Ars Technica

Netflix's decision to pay Comcast for a direct connection to the Comcast network has resulted in significantly better video streaming performance for customers of the nation's largest broadband provider.

Netflix has bemoaned the payment, asking the government to prevent Comcast from demanding such interconnection "tolls." But there's little doubt the interconnection has benefited consumers in the short term.

Average Netflix performance for Comcast subscribers rose from 1.51Mbps to 1.68Mbps from January to February, though the interconnection didn't begin until late February.

In newly released data, Netflix said average performance on Comcast has now risen further to 2.5Mbps, a 65 percent increase since January. Comcast's increased speed allowed it to pass Time Warner Cable, Verizon, CenturyLink, AT&T U-verse, and others in Netflix's rankings. Comcast remains slower than Cablevision, Cox, Suddenlink, Charter, and Google Fiber.

It's no surprise that Comcast donates money to members of Congress. Political connections come in handy for a company seeking government approval of mergers, like Comcast's 2011 purchase of NBCUniversal and its proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable (TWC).

But just how many politicians have accepted money from Comcast's political arm? In the case of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held the first congressional hearing on the Comcast/TWC merger, the answer is all of them. Sen Chuck Schumer (D-NY) led the way with $35,000 from the Comcast federal political action committee (PAC) between 2009 and 2014, Sen Patrick Leahy (D-VT) received $32,500, and Sen Orrin Hatch (R-UT) received $30,000.

These figures are the combined contributions from Comcast to the senators' campaign and leadership committees. Out of 18 committee members, 10 Democrats and eight Republicans, 17 got money from Comcast's federal PAC, according to the database at OpenSecrets.org.

Anti-Comcast Sen Al Franken (D-MN) isn't listed as having received anything from Comcast's PAC, but that's apparently because the database didn't take into account money collected by Sen Franken's recount fund from when he needed a vote recount to get elected to the Senate. Sen Franken’s popularity with Comcast's overlords has obviously gone downhill since the recount fund donation, though.

The senator argued that the Comcast/TWC merger would stifle competition and lead to higher prices and worse service for consumers. “There’s no doubt that Comcast is a huge, influential corporation, and I understand that there are over 100 lobbyists making the case for this deal to members of Congress and our staffs,” Sen Franken said during the hearing. "But I’ve also heard from over 100,000 consumers who oppose this deal, and I think their voices need to be heard, too.”

When does an online threat become worthy of criminal prosecution? The Supreme Court is being asked to decide that unanswered question as prosecutions for online rants, from Facebook to YouTube, are becoming commonplace.

Authorities are routinely applying an old-world 1932 statute concerning extortion to today's online world, where words don't always mean what they seem. The latest case involving the legal parameters of online speech before the justices concerns a Pennsylvania man sentenced to 50 months in prison after being convicted on four counts of the interstate communication of threats. Defendant Anthony Elonis' 2010 Facebook rant concerned attacks on an elementary school, his estranged wife, and even law enforcement.

"That's it, I've had about enough/ I'm checking out and making a name for myself/ Enough elementary schools in a ten mile radius/ to initiate the most heinous school shooting ever imagined/ and hell hath no fury like a crazy man in a Kindergarten class/ the only question is … which one?" read one of Elonis' posts.

Whatever a so-called "true threat" is, it's not protected under the First Amendment. Whether online or not, other forms of speech that do not enjoy the backing of the constitution include child pornography and obscenity.

Only one federal appeals court has sided with Elonis' contention that the authorities must prove that the person who made the threat actually meant to carry it out. Eight other circuit courts of appeal, however, have ruled that the standard is whether a "reasonable person" would conclude the threat was real. The Obama Administration has until April 21 to respond to Elonis' petition to the Supreme Court.

[Commentary] Are cyberattacks, security breaches, and mounting distrust between the US and Chinese governments ushering in a new Cold War era?

Given US officials’ rhetoric and actions in recent months, it might appear that such a sustained state of political and military tensions between the two superpowers is a serious threat.

A number of events have likely precipitated Cold War fears. The disclosures by National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden of dragnet government surveillance, including a revelation that the US has infiltrated the networks of China-based telecommunications company Huawei, have understandably upset the Chinese. Additionally, the increasing number of cyberattacks and security breaches in both the US and China appear to have strained relations. And considering the “mounting tensions over China’s expanding claims of control over what it argues are exclusive territories in the East and South China Seas, and over a new air defense zone,” diplomatic relations between the two countries appear further strained, according to a report from The New York Times.

While US officials are trying to fend off threats of a new Cold War, Harvard Law School scholar Noah Feldman described his belief that rather than entering a new Cold War period, the US and China are instead enmeshed in what he calls a “cool war.”

“What the US and China have in common is that each is a global superpower in a contest for geopolitical supremacy,” Feldman told Ars. “What makes it 'cool' and not cold is that we still have a strong economic partnership with China. While both sides would like to reduce their dependence on the other, neither side wants escalation.”

David Medine had not been on the job for a week as chairman of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board when The Guardian dropped its first of many bombs supplied by National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden.

As Medine described it, the revelation that the NSA was bulk-collecting the metadata from every phone call made to and from the United States "was sort of a fast-moving train that we decided to jump on."

"My first week we requested a briefing from the Justice Department. The third week we met in the Situation Room with the president," Medine said. Six months later, the five-member executive branch board released a scathing report, arguing in January that the NSA must cease the bulk collection of the phone numbers of all calls, the international mobile subscriber identity number of mobile callers, the calling card numbers used in calls, and the time and duration of those calls to and from the United States.

By a 3-2 vote, the presidential panel concluded that, among other things, the program "implicates constitutional concerns.”

Comcast has edged out controversial agribusiness giant Monsanto in Consumerist's March Madness-style "Worst Company in America" poll.

"In one of the narrowest Final Death Matches in the centuries’ long history of WCIA battle, Comcast managed to hold the genetically modified body blows of Monsanto," Consumerist wrote.

To outlast 31 other competitors, Comcast had to win five rounds, defeating Yahoo, Facebook, Verizon, and SeaWorld before taking on Monsanto. The final poll was close, with 51.5 percent of voters selecting Comcast. Consumerist is owned by Consumer Reports, which is arguing against Comcast's proposed merger with Time Warner Cable, so it's perhaps no surprise that Comcast fared poorly.

Consumerist told Ars that while the poll wasn't scientific, it included many thousands of people, and the site blocked repeat voters. A Consumer Reports survey that was more thorough than the Consumerist poll rated Comcast 15th out of 17th in customer satisfaction for telecommunications providers.

Federal agents have been known to use “remote access searches” against a target computer whose location is unknown or outside of a given judicial district in past and ongoing cases: a Colorado federal magistrate judge approved sending malware to a suspect’s known e-mail address in 2012.

But similar techniques have been rejected by other judges on Fourth Amendment grounds. If this rule revision were to be approved, it would standardize and expand federal agents’ ability to survey a suspect and to exfiltrate data from a target computer regardless of where it is.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) published a 21-page memorandum with comments and recommendation to the DOJ. Specifically, the ACLU fears “jurisdictional overreach,” which under the new rules would allow a magistrate judge in any district to impose a “remote access search warrant” in any other district. The memo is authored by Nathan Freed Wessler, Chris Soghoian, Alex Abdo, and Rita Cant, who are attorneys and fellows at the ACLU.

“Unlike terrorism investigations [...], remote searches of electronic storage media are likely to occur with great frequency. The proposed rule is not a minor procedural update; it is a major reorganization of judicial power.” The ACLU also raised the troubling implications of granting the power of a single warrant to conduct vast digital searches.

[Commentary] President Barack Obama says he wants Congress to adopt legislation that would end the National Security Agency's bulk collection of telephone metadata, a surveillance initiative exposed by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

As it currently operates, the NSA's collection program gathers and stores the metadata of every call made to and from the United States. "I have decided that the best path forward is that the government should not collect or hold this data in bulk," President Obama said. "Instead, the data should remain at the telephone companies for the length of time it currently does today." Rights groups are applauding the move. But they say it’s virtually a meaningless gesture in its current form.

As chief executive, President Obama has the power to reform the NSA on his own with the stroke of a pen. By not putting this initiative into an executive order, he punted to Congress on an issue that affects the civil liberties of most anybody who picks up a phone. Every day Congress waits on the issue is another day Americans' calling records are being collected by the government without suspicion that any crime was committed.

“He does not need congressional approval for this,” said Mark Jaycoxx, an Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney. Ultimately, congressional action will be necessary even if the President signs an executive order on the issue. Future Presidents are not bound by former presidential decrees, which means the 44th president does not have to adhere to any President Obama promises of ethical and limited metadata use.

The Supreme Court declined to resolve the constitutionality of the National Security Agency's bulk telephone metadata surveillance program, leaving intact what a lower-court judge described as an "almost-Orwellian" surveillance effort in which the metadata from every phone call to and from the United States is catalogued by US spies.

The move by the justices comes as the Obama administration and Congress consider dramatically revamping the spy program disclosed in June by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The petition before the justices, brought by political activist Larry Klayman, concerned a December decision by US District Judge Richard Leon, who wrote in an opinion that America's founders would be "aghast" at the spying. The President George W. Bush appointee stayed his decision, which concluded that the program infringes the Fourth Amendment, pending appeal because of the case's national security implications. Klayman bypassed a federal appeals court and went directly to the high court, which rarely plucks cases from district courts before they're heard at the federal appellate level.

Google’s plan to deliver Internet service from balloons seems to be flying along nicely, as the company says one of its balloons just completed “a lap around the world in 22 days and has just clocked the project’s 500,000th kilometer as it begins its second lap.”

Project Loon, unveiled in 2013, is an attempt to use solar-powered balloons to create networks that can send wireless Internet signals to areas that would be hard to reach with wired Internet. The balloons are supposed to form a mesh network 20 kilometers above the ground, with each balloon communicating with its neighbors and ultimately to ground stations connected to Internet providers. Internet signals would be sent to antennas installed on buildings.

It’s just in the prototype phases, but Google’s testers have been busy. The balloon that circled the world “enjoyed a few loop-de-loops over the Pacific Ocean before heading east on the winds toward Chile and Argentina, and then made its way back around near Australia and New Zealand,” Google’s Project Loon team said. “Along the way, it caught a ride on the Roaring Forties -- strong west-to-east winds in the southern hemisphere that act like an autobahn in the sky, where our balloons can quickly zoom over oceans to get to where people actually need them.”