It seems these days you can't mention anything to do with cryptocurrency without someone jumping in and insisting that cryptocurrency is a disaster for the environment. There are differing opinions on all of this, but a few years ago, BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen set out to build a more "eco friendly" cryptocurrency called Chia. The basic idea was that, rather than using a proof-of-work system -- which involves using up a ridiculous amount of computing power, it would use a proof-of-space system, looking at how much hard drive space you're allocating. After many years of development, Chiacoin finally launched a few weeks ago. And, to pretty much prove the old axiom that there's no such thing as a free lunch, while it may not be directly wasting CPU cycles, it's impacted the world differently: by destroying the global hard disc supply chain, driving prices for hard disks through the roof -- leading people to point out that even if it's not wasting electricity like Bitcoin, it may be wasting hard drives. Some may challenge the question of whether or not this is wasteful (those hard drives are doing something...) but there are multiple reports of running Chia on SSDs is wearing them out in ridiculously short periods of time -- even to the point that some SSD makers are saying that using their hard drives for Chia will void the warranty. Yikes!All that said, this post is not so much about Chia's setup or its impact on the global supply chain for hard drives. It's about trademark bullying. You'd think that a company started by Bram Cohen -- someone all too frequently falsely accused of being responsible for music and video piracy from his BitTorrent days -- would be extra sensitive to coming across as an "IP bully" of any sort. And this is true of some of the other folks who work on Chia -- some of whom I know are Techdirt regulars.But, for whatever reason, Chia Networks has decided to be an obnoxious trademark bully. Chris Dupres, another Techdirt regular, started a blog to cover news about Chia Networks and ChiaCoin called The Chia Plot. It's got a bunch of interesting articles about what's been happening on the Chia front.And apparently the folks at Chia decided to threaten him with legal action.Last week, "the head of IP for the Chia Network," Belle Borovik (who appears to be a recent law school grad), sent Chia a legal nastygram, insisting that the site violated Chia's trademark. Admittedly, the letter was at least somewhat friendlier that your typical cease and desist or threat letter. It thanked Chris for educating the public about Chia, and asked him to get a license to use the Chia name, which it offered up on a "royalty free" basis.

Update: Perhaps due to all of the negative publicity this received, Stanford agreed to drop the investigation, and allow Wallace to go on with graduating. The original story remains below.Ah, the Federalist Society. It makes a big deal about how "cancel culture" is supposedly a "threat to liberty" but apparently that doesn't apply when someone makes fun of them. Nicholas Wallace is a 3rd year law student at Stanford Law, and a few weeks after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol, Wallace decided to highlight that some prominent FedSoc members who were seen to have cheered on the riot at the Capitol. So he created an obviously satirical email mocking the Federalist Society and the types of events it normally holds and sent it to a Stanford Law listserv. In this case, Wallace made an invite for a fake FedSoc event, parodying standard FedSoc events, entitled: "The Originalist Case for Inciting Insurrection" and claimed that the main speakers at the event would be insurrectionist fist bumper Senator Josh Hawley and still under indictment for felony fraud Texas Attorney General, Ken Paxton.The invite goes on to note:

The Supreme Court has been on a bit of roll lately. After years of making things worse for plaintiffs suing law enforcement officers over rights violations, the Supreme Court has begun reversing qualified immunity decisions finding in favor of the rights violators. It still has a lot of damage to undo from its decades of expansion of the qualified immunity doctrine but it's a start.A new, very short decision [PDF] from the Supreme Court reverses another blown call by an appellate court and restores some Fourth Amendment protections that decision stripped away.In March of last year, the First Circuit Court of Appeals decided to do something a little different: it extended the limits of the poorly defined "community caretaker" function to cover warrantless searches and seizures that involved someone's home. The decision it relied on -- Cady v. Dombrowski (1973) -- previously only covered vehicles already in law enforcement possession or on public roads.In that case, a man's wife called for a welfare check on her husband. The previous night, her husband had asked her to "shoot him now and get it over with." She left and he stayed in the house with the gun. When she couldn't reach him by phone the next day, she asked the police to check in with him.The police spoke to the man and expressed his wife's concerns. They then went to his house. He voluntarily departed via an ambulance to check in at the local hospital to see what help they could be in dealing with the mental breakdown he seemed to be experiencing. The officers took it upon themselves to enter the home and seize any guns they found. They did this despite the man (now hospitalized and posing no threat to anyone) expressly refusing to consent to this seizure.Too bad, said the First Circuit. The home is now a car and "community caretaking" function excuses the lack of warrant or express permission to take personal property.

There has been quite an uptick recently when it comes to the conversation around video game preservation. There are probably several reasons for this. First and most notably, the confluence of the trend toward the gaming public primarily purchasing digital games rather than shiny disks, and the emergence of the latest generation of video game consoles has brought the question of what happens to older games into stark relief for many in the gaming public. Second, America has been in something of a love affair over the last decade or so with all things "retro". And, finally, the concept of video games as works of creative art, rather than wastes of time to be sneered at, has found firm purchase within our society. All of this has combined to make the public much, much more interested in preserving antiquated video games. And, frankly, very disappointed at how often the gaming industry doesn't take preservation at all seriously.Well, it's happening again. In the near future, Electronic Arts will be shutting down the servers and online portions of several Need For Speed games.

Summary: Twitter users who made the mistake of tweeting out an innocuous word -- 'Memphis -- found themselves suspended from the service for 12 hours for apparently violating the terms of use.According to messages sent to suspended users, the use of the Tennessee city name violated prohibitions on posting personal information.The inadvertent damage quickly spread across Twitter as users trolled each other, trying to get unsuspecting accounts to tweet the suddenly-forbidden word. The apparent flaw in the auto-moderation system went unaddressed for several hours as more and more users found themselves temporarily prevented from using the service. Although some users noticed certain accounts (mainly verified ones) weren't being hit with bans, it affected enough users that the ripple effect was not only noticeable, but covered by many mainstream media outlets.The bans were lifted several hours later with no explanation from Twitter other than that an unspecified "bug" had resulted in tweets containing the word "Memphis" being removed and features limited for those accounts.That explanation was not entirely clear. Given the "Memphis" bug's link to alleged violations of Twitter's policies against posting other people's personal information, it was speculated the ban on a single city name may have been the result of an erroneously-completed form on the moderation side. Systems security professional SwiftOnSecurity took a plausible stab at the possible root cause of this improbable series of moderation events.

Thanks to the efforts of transparency activists Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS), residents of Chicago are learning more about the activities of their sworn protectors, the Chicago Police Department. Stuff the PD never wanted the public to see is now in the public's hands. The Chicago Sun Times has started digging into the stash provided by DDoS and has revealed the PD's secret drone program, paid for with off-the-books funds.

It's been quite a month for the former President, Donald Trump, and his attempts to speak out. Almost a month ago, Trump launced a Twitter-like blog, with very limited interactive features, a silly terms of service (which said they could moderate whatever they wanted, like every other site). As we noted, lots of people mocked it for being just a standard old blog, but it did make the point that despite what other social media platforms might do, Trump was not being "censored." He had lots of ways to speak up. Of course, after a couple of weeks, reports noted that the site wasn't getting very much traffic, we highlighted that this showed what the issue really was: Trump wasn't upset about a lack of ability to speak. He was upset about the lack of a free audience.As more and more reports came out about the dwindling traffic on the site, Trump (in standard Trump fashion) insisted that the site was actually getting huge traffic, even more than last year during the election:

Another court case prompted by the Snowden leaks has reached its conclusion. And the findings are that Snowden's revelations were accurate: the NSA's Five Eyes partners were breaking laws and ignoring people's rights when engaging in mass surveillance. That's just a natural side effect of grabbing communications and data in bulk and pretending it's lawful if you sort through it after you've already acquired it.

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Look, I get that the Opinion sections of major newspapers want to run a variety of opinions, and thus might do less fact checking than the news parts of the paper, but it still seems just bizarre that they let any ignorant fool post absolute nonsense with no attempt at providing facts or the reasons why the underlying assumptions the opinion piece is based on are just wrong. Henry Olsen is apparently a "conservative" columnist for the Post while also being involved in some think tank that has been whining about big tech and, bizarrely, apparently suggesting that God believes Republicans should stop Twitter from having rights or something. Anyway, Olsen's column claims that critics of Florida's social media bill "are wrong" and that's it's perfectly legit for a state government to tell a company how to handle speech on their websites.As you'll recall, Florida just signed its bad bill into law, and it's already being challenged in court, where the law is almost certain to be thrown out as unconstitutional.Olsen, though, is sure that the bill is perfectly fine and there are no constitutional problems with it at all. After reading the headline, I expected to see some legal citations or actual, you know, factual arguments. But... that's apparently not what the Washington Post gets out of Olsen. First, Olsen insists that even though the facts don't support the idea that there's anti-conservative bias in how social media is moderated, he can cherry pick two examples -- Donald Trump and James O'Keefe -- as proof that it must be true and that something needs to be done:

When the data doesn't go its way, the US broadband industry has a tendency to just make up data that does. That was certainly the case during the Trump tax cuts, when the industry claimed tax relief would create thousands of new, high paying jobs and boost broadband investment (that never happened). It was also the case during the net neutrality repeal, when the industry claimed that being freed from "burdensome regulation" (read: bare minimum levels of FCC oversight) would also result in job growth and a major spike in broadband investment (that never happened either.With the Biden administration planning a $100 billion $65 billion investment into broadband, major ISPs (AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, Charter) are worried that some of that money could be used to boost broadband competition. After all, real data makes it abundantly clear this lack of competition directly results in Americans paying some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world. To do that, the Biden plan claims it will heavily support local community broadband efforts, often some of the only competition regional telecom monopolies see.To fight back against the plan, telecom policy and lobbying group US Telecom has been circulating industry reports proclaiming that US broadband is...actually super cheap, and getting cheaper:

The past year saw theInternet become a lifeline during the COVID-19 pandemic. But 2020also saw increased scrutiny of online content moderation, regulationof platforms and their effects on society. While recent headlineshave focused heavily on social media platforms, the conversation ismuch more complex: the future of the Internet as we know it dependson discussions and policies regarding intermediary liability -- thelegal rule that platforms should not be liable for the content postedby their users.Section 230 reform inthe U.S. and the proposed DSA and DMA in the European Union aredriving a new era of intermediary liability rule-making, and othercountries have followed suit: India recently updated guidelinesapplicable to intermediaries, and Mexico is discussing how to ensurefreedom of expression in social media platforms. Instead of lettingthe U.S. and Europe influence these debates, governments around theworld can learn important lessons from Brazil.With approximately 145million Internet users, Brazil has a large and growing digitaleconomy. There are around 10,000 ISPs operating in the country,broadband Internet is available to almost 90% of the population, andthe country's Internet Exchange Point, IX.br, is one of thelargest in the world. Brazil also has a strong tradition of Internetgovernance and policy. Since 1995, the country's"Multistakeholder Internet Steering Committee" (CGI.br)has provided technology and policy recommendations to stakeholdergroups to leverage the full potential of the Internet. In 2014, thecountry adopted an "Internet Bill of Rights,"which establishes rights and duties of individual and corporateusers, businesses and the government.Brazil has long been apioneer in sound Internet policies and regulation and holds one ofthe most influential laws regarding intermediary liability not onlyin Latin America, but the world. The Brazilian "Marco Civil daInternet", or Civil Rights Framework for the Internet, which wasapproved in 2014, introduced an intermediary liability regime builtupon almost two decades of practice and jurisprudence in the U.S.around CDA'sSection 230.However, Brazil decidedto deviate from the path enshrined in the 1996 U.S. legal order. TheMarco Civil law grants full immunity from liability to Internetaccess providers and clearly indicates that Internet infrastructureshould not be affected by issues pertaining to the upper layers(i.e., applications layer) of the network. This law adopts arestricted and residual approach: Internet application providers areonly held liable for third-party content in instances where they failto comply with specific judicial orders to render certain contentunavailable. As a general rule, private notice and take downnotifications are not accepted as a means to trigger the liabilitysystem comprised in the Marco Civil. The rule however does not applyto non-consensual dissemination of intimate images and mattersaffecting intellectual property - the latter being subject to aspecialized regime.Perhaps the mostimportant difference between Marco Civil and Section 230 is thatBrazil has deliberately decided not to copy the "Good Samaritan"clause, meaning that the 'protection' provided by theMarco Civil in Article 19 does not grant any immunity to contentmoderation practices adopted by Internet application providers.While the U.S. systemencompasses ante-hoc immunity for liability from third-party contentand also for a company's own good-faith behavior vis-à-vis itsusers, the Brazilian system covers only third-party content. InBrazil, there is no ante-hoc immunity whatsoever for harms caused bythe decisions and measures taken by Internet application providers.For instance, Google was recently forced to pay compensation for"authenticante-hoc censorship" when it applied its termsof service to remove videos from a Civil Society organization'sYouTube channel. What in the U.S. would be solved by the applicationof the "Good Samaritan" clause, in Brazil had a differentoutcome.Why should we careabout Brazil's Marco Civil and why now? Around 90% of Internetusers are outside the U.S. and the narrow application of the Section230, as well as the full immunities it grants, might no longer workto guide Internet policy development elsewhere (especiallyconsidering the complex and diverse discussions related to the scopeof Freedom of Speech). Also, the various proposed reforms to Section230 in the U.S. have spilled over to other countries in verydangerous ways, including in Brazil. In their fight against Big Tech,some politicians in Brazil -emulating the behavior of US politicians-have proposed to suppress immunities that do not really exist in ourlegal order (as our overarching liability regime already coversissues such as the wrongful suppression of content by applicationproviders). So, in addition to being a waste of time, these attemptsare counterproductive as the country could take steps backward inInternet policy and regulation. .The partialintermediary liability adopted by the Brazilian Marco Civil createdobstacles for extrajudicial requests for content removal thatthroughout the 2000s helped foster legal uncertainty and very littletransparency and accountability from platforms. By granting Internetapplications with immunity solely for third-party behavior andcontent (and not for their own behavior and practices), Marco Civilcontributed to increased legal predictability and fostered innovationin Brazil, as shown in by astudy commissioned by the Internet Society.The current landscapeof platform and intermediary liability rulemaking marks an ethoschange from previous decades. In the past, it was imperative toavoid regulating or harming the Internet through overregulation.Today regulation is no longer a taboo. However, regulation must bewise, principled-based and aimed at the correct target in the complexdigital ecosystem.Regulatorsmust resist adopting policies thatpenalize the behavior of social media platforms asthey ultimately punish all users whopost content on these platforms.Rules aimed at social media platforms will end up impactingother types of applications for the mere fact that they operate onthe same layer of the Internet. Any regulation that forces Internetinfrastructure providers to enter the business of content moderationwould be dangerous. The consequences for freedom of expression,innovation and a dynamic digital economy would be significant.How governments decideto address intermediary liability in the near future is critical forusers and for the Internet. We face a critical juncture where we caneither get this right or get it wrong. Learningfrom Brazil's Marco Civil law is a step in the right direction.Bruna Martins dosSantos is Advocacy Coordinatorfor DataPrivacy Brazil Research and DiegoCanabarro is Senior Policy Manager for the InternetSociety.

Over the weekend there was a bit of a reasonable fuss raised after Ars Technica noted that all of the various Amazon connected devices (including Alexa, Echo, Ring, etc.) would become part of a mesh network called Amazon Sidewalk, in which the devices would be sharing a tiny tiny bit of bandwidth across the network of devices. The idea behind the mesh network is kind of cool, and there are some clear benefits to using it.But, of course, this is Amazon we're talking about -- a giant company, and the method of rolling this out seems to have caught a ton of people by surprise: namely opting everyone into the program with a short timeline to opt-out. That seems less than ideal. Lots of privacy folks are concerned, in general, with two aspects of this: the fact that people may be suddenly sharing data with their neighbors without necessarily realizing it, and the tie-in to Amazon, which is (again) a large company that tends to collect quite a bit of data on people. To its credit, Amazon released a pretty comprehensive whitepaper exploring the privacy and security protections they've built in to Sidewalk, and my guess is that for many consumers the benefits of easier setup and better connectivity via Sidewalk will seem worth it to them.The real issue, then, is forcing everyone into the network. Obviously, it's no surprise why this was done. A mesh network really only works if you have enough nodes on the network to make it useful. So it makes sense that Amazon would want as many of the devices to be on the network on day one as possible. However, given the company and the public scrutiny it has received of late, it seems like it should have anticipated these concerns a lot more, pushed for an opt-in setup (perhaps with incentives), rather than jumping to the "hey, we're adding this automatically" approach.While it's possible that Amazon is betting that the concerns over this will blow over, and having so many nodes on the network will make it worthwhile to take the short-term heat, it still surprises me that the big internet companies don't take more steps to alleviate these kinds of concerns up front, including taking a more cautious approach. But, perhaps that's why I don't run a giant internet company.

Earlier today, we announced the release of an open source playkit for Money City, our new game about the future of money that was designed and run for MozFest 2021. For this week's episode of the podcast, Mike is joined by two of the people who commissioned the game — Erika Drushka and Chris Lawrence from Grant For The Web — as well as our game design partner, Randy Lubin of Leveraged Play, to talk more about Money City and using games to explore serious topics and generate useful ideas.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via Apple Podcasts, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Back in 2015, frustration at John Deere's draconian tractor DRM helped birth a grassroots tech movement dubbed "right to repair." The company's crackdown on "unauthorized repairs" turned countless ordinary citizens into technology policy activists, after DRM (and the company's EULA) prohibited the lion's share of repair or modification of tractors customers thought they owned. These restrictions only worked to drive up costs for owners, who faced either paying significantly more money for "authorized" repair (which for many owners involved hauling tractors hundreds of miles and shelling out thousands of additional dollars), or toying around with pirated firmware just to ensure the products they owned actually worked.Six years later and this movement is only growing, thanks in large part to farmers who are tired of getting ripped off:

Polk County, Iowa prosecutors are making a name for themselves. And that name is "Enemy of the First Amendment." Earlier this year, Polk County prosecutor John Sarcone tried and failed to convict a Des Moines Register journalist for attending a protest and attempting to comply with conflicting orders from law enforcement.According to the prosecutor, journalist Andrea Sahouri failed to disperse when ordered to, even though other cops at the same scene were simply telling people to "protest peacefully." Sahouri was attempting to document the protest and was arrested as she was moving away from the epicenter of the protest. This attempt to turn First Amendment protected activity into a crime failed and the prosecutor took a rather humiliating loss in a very public fashion.Another prosecutor from the same office -- Thomas Miller -- has just suffered a similar, very public loss. Activist Viet Tran was arrested last summer after he shared a Des Moines Police Department bulletin with journalists during a televised interview. The PD claimed the document was super-secret and not shareable without committing a crime. The bulletin contained information about protesters targeted by the PD, including some who had vandalized a police car.The prosecutor (along with the PD) attempted to turn the sharing of public interest info with journalists into a felony charge: unauthorized dissemination of intelligence data. Normally, that sort of charge would only be leveled at the person who had shared it with someone who did not have authorization to view it, like whoever leaked it to Tran. Tran isn't a police officer, so his acquisition and sharing shouldn't be a crime. But that's not how the prosecutor's office saw it. And, in keeping with the First Amendment shredding vindictiveness of this whole debacle, the PD never asked the journalist Tran shared the document with to remove it from her Twitter feed.Following a failed attempt to keep Tran locked up until his trial by spiking his bail to $20,000 (rather than the usual $3,000 for Class D felonies), the prosecutors' office has earned its second straight loss in the same case. The court said that even if the government was right about this seeming misuse of "unauthorized dissemination" charges, it was wrong about the document's contents.

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I keep pointing out that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. There are always going to be mistakes. And lots of them. We've spent years highlighting the many obvious mistakes that websites trying to make moderation decisions on thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pieces of content are going to make every day. It's completely natural for those who are on the receiving end of obviously bogus suspensions to take it personally -- though there does seem to be one group of people who have built an entire grievance complex on the false belief that the internet companies are targeting them specifically.But if you look around, you can see examples of content moderation "mistakes" on a daily basis. Here's a perfect example. Dr. Matthew Knight, a respiratory physician in the UK, last week tweeted out a fairly uncontroversial statement about making sure there was adequate ventilation in the hospitality industry in order to help restart the economy. At this point, the scientific consensus is very much that good ventilation is absolutely key in preventing COVID transmission, and that the largest vector of super spreader events are indoor gatherings with inadequate ventilation. As such this tweet should be wholly uncontroversial:

As folks may know, over the past few years, the Copia Institute (the think tank arm of Techdirt) has been building out a series of games -- both of the tabletop variety and for events (both in person and virtual). It began with an election simulation we helped to design with some political consultants (which got a lot of attention for bizarre reasons) and has included a number of other projects, including making a boxed version of a CIA training game, a scenario planning game that was used to inspire science fiction writers to write about the future of work, an election disinformation simulation game, to a fun game to explore a variety of future timelines by looking backwards from the future, and a game workshop to explore the future of AI (the results of which are about to be used in a new X-Prize competition).We've just created a Copia Gaming page about all of our many game related projects, and we have many more in the pipeline. We believe, quite strongly, that games are the perfect tool for explaining the present and exploring the future, and we use our games for both purposes. The games for explaining the present, such as the election simulations and the CIA training game, take on complex real world situations, that have many nuances and trade-offs, and allow people to learn about them in a way that differs than just reading a long article or listening to a panel. It puts players in that world, with responsibility for making actual decisions, and with real incentives. Over and over again we've heard from participants about how the games opened their eyes to understanding real world events with a totally new perspective, even if they thought they'd understood them before.The games to explore the future are slightly different, but equally useful. Most people are familiar with traditional scenario planning or even some aspects of "futurism," but we've found that those processes are either boring or fall into traditional traps that make the end result not nearly as insightful or interesting. By adding a game element to them, we've found that, again, it really takes people out of their own pre-set perspective, and opens them up to many more creative possibilities, by putting them into different roles, with different incentives, resources, and challenges.And today we're releasing an open source toolkit for one of those "explore the future" games we created earlier this year, called Money City, sponsored by Grant For The Web which we ran over three separate sessions at this year's Mozfest (Mozilla's big annual conference).Our game design partner, Randy Lubin of Leveraged Play, has a writeup about the ins-and-outs of the game and some of the design choices that were made in development, and we'll be releasing a podcast later today talking more about it as well.However, the basics of the game were to create a fun game environment in which players would take on the roles of certain factions in a dystopian futuristic world, in which more or less everything is controlled by one giant tech company: MegaCorp. The players join different factions with different goals, resources, and visions of the future, but united with one common goal: to take down MegaCorp, and rethink how society (and money) works without such a dominant force controlling everything and making all the decisions. The game explores a number of themes around money, currency, business models, competition, and just generally what kind of future we should want.We ran three separate sessions of Money City at MozFest, with wildly different results each time. The toolkit includes recaps of these games so you can see some of the unexpected scenarios that developed — like a clandestine sabotage of MegaCorp by the city's artificial intelligence experts, a business boom fueled by peer-to-peer loans using virtual currency from an MMO game, and a hacking scandal involving a popular line of robotic pets.The open source toolkit includes a facilitator guide, a basic "run of show" document, and a variety of other assets needed to run the game. We ran the game on a fun virtual meeting platform called Spatial Chat, that worked great to get the atmosphere right for the game. However, knowing that many people these days use Zoom for everything, we provide some basic ideas for converting the game to Zoom (or to other virtual platforms of your choice). The game can also be converted fairly easily to in-person events (assuming those actually are coming back in the nearish future).Alternatively, if you're interested, you can reach out to us about running the game for you at your events or gatherings, or about running one of our other games (or commissioning new games to meet your own needs).

We've already noted how the Biden broadband plan is good, but arguably vague. As in, the outline proclaims that the government will boost competition and lower prices, but it doesn't actually get at all specific about how it actually hopes to do that. There are some promising aspects, like a pledge to embrace the growing wave of grass roots community broadband efforts popping up around the country, but again, it's not clear how that's going to happen. For example there are 17 state laws (usually written by telecom lobbyists) prohibiting such efforts, and federal efforts to shoot down those protectionists laws haven't gone well.The original Biden broadband plan promised to take $100 billion (from a total of $2.3 trillion in infrastructure funding) to “revitalize America’s digital infrastructure" and "bring affordable, reliable, high-speed broadband to every American." But experts like Victor Pickard and David Elliot Berman at the University of Pennsylvania argue that the plan likely doesn't really go far enough. In part because it doesn't really strike at the heart of the issue. Namely, regional telecom monopolization:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Darkness Of Course with a response to the everpresent complaints from one... prolific commenter about supposedly being censored:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2016, Paramount announced its intention to back down from its lawsuit against the fan film Axanar, though not before the filmmakers got their next filing in. The legal battles over the FBI's hacking tools and malware continued, while the Senate Intelligence Committee was expanding the bureau's NSL powers with a secret amendment.This is also the week we first heard the rapidly-confirmed accusation that Peter Thiel was financing Hulk Hogan's lawsuit against Gawker, and started writing about how worrying the situation was.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2011, ICE kicked off round four of its domain seizures and we continued looking at why the whole program is unconsitutional and how the Justice Department was stalling to avoid lawsuits in response. Meanwhile, the Patriot Act renewal moved forward, with only eight Senators presenting an obstacle and Harry Reid procedurally routing around attempts to fix it, eventually leading to a successful renewal.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2006, a desperate attempt to declare open source licenses a violation of antitrust law predictably failed as the lawsuit was thrown out, while the RIAA's lawsuit against XM radio appeared to be generating publicity for the company's newest device, and TV networks and studios launched a new suit against Cablevision over its network-based DVR. People were beginning to predict the death of MySpace, Verizon was trying to claim that passing on info to credit agencies was a gift to consumers, and we noted how crime reporting would often pointlessly focus on Wi-Fi if it was even tangentially involved. Also, this appears to be the very first time we wrote about a newfangled buzzword: "crowdsourcing".

Just a couple of weeks ago, we discussed a Kickstarter project for an unofficial guidebook to Nintendo's Amiibo product line. While no regular Techdirt reader could have possibly have been surprised that Nintendo issued threats and a DMCA on the project, it was a bit odd for two main reasons. First, Nintendo's main gripe appeared to be the use of some of the corporate iconography and other "design marks" proposed for use in the publication, rather than any wholesale copyright or trademark claim to literally everything in the book. Nuance of that kind is not the norm for the notably litigious and protective Nintendo. Second, this whole fight looked to be something of Nintendo shooting itself in the foot, as the project is essentially one giant advertisement for Amiibo products. Why in the world, we wondered at the time, would Nintendo not want such a book to be released to the public?Well, it seems that perhaps the company does in fact understand all of this. Reports now indicate that the author of the project and Nintendo have resolved all issues the company had and the book will in fact get its release as an "unofficial" guidebook.

Summary: In 2013, two comedians named Jason Selvig and Davram Stiefler, who performed as “The Good Liars,” got some attention for mocking a particular popular target of mockery: poor service from your broadband provider. For Selvig and Stiefler, their target was Time Warner Cable. In late March of that year, they released a video on YouTube in which they pretended to be Time Warner Cable employees interviewing people on the street about how TWC could make its service even worse.To support the initial viral attention that the video was receiving, the two also set up a series of parody Time Warner Cable “customer support” accounts that would respond -- just like the real TWC customer support Twitter account -- to people complaining about their service, again asking how they could make things worse.However, just as the video was getting more momentum, the entire YouTube channel set up by Selvig and Stiefler was taken down, as were most of the fake Twitter accounts, even though they were all clearly labeled as parody accounts, and despite policies that said that parody was allowed on these services.Time Warner Cable, in a statement to the Daily Dot, said that it had no problem with parodies of its service in general, but was opposed to parodies that used the name of its CEO:

For many years now, we've reported on efforts by the Indian government to demand that WhatsApp break its encryption to give the government access. Much of this comes from the fact that the Indian government wants to pin the blame for certain violence and disinformation on WhatsApp, rather than on those actually responsible. WhatsApp has, in the past, pushed back on individual demands to break its encryption.However, things have stepped up a notch. The Indian government recently put in place new regulations that are, to put it mildly, quite troubling. India has framed the laws -- like so many other laws like this around the globe -- as being about stopping "abuse." But, of course, the government gets to decide what is abuse.

The bad news keeps coming for Citizen, the app that really wants to be a cop.Not only is its desire to become some sort of private party/law enforcement hybrid generating it some bad press, but its prior incarnation as "Vigilante" suggests it has always wanted to be in the business of taking down bad guys, with or without the requisite lawfulness.The former "Vigilante" proved true to its past moniker following a wildfire in California, promising a $30,000 bounty to any user or employee who took down the bad guy identified by Citizen. Well… misidentified. After calls from CEO Andrew Frame to "GET THE FUCKER," Citizen had to offer up a bunch of apologies for turning an innocent person into a prime suspect.Coming on the heels of all of this bad news is even more bad news. First off, as Joseph Cox reported late last week, Citizen leaked a bunch of users' COVID-related data following its expansion into contact tracing late year under the name "SafePass."

So we've already noted several times that while Elon Musk's Starlink internet broadband service will be a great thing for folks certainly out of the range of existing broadband options, it's not going to be the massive disruption many people assume. For one thing, the service is only going to serve around 800,000 subscribers in a country where up to 42 million Americans lack broadband access and another 83 million consumers live under a broadband monopoly. So even at the high-end, extremely optimistic, longer term goal of 6 million total Starlink subscribers, we're talking about a small dent in a very big problem.Another problem is that for many of America's underserved populations, the real issue is cost. And given its $500 initial down payment for hardware, and $100 monthly price tag, the service is going to be well out of range for many folks who really need it. That said, if you can actually get it, and actually afford it, and currently have no access to fixed line service, it's going to be an upgrade. Probably, anyway.New reviews at outlets like The Verge have taken some additional bloom off the rose, noting that line of sight and other technical issues are marring the service, at least during its current, ongoing 10,000 user beta. Says The Verge's Nilay Patel:

The dumb takes on social media efforts to deal with problematic content keep getting dumber. Supposedly "conservative" commentator David Marcus has now written an opinion piece for Fox somehow arguing that fact checkers used on social media sites should be regulated. He's not the first to suggest this -- we just recently wrote about a Michigan legislator who was pushing an unconstitutional bill to regulate the fact checkers, but that this is the hill supposedly "conservatives" want to die on, seems particularly stupid.Fact checking is protected by the 1st Amendment.It is expressive. It is a core part of journalism as well, which is doubly protected under the "freedom of the press" part of the 1st Amendment. Marcus' article is so filled with dumb that it needs a fact check itself (as if Fox News ever did that sorta thing).

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Citizen -- an app for reporting crime and other suspicious events -- wants to be in the police business. The app developers have purchased at least one faux patrol vehicle -- co-branded with Los Angeles Professional Security -- and have been driving it around Los Angeles, California.But should private companies be in the business of enforcing the law? Most people would say no. We have enough problems with our actual cops -- ones who are supposed to remain on the right side of the Constitution. Private companies don't have these obligations. That's why they don't have the power (or the ability) to take other people's rights away. But the effort to cloud the lines between public and private is continuous, and it's going to do additional damage to citizens who are already subjected to the violations perpetrated by government employees.Let's not forget that Citizen has always been willing to blur these lines. It debuted as "Vigilante" before its booting from Apple's app store forced a more friendly rebrand. But Citizen hasn't abandoned its vigilante principals. The people at the top of the organizational chart are aggressively pursuing private expansion into public law enforcement space and courting some of the nation's largest police departments.They're also living up to the "vigilante" moniker. Prior to the leaks to Joseph Cox and Motherboard, Citizen was publicly and privately urging the public to take justice into their own hands, as Scott Morris reports for The Verge.

Of all the areas that result in copyright lawsuits that never should have been filed, it surely must be ignorance of the idea/expression dichotomy that is the most common. That link will take you to a litany of posts about copyright fights in which one party sues another over elements of a creative work that are themselves not protectable. The basic explainer goes like this: the specific expression of a work, or even the specific expression of unique thematic or character elements, can be protected by copyright, whereas mere general ideas cannot. This is why Batman is a copyrightable character, but that copyright cannot be used to sue the hell out of anyone that writes a story about an insane rich person who wears a cape and cowl while fighting bad guys. Idea versus expression.It's crazy just how many lawsuits get filed by full grown adult lawyers who don't seem to understand this. One recent example is a lawsuit brought by a high school English teacher against Netflix over the latter's series, Outer Banks. The suit was tossed at the motion to dismiss stage, with the court reasoning that the majority of the 40-plus claims of infringement amount to either non-protectable ideas, or allegations that amount to mere coincidence that has nothing to do with copying anything at all. On the first of those:

As the open source world has grown, so have concerns about the context in which openly licensed items are used. While these concerns have existed since the beginning of the open source movement, today’s larger and more diverse movement has brought new urgency to them. In light of this revived interest within the community, the time may be ripe to begin encouraging experimentation with open source licensing again.How We Got HereWhile the history of open source software is long and varied (and predates the term open source software), for the purposes of this blog post its early evolution was driven by a fairly small group of individuals motivated by a fairly homogeneous set of goals. As the approach became more popular, the community developed a wide range of licenses designed to address a wide range of concerns. This ‘First Cambrian Explosion’ of open source models and software licenses was a time of experimentation within the community. Licenses varied widely in structure, uptake, and legal enforceability.Eventually, the sprawling nature of this experimentation began to cause problems. The Free Software Foundation’s Free Software Definition and the Open Source Initiative’s Open Source Definition were both attempts to bring some order to the open source software world.In the specific context of licensing, the Open Source Initiative began approving licenses that met its criteria. Soon thereafter, it released a License Proliferation Report detailing the challenges created by this proliferation of licenses and proposing ways to combat them.These activities helped to bring order and standardization to the world of open source licensing. While OSI continues to approve licenses, for well over a decade the conventional wisdom in the world of open source has been to avoid creating a new license if at all possible. As a result, for most of this century open source software license experimentation has been decidedly out of style.Largely for the reasons described in the License Proliferation Report, this conventional wisdom has been beneficial to the community. License proliferation does create a number of problems. Standardization does help address them. However, in doing so standardization also greatly reduced the amount of license experimentation within the community.Reduced experimentation means that concerns incorporated into approved licenses (access to modifications of openly licensed code) have been canonized, while concerns that had not been integrated into an approved license (restrictions on unethical uses of software) at the moment of formalization were largely excluded from consideration within the open source community.What ChangedWhat has changed since the move towards codification of licenses? The open source software world has gotten a lot bigger. In fact, it has gotten so much bigger that it isn’t just the open source software world anymore. Creative Commons - today a towering figure in the world of openness - did not even exist when the Open Source Initiative started approving licenses. Now the open world is open source hardware, and Creative Commons-licensed photos, and open GLAM collections, and open data, and all sorts of other things (this is a whole other blog post). The open source world has moved beyond early debates that questioned the fundamental legitimacy of open source as a concept. Open source has won the argument.An expansion of applications of open source has lead to an expansion of people within open source. Those people are more diverse than the early open source software proponents and are motivated by a wider range of interests. They also bring with them a wider range of concerns, and a wider range of relationships to those concerns, than early open source adopters.What is Happening NowThis broader community does not necessarily share the consensus about how to approach licensing that was developed in an earlier period of open source. They bring a range of viewpoints that did not exist in the earlier days of open source software into the open source community itself. They are also applying open source concepts and licenses to a range of applications that were not front of mind - or in mind at all - during the drafting of today’s canonical licenses.Unsatisfied with the consensus rules that have delivered us the existing suite of (incredibly successful) licenses, parts of the community have begun experimenting again. Veteran open source lawyers are rewriting licenses with public understandability in mind. Community members are transforming their interpretation of open source development into licences that invite collaboration without intending to adhere to the open source definition. Some of these licenses are designed to address concerns traditionally excluded from the scope of open source licenses. I am directly involved in the ml5.js attempt to do just that.The creators of these experiments are responding to a standardized approach to licensing that does not fully accommodate their needs and concerns. In some cases the standardized approach does not accommodate these concerns because the community litigated including them in the past and decided it could or should not be done. However, even in those cases, that debate happened within a very different community in at least somewhat different contexts. The conclusions arrived at then are not necessarily valid for the broader world that open source finds itself inhabiting.In light of that, it may be time to begin encouraging experimentation in open source licensing again. Encourage people to test out new approaches by applying them to real world problems. In some cases, the decisions made in the past will prove to be robust and sustainable. In others, a new debate will reveal the decisions’ shortcomings. In both cases, the open source community will be stronger by being tested from within.Coda: Is This Post Just a Lawyer Advocating for Lawyers to Have More Fun?Throw out the old ways of doing things! Try something new! Experiment! Is this just a call for lawyers to have fun by screwing around with exotic licensing concepts at the expense of everyone else’s stability (and sanity)?It could be. But I don’t really think so. The thing about lawyers (as a group - there are always exceptions) is that novelty and instability makes us nervous. Things that are tried and true will probably work. That means we do not have to worry about them. New things - who knows what will happen to them? That uncertainty makes lawyers nervous.That is part of the reason why lawyers like today’s conventional wisdom. The canonical set of open source licenses have more or less worked for decades. It is unlikely that they will explode, and it is even less likely that they will explode in the face of the lawyer who uses them on any given project. In contrast, any lawyer who writes their own license is setting themselves up for a period of anxiety, waiting to discover what they missed or how things will go wrong.Of course, some lawyers do think it is fun to cook up new open licenses. And maybe this post is a call for them to do more of it. But, on balance and as a whole, introducing new licenses into the world of open source will probably cause open source lawyers more anxiety than joy.I think that anxiety is probably worth it. But that will be far from a universally held position.Originally published on Michael Weinberg's blog and repbulished under a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license.

A snitch app called Citizen is angling for the position of Local Law Enforcement®. Going a step further than hotbeds of bigotry like Ring's Neighbors or Facebook-but-for-racism Nextdoor, Citizen is actually trying to create a private law enforcement agency that provides "security" and other services for app users.A marauding cop-like patrol vehicle emblazoned with the Citizen logo (and some branding for another private security company) was spotted roaming Los Angeles last week. The desire to create a private cutout in public law enforcement space was confirmed by current and former Citizen employees, as well as documents shared with Motherboard and Joseph Cox.It's not just theoretical. It appears some employees of this private company really want to convert Citizen into a law enforcement agency. (Supporters of this move may also contain members of the Los Angeles Police Department, which called Citizen's move towards patrolling the streets a "game changer.") Then there's this new twist, which indicates Citizen's partner in patrolling -- Los Angeles Professional Security Services -- really would prefer to be an actual law enforcement agency, rather than the private security company it actually is.

On Monday we noted that Florida Man Governor Ron DeSantis had signed into law the new blatantly unconstitutional social media content moderation bill, complete with its extra corrupt Mickey Mouse exemption for (Disney) companies who own (Disney) theme parks.Of course, it's one thing to just note that the bill is unconstitutional and another thing altogether to go through the annoyingly stupid process of proving that the bill is unconstitutional. Now, NetChoice and CCIA have stepped up to the plate and filed the first legal challenge to the bill (as first noted by USA Today who failed to link to the complaint).The 70 page complaint is pretty impressive to read. The (somewhat long in its own right) Overview highlights the myriad problems in the bill. Here are just the first few paragraphs of the overview, to give you a sense of where the complaint is going.

Late last month, it was discovered the United States Postal Service was operating a social media surveillance program. The "why" of this was never explained. Apparently, the USPS has time and money to blow, so it has something called an "Internet Covert Operations Program" (iCOP) which it uses to investigate crimes that definitely are not of a postal nature.According to the two-page bulletin first reported on by Yahoo News, iCOP was trawling social media looking for "threats." And the "threats" observed in the report shared with the DHS and its many, many (mostly useless) "Fusion Centers" was that the threats weren't credible.Great, I guess, but why is the Postal Service surveilling communications that aren't being sent through the mail? I'm sorry if it feels a bit left out by the move to email and other electronic communication methods, but wandering around Twitter and Facebook looking for crimes seems to be both a waste of its limited resources and something that really isn't covered by the directives of the Post Office's investigative wing.Well, there's even worse news to report. Again, Yahoo News is on top of it. It appears the iCOP program makes use of facial recognition tech. And not just any facial recognition tech. It uses the worst, most questionable offering out there at the moment.

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There had been some talk that we might, once again, get someone to head the Patent Office who actually understood and appreciated the many trade-offs associated with monopoly rights around inventions. But apparently that's not happening. There's an article in The American Prospect saying that Senator Chris Coons -- one of the more maximalist of the copyright and patent maximalists in Congress -- has secured some sort of ridiculous deal with the Biden administration that no one who has ever criticized patents will be allowed to run the US Patent & Trademark Office.

As part of a recent COVID bill, the government recently announced that folks struggling economically during COVID would be getting some temporary help. Under the EBB (Emergency broadband Benefit program), U.S. consumers can nab a $50 discount off their broadband bill, or $75 if you live in tribal areas. The program ends when its $3.2 billion in federal funding expires, or six months after the government has declared an end to the pandemic.It's a useful but temporary band aid, and doesn't really do much to address the regional monopolization and lack of competition that makes US broadband so perennially mediocre in the first place. Nor does it address the fact the Trump FCC gutted its own consumer protection authority because a bunch of telecom monopolies asked them to, using completely bogus justifications.Under the program, the money is first given to your broadband provider, which is then in charge of ensuring you get the discount. But given these companies' track record of dodgy behavior, it obviously didn't take long for US telecoms to misbehave. Enter Verizon, which is using the program as an opportunity to upsell customers to more expensive plans. Users contacting Verizon to sign up were told the program didn't apply to their existing plans, and in order to get the discount they'd need to sign up for more expensive service. The Washington Post politely points out this is rather sleazy:

We've covered intellectual property issues that revolve around Tolkien's Lord of the Rings properties before. By now, everyone should know that any use of or homage to those properties, or even coincidental usage, will typically result in angry letters from lawyers. What's even more fun about all of that is you get to play the game called, "Whose lawyers are going to write the angry letter this time?" Between the Tolkien estate and its IP management partners and Warner Bros., the studio behind the LotR films, they have managed to block an unrelated wine business from using the word "hobbit," bullied a pub named "The Hobbit" to get it to change its name before recanting said bullying, and got a Kickstarter project shut down for trying to create a real-world "Hobbit house."This is where it's worth reminding everyone that Tolkien did not come up with the word "hobbit". That word already existed, though it meant something different than how Tolkien used it to name his race of diminutive folk. The Kickstarter example above is apropos to this post specifically, as it seems that Warner Bros. is at it again, having forced an Airbnb listing clearly designed to be another homage to Tolkien's hobbit homes in the Shire to change its name.

Summary: Three weeks before the presidential election, the New York Post published an article that supposedly detailed meetings Hunter Biden (son of presidential candidate Joe Biden) had with a Ukrainian energy firm several months before the then-Vice President allegedly pressured Ukraine government officials to fire a prosecutor investigating the company.The "smoking gun" -- albeit one of very dubious provenance -- provided ammo for Biden opponents, who saw this as evidence of Biden family corruption. The news quickly spread across Twitter. But shortly after the news broke, Twitter began removing links to the article.Backlash ensued. Conservatives claimed this was more evidence of Twitter's pro-Biden bias. Others went so far as to assert this was Twitter interfering in an election. The reality of the situation was far more mundane.As Twitter clarified -- largely to no avail -- it was simply enforcing its rules on hacked materials. To protect victims of hacking, Twitter forbids the distribution of information derived from hacking, malicious or otherwise. This policy was first put in place in March 2019, but it took an election season event to draw national attention to it.The policy was updated after the Hunter Biden story broke, but largely remained unchanged. The updated policy explained in greater detail why Twitter takes down links to hacked material, as well as any exceptions it had to this rule.Despite many people seeing this policy in action for the first time, this response was nothing new. Twitter had exercised it four months earlier, deleting tweets and suspending accounts linking to information obtained from law enforcement agencies by the Anonymous hacker collective and published by transparency activists Distributed Denial of Secrets. The only major difference was this involved acknowledged hackers and had nothing to do with a very contentious presidential race.Decisions to be made by Twitter:

The EU's Copyright Directive was passed back in 2019, and the two-year period for implementing the law in national legislation is almost up. The text's contradictory requirements to stop infringing material from being posted online without imposing a general requirement to monitor users, which is not permitted under EU law, has proved difficult for governments to deal with. France aims to solve this by ignoring even the limited user protections laid down by the Directive. Germany has been having a rather fraught debate about how exactly Article 17, which implicitly requires upload filters, should be implemented. One good idea to allow users to "pre-flag" as legal the material they upload was jettisoned. That led to fears that the country's implementation of Article 17 would be as bad as France's. But the final version of the law does attempt to ensure that automated filters -- now admitted as indispensable, despite earlier assurances they were optional -- do not block user uploads that are not infringing on copyright. Communia explains:

A proper adversarial system means the accused can confront the accuser. But that's rarely the case when crime solving software is involved. The FBI doesn't allow accused child porn downloaders to examine the malicious software it used to identify their computers. Multiple law enforcement agencies have dropped cases rather than discuss Stingray devices in open court.All DNA analysis is handled by software. Most DNA analysis utilizes proprietary code created by private companies which license it to government agencies. The analysis may be performed by government agencies and employees, but when it comes to giving defense lawyers and their clients a chance to examine the software used to generate evidence, it suddenly becomes a very private matter.Companies routinely intercede in criminal cases, telling judges that handing over source code or other information about their algorithms would somehow make it impossible for them to compete in the crime solving market. In most cases, judges are sympathetic to claims about trade secrets and proprietary code, allowing the accused to only confront their accuser by proxy, via a government expert or an employee of the software company.In rare cases, the court actually finds in favor of the defendant. Earlier this year, a case involving third-party DNA software and the EFF's intercession went the defendant's way with a federal judge in Pennsylvania telling the government it couldn't hide behind third-party trade secret assertions to keep this code out of the accused's hands. As the court reasoned then, if DNA evidence is central to the case against the defendant, the defendant should have access to the evidence and the software that created it.The EFF is hoping for a similar outcome in a case being handled in California. It deals with the possibly wrongful conviction of a 70-year-old man for rape. And it involves a DNA software company whose algorithm was the only one that tied the suspect to the crime.

The hack of the Colonial Pipeline has already made lots of news, and with that, the government is rushing to come up with new regulations, which will almost certainly be overkill. While the transparency aspect of the expected rules (requiring reporting of "cyber incidents" to the federal government) was more or less expected to come at some point no matter what, the other rules are likely to be fighting the last battle. There are constant changes to these kinds of attacks, and seeking just to prevent them is a fool's errand.However, we're now seeing some truly silly suggestions. Lee Reiners, who runs Duke Law School's Global Financial Markets Center, has published an op-ed in the WSJ that truly is an astounding example of throwing out all the babies with the bathwater. Reiners says the way to stop these attacks is to just ban all cryptocurrency. This is silly on many levels -- mostly because (1) that's impossible, (2) it wouldn't work, and (3) it would destroy a ton of important and valuable projects. Frankly this op-ed does not speak well to the Global Financial Markets Center and its understanding of anything. Here's the core of the argument:

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Here's a small victory for the First Amendment and presumption of openness that's supposed to apply to court proceedings. A recent opinion [PDF] by the DC Circuit Court will give everyone more access to recordings covering the dozens of prosecutions of insurrectionist cosplayers who raided the Capitol on January 6th. The court comes down firmly on the side of openness and transparency, but has hung a rather large asterisk on that statement.ProPublica is the entity that made the request for an administrative order, but it's the in-court figurehead for a group of fourteen journalistic concerns. The US Attorney's Office hasn't exactly been proactive when releasing recordings entered as evidence in the Capitol raid cases. It has even (temporarily) withheld recordings that were pulled from social media services and YouTube -- something that indicates these recordings were public before the government made them private.While these recordings are viewable during court proceedings, limited access has prevented some journalists from accessing them. And once the proceedings are over, they're no longer viewable. The DC Circuit Court has made some permanently accessible but only on a case-by-case basis. Considering the volume of criminal cases being handled by the court -- combined with limited access prompted in part by the COVID pandemic -- this no longer appears to be acceptable.

We've repeatedly noted how the "right to repair" movement has been gaining a full head of steam as consumers, independent repair shops, schools, farmers, and countless others grow tired of corporations' attempts to monopolize repair. Whether it's Sony and Microsoft creating repair monopolies for their game consoles, Apple bullying independent repair shops, or John Deere making it a costly hassle just to fix a tractor, the more companies restrict access to cheap repair, parts, tools, and documentation, the more this movement seems to grow. Especially in the COVID era where the problem has also hindered health care.Bloomberg notes that 27 states have considered right to repair legislation so far this year, making access to essential tools and less expensive repair options a legal right. But corporations have shot down all of them so far, in part thanks to a misleading, coordinated lobbying campaign falsely claiming that reform on this front poses dramatic privacy and security harms:

It looks like app developers want to be cops. Late last week, a Los Angeles resident spotted a Citizen-app branded patrol car roaming the city. Citizen is yet another app that allows residents to send crime alerts and other news to each other, following in the steps of Ring's Neighbors app and Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social media service that only lets actual neighbors connect with each other.The only thing missing here is the replicant hunters.

Twitch seems to be putting on some sort of master class in how to respond to a crisis on its platform in as confusing a manner as possible. Without writing a thousand word summary, this whole thing started when Twitch nuked a bunch of streamer content in response to a backlog of DMCA notices, changed its affiliate program without notice, hung its streamers out to dry over the DMCAs when the backlash occurred, and basically angered the hell out of its most important asset, it's creative community. This basically set the theme for the public that Twitch wasn't treating its community very well.This continued to the present. Most recently, we discussed one streamer suddenly having her channel demonitized, ostensibly over so called "hot tub meta" streams, in which she appears in a bathing suit in a hot tub. While Twitch can do as it pleases with its platform, the real issue here was that all of this was done without any communication or notice from Twitch to the streamer, who goes by the handle Amouranth. Well, it turns out that she wasn't alone in having her channel suddenly demonitized in this fashion.

As vaccinations and relaxed health guidelines make returning to the office a reality for more companies, there seems to be a disconnect between managers and their workers over remote work.A good example of this is a recent op-ed written by the CEO of a Washington, D.C. magazine that suggested workers could lose benefits like health care if they insist on continuing to work remotely as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes. The staff reacted by refusing to publish for a day.While the CEO later apologized, she isn’t alone in appearing to bungle the transition back to the office after over a year in which tens of millions of employees were forced to work from home. A recent survey of full-time corporate or government employees found that two-thirds say their employers either have not communicated a post-pandemic office strategy or have only vaguely done so.As workforce scholars, we are interested in teasing out how workers are dealing with this situation. Our recent research found that this failure to communicate clearly is hurting morale, culture and retention.Workers relocatingWe first began investigating workers’ pandemic experiences in July 2020 as shelter-in-place orders shuttered offices and remote work was widespread. At the time, we wanted to know how workers were using their newfound freedom to potentially work virtually from anywhere.We analyzed a dataset that a business and technology newsletter attained from surveying its 585,000 active readers. It asked them whether they planned to relocate during the next six months and to share their story about why and where from and to.After a review, we had just under 3,000 responses, including 1,361 people who were planning to relocate or had recently done so. We systematically coded these responses to understand their motives and, based on distances moved, the degree of ongoing remote-work policy they would likely need.We found that a segment of these employees would require a full remote-work arrangement based on the distance moved from their office, and another portion would face a longer commute. Woven throughout this was the explicit or implicit expectation of some degree of ongoing remote work among many of the workers who moved during the pandemic.In other words, many of these workers were moving on the assumption – or promise – that they’d be able to keep working remotely at least some of the time after the pandemic ended. Or they seemed willing to quit if their employer didn’t oblige.One of authors explains the research.We wanted to see how these expectations were being met as the pandemic started to wind down in March 2021. So we searched online communities in Reddit to see what workers were saying. One forum proved particularly useful. A member asked, “Has your employer made remote work permanent yet or is it still in the air?” and went on to share his own experience. This post generated 101 responses with a good amount of detail on what their respective individual companies were doing.While this qualitative data is only a small sample that is not necessarily representative of the U.S. population at large, these posts allowed us to delve into a richer understanding of how workers feel, which a simple stat can’t provide.We found a disconnect between workers and management that starts with but goes beyond the issue of the remote-work policy itself. Broadly speaking, we found three recurring themes in these anonymous posts.1. Broken remote-work promisesOthers have also found that people are taking advantage of pandemic-related remote work to relocate to a city at a distance large enough that it would require partial or full-time remote work after people return to the office.A recent survey by consulting firm PwC found that almost a quarter of workers were considering or planning to move more than 50 miles from one of their employer’s main offices. The survey also found 12% have already made such a move during the pandemic without getting a new job.Our early findings suggested some workers would quit their current job rather than give up their new location if required by their employer, and we saw this actually start to occur in March.One worker planned a move from Phoenix to Tulsa with her fiancé to get a bigger place with cheaper rent after her company went remote. She later had to leave her job for the move, even though “they told me they would allow me to work from home, then said never mind about it.”Another worker indicated the promise to work remotely was only implicit, but he still had his hopes up when leaders “gassed us up for months saying we’d likely be able to keep working from home and come in occasionally” and then changed their minds and demanded employees return to the office once vaccinated.2. Confused remote-work policiesAnother constant refrain we read in the worker comments was disappointment in their company’s remote-work policy – or lack thereof.Whether workers said they were staying remote for now, returning to the office or still unsure, we found that nearly a quarter of the people in our sample said their leaders were not giving them meaningful explanations of what was driving the policy. Even worse, the explanations sometimes felt confusing or insulting.One worker complained that the manager “wanted butts in seats because we couldn’t be trusted to [work from home] even though we’d been doing it since last March,” adding: “I’m giving my notice on Monday.”Another, whose company issued a two-week timeline for all to return to the office, griped: “Our leadership felt people weren’t as productive at home. While as a company we’ve hit most of our goals for the year. … Makes no sense.”After a long period of office shutterings, it stands to reason workers would need time to readjust to office life, a point expressed in recent survey results. Employers that quickly flip the switch in calling workers back and do so with poor clarifying rationale risk appearing tone-deaf.It suggests a lack of trust in productivity at a time when many workers report putting in more effort than ever and being strained by the increased digital intensity of their job – that is, the growing number of online meetings and chats.And even when companies said they wouldn’t require a return to the office, workers still faulted them for their motives, which many employees described as financially motivated.“We are going hybrid,” one worker wrote. “I personally don’t think the company is doing it for us. … I think they realized how efficient and how much money they are saving.”Only a small minority of workers in our sample said their company asked for input on what employees actually want from a future remote work policy. Given that leaders are rightly concerned about company culture, we believe they are missing a key opportunity to engage with workers on the issue and show their policy rationales aren’t only about dollars and cents.3. Corporate culture ‘BS’Management gurus such as Peter Drucker and other scholars have found that corporate culture is very important to binding together workers in an organization, especially in times of stress.A company’s culture is essentially its values and beliefs shared among its members. That’s harder to foster when everyone is working remotely.That’s likely why corporate human resource executives rank maintaining organizational culture as their top workforce priority for 2021.But many of the forum posts we reviewed suggested that employer efforts to do that during the pandemic by orchestrating team outings and other get-togethers were actually pushing workers away, and that this type of “culture building” was not welcome.[Like what you’ve read? Want more? Sign up for The Conversation’s daily newsletter.]One worker’s company “had everyone come into the office for an outdoor luncheon a week ago,” according to a post, adding: “Idiots.”Surveys have found that what workers want most from management, on the issue of corporate culture, are more remote-work resources, updated policies on flexibility and more communication from leadership.As another worker put it, “I can tell you, most people really don’t give 2 flips about ‘company culture’ and think it’s BS.”Kimberly Merriman, Professor of Management, Manning School of Business, University of Massachusetts Lowell; David Greenway, Doctoral Candidate in Leadership/Organization Studies, University of Massachusetts Lowell, and Tamara Montag-Smit, Assistant Professor of Business, University of Massachusetts LowellThis article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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