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A government has decided to handle "fake news" in about the only way it should be handled. FINALLY. While most governments appear willing to treat "fake news" legislation as a gateway drug to censorship, the UK government -- a government that certainly isn't known for its rational handling of speech issues -- is going the other way.It's a decision that treats the term with all the respect it deserves: none.

Fan translations of movies and video games, while wildly popular in many different countries, have also come under recent attack. Claims of copyright infringement have been leveled against many sites and groups that put these translations together, with the theory being that it violates copyright to make works understandable to fans in countries where, often times, a translated version of the work isn't even on offer. If that sounds stupid and protectionist to you, ding ding ding, you're right.But it's somewhat interesting to see this scenario happen in reverse, and note how different the reaction from fans are when they find their hard work in official releases, without credit. Meet Francesco, an Italian game developer with a particular affinity for a game that I've honestly never heard of.

Turkey's government has already locked up more than 70 journalists -- most of them in the wake of a failed coup. President Recep Erdogan says the imprisoned journalists are terrorists and criminals, but rather than offer evidence of wrongdoing, Erdogan just keeps throwing more of them in jail.The notoriously thin-skinned president has been eliminating dissent and criticism since he took power, so there's no reason to give his accusations of criminal activity credence. Erdogan has leaned on favorable laws elsewhere in the world to press for criminal charges and extradition of citizens of other nations who've offended his delicate sensibilities.As a player on the world stage, Erdogan and his government will use whatever tools they have available to continue to eliminate their critics. It appears Erdogan is now asking the world's police forces to help him track down journalists he hasn't yet jailed. (h/t Mutlu Civiroglu)

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is the latest appeals court to find the FBI's warrant for malware deployment during a child porn investigation to be invalid, but still close enough for government work. The FBI's NIT (Network Investigative Technique) was sent to visitors of a dark web child porn site called Playpen. The hitchhiking software then traveled out of the district the server was housed in (Virginia) to send back identifying info from computers and devices all over the world.At the time the warrant was sought, warrants were only valid in the district they were issued. Multiple courts found the FBI's malware was a search under the Fourth Amendment. A smaller subset found the extrajurisdictional search unsupported by current law and the underlying warrant invalid from the moment it was issued. Challenges to the extrajurisdictional searches have all run into dead ends at the appellate level.The First, Eighth, and Tenth Circuits have all refused to suppress evidence, even if the courts found the search warrant invalid. The reasoning? There was no deterrent effect served by suppressing the evidence because the law changed after the warrant was issued and the malware deployed to allow the FBI to engage in extrajurisdictional searches. In essence, this is retroactive application of a law that changed after the warrant was sought, giving it the sort of blessing courts won't extend to victims of law enforcement misconduct that happened to occur before precedential decisions explicitly declared that particular form of misconduct unconstitutional.In addition to the retroactive application of Rule 41 jurisdictional changes, these appeals courts have also granted the government "good faith." Somehow, it's believed an FBI agent seeking a warrant for a search that he knew would violate Rule 41 limits when executed wasn't the FBI rolling the dice on favorable rulings and a potential future mooting by changes to the law.There's more of the same in the Ninth Circuit decision [PDF]. The court says the warrant was bad but the faith was good, so no harm, no foul, no suppression. (h/t Brad Heath)

Back in August, I wrote a big post about the impossible choices that large internet platforms have to make concerning content moderation. A large part of the point of that post is that there is no perfect content moderation, and especially at scale, there are going to be large swaths of people who disagree with any choice (leaving content up, taking it down, demonetizing it, putting a flag on it, whatever). And expecting these platforms to magically get things right is going to end in serious disappointment for everyone.In its own hamfisted way, Google has now proven that point (and, no, they're not doing this on purpose). About a month after that post went up, we got a notification from Google, telling us that this article violated Google's AdSense policies (we use AdSense to backfill ads when we don't have a better solution -- it pays us close to nothing) and therefore they were restricting AdSense from appearing on that page. The only details we received were that it was "dangerous or derogatory."If you can't see that, it says that our link is "dangerous or derogatory" in that it:

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Fake court orders have landed a businessman real jail time. Michael Arnstein, CEO of Natural Sapphire Company, pled guilty last year to forging court orders he sent to Google to delist negative reviews. This was apparently the lesson Arnstein learned from his single, successful defamation suit: it's cheaper and easier to forge documents than jump through judicial hoops for several months to achieve the same ends.In fact, he said as much to others seeking solutions to negative review problems -- all preserved as evidence used against him by the DOJ:

Historically, large telecom mergers don't end well for consumers or employees. Usually in the wake of these megadeals nothing much happens for about a year, after which the acquiring company begins trimming back redundant positions and offices. In telecom, growth for growth's sake also usually has a detrimental impact on customer service, investment in which takes a back seat to getting acquired systems and employees in sync (see: Comcast). And more often than not, mindless consolidation in telecom tends to slowly reduce overall players in the space, resulting in higher prices and apathy no matter how many promises to the contrary are made by the merging companies (see: Charter, Time Warner Cable).As T-Mobile and Sprint attempt to merge (once again), their executives are throwing out all the usual claims ahead of such mergers: that the merger will create immeasurable "synergies"; that the reduction of major U.S. wireless competitors from four to three will somehow create competition; that the deal will somehow make it easier for them to deploy next-gen "5G" networks; and that the deal will somehow magically create oodles of new jobs.At a meeting with Sprint employees this week, T-Mobile CEO John Legere tried to ease employees' worries that many of them would be out of a job once the two carriers are fused into one. This merger, Legere told employees, would somehow be different (he failed to offer any solid reasons why):

Literally anything can be the basis of a moral panic. The internet's mere existence has prompted all sorts of panickers (professional and lay) to blame any number of things/concepts for destroying the youth of the world. If it's not teens getting high by huffing MP3s with their eyeballs and ears, it's Minecraft creating unrealistic home-building expectations or IoT devices creating a generation of automaton abusers.For those that buy into this thinking, it seems plausible because it's happening in the present. With technology being indiscernible from magic, the academics behind these questionable assertions are no more than shamans guiding the faithful towards conclusions that cohere with their prejudices. If they didn't have X growing up, chances are X is what's ruining their kids. A little history would go a long way. I mean, at one point in time, chess -- the game of kings and gifted elementary school students -- was considered to be the Grand Theft Auto of its day, capable of turning players into cold-blooded killers.Some UK "researchers," who have earned every bit of derision contained in those scare quotes, are claiming internet memes are ruining children. While they may have somewhat of a point about bullying and shaming, they lose it completely by claiming memes play a role in the UK's childhood obesity stats. (via PetaPixel)Here's the part of the "written evidence" [PDF] that makes a little bit of sense:

So just about a year ago the Mexican court system decided to ban all Roku streaming hardware from being sold in Mexico. The ban was the result of legal action taken by Mexican cable company Cablevision, which accused Roku of facilitating piracy. How? While Roku devices are more locked down than many of the more open home media PC solutions (also the target of endless pearl clutching and hyperventilation by the entertainment industry), users can install certain unofficial, third-party "private" channels that provide access to pirated live streams of cable content.While Roku went out of its way to try and lock down their hardware, some users paid hackers a few bucks to crack open and modify the devices anyway, letting them access the dubious third-party channels in question. While this obviously wasn't Roku's fault, Cablevision believed Roku should be punished for the behavior of the company's customers, and declared it was doing Mexican consumers a public service:

In the pantheon of massively talented musical acts that also get and embrace the power of the internet, of using free music to make money, and of emergent business models, the folks behind Run The Jewels stand particularly tall. The duo, Killer Mike and El-P, have managed to make themselves household names through a combination of freely available music, a positive and often humorous level of interaction with their fans, and the kind of forthright public statements that create a bond with those that follow them. It's all so perfectly well done that you would think Run The Jewels was following some kind of a script, but it is pleasantly obvious that these are just really good guys who happen to also make fantastic music. They also occasionally, and far too infrequently, write blog posts, including for Techdirt.The most recent version of all of this started with a Twitter user complaining to El-P that he or she typically listens to RTJ on Spotify and had no idea where to get their albums. Another Twitter account piped up confirming that, like the rest of the RTJ catalog, the albums were available for free download on the group's website. That same Twitter account mentioned that he also bought the albums through iTunes purely out of a desire to support RTJ. This, of course, happens quite frequently, which is virtually ignored by the "Piracy is killing music, argghghgh!" crowd.What doesn't happen as frequently is what came next from El-P.

For years we've talked about the journalistic perils of what journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the "view from nowhere," or the pretty common misconception that journalists should prioritize factual symmetry in news reporting, instead of actually trying to get to the truth. This usually results in "he said, she said" reporting where both sides are given equal weight (even if one side is clearly being intentionally misleading), with the idea that the reader can then ferret out the truth, while the journalist him or herself stands stoically protected from accusations of "bias" because they refused to take a real stand.Rosen put it this way during an interview back in 2010:

The Little Rock drug raid story is appalling. The indiscriminate, repeated, and systemic violation of the Fourth Amendment has been enormously destructive to people's lives, as well as an entire community. But if this situation is to be remedied, and hopefully it will be, it will be thanks to the First Amendment.Most obviously, the First Amendment is what has allowed for Radley Balko's reporting of the story. Speaking truth about power is only possible with strong press protection. By allowing injustice to be discovered and shared, justice becomes possible. With Balko's reporting the public at large can now be aware of the abuse being done in their name, and the revelation is what will allow people to press for change. As it is, publication of the story has already led to charges being dropped against one of its other victims.

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I've threatened in the past to write up a post explaining why a blockchain-based DRM is a terrible idea that will flop -- and it appears I finally need to do so, with the sort of announcement that Sony is preparing to use the blockchain for "next-gen DRM." I should note that, unlike some people, I'm actually not a blockchain skeptic. I think that it does have a few potentially revolutionary and disruptive uses. But... I also think that nearly every use of the blockchain that has been championed so far is incredibly silly and pointless. In most cases, what people claim they're using a blockchain for would better be served with... a database. If you're just replacing a database with a blockchain-based system, all you're really doing is adding unnecessary inefficiency and complexity.So while a blockchain does have efficiency and complexity weaknesses compared to a database, it does have two potential advantages -- but only if those advantages are necessary to the service being built. The first advantage is that the blockchain can be truly distributed, rather than centralized. For years, we've discussed the problems of too many centralized systems, whether it's the siloing of information, the weird incentives it creates for the central database controller, or simply the fact that a centralized system creates a single point of failure and/or point of attack for a would-be assailant. A blockchain can help limit (though not eliminate) some of those problems -- and that can open up some incredible new services. The second big thing that a blockchain does better than a database is that it creates a more trustworthy way to prevent the "double spending" problem.The issue there is that with anything digital, it can always be copied and/or manipulated in some way. If you are trying to construct something that requires scarcity -- such as a digital currency or a specific ledger of asset ownership -- then you want to be sure that the system really has a 100% accurate record, and won't allow the same bit of digital currency to be held by multiple people (or allowing it to be spent multiple times by the same person) or, that the same asset is listed as being owned by different entities. One of the cool features of the Blockchain is that it is designed such that people can be fairly cryptographically certain that we don't have that sort of "double spending" problem. You do have to trust the math and the code, but the code is open and people are constantly checking it. Now, you can claim a centralized database can prevent these kinds of things too, but you have to totally trust whoever is in control over that centralized database. And you might. Most of the money you probably have is really in a centralized database at your bank. But, there are some advantages to have that record be on a publicly distributed ledger a la the blockchain.The issue, of course, is finding services and applications that can really take advantage of these benefits of the blockchain, and so far, they are few and far between, though there are plenty of future possibilities where they could be super useful.For years now, we've heard some people arguing for a blockchain-based DRM. This idea is at least marginally better than simply replacing a database with an unnecessary blockchain, because at the very least, it is an attempt (a weak one, but an attempt) to leverage one of the advantages I discuss above: the double spending issue. Obviously, as lots of people will tell you, the legacy copyright industries have decried the fact that the internet makes content super easy to copy, making their legal monopoly over the distribution of that content less than monopolistic. Thus, the folks who wish to go back to a world in which content is locked up, hear about how a blockchain "solves" the double spending problem, and they get excited: why couldn't we use that as DRM? After all, isn't the point of that aspect of the blockchain that it stops copying of digital assets?But, that's about as far as the thought process goes. Because from there, it completely breaks down. There are few actual details about Sony's blockchain-based DRM idea, but it's not difficult to understand why it will fail. First, it's important to understand something that copyright supporters frequently forget: the copyright on something is different from the content itself. Copyright system supporters like to conflate the content itself and the "intellectual property." But as we've explained in the past while a "copyright" may have property-like elements, the underlying content does not.The blockchain-based system for solving the double spend problem is a useful solution when it's the record or ledger entry that you don't want copied. But that's not what any DRM system would be. Because the "record" is the copyright information -- not the music/movie/book/etc. And who cares whether or not you can copyright the copyright information? You're solving the wrong problem? The content itself can still get copied. There's no way to stop that, because even if you were to somehow encode the actual content in the blockchain (a pointless idea), you'd still have the analog hole to deal with, as the content would inevitably escape the blockchain.The other reason why a blockchain-based DRM solution is so dumb is because it actively goes against what the public wants. The reason a disruptive or transformational technology works is because it provides the public with something much better than they had before. A blockchain-based DRM solution provides a worse solution. There is no demand for such a thing. Sure, there may be "demand" on the label side, but that doesn't translate to usage.The final reason why a blockchain-based DRM solution is utterly stupid is conveyed quite nicely by Cory Doctorow in his BoingBoing post about this announcement, in which he notes that what Sony is proposing appears to be a privacy nightmare:

So we've made it pretty clear by now that the FCC's entire justification for repealing net neutrality was based entirely on fluff and lobbyist nonsense. But because the Administrative Procedure Act requires that regulators actually provide hard data to justify massive reversals in policy, both the Ajit Pai FCC and his BFFs at Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T have clung tightly to one, completely false claim: that net neutrality harmed network investment. But as we've stated countless times, that's simply not true.That's not an opinion, it's based on SEC filings, earnings reports, and the on-the-record statements of nearly a dozen telecom industry CEOs.That undeniable fact hasn't really bothered the folks at US Telecom, the telecom industry's biggest lobbying and policy organization. The group last week penned a blog post with an accompanying graph proudly proclaiming that telecom network investment was on a sharp upward trajectory after the repeal of net neutrality. From the missive:

We're used to stories about asset forfeiture being abused to seize vehicles from citizens here in the US, with the vehicle/sales proceeds going directly to the bottom line of the agency seizing them. That encourages all sorts of abuse performed in the name of Drug Warring but, in reality, just creating a somewhat sustainable revenue source for the government.At least in this context, seizures of vehicles make sense. Perverted incentives have created a demand for assets drug cartels just can't deliver, so it's up to average Americans -- many of them not at all involved in international drug trade -- to make up the difference. But what can you even make of this atrocity, performed by the Flintshire, Wales government? (via Jalopnik)

When we talk about trademark disputes around here, we're often talking about them at the start of a bullying process or at the conclusion of a trial. Those are the natural checkpoints for covering these kinds of disputes, with either the initiation of the dispute, often times specious, or the conclusion when an outcome is reached, often times unfortunate. Less discussed but certainly as important are the softer outcomes of trademark bullying and disputes. And it's useful to highlight just what it can cost a small entity that is victimized by all of this.Dick Fowles and Kate Ackerly opened a clothing store in 1993 called Peter-Blair Accessories, named after the duo's godchildren. Out of the blue in 2009, Fowles and Ackerly received a letter from Blair Corp., a discount retailer of accessories that primarily sells its goods online. Blair Corp. too sold ties and accessories on its website, though they were significantly different in terms of price and quality. The letter accused Peter-Blair Accessories of infringing Blair Corp. trademarks by selling its goods online. After a great deal of back and forth, Blair Corp. agreed to allow the smaller clothier to sell only its own branded ties online. Nothing else.This went on for nearly a decade, coinciding with the exact time when online clothes shopping took off.

To graduate from high school in Texas, you must first be able to show you won't provoke police officers into shooting/tasing/beating you during a traffic stop. That's according to a new state law that ran through the legislature under the guise of solving police/community relationship problems. (via Popehat)

The War on Drugs seems to bring out the worst in law enforcement. Wiretap abuse, asset forfeiture, flashbang grenades tossed into toddlers' cribs, internal corruption… these are all aspects of law enforcement's drug-related police work.Radley Balko has uncovered more abuse and Constitutional violations, this time stemming from the Little Rock PD's anti-drug efforts. The wrongs detailed in Balko's investigation include false statements on warrant requests, abuse of no-knock warrants, "reliable" confidential informants who are anything but reliable, and a handful of destroyed lives left in its wake.It opens with the story of Roderick Talley, whose apartment was raided by a Little Rock (AR) SWAT team. The team used explosives to remove his door, sending it flying onto the couch where Talley was sleeping. The raid was predicated on an informant's supposed controlled buy. But Talley's own security cameras -- which also captured the raid itself -- showed the informant didn't do what police said he did.

By now Techdirt readers should be fairly keyed into FCC head Ajit Pai's schtick: kill most meaningful oversight over the telecom sector at the industry's direct behest (including net neutrality and modest privacy rules), then proudly proclaim you've unleashed a tidal wave of innovation, investment, and competition. When you look a little closer however, you'll generally find that the justifications for such moves not only ignore the will of the public and engineering expertise, but are often based entirely on evidence free lobbying claims from the industry itself. You'll also find the promised competition and innovation never materializes.Consumer groups say this same, evidence-optional, industry-cozy approach has fueled the FCC's attempts to hold telecom operators accountable for lagging post-hurricane repairs.You might recall that Verizon used Hurricane Sandy as cover to effectively stop upgrading huge swaths of its fixed-line networks. Countless customers on traditional copper voice and DSL lines were suddenly left without service or repairs, with Verizon claiming that capped, expensive, frequently unavailable and oft-congested wireless service was a "good enough" replacement for them (those users disagreed). That, in turn, resulted in the previous FCC passing some rules saying that if you're going to kill off landline service, you need to replace it with something at least equal in quality.But like everything else Pai touches, those rules, in addition to other consumer protections (like state rules holding carriers accountable for missed deadlines or unfulfilled promises on refunds), were quickly stripped away under the claim it would bring "greater innovation and investment" to the telecom sector. Fast forward to this month, and consumer groups are arguing that much of this mindless deregulation is actively harming recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Michael.Both Ajit Pai and Florida Governor Rick Scott have been issuing press missives claiming they're "holding carriers accountable." But consumer groups like Public Knowledge say that both Pai and Scott are oddly forgetting to mention that their blind deregulatory efforts managed to throw some very useful guidance and protections out the window, making the existing problem worse:

In the wake of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein, writer Stephen Elliott's name ended up on a Google doc called Shitty Media Men, along with the information "Rape accusations, sexual harassment [sic], coercion, unsolicited invitations to his apartment, a dude who snuck into Binders???" listed under the column heading "ALLEGED MISCONDUCT" and the additional note that, "Multiple women allege misconduct." He has now sued Moira Donegan, the owner of the Google doc, and dozens of anonymous third-party contributors to the list for defamation, as well as intentional and negligent infliction of emotional distress. He has also now cemented his reputation as a very shitty man.First, let me say that I do not call Stephen Elliott a shitty man because of what posters to the Shitty Media Men list wrote about him. He's shitty for filing this lawsuit against the host of and contributors to the list, seeking to chill the speech of those who would speak out against bad behavior. He's shitty for threatening to unmask people who had exercised their right to speak anonymously to warn others of potential harm.

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Before FOSTA passed, a ton of experts warned it would lead to bad things, and now we're seeing more and more stories about how FOSTA is actually increasing the sex trafficking problem, rather than decreasing it. Police have admitted that it's now harder to catch traffickers without the information they used to get from Backpage, and pimps have apparently seized on the opportunity to make use of the disappearance of Backpage and other sites to more aggressively position themselves as the only option for sex workers.The latest such report to make this clear is in the San Francisco Chronicle, where police note that FOSTA has emboldened pimps to take control of sex workers' lives:

As we've made pretty clear, the broadband industry is successfully obliterating most meaningful federal and state oversight of their broken, largely uncompetitive broadband monopolies. They've had great success in convincing the Trump administration to effectively neuter the FCC, driving any piddly, remaining enforcement authority to an FTC that's ill-equipped for the job. At the same time, the federal government and ISPs like Comcast are also waging a not-so-subtle and completely coordinated war on state authority to step in and fill the consumer protection void.Earlier this month, the entire broadband industry, hand in hand with the Trump DOJ, filed lawsuits against the state of California for passing a net neutrality law the majority of the public supports. This week broadband industry lobbying organizations like US Telecom (primarily funded and directed by AT&T) filed suit against the state of Vermont (pdf), again claiming that the state's new net neutrality law is prohibited by the legally dubious "pre-emption" language embedded in the FCC's net neutrality repeal at direct telecom lobbyist request.I've discussed at length here and elsewhere why these efforts aren't likely to work: the simple version being that when an agency (in this case the FCC) abdicates its authority to regulate an industry (which the FCC did with its rollback of Title II classification of ISPs under the Telecom Act), it also eliminates its right to tell states what to do. This isn't a nuanced debate; I've been hard pressed to find a single telecom lawyer that thinks the FCC's state pre-emption efforts are on sound legal footing. It's generally seen as a delay tactic to prevent states from protecting users until the looming suit against the FCC is settled.The lawsuit against Vermont parrots the oft-repeated falsehood that the FCC justly dismantled net neutrality because it was stifling sector investment, a claim that has indisputably and repeatedly been proven false. From the complaint:

Government agencies will eventually follow the letter of FOIA law. It usually takes a lawsuit to push things forward, but even losing in court seldom prompts above-and-beyond service from the government. The spirit of the law is ignored in favor of obfuscation, foot-dragging, and blatant antipathy.Certainly the government shouldn't be expected to compose FOIA requesters requests for them if they send vaguely-worded requests. On the other hand, the government shouldn't demand specificity from requesters who don't know what documents an agency has on hand or how the search will be conducted.The CIA once told a requester he needed to know exactly which parties were involved in communications about the agency's FOIA portal outage -- information that could only be gleaned from the emails the CIA was refusing to look for until it had more information. This is the normal level of being dicked around that requesters can expect when dealing with our more reticent public agencies."Vagueness" was the CIA's excuse to not perform its FOIA duties. The DHS, on the other hand, has decided specificity in requests can also be used against requesters. A FOIA lawsuit filed by the Government Accountability Project contends the agency did a deliberately lousy job searching for records related to border phone searches and ideological assessments performed by border security personnel.The federal judge agrees. The opinion [PDF] notes the DHS has turned the FOIA process into a game -- one requesters aren't likely to win. [h/t Mike Scarcella]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a short first amendment refresher regarding PEN America's lawsuit against Trump:

Five Years AgoThere was plenty of NSA apologia again this week in 2013. Keith Alexander was claiming that he was protecting civil liberties by violating them and playing the fear card by claiming people will die due to the Snowden leaks, while the lawyer who helped give legal cover to Bush's warrantless wiretapping was claiming everyone will grow to love the intrusive NSA, and Dianne Feinstein was playing the 9/11 card (and being debunked by the ACLU).Meanwhile, the latest information from the leaks revealed that the NSA was collecting email contact lists and instant messaging friend lists overseas with no oversight, that the agency was involved in the drone strike program, and of course that the agency was in fact drowning in a glut of data.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, the president finally signed the ProIP bill and created America's copyright czar position. We took a closer look at the MPAA's lawsuit against RealNetworks (and how it was all about controlling innovation), while the RIAA was appealing the mistrial ruling in the Jammie Thomas trial, and a German court was finding Google Images thumbnails to be a copyright violation. Unexpectedly, the McCain campaign sent a letter to YouTube urging them to consider and protect fair use when processing DMCA requests, and YouTube offered up the excellent response that they can't give the campaign special treatment, but they hope McCain will fix the law. Meanwhile, Larry Lessig was giving his own impassioned defense of fair use and remix culture.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2003, the EFF found another person who was wrongly accused of file-sharing and sued by the RIAA (they wouldn't be the last), just as the RIAA was commencing round two of its shakedown scheme by, as promised, offering people a chance to pay up before being sued (how nice of them). We also took a closer look at the RIAA's lawsuits against Grokster and Morpheus, and how their true ambitious goal was to overturn the Betamax precedent that makes video tape machines legal. Also this week, Brewster Kahle was fighting against the DMCA in an attempt to preserve old software.Meanwhile, lots of companies and industries were really struggling to adapt. Some people were discussing possible futures for usual-consumer-electronics-leader Sony after Apple beat it to the punch on smartphones, print publishers were basically dragging their heels about this whole internet thing, and Polaroid reached the highly questionable conclusion that its future was in digital photo kiosks.

A few weeks ago, Bloomberg published a giant story claiming that Chinese spies did a somewhat daring supply chain hack on American big tech firms. The gist of the story was that servers from Super Micro had hidden chips that somehow were then used by Apple and Amazon (not to mention the US government), that allowed someone in China to access certain data. The story was a blockbuster that got everyone talking. But, almost as soon as it came out, a bunch of people started raising questions about the story. While the Bloomberg reporters claimed over a dozen sources, both Apple and Amazon came out with incredibly strong denials. Way stronger than is common in these situations. And while I know some cynical people insist that companies will lie about this stuff all the time, that is not actually true. Some companies may misrepresent things, or try to play down stories, but outright fabrication is not at all common (and the consequences of a company doing it would be severe). And here, both Amazon and Apple's denials were so clear, so specific and so adamant that it raised serious questions about the reporting.Since there was so much confusion over it all, we held off on writing about it, figuring more information would come out in the days and weeks after the initial story. And so far, nearly all of the "additional info" has only served to raise significantly more questions about Bloomberg's reporting. Various government and intelligence agencies all claimed they had no evidence to support these claims. Again, some will argue that they are lying, and (again) while those agencies may have a history of misrepresenting things, the denials here were clear and unequivocal. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre (a part of GCHQ) said they completely supported Apple and Amazon that no such attack occurred. The US Department of Homeland Security said the same thing. Dan Coats, the US Director of National Intelligence said the US intelligence community has seen no evidence of such an attack, which certainly undermines the Bloomberg story. Some of the folks quoted in the Bloomberg article even questioned the accuracy of the article with one going so far as to say the article that he is named in... "didn't make sense."Also, as reporter Nicole Perlroth noted, one of the reporters on the Bloomberg story -- Michael Riley -- had also done a story back in 2014 making bold claims that the NSA had exploited the Heartbleed bug, and multiple other reports ripped that story to shreds, with multiple people denying it and no one else confirming it.Now, with this story, Apple has done something it's never done before: asked Bloomberg for a retraction of the article. That's a pretty big move -- and Bloomberg says it still stands by its reporting (as it did with the Heartbleed story).However, at this point, Bloomberg has whittled away whatever benefit of the doubt there was left and set fire to the scraps. It's difficult to believe that Bloomberg's story was accurate, and the company and its reporters owe everyone an explanation -- or at least some additional evidence to support the reporting. I don't doubt that there is a kernel of truth in the story -- but given the vehement and thorough response from everyone, it certainly seems likely that the reporters on the Bloomberg piece misunderstood something big, leading to misreporting of things in a way that leads to a very inaccurate picture of what's going on. Bloomberg should, at the very least, appoint someone else to go through the work put in by reporters Michael Riley and Jordan Robertson, and explore whether or not the story really is accurate, and why it is that basically everyone is saying it's not.Reporters can, and do, make mistakes. How they respond to such mistakes is the real marker of the ethics they and the organizations they work for hold. Considering Bloomberg stood by that Heartbleed story, perhaps we shouldn't expect such a reckoning at the publication -- but, at the very least, it's going to lead plenty of people to write off Bloomberg as a credible source on issues like these, and that's unfortunate, given that there are some really big and important stories having to do with computer security right now. Having one major publication show itself to be untrustworthy in its coverage would be very bad.

Whistleblowers play a vital role in releasing information the powerful would rather keep secret. But the former pay a high price for their bravery, as the experiences of recent whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden make plain. Another whistleblower whose life has become very difficult after leaking is Rudolf Elmer. He has a Web site about his actions and his subsequent problems, but it's not the easiest to navigate. Here's Wikipedia's summary of who he is and what he did:

Phew. The 11th Circuit appeals court has just overturned a lower court ruling and said that Georgia's laws, including annotations, are not covered by copyright, and it is not infringing to post them online. This is big, and a huge win for online information activist Carl Malamud whose Public.Resource.org was the unfortunate defendant in a fight to make sure people actually understood the laws that ruled them. The details here matter, so let's dig in:For the past few years, we've been covering the fairly insane situation down in Georgia, where they insist that the state's annotated laws are covered by copyright. This is not quite the same thing as saying the laws themselves are covered by copyright. Everyone here seems to recognize that Georgia's laws are not covered by copyright. But here's where the problem comes in. The state of Georgia contracts out with a private company, LexisNexis, to "annotate" the law basically giving more context, and discussing the case law interpretations of the official code. The deal with the state is that LexisNexis then transfers whatever copyright it gets from the creation of the annotations back to the state. Finally, the only "official" version of Georgia's state laws is in the "annotated" version. If you want to look up the official law of Georgia you are sent to the "Official Code of Georgia Annotated" (OCGA), and it's hosted by LexisNexis, and it has all sorts of restrictive terms of service on top of it. Indeed, every new law in Georgia literally says that it will amend "the Official Code of Georgia Annotated," which certainly suggests that the OCGA -- all of it -- is the law in Georgia. And the state insisted that part of the law was covered by copyright.Malamud found this obviously troubling, believing that the law must be freely accessible to anyone in order to be valid. The state of Georgia threatened him and then sued him claiming that reposting the OCGA in a more accessible fashion was copyright infringement. The district court not only found that the annotations (even if part of the official law) could be covered by copyright but further that it was not fair use for Malamud to post them online. This was a horrifying decision.And, it's also no longer a valid one.The appeals court has put together a thorough ruling rebuking the lower court's analysis, and noting that the OCGA is not subject to copyright at all. The court admits the annotations by a private company make this more complicated than the general question of whether or not laws are covered by copyright, but notes that since this is so closely tied to the law, and directed by state officials, it seems clear that the annotations cannot be covered by copyright:

It's no secret that the Vietnamese government is no fan of the open internet. All the way back in 2002 we wrote about the government requiring people to register just to create a website. That same year we were writing about people being arrested for posting criticism of the government. In 2008, we wrote about the Vietnamese government banning "subversive" blogs as well. With the rise of social media, Vietnam has shifted its focus there. In 2013, it banned news reporting on social media, saying it should be for personal use only. In 2014, we wrote about how the government was abusing Facebook's own reporting tools to shut down dissenters from using the site. And at the beginning of this year, we wrote about how the government now employed around 10,000 people whose only job was to monitor the internet for dissent.And now it's going to get even worse -- to a degree that might even lead some of the big internet companies to leave Vietnam entirely. And we have the NSA (partially) to blame. Ever since the revelation of the Snowden documents, describing how the NSA was getting access to all sorts of data and metadata on foreigners by compelling various private companies to cough up their data, there's been a big push among some for data localization. Some of that push has come from privacy activists themselves, arguing in other countries that their data shouldn't be allowed to go to the US where the NSA has so much access -- but much of it has simply been using the NSA revelations as a stalking horse to get what they want: which is the ability to snoop locally on all of that data. That's why countries like Russia has been a huge proponent of data localization.And now we can add Vietnam to the list. Despite strong condemnation from the US (and US internet companies) it appears that Vietnam wants to require any internet company with Vietnamese users to host that data locally where the government and its thousands of content monitors can snoop on it:

The UK government is still polishing its porn filtering law. The latest updates to the law show there's been some effort put forth to make the law less stupid, but even these additions don't make the law (or its implementation) much better.There are still threats of fines and other governmental pressure should sites fail to "voluntarily" adopt the measures recommended by the UK government when the law goes live next year. One noticeable change is that the responsibility of deciding what is or isn't porn will be placed in the hands of the UK's film classification board, the British Board of Film Classification. If it's anything like the MPAA, it won't necessarily know porn when it sees it, but it will know what it doesn't like and regulate along those lines.The updated guidelines [PDF] try to blend suggestions and mandates into something cohesive and palatable, all while removing as much government accountability as possible. The updates recognize collecting personally-identifiable info on British porn filters creates a juicy target for malicious actors. It also notes this data collection must somehow comply with the UK's tangle of privacy laws, meaning companies should put some sort of protections in place, but not so much they undermine positive identifications.The BBFC suggests a possible compromise: verification of age only and no retention of site access logs. But, like everything else, this too is only a suggestion. This means sites are free to gather and retain as much info as they'd like and potentially dodge privacy-related legal battles by pointing to the UK government's porn blockade demands.In this ridiculous pile of "would you kindly (under possible penalty of law)?", one aspect of the porn filtering plans continues to stick out. And it promises to make the BBFC's job extremely difficult, if not completely impossible. One round of updates on and the UK government is still no closer to resolving the issue, as The Verge's James Vincent points out:

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As promised/threatened, the DHS is moving forward with expanded use of biometric scanning at airports, including facial recognition and fingerprint matches. What was touted as a way to combat international terrorism and illegal immigration will now include those on the home front, as the tech spreads to include US citizens on domestic flights. But the TSA doesn't see this as an unwanted incursion into the lives of innocent citizens. Instead, it pitches it as a useful tool to speed up security screening at TSA checkpoints.

