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NEWS ANALYSIS: The worlds largest social network, which has been envious of YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo and other video providers for years, has set the table for its own online television network.

Facebook not only has its users complete attention for news, social networking, games, instant messaging, email, video streaming and a dozen other use cases, it now wants their time in front of ads as a television network.

The worlds largest social network, which has been envious of YouTube, Netflix, Vimeo and other video providers for years, has set the table for its own online television network.

Earlier this year, Facebook reportedlyalthough it never confirmed this publiclyentered the market for discovering and buying content. According to The Hollywood Reporter and covered here in eWEEK, Facebook decided to pick up a canceled MTV show called Loosely Exactly Nicole, from Nicole Byer, creator of the popular Girl Code show. Nicole was canceled after one low-rated season (about 360,000 total viewers, dwindling to less than 150,000) on MTV.

Saw Potential in Former MTV Show

Nonetheless, Facebook saw potential in Nicole, and it was among the first news items about a network-show acquisition that leaked out. Theres more: Facebook apparently is looking at about six genres as focus areas for half-hour shows: sports, science, pop culture, lifestyle, gaming and teens; these will likely stream as weekly series.

Now that type of content, when it becomes available, will have a place to nest and grow. On Aug. 10, Facebook launched a new section of the network called Watch, as a specific home for video.

Watch will be available on mobile, on desktop and laptop, and in Facebook TV apps. It is basically a redesign of Facebooks first video tab, reconfigured in order to keep viewers watching for longer period of time and hopefully to return regularly to view shows. The concept is that when users open Facebook Watch, the most recent episodes of their favorite shows will be there waiting for them, so they can finish them or binge many shows when they feel like it.

Most Facebook users now see videos secondarily when they scroll past a friends post. YouTube, on the other hand, is a destination specifically for watching videos. Facebook obviously is seeing its own virtual television network it as a whole new advertising income stream.

Rolling Out Watch to Limited Number of Users at First

The company said it was rolling out Watch to a limited group of users in the United States before a wider release in the future. No general release date is known at this time.

Heres how Facebook itself described the limited launch Aug. 10:

Gear up for Watch! It is a new platform for all creators, publishers and social media influencers to find an audience, build a community of passionate fans, and earn money for their work on Facebook. We believe our Facebook shows will be successful, particularly because:

(1) Our shows engage fans and the sports community. For example NOW NBA Publicity Studio publishes a daily show where we make and share videos together with our fans from around the world. The NOW stands for Nationally Or Worldwide. The Watchlist makes it easy for our fans to catch every days episode.

(2) We have live shows that connect directly with our fans. We use a combination of recorded and live episodes to connect with our fans and answer questions in real time.

(3) We also have shows that follow a narrative arc and those that have a consistent theme.

(4) Finally, we have live events and rallies that bring communities together while connecting with friends and fellow fans on the Facebook platform.

More Specifics on Types of Content

More detail from Facebooks Director of Products Daniel Danker, who covered this in an Aug. 10 blogpost:

Facebook, with its 2 billion-plus international membership, undoubtedly is looking at that huge number of people to drive its online video viewershipand then talk about shows during or afterward, still on the network. The tools are all right there, theyre familiar, and they generally work well.

That will make the Facebook experience stand out from YouTube and Netflix, even though those, too, are social networks to an extent.

With Netflix, Amazon Prime, YouTube and other over the top (OTT) internet video and television services already maneuvering to get into mainstream cable networksComcast and AT&T come immediately to mindit may only be a matter of time before other major IT product and service companies such as Apple, Microsoft, LinkedIn and others come up with their own networks filled with their own original content.

Excerpt from:
Facebook Launches Social Network Assault on TV with Watch (Update) - Gears Of Biz

Sugar Grove, West Virginia was, by the accounts of its residents, a fine place to live until the Pentagon shuttered the sprawling naval base that sustained the town for decades leaving it with a state secret as its sole remaining attraction. A new documentary film by director Elaine McMillion Sheldon, a longtime chronicler of West Virginian life, visitsSugar Grove after the base was decommissioned and being auctionedoff, and traces the abiding shadow of a nearby National Security Agency facility still looming over the town.

The film is embedded above.

Antennae at the NSA listening post, codenamed TIMBERLINE, were built to capture Soviet satellite messages as they bounced off the moon, imbuing a pristine stretch of Appalachia with a sort of cosmic gravity. Residents lived with the knowledge that something was hidden away on a hilltop above the town, even if it was something they could never know. TIMBERLINEs mission has, to say the least, changed in the intervening years, as submarine-laid internet cables have become a greater priority for American spies than foreign satellite communication.

TIMBERLINE remains operational, but the facility, known to locals as the off-limits Upper Base, was never what kept Sugar Grove alive. The towns heart was the sprawling Lower naval base that served as a robust employer and de facto community center until the Sept. 11 attacks, when residents say even the Navy gym and recreational areas theyd always enjoyed were sealed up, like forbidding TIMBERLINE. Sheldons film reveals a parcel of the country thats dealing not just with a faltering economy and collapsed job base hardly unique to Sugar Grove but also with a legacy thats literally unspeakable. One of the only moments the film captures of anyone talking about the NSAs presence in Sugar Grove comes from a General Services Administration auctioneer Kristine Carson in a vacant naval gymnasium. Asked about the Upper Base, Carson notes, with a small smile, Its underground, I understand. Of course I cant speak to that.

Top video: The film is directed and produced by Elaine McMillion Sheldon/Field of Vision.

Read more here:
Film: The Tiny West Virginia Town Haunted by an NSA Secret - The Intercept

WASHINGTON, D.C.The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) asked the Supreme Court to review and overturn an unprecedented ruling allowing the government to intercept, collect, and storewithout a warrantmillions of Americans electronic communications, including emails, texts, phone calls, and online chats.

This warrantless surveillance is conducted by U.S. intelligence agencies under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The law is exceedingly broadSection 702 allows the government to conduct surveillance of any foreigner abroadand the law fails to protect the constitutional rights of Americans whose texts or emails are incidentally collected when communicating with those people.

This warrantless surveillance of Americans is unconstitutional and should be struck down.

Yet the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, ruling in U.S. v. Mohamud, decided that the Fourth Amendment doesnt apply to Americans whose communications were intercepted incidentally and searched without a warrant. The case centered on Mohammed Mohamud, an American citizen who in 2012 was charged with plotting to bomb a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Oregon. After he had already been convicted, Mohamud was told for the first time that information used in his prosecution was obtained using Section 702. Further disclosures clarified that the government used the surveillance program known as PRISM, which gives U.S. intelligence agencies access to communications in the possession of Internet service providers such as Google, Yahoo, or Facebook, to obtain the emails at issue in the case. Mohamud sought to suppress evidence gathered through the warrantless spying, arguing that Section 702 was unconstitutional.

In a dangerous and unprecedented ruling, the Ninth Circuit upheld the warrantless search and seizure of Mohamuds emails. EFF, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and New Americas Open Technology Institute filed a petition today asking the Supreme Court to review that decision.

The ruling provides an end-run around the Fourth Amendment, converting sweeping warrantless surveillance directed at foreigners into a tool for spying on Americans, said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Mark Rumold. Section 702 is unlike any surveillance law in our countrys history, it is unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court should take this case to put a stop to this surveillance.

Section 702, which is set to expire in December unless Congress reauthorizes it, provides the government with broad authority to collect, retain, and search Americans international communications, even if they dont contain any foreign intelligence or evidence of a crime.

We urge the Supreme Court to review this case and Section 702, which subjects Americans to warrantless surveillance on an unknown scale, said EFF Staff Attorney Andrew Crocker. We have long advocated for reining in NSA mass surveillance, and the incidental collection of Americans private communications under Section 702 should be held unconstitutional once and for all.

For the petition: https://www.eff.org/document/mohamud-eff-cert-petition

For more on Section 702: https://www.eff.org/document/702-one-pager-adv

For more on NSA spying:https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying

See the rest here:
EFF Urges Supreme Court to Take On Unconstitutional NSA Surveillance, Reverse Dangerous Ruling That Allows ... - EFF

Getty Images

BY: Joseph Bottum August 12, 2017 5:00 am

World War III has started, and almost no one seems to have noticed. Or perhaps the Cold War is a better analogy, if the Cold War had 20 sides fighting each other all at once and, again, if almost no one was paying enough attention to realize what is going on.

At least, this is what Alexander Klimburg insists in The Darkening Web, his new book on the battles of cyberspace. It's a quiet war, in the sense that few have died thus far, but it has the potential to be murderous, and every year raises the stakes of that war. The Chinese may be the world's leading players, but in November 2014, North Korea raised its status by stealing and posting publicly confidential information from the Sony corporation, and then erasing Sony's computersall in revenge for a minor comedy film mocking Kim Jong Un.

And then, of course, there are the Russians, both on the level of government and the level of individual criminals. In December 2015, during the Russian Army's push into Ukraine, Klimburg points out, "Ukraine became the first country to suffer a verified large-scale cyber attack on its critical infrastructure. Over 225,000 Ukrainians lost their light and heating in the middle of winter when a cyberattack disabled part of the country's power grid."

Meanwhile, we have hackers for money and hackers for mischief and even hackers on a mission, conducting distributed-denial-of-service attacks and information thefts in the name of one ideology or another. This spring, 16 hospitals in Great Britain were shut down by the WannaCry ransomware virus, which locked patients' computerized records until a small ransom had been paid to a bitcoin account. Similar attacks occurred across Europe and in the United States.

The United States has committed its share of these attacks. In 2009, the centrifuges Iran was using to enrich uranium were sabotaged with the Stuxnet virus, which is now generally agreed to have been a joint American-Israeli exploit. As far as that goes, the United States conducted the first massively successful international hack all the way back in 1981. The CIA learned from its KGB double agent Vladimir Vetrov that the Soviets were looking for software to control the trans-Siberian pipeline. So the CIA allowed the Soviets to steal a sabotaged version of the American software, which in 1982 caused an explosion large enough to be seen from space that destroyed a large portion of the Russian pipeline. Depriving the Soviets of potentially $8 billion a year in oil revenues, it is probably the greatest spy exploit achieved during the Cold War.

But these days the United States mostly operates as something like the backstop, the guarantor of world order, in the new cybernetic space. Or, at least, that's how it should be. There looms "an Armageddon," Klimburg writes, that only the "liberal democracies have the power to avert." But the American spy agencies have reserved for themselves the right to act as international rogue warriors in the cyber realm and thereby weaken the power of the United States to keep the internet in balance. The WannaCry ransomware attack exploited a mysteriously leaked vulnerability in Microsoft Windows that the NSA had previously discovered but not reported, hoping to use the vulnerability for its own spy work. Again and again, Klimburg insists, the American attempt "to achieve total dominance" in internet warfare "can be safely said to have totally backfired."

The overwriting and failure of tone in such clauses form a problem for The Darkening Web. Sentence by sentence, Klimburg just isn't a good writer, studding his text with confusing acronyms and launching into unnecessarily long-winded explanations of topics that weren't necessary for his point in the first placeas when he wanders into an excursus about "path dependency" without much of a clear path back out again.

Chapter by chapter, however, Klimburg has written a powerful and frightening book. The internet is, he thinks, "a fabulous artifice of human civilization," and its (mostly libertarian) early proponents taught us the belief that it would be a device "for advancing freedoms and prosperity." Unfortunately, the current direction of the Cold War of Cyberspace means it may well "become instead a dark web of subjugation." The "international cyber arms race" is "threatening the overall stability and security . . . of our very societies."

The Darkening Web asks us to distinguish three different species of computer attacks. The first is the genuinely and immediately violent: the cyber equivalent of actual war in which we hack a system to turn off automated defenses or cause a dam or a power grid to fail. The 2015 Russian assault on the Ukranian electrical system makes for a clear example.

The second form of computerized attack is the hack for informationloudly announced when done for political effect, but often kept quiet as secret spy work. The phishing attack that cracked the Democratic party's email servers during the 2016 presidential race is an obvious case of an attack in search of embarrassing or sensitive information.

Finally, there is the role of propaganda through the internet, in the form of pushing fake news or the form of restricting disfavored speech. Russia dominates recent press accounts about the first form, but China is the master of the second. Under pressure from Beijing, Apple recently removed from its app store hundreds of apps for its Chinese customers, including the app for the New York Times. The list of words banned by China for social media runs for pages.

Klimburg doesn't give his readers much of a solution for all of this. He insists that the internet needs to remain free, in order to combat the propagandists, but the freedom of the internet is exactly what the other two kinds of computerized attack rely on when they insinuate themselves into sensitive places.

What Klimburg does see clearly, however, is the opportunity that the "internet of things" offers for hacking. Our cars, our refrigerators, our crockpots, and our cameras are increasingly connected to the web these days, and there are, by one estimate, 25 billion devices online in the world today. Each of them is vulnerable and each of them offers a small opportunity for corruption, an accident waiting to happen. As that interconnectedness is extended to our power grids, our sewer systems, and our transportation networks, the chance for murderous attacks grows every year.

The Cyber Cold War is being fought among a swirl of opponents in a swirl of battles. It resembles the original Cold War in the fact that government-sponsored attacks on major institutions are avoided out of fear of retaliation. For that matter, it mirrors the old struggle against the Soviets in its constantly changing naturerequiring the United States always to keep moving ahead, just to stay even.

Read more:
Software and Hard Consequences - Washington Free Beacon

So heres an interesting thing. Footage so striking that even the BBC has run with it. This is the film of a migrant boat landing on a beach in the south of Spain. In recent years for a whole variety of reasons, Spain has avoided the worst of the migrant crisis. Perhaps thats why these images have broken through where the daily images from Italy this summer have not.

Anyway, its hard to think of a more vivid encapsulation of the ongoing suicide of our continent than this one. If you believe Angela Merkel, the European Commission and most of our political class, the people storming that Spanish beach are doctors, engineers and physicists fleeing the terrible civil war in Morocco, and just desperate to lend their skills to our continent.

The reality (as I recently described at book length) is somewhat different from that dream. These young men from a range of sub-Saharan African countries have come to Europe for a hundred different reasons and they will stay in Europe. Most will try to move northwards. And along the way the only employment most of them will find will be working with illegal gangs made up of people from their countries of origin.

Meanwhile, those people on the beach in Spain can happily stand for all the rest of Europe. They want to have a nice time, the sun is still shining and its all just a bit of a bummer that another boatload of people would illegally break into your continent while youre working on your tan. But someone else will deal with them, wont they? Except they wont. Its a myth, like the idea that it doesnt matter because its just one more boat and the continent can easily take in this boat. Like the ones before it. And the endless boats to come.

Elsewhere the Italian authorities have been making more discoveries about the collusion between the smugglers networks and some of the NGOs operating in the Mediterranean. All just another story in the strange suicide of our continent.

My own view is that the effects of a borderless continent (borderless at its external borders where anyone can just get on a boat and arrive as well as borderless within) are already being felt. A lot of the public know this, but there just arent enough people in power who want to admit to it, let alone tackle it. And so for a while to come our politicians will continue to try to find a way around the consequences of their evasions, half-truths and untruths. They will continue to witter on about diversity, for instance as though we just need more and more of the stuff and that it is just an endless good in itself.

On which note, whatever else you may say about the latest gang of child-rapists to have been sentenced in the UK (this time in Newcastle) nobody could claim that it was boringly mono-cultural. The Newcastle rape-gang included men not just from Pakistan and Bangladesh but also from Iraq, India, Iran and Turkey. Whichis a fine demonstration of the diversity which our continent has welcomed in and a model of the integration which our society is trying to make possible.

Read this article:
The reality of Europe's migrant crisis - Spectator.co.uk (blog)