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Charter Communications literally has some of the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any company in any industry in America. Like Comcast, Charter has spent years merging its way to market domination, and now enjoys a notable monopoly over broadband in numerous U.S. markets. This monopoly, combined with regulatory capture, has resulted in a company that literally doesn't have to give a damn about its customers.As it turns out, the company doesn't treat its employees much better.For the last few days, both Gizmodo and TechCrunch have been fielding complaints from a torrent of Spectrum employees who say the company is putting them at unnecessary risk. Employees who say there's no technical reason they can't perform their work remotely have been mandated to continue coming into the office, despite CDC warnings that social distancing will be essential to slow the spread of the pandemic across the United States. Several employees sent internal memos warning all employees the company was ignoring CDC recommendations:

Senator Richard Burr is a real piece of work. In 2012 he was one of only three Senators to vote against the STOCK Act. This was a law put in place following a 60 Minutes expose about how Congress was getting filthy stinkin' rich off of insider trading, since Congress was exempt from insider trading laws. The bill did pass -- Burr's vote against notwithstanding -- and President Obama signed into law. Unfortunately, the next year, Congress passed (and Obama signed) an amendment that rolled the rules back for staffers, though it still does apply to elected officials themselves.So, it's quite interesting to see the news that Senator Burr just sold off a "significant percentage" of his stock holdings, according to a ProPublica article detailing the sale. A big chunk of that stock sale? In the hospitality industry that has been so hard hit. He had a big chunk of stock in Wyndam Hotels and Extended Stay America, but sold those off just before everything went bad. The timing is interesting:

Right-to-repair laws are still a work in progress, mainly due to industry opposition. The wants and needs of millions of device/vehicle owners don't amount to a hill of beans in this world full of interloping industry leaders, as noted DIY repairman/nightclub owner Rick Blaine once sourly noted.Allowing people to actually own the things they've purchased seems like a foreign concept to US tech leaders, even though that was the status quo long before goods went digital and the DMCA was enacted. Why should people be at the mercy of those whose profits depend on walled gardens, closed loops, and well-funded lawyers issuing cease-and-desist orders at the drop of a proprietary screwdriver? Well, as someone else sourly noted, those with the gold make the rules.While we struggle through with some piecemeal replacements for our assumed rights of ownership here in the US, it appears the European Union is going to get serious about handing customers back their purloined rights. As the New York Times reports, a right-to-repair is up for discussion -- not so much because of the impact on customers, but because of the impact on the environment.

There's a growing list of things that the COVID-19 crisis has exposed as unnecessary nonsense. Broadband usage caps come first to mind, followed quickly by a lingering disdain for telecommuting by a long list of executives. But the outbreak is also shining a light on another dumb practice that has long been a point of contention: Hollywood movie release windows.For the better part of a decade now, we've highlighted Hollywood's often vicious opposition to disrupting the traditional delay between a film's theatrical debut, and its release on home video or streaming platforms. Companies like Netflix that have attempted to disrupt this system have traditionally been quickly demonized by the industry. AMC, Regal and Cinemark have all fought tooth and nail to preserve the (usually) 90 day restriction period between a film's theater release and its availability to home consumers, even if such restrictions no longer make much sense in the broadband era.Movie patrons, like most other sensible people, are now practicing social distancing in a bid to slow COVID-19's expansion and ease the looming strain on already maxed out US healthcare systems. In some locations (like here in Seattle), movie theaters are being told to close their doors entirely. In the process, Hollywood is having to suddenly and quickly rethink its longstanding dedication to a release window model that already made no sense in the modern world, and makes even less sense in the wake of a pandemic quarantine.Disney, for example, is now considering moving big releases more quickly to its Disney+ streaming video platform:

Last summer, we wrote about yet another post-Blurred Lines decision, showing that any two random songs that sounded kinda a little similar, might be ripe for a court to find infringing. In this case, it was a Katy Perry song, Dark Horse, that was found to infringe on a little known artist named "Flame," who had a song called "Joyful Noise." As we noted at the time, the similarities between the song were simply basic and fundamental building blocks of music. As that article points out:

If at first you don't get punished, plant, plant again.

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As noted earlier this week, a Softbank-owned patent troll, Fortress Investment Group, spun up a shell company Labrador Diagnostics this month, and days after the company came into existence, it sued a company working on COVID-19 diagnostics, claiming that the technology it used for those tests violated the patents it had bought from Theranos -- the sham of a company that went down in flames, and whose founders are still facing federal charges for fraud. Oh, and Fortress/Labrador/Softbank was using the law firm Irell & Manella, the same law firm that once sued on behalf of a monkey over copyright. On a related note, the current head of the US Patent Office, Andrei Iancu, used to be the managing director of that law firm, and to this day insists that there's no such thing as a patent troll. He should perhaps talk to his former partner, Morgan Chu.As you probably heard (because Irell & Manella made sure to reach out to everyone mocking them for this lawsuit), within hours of my post going viral, "Labrador Diagnostics" (again, a company that literally did not exist a few weeks ago) put out a press release saying that (1) it didn't know that BioFire was working on a COVID-19 test (which is questionable, given that the Wall Street Journal and other publications had mentioned it, but I guess Labrador didn't even exist when that article came out, so...), and (2) that it had "offered" a royalty-free license on COVID-19 tests once it realized. As we pointed out, the details and conditions of that "offer" still have not been made clear.However, as Josh Landau at Patent Progress notes, even if Labrador/Fortress/Softbank is actually offering such a license, it's completely worthless, because the lawsuit is still claiming patent infringement on the machine BioFire is using to run the diagnostic:

Be it Cambridge Analytica, Equifax, or wireless carrier location data, the U.S. has already faced a steady parade of privacy and security related scandals. Now as countries around the world hunker down to slow the rate of COVID-19, the problem could easily grow even larger as a chain reaction of implications make privacy, security, and tools like encryption more important than ever.Millions of Americans are now telecommuting for the first time. As they do so, more than a few of them won't be wise enough to use basic security precautions while handling sensitive work or health related data. And as we've noted for years, services like VPNs often don't provide reliable protection, given it's hard to verify just how secure or trustworthy service owners are. Many services were already shady as hell, and even the reliable offerings may struggle under the load.Many folks are already using the pandemic as scam fodder. As a result, the shift to home work -- and the dramatic spike in healthcare information being shoveled around the internet -- means that the battle over encryption is also more important than ever:

As it has always been, the internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it. Reporters Without Borders is ensuring forbidden information is getting into the hands of whoever wants it, no matter what their government feels they should or shouldn't read.The nexus point isn't a website tucked away on the dark web, only accessible via VPN and a Tor connection. It's right there out in the open, delivered via a platform very few governments have bothered to censor. Here's Reporters Without Borders' understated announcement of its damage-dodging info dump:

Techdirt writes about freedom of information matters often enough. Sadly, many of the stories are about governments and other official bodies refusing to comply with local Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) laws for various reasons, and using a variety of tricks. In other words, rights to FOI may exist in theory, but the practice falls woefully short. That makes the following story from the UK a welcome exception.It concerns Nicola Young, a local government employee in the English market town of Whitchurch, in Shropshire. Part of her job as town clerk was to handle FOIA requests for the local council. One such request asked for a copy of the audio recording of a council meeting. Apparently the person requesting the file believed that the written minutes of the meeting had been fabricated, and wanted to check them against the recording. However, the reply came back that the file had already been deleted, as was required by the official council policy.Undeterred, the person requesting the file sent a complaint to the UK's main Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), which carried out an investigation. The ICO discovered that the town clerk had not only claimed that the audio file had already been deleted when it actually existed, but that she personally deleted it a few days after the FOI request was made. Quite why is not clear, but as a result:

As we've been discussing for a while, India's government has blacked out internet access in Kashmir since around August, setting records for one of the longest government-mandated internet blackouts in history. India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi has tried to argue that the blackout is a necessary security precaution in the face of growing unrest in the region stemming from its loss of autonomy earlier this year. Granted, like most government internet censorship efforts, the move has a lot more to do with cowardice and fear of an informed public than any genuine concern about public welfare.Despite the Indian Supreme Court declaring such restrictions illegal last January, the problem persists. And as a pandemic threatens the planet, these restrictions are making it hard for the residents of Kashmir to access essential medical information on COVID-19:

Sing it with me, folks: content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. Over the last few weeks, all of the big social media platforms have talked about their intense efforts to block misinformation about Covid-19. It appeared to be something of an all hands on deck situation for employees (mostly working from home) at these companies. Indeed, earlier this week, Facebook, Google, Linkedin, Microsoft, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube all released a joint statement about how they're working together to fight Covid-19 misinformation, and hoping other platforms would join in.However, battling misinformation is not always so easy -- as Facebook discovered yesterday. Yesterday afternoon a bunch of folks started noticing that Facebook was blocking all sorts of perfectly normal content, including NY Times stories about Covid-19. Now, we can joke all we want about some of the poor NY Times reporting, but to argue that its reporting on Covid-19 is misinformation would be, well, misinformation itself. There was some speculation, a la YouTube's warning that this could be due to content moderators being sent home -- and not being allowed to do their content moderation duties over privacy concerns, but the company said that it was "a bug in an anti-spam system" and was "unrelated to any changes in our content moderation workforce." Whether you buy that or not is your choice.Still, it's a reminder that any effort to block misinformation is going to be fraught with problems and mistakes, and trying to adapt rapidly, especially on a big (the biggest) news story with rapidly changing factors and new information (and misinformation) all the time, is going to run into some problems sooner or later.

The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals has looked at the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision and decided it applies to cell site location info, even when that information was obtained by law enforcement years before the Supreme Court came to this conclusion. (via Courthouse News)The location records obtained from AT&T without a warrant destroyed the accused murderer's alibi. From the decision [PDF]:

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Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well in the best of times, but the solutions that seem to at least keep it from devolving into a total mess almost always use a combination of humans and technology working together. But what do you do when the humans are sick, self-isolating, quarantined, etc? While I imagine some may be able to work from home, it's a difficult time to expect anyone to be at full productivity. So YouTube has made it clear that it's turning over more content moderation decisions to the machines knowing full well that some of those decisions are going to be bad:

As millions of Americans begin to work and learn from home in a bid to slow the spread of COVID-19, America's patchy and expensive broadband networks are likely to get a workout. To be clear, the shift will certainly highlight the broken US telecom market, at least in terms of patchy availability, limited competition, and high prices. But most experts say US networks should be able to shoulder the load without too much difficulty.As of last week, giants like AT&T and Verizon say they hadn't seen a massive surge in internet usage yet, and insisted they'd be able to shoulder any load once usage ramps up further:

The FBI continues to avoid playing its hand honestly in the "going dark" debate. It continues to do things like call strong encryption "warrant-proof" encryption, damning it by associating its very existence with unlawfulness. FBI Director Chris Wray continues to claim he's not asking for encryption backdoors while calling for encryption backdoors. And for nearly two years, the FBI has refused to update its erroneous count of uncracked devices in its possession.The last time the FBI delivered a number, it claimed it had about 7,800 devices in its possession that it couldn't get into. After being questioned by Congress about its claims, the FBI went back to count devices and found its tracking method had resulted in a severe miscount. No real number has been delivered yet, but the early estimate was that the actual number was slightly over 1,000 devices. Not quite the apocalypse the FBI needed us (and our Congressional reps) to believe it was.As usual, when the government fails, private citizens step in to do the work that government agencies are spending our tax dollars not doing. The DOJ and FBI have spent years hardly bothering to compile an accurate accounting of police use of deadly force, resulting in a small cottage industry of journalists, activists, and hobbyists doing the work for them.The same thing can be said about the "going dark" narrative. The FBI loves the narrative but can't be bothered to provide any hard data backing its assertions that encryption is destroying the criminal justice system. So, it's left up to people like Joseph Cox and his team members at Motherboard to try to get a grip on how often device encryption is disrupting criminal investigations.Using information gathered from more than 500 iPhone search warrants and other court records, Motherboard has compiled a database that gives readers a better idea of encryption's impact on law enforcement investigations -- a narrative stripped of all the competing narratives, if you will.In conclusion, Going Dark is a land of contrasts:

There has been some absolutely ridiculous sniping between the Chinese government and the US government over "blame" for Covid-19. For idiotic reasons, President Trump and his sycophantic followers started referring to Covid-19 as "The Chinese Virus," a racist term that hints at putting blame on Chinese people for the virus or even implying that those of Chinese ancestry are more risky than others. The administration also stupidly limited the number of Chinese staffers allowed at the US bureaus of Chinese news organizations, partly in response to China expelling three Wall Street Journal reporters over a headline it didn't like.The Chinese government responded in an even more idiotic manner, trying to blame Americans for the disease.

Just another reminder the Drug Enforcement Agency doesn't care all that much about drugs and/or enforcement. If there's money to be made, the DEA is all in. If it can score easy wins by engaging in entrapment, it will. But the drugs will flow and the damage will be done. And the DEA will be there to hoover up the cash… even when the cash has nothing to do with drugs.The DEA stole another person's life savings back in 2015. A raid of house predicated on the theory Miladis Salgado's husband was involved in drug dealing ended with the DEA walking off with $15,000 Salgado had saved for her daughter's quinceanera. This was money Salgado had saved while working at a duty-free shop in the Miami airport, along with gifts from friends and relatives.And it all was gone after the DEA raided her house. The good news is Salgado eventually got her money back. But it took time and it took a lawyer. In the end, the DEA admitted it had no evidence tying her husband to drug trafficking.

Techdirt has just written about the extraordinary legal action taken against a company producing Covid-19 tests. Sadly, it's not the only example of some individuals putting profits before people. Here's a story from Italy, which is currently seeing more new coronavirus cases and deaths than anywhere else in the world. Last Thursday, a hospital in Brescia, in the north of Italy, needed supplies of special valves in order to use breathing equipment to help keep Covid-19 patients alive in intensive care (original in Italian). The manufacturer was unable to provide them because of the demand for this particular valve. The Metro site explains what happened next:

Yesterday I wrote up a fairly insane story about how a Softbank-owned patent troll, Fortress Investment Group, through a shell company subsidiary, Labrador Diagnostics (which, despite its name, does not seem to do any diagnostics), using patents that it had bought up from the sham medical testing company Theranos during its fire sale, had sued BioFire Diagnostics/BioMerieux, one of the few companies making a Covid-19 diagnostics test, claiming patent infringement. The patent infringement claims were on all of its diagnostics created using BioFire's FilmArray 2.0, FilmArray EZ, and FilmArray Torch devices -- and the company's Covid-19 tests were based on that technology. Even worse, the company asked the court to issue an injunction, blocking BioFire from using the tests. As we pointed out, this was not just tone deaf, but destructive and dangerous.This morning, hours after our article went viral, Labrador Diagnostics issued a press release claiming that once it became aware that BioFire was working on Covid-19 tests, it had offered the company a royalty-free license on those tests (and only those tests):

For all the fears and freak-outs over "disinformation" on social media, over the past few weeks Twitter, especially, has been an amazing source for getting accurate, thoughtful information regarding the Covid-19 pandemic and how to deal with it. It's a pretty stark contrast, in fact, between people who seemed to be paying attention to credible voices on social media, and who began "social distancing" sooner, and those who were getting their information from politicians and television (especially cable news) who seemed to wave off the dangers for way too long. That's not to say there hasn't been disinformation about Covid-19 online -- including some spread by politicians and crackpots. However, on the whole, social media has done what it does best: allowed credible, knowledgeable voices to rise to the top for many.As Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason notes, COVID-19 Reminds Us: Social Media Is Good, Actually:

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As the EARN IT Act moves forward -- with all of its Section 230 and encryption-threatening appendages still intact -- we're getting some very interesting responses from tech companies that have benefitted from Section 230 and/or rely on strong encryption.The goal may be noble -- the protection of children from sexual abuse -- but those noble goals are just a crowd-pleasing dodge. It's an assault on both Section 230 and strong encryption that's being pushed with an anti-child porn narrative, one that makes it very difficult for legislators to oppose. To vote against EARN IT, supporters will misleadingly claim, is to vote for the spread of child porn, so it's going to be tough to find lawmakers willing to push back.Attorney General Bill Barr wants encryption broken. If it means American citizens are less protected, so be it… just as long as the FBI can get into a few more locked devices or accounts. Plenty of people in the administration seem to feel Section 230 has to go, if only to make it easier to sue platforms for perceived slights.Entities that used to be allied against Section 230 reform and encryption-breaking are now for it. The Electronic Privacy Information Center wants to do both somehow. It has sent a letter [PDF] in support of the EARN IT Act that is pure cognitive dissonance. EPIC claims it wants to see Section 230 reformed but somehow keep this "reform" from threatening the encryption of end-to-end communications. How it imagines this law will achieve both aims is nearly impossible to discern.The letter says Section 230 must be reformed, but for something much lower on the "for the children" list.

While it required some nudging, several of the nation's biggest ISPs this week announced they would be suspending their usage caps and overage fees as millions of Americans prepare to hunker down to slow the spread of COVID-19. Comcast, AT&T, and Centurylink all stopped imposing such limits for at least the next 90 days. Critics (and even leaked Comcast memos) have long made it clear such restrictions (particularly on fixed line networks) aren't technically useful in managing congestion as the industry once claimed, and are little more than glorified price hikes on captive customers.The speed at which such restrictions were dispatched (during a time when overall bandwidth consumption is up, no less) supports industry executive claims that such limits are arbitrary, confusing, and unnecessary.That said, numerous ISPs say they're taking additional steps to ensure users can stay online during the outbreak. For example, a coalition of several dozen ISPs struck a voluntary "Keep Americans Connected Pledge" that they wouldn't kick users offline during the outbreak for lack of payment due to Coronavirus, and wouldn't impose late fees either. From the FCC announcement:

Last week, we were perplexed as to why House Democrats had agreed to an extension of NSA/FBI surveillance powers for a President they keep insisting is incompetent and vindictive against anyone he dislikes. At the same time, we couldn't figure out why Republicans were so keen to support it at the same time they were insisting that those same powers were used by the "deep state" to spy on the President's own campaign. After it passed, President Trump hinted that he might veto it anyway, and now with the Covid-19 pandemic in full swing, the Senate has agreed to punt on the issue for the time being, extending the FISA authorities for 77 days, with a promise of debating real reform in the interim:

Clearview's claims that its controversial facial recognition program is only for use by law enforcement agencies continues to be exposed as a lie. Documents obtained by BuzzFeed showed the company has sold its tech to a variety of private companies, including major retailers like Kohl's and Walmart.It's also expanding its reach across the globe, pitching its products to dozens of countries, including those known mostly for their human rights violations. Even when it limits itself to law enforcement agencies, it still can't help lying -- exaggerating its success and assistance in criminal investigations.Before Clearview became a plaything for government agencies and private corporations, it was a toy for the rich and powerful. Kashmir Hill -- who broke the first story about Clearview's problematic image-scraping operation -- has a followup in the New York Times detailing the company's unpleasant origin story.

Honestly, I wasn't sure how to begin this story or how to fit all the insanity into the title. It's a story involving patents, patent trolling, Covid-19, Theranos, and even the company that brought us all WeWork: SoftBank. Oh, and also Irell & Manella, the same law firm that once claimed it could represent a monkey in a copyright infringement dispute. You see, Irell & Manella has now filed one of the most utterly bullshit patent infringement lawsuits you'll ever see. They are representing "Labrador Diagnostics LLC" a patent troll which does not seem to exist other than to file this lawsuit, and which claims to hold the rights to two patents (US Patents 8,283,155 and 10,533,994) which, you'll note, were originally granted to Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos -- the firm that shut down in scandal over medical testing equipment that appears to have been oversold and never actually worked. Holmes is still facing federal charges of wire fraud over the whole Theranos debacle.However, back in 2018, the remains of Theranos sold its patents to Fortress Investment Group. Fortress Investment Group is a SoftBank-funded massive patent troll. You may remember the name from the time last fall when Apple and Intel sued the firm, laying out how Fortress is a sort of uber-patent troll, gathering up a bunch of patents and then shaking down basically everyone. Lovely, right?So, this SoftBank-owned patent troll, Fortress, bought up Theranos patents, and then set up this shell company, "Labrador Diagnostics," which decided that right in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic it was going to sue one of the companies making Covid-19 tests, saying that its test violates those Theranos patents, and literally demanding that the court bar the firm from making those Covid-19 tests.A bit more background here: the company they're suing, BioFire, recently launched three Covid-19 tests built off of the company's FilmArray technology. And that's what "Labrador" (read: SoftBank) is now suing over. From the lawsuit:

A year ago, I was at a round table discussion, where someone was doing one of the standard rants we've all heard, about how big internet companies were evil because they were focused on profits over the health of their user base, etc. I pointed out that while this narrative had taken hold among many people outside of these internet companies, it didn't seem to reflect what I was hearing from those within those companies -- especially as they were investing heavily in "trust & safety" teams, including both hiring people and building technology, that would provide better overall experiences on the platform. Instead, I suggested, their complaint seemed to be more with Wall Street investors, and the short term profits that it demanded from many public companies. There are the Jeff Bezos/Amazon exceptions -- where he basically told Wall Street to go put their head in a bucket for many years while he re-invested in the business as they demanded profits -- but for the most part, public companies are put on a short leash, not so much by management expectations, but the demands of investors.I'm thinking about that a lot again, following the news of the proxy fight over Twitter's management that was raised just recently. At the beginning of the month, it was revealed that Paul Singer's massive hedge fund Elliott Management had taken a large stake in Twitter, and wanted major changes, including getting rid of founder/CEO Jack Dorsey. A few days later, it was revealed that a deal was struck between Twitter and Elliott Management to keep Dorsey in charge... for now. However, it seems that the situations is fairly tenuous. Elliott Management now has a board seat, and a promise of some very tricky "growth" targets (especially tricky in the face of who knows what's coming with the economy during a pandemic).The details of those metrics makes it seem clear that Elliott Management is forcing Twitter down a specific path -- one that is likely to make the user experience for Twitter users much, much worse:

Mobile voting app Voatz is still a mess. Two years ago, West Virginia decided to give the app a spin to allow some voters to vote from home during the midterm elections. Nobody in the security world thought this was a good idea. The only people who did feel this was a safe, secure way to collect votes were state legislators and Voatz itself. Some early poking and prodding by security researchers immediately found problems with Voatz's handling of votes, including out-of-date SSH and unproven facial recognition tech that was supposed to verify voters by matching their selfies to their government IDs.Two-and-a-half years later, not much has improved. Voatz is still courting state governments, trying to talk them into using its app to allow the housebound and those overseas to vote in their elections. An MIT study of the software found multiple issues, including flaws that would allow attackers to intercept votes -- and alter or trash them -- without anyone on either end realizing they'd been hacked.Voatz responded badly, insulting the researchers and claiming its server-side software would miraculously prevent the described attack from happening. When the researchers pointed out Voatz was wrong about its own software, it published a blog post attacking the researchers as "publicity hounds" seeking to disrupt the election process.Another month has passed and it's more bad news for Voatz. Voatz and Tusk Philanthropies hired cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits to perform a security audit of its software. Guess what? It's still a mess.

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First off, I hope that everyone reading this, and their friends, families, loved ones, etc, are staying safe -- and I urge you to stay safe as well, which means staying home as much as possible. I did want to at least put up a post noting that these are unique and unprecedented times, and I honestly have no idea what this will mean for Techdirt over the next few weeks or months. We may very well be posting less. I don't know if our posting focus will change. I have some posts on the way that touch on the pandemic situation, and plenty that don't, and while I want to continue covering other things, it feels like we're in a moment where pretty much the only thing that is going to matter for the near future is how we deal with the pandemic.We will try to continue on in the same way we always have done, but I don't know what that will actually look like.While the team here is already effectively remote, and you might think that means we should be able to carry on as usual (or even moreso, since we're all pretty much limited in going out and about), I think that's an impossible request as well. Many people are now also dealing with watching children or parents or other relatives, all the time, and that obviously takes time, attention and energy. At the same time, all of us are watching the news and are concerned about what this means for our own health, the health of our loved ones, and the health of everyone else around the globe. It's a frightening and uncertain time -- and that, by itself, makes less than ideal working conditions for anyone. These are not times when I expect anyone, myself included, to be as productive as normal.So, I at least wanted to put up a note that says, more or less, I have no idea what will be happening at Techdirt over the next few weeks and months. We have a new project that we were excited to launch before the end of the month -- and that may still happen, or we may put it off. I don't know how many posts we'll have or what topics they'll be on. I don't know if anyone will feel like recording podcasts, or if I'll feel like recording podcasts. I just don't know.I know that lots of people are now concerned about their own jobs and their own financial position, and I hope that everything works out okay for everyone. I will note, also, that we've already heard from some of our own sponsors and backers, who have put off decisions on sponsorship. Also, a decent part of our revenue last year, and in our planning for this year, was for live events, all of which have now been put on indefinite hiatus -- meaning that if you're not in dire financial straits due to everything else, and are in a position to do so, we'd truly appreciate the support to make sure that we can keep going through these trying times. If you want the most direct way of supporting us, it's to do direct donations via this page, but the general support page lists many different ways to support us, some of which get you nice things in response, beyond the warm feeling of helping Techdirt continue.But, the most important point of all: please, everyone, stay safe out there.

We've noted for years how as US telcos have given up on upgrading their aging DSL lines, they've effectively helped cement a bigger monopoly for cable giants like Comcast and Spectrum in countless markets nationwide. A recent study estimated that 40 million Americans can't get broadband at all -- double FCC estimates. And FCC data indicates that in 44% of US markets, users have the choice of only one ISP at speeds of 25 Mbps or higher. More often than not, your only option for "real" broadband is probably going to be Comcast.Even if you're "lucky" enough to have the choice of two options, telcos and cablecos don't go out of their way to actually compete. Combine this lack of competition with the Trump administration's decision to effectively neuter FCC consumer protection authority, and these mono/duopolies have less incentive than ever to compete on price, improve terrible customer service, avoid net neutrality and privacy violations, or expand service into the many under-served corners of the US.It's a problem that's slowly but surely getting worse. The latest data from Leichtman Research indicates that the nation's eight biggest cable broadband providers added 3.14 million broadband subscribers in 2019, reaching a total of 67.98 million. In contrast, the nation's top eight traditional phone companies, which offer a mix of fiber and DSL, lost a combined 619,605 subscribers to reach a historic low of 33.24 million subscribers last year:AT&T, Verizon, Windstream, CenturyLink, and Frontier are all losing subscribers because they've largely given up on fixed residential broadband in countless markets. Most long ago shifted their focus to enterprise services, video advertising, or anything other than residential broadband, which has never been profitable enough, quickly enough for their liking. As a result, DSL lines aren't being upgraded (or even repaired), service is no longer being seriously expanded, and consumers are heading to their only alternatives: either a capped and expensive cellular connection, or a capped and expensive cable broadband line.Leichtman notes that at the end of 2019, cable broadband providers had a 67% fixed broadband market share versus 33% for US telcos. That 67% market share is the highest level since the third quarter of 2001. So despite all the talk about gigabit fiber, our breathless dedication to the "digital divide," and the "race to 5G," the biggest untold story in US broadband remains the fact that cable monopolies are growing bigger and more powerful at the same time we strip away all of the government's consumer protection authority. What could possibly go wrong?And while 5G is often bandied about as a panacea to this problem, the same issues that have plagued traditional broadband are going to be replicated with 5G: including high prices, regional mono/duopolies (this time over cell tower fiber backhaul), feckless, industry-captured regulators, and an unwillingness by carriers to spend the money needed to seriously deploy to under-served areas.There's some hope that low orbit satellites from the likes of Amazon and Space X could finally disrupt this broken-ass status quo, but having seen numerous disruptive efforts scuttled by the industry's dominant and politically-powerful incumbents over the last few decades, genuine US telecom disruption at any meaningful scale is something you'll need to see before you believe it.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is David, taking a moment to process one particular comment from the Michigan State Police who were taking well-deserved flak on Twitter for bragging about stealing $40,000 from a driver:

We're nearing the end of our series about the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1924. So far we've looked at Hot Water, Legends of Charlemagne, 192X, and The Hounds Follow All Things Down, and this week the feature is the winner of Best Digital Game: You Are The Rats In The Walls by Alex Blechman.This not just a returning win for Alex, but a second in the digital game category, following last year's win with Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening To Steal Treasure. While Stopping By Woods was a Twine-based remix of a Robert Frost poem, Rats brings things into the graphical realm with RPG Maker and takes on one of the more notable 1924 works to enter the public domain this year: H. P. Lovecraft's short story The Rats In The Walls. And both games have one thing in common: a sense of humor that pervades the writing and design. Rats takes the famous story — in which a man returns to his family's ancestral estate and discovers horrible secrets that drive him mad, made manifest in the form of scurrying rats that torment him — and gives the player the role of the titular vermin via a simple game mechanic: nipping at the character's heels to drive him towards various locations on the small but detailed map. Alongside this, it embraces a simple and highly effective comedy premise: combining the elaborate, heavily-wrought prose that Lovecraft is famous for with modern, casual, highly self-aware language. The result is consistently funny, with a few great surprise jokes and an absurd overall tone that just works.As you can see, Rats also makes great use of RPG Maker assets to build a fitting and eye-catching (if unpolished) setting for the game, which was the first thing that made it a contender for the Best Digital Game category, but what really sealed the deal in that regard was the aforementioned game mechanic of driving the character around by controlling the rats that chase him. It's nothing mindblowing, and it can be (intentionally) frustrating, but it adds an element of gameplay and leverages the digital medium to make Rats something slightly more than just a simple story dressed up with sprite graphics (and also undoubtedly required some scripting to go beyond RPG Maker's basic capabilities). The mechanic also successfully makes the basic level of choice in the story (which just amounts to determining what order things unfold in) feel more integrated with the game. All this combines with the excellent writing to create a short experience that keeps players closely engaged from start to finish.You can play You Are The Rats In The Walls in your browser on Itch, or check out the other submissions in our public domain game jam. And come back next week for the final winner spotlight!

The Connecticut State Police have agreed to pay $50,000 to a man its officers subjected to a bunch of Constitutional violations on their way to issuing tickets to him for violations he never committed.Here's a brief description of how this whole thing started:

Back in January, Sonos took some well earned heat for a new product "recycle mode" that effectively bricked older smart speakers the company was no longer interested in supporting. They're now backtracking from the effort after significant backlash.It began last October, when Sonos announced a new "Trade up" upgrade program that let you trade in older Sonos hardware for a 30% discount on new speakers. But the program included a bizarre caveat: to get the discount, users need to put their old hardware into "recycle mode," which effectively bricks the product preventing it from being used again. According to Sonos, once you apply online you'll get the discount immediately, but the speaker system you're trading in goes into a 21 day countdown mode before it's inevitably made useless:

As we noted, there's an effort underway, lead by Senator Thom Tillis' office, to rewrite copyright laws in a manner that is even "friendlier" to Hollywood -- which is kind of insane, given just how far the laws have been bent to favor Hollywood over the years, and against the public. Of course, for the past decade or so, significant updates to copyright law have mostly been a kind of third rail issue in Congress (with a few notable exceptions), as the memory of the SOPA/PIPA protests still lingers. However, with this new approach brewing, it seems that some wish to rewrite that history.Gene Quinn from IP Watchdog -- a site that tends to support an extreme maximalist viewpoint mostly on patents, but sometimes on copyright as well -- has an amazingly weird post, supporting a more maximalist copyright reform, playing off a new paper from ITIF. If you don't recall, ITIF wrote the original paper that became SOPA. It was that think tank's policy proposal that was molded into the awful bill that would have fundamentally changed how the internet worked. So, you should already be somewhat skeptical of ITIF's "policy recommendations" on copyright -- starting with the very idea that "digital piracy" is a "scourge" that requires laws to stop.As we've shown in great detail using the industry's own "piracy" numbers, changes to the law to ratchet up copyright enforcement have failed to decrease piracy. What does decrease piracy is putting in place laws that enable more innovation and experimentation around new licensed services with a variety of business models.But, not surprisingly, that's not the focus of any reform effort. Still, what's most amazing in Quinn's piece is his rather insane attempt to rewrite the history of SOPA/PIPA. If you weren't around when it happened nearly a decade ago, (Gene was, so he has no excuse), a wide coalition of people all got together to point out how dangerous the law would be for a functioning internet, and how it would stifle speech, harm innovation, and (worst of all) break certain technical elements being used to make the internet more secure -- all so Hollywood could continue to tilt at windmills and pretend that "piracy" was being attacked. As more and more people (with very diverse ideological backgrounds) all came to realize how dangerous SOPA/PIPA was, they organized a day of protest on the internet, which set phones ringing throughout Congress, urging elected officials to rethink that plan. One by one, Senators and Representatives dropped their support of the bill, and it never moved forward.That's not how Gene Quinn describes it however. In his version "hacker groups" (?!?) threatened to shut down the internet (?!?!?!?!?) if SOPA passed:

Riding your bike while sending out geolocation data is the hot new crime.Cops are using reverse warrants with increasing frequency, inverting the usual investigation process by demanding info about everyone in a certain area before trimming down the data haul to a list of suspects. It's sort of like canvassing a neighborhood, except investigators approach companies like Google, rather than people who might have seen something.The problem with these dragnets is it makes everyone in the area a suspect. The more heavily-trafficked the area is, the more problematic this process is. Reverse warrants have already resulted in innocent people being jailed. This report by NBC News is another cautionary tale -- one that involves a man who became a suspect in a robbery just because he wandered into the geofence set up by cops.

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Here's one I didn't quite expect to see. Match.com -- the dating website owned by IAC, which owns basically every other major dating site, including OkCupid, PlentyOfFish, Tinder, Hinge, and a bunch of others as well -- has announced that it will support the idiotic EARN IT Act, that would utterly destroy Section 230 and the ability of websites to host user generated content. Match's publicly stated reasons for this are... bizarre. It doesn't actually explain why it supports it. It just says it does, that protecting children is important, and then some mumbo jumbo about the kids online these days -- none of which touches on what the bill would actually do.

To be clear, there are going to be layers of life and death dysfunction that the Coronavirus shines a bright spotlight on, most notable being a shaky US healthcare system and incompetent government leadership. But the outbreak and response is also going to shine a bright light on the broken US telecom market, and the millions of Americans that won't be able to effectively telecommute in a crisis.We've noted time and time again how a lack of competition in the US broadband market means consumers pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for broadband that usually ranks somewhere in the middle of the pack. While we talk a lot about this problem, few actually do much about it. Similarly, few really have noticed how as US telcos effectively give up on upgrading antiquated DSL lines, they're giving cable giants like Comcast even bigger monopolies across vast swaths of America. In turn, those cable giants are facing less incentive than ever to improve customer service, upgrade rural networks, or compete on price.With little competition and federal regulators that are little more than a rubber stamp to their every monopolistic whim, these companies have also been given a green light to gouge US consumers with usage caps and overage fees. Worse, a recent report suggested that 40 million Americans can't get broadband at all, nearly double FCC estimates. The Trump administration and FCC's response to this problem so far has been to blow sweet kisses at the nation's biggest telecom providers in the form of regulatory favors, massive tax breaks for doing nothing, and a lot of overheated rhetoric.This has always been a problem, but as FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel notes, it's going to become a more obvious problem as millions of Americans are suddenly asked to work (and learn) from home to avoid spreading the virus further and faster:

Last fall we were happy to see the 9th Circuit rule against LinkedIn in its CFAA case against HiQ. If you don't recall, the CFAA is the "anti-hacking" law that has been widely abused over the years to try to shut down perfectly reasonable activity. At issue is whether "scraping" information violates a terms of service, and thus, the CFAA. A few years back, the same court ruled in favor of Facebook against Power Ventures, saying that even though Power's users gave permission to Power and handed over their login credentials, Power was violating the CFAA in scraping Facebook, because the information was behind a registration wall -- and because Facebook had sent a cease-and-desist.In the HiQ case, despite what seemed to be a similar fact pattern, the court ruled against LinkedIn, saying it could not block HiQ's scraping via a CFAA claim, with the main "difference" being that LinkedIn information was publicly viewable, and therefore should be open to scraping. I still don't quite see the difference between the cases -- because in the Facebook situation, once you have a login, the information is effectively available in the same manner, but that is how the courts ruled. After first asking (and not getting) an en banc review (and then asking for more time), LinkedIn has now asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on this issue (hat tip to Media Post). I worry that the court might make things much worse if it does take the case, and block all kinds of scraping.Of course, one thing that's notable since the 9th Circuit ruling came down -- all of the attention that Clearview AI has received over the last few months, for its frightening facial recognition app, built of of scraping "public" social media images and profiles. This use of scraping has convinced some -- even some who seemed to support the HiQ ruling -- that perhaps there should be limits on scraping. I think that's a kneejerk reaction, and focusing in too narrowly on the wrong issue. The issue there is not with scraping, but with the specific use of the data as an attack on privacy going well beyond the internet itself (i.e., tracking and identifying people out in the real world). It's one thing to focus on that issue, as opposed to saying that's an argument against free scraping.At a time when we're so worried about competition, the ability to scrape is incredibly important. It's how competitors can be built in a world with network effects. If other companies can build compatible services, without having to do a deal with Facebook or Linkedin or YouTube or Twitter, that enables more competition much more easily. And yet, too many efforts are being made to cut off that kind of interoperability. The LinkedIn case is just one example. If the Supreme Court does take it up, let's hope they recognize just how important this kind of adversarial interoperability can be, rather than buying into some nonsense about how scraping must be blocked and not allowed.As for the petition itself, the question LinkedIn is asking the Court to review is whether or not bots can scrape websites, even after receiving a cease-and-desist letter:

A year ago, the DOJ subpoenaed Chelsea Manning to appear before a grand jury and provide testimony as it was building its case against Julian Assange, who was subsequently indicted on a very questionable basis. Manning refused to comply with the subpoena, and was put in jail for contempt of court. Many people -- even some supporters of Manning -- seemed split on this move, noting that complying with a lawful subpoena, especially regarding a situation where all information had been previously provided and in which the target is already indicted, is different than being asked to cough up private info. But, given the context of Manning's earlier incarceration and commutation, the whole effort seemed somewhat vindictive.As reporter Dell Cameron pointed out, the DOJ already has all the details of Manning's conversations with Assange. It's difficult to see what more it needed to get from her. And yet, she sat in jail. And considering her history with possible suicide attempts, it seemed (tragically) that being confined again could be incredibly damaging to her. Indeed, yesterday it was reported that she attempted suicide once again.Incredibly, just a day later, the court has ordered her released from jail, noting that her appearance "is no longer needed."

Video streaming is a key part of today's Internet world. According to research from Sandvine, it represents 60.6% of total downstream volume worldwide. The centrality of video to the Internet experience makes video codecs one of the hottest technologies. The most popular format today is H.264, used by 91% of video developers. But H.264 is getting long in the tooth -- its history goes back two decades. An upgrade is long overdue. There's a successor, H.265, also known as High Efficiency Video Coding, or HEVC. However, the use of H.265 has been held back by patent licensing issues. As Wikipedia explains in painful detail, there are two main patent pools demanding payment from companies that use HEVC in their devices. For one of the pools, the patent list is 164 pages long. Partly in response to this licensing mess, and HEVC's high per-device cost, the Alliance for Open Media was formed in September 2015:

America's least valuable renewable resource is school resource officers. At some point, we -- as a nation -- apparently agreed school disciplinary issues should be turned over to law enforcement officers. To be sure, this decision was made without our input, for the most part. Most people agree it's ridiculous to turn rote violations of school policy over to men and women trained in the apprehension and investigation of actual, real crimes like homicide, drug distribution, and any number of day-to-day activities carried out while black.What have we received in return for being forced to part with our souls in exchange for the rare occasions where serious criminal acts occur on school grounds? An endless supply of outrage and disgust, which is the renewable resource no one asked for. What is our take-home from this involuntary exchange?I don't know.Do you love a parade? Because this is one of the most horrible:

On Wednesday, the Senate held a hearing about the EARN IT Act, the bill that is designed to undermine the internet and encryption in one single move -- all in the name of "protecting the children" (something that it simply will not do). Pretty much the entire thing was infuriating, but I wanted to focus on one key aspect. Senators supporting the bill, including sponsor Richard Blumenthal -- who has been attacking the internet since well before he was in the Senate and was just the Attorney General of Connecticut -- kept trying to insist the bill had nothing to do with encryption and wouldn't be used to undermine encryption. In response to a letter from Facebook, Blumenthal kept insisting that the bill is not about encryption, and also insisting (incorrectly) that if the internet companies just nerded harder, they could keep encryption while still giving law enforcement access.

Source: The AtlanticMaya MacGuineas, the president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, published a frightening article about technology and capitalism in the April edition of The Atlantic magazine. MacGuineas contends that the tech companies are manipulating us into using their products, addicting our children to potentially harmful devices, and stealing our extremely valuable data in exchange for “free” services.The Masses Are Not So Easily ManipulatedMacGuineas warns us of “habit-forming” products and the “Orwellian art of manipulating the masses”:

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