As you probably have noticed, there's a growing tide of streaming video services popping up to feed users who want a cheaper, more flexible alternative to traditional cable. By and large this has been a very good thing. It's finally driving some competition for bumbling apathetic giants like Comcast, forcing them to at least make a feeble effort to improve customer service. It also reflects a belated admission by the broadcast industry that you need to compete with piracy (instead of say, suing the entire planet and hoping it goes away) by offering users access to cheaper, flexible viewing options.But the gold rush into streaming has come with a few downsides. Studies have suggested that every broadcaster on the planet will likely have their own streaming service by 2022. In a bid to drive more subscribers to their service, said broadcasters are increasingly developing their own content, or striking their own content exclusivity deals, and then locking that content in an exclusivity silo. For example, if you want to watch Star Trek: Discovery, you need to shell out $6 a month for CBS All Access. Can't miss House of Cards? You'll need Netflix. Bosch? Amazon Prime. The Handmaid's Tale? Hulu.Again, on its face this impulse makes perfect sense: you want the kind of content that drives users to your platform. And at first it wasn't all that noticeable, because there were only a handful of services. Even if you subscribed to four of them, you still probably were saving money over your traditional cable bill.The problem is, as more and more companies jump into the streaming market, users are being forced to subscribe to an ocean of discordant services to get access for the content they're looking for. As users are forced to pony up more and more cash for more and more services, it's going to start defeating the purpose of ditching over-priced, traditional cable. But instead of going back to cable, back in March we noted how users are just as likely to consider piracy.And of course that's already starting to happen, with BitTorrent usage seeing some modest but notable bumps, especially overseas. It's minor now, but if you've paid attention to several decades of piracy precedent, it's not hard to predict the outcome of this rush to cordon off everything into far too many exclusivity silos. Disney, for example, is preparing to pull all of its best content off of Netflix (Star Wars, Pixar, Marvel) and make it exclusive to its own streaming platform. In the wake of its acquisition of Time Warner, AT&T is contemplating doing the same thing with old episodes of shows like Friends. You may have noticed a trend:

Earlier this year, we discussed Australia's Department of Communications asking for feedback on the effectiveness of its site-blocking policy after it had been in place for several years. The copyright industries both local and foreign leapt at the chance, making two divergent claims. Claim one: site-blocking is working really, really well and should be continued. Claim two: site-blocking is being vastly undermined by, you guessed it, Google, and the government should extend site-blocking into search-blocking as a result. We made the point at the time that this type of thing occurs like clockwork: you open the door to some censorship and those cheering it on will attempt to expand it further.Well, after collecting its feedback, the Australian Department of Communications has come out with proposed amendments to Australian copyright law that would, you guessed it again, force search engines to censor links to so-called "pirate sites."

The whole saga of the trademark dispute between the famous San Diego Comic-Con comics convention and the smaller Salt Lake Comic Con has been a long and stupid one. Despite everyone with a working brain knowing that the term "comic-con" is both generic and descriptive, SDCC has a trademark on the term that it managed to wield like a legal sword attempting to slay SLCC. While a jury trial returned only a $20k judgement, the court then awarded $4 million in legal fees in favor of SDCC, arguing that SLCC's legal team attempted to jam up the trial process and timeline with its tactics. After all of this, SLCC changed its name to FanX, a whole bunch of other conventions proactively changed their own names, and FanX promised to appeal everything.But it was an open question if SLCC/FanX would survive long enough for the appeal to take place. A $4 million dollar payout to SDCC, according to SLCC, would simply have crippled it and put it out of business altogether. This was the argument made to the appeals court, in which SLCC/FanX asked for a stay on the payments pending the appeal process. Fortunately, the court agreed to delay the attorney's fees payments.

Ignorance of the law is no excuse, us lowly peons of the American justice system are told. The same does not apply to law enforcement, whose business it is to enforce laws. I mean, it's right there in the name. And yet…

Almost exactly a decade ago, for reasons I still don't quite understand, Microsoft invited me to sit down one-on-one with their then Deputy General Counsel for intellectual property, Horacio Gutierrez (who is now General Counsel at Spotify). It was, to say the least, a bizarre conversation in which he repeatedly tried to justify Microsoft's position on software patents, with us getting into a spirited debate over Microsoft's ridiculous FUD campaign about Linux. Suffice it to say, while the conversation was fun, we agreed on almost nothing. For a few years, Microsoft had been trotting out claims that Linux violated over 200 of its patents, and kept making these vague threats about it. It never named the patents in question. It never sued. It just kept obliquely warning that those who used Linux might somehow eventually face some patent infringement suits from Microsoft. Some might call this a patent chilling effect. Or FUD. Or a shakedown. No matter what you call it, I stand by the claim that it was despicable.Partly in response to all this nonsense saber rattling by Microsoft, in 2005 a group of companies who relied heavily on Linux got together to create the Open Invention Network (OIN), which was designed as a giant patent pool, mainly to protect Linux. Basically, all the companies who join agree to license their patents freely for use in Linux (and Linux offshoots) to other members of the network. A large part of the reason for this was to allow various companies working on Linux to freely share patents among each other and protect them from Microsoft-style shakedowns. In 2009, OIN ended up buying a bunch of Microsoft patents for itself to help with its mission -- but here's part of what was amazing about that: Microsoft tried to block the sale, refusing to let OIN be a part of the bidding on those patents. Instead, OIN had to use a third party as a shell bidder so that Microsoft didn't know that OIN was trying to get those patents.That's why the news last week that Microsoft had joined OIN and agreed to freely license all of its patents to every other member in the pool is so shocking. Microsoft's Erich Andersen, who now holds the role that Gutierrez held a decade ago, admitted quite frankly in his blog post about this decision that many will be surprised, but it represents a real "evolution" in the way Microsoft thinks about Linux. I would say that's an understatement.

When Mark Zuckerberg was called to testify earlier this year, the world was shocked by Congress’s evident lack of basic technological literacy. For many, this performance illustrates the institution’s incompetence. After all, if our elected representatives have trouble understanding how Facebook works, how capable are they of understanding the complexities of the federal government, or crafting legislation across a range of technical subjects?For those of us who live and work in the “swamp,” the Zuckerberg hearings were no great surprise. Just this year, we’ve seen Congress struggle with technology issues such as quantum computing, cryptocurrencies, and the governance of online platforms. Indeed, it seems effectively incapable of tackling major technology policy issues such as the debate over online privacy, election cybersecurity, or artificial intelligence.This state of affairs is the product of decades of institutional deterioration, sometimes referred to as the “big lobotomy.” While scholars of American government may offer various books or white papers chronicling this decline, the pattern is evident from a few trends that this post will highlight.The decline of congressional support agenciesMembers of Congress typically come from professional backgrounds in business, law or finance rather than science or technology (for instance, there are currently twice as many talk radio hosts as scientists). To help them understand technical policy issues, Members of Congress and their staff rely on expert advisors in legislative branch support agencies such as the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the Government Accountability Office (GAO), and formerly the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA).Of the congressional support agencies, CRS is the primary analytical workhorse that supports day-to-day operations, producing digestible reports and timely memos at the request of congressional offices. Unfortunately, the capacity of CRS has declined precipitously in recent decades. From 1979 to 2015, CRS’ staff has shrunk by 28% – a loss of 238 positions.Source: Original chart based on data from the Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 5-8.While CRS serves Congress with responsive memos and digestible reports, it also used to have an agency that conducted deep authoritative technical research. This agency was the Office of Technology Assessment, which for over two decades helped Congress understand the nuances of complex science and technology issues. In 1995, Congress eliminated funding for OTA, creating a gap that has not since been filled.Source: Original chart based on data from the Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 5-8, and Future Congress Wiki.In addition to needing analysis related to the nuances and tradeoffs of particular regulatory policies, Congress also needs help understanding its $4 trillion in annual federal spending and the sprawling administrative state. To help rein in waste, fraud and abuse, Congress relies on the Government Accountability Office – which is empowered to conduct audits and investigations in the federal government. GAO boasts a savings of “$112 for every dollar invested.” Yet, from 1979 to 2015, its staff has been cut by 44% – a loss of 2,314 positions.Source: Original chart based on data from the Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 5-8.The decline of congressional committeesA critical source of policy expertise in Congress lies within congressional committees. Yet, like support agencies, committee staffing levels have declined significantly over time. From 1979 to 2015, the number of full-time standing committee staff has shrunk by 38% – a loss of 1,361 positions.Source: Original chart based on data from the Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 5-1.Key committees for technology policy reflect a similar trend. For instance, from 1981 to 2015 (note: 1979 data for House committees was unavailable), the House Energy and Commerce Committee went from 151 to 83 full-time staff. From 1979 to 2015, its Senate counterpart, the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, went from 96 to 64 staff. Similarly, from 1981 to 2015, the House Judiciary Committee went from 75 to 61 full-time staff. From 1979 to 2015, its Senate counterpart went from 223 to 91 staff.With the decline in staffing, committees and subcommittees have also spent much less time conducting hearings, deliberating on policy, and developing legislation. From the 96th Congress (1979-1980) to the 114th Congress (2015-2016), the aggregate number of committee and subcommittee meetings across both chambers decreased by 66%.Source: Original chart based on data from the Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 6-1 and 6-2.Additionally, as shown by Casey Burgat and Charles Hunt, committees are also increasingly shifting resources to communications positions over policy roles.Personal office staff resources are shifting to constituent servicesWith the rise of new digital tools and a growing population, Congress has been bombarded with a torrent of new communications from constituents and advocacy groups. Per a Congressional Management Foundation study, Congress received four times as many communications in 2004 than in 1995. Responding to this influx, more staff have shifted from policy to constituent relations and communications roles. Legislative staff may also be called more often to assist with constituent work.This trend can be seen in the percentage of personal office staff based in district and state offices. From 1979 to 2016, the percentage of personal office staff based in district offices in the House of Representatives went from 35% to 47%.Source: Original chart based on data from the Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 5-3.In the same period in the Senate, the percentage of personal office staff based in state offices has gone from 24% to 43%. Since overall legislative branch staffing and budgets have declined over this period, this trend means fewer resources for retaining policy experts.Source: Original chart based on data from the Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 5-4.From 1979 to 2015, the total number of personal office staff has gone from 10,660 to 9,947. Senate numbers have remained relatively stable, since Senate office budgets are tied to population and distance. In the House of representatives, the total number of personal office staff has declined by 15% – a loss of 1,037 positions.Source: Original chart based on data from the Brookings Institution, Vital Statistics on Congress, Table 5-1.The decline of legislative branch compensationIn congressional offices, legislative analysis and other policy work falls on a variety of different staff positions. While titles and roles vary by office, these include “legislative correspondent,” “legislative assistant,” “legislative director,” and “chief of staff.” To varying extents, these roles are involved in other activities, such as constituent services, administrative work, and communications.While cost of living in DC has gone up in recent decades (making it one of the most expensive cities in the country), the overall inflation-adjusted compensation for congressional policy staff has declined.Source: Original chart based on data from the Congressional Research Service.The median salary for a lawyer in the House of Representatives in 2015 was $56,000. In the private sector in DC, lawyers can easily earn several times that (an attractive exit for many congressional staff). Congressional salaries also fall significantly short of their executive branch counterparts, contributing to an expanding compensation gap. In short, compensation for working in Congress is far below the level needed to attract top talent.Congressional staff do not believe they have access to sufficient resources or expertiseIn a Congressional Management Foundation survey, a group of senior congressional staff were asked about their perspectives on institutional capacity issues. Therein, they rated a range of different areas as either “very important”/”very satisfied” or “somewhat important”/”somewhat satisfied.”In one question, 81 percent said that access to policy expertise was “very important,” but only 24 percent said they were “very satisfied” with the status quo – a gap of 57 percentage points.Source: Original chart based on survey data from the Congressional Management Foundation.In another question, 67 percent said having adequate time and resources for Members of Congress to consider and deliberate on policy was “very important.” However, only 6% reported that they were “very satisfied” with the status quo.While congressional capacity has declined, the need for it has increasedThe Constitution sets up Congress as the first among three equal branches of government, intending it to lead on policy and provide a check on the executive branch’s potential for waste, fraud and abuse. Unfortunately, Congress has ceded much of its policymaking power and oversight responsibility to the administrative state. As Congress has shrunk over the past few decades, the size and scope of the federal government overall has expanded significantly. For instance, between 1979 and 2014, the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations grew from 98,032 pages to 175,268. Over the same period, inflation-adjusted federal discretionary spending grew from $810 billion to $1,220 billion (in 2017 dollars).When most of our timeline data begins in 1979, it was just a year after the first computers were installed in the White House. It would still be several years before the introduction of 3 ½-inch floppy disks – which people today only know through the save icon. And it would still be over a decade before the launch of the World Wide Web.Needless to say, since the late 20th century, the number and complexity of science and technology policy challenges have increased at an accelerating rate. These include issues such as infrastructure cybersecurity, election hacking, artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, CRISPR, data privacy, and more. If we’re to maintain America’s lead in innovation and meet the policy challenges of the 21st century, we’ll need to rebuild a capable and expert legislature.If you’re interested in working on the solution, check out the Future Congress project. This is a new coalition and resource hub working to improve science and technology expertise in the legislative branch.Zach Graves is head of policy at Lincoln Network. Daniel Schuman is policy director at Demand Progress.

Another government employee has been charged with leaking sensitive info. This time it's a Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) official -- one who apparently handed dozens of suspicious activity reports (SARs) to Buzzfeed.

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This week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal in a case called Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, which some are arguing could have a major impact on whether or not social media sites are barred from moderating content because they're quasi state actors and the 1st Amendment blocks them from moderating content.Let's be clear on this: while something could go completely wacky and sideways (it is 2018, after all) the chances of this ruling directly impacting social media platforms is very, very, very, very, very, very, very small. That does not mean whatever ruling won't be cited by various plaintiffs to make bizarre arguments -- as we've seen repeatedly with people misinterpreting the Packingham decision. However, given both the facts of this case, and the way the Supreme Court works, I would be shocked if this ruling has any significant impact at all.This case involves a public access channel, Manhattan Neighborhood Network, where two producers -- DeeDee Halleck and Jesus Melendez -- were apparently fired for making critical comments about the network. They sued, claiming their First Amendment rights were violated, because the city and the network -- as a state actor -- were punishing them based on the content of their speech. The city has been dismissed from the case as it has basically nothing to do with any of this. The question at issue is whether or not this public access channel is a "traditional public forum," in which even a private operator can be judged to be a de facto representative of the government and subject to the limits on the state -- such as the First Amendments ban on suppression of speech.While the lower court sided with the network, the 2nd Circuit reversed, deciding that this particular public access channel represented a public forum. MNN warns, in its petition for cert that if allowed to stand, this ruling could be used to go after social media sites as public forums.

Last year you might recall that the New York AG's office began investigating who was behind all of those bogus comments that flooded the FCC's website during the net neutrality repeal. As we noted then, "somebody" paid a proxy organization to flood the FCC comment period with a myriad of fake comments. Some of those comments hijacked the real identities of real people (like myself). Others utilized a bot to post a myriad of fake support for Ajit Pai using a hacked database of some kind. Some of the most enthusiastic supporters of Ajit Pai's policies were, interestingly enough, dead.When the AG's office reached out to the FCC for help getting to the bottom of who was behind the fake comments, the FCC completely stonewalled them, rejecting nine requests for data between June and November of last year. The FCC has subsequently stonewalled numerous FOIA requests regarding who used the necessary APIs to submit the fraudulent comments in bulk, resulting in a lawsuit by journalist Jason Prechtel. A court recently ruled in Prechtel's favor, demanding the FCC release at least some data (in a month or two) that could identify the culprits.Meanwhile, New York AG Barbara Underwood has expanded her investigation into the bogus comments, subpoenaing more than a dozen ISP-linked lobbying groups (and a few consumer advocacy firms) for additional data on the methodology used to submit the fake support for the FCC's plan. Subpoena targets including groups like the telecom-industry funding lobbying vessel Broadband for America, which we've pretty consistently highlighted for some fairly sleazy and disingenuous behavior.In her statement to me, Underwood stated that at this juncture they've found that 9.53 million of the 22 million net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC were fake:

Oh, the EU, will you ever learn? Over the last few years, the EU has been screaming about the awfulness of evil large tech companies in the name of Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple (sometimes called "GAFA"), though in reality, their biggest concerns are focused almost entirely on Google and Facebook. The EU keeps popping up with ridiculous laws, all of which are designed to hit Google and Facebook. The GDPR was a big one, and the latest is the EU Copyright Directive. And there are more as well. Some of us keep pointing out to the EU that if these laws are designed to go after Google and Facebook, they're going to miss their target quite a bit, because they'll mostly serve to lock in those companies as the dominant providers. That's because they're big enough to manage the regulatory burden, whereas startups and smaller competitors will not be able to and will suffer.The first bit of data is in on the GDPR and of course it shows that the big winner under the GDPR is... Google. The biggest losers? Smaller competitors to Google. A bit surprisingly, Facebook did see its adtech marketshare decline (while Google's grew), but relative to everyone else, Facebook sill beat out all other competitors.Now, the report does note that there are fewer ad trackers for users in the EU -- which is certainly a win for users -- but the fact that this is further cementing the dominant position of Google and Facebook should be a massive concern to people who value competitive markets and innovation.This shouldn't be a surprising result at all. But if part of the goal of the EU is to reduce the reliance on Google and Facebook, the exact opposite is occurring. Just like lots of us predicted.

You will recall that over the past few years, we have been discussing how Iowa State University essentially did everything wrong concerning an alumni group running a pro-marijuana organization that made use of school symbols and iconography. After initially approving the group's use of school trademarks, several members of the state's conservative legislature got involved, leading to the school rescinding that authorization. NORML, the name of the group, sued the school, claiming all of this was a violation of their free speech rights. The courts agreed, eventually to the tune of a $600k judgement, meaning that school wasted over half a million dollars of taxpayer money to fail at trademark bullying.You might have expected that this would serve as a delightful education for the school as to the reasons why they don't want to be a trademark bully. You would be wrong, of course. Instead, the school's next step was to immediately rewrite its trademark use policy, making it laughably restrictive and essentially attempting to give the school broad oversight over all uses of its iconography by student groups. This, predictably, has led to a full on revolt both by many of the school's student organizations and its student government.To start with the student organizations, they are largely dropping ISU connections from their name and branding like a hot stone.

There's been quite a lot of reasonable uproar over the leaked plans for Google to re-enter the Chinese market with a censored, locked down search engine. There's a lot of history there, but giving in to the authoritarian government's desire to block access to all sorts of content would seem to go very much against Google's stated focus on helping provide access to information around the globe. There have been numerous recent reports of Google employees protesting this decision internally, and even some employees have quit Google to put an exclamation point on just how against this idea they are. Recently an opinion piece in the South China Morning Post from a Chinese professor started making the rounds, arguing that "even a censored Google search engine would be better" for people in China than its current main search engine, Baidu.The argument from Bai Tongdong, a professor of philosophy at Fudan University, is pretty straightforward. More or less, it argues that Baidu is not a very good search engine. Google, even in a heavily censored fashion, is almost certainly going to be a lot better, and thus it will certainly aid in getting everyday people in China more access to information:

It's troubling how little is needed to trigger a police investigation and some ancillary damage to the First Amendment. Thanks to flagging tools provided by social media platforms, almost anything can be sent to local law enforcement for additional inspection, which results in the following sort of thing, in equal parts absurd and horrifying.

Last week, the extreme Trump-supporting media sites went positively ballistic when Breitbart released a leaked internal presentation entitled "The Good Censor." According to Breitbart and the other Trumpkin media, this is somehow "proof" that Google is censoring conservatives, giving up on free speech and planning to silence people like themselves. To put this into a context those sites would understand, this is "fake news." I finally had the time to read through the 85 page presentation and, uh, it paints a wholly different picture than the one that Breitbart and such sites have been painting.Instead, it pretty clearly lays out why content moderation is impossible to do well at scale and that it will always result in decisions that upset a lot of people (no matter what they do). It also discusses how "bad actors" have effectively weaponized open platforms to silence people.It does not, as some sites have suggested, show a Google eager to censor anyone. Indeed, the report repeatedly highlights the difficult choices it faces, and repeatedly highlights how any move towards increased censorship can and will be abused by governments to stamp out dissent. It also is pretty self critical, highlighting how the tech companies themselves have mismanaged all of this to make things worse (here's just one example of a much more thorough analysis in the document):The presentation actually spends quite a lot of time talking about the problems of any censorship regime, but also noting that various governments basically are requiring censorship around the globe. It's also quite obviously not recommending a particular path, but explaining why companies have gotten more aggressive in moderating content of late (and, no, it's not because "Trump won"). It notes how bad behavior has driven away users, how governments have been increasingly using regulatory and other attacks against tech companies, and how advertisers were being pressured to drop platforms for allowing bad behavior.The final five slides are also absolutely worth reading. It notes that "The answer is not to 'find the right amount of censorship' and stick to it..." because that would never work. It acknowledges that there are no right answers, and then sets up nine principles -- in four categories -- which make an awful lot of sense.Be more consistent