Techdirt

Attorney General Barr to America: Fuck you, you ungrateful bastards. You're on your own.

For many years we've been covering the rather disturbing revolving door between the US Copyright Office and Hollywood. This includes a bunch of copyright maximalists going back and forth between entertainment industry lobbying organizations and government positions. It seems to happen over and over and over again. Indeed, the former head of the Copyright Office, Maria Pallante, now leads the Association of American Publishers, where she's been advocating for ever more ridiculous copyright laws.And, now we find out that the current head of the Copyright Office, Karyn Temple, a former RIAA VP, who only just became the official Copyright Register (after a few years of being the "interim" Copyright Register after Pallante was fired), has jumped ship to the MPAA. Because of course.

The whitest boy on the beach, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, has decided to bring his beach-grabbing exploits to the attention of everyone.Of course, that's not what Huckabee actually wanted to do. He wanted his privatizing of the area where water meets land to remain as unnoticed as he wishes his front yard was. But if we've learned anything at all over the years, it's that the more you try to stop people from talking about your beachfront property, the less likely it is that you'll get them to stop talking about it.Huckabee's $6 million mansion in the Florida panhandle proves money can't buy quite as much happiness as it used to. Huckabee thought he had purchased a chunk of beach to go with his beach house. Florida beachgoers felt otherwise. They used "his" beach like they used the beach anywhere else along the coast.Andy Marlette of the Pensacola News Journal has compiled a few choice quotes from Huckabee regarding the disrespecting of his $6 million beachfront property.

The Ultimate 2020 Web Designer and Developer Bundle has 6 courses geared to teach you the latest in web design and development. You'll become familiar with Adobe Photoshop, Bootstrap, HTML, CSS, Ruby, Python, and more. You'll learn the essentials of visual and web design, and then practice programming and web development skills. It's on sale for $29 and if you use the code MerrySave15, you'll save an additional 15% off.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Last week we wrote about the sketchy, sketchy deal in which UNC gave some racists $2.5 million to settle a lawsuit that was filed after the agreement was made, and settled moments later. More and more details keep coming out, making the whole situation look even sketchier (and even less legal). However, for our purposes, we're focused on the copyright angle of this story. As you'll recall, the lawyer who tracked down many of the details, T. Greg Doucette, also got his hands on a letter from the racist group, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, explaining the whole deal, including them admitting flat out that they didn't have standing to sue, and any lawsuit would be thrown out almost immediately. That is, unless you've set it up so that the University has already agreed to give you millions of dollars. Doucette posted the letter to his Dropbox account, where he had posted other documents regarding this mess.Then, the Sons of Confederate Veterans sent a DMCA takedown notice over the letter, and Doucette's Dropbox is (as I type this) still limited. However, late last week, Doucette hired lawyers Marc Randazza and Jay Wolman to send quite a letter to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, arguing that the DMCA takedown was a violation of 512(f) of the DMCA. The initial letter (linked here and embedded below) was sent to lawyer Boyd Sturges, who represented the Sons of Confederate Veterans in their "negotiations" with UNC. However, I've been told that Sturges refused to accept the letter, claiming he had nothing to do with this aspect, and so a second (though, nearly identical) letter has been sent directly to R. Kevin Stone, the "Commander" of the Sons of Confederate Veterans.We'll jump straight to the punchline. After spending a few pages in typical Randazza-style flowery language explaining just how bullshit the takedown was (and just how sketchy the UNC deal was), Doucette (via Randazza) say that they will go to court to argue that the takedown violates Section 512(f) unless the following happens:

While the telecom sector often enjoys crowing about the superiority of U.S. wireless, the reality is we're not all that superior. While the U.S. was among the first countries to deploy 4G LTE, US 4G speeds tend to be fairly pathetic, with one study ranking the US 47th out of 77 countries studied. US wireless data prices are also significantly higher than a long list of other developed nations, thanks in no small part to regulatory capture and revolving door regulators.This week the US wireless sector was shamed further via a new report by OpenSignal, which found that US wireless video streaming quality also remains somewhat underwhelming. According to the study, the U.S. is ranked 68th out of 100 when it comes to video streaming quality, someplace between Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The crowdsourced study is based on 94,086,045,513 measurements from 37,671,772 devices running Opensignal’s software between August 1 and October 30. The authors, by and large, place the lion's share of the blame at the feet of insufficient spectrum:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment making the simple, undeniable point that ICE's fake college sting really isn't surprising:

Get 25% off your copy of CIA: Collect It All

Show of hands: who remembers SecuROM? Alright, put your hands down, we can't see each other anyway. So, SecuROM was a really bad DRM used by several publishers to "protect" video games, by which I mean it mostly just annoyed legitimate buyers, got some of those publishers sued, and ultimately made the game unplayable on modern operating systems. The track record is enough to make you wonder why anyone would use DRM at all after this whole debacle.But... it's still happening. Back in 2010, Disney released the game Tron: Evolution. The game was laced with SecuROM and suffered many of the same problems as previously described. As an example of how you don't really own what you buy anymore, the game simply bricked when Disney decided not to renew its SaaS subscription for SecuROM software.

