Home developer built an ISP because state law restricts muni broadband

Small ISP offers $80 gigabit service on a Tennessee mountaintop.

Construction at the Jasper Highlands development. (credit: Jasper Highlands)

Tennessee is at the center of a nationwide battle over whether cities and towns should be allowed to build broadband networks without facing restrictions that help private ISPs avoid competition from the public sector.

But with a lawsuit and legislative battle over a Tennessee state law still pending, one home developer decided to build his own ISP. John "Thunder" Thornton of Chattanooga needed to install high-speed Internet for "his mountaintop residential development in Marion County," but was unable to get affordable service from AT&T or Charter Communications, a Chattanooga Times Free Press article said yesterday. He also couldn't get service from a Chattanooga electric utility that also provides Internet because the state law prevents it from expanding to nearby areas that lack fast, affordable service.

To solve the problem, Thornton "spent more than $400,000 to build his own fiber network and link it with a power cooperative in Stevenson, Ala., where fast broadband is available," the article said. He announced yesterday that his Jasper Highlands community in Jasper, Tennessee, "is now able to offer high-speed, gigabit-per-second Internet service for all home sites in his 3,000-acre complex."

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Music Industry: DMCA Copyright Law is Obsolete and Harmful

A coalition of 400 artists and various music groups including the RIAA are calling on Congress to reform existing copyright law. The DMCA is obsolete, dysfunctional and harmful, they claim, calling for stronger measures against the ongoing piracy troubles they face.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

cassetteSigned into law by President Bill Clinton in 1998, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) aimed to ready copyright law for the digital age.

The law introduced a safe harbor for Internet services, meaning that they can’t be held liable for their pirating users as long as they properly process takedown notices and deal with repeat infringers.

However, in recent years copyright holders, Internet services and the public in general have signaled various shortcomings. On the one hand, rightsholders believe that the law doesn’t do enough to protect creators, while the opposing side warns of increased censorship and abuse.

To hear the growing concerns from all sides the U.S. Copyright Office launched a public consultation in order to evaluate the impact and effectiveness of the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions.

A few hours ago a broad coalition of 400 artists and music groups, including the RIAA, Music Publishers Association and A2IM submitted their response. The 70-page brief provides a comprehensive overview of what the music industry sees as the DMCA shortcomings while calling for significant reform.

“The Music Community’s list of frustrations with the DMCA is long,” the groups write, adding that “a law that might have made sense in 1998 is now not only obsolete but actually harmful.”

The music industry’s comments focus heavily on search engines, Google in particular. In recent years music companies have sent hundreds of millions of takedown notices to Google, but despite these efforts, copyright infringing material is still topping many search results.

“The notice-and-takedown system has proved an ineffective tool for the volume of unauthorized digital music available, something akin to bailing out an ocean with a teaspoon,” they write.

“Copyright owners should not be required to engage in the endless game of sending repeat takedown notices to protect their works, simply because another or the
same infringement of the initially noticed work appears at a marginally different URL than the first time.”

The music groups are calling for advanced technologies and processes to ensure that infringing content doesn’t reappear elsewhere once it’s removed, a so-called “notice and stay down” approach.

This includes audio fingerprinting technologies, hash-matching technologies, meta-data correlations and the removal of links that point to content which has been taken down already.

“The current standard of ‘URL by URL’ takedown does not make sense in a world where there is an infinite supply of URLs,” the groups add.

Another problem with the DMCA, according to the music companies, is that the safe harbor provision also protects sites that are clearly profiting from copyright infringement.

Describing it as a “get out of jail free” card for many dubious sites, RIAA and the others demand change.

“At its worst, the DMCA safe harbors have become a business plan for profiting off of stolen content; at best, the system is a de facto government subsidy enriching some digital services at the expense of creators. This almost 20 year-old, 20th Century law should be updated,” they write.

The music industry groups note that these and other issues have turned the DMCA law into a “dysfunctional relic,” and are calling on Congress to take action and come up with a copyright law that better protects their interests.

The anti-DMCA comments submitted to the U.S. Government are the strongest we’ve seen thus far, but more responses are expected to be published after the deadline passes today.

Where most copyright holders call for stricter anti-piracy measures, many Internet services and activists are expected to focus on the increase on DMCA abuse and censorship.

Earlier this week a Google-funded report revealed that close to 30% of all DMCA requests it receives are “questionable” and the EFF previously called on the public to share their DMCA horror stories.

In addition, Fight for the Future just launched a campaign page, helping the public to inform the Copyright Office that DMCA abuses should be stopped. The campaign generated over 50,000 comments in a day, ‘crashing’ the Government’s website.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.

“I didn’t mean to” doesn’t count for much in some societies

The significance of the moral intent behind an action is weighed differently.

"I had to! The bear attacked me first!" (credit: flickr user: Sheila Sund)

Apologies often march hand-in-hand with a claim about intent—"But I didn't mean it like that!" Even our legal systems recognize this idea. We differentiate between accidentally killing a person (manslaughter) and intentional, planned killing (first-degree murder). The intent of a person clearly matters in how we assess their offenses. And if someone means to do something wrong, it’s judged more harshly when it’s not just an accident, even if the outcome is identical.

Some researchers who study human systems of morality think that the importance of moral intent might even be a universal across all human societies. We have reams of evidence showing that people take intent seriously when they’re weighing up moral transgressions: psychological experiments, brain imaging, and even surveys of legal systems. But most of this evidence comes from what researchers call WEIRD societies: Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, and Democratic.

It’s not really possible to make claims about features that are universal to all humans unless we study a representative sample of humans. Perhaps something about living in large industrial societies, with their education systems and distribution of resources, leads to us WEIRDos to think about moral intent in a particular way. And because these societies interact a lot, ideas can easily spread between them.

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Microsoft’s CaptionBot describes what’s happening in pictures (or at least it tries)

Microsoft’s CaptionBot describes what’s happening in pictures (or at least it tries)

This week Microsoft introduced Seeing AI, a research project that uses a smartphone or Pivothead smart glass app to describe what’s happening in the world to help a blind person read signs or menus, identify the emotional state of people in a room, and more. While Seeing AI isn’t yet available to the public, Microsoft […]

Microsoft’s CaptionBot describes what’s happening in pictures (or at least it tries) is a post from: Liliputing

Microsoft’s CaptionBot describes what’s happening in pictures (or at least it tries)

This week Microsoft introduced Seeing AI, a research project that uses a smartphone or Pivothead smart glass app to describe what’s happening in the world to help a blind person read signs or menus, identify the emotional state of people in a room, and more. While Seeing AI isn’t yet available to the public, Microsoft […]

Microsoft’s CaptionBot describes what’s happening in pictures (or at least it tries) is a post from: Liliputing

After Verizon FiOS changeover to Frontier, some customers lose service

Outages hit California, Florida, and Texas after “technical issue.”

(credit: Down Detector)

Verizon FiOS and DSL networks in California, Florida, and Texas were transferred to Frontier Communications today, completing a $10.54 billion sale announced last year. Although Frontier promised it would be "ready to go day one," there were some problems that left business and residential customers temporarily without service.

There was a "technical issue" involving the integration of systems early in the morning, Frontier spokesperson Brigid Smith told Ars. She did not provide specifics on the cause of the problem or the number of customers affected but said it primarily disrupted service to enterprise and carrier customers in the three states. However, residents have been reporting problems as well through Twitter and the Down Detector website.

The technical problem was resolved at 9:30am ET, Smith said, but customer reports indicate that some have remained without Internet access into the early afternoon. In Florida, an unrelated fiber cut in Tampa caused further outages, but the problems in Texas and California were apparently due only to the system integration mishap.

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Steam hacker says more vulnerabilities will be found, but not by him

“It looks like their website hasn’t been updated for years.”

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

The teenager who grabbed headlines earlier this week for hacking a fake game listing on to Valve's Steam store says there are "definitely" more vulnerabilities to be found in the popular game distribution service. But he won't be the one to find them, thanks to what he sees as Valve "giv[ing] so little of a shit about people's [security] findings."

Ruby Nealon, a 16-year-old university student from England, says that probing various corporate servers for vulnerabilities has been a hobby of his since the age of 11. His efforts came to the attention of Valve (and the wider world) after an HTML-based hack let him post a game called "Watch paint dry" on Steam without Valve's approval over the weekend.

Once that exploit was fixed and publicized, Nealon quickly discovered a second Steam exploit, which Steam has since fixed. This one took advantage of a cross-site scripting hole to hijack a Steam admin's authentication cookie through Valve's own administrative Steam Depot page. Before it was reported and patched, this exploit could have given attackers unprecedented control of Steam's backend, basically letting them pretend to be a Valve administrator.

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Allflicks: Netflix Deutschland bietet 1.550 Filme und Serien an

Golem.de liegen inoffizielle Zahlen zum Umfang des deutschen Angebots von Netflix vor. Nach starken Kürzungen in den USA wurde hierzulande die Anzahl der Filme und Serien nur geringfügig verringert. (Netflix, Streaming)

Golem.de liegen inoffizielle Zahlen zum Umfang des deutschen Angebots von Netflix vor. Nach starken Kürzungen in den USA wurde hierzulande die Anzahl der Filme und Serien nur geringfügig verringert. (Netflix, Streaming)

Android for Work overhauls setup process, now possible for mere mortals

Setup of Google’s dual-persona system goes from 14 pages to a single click.

Android for Work is Android's built-in dual-persona system for enterprises and small businesses. For Google Apps subscribers, the feature allows users to access separate apps and data for work and personal usage. This allows users to have a "Work Gmail" app and "Personal Gmail" app, for instance.

The biggest negative we found in our review of Android for Work was the ridiculously complicated setup process. It involved ticking checkboxes all over the Google Apps Dashboard and even copying and pasting security tokens from one part of the dashboard to another. Google seems to agree that the process was a bit much—setup for Android for Work has been overhauled and now happens with one click.

Google's blog post comes out pretty strongly against the old system, saying, "No longer must admins complete fifteen steps spread across different pages in the admin console, cutting and pasting security tokens, to set up Android for Work." The prerequisite Mobile Management Setup is an easy one-step setup process now, too. Just press the "Manage now" button and it will automatically enforce sensible policies like a lock screen and remote wipe.

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Layer-2-Bitstrom: Bundesnetzagentur bestimmt alternativen Zugang zum Vectoring

Die Telekom muss beim Vectoring ein neues Vorleistungsprodukt bieten. Layer-2-Bitstrom über Ethernet könne den direkten Zugang zur letzten Meile nicht ersetzen, kritisiert der Breko. Durch die langen Fristen müsse auch in Zukunft bis zu drei Wochen auf schnelle Internetanschlüsse gewartet werden. (Vectoring, DSL)

Die Telekom muss beim Vectoring ein neues Vorleistungsprodukt bieten. Layer-2-Bitstrom über Ethernet könne den direkten Zugang zur letzten Meile nicht ersetzen, kritisiert der Breko. Durch die langen Fristen müsse auch in Zukunft bis zu drei Wochen auf schnelle Internetanschlüsse gewartet werden. (Vectoring, DSL)

Theranos blood tests often wildly wrong and may be shut down by feds

Report shows tests fail even internal company standards.

Founder and CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes at TEDMED 2014. (credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBvzKp0AERE)

Late Thursday, federal regulators released a redacted 121-page inspection report of a Newark, California Theranos facility, which revealed that the company’s high-profile finger-prick blood tests failed quality control checks nearly 30 percent of the time.

Theranos and its CEO, Elizabeth Holmes, made waves last year with claims that they could carry out more than 200 medical tests with their Edison devices using just a few drops of blood from a finger prick—rather than a full vein draw taken by a needle. With promises that the cheap and easy finger-prick tests could revolutionize medical diagnostics, the company was valued at $9 billion.

However, since the initial buzz, the company has been hit with a series of questions, criticisms, and federal regulatory snags surrounding the accuracy and validity of its tests. In the latest setback, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) released a redacted inspection report that seems to substantiate concerns and whistleblower reports of the Edison’s failings.

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