Most of the world has been under some form of lockdown for weeks, but that clearly hasn't stopped the indefatigable Austrian privacy expert Max Schrems from working on his next legal action under the EU's GDPR. Last year, he lodged a complaint with the French Data Protection Authority (CNIL) over what he called the "fake consent" that people must give to "cookie banners" in order to access sites. Now he has set his sights on Google's Android Advertising ID, which is present on every Android phone. It builds on research carried out by the Norwegian Consumer Council, published in the report "Out of control".
Order your copy of Working Futures today »It's been over six months since we released Working Futures, our collection of speculative fiction about the future of work, but it's nice to see a great review of the collection by James Pethokoukis, talking about how it's a helpful way to think about the future of work and jobs beyond the traditional "the robots will take all the jobs."
Every emergency brings with it the temptation for governments to grant themselves extra powers while they deal with the current crisis. When the coronavirus made its way into Hungary, it was too much for the Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, to resist.
Today's example of the Masnick Impossibility Theorem is quite a doozy. Podcast Addict, a very popular mobile podcast player, says that Google removed its app from the Play Store, supposedly for violating Google's new rules related to COVID-19. Like pretty much all big internet platforms, Google's Play Store is trying to combat "misinformation" and "disinformation" about COVID-19. A few months back we saw this issue play out with Google advertisements, in which it was blocking politicians from advertising about the failed response of various elected officials to the pandemic, because it said only "official" government entities could advertise about COVID-19.In this case, the "problem" seems to be that via Podcast Addict... you can get podcasts about COVID-19:
Five years ago, we wrote a post detailing the crazy permission-asking media scrum that forms on Twitter when people post photographic or video documentation of something major happening. Under such tweets, you'll often see dozens of reporters asking for "permission" to use the images or videos in news reports. In many cases, fair use would likely cover the usage, but news organizations are understandably gun shy about copyright lawsuits from greedy lawyers who would be all too quick to sue them for merely embedding a tweet.However, it appears that the Associated Press takes this to absolutely insane, and legally problematic, levels. And it appears that the AP would rather not talk about this.You may have seen that, over the weekend, there was an explosion in downtown LA. Others in Los Angeles were able to see the fire and posted images and videos on Twitter. One of these was Brian Magno, who tweeted a 21 second video of the fire:
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Both the NY Times and the Washington Post have been among the most vocal in attacking internet companies like Google and Facebook, claiming that they're bad regarding your privacy. Yet, like with France (who fined Google for its privacy practices, but then got mad at the company over the privacy-protecting features of its COVID contact tracing API), the Washington Post has a very, very weird article complaining about Google and Apple's project because it's too protective of people's privacy. We've talked in the past about how the API (jointly developed between Apple and Google) was designed from the ground up to be privacy protective. And you know damn well that if the API wasn't developed as such there would be huge articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere decrying this API as a threat to everyone's privacy. Yet here, the complaint is that it's too protective, because these companies simply can't win.John Gruber, over at Daring Fireball, has an excellent post explaining just how spectacularly bad the Washington Post article is, but we'll do our own treatment as well.The crux of the article is that some "health officials" are annoyed that the API won't share data with them directly, but is more designed to alert individuals themselves if they may have come into contact with someone who turns out to be COVID-19 positive.
2019 saw a record number of consumers ditch traditional cable television. 2020 was already poised to be even worse, and that was before a pandemic came to town. With the pandemic not only sidelining live sports (one of the last reasons many subscribe to traditional cable in the first place), while putting a strain on many folks' wallets, cord cutting has now started to truly take off. Wall Street analyst Craig Moffett, who a decade ago suggested such cable TV defectors were irrelevant, has long since changed his tune.In his latest research note to investors, he laid out the reality for traditional cable TV providers, and it's really not pretty. It's particularly ugly for satellite TV providers like Dish Network and DirecTV:
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous commenter responding to some questions about the Ohio workers the government wants companies to snitch on:
Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, the backlash was coming in to the appeals court ruling that put a dent in NSA surveillance, with politicians crying foul in response as they hoped to spy on more Americans, while the EFF saw the ruling as reason enough to withdraw its support for the now-worse USA Freedom Act — which nevertheless overwhelmingly passed the Housea big fight in the Senate. Meanwhile, a new "he forgot about it" excuse appeared regarding James Clapper's lies, while the government was showing off its inconsistent treatment of leakers and whistleblowers.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2010, music publishers were still trying to squeeze cash out of lyrics websites, the RIAA successfully got a court to rule that LimeWire was guilty of contributory infringement, and the producers of The Hurt Locker were gearing up for their infamous barrage of copyright lawsuits. A brief in the Viacom/YouTube trial tried to rewrite the DMCA, while Brazil rejected the idea of its own DMCA-style notice-and-takedown system.This was also the week that the freshly-launched "Humble Indie Games Bundle" was blowing up the charts (I actually missed the launch of the bundle the previous week, because we covered it with such a low-key headline when it still wasn't clear how big a deal it would become). By the end of the week it had hit a million sales and it was starting to become clear that it was a big deal, though few might have guessed it would still be going strong today.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, the Senate passed the Iraq appropriations bill that also had a tacked-on problem in the form of the Real ID Act, which looked likely to end up making identity theft easier, and immediately became the target of brewing legal challenges. Following the FCC's recent rejection of the broadcast flag the previous week, the MPAA was looking to legislate it back into existence, while a minor ruling in the Napster investment lawsuit included an important detail about what qualifies as "distribution" for copyright purposes. And it was starting to look like there might be a little resistance among federal agencies to the idea of being Hollywood's personal copyright cops.
The Epic Store is still around, still rocking its exclusivity deals with game publishers, and is still trying really hard to unseat Valve's Steam as the dominant PC gaming platform of choice. Truthfully, the news about the ongoing battle between Steam and Epic has sort of quieted down. That ultimately is probably not a good sign for Epic. If there is unseating to be done, it's going to have to be done loudly, publicly, and with much coverage in the press.Which is perhaps why Epic recently decided to strike a deal with Rockstar to give away Grand Theft Auto 5 for free. Yes, free as in you pay no money and yet own the game forever. Rockstar's reasoning behind this is quite easy to understand: the company already made a hilarious sum of money selling the game for nearly a decade and the game's ecosystem and players have since moved into the online MMO realm where the game now makes hilarious sums of money via microtransactions. More players means more revenue for Rockstar.And for the Epic Store, this is sort of free game is a great way to entice gamers to your store, gin up a chunk of new user adoption, and really show the public how great your PC games store performs--, oh son of a bitch.
Infamous Israeli malware developer NSO Group is currently being sued by Facebook for using WhatsApp as its preferred attack vector. Malicious links and malware payloads are sent to targets, allowing government agencies -- including those in countries with horrendous human rights records -- to intercept communications and otherwise exploit compromised phones.NSO has argued it can't be sued for the things done by its customers, all of which appear to be government agencies. The company says those actions are protected by sovereign immunity. NSO insists it only sells the malware. It does not assist its customers with target acquisition or malware deployment. Documents filed by Facebook say otherwise. NSO appears to deploy malware through servers it owns or rents in the United States, suggesting it is actually more involved in its customers' actions than it has sworn in court.Like any business, NSO Group wants more customers. It's not content to sell exploits to questionable governments that have used its offerings to target journalists, lawyers, activists, and dissidents. It wants to do business in the United States, where there are thousands of potential law enforcement customers.Some details of NSO's stateside push emerged a few years ago, when reports showed the DEA had met with NSO to discuss its offerings. Motherboard has obtained additional documents indicating NSO is courting local law enforcement as well.
I think many of us are going to avoid eating at sit-down restaurants for the foreseeable future, even if governments deem them to be "safe." However, I find it at least somewhat unnerving to see Governor Jay Inslee in Washington say that in order for a restaurant to offer dine-in services, it will need to keep a log of all diners for 30 days, including their telephone and email contact info.
