingeing – drove sales as high as $1.39 billion, according to AHEDA.

Hardest hit have been those box sets, says AHEDA CEO Simon Bush. They've been crushed by subscription services.

"People are going to services like Netflix and Stan for their binge TV content now, so box sets aren't doing so well," he says.

New-release movies, which still come out on physical discs before they are available on the subscription services, are holding up a little better in physical format, he says. They declined only 11.5 per cent in 2018, compared to 2017.

While Netflix, Stan and the other subscription services might have had a negative affect on disc sales, they've had a positive affect on the levels of piracy in Australia.

In 2014, 29 per cent of Australians between the age of 18 and 64 were "actively" engaged in pirating videos, according to figures from Creative Content Australia, a peak body representing movie and TV distributors as well as some video subscription services.

In 2018, that was down to 18 per cent, thanks in no small part to the rise in popularity of subscription TV services, AHEDA's CEO said.

The Australian government's decision to block the domains of piracy-related websites such as piratebay.com helped in equal measure.

"The availability of streaming services is absolutely playing its role, but the 758 domains that have been blocked by Australian ISPs has absolutely played its role, too," said Bush.

Just as TV subscription services had affected the sales of box-set DVDs differently from movie DVDs, so too have subscription services had a variable affect on piracy.

Netflix and Stan have helped drive TV-related piracy to lower levels, but haven't really affected movie piracy rates, AHEDA has found. It was ISP site-blocking that was driving movie piracy rates down.

Stan is owned by this newspaper's proprietor, Nine.

"Site-blocking works really well for new-release content, films that are still in the cinema or has just hit the street in the home-entertainment window."

Indeed, the two-fold effect of subscription services making TV piracy largely unnecessary, and site-blocking making movie piracy more difficult, meant that Australia was now getting its piracy levels down almost as low as they'll go.

"There's always going to be a core of pirates. But now we're at 18 per cent, we're getting towards that 10 to 15 per cent [of Australians] who ... will be difficult to shift. They see piracy as a technological challenge. And where there's a will, there's a way."
https://www.afr.com/technology/techn...0190403-p51a9m





Disney Plus Streaming Service Is Unveiled to Hollywood Fanfare
Brooks Barnes and John Koblin

The Walt Disney Company has been talking about plans to start a Netflix-style streaming service for two years. On Thursday came the big reveal.

D-Day, as some in Hollywood called it.

In a lavish presentation on the Disney lot, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, offered long-awaited details about his counterattack on the tech giants that have moved into the entertainment business. The linchpin is Disney Plus, a new subscription video service dedicated to movies and shows from Disney, Pixar, the “Star Wars” franchise, National Geographic and Marvel.

Disney Plus will cost $7 a month and arrive on Nov. 12. (Netflix’s cheapest plan is $9, and its standard plan is $13.) Disney said it intended to roll out the streaming service in Europe and Asia starting next year. It expects subscribers to total 60 million to 90 million by 2024.

“We are all-in,” Mr. Iger said.

In its first year, Disney Plus will offer 10 original films and 25 original series, including three “Avengers” spinoffs. Disney announced that all 30 seasons of “The Simpsons” would be available on Day One, along with nearly all the “Star Wars” movies, the entire Pixar library and family-focused movies and shows from its Fox library like “The Sound of Music” and “Malcolm in the Middle.”

To market Disney Plus, the company vowed to use the full reach of its empire as it has never done before, starting with a “Star Wars” fan convention in Chicago this weekend. Disney will also mobilize its cruise line, global theme parks, retail stores, hotels and television networks, including ESPN and ABC.

The presentation, inside Soundstage 2, home to the original “Mickey Mouse Club,” began with a 14-minute sizzle reel highlighting Disney’s vast library, which now includes Fox movies like “Titanic,” “Avatar” and “Alien.” Mr. Iger called the library “a treasure trove of long-lasting, valuable content” that “no other content or technology company can rival.”

Mr. Iger added, “It was important to remind you that we’re starting from a position of strength, confidence and unbridled optimism.”

The moment amounted to a turning point in the streaming wars. For the first time, a traditional media company demonstrated the firepower needed to compete with Silicon Valley in the fast-growing realm of online video.

Disney’s plans could have failed to impress, along the lines of what happened to Apple last month when it staged a similar event focused on its streaming ambitions. Apple trotted out celebrities but offered few specifics — nothing on pricing, no launch date, barely any footage.

Disney has a mixed track record with technology, struggling to find a winning strategy with video games and failing to capitalize on tech-related acquisitions like Maker, a YouTube-based video supplier.

Unlike Apple, Disney unveiled footage from original shows and films that are headed to Disney Plus. One live-action series is called “The Mandalorian.” Set in the “Star Wars” universe and created by Jon Favreau, the show cost an estimated $100 million for 10 episodes, on a par with earlier seasons of HBO’s extravagant “Game of Thrones.”

Disney also demonstrated the Disney Plus app. The simple user interface, with movie and television tiles arranged against a dark background, will look familiar to any Netflix, Amazon or Hulu user. There will be “recommended for you” rows of suggested shows and movies, as well as the option to “continue watching” programs.

There will be tiles dedicated to the Disney brands, including Pixar, ‘Star Wars’ and National Geographic. Each time a user hovers over a brand tile, an animated image is set off — fireworks blasting behind the Magic Kingdom for the Disney tile or a comic book flip for Marvel.

Users can make a personalized avatar using characters from Disney’s intellectual property, including Buzz Lightyear and Moana.

While the three-and-a-half-hour presentation’s target audience was Wall Street — analysts were invited to attend — the presentation was also aimed at potential Disney Plus subscribers. Disney also discussed its broader streaming business, which includes Hulu, ESPN Plus and Hotstar, which has 300 million monthly active users in India.

Disney will “likely” bundle its disparate services at a discounted price, according to Kevin Mayer, chairman of the company’s Direct-to-Consumer and International division. Mr. Mayer said that Disney was “actively evaluating” international strategies for Hulu, which currently operates exclusively in the United States. (Unlike Netflix.)

Will Disney greatly expand Hulu’s budget? Randy Freer, the chief executive of Hulu, said it planned to expand original programs but did not say by how much.

With Disney’s acquisition of much of 21st Century Fox, it now owns 60 percent of Hulu, giving the service a majority owner for the first time in its history. (The other companies with ownership stakes include Comcast, at 30 percent, and AT&T’s Warner Media.) Hulu now has 25 million subscribers. Disney said it expected Hulu’s subscriber number to reach 40 million to 60 million in five years, and to be profitable by 2023 or 2024.

Most analysts have sky-high expectations for Disney Plus, which the company styles as Disney+.

“Our confidence in the resilient success of Disney+ comes from the company’s unmatched brand recognition, extensive premium content and unparalleled ecosystem to market the service,” Alexia Quadrani, an analyst at J.P. Morgan, wrote in a recent report. Bank of Montreal and Cowen and Company both upgraded Disney’s stock ahead of Thursday’s presentation.

Mr. Iger has spent years laying the groundwork for Disney Plus. In 2015, as Netflix grew at a blistering rate, Disney began experimenting overseas with an app called DisneyLife. Rolled out in Britain, DisneyLife offered old movies and television series, children’s e-books, games and music. Without new movies, or at least exclusive content, interest was limited.

In 2016 Mr. Iger started talking more openly about needing to develop a streaming business — a risky proposition for a company with vast traditional television holdings. Disney paid $1 billion for a 33 percent stake in BamTech, a streaming services company, eventually paying $1.58 billion more for majority control.

Mr. Iger announced in summer 2017 that Disney would introduce its own Netflix-style service and stop selling movie rerun rights to Netflix, forgoing hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. In 2018 came Disney’s $71.3 billion purchase of 21st Century Fox assets, including National Geographic and the Fox movie studio. Mr. Iger positioned the acquisition as supercharging Disney’s move into streaming.

Michael Nathanson, a media analyst at MoffettNathanson, estimated in a report on Tuesday that Disney Plus could lose as much as $1.8 billion annually through 2023, with programming as one major expense. Add in losses from Hulu and ESPN Plus and Mr. Nathanson expects Disney’s streaming division to lose roughly $3.8 billion this year and next.

At least nine new movies are in production or advanced development for Disney Plus, with budgets ranging from $20 million to $60 million. Disney is remaking two musicals from its animation library as live-action films: “Lady and the Tramp” (1955) and “The Sword in the Stone” (1963). Other new movies include “Togo,” a period adventure about a sled dog; “Noelle,” starring Anna Kendrick as Santa’s daughter; and an animated “Phineas and Ferb” movie.

Marvel Studios is working on three Disney Plus shows. One will focus on Loki from the “Avengers” movies, with Tom Hiddleston reprising the role. Another “Avengers” star, Elizabeth Olsen, will reprise her Scarlet Witch character in a second series. A third show will be associated with “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” with Anthony Mackie returning as the Falcon.

Also in the works are episodic spinoffs of Disney franchises like “High School Musical” and “Monsters, Inc.” Additionally, Disney is working on 10 unscripted shows, including a Disney-themed cooking competition, “Be Our Chef,” and a series called “Encore!” that reunites the casts of high school musicals long after graduation and asks them to recreate their performance.

Roughly 500 films from Disney’s library, including new movies like “Captain Marvel,” and 7,500 episodes of old Disney-branded television shows like “Hannah Montana” will anchor Disney Plus.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/b...streaming.html





Cord-Cutting May Have Peaked Already

But there are some important underlying trends investors need to consider.
Adam Levy

Cord-cutting has been a massive thorn in the side of pay-TV distributors and television media companies for nearly a decade. After U.S. pay-TV subscribers peaked in 2010 at 105 million households, about 14 million homes have cut the cord, according to a report from Digital TV Research. The trend has only accelerated in recent years. 2018 saw nearly double the amount of cord-cutting over 2017, according to Leichtman Research.

But 2018 might've been the pay-TV industry's worst year for cord-cutting. The U.S. will lose fewer pay-TV subscribers this year than last, according to Digital TV Research. And the research firm suggests annual losses will continue to decline next decade.
But there are some key underlying trends investors should consider as overall cord-cutting declines.

AT&T's (NYSE:T) DIRECTV and DISH Network (NASDAQ:DISH) led the way in customer losses in 2018, and that trend is likely only going to get worse even as overall cord-cutting improves.

The two satellite companies lost a combined 2.4 million subscribers last year, compared with 1.7 million in 2017. Telecom and cable providers have managed to hold up much better than satellite providers.

Both DISH and AT&T are using streaming services -- Sling TV and DIRECTV Now, respectively -- to help offset subscriber losses for their more expensive satellite service. But the subscriber additions for the streaming services aren't able to entirely offset their losses. That proved especially true when AT&T removed promotional pricing for DIRECTV Now. What's more, AT&T just raised prices for the service yet again, which ought to further hamper subscriber growth.

Satellite will face more challenges starting this year. The product is best used in rural areas, where building cable TV infrastructure is more costly. But wireless companies are starting to develop 5G networks, which will enable rural households access to high-speed internet fast enough to stream video content. That could enable more satellite customers to cut the cord or switch to an alternative live TV streaming service.

The number of households is still growing

While the number of pay-TV households fell from 105 million to 91 million between 2010 and 2018, the number of total households in the U.S. climbed from 117.5 million to 127.6 million. So the overall number of households without a pay-TV subscribers has basically tripled since the start of the decade. It might reach nearly 50 million homes by 2024, according to Digital TV Research.

That is to say there's still a rapidly growing market for direct-to-consumer video entertainment despite the potential that we've reached peak cord-cutting.

Disney (NYSE:DIS) is investing heavily in streaming video, acquiring a majority of BAMTech for its streaming technology and Fox for its studio output and its stake in Hulu. The company will have three direct-to-consumer streaming products by the end of the year, and it seems poised to make the most of the growing market opportunity among companies not named Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX). That said, beyond the cost of its acquisitions, Disney is also burning cash to scale its streaming services.

There are a number of other high-profile streaming services launching this year or early next year looking to capitalize on the opportunity. A slowdown in cord-cutting shouldn't be a concern for those competitors, but the increasingly crowded market might be.

Investors should consider both of these major trends when looking at the home video entertainment business and its continued evolution.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2019/...d-already.aspx





Google and Other Tech Giants are Quietly Buying Up the Most Important Part of the Internet
Tyler Cooper

Google makes billions from its cloud platform. Now it’s using those billions to buy up the internet itself — or at least the submarine cables that make up the internet backbone.

In February, the company announced its intention to move forward with the development of the Curie cable, a new undersea line stretching from California to Chile. It will be the first private intercontinental cable ever built by a major non-telecom company.

And if you step back and just look at intracontinental cables, Google has fully financed a number of those already; it was one of the first companies to build a fully private submarine line.

Google isn’t alone. Historically, cables have been owned by groups of private companies — mostly telecom providers — but 2016 saw the start of a massive submarine cable boom, and this time, the buyers are content providers. Corporations like Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon all seem to share Google’s aspirations for bottom-of-the-ocean dominance.

I’ve been watching this trend develop, being in the broadband space myself, and the recent movements are certainly concerning. Big tech’s ownership of the internet backbone will have far-reaching, yet familiar, implications. It’s the same old consumer tradeoff; more convenience for less control — and less privacy.

We’re reaching the next stage of internet maturity; one where only large, incumbent players can truly win in media.

Consumers will soon need to decide exactly how much faith they want to place in these companies to build out the internet of tomorrow. We need to decide carefully, too; these are the same companies that are gaining access to a seemingly ever-increasing share of our private lives.

Walling off the garden

If you want to measure the internet in miles, fiber-optic submarine cables are the place to start. These unassuming cables crisscross the ocean floor worldwide, carrying 95-99 percent of international data over bundles of fiber-optic cable strands the diameter of a garden hose. All told, there are more than 700,000 miles of submarine cables in use today.

While past cable builders leveraged cable ownership to sell bandwidth, content providers are building purposefully private cables.

The internet is commonly described as a cloud. In reality, it’s a series of wet, fragile tubes, and Google is about to own an alarming number of them. The numbers speak for themselves; Google will own 10,433 miles of submarine cables internationally when the Curie cable is completed later this year.

The total shoots up to 63,605 miles when you include cables it owns in consortium with Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon. Including these part-owned cables, the company has enough submarine infrastructure to wrap around the earth’s equator two-and-a-half times (with thousands of cable miles to spare).

The impetus for Google’s submarine projects

This submarine cable boom makes more sense when you look at the growth of traffic that’s taken place in the past decade.

In the Atlantic and Pacific, content providers accounted for over half of total demand in 2017. Content provider data use has skyrocketed from less than eight percent to near 40 percent in the past 10 years.

It should be noted here that stats are significantly lower in Africa and the Middle East, suggesting that developed nations hunger for video content and cloud apps are a driver of the trend. This is supported by overall international bandwidth use between countries. In 2017, India only used 4,977 Mbps of international bandwidth. The U.S. used a staggering 4,960,388 Mbps that same year.

The cost of privatized infrastructure

Like the removal of Net Neutrality, privatizing internet infrastructure has only reduced prices for consumers. The problem we now face is a moral one: Do we want a private internet? Or do we want to preserve the “Wild West” web that we’ve had to this point?

Unfortunately, the question isn’t as simple as drawing a line between “good” and “bad” network optimizations. Practices like edge networking and zero-rating are critical to the business models of companies like Netflix and AT&T — they also don’t technically violate the rules, and ultimately deliver much better services to consumers.

As we look to the future, we need to start asking ourselves what the internet is really going to look like whenever the content services that already command so much of our attention are in control of the internet backbone as well. Privatized infrastructure may bring untold benefits for consumers in the short run, but is there a cost we aren’t considering?
https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/06/g...-the-internet/





US Firm Wins Oz-Backed Bid to Block Huawei from Subsea Pacific Cables
Gareth Corfield

An American company is to build a series of undersea cables linking Australia to China after the Aussie government put its foot down and kicked Huawei off the contract.

Building on our reports from last year that Australia had blocked Huawei from building a 4,000km cable between Australia, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, US company TE Subcom has reportedly won the deal to build the link.

"All options for meshing the Pacific Islands are good for the development of the economies of these countries," Keir Preedy, chief executive of the Solomon Island Submarine Cable Company, told Reuters. The company is developing the Solomons' new cable.

In addition to the Aus-PNG-Solomons route previously announced, TE Subcom will build a cable spur to Hong Kong – Chinese territory.

"It is due for completion in 2022 and also includes a possible trans-Pacific branch to Los Angeles," the newswire stated.

As we reported last year, the Australian government is spending $100m from its foreign aid budget to build the cable, purely as a measure to keep Huawei technology off the network. Australia is the US' closest ally in the Pacific and has tightly aligned itself with American calls to block Huawei technology from its digital communications networks.

Sustained pressure from both Australia and America appears to have been the thing that swayed the PNG government.

"The whole idea is to give alternatives... It's not to say 'don't do business with China'. China offers are on the table – it's up to us to be competitive," James Carouso, American charge d'affaires to Australia, said with a straight face last year.

The often-cited justification by western countries for banning Huawei is that the Chinese company's employees can be legally compelled to help Chinese state spies carry out their nefarious doings. This conveniently ignores the fact that all of the western "Five Eyes" nations have identical laws, such as Britain's Snoopers' Charter.

A more realistic reason emerged recently when GCHQ tentacle the National Cyber Security Centre revealed the truly dire state of Huawei's software development processes. While no western country has, so far, revealed any evidence of a deliberate backdoor being planted in Huawei equipment, it appears that the sloppiness of firmware in Huawei network gear is a large security threat on its own.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/0...solomon_cable/





Big Telecom Companies are Suppressing Fast Internet

The telecom industry doesn't want your internet to be good. Deregulation is making it worse. Here's why
Keith A. Spencer

The internet is an ethereal concept. The language we use to describe it contributes to that etherealness: we speak of servers being in "the cloud," as though they were weightless in heaven, and most if not all of our internet access happens wirelessly. Indeed, for most Americans, the internet has little physicality at all anymore: it is probable that you’re reading this article via the miracle of a wireless signal, either wi-fi or cell.

Yet even if the last kilometer of this article’s journey happened through the wireless ether, the rest of its path from my computer to servers to you was achieved via wires. Lots and lots of wires. And even as our dependence on wireless internet grows — as we fill our house with wi-fi–enabled smart devices that communicate with servers all over the world — the need for wires undergirding that system grows exponentially.

Susan Crawford, the author of “Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution—And Why America Might Miss It,” has spent years studying the business of these underground fiber optic cables that make fast internet possible. As it turns out, the internet infrastructure situation in the United States is almost hopelessly compromised by the oligopolistic telecom industry, which, due to lack of competition and deregulation, is hesitant to invest in their aging infrastructure. “That would never happen," Crawford told me. "We saw that with electricity. We’ve seen it with internet access in America already.”

This is going to pose a huge problem for the future, Crawford warns, noting that politicians as well as the telecom industry are largely inept when it comes to prepping us for a well-connected future. I spoke with Crawford via phone about her new book and the myriad problems with internet infrastructure in the US. This interview has been edited for clarity.

Keith A. Spencer: You analogize the situation with fiber-optic lines to the history of electrification. Can you elaborate on that comparison?

Susan Crawford: When electricity was young, it was viewed as a luxury, and so, initially it was only for municipal buildings and street cars, very gradually moving to very rich [people’s] houses. There’s a story in the book about the richest house in San Francisco finally getting electric lights. Then only because of FDR did electricity go out into rural regions.

In the middle of that story, a lot of locals — thousands of them and cooperatives across the country — took matters into their own hands, and decided they were fed up with this cartel and decided to build their own electricity network.

We’re at that point in the story with internet: 800 communities and cooperatives across the country have, or are in the process of, building fiber networks. They understand the phase change that fiber plus advanced wireless represents.

Eventually, this activity is going to shame the federal government in action. It’s interesting to see both Mr. Trump and Mr. [Newt] Gingrich saying we have to do this for our national competitiveness. They are right, but they are probably right for the wrong reasons. They’re probably thinking that [they need] to give a series of subsidies to the existing status quo players. This isn’t necessary and we know that leads to divided market, unbelievably high prices, and a lot of people being left out.

Now, having [internet] is as crucial as having clean water or electricity or [a] sewage system — every American deserves and needs [it]. Basically, an unlimited data connection is necessary for participating in the 21st century… [but] to get there, we’ll need more fiber.

It’s a weird thing today, Keith, Newt Gingrich and the President are saying the same thing. There’s a Newsweek piece right now this week about [Trump] talking about the need for carrier-neutral 5G around the country and how important it is. To do that, you need to have fiber everywhere, and the fiber has to be opened to a lot of competition.

That’s interesting that Republicans like Newt Gingrich are into fiber. Tell me if this is accurate: does Newt Gingrich see the barrier to fast internet as there being not enough competition in the marketplace? As opposed to your critique, the left critique, which I’m understanding is that there is too much power is concentrated in an oligopoly of telecom companies, and/or that there isn’t enough municipal power… and this is something that should be regulated more as a utility rather than a private good?

I think [Newt] is probably unaware of the fact that in order to have advanced internet, you’ve got to have fiber everywhere, and I think he’s probably unaware of how oligopolistic this market is. He’s just vaguely thinking we need more shared spectrum. He’s going way up the chain to the airwaves not analyzing all the fundamental stuff that’s underneath that. Saying we need more 5G and never talking about fiber is like saying we need more airplanes and who cares about airports.

So he’s missing a few steps, and also what he’s suggesting is that private companies will sort of magically do this all on their own. That would never happen. We saw that with electricity. We’ve seen it with internet access in America already.

Right. Tell me more about how the telecom corporations prevent this shift from happening and what they’re doing to keep our American internet infrastructure slower and worse than it could be.

The decay started in 2004 when — maybe out of gullibility, maybe out of naivety, maybe out of calculation —then-chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell — now the head of cable association — was persuaded that the telcos would battle it out with the cable companies, that their cable modem services would battle it out with wireless, and all of that competition would do a much better job than any regulatory structure could at ensuring that every American had a cheap and fantastic connection of the internet. That’s just turned out that’s just not true.

Since then, he deregulated the entire sector — and as a result, we got this very stagnant status quo where in most urban areas — usually the local cable monopoly has a lock in the market and can charge whatever it wants for whatever type of quality services they're providing, leaving a lot of people out…. poor people, people of color in urban areas. And the rural situation is especially dire. It’s an issue that probably isn’t on most politicians’ radar screens.

There’s a Microsoft study from a couple of months ago saying somewhere between half and third of Americans don’t actually use what would qualify as even a very slow high-speed internet access connection. I believe a lot of that is from high prices.

[Editor’s note: the New York Times writeup of the study says: "162.8 million people do not use the internet at broadband speeds, while the F.C.C. says broadband is not available to 24.7 million Americans.”]

That’s the story. It’s a failure of leadership, imagination, and technology. The lack of regulation makes things worse, and the private market isn’t providing high-speed internet.

Why is it that so many people have only one choice for internet in the United States?

Well, there’s no oversight, and then this infrastructure is very expensive to build, and so it only makes sense to control whole markets so that you can monetize the hell of whatever you built. The companies have consolidated, and they can easily swap systems to each other tacitly or explicitly. You only need back office operations for your particular geographic area; when it comes to communications infrastructure and oversight, private players will routinely consolidate and divide markets so as to control a rational portion for themselves and lower their per-unit cost.

These companies aren’t evil. It’s just that we have left them unrestrained.

Today, we’ve sort of fallen in love with the idea that shareholders and profit-making are the only ideologies we value, and that somehow by some magical elixir this is all going to work out. When it comes to internet access, the situation is amplified because of the absence of good data on the price of internet access at any particular location in America, and its availability. In the absence of oversight — and as a result, complete absence of competition — this is what happens with very expensive, effectively natural monopolies like communications infrastructure.

To ask a bigger ideological question, I’m curious about the tendency of all these telecom companies to vertically integrate. Comcast, for instance, owns NBC and Universal pictures, so it produces content. Then it’s involved in distribution – it sells cable TV and internet. And then it owns the wires underground, too, that the data flows through.

What they’re doing is building a castle and then putting a big moat around it — so it’s un-sailable, so that no startups will rise up and compete. So, if you're in Philadelphia and you wanted to start a rival cable system with the Comcast, you probably need access to local sports. Comcast owns all the local sports content, or it owns programming that you can’t get access to except through them. Or maybe content that you can’t live without, like “Game of Thrones.” So AT&T owns [“Games of Thrones” producer] HBO, and HBO is their premier source for great new television.

What this does is allow them to use that content as a sledgehammer. It keeps any distribution competition at bay. The telecom startups just won’t be able to afford to pay for content people must have, in addition to just their data connection.

The other thing that’s going on at the same time is that Comcast is sort of playing both games… so they bought Sky, and that’s so that they can develop premium, exclusive content. That’s their goal with that purchase. At the same time, they’re making all of their profits these days on raising prices on their data service. They’re calling it their connectivity-centric idea. To the extent that anybody else is making money sending content over Comcast’s wires, Comcast can try to capture a portion of that by charging consumers ever more for more data. That make sense?

Yes.

Businesspeople always fear, “oh my god, [consumers] are cutting the cord, that means trouble for Comcast.” No, it doesn’t, because all that Comcast has to do — in its footprint, in its physical areas where it has data connections — is just charge more per subscriber. People slowly get used to it. We’re like frogs being boiled in water.

This whole story is little understood by the American public. I have no clients and no consulting relationships, and my whole goal with these books is to make it so everyone understands what’s actually going on. Because Americans don’t travel, you don’t get the sense of what a third-world country the US is becoming when it comes to communications.
https://www.salon.com/2019/04/07/big...fast-internet/





Microsoft Says its Data Shows FCC Reports Massively Overstate Broadband Adoption
Devin Coldewey

The broadband divide in the U.S. is real, but if you want to know how real, don’t ask the FCC. Its yearly broadband deployment report, already under fire for serious data problems, has now been further questioned by Microsoft, which says its own data contradicts coverage data provided by internet providers. Despite $22 billion in government spending, the company says, “adoption has barely budged.”

In a blog post, Microsoft explained that it was concerned with apparent inaccuracies in reports purporting to document broadband availability throughout the country. Leveraging data sourced from its various online services, it came to vastly different conclusions than the FCC.

“We have 200 services that we operate as a company,” said Microsoft President Brad Smith in a recent talk. “We can see download speeds across the country, and in every county, and we’ve assembled our own map with our own estimates.”

For instance, the FCC report suggests that broadband, as it is currently defined, is not currently available to around 25 million people. Sounds reasonable. But Microsoft’s data says that some 163 million people “do not use the internet at broadband speeds.”

Those aren’t the same thing, obviously, but you’d think if a person had broadband available they would use it at least now and then, right?

To look further into the problem, Microsoft checked out a few locales:

In our home state of Washington, the FCC data indicates that 100 percent of Ferry County residents have access to broadband. When we spoke to local officials, they indicated that very few residents in this rural county had access and those that did were using broadband in business. Our data bears this out, showing that only 2 percent of Ferry County is using broadband.

So the entire county has broadband, but next to no one uses it? Seems odd. The pattern repeats elsewhere as well, rural and urban, with similar deltas between reported broadband availability and observed broadband activity.

“These significant discrepancies across nearly all counties in all 50 states indicates there is a problem with the accuracy of the access data reported by the FCC,” concludes Microsoft’s chief data analytics officer, John Kahan.

Part of the issue is that internet providers essentially just report their own coverage via a form, and the FCC reports it more or less as fact. That’s a problem not just when a mistake on a form adds tens of millions of subscribers that don’t actually exist, but when large ISPs overstate their coverage so they don’t have to pay to fill in the gaps.

Microsoft’s suggestions, which it has made to Members of Congress and the FCC (though it won’t, as I originally wrote here, testify in the Senate on Wednesday) would make it far more difficult to fib on the Form 477, which as written seems to provide enormous leeway for a company to imply coverage that isn’t actually there.

The problems described here are not new or obscure, and even FCC commissioners have taken issue with the way this data is collected. Hopefully given the continued and growing outcry concerning this misleading report we will soon know better who in our country has, or needs, help getting online. That the FCC wants to help I don’t doubt, but in order to do so they need better data.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/08/mi...band-adoption/





Net Neutrality Bill Sails Through the House But Faces an Uncertain Political Future
Tony Romm and Brian Fung

House lawmakers on Wednesday approved a Democrat-backed bill that would restore rules requiring AT&T, Verizon and other Internet providers to treat all Web traffic equally, marking an early step toward reversing one of the most significant deregulatory moves of the Trump era.

But the net neutrality measure is likely to stall from here, given strong Republican opposition in the GOP-controlled Senate and the White House, where aides to President Trump this week recommended that he veto the legislation if it ever reaches his desk.

The House’s proposal, which passed by a vote of 232-190, would reinstate federal regulations that had banned AT&T, Verizon and other broadband providers from blocking or slowing down customers’ access to websites. Adopted in 2015 during the Obama administration, these net neutrality protections had the backing of tech giants and startups as well as consumer advocacy groups, which together argued that strong federal open Internet protections were necessary to preserve competition and allow consumers unfettered access to movies, music and other content of their choice.

Months after Trump took office, though, the Federal Communications Commission repealed the Obama-era net neutrality rules. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, with the support of the telecom industry, argued it had inhibited private-sector investment and exceeded the agency’s own authorities. In its place, Pai and the GOP-led FCC only required Internet providers to be transparent about the ways they manage their networks, while shifting oversight to another federal agency.

The parties’ competing visions — and seemingly widening political divide — played out as debate began on the House floor. Rep. Mike Doyle (D-Pa.) said the bill would give the “FCC the authority to protect consumers now and in the future.”

Republican Rep. Greg Walden (Ore.), the top GOP lawmaker on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees the FCC, blasted the bill as “another plank in [Democrats’] socialist agenda.”

Wednesday’s vote -- adopted on clear party lines -- marked the latest swing of the pendulum in a lengthy battle in Washington over what sites and services consumers can access on the web, and which startups and industries might flourish as a result. The debate has shifted every time control of Congress and the FCC has changed parties, resulting in years of competing Democratic and Republican proposals and a flurry of lawsuits — yet little progress in crafting a lasting federal solution.

It also reflected the continued efforts by Trump’s top Democratic critics in Congress to battle his administration’s deregulatory agenda, a political crusade that’s touched on issues including environmental protection and transportation.

With net neutrality, some Democrats sounded an optimistic note that the House’s vote — coupled with sustained public pressure from net neutrality supporters — could shift their fortunes. During the FCC’s repeal effort, millions of Americans wrote the agency in staunch support of the government’s rules, spurred on by Web activists and the likes of HBO’s John Oliver.

”I think the president, as he heads into 2020, when he sees a groundswell, a juggernaut coming at him, I think he’s going to change,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) ahead of the House vote.

But the bill faces long odds in the GOP-controlled Senate, after Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) told reporters Tuesday that the measure is “dead on arrival." Aides to the president also issued an official notice Monday that they would recommend a veto of the bill, arguing it would “return to the heavy-handed regulatory approach of the previous administration.”

To that end, opponents of the House bill have slammed it as a political stunt aimed at rallying Democratic voters ahead of the 2020 presidential elections. Even some Democrats acknowledged that the prospects of restoring net neutrality rules in the current political climate remains unlikely.

“I do not get the sense the fundamental dynamics have changed,” Sen. Brian Schatz (Hawaii), a top Democrat on the tech-focused Senate Commerce Committee, said in an interview last week. “We're still on the side of net neutrality, they're still not, and they believe they won at the FCC. So they're not interested in establishing a statute. And the only way this is going to change is if we get a new FCC.”

Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, argued the Democratic-backed bill could lead to a bipartisan dialogue.

“I don’t know if they’ll pass this bill,” he said in an interview. “[But] it may very well be a traditional thing where the Senate passes its bill and we go to conference to come up with a consensus … They may differ on how and what it should cover, but they still think we should do it.”

Net neutrality advocates embarked on their campaign to restore the government’s rules almost as soon as Pai finished his repeal. Dozens of state attorneys general, tech companies including Mozilla and a host of consumer advocates sued the FCC last year, arguing the agency had acted improperly in rolling back the Obama-era rules. A federal court heard oral arguments in the case in February. A decision is expected this summer.

In the meantime, a slew of state governments began writing and implementing net neutrality protections of their own. A law adopted in California — seen by some advocates as tougher than even the rules implemented federally in 2015 — quickly drew a legal challenge from the Justice Department in a case that’s still pending.

Reacting to the vote, FCC Chairman Pai blasted bill as a “big-government solution in search of a problem,” adding in a statement: "This bill should not and will not become law.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...itical-future/





U.S. Senate Republican Leader Calls Net Neutrality Bill 'Dead On Arrival'
David Shepardson

U.S. Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday a Democratic bid to restore the 2015 net neutrality rules is “dead on arrival in the Senate.”

The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday debated a Democratic plan to reinstate the Obama-era rules and overturn a December 2017 decision by the Federal Communications Commission to reverse the rules and hand sweeping authority to internet providers to recast how Americans access information.

Late Tuesday, the House opted to delay a vote on the measure and a series of amendments until Wednesday because of an unrelated issue over a separate budget measure.

The net neutrality bill mirrors an effort last year to reverse the FCC’s order, approved on a 3-2 vote, that repealed rules barring providers from blocking or slowing internet content or offering paid “fast lanes.”

The reversal of net neutrality rules was a win for internet providers such as Comcast Corp, AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications Inc, but was opposed by companies like Facebook Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc.

On Monday, the White House told Congress that if the bill were approved, President Donald Trump’s advisers would recommend he veto it. The White House “strongly opposes” the measure that would “return to the heavy-handed regulatory approach of the previous administration,” it said in a statement.

The bill would repeal the order introduced by FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, bar the FCC from reinstating it or a substantially similar order and reinstate the 2015 net neutrality order. The House will also consider a series of amendments.

Representative Mike Doyle, a Democrat, said Tuesday the bill “puts a cop on the beat to make sure our internet service providers aren’t acting in an unjust, unreasonable or discriminatory way.”

Republicans called a bid to restore internet protections akin to a “government takeover of the internet” and said it would open the door to the FCC eventually setting internet rates or imposing new taxes on internet service similar to levies on cable or telephone service. Democrats say polls show Americans overwhelmingly back net neutrality and want protections that providers will not interfere with their internet access.

Reporting by David Shepardson; Additional reporting by Amanda Becker; Editing by Dan Grebler and Lisa Shumaker
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-u...-idUSKCN1RL2HE





White House, FCC Unveil 5G Push and $20B Fund for Rural Broadband

It's part of a plan to position the US ahead of global rivals, says Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai.
Marguerite Reardon, Carrie Mihalcik

The White House on Friday will unveil a new 5G push to position the US ahead of global rivals in the race to deploy the next-generation wireless technology.

President Donald Trump and Federal Communications Chairman Ajit Pai will announce new airwaves auctions and plans to spend $20.4 billion over 10 years on rural broadband.

The FCC will auction off three segments of millimeter-wave spectrum -- which can offer insane data speeds but has limited range -- for commercial use. The auction is scheduled for December, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said on a conference call with reporters ahead of the White House event. He said the FCC plans to auction off 3,400 MHz of spectrum in three different high-frequency bands.

"This will be the largest spectrum auction in American history," he said.

Pai went onto say that this auction, along with others planned for the future, are putting the US on a good path.

"The US is well-positioned to take a lead in 5G," he said.

The FCC is also announcing the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund. The agency plans to reallocate $20.4 billion from its Universal Service Fund over the next 10 years to subsidize eligible companies to build out broadband infrastructure in underserved areas. The money will be allocated to internet service providers that can provide a minimum of 25 megabit per second downloads in areas that are currently in need of connectivity, Pai said.

He added that the new infrastructure will also help bring 5G to these rural areas.

"There are a number of startups that are working on millimeter wave technology to bring 5G to rural America," he said on the call.

The FCC already spends on average about $4 billion a year to subsidize rural broadband deployments, yet 19 million Americans, most of whom live in hard to reach places, still lack high speed internet access. This new injection of funding is expected to connect about 4 million more Americans to rural broadband, according to the FCC.

The race to 5G

5G, which refers to the fifth generation of cellular technology, is the next big thing in wireless technology. It's been hailed as the foundation for other big trends like self-driving cars and streaming virtual reality. The White House's announcement comes as carriers like AT&T and Verizon have begun rolling out their 5G service in select cities. Sprint and T-Mobile are also expected to begin rollouts this year of their 5G service. Other countries, like China, Korea and Japan are also racing to deploy 5G, creating a new kind of technological arms race.

The FCC has already taken steps to make more spectrum available to wireless carriers deploying the technology. In January, it concluded its first auction of high frequency millimeter spectrum in the 28GHz band. The auction raised a total of more than $702 million in gross bids. A total of 2,965 28GHz licenses were won. It's still auctioning off spectrum in the 24GHz band.

In addition to the spectrum auction announced Friday, Pai told reporters the agency is also working to free up so-called midband spectrum that's also crucial for building out 5G networks.

"Rest assured that we are making a priority of [making available] all bands for 5G," he said

The White House and 5G

5G has been on the mind of White House officials for some time. In October, the administration announced it was developing a plan to "position the United States to lead in next generation wireless networks for years to come."

Under this plan, the Secretary of Commerce was tasked with working across agencies to ensure that there is sufficient spectrum to ferry wireless data. Getting more spectrum in the hands of carriers -- particularly rural carriers -- was seen as a critical component of the strategy.

But that wasn't the first time President Trump had been linked to 5G. In January 2018, White House plans for a national 5G network leaked out. FCC officials and other experts largely dismissed the idea. Rumors of a nationalized wholesale 5G network bubbled up again last month as reported by Politico.

When asked about these rumors, Pai once again dismissed the notion of a wholesale 5G network built and operated by the US government. He said the "lesson from 4G" was that American leadership in wireless thrived because of the market-based approach to building and maintaining networks.

But in spite of the White House's efforts to push for more spectrum for 5G and to align other policies to encourage 5G deployment, Trump's tariffs on Chinese goods and pressure on European allies to rip out and ban 5G equipment from Chinese equipment maker Huawei over security concerns have also threatened the speedy rollout of the technology, according to critics.

"So far, this administration's interventions on 5G have done more harm than good," Jessica Rosenworcel, one of two Democrats serving on the FCC, said in a statement. "From imposing tariffs on 5G equipment to alienating allies on 5G security to falling behind the rest of the world on critical mid-band spectrum, the White House has yet to offer a workable plan for US leadership."
https://www.cnet.com/news/white-hous...d-says-report/





If You're Wearing Earbuds But Your Phone is Dead, is it Still Distracted Driving? B.C. Court Says Yes

B.C. RCMP say 1 earbud is fine, but wearing 2 can land you a $368 fine
Bethany Lindsay

A Surrey, B.C., driver who was caught wearing in-ear headphones has been found guilty of distracted driving, even though the earbuds were connected to a dead iPhone.

Patrick Henry Grzelak was coming home after a long day of work on Oct. 12, 2018, when police officers spotted him in the northbound lanes of 152 Street, according to a provincial court judgment.

His iPhone was in the centre cubby hole on his dashboard, with the earbuds plugged in. The battery was dead.

The phone wasn't in his hands or his lap, it wasn't transmitting music or a video, and he wasn't using it to talk to someone or navigate. Nonetheless, Judicial Justice Brent Adair found that Grzelak was legally "using" the phone.

"In my view, by plugging the earbud wire into the iPhone, the defendant had enlarged the device, such that it included not only the iPhone (proper) but also attached speaker or earbuds," Adair wrote in Monday's judgment.

"Since the earbuds were part of the electronic device and since the earbuds were in the defendant's ears, it necessarily follows that the defendant was holding the device (or part of the device) in a position in which it could be used, i.e. his ears."

According to the B.C. RCMP's traffic services, it's OK to drive with one earbud in, but wearing two can result in a $368 fine.

On the question of the battery, Adair said he relied on a 2015 precedent set in provincial court, which says that holding an electronic device in a position where it could be used constitutes an offence, even if it's temporarily not working.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/briti...t-bc-1.5092369





Julian Assange, WikiLeaks Founder, Is Arrested in London
Richard Pérez-Peña

Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who released reams of secret documents that embarrassed the United States government, was arrested by the British police on Thursday at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he had lived since 2012, after Ecuador withdrew the asylum it had granted him.

President Lenín Moreno of Ecuador said on Twitter that his country had decided to stop sheltering Mr. Assange after “his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols,” a decision that cleared the way for the British authorities to detain him.

The relationship between Mr. Assange and Ecuador has been a rocky one, even as it offered him refuge, and WikiLeaks said last Friday that Ecuador “already has an agreement with the UK for his arrest” and predicted that Mr. Assange would be expelled from the embassy “within ‘hours to days.’ ”

Video footage showed a bearded Mr. Assange being taken down the steps of the red brick embassy in the wealthy area of Knightsbridge in central London by several plainclothes police officers and put into a gray police truck that was waiting to take him away.

The United States Justice Department has charged Mr. Assange, 47, in relation to the publication of classified documents, a fact that prosecutors accidentally made public in November.

Marc Raimondi, a Justice Department spokesman, said on Thursday: “We are aware of the reports that Julian Assange was taken into custody by United Kingdom authorities. We refer you to the U.K. for comment regarding the arrest.”

Mr. Assange also faces a charge in a British court of jumping bail, and the Metropolitan Police said in a statement that Mr. Assange had been arrested by officers at the embassy on a warrant issued by Westminster Magistrates’ Court in 2012, for failing to surrender to the court.

Mr. Assange is also suspected of aiding Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election by releasing material stolen from the computers of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party. In July, the Justice Department charged 12 Russian intelligence officers with hacking those computers, and the indictment contends that at least one of them was in contact with WikiLeaks.

Mr. Assange took refuge in the embassy in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced questions about sexual assault allegations. He has insisted that the accusations against him are false, and has said that the Swedish authorities intend to extradite him to the United States.

Sweden has rescinded its arrest warrant for Mr. Assange, but prosecutors have stressed that the case has not been closed and could resume.

Ecuador gave Mr. Assange asylum in 2012, but he has been an irritant in its relations with Britain, the United States and other countries. Mr. Moreno, who became the country’s president in 2017, had looked for a face-saving way to get him out of the arrangement.

Mr. Moreno, in a video statement, said that Mr. Assange had exhausted the patience of his hosts, outlining of litany of grievances: the installation of electronic interference equipment, the blocking of security cameras, and attacks on guards.

“Finally two days ago, WikiLeaks, the organization of Mr. Assange, threatened the government of Ecuador,” Mr. Moreno said, an apparent reference to allegations from the organization that Mr. Assange had been subject to a spying operation. “My government has nothing to fear and doesn’t act under threat.”

In his video, Mr. Moreno singled out the recent release by WikiLeaks of information about the Vatican as evidence that Mr. Assange had continued to work with WikiLeaks to violate “the rule of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states.”

Alan Duncan, the minister responsible for Europe and the Americas at Britain’s Foreign Office, said in a statement that the arrest had followed “extensive dialogue” between the two countries.

Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager who has since been convicted of financial crimes, reportedly offered in 2017 to help Ecuador hand Mr. Assange over to American authorities, but the deal was never struck.

In December, 2017, Ecuador gave Mr. Assange citizenship, and was preparing to appoint him to a diplomatic post in Russia, but the British government made clear that if he left the embassy, he would not have diplomatic immunity.

The Ecuadorean government said in March last year that it had cut off Mr. Assange’s internet access, saying that he had violated an agreement to stop commenting on, or trying to influence, the politics of other countries. The government also imposed other restrictions on him, limiting his visitors and requiring him to clean his bathroom and look after his cat.

He sued the Ecuadorean government in October, claiming that it was violating his rights.

Mr. Assange, who was born in Australia, created WikiLeaks as a vehicle for people to publish secret materials anonymously. It gained enormous attention in 2010, releasing troves of classified United States documents and videos about the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq, and confidential cables sent among diplomats.

The files documented the killing of civilians and journalists and the abuse of detainees by forces of the United States and other countries, as well as by private contractors, and it aired officials’ unvarnished, often unflattering views of allies and of American actions. It also revealed the identities of people working with coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, which United States officials said put their lives at risk.

An Army private, Bradley Manning — now known as Chelsea Manning — was convicted of leaking that collection of files and was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but President Barack Obama commuted the sentence after Ms. Manning had served almost seven years.

During the 2016 campaign, WikiLeaks released thousands of emails stolen from the computer systems of the Democratic National Committee, leading to a series of revelations that embarrassed the party and Hillary Clinton’s campaign. United States investigators have said that the systems were hacked by Russian agents.

Mr. Assange made no secret of his intent to damage Mrs. Clinton, but he has insisted that he did not get the emails from Russia.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/w...r-embassy.html





Websites to be Fined Over 'Online Harms' Under New Proposals
Chris Fox

Internet sites could be fined or blocked if they fail to tackle "online harms" such as terrorist propaganda and child abuse, under government plans.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has proposed an independent watchdog that will write a "code of practice" for tech companies.

Senior managers could be held liable for breaches, with a possible levy on the industry to fund the regulator.

But critics say the plans threaten freedom of speech.

The Online Harms White Paper is a joint proposal from the DCMS and the Home Office. A public consultation on the plans will run for 12 weeks.

The paper suggests:

• establishing an independent regulator that can write a "code of practice" for social networks and internet companies
• giving the regulator enforcement powers including the ability to fine companies that break the rules
• considering additional enforcement powers such as the ability to fine company executives and force internet service providers to block sites that break the rules

Outlining the proposals, Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright said: "The era of self-regulation for online companies is over.

"Voluntary actions from industry to tackle online harms have not been applied consistently or gone far enough."

Discussing potential penalties on BBC Breakfast, he said: "If you look at the fines available to the Information Commissioner around the GDPR rules, that could be up to 4% of company's turnover... we think we should be looking at something comparable here."
What are 'online harms'?

The plans cover a range of issues that are clearly defined in law such as spreading terrorist content, child sex abuse, so-called revenge pornography, hate crimes, harassment and the sale of illegal goods.

But it also covers harmful behaviour that has a less clear legal definition such as cyber-bullying, trolling and the spread of fake news and disinformation.

It says social networks must tackle material that advocates self-harm and suicide, which became a prominent issue after 14-year-old Molly Russell took her own life in 2017.

After she died her family found distressing material about depression and suicide on her Instagram account. Molly's father holds the social media giant partly responsible for her death.

Home Secretary Sajid Javid said tech giants and social media companies had a moral duty "to protect the young people they profit from".

"Despite our repeated calls to action, harmful and illegal content - including child abuse and terrorism - is still too readily available online.

What do the proposals say?

The plans call for an independent regulator to hold internet companies to account.

It would be funded by the tech industry. The government has not decided whether a new body will be established, or an existing one handed new powers.

The regulator will define a "code of best practice" that social networks and internet companies must adhere to.

As well as Facebook, Twitter and Google, the rules would apply to messaging services such as Snapchat and cloud storage services.

The regulator will have the power to fine companies and publish notices naming and shaming those that break the rules.

The government says it is also considering fines for individual company executives and making search engines remove links to offending websites.

It is also consulting over blocking harmful websites.

On the face of it, this is a tough new regime - and ministers have acted upon the demands of charities like the NSPCC which want what they regard as the "Wild West Web" to be tamed.

But a closer look reveals all sorts of issues yet to be settled.

Will a whole new organisation be given the huge job of regulating the internet? Or will the job be handed to the media regulator Ofcom?

What sort of sanctions will be available to the regulator? And will they apply equally to giant social networks and to small organisations such as parents' message boards?

Most tricky of all is how the regulator is going to rule on material that is not illegal but may still be considered harmful.

Take this example. Misinformation is listed as a potential harm, and Health Secretary Matt Hancock has talked about the damaging effects anti-vaccination campaigners have had.

So will the regulator tell companies that their duty of care means they must remove such material?

The government now plans to consult on its proposals. It may yet find that its twin aims of making the UK both the safest place in the world online and the best to start a digital business are mutually incompatible.

What will the 'code of practice' contain?

The white paper offers some suggestions that could be included in the code of best practice.

It suggests the spread of fake news could be tackled by forcing social networks to employ fact-checkers and promote legitimate news sources.

But the regulator will be allowed to define the code by itself.

The white paper also says social media companies should produce annual reports revealing how much harmful content has been found on their platforms.

The children's charity NSPCC has been urging new regulation since 2017 and has repeatedly called for a legal duty of care to be placed on social networks.

A spokeswoman said: "Time's up for the social networks. They've failed to police themselves and our children have paid the price."
How have the social networks reacted?

Rebecca Stimson, Facebook's head of UK policy, said in a statement: "New regulations are needed so that we have a standardised approach across platforms and private companies aren't making so many important decisions alone.

"New rules for the internet should protect society from harm while also supporting innovation, the digital economy and freedom of speech."

Twitter's head of UK public policy Katy Minshall said in a statement: "We look forward to engaging in the next steps of the process, and working to strike an appropriate balance between keeping users safe and preserving the open, free nature of the internet."

TechUK, an umbrella group representing the UK's technology industry, said the government must be "clear about how trade-offs are balanced between harm prevention and fundamental rights".

Jim Killock, executive director of Open Rights Group, said the government's proposals would "create state regulation of the speech of millions of British citizens".

Matthew Lesh, head of research at free market think tank the Adam Smith Institute, went further.

He said: "The government should be ashamed of themselves for leading the western world in internet censorship.

"The proposals are a historic attack on freedom of speech and the free press.

"At a time when Britain is criticising violations of freedom of expression in states like Iran, China and Russia, we should not be undermining our freedom at home."

And freedom of speech campaigners Article 19 warned that the government "must not create an environment that encourages the censorship of legitimate expression".

A spokesman said it opposed any duty of care being imposed on internet platforms.

They said that would "inevitably require them to proactively monitor their networks and take a restrictive approach to content removal".

"Such actions could violate individuals' rights to freedom of expression and privacy," they added.

The BBC has a digital guide to life online for parents and young people: BBC Own It
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-47826946





Smart Speaker Use Is Growing. Will News Grow With It?

Smart speakers are challenging the foundations of radio, and news outlets are racing to find a place on the platform
Gabe Bullard

On midterm election night last year, NPR carried out its usual live coverage, coordinating stories from its reporters and from member stations across the country. Most of the audience followed along via these stations’ broadcast signals.

But those not listening to the radio could get updates, too, by asking Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa for an update on election news from the NPR One app. The response to this request was a short report with the latest news.

“Obviously, there are people that are going to be just glued to election returns,” says Tamar Charney, managing director of personalization and curation at NPR. “But we also know there’s a lot of other people who have a lot of other things going on in their life. They’re dealing with their kids, they’re getting ready for the next day, but they may still want to be able to be plugged in.”

The goal of the Alexa offering was to test two hypotheses: Would listeners find an option like this useful? And could NPR give it to them?

The answer to the second question was yes: A staff worked until about 3 in the morning to make updates available twice an hour.

But as to the first question, whether listeners would find it useful—it’s not clear how many found it at all. NPR won’t say how many people tried listening to the news this way, but, then again, the original commercial radio news broadcast in 1920 didn’t draw a massive audience either. “It was our first time trying this out and it was successful because we developed a workflow and best practices for election night so that we are ready for the volume of listeners we will get in the presidential elections in 2020,” Charney says. (Disclosure: While reporting this story, I was on the staff of the show “1A,” which is distributed by NPR and produced by member station WAMU. I am now a senior editor at the station.)

At least 21 percent of Americans own a voice-activated smart speaker—Amazon’s Echo is the most popular, while Google, Apple and other tech companies make such devices, too. And sales are climbing: In 2017, only seven percent of Americans owned smart speakers. Meanwhile, radio ownership and social media use are dropping. The speakers and the artificial intelligence that powers them can replace or augment the functions of a radio or phone. By voice, users can ask their smart speaker assistants to play music, find recipes, set timers, or answer basic questions.

Users can also ask for news. And this simple request has the potential to challenge the foundations of radio, turning broadcasts into conversations, changing the stories people hear, and creating individualized streams of information.

Smart assistants have long been a feature on mobile phones, but with smart speakers proliferating in homes and the technology coming pre-installed in cars, voice is pushing to the final corners of consumers’ connected lives, creating new habits and leading users to rethink how they interact with their devices. And news outlets are racing to find a place on the platform. “If [voice] does become an ever more dominant interface, then it will probably have quite profound effects on the way that information and content is consumed,” says Mukul Devichand, executive editor of voice and AI for the BBC.

For many publishers, there’s not much question if voice will grow. The question is whether news will grow with it.

The low listenership to the NPR One election night experiment relative to the NPR broadcast can in part be attributed to the lack of people currently asking their smart speakers for news. The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism found that just 18 percent of American smart speaker owners ask for news every day—this typically involves saying,“What’s in the news?” or a similar phrase and getting back short newscast-style reports from a publisher or publishers of the user’s choice. Podcasts didn’t fare much better: Only 22 percent of American smart speaker owners used the devices to listen to podcasts, according to the Reuters Institute report.

But podcasts and newscasts aren’t designed to be played via voice command. Radio news bulletins are broadcast at specific times, usually with weather, traffic and other soon-to-be-outdated updates. In podcasting apps, shows compete for eyes before ears—attractive art and episode titles have been found to boost listening for NPR’s shows, according to Charney, and “asking people to choose without those cues seems like a nonstarter.”

Asking a speaker for news is straightforward, but it can be frustrating in its own way. Echo owners, for instance, can stack up several updates from different publishers and hear them back-to-back. This can lead to hearing the same story told by different outlets in different ways, possibly at different volumes. There might be sponsorship messages at the end of each publisher’s briefing. Depending on when the user asks, the stories may not have been updated recently. And local offerings are scant. A user who asks for a news update early in the morning could hear three outdated stories followed by yesterday’s weather report.

However, it is possible to get broadcast quality news from a smart speaker: Users just need to ask their device to play a radio station. This is something smart speaker owners have taken to.

The Reuters Institute report notes that more than twice as many people in the U.S. listen to radio on their smart speakers than ask for news every day. And public radio stations have noticed an increase in traffic to the online streams of their live broadcasts. NPR reported that, in the first quarter of 2018, across the entire system of member stations, smart speakers made up about 16 percent of streaming though some stations have seen even more. For KCUR in Kansas City, Missouri, smart speakers accounted for 38 percent of online streaming for a week this January. Mobile phone and desktop computer streaming were each under 30 percent.

KCUR digital director Briana O’Higgins says these are mostly new listeners to the stream, not people who switched from streaming on their phone to streaming on their speaker. (Data is not yet available to indicate whether smart speakers are replacing listening to analog radio.) O’Higgins attributes the numbers to an on-air campaign encouraging KCUR broadcast listeners to ask their smart assistants to play the station.

KCUR has not invested heavily in creating content exclusively for smart speakers, but the rise in streaming has given the live broadcast a new relevance, and speaker listening at home is playing a role in programming decisions. The station recently moved the interview program “Fresh Air” to an early evening time slot. O’Higgins says the potential for people to listen to the show’s longform conversations on smart speakers as they cook dinner wasn’t the primary reason for the move, but it was discussed. On top of this, some stations have found that listeners who turn on the livestream with their speakers stay tuned in for longer.

“The actual speaker has become a radio replacement product. It is taking the place in people’s homes, the physical location where radios had been—next to the bed, on the kitchen counter, in the living room,” Charney says. “People are now turning to it, I think, to do some of the things they had used the old device, i.e. radio, to do.”

“Play this radio station” is one of the more primitive—albeit intuitive—commands for a smart speaker. As people get familiar with their devices, and as publishers start designing news updates that take advantage of smart speakers’ unique capabilities, streaming could wind up being a transitional behavior. “I think we’re at early days of the general public even thinking of asking for news from a voice assistant,” Charney says.

If the stream gives way to on-demand news on smart speakers, then public radio—or any radio stations offering smart speaker streaming—will have a lot of company on the platform. The list of available flash briefings for the Amazon Echo already includes not only radio outlets but TV networks, print publications, and websites. There are even updates delivered entirely by synthetic voices. “Our organization is very focused on us delivering the news where our audience is, and there is no question that audio is a growing segment of where audiences expect to find news,” says Kelly Ann Scott, the vice president of content for the Alabama Media Group, which manages several publications in Alabama and is owned by the national media chain Advance Local.

Alabama Media Group is working on briefings and updates for voice platforms. The challenge is figuring out what, exactly, users expect to hear, and how it should sound. “When you put your own user hat on and really think about what do you want from these voices that are coming through the speakers in your lives, you can learn a lot,” Scott says.

The Alabama Media Group’s website AL.com has a flash briefing, “Down in Alabama,” hosted by local journalist Ike Morgan. As he runs through the top stories of the day, his casual delivery and Alabaman accent make him sound more like an informed neighbor than a stentorian newscaster. “It has an incredible sense of place,” Scott says of the update, which is also available as a podcast. “That kind of authenticity makes it authoritative, too, when he’s talking about the news. It’s not talking at people. He really treats it like he’s having a conversation with his listener.”

Similarly, on midterm election night, Charney’s team prepared reports for Alexa with the aim of making them sound distinct from a traditional newscast. They didn’t want asking for news to be the same as turning on a radio. “It’s subtle sometimes but there’s a difference between going on the air and giving a report on something and responding to a question,” she says. “Newscasts are a little more presentation, and what we were aiming for is a more genuine answer to a question.” Charney says the goal is to have updates sound more like the “engaging, compelling, human-to-human answer” that an actual person would give, rather than a machine playing back something recorded for millions of people to hear at the same time.

NPR and Google—maker of the second-most-popular smart speaker in the U.S.—are working separately on news experiences designed specifically for voice; they’re open-ended and designed to travel with users wherever they find themselves near a voice device, which is to say, everywhere. Each one is a feed of audio stories curated largely by algorithms that learn a user’s preferences over time.

NPR has been doing this, absent voice commands, since 2011, when it introduced its Infinite Player, later rebranded as NPR One. The app starts with a newscast consisting of a few short stories. The pieces tend to get longer the more a person listens, with news from local public radio stations interspersed where available. Since the beginning, NPR One has been compared to the music service Pandora, which learns listeners’ preferences and plays them music they’re more likely to enjoy.

The service Google is developing and testing, called News on Google Assistant, is similar. It uses the Google News algorithms to curate a stream of stories from a variety of news organizations, in and out of radio. Like with NPR One, the feed starts with short pieces and expands to longer stories as listening continues. Its aim is to serve content based not only on user preferences, but also on which stories are the most important in their area, and which ones listeners have already encountered on other platforms.

These feeds cater to voice by removing the need for a listener to ask for a specific station or source each time they want an update (though NPR One still needs to be requested by name). There’s also no need to search through a smartphone application to change settings for news playback, either. The experience is analogous to turning on a radio or opening a news app—with an endless feed of information. Both News on Assistant and NPR One end up sounding something like a radio newsmagazine. But unlike a radio show, “it’s contextually relevant and it’s dynamic,” says Steve Henn a former radio journalist who is now the content lead for audio news at Google.

These products are currently built to respond to a generic request like “what’s in the news” or “play NPR One.” But that’s not the only way Charney and Henn imagine users asking their speaker for news.

In an example Henn uses, a listener in California could ask about the bankruptcy of local utility company PG&E and hear a piece from a local news outlet. “In the future you could ask a topical news question and get a story,” Henn says. The technology could also someday allow a user to interrupt a story to get more information—“Alexa, who is this speaking?” “Hey Google, tell me more about PG&E.”

This would require at least two changes: Platforms would need to allow news outlets’ voice apps (called “skills” on Alexa) to respond to questions like this (or users would need to ask these questions of a specific news outlet); and news organizations would need to make sure that voice assistants can find their content and play it as an answer to specific questions.

Already, Google has published instructions for marking up text to point its search engine to the most relevant, newsy information in stories, which can then be read aloud by Assistant’s synthetic voice. For audio to be discoverable by a search engine and played back in response to questions, sound files would need to be indexed and tagged. Speech-to-text technology could also transcribe entire stories for search engines. And this could lead to an even more significant change to audio content than voice alone.

With data on search terms from thousands of users flowing in, audio producers could cater their work to the questions users ask or the topics they most commonly search for when they’re expecting an audio reply. This is common practice for text-based outlets, but new territory for radio producers. Search metrics are more immediate and precise than any other audience data audio producers currently have: Radio ratings take weeks to compile, and while website stats might indicate which topics are popular, they don’t correspond directly to what an audience is willing to listen to. Some radio newsrooms have developed popular series based on answering questions listeners send in; making audio discoverable through search could amplify these efforts. But there are hazards to basing editorial strategy entirely on data. What if no one searches for news on City Hall, for instance?

“Data can be abused,” says Brendan Sweeney, director of new content and innovation at KUOW public radio in Seattle. “And it’s simultaneously true that the myth of a journalist’s or an editor’s gut being the all-supreme thing, that’s also problematic.” The challenge, Sweeney says, is not to assume listeners avoid entire topics, but to instead look at the data more closely to see if something else might be turning them away. “If an important story isn’t finding the audience it deserves, we need to adapt how we tell that story. Experiment with leads, framing, tone, etc.,” Sweeney says.

The most successful ways of telling stories in an algorithmically curated, voice-based news feed will be determined by user data. And many producers are experimenting now to see what works. NPR One provides stations with information on when in a story listeners decide to skip to the next option. Google’s news product could offer similar information, and it’s being developed and tested in partnership with a working group of publishers convened by Google.

Knowing questions users ask and granular details of users’ listening habits could drive audio producers to make stories that almost perfectly fit listeners’ habits and preferences. Conventions of storytelling and production that are common practice could change. Experiments could lead to new standards. However, until the data that could lead to these changes is widely available, the standard radio-style report will likely dominate. For its as-yet-unreleased stream, Google advises producers to keep their stories either under two minutes or between two and 15 minutes, and to make pieces sound-rich by including multiple voices and natural sound, techniques found in abundance on news radio.

Voice could lead to a burst of creativity around traditional beats, or it could lead to stories that don’t connect with audiences vanishing. With algorithmic feeds, though, it’s not just editors who decide which stories users hear. Reporters may experiment with their framing and writing for City Hall stories, but what’s to ensure that they’ll end up in streams that are out of a news outlet’s control?

Henn says the algorithm driving News on Assistant, which surfaces stories of local importance and isn’t based on internet virality, is designed in part to fight filter bubbles, rather than let them build if users skip past certain stories. “Our goal is to provide a diverse range of news, views, and opinions from as wide a variety of authoritative sources so that users can develop their own critical thinking on a story or subject,” he says.

And NPR One has “an algorithm that offers other points of view to people who consume a lot of partisan podcasts,” Charney says. “Human curation is a big part of what we do both to better inform and manage what the algorithm is doing, but also at times to ensure that certain stories aren’t subject to any personalization.”

Amazon declined to comment on whether it was planning any kind of algorithmic news product, but said the decision of what makes it into a flash briefing remains up to the user: “We don’t consider Alexa a news outlet, we consider Alexa a conduit for the news—meaning we have hundreds of news sources customers can choose from and we leave that up to them on what they’d like to hear.”

Even if algorithms and journalists keep users’ best interests in mind, listeners could still end up getting slanted coverage through their smart speakers. Voice platforms are no more immune to trickery than any other platforms, and in some ways, they can be more vulnerable. The technology to create “deepfake” videos that show people doing and saying things they never did or said is developing. But the ability to re-edit, impersonate, or synthetically reproduce a person’s voice is already here. In 2016, Adobe showed off a potential new feature in its Audition audio editing application that would allow editors to create new words and phrases from a sample of a person’s voice. The demonstration involved creating new phrases from existing conversations. (It hasn’t yet been commercially released.)

Completely synthetic voices play a large and growing role in voice technology, too. Smart assistants speak in them, and some news organizations are using text-to-voice technology for their news briefings. Quartz, for instance, uses two computer voices to deliver a few minutes of news every day. The text is drawn from the Quartz smartphone app, which is written as a series of conversational text messages.. Voice simulation has improved to the point that John Keefe, Quartz’s technical architect for bots and machine learning, says some users have told him they prefer the machine narration for short updates. “The voices are getting better and better,” he says. “It’s very clear to me that they’re just going to get to the point of human clarity. And probably better.” At the moment, Henn says his data shows machine voices are less engaging than humans. And machines can’t replace the humans who are quoted in stories, and whose voices convey information not just with words, but through tone and timbre.

To maintain trust, identifiers for the source of each story in a voice news feed will be key. Currently, this happens at the beginning of flash briefings. It’s possible for a malicious actor to try and put a fake NPR skill in these devices’ app store, but Amazon certifies new submissions to its flash briefing skill. And the company says it regularly audits available skills on its platform and reviews reports of “offensive or otherwise inappropriate content.” On algorithmic feeds, like the one Google is planning, the identification of a source becomes an issue of sound design and programming. Google’s specifications for creating news for Assistant include an introduction that identifies both the publisher and the person speaking.

To keep the sources on their platforms accurate, Henn says Google continues to research the origins and spread of fake news. The company is also working on using the same technology that creates deepfakes to recognize them, and they’ve invited developers to submit tools to do the same.

There’s also a possibility that false information could spread not through news designed for speakers, but simply from falsehoods posted online. One feature of smart speakers is their ability to do quick web searches and return information—“how tall is the Empire State Building?” for instance. This gets complicated when users ask about news that’s still developing. The Reuters Institute found that asking for the death toll in the 2017 Grenfell Tower Fire in the U.K. led to different answers from Amazon’s and Google’s devices, because they were drawn from different sources. These answers eventually changed to be the same, correct number, though Alexa was not forthcoming about its source, according to the report.

Whether smart assistants can be fooled by false information is a test of how they search for data—if they draw from Wikipedia, it could be edited or faked, while if they draw from other web sources, their algorithms will have to be capable of properly sourcing information. Keefe says trusting a speaker depends on how savvy a listener is, and their willingness to ask it for the source of a fact. He compares it to “the journalist adage: If your mom tells you she loves you, check it out.”

If Alexa tells you it’s true, check it out.

Building trust between a voice and a listener is a challenge publishers and platforms are working to solve. And there’s also a question of trust between the two. As voice develops, publishers are again finding themselves relying on big tech companies to distribute their content, along with the content of their competitors.

The ease of using a voice device is partly due to it simplicity: Only one answer comes back in response to a question and there’s no need to look at a screen (though smart speakers with screens and voice-activated televisions are available). However, this limits how voice platforms can present news, and how much of it they can present. A user may ask for an update on a big story, but rarely does only one news outlet cover a story. Voice assistants will have to figure out how to respond if a user asks “what happened in the Russia investigation” and every national news outlet has a story. “On big stories it’s inevitable that we are going to have multiple partners covering the same event. In that circumstance we will be guided by what’s best for the users,” Henn says. “Often what is best for the user is giving them a choice. We are working on this but today for topical news queries we give users multiple stories on the requested topic and also offer to send them to their phone.”

Increasingly, the story that’s surfaced could be a local story. Google’s working group of publishers testing News on Assistant includes a handful of local outlets. “Already roughly half of our content comes from local sources,” Henn says. “When there are local stories that are nationally significant hearing from a local reporter can add a tremendous amount of context and expertise to a story.” NPR One data shows that listeners who hear a local newscast are more likely to return to the app.

This could be promising for local journalists who are increasingly fighting for space on global platforms. But an algorithm deciding when to play a story, or distributing stories without paying for them, raises familiar fears of tech companies choosing winners and losers in journalism.

“There’s a long history and I think the skittishness is natural,” Henn says. “Until we lay out a clear monetization strategy publishers are going to be worried.” Henn declined to say what this monetization strategy looks like, in part because it’s still being developed. And that development is happening in a partnership between Google and publishers, through the News on Assistant working group. “Ultimately this product will succeed if it works for our partners,” he says.

For monetization, Henn notes that voice creates the opportunity for interactive ads, and Google offers a way for listeners to tell their speakers to donate to nonprofit newsrooms after they hear a story. While flash briefings for Alexa often feature a sponsorship message at the beginning or end of an update, Henn says “we can’t have a call for support after every one-minute-long story, so we’re working on ways to smartly deliver these messages to Assistant users.”

One term that’s used in these conversations is “offramp.” It’s a way for users to leave the main feed of stories and build a deeper relationship with publishers whose work they find most valuable. This could mean hearing a feed of just one outlet’s stories, opting into an email newsletter, or simply following them on social media. From there, publishers can try to convert these followers into subscribers, donors, or possibly advertising targets. “The piece we control is this single piece of audio. What all publishers want to have more influence on is what happens during, before and after the listener hears that single piece of audio,” says Tim Olson, the chief digital officer of KQED (another Google working group member, which has also received money as part of the Google News Initiative).

For skittish publishers, the rewards beyond revenue remain valuable. Forming a relationship with people on their speakers in the kitchen may make it easier to form a relationship with them on their headphones and in their cars. Working with tech companies now means shaping a growing platform; it’s a rare opportunity for publishers to exert some control over a technology they don’t own.

