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Despite some bold but vague promises, it's still not clear exactly where the Biden administration is going to fall on broadband policy. While the administration is promising a $100 billion investment and "bold action" on broadband, it's also oddly in no rush to appoint a permanent FCC boss, or restore the FCC consumer protection authority gutted during the Trump administration. There's also a lot of telecom industry lobbyists standing in the long stretch between the administration's promises on broadband, and actual implementation.COVID put an extremely bright light on the US' expensive and mediocre broadband, applying more political pressure on lawmakers and regional monopolies than they've seen in a long while. That's compounded by the very correct sense that as everybody has hyperventilated over "big tech," "big telecom" has gotten away with a pretty large heist the last few years when it comes to enjoying mindless deregulation and massive tax breaks in exchange for, well, absolutely nothing.Enter consumer groups, which have been trying to apply more pressure by highlighting the very real cost of rampant regional monopolization, and all the empty promises of the Ajit Pai era. Free Press, for example, recently released a study (based largely on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) showing that during the last four years, broadband prices grew at four times the rate of inflation during the Trump era.AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and Charter (Spectrum) lobbyists haven't much liked that, and have been trying to circulate misleading studies of their own claiming that if you tilt your head and look at U.S. broadband pricing just so, it's an incredible and growing value:

The government of small African island nation Mauritius seems to want to entirely upset the internet applecart for a number of poorly explained reasons. Its Information & Communications Technologies Authority (ICTA) has bundled together some bad ideas and is presenting these as a cure-all for everything social media related -- including "fake news" and the distribution of content considered illegal by the Mauritius government.As the ICTA's proposal notes, it's difficult for the country's government to persuade social media platforms to take down unlawful content since not a single one of them has an office located in the small island nation. To fix this, the government wants to amend existing law to give the government the ability to take down content without having to ask for help from outsiders.The solution proposed by the government is truly astounding:

Well, that was fast. I mean, this all actually happened a few months ago but the unsealing process makes this all seem very sudden.Yesterday, it was revealed that the Trump DOJ sent a subpoena to Twitter demanding personal information related to the NunesAlt account -- one of several Rep. Devin Nunes has unsuccessfully tried to sue for defamation. It seemed very strange that the DOJ would be involved, but Nunes developed a close relationship with Trump over the past four years and it certainly appeared that this was some prime White House backscratching.The subpoena was delivered to Twitter last November. On March 10, Twitter filed its motion to quash, noting Nunes' multiple attempts to sue satirical Twitter accounts, his lack of success in doing so, and his apparent attempts to use federal law enforcement resources to engage in discovery for him.It also noted the DOJ's subpoena made no mention as to why Twitter should turn over this information. It wasn't until Twitter called the AUSA who signed the subpoena that it was provided answers. The answers were incomplete. The DOJ claimed it was part of an investigation into threats allegedly made by the account. But the DOJ refused to show Twitter the alleged threats, much less answer any of its other questions.A week later (but only one day later for us, thanks to a gag order being tossed into the spacetime continuum), the DOJ dropped its request [PDF] for this Twitter users' info. As was the case with the subpoena sent to Twitter, there's not a whole lot of information in the DOJ's withdrawal of its information demand.

TimeMagazine released its inaugural list of the 100 Most InfluentialCompanies, featuring an array of large and small corporations that“are helping to chart anessentialpath forward.”Disturbingly, among its choices of “disruptors” isClearview AI, the controversial facial recognition start-up known forillicitly scraping Americans’ images and demographicinformation from social media and selling the data to lawenforcement. By celebrating a company that engages in illegal masssurveillance, Time is complicit in the degradation of our privacy andour civil liberties.Even cursoryscrutiny by Time would have uncovered Clearview AI’sdisreputable practices. Perhaps Time was satisfied with the vagueexplanation from Clearview AI’s CEO, Hoan Ton-That, that thecompany is “working with law enforcement to balance privacy andsecurity.” But it’s hard to understand why, aftersubstantialreporting by other members of the media, Time chose toaccept Ton-That’s word when there is conclusive evidence thatClearview AI continues to violate civil liberties by supplying lawenforcement agencies, private banks and sports teams with billions ofillegally collected images.Widespread concernabout facial recognition technology’s threatsto civil liberties and its propensity for inaccuracy and racial biasfueled the public outcry that ensued after the New York Times firstbroke news about Clearview AI. Amidcalls from civil rights advocates for lawmakers to ban the use offacial recognition technology, membersof Congressquestioned Clearview AI about its technology and its potential forabuse against First Amendment-protected activity. Since then, agrowing listof U.S. cities havebanned police use of the technology.Despitethe bans and lawsuits, both locallyand internationally,against Clearview AI, the company’s indiscriminate collectionof Americans’ personal data without specific links tocriminality continues unabated. ClearviewAI’s troubling history and ongoing illegal activity should havedissuaded Time from elevating it in the public sphere. Yet the outletonly vaguely summarizes serious concerns about Clearview AI in itsprofile, mentioning briefly that “civil rights advocates fearabuses” of its technology despite reports of both the companyand its clients misleadingthe public. Without evidence, Time also credits Clearview AI for assisting in the arrest of individuals connected to the breach of the U.S. Capitol earlier this year, while sweeping aside Clearview AI’s ties to misinformation.ClearviewAI’s secretive practices that Time lauds as “influential”and “disruptive” represent a dangerous disregard for oursocial norms and expectations of privacy. We have come to expect tocertain tradeoffs with technology providers: we share somedemographic information in exchange for the ease, convenience andconnectivity their products bring to our daily lives. However, anymarginal benefits of Clearview AI do not hold up against itssignificant potential for harm, and Time should have acknowledgedthat. The company’s technology paves the way to a dystopianfuture devoid of privacy and anonymity, both online and offline.Clearview AI is creating an environment where anyone - an ICE agent,a stalker or an individual bad actor within government – cantake a photo of an individual anywhere and automatically pull up thatperson’s Instagram, TikTok, blog, or other personal informationwithout their knowledge or consent.Itis a future civil society advocates have long warned about and willcontinue to fight against. Time should acknowledge these warnings inits report, especially since its readers are among Clearview AI’stargets. As an iconic publication that has been a part of America’smedia and social landscape for almost 100 years, Time has effectivelychronicled the struggle for civil liberties over the decades. It is adisgrace that when it came to covering today’s most influentialcompanies, Time instead chose to endorse a company that isdistinguished only for its unrelenting commitment to destroying thosesame liberties.FreddyMartinez is a policy analyst at Open The Government.

It's no secret that we were not at all impressed with WIRED's recent cover story about Section 230. The resulting conversation sparked a Twitter debate with the story's author, Gilad Edelman, and we thought... why not bring it to the podcast? So on this week's episode, Gilad joins Mike to discuss and debate the story, our response, and Section 230.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.

The war against educating people without paying huge sums of money continues without pause. Over the last few years, we've written a bunch about Sci-Hub and its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, including the fact that academic publishers have convinced the DOJ to investigate Elbakyan, claiming that this effort to (*checks notes*) give more academics free access to academic articles is... tied to Russian intelligence. The whole thing seemed bizarre. Sure, fine, people can make arguments about copyright -- but saying that it's connected to Russian intelligence seems like quite a conspiracy theory.Either way, it appears that the "investigation" continues along. TorrentFreak alerts us that Apple has informed Elbakyan that the FBI now has access to her Apple account. She tweeted about the notification recently:

The best defense is a good offense. The FBI's decade-long streak of allowing informants to commit thousands of crimes a year continues, as Dell Cameron reports for Gizmodo.

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One common theme we've seen for ages in the various content moderation debates are that those who think that governments should be able to determine what content stays up and what content needs to come down don't seem to recognize who various government leaders around the world are these days. Governments have an unfortunate track record of trying to pull down content that embarrasses themselves. And yet, for reasons unknown, eBay has decided that it is going to let government regulators automatically remove listings on the auction site.

You might recall that AT&T spent nearly $200 billion to acquire Time Warner and DirecTV, believing this would turn the dodgy old phone company into an innovative new media juggernaut. But despite $42 billion in tax breaks and oodles of regulatory favors from the Trump administration (like killing net neutrality), AT&T simply couldn't overcome its own nature as a bumbling, government-pampered telecom monopoly. As a result, the company has laid off more than 52,848 employees since 2017.The company has also lost more than 8 million TV subscribers since 2017; users who largely fled due to price hikes imposed to help recoup AT&T's massive merger debt. AT&T also made numerous enemies along the way by reshuffling and shitcanning numerous top executives, gutting numerous brands that were popular with consumers (Mad Magazine, DC's Vertigo imprint), and generally behaving like a cocky bully in a high school cafeteria despite having clearly no idea what it was actually doing.After a micro-investor revolt about growing merger debt, AT&T's now backing out of the media business about as quickly as it came in. After nobody wanted to buy an increasingly useless satellite TV operator, AT&T spun off DirecTV back in March with a value of nearly a quarter of what AT&T paid for it. Now AT&T is also attempting to spin off its media assets in a new combination deal with Discovery that would result in AT&T effectively exiting the media business entirely. Under the deal AT&T gets a little merger debt relief, and the entire operation is spun off into an entirely new entity tasked with competing in the streaming wars with Netflix, Comcast NBC Universal, and Disney.AT&T's media effort will go down in history as one of the most bungled face plants. But coverage from AT&T-owned CNN mentions absolutely no part of AT&T's hubris or repeated failures. Not a single error or layoff is cited as the AT&T-owned company attempts to explain to readers why AT&T is tucking its tail between its legs and running for the exits:

The embrace of "free" in the video game industry continues to pick up speed. We were just discussing the years-long success Epic Games has had with Fortnite, a free-to-play game that has nevertheless racked up $9 billion over the course of two years. The point of that post wasn't that all games have to be free-to-play. The point was that there are methods in the industry that completely negate the idea that has far too long permeated industry mentality which amounts to: you cannot compete with "free" or piracy. Not only does the story of Fortnite prove that isn't true, it proves that it's not true in spectacular fashion.Ubisoft, as a company, has a somewhat tortured history when it comes to its own outlook on this sort of thing. On the one hand, the company has looked for data on just what kind of impact piracy has on its own bottom line. On the other hand, Ubisoft is also a company that has done more to implement restrictive, broken, annoying, and failed DRM than perhaps any other video game company on the planet. It's also a company that certainly has experimented with free-to-play games in the past, but it has always been much more focused on releasing a handful of AAA games per year and making its money that way.That, it seems, is about to change. During a recent earnings call, Ubisoft indicated that it was no longer going to primarily focus on that staccato AAA release strategy and will instead incorporate an increased focus on releasing free-to-play games as well.

More than two years after Chicago police officers terrorized a naked 50-year-old social worker during the raid of a wrong address, the PD's independent oversight -- the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) -- has issued its report. How much of it will result in actual discipline remains to be seen, but there's a whole lot of misconduct to be had. (via FourthAmendment.com)COPA’s investigation led to more than 30 interviews including officers, civilians, a member of the judiciary, an assistant state’s attorney and the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, as well as the review of hundreds of pages of documentary evidence and hours of video material relevant to this incident. The investigation produced nearly one hundred allegations of misconduct stemming from the actions of more than a dozen officers.Anjanette Young's house was raided in February 2019. CPD officers bashed down her door just as she was headed to bed. Here's COPA's clinical description of that encounter, which still makes it pretty clear how traumatizing it was.

Remember ChatRoulette? Eleven years ago, the Web site that pairs random people together for webcam interactions was as hot as today's Clubhouse. A 2010 piece in New York Magazine has a perfect distillation of the ChatRoulette experience at the time:

For the past couple of years, Devin Nunes has been suing Twitter users over obviously satirical accounts that use his name, the most famous of which is "Devin Nunes' Cow." He has yet to succeed, but he has managed to clutter the courts with a bunch of vexatious litigation that, so far, has only proved Devin's skin is mighty thin and that he should definitely make better choices when it comes to choosing legal representation.I suppose if Nunes wants to blow money on lawsuits that are doomed to fail, that's his business. Unfortunately, the victims of his bullshit lawsuits are having their time and money sucked away by a man so apparently powerless he cannot handle criticism without getting the courts involved.But there's a new wrinkle and some new dollars being spent. This latest development -- a few months delayed thanks to a gag order -- involves the expenditure of money contributed by a whole lot of non-parties: US taxpayers. One of the last things the Trump DOJ did before it became Biden's DOJ was send Twitter a grand jury subpoena demanding identifying information from one of the Twitter accounts being sued by Nunes. (h/t Kevin Poulsen)Given Nunes was suing individuals in civil suits, it's hard to see how or why the Department of Justice got involved, much less why this is a grand jury issue. Sure, Nunes may have made wild allegations about RICO violations and illegal impersonation, but no one has made any credible allegations about actual criminal activity, much less federal crimes.And yet, here we are, looking at the DOJ's (granted) request [PDF] to keep Twitter from talking about this subpoena (dated November 23, 2020) and Twitter's motion [PDF] to quash the ridiculous, First Amendment threatening demand for account information.The only thing that can be confirmed about the DOJ's (apparently ongoing) investigation is that the government believes the NunesAlt account said something threatening to someone (presumably Nunes) at some point in time. Not that the DOJ bothered to explain any of this in its subpoena.

It's better than nothing -- especially given that Biden has been so vocal against Section 230 -- but last week, Biden rescinded Trump's ridiculous executive order about Section 230. As you may recall, almost exactly a year ago, Trump issued an absolutely insane executive order demanding the FCC reinterpret Section 230. As we noted at the time, this made no sense, as 230 was written with the explicit admonition that the point was to keep the FCC out of the business of regulating the internet.At any point in the process, those involved in the federal government could have stood up to Trump and said that everything about the executive order was a joke and ridiculous. But, nope, that's not how things work apparently. NTIA, which was in the process of being handed over to a lawyer whose mission in life seems to be to lie about and destroy Section 230 (partly to favor his white nationalist clients), followed through on Trump's demands, and petitioned the FCC to reinterpret Section 230.Then, Ajit Pai had every opportunity to do the right thing and say that this was way outside of the FCC's jurisdiction -- as he had years earlier before Trump even knew what Section 230 was. Instead, he let the charade play on, wasted everyone's time and energy in needing to explain to Pai why the FCC had no authority... and then ignored all of the legal precedent and every ounce of whatever principles he supposedly had, and agreed to do a rulemaking on 230. Of course, what might have suddenly drained Pai of any basic decency was the fact that when his colleague Michael O'Rielly actually spoke the truth, Trump fired him. O'Rielly came out of this nonsense with principles, while Pai came out of it looking like a Trump lapdog with no principles whatsoever.Pai only finally ditched the idea right after January 6th when everyone was focused on the insurrection on Capitol Hill, and he realized that he could dispose of the news while Trump's attention was elsewhere.Still, the whole thing was a huge waste of time, and has completely polluted the dialogue about Section 230 with utter nonsense. It's good that Biden rescinded the order, though it was way too late. Meanwhile, the author of the original executive order, Nathan Simington... got O'Rielly's vacant seat on the FCC, guaranteeing that the two Republicans on the Committee are now anti-1st Amendment, anti-Section 230.Trump didn't end up getting the FCC to issue a reinterpretation of Section 230, but he still did a ton of damage to the dialogue around Section 230, with tremendous help from Adam Candeub, Nathan Simington, and Ajit Pai.

Facebook recently announced its decision to keep Donald Trump banned -- a decision supported by its new oversight board. That decision -- just like the original ban -- made certain people very angry and very sure a platform's decision to ban someone infringes on the First Amendment.One of those deciding they should be the ones violating the First Amendment is New Jersey state senator Michael Testa. Announcing his ignorance on multiple platforms, Testa and a couple of like-minded state legislators declared they were finally going to do something about all of this not-actually-censorship.

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We've talked a bit about the UK's long-running process to basically blame internet companies for all of society's ills. What was originally called the "online harms" bill has now officially morphed into the Online Safety Bill, which was recently released in draft form.Despite the UK government insisting that it spent the past few years talking to various stakeholders, the final bill is a disaster for the open internet. Heather Burns, from the UK's Open Rights Group (loosely the UK's version of the EFF), has a short thread about the bill, explaining why it's so problematic. Here's the key bit:

"Smart" televisions have long been the poster child for the abysmal privacy and security standards inherent in the "internet of things" space. Such televisions have been routinely found to have the security and privacy standards of damp cardboard, making the data they collect delicious targets for hackers and intelligence agencies alike.At the same time these companies have failed repeatedly to secure (or sometimes even encrypt) consumer data, their data collection revenue is positively exploding. Vizio, for example, recently noted that it made $38.4 million in one quarter just from tracking and monetizing consumer viewing and usage data. It made $48.2 million on hardware (both TVs, soundbars, and other products) in that same period, and that gap (if not already closed) is quickly closing:

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about Dartmouth's insane paranoia over cheating, and the resultant surveillance scandal. In first place, it's That One Guy with a comment about the fact that the college appeared to be hiding its due process policies:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, the copyright fight over the Star Trek fan film Axanar was allowed to move forward — though without the too-soon attempt to raise the silly question of copyright on the Klingon language. The UK government was pushing for ten-year jail sentences for copyright infringement, HBO was abusing the DMCA process to stop Game of Thrones spoilers, and we took a look at Minnesota's insanely broad publicity rights law. It was also the week of the opening statements in the Oracle v. Google case that would carry on for years.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, two important DMCA cases (IsoHunt and Veoh) were being heard by the 9th Circuit, while Limewire settled its own case, the US Copyright Group was allowed to move forward with a massive shakedown operation, and BMI was arguing that a single person listening to their own music via the cloud was a public performance under copyright law. Copyright maximalists were also opposing new TLDs for some reason and trying to get domain censorship capabilities included in the .net TLD. This was also the week that we first saw the PROTECT IP act and its extremely bad text that could gut parts of the DMCA and make linking a felony.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, Apple (the tech company) won its trademark battle against Apple (the record label) with help from the now-famous "moron in a hurry" defense. Movie studios were tepidly trying to embrace BitTorrent while failing to understand it, due in large part to the industry's obsession with DRM (though at the same time, the recording industry magnanimously decided it would allow people to rip their own CDs, and Sony was admitting that its DRM-laden proprietary music format was a strategic error). We took a bigger look at why the argument for the necessity of copy protection doesn't make sense, in stark contrast to the analyst who was arguing that a lack of mobile DRM will lead to billions in losses.

Famed YouTuber and Twitch streamer Angry Joe, or Jose Antonio Vargas, has made it onto Techdirt's pages in the past. True to his name, we've discussed his responses on a couple of intellectual property issues he's suffered through. When Nintendo flagged a video Angry Joe did about Mario Party 10, preventing him from further monetizing the video, he simply and angrily swore off of doing any Nintendo videos in the future, rightly noting that with the decision all the free advertising he'd given Nintendo just disappeared. When CBS blocked a review video he did because the review used 13 seconds of Star Trek: Picard, he took to Twitter to rip them to shreds as well. The point is that when Angry Joe encounters the frustrations many others deal with thanks to overly restrictive intellectual property practices, he doesn't stay silent. He gets... well... angry.With that in mind, it's probably not all that surprising that the way Twitch is handling its DMCA process has finally caught up to Angry Joe resulting in yet another angry rant. Like many other Twitch creators, Angry Joe has been hit with DMCA notices. As he goes on to note, the process Twitch has designed for how this all works, well, sucks out loud.

Summary: When people think of content moderation and political debates, they may not think about knitting. However, the knitting community at the online site Ravelry has become a fascinating place to explore content moderation questions. This actually goes back many years, as Ravelry’s content moderation practices (handled by dozens of volunteer moderators) were studied for a PhD dissertation by Sheila Saden Pisa that was published in 2013, entitled: “In search of a practice: large scale moderation in a massive online community.”Knitting and Ravelry have also been quite political at times. All the way back in 2009, a blog post was written by someone who was kicked off of Ravelry, and she believed it was because of her conservative political views. After the election of Donald Trump in 2016, Ravelry was where the initial plans for the now famous “pussyhats” (for the Women’s March protesting Trump’s Presidency) were first released and shared. Ioana Literat and Sandra Markus studied Ravelry’s role in online participation, civic engagement and “craftivism.”Still, it caught many people by surprise, in late 2019, when Ravelry declared a new policy, saying that it would no longer allow any posts supporting Donald Trump. From the announcement:

Anything the Chinese government can weaponize against its Uighur Muslim population, it will. And has. Further details about an iPhone exploit discovered by Chinese hackers show the Chinese government got into the bug bounty program solely to find vulnerabilities to wield against the government's least-liked residents.Patrick Howell O'Neill's article for MIT Technology Review points out Chinese hackers used to participate in popular hacking competitions like Pwn2Own, providing invaluable assistance to tech companies and tech users by finding vulnerabilities that could be patched before they were exploited by malicious hackers.In 2017, Chinese participation in international competitions came to a halt. The founder and CEO of tech giant Qihoo 360 publicly criticized Chinese hackers for helping foreign tech companies find and patch security flaws. The CEO suggested this talent should stay at home and help the government find vulnerabilities to exploit.That's exactly what has happened. The Chinese government banned participation in foreign hacking competitions and started its own. The first homegrown event was won by a researcher working for Qihoo 360, who found an exploit that allowed malicious actors to take control of even the latest iPhones simply by steering the iPhone user to a webpage containing malware.This was patched two months later by Apple, quietly and with little attention drawn to it. But incidents occurring in the two months between the discovery and the patch didn't go unnoticed. Google's security researchers observed unusual activity and wrote about it.

Michigan State Rep. Matt Maddock has quite a reputation for lying:

Reform efforts following the Snowden leaks led to some minor improvements at the FISA Court. The USA Freedom Act gave the court permission to allow someone to present the side of the surveilled from time to time and introduced some reporting requirements that allowed Americans to see just a bit more about how their surveillance tax dollars were spent.But if anything is going to change the way America's surveillance agencies perform their duties, it's going to be up to the FISA Court, which can reject requests and shut down surveillance programs until they're fixed. The Section 215 collection of phone records may have reached an early end-of-life after the untargeted bulk collection of phone records was banned, but other surveillance authorities continue unaltered. The one that leads to most surveillance abuses is one the court can't seem to bring under control: Section 702.This is supposed to be surveillance of foreign national security targets, but agencies with access to 702 collection far too routinely use this as a backdoor to American's communications. And nothing about that has changed, eight years down the road from the Snowden leaks. A newly declassified decision [PDF] from the FISA Court shows the court is still willing to overlook egregious abuses of this authority to spy on Americans.Here's the EFF's summary of last November's decision -- one made public late last month by the FISA Court.

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A week ago, we wrote about Trump's new blog, which was designed to look vaguely tweet-like, noting that this proved that he never needed Twitter or Facebook to speak freely. He's always been able to speak on his own website. NBC News has an interesting story now, suggesting that the blog just isn't getting that much attention.

We've noted for a very long time that despite a lot of lip service about broadband, the U.S. government still doesn't have a very good idea of where broadband is or isn't available. There's a long line of reasons for this, including political pressure by regional monopolies that very much don't want a lack of competition or these coverage gaps to be apparent (somebody might get the crazy idea to try and fix the problem!). The FCC has also long been criticized for methodology that declares a census block (which can be hundreds of square miles in rural areas) "served" with broadband if just one home can theoretically get service from an ISP.After decades of this, the government last year finally took action and passed the DATA Act, which tasks the FCC with fixing the problem. The Biden FCC last February also belatedly announced a "task force" to examine the problem in more detail. But we're still years away from any of these changes being implemented (assuming they're even implemented competently), something of cold comfort to those struggling to afford internet access right now during a pandemic and economic crisis.Meanwhile, the problem persists. The Verge this week utilized data from Microsoft then compared it to FCC and industry data to create a more accurate map of U.S. broadband access. In numerous regions, the disparity is almost comical:

It's been three or so years since Valve announced a new "hands off" approach towards approvals for games on its dominant Steam storefront. This new "policy" was unfortunately rolled out in an extremely Steam-like manner: vague and largely indecipherable, full of holes, and all with a caveat baked in that Steam could still do basically whatever it wants. Later, the company clarified that the chief goal with all of this was to allow for more adult-oriented games while still giving Steam the ability to disallow "troll games", as though that actually clarified anything. Predictably, this new policy set off confusion all over the place, and even years into the change its application appears to be aggressively inconsistent.Three years in and it's still a problem. The developers of Holodexxx, a VR sex game featuring VR-rendered real-life porn stars, has expended thousands of dollars to try to comply with Steam's policies only to find the game banned from the platform. Interestingly, the developers of the game appear to have intended this to be less of a gross or trollish look at a sex video game and more as something that is both adult-oriented but a "sex positive" experience.

Destroying houses appears to be a cop hobby. Somehow searching for suspects involves punching larger-than-man-size holes in walls, shattering every pane of glass that separates cops from perps, and forcibly removing every door that would otherwise open as designed if officers attempted to use the handles.Maybe some of this is justified if an armed and dangerous suspect is barricaded inside. But law enforcement agencies have made citizens suspected of nothing homeless while attempting to extricate shoplifting suspects, homeless people, and a man armed with nothing more than an ice cream bar. One woman's house was rendered unlivable after it was the centerpiece in a 10-hour standoff between local cops and the only resident located in the house: the family dog. And a house that contained no one was destroyed after its empty interior thwarted cops' efforts to apprehend a nonexistent suspect for more than 19 hours.Trying to get anyone other than innocent homeowners to pay for this damage is almost impossible. Almost every court has considered this the cost of doing government business -- something taxpayers are always asked to cover. If officers have a law enforcement reason to raze houses, the cost must be borne by those unhoused.Another case involving the destruction of a house to capture a suspect who wasn't even on the premises has made its way into the court system. And it has (mostly) dead-ended there, thanks to a recent decision by the South Dakota Supreme Court.In this case, the Hamlin County Sheriff's Department was searching for Gary Hamen, who had an outstanding arrest warrant for felony burglary and violation of a protective order. Gary -- who had threatened to shoot himself and anyone else he came in contact with -- called his father, Gareth, asking for a vehicle to drive to "Canada or Mexico." At that point, he was in a nearby trailer home owned by Gareth, located about 600 feet away from Gareth's trailer.Officers listened in on this phone call and deputies saw Gary exit the trailer and then walk back inside. The Sheriff's Department requested the assistance of the Watertown PD and secured a drone to fly over the trailer in an attempt to spot Gary or see any exit routes he might take.A SWAT team assembled and set up a perimeter around the trailer. But this effort appears to have been mostly pointless. From the decision [PDF]:

The NY Times had an incredible story a few days ago about an apparent "cheating scandal" at Dartmouth's medical school. The problem was, it doesn't seem like there was any actual cheating. Instead, it looks like a ton of insane paranoia and an overreliance on surveillance technology by an administration which shouldn't be in the business of educating kindergarteners, let alone med students. We've had a few posts about the rise of surveillance technology in schools, and its many downsides -- and those really ramped up during the pandemic, as students were often taking exams from home.So much of the paranoia is based on the silly belief that if you don't have everything crammed totally into your head, you haven't actually learned anything. Out here in the real world, it seems like a more sensible realization is that if you teach people how they can look up the necessary details when they need them, you've probably done a good job. Yes, there may be some exceptions and some scenarios where full knowledge is important. But for most things, the ability to know how to find the right answer is a lot more important than making sure trivial details are all remembered and can be regurgitated on an exam. Indeed, studies have shown repeatedly, that trying to cram the details into your head for an exam often means they don't stick in long term memory.In short, this type of insane test taking tests people on exactly the wrong thing, and instead encourages the kind of behavior that leads to worse outcomes in the long run.But the situation at Dartmouth is -- believe it or not -- even dumber. 17 Dartmouth medical students have been accused of cheating -- but those accusations were based on a tool that is not designed to spot cheating. It was based on Canvas, a popular platform for professors to post assignments and for students to submit homework through. And here's what happened, according to the NY Times:

For years, "right to repair" advocates have been warning about the problems with efforts to monopolize repair. Whether it's Apple's efforts to bully small repair shops, Sony and Microsoft's efforts to monopolize repair of game consoles, or John Deere's implementation of DRM and repair restrictions so onerous customers have to drive a thousand miles and pay a small fortune to repair their own tractors, the impact is rather obvious. And the impact has only been more pronounced during Covid, as hospitals complain about the difficulty in obtaining the documentation and parts necessary to repair ventilators in a timely fashion.There's of course numerous other problems with making it harder to promptly and inexpensively repair products consumers and companies own, including the environmental impact and waste. Pushed by Congress two years ago to issue a report on the growing problem with repair monopolies, the FTC released a new bipartisan study this week that effectively confirms what "right to repair" reformers have been arguing for years, namely that such onerous and self-serving restrictions harm consumers, innovation, and the planet itself.Like so many other monopolization issues (broadband comes quickly to mind), the FTC study found that these restrictions often unfairly impact marginalized communities where money is already tight:

We've already highlighted our concerns with Wired's big cover story on Section 230 (twice!). The very same day that came out, Wired UK published a piece by Prof. Danielle Citron entitled Fix Section 230 and hold tech companies to account. Citron's proposal was already highlighted in the cover story and now gets this separate venue. For what it's worth, Citron also spent a lot of energy insisting that the Wired cover story was the "definitive" article on 230 despite all of its flaws, and cheered on and liked tweets by people who mocked my arguments for why the article is just not very accurate.Over the last few years, we've also responded multiple times to Citron's ideas, which are premised on a completely false narrative: that without a legal cudgel, websites have no incentive to keep their sites clean. That's clearly not true at all. If a company doesn't moderate, then it turns into a garbage dump of spam, harassment, and abuse. They lose users. They lose advertisers. It's just not good business. There are plenty of incentives to deal with bad stuff online -- though Citron never seems to recognize any of that, and insists, instead, that every site is a free-for-all because 230 does not provide them legal liability. This latest piece in Wired is more of the same.

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A recent case handled by an Illinois Appeals Court has some interesting things to say about cellphones and searches. It also contains some rather interesting assertions by law enforcement, which apparently didn't feel all that compelled to search a seized phone for more than a year after it was seized. (via FourthAmendment.com)It's a drug and gun case, with the defendant facing two felony charges. Lamar Meakens was arrested following a traffic stop where contraband was discovered and his phone was seized. Here's how the court sums up that initial interaction in its opinion [PDF]:

While the Biden administration's $2 trillion American Jobs Plan set aside $100 billion for broadband infrastructure, the details of how that money is to actually be spent remains murky. Enter cable industry lobbyists, who are hard at work attempting to dictate who gets access to those funds, while also trying to make sure the funds aren't used for anything that could threaten their regional monopolies. They're particularly worried about the Biden administration's promise that a big focus of the effort will be on giving aid to locally owned and operated broadband networks, as detailed in this good piece by Issie Lapowsky at Protocol:

By way of a throat clearing, there are a couple of things you need to know about Hergé, the nom de guerre for the artist behind the well-known Tintin comics of yore. First, Hergé's estate has found its way onto Techdirt's pages before and has a reputation for being wildly restrictive and litigious over any use or reference to Tintin. Alongside that, you need to know that Hergé absolutely did every last thing he could to keep women entirely out of his comic strips. His reasoning for this can be best summarized as a combination of having a too much "respect" for women to include them in his humor comic... and also that women, according to his estate, were "rarely comic elements." Women, in other words, are bad for humor.So it makes perfect sense that a modern artist decided to create new material featuring Tintin in romantic or risqué settings with women and both parody and commentary on the original works. And, likewise, it makes perfect sense that the Hergé estate sued over it.

Summary: On June 5, 2019, YouTube announced it would be stepping up its efforts to remove hateful content, focusing on the apparent increase of white nationalist and pro-Nazi content being created by users. This change in algorithm would limit views of borderline content and push more viewers towards content less likely to contain hateful views. The company's blog post specifically stated it would be removing videos that "glorified Nazi ideology."Unfortunately, when the updated algorithm went to work removing this content, it also took down content that educated and informed people about Nazis and their ideology, but quite obviously did not "glorify" them.Ford Fischer -- a journalist who tracks extremist and hate groups -- noticed his entire channel had been demonetized within "minutes" of the rollout. YouTube responded to Fischer's attempt to have his channel reinstated by stating multiple videos -- including interviews with white nationalists -- violated the updated policy on hateful content.A similar thing happened to history teacher Scott Allsop, who was banned by YouTube for his uploads of archival footage of propaganda speeches by Nazi leaders, including Adolph Hitler. Allsop uploaded these for their historical value as well as for use in his history classes. The notice placed on his terminated account stated it had been taken down for "multiple or severe violations" of YouTube's hate speech policies.Another YouTube user noticed his upload of 1938 documentary about the rise of the Nazi party in Germany had been taken down for similar reasons, even though the documentary was decidedly anti-Nazi in its presentation and had obvious historical value.Decisions to be made by YouTube:

One of the NYPD's unions -- the Sergeants Benevolent Association (SBA) -- is feeling ways about stuff again. Last month, the New York City Council passed a number of police reforms which included taking away qualified immunity as a defense in civil lawsuits filed in local courts. The bill has yet to receive the governor's signature, but the SBA is already making its unhappiness known.The SBA issued a statement (via its lawyers) about the supposed downsides of giving the public a fighting chance in civil rights lawsuits. And in doing so, it has inadvertently generated a few arguments against qualified immunity, as Jay Schweikart points out at Unlawful Shield.What was written as a cautionary advisory about the changing legal atmosphere is instead an unforced error that shows how often cops are protected by this immunity even when it's clear they've violated rights. First, the SBA restates the doctrine's intent:

Few things illustrate the broken state of our global intellectual property system better than the fact that, well over a year into this devastating pandemic and in the face of a strong IP waiver push by some of the hardest hit countries, patents are still holding back the production of life-saving vaccines. And of all the countries opposing a waiver at the WTO (or withholding support for it, which is functionally the same thing), Canada might be the most frustrating.Canada is the biggest hoarder of vaccine pre-orders, having secured enough to vaccinate the population five times over. Despite this, it has constantly run into supply problems and lagged behind comparable countries when it comes to administering the vaccines on a per capita basis. In response to criticism of its hoarding, the government continues to focus on its plans to donate all surplus doses to the COVAX vaccine sharing program — but these promises were somewhat more convincing before Canada became the only G7 country to withdraw doses from COVAX. Despite all this, and despite pressure from experts who explain how vaccine hoarding will prolong the pandemic for everyone, the country has continually refused to voice its support for a TRIPS patent waiver at the WTO.Last week, the US finally said that it would support a waiver. This position has issues — there's no commitment to a specific proposal, just to negotiating a new one, so the devil is very much in the details — but the top-line promise of support for the general concept is meaningful and welcome. Some suspected that Canada might finally follow suit with, at least, a similarly open-to-interpretation promise — but apparently the government can't even go that far, and has stated that it's still "weighing support":

The city government of Tamarac, Florida has found a novel way to spend taxpayers' money: paying someone to find out who handed public records to someone entitled to receive public records. (h/t Peter Bonilla)

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It truly is stunning how every single bill that attempts to reform Section 230 appears to be written without any intention of ever understanding how the internet or content moderation works in actual practice. We've highlighted tons of Republican-led bills that tend to try to force websites to host more content, not realizing how (1) unconstitutional that is and (2) how it will make the internet into a giant garbage fire. On the Democratic side, the focus seems to be much more on forcing companies to takedown constitutionally protected speech, which similarly (1) raises serious constitutional issues and (2) will lead to massive over-censorship of perfectly legal speech just to avoid liability.The latest bill of the latter kind comes from Reps. Jan Schakowsky and Rep. Kathy Castor. Schakowsky has been saying for a while now that she was going to introduce this kind of bill to browbeat internet companies into being a lot more proactive in taking down speech she dislikes. The bill, called the Online Consumer Protection Act has now been introduced and it seems clear that this bill was written without ever conferring with anyone with any experience in running a website. It's the kind of thing one writes when you've just come across the problem, but don't think it's worth talking to anyone to understand how things really work. It's also very much a kind of "something must be done, this is something, we should do this" kind of bill that shows up way too often these days.The premise of the bill is that websites "don't have accountability to consumers" for the content posted by users, and that they need to be forced to have more accountability. Of course, this leaves out the kind of basic fact that if "consumers" are treated badly, they will go elsewhere, so of course every website has some accountability to consumers: it's that if they're bad at it, they will lose users, advertisers, sellers, buyers, whatever. But, that's apparently not good enough for the "we must do something" crowd.At best the Online Consumer Protection Act will create a massive amount of silly busywork and paperwork for basically any website. At worst, it will create a liability deathtrap for many sites. In some ways it's modeled after the idiotic policy we have regarding privacy policies. Almost exactly a decade ago we explained why the entire idea of a privacy policy is dumb. Various laws require websites to post privacy policies, which no one reads, in part because it would be impossible to read them all. The only way a site gets in trouble is by not following its privacy policy. Thus, the incentives are to craft a very broad privacy policy that gives sites leeway -- meaning they have less incentive to actually create more stringent privacy protections.The OCPA basically takes the same approach, but... for "content moderation" policies. It requires basically every website to post one:

As one of his last acts as Trump's FCC boss, former agency Chairman Ajit Pai released a rosy report claiming that America was making great strides in bridging the "digital divide." According to the report (pdf), 14.5 million Americans now lack access to broadband, down from 21.3 million one year earlier. This progress, Pai proclaimed, was directly thanks to his decision to effectively lobotomize the FCC's consumer protection authority at telecom lobbyist behest:

The strange flip-flop by Rockstar Games on being open and cool with its fans continues. By way of context and a bit of throat clearing, recall that Rockstar is both the company that whipped out the ban-hammer on Grand Theft Auto 5 players over the use of mods, and the company that paid out money to a modder that fixed that same games long loading times. In addition, Rockstar is both the company that happily used intellectual property to try to silence a documentary while also being the company that enthusiastically embraced gamers making short films out of GTA footage.In other words, when it comes to being open with the gaming and modding community surrounding its games, Rockstar has something of a dual personality. The restrictive side of the company is the one that showed up early in 2021 when a bunch of GTA fans managed to reverse engineer the source code for GTA3 and GTA: Vice City.

A few years ago, the Georgia Court of Appeals kept a lawsuit alive against Snapchat, brought by the parents of a victim of a car crash -- one supposedly encouraged by Snapchat's "speed filter." No Section 230 immunity was extended to Snapchat, which only made the filter available, but did not actually participate (other than as another passenger) in the reckless driving that resulted in the accident that left another driver permanently brain damaged.Removing this case to federal court most likely would not have helped. Another lawsuit against Snapchat over its "speed filter" has been allowed to move forward by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. (via Ars Technica)This case involves another tragic car accident and the use of Snap's app and "speed filter." From the decision [PDF]:

Last week, the Oversight Board made its highest profile decision yet: upholding Facebook's suspension of Donald Trump, though with the caveat that it needs clearer policy reasons to make the suspension indefinite. Unsurprisingly, a whole lot of people have a whole lot of opinions on this, and we wanted to learn more about the decision from the source. Julie Owono is an Oversight Board member and the Executive Director of Internet Sans Frontières, and she joins us on this week's episode to discuss how this decision was reached and what it means for Facebook.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.

It seems by now that public officials should know that they cannot block critics on social media if they are using their social media accounts for official business. This was thoroughly established the Knight v. Trump case, where the court made it clear that if (1) a public official is (2) using social media (3) for official purposes (4) to create a space of open dialogue (and all four of those factors are met) then they cannot block people from following them based on the views those users express, as it violates the 1st Amendment. Yet over and over again elected officials seem to ignore this.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sued over this, as was Marjorie Taylor Greene (both of them eventually settled and agreed to unblock people).Last month, controversy prone Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was sued over the same thing (again by the Knight First Amendment Institute). As the lawsuit notes, many of the people Paxton blocked found themselves in that situation after they replied to Paxton by reminding him of the still ongoing criminal charges he's been facing his entire time in office. Basically, if you remind Paxton of the fact that he's facing criminal charges, you had a decent shot at getting blocked.However, last week, Paxton unblocked the 9 users who sued him, perhaps realizing he was clearly going to lose this case. Of course, it looks like he only removed the blocks on those 9 individuals and kept up the blocks on others. Law professor Steve Vladeck (who is at the University of Texas Law School) noted that he's still blocked, even if the plaintiffs in the lawsuit are not:

Well, someone finally said the quiet part loud: some government officials actually believe the only people who need, want, or use encryption are criminals. Here's Asha Barbaschow with the "encryption is for criminals" news at ZDNet.