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Old 26-06-19, 06:49 AM   #1
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Default Peer-To-Peer News - The Week In Review - June 29th, ’19

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"We're appealing to everybody who wants to report an emergency and needs help to ... go onto the street. Police officers with walkie-talkies are taking to the streets as much as possible so they can be spoken to." – Suzanne van de Graaf


"Just play something else!" – Roopa Kalyanaraman Marcello


"I'm starting a feminist program where I teach young girls to torrent without their boyfriend's help." – Kelly






































June 29th, 2019




VidAngel Vows To Appeal $62.4 Million Judgment For Pirating Movies
Anita Bennett

A federal jury in Los Angeles ordered VidAngel on Monday to pay $62.4 million to Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. for streaming studio content on its service without permission.

“The jury today found that VidAngel acted willfully, and imposed a damages award that sends a clear message to others who would attempt to profit from unlawful infringing conduct at the expense of the creative community,” the studios said in a joint statement.

U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte previously ruled that VidAngel’s service was illegal, and left the decision up to jurors to decide on the amount of the damages. Immediately after Monday’s decision, VidAngel vowed to appeal.

“We disagree with today’s ruling and have not lessened our resolve to save filtering for families one iota,” CEO Neal Harmon said in a statement. “VidAngel plans to appeal the District Court ruling, and explore options in the bankruptcy court. Our court system has checks and balances, and we are pursuing options on that front as well.”

VidAngel rips content from DVD copies, and streams them to users after filtering out profanity, nudity and violence from movies and TV series on Netflix, Amazon Prime, and HBO.

Birotte ordered the service to shut down in December 2016. The company relaunched a filtering service for Netflix and Amazon, which is still in operation.

However, the large verdict is a financial blow to the Utah-based company, which is already in bankruptcy. If the verdict is upheld on appeal, it could force VidAngel out of business.
https://deadline.com/2019/06/vidange...es-1202633976/





U.S. Sen. Wyden Asks NIST to Create Secure File Sharing Guide
Sergiu Gatlan

U.S. Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Director Walter G. Copan urging the agency to develop and issue standards as part of a guidance framework for securely sharing sensitive documents over the Internet.

"Government agencies routinely share and receive sensitive data through insecure methods — such as emailing .zip files — because employees are not provided the tools and training to do so safely," says the Senator in the letter.

Broken sensitive data sharing process

Wyden's request was prompted by the widespread sharing of highly sensitive files packed as password-protected zip files via email in the government sector, with many of the people doing that this way the data is protected while in transit and after reaching the inbox.

However, as the Senator underlines in his letter, "many password-protected .zip files can be easily broken with off-the-shelf hacking tools. This is because many of the software programs that create .zip files use a weak encryption algorithm by default."

Johns Hopkins University Associate Professor Matthew D. Green confirmed the issue in a Twitter thread, saying that "Right now on many ancient versions of Windows, when you 'encrypt' (password protect) a ZIP file using the OS default utility, you get encryption using the legacy ZIP scheme, which is totally broken."

In addition, the PKZIP stream cipher vulnerable to a known plaintext attack causing this issue is "the default ZIP encryption algorithm on Windows XP and (ugh) current versions of MacOS. To Microsoft’s credit, they removed it on more recent versions of the home version of Windows."

Insecure data sharing channels a possible national security threat

Wyden also stated in the request sent to the NIST that this vulnerable sensitive data sharing workflow represents a conceivably disastrous threat seeing that high-profile data breaches and cyber attacks by foreign state actors are a continuous menace to the U.S. national security.

"The government must ensure that federal workers have the tools and training they need to safely share sensitive data," also argued the Senator in his letter.

"To address this problem, I ask that NIST create and publish an easy-to-understand guide describing the best way for individuals and organizations to securely share sensitive data over the internet."

Green added that "there’s a huge opportunity here if NIST responds and asks the community for proposals" with "a huge opportunity for smart people in this field to come up with something much better."

Email content security NIST recommendations

A foundation is already there seeing that NIST released a "Trustworthy Email" publication on February 26 which provides recommendations on how to reduce "the risk of spoofed email being used as an attack vector" and "of email contents being disclosed to unauthorized parties."

"These recommendations cover both the email sender and receiver," as explained by NIST, with Section 5 of the publication covering "server-to-server and end-to-end email authentication and confidentiality of message contents. This includes email sent over Transport Layer Security (TLS), Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME) and OpenPGP."

While NIST presents both S/MIME and OpenPGP as options for securing email content, the agency provides the following recommendation to federal organizations: "Do not use OpenPGP for message confidentiality. Instead, use S/MIME with a certificate that is signed by a known CA."
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/new...sharing-guide/





UFC Urges the US Congress to Incentivize Proactive Piracy Blocking
Bill Toulas

• UFC lobbies for new laws that would incentivize proactive pirating stream link blocking.
• Their representative claims that Facebook and other social media platforms are currently not doing enough.
• The industry is allegedly under threat, as pirate IPTV services are nibbling on its market share.

The General Counsel of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) urges the US Congress to develop incentives that would push online platforms to block pirated live-streams on the internet without requiring a takedown notice. Mixed Martial Arts are a very popular pirating category, and live broadcasts are becoming available through numerous links right before a match starts, as well as throughout its duration. Broadcast rights owners find it very difficult to deal with this problem as new links get posted on social media all the time, so no matter how many are blocked, more pop up all the time.

There are even dedicated IPTV channels and whole subscription packages that are focused on MMA fights, and the takedown notices that reach these services are wholly ignored. Even their hosting services take their side, promising not to take the live feeds down in the case that the rightsholder sends a notice. We have documented this issue again in the past, and it is evident that the people behind this product (fighting sports) are taking every step that they can to protect their business and interests. Recently, the NBA and the UFC asked for the criminalization of IPTV streaming, and now UFC is also proposing pro-active blocking.

According to UFC’s Riche McKnight, although they have agreed on specific takedown arrangements with several social media companies that host the links that pop up during a fighting match, the online platforms seem to be neglectful to the requests and so the links aren’t removed immediately. This causes considerable damage to the rightsholders, as even minutes of online existence for these links translate to many thousands of illegal viewers. McKnight proposes a change in the law that would push social media giants like Facebook to remove these links proactively, without even requiring notice from the UFC. As McKnight told the senators: “Private, voluntary partnerships [with online platforms] are not sufficient to combat online piracy. Addressing this problem requires a new approach that includes a strong legal framework, a combination of private and public enforcement, and enhanced cooperation with our international partners.”

The criminalization of streaming remains the primary goal of UFC’s lobbying, as this will change the field decisively. Until then though, a transition from reactive to proactive takedowns would allow for much-needed breathing space for the legitimate broadcasters, who are now with their backs on the wall. The US Congress will now have to consider what new legal framework would facilitate UFC’s requirements, and one that would include upload filters is, unfortunately, a real possibility at this point.
https://www.technadu.com/ufc-us-cong...locking/71330/





Piracy Rates Around the World Are Dropping According to Recent Survey
Bill Toulas

• Piracy rates are dropping globally, as people find streaming services good and cheap enough.
• This may change soon as the video-on-demand market gets overcrowded and fragmented.
• As the market takes its final form, lesser players will be pushed out as giants establish themselves.

A recent survey conducted by Ampere Analysis indicates a drop in the piracy rates that is simultaneously recorded in the United States and Europe. The main reason for this drop is thought to be the wide availability of affordable subscription-based online streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime, so people have fewer reasons to turn to piracy. The notion of ‘on-demand’ video consumption was actually born inside the pirating ecosystem, while legal services of this kind came many years after to build their success models on it.

The stats compare the first quarters of 2017 and 2019, and the decline is evident mostly in the USA, Netherlands, France, and Spain, while it’s also notable in Germany, Italy, and the UK. While this paints a satisfying picture for copyright holders, the analysts of Ampere Analysis warn that the situation may soon change, and piracy rates could suddenly go upwards. The reason for this would be the ongoing fragmentation of streaming services and the fact that there are so many services offering original content that people want to watch. As it’s impossible for one to maintain subscriptions on various different services, the only way to access this content will be through piracy again.

Is this a real possibility? Some industry experts believe that we are already in the middle of a streaming service bubble, with the availability of so many video-on-demand services now working not only as competitors to each other but as the sappers of their very market. We already have Netflix, Amazon TV, Sling TV, Hulu, Sony PlayStation Vue, fuboTV, CBS All Access, YouTube TV, HBO Now, HBO Go, Philo, Kanopy, Roku Channel, Shudder, Facebook Watch, Sling TV, and more, while giants like Disney are soon to enter the market with their Disney+, AT&T will launch its own service this year, BBC and ITV will try again through BritBox, and even Costco and Walmart are looking to invest in this overcrowded market.

Everyone wants a piece of a growing pie, but it looks like the pie won’t be enough to feed all services in the end. It is unlikely that these new entrants will be able to compete with Amazon and Netflix, however, damaging the field and pushing people to piracy is a real possibility. Of course, while surveys like the above give us an indication of the current state of affairs, we should take into account the possibility of people not admitting of doing something illegal like pirating.
https://www.technadu.com/piracy-rate...-survey/71673/





Dutch Telephone Outage Takes Out Nation's Emergency Number
AP

A major telephone outage took down the Dutch emergency number for more than three hours Monday, forcing police and other first responders to scramble to set up alternatives.

KPN tweeted at around 7:40 p.m. (1740 GMT) that the outage had been repaired, the 112 alarm number was working again and mobile and fixed phone services were restored.

The outage began around 4 p.m. (1400 GMT) forcing emergency services to quickly establish new contact numbers that were publicized on social media and via push alerts to many mobile phones.

Police also sent officers onto the streets so that people could approach them for emergency help and advised people suffering medical problems to go to the nearest hospital.

Subscribe for original insights, commentary and discussions on the major news stories of the week, from columnists Max Fisher and Amanda Taub.

"We're appealing to everybody who wants to report an emergency and needs help to ... go onto the street. Police officers with walkie-talkies are taking to the streets as much as possible so they can be spoken to," police spokeswoman Suzanne van de Graaf told national broadcaster NOS.

Some police forces advised people to use social media if they need to contact emergency services, while others advised people to go to public buildings for urgent help.

Justice and Security Minister Ferd Grapperhaus said in a tweet that he was "in direct contact with KPN" about the outage.

The cause of the outage was not immediately clear.
https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/201...ne-outage.html





US Government Announces Nationwide Crackdown on Robocallers
Brian Fung

The US government announced a nationwide crackdown on illegal robocalls on Tuesday, targeting companies and individuals who have collectively placed over 1 billion unwanted calls for financial schemes and other services, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

The crackdown involves nearly 100 cases, five of which are criminal enforcement actions. They were brought by the FTC, Justice Department, 15 states and a slew of local authorities.

It marks the latest effort by regulators to battle back the tide of unwanted and illegal calls from telemarketers and scammers.

Some of those targeted by the action were a major source of robocalls. Derek Jason Bartoli, a Florida man who allegedly developed, sold and used a form of software that allows millions of calls to be placed in quick succession, was responsible for 57 million calls to US phone numbers over six months in 2017, according to a federal complaint.

"By putting people like Derek Bartoli out of business, we are able to deprive the robocallers of the important tools of their trade," said Andrew Smith, director of the FTC's bureau of consumer protection, in a press conference Tuesday.

The joint action includes the states of Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia.

It comes as lawmakers in both chambers of Congress are preparing legislation that would expand the government's power to limit illegal robocalls. On Tuesday, a House subcommittee is expected to consider the Stopping Bad Robocalls Act. The bill directs the Federal Communications Commission to flesh out its rules making clear that robocalls may only be made to consumers with their consent.

In the Senate, the TRACED Act would expand the FCC's power to punish illegal robocallers by increasing the maximum fines that the agency can levy for each robocall and by extending the statute of limitations to three years, up from one.

Robocalls have become a major concern for policymakers as Americans have increasingly been subjected to unwelcome cellphone interruptions and, in the worst cases, fraud.

Americans received 25.3 billion robocalls in the first half of the year, a 128% increase compared to the same time last year, according to the robocall analytics firm Hiya, which provided details of a forthcoming report to CNN on Tuesday. While not all robocalls are illegitimate — many schools, pharmacies, banks and other institutions rely on them to reach customers — the onslaught has discouraged some Americans from answering cellphone calls altogether, said Hiya.

The telecom industry recently received clearance from the FCC to begin blocking robocalls by default, using technology that can screen out unwanted calls much like spam filters send junk email to a separate folder.

Smith said stemming the flow of robocalls must involve a combination of new technologies, government intervention and consumers' own behavior — hanging up on robocalls, switching on call blocking through wireless carriers and reporting robocalls to the FTC.

"We use those complaints to drive our law enforcement actions," said Smith.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/25/t...own/index.html





Again!? The NSA’s Phone Records Program Still Can’t Stay Within the Law
Matthew Guariglia

Just as the Trump administration has signaled its interest in a permanent “clean” reauthorization of the Patriot Act’s phone surveillance provision, the NSA proves once again that it is not to be trusted with these tools. New documents obtained by the ACLU and reported in the Wall Street Journal have revealed that last year the NSA once again collected phone records of Americans that it was not authorized to obtain.

The NSA collected Information, including who phone-users were calling and for how long, after a telecommunications firm began sending the information to the NSA—despite the fact that it had received no orders that would have authorized them to do so. Although the name of the company is redacted, for years it has been widely reported that large telecommunication firms like AT&T and Verizon have worked with the NSA as part of BLARNEY, an NSA project that leverages “commercial partnerships” in order to gather intelligence.

This “anomalous” unauthorized collection of American’s private information comes only a few months after a separate incident in which “technical irregularities” resulted in the NSA getting access to many more records than it should have. In response, the NSA erased three years of all of its collected metadata, which amounted to records of hundreds of millions of phone calls. The documents released today include an assessment by the NSA that the overcollection had a “significant impact on civil liberties and privacy,” which is putting it mildly.

The NSA’s telephone record program, conducted under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, allows it to collect metadata of phone calls, including phone numbers, time stamps, and other identifying information. While this information may seem benign, many organizations and outlets, including EFF, have demonstrated how things like time stamps, phone numbers, and the GPS coordinates of where calls were made can be stitched together to reveal potentially compromising information about a person. Metadata can, for instance, have dire consequences for vulnerable populations who fear retribution for political beliefs, or whose metadata could be used in immigration enforcement.

With Section 215 up for re-authorization in December, these two instances prove that it’s time to let the NSA’s permission to sweep up phone records expire. If Section 215 is allowed to be reauthorized, accidents like this—in which an unthinkable amount of our personal data winds up in the hands of the government—will continue to happen.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/0...tay-within-law





Report: Hackers Using Telecoms like 'Global Spy System'
Raphael Satter

An ambitious group of state-backed hackers has been burrowing into telecommunications companies in order to spy on high-profile targets across the world, a U.S. cybersecurity firm said in a report published Tuesday.

Boston-based Cybereason said the tactic gave hackers sweeping access to VIPs' call records, location data and device information — effectively turning the targets' cellular providers against them.

Cybereason Chief Executive Lior Div said that because customers weren't directly targeted, they might never discover their every movement was being monitored by a hostile power.

The hackers had turned the affected telecoms into "a global surveillance system," Div said in a telephone interview ahead of the report's launch.

"Those individuals don't know they were hacked — because they weren't."

Div, who is presenting his findings at the Cyber Week conference in Tel Aviv, provided scant details about who was targeted in the hack, saying that Cybereason had been called in to help an unidentified cellular provider last year and discovered that the hackers had broken into the firm's billing server, where call records are logged.

The hackers were using their access to extract the call data of "around 20" customers, Div said.

Who those people were he declined to say, describing them as mainly coming from the world of politics and the military. He said the information was so sensitive he would not provide even the vaguest idea of where they or the telecom were located.

"I'm not even going to share the continent," he said.

Cybereason said the compromise of its customer eventually led it to about 10 other firms that had been hit in a similar way, with hackers stealing data in 100 gigabyte chunks. Div said that, in some cases, the hackers appeared to be tracking non-phone devices, such as cars or smartwatches.

The GSMA, which represents mobile operators worldwide, did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Who might be behind such hacking campaigns is often a fraught question in a world full of digital false flags. Cybereason said that all the signs pointed to APT10 — the nickname often applied to a notorious China-linked cyberespionage group.

But Div said the clues they found were so obvious he and his team sometimes wondered whether they might have been left on purpose.

"I thought: 'Hey, just a second, maybe it's somebody who wants to blame APT10,'" he said.

Chinese authorities have routinely denied responsibility for hacking operations. The Chinese Embassy in London did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Div said that it was unclear whether the ultimate targets of the espionage operation were warned, saying Cybereason had left it to the telecom firms to notify their customers. Div added that he had been in touch with "a handful" of law enforcement agency about the matter, although he did not say which ones.

The FBI in Washington did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
https://www.newstimes.com/business/t...y-14043443.php





Ajit Pai's Silence on Phone Tracking Abuse Is Further Eroding Faith in His Competence
Dell Cameron

The Federal Communication Commission’s investigation into the unauthorized sale of Americans’ location data is now in its second year and still, no one outside of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s office knows a thing about it. On Capitol Hill, faith in his ability to properly handle these apparent violations has reached an all-time low.

On Wednesday, Congresswoman Lori Trahan attached a small amendment to an appropriations bill simply to highlight Pai’s inaction, on what many lawmakers believe is a serious public safety concern. Under a section covering FCC salaries and expenses, she decreased and then increased the agency’s budget by $1 — a small demonstration that gave her a cause to take to the House floor yesterday and call out Pai’s “lack of enforcement and transparency.”

“Location data has been sold through a supply chain with little oversight, often leading to this information ending up in the hands of bad actors,” she said. “For just a few dollars, stalkers and predatory abusers can buy geolocation information to prey on unsuspecting victims—a reality that should set off alarm bells nationwide.”

As Trahan spoke, Motherboard broke another major story in the location-data scandal, linking the apparently unauthorized use of location data to a crime scene an hour east of Dallas, Texas, where two bounty hunters illegally posing as law enforcement officials had exchanged fire with a suspect on the run, resulting in the deaths of all three.

At the same time, two Democratic congresswomen, Debbie Dingell of Michigan and Gwen Moore of Wisconsin, signed a letter to Pai voicing their concerns over the apparent ease with which real-time location data can be illegally obtained.
“Abusers and stalkers often exploit technology to gain access to their victims’ location through GPS tracking and other cell phone apps, forcing victims to get new phones or wipe their current ones when they are trying to leave these dangerous situations,” they said.

The lawmakers urged Pai to “take this matter seriously” and protect location data “to the fullest extent of the law,” stating that domestic violence victims and victims of sex trafficking are among those at greatest risk.

Pai’s office has not responded to multiple requests for comment.

Democratic lawmakers charged with overseeing the FCC’s work believe more and more each day that the investigation itself is being mishandled; and their aides, the federal employees responsible for crafting much of the nation’s laws around communications and privacy are growing increasingly suspicious of Pai, whom many have accused of carrying water for the very mega-corporations directly tied to this mess.

Within his own agency, Democratic officials have privately, and on some occasions openly, accused Pai of intentionally mishandling the investigation—as evidenced mainly by his ongoing refusal to share documentation that would shed light on its progress. Other officials have pointed to an attempt in February to unload the investigation onto a new Democratic commissioner whose office was still void of furniture.

FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks, a former Justice Department attorney, who also served as an assistant chief in the commission’s enforcement bureau, appeared to indicate during an oversight hearing this May that Pai’s oversight of the investigation—as of at least this February—had been deficient.

“What I heard at that briefing did not give me confidence,” he said, “that the case was moving quickly enough.”

Multiple sources at the agency, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about the matter, have said they believe Pai’s intent was to use Starks as a fall guy; saddling him with a faulty case in an effort to at least alleviate Pai of the blame. During the May hearing, Pai was seen as trying to throw Starks under the bus for not accepting the offer, which Democratic officials at the agency told Gizmodo was bizarre, if not inappropriate, to start.

On Wednesday, FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel openly criticized the chairman for remaining silent about the scandal for more than a year while virtually anyone with a cellphone could be at risk. “[F]or too long the FCC has been silent about this security mess. The agency hasn’t said anything about what is going on and how any of us with a mobile phone might be at risk. That’s unacceptable,” she said.
https://gizmodo.com/ajit-pais-silenc...-er-1835921741





Ex-Chair of FCC Broadband Committee Gets Five Years in Prison for Fraud

Telecom CEO forged contracts in order to raise $270 million from investors.
Jon Brodkin

The former head of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee (BDAC) was sentenced to five years in prison for defrauding investors.

Elizabeth Ann Pierce was CEO of Quintillion, an Alaskan telecom company, when she lied to two investment firms in New York in order to raise $270 million to build a fiber network. She also defrauded two individual investors out of $365,000 and used a large chunk of that money for personal expenses.

Pierce, 55, pleaded guilty and last week was given the five-year prison sentence in US District Court for the Southern District of New York, US Attorney Geoffrey Berman announced. Pierce was also "ordered to forfeit $896,698.00 and all of her interests in Quintillion and a property in Texas." She will also be subject to a restitution order to compensate her victims "at a later date."

Pierce's industry experience helped her land the top spot on Pai's broadband advisory committee in April 2017. But she left Quintillion in July 2017 as her scheme unraveled, and she resigned from the FCC advisory panel. Pai appointed a new chair for his committee two months later; he thanked Pierce for her service, saying she did "an excellent job" chairing the committee and "wish[ed] her all the best in her future endeavors."

Pierce used fake contracts to fool investors

Berman's announcement detailed Pierce's fraud:

Between May 2015 and July 2017, Pierce engaged in a scheme to induce two New York-based investment companies to provide more than $270 million to construct the Quintillion System by providing them with eight forged broadband capacity sales contracts and related order forms under which Quintillion would obtain guaranteed revenue once the Quintillion System was built (the "Fake Revenue Agreements"). Under the Fake Revenue Agreements, four telecommunications services companies appeared to have made binding commitments to purchase specific wholesale quantities of capacity from Quintillion at specified prices. The cumulative value of the Fake Revenue Agreements was approximately $1 billion over the life of the Fake Revenue Agreements. In reality, the Fake Revenue Agreements were completely worthless because Pierce had forged the counterparties' signatures.

Some of these revenue agreements "never existed at all," and "others were falsified versions of genuine revenue agreements." Pierce altered the contracts "to make them more favorable to Quintillion and, therefore, more appealing to investors than the genuine agreements," the US Attorney's office said.

"For example, under one of the Fake Revenue Agreements, the customer purportedly agreed to buy from Quintillion increasing quantities of gigabits per second of capacity over a period of 20 years," the US Attorney said. "That agreement, if genuine, would have assured Quintillion hundreds of millions of dollars in future revenue. In reality, negotiations over that deal had ended unsuccessfully, a fact that Pierce never disclosed to the investors. Under another Fake Revenue Agreement, the customer purportedly agreed to buy a fixed, predetermined amount of capacity from Quintillion regardless of subsequent market conditions. In truth, that customer was not obligated to buy any capacity."

Pierce tried to cover up her fraud "by continuing to negotiate with the telecommunications companies in hopes of reaching agreements identical to the ones she forged" but failed to do so.

"Pierce hid these genuine, but inferior, contracts from the investment companies and her own staff," the US Attorney's office said. "When Quintillion and the investment companies ultimately discovered the fraud in mid-2017, they learned that the real contracts Pierce actually negotiated would generate only a fraction of the anticipated guaranteed revenue of the Fake Revenue Agreements she forged."

Pierce convinced the two individual investors that they would receive ownership interests in Quintillion in exchange for their $365,000, when in reality they received no shares in the company. Pierce "used half of one victim's money and all of the other victim's investment for her own personal benefit," the US Attorney's office said.

Quintillion said it "took swift action and self-reported to the Department of Justice" when it learned of Pierce's fraud, the company said in April 2018.

FCC committee favors industry

The FCC committee that Pierce used to lead has repeatedly been criticized for favoring the interests of industry over the public at large. San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo quit the group in January 2018 out of frustration that its recommendations favor the interests of private industry over municipalities.

The committee has also pushed policy that would benefit telecom companies at the expense of other tech companies. In December 2018, the committee urged states to impose new taxes on Netflix, Google, Facebook, and many other businesses that require Internet access to operate. The resulting funding would have been transferred to ISPs via grants that subsidize private broadband providers' network construction. (Pai didn't back the tax proposal.)

The BDAC is continuing its work, with the FCC saying it will "craft recommendations for the Commission on ways to accelerate the deployment of high-speed Internet access... by reducing and/or removing regulatory barriers to infrastructure investment and strengthening existing broadband networks in communities across the country."

In April this year, Pai gave a consumer advisory committee spot to a representative of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which lobbies against municipal broadband, net neutrality, and other consumer protection measures. (Correction: This story originally stated incorrectly that an ALEC representative is a member of the FCC's Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee. The consumer advisory committee is separate from the BDAC.)
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-to-investors/





House Votes to Block Ajit Pai’s Plan to Kill San Francisco Broadband Law

Democratic-led House votes to save rule that lets ISPs reuse broadband wires.
Jon Brodkin

The US House of Representatives has voted to block Ajit Pai's attempt to kill a San Francisco ordinance designed to promote broadband competition in apartment buildings.

As we reported last week, the Federal Communications Commission chair has scheduled a July 10 vote on a measure that would preempt the San Francisco city ordinance, which lets Internet service providers use the existing wiring inside multiunit residential and commercial properties even if the wiring is already used by another ISP that serves the building. The ordinance applies only when the inside wiring belongs to the property owner, but it makes it easier for ISPs to compete in many multiunit buildings already served by another provider.

Pai claimed that the city's rule "deters broadband deployment" and infringes on the FCC's regulation of cable wiring. But US Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) proposed a budget amendment that would forbid the FCC from using any funding to implement or enforce Pai's preemption proposal.

"The FCC's mission is to promote competition," Porter said in a statement her office provided to Ars. "We should be holding them accountable to fulfilling this mission, which is why I'm seeking to defund their declaratory draft ruling preempting San Francisco's local ordinance, effectively preventing competition."

Amendment approved

The House, which is controlled by Democrats, yesterday approved the Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Act for fiscal 2020 in a mostly party-line vote of 224-196.

Earlier in the day, the House approved a block of amendments including Porter's proposal that "prohibits the Federal Communications Committee from finalizing a draft declaratory ruling that would overturn local ordinances that promote broadband competition." The amendment's passage by a vote of 227-220 was also noted in the Congressional Record.

Porter's office confirmed to Ars that "Congresswoman Porter's amendment was included in a package of amendments that passed together." House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) supported the amendment, a Pelosi representative told Ars, which helped get it into the budget bill.

"San Francisco and the State of California have led the way on consumer protections following the Trump administration's assault on net neutrality," a spokesperson for Pelosi told Ars. "The Speaker applauds Rep. Katie Porter's leadership in ensuring broadband choices remain in the hands of San Francisco residents and not in the hands of an anti-consumer puppet of special-interest corporations. It is our hope that the city's policy can serve as a model for localities across the country and that the FCC will recommit to its purpose of a consumer-first agency in order to remove barriers and improve access to broadband."

The amendment could still be defeated in the Senate, which Republicans control 53 to 47, or Trump could veto the appropriations bill.

Pai's preemption proposal is titled "Improving Competitive Broadband Access to Multi-Tenant Environments," even though it would actually block a rule that gives ISPs access to multi-unit buildings.

Pai's preemption proposal came in response to a petition from a trade group that represents ISPs that serve multi-tenant properties.

Under the San Francisco rule, "Those who wish to make use of a building owner's wiring know that they have a regulatory right to share the facility, so they do not need to offer the building owner the same compensation for use that they would otherwise need to in the absence of a regulatory mandate," Pai's proposal says. "Thus, the building owner is deprived of compensation, which it may not be able to otherwise recover. Consequently, Article 52 reduces the value of wiring to a building owner, and therefore the building owner has less incentive to invest in deploying new, additional, or upgraded wiring."

Porter defended the San Francisco ordinance, telling Ars, "The communications industry is in dire need of more competition. San Francisco's Article 52 has been incredibly effective in promoting broadband competition—giving residents the benefit of competition and choice in the market, increasing their service quality while decreasing their monthly bills."
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...broadband-law/





A DIY Internet Network Has Drastically Expanded Its Coverage in NYC

With the installation of "Supernode 3," NYC Mesh now covers large swaths of both Manhattan and Brooklyn.
Karl Bode

A community-run operation named NYC Mesh is on a mission: to deliver better, cheaper broadband service to New York City. The locally-run nonprofit project says it’s engaging in a dramatic expansion that should soon deliver a new, more open broadband alternative to big ISPs to a wider swath of the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

With the installation of a new "supernode," NYC Mesh has greatly expanded its coverage area to much of western Brooklyn, as well as much of lower Manhattan.

Like most cities, New York City suffers from a meaningful lack of broadband competition. The city’s biggest ISP, Verizon, is currently being sued by the city for failing to fully deploy fiber as part of a 2014 agreement with the city. Verizon’s biggest competitor, Spectrum, is routinely ranked as one of the worst companies in America in customer satisfaction.

Born out of frustration in 2013, NYC Mesh isn’t a traditional business. It’s built on the backs of volunteers and donors who dedicate their time, money, bandwidth, hardware, and resources to building an alternative to the abysmal logjam that is shoddy US broadband.

NYC Mesh member and spokesperson Scott Rasmusen told Motherboard the project hopes to address the fact that between a quarter and a third of NYC residents still don’t have a broadband connection. And those that do have access are often stuck with pricey monopolies that don’t respect consumer privacy.

“NYC Mesh believes in an open, neutral, and resilient internet that is accessible to all people—no matter what their home may look like or how much they can afford,” Rasumussen said. “We believe that the best way of achieving this is to build a network that is entirely community owned and managed.”

Initially, the mesh network was powered by a single “Supernode” antenna and hardware array located at 375 Pearl Street in Manhattan. This gigabit fiber-fed antenna connects 300 buildings, where members have mounted routers on a rooftop or near a window. These local “nodes” in turn connect to an internet exchange point—without the need for a traditional ISP.

Unlike a traditional ISP, users don’t pay a fixed monthly rate, and there are no costly monthly usage caps or overage fees. A NYC Mesh rate sheet notes the project is funded by optional monthly member donations of $20 or $50 for a residential users, or $100 for a business. Users also pay $110.00 for a WiFi router and rooftop antenna, and a $50 installation fee.

Rasmussen told Motherboard project leaders do their best “to ensure that price is never prohibitory.”

At the same time, service speed takes a “best effort” approach. Available bandwidth can vary greatly depending on the overall distance from the central node antenna, and may be impacted be regional weather conditions. Customer support, like the network itself, is also a community affair, relying on the time and expertise of local volunteers.

“Our members are contributors to our community, not customers, consumers or users,” notes the project FAQ. “Being a member of our network has many benefits, including replacing your current ISP with fast, neutral, affordable, and unmonitored Internet access.”

The organization just announced it will be dramatically expanding the network starting this month, with the installation of a new Supernode 3 antenna and hardware array at Industry City in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. According to NYC Mesh, this new supernode will have 50 times the capacity of the original node, allowing the project to extend availability to Sunset Park, South Slope, Park Slope, Gowanus, Red Hook, and beyond.

NYC Mesh is just one of 750 US communities that have built some flavor of community broadband as an alternative to substandard service from private ISPs. Data shows that community operations routinely offer faster, cheaper, and better service than traditional ISPs. One community run ISP in Chattanooga was rated the best ISP in America last year.

In contrast to most private ISPs, NYC Mesh says it won’t collect or monetize your private usage data. Aside from occasionally looking at traffic headers for network troubleshooting purposes, the project says it never logs or stores customer usage activity.

Unlike many ISPs, NYC Mesh has promised that its network will always adhere to the idea of network neutrality; as in the network will never prioritize one website or service over another just to make a quick buck.

NYC Mesh is a non-profit project of the New York chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC-NY), an organization tasked with building a better, more secure internet. And it’s part of a steadily growing trend of locals taking the problem of terrible US broadband (thanks to the apathetic government officials who enable it) into their own hands.

“NYC Mesh is more than happy to support anyone interested in building a community network,” Rasmusen said. “Our website includes information about every facet of our network and how-to guides for building your own. We also offer technical training to give all people the opportunity to become community network leaders and experts.”
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/p...overage-in-nyc





Google Announces New Subsea Cable 'Equiano', Connecting Africa and Europe

Alphabet Inc’s Google on Friday announced a new subsea cable dubbed “Equiano” that will connect Africa with Europe, as it boosts its cloud computing infrastructure.

Equiano, fully funded by Google, is the company’s third private international cable.

The search engine giant, which has invested $47 billion in improving its global technology infrastructure over the last three years, said Equiano is the company’s 14th subsea cable investment globally.

“Equiano will be the first subsea cable to incorporate optical switching at the fiber-pair level, rather than the traditional approach of wavelength-level switching,” Google said in a blog post.

Google said a contract to build the cable with Alcatel Submarine Networks was signed in the fourth quarter of 2018, and the first phase of the project, connecting South Africa with Portugal, is expected to be completed in 2021.

The company in April completed the “Curie” project, its first private intercontinental cable, connecting Chile to Los Angeles.

It also announced last year the Dunant transatlantic submarine cable project connecting France and the United States. The 6,600 km cable is scheduled to come into service in 2020.

Subsea cables form the backbone of the internet by carrying 99 percent of the world’s data traffic.

Reporting by Arjun Panchadar in Bengaluru; Editing by Maju Samuel
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-a...-idUSKCN1TT1O0





Trump White House Reportedly Debating Encryption Policy Behind Closed Doors
Patrick Howell O'Neill

The latest chapter of a largely behind-the-scenes encryption fight unfolded on Wednesday when Trump administration officials held a National Security Council meeting focused on the challenges and benefits of encryption, according to a report in Politico.

One of Politico’s sources said that the meeting was split into two camps: Decide, create and publicize the administration’s position on encryption or go so far as to ask Congress for legislation to ban end-to-end encryption. That would be a huge escalation in the encryption fight and, moreover, would probably be unsuccessful due to a lack of willpower in Congress.

No decision was made by the Trump administration officials, Politico reported. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Not too long ago, encryption was a front page issue. Apple and the FBI fought an open and loud battle over encryption in 2015 and, during a campaign speech, then-candidate Donald Trump proposed a boycott of Apple that never materialized.

In the United States, the issue has become an important behind-closed-doors topic of discussion. FBI Director Chris Wray earlier this year described ongoing conversations between the federal government and technology giants about the issue of encryption.

“It can’t be a sustainable end state for there to be an entirely unfettered space that’s utterly beyond law enforcement for criminals to hide,” Wray said. “We have to figure out a way to deal with this problem.”

He continued by saying that he is “hearing increasingly that there are solutions” for strong encryption that opens the targeted data to law enforcement. However, he gave no specific examples of what that means.

The fact that these discussions are ongoing both within the White House and with Silicon Valley shows that the issue is still very much alive within the corridors of power.

Earlier this year, a court battle unfolded when the U.S. government tried to compel Facebook to decrypt Facebook Messenger’s encryption in a criminal investigation. The judge on the case, however, ruled that the details would be kept secret.

Outside of the United States, a lot has happened since encryption was in the headlines two years ago. Most notably, Australia passed an encryption law in December 2018 requiring companies to give law enforcement and security agencies access to encrypted data like Facebook’s WhatsApp or Apple’s iMessage. It’s considered a landmark test being watched closely by governments and technology companies around the world.

In Europe, Germany — a country famous for its world-leading privacy policies — is closely considering its own encryption policy at the moment. What exactly that ultimately means in Germany, Europe, and around the world, however, remains unclear.
https://gizmodo.com/trump-white-hous...icy-1835920433





UK Law Review Eyes Abusive Trends like Deepfaked Porn and Cyber Flashing
Natasha Lomas

The UK government has announced the next phase of a review of the law around the making and sharing of non-consensual intimate images, with ministers saying they want to ensure it keeps pace with evolving digital tech trends.

The review is being initiated in response to concerns that abusive and offensive communications are on the rise, as a result of it becoming easier to create and distribute sexual images of people online without their permission.

Among the issues the Law Commission will consider are so-called ‘revenge porn’, where intimate images of a person are shared without their consent; deepfaked porn, which refers to superimposing a real photograph of a person’s face onto a pornographic image or video without their consent; and cyber flashing, the unpleasant practice of sending unsolicited sexual images to a person’s phone by exploiting technologies such as Bluetooth that allow for proximity-based file sharing.

On the latter practice, the screengrab below is of one of two unsolicited messages I received as pop-ups on my phone in the space of a few seconds while waiting at a UK airport gate — and before I’d had a chance to locate the iOS master setting that actually nixes Bluetooth.

On iOS, even without accepting the AirDrop the cyberflasher is still able to send an unsolicited placeholder image with their request.

Safe to say, this example is at the tamer end of what tends to be involved. More often it’s actual dick pics fired at people’s phones, not a parrot-friendly silicone substitute…

A patchwork of UK laws already covers at least some of the offensive and abusive communications in question, such as the offence of voyeurism under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which criminalises certain non-consensual photography taken for sexual gratification — and carries a two-year maximum prison sentence (with the possibility that a perpetrator may be required to be listed on the sexual offender register); while revenge porn was made a criminal offence under section 33 of the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015.

But the government says that while it feels the law in this area is “robust”, it is keen not to be seen as complacent — hence continuing to keep it under review.

It will also hold a public consultation to help assess whether changes in the law are required.

The Law Commission published Phase 1 of their review of Abusive and Offensive Online Communications on November 1 last year — a scoping report setting out the current criminal law which applies.

The second phase, announced today, will consider the non-consensual taking and sharing of intimate images specifically — and look at possible recommendations for reform. Though it will not report for two years so any changes to the law are likely to take several years to make it onto the statute books.

Among specific issues the Law Commission will consider is whether anonymity should automatically be granted to victims of revenge porn.

Commenting in a statement, justice minister Paul Maynard said: “No one should have to suffer the immense distress of having intimate images taken or shared without consent. We are acting to make sure our laws keep pace with emerging technology and trends in these disturbing and humiliating crimes.”

Maynard added that the review builds on recent changes to toughen UK laws around revenge porn and to outlaw ‘upskirting’ in English law; aka the degrading practice of taking intimate photographs of others without consent.

“Too many young people are falling victim to co-ordinated abuse online or the trauma of having their private sexual images shared. That’s not the online world I want our children to grow up in,” added the secretary of state for digital issues, Jeremy Wright, in another supporting statement.

“We’ve already set out world-leading plans to put a new duty of care on online platforms towards their users, overseen by an independent regulator with teeth. This Review will ensure that the current law is fit for purpose as we deliver our commitment to make the UK the safest place to be online.”

The Law Commission review will begin on July 1, 2019 and report back to the government in summer 2021.

Terms of Reference will be published on the Law Commission’s website in due course.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/26/uk...yber-flashing/





These 5D Glass Discs Store 360 TB Of Data For 13.8 Billion Years
Breitenberg

With increased reliance and use of technology, people inevitably have more data. However, some of the major issues with this data is storing and backing it up. Obviously, devices such as phones and laptops don't last forever so it needs to be backed up somewhere else like a storage drive or even an optical disk. That said, the data still isn't safe and probably won't last very long due to a number of well-known issues such as disc rot and data rot. So, what can be done? Well, a near eternal storage option may be on its way to commercial production.

Eternal Data

Researchers at the University of Southampton have showcased their new nanostructured glass discs that have the ability to store digital data for billions of years. The university announced that they've managed to build a device that can store huge amounts of data on small glass discs using laser writing. It's been dubbed five-dimensional (5D) digital data because, in addition to the position of the data, the size and orientation are extremely important too. Museums, national archives, as well as libraries could all find a good use for this eternal storage on these discs.

In fact, certain data has already started to have been backed up. So far, scientists have preserved important documents such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Magna Carta, and Kings James Bible on individual discs. These ancient documents will probably outlive the human race itself now.

Capabilities

It's all very well talking about the discs, but how much can they actually store? While most people would think that storing data for such a long time means that they can only hold small amounts. Well, the truth is far from that. Each one of these glass storage discs can hold a whopping 360 terabytes of data, which is remarkable. Furthermore, they are stable at temperatures up to 1,000°C (1,832°F), and are expected to keep the data intact for 13.8 billion years at room temperature.
https://www.disclose.tv/these-5d-gla...n-years-370041





In Streaming Age, Classical Music Gets Lost in the Metadata
Ben Sisario

When Roopa Kalyanaraman Marcello, a classical music aficionado in Brooklyn, asked her Amazon Echo for some music recently, she had a specific request: the third movement of Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto.

“It kind of energizes me, motivates me to get things done,” she said.

But the Echo, a voice-activated speaker, could not find what she wanted. First it gave her the concerto’s opening movement; then, on another try, came the second movement. But not the third.

Exasperated, Ms. Kalyanaraman Marcello gave up.

“Just play something else!” she recalled saying.

Her frustration may be familiar to fans of classical music in the streaming age. The algorithms of Spotify, Apple and Amazon are carefully engineered to steer listeners to pop hits, and Schubert and Puccini can get lost in the metadata.

Classical music has always been a specialized corner of the music business, with a discerning clientele and few genuine blockbusters. But by some measures the genre has suffered in the shift to streaming. While 2.5 percent of album sales in the United States are classical music, it accounts for less than 1 percent of total streams, according to Alpha Data, a tracking service.

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Two new companies, Idagio and Primephonic, see an opportunity in the disconnect. Both are challenging the big platforms by offering streaming services devoted to classical music, with playlists that push Martha Argerich over Ariana Grande, and databases tailored to the nuances of the genre.

“The mission we are on is to turn the tide for classical music the way Spotify has done for pop,” said Thomas Steffens, the chief executive of Primephonic, which is based in Amsterdam and went online last fall.

The genre has been an awkward fit for streaming partly because of the major services’ metadata — the underlying organizational schemes for identifying titles of recordings, the personnel associated with them and other details.

For most of the music on Spotify or Apple Music, a listing of artist, track and album works fine. But critics of the status quo argue that the basic architecture of the classical genre — with nonperforming composers and works made up of multiple movements — is not suited to a system built for pop.

Search Spotify’s mobile app for “Mozart Requiem,” for example, and a confusing list of dozens of albums follows; since there is no special field for a composer, most of those albums designate Mozart as the “artist.” On Apple Music, a composer field has become standard only in recent months.

“If you have Herbert von Karajan conducting a Verdi opera with Maria Callas, who is the artist?” said Till Janczukowicz, the chief executive of Idagio, which is based in Berlin and started in 2015.

“This is not a crisis of genre,” Mr. Janczukowicz added. “It is a crisis of the packaging of an industry.”

For contemporary classical artists, metadata is not just an abstract consideration.

When the composer William Brittelle recorded his latest album, “Spiritual America,” he enlisted the Metropolitan Ensemble, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and the indie-rock band Wye Oak. But when it came time to put the album on streaming services, Mr. Brittelle said, he was told that the only way to include those collaborators was to list them all on every track — which, he said, “makes it look ridiculous.” He opted to use only his name.

“I’ve obsessed for seven years over track titles and track order and having everything sit right,” Mr. Brittelle said. “It just ruins everything to have all that information on every track.”

Primephonic and Idagio have tried to solve that problem by building more extensive databases, with extensive listings for composers, soloists, orchestras and conductors. Idagio’s data is tended by a team of 10 musicologists in Slovakia, Mr. Janczukowicz said.

Like any streaming service, Primephonic and Idagio feature colorful welcome pages with new releases, custom playlists and photos of celebrities (for those who consider Matthew Barley and Daniil Trifonov celebrities). They also offer various sorting tools to let connoisseurs sift through the voluminous listings of, say, Beethoven’s string quartets to find that one recording by that one ensemble. Primephonic even lets users search by opus number and key.

Primephonic costs $8 a month and Idagio $10 a month; both services charge more to stream music in high resolution. Neither company would disclose how many paying subscribers it has.

A report released last week by Midia Research, which studies online media, portrayed a classical market in transition, with a relatively small economic impact but wide potential. According to the report, which Idagio commissioned, classical recordings generated $384 million around the world last year. That’s a small piece of the $19.1 billion of sales revenue for all recorded music last year, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.

But the Midia report, based on a survey 8,000 people, found signs of promise. Although the average age of a classical listener was 45, 31 percent of respondents ages 25 to 34 included classical among the genres they “like listening to.”

And not everyone in the classical world is convinced that Apple, Spotify and Amazon are bad for the business. Each of those companies has a vast customer base, with the potential to steer listeners to classical tracks. Increasingly, that has happened through mood-based playlists — “Relaxing Piano,” “Intense Studying” — that intersperse classical tracks with those from other genres.

Placement on a prominent Spotify playlist helped a recording of the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata by Paul Lewis, a British pianist, reach 49 million plays, a number that plenty of pop acts would be happy with.

Those playlists “are exposing new, young audiences to classical music without them realizing initially that they are listening to classical music — they just know that they like what they are listening to,” Mark Mulligan of Midia said in an interview.

Such serendipity may be possible only if classical music exists on services alongside pop, hop-hop, country, Latin and the rest. Last year, the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo released “ARC,” a Beyoncé-style visual album of pieces by Handel and Philip Glass, illustrated by videos directed by luminaries like Tilda Swinton and Mark Romanek.

Mr. Costanzo said he was frequently pinged on Instagram when new listeners encountered those videos, often on Apple Music.

“The segregation of classical music would be a shame,” he said.

Mr. Steffens and Mr. Janczukowicz, of Primephonic and Idagio, argued that the major services’ algorithms would always nudge listeners toward pop.

“The winner-take-all economics” of online media, Mr. Steffens said, “means that if streaming doesn’t work for jazz and classical music, then those genres are just collateral damage.”

Classical record executives said they welcomed the arrival of Primephonic and Idagio, but were not necessarily displeased with the performance of their music on Apple and Spotify.

PIAS, a European company that owns the label Harmonia Mundi and works with orchestras that have their own imprints, like the Berlin Philharmonic, gets most of its listeners these days through streaming. And most of them come through Spotify and Apple.

“You can’t be unhappy with them,” said Katie Ferguson, the director of streaming strategy and business development for classical at PIAS. “They are really propping up our business.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/23/b...c-spotify.html





Spotify Wants a Refund on Overpaid Royalties to US Songwriters, Report Says

It's trying to make up for a new accounting change to last year's rates.
Sean Keane, Joan E. Solsman

Spotify doesn't like a Copyright Royalty Board ruling, but reportedly wants to use an aspect of it to claim refunds from publishers.

As major music streaming services appeal a royalty rate decision, Spotify is taking things one step further: The world's biggest streaming music service is reportedly seeking a refund for overpayments made to songwriters and publishers last year, Music Business Worldwide reported.

Last year, a royalty rate-setting panel in the US, called the Copyright Royalty Board, ruled that a particular kind of royalty paid to songwriters and publishers should rise 44% or more for 2018 through 2022. The board finalized that rate -- called a mechanical royalty -- earlier this year. Then streaming services like Spotify, Amazon, Google and Pandora appealed the payment increases in March.

Now Spotify is saying it paid too much last year and wants a refund, according to Music Business Worldwide.

Music royalty rates are the byzantine system that pays your favorite artists and songwriters whenever you stream or buy their music. Royalties are also streaming services' biggest expense by far -- often so large that profitability is out of reach for many services. Recording artists (the people actually performing on your favorite tracks) and labels typically receive the lion's share of royalties, but songwriters (the people who write musical compositions) and publishers get a smaller cut too.

The CRB rules say the annual streaming royalty rate for US songwriters and publishers between 2018 and 2022 should be set by choosing the highest outcome of three different models, with one model based on a flat fee per subscriber, Consequence of Sound noted.

But Spotify's student discount and family plan bundles add a layer of complexity. The Copyright Royalty Board's rules say a family plan is be worth 1.5 subscribers per month and a student plan is equal to half a subscriber per month. The family plan lets six people subscribe for $15 a month, while students pay $5 a month. (A regular subscriber pays $10.)

The argument by Spotify seems to be that it didn't take some subscribers into account and overpaid publishers. It's not seeking the 2018 money back immediately, but "offered to extend the recoupment period" until the end of 2019, according to Music Business Worldwide.
https://www.cnet.com/news/spotify-wa...s-report-says/





When You Listen, They Watch: Pre-Saving Albums Can Allow Labels to Track Users on Spotify
Micah Singleton

Users who “pre-save” an upcoming release to their Spotify accounts may be sharing more personal data with the act’s label than they realize.

To pre-save music, which adds a release to a user’s library as soon as it comes out, Spotify users click through and approve permissions that give the label far more account access than the streaming giant normally grants them -- enough to track what they listen to, change what artists they follow and potentially even control their music streaming remotely.

This lets labels access some of the data that streaming companies usually guard for themselves -- which they want in order to compete with the streaming giants on a more even playing field. But at a time when the policies of online giants like Google and Facebook has made online privacy a contentious issue, music’s pre-saving process could begin to spark concern among consumers, and perhaps even regulators.

Labels also ask for far more permissions than they need. Spotify users who, for example, tried to pre-save the Little Mix single “Bounce Back” from links shared by the act or its label, Sony Music, were prompted to agree that Spotify could allow Sony to “view your Spotify account data,” “view your activity on Spotify” and “take actions in Spotify on your behalf.” The exact permissions Sony requests are only visible to those who click through to the corresponding submenus, so users may not fully understand all that they’re agreeing to -- or that the changes apply to their account unless they change it on Spotify’s website.

“I’m not sure if most people realize that,” says John Tinker, a media analyst with Gabelli & Company. “There’s nothing they’re doing that’s illegal -- it’s just that no one ever actually realizes when they sign off on these things what they mean.”

The only access labels need to pre-save music to a Spotify account is permission to “add and remove items in your Library.” But the submenus for Sony’s Little Mix campaign asked users for 16 additional permissions, including to “control Spotify on your device” and “stream and control Spotify on your other devices.” In its campaign for Chris Brown’s new single “No Guidance,” featuring Drake, Sony asked to “upload images to personalize your profile or playlist cover” and manage who you follow on Spotify. (Spotify, Sony and the other major labels declined to comment for this story.)

The exact permissions requested vary among campaigns, but Sony often asks for the most, according to over a dozen pre-save campaigns reviewed by Billboard. Universal Music Group’s pre-save campaigns usually ask for 10 additional permissions; in its campaign for “Ritual” -- the recent single from Tiësto, Jonas Blue and Rita Ora -- it requested access to the user’s birthdate. Warner Music Group routinely asks for 10 additional permissions, including full control over private playlists in the campaign for the Black Star Dancing EP by Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds. (All three major labels adhere worldwide to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, which mandates that users be allowed to see the data companies keep about them and, in some cases, ask for it to be deleted.)

“These permissions strike me as expansive and beyond what a reasonable consumer would expect,” says Frank Pasquale, a law professor at the University of Maryland who studies the ethical implementation of technology. “On the other hand, the larger picture is that as the Facebooks, Googles and Amazons of the world get so much data about people, every other company is just going to do the same. I can see why [the labels are] doing it: because they fear if they aren’t as aggressive as Google and Facebook they’re going to lose a competitive advantage.”

Pre-save campaigns, which boost the first-week listening that can drive strong chart debuts, quickly became a music business marketing staple after Spotify added the feature as part of a 2017 update to its API, the software that allows online programs to share data. But the feature has also become a way for major labels, and sometimes other rights holders, to get data on listeners. In some cases, labels could potentially even have the right to control playback on devices running Spotify, like Sonos speakers, although Billboard hasn’t seen evidence of that happening. It does not appear that third parties can change or cancel subscriptions or access a user’s payment information, according to the permission requests reviewed by Billboard.

Major labels are not the only parties who can ask for these kinds of permissions. Independent singer-songwriter Ingrid Michaelson is using the digital marketing company feature.fm in the pre-save campaign for her upcoming album, Stranger Songs, and asking for 12 additional permissions beyond those needed to pre-save the album -- including access to users’ email addresses and control over private playlists.

Pre-saving provides a service to fans, and labels do need a certain amount of access to user accounts to provide it. But Spotify has made it hard to see the extent of permissions that labels ask for, and it hasn’t taken actions to restrict the kinds of information third parties can request -- or what they can potentially do with it. In some cases, for example, when users give a label permission to view their email addresses, it adds them to an artist mailing list. This gives labels the same kind of information about technology users that many online companies already have, but it’s unclear whether users will accept the same kind of tracking practices from them -- especially at a time when such practices are attracting attention in the media and among politicians.

Other streaming services have different policies. For example, Apple Music does not share any identifying information on subscribers, in line with the company’s approach to user privacy. Apple does allow third parties to view users’ music libraries and recently played songs; it also allows third parties to create and modify user playlists with permission, although it makes clearer what access companies are asking for. It does not offer a way for an outside entity to get control over an account or gain access to personal information like an email address.

At a time when media coverage and users are focusing more on online privacy, the data collection practices of streaming services and rights holders haven’t received much attention. That could change soon, however, as companies -- which have in the past sought to cover themselves legally by asking for the widest range of permissions -- shift to asking for only what’s necessary. On May 28, The Washington Post reported that Spotify was among the many iPhone apps that use data trackers to pass along information about users or devices to third parties in the middle of the night, while users sleep.

“I think Spotify could do a lot better, and they ought to be clearer about the nature of consent,” says Pasquale. “Individual consumer action will change nothing: Most people are just too busy to hear about this problem and act on their own. Regulators have to step in and be aggressive in terms of punishing things that are clearly unfair or deceptive and making sure there are some basic standards that are met.”
https://www.billboard.com/articles/b...-users-spotify





Piracy Is Back
Brian Feldman

For a while there, it seemed like piracy was over. The major media conglomerates had figured it out. Thanks to broadband internet and adequate streaming technology, it was easier to access movies and TV and music legally than to turn to peer-to-peer file-sharing. Just a few years after it seemed to threaten the entire entertainment industry, piracy had become the domain of obsessives and paranoiacs — cinephiles and audiophiles who wanted to possess local copies of high-quality media that couldn’t be wrenched away at any time by corporate overlords — while even the most dedicated former movie torrenters were happy with Netflix and its ilk.

Streaming media has been successful. But possibly it’s been too successful. Where there was once only Netflix and grainy clips with a Divx watermark on YouTube, there are now dozens of streaming services in operation or slated to launch soon. I’m just gonna try and name some off the top of my head: Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, Spotify, Apple Music, Disney+, Apple TV+, Quibi, CrunchyRoll, the Criterion Channel, YouTube Red, Amazon Prime Video, Amazon Prime Music, Tidal, CBS All Access, Crackle, Sling, PlayStation Vue, ESPN+, DC Universe, Aereo (RIP), Seeso (RIP), VRV, Boomerang. These services generally cost between $5 and $15 a month, and if you were going to pay for all of them, you’d end up paying about as much as a monthly cable-TV subscription.

You know what’s free? Illegally downloaded movies. Piracy is back.

For years, consumers griped about cable bundling — having to pay high prices for hundreds of channels that they never watched in order to get the handful they did watch. The unrealized dream was that at some point cable companies would relent and offer à la carte pricing, in which customers only paid for the channels they wanted. It appears now that the streaming market saturation has led to a refracted version of this problem, show bundling. Fans don’t want all of a streaming service — they only want certain shows on it.

Yesterday, thousands of Netflix subscribers who need to get out more and try new things were distraught to learn that the NBC sitcom The Office would be leaving Netflix at the end of 2020. Cue that one GIF of Michael Scott yelling “Nooo!”

There it is. On Twitter, Netflix (which is a website and not a person) said it was sad that NBC would do this. “We’re sad that NBC has decided to take The Office back for its own streaming platform — but members can binge watch the show to their hearts’ content ad-free on Netflix until January 2021.” In other words, please please please don’t cancel your subscription until 2021.

It seems like Netflix is caught in a catch-22: it can’t stand to lose mega-popular shows that help it retain users, but it makes more money when it owns programs entirely. That’s why Netflix’s front page and push notifications usually advertise its own productions, Netflix Originals, rather than ones it licenses from elsewhere, even though its most popular shows are licensed fare of the Office and Friends vintage. (Catch-22, by the way, is now streaming on Hulu.)

Everything is splintering. Now if you want to both keep habitually rewatching The Office and keep up on, I dunno, The Crown, you’ll have to pay two subscription fees, instead of one. Disney’s upcoming streaming service will be the only place to catch Avengers: Endgame, which is unfortunate for anyone who might’ve gotten sucked in by watching Avengers: Infinity War, currently on Netflix. One subscription could, within a year, potentially become three — or more, as every studio and distributor who missed the first streaming boom yanks its IP back to each respective mothership and builds out its own service.

So you could pay for a dozen different services to try and consume every new series and album and movie you’re interested in legally. Or you could pay for it on home video, if it’s even available (The Office is $84.99 on Amazon right now). Or you could just pirate it.

Look, I’m not saying piracy is good, or even justifiable. I’m noting that the pop-culture industry is once again re-creating the conditions that allowed piracy to flourish in the first place. Piracy declined because the legal options for consuming media became easier than the illegal options. iTunes aggregated all of music within one storefront and eventually sold it DRM-free, and it made digital film rentals cheap. Before it started making its own stuff, Netflix aggregated thousands of films and shows and made them watchable at the push of a button (between 2010 and 2018, the number of films available on Netflix dropped 40 percent). Now the legal options for media consumption are once again becoming overly burdensome in both a financial and logistical sense. Even paying for a cable subscription won’t fix it. The best centralized place to find media is, once again, through piracy.

When every company starts making their own streaming service. pic.twitter.com/t6sQSCrIij
— Tom Oliver (@TommyOliverSays) April 16, 2019


And before you shed a tear for the streaming companies, you should consider that they are victims of their own success. One could argue that the binge-watch culture that Netflix perpetuated has created an environment in which paying a monthly subscription fee again seems insane. Netflix releases original programming at an unsustainable clip now. You spend a weekend consuming an entire season and then it’s on to the next one. Almost nothing ever sticks, or matters. Binge-watch culture has devalued television to a substantial degree and it has the cascading effect of making streaming appear free of charge. Because streaming-media consumption is so ephemeral, and feels like it costs nothing, consumers might ask themselves “Why not just torrent only the programming I want?” if they think it’s not hurting anyone.

“But piracy is hurting them,” you say. Maybe! This line of thinking often relies on the idea that each instance of piracy represents one lost sale of the same item. This is a fallacy. In fact, the most active pirates often spend the most on legal content. Sometimes piracy is a “try before you buy” kind of thing, sometimes people just prefer having local files over the endless buffering of a stream. Regardless, the idea that online piracy is identical to theft is speculation at best, and so it’s difficult to argue that Netflix or HBO or Hulu or Spotify or whoever is missing money it would otherwise have.

i'm starting a feminist program where i teach young girls to torrent without their boyfriend's help
— kelly (@kelibacy) June 22, 2019


Though piracy might make a comeback, it does so in a substantially different online environment than the one at the turn of the millennium. The hard lesson that the film and music industries learned the first time around is that fighting piracy in court is a foolhardy endeavor. You cannot scare people into not pirating things, you can only offer them better alternatives. Perhaps the bundle makes a comeback, but unlike traditional cable, the costs don’t become bloated and prohibitive. But that’s wishful thinking.

Furthermore, Gen Z and beyond might not even be familiar with the particulars of how piracy works (that The Office, a show that aired on NBC for years before Netflix licensed it, is thought of as a Netflix show feels very telling). Piracy never really went away, but The Pirate Bay, though unkillable, feels more like a nostalgia item these days. Knowing where to find the right album zips on the right file-locker sites feels like arcane, niche knowledge passed down from parent to child. Peer-to-peer file sharing doesn’t really exist on mobile, the dominant form of computing and media consumption among younger generations. Whether the streaming services will be able to anticipate this cyclical shift and know how to fight against it remains to be seen. It feels undeniable though that as the media industry expands and separates, piracy will be the thing that helps people tie everything together.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/...y-is-back.html

















Until next week,

- js.



















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