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

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

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

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

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

A couple of months ago, we were surprised when a WIPO employee showed up in our comments to defend the organization's new database of supposedly infringing sites against our many criticisms. In that post, we highlighted a Twitter thread from lawyer Rick Shera — who represented Mega — and this week, Shera joins us on the podcast to further discuss the inefficacy and negative impact of these kinds of pirate shaming lists.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IN 2017, NY Times columnist Bret Stephens gave a commencement address at Hampden-Sydney College that he then repurposed as one of his NY Times columns entitled: "Leave Your Safe Spaces." The entire theme was that college students are way too soft intellectually, and they've been coddled and are too afraid to debate difficult and dangerous ideas. He mocks the concept of safe spaces, and suggests that it diminishes ones ability to truly seek the truth. Near the end, it states:

For years Hollywood has seen Netflix as a mortal enemy because of the company's interest in disrupting the entertainment industry. Hollywood has been particularly vocal about how Netflix is "destroying" the traditional, sticky-floor, brick and mortar theater business because it wants to modernize antiquated release window rules from a bygone era. For example, Netflix content was banned from Cannes last year largely because the company wouldn't adhere to France's absurd cultural exception law that requires a 36-month delay between theatrical release and streaming availability.Hollywood theater chains' disdain for Netflix bubbled up again this month, with the news that Netflix's latest exclusive, the new Martin Scorsese film "The Irishman," would be banned from being shown at a number of major theater chains. Apparently this was intended as some kind of "punishment" for Netflix, though the company quickly spun the narrative on its head. Like "Roma," "The Irishman" needs at least some major theater time to be considered for Oscar contention, so Netflix has decided to screen the film at the Shubert Organization’s historic Belasco Theatre on Broadway.It's the first time a traditional film has been shown there in the theater's 112 year history, drawing more public attention to the film's release:

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Thankfully, recently, the EU's Court of Justice, has limited the scope of the "right to be forgotten," so that sites can't be forced to censor content outside of the EU. However, it still does apply within the EU, and that has real and significant consequences.Just last week we received yet another notification from Google that one of our articles had been removed from certain (unrevealed) search results in Europe, due to a successful "right to be forgotten" petition. This is hardly the first time this has happened, though at least this time it's not about the one guy who has sent a new RTBF demand every time we write about him. We're still trying to figure out what to do with the latest one, which appears (like so many) to be someone who was convicted of a crime (in this particular case, counterfeiting) who is apparently upset that his name and past crimes come up in a search.We had warned about this years ago, highlighting how a short-sighted attempt to deal with "privacy" would collide head on with free speech and a free press -- and for the most part we were ignored. However, the NY Times has a fairly astounding story about how a RTBF demand from a guy who stabbed his own brother and wanted to hide the resulting press stories more or less bankrupted the publication that had the story:

Wireless carriers have been under fire for failing to protect their users from the practice of SIM hijacking. The practice involves posing as a wireless customer, then fooling a wireless carrier to port the victim's cell phone number right out from underneath them, letting the attacker then pose as the customer to potentially devastating effect. Back in February, a man sued T-Mobile for failing to protect his account after a hacker, pretending to be him, ported out his phone number, then managed to use his identity to steal thousands of dollars worth of cryptocoins.Like the ongoing wireless industry's location data scandals, the FCC has so far refused to utter so much as modest condemnation of carriers that have failed to protect users.But with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey having his Twitter account recently hijacked thanks to SIM hijacking, the government appears to have finally gotten the message that we have a bit of a problem.For example, the FBI issued a warning last month to its private industry partners, noting that two-factor authentication can be bypassed thanks to the hacks:

The official channels don't work. That's the message Snowden sent -- one that was countered by multiple high-level government officials who'd never had the whistle blown on them.Government entities protect their own. Whistleblowers who attempt to bring things through the proper channels are deterred almost every step of the way. The few times they manage to get their reports to someone who might actually be able to do something about it -- like Congressional oversight or the various Inspector General offices -- those affected by the report will do everything they can to silence it.The New York Times discusses what happened when the whistleblower report about President Trump's phone call to the president of Ukraine was routed through the official channels. The whistleblower (who the NYT questionably outed as a CIA officer) used a third party to bring the complaint to the CIA's counsel. The CIA's top lawyer needed to find out whether the allegations about the content of the phone call were accurate. So, she called the White House to get the transcript of the call.You can see where this is going. The New York Times fills in the details, showing why doing things the way the government wants you to do them seldom results in blown whistles. (This is taken from the NYT's podcast transcript, which is why it doesn't read like a NYT article.)

Techdirt has written many times about the need to move from traditional academic publishing to open access. There are many benefits, including increasing the reach and impact of research, and allowing members of the public to read work that they have often funded, without needing to pay again. But open access is not a panacea; it does not solve all the problems of today's approach to spreading knowledge. In particular, it suffers from the same serious flaw that afflicts traditional titles: a tendency to focus on success, and to draw a veil of silence over failure. As a new column in Nature puts it:

As an autonomous collective, let's try (together!) to do a little NYPD math.Here's the beginning of the word problem:How many cops does it take to choke someone to death?One.Officer Daniel Pantaleo. Pantaleo choked Eric Garner to death while "effecting an arrest." The presumed crime was unlicensed cigarette sales, but no one really knows for sure why Pantaleo decided to escalate the situation by using a forbidden tactic to subdue the non-resistant Garner. And we'll never know anything else about it because Officer Pantaleo has dodged everything but a firing over his decision to perform an illegal chokehold in the course of detaining Eric Garner to death.Rather than rally against this illegal use of force, the NYPD union -- headed by awful human being Pat Lynch -- has decided to demonize everyone who isn't a Police Benevolent Association (PBA) member. Citizens who are still alive in the Big Apple don't know how well they have it, being presided over by a bunch of bad apples who labor under the scrutiny of a powerless populace.

Facial recognition tech is considered at least mildly controversial in the United States. Certain federal agencies (like the DHS) are pushing for widespread deployment even as Congress members are raising questions about the tech's accuracy and reliability. Meanwhile, facial recognition bans are being introduced and enacted at the city and state level, showing there's no nationwide consensus that the tech is trustworthy, useful, or non-invasive.Citizens and privacy groups have similar concerns in France, but the French government apparently doesn't care. In the name of "security," the government is adding facial recognition tech to its national ID program, as Helene Fouquet reports for Bloomberg.

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The Herrick v. Grindr case [um] ground to a halt on October 7th, as the Supreme Court refused to grant cert. The lawsuit -- and its attempt to undermine Section 230 immunity -- is dead, relegated to the pile of also-rans which have attempted to get a US court to rewrite this very important section of the Communications Decency Act.Not that there was anything decent in the events leading up to the lawsuit. Matthew Herrick's ex-boyfriend used Herrick's information to create a fake Grindr profile and sent more than 1,200 men to Herrick's home and workplace over the next several months. Herrick sued Grindr, alleging that the company failed to prevent his ex from abusing the service to harass him.The case was tossed on appeal, with the Second Circuit Court finding in favor of Grindr and its invocation of its Section 230 immunity. The party at fault here was Herrick's ex-boyfriend, but it was Grindr Herrick chose to take to court. The case was not argued well. The allegations contained suppositions that were pretty much impossible to reconcile, as Cathy Gellis pointed out in her post on the lawsuit. Herrick tried to dodge Section 230 immunity by claiming Grindr either handed out his geolocation info or some sort of bug left it exposed. This was the basis for his negligence claims. But none of that makes sense.

When you sign up for security services like two-factor authentication (2FA), the phone number you're providing is supposed to be explicitly used for security. You're providing that phone number as part of an essential exchange intended to protect yourself and your data, and that information is not supposed to be used for marketing. Since we've yet to craft a formal privacy law, there's nothing really stopping companies from doing that anyway, something Facebook exploited last year when it was caught using consumer phone numbers provided explicitly for 2FA for marketing purposes.It's not only a violation of your users' trust, it incentivizes them to not use two-factor authentication for fear of being spammed, making everybody less secure. As part of Facebook's recent settlement with the FTC the company was forbidden from using 2FA phone numbers for marketing ever again.Having just watched Facebook go through this, Twitter has apparently decided to join the fun. In a blog post, the company this week acknowledged that participants of the company's Tailored Audiences and Partner Audiences advertising system may have had their phone numbers used for 2FA used for marketing as well:

Another day, another example of copyright being used as censorship. As you may have heard, there was a bit of controversy this weekend when talk show host Ellen DeGeneres attended the Dallas Cowboys game with former President George W. Bush. This made lots of people quite upset as they argued that being friends with Bush was either support for "tolerance of hate and discrimination" or an effort at "whitewashing... his manifest crimes." Others argued, as Ellen did, that there are good reasons to be kind to people you fundamentally disagree with.Wherever you come down on that debate, hopefully you can agree that, no matter what, the Ellen Show was wrong to use a copyright claim to take down a transformative video, created by Rafael Shimunov, that took Ellen's "be nice to each other" monologue about the situation and superimposed images on the back screen of what appears to be scenes of devastation in the Middle East that came about from President Bush's policies. This is, of course, classic fair use. Taking a bit of video (1 minute and 46 seconds) from Ellen's show, and using it in a transformative way to provide commentary and criticism of Ellen's speech. Even if you think it's unfair or heavy handed, it still should quite clearly be protected by fair use. But, instead:That's the original tweet posting the video, showing that it has been "disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner."Of course, in response to this, a whole bunch of folks are now reposting the video on Twitter. So far, (as I type this), they've mostly remained online -- which at least suggests that the original takedown was not an automated takedown notice or machine recognition situation, but a deliberate report. Indeed, other tweets suggest that the "social media manager" of The Ellen Show sent a DMCA takedown over the video.

At long last, the PR nightmare for Epic Games is over. Kind of. You will recall that the company went on a lawsuit blitz over those that develop and/or promote cheats for Epic's hit game Fortnite. While one can understand that the company was salty over cheat enablers for its online shooter, given that disruption by cheaters makes the game less fun and therefore less popular, the fact is that Epic also fought this battle on claims that such cheats violate copyright and the license provided by the game's Terms of Service. These are claims that need to be tested, and hopefully defeated, in court, because they are a twisting of copyright law into the worst kind of pretzel.One of the cheaters Epic sued, at the time without knowing so, was a 14 year old minor. That young man also appears to have been both rude and brazen throughout the lawsuit process, which at various points involved his mother trying to get the court to dismiss the case and Epic arguing that indeed a minor can enter into a ToS contract with the company. The fact that Epic pushed this so hard and for so long was fairly bizarre, given just what a PR nightmare suing a minor over this sort of thing should have been.Well, that nightmare is now over, as there is reportedly a settlement between the two parties.

Order your copy of Working Futures today »Over the last week or so, since releasing our Working Futures book of science fiction stories about "the future of work," we've been profiling each of the stories in the book. The first three stories were profiled here, and the second three were profiled here. Here are the next three stories in the book:Joan Henry vs The Algorithm by Randy Lubin is a modern retelling of the legend of John Henry vs The Machine, but where the machine is an algorithm and there are a few additional twists in the story.Prime of Life. This is my own second story in the collection, and I talked a bit about it on yesterday's podcast. This was my attempt to look at how more and more services are coming with subscription models, and picturing a world (and new kinds of jobs) that might come about if we were to create subscription services for almost anything. But, that also raises questions, such as whether or not you'd want to turn your whole life over to one company. And then what happens if that company decides you should no longer keep that life. But... also what happens if there were real competition in the market to provide such services.The Auditor & The Exorcist by N. R. M. Roshak which is a story that explores the future of work in a near-future world with AI-mediated social credit. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, software bugs are still a thing in the future. If you have nightmares about the lack of security on IOT (and also about the possibility of a social credit score), this one is for you.I like that these three stories are together in the collection, because despite all three being very different, all three present protagonists with jobs that clearly don't exist today... but which don't seem at all unlikely depending on how technology and society evolve over the next decade or so. All three also highlight how these futures we're discussing are neither dystopian nor utopian (or, arguably, they can be seen as both dystopian and utopian depending on whose perspective you're looking at. These are worlds where amazing things are possible, but those amazing things also have costs and consequences that should be considered. Thanks to everyone who has already purchased the book -- and for those who haven't yet, please check it out.

In some surprising, and ridiculous, news the local court judge, Judge John Marshall (no, not that Judge John Marshall), has decided not to dismiss the lawsuit that Nunes filed against Twitter, two satirical Twitter accounts, and political strategist Liz Mair. As you'll recall, Mair and Twitter had both argued that the case had no reason to be in a local Virginia court, and that, if anything, the proper venue was in California. The judge had demanded that Twitter reveal to him the details of who was behind the Twitter accounts (something that was already questionable under the 1st Amendment, which protects anonymity). Twitter refused, though did say that neither account holder was based in Virginia.Of course, now it looks like none of that even mattered anyway, as the judge has said that the venue is fine because Mair once lived in Virginia (she doesn't any more) even though it was a different county from where the lawsuit was filed. The reasoning from the judge is... weird.

It's no secret that the Chinese government is no friend to free speech. While that statement must seem painfully obvious, the entire world is getting an education into just how thin-skinned Beijing is with the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. While those protesters are chiefly demonstrating for their own civil rights, the Chinese government has apparently made it its business to police the rest of the world's speech while holding the second largest economy on the planet as a hostage to its own hurt feelings.And American sporting companies are failing this values test. And failing it badly. We'll start with the NBA. Days ago, Daryl Morey, the GM for the Houston Rockets, tweeted out an image that included the text, "Fight for freedom, Stand with Hong Kong." It's the kind of thing literally anyone could have sent, except that the NBA, and the Rockets in particular, are insanely popular in China. Much of that has to do with Yao Ming having played for the Rockets years ago. Ming now runs the Chinese Basketball Association.The reaction to all of this was swift. The CBA cut ties with the Rockets. Chinese broadcasters announced they would no longer broadcast NBA pre-season games. A pre-season game that is supposed to be played in China in mere days is up in the air as to whether the game will even be played. And Chinese run media ran with it all, with one article stating:

In the 18th Century the Founding Fathers were worried about tyrants. They were worried about government officials abusing the powers of their office and the fate of the nation if there were no check on their power. In the 21st Century those concerns have hardly faded. Today we have a presidential administration that, if nothing else, has publicly (and privately) attempted to turn the ship of state against multiple political opponents, and with such an audacious expectation of impunity that it leaves no basis to believe it would not do the same to anyone else who stands against it.It now it demands more tools to perpetuate these attacks. At a time when the survival of our democracy most critically depends on the people's ability to push back against these sorts of abuses of governmental power, the government seeks to hobble the public's ability to do it –- this time by destroying the ability to keep their communications secret. Because that's what encryption "backdoors" do: completely and utterly obliterate any technical ability to maintain the secrecy in one's data. You can't just backdoor them a little bit -– either communications are secure from all prying eyes, or none of them. And this administration is insisting that it should get to see them all.This administration is not, of course, the first to have demanded the ability to get access to people's data. Both Democratic and Republican administrations have made similar demands (and even helped themselves to it). Each time they have articulated policy arguments for why the government should have the power to read people's private communications, and sometimes these arguments have even been compelling. But none have ever outweighed the critical liberty interest that depends on being able to prevent government access to all of everyone's private communications, and today we see exactly why.The Constitution guarantees the personal freedom necessary to stand against a tyrannical state actor prone to misusing its power. We have been sloppy over the years in preserving that liberty legally, thanks to the implicit assumption that the government is inherently one of the Good Guys and the people seeking to keep their data private presumably are the Bad Guys. It is a view that has infected our understanding of the Fourth Amendment and allowed the government to invade people's privacy in ways the text of the Constitution never allowed. But today we see with painful clarity how it was also a view predicated on wholly unsound assumptions.Today we regularly see our President, Chief Executive, and most senior official charged with enforcing our laws not only routinely flout these very same laws but also routinely threaten those whose sole "crime" is standing against him with vindictive, and meritless, ruinous prosecution. These are not the actions of a benevolent government eager to protect the public from wrongdoing. They are the actions of an autocrat all too happy to victimize people as willingly as the most hardened criminal.Which leaves the public on its own to protect itself, and already significantly hampered. It is bad enough that Trump makes it so treacherous to speak out against him publicly. But when we can no longer speak publicly it becomes all the more important that we be able to speak privately – yet that is exactly what this administration is trying to prevent in demanding encryption backdoors. Should it get its wish, no one will be able to keep secrets from this administration, or challenge its power. It will be able to continue its abuses unchecked.This untenable state of affairs is not what the Founders had in mind, what the Constitution permits, or what our continued democracy can tolerate. It is thus vital to resist this backdoor demand.

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The NSA isn't the only agency to abuse its surveillance powers. The FBI's ability to access unminimized data harvested by the NSA has resulted in abuse after abuse, as the FBI loves to use the massive data haul to perform "backdoor searches" of its domestic targets.This concern has been raised repeatedly, most notably by Sen. Ron Wyden, who has been calling out surveillance abuses for years -- specifically calling out these backdoor searches and hinting (strongly) that they are much more prevalent than most people believed. Nothing much has been done about it, other than multiple federal agencies suggesting they too should be put on the ever-growing list of entities with access to the NSA's multiple collections.A FISA Court opinion released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) details even more abuse of the NSA's Section 702 collections by the FBI. When you give an agency the power to dig into massive amounts of data with minimal oversight, abuses will happen. But this goes further than "inadvertent" collections or erroneous access of unminimized data. This ruling [PDF] -- first reported on by the Wall Street Journal -- shows the FBI treats sensitive collections as its personal playground.

Last week we highlighted a study showing that your cable bill can be as much as 45 percent higher than the advertised price thanks to bullshit fees. Now a new study by Consumer Reports shows that up to 24 percent of your monthly cable bill is comprised of said bullshit fees. The fees are designed specifically for one purpose: to let companies falsely advertise one rate, then charge you significantly more money. It's effectively false advertising, but efforts to rein in the practice are fleeting to nonexistent, because creatively fleecing American consumers is just so hot right now.Consumer Reports examined 787 consumer cable bills from 13 top cable providers and found that while the average user paid around $156.71 per month for cable TV, users in reality paid $217.42 a month once fees were included. As such about 24 percent of your cable TV bill each month ($37.11) is made up of fees and hidden surcharges, generating about $450 per year per consumer for the industry, or about $28 billion in total.The report is quick to highlight how some of the bullshit fees (like the "regulatory recovery fee") are named in such a way to trick the consumer into blaming government. The group reached out to 74 consumer reps posing as a customer and found that support reps are pretty clearly trained to create that impression:

The government with the thinnest skin is at it again. Turkey can't handle being criticized in even the slightest way -- not after installing Recep "Gollum" Erdogan as president. A very, very long list of well-earned criticisms has led to an equally long list of retaliatory actions against the president's critics, which has included the misuse of other countries' laws to secure punishment of non-citizens and the jailing of of journalists declared to be terrorists by President Erdogan's government.The government that can't visit other nations without beating up the locals recently decided it needed to have a little one-on-one time with a US diplomat who interacted with a tweet the Turkish government didn't like.

How far would a cop go to break up an underage drinking party? Far enough to get sued in federal court. (h/t Peter Bonilla)Responding to a tip from a snitch app ("Tip411"), Mequon (WI) police officers rolled up on a house supposedly containing an underage drinking party. The officers first noticed four cars in the driveway and one parked in the street. Hardly indicative of a rager, but the officers had an anonymous tip and apparently nothing better to do.Officer Kristin Toryfter rang the doorbell but received no answer. She called the phone numbers of two of the house's residents -- John and Todd Reardon -- but was similarly rebuffed. What the officers could see from the driveway was "several young people" peeking out at them and various doors and windows closing.At some point, even more officers showed up, including shift supervisor Matthew Schossow. Schossow went around back to "secure the perimeter." Since fleeing teens are a constant threat to law enforcement, Officer Schossow decided to go traipsing across the curtilage to get a look inside the house. Peering through the blinds, Schossow saw -- and let's go to the decision [PDF] for this one...

Law enforcement agencies like to portray asset forfeiture as an important weapon in the Drug War arsenal -- one capable of toppling cartels and kingpins. Every so often, a large amount of cash and drugs is trotted out in front of reporters as evidence of this claim.The reality is much, much different. For all intents and purposes, civil asset forfeiture is a government crime of opportunity. Any search that yields cash is a win for the agencies that profit from the seizure, even when there's no evidence the cash taken has any link to criminal activity. Pretextual traffic stops, knock-and-talks, stop-and frisk programs… all of these have the potential to turn everyday police work into something profitable.WFPL's examination of the Louisville (KY) Metro PD's asset forfeiture paperwork shows the agency isn't really targeting drug traffickers and criminal organizations with its seizures. It's just lifting money from whoever it can, like people who've done nothing more than produced an offensive odor. (You are not misreading that sentence.)

As we hope you know by now, last week we released Working Futures, an anthology of short stories about the future of work in our world of rapidly advancing technology, inspired by settings we developed with a specially-designed scenario planning exercise (pick up your copy from Amazon in ebook or paperback format!) For this week's special episode of the podcast, we've brought in three of the authors whose stories are featured in the book— Katharine Dow, Christopher Hooton, and James Yu — to talk about the process of developing future scenarios and, of course, about their stories.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 talked quite a bit lately about how the Blurred Lines decision, saying that having a similar "feel" in a song can be copyright infringement even if it's not a direct copy, has truly messed up the recording industry. Artists are afraid to even mention inspirations for fear of it leading to a lawsuit. New lawsuits are freaking out musicians and even have the RIAA complaining that maybe copyright protection has gone too far.It appears we've got another such lawsuit, this time against Lil Nas X, who had the undisputed "song of the summer" with "Old Town Road." Lil Nas X released his 7 EP earlier this summer, which included a couple versions of "Old Town Road," but also a collaboration with Cardi B called "Rodeo."And now they (and everyone else) have been sued over the song claiming that it infringes on a beat called "gwenXdonelee4-142" (catchy name that) that was incorporated into a song you probably haven't heard of: "Broad Day" by PuretoReefa and Sakrite Duexe.Now, what's important here is that complaint does not claim that Rodeo sampled Broad Day or even that it directly copied the original beat. It literally notes that they just have a "substantially similar" sound.

The situation at our borders is getting worse for some American citizens. I mean, all American citizens are likely dealing with more questions, more screening, and more general hassle now that the President has declared immigrants and asylum seekers to be a "national emergency."The Presidential narrative that people at border crossings are inherently dangerous has undoubtedly had an effect on the mindset of border agency personnel. But there's an added wrinkle, thanks to President Trump's rhetoric portraying journalists as liars and -- in multiple instances -- "enemies of the people." This, too, is having an effect on border personnel attitudes.Defense One News Editor Ben Watson ran into this when he was returning from an assignment in Denmark:

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As we've detailed a lot over the last week, the DOJ has decided that after years of failing to get backdoors mandated by warning about the "terrorism" bogeyman, it's decided to pick up the FOSTA playbook, and instead start focusing on child porn -- or what "serious people" now refer to as Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). It did this last week with an assist from the NY Times, who published an article with (legitimately) scary stories, but somehow blaming the internet companies... because they actually report it when they find such content on their networks. I've seen more than a few people, even those who generally have been strong voices on the encryption debate and against backdoors, waver a bit on this particular subject, and note that maybe there shouldn't be encryption on social media networks, because it might (as the narrative says) help awful people hide their child porn.Except... that's confusing a few different things. Mainly, it's mixing up the content moderation debate with the "lawful access" or "backdoors" debate. Yes, encryption makes it harder for the police to get in and see certain things, but that's by design. We live in a country with the 4th Amendment, in which we believe that it should be difficult for law enforcement to snoop deeply into our lives -- and that's always meant that some people will do and plot bad stuff out of the sight and hearing of law enforcement. Yet, if you were to look at law enforcement over the past 100 years, you can bet that they have many times more access to information about people today than they have in the past. The claim of "going dark" is laughable when you compare the information that law enforcement can get today even to what it could get 15 or 30 years ago.But, importantly, bringing CSAM into the debate muddies the water by pretending -- incorrectly -- that in an end-to-end encrypted world you can't do any content moderation, and there's simply no way for platforms to block or report certain kinds of content. Yet, as Princeton professor Jonathan Mayer highlights in a new paper, content moderation is not impossible in an encrypted system. It may be different than it is today, but it's still very much possible:

Obama's first FCC boss Julius Genachowski was a bit of a wishy washy mess, supporting any number of conflicting ideas at any given time depending on the audience he was talking to. And while his second term pick, Tom Wheeler, initially raised eyebrows given his history of lobbying for early-era telecom companies, he wound up being one of the better FCC bosses in agency history. Granted telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast might disagree, since he was one of the only FCC bosses in recent history actually willing to stand up to them in any meaningful way.Last week, a court (mostly) sided with the FCC in its repeal of Wheeler-era net neutrality rules. That said, the court also blocked FCC attempts to ban states from passing their own net neutrality rules, meaning the fight has simply shifted to the state level. In an overlooked piece over at the NY Times, Wheeler (who has been relatively quiet post tenure as his efforts are slowly demolished one by one in the Trump era) notes how ISPs will likely try to behave so long as the threat of state action remains:

The New York Times has published a lengthy report on ICE's surveillance network it uses to hunt down undocumented immigrants all over the country. The report is based on the results of public records requests, which show ICE's ability to utilize social media networks, dozens of law enforcement databases, and a bunch of private sector options to find the people they're looking for.This public records investigation mainly focuses on ICE's operations in the Pacific Northwest. The documentation used to compile it includes recordings of phone calls to local law enforcement agencies and interviews with detainees. Together, the hundreds of documents show ICE's breathtaking reach.

Techdirt has just written about how advanced digital technology can be used for less-than-benign purposes, simply because it is a tool that can be applied in both good and bad ways. A fascinating analysis by Jane Macfarlane in IEEE Spectrum explores something similar: how new technology being used as designed, and with only the best intentions, can nonetheless give rise to potentially serious problems. The article is about how the increasingly-popular navigation apps like Waze, Apple Maps, and Google Maps are "causing chaos
":