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Recently, the North Carolina State Board of Elections asked suppliers of electronic voting machines a simple question: who owns you? (h/t Annemarie Bridy)

We've long noted that you wouldn't see net neutrality or privacy violations in the broadband sector if there was more competition. Historically however, entrenched companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have spent millions upon millions of dollars preventing that from happening. They quite enjoy the current paradigm of limited competition, and with state and federal regulatory capture they face absolutely no penalty for sky high prices and abysmal service in most markets. And as the late 90s and early aughts made pretty clear, they're extremely good at crushing smaller companies that try to disrupt the space.Enter Amazon, which is one of countless companies (including Space X) exploring the application of low-orbit satellites as a new broadband alternative. Amazon subsidiary Kuiper Systems last week filed a request with the FCC to ultimately launch 3,236 low orbit broadband satellites that would cover a sizeable portion of the globe. From the filings it's not clear if Amazon will offer these services directly to consumers, or focus more on selling connectivity to other entities:

The intent behind "ag-gag" laws is pretty evident. The aim is to prevent the general public learning about unsatisfactory or downright cruel conditions in which animals are kept by some farmers. Techdirt has been reporting on them for a number of years. Fortunately, US courts are increasingly throwing them out as unconstitutional. So far, ag-gag laws seems to be a US specialty, but that may be about to change. A new law under discussion in France would force online companies to remove "hateful content" from their networks within 24 hours. The journalist Marc Rees spotted a proposed amendment to the law that would define the following content as "hateful" (via Google Translate):

We of course talk a great deal about video game piracy here and nearly all of the commentary from the gaming industry centers on how piracy is destroying an industry that only seems to continue growing. Were you to take only a brief look at the history of our posts on the subject, you would come away with a clear picture that game developers see piracy as the greatest of all evils.It turns out that for many developers there is a greater evil, however. An evil so great, in fact, that game developers are actually pushing the public to piracy as a remedy.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has decided it's OK if a government agency searches a phone that should never have been seized in the first place… so long as it's not the same government agency that illegally seized it. The illegality of the original seizure -- which should have provoked some discussions of poisonous trees and their harmful fruit -- is pretty much discarded in favor of the good faith exception.The backstory is this: Charles Fulton Jr. was targeted by the Galveston (TX) Police Department -- working in tandem with the FBI -- for sex trafficking and prostitution of teens. He was ultimately found guilty on four sex trafficking charges, prompting this appeal of the district court's refusal to toss out the evidence pulled from his seized phone.Here's how the seizure and very eventual search went down, taken from the court's decision [PDF]. (Some emphasis added for reasons that will become apparent momentarily.)

Bruce Schneier is a name most Techdirt readers are very familiar with — he's a famous computer security expert who most recently has taken up the mantle of Public Interest Technologist, and been exploring exactly what that means. This week, Bruce joins us on the podcast to discuss how technologists can dedicate themselves to the common good.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.

Early on, as the scope of Russia's disinformation and hacking efforts were being revealed, there was a tendency on many fronts to downplay the depth and breadth of the problem. For example, early whistleblower revelations of Russia's troll factories--which pump bile and misinformation into the internet bloodstream 24/7--were downplayed as just a few harmless sods posting lame memes in broken English. In time, it became clear that the efforts were larger, broader, and far more sophisticated than initially believed.The now infamous hack of the DNC was similarly downplayed at first. For years, thanks in large part to nonsense and conspiracy theory, there were widespread claims the DNC had hacked itself. Others implied (and still do) that the hack was some kind of mass delusion. We now know the hack was part of a documented attack by Russian intelligence, only exposed due to some sloppy opsec by Russian intelligence agents.Here on planet Earth, one thing keeps being made abundantly clear: the scope of Russia's disinformation and hacking efforts are continually being revealed as much bigger than both "conventional wisdom" and crackpot wingnut theory dictated. The latest case in point: the Seth Rich conspiracy, which proclaimed that the DNC staffer had been covertly murdered instead of being robbed, has infected brains across the internet for years now. While the theory was never true, it gained traction thanks to a wide variety of voices ranging from Wikileaks to Fox News.But a new multi-part report notes that, once again, what was surmised to be just random conspiracy birthed in the bowels of 4chan actually had its foundations in Russian disinformation. The report notes that the Seth Rich theory was first planted by Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, in a phony "bulletin" intended to read like a legitimate intelligence report. The apparent goal: to spread doubt about Russia's involvement and imply the GRU hack of the DNC was actually an inside job. Looking back, you'd have to conclude it was at least partially effective.This inside job narrative was also propped up by a number of flimsy companion conspiracies claiming transfer speed data "proved" that the DNC had hacked itself. We've already discussed how that well circulated claim, printed unskeptically in several mainstream publications, was based largely on fluff and nonsense, circulated by internet trolls pretending to be anonymous intelligence analysts.Whatever their origins, it didn't take long for the planted stories to get picked up by bogus news sites, then funneled into more mainstream arenas:

A decade ago, you may recall, there was a big copyright fight concerning the iconic "Hope" poster that artist Shepard Fairey had created for the Obama campaign. The Associated Press realized that Fairey had used one of its photos as the "model" for making the poster, and started demanding money (there was also a side issue where the actual photographer kept changing his story, first claiming he was thrilled that Fairey had used it, then arguing that the copyright on the photo was his and not the AP's, and then getting angry at Fairey). Eventually Fairey filed for declaratory judgment of non-infringement, against the AP, arguing that his use was covered by fair use. We argued at the time that he had a very strong case. However, Fairey poisoned his own position in the lawsuit by stupidly first (falsely) claiming he had used a different photograph as the basis for his poster and then destroying evidence about which photo he had used. That's bad. Really bad. So, it wasn't a huge surprise to see Fairey eventually agree to just settle the lawsuit, rather than fight for the fair use ruling, since the case was so muddied by his own early actions.But, for those of us who value fair use, this was disappointing, because it would have been nice to have had a clear fair use ruling in that case.However, now, a decade later, we do have a ruling in a case that has some similarities to the Fairey/Obama/Hope/AP case, though, oddly, on photographs and paintings that are much older. And this one also involves two incredibly well-known figures: the artist Andy Warhol and the musician Prince. There's a fair bit of background to this story, so stick with me, but the short version is that a photographer, Lynn Goldsmith, took a bunch of photos of Prince in 1981. In 1984, Vanity Fair magazine (owned by Conde Nast) licensed Goldsmith's photographs for an article the magazine was doing about Prince. The magazine then commissioned Warhol to do a painting of Prince based on Goldsmith's photographs. That resulted in this 1984 spread:Apparently Warhol actually created a bunch of paintings based on Goldsmith's photographs, most of which have been sold, and a few of which are now in the Warhol museum. You can see all the images in the original complaint in this case.After Prince died, Vanity Fair reran its article, and then teamed up with some other Conde Nast publications, and put out a special magazine called "The Genius of Prince" using one of Warhol's other portraits.There was some procedural oddness in all of this -- because Goldsmith claims that she knew about none of this until after that "The Genius of Prince" magazine came out (even though she had licensed a photograph to Vanity Fair, it appears that there was some confusion about that, and at least Goldsmith claims she was never aware of the Warhol portrait based on her photograph back in the 1980s). Goldsmith contacted the Andy Warhol Foundation about the portrait, arguing that it was infringement. The Foundation then filed for declaratory judgment against Goldsmith. It made a bunch of arguments, including that the statute of limitations (three years) had run out, but most of the case focused on the 2016 magazine, which made it still well within the statute of limitations.Either way, the court notes that those other issues don't much matter, because this is an easy fair use call. As the court says, "it is plain that the Prince Series works are protected by fair use."It runs through the standard four factor test, finding that the first, third and fourth factors all lean towards fair use, and the second factor is merely "neutral." The judge finds them transformative:

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The proliferation of deep fake videos is going to start having an effect on First Amendment protections. Hint: it's not going to make these protections any stronger."Deep fake" may be easier to define than "fake news," but that doesn't mean there won't be collateral damage. The issue isn't a new one. Faking reality has been around nearly as long as reality itself. Cheap tools that make this anyone's game is the only thing new. Before we had deep fakes, we had Photoshop and its imitators.Video used to be the last bulwark of truth. It couldn't be faked easily. But this too has been abused for years. Editing video to make it show what the editor wants it to show is a tactic that has been used for years. Now, however, tools make it possible to put new words in peoples' mouths, as was demonstrated to devastating satirical effect when a video of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was tricked out to make it appear as though Zuckerberg was promising to swallow every user's data and privacy.This is prompting legislators to act. Concerns over the potential of deep fakes to mislead people or, in some cases, destroy the unwitting participant's reputation, are leading to the production of legislation from people not entirely sure what they're dealing with.Apparently shaken by a deep fake video of former president Barack Obama calling President Trump a "dipshit" and Housing Secretary Ben Carson "brainwashed," a California assemblyperson is pitching anti-deep fake legislation. Ben Christopher of CalMatters has the details:

Over the years, UK ISPs have been forced by the government to censor an increasing array of "controversial" content, including copyrighted material and "terrorist content." In fits and spurts, the UK has also increasingly tried to censor pornography, despite that being a decidedly impossible affair. Like most global censorship efforts, these information blockades often rely on Domain Name Server (DNS) level blacklists by UK ISPs.Historically, like much of the internet, DNS hasn't been all that secure. That's why Mozilla recently announced it would begin testing something called "DNS over HTTPS," a significant security upgrade to DNS that encrypts and obscures your domain requests, making it difficult to see which websites a user is visiting. Obviously, this puts a bit of a wrinkle in the government, ISP, or other organizational efforts to use DNS records to block and filter content or track user activity.Apparently thinking they were helping(?), the UK Internet Services Providers’ Association (ISPA), the policy and trade group for UK ISPs, last week thought they'd try and shame Mozilla for... trying to secure the internet. The organization "nominated" Mozilla for the organization's meaningless "internet villain" awards for, at least according to ISPA, "undermining internet safety standards in the UK":

Back in April, the UK (with Theresa May making the announcement) released a plan to fine internet companies if they allowed "online harms" in the form of "abhorrent content." This included "legal" content. As we noted at the time, this seemed to create all sorts of problems. Since then, the UK has been seeking "comments" on this proposal, and many are coming in. However, the most incredible thing is that the UK seems to assume so many things in its plan that the comments it's asking for are basically, "how do we tweak this proposal around the edges," rather than, "should we do this at all?"Various organizations have been engaging, as they should. However, reading the Center for Democracy & Technology's set of comments to the UK in response to its questions is a really frustrating experience. CDT knows how dumb this plan is. However, the specific questions that the UK government is asking don't even let commenters really lay out the many, many problems with this approach.And, of course, we just wrote about some new research that suggests a focus on "removing" terrorist content has actually harmed the efforts against terrorism, in large part by hiding from law enforcement and intelligence agencies what's going on. In short, in this moral panic about "online harms", we're effectively sweeping useful evidence under the rug to pretend that if we hide it, nothing bad happens. Instead, the reality is that letting clueless people post information about their dastardly plans online seems to make it much easier to stop those plans from ever being brought to fruition.But the UK's "online harms" paper and approach doesn't even seem to take that possibility into account -- instead it assumes that it's obviously a good thing to censor this content, and the only questions are really around who has the power to do so and how.The fact that they don't even seem to be open to the idea that this entire approach may be counterproductive and damaging suggests that the momentum for this proposal is unlikely to be stoppable -- and we're going to end up with a really dangerous, censorial regulation with little concern for all the harm it will cause, even when it regards actual harms like terrorist attacks.

It's been more than six months since a new law in California opened the books on police misconduct and use of force records. And there are still agencies stiff-arming public records requests. Law enforcement agencies aren't known for their transparency and accountability, which is why laws like California's are needed to force these obligations on them. But while violations of state law might get a resident arrested, they seem to be a bit powerless when it comes to making law enforcement behave in a legal fashion.The Desert Sun reports it still hasn't heard back from a number of agencies it's sent requests to. In some cases, it appears an effort is being made but the responding agencies are just understaffed.

While the shoddy Internet of Things sector gets ample heat for being a security and privacy dumpster fire, the traditional network gear sector has frequently been just as bad. A few years ago, for example, hardware vendor Asus was dinged by the FTC for offering paper-mache grade security on the company's residential network routers. The devices were frequently being shipped with easily guessable default usernames and passwords, and contained numerous, often obvious, security vulnerabilities.In 2017, the FTC also filed suit against D-Link, alleging many of the same things. According to the FTC, the company's routers and video cameras, which the company claimed were "easy to secure" and delivered "advanced network security," were about as secure as a kitten-guarded pillow fort. Just like the Asus complaint, the FTC stated that D-Link hardware was routinely shipped with easily-guessable default usernames and passwords, making it fairly trivial to compromise the devices and incorporate them into DDoS botnets (or worse).Like any good company, D-Link at the time professed its innocence, insisting there was nothing wrong with its products and that the FTC claims were "vague and unsubstantiated." Fast forward to this week, when the company struck a settlement with the FTC, and, according to an FTC press release, has agreed to fix security flaws it previously had claimed didn't exist:

It takes a lot for a law enforcement officer to lose the protective shield of qualified immunity. This protection originates from the courts, not from statute, so it tends to be interpreted pretty loosely by the judges applying it. It covers the most egregious abuses of civil rights and liberties, just so long as the officer being sued has performed these violations with sufficient creativity.Every so often, though, a cop does something no court can forgive. The multitude of exceptions afforded to law enforcement officers occasionally cannot be stretched to cover their sins in a cloak of official forgiveness. The Sixth Circuit Appeals Court recently handled one of these rarities.An opinion [PDF] whose opening paragraph contains this sentence is not going to end well for the appellant.

Last week there was a bit of an uproar about YouTube supposedly implementing a "new" policy that banned "hacking" videos on its platform. It came to light when Kody Kinzie from Hacker Interchange, tweeted about YouTube blocking an educational video he had made about launching fireworks via WiFi:

In news that will surprise no one, Customs and Border Protection -- like many other law enforcement agencies -- is shot through with bigots and sadists. ProPublica was sent screenshots from a closed Facebook group composed of Border Patrol agents. The "10-15 Group," named for the Border Patrol code for "aliens in custody," entertained itself by posting offensive memes and generally treating the people they interact with most as subhuman, at best.

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We recently released our Don't Shoot The Message Board report, which details, with actual numbers, evidence of how Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has encouraged and enabled a tremendous amount of investment in thousands of internet companies, building up real competition. At the event in Washington, DC, where we announced the paper, one of the questions from the audience focused on whether or not we should remove Section 230 protections from large companies as a way to deal with allegedly anti-competitive actions. The premise, put forth by the questioner, was that Google/Facebook/Amazon have benefited so much from Section 230 that that's why they're now so dominant -- and somehow removing the protections of 230 will somehow create competition.That's a very strange take, and one that doesn't seem supported by the evidence. Again, as our report showed, having CDA 230 created lots of investment in startups and new internet platform companies. Taking away Section 230 would create a massive liability and regulatory burden, which I'm sure the big internet companies wouldn't like, but which they could obviously handle. Smaller companies? Not so much. Removing CDA 230 would only serve to lock in Google, Facebook and Amazon.That's why it's good to see a recent paper from law professor Eric Goldman, making exactly this point: Want to Kill Facebook and Google? Preserving Section 230 Is Your Best Hope. The paper is a very quick and easy read and I recommend taking a look. Here's just a brief excerpt:

We've noted repeatedly that the repeal of net neutrality did far more than just kill popular net neutrality rules. It effectively neutered the FCC's ability to do its job and oversee lumbering natural telecom monopolies. And, contrary to the claims of the telecom lobby, it threw any remaining authority to an FTC that lacks the resources or authority to do the job either. In short the repeal gave loathed telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T carte blanche to do pretty much anything they'd like to their captive customer bases, provided they're marginally clever about it.Here's one case in point: the previous FCC had passed some fairly basic rules requiring that ISPs be transparent about the kind of connection you're buying. As in, ISPs were required to not only inform you what kind of throttling or restrictions were on your line, but they were supposed to make it clear how many hidden fees you'd pay post sale. With those rules dead, the FCC's process now basically involves you complaining to the Ajit Pai FCC, and the agency doing jack shit about it. Under Pai's model, ISPs are allowed to bullshit you all they'd like in terms of caps, throttling, and other limits, as long as their bullshit is hidden somewhere in their website. And even that's not likely to be enforced:

Our first place winner on the insightful side this week is James Burkhardt who responded to the news of Microsoft's looming ebook shutdown by sharing his approach to dealing with such content:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, it was slightly refreshing to see the new NSA boss refrain from Keith Alexander's sky-is-falling hyperbole when talking about the fallout of the Snowden revelations. We continued to learn more about already-published documents — such as the fact that the FBI and CIA were joining the NSA in the use of "backdoor searches" — as well as getting new revelations, such as details on how the FISA Court (which incidentally also this week issued a memorandum letting bulk metadata collection continue, had given the NSA incredibly broad powers to spy on almost any country. The EFF was launching a new lawsuit against the agency too, this time over its procedures for dealing with zero-day vulnerabilities, and over in the other major arena of federal government secrecy, a court ordered the DOJ to release the other secret drone strike memo it had referenced in documents the previous week.Meanwhile, in the wake of Aereo's shutdown, the CEO of CBS was twisting reality to call the ruling "pro-consumer", and we noted how the uncertainty it created may have killed the all-important Cablevision ruling about remote DVRs, but it was impossible to be sure.Ten Years AgoSpeaking of the Cablevision ruling, it was this week in 2009 that the Supreme Court refused to hear the case and left the appeals court ruling in place. We were just beginning to get our heads around the scope of automated copyright settlement letter shakedowns, as well as the ridiculous copyright situation faced by academics who want to share their work. Microsoft, Yahoo and Real were all sued for making a misstep in the music copyright maze, the RIAA scored an easy and expected legal win against Usenet.com while Jammie Thomas officially appealed the constitutionality of the award in her case, and L'Oreal was continuing its crusade to hold eBay responsible for its users' actions. This was also the week that a district court infamously blocked publication of an unofficial sequel to Catcher In The Rye, reminding us that copyright is one area where the government doesn't blink about banning books.Fifteen Years AgoEven all the way back in 2004, it was barely news to discover that lots of big companies routinely share customer data without permission or even disclosure. It was perhaps even less surprising to learn that people were opposed to the RIAA suing downloaders, or that CAN SPAM was still a failure at stopping spam (especially with 20% of Americans admitting they'd bought stuff from spam). Also not especially surprising was the latest failure of broadband-over-power-lines or, sadly, the Senate passing yet another slavishly pro-Hollywood bill easily via voice vote. But, though still not exactly "surprising", it was encouraging and inspiring to see the EFF kick into high-gear with its bad-patent-busting efforts that continue to this day.

One of the major players in cop tech is bowing out of the facial recognition race. As Hayley Tsukayama reports for the EFF, Axon (formerly Taser) has decided there are far too many ethical and practical concerns to move forward with adding facial recognition tech to its popular bodycams.Axon actually has an ethics board -- something that certainly would have been welcome back in its Taser sales days. Perhaps having a few ethical discussions would have prevented dead Americans from being awarded postmortem declarations of "excited delirium," thus keeping law enforcement officers from being held accountable for killing people when they were only supposed to be arresting them.The Axon ethics board has arrived at the following conclusion concerning facial recognition software:

Our past posts on Gibson Guitar, the famed guitar-maker, have revealed roughly a decade of strict IP enforcement and other busuiness challenges. Between waffling on its support for SOPA and its own failures to properly innovate in a direction that met its customers' demand, never mind its odd legal trouble over "illegal" wood used in its guitars and the bankruptcy it underwent a few years back, we're not left with a picture of a well-oiled business. Despite that, emerging from bankruptcy, Gibson has continued its IP maximilist ways, most notably in the past few weeks with a lawsuit against the owner of Dean and Luna Guitars for trademark infringement and counterfeiting over several guitar body designs that the defendants claim aren't protectable.There are two important aspects of that specific dispute to note here. First, the public backlash against Gibson over the lawsuit was firm and swift. Second, this specific dispute originated with cease and desist notices sent out by Gibson's legal team back in 2017. That is particularly notable as it was only in November of 2018 that Gibson brought on a new CEO, James Curleigh. In the wake of the backlash over the past few weeks, Curleigh has gone out of his way to promise the public that Gibson is going to quickly move on from its IP maximilist ways.

Back when Sinclair was trying to acquire Tribune Broadcasting, you might recall the company was accused of some highly unethical behavior in order to get the deal done. Despite the FCC doing its best to neuter most media consolidation protections to help move the deal forward, the union would have still resulted in the merged company violating media ownership limits and dominating local broadcasting in a huge number of new markets.To get around those limits, Sinclair allegedly got, uh, creative. Consumer groups accused Sinclair of trying to offload several of its companies to Sinclair-owned shell companies to pretend the deal would remain under the government's ownership cap. The company also tried something similar in trying to offload some stations to friends and other partner companies at highly discounted rates, allowing it to technically not "own" -- but still control -- those stations. Some of the deals involved offloading stations to relatives and friends, for example:

The Chinese government is no longer content to place its own citizens under pervasive surveillance. There's a new twist to border device searches in certain areas of the country: the installation of software that provides government agents with plenty of data -- including text messages -- from visitors' phones. Joseph Cox of Motherboard has the details.

Senator Lindsey Graham is not exactly the most tech savvy of politicians -- and he demonstrates this is the most predictable of ways: falling for bogus tropes about the internet, while always (always) kowtowing to the surveillance state. He's not sure that bloggers should be protected by the 1st Amendment, and he thinks that the law requires internet platforms to be neutral (it does not). Of course, one thing he likes about the internet is the fact that it allows the intelligence community to sweep up all your data.But his latest is that next week he'll be hosting a hearing with the most ridiculous of moral panic titles around: "Protecting Innocence in a Digital World." There's no more information about what the panel is officially about or who will be speaking, but from the name alone you can assume it's going to be full on moral panics about the evils of the internet and how "something must be done" to "protect the children." Of course, given his earlier comments on why Section 230 of the CDA is no good, there's a decent likelihood that this, too, will be attacked during the hearing -- even though CDA 230 was literally written to enable platforms to create "family friendly" spaces -- and amending it would likely take away those incentives.Similarly, this is coming at the same exact time that his colleague, Senator Josh Hawley, is demanding that companies stop moderating altogether, because he's upset by the myth that internet companies are silencing conservatives (reality: they're just saying they don't want to host trolls and Nazis and sometimes they make mistakes because when you're dealing with that much content mistakes will be made).So I'm a bit confused as to how Senator Graham and the Judiciary Committee expect internet platforms to magically stop "bad stuff" online at the same time that another Senator is demanding that they stop moderating altogether.

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I've been thinking a lot lately about how so many of the "problems" that people bring up with regards to the internet these days -- much of them having to do with disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, etc. -- are really manifestations of the problems of people in general, perhaps magnified by technology. At some point I'll likely write more on this concept, but as such it's difficult to see how blaming the technology solves the underlying problems of humanity. It's treating the symptoms, not the disease. Or, worse, in many cases it seems like an attempt to brush the disease under the rug and hope it disappears (to mix metaphors a bit). Alicia Wanless has written a long an interesting post that makes a similar, though slightly different point.She also notes that blaming technology seems unlikely to solve the underlying issues.

The Ajit Pai FCC has pissed off yet another subset of the population still reliant on factual data.Scientists and researchers at NASA, NOAA, and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) have been warning that the wireless industry's use of select bands for 5G could interfere with transmissions of weather-satellite imagery. In a letter (pdf) sent to the FCC last month, warning that the industry's plan to use 24GHz band could severely hamper weather forecasting. The FCC recently auctioned off spectrum in this band for private companies, but a growing roster of scientists say precautions weren't taken first:

Techdirt's reporting on the EU's disastrous Copyright Directive concentrated on its three worst aspects: Article 13 (upload filters -- now renumbered as Article 17), Article 11 (ancillary copyright for press publications, now Article 15) and Article 3 (text and data mining). But there are some other sections, less well known, which could actually help to improve copyright law in the EU. One of them is Article 14, which concerns "Works of visual art in the public domain":

We've talked a great deal of late about Epic Games' kicking off a PC gaming platform war with Steam through its own Epic Store. What the whole thing comes down to is that the Epic Store offers game publishers a revenue split that takes away half as much revenue from the publisher compared with Steam, coupled with a program for gobbling up 6 to 12 month exclusivity deals on many games that keep them off of Steam during that time period entirely. While Valve responded saying this would hurt gamers, and much of the public appeared to agree, Epic's Tim Sweeney has twice now spoken publicly about his plans, while also stating that what Epic is really after is a better gaming marketplace and to get Steam to increase its own revenue splits, promising to end the exclusivity program if its rival does so.Many of our readers have noticed that I'm somewhat open to Epic's strategy here, although I'm not certainly buying into it fully. Many of those same readers have rightfully pointed out that, whatever Epic's longterm goals, the platform wars still aren't good for the gaming public in the immediate. They're absolutely right about that and one perfect example of how platform wars and exclusivity deals can hurt fans of PC games has shown up in the form of Shenmue 3.Shenmue 3 was launched via a Kickstarter campaign way back in 2015. Like any Kickstarter campaign, there were different tiers by which one could support the product. Many of those tiers included day 1 Steam keys as a reward for supporting the game's creation. Then this happened:

Rupert Murdoch and his Wall Street Journal have frequently attacked Google and other internet services, often in ways that suggest little understanding of how things actually work. Sometimes this has dipped into conspiracy theories and totally bullshit news stories whose sole purpose seems to be to attack Google in a misguided way. So, it's actually nice to see that the WSJ at least agreed to publish the latest Andy Kessler op-ed about the importance of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to keeping the open internet. The title, while a bit hyperbolic, is important: Kill Section 230, You Kill the Internet.

Schools are spending more and more money on safety. Or, at least, that's what they're saying they're spending the money on. But simply adding more layers of surveillance -- on campus and off -- isn't really doing much to make schools safer.Preventing violence at schools is a noble goal, but many of the solutions are just repackaged law enforcement products that treat campuses as high-crime areas. The latest developments being pitched to schools aren't innovative. They're just another way to help administrators view students as persons of interest in crimes yet to be determined.This might not be as problematic if the tools worked well. But they simply don't. ProPublica took some repurposed ShotSpotter-esque tech for a spin, only to find out it doesn't work as advertised. The idea is the microphones will pick up aggressive… um… noises and head off the next school shooter. Great in theory. In practice?

The latest in our forever ongoing series, recognizing in the digital age how you often no longer own what you've bought, thanks to DRM and copyright: this week, people with Microsoft ebooks will discover they're dead.

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The terrorists are winning.This shouldn't come as a surprise. The War on Drugs hasn't made a dent in drug distribution. Why should the War on Terror be any different? Two decades and several billion dollars later, what do we have to show for it? Just plenty of enemies foreign and domestic.While politicians rail against "terrorist content," encryption, and the right for people to remain generally unmolested by their governments, they're leaning hard on social media platforms to eradicate this content ASAP.And social media companies are doing all they can. Moderation is hard. It's impossible when you're serving millions of users at once. Nonetheless, the content goes down. Some of it is actual "terrorist content." Some of it is journalism. Some of it is stuff no one would consider terroristic. But it all goes down because time is of the essence and the world is watching.But to what end? As was noted here all the way back in 2017, efforts made to take down "terrorist content" resulted in the removal of evidence of war crimes. Not much has changed since then. This unfortunate side effect was spotted again in 2019. Target all the terrorist content you want, but destroying it destroys evidence that could be used to identify, track, and, ultimately, prosecute terrorists.Sure, there's some concern that unmoderated terrorist content contains the inherent power to radicalize internet randos. It's a valid concern but it might be outweighed by the positives of keeping the content live. To go further, it might be a net gain for society if terrorist content was accessible and easily-shared. This seems counterintuitive, but there's a growing body of research showing terrorists + internet use = thwarted terrorist plots.Call me crazy, but this sounds like a better deal for the world's population than dozens of surveillance agencies slurping up everything that isn't nailed down by statute. This comes from Joe Whittaker at Lawfare, who summarizes research suggesting swift removal of "terrorist content" isn't helping win the War on Terror.

By now we've made it very clear that while fifth generation wireless (5G) is good, it's being painfully over-hyped. Yes, better faster networks with lower latency are always a good thing. And, in time, these networks will power a lot of nifty things. But if you read press coverage of the technology, you'd walk away thinking that 5G is akin to some kind of mystical panacea; something you just sprinkle around on the sidewalk anytime you want innovation and magic to spring forth from between the cracks. It will somehow result in four-day workweeks, we're told. It will revolutionize cancer treatment, companies insist.Wireless carriers facing slumping smartphone sales would certainly like you to think 5G is more revolutionary than it actually is. So would network hardware vendors eager to sell upgraded gear to those wireless carriers. But again, while faster networks are good, they're not magic, and it's the press' job to make it clear 5G is more evolution than revolution.It's a hard lesson to learn, apparently. For example, this Tom's Hardware piece documenting five ways "5G will change your life" is rife with examples that will do nothing of the sort. Like this claim that 5G will somehow revolutionize the classroom:

Boris Johnson -- full name Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson -- was born in New York to English parents, studied at Eton and Oxford, became Mayor of London, and now stands a good chance of becoming the UK's next prime minister. That's not because of any outstanding ability, but largely because he belongs to the country's ruling class and assumes the position is his by right, as do many of his supporters. However, this smooth if completely unearned rise to the top of the UK's political system was threatened recently by an unexpected event. Police were called in the early hours to the London home of Johnson and his partner, Carrie Symonds, after neighbors heard "a loud altercation involving screaming, shouting and banging":

It will surprise nobody to hear that music mega-business Universal Music Group has graced our pages acting aggressive and, at times, downright face-palm-inducing on matters of intellectual property. The whole UMG mantra from the top down appears to be something like: major label music is insanely awesome and the things that make the internet so great are generally terrible. And so, as you might expect, UMG finds itself on Techdirt quite often.Conversely, O-Town, the boy-band that was popular for a minute thanks to the 2000s era MTV show "Making The Band", has apparently never graced our pages. Again, this is as one would expect. But now these two sides find themselves in the same post, all because the latter is attempting a comeback and UMG is being, well, UMG.It all started when, as part of the comeback, O-Town's remaining members applied for a trademark on their own band's name. UMG opposed the application. Why? Well, because UMG owns Motown Records... and just frankly can't help itself, that's why.

If you hadn't noticed by now, Trump's efforts to use tariffs to somehow magically improve the country's standing in the world aren't based on much in the way of sound logic or economic theory. And companies who've been forced to reconfigure and relocate their entire supply chains (to countries like Taiwan) to avoid massive penalties are likely to just pass those costs on to American consumers, something said consumers haven't really fully grokked yet. Countless CEOs think the entire gambit is immeasurably stupid, but have been hesitant to be too pointed in their criticism for fear of upsetting administration regulators.As the actual bill comes due however, consumers are likely to wake up from their slumber. Maybe.Case in point: Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo this week fired off a letter to the Office of the United States Trade Representative, warning the Trump administration's plan to bump Chinese tariffs from 10 to 25 percent will have a profoundly-negative impact on the game industry. With 96 percent of game consoles made in China last year, the act of reconfiguring their entire supply chains will have a massive impact on the sector's bottom line and the numerous connecting companies that tendril out from the big three gaming giants.The letter itself is abundantly clear that it's not these companies that are going to eat these costs, but the American consumer. In fact, the full letter (pdf) leans heavily on data suggesting that the 25 percent hike on game consoles will result in US consumers paying $840 million more on the game hardware than they might have anyway:

Is it a movement? Or just a couple of outliers that will forever remain on the periphery of the surveillance state? It's too early to say, but at least we can now say San Francisco isn't an anomaly.

We were just talking through yet another instance showing that Nintendo hates its own fans, in this case regarding a story about a cool fan-made web game that was essentially a 2D Mario Bros. battle royale game. In that post, I mentioned that Nintendo's lawyerly ways have become so infamously legendary as this point to be the punchline to every announcement for a fan-game that in any way involves Nintendo properties. The battle royale game is obviously not alone in this. And, given the many other options at its disposal, it remains something of a mystery why Nintendo continues to insist on playing the jerk at every turn.And I'm not the only one wondering, it seems, as Kotaku has picked this theme up and written a decent post asking why Nintendo acts this way as well.

A California community college has discovered open records requests. It's not receiving them, which would be normal. Instead, it's filing them. And in doing so, it's attempting to bypass the state's journalist shield law by pretending the party it's FOIAing is a public entity.In an apparent attempt to regain narrative control of an incident involving the college's administration and the student government, Southwestern College is seeking to obtain the recording of that event by the school's student newspaper. The recording is of a student government election that was abruptly cancelled by the school's president in May, apparently over a bogus Instagram post that suggested one group of students was going to engage in interracial violence.The school was rebuffed when it swung by the newspaper to ask for a copy of this recording. So, it decided to go with plan B: a public records request.As FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) reports, the school is attempting to obtain something protected by the state's shield law. The school is aware of this because the student newspaper told it as much when it asked the first time. So, it made an official request and appended a lot of garbage to its request in an attempt to talk the newspaper into believing it was subject to public records requests.

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I've made a similar point a few times in the past, but now that the antitrust knives are out for the big tech companies (mainly Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple), it does seem worth noting just how quickly the tech landscape seems to change. I moved to Silicon Valley 20 years ago. At that time, the "dominant" companies were: Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, Netscape, IBM, SGI, Intel and Yahoo. Those were still the days of "no one gets fired for buying IBM." Google's headquarters today were once SGI's. Facebook now occupies Sun's headquarters (affectionately nicknamed Sun Quentin, for its resemblance to the prison a bit north of here). A decade or so ago, I remember the general refrain about the startup ecosystem was that there were three "dominant" companies in the marketplace that any startup was trying to sell to. The so-called "GYM" companies: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft. Yet, today, all anyone can talk about is "GAFA" (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple) or in some versions "FAANG" (add in Netflix).The tech market is one of disruption. It's a celebrated term around here -- often mocked by outsiders. But dominance has a way of falling. And falling fast. So I appreciate a recent piece by Ryan Bourne at Cato asking some fairly pertinent questions regarding the new antitrust focus on "GAFA."

So we've noted a few times now that the rise of streaming video competitors is indisputably a good thing. Numerous new streaming alternatives have driven competition to an antiquated cable TV sector that has long been plagued by apathy, high rates, and comically-bad customer service. That's long overdue and a positive thing overall, as streaming customer satisfaction scores suggest.But as the sector matures, there's a looming problem it seems oblivious to.Increasingly, companies are pulling their content off central repositories like Hulu and Netflix, and making them exclusive to their own streaming platforms, forcing consumers to subscribe to more and more streaming services if they want to get all the content they're looking for. AT&T, for example, will soon make all of its owned content, like Friends, exclusive to its looming new streaming platform. Disney, similarly, has been pulling its content off of Netflix and Hulu to ensure it's exclusive to its own, looming Disney+ streaming service that arrives next year.This week, Comcast noted that it would soon be pulling The Office from Netflix, making it exclusive to its own streaming service in 2021:

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy who uncovered and expanded on an idea for how to watch the EU's world-without-copyright propaganda film:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2014, the DOJ finally released its memo explaining its justification for extra-judicial drone strikes on American citizens, after a court firmly rejected attempts to bury it — and it was still full of ridiculous redactions and even pointed to a different still-secret memo. Meanwhile, the CIA was getting closer to releasing its torture report, while also being hit with lawsuits over its resistance to FOIA requests.We also saw some good and some bad from the Supreme Court, with a ruling that law enforcement does need a warrant to search mobile phones, but also its infamous ruling against Aereo — which was quickly seized upon by Fox, even as Hollywood's own press was able to see the problems.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2009, the RIAA was defending the huge award in the Jammie Thomas trial while artists like Moby and even one of the musicians whose work Thomas supposedly shared were speaking out against it. The Swedish appeals court found that there was no bias in the Pirate Bay verdict and denied a retrial, while a German politician defected for the Pirate Party in protest of his party's support for an internet blacklist, and the recording industry was suing to force Irish ISPs to implement three-strikes programs (while Spain was rejecting a three-strikes proposal).Fifteen Years AgoMore rapid change was on the horizon this week in 2004 as the web started to replace the library stacks as the best place to do research and folks were warming up to the idea of ditching their landlines for their mobile phones. Jack Valenti was trying to simultaneously deny and defend his infamous anti-VCR stance by rewriting history, Tiffany was suing eBay for not policing counterfeit items, the instant messaging wars were still raging with Yahoo again deciding to block the multi-platform IM app Trillian, SpaceShipOne officially made it to space for the first time (though not quite with the requirements to win the X-Prize), and domain speculators were gearing up for the election by buying all the Presidential candidate domain names they could think of.