Update: As an update, a bunch of folks left comments suggesting that this action was fine because the guy running this Club Penguin server was recently arrested on suspicion of child porn, and that this particular server also allowed "racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic and sexual messages flow freely." Those are certainly reasons to be concerned about this server, but they are not issues that you deal with via copyright. If it's reasonable to go after the people who set up the site for criminal activity, go after them for that. Copyright should not be the tool.Disney's overly aggressive copyright bullying strikes again. Apparently, Disney has decided that if Disney can't run Club Penguin in a way that people want to use it, then no one should be able to run Club Penguin, and so the company has used the DMCA to takedown a fan server.If you somehow missed it, Club Penguin was a hugely popular virtual world in which players as cartoon penguins would hang out and interact. It was targeted at the younger set (age 6 to 14) and at one point had over 200 million users. In 2007, Disney bought the site for $350 million. Over the years, through neglect and the general evolution of what kids think is cool, Club Penguin languished and Disney shut it down in 2017. While Disney then tried to capitalize on the name with an entirely different virtual world called Club Penguin Island, folks who loved Club Penguin were not impressed and Disney quietly shuttered that as well.Some fans still liked the original Club Penguin, and were able to build up unlicensed fan servers recreating the original game. And for a while now Disney had mostly looked the other direction (or perhaps its lawyers were busy gobbling up every other major piece of pop culture). However, now with everyone on pandemic lockdown, the most popular of the unlicensed fan servers, Club Penguin Online, was getting a big usage boost and Disney could not allow that to happen. They sent off a DMCA notice demanding the site be disappeared:
Disney's overly aggressive copyright bullying strikes again. Apparently, Disney has decided that if Disney can't run Club Penguin in a way that people want to use it, then no one should be able to run Club Penguin, and so the company has used the DMCA to takedown a fan server.If you somehow missed it, Club Penguin was a hugely popular virtual world in which players as cartoon penguins would hang out and interact. It was targeted at the younger set (age 6 to 14) and at one point had over 200 million users. In 2007, Disney bought the site for $350 million. Over the years, through neglect and the general evolution of what kids think is cool, Club Penguin languished and Disney shut it down in 2017. While Disney then tried to capitalize on the name with an entirely different virtual world called Club Penguin Island, folks who loved Club Penguin were not impressed and Disney quietly shuttered that as well.Some fans still liked the original Club Penguin, and were able to build up unlicensed fan servers recreating the original game. And for a while now Disney had mostly looked the other direction (or perhaps its lawyers were busy gobbling up every other major piece of pop culture). However, now with everyone on pandemic lockdown, the most popular of the unlicensed fan servers, Club Penguin Online, was getting a big usage boost and Disney could not allow that to happen. They sent off a DMCA notice demanding the site be disappeared:
Suing private companies over their alleged trampling of First Amendment rights is rarely going to go anywhere. That's not stopping people from trying. Again and again and again. Some of these plaintiffs aren't even represented by Larry Klayman.Like this guy, Robert Eugene Wilson, who sued Twitter for deleting his accounts. Wilson represented himself, arguing… well, it's perhaps best to quote directly from the dismissal [PDF]. (via Eric Goldman)
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Earlier this week I wrote about the official Facebook Oversight Board and why everyone hates it because everyone hates everything having to do with Facebook. As I noted, I don't think it will have much of an impact one way or the other, but I do think it's an interesting experiment in moving at least some moderation controls away from an internet company.One of the strangest responses to the announcement, though, came from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who went on a truly bizarre and misleading rant about how this was the "new speech police" in which he then called out individual members of the board to complain that some of them have (*gasp*!) criticized Imperial Number One Leader President Trump.
Canadians already pay some of the highest prices for mobile data in the developed world thanks to limited competition and feckless regulators. With COVID-19 forcing everybody to stay at home, rural Canadians are now being pummeled with even higher bills than ever before. Especially those in rural areas forced to use capped, throttled, and otherwise restricted wireless lines as their primary connections:
The Senate voted today to give us five more years of pretty much unaltered surveillance. The reauthorization of key spy powers is back on again, after Congressional inaction ran head-on into a global pandemic, allowing these to (briefly) expire. Not that this temporary expiration resulted in any less surveillance. And with this overwhelming vote in favor of resumed spying, it will probably only be a matter of days before a consolidated bill ends up on Trump's desk. Despite his continual agitation against the "Deep State," Trump is expected to give these powers his official blessing.
Following the news that the FBI got a warrant and seized Senator Richard Burr's phone as part of its investigation into his alleged insider trading, Burr has announced that he's stepping down from being the chair of the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, where he's long been one of the biggest boosters of the surveillance state.Of course, some are now wondering if that's part of the reason why the Trumpian wing of the GOP have come out against Burr. Because the Senate Intel Committee has released a report confirming that Russia tried to help Trump win in 2016. The report is not particularly surprising, highlighting many widely known points. However, in Trumpland, no one seems to be able to handle the nuanced differences between the campaign directly "colluding" with Russia (for which the evidence is more limited) with the idea that Russia independently sought to boost Trump (for which the evidence is overwhelming). So, Trump supporters have been clamoring for Burr's head on a platter for merely stating facts, which are not allowed in this world where pointing out that The Emperor is Naked is somehow deemed to be heresy.Given Attorney General Barr's recent decisions to more fully weaponize and politicize the Justice Department, it can't be dismissed out of hand that there are political reasons for the FBI's sudden interest in Burr, but it still seems like a stretch. Sooner or later it's likely that there will be some fallout from which one can better assess the validity of the warrant, and whether or not Burr was engaged in insider trading.One point that a few people have raised is to look at whether or not the FBI is looking into any of the other Senators who sold notable chunks of stock just before the pandemic hit, though as we explained in that original story, the situations and fact patterns with each of the other Senators is at least somewhat different than Burr's case. For what it's worth, there are reports that the FBI questioned Senator Dianne Feinstein, who also sold some stock during this period. However, as we pointed out in the original post, there's little indication that her sales were COVID-19 related, especially since it was mostly selling off biotech stocks (exactly the kind of stocks you'd think would go up in a pandemic).The other Senator's selloff behavior that looked at least somewhat sketchy was Senator Kelly Loeffler, whose actions look worse and worse, as she denies things more vociferously. Just recently, she went on Fox News (natch) to claim that "this is 100% a political attack." Huh? What? You're the one who sold the stock. She also (get this) tried to blame socialism because why not?
For those of us of a certain age, MTV defined culture. It was where we learned about not just music, but wider pop culture. Of course, MTV lost its cultural place atop the mountaintop with the rise of the internet, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a key source of culture in the 1980s. Historically, the way that society preserves and remembers culture is to share it and spread it around. This is actually how culture is created. Yet copyright is the opposite of that. Copyright is about locking up content and denying the ability to create shared culture around it. And the best evidence of this is the fact that someone (it is not entirely clear who...) with the power to do so, demanded that the Internet Archive take down a bunch of old MTV videos that were uploaded.
Last year when Sinclair attempted to acquire Tribune Broadcasting for a cool $3.9 billion, you might recall the company was accused of some highly dodgy behavior in order to get the deal done. Despite the FCC doing its best to neuter most media consolidation protections to help move the deal forward, the union would have still resulted in the merged company violating media ownership limits and dominating local broadcasting in a huge number of new markets.To get around those limits, Sinclair allegedly got, uh, creative. Consumer groups accused Sinclair of trying to offload several of its companies to Sinclair-owned shell companies to pretend the deal would remain under the government's ownership cap. The company also tried something similar in trying to offload some stations to friends and other partner companies at highly discounted rates, allowing it to technically not "own" -- but still control -- those stations.It was all so dodgy that even the Ajit Pai FCC, which had initially been doing cartwheels to clear the way for the merger, had to back away from its support of the deal, shoveling deal approval off to an administrative law judge for review (aka the "kiss of death"). Tribune was then forced to kill the merger, and quickly thereafter filed a lawsuit against Sinclair for monumentally flubbing the deal.Fast forward to this week, and the FCC has finally issued a $48 million fine for repeatedly misleading regulators. In a statement, FCC boss Ajit Pai criticized Sinclair, but also criticized those insisting the company's broadcast licenses should be stripped away:
Remember, Rep. Devin Nunes really doesn't want you to read this Esquire article entitled, Devin Nunes’s Family Farm Is Hiding a Politically Explosive Secret. He'd be super duper upset if you read it. The article is about how Nunes, who frequently refers to his prior job as a "dairy farmer" in Tulare, California, probably doesn't want the world to know that his family up and left California to take their farm to Iowa. The article is a worthwhile read, detailing how the information about the location of the Nunes' family farm seems to stay hidden -- including how an article that reveals the Nunes' family presence in Iowa, published in the publication Dairy Star in 2009, suddenly disappeared from Dairy Star's website when Lizza showed up in Iowa asking questions. The article also discusses how many farms in the area employ undocumented workers, but that's almost a side plot.Either way, last fall, we wrote about how Nunes sued over the article in Iowa which, notably, has no anti-SLAPP law. As we pointed out at the time, this seemed like a case that was ripe for Hearst (the publisher of the article) and Lizza to try to make use of California's anti-SLAPP law, even though the case was filed in Iowa, because any reputational harm to Nunes would have to come in California, not Iowa. And, indeed, Hearst's smart lawyers took my advice (just kidding, they knew it without me suggesting it) and have asked the court to use California's anti-SLAPP law:
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I'm wondering how Senator Richard Burr feels about phone encryption right about now? As you may recall, the notoriously pro-surveillance Senator has whined about phone encryption at great length and even introduced legislation that would effectively end encryption on phones.And yet, the FBI just served a search warrant on him and seized his phone as part of its investigation into claims that he engaged in insider trading:
A few weeks back, the Trump FCC put on a big show about a new "Keep America Connected Pledge." In it, the FCC proudly proclaimed that it had gotten hundreds of ISPs to agree to not disconnect users who couldn't pay for essential broadband service during a pandemic. The problem: the 60 day pledge was entirely voluntary, temporary, and because the FCC just got done obliterating its authority over ISPs at lobbyist behest (as part of its net neutrality repeal), it's largely impossible to actually enforce.Shockingly, numerous ISPs immediately proceeded to ignore that promise, and began kicking customers offline. Several ISPs even kicked disabled folks offline, despite repeatedly promising not to. And despite making a big stink about the pledge, the Ajit Pai FCC's response to this was to do nothing. Not only has the FCC done nothing, it has tried to claim that the reason we're seeing a surge in these complaints is somehow thanks to the FCC's half-assed efforts on this front:
Given the massive impact that the coronavirus is having on life and the economy around the world, it's no wonder that governments are desperately searching for ways to bring the disease under control. One popular option is to use Bluetooth-based contact tracing apps on smartphones to find out who might be at risk from people nearby who are already infected. Dozens of countries are taking this route. Such is the evident utility of this approach, that even rivals like Apple and Google are willing to work together on a contact tracing app framework to help the battle against the disease. Although it's great to see all this public-spirited activity in the tech world, there's a slight problem with this approach: nobody knows whether it will actually help.That makes the early experience of Iceland in using contact tracing apps invaluable. An article in the MIT Technology Review notes that Iceland released its Rakning C-19 app in early April, and persuaded 38% of Iceland's population of 364,000 population to download it. Here's what this nation found in its pioneering use of a tracing app:
There is always tension between the First Amendment and trademark law, but it's a tension that is usually dissolved by trademark's primary aims to keep the public well informed as to the source and affiliations of goods and services. Still, it shouldn't be lost on anyone that the law at its heart is chiefly about what a business or commercial interest can name/say about itself. And, while the law carves out space in speech for identifying branding and language, the First Amendment doesn't entirely disappear in such commercial squabbles just because someone shouts trademark at it.A recent example of this would be a trademark suit brought by Marty Stouffer a couple of years ago. Stouffer is a notable documentarian who heavily influenced the nature documentary landscape, typically on PBS. One of his series was entitled "Wild America", a PBS staple beginning in the 80s. National Geographic, on the other hand, produced a series of nature documentaries under the title "Untamed Americas" beginning in 2012. Stouffer claimed the title of the series was infringing upon his trademark in 2018. Well, the court has since ruled in favor of National Geographic, applying the Rogers test, which looks at whether there are First Amendment rights gained by a title that has artistic merit concerning the work itself.
Last August, the North Carolina Court of Appeals decided it was OK for police officers to use protected speech as the basis for retaliatory stops. The stop -- and the criminal charges that followed -- originated from this interaction:
Reuters has published an in-depth report on qualified immunity, the Supreme Court-created legal doctrine that allows law enforcement officers to avoid being held responsible for rights violations, so long as they've taken care to violate rights in a way courts haven't previously directly addressed.The problem originates with the Supreme Court, which established this new quasi-right in a 1967 decision stating that police officers could be granted immunity for rights violations if they acted in "good faith." But it really didn't start going off the rails until 15 years later. In 1982, the Supreme Court expanded this protection, adding the "clearly established law" prong that has derailed countless civil rights lawsuits in the following forty years.It's this prong that makes it incredibly difficult for plaintiffs to prevail. Without a case exactly on point, the rights violations are overlooked as not being "clearly established." And since courts are under no longer under any obligation to reach that far in their rulings, very few rights violations become "clearly established," allowing cops to violate rights with near impunity and force citizens to fund their defense in the resulting lawsuits.It's this Supreme Court-encouraged stasis that Fifth Circuit Appeals Court judge Don Williett called out in a stinging dissent.
As noted yesterday, Congress this week is considering a new bill (the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act of 2020) that would not only renew already widely abused and heavily criticized FISA (Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act) powers, but extend the law to include warrantless access to American browsing and search data, a longstanding goal of the "there's no such thing as too much domestic surveillance" set. Given the well documented problems with the existing system, there's a large bipartisan coalition that believes this is, well, idiotic.Enter Senators Ron Wyden and Steve Daines, who introduced one of three amendments today aimed at making a fleeting effort to rein in FISA authority and abuse. Their amendment would have required a warrant before law enforcement and government could peruse your browsing and search data, which seems like a good idea in normal times, but even more so in the Bill Barr era. Wyden had this to say today about the threat posed by the expansion:
There's been plenty of talk these days about content moderation, and how different platforms should moderate their content, but much less attention has been paid to the people who do the actual moderation. Last year, we highlighted an amazing story by Casey Newton at The Verge detailing just what a horrible job it is for many people -- in which they are constantly bombarded with the worst of the internet. Indeed, some of his reporting helped spur on a labor dispute that just ended (reported, again, by Newton) with Facebook agreeing to pay out $52 million to content moderators who developed mental health issues on the job.
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It's worth pointing out just how difficult it is to get a judge to issue sanctions against a lawyer behaving badly. We cover many, many, many cases involving lawyers behaving really badly, and over and over again we see judges refuse to issue sanctions against those lawyers. Judges give lawyers the benefit of the doubt over and over again. That's one reason why it's so incredible that terrible lawyer and copyright troll Richard Liebowitz keeps getting smacked down by courts for truly egregious behavior.Last week was special for Liebowitz in that he got hit with sanctions twice by two separate courts. In the first case, in the Southern District of NY, Liebowitz, representing Angel Chevrestt (it appears Liebowitz has sued multiple websites on behalf of Chevrestt) against Barstool Sports. As the sanctions order shows, Liebowitz continues to be his own worst enemy in that he's just a terrible, terrible lawyer, who basically seems to ignore basic civil procedure and the court's own instructions:
On one hand, we have wireless companies trying to insist that 5G is some type of cancer-curing miracle (it's not). On the other hand, we have oodles of conspiracy theorists, celebrities, and various grifters trying to claim 5G is some kind of rampant health menace (it's not). In reality, 5G's not actually interesting enough to warrant either position, but you'd hardly know this reading the US and UK press.While the wireless industry's 5G hype machine has quieted somewhat during COVID-19 (though I'm still waiting for some marketing department to suggest it will easily thwart the pandemic), the folks on the conspiracy-theory end of the spectrum have only gotten louder. To the point where they're not only burning down cell towers in the UK, but putting razor blades and needles underneath protest posters on telephone poles:
Asking citizens to snitch on other citizens never seems to work out very well. The federal government has been doing it for years, maintaining "See Something, Say Something" hotlines that have mostly collected tips from people concerned about what their browner neighbors are doing. The same thing happens in the private sector. Ring's proprietary app -- Neighbors -- collects the same sort of garbage, empowering bigots to feel like they're acting on behalf of the common good.With lockdown orders in effect and social distancing rules in place in several cities and states around the country, local governments are asking residents to pitch in with enforcement efforts by reporting those who are breaking the rules. New York City opened a tip line for reports of social distancing violators and collected a bunch of Hitler-related memes, videos of the mayor going to the gym, extended middle fingers, and dick pics instead.The state of Ohio is asking for the same trouble. Its unemployment fraud portal is supposed to collect reports from businesses about employees of theirs that are collecting unemployment rather than coming into work. Some employees are opting out of potential infection when employers haven't shown the willingness to protect them by enforcing social distancing rules and/or providing them with personal protective equipment.The state is now going to have to sift through a whole lot of algorithmically-generated crap to find genuine reports of work shirkers, thanks to the efforts of one anonymous coder.
While I've done a fair share of posts here on the topic of trademarks and the alcohol industries, one of the most frustrating sub-types for those posts is the sort where the dispute exists between one wine maker and one brewery. There appears to be some misconception that alcohol is one big market or industry for the purposes of trademark. While it is true that far too few countries explicitly recognize that wine and beer are different markets in their trademark laws, most of the countries do still have customer confusion as a key test for infringement. And, I feel it's safe to say, the general public can tell the difference between beer and wine, and typically know enough about each's crafters to tell their branding apart.Now the general public in Australia is facing this test in a way, with a large liquor chain trying to oppose the trademark application for a craft beer gift service over a wine trademark it holds, but doesn't seem to be using.
Tyson Timbs went all the way to the US Supreme Court to get his forfeited Land Rover returned to him. Represented by the Institute for Justice, Timbs took his case through every level of the Indiana court system before finding relief in the nation's top court. Seven years after his vehicle was seized during his arrest for heroin dealing, he's still waiting for the cops to return his car.The Supreme Court said the seizure of a $42,000 vehicle over a crime with a maximum possible fine of $10,000 was disproportionate and violated Constitutional protections against excessive fines. Timbs ultimately only paid $1,200 in fines and spent one year on home detention for his crime, which involved two controlled heroin sales to undercover cops totaling less than $400.The state argued it had never adopted the excessive fine clause of the Eighth Amendment, despite most states having already adopted this clause more than 70 years ago. Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch seemed pretty exasperated at the state's attempt to talk around the issue to maintain ownership of a car it had seized in 2013.
Tyson Timbs went all the way to the US Supreme Court to get his forfeited Land Rover returned to him. Represented by the Institute for Justice, Timbs took his case through every level of the Indiana court system before finding relief in the nation's top court. Seven years after his vehicle was seized during his arrest for heroin dealing, he's still waiting for the cops to return his car.The Supreme Court said the seizure of a $42,000 vehicle over a crime with a maximum possible fine of $10,000 was disproportionate and violated Constitutional protections against excessive fines. Timbs ultimately only paid $1,200 in fines and spent one year on home detention for his crime, which involved two controlled heroin sales to undercover cops totaling less than $400.The state argued it had never adopted the excessive fine clause of the Eighth Amendment, despite most states having already adopted this clause more than 70 years ago. Supreme Court Justice Gorsuch seemed pretty exasperated at the state's attempt to talk around the issue to maintain ownership of a car it had seized in 2013.
During the catastrophic 2018 wildfires in California, Verizon made a painful and memorable gaffe: It throttled the Santa Clara Fire Department’s supposedly “unlimited” broadband data, causing the department to have to pay twice as much as usual to restore internet speeds that allowed it to deploy critical wildfire response.Now, with the entire globe gripped by the coronavirus pandemic, internet service providers don’t want to repeat Verizon’s mistake. Several major ISPs all over the world have announced that, among other measures, they’re suspending data caps for the duration of the crisis.It’s something consumers and activists have been calling for — for years. And it only took a global pandemic for ISPs to start listening.But will data caps come back as soon as countries ease their lockdowns and workplaces and schools start going back to normal? Will ISPs resume their data capping practices even sooner than that?We have plenty of reason to believe this is temporary. Rather than letting ISPs off the hook right now, we should be preparing ourselves for when some (or all) of them inevitably return to their old tricks. It only takes looking at the history of ISPs and consumer satisfaction to see why.What Is Data Capping, and Why Do ISPs Get Away with it?Data capping is a fairly common practice in the internet service provider industry, in which ISPs restrict how much data customers can use with their plans. This can take a couple different forms:
The DHS has come out against internet voting. Sort of.If there's anything less secure than electronic voting, it's internet voting. The temptation is to provide voters with more options if the pandemic continues to keep voters home. But guidelines from the DHS's redundantly-named Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) say this risks the integrity of those votes by opening them up to attackers.
A few weeks back, we went into detail on why Quibi was such a total disaster from Day 1, which can pretty much be summed up by the fact that Hollywood thinks the way you build something people want is to throw tons of money at it (and fudge the books on the back end), while refusing to understand that getting people to actually like what you want -- by making it convenient and building community -- matters. Hollywood overvalues throwing money at big name content makers, and completely ignores the tech, community, and social side of things. And Quibi just makes that whole thing abundantly clear.However, as Quibi sinks further and further away from relevance, and gets closer and closer to a footnote in a future "whatever happened to....?" story, the mastermind behind the clusterfuck, Jeffrey Katzenberg (formerly of Disney and Dreamworks), has decided that, no, no, the blame belongs entirely with the COVID-19 pandemic, and not with anything that he or his team did wrong:
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We've been pretty critical of federal surveillance powers going back, well, as long as we can remember. And while Trump's biggest supporters like to insist that FISA warrant abuses were some sort of new thing that were just used against his campaign in a politically motivated manner, the reality is that it's just been standard operating procedures for the FBI to abuse the same "backdoor warrants" that were first revealed in 2013, but go back years before that. While, yes, the problems with the Carter Page surveillance were concerning, they were no more concerning than tons of other crap the FBI has done in making use of so-called backdoor warrants to surveil tons of Americans without cause.Indeed, just this morning we were writing about how the FBI couldn't even bother to meet the most basic procedural requirements regarding the use of these backdoor searches, and violated the Constitution over and over and over again in sniffing through this huge corpus of data.Now, you might hope that even as we've had a new rash of misleading "deep state" complaints from Trump and his fans over the past few days, the government might actually look to pull back on the authorities granted to the DOJ/FBI to spy on Americans this way, but it appears that (of course) the opposite is happening. A draft bill to renew FISA powers would expand the FBI's ability to conduct warrantless backdoor surveillance of Americans by snarfing their way through NSA collections of data.Indeed it appears that, rather than enabling these backdoor searches through, let's just say, creative interpretation of the words in the law, the new amendment would explicitly allow such searches.
Time and time again we've highlighted how in the modern era you don't really own the hardware you buy. In the broadband connected era, firmware updates can often eliminate functionality promised to you at launch, as we saw with the Sony Playstation 3. And with everything now relying on internet connectivity, companies can often give up on supporting devices entirely, often leaving users with very expensive paperweights as we saw after Google acquired Revolv.And with the world shifting toward a "service as a subscription" model for everything, the products you buy can also suddenly cost you far more than the original value proposition suggested. Users who spent money to outfit their home with hardware from Wink learned this the hard way, when the company suddenly announced users would need to start paying a $5 per month subscription fee if they wanted the company's "smart" home products to keep working.According to a company blog post, users who don't pay the fee will "no longer be able to access your Wink devices from the app, with voice control or through the API," and all automations will be disabled on May 13. The blog post also attempts to explain that because the company doesn't rampantly monetize your personal data (something it's routinely hard for consumers to verify), the fee is necessary to keep the lights on:
The Intelligence Community's latest transparency report [PDF] contains even more evidence of the FBI's inability to follow the law when helping itself to the NSA's collections. The infamous "backdoor searches" of the NSA's Section 702 collections -- which sweep up millions of electronic communications every year -- have always been a problem for the FBI. (But it's a problem the FBI likely doesn't mind having.)Communications and data related to US persons are supposed to be minimized before being accessed by the FBI. The FBI may have permission to access this collection, but the impossible-to-stop "incidental" collection of US persons' communications means the FBI is supposed to use warrants when searching the data using US person queries. This mandate only applies to certain cases: criminal investigations not related to national security. The built-in minimization procedures are supposed to take care of the rest of the agency's backdoor searches, supposedly ensuring the FBI can't use a foreign-facing communications collection to spy on Americans.In practice, this almost never works. It certainly didn't work in every case listed in the ODNI's latest report. Elizabeth Goitein, writing for Just Security, says the report contains more depressing admissions from the FBI. Every time the FBI has accessed US persons communications in cases where it's required to get a warrant, it hasn't bothered to get a warrant.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been discussing for some time that esports is having itself a moment. The reason for that is obvious: there is an enormous vacuum that has been left by IRL leagues shutting down throughout the world. That vacuum is easily filled by esports that don't rely on sweaty people rubbing up against each other in order to pull off the same style of competition. It's all gotten big enough that the gamblers are now involved, along with most of the major sports leagues.So what more indication can there be that esports is filling the IRL sports void during this nightmare? Well, how about at least one national sports league deciding its championship via esports standins while the league is shut down?
For as long as people have been driving, cops have been imagining reasons to pull them over and coerce them into "voluntary" searches. The Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision (sort of) put an end to extended stops -- the ones that start with a perceived violation that's dragged out until a drug dog arrives. Unfortunately, that decision only removed part of the equation. The Supreme Court's Heien decision made it possible for cops to rely entirely on pretext to engage in fishing expeditions by saying cops only had to think they witnessed a traffic violation, rather than actually be accurate about the laws they're tasked with enforcing.Cops are still trying to bring drug dogs to routine traffic stops. The Rodriguez decision is generally taken to mean cops just need to be quicker about rustling up a K-9 unit. Cops love drug dogs because they allow cops to perform the warrantless searches they want to perform. The drug dog's handler can call literally any movement by the dog an "alert," turning normal dog behavior into "probable cause" for a search. It doesn't help that the dogs are rewarded for every alert and given no positive reinforcement for failing to find anything interesting.Courts have historically been willing to cut drug dogs as much slack as they cut their law enforcement officer handlers. Subjective interpretations of anything an animal does to please its master is considered close enough to Fourth Amendment compliance to justify warrantless searches. Every so often, a court will question the reliability of the dog or the intent of its handler, but those are anomalies.This case, via FourthAmendment.com, is an amazing anomaly. Not only did the court choose to hear from experts on drug dog training and handling, it actually went so far as to call into question the reliability of every drug dog in the state.The suppression order [PDF] contains a subheading rarely seen in federal court decisions:
The NY Times had a report over the weekend about how the US government was gearing up to accuse China of using cyberattacks to get at COVID-19 vaccine data:
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