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Despite obvious red flags regarding reduced competition and massive layoffs, both the FCC and DOJ have rushed to support T-Mobile's $26 billion merger with Sprint. We've noted that the math (and history) are very clear on this front: the reduction of major telecom competitors uniformly results in much higher consumer prices as the incentive to compete in direct price competition is hugely reduced. It's a major reason why you haven't seen AT&T and Verizon (both lobbying juggernauts) criticizing the merger. History's also clear: such mergers inevitably result in huge layoffs as redundancies are eliminated.And while the FCC and DOJ (both now run by former telecom executives, it bears repeating) are tripping over themselves to sign off on the merger, a growing coalition of states has other plans. 10 states have sued to block the deal, quite correctly noting that mindless M&As are one of the biggest reasons we all hate broadband providers like AT&T and Comcast so much. Such deals help just two class of folks: investors and executives. Everybody else pays a steep price.While the DOJ had approached numerous states in the hopes it could convince them to drop the lawsuit, that's not going all that well. Republican Texas AG Ken Paxton has now done the complete opposite, and in a statement announced that Texas will be joining the suit instead:

The San Francisco Police Department's "investigation" of journalist Bryan Carmody has just about finished collapsing completely. The stupid "investigation" -- supposedly initiated to figure out which cop leaked sensitive documents to the stringer -- has been the equivalent of a claymore mine deployed in reverse. Several claymore mines, to be more precise. With each iteration of the news cycle, the SFPD has sustained consecutive, concussive blasts to the face.What culminated in a raid of Carmody's house began with a warrant seeking phone call and messaging data covering two days in February. That warrant has already been unsealed and quashed, with the judge pointing out the swearing officer did everything he could to avoid telling the court the SFPD was looking to put a journalist under surveillance.This warrant preceded everything else. Since that was the foundation for search warrants targeting Carmody's home and the multiple devices SFPD officers seized from there, the rest of the investigation -- along with any charges the SFPD thought it might get away with pressing -- is disintegrating. Nicholas Iovino reports for Courthouse News Service that two more warrants the SFPD obtained have been tossed by judges.

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We live in a post Blurred Lines world, in which songs that merely pay homage to earlier songs, or that have a similar "groove" but don't actually copy anything are deemed infringing. The latest such case is the Katy Perry case, in which a jury found that she had infringed on a work by an artist named Flame, whose track "Joyful Noise" has a few similarities to Perry's "Dark Horse." Of course, "some similarities" is not supposed to be infringing. Especially when the similarities are so basic and fundamental to lots of different songs, including many that pre-date "Joyful Noise."

Since the White House is convinced social media companies are kicking conservatives off left and (mostly) right, it has decided to do something about it. What this "something" is remains about as vague as the accusations.Once you remove a handful of grifters and Nazi fans from the list, you're left with not that much to get upset about. But the few who fervently believe this is happening make a lot of noise and have the ears of powerful people, so stuff -- vague stuff -- is being set in motion while the First Amendment is set aside.A leaked copy of what was supposedly a draft executive order on social media bias appeared late last year. If the leak was legitimate, the White House's proposal would not have been Constitutional. It would have used the pretense of bias to allow the federal government to directly regulate speech on social media platforms. Here's Mike Masnick's take on the draft order:

The DOJ this week announced that AT&T employees have been paid more than $1 million in bribes to unlock millions of smartphones, and to install malware and unauthorized hardware on the company's network. According to the full DOJ complaint (pdf), Muhammad Fahd, a 34-year-old man from Pakistan and a (presumed dead) co-conspirator, Ghulam Jiwani, paid off AT&T employees at the company's Mobility Customer Care call center in Bothell, Washington. In return, from April 2012 until September 2017, the two men unlocked iPhones so they could be used on another carrier's network.Worse, the bribed employees happily installed malware and keyloggers providing broad access to the AT&T network. That includes keyloggers intended to gather data on AT&T's internal systems and processes:

For years now many hardware vendors have failed utterly to implement even basic security protections on most consumer-grade routers. D-Link, for example, just settled with the FTC after being sued for shipping routers with numerous vulnerabilities and default username/password combinations, despite advertising its products as "easy to secure" and replete with "advanced network security." Asus was similarly dinged by the FTC for shipping gear with numerous flaws and easily-guessed default username and password combinations.As such, it's not too surprising to see a new Consumer Reports study that found that a large number of mainstream residential routers lack even rudimentary security protections. 11 of the 26 major router brands examined by the organization came with flimsy password protection. 20 of the routers let users only change the password, but not the username of web-based router management clients. 20 of the routers also failed to protect users from repeated failed password login attempts, now commonplace on most apps, phones, and other services.Two thirds of the routers tested came with UDP enabled by default:

For over a year now, we've been discussing a worrying trend in Japan, where the government is looking to severely ramp up its anti-piracy efforts. The worry lies in the implications of these various proposed programs, including the censorship of internet sites supposedly used for piracy, the criminalization of pirating content, and how all of this is going to impact the public. One of the largest barriers to doing any of these expansions to copyright law is the Japanese constitution and legislation, which are fairly restrictive on matters of both censorship and the invasion of privacy. How the government thought it was going to route around those provisions is anyone's guess.But it seems there is confidence that it can do so, as every new proposal coming out looks to in some way violate Japan's constitution. The latest involves putting a system in place that would delivery popup warnings to anyone visiting a site that is deemed to be a "pirate site."

You'd think an entity with the name "New York Police Department" would at least have some passing respect for the law. But the more time you spend examining the NYPD, the more you find it acts in opposition of almost every law meant to control it. Sure, it's more than willing to kill you over unlicensed cigarette sales, but it can't seem to hold any of its own accountable for their multiple violations.Anything meant to bring a modicum of accountability to the agency is met with a shrug of official indifference. The only thing that's been proven to effect change in the department is orders from federal judges, and even these are greeted with foot-dragging and brass-enabled resistance.Adding to the annals of the PD's refusal to play by rules it doesn't like is this report from The Marshall Project. The NYPD and city prosecutors are using supposedly expunged arrests to push for plea deals, longer sentences, and the denial of bail.In one case examined by The Marshall Project, a man arrested for being in a vehicle that also contained an unlicensed handgun assumed he'd get cited and fined because of his lack of a criminal record. Instead, the man (referred to only as J.J.) watched as the city prosecutor produced printouts of expunged charges from back in the PD's stop-and-frisk heyday to argue for a prison sentence. J.J. had never been convicted of a crime, but the city was presenting records that should have been removed from the system to argue he was a career criminal.J.J. is now suing the city and the NYPD for its refusal to follow state laws on the handling and use of expunged criminal records.

To be part of your local law enforcement's surveillance network, all you need is a little tech from Amazon. Amazon's Ring doorbell/camera is being handed out to cops, who can then give them to citizens with the implication the recipients of this corporate/government largesse will deliver recordings upon request.Every Ring installed is another contributor to this ad hoc network of cameras -- something both cops and Amazon have access to. Amazon is looking to corner two markets at one time, roping in both the public and private sectors with an eye on dominating both. The added bonus -- at least as far as Amazon is concerned -- is its Neighbors app. Neighbors allows people to report suspicious things to other neighbors, as well as law enforcement. Unsurprisingly, early adopters have tended to report the existence of brown people in their neighborhoods more often than anything else.The whole process is guided by Amazon's heavy hand. Government agencies participating in the Ring handouts are given talking points, pre-written press releases, and contractual obligations to promote the product they're giving away. Recently-obtained documents show Amazon has even crafted scripts for police officers and press relations staff to use when questioned by citizens.But there's even more to this partnership than everything you see above. Lucas Ropek of GovTech reports cops have an Amazon-enabled workaround if Ring recipients aren't willing to turn over footage without a warrant.

Academic publishing giant Elsevier really, really, really hates Sci-Hub, the site that offers up access to lots of academic research. Elsevier has sued the site directly and tried many times to get it blocked (which, to date, seems to have only helped it get more attention). Last week, Elsevier got all legal-threaty against Citationsy, a site that helps scholars create citations. Elsevier claimed that Citationsy was infringing its copyright by linking to Sci-Hub.

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Hey, SCOTUS says it's OK so it must be OK. Via Greg Doucette comes another WTF decision [PDF] -- one that gives North Carolina cops the green light to engage in retaliatory arrests over protected speech.It's not like there's no case law to work with. The Eighth Circuit Appeals Court denied immunity to an officer who arrested someone for shouting "Fuck you!" at him as they drove by. Other federal courts have come to the same conclusion: flipping the bird/dropping f-bombs in the direction of police officers is protected speech and cannot form the basis for traffic stops or arrests.In the state court of appeals, North Carolina judges have come to pretty much the same conclusion our nation's top court did: so long as an officer can imagine a crime has been committed, they're allowed to detain and arrest people who have offended them with their words and/or hand gestures.And what a glorious hand gesture it must have been. Even the court's dry recounting of the event manages to paint a vivid picture of the event that kicked off this debacle.

It's been a bit of a roller coaster ride for Kangaroo Manufacturing over the past few weeks. The company -- which has admitted that it looks for popular items that are being sold on Amazon, and then develops competing products -- won its lawsuit a few weeks back, in which it was accused of copyright infringement for copying a floating duck pool float. In that case, the court determined that the ducks in question were not similar enough to be infringing. However, in another case, involving banana costumes, Kangaroo was not so lucky. Back in April we wrote about the appeals court hearing in that case, in which the judges joked that they were disappointed none of the lawyers showed up in the costume. However, in the end, the 3rd Circuit appeals court upheld the lower court's injunction that the two banana costumes were too similar and that Kangaroo's violated the copyright of Rasta Imposta (ht to Bill Donahue for spotting this one).There were two keys to this particular ruling. The first was the Supreme Court's terrible ruling in the Star Athletica case upturning decades of copyright law saying that you can't get a copyright on "useful articles," (which many people believed included clothing). In Star Athletica, the Supreme Court effectively changed that, saying that if there's artwork within the clothing, that could be viewed separately from the clothing, it's a different story. That's why there is suddenly a bunch of these kinds of copyright lawsuits. Here, the judges feel that Star Athletica means that if two banana costumes are too close, well, that's infringement.

Looks like there are no more untapped markets for facial recognition tech.

What is it about companies leaving consumer data publicly exposed on an Amazon cloud server? Verizon made headlines after one of its customer service vendors left the personal data of around 6 million consumers just sitting on an Amazon server without adequate password protection. A GOP data analytics firm was also recently soundly ridiculed after it left the personal data of around 198 million citizens (read: most of you) similarly just sitting on an Amazon server without protection. Time Warner Cable also recently left 4 million user records sitting in an openly-accessible Amazon bucket.You'd think that after all of this press attention fixated on a fairly basic (but massive) screw up, that companies would stop doing this. But you'd be wrong.The latest company to fail at fundamental security practices is California's Bank of Cardiff, which managed to leave millions of phone recordings made by employees -- you guessed it -- in an unsecured Amazon cloud bucket open wide to the general internet. Many of the phone recordings exposed include bank employees talking with customers about sensitive financial transactions:

Week after week we've documented how internet of things devices are being built with both privacy and security as a distant afterthought, resulting in everything from your television to your refrigerator creating both new attack vectors and wonderful new surveillance opportunities for hackers and state actors. And CIA leaks have indeed confirmed that "smart" TVs and other devices with embedded microphones make for wonderful surveillance tools.So it's not too surprising to see Microsoft's Security Response Center proclaim this week that it has caught Russian hacking group “Strontium" (aka Fancy Bear and APT28) using poorly secured printers, VoIP phones, and video decoders to gain access to sensitive networks. As is usually the case, Microsoft found that once these devices' security was bypassed (often an easy feat given there's sometimes little to no security measures in place), they were able to use them as a beach head to gain broader access to the networks they were connected to:

Just a few weeks ago we pointed out (for not the first time) that news paywalls for general interest publications did not seem likely to succeed outside of a very small number of exceptions: mainly three giant east coast newspapers which have established themselves as key news sources: the NY Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal (arguably the last one, with its focus on finance, might not even count as "general interest"). In that last post, we pointed out that even people who liked to pay for news tended to only subscribe to a single news source. That helps create a winner take all proposition where only a very small number (see above) can actually build a sustainable business model through an internet paywall.And that means that even if you're a pretty well known newspaper, falling outside the big ones, it means you're going to be in trouble. Witness the LA Times failing paywall. As Nieman Lab notes, in terms of paper subscriptions, the LA Times used to rank above the Washington Post. But it didn't make the transition to digital the way the Post did:

For years, we've noted how popular TV ratings firm Nielsen has turned a bit of a blind eye to cord cutting and the Internet video revolution, on one hand declaring that the idea of cord cutting was "pure fiction," while on the other hand admitting it wasn't actually bothering to track TV viewing on mobile devices. It's not surprising; Nielsen's bread and butter is paid for by traditional cable executives, and really, who wants to take the time to pull all those collective heads of out of the sand to inform them that their precious pay TV cash cow is dying?Eventually, the cord cutting trend became too big to ignore, forcing Nielsen to change its tune and start acknowledging the very real trend (though they called it "zero TV households" instead of cordcutters). Broadcasters (especially those hardest hit by cord cutting) didn't much like that, and began bullying the stat firm when it showed data that didn't jive with the view a foot below ground. While Nielsen slowly improved its methodologies, it would occasionally back off on certain data collection and reporting changes if the cable and broadcast industry complained loudly enough.Ironically, this fealty to wishful thinking has not paid dividends for Nielsen. Nearly every broadcasters in your cable lineup is expected to launch their own streaming service by 2022. Many of these companies (like CBS) have eyed ditching Nielsen because, they claim, it's charging too much money for a user tracking system that hasn't adapted for the streaming era. And despite attempting to use patent monopolies to retain its dominance as the source for TV viewership data, things simply have gone from bad to worse for the one time industry leader.New reports indicate that after failing to find a buyer, the firm may soon be forced to resort to being chopped up and sold for scraps:

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So, about a week ago, the NY Times properly mocked politicians for totally misrepresenting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This week it needs to mock itself. Reporter Daisuke Wakabayashi wrote a piece provocatively titled (at least as it was originally published) Why Hate Speech On The Internet Is A Never Ending-Problem, with a subhead saying: "Because this law shields it." And in case you believed it might be talking about some other law, between the head and the subhead it showed part of the text of Section 230 (technically, it showed Section (c)(1)).If you want to see how badly the NY Times botched this, just check out the current headline on the piece. It's pretty different. Now it says: "Legal Shield for Websites Rattles Under Onslaught of Hate Speech." Even that's... not great. Also, the NY Times added the following whopper of a correction notice:

The DOJ wants its secrecy. The President keeps taking it away. Over the past couple of years, FOIA litigants have received unexpected support from President Trump, often in the form of tweets. While the DOJ is arguing nothing the records seekers are seeking should be handed over, Trump is tweeting out demands that everything should be released -- largely due to his unwavering belief that selective transparency will somehow expose a massive Deep State operation against him and his associates.The stuff Trump wants exposed relates to FISA court orders and other documents related to investigations of Trump's campaign team and their ties to Russia. Trump is convinced there's nothing there and wants the public to see this for themselves. It's inadvertently commendable, even though there's a strong possibility the documents won't actually prove what Trump thinks they'll prove.Nonetheless, the friction between the DOJ's FISA-related opacity and Trump's Twitter account continues, as Josh Gerstein reports for Politico.

Man, these presidential election years sure seem to last longer than a year, don't they? And, in our hyper-partisan world of never ending political stupidity, it's somewhat comforting that the one thing we can all agree on is that the debate formats recently have basically sucked out loud. The complaints about debate formats started with the 2016 RNC primaries, with its crowded field and strange varsity/JV debate night structure. Fast-forward to 2019 and the DNC's Democratic debates are being pilloried as well. In the latter case, the chief criticism appears to be that there is far too little substance discussed, with moderators for cable and OTA networks instead focusing on getting the candidates to clash in the most easy-to-soundbite fashion. Even from the major print media, you get takes such as:

Despite spending more than $150 billion on mergers intended to help it dominate the video space, AT&T's video ambitions are falling flat. The company just posted a loss of more than 778,000 "traditional" video subscribers last quarter (satellite TV, IPTV), but also lost another 168,000 subscribers at its DirecTV Now streaming service. The reason? The company's acquisitions of DirecTV ($67 billion) and Time Warner ($86 billion) saddled it with so much debt, the company was forced to raise rates. This, in turn, helped drive AT&T's customers to the exits.Despite its voracious appetite for M&A, it's not entirely clear the company knows what to do from here. The same week it announced record subscriber losses, AT&T proclaimed it would be engaged in a rebranding that will kill off the DirecTV brand. AT&T's DirecTV Now streaming video service will now be, quite creatively, named just AT&T TV Now:

The Chinese authorities really don't like rumors being spread. Back in 2012, Techdirt reported on a "five strikes and you're out" plan for throwing rumormongers off social media for 48 hours. That obviously didn't work too well, since in 2013 a tougher line was introduced: three years in prison if you get 500 retweets of a "hurtful" rumor. But even that doesn't seem to have achieved its aim, judging by this post on Caixin Live about yet another law aimed at stamping out rumors:

There's a new but growing desire, both within the tech industry and among onlookers, for more technologists to get involved in public policy and doing work to serve the public interest. Various plans to help make this happen are starting to appear, and an especially interesting one is the Aspen Tech Policy Hub, which aims to help establish a new generation of tech policy entrepreneurs using an incubator model in the vein of Y Combinator. This week, Mike is joined by director Betsy Cooper to discuss the Hub's inaugural cohort of technologists, and what comes next.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.

We've had something of a long-running series of posts on the topic of content moderation, with our stance generally being that any attempt to do this at scale is laughably difficult. Like, to the point of being functionally impossible. This becomes all the more difficult when the content in question is not universally considered objectionable.Tech firms tend to find themselves in the most trouble when they try to bow to this demand for content moderation, rather than simply declaring it to be impossible and moving on. The largest platforms have found themselves in this mess, namely Facebook and YouTube. YouTube, for instance, has released new moderation policies over the past two months or so that seek to give it broad powers to eliminate content that it deems to be hate speech, or speech centered on demographic supremacy. Wanting to eliminate that sort of thing is understandable, even if you still think it's problematic. Actually eliminating it at scale, and in a way that doesn't sweep up collateral damage and garners wide support, is impossible.Which makes it frustrating to read headlines such as Gizmodo's recent piece on how YouTube is doing with all of this.

