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Facebook -- and Sheryl Sandberg in particular -- have been the most vocal supporters of SESTA. Sandberg wrote a bizarre Facebook post supporting the horrible SESTA/FOSTA Frankenstein bill the day it was voted on in the House. In it, she wrote:

Cable providers like Comcast and Charter continue to quietly secure a growing monopoly over American broadband. A new report by Leichtman Research notes that the nation's biggest cable companies added a whopping 83% of all net broadband subscribers last quarter. All told, the nation's top cable companies (predominately Charter Spectrum and Comcast) added 2.7 million broadband subscribers in 2017, while the nation's telcos (AT&T, Verizon, CenturyLink, Frontier) saw a net loss of 625,000 subscribers last year, slightly worse than the 600,000 subscriber net loss they witness in 2016.A pretty obvious pattern begins to emerge from Leichtman's data, and it's one of total and absolute cable industry dominance:

Police in Raleigh, North Carolina are using Google as a proxy surveillance dragnet. This likely isn't limited to Raleigh. Google harvests an astounding amount of data from users, but what seems to be of most interest to law enforcement is location info.

We've just written about calls for a key legal communications system to be open-sourced as a way of re-building confidence in a project that has been plagued by problems. In many ways, it's surprising that these moves aren't more common. Without transparency, there can be little trust that a system is working as claimed. In the past this was just about software, but today there's another aspect to the problem. As well as the code itself, there are the increasingly-complex algorithms, which the software implements. There is a growing realization that algorithms are ruling important parts of our lives without any public knowledge of how they work or make decisions about us. In Germany, for example, one of the most important algorithms determines a person's SCHUFA credit rating: the name comes from an abbreviation of its German "Schutzorganisation für Allgemeine Kreditsicherung", which means "Protection Agency for General Credit Security". As a site called Algorithm Watch explains:

Violent video games have once again found themselves in the role of scapegoat after a recent spate of gun violence in America. After the Florida school shooting, and in the extended wake of the massacre in Las Vegas, several government representatives at various levels have leveled their ire at violent games, including Trump, who commissioned an insane sit-down to act as moderator between game company executives and those that blame them for all the world's ills. Amid this deluge of distraction, it would be easy to forget that study after study after study have detailed how bunk the notion is that you can tie real-world violence and violent games is. Not to mention, of course, that there has never been more people playing more violent video games in the history of the world than at this moment right now, and at the same time research shows a declining trend for deviant behavior in teens rather than any sort of upswing.But a recent study conducted by the Max Planck Institute and published in Molecular Psychiatry further demonstrates the point that violence and games are not connected, with a specific methodology that carries a great deal of weight. The purpose of the study was to move beyond measuring behavior effects immediately after short, unsustained bursts of game-playing and into the realm of the effects on sustained, regular consumption of violent video games.

Violent video games have once again found themselves in the role of scapegoat after a recent spate of gun violence in America. After the Florida school shooting, and in the extended wake of the massacre in Las Vegas, several government representatives at various levels have leveled their ire at violent games, including Trump, who commissioned an insane sit-down to act as moderator between game company executives and those that blame them for all the world's ills. Amid this deluge of distraction, it would be easy to forget that study after study after study have detailed how bunk the notion is that you can tie real-world violence and violent games is. Not to mention, of course, that there has never been more people playing more violent video games in the history of the world than at this moment right now, and at the same time research shows a declining trend for deviant behavior in teens rather than any sort of upswing.But a recent study conducted by the Max Planck Institute and published in Molecular Psychiatry further demonstrates the point that violence and games are not connected, with a specific methodology that carries a great deal of weight. The purpose of the study was to move beyond measuring behavior effects immediately after short, unsustained bursts of game-playing and into the realm of the effects on sustained, regular consumption of violent video games.

Despite worries about the reliability and safety of self-driving vehicles, the millions of test miles driven so far have repeatedly shown self-driving cars to be significantly more safe than their human-piloted counterparts. Yet whenever accidents (or near accidents) occur, they tend to be blown completely out of proportion by those terrified of (or financially disrupted by) an automated future.So it will be interesting to watch the reaction to news that a self-driving Uber vehicle was, unfortunately, the first to be involved in a fatality over the weekend in Tempe, Arizona:

The old truism is in play again with the FBI's renewed CryptoWar: if X is outlawed, only criminals will have X. In this case, it's secure encryption. The FBI may not be trying to get encryption banned, but it does want it weakened. No backdoors, claims FBI director Chris Wray, just holes for the government to use at its pleasure. So, if the FBI gets it way, the only truly secure encryption will be in the hands of criminals… exactly the sort of people the FBI claims it needs weakened encryption to catch.

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Earlier today, in discussing a long list of possible fixes for SESTA, we noted that the only one that even has a remote chance (i.e., the only fix that actually has the potential of being considered by the Senate) is Senator Wyden's amendment, which is designed to solve the "moderator's dilemma" issue by clarifying that merely using a filter or doing any sort of moderation for the sake of blocking some content does not automatically append liability to the service provider for content not removed. Senator Portman -- the sponsor of the bill -- has insisted (despite the lack of such language in the bill) that this is how SESTA should be interpreted. Specifically, Portman stated that SESTA:

It appears that sometime this week (or even possibly today), the Senate is unfortunately likely to vote (perhaps by an overwhelming margin) for SESTA, despite the fact that it's a terribly drafted bill which no one can explain how it will actually stop sex trafficking. Indeed, it's a bill that many victims advocates are warning will not just make problems worse, but will put lives in danger. And that's leaving aside all of the damage it will do to free speech and tons of websites on the internet.Much of this could have been avoided if anyone in Congress were actually interested in understanding how the internet worked, and how to write a bill that actually addressed problems around sex trafficking -- rather than buying into a false narrative (pushed mainly by Hollywood) that the liability protections of CDA 230 were magically responsible for sex traffickers using the internet. Two academics who are probably the most knowledgeable experts on intermediary liability, Daphne Keller at Stanford and Eric Goldman at Santa Clara University, have each posted thoughts on how to "salvage" SESTA. If Congress were serious, it would listen to them. But that's a big "if."Let's start with Keller's suggestions that she helpfully put into a Twitter thread:

This week, following our coverage of the disturbing actions of a cop that led to a high-speed crash killing an infant, one commenter for some reason felt it was time to turn the blame around on the mother, suggesting the death must have been caused by her negligence. A reply from Alexander won first place for insightful:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2013, the Prenda situation positively exploded. As we awaited Monday's hearing, we learned more about Allan Mooney and saw Verizon get involved. Then, of course, the Prenda team itself didn't show up in court, meaning they escaped (at great cost) an absolutely crazy hearing with a very unhappy judge (written up for us by Ken White of Popehat fame). The judge ordered a second hearing and made it clear Prenda was expected to actually show up, while transcripts of John Steele's intimidating phone calls to Alan Cooper hit the docket, and Paul Duffy was scrambling to do some too-little-too-late damage control.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2008, following the death of HD-DVD, the next question was whether Blu-Ray would actually catch on in a big way. We now know it did, though early price hikes didn't help. But it certainly had nothing to fear from an ill-advised late entrant into the format wars. Meanwhile, having expressed displeasure with the agency's approach, EMI decided it wouldn't quit the IFPI, but would stop paying so much for its lawsuits against fans, while the IFPI was turning its sites on ISPs instead (and unsurprisingly triggering the Streisand effect when trying to block websites).Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2003, we watched the steady emergence of video game development courses at colleges, had an early discussion about Americans using the internet to find alternative news sources, and perhaps didn't realize just quite how revolutionary Amazon's focus on web services would be. There were still five big record labels but they were looking to merge (while betting a tad too heavily on enhanced CDs), McDonald's became the second huge chain to start offering free wi-fi, and we looked at the debunking of a hoax story about a cyberwar virus targeting Iraq (though that idea wouldn't seem so crazy seven years later when we all learned about Stuxnet in Iran). Also, Techdirt got chosen by Forbes as one of the five best tech blogs.

We recently wrote about an important judgment from the EU's top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The ruling said that that corporate sovereignty provisions included in trade deals between the EU's member states were illegal. Significantly, the logic behind that decision suggests that any form of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) -- the official name for the corporate sovereignty framework -- even in trade deals involving countries outside the EU, would be forbidden too. Christina Eckes, professor of European law at the University of Amsterdam and director of the Amsterdam Centre for European Law and Governance, believes that the implications of the CJEU ruling are even broader.Eckes says that in the wake of the judgment, serious doubts hang over the investment chapter in the Canada-EU trade deal, CETA, which has still not been ratified by all EU member states yet -- a process that is necessary before it comes into force definitively. In fact, Belgium has explicitly asked the CJEU to rule on the legality of the Investor Court System (ICS) in CETA, which is the modified version of corporate sovereignty that supposedly addresses its flaws. As a result, a ruling on whether CETA's investment chapter is legal is definitely on its way, and could have major implications for CETA and its ratification. However, Ecke points out that there is something called "EU loyalty", which:

Buzzfeed has obtained files the NYPD never wanted the public to see. This isn't the result of a protracted public records battle, but rather the work of an anonymous whistleblower. Presumably, those further up the chain of command are already familiar with the department's disinterest in holding officers accountable, so there's no whistleblowing outlet there. Also, presumably, the Civilian Complaint Review Board's hands are tied and it cannot hand out disciplinary reports for officers never formally disciplined. So, leak it is. And what a leak it is.

In all of our conversations about video game piracy and the DRM that studios and publishers use to try to stave it off, the common refrain from those within in the industry and others is that these cracking groups are nearly nihilism personified. Nothing is sacred to these people, goes the mantra, and they care nothing for the gaming industry at all. If the gaming industry is destroyed, it will be because of these pirate-y pirates simply not giving a damn.This notion is belied by the story of Crackshell, makers of indie spinoff of the Serious Sam franchise called Serious Sam's Bogus Detour, and Voksi, an individual that runs a game-cracking ring. Voksi has been featured in our pages before as one of the few people out there who has been able to consistently defeat the Denuvo DRM, helping propel the software's precipitous fall from grace. If a game developer and a game-cracker seem to be natural enemies, it will come as a surprise to you that they have recently teamed up to try to resurrect Bogus Detour from the bin of failure.The whole story is useful for debunking the notion that these pirate sites and those that run them are pure venom for the game industry, but it's particularly useful to hear how this relationship came to be.

A chief federal judge in Chicago has handed down a scathing opinion calling ATF stash house stings an "ends justifies the means" evil that needs to be "relegated to the dark corridors of our past." The opinion shuts the door on two defendants hoping to show the ATF's fake robberies of fake stash houses filled with fake drugs were racially-biased, but it does show even without the taint of bias, the sting operations are exploitative and useless. (via Brad Heath)The opinion [PDF] has nothing good to say about the stash house stings. It opens with numbers that certainly appear to show racial bias and it doesn't let up from there.

It's become quite fashionable these days to gripe about the Internet. Even some of its staunchest allies in Congress have been getting cranky. Naturally there are going to be growing pains as humanity adapts to the unprecedented ability for billions of people to communicate with each other easily, cheaply, and immediately for the first time in world history. But this communications revolution has also brought some extraordinary benefits that we glibly risk when we forget about them and instead only focus the challenges. This glass is way more than half full but, if we're not careful to protect it, soon it will be empty.As we've been talking about a lot recently, working its way through Congress is a bill, SESTA/FOSTA, so fixated on perceived problems with the Internet (even though there's no evidence that these are problems the Internet itself caused) that it threatens the ability of the Internet to deliver its benefits, including those that would better provide tools to deal with some of those perceived problems, if not outright make those same problems worse by taking away the Internet's ability to help. But it won't be the last such bill, as long as the regulatory pile-on intending to disable the Internet is allowed to proceed unchecked.As the saying too often goes, you don't know what you've got till it's gone. But this time let's not wait to lose it; let's take the opportunity to appreciate all the good the Internet has given us, so we can hold on tight to it and resist efforts to take it away.Towards that end, we want to encourage the sharing and collection of examples of how the Internet has made the world better: how it made it better for everyone, and how it even just made it better for you, and whether it made things better for good, or for even just one moment in one day when the Internet enabled some connection, discovery, or opportunity that could not have happened without it. It is unlikely that this list could be exhaustive: the Internet delivers its benefits too frequently and often too seamlessly to easily recognize them all. But that's why it's all the more important to go through the exercise of reflecting on as many as we can, because once they become less frequent and less seamless they will be much easier to miss and much harder to get back.

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The UN has decided it's possibly Facebook's fault things are going so badly in Myanmar. Muslims have been fleeing the country in droves thanks to Myanmar security forces engaging in widespread acts of violence (including rape) against them, urged on by hardline nationalist monks.For all intents and purposes, Facebook is Myanmar's internet. Loosening of restrictions on social media access has resulted in a large portion of the population getting all their news (along with all the hate speech the UN is complaining about) via the social media giant. The UN is looking into genocide accusations but has decided to speak up against Facebook first.

Last fall, the Department of Justice announced it would be suing to block AT&T's $86 billion acquisition of Time Warner. According to the DOJ, it sued to block the lawsuit to protect consumers, arguing that the deal would likely make it harder for streaming competitors to license the content they need to compete with AT&T (especially HBO programming). Consumer advocates have long argued that AT&T (with its decade of well-documented and often comedic anti-consumer behavior in tow) would simply use its greater leverage and power to hamstring competition and jack up rates for consumers (especially with net neutrality dying).While some have argued that the DOJ is simply following antitrust protocol, others (including AT&T lawyers) think the lawsuit is driven by other motivations.That's not a hard case to make given the Trump administration's anti-consumer, anti-innovation, and anti-competition tendencies on other fronts (like net neutrality). Trump's pick to head the DOJ's antitrust division, Makan Delrahim, was also on record, before joining the DOJ, stating he saw no real problems with the deal. Meanwhile Trump's disdain for Time Warner-owned CNN is also well established, and reports have indicated that Trump pal Rupert Murdoch spent much of last year trying to scuttle the deal for competitive reasons (Muroch has also approached AT&T twice about buying CNN).Adding fuel to this fire was a bipartisan group of ex-DOJ officials (from US Attorney Preet Bharara and Nixon White House counsel John Dean) that, last week, filed an amicus brief with the court urging an inquiry into whether any potential laws were broken. The brief doesn't even mention Murdoch, and instead focuses on the obvious, inherent problems in scuttling a merger just because the President doesn't like one of the media outlets involved:

We've made the point for a long time that, on a long enough timeline, pretty much everybody is a pirate. The point is that the way copyright laws have evolved alongside such useful tools as the internet makes knowing whether common sense actions are actually copyright infringement an incredibly dicey riddle to solve. Often times without even trying, members of the public engage in infringing activities, up to and including the President of the United States.And, it appears, up to and including entire branches of the United States military, though claims of accidental infringement in this case would appear to be rather silly. Bitmanagement, a German software company that produces virtual reality software, is accusing the US Navy of what can only be described as massive levels of copyright infringement.

Given the sensitive nature of their work, lawyers need to take particular care when communicating online. One way to address this -- quite reasonable, in theory -- is to create a dedicated system with strong security built in. That's the route being taken by Germany's Federal Bar Association (Bundesrechtsanwaltskammer -- BRAK) with its "besondere elektronisches Anwaltspostfach" (special electronic mailbox for lawyers, or beA). However, the reality has not matched the theory, and beA has been plagued with serious security problems. As a post on the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) site explains (original in German)

Supposedly completely of its own volition, Maryland's court system has decided to extend extra rights to law enforcement officers. Going to bat for opacity, the Maryland Judiciary has made it harder for the public to find out what officers are doing (or how often they're being sued). This comes against a backdrop where more sunlight would seem essential, what with several Baltimore police officers facing corruption charges in a wide-ranging investigation that has already netted a handful of convictions and guilty pleas.Citing a favorite cop excuse, the state's courts have decided the public should be less informed.

Law professor Danielle Citron -- best known at Techdirt for her attacks on Section 230 immunity -- has written a paper attacking Google, Facebook, etc., but not for the reasons you might think. Her paper [PDF] points out policy changes that have been made by several tech companies not in response to users or US government activity, but to get out ahead of increasing regulatory pressure in Europe. In the recent past, these platforms routinely defended the rights of everyone around the world to engage in free speech, even if that meant offending local governments. Now, with the internet headed towards enforced Balkanization backed by hefty fines, US companies are now routinely engaging in preemptive censorship of content perfectly legal in the US (and arguably legal elsewhere).

We've written about Trump's long-term personal lawyer Michael Cohen a few times before. The first time was back in 2015 when he made a particularly stupid threat against reporters for reporting on Cohen's own stupid comments. In case you don't remember:

Spoilers suck, sure, but this is the internet and some things cannot be avoided. Still, for those that produce content, there are better and worse ways to handle the issue of spoilers. Some large entertainment groups try to sue over spoilers, but it rarely works. Others settle for mere DMCA takedowns. Most entertainment groups, meanwhile, don't do a damn thing about spoilers, because that's the correct course of action.Still, even with that wide spectrum of past responses, sending legal threats to journalists over spoilers, such as the Lucha Underground wrestling show has done, is a new one for me. The legal threats rest on the NDAs the audience has to sign before attending a show.

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Update: Late this evening ProPublica retracted and corrected a story from last year, saying that Haspel was in charge of the Thai CIA prison site while Zubaydah was tortured. That does suggest that some of the accusations against Haspel actually should be blamed on her predecessor. As the correction notes, she did not arrive to run the base until October of 2002, after Zubaydah's torture had concluded. However the report quotes the NY Times saying that she did still oversee the torture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri and that she was still involved in the destruction of the video tapes of the torture sessions -- both of which should be disqualifying from the job.In addition, these kinds of mistakes wouldn't be made if the government actually came clean over what it did and who did it. Revealing who ran that prison site and what they did would not harm national security. It would provide an accurate accounting of what really went down. I'm sure that some Haspel supporters will argue that this correction mean that all of the concerns about Haspel are "fake news" even though that's clearly not true at all. Instead, this seems like even more evidence for why the details of her involvement needs to be declassified prior to facing confirmation hearings in the Senate. Our original article is below.As you've probably heard, with the latest in the neverending rotating cast of characters that makes up the current Trump administration, a set of dominoes has been knocked over with the tweeted firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the nomination of CIA boss (and former Congressional Rep/longtime defender of surveillance and torture) Mike Pompeo to replace him. While Pompeo was a vocal supporter of the CIA's torture program, he didn't actually have any hand in running it. Instead, that distinction goes to Gina Haspel, whom Trump has nominated to take Pompeo's place. Haspel not only oversaw parts of the CIA's torture program, she was also directly involved with the destruction of the video tapes showing the torture procedures. The still classified 6,700 page Senate report on the program apparently contains a lot of details about the program that Haspel ran while running a CIA blacksite in Thailand. Annabelle Timsit has helpfully pulled together some details of what is currently known from the heavily redacted declassified executive summary (you may recall we spent years writing about the fight to just release that summary). What's stunning is that the program so disgusted CIA employees that some were at the "point of tears and choking up" and multiple people on site asked to be moved to other locations if the CIA was going to continue these torture techniques. From the report (see the update above, noting that these quotes were from a couple months before Haspel took over):

Earlier this year, California introduced new net neutrality legislation as part of similar efforts across more than half the states in the nation. At the time, we noted how the EFF wasn't a particular fan of California's proposal, arguing that the wording of the effort left the law open to challenges by the FCC, which has (at AT&T and Comcast behest) promised to block states that actually try to protect consumers in the wake of its unpopular net neutrality repeal. But a new California proposal has no such Achilles heel, goes notably further than the first effort, and now has the EFF's full support.California state senator Scott Wiener this week introduced SB 822, a much tougher, more comprehensive proposal that would prohibit not only the blocking and throttling of websites and services by ISPs, but would ban "paid prioritization" deals that would allow deep-pocketed content companies (like, say, ESPN) from buying an unfair advantage against smaller competitors and startups. The bill also takes aim at the kind of interconnection shenanigans and double dipping that resulted in Netflix performance issues back in 2014, while leaving the door open to reasonable network management practices.In some ways the proposal goes a bit further than the FCC's 2015 net neutrality rules, in that it more concretely addresses the problem of "zero rating" ( when ISPs let a partner's content or their own bypass usage caps while still penalizing others). Zero rating in general is allowed, but only if entire classes of content are whitelisted. Individual efforts to whitelist only specific partners (as we saw with T-Moble's controversial "Binge On" efforts), would be forbidden, as would pay to play approaches where content companies are allowed to buy a zero rating advantage over a competitor:

It almost seems like half a lifetime ago, but only a half-decade has passed since James Clapper lied to Ron Wyden about the NSA's domestic collections. Wyden pointedly asked Clapper during an intelligence committee hearing whether or not the NSA was collecting "any type of data at all" on American citizens. Clapper gave two answers, both untrue: "No, sir" and "Not wittingly."A couple of months later, the first Snowden leak -- detailing massive amounts of call data being captured in the Section 215 dragnet -- undid Clapper's careful, under-oath lies. Since then, nothing has happened. The DOJ refused to investigate Clapper for lying to his oversight. Clapper exited office a few years later, becoming a go-to national security expert for a variety of news programs. He has since offered a variety of excuses for lying, but none of them are particularly good.As of March 12, the clock has run on perjury charges. James Clapper has violated federal law and gotten away with it.

It almost seems like half a lifetime ago, but only a half-decade has passed since James Clapper lied to Ron Wyden about the NSA's domestic collections. Wyden pointedly asked Clapper during an intelligence committee hearing whether or not the NSA was collecting "any type of data at all" on American citizens. Clapper gave two answers, both untrue: "No, sir" and "Not wittingly."A couple of months later, the first Snowden leak -- detailing massive amounts of call data being captured in the Section 215 dragnet -- undid Clapper's careful, under-oath lies. Since then, nothing has happened. The DOJ refused to investigate Clapper for lying to his oversight. Clapper exited office a few years later, becoming a go-to national security expert for a variety of news programs. He has since offered a variety of excuses for lying, but none of them are particularly good.As of March 12, the clock has run on perjury charges. James Clapper has violated federal law and gotten away with it.

I've had the opportunity to write about many trademark disputes in these pages, but it's been rare for any of them to hit very close to home. That changed this week when we learned that Ravinia Festival in the northern Chicago suburbs, at which I have seen many a concert, has decided to bully a startup brewery over its use of the word "Ravinia" in its name.

The Defense Department's 1033 program has allowed law enforcement to muddy the water on the distinction between police force and military force. Given the right reasoning (most commonly cited: Wars on Terror/Drugs), police departments are allowed to pick up surplus military gear, often for free (utilizing DHS grants) and start pretending they're an occupying force, rather than public servants.This came to a head following protests in Ferguson, Missouri, where viewers around the world were treated to the sight of local law enforcement rolling up on residents in mine-resistant vehicles while clad in gear that made officers look far more like soldiers than cops. This prompted a rollback of the 1033 program by Obama, limiting the sort of gear police departments could obtain to more innocuous surplus, like computers and furniture.That has since changed. President Trump, showing his support for all things law enforcement, rolled back Obama's rollback, giving police departments access to assault vehicles and military weapons. With this comes a rollback in trust, as it has been shown giving military gear to cops makes them believe they're soldiers in a war zone, rather than public servants in a community.Not everyone abuses this program, but those that do, do so spectacularly. An 11-member police force for a Delaware town with 400 residents has availed itself of more than $3 million in 1033 gear over the last five years. This first came to light late last year when documents obtained by Muckrock prompted town officials to wonder why they hadn't been notified of the department's stockpile.

Over the last few months, if you haven't been hiding under a tech news rock, you've probably heard at least something about growing concerns about so-called "Deepfakes" which are digitally altered videos, usually of famous people edited into porn videos. Last month, Reddit officially had to ban its deepfakes subreddit. And, you can't throw a stone without finding some mainstream media freaking out about the threat of deepfakes. And, yes, politicians are getting into the game, warning that this is going to be used to create fake scandals or influence elections.But, at the same time, many of the same politicians suddenly concerned about deepfakes are still pushing forward with SESTA. However, as Charles Duan notes, if SESTA becomes law, it will make it much more difficult for platforms to block or filter deepfakes:

You will recall that Dennis Prager, the conservative commentator who also runs a YouTube channel to inform his viewers of his perspective on a variety of topics, recently sued YouTube. The meat of Prager's claims is that YouTube is censoring some of his videos purely because he is a conservative -- with the clear implication being that YouTube is a liberal bastion of conservative-hating video hosting. Just to be clear, there is no real evidence for that. What there is evidence for is that YouTube is trying very hard to sort through its hilariously enormous trove of video content for objectionable material, and that it often does this quite badly. None of that amounts to, as Prager claims, a liberal conspiracy against some conservative guy.While Prager is seeking a preliminary injunction against YouTube to keep it from administering its own site as it sees fit, YouTube is asking for the case to be dismissed outright. There are two claims at issue: first, that YouTube classifying some of his videos in its "restricted mode" amounts to YouTube censoring him and, second, that YouTube is doing this "censoring" for purely partisan political reasons. If you find yourself sympathetic to those claims, perhaps it's because you have heard them repeated often elsewhere, over and over again (or because you've seen Prager sending out fundraising notices making exactly these claims), then you really should read the declaration from Alice Wu, part of the Trust and Safety management team at YouTube, filed in the case last week. Wu directly takes on both of Prager's claims and dismantles them completely to the point that it's almost embarrassing for Prager.We'll start with the claim that YouTube classifying some Prager videos for its restricted mode being a form of censorship. She notes first that the Prager's videos that were flagged for restricted mode were done so purely for its content and amounted to something like a "teen rating."

A federal judge is going to let a bunch of people keep suing Yahoo over its three-year run of continual compromise. Yahoo had hoped to get the class action suit tossed, stating that it had engaged in "unending" efforts to thwart attacks, but apparently it just wasn't good enough to prevent every single one of its three billion email accounts from falling into the hands of hackers.

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Last week I asked for anyone to explain how SESTA would (in any way) reduce sex trafficking? Not a single person even tried to answer. Because there is no answer. Sex trafficking is already illegal, and yet people do it. Nothing in SESTA makes sex trafficking more illegal. Nothing in SESTA makes it easier for law enforcement to find or crack down on sex trafficking or to help the victims of sex trafficking. Indeed, as we've detailed, it does the exact opposite. It puts criminal liability on internet sites that are somehow used in conjunction with prostitution (going beyond just trafficking, thanks to the FOSTA addition to SESTA), and uses a vague, poorly drafted, unclear "knowledge" standard that none of SESTA's supporters can adequately explain or define. As we noted, from our experience in covering what happens when you pin liability on a platform instead of its users -- especially using vague and unclear standards -- bad things usually result.But over the past few days, it's becoming increasingly clear just how dangerous this bill could actually be. Last week we wrote about Alana Massey's powerful article on just how much damage SESTA could actually do to sex workers, including shutting down the various resources that they use to protect themselves, keep safe, or even get information to get out of sex work (for those who wish to do so). It also will mean that sites that provide tools and information for victims of sex trafficking may also be forced to shut down. It's hard to see how that's a good thing.Over at Jezebel, Tracy Clark-Flory notes that the bill "is a disaster for basically everything it touches," and highlights how survivors of sex work have set up their own Survivors Against SESTA website that lays out in stark detail just how dangerous SESTA will be for everyone.

Several years back Verizon paused all serious residential fiber deployment to shift its focus to slinging video ads at Millennials, an effort that isn't going all that well. While Verizon was busy attempting to pivot from stodgy protectionist telecom monopoly to sexy new media brand, one of its core legacy businesses (fixed line broadband) was simply allowed to wither and die on the vine. As such, the company has spent the last few years bombarded with complaints up and down the east coast about how it neglected repairs and upgrades across a massive swath of its telecom empire.One one hand, Verizon's disinterest in residential broadband has resulted in a growing cable broadband monopoly as frustrated users flee to their only option for current-generation speeds. That in turn results in less competitive pressure than ever, resulting in higher prices, worse service, and the slow but steady deployment of arbitrary and punitive usage caps across the board. Meanwhile, customers on aging DSL lines who stick with Verizon face repair delays and higher prices as Verizon literally tries to drive away customers it simply no longer has a genuine interest in serving.Despite the fact that many of these lines were taxpayers subsidized, occasionally Verizon's behavior results in something vaguely resembling a wrist slap. Case in point: after highlighting the massive state of disrepair of Verizon's network in New York, the Communications Workers of America this week managed (with the help of the NY Public Service Commission) to force Verizon to upgrade a notable chunk of its neglected networks across the state. An announcement by the CWA notes that Verizon not only has to repair neglected infrastructure, but expand real, fiber broadband in New York City:

Something pretty ugly has been attached as a rider to a routine reauthorization bill. If the bill manages to move forward without this being stripped, future elections would resemble those held by dictatorial governments, where the outcome is assured before the first voter is even intimidated.

The open access movement believes that academic publications should be freely available to all, not least because most of the research is paid for by the public purse. Open access supporters see the high cost of many academic journals, whose subscriptions often run into thousands of dollars per year, as unsustainable for cash-strapped libraries, and unaffordable for researchers in emerging economies. The high profit margins of leading academic publishers -- typically 30-40% -- seem even more outrageous when you take into account the fact that publishers get almost everything done for free. They don't pay the authors of the papers they publish, and rely on the unpaid efforts of public-spirited academics to carry out crucial editorial functions like choosing and reviewing submissions.Academic publishers justify their high prices and fat profit margins by claiming that they "add value" as papers progress through the publication process. Although many have wondered whether that is really true -- does a bit of sub-editing and design really justify the ever-rising subscription costs? -- hard evidence has been lacking that could be used to challenge the publishers' narrative. A paper from researchers at the University of California and Los Alamos Laboratory is particularly relevant here. It appeared first on arXiv.org in 2016 (pdf), but has only just been "officially" published (paywall). It does something really obvious but also extremely valuable: it takes around 12,000 academic papers as they were originally released in their preprint form, and compares them in detail with the final version that appears in the professional journals, sometimes years later, as the paper's own history demonstrates. The results are unequivocal:

For game developers and publishers, there are lots of ways to react to the modding community that so often creates new and interesting aspects to their games. Some companies look to shut these modding communities down completely, some threaten them over supposed copyright violations, and some developers choose to embrace the modding community and let mods extend the life of their games to ridiculous lengths.But few studios have gone as far to embrace modders as developer 1C, makers of IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover. The flight-sim game, released way back in 2011, burst onto the gaming market with decidedly luke-warm reviews. Most of the critiques and public commentary surrounding the game could be best summarized as: "meh." But a modding community sprung up around the game, calling itself Team Fusion, and developed a litany of mods for IL-2. Rather than looking at these mods as some sort of threat, 1C instead worked with Team Fusion and developed an official re-release of the game incorporating their work.

The apparent success of MoviePass raises a whole bunch of interesting business model questions — and privacy concerns about the data-harvesting portion of that business model add another layer of complexity. So this week, we're going back to a good old-fashioned formula for the podcast, and dedicating an episode to examining the company in detail and trying to figure out where it might be headed.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Just recently, Senator Amy Klobuchar suggested that the government should start fining social media platforms that don't remove bots fast enough. We've pointed out how silly and counterproductive (not to mention unconstitutional) this likely would be. However, every time we see people demanding that these platforms better moderate their content, we end up with examples of why perhaps we really don't want those companies to be making these kinds of decisions.You may have heard that, over the weekend, Twitter started its latest sweep of accounts to shutdown. Much of the focus was on so-called Tweetdeckers, which were basically a network of teens using Tweetdeck software to retweet accounts for money. In particular, it was widely reported that a bunch of accounts known for copying (without attribution) the marginally funny tweets of others and then paying "Tweetdeckers" for mass promotion. These accounts were shutdown en masse over the weekend.Twitter noted that the sweep was about getting rid of spammers:

A small town in Iowa has decided one of its residents has too much First Amendment. Boldly marching forward in the face of mild criticism, Sibley's government had its lawyer threaten a local man with a lawsuit if he didn't take down or alter his website that criticized the town government for its repeated failure to address a serious problem in the town.Sibley has less than 3,000 residents but it is the home to a large animal byproduct processing plant. Iowa Drying and Processing went into operation five years ago. Unaffectionately nicknamed the "Blood Plant," IDP's operations were the subject of complaints due to the pervasive foul odor emanating from it.Local programmer Jeremy Harms set up a website advising people to stay away from Sibley after repeated calls for action were met with a lot of doing nothing by city politicians. His website previously answered the question about relocating to Sibley with "No." Thanks to the city's legal threats, the answer has been upgraded to "Maybe." In addition to pulling his hard "no," Sibley also amended his original post to reflect the few positives the town has.After his website went locally viral (2,000 hits from a town with less than 3,000 residents), the government decided to act. It didn't approach the Blood Plant about taming the fumes. Instead, it sent a letter to Harms threatening him with a lawsuit if he didn't stop criticizing the town and its government. On top of that, the city's attorney (Daniel Dekoter) ordered Harms to stop talking to the press. These dubious demands were backed by a dubious interpretation of state law.

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Over this past weekend, it was revealed that (1) the adult film actress Stormy Daniels (real name: Stephanie Clifford), who has claimed she had an affair with Donald Trump and then was given $130,000 to stay silent about it, is scheduled to appear on 60 Minutes next weekend and (2) President Trump's lawyers are considering going to court to block CBS from airing it. This is silly, dumb and not actually allowed by the law.

For years we've noted how the traditional cable TV industry is slowly-but-surely bleeding customers tired of paying an arm and a leg for bloated bundles of often terrible programming. And for just as long we've documented how far too many cable and broadcast executives are hell bent on doubling down on all of the bad behaviors that cause these defections in the first place. That has ranged from knee jerk price hikes in the face of growing streaming competition, to efforts to stuff more ads into every viewing hour, whether by editing down programs or speeding them up to ensure maximum commercial load.The ugly truth most cable and broadcasting executives can't face is that the era of the sacred cable TV cash cow is over. Television simply isn't going to be as profitable in the wake of real competition and the more flexible, cheaper pay TV alternatives that competition is providing. And while countless industry executives still somehow think this is a fad they can wait out, there's growing evidence that at least a few industry executives are finally getting the message.Fox executives, for example, last week signaled that they intend to dramatically lower the ad load to two minutes an hour across their networks by 2020 (it's currently 13 minutes for broadcast networks and 16 minutes for cable):