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Old 02-01-19, 07:57 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - January 5th, 2019

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"As usual, Ajit Pai is full of it." – Evan Greer


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January 5th, 2019




Smartphone Refuseniks are a Rare But Happy Breed

In a country where most of us own smartphones but are ambivalent about digital dependence, a few are deliberately logging off – and they say it’s done wonders for their imaginations and peace of mind
Elizabeth Renzetti

Let’s say you’re at the doctor’s office to address a particularly persistent bout of texter’s neck. To pass the time, you’re rage-scrolling through Twitter and checking Snapchat for the most adorable filters to honour your cat. There are scores to be learned, because your team is playing, and scores to be settled on Facebook.

Then you notice someone in the office not scrolling or raging, but sitting quietly, perhaps reading a magazine or staring into space. Poor wretch, you think. She’s forgotten her phone at home.

But what if she doesn’t have a phone at all? It’s hard to imagine, when three-quarters of Canadians own smartphones (the figure rises to 94 per cent of 15- to 34-year-olds.) But there is indeed a rare species that shuns or severely limits smartphones and social media – let’s call them digital refuseniks. They are hidden among us, neither jobless nor friendless, and living quite happily. Cut off from Uber, yet somehow thriving.

For example, Tony North does not live for his smartphone, because he’s never had one. “I just didn’t want to get into the habit of distraction,” he says simply, in an interview conducted over landline from his home in Paris, Ont. The high-school teacher spends about 20 minutes a day on his one social-media platform, Facebook, which he uses to keep in touch with family back home in Australia. In fact, you could blame Australia for Mr. North’s desire to be digitally unleashed: He remembers leaving home to travel overseas, and the wonderful feeling of being uncontactable that came with it. “It was such a feeling of freedom, and I guess I wanted to keep a bit of that.”

As a teacher of English and drama, Mr. North, 53, is worried about the consequences of teenagers’ near-constant devotion to their online lives (his own two children, 12 and 13 years old, do not have phones). In drama class, he makes his students put away their phones and engage in face-to-face exercises: “I’m basically forcing them to interact,” he says. “When I ask for evaluations at the end of the semester, it’s one of the things they most seem to appreciate.”

And yes, before you ask, there are inconveniences, too. Because he has no smartphone, if he wants to take his students on a field trip, he has to partner with a teacher who has one (and they all do) because the group must be reachable. But as compensation, he reads many novels and enjoys quiet moments of reflection and watching the world go by.

Talk to digital refuseniks and you’ll hear some variation on this: They love the quiet wandering of their own imaginations. “Drift, wait, obey,” was Rudyard Kipling’s recipe for inspiration, a sentiment that is almost unimaginable today, when our minds are constantly being filled with micro-nuggets of unrelated information.

‘I didn’t want to be that person’

For Bethany March, who severely restricts her digital use, contentment lies in people-watching. “I was on the streetcar for 40 minutes yesterday,” the 18-year-old university student says, “and I did nothing. Everyone else was on their phones, but I just looked out the window.”

Ms. March, who’s in her first year of studying French education at York University, reluctantly gave in and bought a smartphone when she was 16. All the information for her school clubs was on Facebook, so she downloaded the app, and it’s still the only one she has. She uses her phone sparingly to call and text. And yes, her peers think it’s strange that she doesn’t really use social media; but then she wonders about them, too.

‘’I saw the way that people got so invested, not just in their phones, but in social media, and I didn’t want to be that person,” she says. “So many times people would be zeroed in on their phones. It was just rude, to be honest. I’d think, ‘I’m here with you, talk to me.’”

It’s clear many people feel ambivalent about digital dependence. While some speak longingly of shedding their shackles, few ever completely do it – and in a 2016 Statscan survey, 60 per cent of Canadians said technology improved their lives. Much of people’s professional and personal lives relies on social-media connections, and the convenience of online experiences, creating almost a disembodied self. The tension exists between that convenience and sense of fellowship and the ever-mounting worries about what technology dependency does to physical and mental health. Canadians between the ages of 18 and 34 spend nearly five hours a day online, according to a 2017 survey from Media Technology Monitor. On average, Canadians spent 24.5 hours online a week in 2016, up two hours per week from the year before. And that is almost certainly an underestimation, when all flickers and glances and zombie-stares are taken into account. “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” the Atlantic magazine asked last year in a cover story designed to keep parents up at night, frozen in the blue light of further bad news.

It’s also become clear that the people who are most likely to restrict digital access for their children are the gurus who make their fortune peddling the promise of technology. They refuse to buy smartphones for their kids, and make their nannies sign “no-phone contracts,” as The New York Times’ Nellie Bowles has reported. In a recent story about the technology industry’s new Cassandras, Ms. Boles quoted Athena Chavarria, who works at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a foundation created by Priscilla Chan and her husband, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.”

That’s a fear shared by many parents, and even some of their kids. Sophie Bezanson is 15, and she’s glad that her parents have not bought her a phone. Interestingly, her parents made the decision to give her more freedom and independence to be herself, without supervision. She is the only one of her friends who doesn’t have a phone or use social media. When they wait for the school bus in New Minas, N.S., the other students are on their phones. Sophie gets to daydream, or read, or think about the day ahead.

There are moments when the Grade 10 student does feel a fleeting fear of missing out, as the latest meme or joke goes over her head: “Social media is how my generation communicates. If I meet someone, they’ll say, ‘Just add me on Instagram.’ And I have to tell them that I only have e-mail, which sounds like a thing of the past. Sometimes I wish I could communicate faster with people.”

Like all refuseniks, Sophie makes delicate calibrations all the time: What are the costs, and what are the benefits, of sitting out the dance when everyone else is on the floor? She’s been discussing with her parents the possibility of joining Instagram, and the other night she was paging through the social-media platform famous for its aspirational content. She came across a friend’s feed, and found something she had not expected: "It was her showing off her body, and that really surprised me. I think a lot of people do that, they try to shape their lives in a perfect way. It isn’t very realistic, but I see it a lot.’’

‘They love to hate it’

The effort of social-media performance can be draining, as anyone who spends a lot of time online will know. After a certain amount of time, the return on investment may seem increasingly small, and the performance itself becomes drudgery. Then the phoneless become less objects of pity, and more of envy.

John Moir is another refusenik, although he is quick to say, with a laugh, that he is not sanctimonious about it. He does have e-mail and Skype, after all, and a basic flip phone. However, the 71-year-old Vancouverite has the phone only because his cycling group requires it, and he has “only ever used it to make sure it works.” Like Mr. North, he likes the freedom of being disconnected, especially when he is travelling. It means he is really experiencing a new location, “rather than trying to be in two places at once.”

He gets a particular response from digitally connected people, which is perhaps not too strange when you think about it: jealousy. “Whenever I tell people I don’t have a phone, they say, ‘Oh, that’s so great. I wish I didn’t have to have one.’ It’s odd that people look at it that way, as if the phone itself is something alive. They love to hate it.’’

They may not always know the latest score and they may be late discovering what Kanye West’s politics are, but that’s one thing digital refuseniks never have to worry about: Who is the servant in their digital relationship, and who is the master.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/busi...t-happy-breed/





Ajit Pai Thanks Congress for Helping him Kill Net Neutrality Rules

Democratic effort to reverse repeal fell short as Congressional session ended.
Jon Brodkin

Ajit Pai today celebrated a victory in his ongoing quest to prevent the US government from enforcing net neutrality rules.

The Pai-led Federal Communications Commission repealed Obama-era net neutrality rules, but the repeal could have been reversed by Congress if it acted before the end of its session. Democrats won a vote to reverse the repeal in the Senate but weren't able to get enough votes in the House of Representatives before time ran out.

"I'm pleased that a strong bipartisan majority of the US House of Representatives declined to reinstate heavy-handed Internet regulation," Pai said in a statement marking the deadline passage today. Pai claimed that broadband speed improvements and new fiber deployments in 2018 occurred because of his net neutrality repeal—although speeds and fiber deployment also went in the right direction while net neutrality rules were in place.

"Over the past year, the Internet has remained free and open," Pai said, adding that "the FCC's light-touch approach is working." Pai didn't mention a recent case in which CenturyLink temporarily blocked its customers' Internet access in order to show an ad or a recent research report accusing Sprint of throttling Skype (which Sprint denies).

Pai is “full of it”

"As usual, Ajit Pai is full of it," Deputy Director Evan Greer of advocacy group Fight for the Future told Ars. "His claim that broadband speeds are up is the tech policy equivalent of 'it's snowing outside, therefore climate change is a hoax.'"

Fight for the Future and other advocates led a campaign to pressure Congress into reversing the repeal. In the end, 182 US representatives (nearly all of them Democrats) supported the bill, but 218 votes were needed.

"The fight is far from over," Greer said. "Dozens of anti-net neutrality members of Congress have already lost their jobs, and supporters of the open Internet will soon chair the key committees that provide oversight for the FCC. Ajit Pai won't be laughing long when he has finally has to answer questions like why his agency lied to the media about a DDoS attack that never happened."

The new session of Congress is scheduled to begin tomorrow, with Democrats controlling the House and Republicans controlling the Senate. Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) will be the new chair of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, which oversees the FCC. After the election, Pallone said that he and other Democrats will act to "protect net neutrality" and "provide meaningful privacy and data security protections."

"I question whether or not Chairman Pai understands how Congress works," Pallone told Ars today, in a response to Pai's statement. "Republicans controlled the House last year and refused to even bring the CRA [Congressional Review Act resolution] up for a vote because they were concerned it would have passed. The net neutrality repeal has been a disaster for consumers. It ignored the will of the American people and gave ISPs an opening to control peoples' online activities at their discretion. The new Democratic majority will work to restore strong net neutrality rules in the House of Representatives this year."

While the simple option of reversing the repeal and reinstating the old rules is no longer available, congressional Democrats could try to pass a new net neutrality law.

The court system could end up having a bigger impact on whether the federal government or individual states enforce net neutrality rules. The FCC is defending its net neutrality repeal in court against a lawsuit filed by more than three dozen entities, including state attorneys general, consumer advocacy groups, and tech companies. Oral arguments at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit are scheduled for February 1, 2019.

Judges will be asked to decide whether the FCC's net neutrality repeal can remain in place and whether the FCC can preempt state net neutrality laws. California agreed to suspend enforcement of its new net neutrality law while the litigation is pending.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...trality-rules/





FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Cancels Trip to CES Amid Government Shutdown

It will be the second year in a row that he hasn’t attended the conference
Makena Kelly

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Brendan Carr are canceling their appearances at CES this year as a consequence of the ongoing partial government shutdown, according to Politico Pro.

Pai’s planned session with moderator Gary Shapiro, from the Consumer Technology Association, would have focused on “the exciting opportunities the FCC faces as the agency navigates the rapidly changing technological landscape.”

Carr was expected to attend a roundtable session with Federal Trade Commission Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter to discuss regulatory and policy issues involving 5G, privacy and accessibly, along with other topics.

Both events have been removed from the CES schedule, but organizers have yet to respond to requests for comment.

This will be the second year in a row that Pai has canceled his plans to attend the biggest consumer electronics showcase in the country. Last year, he cited safety concerns following the commission’s move to repeal the Open Internet Order, which reversed net neutrality regulations, only a few weeks prior to the conference. Last year, Recode reported that federal law enforcement intervened in Pai’s 2018 appearance, following death threats he received in the aftermath of the net neutrality rollback. It was the first time in five years that he had not attended the conference.

As of Thursday afternoon, non-essential FCC employees were furloughed and “most” operations were suspended as Congress battles it out over a funding package for the upcoming fiscal year. While the agency is shut down, consumer complaints will not be heard, consumer protection enforcement actions will be ceased, and licensing services will end until new funding is approved.

CES 2018 begins on January 8th and runs through the 11th. Pai was scheduled to speak on opening day at 1:30PM PST.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/3/18...nment-shutdown





Senate Confirms New FCC Commissioners Carr and Starks
Devin Coldewey

The Senate has officially confirmed the incoming FCC commissioners, Brendan Carr and Geoffrey Starks have been officially confirmed by the Senate for their five-year terms. This completes the five-seat commission, which is required to be balanced between the two parties — today’s additions bring it to three Republicans and two Democrats.

Carr, nominated and previously confirmed in August of 2017 (though only just now for his full term), was an advisor to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai during his time as a Commissioner, and before that worked at a law firm that works with telecoms. He’s the Republican of the two.

Starks was nominated this last June and has worked in the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau (think fines and legal threats) and the Justice Department.

A tweet from the Senate Cloakroom account, operated by Republican staff on the floor there, shows a note that seems to have erroneously confused the two: according to the note, Carr’s term starts in 2018 and Starks’s in 2017, despite the fact that the latter wasn’t even nominated at that time, and 2017 is certainly when Carr actually began his duties. I’ve asked the FCC about this discrepancy and will update the post if I hear back.

Chairman Pai issued a statement welcoming both Commissioners to their positions:

I congratulate Geoffrey on his Senate confirmation. He brings a wealth of experience and expertise, including having served most recently as Assistant Chief in the Enforcement Bureau. During his confirmation hearing, I was excited to hear him highlight the need to expand rural broadband and the power of telemedicine. I look forward to working with him and having a fellow Kansan on the Commission.

I also congratulate Brendan on his confirmation to a full term. Brendan has done tremendous work on a number of issues, including his leadership on wireless infrastructure modernization. He has also been a staunch advocate for rural broadband deployment, particularly for precision agriculture and advancements in telemedicine.


Commissioners Carr, O’Rielly, and Rosenworcel all tweeted out welcomes as well:

Congratulations @BrendanCarrFCC and Geoffrey Starks! Looking forward to working with both of you to expand the opportunities of digital age communications for all.

— Jessica Rosenworcel (@JRosenworcel) January 3, 2019

Not sure what took you so long, but I could not be happier to congratulate and welcome Geoffrey Starks as a colleague and Commissioner of the FCC. https://t.co/cl4893WU6m

— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) January 3, 2019

Congrats to @BrendanCarrFCC & Geoffrey Starks on approval by U.S. Senate. Looking forward to a full @FCC soon.

— Mike O’Rielly (@mikeofcc) January 3, 2019


A full Commission means more work gets done, since these people and their staffs have to come up with and enforce all the rules on the books. It maybe politically expedient to have a 2:1 Republican majority on the Commission when taking controversial measures like rolling back net neutrality rules, but ultimately the job to be done needs five.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/02/se...rr-and-starks/





The Lies Comcast Allegedly Told Customers to Hide Full Cost of Service

Minnesota AG seeks refunds, saying thousands of Comcast customers were harmed.
Jon Brodkin

A new lawsuit filed against Comcast details an extensive list of lies the cable company allegedly told customers in order to hide the full cost of service.

Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson sued Comcast in Hennepin County District Court on December 21, seeking refunds for all customers who were harmed by Comcast's alleged violations of the state's Prevention of Consumer Fraud Act and Uniform Deceptive Trade Practices Act.

The complaint alleges, among other things, that Comcast reps falsely told customers that the company's "Regional Sports Network (RSN)" and "Broadcast TV" fees were mandated by the government and not controlled by Comcast itself. These two fees, which are not included in Comcast's advertised rates, have gone up steadily and now total $18.25 a month.

Comcast has responded to some lawsuits—including this one—by saying that the company had already stopped the practices that triggered the court actions. But Minnesota says that Comcast's lies about the sports and broadcast fees continued into 2017, which is after Comcast knew about identical allegations raised in a separate class action complaint filed in 2016. (That case was settled out of court.)

Here's what the Minnesota AG's complaint says about how Comcast described the controversial fees to customers:

Despite creating the Broadcast TV fee and Regional Sports fee on its own initiative and increasing them at its own whims, Comcast/Xfinity has sometimes misrepresented to Minnesota consumers that it cannot control whether it charged consumers these fees or how much it charged for the fees. For example, Comcast/Xfinity told Minnesota consumers in 2015, 2016, and 2017—when the consumers called the company regarding undisclosed increases on their supposedly fixed-price bills—that the Broadcast TV fee and Regional Sports fee had increased or been added to their bills, but that "those fees are actually local fees and correspond to the FCC and we don't manage those okay? Those aren't up to Comcast;" "but that's something again that's out of our control;" that the increases "are outside our control;" "we have no control over the fees;" "the only thing Comcast cannot control are the taxes and fees within your state;" and that the Regional Sports fee can't be taken off because it's part of the "taxes."

But in fact, "Comcast/Xfinity is not required by any state or federal law to collect such fees," the Minnesota complaint said. Comcast "has chosen to segregate these fees from its base price so it can deceptively advertise and promise an artificially low price to price-sensitive customers, and at the same time confuse and conceal the true monthly cost of its Cable Television Packages."

The AG's office also says that Comcast charged many customers for services they didn't request, and it promised prepaid Visa gift cards as incentives but "did not deliver these gift cards to thousands of Minnesota customers."

"Comcast/Xfinity's conduct has violated Minnesota's consumer protection laws and injured thousands of Minnesota consumers who purchased Comcast/Xfinity's cable television packages," the complaint said.

Comcast blames customer service reps

When contacted by Ars, a Comcast spokesperson yesterday said that "our policy is to be very clear to our customers about the broadcast TV and RSN fees and [tell them] that these are not government-mandated fees."

But employees make mistakes, the Comcast spokesperson said. "Employees may go off script and incorrectly characterize things, but that is not in line with our policy because [the broadcast TV and sports charges] are not government-mandated fees," Comcast said.

Comcast pointed out that the fees are described correctly at this Comcast webpage. On customer bills, the charges are disclosed and listed separately from actual government-imposed taxes, Comcast said.

Comcast hasn't explained why so many of its employees apparently made the same exact mistake, however.

Comcast noted that other cable companies started charging the broadcast TV and sports fees before Comcast began doing so in 2014 and 2015 and that "they reflect the increasing amount we need to pay for broadcast and sports."

"Breaking the fees out makes it easier for customers to see what they're paying for and lets us be clear about the factors that drive price changes," Comcast said.

But as the Minnesota lawsuit notes, breaking the fees out separately also helps Comcast advertise lower rates than it actually charges. Minnesota says that the fee disclosures on Comcast's promotional materials "are inconspicuous and not sufficient to correct the overall misimpression that the emphasized, artificially low base price is the actual price consumers will pay."

Comcast will fight the Minnesota lawsuit and provided this statement:

We're fully committed to our customers in Minnesota, and it's important to us to make sure we deliver best-in-class products and services and that our customers understand the products and services they order. We fully disclose all charges, fees, and promotional requirements—and in fact have made numerous enhancements in our communications with our customers over the past few years. The facts today simply do not support the Minnesota AG's allegations, most of which date back several years and have already been corrected. Our preference all along has been to work collaboratively with the Minnesota AG's Office to resolve any remaining issues the office might have.

Swanson is leaving office after 12 years, and she will be replaced this month as Minnesota attorney general by Keith Ellison. Comcast claimed that "Bringing a lawsuit on the eve of the end of the AG's term is simply not in the best interests of Minnesota consumers.” However, it's not unusual for a new attorney general to continue pursuing lawsuits filed by the previous AG.

AG: Comcast knew of its bad behavior

Extra fees charged by Comcast "include monthly equipment rental fees for equipment to receive its Cable Television Packages, like cable set-top boxes, digital adapters, and Internet modems, as well as one-time activation and installation fees," the Minnesota complaint said. The various fees, "often unbeknownst to consumers, can add 30 percent or more to the Cable Television Package's total monthly price."

Despite blaming customer service reps for the problems, Comcast has known for years "that it has misrepresented the total cost of its Cable Television Packages and failed to disclose that it will charge substantial, additional fees in addition to the deceptively low price that is promised consumers," the lawsuit said. Comcast's internal reports and investigations confirmed these failures, the complaint said.

For example, Comcast "is well aware of its fraudulent practice of charging Minnesota consumers for unauthorized services and equipment that they never requested and/or specifically refused," the lawsuit said, noting that in 2016 Comcast settled an FCC investigation over the practice.

In November 2018, Comcast agreed to pay $700,000 in refunds "and cancel debts for more than 20,000 Massachusetts customers" to settle allegations that it used deceptive advertising to promote long-term cable contracts, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey announced at the time. Comcast is also facing a lawsuit from Washington state that accuses the company of misleading 500,000 customers in order to sell them "near-worthless" service protection plans.

Real-world examples

The Minnesota AG's complaint alleges that Comcast reps routinely lied to customers about the actual prices they'd pay during door-to-door solicitations and phone calls. Reps were incentivized by Comcast's commission structure, the complaint said.

Comcast reps used routine customer interactions including repair calls "as a chance to sell or upgrade such packages" because of the commission structure, the complaint said. Here's an example described in the complaint:

When a consumer returned his modem to a Comcast/Xfinity store in 2015, unbeknownst to him, the company changed his Internet service to Blast Internet and charged him $5 for it. When he called Comcast/Xfinity to remove this unauthorized charge, it told him that agents at its stores "really like to do that" because they are paid commission from such practices.

The complaint details many more real-world experiences of individual customers. Here are a few examples of customers who were allegedly promised one price over the phone before being charged a different price:

• Comcast/Xfinity misrepresented in 2016 that a consumer would pay $122 per month "including the taxes and fees and equipment" for two years for a Cable Television Package. The consumer confirmed that this was the total price Comcast/Xfinity would charge, stating he did not want to be "surprised" by the company's bills, and Comcast/Xfinity again falsely confirmed it would only charge him $122 per month. Comcast/Xfinity actually charged him approximately $132 per month for the first six months and then raised his bill to $139.90.
• In 2014, Comcast/Xfinity falsely promised a price of "only $99" per month to a consumer—who confirmed "and that's all for $99?" to which Comcast/Xfinity replied "that's totally correct." In reality, however, the company charged the consumer $131.46 in the first month and $120.01 in the second month—due to undisclosed DVR and equipment fees.
• Comcast/Xfinity deceptively promised another consumer in 2016 that she would pay $107.38 per month, "after taxes and equipment" for two years but actually enrolled her in a $119.99 per month base rate plan, on top of which Comcast/Xfinity charged numerous additional fees.

Door-to-door sales

Similar shenanigans allegedly happened in door-to-door sales.

"Until at least 2017, when making door-to-door sales, Comcast/Xfinity routinely failed to disclose that it would charge numerous additional fees on top of the company's promised price—including, for example, the Broadcast TV fee and Regional Sports fee—or that Comcast/Xfinity could increase these fees at any time and in its discretion," the lawsuit said.

Here are some more customer examples from the lawsuit, focusing on door-to-door sales:

• In 2016, Comcast/Xfinity promised a consumer on his Service Order that it would charge him $109, plus tax, for two years. Despite his Service Order stating: "HD/DVR $0" and "Addl. Monthly Fees $ ---" Comcast/Xfinity increased his bill by $19.95 per month by adding an equipment (DVR) fee as well as Broadcast TV, Regional Sports, and HD Technology fees.
• Similarly, in August 2016, Comcast/Xfinity promised a consumer that it would charge him the same price for two years and wrote that he would pay $139.99 per month on his Service Order. Comcast/Xfinity instead charged him more, including an undisclosed Broadcast TV fee of $4.50 per month and Regional Sports fee of $3.00 per month, and then raised his rate by over $19.95 per month in the second year of his term by adding an HD Technology fee and an equipment (DVR) fee, despite his Service Order misrepresenting: "HD DVR Qty 1 $Free."
• In October 2015, Comcast/Xfinity promised two consumers during its in-home sales pitch a Cable Television Package that would be "locked" for two years. During their two-year term, however, Comcast/Xfinity increased their bill by over $20 per month by adding an undisclosed equipment (DVR) fee and HD Technology fee. When the consumers complained to the company about the price increase, it told them that part of the increase was due to its Broadcast TV fee and Regional Sports fee increases, falsely claiming "those are outside our control."
• Likewise, in 2016 Comcast/Xfinity came to another consumer's door and promised that he would pay only $99 per month total for its Cable Television Package. Because he was retired and the total monthly price he would pay was important to him, the consumer asked the company to confirm that his "bottom line" price would be $99 per month, which Comcast/Xfinity confirmed. Comcast/Xfinity further falsely promised on his Service Order that he would not be charged for a DVR, stating: "DVR Qty 1 $0." Subsequently, however, Comcast/Xfinity charged the consumer far more than it promised, including undisclosed equipment (DVR), Broadcast TV and Regional Sports fees.

Even the email confirmations sent to customers after sales were misleading, the lawsuit said.

"Comcast/Xfinity's 'confirmation' emails... did not disclose that it may increase its prices even for consumers on a promotional or minimum-term agreement by increasing the fees it imposes," the complaint said. "Nor did the emails always provide the essential details of the minimum-term agreement, like the duration of the term, that an early termination fee will be charged if the consumer cancels services, or the cost of the early termination fee."

Charges for services customers didn't want

The complaint also lists numerous instances of customers being charged for services they didn't request. Here are a few examples:

• In 2015, Comcast/Xfinity deceptively enrolled a consumer in a minimum-term agreement Cable Television Package that she did not want, and then charged her an early termination fee when she cancelled the unrequested package.
• In 2015, a consumer called Comcast/Xfinity to have her Internet service restored and was told a technician would be sent out to resolve the issue. Without informing the consumer, Comcast/Xfinity then added a charge for a service protection plan to her account and began charging her $4.99 each month for this unauthorized service.
• Comcast/Xfinity fraudulently added and began charging a consumer (who was receiving Comcast/Xfinity's cable and Internet services) for telephone service in 2014, even though the consumer had explicitly declined Comcast/Xfinity's offer for such telephone service. Once Comcast/Xfinity finally agreed to remove this unauthorized service, it still charged the consumer a $130 early termination fee and one month of telephone service.
• In 2016, a consumer called Comcast/Xfinity to inquire about its Cable Television Packages but ultimately stated she needed more time to think over her options and did not agree to enroll in any Comcast/Xfinity service. Nevertheless, Comcast/Xfinity enrolled her in a Cable Television Package and shipped her equipment (that she never ordered) in the mail and began sending her monthly bills, as well as threatened to refer her account to a collections agency due to nonpayment.
• Comcast/Xfinity fraudulently began charging a consumer a monthly fee for a modem in 2016. The consumer never authorized this charge and had explicitly informed Comcast/Xfinity that he did not want or need a modem from the company because he already had his own.
• In 2015, a consumer noticed that Comcast/Xfinity had been charging him $4.99 a month for its service protection plan, even though the consumer had never requested the plan and never consented to this monthly charge.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...st-of-service/





Comcast, Dish, AT&T to Raise TV Prices to Counter Cord-Cutting
Gerry Smith

• Rising TV bills could speed subscriber losses, analyst says
• Higher bills target cost of broadcast, local sports channels

Another year, another increase to your monthly pay-TV bill.

Giants including Comcast Corp., Dish Network Corp. and AT&T Inc.’s DirecTV plan to raise rates again in the new year, a move that could boost revenue but risks alienating subscribers who have been ditching their traditional TV subscriptions in record numbers.

Cable and satellite providers are hoping to squeeze more money from consumers who remain loyal to their packages with hundreds of channels, Philip Cusick, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. analyst, said in a note this week, even though “this strategy could accelerate video sub declines.”

It’s common for pay-TV providers to raise prices in the new year. They are passing on the rising costs they pay to carry networks like CBS and ABC, as well as regional sports channels like the YES Network, which are shelling out more and more for sports broadcast rights.

The latest price increases come as cord-cutting accelerates. In the third quarter, the TV industry saw its largest ever rate of decline, with subscribers shrinking by 3.7 percent, according to MoffettNathanson LLC. Consumers are dropping traditional TV for lower-cost online options like Netflix Inc. and slimmer TV options from Hulu and YouTube.

Rising Fees

Comcast, the largest U.S. cable company, is raising its fee for regional sports networks by $1.50 on average and its fee for broadcast channels by $2 a month, according to Cusick. Charter Communications Inc., the second-largest U.S. cable provider, recently boosted its monthly fee for a set-top box by about 50 cents and its broadcast channel fee by about $1.

DirecTV is raising rates on all English-language video packages by $3 to $8 a month while hiking fees for regional sports networks by $1 to $1.90 in most markets. Dish said it’s increasing prices for English-language video packages by $3 to $5 a month. Altice USA, the fourth-largest cable operator, recently raised rates by 3 percent on Optimum subscribers.

A Comcast spokeswoman said the changes were necessary because of rising broadcast television and sports programming costs, “which are the largest drivers of price increases,” while an AT&T spokesman noted some DirecTV plans won’t increase. The other companies didn’t respond to requests for comment.

To avoid raising prices more and losing more customers, pay-TV companies have tried taking a hard line with channel owners demanding more money. Charter subscribers in 24 markets are currently not getting broadcast channels owned by Tribune Media Co. because of a contract dispute that could black out NFL playoff games this weekend.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...g-higher-costs





This Western Mass. Town Rejected Comcast and Will Build its Own Broadband Network.
Andy Rosen

The public library here, in a wing of the sturdy brick Town Hall off of Route 2, isn’t necessarily the best spot for quiet study.

It’s one of the few places in this small town nestled in the northwest corner of the state where residents can reliably get high-speed Internet access. So when the library is open — parts of three days a week — patrons are as likely to be immersed in a teleconference or a streaming movie as they are in a good book.

“People are coming for all of the reasons that people use the Internet,” said library director Andrea Bernard, who said she doesn’t mind a little noise, given the circumstances. “I just want everybody to be able to get the resources that they need.”

Like many of the small hill towns in the region, Charlemont has been waiting years for reliable Internet access, stuck in an antiquated system of dial-up and DSL that makes it hard to work remotely, buy stuff online, and access government services that require online filings.

After a generation of hoping someone would build a broadband network to serve Charlemont’s farthest-flung corners, the community of about 1,100 people got an offer this year that might have been the answer to their prayers. Comcast, in exchange for a subsidy from the state and local governments, was willing to build connections to nearly all of the town’s homes.

Instead, residents handed the communications giant a collective “No, thank you.” At a Special Town Meeting on Dec. 6, they voted to build their own $1.5 million broadband network — at an added cost of nearly $1 million over the Comcast offer.

Charlemont is one of several municipalities in Western Massachusetts puzzling over how to ensure that decisions about connectivity stay in local hands. Some residents are wary of trusting a big company to make decisions about such a crucial service.

“I like the idea that it will be owned by the town. It’s something that the town should be proud of,” said Trevor Mackie, a member of Charlemont’s broadband committee, which has been examining the puzzle of how to network the town for several years.

If something goes wrong with the town-built system, he said, “You can talk to a person. You don’t have to talk to a corporation: Push 1 for this. Push 2 for that.”

But the town’s decision to hire a contractor to build out its system did not come easily — largely because of the upfront cost. That’s what has Karen Hogness, a resident who voted in favor of the municipal network, still feeling uneasy.

“I have some problems with Comcast,” she said, citing concerns including the company’s pricing and customer service. “But I also have some problems with my decision.”

Other small towns have found themselves torn along similar lines amid a yearslong effort by the state to expand broadband to remote, sparsely populated areas that aren’t attractive to service providers.

The Massachusetts Broadband Institute was launched in 2008, when Governor Deval Patrick cobbled together money from state coffers and the recession-era federal stimulus program to pay for the major infrastructure effort.

One big step was the $90 million construction of a broadband line to connect 123 municipalities in the central and western parts of the state. Next, the state encouraged them to arrange “last-mile” connections from the main line directly into homes.

While the broader connection has faced legal and economic problems, it is up and running. The “last mile” projects, on the other hand, have proved to be more time-consuming.

In part, this is because of a change in approach after Governor Charlie Baker took over. Many towns, including Charlemont, had been moving toward the formation of a joint effort called Wired West, which would own a shared network.

But state officials questioned the financial viability of that approach and in 2016 urged Comcast and other companies to look again at the municipalities, while leaving open the option for towns to build independent municipal networks.

For towns like Charlemont that had already put aside money to participate in Wired West, that left few options. Comcast did not immediately step in, so last year the town decided to hire Westfield Gas & Electric, a utility that has helped several other towns build networks.

Then, this year, Comcast made its offer. Though the town had voted on the Westfield plan before, the Select Board decided that the cable company’s proposition was attractive enough to give townspeople a chance to change course.

In the end, voters chose narrowly to stick with the municipal option.

Faced with a similar question, nearby Worthington could not muster a required margin of two-thirds to build its own system and decided in May to go with Comcast.

Charley Rose, chairman of the Worthington Selectboard, worries the May decision was short-sighted.

“I’m sure it will be fine for a while, maybe for 10 or 15 years, maybe forever. But who knows? . . . When their agreement with the state is expired, will they continue to invest in their system like they will in a system in Eastern Mass., or even in Springfield? I doubt it.”

Comcast has said that once it builds out a system, it is committed to maintaining it.

There are other benefits to town-owned systems. Local governments can choose their own equipment, and many have gone with faster, state-of-the-art fiber optic lines rather than the cable connections the companies might offer.

Charlemont’s broadband committee told voters the municipal plan would not necessarily cost them more. The effect on the tax rate will be the same as the Comcast deal if 59 percent of potential customers take the service, according to town documents, and cheaper if more subscribe.

And for many in the region, the appeal of independence is hard to ignore.

Some have been frustrated by their phone company, Verizon, which in many hill towns has such limited broadband capacity that it can’t take new customers. In houses that are lucky enough to have service, owners who want to move can have trouble selling because they can’t guarantee that Verizon will transfer the account.

That represents a problem for towns that have seen their economic base decline in recent decades and are trying to find a place in the new economy. Many people in Charlemont are transplants, interested in rural living that’s not too far from Boston or New York.

“We don’t have a lot of jobs here. A lot of things that were here 30 years ago — the power companies . . . the other industries — those are gone now,” said Carol Bolduc, a real estate agent in Shelburne Falls. She said an important alternative is “attracting people who are connected to jobs elsewhere, and that is why connectivity is important.”

In urban areas, where Internet connections are seemingly unlimited, some people are looking for ways to spend less time online — disconnecting from the barrage of notifications that clutter our days and the social media arguments that can decay our civic lives.

But to Karen Hogness, there’s nothing quaint or romantic about living offline, with no way to reliably participate in the digital economy.

“Part of what you want to conserve in small towns is the fact that there’s families. There’s multigenerational opportunities. That’s going away because of the lack of broadband. Young families aren’t coming out the same way, because they can’t make a living,” she said. “No town should be mostly populated by mostly 65-and-older folks. That’s not the richness of a rural community.”
https://www.bostonglobe.com/business...L2M/story.html





California Could Soon Have Its Own Version of the Internet
Klint Finley

The Chinese internet is not like the internet in the rest of the world. More than 150 of the world’s 1,000 most popular internet sites are blocked in China, including Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Instead, domestic platforms like Baidu, WeChat, and Sina Weibo thrive.

Internet freedom advocates have worried that the internet will fracture into multiple national "splinternets" since France banned Yahoo's ecommerce users from selling Nazi paraphernalia in the country in 2000, whether due to state censorship or well-intentioned policies that alter the web experience. The Tor Project says at least a dozen countries, including Pakistan and Russia, censor the internet. Meanwhile, search results within the European Union can differ from those elsewhere due to its right to be forgotten law, and web publishers around the world are still grappling with the effect of the sweeping EU privacy regulations that took effect this year.

A series of laws passed in California this year raise a new possibility: that individual US states will splinter off into their own versions of the internet. In July, California passed a privacy law, similar to the European Union's policies, that will give users more control about the data companies collect about them. Governor Jerry Brown followed by signing a net neutrality law in late September meant to replace federal rules banning broadband internet providers from blocking or otherwise discriminating against lawful content, as well as a law that requires bots to identify themselves if they promote sales or try to influence an election.

These are hardly the first attempts by a state to regulate online life. Illinois, for example, has a biometric privacy law that has been invoked to cover facial scanning software used by Facebook and Google. And states such as Washington have also passed net neutrality rules. But California’s size and the sweeping nature of its regulations, especially when taken together, set it apart from other states.

Milton Mueller, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy and author of the book Will the Internet Fragment?, calls policies like California's net neutrality law and Chinese censorship “alignments” rather than “fragmentation” for technical reasons. But he does think such policies can be dangerous. "We're undermining what's good about the internet, the ability to offer services anywhere, the permissionless innovation idea," he says.

Mueller likes the idea of bots having to identify themselves, for example. The new law will require that anyone who automates all or “substantially all” posts to platforms with at least 10 million monthly US visitors to disclose that the account is run by a bot or bots, if the account is being used to promote products or services or to influence an election. But Mueller worries about the effects of implementing the policy at a state level. "It encourages this trend of breaking up the internet into different islands of jurisdiction that could be worse than the benefit that might be achieved by this," he says.

Rather than splinter the internet, Mueller says California’s laws could over time become national, or worldwide, standards, depending on how publishers apply them. He points to the way a dozen other states have adopted California emission standards for new cars. Some companies, including Microsoft, have opted to follow European data privacy laws worldwide and offer a privacy dashboard that enables users to delete or download the data the company has collected from them.

Others note that California’s rules aren't radical departures from how the internet already works. "I think that California, like Brussels, certainly might set the bar for compliance on several important tech issues," says Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University. "But this might not lead to balkanization in the way we’re seeing in China and Russia."

For example, the privacy rules passed in California are similar to those passed by the European Union. In that sense, rather than fragmenting the internet, California would be bringing the state or possibly the country into harmony with other countries.

In the case of net neutrality, the purpose of the rules is to avoid fragmentation by ensuring that people's ability to access content doesn't vary from one broadband provider to the next. Stanford University law professor Barbara van Schewick points out Europe had a patchwork of different net neutrality rules until the EU passed more unified regulations in 2015. The patchwork era of net neutrality in Europe didn't result in fragmentation, van Schewick argues.

It's also possible that California's laws won't stick. The Department of Justice has already sued California over its net neutrality law, arguing that only the federal government has the authority to regulate interstate communications networks, while Congress considers multiple proposals to regulate net neutrality at the federal level. California agreed to pause the law while lawsuits play out over federal regulators’ decision to dismantle net neutrality rules. Meanwhile, the tech industry is lobbying Congress to pass a less stringent national data privacy law that would override California's law.

"I think the more likely outcome in our system is national legislation as lawmakers heed industry complaints over facing a 'patchwork' of laws," says Ryan Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington specializing in privacy and cyber law. "A lot of folks see privacy legislation as nigh inevitable."

But with Washington's gridlock, nothing is inevitable.
https://www.wired.com/story/californ...sion-internet/





China Got on the Bandwagon to Provide Global Satellite Internet
Echo Huang

Over the weekend, China launched a satellite into low-earth orbit, the first step of a plan to provide global satellite internet to people who still don’t have reliable access.

Nearly 3.8 billion people are unconnected to the internet, and women and rural poor are particularly affected.

The satellite, called Hongyun-1, took off at China’s national launching site Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Saturday (Dec. 22). Hongyun-1, or “rainbow cloud,” is the first of 156 satellites of the same name developed by state-owned spacecraft maker China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC). A Long March 11 rocket, made by another state-owned firm, China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, carried the Hongyun-1.

CASIC intends to launch all the Hongyun satellites by around 2022 to form a constellation that will improve internet access in remote parts of China, and eventually in developing countries, a plan first announced in 2016. Most of the satellites will operate 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) above the earth, far lower than satellites are typically placed. The project is “moving the internet currently on the ground into the sky,” said Hou Xiufeng, a spokesperson for CASIC, “It’s China’s first true low-orbit communication satellite… The launch will greatly boost commercial space.”

China is increasingly configuring its global Belt-and-Road infrastructure plan to involve digital infrastructure, raising some concerns about the idea of a country known for its heavily policed internet being the key to connectivity and data in other nations. China this year advanced its Beidou system, China’s answer to the US Global Positioning System, or GPS.

China’s move comes as a number of companies look at fixing satellite internet, which has the potential to give people access to the internet no matter where they are on earth, bridging the limits of cable infrastructure. It’s been around for a while but service hasn’t been great—it’s seen slow upload speeds due to satellite distance, and data caps because of limited numbers of satellites providing the service.

The most ambitious reinvention of satellite access, SpaceX’s Starlink project, is on an entirely differently scale from China’s Hongyun project. SpaceX is looking at putting some 12,000 satellites into operation at altitudes between 335 and 346 km. It won approval for 7,000 launches in November from the Federal Communications Commission, which regulates communications services in the US, and in March gave the company the green light to put 4,425 satellites in orbit.

SpaceX has launched two test satellites this year, and will launch the first batch of the constellation by the end of 2019 with the aim of starting the service, which it expects to eventually be very profitable, in 2020.
https://qz.com/1506358/china-got-on-...lite-internet/





Censoring China’s Internet, for Stability and Profit

Thousands of low-wage workers in “censorship factories” trawl the online world for forbidden content, where even a photo of an empty chair could cause big trouble.
Li Yuan

Li Chengzhi had a lot to learn when he first got a job as a professional censor.

Like many young people in China, the 24-year-old recent college graduate knew little about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. He had never heard of China’s most famous dissident, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in custody two years ago.

Now, after training, he knows what to look for — and what to block. He spends his hours scanning online content on behalf of Chinese media companies looking for anything that will provoke the government’s wrath. He knows how to spot code words that obliquely refer to Chinese leaders and scandals, or the memes that touch on subjects the Chinese government doesn’t want people to read about.

Mr. Li, who still has traces of youthful acne on his face, takes his job seriously. “It helps cleanse the online environment,” he said.

For Chinese companies, staying on the safe side of government censors is a matter of life and death. Adding to the burden, the authorities demand that companies censor themselves, spurring them to hire thousands of people to police content.

That in turn has created a growing and lucrative new industry: censorship factories.

Mr. Li works for Beyondsoft, a Beijing-based tech services company that, among other businesses, takes on the censorship burden for other companies. He works in its office in the city of Chengdu. In the heart of a high-tech industrial area, the space is bright and new enough that it resembles the offices of well-funded start-ups in tech centers like Beijing and Shenzhen. It recently moved to the space because customers complained that its previous office was too cramped to allow employees to do their best work.

“Missing one beat could cause a serious political mistake,” said Yang Xiao, head of Beyondsoft’s internet service business, including content reviewing. (Beyondsoft declined to disclose which Chinese media or online companies it works for, citing confidentiality.)

China has built the world’s most extensive and sophisticated online censorship system. It grew even stronger under President Xi Jinping, who wants the internet to play a greater role in strengthening the Communist Party’s hold on society. More content is considered sensitive. Punishments are getting more severe.

Once circumspect about its controls, China now preaches a vision of a government-supervised internet that has surprising resonance in other countries. Even traditional bastions of free expression like Western Europe and the United States are considering their own digital limits. Platforms like Facebook and YouTube have said that they would hire thousands more people to better keep a handle on their content.

Workers like Mr. Li show the extremes of that approach — one that controls what more than 800 million internet users in China see every day.

Beyondsoft employs over 4,000 workers like Mr. Li at its content reviewing factories. That is up from about 200 in 2016. They review and censor content day and night.

“We’re the Foxconn in the data industry,” said Mr. Yang, comparing his firm to the biggest contract manufacturer that makes iPhones and other products for Apple.

Many online media companies have their own internal content review teams, sometimes numbering in the thousands. They are exploring ways to get artificial intelligence to do the work. The head of the A.I. lab at a major online media company, who asked for anonymity because the subject is sensitive, said the company had 120 machine learning models.

But success is spotty. Users can easily fool algorithms.

“The A.I. machines are intelligent, but they aren’t as clever as human brains,” Mr. Li said. “They miss a lot of things when reviewing content.”

Beyondsoft has a team of 160 people in Chengdu working four shifts a day to review potentially politically sensitive content on a news aggregating app.

For the same app, Beyondsoft has another team in the western city of Xi’an reviewing potentially vulgar or profane content. Like the rest of the world, China’s internet is rife with pornography and other material that many users might find offensive.

In the Chengdu office, workers must put their smartphones in hallway lockers. They can’t take screenshots or send any information from their computers.

The workers are almost all college graduates in their 20s. They are often unaware of, or indifferent to, politics. In China, many parents and teachers tell the young that caring about politics leads only to trouble.

To overcome that, Mr. Yang and his colleagues developed a sophisticated training system. New hires start with weeklong “theory” training, during which senior employees teach them the sensitive information that they didn’t know before.

“My office is next to the big training room,” Mr. Yang said. “I often hear the surprised sounds of ‘Ah, ah, ah.’”

“They didn’t know things like June 4,” he added, referring to the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. “They really didn’t know.”

Beyondsoft has developed an extensive database based on such information that Mr. Yang calls one of its “core competencies.” It also uses anti-censorship software to regularly visit what it calls anti-revolutionary websites that are blocked by the Chinese government. It then updates the database.

New employees study the database much like preparing for college entrance exams. After two weeks, they have to pass a test.

The screen saver on each computer is the same: photos and names of current and past members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the Communist Party’s top leadership. Workers must memorize those faces: Only government-owned websites and specially approved political blogs — a group on what’s called a whitelist — are allowed to post photos of top leaders.

Workers are briefed at the beginning of their shift on the newest censoring instructions sent by clients, which the clients themselves receive from government censors. Workers then must answer about 10 questions designed to test their memory. The results of the exam affect the workers’ pay.

One question on a recent Friday: Which one of the following names is the daughter of Li Peng, China’s former premier? The correct answer is Li Xiaolin, a longtime target of online ridicule for her expensive fashion taste and for being one of many children of senior officials who come into high positions or wealth.

That’s a relatively easy one. A tougher test is parsing the roundabout ways that China’s internet users evade stringent censorship to talk about current affairs.

Take, for example, a Hong Kong news site’s 2017 commentary that compared the six Chinese leaders since Mao Zedong to emperors during the Han dynasty. Some Chinese users started using the emperors’ names when referring to the leaders. Beyondsoft’s workers have to know which emperor’s name is associated with which leader.

Then there are the photos of an empty chair. They refer to Mr. Liu, the Nobel laureate, who wasn’t allowed to leave China to attend the award ceremony and was represented by an empty chair. References to George Orwell’s novel “1984” are also forbidden.

Beyondsoft’s software trawls through web pages and marks potentially offensive words in different colors. If a page is full of color-coded words, it usually requires a closer look, according to the executives. If there are only one or two, it’s pretty safe to let it pass.

According to Beyondsoft’s website, its content monitoring service, called Rainbow Shield, has compiled over 100,000 basic sensitive words and over three million derivative words. Politically sensitive words make up one-third of the total, followed by words related to pornography, prostitution, gambling and knives.

Workers like Mr. Li make $350 to $500 a month, about average pay in Chengdu. Each worker is expected to review 1,000 to 2,000 articles during a shift. Articles uploaded to the news app must be approved or rejected within an hour. Unlike Foxconn workers, they don’t work much overtime because longer hours could hurt accuracy, said Mr. Yang, the executive.

It’s easy to make mistakes. One article about Peng Liyuan, China’s first lady, mistakenly used the photo of a famous singer rumored to be linked to another leader. It was caught by someone else before it went out, Mr. Yang said.

Mr. Li, the young censor, said the worst mistakes were almost all related to senior leaders. He once missed a tiny photo of Mr. Xi on a website not on the whitelist because he was tired. He still kicks himself for it.

When asked whether he had shared with family and friends what he learned at work, such as the Tiananmen crackdown, Mr. Li vehemently said no.

“This information is not for people outside to know,” he said. “Once many people know about it, it could generate rumors.”

But the crackdown was history. It wasn’t a rumor. How would he reconcile that?

“For certain things,” he said, “one just has to obey the rules.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/b...et-censor.html





How Much of the Internet Is Fake? Turns Out, a Lot of It, Actually.
Max Read

In late November, the Justice Department unsealed indictments against eight people accused of fleecing advertisers of $36 million in two of the largest digital ad-fraud operations ever uncovered. Digital advertisers tend to want two things: people to look at their ads and “premium” websites — i.e., established and legitimate publications — on which to host them. The two schemes at issue in the case, dubbed Methbot and 3ve by the security researchers who found them, faked both. Hucksters infected 1.7 million computers with malware that remotely directed traffic to “spoofed” websites — “empty websites designed for bot traffic” that served up a video ad purchased from one of the internet’s vast programmatic ad-exchanges, but that were designed, according to the indictments, “to fool advertisers into thinking that an impression of their ad was served on a premium publisher site,” like that of Vogue or The Economist. Views, meanwhile, were faked by malware-infected computers with marvelously sophisticated techniques to imitate humans: bots “faked clicks, mouse movements, and social network login information to masquerade as engaged human consumers.” Some were sent to browse the internet to gather tracking cookies from other websites, just as a human visitor would have done through regular behavior. Fake people with fake cookies and fake social-media accounts, fake-moving their fake cursors, fake-clicking on fake websites — the fraudsters had essentially created a simulacrum of the internet, where the only real things were the ads.

How much of the internet is fake? Studies generally suggest that, year after year, less than 60 percent of web traffic is human; some years, according to some researchers, a healthy majority of it is bot. For a period of time in 2013, the Times reported this year, a full half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a portion so high that employees feared an inflection point after which YouTube’s systems for detecting fraudulent traffic would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this hypothetical event “the Inversion.”

In the future, when I look back from the high-tech gamer jail in which President PewDiePie will have imprisoned me, I will remember 2018 as the year the internet passed the Inversion, not in some strict numerical sense, since bots already outnumber humans online more years than not, but in the perceptual sense. The internet has always played host in its dark corners to schools of catfish and embassies of Nigerian princes, but that darkness now pervades its every aspect: Everything that once seemed definitively and unquestionably real now seems slightly fake; everything that once seemed slightly fake now has the power and presence of the real. The “fakeness” of the post-Inversion internet is less a calculable falsehood and more a particular quality of experience — the uncanny sense that what you encounter online is not “real” but is also undeniably not “fake,” and indeed may be both at once, or in succession, as you turn it over in your head.

The metrics are fake.

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day — though, as Facebook admitted, the 60 seconds in that one minute didn’t need to be watched consecutively. Real videos, real people, fake minutes.

The people are fake.

And maybe we shouldn’t even assume that the people are real. Over at YouTube, the business of buying and selling video views is “flourishing,” as the Times reminded readers with a lengthy investigation in August. The company says only “a tiny fraction” of its traffic is fake, but fake subscribers are enough of a problem that the site undertook a purge of “spam accounts” in mid-December. These days, the Times found, you can buy 5,000 YouTube views — 30 seconds of a video counts as a view — for as low as $15; oftentimes, customers are led to believe that the views they purchase come from real people. More likely, they come from bots. On some platforms, video views and app downloads can be forged in lucrative industrial counterfeiting operations. If you want a picture of what the Inversion looks like, find a video of a “click farm”: hundreds of individual smartphones, arranged in rows on shelves or racks in professional-looking offices, each watching the same video or downloading the same app.

I never tire of looking at videos of Chinese click farms. It's just so surreal to see hundreds of phones playing the same video for the purposes of fake engagment. pic.twitter.com/bHAGLqRqVb
— Matthew Brennan (@mbrennanchina) December 10, 2018

This is obviously not real human traffic. But what would real human traffic look like? The Inversion gives rise to some odd philosophical quandaries: If a Russian troll using a Brazilian man’s photograph to masquerade as an American Trump supporter watches a video on Facebook, is that view “real”? Not only do we have bots masquerading as humans and humans masquerading as other humans, but also sometimes humans masquerading as bots, pretending to be “artificial-intelligence personal assistants,” like Facebook’s “M,” in order to help tech companies appear to possess cutting-edge AI. We even have whatever CGI Instagram influencer Lil Miquela is: a fake human with a real body, a fake face, and real influence. Even humans who aren’t masquerading can contort themselves through layers of diminishing reality: The Atlantic reports that non-CGI human influencers are posting fake sponsored content — that is, content meant to look like content that is meant to look authentic, for free — to attract attention from brand reps, who, they hope, will pay them real money.

The businesses are fake.

The money is usually real. Not always — ask someone who enthusiastically got into cryptocurrency this time last year — but often enough to be an engine of the Inversion. If the money is real, why does anything else need to be? Earlier this year, the writer and artist Jenny Odell began to look into an Amazon reseller that had bought goods from other Amazon resellers and resold them, again on Amazon, at higher prices. Odell discovered an elaborate network of fake price-gouging and copyright-stealing businesses connected to the cultlike Evangelical church whose followers resurrected Newsweek in 2013 as a zombie search-engine-optimized spam farm. She visited a strange bookstore operated by the resellers in San Francisco and found a stunted concrete reproduction of the dazzlingly phony storefronts she’d encountered on Amazon, arranged haphazardly with best-selling books, plastic tchotchkes, and beauty products apparently bought from wholesalers. “At some point I began to feel like I was in a dream,” she wrote. “Or that I was half-awake, unable to distinguish the virtual from the real, the local from the global, a product from a Photoshop image, the sincere from the insincere.”

The content is fake.

The only site that gives me that dizzying sensation of unreality as often as Amazon does is YouTube, which plays host to weeks’ worth of inverted, inhuman content. TV episodes that have been mirror-flipped to avoid copyright takedowns air next to huckster vloggers flogging merch who air next to anonymously produced videos that are ostensibly for children. An animated video of Spider-Man and Elsa from Frozen riding tractors is not, you know, not real: Some poor soul animated it and gave voice to its actors, and I have no doubt that some number (dozens? Hundreds? Millions? Sure, why not?) of kids have sat and watched it and found some mystifying, occult enjoyment in it. But it’s certainly not “official,” and it’s hard, watching it onscreen as an adult, to understand where it came from and what it means that the view count beneath it is continually ticking up.

These, at least, are mostly bootleg videos of popular fictional characters, i.e., counterfeit unreality. Counterfeit reality is still more difficult to find—for now. In January 2018, an anonymous Redditor created a relatively easy-to-use desktop-app implementation of “deepfakes,” the now-infamous technology that uses artificial-intelligence image processing to replace one face in a video with another — putting, say, a politician’s over a porn star’s. A recent academic paper from researchers at the graphics-card company Nvidia demonstrates a similar technique used to create images of computer-generated “human” faces that look shockingly like photographs of real people. (Next time Russians want to puppeteer a group of invented Americans on Facebook, they won’t even need to steal photos of real people.) Contrary to what you might expect, a world suffused with deepfakes and other artificially generated photographic images won’t be one in which “fake” images are routinely believed to be real, but one in which “real” images are routinely believed to be fake — simply because, in the wake of the Inversion, who’ll be able to tell the difference?

Our politics are fake.

Such a loss of any anchoring “reality” only makes us pine for it more. Our politics have been inverted along with everything else, suffused with a Gnostic sense that we’re being scammed and defrauded and lied to but that a “real truth” still lurks somewhere. Adolescents are deeply engaged by YouTube videos that promise to show the hard reality beneath the “scams” of feminism and diversity — a process they call “red-pilling” after the scene in The Matrix when the computer simulation falls away and reality appears. Political arguments now involve trading accusations of “virtue signaling” — the idea that liberals are faking their politics for social reward — against charges of being Russian bots. The only thing anyone can agree on is that everyone online is lying and fake.

We ourselves are fake.

Which, well. Everywhere I went online this year, I was asked to prove I’m a human. Can you retype this distorted word? Can you transcribe this house number? Can you select the images that contain a motorcycle? I found myself prostrate daily at the feet of robot bouncers, frantically showing off my highly developed pattern-matching skills — does a Vespa count as a motorcycle, even? — so I could get into nightclubs I’m not even sure I want to enter. Once inside, I was directed by dopamine-feedback loops to scroll well past any healthy point, manipulated by emotionally charged headlines and posts to click on things I didn’t care about, and harried and hectored and sweet-talked into arguments and purchases and relationships so algorithmically determined it was hard to describe them as real.

Where does that leave us? I’m not sure the solution is to seek out some pre-Inversion authenticity — to red-pill ourselves back to “reality.” What’s gone from the internet, after all, isn’t “truth,” but trust: the sense that the people and things we encounter are what they represent themselves to be. Years of metrics-driven growth, lucrative manipulative systems, and unregulated platform marketplaces, have created an environment where it makes more sense to be fake online — to be disingenuous and cynical, to lie and cheat, to misrepresent and distort — than it does to be real. Fixing that would require cultural and political reform in Silicon Valley and around the world, but it’s our only choice. Otherwise we’ll all end up on the bot internet of fake people, fake clicks, fake sites, and fake computers, where the only real thing is the ads.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/...t-is-fake.html





Cyberattack from Outside the U.S. Hits Newspapers Across the Country, Preventing Distribution, Source Says
Tony Barboza, Meg James and Emily Alpert Reyes

A cyberattack that appears to have originated from outside the United States caused major printing and delivery disruptions at several newspapers across the country on Saturday including the Los Angeles Times, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.

The attack led to distribution delays in the Saturday edition of The Times, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun and several other major newspapers that operate on a shared production platform. It also stymied distribution of the West Coast editions of the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, which are all printed at the Los Angeles Times’ Olympic printing plant in downtown Los Angeles.

“We believe the intention of the attack was to disable infrastructure, more specifically servers, as opposed to looking to steal information,” said the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly.

No other details about the origin of the attack were immediately available, including the motive. The source identified the attacker only as a “foreign entity.”

All papers within The Times’ former parent company, Tribune Publishing, experienced glitches with the production of papers. Tribune Publishing sold The Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune to Los Angeles businessman Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong in June, but the companies continue to share various systems, including software.

“Every market across the company was impacted,” said Marisa Kollias, spokeswoman for Tribune Publishing. She declined to provide specifics on the disruptions, but the company properties include the Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Annapolis Capital-Gazette, Hartford Courant, New York Daily News, Orlando Sentinel and Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel.

Tribune Publishing said in a statement Saturday that “the personal data of our subscribers, online users, and advertising clients has not been compromised. We apologize for any inconvenience and thank our readers and advertising partners for their patience as we investigate the situation. News and all of our regular features are available online.”

The Times said the problem was first detected Friday. Technology teams made significant progress in fixing it, but were unable to clear all systems before press time.

Readers can access a digital edition of the Saturday paper here.

Director of Distribution Joe Robidoux said he expects the majority of Los Angeles Times subscribers will receive their paper Saturday, however delivery will be late. For print subscribers that did not receive Saturday’s paper, they will receive the paper with their regularly scheduled delivery of the Sunday edition.

The attack seemed to have begun late Thursday night and by Friday had spread to crucial areas needed to publish the paper.

The computer problem shut down a number of crucial software systems that store news stories, photographs and administrative information, and made it difficult to create the plates used to print the papers at The Times’ downtown plant.

“We are trying to do work-arounds so we can get pages out. It’s all in production. We need the plates to start the presses. That’s the bottleneck.” Robidoux said.

“We apologize to our customers for this inconvenience. Thank you for your patience and support as we respond to this ongoing matter,” The Times said in a statement.

It was unclear whether the company has been in contact with law enforcement regarding the suspected attack. An FBI spokeswoman was not immediately aware if the incident had been reported to her agency.

The problem caused widespread issues for Sun-Sentinel readers in South Florida, one of Tribune Publishing’s major markets.The paper told readers that it had been “crippled this weekend by a computer virus that shut down production and hampered phone lines,” according to a story on its website.

The problem caused widespread confusion, the paper noted, because subscribers who called the newspaper’s offices on Saturday morning were “told, incorrectly, that the numbers were not in service.”

New York Times and Palm Beach Post readers in South Florida also failed to receive their Saturday editions because the Sun-Sentinel also prints those newspapers. The Sun Sentinel told readers that they would receive their Saturday issue along with their Sunday papers. The Orlando Sentinel subscribers received their papers on time, according to a Tribune Publishing executive.

The Ventura County Star, owned by Gannett Co. Inc., said it was also affected.

Experts said holidays are “a well-known time for mischief” by digital troublemakers because organizations are more thinly staffed

“Usually when someone tries to disrupt a significant digital resource like a newspaper, you’re looking at an experienced and sophisticated hacker,” said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, a nonprofit public interest research group.

Malware has, over time, become more sophisticated and coordinated, involving more planning by networks of hackers who infiltrate a system over time, she said.

“Modern malware is all about the long game,” Dixon said. “It’s serious attacks, not small stuff anymore. When people think of malware, the impression may be, ‘It’s a little program that runs on my computer,’” Dixon said.

Today, “malware can root into the deepest systems and disrupt very significant aspects of those systems.”
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/...229-story.html





BitTorrent Loses Recent CEO, Adds Crypto-Currency to uTorrent
Janko Roettgers

Longtime BitTorrent executive and recent CEO Rogelio Choy left the company just 6 months after its acquisition by blockchain entrepreneur Justin Sun. Coincidentally, Choy’s departure comes just as BitTorrent is doubling down on blockchain tech: The company announced Thursday that it is adding a crypto-currency to its popular uTorrent client.

Choy had been BitTorrent’s chief operating officer from 2012 to 2015. After a 2-year stint at an on on-demand startup, he rejoined the company in 2017 as its CEO. His departure was confirmed by a company spokesperson Thursday, who said that he “decided to pursue other opportunities.”

The exact reasons for his departure are unknown at this time, but a source close to the company suggested that there had been disagreements about the direction of the company. Choy wasn’t available for comment.

A spokesperson for Sun’s Tron blockchain startup denied that there had been disagreements between Choy and Sun following the initial publication of this story. “The two had a good working relationship,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “People leave companies in normal course of business. Tron has been steadily filling out its executive ranks with hires of seasoned people from Google, S&P and elsewhere.”

One possible point of contention is BitTorrent’s increased focus on crypto-currencies: The company announced Thursday that it was adding a crypto token to its popular uTorrent Windows client. The token will initially allow uTorrent users to achieve faster download speeds.

Ultimately, the company plans to use the token for other use cases as well. “BitTorrent token is the first in a series of steps to support a decentralized internet,” said Sun in a blog post. “In one giant leap, the BitTorrent client can introduce blockchain to hundreds of millions of users around the world and empower a new generation of content creators with the tools to distribute their content directly to others on the web.”

The BitTorrent token will be made available on Binance, but won’t be available to U.S.-based users at launch. BitTorrent emphasized Thursday that users will always be able to opt out of the scheme as well.

In addition to heading Tron, Sun is now also CEO of a newly-founded BitTorrent foundation, which is incorporated in Singapore. Choy had been CEO of BitTorrent until the acquisition, and subsequently became general manager of Tron’s storage business.

His departure is just the latest in a long list of tumultuous executive changes the company underwent in recent years. Most notably, in 2016, two outside investors managed to buy themselves seats on the company’s board and install themselves as co-CEOS.

The duo spearheaded an expensive expansion into the media space, including the opening of a Los Angeles production facility. Those efforts ultimately faltered; both CEOs were fired that same year, and the company shut down its L.A. studio space and effectively shuttered its media operations.
https://variety.com/2019/digital/new...en-1203098486/





Tor Is Easier Than Ever. Time to Give It a Try
Lily Hay Newman

You probably know about the digital anonymity service Tor, but for whatever reason you may not actually use it. Maybe between the nodes, traffic rerouting, and special onion URLs it seems too confusing to be worth the effort.

In truth, Tor has been relatively accessible for years now, largely because of the Tor Browser, which works almost exactly like a regular browser and does all the complicated stuff for you in the background. But in 2018 a slew of new offerings and integrations vastly expanded the available tools, making 2019 the year to finally try Tor. You may even end up using the network without realizing it.

"At the end of the day for Tor what we hope is that our technology becomes underlying, and everything else that happens online happens on top of it," says Isabela Bagueros, executive director of the Tor Project. "Seeing interest and adoption from for-profit companies and other organizations is a very interesting moment for us, because we are creating different examples to show how our vision can be possible."

Tor's primary benefit, for the uninitiated: It encrypts your traffic and bounces it through a chain of computers, making it very difficult for anyone to track where it came from. You can see how easy access to an anonymized services like that might come in handy when you're working on anything from job hunting to political organizing.

This year, it became easier than ever to do so on Android, with the introduction of Tor Browser for Android. The platform first debuted in September and is still being tested, but is now close to its final, stable release. You can download it on Google Play or directly from the Tor Project. There are also some Tor options for iOS, including an app called Onion Browser, but the Tor Project doesn't currently have its own offering. Being able to access Tor on mobile is increasingly important, as more and more browsing shifts to smartphones.

Tor on desktop has gotten new options as well. The privacy-focused browser Brave added Tor routing in June as an option for its tabs. Brave makes it easy to have some tabs that are running Tor and others that aren't, letting you do all of your browsing side by side. In Brave you simply navigate to the File menu and choose "New Private Tab with Tor," or flip a Tor switch after you launch a new private tab, to add the protection.

"A Brave Private Window with Tor keeps the user history secret from other people who may be using the computer, but also makes it more difficult for ISPs, employers, or guest Wi-Fi providers to track which websites a user visits," Brave said in a statement. "We're getting great feedback from users...[and] we're also adding more Tor functionality in Brave."

Brave's integration options are convenient. And the Tor Project's Bagueros says that Brave has so far shown strong commitment to evolving its Tor implementation to be increasingly secure. While people could just use the official Tor Browser for maximum protection—something even Brave itself recommends "for users who require leakproof privacy"—Bagueros says the goal is to foster as many implementations as possible to make Tor more accessible. "We don’t want to be the only browser," she says. "If there are 20,000 browsers doing the same thing we don’t mind. We think that’s great."

Other types of Tor integrations relate to creating infrastructure so that people's browsing can opportunistically route over the Tor network and have stronger anonymity protections. Facebook—which has run an "onion service" since 2014 to make connecting to Facebook on Tor even more secure—expanded its offerings in November to make them faster and more efficient. The improvement was also aimed at making it easier for Tor users to access the most secure version of Facebook from within a platform like Tor Browser without having to remember a special onion URL.

Content delivery network and internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare also launched an onion service in September that makes it easier to access the most secure versions of its client sites on Tor. Through its new setup, Cloudflare helps to extend protections on user anonymity without knowing anyone's identity, even on its own service. "If we can make it easier for more people to use Tor that's great," says Matthew Prince, Cloudflare's CEO. "Other platforms can support this to get an advanced level of security for their users." Cloudflare's Tor integration is also set up to more accurately separate legitimate Tor traffic from malicious activity, by making it more costly for hackers to mount attacks without undermining anonymity protections for legitimate users.

With all this new private industry collaboration, the Tor Project's Bagueros says she thinks that more people will start using the service and be able to integrate it into their lives. The Tor Project has been working on ways to scale more efficiently in anticipation of eventually needing to meet this higher demand. But it also remains focused on the core concept of Tor as a distributed and decentralized network. "We don’t want any corporations to own a big part of the network," Bagueros says. "So we educate them on how many servers are okay for them to pitch in and if they want to add more they can donate to different nonprofits who run relays so they can still increase the network that way."

The vision of Tor as the underpinning of the entire internet is still probably a long way off, if it can ever happen at all. But the options available to access the Tor network and use it more easily are rapidly expanding. This is the year to try them out.
https://www.wired.com/story/tor-anon...ier-than-ever/





Latvian ISPs Can Now Block Pirate IPTV Websites Without Court Order
Bill Toulas

• A new law on electronic mass media to compel ISPs to block piracy domains following a relevant order.
• The National Electronic Media Council will issue the order, and no courts will be involved in the process.
• The Latvian government is escalating their action against piracy, as copyright owners raise their pressure on them.

A new Latvian law that just came into effect burdens the country’s ISPs (Internet Service Providers) with domain blocking obligations. The domains to be targeted include pirate sites that illegally broadcast unlicensed TV content via the Internet. As is the case all over the world right now, pirate IPTV services in Latvia have shown an explosion in their growth, with many thousands of people choosing to subscribe to these platforms and enjoy a rich collection of available content at a meager cost.

According to the new law (Article 21.8 of the “On Electronic Mass Media”), the blocking order will be issued by the National Electronic Media Council (NESMI) and then passed to the Latvian ISPs who will be blocking them within 15 days. The budget that has been allocated to NESMI for the blocking function is about $335k for 2019, and another $280k for the next two years. Whatever is left from this budget will be invested in the development of a special piece of software that will search and monitor websites that contain copyright infringing material.

The blocking of a domain will last for six months, with the option to extend this period while the reported URL remains on NESMI’s blacklist. The new law that overrides the need to acquire a court order for the domain blocking is the result of close cooperation between the Latvian government and a lobby of 14 companies who have interest in protecting copyrighted content against piracy in Latvia. This is only the most recent step taken, as in 2018, the Latvian police have conducted multiple raids in locations that were housing piracy website infrastructure, many criminal cases were brought to court, and many illegal broadcasting companies were fined and closed.

Latvians will have to revert to using the common bypassing methods that are used everywhere where such domain blocks take place, so the technical means is still there no matter the intensification of the war against piracy. However, new laws that streamline the action against pirating websites are simplifying and accelerating the blocking procedure, so this is nothing short of another punch to the face of Latvian piracy.
https://www.technadu.com/latvian-isp...t-order/53168/





Here are the Most Pirated Teams in the NBA
Austin Powell

Reddit NBA Streams is an open secret among serious (and seriously broke) basketball fans. The subreddit makes it ridiculously easy to find a live stream of every NBA game, no matter where you live or what device you’re using. Now researchers have determined which team’s games are being pirated the most on Reddit NBA Streams. Here’s everything you need to know about the subreddit.

What is Reddit NBA Streams?

As noted in its About tab, r/nbastreams is “a subreddit to help you find streams for every NBA game in one place,” and it’s one of the more popular destinations on the social news site, especially when the playoffs roll around. According to Reddit List, which tracks the popularity of various subreddits, r/nbastreams has nearly 400,000 subscribers, up from just over 45,000 subscribers before the start of the 2016-17 season.

Here’s how it works: Each NBA game is listed in a separate thread, and each thread typically goes live about one hour before tip-off. Users post links to live streams of that game in the comment section for the thread following a format more strict than your high school curfew. (Seriously, the list of rules for posting runs 25-deep, covering everything from the use of bold to highlightingn for HD streams to the need to specify whether a stream is mobile compatible. “Puffin browser DOES NOT count as mobile compatibility,” the rules clarify.) Nonactive links are removed by the moderators, who also delete the threads after each game concludes. The heavy moderation and attention to detail make Reddit NBA Streams an incredibly attractive destination for those looking to watch NBA games online for free.

Is Reddit NBA Streams legal?

Let’s get one thing straight: I’m not advocating the use of Reddit NBA Streams. I’ve found an investment in NBA League Pass to be more than worth the monthly fee, especially since I live in a city where I don’t have to worry about regional blackouts affecting my ability to watch my favorite team (the Portland Trail Blazers, for the record).

But is Reddit NBA Streams legal? Like any other pirating service, it exists in a gray area, to say the least. As you’ll hear at least once during any game, the reproduction, republishing, uploading, posting, transmitting, etc. of any NBA footage without the league’s approval is strictly prohibited. But the streaming of copyrighted content, as opposed to downloading, is more challenging for copyright holders to address, in part because of the more ephemeral nature of the content and the rampant use of VPNs (or virtual private networks), which mask the IP address of users and, thus, make it more difficult to track down the individuals responsible.

Why doesn’t the NBA try to shut down Reddit NBA Streams? For starters, Reddit historically has been hesitant to take down subreddits over free speech concerns, though it’s made some positive progress in recent years. But essentially, forums like Reddit’s NBA Streams create a game of Whac-A-Mole for copyright holders: Even if you get the forum shut down, or you get one individual to take down a specific live stream, there’s nothing preventing another stream or forum from popping up in its place.

Which teams are most popular on Reddit’s NBA Streams?

The consumer site Comparitech did a deep dive into the activity of Reddit NBA Streams over the course of last season to find which teams and matchups were attracting the most attention online. Here’s how the site described its methodology:

We collected the text from 1,340 submissions and 25,698 comments on the subreddit from the 2017-2018 season and created a popularity score for each team. We added the total number of comments and the net score (the number of upvotes subtracted by the number of downvotes) for each game submission for the regular season and then for the playoffs. We then broke it down by team and created an average for each over the course of the season and playoffs to determine who the most pirated teams were.

What did the researchers find? The Cleveland Cavaliers had the highest overall pirate-stream rating during the regular season and the most streams per game as well. The team’s playoff games were also among the most pirated as well. Other popular teams included the Boston Celtics, defending champions Golden State Warriors, and the Toronto Raptors. Unsurprisingly, smaller-market teams tended to have lower numbers of streams per game, but the Oklahoma City Thunder and Milwaukee Bucks were still in the top tier of popularity for regular-season games.

You can find the complete results on Comparitech.

With LeBron James now ushering in a new era of Showtime with the Los Angeles Lakers, I imagine this data would look much different for this season. It would be interesting to see if teams that are having a surprisingly strong start to the season (Los Angeles Clippers, Dallas Mavericks, and Denver Nuggets, and Sacramento Kings all come to mind) are seeing a corresponding uptick in streams on Reddit.
https://www.dailydot.com/upstream/reddit-nba-streams/





The Most-Pirated Show Of 2018 Was The Walking Dead
Holly Brockwell

Every year, TorrentFreak announces the most-pirated TV shows of the year, and 2018 sees The Walking Dead end Game of Thrones' 6-year reign at the top.

That's because only shows that were released in that year are counted, and GoT didn't give us any new episodes this year. AND DON'T WE KNOW IT.

Here's the top ten:

1. The Walking Dead

2. The Flash

3. The Big Bang Theory

4. Vikings

5. Titans

6. Arrow

7. Supernatural

8. Westworld

9. DC's Legends of Tomorrow

10. Suits

Last year, the shows in first, second and third place were in second, third and fourth respectively, so they're still as popular as ever -- they've just moved up a slot because of the lack of Thrones.

Surprisingly, given Meghan Markle mania, Suits has dropped a place from 9 to 10 this year.

The rankings are taken from BitTorrent traffic, so they might not accurately represent the pirating activity of the whole internet, but it's a good indication.

It's also a good indication of which shows are a complete pain in the bum to get hold of legally -- many people will quite happily stream or download something on the right side of the law if they can, but if there are no good options available or it's significantly easier to use a torrent, that's what they'll do. A lot of that is on the content owners -- let us give you our money!

Game of Thrones is of course back on our screens next year, at which point we fully expect to see it back in its rightful place at the top of the table.
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2018/12/mos...-show-of-2018/





ONE CUT OF THE DEAD, Prime Video Direct, Internet Piracy And You

A nuanced look at this weekend's ONE CUT OF THE DEAD debacle.
James Emanuel Shapiro

If you follow this site or pay attention to Fantastic Fest, there’s a good chance you’ve now heard of the Japanese film One Cut of the Dead. It’s a uniquely touching film that won the Audience Award at this year's Fantastic Fest that had a successful theatrical run in Japan from late 2017 to summer 2018. It was also enough of a favorite among the BMD staff that when it suddenly showed up on Amazon Prime over the holidays, it brought much excitement to those who were dying to see it again.

However, it started to become apparent that it was not part of a real release. It is significant for any film that’s played at Fantastic Fest to sell after the fest, and as the head of Fantastic Fest’s industry office, I hadn’t heard of a US sale. That raised a red flag with me, but it doesn’t immediately mean something rotten is afoot because the US market for niche foreign language titles has shrunk considerably since IFC and Magnolia were pushing a lot of foreign films through their VOD model. Plus, license holders can and do license content directly to streaming platforms rather than wait for a US deal. What clinched it was when several folks with connections to the licensor holder, Third Window Films, suggested it was a pirated copy. Soon after, Third Window made a public statement that it was an illegal release and asked everyone to stop pushing people to it.

How did an illegal copy of a popular film (in certain circles) get uploaded to Amazon Prime? Was that bad? What does this all mean? Let’s talk about these answers from my perspective. I say my perspective because Third Window Films, a tiny UK distributor that specializes in niche Japanese films, stated that the leak would deal significant harm to both their UK release and - since they have worldwide rights - any potential sale to other territories, including the US. I'm not saying we shouldn’t take them at their word. I’m sharing my opinion as someone who has worked as a buyer and as a distributor. Their reality is their reality. Our friends over at Film School Rejects also published a take yesterday that includes a conversation with XYZ partner and Head of Acquisitions and Productions Todd Brown who reiterated the position that this leak can only damage the film’s worldwide exploitation. There’s no one who is better tied into the international marketplace than Todd Brown, so his opinion on this matter should carry a lot of weight.

I’m going to give a contrary opinion.

Let’s talk about how it happened, since this caused some surprise. We’re now in a world where digital distribution, especially subscription-based distribution, is driving the engine. One benefit from this is that it has never been easier to distribute films digitally. Platforms like Amazon Prime Direct, YouTube and Vimeo only need a digital file (and a closed-captioned file if it doesn’t have subtitles burned in) to stream a film. With Amazon Prime Direct, you do need to provide a bank account and some tax information as they will pay you per stream, so it’s not as simple as YouTube or Vimeo. It is probably worth clarifying that while you can’t tell the difference from a consumer standpoint between movies that are licensed directly for Amazon Prime or titles that are added to the service through Amazon Prime Video Direct, there is a difference in that films licensed for Prime get money upfront, while movies added to Prime Video Direct only get paid for each time someone streams the film. In this case, the pirated copy was uploaded using Prime Video Direct, and since they provided a bank account and some tax info, there is a paper trail on who did it.

This also happens a lot, especially on YouTube, as copyrighted material is uploaded every day, and as I’ve demonstrated, it's not that hard for anyone to do it. Since there’s SO MUCH CONTENT on all these platforms, there is no way for the platforms themselves to police piracy. It would take an army of people several months to review every piece of content that is on these services on a day-by-day basis. That’s not possible. Content owners must remove the content themselves. Since it's rather frequent, the platforms have made it extremely easy for content holders to request their copyrighted material be taken down by filling out a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notice. You basically swear under penalty of perjury that you are the content owner and the content in question is illegal. It takes about one minute to fill out and a few hours for the content to be removed. As a distributor, I spend a few hours each week searching these sites for all the Drafthouse Films library and taking down the illegal copies. You can also hire companies to do this for you.

Was this bad? This is a more complicated answer than one might think and will lead into a larger opinion and conversation about piracy in general. First, all piracy is bad in the sense that you are losing control over your content. The content holder should always control all aspects of the release and exploitation so they can maximize its value. Piracy for Asian content is also more of a problem because piracy is even more prevalent in that part of the world. In fact, the biggest US distributor of Asian content, WellGo, has decided to always try to release their Asian content around windows set by the Asians distributors. This is a less than ideal way of distributing content as you would always prefer your territory goes first and that you can dictate when that happens. But for them, they are not the primary revenue for these titles, and they have built an effective model to either go day-and-date with the first territory or they have enough means to make the title work in a different time. But once the movie is released in Asia, they are worried about how piracy will hurt their release.

However, piracy as an effect on the exploitation of content is a lot more complicated from a philosophical standpoint. There’s a more nuanced way of looking at who is pirating content and how that affects a film’s exploitation. Let’s consider for a second that the most pirated content is frequently the highest demand content on any platform. The most recent season of Game of Thrones was pirated more than a billion times in 2017 but it still averaged more than 30 million viewers an episode. If you have content that is being pirated a significant amount, you also have content that is being legally transacted a significant amount. I know what you’re thinking. All that piracy is still costing content transactions and viewers. You’re right, it is. However, one illegal view does not equate to one lost legal view. Why? Well, let's also consider who is doing the pirating.

There are two kinds of individuals who pirate content. First, the person who will never legally transact on the content. Second is the person who will both pirate and legally transact content. It’s the folks in the second group that contribute to lost revenue from piracy, as the first group was never going to be your customer in the first place. What is interesting about the second group is, as referenced in this paper here and also this paper here, they are high consumers of content both legally and illegally, meaning the people who pirate the most movies also purchase the most movies. Since we also know that piracy can raise awareness about films the same way festivals and other word-of-mouth screenings raise awareness, the people pirating movies are also telling others about them, and that can lead to additional legal transactions.

(Quick break to point out this excellent piece in Filmmaker by our friend Matt Lynch on piracy as an archival institution which is an additional layer to this nuanced view of piracy.)

To reiterate, this is not an advocacy of piracy. It’s a perspective that doesn’t frame piracy as an absolute, and if we apply this view to what happened this past weekend with One Cut of the Dead, let’s consider how much additional awareness was raised with the film’s leak. Yes, we want these transactions to lead back to the content owner’s bank account, but all the articles and all the social messaging from people who had seen the film and loved it were done in service of driving awareness. And drive awareness they did.

Did the leak hurt the film’s sales chances? I personally don’t believe so. The film has been finished and available for sale since 2017 and has already been released in Asia where, as I mentioned above, US distributors already know that once the film has been released (including home entertainment), it's already going to be frequently pirated. Also, the film had not secured US distribution despite playing at several high-profile genre fests and winning the audience award at Fantastic Fest with almost all the leading US distributors of foreign genre content in attendance. I’d also like to suggest, as both a former retail buyer and current distributor, these leaks are usually not the fault of the licensor holder, and we know the content can quickly come down, as it did in this case. Potential buyers of content and gatekeepers to digital, home entertainment platforms know it's not part of the official release, and it's unlikely they will hold it against the content owner especially with a film that has such a passionate following. That demonstrates significant demand.

What happened this weekend with One Cut of the Dead was unfortunate. Third Window is dealing with the real-world repercussions of the film's leak. It’s a special film and hopefully the aftermath is more tempered, as I have suggested. My goal here was to explain how this happened and what it could mean in a larger view of piracy and how it affects distribution.
https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2019/01...piracy-and-you





The Internet is Arguing Over the Best Way to Pirate Netflix's 'Bandersnatch'

The internet will always find a way.
Jack Morse

Netflix's new choose-your-own-adventure style episode of Black Mirror, "Bandersnatch," has the online world abuzz with all the different storylines available for the viewer/player of the streaming digital experience.

Overlooked in the discussion regarding which breakfast cereal best kicks off the main character's day lies another probing question. How, exactly, does one pirate a show that has roughly 5 hours of total runtime spooled out over multiple non-linear scenes requiring a specially designed Branch Manager tool to access?

Fear not, internet pirates are on the case.

While some in media and online have speculated that the format of "Bandersnatch" would make it "more difficult to pirate," difficult does not equal impossible — a fact we are reminded of by a quick stroll to The Pirate Bay and Reddit.

On The Pirate Bay, a notorious torrenting site, we found numerous copies of the episode for download that addressed the specific problems inherent in illegally downloading a choose-your-own-adventure video in a variety of ways.

One file description, for example, explains that out of "the 250 available decision events, this is the default 68 choices Netflix have defined as the default 'linear' timeline." It lists a runtime of 1 hour, 33 minutes and 12 seconds, and seemingly just plays out as a straight film (for legal reasons we did not download the file). In other words, this iteration solves the aforementioned problem of different storylines by simply ignoring it.

Another pirated copy, listing a 5 hour and 12 minute runtime, suggests a different approach. With reports putting the total amount of all the final "Bandersnatch" footage combined at just over five hours, it would seem that this content pirate just decided to go ahead and upload everything as a single uninterrupted movie.

However, that approach defeats the entire purpose of the thing. Seeing all possible outcomes, one after another, is not the same as making a specific choice and watching the ramifications of that choice unfold — a fact the true sophisticates of Reddit clearly understand.

A Reddit thread titled "Soo.... How the hell am I going to pirate Netflix' Bandersnatch?" asks if "there is a method of preserving the [episode's] interactivity" via a torrent file.

The top response as of this writing, which begins with "Have none of you used interactive porn?", ends just as poorly as it started: with a suggestion to use a flash player.

A different Reddit thread suggests a more technical approach: specially, using the MKV file format to create "editions, file linking and ordered chapters." A helpfully linked blog post explains that, if implemented correctly, these features "let the viewer choose between multiple 'angles' or versions of the video (said versions may or may not be in the same file)."

In other words, the necessary tech to pirate and view a fully interactive copy of "Bandersnatch" is already out there. Someone just has to make it happen. If the "Bandersnatch" format ever moves from gimmick to mainstream, you should expect custom-tailored pirating techniques to move with it.

Of course, you could always take the extremely lazy and technically unsophisticated approach of just watching the reported five distinct endings on YouTube. That or sign up for a Netflix account.

After all, in the end, you get to make your own choice as to how you'll watch "Bandersnatch" (if you watch it at all)...which seems fitting.
https://mashable.com/article/how-to-...-bandersnatch/





Japan Looking to Tighten Their Manga Pirating Policy
Bill Toulas

• Japan is processing a new law that threatens to imprison people who download manga images and comics.
• The punishments will constitute two years in prison for users and up to five years imprisonment for website owners.
• Users who download manga images may face up to $18k in fines.

The Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs (ACA) is promoting stricter laws for the punishment of internet users who download still images of manga comics and pictures. ACA is an advisory committee that engages in the field of copyright protection, popularizing the problems that arise from piracy and organizing education programs on copyright issues. In the case of manga, the Japanese Copyright Act didn’t offer any type of protection against piracy, as all the focus and effort was exhausted in movies and music material. However, ACA believes that the treasured manga material should also be included under their protective umbrella, proposing a strict punishment to prevent further pirating.

According to the new law proposal, violators could face up to two years of imprisonment and a two million yen fine that is the equivalent of around $18k. While this law is still in the draft revisions stage of development, experts claim that it has already been promoted for commenting and optimization, so it is definitely going to see the light in some form, even if the actual punishment figures are transfigured to something else. While the downloads are included in the punishment frame, accessing pirated content online, like viewing images on a website is not considered a criminal act. This is technically obscure, as when viewing media online they are often downloaded onto the user’s systems, even as cached files. This makes it hard for the authorities to form a prosecution framework for users who access pirated content databases, as courts will have to access and analyze individual systems to determine the points of the law infringement.

The ACA panel makes special mention to a website named “Haruka Yumeno Ato” that acted as a central database pointer for people who look to download manga content. According to ACA, the damage caused by sites like this is estimated to about $675 million and is continuously growing, year by year. ACA has received numerous complaints from publishers of manga books and magazines, who are reporting an unprecedented level of piracy targeting against them nowadays. Of course, these platforms that are typically not containing any copyright protected material will not be left out of the new law’s scope. ACA has proposed that owner of websites that merely link to copyright-infringing content should be published by up to five years in prison if the relevant takedown requests are ignored for a determined period of time.

If all of the above increased your appetite for anime, check out our post for the best websites to watch anime and cartoons online for free.
https://www.technadu.com/japan-manga...tighten/53621/





Album Sales Are Dying as Fast as Streaming Services Are Rising

Music consumption shot up in 2018, no thanks to album or song sales
Amy X. Wang

In 2018, Best Buy decided to stop selling CDs, with the change partly brought on by record labels’ increasing reluctance to even issue them. Both choices are symptoms as well as causes of a seemingly inevitable trend: Buying music is now going out of style nearly as fast as streaming music is rising.

In 2018, album sales fell 18.2 percent from the previous year and song sales fell 28.8 percent, according to U.S. year-end report figures from data company BuzzAngle, which tracks music consumption. Meanwhile, total on-demand music streams, including both audio and video, shot up 35.4 percent. Audio on-demand streams set a new record high in 2018 of 534.6 billion streams, which is up 42 percent from 2017’s 376.9 billion streams.

It’s tricky to compare the specific unit numbers of sales to streams — since such a comparison would be pitting continuous playback of a certain piece of music against a one-time purchase of it — but certain other milestones in the consumption market can help highlight just how much streaming is replacing physical sales and downloads in America.

For instance: Even though total song downloads are still in the hundreds of millions, they’re coming down in scale at the top. In 2018, there was not a single song that broke 1 million sales — compared to 14 songs that reached that figure in 2017, 36 in 2016 and 60 in 2015. At the 2 million sales mark, two songs took that trophy in 2017, while five claimed it in 2016 and 16 songs made it in 2015, throwing the modest figures of this year’s sales into even sharper relief.

The dwindling popularity of music purchases — which is driven by listener preference as well as the music industry’s shift of focus away from sales, giving it a knock-on effect for retailers and buyers — can also be seen in the shares of total album consumption in 2018. (For this breakdown, 1,500 streams is equated to one album sale, which is also equated to 10 song sales.) Of all the music that U.S. fans listened to last year, 77 percent was through music-streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, while 17.3 percent of that was through album sales and 5.7 percent through the sales of singles, according to BuzzAngle’s tally. Those numbers in 2017 were 66 percent, 24.6 percent and 9.3 percent, respectively.

Thanks to the still-expanding streaming industry, overall music consumption grew in double-digits for the second year in the row. But the way we think of “music consumption” itself is permanently changed, and it doesn’t show any signs of going back to what it used to be.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/m...rising-774563/





How YouTube’s Domination of Streaming Clips the Market’s Wings

Firstly, happy new year to you all. Now on to the first post of 2019.
Mark Mulligan

The Article 13 debate that shaped so much of the latter part of 2018 will continue to play an important role throughout 2019 while European and then national legislators deliberate on the provision and the wider Digital Copyright Directive of which it forms a part. Regular readers will know that MIDiA first highlighted the risk of unintended consequences of Article 13. Today we present the case for the impact YouTube has on the broader streaming market, driven by the advantages of its unique licensing position. (This is a complex and nuanced topic with compelling evidence on both sides of the debate).

To illustrate YouTube’s impact on the streaming market this post highlights a few of the findings from a new MIDiA report: Music Consumer Behaviour Q3 2018: YouTube Leads the Way But At What Cost?

YouTube is the dominant music streaming platform, with 55% of consumers regularly watching music videos on YouTube, compared to a combined 37% for all free audio streaming services. YouTube usage skews young, peaking at nearly three quarters of consumers under 25. Although YouTube leads audio streaming in all markets — even Spotify’s native Sweden — there are some strong regional variations. For example, emerging streaming markets Brazil and Mexico see much higher YouTube penetration, peaking at close to double the level of even traditional music radio in Mexico. Indeed, radio is feeling the YouTube pinch as much as audio streaming. 68% of those under 45 watch YouTube music videos compared to 41% that listen to music radio. The difference increases with younger audiences and the more emerging the market. For example, in Mexico YouTube music penetration is 84% for 20–24 year olds, compared to 37% for music radio. Streaming may be the future of radio, but right now that streaming future is YouTube.

YouTube’s advantage

While cause and effect are difficult to untangle, the implied causality here is that YouTube’s unique value proposition steals much of the oxygen from the wider streaming market. Due to its unique licensing position – which Article 13 would likely change, YouTube has more catalogue and fully-on-demand free streaming, not to mention standout product features such as complete music video catalogue and social features such as song comments, likes / dislikes. Services that do not use safe harbour protection (i.e. the vast majority of audio streaming services) do not have these assets and so are at a distinct market disadvantage to YouTube. If you are a consumer in the market for a free streaming service, you have the choice between everything that you want, with complete control or constraints and restrictions, with fewer features. It’s not hard to see why consumers from Mexico through to Sweden make the choice they do. With a free proposition this good (especially when you factor in stream ripper apps and ad blockers), who needs a subscription?

A new value gap emerging?

Against this though, must be set two crucial factors:

• Audio streaming services would fare better if they had more of the features YouTube and Vevo have
• YouTube and Vevo are still the best ad monetisation players in the global market (i.e. discounting Pandora as it is US only). What’s more, (annual) audio ad supported ARPU declined in 2018 to $1.23, while video ad supported ARPU rose to $1.08. Ad-supported users grew faster than revenue while the opposite was true of video. There is a real risk here of an audio ad-supported value gap emerging. Spotify needs to get better at selling ads, fast.

Fully committed to subscriptions?

The final part of the YouTube impact equation is premium conversion. Since appointing Lyor Cohen, YouTube has taken a much more proactive approach to subscriptions, heavily touting its, actually-really-quite-good, YouTube Music premium product. Whether Alphabet’s board is equally exuberant about subscriptions, and whether YouTube Music’s launch lining up with the Article 13 legislative process was coincidental, are both open questions…

But politics and intent aside, YouTube is always going to be far poorer at converting to paid subscriptions because a) its user base is vast, and b) that user base is there for free stuff. So, while 58% of Spotify’s weekly active users (WAUs) are paid, the rate for YouTube Music weekly active usership is in single digit percentage points. That dynamic is not going to change in any meaningful way. In fact, YouTube has a commercial disincentive for pushing subscriptions too hard. It makes its money from advertising, and advertisers pay to reach the best possible consumers. Subscription paywalls lock away your best users, out of the reach of ads, which in turn reduces the value of your inventory to advertisers, which leads to declining revenues. YouTube is not about to swap a large-scale high-margin business for a small-scale low-margin one. Moreover, this issue of advertisers trying to reach paywalled consumers is going become a multi-industry issue in 2019. See my colleague Georgia Meyer’s excellent ‘Marketing to Streaming Subscribers’report for a deep dive on the topic.

Article 13 as a platform for innovation?

The overarching dynamic here is of a leading service that constrains the opportunity for services that are not able to play by the same rules. A levelling of the playing field is needed, but this should not just be legislation (and of course should be careful not to kill music’s ad supported Golden Goose). It should also see labels and publishers finding some common ground between the Spotify and YouTube models, and making those terms available to all parties. Because if YouTube does one thing really well, it shows us how good the streaming music user proposition can be when it is not too tightly constrained by rights holders. Let’s use Article 13 to raise the lowest common denominator, not to bring YouTube down to it.

Streaming music services need a user experience quantum leap in 2019; wouldn’t it be great if Article 13 could be the springboard for transformation and innovation?
https://musicindustryblog.wordpress....markets-wings/





An Economist Explains what Digital Technology Means for the Future of Popular Culture

Digital renaissance?
Angela Chen

In the early days of file-sharing and the internet, experts worried that technology would gut the creative industries, leaving consumers with fewer (and lower-quality) choices than ever before. It’s clear now that this hasn’t been the case, says Joel Waldfogel, an economist at the University of Minnesota.

Pirating remains a problem, and traditional gatekeepers aren’t as powerful as they once were. But revenue for recorded music is growing, and there are more books, movies, television, and music than ever before. In his new book Digital Renaissance: What Data and Economics Tell Us about the Future of Popular Culture (Princeton University Press), Waldfogel argues that digital technologies haven’t killed creative industries, but they have created a renaissance of new cultural products that consumers like and that wouldn’t have made created otherwise.

The Verge spoke to Waldfogel about why pirating didn’t kill the music industry, the good news and bad news for creators, and the dangers to watch out for in the midst of this renaissance.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Let’s start with the case of music. When it comes to music, you say that the internet did make it harder to make money off of recorded music because of pirating, but it also made it easier to create music. Can you talk about the relationship between those findings?

In these industries, the fear was that if the internet and pirating threatened revenue, it’d threaten continued product creation, and we’ll be threatened as consumers. That’s a credible concern, and I tried to see what’s really happening to the creation of products and the enjoyment of consumers in the internet period.

The threat of piracy is real, but there’s good news: it’s clearly much cheaper now to produce and distribute movies, television, books, and so on. Creation and distribution have become trivially inexpensive. That’s one important counterpoint, at least, to loss of revenue.

The other thing, that’s in some ways even more important, is the unpredictability of success and how that plays out to potentially have big effects. Imagine that traditional gatekeepers were really good at predicting what was going to succeed. In that case, if the cost of distribution fell relative to revenue, they could greenlight more of the products they used to say no to. But all of those newly greenlit products would be worse than the former lowest threshold, so it wouldn’t be that helpful to consumers to get a lot of not-very-appealing stuff.

But the real world’s not like that at all. In the real world, it’s very hard, even for very sophisticated gatekeepers, to predict what’s going to win. So if some change occurs, it allows more products to be tested with consumers. A lot of them will be bad. But because it’s so hard to predict success, some of them will be really good, at least in the sense that they appeal to a lot of consumers. That lets a lot of new products come to market and be discovered that have never come through before.

Do we have numbers on how many more of these works are coming to market that wouldn’t have if it weren’t for digitization?

There are two kinds of numbers that jump out. One is the absolute number of new products, like a tripling of the number of new songs being brought to market. There’s huge growth in books. It’s good news for consumers, but most new products are unappealing and attract very few consumers.

To me, the much more interesting numbers come from the best-seller lists. What share of those were products that would not have made it through in the past? In music, I would say the growing success of music from independent labels is evidence. In books, it’s the growing success of self-published books. One astounding statistic in my mind is the USA Today best-seller list. It’s a fairly deep best-seller list of 150 titles per week.

The number of self-published books on that list went from about 0 percent to 15 percent in a few years after the Kindle was introduced. In the romance category, it’s nearly 50 percent now. These are books that circumvented traditional gatekeepers after demonstrating value.

What about the question of quality? You write that there’s no evidence that the rise of self-published books is leading to lower standards for literary culture. Why is that?

To answer this question, I looked at The New York Times Notables list, specifically at which of those books came to market as self-published books. There is no change in the share of self-published books that are NYT notable. It’s zero.

Basically, what you find is that self-publishing is displacing the usual mass-market stuff, but it’s not diverting our consumption away from the elevated stuff. There’s not a displacement of traditional elevated consumption.

We’ve been talking mostly about books and music. How has digitization changed the movie and television industries?

Two big things. One is the reduced cost of creation. I can make a cinema-quality movie with a $2,000 camera, and I don’t need film, and it can be inexpensive to shoot. That’s not a big deal if I’m spending $100 million, but it’s a big deal that if I’m an independent guy who went to film school and wants to make a movie.

The other, and perhaps more important, thing is the relaxation of distribution bottlenecks. That’s a fancy way of saying it’s easier to get things to people. It used to be that if you made a movie, you got it into theaters, and that was one of the important ways of generating revenue. Although we have 40,000 screens in the US, there was really only room for a couple hundred movies a year when you consider how many screens and weeks the big movies play. Movies beyond the ones that were going to get wide theatrical distribution didn’t have much of a way to make money.

Now, every phone, television, iPad, and computer is a distribution venue. In the old days, it only made sense to make a movie if I could get enough people near a bunch of theaters who wanted to see it. If I made a movie that would attract an audience of 100,000 in the whole country, that’d be a total non-starter because it’s a few people per theater. Whereas if I can distribute it digitally, I can find those people without having done a very expensive distribution through physical means. So it’s not an economic waste of time to target a much narrower swath of moviegoers, and we really have seen large growth in the number of new movies created.

So far, we’ve been talking about how digitization has been good for the consumer. What about creators? Even if we have lots more creators and lots more cultural products, the industry isn’t very sustainable for any one creator.

There are winners and losers here. There are some people who are able to make money creating things that in the past made none. There are some people who once made more, and now they make less because of competition. There’s still stealing going on.

I am sympathetic to the concerns of creators, but the book is about the consumer standpoint, so the relevant measure is whether there are a lot of new cultural products of value being produced, and that answer is yes. Having said all of that, I think there are some hopeful examples of how business models can change to help creators.

One example is bundled subscription sales, which is basically Netflix and Spotify. In the US, when music is played on the radio, the owner of the sound recording doesn’t get paid. But when you get played on Spotify or Pandora, there is a payment. In the old days, if I got a CD — and I’m old enough to be a CD guy — when I played it the thousandth time, there was no additional revenue.

If you think about the way we used to sell music in the recent past, it was a dollar per song, so you only bought a song if you were pretty confident that it was worth a dollar. Now, you pay $10 a month for access to everything, and it creates revenue where there was none. Recorded music revenue actually rose substantially for the past two years, precisely because of bundled sales. I’m enthusiastic about that.

You write that recorded music revenue started going up in 2016 because people started paying the subscription fee for Spotify, right?

Right. It really took off in the US. It takes a while for people to become comfortable buying digital products as services. You’re used to the ownership model, which is either a physical product or a permanent download you couldn’t sell. But now people are becoming much more comfortable with paying $10 for access.

My next question is one that I’ve personally wondered for a long time. Why is it that Spotify can license basically every song, but Netflix’s offerings have become worse and worse over time?

That’s an interesting question. In video, like with Netflix as they transform from being a re-renter of physical products to a streamer of old products to a streamer of new products, the studio that created movies started to worry about them and said, “I don’t know if I want to make my stuff available. We’ll make our own exclusive content.” So the basis of competition has moved toward “I want to have a bunch of exclusive content to make people subscribe to my service,” whereas in music, it’s really been different. In music, essentially every service has the same products. There are little differences here and there, and for a while, Spotify didn’t have Taylor Swift, but by and large, they compete not on the basis of differential content.

In music, it looks to me more like a race to be big first, to get a lot of subscribers, and have some appealing services like playlists and other aspects that get better as you have more subscribers.

One interesting thing you addressed in the book is digital globalization, or the fear that local cultural products would suffer because ones from America or the UK would become so popular. Why hasn’t that happened?

It’s become cheaper to make things, but another aspect that’s underappreciated is the extent to which digitization makes it possible to sell things to export. People are actually consuming products from elsewhere, and small countries that used to bear the hegemony of Anglo products are finding themselves more successfully exporting. How many Netflix viewers thought they would be watching products in Spanish and Norwegian? There are more doing that than we had expected.

Clearly, you’re pretty optimistic about digitization and culture. But you also note things to watch out for, such as the threat of new technological gatekeepers.

The worry is that a small number of decision-makers will get to choose what gets greenlighted and what we have access to. Traditionally, that’s stuff like traditional movie studios, retailers, even. Music labels used to worry about Walmart having a big share of the market and therefore potentially outsized influence.

Well, now Spotify is playing the role of radio stations and record stores. It’s got a big share of the market. It’s not alone — Apple and Google and Amazon are trying — but we’re really talking about a very small number of players who have an enormous influence on what succeeds. I don’t see evidence of sinister behavior, but we have to be on the watch for this, in part because a lot of this behavior is harder to observe than it used to be. For example, Amazon doesn’t release statistics on sales of its products, so it’s very hard to know. We should be vigilant because we’re allowing a lot of power to concentrate in a small number of hands.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/4/18...logy-interview





Mickey Mouse Will be Public Domain Soon—Here’s what that Means

The Internet stopped another copyright extension without firing a shot.
Timothy B. Lee

As the ball dropped over Times Square last night, all copyrighted works published in 1923 fell into the public domain (with a few exceptions). Everyone now has the right to republish them or adapt them for use in new works.

It's the first time this has happened in 21 years.

In 1998, works published in 1922 or earlier were in the public domain, with 1923 works scheduled to expire at the beginning of 1999. But then Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It added 20 years to the terms of older works, keeping 1923 works locked up until 2019.

Many people—including me—expected another fight over copyright extension in 2018. But it never happened. Congress left the existing law in place, and so those 1923 copyrights expired on schedule this morning.

And assuming Congress doesn't interfere, more works will fall into the public domain each January from now on.

Next January, George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue will fall into the public domain. It will be followed by The Great Gatsby in January 2021 and Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises in January 2022.

On January 1, 2024, we'll see the expiration of the copyright for Steamboat Willie—and with it Disney's claim to the film's star, Mickey Mouse. The copyrights to Superman, Batman, Disney's Snow White, and early Looney Tunes characters will all fall into the public domain between 2031 and 2035.

The expiration of copyrights for characters like Mickey Mouse and Batman will raise tricky new legal questions. After 2024, Disney won't have any copyright protection for Mickey's original incarnation. But Disney will still own copyrights for later incarnations of the character—and it will also own Mickey-related trademarks.

James Grimmelmann, a copyright scholar at Cornell Law School, tells Ars that this is an uncharted area of law because licensing practices for modern characters are "so much more intensive and so much more comprehensive now" than in the 1920s and 1930s. "We never had megacharacters in the same way" prior to the 1920s, he says.

Internet activism made another extension untenable

Dennis Karjala was a law professor who helped lead the doomed resistance to the 1998 extension. He passed away in 2017, but when I interviewed him in 2013, he told me that it was "basically the Gershwin family trust, grandchildren of Oscar Hammerstein, Disney, others of that ilk" who pushed for ever-longer copyright terms.

Most copyrighted works become commercially worthless within a decade or two. But a small minority of famous works from the 1920s and 1930s were still generating significant revenues in the 1990s. Retroactively extending copyright terms meant an enormous windfall for the companies and families that owned the copyrights.

"There was not a single argument that actually can stand up to any kind of reasonable analysis," Karjala said. But the public domain had few defenders. So even though the arguments for longer copyright terms weren't very strong, they won the day in Congress.

Until recently, I assumed that the same interest groups would try to extend copyright terms again in 2018. But the political climate for copyright legislation has changed radically over the last 20 years.

A year ago, Ars Technica broke the news that three of the nation's most powerful rights holder groups in the country, the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the Authors Guild, were not even going to try to pass legislation extending copyrights.

"It's not something we are pursuing," an RIAA spokesman told me.

The reason was simple, Grimmelmann argues: they knew they weren't going to win.

"There's now a well-organized, grassroots lobby against copyright expansion," Grimmelmann tells Ars. "There are large business interests now on the anti-expansion side. Also a wide popular movement that they can tie it into."

The rise of the Internet and its remix culture means that a lot of people now benefit from a growing public domain in ways that wasn't true in 1998. That includes big companies like Google but it also includes grassroots communities like Wikipedia editors and Reddit users. This emerging copyright reform coalition flexed its lobbying muscles in 2012 when it overwhelmingly defeated an Internet filtering bill called the Stop Online Piracy Act.

So if the usual suspects had pushed for another copyright extension, they would have had a serious fight on their hands. Digital rights groups, online activists, and lobbyists from big technology companies would have swarmed Capitol Hill making the case against copyright extension. Evidently, major rights holders didn't have the stomach for another battle like that.

Of course, it's possible they could make another effort in the future. But such an effort would face long odds: today's opponents of copyright extensions are vastly better organized and better funded than the ragtag band that tried to stop the 1998 copyright extension.

A company like Disney enjoys several layers of legal protection for a major character like Mickey Mouse. It owns the copyright to the original character. It owns the copyrights to subsequent versions of the character, which tend to be better known to modern audiences. And they also own trademark rights.

The copyright for the original version of Mickey Mouse is scheduled to expire on January 1, 2024. But the other rights associated with Mickey Mouse will remain in place for longer.

Suppose, for example, that you wanted to create a new Mickey Mouse toy without authorization from Disney. You'll be free to do that in 2024, but only if your Mickey Mouse looks like this:

The Mickey Mouse character has evolved over the decades, Grimmelmann points out. And "modern Mickey is still protected," he says.

The most obvious example here is Mickey's white gloves. He didn't wear them in Steamboat Willie. So if you wanted to sell a Mickey toy with white gloves, you'd probably need to wait until 2025, when the copyright for the first Mickey short with white gloves, The Opry House, is scheduled to expire.

The early Mickey Mouse cartoons were black and white, so if you wanted to make a Mickey Mouse toy with modern colors, you'd have to carefully research when those colors first appeared.

Later changes to Mickey's appearance have been more subtle. But they may still be legally significant.

"I would expect Disney to be very careful to document similarities between the toys and any elements of Mickey still under copyright," Grimmelmann tells us. "It would be very easy to slip into more iconic Mickey toys without realizing it."

This is a line that third parties are already walking for the Sherlock Holmes series, which was published between 1887 and 1927. Most of the books are in the public domain, but the last few volumes are still under copyright. A few years ago, the estate of Arthur Conan Doyle tried to stop publication of a book based on the Sherlock Holmes character, arguing that the full complexity of the Holmes character wasn't revealed until later in the series. The Seventh Circuit appeals court rejected this argument, finding that people were free to create new Sherlock Holmes books as long as they didn't use elements of the Holmes canon that were introduced in books that were still under copyright.

The same legal issues will arise when other iconic characters—Batman, Superman, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Winnie the Pooh, and so forth—fall into the public domain over the next 20 years. In a few years, it'll be legal to create new creative works based on these characters, and possibly even to sell toys and other merchandise without authorization from the copyright holders.

But the original rightsholders will be looking over their shoulders. Anyone will be able to make new Batman cartoons after 2035, but they'll have to be careful to only use elements from Batman's original incarnation. Story lines, characters, and other elements that were released in later years will still be under copyright, and so people will have to wait for those later editions of the series to expire before those elements will be free for anyone to use.

Trademark law adds an extra wrinkle

Disney holds both copyright and trademark protections for the Mickey Mouse character. Copyright protection expires; trademark doesn't. So even after all significant Mickey Mouse copyrights have expired. Disney could potentially use trademark law as a weapon against unauthorized Mickey Mouse products.

Grimmelmann calls this a "messy area for IP law." The big question for trademark law is whether consumers are confused about the origin of the product—in this case, whether they believe a product is official Disney merchandise. That might be an easier case for Disney to win if someone used Mickey's image to market an unrelated product like toothpaste.

But a company selling a Mickey Mouse toy or a new movie featuring Mickey Mouse would likely be on firmer legal ground, Grimmelmann argues. He points to a 2003 case where a company called Dastar republished portions of a television documentary based on a Dwight Eisenhower book. The copyright for the documentary had not been renewed, putting it into the public domain. Dastar edited it to strip out the original credits and present it as a Dastar production.

Twentieth Century Fox, which had owned the television rights before they expired, sued Dastar arguing that Dastar had violated trademark law by passing off Fox's work as is own. But the Supreme Court rejected that argument, noting that allowing the use of trademark law to restrict the republication of creative works would create "a species of mutant copyright law" that limits copying of public domain works.

"We have been careful to caution against misuse or overextension of trademark and related protections into areas traditionally occupied by patent or copyright," the high court wrote.

Grimmelmann argues that similar reasoning would prelude Disney from using its trademarks to restrict creative reuse of Mickey Mouse. "The broader principle the decision stands for is you can't use trademark law to control the distribution of a copyrighted work," he tells Ars.

Still, some amount of litigation is inevitable.

"Disney could be quite vigilant about watching out for cartoons that give the impression that they're affiliated with Disney," Grimmelmann says.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...public-domain/





New Life for Old Classics, as Their Copyrights Run Out
Alexandra Alter

Nearly a century ago, the publisher Alfred A. Knopf released a slim book of spiritual fables by an obscure Lebanese-American poet and painter named Kahlil Gibran.

Knopf had modest expectations, and printed around 1,500 copies. Much to his surprise, the book — titled “The Prophet” — took off. It became a huge hit, and went on to sell more than 9 million copies in North America alone.

Until now, the publishing house that still bears Knopf’s name has held the North American copyright on the title. But that will change on Jan. 1, when “The Prophet” enters the public domain, along with works by thousands of other artists and writers, including Marcel Proust, Willa Cather, D. H. Lawrence, Agatha Christie, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, P. G. Wodehouse, Rudyard Kipling, Katherine Mansfield, Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens.

This coming year marks the first time in two decades that a large body of copyrighted works will lose their protected status — a shift that will have profound consequences for publishers and literary estates, which stand to lose both money and creative control.

But it will also be a boon for readers, who will have more editions to choose from, and for writers and other artists who can create new works based on classic stories without getting hit with an intellectual property lawsuit.

“Books are going to be available in a much wider variety now, and they’re going to be cheaper,” said Imke Reimers, an assistant professor of economics at Northeastern University who has studied the impact of copyright. “Consumers and readers are definitely going to benefit from this.”

The sudden deluge of available works traces back to legislation Congress passed in 1998, which extended copyright protections by 20 years. The law reset the copyright term for works published from 1923 to 1977 — lengthening it from 75 years to 95 years after publication — essentially freezing their protected status. (The law is often referred to by skeptics as the “Mickey Mouse Protection Act,” since it has kept “Steamboat Willie,” the first Disney film featuring Mickey, under copyright until 2024.)

Now that the term extension has run out, the spigot has been turned back on. Each January will bring a fresh crop of novels, plays, music and movies into the public domain. Over the next few years, the impact will be particularly dramatic, in part because the 1920s were such a fertile and experimental period for Western literature, with the rise of masters like F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Virginia Woolf.

“Eventually, these books belong to the people,” said James L. W. West III, a Fitzgerald scholar. “We can have new attempts to edit and reinterpret all of these iconic texts.”

Once books become part of the public domain, anyone can sell a digital, audio or print edition on Amazon. Fans can publish and sell their own sequels and spinoffs, or release irreverent monster mash-ups like the 2009 best-seller “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.”

Theater and film producers can adapt the works into movies, plays and musicals without having to secure rights. Rival publishing houses can issue new print editions, and scholars can publish new annotated versions and interpretations. Free digital copies will circulate online. At the start of the new year, Google Books, which has more than 30 million works scanned in its vast online digital library, will release full digital editions of works published in 1923, among them Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Tarzan and the Golden Lion” and Edith Wharton’s “A Son at the Front.”

It’s difficult to say exactly how many works will enter the public domain this January, because some authors and publishers allowed their copyright to lapse, and some foreign-language books first published overseas in 1923 may remain under copyright for now, like Felix Salten’s “Bambi.” More than 130,000 copyright registrations were filed in 1923 for various creative works, but most of those were not renewed, according to John Mark Ockerbloom, a digital library strategist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Some publishers and the writers’ heirs fear that losing copyright protections will lead to inferior editions with typos and other errors, and to derivative works that damage the integrity of iconic stories.

“Publishers are right to be concerned about a proliferation of unreliable editions, some of them probably not very good,” said John Kulka, the editorial director of Library of America, a nonprofit organization that publishes American literary classics.

Still, many scholars and legal experts argue that American copyright law, which is mind-numbingly complex, has skewed toward enriching companies and the heirs of writers and artists at the expense of the public. When the first Copyright Act was passed in the United States in 1790, the maximum term was 28 years. Over the decades, lawmakers repeatedly prolonged the terms, which now stretch to over a century for many works. “It’s worse than the tax code,” said Rebecca Tushnet, an intellectual property expert at Harvard Law School. “The copyright term is way too long now.”

Some studies show that extending copyright can actually have a negative impact on the sales and availability of books. A few years ago, Paul J. Heald, a law professor at the University of Illinois, used software that randomly sampled books available on Amazon, and discovered that there were more new editions of books published in the 1910s than from titles published in the 2000s. Publishers often stop printing books that aren’t selling, but still retain the copyright, so no one else can release new editions. Once the books enter the public domain, a wider variety of new editions become available again, filling in a hole in the public and cultural record.

Legal experts say that Congress is unlikely to pass yet another copyright extension because the political dynamics have shifted over the decades, with growing public opposition to stringent intellectual property protections.

For readers and book buyers, the proliferation of competing texts and editions will mean more selection and cheaper books. In 2019, the digital publisher Open Road Media is publishing around a dozen newly available works from 1923, including e-books of Jean Toomer’s “Cane,” Gibran’s “The Prophet,” Sigmund Freud’s “The Ego and the Id,” P. G. Wodehouse’s “The Inimitable Jeeves” and Christie’s “The Murder on the Links,” one of her early novels featuring the detective Hercule Poirot.

Legacy publishers are also snapping up newly available works. Penguin Classics is releasing new editions of “Cane,” Gibran’s “The Prophet” and Proust’s “The Prisoner.” Vintage Classics is publishing a new edition of Robert Frost’s “New Hampshire” — which will feature the original woodcut art and some of his best-known poems, including “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” — as well as Dorothy Sayers’s “Whose Body?” and three new editions of classic Agatha Christie novels.

In anticipation of a flood of new editions of Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” when the copyright expires in 2021, the Fitzgerald estate and his publisher, Scribner, released a new edition of the novel in April, hoping to position it as the definitive version of the text. The novel has sold around 30 million copies worldwide, and continues to sell more than 500,000 copies a year in the United States alone. But in two years, anyone with a laptop will be able to publish an e-book of the text, or sell fan fiction based on the story.

Blake Hazard, Fitzgerald’s great-granddaughter and a trustee of his estate, said she hoped some interesting new interpretations of the story would emerge. But she also worries about what would happen to the novel’s legacy when the inevitable homages and retellings land, which will probably include unauthorized Gatsby sequels or novels told from Daisy Buchanan’s perspective.

“I hope people maybe will be energized to do something original with the work, but of course the fear is that there will be some degradation of the text,” Ms. Hazard said.

But publishers who specialize in classics see a tremendous opportunity to reintroduce old works. Some have been planning for this moment for decades.

Penguin Classics had a number of 1923 titles lined up for 1998, when the copyright for books published that year was set to lapse, but those plans were scrapped after Congress extended protections. About three years ago, Penguin’s editorial team went back to their list of 1923 titles and began looking for classics that still resonate and sell well. Several jumped out, including “The Prophet.”

John Siciliano, the executive editor of Penguin Classics, wanted something to distinguish its edition of “The Prophet” from the others, so he decided to commission a new introduction from a contemporary poet.

“I’d been thinking of who the perfect person would be, someone like Kahlil Gibran, a poet with mass appeal,” he said. “It became obvious that Rupi Kaur was the one.”

In January, Penguin will publish 20,000 copies of its edition of “The Prophet,” with a new introduction from Ms. Kaur, a young Canadian poet whose large social media following has helped build a huge audience for her work. Mr. Siciliano hopes it will bring a new audience to Gibran’s book.

“Having multiple editions of these works and renewed publication energy behind them enlarges the market rather than cannibalizing it,” Mr. Siciliano said. “It’s an opportunity to breathe new life into these works.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/29/b...ic-domain.html





Security Researcher Cracks Google's Widevine DRM (L3 only)

Widevine hack is clever, but it won't spur any waves of Netflix piracy any time soon.
Catalin Cimpanu

A British security researcher has cracked the L3 protection level of Google's Widevine digital rights management (DRM) technology. The hack can allow the researcher to decrypt content transferred via DRM-protected multimedia streams.

While "cracking Google's DRM" sounds very cool, the hack isn't likely to fuel a massive piracy wave. The reason is that the hack works only against Widevine L3 streams, and not L2 and L1, which are the ones that carry high-quality audio and video data.

Any user who cracks a Widevine L3 stream would only gain access to grainy low-quality video and lo-fi audio.

Many security and cryptography experts weren't surprised by the Widevine L3 hack, as the L3 protection level is the lowest one.

Google designed its Widevine DRM technology to work on three data protection levels --L1, L2, and L3-- each usable in various scenarios. According to Google's docs, the differences between the three protection levels is as follows:

L1 - all content processing and cryptography operations are handled inside a CPU that supports a Trusted Execution Environment (TEE).
L2 - only cryptography operations are handled inside a TEE.
L3 - content processing and cryptography operations are (intentionally) handled outside of a TEE, or the device doesn't support a TEE.

Service providers, such as Hulu or Netflix, usually perform a check of a device to see what Widevine DRM level they support, before sending any actual content.

Because of the varying security levels, which exposes the DRM-encrypted content to attacks, service providers deliver audio and video streams with varying quality levels, with L3 receiving the lowest.

While it was known for a few years that Widevine's L3 protection level was the weakest, no one until this today found a way to decrypt Widevine L3 encrypted content.

However, today, British security researcher David Buchanan made the first such claim.

"Soooo, after a few evenings of work, I've 100% broken Widevine L3 DRM," Buchanan said on Twitter. "Their Whitebox AES-128 implementation is vulnerable to the well-studied DFA attack, which can be used to recover the original key. Then you can decrypt the MPEG-CENC streams with plain old ffmpeg."

Albeit Buchanan did not yet release any proof-of-concept code, it wouldn't help anyone if he did.

In order to get the DRM-encrypted data blob that you want to decrypt, an attacker would still need "the right/permission" to receive the data blob in the first place.

If a Netflix pirate would have this right (being an account holder), then he'd most likely (ab)use it to pirate a higher-quality version of the content, instead of bothering to decrypt low-res video and lo-fi audio.

The only advantage is in regards to automating the pirating process, but as some users have pointed out, this isn't very appealing in today's tech scene where almost all devices are capable of playing HD multimedia [1, 2].

For all intents and purposes, Buchanan's hack is purely an interesting topic of research that has achieved something that many other experts have only speculated until now.

The researcher said he did report the issue to Google. He also said the issue is unfixable, as it's a design flaw and not a bug or vulnerability.

Google's Widevine is today's most popular DRM technology, being used by content providers such as Netflix, Hulu, Disney, HBO, DirectTV, Facebook, Showtime, Jio, Sony and more. Almost all hardware platforms and device makers support it, such as Apple, Samsung, Google, Intel, LG, Roku, Mozilla, and others. If Google decides to update Widevine's L3 cryptography implementation, patching it would be a considerable and drawn-out effort.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/securi...e-drm-l3-only/





Video Services May Use Artificial Intelligence to Crack Down on Password Sharing
Janko Roettgers

Still using your ex-roommates cable credentials to watch “Game of Thrones?” That may soon be getting a lot harder, thanks to new efforts to crack down on password sharing for pay TV and online video services. One of these efforts, launched by London-based Synamedia ahead of next week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), even uses artificial intelligence to uncover notorious password sharers.

Credentials Sharing Insight, as the new service is being called, targets both casual password sharing as well as criminal enterprises looking to resell pay TV login information. However, the focus clearly is on friends and family taking their generosity a bit too far, explained Symanedia chief product officer Jean-Marc Racine in an interview with Variety this week.

“The way you secure OTT is evolving,” said Racine. Previously, TV operators largely relied on secure devices, including locked-down set-top boxes and smart cards to decrypt satellite TV. These days, everything is moving to streaming, and operators are looking to make things as simple as possible for consumers. The flip side of that move to convenience is a lack of control, he argued. “Passwords are easy to share.”

And while TV operators in the past downplayed password sharing, claiming that it was just as much promotion, there’s a lot more caution about the topic these days. Parks Associates recently estimated that the industry could lose as much as $9.9B due to password sharing by 2021.

Most services have tried to curtail password sharing by limiting the number of simultaneous streams, with little else to go by to identify abuse. “Today, you are in the dark,” he said.

Synamedia’s solution on the other hand digs through lots of data to cluster users based on their streaming behavior. This can include user’s physical location (someone streaming from both coasts at the same time) as well as general usage patterns (someone streaming 24/7).

The company can even take a look at the specific content streamed by a user to identify unusual patterns. Based on these clues, Synamedia trains models to score users on a scale of 1 to 10, indicating whether they are likely sharing their passwords or not.

What the streaming service ultimately does with likely offenders is up to each company, said Racine. He suggested that the response doesn’t have to be punitive. Instead, companies could target password sharers with up-sell options for tiers with additional simultaneous streams. Services could also target users of shared passwords with specific messaging to convince them to pay up, or restrict access to the most popular content.

Whatever the response, Racine cautioned that it was important to dig into the data, and not jump the gun on users who may simply use the same account within their immediate family — something that is widely seen as acceptable. “You don’t want to have false positives,” he said.
https://variety.com/2019/digital/new...ia-1203098715/





A Nostalgic Look Back at Digital Music Piracy in the 2000s
Abhimanyu Ghoshal

A couple of decades ago – well before a $10 monthly fee would unlock access to virtually every song ever recorded through streaming services – digital music piracy was rampant around the world. Whether it was because you were young and couldn’t afford to buy MP3s, or simply couldn’t access them in your country, it was all too common to simply download music shared by other people on the web.

What was particularly interesting back then was the wide range of ingenious methods people used to share tunes. Back in the day, people went beyond simply hosting music on public-facing websites, and instead, found ways to send and receive tracks directly with other internet users. Let’s take a walk down memory lane and take a look at some of the ways people grew their music collections in the late 90s and early 2000s.

But first, a little bit about MP3s

In the 90s, digital music was most commonly available in the form of albums on CDs, which stored about 700MB worth of uncompressed audio tracks – good for a full-length album. But with internet bandwidth and speeds being what they were back then, it didn’t make sense to copy those music files and send them to friends over the internet. A single four-minute song would weigh in at about 42MB in WAV format, and would take roughly three and a half hours to download.

Lucky for music fiends, the MP3 compression format came along in 1993 and made things a lot easier. It allowed for reasonable audio fidelity with comparatively small file sizes, making it easier to rip music from CDs, store them on hard drives (remember, this was back when the average household didn’t have a more than a couple hundred GBs of storage space at best), and distribute them online. That four-minute song I told you about? You could shrink it down to 3.84MB, at an acceptable bit rate of 128kbps.

And with that, we were off to the races.

The rise of Napster – and the fall of the music industry

While a small number of web users had already begun sharing music online through channels like the Internet Underground Music Archive, digital piracy really took off with the launch of Napster, a free file-sharing network that connected people around the world directly to one another.

It was developed by 18-year-old Shawn Fanning while he was a student at Northeastern University, achieved in a 60-hour coding marathon that he put himself through. In 2000, Napster was believed to have experienced the fastest growth of any digital service in history, having amassed some 80 million users at its peak, during its short life span of about two years.

The app was shut down in 2001 after many a legal battle with artists, companies, and music industry bodies in the US – including Metallica, Dr. Dre, and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) – for its role in countless copyright violations.
But while it was around, you could simply fire up Napster, search for a song, album, or artist, and see a list of files hosted by people who were online at that time and had what you were looking for. When you clicked ‘download,’ you’d essentially initiate a direct peer-to-peer (P2P) file transfer between your computers, and have those tracks on your hard drive in minutes. It was genius. Undeniably illegal genius, but genius nonetheless.

Napster knocked the music industry on its ass from the time it launched, taking revenues down big time. Though music industry revenues are still below the heights they reached in 1999, they’ve seen an uptick in recent years, with an increase in industry revenues of 16.5 percent in 2017.

I remember checking out Napster briefly, but it closed down before I got much use out of it. But as you’d expect, there were several alternatives back then.

P2P madness

Alongside the monumental growth of Napster, the year 2000 saw the rise of many rival P2P networks, and even more desktop clients for each of them – despite the dangers of building such services being painfully obvious, thanks to the US music industry cracking down on them with all the legal firepower they could muster.

Arguably the most notable of these was Gnutella, which is said to have been the first large-scale decentralized P2P network on the internet, and to have cornered some 40 percent of the file-sharing market at its peak. It was developed that year by Justin Frankel and Tom Pepper, who you might remember as the people behind the popular Winamp music player.

The Gnutella network powered several client apps like LimeWire, Morpheus, BearShare, and Shareaza. Of these, LimeWire was perhaps the best known of the lot, and was estimated to have been installed on every third PC in the world at one point in its existence. In addition to facilitating file transfers, it also included an XMPP-based instant messaging service, so you could chat with people you were sharing content with.

LimeWire was sued by several record labels in 2006, and eventually shut down in October 2010. Most other P2P apps met a similar fate during the 00s, as the RIAA and other bodies and companies from the music industry went legal on them as quickly as they could.

There were other apps that used their own networks, including Soulseek, Ares Galaxy (which spun off from Gnutella and launched in 2002), and WinMX, which offered compelling features like chat rooms and the ability to download files in small pieces from multiple users simultaneously. Here’s the latter in action:

While those were simply shut down over copyright infringement concerns, KaZaa went through a completely different sort of trial. The service, which was developed in Estonia, was sued to hell as well – to the tune of $100 million, in fact – and eventually turned into a legal music subscription service. That’s similar to what’s going on with Napster, which is now owned by Rhapsody and is the brand used by the company for its streaming music service.

Truly old-school: IRC

While you could certainly hop on P2P networks like the ones we’ve mentioned, the OGs opted for IRC instead. It’s a basic chat protocol that was first invented in the late 80s and is still around today. For the most part, it’s designed for text chat, and using IRC involves finding relevant servers that host chat rooms of interest to you.

So if you wanted to download music, you’d first need to find a server that had people sharing tunes in public genre-based chat rooms, and pop into one of them. You’d then have to ask around to see if people in the room had the kind of music you wanted, and initiate a file transfer.

Of course, some folks got clever about it, and set up scripts to crawl their hard drives for songs, and catalog them into text files. Next, they’d employ a script to periodically post ‘advertisements’ promoting the kind of music they had to offer in the chat room, with eye-catching ASCII art banners and lists of artists or albums that you could grab from them.

Once you spotted something you liked in a user’s music catalog, you’d have to request those specific files by entering them along with an IRC command, and that’s it – as long as that user was online, you could download files from their hard drive to yours.

What struck me was that these people sharing music had nothing to gain except goodwill, and perhaps some notoriety in an anonymous chat room. There’s a lot less of this now, but researching this method for this story brought back fond memories of chatting with strangers to learn what was worth listening to – and spending valuable bandwidth to download.

An oldie but a goodie: Audiogalaxy

Launched in 1998 (and therefore predating Napster), Audiogalaxy was one of the oldest services for sharing music. It evolved from an index of FTP sites that hosted music into an excellent sharing service with a quirky workflow.

You’d have to first visit the site, search for music that you wanted, and then add files to your Satellite – a piece of desktop software whose sole task was to facilitate anonymous file transfers. Once you’d added the files you wanted to download, Satellite would automatically grab them for you when they were available from other users, all without exchanging any user details publicly.

I was probably around 12 or 13 at the time, and I was just getting into modern rock and nu-metal. It wasn’t always easy to find that sort of stuff in India as it hit the airwaves, so Audiogalaxy was one of the only ways to get my hands on records by Creed, Linkin Park, and Limp Bizkit.

Those were the days – or were they?

While many people found various ways to justify their pirating in the early 2000s, it’s obvious that it didn’t serve the artists behind our favorite records. At the same time, we were discovering new music like never before. Our own Nino de Vries summed up the experience well:

Growing up, I was way into hardcore punk, so much so that I got a Minor Threat tattoo when I was 18. Around I found Soulseek to be the perfect tool to steal music from hard-working musicians who barely made enough money to pay their rent. I had a couple of favorite users who had gigabytes and gigabytes of the best hardcore and I would just leech their entire hard drive in my quest for new music. After that, I found a good local message board where people swapped download links via DMs.

I can’t say that I’m proud of any of this. Sure, I was a young kid with nothing but debt to my name — but stealing music I loved was inexcusable. I’m extremely grateful for modern streaming services; Spotify has every song I could ever want and I happily pay the ten bucks per month for their platform. It’s way easier than having to leave your computer on overnight for Soulseek to complete it’s slow-as-fuck downloads back in the day.


Our Plugged reporter Callum Booth explained how that era turned him into a music aficionado:

I once worked out that I’ve spent close to £15,000 (about $16,600) on recordings of music in my life – and loads more on instruments or gigs. From when I got my first job at 13, up to this very day, I’ve been splurging on CDs and vinyl.

But it was downloading (and sharing) music that really kickstarted my love affair with the format. The first track I downloaded? Basment Jaxx’s

‘Where’s Your Head At.’

I was around 11, and I remember in such vivid detail lying on the wooden floor with KaZaa open on an old laptop screen, waiting for the file to download. It took hours over the dial-up connection. And this is what it was like for a couple of years: an achingly slow progress to grab a couple of songs. It was magical.

Things really changed for me a few years later. I’d moved houses and internet connections had improved massively. One of my friends had a sick computer, loud speakers, broadband, and an office in the loft so we weren’t disturbed. And you know what was on that computer? Motherfucking LimeWire.

At this point in my life (I guess I was around 15), I still bought music magazines. In this age of instant musical gratification, it’s strange to think that I’d read about bands and have to imagine what they sounded like.

So, almost every week we’d crowd round the computer, boot up LimeWire, and download not only the latest singles from bands, but also old classics. And each week I’d leave with a CD filled with that week’s tracks, and blast them endlessly on the stereo in my room. Until the next week. The cycle continued, until my folks got a comparable internet connection. I still have nothing but fondness for those times.

Downloading music exposed me to a world I could’ve never afforded otherwise. I can say with no doubt that I’ve spent more on physical music because I downloaded. It let me experiment with genres. It let refine and discover my taste. And it totally fucking ruled.


My experience was similar: these services opened me up to a world of music I hadn’t come across elsewhere. As a teen in India during this golden era of piracy, it wasn’t easy finding communities and friends who shared my tastes in music. But on P2P networks and IRC chat rooms, there were loads of folks who were only too happy to recommend artists and albums worth checking out – and to beam them across a few kilobytes at a time.

Now that I’m older and wiser, I wouldn’t condone pirating music, especially given how hard it is to make it in the industry in 2018 and earn a living. But I’m certainly a more avid fan of the art than I would’ve been without that experience during my teens, and I’m happy to spend as much as I can afford on records, concerts, and merchandise to support my favorite artists.
https://thenextweb.com/insights/2018...-in-the-2000s/

















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