The California Supreme Court has overturned 17 years of questionable case law, restoring a bit of the Fourth for drivers in the state. (via Courthouse News)For nearly two decades, state law enforcement officers were able to search a vehicle without a warrant if the driver could not provide identification. While traveling on public roads in your car lowers your expectation of privacy, vehicle searches still require reasonable suspicion of criminal activity at the very least. Officers have a few other options to bypass warrant requirements, including inventory searches if the vehicle is being impounded and the ever-popular "probable cause of four legs" K-9 units to bypass warrant requirements.California judicial precedent gave officers another way around warrant requirements by allowing searches of vehicles if the driver didn't have their ID on them. That's no longer the case in California, thanks to this recent ruling [PDF].In this case, a vehicle search following demands for identification resulted in officers discovering methamphetamine in the driver's purse. That evidence -- along with this terrible precedent -- is no longer usable by law enforcement.The trial court said the search was unconstitutional because none of the acceptable justifications for vehicle searches incident to arrest were in use here.

Like most of the infamous "internet of things," (IOT) smart TVs are a security and privacy dumpster fire. Numerous set vendors have already been caught hoovering up private conversations or transmitting private user data unencrypted to the cloud. One study in 2017 surmised that around 90% of smart televisions can be hacked remotely, something intelligence agencies, private contractors and other hackers are clearly eager to take full advantage of.This week, the FBI, that bastion of sage privacy and security advice, issued a blog post out of its Portland field office warning cyber Monday shoppers that their smart TV is a little too smart, and likely watches you as much as you watch it. The post is filled with some handy tips to help you protect your privacy:

Get 25% off your copy of CIA: Collect It All

Where the Fifth Amendment ends for device owners largely seems to be determined by their favored security measure. If it's a password keeping a device encrypted, courts seem more willing to call compelled production a Fifth Amendment violation. If it's a biometric feature -- most commonly fingerprints or faces -- the courts are more likely to consider body parts non-testimonial.There's not enough of a consensus either way to make it a clear choice, but courts seem to feel faces/fingerprints are like "keys" and passwords like "combinations" when it comes to the metaphorical lockbox that is your phone.Adding to the case law that is "fingerprints are lockbox keys" is this decision [PDF] from a federal court in Illinois. (via FourthAmendment.com) The court says the Supreme Court says this is how it must be, even if the Supreme Court has yet to field a device encryption case.The government wants to look in the defendant's phone for evidence of his threats against a confidential informant. There's a built-in limit to this, although it's not one of the government's making. Investigators want to apply the suspect's fingers and thumbs to the seized iPhone to unlock it. The suspect's mind is being taken out of the equation (as it were), which could result in the government getting what it wants in this request without actually getting what it wants from the man's iPhone.

Are you a practicing professional but wanting to learn more? Learn new skills and knowledge at your own pace with Whizlabs. Whizlabs is a pioneer among online training providers across the world. They provide online certification training in various disciplines such as Cloud Computing, Java, Big Data, Project Management, Agile, Linux, CCNA, and Digital Marketing. It's on sale for $59.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Earlier this year, we wrote about what we referred to as "the dumbest gotcha story of the week", in which the annotation site Genius accused Google of "stealing" lyrics from their site -- which they "discovered" by a modestly clever use of curly apostrophes and straight apostrophes as hidden markers in their own posting of lyrics, which they then spotted on Google. As we explained, the actual evidence did not suggest at all that Google was copying the lyrics from Genius. Instead, as became obvious, Google (like most other lyrics sites on the internet), licenses lyrics from LyricFind. Indeed, it later came out that basically every site that uses LyricFind had the same "watermarked" lyrics.In our original post, we went through all of the various legal arguments that some were suggesting Genius could use against Google, and highlighted how each of them was laughable. The copyright doesn't belong to Genius, so there's no copyright claim. Also, as we noted in the original post, when sites like these "license" lyrics from publishers, they're often just licensing the ability to guess at what the lyrics are. The publishers themselves often don't have their own lyrics. Indeed, we pointed out that some publishers use the various lyrics sites as the source for their own lyrics that they licensed. So everyone's just kind of making it up as they go along, and there's no proprietary right to your version of the lyrics vs. someone else's.However, for reasons I do not understand, Genius has decided to go ahead and sue both Google and LyricFind over this. The complaint is in state court in Brooklyn, and... it's bad. I mean, if people were to put the complaint on Genius and "annotate" it, most of it would just be people laughing at how bad the arguments are.And, honestly, this entire lawsuit is strategically idiotic for Genius -- a site that regularly takes content from elsewhere on the internet for the purpose of annotating it. Indeed, I used to regularly see Techdirt posts hosted on Genius for others to annotate (though now I'm looking and it appears that Genius has gone back to focusing just on lyrics, and stopped hosting annotated blog posts).There are no copyright claims, of course, in the complaint, because Genius holds no copyright here. Instead, the claims are just grasping for anything. And I can't see the lawsuit getting very far. The strongest claim (and it's not that strong) is that there's a competition issue with Google displaying lyrics in its "one box" at the top of search results. The argument is that by providing this information directly, rather than passing you on to a link to Genius, Google is somehow being anti-competitive:

For decades, big and small telecoms alike have abused the FCC Lifeline program, a fund that's supposed to help subsidize telecom connectivity for low income users. Started by Reagan and expanded by Bush, the fairly modest program doles out a measly $9.25 per month subsidy that low-income homes can use to help pay a tiny fraction of their wireless, phone, or broadband bills (enrolled participants have to chose one). While the program (which you pay into via your telecom bills) has been a subject of fraud, enforcement of abuse hasn't always been consistent.Back in September, the FCC noted that Sprint had been taking taxpayer funds for roughly 885,000 Lifeline customers who were no longer actually using the company's services. The FCC stated that it would be investigating the potential fraud, but hasn't yet announced any actual penalty. This week the Wall Street Journal raised the ante, issuing a report (non-paywalled alternative here) that took a closer look at Sprint documents and found that the problem went much further -- and has been going on for much longer -- than the FCC acknowledged:

We knew the DHS would get to this point eventually. Since the beginning of its biometric scanning program rollout, the DHS has planned on adding US citizens to the list of people forced to trade their faces for air travel privileges. So far, the program has been limited to suspicious foreigners (which is all of them, including those here on visas), but a recent filing -- caught by Zack Whittaker at TechCrunch -- says flying in the United States would soon require adding yourself to the government's facial recognition databases.

Whatever your views on the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), there is no denying the impact it has had on privacy around the world. Where the GDPR deals with personal data stored "at rest", the proposed ePrivacy Regulation deals with with personal data "in motion" -- that is, how it is gathered and flows across networks. As Techdirt discussed two years ago, the pushback from Internet companies and the advertising industry against increased consumer protection in this area has been unprecedented. Some details were provided at the time in a report from the Corporate Europe Observatory. Unfortunately, that massive lobbying has paid off. Good ideas in the draft text produced by the European Parliament, like banning encryption backdoors or "cookie walls", have been dropped, as has the right of Internet users to refuse to accept tracking cookies. In the most recent version of the text (pdf) put together under the Austrian Presidency of the Council of the European Union (one of the three EU institutions that has to agree on the final law), there's even a new bad idea:

The NYPD has finally finalized its body-worn camera footage release policy. It's not much better than its initial public offering, which sought public input and then ignored every bit of the public's input to craft an officer-friendly deployment policy that left the act of recording to officer discretion.Even the vague promise of eventually releasing BWC footage to the public was too much for the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association to bear. The NYC PBA sued to prevent the release of body camera footage to the public. This lawsuit was pursued as PBA President Pat Lynch made claims about officers' resistance to body-worn cameras that were contradicted by NYPD officers' statements.Something the former mayor thought would be a "gotcha" tool to persecute otherwise fine officers has actually had zero effect on officer accountability or NYPD transparency to this point. It's not going to get any better either. The official policy [PDF] released by the NYPD still gives the public the shaft.The editorial board for the New York Daily News sums it up nicely:

We've been covering all the various SLAPP suits filed by Devin Nunes against his critics, journalists, political operatives, and (most famously) a satirical internet cow. As we've noted, despite Nunes being a Representative from California, and despite the fact that many of the people and companies he's targeting are California-based, he's filed most of the suits in Virginia state court. The reasons for this seemed fairly obvious to many commentators. Virginia has a very weak anti-SLAPP law. California has a very robust one.We were actually a bit surprised to see Nunes file one lawsuit in California, but he quickly dropped it to file a related lawsuit... back in Virginia. His one other non-Virginia lawsuit was filed in Iowa which has no anti-SLAPP law at all.And while these lawsuits all appear to be frivolous attempts to intimidate critics and journalists, they may actually have a potentially good result. Legislators in Virginia have been inspired by this abuse of the judicial system to consider beefing up Virginia's weak anti-SLAPP law:

How much warrantless surveillance is too much surveillance? It depends on which court you ask.Public areas, which include people's front doors and unfenced yards, have very little in the way of privacy expectations. Consequently, there's a lot of warrantless surveillance aimed at these areas, usually in the form of pole-mounted cameras. While warrants could be obtained, they usually aren't. And, in some cases, the surveillance occurs during the early stages of an investigation where enough probable cause hasn't been established to secure a warrant even if investigators thought they might need one.In 2014, a Washington federal court judge said six weeks of pole-mounted surveillance was unconstitutional without a warrant. This surveillance wasn't just passive. The camera could be controlled by officers while it was recording in addition to providing investigators with dozens of hours of recordings. This was too much for the federal court, which suppressed the video evidence obtained with the utility pole-mounted camera.A couple of years later, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said indefinite surveillance from a pole-mounted camera doesn't violate the Fourth Amendment. It reasoned that if an ATF agent could spend an 8-hour shift surreptitiously monitoring a suspect's rural Tennessee home without violating the Constitution, the proxy surveillance that went uninterrupted for ten weeks didn't violate the Constitution either. What's Constitutional for eight hours doesn't suddenly become unconstitutional when it's 1,680 hours.Six weeks is bad, ten weeks is OK… and in a case from earlier this year, eight months of continuous surveillance falls on the wrong side of the Constitution. The federal court read the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision to expand Fourth Amendment protections (specifically, expectations of privacy), even if that case only dealt with cell site location info. Also at play here were the camera's features, which allowed investigators to remotely access and control the camera, rather than just replay recordings.A recent decision [PDF] from the Colorado state appeals court sort of splits the difference. More than three months of continuous surveillance by a utility pole-mounted camera is too much for the Constitution to bear. (via FourthAmendment.com)Like two of the other cases above, the camera's movement could be controlled remotely by investigators as it recorded. This camera also did something the average passerby couldn't do (I mean, in addition to staring at someone's house for 13 weeks straight): it could see above the suspect's six-foot privacy fence to the end of the driveway near the house's garage and entrance.Nonetheless, the government claimed these areas that were hidden behind the privacy fence could be viewed from certain angles by the proverbial "man on the street" the investigators claimed their camera emulated. Photos introduced during the hearing showed the end of the driveway could be viewed through "thin gaps" between the boards of the privacy fence, as well as from exterior stairways of nearby apartments. The court doesn't think much of these hypotheticals.

The Ultimate AWS Data Master Class Bundle has 9 courses to get you up to speed on Amazon Web Services. The courses cover AWS, DevOPs, Kubernetes Mesosphere DC/OS, AWS Redshift, and more. It's on sale for $39. Use the code MERRYSAVE15 and receive an additional 15% off.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

If you look in the dictionary, the word "projection" has many different definitions. I find it particularly amusing that in Merriam Webster's dictionary, the following two are right next to each other:

As Silicon Valley giants like Google and Facebook face all manner of (justified) regulatory scrutiny, telecom has been able to somehow remove itself from the conversation, despite engaging in many of the same (if not worse) behaviors over the years. While Congress obsesses about new ways to regulate "big tech," the US government has oddly been busy neutering all oversight of "big telecom". That's at least partially by design; giants like AT&T and Comcast have spent years pushing for the hyper regulation of companies telecom increasingly competes with in the online ad space.The result: as Silicon Valley faces an endless cavalcade of daily DC and press outrage, the telecom sector has suddenly little to no scrutiny whatsoever. Whether it's the speed at which the competition-eroding T-Mobile merger is being shoveled through the DOJ and FCC, or the blind eye being turned to major telecom privacy scandals (like location data), telecom lobbyists have been on a successful tear convincing well-heeled DC lawmakers to ignore the massive, obvious monopoly, privacy, and competition issues inherent in telecom to focus exclusively on the problems in "big tech."AT&T's top lobbying and policy man, Jim Cicconi, was recently brought out of retirement to (in part) help tackle both the looming privacy minefield and an ongoing revolt among investors who have grown tired of AT&T's focus on growth for growth's sake. In a treatise nobody asked for, Cicconi this week shared his thoughts on recent missives at the NY Times exploring how the bloom of optimism has fallen from the internet rose in recent years.The Times package focuses on everything from US broadband coverage woes to the rise of internet misinformation. But Cecconi's takeaway from the package, unsurprisingly, is somehow that broadband providers are yesterday's news and no longer worth talking about:

The recent election in Hong Kong may have scored some wins for pro-democracy candidates, but supporters of protesters and newly-elected candidates still aren't able to do much celebrating on social media. WeChat, the massively popular messaging app owned by China's Tencent, is apparently censoring posts and shutting down pro-democracy accounts.That a Chinese company would censor pro-democracy messages is unsurprising. What's a bit more unexpected is Tencent's apparent willingness to shut down accounts owned by users in other countries, as Zoe Schiffer reports for The Verge.

For whatever reason, while we see a ton of instances of someone trying to trademark a word or phrase that is absolutely generic and not a source identifier, often it seems some of the most ridiculous instances come from the literary world. Why authors have such a hard time with this is perhaps not entirely mysterious. Steeped in an industry with a tradition of strong views on copyright protections, I suppose it's a short leap that those in that industry would assume trademark works the same way. After all, journalists make this mistake all the time, so why not authors?Still, witnessing my book-writing brethren make a run at trademarking words like "how" or "cocky" is more than slightly frustrating. And now we can add the word "dark" to the mix, as author Christine Feehan has applied for a trademark on that word for use in books and fiction.

I'm always happy to see someone add to the growing body of First Amendment/vanity license plate case law. Using a very limited amount of space, some applicants have managed to offend the delicate sensibilities of government agencies, even without using the number 5 twice to spell "A55."A New Hampshire man applied for a license plate to make an uncontroversial statement about law enforcement (COPSLIE) only to have it rejected by the state, which claimed this fact was "offensive to good taste." He took his case to the state's Supreme Court and drove away with a free speech victory and a future full of hassling by law enforcement.Completely conversely, the Indiana Supreme Court refused to give a cop his 01NK license plate, arguing rather absurdly that speech-via-vanity plate isn't protected because it's too… short. The court did not specify how many characters it takes for speech protections kick in, but presumably it's a larger number than the eight allotted for Indiana license plates.Via Courthouse News comes another successful First Amendment challenge. A federal court in Kentucky has decided [PDF] that the state's refusal to give Bennie Hart his requested "IMGOD" license plate violates his First Amendment rights.The state operates a specialty plate program that allows drivers to add logos to their license plates. That isn't the issue here, but since the state law governing vanity plates without vanity logos incorporates ("clunkily," the court notes) the logo statute, the same restrictions applied to logos control what words drivers can put on their plates.Here are the guidelines:

A few weeks back, a Canadian court issued a shockingly broad blocking order against GoldTV, an IPTV service that copyright holders allege are engaging in piracy by offering streaming access to unauthorized TV streams. The case itself is interesting in that Bell Media and Rogers Media sued GoldTV's owners (listed as John Does) as defendants, but then also had all Canadian broadband ISPs listed as "respondents," including Bell Canada and Rogers Communications -- which almost makes this a case where Bell and Rogers are effectively suing themselves. Wacky.The plaintiffs in the case demanded that the various ISPs block GoldTV. Not surprisingly, Bell's and Rogers' ISP arms consented to the demand with no protest (as did Fido and Videotron). Most of the other ISPs "took no position" on the matter. I'm not familiar enough with Canadian civil process to fully understand this, but it sounds more or less like they would agree to whatever the court decided, and wouldn't advocate one way or the other. The only ISP to fight back was Teksavvy. The company's lawyers said that the federal court system lacks the jurisdiction to issue a blocking order. The company's argument was that this is a copyright issue, and Canada's revised copyright law has no provision for site blocking. Indeed, such a remedy was proposed but rejected by the Canadian Parliament. Teksavvy also pointed out that issues of site blocking for ISPs was not within the jurisdiction of Canadian courts, but rather the CRTC, the regulatory agency overseeing communications policy (roughly the equivalent of the American FCC). The argument here is that since the CRTC has a net neutrality-like rule that says that content must be treated equally, site blocking would violate that rule.Indeed, Teksavvy made it clear that even if GoldTV is a bad actor and engaged in widespread infringement, a full site blocking order is a problematic statement for how the internet should work. In a statement given to the website Mobile Syrup Teksavvy explained its position as a principled one in favor of an open internet (and not as a defender of piracy):

Singapore's "fake news" law continues to pay off for the Singaporean government. It's already been used to target allegations made by political opposition leaders and now it's converted Facebook to an extension of the ruling government.Alex Tan, the founder of "anti-establishment" news site State Times Review has been irritating the Singapore government for a few years now. Late last year, his site published an article claiming Singapore's prime minister was complicit in laundering Malaysian government funds through Singapore's banks.This resulted in the Monetary Authority of Singapore filing a criminal complaint against Tan for "impugning its integrity." The Ministry of Law then demanded Facebook remove Tan's posts from its site. None of this worked. Tan, now a resident of Australia, was beyond the reach of the Singaporean government. Facebook refused to comply with the government's request because that was all it was: a request.Tan's posts and Facebook's refusal to remove them were cited by the government as evidence a "fake news" law was needed.

As he promised last week, Rep. Devin Nunes has now sued CNN for defamation for accurately reporting what the indicted Lev Parnas's lawyers had told them about Devin Nunes. Rather than state court in Virginia, this time, Nunes' lawyer, Steven Biss filed the case in the big boy federal court in Virginia. This complaint may be the most laughable one yet of Nunes' various SLAPP suits, and I should remind you that one of them involves him suing a cow.The timing of this suit was a bit inauspicious, given that it was filed at around the same time as the House Intelligence Committee released its Impeachment Inquiry Report, which shows multiple phone records showing that Devin Nunes and Lev Parnas were in phone contact with each other -- which is the very heart of the CNN story. From the report:

This RC070C is the latest 7-inch portable HDMI LCD monitor with a high resolution of 1024x600. This 7-inch monitor comes with a 2.0MP front camera that allows taking photos or video chat. It’s compatible with the latest Raspberry Pi 3B+, BB Black, Banana Pi, and other mainstream mini PCs. It even supports capacitive touch control letting you turn your Raspberry Pi into something closer to an iPad. You can also choose to use it as a general-purpose HDMI monitor to connect with a computer and use as a sub-display. Additionally, it works as a Windows PC monitor. It's on sale for $69.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Reporter Jon Schwarz, over at The Intercept, has yet another story of content moderation at scale gone wrong, focusing this time on Twitter and his own account. It seems that a bunch of white supremacists on Twitter got mad at him, found an old joke, taken out of context, reported it en masse, and Twitter blocked him over it. Schwarz's story is worth reviewing in detail, but I think he gets the wrong message out of it. His take is, more or less, that Twitter doesn't much care about lowly users, and can't be bothered to understand the context of things (we'll get to the details of the spat in a moment):

We've noted for a while now how mobile carriers don't seem particularly aware that they're associating 5G in the minds of American consumers with hype and bullshit. AT&T's efforts to use bogus phone icons to pretend 4G is 5G; Verizon's tendency to dramatically overstate availability; scant handset support and annoying surcharges; overly ambitious marketing means that consumers' first contact with 5G is generally one of disappointment.That's not to say that 5G won't be a solid improvement when it arrives at scale, just that carriers were abundantly eager to overstate what 5G can do and where it's available, and didn't stop to think that they were doing the technology a disservice.The latest case in point: T-Mobile this week proudly proclaimed it had launched "America's first nationwide 5G network." But a closer look at actual availability finds that by "nationwide," T-Mobile means about 60% of the US. When pressed for clarification, the company that professes to be the "no bullshit" alternative to AT&T and Verizon wouldn't really answer the question:

Tony Robbins is American. Buzzfeed is an American news organization. Last week, Buzzfeed published its sixth story in an investigative series about Robbins, that included a story of Robbins allegedly sexually assaulting a high schooler at a summer camp in California. Which, last I checked [looks around quickly], is also in America. So, you might wonder why it is that Robbins has sued Buzzfeed in Ireland. Robbin's lawyer, Paul Tweed has tried to defend the decision to sue in Ireland, but I'm having trouble seeing how any of this is convincing:

I never stop being surprised at how often the topic of comedy and comedians makes it on our pages. Between strange concepts like comedians claiming copyright on stand-up jokes and a more violent war sometimes waged on the technology audience members carry around in their pockets, it really does feel like those in comedy should have, you know, a better sense of humor about all of this.But to really see the combination of entitlement and disdain for the public at work in the world of comedy, you have to turn to SNL's Pete Davidson. Davidson apparently tries to smuggle in a non-disclosure agreement to anyone that buys tickets to his stand-up shows, with penalties of up to a million dollars for violations of that agreement.

Ring may be holding off on adding facial recognition tech to its already-problematic security cameras, but that's not stopping any of its not-exactly-end-users from doing it for themselves.Ring is swallowing up the doorbell camera market with aggressive marketing that includes the free use of taxpayer-funded services. It calls over 600 law enforcement agencies "partners." In exchange for agency autonomy and free cameras, police departments all over the nation are pushing cameras on citizens and asking them to upload anything interesting to Ring's "I saw someone brown in my neighborhood" app, Neighbors.The company that has someone in charge of its facial recognition division Ring claims it's not using to implement facial recognition tech is handing out cameras like laced candy. Law enforcement agencies are snatching the cameras up. And they're snatching the footage up, using subpoenas to work around recalcitrant homeowners. Once they have the footage, they can keep it forever and share it with whoever they want.They can also run the footage through whatever hardware or software they have laying around, as Caroline Haskins reports for BuzzFeed.

When Kashmir Hill last joined us on the podcast, it was to discuss her experiment with cutting big tech companies out of her life. This week she's back to discuss something even harder to escape, and subject of her recent article in the New York Times: the low-profile companies that track consumers and assign them secret scores, and the disturbing amount of power they wield.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Since the election, I've been pretty firmly in the camp that believes that those who rushed to blame social media and things like (well documented) Russian attempts to interfere in the election via social media, have been vastly blown out of proportion. It's resulted in silly things like famous comedians suggesting that if Mark Zuckerberg allows Russians trolls to try to influence another election Zuck should go to jail. That's just silly. Much of it, to me, seems to be people who expected one outcome in the 2020 election casting blame towards something they could latch onto. Did Russian trolls try to use social media to influence the election? Absolutely. Did the results of the 2016 Presidential election surprise the politically savvy? Absolutely. Does that single correlation mean anything? There's been little evidence to suggest there is, even as many people assume their must be.Given those priors, you might think that I'd be quick to jump on board a new study that suggests that my intuition is accurate. The study, entitled Russian Influence on US Twitter Users, by some Duke University researchers suggests little impact from Russian trolling operations.

Get 25% off your copy of CIA: Collect It All

Those assholes at ICE are still at it. For most of the past year, ICE's fake college sting has resulted in a long string of arrests, but not very many prosecutions.The sting involved a fictitious university set up by ICE to ensnare foreigners seeking to extend their US stays by complying with the law. That's the underlying truth that was dismantled by ICE's fiction. Visitors on student visas are allowed to stay in the country as long as they continue their studies.ICE's fake college looked like a legitimate option, seeing as the agency had talked an accreditation agency into giving it the official thumbs-up as a certified education entity. The fake college had an online presence and a physical building. It also had staffing that accepted tuition money before turning applicants in to ICE agents.ICE netted 250 arrests from this sting, with most duped students opting for voluntary departure. The agency is being sued for its fakery -- something it has consistently spun as foreigners bypassing the law to stay in the country. But this is what the law allows them to do and ICE is punishing them for doing it.Very few of the arrests deal with fraudulent actions by students. Instead, criminal charges have targeted a few middlemen who took cash from visitors on student visas with promises to help them avoid being deported. Out of ICE's 250 arrests, only eight resulted in criminal charges. The bulk of the sting operation netted nothing more than administrative charges, ending some students' stay in the country.ICE insists the US government is the real victim here. The victims of ICE's scam university aren't actually victims, according to ICE. They're actually crafty operators gaming the country's visa system.

Take advantage of extra savings across our site. CMSAVE20 gets you 20% off site-wide, CMSAVE40 gets you 40% off apps and software, and CMSAVE60 gets you 60% off elearning courses (all codes valid 12/2 -- 12/3). We're featuring the 2020 Limited Edition Mac Bundle today.In the event of a collision, the Black Box is your best witness. Engineered with its own G-sensor, this dash cam captures footage and audio in the moment, ensuring you'll always have a second pair of eyes if you find yourself in an accident. It records in crisp 1080p resolution day or night and boasts an impressive 120-degree recording angle that will capture every important detail. And, thanks to its compact design, you can stick it directly on your windshield without obscuring your line of sight. It's on sale for $30.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Last Wednesday, right before Thanksgiving, some very odd news broke about the University of North Carolina giving the Sons of Confederate Veterans $2.5 million and a bullshit confederate statue that had been torn down by protesters in 2018. The Sons of Confederate Veterans have a history of promoting racist ideas and movements, with a special focus on promoting Confederate monuments and symbols -- symbols of support for slavery from a bunch of literal traitors -- as well as promoting historical revisionism about the US Civil War. Contrary to the belief of some, those monuments -- including the one at UNC -- were put up many years after the Civil War, and were frequently put in place as a show of racist attitudes and beliefs, not as a historical remembrance. There's a reason so many places are choosing to take those down.The NY Times story linked above had some oddities in it. It claims that UNC's Board of Governors agreed to hand the "Silent Sam" statue over to the group and give them $2.5 million, perhaps to build a museum to house the statue, to settle a lawsuit. But what lawsuit? And what possible standing could the Sons of Confederate Veterans have to sue over a statue it did not own and had no direct relationship with? There was one line that really stood out to me in the original story:

Last year, the DOJ announced it had launched an investigation into whether AT&T, Verizon and a telecommunications standards organization had conspired to make it harder for consumers to switch mobile carriers. At the heart of the controversy was eSIM, a technology that's supposed to make it easier than ever to switch carriers without consumers needing to buy and install a new SIM card. With eSIM, user identification technology of a traditional SIM card is instead transferred to the device's processor or modem itself. Ideally, that could let a consumer switch carriers within just a few seconds.But given AT&T and Verizon had already been losing subscribers hand over fist to smaller competitors like T-Mobile, they had a vested interest in ensuring this technology never fully materialized. As a result, they leveraged their influence over the GSM Association (GSMA) -- a trade association for mobile network operators -- to hamstring the technology's rise. By and large this was done by ensuring the inclusion of bizarre and arbitrary restrictions and bureaucracies the DOJ found served no technical purpose outside of slowing the actual implementation of the tech and locking users to one carrier.Just before Thanksgiving the DOJ quietly did a news dump announcing the completion of its two year investigation into the sector collusion, and it's not particularly impressive. According to the DOJ announcement, the investigation has ended with no punishment or penalty of any kind. Why? The industry effectively pinky swore to the DOJ that it would try to do better in the future:

Hey, it's only people's freedom on the line. Why try harder?

Just under three years ago, Techdirt wrote about China's plan to install satnav tracking devices on vehicles in Xinjiang. That was just one of several early signs of the human rights abuses happening there. Today, people are finally waking up to the fact that the indigenous turkic-speaking Uyghur population is subject to some of the harshest oppression anywhere on the planet. Tracking huge numbers of vehicles might seem to be a typically over-the-top, money-no-object Chinese approach to total surveillance. Unfortunately, there are signs the idea is starting to spread, as this story in RFID Journal explains:

The Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision took a lot of fishing line away from law enforcement officers. Thousands of traffic statutes are violated every day. (Or not broken, in some cases.) All an officer needed to do was follow someone around until they violated one and then turn the traffic stop into a Q&A session with an eye on obtaining consent to search drivers, passengers, and vehicles.The Supreme Court said pretextual stops are fine, but once the objective has been achieved (citation or warning given), the stop is over. No further questions. No calling for a drug dog. Nothing. Some officers took this to mean they could violate the Fourth Amendment as long as they did it quickly enough. Some courts allowed them to get away with speedy Constitutional violations. But, more often than not, courts interpreting the Supreme Court decision have read it as saying there's no extending a stop without reasonable suspicion to do so. There's some gray area, but not as much as officers had hoped.The Supreme Court of Oregon has almost completely revoked law enforcement's fishing license. (via Reason) Its decision [PDF] applying the state's Constitution is more restrictive than the Rodriguez decision. There's no fishing, period. The court says even asking questions unrelated to the objective of the traffic stop is impermissible unless officers see, hear, or smell something that gives them reasonable suspicion to move past the objective of the stop.The state argued that "unavoidable lulls" -- the moments between the officer's request for license and registration and the driver's production of these documents -- could be filled with all sorts of unrelated questions. The officer in this case testified that he fired off a salvo of questions at the beginning of every traffic stop.

Like Microsoft, wireless startup Starry -- the brain child of Aereo creator Chet Kanojia -- has decided to view the public's desire for solid privacy rules as a marketing opportunity instead of something to ceaselessly undermine or whine about.Knowing that the telecom giants they're hoping to disrupt have an abysmal record on privacy, Starry has announced that, like Microsoft, it will be using California's looming privacy law as a template for its business nationwide. While California's looming law is admittedly under-cooked and needs some major revisions before serious enforcement begins later next year (it takes effect in January but won't be seriously enforced until June), Starry, which is slowly pushing uncapped wireless service to major metro areas around the US, announced it's going to adhere to its core principles in every state it does business.That includes getting permission before sharing data, being transparent about what data is being collected and who it's sold to, and giving consumers at least some passing control over what data is already stored (largely mirroring the FCC broadband privacy rules industry lobbyists killed in 2016). Both Starry and Microsoft seem to understand that after an endless sea of corporate privacy scandals and incompetence, the public wants at least some baseline privacy protections, and swimming against that sentiment is going to prove counterproductive:

I've discussed in the past how problematic it is when people don't recognize the differences between edge providers and infrastructure providers when it comes to internet services. Usually it's policymakers (or the press) getting these things confused, but we've certainly seen our fair share of attempts by copyright maximalists to use this confusion to their advantage. However, this may be the first I recall of seeing a copyright trolling operation trying to effectively do the same.Earlier this fall, Mark Jeftovic, from EasyDNS had a blog post about how a German copyright troll, called Fechner Law, had threatened criminal charges against the company if it didn't take down an allegedly infringing URL and pay a significant cash settlement. Jeftovic responded to Robert Fechner, the young lawyer behind Fechner Law, and pointed out that EasyDNS is merely the domain registrar, and doesn't host the site in question. Fechner, somewhat obnoxiously hit back by saying that German law required EasyDNS to at least turn over the information about the website owner or face criminal charges -- even adding on "additional damages due to your uncooperative and unlawful behaviour will be claimed."

Ring may say it's not getting into the facial recognition business, but its internal documents say otherwise. The company has a head of facial recognition tech in its Ukraine office. And its answers to Senator Edward Markey's questions make it clear Ring hasn't ruled out adding this tech to its doorbell cameras. Specifically, the company said it had no plans at the present but was always looking to "innovate" to meet "customer demand."Documents obtained by The Intercept show Ring is still "innovating," even if there's no apparent customer demand for facial recognition tech. Sam Biddle has the details:

It's Cyber Monday! Take advantage of extra savings across our site. CMSAVE20 gets you 20% off site-wide, CMSAVE40 gets you 40% off apps and software, and CMSAVE60 gets you 60% off elearning courses (all codes valid 12/2 -- 12/3). We're featuring the 2020 Limited Edition Mac Bundle today.The 2020 Limited Edition Mac Bundle includes 13 award-winning apps for productivity, photography, privacy and more. The featured app is Parallels Desktop 15, which lets you run thousands of Windows apps like Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Access, and even graphic intensive games and CAD programs without compromising on performance or rebooting. The other apps include: PDF expert, iMazing, Aurora HDR, XMind 8 Pro, Banktivity, NetSpot Pro, Windscribe VPN Pro, Live Home 3d Pro for Mac, TextExpander, Disk Drill Pro, Rapid Weaver 8, and Delta Walker Pro. The bundle is on sale for $60. And don't forget, you can get an additional 40% off with the code CMSAVE40.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.