Ars Technica

[Commentary] Facebook scared some of its privacy-conscious users by revealing that it performed a scientific study on manipulating the emotional content of users' News Feeds.

Since the study came to light, the company has been accused of acting unethically -- even illegally -- by subjecting its users to an experiment without notice or consent. While the implications of the study are a little frightening, Facebook's study might actually have been a responsible thing to do. Some of the professors who did help with the study are with universities that are federally funded and subject to the Common Rule of the Institutional Review Board, which regulates how human subjects are used.

This makes the whole issue less clean-cut. Facebook did not have to publish the results the way it did, in a publicly available scientific journal.

Dr Nita Farahany, director of Duke University's master program in bioethics and science policy, points out that Facebook's experiment may not qualify as human subject research. "Facebook’s 'research' falls into a relatively new and under-theorized category of threats to individual autonomy," Farahany told Ars. "Advertisers attempt to manipulate human emotions through advertisements, A/B testing, subtle changes in wording all the time. And they attempt to measure the effects of those differences. Is this different?"

Since 2013, Comcast's wireless gateways have by default broadcast a second signal that turns each customer's modem and router into a public Wi-Fi hotspot.

It's all part of Comcast's plan to create a nationwide Wi-Fi network of more than 1 million hotspots that the cable company can sell access to. Routers broadcast public Wi-Fi signals, unless you ask Comcast to turn it off.

Comcast deflected criticism by arguing that the hotspot's bandwidth is separate from the bandwidth subscribers pay for, so it won't reduce the customer's Internet speeds. But what about electricity? Alex Gizis, CEO of Speedify, which makes software that bonds Internet connections to combine bandwidth, decided to investigate.

To test the effect of people using the hotspot, Gizis plugged the Comcast modem and router into a power strip that was being monitored by a "Kill A Watt" meter. After testing the devices while idle, "we then connected two Windows laptops to the Xfinity hotspot, one watching Netflix and the other downloading files," he wrote. "You could immediately see the difference in the power meter, as the devices jumped from 0.14 Amps when idle, up to 0.22 Amps when actually being used. To translate this into dollars and cents, we used the average cost of power here in the Mid-Atlantic, which is $0.162 per KWh."

Comcast spokesperson Joel Shadle told Ars that the Speedify test relied on Comcast's business equipment, rather than the equipment that's used for the residential hotspot program, and that the equipment was outdated.

[Commentary] The network neutrality debate is a muddy one at best, with different people using the term in different ways. Regulatory enforcement of the idea would at best prove inadequate to achieve what people want.

At worst, it might even prove harmful to innovation and progress, potentially outlawing existing widespread and harmless practices. In addition, the current fixation on network neutrality happens to work to the advantage of the large incumbent Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

While they may oppose network neutrality regulations (or, indeed, any legislative or regulatory limitations on their business at all), so long as the debate centers around network neutrality, the largest ISPs can be confident that nothing will challenge their dominant market positions.

There is another way. Proven "unbundled access" schemes can provide the same perceived advantages as the "network neutrality" idea while avoiding the difficulties that network neutrality regulations could impose. The approach has been used around the world to establish competitive markets that ultimately rely on market forces rather than regulation to ensure that ISPs provide a quality service.

Legal experts say that the landmark Supreme Court decision protecting cell phone privacy does not have any immediate implications for the use of cell tracking devices, known as stingrays.

But the court’s ruling could point the way forward for future judicial consideration.

Relatively little is known about how, exactly, stingrays are used by law enforcement agencies nationwide, although new documents have recently been released showing how they have been purchased and used in some limited instances. Worse still, cops have lied to courts about their use. Not only can stingrays be used to determine location, they can also be used to intercept calls and text messages.

Brian Pascal, a research fellow at the University of California, Hastings, told Ars that he didn’t think that this new ruling would impact metadata gathered via stingrays. FBI spokesperson Christopher Allen sent Ars a recent affidavit outlining the agency's position on why so little information has been publicly disclosed.

Several of Germany's largest newspaper and magazine publishers have instituted legal proceedings against Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

They're seeking an order that would make the search engines pay them an 11 percent portion of their "gross sales, including foreign sales” that come “directly and indirectly from making excerpts from online newspapers and magazines public." That's according to new media pundit Jeff Jarvis, who published a blog post calling the demands "as absurd as they are cynical and dangerous" and part of a German "war on the link."

The move appears to be an attempt to achieve in courts what the publishers were not able to get through the German legislative process in 2013.

YouTube is getting ready to block music videos from artists that haven't agreed to the contract terms for its upcoming subscription service, the Financial Times reported.

The videos set to get the boot include those from independent record labels and artists including Adele and Arctic Monkeys. The new subscription service for videos will charge a monthly fee but will let users watch videos on YouTube without ads.

FT noted that the service will also allow users to watch videos "even when not connected to the Internet" on any device, suggesting some sort of pinning or downloading infrastructure to go with the platform.

Robert Kyncl, YouTube's head of content and business operations, told FT that record labels representing 90 percent of the music industry have agreed to the contract terms that include provisions for the subscription service. But YouTube will apparently not let the 10 percent that have resisted carry on as ad-supported-only videos, and Kyncl told FT that the blocking will begin in a matter of days.

In a key transparency case, a federal judge has ordered the United States government to hand over four orders and one opinion from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) published in secret between 2005 and 2008.

US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers will then review those documents in private.

The case, known as Electronic Frontier Foundation v. Department of Justice, hinges on which, if any, documents from the FISC should be made public.

The original lawsuit dates back to October 2011, when the EFF asked the government to handover “all reports, memoranda, guidance, presentations, legal briefs, e-mails or any other record” pertaining to Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act.

The EFF and the DOJ faced off in federal court in Oakland, California in early June -- EFF attorney Mark Rumold asked the judge to review the FISC’s orders, and decide which ones must be released. The court is now moving in that direction.

[Commentary] A lot has been done to secure major Web services and Internet applications, particularly on the PC. But one of the lessons we have learned was that for every data leak that has been plugged by the major websites, another springs up on mobile.

And mobile devices are the ones that face the greatest risk of surveillance and attack -- not so much from the National Security Agency, but from companies and criminals looking to track and target individuals on a smaller scale.

Public Wi-Fi has become an integral part of how mobile devices’ apps work. Apple and Google have both configured their mobile services to leverage Wi-Fi networks to improve their location services, and mobile and broadband companies offer public (and unencrypted) Wi-Fi networks to either offload users from their cellular data networks or extend the reach of their wired network services. Comcast, for example, has been expanding its Xfinity broadband networks by turning access points at homes and businesses into public Wi-Fi hotspots for subscriber access.

That’s great for customers’ convenience, but it also opens up a potential vector of attack for anyone who wants to get in the middle of broadband users’ Internet conversations. We demonstrated one potential Wi-Fi threat during our testing -- using a rogue wireless access point broadcasting the network ID (SSID) “attwifi” prompted AT&T iPhones and Android devices with default settings to automatically connect to them.

DigitalGlobe, the only American provider of high-resolution satellite imagery, announced that it had received permission from the United States Department of Commerce to sell its “highest-quality” images.

DigitalGlobe already has two orbiting satellites that can provide images of 41 cm and 46 cm and will be able to release new images from those satellites immediately. The company has another satellite launch planned for August 2014; that satellite can image objects with a resolution of 31 cm (just over a foot). Under the new government regulations, however, DigitalGlobe won’t be able to sell imagery from the new bird until six months after launch.

The Colorado-based firm is one of the top providers of satellite images to the United States National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (USNGIA).

In April, ARIN, the (North) American Registry for Internet Numbers, announced that it had reached "phase 4" of its IPv4 countdown plan, with fewer than 17 million IPv4 addresses remaining.

LACNIC, the Latin American and Caribbean registry, reached a similar threshold of a little more than four million remaining IPv4 addresses.

APNIC and the RIPE NCC, Europe’s registry, will give ISPs and other network operators one last block of 1024 addresses, the rules for LACNIC are similar, and ARIN is tightening the address supply but still allows ISPs to come back for more.