Every time there are mass shootings in America, the public discourse disolves into a muck of tribal finger-pointing. We blame guns, video games, past Presidents, Congress, homosexuality, the decline of the nuclear family, mental illness, the internet, and on and on. Nothing gets done, no proposed solutions are adopted, and those proposed solutions gradually become all the more insane. The truth is more nuanced than can fit into a soundbite on some cable news program, but somehow the debates soaked in blood and grief never acknowledge this. If there is to be a sea change in the rate of incidents of mass violence in this country, this will have to change.Or, if you're President Trump, you just tell the same social media companies you've regularly railed against for being biased to be your pre-crime agents instead.

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For a country that likes to talk about "being number one" a lot, that's sure not reflected in the United States' broadband networks, or the broadband maps we use to determine which areas lack adequate broadband or competition (resulting in high prices and poor service). Our terrible broadband maps are, of course, a feature not a bug. ISPs have routinely lobbied to kill any efforts to improve data collection and analysis, lest somebody actually realize the telecom market is a broken mono/duopoly whose dysfunction reaches into every aspect of tech.While these shaky maps have been the norm for several decades, recent, bipartisan pressure by states (upset that they're not getting their share of taxpayer subsidies because we don't actually know where broadband is) has finally forced even the Ajit Pai FCC to take some modest action.Previously, the form 477 data provided by ISPs let them declare an entire census block "served" with broadband if they provided broadband to just one home in that census block. After years of complaints, that is finally changing with a new FCC rule change that will require that ISPs provide geospatial maps of where they actually offer service for the first time in history:

Ever since Ed Snowden doxed the NSA's phone records collection, the agency has been coughing up documents showing its multiple collection programs have never not been abused since its was granted more power shortly after the 9/11 attacks.The putative sacrificial lamb offered up to angry Congressional reps and dismayed citizens was the Section 215 program. Well, only a small part of it, actually. The NSA would continue to hoover up business records without a warrant, but it was having trouble working within the confines of modifications forced upon it by the USA Freedom Act.Rather than use its considerable expertise to tackle the problem of over-collection, the NSA has apparently decided to abandon this collection altogether. It only took six years since the first Snowden leak, but it's something. But the NSA's uninterrupted string of abuses continued right up to its offer to shutter the program -- something that won't actually be official until Congress codifies the abandonment.Thanks to yet another FOIA lawsuit, more bad news about the tail end of collection's lifespan has been released. Charlie Savage of the New York Times reports the NSA's claims about its purge of over-collected data were as hollow as any of the dozens of public statements it has offered in response to a steady stream of leaked documents.

Last week, the European Court of Justice ruled on three separate cases regarding copyright, and exceptions to copyright. We had covered two of these cases back in the summer of 2017 and we finally have rulings. Two of the rulings are... not good. One is okay. We'll save the best for last.The first of the cases, the Pelham case, was about whether or not sampling was infringing in Germany. This case actually goes back to the turn of the Millennium. In fact, all the way back in 2012 we wrote about how this (then) 12-year-old case had finally come to an end. If only. It involved a German rapper in the late 90s using 2 whole seconds of a 1977 Kraftwerk song "Metall auf Metall." The question was whether or not such a tiny sample could be infringing. At the heart of the case was the ever-present conflict between copyright and freedom of expression. And here, the court said copyright trumps freedom of expression and creativity, even when it's a tiny 2 second music sample. The only exception is if you somehow distort the sample so that it's not recognizable.

Here's where we are in the development of the American police state: no-knock raids over code violations.

Not keen on competing with cheaper Chinese hardware, Cisco has long lobbied the US government to hamstring Chinese competitors like Huawei for lax security practices. At the beginning of this decade as Huawei began to make inroads into US markets, Cisco could frequently be found trying to gin up lawmaker angst on this subject for obvious, financial gain. And while Huawei (like most telecom giants) certainly does dumb and unethical things, it's fairly obvious that at least a portion of our recent hyperventilation over (so far unproven) allegations that Huawei spies on Americans is good old fashioned protectionism.Fast forward to this week, when new reports suggested that Cisco should have spent a little more time worrying about its own products. The company was required to pay the government $8.6 million after it was found the company routinely sold the government hackable video cameras, then did nothing to secure the devices once they were in the wild. For years. The vulnerable gear, exposed by a Cisco whistleblower, was sold to a variety of hospitals, airports, schools, state governments and federal agencies.And while news of the scandal was buried underneath the other, more notable privacy and security scandals of the day, the flaws were not what you'd call modest:

For all the talk about social media platforms and their supposed anti-conservative bias, it seems like plenty of conservatives are doing just fine. Once you eliminate a short list of fringe grifters and Nazi fans, you're left with plenty of big name conservatives who still enjoy the use of multiple platforms. Even Dennis Prager of PragerU is struggling to make a federal case of YouTube's moderation of a small percentage of his videos; asking the court to ignore the forest of views for a few pruned trees.Moderation at scale is hard and every new wrinkle demanded by politicians and activists results in another string of failures. Jim Waterson of The Guardian digs in deep into the details of another Facebook moderation failure -- one that allowed newly-minted Prime Minister Boris Johnson's lobbying buddy to skirt rules meant to inform users about paid political campaigning efforts.

One of the things that I've tried to highlight over the years, when it comes to questions of content moderation on internet platforms, is that there is a much wider spectrum of options than just "take it down" or "leave it up." Many people seem to think that those are the only two options -- and this is especially true when it comes to policymakers looking to create new laws to moderate types of content online. So much of it is focused on getting sites to remove content. But there are other options -- and sometimes those other options can be more effective.The latest episode of the radio program On The Media is an interesting (and admittedly unscientific) experiment in using techniques of "restorative justice" in response to internet trolling and harassment. On The Media has been doing an interesting series of episodes on the concepts of "restorative justice," highlighting that focusing just on punishing those who engage in bad behavior often leads to more of their bad behavior, rather than an improvement going forward. There are a variety of programs these days, that seek to come up with more proactive approaches to dealing with criminal behavior that is driven by circumstances, and it's likely there will be many more as well.For the experiment, OTM producer Micah Loewinger teamed up with researcher Lindsay Blackwell, to see if they could use restorative justice techniques to deal with internet fights that resulted in someone being banned from a particular platform. They specifically chose a potentially controversial subreddit, and tried to get fighting parties to come together to discuss things. They did three such cases -- and arguably one was a pretty clear success, one was a pretty clear failure, and one was... somewhere in the middle. I won't breakdown the whole thing, but suggest you listen:In listening to it, it reminded me of a couple of other stories that I've pointed to over the years, both involving cases where people you don't expect end up "befriending" and talking to KKK members. One is the story of Rabbi Michael Weisser, who after moving to Lincoln, Nebraska, started receiving a bunch of hate mail from a local racist named Larry Trapp, the Grand Dragon of the KKK in Nebraska. Over time Weisser befriended Trapp and tried to help him. The story is covered in a variety of articles, but here's one from the NY Times:

There were more mass shootings this weekend in the US. The Onion has been busy running more copies of its infamous ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens articles which run after every such shooting. And yet, it seems that many people want to talk about censorship. And this is true on both sides of the mainstream political aisle. Rep. Kevin McCarthy got the nonsense kicked off with the usual fallback for Republicans who don't want to talk about guns, by blaming video games. This happens all the time -- often from people who claim that they're "Constitutionalists." Of course, it's hard to see how you can be a Constitutionalist if you dump on the 1st Amendment to protect the 2nd.But it's not just Republicans with an aversion to having any sort of actual discussion about gun control who jump to censorship. Given that some of the most recent shootings have involved angry, ignorant, idiotic rants posted on 8chan (stop calling them manifestos, guys), there's been a vocal discussion this past weekend on whether or not 8chan should be censored or shut down. 8chan, as you may recall, was founded as something of an alternative to 4chan, after some people (somewhat ridiculously) felt that that site was moderated too much. It was founded with the same hubris as the ignorant people who insist that there should never be any content moderation on any site, without realizing what that means in reality. And now, with even the site's own founder saying that it should be shut down (people might want to go back and look at what he was saying during the GamerGate era...), Cloudflare has now been pressured into cutting off its services for 8chan as well.This is a perfectly reasonable move for the company to make, as part of being in society and providing services to society is determining what kinds of services you want to provide and to whom. I appreciate that Cloudflare is reluctant to get into the business of making any sorts of judgment calls on content, but no one can avoid those questions forever. However, as Cloudflare notes, it's not clear that a company like Cloudflare making this decision will change much in the long run:

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As we pointed out recently, last year, Devin Nunes co-sponsored a bill discouraging frivolous lawsuits. He also voted for a House Amendment to protect free speech. And then he started filing frivolous lawsuits against critics and the media for exercising their free speech rights to criticize (or even mock him). He sued Twitter and some satirical Twitter accounts, as well as a political consultant, Liz Mair, who has criticized and mocked Nunes. He also sued news giant McClatchy (and Liz Mair a second time) for writing an article he felt was unfair.And, just this week he said he has more lawsuits planned:

Back in 2007, Verizon was forced to strike an agreement with the New York State Attorney General for marketing data plans as "unlimited" when the plans had very clear limits. Twelve years later and it's not clear the company has learned much of anything.The latest case in point: Verizon this week once again revamped the company's not really "unlimited" data plans, and they once again come with some very real limits. For example the company's entry level "unlimited" plan still bans HD video entirely, throttling everything to 480p, then forcing you to pay extra should you want to view a video stream as its originator intended. But all of the company's plans feature some kind of limits with the goal (always) of upselling you to a more expensive plan should you, you know, actually want unfettered access to the internet and use your device as intended (say as a mobile hotspot):Verizon has added a new wrinkle to the mix by banning 4K video streaming entirely unless you subscribe to a new Verizon 5G plan (still barely available in most areas) for another additional $10 per month. And again, all of these plans have limits that result in your "unlimited" connection being throttled should you, you know, actually use it. This throttling occurs after 25 GB/mo on Play More Unlimited, 50 GB/mo on Do More Unlimited and 75 GB/mo on Get More Unlimited.Other mobile carriers like Sprint have similarly experimented with throttling games, video, and music, then charging you more money if you want to bypass these arbitrary restrictions. Again, the entire function of this model is to upsell wireless data customers (who already pay some of the highest prices for mobile data in the developed world) to even more expensive plans if they just want their damn connection to work. Customers who don't know what a gigabyte is or what these restrictions mean will usually migrate to the more expensive plan "to be safe." It's a pricing funnel designed to scare consumers into paying more.It's fairly impressive that twelve years after Verizon was dinged for not understanding the definition of unlimited -- and after fifteen years of net neutrality debates -- some people still don't see the terrible precedent these kinds of pricing plans set. Letting ISPs impose arbitrary restrictions, then charge you more money to get around them, isn't a model that's going to be great for innovators over the longer haul. And with the triple punch of regulatory capture at the FCC, the death of net neutrality, and looming consolidation/competition erosion courtesy of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, there's a whole lot more of this sort of thing over the horizon.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is TKnarr responding to the idea that the dismissal of the Covington teen's lawsuit against the Washington Post was a premature decision:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014 was one of significant events around the CIA. First, it was reported that the agency was intercepting confidential whistleblower communications sent to the Senate, which led to angry denials followed in short order by an admission and apology — while also revealing that the spying on the Senate went even further than the report showed. At the same time as all this, the CIA torture report was winding its way towards release. Some leaked details revealed that State Department officials knew about the torture and were instructed not to tell their bosses, and then the White House passed on its redacted version to the Senate — leading Dianne Feinstein to ask why so much of the report was redacted and delay its release. Then, at the end of the week, President Obama addressed the issue with the disturbingly casual statement that "we tortured some folks".Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, there was no surprise when the court rejected Joel Tenenbaum's highly questionable fair use defense for file sharing, capping off the general trainwreck of his defense, and ending with Tenenbaum being ordered to pay $22,500 per song, for a total of $675,000. Meanwhile, the Associated Press was sick enough of people mocking its plans to DRM the news that it said it's done talking about fair use, though perhaps a more important question was whether the AP was still relevant at all. This was somewhat mirrored in Barnes & Noble's bizarre response to questions about why it put DRM on public domain books.Also this week in 2009: Taser dropped its misguided lawsuit against Second Life, we saw what appears to be the first defamation lawsuit over a tweet, and Apple was fighting to prevent a DMCA exception for jailbreaking iPhones — not a great look in the same week it blocked Google Voice from the iPhone and sparked an FCC investigation.Fifteen Years AgoFive years earlier in 2004, before the iPhone existed (but with people including us already using the term to describe a hypothetical device we all suspected was coming), Apple made news by putting a slimmed down version of iTunes on a Motorola phone, though we couldn't help but wonder if carriers would kill it due to their own walled-garden mentality. Not that Apple would deserve much sympathy since, that same week, RealNetworks engineered a way for people to put their Real music onto iPods only for Apple to act indignant and accuse them of "adopting the tactics and ethics of a hacker". Meanwhile, Google was moving towards its hotly anticipated IPO when it got hit by the MyDoom virus and taken offline for several hours (which may have only served to make people realize just how much they use it).

Fake news laws are so hot right now. Any government with an authoritarian bent is getting in on the action, stepping up domestic surveillance while trampling remaining speech protections -- all in the name of "protecting" people from a concept they can't clearly define.It's not just the places you expect. Sure, we may like to think this sort of opportunistic lawmaking may be relegated to places like Vietnam and Singapore, where governments have continually expressed their interest in deterring criticism of governments and kings and their shitty laws. But even our own President spends a great deal of time talking about "fake news" and the need to prevent journalists from criticizing the guy sitting in the Oval Office. And France's government is looking at adding this to its long list of speech restrictions, even if only at "election time."The latest country to add a speech-squashing, government-expanding "fake news" bill to its roster of bad ideas is the Philippines. The proposal doesn't use the terminology du jour, but "fake news" by any other name is still "fake news." Here's the immediate effect the "Anti-False Content Act" would have on the country's population.

Were you to hear from the lobbying groups for the major book publishers on the topic of copyright, their answers are generally to push for longer terms, stricter anti-piracy measures, and the most draconian reading of copyright law possible. Groups like The Authors Guild have been firm in their stances that copyright is the only thing that keeps authors in any kind of business, so important is it to their livelihoods. One would think, therefore, that all authors of books would likewise take copyright very, very seriously.Fortunately, for those of us that appreciate irreverent humor, not so much.

Another day, another attempt by someone to silence people for saying something they don't like. The latest is a history professor, who was briefly quoted in an article about another lawsuit. That lawsuit? An attempt by some Virginia residents to stop the removal of some Confederate monuments in Charlottesville, Virginia. One of the plaintiffs in that case is Edward Dickinson Tayloe II. The article, written in the publication "C-Ville" (as you've figured out, a publication about Charlottesville) goes a bit into the history of the Tayloe family -- which goes back centuries in Virginia and apparently includes cotton plantation (and slave) owners.The article contains two quotes from UVA history professor Jalane Schmidt. In the introduction to the article, she is quoted as saying the following about those who were suing to prevent the removal of Confederate monuments:

We've for some time written about cable TV programming blackouts stemming from contract disputes over retransmission fees. The way this works is that cable operators pay broadcasters of television channels fees to retransmit those broadcasts to customers. When those contracts come to term, broadcasters often demand rate-hikes, which the cable operator resists. In the event no agreement is reached, one side or the other blacks out the channel, pissing off fans of that channel. That anger is then leveraged by both sides to negotiate better terms. Pay TV customers, meanwhile, never see any kind of refund for the missing channel.In the pantheon of reasons that cord-cutting continues to be a trend, blackouts may not rank as the highest of reasons, but it might be one of the easiest to understand, irritating examples of how the cable TV business simply isn't serving its customers all that well. Blackout instances have been trending upward for years, but as Karl just discussed 2019 is already a record-breaking year for blackouts, and we're only a bit over half way through the year.

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I feel like we need to repost this on a near weekly basis, but there are two big myths that keep making the rounds over and over and over again, so they need to be repeatedly debunked. First, it's the idea that internet companies are "censoring" conservatives. And, yes, I know that we're going to get some angry commenters pinky swearing that it's true, and calling me all sorts of creative names for not being willing to admit it, but it remains true that there has been absolutely no evidence shown to support that premise. The other one, which is related, is the idea that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act somehow was premised on platforms being "neutral." Three recent articles tackle these myths, and it seemed worth highlighting all three.We'll start with Siva Vaidhyanathan's piece in the Atlantic, responding to the bogus cries of censorship. Vaidhyanathan points out that, rather than censoring conservatives, Republicans seem to have used these platforms to great advantage:

AT&T is increasingly becoming one of those companies that's so bone-grafted to the government, it's getting harder to determine where the telecom giant ends and the government begins. Reports have already explored how AT&T is effectively fused to the NSA; the company provides the government widespread access to every shred of data that traverses its network, and its employees can often be found acting as government intelligence analysts.Granted after some early concerns about corruption, AT&T has also been tasked with building the nation's $47 billion emergency communications network, FirstNet. And this week the company also netted a new $1 billion, fifteen-year contract to rebuild the Department of Justice's computer systems:

So much for the Fifth Amendment. At least in Idaho, anyway. Back in January, a magistrate judge rejected the government's attempt to force a suspect to unlock a seized phone using his fingerprints. The judge found the government's request to be a violation of two rights -- the Fifth Amendment protection against compelling a defendant to testify against themselves -- and the Fourth Amendment, since the government hadn't shown a connection between the accused and the seized device.As the magistrate pointed out, the government could not rely on "foregone conclusion" arguments because it had failed to develop any foregone conclusions. The warrant itself said the government was seeking to search the phone for "indicia of ownership" -- something the government should have been able to plausibly allege long before it started asking the court to compel the suspect to unlock the device.The judge said the government's application lacked a lot of info it needed to pursue this next step.