Techdirt

Just because your service provider is willing to notify you of the government's (perhaps unexpected) interest in all your digital belongings doesn't mean there's someone standing between you and the government's flimsy piece of administrative paper.A recent report by the Los Angeles Times -- based on notifications from service providers about government demands for data -- shows there's not much that can stop the government from obtaining a bunch of info with almost zero judicial oversight. Email notifications from Google shared with journalists show just how powerless end users are when confronted with government demands for data. Sure, notification is nice, but it's not all that helpful.The government has almost unlimited power to make requests for data. The people they serve, however, are subject to demands that cannot possibly be met.

The 2021 Complete PMP Career Training Bundle has 10 courses of training project management and different methodologies and tools. You'll learn about various methods like Lean Six Sigma, Agile, Scrum, Waterfall, and more. You'll also learn how to use Smartsheets, Trello, and Monday to help you organize and optimize your projects. One course covers what you need to know for the PMP certification exam. The bundle is on sale for $35.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

We had just noted that should Donald Trump ever launch his rumored social media website, it would undoubtedly rely on Section 230 despite the fact that Trump insisted that Section 230 must be repealed and even tried to block military funding if the law wasn't taken away.Yet, apparently we don't even need to wait for his vaporware social media website to appear. As the excellent @Section_230 Twitter feed alerts us, the new "The Office of Donald J. Trump" website already appears to invoke the protections of Section 230 by mirroring its language in its terms of service concerning liability for 3rd party content:

Once again, it's time to end encryption... for the children. That's the message being put out by the UK's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). And that message is largely regurgitated word-for-word by Sky News:

By now it should be clear that DRM is essentially an arms race that will never be won by producers and publishers of content. While the fall of even the most vaunted DRM platforms has shown how useless those platforms are, the more consequential outcomes of DRM tend to be the way it bricks the products people bought or else limits the use of those products once the DRM is no longer supported. In sum total, it's very clear that DRM is very much anti-consumer, while failing completely at being anti-pirate.It's a lesson that some in the video game industry insist on re-learning over and over again. Activision recently re-released Crash Bandicoot 4 for the new generation of consoles... and a long-awaited debut on PC. Despite the game having no online gaming components in it, Activision decided to put an online DRM requirement in the game, forcing it to check in with the Battle.net app for it to work. To be clear, there was no reason to include the DRM beyond it being a piracy check. And to be equally clear, even that reason was silly. Why? Well...

Lots of plain view jurisprudence relies on the fact that if it can be observed by random people -- not just by law enforcement -- then there's no Fourth Amendment issue. If airplanes can pass over someone's land, surely police helicopters can do the same thing without undoing expectations of privacy.Some of this judicial thought process has been altered by persistent surveillance from law enforcement cameras -- ones that don't just observe, but also record and provide officers with searchable footage of residences investigators are interested in. Then there's the incidental aspect. If a cop enters a home to perform community caretaking functions and spots contraband, this is legal as it's not the point of the cop's entry. If the cop is there solely to look for contraband, a warrant and probable cause is needed.But a brief overflight generally isn't a Constitutional issue, no matter how high a fence those under investigation have constructed. A flyover isn't persistent or invasive surveillance. But tech advances have altered how flyovers by government agencies are conducted. In this case, via FourthAmendment.com, the Michigan Court of Appeals has found in favor of a defendant who moved to suppress evidence gathered by the city with its drone.And this is still very much law enforcement activity, even if it wasn't related to the sort of crime we normally associate with constitutional violations. From the decision [PDF]:

Despite all the nonsense that dominates so much of the public discussion on the subject, free speech in the age of big social media platforms is a vital topic with a lot of nuances, and there are many people with important perspectives on it. One such person is EFF Director of International Freedom of Expression Jillian York, whose new book Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism offers an exploration of the topic rooted in personal experience and years of activism — and she joins us on this week's episode to discuss the challenges and pitfalls of internet content moderation and its impact on free expression around the world.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

It's not sure why journalists keep having to do the wireless industry's job, yet here we are.Sometime around mid-march, Motherboard reporter Joseph Cox wrote a story explaining how he managed to pay a hacker $16 to gain access to most of his online accounts. How? The hacker exploited a flaw in the way text messages are routed around the internet, paying a third party (with pretty clearly flimsy standards for determining trust) to reroute all of his text messages, including SMS two factor authentication. From there, it was relatively trivial to break into several of the journalist's accounts, including Bumble, Whatsapp, and Postmates.It's a flaw the industry has apparently known about for some time, but they only decided to take action after the story made the rounds. This week, all major wireless carriers indicated they'd be taking significant steps to the way text messages are routed to take aim at the flaw:

Well, here's a fun one. Over the weekend, the musician Lil Nas X announced that, along with MSCHF, he was selling "Satan Shoes." From the beginning this was all just a silly publicity stunt that more or less played out probably exactly as those involved expected. If you don't know what MSCHF is then it's worth reading up on the organization that claims it's based on "structured chaos" and only ever so often randomly drops some kind of offering for sale, usually in limited quantities that get lots of attention and sell out quickly. As was summarized in a Business Insider article about MSCHF last year:

Are you tired of wasting your time while trying to remove vocals from a song manually? EasySplitter Pro will split any song into 4 stems: Vocal, Instrumental, Drums, and Bass. Each split song can be played in real-time in the built-in audio player at your own dashboard. All the files can also be downloaded at any time. The file history feature will allow you to keep your split files on hand. All the files will be stored in your cabinet. It's on sale for $40.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

As I'm sure most people are aware, last week, the House Energy & Commerce Committee held yet another hearing on "big tech" and its content moderation practices. This one was ostensibly on "disinformation," and had Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai, and Twitter's Jack Dorsey as the panelists. It went on for five and a half hours which appears to be the norm for these things. Last week, I did write about both Zuckerberg and Pichai's released opening remarks, in which both focused on various efforts they had made to combat disinfo. Of course, the big difference between the two was that Zuckerberg then suggested 230 should be reformed, while Pichai said it was worth defending.If you actually want to watch all five and a half hours of this nonsense, you can do so here:As per usual -- and as was totally expected -- you got a lot more of the same. You had very angry looking Representatives practically screaming about awful stuff online. You had Democrats complaining about the platforms failing to take down info they disliked, while just as equally angry Republicans complained about the platforms taking down content they liked (often this was the same, or related, content). Amusingly, often just after saying that websites took down content they shouldn't have (bias!), the very same Representatives would whine "but how dare you not take down this other content." It was the usual mess of "why don't you moderate exactly the way I want you to moderate," which is always a silly, pointless activity. There was also a lot of "think of the children!" moral panic.However, Jack Dorsey's testimony was somewhat different than Zuckerberg's and Pichai's. While it also talks somewhat about how Twitter has dealt with disinformation, his testimony actually went significantly further in noting real, fundamental changes that Twitter is exploring that go way beyond the way most people think about this debate. Rather than focusing on the power that Twitter has to decide how, who, and what to moderate, Dorsey's testimony talked about various ways in which they are seeking to give more control to end users themselves and empower those end users, rather than leaving Twitter as the final arbiter. He talked about "algorithmic choice" so that rather than having Twitter controlling everything, different users could opt-in to different algorithmic options, and different providers could create their own algorithmic options. And he mentioned the Bluesky project, and potentially moving Twitter to a protocol-based system, rather than one that Twitter fully controls.

Parler -- the social media cesspool that claimed the only things that mattered to it were the First Amendment and, um… FCC standards -- has reopened with new web hosting after Amazon decided it no longer wished to host the sort of content Parler has become infamous for.Parler has held itself up to be the last bastion of the First Amendment and a protector of those unfairly persecuted by left-wing tech companies. The users who flocked to the service also considered themselves free speech absolutists. But like far too many self-ordained free speech "absolutists," they think the only speech that should be limited is moderation efforts by companies like Twitter and Facebook.And, like a lot of people who mistakenly believe the First Amendment guarantees them access to an active social media account, a lot of Parler users don't seem to understand the limits of First Amendment protections. Parler, like every other social media service, has had to engage in moderation efforts that removed content undeniably protected by the First Amendment but that it did not want to host on its platform. It has also had to remove illegal content and that's where its most recent troubles began.Over the weekend, the resurrected Parler crossed over into meta territory, resulting in an unintentionally hilarious announcement to its aggrieved users upset about the platform's decision to forward Capitol riot related posts to law enforcement. It really doesn't get any better than this in terms of schadenfreude and whatever the German word is for an ad hoc group of self-proclaimed First Amendment "experts" having their second favorite right explained to them.Here's Matt Binder for Mashable:

When it comes to the video game industry, there has been some recent recognition that copyright laws and the ways that publishers utilize them have hampered the ability to preserve this sort of art. In the olden days of a decade or so ago, the challenges around preserving video games centered around both the publisher's unwillingness to allow a group access to source code to preserve a game and the deterioration of physical game media. But in these modern times, this has changed. Now, the challenges are the publisher copyright question... and that same publisher's ability to simply stop supporting the online resources modern games and platforms require to run. Given the ongoing war on emulators by the likes of Nintendo and a rather insane industry stance that preservation is trumped by copyright concerns, there is a very real risk of losing the ability to preserve video game history at all.Recent rumors that Sony is going to shut down online stores for a bunch of old hardware, has thrown the question of what happens to digital purchases in sharp relief.

It's always a problem when a private citizen starts horning in on the government's racket. The government has plenty of rackets and likes them to stay in their possession, undisturbed and unthreatened.When the government feels threatened, it starts making threats. And, since it has almost all the power, its threats usually work. But sometimes it gets sued. That's what's happening here: a government regulatory body has decided the incumbent interests it has propped up for years is more important than little things like the First Amendment.A drone operator in North Carolina is suing the state because it claims he can't fly drones over land and take pictures without the proper license. It's not a commercial drone operator license. (He has that.) It's a license that basically says the government has given him permission to photograph the land underneath the drones his company operates. (h/t Techdirt reader Vidiot)Here's the impetus of the lawsuit being brought by photographer Michael Jones, as summarized by Miriam McNabb of Drone Life:

Cops have been using protests against police violence to engage in police violence against journalists. The addition of federal cops to the heated mix in Portland, Oregon made this worse. The new cops amped it up so much journalists had to seek a protective order telling cops to stop doing things they knew they shouldn't be doing, like targeting journalists with things like pepper spray and rubber bullets.But they're going further. Wading into the policing of protests -- something already fraught with First Amendment concerns -- cops are arresting journalists simply for covering demonstrations. An attempted prosecution of a reporter in Iowa ended with an arrested journalist being cleared of all charges. That it ever reached the point it needed to be handled by a judge and jury is an indictment of local cops and local prosecutors. (But not the kind of indictment that leads to prosecutions, unfortunately.)A similar case is underway in Los Angeles. A reporter for website L.A. Taco released footage of him being attacked by LAPD officers while covering the city's chaotic "celebration" of a World Series win.

There's a new cottage industry of Section 230 lawsuits springing up from the law offices of Tycko & Zavareei in Washington, DC (with the assistance of Pearson, Simon & Warshaw of California, the state where the lawsuits are being filed).Over the past few years, we've seen a plethora of lawsuits alleging vicarious liability for terrorist attacks being filed against social media platforms by opportunists at 1-800-LAW-FIRM and Excolo Law. Not a single one of these lawsuits has made it past the pleading stage, even if one Ninth Circuit judge went off the rails a bit during oral arguments last spring. Whatever Section 230 immunity doesn't eliminate, the law firms' decision to sue the wrong parties (i.e., anyone but the people who committed the crimes) has generally proven fatal to their claims.Fortunately, this new batch of lawsuits doesn't involve exploiting people who've recently suffered personal tragedies. Instead, they're trying to force companies like Google and Apple to reimburse small-time losers who lost real money to gambling apps.No less than five putative class actions over (incredibly small) gambling losses have been filed by Hassan Zavareei of Tycko & Zavareei and Daniel Warshaw of Pearson, Simon & Warshaw. The only unique factor is the dollar amount of gambling losses. But these aren't whales. These are small fish in the online gambling ocean demanding courts order app store purveyors pay them back for the tens of dollars they've lost. Not a single one of these plaintiffs has lost more than $300 to gambling apps, but every single one of them is demanding a chunk of damages their attorneys claim exceeds $5,000,000.Everything is boilerplate, other than the named plaintiffs' individual losses and their choice of app store purveyor. Apple is named in one lawsuit. Google is named in all the others. But they're all equally ridiculous. Feast your eyes on this accusation:

The 2021 Complete Computer Science Training Bundle has 9 courses to help you build your IT and computer science skills. Courses cover Python, Linux, TensorFlow, Discrete Math, and more. It's on sale for $40.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Over the last couple years of a near constant flow of mis- and disinformation all about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, one element that has popped up a lot (including in our comments) especially among angry Trumpists, is that because Section (c)(2)(A) of the law has a "good faith" qualifier, it means that websites that moderate need to show they did so with "good faith." Many seem to (falsely) assume that this is a big gotcha, and they can get past the 230 immunity barrier by litigating over whether or not a particular moderation choice was done in "good faith." However, as we've explained, only one small part of the law -- (c)(2)(A) mentions "good faith." It's this part:

Though text messaging is starting to look somewhat archaic in the WhatsApp era, it's still the most effective way for political campaigns and nonprofits to reach their target audience, in part because 90 percent of text messages are read within 3 minutes. But the collision between wanting to allow these organizations to market their candidates and campaigns -- and protecting consumers from an ever-steady array of scammers, spoofers, and text messaging spammers -- has proven to be a cumbersome dance of dysfunction.The latest chapter in this saga: wireless carriers say they're working on a new system that would give each organization looking to send text messages a shiny new trust score. So far wireless carriers aren't saying how this trust score would be determined, but those who don't rank highly enough on the scale won't be able to send text messages en masse. The system is being contemplated after the 2020 election saw no shortage of text messaging spam that wireless subscribers found it difficult -- if not impossible -- to properly opt out of.The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 is a dated piece of befuddling legislation that's been interpreted to mean that you can't send unsolicited text message spam en masse. But marketers and political campaigns have long wiggled around the restrictions via P2P text message efforts, which still let you send blanket text message campaigns -- just somewhat individually via pre-scripted templates. These efforts were ramped up by the Sanders campaign, and were even more heavily embraced by the Trump campaign.Wireless carriers want to make sure customers don't get annoyed and leave, but they also want to ensure they won't be held liable under the TCPA. At the same time, many political organizations are understandably a bit nervous about companies like AT&T determining who is or isn't trustworthy in a way that probably won't be transparent:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, the press was still pretending encryption contributed to the Paris attacks when there was another attack in Brussels and... politicians rushed to blame encryption without waiting for the evidence (which didn't come). Meanwhile, the DOJ was fighting Apple in court over encryption when a new flaw in iMessage encryption was discovered, leading the DOJ to ask for a postponement in the case — and this all raised some questions about apparent contradictions in the DOJ's various statements as well as statements by the FBI.Also, though it happened the previous Friday afternoon, this was the week that we covered Hulk Hogan winning his lawsuit against Gawker.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, a major loss for Righthaven set up the important precedent that copying an entire work can still be fair use. We were dismayed by the loophole-happy lawyers defending the government's domain seizures, and had a post about how copyright filters were presenting a serious challenge for DJ culture. Meanwhile, the New York Times was getting used to its new soft paywall, and it was a bit of a mess: columnists were telling readers how to get around it, while the paper was trying to shut down a Twitter account that aided people in doing so, and somehow convincing itself that most people would pay — all while we wondered what the DMCA anti-circumvention implications were.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, the Supreme Court was considering some important cases to do with what can be patented. Companies were rushing to build web-based word processors after Google's purchase of Writely, Microsoft was embarking on an attempt to compete with Craigslist, and credit agencies were fighting against any rules that would force them to protect people's privacy. One judge tossed out a bizarre lawsuit claiming open source software violates antitrust law, and another shut down the RIAA's dreams of randomly hunting through everyone's computers. Meanwhile, the FBI was still trying to figure out email.

Well, that didn't last long. You will recall that in early February a Utah theme park called Evermore filed a very stupid trademark lawsuit against Taylor Swift. At supposed issue was Swift's new album, Evermore, and the associated merchandise for it. The theme park claimed that Swift's album was driving their search engine rankings down, that people would be confused thinking she was somehow connected to the theme park, and that the park also produces some music, putting them in the same competitive marketplace as the singer. Swift's team countersued, alleging that some of the park's actors would sing and perform copyrighted music, including Swift's. It was all, frankly, very dumb.But merely a month later, the dumbness is gone. Rolling Stone reports that both sides have dropped their lawsuits and reached an agreement, one which does not carry any monetary exchange.

Summary: For over a century, Edvard Eriksen’s bronze statue of The Little Mermaid becoming human has been installed on a rock along the water in Copenhagen, Denmark. The statue was designed to represent the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, and has become a tourist attraction and landmark.

It's no secret that Elizabeth Warren thinks the big internet companies should be broken up. She's made that argument emphatically over the years. I'm not exactly clear what breaking them up actually accomplishes beyond punishing the companies, but as a Senator, she can certainly make the arguments for why it makes sense, or pass laws that impact how antitrust works.However, what she cannot and should not do, is threaten to punish a company for its speech. And, yet, that's exactly what she did. Amazon tweeted at Warren after Warren said that Amazon exploits loopholes and tax havens, and that she was introducing a bill to make the company pay more taxes. In response, Amazon said in a short tweet thread:

I've already explained how Senator Mark Warner's "SAFE TECH Act" is an attack on the open internet. However, it goes beyond that. Over at OneZero, Cathy Reisenwitz has written a compelling op-ed explaining how the SAFE TECH Act will actually make the internet a lot less safe for many people.In some ways, her argument builds on what we already know about the disastrous human impact of FOSTA -- the last attack on Section 230 that was sold to the public as a way to "protect women and children" online. In fact, the evidence now suggests that after FOSTA sex trafficking increased and made it that much more difficult for law enforcement to find and stop sex trafficking. Some in Congress are finally realizing that FOSTA was perhaps a mistake and would like to study the impact of it.One would hope that this is allowed to happen before Senators like Warner are allowed to ram through further changes that they don't seem to understand.As Reisenwitz writes, everything about the SAFE TECH Act would create more harm -- again with sex workers being put at significant risk.

In 2019, facts came to light showing ICE had set up an entire fake college in Michigan to "catch" foreign visitors in the act of COMPLYING WITH FEDERAL LAW by continuing to pursue advanced degrees. Student visas remain valid as long as foreign visitors continue their education. The dwindling supply of H-1B visas under Trump meant that staying on top of educational obligations was a priority for those already in the country.But instead of sitting back and seeing whether some H-1B visa holders violated their obligations, ICE set up an a fake college -- one with a campus and a Facebook page and personnel who gladly accepted $100 application fees from H-1B hopefuls. ICE even asked a private entity to step in and designate its faux college as fully accredited for H-1B applicants to sell the ruse.After the ruse served its purpose, ICE moved in. It managed to ensnare all of eight people who might be associated with defrauding foreign visitors. ICE apparently avoided looking too hard at itself and its personnel... which took cash from applicants in exchange for false promises about visa extensions. More than 150 duped students were arrested but only eight of those are actually facing criminal charges.ICE said it was the foreign students' own fault if they didn't recognize the carefully constructed ruse for what it was. It also said it was trying to protect people from fraud, even as it defrauded more than 600 students out of $100 application fees. Multiple lawsuits against ICE have been filed since this information became public. And, so far, two consecutive administrations have failed to talk federal courts into dismissals.We've had a change in regimes and DOJ figureheads, but the government continues to insist it has done nothing wrong. If anyone was expecting Biden to roll back all the anti-immigrant policies and programs instituted by former president Donald Trump, they need to brace themselves for a whole bunch of disappointment. The new, improved DOJ is still the same old DOJ. The government did nothing wrong, the DOJ continues to insist, despite many in the current administration claiming the previous presidency did a whole lot of wrong.

The Learn to Code 2021 Bundle has 13 courses to help you kickstart your coding career. Courses cover Ruby on Rails, C++, Python, C#, JavaScript, and more. You'll also learn about data science and machine learning. The bundle is on sale for $35.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

For years we've talked about how the fact that no one really understands privacy, leads to very bad attempts at regulating privacy in ways that do more harm than good. They often don't do anything that actually protects privacy -- and instead screw up lots of other important things, from competition to free speech. In fact, in some ways, there's a big conflict between open internet systems and privacy. There are ways to get around that -- usually by moving the data from centralized silos out towards the ends of the network -- but that's rarely happening in practice. I mean, going back over thirteen years ago, we were writing about the inherent conflict between Facebook's (then) open social graph and privacy. Yet, at the time, Facebook was cheered on for opening up its social graph. It was creating a more "open" internet, an internet that others could build upon.But, of course, over the years things have changed. A lot. In 2018, after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Mark Zuckerberg more or less admitted that the world was telling Facebook to lock everything down again:

Efforts by industry and captured regulators to demonize California's net neutrality law have begun in earnest.Last week, AT&T lied that it had been forced to stop giving its customers "free data" nationwide because of the new law. Of course, that's not true. In reality, the law (slightly tougher than the FCC rules AT&T lobbied to kill) prevents AT&T from abusing its bullshit monthly usage caps. Under the law, AT&T can no longer abuse usage caps to give its own streaming services an unfair advantage over competitors like Netflix (which it had been doing for several years), nor can it let deep-pocketed companies buy an unfair advantage on AT&T's network (something AT&T called "sponsored data").Despite the industry's attempts to frame this so-called "zero rating" as akin to "free data," that's not accurate, and numerous experts say blocking such efforts is a good thing for consumers and competitors alike (for many reasons). And it's not that AT&T was forced to stop offering "free data," so much as the law stops AT&T from erecting artificial network limits, then exploiting those pointless restrictions to give itself (and deep-pocketed competitors) an unfair advantage in online competition.Because the broadband industry's gamesmanship with zero rating is hard for non-technical (or outright dumb) people to understand, it's easy to confuse folks. Enter FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who this week falsely tried to claim California's new net neutrality law would soon be "cutting off free health services" from veterans nationwide:

Back in 2018, after a year of truly hammering down on independent game studios producing what many would consider "adult" or "porn" games, Valve finally relented and said its Steam platform would be more open. As part of the announcement, Valve indicated it would take a hands off approach to game curation and allow more adult-style games generally, later clarifying that it intended to prevent only "troll" games. If all of that sounds incredibly vague and ripe for creating a massive and confusing mess, well, that's precisely what happened. Developers saw the chance that Steam would accept their games as a crapshoot, with some making it through and others not. The reasons for denials were equally vague and arbitrary.The dust has settled somewhat in the subsequent years, but the lack of clarity for developers in what is allowed or not continues to rear its ugly head. One recent case is with Super Seducer 3, a game that appears to now be fully denied from Steam despite the developer being way open to working with Steam on any perceived issues.

Location data is the new growth market. Data harvested from apps is sold to data brokers who, in turn, sell this to whoever's buying. Lately, the buyers have been a number of government agencies, including the CBP, ICE, DEA, Secret Service, IRS, and -- a bit more worryingly -- the Defense Department.The mileage varies for purchasers. The location data generally isn't as accurate as that obtained directly from service providers. On the other hand, putting a couple of middle men between the app data and the purchase of data helps agencies steer clear of Constitutional issues related to the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision, which introduced a warrant mandate for engaging in proxy tracking of people via cell service providers.But phones aren't the only objects that generate a wealth of location data. Cars go almost as many places as phones do, providing data brokers with yet another source of possibly useful location data that government agencies might be interested in obtaining access to. Here's Joseph Cox of Vice with more details:

Earlier this month, we noted that, to close out its session, the Utah legislature decided to pass two separate blatantly unconstitutional bills. One requiring porn filters on internet-connected devices, and the other that tried to overrule Section 230 (something states can't do) and require all "social media corporations" to employ an "independent review board" to review content moderation decisions. It also says that social media companies must moderate in an "equitable" manner (whatever that means).We went through all of the reasons why the bill was unconstitutional, as did others in Utah. In response, the bill's sponsor, Senator Michael McKell, gleefully told a local TV news station that he looked forward to wasting Utah taxpayers' hard earned money by defending it in court (he didn't say that it would be wasting the money -- that's just us noting that it would be throwing away their money since the law is so clearly unconstitutional).Thankfully, Utah Governor Spencer Cox (who happens to be Senator McKell's brother-in-law) has decided to veto the bill -- his very first veto (as we noted earlier, he chose to sign the other unconstitutional bill about porn filters).Oddly, Cox's office released two separate statements regarding the veto -- only one of which notes that the bill was likely unconstitutional, while the other one seems to act like the bill just needs a few technical tweaks. It's almost as if he's trying to have it both ways and address two different audiences with two very different statements. The official veto statement makes it clear that the bill has serious constitutional issues:

More information has come out about the disastrous attempt by Arizona prosecutors to turn anti-police-violence protesters into a street gang. Phoenix police officers waded into the protest comprised of (checks official documents) 17 protesters, showering them with pepper balls and arresting them all. Charges were brought, including one very damaging one: assisting a criminal street gang. Gang charges are automatic felonies with hefty sentence enhancements.According to the prosecutors handling the case, the use of the acronym ACAB (All Cops Are Bastards) by the protesters was indicative of their gang status. That and their use of umbrellas and black clothing. According to grand jury transcripts obtained by ABC15, a county prosecutor and Phoenix police Sgt. Doug McBride led jury members to believe "ACAB" was a street gang. Here's the prosecutor questioning McBride during a grand jury presentation:

Yesterday, in a (deliberately, I assume) well-timed release, the Tech Transparency Project released a report entitled Facebook's Militia Mess, detailing how there are tons of "militia groups" organizing on the platform (first found via a report on Buzzfeed). You may recall that, just days after the insurrection at the Capitol, that Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg made the extremely disingenuous claim that only Facebook had the smarts to stop these groups, and that most of the organizing of the Capitol insurrection must have happened elsewhere. Multiple reports debunked that claim, and this new one takes it even further, showing that these groups are (1) still organizing on Facebook, and (2) Facebook's recommendation algorithm is still pushing people to them:

The Ultimate Beginner to Grandmaster Chess Course Bundle has 137 hours of instruction on everything from basic chess theory to advanced strategies. You'll gain skills and knowledge from international and grand masters, learn about positional chess, learn valuable endgame ideas and principles, and much more. It's on sale for $90.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

We've pointed out a few times how silly all these Congressional panels on content moderation are, but the one happening today is particularly silly. One of the problems, of course, is that while everyone seems to be mad about Section 230, they seem to be mad about it for opposite reasons, with Republicans wanting the companies to moderate less, and Democrats wanting the companies to moderate more. That's only one of many reasons why today's hearing, like those in the past, are so pointless. They tend to bog down in silly "but what about this particular moderation decision" which will then be presented in a misleading or out of context fashion, allowing the elected official to grandstand about how they "held big tech's feet to the fire" or some such nonsense.However, Cat Zakrzewski, over at the Washington Post has highlighted yet another reason why this particular "investigation" into disinformation online is so disingenuous: a bunch of the Republicans on the panel, exploring how these sites deal with mis- and disinformation -- are guilty of spreading disinformation themselves online.

For decades now Utah legislators have repeatedly engaged in theater in their doomed bid to filter pornography from the internet. And repeatedly those lawmakers run face first into the technical impossibility of such a feat (it's trivial for anybody who wants porn to bypass filters), the problematic collateral damage that inevitably occurs when you try to censor such content (filters almost always wind up with legit content being banned), and a pesky little thing known as the First Amendment. But annoying things like technical specifics or the Constitution aren't going to thwart people who just know better.For months now Utah has been contemplating yet another porn filtering law, this time HB 72. HB 72 pretends that it's going to purge the internet of its naughty bits by mandating active adult content filters on all smartphones and tablets sold in Utah. Phone makers would enable filters by default (purportedly because enabling such restrictions by choice is just to darn difficult), and require that mobile consumers in Utah enter a pass code before disabling the filters. If these filters aren't enabled by default, the bill would hold device manufacturers liable, up to $10 per individual violation.On Tuesday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed the bill into law, claiming its passage would send an “important message” about preventing children from accessing explicit online content:

Techdirt has been following the saga of the City of London Police's special "Intellectual Property Crime Unit" (PIPCU) since it was formed back in 2013. It has not been an uplifting story. PIPCU seems to regard itself as Hollywood's private police force worldwide, trying to stop copyright infringement online, but without much understanding of how the Internet works, or even regard for the law, as a post back in 2014 detailed. PIPCU rather dropped off the radar, until last week, when its dire warnings about a new, deadly threat to the wondrous world of copyright were picked up by a number of gullible journalists. PIPCU's breathless press release reveals the shocking truth: innocent young minds are being encouraged to access knowledge, funded by the public, as widely as possible. Yes, PIPCU has discovered Sci-Hub:

While denialism over cord-cutting is still somewhat a thing, a vastly larger segment of the public can finally see the writing on the wall. While the cable industry's first brave tactic in dealing with the cord-cutting issue was to boldly pretend as though it didn't exist, industry executives more recently realize that there is a bloodbath coming its way. There are few roadblocks that remain for a full on tsunami of cord-cutters and one of the most significant of those is still live sports broadcasting. This, of course, is something I've been screaming about on this site for years: the moment that people don't need to rely on cable television to follow their favorite sports teams live, cable will lose an insane number of subscribers.Over the past few years, the major American sports leagues have certainly inched in that direction. Notable for this post, 2017 saw the NFL ink a new streaming deal for mobile streaming with Verizon. The NFL had a long partnership with Verizon for mobile streaming already, but the notable aspect of the new deal was that NFL game streaming was suddenly not exclusive. Other streaming services could get in the game. And, while you can't draw a direct line to it, the tangential story of how the NFL just inked an exclusive deal with Amazon Prime for the broadcast rights for Thursday Night Football certainly shows you where this is all heading.

Summary: A wild few days for the stock market resulted in some interesting moderation moves by a handful of communications/social media platforms.A group of unassociated retail investors (i.e. day traders playing the stock market with the assistance of services like Robin Hood) gathering at the Wall Street Bets subreddit started a mini-revolution by refusing to believe Gamestop stock was worth as little as some hedge funds believed it was.The initial surge in Gamestop's stock price was soon followed by a runaway escalation, some of it a direct response to a hedge fund's large (and exposed) short position. Melvin Capital -- the hedge fund targeted by Wall Street Bets denizens -- had announced its belief Gamestop stock wasn't worth the price it was at and had put its money where its mouth was by taking a large short position that would only pay off if the stock price continued to drop.As the stock soared from less than $5/share to over $150/share, people began flooding to r/wallstreetbets. This forced the first moderation move. Moderators briefly took the subreddit private in an attempt to stem the flow of newcomers and get a handle on the issues these sort of influxes bring with them.Wall Street Bets moved some of the conversation over to Discord, which prompted another set of moderation moves. Discord banned the server, claiming users routinely violated guidelines on hate speech, incitement of violence, and spreading misinformation. This was initially viewed as another attempt to rein in vengeful retail investors who were inflicting pain on hedge funds: the Big Guys making sure the Little Guys weren't allowed on the playing field. (Melvin Capital received a $2.75 billion cash infusion after its Gamestop short was blown up by Gamestop's unprecedented rise in price.)But it wasn't as conspiratorial as it first appeared. The users who frequented a subreddit that described itself as "4chan with a Bloomberg terminal" were very abrasive and the addition of mics to the mix at the Discord server made things worse by doubling the amount of noise -- noise that often included hate speech and plenty of insensitive language.The ban was dropped and the server was re-enabled by Discord, which announced it was stepping in to more directly moderate content and users. With over 300,000 users, the server had apparently grown too large, too quickly, making it all but impossible for Wall Street Bets moderators to handle on their own. This partially reversed the earlier narrative, turning Discord into the Big Guy helping out the Little Guy, rather than allowing them to be silenced permanently due to the actions of their worst users.Decisions to be made by Discord:

A drone manufacturer really really wants cops to start inviting drones to their raiding parties. This will bring "+ whatever" to all raiding party stats, apparently. BRINC Drones is here to help... and welcomes users to question the life choices made by company execs that led to the implementation of this splash page:If these cops don't really look like cops to you, you're not alone. And by "you," I also mean BRINC Drones, which apparently wants to attract the warriors-in-a-war-zone mindset far too common in law enforcement. BRINC has a new drone -- one that presents itself as warlike as its target audience.Drones are definitely an integral part of the surveillance market. BRINC wants to make them an integral part of the "drug raids and standoffs with reluctant arrestees" market. Sure, anyone can smash a window. But how cool would it be if a drone could do it?

As you may know, tomorrow Congress is having yet another hearing with the CEOs of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, in which various grandstanding politicians will seek to rake Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and Sundar Pichai over the coals regarding things that those grandstanding politicians think Facebook, Twitter, and Google "got wrong" in their moderation practices. Some of the politicians will argue that these sites left up too much content, while others will argue they took down too much -- and either way they will demand to know "why" individual content moderation decisions were made differently than they, the grandstanding politicians, wanted them to be made. We've already highlighted one approach that the CEOs could take in their testimony, though that is unlikely to actually happen. This whole dog and pony show seems all about no one being able to recognize one simple fact: that it's literally impossible to have a perfectly moderated platform at the scale of humankind.That said, one thing to note about these hearings is that each time, Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg inches closer to pushing Facebook's vision for rethinking internet regulations around Section 230. Facebook, somewhat famously, was the company that caved on FOSTA, and bit by bit, Facebook has effectively lead the charge in undermining Section 230 (even as so many very wrong people keep insisting we need to change 230 to "punish" Facebook). That's not true. Facebook is now perhaps the leading voice for changing 230, because the company knows that it can survive without it. Others? Not so much. Last February, Zuckerberg made it clear that Facebook was on board with the plan to undermine 230. Last fall, during another of these Congressional hearings, he more emphatically supported reforms to 230.And, for tomorrow's hearing, he's driving the knife further into 230's back by outlining a plan to further cut away at 230. The relevant bit from his testimony is here:

You might recall that Verizon's attempt to pivot from grumpy old telco to sexy new Millennial ad brand hasn't been going so well. Oddly, mashing together two failing 90s brands in AOL and Yahoo, and renaming the coagulated entity "Oath," didn't really impress many people. The massive Yahoo hack, a controversy surrounding Verizon snoopvertising, and the face plant by the company's aggressively hyped Go90 streaming service (Verizon's attempts to make video inroads with Millennials) didn't really help.By late 2018 Verizon was forced to acknowledge that its Oath entity was effectively worthless. By 2019, Verizon wound up selling Tumblr to WordPress owner Automattic at a massive loss after a rocky ownership stretch. Throughout all of this, Verizon has consistently pretended that this was all part of some amazing, master plan.Those claims surfaced again this week with Verizon announcing that the company would be doubling and tripling down on the Yahoo experiment. For one, the company is launching Yahoo Shops, "a new marketplace destination featuring a curated, native shopping experience tailored to the user including innovative tech, from shoppable video to 3D try-ons, and more." It's also shifting its business model to focus more on subscriptions through Yahoo Plus, hoping to add on to the 3 million people that, for some reason, subscribe to products like Yahoo Fantasy and Yahoo Finance.Again though, all of this sounds very much like unsurprising and belated efforts to mimic products and services that already exist. While surely somebody somewhere finds these efforts enticing, that this is the end result of its $4.48 billion Yahoo acquisition in 2017, and its 2015 $4.4 billion acquisition of AOL is just kind of...meh. It's in no way clear how Verizon intends to differentiate itself in the market, and people who cover telecom and media for a living continue to find Verizon's persistence both adorable and amusing:

Creating a site has been made easier with Way Pro. This landing page builder is an easy, no-code, and component-ready platform that helps you execute lead generation campaigns faster. It comes with tons of templates and components that make your page beautiful and powerful. With a responsive design, Way Pro makes every element and section mobile-ready. Its quick setup only takes less than 30 seconds to publish a landing page and start getting results. You can also easily export your leads with a click. It's on sale for $35.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

There have been rumors for ages that former President Donald Trump might "start" a social network of his own, and of course, that talk ramped up after he was (reasonably) banned from both Twitter and Facebook. Of course Trump is not particularly well known for successfully "starting" many businesses. Over the last few decades of his business career, he seemed a lot more focused on just licensing his name to other businesses, often of dubious quality. So it was no surprise when reports came out last month that, even while he was President, he had been in talks with Parler to join that site in exchange for a large equity stake in the Twitter-wannabe-for-Trumpists. For whatever reason, that deal never came to fruition.But, over the weekend, Trump spokesperson (and SLAPP suit filer) Jason Miller told Fox News that Trump was preparing to launch his own social network in the next few months. Amusingly, right before Miller made this claim, he noted exactly what I had said about how Trump being banned from Twitter and Facebook wasn't censorship, since Trump could get all the press coverage he wanted:

Way back in 2007, Verizon was forced to strike an agreement with the New York State Attorney General for falsely marketing data plans with very obvious limits as "unlimited." For much of the last fifteen years numerous other wireless carriers, like AT&T, have also had their wrists gently slapped for selling "unlimited" wireless service that was anything but. Despite this, there remains no clear indication that the industry has learned much of anything from the punishment and experience. Most of the companies whose wrists were slapped have, unsurprisingly, simply continued on with the behavior.The latest case in point is Boost Mobile, a prepaid wireless provider that was shoveled over to Dish Network as part of the controversial T-Mobile Sprint merger. For years the company has been selling prepaid "unlimited" data plans that aren't, by any definition of the word, unlimited. In part because once users hit a bandwidth consumption threshold (aka a "limit"), users find their lines slowed to around 2G speeds (somewhere around 128 kbps) for the remainder of the billing period.No regulators could be bothered to thwart this behavior, so it fell to the wireless industry's self-regulatory organization, The National Advertising Division (NAD), to dole out the wrist slaps this time. The organization last week told Boost that it should stop advertising its data plans as unlimited, after getting complaints from AT&T -- a company that spent a decade falsely advertising its plans as unlimited:

In January, Dominion Voting Systems sued former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell for defamation. The voting machine maker claimed the self-titled "Kraken" was full of shit -- and knowingly so -- when she opined (and litigated!) that Dominion had ties to the corrupt Venezuelan government and that it had rigged the election against Donald Trump by changing votes or whatever (Powell's assertions and legal filings were based on the statements of armchair experts and conspiracy theorists).Sidney Powell has responded to Dominion's lawsuit with what is, honestly, about the best defense she could possibly muster. And that defense is, "I have zero credibility when it comes to voting fraud allegations and certainly any reasonable member of the public would know that." From Powell's motion to dismiss [PDF]:

Readers here will remember that the last quarter of 2020 was a very, very bad time for streaming platform Twitch. It all started when the RIAA came calling on the Amazon-owned platform, issuing a slew of DMCA takedown notices over all sorts of music included in the recorded streams of creators. Instead of simply taking the content down and issuing a notice to creators, Twitch simply perma-deleted the content in question, with no recourse for a counternotice given to creators as an option. After an explosive backlash, Twitch apologized, but still didn't offer any clarity or tools for creators to understand what might be infringing content and what was being targeted. Instead, during its remote convention, Twitch only promised more information and tools in the coming months.Five months later, Twitch has finally informed its creators of the progress its made on that front: tools on the site to help creators remove material flagged as infringement and some more clarity on what is infringing.

A lot of rights just vanish into the ether once you're incarcerated. Some of this makes sense. You have almost no privacy rights when being housed by the state. Your cell can be searched and your First Amendment right to freedom of association can be curtailed in order to prevent criminal conspiracies from being implemented behind bars.But rights don't disappear completely. The government has an obligation to make sure you're cared for and fed properly -- something that rarely seems to matter to jailers.Treating people as property has negative outcomes. Not only are "good" prisoners expected to work for pennies a day, but their families are expected to absorb outlandish expenses just to remain in contact with their incarcerated loved ones. The government loves its paywalls and it starts with prison phone services.Cellphone adoption changed the math for service providers. After a certain point, customers were unwilling to pay per text message. And long distance providers realized they could do almost nothing to continue to screw over phone users who called people outside of their area codes. Some equity was achieved once providers realized "long distance" was only a figure of profitable speech and text messages were something people expected to be free, rather than a service that paid phone companies per character typed.But if you're in prison, it's still 1997. The real world is completely different but your world is controlled by companies that know how to leverage communications into a profitable commodity. As much as we, the people, apparently hate the accused and incarcerated, they're super useful when it comes to funding local spending. Caged people are still considered "taxpayers," even when they can't generate income or vote in elections.So, for years, we've chosen to additionally punish inmates by turning basic communication options into high priced commodities. And we've decided they don't have any right to complain, even when the fees are astronomical or prison contractors are either helping law enforcement listen in to conversations with their legal reps or making it so prohibitively expensive only the richest of us can support an incarcerated person's desire to remain connected to their loved ones.Connecticut legislators have had enough. Whether it will be enough to flip the status quo table remains to be seen. But, for now, a bill proposed by the Connecticut House aims to strip the profit from for-profit service providers, as well as the for-profit prisons that pad their budgets with kickbacks from prison phone service providers. (h/t Kathy Morse)

For some reason, a lot of people who get involved in the debate about content moderation still insist that online platforms are "doing nothing" to address problems — but that's simply not true. Platforms are constantly working on trust and safety issues, and at this point many people have developed considerable expertise regarding these unique challenges. One such person is Alex Feerst, former head of Trust & Safety at Medium, who joins us on this weeks episode to clear up some misconceptions and talk about the current state of the trust and safety field.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.

This is today's law enforcement. While there are multiple societal and criminal problems that deserve full-time attention, our tax dollars are paying cops to turn our children into criminals. We don't have the luxury of pretending this isn't happening. Schools have welcomed cops into their confines, turning routine disciplinary problems into police matters.While there may be some schools plagued by actual violent criminal activity, the stories that most often rise to the surface are those that involve violence by (uniformed) adults being inflicted on children. And I don't just mean legal minors -- a group that usually involves anyone under the age of 18. We're talking actual kids.Here's a brief rundown of some notable cases involving "school resource officers, " a term that suggests these cops aren't actually just cops, but rather an integral part of the school disciplinary system. But when SROs deal with children, they treat children just like they treat hardened criminals.This is a post about cops in schools I put together back in 2013. In this one, students were arrested for engaging in a water balloon fight, a 14-year-old was arrested for wearing an NRA shirt, and a DC cop gave a 10-year-old a concussion for ditching out on his music class. That's the tip of the ugly iceberg covered in this post.But let's look at a few more incidents.