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COVID-19 has shone a very bright light on the importance of widely available, affordable broadband. Nearly 42 million Americans lack access to any broadband whatsoever--double FCC estimates. And millions more can't afford service thanks to a lack of competition among very powerful, government pampered telecom monopolies.As usual, with political pressure mounting to "do something," DC's solution is going to be to throw more money at the problem:

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For well over a decade we've talked about the many problems that arise when copyright is compared to "property" -- and people try to simply move over concepts from physical, tangible property into the world of digital. A key aspect of this: when you "purchase" something digital online, is it really a "purchase" or is it a "license" (especially a license that could be revoked)? If it was a true "purchase" then you should own it and the seller shouldn't be able to take it back. But in practice, over and over and over again, we've seen stories of people having things they supposedly "bought" disappear. The situation is so crazy that we've referred to it as Schrödinger's Download, in that many copyright holders and retailers would like the very same thing to be a "sale" some of the time, and a "license" some of the time (the "times" for each tend to be when it hurts the consumers the most). This has, at times, seeped into physical goods, where they've tried to add "license agreements" to physical products. Or, worse, when some copyright folks claimed that buying a DVD means you don't actually own what you bought, but rather are merely "purchasing access" to the content, and that could be revoked.Anyway, I'm amazed that we don't see more lawsuits about this kind of thing -- but one was recently filed in California. Someone named Amanda Caudel is suing Amazon for saying that you've "purchased" a video download, which Amazon might disappear from your library whenever it wants. As the lawsuit makes clear, Amazon directly says that you are buying the movie (as opposed to renting it). From the lawsuit filing itself:And, they point out, in your account there's a listing of "Your Video Purchases & Rentals." But, the lawsuit claims, what you purchase doesn't seem to behave like a real purchase:

Last week AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson stepped down after his $150 billion bid to dominate the video advertising space fell flat on its face. Stephenson's tenure was plagued by no shortage of scandals, though it was his failures on the TV front that likely cost him his comfy seat as one of the highest paid executives in America.After spending $150 billion on several dubious megamergers (most notably the 2015 purchase of a satellite TV provider DirecTV), Stephenson saddled the company with an ocean of debt. So much debt it was forced to raise rates on customers in the middle of one of the biggest transformational shifts in the TV sectors in decades (cord cutting and the rise of streaming video). And while Stephenson deserves credit for at least trying to get out ahead of the trend, his tenure was pockmarked by a long line of dubious decisions that directly contributed to the company losing more than 3.2 million pay TV subscribers last year alone.But Stephenson's replacement, AT&T executive John Stankey, doesn't seem much better. In a profile piece last week, Bloomberg described fairly idiotic and cocky recent comments by Stankey as "blunt." Among them was the claim that "nobody knows as much about TV as me," and the insistence that those who don't subscribe to AT&T's confusing assortment of discount TV streaming services must certainly be stupid:

The government loves its secrets. It loves them so much it does stupid things to, say, "secure the nation..." or "protect the integrity of deliberative processes" or whatever the fuck. We should not trust the government's reasoning when it chooses to redact information from documents it releases to FOIA requesters. These assertions should always be challenged because the government's track record on redactions is objectively awful.Here's the latest case-in-point: Emma Best -- someone the government feels is a "vexatious" FOIA filer -- just received a completely stupid set of redactions from the Secret Service. Best requested documents mentioning darknet market Hansa, which was shut down (along with Alpha Bay) following an investigation by US and Dutch law enforcement agencies.The documents returned to Best contained redactions. This is unsurprising given the nature of the investigation. What's surprising is what the Secret Service decided to redact. As Best pointed out on Twitter, the Secret Service decided public press releases by the DOJ were too sensitive to be released to the general public.

I'm lucky enough to own a decades old Nintendo 64 and a handful of games, including the classic Mario 64. My kids love that game. Still, the first thing they asked when I showed it to them the first time is why the screen was letterboxed, why the characters looked like they were made of lego blocks, and why I needed weird cords to plug it all into the flat screen television. The answer to these spoiled monsters' questions, of course, is that the game is super old and wasn't meant to be played on modern televisions. It's the story of a lot of older games, though many PC games at least have a healthy modding community that will take classics and get them working on present day hardware. Consoles don't have that luxury.Well, usually, that is. It turns out that enough folks were interested in modernizing Mario 64 that a group of fans managed to pull off porting it to PC. And, because this is a port and not emulation, they managed to update it to run in 4k graphics and added a ton of modern visual effects.

One of the key points we've been making concerning Attorney General William Barr and his DOJ's eager support for the terrible EARN-IT Act, is that much of it really seems to be to cover up the DOJ's own failings in fighting child porn and child exploitation. The premise behind the EARN IT Act is that there's a lot of child exploitation/child abuse material found on social media... and that social media companies should do more to block that content. Of course, if you step back and think about it, you'd quickly realize that this is a form of sweeping the problem under the rug. Rather than actually tracking down and arresting those exploiting and abusing children, it's demanding private companies just hide the evidence of those horrific acts.And why might the DOJ and others be so supportive of sweeping evidence under the rug and hiding it? Perhaps because the DOJ and Congress have literally failed to live up to their mandates under existing laws to actually fight child exploitation. Barr's DOJ has been required under law to produce reports showing data about internet crimes against children, and come up with goals to fight those crimes. It has produced only two out of the six reports that were mandated over a decade ago. At the same time, Congress has only allocated a very small budget to state and local law enforcement for fighting internet child abuse. While the laws Congress passed say that Congress should give $60 million to local law enforcement, it has actually allocated only about half of that. Oh, and Homeland Security took nearly half of its "cybercrimes" budget and diverted it to immigration enforcement, rather than fighting internet crimes such as child exploitation.So... maybe we should recognize that the problem isn't social media platforms, but the fact that Congress and law enforcement -- from local and state up to the DOJ -- have literally failed to do their job.At least some elected officials have decided to call the DOJ's bluff on why we need the EARN IT Act. Led by Senator Ron Wyden (of course), Senators Kirsten Gillbrand, Bob Casey, Sherrod Brown and Rep. Anna Eshoo have introduced a new bill to actually fight child sex abuse online. Called the Invest in Child Safety Act, it would basically make law enforcement do its job regarding this stuff.

Given all we know about facial recognition tech, it is literally jaw-dropping that anyone could make this claim… especially without being vetted independently.

You may have seen the news reports this week that German prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Dmitry Badin for a massive hack of the German Parliament that made headlines in 2016. The reports about the German arrest warrant all mention that German authorities "believe" that Badin is connected to the Russian GRU and its APT28 hacking group.The folks over at Bellingcat have done their open source intelligence investigation thing, and provided a ton of evidence to show that Badin almost certainly is part of GRU... including the fact that he registered his 2018 car purchase to the public address of a GRU building. This is not the first time this has happened. A few years back, Bellingcat also connected a bunch of people to the GRU -- including some accused of hacking by the Dutch government -- based on leaked car registration info.There's much, much more in the Bellingcat report, but the final paragraph really stands out. Bellingcat also found Badin -- again, a hacker who is suspected in multiple massive and consequential hacks, including of email accounts -- didn't seem to be all that careful with his own security:

For years, the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office in Louisiana issued fake subpoenas to witnesses and crime victims. Unlike subpoenas used in ongoing prosecutions, these were used during the investigation process to compel targets to talk to law enforcement. They weren't signed by judges or issued by court clerks but they did state in bold letters across the top that "A FINE AND IMPRISONMENT MAY BE OPPOSED FOR FAILURE TO OBEY THIS NOTICE."Recipients of these bogus subpoenas sued the DA's office. In early 2019, a federal court refused to grant absolute immunity to the DA's office for its use of fake subpoenas to compel cooperation from witnesses. The court pointed out that issuing its own subpoenas containing threats of imprisonment bypassed an entire branch of the government to give the DA's office power it was never supposed to have.

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Have you heard of Heath Freeman? He's a thirty-something hedge fund boss, who runs "Alden Global Capital," which owns a company misleadingly called "Digital First Media." His business has been to buy up local newspapers around the country and basically cut everything down to the bone, and just milk the assets for whatever cash they still produce, minus all the important journalism stuff. He's been called "the hedge fund asshole", "the hedge fund vampire that bleeds newspapers dry", "a small worthless footnote", the "Gordon Gecko" of newspapers and a variety of other fun things.Reading through some of those links above, you find a standard playbook for Freeman's managing of newspapers:

Back when T-Mobile and Sprint were trying to gain regulatory approval for their $26 billion merger, executives repeatedly promised the deal would create jobs. Not just a few jobs, but oodles of jobs. Despite the fact that US telecom history indicates such deals almost always trigger mass layoffs, the media dutifully repeated T-Mobile and Sprint executive claims that the deal would create "more than 3,500 additional full-time U.S. employees in the first year and 11,000 more people by 2024."About that.Before the ink on the deal was even dry, T-Mobile began shutting down its Metro prepaid business and laying off impacted employees. When asked about the conflicting promises, T-Mobile refused to respond to press inquiries. Now that shutdown has accelerated, with estimates that roughly 6,000 employees at the T-Mobile subsidiary have been laid off as the freshly-merged company closes unwanted prepaid retailers. T-Mobile says the move, which has nothing to do with COVID-19, is just them "optimizing their retail footprint." Industry insiders aren't amused:

Government officials always remind us that the price of order and lawfulness requires us, as a society, to give up some of our privacy and liberty. It shouldn't be that way, but it almost always is.For UK motorists, the exchange rate for orderly motorway traffic is millions of their travel records left exposed on the open internet.

Oscars DVD screeners, the DVDs that get sent out to judges that are up for an award, have been an on again, off again topic for years at Techdirt. These screeners were at one time a very prevalent source for pirated films that showed up on the internet. There was once some irony in the MPAA and film industry insisting that piracy could be solved by tech companies if only they would nerd hard enough, yet here are these screeners going out the doors that supposedly were secure and turned out not to be. It was all bad enough that the MPAA wanted to ban screeners entirely, which pissed off filmmakers enough that the lobbying group ended up having to back down.It turns out that technology actually could solve the film industry's screener DVD piracy problem. With better quality film rips showing up on pirate sites, ripping relatively low-res DVDs became not a thing. Perhaps because of that, alongside the stated desire to be more sustainable, there will be no more Oscars DVD screeners moving forward.

The internet economy runs on data. As of 2019, there were over 4.13 billion internet users generating more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. By the end of 2020, there will be 40 times more bytes of data than there are stars to observe in space. And all of this data is powering a digital revolution, with the data-driven internet economy already accounting for 6.9% of U.S. GDP in 2017. The internet data ecosystem supports a bustling economy ripe with opportunity for growth, innovation, and profit.There’s just one problem: While user-generated data is the web’s most valuable asset, internet users themselves have almost no control over it. Data storage, data ownership, and data use are all highly centralized under the control of a few dominant corporate entities on the web, like Facebook, Google, and Amazon. And all that data centralization comes at an expensive cost to the ordinary internet user. Today’s internet ecosystem, while highly profitable for a few corporations, creates incentives for major platforms to exercise content censorship over end-users who have nowhere else to go. It is also incompatible with data privacy, insecure against cybercrime and extremely fragile.The web’s fragility in particular presents a big problem for the long-term sustainability of the web: we’re creating datasets that will be important for humanity 1000 years from now, but we aren’t safeguarding that data in a way that is future-proof. Link rot plagues the web today, with one study finding that over 98% of web links decay within 20 years. We are exiting the plastic era, and entering the data era, but at this rate our data won’t outlast our disposable straws.To build a stronger, more resilient and more private internet, we need to decentralize the web by putting users back in control of their data. The web that we deserve isn’t the centralized web of today, but the decentralized web of tomorrow. And the decentralized web of tomorrow will need to last the next 1,000 years, or more.Our team has been working for several years to make this vision of a decentralized web a reality by changing the way that apps, developers, and ordinary internet users make and share data. We couldn’t be doing this today without the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)—a crucial tool in our toolbox that’s helping us tear down the major technological hurdles to building a decentralized web. To see why, we need to understand both the factors driving centralization on the web today, and how IPFS changes the game.In fact, I want to make a bold prediction: in the next one to two years, we’re going to see every major web-browser shipping with an IPFS peer, by default. This has already started with the recent announcement that Opera for Android will now support IPFS out of the box. This type of deep integration is going to catalyze a whole range of new user and developer experiences in both mobile and desktop browsers. Perhaps more importantly, it is going to help us all safeguard our data for future net-izens.Here’s how:With the way the web works now, if I want to access a piece of data, I have to go to a specific server location. Content on the internet today is indexed and browsed based on where it is. Obviously, this method of distributing data puts a lot of power into the hands of whoever owns the location where data is stored, just as it takes power out of the hands of whoever generates data. Major companies like Google and Amazon became as big as they are by assuming the role of trusted data intermediaries, routing all our internet traffic to and through their own central servers where our data is stored.Yet, however much we may not like “big data” collecting and controlling the internet’s information, the current internet ecosystem incentivizes this kind of centralization. We may want a freer, more private and more democratic internet, but as long as we continue to build our data economy around trusted third-party intermediaries who assume all the responsibilities of data storage and maintenance, we simply can’t escape the gravitational pull of centralization. Like it or not, our current internet incentives rely on proprietary platforms that disempower ordinary end users. And as Mike Masnick has argued in his essay "Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech", if we want to fix the problems with this web model, we’ll have to rebuild the internet from the protocol layer up.That’s where IPFS comes in.IPFS uses “content-addressing,” an alternative way of indexing and browsing data that is based, not on where that data is, but on what it is. On a content-addressable network, I don’t have to ask a central server for data. Instead, the distributed network of users itself can answer my data requests by providing precisely the piece of data requested, with no need to reference any specific storage location. Through IPFS, we can cut out the data intermediaries and establish a data sharing network where information can be owned by anyone and everyone.This kind of distributed data economy undermines the big data business model by reinventing the incentive structures of web and app development. IPFS makes decentralization workable, scalable and profitable by putting power in the hands of end users instead of platforms. Widespread adoption of IPFS would represent the major upgrade to the web that we need to protect free speech, resist surveillance and network failure, promote innovation, and empower the ordinary internet user.Of course, the decentralized web still needs a lot of work before it is as user-friendly and accessible as the centralized web of today. But already we’re seeing exciting use cases for technology built on IPFS.To get us to this exciting future faster, Textile makes it easier for developers to utilize IPFS to its full potential. Some of our partners are harnessing the data permanence that IPFS enables to build immutable digital archives that could withstand server failure and web decay. Others are using our products (e.g., Buckets) to deploy amazing websites, limiting their reliance on centralized servers and allowing them to store data more efficiently.Textile has been building on IPFS for over three years, and the future of our collaboration on the decentralized web is bright. To escape the big data economy, we need the decentralized web. The improvements brought by IPFS, release after release, will help make the decentralized web a reality by making it easier to onboard new developers and users. As IPFS continues to get more efficient and resilient, its contribution to empowering the free and open web we all deserve will only grow. I can’t wait for the exponential growth we’ll see as this technology continues to become more and more ubiquitous across all our devices and platforms.Carson Farmer is a researcher and developer with Textile.io. Twitter: @carsonfarmer

Back in February, $130 "smart" pet feeders from a company named PetNet simply stopped working. When customers reached out to the company to complain, they hit a complete and total brick wall in terms of functioning customer service. Customers say emails and phone calls weren't returned (or wound up undeliverable), and the company simply refused to answer annoyed customer inquiries on Twitter or Facebook.Fast forward to late March and April and PetNet customers once again complained to outlets like Ars Technica that the company's products didn't work and its customer support was still nowhere to be found. Customers who complained were now being shoveled to a third party contractor with 16 followers on Twitter which, like the company that employed it, didn't appear capable of offering any help:

A few days back I saw a friend share an incredible video on YouTube of a guy in Milwaukee named Wes Tank, rapping Dr. Seuss's "Fox in Sox" over Dr. Dre beats. Even if you think that sounds great, the final result is even better than you expect:That video went super viral and is currently at over 3.5 million views on YouTube. Wes has since been adding more and more Seuss-over-Dre videos to his channel and each one is incredible. Because I can't pick favorites, here are a few. You'll want to watch them all.Since seeing these videos (multiple times), I've read and watched a few different interviews with him and he says he basically came up with this idea on a whim five or so years ago, and did it at a live show, and got a tremendous response. Since then, he's done it a few times and it's a crowd favorite, but he never really had time to make the videos for it until, you know, the pandemic hit and the work he was planning to do with his recently created video production company, TankThink, got put on hold.Of course, as someone who has promoted and supported the concept of mashup or remix culture for decades, this reminded me (yet again) of why being able to do this kind of creativity is so important. Wes himself has talked about the joy and value these videos are creating:

When you lose a lawsuit -- as former Sheriff Joe Arpaio did last year -- you have a few options. Arpaio sued a few news outlets for defamation, alleging their reference to him as a convicted felon had done over $300 million in damage to his pristine reputation.Represented by Larry Klayman, Arpaio came away with a loss. The DC federal court not only said Arpaio failed to state facts pointing to actual malice by the publications, but that Arpaio failed to plead any facts at all. That's classic Klayman lawyering: go light on facts, heavy on rhetoric, and try to avoid being being hit with sanctions and/or having your license suspended for your antics both on and off the court.The correct thing to do when faced with a dismissal is file a motion to amend the lawsuit or petition the DC appeals court for a second look. Arpaio and Klayman did neither of these things. Instead, they dropped one defendant (CNN) and filed essentially the same lawsuit in the same court that had dismissed Arpaio's previous lawsuit with prejudice. (h/t Adam Steinbaugh)Having had its time wasted twice with the same lawsuit, the court isn't happy with Arpaio or his representation. This decision [PDF] is even shorter than the 11-page dismissal Arpaio received on his first pass. The court says there's nothing new here and this isn't the way the court system works -- something Arpaio's lawyer should know but apparently chose to ignore.

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It's been over a year since Devin Nunes kicked off his vexatious campaign to sue various critics. As you probably are aware, in that year he's sued news organizations, journalists, political operatives, critics, and, most famously, a satirical internet cow.Most (though not all) of those lawsuits have been filed in Virginia which has a notoriously weak anti-SLAPP law. He's also filed a lawsuit in Iowa, which has no anti-SLAPP law. He briefly filed one case in California -- which does have an anti-SLAPP law -- but (1) he had his campaign file it rather than himself personally, and then (2) quickly dropped it.The barrage of frivolous, censorial SLAPP suits in Virginia, though, inspired lawmakers there to pass a good anti-SLAPP law, though the two legislative houses were unable to come to an agreement on a consensus version of the law before their brief 2020 legislative session came to an end, though they promised to take it up again in 2021.What's interesting is that in a new article about what happened with the law in the Roanoke Times, it's explained that once the law does hopefully pass next year, it may apply back to Nunes' series of vexatious lawsuits -- meaning he might be on the hook for the legal bills of everyone he sued. Normally, laws cannot apply retroactively, but as the article notes, this wouldn't be about making something illegal retroactively, but rather about making a procedural change to how cases play out, meaning it could apply retroactively:

We've long discussed how the Pai FCC's net neutrality repeal was plagued with millions of fraudulent comments, many of which were submitted by a bot pulling names from a hacked database of some kind. Millions of ordinary folks (myself included) had their identities used to support Pai's unpopular plan, as did several Senators. The Trump FCC stonewalled both law enforcement and journalist inquiries into who was behind the comments, and why the FCC didn't lift a finger to either stop them or to help identify those responsible.Numerous journalists like Jason Prechtel have submitted FOIA requests for more data (server logs, IP addresses, API data, anything) that might indicate who was behind the fraudulent comments, who may have bankrolled them, and what the Pai FCC knew about it. Thanks to that effort, early last year, Gizmodo's Dell Cameron worked with Prechtel to link some of the fake comments to Trump associates and some DC lobbying shops like CQ Roll Call. Then late last year, Buzzfeed's Kevin Collier and Jeremy-Singer Vine showed how, unsurprisingly, the broadband industry funded at least some of the fraudulent efforts.Meanwhile two reporters for the New York Times, Nicholas Confessore and Gabriel Dance, sued the FCC under the Freedom of Information Act after the agency refused to reveal logs that could show the IP addresses used to submit the mass comments. Last week, a Manhattan federal judge hand over copies of the logs to both Confessore and Dance:

NSO Group is not having a great year. At least not on the PR front. The books may be balancing, but its indiscriminate distribution of malware/spyware to questionable governments has been raising eyebrows and blood pressure for years. Now, it's being sued by Facebook for using WhatsApp as its preferred delivery system for malware payloads.These payloads target criminals and national security threats. But -- since NSO doesn't care who it sells to or what they do with its powerful software -- the payloads also target journalists, dissidents, activists, and attorneys. This malware can take over devices, feeding communications and phone contents to government agencies that want to keep an eye on their enemies -- even when their "enemies" are just critics and people who disagree with their policies.But the malware can be used for other reasons, too. Any powerful surveillance tool ultimately ends up being misused. Just ask the NSA. And the FBI. And now, ask NSO, as Joseph Cox has for Motherboard.

Sometimes you turn out to be wrong. When we initially discussed Kawhi Leonard's lawsuit against Nike over the "Klaw" logo, I'd said I was interested to hear Nike's response. That was because my glance at Leonard's description of the history of the logo, one which he created in rough draft form when he was young to one which Nike used as inspiration for the eventual Nike Kawhi shoe logo, it sure seemed like Nike was being hypocritical. After all, Nike has a reputation for being extremely protective of its own intellectual property rights while being rather cavalier with those of others. As a reminder, Leonard created a logo that makes something of a "K" and "L" outlined via the tracing of his own hand. It sure seemed that if that all wasn't unique enough that Nike shouldn't be trying to trademark a version of the logo from under him, what could be?Well, a U.S. District Judge in Oregon appears to disagree. And, given some of the side by side comparisons that Nike brought in its response... perhaps he has a point.

If you do anything internet related, hopefully you already know Tim Bray. Among tons of other things, he helped develop XML and a variety of other standards/technologies the internet relies on. He's also been a vocal and thoughtful commenter on a wide variety of issues, especially in the tech policy space. For the past five years he's been working at Amazon as a VP and Distinguished Engineer -- but as he's announced he has now quit in protest over the company's retaliation against workers who were speaking up over the company's handling of their working conditions during the pandemic. Bray gives some of the background of workers organizing and speaking up about their concerns, and then discusses the company's reaction (firing the vocal ones and offering lame excuses).

It seems like Ring really wants to add facial recognition tech to its cameras. It employs a "Head of Facial Recognition Tech." It pitches this still-nonexistent feature to law enforcement. And it says it will "continue to innovate" to meet customer feature demands in response to Congressional queries about its facial recognition plans.But now is not the best time to be trotting out new facial recognition products. Cities and one entire state have enacted bans or moratoriums on facial recognition tech use by government agencies. Even the leader in law enforcement body cams (Axon, formerly Taser) has pulled back from adding this tech to its products. So, Ring is playing it safe even if it's inevitably going to add this feature in as soon as it can justify it.And it's looking for ways to justify it. Just like it promised Congress, it will continue to "innovate" by adding features customers say they want -- even if it's tech many feel is untrustworthy, if not possibly dangerous. A document obtained by Ars Technica shows the company is feeling out its newest customers on several potential features, including facial recognition.

Earlier this year, we mentioned, in passing, personal injury lawyer Annie McAdams' weird crusade against internet companies and Section 230. The lawyer -- who bragged to the NY Times about how she found out her favorite restaurant's secret margarita mix by suing them and using the discovery process to get the recipe -- has been suing a bunch of internet companies trying to argue that we can ignore Section 230 if you argue that the sites were "negligent" in how they were designed. In a case filed in Texas against Facebook (and others) arguing that three teenagers were recruited by sex traffickers via Facebook and that Facebook is to blame for that, the lower court judge ruled last year that he wouldn't dismiss on Section 230 grounds. I wish I could explain to you his reasoning, but the ruling is basically "well, one side says 230 bars this suit, and the other says it doesn't, and I've concluded it doesn't bar the lawsuit." That's literally about the entire analysis:

For over a decade now, we've been saying that the Supreme Court should absolutely stream its oral arguments live via the internet -- and for all that time the Supreme Court has rejected the idea. All of the Justices have always seems to be aligned in this view, though with very bad justifications. The two most frequently cited reasons are that (1) the public wouldn't understand what was going on, and (2) that it might make the oral arguments more "performative" as the Justices (and perhaps some lawyers) would act differently for the cameras. Neither of these arguments makes much sense.If people just wouldn't understand -- well, it seems like that would be a very educational opportunity. Having the video of the arguments would allow for more people to learn about our justice system and how it works, and for experts to step in and teach people. As for the "performative" concern, that also seems silly. Are the Justices really arguing that after working their way up through the ranks as judges for decades, that they'll suddenly toss away all of their solemn and careful approach to justice because the cameras are on? If so, they don't belong on the Supreme Court. And, of course, many other courts, including the Appeals Courts that these judges came from, will stream oral arguments live on the internet, and there's been little to no evidence that it suddenly caused the judges to start tap dancing for the cameras.Either way, with the pandemic forcing the court to shift to operating remotely, today for the very first time, the Court heard arguments telephonically and agreed to stream it live online for anyone to listen to (initially there had been talk that they would only stream it to "journalists" which raised a number of 1st Amendment issues on its own -- and eventually the decision was made to just make it accessible to everyone). Amusingly, when asked, many Supreme Court lawyers apparently said they'd still stand up while making their arguments, as if at the lectern in the Supreme Court (as someone who works mostly at a standing desk and prefers to do calls standing, I approve):

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In 2018, Cambodia's government passed a "fake news" law. It was enacted shortly before a general election, allowing the government to stifle criticism of the Prime Minister. It also required all local websites to register with the government and put government employees to work scouring social media for violations.The government's new power to decide what is or isn't "real" news allowed it to consolidate its power over the local press. One newspaper was sold to a Malaysian firm that also performed PR work for the Prime Minister, giving the PM the ability to produce news unlikely to ever be classified as "fake."The appearance of the coronavirus in Cambodia has resulted in a spike in "fake news" arrests. A crisis like this shouldn't be allowed to go to waste and the Cambodian government is making the most of its new powers to silence critics, stifle dissent, and punish anyone who doesn't have nice things to say about the party in power.

For years, consumers have been bitching about the high cost of sports programming as it pertains to your monthly cable bill. Especially for those who don't watch sports, but are often forced to pay the sky high prices for sports programming as part of a bloated cable bundle anyway. One survey a few years ago found that 56% of consumers would ditch ESPN in a heartbeat if it meant saving the $8 per month subscribers pay for the channel. The "regional sports fees" tacked on to subscriber bills have also long been a point of contention because they're often used to help falsely advertise a lower rate.This is the "norm" in more normal times. During a pandemic, sports have largely been cancelled, but consumers are still shelling out big bucks for sports programming that costs them an arm and a leg. That's resulted in a spike in complaints to NY Attorney General Letitia James, who this week announced she would be asking the nation's six biggest traditional cable providers to reduce or eliminate fees related to sports programming while there's, you know, no sports:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side comes from James Burkhardt in response to someone questioning our use of "OK, Landlord" in reference to copyright holders:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, we learned more about one of the NSA's sweeping but useless surveillance programs, and about the stunning lack of oversight when the CIA wants to drone-strike people. But we weren't learning more about the TPP, since it was secret, even though President Obama was demanding critics explain what was wrong with the agreement they weren't allowed to see (just as a UN expert was saying that secret trade negotiations are a threat to human rights). Tom Friedman, meanwhile, was maybe going just a little overboard in advocating for the deal.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2010, the UK Labour Party was yet again caught apparently infringing on copyright with a campaign poster while also being the champions of the Digital Economy Bill and its draconian copyright rules. They claimed "innocent error" — a defense notably absent from their own law. In the US, a worrying bill was pushing to extend DMCA-style takedowns to "personal information", while Twitter was taking down a lot of tweets over bogus DMCA claims, and an appeals court upheld a hugely problematic ruling about who counts as a journalist.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, Wal-Mart was making a hilariously late second-entry into the online music store market, while Disney was backing down from a video-on-demand offering that I suppose counts as a distant ancestor to Disney Plus. Nathan Myhrvold was mixing up innovation and invention with Intellectual Ventures, while the head of the Patent Office was floating some very bad ideas about reform, even as companies like Intel were getting vocal about the problem of patent trolls.

Last fall, we wrote about what appeared to be many of the sketchy details between the non-profit Internet Society (ISOC) agreeing to sell off the non-profit Public Interesty Registry (PIR), which runs the .org top level domain registry, to the very much for-profit private equity firm, Ethos Capital, which had recently been formed, and involved a bunch ex-ICANN execs and other internet registry folks. Even if the deal made perfect sense, there was a lot of questionable issues raised concerning who was involved, whether or not there was self-dealing, and how transparent the whole thing was. On the flipside, a number of very smart people I know and respect -- including some who worked for ISOC, insisted that the deal not only made sense, but was good for the future of the .org domain and the wider internet. In January, we had a long podcast with Mike Godwin, who is on the board of ISOC and voted for the deal, debating whether or not the deal made sense.In the intervening months, many people and organizations had petitioned ICANN to block the deal, and ICANN had repeatedly delayed its vote -- with the last delay coming a few weeks ago right after California's Attorney General, Xavier Becerra, sent a pretty scathing letter about the deal.On Thursday, ICANN's board voted to block the deal, saying that it just created too much uncertainty for non-profit organizations who rely on the .org top level domain.

Things are getting even more interesting in Facebook's lawsuit against Israeli malware merchant, NSO Group. Facebook was getting pretty tired of NSO using WhatsApp as an attack vector for malware delivery, which resulted in the company having to do a lot more upkeep to ensure users were protected when utilizing the app.Unfortunately, Facebook wants a court to find that violating an app's terms of service also violates the CFAA -- something most of us really don't want, even if it would keep NSO and its customers from exploiting messaging services to target criminals, terrorists… and, for some reason, lots of journalists, dissidents, and activists.NSO finally responded to Facebook's lawsuit by saying it could not be sued over the actions of its customers. Its customer base is mainly government agencies -- including some especially sketchy governments. NSO claims all it does is sell the stuff. What the end users do with it is between the end users and their surveillance targets. Since its customers are governments, sovereign immunity applies… which would dead-end this lawsuit (wrong defendant) and any future lawsuits against governments by Facebook (the sovereign immunity).NSO's claims it can't be touched by this lawsuit are falling apart. Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton pointed out on Twitter that Facebook's latest filings point to NSO operating its malware servers from inside the United States -- apparently doing far more than simply selling malware to government customers and letting them handle the deployment details.Facebook's answer to NSO's attempt to dismiss the lawsuit concedes NSO's point: it is not its customers. But that's precisely why it can be sued. From Facebook's response [PDF]:

I remain perplexed by people who insist that internet platforms "need to do more" to fight disinformation and at the same time insist that we need to "get rid of Section 230." This almost always comes from people who don't understand content moderation or Section 230 -- or who think that because of Section 230's liability protections that sites have no incentive to moderate content on their platforms. Of course platforms have tons of incentive to moderate: much of it social pressure, but also the fact that if they're just filled with garbage they'll lose users (and advertisers).But a key point in all of these debates about content moderation with regards to misinformation around COVID-19, is that for it to work in any way, there needs to be flexibility -- otherwise it's going to be a total mess. And what gives internet platforms that flexibility? Why it's that very same Section 230. Because Section 230 makes it explicit that sites don't face liability for their moderation choices, that enables them to ramp up efforts -- as they have -- to fight off misinformation without fear of facing liability for making the "wrong" choices.

Tired: monitoring parolees with ankle bracelets. Wired: monitoring parolees with smartphone apps.Maybe it will be a better idea someday, but that day isn't here yet. Ankle bracelets are prone to unexpected failure, just like any other electronic device. False negatives -- alerts saying a parolee isn't at home -- are no better than false positives in the long run, although the former is the only one that can take away someone's freedom.The costs of ankle bracelets are borne by the parolee. Smartphone apps may be slightly cheaper… but only if you don't factor in the cost of a smartphone or the app itself. Smartphones aren't easy for parolees to obtain. Neither are the jobs needed to subsidize both the phone and the app's monthly charge.Those lucky enough to secure a smartphone are discovering the new solution is just as prone to error as its predecessor.

As you may have heard (and may still being bombarded by ads for) recently, a new video streaming service called Quibi launched to much fanfare. The fanfare was not around the technology or the content, mind you, but around the fact that there were some famous people involved (namely: former Disney/Dreamworks exec Jeffrey Katzenberg and, to a lesser extent, former eBay/HP CEO Meg Whitman -- who had been a Disney and Dreamworks exec earlier) and the ridiculous fact that the company raised nearly $2 billion before it even had launched. There was some buzz about it leading up to launch... but mostly from the media which always falls for the story of the company that raises a ton of money and has some famous person in charge.So far, however, Quibi appears to be yet another example of a point I made about Hollywood and the internet over a decade ago: entertainment execs have a long history of overvaluing the content and undervaluing users and what they want. Sometimes I've described this as overvaluing content and undervaluing technology (which plays into the whole Hollywood/Silicon Valley divide), but it's actually something different than that, which is ably shown by the complete dumpster fire that Quibi has been so far. They spent silly amounts of money on content, and then seemed to focus the "technology" money on a completely pointless and weird setup where the orientation of your devices changes what you see (that is, if you hold your phone in portrait orientation, what you see is not just a scrunched up landscape mode, but something different). That seems like the kind of thing that a bunch of out-of-touch execs would sit around and brainstorm without any understanding whatsoever of how real people use devices. At best it seems like an attempt to try again with Verizon's brain-dead Go90 service that no one ever used.And, so far Quibi's living down to expectations. Within a week of its launch, things were not looking good:

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I have opined that FBI Director Chris Wray needs to shut the fuck up about encryption. Wray has presented a completely skewed perspective on the issue, following in the footsteps of Jim Comey. Wray claims encryption is leading to a criminal apocalypse, even as crime rates remain at historic lows. He also claims encryption is making it impossible to follow through with investigations, but has presented no evidence to back this claim.The best argument the FBI could present was its always-growing number of encrypted devices in its possession. In the space of a couple of years, the number jumped from less than 900 to nearly 8,000. This seemed to indicate encryption was a growing problem, but when the FBI tried to verify this number for Congress, it found out it had overstated the amount of locked devices in its possession. In reality, the number of locked devices is likely less than 2,000 -- hardly the apocalypse of impregnability Wray and Comey continuously presented. This was discovered in May 2018. The FBI has yet to hand over an accurate count of these devices.Now, there's this bit of news, which surfaced during Facebook's lawsuit against malware developer, NSO Group. Chris Wray was for encryption before he was against encryption. Documents filed by Facebook detail Wray's defense of WhatsApp and its encryption in an earlier legal battle while Wray was working for the King & Spalding law firm. [paywall-free link here]

After pressure from consumer groups, major ISPs last month announced that they would be suspending all usage caps and overage fees for 60 days in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. After all, US consumers already pay some of the highest prices for broadband in the developed world, and imposing draconian usage restrictions and overage fees created added hardships for consumers already facing unemployment and additional financial headaches due to the pandemic. Being the sweetheart it is, Comcast also stated it would temporarily stop kicking poor folks offline during the pandemic.This week Comcast announced it would be graciously extending the suspension of said caps for another 60 days. This is, Comcast insists, part of the company's dedication to ensure people remain connected during a crisis:

A friend sent over a press release announcement from a company called CREOpoint that claims it has patented "Containing the Spread of Disinformation" and that it was now using it to "help contain the spread of COVID-19 disinformation." Would that it were so, but that's not how any of this works. Tellingly, the press release does not provide the patent number of any of the details about the patent -- which should probably be your first sign that it's utterly bogus. However, with a little sleuthing I was able to turn up the patent application... and it confirms that this is a ridiculous patent that never should have been approved. The official title is "Containing Disinformation Spread Using Customizable Intelligence Channels."The 1st claim is the main one and describes what the patent is about:

The COVID-19 crises has changed most of our lives. Working from home is now the norm for many, rather than a perk. Sports is mostly gone, replaced by esports simulacrums. Schools are shut down, as are most non-essential businesses.And the folks from Queer Eye are now advising on and critiquing your digital homes rather than your IRL abodes.

It's becoming an unfortunate regularity that we keep writing posts highlighting how China is trying to suppress criticism around the globe regarding its terrible handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we've said over and over again, what the world needs right now is radical transparency regarding the disease and various responses, and instead we're getting standard operating procedures from the Chinese government which is all about suppressing bad information and denying everything (with a healthy does of spreading more disinfo everywhere -- make sure you check the comments here a few hours after we post this, because it seems to show up in a timely manner).The latest example comes from the EU, where the Chinese government pressured officials in Brussels not to release a report about the Chinese government's disinformation efforts regarding COVID-19. While the EU did eventually release it, it put it out on a Friday evening (the classic news dump of where you hide stuff) and some of the criticism of China was supposedly "rearranged or removed."

So we've noted a few times how giant telecom providers, as companies that have spent the better part of the last century as government-pampered monopolies, are adorable when they try (then inevitably fail) to innovate or seriously compete in more normal markets. Verizon's attempt to pivot from curmudgeonly old phone company to sexy new ad media darling, for example, has been a cavalcade of clumsy errors, missteps, and wasted money.AT&T has seen similar issues. Under CEO Randall Stephenson, AT&T spent more than $150 billion on mergers with DirecTV and Time Warner, hoping this would secure its ability to dominate the pay TV space. But the exact opposite happened. Saddled with so much debt from the deal, AT&T passed on annoying price hikes to its consumers. It also embraced a branding strategy so damn confusing -- with so many different product names -- it even confused its own employees.As a result, AT&T lost 3,190,000 pay TV subscribers last year alone. Not exactly the kind of "domination" the company envisioned.Stephenson's failures on this front were so pronounced, even the company's investors got angry about how much money AT&T spent on questionable mergers. And late last week, Stephenson himself announced (not coincidentally) he'd now be retiring, though AT&T's farewell letter understandably addresses none of these recent headaches:

Clearview AI is inserting itself into a discussion no one invited it to participate in. The discussion around contact tracing to manage and (hopefully) impede the spread of the coronavirus involves multiple governments around the world. It also includes Google and Apple, who are partnering to create a platform for contact tracing apps.At least in the case of Google and Apple's offerings, there appears to have been a serious discussion about protecting users' privacy as much as possible while still offering a valuable service to government health agencies and people concerned about contracting the virus.Now, Clearview has blundered into the discussion -- a company that has shown utter disdain for the millions of people it has force-fed to its multi-billion image database via social media site scraping. There is no opting in or out of this collection -- one that Clearview is selling to law enforcement agencies in the US and to government agencies around the world. If it's on the web, it's likely already in Clearview's database.In a brief discussion with NBC News, CEO Hoan Ton-That pitched his idea for a Clearview-based contact tracing program. What Ton-That wants to do is tie his app and its database to thousands of CCTV cameras located in stores, parking lots, gyms, and other locations where, as he puts it, "there's no expectation of privacy." Ton-That doesn't explain how his system will be notified of a person's COVID status, but he's pretty sure his software will be able to recognize faces accurately. Clearview's facial recognition AI remains unproven, but it's supposedly capable of making guesses about faces using images as small as 110x110.Ton-That also seems unconcerned about the privacy implications of adding people's health status to his enormous database of scraped personal information. He says any limitations on gathering/storage of this info would be up to whoever decides to take him up on his unsolicited offer.Obviously, no one should do this. The AI is unproven and Clearview is far from trustworthy. Activist group Fight For The Future has issued its official statement on Clearview's contact tracing pitch. It's short but punchy.

As the pandemic got worse and worse earlier this year, many internet platforms sprang into action -- spurred by many calls to do exactly this -- to ramp up their content moderation to fight off "disinformation" attacks. And there is no doubt that there are plenty of sophisticated (and even nation state) actors engaging in nefarious disinformation campaigns concerning the whole pandemic. So there's good reason to be concerned about the spread of disinformation -- especially when disinformation can literally lead to death.However, as I've been saying for quite some time now, content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. And that's true in the best of times. It gets much more complicated in the worst of times. As we noted a few weeks ago, various internet platforms said they'd be taking down information that contradicted what government officials were saying, but that ran into some problems when the various officials were wrong.How can we expect internet platforms to know what is "allowed" and what is "truthful" vs. what is "disinformation" when we have a situation where even the experts are working in the dark, trying to figure things out. And the natural process of figuring things out often involves initially suggesting things that turn out to be incorrect.Professor Kate Starbird has a great piece over at Brookings, detailing just how important social media is in helping people go through this "collective sensemaking process" and highlighting that if we're too aggressive in trying to take down "disinformation," it's likely that much of the important process of figuring out what's going on for real can get lost in the process. To be clear: this is not an excuse for doing nothing. Pretty much everyone agrees that some level of moderation is necessary to deal with outright dangerous disinformation. But as we've spent years detailing, these issues are very, very, very rarely black and white -- and we need that vast gray area to help everyone sort out what's going on.

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We've been writing a number of pieces lately about how incredibly dangerous China's internet censorship has been during COVID-19, from silencing medical professionals to hiding research results tod trying to ignore Taiwan's success in fighting COVID-19, it's shown a pretty clear pattern that Chinese internet censorship is literally killing people. This is not to say that the US government's response has been much better -- it's obviously been a disaster, but at least we have more free speech online and in the press, which is enabling all sorts of useful information to spread.But you might not know that if you read this odd piece in the Atlantic by Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods arguing that China has the right approach to handling free speech online during a pandemic, and the US has not. While the overall piece is, perhaps, a bit more thoughtful than the headline and tagline, it has moments that simply defy any sense of what's happening in the world.

There's a laundry list of shoddy arguments and business structures that have been exposed as nonsense and folly during the pandemic. One of them is the traditional Hollywood film release window, which typically involves a 90 day gap between the time a move appears in theaters and its streaming or DVD release (in France this window is even more ridiculous at three years). The goal is usually to "protect the traditional film industry," though it's never been entirely clear why you'd protect traditional theaters at the cost of common sense, consumer demand, and a more efficient model. Just because?While the industry has flirted with the idea of "day and date" releases for decades (releasing movies on home video at the same time as brick and mortar theaters) there's long been a lot of hyperventilation on the part of movie theaters and traditionalists that this sort of shift wasn't technically possible or would somehow destroy the traditional "movie experience," driving theaters out of business.Then came the pandemic, when visiting a traditional theater suddenly became potentially fatal. Numerous studios quickly adapted, and began experimenting with much shorter release windows or in some instances, no window at all. Comcast NBC Universal, for example, offered early access to some films for $20 at home while they were still in theaters. Other films, like "Trolls World Tour," were released simultaneously on video on demand and in theaters that remained open.Guess what: the film did very well, raking in $100 million in premium VOD rentals in its first three weeks in North America, which wasn't just profitable, but wasn't that far behind the $116 million grossed by the original Trolls film during the first three weeks it was in theaters in 2016. Excited by the success, Comcast NBC Universal CEO Jeff Shell gave a fairly innocuous statement to the Wall Street Journal: