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So we've already noted how Space X's Starlink low-orbit satellite broadband service isn't going to revolutionize the broadband industry. The service lacks the capacity to service dense urban or suburban areas, meaning it won't pose much of a threat to traditional cable and fiber providers. With a $100 monthly price tag and $500 hardware fee, it's not exactly a miracle cure for the millions of low-income Americans struggling to afford a broadband connection, either.That said: if you're currently one of the 42 million Americans who lacks access to any broadband at all, the service, capping out at 100 Mbps, is going to be damn-near miraculous. It's also going to be a significant upgrade for those currently stuck on last-generation expensive, capped, and sluggish traditional satellite lines.Enter ViaSat, which clearly isn't keen on having its captive business market disrupted. The company this week urged the FCC to conduct an environmental review of SpaceX’s low-orbit Starlink constellation, arguing that the fledgling system poses environmental hazards in space and on Earth. Since the 80s, satellite systems have had a baked in exemption from the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), excluding their businesses from environmental review. But the 12,000 lower orbit satellites Space X intends to launch should change that equation, ViaSat argues:

Late last year, it was discovered that yet another set of IoT devices were being turned against their owners by malicious people. It would be a stretch to call these losers "hackers," considering all they did was utilize credentials harvested from multiple security breaches to take control of poorly secured cameras made by Ring.Password reuse is common and these trolls made the most of it. Streaming their exploits to paying users, the perpetrators shouted racist abuse at homeowners, talked to/taunted their children, and interrupted their sleep by blaring loud noises through the cameras' mics.This string of events landed Ring in court. Ring claims this isn't the company's fault since the credentials weren't obtained from Ring itself. But Ring's lax security standards allowed users to bypass two-factor authentication and, until recently, didn't warn users of unrecognized login attempts or lock their accounts after a certain number of login failures.There's another insidious twist to this new form of online/offline abuse. And it's caught the attention of the feds. The FBI says these cameras are now being combined with swatting to inflict additional misery on camera owners.

Almost exactly a year ago, we wrote about a very troubling case in which Apple sued Corellium, arguing that it was copyright infringement for the company to create a virtualization tool to let users create and interact with virtual iOS devices. As we noted, virtualization is a useful tool for a wide variety of issues, including security researchers and app developers. A key part of Apple's lawsuit was that this virtualization violated Section 1201 of the DMCA. As we've explained for years, DMCA 1201 is the "anti-circumvention" part of the DMCA, and has been widely abused to try to stop perfectly legitimate activity that has nothing to do with copyright infringement. DMCA 1201 is a bad law and honestly we'd be better to just toss the whole thing in the garbage.Apple's lawsuit against Corellium is a perfect example of why. One key thing that came out in the lawsuit is that Apple first tried to buy Corellium, and only filed the lawsuit after talks fell through, which certainly gives it the appearance of extra vindictiveness. Right before New Years a judge ruled on the summary judgment motions from both sides and tossed out some claims, but let others move forward. Unfortunately, reporters who apparently are unable to actually read through a full opinion, reported it (incorrectly) as Apple "losing" the case:The reality is, unfortunately, not so clean. The court did toss out some copyright claims by ruling (correctly!) that Corellium's use is covered by fair use. But it also allowed the 1201 anti-circumvention claims to move forward -- and that's incredibly dangerous. Let's cover the dangerous parts first (which is the opposite of what the court did). The key issue is whether or not Corellium circumvents Apple's authentication server. Corellium argued both that it did not circumvent Apple's technological protection measures and that, even if it did, it was fair use. Unfortunately, the court (citing some other questionable decisions) says that there is no fair use defense to 1201 violations.

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One of the more bizarre parts of the Parler debate is the weird insistence among many in the Trumpist set that somehow taking away Section 230 will magically lead to less moderation, rather than more. This is almost certainly untrue, because assuming a shift to more traditional distributor liability rules as were considered in place prior to Section 230, websites would potentially face liability for content that violated the law if they were shown to have knowledge of the law-violating material.We don't have to look far to see such a system in practice: it's how the DMCA's Section 512 notice-and-takedown regime effectively works today. Under that regime, anyone who wants anything taken offline just files a notice, and if a website wishes to avoid liability, they then need to remove the content. That removal protects them from liability. Prior to the notice, it's unlikely that they would be seen as liable, since they wouldn't have notice of the content in question possibly violating a law. Of course, as we've seen, the DMCA's notice-and-takedown provision is widely abused. Recent studies have shown that the notice-and-takedown provisions are regularly used to target non-infringing works and many sites pull down that content to avoid liability.It's quite likely that we'd see the same sort of result without 230, leading to significantly more removals of perfectly legal speech -- which seems to be the exact opposite of what Trumpist fans of revoking 230 expect. Last month, we were happy to see that the Trumpist social media site, Parler, seemed to recognize this, and its CEO John Matze correctly pointed out that removing Section 230 would help the big companies and harm smaller competitors (though, hilariously, he tried to lump himself in as a big guy):

Last November, Comcast announced it would be expanding its bullshit usage caps and overage fees into the Northeast. For years, the Northeast had avoided the utterly pointless cash grab that is broadband usage caps because Comcast faced at least a tiny bit of competition from (uncapped) Verizon FiOS. But as federal and state regulators have grown more toothless and pathetic, Comcast's eagerness to expand the surcharges has only grown.Reminder: Comcast's own internal memos have indicated such restrictions don't manage congestion or serve any valid technical or financial purpose. They're a glorified price hike on captive customers, and Comcast's decision to expand them (in addition to a bevy of other price hikes and fee increases) during a pandemic isn't being taken particularly well by lawmakers like Massachusetts State Rep. Andy Vargas:

The Chinese government has been showing its impatience over its impending takeover of Hong Kong. China agreed to allow Hong Kong to run under its own government until 2047, but the last couple of years have seen the Chinese government indicating its willingness to perpetually violate this agreement with the region.As pro-democracy protests continue to rage against the Chinese machine, the Chinese government has begun forcing its will on Hong Kong residents. This has been greatly aided by complicit Hong Kong government legislators, who have basically agreed to all the Chinese government's demands. The latest attempt to undermine the will of the people came packaged in a "national security" law -- one that outlawed demonstrations against the Chinese government's early and uninvited interloping, threatening dissenters with a lifetime of imprisonment.Since then, the Chinese government (again with the assistance of Hong Kong's supposedly-independent government) has been arresting and jailing prominent critics, along with dozens of other vocal protesters. One of the most famous arrestees is Jimmy Lai, a vociferously pro-democracy media tycoon -- one with the power and reach to do serious damage to the Chinese government's unwanted advances.Lai was arrested under the new national security law last August. The Chinese government -- via its Hong Kong mouthpiece -- claimed Lai's pro-democracy agitation was an illegal "collusion" with "foreign governments." This vague assertion likely referred to Lai's visits with world leaders -- visits in which he expressed his displeasure with the Chinese government.In late December, Lai was granted bail by a Hong Kong court, reversing its earlier denial. It came with very tight strings attached. Lai was placed on house arrest and, more importantly, forbidden from doing anything that might make the two governments engaged in his prosecution look bad.

Techdirt readers will be very familiar with CERN, the European Council for Nuclear Research (the acronym comes from the French version: Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire). It's best known for two things: being the birthplace of the World Wide Web, and home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator. Over 12,000 scientists of 110 nationalities, from institutes in more than 70 countries, work at CERN. Between them, they produce a huge quantity of scientific papers. That made CERN's decision in 2013 to release nearly all of its published articles as open access one of the most important milestones in the field of academic publishing. Since 2014, CERN has published 40,000 open access articles. But as Techdirt has noted, open access is just the start. As well as the final reports on academic work, what is also needed is the underlying data. Making that data freely available allows others to check the analysis, and to use it for further investigation -- for example, by combining it with data from elsewhere. The push for open data has been underway for a while, and has just received a big boost from CERN:

FOIA requests, leaked documents, data breaches, Congressional testimony… all of these have led to the outing of cellphone surveillance tech utilized by law enforcement. As far back as 2014, Chris Soghoian -- former ACLU "technologist" and current Senator Wyden advisor -- was telling cops their "secret" Stingray devices weren't all that secret anymore.But the market for tracking people via their cellphones remains uncornered. For the most part, Stingrays (cell tower spoofers) need warrants to operate. The same goes for demanding weeks or months of historical cell site location data from service providers.The courts may be deciding there's a bit more Fourth Amendment to go around these days, but cops seem to be deciding there's more Fourth than ever that should be avoided. New tools, toys, and tactics are in play. "Reverse warrants" contain the word "warrant," but they demand info on every cellphone user in a certain area at a certain time, flipping probable cause on its head. Data brokers collecting location data from apps sell access to law enforcement agencies, allowing them to engage in tracking that would be unconstitutional if it involved cell service providers.There's a lot of data flowing towards law enforcement agencies. But it's useless if it can't be analyzed. That's where a little known company steps in, giving cops a way to wrangle all that subpoenaed data into something actionable. The Intercept's Sam Richards has the details.

Even if you think that Julian Assange conspired against the US with the help of Russia, as some allege, you should still be extremely concerned about the US's prosecution of him. As we've explained, the details in the indictment would criminalize many activities that journalists do every single day. It would be a massive expansion of how the Espionage Act was interpreted and would try to blame him for hacking he had nothing to do with.So, at least for now, it's good to see that a UK court has refused to extradite Assange to the US. The reasons have little to do with the sketchiness of the underlying case, but rather is a condemnation of US prison conditions. The judge notes that in Assange's current mental state, he'd likely end up killing himself if placed in the US prison system, but rejected the claims from Assange that the prosecution is politically motivated, and therefore invalid.

Staying ahead of modern Internet usage – including the unprecedented surge caused by the global pandemic – requires much more than just raw capacity. More than ever, networks need to be smart in order to effectively anticipate and respond to traffic demands that are growing exponentially larger and more complex each year. For years, network operators have been investing in software and artificial intelligence that played key roles in meeting the unique challenge posed by COVID-19.Throughout the pandemic surge, we have observed the performance of our network more closely than ever before, conducting nearly 700,000 diagnostic speed tests per day, and since March we’ve continued to deliver above-advertised speeds across the country, even in the areas we serve that have been most dramatically affected by COVID-19.Our industry’s commitment to adding capacity was certainly critical to that success – since 2017 alone, Comcast has devoted more than $12 billion in private investment to strengthen and expand our network – including building more than 33,000 new route miles of fiber. But in today’s network environment, even massive capacity improvements have become table stakes. Every 2.5 years we add as much capacity to our network as we added in all the previous years combined, and while that’s enabled us to consistently deliver faster speeds to more people, we know that by itself, it is not enough.Our teams also stepped-up in the face of the pandemic surge, performing an average of 771 network augments each week between March and September – compared to about 350 per week pre-pandemic (and averaging over 1,000 per week in the first few months of the pandemic). That our teams did this in the midst of an unprecedented shift to working from home and adapting to new ways to serve our customers – and safely conducting vital field work – made it that much more impressive. That work continues today, as pandemic-related stay-at-home activity continues to drive elevated traffic.Of course the combination of investment and hard work was vital, but we also implemented new technologies and innovations to meet the unique challenge posed by the pandemic.Internet traffic hasn’t just increased exponentially in recent years, it’s become dramatically more variable and complex. One illustration of this is popular gaming downloads, the largest of which can spike downstream demand across our entire network by as much as 10 percent overnight. With downstream usage regularly generating more than 14 times more Internet traffic than upstream, these gaming spikes represent truly massive traffic events. Today, such surges are commonplace, and are only one example of how much the modern network landscape has evolved to handle all kinds of Internet traffic.We’ve been working to build smarter networks for more than a decade, transforming architecture, equipment, and tools to be faster, more efficient, and more resilient, but that work has accelerated dramatically in recent years, as we’ve leaned into AI and machine learning to monitor, optimize, and repair network performance faster than was previously possible.Perhaps the most remarkable recent example of this work has been our Comcast Octave AI platform.Comcast engineers in Philadelphia and Denver designed Comcast Octave to check more than 4,000 telemetry data points (such as external network “noise,” power levels, and other technical issues that can add up to a big impact on performance) on tens of millions of modems across our network every 20 minutes. It is programmed to detect when a modem isn’t using all the bandwidth available to it and automatically adjust the modem to deliver significant increases in speed and capacity.This is not an example of AI replacing the work of human technologists, but rather of AI performing a volume of work at a speed that would be impossible for thousands of engineers, working around the clock. As a result, Octave enabled us to improve network performance and enhance customer experiences in a way that wasn’t previously possible. In essence, Octave becomes a force multiplier for the network that is constantly and automatically optimizing performance, in conjunction with the 24/7 work of our network technicians, engineers, and field crews across the country.We developed Octave in 2019, just before the pandemic, so when it hit, we had only rolled it out to part of our network. Knowing how important it could be to providing additional performance and capacity, a team of about 25 engineers worked seven-day weeks to reduce the deployment process from months to weeks. As a result, in addition to the capacity we gained by adding significant new physical infrastructure in March and April 2020 and the work of hundreds of other network engineers to make other optimizations, we were also able to deliver a 36 percent increase in capacity with Octave alone – just at the time that customers needed more bandwidth than ever as they shifted to doing everything from home.While Octave’s behind-the-scenes operations are invisible to users, its positive impact on them is unmistakable. Octave helped us to provide sustained, robust Internet access for our customers throughout one of the most significant challenges in our history – to maintain the high quality of remote classes they take, movies they stream, games they play, and video conference calls they participate in. And because Octave is so new, we continue to make significant improvements to the technology, improving device performance even more as the pandemic surge continues.As we accelerate the digitization and virtualization of our networks, and evolve our use of AI and machine learning to not only monitor performance, but also automatically improve it millions of times every hour, we are approaching an inflection point in network technology that will deliver unprecedented speed, resiliency, reliability, and enriched service for consumers, even as demand continues to skyrocket.Jason Livingood is Vice President, Technology Policy and Standards, Comcast Cable.

Israeli surveillance tech firm NSO Group is something else. (Pejorative, yo.) It set up shop in a contested country where it's not all that paranoid to say everyone is out to get them. (But it's still a little paranoid, if not a lot racist.) That being said, Israel doesn't have a lot of nearby allies. And its ongoing conflict with Palestine hasn't made it any new friends.You'd think a government contractor operating out of this space would be more judicious with its sales efforts. But finding new customers seems to be more important to NSO Group than defending its own country against attacks. NSO has sold its pervasive surveillance products -- ones that leverage popular messaging apps to create spy-holes in end-to-end encryption -- to anyone who wants them, including those that would turn these tools against Israeli citizens, journalists, and activists.NSO has enabled a global war on dissent and criticism. It's not the only company that takes a hands-off approach to sales -- justifying the money in its pocket with claims it's nothing more than an exploit-hawking middleman. This has earned it some justifiable disdain. It has also earned it lawsuits, including one filed by a company too big to ignore: Facebook.Multiple governments have purchased exploits from NSO, resulting in a worldwide war on journalists and activists. This makes NSO richer. But it doesn't make the company any smarter. NSO and Israel briefly joined forces to engage in domestic surveillance, utilizing NSO's malware to facilitate COVID contact tracing -- an effort swiftly blocked by an Israeli court.NSO hasn't slowed down its surveillance efforts -- the ones deployed by its customers. But it has again managed to generate unfavorable headlines and coverage. The company, whose offers of contact tracing were rejected by an Israeli court, hasn't dialed back its efforts to place people under surveillance -- supposedly for the public good.But its exploits have their own security flaws. While it was trying to sell governments its contract tracing goods, it failed to secure some of the data it had been gathering in hopes of vertically integrating its spy tech and its "concern" for the general population's health. Zack Whittaker reports for TechCrunch:

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I have a browser open with about a dozen different bad and wrong takes on Section 230 that one day I may write about, but on Sunday night, 60 Minutes jumped to the head of the line with an utterly ridiculous moral panic filled with false information on Section 230. The only saving grace of the program was that at least they spoke with Jeff Kosseff, author of the book on Section 230 (which is an excellent read). However, you can tell from the way they used Jeff that someone in the editorial meeting decided "huh, we should probably find someone to be the "other" side of this debate, so we can pretend we're even-handed" and then sprinkled in Jeff to explain the basics of the law (which they would then ignore in the rest of the report).It's almost difficult to describe just how bad the 60 Minutes segment is. It is, quite simply, blatant disinformation. I guess somewhat ironically, much of the attack on 230 talks about how that law is responsible for disinformation. Which is not true. Other than, perhaps, this very report that is itself pure disinformation.What's most astounding about the piece is that almost everything it discusses has nothing to do with Section 230. As with so many 230 stories, 60 Minutes producers actually seem upset about the 1st Amendment and various failures by law enforcement. And somehow... that's the fault of Section 230. It's somewhat insane to see a news organization like 60 Minutes basically go on an all-out assault on the 1st Amendment.The central stories in the piece involve people who (tragically!) have been harassed online. One case involves a woman that was falsely blamed by some nutjob conspiracy theorists of having brought COVID-19 to the United States. Because of that, she and her family received death threats, which is absolutely terrible, but has nothing to do with Section 230. 60 Minutes points out that law enforcement didn't care and said that the death threats weren't enough of a crime. But... uh... then shouldn't 60 Minutes be focused on the failures of law enforcement to deal with threats (which actually can be a crime if they fall into the category of "true threats")? Instead, somehow this is Section 230's fault? How?And it gets worse. 60 Minutes trots out the bogeyman of "anonymous internet trolls," even though this comes right after 60 Minutes shows that the nutjob conspiracy theorist who started this has a name and is well known (as a nutjob conspiracy theorist). The whole setup here is bizarre. The death threats are awful, and if they are criminal, then the problem is with the police and the FBI who the show says did nothing. If they're not criminal, then they're not breaking the law. So, the reason there's "no one to sue" is not because of Section 230, but because no laws were broken. But that's not how 60 Minutes' Scott Pelley frames it.

It's been pretty clear for a while now that the Trump/Ajit Pai FCC simply doesn't give a shit about consumer protection, healthy markets, high prices, or competition. It's why they've effectively dismantled the FCC's authority and ceded US telecom policy-making to AT&T and Comcast lobbyists. All in the repeatedly disproven belief that gutting oversight of a bunch of politically powerful natural monopolies somehow results in free market magic. Of course the end result of thirty-years of this kind of policy thinking is Comcast, which pretty much speaks for itself.Instead of doing one of its core jobs of protecting markets and consumers, the Pai FCC has spent an inordinate amount of time hyperventilating over pirate radio broadcasts. Every few months or so the FCC will crow about how it has cracked down on some piddly pirate radio broadcaster that (usually) is causing minimal harm (and can't pay the resulting fine anyway). Often, some of these broadcasts are catered to very narrow and underserved minority communities, and taking them offline isn't worth the time and enforcement cost unless it's causing significant, major harm to a legit regional broadcaster or public safety.But recently the FCC took things to the next level, by using recently expanded authority under the PIRATE Act to target property owners and landlords who host those engaging in pirate radio broadcasts:

It's that time again! This challenging year has come to a close, and now it's time to look back at the top comments from 2020 based on user votes for Insightful or Funny. As usual, we'll be covering the top three in each category, plus a couple of outliers — and if you want to see this week's winners, here's first and second place for insightful, and first and second place for funny.The Most Insightful Comments Of 2020For our first place winner, we go back to July and our post about a woman who complained about a Starbucks barista who refused to serve her because she wasn't wearing a mask, and then demanded half of the money that came flooding in to a GoFundMe for said barista. She claimed that medical conditions exempted her from mask requirements, and Grey racked up the votes to be the most insightful comment of the year by sharing some personal experience that underlines why this kind of thing is so infuriating:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, China was doing exactly what many warned they would do and pointing to the US to defend its own anti-encryption stance, while Mark Zuckerberg was desperately defending Facebook's "Free Basics" power grab. It was revealed that the NSA never stopped spying on foreign leaders and even swept up the US congress in the process, leading to some amusing backlash from former congressional defenders of the agency. Meanwhile, Harvard Law Review was freaking out about a public domain citation guide, 50 Cent was hypocritically suing over a mixtape, and CBS filed a lawsuit over the Star Trek fan film it had previously seemed to be supporting.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2010, a Dutch court threw out criminal charges against a P2P index site for relying too much on information from a private anti-piracy group, while leaked cables revealed that Swedish officials had complained to the US about the impact of a Hollywood-pushed copryight law, and a Canadian music collection society was demanding payment for 30-second song previews and France was trying to extend its private copying levy to tablets... unless they run Windows. We talked about permission culture and the automated diminishing of fair use, while NBC Universal and the MPAA were getting New York City to run anti-piracy propaganda and Gibson got an injunction over PaperJamz.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, there was a dust-up online over the question of blog piracy, while one Chinese blogging firm with big dreams was collapsing before it got started. The movie industry was pointing fingers over its poor box office returns, the RIAA was accused of coaching a 15-year-old witness in a file sharing lawsuit, and Australia was considering expanding fair use. We talked about how the Sony rootkit scandal had woken more people up to copy protection and the war on modifying your devices, while Sony was giving away a whole lot of free downloads in a settlement over the infected CDs.

Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »Today's the day:works published in 1925 have run out of copyright protection and the public domain has gotten bigger, and our game jam celebrating it has begun! Gaming Like It's 1925 runs from now until the end of the month, and it's the perfect chance to start digging into of all the amazing material that's finally free for everyone to use.The premise of the jam is simple: build a digital or analog game that incorporates, in some way or another, one or more works from 1925. You don't need to be an experienced game designer to participate — entries can be as simple as a few instructions in a PDF, or as robust as an entire board or video game, and you can make use of all sorts of easy development tools (a few of which are listed on the jam page). And there are so, so many great works to choose from, a few of which are listed on Duke University's annual round-up, which is a great place to start looking.As in the past two public domain game jams, we'll be awarding prizes in six categories (the winners of the 2020 jam are linked below, and you can read our judges' thoughts on them here):

It's tricky to figure out how to start this post this year, of all years. As long-time readers are aware, ever since 2008, my final post of the year was a reflection on optimism. It started, in 2008, in the midst of a few fights to create a better internet at the time, in which two separate people had expressed to me what they believed to be a contradiction: I am unfailingly optimistic about the potential for innovation to make the world better, and yet I often appeared (to them, at least), to be so angry about the state of the world and the efforts various people were involved in to impede the internet. And thus started the tradition of writing a post about how important it was to stay happy and optimistic, even in the face of so many challenges to that optimism. Whatever anger or frustration people sense from me has never been in opposition to that optimism, but directed at how that optimistic vision may be delayed or limited by short-sighted thinking. If you'd like to look over the history of these posts, here's the full list:

There are plenty of issues with the patent system as we know it today, but one big one is with the system we use to award them. It's a problem because the more important we think patents are, the more important it is to ensure that the mechanism we use to grant them is capable of recognizing all the invention patent law is intended to protect. Unfortunately, however, right now the patent-review system is architected in a way that makes it miss all too many patent-worthy inventions – including, especially, those inventions invented by women.The lack of diversity among patent recipients has now caught the attention of a few Senators, who in December wrote to USPTO Director Iancu to express their concern. There may be several reasons for why women inventors are, by and large, not being granted patents, but one conspicuous one that the Senators focused on in their letter is the commensurate lack of women allowed to do the specialized work of filing for patents:

Summary: During the somewhat controversial Senate confirmation hearings for the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, there were a few moments that gained extra attention, including a confrontation between Senator Mazie Hirono and the nominee concerning statements regarding LGBTQ rights that Barrett had made in the past. Hirono, who had separately called the hearings themselves illegitimate, was then criticized by traditionally right-leaning media for what they felt was overly aggressive questioning.The satirical site The Babylon Bee, which frequently targets Democrats for satirization, published a piece roughly parodying a famous Monty Python sketch in which villagers in a medieval town try to determine if someone is a witch, including by weighing them to see if they weigh the same as a duck. The Babylon Bee took that sketch’s premise and ran a satirical article claiming that Hirono demanded that Barrett be weighed against a duck.Facebook had the article removed, saying that it was “inciting violence.” The Babylon Bee appealed the decision, only to be told that upon a further “manual” review, Facebook had decided that its original analysis stood, and that the article “incites violence.”Decisions to be made by Facebook:

So much for body cameras giving us better law enforcement. What started as an accountability effort has turned into a boon for prosecutors and little else. Every so often, citizens win lawsuits or have charges dropped because recorded footage differs greatly from the official narrative, but those are relative anomalies. When footage would be useful, it tends to go missing or is never recorded.Every so often, footage that was never meant to see makes it into the hands of the public. The Appeal was given access to 66 hours of footage recorded by officers handling protests in Boston. The recordings show bad cops will continue to be bad cops, even when they're aware (or should be) they're all wearing recording devices.Recordings show officers deploying force against people attempting to comply with their orders and discussing what appears to be an arrest quota. It shows an officer appearing to pocket a tie (with the price tag still on it) picked up near a looted store. It shows officers repeatedly pepper-spraying peaceful protesters and discussing targeting certain individuals for more spraying.One of the most disturbing clips shows a cop bragging about hitting protesters with his unmarked car:

You'd think a massive and controversial deal to sever the UK from the European Union, impacting the lives of millions of people over the better part of the next generation, would contain a certain amount of... precision.Not so much.After a long, contentious debate and some last minute haggling over fish, the final agreement governing the United Kingdom and European Union’s trade relations for decades was finalized last week. But when security researchers dug through the wording of the final agreement (which you can peruse here (pdf)), they found a bunch of indications of laziness.Including, apparently, recommendations to protect yourself from cyberattacks by using a web browser (Netscape) that stopped being updated somewhere around 1997 or so:

[Note: this is one in a series of posts on the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement's lengthy report on all things police-related.]During his, shall we say… tumultuous single term as president, Donald Trump made it clear law enforcement people were better than regular people, even though a whole lot of regular people were saying otherwise at the time.

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As basically a million people mentioned to me, on Monday, John Paul Mac Isaac, computer repair shop owner, sued Twitter for defamation. You may recall his name as the computer repair shop guy who allegedly had Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop, which later became a NY Post story. That story then became a content moderation story, as both Twitter and Facebook sought to limit the spread of the story. In Twitter's case, the company claimed that it violated the social media site's policy against linking to "hacked materials."As we noted at the time, this Twitter policy had been in place for a while and was already controversial in how it had shut down accounts that were clearly doing journalism based on hacked documents. Twitter later changed its policy regarding hacked materials, in large part due to the controversy over this story.When I was first pointed to the lawsuit, I assumed that like nearly all defamation lawsuits against Twitter, it was actually about posts by users (which would be clearly barred by Section 230). The lawsuit is ridiculous, but it's ridiculous in a different way. Isaac was not suing over user speech on Twitter, but over Twitter's decision to refer to that material as "hacked," which he claimed defamed his reputation, and made people think he was a hacker.

You'd hardly know there was an historic economic and health crisis going on based on Comcast's behavior.Clearly nervous about a new incoming regulatory regime that even semi-coherently focuses on consumer issues, Comcast last month expanded its bullshit usage caps into the Northeast, one of the only regions that had yet to be saddled with the charges. The monthly cap and resulting overage fees, which you can avoid by paying for an "unlimited" plan, serves no technical or financial purpose. The restrictions don't actually help manage network congestion, flat-rate broadband is already hugely profitable due to muted competition, and ISPs like Comcast can deal with a small minority of extra-heavy bandwidth users by pushing them to a business-class tier of service. It's literally just a cash grab on the backs of uncompetitive US broadband markets.But Comcast's not stopping there. The company also recently imposed a price increase on its cable TV bundles, broadband service, and many of the bullshit fees it imposes on your bill to help it falsely advertise a lower rate. This includes the company's "Broadcast TV fee," which is literally just a portion of your existing cable TV bill, broken out and hidden below the line, leaving you uncertain of what you'll actually be paying for service until you've received a few bills. It's false advertising and predatory, but good luck finding a US regulator or lawmaker who much cares.But Comcast's not even stopping there; the company also says it's going to start charging significantly more for house calls in the new year:

Law enforcement -- especially at the federal level -- has spent a great deal of time complaining about an oddity known only to the FBI and DOJ as "warrant-proof" encryption. Device users and customers just call this "encryption" and realize this protects them against criminals and malicious hackers. The federal government, however, sees device encryption as a Big Tech slap in the face. And so they complain. Endlessly. And disingenuously.First off, law enforcement has access to a wide variety of tech solutions. It also has access to plenty of communications and other data stored in the cloud or by third parties that encryption can't protect. And it has the users themselves, who can often be persuaded to allow officers to search their devices without a warrant.Then there's the protection being handed out to phone users. It's got its own problems, as Matthew Green points out:

While Techdirt generally and myself more specifically tend to fall on the side of a more permissive philosophy when it comes to policing trademarks, there are certainly times when one entity or another crosses the line. As it happens, it seems somewhat common that those lines get crossed by parties that have themselves been quite aggressive in policing their own IP. When the Girl Scouts of America (GSA) sued the Boy Scouts of America in 2018 over the rebranding BSA went through after finally allowing girls to join, it was not difficult to see the GSA's side of things. Essentially, what was The Boy Scouts of America became simply Scouts BSA, which did away with the core gender distinction that drew a shiny line between the two organizations in the public sphere. GSA provided real world examples of confusion in the public, with stories of some families thinking or being told that BSA and GSA had merged, and others having intended on signing their daughters up for GSA and ending up in Scouts BSA.In the end, this ultimately was caused by the cavalier attitude Scouts BSA took to its rebranding. A moment's thought would immediately have brought these concerns to light, but Scouts BSA plowed ahead.And now that cavalier attitude appears to have continued, with GSA issuing another filing against BSA over further rebranding efforts its undertaken.

The other day Senator Schatz tweeted, "Ask every Senator what Section 230 is. Don’t ask them if they want to repeal it. Ask them to describe it."

[Note: this is one of multiple posts covering the Commission's 332-page report.]The Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement -- ushered into existence by a 2019 Executive Order -- has released its report [PDF], just in time for the man who ordered it to move out of the White House. President Trump spent his four years defending and praising law enforcement, no matter how often law enforcement's actions provoked criticism elsewhere. This report does the same thing, even as it pretends to offer an objective opinion on the challenges facing the law enforcement community.The Commission is composed solely of law enforcement officials and officers, which makes its findings one-sided and, of course, suspect. The report calls for an end to the "disrespect" shown to law enforcement. But it does little to address the roots of this perceived disrespect. At best, the report suggests the public is just "misinformed" about law enforcement's role in society and posits it's "progressive prosecutors" and opportunistic legislators causing most of the reputational damage, rather than the things cops do when their leash is long enough.The report also has nothing good to say about device encryption. Using lingo provided to it by consecutive FBI directors and former AG Bill Barr, the report claims something called "warrant-proof encryption" (a.k.a., regular encryption) should have backdoors legislated into it.

Shortly after the coronavirus started showing up everywhere uninvited, President Trump decided to amplify his China-centric trade war with a war of words, referring to the new virus as the "China virus." The Chinese state media responded by suggesting the United States was actually the source of the virus, and then everything just kind of went to hell for awhile. Both countries took turns throwing each other's journalists out -- something that made a lot of noise but didn't really accomplish anything.With that spat behind it, China went back to doing what it does best: locking up its own citizens. This was done with more enthusiasm than usual, since the state media's attempt to control the coronavirus narrative failed spectacularly, contradicted by local reports that managed to escape the Chinese government's blockade.The government is still rounding up journalists and locking them up for reporting on the local spread of the virus. Zhang Zhan, former lawyer and current journalist, has been incarcerated since May of this year. She's accused of "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble." The schoolground wording belies the severity of these charges, which are a convenient catch-all for journalists, dissidents, and critics of the state.Little had been heard about Zhang's arrest (and the others that accompanied) since earlier this year. The government finally released information on the charges in mid-November. Zhang's charges -- which include accusations of spreading "false information" via the internet -- come with a recommended sentence of 4-6 years.This isn't Zhang's first run-in with the Chinese government.

As you likely know by now, President Trump is trying to use his last few weeks in office to use various levers of power remaining to him to make sure he fucks up the open internet. However, he also threw a wrench in the works of the long-overdue and way too small COVID relief package by saying that the checks to individuals should be $2,000 rather than $600. He's not wrong, but it was bizarre that his own White House was part of the negotiations that made sure the checks were smaller. It's almost as if the President and his own administration don't communicate very much.House Democrats took up the cause, and pushed for the $2,000, and many House Republicans went along with it, recognizing how popular an idea this was. The problem, of course, is that Mitch McConnell has absolutely no interest in this at all. Earlier today, Mitch McConnell blocked the motion to vote on increasing the checks to $2,000. Afterwards, he announced, in the most awkward language possible, that he wants to link the raised stimulus to... Section 230 repeal and the made-up issue of "election fraud."

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A few weeks ago, Oracle announced that it was moving its headquarters out of Redwood Shores, in the middle of Silicon Valley, to Austin, Texas. The move is more symbolic than anything else. The company told employees they can continue working from wherever they want and founder Larry Ellison sent an email to all employees saying he'll be working from the island of Lanai, which he purchased a few years ago. But the symbolism of the move works in multiple ways. Despite being founded and headquartered in Silicon Valley for almost half a century, Oracle has long represented the anti-Silicon Valley approach to innovation.Nearly a decade ago, cartoon artist Manu Cornet made this truly classic cartoon image of tech company org charts (which he thankfully put under a Creative Commons license):I've heard people at all of those companies more or less confirm the accuracy of every one of those. The Oracle one is particularly on point:For a while now, people in Silicon Valley have been well aware of Oracle's reputation as the anti-innovation behemoth, especially following its attack on APIs, interfaces, and how software is developed with the case against Google's reimplementation of the Java API. We're still waiting on how the Supreme Court rules on that one, to see whether or not Oracle has succeeded in undermining a key part of how software is developed -- including Oracle's own practices in reimplementing others' APIs.Bloomberg now has a big report on how all of the recent antitrust cases against Google have Oracle's fingerprints all over them, and in the article, Oracle's top lobbyist gleefully takes credit for it.

Update: The original report from NJ.com and the man's lawyer said that Clearview was involved, however the NY Times has now reported that it was not actually Clearview, but other facial recognition technology. The post has been updated accordingly.Given facial recognition tech's predilection for false positives, the only thing surprising about its link to false arrests is how long it took. After years of live trial runs all over the world, tech used by the Detroit Police Department managed to contribute to two bogus arrests in a matter of months.Despite this, the PD defended its use of the tech, even while admitting it was wrong 96% of the time. The PD said safeguards were in place to prevent false arrests -- including forbidding officers from using facial recognition search results as the sole probable cause for arrest warrants. Nonetheless, the false arrests happened. And, in both cases, it appears the safeguards were ignored.Now, there's a third victim of facial recognition tech. A New Jersey man was falsely arrested for theft he didn't commit, thanks to mistaken facial recognition.

Given facial recognition tech's predilection for false positives, the only thing surprising about its link to false arrests is how long it took. After years of live trial runs all over the world, tech used by the Detroit Police Department managed to contribute to two bogus arrests in a matter of months.Despite this, the PD defended its use of the tech, even while admitting it was wrong 96% of the time. The PD said safeguards were in place to prevent false arrests -- including forbidding officers from using facial recognition search results as the sole probable cause for arrest warrants. Nonetheless, the false arrests happened. And, in both cases, it appears the safeguards were ignored.Now, there's a third victim of facial recognition tech. A New Jersey man was falsely arrested for theft he didn't commit, thanks to none other than facial recognition uber-villain Clearview.

Predictive policing has spread from the streets to the school house, bringing with it everything that's screwed up about it. But this time it targets minors, turning missed school days, low grades, and exposure to domestic abuse into criminal predicates.This subjects minors to the same harassment that currently targets adults in the Pasco County (FL) Sheriff's jurisdiction. The pre-crime program run by the Sheriff allows deputies to swarm houses late at night to harass residents and write them citations for missing mailbox numbers or overgrown grass. There's nothing in this program that appears to target serious or violent crime. Instead, as the Sheriff has stated, the goal is to make people miserable enough that they "sue or leave the county."This same mentality now plagues Pasco County schools. And there's more to it than a lifetime of petty harassment that now begins while residents are still minors. Not only is it pretty messed up to predetermine students' criminal histories using a handful of questionable indicators and an Excel spreadsheet, it also appears to be illegal. The Pasco County Sheriff's Office seems to have bypassed asking itself any tough questions about turning bad students into criminals. It also appears to have avoided running this program past its in-house counsel.Subjecting students to the Sheriff Office's "juvenile intelligence analysts" isn't as straightforward as the Pasco Sheriff thinks. There are laws governing the sharing of school records -- both at state and federal levels. And the Sheriff's Office -- the personification of "rule of law" -- appears to be violating federal law, according to analysis by Student Privacy Compass.

Last month Techdirt wrote about some ridiculous scaremongering from Elsevier against Sci-Hub, which the publisher claimed was a "security risk". Sci-Hub, with its 85 million academic papers, is an example of what are sometimes termed "shadow libraries". For many people around the world, especially in developing countries, such shadow libraries are very often the only way medics, students and academics can access journals whose elevated Western-level subscription prices are simply unaffordable for them. That fact makes a new attack by Elsevier, Wiley and the American Chemical Society against Sci-Hub and the similar Libgen shadow library particularly troubling. The Indian title The Wire has the details:

Summary: With the COVID pandemic still in full force, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology moved its annual meeting online. The event was due to run for an entire week, but early issues caused attendees and moderators to question the contents of the pre-packaged content filter provided by Convey Services, which operated the virtual meeting software.The effort to ensure followup Q&A sessions would be free of profanity and other disruptiveness went awry when terms commonly used by paleontologists got caught in the software's filter. While words like "pubic," "bone," or "hell" might be appropriately blocked elsewhere, the blocklisting of these words disrupted the conference the software was supposed to keep from being disrupted.

More than a decade ago, Simon Glik was arrested by Boston police officers for the "crime" of recording them in public. This was made possible by a law passed in the mid-60s, which turned Massachusetts into a "two-party" recording state. Unless the person doing the recording has the consent of the person being recorded, it's a violation of the state's wiretap law.Glik successfully challenged this law, securing an Appeals Court ruling that stated the law was unconstitutional as applied to the recording of police officers in public places. This didn't immediately end the bogus arrests. Five years later, the government was taken to court again for enforcing this law in a way the Appeals Court said it couldn't. Also along for the ride was James O'Keefe's "Project Veritas," which argued the law was unconstitutional when applied to any public official in nearly any setting.The federal court said the Glik decision applied to the recording of police officers, whether surreptitious or not. It pointed out the Boston Police Department had issued new guidance based on the Glik decision, but falsely portrayed acceptable recordings as limited to those cops knew were happening. Not so, said the court. Even surreptitious recordings of cops in public spaces are protected by the First Amendment. It didn't come to the same conclusion about Project Veritas' arguments, finding the law was not overbroad when it applied some minimal restrictions to recording public officials.The Commonwealth still wants to abuse its bad law. It appealed this decision, sending it to the same court that had found its application of the law to the recording of cops unconstitutional nearly a decade ago. The First Circuit Court of Appeals says [PDF] the government's arguments are no better nine years later. Surreptitious recordings of police officers performing their public duties does not interfere with their work. Citizens are under no obligation to tell police officers they're being recorded. The government's interpretation of the law would just provide cover for misconduct.

A few weeks ago we noted that smaller, but still important, internet companies were working to get in the room on the discussions regarding Section 230 in Congress. The issue is that, among many in Congress and the media, they believe (falsely) that Section 230 is some sort of subsidy "only for Big Tech." As we've pointed out many times, the opposite is true. Facebook and Google have giant legal teams who can handle the liability without 230. It's everyone else who is screwed. This is why Facebook has always been first in line to undermine Section 230.As you'll recall, Facebook was the key cog to fold and support FOSTA, pressuring the Internet Association to support the law, and allowing Congress to claim (falsely) that "tech" supported the law. Right after that happened I remember talking to some of the smaller members of the Internet Association who were absolutely livid about the situation, and how they felt that Facebook and IA completely threw them under the bus to cement Facebook's own position in the market.With the fight over 230 heating up again it looks like a bunch of those companies have decided not to make the same mistake again. They've started a new organization, called Internet.Works to advocate on issues around 230. The coalition is made up of a bunch of important and successful internet companies, all of whom rely on Section 230, but who are not Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple. Instead, it's Automattic (the WordPress guys), Cloudflare, Dropbox, eBay, Etsy, Glassdoor, GoDaddy, Medium, Nextdoor, Patreon, Pinterest, Reddit, Snap, TripAdvisor, Vimeo, and Wikimedia.The organization is clearly set up to be a counterbalance to Facebook's ability to completely undermine 230 for everyone else:

[Note: this is one of what will probably be several posts covering the Commission's 332-page report. There's a lot to cover in here and one post simply isn't enough to cover everything in it. Stay tuned.]President Trump took office and immediately declared war on Americans. The only good people are government people. And the best people of all are law enforcement people, who were immediately elevated above those they served by the new leader of our nation.

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Back in March, Devin Nunes filed yet another of his many, many SLAPP suits. This one was against the Washington Post and reporter Shane Harris. As we noted at the time, the lawsuit was mostly performative, and had no real legal argument. After first being transferred to the appropriate venue, last week the federal court in DC easily tossed the case noting that Nunes failed to plead anything actually defamatory.

While unveiling its shiny new 5G-enabled iPhones back in October, Apple brought Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg to the stage to declare that Verizon had launched an updated, "nationwide" 5G network that shores up the company's 5G coverage. Until now, Verizon has largely embraced "high band" or millimeter wave 5G, which provides amazing speeds if you're near an antenna, but suffers from terrible range and building wall penetration issues. As a result, the company has been routinely criticized for comically overstating not only what 5G is capable of, but where 5G is available.To attack this credibility problem, and drive some hype for the new iPhones, Verizon announced that it was dramatically expanding its 5G network to 200 million more people. To do so, Verizon announced it would be using "dynamic spectrum sharing" (DSS) that helps utilize some existing 4G channels to offer 5G.Fast forward a few months, and the early reviews of Verizon's DSS 5G improvements... aren't so hot. PC Magazine took a closer look at Verizon's latest upgrade and found that users in many cases would be better off just sticking to 4G:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is BentFranklin passing along a useful link on our post about the people helping Trump consider martial law:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, while newly-leaked documents were exposing the US government's surveillance options, Hillary Clinton was nonsensically calling for an encryption "Manhattan Project" but not to produce a back door. Tom Cotton was also attacking Tim Cook and demonstrating profound ignorance, and was joined by Manhattan's Disctrict Attorney. Blackberry, apparently hoping to hasten its own demise, started arguing for greater cooperation with law enforcement. And yet, amidst all this, the government apparently didn't notice the irony in freaking out about an unauthorized backdoor discovered in Juniper firewall software.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2010, we wondered if journalists would face the same treatment as Julian Assange and why US publications were downplaying the significance of major leaks, while, in apparent anticipation of a leak, Bank of America started trying to block payments to Wikileaks, soon followed by Apple blocking the Wikileaks app. Meanwhile, we got a closer look and Homeland Security's terrible evidence for its recent domain seizures, and its affidavit that was riddled with errors that just got worse and worse.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, Senators were apparently undeterred by multiple court rulings on the unconstitutionality of video game bans, the FTC was cautiously optimistic about spam trends although the clock was ticking on Bill Gates's prediction that the problem of spam would be solved by early 2006, and Eliot Spitzer began an investigation into digital music price fixing. Sony's woes continued as Texas expanded its lawsuit to include MediaMax CDs and some of the parent company's own stores were failing to pull the rootkit CDs from shelves. And, as three men were facing charges for selling modified Xboxes, we wanted to know why modifying your own hardware is a federal crime.

Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »Lots of people will be exchanging gifts tomorrow, but we all get one on January 1st when new material enters the public domain in the US for the third year in a row — and, also for the third year in a row, we're hosting our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925. We're looking for designers of all stripes to create games using some of the works from 1925 that are running out of copyright protection in the new year, and offering prizes in a bunch of categories. We announced this one a bit early to give people time to make plans, and you can sign up on the jam page on itch.io before it officially launches on New Year's Day!You may have heard about The Great Gatsby entering the public domain, but while it's one of the highest-profile 1925 works, it's not alone: works by Agatha Christie, Aldous Huxley, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Noël Coward, Zora Neale Hurston and more are joining it, along with films like Harold Lloyd's The Freshman and Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush — and that's not even mentioning the artworks and musical compositions. Our jam page has links to several lists of 1925 works including Duke University's always-excellent roundup.We're long-time believers in the value of a robust public domain and this game jam is all about showing the kinds of amazing new things that are created when old works are opened up. Get all the details on itch.io including complete rules, categories and prizes, and the list of judges — and get ready for January 1st when it's time to start gaming like it's 1925!Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »

While we've continued to cover the rise of esports as an emerging force in the competitive games marketplace, the rise in popularity and adoption of it have started to grow exponentially. Some of this has to do with the COVID-19 pandemic, with esports first taking the place of shut-down IRL sporting events and then cementing its position as a viewing spectacle almost perfectly designed to be consumed from home. But the fact is that the growth and rise of esports was occurring prior to the pandemic and was always going to continue its rise, with professional sports organizations jumping on board, and major marketing and apparel players in the sports world jumping in as well.But one major milestone that has eluded esports thus far has been to be included in major regional and international competitions. The Olympics, for instance, has reportedly considered adding esports to its games, but previously there has been a lot of shade thrown on the topic by IOC officials as well. That's why it's somewhat notable that the Asian Games in 2022 will feature esports as a medal event.