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Old 24-04-19, 06:10 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - April 27th, ’19

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April 27th, 2019




Gambling, Betting Advertising Dominates File-Sharing Sites
Steven Stradbrooke

1xbet-advertising-online-gambling-file-sharingOnline gambling and betting sites remain the bedrock on which copyright piracy hubs rely for advertising revenue, according to a new Spanish study.

Earlier this month, consulting firm GfK released its Piracy Observatory and Digital Contents Consumption Habits 2018 report. The report was commissioned by the La Coalición de Creadores e Industrias de Contenidos, a body representing the country’s film, television, music, publishing and videogame sectors.

According to the report, Spaniards accessed nearly 4.35b items of illegal digital content last year via file-sharing sites, a 3% decline from 2017’s report. However, the report claims this cost La Coalición members over €1.9b in lost earnings while the government allegedly lost out on €638m in taxes and fees on same.

The report claims that file-sharing sites generated over 90% of their revenue from advertising in 2018, a figure roughly similar to previous years. Asked what types of ads they remembered seeing, 50% of visitors to file-sharing sites reported seeing ads for gambling and betting operators. That’s down from 68% in 2017 but still significantly higher than the 36% who remembered seeing ads promoting dating sites or the 28% who saw ads for virtual private network (VPN) software.

Similar accusations have been lobbied against gambling operators for years. GVC Holdings’ PartyGaming brand (under its previous Bwin.party ownership) was once said to account for 1/8 of ad revenue on Kim Dotcom’s now defunct Megaupload site, and Russian copyright groups have repeatedly complained about online casino Azino777’s ubiquitous presence on Russian-language file-sharing portals (as well as on more mainstream sites such as YouTube).

Just last week, Russian online gambling operator 1xBet (or its internationally licensed doppelgangers) was reported to be advertising prominently on file-sharing sites that were illegally circulating screener copies of high-profile US cable television programs, including unreleased episodes of American Gods, The Spanish Princess and Knightfall, to name a few.

In 2017, UK cyber-police claimed to have achieved a significant reduction in the number of online gambling ads appearing on torrent sites, at least, ads promoting operators licensed by the UK Gambling Commission (UKGC). That followed the UKGC imposing a new licensing condition that banned operators from running ads on “websites providing access to unauthorized content.”
https://calvinayre.com/2019/04/15/bu...sharing-sites/





Of Course the Entirety of Avengers: Endgame Has Already Been Pirated
Charles Pulliam-Moore

Disney/Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame, a movie that millions of people have been waiting years to see, has begun screening in certain theaters around the globe ahead of its release in the U.S. This should not come as a surprise to anyone, but the full movie has already been pirated because...this is the world we live in?

Depending on where you are in the world, the advertisements announcing Avengers: Endgame’s release date have been different, because the film isn’t being rolled out simultaneously. After premiering in Los Angeles on April 22, Endgame came to markets throughout Asia, Europe, and Australia on the 24th, and it’s being released in the U.K. today.

All of this is to say that quite a few people have already seen the movie in theaters, which means that people have had the opportunity to illegally record the film and upload it online. TorrentFreak reports that Chinese uploads of Endgame hit BitTorrent last night, and the quality of the watermark-laden video is abysmal. We’ve reached out to Disney for comment about the pirated copies of the film and will report back if we receive a response.

None of this is surprising, really.

The most interesting thing about the spoiler-heavy chunk of Avengers: Endgame footage that leaked onto the internet last week was the implication that whoever initially posted the ill-gotten video likely had clearance to view it. A big part of why Marvel’s been able to largely keep details about the film quiet is that the studio goes to great lengths to ensure that people close to the production don’t reveal things to the public. But this new instance of pirating isn’t surprising when you consider Avengers: Endgame is one of the most anticipated films of the past decade— partially because audiences are, to a certain extent, inherently hyped, but also because Marvel Studios has been actively encouraging fans to work themselves into a fever pitch of excitement.

Tongue-in-cheek jokes about Marvel movies being quaint little indie films haven’t been funny for quite some time now, in large part because the movies are quite literally pieces of an industry titan that’s consolidating power at an impressive and rather alarming clip. Like them or not, blockbusters of Endgame’s magnitude become cultural moments that capture the public’s attention and imagination, and sadly, pirating’s pretty much an inevitability.

That being said. If you’re interested in seeing Avengers: Endgame in its full glory the way the filmmakers intended, have some self-respect, don’t watch a piss-poor cam video, and drag your ass to the theater like everyone else. Thanos demands it.

Avengers: Endgame opens in the U.S. on April 26.
https://io9.gizmodo.com/of-course-th...ady-1834302731





'Avengers: Endgame' has Biggest Opening Night Ever
Frank Pallotta

"Avengers: Endgame" made $60 million at the domestic box office for its preview showings on Thursday night. That makes it the biggest opening night in history.

That surpasses the record held by another Disney (DIS) property "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," which made $57 million on its opening night in 2015, according to Comscore (SCOR). "Endgame's" prequel "Avengers: Infinity War" made $39 million for its preview showings last year before going on to have the highest-grossing opening weekend in history at $258 million.

Analysts have said that "Endgame" could make north of $260 million in North America and more than $800 million globally this weekend -- both of which would be box office records. Some analysts have said the film could even nab a $300 million opening domestically this weekend.

The film is already off to a big start overseas, raking in $305 million since opening internationally on Wednesday. "Endgame" had the biggest opening day in China, the world's second largest movie market.

"Endgame" is the epic finale to the superhero studio's decade long series of films. All together Marvel Studios has made more than $18.7 billion worldwide.

Fandango said Thursday that "Endgame" is the biggest preseller in its history.

Movie chains are running around the clock and adding showtimes to meet the demand of moviegoers. AMC (AMC) Theatres announced on Monday that seventeen locations will stay open for 72 straight hours from Thursday night through Sunday.

"Endgame" could also help save Hollywood from a sluggish year. The domestic box office is down about 16% compared to last year.

The film, which clocks in at three hours, has garnered critical acclaim. It holds a 96% score on review site, Rotten Tomatoes.

"Having set up a formidable task and then some with the finish of 'Infinity War,' 'Avengers: Endgame' rises to the challenge, delivering an epic finale that proves immensely satisfying," wrote Brian Lowry, CNN's film and TV critic.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/26/media...ice/index.html





We’ve Been Warned About AI and Music for Over 50 Years, But No One’s Prepared

‘This road is literally being paved as we’re walking on it’
Dani Deahl

AI is capable of making music, but does that make AI an artist? As AI begins to reshape how music is made, our legal systems are going to be confronted with some messy questions regarding authorship. Do AI algorithms create their own work, or is it the humans behind them? What happens if AI software trained solely on Beyoncé creates a track that sounds just like her? “I won’t mince words,” says Jonathan Bailey, CTO of iZotope. “This is a total legal clusterfuck.”

The word “human” does not appear at all in US copyright law, and there’s not much existing litigation around the word’s absence. This has created a giant gray area and left AI’s place in copyright unclear. It also means the law doesn’t account for AI’s unique abilities, like its potential to work endlessly and mimic the sound of a specific artist. Depending on how legal decisions shake out, AI systems could become a valuable tool to assist creativity, a nuisance ripping off hard-working human musicians, or both.

Artists already face the possibility of AI being used to mimic their style, and current copyright law may allow it. Say an AI system is trained exclusively on Beyoncé’s music. “A Botyoncé, if you will, or BeyoncAI,” says Meredith Rose, policy counsel at Public Knowledge. If that system then makes music that sounds like Beyoncé, is Beyoncé owed anything? Several legal experts believe the answer is “no.”

“There’s nothing legally requiring you to give her any profits from it unless you’re directly sampling,” Rose says. There’s room for debate, she says, over whether this is good for musicians. “I think courts and our general instinct would say, ‘Well, if an algorithm is only fed Beyoncé songs and the output is a piece of music, it’s a robot. It clearly couldn’t have added anything to this, and there’s nothing original there.’”
"“A Botyoncé, if you will, or BeyoncAI.”"

Law is generally reluctant to protect things “in the style of,” as musicians are influenced by other musicians all the time, says Chris Mammen, partner at Womble Bond Dickinson. “Should the original artist whose style is being used to train an AI be allowed to have any [intellectual property] rights in the resulting recording? The traditional answer may well be ‘no,’” Mammen says, “because the resulting work is not an original work of authorship by that artist.”

For there to be a copyright issue, the AI program would have to create a song that sounds like an already existing song. It could also be an issue if an AI-created work were marketed as sounding like a particular artist without that artist’s consent, in which case, it could violate persona or trademark protections, Rose says.

“It’s not about Beyoncé’s general output. It’s about one work at a time,” says Edward Klaris, managing partner at Klaris Law. The AI-made track couldn’t just sound like Beyoncé, in general, it would have to sound like a specific song she made. “If that occurred,” says Klaris, “I think there’s a pretty good case for copyright infringement.”

Directly training an AI on a particular artist could lead to other legal issues, though. Entertainment lawyer Jeff Becker of Swanson, Martin & Bell, says an AI program’s creator could potentially violate a copyright owner’s exclusive rights to reproduce their work and create derivative works based upon the original material. “If an AI company copies and imports a copyrightable song into its computer system to train it to sound like a particular artist,” says Becker, “I see several potential issues that could exist.”

It’s not even clear whether AI can legally be trained on copyrighted music in the first place. When you purchase a song, Mammen asks, are you also purchasing the right to use its audio as AI training data? Several of the experts The Verge spoke to for this piece say there isn’t a good answer to that question.

During a panel The Verge recently hosted on the state of AI and music at Winter Music Conference, which included Bailey; Matt Aimonetti, CTO of Splice; and Taishi Fukuyama, CMO of Amadeus Code, an audience member asked just that. “What if I wanted to license my catalog to a company so its AI could learn from it?”

“Currently,” replied Aimonetti, “there’s no need for that.”

"How can anyone prove an algorithm was trained on the song or artist it allegedly infringes on?"

Even if an AI system did closely mimic an artist’s sound, an artist might have trouble proving the AI was designed to mimic them, says Aimonetti. With copyright, you have to prove the infringing author was reasonably exposed to the work they’re accused of ripping off. If a copyright claim were filed against a musical work made by an AI, how could anyone prove an algorithm was trained on the song or artist it allegedly infringes on? It’s not an easy task to reverse engineer a neural network to see what songs it was fed because it’s “ultimately just a collection of numerical weights and a configuration,” says Bailey. Additionally, while there are scores of lawsuits where artists were sued by other artists for failing to credit them on works, a company could say its AI is a trade secret, and artists would have to fight in court to discover how the program works.

“Getting to that point might only be available to the biggest artists that can afford it,” says Becker.

Copyright law will also have to contend with the bigger issue of authorship. That is, can an AI system claim legal authorship of the music it produces, or does that belong to the humans who created the software?

Arguments about whether code can be the author of a musical work in the US are over 50 years old. In 1965, the Copyright Office brought up this concern in its annual report under a section titled “Problems Arising From Computer Technology.” The report says the office had already received one application for a musical composition made by a computer, and it “is certain that both the number of works proximately produced or ‘written’ by computers and the problems of the Copyright Office in this area will increase.”

Despite this early warning flag, current US copyright law is still vague when discussing authorship of works that weren’t created by humans. For now, lawyers are still grappling with the implications of one ruling, in particular, which doesn’t involve computers or AI at all: it’s about a monkey taking a selfie.

The case centered on a crested macaque that picked up the remote trigger for a photographer’s camera and took photos of itself. The resulting debate was over which creator should own the copyright: the photographer who set up the camera and optimized the settings for a facial close-up, or the monkey that pressed the remote trigger and took the photograph.

"Current US copyright law doesn’t differentiate between humans and non-humans"

Ultimately, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided that the monkey could not hold a copyright. The court made two points: the copyright law’s inclusion of terms like “children” and “spouse” imply an author must be human, and although courts have allowed corporations to sue, corporations “are formed and owned by humans; they are not formed or owned by animals.”

Many outlets used the monkey selfie ruling to discuss implications about artificial intelligence and authorship. If a monkey can’t own a copyright, it goes, then what about a song created entirely by AI? Would authorship go to the humans who created the AI, the AI itself, or the public domain?

The heart of this problem is that current US copyright law never differentiates between humans and non-humans. But, the Compendium of US Copyright Office Practices actually spends a lot of time talking about how humanness is a requirement for being considered a legal author. In an internal staff guidebook for the Copyright Office, the Compendium has a section titled, “The Human Authorship Requirement.” There’s also a separate bit to address copyright when a work lacks a human author. According to the Compendium, plants can’t be authors. Neither can supernatural beings or “works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author.”

The Compendium has been updated to note that “a photograph taken by a monkey” cannot be given a copyright. But there’s nothing yet on AI.

A mashup of all of these weird problems happened just weeks ago. Recently, the developers behind Endel, an app that uses AI to generate reactive, personalized “soundscapes,” signed a distribution deal with Warner Music. As part of the contract, Warner needed to know how to credit each track in order to register the copyrights. The company was initially stumped with what to list for “songwriter,” as it used AI to generate all of the audio. Ultimately, founder Oleg Stavitsky told The Verge, the team decided to list all six employees at Endel as the songwriters for all 600 tracks. “I have songwriting credits,” said Stavitsky, “even though I don’t know how to write a song.”

It sounds like a ludicrous outcome, but preventing humans from obtaining copyright on AI-assisted works could limit our ability to use these algorithms for creative purposes. “If you accept AI-generated work as a new form of art and take away the intellectual property rights of the person who created the algorithm,” says Klaris, “you’ve basically said, ‘you’re out,’ and take away their incentive to create.”
"“This road is literally being paved as we’re walking on it.”"

Endel was able to list its employees as songwriters because, in the US, you only need someone to claim they authored a work. But if there’s pushback — like in the monkey selfie case — authors have to prove that they made the work in question. The same might have to be done for music and AI in order to establish any precedent about how to treat this type of material in copyright law moving forward. And there are a million ways to parse the problem.

For now, there are far more questions than there are answers. If you take these problems a few steps further, you get into issues around AI and legal personhood that start to get “existential,” says Rose. Can software be creative? What if an AI software’s creations belong to no one at all?

“We haven’t figured it out,” Becker says. “This road is literally being paved as we’re walking on it.”
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/17/1...opyright-human





Nancy Pelosi Tells Senate to ‘Wake Up’ and Vote on Net Neutrality
Andrew Wyrich

McConnell called the net neutrality bill ‘dead on arrival’ in the Senate.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to take up votes on a number of bills passed by the House, including a measure that would restore net neutrality rules.

The Save the Internet Act, a bill that would undo the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) repeal of net neutrality and restore the 2015 Open Internet Order, passed in the House of Representatives 232 to 190, with one Republican voting in favor of it.

Pelosi highlighted the bill as one of several that have been passed that she wants the Senate majority leader to take up “as soon as possible.”

Ahead of the vote, McConnell called the bill “dead on arrival” in the Senate.

“The Republican Senate needs to wake up, and vote on these urgently needed bills immediately. If they don’t like our bipartisan bills, then they can pass their own version and we can go to conference,” Pelosi said in a statement.

Every Democratic senator and the independent senators who caucus with them except Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) immediately co-sponsored the net neutrality act when it was introduced.

After facing pressure from pro-net neutrality advocacy groups, the Arizona lawmaker announced she formed a working group with Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) to find a “bipartisan solution.”

Some Democrats have floated the idea of adding the Senate net neutrality bill to the appropriations bill, according to Politico.
https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/net-...tch-mcconnell/





Charter Avoids Getting Kicked Out of New York, Agrees to New Merger Conditions

Charter must expand its own network and pay $12 million to fund more broadband.
Jon Brodkin

Charter Communications won't be kicked out of New York after all.

Nine months after a New York government agency ordered Charter to leave the state over its alleged failure to comply with merger conditions, state officials have announced a settlement that will let Charter stay in New York in exchange for further broadband expansions. The settlement will enforce a new version of the original merger conditions and require a $12 million payment, about half of which could help other ISPs deploy broadband.

The State Public Service Commission (PSC) had voted in July 2018 to revoke its approval of Charter's 2016 purchase of Time Warner Cable (TWC), saying Charter failed to meet interim deadlines for broadband-expansion requirements. The order, which came just a month after a $2 million fine, would have required Charter to sell the TWC system to another provider. But the PSC never enforced the merger revocation order as it repeatedly granted deadline extensions to Charter while the sides held settlement talks.

The result is a proposed settlement between Charter and the state Department of Public Service (DPS) that was announced Friday.

"Pursuant to the agreement, Charter would expand its network to provide high-speed broadband service to 145,000 residences and businesses entirely in Upstate New York; the network expansion would be completed by September 30, 2021 in accordance with a schedule providing frequent interim enforceable milestone requirements; and Charter will pay $12 million to expand broadband service to additional unserved and underserved premises," a DPS statement said.

Half of that $12 million could end up going back to Charter, but Charter would have to use it to deploy broadband to locations in addition to the 145,000 already required. The other $6 million would fund broadband deployment projects in a competitive bidding process, and it could thus end up going to Charter's competitors—although Charter would be eligible to bid for the funding, too.

The settlement needs approval from the PSC, which is taking public comments on the settlement for 60 days before making a final decision. The proposed settlement "does not constitute a finding or admission of any violation by Charter nor does it constitute a penalty or forfeiture under the New York State Public Service Law," Charter and the DPS said in a joint letter to the PSC. The settlement "allows the parties to move forward with the critical work of expanding access to broadband, by resolving their disagreements without the need for costly litigation," the letter said.

Numbers dispute settled

The 2016 merger approval required Charter to extend its high-speed broadband network to 145,000 unserved and underserved homes and businesses by 2020. The "new" 145,000-location requirement in the settlement is thus no different from the existing requirement, except that Charter will now get an extra year to comply.

But the settlement should end the sides' dispute over what actually counts toward the 145,000 locations. While Charter had claimed it was meeting all merger-condition deadlines, the PSC accused Charter of trying to count locations that weren't eligible for the deployment requirement. For example, the PSC alleged that Charter wrongly counted broadband deployments at New York City homes and businesses that it was already required to serve as part of its franchise agreements.

Under the settlement, no address in New York City will count toward the 145,000 locations. To count toward the 145,000, a home or business must not be "passed, served, or capable of being served (by either a standard or non-standard installation), by pre-existing network from Charter or any other provider capable of delivering broadband speeds of 100Mbps or higher," the settlement says.

Last year, Charter claimed that it had deployed new broadband to more than 86,000 New York homes and businesses since the merger agreement. Charter will be able to count most but not all of those toward the 145,000-location requirement, as the settlement says it will get credit for 64,827 homes and businesses that it deployed broadband to as of December 16, 2018.

In addition to the 145,000-location deadline of September 30, 2021, Charter will face six interim deadlines between September 30, 2019 and May 31, 2021. The interim requirements range from 76,521 to 133,586 locations.

If Charter doesn't meet any of the interim deadlines, it will have to pay $2,800 for each location below the required amount. For example, Charter would have to pay $2.8 million if it fell 1,000 locations short of any of the interim deadlines—though Charter can apply for penalty waivers if there are "extreme weather events" or delays outside of Charter's control.

The PSC had previously filed an enforcement proceeding against Charter in a state court, but the parties will seek a stay in the case if the settlement is approved. The settlement does not prevent New York from suing Charter again if the ISP fails to comply with the settlement.

$12 million broadband fund

The new requirement to pay $12 million is "over and above" what the 2016 merger approval required, and it will be used "for broadband expansion projects at locations to be selected by the Department and the Broadband Program Office," Charter and the DPS said in their joint letter. This will result in additional deployment beyond the required 145,000 homes and businesses.

The $12 million payment will be split into two $6 million deposits into escrow funds. After Charter fulfills its 145,000-location broadband expansion requirement, it can seek funding from the first $6 million to finance "incremental broadband expansion projects in Charter's franchise areas within New York State, as directed by the Department," according to the settlement.

To get reimbursement from the fund, Charter will have to provide quarterly expenditure records to the state, and reimbursements will be "based upon Charter's actual expenses." It's not clear how many homes and businesses will get broadband from this fund, as the settlement says Charter shall continue to expand its network to new locations "until the funds set aside... have been exhausted."

This fund could rise above $6 million if Charter misses any of its interim deadlines, as the $2,800-per-location penalties would be added to the initial $6 million.

The other $6 million payment will fund new broadband deployments through a competitive bidding process, so that money could end up going to Charter or its competitors. This funding will be distributed "through the solicitation of public bids from broadband providers capable of delivering broadband speeds of 100Mbps or higher including, but not limited to, Charter," the settlement says. The funding can be distributed both in areas where Charter offers service and areas where it doesn't. If the bidding attracts no cost-effective bids from a wireline provider, wireless providers capable of delivering at least 25Mbps download speeds will be eligible for the funding.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...er-conditions/





Comcast Usage Soars 34% to 200GB a Month, Pushing Users Closer to Data Cap

Median usage hit 200GB, but Comcast won't say how many use a full terabyte.
Jon Brodkin

Comcast said its customers' monthly Internet data usage increased 34 percent between Q1 2018 and Q1 2019, rising to a median of 200GB. The rise is being driven by streaming video, and, in particular, 4K video, Comcast said.

"Our customers' demand for speed and data usage keeps increasing," Comcast CEO Brian Roberts said in a call with investors yesterday (transcript). "Our median broadband home now uses over 200 gigabytes of data per month, an increase of 34 percent year-over-year, which accelerated from the fourth quarter." (Stop the Cap reported on Comcast's remarks earlier.)

The median customer is using only about 20 percent of Comcast's 1TB data cap, which is enforced in 27 of Comcast's 39 states. But the rise in median usage almost certainly means that more Comcast customers are exceeding the 1TB cap.

As we reported in January, OpenVault research on the US cable industry found that 4.1 percent of households were using at least 1TB a month, up from 2.1 percent the previous year. That same research found that US cable Internet customers were using an average of 268.7GB per month.

Comcast used to reveal the percentage of its customers that exceed its data cap, but the company seems to have stopped making that data public. In late 2013, when the cap was 300GB, Comcast was saying that only 2 percent of its customers used more than that. By late 2015, that was up to 8 percent.

Comcast raised the cap from 300GB to 1TB in June 2016. Comcast says on its website now that only "a very small percentage of our customers use a terabyte of data in a month," without providing a specific percentage. When contacted by Ars today, Comcast declined to provide a specific percentage.

Comcast's website hasn't been updated to reflect the new 200GB number yet. "As of December 2018, Xfinity Internet customers' median monthly data usage was 174GB during the past six months," Comcast's site says. That same statistic was 151GB as of June 2018.
Streaming video drives up broadband usage

Comcast would prefer that customers buy Comcast cable TV instead of watching Netflix or other non-Comcast online services. But Comcast cashes in on increased streaming video usage because of its 1TB cap, charging $10 fees for each additional block of 50GB or $50 monthly for an upgrade to unlimited data.

"I think that we start with the central view that streaming is going to happen, video over the Internet is more friend than foe," Roberts said.

While Comcast "wish[es] every bit was our bit," customers streaming more online video and particularly 4K video is "in the sweet spot of where this company is going to grow," he continued.

Roberts noted that Comcast has partnerships with Netflix and Amazon to resell their video services on Comcast cable boxes.

"It's a deep, successful, beautiful, elegant integration that the tech teams have done at both companies," Roberts said, perhaps somewhat overselling the installation of a video app on a cable box. "And we've done that with YouTube. And you can imagine we'll do that again with others as the world continues to evolve."
https://arstechnica.com/information-...r-to-data-cap/





Blockbuster Films Keep Getting Longer; How And Why Did We Get Here?
Chris Klimek

"No amount of money ever bought a second of time," says Tony "Iron Man" Stark, patient zero of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, midway through the new Avengers: Endgame.

As has frequently been the case in the nine Marvel films in which he has appeared, Mr. Stark is right but also wrong. Endgame, the long-promised commencement ceremony/farewell tour for the founding class of Earth's Mightiest Heroes, has both commodities in abundance. Contrast that with the 1990 Cannon Films production Captain America, starring Matt (Revenge of the Nerds) Salinger as Steve Rogers, which runs a svelte 97 minutes and looks like it may well have cost several hundred dollars.

That was then. As the capstone of Marvel Studios' 11-year, 22-film saga, freely adapted from more than half a century of comic books, the no-expense-spared Endgame dares what few blockbusters have, occupying a bladder-taxing, intermission-free 182 minutes. But then, movies such as this one — franchise entries, popcorn flicks, movies that often harbor artistic ambitions but are always designed to draw a huge audience — began to Hulk out years before Iron Man arrived in May of 2008.

As a trained semiprofessional film critic, licensed, insured and bonded, I am credentialed to tell you that the follow-up to Avengers: Infinity War feels satisfyingly ... finite. I do not consider the irreplaceable 3 hours, 2 minutes that Avengers: Hail Dehydration extracted from my statistically half-over life to have been misspent. But I do feel an obligation to remind you, reader, that that is — and I invite you to check my math on this — 0.0003 years.

That's 17 minutes longer than 2012's The Dark Knight Rises, the only superhero blockbuster that's had to satisfy remotely comparable expectations.

And 33 minutes longer than Avengers: Infinity War.

Still 12 minutes shorter than Titanic, 1997's unlikely box office champion and Academy Awards magnet.

And 28 minutes shorter than the 1963 farce It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Which would be a good subtitle for an Avengers movie.

As a budding cinephile, one who wouldn't see Lawrence of Arabia (227 minutes) until my 30s, I conflated length with substance, just as hardcover books seemed to be more important than paperbacks, regardless of their contents. I have an early memory of phoning my local multiplex to ask the running time of Jurassic Park and feeling relieved to learn it was 130 minutes. Run times shorter than two hours were permissible, if suspect; a footprint of under 90 minutes reflected incompetence on the parts of the filmmakers. Long movies were measurably more entertaining than short ones; that was quantifiable. That was physics.

A few years later, in high school, my girlfriend's mom would kick me out of their house promptly at 11 p.m. unless we were watching a movie that had yet to finish. Amy had a yen for expansive 1950s and '60s musicals and historical epics anyway, but the loophole in her mom's curfew enforcement regimen led us to become well acquainted with our local Blockbuster's complement of double-VHS selections. I don't remember how Doctor Zhivago ends, but I remember being grateful, under the circumstances, that it took 193 minutes — Endgame +12 — for the Russian Revolution to ... succeed? Fail? I think someone sings a song at the end.

When Endgame's run time was first announced, observers on Twitter began opining that it should have an intermission. 2001: A Space Odyssey (the biggest hit of 1968!) does, and it's a mere 148 minutes. Beginning with a chapter called "The Dawn of Man" and climaxing with astronaut Dave Bowman's consciousness-expanding journey "Beyond the Infinite" 2 million years later, 2001 apparently warrants 34 fewer minutes of our attention than does Endgame, which stars Bradley Cooper as a talking, violence-loving raccoon. (2001 cast mime Daniel Richter as an enterprising hominid who discovers weapons, so there's a congruity there. Sorta.)

There's more to be factored in, of course. 2001's humans, by design, do not exude warmth or humor or sex appeal; Stanley Kubrick did not make hangout films. Endgame, meanwhile, is bursting with noble characters embodied by charismatic and good-looking actors — bursting, in fact, like Bruce Banner's shirts (and unlike his suspiciously resilient purple pants). Plus, it's got jokes! One of them is about Bruce Banner's shirts.

How We Got Here: A Brief History of Blockbuster Run Times

In the beginning, there was a great white shark. Jaws, it was called, and though its influence on the movie business would persist for decades, the film that starred him did not overstay. That first blockbuster — loosely defined as a movie that opens nationwide, delivers the sort of visceral experience that would invite comparisons to theme park rides and enjoys repeat business by appealing to 11-year-olds of every age — was 124 minutes long.

Two Memorial Day weekends later, Star Wars took us to a galaxy far, far away but got us home in (again) 124 minutes, becoming the top-grossing movie of 1977. Exactly six years after that, when Return of the Jedi brought what felt like a close to the biggest movie franchise the world had yet seen, its run time was upscaled accordingly, to 134 minutes. The cinematic event of 1983, a movie that grossed 2 1/2 times what the year's next highest earner (the James L. Brooks drama Terms of Endearment) brought in, was the same length as this year's Shazam! — an amiable, kid-focused superhero comedy that has no business being a minute longer than 1 hour, 45 minutes, which is the length it would have been had it been made in the prior century.

Not until the turn of the century did megabudget movies begin to suffer from mission creep. Seven of the year-end top grossers released during the 1980s ran under two hours. But from 1991 to 2000, only three of the top earners were that compact.

Only two year-end box office champs this century have had sub-two-hour run times, and both were animated: Shrek 2 (2004) and Toy Story 3 (2010).

Even the Marvel movies have swollen. I did the math: The six films that comprised Marvel's Phase One, beginning with Jon Favreau's Iron Man and culminating in Joss Whedon's The Avengers, averaged 124 minutes — a number significantly inflated by The Avengers' 143-minute run time. The six Phase Two movies averaged 127 minutes.

In the 11-film Phase Three (2016's Captain America: Civil War through Spider-Man: Far From Home, due in July) the average run time has swollen to 136 minutes. (Far From Home has not been factored in here, as the movie's running time is still TBD.) The only hero regularly getting it done in less than two hours nowadays is, appropriately enough, Ant-Man. And just barely.

Predictably, even graybeard blockbuster franchises have begun to emulate the youngest one. The longest film in the 57-year-old James Bond series is also the most recent, 2015's Spectre (148 minutes). In fact, the three longest of the two dozen EON Productions Bond entries released since 1962 have all starred the current occupant of the tuxedo, Daniel Craig. (He also headlined 2008's Quantum of Solace, the shortest 007 joint, but also the first one in the series to continue the storyline of the prior film.)
The longest film in the 42-year-old Star Wars franchise? The Last Jedi, released in 2017. 152 minutes.

The eight (!) Fast & the Furious movies circa 2001-2017 average 120 minutes, but that's because each of the latter four are almost half an hour longer than the initial four. They swole up, run time-wise and gross-wise, with 2011's Fast Five, when Dwayne Johnson joined the cast.

The Harry Potter movies, by contrast, were always long. Released between 2001 and 2011, the eight movies have an average run time of 147 minutes. This makes sense; J.K. Rowling's novels are doorstops.

But what about Pirates of the Caribbean? There are five of these, somehow, running an average of 144 minutes. These are perhaps the purest blockbusters, in that they were literally extrapolated from a theme park ride.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy films were each substantially extended for their home video releases, but in their original theatrical runs circa 2001-2003, they averaged 186 minutes. Released one year apart from one another and featuring the same cast and creative principals, all displaying a great reverence for the literary material being adapted, perhaps these were the movies that convinced Marvel Studios honcho Kevin Feige that such an ambitious act of translation could succeed. Certainly the current Marvel movies more resemble these interlocked early-aughts blockbusters than they do Sam Raimi's roughly contemporaneous (2002-2007) trilogy of Spider-Man movies.

Why We Got Here: The Benjamins

Movies can be so long nowadays because there is now less financial pressure to keep them short. According to the National Association of Theater Owners, there were 40,837 movie screens in the United States in 2018. In 1987 that number was 22,697. That year's box office champ was Three Men and a Baby, running 102 minutes, or Endgame-minus-80. In those days, screen real estate was more scarce, and movies that ran much longer than two hours would reduce the number of potential screenings per day. Availability is seldom an issue now, with single-screen theaters having all but vanished, and theatrical exhibition windows having shrunk to as little as 60 days, when there's a theatrical exhibition window at all.

Let's consider some other metrics that may have changed in that three-decade period, like, say, the human lifespan. For men and women of all races in the United States, life expectancy has ticked up by about four years since the mid-1980s, from 74 to 78. We've each been given, on average, another 1,460 days to spend as we will. I suppose you could use that extra time watching more movies or reading more books, or basking in the laughter of your grandchildren, if that's your sort of thing.

Plus, the entertainment options competing with theatrical movies are more format-agnostic than they've ever been. Streaming video platforms have made it so that episodes of what I'm still calling television can run barely into the double-digit minutes or as long as 90. The number of episodes that comprise a season is just as malleable.

Endgame is probably where this wave of expanding theatrical run times will break. These massive temporal footprints shall and should remain anomalies. Sixteen years ago, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King became both 2003's top-grossing film and its Best Picture winner despite a theatrical (and intermissionless) run time of 201 minutes.

Endgame +19.

0.0004 years.

In this economy? Who can afford to watch a movie like that?
https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=717088744





Computers, Not TV, Are to Blame for Increase in US Sitting Time, Study Says
Susan Scutti

There's a key culprit in the battle against sitting. Time spent watching TV and videos has remained consistently high in the United States over the past 15 years, but time sitting at a computer has increased dramatically, new research finds.

Leisure-time computer use increased between 4.8% and 38% for various age groups between 2001 and 2016, said Yin Cao, senior author of the new study and an assistant professor of surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Overall, up to 43% of the US population used a computer for two or more hours a day and up to 25% used a computer for three or more hours each day in 2016.

The result of these increases: Teens spent about 8.2 hours a day sitting while adults sat for 6.4 hours a day.

Both groups saw a one-hour increase over the decade ending in 2016, Cao said.

Cao believes that her research, published Tuesday in JAMA, will help Americans better understand our sedentary habits -- and change them.

Sitting trends over the past 15 years

"Research evidence has been growing on the association between sedentary behavior -- primarily TV watching -- and a variety of diseases, including obesity, cardiovascular disease, cancer, Type 2 diabetes and overall mortality," Cao said.

For the first time, the US Department of Health and Human Services mentioned in last year's edition of its physical activity guidelines "that people would benefit from both increasing moderate to vigorous activity and also reducing time spent sitting," she said.

She wondered: How much do Americans sit, and how has the trend changed over the past 15 years? To answer these questions, Cao and her co-authors used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey on 51,896 people -- 10,359 children, 9,639 teens and 31,898 adults -- from 2001 through 2016.

Overall, up to 65% of the population reported watching TV for at least two hours each day, the study found. "This is quite high and has been overall stable over the past 15 years," Cao said. Computer time, though, has been increasing over that same period.

Just 43% of children reported using a computer for one hour per day or more in 2001; that rate increased to 56% in 2016, the study indicates. The estimated prevalence for teens increased from 53% to 57%, and for adults it went from 29% to 50% between 2003 and 2016. Only adults and teens reported their total sitting time.

"Hopefully, this paper will be helpful in terms of setting the national achievable goal of reducing sitting, given that we already know prolonged sitting is bad for many health outcomes," Cao said.

Every little bit helps

Peter Katzmarzyk, a professor at Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Center and a member and fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine, said the study's value is in showing trends over time.

Katzmarzyk, who was not involved in the research, noted that the paper also highlights some important differences across demographic groups that could result in health disparities. "For example, levels of sitting were higher in males, in African Americans and also in adolescents and adults with overweight or obesity," he said.

Although everyone needs to focus on increasing activity and reducing sitting, "it is even more important to limit the time spent sitting in people who are not meeting the physical activity guidelines, because they are at highest risk" for chronic diseases and premature mortality, he said.

A separate study published this week in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that moderate-to-vigorous physical activity offset the link between sitting time and increased risk of death from all causes and cardiovascular disease death risk. The study tracked nearly 150,000 people ages 45 and older.

Keith Diaz, an assistant professor of behavioral medicine in the Columbia University Department of Medicine, said that the message of the research published in JAMA may be familiar but that it is important.

"Largely, we're becoming more sedentary as a nation, and one of the principal contributors to that rise in sedentary time is our computer usage," said Diaz, who did not participate in the research.

"What I was really struck by was, 62% of children are watching TV for two or more hours per day," he said. "And they're using computers a lot, too."

A parent, he added, "these behaviors really manifest early on, in childhood, and it's probably something we have to start curtailing and targeting really early if we are going to break this vicious cycle of us becoming a more sedentary society."

He said people who have read his research often ask him two questions: "What should I do when I take a break from my sitting time?" and "When I take that break, how long does that break have to be?"

His most recent study found that intensity matters but is not essential.

"So if you were to replace 30 minutes of sedentary time with 30 minutes of light activity -- a casual stroll down the hall -- you would lower your risk of early death by 17%," he said. Replace 30 minutes of sitting with more vigorous activity, and you lower your risk by 35%.

He also found that "short bursts of activity, if you get enough of them across the day, will be enough to lower your risk from sitting all day."

"To combat sitting doesn't require you going to the gym and working out for hours at a time," he said.

Getting off your office chair or the couch and taking a short break here or there is enough, he said: "It doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be long."
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/23/h...udy/index.html





Mozilla Highlights AI Bias and ‘Addiction by Design’ Tech in Internet Health Report
Khari Johnson

Mozilla today released the 2019 Internet Health Report, an analysis that brings together insights from 200 experts to examine issues central to the future of the internet. This year’s report chose to focus primarily on injustice perpetuated by artificial intelligence; what NYU’s Natasha Dow Schüll calls “addiction by design” tech, like social media apps and smartphones; and the power of city governments and civil society “to make the internet healthier worldwide.”

The Internet Health Report is not designed to issue the web a bill of health, rather it is intended as a call to action that urges people to “embrace the notion that we as humans can change how we make money, govern societies, and interact with one another online.”

“Our societies and economies will soon undergo incredible transformations because of the expanding capabilities of machines to ‘learn’ and ‘make decisions’. How do we begin to make tougher demands of artificial intelligence to meet our human needs above all others?” the report reads. “There are basically two distinct challenges for the world right now. We need to fix what we know we are doing wrong. And we need to decide what it even means for AI to be good.”

The modern AI agenda, the report’s authors assert, is shaped in part by large tech companies and China and the United States. The report calls particular attention to Microsoft and Amazon’s sale of facial recognition software to immigration and law enforcement agencies.

The authors point to the work of Joy Buolamwini, whom Fortune recently named “the conscience of the AI revolution.” Through audits published by Buolamwini and others in the past year, facial recognition software technology from Microsoft, Amazon’s AWS, and other tech companies was found to be less capable of recognizing people with dark skin, particularly women of color.

Also highlighted is the work of AI Now Institute cofounder Meredith Whitaker. A number of co-organizers of Google employees’ ethically motivated worldwide walkouts last fall said they have been demoted since the protest. Whitaker said she was told after Google disbanded its AI ethics board to stop her work at the AI Now Institute if she wanted to keep her job, Wired reported Monday. A Google spokesperson denied that any retaliatory changes were made.

“Are you going to harm humanity and, specifically, historically marginalized populations, or are you going to sort of get your act together and make some significant structural changes to ensure that what you create is safe and not harmful?” Whitaker asked in a quote included in the report and shared with Kara Swisher’s Recode podcast last month.

Referencing Finland’s initiative to train 1% of its population in artificial intelligence essentials, the report called AI literacy critical for not only business and government leaders but the average citizen, as well.

“Each and everyone of us who cares about the health of the internet — we need to scale up our understanding of AI. It is being woven into nearly every kind of digital product and is being applied to more and more decisions that affect people around the world,” the report reads. “It’s not just technology companies that need to be interrogating the ethics of how they use AI. It’s everyone, from city and government agencies to banks and insurers.”

The report also explored solutions to the threat of deepfakes. Some scholars advise against attempts to regulate deepfakes since governments would be allowed to act as arbiters of what’s fact and fiction and label views they disagree with as “fake news.”

The report also focuses on what it calls “breaking free of the addiction machine” that includes smartphone apps, social media platforms, and recommendation engines. In the 2018 Internet Health Report, Mozilla argued that tech giants like Facebook and Amazon should be regulated, disrupted, or broken up.

Business models that incentivize engagement still reign, and the report called for new incentives or business models.

“There is an opportunity for people within the tech sector — developers, designers, content creators, marketers, and others — to be leaders in creating apps and services that do not encourage addictive behaviors and instead incentivize positive, healthy online experiences,” the report reads.

It also takes a closer look at Germany’s hate speech law, which went into effect about a year ago and requires companies to removed hate speech from their social media platforms within 24 hours or face fines of up to €50 million ($56 million).

Twitter, Facebook, Google, and YouTube published reports sharing their first year of operations under the new legislation, but experts say they want more information and transparency to accurately gauge the impact of Germany’s hate speech law.

The report also looks at a number of other issues, like world access to the internet. The majority of people on Earth gained access to the internet earlier this year. However, there appears to be an increase in internet censorship via forms of intentional slowdown.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/04/23/m...health-report/





Sliding Backward on Tech? There Are Benefits

Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, decided to downgrade her tech two years ago. It has worked out, with paper and DVDs instead of the latest apps and gizmos.
Featuring Pamela Paul

How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, discussed the tech she’s using.

About two years ago, you wrote an article about how you downgraded all your tech. How did you downgrade? What do you love about having done that?

It’s easier than you might think because you can pretty effectively downgrade merely by neglecting to upgrade. You just naturally find yourself sliding backward. In my case, this shift has been deliberate, but more about making a mental adjustment than about deactivating existing technology. (Though I did permanently jettison the electric toothbrush.)

There’s a prevailing assumption that just because there’s a new high-tech version of something previously handled in a low-tech way, one should adopt that technology. I come at it from a different angle, which is to start with the need or problem and ask myself: Will this new technology substantively help? And if the upside is speed or information, my next question is: What’s the trade-off? What do I lose along with this gain, and on balance, do the gains outweigh the losses? (Possibly the only thing I learned from Econ 111.)

Quite often, I find that it doesn’t. What lands in the loss column may have to do with process, and the process of doing something can be just as valuable as the end result. I read this book last year, “Cræft: An Inquiry Into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts.” I am in no way crafty, but this book had me yearning to thatch my own roof just to be in touch with the physical and attendant mental labor of putting something useful together. (That said, I haven’t lifted a finger.)

On the flip side, I find that many new technologies are actually far less efficient than the tools they attempt to replace. A Nook or a Kindle or iPad is, for my purposes, unequivocally worse than a printed book. You can’t flip back and forth to the photo inserts or skim easily through the index; you have no sense of page count (percentages, really?). You lose the design of the product, which is often beautiful, down to the weight of the paper and the choice of typeface. You’d have to pay me a very fancy salary to give up print for a year.

Same thing with paper calendars; they’re just better. I get irrationally impatient with the slowness with which people tap meetings into their calendars on the phone. It is at least 30 seconds faster to write it in an old-timey agenda (Levenger here). My Google calendar will always play second fiddle to this far more detailed agenda, supplemented by Post-its and a Moleskine to-do list. I trace this obsession with efficiency to the children’s book “Cheaper by the Dozen,” about a couple of efficiency experts and their brood, which I took way too literally.

Given all this, what does your tech setup look like for doing your work?

My personal life, techwise, operates in sharp contrast to and in part as ballast against my professional life. Despite working on what one might consider the most low-tech of beats, we are in a tech-oriented workplace, and our content is delivered through high-tech platforms to tech-savvy readers.

That means doing everything I can while at work to understand, adopt and assess the same tools our newsroom colleagues and our readers are using, and figure out how they can materially enhance our journalism. We were actually the first desk to have a podcast (now in its 15th year) and are part of the pilot program for Alexa, which adapts our audio content for voice users. While at work, I have 12 windows and tabs open, toggling madly between laptop and phone like every other digital drone.

As an aside: I have the ugliest but best low-tech phone case for klutzes like me who drop their phones all the time. It costs 3 euros from Ale-Hop in Madrid, and you can order it online. You will look ridiculous carrying it around but triumphant picking it up.

What’s your advice for others who want to downgrade their tech?

In general, when I hear the phrase “There’s an app for that,” my first question is, “Does there need to be?” The vast majority of new technologies are developed with a profit motive. So each new form of tech raises the question: Is this something I’m willing to pay for, whether the cost is in terms of dollars or privacy? Like many people, I chafe at the notion of my personal life being monetized.

How has the book industry’s shift toward digital publishing changed the way that The Times reviews books? And what hasn’t changed?

Strictly in terms of review process, our desk hasn’t changed much — because the vast majority of our editors and reviewers prefer to work in print.

It’s easier for an editor to assess a book without reading it in its entirety by dipping in and out. Reviewers like to mark up their galleys, which are early review copies.

That said, PDFs make fact-checking far easier and speed our process for embargoed books. We can also see early editions of visual books that aren’t available in galleys (the printing costs are too high) without having to wait for finished physical copies. And we can more readily get access to audiobooks digitally than we ever could with CDs.

Outside of work, what low-tech product are you currently obsessed with?

I am fairly confident that I’m the last DVD subscriber to what was once called Netflix and is now DVD.com, and my queue is maxed to the 500. I don’t subscribe to any streaming services, nor does our television have an antenna set up for network TV.

This makes my decision around what to watch really easy: There are only four choices. When I go somewhere with multiple streaming subscriptions, there’s actually nothing I want to watch. As Barry Schwartz wrote in his persuasive 2004 book, “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less,” we become easily overwhelmed and paralyzed when faced with too many possibilities (at least I do). It’s also easier to find old and foreign movies on DVD.

I do, however, like tech that narrows choice down. One app we recently used with much success was Happy Cow, which locates vegan dining options. It was seriously useful while traveling in Germany last summer with our 13-year-old vegan daughter.

I still regret uploading all my CDs at the behest of my husband, who is far techier than I am. Recently, I bought portable CD players for two of my kids. I think about digging out the vinyl again. Maybe I’ll pick up a “new” record player one of these days.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/24/t...-benefits.html





Amazon's Alexa Team Can Access Users' Home Addresses
Matt Day, Giles Turner, and Natalia Drozdiak

• Some members of Alexa Data Services see latitude and longitude
• The team is charged with helping Alexa improve its performance

An Amazon.com Inc. team auditing Alexa users’ commands has access to location data and can, in some cases, easily find a customer’s home address, according to five employees familiar with the program.

The team, spread across three continents, transcribes, annotates and analyzes a portion of the voice recordings picked up by Alexa. The program, whose existence Bloomberg revealed earlier this month, was set up to help Amazon’s digital voice assistant get better at understanding and responding to commands.

Team members with access to Alexa users’ geographic coordinates can easily type them into third-party mapping software and find home residences, according to the employees, who signed nondisclosure agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the program.

While there’s no indication Amazon employees with access to the data have attempted to track down individual users, two members of the Alexa team expressed concern to Bloomberg that Amazon was granting unnecessarily broad access to customer data that would make it easy to identify a device’s owner.

Location data is more sensitive than many other categories of user information, said Lindsey Barrett, a staff attorney and teaching fellow at Georgetown Law’s Communications and Technology Clinic.

“Anytime someone is collecting where you are, that means it could go to someone else who could find you when you don’t want to be found,” she said. Widespread access to location data associated with Alexa user recordings “would set up a big red flag for me.”

In an April 10 statement acknowledging the Alexa auditing program, Amazon said “employees do not have direct access to information that can identify the person or account as part of this workflow.”

In a new statement responding to this story, Amazon said “access to internal tools is highly controlled, and is only granted to a limited number of employees who require these tools to train and improve the service by processing an extremely small sample of interactions. Our policies strictly prohibit employee access to or use of customer data for any other reason, and we have a zero tolerance policy for abuse of our systems. We regularly audit employee access to internal tools and limit access whenever and wherever possible.”

Amazon’s Alexa Data Services team, which manages the scads of recordings of human speech and other data that helps train the voice software, numbers in the thousands of employees and contractors, spread across work sites from Boston to Romania and India.

Some of the workers charged with analyzing recordings of Alexa customers use an Amazon tool that displays audio clips alongside data about the device that captured the recording. Much of the information stored by the software, including a device ID and customer identification number, can’t be easily linked back to a user.

However, Amazon also collects location data so Alexa can more accurately answer requests, for example suggesting a local restaurant or giving the weather in nearby Ashland, Oregon, instead of distant Ashland, Michigan.

In a demonstration seen by Bloomberg, an Amazon team member pasted a user’s coordinates, stored in the system as latitude and longitude, into Google Maps. In less than a minute, the employee had jumped from a recording of a person’s Alexa command to what appeared to be an image of their house and corresponding address.

It’s unclear how many people have access to that system. Two Amazon employees said they believed the vast majority of workers in the Alexa Data Services group were, until recently, able to use the software.

Sometimes Amazon scoops up data by default. As recently as last year, the first time a customer asked an Echo smart speaker a question related to location, the company often used the device’s internet connection to get its approximate location. More recently, the company has started using the shipping address associated with a customer’s account as the Echo’s default location.

Amazon’s location data is not always precise, and it doesn’t always refer to the location of an Echo. The Alexa smartphone app prompts users to enter a home address when they set up a smart speaker and also asks for permission to use smartphone location data.

In a list of frequently asked questions about Alexa, Amazon says it uses mobile device location to provide more relevant answers and recommendations, and to enable features like reminders designed to trigger when a user reaches a certain place.

A second internal Amazon software tool, available to a smaller pool of workers who tag transcripts of voice recordings to help Alexa categorize requests, stores more personal data, according to one of the employees.

After punching in a customer ID number, those workers, called annotators and verifiers, can see the home and work addresses and phone numbers customers entered into the Alexa app when they set up the device, the employee said. If a user has chosen to share their contacts with Alexa, their names, numbers and email addresses also appear in the dashboard. That data is in the system so that if a customer says “Send a message to Laura,” human reviewers can make sure transcribers wrote the name correctly so that the software learns to pair that request with the Laura in the contact list.

Amazon appears to have been restricting the level of access employees have to the system.

One employee said that, as recently as a year ago, an Amazon dashboard detailing a user’s contacts displayed full phone numbers. Now, in that same panel, some digits are obscured.

Amazon further limited access to data after Bloomberg’s April 10 report, two of the employees said. Some data associates, who transcribe, annotate and verify audio recordings, arrived for work to find that they no longer had access to software tools they had previously used in their jobs, these people said. As of press time, their access had not been restored.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...home-addresses





Massachusetts Court Blocks Warrantless Access to Real-Time Cell Phone Location Data
Jennifer Lynch

There's heartening news for our location privacy out of Massachusetts this week. The Supreme Judicial Court, the state's highest court, ruled that police access to real-time cell phone location data—whether it comes from a phone company or from technology like a cell site simulator—intrudes on a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy. Absent exigent circumstances, the court held, the police must get a warrant.

In Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Almonor, police had a phone carrier “ping” the cell phone of a suspect in a murder case—surreptitiously accessing GPS functions and causing the phone to send its coordinates back to the phone carrier and the police. This real-time location data pinpointed Mr. Almonor’s phone to a location inside a private home. The state argued it could warrantlessly get cell phone location data to find anyone, anytime, at any place as long as it was less than six hours old. A trial court disagreed and the state appealed.

EFF filed an amicus brief in this case in partnership with the ACLU and the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. We asked the court to recognize, as the Supreme Court did in U.S. v Carpenter, that people have a constitutional right to privacy in their physical movements. We argued that, because people have their phones with them all the time, and because the location information produced by the phone can reveal our every move—where and with whom we live, socialize, visit, vacation, worship, and much more—the police must get a warrant to access this sensitive information.

The Massachusetts court held that “[m]anipulating our phones for the purpose of identifying and tracking our personal location presents an even greater intrusion” than accessing the historical location data at issue in Carpenter. It concluded that “by causing the defendant's cell phone to reveal its real-time location, the Commonwealth intruded on the defendant's reasonable expectation of privacy in the real-time location of his cell phone.” The court recognized both that cell phone use is ubiquitous in our society, and that a phone’s location is a “proxy” for its owner’s location. The court noted that “society's expectation has been that law enforcement could not secretly and instantly identify a person's real-time physical location at will,” and “[a]llowing law enforcement to immediately locate an individual whose whereabouts were previously unknown by compelling that individual's cell phone to reveal its location contravenes that expectation.”

Much of the majority’s opinion focuses on the fact that, in this case, law enforcement directed the phone company to “manipulate” the defendant’s phone, causing it to send its location to the phone company. In other words, the phone company wouldn’t have collected the data on its own as part of its normal business practices. But two judges, in a concurring opinion, expressed concern that this focus on law enforcement action—rather than on the collection of location data alone—would result in an exception for searches of real-time location data that providers collect automatically. The concurring justices would hold that the Massachusetts constitution “protects us from pings not because of the right to keep the government from interfering with our cellular telephones, but because of the right to keep the government from finding us.”

This is very concerning because, as the concurring justices note, the majority’s focus on government action here could allow the police to “side-step the constitutional protection” by just asking for the data the cell service provider collects on its own. Although the majority denied that would happen, it remains to be seen, both how officers will implement searches after this opinion and how lower courts will apply constitutional law to those searches. We’ve seen the Commonwealth interpret this court’s prior decisions on location tracking very narrowly in the past.

Although the defendant raised both federal and state constitutional claims in Almonor, the court based its decision solely on Article 14 of the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights, which was drafted before—and served as one of the models for—our federal Bill of Rights. Article 14, one of the cornerstones of the Massachusetts Constitution, is the state’s equivalent to the Fourth Amendment. As the court notes, it “does, or may, afford more substantive protection to individuals than that which prevails under the Constitution of the United States.”

Courts around the country are now being asked to address the scope of the Carpenter ruling. Almonor in Massachusetts and a case called State of Maine v. O’Donnell, in Maine are among the first to deal directly with how Carpenter should be applied when police track and locate people in real-time. We’re heartened that the Massachusetts court took these issues seriously and made clear that the police must get a warrant, whether they access historical cell phone location data or whether they cause a phone to send its real-time location. We’re still waiting for the Maine court’s opinion in O’Donnell, and we’re actively tracking other cases addressing these issues across the country.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/0...-location-data





The Feds Are Dropping Child Porn Cases Instead of Revealing Info on Their Surveillance Systems

Human Rights Watch and other groups say these systems draw serious concerns.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown

The Department of Justice has been dismissing child pornography cases in order to not reveal information about the software programs used as the basis for the charges.

An array of cases suggest serious problems with the tech tools used by federal authorities. But the private entities who developed these tools won't submit them for independent inspection or hand over hardly any information about how they work, their error rates, or other critical information. As a result, potentially innocent people are being smeared as pedophiles and prosecuted as child porn collectors, while potentially guilty people are going free so these companies can protect "trade secrets."

The situation suggests some of the many problems that can arise around public-private partnerships in catching criminals and the secretive digital surveillance software that it entails (software that's being employed for far more than catching child predators).

With the child pornography cases, "the defendants are hardly the most sympathetic," notes Tim Cushing at Techdirt. Yet that's all the more reason why the government's antics here are disturbing. Either the feds initially brought bad cases against people whom they just didn't think would fight back, or they're willing to let bad behavior go rather than face some public scrutiny.

An extensive investigation by ProPublica "found more than a dozen cases since 2011 that were dismissed either because of challenges to the software's findings, or the refusal by the government or the maker to share the computer programs with defense attorneys, or both," writes Jack Gillum. Many more cases raised issues with the software as a defense.

"Defense attorneys have long complained that the government's secrecy claims may hamstring suspects seeking to prove that the software wrongly identified them," notes Gillum. "But the growing success of their counterattack is also raising concerns that, by questioning the software used by investigators, some who trade in child pornography can avoid punishment."

Courts have sought to overcome concerns that scrutiny would diminish the effectiveness of the software for law enforcement or infringe on intellectual property rights by ordering only secret and monitored third-party review processes. But federal prosecutors have rejected even these compromises, drawing worry that it's not legitimate concerns driving their secrecy but a lack of confidence in the software's efficacy or some other more nefarious reason.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has raised questions about how much data (not just on defendants but on all Americans) these programs have been accessing and storing.

In February, HRW sent a letter to Justice Department officials expressing concerns about one such program, called the Child Protection System (CPS). TLO, the company behind the CPS system, has intervened in court cases to prevent disclosure of more information about the program or independent testing of it.

"Since the system is designed to flag people as suspected of having committed crimes, both its error rates and its potential to exceed constitutional bounds have implications for rights," HRW states. Yet "it is unclear what information the Justice Department has about CPS' potential for error (and on what basis)."

Prosecutors say they can't share any details about it "because it is proprietary and not in the government's possession," notes HRW, which since 2016 has been researching cases involving the CPS system. "We fear that the government may be shielding its methods from scrutiny by relying on its arrangements with the non-profit," states HRW. (Read more here.)

Another tool used in these cases, Torrential Downpour, was developed by the University of Massachusetts. The school has been fighting against the release of more information about Torrential Downpour, too. But defendants' lawyers say it's necessary after the program alerted authorities about alleged child porn on computers that couldn't actually be found anywhere on the physical devices.

"An examination of the software being used to build cases should be allowed, but the entities behind the software won't allow it and the government is cutting defendants loose rather than giving them a chance to properly defend themselves against these very serious charges," writes Cushing. "I supposed it ultimately works out for defendants, but it only encourages the government to tip the scales in its favor again when the next prosecution rolls around with the hopes the next defender of the accused isn't quite as zealous"

Plus, if these defendants really are innocent, than the government has publicly and falsely smeared them as sickos and then balked at allowing them a true opportunity to clear their names.

"These defendants are not very popular, but a dangerous precedent is a dangerous precedent that affects everyone," HRW's Sarah St.Vincent told ProPublica. "And if the government drops cases or some charges to avoid scrutiny of the software, that could prevent victims from getting justice consistently. The government is effectively asserting sweeping surveillance powers but is then hiding from the courts what the software did and how it worked."
https://reason.com/2019/04/24/the-fe...lance-systems/





The Brave Browser Will Pay You to Surf the Web
Klint Finley

If you were on the internet in the late 1990s, you might remember companies like AllAdvantage that promised to pay you to surf the web. You could install a program that tracked your browsing and showed you targeted ads at the top of the screen; then AllAdvantage would give you a cut of the ad revenue you generated.

These schemes largely disappeared after the dot-com crash. But Brendan Eich, the controversial creator of the JavaScript programming language and cofounder and former CTO of Mozilla, thinks his company Brave Software has found a way to revive that old idea.

Brave makes a browser based on Google Chrome that blocks tracking scripts and other technologies that spy on your online activity. As a result, it also blocks many web ads; if you visit WIRED.com using the Brave browser, you won’t see any ads. But starting Wednesday, Brave will give users the option to see ads that Eich says will respect your privacy. The ads will appear as desktop notifications, he says, not as replacements for the ads the Brave browser blocks. So you still won’t see ads on WIRED.com, but you might see them elsewhere on your screen. If you choose to see these ads, you’ll get 70 percent of the revenue they generate.

Eich hopes Brave can solve two of the web's most vexing problems—privacy and revenue—by turning the traditional digital advertising model on its head. Today, ad networks pay sites like WIRED.com for ad space and web browsers like Brave and Chrome deliver content from those publishers to users. Brave is trying to put the browser in the center of the advertising experience. Instead of paying publishers directly, ad networks would pay Brave, which will pass part of the money to users—and eventually to publishers—and keep a cut for itself.

By handling advertising in the browser on your device, Brave says it will be able to target ads without sending your data to the cloud, and protect your privacy. When you interact with an ad on Brave, the browser sends notice to the company's servers, but doesn't include any identifying information. Eich sees four sets of winners: browser makers get paid; users get paid, and get more privacy; advertisers can target pitches without running afoul of European privacy regulations; and publishers can survive in a world where many users are installing ad blockers.

Eich cofounded Brave in 2015 following his ouster from Mozilla in 2014 over his 2008 donation toward a California ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriages. The first version of Brave’s browser launched in 2016 with the ability to block trackers; the company added features later that year that allowed users to donate to their favorite websites. Now it’s adding the first of its promised advertising features.

Eventually, the company plans to offer a service that will replace any blocked ads on a publisher's site with ads placed by Brave and give those publishers a cut of the ad revenue. Eich says Brave will only replace ads on sites that opt into its service.

The Brave browser; the box in the lower-right-hand corner is an example of the types of ads the browser will display starting Wednesday.
Brave

Publishers and ad networks might bristle at the idea of putting browser makers in the middle of their business. But in recent years browsers have taken a more active role in shaping the web, instead of merely displaying a website’s content. Chrome now blocks ads on a small number of sites with particularly egregious advertising practices, while browsers like Firefox and Safari have added privacy protections. Meanwhile, browser plugins are giving users more control over their experience. There are Chrome extensions, for example, that let you change Facebook's color scheme, or change the way images are displayed on Pinterest. And of course there are extensions that block all ads.

Trying to win advertisers and publishers to a new model isn't Brave's only challenge. It also needs users. Eich says Brave has 5.9 million users and is growing. But Brave doesn't yet register on web analytics firm StatCounter's rankings of web browsers, where Chrome reigns supreme with about 63 percent market share.

Brave will give users a 70 percent cut of its advertising revenue, which Eich estimates could work out to about $5 a month. Brave will pay users with its own bitcoin-style "cryptocurrency” called Basic Attention Tokens or BAT, which has traded for as little as 12 cents and as much as 46 cents over the past 12 months, according to CoinMarketCap. Today, there’s no way for users who receive BAT for viewing ads to swap their digital currency for dollars, but Eich says Brave will partner with cryptocurrency exchanges to make that possible.

The company offers a service through the cryptocurrency exchange Uphold to allow users to buy BAT and donate it to publishers, and for publishers to exchange the BAT they receive for dollars. Advertisers, which Brave says will include Vice, HomeChef, and a number of cryptocurrency related companies, will be able to buy ads either with BAT or with traditional currencies.

Eich says Brave opted to create its own tokens using the Ethereum cryptocurrency platform in part to avoid regulatory requirements, such as verifying users' identifies, that partners like Uphold are better equipped to handle.
https://www.wired.com/story/brave-br...-pay-surf-web/





Warren Buffett Sees Most Newspapers as ‘Toast’ After Ad Decline
Katherine Chiglinsky and Gerry Smith

• ‘World has changed hugely,’ billionaire tells Yahoo Finance
• He sees a few papers surviving, such as the New York Times

Warren Buffett, the man behind a print-media empire that includes the Buffalo News and Omaha World-Herald, doesn’t think most newspapers can be saved.

The decline of advertising gradually turned the newspaper industry “from monopoly to franchise to competitive,” the billionaire chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. said in an interview with Yahoo Finance. And now most newspapers are “toast.”
Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Annual General Meeting

“The world has changed hugely,” Buffett said in the interview with Yahoo Finance, which will serve as the livestream host for Berkshire’s shareholder meeting.

The bleak outlook echoes Buffett’s remarks at last year’s annual meeting, when he lamented the state of the newspaper industry. Berkshire’s BH Media, which owns papers across the country, has been cutting jobs to cope with declining advertising revenue.

Berkshire struck a deal last year for Lee Enterprises Inc., which owns papers including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, to manage its newspapers and digital operations in 30 markets.

Buffett, 88, said last year that it wasn’t of much economic consequence to Berkshire because the company bought its papers at “reasonable” prices.
Craigslist’s Impact

Readers sought out newspapers when they were packed with ads about bargains, jobs and apartments, Buffett said. But Craigslist and other sites have taken over that role.

By 2016, the newspaper industry’s ad revenue was nearly a third of what it was a decade before, falling to $18 billion from $49 billion, according to Pew Research Center.

“It upsets the people in the newsroom to talk that way, but the ads were the most important editorial content from the standpoint of the reader,” Buffett said.

Not all papers are doomed, though. The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal will survive, he said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ter-ad-decline

















Until next week,

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