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The TSA accidentally admitted years ago that its (annoying) presence at airports was extraneous. Summoned into existence by the 9/11 attacks, the TSA was nothing more than an obsolete government fixture a few years later. With terrorism being pretty much ground-based at this point in time, we're left to wonder why we still need to jump through all the TSA's hoops just to board a plane agents haven't made any safer with their elaborate security pantomime.The TSA may not be able to find any bombs headed for planes, but it will leave no baby stroller/terminal disease sufferer unturned in its quest to justify its continued existence. It may not be able to stop terrorists, but it will not let an inert souvenir go uncrowed about on its blog or social media accounts.Instead of doing anything useful, the TSA busies itself with the busywork of looking busy. To ensure maximum harassment of travelers, it's adding things like this to its list of annoying traits:

China's no stranger to censorship online, given it runs one of the most sophisticated internet censorship operations on the planet. Like many governments upset with the idea of free expression online, China has also long waged a war against VPNs and proxies that let the public bypass this ham-fisted techno-blockade.But the repression and censorship China enacts within its core territories have been harder to implement in Hong Kong, where internet traffic isn't forced through China's massive censorship firewall. Case in point: when reports began circulating that China was considering censoring access to certain websites and services, the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association (HKISPA) issued a statement saying thanks but no thanks. A core complaint by the ISPs was the fact that the use of encryption and VPNs means that such efforts are largely pointless:

A new twist in the first of Devin Nunes' SLAPP suits: the judge has asked Twitter to reveal to him who is behind the two satirical Twitter accounts that Devin Nunes is suing over. According to the Fresno Bee:

There's a perception among some that the forward-looking tech companies throughout the country are more permissive in intellectual property concerns than other industries or marketplaces. And perhaps there is some truth to that. But certainly this is not without exception. For instance, you can bear witness to Uber going after a beautician over her stylist-booking app, called BeauBer.

Roughly a year ago, the government attempted to argue the border search exception applied to GPS tracking devices it surreptitiously attached to a truck crossing the border from Canada and tracked for the next 48 hours, following it from its arrival point in Michigan to its destination in California.The court disagreed with the government's interpretation of the border search exception. While it may have covered the original warrantless placement of the tracking device, it did not cover the next two days of tracking while the truck traveled far inland.The government lost its evidence and, eventually, its case. Stuck with evidence solely derived from an unconstitutional search, the government dismissed the charges and the two arrested Canadians were free to return to their home country.During this case, the government claimed these apparently illegal searches were within policy. Specifically, affidavits filed by the DOJ stated ICE and CBP both had policies that permitted the warrantless, suspicionless installation of tracking devices on vehicles at border crossings.If these policies exist, no one has seen them. The EFF would like to. It filed FOIA requests with both ICE and CBP, asking the agencies to produce the policies referred to in court. To date, it has received nothing from either agency.According to the EFF's FOIA lawsuit [PDF], both agencies have violated the law with their continued refusal to produce the requested documents. ICE received the EFF's request last November. Four months later, it said it had found three responsive pages, but that all three pages would be withheld, citing Exemption 7(E). This exemption protects "law enforcement sensitive information" that might give bad guys the jump on the feds if they knew the feds might try to sneak tracking devices onto their vehicles at border crossings.It would seem the case above -- the one cited in the EFF's lawsuit -- kind of exposed ICE's GPS device subterfuge. The only thing surprising about the use of GPS devices was the government's assertion that the border search exception applies everywhere in the United States, not just at or near its borders.The EFF's appeal of ICE's decision also pointed out that the Supreme Court's 2012 decision on tracking devices made it pretty clear this super-secret law enforcement technique was actually well-known and understood pretty thoroughly by cops and criminals alike. Upon receipt of this appeal, ICE apparently decided it would no longer discuss its ridiculous exemption deployment.The CBP, on the other hand, has refused to do anything at all. It too received the EFF's FOIA request last November, but apparently can't even be bothered to look for documents, much less pretend discussion of GPS tracking devices would undermine its covert operations.The lawsuit seeks the full disclosure of the documents as well as any legal fees incurred by the government's refusal to comply with FOIA law. Should this finally dislodge the documents, we'll all know just a little more about the apparently minimal standards border agencies apply to their use of tracking devices.

Ed Case represents Hawaii's 1st district in Congress. He was just elected in 2018, though he actually was in Congress once before, when he represented Hawaii's 2nd district from 2002 to 2007. He left Congress last time to run for the Senate, but that flopped. And he lost another attempt at rejoining Congress in 2010. In 2013 he announced that he was joining a Hawaii-based hotel operator, Outrigger Enterprises Group, as Senior Vice President and Chief Legal Officer. At the time, he said that doing so "likely ends any further political career." In 2016, he joined the board of directors of the American Hotel & Lodging Association, a large hotel trade group. AHLA has been among the leading hotel industry groups pushing to kill Airbnb. The hotel industry, as a whole, seems to have spent much of the last decade looking for any possible way to attack and kill Airbnb rather than improve its own products.And now Case is back in Congress -- and apparently an early order of business is to continue to push for AHLA and his former employer's goals. As sent to me by a few people, Case has sent a letter around to his House colleagues, asking them to support and cosponsor a new bill that he has not yet released, that would strip Section 230 protections from any short-term rental platform like Airbnb:

If you have had a toddler in your house sometime over the past few years, you likely already know all about the "Baby Shark" song. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you are among the luckiest people on the planet. Except now I'm going to embed the video below to ensure you are aware of it.I'll give you a moment to shake off whatever ill feelings you have for me.Now, the origins of the song are something of a minor mystery. We'll get more into that in a second. For now, you can note that Pinkfong's "Baby Shark" video was published on YouTube in 2016 and has millions of views. It was only this summer, however, that a musician named Johnny Only sued Pinkfong in South Korea for copyright infringement, claiming that the latter's music was a ripoff of his own "Baby Shark" song that he published on YouTube in 2011.I already know what you're thinking: "But, Tim, those songs do sound very, very similar." And when I tell you that Only is claiming in his lawsuit that the songs are specifically similar in length, tempo, rhythm, and style, your first thought is probably to agree with Only entirely. But maybe your second thought would be, "Wait, why are those the only similarities he's claiming? Why not the lyrics, which are largely the same? Or the music entirely? Why is he so specific?"The answer has to do with the mysterious origin of "Baby Shark."

As we recently noted, the DOJ is absolutely tripping over itself to approve a $26 billion merger between T-Mobile and Sprint that most objective experts say will inevitably erode competition, raise rates, and reduce not only the total number of sector jobs--but the amount everybody in the telecom industry is paid. Forty years of telecom history is very clear on this point: when you reduce the total number of competitors in a telecom market, the results generally aren't pretty (unless you're an investor or executive).To try and justify its approval, the DOJ has been pushing a plan that would involve the government nannying the creation of an entirely new fourth wireless carrier by spinning some of T-Mobile and Sprint assets to Dish Network, a company with a long history of empty promises on the wireless front. But a closer look at the proposal notes that not only will it take years for Dish to become a viable replacement fourth carrier (if it happens at all), the end product will result in a carrier that covers just 70% of the US, not the 99% T-Mobile, Sprint, and the FCC have been promising:

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For years I've been arguing that we're bad at regulating privacy because too many people think that privacy is a "thing" that needs to be "protected," rather than recognizing that privacy is always a series of tradeoffs. As I've pointed out a few times now, part of the problem that many people reasonably have about how internet companies are dealing with our "privacy" is the lack of transparency from those companies, making it difficult (or impossible) to accurately weigh the costs and benefits of the tradeoff choices.It often comes down to a question of "is it worth sharing this data, in order to get this service." But to make that determination, it helps to know which data exactly, how it's being used, how it's being secured, what the likelihood is of it getting spread more widely and what the potential downstream impacts might be to me if that data does get spread more widely. If there was an accurate way to understand that, then we'd have a better sense of whether or not it's worth giving up that data in exchange for the service. But, many internet companies (from the big ones on down) are notoriously bad about providing that information, meaning that we can't make an informed decision about whether or not the tradeoffs are worth it.And that's a big part of the reason users get so concerned whenever there's a privacy scandal. It's because that information wasn't provided to us. People didn't realize that Facebook would be enabling people to share the data of all of our friends with a sketchy corporation who might use it to suppress votes. People didn't realize that Facebook would take phone numbers provided for security purposes and use them to push advertisements and friend notifications to our phones.But... since very few people seem to recognize that privacy is a "set of tradeoffs," too many of the regulations try to treat it as "a thing" and require companies to "protect" it -- even if that doesn't mean very much. And, even worse, trying to force companies to "protect" privacy can actually interfere with the necessary transparency that would allow individuals to better understand their privacy tradeoffs.Case in point: a year and a half ago, Facebook agreed to support a new scholarly project to share a bunch of data with a bunch of academics in the interest of transparency. The project was dubbed Social Science One, and was funded by a bunch of big philanthropic foundations. Yet, a recent article in Buzzfeed points out that a year and a half later, Facebook still hasn't delivered most of the promised data to the waiting academics. Indeed, a follow up article notes that the big list of powerful foundations funding the whole project have now threatened to pull their funding if Facebook doesn't share the data by the end of September.A key issue? Various attempts to regulate privacy.

For a country that likes to talk about "being number one" a lot, that's sure not reflected in the United States' broadband networks, or the broadband maps we use to determine which areas lack adequate broadband or competition (resulting in high prices and poor service). Our terrible broadband maps are, of course, a feature not a bug. ISPs have routinely lobbied to kill any efforts to improve data collection and analysis, lest somebody actually realize the telecom market is a broken mono/duopoly whose dysfunction reaches into every aspect of tech.While these shaky maps have been the norm for several decades, recent bipartisan pressure by states (upset that they're not getting their share of taxpayer subsidies because we don't actually know where broadband is) has finally forced even the Ajit Pai FCC and the telecom industry to take some modest action.US Telecom, a lobbying org largely backed by AT&T, has been conducting trials in Missouri and Virginia that utilize a new broadband mapping system that integrates hundreds of millions of data points, statistical scoring, and managed crowdsourcing to get a far more accurate assessment of broadband availability. The results? A huge chunk of the areas the FCC has long claimed have broadband, don't:

Another field drug test has managed to misidentify a common legal substance. This doesn't matter to the government, which is only out ~$2. But it does matter to the non-criminals being treated like criminals because the ultra-faulty tests are even worse than K-9s at detecting actual drugs.Field drug tests have determined everything from cotton candy to donut crumbs to drywall dust to bird poop (on the hood of a car no less!) to be illegal substances, resulting in a cascade of horrors on the innocent, starting with the arrest and criminal charges, and proceeding directly to indefinite pretrial detention and the loss of income, housing, etc. that comes with it.Field drug tests are more "reliable" than drug dogs. I mean, to the extent that they'll more reliably generate the "probable cause" needed to search a car or arrest a person. If you're looking to boost your drug war stats, nothing's more useful than a cheap kit that can't tell the difference between narcotics and common household items.Adding to the pathetic annals of cops upending people's lives with unreliable tests is this new twist: they're using these at ports-of-entry as well. A legal resident of the US spent three months in jail because the field test couldn't differentiate between a product created by bees and a product created by amateur chemists in a trailer park bathtub. (h/t Jeff Bonner)

We've been talking about the trademark crisis facing the craft brewing industry for some time. To recap, an industry explosion coupled with the habit of that industry to come up with creative and referential names for its products has collided with trademark attacks coming both from within and outside of the industry. The industry, which once had a quite permissive and fraternal approach to intellectual property, has since become corporatized. New entrants to the market, therefore, face challenges with how to name their craft beers without facing legal threats.This is where it's worth repeating that trademark law is chiefly designed to keep the public from being confused as to the source of affiliations of a good or service. In other words, the brand name of a product shouldn't fool the public into thinking it came from somewhere it did not. That reality makes it quite frustrating to see Off Track Brewing agree to change the name of one of its signature brews due to threats issued by a peanut butter brand.

In response to controversial shootings of citizens by police officers, California's governor has (far too proudly) signed into law a bill that will do almost nothing to prevent more of these kinds of killings:

"This case is likely one of the first filed in this Court that addresses the relationship between the First Amendment and the Internet-based [Facebook] communications platform" claims a new lawsuit filed against Facebook by a guy very angry that his account got shut down (case first spotted by John Roddy). Suffice it to say that this is not one of the first such lawsuits. Many have been filed, and literally every single one of them has failed. Facebook is not bound by the First Amendment. Courts are clear on this. Over and over and over again, courts have been clear on this. But this lack of understanding of what's come before is just the first of many fun things in this 174 page pro se lawsuit. The complaint is so long that only the first 91 pages were filed as the official complaint, and the rest were put in the docket as an "attachment."The complaint is... something. It goes on and on about every historical Facebook scandal, going back nearly a decade, talking about the FTC consent decree, Cambridge Analytica, privacy questions, Elizabeth Warren's proposed plan to break the company up, before finally getting around to the reason he's actually suing. His account got shut down.

Here's another one of those weird signs of the time. Under any normal presidential administration, this move by the US Patent and Trademark Office might look a bit strange. But only a bit. There are some legitimate reasons for doing this, but filtered through the administration's xenophobia, it seems to be just another way to hassle non-citizens. (h/t Jef Pearlman)

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For many years now, I've talked about why so many of the problems that face the current internet could be understood by looking at how we moved from an internet dominated by open protocols to one dominated by central platforms -- and I continue to note that many of those problems could be solved by moving back to open protocols (with some modern additions). I first raised this idea nearly five years ago, when people were first debating how internet platforms should moderate toxic speech. It came up again last summer in the context of the various fights over "deplatforming" certain individuals. I mentioned it, yet again, earlier this year in noting that this would be the most effective way to truly create competition and "break up" the big internet platforms.I've hinted that I was working on a longer paper about this, and I'm happy to note that the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University has now published that essay, entitled: Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech. It's a part of a new essay series the Institute has just published, called Free Speech Futures, in which various scholars and experts "reimagine" the 1st Amendment.The article is long, but I wanted to be fairly thorough in explaining what I'm talking about -- and highlighting what might go wrong as well. As I note early on:

For many years, we've pointed out that for all the salacious stories and claims about how Backpage.com was somehow supporting and facilitating sex trafficking, the site was actually an amazing tool for finding, arresting, and convicting sex traffickers. Earlier this year, we wrote about a very detailed piece in Wired that highlighted just how far Backpage went in helping law enforcement stop sex trafficking:

Eugene Volokh has come across another attempt by a litigant to bury his own court proceedings. This isn't a malicious or underhanded attempt to remove embarrassing info from the court system in order to... say... scrub a client's reputation. This is simply a pro se litigant perhaps misunderstanding what he was getting into when he decided to start filing lawsuits.As Volokh points out, knowing very little about the court system you're engaging with as your own lawyer tends to result in very strange requests.

In 2009, the Spanish government brought in a law requiring electricity bill subsidies for some five million poor households in the country. The so-called Bono Social de Electricidad, or BOSCO, was not popular with energy companies, which fought against it in the courts. Following a 2016 ruling, the Spanish authorities introduced new, more restrictive regulations for BOSCO, and potential beneficiaries had to re-register by 31 December 2018. In the end, around 1.5 million households were approved, almost a million fewer than the 2.4 million who had benefited from the previous scheme, and a long way from the estimated 4.5 million who fulfilled the criteria to receive the bonus.The process of applying for the subsidy was complicated, so a non-profit organization monitoring public authorities, Civio, worked with the National Commission on Markets and Competition to produce an easy-to-use Web page that allowed people to check their eligibility for BOSCO. Because of discrepancies between what the Civio service predicted, and what the Spanish government actually decided, Civio asked to see the source code for the algorithm that was being used to determine eligibility. The idea was to find out how the official algorithm worked so that the Web site could be tweaked to give the same results. As Civio wrote in a blog post, that didn't go so well:

A while back, an MPAA whistleblower sent me a big file of internal MPAA documents. I spent many months going through them and trying to track down any actual story in them, but there really wasn't much there. Most of the documents were quite old and not all that revealing beyond what was already known (or widely assumed) about how the MPAA acted. The only thing that struck me as interesting, was a very old memo, written by lawyer Steven Fabrizio, before he became the MPAA's General Counsel, when he was still at the MPAA's favorite law firm, Jenner & Block. The memo outlined a very long list of potential anti-piracy strategies, and whether or not they were legal. Some of them were... quite surprising in what they were even considering (it included things like taking over a pirate site and using it as a honeypot). Many were what I would personally classify as somewhere between sleazy, dishonest and unethical. I never wrote up any details, because there was no evidence that the MPAA ever actually did any of the proposed programs, and a few people I ran questions by pointed out that, as as corporate lawyer, reviewing crazy ideas by clients and giving a legal opinion on them is standard practice.The Fabrizio connection struck me as interesting on a few levels, though. Beyond being the MPAA's top legal attack dog for nearly a decade, the Sony Pictures email leak showed that Fabrizio was the mastermind behind Hollywood's Project Goliath to use MPAA/Hollywood Studio funds to pay for having state Attorney's General and news media owned by those studios, to attack Google to try to pressure it into some sort of "deal" with the studios. Fabrizio was also formerly the top litigator at the RIAA, and led its charge against Napster. Fabrizio was deeply involved in key copyright lawsuits, including the fights against Grokster, Hotfile, and Aereo. Basically, much of the history of "anti-piracy" litigation and "anti-piracy" efforts regarding the internet, was somehow touched by Steve Fabrizio.And, of course, the usual line that people would give in supporting these positions is that it was necessary is because "piracy is illegal" and so on.Anyway, that's why it's a bit shocking to discover that Fabrizio has now been arrested in DC (and fired by the MPAA) for alleged sexual assault and blackmail. Variety's story on the charges is really quite incredible:

We've talked a lot about how many of the controversial, challenging problems that exist online could be addressed by refocusing on making the internet what it was always supposed to be: a network of open protocols, not a cluster of walled gardens. Mike's recent paper on the subject lays out the reasons in detail, and on this week's episode of the podcast we're joined by one of the people working towards that goal: Anil Dash, whose Glitch community aims to bring development back to the masses.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.

Elliot Harmon, from EFF, has an excellent op-ed piece over at the Hill pointing out that nearly all the talking heads are getting it wrong when it comes to Section 230. It's not a gift to big internet companies. Indeed, as the piece argues, Facebook lobbied strongly for gutting 230 with FOSTA, and then took advantage of the gap in the market that was created after FOSTA became law:

President Trump is back at it, misusing his emergency powers to declare difficult situations "national emergencies" so he can get what he wants. When Congress rejected his border wall funding, Trump simply declared an influx of immigrants a "national emergency." How an uptick in families seeking citizenship and/or asylum suddenly became a threat to the nation as a whole went unexplained.What did go explained were the President's reasons for declaring a national emergency. During his press conference, he made it clear there was actually no emergency. This was done solely to secure the funding Congress said he couldn't have. If our representatives possessed any collective backbone, this would have been rolled back by Congress with a veto-proof rejection of this non-emergency emergency declaration.Trump has done it again. He's now "ordering" US companies to stop doing business with China. This wasn't delivered as an Executive Order or proposed legislation. Rather, it was delivered via tweets from a miffed president who has declared -- and been repeatedly shown these assertions are false -- that trade wars are:

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I will admit being only marginally aware of Bret Stephens in the past -- as someone the NY Times seems to employ to write really dumb opinion pieces that get people angry with how dumb they are. This latest bit of Bret Stephensisms isn't going to improve that impression. One of Stephens' big things, apparently, is whining about "the left" not believing in free speech any more, and complaining about things like "safe spaces on campus." Here are two recent examples:

A few weeks ago, we wrote about a troubling SLAPP lawsuit in Charlottesville, Virginia against a local independent paper, C-Ville, and a UVA history professor. That post mostly focused on the lawsuit against the history professor, Jalane Schmidt, and the ACLU's decision to defend her in the lawsuit. We didn't have much information for how C-Ville itself is dealing with the SLAPP suit. However, given its response to another SLAPP threat, it appears that C-Ville is mostly caving.Back in May, Molly Conger, an opinion columnist for C-Ville, who built up her reputation by reporting on local racists and what they're up to, wrote an opinion piece merely highlighting the fact that a Charlottesville police officer, Logan Woodzell, who had just been promoted, had also been seen in a photo passed around on social media "posing with James Napier of the neo-Confederate group the Hiwaymen and Tammy Lee of American Freedom Keepers (one of the militia groups sued by the city for its involvement in Unite the Right)."Nothing in the column calls Woodzell a racist. She just raises questions about the process by which Woodzell was given a promotion, as well as gives her opinion that the promotion shows "poor judgment" and "a disregard for the concerns of a community." Nothing in any of that is remotely defamatory. It's either a clearly factual statement (the photo exists and had been shared on social media) or opinion about what it showed concerning the Chartolttesville police force and its police chief, RaShall Brackney. Indeed, Woodzell is barely mentioned beyond the opening of the piece.However, according to a Twitter thread from Conger, a lawyer from the local police union then threatened the paper over the piece -- leading C-Ville to cave and end Conger's relationship with the paper. Here's a lightly edited transcript of Conger's tweet thread:

The Ninth Circuit has given back a bit more of the Fourth Amendment to American citizens. Again.Supposedly, we're so very much in need of national security, hardly anyone is allowed to avail themselves of their surely misnamed "rights" within 100 miles of our borders. This includes things like international airports as well, so the "Constitution-free zone" swallows up a large portion of our nation's populationIn 2013, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the Fourth Amendment still applies at the border, despite the US government's protestations. The government can still get away with suspicionless searches at the border, but they have to be cursory, not exploratory. That case -- US v. Cotterman -- resulted in a finding that deeper searches of electronic device, like Cotterman's laptop, needed reasonable suspicion. (The court also helpfully noted that the existence of password-protected files is not enough to meet that bar.)Given the vast amount of information travelers carry on them at all times in their multiple electronic devices, it seems like this reasonable suspicion standard should be the minimum expected. We're not quite up to a warrant requirement, but we're getting closer. This recent decision [PDF] by the Appeals Court relies on its Cotterman precedent to find the same standard applies to cellphones -- and clarifies what exactly that standard is.In this case, a man arrested at a border crossing for trafficking drugs challenged the evidence found on his phone. After Border Patrol agents found cocaine concealed in a spare tire underneath his truck, the agents decided to search his phone. The man, Miguel Cano, claimed he was crossing the border visit his family in Los Angeles. (Cano is a US citizen who recently moved to Tijuana, Mexico.)Cano claimed he knew nothing about the drugs stashed in the back of his vehicle. The agents decided to take a deep dive into his phone using Cellebrite software, which pulled text messages, contacts, call logs, and application data from Cano's phone. This was apparently done because the cursory search -- the one still fully protected by the border exception -- failed to turn up anything interesting to the Border Patrol officers.This is a search too far, the court says. Referring to its 2013 decision on device searches, the Appeals Court fills in some blanks from its previous ruling to give the government explicit rules on suspicionless device searches.

We were just discussing how there are some cracks starting to show in the PR war that Epic decided to kick off when it initiated the PC gaming platform war against Steam. Part of the problem Epic has is that, despite its attempt to frame its exclusivity deals as some attempt to heal a broken PC gaming industry, the public very clearly isn't buying it. It's gotten bad enough that publishers that buy into Epic's exclusive deals are proactively messaging publicly to the gaming masses that they would prefer not to be the target of widespread harassment.That, honestly, is bad enough to warrant concern by the industry as a whole. But when indie developers begin coming out publicly to refuse an Epic Store agreement, and frame that decision as a moral choice, the problem has only deepened. Wlad Marhulets is the solo developer behind Darq, a horror game released recently. He got an email from Epic seeking to sell the game on the Epic Store. Marhulets read the email and its request for an exclusivity deal, then he took a look at all the backlash other publishers have faced for entering into that agreement, and decided that he would be breaking his word to the public by entering into such a deal.

It's not often a citizen's complaint results in a fired officer. Even more rarely does it result in a criminal investigation and prosecution. But a woman known only as "Debbie" hit the accountability jackpot, as Matt Rocheleau reports for the Boston Globe. And it all started with nothing more than a state trooper being an asshole.

David Streitfeld is a NY Times reporter who, among other things, covers Amazon. As far as I can tell, he has never written about Amazon in an article where he doesn't present things in the worst, most distorted anti-Amazon light. It's gotten to the point where I generally just won't bother with a Times article about Amazon if it's by Streitfeld, because it's guaranteed to be misleading. Somehow, however, I made it through most of this recent article about counterfeit George Orwell books on Amazon before realizing it was yet another Streitfeld hit piece. The article itself is kind of interesting: there are a bunch of folks attempting to sell unofficial George Orwell books on Amazon, and sometimes they're garbage.What I find odd, is that while the article admits that many are published in India, where Orwell's works are in the public domain, the article makes no mention of the odd copyright situation in the US and UK, where Orwell's books all should be in the public domain based on the copyright deal that was made with Orwell when he wrote the books. Under those terms, all of Orwell's books -- including Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) -- should have entered the public domain years ago, meaning that there would be a robust market for legitimate copies of those works.Streitfeld also complains about some attempts to "improve" on Orwell.

One of the many problems with collecting biometric data is you need to have someplace safe to store it. Sure, you could lock it away in something disconnected from the net, but then it's not much use to the dozens of private companies and government agencies that want access to the data they've collected. So, back on the web it goes, where it can be prodded for weaknesses by security researchers and malicious hackers alike.We can only hope the security researchers got there first.

Sean Gallagher, over at Ars Technica, has a story about yet another bizarre lawsuit. A company called Crown Sterling, which claims it's disrupting the entire encryption business, is suing the Black Hat conference organizers after it paid $115,000 to be a "gold sponsor," only to find their presentation widely mocked. You can read the complaint here. It's quite something.Gallagher's article does a nice job summing up the presentation and the background in a single paragraph:

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Missouri's government is flexing the weirdest right now. The state's Attorney General is currently in court trying to keep public records out of the public's hands. This doesn't actually stem from a public records lawsuit, but from a discovery request in a defamation lawsuit filed by a former mayor against a state representative.Ex-Scott City mayor Ron Cummins is suing state rep Holly Rehder for defaming him while he was still in office. His discovery request has been greeted with this baffling assertion by the Attorney General. (h/t Peter Bonilla)

We give FCC chair Ajit Pai a lot of grief (to be fair: we've given basically every FCC chair a lot of grief over the years). However, when he does something right we should give him credit. And he's now embraced a plan to give the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline its own 3 digit number, likely to be 988. This is one of those simple plans that just makes sense. Thankfully, there's been a lot greater awareness over the past few years concerning the hotline and suicide prevention in general -- but you still need to remember the phone number. Most people don't (it's 1-800-273-8255 (TALK), in case you don't know). Moving it to a simple three digit number is a good idea that should save lives.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is James Burkhardt with a response to a common conspiracy theory about election fraud:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, all eyes were on the protests in Ferguson, Missouri where police were threatening and arresting reporters even after, it turned out, they signed a court agreement promising not to. It was a stark example of the broader problem of police militarization, a trend promoted by defense contractors thanks to which police in the suburbs sometimes have more powerful weapons than Marines in Afghanistan, and of course the routine use of tear gas which is a banned chemical weapon except for domestic use thanks to... an exception lobbied for by the US.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, we wondered if there could be any such thing as a fair trial about file sharing given the proliferation and normalization of biased language about "piracy" and "property". Courts were busy insanely slicing and dicing the Superman copyright, the IFPI was insisting that the Pirate Party shouldn't be allowed to hold the positions it does, music publishers were waging their war against lyrics websites, the Associated Press was still utterly failing to explain its plan to DRM the news, and we saw the kickoff of a new copyright maximalist push in the UK after Lord Peter Mandelson spent the weekend with David Geffen. We also took a look at a murky and possibly-apocryphal, but nevertheless interesting, story about what might have been the first-ever copyright trial in 6th century Ireland.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, after all the hype, the Google IPO... was delayed by the SEC. Then the company admitted it had been a bit overly optimistic by lowering the IPO range and cutting the number of shares, before finally actually going public and only hitting the bottom price of the reduced range.Also this week in 2004: music labels were continuing to bet the farm on ringtones being more than a trend, Real was hoping its battle with Apple would spark some good customer responses but apparently forgot it still wasn't a super-popular company, and an appeals court upheld the all-important Grokster decision.

Over the years, we've seen plenty of aggression from universities when it comes to trademark enforcement. The impetus for much of this was rulings nearly a decade ago that essentially gave universities far broader and more exclusive rights to their school logos. The fallout of those rulings became schools going after all kinds of uses and near-uses of those logos, including a strange war on pastries, and colleges going after high schools for using similar iconography.The latter continues to the present. The latest version of this is Rutgers, in New Jersey, forcing a Louisiana high school to change its logo because it was essentially the same as Rutgers' famed "R" logo.

Well, this post of mine has aged terribly.Back in 2014, I breathlessly reported the Oakland PD's adoption of body cameras had resulted in sweeping improvements to its use of force. Deadly force usage had dropped to nothing, reducing the number of people killed by cops from eight per year to zero.That still holds. If you just look at dead bodies, you'll see that the Oakland PD had produced zero corpses in the 18 months following the installation of body cameras. But other stats in that report are a bit more questionable.

Just days after the two Republican members of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) blocked an investigation into the NRA and its use of Russian funds to influence the election, the chair of the FEC (who voted for that investigation) has pointed out that Donald Trump should put up or shut up with his totally baseless, absolutely insane, claims that "voter fraud" cost him millions of votes in the election.

We've written a few times now about Devin Nunes' ridiculous lawsuit against Twitter, two parody Twitter accounts, and political strategist Liz Mair. In a news interview back in April, Nunes more or less admitted that these lawsuits were fishing expeditions to reveal journalists' sources on articles about himself that he didn't like. Meanwhile, both Twitter and Mair filed motions in the case saying that a Virginia state court is the wrong venue.The court held a hearing on those motions today, and while the judge has not ruled, the Fresno Bee's article about the hearing lists out Nunes' discovery requests, which show just how much of a fishing expedition this case is. From the Fresno Bee (which is being sued by Nunes in a separate lawsuit):

Insurance claims result in investigations. This much is a given. Sometimes it involves both insurance companies and law enforcement agencies, depending on what's being investigated. But in many cases, insurance companies are doing the investigative work for law enforcement agencies and pushing prosecutors towards bringing fraud charges against claimants just trying to be compensated for valuables damaged or lost.The combined power of these two forces is enough to obliterate lives and livelihoods. Kendall Taggart's report for Buzzfeed is a long, horrifying read. It details the close relationship between insurance companies and cops -- one that extends so far as companies paying cops, prosecutors, and expert witnesses to turn valid insurance claims into insurance fraud charges.

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NPR has an incredible story about the media and Jeffrey Epstein. You should read the whole damn thing, because no summary here will do it justice. It covers multiple attempts by various large media organizations, including Vanity Fair, the NY Times and ABC to report on Jeffrey Epstein over the years, and how Epstein, intimidated, coaxed and even potentially bought off reporters to get more favorable coverage, or to kill stories outright. It's horrific and awful and everything along those lines. Go read it.But, I'm going to focus on the fact that NPR quotes David Boies throughout the piece, acting horrified at how the media fell down on this. He's 100% correct about that, but he's the wrong fucking messenger given his own long history doing pretty much exactly what Epstein is reported to have done regarding the media in this particular piece. Boies is defending some of Epstein's victims, and good on him to be a strong advocate for his clients and against Epstein. But this quote is not one David Boies should be making:

Last month we wrote about how Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act did exactly what it was supposed to do in protecting Facebook from a bogus lawsuit from a Russian news trolling operation, called Federal Agency of News (FAN). Facebook had kicked FAN off its platform soon after the 2016 election, when it realized it was a Russian operation spewing nonsense, often targeting people voting in the 2016 US election. FAN somehow found US lawyers from a previously reputable firm to represent them in this quixotic attempt to sue Facebook. The whole thing flopped, of course, because Facebook is free to kick whomever it wants off its platform, including Russian trolls seeking to spread fake news to influence an election. The court dismissed the case easily under Section 230. All of the Russian attempts to claim it violated their 1st Amendment rights, California civil rights, breach of contract, etc., went nowhere fast.But, since the court left FAN free to try an amended complaint, it has now filed an amended complaint (first spotted by John Roddy). Somewhat incredibly, it does not appear to make any new arguments. It just repeats the old ones with more emphasis.The key to the new filing is an incredibly, laughably weak attempt to connect Facebook to the US government, in an attempt to argue that the Constitution applies to Facebook as well. This is almost comically badly done in the complaint. It basically looks for any scrap of evidence of Facebook working with the US government to combat Russian election interference as somehow proof that Facebook magically becomes a state actor.

If you hadn't noticed by now, in the IOT era, sometimes dumb technology is the smarter option. Given that privacy and security are usually afterthoughts for many vendors, we now live in an age where your Barbie can be hacked and used to spy on your kids, your refrigerator can be hacked to gain access to your Gmail account, your smart tea kettle can provide a nice attack vector on your home network, and your "smart" television watches you every bit as often as you watch it. This wasn't the future the Jetsons promised.Enter the June oven, a "smart" oven that originally launched in 2015 with a $1500 countertop variant that used a camera and "computer vision" to know what was being cooked. The company then launched a $600 version in 2018 that integrates an oven, an air fryer, dehydrator, slow cooker, broiler, toaster, warming drawer, and convection countertop oven. Which might all be fairly impressive if the oven didn't have a weird habit of turning itself on in the middle of the night:

The BBC News site has one of those heart-warming stories that crop up periodically, about how clever new technology averted a potentially dangerous situation. In this case, it describes how a group of people lost in a forest in England were located by rescue services. The happy ending was thanks to the use of the What3words (W3W) app they managed to download following a suggestion from the police when they phoned for help. W3W's creators have divided the world up into 57 trillion virtual squares, each measuring 3m by 3m (10ft by 10ft), and then assigned each of those squares a unique "address" formed by three randomly-assigned words, such as "mile.crazy.shade". The idea is that it's easier to communicate three words generated by the What3words app from your position, than to read out your exact GPS longitude and latitude as a string of numbers. It's certainly a clever approach, but there are number of problems, many of which were discussed in a fascinating post by Terence Eden from earlier this year. The most serious one is that the system is not open: