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For years we've noted how both Apple and John Deere have become the face of the kind of obnoxious repair restrictions that have fueled the growing "right to repair" movement. Apple has long been criticized for bullying independent repair shop owners, attempting to monopolize repair, and generally being terrible from an environmental standpoint when it comes to waste and repair. John Deere has been equally criticized for obnoxious DRM and draconian repair policies that force many rural tractor owners to spend thousands of dollars, and sometimes drive thousands of miles, just to get essential agricultural equipment repaired.US PIRG is now attempting to pressure both companies via their investors, and alongside a "socially responsible mutual fund company," Green Century Funds, has filed shareholder resolutions with both Apple and John Deere asking them to account for “anti-competitive repair policies." The mutual fund argues that Apple is harming the company's brand value by insisting it's socially responsible, then routinely embracing policies that, well, aren't:

Three former US intelligence community employees (two who worked for the NSA) have just agreed to pay $1.68 million in fines for violating export control regulations by providing the United Arab Emirates government with powerful hacking tools that government used to target dissidents, pro-democracy activists, and other perceived enemies of the UAE.If that seems a little light for giving authoritarian thugs better ways to locate, punish, or completely disappear residents and citizens who have angered them by asking for basic human rights, you're right: it is. But that's what the DOJ has agreed to do.

It will come as no surprise that we have done many, many posts at Techdirt that involve Sony. While not all of those posts are critical of the company, many of those posts deal with Sony wielding IP law about while claiming it is doing so to "protect creators" of content. We've also discussed instances where some of these IP-wielding companies, that are supposedly the vanguards of the creative community, also have managed to use the art created by their own fans without bothering to credit them. To be clear, that likely doesn't run afoul of copyright law, given that the fan art typically uses IP owned by these companies. But it doesn't change the fact that it's both quite hypocritical to not bother even crediting the fan that created the art, as well as being just plain shitty.So back to Sony: the company appears to be both quite hypocritical and just plain shitty to one fan that seems to have found his fan art used on a movie poster for Venom: Let There Be Carnage.

So we've noted more than a few times that while Elon Musk's Starlink will be a good thing if you can actually get and afford the service, it's going to have a decidedly small impact on the broadband industry as a whole. Between 20 and 42 million Americans lack access to broadband entirely, 83 million live under a monopoly, and tens of millions more are stuck under a duopoly (usually your local cable company and a regional, apathetic phone company). In turn, Starlink is going to reach somewhere between 300,000 to 800,000 subscribers in its first few years, a drop in the overall bucket.Thanks to massive frustration with broadband market failure (and the high prices, dubious quality, and poor customer service that results), users are decidedly excited about something new. But not only are there limited slots due to limited capacity and physics, a lot of those slots are going to get gobbled up by die-hard Elon Musk fans excited to affix Starlink dishes to their boats, RVs, and Cybertrucks. As a result it will be extremely unlikely that most users who truly need the improved option will absolutely be able to get it.But a new PC Magazine survey continues to make it clear that most consumers don't quite understand they'll never actually have the option (especially if they live in a major metro market):Starlink is expected to come out of beta next month for a broader commercial launch, and has seen 600,000 orders so far. But many of the customers who have signed up say getting a status update from Starlink customer service is effectively impossible. While major Wall Street analysts like Craig Moffett estimate the service may be able to scale to 6 million users over a period of many years, he also notes that guess is extremely optimistic, and will require a significantly updated fleet of 42,000 satellites to achieve.This all assumes that Starlink will remain financially viable as it works toward that goal, something that's not really guaranteed in a low-orbit satellite industry that has a history of major failures. And there will be questions about throttling and other restrictions once the network gets fully loaded with hungry users. Again, Starlink will be great for off the grid folks if they can get -- and afford -- it, but I suspect there's going to be some heartache when folks excited about the service realize the limitations of its actual reach. And this scarcity is only going to drive even greater interest in a service you probably won't be able to get anytime soon.

For decades, EFF and others have been documenting the monumental failures of content moderation at the platform level—inconsistent policies, inconsistently applied, with dangerous consequences for online expression and access to information. Yet despite mounting evidence that those consequences are inevitable, service providers at other levels are increasingly choosing to follow suit.The full infrastructure of the internet, or the “full stack,” is made up of a range of entities, from consumer-facing platforms like Facebook or Pinterest, to ISPs like Comcast or AT&T. Somewhere in the middle are a wide array of intermediaries, such as upstream hosts like Amazon Web Services (AWS), domain name registrars, certificate authorities (such as Let’s Encrypt), content delivery networks (CDNs), payment processors, and email services.For most of us, most of the stack is invisible. We send email, tweet, post, upload photos and read blog posts without thinking about all the services that help get content from the original creator onto the internet and in front of users’ eyeballs all over the world. We may think about our ISP when it gets slow or breaks, but day-to-day, most of us don’t think about intermediaries like AWS at all—until AWS decides to deny service to speech it doesn’t like, as it did with the social media site Parler, and that decision gets press attention.Invisible or not, these intermediaries are potential speech “chokepoints” and their choices can significantly influence the future of online expression. Simply put, platform-level moderation is broken and infrastructure-level moderation is likely to be worse. That said, the pitfalls and risks for free expression and privacy may play out differently depending on what kind of provider is doing the moderating. To help companies, policymakers and users think through the relative dangers of infrastructure moderation at various levels of the stack, here’s a set of guiding questions.

The vulnerability equities process meets the FBI's natural tendency to find and hoard illegal things until it's done using them. And no one walks away from it unscathed. Welcome to the cyberwar, collateral damage!If an agency like the NSA comes across an exploit or unpatched security flaw, it's supposed to notify affected tech companies so they can fix the problem to protect their customers and users. That's the vulnerability equities process in theory. In practice, the NSA (and others) weigh the potential usefulness of the exploit versus the damage it might cause if it's not fixed and make a disclosure decision. The NSA claims in public statements it's very proactive about disclosing discovered exploits. The facts say something different.Then there's the FBI, which has engaged in criminal acts to further investigations. Perhaps most famously, the FBI took control of a dark web child porn server and ran it for a few weeks so it could deploy its malware (Network Investigative Technique, according to the FBI) to users of the site. Not only did it continue to distribute child porn during this time, but it reportedly optimized the system to maximize its malware distribution.The trend continues. As Ellen Nakashima and Rachel Lerman report for the Washington Post (alternative link here), the FBI could have stopped a massive ransomware attack but decided it would be better if it just sat on what it knew and watched things develop.

This lawsuit is a couple months old, but I'm clearing out some older stories, and thought it was worth writing up still. Southwest Airlines is regularly ranked as a favorite of consumers. While it's generally relatively low cost as airlines go, it has kept up a reputation of stellar customer service -- contrary to the reputations of some other low cost airlines. However, earlier this year, Southwest not only decided to be particularly anti-consumer, but to go legal about it. The company decided to sue the site Skiplagged.If you've never seen it, Skiplagged is a neat service -- effectively finding secret cheaper fares by exposing some of the hidden (stupid) secrets of airline fares. I discovered it years ago, after writing about some sketchy airline pricing tricks involving multi-city travel. The secret that Skiplagged realized is that you can often find cheaper flights by booking a multi-leg trip, and not taking all the flights. As Skiplagged sums it up: "As an example, a traveler who wants to go to San Francisco from New York would book a flight that is ticketed for NYC -> San Fran -> Seattle and end their travel once they arrive in San Fran and skip the leg to Seattle."This can create some pretty massive details, and like those sketchy scam ads say "this one weird trick... that the airlines hate" except that it actually works. And now Southwest has decided to go to court over it.Now, it's important to note that unlike many other airlines, Southwest requires people to buy tickets via its own site, and refuses to have its fares offered on aggregation sites. It also has a long and somewhat unfortunate history of suing websites who try to improve on Southwest fares in some manner. A decade ago we wrote about Southwest going after sites that help flyers track their frequent flyer mileage, and a few years back, we wrote about a ridiculous lawsuit against a website that alerted Southwest flyers if they could change their ticket to a cheaper option after they booked a flight (since Southwest has a no-charge for changes policy). Unfortunately, after a court refused to dismiss that lawsuit under Texas's anti-SLAPP law, leading the site to effectively agree to shut down permanently.Here, Southwest is claiming a sort of double-whammy -- saying that Skiplagged is getting data on Southwest flights via another company (who Southwest is already suing), Kiwi.com, and using those fares to find the skipped leg cheaper options (also referred to as "hidden city" tickets).Southwest claims this violates basically all the laws: trademark violations, page scraping violations, unauthorized sales, unfair and deceptive practices and a few others as well.

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The Snowden leaks exposing NSA dragnet surveillance prompted a lot of litigation. Cast a wide enough net and you're bound to snag it on some people's rights. The Wikimedia Foundation was one of several parties who sued over the NSA's seemingly unconstitutional collection efforts, targeting the agency's "upstream" harvesting of all data and communications straight from internet backbones.To keep the case in court, Wikimedia had to plausibly allege its data and communications had been scooped up by the NSA. Fortunately, Ed Snowden had provided some pretty solid evidence for the Foundation. A leaked NSA presentation showed Wikipedia was included in the agency's HTTP dragnet:Well, that leaked presentation, which included the Wikipedia logo as part of the traffic the NSA could snag from internet backbones wasn't enough to impress the district court, which dismissed the lawsuit. It was revived by the appeals court a couple of years later, which said it had alleged enough plausible harm and possible targeting to pursue its First and Fourth Amendment claims.It went back down to the lower court, which did the same thing it did the first time around. The suit was again dismissed, this time because the district court felt the Foundation didn't bring enough factual allegations to the table. But then, how could it? The NSA basically said facts could not be introduced or argued.

Much like the company's dedication to women, AT&T's dedication to not funding people eager to overthrow democracy appears to be somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent. Shortly after January 6 a number of companies, including telecom giants like AT&T, publicly crowed about how they'd be ceasing all funding to politicians that supported the attack on the Capitol and the overturning of, you know, fucking democracy. Of course that promise was never worth all that much, given the the umbrella lobbying orgs companies like AT&T used never really stopped financing terrible people.Initially, AT&T made a big stink about how it had suspended funding to all 147 Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election. But not only did AT&T not actually suspend funding via its numerous policy and lobbying tendrils, it didn't even really ever stop funding insurrectionists directly:

The top court in Massachusetts is asking itself (and legal counsel representing both sides) questions that -- on the surface level -- don't really appear to be that difficult to answer. Here's how Thomas Harrison sums it up for Courthouse News:

It's been a minute since we last discussed Billy Mitchell, the man with the self-propelled reputation as an immense gamer with many high scores on record. He has also demonstrated a willingness to be quite litigious towards anyone who disagrees with this assessment of his gaming prowess. A couple of years back, he threatened to sue the Guinness Book of World Records for -- checks notes -- , huh, defamation. This defamation appeared to amount to the GBoWR rescinding his "record" for a high and perfect Pacman score, noting that there were evidenced claims that Mitchell had not earned the videotaped score on an official arcade cabinet, but rather using an emulator. These records were later reinstated, with GBoWR indicating it didn't have enough evidence to refuse the record. Mitchell also sued Twin Galaxies, an organization that acts as something of an arbiter for gaming records like this. That case failed to get dismissed on anti-SLAPP grounds and appears to still be active.As does the website Mitchell setup to proclaim his own glory, it seems, though it appears that Mitchell let his registration for the site lapse and now it is under decidedly new ownership.

Summary: On the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, internet users noticed Microsoft's Bing search engine was producing some interesting results. Or, rather, it wasn't producing expected search results for some possibly interesting reasons.Users searching for the most iconic image of the protests — that of the unidentified person known only as "Tank Man" — were coming up empty. It appeared that Microsoft's search engine was blocking results for an image that often serves as shorthand for rebellion against the Chinese government.As was reported by several web users, followed by several news outlets, the apparent blocking of search results could be observed in both the United States and the United Kingdom, leaving users with the impression the Chinese government had pressured Microsoft to moderate search results for "tank man" in hopes of reducing any remembrance of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, which resulted in the deaths of 2,500-3,500 protesters.The apparent censorship was blamed on Microsoft's close relationship with the Chinese government, which allowed its search engine to be accessed by Chinese residents in exchange for complying with government censorship requests.This led to Microsoft being criticized by prominent politicians for apparently allowing the Chinese government to dictate what users around the world could access in relation to the Tiananmen Square protests.Company Considerations:

The Chinese government's national security law -- adopted/acquiesced to by Hong Kong politicians apparently handpicked to serve the country that agreed not to interfere in Hong Kong's government business until 2047 -- is still paying off for the region's impatient overseers.The handover of Hong Kong to China has provoked an never-ending stream of pro-democracy protests. China doesn't care for democracy, nor does it care for any other form of autonomy. To combat its opponents, the Chinese government -- with an assist by a China-controlled Hong Kong government -- has declared advocating for democracy to be an act of terrorism. Dissent has been equated with undermining national security, and will be punished accordingly.The latest news in this ongoing attack on Hong Kong's autonomy -- one that is being committed in broad daylight in front of a world full of witnesses -- is the arrest of even more pro-democracy activists and the shuttering of their website.Earlier this month, the Hong Kong police state came for activists who ensured the Chinese government was never allowed to forget 1989's Tiananmen Square Massacre -- an act that made it clear what the government thought about people who demanded some say in their representation. In response to its annual Tiananmen-related rally and other demands for democracy, four activists were arrested.

Today we're launching our latest Techdirt Tech Policy Greenhouse discussion in which we bring in a bunch of actual experts to discuss and debate complex and nuanced subjects regarding tech policy -- this time about content moderation at the infrastructure layer. We're excited that we're doing it in partnership with our friends over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)! Also, we're going to conclude this new series of posts on Techdirt with two virtual events. On October 6th from 9am to noon PT, we'll have many of this series' authors discussing and debating their pieces in front of a live (though virtual!) audience (register to attend here). The following day, on October 7th, EFF and Techdirt will be hosting a smaller workshop event to take some of what we learned and discussed the previous day, and see if we can come up with more concrete steps and approaches to make sure providers, policymakers, and others understand the risks and challenges of infrastructure moderation, and how to respond to those risks.As you may recall, in the past we've had such Greenhouse discussions on broadband in the age of COVID, content moderation, and privacy.The latest edition will again dip into the content moderation well, but will focus on a part of the discussion that is all too often forgotten (leading to potentially damaging consequences). Specifically, we'll be talking about content moderation not at the "edge" of the internet (i.e., the user-facing services like Google, Facebook, and Twitter), but at the infrastructure layers deeper in the stack. This could include content moderation via hosting companies, domain registrars, ad networks, payment processors, app stores, and much, much more. Since so much of the discussion (and anger) around content moderation focuses on those edge providers that everyone is familiar with, it seems that nearly all proposals tend to just focus on correcting perceived content moderation ills for end users. But, at the same time, it seems that most of the policy proposals we see would apply equally (if not more so) to infrastructure providers.Some of this is by design.The "original" content moderation debate on the internet revolved around copyright -- with the record labels (mainly) demanding ever more draconian regulations and standards to force content offline. However, as the technology evolved, we increasingly saw the legacy entertainment companies recognize that they could get more bang for the buck by targeting infrastructure intermediaries. They started to threaten ad networks and domain registrars for infringement that happened on websites that neither of those entities had power over.Indeed, the biggest concern with moving moderation decisions down the stack is that most infrastructure players only have a sledge hammer to deal with these questions, rather than a scalpel. They can't remove just the "bad" content. They can only remove (or, at least threaten to remove) all service, which can wreak havoc on a site. And we've seen how that pressure can be used to extreme ends. People focus on more recent examples, but over a decade ago, caving to pressure from US government officials, Amazon and others dumped Wikileaks.That said, the infrastructure companies are still private entities, and do (for the most part, with a few exceptions) retain the power to run their businesses how they wish -- including the right to refuse service to certain customers. And there are reasons why infrastructure providers may not just want, but actually need, the ability to do some amount of moderation -- for example ISPs have good reason to run spam filters for their customers, and there have been cases where serving companies have (understandably) wanted to pull down malware bot networks using their infrastructure.In other words, there are a lot of nuances here, and plenty to discuss and debate and explore better paths forward.Finally, we should note that, beyond partnering with EFF for this project, we are also supported by the grant we received last year from the Knight Foundation to explore this very topic, as well as sponsorships from Cloudflare, ISOC, and Golden Frog.

Last week's news about Justice Barrett fretting about the Supreme Court being seen as partisan calls to mind the old joke about a defendant on trial for murdering his parents and begging the court for mercy because he's an orphan. If you've created the mess you find yourself in, you have no one to blame but yourself.Nevertheless, there is credence to her protest (which other justices have since echoed) that the way the Court has acted recently is not actually "partisan." After all, Republican-appointed Justice Roberts has been frequently joining the Democrat-appointed justices of late, which we wouldn't expect if political loyalties were all that were at the root of all Supreme Court actions. As Justice Barrett herself suggests, to understand what the Court has been doing of late, we need to look deeper:

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The saga of Devin Nunes' family's lawsuit against reporter Ryan Lizza and Esquire Magazine got even more bizarre last week. Back in June, we had written about some heavily redacted documents in the case that suggested that Nunes' lawyer, Steven Biss, was playing some very dangerous games in order to try to keep the employees of the NuStar Farms (owned by Nunes' relatives) from testifying as to their immigration status. As you may recall, the only part of the lawsuit that was still going on were defamation claims regarding the implication that the farm might employ undocumented workers, which would be noteworthy, considering Devin Nunes hardline stance on immigration.As we covered back in June, after first making it difficult to set up a deposition with the employees, when that deposition finally occurred, the lawyer for the employee recommended he take the 5th, at which point Biss (who was not representing the employee) paused the deposition for quite some time, before insisting that the employee would not take the 5th. From the filing:

Apple has never looked too kindly upon users actually repairing their own devices. The company's ham-fisted efforts to shut down, sue, or otherwise imperil third-party repair shops are well established. As are the company's efforts to force recycling shops to shred Apple products (so they can't be refurbished and re-used), and Apple's often comical attacks on essential right to repair legislation, which only sprung up after companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sony, John Deere, and others created a grass-roots counter-movement via their attempts to monopolize repair.The company's policies are also pretty ingrained in the company's employee training process. New leaked Apple training videos obtained by Motherboard show how Apple trains its employees to routinely steer consumers away from less expensive options, and toward "authorized" Apple repairs. Repairs that, not at all surprisingly, wind up costing the consumer significantly more dough:

Normally, when we talk about beer in these pages, we're typically talking trademark infringement issues. Because of the creative way those in the exploding craft brewing industry have gone about naming their brews and designing their labels, far too often this results in disputes between parties over what is too similar to what, or who's design is too close to another's. While this specific story doesn't involve trademark law or disputes, it does still exist due to the creative practice of labeling.Flying Dog is a well known name in the craft beer industry. Not huge, but certainly not small, Flying Dog's labels have a certain aesthetic motif in the artwork that is easily recognizable. As part of the process for using those labels on cans and bottles of beer, the brewery has to gain a certificate of label approval from the ATF. It also then has to gain the approval for labels from individual state agencies as well. For its forthcoming "Freezin' Season" ale, Flying Dog was able to get the afore-mentioned approvals at both the federal and state levels in every case, except for North Carolina. There, the North Carolina Alcohol Beverage Control Board (ABC) denied approving the label, thereby disallowing Flying Dog to sell bottles within the state entirely. Why? Well...Still having trouble figuring out what the problem is? Well, it's that little protrusion from between the outlined figure's legs. Is it a penis? Gasp! Maybe! Flying Dog hints that it's actually a little tail nubbin, but I'm not sure I believe them. Nor does that really matter, actually, since this beer label is absolutely constitutionally protected speech and the ABC's refusal to permit its sale in commerce not only serves as a violation of Flying Dog's speech rights, but also is prior restraint.

The Pasco County (FL) Sheriff's Office believes in "intelligence-led policing." This is its formal slang for harassing residents until (in the office's own words) "they sue or move." The Sheriff's Office turns anyone with a criminal background into a suspect-for-life. Deputies visit residences and residents on the "intelligence-led" shit list multiple times a month, demanding answers to questions they have no business asking. When residents fail to comply, nuisance (in every sense of the word) citations are issued for things like uncut grass or missing mailbox numbers.It doesn't really matter whether the Sheriff's Office believes its own PR bullshit. It is fully engaged in harassing as many residents as possible. That's why it's allowed its so-called predictive policing program to infiltrate local schools, subjecting minors (and their families) to the same harassment previously limited to adults with criminal records. Almost anything can trigger unwelcome interactions with the office's deputies, including slipping grades, missed school days, or simply being the victim of, or witness to domestic violence.Local schools are apparently fine with this. They've been sharing student records with the Sheriff's Office. And the Sheriff's Office has been sharing this info with officers. Both of these actions appear to violate federal and local student privacy laws. Not that the Sheriff's Office cares. It says it has done nothing wrong -- only availed itself of records shared with it (unlawfully) by schools.The exposure of these programs by the Tampa Bay Times has led to multiple investigations and accusations of lawbreaking. One of these investigations involves the federal government, which makes it clear it's not just the locals that find the Sheriff's Office's programs abhorrent. The Department of Education opened an investigation in April to determine whether the in-school "intelligence-led policing" violated federal student privacy laws.There's a new federal investigation underway. The Department of Justice wants to know what the fuck is going on in Pasco County, Florida. (h/t WarOnPrivacy)

The concept of "shadowbanning" comes up a lot in content moderation discussions — often from people who are spreading nonsense. But various means of deprioritizing content have been employed by platforms for many years. This week, we're joined by Dr. Carolina Are, a researcher who recently released a paper on the subject, especially how it relates to nudity and censorship on Instagram. This week, she joins us on the podcast to discuss shadowbanning, how it works, and the impact it has.Additionally, we've got a special announcement: to celebrate our upcoming 300th episode of the podcast, we'll be hosting a live stream with the return of the original co-hosts Dennis Yang and Hersh Reddy, including (hopefully, barring technical issues) the ability for viewers who back our Patreon to call in live and ask questions. The stream will happen on Thursday, September 30th at 1pm PT/4pm ET — stay tuned for more details on how you can watch the stream, and be sure to back our Patreon if you want a chance to call in!Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Support our crowdfunded paper exploring the NFT phenomenon »Over the last year or so there has been tremendous hype around the concept of NFTs (non-fungible tokens). In my experience so far, people tend to fall into one of three camps surrounding NFTs. There are the "true believers", who are obsessed with the space and believe it is going to change everything about creativity and culture (and, according to some, "ownership"). There are the skeptics, who insist that it's a scam or the new tulip-craze bubble, and that NFTs are helping to burn down the planet with wasted energy usage. Finally, there's a very large camp of people who insist that they just don't understand NFTs at all and have completely blocked out the possibility that they could matter. I've been following the whole concept for a while now and I put myself in a weird place, potentially straddling multiple camps. I think there is a lot of nonsense in the space, and jargon meant more to confuse than to help -- but at the same time, I think there really is something interesting in the potential of NFTs, though the real value may be in a different place than even NFT-boosters believe.The thing that's interesting to me, mainly, is how NFTs have found a way to productize a new scarcity -- one that may be really interesting (even as many of the current uses are missing that). Long term Techdirt readers may recall the series of posts I wrote back in 2007, exploring "The Economics of Free," in which the core point was about understanding what was scarce, and what was not just abundant but infinitely available -- something I refer to as "infinite goods." One of the points raised in that series was how new infinite goods not only completely upended traditional business models, that they also created new scarcities, and the really interesting business models were in finding those scarcities and leveraging the infinite goods connected to them to make them more valuable.At the time, many of the new scarcities I was talking about were things like time and attention. But NFTs are actually highlighting a new set of potentially interesting scarcities related patronage and support, which previously had been amorphous concepts but which can actually be quantified to some level today. At the very least, I think this presents some interesting possibilities that go way beyond the state of the current NFT market (which, no doubt, is filled with significant hype, fluff, and nonsense). Just because there may be some level of exaggerated frenzy around NFTs, which turns some people off, that does not mean we should completely ignore and dismiss some of the underlying ideas that make NFTs so interesting.That's why today we're launching a crowdfund on Mirror.xyz, a decentralized publishing platform with built in crowdfunding tools, to write a deep-dive paper entitled Newly Finite Themes that will explore the ins and outs and details of NFTs. The paper is not going to be an unfettered boosterism of NFTs, nor will it be condemning the entire concept. The plan is to explore every aspect of NFTs -- including the the economic, legal, cultural, and (yes) environmental implications -- and produce a thorough paper that will highlight which parts of NFTs are actually interesting and have real potential. In some ways, this will be a follow up to my 2019 Protocols, Not Platforms paper that helped inspire Twitter's Bluesky initiative.As part of this process, we want to experiment with the very technologies we'll be writing about -- something we are enabled to do by Mirror (and yes, to back the project on Mirror, you have to use ETH). When the paper is complete, it will be minted as an NFT. Backers of the crowdfund will get a token that will entitle them to some of the proceeds when that NFT is sold. In addition, backers who support us at a level above 1 ETH (up to a total of 15 such backers) will get a separate NFT showing their support for a protocols over platforms approach to the internet. Finally, Mirror has a very cool new feature, enabling the top three backers to be rewarded with individual NFTs commemorating their key role in enabling this paper, and giving them Executive Producer, Producer, or Associate Producer status for the paper -- though this is only available to those who back within the first few days of the crowdfund.All of the details can be seen on our Mirror crowdfund page.Support our crowdfunded paper exploring the NFT phenomenon »

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What is it with annoying grandstanding Senators of both parties and their incorrect beliefs that they can bully private companies over 1st Amendment protected expression? Last week we wrote about Senator Elizabeth Warren's bogus threats sent to Amazon regarding the fact that Amazon is selling books with "misinformation" in them. Right as that was happening, it seems that Senator Josh Hawley decided to do something somewhat similar, in "demanding answers" from Google regarding Google's decision to reject ads from an anti-abortion organization.This story got attention after the founder and President of the anti-abortion group Live Action, Lila Rose, posted a Twitter thread insisting that ads from her group were banned "at the request of abortion activists." Of course, if you look at the actual images that Rose posted, it's pretty clear that the decisions had nothing to do with ideological viewpoints on abortion, but rather concern about advertising sketchy medical interventions. Specifically, Live Action was trying to run an ad about an "abortion pill reversal treatment."As the Daily Beast recently detailed, this "treatment" is extremely sketchy, totally unproven, and extraordinarily dangerous. From a Washington Post article about these treatments:

Hong Kong is now just China. The last pretense of the region being anything but another Chinese province has been washed away.It's been a steady erosion since China took possession of the region from the British government back in 1997. Despite an agreement to steer clear of direct control of Hong Kong's government until 2047, the Chinese government immediately began meddling, amping things up when Hong Kong residents engaged in sustained pro-democracy protests.Over the past couple of years, the Chinese government has turned protesting into a crime with life sentences attached and restyled the Hong Kong government in its own image. It has also used the greatest excuse ever invented for governmental power grabs -- "national security" -- to make it easier to jail opponents, eject problematic government officials, and control the flow of information, along with the information itself.Control of the internet has been handed over to Hong Kong police, an entity which is entirely subservient to its new masters. As if that wasn't enough, the Chinese government, with the assistance of the complicit remnants of Hong Kong's government, converted the burgeoning police state into a literal police state by making a police commissioner the region's Secretary of Security (the same police commissioner who presided over numerous acts of violence against pro-democracy activists) and elevating the former Secretary of Security to fully-compromised Chief Executive Carrie Lam's second-in-command.The latest move -- enabled by a law passed earlier this year -- cuts Hong Kong residents out of the election loop. Only certain people are allowed to vote for their new representatives and officials, and they've been preapproved by the Chinese government.

Earlier this month we noted how the FCC announced it would be taking a closer look at the dodgy deals big ISPs make with landlords to hamstring broadband competition. While the FCC passed rules in 2008 outlawing strict exclusivity agreements, big ISPs have, for years, tap-danced around the loose wording of the restrictions, often by simply calling what they're doing... something else. ISPs also still do stuff like charging door fees just to access the building (making it tougher on less wealthy, small ISPs), or striking deals that ban any competitors from even advertising in the building.Obviously the broadband industry loves these sorts of deals, as they effectively give them a building-by-building monopoly over broadband access. As such they're already trying to apply pressure on the FCC while claiming such arrangements are secretly a really good thing:

It won't come as a total surprise that we have covered intellectual property stories involving The Wizard of Oz in the past. Both the book and film are iconic to say the least, so it would perhaps be a bit strange if such issues didn't arise from time to time. That being said, the relevant players here tend to be on the extreme end of the enforcement spectrum, which leads to extreme cases such as Warner Media opposing a trademark filing by a self-proclaimed "wicked witch" for some reason.The point is that the IP holders for the film tend to see anything remotely resembling a reference to the film as infringement of some kind or another. A recent example of this is Turner Entertainment, part of Warner Media, forcing 7 Locks Brewing to change its name and branding of its beer "Surrender Dorothy."

Body-worn cameras were supposed to usher in a new era of police accountability. That hasn't happened. At best, they've generated a ton of additional footage of interactions and arrests that may prove valuable to criminal defendants and people filing civil rights lawsuits. "May" is the operative word. Cops still control the footage, which limits public access and increases the odds that unflattering/unhelpful (to police) footage rarely ends up in the hands of the public. The end result is that prosecutors have been the biggest beneficiary of this so-called accountability tech.A case in Massachusetts has raised some interesting constitutional questions about body cameras and recordings. Officers responding to a domestic violence call recorded the interior of a home with their body cameras. Weeks after that call, they accessed the footage to find corroborating evidence that was used to apply for a search warrant. One of these is a constitutional violation, Massachusetts' Supreme Judicial Court has ruled. (via Courthouse News)Here's what happened during that domestic disturbance call, as recounted in the opinion [PDF]:

When Wikipedia was first launched 20 years ago, it was widely derided as an impossible project, bound to fail or, at best, to produce worthless rubbish. And yet today, along with open source software, it is undoubtedly the best demonstration that a distributed team of volunteers can produce work that is not just free but arguably better than anything created for profit using traditional, top-down management approaches. But beyond that, Wikipedia has become something else: a unique repository of validated information and thus, implicitly, a store of "truth" about the past and the present. That has turned many pages of Wikipedia into a battleground, as people with different views fight in sometimes fierce "edit wars" over what counts as "verified". The choice of information and even how things are phrased often have considerable social, economic or political importance. No surprise, then, that there is a struggle taking place over what Wikipedia should say is happening in the contested space of Hong Kong. Back in July, an article in the Hong Kong Free Press explained:

The Russian government sent KGB 2.0 (the FSB) to kill opposition leader Alexey Navalny late last summer. That effort failed. Navalny survived the poisoning attempt to continue to be a thorn in Putin's side. So, the Russian government did the next best thing. It tossed Navalny in jail, revoking his suspended sentence to imprison him in a "corrective labor colony."That still hasn't managed to silence Navalny to the Russian ruling party's satisfaction. He's still capable of moving masses and shaping elections despite being confined. One of his efforts -- Smart Voting -- continues to make things difficult for the dominant "United Russia" party. Debuting in November 2018, Smart Voting aids in the consolidation of opposition votes in areas where parliamentary races are close enough they can possibly be swung in favor of opposition candidates.The effort to silence Navalny continues, with the Russian government trying to kill off his Smart Voting project. Its first move was to secure a court order forbidding Google and Yandex from returning search results for the term "smart voting." Enjoy this incredibly bold blast of extreme shadiness that does everything but provide a phonetic pronunciation of the word "corruption."

While I am concerned about the power wielded by giant tech companies and am interested in creating more competition, I'm always a little perplexed by the arguments that people make that, somehow, the "big four" companies of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are so dominant that no new competitor can ever catch up to them. It's one thing to point to similar articles about Myspace that totally dismissed Facebook as a possible competitor to that platform, but it's another thing altogether to see new social media apps... actually doing pretty well.TikTok really only launched in 2017 (yes, there were some predecessors, but what we now think of as TikTok was launched in 2017, and really only took off after purchasing Musical.ly in late 2018), by which point we were already told that Facebook and Google had locked down the market entirely. Hell, remember the original FTC complaint against Facebook didn't even mention TikTok? And then the amended complaint (after the initial one was tossed) barely mentions it and only does so to insist that it's somehow different.But, last month it came out that in 2020, TikTok was downloaded more than Facebook. Now, you could maybe try to make the argument that this is because everyone already has Facebook on their phones, but it still is noteworthy. Perhaps even more noteworthy is another report noting that TikTok has overtaken YouTube in average watch time in both the US and UK.That report does note that YouTube still has more viewers, and thus greater overall time watched, but on a per user basis, users are spending more time on TikTok than YouTube.There can still be reasonable concerns about practices from the big companies, if they're shown to be suppressing competition. But it seems harder and harder to buy the line that it's "impossible" for there to be new entrants in the market these days. Because that's clearly not the case.

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Another malware purveyor is shocked, SHOCKED to discover its products have been used to do Very Bad Things. Thomas Brewster has more details for Forbes. Here's the setup:

A few months back we noted how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had taken to Newsweek to dust off a fifteen year old AT&T talking point. Namely that "big tech" companies get a "free ride" on telecom networks, and, as a result, should throw billions of dollars at "big telecom" for no real reason. You'll recall it was this exact argument that launched the net neutrality debate, when former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre proclaimed that Google wouldn't be allowed to "ride his pipes for free." Basically, telecom giants have long wanted somebody else to fund network builds they routinely leave half finished despite billions in subsidies.Carr, who has been trying to seed this idea in the press and policy circles for months, was back at it again last week, pointing to a new Oracle-funded study that suggests funding broadband expansion via a tax on advertising revenue:

This week, all four of our winning comments come from our post about a ridiculous column arguing that fact checking is an assault on free speech. In first place on the insightful side, it's an anonymous response to the question of whether we needed fact checking to help turn people against slavery:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, Netflix was urging the FCC to crack down on broadband usage caps, Hollywood was struggling to keep its movie screeners secure (despite insisting that anti-piracy tech should be easy), and Paramount issued a DMCA takedown over an Ubuntu Linux torrent. Scientists were realizing that the recent ruling in Europe on infringement-by-linking was making science much more difficult, while the EU was barreling ahead with its absolutely ridiculous copyright proposal, and another bad EU ruling said that WiFi providers can be forced to require passwords if copyright holders demand it. The ACLU was launching a campaign to have President Obama pardon Ed Snowden, while the House Intelligence Committee was insisting that he doesn't qualify as a whistleblower. We also took a closer look at how corporate sovereignty provisions in trade deals are dangerous, while over 200 economics and law professors were urging Congress to reject such provisions. Also, this was the week that Prenda's Paul Hansmeier lost his law license.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, a new proposal in the UK would allow police to seize domain names without a court order, the US government was continuing to indict people for file sharing, the Authors Guild filed lawsuits against five universities for providing access to orphaned works, and Hotfile was fighting back against Warner Bros. with a countersuit for copyright misuse. Europe's recent retroactive copyright extension was leading to much well-deserved anger (considering it was costing the public a billion euros), while Canada was planning to reintroduce its terrible copyright plan. We also took a look at one of the starkest examples of the insanity of Hollywood accounting: the fact that the actor who played Darth Vader was still not getting paid because supposedly Return of the Jedi was still not profitable.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, record labels were being evasive about their own use of file sharing tech, Universal Music was publicly threatening to sue YouTube and MySpace, the USPTO was getting in on the game of brainwashing school kids about infringement, and we reiterated the arguments about why fashion copyright isn't necessary. Nearly a year after the original scandal, Sony's rootkit was still causing problems, while the company was trying to avoid having to pay out another settlement in Canada. The world's largest DVD manufacturer was bragging about yet another DRM scheme, and we noted how — after all the "significant blows" to piracy that had supposedly been happening — piracy still wasn't going down. Also this week, we saw a very early attempt by a Chinese car company at showing off a fully driverless vehicle.

Well, well, it appears that this particular story is going to move faster than I had thought. And, to be frank, I kinda sorta get it. We had just discussed Scouts BSA, formerly The Boy Scouts of America, seeking summary judgement in the trademark suit brought by The Girl Scouts of America. You can go back through the old posts for the detailed context, but the short version is that the Boy Scouts decided girls aren't as icky as they previously thought and rebranded as Scouts BSA to be more inclusive. This created a bunch of confusion with The Girl Scouts, some of it very much due to the actions of local Scouts BSA chapters, such as:

An immense amount of reform has hit cops in California over the last few years.The state very recently made it possible for public records requesters to obtain records about police misconduct -- something that had been statutorily-shielded for decades. That, of course, made local law enforcement agencies unhappy. They sued. They let the state Attorney General argue against the interests of California residents. They fucked around and found out. And yet, they still pretended they could shred their way through this.There's more reform on the horizon. If cops didn't like having their misconduct records being made available to the public, they're really not going to like what's coming next. The general public could have access to even more records -- ones that may confirm assumptions about cops and their motivations.

You might have seen a week or two ago how everybody absolutely freaked out after a Rolling Stone article falsely reported that Ivermectin overdoses were causing massive congestion at Oklahoma hospitals. In reality, the truth wound up being something substantively less than that (Mathew Ingram at Columbia Journalism Review has a good breakdown here). The whole mess began after a local news organization published a story that was misinterpreted by a bunch of national outlets who "aggregated" and repackaged it. The screw up was then picked up in turn by conservative commentators eager to point out that the press was specifically out to get them.But that wasn't true either. These kinds of aggregation screw ups probably happen a hundred times a day. They usually involve a bunch of click-hungry sites amplifying a story without bothering to check if the original story was true (in the case of the Ivermectin story, countless outlets, including MSNBC, didn't bother to even read the original interview with the local doctor). These screw ups aren't necessarily malicious, they're just representative of a broken U.S. ad-based press for which speed, inaccuracy, and inflammatory headlines make more money than measured, sometimes boring, often complicated truth. As Mike discussed, confirmation bias plays a huge role in the whole mess.But it really can't be reiterated how often this kind of cock up happens without the level of breathy introspection that accompanied the Ivermectin/Oklahoma error. For example, this week it wasn't particularly hard for some hoaxers to release a completely fake press release (using GlobeNewswire) stating that Walmart had partnered with the cryptocurrency Litecoin. Countless journalists and news outlets leeched onto the press release and wrote elaborate stories and hot takes, without a single one bothering to confirm that any of the facts in the release were true.They weren't, and everybody in the chain, from GlobeNewswire to a long line of outlets, had to apologize about screwing up so badly. Reuters was one of several news outlets forced to withdraw the story, then try and pretend it never happened:

PETA is certainly not above filing some pretty ridiculous lawsuits, so I was initially skeptical when I heard that it had filed a lawsuit against the directors of the National Institutes of Health (Francis Collins) and Health & Human Services (Xavier Becerra) over Facebook keyword blocking. However, upon reading through the lawsuit, it seems pretty legit. At issue is that it appears that NIH has put in place a block list on Facebook and Instagram that blocks anyone from mentioning PETA and a surprisingly long list of words and phrases that are likely of interest to PETA.If this sounds sorta somewhat similar to the lawsuits saying that the President can't block people on social media, well, perhaps that's because that lawsuit and this one both involve lawyers from the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, who have specialized in getting government officials to stop abusing social media blocks to suppress speech. In this case, some PETA supporters were noticing that certain comments they were posting on the NIH Facebook and Instagram pages didn't appear to be showing up. So they FOIA'd the blocklist that NIH was using, and discovered it was pretty extensive... and not generally what you would call "content neutral" (which would be required under the 1st Amendment):

The First Amendment protects unsympathetic plaintiffs just as much as it does those able to obtain mass support for their arguments. This case, originating from Bloomington, Minnesota, involves someone whose motives seem bigoted but whose actions were clearly covered by the Constitution.When a new school catering to immigrants moved into the neighborhood, Sally Ness took action. An agreement between the city and the Dar Al-Farooq School allowed students of the school to use a nearby park for recreation. Ness felt the school and its students were violating the terms of the agreement and took to filming students at the park, as well as the traffic flowing to the school to pick up students.This resulted in harassment accusations from parents of these students, which the Bloomington PD investigated, visiting Ness at her home and, later, telling her to stop filming students because parents and school administrators might be feeling "intimidated" by her actions. The officers told her to "take her pictures" and "move on."Ness also frequently attended city council meetings to voice her displeasure with the school and its apparent abuse of the public park. After a few meetings, the council amended its harassment law to include something that very specifically targeted Ness' actions.

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Another day, another truly silly lawsuit. The "Liberty Justice Center" and the Tyler & Bursch law firm -- both of which seem to specialize in filing ridiculous lawsuits -- have now filed a lawsuit on behalf of a disinformation-spewing anti-masker against Joe Biden, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Facebook, and Twitter... because Facebook and Twitter locked his account after he posted an image claiming (incorrectly) that "masking children is impractical and not backed by research or real world data."The image, which you can find in the lawsuit, but which I will not post here, posts some stuff that is true but uninteresting (such as the fact that sometimes people wear masks improperly) with stuff that is out of context and misleading (such as that studies don't have conclusive answers yet about the effectiveness of masks for kids) to try to make a claim that masking kids is a bad idea. But, like so much misinformation, it's telling a story by cherry-picking a few points out of context. Actual credible sources have broken down why these claims -- repeated frequently by anti-maskers -- are basically bullshit. Yes, there remain some unknown things and inconclusive science (though the blanks will be filled in soon). But the really "scary" stuff about harming development are mostly bogus. Of course, this is the way most misinformation works: take things out of context that you can point to as true, pool them together with a few other things, slip in a few exaggerations, and claim a big picture, the implications of which are ridiculous and not supported.That's what the graphic Justin Hart posted basically did. And, Facebook and Twitter both reasonably felt that it was spreading potentially dangerous misinformation about masks and children. So both services gave him a time-out. Facebook suspended him for three days for violating its community standards. Twitter locked his account for violating its rules.Hart is suing Biden, Murthy and other government officials on the laughably bogus argument that the account suspensions were ordered by the US government. The argument is that because the White House did use its bully pulpit to get angry at Facebook for leaving up misinformation, that somehow makes the government responsible for the actions against Hart (even though those occurred before the White House statements). As we noted at the time, the White House's statements were pretty stupid and short sighted. But they did not, in any way, amount to evidence that the White House and social media were colluding to censor people. Indeed, the whole point of the White House's statements were that Facebook wasn't taking down accounts.The claims in the case are, as expected, silly. First you get a state action claim.

How do you reform this?

Way back in 2017, years before CD Projekt Red released Cyberpunk 2077 in a poor enough state so as to kickoff lawsuits from investors and a shitstorm of criticism by the public, we discussed how CDPR had acquired the US trademark for "Cyberpunk" in its licensing arrangements and then applied for a mark on the same term in the EU. The problem, of course, is that "cyberpunk" isn't just the name of a series of tabletop and video games, but also the name of a broad genre of fiction. These are trademarks that should never have been granted, as they are akin to getting a trademark on something like "True Crime". Plenty of folks in American and the EU cried foul over this, leading to CDPR putting out a statement that, among other things, noted that the company is not a trademark bully and would not be aggressive in enforcing the mark for unrelated projects in the cyberpunk genre. Pay special attention to the tweet from CDPR below in the section headed "What does it mean that CD Projekt owns the trademark for "Cyberpunk"?

Last week, China restricted children under 18 to three weekend hours of video games per week. If you’re a parent of a Minecraft- or Fortnite-obsessed child, you may be wondering why the U.S. doesn’t do something similar. But China’s move against juvenile gaming is just the Chinese government's latest salvo in their barrage of attempts to control internet technology. Their centralized approach is one that we in the U.S. have historically rejected and should continue to reject.China’s Great Firewall has long cut off the Chinese people’s access to much of the global internet. But recent actions in China focus on its own tech companies. These moves include passing a stringent new privacy law (which offers no protection from government spying) and tough new antitrust restrictions. China also blocked internet finance company Ant’s I.P.O., fined e-commerce company Alibaba 18.2 billion yuan and has heavily regulated online lenders, rapidly reducing their numbers from 5,000 to six as of September 2020. One prominent financial tycoon was abducted in Hong Kong, taken to China, and is apparently under house arrest while Chinese regulators seize and dismantle his companies. The crackdown expands beyond tech companies to users – Chinese police have arrested social media stars for on-camera eating as part of a campaign against food waste. It is, according to commentary circulated by Chinese state media, a “profound revolution” against “the chaos of big capital” and “a return to the Communist Party of China’s initial aspirations, a return to people as the center, and a return to the essence of socialism.”In short, China’s leaders are grasping to centralize control. And their method is to label individualism as a vice rather than a virtue.China’s leaders fear that they are losing control of markets and society, especially in the digital age.They are right. But as I argue in my forthcoming book, Getting Out of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World, control is overrated – and often it is counterproductive. Complex systems like markets are characterized by emergent order, with robust and productive patterns forming from the interactions of many individual participants following relatively simple rules. These patterns cannot be anticipated or centrally designed, because the knowledge they embody is produced by the individuals grappling with the situations in front of them.Attempts to centrally control such systems eliminate much of the nuance and knowledge contained within them. The result is a simplistic, centralized system that leaves most participants worse off than they were under the emergent order produced by the complex, decentralized system. Unsurprisingly, those who are better off under centralized systems tend to be those at the center – those in control. Their control comes at the expense of everyone else’s welfare.I don’t expect this argument to persuade China’s leaders to change their path, although for their citizens’ sake I wish they would. But it might help guide our path here in the U.S. The U.S. character – and our Constitution - would never permit the kind of full-bore government centralization that China has undertaken. Yet the technocratic desire to be in control, especially in times of rapid change, is alive and well here.Indeed, many of the ideas China has adopted are floating around U.S. academia and even Capitol Hill. Breaking up big tech, regulating new technologies like blockchain and cryptocurrencies, regulating what kind of speech cannot or must be allowed on social media sites, limiting the use of encryption – these are increasingly common sentiments across the U.S. political spectrum. Sen. Josh Hawley’s proposed bill to ban “infinite scroll” on phone apps would fit in seamlessly with the Chinese government's diktats.It's as if China is taking the most precautionary policies from US academics, advocates, and lawmakers and implementing them via boot, truncheon, and machine gun. In fact, China’s commercial privacy law – created by a government that surveilles its citizens relentlessly – has drawn praise from some U.S. tech policy leaders who seem to wish we in the U.S. could ram through such onerous laws without the inconveniences of the democratic process.But America’s strengths include our embrace of individualism, couched appropriately within functioning institutions (themselves artifacts of emergent order), and our willingness to participate in complex systems where no one seems to be in control. These strengths have made the U.S. an economic powerhouse, home to many great innovators in technology and businesses, and the source of creative expression that entertains and educates the world.As tech analyst Ben Thompson has argued, let’s not do a pale imitation of China's attempt to stamp out individualism and centralize control. Instead, let's double down on freeing the individual to create solutions to the problems they and others face.Even if that means you, not the government, has to tell your kid to put down the game controller.Neil Chilson is a senior technology and innovation research fellow at Stand Together and former Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission. His new book, "Getting Out of Control: Emergent Leadership in a Complex World," will be released on September 23.

Another bullshit forfeiture has attracted national press attention. This one has some added bonuses, like local cops stating on (body cam) that the easiest way to get their hands on the seized money would be to ask the feds to come in.It's the usual stuff: a pretextual stop, a bunch of questions unrelated to the alleged violation, and the theft of a person's money based on nothing more than an officer's speculation about its origin. (alternate link)

We're going to have to do this again up front because I know how this is going to go over among some: even if you think Amazon is the root of all evil, and Senator Elizabeth Warren truly is the greatest Senator in the last century, that does not mean that she gets to ignore the Constitution. We had this issue earlier this year when Warren threatened to punish Amazon for its constitutionally protected speech, and now she's going even further. She has sent a letter to new Amazon CEO Andy Jassy to complain about the fact that there are some books on Amazon that have dangerous mis- and disinformation about COVID-19 and various treatments and vaccines. And, yes, I recognize just as well as you do how dangerous that kind of mis- and disinformation can be. But, whether you like it or not, that mis- and disinformation is almost certainly protected by the 1st Amendment. And Warren ignores all that and implies that Amazon hosting this material is potentially "unlawful." It's not and threatening Amazon for carrying it is a huge 1st Amendment issue.

Earlier this year, the Florida state legislature passed a law that turned protesting into a crime by expanding the definition of "riot" to make peaceful protesters culpable for the actions of those actually engaged in rioting. It refused bail to those arrested at protests and the term "aggravated rioting" was expanded enough to cover any gathering of more than nine people that blocked any road.As soon as the law went into effect, it was deployed against protesters. But only certain protesters. Those involved in Black Lives Matter/anti-police brutality protests were targeted, but Cuban solidarity protesters were not only allowed to block traffic without being arrested, they were actually allowed onto freeway access ramps by police officers.The law was immediately challenged by a number of groups when it went into effect. The Florida NAACP, Black Lives Matter Alliance Broward, and Dream Defenders sued to have the law blocked and declared unconstitutional. Thanks to a Florida federal court, they have obtained the injunction they were seeking.The injunction order [PDF], written by Judge Mark Walker, opens with a brief recounting of how riot laws have historically been deployed to assist the government in enforcing segregation and other racists policies.