Techdirt

For years now, tinkerers everywhere have built custom-made PCs that use the open-source Kodi platform. Highly flexible and customizable, this hardware can often work notably better than the locked-down TV hardware (especially traditional cable boxes) that are the norm. But the hardware can also be used to streamline access to copyright content. And in more recent years, outfits like Dragonbox or SetTV have taken things further by selling users tailor-made hardware that provides easy access to live copyrighted content.Not too surprisingly, video producers and broadcasters haven't much liked this. And in recent months, Amazon and Netflix have joined forces with Hollywood to try and sue many of these operations out of existence. Last week they got a little help from FCC Commissioner Mike O'Rielly, who fired off a letter to both Amazon and Ebay demanding they do more to combat the listing of these devices on their respective websites. O'Rielly was quick to acknowledge that the FCC's authority over copyright is negligible, so he focused instead on these companies' unauthorized use of the FCC logo:

The government has dismissed more defendants from the J20 protest prosecution. A mass prosecution that ensnared journalists and activists -- along with those who may have actually participated in damaging property -- has gradually disintegrated as the government has undermined its own efforts again and again. (To say nothing of the multiple times the government tried to undermine the prosecution, starting with the mass First Amendment incursions of arresting journalists, before heading on to broadsides of the Fourth thru Sixth Amendments.)The government isn't done blasting holes in its feet just yet. Alan Pyke, reporting for ThinkProgress, says the prosecutorial fiasco the government is trying to abandon contained a host of Constitutional violations.

The EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has only just started to be enforced, but it is already creating some seriously big waves in the online world, as Techdirt has reported. Most of those are playing out in obvious ways, such as Max Schrems's formal GDPR complaints against Google and Facebook over "forced consent" (pdf). That hardly came as a shock -- he's been flagging up the move on Twitter for some time. But there's another saga underway that may have escaped people's notice. It involves ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), which runs the Internet's namespace. Back in 2015, Mike memorably described the organization as "a total freaking mess", in an article about ICANN's "war against basic privacy". Given that history, it's perhaps no surprise that ICANN is having trouble coming to terms with the GDPR.The bone of contention is the information that is collected by the world's registrars for the Whois system, run by ICANN. EPAG, a Tucows-owned registrar based in Bonn, Germany, is concerned that this personal data might fall foul of the GDPR, and thus expose it to massive fines. As it wrote in a recent blog post:

The last time we checked in with PUBG Corp., the company behind the popular PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds video game, creator Brendan Greene was remarking on how video games are afforded no intellectual property rights at all, despite that absolutely not being the case. This confused take on a key aspect of his industry came on the heels of the developer of PUBG suggesting that it was considering suing Epic Games, the makers of Fortnite, for copyright infringement because Epic had updated its own game with a "battle royale" mode. Like PUBG, this mode pits 100 people against each other in a last-man-standing battle format. It was at that time that we tried to remind PUBG Corp. that the idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law is a thing. While specific expression gets copyright, general concepts, such as generic game-modes and genres, do not. A battle royale game format is no more deserving of copyright than the first-person shooter genre.It seems that the lesson didn't take, however, as it was recently revealed that PUBG went ahead and filed a lawsuit in South Korea way back in January.

Depending on your view, the Supreme Court has either restored a bit of the Fourth Amendment with its recent decision, or simply reiterated its protections. Either way, the decision [PDF] in Collins v. Virginia does halt the expansion of the "automobile exception." The State of Virginia was hoping to see this extended all the way up people's driveways, but that runs contrary to the exception itself, which only grants law enforcement plenty of warrant-free searches if the vehicle is on a public road.There's a difference between houses and vehicles in Fourth Amendment caselaw, but this case combines them both. Decisions at multiple lower levels all found for the state. The Supreme Court disagrees. The automobile exception is predicated on a few traits specific to vehicles on public roads.

Last year, hackers and security researchers highlighted long-standing vulnerabilities in Signaling System 7 (SS7, or Common Channel Signalling System 7 in the US), a series of protocols first built in 1975 to help connect phone carriers around the world. While the problem isn't new, a 2016 60 minutes report brought wider attention to the fact that the flaw can allow a hacker to track user location, dodge encryption, and even record private conversations. All while the intrusion looks like like ordinary carrier to carrier chatter among a sea of other, "privileged peering relationships."Telecom lobbyists have routinely tried to downplay the flaw after carriers have failed to do enough to stop hackers from exploiting it. In Canada for example, the CBC recently noted how Bell and Rogers weren't even willing to talk about the flaw after the news outlet published an investigation showing how, using only the number of his mobile phone, it was possible to intercept the calls and movements of Quebec NDP MP Matthew Dubé.Again the flaw isn't new; a group of German hackers revealed the vulnerability in 2008 and again in 2014. It's believed that the intelligence community has known about the vulnerability even earlier, and the hackers note that only modest headway has been made since German hacker Karsten Nohl first demonstrated it. But the flaw has gained renewed attention in recent weeks after Senator Ron Wyden sent a letter to the FCC (pdf) complaining that the agency isn't doing enough (read: anything) to address it:

Last week we wrote about how the new proposal for the EU Copyright Directive has some really destructive ideas in it, and is very close to becoming official. Last week (on GDPR day) the various EU member states basically gave the proposal their blessing, and the only thing left is that the Legal Affairs Committee in the EU Parliament who will vote on June 20th (or possibly the 21st). Many, many experts have raised serious concerns about elements of the proposal -- including the link tax and the mandatory filters for content, both of which will create tremendous problems for innovation and speech online. We'll have even more on this next week, but for now, it's worth looking at just how messed up the lobbying process has gone as supporters of the bill (including big publishers and legacy copyright industries) want to get it across the finish line, apparently not caring very much how they do so.Earlier this week, MEP Julia Reda alerted the world to an article in EU Today, which described how the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) was using another party, the EPP, to basically shake down other MEPs to get them to vote, saying that if they didn't do so, they will effectively be stripped of all power, blocked from being given reports or parliamentary positions. At one point the article said the following:

Sid Meier's Civilization needs little introduction, but the newest entry to the saga offers entirely new ways to engage with your world. The turn-based strategy franchise has sold over 35 million units worldwide since its creation, creating an enormous community of players attempting to build an empire to stand the test of time. Advance your civilization from the Stone Age to the Information Age by waging war, conducting diplomacy, advancing your culture, and going head to head with history's greatest leaders. Your decisions carry even more weight in the expansion. With the loyalty of your citizens on the line, the borders of the world are in constant flux as free cities emerge and neighboring empires compete for their allegiance. Lead your empire successfully, and you can send it into a prosperous Golden Age, but reckless decisions can send you into a Dark Age and spell swift defeat. Get the Sid Meier's Civilization VI Bundle on sale for $56.99, or grab Civilation VI ($29.99) or the expansion Rise and Fall ($26.99) separately. Use the code SAVE15NOW for an additional 15% off.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

In the past few months we've written a few times about the problems with "The CLASSICS Act", which is part of an otherwise mostly unobjectionable copyright modernization bill. You can look back at the previous posts, which get deep into the weeds on the problems of the bill, but the short version is that in an attempt to change how pre-1972 sound recordings are treated (specifically, to get streaming companies to pay a brand new "performance right" license on those works), the CLASSICS Act creates this new right, but leaves out all of the supposedly balancing factors of federal copyright law -- including the time limit before these works should go into the public domain.Hilariously, for merely pointing out why it seems silly to give the record labels (and, yes, it's mostly the record labels) a brand new right, taking it away from the public, and doing so in a manner that does nothing for the public other than remove a right that it already had (oh, and which does nothing to incentivize the creation of new music), Billboard's famed tech hating columnist Rob Levine has posted a silly screed, claiming that anyone challenging the CLASSICS Act must be an "anti-copyright" activist.Levine has done this for a decade or so. If you dare to push back on extreme copyright maximalism, and point out that maybe it doesn't make sense, he will tar you as being against musicians or against copyright entirely. But that's silly. The problems of the CLASSICS Act are pretty clear. It is creating a brand new right for copyright holder (i.e., record labels) and in doing so, is taking that right away from the public. Even worse, it's doing so in a manner that doesn't bring with that new right any of the necessary and Constitutionally required protections for the public's own rights -- including the right for the work to move into the public domain in a reasonable amount of time.Senator Ron Wyden has introduced an alternative bill in the Senate, called the ACCESS to Recordings Act, that takes a more reasonable approach to the issue of pre-1972 sound recordings. Rather than just handing them one new right, while keeping them under obsolete state copyright laws, which block those works from entering the public domain with any other creative work created in the same time, Wyden's bill effectively just puts pre-1972 sound recordings on par with other pre-1972 works (and post-1972 works). It's still creating a brand new right out of thin air for legacy copyright holders -- and it's worth discussing why we want to do that -- but if we see it as a trade-off between giving copyright holders a performance right in exchange for getting those works into the public domain when they belong there, perhaps it's worth while.Organizations like the Internet Archive have come out strongly in favor of Wyden's bill, and if the RIAA and the record labels (and folks like Rob Levine) are actually being honest in claiming that the CLASSICS Act is necessary to get streaming royalties paid to performers, then they too should support Wyden's bill over the CLASSICS Act. It provides them exactly what they claim they want, a brand new streaming performance right for those works, but does not allow those works to be held out of the public domain for many extra decades.If they continue to insist that the CLASSICS Act must move forward over the ACCESS Act, then it's a pretty clear statement that they really wish to only give the labels this bit of government welfare, without compensating the public for taking these rights away from them. Let's take a wild guess how this will turn out...

In the wake of any mass or school shooting that occurs in America, which pretty much means most of the time that exists, everyone immediately runs to their preferred corners to blame their preferred target for the latest tragedy. I've pointed this out as often as I can, but the truth is that both gun violence and the incidence of mass shootings in America is a terribly complicated subject that deserves all the nuance and sober-thinking it could possibly be afforded. But, since this is America we're talking about, we tend to do the exact opposite and instead pick a single target and heap as much blame as we can on it. It's guns that's the problems. Or it's violent movies. Or video games. Those are the typical targets, and they have been for some time. Meanwhile, the shootings continue, nothing is done, and on it goes.House Rep. Diane Black of Tennessee knows why this is. We've had the wrong target all along. The real cause of school shootings is porn.

The FCC remains under heavy fire for its mindless assault on popular net neutrality protections. But the agency has also been facing widespread, bipartisan criticism for the FCC's decision to gut decades-old media consolidation rules -- specifically to help Sinclair Broadcast Group cement its $3.9 billion acquisition of Tribune.Like net neutrality, media consolidation rules traditionally enjoy bipartisan support because they protect local opinion diversity and speech, preventing one company from dominating smaller competitors. The Washington Post recently offered a piece highlighting the very real, negative impact mindless M&A mania in the broadcast sector has had on the quality and diversity of local news, which in many towns is now little more than an echo chamber of substandard drivel:

You may recall that the Swedish Pirate Party recently declared war on copyright trolls operating within Sweden. The party's newfound efforts, which had remained far too dormant for far too long, come on the heels of an explosion in so-called "settlement letters" being sent out to Swedish citizens. Those letters, as is typical elsewhere, are armed merely with an IP address and a claim of infringing behavior. Despite this, Danish law firm Njord Law has been able to collect millions of dollars in "settlments" after sending out notices to tens of thousands of account holders of IP addresses alleged to have engaged in copyright infringement. Njord Law was able to get this data from Swedish ISPs by spending a great deal of time in court, claiming that it needed this customer information in order to get justice for the copyright holders it represents.What makes that stated goal somewhat odd is that Njord Law appears to spend almost no time in the courtroom for literally anything else beyond getting this customer data. Despite the firm's own admission that nearly half of the recipients of these letters don't even bother to respond, the firm has brought exactly zero of these cases to the courtroom.

If a government employee suspects you might be carrying drugs, be prepared to engage in a nonconsensual, highly-intimate relationship with the feds and their helpers. A New Mexico resident suspected of carrying drugs was subjected to multiple anal probings and enemas before law enforcement finally decided he wasn't actually carrying any drugs on him (or in him). An 18-year-old Arizona woman was subjected to vaginal and anal probing when attempting to return from a short trip to Nogales, Mexico. Again, no drugs were found but the helpful medical "professional" decided to go from CBP accusation to painful probing, bypassing less intrusive options (x-rays, etc.) in his earnest desire to save America from illicit substances.Another incident with lots of probing and violations but zero drugs has landed in the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court. Gloria Bustillos (an American citizen) was attempting to return to El Paso, Texas after a visit to Juarez, Mexico when CBP agents decided she must be trafficking drugs. The indignities began immediately. From the decision [PDF]:

Just last week we wrote about how the big record labels have a hilariously long history of failing to grasp the importance of providing a good underlying technology service for music online and how they always overvalue the content, and assume that the technology and services are a commodity that is effectively worthless. And, yet again, that approach has failed them. The latest is the collapse and capitulation of Vevo, the service put together by a few of the major record labels to try to "take on" YouTube (even while using some of YouTube's underlying technology). Earlier this week, Vevo announced that it was shutting down its own site and app, which basically no one used anyway. Instead, it'll just focus on using YouTube, which was where everyone watched Vevo videos in the first place.Still, as with that article last week, this is yet another demonstration of how the labels overvalue the content and assume that the only thing that matters is the content, and that the technology is interchangeable. It's not. History has shown time and time again that without good technology and services for the public, content delivery platforms will fail. And, that's not to say the content isn't important -- it is. But it's the combination of both together than make a compelling service. Netflix figured this out. Spotify figured this out. Apple figured this out. YouTube figured this out. But the major labels still can't seem to let go of the idea that it's the copyright holders who have the leverage and should be able to (1) control everything and (2) take nearly all of the profits.Either way, we can add Vevo to the list, with MusicNet and Pressplay, of examples where the record labels thought that they could mostly ignore building a good and compelling service, because just having the content would make it work.

A few months ago I suggested that calling Facebook a bull in a china shop might not be fair to bulls. I fear the suggestion remains apt, as Facebook throws its considerable weight around in ways that, while potentially well-meaning, leaves all sorts of chaos in its wake. The latest evidence of this tendency relates to its recent announcement of policies designed to limit who can place political ads on Facebook.The problem is, that's what it's done: limit who can place ads on Facebook. But according to the Verge, all it's done is limit the ability for SOME people to post political ads. As in, only SOME of the candidates in any particular race.The Verge article notes that the Mississippi primary is set for June 5. But in one particular race for Congress, only the incumbent's authentication paperwork is in order, so only he is able to buy ads. As the day of the election draws near, his challenger finds himself locked out of being able to advertise through the medium.

Much has been made about Donald Trump walking back sanctions placed on ZTE, a partly state-owned Chinese cellphone manufacturer, for selling products to Iran and North Korea. (Fun fact: our law enforcement agencies still do business with tech companies that sell to blacklisted countries.) The company has already paid millions of dollars in fines to the US for these violations, even if the working theory is the company paid zero dollars and the Chinese government picked up the tab.The actual badness of ZTE is somewhere between the extremes resulting in sanctions and the trade war victim it tries to present itself as. Trump is a fan of trade wars, even if Pyrhhic stalemates are still considered righteous wins in the Trade War Game. Trump has decided to lift the US government boot from ZTE's mostly-unbruised neck as a gesture of goodwill or something after slapping the world's largest exporter of consumer goods with a bunch of tariffs that seem to be doing more harm than good on the home front.And, because it's Trump lifting the sanctions, lots of people are claiming it's unilaterally a bad thing for him to do. This has resulted in some really bad arguments for maintaining sanctions and there's one being made at TechCrunch. It begins with a horrendous attempt to quantify the "terribleness" of ZTE by using an incredibly meaningless stat.

With 8 courses (50+ Hours), the Amazon Web Services Certification Training Mega Bundle is your one-stop to learn all about cloud computing. The courses cover S3, Route 53, EC2, VPC, Lambda and more. You will learn how cloud computing is redefining the rules of IT architecture and how to design, plan, and scale AWS Cloud implementations with best practices recommended by Amazon. The AWS bundle is on sale for $69.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

You may recall five years ago how WIPO -- the World Intellectual Property Organization, a UN body that is famous for its maximalist and expansionary approach to intellectual property -- delayed and then rejected the Pirate Parties International request to become an "observer." As we noted, the "observer" process is more or less a formality, and it's pretty common to see everyone who applies get approved. So it was a bit odd that WIPO rejected the Pirates.And it's even odder when you consider just who WIPO allowed in this year. As noted by Intellectual Property Watch, one of the organizations whose application was rubber-stamped this year to become a WIPO observer is that of the generically named "IP Centre." However, that group's website at the time that it was granted observer status claimed the following as its mission:

ESPN has long personified the cable and broadcast industry's tone deafness to cord cutting and TV market evolution. The company not only spent years downplaying the trend as something only poor people do, it sued companies that attempted to offer consumers greater flexibility in how video content was consumed. ESPN execs clearly believed cord cutting was little more than a fad that would simply stop once Millennials started procreating, and ignored surveys showing how 56% of consumers would ditch ESPN in a heartbeat if it meant saving the $8 per month subscribers pay for the channel.As the data began to indicate the cord cutting trend was very real, insiders say ESPN was caught flat footed by the trend. Instead of adapting for the streaming era, the company spent years doubling down on bloated sports licensing deals and SportsCenter set redesigns.These decisions ultimately came back to haunt the "worldwide leader in sports," resulting in ESPN losing 16 million subscribers over seven years (and an estimated 17,000 defecting viewers per day). As the accountability hammer began to fall, ESPN execs tried to pretend they saw this coming all along. ESPN subsequently decided the only solution was to fire hundreds of longstanding sports journalists and support personnel, but not the executives like John Skipper (since resigned) whose myopia made ESPN's problems that much worse.This week, the Wall Street Journal offered up a report on the arguably stupid debate over whether ESPN's programming is partisan. In it was buried this little nugget indicating that the analysts ESPN paid to help prepare it for the future routinely told company leadership that cord cutting was a nothingburger that would never become a widespread issue. Even as late as 2014, when the stats were becoming very clear, analysts were telling execs they had nothing to worry about

Apple has released its latest transparency report. It shows the United States, by far, has the most interest in obtaining user content and data from the company.

Over the years, Techdirt has written about some pretty bad stuff happening in South Africa on the copyright front. For example, there was the Business Software Alliance using made-up figures in an attempt to revise copyright law in its favor. The South African music rights organization tried to put public domain works under copyright. And -- most insane of all -- the South African recording industry association ran a stupid "anti-piracy" campaign called "Shoot the Pirate", which resulted in actual violence. So it makes a pleasant change to report on some good news from the country. A new organization of creators has been formed to press for a more balanced copyright system in South Africa. They call themselves ReCreate, although apparently the group has no connection with the similar US organization Re:Create. Here are the South African ReCreate's basic principles:

Earlier this month, Facebook announced that it will wedge its way into an already-crowded corner of online commerce. The social networking site plans to use its giant storehouse of personal data to create a dating service, promising to help users find "meaningful relationships," not just "hookups," as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg put it.It remains to be seen whether Facebook's new service will be a "Tinder-killer" that users flock to, or a flop for a company that's long been beset with privacy concerns. But there's one thing Facebook, its competitors, and its detractors should all be able to agree on. When a new dating service launches, it should rise or fall based on whether it can win the trust of users—not an arbitrary race to the Patent Office.Unfortunately, well before it built and launched an actual dating service, Facebook engaged in just such a race. The company applied for a stupid patent on "social dating" back in 2013, and earlier this year, the Patent Office granted the application.Take Established Methods, Add One "Social Graph"Online dating is a perfect example of a software-based business that truly doesn't need patents to be innovative. Companies have built such services based on what they hope will be useful or attractive to different groups of users, rather than engaging in arguments over who did what first. Patent tiffs are particularly pointless in a space like online dating, which builds on a long history of pre-digital innovation. Placing personal ads in newspapers has a history that dates back more than a century.The first claim of Facebook's US Patent No. 9,609,072 describes maintaining a "social graph" of user connections, then allowing one to request "introductions" to friends-of-friends. Subsequent claims are variations on the theme, like allowing users to include "preferences" and rank their possible matches.This application should have been rejected under the U.S. Supreme Court's 2014 decision in CLS Bank v. Alice. In that case, the high court made it clear that simply adding "do it on a computer"-style jargon to long-established ways of doing business wasn't enough to get a patent. Unfortunately, here, the Patent Office allowed Facebook to pull a similar trick. The company essentially took the idea of introducing available singles through friends-of-friends, added graphics, profiles and the "social graph," and then got a patent on it.The idea of finding good matches is positively ancient, whether people have been looking for the right lover, the right product, or the right business partner. It doesn't warrant a patent, and when patent trolls have claimed otherwise, they haven't fared well in court."Having two or more parties input preference data is not inventive," wrote U.S. District Judge Denise Cote in 2013, as she dismantled the patent of a shell company called Lumen View Technology LLC. "Matchmakers have been doing this for millennia."Patently PointlessTo be fair to Facebook, the company may have felt compelled to get its own stupid patent because there are so many other stupid online dating patents out there. In a phenomenon that's the patent equivalent of "mutually assured destruction," many tech companies have stockpiled poor-quality Internet patents simply to have a threat to fight off other companies' poor-quality Internet patents. This arms race, of course, costs many millions of dollars and benefits no one other than patent system insiders.In the world of online dating, wasteful, anti-competitive patent litigation isn't just theoretical. Earlier this year, Match Group sued up-and-comer Bumble for patent infringement. The suit was brought shortly after Match reportedly tried to purchase Bumble. And in 2015, Jdate sued Jswipe, accusing their competitor of infringing U.S. Patent No. 5,950,200, which tried to claim the idea of notifying people that they "feel reciprocal interest for each other." It was a basic patent that sought to encompass just about the whole concept of a dating service.This growing web of stupid patent claims won't stop Facebook from getting into online dating. It won't stop Facebook's giant competitors, like Match Group or IAC. But for an entrepreneur who wants to start a new business, the costly dueling patent claims will be a barrier. The battle to win the hearts and minds of online daters should be won with apps and code, not with patents.Republished from the EFF's Stupid Patent of the Month series.

We've talked about author Rob Reid many times on Techdirt, and had him on the podcast once before. Now, in what started as a project to promote his latest novel, Reid is hosting a podcast called After On, which tackles some pretty crazy real-world topics — from alien life to mind-reading technology — befitting a science fiction writer. This week, he returns to our podcast to discuss what it's like interviewing big thinkers about mind-bending ideas.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.

It's really no secret that traditional cable and broadband providers have some of the worst customer satisfaction of any companies in America. Comcast and Charter (Spectrum) in particular can usually be found stumbling around in last place in most satisfaction and support rankings. That's been particularly true of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which routinely shows cable and broadband providers rank consistently worse than nearly any other company in any industry in America. In fact, these companies even tend to be ranked worse than Americans' experiences with government agencies like the IRS.And despite seemingly bi-annual promises by these companies that customer service is their top priority (remember when Comcast promised a new "Customer Experience VP" would fix everything?), it's actually getting worse.According to the latest ACSI report, high prices, bloated cable bundles, and terrible customer service continue to leave customers angry and frustrated:

We've been pointing out for a while that, however well-intentioned the GDPR may be, and however important the general concept of protecting user's private data is, that still doesn't make the GDPR any less ridiculous. Indeed, we've pointed out that the setup of the GDPR is such that it's becoming a regulatory nightmare because the compliance costs are high, and the setup of the rules are so vague that the liability risk remains high. I know that some people keep insisting that the requirements to be compliant aren't actually that difficult. Indeed, EU Commissioner Vera Journova recently claimed that complying with the GDPR was so easy that even she could do it.Upon hearing that, software engineer Matthias Gliwka wondered if the EU was actually complying with its own "so easy" GDPR rules. Turns out, not so much. As Gilwka noted, the EU Parliament's own website appears to violate the GDPR.

If you've ever considered, or are considering, a career in SQL Server Administration, the MCSE Data Platform Certification Exam Prep bundle of courses will assess your ability to build enterprise-scale data solutions both on-premises and in cloud environments, and prepare you for the MCSE SQL Server Certification exam. Server administrators are well paid, and always in demand, so the time to start studying is now! It's on sale for $49.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

The FBI's push for encryption backdoors relied on ever-skyrocketing numbers of uncracked devices the agency's best and brightest just couldn't seem to access. "Look!" DOJ and FBI officials said, pointing lawmakers at charts showing an explosion in the number of locked devices over the last couple of years. Unsustainable, it seemed to say. But it was all a lie. Not a deliberate lie, maybe, but a lie nonetheless. A convenient misrepresentation of the problem caused by a software error.How does an agency with the technical capabilities the FBI has miscount physical items? Apparently, you let software do the counting and hope for the best.

Early last year, Charter Spectrum was sued by New York State for selling broadband speeds the company knew it couldn't deliver. According to the original complaint (pdf), Charter routinely advertised broadband speeds executives knew weren't attainable -- while simultaneously refusing to upgrade their network to handle added consumer demand (a problem that only got worse in the wake of its merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks).Buried in the suit were all manner of interesting allegations, including claims that Charter executives discussed via e-mail how they hoped to manipulate congestion to drive up costs for companies like Netflix (you'll recall this was part of the whole interconnection slowdowns Netflix and companies like Level3 complained about a few years ago). The suit also highlights how Charter gamed the results of a program the FCC has traditionally used to measure real-world broadband speeds using custom-firmware embedded routers in consumer volunteer homes.Charter has since been trying to tap dance out of the suit by flinging pretty much every legal argument against the wall to see what sticks. Most recently, the company tried to claim that the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal contains language banning states from trying to protect consumers. And while that was certainly the hope of Ajit Pai's FCC, legal experts have argued that the agency's claims don't hold water. More specifically, when the FCC rolled back its Title II authority over ISPs, it also ironically dismantled its legal authority to tell states what to do.Amusingly, Charter has now shifted its argument to the claim that the entire lawsuiit is somehow part of an unholy cabal orchestrated by Google and Netflix. You might recall that ISPs (and Ajit Pai) have long tried to claim that the entrenched telecom monopolies are innocent daisies, and that net neutrality is simply a conspiracy concocted by Google and Netflix to ruin AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Charter's livlihood. This narrative has been routinely driven by ISP policy folks despite the fact net neutrality is very much a bipartisan, grassroots consumer welfare issue.New York State brought in Tim Wu, the Columbia Law Professor who coined the term "net neutrality," to consult on the case. And because Wu had at points talked to both Google and Netflix (who were concerned that Charter was abusing its last-mile monopoly to drive up costs), Charter hopes to use this "unclean hands defense" to try and scuttle the lawsuit by claiming it was a vast conspiracy against Charter:

Last fall, I joked (no, really, it was a fucking joke!) that the monkey selfie saga "will never, ever be over." I stand by that prediction, even if Cathy Gellis wrote here last month with what she falsely believed was "the last update from the monkey selfie case". She wrote that because the 9th Circuit -- after rejecting a problematic settlement between PETA and photographer David Slater because Naruto, the apparent monkey in the middle had clearly not approved of any settlement -- had clearly and decisively rejected PETA's ridiculous argument. The court found no reason to believe that PETA (being a "next friend" of the monkey) should get the monkey's copyright for taking the selfie. The court said -- as we've said from the very beginning -- that monkeys don't get copyright.

It's been a while since we had a double-winner, but this week we've got one comment taking the first place spot for both funny and insightful. In response to our post about copyright being used to prevent an actress from showing her own demo reel, Killercool pointed out what a sad picture that paints of the rightsholder:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2013, we watched plenty of copyright hysteria as a trade group insisted that accommodating the deaf and blind would mean "casting aside" copyright, a Swedish prosecutor tried to label the Pirate Bay's domain registrar as an "accomplice", and all the major Hollywood studios sent bogus DMCA notices over a documentary about said Bay. Meanwhile, we were watching the TPP negotiations over the contentious intellectual property chapter, a key legal fight over DMCA abuse (while the RIAA continued whining that safe harbors are broken), and the effort in Congress to fix the anti-circumvention provisions.Ten Years AgoFive years earlier in 2008, we were already talking about how far behind the mainstream media was when it came to the DMCA and DRM. We took a look at how the RIAA and MPAA helped make The Pirate Bay even more popular, while the MPAA was getting people to settle lawsuits over simply linking to content, and Hollywood was working hard on making sure set-top boxes suck.This was also the week that we got our very first leaked glimpse at something that would become a huge topic in years to come: ACTA, which at the time we called The Pirate Bay Criminalization Treaty.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2003, worlds collided in an odd way as Roxio, the company that acquired the Napster name, made a deal to buy Pressplay, the music studios' crappy download service. Meanwhile, a Spanish site was claiming to offer legal music downloads, which as you can imagine the industry didn't quite see the same way. In the mean time, the music industry got into its head that a website listing out legal services was the key to ending piracy, while Disney was preparing to offer its own video-on-demand service, and Jack Valenti was busy rewriting history as usual. And, to bring us back around to the very first link in this history post, it was this week in 2003 that we first started hearing about the blind and deaf fighting back against the DMCA — something we optimistically thought might actually be effective, but that was giving the industry too much credit, apparently.

Happy GDPR day! At least if you can manage to be happy about a cumbersome, punitive, unprecedentedly extraterritorial legal regime that hijacks the resources of businesses everywhere without actually delivering privacy protection commensurate with the enormous toll attempts to comply with it extract. It's a regulatory response due significant criticism, including for how it poorly advances the important policy goals purportedly prompting it.In terms of policy goals, there's no quarrel that user privacy is important. And it's not controversial to say that many providers of digital products and services to date may have been… let's just say, insufficiently attentive to how those products and services handled user privacy. Data-handling is an important design consideration that should always be given serious attention. To the extent the GDPR encourages this sort of "privacy by design," it is something to praise.But that noble mission is overwhelmed by the rest of the regulatory structure not nearly so adeptly focused on achieving this end, which ultimately impugns the overall effort. Just because a regulatory response may be motivated by a worthwhile policy value, or even incorporate a few constructive requirements, it is not automatically a good regulatory response. Unless the goal is to ruin, rather than regulate, knotty policy problems need nuanced solutions, and when the costs of complying with a regulatory response drown out the intended benefit it can't be considered a good, or even effective, policy response. Here, even if all the GDPR requirements were constructive ones – and while some are, some are quite troubling – as a regulatory regime it's still exceptionally problematic, in particular given the enormous costs of compliance. Instead of encouraging entities to produce more privacy-protective products and services, it's instead diverted their resources, forcing them to spend significant sums of money seeking advice or make their own guesses on how to act based on assumptions that may not be correct. These guesses themselves can be costly if it results in resources being spent needlessly, or for enormous sums to be put in jeopardy if the guesses turn out to be wrong.The rational panic we see in the flurry of emails we've all been getting, with subject lines of varying degrees of grief, and often with plaintive appeals to re-join previously vibrant subscriber communities now being split apart by regulatory pressure, reveals fundamental defects in the regulation's implementation. As does the blocking of EU users by terrified entities afraid that doing so is the only way to cope with the GDPR's troubling scope.The GDPR's list of infirmities is long, ranging from its complexity and corresponding ambiguity, to some notably expensive requirements, to the lack of harmonization among crucial aspects of member states' local implementations, to the failure of many of these member states to produce these local regulations at any point usefully in advance of today, and to the GDPR's untested global reach. And they fairly raise the concern that the GDPR is poorly tailored to its overall policy purpose. A sound regulatory structure, especially one trying to advance something as important as user privacy, should not be this hard to comport with, and the consequences for not doing so should not be so dire for the Internet remaining the vibrant tool for community and communication that many people – in Europe and elsewhere – wish it to remain being.

Back in 2014, we wrote about a campaign by Yelp which it called "Focus on the User," in which it made a very compelling argument that Google was treating Yelp (and TripAdvisor) content unfairly. Without going into all of the details, Yelp's main complaint was that while Google uses its famed relevance algorithm to determine which content to point you to in its main search results, when it came to the top "One Box" on Google's site, it only used Google's own content. Four years ago, the Focus on the User site presented compelling evidence that users of Google actually had a better overall experience if the answers for things like local content (such as retailer/restaurant reviews) in the One Box were ranked according to Google's algorithm, rather than just using Google's own "Local" content (or whatever they call it these days).As we noted at the time, this argument was pretty compelling, but we worried about Yelp using the site to ask the EU to then force Google to change how its site functioned. As we wrote at the time:

I'll admit that I traditionally haven't been as paranoid as many people in regards to the surveillance powers of digital assistants like Amazon's Alexa or Google Home. Yes, putting an always-on microphone in your home likely provides a wonderful new target for intelligence agencies and intruders to spy on you. That said, it's not like a universe of internet of broken things or smart TVs aren't doing the same thing, before you even get to the problem with lax to nonexistent privacy standards governing the smartphone currently listening quietly in your pocket and tracking your every location.That said, nobody should ever labor under the false impression that good opsec involves leaving always on, internet-connected microphones sitting everywhere around your house.One Portland family learned this the hard way when their Amazon Alexa unit recorded a part of a private conversation and randomly sent it to somebody in her contact list. According to local Seattle affiliate Kiro 7, the family was contacted by a coworker who stated that he was receiving audio files of private conversations that had occurred in the family's house:

Earlier this week our Kickstarter campaign for our adaptation of the recently declassified CIA training game, called CIA: Collect It All ended, closing out with over 500% of our target goal. Even so, we know that many people missed out on the campaign who now want to order the game as well (trust me, we've gotten your emails!). So, as we continue to get the game ready, we're now opening up a pre-order system using Celery for others to purchase the game, to be included in our list of backers when we ship out the game later this year. You can now pre-order the game right here for the next month or so until we start manufacturing the cards.

Even the best writers make errors, WhiteSmoke checks your work for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and style errors - so you never send off a flawed work email again. Whether you're writing on mobile or desktop, this easy-to-use software is compatible with all browsers, includes a translator for over 50 languages, and lets you perfect your writing virtually anywhere you do it. A 1 year subscription is on sale for $19.99 or pay once for unlimited access for $61.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Back during the 2016 election, when Wikileaks published John Podesta's leaked emails, Democrats freaked out and blamed Wikileaks, and even tried to lie about the validity of those emails. Many supporters of the Democratic party, to this day, believe that Wikileaks and/or Julian Assange should face legal consequences for publishing those hacked emails. Of course, Republicans cheered on that effort. Sean Hannity, who back in 2010 was screaming about how Assange was "waging his war against the U.S." by publishing the leaked documents from Chelsea Manning and demanding that Obama "arrest" Assange, is now seen as one of Assange's most vocal supporters even having him on his show.But, of course, when the shoe is on the other foot, things change. Just recently, various news organizations started reporting on shenanigans by top Trump fundraiser, Elliott Broidy, based on a leak of Broidy's emails. Broidy's not taking this very well, issuing a subpoena to the Associated Press to try to uncover the news organization's source for his emails.No one is saying that it's okay to hack into someone'e email. But in both cases we're talking about those who are upset about an email leak going after the organization publishing the details of the leak and blaming the messenger. Just because documents are leaked or hacked or obtained through questionable means, it does not mean that news organizations can't publish them. Nor does it mean that they have to hand over the details of their sources. But it is worth noting that I don't see anyone who was screaming about Wikileaks now supporting Broidy's demands to the AP. Nor do I see those who were defending Wikileaks now defending the Associated Press against Broidy.It's almost as if most of the people on either side of this political horse race are determining which news orgs to support based on whose side the revelations help. That's... bad. We should support a free press and condemn attacks on news organizations when they're revealing newsworthy leaked information, no matter whether the news helps or hurts "your" side. Treating politics as a "red team" v. "blue team" sport leads to bad outcomes for everyone's rights.

As we've noted a few times now, however bad the recent Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal was, the nation's broadband providers have routinely been engaged in much worse behavior for decades. Yes, the Cambridge and Facebook scandal was bad (especially Facebook threatening to sue news outlets that exposed it), but the behavior they were engaging in is the norm, not the exception. And watching people quit Facebook while still using a stock cellphone (which lets carriers track your every online whim and offline movement) was arguably comedic.As the recent Securus and LocationSmart scandal highlights, wireless carriers pretty routinely sell your location data to a laundry list of companies, governments, and organizations with only fleeting oversight. And while some lawmakers are pressuring the FCC to more closely investigate the scandal (which resulted in the exposure of wireless location data of some 200 million users in the U.S. and Canada), few expect the same FCC that just killed net neutrality to actually do anything about it.When the previous FCC tried to pass some pretty modest privacy protections last year requiring that ISPs be more transparent about all of this, ISPs quickly took advantage of a cash-compromised Congress to scuttle those protections before they could even take effect:

For many years (looong before this current administration), we've documented the problems with ICE, a government agency that has long been totally out of control, abusing its power and authority not just in dealing with immigration, but in literally seizing blogs, because Hollywood told them to do so. The organization has done nothing to improve its reputation over the years, and lately almost seems to relish in the free reign it has to act like complete thugs in uniform.The latest story -- as with seizing blogs -- appears to have some serious First Amendment concerns, though there's no indication that ICE cares at all about that. In this story, ICE detained a journalist and is trying to have him deported because of that reporter's coverage of ICE activities. Freedom of the Press has the details, but the short version is that Manuel Duran, who fled El Salvador a decade ago over death threats there, has been living in the US and reporting for a few different Spanish language news organizations.In April, he was reporting on immigration protests in Memphis when he was arrested. That, by itself, is problematic enough. All too often we've seen reporters being arrested for covering protests, despite multiple courts stating quite clearly that such arrests violate the First Amendment. Indeed, Duran's own case was dropped and the judge dismissed the case. However, ICE not only refused to let Duran out of jail, it transferred him to another ICE detention center, and are trying to deport him back to El Salvador.

In the realm of the alcohol industry, the French champagne makers have distinguished themselves for their jealous protection of the name of their sparkling white wine. This protectionism is taken to the extreme, with association groups representing champagne makers essentially forbidding anyone else from even using the term. France's neighbor, Italy, has its own sparkling white wine called prosecco. And it seems that the makers of prosecco are trying to take a page from their champagne-making cousins in "protecting" their trademarks to a ridiculous degree.A maker of drinks for pets recently tried to trademark the name of a product it makes called "Pawsecco." The pet treat is not alcoholic, is sold only to pet owners, and is, frankly, puntastic. Despite all of this being supremely obvious, Woof and Brew faced a trademark opposition from the prosecco people.

The Milwaukee PD is (or was) staring down the barrel of a DOJ consent decree for its unconstitutional policing (mainly stop-and-frisk) and routine deployment of excessive force. This is among the many concerns brought to light last year by the DOJ's draft report on the department.

In the Supreme Court oral argument (p. 12) of MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd, Don Verrilli, attorney for the Recording Industry Association and other content owners, raised eyebrows:

Just last month, we noted that a court in Kentucky had ruled that the Governor of that state was free to block critics on social media accounts, saying that while people are free to speak, the First Amendment does not mean that the Governor has to listen. As we noted at the time, that ruling did not bode well for a more high profile case that was filed by the Knight First Amendment Center at Columbia University against President Donald Trump under similar circumstances. However, as you may have heard, a federal court in New York has now ruled that Trump's blocking is unconstitutional.This is, not surprisingly, getting lots of attention, but many people commenting on it are not fully understanding the actual issues in the lawsuit (shocking, I know, that people doing legal analysis on the internet might sometimes not get it right...). As we've noted plenty of times in the past, the First Amendment does not apply to private platforms, and nothing in this ruling means that Twitter is a "public forum" (as some nuttier lawyers are trying to argue in other cases). Instead, the ruling is specific that it is just the commentary in response to Donald Trump that has become a public forum.

Look, when it comes to Comcast, it's obviously quite easy to slap the company around for any number of its anti-consumer practices. Just sampling from the most recent news, Comcast was sued over its opt-out mobile hotspot from your home router plan, the company has decided to combat cord-cutting by hiking prices and fees on equipment for customers who cord-cut cable television, and it also has put in place a similar plan to charge all kinds of bullshit fees on equipment installations for customers who aren't bundling in other services with its ISP offering. You should be noticing a trend in there that has to do with how Comcast handles so-called "equipment rental" fees for its broadband customers and how it handles customers that choose to bring their own device to their home networks instead. Comcast has always hated customers that use their own WiFi routers, as the fees for renting a wireless access point represent a huge part of Comcast's revenue.Which is why you would think that the company would at least not expose the home networks of customers who use that equipment. Sadly, it seems that Comcast's website made the network SSIDs and passwords available in plain text of customers who were renting router equipment, while those that used their own routers were completely safe.

The Nope Portable Sound Microphone Blocker plugs directly into your device's 3.5mm headphone jack and forces your device to sense an installed mic, turning off your device's onboard microphones, giving you back your privacy. The 2 pack comes with a key chain holder so you can always have them handy. It's on sale for $16.99.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Hey Elon,Let's start this off by noting I'm generally a big fan of what you've done over the years with your various companies (Zip2 always seemed a bit silly, but, you know, since then...). Just recently I got a tour of the Tesla factory and I felt like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, even if I didn't get to own the factory when it was over. I've also been impressed by the way you decide to seriously "just get it done" when you see something that should be done. I mean, half the world seemed to think your idea for the Boring Company was actually a joke and yet a year and a half later, you've got a freaking tunnel under LA (in contrast, the 2nd Avenue Subway in NY was proposed in 1919 and just opened partially last year). So, like, I take it seriously when you say you've got a new project underway.And, yesterday you went on a bit of a Twitter rant about the media and said that you were going to start a media truth rating site called Pravda (clever!). And, as with the Boring Company, I believe you'll do it. I mean, you actually did incorporate Pravda Corp. last fall. So, you've got that going for you.On top of that, I even think you have a general point about how bad the mainstream media is. We've been at this for over 20 years, and some of our most successful stories have been calling out really bad reporting by big publications. It's good to keep them honest.That said, I have some pretty serious concerns about this whole setup and believe you've misdiagnosed the problem. Let's start with your tweet that suggests the reason reporters get stories wrong is because they're incentivized by clicks and ad dollars:

Once you release a document to a public records requesters, it's a public record, whether you meant to release it or not. The person handling FOIA requests for the Washington State Fusion Center (a DHS/local law enforcement collaboration known more for its failures than successes) sent Curtis Waltman something unexpected back in April. Waltman asked the Fusion Center for records pertaining to Antifa and white supremacy groups. He did get those records. But he also got something titled "EM effects on human body.zip."Instead of intel and assessments on local Antifa/white supremacists, Waltman found things like this:And this:The files did not appear to have been generated by any government agency, but rather collected from other sources who thought there might be some way the government could control minds using electronic stimulation or "remote brain mapping." Why the Fusion Center had them on hand remains a mystery, as does their attachment to a FOIA request containing nothing about electronic mind manipulation.This inadvertent disclosure has led to more requests for the same documents. Only this time, requesters -- like Joshua Eaton of ThinkProgress -- are asking specifically for government mind control files. It appears the Fusion Center first thought about withholding some mind control docs, but somewhere along the line decided it couldn't pretend the documents that weren't supposed to be released hadn't actually been released.An email chain in the release [PDF] to Eaton contains an apology from the staffer who accidentally sent Waltman the mind control files.

We've noted repeatedly how broadband ISPs aren't just trying to kill net neutrality, they're trying to kill nearly all state and federal oversight over giant telecom monopolies entirely. From language buried in the net neutrality repeal aimed at preventing states from protecting consumers, to attempts to neuter the FCC and shovel all remaining oversight to an FTC ill-suited to police telecom operators, the end goal really is little to no real oversight of some of the least liked, least competitive companies in any industry.While this is all being portrayed as "regulatory modernization" by ISPs and their armies of consultants and allies, former FCC Boss Tom Wheeler has gone so far as to call the effort a "fraud." Wheeler was quick to note that not only does the FTC lack rule-making authority, it can only act against an ISP if it can be very clearly shown that the ISP's actions were "unfair or deceptive." That's tricky to do in the net neutrality era where anti-competitive behavior is often disguised as "reasonable network management."The ISP narrative being parroted about is that the FTC is somehow better suited to police net neutrality than an FCC custom-built by Congress for the purpose. But that's patently false, and as Wheeler noted in an interview last year, ISPs know that shifting oversight authority from the FCC to FTC will leave ISPs lost in the regulatory wash (which is the entire purpose of their gambit):

In the months following the appearance of the Snowden leaks, several state legislatures attempted stiff arm snooping feds by introducing bills prohibiting collect-it-all programs from being deployed against Americans by the NSA. Most targeted the NSA's warrantless collection of metadata, creating a warrant requirement for the collection of data within the state's borders.Others were a bit more creative, forbidding state law enforcement from participating in federal surveillance efforts or, in the case of Utah, where a new NSA data center was being built, forbidding the state's water supply from being used in data collection efforts (to cool the agency's many, many servers).In Michigan, one of these laws is actually being enacted. As the Washington Examiner reports, the effective date of the Fourth Amendment Rights Protection Act is nearly five years to the day from the first Snowden leak.

The Obama administration was terrible when it came to how it treated journalists, acting vindictively against many journalists, and opening up investigations that created massive chilling effects on journalism. While some supporters of our previous President insisted that these actions were necessary due to the journalists "leaking" or revealing sensitive information, that's a ridiculous claim. A journalist's job is to report on things, including revealing the kind of information a government would prefer be kept secret. And, more importantly, normalizing a government at war with the journalists who cover it was bound to be abused even more going forward.And that brings us to the current administration, whose attacks on journalists have been frequent as well, though of a different, more clumsy nature. While the last administration focused on keeping secrets and launching chilling investigations, this one seems focused on name calling and hamfisted attempts at shutting out the media in the most obvious and petty of ways. Neither approach is good, but the current administration's attacks on journalists are so blatant and so stupid, it just makes people wonder what they're so afraid of.While most people think mainly about the President's comments about the media, the EPA's attitude towards the media may be even more instructive. Just a few weeks ago, NY Times reporter Eric Lipton, in an interview with NPR's Terry Gross, explained how the EPA sought to shut out the media: