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Over the last few months a wide variety of activists, experts, engineers, and academics provided their insights into broadband access (or a lack thereof) in the COVID era. We'd like to thank all of the participants for their insights during a difficult and complicated time, and hope readers gleaned something useful from the exercise. You can peruse all of the contributions here if you missed any of them during the busy holiday season.Our first two Techdirt Greenhouse panels, focusing on content moderation and privacy, saw no shortage of elaborate solutions for extremely complicated subjects. While broadband access can certainly be complicated (especially when it comes to policy, legislation, and network management), in many ways it's the simplest subject we've tackled so far.42 million Americans still lack access to any broadband whatsoever, double official FCC estimates. Millions more can't afford access (given US broadband pricing is some of the highest in the developed world). The primary reason why: 83 million Americans can only obtain broadband access through a single provider (aka a monopoly). Hand-in-hand with regulatory capture, the result has been decades of high prices, slow speeds, stifled competitive potential, and abysmal customer service.The reason isn't that complicated: We've let natural telecom monopolies dominate the market and (with the occasional exception) dictate state and federal policy. These politically-powerful monopolies have then cultivated an environment of apathy or outright denial. And instead of driving more, creative solutions to market, the US solution to this problem has (again with the occasional exception) been to downplay or deny there's a problem, or to use flawed data and sloppy policy to throw millions in subsidies at giant companies for networks routinely left half deployed. Often with zero penalty.The one-two punch of monopolized access and apathetic/corrupt regulators/lawmakers has calcified a problem that should have been solved a decade ago. That's left a discordant chorus of folks, usually on the state or local level, scrambling to fix the problem using limited funds and bad data, usually without adequate federal support. All while being undermined at every step of the way by powerful entrenched monopolies whose top priority is to deny there's a problem, unfairly demonize creative solutions to said nonexistent problem, and keep the broken status quo intact.Peggy Schaffer, in charge of expanding broadband access in Maine, discussed how federal data is so lacking, states have been forced to crowdsource their own home-grown solution simply to identify US broadband gaps. As Pew's Anna Read confirmed, there's a lot the federal government can learn from watching state efforts to bridge this persistent digital divide.For years the internet saw ample debates over whether broadband was a luxury or an essential utility; the latter generally opposed by industry because it creates greater urgency to actually address monopolization. With COVID making it clear broadband is essential for survival, opportunity, health care, education, and employment, experts like Consumer Reports' Jonathan Schwantes argue that it's time to treat broadband as the essential service it is.Experts like Gigi Sohn say the federal response during the COVID era has been a profound disappointment. And, as Francella Ochillo and Andrea Kelemen noted, the most vulnerable among us are usually the first punished by our collective failure.Fortunately, this is all fixable, and COVID could finally provide the impetus to break through decades of policy dysfunction.Most of our experts agree the first step is better data and better maps to accurately identify the scope of the problem (Blair Levin), something we've only just begun with the recent passage of the DATA Act. From there, the solution involves supporting local, creative efforts to drive more competition to market, whether that comes in the form of innovative mesh networks (Terique Boyce), or local community broadband builds (Christopher Mitchell). It also involves giving regulators at the FCC the authority and resources to actually do their jobs (Dana Floberg), and applying antitrust enforcement consistently.Again, the solutions are difficult but not impossible, though they all start with challenging entrenched, politically-powerful monopolies, which has never been America's strong suit. But while COVID has taken much from us, our COVID-era educational failures (Brandon Forester, Deb Socia, and Geoff Millener) could finally provide the motivation we need to take America's broadband affordability and availability problem seriously.

It should be pretty clearly established by now that giving the finger to public officials (in every case listed here, police officers) is protected expression. Even if the expression isn't protected, it sure as shit doesn't justify detainment, arrest, or the seizure of someone's property.Decisions have been handed down by both state and federal courts saying giving a cop the bird is protected expression. And if it isn't necessarily protected (due to courts not seeing anything that justifies deciding this point in certain), it's pretty clearly not evidence of any criminal act, no matter how much offended cops wish it to be.If you're a cop on the receiving end of this hand gesture, it's best to just move on. Choosing this hill to die on just means the officer now has multiple ways to lose their qualified immunity. First, there's the Fourth Amendment violations, which include detaining people when no actual criminal activity is suspected. Then there are the First Amendment issues, which included illegally retaliating against people for exercising their rights.The Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals is the latest to add to this body of case work that says engaging in any law enforcement response to a flipped bird is unwise, at best. In this case, the officer who decided it was impossible to ignore an erect middle finger has lost her qualified immunity. This decision [PDF] not so gently reminds cops that being an asshole isn't a crime. (If it was, can you even imagine the number of cops under indictment?)Ruben Garcia sued officers from the New Hope, Minnesota police department after being hassled excessively by Officer Kaitlyn Baker, whom he first encountered near a local school.The first encounter was innocuous, but somehow laid the groundwork for officious retaliation later in the day.

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On Thursday, a day after his boss helped incite a mob to storm the Capitol, only then did outgoing FCC chair Ajit Pai finally "distance" himself from Trump and say he won't go forward with Trump's plan to have the FCC reinterpret Section 230.

We've noted repeatedly how fifth-generation wireless (5G) was painfully overhyped. To spike lagging smartphone and network hardware sales, carriers, equipment makers, and the lawmakers paid to love them spent years insisting that 5G would change the world, ushering forth amazing new cancer cures and the revolutionary smart cities of tomorrow. But while 5G is an important evolutionary step toward faster, more resilient networks, it's not some magical revolution, and US 5G speeds so far have proven to be much slower than overseas counterparts, and in many instances actually slower than 4G.You'd think industry and experts would view this as a sort of cautionary tale about hype. You'd think pundits and industry would understand that by over-promising what 5G is capable of, they've associated the branding with empty hype and bluster in the eyes of the public. You'd be wrong.Some wireless industry executives have already started insisting that 6G will be a lot like The Matrix (it won't). And this week, telecom trade magazine Light Reading cited a few companies and experts who are already arguing that 6G will somehow enable Star Trek-esque transporters and the ability to taste and smell things over the internet. Seriously:

As a reminder, Josh Hawley is a sedition supporter who should never be near any position of power ever again. In response to his ongoing support for overturning the will of the people, book publishing giant Simon & Schuster made the totally reasonable call that it would refuse to publish the book he was preparing called (hilariously) "The Tyranny of Big Tech." Make no mistake about it: this was Hawley's campaign book to push for the nomination in 2024. The key authoritarian strongman move is to claim that someone else is the tyrant and that you're hear to "save" them. That's Josh Hawley's entire play over the last couple of years: "big tech" is the "tyrant" that he's here to "free" you from, through idiotically bad laws. But it's all a game to him.Simon & Schuster's statement was pretty straightforward:

We've all been there. You jump on some social media platform having met someone in this existence that passes for real life and fire off a friend request to them. And then you... wait. Sometimes you then wait some more. And then, sometimes, you're left in this terrifying, self-absorbed limbo, having tried to make this connection only to see it never accepted. Your mind races. Why didn't they accept my request? Do they not like me? Is it something I said? I know, you think, I'll just threaten to murder them and go break down their front door!Wait, what? Well, that appears to be exactly the way that one North Dakota man chose to end his 2020 after a co-worker didn't accept his Facebook friend request.

Richard Liebowitz is infamous as the notoriously inept copyright troll lawyer. He's so bad at his job that he's been sanctioned repeatedly, and recently was suspended from practicing law in the Southern District of NY (his home court). The details of him lying under oath over and over again are simply staggering.However, you have to give Richard Liebowitz credit for one thing: he's so bad at copyright trolling, that he's set some useful precedents. We wrote about one such case a year and a half ago, where Liebowitz's greed in turning down a settlement offer ended up costing his client a ton.Now, lawyer Dan Booth (who has gone up against Liebowitz in a variety of cases) points us to another loss by Liebowitz that is actually a win for everyone (and if you're wondering, this ruling (in Arizona) came out before he was suspended in NY. But the ruling is important in highlighting how fair use can protect bloggers who repost articles from elsewhere.The case was brought by Daniel Fellner, a photographer and journalist, against "Travel 4 All Seasons LLC" which is actually just a hobby website run by Alfred Hague, who admits he's never made any money from the site. While nearly all of the hundreds of Liebowitz trolling lawsuits are filed over photographs, this one was over the fact that Hague reposted part of an article that Fellner had written about.... Pickleball on cruise ships (I don't know what this is, and I don't think I want to know).Some people like to insist that an article can't possibly be fair use. But that's wrong. A decade ago, in the midst of another highly publicized copyright troll, Righthaven, a court also found that reposting a full article can be fair use (incredibly, in a case where the defendant hadn't initially even raised fair use as a defense!). In this case, while Liebowtiz claimed that Hague reposted Fellner's entire article, the actual evidence suggested that wasn't even true.And, again, in this case, the judge found that Hague's reposting of Fellner's pickleball article was absolutely fair use. First, of course, the court does the obligatory highlighting of Liebowitz's highly sanctioned record ("Mr. Liebowitz has filed hundreds of similar actions in federal courts throughout the country and has repeatedly been cited for misconduct in this District and in many other federal courts throughout the United States."), highlights his poor lawyering in this case ("During the course of discovery, it appears that Plaintiff requested hardly any discovery, and he did not depose Defendant or its principal, Alfred Hague"), his obvious cut-and-paste from other filings laziness ("Ironically, the vast majority of Plaintiff’s Response appears to have been copied and pasted from other briefs by Mr. Liebowitz, as the Response almost exclusively discusses the theft of photographs, not written text, and most of the law cited is from out of Circuit."), and a final "that's not how you evidence" smackdown:

I spent yesterday quite numb watching the events unfolding in Washington DC, in which an angry mob of insurrectionists -- egged on by the President of the United States, a few key Senators, and certain news media personalities -- literally stormed the US Capitol to try to block the formality of Presidential vote counting or, worse, to overthrow the government. I couldn't write anything. I couldn't take care of other work happening. I was witnessing the kind of history I never thought I would witness. I was angry. I was scared. I was frustrated. But most of all I was disappointed. What can you say after a day like yesterday? Most of what I could say would be covered by everyone else. Indeed, this morning I got to my desk to find that our own Tim Geigner had written the kind of post I originally thought I would write.So this post will be a little different. It is clear by now that there is no redeeming our President even in his last days in office. He has shown that everything is about him. He literally said "we love you!" to the mob storming the Capitol. It has long been obvious that the only thing he cares about is himself -- and that he views everything through the lens of "does this person like me or not." He does not care about America. He does not care about its people. He cares about people who like him, and those storming the Capitol did so in his name, and he obviously loved it. Because, as stupid and illegal as what they did was, they were showing that they would do stupid and illegal things for him.However, the real anger needs to be directed as his enablers. His many, many enablers. And it has become obvious that, for many of them, this is a game. This is not about governing. This is not about representing people's interests. This is about red team v. blue team, and doing whatever it takes to win. This is not new, of course. This has been the nature of politics going back centuries. But, in the US, there were at least some limits. Some small bit of idealism, often hidden away in the back corner of the attic, highlighted by the regular peaceful transfer of power even among political enemies, that said: in the end, the greater good is more important than just winning the game.But, for too many, that has gone away. And winning the game is all that matters -- even if it destroys the entire nation. And for all the complaints I have about the Democratic Party, this is entirely on the Republican Party and its leadership. As I said on Twitter the other day, I actually prefer a divided government that can work on compromise. Despite regular accusations from people that I am whatever they are not, I've never been a member of either party, and I have always tried to support policies that I think will be most effective -- not based on ideology, but on understanding the policy and its likely impact. That's the way governing should work.But the events of the last few years has shown that for too many in the Republican Party it is 100% about winning. It's not even based on ideology -- as the last four years has shown that their ideology will shift on a dime if they think it will help them win. The party of free trade flipped to be the party of trade wars. The party of small government became a huge supporter of government interference in business operations. Because it was not about ideology, it was about the game. About helping the red team win.Much of the anger at this approach to "governing" needs to be directed at Mitch McConnell, who made it clear 12 years ago that his single driving ethos was making sure his team won and the other team lost -- and then made all sorts of unprecedented moves to make that happen. But, at least when on the brink, he recognized the pointlessness of continuing to push the myth that Trump actually won when it mattered yesterday. His last minute attempts to stuff that genie back in the bottle yesterday are no excuse, but the true scorn must be reserved for those who couldn't even do that much: Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz. Respected conservative commentator George Will got this part right in his Washington Post column today. Hawley and Cruz should forever be branded as seditionists after egging on and encouraging the events of yesterday, even as they came out late in the day with weak "we didn't mean violence!" statements:

It's Thursday, January 7th, one day after a group of thuggish, Trump-supporting hooligans stormed the nation's Capitol building and attempted to take up residence in the vaunted halls of our self-governance. Already there is an effort to paint this attack on democracy as anything other than what it was: an attempt to either disrupt or overthrow a democratic form of government as dictated by the will of the people. Lin Wood, a lawyer who has been independently creating post-election craziness, suggested the rioters were actually Antifa without evidence, before heading to Parler to claim that a coup was underway. Sarah Palin suggested likewise on Fox News yesterday, while also taking to Twitter to cast doubt on the support these people had for Trump.This follows weeks and weeks of Trump supporters, political leaders, and elected members of Congress engaging in different flavors of casting doubt on the 2020 election with reckless abandon. And reckless really is the word here. Lindsey Graham, who cynically took to the floor of Congress last night to give a tearful lecture on the importance of respecting our election process and institutions, was accused of calling Georgia election officials weeks earlier, attempting to get legitimate ballots thrown out. Josh Hawley happily waved to the rioters as he headed into the Congressional halls yesterday to voice his nonsense objections to counting electoral college votes, shortly before the rioting began. Ted Cruz likewise lodged objections to the democratic process, all for his own cynical political ambitions. Hours before the rioting began, Rudy Giuliani made reference to "trial by combat" at the rally from where the riots launched in a rambling diatribe claiming the election was stolen. Joe diGenova, Trump Campaign lawyer, was quoted as saying in early December that Trump's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency former head, Chris Krebs, should be "taken out and shot" simply for acknowledging that the election was secure after being fired by Trump.Many, if not all, of these same people have been quick in the recent hours to distance themselves from any actual violence or rioting that occurred. It should be clear that any such distancing is theatrical bullshit. They, be it has-beens like Sarah Palin or President Trump, simply don't get to trade in the rhetoric of violence, doubt-casting, and conspiracy theories only to wipe their hands clean of what they created.And what they created was a movement based on insurrection and violence. Trump sent those people to the Capitol Building and was only able to do so because of his enablers in the government and media.

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All the cops in the federal shops say "going dark" is a thing. Local cops have much less to say about the issue, even though they've got as much at stake. The FBI can't be trusted to count its own inventory of "locked" devices, so how much of a problem encryption poses is still highly theoretical. Which is the way the FBI and DOJ want it.We live in a golden age of surveillance. Much of it is self-enabled. Phones track users wherever they go, an unfortunate byproduct of remaining "connected." FOMO has turned dozens of phone apps into unstoppable data generators. In-home devices record conversations, track viewing habits, and record internet usage habits. Wearables provide even more location data, as well as tons of useful biometric info.Any cop complaining about the "restraints" of device encryption just isn't using their imagination. Cloud services provide cops with backups of conversations they can't access from locked devices. Billions of data points harvested by apps, data brokers, and government contractors give cops tons of info that's escaped the protective measures device owners have deployed to protect their devices.A recent report by NBC News shows yet another way cops are leveraging "always-on" information gathering to round up criminal suspects, encryption be damned. Investigators hoping to solve the alleged murder of a Michigan resident turned to third parties to gather evidence, using collected data to build a case. The murder victim was dragged behind his vehicle by his neck, resulting in his violent death. His body was covered in abrasions and his skull had been "partially flattened."At first, investigators were stumped. But then they went searching for information that has never been historically available to law enforcement. Say what you will about "going dark," but for dozens of years, cops have never been able to trace a vehicle -- much less the actions of its occupant -- without actually sending units/officers out to trail someone. And, in a case like this, there was no reason to shadow the person who killed Ronald French, since he wasn't suspected of murder until after the crime happened. Fortunately for law enforcement, "someone" was already trailing the suspect they originally never suspected of anything.

Last March, the Trump FCC put on a big show about a new "Keep America Connected Pledge" to help broadband users during COVID. In it, the FCC proudly proclaimed that it had gotten hundreds of ISPs to suspend usage caps and late fees, and agree to not disconnect users who couldn't pay for essential broadband service during a pandemic. The problem: the 60 day pledge was entirely voluntary, temporary, and because the FCC just got done obliterating its consumer protection authority as part of its net neutrality repeal, was impossible to actually enforce. It was regulatory theater.The rather meaningless pledge has since expired despite the pandemic only getting worse. And because this FCC doesn't actually care about consumer protection (it literally doesn't even collect data on who is getting kicked offline for nonpayment during a plague), many ISPs simply ignored the pledge, and kicked users offline anyway; even disabled Americans who were told repeatedly by their ISPs that they wouldn't be booted offline for nonpayment during the crisis.If you hadn't noticed, the COVID health and economic crisis has only gotten worse. Yet most of the ISPs that crowed about the benefits of this performative prattle have also restored their bullshit, arbitrary usage caps, making them a pretty additional penny during a crisis. AT&T, for example, has restored arbitrary usage caps as of January 1:

If you want to turn a local crime federal, all you need is the internet. This has been the federal government's M.O. for years: bring federal charges as often as you can because everyone uses the internet to communicate. A plethora of content servers located around the United States makes this easy for prosecutors to use and abuse. Almost every communication -- IM, email, or comment -- passes through a number of servers located miles away from the person now accused of violating federal law.Taking a local crime federal means enhanced charges and longer sentences, often prompting accused citizens to sign plea deals that will keep them from paying a trial tax that now includes federal sentences for local actions.A successful challenge to "well, now it's federal" assumptions about internet use has been raised by Michael Golightley -- a man accused of violating federal law for allegedly hacking and threatening his local broadband provider. Golightley, a Lenora, Kansas resident, decided to fight back when his internet service provider (Nex-Tech) removed his online sales listing for supposedly violating the intellectual property rights of unnamed third parties.Golightley got mad. And got even. Incoherent threats were made. From the Tenth Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF]:

Summary: Sexual content can be challenging for content moderation on a number of different levels -- especially when it involves fictional content about taboo, controversial, or even illegal activities. Literary fiction around these topics has been controversial throughout history, including books like Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, which focuses on a story told (somewhat unreliably) by a middle-aged male English professor who becomes obsessed with a 12 year-old girl.But while there have been widespread public debates about whether or not such written works have artistic merit or are obscene, the debate becomes different when such content is hosted on social media platforms, and raises questions about whether or not it complies with terms of service.LiveJournal, the very popular blogging platform in the mid-2000s, faced that question in 2007. A religious group called “Warriors for Innocence,” that was ostensibly set up to track down child abuse online, launched a public campaign accusing LiveJournal (at the time owned by another blogging company, SixApart) of harboring people promoting child sexual abuse. In response, LiveJournal suspended approximately 500 accounts. Many of the suspended accounts, however, hosted fictional writings, including fan fiction about the Harry Potter universe, as well as a (Spanish-language) LiveJournal that hosted a discussion about Nabokov’s Lolita.Many of the LiveJournal users were upset about this, and argued that even if they were writing about taboo sexual content, fiction about criminal behavior is quite different than supporting or engaging in the same criminal behavior.

The Mahanoy Area School District of Pennsylvania, which currently serves 11,000 residents and 1,100 students -- wants to keep wasting local and federal tax dollars defending its decision to infringe on the free speech rights of students.In 2019, the district was sued by "B.L.," a student whose f-bomb laden Snapchat message was reported to school officials. Using the vernacular of high school students, B.L. expressed her displeasure with things that often displeased students.

The digital divide is not only a rural problem. The digital divide is a problem that unites us across rural, urban, suburban and tribal lands. It is a bipartisan problem. The solution must be multi-pronged: affordable ubiquitous broadband with the appropriate devices and trusted digital literacy and technical support.Last March, as the pandemic forced all kinds of essential activities online, communities across the U.S. woke to the reality that large numbers of their residents couldn’t access the internet because they lacked the necessary broadband connections, equipment and/or skills. Schoolchildren and college students couldn’t participate in online classes; patients with chronic illnesses couldn’t visit their doctors via telemedicine; seniors living alone were cut off from service programs, faith, and even family support. Companies found that many employees lacked the connectivity to work where they lived. Whole families found themselves in library parking lots, using Wi-Fi for online tasks they couldn’t perform at home.Suddenly there was a widespread realization that the digital divide is everywhere -- not just out in the country, but in the biggest cities and many of their suburbs as well.Yes, there were (and are) many families in rural communities struggling to deal with online learning, work and social life because the available internet services where they live are far too slow to support them. But there are also millions of American households whose communities have excellent access to high-speed broadband service from one, two or three providers -- but at a monthly cost that those households just can’t afford. Many of those same households don’t have computers -- for the same reason, i.e. affordability -- or have never had a chance to develop the basic digital skills to use the technology.Enter the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, the $2.3 trillion COVID relief and government funding package, which includes several provisions that address broadband deployment and digital inclusion, particularly broadband affordability. The new law allocates $3.2 billion for an Emergency Broadband Benefit program, which will reimburse internet service providers for providing broadband service and devices to low-income households. Additionally, the Act lists digital inclusion and broadband adoption as activities eligible for funding within “Tribal Connectivity” and the “Office of Minority Broadband Initiatives.”While there are still many questions as to how the broadband sections will be implemented, one thing is certain - we now have Congressional recognition that the affordability barrier to digital equity must be addressed.For years, the conversation and advocacy around the digital divide was itself divided. In part, due to the inconsistency of what is meant by “digital divide.” According to the 2019 U.S. Census, 36 million households do not subscribe to a wireline broadband service. 26 million of these households are in urban areas. 10 million are in rural areas. The lower a household’s income, the less likely they are to consistently subscribe to a wireline broadband service.In addition to rural deployment solutions, we must:

Cass Sunstein is a famous legal scholar, who is probably most well known for his book "Nudge" about design decisions that governments can take to influence better behavior. The last time we wrote about him was back in 2014 when he decided to write a Bloomberg column attacking free speech, by saying that free speech hurts public civility and democratic self-government. Specifically, he was attacking one of the most important 1st Amendment cases the Supreme Court has ever heard, NY Times v. Sullivan, which cemented very important 1st Amendment protections in defamation cases -- such as establishing the "actual malice" standard to make sure that defamation law was compatible with the 1st Amendment.Well, apparently things haven't changed that much in six years. Sunstein is back, again in the pages of Bloomberg, to again attack NYT v. Sullivan, and to make a very, very poorly argued case for using defamation law to combat "fake news." Before we get into the problems of the article, let's just note that focusing on "fake news" in general remains a really dangerous proposition. Remember, the term originally became super popular with Hillary Clinton supporters in the runup to the 2016 election, to highlight some completely made up stories in support of Donald Trump. Of course, after the election, Trump and the Trumpist community turned the "fake news" cry right around and made it a rallying cry for any accurate news reports they didn't like.So even Sunstein's basic framing here, that we need to attack fake news with the law, should worry people. It's handing a tool to people who will twist it and abuse it to stifle accurate reporting they don't like.

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"Going dark" is a "problem" that appears to be localized almost entirely at the federal level. While numerous options have presented themselves over the years, the FBI, DOJ, and the president's law enforcement commission continue to claim encryption poses insurmountable problems to law enforcement. With the exception of one Manhattan prosecutor, no one else seems to believe encryption is much of a problem.Encryption may be limiting access to the contents of a few devices and a handful of IMs, but it's really not stopping investigators from securing evidence or prosecutors from securing convictions. Time after time after time after time it's been pointed out a wealth of options are available to law enforcement. And every new iteration of "smart" things just gives them more. Encrypted phones may eliminate the most direct route to evidence, but the number of workarounds is nearly infinite.People are tracking their movements and actions with more accuracy than ever. Smart meters track utility use with an intense amount of detail. Citizens are installing cameras in their homes and granting access to devices that record their conversations and log their interactions with any number of services. The only way the FBI, DOJ, et al can say anything is "dark" is if they're walking around with their eyes closed. And that appears to be the case.Yet another lengthy report on the "golden age of surveillance" has been released, highlighting the surveillance side doors available to law enforcement if the "front door" appears to be locked. "We can't get any evidence!" claim consecutive FBI directors, pointing to the agency's uncounted pile of locked devices.Meanwhile:

Singapore has a relatively long history when it comes to using modern technology to create a surveillance state within its borders. The monitoring of use of the internet and other digital services goes way back to 2002, sold to the citizenry as both an anti-terrorism bulwark and a tool to keep hate-speech at bay. Of course, though the populace as a whole seemed to take to the government's use of surveillance for a variety of reasons, Singapore also has a history of clamping down on any speech it simply doesn't like.At present, of course, surveillance of populations has increased worldwide, though in the form of contact tracing to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. All sorts of technology and tools have been rolled out to accomplish effective contract tracing, with unfortunately far less emphasis put on securing the data of participants. It should go without saying that if contact tracing is going to be effective, it needs to be widely trusted and adopted. Any breaks in the links of the contact chain render it worthless. Which is probably why Singapore had assured its citizenry, when rolling out its plan for contact tracing using the TraceTogether app, that any data collected from it would be secured and used only for tracing purposes.

Plenty of people can ruin lives. But no one can ruin lives like cops and prosecutors.Look, we get it. Everyone likes an easy day at work. But when lives are on the line, the "easy" should be subservient to the "justified." But that's not what happens. When cops decide they like someone for a crime, "correct" is no longer a factor. You can't close a case file without a convicted perp. And closing a case apparently means more than being right, even if it means the real perp is still on the loose.So (to paraphrase the screw coming down on Paul Newman) you get what we have here: a perp. A perp who wasn't the actual killer, but still lost more than a third of his life expectancy to police and prosecutors eager to close a case. Who pays for this miscarriage of justice? Well, it's the same people who want for all the world to believe a miscarriage of justice will never occur: taxpayers.We want to believe cops want to protect us from violent criminals. The reality is opposed to this viewpoint. The cops want whoever they can hang a crime on, even if it's not the real criminal. And while cops go to bed feeling they've made us safer, real life shows us cops can sleep through the shittiest railroadings. So can prosecutors.In Philadelphia, taxpayers are being forced to cough up nearly $10 million to pay for the things that let terrible cops and worse prosecutors sleep the sleep of the righteous. Here's Jeremy Roebuck of The Philadelphia Inquirer, letting us know that horrendous things are being done in our names because it's being done with our tax dollars.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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