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Nearly five years after being unlawfully arrested for violating a law declared unconstitutional thirty-two years ago, the ex-wife of a particularly stupid law enforcement officer is getting paid.Anne King, former spouse of Washington County (GA) deputy Corey King, posted a rather innocuous complaint about her husband on Facebook. Her post was the usual venting about inadequate assistance coming from the other parent -- nothing that justified what came after that. This is taken from Anne King's original complaint [PDF]:

Today has been declared the 50th anniversary of the internet, as on October 29th, 1969, a team at UCLA, lead by Leonard Kleinrock, sent a message to a team at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), representing the very first transmission over the then ARPANET, which later became the internet. This seems like a good moment to think about all that the internet has enabled -- but also just how far we may have strayed from its early promise and how far we might still be able to go. On the historical side, Kleinrock himself has posts at both ICANN and the Internet Society, and both are worth reading. The ICANN post is all about that first message transmission:

We recently wrote about the many problems (even if created through good intentions) with California's new AB5 law that will turn many freelancers into employees. As we noted, a big part of the problem is that many freelancers don't want to be employees, and the law will almost certainly backfire, in making companies wary of hiring freelancers in California. The one area we focused in on (though many are impacted) is journalism, where the author of the bill, Lorena Gonzalez admitted upfront that she chose 35 submissions per year as the dividing line "arbitrarily," despite the fact that many freelancers will contribute a much higher number than 35 stories for many publications.Andy Kessler, who is a freelance columnist for the Wall Street Journal, has a new piece highlighting how silly this new law is, including the fact that it seems based on the assumption that freelancers all really desire to be employees.

In 2009, the FCC funded a Harvard study that concluded (pdf) that open access policies (letting multiple ISPs come in and compete over a central, core network) resulted in lower broadband prices and better service. Of course when the Obama FCC released its flimsy, politically timid "National Broadband Plan" back in 2010, this realization (not to mention an honest accounting of the sector's limited competition) was nowhere to be found.Since then, "open access" has become somewhat of a dirty word in US telecom, and even companies like Google Fiber -- which originally promised to adhere to the concept on its own network before quietly backpedaling -- are eager to pretend the idea doesn't exist. But building core infrastructure (sometimes with government's help, sometimes not), then forcing ISPs to come in and compete in layers remains a compelling idea America wants nothing to do with.Well, most of America. Back in 2016, the city of Ammon, Idaho (population 16,500) decided to build an open access broadband network that let multiple private ISPs offer service to customers over city-owned fiber. The resulting competition has, several years later, resulted in (surprise), better, faster, and cheaper access to broadband. As a result, this city in Idaho now boasts better broadband infrastructure than most US "tech hubs" like San Francisco and Seattle, both of which have flirted with the idea but never followed through:

We've been highlighting lately how the situation with the whistleblower, who first tried to ring the alarm bells about President Trump's now confirmed quid pro quo call with Ukraine to dig up dirt on a political opponent, showed why the "official channels" are useless for whistleblowers. Some suggested that we were premature in making that claim. However, since then, we've seen the President himself repeatedly try to attack the whistleblower while repeatedly demanding that the whistleblower be revealed. Now come reports that a staffer for Rep. Devin Nunes is going around revealing the name of the whistleblower:

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Longer yellow lights are on the way, thanks in part to a man a state government agency once forbade from criticizing red light cameras without a proper license.As The Newspaper reports, the Institute of Transportation Engineers -- which develops standards for managing all aspects of driving under the US Department of Transportation -- has agreed with recommendations made by a team of engineers that found ITE-approved yellow light timing standards reduced public safety and resulted in more accidents.

Both Mozilla and Google have begun pushing encrypted DNS via their respective browsers, making it more difficult for outsiders to monitor and/or monetize your daily browsing habits. Not too surprisingly the broadband industry, which has a long, proud history of covertly collecting and selling this data, isn't particularly happy about this evolution. With the help of unskeptical news outlets, telecom lobbyists have been trying to convince the government that what Mozilla and Google are up to is somehow nefarious, going so far as to (incorrectly) claim the move is even an antitrust violation.Last week, Motherboard published Comcast documents highlighting how Comcast has been also trying to convince gullible lawmakers that the move to encrypt DNS traffic somehow poses a threat to national security and the sacred DC tech policy pixie dust that is 5G:

A couple of years ago, the Georgia state appeals court interpreted the Supreme Court's Riley decision to cover data pulled from vehicles after accidents. If warrants were required to search cellphones -- thanks to their ability to store all sorts of personal information -- it stood to reason warrants should be needed to access other data not visible to the naked eye.

Thanks to untrustworthy cops, people's lives are being destroyed. It's more than just bogus stops and bogus arrests. It's more than faulty field tests that tell cops innocuous substances are illegal drugs. It's more than a judicial system that's tilted against criminal defendants, even as the system claims we're all innocent until proven guilty.One of the reasons the system is tilted against defendants is prosecutors' refusal to turn over exculpatory evidence. More than one judge has noted the "epidemic of Brady violations." Named after the 1963 Brady v. Maryland Supreme Court decision, Brady evidence is anything that might help the defense argue against the government's case. There's an obligation placed on prosecutors, far too many of which feel is optional. Nearly 100% of criminal prosecutions end in plea deals, giving prosecutors a convenient way of closing cases before they even need to consider their evidentiary obligations.Brady lists are lists of officers considered too untrustworthy to testify in court. This could be because they've been caught lying on the stand. This could be because of a lengthy history of misconduct. Law enforcement agencies rarely fire bad cops. But, occasionally, they'll inform prosecutors they don't want these officers testifying because of their internal affairs rap sheets.This information should be handed over to defendants, but it very rarely is. The easiest way to dodge this obligation is to not create the lists in the first place. If you don't know who's a bad cop, you can't possibly inform the defense that your key witness is impeachable. Win-win for the government. An investigation by USA Today shows the creation and maintenance of Brady lists appears to be another thing law enforcement considers to be optional.

What is it with college bus companies? For years we've covered the insanity of Suburban Express and its attacks on customers for criticizing the company, and now we have a story that impacts my own alma mater. Coach USA is a large bus holding company that runs a bunch of different bus companies, including ShortLine, which runs regular coach bus service between downstate New York and upstate New York, making it a popular option for students from the New York City metropolitan region going to college at Binghamton, Ithaca, Cornell, Albany or Elmira. It's been around for quite some time -- and like many college bus transportation services, the subject of jokes.CU Nooz, a satirical news site that I'm pretty sure began its existence long after I left town, recently had a satirical article (which is basically all the site does) mocking the Shortline Bus. And Coach USA responded by sending an utterly ridiculous cease & desist letter.

Someone's keeping the government in line in Idaho. Federal judge Ronald E. Bush isn't just skimming warrant applications and signing them. He's actually reading them and applying the law. This probably isn't endearing him to federal agents.In May of this year, he told the government that forcing a suspect to unlock a phone using swipe pattern was unconstitutional. He told the government the same thing a couple of months later when it was attempting to get a court order compelling fingerprint production. One of these was rolled back by the district court, but it appears warrant applications in Ronald Bush's court are receiving more scrutiny than they are elsewhere.Judge Bush's latest pushback deals with cell site location info. This information, collected by cell service providers, used to be acquired without a warrant. Up until the Supreme Court's 2018 decision, CSLI was considered a third party record that could be obtained with only a subpoena. Historical location data now needs warrants, hence these warrant applications -- one of which Judge Bush has rejected [PDf}.Bush says the Stored Communications Act (SCA) warrant is fine as long as the government sticks to, you know, stored communications. But the government wants to do more under this same authority. Since the government doesn't appear to know exactly where its suspect is located, it wants to use the SCA to track the location of the suspect's phone as location records are generated.

Last week we noted that the House (overwhelmingly) voted in favor of the CASE Act, which is presented as a "small claims court" for copyright issues, but which has significant Constitutional issues, and would almost certainly lead to an uptick in copyright trolling activity. As we noted, the bill still needed to go to the Senate, and it appears that this is (at least for now) being blocked by Senators Ron Wyden and Rand Paul who have put a hold on the bill, and will introduce an alternative approach.

India must be looking across the border at China and nodding approvingly. India is rolling up the global censorship charts, firing off thousands of takedown demands and court orders to American social media companies. The government also seems overly-concerned with "fake news" and has been abusing its national security laws to make social media posts (and sometimes their posters) disappear into the ether.Tech advancements are increasing the capabilities of the government's multiple surveillance networks. The most immediate beneficiary has been the country's law enforcement, which has added pre-crime analytics to a tool chest containing thousands of cameras and their biometric add ons.Citizens are also being saddled with digital IDs based on their fingerprints. The tech doesn't work as well as dozens of sci-fi movies led us to believe. The end result is people being unable to convince the government they are who they say they are, thanks to faulty tech or fingerprints that aren't in perfect enough shape to talk print readers into responding appropriately. This had led to people losing access to public assistance, sending the nation's most vulnerable residents into tailspins they may never recover from.Since this modernization is all going so well, the Indian government wants to expand its biometric collections. The country is seeking to assemble one of the world's largest facial recognition databases, as well as everything needed to make use of it, including cellphone apps for cops running scans and searches while on patrol.

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Despite industry claims, US wireless is painfully mediocre. US consumers pay some of the highest prices for mobile data in the developed world, thanks to regulatory capture and wireless competitors who embrace "competition theater" more than actual price competition. Also contrary to industry claims, these high prices don't necessarily reflect quality; US LTE (4G) speeds are not only among the slowest in the developed world, arbitrary throttling, caps, and other usage restrictions reduce the value of these connections even further.Up in Canada the problem is even worse, thanks to industry consolidation the US appears poised to replicate. Rogers, historically one of the more embarrassing Canadian telcos on the net neutrality front, has seen its stock drop this week after the company was forced to slash its revenue expectations for this year. The reason? Rogers, under pressure from the public and regulators, was forced to introduce unlimited data plans this year, causing a user exodus from more expensive, metered offerings that sock users with costly per gigabyte surcharges.Rogers, for its part, was amusingly surprised by the sudden consumer interest in (relatively) straight forward wireless data plans that don't nickel-and-dime users to death:

The whistleblower report implicating President Trump in a quid pro quo exchange of US military aid for promises to investigate a political rival has been very illustrative of the dangers of whistleblowing. Laws and policies mean next to nothing when the proper channels are willing to bury reports and possibly the reporter.The president himself has called for the whistleblower to be unmasked. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence unilaterally decided this whistleblower report didn't need to go any further than its unfriendly confines. This decision was made despite the allegations containing matters of "urgent concern:" foreign interference in a US election.The ODNI got the back up it needed from the White House. The Office of Legal Counsel sided with the administration and claimed the content of Trump's call with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky wasn't "concerning" enough to be forwarded to Congressional oversight by the ODNI.The Inspectors (plural) General disagree. A letter [PDF] sent to the Office of Legal Counsel -- signed by more than 50 IGs from dozens of federal agencies, including the DOJ, NSA, CIA, and State Department -- says the OLC's opinion is not only wrong but potentially seriously damaging.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Rico R., responding to an ultimately-unconvincing defense of the CASE act from a popular source:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, scrutiny was ramping up on former NSA boss Keith Alexander from all directions, while evidence continued to emerge further linking the NSA's SIGINT director to private contractors. Rep. Mike Rogers was calling for Ed Snowden to be charged with murder, and a former agency official was saying anyone who "justified" Snowden's leaks shouldn't be allowed to work for the government. We learned more about the CIA's spying on the Senate, while Congress was not so easily giving in to the FBI's demands about ending encryption, and amidst all this... more research showed mass surveillance doesn't work.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, the copyright lobby was bumping up against proposed anti-spam laws because they might interfere with their DRM and spyware practices, copyright holders were going to war with univeristy photocopy shops, and the US Chamber of Commerce began its DMCA-fight with prank group The Yes Men. We learned that Shepard Fairey made some bad decisions in his copyright fight with the AP over his famous Obama poster, but also wondered whether anyone could trust the AP's own reporting on the subject. And we saw trademark shenanigans from both the usual suspects (Monster Energy) and some more surprising ones (The Sex Pistols).Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, people were looking to the future of mobile devices — especially with cheap wifi on the rise — and examining everything from what makes mobile bullying unique to the coming consequences of device convergence and the possibility of peer-to-peer bartering becoming a dominant form of commerce. One prediction certainly didn't come true: a Finnish researcher extrapolated some trends and decided that the internet would collapse in 2006. Meanwhile, the RIAA's own figures were painting a different picture about file sharing from the one the agency liked to tout, web publishers were maybe-kinda-sorta coming to terms with BugMeNot, and some news websites were getting over their silly aversion to linking to other news outlets in their own coverage.

We've long discussed the problem that is astroturfing and companies that abuse website reviews sections by inputting fake positive reviews for their own products. These fake reviews break the ecosystem of sites like Yelp and many others, where a big part of the draw to the sites are the communities that provide helpful, honest reviews. It's also been the case, however, that such fake review campaigns have occasionally come with fines or lawsuits with limited clarity on precisely what laws were being broken.Still, the FTC is a thing and it would seem to be in that organization's purview to mete out some kind of punishment for the truly bad actors out there. In the case of skincare company Sunday Riley, however, it seems that FTC settlements for truly egregious fake review campaigns are entirely without teeth.Let's start with the scheme itself. According to the FTC, for two years, spearheaded by founder Sunday Riley herself, employees and interns were tasked with both voting down real negative reviews on Sephora.com, as well as setting up fake accounts for Sephora and inputting fake positive reviews. This, again, was directly communicated by Riley herself.

On very rare occasions, the front mouths for law enforcement -- police unions -- will surprise you with inadvertent truthiness. Such a rarity occurred recently. It was -- as almost every union outburst is -- provoked by the introduction of the tiniest sliver of accountability.The Bronx District Attorney decided to release its list of cops even it can't trust. What the New York Post refers to as a "naughty list" bears some resemblance to the Brady lists compiled (but rarely released) by other city prosecutors. These lists contain cops who have been caught lying in reports or in court or have had evidence tossed (usually more than once) for Constitutional violations.These lists are supposed to make their way to criminal defendants. This rarely happens either. No prosecutor wants their star witness impeached, even if the prosecutor knows what we know: cops lie. Some more than others.The list released to the New York Post contains some redactions (thanks to sealed cases), but at least a few officers' names were made public. Here's one snippet from the "naughty list."

Another day, another shining example of why connecting everything from your Barbie dolls to tea kettles to the internet was a bad idea. This week it's Whirlpool that's under fire after a researcher discovered that the company had failed to secure a database containing 28 million records collected from the company's "smart" appliances. The database contained user email addresses, model names and numbers, unique appliance identifiers, and data collected from routine analysis of the appliances' condition, including how often the appliance is used, when its off or on, and whether it had any issues.Needless to say this is just the latest example of security researchers doing companies' jobs for them after they connected their products to the internet, then failed to adequately secure the data gleaned from them. For its part, Whirlpool told the researcher that they managed to secure the information within a few days of being alerted earlier this month:

The federal government still doesn't have any great ideas on how to head off future school shootings. But it does have some ideas. Some ideas are better than none when calls to "do something" abound. Something is indeed in the works. Unfortunately, the solution being offered just opens up students to increased surveillance, on and off campus.You already know we're headed to a darker place when the head of the DOJ is touting anti-terrorism tactics as a solution.

I've mentioned in the past that, from Techdirt's earliest posts, one key topic is how you handle "jurisdiction" on the internet, since the internet is global, and laws don't always work that way. Indeed, allowing for global jurisdiction for any particular government's laws would inevitably mean that the most draconian and the most limiting laws rule around the globe -- and that should worry everyone. This is why we've been so concerned about rulings concerning "global" blocking of content in places like Canada and the EU. Thankfully, just recently, the Court of Justice in the EU stopped one global application of the EU's right to be forgotten, and Canada's attempt got effectively stopped by a US court.And now we get to see how all this plays out in India, as a court has issued a global blocking order directed at Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The content in question appears to be a video about a book, Godman to Tycoon that the courts have deemed to be defamatory towards Swami Ramdev, a somewhat controversial "yoga superstar."The companies pushed back arguing a variety of points including that the whole case made no sense since the person who uploaded the videos themselves wasn't even targeted with any lawsuit -- and if that person removed the videos, they would be gone worldwide. But, mostly they focused on just how wrong it is to think that an Indian court should be able to control content well outside its jurisdiction (and they point to the rulings in the Canadian and EU cases above, among others, to suggest that it will only lead to embarrassment for the Indian court to try to reach its power too far).

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There is an infamous chart in media circles. It shows newspaper advertising revenue steadily rising until about the year 2000. A few years later, it drops off a cliff. Superimposed on this chart is the exponential growth of Google and Facebook:Source: Thomas BaekdalThe obvious implication, at least to those who work in journalism, is that Google and Facebook killed their industry. That’s certainly the conclusion Matt Stoller comes to in a recent op-ed for the New York Times:

Have we mentioned lately that 5G is being over-hyped? While it's an important evolutionary step in wireless connectivity, it's far from the revolution hardware vendors and cellular carriers are promising. Verizon, for example, insists that 5G is the "fourth industrial revolution" that will almost miraculously spur the smart cities and smarter cars of tomorrow. While 5G is important (in that faster, more resilient networks are always important), the idea that 5G will fundamentally transform the world tends to overshoot the mark.Carriers haven't quite learned yet that over-hyping the standard (or flat out lying about it) only serves to associate it with disappointment in the minds of consumers. Verizon, for example, has crowed widely about the company's early 5G launches, but when reporters and users actually try to use these networks, they routinely find they're barely available.To hype the standard further, Verizon has been deploying it to select parts of a handful of major sports venues, insisting in its press releases that these early deployments are "fundamentally changing the way we live, work and play." But when reporters actually press the company on where it's available, they quickly discover it's, well, not. While Verizon has been hyping 5G availability in NFL stadiums, deeper inquiries have shown that the service is available in only a few areas because the millimeter wave spectrum Verizon is using for these early efforts has a hard time with range and penetrating walls.The same thing is now playing out in other major sporting venues. While Verizon has claimed in press statements that it will soon be offering 5G in more than 10 major sports venues, Jon Brodkin at Ars Technica pressed them for additional detail and came away notably unimpressed:

We've talked before about the over-reliance on tech to do certain jobs that cannot be simplified to the sum of mathematical parts. The criminal justice system is starting to turn over sentencing to algorithms -- something that seems like the smart thing to do but removes judicial and prosecutorial discretion from the mix, leaving defendants with the unpalatable option of challenging software they're never allowed to examine.Police departments are also moving towards predictive policing. Relying on historical data, cops are hoping to head off future crimes by allocating resources to areas where crime appears to be more likely to be committed. Sounds good on paper, but in reality, all it does is reinforce biases and push law enforcement to treat everyone in targeted areas as criminals. If the data being fed in reflects biased policing, crunching the numbers even harder isn't going to erase that. It's only going to reinforce it. And, again, suspected criminals aren't able to access the data or software that puts them in law enforcement's crosshairs.A certain amount of automation is expected as government agencies seek to streamline public services. The problem isn't necessarily the tech. It's the removal of human interaction. As has been stated here frequently, moderation at scale is impossible. So is automated governing. Automated processes are as prone to failure as the people overseeing them. But when you decide software is going to do almost all of the work, those who need the assistance of other humans most are cut out of the loop.Citizens looking for government assistance have grown accustomed to jumping through red tape hoops. Now, the hoops are inaccessible, but still must be jumped through. The most marginalized members of society are given URLs instead of contact names and numbers when many of them have no reliable access to the internet or a computer. A new series by The Guardian shows the human cost of going paperless. It's happening all over the world, and it's literally killing people.

To a certain segment of the population, just mentioning IPTV is enough to get them frothing at the mouth and shouting "copyright infringement" at anyone who will listen. This isn't entirely without cause, of course, as IPTV is a technology that can be used to infringe by streaming copyrighted TV shows and films. There are entire sites out there that list such infringing content, as well. But the fact remains that IPTV is a tool, not content that infringes copyright itself. As such, there are plenty of IPTV-related tools and uses out there that are perfectly legit.Like Perfect Player, for instance. Perfect Player is an android app that allows the user to choose what IPTV playlists from 3rd party providers can be played. In other words, it's essentially a media player for IPTV streams. Upon installation, it does not come with infringing playlists to stream. What is watched on the player is entirely the choice of the end user. Despite all of this, one unnamed major pay-TV company filed a copyright complaint against the app with Google, arguing that because end users can use Perfect Player to infringe on copyright, the app itself was infringing. Google, frustratingly, complied and has delisted the app from the Play Store.

We've covered a few times in the past some of the oddities of both Australia's defamation laws and its views on intermediary liability. Our big complaint regarding both of those things is how they end up enabling censorship by the powerful of critical reporting and commentary. Perhaps a perfect example of this is former National Enquirer editor Dylan Howard having some pricey lawyers threaten Australian booksellers if they decided to offer Ronan Farrow's new book Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators. If you haven't guessed, a part of Farrow's book covers efforts by the Enquirer to "get dirt" on certain people in what appears to be an attempt to suppress their credibility or ability to go public, and also to engage in the practice of "catch and kill" (from whence the book gets its title) a story by "buying" the exclusive rights to it, only to kill it.It appears that some of those threats have worked, as a number of booksellers have chosen not to sell the book (though some others, admittedly, are still offering it for sale). Of course, the threat letter to the various book retailers has some weasel wording, allowing Howard and his lawyers to pretend that they're not trying to seek the blocking of the book:

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is a law enforcement agency known mainly for its criminals. Yes, it oversees the largest jail system in the world, but even that can't hold all the criminals the LASD associates with. The Department hires (and re-hires) criminals to staff itself. It has 300 employees on the LA District Attorney's "Brady list" -- the list of officers prosecutors feel are too untrustworthy to testify in court due to past misconduct and lying.For an entity that prides itself on policing gang activity in East LA, the Department has shown no similar willingness to police itself. The Department has been the home to several gangs over the years, composed of deputies and jailers willing to break the law in order to enforce the law.The LASD has rolled out of one federal investigation and right into another one. Former Sheriff Lee Baca ran a corrupt jail system presided over by a racist deputy gang that hid an FBI informant from his federal handlers and allowed (another) white supremacist gang to run the prison. Deputies were so sure they were untouchable they openly threatened FBI agents. Seven convicted deputies later, Sheriff Baca -- himself convicted of obstructing an investigation -- was out of a job.You'd think a change in management would have resulted in some internal housecleaning. It didn't. Baca's replacement, Sheriff Alex Villanueva, did nothing while pretending to do something. Taking credit for employee turnover he had almost nothing to do with, Villanueva claimed he had rid the department of its toxic deputy "gangs."A recently-filed lawsuit says otherwise. It also says the LASD protects it most violent and racist members, many of whom belong to a deputies' gang known as the "Banditos." Ali Winston of The Appeal reports on the good cops who are hoping to take down the department's many bad cops.

In the earlier days of Techdirt, Lego made multiple appearances as an IP bully. However, its IP bullying ran into some legal headaches as various courts pushed back again and again and again. The company failed, pretty spectacularly, in its quest to argue that no one could make similar, or even interconnecting, Lego bricks. Its patents long expired, and any copyright and trademark rights were much more limited.For years, the company has relied on the fact that even with the ability of other companies to copy its designs, really only Lego could manufacture the toy bricks with the kind of exact precision that made them work properly. Knock-offs tended to not connect nearly as well. And Lego's manufacturing was such that beyond the precision in the blocks, it could also make the blocks so cheaply that it was difficult for anyone to undercut them anyway. Finally, Lego's brand is pretty powerful in its own right, and many people would buy official Lego products as the default anyway, because of the brand association.All of that makes the recent news of Lego threatening the 3D printing community all the more bizarre. There's simply no way that 3D printed version of Lego-style bricks are a "threat" in any way. The takedown letter itself, as posted by recipient MyMiniFactory (who initially thought it was spam!), is bizarre. It's symptomatic of obnoxious IP bullying, in that it was sent to platforms like MyMiniFactory that host 3D printable designs for sale, but, while it lists out designs it says are infringing, it appears not to explain how or why they are infringing. It does list out copyright and trademark rights that the company holds, but does not indicate which ones its complaining about for which designs, leaving it up to MyMiniFactory to determine such things. That, by itself, is a bullying tactic, effectively making it harder for the recipient to judge the merit of the infringement claims, and (most likely) hoping that leads to broader compliance with the request to avoid the hassle and potential legal costs and liability.

Surveillance growth markets are the best growth markets. Amazon, not satisfied with tying up the online shopping and data storage markets, is moving forward aggressively with plans to become the government's top surveillance vendor, as well as the friendly face of (cop-enabled) home surveillance via its Ring doorbell camera. A swarm of analytics companies have descended on the massive amounts of data generated by social media/cellphone users to turn haystacks into marketable needle sources.Anywhere a camera can be installed, a camera has been installed. Some are mute witnesses, incapable of doing anything more than providing playback of recorded footage. But some have additional features, like facial recognition tech or the ability to read license plates.Your local eatery may be the next frontier for a curious blend of data analytics and surveillance. Louise Matsakis reports for Wired that Outback Steakhouse is tying analytics software to its existing cameras. The goal is to provide better customer service, but the backend resembles a dystopian sci-fi plot line.

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There are many critics of CDA 230 these days, and there's a pretty wide range in the quality of their arguments. Law professor Danielle Citron is, for good reason, considered one of the more thoughtful critics of the law. And, to her credit, she actually does understand the law, what it enables, and what the wider impacts of the law might be. Her scholarship tends to be thoughtful and careful as well, and, just recently, she was awarded a MacArthur "genius grant." And that's why I find it frustrating that her presentations before Congress recently seem to miss the mark by a fairly wide margin. Earlier this year, we called out her testimony on "deep fakes" because she falsely suggested that internet platforms have "no incentive to address destructive deepfake content."As we explained at the time, nothing could be further from the truth. The companies have been facing tremendous pressure from the media, the public, politicians, and (importantly) advertisers to clean up junk on their networks, or they risk losing users and revenue. The incentive is the desire not to have their platforms turn into complete garbage dumps.Unfortunately, Citron is continuing to spread this misleading idea to Congress, as she did last week, when the House held a hearing on Section 230. Citron's opening statement has also been posted to Slate with the title: Tech Companies Get a Free Pass on Moderating Content, and the subtitle: "It's time to change that." Once again the premise is simply false. What is accurate is that platforms do have a legal free pass to decide what level of moderation is appropriate, but that level of appropriateness is very much driven by the concerns of all of the stakeholders mentioned above, with users and advertisers topping the list (for fairly obvious reasons).It is misleading in the extreme to suggest that a lack of legal incentive somehow means no incentive at all. It is a kind of faith in legal systems (and an ignorance of markets) that is disconnected from reality. Citron's piece does mention market power, but only to brush it away with a blind insistence that it couldn't possibly work:

You may be shocked to learn this, but nearly all of the promises AT&T made in the lead up to its $86 billion merger with Time Warner wound up not being true.The company's promise that the deal wouldn't result in price hikes for consumers? False. The company's promise the deal wouldn't result in higher prices for competitors needing access to essential AT&T content like HBO? False. AT&T's promise they wouldn't hide Time Warner content behind exclusivity paywalls? False. The idea that the merger would somehow create more jobs at the company? False.This was all laid out to US District Judge Richard Leon during the trial (twice), who ignored all of the warnings and rubber stamped the deal without a single condition. At absolutely no point did Leon in his absurd ruling recognize the threat of AT&T owning both a monopoly over broadband and a massive media empire in charge of content needed by competitors. And when lawyers and economists warned him that kind of power would only lead to higher rates, he almost happily ignored them.Fast forward a year or so and AT&T is already imposing another significant hike on its TV customers (both traditional and streaming). New and existing users are seeing price hikes upwards of $10 to $15 per month. It's the second price hike in less than a year. And despite being the broadcaster in this equation, AT&T blamed the hikes on broadcasters:

Blizzard's decision to pander to the Chinese government is a PR headache that simply isn't going away. Last week, games giant Blizzard stepped in a minefield when it severely punished a Hearthstone player for supporting the protests in Hong Kong during a championship live stream. The reaction was swift, justified, and severe, with everyone from gamers to Blizzard employees accusing the company of prioritizing profits over principles.After days of silence, Blizzard ultimately issued a statement on the decision and, while public backlash forced it to retreat from some of the player's more severe punishments, the company doubled down on its decision to censor players for political opinions, ignoring most of the criticisms leveled by human rights organizations like Access Now. It also tried to claim with a straight face that its financial interests in China played no role in the decision:

The City of Baltimore was hit with a ransomware attack in May of this year. Criminals using remodeled and rebranded NSA exploits (EternalBlue) knocked out a "majority" of the city's servers and crippled many of its applications. More details didn't surface until September when the city's government began reshuffling the budget to cover the expenses of recovering from the attack.The person in charge of the city's systems was Frank Johnson, who went on leave (presumably permanently) after a post-attack audit found the IT director hadn't done much IT directing.

A couple of months ago, we were surprised when a WIPO employee showed up in our comments to defend the organization's new database of supposedly infringing sites against our many criticisms. In that post, we highlighted a Twitter thread from lawyer Rick Shera — who represented Mega — and this week, Shera joins us on the podcast to further discuss the inefficacy and negative impact of these kinds of pirate shaming lists.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.

The fallout from Blizzard's heavy-handed move on a professional Hearthstone player for voicing support for the ongoing Hong Kong protests on a livestream, which included ripping away prize money and issuing a 1 year ban on competing, continues to blaze. But while most of the backlash has been directed solely at Blizzard, the company's actions are having a ripple effect across the eSports landscape.Depressingly, plenty of folks in the eSports industry are clearly frightened that they might accidentally cross some undefined line with gaming companies and find themselves on the losing end of an international public relations argument. One lovely example of this is Riot Games' League of Legends competitions and streams. There appear to be plenty of folks out there that are self-censoring mentions of Hong Kong to ridiculous levels, including attempts to avoid saying the name of a LoL team, the Hong Kong Attitude.

I'm really not sure what to tell anyone at this point. None of this works.

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You may have heard over the past few days about a bit of a feud between Presidential candidates -- mainly Elizabeth Warren -- and Facebook about how the company handles political ads with false information. It began a week or so ago when the Trump campaign started running a bunch of Facebook ads around impeachment, some of which were blatantly false, based on totally debunked claims. Facebook, however, just recently clarified its policy, noting that while it will block ads that its partner fact-checkers have determined to be untrue, that does not apply directly to political candidate ads themselves:

Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that 5G won't be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon has repeatedly hyped early non-standard launches that, when reviewers actually got to take a look, were found to be barely available.There's a solid chasm between where carriers say they offer 5G, and where 5G is actually available. And there's every indication that mobile carriers are working overtime to make sure that chasm isn't obvious to consumers.As the FCC finally buckles to pressure to fix the US's comically inaccurate broadband availability maps, both AT&T and Verizon are trying to ensure that 5G is excluded from these efforts. The FCC has been widely ridiculed for blindly relying on overly-generous ISP data indicating where wireless and wired broadband exists. The FCC has long declared that an entire census tract is technically "served" with broadband if just one home in that tract has service. After massive bipartisan political pressure, the FCC recently announced it would at least take a look at using more accurate geospatial data to pinpoint broadband availability.But in letters to the FCC, the wireless industry declares that 5G should be excluded from these mapping improvements because it might reveal ambiguously "sensitive" information:

Order your copy of Working Futures today »We're off today for the long weekend, but I wanted to use the opportunity to publish the last of our posts about the stories in our Working Futures science fiction anthology about the future of work. If you haven't read the earlier ones, they're here:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is aerinai proposing a way to find out just how much cops and prosecutors believe in asset seizure as an effective means of law enforcement:

Order your copy of Working Futures today »Techdirt is taking a break for the long weekend — and while we've still got the comments post coming tomorrow, today instead of the usual history post we're looking forwards, with our new Working Futures anthology.For those who don't know or who haven't had time to check it out yet, Working Futures is a collection of fourteen speculative short stories by science fiction authors, exploring the question of what work will be like in the future as artificial intelligence and other technologies continue to transform our world. If you want a taste, you can check out the first half of one of the stories, A Quiet Lie in our pre-launch teaser post. Since then, Mike has been sharing summaries and thoughts about other entries in the book: about how AI and humans could keep each other in check, and how private services and social credit could define our lives, and how the lines between human and machine could blur in fascinating and challenging ways, among many other topics.This week, we also had a special episode of the Techdirt Podcast in which Mike was joined by three of the authors: Katharine Dow, whose story The Funeral Company portrays a society divided by its reactions to both climate change and ubiquitous surveillance; James Yu, whose story The Mummer gives us eerily real characters in a not-too-distant future running up against the darker side of our interaction with robots; and Christopher Hooton, whose story A Brief History Of Algorithmic Life: Introduction closes out the anthology with a moving, lyrical tale about about the first true human-AI friendship.And of course, Working Futures also contains a pair of stories by Mike himself, who hadn't tried writing fiction in a long time, but hit the ground running with two engaging possible futures: one in which increasing centralization has put our lives in the hands of a few big companies that compete to offer the services and products for your entire life, and another in which the return to a truly decentralized online world has led to an energetic and anarchic knowledge economy. We've also got a story by our own Tim Geigner, who has been at this for a long time (his earlier sci-fi novels Digilife, Echelon, and Midwasteland are available as pay-what-you-want ebook downloads in our Insider Shop) and who went straight for the core of the "future of work" premise with a story about working in corporate human resources for not-so-human employees.I hope some of that piques your curiosity. Techdirt will be off on Monday, so if you're looking for something to read, grab a copy of the Working Futures paperback or ebook to see you through! And if you do read some or all of the stories, we'd greatly appreciate a review on Amazon and anything else you can do to help spread the word.

It's baseball playoff season, and this week, as many have been highlighting, it's actually the 100th anniversary of the infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal, in which a bunch of players from the Chicago White Sox were later accused of deliberately throwing games in a deal with some gamblers. I've seen a few stories covering "facts and myths" about the scandal (which only really came to light the following year), but the NY Times has really great debunking of some myths about the scandal by the historian of Major League Baseball, John Thorn.So, what's this got to do with Techdirt? Well, according to Thorn's piece, a key fact that many have associated with the Black Sox was entirely made up, and the reason for it being made up was a confused (and incorrect) understanding of copyright law. To understand what happened, we need to take a few steps back. First, there's a fairly long history of what's known as "fictitious entries" that have been used in various reference works for ages -- with it being especially common in map making, where the practice is sometimes referred to as "trap streets." These are entirely fictitious streets (or sometimes towns) that are added to a map to try to catch a competitor who is just copying the work. In short, if your fake street (or dictionary entry, or whatnot) is showing up elsewhere, you know that it was copied from you. We even saw a very recent example of this kind of technique when the annotation site Genius altered apostrophe's to try to "catch" Google allegedly copying Genius's lyrics (which turned out not to be the case). Google itself has used this technique to catch Microsoft copying its search indexing for Bing.And, it remains a valid technique for catching copying -- which some might call a form of plagiarism. However, when it comes to copyright, it's a bit of a different story, because the underlying reference facts often aren't subject to copyright in the first place. The key court case on all of this is the famous Feist case in which one telephone directory company was accused of infringement for copying another phone book, with the "evidence" being some fake entries (kids: in the pre-internet days, to figure out how to contact someone, you went through a giant book of phone numbers). But as the Supreme Court eventually ruled, the directory listings weren't subject to copyright in the first place and (in the US, at least) you don't get a copyright for merely assembling a collection of facts if there was no creativity involved (which there shouldn't be for a phone directory!).That brings us back around to the Black Sox. The most well known book covering the Black Sox scandal was the book Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof, which was published in 1963 (Asinof also co-wrote the movie by the same title that came out in 1988 and was quite popular). A key character in the book was a figure by the name of "Harry F." As described on the "famous trials" website:

We were just discussing how the NBA and Blizzard each responded to the thin-skinned Chinese government's pressure on each in the wake of statements made supporting the Hong Kong protests that have raged for months now. The Blizzard half of that conversation involved the company yanking prize money and issuing a 1 year ban on a Hearthstone champion going by the handle Blitzchung, who stated support for the protests to sign off of a recent stream -- which, Blizzard claims, violated contest rules. The backlash to Blizzard's decision, was swift and severe. Unlike the NBA, which backtracked on its own appeasing comments to the Chinese government, Blizzard hasn't budged an inch.The fallout is continuing, if not intensifying. Most recently, famed streamer Brian Kibler quit Hearthstone entirely over Blizzard's decision.

Order your copy of Working Futures today »Since releasing our Working Futures book last week, we've been profiling the various stories so that people are aware of what kinds of stories are in the book. We profiled the first three, then the next three and earlier this week, another three. Below we'll profile three more stories and then next week we'll profile the last few stories in the book as well.Trash Talk by Holly Schofield explores the kind of job that probably doesn't get much attention when people talk about "the future of work": jobs that require manual labor. Many people seem to assume that those will just be entirely automated away but, as this story explores, it's possible that we'll just enhance humans with machines, rather than replacing them altogether. And sometimes that might create some, well, tricky situations.A Quiet Lie by Ross Pruden. We previewed the first half of this story the week before we launched, so you can read it right here on Techdirt. It's also a story that explores how more traditional jobs might be enhanced by technology, perhaps leading to ideas and concepts that simply aren't possible today. What's interesting to me about this one is that people have responded to this particular story in totally divergent ways. Some think that the story presents an exciting possible future world, while others see it as a dangerous path. It's a kind of test of how you view the world.The Mummer by James Yu. James talked a bit about his thinking behind this story on our recent podcast, talking about how it explored the blurry lines between when a human "helping" machines becomes a part of the machine itself... while also exploring when a machine becomes increasingly human-like. It's a fascinating character study that raises a bunch of questions about what is a machine and what is a human being.I think it's great that these three stories follow one another in the book, as they all explore different (often very different) aspects of a world in which computers and technology "enhance" work -- and the consequences (both good and bad) that can result. These are big questions that we're going to be dealing with for a long, long time, and these three stories provide some perspectives on ways to think about that issue.