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So, we had just pointed out that the "fired ex-Googler whistleblower" whom everyone was pointing to last week as "proof" of "anti-conservative bias" at Google, didn't look so good when you got to see the details (which included statements that certainly read to be pretty supportive of white nationalists, rather than support for, say, the free market and lower taxes). You'd think that peddlers continuing to push this theory with the next person would take more time in the vetting process. But... of course, if it's Project Veritas we're talking about, it appears the only vetting they like to do is "can we spin this the way we want so that idiot suckers will buy it?" And that's what's happened.The usual folks in our own comments who insist there's anti-conservative bias at Google have been yelling at me for the past few days, claiming that I'm "ignoring" this proof because I just can't take it or something. Or... more accurately, because it's total garbage. First, let's talk about the "whistleblower." If you thought the last guy was bad, well, get a load of Zach Vorhies:

The NSA decided to abandon its phone data collection earlier this year, stating that it was having all sorts of technical issues collecting only the stuff it was asking for. In the good old days prior to the enactment of the USA Freedom Act, the NSA simply asked for everything. "Reasonable articulable suspicion" now guides the record collection -- something that appears to be too tricky for the NSA to wrap its collective collection powers around.It's not all the NSA's fault. The telcos now hold the records and only hand over what's asked for when the NSA approaches them. Easier said than done, apparently, as over-collection continues and the NSA seems unable to prevent collecting records it's not actually trying to correct.But it's also the NSA's fault because it's had plenty of time to get used to the new rules and develop better practices/software to sort through collected data. Of course, the NSA has also hinted the program is of limited usefulness and has seemed willing to give it up for years now, especially if the token sacrifice saves other, far more intrusive programs from the Congressional chopping block.Is it really shut down, though? That's been a tough question to answer. The NSA did recommend the program be shut down and claims it's just gathering dust at the moment, but there's been nothing definitive delivered to its oversight. Until now. Charlie Savage reports for the New York Times that there's finally official confirmation of the program's (possibly temporary) demise. Exiting Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats' unclassified letter makes it clear the NSA has shut down the program indefinitely.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is HegemonicDistortion with a response to the FBI's latest encryption fearmongering:

Five Years AgoThe fight for government transparency continued this week in 2014, with a judge giving the DOJ until the end of the month to submit a declassified FISA court opinion explaining the justifications for Section 215, the exposure of regular fraud and abuse by patent examiners that the USPTO tried to hide from the Inspector General, and new revelations from Ed Snowden including the fact that Syria's 2012 internet outage was the result of an NSA hack gone wrong, and that the agency abused its internet metadata program just like every other program. But the biggest battle was for the CIA torture report, which the intelligence community began warning would "inflame anti-US passions" in the Middle East if it was released.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, there was an earlier story of USPTO misbehavior in the form of bilking people out of money. The Encyclopedia Britannica yet again lost in an attempt to abuse a patent that it claimed covered basic GPS functionality, one judge blocked sales of Microsoft Word over patent infringement (in a ruling that had no hope of sticking) while another banned Real from selling RealDVD (sadly not so simple), and yet another overturned the ruling that allowed DVD jukeboxes. While the DOJ was defending the $80,000/song award in the Jammie Thomas lawsuit, a poet who tried to sue Oprah Winfrey for the even-more-insane sum of a trillion dollars saw his lawsuit thrown out — while another author was trying a similar approach to cash in on the success of Twilight.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, the number one culprit on the EFF's list of bogus patents was being wielded against universities and just about everyone else who streamed any kind of content online, while Microsoft was keeping the wheel turning with a newly granted patent on storing then automatically uploading data, and we talked about how innovation and IP hoarding don't mix. Meanwhile, Google was ramping up for its IPO (after giving some stock to Yahoo to settle outstanding legal disputes) and worrying its emails might be filtered as spam, while smaller investors tried to figure out if they could get in on the action and other companies quietly delayed their own IPOs to avoid getting lost in the Google hype.

There's this weird thing in the video game industry in terms of how the industry reacts to fans doing things with their games. On one side, you have publishers that strictly control what fans can do with their games, even going the legal threat route at times. Other publishers are more permissive with game IP and are then shocked at what fans manage to do with their games. Still other publishers proactively create tools within their games to allow fans to create wildly cool productions within the games and then celebrate those fans. And, of course, there are fans manipulating properties such as original soundtracks to create new music as an homage to the original score.There is a wide spectrum of what fans want to do to express their fandom with video games, in other words, and also a spectrum of ways publishers respond to these dedicated fans. The original Doom, for instance, was created nearly three decades ago, but an active modding community has kept the game relevant by building on that original work. In the case of System Shock 2, however, it turns out the game originally released in 1999 is essentially only playable on modern machines due to the dedication of one single mystery fan.

How many chances does the government get to try to convict a couple of people for selling a drug analogue the DEA's own chemist said wasn't "substantially similar" to any controlled substance? Apparently the government will get at least one more swing at the plate, having batted .500 during its first two tries.In 2012, the DEA raided Zencense, a business owned by Charles Ritchie and Benjamin Galecki. They were charged with conspiracy to distribute controlled substance analogues. The "spice" made by Zencense used XLR-11 and UR-144 as active ingredients. The government claimed these were analogues of JWH-018, which is a controlled substance.The defendants argued that their spice was not an analogue of a controlled substance. If true, this sunk the government's case, because the conspiracy charges relied on the "knowing" distribution of illegal drug analogues.The government claimed XLR-11 and UR-144 were pretty much the same thing and pretty much identical to JWH-018. This testimony was undercut by one of the DEA's own chemists, who had stated in other prosecutions that UR-144 was not an analogue of JWH-018. Not only that, but the chemist's professional opinion on this subject was freely available online, as part of a handout on litigating synthetic drug cases.The defendants hoped to have the chemist testify on the differences between these substances, which would likely have resulted in them being found innocent of the conspiracy charges. The trial court denied this request, resulting in the defendants' first appeal.On appeal, the Fourth Circuit sided with the defendants, finding the government could not claim the chemist's testimony was "privileged" -- not when it had relied on it in other prosecutions. It sent the case back down to the district court to reconsider the admissibility of this exculpatory evidence.The case is now back in the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court, thanks to the lower court deciding once again that this testimony isn't relevant and would have had no effect on the outcome of the case. That the outcome was one mistrial and one hung jury (one that was un-hung with an Allen charge) seems to have escaped the attention of the court.The Appeals Court [PDF] wants to make sure this doesn't happen again. The lower court looked at the testimony that directly contradicted the assertions made by the government and shrugged.

Remember a year ago when lots of people were blaming WhatsApp for violence in India, and demanding that there needed to be new laws passed to deal with WhatsApp? Well, if the actual problem is societal, it's not much going to matter how you target a particular platform. Wired now has an article talking about another, super popular platform, TikTok, and arguing that it is "fuelling India's deadly hate speech epidemic." This, of course, is the same language that was used to discuss WhatsApp over the past few years.TikTok, as you may know, is the rapidly growing newish social media platform that is owned by the Chinese firm ByteDance. Of course, its rapid rise in popularity should already challenge the narrative that the big social media platforms -- Facebook (along with Instagram and WhatsApp), YouTube, and Twitter -- are so dominant that it's impossible for new entrants to make a play. But, even more importantly, it shows that if the problem everyone is debating is a societal one, blaming the service providers in the middle for not magically stopping societal problems is not helpful. These problems will just keep appearing on each successive platform.

The first documented case of the NYPD using reverse warrants to find criminal suspects has been revealed. It made its appearance in perhaps the most 2019 of cases: the trial of two members of the Proud Boys facing assault charges for allegedly attacking members of Antifa.Reverse warrants work this way: law enforcement agencies approach tech companies with geographic coordinates, asking for phone data for all phones within the geofenced area during a certain time frame. Using this data, law enforcement works its way backwards to probable cause, sifting through records to find what phones were in the area when the alleged crime was committed.Obviously, this is a highly-imperfect way to track down suspects. For one, GPS data collected by companies like Google isn't exactly precise. For another, "fenced-in" areas will always contain numerous people who aren't criminals or even suspects, but the data turns them all into suspects until investigators sort them out. The more heavily-trafficked an area is, the more likely the chance officers will pursue the wrong phones/people.This case was made a bit trickier by the victims' unwillingness to cooperate with the investigation. As George Joseph reports for Gothamist, the lack of victims to question nudged the NYPD towards deploying the legally-dubious tactic.

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We've spent the last year and a half or so pointing out that, while it may have been well-intentioned, there are all sorts of consequences -- whether intended or not -- to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), including giving more power to the giant internet companies (when many argued the GDPR was necessary to curb their power), censorship of media, and a way for the rich and famous to harass people. But, of course, some might argue that those are worthy trade-offs if it did a better job protecting people's privacy.About that... Last year, we pointed out that one consequence of the GDPR was that, in making it easy to "download" your data, it could open up serious privacy consequences for anyone who has their accounts hacked. In that story, we talked about someone having their Spotify account hacked, and having all the data downloaded -- a situation that might not be that impactful. However, last week, at Black Hat, James Pavur, a PhD student at Oxford, explained how he exploited the GDPR to access a ton of private info about his fiancee.

So a few years ago we wrote about Alex Nguyen, one of the only folks to file a formal net neutrality complaint (pdf) with the FCC. Before the rules were killed, users could file a free complaint, of which there were thousands. But if you wanted to actually have your complaint looked at by the FCC, you needed to pay $225, submit an ocean of paperwork, and kick off a long-train of procedural and legal fisticuffs most consumers simply didn't have time for. But Nguyen took the time, and filed a lengthy complaint outlining how Verizon Wireless had a long history of anti-competitive, restrictive behavior that harmed innovation and competition.With 300 citations across a 112-page document, Nguyen documented Verizon's ugly history, including banning mobile payment services that competed with Verizon's own payment offerings, blocking tablets from working on its network to promote its own tablets, and even banning devices from using GPS to -- you guessed it -- force subscribers to use the company's own subscription GPS services. Most of these efforts violated not just net neutrality, but the "Carterfone" conditions affixed to Verizon's spectrum to ensure the company would treat all devices and services fairly.Verizon's long history on this front is fairly indisputable, and the company has never been held seriously accountable for any of it. And while Nguyen hoped he'd be the one to help hold Verizon to account, the regulatory capture in the telecom sector had other ideas.Nguyen formally submitted his detailed complaint back while the net neutrality rules were still active (July of 2016), so the Pai FCC was mandated to take a look at the complaints. But instead of actually taking the only formal net neutrality complaint made seriously, the Pai FCC (surprise!) forgot completely about it for years. Last week the agency remembered it needed to at least respond, and (surprise!) broadly declared that the complaint lacked any compelling evidence whatsoever:

