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There was a time when a key part of the Republicans' political platform was for "tort reform" and reducing the ability of civil lawsuits to be brought against companies. The argument they made (and to which they still give lip service) is that too much liability leads to a barrage of frivolous nuisance litigation, which only benefits greedy trial lawyers. Apparently, that concept has been tossed out the window -- as with so many Republican principles -- if you mention "big tech." The latest example of this is a new Section 230 reform bill introduced by Representative Jim Banks called the "Stop Shielding Culpable Platforms Act" which would massively increase liability on any company that hosts user content online.Banks trumpeted his own confusion on this issue earlier in the week by tweeting -- falsely -- that "Section 230 knowingly lets Big Tech distribute child pornography without fear of legal repercussions." This is wrong. Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is very, very, very much illegal and any website hosting it faces serious liability issues. Section 230 does not cover federal criminal law, and CSAM violates federal criminal law. Furthermore, federal law requires every website to report the discovery of CSAM to the CyberTipline run by NCMEC.The law is pretty clear here and you'd think that a sitting member of Congress could, perhaps, have had someone look it up?

As a bunch of US lawmakers keep threatening new laws that would force websites to remove more content, we should note just how much such moves reflect what is happening in China. The NY Times reports that Microsoft is in hot water in China, because LinkedIn apparently has been too slow to block content that displeases the Chinese government. As the article notes, LinkedIn is the one major US social network that is allowed in China -- but only if it follows China's Great Firewall censorship rules.If you're not familiar with how that works, it's not that the government tells you what to take down -- it's just that the government makes it clear that if you let something through that you shouldn't, you're going to hear about it, and risk punishment. And it appears that's exactly what's happened to Microsoft:

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Giant US ISPs have long (ab)used the lack of competition in the broadband market by imposing completely arbitrary and unnecessary monthly usage caps and overage fees. They've also taken to exempting their own content from these arbitrary limits while still penalizing competitors -- allowing them to tilt the playing field in their favor (or the favor of other deep pocketed giants). For example, an AT&T broadband customer who uses AT&T's own streaming services (like HBO Max) faces no bandwidth penalties or fees. If that same customer uses Netflix or a competitor they're socked with surcharges.When the FCC passed net neutrality rules in 2015, it failed to recognize how this "zero rating" could be abused anticompetitively. They were just starting to figure this out and shift policy positions when Donald Trump was elected and net neutrality rules were killed. However, in the wake of net neutrality's federal repeal, states like California (much like the EU) passed their own net neutrality rules that genuinely prohibit zero rating.More specifically, California's rules prohibited a company like AT&T from taking money from, say, ESPN, to exempt just ESPN content from caps. Why? One, again, caps are bogus artificial constructs that serve no technical function. And two, if a deep-pocketed giant like ESPN can afford to bypass your pointless cellular restrictions, and smaller online sports website can't, ESPN just gained an unfair competitive advantage (once AT&T gets its slice of the pie, of course).AT&T, as you might expect, doesn't like this loss of revenue and power (the only two things this has ever been about for them). As such, the company took to their policy blog this week to whine incessantly about how unfair this all is. The company says that as a result of the rules it's backing off its "sponsored data" zero rating plan not just in California, but in other states. It will also no longer let companies buy cap-exempt, "zero rated" status. That's a good thing for internet competition, startups, innovation, and consumers. But this being AT&T, of course the company claims the exact opposite:

Asset forfeiture means taking everything that isn't nailed down. Why bother being selective? In most cases, it's pure profit for the law enforcement agency that performs the seizure. And since forfeitures are so rarely successfully challenged, it's pretty much a foolproof way to make a little extra cash. The citizens who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (in their own houses with their own possessions) are acceptable collateral damage.We're in the middle of a war against drugs. Collateral damage should be expected. That's the viewpoint of drug warriors, even when the "acceptable" collateral damage means nothing more than law enforcement officers taking stuff just because they can.Here's a rare successful motion for a return of property -- one filed against the Bay County (FL) Sheriff's Office by a person who had his stuff taken even though it was his father being charged with criminal acts. The son -- whose father had all charges dropped after passing away -- took on the Office and secured a ruling that should finally give him back what was taken from him. (via FourthAmendment.com)Unfortunately, there are still some hurdles standing between the plaintiff and the 75-inch TV and PlayStation 4 taken by the Sheriff's Office during a raid of his father's house. One set of hurdles has already been cleared. But it involved getting the Office to not only admit it was lying about taking the property, but also admitting it had likely liquidated the seized items before it had legal permission to do so.Here's how the Florida Court of Appeals details the events [PDF] leading up to its findings in favor of the plaintiff.

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A few weeks ago, Stanford's Daphne Keller -- one of the foremost experts on internet regulation -- highlighted how so much of the effort at internet reform seems to treat "the internet" as if it was entirely made up of Facebook, Google and Twitter. These may be the most visible sites to some, but they still make up only a small part of the overall internet (granted: sometimes it seems that Facebook and, to an only slightly lesser extent, Google, would like to change that, and become "the internet" for most people). Keller pointed out that the more that people -- especially journalists -- talk about the internet as if it were just those three companies, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, in part because it drives regulation that is uniquely focused on the apparently "problems" associated with those sites (often mis- and disinformation).I was reminded of this now, with the reintroduction of the PACT Act. As I noted in my writeup about the bill, one of the biggest problems is that it treats the internet as if every website is basically Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The demands that it puts on websites aren't a huge deal for those three companies -- as they mostly meet the criteria already. The only real change it would make for those sites is that they'd maybe have to beef up their customer support staff to have telephone support.But for tons of other companies -- including Techdirt -- the bill is an utter disaster. It treats us the same as it treats Facebook, and acts like we need to put in place a massive, expensive customer service/content moderation operation that wouldn't make any sense, and would only serve to enable our resident trolls to demand that we have to provide a detailed explanation why the community voted down their comments.In that same thread, Keller suggested something that I think would be quite useful. Saying that there should be a sort of "test suite" of websites that anyone proposing internet regulation should have to explore how the regulations would effect those sites.

We've noted repeatedly how the United States has an unhealthy fascination with the growth for growth's sake mindset. That's best exemplified by our near-endless adoration of megamergers in sectors like telecom, which result in extremely harmful monopolization and consolidation problems that are extremely obvious, but we choose to ignore anyway. Time after time after time in telecom (and banking, and airlines, and...), companies promise a universe of investment, job creation, innovation, and synergies in exchange for merger regulatory approval. And time after time after time, reality shows that these pre-merger promises are meaningless and harmful... unless you're one of the few investors or executives who benefit.Despite the steady drumbeat of market, employment, and consumer harms from such mergers, we insist on learning nothing from the experience here in the States; the job and competition killing Sprint T-Mobile deal being just the latest in a long line of examples of companies promising all manner of job growth, competition, and innovation, right before the exact opposite happens. With no meaningful penalty whatsoever, unless you're a consumer or employee.While you might think things are different up in Canada, often they're even worse. This week, two of the nation's biggest telecom giants, Shaw and Rogers, announced they'd struck a new $26 billion deal that would dramatically reduce overall competition in the already not-particularly-competitive Canadian telecom market. The announcement is rife will all manner of dodgy claims of amazing "synergies" and job creation:

Late last year, we discussed a disappointing move by GOG to delist well-reviewed horror PC game Devotion from its platform. Making it all very odd were the facts that GOG had just announced that morning that the game would be available that day, as well as Devotion's previous delisting from Steam. The reason for the multiple delistings was never perfectly spelled out in either case, but the game includes a reference to China's President Xi and the never ending joke that he resembles Winnie the Pooh. GOG, instead of being open about that being the obvious reason to delist the game, instead said it made the move after receiving "messages from gamers." Groan.Well, fortunately, this is 2021, which means instead of the game dying on the doorstep of well-entrenched gatekeepers, developer Red Candle Games can instead just release the game itself on its own website.

Summary: In the fall of 2019, Disney launched its Disney+ streaming service to instant acclaim. While it offered up access to the extensive Disney catalog (including all of its Marvel, Star Wars, and 21st Century Fox archives), the first big new hit for the service was a TV series set in the Star Wars universe called The Mandalorian, which featured a character regularly referred to as “Baby Yoda.”Baby Yoda was a clear hit online, and people quickly made animated gif images of the character, helping spread more interest in The Mandalorian and the Disney+ service. However, soon after Vulture Magazine put up a story that was all just Baby Yoda GIFs, it was discovered that Giphy, a company that has built a repository of GIFs, had taken all of the Baby Yoda GIFs down. This caused many to complain, blaming Disney, highlighting that such GIFs were clearly fair use.Many people assumed that Disney was behind the takedown of the Baby Yoda GIFs. This may be a natural assumption since Disney, above and beyond almost any other company, has a decades-long reputation for aggressively enforcing its copyright. The Washington Post even wrote up an entire article scolding Disney for “not understanding fans.”That article noted that it was possible that Giphy pre-emptively decided to take down the images, but pointed out that this was, in some ways, even worse. This would mean that Disney’s own reputation as an aggressive enforcer of copyrights would lead another company to take action even without an official DMCA takedown notice.Giphy itself has always lived in something of a gray area regarding copyright, since many of the GIFs are from popular culture, including TVs and movies. While there is a strong argument that these are fair use, the company has claimed that most of its content is licensed, and said that it does not rely on fair use.Decisions to be made by Giphy:

Never let it be said that cops are not open-minded.Sure, everyone with a darker-than-white skin tone moving around in any part of the city deemed unsafe by the same people charged with keeping it safe are almost always considered de facto criminals, but cops are still very willing to explore alternate avenues when it comes to arresting and criminally charging people.Let's take a look at cops and their willingness to suspend their disbelief. Anyone accused of a crime is inherently untrustworthy: guilty until proven innocent. This includes people they've killed for doing nothing more than, say, threatening to kill themselves. The only good criminals are those who are willing to work with cops. These criminals have reputations that are unassailable and cops are willing to fabricate the paperwork needed to keep assailing of their reputations to a minimum.Cops and prosecutors have, for years, relied on "experts" who were often no better than YouTube conspiracy theorists. For years, law enforcement has said things like bite marks, hair samples… even mass-produced clothing should be admitted as damning evidence of criminal acts. And everyone indulged them.We've finally reached the critical mass needed to turn criticism of cop means and methods into mobilization. Years after it should have been apparent this was abject bullshit, the Texas Rangers are finally abandoning an investigative "technique" that has done little more than propel the storylines of horror movies since its inception.

Last summer we wrote about the PACT Act from Senators Brian Schatz and John Thune -- one of the rare bipartisan attempts to reform Section 230. As I noted then, unlike most other 230 reform bills, this one seemed to at least come with good intentions, though it was horribly confused about almost everything in actual execution. If you want to read a truly comprehensive takedown of the many, many problems with the PACT Act, Prof. Eric Goldman's analysis is pretty devastating and basically explains how the drafters of the bill tried to cram in a bunch of totally unrelated things, and did so in an incredibly sloppy fashion. As Goldman concludes:

Everyone loves buying location data. Sure, the Supreme Court may have said a thing or two about obtaining this data from cell service providers but it failed to say anything specific about buying it from third-party data brokers. Oh well! Any port in an unsettled Constitutional storm, I guess.The DEA buys this data. So does ICE and the CBP. The Defense Department does it. So does the Secret Service and, at least once, so did the IRS. Data harvested from apps ends up in the hands of companies like Venntel and Babel Street. These companies sell access to this data to a variety of government agencies, allowing them to bypass warrant requirements and phone companies. Sure, the data may not be as accurate as that gathered from cell towers, but it's still obviously very useful, otherwise these brokers wouldn't have so many powerful customers.The latest news on the purchasing of location data comes to us via Joseph Cox and Motherboard -- both of which have been instrumental in breaking news about the government's new source of third-party data capable of tracking people's movements.So, who's using this data now? Well, it's a government agency overseeing a very captive audience.

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So last year, when everybody was freaking out over TikTok, we noted that TikTok was likely the least of the internet's security and privacy issues. In part because TikTok wasn't doing anything that wasn't being done by thousands of other companies in a country that can't be bothered to pass even a basic privacy law for the internet. Also, any real security and privacy solutions need to take a much broader view.For example, while countless people freaked out about TikTok, none of those same folks seem bothered by the parade of nasty vulnerabilities in the nation's telecom networks, whether we're talking about the SS7 flaw that lets governments and bad actors spy on wireless users around the planet or the constant drumbeat of location data scandals that keep revealing how your granular location data is being sold to any nitwit with a nickel. Or the largely nonexistent privacy and security standards in the internet of broken things. Or the dodgy security in our satellite communications networks.Point being, hysteria over the potential threat of a Chinese app packed with dancing tweens trumped any real concerns about widespread, long-standing security vulnerabilities and privacy issues, particularly in telecom. This week this apathy was once again on display after reporters found that a gaping flaw in the SMS standard lets hackers take over phone numbers in minutes by simply paying a company to reroute text messages. All for around $16:

It's been a delayed reaction, but legislators are finally trying to do something about the horrific outcomes that result from advances in technology colliding with laws that have been on the books for decades. Smartphones are omnipresent and teens are using them just like adults use them. Sexting -- the sending of explicit images to willing recipients -- shouldn't be illegal. And yet it is because some of those participating in this consensual distribution of explicit images are minors.Operating under the belief that no one engages in sexual acts until they reach the age of consent, law enforcement has managed to turn this form of communication into a lifetime of misery for participants. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of using child porn laws to prosecute minors for sexting is the fact that actual sexual acts would be legal under the same set of laws.Rather than allow parents to handle sexting by minors, prosecutors have stepped in to turn consenting teens into sexual predators, even if they've done nothing more than send images of themselves to another teen. There's a massive logical leap that needs to be made to turn a teen photographing their own body into their own child pornographer, but cops and prosecutors have been willing to bridge that gap over reality to prematurely end these teens' lives. Charges stemming from child porn charges -- even when the teen has done nothing but "exploit" themselves -- come with a lifetime of downsides, thanks to sex offender statutes.Maryland's legislature is trying to mitigate the damage done by existing laws -- ones passed by legislators who could not have possibly foreseen teens willingly (and easily) distributing sexual images amongst themselves. The absence of any actual child pornographer isn't something addressed by child porn laws, so the Maryland legislature has decided to make it a bit more difficult for prosecutors to convert questionable judgment calls by teens to criminal charges.

The inability of someone to understand the idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law strikes again! For those of you not familiar with this nuance to copyright law, it essentially boils down to creative expression being a valid target for copyright protection, whereas broader ideas are not. In other words, the creator of Batman can absolutely have a copyright on Batman as a character, but cannot copyright a superhero who is basically a rich crazy guy who fights crime in a cape and cowl with a symbol of an animal on his chest. You get it.Katrina Parrott, who came up with some original emojis of a more diverse nature than previously made, does not get it. She sued Apple late last year, claiming copyright infringement after Apple came out with its own diverse emojis.

The Pasco County (FL) Sheriff's Office is being sued over its targeted harassment program -- one it likes to call "predictive policing."Predictive policing is pretty much garbage everywhere, since it relies on stats generated by biased policing to generate even more biased policing. In Pasco County, however, it's a plague willingly inflicted on residents by a sheriff (Chris Nocco) who has apparently described the ultimate goal of the program as "making [people] miserable until they move or sue."Well, Pasco County's getting one of these outcomes, after years of hassling residents who happen to find themselves labelled as criminals or possible criminals by the Sheriff's faulty software. Under the guise of "fighting crime," Sheriff's deputies make multiple visits to residences deemed troublesome, ticketing them for unmowed lawns, missing mailbox numbers, or for "allowing" teens to smoke on their property.This program has bled over into the area's schools, subjecting minors to the same scrutiny for failing to maintain high grades or steady attendance. In one case, a 15-year-old on probation was "visited" by deputies 21 times in six months. Since 2015, 12,500 "checks" have been performed as part of Office's predictive policing program.The Institute for Justice is representing four plaintiffs, including Robert Jones -- a target of the program who did both things the Office wanted: moved and sued.

Textiles have been around for such a long time that we barely think about them. The making of fabric is one of the oldest crafts, and has played a major role in human civilization for thousands of years — and that might lead one to assume that there's nothing left to be learned from fabric's history. But they'd be wrong. This week we're joined by Virginia Postrel, whose book The Fabric Of Civilization: How Textiles Made The World is a fascinating look at how textiles have pushed and shaped the history of innovation, and how the story of fabric can teach us important lessons about today's biggest challenges around innovation.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Back when Netflix was a pesky upstart trying to claw subscribers away from entrenched cable providers, the company had a pretty lax approach to users that shared streaming passwords. At one point CEO Reed Hastings went so far as to say he "loved" password sharing, seeing it as akin to free advertising. The idea was that as kids or friends got on more stable footing (left home to job hunt, whatever), they'd inevitably get hooked on the service and purchase their own subscription. Execs at HBO (at least before the AT&T acquisition) have stated it doesn't really hurt these companies' bottom lines in part because, much like with traditional piracy, there's no guarantee these users would actually subscribe if they lost access.In the last year or two, as Netflix's dominance grew, the company's position on the subject unsurprisingly started to toughen. And last week, the company began testing a system that would nudge password sharing subscribers to get their own account:

We've talked a lot in the past about how almost no one seems to actually understand privacy, and that leads to a lot of bad policy-making, including policy-making that impacts the 1st Amendment and other concepts that we hold sacred. Sometimes, it creates truly bizarre scenarios, like the arguments being made by Texas's Attorney General in the latest amended antitrust complaint against Google.As you'll likely recall, back in December, Texas's Attorney General Ken Paxton -- along with nine other states -- filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. There were some bits in the laws that suggested some potentially serious claims, but the key pars were heavily redacted. Of the non-redacted parts there were really embarrassing mistakes, including claiming that Facebook allowing WhatsApp users to backup their accounts to Google Drive was giving Google a "backdoor" into WhatsApp communications.That makes the latest amended complaint even more bizarre. It attacks Google for doing more to protect its users' privacy. As you remember, a couple weeks ago, Google noted that as it got rid of 3rd party cookies in Chrome, it wasn't going to replace it with some other form of tracking. This is, clearly, good for privacy. It is, also, good for Google, since it's better positioned to weather a changing ad market that doesn't rely on 3rd party cookies tracking you everywhere you go.So the new amended complaint takes a move that is clearly good for everyone's privacy and whines that this is an antitrust violation.

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Law enforcement loves loves LOVES third parties. Anyone one step removed from someone they're investigating generally isn't covered by the Fourth Amendment, which means no one needs a warrant or probable cause to go fishing for "third party" data.But when it comes to the accused, what's easy for law enforcement is seldom simple for regular citizens. Third parties obtain tons of personal data when interacting with customers and users. But when a regular person asks for this information, third parties apparently feel free to blow them off. That's the case when someone's trying to do nothing more than dispute something on their credit record. And it's also the case when someone's life is literally on the line.This cavalier approach to record keeping might finally cost a third party some money. A man falsely accused of murder is taking car rental agency Hertz to court for sitting on a receipt that would have cleared him for several years.

The British government is looking to literally silence dissent. Protests are a fact of life. There hasn't been a government yet that's been able to avoid them. But governments still do all they can to prevent them from reaching critical mass. In Hong Kong, the Chinese government has turned protesting into a national security crime with life sentences. In the United States, legislators are still trying to find ways to shut people up without violating their long-protected right to be verbally and demonstratively angry at their government.Over in the UK, the government wants people to shut up. So, the Home Office has crafted a bill that would do exactly that: criminalize the "noise" protesters make. The bill would amend the 1986's Public Order Act to make it a crime to do the one thing demonstrations and protests are supposed to do: draw the public's attention. Here's Ian Dunt, writing for Politics.co.uk.

Late last year, we discussed Microsoft's acquisition of Zenimax, the parent company of Bethesda, and what it would mean for the studio's beloved franchises. At particular issue, given that this is Microsoft we're talking about, was whether new or existing franchises would be exclusive to Xbox consoles and/or PC. The communication out of Microsoft has been anything but helpful in this respect. First, Xbox chief Phil Spencer and Bethesda's Todd Howard made vague statements that mostly amounted to: man, we don't have to make Bethesda games exclusives and it's hard to imagine us doing so. Only a few weeks later, another Microsoft representative clarified that while the company may have plans to make Bethesda games "first or best" on Microsoft platforms, "that's not a point about being exclusive." This naturally led most to believe that Microsoft might have timed release windows on other platforms, but wouldn't be locking any specific titles down.What a difference a few months can make, it seems. With the acquisition officially complete, Microsoft put out a "welcome" announcement to the Bethesda team, which included this fun bit to be consumed by the public.

The Kansas City Police Department has managed to turn a few heads -- and not in the good way -- with an internal PowerPoint that may as well have been titled "So, You've Killed Someone." The document was obtained during discovery in a wrongful death suit against the KCPD. Back in 2019, Officer Dylan Pifer shot and killed Terrance Bridges, claiming he thought Bridges was trying to pull a gun from his sweatshirt pocket. No gun was found on Bridges.The presentation [PDF] obtained from Bridges' family's lawyer by the Kansas City Star advises cops of two things: police shootings should be handled like routine criminal investigations to eliminate claims of bias. And police shootings should be handled nothing like routine criminal investigations because they involve cops.The opening slide makes it clear what the priority is in investigations of shootings by cops: preserving the narrative. It even has the number one next to it.

Despite bottomless pockets and all but owning state and federal regulators for the last four years, telecom continues to stumble with adaptation in the streaming video era. Verizon's attempt to pivot from curmudgeonly old phone company to sexy new media brand fell flat on its face. AT&T's plan to spend $200 billion on the Time Warner and DirecTV mergers to dominate the television space has resulted in them losing 8 million pay TV subscribers in just the last four years. In short, pampered telecom monopolies aren't finding that getting ahead in more competitive markets to be particularly easy.Comcast too isn't having a great time of it, despite dumping the company's resources into its new Peacock streaming platform. A new filing this week indicates that Comcast lost $914 million on the venture just last year alone. Some of these losses were expected as Comcast shuffles resources around NBC Universal, pours money into new projects, and streamlines the company's overall structure, but it's worth noting that Comcast remains somewhat cagey about how many paying customers are actually signed up:

The good news is that Iowa prosecutors' attempt to jail a journalist for being present at a protest has failed. Andrea Sahouri -- who was arrested while covering a George Floyd protest in Des Moines last summer -- has been acquitted of all charges by a jury. But the fact that she was prosecuted at all is still problematic.Sahouri was arrested by Des Moines police officers while apparently walking away from the scene of a protest. Officers at the scene broadcast conflicting orders from their squad cars. While one loudspeaker told protesters to disperse, another told protesters to "protest peacefully." Officer Luke Wilson performed the arrest. Unfortunately, it took place out of view of nearby CCTV cameras. That shouldn't have been a problem since Officer Wilson was wearing a body camera. But he "forgot" to ensure it was recording before he began arresting people.The prosecution of Sahouri was handled in bad faith. Prosecutors sought to bar any mention of her employment as a Des Moines Register journalist during the court case. They claimed this case had nothing to do with press freedom -- that it only involved someone disobeying a lawful order to disperse. They claimed this despite recordings of the PD's arrival on scene showing officers issuing conflicting orders to protesters.

The DOJ has indicted another company for supposedly making it easier for criminals to elude law enforcement. The true target, though, isn't the company whose principals have been indicted, but encryption itself.A couple of years ago the DOJ decided to bring RICO charges against Phantom Secure, a cellphone provider that catered to the criminal element with "uncrackable" phones/messaging services built on existing Blackberry hardware/software.The FBI approached Phantom Secure, asking for an encryption backdoor that would allow it to snoop on its customers. Phantom Secure declined the FBI's advances. Its phones -- originally marketed to professionals desirous of additional security -- were soon marketed to criminals, a market sector that truly valued the security options offered by Phantom.But rejecting the FBI and selling to criminals causes problems. The DOJ went after Phantom Secure, arresting the owner and charging him with a bunch of RICO and RICO-adjacent crimes.It is happening again. The DOJ has decided encryption is a crime when companies offering encrypted communications choose to sell to people the DOJ considers to be criminals.Here's the DOJ's portrayal of its crime-fighting efforts -- one supported by people who rarely find a sandwich they don't think can be criminally charged.

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The Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler recently had a very interesting article about how Amazon won't allow the ebooks it publishes to be lent out from libraries. As someone who regularly borrows ebooks from my local libraries, I find this disappointing -- especially since, as Fowler notes, Amazon really is the company that made ebooks popular. But, when it comes to libraries, Amazon won't let libraries lend those ebooks out:

Last week the House unveiled (a previous version of this story incorrectly stated the bill had been passed) the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. The bill, which died last year after Mitch McConnell's Senate refused to hold a vote on it, includes a lot of great things, including spending $94 billion on expanding broadband into underserved areas. There's a ton of other helpful things in the proposal, like boosting the definition of broadband to 100 Mbps down (and upstream), requiring "dig once" policies that deploy fiber conduit alongside any new highway bills, and even a provision requiring the FCC to create rules forcing ISPs be transparent about how much they actually charge for monthly service.A summary (pdf) of the bill offers some additional detail, such as the fact the bill includes a mandate that the government (specifically the Office of Internet Connectivity and Growth within the NTIA) more fully study the impact of affordability on broadband access. In the wake of allegations that the FCC's subsidy auction process is a corrupted and exploited mess, the law also lays down a lot of groundwork to make the subsidization of broadband access more transparent, equitable, and accountable to genuine oversight with an eye on affordability (instead of exclusively focusing on access, which is the DC norm):

Last week the House unveiled (a previous version of this story incorrectly stated the bill had been passed) the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. The bill, which died last year after Mitch McConnell's Senate refused to hold a vote on it, includes a lot of great things, including spending $94 billion on expanding broadband into underserved areas. There's a ton of other helpful things in the proposal, like boosting the definition of broadband to 100 Mbps down (and upstream), requiring "dig once" policies that deploy fiber conduit alongside any new highway bills, and even a provision requiring the FCC to create rules forcing ISPs be transparent about how much they actually charge for monthly service.A summary (pdf) of the bill offers some additional detail, such as the fact the bill includes a mandate that the government (specifically the Office of Internet Connectivity and Growth within the NTIA) more fully study the impact of affordability on broadband access. In the wake of allegations that the FCC's subsidy auction process is a corrupted and exploited mess, the law also lays down a lot of groundwork to make the subsidization of broadband access more transparent, equitable, and accountable to genuine oversight with an eye on affordability (instead of exclusively focusing on access, which is the DC norm):

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a comment from Baron von Robber, responding to someone who is still insisting that Democrats "stole" the election:

We're nearing the end of our series of posts about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. We've already featured ~THE GREAT GATSBY~, The Great Gatsby Tabletop Roleplaying Game, Art Apart and There Are No Eyes Here, and Remembering Grußau, and today we're looking at the third and final game based on The Great Gatsby and the winner of the Best Digital Game category: Rhythm Action Gatsby by Robert Tyler.From the name alone, you can probably guess what the game is: rhythm action games are a popular genre, and hey, why not make one for The Great Gatsby? The premise is presented as a joke, with the designer describing it as "the way F. Scott Fitzgerald would have wanted his legacy to be maintained" — but the game doesn't just lean on this one bit of amusing silliness, nor does it cut any corners in fulfilling its promise. Rather, it's full of handcrafted original material.But before we get to all of that, there's another thing that makes Rhythm Action Gatsby stand out among all the Gatsby-based games this year: it's partly based on the book's incredibly iconic cover art. (We wondered if the cover art was even itself in the public domain, but it turns out that unlike most books, that particular cover was actually designed before the writing was done and published along with the first edition, and has an interesting story all its own.) The floating eyes and mouth that almost everyone immediately associates with The Great Gatsby become the target points of the rhythm action game, controlled by the player as they gaze out from the screen. The eyes must be triggered in time with the sparkling fireworks that rise from below and represent the notes of the music, while the mouth must be controlled to speak the words that tumble down from above.The words are a well-known passage from the novel, dramatically spaced out over the 2-minute duration of the game — and it's all narrated aloud. That's where we get to all the other original material in the game. The narration? Freshly recorded by the designer, with a distinct mood and excellent delivery. The jaunty music that sets the pace of the game? An original piece written and recorded by the designer. And then there's all the details: the color changes and screen flashes that occur throughout the course of a playthrough, linked to both progression and the player's performance. All of this is choreographed so well that when it comes together it makes a rhythm game that, although simple and short, feels surprisingly dramatic and narrative — and that's not only impressive, it's extremely appropriate to an adaptation of a novel, and proves that the initial joke about the combination of genre and subject being silly wasn't quite what it seemed. That's just great, and makes it a worthy winner of the Best Digital Game award.(Oh, and at the end, your performance is ranked and you get to find out just how great of a Gatsby you are. Several of our judges played it multiple times to try for better results, and maybe you will too.)Play Rhythm Action Gatsby in your browser on Itch, and check out the other jam entries too. Congratulations to Robert Tyler for the win! We'll be back next week with the final game jam winner spotlight.

The SolarWind intrusion, with the revelation that part of the architecture included, at least for a while, a really weak default password, and the hack of the water treatment plant with a similar password reuse problem, reminded me of this story I heard not long ago about another instance of poor security design.In a recent fan Q&A on Facebook, Bill Gibson, the drummer for Huey Lewis and the News, told a story about his friendship with Stevie Ray Vaughan. Stevie Ray Vaughan and his band Double Trouble had opened for the News for a while in the mid-1980s, and in that time Bill and Stevie had become good friends. Back at the hotel one evening after a show in New York City it came up that Bill had seen Jimi Hendrix perform something like seven times. Stevie, a guitarist who idolized Hendrix, was in awe. He wanted to hear everything about what it was like seeing Hendrix play, so he grabbed some beer and they settled in for an evening of Bill telling Stevie everything he remembered.By 3:00 AM they were out of beer, so they went down to Stevie's tour bus parked out in front of the hotel to get some more. He opened the bus with his key and started looking for the cooler he kept it in. "That's odd," Bill recalls Stevie musing, "The cooler is usually kept in this spot over here." Eventually he found a cooler elsewhere, removed the needed beer, and they left to go back up to finish their conversation.The next day they discovered why they'd had trouble finding the cooler. At the time, most bands were touring in buses that all came from the same company. That all looked the same. And that all were opened by the exact same key. Thus the reason that Stevie could not find the cooler where he expected it to be was because they were not on the bus where they expected to be. Instead of being on Stevie's bus, it turns out they were actually on UB40's bus that, unbeknownst to them, had just pulled up that night while they'd been ensconced in the hotel talking. Which Stevie's key had opened. And on which the UB40 band had apparently been sleeping the whole time Stevie and Bill were there inadvertently pilfering their beer…So let this story be a lesson to security designers, people who really should be employing security designers, and pretty much everyone else who likes to reuse their passwords: When the security credentials for one resource can be used to gain access elsewhere, especially in a way you did not anticipate, there's really not that much security to be had.And in most such cases it will likely be so much more than UB40's beer that's now been put at risk.

Summary: Google's ad service offers purchasers access to millions of users, including those viewing videos on YouTube. But its policies -- meant to prevent abuse, fraud, harassment, or targeting of certain demographics -- sometimes appear to prevent legitimate organizations from doing something as simple as informing others of their existence.Chad Robichaux, the founder of Christian veterans support nonprofit Mighty Oaks, wanted to reach out to veterans who might need his services. But his attempt to purchase YouTube ads was rejected by Google's Ad service for a seemingly strange reason.According to a screenshot posted by Robichaux to Twitter, Google forbade the use of "Christian" as a keyword. To Robichaux (and many responders to his tweet), this was evidence of Big Tech's bias against Christians and conservatives.But the real reason for this block was far less censorial or nefarious, if no more explicable. According to YouTube (which reached out directly to Robicheaux), the aim isn't to keep Christians from advertising, but rather to prevent advertisers from targeting users on the basis of their religion. Unfortunately, Google's policy doesn't exactly make that clear, instead stating that ads cannot contain "religious basis" content if the purchaser is engaging in personalized advertising.Decisions to be made by Google:

Last Wednesday, the House passed the "George Floyd Justice in Policing Act," a bill that targets a number of aspects of law enforcement that need improvement, including two that have caused a considerable amount of collateral damage.The bill [PDF] -- passed by the Democratic majority 220-212 with all but one member of either party voting the way you'd expect them to vote -- bans discriminatory profiling, mandates more training on discrimination, and requires law enforcement agencies to collect data on investigatory activities. It also bans chokeholds and no-knock warrants, both instruments of death still permitted by far too many law enforcement agencies. The on-again, off-again limits on the requisition of military gear via the 1033 program are back on.There are also mandates for federal officers, finally requiring their use of body cams and dashcams -- something they've avoided doing for years.But here are the accountability add-ons that are resulting in pushback from law enforcement agencies, their supporters, and (of course) their unions.

Last week the FCC took the wraps off a new $3.2 billion program designed to help struggling Americans afford broadband during the pandemic. The program was required by Congress as part of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, and will, once fully operational, dole out $50 a month for broadband service to lower-income American families that qualify. That number jumps to $75 on Tribal lands (a stark reversal from the Trump/Pai era, where the FCC was interested in pulling back on tribal broadband subsidies). The program also doles out up to $100 for a tablet or computer.With COVID-19 showcasing broadband's essential nature in more ways than one, it's a welcome program that should deliver some immediate relief to the estimated 42 million Americans with no broadband whatsoever, and the estimated 18.5 million households that lack broadband access specifically due to the high cost of service. There's no reason children in the wealthiest country in the history of the planet should have to huddle in the dirt outside of Taco Bell, something interim FCC boss Jessica Rosenworcel was quick to highlight:

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A little over a year ago we wrote about a laughably stupid SLAPP suit that the Trump campaign, represented by Charles Harder, filed against the NY Times. As we noted at the time, the lawsuit appeared to have no intention of succeeding -- it was purely performative nonsense. The lawsuit claimed that an opinion piece by Max Frankel was defamatory because it noted that whether or not there was any explicit collusion between the Trump Campaign and Russia, it didn't matter, since both sides seemed to expect certain outcomes and allowed them to act accordingly.We also pointed out that the lawsuit completely misrepresented the article, pretending that Frankel's thesis -- again, that there didn't need to be any explicit deal -- was Frankel saying that there was "collusion" between the two. The case made no sense no matter how you looked at it. Frankel's article was an opinion piece -- and opinions aren't defamatory. It didn't allege what the campaign's lawsuit says it alleged, and there was no way in hell it could possibly meet the actual malice standard necessary for defamation.It took a year, but the Supreme Court of New York (which, contrary to its name, is more like a district court), has tossed out the lawsuit, though denying the NY Times' request for sanctions against Harder. As we expected, this was not a difficult decision for the court to come to. First, it was obviously opinion, and thus not defamatory:

One the one hand, you have wireless carriers telling anybody who'll listen that 5G will soon create the incredible, smart cities of tomorrow and no limit of incredible innovation. On the other hand, you have 42 million Americans without access to broadband during a plague, and tens of millions more stuck paying high prices for slow services thanks to monopolization and a lack of competition. It's a discordant reality gap that isn't lost on Martin Cooper, who invented the first cell phone (the Motorola Dynatac 8000x) in 1973. In an interview at CNET, Cooper pointed out how despite a history of innovation, the United States still somehow can't make broadband both universal and affordable, which is why 40% of US students struggle to get online:

It will come as no surprise to most of our readers that the NCAA is a jealous protector of its March Madness trademark. Much like the Super Bowl, the NCAA likes to march (heh) around and try to pretend like its trademarks give it overly restrictive rights when it absolutely doesn't.But what you may not be as familiar with is all of the ride along trademarks the NCAA has amassed relating to its men's basketball tournament. For instance, the NCAA also holds a trademark for "March Mayhem" and has used that in advertising partnerships in the past. For some reason, this has caused the NCAA to think that this allows it to oppose a trademark for a vasectomy clinic with an admittedly questionable marketing scheme.

At long last, some more NYPD police misconduct records have been released. Last month, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals refused to block the release of these records, now publicly available thanks to the repeal of a state law that shielded these records from the public eye for more than 40 years.A first batch of records was released before the matter was even settled. Records obtained by the NY-ACLU and ProPublica were released by ProPublica even as the Police Benevolent Association secured a restraining order blocking their release. Since neither of these entities were party to the lawsuit (the PBA was suing New York City and Mayor Bill de Blasio), they weren't subject to the court order.The partial set of records published by ProPublica came from the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB). The publication only included records for officers with at least one substantiated complaint against them. A much fuller set of data has now been released by the CCRB -- a set that dates back more than 20 years and covers tens of thousands of NYPD officers.

Last summer we wrote about an interesting case involving the latest evolution of copyright trolling, involving Jon Nicolini, who some copyright troll watchers may recognize from his participating in an earlier generation of copyright trolling, when he was a sketchy "forensic expert" for copyright trolling firm CEG TEK. These days, Nicolini runs his own firm, Okularity, which appears to have created a new form of copyright trolling. According to the lawsuit, rather than file lawsuits as the pressure point (as was common in the past), Okularity sends a ton of DMCA takedown notices to social media companies, and then once your account gets taken down, Nicolini pounces and demands huge sums to rescind the notices, so you can get back your account.As we wrote over the summer, one of Okularity's targets was the well known Paper Magazine, put out by the publisher Enttech Media Group. Enttech said that Okularity sought to have Paper Magazine's Instagram account shut down, and then offered to "settle," demanding a pretty massive sum in the process. The lawsuit alleged violations of DMCA 512(f) which is the (unfortunately) mostly toothless part of the DMCA that is supposed to allow those on the receiving end of bogus DMCA takedowns to fight back. In practice, however, courts have mostly rejected all 512(f) claims, or made it so they're basically impossible to do anything useful with. Because of that, any time we see a 512(f) claim that has legs, we pay attention.The original complaint also tried to argue that Okularity violated the RICO statute, and long time readers here know what we think of RICO claims. While there did appear to be some unauthorized practice of law happening, there didn't seem to be nearly enough to make a RICO claim -- because there's basically never enough to make a RICO claim. We predicted that the RICO claim would get tossed out, but that the 512(f) claim might live on.Turns out, we were right.While the case has had some twists and turns, this week the judge tossed out the RICO claims, but is allowing the 512(f) claims to move forward. Nicolini and Okularity had argued that Enttech's lawyer, Robert Tauler, should face Rule 11 sanctions for ignoring evidence regarding their fair use analysis, but the court rejected those as well. Tauler did have to file a third amended complaint, however, to get to this point, as the court did find the first two complaints somewhat deficient.But on the key point -- 512(f) -- the court notes that the case can continue, even under the confused Lenz standard in the 9th Circuit, that basically said (1) DMCA filers have to "subjectively" consider fair use to be a "good faith" filing, but (2) automated takedowns may be okay... because we say so. Nikolini and Okularity argued that they do consider fair use before sending notices, while Enttech argued the notices appeared to be totally automated. The court basically says -- Enttech has met the initial burden that the case can move forward.One key point of contention in this: the takedown letters sent by Okularity do contain a "discussion of infringement and fair use," Okularity claims that shows that it does consider fair use. Enttech responded that every single notice Okularity sends contains an exact copy of this discussion, suggesting no actual analysis is done, and it's just a cut-and-paste. This point is what the judge focused in on:

Killing people using metadata is boring. These days, we're killing people using data brokers.

Over the last month we've written quite a few times about various state legislatures (and Governors) picking up on the nonsensical and unsupported statements that (1) "conservatives" face too much bias in social media content moderation decisions and (2) that Section 230 is somehow to blame for this. They've pushed a whole bunch of blatantly unconstitutional state laws that would seek to limit how social media companies can moderate content -- effectively compelling them to host content they disagree with (which would violate the 1st Amendment). Of course, as we've noted for quite some time now, both Republicans and Democrats seem to be very mad at Section 230, but for totally contradictory reasons. Republican bills seek to make social media companies moderate less content, while Democratic bills seek to make social media companies moderate more content.Both approaches are unconstitutional violations of the 1st Amendment. While most of the fights over the past few years have happened in Congress, now with these bad bills moving to the state legislators, it appears that Democrats don't want to be left behind. Over in Colorado, Colorado Senate president pro tempore Kerry Donovan would seek to force companies to moderate "hate speech," "fake news," and "conspiracy theories."The full bill is really, really bad. Websites would need to register (for a fee) with a "digital communications commission" in Colorado, and that Commission would accept complaints against social media websites if they were used for hate speech, undermining election integrity, disseminating intentional disinformation, conspiracy theories, or fake news. There's a big problem with this: most of that is protected under the 1st Amendment. I know that many people don't like that those things are protected speech, but you actually should like it. Because if "fake news" or "undermining election integrity" was not protected under the 1st Amendment, just imagine how the Trump administration would have abused both things.After all, it spent four years arguing that any criticism of the administration was "fake news" and claimed, repeatedly (despite the total lack of evidence) that the processes and procedures that helped make the 2020 election fair actually "undermined election integrity." This is why we don't let the government punish people for speech around those issues, because the government will define it in ways we dislike.As Eugene Volokh notes, beyond the fact that all of this is pretty clearly unconstitutional, the bill doesn't even bother to define "hate speech." Or "undermine election integrity." Or "fake news." Or "conspiracy theories." Or "intentional disinformation."Kerry Donovan is now running for US Congress as well (against conspiracy theorist Lauren Boebert). One would hope that she would have first learned how the 1st Amendment works before seeking to run for Congress. We might agree that Boebert clearly doesn't belong anywhere near Capitol Hill, but that's no excuse for misunderstanding some fairly basic principles in the Bill of Rights.

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Put enough cameras up and pretty soon they become tasty targets for malicious hackers.

As companies like Google shift away from individual behavior tracking in their ad efforts, telecoms like T-Mobile are headed in the opposite direction. The wireless giant this week announced it would be automatically enrolling all of its customers (including recently acquired Sprint customers) in a new behavioral tracking and ad system the company is launching on April 26. Whereas Google is shifting to its FLOC system that tends to clump consumers into groups of like minded consumers (an approach that still comes with its own issues), T-Mobile is doubling down on individualized targeting, and will start sharing its customers’ web and mobile-app data with advertisers.While this sort of tracking is nothing new for AT&T and Verizon, it's a shift away from T-Mobile's more consumer friendly branding, and will be something new for recently acquired Sprint customers. Fortunately users can opt out of the tech, though that may not always mean what you think it does. AT&T, for example, has historically viewed "opting out" as meaning "we will no longer hit you with targeted ads based on your online data," not that they won't gather data whatsoever. Other times in telecom, opting out can easily be reverted to opting in without the consumer really knowing.T-Mobile, like so many companies before it, tries a bit too hard to hide behind the claim that "anonymization" of individual user data makes collecting it ok, something that's been disproven by a repeated barrage of different studies. It only takes a small number of additional data points to quickly make users not so anonymous.One investigation of "anonymized" user credit card data by MIT found that users could be correctly "de-anonymized" 90 percent of the time using just four relatively vague points of information. Another study looking at vehicle data found that 15 minutes’ worth of data from just brake pedal use could lead them to choose the right driver, out of 15 options, 90% of the time.Despite this, companies continue to toss around the word "anonymization" as some kind of get out of jail free card, as if the terminology means anything. Case in point: T-Mobile's comments to the Wall Street Journal, which were thankfully quickly corrected by the EFF's Aaron Mackey: