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Plenty has been made of the President's unwillingness to adhere to anything close to reasonable security when using his mobile phones. Whereas the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the National Security Agency usually work in concert providing state leaders with "hardened" devices that are heavily encrypted, routinely updated, and frequently swapped out, Trump has refused to use these more secure DMCC-S devices (effectively a Samsung Galaxy S4 device utilizing Samsung's Knox security architecture) because they apparently infringe on his ability to Tweet.Just a few months ago, Senators sent a letter expressing concern that Trump's mobile phone practices were leaving the President open to potential hacking by foreign entities:

Sci-Hub describes itself as "the first website in the world to provide mass & public access to research papers". At the time of writing, there were 77.5 million academic papers available on the site. Many, perhaps most, of them were funded by taxpayers, through government grants to researchers working at educational institutions. The person behind Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, presumably sees her site as a way of letting people have access to the work they paid for. The publishing giant Elsevier doesn't agree. For some reason, it seems to think it has a right to a profit margin of 35-40% arising from its role as a gatekeeper to the papers that the public has paid for.The resulting David and Goliath battle between Sci-Hub and Elsevier has been raging for years, and follows a predictable pattern. Elsevier spends lots of money getting a court somewhere to shut down one way of accessing Sci-Hub, and the latter simply finds an alternative -- by moving to a new domain, for example. As TorrentFreak reports, Elsevier has just "won" another pointless legal battle:

It probably shouldn't be all that surprising that there is a decent volume of trademark disputes that occur over restaurant menu items. Somewhat like the craft beer industry, the restaurant industry has for a long, long time looked toward creative output for menu items as a way to stand out. Because there are only so many ways you can name food or a dish, occasionally this creative naming practice causes trademark issues.A recent example of this occurred in Canada, where multiple diners were making omelettes and calling them "mish-mash." Beauty's is a Montreal staple that has served a mish-mash omelette, composed of the normal egg ingredients alongside items like hotdogs, peppers, and salami, for several decades. It was only in 1989, though, that Beauty's got a trademark on the name. Other diners, such as Cosmos and Bagel Etc., have offered up their own mish-mash omelettes going as far back as the early 1980s. Despite the trademark, there were no disputes over the menu items until this year, when Beauty's sent C&D notices to several restaurants.

On November 19, Google is expected to finally launch the company's long awaited game streaming platform, Google Stadia. Stadia is being heralded as the vanguard of a new push to eliminate your local game console, and shift all of the computing and processing power to the cloud. The shift to game streaming is likely inevitable, the only problem is that Stadia may be a little ahead of its time. And, like so many Google projects (like Google Fiber), game developers are apparently worried that Google may waffle on its commitment to the project:

There has been a debate over the past few years about the legality of "doxxing," which would loosely be defined as identifying individuals and/or their personal information which they'd prefer to remain secret. This is coming up in a variety of contexts, including effort to unveil the whistleblower who first called attention to President Trump's questionable call with Ukraine's President. However, we also noted in passing, last week, that the new privacy bill from Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Anna Eshoo contained an anti-doxxing clause, which states:

Just a few days ago, copyright troll lawyer Richard Liebowitz was being threatened with jail time for refusing to provide a judge with some evidence his grandfather had died. If that doesn't seem like something most judges would demand, you're right. It takes a special kind of lawyer to drive a federal court judge to start demanding proof of death from an attorney.Liebowitz had blown off a discovery conference. When called on it, he claimed his grandfather had died on April 12th, forcing him to miss the scheduled conference. The judge had other reasons to doubt Liebowitz's claim -- like other screwing around he had performed during this litigation, as well as his short, but colorful (read: sanction-heavy) litigation career.This information was demanded again and again by the judge. Liebowitz again and again refused to provide documentation of his grandfather's death. Sanctions were handed down, rising from $100/day to $500/day as Liebowitz continued to refuse to respond to the judge's order. The judge gave Liebowitz one more chance to turn up in court with the proper paperwork. If he failed to do so, he was to be arrested.Since then, there have been a couple of developments. William Bastone of The Smoking Gun managed to find evidence of Liebowitz's grandfather's demise.

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As you're probably aware, on January 1st of this year, we actually had a public domain day in the US for the first time in over two decades. Prior to that Congress (with the help of Hollywood lobbyists) had worked to continually extend copyright law whenever new works were due to go into the public domain. These extensions still seem to violate the spirit of the copyright clause in the Constitution, given that it is granting Congress permission to create such monopolies only so much as those monopoly rights "promote the progress." Any reasonable interpretation of that clause means that copyright law should be allowed in cases where it creates the incentive to create. But it's difficult to see how extending copyright law decades after the work has been created does anything to incentivize that work in the first place.Nonetheless, this year, Hollywood finally realized that it was probably too much to ask to get another copyright term extension and finally let works from 1923 enter the public domain. One of the signature works of the public domain class of 1923 was the song Yes! We Have No Bananas by composers Irving Cohn and Frank Silver. As of January 1st, anyone was free to make use of that song. Indeed, in our own Public Domain Game Jam competition, we actually had not one, but two separate game entries based on "Yes! We Have No Bananas."But, of course, even if Hollywood wasn't going to push for term extension, that doesn't mean it won't do what it always does, and pull other levers. Glenn Fleishman had posted a video of the song to YouTube in celebration of it entering the public domain earlier this year. He even titled it "Yes! We Have No Bananas, now in the public domain." The video is of him and friends/family singing it at a New Year's Eve Party:However, that video has now been "claimed" by Universal Music and various subsidiaries, meaning that they could "monetize" it or force it offline, despite them literally having no rights to speak of.

US wireless carriers have spent much of the last year under fire for hoovering up your location data, then selling that data to any nitwit with a nickel. More recently they've been busted even selling access to E-911 location data, which is increasingly even more accurate in tracking users than traditional GPS. We've noted repeatedly that lax ethical standards result in this data often being abused by dubious third parties, or used illegally by law enforcement or those pretending to be law enforcement.Throughout these evolving scandals, the Trump FCC hasn't done anything to ensure the public this is being adequately looked into. There's been no critical statement about this practice issued by the FCC, and despite some early hints at a potential investigation, there's been zero public traction of any kind. Last week, some lawmakers wrote to the FCC boss Ajit Pai calling him out for doing nothing in response to the scandal:

There's a bit more Constitution in the "Constitution-free zone." A federal court in Massachusetts has ruled [PDF] border agents can no longer perform suspicionless device searches. This ruling aligns itself with the decision handed down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this year. If the government wants to dig into travelers' phones and laptops without a warrant, it needs to show it believes contraband will be located on the seized device.It's not quite a warrant requirement, which would align it with the Supreme Court's Riley decision. No court has been willing to apply this decision at the border, but requiring reasonable suspicion is a step in the right direction.The lawsuit was filed by 11 travelers whose devices were seized and searched by CBP and ICE agents. For some of the plaintiffs -- represented by the ACLU -- this happened multiple times. The court provides a snapshot of the intrusions central to the group complaint.

As we've detailed for some time now, while contract blackouts have almost always been an annoyance in the cable television industry, they are becoming increasingly prevalent alongside the rise of cord-cutting. Normally when we discuss cable blackouts, the discussion revolves around the entirely predictable strategy by both the broadcaster and cable operator to blame one another, all while paying customers sit without the channels they're paying for. While annoying, that is usually the extent of our comments on the matter.But DirectTV has forged a new path on how to handle broadcast blackouts. In Colorado, both DirectTV and Comcast were hit with a blackout of the Altitude Sports Network, the broadcaster for the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche, and more. ASN wanted, as per usual, higher fees for its broadcast rights. DirectTV and Comcast did not want to pay those higher fees. But, as part of a larger investigation into the fees Comcast and DirectTV assess their customers, the Colorado AG is looking into why DirectTV kept charging customers the regional sports fee for the channel it was no longer showing.

Another bang-up job by our nation's drug warriors (which included the use of flashbangs!) has resulted in yet another lawsuit alleging a host of rights violations. The Louisville (KY) PD's SWAT team was in such a hurry to raid a supposed drug dealer's house, the swearing officer couldn't be bothered to get any of the facts right. (via Reason)Fourteen officers descended on Ashlea Burr and Mario Daugherty's home on October 26. The no-knock raid began with the breaking of the home's glass front door and didn't end until everyone in the house -- including three teenage children -- had assault rifles pointed at them. Despite the assurances of Detective Joseph Tapp that there would be drugs found in the house, there were no drugs found in the house.The lawsuit [PDF] and the warrant affidavit [PDF] are disturbing reads. It shows just how little is needed to secure judicial permission to point guns at innocent people. They're best read together to highlight how much bullshit Det. Tapp shoveled onto the affidavit's pages to come up with something approaching "probable cause."From the affidavit:

We've made it abundantly clear that California's new privacy law is aggressively undercooked, and will require some very serious fine tuning if it's going to be workable for many California companies. At the same time, giant companies like Google, Comcast, and AT&T have spent a lot of time aggressively misrepresenting what the law actually does, running ads outright lying about the bill's impact, and downplaying the fact that states wouldn't be wading into the privacy waters if these companies hadn't lobbied to kill modest federal privacy requirements in the first place.Whereas companies like Facebook have repeatedly and routinely tripped over themselves in almost dystiopian fashion to make their existing regulatory headaches worse, it has been interesting to watch Microsoft, steeled from its experiences in the late 90s, navigate the current minefield more deftly. That was on display again this week when Microsoft came out in seemingly total support of California's new privacy law, with a blog post by Chief Privacy Officer Julie Brill stating the company intends to apply its adherence to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) law nationwide:

Two separate news reports last week highlighted how both Twitter and Instagram appear to be taking to heart arguments made about how both of those platforms may (inadvertently) encourage questionable behavior. Instagram will begin hiding "likes" from users in the US to cut down on the dopamine rush of trying to maximize those bits of pointless social validation:

Nothing owns like a self-own. And Ring -- Amazon's doorbell surveillance project -- is so into self-abuse, it's almost kinky. It's a DOM when it picks up another submissive law enforcement partner (400+ at last count, so maybe get tested if you install a doorbell without protection). Any other time, it seems to be a relentlessly cheery masochist. Hopefully it's deriving some pleasure from the endless negative news cycles. Maybe 95% market share heals all wounds.Ring is putting the "creep" back in the phrase "surveillance creep." While there's some value to keeping an eye on your front doorstep when you're expecting an expensive delivery, the downside is Ring might be letting cops know you've got a camera on your house. What it won't be letting you know is that it will part with your footage at the drop of a subpoena.If you're not eyeballing your neighbors by proxy, you're not living right. That's the message of the Neighbors app, which is pushed by Ring and cops alike. Breaking down "sharing" barriers is the first step toward bypassing the warrant process. Ring is the grease and the wheel.The pushback against Ring's law enforcement adoption offensive has had minimal effect on the company. It continues undeterred, even as it attempts to explain both its lack of interest in adding facial recognition software to its doorbells and its retention of a facial recognition division head. It's things like this that make one believe the public's opinion ultimately doesn't matter, not if Ring can convince enough cop shops to start pushing its offerings on the public.Ring is back in the news again. And, again, it's not because it did anything right. Or competently.First, Buzzfeed reports the doorbell company is as tone deaf as it is dominant in its market sector. What Ring thinks is cute and fun is actually just very, very creepy.

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Well, here we go again. So many politicians seem to think that Section 230 is the root of anything bad they see online, and insist that it needs to be removed to fix things that have nothing to do with 230. The latest is Joe Biden, who has a pretty horrible record regarding his own understanding of technology and the internet. In a weird comment on CNN about what to do about Facebook and moderating political advertising... Biden shifted the conversation to Section 230 after first making some false statements about what the law requires.

While the DOJ (run by former Verizon lawyer William Barr) and the FCC (run by former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai) are really excited to rubber stamp Sprint's $26 billion competition-eroding merger with T-Mobile, a bipartisan coalition of states are all that stand in the way in the deal. What began as a coalition of ten states had been slowly expanding over the last few months to include states like Texas. Collectively, state AGs have made it very clear that every meaningful economic metric indicates the deal will erode competition, raise rates, and result in thousands of layoffs as redundant employees are inevitably eliminated.But in recent months, T-Mobile lobbyists have had some success peeling states off from the lawsuit by making all manner of promises that history suggests aren't likely to be followed through on. Last month, for example, Colorado's AG pulled the state from the lawsuit after T-Mobile promised some additional jobs and 5G coverage to the state. In a press announcement, the Colorado AG says Dish Network (whose involvement we explain here) promised the state 2,000 additional jobs and broader 5G deployment to rural parts of the state if they back off the suit:

The ongoing Hong Kong protests aren't going to end anytime soon, but the government keeps throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. While US corporate entities are busy exchanging their spines for Chinese market share, those actually on the front lines are standing up for Hong Kong protesters.Hong Kong retains some autonomy from the Chinese government, which has allowed it to somewhat elude being cut off from the world by the Great Firewall of China. Local ISPs aren't willing to play the government's game, pushing back against demands they engage in censorship of Hong Kong residents on behalf of China. Pointing to the existence of VPNs and encrypted traffic, ISPs said any efforts it made would be mostly useless, if they were interested in making this effort. Which they weren't.Other providers, like Telegram, have refused government demands to censor content and have faced repeated DDoS attacks from state-sponsored hackers in retaliation. What's already being attempted will likely accelerate, thanks to an order handed down by the Hong Kong high court.

You might think that throwing a word like "magenta" into the Techdirt search engine wouldn't get you any results. But you would be wrong about that and you'd be wrong entirely because of T-Mobile and its parent company Deutsche Telekom. See, Telekom has trademark rights in several countries for a very specific shade of magenta. And with those trademarks, Telekom rather enjoys threatening other businesses that dare to use anything that remotely looks like magenta in their trade dress, whether the color in question is actually magenta or not, and regardless of whether the other company is even a competitor or not.And Telekom is still at it to the present. A German court has informed a startup insurance company out of New York called Lemonade that it must cease to use the shade of pink it's been using in it's branding for three years.

It's kind of stunning how frequently we see elected officials proposing things that are so blatantly unconstitutional that you wonder how they were proposed in the first place. Take, for example, a situation in southwest Wisconsin. Last week it was reported that the Lafayette County's board would be considering a hilariously overbroad resolution that threatened to prosecute journalists if they did not report on the local "Review Board of the Water Quality Study." The proposed resolution did not mince words, noting that it was put in place because of worries about "slander":

We've said it before (and even put it on a t-shirt) and we'll say it again: copying is not theft, and intellectual "property" is anything but. In September, the Niskanen Center published an excellent paper exploring this issue and explaining why IP is a misnomer — and this week we've got one of the authors of that paper, Daniel Takash, to discuss in more detail why property is simply the wrong lens for looking at copyrights and patents.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.

Earlier this year, the NSA -- after a few months of hedging -- finally mothballed its phone record collection program. The modified phone metadata collection had posed problems for the NSA since its remodeling with the enactment of the USA Freedom Act, which forced the NSA to ask telcos for specific records, rather than just demanding they hand over everything on a rolling 90-day basis.Whatever benefits this program provided to the NSA was apparently outweighed by the technical problems it created. After hinting at its impending death on a podcast of all things, the NSA made it (sort of) official in May, saying it didn't see any reason to move forward with the collection, not after it had already been unofficially shut down for several months by that point.The NSA may not need the phone records collection but it appears the FBI thinks it does. The easiest way for Congress to codify the program's shut down would be to let it expire at the end of this year. FBI Director Chris Wray is hoping to prevent a do-nothing Congress from doing nothing and letting the clock run out on the metadata collection.Wray's testimony to the Senate Intelligence Community asks legislators to flip the switch back to "ON."

Ever since coal boss Bob Murray threatened and then sued John Oliver and HBO over their story mocking his supposed concern for coal miners, I've been publicly (and possibly privately*) bugging Oliver and his team at HBO to do an episode specifically about SLAPP lawsuits and anti-SLAPP laws. And I'm happy to say that they listened! This past Sunday, Oliver's big story was all about SLAPP suits and anti-SLAPP laws, and focused again on Bob Murray, who finally dropped his case against Oliver and HBO earlier this year. It is well worth watching all the way up until the end:While most of the attention is obviously going to that fairly epic final musical number of insults directed at Bob Murray, I wanted to call out a few important points that were mentioned earlier in the piece that might have been passed over by some:

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Copyright troll attorneys are the worst. At best (and "best" is very relative here), they're using the judicial system as leverage in their extortion scheme -- one that involves complaint carpet-bombings and the hope that a small percentage of settlements will make the entire operation profitable. At worst, well... they're the worst.If they're not being called out by courts for their speculative invoicing operations, they're being literally convicted of fraud. Trolls cut and run when faced with any scrutiny from judges and defendants. At least the smart(er) ones do.Richard Liebowitz -- IP gun-for-hire -- isn't smart enough to do that. He rushes to the sound of his own gunfire, seemingly determined to maximize the self-inflicted damage. In a few short years, he managed to put a client on the hook for everyone's legal fees, been hit with a $10,000 bond demand after lying about his client's licensing agreement, and potentially set precedent that would make trolls like him liable for all ongoing legal fees if settlements higher than the final judgment are rejected by the plaintiff.Now, Liebowitz has added to his infamy by being sanctioned [PDF] for lying to the judge about a death in the family. (h/t Owen Barcala)Liebowitz blew off a discovery conference ordered by Judge Cathy Seibel. No call. No email. Nothing. The court only obtained a response from Liebowitz after ordering him to inform the court why he missed the conference and why he shouldn't be required to pay the defendant's legal fees for the conference he no-showed.Liebowitz's response -- aimed at avoiding having to pay someone else's legal fees -- was deliberately vague.

Back in 2007, Verizon was forced to strike an agreement with the New York State Attorney General for marketing data plans as "unlimited" when the plans had very clear limits. Twelve years later and it's not clear the industry has learned much of anything.After their efforts to strictly monetize usage didn't go well with consumers, wireless carriers around 2012 or so returned to offering unlimited data plans. But much like the unlimited data plans of old, these plans have all manner of bizarre restrictions. Verizon, for example, bans users from even watching videos in HD unless they sign up for more expensive plans. Carriers also throttle usage after you reach a certain amount of data for the remainder of your billing cycle. There are also limitations on how frequently you can use your phone as a tethered modem or hotspot.AT&T's latest updates to its "unlimited" wireless data plans are no exception, and require an industry-lingo decoder ring and a few hours of fine print reading to actually understand. Here, for example, is how CNET framed the changes:

India has expressed an interest in being considered a top-tier totalitarian state. Not content to let nearby nations claim all the glory in the "Terrible Places to Live" race, India has been stepping up its censorship and its domestic surveillance, presumably in hopes of being the next country to claim a coveted UN blacklist spot.The Indian government has asked third party contractors to help it build a massive surveillance network utilizing thousands of cameras and the current cream of the facial recognition crop at the time of deployment. The whole thing needs to be in place less than 8 months after the contract is secured, suggesting the government is more than happy to move forward with whatever it has on hand rather than whatever might actually do the job well.It's also climbing the global censorship charts, trailing only Russia, China, and Turkey in various social media platform demographics. But it is the king of Facebook censorship, delivering more takedown demands to Facebook than closest rival, Russia. When you're out-censoring Russia, you're playing the censorship game right.Disputed areas the Indian government claims, but doesn't actually control, are only encouraging further censorship from the Indian government. Unfortunately, US tech companies are helping the government maintain control of the narrative by silencing dissenting voices. Kunal Majumder of the Committee to Protect Journalists has more details:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment regarding the DOJ's attempts to squash a book, but one that is pretty generally applicable:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, while congress was gearing up to push a dangerous cybersecurity bill and one court was telling the DOJ that "state secrets" isn't a magic wand, we were hoping an important lawsuit about NSA surveillance would go forward despite the nutty plaintiff. A former NSA lawyer was hilariously warning Google and Apple that Blackberry failed because of 'too much encryption', while James Comey was just angrily demanding backdoor keys, and in the UK the GCHQ was straight-up blaming the tech industry for facilitating murder.Ten Years AgoThis very same week in 2009, the Obama administration was playing the "state secrets" card in a warrantless wiretapping case, not long after promising to change its state secret practices. Meanwhile, the MPAA was telling the FCC that file sharing would kill the internet, hot on the heels of getting 60 Minutes to air a full show of unalloyed MPAA propaganda about piracy — even as yet more studies were showing file sharers buy more media (just like how DVRs were helping, not hurting, TV) and attacks on file sharing just drive people further underground. But the latest leaks showed the copyright folks were planning on getting their way in one place: ACTA, which was looking like an entertainment industry wishlist.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, long before today's concerns about social media and politics, the big question was if political spam could influence elections. The MPAA was in the news too, foolishly following in the RIAA's footsteps and suing 200 file sharers — while DVRs were just starting to truly catch on. Phones were transforming tech with voicemail on the way out in favour of SMS and camera phone photos showing up on the front pages of newspapers. And the broadband providers were still fighting their vicious fight to ensure municipal broadband never happens.

We had just talked about the apology that Blizzard's President J. Allen Brack issued at the opening of Blizzcon this past week. In that apology, Brack accepts responsibility for "moving too quickly" in banning Blitzchung for his mild statements of support for the ongoing protests in Hong Kong and states that Blizzard hadn't "lived up to the high standards" that Brack apparently expects out of the company. Notably absent from the apology was any reference to altering Blitzchung's six month ban from competition, or any changes to other bans over Hong Kong speech the company had handed out.And now Brack has explicitly stated in a recent interview that Blitzchung's 6 month ban will stay in place, further calling into question what the point of his "apology" was at all.

A couple years back we wrote about the patent trolling operation Blackbird Technologies, which was a law firm that pretended it wasn't a law firm, and seemed to focus on buying up patents to shake down companies for cash. It had threatened many and sued a few, but definitely picked the wrong target when it decided to go after Cloudflare. Like Newegg before it, the team at Cloudflare decided that even if it was cheaper to settle, it would set a bad precedent and would likely lead to more trollish threats landing on its doorstep. So, instead, Cloudflare decided to fight back. And it went a step or two beyond Newegg, who would just fight the trolls in court. Cloudflare decided to not just fight in court, but then to seek to destroy Blackbird Technologies entirely. It launched a crowdsourced contest to search out prior art not just on the patent at issue in its own case, but on all Blackbird patents. It also went after the lawyers at Blackbird, filing bar complaints against the company for violating attorney ethics rules (mainly in holding itself out as not a law firm, but then acting as a law firm). There was also the issue of the firm appearing to purchase the bare right to sue, the same issue that brought down copyright trolling operation Righthaven. The issue there is that if you purchase the rights to a patent or a copyright, you have to actually purchase all of the associated rights, not do a convoluted thing where you pretend to buy the rights, but the original copyright or patent holder gets some of the proceeds of your trolling.The legal strategy went swimmingly well. Cloudflare got an easy win at the district court, and then a super quick and easy win on appeal at CAFC, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Cloudflare was so obviously on the right side of things that the CAFC panel didn't ask its lawyers a single question (which is very rare), issued a decision mere days after the hearing (incredibly rare) and found Cloudflare's arguments so correct that it didn't even explain its decision, but just issued a judgment that said "Affirmed" (even more rare). As we noted at the time, even though it was an "easy" win for Cloudflare, it still involved two years of legal wrangling, involving over 1,500 pages of legal briefings on both sides (900 from Cloudflare alone). That's expensive, time-consuming and distracting.Earlier this week, Cloudflare released an update about the rest of its efforts to hit back at Blackbird (now that Blackbird chose not to request the Supreme Court review the CAFC decision). All in all, the effort to clip Blackbird's wings appears to have been a pretty good success overall, even if the company is still operating. The crowdsourcing (and funding) campaign to find prior art against a bunch of Blackbird patents was definitely a success:

You may recall that back in January Netflix took something of a public pounding for pulling an episode of Hasan Minhaj's Patriot Act, after Minhaj went hard at Mohammad bin Salman. Netflix pulled the episode inside of Saudi Arabia when the country claimed the episode violated the kingdom's internet laws, which mostly revolve around keeping any criticism of the Saudi royal family off of the internet. Critics in America and elsewhere slammed Netflix for kissing the Saudi family's ring, while still others pointed out that the episode was still available on Netflix's YouTube page, including in Saudi Arabia. Some even argued that Netflix knew that all of this would be Streisanded, actually getting the episode more attention in Saudi Arabia that way.Such strategic moves to hold to moral values doesn't appear to have been reality, however, as Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently came out and publicly washed his company's hands of any kind of value-based stance.

So we've noted a few times now that the rise of streaming video competitors is indisputably a good thing. Numerous new streaming alternatives have driven competition to an antiquated cable TV sector that has long been plagued by apathy, high rates, and comically-bad customer service. That's long overdue and a positive thing overall, as streaming customer satisfaction scores suggest.But as the sector matures and players rush to the trough, there's a looming problem it seems oblivious to: too many services, and too many exclusives, and too high a price point could drive users back to piracy. An ironic outcome for a sector that took years to learn the lesson that the best way to compete with piracy is to offer better, cheaper, simpler services.It's the simplicity that's starting to unwind as every company on Earth rushes to capitalize on the streaming evolution and lock down their own content exclusives, fracturing availability. A new survey of more than 6,000 users around the world found that 70 percent of streaming customers say there’s now too many streaming options, and 87 percent worry it will become too expensive to keep up with all of them.Granted, while the "streaming is getting too expensive" line is a media hot take that shows up a few times a week now, it's often over-stated; users don't have to subscribe to all of the services at once, and unlike traditional cable can subscribe and unsubscribe at their leisure to save money. That said, there's still a problem with fracturing content availability to the point where users have to manage a dozen account logins, or hunt and peck through a dozen services to find content that's endlessly appearing and disappearing due to ever shifting and exclusive licensing arrangements:

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Welcome to the Intelligence Community, CBP!

In a bid to avoid losing access to the cash cow that is your daily browsing data, ISPs like Comcast have been lying about Google and Mozilla's quest to encrypt DNS data. The effort would effectively let Chrome and Mozilla users opt in to DNS encryption -- making your browser data more secure from spying and monetization -- assuming your DNS provider supports it. Needless to day, telecom giants that have made billions of dollars monetizing your every online behavior for decades now (and routinely lying about it) don't much like that.As a result, Comcast, AT&T, and others have been trying to demonize the Google and Mozilla efforts any way they can, from insisting the move constitutes an antitrust violation on Google's part (it doesn't), to saying it's a threat to national security (it's not), to suggesting it even poses a risk to 5G deployments (nah).Mozilla this week came out with a letter not only taking aim at those claims, but urging Congress to investigate telecom's long history of privacy problems:

The cost of sequencing every DNA "letter" in a human genome has fallen faster than Moore's Law, from around $100 million in 2001, to under $1,000 today (although some say the overall cost in a clinical context is higher). This brings with it the prospect of routinely carrying out full-genome sequencing for everyone. That's precisely what Matt Hancock, the UK's Health Secretary, has said he wants to see as a part of the country's National Health Service (NHS), reported here by The Telegraph:

Trademark bullies, being the obviously frustrating entities that they are, rarely incorporate enough shame to allow for any retreat from their bullying ways. Still, occasionally you come across a trademark bully that actually feels enough public pressure to back down. Relatively rare as these instances are, it's worth highlighting when an informed public actually pushes back on a bully enough to get them to back down.Meet Backcountry.com. The site sells all kinds of outdoors gear, with a focus on winter sports. As you might expect, the company also filed for trademarks for "backcountry" for clothing and apparel about a year ago. Despite that being a fairly generic term, particularly in the realm of outdoors gear, Backcountry.com then recently went on a trademark bullying spree.

As we've noted multiple times here at Techdirt, criminal defamation laws are unconstitutional, outdated, and almost exclusively used by law enforcement agencies to punish their critics. The ACLU -- along with a victim of New Hampshire's terrible criminal defamation law -- is hoping to have this law struck down as unconstitutional.Despite the law being clearly unconstitutional and its history of use in the state showing it has mainly been used by cops to go after critics, the state's Attorney General is spending taxpayers' money to defend a law that provides zero benefit to taxpayers.The problems inherent in an abusable law like this are only made worse in New Hampshire, where law enforcement officers are not only allowed to arrest people, but also initiate prosecution for misdemeanor charges like this one. The state also does not respect the right to counsel in misdemeanor cases, leaving it up to defendants without the means to hire a lawyer to defend themselves against charges brought by cops who are now acting as prosecutors.The state claims the law is perfectly fine and that Bob Frese -- the man arrested and prosecuted by Exeter police officers for saying Exeter cops were "dirty" and were being covered up for by their "corrupt" chief -- has no grounds to sue the law out of existence. The court disagrees, finding plenty that's disagreeable about the law itself and its use by police officers to punish critics. (via NHPR)As the court notes in its denial [PDF] of the state's motion to dismiss, Frese has already twice been subjected to arrest and prosecution under this law.

We live in interesting times. A year ago, the NY Times had reported that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was aggressively using Twitter to keep tabs on and harass critics of the government. As part of that story, it also claimed that the Saudis might have a "mole" within the company in the form of Ali Alzabarah, who had risen through the engineering ranks to a point where he could access information on people the Saudi government was interested in. That story only noted that Western intelligence agencies had alerted the company that the Saudis were "grooming" Alzabarah. Now, the DOJ has charged two former Twitter employees, including Alzabarah, along with a third individual who worked in social media marketing, with spying for the Saudis. The complaint is worth reading.It shows how officials appeared to groom the Twitter employees, starting with Ahmad Abouammo, who was (for a time) a marketing manager at Twitter, but who left the company in 2015. It describes how Saudi officials built up a relationship with him, setting up a tour of Twitter's headquarters, and then later providing gifts, such as an expensive watch. Soon after, Abouammo is accused of accessing information on Saudi critics and dissidents;

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There's a race on to have Congress introduce a comprehensive federal privacy law. As you may (or may not?) know, the US really doesn't have a law protecting our privacy. To date, any privacy protections have been a mixture of other laws, from the defanged 4th Amendment protecting (in theory more than reality) against government intrusion into our private lives, to the FTC's consumer protection mandates. However, many people recognize that this probably isn't doing enough to protect privacy in this age -- and with the EU taking the lead with the GDPR, it's become clear that the US needs to put at least something in place. So far, Congress has failed to come up with much, and there's a bit of a ticking time bomb in the form of California's hugely problematic CCPA law, which is set to go into effect on January 1st, despite a long list of problems with the law.So much of the discussion has been around whether or not a new federal law will come into play that pre-empts various states trying to create their own set of privacy laws. Reps. Anna Eshoo and Zoe Lofgren have now announced their entrant into the discussion with their Online Privacy Act. It is quite long and detailed, coming in at 132 pages which I recommend reading. They've also created a one page summary of the bill.The bill is ambitious, detailed and thoughtful... but also has some problems and is not likely to become law. There's a lot in the bill, but it will create a brand new federal agency, staffed with 1,600 employees, to "enforce users' privacy rights." Along those lines, it establishes what those rights are -- with much of it pulling from concepts currently found in the GDPR (i.e., rights to access, correct, delete, and download information companies hold about you). There are some opt-in requirements for using your data for things like machine learning (what seems like a response to the kerfuffle over IBM using Flickr images to train facial recognition AI).The law would also put a bunch of obligations on companies regarding data minimization and also force the companies to be more upfront about what they need particular data for. It would also limit the sale or transfer of personal information. It also criminalizes "doxxing" which it defines as disclosing "personal information with intent to cause harm." If this became law, that section might run into some 1st Amendment problems.Part of the "thoughtfulness" of the bill is that Eshoo and Lofgren have clearly heard some of the concerns that were laid out about the GDPR or other approaches to privacy. It includes an exemption for small businesses and then also includes a "ramp up" phase for companies that cross out of the small business realm. I'm always a bit concerned about "small business exemptions" because they lead to weird incentives and not always great outcomes. From a purely efficient standpoint, I tend to think that if the law is written in a manner that requires exempting certain classes of companies, it tends to highlight problems with the overall law itself, though there are some exceptions to that rule.Importantly, the bill also calls out that it should have no impact on journalism, and acts of journalism (reporting on people) should never be seen as violating the law. That could lead to some conflicting situations within the bill, but hopefully the blanket exemption on journalism would protect journalistic activity.That said, there are still problems with the bill. The biggest one is that it does not appear to pre-empt state laws, which is kind of the whole reason for introducing a federal law in the first place. I know that some privacy activists have pushed back against state pre-emption, but that by itself makes the bill somewhat useless, because California's law and other state privacy laws would more or less wipe this law off the books in terms of effectiveness. I understand the thinking that some have put forth that letting states craft their own privacy laws encourages more experimentation and thoughtfulness, but it makes little sense on an internet that crosses all borders. Complying with all state privacy laws is going to be a huge mess -- and therefore it seems like a federal law must include pre-emption of state laws for it to be valid.The bill also includes a private right of action, which is seen by many to be problematic -- as it's going to enable the rise of what are, in effect, privacy trolls. Again, there are reasonable concerns about if it's only left up to government enforcement that enforcement will be lax, or will suffer from regulatory capture, but leaving open a broad private right of action could have significant problematic consequences. The bill also seems clearly designed to set up certain non-profits to file a bunch of class action privacy lawsuits:

Back in 2014 the FTC sued AT&T for selling "unlimited" wireless data plans with very real and annoying limits. The lawsuit noted that starting in 2011, AT&T began selling "unlimited" plans that actually throttled upwards of 90 percent of your downstream speeds after using just two or three gigabytes of data. AT&T spent years trying to wiggle out of the lawsuit via a variety of legal gymnastics, including at one point trying to claim that the very same net neutrality and FCC Title II rules AT&T was trying to kill prevented the FTC from holding it accountable.Nearly a decade after AT&T's molestation of the dictionary began, the company has finally agreed to a $60 million settlement with the FTC without actually admitting any wrongdoing. That $60 million, after lawyers get a cut, will be split among millions of customers who signed up for AT&T unlimited data plans before 2011. Moving forward, AT&T also has to clearly disclose any limits on its "unlimited data plans" in a conspicuous manner (read: not hidden via fine print or embedded in a hyperlinked asterisk).For a company that pulled down $46 billion in revenues in the last three months that's not much of a penalty. And because the FTC's ability to rein in telecoms is restricted only to policing offenses that are very clearly "unfair and deceptive" under the FTC act, AT&T is, of course, still imposing all manner of restrictions on its unlimited data plans, it's just being marginally more clever about it. For example. AT&T's latest "unlimited" plans, released just last month, include all manner of restrictions on how you can use them and how much bandwidth you can use, AT&T's just marginally more up front about it.The problem is the government has been doling out wrist slaps on this subject for the better part of a decade without much to show for it. New York's Attorney General forced Verizon to dole out $100 million in refunds as long ago as 2007 in a bid to get the company to stop lying. Fast forward to 2019, and Verizon's still selling unlimited data plans with limits; in fact it now charges its unlimited data users extra if they want to actually view movies in HD. Sprint has also experimented with throttling video, music, and games on its unlimited data plans unless you pony up more cash.Regulators have generally looked the other way while carriers use their dominance to impose arbitrary nickel-and-diming limits. But because they inform users of the restrictions in a 400 page EULA, the FTC lacks the authority to really crack down on the behavior (assuming it had the resources or bandwidth to even do so in the first place) because it's not crystal clear they're being "unfair and deceptive." The FTC's Rohit Chopra issued a statement making it clear that a lack of competition is the primary culprit here:

A couple of months ago, security researchers performing a very physical penetration test of an Iowa courthouse were arrested for breaking and entering. They were also charged with possessing burglar's tools, which they did indeed possess.The employees of Coalfire Security said they had been employed by the state's judicial branch to test physical accessibility of courthouses. They had paperwork granting them permission to perform "physical security assessments" at multiple locations. While nothing specifically instructed the security testers to break into buildings, nothing in the documents suggested this was forbidden either. All it told the testers to do was to attempt to gain access to documents, internal systems, and areas closed off to the public.A statement from the judicial branch suggested there had been some sort of misunderstanding and it apologized to the law enforcement officers for the "confusion" caused by this unorthodox penetration test. That apparently wasn't enough for sheriff's department and local prosecutors who moved ahead with felony charges.Coalfire Security didn't have much to say when the news first broke, but the company has now issued a lengthy statement [PDF] that accuses the Dallas County Sheriff of turning a routine security test into a battle of wills between his office and the state's judicial branch.

The fallout from Blizzard's complete bungling of several eSports competitors taking public stances in support of the ongoing protests in Hong Kong has been both brutal and ongoing. As a reminder, professional Hearthstone player Blitzchung made relatively mild statements on a Blizzard stream backing the protests, leading to Blizzard yanking his prize money from an event and then issuing him a 1 year ban from competition. Others joined him in those comments afterwards, resulting in more bans. Soon after that, Blizzard returned Blitzchung's prize money and reduced his ban to 6 months, apparently believing the outrage that had ensued was over 6 months of the bans, rather than the fact that Blizzard would ban players for this kind of speech at all. Congress started making noise, calling on Blizzard to behave better, while at least one advertiser bailed on Blizzard entirely.That's what has occurred basically over the last month or so. This past week, of course, was the start of Blizzcon, the convention that is supposed to be one enormous celebration of Blizzard. Instead, Blizzard President J. Allen Brack was forced to walk onto the stage at Blizzcon's opening ceremony and issue an apology.

Right after Donald Trump lost the case against him for blocking people on Twitter, we noted that Dov Hikind, a critic of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez launched a similar lawsuit against her for blocking him. Again -- because it's important to repeat -- the court rulings in the Trump case made it clear that politicians who used Twitter for part of their job representing the public could not block people, as that's a violation of the 1st Amendment. The specific criteria laid out by the courts were that (1) if you're a public official, and (2) using social media (3) for official purposes (4) to create a space of open dialogue, then you cannot block people from following you based on the views they express.It appeared that the @AOC account met all of the criteria, and therefore should not be able to block critics for expressing their dislike of her stances or policies. Ocasio-Cortez, on her part, stood by her right to block people by claiming that she only blocked 20 people, none were constituents, and that they were only blocked for harassment which, she argued, was "not a viewpoint" (i.e., this wasn't viewpoint discrimination). Either way, just as the Hikind case was about to go to trial, Ocasio-Cortez has settled the case, admitted she was wrong to block Hikind and apologized:

Earlier this year you might recall that a self-driving Uber in Tempe, Arizona killed a woman who was trying to cross the street with her bike outside of a crosswalk. The driver wasn't paying attention, and the car itself failed to stop for the jaywalking pedestrian. Initial reporting on the subject, most of it based on anonymous Uber sources who spoke to the paywalled news outlet The Information, strongly pushed the idea that the car's sensors worked as intended and detected the woman, but bugs in the system software failed to properly identify the woman as something to avoid:

Rep. Devin Nunes remains super angry about a satirical internet cow. Earlier this year, we wrote about his lawsuit against the satirical cow on Twitter (and against Twitter itself) as well as a bunch of other lawsuits Nunes has been filing against critics in the intervening months. The cases appear to be fairly obvious SLAPP lawsuits; that is lawsuits that are designed solely to silence critics, rather than based on any legitimate legal basis. As we've noted, the venues in which Nunes has focused his lawsuits (mostly Virginia, and now Iowa) have either weak or non-existent anti-SLAPP laws. Tragically, the original case, against two satirical Twitter accounts, including one called "Devin Nunes' Cow" (a satirical reference to Nunes' oft-repeated claim of being a California dairy farmer, even as his family farm has uprooted itself to Iowa) was not thrown out by the judge on jurisdictional grounds, allowing the case to move forward.According to the Fresno Bee, however, even as that lawsuit is ongoing, Nunes' lawyer in the case has sent a threatening demand letter to Andrew Janz, a lawyer and state prosecutor who ran against Nunes in the last election and lost (much more narrowly than many people seemed to expect). The full letter is truly a piece of work, demanding Janz make the @DevinCow account stop making fun of Devin Nunes and issue an apology.I only wish I was joking. The letter is amazing in so many ways, starting from the opening lines: