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There have been some very vocal calls for encryption backdoors by the heads of certain law enforcement agencies. And those making the most noise imply every other law enforcement agency that isn't clamoring for worse security supports the clamoring loudmouths demanding mandated backdoors.Maybe these other agencies do agree with "going dark" proselytizers like Chris Wray and Cy Vance. Maybe these agencies that never speak out are the silent majority. Then again, maybe they recognize the tradeoff for what it is and find other ways to obtain the evidence they need. But one thing is clear, cops are fans of encryption if it benefits them.Admissions made in a lawsuit brought by a fired Michigan State Police inspector show police officials have been using an encrypted messaging app with a self-destruct feature to engage in official business.

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There's an idea that pops up every so often among people who are upset about misinformation online but don't actually understand the realities of online communities and the dynamics of how it all works: it's the idea that "anonymity" is the root cause of many of the internet's problems. We've spent years debunking this, though it's been nearly a decade since there was a previous focus on this issue -- and it's now coming back.Unfortunately, part of the reason it's coming back is because a friend of Techdirt, Andy Kessler (who we've even published on Techdirt), wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal calling for the end of anonymity online. I will note, that a large part of the article is correct: the part that accurately notes that Section 230 is not the problem and reforming or repealing it will do a lot more harm than good. That is exactly right.But then Andy goes off the rails and decides that getting rid of anonymity is the real solution.He's wrong, and we'll get into why in a moment. But, tragically, his piece has picked up some supporters in high places. Senator Ron Johnson, one of the key enablers of spreading disinformation in Congress (under his own name, of course), tweeted a link to the article, saying that perhaps we should end anonymity online:That says:

When Google Fiber launched back in 2010, it was heralded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive telecom sector. Initially things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to the company in the hopes of breaking free from the broadband duopoly logjam. And in markets where Google Fiber was deployed, prices dropped thanks to this added competition (fancy that!).The fun didn't last. In late 2016 Alphabet began getting cold feet about the high costs and slow return of the project, and effectively mothballed the entire thing -- without admitting that's what they were doing. The company blew through several CEOs in just a few months, laid off hundreds of employees, froze any real expansion, and cancelled countless installations for users who had been waiting years. And while Google made a lot of noise about how it would be shifting from fiber to wireless to possibly cut costs, those promises so far appear stuck in neutral as well.Now another Google broadband disruption play is meeting a similarly uninspiring end. Google Loon, Alphabet's attempt to use coordinated hot air balloons to provide supplemental broadband service to hard to reach areas, is being shuttered after nine years of development. While the company quieted many doubters who didn't think the project would work, it said it was never able to find a sustainable business model:

When Google Fiber launched back in 2010, it was heralded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive telecom sector. Initially things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to the company in the hopes of breaking free from the broadband duopoly logjam. And in markets where Google Fiber was deployed, prices dropped thanks to this added competition (fancy that!).The fun didn't last. In late 2016 Alphabet began getting cold feet about the high costs and slow return of the project, and effectively mothballed the entire thing -- without admitting that's what they were doing. The company blew through several CEOs in just a few months, laid off hundreds of employees, froze any real expansion, and cancelled countless installations for users who had been waiting years. And while Google made a lot of noise about how it would be shifting from fiber to wireless to possibly cut costs, those promises so far appear stuck in neutral as well.Now another Google broadband disruption play is meeting a similarly uninspiring end. Google Loon, Alphabet's attempt to use coordinated hot air balloons to provide supplemental broadband service to hard to reach areas, is being shuttered after nine years of development. While the company quieted many doubters who didn't think the project would work, it said it was never able to find a sustainable business model:

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to Google threatening to pull out of Australia if the country goes ahead with demanding payments for linking to newspapers. Rekrul won first place with a question:

Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »We're on the home stretch of our annual public domain game jam! If you plan to submit something but haven't signed up, make sure you do it before it's too late — and if you're just waiting to play the great games that come in, you can head on over now and check out some of the early bird submissions.Although only a handful of brave designers have decided to submit their entries before the deadline, we've already got a great-looking selection of games piling up for our judges to start playing on Monday. As expected, The Great Gatsby has been given a lot of attention: so far, we've got a platformer with beautiful pixel graphics, a stylish rhythm game, and not one but two tabletop roleplaying games, all based on the famous novel. But it's not all Gatsby stuff — there's also a competitive card game based on Smithsonian portraits, a game inspired by a 1925 jazz song, a game about Jewish surrealist painter Felix Nussbaum, and more.There are likely to be a lot more entries before the jam ends tomorrow night at midnight (that's still enough time to whip something up, by the way) so if you play to play them all, you might as well get a head start.A big thanks to all the designers who have already submitted their games, and all those with something in the works! Let's all start gaming like it's 1925.Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »

Every once in a while, you come across some story about chatbots. These tend to range from fun stories about how someone makes a chatbot to make some interaction more efficient to some large company making a chatbot that turns out to be horrifically racist thanks to its interactions with the general public. Good times all around, in other words.But a recent patent granted to Microsoft is a whole different thing.

Summary: Manzoor Ahmed Pashteen is a human rights activist in Pakistan, calling attention to unfair treatment of the Pashtun ethnic group, of which he is a member. In 2018, days after he led a rally in support of the Pashtun people in front of the Mochi Gate in Lahore, his Twitter account was suspended.A number of human rights activists and other supporters of Pashteen quickly began to use Twitter to ask the company, and CEO Jack Dorsey, why Pashteen’s account was suspended.Decisions to be made by Twitter:

As the Iancu era at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office comes to a close, one of the USPTO's initiatives has focused on promoting diversity in patenting. The newly established National Council on Expanding American Innovation, and the associated USPTO request for comments on a national strategy for expanding innovation, focus on having under-represented groups more involved in creating patentable inventions.That's a laudable goal. But we shouldn't be aiming just to have more under-represented groups receive patents. More patents doesn't necessarily mean more innovation, it just means more patents. Instead, we need to ensure that those groups are both provided the support to innovate and that their innovation is recognized.To do that, we have to change how we talk about innovation. In a recent article, Prof. Anjali Vats notes that the "stories that people tell about invention in the U.S. continue to focus on white men – the Benjamin Franklins, Thomas Edisons and Elon Musks – without affording women and people of color the same larger-than-life status." Often, those stories focus on lone individuals, not teams. Those failures lead to barriers to innovation by under-represented groups whose contributions may not fit that model.As one example, many—including USPTO Director Iancu—like to lionize Thomas Edison as the prototypical heroic inventor. They point to him as a role model. But Edison is a perfect example of the problems with the "heroic inventor" story. Edison employed a large staff who did much of the work of his inventions—without those "muckers", he'd have gotten much less done. And of course, Edison was neither the inventor of electric light nor the inventor of a practical light bulb. Alessandro Volta, the namesake of the word "voltage", generated light from electricity 80 years before Edison did. Humphrey Davy invented the electric arc light, which was in wide use in the 1800s, although it was impractical for home lighting.And while Edison devised a carbon filament bulb, his bulbs only burned for a few days before they burnt out. It was Lewis Latimer who devised a process for making a filament sufficiently useful to allow electric lighting to become widespread. Latimer also wrote the first technical book regarding electric lighting. He even drafted the drawings for Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent—an application which beat Elisha Gray's competing application to the patent office by only a few hours.Latimer was African-American, the son of an enslaved person. His story isn't often mentioned alongside contemporaries like Edison or Bell when talking about American inventors, despite having been as or more responsible for the invention of electric light. Similar "hidden figures" include Katherine Johnson, a NASA engineer, and other women who worked as "computers" for the Army, for astronomical calculations, and to support the Works Progress Administration.While these stories have been popularized, how many more unrecognized innovators are out there whose contributions were never recognized because they didn't fit the model of "lone inventor creates idea and patents it"? How many more innovations could we have if that wasn't what was promoted as the primary model for innovation?Instead of focusing on promoting patenting activity and lionizing heroic inventor stories, let's try to promote innovation and recognize forms of innovation that don't fit neatly into the patent framework. Collaborative research, open-source and open-science models, and other such forms of innovation are at least as important as patents—let's give them at least as much priority.Originally posted to the Patent Progress blog

Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »What are your plans this weekend? If you're like most of us living under pandemic lockdown, the answer is probably "not much" — but it could be "making a game using newly-public domain material!" All you have to do is sign up for Gaming Like It's 1925 and start exploring the wealth of works published in 1925 that have now run out of copyright protection and can serve as the basis for a great new analog or digital game. But don't delay — entries are due Sunday night at midnight!If you've never made a game before, that might sound like it's not enough time — but a two-day game jam is actually a great way to try your hand at game design. Entries can be as simple as a few rules for a roleplaying game typed into a text document, or you could make use of a tool like Twine or Story Synth that's easy to learn and provides everything you need to create a simple browser-playable game. The important thing isn't complexity or fancy assets — it's a clever idea and a vision for building something new based on old material, to show why a growing public domain benefits us all.Check out the game jam page for the full rules and some links to public domain works you could draw on, then join the jam and start working on your entry before midnight on Sunday, January 31st. Our judges will be playing the entries to select winners in six categories to receive some great Techdirt prizes (the winners of the 2020 jam are linked below, and you can read our judges' thoughts on them here):

Apparently every damn story has a content moderation angle these days. The still ongoing GameStonks! story keeps getting more and more fascinating in all sorts of ways. Yesterday, we noted as a side note, that Discord had shut down the r/WallStreetBets server that many of the subreddit users had used to communicate. Discord claimed -- somewhat unbelievably -- that it had done so at this very moment because of a long term "hate speech" problem on that server.But, then, a day later, Discord said it had re-enabled the server... but that the company itself was helping to moderate the server.

Although the main fight over the EU's Copyright Directive was lost back in March 2019, there are plenty of local battles underway. That's a consequence of the fact that an EU Directive has to be implemented by separate national laws in each of the region's 27 member states. Drawing up the local legislation is mostly straightforward, except for the controversial Article 17, which effectively brings in a requirement to filter all uploads. Trying to come up with a text that meets the contradictory obligations of the Directive is proving difficult. For example, although the law is supposed to stop unauthorized uploads, this must not be through "general monitoring", which is not permitted in the EU because of the e-Commerce Directive.As the various countries struggle to resolve these problems, it is no surprise that they are coming up with very different approaches. These are usefully summed up in a new post on the Kluwer Copyright blog. For example, France is implementing the Copyright Directive by decree, rather than via ordinary legislative procedures. As Techdirt reported, the French government is pushing through an extreme interpretation that ignores requirements for user protections. Germany, by contrast, is bringing in wide-ranging new law that contains a number of positive ideas:

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Steven Hill, the former policy director with the Center for Humane Technologies -- the non-profit that everyone seems to look to as some sort of knowledgeable source on "anti-Big Tech" talking points -- has come out with one of the most ridiculous op-eds regarding Section 230. And I say that as someone who seems to wade through a dozen or so terrible Section 230 op-eds every day. The title alone, should already make you nervous, but honestly this piece is so bad, so wrong, and so disconnected from reality, it completely undermines the Center for Humane Technology's credibility, even though this guy is no longer associated with them.The piece is titled: Biden should revoke Section 230 before we lose our democracy, which is just bizarre framing, but I'm open-minded enough to give any piece about Section 230 at least a chance to make its arguments.Of course, it starts off on the wrong foot since, you know, Biden literally cannot revoke Section 230. That's not how any of this works. You'd think that at least someone would point out that the President doesn't get to just revoke laws that Congress passed and were signed into law. That's just not how any of it works. But... maybe it's just a clueless editor at the Chicago Tribune and the article itself is better... Or maybe not.The 1st half of the article is basically one long "correlation / not causation" error. It talks about how we now have big internet companies and before we didn't -- and now we also have Trumpism, and before we didn't. Ergo, the theory goes, big tech is somehow responsible for Trumpism. There is not even any attempt to logically connect the two, it's just stated as if it's obvious:

A handful of municipalities in Georgia have filed a lawsuit (pdf) against Hulu, Netflix, and other streaming providers in a ham-fisted bid to saddle customers with cable franchise fees. Such franchise fees were common in the cable TV era. In large part because such cable providers had a physical presence in local municipalities. They utilized public rights of way, hung their coaxial cable on city-owned utility poles, often had local offices or broadcast hubs, and in some instances provided public access television.As a result, traditional cable companies struck local franchise agreements requiring they pay the local community for the right to access public property and resources. Since streaming providers (usually) have no physical presence in the states they're doing business, those fees didn't transfer over to the streaming industry. Enter these Georgia towns, which filed a lawsuit not only claiming that traditional cable companies haven't been paying the money they owe, but that streaming providers like Hulu and Netflix should also be paying up:

As more evidence comes to light showing a disturbing amount of law enforcement participation in the January 6th attack on the Capitol, police departments around the nation are finally being forced to face something they've ignored for far too long.The law enforcement officers who participated in the insurrection attacked officers attempting to defend the building, or, at the very least, did nothing to discourage the lawless actions occurring all around them. The officers that went to DC and engaged in a riot aren't an anomaly. They've been part of law enforcement for as long as law enforcement has existed: bigots with a penchant for violence and a thirst for power.These officers are finally beginning to be rooted out, but only because they did things no one can ignore. Hundreds of participants produced hundreds of recordings, turning their own celebration of their attempted election-thwarting into the evidence needed to identify them and charge them with federal crimes. Posts made to social media platforms provided more evidence, tying incriminating statements to location data to place off-duty cops on the scene.Now that agencies are finally confronting their in-house white supremacist/militia problem, they're asking for everyone to be made less secure so they can handle the problem that's been hiding in plain sight for years.Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo -- who presides over an agency with more than its share of bad cops -- was asked what officials like himself are doing to confront this problem. In response, Chief Acevedo asked for Congress to do him -- and other law enforcement agencies -- a favor:

As you should know by now as readers here, content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. Examples for how and why this is so are extensive on these pages, but the crux of the matter is that scaling moderation for content across huge platforms and a variety of avenues in a way that everyone both agrees is right and that doesn't create false-positives is, well, self-evidently impossible. Not everyone agrees what should be moderated, for starters, nor does anyone trust these platforms to actually get it right. Meanwhile, some massive amount of the public does agree that these platforms should be doing something.And that's how you get big platforms trying to automate content moderation in a way that makes everyone look incredibly dumb. Yet another example of this is the Google Play store banning a video player application over "sexual content and profanity", but just not for the reasons you're probably already imagining.

Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io »Game jams come in all shapes, sizes and, crucially, time spans. Many of them take place over a single weekend — so even though it's been running since the start of January, there's still time to sign up for our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1925 and start working on an entry before the deadline on Sunday night!We're seeking analog and digital games that make use of material published in 1925, which entered the public domain in the US this year. Sometimes the best games are the simplest ones with the clearest focus, and that's where a three-day crunch can be a help rather than a hindrance! By making use of tools like Twine or Story Synth, even if you've never used them before, making a digital game is easier than you think. Or, you could try thinking up a roleplaying or party game that needs nothing more than some written rules. Check out the game jam page for the full rules and some links to public domain works you could draw on, then join the jam and get designing!Entries are due by midnight on Sunday, January 31st and then our judges will begin playing the entries to select winners in six categories (the winners of the 2020 jam are linked below, and you can read our judges' thoughts on them here):

The cable industry was already struggling last year, when a record number of cable customers "cut the cord" and flocked to over the air or streaming alternatives. That was before a pandemic came to town. Now, with live sports less consistent and folks desperate to cut costs as they struggle to pay rent, the trend simply exploded in 2020. The number of folks still paying for traditional cable has now dropped 22.8% from pay TV's peak back in 2014. But by the end of 2024, analysts expect that fewer than half of US homes will subscribe to a traditional pay TV service.It's a trend that's expected to accelerate dramatically in 2021. One new survey by The Trade Desk indicates that another 27 percent of US households are planning to cut cable TV from their budgets this year:

We've covered so many bad faith bills that are attempting to undermine Section 230 for silly and disingenuous reasons. However, I expect we'll be seeing many more bills coming up that actually mean well, and have good intentions underlying the bill... but are still problematic and may make things worse. A new example of this is a not-yet-introduced bill from Rep. Yvette Clarke, along with Rep. Mike Doyle. They've released a "discussion draft" of the bill which they've dubbed the Civil Rights Modernization Act of 2021. This bill does two things that so many Section 230 reform bills do not: (1) it appears to attack an actual, clearly stated problem, and (2) it attempts to take a narrow approach to it.Unfortunately, as currently written, the bill fails to deal with the actual problems, and is likely to create a wide variety of unintended consequences that do a lot more harm than good.The idea behind the bill is simple: it's to add yet another exemption to Section 230, such that it would no longer apply to civil rights law in one specific situation: when dealing with targeted advertising. This bill comes almost directly in response to a report from ProPublica years ago showing that because of Facebook's ad targeting tools, landlords were able to exclude users by race. This is horrific and bad, and takes the world back to decades of horrific and regrettable US history where redlining was the norm, and communities were designed (with support of the government) to exclude people of color. Civil rights laws were supposed to help end that practice, and it's completely understandable to be horrified to see that Facebook may have been inadvertently bringing it back.Of course, after that report came out, Facebook promised to update its policies and tools to deal with this, explicitly banning discriminatory practices within its ads and promising more enforcement against such ads. Of course, as we know, content moderation at scale is impossible, and a follow-up report by ProPublica a year later... found the problem still existed. Facebook blamed a "technical failure" on missing those ads, but... yeah... not a good look by Facebook.Another year and a half after that, Facebook once again announced changes to its policies for dealing with discrimination in advertising, noting that it came after a bunch of civil rights organizations had sued the company over the discriminatory ads. This was part of a settlement of the lawsuit with those groups. Of course, just a week and a half later, Facebook got hit with another lawsuit, this time from the US government over these same discriminatory ads.Meanwhile, last summer, the Markup found... the same type of discriminatory ads on Facebook. So, whatever Facebook is doing, it hasn't been able to solve this issue.Given all of that, it might seem totally reasonable to argue that this bill makes sense. But, if you start to peel back the layers, that does not appear to be the case, and this bill might do a lot more harm than good. First off, let's go back to the core reason why Section 230 exists in the first place: to put liability in the right place. There is nothing, right now, that stops anyone from properly holding landlords who advertise in a discriminatory fashion liable. Indeed, if they're the ones doing the targeting in this manner, it seems only appropriate to correctly accuse them of violating Fair Housing laws. And, if you go after many of them for abusing targeting tools in this manner, that will hopefully get rid of much of the problem simply by convincing the ad buyers themselves to avoid such discriminatory and disgusting practices.But it gets worse from there. As Public Knowledge pointed out in an article last year, holding a platform liable for some types of speech can lead to significant suppression of important and useful speech:

CPAC, the "Conservative Political Action Conference" put on each year by Matt Schlapp's American Conservative Union (ACU), used to be the kind of gathering where Republicans would go to get their yearly talking points fed to them. Over the past few years, it has become increasingly tied at the hip with the Trumpists, as they took over the Republican party, threw out anything even remotely resembling principles, and just started acting like "making the libs cry" was a political platform. With the Republicans now losing both the White House and both houses of Congress, as well as some concerns about how some leading members of the Republican Party (looking at you Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley) were seen inspiring insurrectionists to storm the Capitol and try to overthrow an election, it seems like many people and organizations who would normally attend or sponsor CPAC (justifying it with the old "gotta work with both sides" nonsense) are deciding to stay away.Politico has a pretty thorough story on the mess that includes this silly bit of nonsense:

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I had been meaning to do another story on the whole GameStop/Reddit/WallStreetBets story, because there's a lot of really fascinating points on this, but my original story got pretty much wiped away this morning when Robinhood, the popular stock trading app that promotes itself as a way of democratizing stock trading and providing free trades -- and which was the main app used by Redditors to drive up the prices of various stocks that a bunch of hedge funds were trying to short -- announced that it was blocking the trades in all of the volatile stocks that Redditors were driving up. It did so in the most ridiculous of statements, claiming that they were pausing buying of those stocks to "[help] our customers navigate this uncertainty."

Apparently, when you write about major tech policy for the Wall Street Journal, you don't have to have the slightest idea what you're talking about. Take, for example, this bizarre piece by Allysia Finley dubbed "Net Neutrality and Big Tech’s Speech Hypocrisy." Finley and the WSJ editorial board were apparently excited to paint "big tech" companies as hypocrites for supporting net neutrality, while (gasp) opposing efforts to dismantle Section 230 by a bunch of folks who think they have a God-given right to be bigoted, trolling assholes on private platforms.The Murdoch family screed steadily goes downhill as it tries to fuse net neutrality and recent Section 230 debates into an incoherent mush just to paint Silicon Valley as hypocritical:

How does someone end up on the federal government's "no-fly" list? You'd think the shorter, less-convoluted question would be how one avoids ending up on this list. Unfortunately, the answer to either question is a convoluted mess -- one complicated unnecessarily by the number of federal agencies that think they should have a say in who lives and who flies.Papers Please has attempted to explain the no-fly list and its parameters. And it has kind of failed, albeit through no fault of its own. The interconnectedness of government things -- the wheels of which were greased with countless pieces of post-9/11 legislation, memoranda of understanding, data-sharing agreements, and the insistence of numerous agencies that they, too, were important cogs in the War on Terror Machinery -- has made this almost impossible to parse.Behold your tax dollars at work preventing you from flying:If you can't see the embed, here's an annotated PDF version.There were demands -- some made by the incoming President's people -- that participants in the Red Hat Insurrection should be added to the no-fly list. Bad idea. The no-fly list has been abused for years and it's not getting any better. Courts may be coming around to the fact that arbitrary federal-level decisions with almost zero recourse isn't what America's all about, but if change is coming, it will be slow, expensive, and stymied constantly by invocations of the "national security" mantra.Here are some of the facts. The FBI has used the no-fly list as leverage to turn Muslims into informants so it can more easily score empty net goals against supposed "terrorists" too poor to buy terrorist supplies and too mentally incompetent to formulate an attack plan, much less draft their own statement of ISIS allegiance.The feds' belated focus on domestic extremists doesn't excuse years of projecting a presumption of guilt on Muslims just because some extremists decided to fly planes into buildings. But the presumption of guilt continues -- encompassing pretty much any American who desires to board a plane.Airlines aren't much without passengers. So it's in their best interest to sell as many tickets as possible and board as many people as possible. Their default assumption is everyone's good to fly unless proven otherwise. The government has taken an opposing stance, presuming everyone guilty of latent terrorism.

As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, one of the main points of contention has been how to handle schools. Some countries sent all students home to keep them from spreading the virus. Other countries made schools the last thing they shut down, if they ever did, arguing that schools haven't been a major source of transmission and teaching kids is too important to shut down. Here in America, most states did a hybrid model, choosing the absolute worst of both worlds. Teachers get hamstrung having to teach students both locally and remotely, which is basically impossible, while still having students and teachers come into schools to transmit the virus to one another.Along the way, lots of schools took lots of actions meant to help students learn remotely, most of which were also quite dumb. Incorporating biometrics and AI to assist with remote testing sounds like a good idea, except these always go sideways. Privacy issues are discovered and kids learn how to game the AI-driven tests. Still other districts forced teachers to come into the school solely to teach kids who were at home and then told teachers to take their masks off if they were causing audio problems.But to see the cake-taking, best combination for good intentions gone horribly wrong, you really have to hand it to the UK ordering a ton of laptops for remote learning... that also came pre-loaded with Russian malware.

Summary: Upstart social network Parler (which is currently offline, but attempting to come back) has received plenty of attention for trying to take on Twitter -- mainly focusing on attracting many of the users who have been removed from Twitter or who are frustrated by how Twitter’s content moderation policies are applied. The site may only boast a fraction of the users that the social media giants have, but its influence can't be denied.Parler promised to be the free speech playground Twitter never was. It claimed it would never "censor" speech that hadn't been found illegal by the nation's courts. When complaints about alleged bias against conservatives became mainstream news (and the subject of legislation), Parler began to gain traction.But the company soon realized that moderating content (or not doing so) wasn't as easy as it hoped it would be. The problems began with Parler's own description of its moderation philosophy, which cited authorities that had no control over its content (the FCC), and the Supreme Court, whose 1st Amendment rulings apply to what the government may regulate regarding speech, but not private websites.Once it became clear Parler was becoming the destination for users banned from other platforms, Parler began to tighten up its moderation efforts, resulting in some backlash from users. CEO John Matze issued a statement, hoping to clarify Parler's moderation decisions.

Another day, another example of why we might want to actually pass at least a basic privacy law for the internet era. The latest problem bubbled up over at home security vendor ADT, after a technician was caught using home security cameras to spy on people for years. More specifically, the tech accessed customer video cameras in 200 homes some 9,600+ times over a period of four years. His preferred targets were attractive women he spied on while they were having sex, bathing, or getting dressed. This was, as US Attorney Prerak Shah was quick to note, a grotesque abuse of trust:

Rightwingers are demanding that their political leaders do something,anything. There must be a response to Twitter's ban on Donald Trump, and to AmazonWeb Services' shutdown of Parler. Republicans, once so ardentfor free markets, want thegovernment to teachprivate tech companiesa lesson they won't soon forget. Nationalizethem.Prosecutethem.Whatever. Any measures that convey hate for the scarytruth-phobicplutocraticBolsheviksof Silicon Valley will do.Thefirst problem, of course, is that the GOP, though strong in anger, isweak in power. Even if they channel their enthusiasminto concrete bills, they control neither the White House nor theSenate nor the House of Representatives.Tobe sure, Democrats, too, are mad at the major social media platforms.Their biggestgripe, however, is that those platforms failed to suppress rightwingextremism earlier.Democrats strongly want quite literally the opposite of whatRepublicans want. They want Trump and QAnon and “Stop theSteal” to remainoff Twitter and Facebook.Evenif implemented, most rightwing populist ideas would not serverightwing populist ends. We are told, for instance, that Section 230must be repealed. But that would not undermine platforms'discretion in moderating content. Platforms have First Amendmentrights of free speech and free association. When PragerU sued it forplacing certain videos in restricted mode, YouTube prevailednot under Section 230, but under the First Amendment.Actually,repealing Section 230 would ensure that more far-right content getstaken down. Section 230 is most useful, not when a platform removescontent, but when it leaves content up. Consider Forcev. Facebook,decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in 2019.Victims of terror attacks in Israel sued Facebook for not doing abetter job of finding and removing extremist content posted by Hamas.The court held both the publishing of the content, and anyalgorithmic promotion of it, protected by Section 230.Plaintiffs'lawyers will not hesitate to treat posts by rightwing extremists asakin to posts by Hamas. Nor will platforms, if exposed to liabilityfor such posts, hesitate to take down marginal material—anypost that plaintiffs' lawyers might try to tie to an attack.It'd almost be worth it, the GOP destroying Section 230, forthe spectacle of Republicansempowering plaintiffs'lawyersto drive the party's burgeoning conspiracist faction from thecommercial Internet.Anotherrightwing proposal is to declare each major platform a “publicforum” subject to First Amendment restrictions. But this planis almost certainly unconstitutional. “Merely hosting speech byothers,” the Supreme Court recently declared, in anopinionby Justice Kavanaugh, does not “transform private entities intostate actors subject to First Amendment constraints.”Someon the right wantto expandthis “state action” doctrine to embrace platforms. Otherswant to apply PruneyardShopping Center v. Robins,a 1980 Supreme Court decision forcing a mall to let students proteston its private property, in bold new ways. These efforts are riddledwith difficulties. For one thing, a pack of conservatives hasrecently taken the bench. Most of those judges presumably have littleinterest in bending the law simply to reach socialistic outcomes.PopulistRepublicans will likely conclude that antitrust is their best cudgelfor chastising Big Tech. Joining with Democrats, they can seek toredistribute revenue, unwind deals, and punish refusals to deal. Whenit comes to online speech, however, even antitrust will probably dothe right no good.Freezinga competitor out of a market for economic reasons can, indeed, be anantitrustviolation.That is not at all the same as refusing to deal with a companybecause of the abhorrent opinions it holds, spreads, or condones.After the storming of the Capitol on January 6, a prominent QAnonaccount proclaimed that a death cult secretly runs the planet, thatthis cult stole the election, and that President Trump had ensnaredthe cult in a sting operation. The post received more than 2.2million views on Parler:Youhave a First Amendment right not to associate with a business thatamplifies wingnuts. So does Amazon Web Services.SomeRepublicans want to use antitrust to breakupcompanies. But would that really change anything? Amazon Web Serviceshas many competitors in the cloud-computing industry. So far none—noteven Trump-friendly Oracle—has been willing to accept Parler asa client. Parler hosteda lot of violent, racist, toxic speech. Even if there were twice asmany Facebooks and Twitters, they might all refuse to carry suchmaterial. And even if there were twice as many cloud-computingproviders, Parler might still find itself universally shunned. Again,Parler can’t makeother companies work with a partner they find immoral. This is, asthey say, a free country.Whichbrings us to the rub: a political party that lacks culturalpower—that cedes it ostentatiously, in fact, as if doing sowere a strategy—isdoomed to struggle. It’s not a question of electoral success.Political power counts for little when you have no sway inuniversities, large cities, the mainstream media, Hollywood, SiliconValley, or the wider corporate world.Inter-elitebattles matter. If conservative ideas don’t get a hearing atPrinceton, at Google, or at NBC, conservative fortunes will suffer.Conservatives should pay more attention, therefore, to ensuring theyare present where cultural power is wielded. They can do this bydenouncing the GOP’s fringe elements; by supporting principledmoderates and by offering a positive vision, one that appeals to thenext generation of top talent who will occupy our cultural heights.Conservativeprofessors, computer engineers, and screenwriters deserve support.Cranks and bigots “censored” by social media platforms donot.Corbin Barthold is Internet Policy Counsel for TechFreedom

As Congress (on both sides of the aisle) continues to explore new and dumber ways to wreck Section 230, often claiming that they need to do it to "protect" or "help" certain people or groups, over 70 civil rights, human rights, and social justice groups have sent a letter to Congress and the new administration, telling them that they are targeting the wrong thing, and that destroying the open internet will do a lot more harm than good.

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Facebook has often been accused of having an anti-conservative bias. But its efforts to clean up its platform following the January 6th attack on the Capitol building indicate it just has an ongoing (and probably unsolvable) moderation problem.Shortly after the DC riot, it announced it would be removing content containing certain slogans (like "stop the steal") as an "emergency measure" to stop the spread of misinformation or encourage similar election-based attacks on other government buildings.It's not clear what other switches were flipped during this post-riot moderation effort, but it appears groups diametrically opposed to Trump and his views were swept up in the purge.

Like many companies, AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon recently made a big stink about how they were pausing all PAC spending in supposed disgust at the insurrectionists in Congress whose bullshit resulted in a fatal riot at the Capitol. As noted already, that doesn't mean all that much. PAC spending is usually paused after an election to help get the lay of the land. Also, pausing PAC spending for a bit doesn't really justify the four years they spent enabling and normalizing fascism and bigotry just to nab merger approvals, deregulatory favors, and massive, pointless tax breaks.Granted while Comcast and friends paused direct PAC spending to the alt-reality, anti-democratic bullshit artists in Congress, it's worth noting that their umbrella lobbying and policy organizations didn't. Sure, Comcast temporarily suspended PAC spending, but the NCTA, which largely represents cable giants like Comcast, didn't:

Here's the latest stupid way pro-Trump rioters are getting arrested for their participation in the Little Insurrection That Couldn't. Surprisingly, the inauguration went off without a hitch, but no one could have seen that coming a couple of weeks ago, when Trump fans raided the Senate building in an attempt to prevent election results from being certified.Opsec was the last thing on many invaders' minds. Providing great content for Parler followers or whatever seemed to be more important. The fierce opposition to wearing masks for health reasons carried over to a reluctance to wear masks for "committing federal crimes" reasons. Plenty of public posts to various social media services have made it exceedingly easy for investigators to track down perpetrators without having to leave their desks.I hesitate to call this the peak of January 6th related stupidity. There's always a chance this will be topped. But this is just gobsmackingly idiotic. As we're all painfully aware, cellphones generate a ton of useful (to investigators) location data that can track movements and tie people to criminal activities.It's one thing to forget your cellphone is an omnipresent snitch. It's quite another to forget you're wearing a device specifically designed to deliver your current location data to law enforcement. May I introduce to this fucking guy:

The NYPD is still spending taxpayers' money to prevent taxpayers from accessing police misconduct records. The latest fight over these records was prompted by the New York legislature, which repealed the law that allowed the NYPD to deny the public access to this information last summer.Since then, the NYPD and other first responder agencies have been attempting to litigate their way back to opacity. New York law enforcement agencies -- represented by their unions -- secured a temporary injunction blocking the release of these records last fall, setting the stage for even more expenditure of public funds to argue for the further screwing of the public these agencies are supposed to be serving.Additional litigation was prompted by Mayor Bill de Blasio's unsealing of disciplinary records in response to the law's repeal. NYPD officers and city firefighters filed their own suit following ProPublica's publication of the unsealed records. The NYPD's union was able to secure an injunction prior to this publication, but it was completely nullified by ProPublica's reporting, which put everything it had obtained from the CCRB (Civilian Complaint Review Board) -- which has its own copies of NYPD misconduct files -- online in a searchable database.This transparency genie can't be put back into the bottle, but that isn't stopping the litigants from trying to obtain a judicial order demanding this impossibility. US District Court Judge Katherine Polk acknowledged last year any order she might issue would be unable to "reach backwards in time" and reverse the publication of this info.The unions are back in court, claiming the release of this info by the CCRB (and its subsequent publication) has created a danger that can only be addressed with a history-erasing court order.

Let's get this straight out of the gate: I am an expert on nothing to do with the stock market beyond my own personal investments. So, absolutely none of this should be taken as any advice or indication that a certain position in any market is being advocated personally by me. This is not a post about where you should invest your money. It is, instead, a post about how silly certain portions of the stock market appear to have become.And that statement is informed by a decade of watching GameStop, the retailer for new and used video games, new and used video game consoles, and mostly new Funko Pop toys, has been driven further and further from relevance. While predictions about the demise of GameStop have been around forever, recently there is more reason to think they're going to become true. First, the trend of expanded purchases for digital downloads does away with a hefty chunk of GameStop's potential revenue. Yes, GameStop offers its own digital download platform... but nobody uses it. In recognition of that trend, the next generation of consoles are being offered with an option to forgo any optical drive entirely, which would be another nail in GameStop's coffin if widely adopted. And, like most retail operations, the COVID-19 pandemic has severely crippled GameStop's business.Which is why those challenges and trends are accurately reflected in GameStop's stock price, because... oh, wait... shit.So, yeah, in the month of January, GameStop's stock has risen roughly 4x. And if you want to try to explain that away, please note that pulling the timeline back further actually makes all of this look way more bonkers.Okay, so what's going on here? Did GameStop come up with an entirely new strategy to propel its relevance in the long-term video game industry? Did it totally restructure, coming up with cost-saving measures or store and staffing closures that make it suddenly more profitable? Was there some consequential change of leadership or outside investment in the company?Nope, none of that. Instead, there appears to be a sort of insane tug of war going on right now on Reddit between short sellers and day traders that is artificially sending this stock on an insane rollercoaster.

We've got one more cross-post from another podcast this week, and the subject is still the law that's dominating the tech policy discourse: Section 230. Mike recently joined R Street's Shoshana Weissmann on the Daily Tech News Show hosted by Tom Merritt, for a roundtable discussion about the all-important online liability shield and its many, many vital applications that people typically fail to consider. You can listen to the whole conversation on this week's episode of the Techdirt Podcast.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Republicans have spent decades holding themselves out as the party of "small government" and "keeping government out of business," while also claiming to be strict supporters of an originalist interpretation of the Constitution. The reality, of course, is something altogether different. Even as Republican politicians often pay lips service to these claims, their policy ideas show the opposite. The top Republican on the House Energy & Commerce Committee has announced the GOP's "Big Tech Accountability Platform" that has an astounding level of government interference not just into business, but into the 1st Amendment rights of all Americans.The full plan is somewhat astounding (I don't know why it's showing sideways, but I guess download it and rotate it). It opens by paying lip service to the idea of the 1st Amendment, and the value of "more speech" over suppressing speech. But then immediately seeks to undermine the 1st Amendment by suggesting that internet companies should be compelled to host speech they disagree with. It falsely suggests that the decision to suspend President Trump's account was an attack on his conservative views, and not his efforts to incite his supporters into overturning the election. It includes a section on giving law enforcement more access to content and forcing tech companies to become an arm of law enforcement. It (of course!) has a section on protecting "our children."The whole thing is a censor's dream.Of course, the GOP has no real power in Congress, especially in the House right now, but that could change quite a bit over the next few years, so we should take these proposals seriously. The key parts of the plan are here:We could go through piece by piece and explain how these issues are misleading, wrong, silly, or pointless, but I'm sure we'll have plenty of chances to address each point as they start showing up in various bills.What is clear, however, is that most of this policy is not about any principled stands the GOP may have. Most of it is about spite.

Back in 2019, a California court tossed a lawsuit brought by a self-described feminist who had her Twitter account banned following some posts targeting transgender people. Meghan Murphy tweeted enlightening things like "men aren't women tho" and "how are transwomen not men?" She also "deadnamed" transsexuals, identifying them using their former gender/names, something Twitter's rules explicitly prohibit.The court didn't care much for Murphy's proposed class action lawsuit, pointing out that Twitter is free to remove users and content for any and all reasons, even reasons it hadn't yet added to its official list of rules. (The deadname prohibition came after Murphy's account was permanently suspended.) This may seem unfair, but that's the rules people agree to when using a platform provided by others.Beyond that, there's Section 230, which shields Twitter from exactly these kinds of lawsuits. The court pointed out Twitter's editorial decisions (i.e., the removing of her account and its content) do not remove the platform's Section 230 protections. In fact -- contrary to inexplicably popular belief -- Section 230 of the CDA expressly provides for good faith moderation efforts and does not limit them to removing only illegal or illicit content.The court tossed the lawsuit and Murphy appealed. Murphy's second pass doesn't go any better than her first. And, again, it's Section 230 that's instrumental to this second dismissal. From the decision [PDF]:

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Here's an interesting lawsuit, brought to you by some familiar names. And by "interesting," I mean "exceedingly stupid."The lawsuit [PDF] was filed by "Ambassador Marc Ginsberg." Ginsberg last served as an ambassador in 1998. And yet, that title is being used to name him as the plaintiff. The defendant is Apple. In the mix (but not a defendant) is Telegram, a popular and often controversial messaging app that has served as a mouthpiece for alt-right personalities and others who have been banned from more mainstream social media services.Ginsberg also runs the Coalition for A Safer Web (the co-plaintiff in this lawsuit), a non-profit whose mission is "inter alia, to promote new public/private partnerships to facilitate the expeditious removal of extremist and terrorist incitement and instruction content from social media platforms." The executive team at CSW includes Dr. Demetrick Pennie, a former Dallas Police sergeant and, according to the site, "leading CDA 230 expert."Here's some of Dr. Pennie's 230 expertise at work:

As we've noted a few times, there's an underlying belief in American tech policy that if we just keep throwing money at entrenched broadband monopolies we can lift US broadband out of the depths of mediocrity. But as we've noted more than a few times, heavily subsidizing a bunch of regional monopolies, while not doing anything about the conditions that created and insulate those monopolies, doesn't result in much changing. It's especially ineffective when you don't really punish ISPs for decades of taking taxpayer money in exchange for network upgrades that almost always, like clockwork, wind up unfinished.The latest case in point: in 2015, regional monopolies CenturyLink and Frontier Communications took nearly $800 million in taxpayer funds to expand broadband to underserved areas they deemed too expensive to wire themselves. And guess what happened:

When cops complain about marijuana legalization being the slippery slope to a crime-ridden, apocalyptic hellhole, they're really only complaining about the removal of one of their favorite excuses for searching vehicles, houses, and people without a warrant.For years, the odor of marijuana has been a blank check for warrantless searches. But when marijuana possession is no longer a crime, it stands to reason the odor of marijuana is no more "suspicious" than the odor of gasoline or fresh bread or a litter box. These are all just things now -- non-criminal things. And yet, cops can't seem to let this go, even years after the contraband is no longer contraband.A recent decision [PDF] by an Oregon appeals court -- a state where marijuana has been legal since 2015 -- reaffirms the legality of possessing marijuana and firmly reminds the state's law enforcement they need far more than a whiff of marijuana to engage in further hassling of citizens. (via FourthAmendment.com)In this case, a state trooper followed his nose to an arrest for drug trafficking. It started with a traffic stop:

Police reform efforts are being mounted all over the nation, but very few appear to be capable of creating any lasting, positive changes. Reforming law enforcement is difficult to do. Legislators, for the most part, still "back the blue," if for no other reason than cops are also government employees. Powerful police unions are firmly entrenched, providing the biggest obstacle to reform -- fully capable of gutting reform bills by leaning on legislators and threatening less law enforcement activity.The Louisiana legislature has finally agreed to some recommendations from a state task force. The best recommendations, however, were excised from the final proposal, leaving state residents to deal with law enforcement agencies which won't really have to change much of anything to comply with the minimal changes.Perhaps the most significant change is this, which shows you just how little will be changing for the state's cops.

Readers here will not need to be reminded that BMG, a prolific music label, is also a prolific enforcer of copyright. BMG has been party to some of the most notable instances of copyright enforcement, from its lawsuit against Cox, to its use of Rightscorp to troll internet users and lie to them, up to and including taking down news videos of President Obama singing an Al Green song. There are plenty more examples after those, leaving anyone perusing them with the distinct impression that BMG super-duper respects the strictest enforcement of copyright laws, presumably in order to protect creators of content.But that wouldn't seem to be the case if the accusations from the Jehovah's Witness affiliated Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society are true. See, BMG is the publisher for artist Aled Jones' album Blessings, which is essentially a collection of religious songs from a wide variety of faiths. Jones included a Jehovah's Witness song, kicking off a shit storm.

South Carolina's civil asset forfeiture programs are abusive and unconstitutional. That was the conclusion reached by a South Carolina court late last year.

For the last year, we've been highlighting how Australia's rush to create a Google News tax is so stupid. It follows similar efforts in Europe and a few other places, where newspapers that spent years dismissing the internet and doing little to adapt, are now whining that Google is... sending them free traffic and not paying them for it.It's truly bizarre. Google sends lots of traffic to news organizations. Tons of news organizations employ search engine optimization experts who work hard to get even more traffic from Google. But... around the globe, many of them are demanding that Google also pay them for sending them traffic. Back in 2014, Google shut down its Google News offering in Spain when that country passed a similar law. Over the past few months, Google has tried to explain to Australian officials just how incredibly stupid this plan is, but Australian officials (and the newspaper lobbyists down under) don't seem to care.Last week, Google finally pulled out the nuclear option, saying that it might just pull out of Australia entirely if the law passes. That's an even bigger threat than the one Facebook made a few months back, when it claimed it would likely block the ability of anyone in Australia to share news on Facebook. But Google says it may shut down entirely in Australia:

With Trump FCC boss Ajit Pai and his giant coffee mug headed for the revolving door, the Biden administration has tagged existing FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel as the new boss of the agency. Rosenworcel is well liked by consumer advocates and industry insiders, and largely opposed the Trump FCC's efforts to lobotomize the agency's consumer protection authority, kill net neutrality, eliminate decades-old media consolidation rules, and effectively turn the agency into a rubber stamp for Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon's every policy pipe dream.Outside of that time when she helped scuttle an FCC effort to bring more competition to the cable box because the US Copyright Office (falsely) claimed doing so would violate copyright, Rosenworcel has a good track record as somebody genuinely interested in real data and real solutions. That makes her a notable improvement to Ajit Pai, who literally could not even admit US broadband is expensive, spotty, and generally mediocre, or that this is due to rampant, unchecked monopolization. It's a willful blindness Rosenworcel clearly doesn't share:

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