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By now, of course, you've probably heard that the EU Commission has fined Google €2.4 billion for antitrust violations, specifically regarding shopping search (there are at least two other investigations going on around antitrust questions involving Android and Adsense). The specific issue leading to this fine is that Google, for years, has been pushing its own comparison shopping results in response to searches on products, and other comparison search vendors feel this is unfair, as users are more likely to just jump to Google's shopping options in the boxes up top -- usually called the "onebox" (for what it's worth, I almost never click on those boxes, in fact, I almost never use Google for product search, preferring other, better, dedicated sites -- but that's a single anecdotal point, while the EU is citing some data it claims supports its position). Anyway, rather than digging all that deep, let's go with three thoughts I had in reading through the EU's announcement (linked above), Google's response and some of the other coverage.

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One of the big stories of the week so far was Zillow's mind-numbingly bizarre decision to have a recent-hire lawyer send out a completely bullshit threat letter to the website McMansion Hell. Things have not gone well for Zillow in the wake of this. Multiple news articles have been mocking Zillow's decision, and my own Twitter feed has been filled with people saying unkind things directed at the company. And then there's whatever this is:

For decades now, AT&T has promised that an incredible boon in broadband investment is waiting just around the corner -- but only if AT&T gets what it wants from the government. Whether it's gunning for tax cuts and subsidies, or looking for approval of its latest megamerger, AT&T's an absolute master of the regulatory carrot and a stick game. Even if the carrot is entirely hallucinated, as we saw when AT&T threatened to curtail already minimal fiber optic deployment unless net neutrality was killed.Of course because AT&T doesn't face meaningful competition in most markets, and few members of either party of government are truly interested in doing much of anything about this problem, this investment explosion never really materializes one way or the other. That's why millions upon millions of AT&T customers still pay an arm and a leg for last-generation DSL speeds, AT&T's consistently under fire for failing to upgrade many cities, and most of the company's network can't offer speeds remotely close to the gigabit-speeds now being offered by cable.Yet somehow, each and every time AT&T comes stumbling toward government with its hand outstretched, we oddly and mysteriously ignore this history lesson and provide AT&T with absolutely every benefit of the doubt. Case in point: with AT&T looking for Trump administration approval of its $85 billion Time Warner deal, the company last week trotted out its latest promise: a massive wave of broadband investment if the company sees some major tax cuts and has its latest merger approved; a narrative the press was happy to reiterate without qualification:

Earlier this year, we brought to you the story of one man's quest to sue all of the news organizations for using a clip of his Facebook video in which his partner is giving birth to his child. Kali Kanongataa sued ABC, NBC, Yahoo, CBS, Microsoft, Rodale and COED Media Group for reporting on the video and showing a clip of it, claiming copyright infringement. It was an odd claim for many reasons, not the least of which being that Kanongataa made the stream public and available on his Facebook page, not to mention the obvious Fair Use case to be made by the news groups reporting on the matter. The suits didn't work, of course, with most or all of them having now been dismissed.But that wasn't the end of the story for Kanongataa and his crack legal team that saw fit to entertain this frivolity. The judge in the case, Lewis Kaplan, decided to verbally light his lawyers on fire when assessing Kanongataa to pay legal fees to the defendants.

Nobody trusts anybody, and it's probably going to end up affecting end users the most. The Snowden leaks showed the NSA's Tailored Access Operations routinely intercepted network hardware to insert backdoors. The exploits leaked by the Shadow Brokers indicated the NSA was very active on the software exploit front as well.In response to the Snowden leaks, it appears the Russian hardware/software purchasers are stepping up their due diligence efforts. This comes at a time when the Russian government is suspected of hacking away at the American democratic process, as Reuters reports.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has no good news for the lying law enforcement officers who were hoping to walk off with $167,000 of someone else's money. Two years ago, the district court ruled in favor of Straughn Gorman, who was subjected to two lengthy traffic stops in less than an hour by officers hoping to help themselves to cash he was carrying in his RV.After stopping Gorman for a non-violation (driving too slow in the left lane), State Trooper Greg Monroe spent roughly a half-hour trying to obtain consent to search Gorman's RV. His reasonable suspicion? Gorman's use of the word "chick" to describe the girlfriend he was driving to visit and the supposedly "rehearsed" aspects of his employment history. Trooper Monroe performed an extensive background check on Gorman while hoping to prolong the stop until a K-9 unit could be deployed, but even his non-routine call to an El Paso DEA records center failed to drag out the traffic stop long enough for it to arrive.All Monroe knew when he finally let Gorman go is Gorman had at least $2,000 on him. Monroe wasn't going to let this money get away, so he called up another officer from another agency and "relayed his suspicions." He also told the other officer (Deputy Doug Fisher) to bring a drug-sniffing dog with him. Fisher wasn't assigned to patrol the highway Gorman was traveling on, but decided that would be the best use of his time.Fisher pulled over Gorman after his tire touched the fog line a couple of times. Another records check was run, even though Fisher already knew what results to expect, thanks to Trooper Monroe's heads-up. The drug dog supposedly alerted near a right-rear compartment of the RV. Gorman gave the deputy permission to search that area, but that wasn't good enough for Fisher. Fisher said the alert gave him permission to search the entire RV. This resulted in the discovery of $167,000 in cash, which Fisher took. Gorman was (again) free to go. Gorman was never charged with any criminal act, much less given a citation for the supposed moving violations that predicated the two stops.The government appealed the lower court's decision, which gave Gorman back his $167,000 plus legal fees. It raised a number of defenses for its actions (which included the state's attorney omitting several facts about the two searches from its affidavits), but the Appeals Court is no more receptive of this deception and deceit than the lower court. From the decision [PDF]:

As we reported last month, CDN provider Cloudflare has decided to hit back against patent troll Blackbird Technologies with an aggressive strategy. Leading this charge is Doug Kramer, Cloudflare's General Counsel, who joins us this week to discuss the current situation with Blackbird and the broader patent landscape.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes or Google Play, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

The ACLU is celebrating twenty years of making the internet better. On June 26th, 1997, the ACLU prevailed in Reno v. ACLU, with the Supreme Court striking down the anti-indecency portions of the 1996 Communications Decency Act (CDA).As can be gathered by the law's name, it was written from a position of morality and panic -- the fear that the internet's connectivity would drown the nation's youth in easily-accessible porn. And yet, the law survives today as one of the most important factors in the internet's speedy growth, thanks to Section 230, which prevents service providers and social media platforms from being held civilly responsible for users' posts and actions.But it might not have been that way. In 1996, the ACLU didn't even have a website of its own and most legislators had nothing more than bill sponsors' parades of horribles to go on. So, for the children, the CDA criminalized "obscene or indecent" material if it could be viewed by minors.It was another case of legislators "knowing" what was indecent when they saw it. But even under that wholly subjective standard, the government spent most of its time shrugging.

We already wrote about the new Copyright Office report on DMCA 1201 -- the section of the law that deals with the "anti-circumvention" provisions of the DMCA. That post focused on the realization by the Copyright Office that the current setup of 1201 does significant harm to security research, as researchers are often frightened to actually investigate certain technologies out of a fear that they may accidentally violate copyright law in getting around some sort of "technological protection measure."But there's much more in the report as well, and I want to focus on one part, in particular, because it demonstrates a disturbing way in which the Copyright Office thinks about copyright law. But to understand why, we need some background. One of our big complaints about Section 1201 is that it says that circumventing a "technological protection measure" (TPM) is a violation of copyright law by itself. That's always troubled us, because it means you can violate copyright law even if you're not infringing on anyone's copyright. And that seems... wrong. And it's why 1201 has been cited in various lawsuits that clearly have nothing whatsoever to do with copyright: such as cases about printer ink cartridges and garage door openers. And the courts have struggled with this quite a bit. Thankfully, there have been some good rulings, noting that interpreting 1201 this way is bonkers, and a clear abuse of the law for issues that have nothing to do with copyright. But... not all courts.The Copyright Office report actually has a nice rundown of some of the key caselaw history, so we'll let the report do it for us. The key issue, as the report notes, is whether or not 1201 requires a "nexus" to infringement. Specifically: should it be a 1201 violation if the underlying circumvention is done for a reason that is not even remotely connected to what copyright law actually protects?

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Stories about both the abuse of the DMCA process and the peril YouTubers regularly find themselves subject to by way of intellectual property laws are both legion, but to see the truely egregious nature of the abuse of this sort of thing, it takes a story about them intersecting. We appear to have such a story on our hands in the form of a music composer hired to work on a video game that then began sending DMCA notices to YouTubers over a contractual dispute with the game publisher. This story weaves a strange path, so let's dig in.Alex Mauer is a digital composer. She was hired to do contract work by Imagos Softworks, the developers of Starr Mazer: DSP. That game had been available for early access on Steam, but is still down at the time of this writing. The reason for that is that Mauer sent Steam a DMCA notice for the game, claiming that it used her music without proper payment. Mauer and Imagos are in the middle of a fairly heated contract dispute, one which Imagos has been taking public with explanations of what happened and why the claim is not true.

Last year, the cable industry quietly launched one of the most misleading and successful lobbying efforts in the industry's history. The target? A plan concocted by the former FCC that would have let customers watch cable programming without having to rent a cable box or use a CableCARD. Given the industry makes $21 billion annually in rental fees off of this entrenched hardware monopoly, the industry got right to work with an absolute wave of disinformation, claiming that the FCC's plan would confuse customers, increase piracy, and was (with a little help from Jesse Jackson) somehow even racist (seriously).At one point, the industry even managed to grab the help of the US Copyright Office, which falsely claimed that more cable box competition would somehow violate copyright. Of course the plan had nothing to do with copyright, and everything to do with control, exemplifying once again that for the US Copyright Office, public welfare is often a distant afterthought.As part of this stage show, the cable industry also created a group specifically tasked with attacking the proposal. Dubbed the Future of TV Coalition, the group set forth to not only attack the FCC's plan, but to propose its own counter proposal it claimed made any cable box reform efforts at the FCC unnecessary. Dubbed the "ditch the box" proposal, the cable industry and the Future of TV Coalition breathlessly stated the industry (pdf) was already cooking up ways to help consumers avoid rental fees have greater choice, and that these efforts were already well underway:

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld Matthew Keys' conviction and sentence of two years for a 40-minute web defacement he didn't actually perform himself. That works out to basically 18 days for every minute of mild disruption the LA Times suffered, as it (very briefly) suffered through a headline changed to read "Pressure builds in House to elect CHIPPY 1337."Prosecutors actually wanted five years for this momentary mild hacking, but still managed to end up with two years after the LA Times submitted enough paperwork to make it appear as though this 40-minute malicious hiccup racked up $1 million in CFAA damages.The appeals court isn't there to question the accuracy of the LA Times' bill of lading, but it does use the inflated figure to affirm the part of the sentencing affected by the claimed damages. From the unpublished opinion [PDF]:

Of all the wonderful gifts the internet has bestowed upon humanity, there is perhaps none more precious to me than the now famous Crying Jordan meme. After Michael Jordan's tearful Hall of Fame induction speech, an image of him in tears took on the secondary purpose of being photoshopped onto anyone the internet wanted to portray as being sad or upset about pretty much anything. The creativity of some of the memes is nearly unmatched, leading to it becoming so popular that then President Obama brought it up when giving Jordan the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In other words, as far as internet memes go, the crying Jordan meme is nearly as prolific and celebrated as the basketball career of Jordan itself.Which is why it's somewhat odd that the loser of a local township committee election went completely bonkers when he himself got "crying Jordan'd."

There are few things I hate more than when tech platforms -- which have benefited from key rights provided to internet platforms and the public -- turn around and abuse the law to try to silence or kill off others. And the latest company to dive headfirst into this unfortunate pool of shame is Zillow, which is threatening to sue the person behind McMansionHell.com based on a number of different awful interpretations of the law that can be summed up as: "hey, you can't use our images to make fun of homes."This threat against McMansion Hell is particularly dumb. On multiple levels. The threat letter offers up a bunch of theories for why McMansion Hell is illegal, none of which make any sense at all when you dig in. Zillow just looks like a particularly assholish, censorial thug.McMansion Hell, if you didn't already know about it, is basically exactly what it says on the tin. It's a website that looks critically at some trends in home design. I've visited the site a few times in the past, but not in a while -- and because of the threat, the site is currently down. This is what you see as I write this:But, before that, it looked something like this (via Google Cache):I realize there's a lot there, but the site would take a bunch of images, of houses, sometimes adding annotations and captions and the go into great detail critiquing a trend, or style, or architectural or real estate idea. It was informative and funny. And, at least for the time being, it doesn't exist.Zillow's legal theories here are... mostly of the crazypants variety. First, the letter says that McMansion Hell is violating Zillow's terms of service, because the terms of service forbid reproducing or modifying images on Zillow.

Last week, the Copyright Office finally released a report that it had been working on for some time, looking specifically at Section 1201 of the DMCA. In case you're new around here, or have somehow missed all the times we've spoken about DMCA 1201 before, that's the "anti-circumvention" part of the DMCA. It's the part that says it's against copyright law to circumvent (or provide tools to circumvent) any kind of "technological protection measures," by which it means DRM. In short: getting around DRM or selling a tool that gets around DRM -- even if it's not for the purpose of infringing on any copyrights -- is seen as automatically infringing copyright law. This is dumb for a whole host of reasons, many of which we've explored in the past. Not only is the law dumb, it's so dumb that Congress knew that it would create a massive mess for tons of legitimate uses. So it built in an even dumber procedure to try to deal with the fact it passed a dumb law (have you noticed I have opinions on Section 1201?).Specifically, every three years, people and companies can petition the Copyright Office/Librarian of Congress to "exempt" certain technologies or uses from 1201, saying that it is legal to circumvent the technological protection measures in that case, for the succeeding three years (yes, after three years, the original exemption expires, unless it is renewed). This triennial review process has historically been an (annoying) joke, where people basically have to beg the Copyright Office to let them, say, get around DVD DRM, in order to make documentaries. Or, famously, that time in 2012 when the Librarian of Congress refused to renew the phone unlocking exemption, magically making it illegal to unlock your phone for no clear reason at all. The whole thing is fairly described as a hot mess.And, it really harms our own security the most.That's because security researchers often need these exemptions the most, because they don't want to be accused of violating copyright law for doing their jobs in figuring out where there are weaknesses and vulnerabilities in various technologies. So, many of the applied for exemptions tend to come from the security community -- and sometimes they're granted, and other times they are not. A year ago, some security researchers (along with the EFF) sued the US government, arguing that 1201 violates the First Amendment, scaring off security researchers, and providing none of the usual defenses against infringement, such as fair use (which the Supreme Court has argued is a necessary First Amendment valve on copyright). That case is still waiting for a judge to rule on early motions (and it's waiting a long time).Given all that as background, it's somewhat fascinating (and marginally surprising) to see that the Copyright Office officially agrees that the 1201 setup totally sucks for security researchers, and it would actually like Congress to fix that. The report specifically recommends expanding the existing "permanent exemption" for certain types of "security testing" to make it more applicable to a wider set of security practices:

Last year, you might recall that AT&T came up with an ingenious idea: to charge broadband customers significantly more if they actually wanted to protect their own privacy. It basically worked like this: users ordering AT&T's broadband service could get the service for, say, $70 a month. But if that user wanted to opt out of AT&T's Internet Preferences snoopvertising program (which used deep packet inspection to study your movement around the Internet down to the second) users were forced to pay upwards of $800 more each year. With its decision, AT&T effectively made user privacy a premium service.AT&T backed off this idea after massive backlash, in part because the former, Wheeler-run FCC had started raising a stink about the practice, but also because it wanted regulatory approval for its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner.But after successfully lobbying the GOP to kill FCC broadband consumer privacy protections (which would have let the FCC crack down on these kinds of practices on a case-by-case basis), AT&T is apparently considering bringing the program back.Speaking last week on C-SPAN's The Communicators program, AT&T Senior Vice President Bob Quinn acknowledged that AT&T's first attempt to charge more for privacy didn't go over all that well:

Winning the never-coveted "Stupid Patent of the Month" award is no honor. In fact, it sometimes enrages recipients to the point of sueball-throwing. But there is definitely a large amount of schadenfreude to be enjoyed by onlookers -- perhaps no more so than in the case of 2015 "SPotM" winner, conspiratorially-monikered Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations, LLC (whose limited liability fails to save it).Rothschild "invented" a method of hooking up a mixing device to the internet to allow consumers to produce custom blends of their own. Prior art should have invalidated it, but didn't. Instead, the stupid patent allowed Rothschild to go after anyone who allowed users to customize anything over the internet. In one case, Rothschild applied its super-vague patent to a remotely accessible thermostat, arguing this was patent infringement because it allowed users to remotely customize temperatures. To cap off its troll pedigree, Rothschild filed all of its infringement lawsuits in the Eastern Texas District.Now it's being told by the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals it must shell out some money for its disingenuous claims and litigation. (h/t The Technologist) As the opinion details, Rothschild tried to dismiss the lawsuit once it became apparent it wasn't going to win. The defendant served Rothschild with notice the patent would likely be found invalid after examination, as its first patent claim was ineligible for protection under federal law. ADS (the defendant) offered to settle for $43,000 in legal fees. Rothschild refused.ADS then filed a motion to dismiss, using the same information it had given to Rothschild. It also included prior art that further bolstered its claims about the patent's lack of validity. Rothschild quickly moved to dismiss the case, hoping to avoid both a settlement or being stuck with paying the defendant's legal fees. This attempt failed.ADS moved to block the dismissal, detailing Rothchild's long history of patent trolling. From the decision [PDF]:

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As you are likely already aware, there is something of a debate about debates that occur on college campuses these days. Amidst a climate of ultra-polarized politics, there have been several high profile incidents on college campuses involving a revolt by student bodies -- and, allegedly, outside troublemakers -- over specific speakers invited onto campus and topics opened for debate. In reaction to these revolts that generally end with colleges uninviting speakers, some states have decided to try to legislate against this sort of thing in the name of free speech. It's one of those unhappy circumstances in which everyone on every side appears to be wrong. Student revolts and petitions to uninvite speakers are themselves a form of speech and worthy of protection, even if that sort of thing is antithetical to the university experience and ultimately works counter to the aims of the students doing the revolting. Meanwhile, the uninvited and their supporters are shouting about censorship in a way that suggests their views must be tolerated without reaction, which is a complete misunderstanding of how free speech works. As for the politicians, the haphazard decision to legislate on matters of speech in this matter betrays a lack of understanding of how sacred our free expression laws are in America and the care with which any lawmakers ought to take on the topic.For an example of that, we need only look to Wisconsin, where a bill is being considered in reaction to all of this that would essentially force universities to take no position on any current topic that can be seen as controversial. School administrators are rightly concerned about the laughably vague language in the bill.

The TSA continues to expand the intrusiveness of its searches, supposedly justified by an increased threat to air travel that doesn't seem to have materialized. In fact, the TSA has admitted attacks on airplanes are the threat voted Least Likely To Occur. One only needs to look at the recent string of terrorist attacks to see there are far more efficient ways to attack the populace than purchasing a ticket and making your way past security.Nevertheless, the charade continues, only with more of it as often as possible. Fliers are now being asked to stow explosive batteries in the cargo hold and liquid limits are still being enforced to ensure dangerous things like medication and breast milk aren't brought on board.Now, the TSA wants to know what you're reading. As airlines have increased rates for checked bags, travellers are packing more and more into their carry-on luggage. This is causing problems for the TSA's X-ray machines, which are having more trouble discerning what's actually being carried in passengers' bags. The densest materials are the hardest to "see" through, so TSA agents will now be demanding access to reading materials travelers are carrying.

