Dogecoin, a blockchain-based digital currency named for a meme about an excitable canine, has seen its price rise by a factor of five over the last week. The price spike has made it one of the world’s 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies, with a market capitalization of $45 billion.

Understanding the value of cryptocurrencies is never easy, and it’s especially hard for Dogecoin, which was created as a joke. Dogecoin isn’t known for any particular technology innovations and doesn’t seem to have many practical applications.

What Dogecoin does have going for it, however, is memorable branding and an enthusiastic community of fans. And in 2021, that counts for a lot. In recent months, we’ve seen shares of GameStop soar to levels that are hard to justify based on the performance of GameStop’s actual business. People bought GameStop because it was fun and they thought the price might go up. So too for Dogecoin.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk may have also played an important role in Dogecoin’s ascendancy. Musk has periodically tweeted about the cryptocurrency, and those tweets are frequently followed by rallies in Dogecoin’s price. Late on Wednesday night, Musk tweeted out this image:

Dogecoin’s price tripled over the next 36 hours.

My editor suggested that I write about whether Dogecoin’s rise is a sign of an overheated crypto market, but for a coin like Dogecoin, I’m not sure that’s even a meaningful concept. Dogecoin isn’t a company that has revenues or profits. And unlike bitcoin and ether, no one seriously thinks it’s going to be the foundation of a new financial system.

People are trading Dogecoin because it’s fun to trade and because they think they might make money from it. The rising price is a sign that a lot of people have decided it would be fun to speculate in Dogecoin.

Of course, the fact that lots of people have money to spend on joke investments might itself be a result of larger macroeconomic forces. The combination of stimulus spending, low interest rates, and pandemic-related saving means that a lot of people have more money than usual sitting in their bank accounts. And restrictions on travel and nightlife mean that many of those same people have a lot of time on their hands.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1757497

Don’t let American companies sell semiconductor design software to Chinese firms, two members of Congress are asking the Department of Commerce. 

Sen. Tom Cotton (R- Ark.) and Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.) yesterday requested that electronic design automation (EDA) tools be designated as “foundational technologies” by the Department of Commerce. The label would require companies to obtain export licenses if they want to sell EDA tools to Chinese companies. The congressmen also requested in their letter to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo that any fab worldwide that uses American tools be prevented from selling 14 nm or better chips to Chinese companies.

The current leading edge in semiconductors is the 5 nm node, and currently, only Samsung and Taiwanese semiconductor company TSMC are producing chips commercially at that node. Restricting Chinese companies to 16 nm or larger could possibly keep them four generations off the leading edge. 

Semiconductors are incredibly important to China, which imported more than $300 billion worth of chips last year. That’s more than the country spends on imported oil. 

If the US government were to cut Chinese companies off from EDA tools, it would be a significant blow to the country’s already lagging semiconductor industry. Chinese semiconductor manufacturers are almost entirely reliant on foreign tools and software, and the country’s own EDA software is eight to ten years behind. There are EDA companies based outside the US, but American firms are particularly dominant, with companies like Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys controlling around 90 percent of the market, according to some estimates.

Stuck behind

The Chinese semiconductor market has always been behind the leading edge, though it has caught up in recent years as companies like SMIC have recruited heavily from TSMC and Samsung. The company has been producing chips at 14 nm in decent numbers, and last year it announced its “N+1” node, which it says is 57 percent more efficient and 20 percent faster. But yields on that new process are reportedly low, and it likely represents a dead-end unless SMIC can obtain an extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machine from photolithography company ASML.

EUV is all but required to produce semiconductors at 5 nm or below. The technology uses 13.5 nm UV light to etch features on a wafer. Existing deep ultraviolet tools (DUV) use 193 nm light. Even with the clever hacks the industry has implemented to make DUV work at smaller nodes, yields below 7 nm using DUV would be too low to be commercially viable. 

It’s unlikely that SMIC will ever get its hands on ASML’s most advanced machine, though. SMIC placed an order for an EUV machine in 2018, but that order has been held up by government officials in the Netherlands, where ASML is based. The US government began pressuring Dutch officials to halt the sale almost immediately after the order was placed, and a year and a half ago, the US, the Netherlands, and Japan (where Canon is another potential supplier of advanced lithography tools) entered into an ad-hoc agreement not to sell advanced chipmaking equipment to China. 

Cotton and McCaul’s request to bar China from obtaining advanced EDA software would further stymie China’s ambitions. As semiconductor manufacturing has grown ever more sophisticated, the tools required to produce chips have advanced apace. Barring China from obtaining EUV likely would set the country back a decade or more. The Chinese government is spending over $1 trillion to catapult its semiconductor industry to the leading edge, but it still faces headwinds. For example, it took ASML more than a decade before its EUV tools were ready to be inserted into customers’ production lines. Restricting Chinese companies’ access to EDA tools would only add to their already significant challenges. 

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1757446

US officials on Thursday formally blamed Russia for backing one of the worst espionage hacks in recent US history and imposed sanctions designed to mete out punishments for that and other recent actions.

In a joint advisory, the National Security Agency, FBI, and Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency said that Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, abbreviated as the SVR, carried out the supply-chain attack on customers of the network management software from Austin, Texas-based SolarWinds.

The operation infected SolarWinds’ software build and distribution system and used it to push backdoored updates to about 18,000 customers. The hackers then sent follow-up payloads to about 10 US federal agencies and about 100 private organizations. Besides the SolarWinds supply-chain attack, the hackers also used password guessing and other techniques to breach networks.

After the massive operation came to light, Microsoft President Brad Smith called it an “act of recklessness.” In a call with reporters on Thursday, NSA Director of Cybersecurity Rob Joyce echoed the assessment that the operation went beyond established norms for government spying.

“We observed absolutely espionage,” Joyce said. “But what is concerning is from that platform, from the broad scale of availability of the access they achieved, there’s the opportunity to do other things, and that’s something we can’t tolerate and that’s why the US government is imposing costs and pushing back on these activities.”

Thursday’s joint advisory said that the SVR-backed hackers are behind other recent campaigns targeting COVID-19 research facilities, both by infecting them with malware known as both WellMess and WellMail and by exploiting a critical vulnerability in VMware software.

The advisory went on to say that the Russian intelligence service is continuing its campaign, in part by targeting networks that have yet to patch one of the five following critical vulnerabilities. Including the VMware flaw, they are:

• CVE-2018-13379 Fortinet FortiGate VPN
• CVE-2019-9670 Synacor Zimbra Collaboration Suite
• CVE-2019-11510 Pulse Secure Pulse Connect Secure VPN
• CVE-2019-19781 Citrix Application Delivery Controller and Gateway
• CVE-2020-4006 VMware Workspace ONE Access

“Mitigation against these vulnerabilities is critically important as US and allied networks are constantly scanned, targeted, and exploited by Russian state-sponsored cyber actors,” the advisory stated. It went on to say that the “NSA, CISA, and FBI strongly encourage all cybersecurity stakeholders to check their networks for indicators of compromise related to all five vulnerabilities and the techniques detailed in the advisory and to urgently implement associated mitigations.”

A representative of VPN provider Pulse noted that patches for CVE-2019-11510 were released in April 2019. “Customers who followed the instructions in a Pulse Secure security advisory issued at that time have properly protected their systems and mitigated the threat.” FortiNet in recent weeks has also pointed out it patched CVE-2018-13379 in May 2019. The makers of the other affected hardware and software have also issued fixes.

The US Treasury Department, meanwhile, imposed sanctions to retaliate for what it said were “aggressive and harmful activities by the Government of the Russian Federation.” The measures include new prohibitions on Russian sovereign debt and sanctions on six Russia-based firms that the Treasury Department said “supported the Russian Intelligence Services’ efforts to carry out malicious cyber activities against the United States.”

The firms are:

• ERA Technopolis, a research center operated by the Russian Ministry of Defense for transferring the personnel and expertise of the Russian technology sector to the development of technologies used by the country’s military. ERA Technopolis supports Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU), a body responsible for offensive cyber and information operations.
• Pasit, a Russia-based information technology company that has conducted research and development supporting malicious cyber operations by the SVR.
• SVA, a Russian state-owned research institute specializing in advanced systems for information security located in that country. SVA has done research and development in support of the SVR’s malicious cyber operations.
• Neobit, a Saint Petersburg, Russia-based IT security firm whose clients include the Russian Ministry of Defense, SVR, and Russia’s Federal Security Service. Neobit conducted research and development in support of the cyber operations conducted by the FSB, GRU, and SVR.
• AST, a Russian IT security firm whose clients include the Russian Ministry of Defense, SVR, and FSB. AST provided technical support to cyber operations conducted by the FSB, GRU, and SVR.
• Positive Technologies, a Russian IT security firm that supports Russian Government clients, including the FSB. Positive Technologies provides computer network security solutions to Russian businesses, foreign governments, and international companies and hosts recruiting events for the FSB and GRU.

“The reason they were called out is because they’re an integral part and participant in the operation that the SVR executes,” Joyce said of the six companies. “Our hope is that by denying the SVR the support of those companies, we’re impacting their ability to project some of this malicious activity around the world and especially into the US.”

Russian government officials have steadfastly denied any involvement in the SolarWinds campaign.

Besides attributing the SolarWinds campaign to the Russian government, Thursday’s release from the Treasury Department also said that the SVR was behind the August 2020 poisoning of Russian opposition leader Aleksey Navalny with a chemical weapon, the targeting of Russian journalists and others who openly criticize the Kremlin, and the theft of “red team tools,” which use exploits and other attack tools to mimic cyber attacks.

The “red team tools” reference was likely related to the offensive tools taken from FireEye, the security firm that first identified the Solar Winds campaign after discovering its network had been breached.
The Treasury department went on to say that the Russian government “cultivates and co-opts criminal hackers” to target US organizations. One group, known as Evil Corp., was sanctioned in 2019. That same year, federal prosecutors indicted the Evil Corp kingpin Maksim V. Yakubets and posted a $5 million bounty for information that leads to his arrest or conviction.

Although overshadowed by the sanctions and the formal attribution to Russia, the most important takeaway from Thursday’s announcements is that the SVR campaign remains ongoing and is currently leveraging the exploits mentioned above. Researchers said on Thursday that they’re seeing Internet scanning that is intended to identify servers that have yet to patch the Fortinet vulnerability, which the company fixed in 2019. Scanning for the other vulnerabilities is also likely ongoing.

People managing networks, particularly any that have yet to patch one of the five vulnerabilities, should read the latest CISA alert, which provides extensive technical details about the ongoing hacking campaign and ways to detect and mitigate compromises.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1757269

Charter Communications employees who have been on strike since 2017 are building an Internet service provider in New York City called “People’s Choice.”

“People’s Choice Communications is an employee-owned social enterprise launched by members of IBEW Local #3 to bridge the digital divide and help our neighbors get connected to the Internet during the COVID-19 pandemic,” the ISP’s website says. “We are the workers who built a large part of New York City’s Internet infrastructure in the first place. We built out [Charter] Spectrum’s cable system, until in 2017, the company pushed us out on strike by taking away our healthcare, retirement, and other benefits. It’s now the longest strike in US history.”

So far, People’s Choice says it has completed rooftop antenna installations at two schools in the Bronx and installed “hardline connections to wireless access points connecting 121 units” at housing for survivors of domestic violence who have disabilities.

A Gizmodo article said the system is equipped to offer minimum speeds of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, meeting a broadband standard that has been used by the Federal Communications Commission since 2015. “We have a big portion of most of the Bronx covered with our antenna,” IBEW Local #3 steward Troy Walcott told Gizmodo. “Now we have to go building by building to let people know we’re out there and start turning them on.”

“A few dozen Spectrum strikers have been actively involved in the installations, but Walcott expects that at least one hundred workers are waiting in the wings for the project to scale up,” the Gizmodo article said.

Filling broadband gaps

People interested in bringing broadband to their building can fill out a form. “We work in affordable housing, supportive housing, co-op housing, NYCHA [NYC Housing Authority], homeless shelters, and regular old apartment complexes,” the webpage notes.

“After we build out a network in your building, it transfers to cooperative ownership, so profits are returned to users,” the People’s Choice website says. “We are able to provide high-speed service in most cases for $10-$20/month. No more cable company ripping you off, and as an owner, you have a vote in policies like data privacy.”

People’s Choice is similar to the volunteer-run NYC Mesh project that has been building a wireless network for unserved people in the city the past few years.

Charter, which sells Internet access under the Spectrum brand name, became the second-largest cable company in the US when it bought Time Warner Cable in 2016. Charter wants customers to “pay more for less service because they have no other choice,” Walcott said, according to an article in Vice’s Motherboard section.

Walcott said the Charter employees were motivated by inaction both from Charter and politicians. “Having elected officials thank us quietly for our sacrifice but not say anything about our strike publicly motivated us. Seeing customers denied service during COVID because they had outstanding bills motivated us,” he said.

Turbulent times since Charter bought TWC

About 1,800 Charter workers began their strike in March 2017. Charter hired hundreds of replacement workers and tried to decertify the union, an attempt the union has been fighting at the National Labor Relations Board.

Last year, a New York City broadband plan said that nearly a third of households in the city “do not have a broadband connection at home” and that “more than 1.5 million New Yorkers have neither a mobile connection nor a home broadband connection.” Low-income residents were more likely to lack service, and areas with higher incomes benefited from more home-Internet competition.

In July 2018, the New York State Public Service Commission voted to revoke its approval of Charter’s purchase of Time Warner Cable, saying the company repeatedly failed to meet deadlines for broadband expansions that were required in exchange for merger approval. The commission ordered Charter to sell the former Time Warner Cable system in New York, but Charter avoided that fate by agreeing to more broadband deployment and a $12 million payment to be used by the state for expanding broadband to unserved and underserved homes.

Disclosure: The Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which owns 13 percent of Charter, is part of Advance Publications. Advance Publications owns Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1757204

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos used his final letter to Amazon shareholders to focus on employee well-being and the company’s significant carbon footprint.

Bezos’ new emphasis on employee well-being comes on the heels of a contentious unionization vote at one of its warehouses in Bessemer, Alabama. Though Amazon won, with 1,798 employees voting against unionizing out of 3,041 total ballots cast, participation was low, with just over half of eligible voters participating. Labor organizers have made it clear that even if unionization votes continue to go against them, they’ll keep pressuring Amazon through other means.

That strategy may be working. Bezos dedicates a significant portion of his letter to both the unionization vote and to employee well-being. Whereas Bezos wrote a single paragraph about a tuition reimbursement program three years ago, he wrote nearly 1,200 words about pay rates, employee satisfaction, and workplace safety this year.

“Does your Chair take comfort in the outcome of the recent union vote in Bessemer? No, he doesn’t,” Bezos wrote. “I think we need to do a better job for our employees. While the voting results were lopsided and our direct relationship with employees is strong, it’s clear to me that we need a better vision for how we create value for employees—a vision for their success.”

Among his proposals are new staffing rotations that he hopes will reduce repetitive stress injuries at warehouses. Injuries aren’t uncommon at warehouses—many actions are repeated hundreds of times per day—but Amazon’s fulfillment centers seem to be particularly prone to injuries, according to an investigation by Reveal. Because Amazon’s warehouse robots move quickly, workers move faster, too, giving their muscles less time to rest between repeated movements.

Bezos also touts the company’s decision to increase Amazon’s minimum wage to $15 per hour, a rate that labor groups have been advocating for since at least 2012. He cites a recent study that says that pay in low-wage areas increased by 4.7 percent when the company bumped rates to $15 per hour.

Climate Pledge

Amazon’s enormous carbon footprint has also drawn scrutiny in recent years, and Bezos again spills a fair number of bytes discussing the matter. The company’s carbon footprint surged in 2019 to over 51 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is only about 6 percent less than Peru’s annual emissions. 

Bezos points out that Amazon helped co-found the Climate Pledge, which commits companies to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. As part of that pledge, Amazon has installed or purchased 6.9 gigawatts of wind and solar capacity that produce 20 million gigawatt-hours of electricity per year. The company has also invested $1 billion in automaker Rivian and has placed an order with the startup for 100,000 electric delivery vans. By 2030, the EVs will shave the company’s footprint by an estimated 4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year. Amazon has also invested $2 billion in a climate tech fund, and Bezos himself has committed $10 billion in grants for climate-oriented companies and organizations.

The Climate Pledge also calls for companies to offset emissions “to compensate for economic activities where low-carbon alternatives don’t exist,” Bezos wrote. Offsets span a range of activities, from planting trees and protecting forests to burning methane from landfills, though most revolve around trees. As a whole, offsets are contentious because of a number of their shortcomings. Some offsets might end up being double-counted, others may not be as permanent as originally intended, and still others may count forests that were already protected, which won’t lead to any net reductions. The Nature Conservancy, for example, has recently come under fire for the way it was calculating offsets from its program, which includes many properties it already owned and protected.

End of an era

This letter is Bezos’ last, since he will be stepping down as CEO later this year, more than 20 years after founding the company that has changed e-commerce. He left an indelible mark on Amazon—one that isn’t likely to fade, as he’s not really leaving. Rather, he’ll be serving as executive chair, a role that will find him overseeing the board and advising the incoming CEO, current AWS head Andy Jassy.

“In my upcoming role as Executive Chair, I’m going to focus on new initiatives. I’m an inventor,” Bezos wrote.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1757162

The Communications Workers of America (CWA) union is lobbying state governments to regulate Internet service providers as utilities.

The CWA, which represents more than 150,000 workers at AT&T and over 30,000 at Verizon, announced on Monday a “multi-state effort to pass state legislation that would establish public utility commission oversight of broadband in public safety, network resiliency and consumer protection.”

“Legislation has already been introduced in California, Colorado and New York, and CWA is in active conversations with policymakers in state houses across the country about its model bill, the Broadband Resiliency, Public Safety and Quality Act,” the union said. In addition to broadband regulation, the model bill calls for regulation of the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) home phone services offered by cable companies and other ISPs, which have replaced the old copper-wire landlines for many consumers.

The Federal Communications Commission is likely to restore Title II common-carrier regulation of broadband providers and net neutrality rules after Democrats gain an FCC majority. But state-level regulation similar to what’s historically been applied to telephone service and other utilities could provide additional protection for broadband consumers.

“States have always had a vital role to play in overseeing our communications networks and ensuring that those networks are operated in the public interest—it’s codified in the Communications Act of 1934,” Gigi Sohn, a consumer advocate who served as counselor to then-Chairman Tom Wheeler in the Obama-era FCC, said in the CWA press release. “Unfortunately, many states abdicated that responsibility in the early part of the millennium at the behest of incumbent broadband providers. Now that the COVID-19 pandemic has made abundantly clear that broadband is essential infrastructure, it’s time for states to take back that authority. I wholeheartedly support CWA’s initiative to convince states to reassert their authority over broadband and Voice over IP services.”

States should be “able to protect consumers, ensure that networks can withstand ever-increasing natural disasters and other threats to public safety, and collect data about broadband pricing, deployment, adoption and network resiliency,” Sohn said.

Political winds shift

While cable and telecom lobby groups will vigorously oppose any new regulation of broadband services, the CWA and Sohn see a window of opportunity as the pandemic has put a spotlight on the abusive customer-service practices of major ISPs, lack of broadband competition in large parts of the US, high prices, and telcos’ failure to maintain slow and outage-prone networks.

President Joe Biden has already vowed to lower broadband prices, end hidden fees by requiring Internet providers to clearly disclose the prices they charge, and expand municipal networks that could fill gaps in areas neglected by private providers. Nearly 20 states have restricted municipal broadband with laws supported by private ISPs and Republicans, but that, too, is changing, with some states taking those laws off the books and Biden announcing a goal of “lifting barriers that prevent municipally owned or affiliated providers and rural electric co-ops from competing on an even playing field with private providers.”

CWA President Chris Shelton said that “the past three decades of industry-driven deregulation have failed us,” leaving the US “with deteriorating telephone networks and a failure to deliver next-generation services to rural and low-income areas.”

“Telecom-industry executives said deregulation was necessary for competition and that competition would magically fix everything. It hasn’t, and the public needs watchdogs we can work with to ensure this essential service is there for our communities today and into the future,” said Brenda Roberts, VP of the CWA district that covers the Mountain West, Pacific Northwest, and Upper Midwest regions. “Without regulation, the goal of universal broadband service is just a nice dream.”

The CWA held an event discussing its push for state regulation, with video available here.

Model bill details

The CWA provided a one-page fact sheet on its model bill, saying that “industry-driven deregulation of POTS/copper networks and non-regulation of broadband networks have left residents with no watchdogs over essential communication services.” Among other problems, ISPs tend to “upgrade infrastructure where it is most profitable,” leaving lower-income areas without modern service, the fact sheet said.

The model bill would do the following in states that enact it as proposed by the CWA:

1. Undo any blanket prohibition on state oversight for broadband/VoIP
2. Explicitly authorize PUC [the state public utility commission] to exercise oversight over broadband/VoIP
3. Direct PUC to exercise authority over broadband/VoIP in specific areas [of] resiliency, public safety, data collection/transparency, and consumer protection
4. Authorize PUC to conduct third-party audits of facilities and infrastructure
5. Direct PUC to report back to the legislature annually

The model bill begins with an intro that says, “The legislature hereby finds and declares that access to high-speed broadband is a necessity and essential to participation in the economy” and that “VoIP has replaced traditional voice telephone service for a large segment of the population… State regulators require unambiguous authority and a clear mandate to establish and enforce appropriate oversight and regulation of broadband and VoIP in order to meet the state’s goals of universal, high-quality and affordable access.”

The model bill doesn’t specifically call for price regulation, but it says that state commissions shall issue “rules and regulations necessary to implement effective oversight of broadband and VoIP service… including but not limited to” the specific areas of regulation detailed in the bill. The bill instructs the state public utility commission to “require Internet service providers to report data on the deployment/availability, pricing and adoption of VoIP and broadband service” and “exercis[e] oversight of Internet service providers’ emergency preparedness and plans for post-emergency network restoration, including establishing minimum power back-up requirements and requiring all Internet service providers to maintain networks sufficiently to ensure reliable and safe communications services.”

The state commission would also be empowered to conduct evaluations and audits of facilities and infrastructure “in regards to areas of public safety, resiliency, broadband and anything else the commission deems relevant to achieving goals of resiliency, quality and public safety in broadband service as well as the overall goals of universal access and affordability of broadband service.”

Legislation based on the model bill has been introduced in New York. Separately, the CWA is supporting a bill in California to require collection of information from telecom providers about their efforts to repair or replace communications infrastructure damaged in emergencies or disasters. The CWA is also supporting Colorado bills to provide subsidies to low-income residents and improve broadband-availability mapping to identify “critically unserved areas” where the state should fund deployment.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1756981

The Washington state legislature has voted to end limits on municipal broadband, and the bill lifting those restrictions now awaits the signature of Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee. The state Senate passed the bill Sunday in a 27-22 vote, and the state House passed it on February 23 by a vote of 60-37.

“This bill reverses decades of bad policy—Washington was one of only 18 states with a STATE LAW prohibiting some local governments from offering broadband directly to the public,” Democratic Rep. Drew Hansen, the bill’s lead sponsor, wrote on Twitter. “Long overdue. Thanks to the BIPARTISAN group of Senators who stood up for public broadband today!!”

The Senate vote went mostly along party lines, but one Republican (Brad Hawkins) voted yea and three Democrats (Steve Hobbs, Mark Mullet, and Lisa Wellman) voted nay.

There’s still one complication. A second bill sponsored by Sen. Wellman that “would do much less to eliminate barriers to municipal broadband solutions” passed the House on Sunday and had previously passed the Senate, said an article on the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Community Broadband Networks website. “The two competing bills have been sent to the state governor and it is expected one will be vetoed,” the article said.

Details on competing bills

A 21-year-old Washington state law (54.16.330) “authorizes some municipalities to provide communications services but prohibits public utility districts from providing communications services directly to customers,” as noted in attorney Jim Baller’s list of states that restrict municipal broadband or other public communications initiatives. (Baller runs a telecommunications law firm that represents local governments.)

The Hansen-sponsored bill now awaiting the governor’s approval specifically authorizes public utility districts, port districts, counties, and towns to provide retail telecommunications service to end users. Additionally, the bill lets public utility districts and port districts offer service both inside and outside their district’s geographic limits.

The bill also deletes a line from 54.16.330 that says, “[N]othing in this section shall be construed to authorize public utility districts to provide telecommunications services to end users.” The bill changes another state law by deleting the line “nothing in this subsection shall be construed to authorize port districts to provide telecommunications services to end users.”

By contrast, the other bill that the governor has the option of signing prohibits public networks in areas defined as served. The Community Broadband Networks article explained:

S.B. 5383 originally included a preemption clause that gave private Internet Service Providers (ISPs) the power to veto proposed public projects in areas they plan to expand service within the six months. The clause was later amended to remove the veto authority, but in its place a new provision favoring incumbent ISPs was added. The added amendment prohibits PUDs (public utility districts) and ports from providing retail Internet services in areas where an existing provider offers service at a minimum speed threshold of 100/20 Megabits per second (Mbps), meaning any region served by a cable provider is unlikely to become serviceable by a PUD or port. It is not clear what measurements would be used to decide whether 100/20 is available in a given area.

The Wellman bill specifically says that municipal providers can only offer retail telecom service in unserved areas.

The final version of the Hansen bill requires municipalities to provide “evidence relating to the unserved nature of the community” before offering broadband, but Hansen said that it does not prohibit municipal networks in those unserved areas. Hansen told Ars that “it’s just a reporting requirement” and that public entities “can still serve the areas that already have service.” The reporting “lets the State Broadband Office know who literally has nothing, which can help the broadband office allocate grants,” he said.

Hansen was also the lead sponsor of Washington’s net neutrality law.

Chipping away at municipal broadband limits

Washington is one of 19 states on Baller’s list of states that restrict municipal networks. Arkansas is another of those 19 states, but its Republican-dominated legislature in February gave local governments new authority to provide broadband access.

Municipal broadband can solve access and affordability problems in areas where private ISPs haven’t upgraded networks to modern speeds, fail to provide service to all residents, and/or charge outrageous rates. Though the Arkansas vote shows that Republicans aren’t universally opposed to municipal broadband, the GOP in general has been fighting public networks for years in order to protect private ISPs from competition. Congressional Republicans in February proposed a nationwide ban on municipal broadband networks.

Democrats in Congress proposed overturning state laws that prevent the growth of municipal broadband, and President Joe Biden has a stated goal of “lifting barriers that prevent municipally owned or affiliated providers and rural electric co-ops from competing on an even playing field with private providers.” Biden’s plan would also spend $100 billion to upgrade broadband while prioritizing support for “networks owned, operated by, or affiliated with local governments, non-profits, and co-operatives—providers with less pressure to turn profits and with a commitment to serving entire communities.”

The cable lobby predictably opposed Biden plan, saying the US funding programs should continue to favor private ISPs. The cable lobby also objected to Biden’s pledge to work “with Congress to find a solution to reduce Internet prices for all Americans.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1756744

Facebook is allowing its oversight board to rule on moderation decisions relating to content that remains on its Facebook and Instagram platforms. Previously, the only rulings the board could issue were to restore content that moderators had removed.

The Facebook Oversight Board was established last year in response to concerns that the social media company wielded too much unchecked power over what content appeared on its site. Current board members include several law professors, executives from think tanks and nongovernmental organizations, a former US federal circuit judge, and the former prime minister of Denmark. The board is managed by an independent organization that the company seeded with $130 million.

To appeal a post, a person must have an active Facebook account and must have exhausted the company’s appeals process. At that point, the user can take their petition to the oversight board.

In the six months since it was founded, the board has made eight decisions, basing its rulings on Facebook’s policies and overruling the company in five of them. The board’s charter says that its rulings are binding “unless implementation of a resolution could violate the law.” Since Facebook is available in every country except those that officially ban it, including China, it’s unclear which laws those include. 

CEO Mark Zuckerberg initially floated the board idea back in November 2018, writing in a blog post that the board would be in place by the end of 2019. The board heard its first case on October 22, 2020, two years after being announced. Board members were selected by Facebook, confirmed by a board of trustees (who were also selected by Facebook), and serve for a maximum of two three-year terms. Many board members appear to have other employment, though they reportedly receive six-figure salaries for around 15 hours of work per week, according to The New Yorker. 

Today, the board has 19 members with the potential to expand to 40. The size of the board, even when at full capacity, provides a sharp contrast to the volume of potential appeals it could be presented with. In the second quarter of 2020, Facebook removed 22.5 million posts for violating the company’s hate-speech policy. Now that the company is opening the process to all content on its two biggest platforms—Facebook alone has over 1.8 billion daily active users—the caseload will certainly grow. 

Neither Facebook nor the oversight board has disclosed how many removals have been appealed. But based on reported figures, the board has ruled on around 0.003 percent of posts moderated for violating hate speech policies. (That percentage would almost certainly be lower if it included the number of posts moderated for reasons that do not include hate speech.)

Comparing those numbers with the federal appeals court, which the board is reportedly modeled after, reveals the scope of the challenge. The US Court of Appeals, which has 179 congressionally authorized judgeships in 13 circuits, heard 50,258 cases last year, equal to about 12 percent of the caseload at the district level. (Those numbers aren’t perfect, since appeals to district decisions don’t always occur in the same year.)

Facebook appears to be hoping that automation can expand the oversight board’s decisions to other posts it thinks apply. When that happens, the company says it will “take action by analyzing whether it is technically and operationally feasible to apply the board’s decision to that content as well.” It’s unclear if any moderation that results from automated applications of decisions can be appealed to the oversight board.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1756620

A judge has ordered Charter Communications to pay $19.2 million to Windstream for lying to customers in order to trick them into switching from Windstream to Charter’s Spectrum Internet service. Charter also faces a $5,279 penalty for shutting off service to hundreds of Windstream’s resale customers.

When Windstream filed for bankruptcy in early 2019, Charter began a “literally false and intentionally misleading advertising campaign intended to create the impression, using mailings designed to seem as if they were coming from the Debtors [Windstream], that the Debtors were going out of business,” said an order issued Thursday by Judge Robert Drain of US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York.

Charter’s goal with the mailings “was to induce the Debtors’ customers to terminate their contracts and switch to Charter by sending them literally false and intentionally misleading information about the Debtors’ bankruptcy cases and financial wherewithal,” the ruling said. Charter premised its ad campaign “on false assertions regarding the Debtors’ bankruptcy cases,” the ruling said.

“We are gratified that Judge Drain’s ruling means Charter will have to pay a significant price for its egregious false advertising,” Windstream General Counsel Kristi Moody said, according to a FierceTelecom article. “Charter knew full well what it was doing when it embarked on a dishonest scare-tactic campaign to lure away our customers. At Windstream, we will always aggressively defend ourselves and our customers against predatory schemes and meritless allegations.”

Charter declined to comment on the ruling when contacted by Ars today.

Charter mailings

A Charter mailing to Internet users came in envelopes “with Windstream’s mark and distinct color pattern to make Windstream’s customers believe that the letters came from Windstream,” according to Windstream. The envelope was labeled “Important Information Enclosed for Windstream Customers.” Inside the envelopes were advertisements that said:

Windstream Customers,

Don’t Risk Losing Your Internet and TV Services.

Windstream has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, which means uncertainty. Will they be able to provide the Internet and TV services you rely on in the future? To ensure you are not left without vital Internet and TV services, switch to Spectrum. With a network built for the future, Spectrum is here for the long haul.

The ads also said, “Windstream’s future is unknown, but Spectrum is here to stay.”

In May 2019, the bankruptcy court issued a preliminary injunction against Charter and authorized Windstream to send letters to customers notifying them that “a federal court has now ruled that the advertisement sent to you by a competitor was untrue and improper.” Charter was ordered to pay for Windstream’s costs in mailing the letter to all customers who had received Charter’s false advertisements.

Windstream has about 1.1 million Internet customers and offers residential service in 18 states. Windstream estimated that 1,386 customers “canceled their Windstream subscription services as a result of Charter’s false advertising,” it said in a court filing.

Charter claimed “First Amendment” right

Charter claimed that punishment for its “literally false and intentionally misleading advertising campaign would violate their First Amendment right to free speech,” the judge wrote. But First Amendment rights are not absolute and do not protect Charter’s false statements about Windstream’s bankruptcy proceedings and financial wherewithal, he wrote. “Such commercial speech is properly curtailed by precluding such wrongful conduct,” he wrote.

Charter also claimed “that if anyone violated the stay, it was their advertising agency and their consultant, One Touch Intelligence in developing the campaign,” Drain wrote. The judge dismissed this claim briefly, writing that Charter’s argument “ignores the Defendants’ authorization of the campaign to be modeled on a prior campaign relating to a competitor that was ‘shutting down service’ to create doubt whether the Debtors would remain in business… Moreover, the acts of the Defendants’ agents in violation of the stay would be imputed to them.”

Charter itself filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and then sued DirecTV “for ‘false’ advertising that it said could give customers the impression Charter is liquidating and that its cable TV services will soon end,” as Reuters reported at the time.

Calculating damages

While the preliminary injunction was issued shortly after Windstream sued Charter, further proceedings were held to determine how much Charter has to pay Windstream in compensatory damages. Ultimately, Charter was ordered to pay $19,179,329.45 to Windstream “for the losses caused by their violation of the automatic stay by intentionally and wrongfully interfering with the Debtors’ customer contracts and good will.”

An automatic stay is an important mechanism in US bankruptcy law “that temporarily prevents creditors, collections agencies, government entities, and individuals from pursuing debtors for amounts owed,” as Investopedia notes.

Charter claimed the automatic stay law “is ambiguous or impermissibly broad in regulating their conduct,” the judge wrote. However, “improper advertising such as the Defendants’ clearly and objectively interfered with the Debtors’ customer contracts and goodwill and thus clearly was precluded by section 362(a)(3)’s plain terms and the caselaw applying them,” he wrote.

Windstream showed that it “suffered $5.1 million of lost profits” because of Charter’s false ad campaign, and Charter did not challenge Windstream’s “assertion of damages of $862,775 comprising the cost of corrective advertising in response to the ad campaign,” the ruling said.

The court ruled Windstream should be reimbursed for $4,033,425 that it spent on “a promotional campaign comprising customer upgrades, discounts, and other pricing promotions undertaken from September through December 2019,” which Windstream undertook “because of and in response to Defendants’ ad campaign.”

The $19.2 million judgment includes $9.2 million for litigation fees and expenses.

Charter disconnected Windstream customers

The ruling also said that Charter breached the automatic stay order by disconnecting Windstream customers who were being served over the Charter network under a reseller agreement. Charter disconnected those users despite having received notice of the bankruptcy proceedings and the automatic stay.

Charter’s penalty for the service disconnection is $5,278.85 to cover credits Windstream provided to customers who were disconnected.

Charter disconnected about 350 Windstream customers on or around March 14, 2019, Windstream told the court in an April 2019 filing after suing Charter. “When Windstream customers contacted Charter to have their services reinstated, they were told by Charter that service was not being repaired because of Windstream’s failure to pay certain amounts due to Charter,” the filing said. “Windstream, however, is not currently authorized to make any payments to Charter on account of prepetition debt as a result of the Chapter 11 filing.”

Charter continued with a “smaller number of additional shutoffs in April and May 2019,” last week’s ruling said. It took Charter until May 9, 2019 to complete the “restoration of the Debtors’ accounts that should not have been automatically terminated in violation of the automatic stay,” last week’s ruling said.

Charter offered weak defense

Windstream alleged that Charter’s improper disconnections of those customers “was a deliberate attempt to manufacture a problem with Windstream’s services.”

Charter’s only response to the allegation “is a variation on the ‘inability’ defense to a finding of contempt, that is, that the termination of service was wholly mechanical, arising from ‘automatic nonpayment protocols’ programmed into its computerized billing system, or, possibly, that Charter reasonably attempted to comply,” the ruling said.

The judge rejected this argument, writing:

First, it is not really a defense for a large and sophisticated entity like Charter that provides services to many customers, some of whom inevitably will file for relief under the Bankruptcy Code, to argue that its systems do not have an effective fail‐safe to prevent it from violating the automatic stay. Charter has not contended that it lacked the capacity to adopt systems to override such automated collection activity. Turning a blind eye to the automatic stay by choosing systems that are incapable of complying with it is not tantamount to an inability to comply nor with making diligent efforts to comply in a reasonable manner.

Moreover, when Charter terminated service to the Windstream customers, “they did not even comply with the VAR [value-added reseller] Agreement itself, which provides at page 2 for 30‐days’ notice before service cancellation,” the judge wrote.

Disclosure: The Advance/Newhouse Partnership, which owns 13 percent of Charter, is part of Advance Publications. Advance Publications owns Condé Nast, which owns Ars Technica.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1756311

A federal appeals court struck a significant blow against disability rights this week when it ruled that a Florida grocery store’s inaccessible website did not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ruling contradicts a 2019 decision by a different appeals court holding that Domino’s did violate the ADA when it failed to make its app accessible to blind people. The disagreement between courts creates uncertainty about the rules that will govern online accessibility in the future.

Winn-Dixie is a grocery store chain with locations across the American South. Juan Carlos Gil is a blind Florida man who patronized Winn-Dixie stores in the Miami area for about 15 years.

A few years ago, Gil learned that the store offered customers the ability to fill prescriptions online. Ordering online saves customers time because prescriptions are ready when the customer arrives. Gill also preferred to order prescriptions online because it offered greater privacy. In court, he testified that ordering in person as a blind man made him “uncomfortable because he did not know who else was nearby listening” as he told the pharmacist his order.

Unfortunately, the Winn-Dixie website was incompatible with the screen-reading software Gil used to surf the web, rendering it effectively useless to him. Incensed, Gil stopped patronizing Winn-Dixie and filed a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Gil argued that the inaccessible design of the Winn-Dixie website discriminated against blind customers like him because it forced them to order prescriptions in person, a process that is slower and offers less privacy.

In his lawsuit, Gil also said he couldn’t access two other features of the Winn-Dixie website: a store locator function and the ability to clip digital coupons and automatically apply them at the register with his loyalty card.

A trial court victory

In 2017, a trial court ruled in Gil’s favor, finding that Winn-Dixie’s website discriminated against blind users. Specifically, Title III of the ADA requires that a “public accommodation” such as a grocery store must provide disabled customers such as Gil equal access to its “goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations.”

Winn-Dixie had argued that the law defines “public accommodations” to only include physical locations like a store. A website isn’t a physical location, and hence it’s outside the scope of the law, the grocery chain argued.

But Judge Robert Scola disagreed.

“Where a website is heavily integrated with physical store locations and operates as a gateway to the physical store locations, courts have found that the website is a service of a public accommodation and is covered by the ADA,” Scola argued.

A website might not be a physical location, Scola reasoned, but a customer who can’t use the website doesn’t have full access to the store’s services, privileges and advantages—such as the service of ordering a prescription ahead of time for quick and discreet pickup.

An appeals court reversal

The grocery chain appealed the case to the 11th Circuit Appeals Court, which reversed Scola in a 2-1 ruling.

The two-judge majority placed a lot of weight on the fact that the ADA only applies to physical spaces. In their view, a website is not a public accommodation as the ADA defines the concept.

And while filling a prescription in person might not be as private or convenient as placing an order online, the judges argued that it was good enough to satisfy the ADA.

“Although Gil was not always happy with the speed or privacy of the service he received at the pharmacy, nothing prevented Gil from refilling his prescriptions during his time as a Winn-Dixie customer,” wrote Judge Elizabeth Branch for the majority.

But a dissenting judge, Jill Pryor, rejected the majority’s reasoning. “After comparing the experiences of Winn-Dixie’s disabled and nondisabled customers regarding express prescription refills, I cannot understand how the majority concludes that disabled customers, like Gil, were offered equal treatment,” she wrote. She argued that the online prescription feature was a service of the physical store and therefore subject to the ADA.

But Branch’s majority opinion warned that such a broad interpretation of “services” would open a Pandora’s box.

“The dissent concludes that because visually disabled individuals cannot access the website’s content, they are not receiving a ‘comparable’ or ‘like’ experience to that of sighted customers,” she wrote. “But under such an expansive interpretation, virtually anything—from the tangible to the intangible—might be deemed a service, privilege, or advantage.” She argued Congress didn’t intend “such a sweeping interpretation” of the law.

A circuit split

The ruling runs directly contrary to a 2019 decision by the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court, which covers California and several other Western states. In 2019, the Ninth Circuit ruled that Domino’s had violated the ADA by failing to make its online ordering system accessible to blind customers. Plaintiff Guillermo Robles claimed that this violated his rights under the ADA, and the Ninth Circuit agreed.

“Domino’s website and app facilitate access to the goods and services of a place of public accommodation—Domino’s physical restaurants,” the Ninth Circuit held. “They are two of the primary (and heavily advertised) means of ordering Domino’s products to be picked up at or delivered from Domino’s restaurants.”

Hence, while the website itself might not be a place of public accommodation, an inaccessible website impedes blind customers’ access to the Domino’s restaurant—which clearly is such a place.

This situation—where two different appeals courts take divergent positions on the same legal question—is known as a circuit split. For now, businesses in Western states will be required to follow the Ninth Circuit’s broad interpretation of the ADA and make their websites accessible. Meanwhile, businesses in the three Eleventh Circuit states—Alabama, Georgia, and Florida—won’t have to worry as much about making their websites ADA compliant.

Businesses in other circuits will have to wait for their own appeals courts to rule on this question if they haven’t done so already. Of course, some businesses might decide to make their websites accessible just to be on the safe side—especially if they do business nationwide. But others might decide to wait and see how other courts rule on the issue.

This week’s ruling was made by a panel of three Eleventh Circuit judges. Gil could still request that the case be re-heard by a larger group of judges, which is known as an en banc appeal. Gil could also appeal the case to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court reviews only a fraction of the rulings made by lower courts. However, the high court uses circuit splits as an important signal of which cases are worth taking. So the fact that the Ninth and Eleventh Circuit disagree makes it somewhat more likely that the high court will intervene.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1755715