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Gaming Like It's 1926: The Public Domain Game JamHappy new year everyone — and happy public domain day! That's right: as of today, works from 1926 are now officially in the public domain in the US, and that means it's time for the latest public domain game jam: Gaming Like It's 1926, presented by Techdirt and Randy Lubin of Diegetic Games. Just like in past years, we're calling on game designers of all stripes and levels of experience to create games that make use of, or are based on, material from newly-public-domain works. The jam starts today and runs until the end of the month: just sign up for the jam on itch.io and submit your game by January 31st.As always, the jam is open to both digital and analog games (be sure to read over the full requirements on the jam page). There are lots of interesting works entering the public domain this year, including:

As long term readers of Techdirt know, each year since 2008 my final post of the year has been a kind of reflection on optimism. This tradition started after I had a few people ask how come it seemed that I was so optimistic when I seemed to spend all my time writing about scary threats to innovation, the internet, and civil liberties. And there is an odd contradiction in there, but it's one that shows up among many innovation optimists. I'm reminded of Cory Doctorow's eloquent response to those who called internet dreamers like John Perry Barlow "techno utopians."

Following protests over killings by law enforcement officers, the Department of Justice decided it might be a good idea to equip more police officers with body cameras. In May 2015, it announced the federal government would be spending $75 million over the next three years to purchase body cameras for local law enforcement agencies.The DOJ saw the potential for body cameras to produce more accountability, lower the chances of deadly interactions, and rebuild some trust with the communities officers served. That's presumably why it opted out of this push for body camera adoption. Five months after it announced the body cam grant program, DOJ reps told local law enforcement that use of body cameras wasn't allowed when partnering with federal law enforcement. Either the cameras stayed home or the local cops did. No exceptions.It wasn't until five years later that the DOJ finally decided it was ok for federal agents to work with local law enforcement officers sporting body cameras, perhaps realizing the cameras simply weren't going to go away. After all, it had encouraged adoption of the tech with three years of federal funding. But this still meant federal officers were going about their work unobserved, which still seemed problematic given all the advantages the DOJ said these cameras created when it started handing out federal cash in 2015.It took another year before the DOJ finally decided federal officers should get with the body camera program. Six years after it invested in nationwide distribution of body cameras, federal officers are finally going to start wearing them. The ATF was the first to perform a test run of the cameras. Now, the DHS is following suit.

It's been a rough year for our community of tech policy advocates, with us losing two of our own, Sherwin Siy in July and then Elliot Harmon in October. We remembered Sherwin here, and the EFF wrote about Elliot over there.But what we realized is that both of them had also written here at Techdirt, so we thought we'd use this end-of-year time of reflection to share those posts from the Techdirt archives.Sherwin appears to have had just one post, but it was a quintessentially Sherwin post that both relished the absurdity of the world, while diligently explaining it:"Die Another Eh: What Does It Mean Now That James Bond Is In The Public Domain In Canada?"Elliot also wrote about wayward applications of intellectual property laws. His first post here was about a winner of the EFF's stupid patent of the month "award," which was bestowed upon Ford for having patented a windshield. He then later wrote about another stupid patent with Daniel Nazer, this time "celebrating" Elsevier's patent on peer review.He also wrote about copyright getting out of hand, including in this post about how current copyright policy creates dangers to research.Of course, IP isn't the only thing to worry about in tech policy; there's also the chilling efforts to increase liability for platforms. He wrote about the problems with these proposals too, counseling Congress not to force platforms to censor their users, and warning about the inevitable harms of SESTA/FOSTA in several other posts:

After bad cops do bad things, other cops will rush to the defense of the agency employing them, claiming most cops are good and these officers are outliers. These assertions might be more believable if law enforcement agencies (and their unions) didn't regularly cover for bad officers or, in the case of police unions, work tirelessly to ensure bad cops get their jobs back.Everything works in favor of bad cops. Their union reps can force agencies to rehire them. Fellow officers look the other way or falsify reports to cover for their actions. Oversight boards are neutered, ignored, and obstructed. Police officials with the power to rid agencies of bad officers either refuse to do so or are powerless in the face of restrictive union contracts.If there's an upside to all of this right now, it's that transparency has been forced on several law enforcement agencies over the past few years, making it easier to obtain misconduct records. Agencies no longer have the opacity to engage in repeated denials of severe misconduct by officers. And they can no longer claim they truly care about ensuring only the best officers remain employed.And there are other, non-official sources for this data. Entities like DDoS (Distributed Denial of Secrets) have exfiltrated files from law enforcement servers, resulting in revelations law enforcement agencies weren't willing to make.Disciplinary files freed by a ransomware hack were converted to searchable documents and examined by The Reveal and DCist. The documents show how much the Washington, DC police department has done to ensure some of its worst officers stayed on the payroll. Criminal misconduct by law enforcement officers apparently isn't worth a firing, not when DC police officials have the final say on discipline.

Missouri Governor Mike Parson is nothing if not consistent in his desire to stifle free speech. As you'll recall, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch discovered that the state's Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website was programming in such an incompetent fashion that it would reveal, to anyone who knew where to look, the social security numbers of every teacher and administrator in the system (including those no longer employed there). The reporting on the vulnerability was done exactly following ethical disclosure best practices -- getting just enough evidence of the vulnerability, alerting the state to the problem and not publishing anything until the vulnerability was fixed. The FBI told Missouri officials early on "that this incident is not an actual network intrusion" and DESE initially wrote up a press release thanking the journalists for alerting them to this.But then Parson blundered his way into making a mess of it, insisting that the reporters were hackers and ordering the Missouri Highway Patrol to "investigate" them for prosecution. When people mocked him for this, he doubled down by insisting that this was real hacking and that those reporting otherwise were part of "the fake news."A month later, DESE admitted that it had fucked up, apologized to all the teachers and administrators (current and former) who its own incompetence had exposed, and offered credit monitoring to them all. Notably, DESE did not apologize to the journalists who discovered this mess, and the governor has continued to stand by his call to prosecute them.Earlier this week the Highway Patrol claimed it had completed its investigation... and turned the findings over to state prosecutors. That alone seems worrisome, as there's nothing to turn over to prosecutors here beyond "our governor is a very foolish man, who can't admit to his own failings."

Congress has been holding lots of "but think of the children online!" hearings over the past couple of months, and one prominent topic that comes up over and over again is the fact that people can find "drug" information online. Fears about kids and drugs goes back decades, but politicians love it, because it always works. And, of course, the media loves to run these overhyped stories. A quick search finds dozens of stories like the following in just the last month or so:

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Pretty much exactly a year ago, the Washington Post obtained documents that showed Chinese tech giant Huawei was working with the government to create facial recognition on steroids: a system capable of not just recognizing faces, but also certain ethnicities.There's only one reason for developing ethnicity recognition in China. The government's war on its Muslim Uighur population continues with no sign of letting up. Huawei's tech would enable the government to identify and track its most undesirable citizens, most likely to find any reason at all to disappear them into the country's many prisons and reeducation camps.Huawei denied involvement in this project. It did not deny the documents seen by the Washington Post were legitimate, however. Instead, it claimed the documents referred to a test project that had not been deployed. According to its spokesperson, the company would never provide the powerful Chinese government with tools developed for the purpose of targeting Uighur citizens.It was a pretty weak denial, considering Huawei's disadvantaged position. If it wishes to maintain its healthy market share in China, it will have to comply with the government's demands. That's how it works in China and that's how it's worked for years. And, no matter where they're located, companies don't often spend money on test runs of products they don't intend to sell or deploy in the future. Some testing may be done to see if something is feasible. But if the product works well enough to put on the market (or sell to governments), it will eventually result in real-world applications.One year later and it's the Washington Post again obtaining documents about Huawei's relationship with the Chinese government. Huawei has suggested it's not working directly with the government to create surveillance gear, claiming it's nothing more than a provider of apolitical networking hardware and software.But the documents seen by the Post strongly suggest otherwise.

Two years ago the Trump DOJ and FCC rubber stamped the Sprint T-Mobile merger without heeding experts warnings that the merger would likely erode competition, raise rates, and kill jobs. Then, working closely with T-Mobile and Dish, the FCC and DOJ unveiled what they claimed was a "fix" for the problematic nature of the deal: they'd try to cobble together a fourth major replacement wireless carrier in Dish Network.As we noted a few times the proposal was never likely to succeed. One, because Dish had no track record in this space outside of a parade of empty promises. Two, because the remaining three providers (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile) want less price competition and would be incentivized at every step to ensure it fails. Three, because the government would likely dole out more than wrist slaps should Dish miss major build out milestones.So far, things are going just about as well as you'd expect. T-Mobile has already laid off 5,000 employees, and the plan has been mired with endless squabbling between T-Mobile and Dish. And both the beta and commercial launch of Dish's 5G network, first in Las Vegas, keeps being delayed. There is technically a network operating in Las Vegas, but most folks in wireless continue to eye the company's plans with justified skepticism. Early analysis of the network that does exist isn't what you'd call bubbly, as both speeds and coverage are sorely lacking after repeated delays:

While we have been discussing the way mainland China's plan to slow-creep the end of democracy in Hong Kong has turned into more of a sprint, it's also quite true that what is occurring there hasn't gotten nearly enough media burn as it should. Plenty of folks have chalked up China's aggressive attitudes towards Hong Kong to the 2019 pro-democracy protests, but the real sprint began once it became clear that Donald Trump stood a good chance of losing the White House to Joe Biden. Trump showed little willingness to push back on China when it came to its treatment of Hong Kong and the theory was that Biden would reverse course and show some backbone. That he generally hasn't is one of geopolitics great ironies. Beijing has taken such steps as to try to erase the CCP's own bloody history, to censor all kinds of Hong Kong pro-democracy culture, and to arrest of all kinds of pro-democracy lawmakers and media.Democracy is over in Hong Kong, in other words, and has been for some time now. What Beijing is currently in is a mop-up mode, as it looks to take the vice it has built around the city-state and spin the tightening lever. China's actions have made any designation of Hong Kong as a Special Administrative Region an absolute punchline, including at present when China is busy arresting more pro-democracy cultural icons, including a popular musician, Denise Ho.

Years after they've become a go-to tool for law enforcement to work their way backwards to suspects, the Massachusetts Supreme Court is wrestling with the issue of cell tower dumps.Cell tower dumps can often be had with only a subpoena. They give investigators access to all cell phones that were in the area of the tower at certain times. Investigators peruse these lists of numbers to try to find numbers that might be linked to someone who committed a crime. The problem is investigators don't know who that "someone" is, so they, however briefly, turn everyone in the area into a suspect.The Third Party Doctrine tends to control this collection of data. The information is collected as a necessary part of cell phone operation. Therefore, there's no expectation of privacy in this information, the theory goes, since users are aware service providers need this information to provide service. And it very well may be that cell users are aware of this. What they generally don't expect is that law enforcement can obtain this data without a warrant, or, indeed, obtain it at all when investigators don't even know who they're looking for.The thorny issue of tower dumps is before the court, which now has the US Supreme Court's Carpenter decision to consider as well, something it didn't have prior to June 2018. In that decision, the Supreme Court says there was an expectation of privacy in cell site location data, which tower dumps are, even if they contain information on hundreds or thousands of people, rather than the more targeted collection of cell site location info related to a single targeted number.The Carpenter decision was rather narrow, holding that use of cell site location info to track people's movements requires a warrant. But it also stated clearly that there's an expectation of privacy in these records, whether or not they're collected long term or once via a tower dump. The tracking was the issue here, but Carpenter changed how courts view cell site location info.The state of Massachusetts has its own constitution to factor in as well. And in some cases, state constitutions have proven more protective of rights than the US Constitution, which is considered to be the floor for rights, rather than the ceiling.Thomas F. Harrison covered the oral arguments in the Massachusetts Supreme Court for Courthouse News Service. And from what's reported here, it appears the justices aren't all that keen on pretending working backwards from untargeted data dumps isn't the sort of thing the public expects to be happening with the phone records they generate simply by taking their phones wherever they go.

The history of copyright can be seen as one of increasing control by companies over what ordinary people can do with material created by others. For the online world, the endgame is where copyright holders get to check and approve every single file that is uploaded, with the power to block anything they regard as infringing. That digital dystopia moved much closer two years ago, with the passage of the EU Copyright Directive. At the heart of the Directive lies precisely these kind of upload filters – even though the legislation's supporters insisted that they would not be needed. When the law was safely passed – despite voting issues – only then did they admit that upload filters would indeed be required.The parts of the EU Copyright Directive dealing with upload filters are so badly crafted that most of the EU’s Member States are struggling to implement them in their national laws in any coherent way. This means the full impact of the legislation's upload filters won't be known for some time.Until then, we can look at the real-life effects of a similar approach, as used by YouTube. Content ID is a digital fingerprinting system developed by Google at great cost – around $100 million by 2018 – which is designed to spot and block allegedly infringing material on YouTube. Content ID’s flaws are well known, particularly in terms of overblocking perfectly legal uploads. This is the fundamental problem with all upload filters: there is no way that an automated, algorithmic system can encompass the complexities of global copyright laws, which even trained lawyers struggle with. The problem of overblocking is widely known on an anecdotal basis, but we have not had reliable data about the scale of the problem. That has finally changed with the release of YouTube’s first Copyright Transparency Report. The Kluwer Copyright Blog has a good analysis and summary of the report by Paul Keller, Director of Policy at openfuture.eu:

It remains somewhat surprising to me how many people who have ideas for Section 230 reforms clearly do not understand the law and how it works. Perhaps much more surprising is that, when experts try to highlight where their analysis has gone wrong, these "reformers" double down rather than correct their previous faulty assumptions. Dean Baker is a fairly well-known economist whose views on copyright we've highlighted in the past for being quite insightful. Unfortunately, Baker seems to feel that his insight in these other areas allows him to skip the basics on Section 230, defamation law, internet business models and the like. A year ago he wrote two separate very wrong and very confused blog posts advocating for the full repeal of Section 230. Both of them misunderstand how 230 works, its interplay with the 1st Amendment, and how defamation law works.I had planned to write a response to them last year, but never got around to it. However, Baker is still at it, and after Jeff Kosseff and I spent some time trying to explain some fairly basic principles that you need to understand in order to explore the trade-offs in any Section 230 reform proposal, Baker wrote a long thread ignoring the points we raised, and insisting that his plan for 230 reform wouldn't run into any issues. He's wrong, and despite my going back and forth with him over a dozen times, it's become clear that he has no interest in exploring or correcting the mistakes in his analysis. That said, I do think that he makes so many fundamental errors, that it might be useful to go through his thread to explain to other, more open-minded folks, the very significant challenges in these plans to reform Section 230.Baker's latest proposal is apparently no longer the full "repeal" of Section 230 he wanted a year ago, but now just that only subscription supported sites (with no advertising) get the benefits of Section 230. As laid out in his thread, the underlying theory is that Facebook is too big, and by removing Section 230, this would force Facebook to downsize. This is wrong for a bunch of reasons, some of which we've explained before, but we'll get there. He seems to no longer support a full repeal of Section 230 because people highlighted how it harms other sites. So his new version is that Section 230 is only removed for sites that have advertising as their main business model under the (incorrect) theory that this will magically create a world where every site other than Facebook moves away from ads to subscription only, and that somehow makes Facebook smaller. Substacks for everyone!So, again, the keys to Baker's plan seem to be that by removing Section 230 for ad supported sites, it somehow (1) forces Facebook to shrink and (2) forces paywalls all over the internet. And this is somehow good. Both assumptions are fundamentally wrong -- but it's important to understand why, because this mistake is made by too many people who haven't bothered to take the time to understand Section 230.Section 230 does not provide an outsized benefit to Facebook -- instead, it protects everyone else significantly more than it protects Facebook.This is one thing that many, many people fundamentally misunderstand about Section 230. They think that because Section 230 "protects" Facebook and Facebook is so big, that Section 230 protects Facebook more than it protects others, and therefore any removal of 230 protections will have a greater impact on Facebook than other sites.The problem with this is that the real benefit from Section 230 is not the underlying protection from liability, rather it's the procedural benefits that 230 provides that help companies get out of frivolous lawsuits at an earlier stage. We've discussed this before a few times, but many people seem to miss it. There are two important issues as it relates to liability for websites in cases that try to drag them in: (1) what is the likelihood of any underlying cause of action actually leading to liability (outside of Section 230) and (2) how expensive is it to find out whether or not that liability sticks.In the vast majority of cases, there is no underlying cause of action that will create liability. We've actually seen this in action in the few cases that get past the Section 230 hurdle. One of the most famous cases that chipped away at Section 230 protections was Fair Housing v. Roommates, in which the court determined that, while Section 230 protected Roommates.com from content that other users created, it did not protect the company from liability for the pull down menus that it created itself.Many people think this means that Roommates.com lost the case, and very, very few people realize that years later Roommates.com still won, when the courts determined that even though 230 didn't kick the case out early, Roommates.com still didn't actually violate the law. The same is true of the other big 230 exception case, the more recent Enigma Software v. Malwarebytes case, in which the court (somewhat bizarrely) argued that Malwarebytes doesn't get Section 230 protections in cases where a malware designation might be deemed anti-competitive. But, in the end, many years later, Malwarebytes still won.Again, the key benefit to Section 230 is not that it removes all liability, but rather that it gets cases dismissed very early on, cases that would have almost no chance if they went through the full litigation process. In other words, it's a form of protection against frivolous lawsuits, and the main mechanism involved is getting cases dismissed earlier, rather than years (and millions of dollars later). That helps smaller companies way more than it helps Facebook. Facebook has all the money in the world and it can afford to litigate these cases all the way through. It would cost the company pocket change, but the company would likely still win in the end.Smaller companies, on the other hand, cannot afford the costs. Getting a case dismissed on 230 grounds might cost six figures. Having to go all the way through the full litigation is more like 7 or 8 figures (depending on circumstances). Facebook can find that money in the seat cushions of their office couches. Smaller companies cannot.Dean also appears to not understand how defamation law works at all. In his thread, he seems to think that without Section 230, if someone posted something defamatory that would automatically make Facebook liable for the defamation:

India's Information Technology Act has been problematic since its inception. Almost a decade ago, it was deployed to justify the arrest of an Indian citizen who'd done nothing more than criticize a politician, insinuating the politician had used his position to amass personal wealth.Once the politician complained, the government ignored available libel law, which would have resulted in a civil case and opted to use a clause of the IT Act which allowed prosecution for "sending an email or other electronic message that causes annoyance or inconvenience." That's how the law was used in 2012.The 2021 version of the law is much more dangerous. Folding into the act passed in 2000 are new rules about national security. This escalates the Act's abusability, since nearly anything can be called a threat to national security and drastically limits the defenses those targeted by this part of the act can raise.Added into this revision are new mandates for social media companies, which allows the government to hold companies responsible for content created by their users. There's a long list of forbidden content that starts with child sexual abuse material and terroristic content and ends with things like "promoting tobacco use," "blasphemy," and "harms minors in any way."It is those changes that have resulted in the banning of 20 supposedly "anti-India" YouTube channels.

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Senator Amy Klobuchar really is taking to her role as the Senator most eager to set up a Ministry of Truth in the government. Klobuchar has always been terrible on tech/internet issues, but she's really taken it to a new level in the past year or so. Over the summer, she released a blatantly unconstitutional bill that literally would empower the Director of Health & Human Services to declare what counts as health misinformation and make social media websites liable for it (imagine how that would have played out under a Trump administration -- because Klobuchar apparently can't remember that far back).Last week, she sent a ridiculous letter to Mark Zuckerberg demanding he explain Facebook Meta's handling of misinformation regarding the election. A dozen other Senators -- including many who have unfortunately long histories grandstanding against the internet -- signed on to the letter as well.

For years the broadband industry has successfully convinced the U.S. government to remain fixated exclusively on broadband coverage gaps, not the overall lack of broadband competition. That's in part because they've known for decades that substandard maps mean policymakers have never really known which areas lack or need access. That's helped create an ecosystem where we throw billions upon billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies at regional monopolies every year, in exchange for broadband networks that are routinely half-completed.With a record $42 billion broadband investment on the horizon, the industry is obviously worried that some of that money might go toward (gasp) added competition. As in, not just used to expand access to the estimated 20-40 million Americans without broadband, but funding to help bring new competitors to the estimated 83 million Americans living under a broadband monopoly. That regional monopolization, as we've long documented, is why U.S. broadband tends to be expensive, spotty, slow, and with terrible customer service.Of course you can't just come out and acknowledge you don't want money going toward encouraging broadband competition, even though more competition would greatly benefit consumers, small businesses, and countless internet-based economies. So instead the industry's biggest players (and the politicians and regulators paid to love them) like to complain about "overbuilding," or the act of creating "duplicative" broadband networks in "already served" areas. This is generally framed in such as a way as to make it sound as if broadband in most parts of the country is already wonderful, and spending any money to expand access in these "already served" areas would be completely wasteful.That rhetoric and language was quick to pop up in a House Republican letter sent to the two agencies overseeing fund distribution: the NTIA (pdf) and FCC (pdf). In the letters, lawmakers profess they're just super duper worried about the potential for waste:

In early 2019, a whistleblower revealed some ugliness emanating from the United Arab Emirates: former NSA analysts working for a private company hired to perform counterterrorism work for the government were spying on journalists, activists, and the occasional American citizen on behalf of their royal benefactors.Why these analysts were working for known human rights abusers was unclear. Why they decided this work should involve targeting people who weren't terrorists, but rather critics of the UAE government, was similarly left unexplained. The program was called Project Raven and former employee Lori Stroud was the only person involved willing to speak publicly about its activities. Everyone else -- from the NSA to the UAE government -- refused to comment.More than two years later, the harms perpetrated by these former analysts were given a price tag. Three former US intelligence community analysts (two of which worked for the NSA) were fined $1.68 million for utilizing powerful hacking tools to target dissidents, activists, journalists, and the occasional American citizen for the UAE government. The tools used included "Karma," which was capable of remotely compromising targets' phones without any interaction from phone owners, allowing for wholesale collection of photos, emails, text messages and location information.Over the years covered in the indictment (which resulted in the fines mentioned above), the analysts began with Project Raven, which migrated from Cyberpoint (a company associated with Italy's infamous Hacking Team), before finally ending up as a wholly-UAE-owned company called Darkmatter.It's this company that's now being sued by one of its targets, a Saudi activist represented by the EFF.

Horizon Worlds is a VR (virtual reality) social space and world building game created by Facebook. In early December, a beta tester wrote about being virtually groped by another Horizon Worlds user. A few weeks later, The Verge and other outlets published stories about the incident. However, their coverage omits key details from the victim’s account. As a result, it presents the assault as a failure of user operated moderation tools rather than the limits of top-down moderation. Nevertheless, this VR groping illustrates the difficulty of moderating VR, and the enduring value of tools that let users solve problems for themselves.The user explains that they reported and blocked the groper, and a Facebook “guide”, an experienced user trained and certified by Facebook, failed to intervene. They write, “I think what made it worse, was even after I reported, and eventually blocked the assaulter, the guide in the plaza did and said nothing.” In the interest of transparency, I have republished the beta user’s post in full, sans identifying information, here;

It's becoming quite a theme: basically every industry is blaming the internet for anything wrong happening in their industry and the legacy media is more than willing to help out. The latest is the supposed "surge" in shoplifting and retail crime. You've probably seen the stories, and maybe the shaky video coverage of the big smash and grab runs at some big San Francisco stores. This is being leveraged by those retailers in a variety of ways, including in a push to roll back policing reforms, but also to attack the internet. We've talked about the problems of the INFORM Act, which is being pushed heavily by large retailers. If you read that letter (sent to Congressional leaders by a bunch of big retailers), it uses those stories of theft to say we need to pass new regulations about internet sales:

To be subservient to the Chinese government is to be in a constant state of (mandated) denial. The government has a narrative to project. No, that's not an accurate depiction. The state has a narrative to enforce.An obscene amount of oppression and death is apparently nothing to be ashamed of. And how could the government be ashamed of it? It never happened. Whatever violence Chinese citizens saw perpetrated against them was merely the actions of a heroic and patriotic government, inflicting death and misery for the greater good. Of course, the only beneficiaries of this "greater good" are those inflicting death and misery. Hence the friction between fact and government fiction.To make things easier for the people who serve the government (rather than the other way around), the Chinese government has spent years trying to eliminate the friction. Having a singular narrative may not fool people, but it at least gives them an official timeline to follow, which makes it easier to maintain "citizen scores" and stay off the radar of a government more interested in curbing thoughtcrime than actual crime.The Chinese government's steady incursion into the day-to-day activities of Hong Kong residents has been greeted with heated, sustained protests from residents of the region, as well as international condemnation. Neither of these reactions have slowed the Chinese government's roll. Neither has its tacit agreement with the British government to leave Hong Kong unmolested until 2049. Since 1999, the Chinese government has inflicted its will on the extremely profitable region, stripping it of the democracy and independence that allowed it to flourish.When regular laws just weren't effective enough in shutting down Hong Kong protests, the Chinese government introduced a new national security law. With this vague and easily abused justification for crushing dissent, the Chinese government made resistance untenable by threatening protesters and critics with life sentences for daring to challenge the narrative.Then it began erasing history. The Chinese government had already cleared the slate in China, eliminating its past misdeeds by rewriting textbooks, jailing dissenters, and creating an insular web overseen by multitudinous censors. Then it came for Hong Kong, using its "national security" pretext to jail journalists, target documentarians, and prevent artistic works challenging the official narrative from being displayed.Now, it has come for the last physical remnants of its checkered past. Erasure is here if you want it. If you have no monument to atrocities, did the atrocities even happen?

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We've noted for years how U.S. telecom giants aren't particularly competent when it comes to wandering outside of their core competencies (building and running networks, lobbying the government to hamstring competitors). As government pampered regional monopolies who haven't had to try particularly hard for decades, stuff like competition, innovation, adaptation, and creativity are often alien constructs.It routinely shows in the failed products they try to launch: mobile payment platforms that share names with terrorist organizations; Millennial-targeting streaming video platforms nobody actually wanted to watch; news websites that aren't allowed to write about the news; "me too" apps, app stores, and other products that can't compete.AT&T in particular has showcased telecom's knack for face plants with its $200 billion acquisitions of DirecTV and Time Warner, which was supposed to cement the telecom's place as an advertising and mobile media giant. Instead, the company somehow managed to lose millions of subscribers while laying off tens of thousands of employees, despite receiving no shortage of regulatory favors and tax breaks to make it easier to succeed.After recently spinning off the entire media fiasco, AT&T's now jumping ship from its ad ambitions as well as it tries to recover from the massive debt load creating by its megamerger fiasco. The company last week quietly announced it would be selling Xandr, its programmatic advertising marketplace, to Microsoft:

It's always fun to watch each new entrant into the social media market that rushes in claiming that it is the "true" supporter of "free speech" learn about the necessity of some level of content moderation. We watched it happen with Parler, the site set up by Trump benefactor Rebekah Mercer. And now we're watching it happen with former Trump spokesperson Jason Miller -- who is so supportive of "free speech" that he once sued a news org for reporting on something he didn't want public (he lost badly and was told to pay legal fees). GETTR has already had some fun learning that content moderation is necessary (and not a necessary "evil" -- just necessary). But now it's gone up a level.Of course, it was just a month ago that Miller was running his mouth, attacking Twitter and claiming that Jack Dorsey was "strangling free expression" at Twitter and "censoring opinions he doesn't like."So it seems noteworthy that just a few weeks later, it's Miller who is... doing the same thing. Specifically, GETTR banned Nick Fuentes, a pathetic wannabe neo-Nazi, who seems to spend all of his time just trying to troll people into being mad about what a sad little white nationalist he is. GETTR claimed that Fuentes violated its terms of service which, um, is the same thing that Twitter does when it bans people because that's how it works.But then GETTR went even further -- including much further than anything I've seen Twitter ever do. It started banning a word associated with Fuentes and his followers: "groyper." It's not worth getting into the history of groyper, but suffice it to say, it started as an alternative to the old alt-right co-opting of the Pepe the frog cartoon, and then just became a truly pathetic chant that Fuentes' followers chant as a sort of talisman to make sure they ward off anyone with more than a dozen brain cells. Anyway, Fuentes' little band of misfit children started filling up GETTR with "groyper spam" to protest the ban of Fuentes, and so Miller and GETTR just... decide to ban the word "groyper" from the site entirely. As the Daily Beast discovered, it's just not allowed at all.Say what you want about Twitter "strangling free expression" but I don't recall the company ever blocking your ability to post a single word in an effort to stop a bunch of sad edgelord teenagers from overflowing the site with protest spam. And, of course, as anyone with more than a little bit of experience in the content moderation space knows, doing simple word filter bans is not just silly, but also totally ineffective, as Arizona's dumber-than-you-can-believe State Senator Wendy Rogers highlighted with the addition of a few "o's":The key point here is that every website needs some level of content moderation or it becomes a total and complete cesspool that is basically unusable. Every website realizes that eventually. The idea that GETTR is any more "supportive of free speech" is nonsense. It just has a different set of rules that it will enforce somewhat arbitrarily, and it will make mistakes just as Twitter, Facebook, and other sites make mistakes. Of course, as a marketing tool, GETTR will continue to lie and claim that it is somehow uniquely more supportive of free speech, when that's all a bunch of nonsense.

In a spectacular bit of self-ownership, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) took to Facebook to brag about stealing money from a person at Love Field Airport.If you can't read the text or see the picture, it's a photograph of a Dallas PD drug dog standing next to several piles of money. The caption, written by the DPD, says:

Racism and policing go hand-in-hand. It's been this way ever since police forces were created for the purpose of tracking down escaped slaves and returning them to their owners. Flash forward 150 years and very little has changed other than the ending of slavery.Unsurprisingly, the advent of social media platforms and the increase in smartphone use has exposed the racism that still flows through far too many law enforcement agencies. Multiple investigations have been triggered by the exposure of bigoted communications between officers. It hasn't exactly resulted in a nationwide reckoning for racist officers, but it has at least seen a few bad apples tossed from barrels across the country.If cops aren't worried about what happens to them -- as is evidenced by their carefree deployment of casual racism -- it's doubtful they're too worried about what happens to the general public. They claim to be the thin blue line standing between us and criminal chaos, but their racist words are erasing that line, allowing criminal suspects to return to the streets.The Torrance Police Department in California is the epicenter of the latest garbage racist cop shitstorm. And rightfully so, given what's been uncovered there. Convictions and pending criminal cases are now in jeopardy because of officers texting each other things like this:

Don't kid yourselves, techbros. Predictive policing is regular policing, only with confirmation bias built in. The only question for citizens is whether or not they want to pay tech companies millions to give them the same racist policing they've been dealing with since policing began.Gizmodo (working with The Markup) was able to access predictive policing data stored on an unsecured server. The data they obtained reinforces everything that's been reported about this form of "smarter" policing, confirming its utility as a law enforcement echo chamber that allows cops to harass more minorities because that's always what they've done in the past.

We've long written about how you don't really own what you buy in the modern era. Books, games, and other entertainment can stop working on a dime due to crappy DRM. Game consoles you've purchased can find themselves suddenly with fewer features. Or worse, hardware you've bought thinking you'd own it for a decade can wind up being little more than a pricey paperweight.But quite often, products that should work for years just slowly stop being supported, leaving you with hardware that gradually becomes less and less useful. We saw this recently when Sonos initially bricked still working (and expensive) speakers. The phenomenon popped up again this week when Google announced that its OnHub router, launched back in 2015, will no longer be supported starting next year. The products will still technically function as a basic router, but they'll no longer see security updates, and many of the cloud-based functionality and advanced features will be stripped from the devices.To be clear this isn't an end of the world type of scandal. Google's providing 40% discounts to OnHub owners off of new Google routers (which will experience the same fate in a few years). The Hub also had some initial performance problems, and was quickly supplanted in Google's lineup by its Google WiFi (now Nest) products a year after they launched. But the downgrades are still part of an annoying shift in which companies hype all manner of cloud-based functionality at launch, then gradually strip functionality away once they no longer want to pay to support their own products:

Sometimes tough questions about rights have to be asked even when central figures are far from sympathetic. Good case law is sometimes made by bad people (or, at least, people accused of doing terrible things).But the questions must be asked. That's what the courts are for. They're a check against government overreach. And this case, coming via the Volokh Conspiracy, involves a defendant who's unlikely to gain much mainstream support.Jonathon Shroyer is a talk show host who works for Infowars. He's also -- according to the DOJ -- one of thousands who raided the Capitol building last January. Technically, he's a journalist, given that he collects information and reports it on his Infowars show. He may not be a journalist in the traditional sense, but there are many people who perform "non-traditional" journalism, even if they haven't hitched their wagon to an entity mostly known for pushing outrageous conspiracy theories.Shroyer joined other Infowars figures in a demonstration on January 6th, calling for the election to be overturned. Then he went further. This is from the magistrate's order [PDF] asking the DOJ to explain itself:

This is so bizarre. Last month we wrote about how the incredibly hypocritical oafs at Project Veritas were, on the one hand, screaming about their own press freedoms (for potentially legitimate reasons) while simultaneously trying to get a prior restraint order against the NY Times using the famed press silencers at the censorial thuggish law firm Clare Locke. Somewhat incredibly, on Christmas Eve a New York Supreme Court judge granted the request.At issue is that the NY Times apparently got access to some memos that Project Veritas's lawyer had sent to Project Veritas, apparently about how Project Veritas' brand of secret filming and selectively edited "journalism" might violate various laws. PV ran to court to stop the Times from publishing anything from the documents, and got a ridiculously broad order that could be read to say that the NY Times couldn't even continue reporting on PV. Incredibly, Project Veritas, whose entire genre of "reporting" revolves around obtaining information through deceit, claimed that the NY Times could be stopped under a law that allows for the "suppression of information improperly obtained." Can't see how that might come back to bite PV, now.The NY Times rightly pointed out that this order was clearly prior restraint and unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. The complicating factor here is that the censorial hypocrites at PV are suing the NY Times for alleged defamation, and claim that the information obtained by the NY Times reporters "relates directly" to the case at hand. The Times, on the other hand, pointed out that the information in the memos they obtained "have nothing to do with the subject matter in the underlying defamation action" and actually predate the PV video at issue in that case. More importantly, the NY Times noted (correctly!) that a news organization cannot be prevented from reporting on newsworthy info, even if that information is attorney-client privileged info, so long as they came by it via the news gathering process (i.e., not via discovery and the legal process in the lawsuit).And, here, it's impossible that the documents were obtained via discovery because discovery hasn't even happened yet in the lawsuit.But the judge, Charles Wood, says that Project Veritas "has met is burden of showing the subject memoranda were obtained by irregular means, if not both irregular and improper." The judge goes on a long digression about the importance of attorney-client privilege, but seems to totally miss the fact that it only matters with regards to being able to deny certain discovery requests, and that a third party news organization is simply not bound by the attorney-client privilege of a lawyer and a client if the material is obtained through their reporting.The court then addresses the 1st Amendment issues here... by basically brushing them off and saying it's no big deal. It goes through a long discussion on prior restraint and how the Supreme Court has rejected attempts at prior restraint in the past, but then seems to think that attorney-client privilege trumps that. It's bizarre. Even more bizarre is a weird aside about how our smart phones "beep and buzz" with information the judge believes is unimportant.

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Hey The North Face! Hi, how are you? We keep meeting like this and I really wish it would stop. As you may recall, last month, the "brand protection" company that you hired, Yellow Brand Protection, currently owned by Corsearch, sent us a completely bogus legal threat claiming that our news story from nine years earlier -- about someone you threatened for creating a parody image of a patch (not an actual patch and not for sale) saying "Hey Fuck Face" -- was somehow infringing.I realize this can get confusing, so let me spell that out for you again more clearly. Nine years ago, someone Photoshopped a fake patch parodying The North Face logo, with one that said "Hey Fuck Face." They posted it to Flickr. You guys lost your shit and filed a bogus takedown notice on this obvious parody that was not being used in commerce in anyway. But, much worse, nine years later, you had your "brand protection" company send us -- a news organization -- an even more bogus takedown for our reporting on it.That story got a bit of attention, and you had an executive reach out to me and admit that this "is obviously such a ridiculous mistake" and that you were "trying to figure out what happened." You also said you were "digging into it" and thought maybe someone had just "hit the wrong button." Your exec was very nice about it and apologized for the inconvenience and said that you'd use this as a learning experience to "course correct."I appreciated that.So... what I don't appreciate is that after all of that, Yellow Brand Protection/Corsearch apparently decided to escalate this matter a month after all of this went down. I assumed that after you realized how "ridiculous" this was and moved to "course correct" that at some point you informed Yellow Brand Protection to knock it off. Either you did not, or you don't yet realize just how much money you're wasting with them. Because on December 17th (again, a month after I thought this was all sorted out) Corsearch's "Vice President of Enforcement," Joseph Cherayath (who used to do internet enforcement for the City of London police, infamous for their completely confused and incorrect approach to intellectual property enforcement) upgraded the threat, sending a takedown demand not to us -- but to our CDN provider, Cloudflare.This now gets slightly more serious, because Cloudflare passes it on to our hosting company, who then demands that we do something about this potential legal threat, so rather than before where we could just ignore it, we need to go and explain to our hosting company why they shouldn't kick us off or go talk to their lawyers on how to deal with this. And at the same time, we have to go reach out to Cloudflare to make sure they know that we're not -- as Joseph Cherayath falsely claimed in his letter to Cloudflare -- "infringing on my client's IP rights by misusing the 'The North Face' trademark to sell counterfeit products."So, now you're not just wasting a little of my time, you're wasting a lot of it, along with two other companies, and putting me in a position where my site is at risk.So... yeah, forgive me for asking why do you still employ Corsearch for anything? And next time you're looking to use this as a learning experience and to course correct, could you do it without risking my entire site being taken offline? Please?

For years a growing number of US towns and cities have been forced into the broadband business thanks to US telecom market failure. Frustrated by high prices, lack of competition, spotty coverage, and terrible customer service, some 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of community broadband option. And while the telecom industry routinely likes to insist these efforts always end in disaster, that's never actually been true. While there certainly are bad business plans and bad leaders, studies routinely show that such services not only see far better customer satisfaction scores than large private ISPs, they frequently offer better service at lower, more transparent pricing than many private providers.Undaunted, big ISPs like AT&T and Comcast have waged a multi-pronged, several decades attack on such efforts. One, by writing and buying protectionist laws in dozens of states either hamstringing or banning cities from building their own networks, often in cases where private ISPs refuse to expand service. Two, by funding economists, consultants, and think tankers (usually via proxy organizations) happy to try and claim that community broadband is always a taxpayer boondoggle -- unnecessary because private sector US broadband just that wonderful.Of course if you ask actual American consumers, they generally support towns and cities building better, faster broadband networks if they've been historically underserved. And they most certainly don't approve of Comcast buying state laws that eliminate their voting right to make local infrastructure decisions for themselves. A recent Consumer Reports survey found that three out of four Americans support community broadband efforts:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is PaulT with a comment in a thread that tangentially devolved into antivaxxer nonsense:

Citizen Lab has uncovered more state-level spying targeting political opponents and journalists. There's a twist to this one, though. One of those targeted had his phone infected by two forms of malware produced by two different companies. And yet another twist: both companies have their roots in Israel, which is home to at least 19 entities that develop phone exploits. Here's the summary from Citizen Lab:

While arguing that video games are a form of art and should be respected as such has been a personal drum I've enjoyed beating for a decade, it's worth acknowledging just how far the public has come in its acceptance. While I spent a great deal of time ten years ago trying to get people, especially older folks, to see the light on this topic, the idea that video games are an artform has become far less controversial. As more people experience games, they've come to recognize better that games exhibit all the traditional hallmarks of an artform: creativity, political and ideological expression, efforts at preservation, and fights over expression in the courthouse.But, of course, that doesn't mean that everyone is convinced. So every once in a while comes a news story that gives me the opportunity to pull the old drum and sticks out and get back to playing persuasive percussion. Today that story is that a little bit of history was made by indie video game Hades, which has become the first game ever to win a Hugo Award.

Texas consumers recently learned the hard way that regulatory capture can prove to be fatal. Texas energy companies (and the regulators and lawmakers who love them) ignored a decade-plus of warnings that they needed to harden their utility infrastructure in the face of climate change. As a result, we're still measuring the casualties. Not only did 700 Texans die after they lost power during a brutal cold snap last February, but a new report by ProPublica found that an additional 1,400 Texans were hospitalized, and at least 7 died.A joint investigation by ProPublica, NBC, and The Texas Tribune found that lax regulatory oversight (aside from, yes, poor human decision making) was a primary reason people keep dying from something so avoidable as carbon monoxide poisoning:

We were just highlighting how rules that enable the easy takedown of content on social media will always lead to over-blocking, and this is why we should be quite careful about government attempts to mandate content removal -- like those of Senator Amy Klobuchar to require websites to remove "health misinformation." It's not like we don't have tremendous evidence of this. Daphne Keller over at Stanford has been keeping tabs on studies of "over-removal", with the key culprit being copyright law.In the US, copyright law remains the main tool for silencing speech (which is why there's still a very strong argument that the DMCA fundamentally has a 1st Amendment problem). It didn't get that much attention, but a recent revelation from Twitter about removing networks of coordinated inauthentic behavior online, reveals just how US copyright law can be weaponized by foreign governments to silence critics -- and it should be a very loud warning to those looking to create government mandates for the removal of information online.Twitter shared the details of these removals with the Internet Observatory at Stanford and it's from that organization's report that the details of what happened here come. However, Stanford IO released reports on a bunch of different networks at once, so what happened with Tanzania seems to have gotten less attention than the overall set of examples. But the Tanzania example should send up signal flares about why making it easy to remove content online is so dangerous.For years we've highlighted a tactic that people have used to silence others: faking a copyright on material and then claiming infringement. The tactic is stupidly brilliant. If you find some content you don't like, just copy it onto your own website/blog and then backdate it so it looks like it came out before the content you want to have deleted. Then, send a DMCA takedown notice claiming that yours is the original, and the actual original is infringing.A year ago, the good folks at Access Now spotted how they had been alerted to Tanzanian activists being silenced on Twitter through this technique:

The Fifth Amendment implications of compelled password production has reverted from "somewhat settled" to "not settled at all" in the state of Illinois.In 2019, an Illinois appellate court said the Fifth Amendment protects people against compelled password production to unlock devices. As the court pointed out in that decision, investigators had zero interest in the password itself. They were interested in what it would give them access to, which was all the evidence allegedly on the locked phone.The state relied on the "foregone conclusion" theory. In the government's view, the only information it needed to know with certainty is that the phone belonged to the suspect and that the suspect knew the passcode to unlock it. But the appellate court said that wasn't the right conclusion. What investigators wanted was access to the phone's contents, and it could not compel production of a passcode just to see if its guess about evidence contained in the phone was correct.

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Last week the State Department released its United States Advisory Council on Human Trafficking Annual Report 2021, and it's... a weird document in so many ways. Anti-human trafficking policy making is one of those issues that just seems to attract some very, very bizarre people -- as you might have noticed from the world of Pizzagate and Q-Anon. Human trafficking is (1) a very real problem, (2) a very serious problem, (3) just generally horrific for all the reasons you know, but (4) happens way less than most people think (especially given how much people focus on it). Obviously, continued efforts to prevent all human trafficking are important, and so I can understand why the State Department set up this advisory council. However, they seemed to staff it with a bunch of folks who have a very clear incentive to play up the issue as much bigger and more threatening than it really is.And perhaps that explains the report's incredibly bizarre, incorrect, and just weird thoughts on the internet and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. First, they have a section that looks like it was directly written by The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), which while you might think that's a group with relevant expertise, is not. The group was founded in 1962 as "Morality in Media" and has spent decades trying to stop anything they deem to be smut. They only changed their name to NCOSE because it played better in the media to tie their anti-porn, anti-obscenity obsession to exploitation. They were also a major force behind FOSTA, which they always viewed as a step towards making all porn illegal.One of the group's big lobbying campaigns is to convince states to pass laws declaring pornography to be a "public health issue." It's not, of course, but this group's entire existence doesn't make much sense if they can't convince more prudes that nekkid people are destroying society. Which, fine, if outlawing porn gets you off, do what you have to do, but I don't see why the State Department needs to support that kind of nonsense. Yet, right in this report we get:

Despite the relentless hype leading up to the deployment of 5G, and all the lopsided favors regulators gave wireless carriers on behalf of 5G, and all the lobbying and DC rhetoric about how the U.S. was engaged in a "race with China" over 5G -- U.S. 5G continues to be... largely mediocre.A number of recent studies have already shown that U.S. wireless isn't just the most expensive in the developed world, U.S. 5G is significantly slower than most overseas deployments. That's thanks in large part to our failure to make so-called middle band spectrum available for public use, resulting in a heavy smattering of lower band spectrum (good signal reach but slow speeds) or high-band and millimeter wave spectrum (great speeds, but poor reach and poor reception indoors). The end result is a far cry from what carriers had spent the last three years promising.Now another Ookla report has emerged showing that while U.S. 5G availability is going well, the actual speeds users are getting rank among the worst in the developed world:

Because law enforcement just can't stop taking money from innocent people, here's another roadside shitshow that has resulted in an attempt to force the government to give back money it flat out stole.This one has a couple of twists. First, it involves body cameras, so the whole depressing farce can actually be watched as it unfolds. The second twist is the federal government, which arrived (via cell phone) to pitch in with the theft.This is what happened to Stephen Lara, 16-year military veteran and innocent person, as he traveled through Nevada on his way to visit his daughters in California.

There's not much privacy in prison. And there's going to be even less. Inmates are warned that all calls are monitored. How often this goal is achieved is impossible to say, but tech advances are making it a reality. Attorney-client privilege is supposed to be respected in prisons, but we've already seen instances where it hasn't been, thanks to automated monitoring equipment.What's already been a problem is going to get worse. AI is doing the eavesdropping, and it's far from perfect. A new report from Thomson Reuters shows prisons are investing heavily in automation to ensure as many conversations as possible originating from prisoners are recorded, captured, and mined for useful info.

It was only a few months back that Amazon released its MMO game New World. While there was a bunch of hype around the game, it was met critically with mostly a collective "meh". While the lack of exuberant reviews focused mostly on bland gameplay that doesn't survive its honeymoon period, there were also bugs. So, so many bugs. So many bugs, in fact, that both gamer media covered them in detail and entire Reddit threads were created to discuss them.This isn't unique to New World, of course. With the unfortunate industry trend of releasing a game first and then day 1 patching most of the problems out of it afterwards, there are a ton of these stories. But what makes this one different is that a YouTuber created a video about one of the bugs and then alerted Amazon to it so that they could fix it, only to have Amazon issue a copyright strike against his channel.

We've noted for years how much of the hysteria surrounding 5G health hazards aren't based on actual science. In fact, 5G in general is arguably less powerful that previous standards; especially millimeter wave 5G, which struggles with distance and wall penetration. Most 5G health freak outs you'll see online are often based on a twenty year old misinterpreted graph that doesn't actually say what folks claim it does. That's not to say it's impossible that cellular technology could be harming human health, just that the evidence we have so far absolutely does not point in that direction.Of course facts and data aren't particularly popular in the post-truth era, leading to endless continued freak outs over 5G. Some of which have proven notably dangerous to wireless company technicians, who've been increasingly targeted by conspiracy theorists. They've also resulted in a sub-market of grifters, offering "solutions" to a problem that isn't real (see this faraday cage enclosed router, for example).Some of these grifts have proven to be a bit more harmful to their target audience however. For example the Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection (ANVS) in the Netherlands just had to issue a warning that several brands of “quantum pendants” and other “negative ion” jewelry marketed as "anti-5G" were in fact radioactive and dangerous to human health:

Spyware is spyware. It doesn't matter who's deploying it. Proctorio -- the snitchware maker that helps schools keep tabs on distance learners -- has made headlines here for abusing the DMCA to silence security researchers who found flaws in the remote surveillance software. Bogus claims were filed and Proctorio is currently being sued by the EFF and one target of its censorial bullshit.It was only a matter of time before someone took advantage of the omnipresent anti-cheat spyware, which takes control of students' cameras and microphones to keep an eye on them as well as track their internet activity to ensure they aren't searching the internet to find answers to tests. That's a lot of centralized power enabled by expansive, mandatory permissions. It was bound to be exploited sooner or later. And sooner was the most likely outcome, considering Proctorio sometimes seems more interested in silencing critics than addressing the harms its software poses.RTL News reports that students in the Netherlands may have been working with compromised computers for months, thanks to exploitation of Proctorio's anti-cheat software.

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I still find myself somewhat amazed at how otherwise intelligent people seem to lose their entire minds over the fact that there's a fair bit of misinformation out there. Robert Reich is not a dumb guy, but like so many these days, he seems to work himself up in a lather about things he doesn't seem to understand. He has an opinion piece at the Guardian about his suggestions to restore American democracy... and apparently part of that is throwing out the 1st Amendment. Which is, you know, quite a choice. I won't comment on his first and third suggestions (voting rights and money/politics) because those aren't my areas of expertise, but when he dips his toe into Section 230 and misinformation, I have to point out that everything Reich writes in this piece is so far beyond wrong that it would need to ask directions just to get back into the vicinity of "just kinda wrong."