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We'd already noted that the FAA had been pushing to impose limits on 5G deployments in certain bands due to safety concerns. The problem: the FCC, the agency with the expertise in spectrum interference, has repeatedly stated those concerns are unfounded based on the FCC's own research. Worse, the FAA has proven a bit intractable in providing the FCC with data proving their claims of harm. The FAA claims that deploying 5G in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz "C-Band" will cause interference with certain radio altimeters. But the FCC has shown that more than 40 countries have deployed 5G in this band with no evidence of harm.That didn't seem to sway the FAA, which prodded both AT&T and Verizon to pause deployment in the C-band. The FAA's refusal to listen to the FCC, or be transparent about sharing any data to support its claims, has pissed off the FCC. To the point where a bipartisan coalition of six former agency commissioners and bosses wrote a joint letter politely tut-scolding the agency for being bull-headed:

We're going to keep repeating this until it becomes common knowledge: trademark law is designed to keep the public from being confused as to the source of a good or service, not as some mechanism for businesses to lock up language in a competitive marketplace. In other words, if there is no risk of customer confusion, trademark laws very rarely come into play in terms of disputes or infringement.Which brings us to Papa's Burgers in Texas and its announcement that it will be changing its name and branding.So, a company that has existed as Papa's Burgers for 8 years is changing its name due to a C&D notice. So what's going on here? Well, the company decided to finally get around to trademarking its name but was advised by its counsel that there was another large restaurant group that had a similar name. That company was Pappas Restaurants, which operates a wide swath of venues, such as Pappas Bros. Steakhouse, Pappas Seafood House, and, yes, Pappas Burger.Due to the that input from counsel, Papa's Burgers owner Robert Walker sent a letter to Pappas Restaurants explaining his respect for their business and his intention to trademark his business name. Kind of a nice thing to do. His reward for that was receiving the C&D notice.

While it's certainly possible to sometimes do biometrics well, a long line of companies frequently... don't. Voice print authentication is particularly shaky, especially given the rise of inexpensive voice deepfake technology. But, much like the continued use of text-message two-factor authentication (which is increasingly shown to not be secure), it apparently doesn't matter to a long list of companies.Banks and telecom giants alike have started embracing voice authentication tech at significant scale despite the added threat to user privacy and security. And they're increasingly collecting user "voice print" data without any way to opt out:

Might a free PACER finally be on the horizon? For years, activists and a handful of Congressional reps have attempted to strip the fees from PACER, the federal court system's antiquated database that provides online access to court documents.The antiquation doesn't begin with the fees. The system is outdated and hasn't improved much over the years, despite the fact that PACER regularly turns a profit. PACER looks and performs like a holdover from the 1990s. The UI is its own barrier to entry. The search function barely functions, vacillating between drawing a blank or producing several pages of irrelevant search results.And that's where the fees kick in. PACER operates like a library copy machine, charging users $0.10/page for everything. Search results and dockets are treated like they're being printed out at the central PACER desk. Useless search results are $0.10/page. So are dockets, which may or may not contain the documents. These fees add up before users even locate the documents they're looking for. Those documents are also $0.10/page to download in PDF form, putting price on ones, zeroes, and the fractions of cents needed to generate, store, and transmit the documents.The US Courts System has blown PACER profit on in-court niceties like new TV screens and furniture. Almost none of the millions PACER generates has gone towards improving PACER itself or lowering access fees. The federal court system has argued it will cost billions to overhaul PACER and provide free access to users.But according to the Congressional Budget Office investigation and former government technologists, the actual outlay for an improved, free PACER is much less. The CBO says free access would only cost about $1 million a year. Technologists estimate the overhaul would only cost $10-20 million and require less than $5 million a year to maintain.These facts helped push a bill mandating free access to PACER through Congress late last year. But that's only half the battle. And it's the far easier half of the battle. The Senate still needs to create and pass its own version, meld that with the House of Representatives offering, and drop a cohesive bill on the President's desk.Well, we're one step closer to that happening, as Nate Raymond reports for Reuters.

Back in high school, I read Robert Anton Wilson/Robert Shea's Illuminatus! Trilogy back-to-back with Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, and ended up being amused and fascinated at the intersection of conspiracy theories and pranksters. If you're unaware, both books satirize the nature of conspiracy theories. Soon after I picked up a copy of Re/Search's Pranks! book, which, to this day, is on my book shelf between a copy of the Mondo 2000 book and The Book of the SubGenius (with a copy of the tiny Loompanics yellow version of Principia Discordia sitting next to them). Soon after reading those, I got to college, and thanks to the wonders of the internet (and Usenet in particular) discovered a group of somewhat merry internet pranksters who dubbed themselves "The Flat Earth Society" -- as a purely ironic group who enjoyed the mixture of absurdity, satire, pranking, with an appreciation for the occasional conspiracy theory worth mocking (I'm still in touch with some people from that group decades later, again, thanks to the internet).That's all preamble to note that I not only recognize, but really appreciate what's going on with a group of Gen Z pranksters, who cooked up a rather brilliant satirical conspiracy theory, better known as "Birds Aren't Real," which has been making the rounds for a while now, and only was officially "exposed" as a prank in a thoroughly delightful NY Times article last week.

MyPillow CEO/election fraud conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell apparently understands defamation law about as well as he understands cybersecurity, social media, and election machine operation. Lindell will be learning more about defamation law as he defends himself against voting machine manufacturer Dominion which has sued him (and a bunch of other Trumpists) over his alleged defamation.But we'll see if he learns anything from this other lawsuit -- one he filed after the Daily Mail published an article claiming he pursued a relationship with 30 Rock actress Jane Krakowski. Now, most people would not feel insulted after being romantically linked to an actress, but this apparently bothered Lindell so much he decided to sue over it.There's no defamation there says the New York federal court handling Lindell's complaint. The ruling is short, punchy, and instructive, although the court is dealing with a student especially resistant to learning lessons from stupid mistakes. (via Courthouse News Service).The decision [PDF] says nothing in the Daily Mail's article, which alleged Lindell and Krakowski had a nine-month relationship during which Lindell sent her gifts like bottles of champagne, even approaches defamation, no matter how much Lindell would like to construe it otherwise.Lindell immediately informed the Daily Mail the romance never happened. So did Krakowski. Both denials were included in the article. Even if the article was false, it wasn't defamatory and it contained denials that would allow readers to draw their own conclusions about the Mail's claims, which were allegedly supplied by friends of the actress.But Lindell's main problem isn't his alleged relationship with the sitcom star. No, he's far more bothered by the implication that he -- a clean and sober recovering drug user and alcoholic -- would deign to buy alcohol for other people, even as a gift.

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In the past we've pointed out how western politicians' attacks on social media are only serving to play into the hands of authoritarians around the globe, justifying their crackdowns on free speech and critics. And that doesn't seem to be slowing down any time soon. The latest is Turkey's President repeating the exact lines that US/EU politicians have been using to slam social media as "dangerous to democracy" in order to justify even more draconian crackdowns on speech and the press in his country.We've written about Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for years -- mostly covering his regular attacks on free expression. Erdogan has sued thousands of people for "insulting" him online. Even more serious is his regular practice of jailing journalists by falsely calling them terrorists. He's also lead aggressive campaigns to ban any website that portrays him in an unflattering light.So, you'd think that maybe US/EU politicians might recognize the problems of someone like Erdogan using their own words to further push his agenda. This weekend, Erdogan announced that social media is a "threat to democracy" and pushed for new laws that would criminalized "fake news" being spread on social media.

Hungry to boost municipal budgets, a growing roster of states and cities have spent the last five years or so trying to implement a tax on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services. Sometimes (like in Chicago) this has involved expanding an existing amusement tax (traditionally covering book stores, music stores, ball games and other brick and mortar entertainment) to online streaming. Other times this has involved trying to leverage existing cable TV laws or ordinances to try extract their pound of flesh from Netflix. In both, it involves taking rules written for the physical world, and applying them to the internet. Often haphazardly.That's what's happening in Austin, where the city just joined a growing Texas lawsuit trying to force Netflix to pay the same taxes as local cable providers. Texas law allows cable and video providers to deliver cable TV via publicly-owned utility poles on public land in exchange for remitting 5% of gross revenue to the municipality. So the argument has generally been because Netflix bits technically travel over those same lines, they should also be responsible for paying that tax:

There's a constitutional right not to be framed by cops for a crime you didn't commit. This shouldn't even need to be argued in court once, much less twice. But "framed by cops" is exactly what happened to James Dennis, who spent 25 years in prison after being falsely accused of murdering a high school student back in 1991.After having his wrongful conviction vacated in 2013 (and this decision affirmed by the Third Circuit Appeals Court in 2016), Dennis sued the cops that took 25 years of his life away by hiding exculpatory evidence and creating a narrative that put him behind bars.Back to the Third Circuit goes Dennis again, with the Appeals Court handling an attempt by two detectives to escape Dennis' lawsuit [PDF]. The district court stripped immunity from the detectives who built the case against Dennis. The detectives appealed but they're not going to be able to walk away from this one.The allegations are severe. According to Dennis, detectives Frank Jastrzembski and Manuel Santiago hid evidence that would have cleared Dennis and worked together to railroad him into a murder conviction. Buckle up, there's a lot to take in here.

Back in April of 2020, which feels roughly like a damned lifetime ago, we discussed a much-publicized report that indicated explosive growth in traffic to pirate torrent and streaming sites for movies, music, television, and video games. Much hand-wringing ensued, which was largely silly. All kinds of media consumption traffic rose during the initial lockdown months of the COVID-19 pandemic and it only made sense that piracy traffic would follow suit, particularly when you consider the broader economic impact of the pandemic. This wasn't some new paradigm shift in the piracy landscape; it was literally one of the most predictable things that could have happened.But now, almost two years later, where are we at? Well, per a recent study by the EU Intellectual Property Office, piracy traffic hasn't just fallen, it's fallen sharply.

Last month, we noted that the DOJ had announced it was going to intervene in Donald Trump's bombastically silly lawsuits against Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for suspending his account for violating the websites' terms of service. Those lawsuits have not been going well. While Trump filed them in his home court in Florida, they've all been transferred to California. His decision to use the case to claim Section 230 is unconstitutional only served to wake up the Justice Department, and have them step in to respond to that particular point.The DOJ has now filed its briefs -- we'll just share the one in the Twitter case since they're all basically the same -- to say (1) it's easy to dismiss this case without bothering to explore the constitutionality of 230, but if it feels otherwise (2) it's blatantly obvious that 230 is constitutional.On point one:

Julian Assange and Wikileaks did a lot over the past few years to destroy the goodwill they'd managed to accumulate prior to that by being a fearless publisher of leaked documents. At times, Assange has acted hypocritically and there's some evidence he worked with Russian operatives to gather information in an attempt to damage the Democratic Party's 2016 election hopes.That being said, the on-again, off-again attempt to prosecute Assange over alleged Espionage Act violations threatens journalism as a whole. The DOJ occasionally appeared to recognize this, hence its stop-start prosecution effort. Attempts were made to get President Biden to drop the case, but there appears to be no turning back now. The US government has won its appeal of the UK court's decision to refuse extradition.Here's a very brief summary of the UK court's decision [PDF]:

We'd already noted how telecom and media giants eager to keep their spoils from the Trump era have been waging a not so subtle smear campaign on Biden FCC Commissioner nomination Gigi Sohn, using loyal GOP lawmakers as marionettes. Sohn is broadly popular across both sides of the aisle, but she's also a fairly fierce advocate of functional regulatory oversight, transparency, and market competition. So companies like AT&T and News Corporation have been seeding a lot of gibberish in DC and in select press outlets about how she's a "radical" who wants to "censor conservatives" and hurt puppies.Last week the Fraternal Order of Police joined the fray with a facts-optional missive opposing Sohn's nomination, claiming it creates "serious public safety considerations." Their problem? Sohn supports (gasp!) encryption:

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Understanding the "bipartisan" approach to internet regulations over the last couple of years really boils down to "both parties want to control the internet" and twist it to their own advantage. Almost everything you hear about "harms" from the internet are disingenuous nonsense from grandstanding politicians. That's not to say there aren't real problems with things on the internet or how it's structured -- but there is almost no realistic exploration of those issues by those in various legislatures. It's all about grabbing control over the internet. Two recent articles highlight pretty clearly how both Republicans and Democrats are clearly salivating to control speech online for their own benefit -- and not for the actual good of society or the internet.First up, we have The Spectator. To be honest, this publication has been a garbage publication recently, pushing out all sorts of nonsense, but apparently there are still a few people there who can publish something good. Taylor Millard has written a short and to the point article noting, accurately, that so much of the bipartisan attacks on the internet lately are really about one thing: how both parties want to control your speech online. We've discussed how the policy plans of Republicans and Democrats often feel at odds, with Republicans complaining about too much moderation, and Democrats complaining about too little, but the truth is slightly more nuanced, and both are really just looking to have control over speech online -- control that is simply not allowed under the 1st Amendment.The Democrats' attacks on free speech are pretty straightforward:

Another one of ICE's (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) data spigots has been shut off. Don't cry too many tears for poor old ICE. It still has plenty of options. It's still hoovering up location data from app developers who either don't know or don't care that this data is buyable through data brokers. It also still has plenty of privileges, thanks to laws and judicial decisions that say most constitutional rights are null and void within 100 miles of our nation's ports of entry (borders, coasts, and -- making this far more concerning -- any domestic airport offering international flights).Plenty of data can still be had (and plenty of brokers willing to sell it), but ICE has just lost access to one source of data it uses to track down immigrants: utility bill information gathered, packaged, and sold to government agencies by third parties like Equifax and Reuters.Equifax gathers this information ostensibly to assess the creditworthiness of United States residents. (It also leaks this information on occasion.) Thomson Reuters uses the same information (called "utility header data") in its CLEAR database, which contains "billions of data points" and "leverages cutting-edge public records technology." Its potent combination of bulk data and profit-seeking is sold to whoever wants access, which includes US law enforcement agencies.ICE no longer has access to this data through CLEAR. At least the "utility header data" part of it. So have the nation's law enforcement agencies. Following pressure from Senator Ron Wyden, utility companies will no longer allow this data to be resold by Equifax to private entities like Reuters. (Possible paywall ahead. Alternate link.)

This week, three out of our four winners come from our post about Rep. Thomas Massie skipping past the First Amendment and blocking people for their responses to his gun-laden tweet celebrating the Second Amendment with insulting timing. In first place on the insightful side, it's Rocky responding to the claim from another commenter that Usenet groups don't moderate posts like social media platforms, and it works out fine:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, we got a good example of how "just metadata" could still be dangerous, the FBI was smacked down for using outdated boilerplate on a National Security Letter, and a bunch of online platforms made a terrible agreement to block "terrorist content". A shortsighted newspaper association was asking Trump to whittle down fair use, congress was beginning to consider a new round of terrible copyright reform, and Rep. Marsha Blackburn said ISPs have an "obligation" to block "fake news". We also took a look at all the terrible trade deals floating around, and asked if there's a better way to do them.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, we learned more about how much big media firms were donating to the sponsors of SOPA and PIPA, while the bills were leading to internal fights at various organizations: Kaspersky left the BSA over its initial support of SOPA, and the American Bar Association was warring with itself over its position. We wrote about other realms of collateral damage from the bills like people with disabilities and human rights groups, and about how the arguments from supporters made no sense. A more reasonable (though not perfect) alternative proposal was, as expected, totally hated by the SOPA brigade and continued trying desperately to buy "grassroots" support. And we were very much not shocked when two congressional staffers who helped write SOPA and PIPA became entertainment industry lobbyists.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, a judge ruled that it was legal for the FBI to spy on people using the microphones in their phones. Countries around the world began reacting to YouTube, with Japan's entertainment industry demanding an end to unauthorized uploads while Iran decided to just block the entire site outright. Tracfone was freaking out about the DMCA anti-circumvention exception for unlocking mobile phones even though it was hardly a big deal. Meanwhile, in the UK, an impressively balanced report on intellectual property sparked the expected backlash, with a group of 4,000 musicians signing a petition calling for "fair play" that didn't sound too fair — and then it turned out that the list of signatures included several from dead musicians.

We had just been talking about how Mark Fitzpatrick, a YouTube personality who focuses on doing reviews and let's draws for anime properties, had been targeted by Toei Animation for the takedown of over a 150 of his videos over copyright claims. Toei is the animation house for several popular animes, including the Dragon Ball series. While Fitzpatrick's videos fall squarely in the category of fair use, as they are chiefly commentary and reviews that use snippets of the animes in question in order to illustrate points, because of the onerous way YouTube enforces such claims, his videos were taken down first and remain down at the time of this writing.Well, if Toei was hoping this would all fly under the radar, it most certainly is not. Fitzpatrick's own video complaining about how Toei is behaving itself has over 700k views. And now streaming icon Pewdiepie is inserting himself into all of this, squarely on on Fitzpatrick's side.

Last week, the district court Judge Robert Pitman wrote an excellent ruling tossing out Texas' silly content moderation law as clearly unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. As was widely expected, Texas has appealed the ruling to the 5th Circuit (undeniably, the wackiest of the Circuits, so who knows what may happen). However, in the meantime, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also asked the lower court to have the law go into effect while waiting for the appeals court to rule!

Concurrent with Apple's announcement that it was suing Israeli tech company NSO Group over its iPhone exploits was its announcement that it would be notifying customers of suspected hacking attempts utilizing NSO's extremely powerful Pegasus malware.

For years now, we've been highlighting how book publishers are at war with libraries, and see ebooks and ebook pricing as a key lever in that war. With regular books, a library can just buy the book and lend it out and do what they want with it. But not ebooks. Because of a broken copyright law, publishers retain excess control over ebooks, and they lord that over libraries, arbitrarily raising prices to ridiculous levels, limiting how many times they can lend it out before they have to "repurchase" the ebook, and generally making it as difficult as possible for libraries to actually be able to offer ebooks.This is because of a broken copyright system that gives publishers way more control over ebooks than traditional hardcopy books. And book publishers have spent the past decade abusing that power. In an ideal world, Congress would get its act together and fix copyright law and properly add first sale rights for digital goods like ebooks. But, without that, some states are trying to step in and fix things, including Maryland, which earlier this year passed a law that would require publishers to sell ebooks to libraries at "reasonable" rates.With the law set to go into effect next year, helping more Maryland residents get access to ebooks in the midst of a still ongoing pandemic, the book publishers have continued their Grinch-like ways, and sued to block the law. The complaint says that this is an attempt by state law to route around federal copyright law, and since the 1976 Copyright Act, state copyright laws are pre-empted by federal law.The complaint spews a lot of nonsense and propaganda about "the importance of copyright" to "the ultimate benefit of the public" which is laughable -- especially coming from book publishers who have gone out of their way to use copyright to fuck over the public. But, as ridiculous as it is from a societal level, the publisher's reading of the 1976 Act might convince a court. It is true that the 1976 act says that states can't pre-empt federal copyright law, so the publisher's argument is that this law is a route around that.I assume that Maryland will argue, forcefully, that this is not a copyright law or an attempt to route around federal copyright law, but rather something else entirely. Indeed, as some have noticed, the Maryland law is deliberately "modest." It only says that if a publisher is already offering ebooks, it also has to make sure it will sell to libraries at a reasonable price. It's not forcing publishers to offer ebooks at all -- just make sure that the publishers can't treat consumers and libraries differently. And, as the libraries argued in the runup to this bill passing, there is historical evidence that a law that only impacts contracting does not impede on copyright:

When a reporter sends inquiries about claims made on your website, the best response is obviously to threaten them with a lawsuit. That should ensure a steady stream of positive press and deter them from asking further questions about claims made on your website.Oh, wait. It's the other thing. It ensures you'll be at least temporarily enshrined as an asshat and litigious thug, especially when the reporter is only asking questions any logical person might when coming across these claims.That's what just happened to Isabella Cheng of IPVM, a long-running and respected authority on security cameras and other video surveillance technology. Here are just some of IPVM's credentials:

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CNN, the news organization that, until recently, employed Chris Cuomo, and still employs Jeffrey Toobin, and is (for the moment at least) owned by AT&T which funded an entire extremist propaganda TV network just to appease President Trump (not to mention being absolutely terrible on privacy issues), wants you to hate social media. There may be reasons to hate on social media, but it's difficult to take CNN seriously when it presents itself (1) as some unbiased party in this discussion, and (2) puts forth an article that is nothing more than blatant moral panic propaganda about kids and social media.Are there dangers to kids on social media? Maybe! Are there benefits for kids on social media? Maybe! Does the article only present one side full of anecdotes without any actual data? You bet. The article presents a couple of anecdotes about teens with depression, and then just insists that it's because of social media. Apparently it may surprise CNN's reporters to learn this, but teenagers (and adults) have been dealing with depression for a long, long time, including before social media existed. Again, it's entirely possible that social media creates image problems for teens, but the article repeatedly just insists its true without evidence. It opens with a pure anecdote that is designed to pull at the emotional heart strings.

Earlier this year Apple received ample coverage about how the company was making privacy easier for its customers by introducing a new, simple, tracking opt-out button for users as part of an iOS 14.5 update. Early press reports heavily hyped the concept, which purportedly gave consumers control of which apps were able to collect and monetize user data or track user behavior across the internet. Advertisers (most notably Facebook) cried like a disappointed toddler at Christmas, given the obvious fact that giving users more control over data collection and monetization, means less money for them.By September researchers had begun to notice that Apple's opt-out system was somewhat performative anyway. The underlying system only really blocked app makers from accessing one bit of data: your phone's ID for Advertisers, or IDFA. There were numerous ways for app makers to track users anyway, so they quickly got to work doing exactly that, collecting information on everything from your IP address and battery charge and volume levels, to remaining device storage, metrics that can be helpful in building personalized profiles of each and every Apple user.Privacy advocates and the press noted how this was all giving Apple users a false sense of security without really fixing much. Privacy experts and press outlets also repeatedly informed Apple this was happening, but nothing changed. In fact, the Financial Times notes that six months after the feature was introduced, Apple has further softened its stance on the whole effort:

Earlier this year Apple received ample coverage about how the company was making privacy easier for its customers by introducing a new, simple, tracking opt-out button for users as part of an iOS 14.5 update. Early press reports heavily hyped the concept, which purportedly gave consumers control of which apps were able to collect and monetize user data or track user behavior across the internet. Advertisers (most notably Facebook) cried like a disappointed toddler at Christmas, given the obvious fact that giving users more control over data collection and monetization, means less money for them.By September researchers had begun to notice that Apple's opt-out system was somewhat performative anyway. The underlying system only really blocked app makers from accessing one bit of data: your phone's ID for Advertisers, or IDFA. There were numerous ways for app makers to track users anyway, so they quickly got to work doing exactly that, collecting information on everything from your IP address and battery charge and volume levels, to remaining device storage, metrics that can be helpful in building personalized profiles of each and every Apple user.Privacy advocates and the press noted how this was all giving Apple users a false sense of security without really fixing much. Privacy experts and press outlets also repeatedly informed Apple this was happening, but nothing changed. In fact, the Financial Times notes that six months after the feature was introduced, Apple has further softened its stance on the whole effort:

The US, UK and Australia have all announced a diplomatic boycott of the Beijing Winter Olympics. The reason given for the move is because of human rights abuses in China, particularly in the turkic-speaking region of Xinjiang. Techdirt has been writing about the Chinese authorities' use of technology to censor and carry out surveillance on the local Uyghur population, among others, for some years. One of the most controversial aspects of China's policy in the region is the use of huge detention camps. According to the authorities there, these camps are for educational and vocational training. Human rights organizations call them internment camps; some governments speak of "genocide" against the Uyghurs.Given the highly sensitive nature of the topic, it is naturally hard to ascertain what is really happening in these camps. One solution is to use satellite imagery to peek inside China's tightly-controlled borders. Perhaps the best-researched investigation using this technique appeared on BuzzFeed News last year. The main article, and the four follow-ups, revealed the hitherto unknown scale of the internment camps, but were necessarily limited by their use of an extreme physical viewpoint -- the view from space.A Chinese travel blogger going by the name of Guanguan decided to investigate on the ground some of the camps located by BuzzFeed News, by driving to them. The remarkable 20-minute video summary of his travels provides unique views of the camps, which complement the satellite imagery used by BuzzFeed News. Specifically, they show in some detail side-views of the camps. This allows Guanguan to make reasonable guesses about which camps are indeed for education and training of some kind, and which ones are likely to be high-security internment camps.The video is well-worth watching in its entirely, since it provides probably our best glimpse yet of the reality of China's internment camps for Uyghurs and others (wisely, Guanguan seems to be out of China now). In fact, the quality of the video images is such that IPVM, which specializes in covering the world of video surveillance, was able to recognize several of the security cameras used at the internment camps. There are a few cameras from the Chinese company Dahua Technology, but the majority identified come from Hikvision. This, Techdirt readers will recall, is the company whose director of cybersecurity and privacy said that IoT devices with backdoors "can't be used to spy on companies, individuals, or nations." IPVM reported that Hikvision "declined to comment" on these latest findings. Its article noted that the visual evidence of Hikvision cameras being used in multiple internment camps, the result of an interesting unplanned, ad-hoc collaboration between Western journalists and a Chinese video blogger, is likely to make things even worse for a company already blacklisted by the US government.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

As previously noted, Space X, Amazon, and others are pushing harder than ever into the low-orbit satellite broadband game. The industry, pockmarked by a long road of failures, involves firing thousands of smaller, cheaper, lower orbit satellite constellations into space to help supplement existing broadband services. The lower orbit means that LO satellite service will offer lower-latency broadband than traditional satellite offerings, which for 15 years or so have been widely maligned as expensive, slow, and "laggy," with annoying monthly caps.And while these services should absolutely help bring some additional options to rural Americans, nautical ventures, and those out of range of traditional service, folks shouldn't get their hopes up in terms of broader disruption of the uncompetitive U.S. telecom market. The physics involved in satellite transmission means there will always be limited capacity and odd throttling and network management restrictions, meaning it won't really make much headway in highly monopolized major metro areas. In short, the tech is absolutely a positive advancement, but it's not going to be the game changer many think.Enter the other major problem: the gold rush into the low orbit satellite space without much in the way of regulatory oversight has resulted in an explosion of space traffic and debris that's already causing genuine harm. The tens of thousands of additional low orbit satellites being flung into orbit without much of an over-arching plan not only make space navigation immeasurably more complicated and dangerous, the light pollution created is having clear and profound harms on astronomy and other research. Harms researchers say can't be mitigated with technology.While regulators in the U.S. have taken a few steps to mitigate space debris, most experts say it's not enough. And regulators have done even less to manage the low-orbit gold rush's impact on science. Generally, the modus operandi has been to kiss the ass of companies like Amazon and Space X in this space, letting them dictate the cadence and rules of deployment. The same approach is occurring in the EU, and it's starting to raise some hackles:

Well, it couldn't happen to a more deserving shitheel. Clearview, the tech company with 10 billion facial recognition images and zero shame, has now been uninvited from the largest portions of the British Empire.In February of this year, the Canadian government officially asked Clearview to get off its lawn following an investigation by the country's Privacy Commission. The Commission concluded Clearview's modus operandi -- scraping images and personal data from hundreds of websites -- violated the nation's privacy laws. By that point, Clearview had already pulled out of the Canadian market, but not before allowing the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to test drive its product. (This test driving was also determined to be illegal.)Nine months later, the Australian government did the same thing, coming to many of the same conclusions. Local laws were ignored by Clearview when it scraped the web for personal info, cutting Australian residents out of the consent loop. The Australian government told Clearview to get the hell out, to which Clearview responded that it did nothing wrong and that it had stopped selling to Australian government agencies months before, when the investigation was initiated.That left the county seat of the British Empire (so to [very colloquially] speak), the United Kingdom itself. As Natasha Lomas reports for TechCrunch, the UK government is offering an incentive plan to Clearview to hasten its exit.

As has been a hot topic of discussion of late, YouTube has a copyright enforcement problem on its hands. To be fair, this problem has existed for some time, but due to some recent transparency from YouTube itself over how often it receives claims and enforces them, the scale of this problem is becoming more widely known. In YouTube's minor defense: this is difficult challenge to overcome. The platform operates internationally, which means that it often finds itself attempting to navigate the nuances of copyright laws throughout the world. Still, to say it's not a problem would be silly. And, frankly, YouTube's creative community is becoming more and more vocal about it.Take Mark Fitzpatrick, for instance, the operator of the Totally Not Mark YouTube channel. Fitzpatrick releases a video a week covering mostly anime topics, primarily either reviews of anime shows or episodes, alongside some let's draws for anime images and characters. He has had this channel for several years and has well over half a million subscribers. This is all fairly straightforward fair use stuff. And, yet, Mark was slammed with a series of copyright claims on 150 of his videos over the course of a day or so, resulting in those videos being taken offline.

The spies are back to complaining that the always-on digital world and the omnipresence of surveillance devices (both public and private) is making it difficult to do spy stuff.Last January, sources were telling Yahoo that it's no longer enough to carry around a few fake documents to get past customs and engage in spycraft -- not when the cover identities are bereft of the digital detritus generated by simply existing in a connected world. And it's difficult to move about unobserved when every street light, business, and front porch has a camera attached to it, monitoring activity 24/7/365.The report also noted that online access to a large variety of information also made it more difficult to engage in covert activities. Russian counterintelligence agents were apparently able to sniff out CIA agents working in US embassies by looking for things like prior postings in certain countries, pay bumps for hazardous work, or mismatches in salary for employees with similar titles. Some of this investigative work could be achieved by utilizing open source information gleaned from government sites and professional-oriented platforms like LinkedIn. Data from the massive Office of Personnel Management hack likely filled in the rest of the details.It isn't all losses, though. The same surveillance apparati that made it difficult for covert operatives to maintain cover also made it easier for them to track their targets. But the overall tone of the report was that undercover work needed to undergo an extensive overhaul or it would be rendered almost entirely useless.It's been almost two years since that report was released. Since then, surveillance tech has become even more ubiquitous, with governments and private citizens alike installing more cameras and monitoring other people's movements and activities more frequently.The complaints from agencies utilizing covert surveillance haven't changed, though. What used to be extremely difficult is now almost impossible, according to this report from the Wall Street Journal. (alt. link here)

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The common "accepted knowledge" these days among many is that the rise of disinformation and conspiracy theories must be driven by social media, and Facebook in particular (with Twitter and YouTube right behind). This theory has always seemed a bit bonkers, and we've pointed to multiple detailed, data-driven studies that showed that cable news was a much bigger driver of misinformation than social media. Specifically, it found that conspiracy theories and misinformation and the like didn't actually "go viral" until after it appeared on cable news.So, it's good (but not at all surprising) to find yet another study pointing out the same thing. This one, first highlighted by MediaPost, involved a big survey exploring the spread of conspiracy theories -- and found that the mainstream media is often the biggest vector, rather than social media.

The US Senate this week approved a new five-year term for Federal Communications Commission Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, making her the first permanent FCC chair in agency history. Technically the first female chair was Mignon Clyburn, who temporarily served as interim chair before Tom Wheeler was appointed boss back in 2013. Rosenworcel's term was set to expire at the end of the year, raising some concerns that her re-nomination would stall, leaving the GOP with a 2-1 FCC majority at Biden's FCC.While that scenario was avoided, Rosenworcel's appointment still leaves the agency gridlocked at 2-2 commissioners, and incapable of having a voting majority on any policy issue of substance. If you recall this was quite by design; the GOP rushed to appoint Trump ally Nathan Simington to the commission late last year in a quick appointment process that took less than 30 days. This was at the behest of the telecom and media sectors, which very much don't want the Biden FCC rolling back any of the Trump-era deregulatory favors, whether that's net neutrality or media consolidation rules.To that end, telecom giants like AT&T, hand in hand with Rupert Murdoch, are now focused on blocking Biden's other FCC pick, Gigi Sohn, from being appointed to the FCC so Rosenworcel can't actually use her Democratic majority. That has involved pushing the false claim through trusted news outlets that Sohn wants to "censor conservatives," despite absolutely zero evidence that's actually true.This being the post-truth era (especially in the GOP), that doesn't seem to matter. Saule Omarova, a Cornell Law School professor and Biden's pick for comptroller of the currency, backed out of her nomination this week because the banking industry was worried she might actually hold them lightly accountability for something. The banking industry in turn got the GOP to run a campaign accusing Omarova of being a "communist" because she was born in the Soviet Union:

Clearview has burned its bridges inside the facial recognition tech industry. Despite it being largely morally malleable, the industry as a whole appears to have cut ties with CEO Hoan Ton-That's startup, which relies on more than 10 billion images scraped from the web to generate a database for its customers to match faces with.The company played it fast and loose upon rollout, handing it out to whoever seemed interested, inviting them to run searches against photos of friends and family members. The "give it a spin" invitations were handed out to government agencies as well, inviting cops to play image roulette with Clearview's ever-expanding database.To date, the efficacy of Clearview's AI remains untested. Clearview did finally volunteer to have the National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) examine its product for accuracy but only allowed it to run a one-to-one test -- the kind that would, for instance, allow a phone user to unlock their phone via facial recognition.This is not the product Clearview sells. Clearview sells one-to-many matching, relying on images and other personal info scraped from the internet. This practice has alienated the internet. It has also gotten Clearview kicked out of two countries and served with multiple lawsuits. Consequently, other facial recognition tech companies are cursing Clearview both over and under their breath as the company somehow manages to remain viable in the face of months of negative press coverage.Persona non grata status apparently applies to even other controversial facial recognition tech companies. AnyVision spent some time in the media spotlight for being used by the Israeli military to surveill Palestinians. It managed to take down Microsoft with it (albeit temporarily), exposing the tech giant's pinky-swear-rejection of enabling abusive surveillance to be the lip service it was. AnyVision doubled down on its first mistake(s) by threatening to sue news agencies that reported on this factual development.AnyVision resurfaced a couple of years later as the company behind pervasive surveillance systems deployed by Texas public schools. AnyVision appeared to be good at what it did. It matched faces per school hot lists and let administrators know any time those faces were detected. A little too good, perhaps. The system racked up 164,000 "hits" during its seven-day test run, returning as many as 1,100 matches for a single student.AnyVision is back. Sort of. It has rebranded as Oosto, divested itself of some of its more problematic deployments, and is now taking shots at Clearview.Back in September, it argued that facial recognition companies selling to government agencies should offer customers a blank database -- one the end users could fill with mugshots and persons of interest. This was a clear shot across Clearview's bow. Clearview's main selling point is its scraped database of 10 billion images. AnyVision also forwarded this suggestion to a number of government bodies, including the UK's Surveillance Commissioner and the NIST.It's always good to be wary of private companies pleading for the government to regulate them more. It often means incumbents are looking for better ways to stave off competition by helping enact rigorous guidelines that upstarts can't afford to implement. And AnyVision's suggested "fixes" for facial recognition tech obviously aims to exclude Clearview from the government market in multiple countries, making it that much easier for the rebranded company to find customers in need of controversial tech that at least won't be as controversial as Clearview.The war of words continues, albeit behind a paywall:

Summary: In early May 2021, writer and researcher Mariam Barghouti was reporting from the West Bank on escalating conflicts between Israeli forces and Palestinian protestors, and making frequent social media posts about her experiences and the events she witnessed. Amidst a series of tweets from the scene of a protest, shortly after one in which she stated “I feel like I’m in a war zone,” Barghouti’s account was temporarily restricted by Twitter. She was unable to post new tweets, and her bio and several of her recent tweets were replaced with a notice stating that the account was “temporarily unavailable because it violates the Twitter Media Policy”.The incident was highlighted by other writers, some of whom noted that the nature of the restriction seemed unusual, and the incident quickly gained widespread attention. Fellow writer and researcher Joey Ayoub tweeted that Barghouti had told him the restriction would last for 12 hours according to Twitter, and expressed concern for her safety without access to a primary communication channel in a dangerous situation.The restriction was lifted roughly an hour later. Twitter told Barghouti (and later re-stated to VICE’s Motherboard) that the enforcement action was a “mistake” and that there was “no violation” of the social media platform’s policies. Motherboard also asked Twitter to clarify which specific policies were initially believed to have been violated, but says the company “repeatedly refused”.Company Considerations:

For a long time now, it's been fairly clear that consumer safety was an afterthought for some of the more well known companies developing self-driving technology. That was made particularly clear a few years back with Uber's fatality in Tempe, Arizona, which revealed that the company really hadn't thought much at all about public safety. The car involved in the now notorious fatality wasn't even programmed to detect jaywalkers, and there was little or no structure at Uber to meaningfully deal with public safety issues. The race to the pot of innovation gold was all consuming, and all other considerations (including human lives) were afterthoughts.That same cavalier disregard for public safety has been repeatedly obvious over at Tesla, where the company's undercooked "autopilot" technology has increasingly resulted in a nasty series of ugly mishaps, and, despite years of empty promises, still doesn't work as marketed or promised. That's, of course, not great for the public, who didn't opt in to having their lives put at risk by 2,500 pound death machines for innovation's sake. Every week there's new evidence and lawsuits showing this technology is undercooked and dangerous, and every week we seemingly find new ways to downplay it.This week the scope of Elon Musk's failures on this front became more clear thanks to a New York Times piece, which profiles how corner cutting on the autopilot project was an active choice by Musk at several points in the development cycle. The piece repeatedly and clearly shows that Musk overstated what the technology was capable of for the better part of the last decade:

Apple's announcement that it was suing Israeli malware purveyor NSO Group for targeting iPhone users was coupled with another, equally dismaying (I mean, for NSO…) announcement: it would be informing targets of malware anytime it detected a suspected intrusion.Actually, this may be more of a concern for NSO's customers. After all, they're still paying the same licensing fees even if their targets are being warned of hacking attempts. It can't make them happy and -- since it appears many of NSO's customers like to target non-terrorists and non-criminals -- there's really nothing they can do about it. Local entities may be sworn to secrecy with court orders (if those are even obtained) but there's nothing preventing Apple from alerting users that malware might be present on their phones.Given the long list of seemingly inappropriate targets for NSO's Pegasus spyware -- which includes journalists, activists, dissidents, government critics, political figures, religious leaders, lawyers, ex-wives, etc. -- Apple's policy is the Right Thing To Do. NSO's customers agree to use the spyware to target terrorists and dangerous criminals. They clearly don't do that. If NSO won't stop them (and it won't [until very recently]), this is one way to mitigate the damage.And so the disclosures have flowed. A Polish prosecutor who dared to offend the ruling party in that country was one of the first notified by Apple's new program. Since then, the floodgates have opened, potentially ruining the surveillance plans of several governments. Here's Carly Page for TechCrunch, rolling out the details on Apple's unwelcome mat.

Any cursory look at Techdirt for stories involving YouTube and copyright issues will give you a very accurate impression of the state of all things copyright for the platform: it's a complete shitshow. You will see all kinds of craziness in those posts: white noise getting hit with a copyright claim, labels claiming copyright on songs in the public domain, and all kinds of issues with automated systems like ContentID causing chaos. That really is a sample platter rather than the whole meal, but it's also worth noting that YouTube knows this is a problem.To that point, the platform recently put out its first "Copyright Transparency Report" that teases out all kinds of numbers for copyright claims on YouTube videos. As with any statistical report, how you view it is going to come down to how you want to slice and dice the numbers. For instance, it's worth noting that over 99% of the copyright claims YouTube receives comes from ContentID, an automated system. More to the point of this particular post, you will likely also witness copyright enforcement advocates focus on numbers like this from YouTube's own report.

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Missouri Governor Mike Parson is nothing if not committed to shamelessly lying. As you'll recall, after journalists from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ethically informed the state that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) website included a flaw that revealed the social security numbers of over 600,000 state teachers and school administrators, Parson responded by calling the reporters hackers and vowing to prosecute them. Again, the DESE system displayed this information directly in the HTML, available for anyone to see if they knew where to look. That's not hacking. That's incompetent computer security.So far, this has mostly played out as expected. A month after the revelations, DESE finally admitted it fucked up and apologized to the teachers and administrators and offered them identity fraud protection services. Then, last week, a public record request revealed something incredible, though perhaps not surprising: the FBI had already told Missouri officials that no hacking took place and DESE had prepared a statement (correctly) thanking the journalists for alerting them to their own fuck up... but that statement was ditched in favor of the nonsense one claiming that the journalists "hacked" the system. As we said in that last story, right at the end it notes that the Highway Patrol investigation, instigated by Parson, was "still active."And now Parson is still standing by the ridiculous claim that the reporters are hackers. As for how he could possibly claim that after the revelation of internal documents on the situation? Well, Parson is trotting out the old "fake news" bullshit:

For several years now a steady parade of scandals have showcased how the collection and sale of consumer location data (to governments and data brokers alike) is a hugely unaccountable mess with few if any guardrails. And every week or so a new scandal emerges making that point abundantly clear. This week it's the unsurprising revelation that "security" and "family safety" app Life360, which lets parents track the location of their kids, has been selling access to this data to data brokers for years:

There's something different about being a cop. The training, the atmosphere, the culture… all of it leads to officers handling crime differently than regular people. Even when they're the ones committing it.A normal person doesn't do the things Newark police officer Luis Santiago did. While driving on the Garden State Parkway, Santiago struck and killed 29-year-old Damian Dymka. This is what Officer Santiago (who was off-duty and in his own vehicle) -- with all his training, expertise, and knowledge of applicable laws -- did next:

We'd already noted how Elon Musk's Starlink isn't going to be the broadband disruption play many people had imagined. The service lacks the capacity to really provide broadband to more than 500,000 to 800,000 users during its first few years in operation (for context, somewhere between 20 and 40 million Americans lack access to broadband, and another 83 million live under a broadband monopoly). With a $100 monthly cost and a $500 first month equipment fee, it's also not doing any favors for the millions of Americans who lack access to affordable broadband.Eventually, with a fully upgraded fleet of 42,000 low orbit satellites years from now, Wall Street analysts estimate Starlink could potentially reach upwards of 6 million users. But again that's an optimistic high end guess, and it requires that everything go swimmingly the next few years.Everything is not going swimmingly. Chip shortages initially delayed Starlink's exit out of beta. And now a new leaked email suggests that Musk is warning about a potential bankruptcy for Space X if the company can't sort out production of the company's Raptor engine:

Our lives are lived at the intersection of vast systems (economic, technological, and beyond) that are incredibly complex and often chaotic, and it's hard to understand and embrace what author Neil Chilson's new book, Getting Out Of Control, calls "the emergent mindset." On this week's episode, Neil joins us to discuss his book and why you can't simply "control" complex systems.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.

Sidney Powell, the self-proclaimed "Kraken," has managed to turn a bunch of potentially defamatory allegations and unabashed pro-Trump showboating into actual money. I mean, she probably had before this, what with the Trump camp being hip deep in grifters at all times. (And neck deep in people who apparently just love being grifted.)But this time it's the grifter, alleged defamer, and spectacular flameout being relieved of money. Sidney Powell -- along with several other lawyers who sued over Michigan election results (most notably, fellow grifter L. Lin Wood) -- has already been sanctioned by a federal court. Back in August, Judge Linda Parker ran Powell and her legal arguments through the judicial woodchipper, leaving nothing but minute chunks of election fraud rhetoric and MAGA blood scattered across the 110 pages of masterclass excoriation.For instance:

Back in 2008, Verizon proclaimed that we didn't need additional consumer privacy protections (or opt in requirements, or net neutrality rules) because consumers would keep the company honest. "The extensive oversight provided by literally hundreds of thousands of sophisticated online users would help ensure effective enforcement of good practices and protect consumers," Verizon said at the time.Six years later and Verizon found itself at the heart of a massive privacy scandal after it began covertly injecting unique user-tracking headers into wireless data packets. The technology allowed Verizon to track users all over the internet, and the company neither bothered to inform users it would happen, or gave users any way to opt out. It took security researchers two years before security researchers even realized what Verizon was doing. Verizon ultimately received a $1.35 million fine from the FCC (a tiny portion of what Verizon made off the program), but still uses the same tech (albeit with functioning opt-out) today.A few years later and it's not clear Verizon has actually learned all that much. The company last week began expanding its data collection and monetization once again, this time via a new "Verizon Custom Experience" the company says will help it "personalize our communications with you, give you more relevant product and service recommendations, and develop plans, services and offers that are more appealing to you." In reality that means Verizon is expanding the collection of data on the websites you visit, the people you communicate with, and the apps you use.Of course Verizon isn't asking user permission before enrolling them in this new exciting "experience," and while the company claims it emailed users to inform them they were being opted in, many customers (including myself) never received any such notification. So while users can opt out through a fairly simply opt-out process, most users aren't going to know they're enrolled in the first place. And Verizon being Verizon (where most of its apps and services are shoddy copies of better products), nobody really wants any of this stuff in the first place: