Internet Service News (US ISPs are bad and should feel bad)

[6souls]

[6souls]

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-47908220
https://blog.archive.org/2019/04/10/...orist-content/

Europol has been spamming the Internet Archive with removal notices for content is it deems as terror-related. All of the removals, which have not been honored, were given 1-hour time frames.

The Internet Archive said the demands wrongly accused it of hosting terror-related material.

The website said the requests set a poor precedent ahead of new European rules governing removal of content.

If the Archive does not comply with the notices, it risks its site getting added to lists which ISPs are required to block.

In a blog, the website's Chris Butler said that it had received notices identifying hundreds of web addresses stored on archive.org as leading people to banned material.

However, Mr Butler said, the reports were wrong about the content they pointed to, or were too broad for the organisation to comply with.

Some of the requests referred to material that had "high scholarly and research value" and were not produced by terror groups, he said.

Others called for the delisting of massively popular links that led people to "millions" of items.

"It is not possible for us to process these reports using human review within a very limited timeframe like one hour," he said.

He asked: "Are we to simply take what's reported as 'terrorism' at face value and risk the automatic removal of things like the primary collection page for all books on archive.org?"

Europol said the requests actually came from the French IRU which routed its requests through Europol.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/0...rist_takedown/

There's only one problem: the illegal and offensive content they have identified includes live recordings of the Grateful Dead, archives of TV news shows and pages from Project Gutenberg – which archives plain text versions of books as horrifying as The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Alice in Wonderland.

There is another chilling component too, highlighted by the Internet Archive: a separate takedown notice sent by the French L'Office Central de Lutte contre la Criminalité liée aux Technologies de l'Information et de la Communication (OCLCTIC).

In this case, it demanded that the organization take down a video that discussed whether the Islamic holy text, the Quran, included "provocation of acts of terrorism or apology for such acts".

The idea that any mention of terrorism, without any consideration of context, is akin to terrorism is a truly disturbing development that can only serve to reinforce people's personal prejudice. The fact that the request made it through the French government's processes and resulted in a takedown demand is exactly the sort of thing that opponents of the legislation feared would happen.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/11/1...et-archive-org

The notices came from Europol’s European Union Internet Referral Unit (or EU IRU) and its French counterpart. They included URLs for major collection pages, each containing millions of items (e.g., “https://archive.org/details/texts” and “https://archive.org/details/television”) as well as links to scientific research and US government reports, including TV footage from CSPAN.

Under legislation that the EU is currently drafting, the Internet Archive could have been hit with penalties — including fines of up to 4 percent of its global revenue — for not honoring such takedown notices within an hour.

A spokesperson for Europol told The Verge that of the 25 URLs highlighted by name by the Internet Archive as false, all were requests by the French IRU unit. Such national units often send takedown requests using Europol’s domain. The spokesperson said that they were not able to share any of the other URLs that had been included in the takedown notices, but noted that since 2014 the Internet Archive has complied with 64 percent of its requests.

[Melena]

I swear, every time America tries to fuck up the internet, Europe has to turn it into a god damn competition.

[Byrthnoth]

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/24/1...imeter-wave-5g

T-mo and Verizon have agreed that rural america will basically be getting a slight upgrade to the existing 4G LTE system (eventually). It looks like AT&T might have been ahead of the game by just changing the 4G LTE icon on their phones to read 5G, because that's going to be the truth for most of the country.

Rural data access would probably be better served by expanding the extant 4G LTE network so coverage goes up vs. implementing a different protocol and splitting the bandwidth baby in two.


5G is for cities (maybe) and otherwise is just a wireless provider PR stunt.

[Gredival]

Pai is fine with large government regulation when it's protecting the poor cable providers

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...nd-regulation/

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk

[TsingTao]

Pai and company at it again.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...ble-broadband/

[Tokitoki]

Good old Republican adage of leaving it up to the states is hard at work... oh wait.

[Cail]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/techn...trality-rules/

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled in favor of the Federal Communications Commission and upheld its repeal of Obama-era net neutrality protections, issuing a mixed decision that also appeared to open the door for state and local governments to try to introduce their own rules.


In a nearly 200-page decision, judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals largely sided with the FCC and its Republican chairman, Ajit Pai, over their decision two years ago to unwind Internet rules that required AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and other service providers to treat all Web traffic equally. The judges found “unconvincing” the arguments of a collection of tech companies, consumer advocates and government officials that had challenged the repeal.

[djzombie]

Fuck this country's government in the ass with a pitchfork.

[Byrthnoth]

I was in one of Verizon's HQs recently and they had OAN on in the lobby. I guess that reciprocates the reach around.

[Byrthnoth]

https://arstechnica.com/information-...ng-on-netflix/

When your net neutrality / shitty ISP / what is on Netflix? threads have a baby because of the missing antitrust thread

F u Bork

[DrClout]

Well damn

Sent from my SM-G965U using Tapatalk

[6souls]

[Kalmado]

For the last roughly six years I've negotiated a new promo for internet with Comcast. Every year it's the same thing. Get Blast for $50. Service goes up to $70-$100 per month. Tell them to cancel. They put it back to $50 for a year. Repeat. This year surprisingly I haven't had to do that and the bill & speeds haven't changed. One thing that has never changed is I haven't been able to log into my Comcast bill on any device or browser for a little over five years. Ever since buying our house they somehow botched the account and created two accounts in my name with the same address. No one over the phone can explain why it happened and they can't seem to fix it either. I went to the local place and they were similarly baffled on what to do, but I give them slack as I understand and sympathize with them how much they probably get bitched at in person for Comcast's phone and online support being terrible.

[Melena]

For the last roughly six years I've negotiated a new promo for internet with Comcast. Every year it's the same thing. Get Blast for $50. Service goes up to $70-$100 per month. Tell them to cancel. They put it back to $50 for a year. Repeat. This year surprisingly I haven't had to do that and the bill & speeds haven't changed. One thing that has never changed is I haven't been able to log into my Comcast bill on any device or browser for a little over five years. Ever since buying our house they somehow botched the account and created two accounts in my name with the same address. No one over the phone can explain why it happened and they can't seem to fix it either. I went to the local place and they were similarly baffled on what to do, but I give them slack as I understand and sympathize with them how much they probably get bitched at in person for Comcast's phone and online support being terrible.

Don't worry, when we moved into our apartment, they put the e-mail address of the previous tenant as the primary account holder. Comcast in their infinite wisdom ties your account # to your address. So if you move, you get a new account #. Took a year to fix that shit after it was discovered. So every time I paid a bill before I discovered that, the bill pay e-mail was going to this rando which gave my last 4 of my credit card.

[Kalmado]

Don't worry, when we moved into our apartment, they put the e-mail address of the previous tenant as the primary account holder. Comcast in their infinite wisdom ties your account # to your address. So if you move, you get a new account #. Took a year to fix that shit after it was discovered. So every time I paid a bill before I discovered that, the bill pay e-mail was going to this rando which gave my last 4 of my credit card.

Wow that is BAD. My issue is nothing within my billing will load. Like, I can log into my account, and most of the time can see I have internet service, but I cannot pay, make changes, etc anything online. I researched it awhile back and it's a very common on and off problem I guess. It's not a big deal overall, just a thing that shouldn't happen that does and no one can answer why or get it fixed.

[arus2001]

Couple weeks old and likely got lost to the virus shuffle as this just came past my radar, but Graham and some other fuckwits are basically trying to make encrypting data illegal and that anything we send needs to be scanned by our ISPs or whomever they deem suitable.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/0...message-online

Step 2 after killing Net Neutrality, I guess.

[zoobernut]

Well this shelter in place forced work from home thing has given me some fuel with the local community foundation as well as my work and some local ISP's in the area that we need better high speed internet where I live. Can't exist stuck at home for months on satellite internet. I have had several phone meetings with key people. I am hoping to convince the area I live in to get a loan to start a community based non profit ISP or some such thing to get microwave based high speed internet into the area. I hope all this work pays off.

[arus2001]

Good luck with that. ISPs love to lawyer the shit out of potential municipal networks.

[djzombie]

Well this shelter in place forced work from home thing has given me some fuel with the local community foundation as well as my work and some local ISP's in the area that we need better high speed internet where I live. Can't exist stuck at home for months on satellite internet. I have had several phone meetings with key people. I am hoping to convince the area I live in to get a loan to start a community based non profit ISP or some such thing to get microwave based high speed internet into the area. I hope all this work pays off.

I know the feels, I am stuck on DSL right now. We have a high speed provider near us but they need to do some work to to connect us to their network. Something seems shady with them too.

We read reports of people paying them to install wiring/service and its been over a year and still not done.

Another thing that was a red flag was that we have a pole in our backyard that our current service comes in from, we had our DSL upgraded recently and they worked from the pole. This new provider came to survey our place and said they would have to dig to put in lines. Not sure why that would be when the other provider went right from the pole with no digging required.