FTP (file transfer protocol) celebrated its 50th anniversary this week. Long-time Slashdot reader sandbagger shares an article commemorating a half-century of FTP: Over the years, the FTP protocol got refined with 16 different revisions(*1) adding support with TCP/IP, a secure extension also known as FTPS which is leveraging the same tech as HTTPS and more recent addition like IPv6 support. Fifty years after its inception, FTP is still going very strong with millions of FTP server still being exposed on the internet which is fairly amazing considering the bad press it gets...

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Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill on Friday requiring all Internet service providers in New York to offer affordable high-speed access for low-income families. From a report: The providers can charge those families no more than $15 a month, Cuomo said during a briefing Friday at the Northland Workforce Training Center in Buffalo. He was joined by Eric Schmidt, former chief executive officer of Alphabet, who chairs a 15-member state commission focusing on using technology to help the state reopen better than it was before the virus. Cuomo also said an emergency fund from Schmidt Futures and the Ford Foundation will provide free Internet access to 50,000 students statewide through the 2021-22 school year. The bill passed by the state legislature caps a basic broadband plan at $15 a month and a higher-speed one at $20. Currently, a basic high-speed plan costs on average more than $50 a month, according to a statement from Assembly member Amy Paulin. Schmidt, who praised the embattled governor for his "extraordinary" leadership during the pandemic, said universal broadband access is the first and most important priority of the commission. Members were concerned about the "hundreds of thousands of people who apparently had no Internet access at all," Schmidt said, an impediment to learning and tele-medicine.

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Bloomberg's William Turton and Joshua Brustein have published a profile of the 23-year-old proprietor of VanwaTech, an internet provider in Vancouver, Wash. that "provides tech support to the U.S. networks of White nationalists and conspiracy theorists banned by the likes of Amazon." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: Two and a half months before extremists invaded the U.S. Capitol, the far-right wing of the internet suffered a brief collapse. All at once, in the final weeks of the country's presidential campaign, a handful of prominent sites catering to White supremacists and adherents of the QAnon conspiracy movement stopped functioning. To many of the forums' most devoted participants, the outage seemed to prove the American political struggle was approaching its apocalyptic endgame. "Dems are making a concerted move across all platforms," read one characteristic tweet. "The burning of the land foreshadows a massive imperial strike back in the next few days." In fact, there'd been no conspiracy to take down the sites; they'd crashed because of a technical glitch with VanwaTech, a tiny company in Vancouver, Wash., that they rely on for various kinds of network infrastructure. They went back online with a simple server reset about an hour later, after the proprietor, 23-year-old Nick Lim, woke up from a nap at his mom's condo. Lim founded VanwaTech in late 2019. He hosts some websites directly and provides others with technical services including protection against certain cyberattacks; his annual revenue, he says, is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Although small, the operation serves clients including the Daily Stormer, one of America's most notorious online destinations for overt neo-Nazis, and 8kun, the message board at the center of the QAnon movement, whose adherents were heavily involved in the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6. Lim exists in a singularly odd corner of the business world. He says he's not an extremist, just an entrepreneur with a maximalist view of free speech. "There needs to be a me, right?" he says, while eating pho at a Vietnamese restaurant near his headquarters. "Once you get to the point where you look at whether content is safe or unsafe, as soon as you do that, you've opened a can of worms." At best, his apolitical framing comes across as naive; at worst, as preposterous gaslighting. In interviews with Bloomberg Businessweek early in 2020, Lim said he didn't really know what QAnon was and had no opinion about Donald Trump. What's undeniable is the niche Lim is filling. His blip of a company is providing essential tech support for the kinds of violence-prone hate groups and conspiracists that tend to get banned by mainstream providers such as Amazon Web Services.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Washington State lawmakers have voted to kill telecom-industry backed restrictions that limit the reach of community broadband. The Public Broadband Act (HB1336) passed the state Senate with a 27-22 vote on Sunday, after passing the House with a vote of 60-37 last February. State Representative Drew Hansen applauded the bill's passage on Twitter, stating it "reverses decades of bad policy" and opens the door to better, cheaper broadband. "Washington was one of only 18 states that restricted local governments from serving the public by providing public broadband," Hansen told Motherboard. "My bill eliminates that restriction." In Washington, a twenty-one year old law let some local governments build their own broadband networks, but prohibited local utilities from delivering broadband to customers directly. Hansen, who was also the primary sponsor of the state's new net neutrality law, says his bill finally eliminates those unnecessary limits entirely. "The Public Broadband Act broadly authorizes all local governments to provide broadband to anyone -- people who are totally unserved, people who have some internet access but it's not affordable or reliable -- any people at all," Hansen told Motherboard. "Under the Public Broadband Act, Washington governments have completely unrestricted authority to provide broadband to the public."

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The FCC is encouraging netizens to use its internet speed mobile app in an effort to finally get accurate broadband data across the United States. The Register reports: In an announcement on Monday, the telecoms regulator noted that "the app provides a way for consumers to test the performance of their mobile and in-home broadband networks" and "provides the test results to the FCC." It stops far short of saying that the data will be used to make policy decisions, however, saying only that the figures gathered "will help to inform the FCC's efforts to collect more accurate and granular broadband deployment data." The public push doesn't mean that things are going to get better soon. Big Cable has aggressively -- and successfully -- argued in the past that data provided by users over an app is not sufficiently robust to form the basis of governmental decisions. And so the FCC will have to use the results as a way to push for change rather than use the data to make direct decisions. Everybody, including numerous states, cities, congressfolk and the GAO, know that the official FCC data provided by ISPs is not worth the paper it's written on. But broader usage of the app should expose just how inaccurate official figures are, which should in turn provide enough impetus for change. The bigger question is whether enough progress is made in the next four years to make any difference.

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In Myanmar, the junta's intensifying crackdowns on protesters in the street are mirrored by its rising restrictions online. Reuters: In the early hours of Feb. 1, Myanmar's military seized power in a coup that has ignited months of mass protests. The military junta's security forces have since killed more than 550 civilians in crackdowns on the pro-democracy protesters, including children. To try to suppress protests, the junta has imposed increasing restrictions on internet access, culminating in a near total shutdown as of April 2. That has made it extremely difficult for people to access information, upload videos of protests, or organize. These tactics have also crippled businesses and limited access to medical information during the coronavirus pandemic. A Myanmar junta spokesperson did not respond to calls seeking comment. At a March 23 press conference, spokesperson Zaw Min Tun said the junta had no immediate plans to ease internet restrictions because violence was being provoked online. Protesters in Myanmar, who asked to stay anonymous, told Reuters they were terrified about being shut off from the world, with no way to broadcast news of the protests or of the army's killings to those outside of Myanmar. "We Myanmar people are in the dark now," said one young protester. "News from Myanmar is going to disappear," another added. Governments around the world are increasingly using internet restrictions during political crises as a tool to limit free expression and hide human rights abuses, according to data from the digital rights organization Access Now. The U.N. Human Rights Council has condemned such intentional disruptions as a human rights violation. "Whenever the internet is shut down during such critical moments we would hear or document or see reports of human rights abuses, and that is what is happening in Myanmar," said Felicia Anthonio, a campaigner with Access Now. "The government is cracking down on protesters to ensure they do not let the rest of the world know what is happening." Since the coup, the junta has ordered telecom companies to carry out dozens of shutdowns. These shutdowns targeted mobile and wireless internet, which is the only available internet for most in the country.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Live-streaming service Twitch will ban users for offenses such as hate-group membership or credible threats of mass violence that occur entirely away from the site, in a new approach to moderating the platform, the company said on Wednesday. The Amazon-owned platform, which is popular among video gamers, said under its new rules it would take enforcement actions against offline offenses that posed a "substantial safety risk" to its community. It said examples of this "severe misconduct" include terrorist activities, child sexual exploitation, violent extremism, credible threats of mass violence, carrying out or deliberately acting as an accomplice to sexual assault and threatening Twitch or its staff. "Taking action against misconduct that occurs entirely off our service is a novel approach for both Twitch and the industry at large, but it's one we believe -- and hear from you -- is crucial to get right," the company said in a blog post. The company said users will be able to report such behaviors but it may also investigate cases proactively, for instance if there is a verified news report that a user has been arrested. Twitch said it would rely more heavily on law enforcement in "off-service" cases and is partnering with an investigative law firm to support its internal team. It declined to name the firm. The new standards will apply even if the target of the offline behaviors is not a Twitch user or if the perpetrator was not a user when they committed the acts. Perpetrators would also be banned from registering a Twitch account, it said. Twitch said it would take action only when there was evidence, such as screen shots, videos of off-Twitch behavior or police filings, verified by its internal team or third-party investigators. Users who submit a large amount of frivolous reports will face suspension. The company said in cases where the behavior happened in the distant past, users had gone through rehabilitation such as time in a correctional facility, and they no longer presented a danger to the community, it might not take action or might reinstate users on appeal. It said it would share updates with the involved parties but would not share public updates about actions under this policy.

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Myanmar's military rulers have ordered internet service providers to shut down wireless broadband services until further notice, Reuters reported Thursday, citing sources. From the report: The instruction to halt wireless broadband services was relayed to employees of one provider in an email seen by Reuters, which did not state a reason for the order. It also said the current mobile internet shutdown would continue and by law it had to comply with the directive.

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One of the many promises made in President Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure plan is to deliver "future proof" broadband to every home in American within eight years. It sets aside $100 billion to accomplish this feat. Motherboard reports: While specifics are murky, a new fact sheet on the proposal states the plan won't just involve throwing more subsidies at America's deep-pocketed incumbents, an American pastime studies show historically hasn't delivered on the promise of faster, better broadband. Instead, the Biden administration says it plans to "prioritize support" for broadband networks owned, operated, or run in concert with local governments. Frustrated by limited competition and substandard service, some 750 U.S. communities have built local broadband networks that studies have shown are faster and less expensive than traditional options. "President Biden's plan will promote price transparency and competition among internet providers, including by lifting barriers that prevent municipally-owned or affiliated providers and rural electric co-ops from competing on an even playing field with private providers, and requiring internet providers to clearly disclose the prices they charge," the plan states. The problem: neither the Biden FCC nor broader administration can do much about such state-level restrictions. Previous efforts by the Obama FCC to eliminate state barriers to community broadband were shot down in court. Still, clear support for such efforts is a course change from the GOP, which has repeatedly tried to ban community broadband entirely.

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This week Swedish developer Daniel Stenberg posted a remarkable reflection on the 20th anniversary of his command-line data tool, cURL: curl was adopted in Red Hat Linux in late 1998, became a Debian package in May 1999, shipped in Mac OS X 10.1 in August 2001. Today, it is also shipped by default in Windows 10 and in iOS and Android devices. Not to mention the game consoles, Nintendo Switch, Xbox and Sony PS5. Amusingly, libcurl is used by the two major mobile OSes but not provided as an API by them, so lots of apps, including many extremely large volume apps bundle their own libcurl build: YouTube, Skype, Instagram, Spotify, Google Photos, Netflix etc. Meaning that most smartphone users today have many separate curl installations in their phones. Further, libcurl is used by some of the most played computer games of all times: GTA V, Fortnite, PUBG mobile, Red Dead Redemption 2 etc. libcurl powers media players and set-top boxes such as Roku, Apple TV by maybe half a billion TVs. curl and libcurl ships in virtually every Internet server and is the default transfer engine in PHP, which is found in almost 80% of the world's almost two billion websites. Cars are Internet-connected now. libcurl is used in virtually every modern car these days to transfer data to and from the vehicles. Then add media players, kitchen and medical devices, printers, smart watches and lots of "smart"; IoT things. Practically speaking, just about every Internet-connected device in existence runs curl. I'm convinced I'm not exaggerating when I claim that curl exists in over ten billion installations world-wide... Those 300 lines of code in late 1996 have grown to 172,000 lines in March 2021. Stenberg attributes cURL's success to persistence. "We hold out. We endure and keep polishing. We're here for the long run. It took me two years (counting from the precursors) to reach 300 downloads. It took another ten or so until it was really widely available and used." But he adds that 22 different CPU architectures and 86 different operating systems are now known to have run curl. In a later blog post titled "GitHub Steel," Stenberg also reveals that GitHub gave him a 3D-printed steel version of his 2020 GitHub contribution matrix — accompanied by a friendly note. "Please accept this small gift as a token of appreciation on behalf of all of us here at GitHub, and everyone who benefits from your work."

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Sidestepping a crackdown on internet use since the military seized power almost two months ago, hundreds of thousands of protesters and citizens in Myanmar are finding different ways to communicate online, downloading tools to bypass censorship restrictions and turning to alternative media sources and underground networks, according to new research. From a report: They have moved to a mirror site of Facebook on the dark web, used apps that rely on Bluetooth technology to continue messaging each other and turned to lesser known social media platforms to stay connected, according to Recorded Future, a closely held cybersecurity firm based near Boston. Myanmar citizens are following the lead of protesters in Hong Kong, Belarus and elsewhere who have found creative ways around government internet restrictions. Protesters from some of those countries are now providing guidance and support to Myanmar, and online forums are offering tips on how its citizens can stay connected. "In the history of Myanmar and all the coups they've experienced and all this political upheaval, it looks to be the first time the people really had this type of access to alternative platforms, and have used it to reach out to international organizations and other countries for help," said Charity Wright, cyber threat intelligence analyst at Recorded Future, who has been studying the impact of the crackdown on the internet for the past month and a half.

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theodp writes: Sneakerheads like to complain about the one that got away," writes the L.A. Times' Ronald D. White. "About haunting sneaker apps and websites yet failing to win shoe-drop raffles or find what they want at semiaffordable prices. About how the system must be rigged by resellers using bots and inside connections. Now, a scandal involving a Nike executive and her reseller son is roiling the sneaker world, highlighting worst suspicions about a booming market in which shoes can be traded like stocks. For serious sneaker collectors, this is more than a tempest in a shoebox." In a case of remarkably bad timing, just as the ethics of the lucrative sneaker resale industry came under scrutiny in the wake of the Nike scandal and questions were raised about exorbitant pandemic-fueled profits, Amazon launched a program for K-12 students that highlights how CS makes the sneaker resale marketplace gold rush possible. "Amazon and the AWS Services are really the backbone and foundation of how we do all of our work in Data Science," explains a GOAT Data Platform Engineer in an Amazon Future Engineer lesson that teaches kids how AI and data can be used to help flip sneakers by classifying GOAT website visitors as "Hype" ['willing to splurge'], "Core", or "Under Retail" user types.

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Google, Microsoft and the broader web community are working together to make it easier for developers to build websites that work seamlessly across browsers. From a report: They've teamed up for a cross-browser effort called #Compat2021, which aims to eliminate the top five browser compatibility pain points on the web for developers. The group identified the issues they decided to focus on based on usage data, number of bugs reports, survey feedback and test results. One of the most problematic issue that they want to address is with CSS Flexbox, since images as flex items are often stretched incorrectly and differently between browsers. They also want to improve CSS Grid so that it can be used to create animated grid layouts on Chromium and WebKit -- at the moment, the ability is only supported in Gecko. The group wants to work on sticky positioning so that any content that's stickied looks consistent across browsers, as well. Similarly, they want to make sure web elements maintain a consistent width-to-height ratio and that animations and 3D effects look the same whatever browser a user is on.

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Abstract of a new paper posted on Nature: In recent years, there has been a great deal of concern about the proliferation of false and misleading news on social media. Academics and practitioners alike have asked why people share such misinformation, and sought solutions to reduce the sharing of misinformation. Here, we attempt to address both of these questions. First, we find that the veracity of headlines has little effect on sharing intentions, despite having a large effect on judgments of accuracy. This dissociation suggests that sharing does not necessarily indicate belief. Nonetheless, most participants say it is important to share only accurate news. To shed light on this apparent contradiction, we carried out four survey experiments and a field experiment on Twitter; the results show that subtly shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of news that people subsequently share. Together with additional computational analyses, these findings indicate that people often share misinformation because their attention is focused on factors other than accuracy -- and therefore they fail to implement a strongly held preference for accurate sharing. Our results challenge the popular claim that people value partisanship over accuracy, and provide evidence for scalable attention-based interventions that social media platforms could easily implement to counter misinformation online.

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Too many young people around the world are excluded from accessing the web, and getting them online should be a priority for the post-Covid era, Tim Berners-Lee has said. From a report: In a letter published to mark the 32nd birthday of the web, its founder says the opportunity "to reimagine our world and create something better" in the aftermath of Covid-19 must be channelled to getting internet access to the third of people aged between 15 and 24 who are offline. "The influence of young people is felt across their communities and online networks," Berners-Lee writes. "But today we're seeing just a fraction of what's possible. Because while we talk about a generation of 'digital natives,' far too many young people remain excluded and unable to use the web to share their talents and ideas. "A third of young people have no internet access at all. Many more lack the data, devices and reliable connection they need to make the most of the web. In fact, only the top third of under-25s have a home internet connection, according to Unicef, leaving 2.2 billion young people without the stable access they need to learn online, which has helped so many others continue their education during the pandemic." Even though young people are more likely than the typical global citizen to have internet access -- roughly half the world is online, but the figure rises to 70% of people aged between 15 and 25 -- Berners-Lee argues that aiming to connect every young person in the world to the web would reap dividends. He also says doing so would be relatively cheap compared with the cost of many government programmes launched over the last 12 months. He estimates that an investment of $428bn over the next decade would provide everyone with a quality broadband connection.

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"The Border Gateway Protocol was first described in 1989...," according to Wikipedia, "and has been in use on the Internet since 1994." But now long-time Slashdot reader jovius reports that a startup named Syntropy "aims to replace BGP as the default routing method of the internet, by using nodes around the world to constantly gather data of the inefficiencies of the current network." The intelligence is then used to route data via the most efficient routes. Actual tests with hundreds of servers have proved that latencies can be reduced by tens to hundreds of milliseconds. The connections are by default encrypted, and jitter is also reduced. Eventually, the company-run servers are augmented with tens of thousands of nodes run by users/smart devices, who are rewarded for their work. The team was recently joined by former SVP at Verizon Shawn Hakl and former Chief Product Officer at AT&T Roman Pacewicz. One of the founders of Syntropy is the co-founder of Equinix and NANOG Bill Norton. Syntropy is an Oracle and Microsoft partner, and transforming into a foundation and DAO to govern the protocol work. Decentralised autonomous routing protocol (or DARP) has just been opened for community testing, and the system is live on https://darp.syntropystack.com/.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some Comcast customers received an unwelcome surprise yesterday morning when their upload speeds were suddenly lowered from 20Mbps to 16Mbps. Comcast was raising download speeds on its "Extreme Pro" tier from 600Mbps to 800Mbps -- good news, to be sure -- but the plan's relatively paltry 20Mbps upload speeds received a simultaneous 20 percent cut. Customers affected by the change complained to Comcast, and two of them emailed Ars yesterday. When we passed these complaints on to Comcast public relations, a spokesperson initially told us that "there was no change to the upstream speed." But after we pointed out that customers were in fact getting reduced upload speeds, Comcast investigated further and discovered it made a mistake while rolling out download-speed upgrades for some of its plans. "The customers who received the [download] speed increase last night should now be seeing the correct upload speeds in their usage meter," Comcast told Ars last night. "When we pushed the speed increase overnight, there was an issue with how the upload speeds were provisioned, which is why the meter and our internal tools that our care agents use were showing the upload speed of 16Mbps. Once you notified us, we quickly looked into it and everything should be correct now." The fix is rolling out automatically so customers don't have to do anything, Comcast said. "For a period of less than 24 hours, customers would have seen slightly slower upload speeds," Comcast told us. "This issue only impacted customers in our Central markets who received this [download] speed increase from 600Mbps to 800Mbps." Comcast told us that the problem affected users in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

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Kelerei writes: A major fire has destroyed a data center of European cloud provider OVH in Strasbourg, France. The SBG2 data center is completely destroyed, while the blaze caused some damage to SBG1 before being contained. SBG3 and SBG4 were also taken offline, but a plan is underway to restart them once the firefighters give the all-clear. All OVH staff at the site are accounted for and unhurt, but it is unlikely that the data in SBG2 is recoverable. On OVH's status page, an ominous note states "if your production is in Strasbourg, we recommend to activate your Disaster Recovery Plan." Among the sites affected is the WordPress image optimization site Imagify and the encryption utility VeraCrypt. (Submitter's note: this is why any disaster recovery plan should include offsite backups...)

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Long-time Slashdot reader lee1 shares a new article from Linux magazine: The danger and irritations of the modern web have unleashed a movement dedicated to creating a safer and simpler alternative. The old Gopher network and the new Gemini protocol have emerged as building blocks for this new "small Internet." Anyone who has used the World Wide Web (WWW) lately knows that something bad is happening to it. It does not resemble the WWW of the early years, with enthusiastic amateurs freely sharing ideas and information. These things still exist, and the web is still an indispensable medium connecting the world. But the web experience is now encumbered with advertising, invasions of privacy in the form of pervasive tracking, enormous file sizes, CPU straining JavaScript, the danger of exploits, and door slams asking you to subscribe to a newsletter before viewing a site. This unpleasant environment has led to a backlash. There are now some communities of developers and computer users who still desire a connected information system, but who seek a refuge from the noise, danger, and increasingly resource-hungry WWW. They feel that web technology does too much, and that since it makes various forms of abuse too easy, no lasting reform is possible. The solution is to use or create a separate protocol that is simply not capable of supporting the technologies that enable advertising networks, user fingerprinting, or the myriad of other things that exploit users rather than helping them. This small movement has approached the problem from two directions that in practice are often merged: the revival of the Gopher protocol and the creation of a new protocol called Gemini. Gemini would support its own lightweight hypertext format, and would co-exist with Gopher and HTTP as an alternative client-server protocol with built-in privacy-assuring features like mandatory Transport Layer Security and a "Trust On First Use" public-key security model. ("Connections are closed at the end of a single transaction and cannot be reused," notes the Project Gemini home page.) "You may think of Gemini as 'the web, stripped right back to its essence,'" explains its FAQ, "or as 'Gopher, souped up and modernised just a little', depending upon your perspective..." "Gemini is also intended to be very privacy conscious, to be difficult to extend in the future (so that it will *stay* simple and privacy conscious), and to be compatible with a 'do it yourself' computing ethos."

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Stacey Higginbotham: If you own a 2013 SmartThings hub (that's the original) or a SmartThings Link for the Nvidia Shield TV, your hardware will stop working on June 30 of this year. The device depreciation is part of the announced exodus from manufacturing and supporting its own hardware and the Groovy IDE that Samsung Smartthings announced last summer. SmartThings has set up a support page for customers still using those devices to help those users transition to newer hubs. That transition will also include a discount for users of the affected devices if they want to purchase the latest Aeotec version of the SmartThings hub. If you're still using either of the older devices you should expect an email that will provide a discount code to buy the Aeotec hub through TheSmartestHouse.com. That discount will be available until April 15.

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