Back in October last year, Techdirt wrote about some unfortunate developments taking place in the African digital world. Governments across the continent are bringing in levies and taxes on Internet use, making it more expensive and thus harder for ordinary people to access the Internet at a time when the digital ecosystem in Africa is starting to take off in a big way. In February of this year, we reported on some evidence that the social media tax in Uganda was indeed causing fewer people there to use the Internet, and for the total value of mobile transactions to drop. Quartz Africa has a post about a new report from Brookings on the steep rise in taxes on mobiles and data in Kenya, and the harms it is likely to cause. Here's how things have gone from bad to worse:

Our posts on famed gaming giant Nintendo will likely give you the impression that the company has a very strange distaste for its own fans. Your brain will probably try to convince you that this doesn't make any sense, since Nintendo fans are what makes Nintendo money. Your brain is wrong. Nintendo has demonstrated over and over again that if forced to choose between maximum control over its intellectual property and allowing fans to do fan-things, it will choose control every single time.YouTube in particular tends to find itself in Nintendo's crosshairs, what with the site being the natural place for fans of Nintendo to share Nintendo-y things with other fans. It's worth noting again that, on matters of copyright at least, there's really no reason why Nintendo must issue takedowns for anything that even barely could be seen as infringing on its IP. Such is the case with the recent spate of takedowns the company issued against a YouTube channel which had the singular purpose of celebrating Nintendo game music.

President Donald Trump set the tone for his administration as soon as he took office. Less than a week after his inauguration, he issued this statement:

So, this is interesting. Every time we talk about alleged "anti-conservative" bias on various internet platforms, people who believe it's true (and who yell at us for daring to ask for evidence) tend to do two things: (1) cite Dennis Prager and his claims of YouTube's anti-conservative bias and (2) insist that there is no equivalent on the more liberal end of the spectrum that received similar treatment. We've discussed in great detail why both of those claims are laughably wrong, but we never quite expected the very same lawyers who filed Prager's failed lawsuit against YouTube -- the very same lawsuit that Prager himself just used on the pages of the Wall Street Journal to insist was proof of anti-conservative bias -- would now file a nearly identical complaint against YouTube... but on behalf of various LGBTQ+ YouTube channels.In both cases, the plaintiffs are represented by Peter Obstler and Eric George of the law firm Browne George Ross law firm. And this new lawsuit has basically as much chance of succeeding as Prager's lawsuit did. Of course, it strikes me as rather ironic that this very lawsuit seems to undermine the basic claim of the Prager lawsuit, that the "only" reason why Prager's videos could have been put into restricted mode were because of the conservative viewpoints they represented. Yet, here, in this lawsuit, there are lots of claims about how Google/YouTube are purposefully discriminating against the LGBTQ+ community.

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Over the last few months we've witnessed a veritable flood of misleading to simply false articles about internet companies showing up in mainstream sources. There were misleading articles in Vox and the Washington Post. And then, just recently, we saw not one but two NY Times pieces that went out of their way to misrepresent the law. And, then of course, there's the Wall Street Journal that has been misrepresenting Section 230 for ages. To date, the only one of these publications to run a serious correction (and to continue to help debunking misrepresentations) is the smallest of those listed above: Vox, who did some research and published a big mea culpa.This has gotten many in the tech industry to begin to wonder. It's one thing for (cross aisle) grandstanding politicians like Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Nancy Pelosi, and Richard Blumenthal to totally misrepresent the law. But when the mainstream media is doing so on a regular basis -- it's causing a lot of talk behind the scenes about whether this is a coordinated hit. Some, like the excellent reporter Anna Wiener, recently more or less dismissed this theory as being "mostly... a facile argument," though I think she mixes up two separate issues. First, it is absolutely true that many startup founders don't know how to deal with the press well, and get personally offended by bad press coverage. And, for those entrepreneurs: fuck 'em. They should grow up and learn what the press actually does, when done right -- which includes researching and debunking nonsense (and there's a ton of nonsense in Silicon Valley).But, that's a separate issue from whether or not there's a coordinated campaign to undermine the foundations of the internet by a few larger, legacy industries who have failed to adapt to a changing time. Indeed, we saw significant evidence of Hollywood's top lobbyists working behind the scenes (though, it occasionally slipped out publicly) to push for FOSTA, the first bill that significantly undermined Section 230.And there's plenty more evidence of legacy industries -- mainly legacy media and entertainment companies -- plotting to take down internet companies by making use of the news. Remember, during the Sony Pictures hack, that MPAA emails were leaked, revealing "Project Goliath," which was specifically a plan to damage Google through any means necessary -- and that included using a smear campaign placed in the Wall Street Journal and on the Today Show. In an email sent to an official in Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood's office by then MPAA "director of external state government affairs" official (and former ICE official) Brian Cohen, Cohen admits the "proposed plan" is to place an anti-Google smear campaign:

So last week, you probably saw the leaked plan by the Trump administration to try and "fix" the nonexistent censorship of Conservatives on social media. According to the leak, a large part of the plan would involve having the FCC, which has no real authority in this area, police speech on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Most legal experts I've spoken to say the plan is illegal and utterly nonsensical, and the FCC has no authority to do this under Section 230 or anywhere else. The order would also undermine most of the logic the Pai FCC used in its effort to repeal net neutrality.Oddly though, an FCC that has been very vocal on this subject when convenient has been oddly mute since the story broke, with none of the agency's three Republican Commissioners (Ajit Pai, Brendan Carr, or Mike O'Rielly) making so much as a peep about the terribleness of the latest Trump "plan."This kind of silence is uncharacteristic. O'Rielly, for example, was positively apoplectic recently when he proclaimed (falsely) that community broadband posed a dire threat to free speech. Carr has similarly expressed great disdain previously at the idea of government regulating speech on social media platforms, and hyperventilates over telecom sector free speech rights any time someone even faintly suggests giants like Comcast should be held accountable for decades of abysmal service:

The only person singing the praises of the Darien (CT) Police Department is the person who was ordered out of his own vehicle at gunpoint. New York Yankees GM Brian Cashman's onset of Stockholm Syndrome is one of the earliest in recorded history. (via Deadspin)To sum up, the cops here didn't do anything particularly wrong… except for one major aspect of the equation which would have prevented it from arriving at the point where Cashman needed to be walked backwards at gunpoint from his own vehicle to waiting officers.

Of all the battles we wage here, my personal frustration probably peaks on the topic of video games and real world violence. The amount of calories spent even having this discussion should go down as some kind of complete human failure. Study after study, never mind the input from actual law enforcement professionals, has demonstrated that the political talking points on violent games are complete bunk. I used to be fond of saying that the science on this topic was unsettled. At this point, the science is quite clear.Which means what we really need for that science to take hold with the public and end this stupid debate is to stop signaling that the debate isn't over. But when ESPN, with all of its popularity, decides to suspend a broadcast for an Apex Legends tournament because of the recent mass shootings, it's doing the opposite.

We've written a bunch of stories about Malibu Media, a copyright trolling operation. The company's founders, Colette Pelissier and Brigham Feld, like to claim that they're purveyors of "classy" pornography under the X-Art brand, but their business seems almost entirely focused on trolling practices. And its embrace of copyright trolling has resulted in some significant problems for the company over the years, as judges have very much caught on to the company's long history of sketchy practices.Apparently those sketchy practices may go beyond its copyright trolling, as two of Malibu Media's investors are now suing the company, claiming that they lent the company money when it was short on cash, in exchange for 50% of its "net recovery" from the trolling operations, and a "50% interest" in the copyright of the porn X-Art created. So, how'd that work out?

Attorney Larry Klayman is building himself quite the portfolio of high-profile losses. He's well on his way to seeing his lawsuit on behalf of Judge Roy Moore tossed by an irritated court. His lawsuit against social media companies for their banning of noted tire slash expert Laura Loomer has already been dismissed.Well on his way to having his law license suspended, Klayman has just seen another one of his ridiculous lawsuits tossed by a federal court. [h/t Adam Steinbaugh]This one claimed three publications -- including the New York Times -- besmirched the previously-unsullied reputation of (ex) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, preventing him from successfully running for Senator.Reciting the litany of terrible things Arpaio had done over his career, the New York Times pointed out Arpaio is pretty much defamation-proof. Even though the Times screwed up by calling him a convicted felon rather than a convicted misdemeanant, everything else written about him was true or protected opinion.The court points out Arpaio's Klayman-authored complaint is a skeleton partially garbed in useless invective. The decision [PDF] is concise, running only 11 pages, but it still provides enough space to completely dismantle the former sheriff's arguments.Even with the court siding with the plaintiff at this stage of the pleadings, there's not enough in Arpaio's complaint to push this past the NYT's motion to dismiss. When you come to court, you need to bring facts. That's not exactly Klayman's strong suit.

Revenge porn -- or, more accurately, "non-consensual" posting of naked photos -- is a real problem. Such postings are, rightly, seen as an invasion into people's private lives, and are (quite frequently) supported by really awful online services, run by scammers and jackasses who keep ending up in prison or in other trouble with the law. Most of time this is because existing laws can, and do, handle these situations. Most mainstream internet platforms now have very clear rules against non-consensual nudity and act quite quickly to take it down.However, there are continued efforts at passing laws to deal with this issue -- even if the attempts to do so mostly appear to be unconstitutional. We've also pointed out that these laws potentially criminalize behavior most people don't think of as "revenge porn," which could represent a real issue.And that brings us to the case of Whitney Cummings, a comedian/actress/producer, who is getting some attention this week after responding to a blackmail threat from someone, asking for money to not release a photo that apparently shows her exposed nipple (which she had accidentally, and very briefly, included in an Instagram story). Someone sent her a version of the photo and asked how much not to post it (in this screenshot the naughty bits are cropped, and even though she's now released it, I'm not linking to the image because, be better than that).In posting it, Cummings notes that "They all must think I’m way more famous than I am, but they also must think I’m way more easily intimidated than I am. If anyone is gonna make money or likes off my nipple, it’s gonna be me. So here it all is, you foolish dorks." Lots of people are, rightly, coming out to support her -- and are sending embarrassing pictures of themselves to her.She does claim that others are threatening to blackmail her by saying that they've got access to her iCloud, but notes:

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It's widely recognized that there's been a widespread backlash against the big tech companies over the last few years. Politicians on both sides of the aisle in the US have been calling for massive, sometimes crippling, regulations, fines or even antitrust breakups of the companies. Regulators around the globe have been fining the companies billions of dollars.Apparently all of that is news to Fox News contributor Juan Williams, who has taken to the august pages of The Hill to publish an op-ed calling for a backlash to big tech. Dude, it's already happening. Still, perhaps Williams has a new argument that is worth considering? I mean, there are legitimate points to be made about competition, privacy and the like. But... nope. Williams is mad that Wikileaks -- which, last I checked, is not considered a member of "big tech" -- leaked his cell phone number in a cache of John Podesta emails:

So for years we've been pointing out that Verizon's attempt to pivot from grumpy old telco to sexy new Millennial ad brand hasn't been going so well. Oddly, mashing together two failing 90s brands in AOL and Yahoo, and renaming the coagulated entity "Oath," didn't really impress many people. The massive Yahoo hack, a controversy surrounding Verizon snoopvertising, and the face plant by the company's aggressively hyped Go90 streaming service didn't really help.By late last year Verizon was forced to acknowledge that its Oath entity was effectively worthless. And this week, Verizon issued a statement saying that it would be selling Tumblr to WordPress owner Automattic after a rocky ownership stretch. Rather amusingly, Verizon tries to suggest that this was all part of some ingenious master plan:

We live in a weird moment right now where any piece -- no matter how misleading or unhinged -- seems to be able to find a publication place so long as it blames basically everything on the big internet companies and demands that they do more (or sometimes less) to stop bad stuff from happening online. There are still a few brave souls out there pointing out how problematic all of this might be, and thankfully the EFF's executive director, Cindy Cohn, has taken to the pages of Wired to explain why asking the internet to stifle speech online could backfire in a really big way. She notes that it's a reasonable emotional reaction to mass murdering assholes posting screeds on 8chan to seek to shut the site down entirely, but that comes with serious costs as well.

For some time now we've discussed in a series of posts the trademark fallout that has hit the craft brewing industry. With the explosion of this industry throughout the world, the once-congenial attitude breweries had towards intellectual property concerns has slipped away, replaced by both aggression when it comes to protecting IP and the threat of aggressive action from those outside the industry, given the amount of money being made in brewing. It's been sad to see and it has frankly led to some of the silliest IP disputes I've ever seen.As in any other industry, however, the truly frustrating stories when it comes to trademark disputes in the brewing business involve those outside the industry initiating conflict where it doesn't belong. The most recent example of this is Boss Brewing having to change the name of a couple of its beers after being bullied by Hugo Boss, the upscale clothier.

Last week we highlighted the ongoing dispute between academic publishing giant Elsevier and the University of California (UC) system. Earlier this year, UC cancelled its contract with Elsevier, after the publishing giant -- which gets nearly all of its content and labor for free, but charges insane prices for what is often publicly funded research -- refused to lower prices or to work with the UC system on moving to an open access approach. Last week, we covered how Elsevier had emailed a bunch of UC folks with what appeared to be outright lies about the status of negotiations between the two organizations, and UC hit back with some facts to debunk Elsevier.Perhaps Elsevier is getting antsy because a bunch of UC scientists have sent an open letter to Elsevier, saying they will no longer do editorial work for any Elsevier publications until this dispute gets worked out.

Ever since the FCC announced its proposed settlement with Facebook, the headlines have focused on the largest-ever privacy fine that came with it — but few people paid attention to the many, many important details. This week, we've got the first half of a two-part podcast with lawyer Joshua de Larios-Heiman, who helps us go through the entire settlement from start to finish, and pick apart what it means.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.

Another day, another major publication peddling complete and utter bullshit about big internet platforms. The latest is Dennis Prager, whose Wall Street Journal op-ed, Don't Let Google Get Away With Censorship (possibly paywalled) is so utterly full of wrong that it should maybe be a canonical example of how to bloviate wrongness. The entire premise is bullshit, with most of it focusing on the made up claim that YouTube is somehow censoring Prager's videos because of his "conservative" viewpoints. We've debunked Prager's arguments in great detail before, but apparently we need to do so again.As a quick summary: a very small percentage (less than 12%) of Prager's videos are put into "restricted" mode. This does not demonetize them. It only means that the very small percentage of people who have opted-in to set up YouTube to not return videos that are inappropriate for children (which is less than 1.5% of YouTube's users) don't see that small percentage of YouTube videos in their search results. This includes videos with titles like: "Born to Hate Jews" and "Are 1 in 5 Women Raped at College?" which "includes an animated depiction of a nearly naked man lunging at a group of women." You might recognize why people at YouTube thought this might not be appropriate for children. But Prager insists that it's evidence of an anti-conservative bias.Also, as we pointed out, many YouTube channels that come from sources that most would consider to be much more "liberal" find a much higher percentage of their videos put into the same restricted mode. This includes Stephen Colbert (13%), The Huffington Post (14%), The History Channel (?!?) (24%), Vox (28%), Sam Seder (36%), Buzzfeed, (40%), Democracy Now (46%), Last Week Tonight (50%), The Daily Show (55%) and The Young Turks at a whopping 71%. To argue that having fewer than 12% of your videos put into this restricted mode is evidence of anti-conservative censorship is pretty ridiculous, but this is Dennis Prager we're talking about, and he's up to the task:

A high-profile act of violence has brought FBI complaints about device encryption to the surface again. This has been a long-running theme with the agency, one amplified recently by domestic surveillance advocate/Attorney General William Barr. Barr claimed encryption was creating a more dangerous world for everyone. Barr's claims echoed those of successive FBI directors. Both Barr and Wray continue to talk about device encryption despite having (so far) refused to update the number of encrypted devices the FBI can't access.As Barr warned in his rant against encryption, all it would take is one major attack to sway public opinion to the government's side.

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Last week we wrote about the NY Times having to issue a whopper of a correction on a giant front page of the Business Section, totally false claim, saying that Section 230 "protected hate speech" online -- which they later had to edit to note that it was actually the 1st Amendment that protected such speech (and the article leaves out that it's actually Section 230 that allows websites to remove hate speech). Coming from a paper that, just weeks earlier, had published an editorial mocking politicians for getting 230 wrong, this was kind of embarrassing.Even more embarrassing, though, was the day after the NY Times had to totally correct that false article, they ran another blatantly wrong op-ed about Section 230, this one published by Jonathan Taplin, who two years previously had published another op-ed at the NY Times that completely fabricated a bunch of blatant lies about how YouTube and Google operate. You would think that would be enough for the NY Times to maybe think twice about having him publish another op-ed, especially about Section 230 a day after the paper got called out for getting the Constitution wrong. But, nope. Taplin got to publish his anti-Section 230 op ed with no problems, until the NY Times felt the need to issue a correction on that one too.

As the FCC has rushed to kiss up to telecom giants like AT&T and Verizon, it has enjoyed a fairly casual relationship with both the truth and the law. The agency's repeal of net neutrality, for example, was hinged largely on the idea that the modest rules devastated sector investment, something that data repeatedly disproved. Other Pai FCC policies have equally leaned on flimsy and manufactured data plucked directly from the mouths of sector lobbyists. And while this casual relationship to the truth may play well to Pai's allies, just making things up doesn't work quite as well when it comes time to defend these policies in the courts.Case in point: earlier this year the FCC tried to take away a modest $25 per month broadband stipend for tribal residents (you know, for freedom or whatever), while also banning smaller companies from receiving broadband subsidies (giants like AT&T and Verizon surely appreciated that). But while Pai's office claimed screwing tribal residents would somehow massively spur broadband deployment, the courts shot that ruling down for being "arbitrary and capricious," noting that Pai's FCC failed completely to follow the law or to justify its policy with actual facts.Fast forward to last week, and the FCC found itself again slapped down for playing fast and loose with factual reality. This time, the courts shot down a sizeable chunk of a recent proposal that gutted most state and local authority over the placement of cellular towers (and so-called "small cells," which are smaller antenna usually affixed to city street lights to extend wireless coverage). While the FCC claimed that doing so would speed up broadband deployment, a coalition of local leaders stated the plan was little more than a giveaway to giants like AT&T and Verizon, who don't like having to deal with pesky things like environmental reviews for cell tower placement.And (and tell me if you're noticing a trend here), the courts were quick to point out (pdf) that the Pai FCC proposal (again) ignored the law and didn't justify the plan with, you know, facts.Here's the court's comment on the FCC's attempt to exclude towns and cities from having a say where small cells are placed on city infrastructure, for example:

While in theory the UK is supposed to be leaving the EU soon, it's still technically a part of it, and now appears to be implementing the AVMSD (Audiovisual Media Services Directive) which was agreed to last year. One section of the agreement talks about "protection of minors" and like pretty much all "think of the children" type regulations, it's full of moral panics and impossible demands. While the Directive looks like it was designed for professionally broadcast content, apparently the UK has determined that it should apply to all online video, and the UK Parliament "quietly approved" a plan to give its media regulatory body, Ofcom, the power to fine social media companies up to 5% of their revenue if they can't magically make stuff that "might seriously impair" minors disappear from the internet.Of course, content that "might seriously impair" minors seems widely open to interpretation -- which almost certainly means over-censorship. But, it appears that Ofcom doesn't think it's a big deal at all:

DC Comics, the company behind some of our most beloved superheroes, has built a reputation for itself for playing the supervillain when it comes to intellectual property disputes. Chiefly at issue tends to be trademark law, which DC views as some kind of overarching right for it to not allow any other entity to hold a trademark that even remotely overlaps with its own established marks. DC has taken this to absurd levels, opposing trademark applications that couldn't possibly be confused with its own properties, even as many of its marks are very, very well known.This continues to the present. Most recently, DC has decided to oppose the trademark application for a group founded by MIT's Joy Buolamwini to spotlight the negative consequences of certain technologies, which she dubbed The Algorithmic Justice League.

Disclaimer: I did a teeny bit of legal work on a teeny part of Aereo's defense against the litigation onslaught seeking to obliterate it. But that's not why I think the Supreme Court's decision enabling that obliteration was terrible. On the contrary, it's why I wanted to work on the defense at all, because it was always apparent that trying to use copyright to crush Aereo was a terrible idea that would have terrible consequences. And time has, of course, born this prediction out.It had never made sense why all these TV stations would be suing Aereo in the first place. After all, isn't the thing that TV stations always want a larger viewership? With a larger viewership they can charge more for ads and make more money. So a service that helps them get that larger viewership (and at no cost to themselves) seems like something they should actually be glad to have. In any case, it was certainly quite odd to see them resent something that helped connect them with bigger audiences beyond what their broadcast signal could manage.And it made even less sense for a public television station like WNET to be part of any of these lawsuits. Commercial profit was never supposed to be its goal. Instead, pledge drive after pledge drive has always begged the public for the funds necessary to show its programming. Yet there it was, now trying to eradicate a service that helped people actually watch that programming. Which necessarily prompts the question of why anyone should ever bother to give money to WNET ever again if it was so bound and determined to limit the number of people who could benefit from it.Anyway, while the fight against Aereo made no sense, and the US Supreme Court decision killing it made even less, the result is that today we live in a world without it, where the reach and influence of local TV stations has effectively been damned to the geographical limits of their signal strength. And this pointless and artificial limitation has had a cost.Because think about what has been happening in recent elections: results end up hyper-localized, with impenetrable divisions between red and blue states, urban and rural regions, large markets and small, etc. At least in the story of the country mouse and city mouse they both got to visit each other and learn what each other's lives were like. But thanks to the Supreme Court, now it is so much harder for Americans everywhere to learn about what life is like outside the areas where they live.Aereo helped build connections between these places by overcoming the barriers imposed by distance. Instead of people only being able to see the broadcasts they could receive on their own antennas, it gave them a window into other communities by allowing them to essentially rent antennas in these other places and experience the broadcasts aimed for people there. Certainly if they'd rented an entire house in these other places there would have been no issue with them using its antenna to watch these broadcasts. So it hardly follows that it should be illegal if they simply saved the enormous expense of moving to that other place and instead only rented the antenna. (Which, despite the Supreme Court's technical misunderstanding about what Aereo did, is exactly what Aereo – and, for the past year or so, now Locast – actually did.)Especially not when, as described above, it would have been good for those stations. And especially not when it also would have been good for the nation. It does us no good to remain little regional enclaves unable to find common ground between each other. Sharing in each other's broadcast media would go a long way to bridging those geographically-enforced cultural gaps. Indeed, it would seem to vindicate the very goals of copyright, to promote the progress of arts and sciences, to ensure that local insight could be efficiently exchanged among these regions. Instead, however, the Supreme Court, in its decision to contort copyright law to effectively ban Aereo, doubled-down on the physical restrictions curtailing that exchange with artificial legal barriers that can only serve to enforce the effects of that distance upon the national electorate. And our democracy has been paying the price for this decision ever since.Perhaps things can be different with Locast. While too new to have been able to have had as much impact on national political culture as a mature service would have had by now, since last year it has tried to thread the confusing needle the Supreme Court set out for these sorts of antenna-rental services. As the courts now stand to review the legal questions they raise again, one can only hope the courts better understand this time around the public interest in knowledge exchange that's at stake, which copyright law is supposed to advance, not smother.

When we recently wrote about the myth of anti-conservative bias at the various internet platforms, we got a lot of angry responses from people who insist (very loudly, often with lots of insults and anger, but rarely with any facts or data) that we're full of shit. We'd be open to believing it if there was any actual support for these claims. But none is ever forthcoming. Indeed, amusingly, some people pointed out that a recent WSJ article about an alleged fired "conservative" engineer at Google, described as a "whistleblower," was more "proof" that the company has it in for conservatives. Tucker Carlson even had the engineer, Kevin Cernekee, on his show last week to continue to feed the narrative.And, of course, other Fox News characters, such as Lou Dobbs, played up Cernekee's claims as well, which even got President Trump to retweet Dobb's segment about Cernekee as "proof" that Google is trying to influence the 2020 election.However, as we've pointed out concerning most of the "conservatives" who have had content removed or been banned from social media platforms (as is true in similar situations with liberals and other non-conservatives) there is almost always more to the story -- and that "more" is often that these people are not banned or fired or otherwise held back because of their general political views, but because of something much worse. And, in the case of Cernekee, people finally realized that maybe it wasn't that he was a conservative, but that he wanted to fundraise in support of one of the US's most well known white supremacists, Richard Spencer.

For doing the company the favor of informing it about a leaky AWS bucket exposing sensitive counseling records of 300,000 Indian employees, the company -- 1to1Help -- has filed a criminal complaint against the person who brought the situation to its attention.In the middle of May, a researcher came across the exposed data and informed Dissent Doe of DataBreaches.net about their findings. After verifying the leak, Dissent Doe began trying to contact 1to1Help to inform it of the leak. No response was received until over a month later, possibly prompted by Dissent Doe contacting a large American company that was a customer of 1to1Help.The slow response was blamed on internal email routing. Here's some of what was seen in the exposed bucket:

Lee Fang of The Intercept has dug into the cache of internal license plate reader manufacturer documents dumped on the web earlier this year. In addition to hundreds of images of drivers and their vehicles passing through border checkpoints, the files also contained emails from Perceptics (the LPR manufacturer targeted by hackers) to Congressional reps, reminding them to hit their marks at the next Congressional hearing.

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It hasn't taken long for Trump's and Paul Ryan's once-heralded Foxconn factory deal in Wisconsin to quickly devolve into farce. The state originally promised Taiwan-based Foxconn a $3 billion subsidy if the company invested $10 billion in a Wisconsin LCD panel plant that created 13,000 jobs. But as the subsidy grew to $4.5 billion the promised factory began to shrink further and further, to the point where nobody at this point is certain that anything meaningful is going to get built at all.Reports last fall detailed the ever-shrinking nature of the deal, and how Foxconn was using nonsense to justify its failure to follow through, claiming it was building an "AI 8K+5G ecosystem" in the state to somehow make everything better. But the buildings Foxconn have purchased remain largely empty and the lion's share of the company's promises unfulfilled, despite mounting taxpayer cost.Fast forward to this week, when an analysis of the cost impact of the downsized project basically concluded what most knew all along: the deal was never going to work as structured, and throwing taxpayer funds at Foxconn isn't likely to pay dividends. And while there's still the possibility some jobs get created (assuming the company actually builds anything of note), the math still doesn't add up:

As soon as the Capital One breach was announced, you knew the lawsuits would follow. Handling the sensitive info of millions of people carelessly is guaranteed to net the handler a class-action lawsuit or two, but this one -- filed by law firm Tycko & Zavareeri -- adds a new twist.

As soon as the Capital One breach was announced, you knew the lawsuits would follow. Handling the sensitive info of millions of people carelessly is guaranteed to net the handler a class-action lawsuit or two, but this one -- filed by law firm Tycko & Zavareeri -- adds a new twist.

Our first place winner on the insightful side this week is an anonymous commenter who provided a thorough, piece-by-piece reply to a comment about alternatives to Section 230:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, while President Obama was defending the CIA's increasingly exposed use of torture on the basis that they had a "tough job", James Clapper was defending the redactions in the torture report and calling them "minimal" — but Senators were calling it "incomprehensible", because even 15% redaction can hide all the critical details.Meanwhile, comic artist Randy Queen was giving a crash course in DMCA abuse, using takedowns to censor blogs that were critical of his work, then claiming that posts criticizing this were defamatory, then doubling down yet again by trying to DMCA the posts about his DMCA abuse.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, a Washington Post writer started an online journalism dust-up when he complained about Gawker "ripping off" his reporting with a blog post discussing and heavily linking to one of his articles. Other bloggers quickly pointed out that, in fact, the mainstream press "rips off" bloggers constantly, spurring more people to dig in and illustrate the entitlement mentality driving big media's complaints about blogs, and finally the suggestion that perhaps they should run their own blogs about their own reporting if they are so upset. Amidst this, the Associated Press was still digging in on their plan to DRM the news, with their text licensing calculator that would gladly charge you for any text whether it came from the AP or not, and ironically leveraging Creative Commons licensing language for their ill-fated DRM tech. We suggested the agency would be better off finding other services to offer newspapers, while competitor Reuters stepped up defended linking, excerpting and sharing.Also this week in 2009, we published a long rebuttal to the RIAA's factually-challenged boasts about the Joel Tenenbaum verdict.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2004, long before Joel Tenenbaum, we were wondering why the RIAA gets to hold parents responsible for their kids' downloading. The US was using trade negotiations to export the DMCA and software patents to Australia, as it likes to do, Hollywood succeeded in driving a DVD backup software company out of business, and for no particular reason the FCC happily voted that VoIP systems should be required to have wiretap backdoors for law enforcement — a fitting week for Tim Wu to write a post exploring how different regulatory schemes create a "copyright gap" that impacts the telephony and content industries in vastly different ways. We also got an important appeals court ruling that found websites devoted to criticizing companies are not commercial speech and thus do not constitute trademark infringement.

One of the more subtle assaults on net neutrality has been the slow but steady introduction of arbitrary, often unnecessary restrictions mobile carriers will then charge you to get around. Sprint, for example, has toyed with plans that throttle all video, music, and games unless you pay extra. Verizon has also banned 4K video from its network unless you pay more for 5G (which isn't widely available). The company also now throttles all video on its "unlimited" data plans, charging consumers even more if they want to view content in HD as the originating service intended.Comcast has now followed Verizon's lead, and its new wireless service will also now ban HD videoon its unlimited data plans unless you pony up an adidtional $20 per month. The company technically began throttling all video to 480p on its wireless network a week ago, but only just last week announced that users would now be charged more if they actually wanted to watch video in HD:

Three of the five warrants the San Francisco Police Department obtained to search journalist/stringer Bryan Carmody's home, office, and phones have been tossed by the judges who issued them.The initial warrant, issued in February by Judge Rochelle East was the first be declared invalid. Judge East said the warrant application was misleading, omitting information that would have made it clear Carmody was a journalist and protected by the state's shield law. This warrant -- seeking access to phone call and text message records -- has been tossed. Since everything else in the Carmody investigation stems from this illegal search, the rest of the warrants are destined for the dustbin.Judge East's findings have led to two more judges tossing warrants they issued. It also has led -- at least in Judge Victor Hwang's case -- to the judge possibly reading the warrant for the first time. This statement from David Snyder of the First Amendment Coalition says the warrant Judge Hwang tossed contained information about Carmody that made it clear the SFPD was targeting a journalist.

You may recall that, back in March, we were excited to hear the news that the University of California had cancelled its Elsevier subscription, after Elsevier was unwilling to support UC's goal of universal open access to all of its research (while simultaneously cutting back on the insane costs that Elsevier charged). Apparently the fight between Elsevier and UC has continued, and it's getting nasty. Recently, UC put out a blog post that accused Elsevier of playing dirty and making a bunch of bullshit claims about UC and the negotiations: