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It's historically always been true that however bad a hack scandal is when initially announced, you can be pretty well assured that it's significantly worse than was actually reported. That's certainly been true of the recent T-Mobile hack, which exposed the personal details (including social security numbers) of more than 53 million T-Mobile customers (and counting). It's the fifth time the company has been involved in a hack or leak in just the last few years, forcing the company's new(ish) CEO Mike Sievert to issue yet another apology for the company's failures last Friday:

There was plenty of attention paid OnlyFans decision recently to ban "sexually explicit" content -- a policy the company suspended following an outcry. However, more and more people are noticing that the same kind of thing is happening across the internet due to FOSTA.The New Yorker has a very interesting article describing how eBay recently banned almost all adult content on its website, and one of the consequences is that important historical LGBTQ content is disappearing. Yet again, this appears to be one of the very much intended consequences of FOSTA. You may recall that one of the major backers of FOSTA were pretty explicit that they saw it as part of their plan to stop all pornography from existing.And, it's working:

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Is there anything law enforcement won't use geofence warrants for? The answer appears to be "no."A recent Google transparency report shows exponential growth in the geofence (a.k.a. "reverse") warrant market, one that Google has inadvertently cornered by collecting more GPS info than any of its competitors. These aren't traditional warrants. Traditional warrants use probable cause to justify searches of places, people, and objects (like vehicles)."Reverse" warrants are just that: a dragnet cast by cops to find a suspect in a pool of possibilities, most of whom are not criminals. Working backwards from a long list of GPS data points and cellphone information, investigators try to find the most likely suspect and then move forward again, this time using some actual probable cause. They're not always correct. And they seem largely unconcerned that demanding location data on hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent people perverts the process.A recent report by Russell Brandom for The Verge shows the trend towards bulk collection continues. And, as reported previously, it involves federal agents who want to convert state charges to federal charges (using imaginative readings of the phrase "interstate commerce" to do so) to generate as much pain as possible for people who participated in protests against police violence, whether lawfully or not.Protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin following the shooting of a black man by police quickly turned violent. Not only were businesses burned and destroyed, a 17-year-old interloper named Kyle Rittenhouse convinced his mom to drive him to Kenosha from his home in Antioch, Illinois. Once there, the armed Rittenhouse engaged in his vigilante fantasies, shooting three protesters, killing two of them.The ATF was more interested in the arson, though. And it thought the best way to generate investigative leads was to gather information on thousands of protesters, almost every one of which did not start any fires.

After Hurricane Katrina, in 2008 the FCC passed rules mandating that cellular towers be upgraded to include battery backups or generators capable of delivering at least 8 hours of backup power, basically the bare minimum for usefulness. But the US cellular industry, you know, the one whose rates are some of the highest in the developed world, cried like a petulant child about the requirement and sued to successfully scuttle the rules.Backed by the then Bush White House, cellular carriers insisted that the requirement would create "a huge economic and bureaucratic burden" for the industry. A better approach, it proclaimed, would be to let the industry self-regulate and adhere to entirely voluntary guidelines, leaving it with the "flexibility" to adapt to problems as the industry saw fit. The U.S. government did what the industry asked because, well, that's what U.S. telecom policy basically is now. And despite the fact this kind of industry ass kissing never works out particularly well, the country simply refuses to learn much of anything from the experience.U.S. telecom policy failure has been apparent everywhere, most notably in telecom competition, reliability, customer service, and pricing. But it's also abundantly obvious when it comes to disaster policy.There have now been repeated examples where the industry's failure to weather proof their infrastructure -- and provide reliable backup power at cell tower sites -- added insult to injury. Most notable among them was Hurricane Sandy in 2012, hurricanes Irma and Maria (which absolutely devastated Puerto Rico) in 2017, and the historic California wildfires of 2019. In every instance essential cellular service failed because many penny pinching companies weren't willing to spend the necessary money to harden their networks in the face of climate change, and regulators didn't genuinely hold them accountable.Fast forward to this week, and the same story played out once again. About 40% of AT&T's wireless network simply didn't work in the wake of Hurricane Ida (unsurprisingly due to lack of backup power at many cell sites), leaving disaster victims unable to contact loved ones. Telecom policy experts keep pointing out that this is preventable, and that letting spending-averse telecom giants dictate U.S. policy on this subject isn't wise:

You will recall that we were just discussing a cool little story about Bethesda going so far in embracing the modding communities surrounding its games that it ended up hiring one of the writers of an impressive Fallout 4 mod onto its team. Part of what made that story interesting was not how totally novel it was. After all, modders have found their way into developer roles in the past. Instead, it's that it was Bethesda that made it interesting, being a AAA title developer and the fact that the gaming industry certainly doesn't approach modding communities with unanimity.But it would be great for this to become a trend, as a demonstration of the boon that modding communities can be for developers, rather than some kind of a threat to their control. It's probably too early to call this a full on trend at this point, but it is worth highlighting that we have yet another story of a AAA developer hiring on members of a modding community, this time with CD Projekt Red.

There's an interesting discussion that happens in content moderation circles with regards to government requests for takedowns: are those requests about content that violates local laws or about the content violating website policies? Many people lump these two things together, but they're actually pretty different in practice. Obviously, if a government comes across content that violates the law, it seems reasonable for them to alert the platform to it and expect that the content will be removed (though, there may be some questions about jurisdiction and such). However, when it's just content that may violate site policy, there are some pretty big questions raised. This actually gets to the "jawboning" question we've been discussing a lot lately, and exploring where the line is between a politician persuading a website to take something down and compelling them to do so.There is one argument that suggests that a government pointing out content that might violate site policies is simply helping out. The website doesn't want content that violates its standards, and the government reporting it is just like any other user reporting it (though, backed up by whatever credibility the government may or may not have). But, the flip side of that is, if the content is perfectly legal, this often starts to feel like a loophole through which government actors can engage in wink-wink-nudge-nudge censorship -- just send a notification to the site that this particular content may not break the law, but hey, doesn't it violate your policies?A recent decision by the Oversight Board, and a corresponding statement from Facebook, suggests that Facebook is going to be clearer about when this situation happens. The case the Oversight Board reviewed was an interesting one. Here's how it summarized the situation:

There's an interesting discussion that happens in content moderation circles with regards to government requests for takedowns: are those requests about content that violates local laws or about the content violating website policies? Many people lump these two things together, but they're actually pretty different in practice. Obviously, if a government comes across content that violates the law, it seems reasonable for them to alert the platform to it and expect that the content will be removed (though, there may be some questions about jurisdiction and such). However, when it's just content that may violate site policy, there are some pretty big questions raised. This actually gets to the "jawboning" question we've been discussing a lot lately, and exploring where the line is between a politician persuading a website to take something down and compelling them to do so.There is one argument that suggests that a government pointing out content that might violate site policies is simply helping out. The website doesn't want content that violates its standards, and the government reporting it is just like any other user reporting it (though, backed up by whatever credibility the government may or may not have). But, the flip side of that is, if the content is perfectly legal, this often starts to feel like a loophole through which government actors can engage in wink-wink-nudge-nudge censorship -- just send a notification to the site that this particular content may not break the law, but hey, doesn't it violate your policies?A recent decision by the Oversight Board, and a corresponding statement from Facebook, suggests that Facebook is going to be clearer about when this situation happens. The case the Oversight Board reviewed was an interesting one. Here's how it summarized the situation:

Canada is barreling towards a federal election, and if recent legislative proposals are any indication, the outcome will have huge implications for the future of the internet in the country. Between the recent Bill C-10 and the proposed online harms legislation (among other things), it's clear that plenty of Canadian politicians want to make drastic and draconian changes to how the internet is regulated. This week, I join Mike on the podcast along with Matt Hatfield, the Campaigns Director of OpenMedia (something like Canada's version of the EFF), to discuss the Canadian election and what it means for a variety of important internet policy issues.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.

Whatever you think of what happened on January 6th, people should be concerned about the House Select Committee that is investigating those events now demanding information from various social networks. As the committee announced in a press release, it was demanding records from a long list of social media companies.

Under president Donald Trump, ICE went from barely tolerable to fascist stormtroopery, doing anything in its power to kick people out of the country. Trump claimed he was just trying to make the nation safer by ridding us of the "worst of the worst." His vague directives lit a fire under the worst ICE employees, giving them free rein to forcibly eject as many people as possible, even if those people were not the "worst," nor even trending towards that direction.ICE struggled to find (figuratively [but also maybe literally?]) boatloads of hardened criminals to send packing, so it decided quantity was preferable to quality. To cite just one example of ICE's enthusiasm for ejecting even the best and brightest (along with everyone else), the agency set up and ran a fake college solely for the purpose of booting people trying to do nothing more than continue their education and satisfy the requirements of their student visas.A court case currently being reviewed by the Eleventh Circuit Appeals Court appears to show ICE engaging in retaliation against protected speech in order to remove (check reports) a man who has lived in this country illegally, but definitely gainfully, for nearly two decades. Joel Rose has this report for NPR:

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When the UK announced its rebranded "Online Safety" bill (originally, the "Online Harms" bill) we noted that the mechanism included was effectively identical to the original Great Firewall of China. That is, when China first began censoring its internet, rather than telling websites explicitly what needed to be taken down, it just gave vague policy guidance about what "harmful" information would be a problem if it was found online, and backed that up with a serious threat: if any service provider was found not to have taken down information the government deemed problematic, it would face serious consequences. There was, of course, no such threat for taking down information that should not have been taken down. The end result was clear: when in doubt, take it down.It remains preposterous to me that all across Western democracies, we've seen them taking the same basic approach -- insisting that platforms need to be much more aggressive in pulling down "bad" information (loosely defined), with significant liability attached to leaving it up (even if the content is legal), and little in the way of punishment for overblocking. And, over and over and over again studies have shown that when you set up a liability regime this way, you get massive overblocking. It seems that some countries see that as a feature, not a bug.And, of course, with that approach now being picked up in other countries, China has apparently decided to ramp up its own approach. Under the guise of stopping "harmful" information online, China has released a draft of new regulations to punish internet companies that don't remove harmful information:

For a while it's been clear that Apple has been hoping to use "we care about privacy" as a marketing advantage in an internet economy that consistently... doesn't. For example Apple has stood up to the FBI when it comes to backdooring encryption. And in 2020 Apple unveiled several new privacy features and policies it hoped would differentiate it from its other "big tech" contemporaries repeatedly under fire in the press and in Congress. Granted there's been ongoing hints this dedication isn't exactly consistent, but it's the thought that counts, I guess.But Apple employees say the company's outward-facing dedication to privacy isn't reflected in house. This week The Verge reported on how the company's decision to force Apple employees to link their personal Apple ID and work Apple accounts are creating significant privacy headaches for employees. Personal Apple ID accounts are obviously filled with all manner of sensitive personal and financial data that an employee might not want shared with an employer. And the requirement that employees fuse their personal and work lives in such a fashion is causing significant internal turmoil, the report claims:

You may recall that my colleague Karl Bode discussed Netflix's response to real competition last month, dealing mostly with how Netflix has attempted to hand-waive concerns over losing subscribers in the face of increasing streaming options from the likes of Amazon, Disney, and Comcast. But buried down in the last paragraph was a reference to Netflix's reported interest in video game streaming. Reports indicated that Netflix had hired an executive that had previously worked for EA, speculating that the company was getting into game publishing. There was no official word from Netflix as to what this game studio would actually look like, and the speculation was roughly what you would expect.

Surprising nobody, the traditional cable TV industry lost another 1.2 million paying subscribers last quarter as users flee to other alternatives. Largely those alternatives consist of streaming video services that are cheaper, more flexible, and feature better customer service. Many others are rediscovering free over the air broadcasts. Others have simply shifted away from TV entirely, choosing to embrace YouTube or TikTok.According to Leichtman Research, the top cable companies lost 587,649 customers in just the last quarter, compared to 698,000 for telco and satellite providers. Over the last year, traditional pay TV providers saw a net loss of about 4,520,000 subscribers, compared to a loss of about 5,460,000 over the year prior (impressive for a trend that the industry spent years pretending wasn't actually happening). Fortunately for the industry, the cord cutting revolution appears to be slowing somewhat:

Former Trump lawyer/current conspiracy theorist/lawsuit defendant Sidney Powell has one more thing to add to her extremely dubious CV: sanctions.The attorney general for the state of Michigan -- one of the states alleged to be the home of election fraud by Sidney Powell and her like-minded associates -- pressed for sanctions, using Powell's own statements against her. Powell claimed her statements about election fraud were nothing more than heated hyperbole that no reasonable person would have believed were facts when seeking to have Dominion Voting Systems' defamation lawsuit dismissed. Michigan's AG noted this same "hyperbole" formed the basis of the election fraud lawsuit she had filed in Michigan, which basically meant Powell expected the court to take her wild speculation as credible and potentially provable facts.You can't have it both ways. Powell is now being sanctioned, along with several other lawyers (including L. Lin Wood) who participated in this harmful waste of government resources. The sanctions order [PDF] is a brutal masterpiece. It runs 110 pages and it details everything wrong about Powell's actions and allegations. Someone give Judge Linda Parker a raise.This is the opening paragraph, which gives the reader a pretty good idea how the rest of the order is going to run. If that reader is one of the lawyers being sanctioned, this paragraph is a swift punch to the solar plexus. Unfortunately for those particular readers, it's only the first blow in a sustained, impeccably delivered beating.

Everything is bigger in Texas, even the act of unconstitutional spitting on the 1st Amendment. We've already talked about the blatantly unconstitutional bill, HB20, that picks up where Florida's already-declared-unconstitutional bill leaves off, and makes it even worse. Well, that bill was voted on Friday and Texas Republicans approved it by a vote of 76 to 44.But, as Adam Kovacevich noted on Twitter, some Democratic legislators wanted to make sure that the Republicans supporting such a gross infringement of the 1st Amendment were on the record for what they supported. So they introduced amendments to carve out the "must carry" rules for Holocaust denialism, terrorist content, and vaccine disinformation. And Republicans made sure to reject all three amendments, thereby explicitly admitting that with their bill they want to make sure that websites are forced to carry vaccine disinformation, terrorist content, and Holocaust denialism.Now, to be clear, all three of those things are (mostly) protected under the 1st Amendment. But so is the right for a website to remove them and not be associated with them. Anyway, 73 Texas legislators said that websites should not be able to takedown "vaccine misinformation." Literally, that's what they voted against:And, reading the amendment on terrorist content, it appears that no website will be allowed to remove ISIS-promoting content any more, which is an interesting choice by Texas Republicans.And then there's the Holocaust denialism bit. Social media sites will have to include it as well. I'm kind of surprised that the legislators introducing this amendment didn't also do one explicitly about "critical race theory." Now that really would have tested things. After all, this very same Texas legislature that, earlier this year, passed an equally unconstitutional bill that says teachers in Texas can't openly talk about America's racist past.And, I guess that is at least consistent. You must post stuff denying the holocaust, but suggesting that there is systemic bigotry? Well, that's beyond the pale.

It's not just headliners like L. Lin Wood and Sidney Powell getting sanctioned for pursuing bullshit election fraud lawsuits. Other grifting asshats with Esq. on their letterhead are getting benchslapped for abusing the court system to pursue political goals, utilizing nothing more than speculation and wild conspiracy theories as "evidence."The lawyers behind a ridiculous lawsuit filed in Colorado have just been sanctioned by a federal judge. The opening of the sanction order [PDF] makes a valiant effort to succinctly sum up the litigation that has resulted in punishment, but there's just so much going on. Enjoy (?) the following craziness:

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Reporter Joseph Bernstein recently published a fantastic cover story in Harpers all about "disinformation" and "fake news" but not in the way you normally think about it. It's not like most such articles -- often decrying just how much disinformation is flowing out there, but rather taking a very critical eye about how we (especially the media) talk about such things. The piece is thought-provoking and well worth reading, and I've spent the last week or so letting it sit and percolate in my head before writing up this post about it.Right after the 2016 election, there was a flurry of hand-wringing from the media, trying to understand how what they were positive would happen (a Hillary Clinton victory and a Donald Trump loss), didn't actually happen. A convenient scapegoat for this surprising turn of events was... Facebook. The narrative took over that it was "fake news" on Facebook that convinced a bunch of gullible people to support a clearly unqualified candidate. That this convenient scapegoat also happened to be successfully siphoning advertising dollars away from some traditional media organizations was mostly just made pointing fingers at it feel even better. However, as we warned at the time, focusing in on social media and "fake news" was not just silly, but potentially counterproductive. Indeed, within weeks, authoritarians around the world started adopting the term "fake news" as a convenient excuse for censoring the media. And, obviously, it became a key part of Donald Trump's stump speech as well.It wasn't long until "fake news" was used against any content someone in power didn't like, and it became a key tool to push for censorship of those who were actually exposing malfeasance.Bernstein's article highlights how this same sort of thinking is happening with the term "disinformation." Of course, disinformation doesn't have a clear definition, and often it's in the eye of the beholder (like "fake news" before it). But, the media (and many politicians) have become so obsessed with "disinformation" that, once again, we've turned it into a kind of moral panic -- and a convenient one for censors around the globe. As Bernstein notes, the hue and cry over "disinformation" has made many Americans think it's one of the biggest threats around:

So we've noted for a long time how the FCC's broadband maps are a bit of a joke, routinely overstating broadband competitors, speeds, and service availability. We've also routinely noted how these bad maps go hand in hand with extremely sloppy subsidy programs that often dole out money to regional monopolies for doing as little as possible. That was punctuated recently by a $9 billion scandal in which the FCC (under Trump appointee Ajit Pai) doled out hundreds of millions of undeserved dollars to ISPs (like Elon Musk's Starlink) so they could deliver broadband to airport parking lots and traffic medians.While the agency has been taking steps to remedy some of the problems under interim boss Jessica Rosenworcel, the agency's mapping and subsidy dysfunction seems to have resulted in it being boxed out of managing the $65 billion in new broadband funding included in the infrastructure bill:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about Universal Music Group sending a takedown over footage of the moon:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, we watched as telcos tapdanced around net neutrality requirements, and also took a look yet again at the clear evidence that net neutrality didn't hurt broadband investment. The think tank that originally proposed SOPA claimed to have "proof" that it would have been great, Obama was pushing to ratify the TPP, and India made it a criminal act to merely visit a site that was "blocked" for copyright infringement. On the podcast, we had an interview with Kim Dotcom's lawyer, while it also came out that the FBI had let its seized Megaupload domains lapse and they were now enhanced darkweb child porn sites in its efforts to combat them). This was also the week that we launched our Copying Is Not Theft t-shirt (which was much later taken down by Teespring with no explanation, so you can now get it on Threadless.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, the chorus of mainstream press talking about how the patent system is broken was getting louder, with even the Wall Street Journal getting in on the action. The RIAA filed a predictable appeal over the judge's decision to decrease the jury award in the Jammie Thomas trial, the ruling in the MP3Tunes lawsuit thankfully protected DMCA safe harbors, and we looked at an important but often overlooked aspect of the fair use ruling over South Park's What What (In The Butt)? parody. Meanwhile, the fight was on over PROTECT IP, with Don Henley supporting it due to his irrational hatred of YouTube and the Washington Post promoting it with an editorial full of questionable claims, while Paul Vixie issued a thorough explanation of how it would break the internet. And we also had one of our first posts about what, at the time, was a "side show" in the Oracle/Google patent fight: API copyrights.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, we took a look at how takedown notices were challenging the internet's usual ability to route around censorship, and discussed the failures of the RIAA's automated lawsuit threat strategy (as well as looking at a way to stupidly lose such a lawsuit, and another way to get one dismissed). Heads were rolling inside AOL over its search data leak, while researchers were conflicted about making use of the potentially very useful data. This was also the week that Amazon rolled out something that would become a central component of so many modern internet services, by offering processing power at utility rates for people to use in building products.

Someone finally hit an airplane with a drone while flying it near an airport. And of all people, it was the cops. (h/t Justin England, via Hackaday)

Back in May, we wrote about the growing number of pure copyright scammers, using completely made up claims of copyright infringement as a form of a phishing technique. As I mentioned in a comment, we get multiple such messages every week here at Techdirt -- with almost identical comments being placed (or attempted at least -- since our spam filter seems to have caught all or most of them) on various Techdirt articles claiming infringement. They always came with a link to "the evidence," (which we never clicked of course).These scams are different than standard copyright trolling, in which there may even be a kernel of truth in the initial copyright claim. Here, the scammers are just phishing for logins or other private data, and using the ridiculously overbroad power of copyright statutory damages to frighten people into coughing up the information. And, not surprisingly, the scam is evolving. Sophos recently reported that it's now seeing scammers sending the copyright threats with phone numbers to call, rather than phishing links.

We have seen and covered a great many ridiculous copyright issues here at Techdirt. It is, after all, sort of our thing. Still, some attempts at enforcing copyrights are so ludicrous that they take your breath away. Now, granted, often times the most egregious of these stories arise out of the use of automated bot systems that troll all the places for copyright infringement and often times get it completely wrong. But that isn't so much an excuse for those situations as it is a spotlight on how brutally terrible the current iteration of copyright enforcement has become and how despicable it is that the wider copyright industries just shrug their shoulders at all the collateral damage they cause.And then there's the moon. I know, I know, you're thinking, "The moon? Is Timothy having another stroke while writing a post?" First off, my personal health is none of your concern. And secondly, nope, because a video recording of the moon as seen from Greece, which included no audio, was blocked all over the place due to a copyright claim made by Universal Music Group.

Administrators of publicly-funded schools have a strange habit of misunderstanding the limits of their power and failing to respect the freedoms extended to their students by the Constitution. Naturally, this has resulted in lawsuits. Lots of them. And lots of losses for administrators, including one recent notable loss delivered by none other than the US Supreme Court.But administrators aren't actually feeling these losses, for the most part. As government employees, they have access to qualified immunity, which gives them a chance to avoid being sued as long as they've violated rights in a non-clearly-established way. (Not only that, but if this shield somehow fails, it's taxpayers who foot the bill for courtroom losses.)An op-ed for USA Today, written by FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) members Greg Lukaniaoff and Adam Goldstein, asks why we're allowing administrators to avail themselves of this protection, given they're not asked to make speedy decisions under tremendous pressure.

We've covered plenty of stuff about the Oversight Board that Facebook set up. While we recognize the cynicism towards it and still think it's somewhat early to judge, for many of us following the Board's decisions closely, it's been really kind of eye opening how much the Board has really pushed Facebook to make real changes. Of course, there are many real structural issues with the way the Oversight Board is set up -- but the initial results have been fascinating.And that's why it's interesting to hear that the company is considering creating another oversight board like setup for dealing with the challenges of moderation and elections, according to a report in the NY Times.

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Thanks to its never-ending collection of location data, Google has become a prime target for law enforcement investigators. Using so-called "reverse warrants," investigators ask Google to turn over information for all devices in a geofenced area, with the hope of working their way backward from these data points to actual criminal suspects.They're called "warrants" but they can't possibly be supported by probable cause. Treating everyone in the area of a suspected crime as a criminal suspect until things can be sorted out inverts this concept. And the government isn't always honest with courts about how many innocent people these "reverse warrants" can ensnare. Fortunately, we've seen some courts engage in more active reviews of these requests, which has led to a few notable rejections.Google has released some details [PDF] on reverse warrants, which show they're an increasingly-popular option for law enforcement agencies. Zack Whittaker breaks down the data for TechCrunch.

You might recall after the telecom lobby convinced Congress to obliterate both privacy and net neutrality rules (despite both having bipartisan public support), there was a lot of industry whining about the various state replacement efforts that popped up. For example when California popped up with its own net neutrality rules, AT&T whined incessantly about how a "discordant network of state laws" would harm puppies and innovation. Ignored, of course, is that states were simply rushing to fill the consumer protection void created by federal apathy, itself a direct result of lobbying (aka corruption).The same thing happened with broadband privacy guard rails. In 2015, the FCC proposed some fairly basic broadband privacy rules largely focused on making sure what was being collected and sold would be transparent to consumers. But the telecom lobby was easily able to lobby the GOP-controlled Congress to use the Congressional Review Act to kill those rules before they could even take effect. And again, giants like AT&T whined about the discordant landscape of imperfect state legislative efforts that popped up in its wake, hoping you'd ignore that they helped create the problem by attacking even the most basic federal protections.The same thing of course is now playing out in the broader tech sector as well. For years, the tech, healthcare, marketing, insurance, and telecom sectors have worked to uniformly battle any meaningful federal privacy protections on the federal level. Not just the bad proposals. All of them. And, unsurprisingly, after years of this, states have started filling the void with their own solutions, many of which are less than perfect. This, as we saw with telecom, is causing all manner of consternation and constipation at major tech companies:

How gaming companies treat their modding communities that spring up around their games is something of a fault line in the industry. Game studios tend to be either pro-modding or not, with very little space in between. Nintendo, for instance, is notoriously anti-modding of its games. Bethesda, on the other hand, has traditionally been quite open-minded when it comes to the modding communities that have sprung up around its games. We've made the point for a long, long time that embracing modding communities is typically a massive boon to gaming companies and the restrictive attitude companies like Nintendo take makes little sense. Mods extend the shelf life and interest of games, driving attention and elongating the sales cycle and windows for those games. Giving up a little control for more sales seems to only make sense.But, speaking of Bethesda, some developers go even further. For instance, there is a forthcoming Fallout mod made by an independent team that is entitled Fallout: London, and it looks amazing.Now, I am very much a fan of this franchise, so I'm comfortable saying that if you can see a quality difference between what appears in this trailer and what has appeared in official trailers for the franchise, you're a much bigger stickler for details than I am. The mod changes more than just the location, though. It puts an emphasis on different types of gameplay to reflect a more British sensibility.

We all know how lousy civil asset forfeiture is. In lieu of actual criminal charges, cops (and feds) just seize any property they can get their hands on, turning other people's money into pure profit for law enforcement agencies. Money they can often spend with little to no oversight.It's a profitable venture. Cops steal more than actual crooks do, netting billions a year across the nation. The legal process for forfeiture asks very little from law enforcement -- rarely more than a mild hunch the seized funds are linked to criminal acts. The government has a very low bar to meet in most cases. For the people who've suddenly seen their money taken away, the bar is much higher.In most cases, the government gets to decide when forfeiture proceedings begin. It also doesn't have to make much of an effort to notify forfeiture victims that proceedings have begun. That leads to a lot of default wins for government agencies. The amount of money it takes to hire a lawyer to challenge a forfeiture is often more costly than the funds seized, leading to even more government "wins." Every cheap win is treated like a victory in the war on crime, even when it's usually nothing more than the government making some random person poorer.In the state of Massachusetts, one particular District Attorney is ensuring there's no due process when it comes to asset forfeiture. Thanks to severely lax laws, there's no lower limit for seizures, which means the DA's office is more than happy to help cops nickel-and-dime people to figurative death. There's also no legal obligation for the office to move forward with forfeitures in a timely fashion.This has led to the DA's office waiting for as long as possible to initiate some proceedings. And, since the office takes home a percentage of every successful forfeiture, it does as little as possible to ensure those who've had their money seized are made aware that proceedings are imminent. Saurabah Datar and Shannon Dooling have done some digging to produce this enraging report for ProPublica. (h/t @pakanukeha)

We've noted for years that the FCC's purported "war on robocalls" has been predominantly empty. Just a few years ago, for example, the FCC patted itself on the back for some minor rule changes that simply let wireless carriers offer robocall blocking tech by default. And quite often, the "record" fines the FCC announces to punish robocallers are never actually collected. Making matters worse, the US government usually only targets smaller scam robocallers, and not any of the major "legit" industries (like debt collectors) that utilize the same tactics as robocall scammers to harass struggling Americans they know can't pay anyway.You can see how effective the FCC's "war on robocalls" has been by the amount of robocalls you've received. Though it ebbs and flows, the problem has grown massively since 2015, and the Robocall Index notes that 30.7 billion robocalls have been placed in 2021 so far, up from last year. That's just the United States. This is not a war anybody could confidently claim we're winning.This week, the FCC made headlines again for announcing a "record" fine against partisan bullshit artists Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman for making 1,141 robocalls to cellphones during the 2020 elections without gaining consumer consent. The fines come after the duo were charged with four felonies in Michigan for making misleading robocalls to area minority voters. From the FCC's press release:

I remain confused at why so many people endorse Macarthur Genius award winner, Prof. Danielle Citron's views on Section 230. Over and over again people say that her ideas for reforming Section 230 are sensible. Except that they are not. She has falsely insisted that companies have no incentives to moderate and that their incentives are to push the most extreme content. This has been debunked over and over again. If it were true, then every website would turn into 8kun. But that doesn't happen, because most websites realize that when your website is full of garbage people, it drives away other users (including those more likely to support you or your advertisers) and it drives away advertisers.Citron's big idea is to put in place a duty of care or "reasonableness" standard, but we've explained at length why that's the kind of idea only an academic with no experience running a website could love. It would lead to a ton of costly litigation in which companies would have to repeatedly defend their moderation practices in court. At best this would lead to companies all adopting nearly identical moderation practices to whichever company survived the litigation gauntlet first -- effectively crushing any ability to experiment and innovate in the moderation market, and likely locking in Facebook as one of the few companies that can afford to handle moderation's liability risks.All that said, I'm even more flabbergasted by Citron's initial response to the (now walked back) news that OnlyFans was planning to phase out sexually explicit content. Many, many people have made the connection between OnlyFans' decision and FOSTA, the last time Section 230 was amended to add more liability to platforms. Of course, as we've now seen, FOSTA has had a massive human cost, is leading to some wacky vexatious civil lawsuits, and according to the GAO's own study, has failed to live up to any of its promises.In an article at CNN about the OnlyFans decision, Citron makes an absolutely bizarre claim, that the answer to OnlyFans deplatforming sex workers... is to put more liability on OnlyFans so that those sex workers can sue. I only wish I were kidding.

Recently, following our announcement that we have removed all Google ads and tracking code from Techdirt, a reader reached out to us with a novel (and greatly appreciated!) proposal for supporting the change and our ongoing reporting while also helping out a good cause: buying an ad — not for their own benefit, but for that of a public interest campaign that aligns perfectly with our own values. That's why you see a new banner in the sidebar on the site, encouraging our readers to sign an open letter put together by FSFE calling on the EU to pass a law requiring all publicly financed software to be made available under a free and open source license.This reader purchased the ad with their own money, as a way of helping out both Techdirt and the FSFE campaign — and we think this is such an amazing and generous idea that we wanted to call extra attention to it with a post. We've written about this same issue of open sourcing publicly funded software in the past, when the White House began embracing the idea and then unveiled an official open source software policy — but the fact is it should be the norm for all governments that use taxpayer money to develop software. If the public funds something, it should be available to the public by default.And, of course, we also want to call attention to this campaign as a way that you can support Techdirt. As we said in our post about removing Google trackers from the site, these kinds of reader-friendly changes also take away some of our revenue streams, and increase our reliance on you, our readers, to support us directly when and if you can. We're extremely grateful to all the readers who stepped up and gave us a tip through our Friend of Techdirt option in the Insider Shop, or engaged with one of the many other ways to support us — and now this one generous reader has showed yet another option, and one that allows you to support Techdirt and the public interest at the same time.So we encourage everyone to sign the open letter to help demonstrate that this kind of campaign works. Moreover, if there's a campaign or an organization out there that you think aligns well with Techdirt's values and readership and that you'd like to support while helping us out in this way, please get in touch and let us know. We don't currently have fixed rates for direct ad purchases like this, and instead prefer to come up with custom solutions that fit your budget and needs — so don't hesitate to reach out and let us know what you have in mind.Thanks again to all our readers, and today especially to this one reader who came to us with this excellent idea!

Gunshot detection tech provider ShotSpotter is fighting a PR battle on multiple fronts after more news surfaced that its analysts may alter detection records to fit police narratives and investigators' theories. Communications and court documents obtained by the Associated Press confirmed ShotSpotter allows law enforcement officers to request modifications to detection records. And the company apparently used to allow police officers to modify the data themselves.In addition to its questionable handling of evidence, ShotSpotter is also shedding customers. Law enforcement agencies in some cities have decided it's not worth paying for a product that can't reliably detect gunshots. Cities that have dumped ShotSpotter have reported false positive rates as high as 75%.ShotSpotter has fired back, claiming everyone reporting on its tech is wrong about its tech. It also claims it doesn't alter or allow alteration to reports submitted as evidence in criminal cases. Its assertions ring pretty fucking hollow in the face of all of this reporting, which relies on documents filed in court or obtained through public records requests. ShotSpotter's claims, however, are supported by nothing more than the company's own ineffective anger.Now, there's even more evidence showing ShotSpotter isn't worth paying for. The Chicago PD's Inspector General has concluded its investigation of the tech the city pays roughly $11 million/year for. And it has found the tech doesn't seem to be worth the money.

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Remember Gettr? That's the Trumpist social network run by former Trump spokesperson (and vexatious lawsuit filer) Jason Miller that promised to be supportive of "free speech." As we point out what happens with every new social network that jumps into the space with promises to "support free speech!" and "not censor!" before long they will begin to realize content moderation is required to keep your site running -- and soon they discover that content moderation will involve difficult choices. And, sometimes, it involves making mistakes.Of course, whenever Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or whoever else note that they made a "mistake" with a content moderation decision and reverse it, there are always some people who insist it couldn't possibly be a mistake and must be [insert conspiratorial reason here]. So I find it hilarious that on Wednesday, Gettr got to experience all this as well. First, Trump buddy and admitted "dirty trickster" Roger Stone went on Gab -- another such social network -- to whine about how he was "censored" by Gettr, claiming it was because he had made what he believed were disparaging remarks about Miller (and Steve Bannon).

Back in 2009, the FCC funded a Harvard study that concluded (pdf) that open access broadband networks (letting multiple ISPs come in and compete over a central, core network) resulted in lower broadband prices and better service in numerous locations worldwide. Of course when the Obama FCC released its "National Broadband Plan" back in 2010, this realization (not to mention an honest accounting of the sector's limited competition) was nowhere to be found. Both parties ignored the data and instead doubled down on our existing national telecom policy plan: letting AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast do pretty much whatever they'd like. Something, of course, taken to ridiculous new heights during the Trump era.Since then, "open access" has become somewhat of a dirty word in telecom policy, and even companies like Google Fiber -- which originally promised to adhere to the concept on its own network before quietly backpedaling -- are eager to pretend the idea doesn't exist. Why? Because having ISPs compete in layers over a centralized network may improve service, boost speeds, and reduce prices (see: this community-run network in Ammon, Idaho), but it would eat into the revenues of the regional monopolies bone-grafted to our intelligence gathering apparatus, and you simply can't have that.Which is why it was surprising to see California recently pass a $6 billion broadband infrastructure bill that does something unique: it mandates the creation of a massive "middle mile" fiber network that will be open access, which should encourage increased competition. The original announcement breaks down the spending this way:

We've done more than our share of posts in the past about the problems within the DMCA takedown system as currently practiced. The reason for so many posts is in part due to the sheer number of problems with how this all works. For starters, when notices go out to search engines like Google to delist "problem" URLs, those notices are often times generated by automated systems that unsurprisingly result in a vast majority of notices targeting URLs that are non-infringing. As in, over 99% of those notices. And even once we get past the malpractice of using automation buckshot notices that result in an incredible amount of collateral damage, we then have to add the wide open avenues for fraud and abuse of the DMCA system. That type of fraud runs the gamut, from trolls merely trying to cause chaos for the fun of it to competitors of certain forms of content trying to hurt the competition. In the immortal words of former NFL coach John Fox: "It's all a problem."And, on the fraud and abuse side, it's such a problem that perfectly legit URLs can get delisted by Google due to a request from "The U.S. Copyright Office", even though that office doesn't make those sorts of requests.

Summary: YouTube offers an endless stream of videos that cater to the preferences of users, no matter their age and has become a go-to content provider for kids and their parents. The market for kid-oriented videos remains wide-open, with new competitors surfacing daily and utilizing repetition, familiarity, and strings of keywords to get their videos in front of kids willing to spend hours clicking on whatever thumbnails pique their interest, and YouTube is leading this market.Taking advantage of the low expectations of extremely youthful viewers, YouTube videos for kids are filled with low-effort, low-cost content - videos that use familiar songs, bright colors, and pop culture fixtures to attract and hold the attention of children.Most of this content is innocuous. But a much darker strain of content was exposed by amateur internet sleuths, which was swiftly dubbed "Elsagate," borrowing the name of the main character of Disney's massively popular animated hit, Frozen. At the r/ElsaGate subreddit, redditors tracked down videos aimed at children that contained adult themes, sexual activity, or other non-kid-friendly content.Among the decidedly not-safe-for-kids subject matter listed by r/ElsaGate are injections, gore, suicide, pregnancy, BDSM, assault, rape, murder, cannibalism, and use of alcohol. Most of these acts were performed by animated characters (or actors dressed as the characters), including the titular Elsa as well as Spiderman, Peppa Pig, Paw Patrol, and Mickey Mouse. According to parents, users, and members of the r/Elsagate subreddit, some of this content could be accessed via the YouTube Kids app — a kid-oriented version of YouTube subject to stricter controls and home to curated content meant to steer child users clear of adult subject matter.Further attention was drawn to the issue by James Bridle's post on the subject, entitled "Something is Wrong on the Internet." The post — preceded by numerous content warnings — detailed the considerable amount of disturbing content that was easily finding its way to youthful viewers, mainly thanks to its kid-friendly tags and innocuous thumbnails.The end result, according to Bridle, was nothing short of horrific:

Under Trump, the DOJ did all it could to break the spirit of the Black Lives Matter movement that took on renewed vigor last spring following yet another killing of an unarmed black person by a white cop. That's according to a report [PDF] by The Movement for Black Lives, which examined BLM-related prosecutions headed by federal prosecutors.

So, last week the news broke that OnlyFans, the wildly popular platform for "subscribing" to private video and photographic content -- and whose most popular usecase appears to be for adult content -- announced that it was banning "sexually explicit material" in response to difficulty finding investors and payment processors/banks threatening to cut them off (and possibly rejecting too many payments). The whole thing was somewhat confusing because the company did say that nude imagery would still be allowed, just not "sexually explicit," and I'm sure the guidelines for the company's content moderation team on that distinction would have been quite something.Either way, this move lead to an outcry of complaints -- led by sex workers who were already quite reasonably pissed off at previous attacks on them via things like FOSTA. And now, OnlyFans has announced that it has dropped the plans to ban such content, and said that it had worked out some sort of agreement with the financial companies who had been causing trouble before:

While body-worn cameras have mainly proven to be a boon for prosecutors, rather than the all-purpose accountability tools many of us thought they would be [raises hand sheepishly], the mere existence of more recordings is still a net gain for the general public.When cops are doing the recording, there's always a chance footage that disputes their narrative or discredits their testimony may go missing (or never recorded at all). But sometimes everything remains intact and, to officers' dismay, works against them when they're lying about stuff. Courts have always tended to give cops more credence than defendants in criminal trials, but the increase in recordings has freed courts to defer to the witness with no skin in the game: the recording device.This doesn't always happen. Sometimes judges would rather believe cops than their own eyes. It happened in this case. Fortunately for the person challenging a stop that resulted in criminal charges, the second court to review the video decided the recording was far more credible than the officer. (via FourthAmendment.com)A stop that resulted in DUI charges for Michael Boger was predicated on the officer's claim that the rear license plate wasn't illuminated. While it may have been true that Boger was under the influence and behind the wheel, it helps to remember that law enforcement isn't an ends-based operation. The means count, especially if we want the Constitution to mean anything.Officers need to have a reason to pull over people and subject them to at least temporary detention. Courts aren't necessarily opposed to a little pretext. But the pretext needs to hold up. And if it's going to hold up, the stated reason for the stop needs to be credible, rather than immediately undercut by an officer's own body camera.Here's how and why the stop was initiated, as recounted in the North Dakota Supreme Court's decision [PDF]:

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As you likely know by now, a little over two years ago, Devin Nunes kicked off his SLAPPy litigiousness by suing the satirical internet cow with about 1,200 followers at the time of the lawsuit (it now has over 770,000). What got a bit less attention was that the satirical cow was only one of the four parties sued. There was also another satirical account pretending to be Nunes' mother, and then there was Twitter and a political consultant named Liz Mair (who he actually sued another time as well -- in a case that was also dismissed, though Nunes is appealing).Mair has written about what an attack on free speech this is, and spoke with us last year about what a nuisance it is to be sued. Last summer, the judge dismissed Twitter from the lawsuit and now he's finally dismissed Mair as well (as first reported in the Fresno Bee, whose parent company Nunes has also sued).The ruling is pretty short and sweet, as apparently this is just the paper version of what he ruled from the bench last month. But, more or less, the case fails for the exact reason everyone who knows anything about defamation predicted: the complaint doesn't show anything Mair stated was even remotely defamatory, and there's nothing showing actual malice, which is necessary if a public figure is claiming to be defamed.

Back around 2007 or so there was a bit of a ruckus when broadband ISPs were found to be selling your "clickstream" data (which sites you visit and how long you're there) to any nitwit with a nickel, then basically denying they were even doing that. Concerns about that now seem quaint.In the years since, technologies like deep packet inspection have allowed ISPs to collect and sell details on every aspect of your online life, then, through obfuscation, proxies, and empty promises of "anonymization," insist they're not doing exactly that. Or, as the wireless industry's location data scandals have shown, collect and sell your daily movement habits, initially with only a fleeting concern about user privacy and security.Now, sources in the infosec community tell Motherboard ISPs are also (again, via proxies) selling access to "netflow data." As the name suggests, netflow data details the day to day broader stroke network traffic (pdf), whether that's overall network loads, which servers are talking to one another, network topology, etc. The data is generally beneficial to researchers to understand network and user behavior, and to security experts to help mitigate network attacks. But it's also valuable, and increasingly, it's being offloaded to businesses who are then turning around and selling it:

We've talked plenty of times in the past about instances in which publishers of content, typically movies, get copyright takedowns performed on trailers. These takedowns are, frankly, never a great idea, but they are particularly stupid when companies like Marvel, Disney, and Warner Bros. takedown trailers, otherwise known as advertisements, and then release an identical or nearly identical trailer days later. What in the actual hell is the point of that? Killing off your own word of mouth and free advertising for your film?Now, Sony just went through this experience itself, having attempted to DMCA to death a leaked and, importantly, unfinished trailer for Spider-Man: No Way Home.