Earlier this year, Louisville (KY) police officers killed an unarmed woman during a no-knock drug raid. Breonna Taylor was killed after her boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, opened fire on SWAT officers Walker believed were criminals entering their home. The officers claimed they had announced their presence before entering. A 911 call placed by Walker -- a licensed gun owner -- indicated no warning had been given.
As one of, if not the, largest player in the streaming platform wars, Netflix is oft the target of copyright infringement threats and lawsuits. These actions against it have by and large been found to be absolutely baseless. Whether it's estates of long-dead authors, private prisons, or the brother of dead drug kingpin Pablo Escobar, there are plenty of folks out there who see a wealthy company on the rise and try to get a piece of that cash for themselves by making dubious intellectual property claims.But if Netflix is the biggest player in streaming, then certainly its hit show Stranger Things is its most notable contribution. And, so, it's no surprise that the show has faced copyright challenges in the past and is being sued once again by someone claiming the idea for the show was his first.
Outside of the agencies desiring to participate in a cyberwar, cyberwars are generally considered to be a bad idea. At some point, the cyber is going to turn physical and we'll just be stuck in a regular war that actually kills people. And since accurate attribution still remains elusive, the potential for picking the wrong fight remains.There was some talk of going to cyberwar with Russia after the DNC server hacking. The CIA, in particular, was all too willing to send its keyboard warriors out to do battle. This desire to draw virtual blood found some backing in the press when NBC acted as the agency's PR office, talking up the new bright, shiny warfare and asking viewers if they'd like to know more.As long as officials have been claiming we're on the cusp of a "cyber Pearl Harbor," the CIA has been wanting to go on the offensive. The CIA already participates in plenty of cyber-attacks, but it's mostly of the one-to-one variety, targeting individuals the agency has placed under surveillance. But the agency does know how to disrupt elections, participate in coups, and otherwise wreak havoc in "enemy" lands.Now it can do it at the cyber level. And, as Yahoo News was the first to report, it's been doing it for a few years now thanks to the new kid in town.
Everyone is still sorting out exactly what happened last week with the big hack of Twitter in which a number of prominent accounts -- including those of Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Apple, and Uber -- all tweeted out a Bitcoin scam, promising to double people's money if they sent Bitcoin to a specific wallet (which appeared to receive a little over $100k). However, from what has been reported so far, it appears we actually got fairly lucky and that it was mainly a bunch of SIM swapping social engineers who historically have focused on getting popular short usernames. If you're not familiar with all of this, the Reply All podcast had a fascinating episode about the scam last year.Meanwhile, Vice has a post describing how the hackers involved convinced a Twitter employee, who had access to a Twitter control panel, to make changes for them. The guy who controls the (formerly Adrian Lamo's) Twitter account @6, provided some details on how the hack got around two factor authentication controls: within the control panel a new email address was added to the account, and then, from the control panel, the two factor authentication would be disabled. An alert would be emailed out about this -- but to the new email address. Brian Krebs provided some details about who he thought was behind all of this (and the connection to the SIM swapped hack of Jack Dorsey's account from last year). Finally, the NY Times scored an interview with the hackers themselves -- again, showing that it was just a crew of SIM swapping kids, mostly doing this for the lulz (and also suggesting that the person Krebs fingered was only peripherally involved, in that he'd made use of the same access to pick up Lamo's old @6 account, but didn't take part in the Bitcoin scheme).
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Looks like we finally have some secret police to call our own. Ongoing protests stemming from a Minnesota police officer's brutal killing of an unarmed Black man have provoked a federal response. In some cases, the National Guard has been called in to quell the more violent and destructive aspects of some demonstrations. Others -- like the 50+ days of continuous protests in Portland, Oregon -- have been greeted with something far more frightening.Jonathan Levinson and Conrad Wilson of Oregon Public Broadcasting were the first to break the news of unidentified federal officers yanking people off the street into unmarked vehicles and disappearing them for a few hours of interrogation.
Like countless other American business sectors, U.S. cable and broadband providers have been using hidden fees to covertly jack up their advertised rates for much of the last decade. These fees, which utilize a rotating crop of bullshit names, help these companies falsely advertise one rate, then sock the consumer with a significantly higher rate post sale (often when locked into a long-term contract). They also let them falsely try and claim that prices haven't increased, when they pretty clearly have.Back in 2014, Comcast introduced a new $1.50 per month surcharge on cable bills it called its "Broadcast TV Fee." Said fee was really just a portion of the cost of doing business for Comcast (programming costs), busted out of the full bill and hidden below the line -- again to help the company falsely advertise a lower price. Fast forward to 2020 and the fee is now $15 per month, per user, and growing -- despite a number of lawsuits (correctly) alleging that the fees are misleading and predatory.And it's not just Comcast. Charter (Spectrum) has also heavily embraced such a fee, its own "broadcast TV surcharge" getting jacked from $13.50 to $16.45 a month starting in August:
This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to the woman who hopes to sue for half of the GoFundMe proceeds for a Starbucks barista she fought with after refusing to wear a mask. In first place, it's Grey bringing some perspective to her claim that she can't wear masks due to a disability:
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The Houston PD decided to take a look at itself after a botched drug raid ended with two people killed by officers. The raid was predicated on pure bullshit. Officer Gerald Goines turned two Houston residents into dangerous drug traffickers by using a nonexistent confidential informant, drugs Goines had stashed in his squad car, and a narrative unsupported by any actual facts. Claims of heroin trafficking by a violent drug dealer were undercut by the raid itself, which turned up no heroin or the gun the (fake) informant claimed he saw.Officer Goines is now former officer Goines. He's facing multiple state and federal charges, including two counts of felony murder. This sort of thing doesn't just happen. It's not an anomaly formed in a pristine environment. The almost-nonexistent oversight of the Houston PD's drug warriors led directly to Goines' deadly concoctions. An internal review of the drug unit by the Houston PD shows officers operated with indifference, carelessness, and negligence. Officer Goines may have been the worst of the 175 officers, but he was far from the only one abusing the system to engage in unsupervised drug warrior freelancing. (via Grits For Breakfast)
This series of case studies is published in partnership with the Trust & Safety Foundation to examine the difficult choices and tradeoffs involved in content moderation. Learn more »Summary: In early 2020, with the world trying to figure out how to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the big questions faced by internet platforms was how to combat mis- or disinformation regarding the pandemic. This was especially complex, given that everyone -- including global health experts were trying to figure out what was accurate themselves, and as more information has come in, the understanding of the disease, how it spread, how to treat it, the level of risk, and much, much, has kept changing.Given the fact that no one fully understood what was going on, plenty of people rushed in to try to fill the void with information. Most social media firms put in place policies to try to limit or take down misinformation or disinformation using a variety of policies and tactics. But determining what is misinformation as opposed to legitimate truth-seeking can be very tricky in the midst of a pandemic.In late March, as the pandemic was hitting full swing, an article appeared on the website Medium by Aaron Ginn, a self-described Silicon Valley “growth hacker,” arguing that the response to COVID-19 was overblown and driven by “hysteria.” The piece included many citations of credible data and reports, but also included a few quotes significantly downplaying the risk of COVID-19, including saying that its “transmission rates are very similar to seasonal flu.”The story started to spread widely, mainly after a number of Fox News hosts started tweeting it. As the story got more and more attention, Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, decided to critique Ginn’s article in great detail via an extended Twitter thread. Bergstrom makes a fairly compelling case that Ginn’s lack of expertise in epidemiology led him to making a number of mistakes in his analysis, in particular, not understanding how viruses spread, and how that information is tracked. He also argued that Ginn cherry-picked certain data to support a thesis. Bergstrom and others started arguing that Ginn’s Medium piece was (perhaps not intentionally) misinformation.Decisions to be made by Medium:
A decade ago, one of the most ridiculous copyright trolling outfits was CEG TEK (which stood for "Copyright Enforcement Group... um... TEK"). It would shake down people like any other copyright troll, but it also had a "CTO", named Jon Nicolini, who CEG TEK would trot out as a questionable forensic expert in various trolling cases.It appears that Nicolini has since set out on his own, creating a more modern form of a copyright trolling operation called "Okularity." We've talked recently about how some folks have, instead of using the courts, simply been using social media takedowns via bogus copyright claims as a form of extortion, and that's become quite popular. However, so far, it seems that this has mostly been done by stupid kids looking to make a quick buck.Nicolini and Okularity appear to have professionalized the extortion racket.And they may have picked on the wrong person. In a recently filed lawsuit by Enttech Media Group, the parent company of the famous (and excellent) Paper Magazine, lawyer Richard Tauler lays out in great detail the kind of scam shakedown that Nicolini runs via Okularity:
In early 2019, after Spotify announced the purchase of podcast studio Gimlet Media, we worried that it signaled an end to the open world of podcasting. Part of what made podcasting so special is that, like the early parts of the internet, it was wide open. Anyone could make their own podcast, and just host it somewhere with an RSS feed and then anyone could listen to it via any podcast app or service they wanted. But Spotify is a mostly closed platform.Our fears solidified a lot two months ago when Joe Rogan moved to Spotify (under a rumored $200 million deal), such that his insanely popular podcast will only be heard via Spotify going forward. As we said then, the world loses a lot when podcasts go into private silos (even if the podcasts are available for free). We start moving away from an open system that anyone can use, and which democratizes the creation and distribution of content, to much more of a traditional gatekeeper-run broadcast model. And that's unfortunate, even if it's understandable.And now we have Michelle Obama announcing "The Michelle Obama Podcast," which is exclusive to Spotify. Frankly, we should not call it a podcast any more when it's not actually available for anyone to listen to on their own podcast apps. This is Spotify exclusive audio. That's not a podcast.I understand why we got here and why everyone involved did this. For Spotify, it will boost usage (as will the Rogan deal) of their app and once people start using it to listen to those exclusive podcasts, a lot of people will probably shift over and do all their podcast listening via Spotify as well. And I'm sure that, as with Rogan, Spotify is paying a lot to Michelle Obama to do this. And, of course, I'm sure the production value will be great.But, still, it's worth noting that this move to silo'd, locked up content is disappointing and a shame, as it's yet another nail in the coffin for the promise of the truly open internet.Open systems allow for more participation, more inclusiveness. Closed systems, by their very nature, create gatekeepers and exclusivity. That may be good in the short term for certain business interests, but it's bad in the long term for the public and speech interests. Spotify may very well be successful with this strategy, but the least we can do is stop confusing the closed, exclusive, gatekeepered system with the open, inclusive ecosystem.
In early 2019, after Spotify announced the purchase of podcast studio Gimlet Media, we worried that it signaled an end to the open world of podcasting. Part of what made podcasting so special is that, like the early parts of the internet, it was wide open. Anyone could make their own podcast, and just host it somewhere with an RSS feed and then anyone could listen to it via any podcast app or service they wanted. But Spotify is a mostly closed platform.Our fears solidified a lot two months ago when Joe Rogan moved to Spotify (under a rumored $200 million deal), such that his insanely popular podcast will only be heard via Spotify going forward. As we said then, the world loses a lot when podcasts go into private silos (even if the podcasts are available for free). We start moving away from an open system that anyone can use, and which democratizes the creation and distribution of content, to much more of a traditional gatekeeper-run broadcast model. And that's unfortunate, even if it's understandable.And now we have Michelle Obama announcing "The Michelle Obama Podcast," which is exclusive to Spotify. Frankly, we should not call it a podcast any more when it's not actually available for anyone to listen to on their own podcast apps. This is Spotify exclusive audio. That's not a podcast.I understand why we got here and why everyone involved did this. For Spotify, it will boost usage (as will the Rogan deal) of their app and once people start using it to listen to those exclusive podcasts, a lot of people will probably shift over and do all their podcast listening via Spotify as well. And I'm sure that, as with Rogan, Spotify is paying a lot to Michelle Obama to do this. And, of course, I'm sure the production value will be great.But, still, it's worth noting that this move to silo'd, locked up content is disappointing and a shame, as it's yet another nail in the coffin for the promise of the truly open internet.Open systems allow for more participation, more inclusiveness. Closed systems, by their very nature, create gatekeepers and exclusivity. That may be good in the short term for certain business interests, but it's bad in the long term for the public and speech interests. Spotify may very well be successful with this strategy, but the least we can do is stop confusing the closed, exclusive, gatekeepered system with the open, inclusive ecosystem.
So we had an incredible post recently about infamous (as in called out for lying in court multiple times) copyright troll Richard Liebowitz running into more potential trouble when his own client, photographer Glen Craig, sending a letter directly to the judge saying that he had no idea about cases filed in his name.Liebowitz has now responded with more detail than I expected, given his past infamy, suggesting at the very least that Craig was aware of the original lawsuit against PopMatters. That does not mean it will help Liebowitz. And it may get him in more trouble.First, let's discuss the big problem: Liebowitz is still representing Craig in this case. And here he is now acting against his client's own interests, basically telling the judge "don't make me pay the attorney's fees in this case, make my client pay." That's the very definition of acting in favor of his own interests and against his clients. And that's not even getting into the decision to reveal privileged correspondence between himself and his client. There are cases where this makes sense, but you're certainly supposed to withdraw as the client's lawyer first, since you can no longer represent the client. That's not what has happened here.So, even if it proves that Craig did know about the case, doing this does not necessarily do Liebowitz any favors, and again raises (more) significant questions about how Liebowitz is still a practicing lawyer.As for the actual filings, Liebowitz submits five exhibits of email communications between himself (or his staff) and Craig which indicate to some extent Craig was aware of all of this. But I stress the "to some extent." First, there's an email reply to Liebowitz staffers, who had sent Craig a list of URLs that they claimed showed matches on a Craig photograph. Next to each URL Craig wrote "YES OK" "OK" or "NO NO GO AFTER." The implication is that "YES OK" or "OK" meant that those were licensed cases, but "NO NO GO AFTER" were unlicensed uses, and Liebowitz should "go after" them, which likely could be seen as an okay to sue (though, normally "NO NO GO AFTER" seems like a weird way to give approval for a lawsuit). But in the "NO NO GO AFTER" category is a link from PopMatters, which is the defendant in this case:Liebowitz then presents a few emails from Craig -- some in ALL CAPS and with poor spelling and grammar -- apparently showing Craig repeatedly asking Liebowitz to file suit against PopMatters (and also asking for money from Liebowitz). I will note that Craig's writing style in these emails is markedly different from his writing style in the letter he sent to the judge.
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The Second Circuit just issued an ugly decision in a defamation lawsuit against Joy Reid. It not only revived the case against her, but it greased the skids for many more defamation cases to be brought in federal court, including plenty even less meritorious.The case, La Liberte v. Reid, involves two of Reid's social media posts from 2018. The first was from June 29:
Last Friday, the internet exploded with the news that Amazon was banning its employees from installing TikTok, the hugely popular social media app by Chinese company ByteDance. An entire day's news cycle was dedicated to Amazon's decision, with an ocean of press reports implying that the Chinese social networking platform was a privacy nightmare directly tethered to the Chinese government. The story came on the heels of months of allegations by the Trump administration that the app was doing things so vile and atrocious that the only solution was to ban the popular app from the United States entirely.But then, at the end of the day, something odd happened. Amazon suddenly backtracked, stating that its announcement to employees urging them to uninstall TikTok was a mistake. An entire day's news cycle, filled with allegations that TikTok was a privacy nightmare, was based on little more than an administrative brain fart.It was just the latest example of how, upon closer inspection, much of the hysteria surrounding TikTok isn't based on much of anything... substantive. There's been no limit of pearl clutching from the Trump administration and its allies about the app, but when it comes to actual supporting evidence to justify an outright ban, there's just not much of it beyond "it's from China." Case in point: Senator Ken Buck penned one of a flood of editorials over at Newsweek, declaring that TikTok was aggressively nefarious and a diabolical threat to US consumers:
The Trump Administration has all but abandoned its duty to hold the nation's law enforcement agencies accountable for wrongdoing. When Trump took office, he immediately declared his administration would "end" the "dangerous anti-police atmosphere." Being pro-accountability means being "anti-police," apparently. Trump's DOJ immediately took action to comply with the new boss, focusing on eliminating the department's Community Oriented Policing Services office and severely curtailing its investigations of law enforcement agencies.The DOJ's Civil Rights office hasn't been completely eliminated. But its focus has shifted towards "protecting" churches from COVID-related closures and dismantling Section 230 to protect the children destroy encryption.It's 2020 and the DOJ is only now delivering the results of its first "pattern and practice" investigation of a law enforcement agency. This one targets the Narcotics Bureau run by the Springfield, Massachusetts police department. This investigation was prompted by the actions of two of its members, which resulted in federal criminal charges.
For golf fans such as myself, one of the great joys over the past few weeks has been the return of live golf to the television screen. As one of the sports that is most naturally aligned with the need for social distancing and crowdless events, it was also one of the first to come back. Still, with COVID-19 running rampant throughout the world and America in particular, not every last thing is coming back. For instance, the pandemic has led organizers for the R&A's signature gold event, The Open in the U.K., to at least delay it from its July 16th start, or possibly cancel it altogether.With that being said, what do sporting event organizers in 2020 do when they cannot play their IRL sports tourneys? Well, for one, they turn to esports of course! R&A has announced it will hold an e-Open event, using TopGolf's WGT game to allow literally anyone to compete in this year's Open.
Back in February, $130 "smart" pet feeders from a company named Petnet simply stopped working. When customers reached out to the company to complain, they hit a complete and total brick wall in terms of functioning customer service. Emails and phone calls weren't returned (or wound up undeliverable), and the company simply refused to answer annoyed customer inquiries on Twitter or Facebook.These problems extended into March and April, with customers consistently complaining to outlets like Ars Technica that their "smart" feeders still didn't work, and support was nowhere to be found. By late April, the company announced it had at least partially shut down, furloughed employees, and closed its offices. The outfit attempted to largely blame COVID-19 for its misfortunes, despite the fact its problems started well before the pandemic, and the company's office had been empty and available to lease since last October.Claiming they had no other option, Petnet also began trying to charge customers a new $4 monthly fee to keep the company's lights on and customers' not-so-smart pet feeders semi-operational. Many users begrudgingly decided to pay the fee, and for some reason were shocked to discover that it hasn't really improved things in the slightest. For many, their $130 smart pet feeder sometimes works, but it can't connect to the internet or Petnet systems (the whole point). And throughout all of this, Petnet has proven incapable of providing even baseline customer support:
This one sounds boring, but stick with it because it's important. Because the US and the EU have vastly different privacy regulation regimes, there has always been some conflict over how (mainly) US internet companies handle data from the EU. For years, this was "settled" by a weird and mostly useless "EU-US data protection safe harbor" agreement, in which US companies would have to get "certified" that they kept EU-originated data protected at an "equivalent" level to how it would be protected in the EU when transferring it across the Atlantic to US-based data centers. It was a bit of a nuisance as a company (we went through the process ourselves), but in 2015 the entire safe harbor agreement was invalidated by the EU Court of Justice because of the NSA's ongoing snooping on data from those internet companies, as revealed by Ed Snowden.The EU and US freaked out, and had a frantic negotiation to come up with a new "safe harbor" agreement with the catchier name of "Privacy Shield," but as we pointed out when it was announced, the problem wasn't the text of the agreement, but rather the NSA's surveillance practices with regards to internet data. Here's what I wrote four years ago:
Law enforcement "gang databases" are a joke. And definitely not a funny one. Officers can convert innocent citizens into gang members just because they live in the same neighborhood or attend the same schools as gang members. Wearing the "wrong" clothes can get people "nominated" for extra law enforcement harassment. So can simply talking to gang members, like volunteers of outreach programs often do.This has filled gang databases with a bunch of junk data. But it's junk data that can disrupt lives, if not destroy them completely. Los Angeles cops trying to look busy (this is the best spin I can put on this) have been tossing people into CalGang with zero justification whatsoever. More than a twenty officers are under investigation for falsifying records related to the state's gang database.The investigations continue but it appears at least a few LAPD officers might be heading to jail.
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I know you've heard this before, but just so we're all clear: wear a fucking mask, people. It's truly not that big of a deal. I wear one at work any time I am not seated in my office. It's crazy easy and you can even get a little fun out of it by wearing a personalized one like our Techdirt masks.But, if you're not going to wear a mask, don't also be an insufferable jerk like Amber Gilles. Amber got really mad when a Starbucks barista named Lenin Gutierrez refused to serve her because she wasn't in a mask. She decided to take a picture of Gutierrez and post it on Facebook, complaining about it. When the internet saw the post, it did its thing.
We've talked a lot about how while fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a good thing (in that faster, more reliable networks are always good), it's been comically over-hyped by cellular carriers that have taken every opportunity to misrepresent what the technology is capable of, the kind of real world speeds users will actually see, and where the technology is actually available.If you listen to Verizon's 5G ads, you'd think the technology was already available nearly everywhere. Verizon ads routinely proclaim that "People from midtown Manhattan to downtown Denver can experience what your 5G can deliver," and usually feature thrilled consumers from Omaha to Los Angeles basked in ultra-fast wireless glory.Reality is... something different. One recent study by OpenSignal found that users in the real world are able to obtain a Verizon 5G signal about 0.4% of the time, largely because the millimeter wave spectrum Verizon is using doesn't provide very good range, and can't penetrate buildings particularly well. Even in the places that Verizon advertises as having widespread coverage -- like sports stadiums -- routinely see patchy availability.As such, after fielding complaints from AT&T (which has routinely made its own false claims about 5G), the National Advertising Division (NAD)--the investigative arm of a nonprofit dubbed the BBB National Programs--has told Verizon to stop misleading consumers as to where 5G is actually available:
The last time the CBP delivered a Privacy Impact Assessment of its automated license plate readers, it informed Americans as far as 100 miles inland that there's really no privacy being impacted by the deployment of tech capable of capturing millions of plate images every year. If you don't want to be on the CBP ALPR radar (which is shared with the DEA and other law enforcement agencies), don't drive around in a properly licensed vehicle.This impact assessment was not updated when the CBP's ALPR vendor was hacked and thousands of plate photos -- some of which contained photos of drivers and passengers -- were taken from the vendor's servers. The vendor was never supposed to be storing these locally, but it decided to do so and the end result was a lot of leakage the CBP assured everyone contained "no personal information" about the thousands of people and vehicles contained in the photos.The CBP's latest Privacy Impact Assessment [PDF] has been turned in and it's more of the same thing. Want to dodge the feds' plate readers, stay off the road. (via Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
It's hardly news to Techdirt readers that China carries out censorship on a massive scale. What may be more surprising is that its censorship extends to even the most innocuous aspects of life. The ChinAI Newsletter, which provides translations by Jeff Ding of interesting texts from the world of Chinese AI, flags up one such case. It concerns a Chinese online TV series called "The Bad Kids". Here's how the site Sixth Tone describes it:
This series of case studies is published in partnership with the Trust & Safety Foundation to examine the difficult choices and tradeoffs involved in content moderation. Learn more »Summary:Google’s biggest early innovation in search was that it used inbound links as a tool for determining the popularity of a website, and thus what its relevance to a particular search might be. That feature, however, created some side effects that raised concerns about how search results might lead to misinformation, or how the search engine might be gamed.One of the earliest examples of this was the discovery in 2004 that the first result of a search on the word “jew” pointed to a blatantly anti-semitic website, Jewwatch. It was widely theorized that the reason for this was that the singular noun “jew” was more likely to be used by those pushing anti-semitic arguments, rather than the more common adjective “jewish” or the phrase “jewish wo/man” etc. Also, the site Jewwatch had been in existence for many years, and had many inbound links from other sources.Some also believed that the people behind Jewwatch had used an early search engine optimization technique known as “Googlebombing” to purposefully game the results — deliberately linking to Jewwatch from other sites, and using the word “jew” as the link text.As this result got attention, Google came under tremendous pressure to change the search result, as people accused the company of anti-semitism or deliberately pointing to the Jewwatch site in search results. The Anti-Defamation League sent a letter to Google asking it to explore whether or not its ranking system needed to be changed (though the ADL also posted an article to its own site telling people that it was clear that the result was not intentional, or done for nefarious reasons). Some politicians, including Senator Chuck Schumer, also got involved to pressure Google to change its results.Decisions to be made by Google:
This series of case studies is published in partnership with the Trust & Safety Foundation to examine the difficult choices and tradeoffs involved in content moderation. Learn more »Summary:Google’s biggest early innovation in search was that it used inbound links as a tool for determining the popularity of a website, and thus what its relevance to a particular search might be. That feature, however, created some side effects that raised concerns about how search results might lead to misinformation, or how the search engine might be gamed.One of the earliest examples of this was the discovery in 2004 that the first result of a search on the word “jew” pointed to a blatantly anti-semitic website, Jewwatch. It was widely theorized that the reason for this was that the singular noun “jew” was more likely to be used by those pushing anti-semitic arguments, rather than the more common adjective “jewish” or the phrase “jewish wo/man” etc. Also, the site Jewwatch had been in existence for many years, and had many inbound links from other sources.Some also believed that the people behind Jewwatch had used an early search engine optimization technique known as “Googlebombing” to purposefully game the results — deliberately linking to Jewwatch from other sites, and using the word “jew” as the link text.As this result got attention, Google came under tremendous pressure to change the search result, as people accused the company of anti-semitism or deliberately pointing to the Jewwatch site in search results. The Anti-Defamation League sent a letter to Google asking it to explore whether or not its ranking system needed to be changed (though the ADL also posted an article to its own site telling people that it was clear that the result was not intentional, or done for nefarious reasons). Some politicians, including Senator Chuck Schumer, also got involved to pressure Google to change its results.Decisions to be made by Google:
The inaugural edition of the Techdirt Tech Policy Greenhouse is in the books, and we'd like to thank all of our contributors and those that engaged in conversation as we tackled one of the thornier issues of the modern tech policy era. As we noted early on, our goal with the project is to bring some nuance, collaboration, and understanding to a privacy conversation frequently dominated by simplistic partisan bickering, bad faith arguments, and the kind of deep ideological ruts that routinely result in either bad policy,or, in the case of U.S. privacy, no policy at all.If you've not yet had a chance to dig through contributions for this inaugural edition, here's a brief rundown:Senator Ron Wyden argued that it's time for Congress to finally pass a meaningful privacy law for the internet era. One with an eye on transparency, end user control, and meaningful penalties for incompetent or malicious corporations.Lindsey Barrett discussed the fixation on "big tech" when talking about privacy, and how this has allowed certain actors (predominantly in the adtech and telecom sectors) to tap dance over, around, and under meaningful scrutiny for the same or worse behavior.Evan Engstrom discussed whether we can craft a meaningful privacy law in the United States without ushering forth a new breed of privacy troll.Gigi Sohn and Jeff Gary explored how telecom industry lawyers in Maine are myopically engaged in a legal assault that could have a massive and poorly understood impact on our ability to address sector-specific privacy issues.Jen Persson explored the challenges facing educators during the pandemic, and the unrelenting quest to monetize the data gleaned from a growing array of often dubious, gamified, and poorly understood algorithms and e-learning platforms.Chynna Foucek examined how inherent racial biases fused with a broken court system and Luddite government leaders creates a perfect storm of privacy dysfunction.Joey Salazar and Benjamin Moskowitz explored how one path toward greater privacy would be to encrypt the domain name system (DNS) as we attempt to rebuild something vaguely resembling consumer trust.Malkia Devich Cyril explored how existing systemic bigotry all but ensures that contact tracing technologies won't adequately protect Black and disadvantaged communities, especially without comprehensive and equitable health care reform.Kirk Nahra explored how the pandemic has created an abrupt collision between privacy welfare and health care industry interests, requiring a reconciliation during one of the most challenging periods in American history.Cory Doctorow explored the need for greater technological interoperability on the road toward shifting power from massive unaccountable conglomerates to end users. Chris Lewis also discussed the need for greater interoperability, and how our current paradigm can be particularly harmful to disadvantaged communities and content creators.Kate Tummarello explored the delicate balancing act of crafting sensible privacy policy without harming startups, innovation, and overall competition.Gaurav Laroia examined how Coronavirus surveillance is far too important and risky to be left exclusively up to the private sector.Ernesto Falcon made the case that we need clear and obvious legal liability (aka a "private right of action") for companies that repeatedly fail to respect consumer privacy and data security, resulting in some excellent panel discussion on what's proven to be one of the thornier issues in the privacy debate.Jim Harper argued that the quest for better online privacy and security can’t be solved by giving people new property rights in personal data.Joe Jerome took a deeper dive into how, in a country where privacy enforcers at the FTC are simultaneously captured and underfunded, what actual reform and a functioning and transparent U.S. privacy enforcement mechanism might look like.Crafting meaningful privacy guidelines and ensuring sensible, consistent, transparent enforcement was a steep uphill climb even during the best of times. Now the effort will share fractured attention spans and resources with an historic pandemic, recovering from the resulting economic collapse, and addressing the endless web of socioeconomic and political dysfunction that made the American COVID-19 crisis far worse than it needed to be.But as many of our contributors made clear, many of these problems are not mutually exclusive. Crafting sensible, transparent, and equitable privacy rules and standards remains just as essential as ever; preferably before the steady parade of privacy and security scandals inevitably get worse. We're hopeful the insight and conversation collected here gave policymakers and observers alike some additional food for thought as we collectively stumble in the right direction.
It's appropriations season (isn't it always?), and as the House Appropriations Committee digs into the various ways in which it funds the government a friendly little birdie pointed me to a fun little tidbit buried in the House's Financial Services and General Government Appropriations Bill for 2021:If you can't read that it says:
ICE has already decided it won't make foreign students here on visas choose between their health and their education. The temporary relaxation of rules governing remote learning -- put in place in March when the coronavirus started rolling through the United States -- was suddenly (and inexplicably) reversed by ICE last week, even as COVID infection numbers continue to spike.The reversal made no sense, unless disrupting the lives of foreigners here legally was the real point of ICE's unjustified rollback. With this rollback -- and no sign of abatement in the pandemic -- students here on visas were facing severe disruption. If the schools they were attending didn't offer in-person classes during the fall semester, their only option was to return home and hope everything came together internet-wise so they could continue their education.ICE was immediately sued. MIT and Harvard went after the agency, claiming its reversal violated federal administrative law. Its lawsuit was joined by another 170 universities -- all of which faced the prospect of shedding foreign students or turning their campuses into COVID attack vectors. The agency was also sued by a number of state attorneys general for the same reason.Fortunately for the ~100,000 affected foreign students, ICE has ditched its rollback, thanks to this legal pressure.
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Oh, copyright troll Richard Liebowitz is at it again. Last month, we wrote about an absolutely massive benchslap he received, as a judge detailed pages upon pages of Liebowitz lying to various courts, filing questionable lawsuits, and doing all sorts of things no lawyer should ever do. And now that list is getting longer.Apparently Liebowitz has spent nearly two years engaged in a lawsuit in which he never informed his own client about anything related to the lawsuit. The client -- a photographer named Glen Craig -- seems reasonably upset by all this. I know I would be.
While there's really no denying that Chinese smartphone and network gear maker Huawei engages in some clearly sketchy behavior, it's generally not anything that can't be matched by our own, home-grown sketchy telecom companies. And while the Trump administration has been engaged in a widespread effort to blackball Huawei gear from the global marketplace based predominantly on allegations of spying on Americans (mostly to gain leverage in what's largely seen as a counterproductive tariff and trade war), nobody's been able to provide a shred of public evidence that this actually occurs despite 20 years of pearl clutching.That's not to say that Huawei doesn't pose national security risks. But for an argument that's been making the rounds for the better part of the last decade (including one 18 month White House investigation that found nothing), there's a surprising lack of hard evidence of actual spying on Americans when you actually go looking for it. And there are surprisingly few people that actually seem to care.With that in mind, Germany and the UK (including UK intelligence services) initially balked at the Trump administration push, noting that if there were security issues with Huawei gear, they'd be caught by existing hardware security review processes. The concern is that a global blackballing -- including pulling Huawei gear out of existing networks -- would be cumbersome, costly, ineffective, and create potential new problems. And given that Chinese hardware is literally in everything from your home router to the litany of feebly secured "IOT" devices attached to your home and business networks -- potentially futile.This week however the UK finally buckled to U.S. requests, and announced that it would be (slowly) implementing a ban on Huawei gear in both 5G and fixed fiber networks:
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) is the EU's top court. As such, it regularly hands down judgments that cause seismic shifts in the legal landscape of the region. Sometimes, though, it makes decisions that can seem a little out of touch. Here, for example, is the CJEU judgment on a case that involved unauthorized uploads of videos to YouTube (pdf):
Stalkerware is one of those things that most people never would have considered when technologies were being developed, but which in hindsight come off as practically inevitable. These apps, often times named as if they would be chiefly marketed to parents trying to keep tabs on their kids, but which instead are also specifically advertised as ways to stalk current romantic partners and exes, are all different flavors of creepily allowing a person to snoop on the location and activities of an unsuspecting other person. The whole concept is so obviously evil that it's a wonder why any platform would allow these apps to be sold in the first place, and yet it was only in 2019 that Google managed to ban them from its app store.
There's a new way for cops to get information about suspects and it involves people who've already been victimized by criminal acts and/or careless handling of personal data by corporations. As Joseph Cox reports for Motherboard, law enforcement agencies are using third-party services to gain access to personal info derived from data breaches.
At the end of May, we launched the Techdirt Greenhouse — a new project to foster long-form conversations with a wide variety of experts about the most challenging and nuanced tech policy questions of our time. Since then we've been focusing on our first topic: privacy. Now we're wrapping that up and getting ready to launch a series of posts on our next subject, but first we wanted to sit down with one of our Greenhouse editors, Karl Bode, to look back on all the excellent pieces that we've published over the past few weeks. Check out the Greenhouse page here on Techdirt to catch up on the posts, then listen to the podcast for a wrapup of all the ins-and-outs of privacy policy challenges that our many great contributors brought to the project.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.
There has been something of an explosion of copyright claims on streaming services as of late. Frankly, the impetus for these claims is all over the place. You have your ever-expanding cadre of copyright maximilists going ballistic. There are the political actors, looking to copyright claims to try to take down content from those on the opposite side of the aisle. There are the automatic bots that crawl for content and get it wrong many times. And then there are the scammers.There are lots of ways to abuse copyright to scam folks out of money, or their accounts and content. But one recent method appears to be crawling for YouTube videos that incorporate tiny sections of video game music and then attempting to take over monetization of those videos.
Okay, I think I've found it: the absolute perfect specimen of how copyright maximalism eats the brains of its proponents. Last week we had a few discussions about the now infamous open letter in Harper's about so-called "cancel culture." I made my criticism of the whole saga quite clear, but even as someone who often sees how copyright impacts almost everything around us, I never would have ever thought that there was any kind of tie-in to copyright law. But, that's why I don't work for the Center for the Protection of Intellectual Property (CPIP) at George Mason University. CPIP, set up and funded by a combination of extreme copyright and patent maximalists, tends to be quite reliable as pushing out the most ridiculous takes possible in favor of copyright and patent maximalism.But this latest from CPIP's new Executive Director, Sean O'Connor, reaches new heights of pure propagandistic nature -- arguing that somehow copyright is the answer to what concerns the signatories of the silly Harper's Letter. Why? I honestly can't tell you. I've read the piece a half dozen times and it never actually makes an argument. It takes, as a given, that cancel culture is a thing and claims (totally incorrectly) cancel culture itself responded to the letter. I don't even know what that means. Even if we assume that cancel culture is a thing, "it" doesn't "respond" to anything. The criticism to the letter wasn't from "cancel culture." It was from people who criticized the letter. Because the letter was lame, and used bland platitudes that could both be used to defend an open market of ideas and as a shield from criticism of truly awful ideas.The article then goes on a weird and one-sided history lesson about the rise of intelligent discourse, which it associates with the rise of copyright, which is an ahistorical notion. The crux of the article, though, is that copyright is the reason why ideas get published:
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As we had fully expected a judge in NY has now tossed out the bogus restraining order against Mary Trump, the niece of President Donald Trump, regarding her book about the President and their family.In a much more detailed order than his original Temporary Restraining Order, NY Supreme Court judge Hal Greenwald gives multiple reasons for rejecting the effort, lead by the President's lawyer Charles Harder but on behalf of the President's brother Robert Trump, to claim that the contract that was agreed to among various family members should block the publication of the book. Some had noted that the gag clause in the agreement between the various Trump family members was quite broad, and wondered how that might actually lead to problems with publication, but Judge Greenwald notes that the broadness works against the contract here:
In telecom policy circles, there's an army of "experts" who twist themselves into pretzels trying to pretend U.S. telecom is a healthy, normal, vibrant market. Blinded by partisan loyalties, sector financial links, or ideologies embedded decades ago in grad school, they're incapable of even acknowledging that Americans pay too much money for spotty, substandard service with historically terrible customer support. They're even less likely to acknowledge the corruption, regulatory capture, and lack of competition that made this dysfunction possible. If it is acknowledged, it's downplayed to a comical degree.As in the Ma Bell days, at the heart of U.S. broadband dysfunction sits phone companies. Providers that have long refused to upgrade their aging DSL networks despite millions in taxpayer subsidies, yet lobby for state laws that ensure nobody else can deliver broadband in these neglected footprints either. These are companies that have a bizarre disdain for their paying customers, delivering the bare minimum (slow DSL) at the highest rates they can possibly charge without a full-scale consumer revolt. It's not surprising, then, that many telco DSL customers are fleeing to cable, assuming they even have a second broadband option.The poster child for U.S. telecom dysfunction is Frontier Communications. Frontier has repeatedly been busted in a series of scandals involving substandard service and the misuse of taxpayer money. Frontier-related graft and corruption in many states (like West Virginia) is so severe, state leaders have buried reports detailing the depth of the problem, and, until recently, a Frontier executive did double duty as a state representative without anybody in the state thinking that was a conflict of interest.In many states, regulatory capture ensures that Frontier's behavior never sees so much as a wrist slap. That was particularly noticeable when Frontier was recently busted charging users a $10 monthly "rental" fee for modems that the users owned. Frontier, like many big ISPs, has also been given free reign to impose all manner of additional sleazy and misleading fees, usually used to help broadband and TV providers falsely advertise a lower rate.Even in states where consumer protection is a little tougher, the penalties aren't routinely damaging enough to deter bad behavior. The latest case in point: Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson reached a settlement with Frontier last week (pdf) in which Frontier will pay a $900,000 fine for years of imposing bullshit fees on the company's customers. One such fee, dubbed the "Internet Infrastructure Surcharge," imposed an additional $4 monthly on user bills:
Late last month, the first known false arrest linked to facial recognition software was reported. But that first in AI police work now appears to be merely a repeat offender. There have been two bogus arrests linked to facial recognition false positive. And both bogus arrests were performed by the same law enforcement agency, the Detroit Police Department. Elisha Anderson of the Detroit Free Press has the details on the first blown call by the PD's software.
For some years, we have been banging the drum repeatedly pointing out that video games need to be viewed through the lens of artwork. There a variety of headwinds in solidifying this stance, but they mostly revolve around older generations repeating the sins of their forefathers in declaring any art they aren't "in to" to not be art at all. And, yet, thinking about this for ten seconds will reveal just how silly that is. Video games include elements of drawing, storytelling, creative modeling, and music. Any one of those is most certainly art in and of themselves, yet combining them to make something entertaining somehow throws a lot of people for a loop. And, yet, we see revolutionaries turning to games these days to make compelling artwork, while museums have already begun curating the output of this relatively young industry.And once we accept that video games are a form of art, it follows that the flow of culture and society will influence that art. That's the way it's always been. Art is a mirror held up to society. And one of the glaring flaws in that mirror image in gaming has, for a long time, been the multi-faceted lack of diversity in both the industry and the games themselves.
In recent years, technologists have coined the phrase “splinternet” to describe the internet’s supposed evolution from a unified, borderless realm into a fragmented set of parallel internets, divided by national borders.This assumes that the internet was, at one point, global in some meaningful sense. But the reality has always been more complex. From the stark digital divide for students during COVID-19 to Western companies enacting overly broad regional blocking in the name of “security,” the digital world never floated freely on a flat plane, untethered from political and geographical boundaries.Yet, talk of a splinternet points to an important question: will the internet be more like one world (with some bumps along the way), or will it have semi-permeable borders that are tricky and expensive — perhaps even impossible — to cross?To know whether (or how) the internet is becoming more fragmented first requires reliable methods for measuring internet fragmentation. The Daylight Security Research Lab has been working on this challenge for over a year with UC Berkeley’s Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity.The internet is not a singular technology. It’s an ensemble, cobbled together from a variety of complementary tools and protocols. Each protocol sits on top of the one beneath it, creating "layers" of technologies that, together, we colloquially call “the internet.” In a recent column in the New York Times, for example, Shira Ovide describes fragmentation among companies providing digital services in India. This competition happens at the "content layer," which hosts the applications we interact with.But this content layer locality is only one dimension of fragmentation. “Below” this layer, IPv6, an upgraded internet protocol system — the basic addressing system that allows computers to connect to the internet — rolls out unequally across the world. As older IPv4 addresses (in the style of 127.0.0.1) become increasingly scarce, internet outages could hit countries with low IPv6 penetration. Upgrading to IPv6 requires private- and, in some cases, public-sector investment so this divided access to the internet will break along lines of wealth.“Above” these technical layers, regulations like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Russian data locality laws fragment the internet at the "legal" or "social" layer. Russia’s laws require data about Russians to be stored in Russia and have enabled the Putin regime to disconnect from the wider internet as part of a “preparedness” drill. However, the GDPR has yielded a more subtle, bureaucratic flavor of fragmentation. As of 2018, about a third of major U.S. news sources blocked visitors from Europe to avoid GDPR regulations. While the policy merits of the GDPR can be debated, the regulation has undeniably made national borders matter more for the way data flows throughout the world.Fragmentation can come at any layer of the internet stack. To capture this multifaceted reality, the Daylight Security Research Lab built a dataset to measure internet fragmentation through proxy measures based on four different layers of this stack.Rather than revealing a world moving in one direction from "global" to "fragmented," the research reveals a more complex reality. Internet governance decisions produce diverse types of fragmentation. Some countries may have lots of data locality laws, while their content-layer patterns align with global norms. Other countries may exhibit the opposite pattern.Across the five layers of the stack, the research mapped these fragmentation profiles with surprising results. On the one hand, countries expected to be different were surprisingly similar. Ask what Norway has in common with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, and Bahrain, and someone might guess, “aside from oil, not much.” However, these very different countries have very similar, country-specific browsing habits, degrees of network non-neutrality (e.g., government or ISP interference) and work on similar infrastructures. While the specific browsing habits are almost certainly different between Norway and Saudi Arabia, the way in which they are different from the supposedly “global” internet is itself similar.On the other hand, similar countries can have a surprisingly different internet. Per popular imagination and some recent reports, China’s model of the internet — one in which blocking is pervasive and centralized— has set a precedent that other Belt & Road countries, like Laos and Indonesia, are following. But the data challenges that assumption. In fact, China stands out from all of the seven Belt & Road countries that were analyzed. China has more data locality laws, a higher degree of content layer locality and significantly higher observed network interference.As the shape of internet governance changes, barriers and enablers to using these services shift as well. It becomes easier to carry out speech, commerce and other digital activities in “blocs” of interoperability, and harder to move across the borders between those blocs. For an app starting today in the United States, it may be easier to block users from EU countries than to learn about and comply with EU regulation. Imagining this small-scale conflict playing out on a larger scale, regulations can (and do) produce fundamentally different experiences on the internet.In the meantime, as you read anecdotes claiming the internet is becoming one way or another, or that changes have some good or bad effect, remember the eternal truth about any complex system: it's complicated.What are we to make of the weird parallels between Norway and Bahrain? And what does this multifaceted reality mean for businesses or policymakers? Our ability to answer these questions is limited by our lack of a common language for discussing the phenomena. To know what’s down the road for the web, we first need to measure it.Nick Merrill directs the Daylight Security Research Lab at the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity. His research is focused on identifying potential harms of technology, and to help others do the same.
As details continue to come out about the San Francisco Police Department's raid of a journalist's home last year, the more it appears as though there was a concerted effort by the PD to ignore both the First Amendment and the state's journalist shield law.From the beginning, investigators knew someone from within the police department had leaked a coroner's report to Brian Carmody, a local "stringer." But the department didn't limit itself to tracking down its inside source. It placed Carmody under investigation, targeting his phone records, location data, and, finally, his home. The department's chief, Bill Scott, spent two weeks defending the raid before deciding it was OK to blame officers for actions he explicitly improved.Five warrants linked to the investigation have been tossed by the courts that issued them. Carmody has received a $369,000 settlement for his rights being violated. And more details continue to come to light, showing the department personnel involved never came anywhere close to operating in good faith.Last month, it was revealed that the officers sent to raid Carmody's home were instructed to turn off their body cameras. This allowed the PD to write its own narrative of the search without anything more neutral possibly exposing lies or omissions.Fox affiliate KTVU is continuing to dig into this story and has uncovered even more damning information about the investigation of Carmody and the raid of his home. First, the SFPD was well aware (or should have been) Carmody was a journalist, and that targeting him for surveillance would be problematic and unconstitutional.
As was widely expected, the NFL team based in Washington DC, formerly using the "Redskins" as their team name, will be renaming themselves after years of people pointing out that the name is racist, and the team being so obnoxious that it has literally sued native Americans who had previously sought to cancel the team's trademark. Either way, what finally got the Dan Snyder-owned team to ditch the name was... money, of course. The biggest sponsors of the team began to threaten to pull support, and that finally convinced Snyder to do something he should have done a long time ago.Of course, the story that many are focusing on following the official announcement to find a new name is... the fact that some dude has been busy filing trademark applications on a bunch of possible replacement names.
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