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Some 750 US communities have built some kind of locally owned and operated broadband network, usually in response to broadband market failure. Data has repeatedly shown that these networks usually not only offer faster, better service than the private sector, they frequently prompt apathetic local monopolies to actually try harder. That's not to say community broadband is a panacea for all US markets, but it's certainly an important part of the puzzle that is fixing the US' mediocre and expensive broadband access problem.Yet during the Trump era, community broadband was treated like some kind of infectious disease.FCC Commissioners could usually be found falsely trying to claim such networks posed a dire threat to free speech. More recently, the GOP tried to pass a bill that would have banned such networks entirely (during a pandemic no less). While this opposition is usually framed as a good faith concern about taxpayers (a concern that never manifests when an incumbent like AT&T gets billions in exchange for absolutely nothing), the reality is such folks really just don't like anything that interferes with the God-given revenues of deep-pocketed campaign contributors like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon.Enter the Biden administration's new broadband plan, which pledges to expand "future proof" (read: fiber) broadband access to the entirety of America within the next eight years. While notably vague on anything detailing how they'll actually accomplish or pay for this, the outline indicates the proposal, part of a much broader $2 trillion infrastructure initiative, specifically embraces community broadband as a cornerstone of these efforts:

Bail can no longer be used to keep still-presumed-innocent people locked up in California. In a unanimous decision [PDF], the state's Supreme Court has declared keeping people locked up just because they can't afford bail is unconstitutional.The decision doesn't entirely eliminate bail -- it can still be used in some cases -- but it cannot be the default operating mode for handling arrestees. The court starts the opinion by pointing out there's a big gap between principle and practice when it comes to bail. The state has a compelling interest to use bail to insure trial appearances and provide public safety. That point isn't being argued.What's actually happening is the state is regularly depriving arrestees of their freedom by demanding cash bail in nearly every case, whether or not it addresses these compelling interests.

Sega has something of a flip-floppy history when it comes to how restrictive the company chooses to be with intellectual property generally and DMCA takedowns more specifically. The company notably went DMCA happy back in 2012, for instance, over a bunch of fan videos on YouTube for Shining Force, all because it had a planned release for a PSP version of the title. In 2013, the company actually half-apologized for doing so, promising to be more lenient with what it allows, though there were caveats expressed as well. Fast forward to 2016 and Sega quite gleefully poked some fun at its rival, Nintendo, for its DMCA blitzes, instead encouraging fans to make and create cool and fun stuff with some of its IP.Well, here we are in 2021, and Sega once again is in the news, in this case for a DMCA takedown sent to the SteamDB site.

Qualified immunity is pure judicial cancer. This fact cannot be ignored. What began as a limited defense for decisions made in the heat of the moment has become the de facto response to civil rights lawsuits. The Supreme Court -- which conjured this new Section 1983 ejection seat out of thin air -- has only made it worse over the past few decades.Qualified immunity is more bulletproof than the Kevlar vests worn by those who summon its protections most frequently. Efforts have been made to dial this back, but so far, we've yet to see them come to fruition.Attempts to remove qualified immunity have faced massive amounts of opposition from some of the most powerful entities in the United States: law enforcement agencies and their unions. Despite this, efforts continue to be made to rein in something that has pretty much become a permission slip for rights violations.The good news (via MagentaRocks) is that one ongoing effort to end immunity targets the largest law enforcement agency in the nation: the New York City Police Department. This package of reforms offers up some other useful changes, like requiring NYPD officers to live in the city and mandating quarterly reports on vehicle stops, broken down by ethnicity, race, and age. It also would strip the police commissioner of final say on cases recommended for discipline by the Civilian Complaint Review Board. This would prevent CCRB recommendations from being overturned by the NYPD, something that has happened with alarming frequency in the past.But here's the big news: the end of qualified immunity for NYPD officers.

You might recall that pre-merger T-Mobile used to make fun of the wireless sector's repeated failures in the TV space, such as Verizon's massive Go90 face plant. Of course, at the same time, T-Mobile was busy planning its own streaming TV efforts. Launched just last fall, T-Mobile's TVision TV service was supposed to truly disrupt the stodgy TV sector (something already happening at the hands of countless platforms). T-Mobile CEO Mike Sievert explained it like this last October:

The modern smartphone is a technological wonder, cramming into its compact form factor multiple functions -- phone, pager, computer, camera, calculator, diary, multimedia player, radio, TV, clock, maps, GPS, voice recorder, eBook reader, gaming device, WiFi hotspot, flashlight etc. etc. -- that required over a dozen separate devices a couple of decades ago. No wonder, then, that most people want one, and would like to buy a model that offers all these features. However, in many parts of the world, the price of a good smartphone represents a big chunk of their annual wages. The obvious solution is to take out a loan, but that typically requires a credit rating, and many people in those countries lack a credit history, and may not have a bank account. To get around that problem, companies have come up with a new kind of smart loan for the "unbanked", as they are known. A fascinating article on the Rest of the World site, about the Indian Datacultr app, explains how the system works:

Never let a good crisis go to waste. The federal government is always on the lookout for expansion opportunities and a bad actor known colloquially as "Current Events" keeps handing the government what it's looking for.On January 6th, a bunch of Trump fans, who thought it was possible to overturn certified election results, raided the Capitol building. Five people, including a Capitol police officer, died during the attack. This horrific event was turned into a chance to increase domestic surveillance by the incoming president, who threatened Americans with the sort of good time they've been afflicted with since October 26, 2001.Domestic terrorism legislation was an administration "priority," something that would free investigative and intelligence agencies to turn their surveillance programs inward and more directly target US citizens.The blockbuster breach of widely-used SolarWinds network software affected dozens of federal agencies and millions of users around the world. In response to this travesty, the director of the NSA and its military counterpart CYBERCOM (Cyber Command) floated the idea of allowing the NSA (and others) to gaze inwardly at the country's moving (computer) parts. Here's Spencer Ackerman, writing for The Daily Beast:

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The exponential growth of facial recognition tech over the past decade is cause for concern. The tech is unproven and caters to pre-existing biases. The biggest beneficiaries of the tech explosion are the usual suspects: white guys over the age of 35. Cops claim it's a godsend -- a tool that gives them what they need to close cases, even when it's usually just doing what they've always done: deciding any minority "fits the description."A late entrant to the facial recognition games drew a lot of heat. Clearview gives its government customers (along with billionaires, retailers, and… um… gyms) access to billions of images, every one of them scraped from public posts at hundreds of websites and social media platforms. The legality of the scraping is still unsettled, but the company's desire to turn online posts into fodder for misidentifications that can lead to wrongful incarceration is truly disturbing.But it's not just the public sector taking advantage of AI "advances." Facial recognition is a game even amateurs can play. Online tools allow the Wikipedia Browns of the world to misidentify people just as often as the pros do. Ryan Reilly and Jesselyn Cook of Huffington Post detail the online sleuthing done by internet denizens following the January 6 insurrection attempt. Here's how the possible ID of two Capitol raid participants went down:

One consistent point of pride for the Trump FCC, like many Trump agencies, was its active disdain for real world data. It didn't matter how much data showed that US broadband was expensive and spotty due to monopolization (and there's a lot of data clearly proving that point), the Trump FCC didn't care. It didn't matter that surveys showed that net neutrality was popular among consumers. Guys like Ajit Pai believed that the US broadband sector was perfectly healthy and competitive and you make things even more wonderful by gutting already fairly feckless regulatory oversight even further.In short, some people have an ideology and refuse to accept any data that challenges it, no matter how clear it is. The Ajit Pai Donald Trump FCC was the poster child for this mindset. Yeah, it can be hard for anybody to be open to changing your opinions in the face of new or shifting data, but the Trump FCC didn't try. Like, ever. It blacklisted all reporters that even remotely criticized policy. It actively embraced bogus data from lobbyists. It routinely and knowingly spread absolute, disproven falsehoods. It wasn't interested in real world data. It simply wasn't.It's not entirely clear yet what the Biden FCC is going to look and behave like, as the Biden camp still hasn't yet fully staffed the agency with a third Commissioner and possible permanent boss (kind of a problem during a pandemic busy highlighting how essential broadband is to... everything). But there are indications it's going to at least listen to the data and objective experts instead of just, you know, making shit up completely.Whereas the Pai FCC basically killed a program that used real world data collected from real consumer routers to measure consumer broadband experience (again, because it revealed truths that clashed with Pai's ideology), the new FCC says it's making real world consumer experiences a priority again. That includes a new portal and a new form US broadband users can use to explain their experiences with customer service, prices, speeds, availability, and other sticking points in a highly monopolized business sector.That data will then, purportedly, be used to actively inform policymaking (crazy!):

The repeal of a law that shielded New York police misconduct records from public view has prompted a delayed deluge of records -- one temporarily slowed by the expected litigation from police and police reps who wished to put this transparency genie back in the bottle.The records confirmed what has always been suspected: the NYPD doesn't like to discipline its officers and the Civilian Complaint Review Board is pretty much powerless when it comes to police accountability. ProPublica -- one of the early publishers of NYPD misconduct records -- has obtained more information from the CCRB. This batch of info -- aided by the CCRB's own publication of misconduct data -- shows it hasn't done much to handle the influx of complaints following the NYPD's response to a number of Black Lives Matter protests.

Summary: For years, Google and YouTube have included a trusted flagger program by which certain entities that have shown they “are particularly effective at notifying YouTube” of content violations are given more powerful tools with which to do so.This is used often in the copyright context, and companies with a good history may be given access to things like bulk flagging tools and priority review of flagged content. One such trusted flagger for copyright was a company called Topple Track, which offered an automated service for musicians, searching the internet for infringing works and dashing off automated DMCA notices.In May of 2015, digital music distribution company Symphonic purchased Topple Track, but appeared to keep the service running under its own brand.In the summer of 2018, some people noticed that Topple Track’s automated DMCA notices appeared to go a bit haywire, sending DMCA notices for all kinds of perfectly legitimate content. Among those targeted with DMCA notices were the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Bar Association, NYU’s Law Review, the Crunchbase article about the company MP3Tunes and many, many more -- including many artists’ own web stores. EFF’s summary of the wild takedowns gives a sample

Another day, another state house deciding that it needs to jump into the business of content moderation. This time it's California, and this bill (1) is not nearly as insane as many other states and (2) appears to be coming from well meaning people with good intentions. It doesn't make it a good bill, however. It was announced this week in a somewhat odd press release from Assembly Majority Whip Jesse Gabriel, who declares it to be "groundbreaking" as well as a "bipartisan effort to hold social media companies accountable for online hate and disinformation."Needless to say, the bill is neither groundbreaking, nor would it do much of anything to hold social media companies accountable for online hate and disinformation. Also, bizarrely, the press release does not link to the bill. That's just dumb. However, I will link to it, even though I'm not any of the elected officials supposedly pushing this bill that they do not want to link to. And then if you look at the bill, you can see it was actually introduced... back in early February, so it's not clear why they waited until now to do the press release.The press release makes a lot of blustery claims that the bill cannot live up to (perhaps why they didn't link). Also, there's a key part in all of this that goes unstated: whether we like it or not, everything that the press release and this bill are complaining about -- hate speech, disinformation, extremism, and even a lot of harassment -- are still protected under the 1st Amendment. So, realistically there is not much that any bill on those topics can do without running afoul of the 1st Amendment. To be clear, this is not saying that any of those things are good or should be hosted on mainstream websites. Nor is it saying that the big social media companies shouldn't be constantly improving their moderation practices to deal with those things. It's just noting the reality of the 1st Amendment, and how this bill appears to mainly be upset about those 1st Amendment realities.As for the actual bill, it is pretty limited. It only applies to "social media companies" that have over $100 million in revenue in the previous year:

In early March, Senators pushed the Biden FCC to update our fairly pathetic definition of broadband, which is currently anything 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. The Senators proposed something closer to 100 Mbps in both directions, a definition mirrored in a new broadband bill recently introduced in the House.As they've done every single time anybody has tried to improve the US definition of broadband, ISPs have started to fight back against any changes. After all, when you increase the definition of broadband, you only further advertise the fact that monopolization has resulted in spotty coverage and slow broadband speeds across most of US. As a result there's virtually no real competition at speeds of 100 Mbps or above in the United States.Enter AT&T, which, in a blog post last week, argued both against subsidizing ultra-fast fiber deployments across the US, while also trying to argue that 10 Mbps upload speeds are good enough for Americans:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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