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At the beginning of this week, reports emerged that Avast, owner of the popular CCleaner software, had been hacked. Initial investigations by security researchers at Cisco Talos discovered that the intruder not only compromised Avast's servers, but managed to embed both a backdoor and "a multi-stage malware payload" that rode on top of the installation of CCleaner. That infected software -- traditionally designed to help scrub PCs of cookies and other tracking software and malware -- was subsequently distributed by Avast to 700,000 customers (initially, that number was thought to be 2.27 million).And while that's all notably terrible, it appears initial reports dramatically under-stated both the scope and the damage done by the hack. Initially, news reports and statements by Avast insisted that the hackers weren't able to "do any harm" because the second, multi-stage malware payload was never effectively delivered. But subsequent reports by both Avast and Cisco Talos researchers indicate this payload was effectively delivered -- with the express goal of gaining access to the servers and networks of at least 18 technology giants, including Intel, Google, Microsoft, Akamai, Samsung, Sony, VMware, HTC, Linksys, D-Link and Cisco itself.Cisco's researchers say they obtained a copy of the hackers' command-and-control server from an unnamed source. That server contained detailed logs of the 700,000 or so computers that had "phoned home" to the hackers earlier this month. Subsequent investigation has concluded that the hackers didn't really care about most of the infected customers, and that this may have been a sophisticated state-sponsored attack specifically designed access and copy internal information and trade secrets from major tech firms:

The latest batch of Snowden docs published at The Intercept cover a lot of ground. The internal informational sheets from the Signals Intelligence Directorate include info on a host of surveillance programs that haven't been revealed by previous document dumps. Nor do they discuss the programs in full. As such, some of the information is limited.One of those published last week mentions the NSA's targeting of internet cafes in Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries using a program called MASTERSHAKE. Using MASTERSHAKE, analysts were apparently able to drill down location info to which target was sitting in which chair at the cafes under surveillance.Further down the page [PDF], past this brief mention of a program discussed more fully elsewhere, there's another interesting tidbit. Apparently, the NSA can suss out electronic dead drops using harvested metadata. (h/t Electrospaces)

The UK government has apparently already asked WhatsApp to provide it with an encryption backdoor, according to Sky News. The app developers were told they needed to come up with a way to give law enforcement access to message content but WhatsApp politely declined the probably not-all-that-polite "request."That doesn't mean WhatsApp doesn't have anything it can give the government when it comes asking.

Readers of this site will be well-versed in trademark threat letters. With the sorts of trademark stories we cover here, our discussion about threat letters typically take the form of trademark holders going out of their way either to overstate their rights or to act as aggressive and threatening as possible. Or, of course, both of those things at the same time. But not every company goes full bully when sending out trademark cease and desist notices, as exemplified by Netflix this week, when it sent out a notice to a Chicago popup bar called The Upside Down, an obvious reference to Netflix's hit show Stranger Things.

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It's fairly stunning just how much people believe that it's easy for companies to moderate content online. Take, for example, this random dude who assumes its perfectly reasonable for Facebook, Google and Twitter to "manually review all content" on their platforms (and since Google is a search engine, I imagine this means basically all public web content that can be found via its search engine). This is, unfortunately, a complete failure of basic comprehension about the scale of these platforms and how much content flows through them.Tragically, it's not just random Rons on Twitter with this idea. Ron's tweet was in response to UK Prime Minister Theresa May saying that internet platforms must remove "extremist" content within two hours. This is after the UK's Home Office noted that they see links to "extremist content" remaining online for an average of 36 hours. Frankly, 36 hours seems incredibly low. That's pretty fast for platforms to be able to discover such content, make a thorough analysis of whether or not it truly is "extremist content" and figure out what to do about it. Various laws on takedowns usually have statements about a "reasonable" amount of time to respond -- and while there are rarely set numbers, the general rule of thumb seems to be approximately 24 hours after notice (which is pretty aggressive).But for May to now be demanding two hours is crazy. It's a recipe for widespread censorship. Already we see lots of false takedowns from these platforms as they try to take down bad content -- we write about them all the time. And when it comes to "extremist" content, things can get particularly ridiculous. A few years back, we wrote about how YouTube took down an account that was documenting atrocities in Syria. And the same thing happened just a month ago, with YouTube deleting evidence of war crimes.So, May calling for these platforms to take down extremist content in two hours confuses two important things. First, it shows a near total ignorance of the scale of content on these platforms. There is no way possible to actually monitor this stuff. Second, it shows a real ignorance about the whole concept of "extremist" content. There is no clear definition of it, and without a clear definitions wrong decisions will be made. Frequently. Especially if you're not giving the platforms any time to actually investigate. At best, you're going to end up with a system with weak AI flagging certain things, and then low-paid, poorly trained individuals in far off countries making quick decisions.And since the "penalty" for leaving content up will be severe, the incentives will all push towards taking down the content and censorship. The only pushback against this is the slight embarrassment if someone makes a stink about mistargeted takedowns.

One of the problems in the debate about the impact of unauthorized downloads on the copyright industry is the paucity of large-scale, rigorous data. That makes it easy for the industry to demand government policies that are not supported by any evidence they are needed or will work. In 2014, the European Commission tried to address that situation by putting out a tender for the following research:

For months now we've noted how somebody is intentionally filling the FCC's net neutrality comment proceeding with bot-generated bogus comments supporting the agency's plan to kill net neutrality protections. Despite these fake comments being easily identifiable, the FCC has made it abundantly clear it intends to do absolutely nothing about it. Similarly, the FCC has told me it refuses to do anything about the fact that someone is using my name to file comments like this one falsely claiming I support killing net neutrality rules (you may have noticed I don't).While nobody has identified who is polluting the FCC comment system with fake support, it should be fairly obvious who this effort benefits. By undermining the legitimacy of the public FCC comment proceeding (the one opportunity for transparent, public dialogue on this subject), it's easier for ISPs and the FCC to downplay the massive public opposition to killing popular net neutrality rules. After all, most analysis has shown that once you remove form, bot and other automated comments from the proceeding, the vast, vast majority of consumers oppose what the FCC and Trump administration are up to.Attempts to dig deeper into this mystery haven't gone well. Freelance writer Jason Prechtel filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on June 4 asking the FCC for data on the bogus comments, the API keys used, and how the FCC has worked to address the problem. But while the FCC acknowledged the FOIA request, it wound up giving Prechtel the runaround throughout the summer -- stating on June 14 that it would be extending the deadline for responding to his request from July 3 to July 18 -- before ultimately deciding to ignore his request altogether.As a result, Prechtel has filed a lawsuit against the FCC (pdf), stating the agency is breaking the law by sitting on its hands. From a Medium post written by Prechtel explaining the suit:

Several years ago, in an unfortunate display of police bending the knee to the copyright industries, Swedish law enforcement raided the offices of Undertexter, a site chiefly dedicated to fan translations for subtitles of films. While these fan translations have been handcuffed to film piracy -- mostly through the messaging efforts of film and television content producers -- the raid registered as an extreme escalation in the battle on subtitles. Most folks have a hard time understanding why such action was taken, with most fan translations only being useful due to the content makers underserving parts of the earth that speak a variety of languages. These fan translations mostly open up those markets for makers of movies and television who have otherwise chosen not to translate their work into the relevant languages.For its part, Undertexter vowed to fight the legal action, proclaiming its work non-infringing by virtue of serving up mere dialog translations.

Solvera -- a reputation management firm allegedly engaging in legal fraud to delist criticism -- is facing multiple legal problems as a result of its highly-questionable services. In late August, the Texas Attorney General filed a complaint against the company, alleging it defrauded courts by filing bogus defamation lawsuits on behalf of possibly-unaware clients, utilizing duped lawyers with bogus statements from fake defendants.This sort of behavior has been uncovered in recent months through investigations by Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen and lawprof/blogger Eugene Volokh. It has also been revealed through independent research by Pissed Consumer, an obvious target of these unsavory (and illegal) reputation management tactics.Pissed Consumer is also going against Solvera. It has sued the company in Contra Costa County, California -- Solvera's backyard -- along with a number of other firms in the reputation management business and the companies they've created to act as plaintiffs in bogus defamation lawsuits.It's pretty much identical to the lawsuit Pissed Consumer filed last year against a number of defendants, including the lawyers whose name appeared on the bogus paperwork: Mark Lapham and Owen Mascott. The previous lawsuit referenced Nevada Corporate Headquarters -- the apparent origin point of some of these bogus lawsuits -- but the latest adds Solvera as a defendant.It also places much of the alleged blame on the embattled rep management firm. From the filing [PDF]:

Over the last few years, you may have noticed that Verizon is attempting a pivot from stodgy old telco to sexy new advertising juggernaut. Part of that effort has involved refusing to upgrade its lagging DSL infrastructure in countless towns and cities as it shifts its focus toward wireless and using its AOL and Yahoo acquisitions to sling videos and advertisements at Millennials. To justify its failure to upgrade its fixed-line network during this period (something it's being sued for by cities like New York), Verizon has long proclaimed that wireless is a "good enough" replacement for fixed-line alternatives.But the company is now inadvertently highlighting just how not-ready for prime time wireless connections truly are. Verizon has been taking heat over the last few weeks for kicking thousands of customers off of its wireless network in more rural areas. Why? The company insists these customers (at last count 8,500 customers utilizing 19,000 lines across 13 states) are being kicked off the Verizon wireless network for using a "substantial" amount of data. But Verizon is refusing to tell these users what "substantial" actually means, after marketing "unlimited" data plans to these users for much of the year:

Another large batch of Snowden docs have been released by The Intercept. The new documents are part of the site's "SID (Signals Intelligence Directorate) Today" collection, a sort of interoffice newsletter featuring discussions of intelligence-gathering efforts the agency has engaged in, as well as more mundane office business.The one discussed in this Intercept post details some careless opsec by Intelligence Community (IC) employees. Like anyone in any office anywhere, IC employees use their office computers to send personal email, shop online, and fritter away the downtime with some web surfing.That's where they're running into problems. This SID Today document [PDF] deals with the IC's personal use of company computers -- namely, the "attribution" problem that develops when outside websites are accessed using IP addresses that can be traced back to the NSA and other IC components.The IC uses a system called AIRGAP to provide internet access for IC employees while supposedly still preventing outsiders from tracing IP addresses back to sensitive locations. Set up in 1998 by "one of the world's largest internet providers," the system was supposed to provide non-attributable access to the outside internet world.Unfortunately, as is detailed by the SID Today doc, the execution of AIRGAP was lacking.

Google's decision to boot a controversial social media app from its Play store has resulted in a lawsuit. And it's a very strange lawsuit -- one that attempts to turn inconsistent moderation efforts into anti-trust allegations against Google.Some background information is necessary. Some of this can be gleaned from the complaint [PDF], which was put together by Marc Randazza (of First Amendment fame), Ron Coleman (key to the Slants' Supreme Court trademark win), and Jordan Rushie (who has participated in/fought against copyright trolling efforts). Given the litigation credentials behind the filing, it's surprising there's not more to the complaint.But first, the background:Gab.ai is the plaintiff in this suit. Gab sprung to life as a Twitter alternative, built in response to a perceived crackdown on alt-right accounts. It's not as though the accusations are false. Twitter has frequently applied its moderation standards unequally, resulting in bans and shadowbans of alt-right accounts. As the lawsuit points out, Twitter removed alt-right figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos verified checkmark -- not because Milo wasn't who he said he was, but because it apparently didn't like him or his millions of followers. Six months later, Twitter banned him for good, citing his harassment of actress Leslie Jones.So, much like Voat became a Reddit for people who thought Reddit censored too much speech, Gab became Twitter for those who felt Twitter censored too much speech. Gab became a mostly-free alternative Twitter, supported by subscribers, and heavily-populated by alt-right Twitter users.Gab claims to embrace free speech. It engages in very little moderation of users' content, only culling certain content like child porn, posting of private information, threats, spam, and use of the platform to sell illegal goods. It does not police "hate speech" like Facebook, Twitter, and Google do. It's the last part that bothers Google. Or at least that's the stated reason for Google's ban of Gab from its app store.But this wasn't Gab's first app store ban. Apple blocked it twice, first citing pornographic content as the reason. (Obviously, Twitter allows pornographic posts and yet remains available in the iOS app store...) Gab added porn-blocking by default but was rejected again by Apple, with the company pointing to its rules on hate speech.Pretty much the same thing happened with Google. Google claimed Gab did not include a "sufficient level of moderation" and did not act to remove content "encouraging violence and hate against groups of people."Gab's response to Google's ban pointed out it shouldn't need to police speech that isn't actually unlawful just to stay in Google's app store graces. Roughly a month after Google's decision, Gab has sued. What should probably have been left to public shaming of Google for belatedly distancing itself from Gab's social media construct has now become a plea for federal intercession.The lawsuit runs down the history of Gab, as well as Twitter's shutdown of prominent alt-right/white supremacist accounts. The antitrust action appears to be limited to Google's partnership with Twitter. Google now has access to Twitter's "firehose" -- all public posts from all Twitter users in real time. This allows Google to return tweets in its search results.Apparently, this partnership -- combined with Google's domination of Android app services -- is evidence of Google's anticompetitive behavior. The problem with the argument is Google's unwieldy application of its app store policies doesn't appear to be Google attempting to eliminate a competitor. Gab doesn't directly compete with Google+. If anything, it's a Twitter competitor. Google's only interest in Twitter is better search results. Kicking Gab out of the app store doesn't remove its web presence, nor does it prevent Gab users from downloading the app directly from Gab itself.Much is made of the danger of sideloading apps. And it's true sideloading poses greater risks to Android users, especially if they're careless with their sources. While this behavior is somewhat discouraged by the Android system during phone setup, the option to sideload can be turned on and off as needed to allow the installation of apps not included in Google's Play store.The lawsuit makes better points about removal from the Play store having deleterious financial effects on Gab, including the loss of ad placements in Google store and targeted ad campaigns utilizing Google's tools to find new app users.Included in the filing are several reasons why Gab's removal is inconsistent with Google's own app policies. But that doesn't turn this into an anticompetitive act on Google's part. The end result may be indistinguishable but there are plenty of innocuous reasons for the app's removal that have nothing to do with Google killing Gab to protect its partnership with Twitter.But that's pretty much what the filing hopes the judge will find. Google's history of anticompetitive behavior is detailed in the lawsuit, as well as its forays into patent enforcement. Twitter's inconsistent application of its policies to shut down alt-right accounts is also detailed, providing evidence of nothing, considering Twitter isn't party to this lawsuit.Hidden in all of this are two paragraphs on Section 230 which misconstrue protections afforded to entities like Gab.

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You may have noticed that the shift to solar is happening whether traditional utilities like it or not, and attempting to stop solar's forward momentum is akin to believing you can thwart the Mississippi with a fork and a few copies of Mad Magazine. Said futility clearly hasn't discouraged Florida utilities, who have gone to numerous, highly-creative lengths to try and hinder or curtail solar use. When last we checked in with legacy Florida utilities, they were busy using entirely fake consumer groups to push a law that professed to help the solar industry while actually undermining it.Fortunately Florida consumers ultimately saw through this effort, though this was just one of a steady stream of similar bills aimed at stalling progress. Many Florida Power and Light customers obviously lost power in the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricane Irma, despite promises by the company that endless rate hikes would help harden the utilities' lines. But customers thinking they could use the solar panels on their roofs to help keep themselves afloat until traditional power was restored were in for a rude awakening.Thanks to the fact that Florida utility lobbyists are being allowed to quite literally write the state's energy laws, many locals discovered they weren't able to use their solar panels in the wake of the storm lest they violate state law:

Another large Snowden document dump from The Intercept uncovers many more off-brand uses of NSA surveillance tools. The pile of documents come from the NSA's "SID (Signals Intelligence Directorate) Today" files, of which there are apparently thousands of available pages. The documents released late last week show that if it happened online, the NSA was looking at it.

Free Software Foundation Europe has a new campaign -- "Public money, public code" -- which poses the following question:

A few months ago, we alerted our readers that a trademark dispute between the San Diego Comic-Con and a company producing a Salt Lake City Comic Con, originally filed in 2014, was still going on. In fact, the district court hearing the case just recently ruled on several motions from both parties, including motions for judicial notice (essentially having the court affirm basic facts about the case), motions to exclude expert testimony, and motions for summary judgement. On the face of it, the news is mostly bad for the Salt Lake City convention, with nearly every ruling coming down against it. However, digging into the ruling itself, there is a light at the end of the tunnel.As for the bad news, it seems to be mostly of the Salt Lake City Comic Con's own making, or the making of its legal team. The court points out that the defendant's lawyers motion and defenses are all over the place, in some places arguing for generecide -- or that "comic con" has become a generic term -- while in others arguing that "comic con" is generic ab initio -- or that the term was generic even prior to San Diego Comic-Con's initial use of it. It's an important distinction for a couple of reasons, including that the defenses SLC has stated it will make revolve around genericide, yet much of the evidence in the motions in this ruling revolve around generic ab initio and, more importantly, the 9th Circuit doesn't have any precedent or acknowledgement of generic ad initio as a matter of law, and this district court is governed by 9th Circuit precedent.

Around a year ago, HP was roundly and justly ridiculed for launching a DRM time bomb -- or a software update designed specifically to disable competing printer cartridges starting on a set date. As a result, HP Printer owners using third-party cartridges woke up one day to warnings about a "cartridge problem," or errors stating, "one or more cartridges are missing or damaged," or that the user was using an "older generation cartridge." The EFF was quick to lambast the practice in a letter to HP, noting that HP abused its security update mechanism to trick its customers and actively erode product functionality.HP only made matters worse for itself by claiming at the time that it was only looking out for the safety and security of its customers, while patting itself on the back for being pro-active about addressing a problem it caused -- only after a massive consumer backlash occurred.Fast forward almost exactly one year, and it looks like HP hasn't learned much from the Keurig-esque experience. The company this week released a new software update for the company's OfficeJet 6800 series, OfficeJet Pro 6200 series, OfficeJet Pro X 450 series, and OfficeJet Pro 8600 series printers. One of the major "benefits" of the update? Printer cartridges from competing manufacturers no longer work. Again:

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So, earlier today the Senate Commerce Committee held a two and a half hour hearing about SESTA -- the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2017. The panelists were evenly split, with California Attorney General Xavier Becerra and Yiota Souras from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children being in support of the bill, and Professor Eric Goldman and Abigail Slater from the Internet Association worrying about the impacts of SESTA (notably, both highlighted that they're not against all changes to CDA 230, they just want to be quite careful and are worried about the language in this bill). I was actually somewhat surprised that the hearing wasn't as bad as it could have been. There certainly was some grandstanding, and some insistence that because SESTA says it will go after sex trafficking, it obviously will -- but many Senators did seem willing to listen to concerns about the bill and how it's written. Much attention was paid to the sketchy "knowledge" standard in the bill, which we wrote about this morning. And that's good -- but there was a fair bit of nonsense spewed as well.Perhaps the most problematic comments were from the bill's co-author, Senator Richard Blumenthal, who has been attacking CDA 230 since his time as Connecticut's Attorney General. While you can watch the entire hearing, I created a short clip of Blumenthal's questions (which, oddly, C-SPAN won't let me embed here) so I'll transcribe it:

It's fairly stunning just how often the NY Times Opinion pages are just... wrong. Nick Kristof, one of the most well known of the NYT's columnists, has spent years, talking about stopping sex trafficking -- but with a history of being fast and loose with facts, and showing either little regard for verifying what he's saying, or a poor understanding of the consequences of what he says. I would hope that everyone reading this supports stopping illegal and coerced sex trafficking. But doing so shouldn't allow making up facts and ignoring how certain superficial actions might make the problems worse. Kristof, in particular, has been targeting Backpage.com for at least five years -- but has been caught vastly exaggerating claims about the site to the point of potentially misstating facts entirely (such as claiming Backpage existed before it actually did, and that it operated in cities where it did not). Kristof also has a history of being laughably credulous when someone comes along with a good story about sex trafficking, even when it's mostly made up. He's been accused of having a bit of a savior complex.And that's on display with his recent, extraordinarily confused piece attacking Google for not supporting SESTA -- the "Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act." As we've explained in great detail, SESTA (despite its name) is unlikely to stop any sex trafficking and likely would make the problem worse. That's because the whole point of SESTA is to undermine CDA 230, the part of the law that creates incentives for tech companies to work with authorities and to help them track down sex trafficking on their sites. What the bill would do is make websites owners now both civilly and criminally liable for knowledge of any sex trafficking activity on their sites -- meaning that any proactive efforts by them to monitor their websites may be seen as "knowledge," thus making them liable. The new incentives will be not to help out at all -- not to monitor and not to search.Meanwhile, by putting such a massive target on websites, it will inevitably be abused. We see how people abuse the DMCA to take down content all the time -- now add in the possibility of sites getting hit with criminal penalties, and you can see how quickly this "tool" will be abused to silence content online.But, never mind all of that. To Kristof, because the bill says it's against sex trafficking, and he's against sex trafficking, it must be good. And, he's quite sure that the only people against the bill are Google, and that there's ill-intent there.

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Earlier today, I wrote up a list of the many problems with SESTA and how it will be abused. Over and over again, we've seen defenders of the bill -- almost none of whom have much, if any, experience in managing services on the internet -- insist that the bill is "narrowly targeted" and wouldn't create any problems at all for smaller internet services. However, with the way the bill is worded, that seems unlikely. As stated in the last post, by opening up sites to facing both lawsuits from state Attorneys General and civil lawsuits, SESTA puts almost any site that offers services to the public at risk. The problematic language in the bill is that this is the "standard" for liability:

We've been talking quite a bit about SESTA -- the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act -- and why it's so problematic, but with hearings today, I wanted to dig in a bit more closely with the text to explain why it's so problematic. There are a large number of problems with the bill, so let's discuss them one by one.Undermines the incentives to moderate content and to work with law enforcement:This remains the biggest issue for me: the fact that the bill is clearly counterproductive to its own stated goals. When people talk about CDA 230, they often (mistakenly) only talk about CDA 230(c)(1) -- which is the part that says sites are immune from liability. This leads many people to (again, mistakenly) claim that the only thing CDA 230 is good for is absolving platforms from doing any moderation at all. But this actually ignores the equally important part of the same section: CDA 230(c)(2) which explicitly encourages platforms to moderate "objectionable" content, by noting that good faith efforts to moderate and police that content have no impact on your protection from liability in part (1).In other words: as currently stated, CDA 230 says that you're encouraged to moderate your platform and takedown bad content, because there's no increase in legal liability if you do so. Indeed, it's difficult to find a single internet platform that does zero moderation. Most platforms do quite a bit of moderation, because otherwise their platforms would be overrun by spam. And, if they want people to actually use their platforms, nearly every site (even those like 4chan) tend to do significant moderation out of public pressure to keep certain content off. Yet, under SESTA you now face liability if you are shown to have any "knowledge" of violations of federal sex trafficking laws. But what do they mean by "knowledge"? It's not at all clear, as it just says "knowledge." Thus, now if a site, for example, discovers someone using its platform for trafficking and alerts authorities, that's evidence of "knowledge" and can be used against them both in criminal charges and in civil lawsuits.In other words, somewhat incredibly, the incentive here is for platforms to stop looking for any illegal activity on their sites, out of fear of creating knowledge which would make them liable. How does that help? Indeed, platforms will be incentivized not to do any moderation at all, and that will create a mess on many sites.The vague "knowledge" standard will be abused:This is sort of a corollary to the first point. The problematic language in the bill is this:

You'll recall that earlier this year, AT&T, Verizon and Comcast successfully lobbied the GOP and Trump administration to kill consumer broadband privacy protections that were supposed to take effect last March. While big ISPs engaged in breathless hysteria about the "draconian" nature of the rules, the restrictions were quite modest -- simply requiring ISPs be transparent about what user data gets collected and sold. They also made it more difficult for big ISPs to charge users significantly more money just to opt out of private data collection, an idea both AT&T and Comcast have already flirted with.But in quickly axing the rules, big ISPs --- and the regulators and lawmakers paid to love them -- got a bit more than they bargained for. The ham-fisted rush to kill the protections quickly resulted in more than a dozen states passing a patchwork collection of new state laws aimed at protecting broadband consumers. Among the most notable was California Assemblyman Ed Chau's AB 375 (pdf). The proposal largely mirrors the FCC's proposal, though it took an even harder stance against ISPs looking to abuse the lack of competition to effectively make privacy a paid, premium option.The law quickly received praise from the EFF, which argued that the law would be a good template for other states moving forward, lessening the chance for over-reaching, inconsistent, and poorly written state measures. But large ISPs, Facebook and Google lobbyists quickly got to work demonizing Chau's proposal too, falsely claiming it would somehow weaken user security and magically increase pop ups all over the internet. These and other claims were recently picked apart in an EFF blog post:

This is not a huge surprise, but it's still disappointing to find out that the W3C has officially approved putting DRM into HTML 5 in the form of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME). Some will insist that EME is not technically DRM, but it is the standardizing of how DRM will work in HTML going forward. As we've covered for years, there was significant concern over this plan, but when it was made clear that the MPAA (a relatively new W3C member) required DRM in HTML, and Netflix backed it up strongly, the W3C made it fairly clear that there was no real debate to be had on the issue. Recognizing that DRM was unavoidable, EFF proposed a fairly straightforward covenant, that those participating agree not to use the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA (DMCA 1201) to go after security researchers, who cracked DRM in EME. The W3C already has similar covenants regarding patents, so this didn't seem like a heavy lift. Unfortunately, this proposal was more or less dismissed by the pro-DRM crowd as being an attempt to relitigate the question of DRM itself (which was not true).Earlier this year, Tim Berners-Lee, who had the final say on things, officially put his stamp of approval on EME without a covenant, leading the EFF to appeal the decision. That appeal has now failed. Unfortunately, the votes on this were kept entirely secret:So much for transparency.In Bryan Lunduke's article about this at Network World, he notes that despite the W3C saying that it had asked members if they wanted their votes to be public, with all declining, Cory Doctorow (representing EFF) says that actually EFF was slapped on the wrist for asking W3C members if they would record their votes publicly:

Protecting children from harm is a laudable goal. But, as we've noted for many years, grandstanding politicians have a fairly long history of doing a lot of really dangerous stuff by insisting it needs to be done "for the children." That doesn't mean that all "for the children" laws are bad, but they do deserve scrutiny, especially when they appear to be reactive to news events, and rushed out with little understanding or discussion. And that's a big part of our concern with SESTA -- the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act -- a "for the children" bill. With a name like that, it's difficult to oppose, because we're all in favor of stopping sex trafficking. But if you actually look at the bill with any understanding of how the internet works, you quickly realize that it will be tremendously counterproductive and would likely do a lot more to harm trafficking victims by making it much more risky for internet services to moderate their own sites, and to cooperate with law enforcement in nabbing sex traffickers using their platforms.There's a hearing tomorrow morning about SESTA, and the bill is quickly moving forward, with very few Senators expressing any real concern about the impact it might have on free speech or the internet -- despite the fact that a ton of tech companies and free speech advocates have spoken out about their concerns. Instead, over and over again, we're hearing false claims about how it's just Google that's concerned. Last month, we'd put up a page on our Copia site about the bill with a letter to Congress signed by a few dozen tech companies. Today we're offiically announcing a standalone site, 230Matters.com, that explains why CDA 230 is so important, highlighting the many different parties concerned with the bill, from the ACLU and EFF to tech companies to think tanks and more. The site also hosts the letter that we sent to Congress with our concerns about the bill, put together with the group Engine Advocacy and signed by over 40 companies including Kickstarter, Reddit, Tucows, NVCA, Github, Automattic, Cloudflare, Rackspace, Medium and more.That's not "just Backpage" or "just Google". The letter was signed by internet companies big and small that know just how damaging SESTA will be -- not just to their ability to operate online, but to their own efforts to proactively moderate their own sites, or even to work with law enforcement to help stop trafficking online. In other words, this bill is a double whammy: (1) it will greatly harm innovation and free speech online and (2) do so in a way that is likely to make trafficking worse. Unfortunately, supporters of the bill are falsely claiming that being against this bill is the equivalent of supporting sex trafficking. That's dangerous and leaves no room for actual discussion about why the bill will be so counterproductive.The letter is still open for more signatures -- so if you represent a company that is concerned about this bill, please consider signing on.With Congress paying attention to SESTA this week, you can expect more posts from us exploring the problems with the bill and with the arguments in its favor. We already had one post earlier today debunking the attacks on EFF and CDT, and more are forthcoming...

You may have noticed lately that there's an increasing (and increasingly coordinated) effort to paint today's biggest and most successful companies as some kind of systemic social threat that needs to be reined in. As veteran tech journalist John Battelle put it, tech companies frequently are assumed these days to be Public Enemy No. 1, and those of us who defend the digital world in which we now find ourselves are presumptively marked as shills for corporate tech interests.But a deeper historical understanding of how we got to today's internet shows that the leading NGOs and nonprofit advocacy organizations that defend today's internet-freedom framework actually predate the very existence of their presumed corporate masters.To get taste a of the current policy debate surrounding Google and other internet companies, consider the movie I Am Jane Doe, which documents the legal battle waged by anti-sex-trafficking groups and trafficking victims against the website Backpage.com. The film, which premiered this February with a congressional screening, also tracks a two-year investigation and report by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations into the site's symbiotic relationship with traffickers.The documentary is powerful and powerfully effective. It has managed to accomplish what few works of art can – encourage Congress to fast-track legislative action. Last month, a powerful group of 27 bipartisan cosponsors introduced new legislation targeting Backpage.com titled the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act, or SESTA. While there were rumors the bill would be attached to the upcoming "must-pass" defense authorization bill, it now appears it will move through regular order, with a hearing in the Senate Commerce Committee scheduled for Sept. 19.Some documentarians strive to be perceived asneutral chroniclers, but I Am Jane Doe producer Mary Mazzio has lobbied aggressivelyon behalf of the bill. The film's official website and social media accountshave also jumped into the fight, publishing legislativeguides and lobbying materials, as well as rallying acoalition to go after the bill's opponents.Here's our problem with Mazzio's blunderbuss approach: since the bill's introduction, internet-freedom advocates (including a letter by R Street, the Copia Institute and others) as well as legal academics have raised alarm bells. In particular, the bill's overly broad provisions would gut key protections for free expression and digital commerce by amending a foundational law undergirding today's internet – Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.If you love even parts of what the internet has to offer, you likely owe thanks in some way or other to Section 230. We don't view any statute as immune from any criticism, but we do insist that any effort to chisel away at a law expressly crafted to protect and promote freedom of speech on the internet deserves a great deal of scrutiny. The problems posed by the proposed legislation are both expansive and complex, and internet freedom groups have the expertise to highlight these complexities.Mazzio isn't one for complexity, as her film makes it a point to smear internet-freedom groups rather than address their arguments on the merits. The producers do interview experts from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), but ultimately paint those experts as shills for big tech companies. They allege advocates of online free speech and expression callously oppose commonsense efforts to curb trafficking simply because they would hurt big tech's bottom line.This kind of rhetoric has continued throughout the advocacy campaign to pass SESTA.

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If all goes well, we might have the US border join the rest of the United States in recognizing citizens' Fourth Amendment rights. The Supreme Court's Riley decision made it clear law enforcement needed to obtain warrants before searching people's cellphones. Unfortunately, the so-called "border exception" -- upheld by at least one court -- says securing the border is more important than recognizing people's rights.The EFF and ACLU -- along with the 10 US citizens and one permanent resident they're representing -- are suing DHS, CBP, and ICE for violating the Constitutional rights of the plaintiffs by warrantlessly searching their devices. Not only did the government search their devices, but in some cases, held onto the devices for weeks. One plaintiff's phone is still in the hands of the CBP, having originally been taken from the plaintiff in January.The filing [PDF] provides details of the plaintiffs' interaction with government agents at US borders. All plaintiffs were taken to secondary screening where they were coerced into handing over their devices and, in some cases, passwords. This is all being done with zero articulable suspicion or probable cause. Agents imply devices will be returned sooner if those they've detained are compliant. But even complicity can result in citizens having to leave their devices in the hands of the government.

For years the traditional cable and broadcast industry has gone to comedic lengths to deny that cord cutting (getting rid of traditional cable TV) is real. First, we were told repeatedly that the phenomenon wasn't happening at all. Next, the industry acknowledged that sure -- a handful of people were ditching cable, but it didn't matter because the people doing so were losers living in their mom's basement. Then, we were told that cord cutting was real, but was only a minor phenomenon that would go away once Millennials started procreating.Of course none of these talking points were true, but they helped cement a common belief among older cable and broadcast executives that the transformative shift to streaming video could be easily solved by doubling down on bad ideas. More price increases, more advertisements stuffed into each minute, more hubris, and more denial. Intentional blindness to justify the milking of a dying cash cow -- instead of adapting.But we're slowly but surely reaching the point where the rise of the streaming video revolution can't be denied, with data indicating it's worse than anybody thought. While the pay TV sector lost another 1 million subscribers last quarter, those totals don't factor in those that bought a new home or rented a new apartment, but chose not to sign up for cable. Many of these folks are dubbed "cord nevers," having never bought into the value proposition of paying $130 more per month for a bloated bundle of largely-unwatched reality TV channels from a company that treats paying customers with disdain.Meanwhile, a new report by eMarketer this week indicates that the pace of customer defections is notably higher than most previous estimates. The firm notes that it was forced to reduce its estimate for US TV ad spending due to faster-than-expected growth in cord-cutting:

Facebook has won its challenge against a warrant gag order. Unfortunately, it's more of a case of the government forfeiting than the social media giant raising a successful challenge.Details from the case are limited, but the warrant appears to target protesters arrested during Trump's inauguration. Nearly eight months after having the gag orders challenged, the government has decided to let Facebook inform users affected by the government's demand for 90 days of Facebook activity from three accounts. But there's no victory here for Facebook, because it appears the government is merely seeking to avoid losing the case and having gag order-unfriendly precedent established in a district where it does a whole lot of secretive work.Here are the details, from Zoe Tillman at Buzzfeed.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Derek Kerton, with an excellent response to the game developer that has decided to DMCA PewDiePie videos (though it is very generally applicable):

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, we were watching as the House of Representatives got ready to move forward with extending the FISA Amendments Act despite huge problems and a worrying lack of information about secret interpretations of the law. Of course, it quickly passed — basically thanks to lots of lying and misrepresentation about what the bill actually contained. Meanwhile, having failed to get new cybersecurity legislation passed, the White House was looking to tackle the issue with an executive order, the draft text of which was leaked at the end of the week. Of course, we were also worried about efforts to make cybersecurity enforcement the job of the ITU, an idea with a whole host of problems of its own.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, we were appalled at (and slightly amused by) the pathetic attempts at "innovation" on display in the legacy recording industry, such as the hype around the "ringle" — a combination of a single and a ringtone! Imagine that! Similarly, Universal Music seemed to have gotten the message that subscription services are a good idea, but gotten the details of the implementation entirely wrong. It was also around this time that we started to hear complaints from sound engineers and audiophiles about iPods and earbuds destroying the sound quality of music — though perhaps that was just a way to get press, much like blaming Facebook for destroying the economy. Meanwhile, Prince, unpredictable as always, decided to sue eBay, YouTube and The Pirate Bay for copyright infringement.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, the bizarre blanket ban on video games we mentioned last week quickly started to fail in the courts, the battle between China's censors and Google heated up then fizzled out, and a well-known AP writer joined the ranks of people totally misunderstanding the digital music debate. The music industry was doing its best to paint Kazaa and Morpheus as infringers, while Morpheus was seeking summary judgement saying it doesn't violate copyright law. And one on-the-money essay explained how the industry was killing the goose that lays the golden eggs by trying to destroy digital music.

Okay, here's a fun post for a Friday evening: Earlier this week, I was at World Hosting Days, where I gave a keynote speech about the importance of CDA 230 and things like intermediary liability protections -- and why they are so important to protecting free speech online. The emcee of the event was Mike Godwin, who (among his many, many accomplishments over the years as an internet lawyer and philosopher) coined Godwin's Law. The organizers of the event, realizing that they had the guy who coined Godwin's Law and the guy (me!) who coined the Streisand Effect in the same place at the same time, thought it might be fun to have the two of us talk about these two memes.And, voila. Here's the video of the two of us discussing it. We're also planning to release this as a podcast soon, so if you already listen to the Techdirt podcast and want to wait for that, feel free... But, if you want to skip ahead and watch/listen now, go for it.

Concentrated attacks on technology tools that can sometimes, but not always, be used for nefarious purposes have quite a long history, from Google and Wikipedia, to suing online sites like Craigslist over how users use the service. Even torrent technology itself, having become a four-letter-word that the content industry has managed to tether to copyright infringement, is nothing more than a tool with plenty of legitimate uses.Well, it appears that the latest target in the music industry's crosshairs are sites that rip YouTube videos into MP3 format.

Back in 2011, you might recall that AT&T and Verizon stopped offering users unlimited wireless data plans. Taking advantage of a lack of competition at the time, the duo worked in concert to shove users toward confusing, metered plans that imposed a usage cap, then socked users with overage fees upward of $15 per gigabyte. When users refused to migrate to these plans, both companies spent years making life as difficult as possible for these subscribers, AT&T going so far as to block users from accessing Facetime until they switched to these more expensive, metered plans (but who needs net neutrality rules, right?).All the while, both companies repeatedly insisted that nobody actually wanted simpler, unlimited plans. That was until increased competition from T-Mobile (thanks in large part to regulators blocking AT&T's attempted acquisition of the company) forced both companies to bring back their unlimited data plans. And while Wall Street has been whining for months that competition is preventing these companies from nickel and diming their customers, consumers generally like the return to unlimited data.Case in point: a new study by JD Power and Associates indicates that unlimited data customers are consistently more impressed with the performance of their connections than their capped and metered counterparts. More specifically, users on unlimited data plans state that they experience fewer network problems of all kinds than metered users:

Harvard is one of the most prestigious universities in the world (and its graduates often feel the need to remind you of that). But apparently Harvard is more worried about protecting its reputation from the elite than actually fulfilling its stated mission of "educating the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society." In an act of utter cowardice, it withdrew a Visiting Fellowship that it gave to Chelsea Manning just a couple days after announcing it -- all because the CIA and its friends got upset. Harvard caving in to the CIA is not a good look.Two days ago, Harvard's Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School announced that Chelsea Manning would be a "Visiting Fellow" for the 2017-2018 school year. She was joining others -- including former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer, former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook. The Visiting Fellows program is basically a high falutin' way of saying that these people would come give some talks at the school. But the point of the program -- in theory -- is to expose people to a variety of ideas from a variety of different perspectives. Personally, I think honoring Spicer, Lewandowski and Mook is fairly ridiculous, but I respect and support Harvard wishing to bring them -- or anyone -- in to talk about their experienceBut, of course, anything having to do with Manning is controversial to some -- mostly those who have bought into a misleading line of tripe from cable news. And thus people freaked out that Harvard was including her. Among those most triggered by Harvard planning to have Manning come talk to students was the CIA. On Thursday, former CIA depute director (and former acting director) Michael Morell resigned from his own fellowship (in a different program) at the Kennedy School in protest. His letter is full of debunked bullshit.

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Senator Ron Wyden, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, spent half a decade trying to get President Obama's Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, to answer some fairly straightforward questions about NSA surveillance on Americans. As you may recall, this got so bad that Clapper flat out lied to Wyden in an open Senate hearing, which inspired Ed Snowden to leak documents to Glenn Greenwald. With the Trump administration, Dan Coats took over Clapper's job... and Clapper's role of obfuscating in response to important questions from Wyden concerning NSA surveillance. Despite promises to the contrary, Coats (like Clapper before him) has refused to share just how many Americans have their information sucked up under Section 702. Since that program is up for renewal later this year, that kind of information seems quite relevant to the debate.However, as we noted back in June, Wyden has also been asking a different, and much more specific question of Coats. At a hearing in June, Wyden asked:

For years one of the greasier lobbying and PR tactics by the telecom industry has been the hijacking of minority and civil rights groups to help parrot awful policy positions. Historically, such groups are happy to take financing from a company like Comcast, in exchange repeating whatever memos are thrust in their general direction -- even if the policy dramatically harms their constituents. The tactic of creating or "co-opting" such groups helps foster the illusion of broad support for awful, anti-consumer policies, whether that's support for the latest competition-killing merger or support for the assault on net neutrality.Because this cozy quid pro quo is implied but never put into writing, ISPs traditionally respond with breathless indignance to the mere suggestion they're using minority voices as policy props. But Comcast has found that tactic consistently so successful, a few years back it went so far as to give its top lobbyist, David Cohen, a new title: "Chief Diversity Officer." Said title not only lets Cohen profess the company's unwavering dedication to minorities with one hand while undermining them with the other, but helps him skirt the government's flimsy restrictions on lobbying.A few weeks back boss Ajit Pai announced the creation of a new "Advisory Committee on Diversity and Digital Empowerment," a group Pai insisted was established to champion the voice of every American, “no matter their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, or sexual orientation." But as we've noted before, Pai's breathless support of closing the digital divide is utterly illusory, as his policies (ranging from gutting popular consumer protections to protecting the cable industry's monopoly over the cable box) consistently involve undermining consumer interests while encouraging industry rate hikes.Pai has appointed Julia Johnson, president of a consulting firm called NetCommunications, to lead the Advisory Committee. Not too surprisingly, The Intercept was quick to highlight how Johnson has a long history of actively undermining minority interests on behalf of the Multicultural Media, Telecom & Internet Council, a Comcast, AT&T and Verizon funded vessel specifically designed to help provide illusory minority community support for these companies' positions:

First, let's all just take a moment to drink in that headline above. 2017, people: it's a weird time to be alive. In any case, you likely have heard of Netflix's hit original show, Narcos. The show follows the exploits of Pablo Escobar's drug organization and was once the subject of Escobar's brother demanding a billion dollars from Netflix over the portrayal. Netflix, of course, was the disruptive new streaming service for movies and television that has since decided to go the route of copyright protectionist now that it is producing its own original content. It's a strange look for a company that exploded on a model of convenience over piracy, raking in tons of legit dollars by simply being an option better than or comparable to pirating films and television. Rather than continuing to compete in that arena, the company has begun to go the way of Big Content, firing off all kinds of DMCA notices.And now threatening to shoot people and their families for pirating Netflix content? Well, not really, of course. I'm sure the folks at Netflix thought it would be funny to have actors from Narcos do so in character in France. But watch the video Netflix put out for yourself.If you cannot see the video, the TorrentFreak link above has a nice summary of it.

Various authority figures have attempted to define journalism, usually excluding their critics. A recent post here covered a police chief who decided he could determine a journalist's credibility based almost solely on their web presence. Trimming down the definition of "journalist" allows government officials to limit their accountability by treating only certain outlets as credible.So, we already have government authorities attempting to define what is or isn't a "real" news outlet. Jonathan Peters of the Columbia Journalism Review reports a government authority is attempting to define what is or isn't news. In this case, it's the Vermont State Police.

Trump's pick for attorney general unsurprisingly holds the same ideals as his boss. He also holds the same misconceptions and misplaced nostalgia for tough-on-crime policing that went out of vogue as soon as it became apparent it wasn't doing anything but filling up prisons.Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been going hot and heavy on a 1980s-esque law enforcement policy revival. He booted the DOJ off the civil rights beat, telling states and cities to solve their own police misconduct problems -- something they were clearly unwilling to do on their own, hence the DOJ's intercession. He told cops they're getting back their access to war gear, rolling back the Obama administration's minimal 1033 program reforms.He's been touting tougher policing and tougher sentencing, using a false narrative of a country under siege by drug dealers and criminal border-jumpers. In a time of historic lows -- both in violent criminal activity and violence towards police officers -- AG Sessions is acting like a street corner preacher, promising an impending apocalypse to anyone who will listen.Sessions is also peeling away federal reforms to asset forfeiture. He's opened the federal safety valve for civil forfeitures, allowing local PDs to dodge state laws limiting the amount of property they can take from uncharged citizens.Given the makeup of Congress, one would assume Sessions' ongoing effort to raise US law enforcement to "a law unto itself" level would ride on rails, at least up until midterm elections. Instead, Sessions is facing a literal House divided -- not against itself exactly -- but against him.

The ATF isn't restrained by oversight. It's hardly restrained at all. It's made a business of fake stash house sting operations, where downtrodden suckers looking for cash are persuaded to rob a ficitonal stash house of its fictional drugs. The problem is the government then bases its charges on the amount of nonexistent drugs sting victims were told the fake stash house contained. In no sting operation was the "amount" of drugs lower than 5 kilograms -- the amount needed to trigger a 20-year minimum sentence.Why is the ATF involved? Because every sting operation involves fictional armed guards, necessitating the use of illegally-obtained weapons by sting victims. Bang. More charges with lengthy minimum sentences.When not pushing people into fake robberies, the ATF regulates alcohol, tobacco, and firearms. (Also explosives, but it makes the well-known acronym more than a bit clumsy.) To facilitate maximum price gouging by state governments, the ATF tries to break up untaxed cigarette sales.It's this simple work that has propelled an accountability-free explosion in the ATF, most of it traced back to a single office in Bristol, Virginia, fronted by a quasi-legitimate tobacco distributor. From there, an appalling amount of illegal activity was participated in by ATF agents and officials.Matt Apuzzo has put together an amazing story for the New York Times, sourced from interviews and public records requests -- one that will cause your jaw to drop lower the further you scroll down the page. As Apuzzo puts it, the operation began as a way to bust black-market cigarette sales. It ended up as something much more sinister: an ATF slush fund that mixed public and private money with zero oversight or statutory authority. If any agent needed anything -- from vending machines with cameras in them to credit cards for unquestioned expenses -- they went to Bristol. It was done in the government's name, but plenty of agents personally profited from the operation.

Ted Frank is a well-respected lawyer who has heroically dedicated much of his career to stopping bad legal practices, including sketchy settlements in class action lawsuits. Now he's taking action in another case involving a sketchy settlement: the monkey selfie case. As we highlighted earlier this week, while it was no surprise that PETA and photographer David Slater worked out a settlement agreement to end the ridiculous lawsuit PETA had filed, it was deeply concerning that part of the settlement involved PETA demanding that the original district court ruling -- the one saying, clearly, that animals don't get copyrights -- should be thrown out.It took just a few days for Frank, on behalf of CEI, to file a wonderful and hilarious amicus brief with the court. There are a bunch of reasons why vacatur is improper here, but the real beauty of this brief is in pointing out that Naruto -- the monkey -- has been left out of the settlement, and thus not "all parties" have agreed. No, really.

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As you may know, Charles Harder is the lawyer behind the lawsuit Shiva Ayyadurai filed against us, so feel free to view everything we say here through that prism. Last week, of course, the judge in our case dismissed the case against us, noting that everything we said was clearly protected by the First Amendment. But that wasn't Harder's only loss of the week. Eriq Gardner points out that he also lost a case he filed against The Deal.That case had been filed a couple months before our lawsuit, in federal court in New Hampshire. It was filed on behalf of Scottsdale Capital Advisors, a company based in Arizona, and one of its execs, the Nevada-based John Hurry, against the Delaware-registered and New York-based "The Deal" and one of its reporters, the California-based William Meagher. Now, you may wonder why this lawsuit was filed in New Hampshire, seeing as none of the states above include "New Hampshire." And, indeed, the court was wondering that too, because it dismissed the case over this bit of weird venue shopping:

When Google Fiber first arrived back in 2010, it was heralded as a gamechanger for the broadband industry. Google Fiber would, we believed, revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and using it to disrupt the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive telecom sector. Initially things worked out well; with the mere mention of a looming Google Fiber target market resulting in a much-needed conversation about why the United States consistently languishes in mediocrity when it comes to our broadband networks (pro tip: it's because AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all but own state and federal lawmakers).Seven years later, however, and the Google Fiber bloom appears to be off the rose. There's little doubt that Google Fiber brought some much-needed competition to countless markets, driving down costs and spurring deployment of gigabit networks in key areas (though these benefits are often over-hyped, and broadband competition in countless markets is actually getting worse). There's also no doubt that Google Fiber has been of great benefit to disadvantaged communities, thanks to free deployment of gigabit broadband to anchor institutions and low-income housing developments.That said, the company has gone through two CEOs in a matter of months, laid off an unspecified number of employees during a restructuring last fall, and has begun to show signs that the company's dedication to the project is wavering at best, and notably derailed at worst. Reports began to circulate last fall that high-level Alphabet execs were bored with the slow pace and high cost of fiber deployment, and were considering pivoting the entire Google Fiber business model to wireless. But the company's messaging regarding this transition has been anything but clear, only driving unease among those waiting for the promised revolution.Kansas City, Google Fiber's first launch market, was hyped as nothing short of a looming connectivity Utopia at launch. But the better part of a decade later and many locals say Google Fiber has cancelled their installations after years of waiting. And one Kansas City local made headlines recently when she revealed that the company cancelled her broadband service over a 12 cent dispute, a rather Comcast-esque failure by the company. And a local Motherboard report highlighted further how the honeymoon phase of Google Fiber is most decidedly at an end: