industryterm:telecommunications services

Facebook is unfixable. We need a nonprofit, public-spirited replacement.
▻https://boingboing.net/2018/04/06/utterly-zucked.html

The corruption and surveillance culture of Facebook is baked in deep and can never be removed; if you doubt it, just peruse a sampling of their patent filings, which are like Black Mirror fanfic written by lawyers.

Tim Wu (previously) points out that sites on the scale of Facebook — like Wikipedia — deliver value to titanic, global audiences at a fraction of the cost of Facebook’s operating budget. When you take out the spying, the sleaze, the giant paydays for execs and investors, it’s a tractable proposition to run Facebook without Facebook, Inc.

Another “alt-Facebook” could be a nonprofit that uses that status to signal its dedication to better practices, much as nonprofit hospitals and universities do. Wikipedia is a nonprofit, and it manages nearly as much traffic as Facebook, on a much smaller budget. An “alt-Facebook” could be started by Wikimedia, or by former Facebook employees, many of whom have congregated at the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit for those looking to change Silicon Valley’s culture. It could even be funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was created in reaction to the failures of commercial television and whose mission includes ensuring access to “telecommunications services that are commercial free and free of charge.”

When a company fails, as Facebook has, it is natural for the government to demand that it fix itself or face regulation. But competition can also create pressure to do better. If today’s privacy scandals lead us merely to install Facebook as a regulated monopolist, insulated from competition, we will have failed completely. The world does not need an established church of social media.

#seenthis ?!?

What Will Really Happen if the FCC Abandons Net Neutrality ?
▻http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/net-neutrality-debate

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/022117_netneutrality.jpeg

Article intéressant parce qu’il donne la parole aux opposants à la neutralité. Mais à trop vouloir jouer au centre, on finit par prendre le point de vue des dominants.

Supporters often link net neutrality to free speech and unfettered, equal access to the internet. They also want stricter rules to curb the conduct of ISPs. “Removal of the net neutrality rules could entirely take down the internet as a free and open source of information,” said Jennifer Golbeck, a professor at the University of Maryland, on the Knowledge@Wharton show on SiriusXM channel 111. “It’s going to be more corporate control over the content we see … potentially not just favoring things that benefit [ISPs] financially but favoring them politically.”

But critics say that too much regulation dampens innovation and investments in the internet, which has thrived for decades without formal net neutrality rules. For example, net neutrality would tamp down on innovations such as T-Mobile’s “Binge On” service, which lets customers stream video from Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and other sites without counting it against their data buckets, said Christopher Yoo, professor of law, communication and computer and information science at the University of Pennsylvania, on the radio show. Moreover, the order brings back the FTC as the antitrust enforcer of ISP behavior, protecting consumer interests and banning deceptive business practices. (Listen to a podcast of the radio show featuring Yoo and Golbeck using the player above.)

As providers of information services, ISPs were much more lightly regulated than telecommunications services — such as the old Ma Bell. However, the FCC did adopt policies to preserve free internet access and usage and curb abuses. In 2004, FCC Chairman Michael Powell under President George W. Bush set out four principles of internet freedom: the freedom to access lawful content, use applications, attach personal devices to the network and obtain service plan information.

In 2010, under Obama’s first FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, the agency’s Open Internet Order adopted anti-blocking and anti-discrimination rules after finding out that Comcast throttled BitTorrent, a bandwidth-intensive, peer-to-peer site where users shared files of TV shows, movies or other content. Faulhaber says Comcast made the mistake of “targeting a particular upstream company. That you can’t do. If you want to control traffic, you have to do it in a much less discriminatory way.”

But the 2010 order, which also required ISPs to disclose their network management practices, performance and commercial terms, was vacated by a federal court in 2014 after Verizon sued the FCC. The court said the FCC did not have the authority to act because ISPs are not regulated like common telephone carriers.

This ruling led to the 2015 order by Wheeler that reclassified ISPs like landline phone companies, giving the agency the power to regulate many things, including prices set by broadband providers, although this was set aside. The order also specified the no-blocking and no-discrimination of traffic, and banned paid prioritization, which would give faster internet lanes to companies that pay for it. And it crafted internet conduct standards that ISPs must follow. Last year, an appellate court upheld this order.

The current proposal by Pai rolls back Wheeler’s order, and more. It classifies ISPs back under information services. It allows paid prioritization. It also punts the policing of any ISP blocking and discriminatory behavior to the FTC to be investigated on a case-by-case basis. It dismantles Wheeler’s internet conduct standards because they are “vague and expansive.” But the proposed order does adopt transparency rules, requiring ISPs to disclose information about their practices to the FCC and the public.

For ISPs, the issue is not so much net neutrality as it is about Title II. “All of the major ISPs like Comcast and AT&T are on the record saying that they support the idea of net neutrality, but they just oppose the legal classification of broadband as a regulated telecommunications service,” Werbach says. “I wouldn’t expect to see any dramatic changes in the companies’ practices near term. They’re going to wait and see how this all plays out, and they’re also not going to do something that will provoke significant backlash and pressure for more regulation.”

During her radio show appearance, Golbeck noted that the danger of fast lanes is that smaller websites that cannot afford to pay the ISP could be left behind. Research shows that “even delays of less than a second in serving up content [will make people] bail from your site and go someplace else.” Conversely, she said, if ISPs speed up access to popular sites like Amazon and Netflix because they pay, “it inhibits the ability for other new startup sites to compete.”

#Neutralité_internet

Warning: for Windows systems: important spread of #WannaCry (#Wcry) ransomware

▻http://thehackernews.com/2017/05/wannacry-ransomware-unlock.html?m=1
▻https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/05/an-nsa-derived-ransomware-worm-is-shutting-down-computers-worldwide

The malware/worm is causing disruptions at banks, hospitals, telecommunications services, train stations, and other mission-critical organisations in multiple countries, including the UK, Spain, Germany, and Turkey. Telefonica, FedEx, and the UK government’s National Health Service (NHS) have been hit. Operations were cancelled, x-rays, test results and patient records became unavailable and phones did not work.

The ransomware completely encrypts all your files and render them unusable. They ask you to pay some money to get the decryption key. ($300 to $600 worth in bitcoins). Paying does not guarantee you will get a decryption key though.

The malware spreads through social engineering e-mails.
Be careful with any attachments you receive from unknown sources (and even known sources). Make sure the files are sent intentionally.
Watch out for .pdf or .hta files, or links received via e-mail that point to .pdf or .hta files.

More than 45.000 computers worldwide have already been infected, but there appears to be a kill switch, i.e. a way to stop its spreading.
As one of the first operations, the malware tries to connect to the website www.iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com. It doesn’t actually download anything there, just tries to connect. If the connection succeeds, the program terminates.

This can be seen as a kind of kill switch provision, or perhaps it had some particular reason. Whichever it is, the domain has now been sinkholed and the host in question now resolves to an IP address that hosts a website. Therefore, nothing will happen on any new systems that runs the malware. This will of course not help anyone already infected.

Microsoft has released a patch to block the malware on Windows machines:

MS17-010
▻https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms17-010.aspx

It is important to apply the patch because other variants of the malware can exploit the same vulnerability and/or use a different domain name check.

Nice technical analysis of the worm:

▻https://blog.malwarebytes.com/threat-analysis/2017/05/the-worm-that-spreads-wanacrypt0r

And more technical info about the worm itself: (careful)

▻https://gist.github.com/rain-1/989428fa5504f378b993ee6efbc0b168

typedef struct _wc_file_t {
char     sig[WC_SIG_LEN]     // 64 bit signature WANACRY!
uint32_t keylen;             // length of encrypted key
uint8_t  key[WC_ENCKEY_LEN]; // AES key encrypted with RSA
uint32_t unknown;            // usually 3 or 4, unknown
uint64_t datalen;            // length of file before encryption, obtained from GetFileSizeEx
uint8_t *data;               // Ciphertext Encrypted data using AES-128 in CBC mode
} wc_file_t;

#malware #worm #ransomware #NSA #Shadow_Broker #EternalBlue