Radio producers moving toward voice have room to experiment in these early stages. Their primary audiences remain tuned in to the old devices: More than 90 percent of American adults listen to radio each week. Public radio ratings have never been higher. This might not last. And promotions for smart speaker skills are showing up between stories in radio news as smart speakers become another type of furniture in more and more American homes. It’s not guaranteed the people in those homes will ask for news. But for now, publishers and tech companies are preparing, so if anyone does ask, they’ll have an answer.
https://niemanreports.org/articles/r...ng-audio-news/





Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell Alexa

A global team reviews audio clips in an effort to help the voice-activated assistant respond to commands.
Matt Day, Giles Turner and Natalia Drozdiak

Tens of millions of people use smart speakers and their voice software to play games, find music or trawl for trivia. Millions more are reluctant to invite the devices and their powerful microphones into their homes out of concern that someone might be listening.

Sometimes, someone is.

Amazon.com Inc. employs thousands of people around the world to help improve the Alexa digital assistant powering its line of Echo speakers. The team listens to voice recordings captured in Echo owners’ homes and offices. The recordings are transcribed, annotated and then fed back into the software as part of an effort to eliminate gaps in Alexa’s understanding of human speech and help it better respond to commands.

The Alexa voice review process, described by seven people who have worked on the program, highlights the often-overlooked human role in training software algorithms. In marketing materials Amazon says Alexa “lives in the cloud and is always getting smarter.” But like many software tools built to learn from experience, humans are doing some of the teaching.

The team comprises a mix of contractors and full-time Amazon employees who work in outposts from Boston to Costa Rica, India and Romania, according to the people, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program. They work nine hours a day, with each reviewer parsing as many as 1,000 audio clips per shift, according to two workers based at Amazon’s Bucharest office, which takes up the top three floors of the Globalworth building in the Romanian capital’s up-and-coming Pipera district. The modern facility stands out amid the crumbling infrastructure and bears no exterior sign advertising Amazon’s presence.

The work is mostly mundane. One worker in Boston said he mined accumulated voice data for specific utterances such as “Taylor Swift” and annotated them to indicate the searcher meant the musical artist. Occasionally the listeners pick up things Echo owners likely would rather stay private: a woman singing badly off key in the shower, say, or a child screaming for help. The teams use internal chat rooms to share files when they need help parsing a muddled word—or come across an amusing recording.

Sometimes they hear recordings they find upsetting, or possibly criminal. Two of the workers said they picked up what they believe was a sexual assault. When something like that happens, they may share the experience in the internal chat room as a way of relieving stress. Amazon says it has procedures in place for workers to follow when they hear something distressing, but two Romania-based employees said that, after requesting guidance for such cases, they were told it wasn’t Amazon’s job to interfere.

“We take the security and privacy of our customers’ personal information seriously,” an Amazon spokesman said in an emailed statement. “We only annotate an extremely small sample of Alexa voice recordings in order [to] improve the customer experience. For example, this information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone.

“We have strict technical and operational safeguards, and have a zero tolerance policy for the abuse of our system. Employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow. All information is treated with high confidentiality and we use multi-factor authentication to restrict access, service encryption and audits of our control environment to protect it.”

Amazon, in its marketing and privacy policy materials, doesn’t explicitly say humans are listening to recordings of some conversations picked up by Alexa. “We use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems,” the company says in a list of frequently asked questions.

In Alexa's privacy settings, the company gives users the option of disabling the use of their voice recordings for the development of new features. A screenshot reviewed by Bloomberg shows that the recordings sent to the Alexa auditors don’t provide a user’s full name and address but are associated with an account number, as well as the user’s first name and the device’s serial number.

The Intercept reported earlier this year that employees of Amazon-owned Ring manually identify vehicles and people in videos captured by the company’s doorbell cameras, an effort to better train the software to do that work itself.

“You don’t necessarily think of another human listening to what you’re telling your smart speaker in the intimacy of your home,” said Florian Schaub, a professor at the University of Michigan who has researched privacy issues related to smart speakers. “I think we’ve been conditioned to the [assumption] that these machines are just doing magic machine learning. But the fact is there is still manual processing involved.”

“Whether that’s a privacy concern or not depends on how cautious Amazon and other companies are in what type of information they have manually annotated, and how they present that information to someone,” he added.

When the Echo debuted in 2014, Amazon’s cylindrical smart speaker quickly popularized the use of voice software in the home. Before long, Alphabet Inc. launched its own version, called Google Home, followed by Apple Inc.’s HomePod. Various companies also sell their own devices in China. Globally, consumers bought 78 million smart speakers last year, according to researcher Canalys. Millions more use voice software to interact with digital assistants on their smartphones.

Alexa software is designed to continuously record snatches of audio, listening for a wake word. That’s “Alexa” by default, but people can change it to “Echo” or “computer.” When the wake word is detected, the light ring at the top of the Echo turns blue, indicating the device is recording and beaming a command to Amazon servers.

Most modern speech-recognition systems rely on neural networks patterned on the human brain. The software learns as it goes, by spotting patterns amid vast amounts of data. The algorithms powering the Echo and other smart speakers use models of probability to make educated guesses. If someone asks Alexa if there’s a Greek place nearby, the algorithms know the user is probably looking for a restaurant, not a church or community center.

But sometimes Alexa gets it wrong—especially when grappling with new slang, regional colloquialisms or languages other than English. In French, avec sa, “with his” or “with her,” can confuse the software into thinking someone is using the Alexa wake word. Hecho, Spanish for a fact or deed, is sometimes misinterpreted as Echo. And so on. That’s why Amazon recruited human helpers to fill in the gaps missed by the algorithms.

Apple’s Siri also has human helpers, who work to gauge whether the digital assistant’s interpretation of requests lines up with what the person said. The recordings they review lack personally identifiable information and are stored for six months tied to a random identifier, according to an Apple security white paper. After that, the data is stripped of its random identification information but may be stored for longer periods to improve Siri’s voice recognition.

At Google, some reviewers can access some audio snippets from its Assistant to help train and improve the product, but it’s not associated with any personally identifiable information and the audio is distorted, the company says.

A recent Amazon job posting, seeking a quality assurance manager for Alexa Data Services in Bucharest, describes the role humans play: “Every day she [Alexa] listens to thousands of people talking to her about different topics and different languages, and she needs our help to make sense of it all.” The want ad continues: “This is big data handling like you’ve never seen it. We’re creating, labeling, curating and analyzing vast quantities of speech on a daily basis.”

Amazon’s review process for speech data begins when Alexa pulls a random, small sampling of customer voice recordings and sends the audio files to the far-flung employees and contractors, according to a person familiar with the program’s design.

Some Alexa reviewers are tasked with transcribing users’ commands, comparing the recordings to Alexa's automated transcript, say, or annotating the interaction between user and machine. What did the person ask? Did Alexa provide an effective response?

Others note everything the speaker picks up, including background conversations—even when children are speaking. Sometimes listeners hear users discussing private details such as names or bank details; in such cases, they’re supposed to tick a dialog box denoting “critical data.” They then move on to the next audio file.

According to Amazon’s website, no audio is stored unless Echo detects the wake word or is activated by pressing a button. But sometimes Alexa appears to begin recording without any prompt at all, and the audio files start with a blaring television or unintelligible noise. Whether or not the activation is mistaken, the reviewers are required to transcribe it. One of the people said the auditors each transcribe as many as 100 recordings a day when Alexa receives no wake command or is triggered by accident.

In homes around the world, Echo owners frequently speculate about who might be listening, according to two of the reviewers. “Do you work for the NSA?” they ask. “Alexa, is someone else listening to us?”

— With assistance by Gerrit De Vynck, Mark Gurman, and Irina Vilcu
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...-reviews-audio





How to Stop Amazon From Listening to Your Alexa Recordings
Monica Chin

Anything you say to Alexa can be seen by Amazon employees. According to a Bloomberg report, Amazon employs thousands of workers to transcribe recordings of Alexa users for the purpose of improving the voice assistant's recognition algorithm.Credit: AmazonCredit: AmazonThe recordings don't include your full name or address, but they are linked to your account number, your first name, and your device's serial number. Each employee reportedly listens to around 1,000 recordings per day. Employees admitted that they don't use conversations that are clearly private. However, particularly distressing or amusing recordings can be shared through employee chat rooms.

Here's how to opt out of this feature if you don't want Amazon listening to your recordings.

1. In the Alexa app, access Settings. You'll find this button at the bottom of the menu in the top left corner of the home screen.

2. Click on Alexa Account. This should be at the top of the page.

3. Select Alexa Privacy. You'll be taken to Amazon's external Alexa privacy page. You can review a number of things here, including our voice history, skill permissions, and other data settings.

4. Tap "Manage How Your Data Improves Alexa."

5. Toggle "Help Develop New Features" and "Use Messages to Improve Transcriptions" to Off. Alexa will no longer learn and improve from your responses, but your recordings will be safe and sound.
https://www.tomsguide.com/us/how-to-...ews-29851.html





Major Browsers to Prevent Disabling of Click Tracking Privacy Risk
Lawrence Abrams

Newer versions of Chrome, Safari, and Opera will no longer allow you to disable hyperlink auditing, which is a concern for those seeking maximum privacy. While some of these browsers previously allowed you to disable this feature, newer versions are going in the opposite direction.

Hyperlink auditing is an HTML standard that can be used to track clicks on web site links. This is done by creating special links that ping back to a specified URL when they are clicked on. These pings are done in the form of a POST request to the specified web page, which can then examine the request headers to see what page the click came from.

To create a hyperlink auditing URL, you can simply create a normal hyperlink HTML tag, but also include a ping="[url]" variable as shown below.

This will render on the page as a normal link to google.com and if you hover over it, will only show you the destination URL. It does not show you the ping back URL of https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/pong.php, so users will not even realize this is happening unless they examine the sites source code.

When a user clicks on the above link, the browser will first send a POST request back to the ping URL https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/pong.php as shown below. It will then open the www.google.com page. This means that every time a user clicks on a hyperlink audited link, the browser will make two requests instead of one.

Scripts that receive the ping POST request, can then parse the headers in order to see what page the ping came from and where the hyperlink audited link was going to. The headers associated with the information sent in the ping request are shown below.

[HTTP_PING_FROM] => https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ping.html
[HTTP_PING_TO] => https://www.google.com/
[CONTENT_TYPE] => text/ping

As you can see, using Hyperlink Auditing developers can track link clicks from any web property that they have access to.
Most browsers will not let you disable in the future

With privacy and online tracking being such a large problem and major concern for many users, you would think that browser developers would give you the option to disable anything that could affect your privacy.

Unfortunately, this seems to be going in the reverse direction when it comes to hyperlink auditing.

According to developer Jeff Johnson, Safari enabled hyperlink auditing by default, but allowed you to disable it by using the following hidden preference.

Johnson has stated that this flag no longer works with Safari 12.1.

"Unfortunately, this no longer works in Safari 12.1. I actually discovered the issue in Safari Technology Preview 72, and I filed a Radar on January 2, 2019 as rdar://problem/47000341," Johnson stated in a blog post. "Despite several months notice from me, Apple shipped Safari 12.1 last week to the public with no way to disable hyperlink auditing. I hope to raise awareness about this issue, with the ultimate goal of getting hyperlink auditing disabled by default in Safari. Apple claims that Safari is supposed to protect your privacy and prevent cross-site tracking, but hyperlink auditing is a wide open door to cross-site tracking that still exists. To end this article, I'll quote the full text of the Radar that I filed:"

Google Chrome also enables this tracking feature by default, but in the current Chrome 73 version it includes a "Hyperlink auditing" flag that can be used to disable it from the chrome://flags URL.

In the Chrome 74 Beta and Chrome 75 Canary builds, though, this flag has been removed and there is no way to disable hyperlink auditing.

The current version of Microsoft Edge also enables hyperlink auditing by default and provides no way to disable it that I could find. I also took a look at the upcoming Microsoft Edge Insider build and as it's based on Chromium 75, there is no way to disable hyperlink auditing on that browser either.

Like Edge, Opera is also based on Chromium, and the Opera 61 Developer build removes the option to disable hyperlink auditing as well.

Finally, I also tested it the mobile versions of Chrome and Safari and its enabled by default with no way of disabling it.

What this means is that starting next month when Chrome 74 is released to the stable branch, the Edge, Chrome, Opera, and Safari browsers will no longer offer a way of disabling this tracking feature and privacy risk.
Firefox and Brave win the award

Of all the browsers I tested, only Brave and Firefox currently disable it by default and do not appear to have any plans on enabling it in the future.

Firefox 66, Firefox Beta 67, and Firefox Nightly 68 disable Hyperlink auditing by default and allow users to enable it using the browser.send_pings about:config setting.

The privacy focused Brave Browser also disables it by default and does not allow you to enable it at all. It does have a display bug in the brave://flags that show that Hyperlink auditing is enabled, but this is a carryover from Chrome and is not displayed correctly.

Going forward, if privacy is important to you and you want to reduce the risk of being tracked online, then you will need to use Firefox or Brave.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/major-browsers-to-prevent-disabling-of-click-tracking-privacy-risk/





Netflix Isn't killing Movie Theaters: Viewers Who Stream More Also go to Cinemas More

• Streaming services are not disrupting movie theaters.
• At CinemaCon in Las Vegas last week, movie distributors and theater owners alike say there is little to fear from a growing population of streaming services.
• The U.S. box office is expected to grow about 1 percent to a record-breaking $12 billion this year.

Sarah Whitten

While streaming services have fundamentally altered how consumers watch TV, the idea that if audiences are spending more time watching content at home they are spending less time at theaters is a myth.

At CinemaCon in Las Vegas last week, movie distributors and theater owners alike said there was little to fear from a growing population of streaming services, which will soon include Disney+ as well as platforms from Comcast, Warner Bros. and Apple.

"Our takeaway is that Netflix and the expansion of [streaming video on demand] platforms will have minimal impact on box office given the vast supply of content, plenty of which is ideal for theatrical release (and most talent fiercely and contractually objects to a straight-to-streaming release)," Michael Pachter, analyst at Wedbush, wrote in a research note Monday.

Last year, the domestic box office had a record-breaking year, hauling in $11.9 billion, there was a 5% rise in the number of movie tickets sold, and 263 million people — 75 percent of the population — saw at least one movie in theaters.

At its current pace, Pachter expects the U.S. box office will grow about 1% to $12 billion this year, another record.

"Everyone has a kitchen, but everyone still goes out to eat," Charles Rivkin, CEO of the Motion Picture Association of America, said, quoting Sterling Bagby, the late co-founder of B&B Theatres, during a "State of the Industry" panel last week.

Rivkin said that with each new innovation in the entertainment industry, there has been worry that it will kill the movie industry. Talking pictures, technicolor movies, television, basic cable and smartphones were all seen as disruptors.

"And yet we're still here," Rivkin said.

Rivkin took the helm of the MPAA in 2017 and has embraced Netflix. The streaming platform was the first of its kind to join the MPAA and now sits alongside Disney, Paramount, Sony, Fox, Universal and Warner Bros.

"The theatrical and home entertainment sectors both grew strongly in 2018, and that's great news, because we are all part of the growth together," he said.

In fact, according to a study by EY's Quantitative Economics and Statistics group, the people who go to see movies in theaters more frequently are also the people who consume more streaming content.

Still, there are tensions between Netflix and theater owners. Netflix has notoriously opted for shorter release periods at the box office than movie theater operators typically expect.

Traditionally, Hollywood studios, and even Amazon, have adopted a 90-day theatrical release window, which means the film will run in theaters for that time period before being available on video-on-demand or on a streaming service's site or app.

A longer window means more money for theater owners.

"The exhibitors were all very clear at CinemaCon 2019 that they are happy to continue working alongside Netflix as they have been, as neither has been negatively impacted by the other," Pachter said. "Alternatively, the exhibitors would be happy to screen Netflix content should Netflix abide by the existing theatrical window."

But financial gain isn't the only reason filmmakers and theater owners want movies to be screened at cinemas.

"We had to make a choice whether to tell 'Crazy Rich Asians' on a streaming service or theatrically. It wasn't an obvious choice to some, but to us it was very obvious," Jon Chu, director of "Crazy Rich Asians," said during a panel last week.

"If we wanted to affect culture on a global scale, to become part of the dialogue that had to be had and urgently, we knew there was only one way to present our movie, and that was theatrically," he said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/08/netflix-isnt-killing-theaters-people-who-steam-more-see-movies-more.html





DVD and Blu-Ray Sales Nearly Halved Over Five Years, MPAA Report Says

The MPAA report is chock-full of interesting figures about a changing industry.
Samuel Axon

In its annual Theatrical Home Entertainment Market Environment report, the Motion Picture Association of America described an immensely sharp drop-off of physical media sales over the past five years. According to the data, which was obtained from DEG and IHS Markit, global sales of video disc formats (which in this context means DVD, Blu-ray, and UltraHD Blu-ray) were $25.2 billion in 2014 but only $13.1 in 2018. That's a drop in the ballpark of 50 percent.

Don't expect 8K Blu-rays or other emerging quality-focused formats to turn the tide, either. Market data published by Forbes showed that the aging, low-definition DVD format still accounts for 57.9 percent of physical media sales, and 4K Blu-rays are only 5.3 percent.

Samsung introduced the very first UltraHD (that's the industry certification for 4K discs) Blu-ray in 2015 but told the press it was stopping manufacture of Blu-ray players in the US this year—and not just 4K ones, either. Chinese OEM Oppo made a similar announcement last year, though Sony and Panasonic continue to make dedicated Blu-ray players. Also, Microsoft and Sony's game consoles still play Blu-rays.

With drops that sharp, you'd expect apocalyptic financials for companies making and distributing movies. However, while there are certainly losers in this trend, the overall industry actually grew over the same period. Home entertainment spending grew 16 percent in 2018 thanks to surges in consumer spending on digital video services from players like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu.

The global number of subscriptions to online streaming services grew 27 percent to 613.3 million in 2018, surpassing cable subscriptions (at 556 million) for the first time ever. However, cable still drives more overall revenue than streaming—it was the highest revenue platform in 2018, with $118 billion globally.

Subscriptions are expected to grow significantly over the next couple of years, as major players like Disney, Apple, and WarnerMedia introduce new streaming services to compete with existing players like HBO and Netflix.

The report covers the video content industry broadly, and it also found that movie theater revenues were up very slightly last year and that 75 percent of US and Canadian consumers went to see at least one movie at a theater in 2018. You can view the MPAA's full report for more details like breakdowns by film, gender, race, rating, and so on.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/04/dvd-and-blu-ray-sales-nearly-halved-over-five-years-mpaa-report-says/





Sony Creates Colossal 16K Screen in Japan
Leo Kelion

The biggest 16K screen of its kind will shortly go on show in Japan.

Sony's display contains 16 times as many pixels as a 4K television and 64 times as many as a regular 1080p high definition TV, meaning it can show images in far more detail than normal.

This will let viewers stand close to the unit - which is longer than a bus - without its image looking blurred.

One expert said it would likely take decades for 16K tech to filter down to consumer products.

The 63ft by 17ft (19.2m by 5.4m) screen is currently being installed at a new research centre that has been built for the Japanese cosmetics group Shiseido in the city of Yokohama, south of Tokyo. It is so large it will stretch between the first and second floors.

The development was announced by Sony at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show, which is currently being held in Las Vegas.

"We're moving slowly towards 8K TVs at the end of the decade and who knows how long it will take to get beyond that, so 16K is likely to be limited to the corporate world for the time being," commented David Mercer from the consultancy Strategy Analytics.
"But there's no doubt about it. These displays are incredibly impressive in person - even 8K on a big display is almost mesmerising.

"When you get to this resolution it delivers almost a quasi-virtual reality experience as your eyes perceive there to be depth to the content."

Sony had previously designed a separate 16K display that went on show at Tokyo's Haneda Airport in 2014, but that looked like it was made up of dozens of smaller screens rather than presenting a single seamless picture.

The new "super-size" installation has in fact been created out of several modular panels, but because they do not have bezels they can be fitted together without any visible gaps to create the impression of being a single screen.

Sony calls the technology "Crystal LED", which is its brand name for micro-LED display tech. Samsung is also experimenting with the format.

The innovation does not require a backlight, but goes much brighter than OLED (organic light-emitting diode) screens while still delivering similar deep blacks. At present, however, the high manufacturing costs involved make it too expensive for widespread use.

For now, Sony is pitching a range of smaller, lower-resolution Crystal LED displays for use in office lobbies, car showrooms, cinemas and theme parks.

Since little 16K footage exists elsewhere, the firm has produced its own film for Shiseido showing life-size animal wildlife.

It has not disclosed the method involved, but has previously achieved what is known as "quad ultra-high definition" footage by using a method called demosaicing.

This involves applying an algorithm to 8K footage to deduce what the additional pixels should look like, similar to the way 4K TVs sometimes up-sample 1080p footage.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47867038





SAS 2019: Exodus Spyware Found Targeting Apple iOS Users

The surveillance tool was signed with legitimate Apple developer certificates.
Tara Seals

The Exodus spyware that was recently found lurking in 25 different malicious apps on Google Play has been ported to the Apple iOS ecosystem.

The surveillance package can exfiltrate contacts, take audio recordings and photos, track location data and more on mobile devices. Earlier this month, word came that Google had booted a raft of Exodus-laden apps.

According to Lookout, it turns out that iOS versions had become available outside the App Store, through phishing sites that imitate Italian and Turkmenistani mobile carriers. These are notable in that they abused the Apple Developer Enterprise program.

Exodus – a Mass Departure of Personal Info

According to Lookout and other research from Security Without Borders, the spyware appears to have been under development for at least five years. It’s a three-stage affair, starting with a lightweight dropper that then fetches a large second-stage payload that contains multiple binaries with most of the spy goods housed within them. Finally, a third stage typically uses the Dirty COW exploit (CVE#2016#5195) to obtain root privileges on a targeted device.

In delving into the technical details, Lookout saw evidence of a fairly sophisticated operation, suggesting that it may have been initially marketed as a legitimate package for the government or law-enforcement sectors.

“Several technical details indicated that the software was likely the product of a well#-funded development effort and aimed at the lawful intercept market,” researchers said in an analysis shared with Threatpost ahead of a presentation at the Security Analyst Summit (SAS) 2019, which kicks off in Singapore this week. “These included the use of certificate-pinning and public key encryption for command-and-control (C2) communications, geo#restrictions imposed by the C2 when delivering the second stage, and the comprehensive and well-implemented suite of surveillance features.”

Analysis of the Android samples led the researchers to several samples of an iOS variant, which further examination revealed to be served up on clever phishing sites. The adversaries spoofed both Wind Tre SpA, an Italian telecom operator, and TMCell, the state-owned mobile operator in Turkmenistan, to target iPhone users, according to Lookout.

Abusing Legit Enterprise Development Tools

In order to spread the iOS app outside of the official App Store, the cybercriminals abused Apple’s enterprise provisioning system, which allowed them to sign the apps using legitimate Apple certificates.

“The Apple Developer Enterprise program is intended to allow organizations to distribute proprietary, in#house apps to their employees without needing to use the iOS App Store,” Lookout researchers explained. “A business can obtain access to this program only provided they meet requirements set out by Apple. It is not common to use this program to distribute malware, although there have been past cases where malware authors have done so.”

The apps themselves dovetailed with the phishing sites, purporting to be help apps offered by the carriers. They instructed users to “keep the app installed on your device and stay under WiFi coverage to be contacted by one of our operators.”

Lookout’s analysis found that the iOS variant is a bit cruder than its Android counterpart, and it lacks the ability to exploit device vulnerabilities. However, the apps were still able to use documented APIs to exfiltrate contacts, photos, videos and user-recorded audio recordings, device information and location data; and, it offered a way to perform remote audio recording, though this required push notifications and user interaction.

“Though different versions of the app vary in structure, malicious code was initialized at application launch without the user’s knowledge, and a number of timers were setup to gather and upload data periodically,” according to the analysis. “Upload data was queued and transmitted via HTTP PUT requests to an endpoint on the C2. The iOS apps leverage the same C2 infrastructure as the Android version and use similar communications protocols.”

The good news is that Apple has revoked the affected certificates for this particular crop of apps.

More Links to eSurv

Exodus is thought to be tied to an Italian company called eSurv, based in Catanzaro, in Calabria, Italy. It publicly advertises products like CCTV management systems, surveillance drones, facial- and license-plate recognition systems – and is now under investigation by Italian authorities, according to local news reports.

Lookout researchers said that they had uncovered further evidence linking Exodus to eSurv.

“Early versions of the Android application used infrastructure which belonged to a company named Connexxa S.R.L. and were signed using the name of an engineer who appears to hold equity in Connexxa,” according to the report. “This engineer’s name is also associated with [eSurv]. eSurv’s public marketing is centered around video surveillance software and image recognition systems, but there are a number of individuals claiming to be mobile security researchers working at the company, including one who has publically made claims to be developing a mobile surveillance agent.”

Moreover, eSurv was once a business unit of Connexxa. “The eSurv software and brand was sold from Connexxa S.R.L. to eSurv S.R.L. [in 2016],” the analysis noted.

And finally, each of the recently found phishing sites contained links to metadata such as the application name, version, icon and a URL for the IPA file.

“To be distributed outside the app store, an IPA package must contain a mobile provisioning profile with an enterprise’s certificate,” Lookout researchers noted. “All these packages used provisioning profiles with distribution certificates associated with the company Connexxa S.R.L.”
https://threatpost.com/exodus-spyware-apple-ios/143544/





Zain Qaiser: Student Jailed for Blackmailing Porn Users Worldwide
Dominic Casciani

A student who made hundreds of thousands of pounds blackmailing pornography website users with cyber attacks has been jailed.

Zain Qaiser from Barking, London, used his programming skills to scam visitors to pornography sites around the world.

Investigators have discovered about £700,000 of his profits - but his network may have made more than £4m.

Qaiser, 24, was jailed for more than six years at Kingston Crown Court.

The court heard he is the most prolific cyber criminal to be sentenced in the UK.

Judge Timothy Lamb QC said: "The harm caused by your offending was extensive - so extensive that there does not appear to be a reported case involving anything comparable."

His jail sentence of six years and five months is a second major success for the National Crime Agency (NCA) after the jailing earlier this year of a British man who broke an entire nation's internet.

Bedroom attack

Qaiser was first arrested almost five years ago - but the case has been delayed because of the complexity of the investigation and mental health concerns.

Initially working from his bedroom at his family home in Barking, Qaiser began to make money through "ransomware" attacks when he was only 17 years old.

This is a form of attack in which a computer is hijacked and frozen by a small piece of software until the user pays a fee for its release.

Millions of these attacks occur every day around the world - the most well-known example in the UK is the "Wannacry" attack on the NHS in 2017.

Qaiser contacted the Russian controller of one of the most potent attack tools and agreed a split of his profits if his planned blackmail operation was a success. In turn, he forged contacts with online criminals from China and the USA to help shift the cash.

Over 18 months, the teenager posed as a legitimate supplier of online promotions and booked advertising space on some of the world's most popular legal pornography websites.

But each of the adverts that was promoted on the websites contained a malicious tool called the "Angler".

Any visitor to the adult site who clicked on one of Qaiser's fake adverts would trigger the download to their own computer of the attack kit.

If the home computer was not protected with up-to-date anti-virus software, the Angler would search for vulnerabilities and, if possible, deliver the "ransomware" that seized control of the machine.

It immediately splashed a full screen message to the user, purportedly from the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, accusing the user of breaking the law - warning them they faced up to three years unless they paid an immediate fine equivalent to roughly $200 or £100.

"Out of fear of embarrassment from friends or family members discovering they had accessed pornography, many users paid the ransom," prosecutor Joel Smith told Kingston Crown Court.

"For obvious reasons very few people complained to law enforcement officials."

To make thing worse, the warning page claimed that police had captured webcam images of the user during their visit to the adult website - and gave a deadline for the payment to be made.

The National Crime Agency says that it's impossible to know exactly how many people paid up - but forensic data has revealed Qaiser's operation was enormous.

One screen grab from his control system reveals that he made £11,000 in July 2014 alone.

In a sampling exercise, the NCA calculated just one of the fake adverts appeared on 21 million web browsers every month - including 870,000 appearances on pornography pages accessed in the UK.

In turn, the attack kit would have been downloaded on approximately 165,000 PCs. Some 5% of those - about 8,000 users - were likely to have fallen victim to the ransom demand.

Financial investigators have established that Qaiser's operations shifted at least £4m through a string of crypto-currency platforms - although a great deal of these profits were ploughed back into the scam by buying more and more advertising space.

The NCA's financial investigators identified that the former computer sciences student had personally received almost £550,000 by the time of his arrest.

During the lengthy investigation while he was on bail, detectives found he received a further £100,000 as his associates moved funds through Gibraltar and Belize to a UK-accessible online account.

Qaiser is believed to have more stashed in online crypto-currencies because he revealed in online chats that he has further "offshore savings".

Mike Hulett, head of cyber investigations at the National Crime agency, said: "We regard Zain Qaiser as probably the most significant cyber crime offender that the NCA has investigated.

"The sheer volume and complexity of the actions - the number of people he is connected with worldwide and the frequency of his operation made it so successful and led to him making the money that he did.

"I don't think we will ever know the true number of people who paid up."

During his offending, Qaiser had no legal income - but he maintained a high-rolling lifestyle.

He spent almost £5,000 on a Rolex watch and £2,000 on a stay in a Chelsea hotel. He regularly spent money on prostitutes, drugs and gambling, including almost £70,000 in a casino in an upmarket shopping centre.

Threat to brokers

While it appears that no users of adult websites directly alerted police anywhere in the world, the advertising brokers who unwittingly placed Qaiser's malware promotions did.

When a Canadian company selling advertising space asked Qaiser to stop, he launched a massive cyber attack against it, causing hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of damage to the business.

"Really, it's just better if we work together," warned Qaiser in one message to the broker.

"We can make some serious money together. It's my way or no way. The K!NG is back."

The Canadian company contacted police.

Elizabeth Lambert, defending, said that Qaiser had suffered from bouts of mental illness and was influenced by older, more experienced organised cyber criminals.

Qaiser initially denied the crimes and claimed he had been hacked, before pleading guilty to 11 charges - including blackmail, fraud, computer offences and possessing criminal property.

The ransomware offences were committed between 2012 and 2014.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-47800378





Reddit’s /r/Piracy is Deleting Almost 10 Years of History to Avoid Ban
Andy

Under pressure from Reddit's administrators over copyright issues, the site's largest forum dedicated to piracy discussion has opted for "The Nuclear Option". After voting by its contributors, all posts older than six months are now being deleted. That's almost 10 years of data, the vast majority of it completely legal. The negative effects are already being felt.

With around a quarter of a billion monthly users, Reddit is one of the most important sites on the Internet.

The site plays host to millions of live discussions on countless topics ranging from the mundane to obviously controversial.

Recently we’ve reported on the troubles being faced by /r/piracy, Reddit’s most popular sub-Reddit focused on piracy discussion.

In an article published mid-March 2019, we reported how the moderators of the forum were making best efforts to keep content on the right side of the law and within Reddit’s rules. Just a handful of days later, however, the moderators received notice from Reddit that they were receiving too many copyright complaints from rightsholders.

For a sub-Reddit that has strict rules forbidding anyone posting links to infringing content, the notification came as a disappointment. While some complaints were legitimate (some people simply won’t abide by the rules and some posts do get missed), many were not. This placed the forum’s moderators between a rock and a hard place.

According to some of the copyright notices filed with Reddit, simply posting an alleged pirate site homepage URL warranted a complaint, even when that URL didn’t link to any infringing content. We’ve seen the same kind of issues before, when copyright holders have made attempts to have site homepages delisted from Google, despite their content never appearing there.

Further complicating the process is that the moderators of /r/piracy have no ability to respond to potentially false allegations. If a user makes a post that results in a copyright notice, only that user (or Reddit’s admins) are in a position to dispute the claim with the notice sender, so that rarely happens. Even if it does, nothing is made public.

Meanwhile, the notices keep building up, despite best efforts and whether they’re valid or not. Even people simply posting names of releases are being flagged for copyright infringement, something that isn’t illegal in any form. As a result, those posts too are now being removed, as quickly as the mods can reach them.

“I have begun unofficially removing release posts and it’s quite sad considering that a rather large bulk of our users look forward to them every day, I know I did,” moderator ‘dysgraphical‘ informs TF.

“We have had days when releases were the highlight of the day filled with hundreds of comments of excited people discussing the film. This has all been scrubbed now. We recently had an April Fool’s ‘Avengers: Endgame’ release post hit r/all and while the community was happy to meme on being fooled, a few users were concerned that copyright holders might act on it and have it removed.”

It’s nothing less than self-censorship in response to sloppy and/or fraudulent claims, but these are testing times.

But the really big issue here relates to the huge archive of posts already present on /r/piracy – some ten years’ worth of discussions. Is there anything in there that could warrant a surprise complaint? Apparently so, since rightsholders have been digging up issues from the past and complaining to Reddit.

This left the moderators of /r/piracy with a huge dilemma. Uncertain of what lay in the archives and only being in a strong position to be absolutely certain of the state of play more recently, they asked the community for input on the ‘Nuclear Option‘ – deleting every post older than six months old, just to be sure.

After the votes were counted, those in favor of deleting the archives outnumbered those asking for preservation by ten to one. All that was left was to find a way to begin deleting history, around 9.5 years of posts. A script was created and put into motion and the purge began.

“Given the speed, this might take weeks,” says moderator ‘dbzer0’, a nine-year veteran of the sub-Reddit.

It’s unclear when this sweeping process with be fully completed, but it’s hoped that it can keep the community alive. Not all of the moderators were in favor of the mass deletion since that, of course, deletes the community’s history too.

“The Scrubbing [as the deletion process is now called] is just a poorly, rushed attempt to elongate the community’s lifespan on Reddit,” dysgraphical says.

“We have already seen this performed in other subreddits in which mod teams have bent over backwards to please the administration by implementing their own set of stringent rules. These communities no longer exist.”

But the vote was cast and the final decision appears to have been a democratic one rooted in self-preservation. It does raise interesting points, however.

The recently highlighted situation shows that sub-Reddits devoted to controversial topics – especially those related to piracy – are at risk of being targeted. When they are, the copyright notice and counter-notice process is somewhat undermined.

While users can be banned for repeat infringements, it’s trivial to open a new account. And when the notices start to pile up on Reddit – legitimately or not – whole communities can be banned, despite working above and beyond the requirements of the law.

“The issue at hand is not that r/Piracy distributes copyrighted content, but rather that the discussion of digital piracy is no longer protected; it never was,” dysgraphical adds.

“As copyright holders continue pushing the envelope, by claiming that the mention of streaming sites infringe their IP, Reddit will continue complying and effectively ban r/Piracy. Copyright holders on Reddit no longer need to dig deep to find infringing content, they can pick any thread or comment at random that loosely relates to their IP, and file a DMCA takedown notice.”

To give a school analogy, it appears that if a few kids misbehave, get misinterpreted, or targeted incompetently, the whole class gets kept behind after school – before being permanently expelled. It’s effectively mass punishment based on the acts of a few – or the whims of bots.

Finally, subscriptions to /r/piracy have always been on the increase and are now edging towards 370,000 subscribers but the ongoing purge is having a clear effect on traffic to the sub-Reddit, when the two unusual peaks (including the April 1 surge) are discounted.

Whether the popular forum can fight back from this decline will remain to be seen but it’s clear that deleting most of its history is already causing pain. The big question is whether Reddit’s admins are taking note of this huge olive branch or whether they’ll still choose to chop down the whole tree regardless.
https://torrentfreak.com/reddits-r-p...id-ban-190407/





Facebook's New Watch Party Video-Streaming Feature is Wildly Popular with Pirates, Who Use it to Run Illicit Movie Marathons
Rob Price

• Facebook's new group-video-watching feature, Watch Party, is proving wildly popular with pirates. It's designed to let Facebook users watch a video on the platform all at the same time, letting them comment and react as it plays.
• But Business Insider found that pirates were also using it to host movie marathons and binge-watch classic TV series on the social network, in an apparent circumvention of copyright law.
• Everything from Oscar nominees like "Her" to reruns of Gordon Ramsay cooking shows and "Mean Girls" are being shared using the feature, we found.
• It adds a social aspect to piracy, letting users chat, joke, and connect with one another as they improperly consume copyrighted content on Facebook.
• After Business Insider reached out for comment, Facebook took down several of the Watch Party groups we looked into for this story.
• Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

Facebook's new video-streaming feature, Watch Party, is a big hit, bringing together users from across the globe. There's just one problem: Some are using it in ways that Facebook didn't intend, and that are almost certainly illegal.

Launched to all users in November, Watch Party lets users "host" video-watching events with friends and others on the site, letting them watch simultaneously and comment or react in real time to what's on the screen.

But it has also proved hugely popular with pirates, Business Insider found, with users flocking to the feature to broadcast copyrighted movies and TV shows to strangers across Facebook.

We found that illicit watch parties were a frequent occurrence on the social network, broadcasting a range of media, from relatively recent hits like "Her" to cinematic classics like "Mean Girls" and vintage TV shows like the original "Twilight Zone."

Groups have sprung up to host these watch parties, with names like "Super Film Club Watch Party" and "Watch Party Cinema," that often have hundreds or even thousands of users and make no attempt to hide their purpose. Some, like "Firefly Watch Party - The Group," are dedicated to rewatching a single TV show together.

"Watch Party Central Movie Lovers Unite" openly billed itself as "a place for movie lovers to enjoy movies together for free and discuss the films," while another group said: "It is simple the way the Game works. Every Friday a member picks a movie and we all watch it. We will then discuss the film and rate the film under the Rotten Carl Score post for the film."

The watch parties also sprang up in unrelated groups as a way to bring members together. "It's 2005 and this is cool as hell" is one example of a group that hosted these events nearly constantly, to which Facebook's automatic notifications then alerted its nearly 119,000 members.

After Business Insider reached out to Facebook for comment, the company took down the groups listed above.

In a statement to Business Insider explaining the group takedowns, a Facebook representative, Carolyn Thomas, said: "We devote significant resources to address and prevent piracy for all videos on Facebook, including in Watch Parties. We have several measures in place to address infringing content, including our notice-and-takedown program, repeat infringer policy, Rights Manager, and use of Audible Magic."

She added: "We take prompt action against IP infringement when we become aware of it, and disable the accounts of repeat infringers when appropriate. In this instance, the Groups have violated our Community Standards on Intellectual Property and have been removed."

Facebook has a long history of copyright infringement on the platform. In 2018, Business Insider reported that its groups were widely used for sharing pirated rips of popular movies, with some growing to hundreds of thousands of members on the back of such material.

And content creators have for years complained about "freebooting," when nefarious users rip copies of their video from other platforms like YouTube and then upload it on Facebook without their permission.

Facebook's stated mission is "to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together," but Watch Party's adoption by pirates illustrates that the company's features for building "community" aren't restricted to virtuous uses. And more than that, it represents a notable shift in the evolution of piracy.

Historically, this kind of copyright infringement has, for most people, been a fundamentally solitary activity - one person's decision to download a specific video or stream a movie. Any piracy-focused forums or chat groups were largely adjacent to the illegal activity, rather than a core component of it.

But Watch Party introduces a social aspect to piracy, without requiring any technical know-how from users. It turns piracy into something like a communal TV-viewing experience, with users chatting about the copyrighted content as it plays, connecting with one another in the comments, or even establishing threads to discuss what they should watch together next.

Facebook has previously tried to wash its hands of content infringement. When Business Insider reached out to the company in 2018 about piracy-focused groups, it declined to take them down, saying that unless rights-holders complained, it couldn't be sure that the videos were being shared illegally - even when they were clearly recorded in cinemas by people using handheld cameras.
https://www.businessinsider.in/faceb...w/68803415.cms





Video Which Trump Tweeted is Pulled from His Account for Pirating the Theme Music from The Dark Knight Rises

• The fan-made 2020 campaign video was reposted by Trump on Tuesday with the message: 'MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN'
• But within hours Warner Bros. demanded its removal for its use of Hans Zimmer's theme music from the 2012 movie The Dark Knight Rises
• Text against the score said: 'First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they call you a racist. Donald J. Trump. Your vote. Proved them all wrong.'
• Trump has previously been hit by artists for using their music at rallies, including Aerosmith and Pharrell Williams

Afp and Ap

A video that President Donald Trump re-tweeted that included the soundtrack of a Batman movie was pulled from his account due to copyright violations.

Trump on Tuesday tweeted the video, which featured images of Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton juxtaposed with images from Trump's two years in office.

The text, set against the movie's score, read: 'First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they call you a racist. Donald J. Trump. Your vote. Proved them all wrong.'

The video, which Trump reposted Tuesday evening, showed images of his presidency, including his meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

'Your vote proved them all wrong,' the two-minute video said, calling Trump's 2020 re-election a 'great victory.'

Woops: All that was left after the complaint from Warner Bros. about the unauthorized use of their copyrighted material

The soundtrack of the video was composer Hans Zimmer's 'Why Do We Fall?' from the 2012 movie 'The Dark Knight Rises' - and movie Warner Brothers, which owns the Batman franchise, was not happy.

'The use of Warner Bros.' score from The Dark Knight Rises' in the campaign video was unauthorized,' the movie studio told Buzzfeed News. 'We are working through the appropriate legal channels to have it removed.'

By Wednesday all that was left on Trump's Twitter feed was a dead link with a message that read 'This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...violation.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















Current Week In Review





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April 6th, March 30th, March 23rd, March 16th

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


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