There's been no unified push for encryption backdoors from world leaders, but the number of those suggesting it might be a good idea has increased in recent months. UK Prime Minister Theresa May recently said terrorists shouldn't be allowed to use Whatsapp to hide their conversations from law enforcement even as her own party members routinely use the app to engage in secure communications. Newly-elected French president Emmanuel Macron said basically the same thing while campaigning, stating a preference for compelled access to encrypted communications.Shortly before he was shown the exit door, former FBI director James Comey floated the idea of an "international framework" for encryption backdoors. It appeared Comey realized he wasn't going to be able to sell this idea at home, so perhaps a little international peer pressure would push US legislators towards mandating lawful access.Comey may get his wish, even if he won't be able to take advantage of it himself. Australian Attorney General George Brandis is stating he'll be pushing for backdoors at the next Five Eyes meetup.

This week, there was lots of talk about the lawsuit against HBO's John Oliver from Bob Murray over a report about his coal company. There was some back-and-forth about Oliver's political leanings and the like, during which one anonymous commenter won most insightful comment of the week by cutting through some of the partisan fog:

Five Years AgoThe Charles Carreon saga continued this week in 2012, with a lawsuit against Matthew Inman and the charities he was raising money for. When the full details of the suit became public, so did all sorts of nuttiness contained therein. Inman came to the table with an open letter, telling Carreon to take some time off and cool down — but he didn't listen, and promised to subpoena Twitter and Ars Technica over a parody account mocking him. Finally, at the very end of the week, he admitted the initial lawsuit was a mistake — but kept on digging anyway with new bizarre theories and attacks.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, NBC was on a copyright warpath, trying to get the FCC to force ISPs to monitor traffic for infringement, and trotting out the now famously hilarious attempt to blame movie piracy for hurting corn farmers. Viacom was still going full-force against YouTube and bulldozing over fair use in the process, even as YouTube (which played a big role in ending P2P's dominance of web traffic) was unveiling its video editing tool to encourage more user-generated content. And EMI was oh-so-shockingly discovering that people responded positively to the sale of DRM-free music.Fifteen Years AgoThere are a variety of reactions I often have to these stories from these early days of Techdirt. Sometimes they include amusingly incorrect predictions or shockingly precise ones; sometimes it's simply intriguing to see the small beginnings of something that would later become a big deal. This week in 2002, there was one post that fell into that latter category in a particularly striking way that makes it very funny to read now in all its early innocence, and so I think it's worth reposting in full. In the days when the web was still fresh, before some of the bigger cyberwar panics, and long before today's perplexing geopolitical landscape, there was this small post entitled Can't Hack The Kremlin:

It ain't easy being a high-profile celebrity these days. A job that once mostly involved ducking cameras and putting out the occasional press release has evolved into one where multiple social media platforms must be updated so that fans feel that real connection that can only come with a carefully managed social media message. The brand is the ultimate product rather than any athletic or artistic output. To that end, even these social media messages come with sponsorships, carefully cultivated relationships with large companies itching to attach their names to well-followed celebrities and their social media accounts.Speaking of athletes, the NBA draft just happened. Many young men realized their dream to play in the NBA after years of hard work. Because they are young, many of those athletes have social media accounts with the expected platforms. And many of them posted messages about how happy they were with the draft day results. Like Markelle Fultz, for instance, who was drafted number one overall by the Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers and immediately took to Instagram to let his fans know completely, organically and authentically how pleased he was.

App-maker King, of Candy Crush fame, has built up a reputation for itself as a trademark bully. The company has previously attempted to threaten pretty much any game or mobile app that utilizes the words "candy" or "saga." And if that sounds insane to you, you're not alone, as there have been several instances of severe backlash against how King goes about "protecting" its trademarks.As this site's version of the saying goes: live by the intellectual property, die by the intellectual property. Well, not die, perhaps, but it's slightly amusing to watch King have its "Crush" trademark opposed by Dr. Pepper.

See Something, Say Something (UK Edition) has arrived! In the wake of terrorist attacks, local law enforcement are urging people to report "suspicious" activities. There's a long list of things to be on the lookout for, but most notable is the call to view certain internet use as suspicious, as Joseph Cox reports.

So (for good reason), we keep noting that if you want to see how the American broadband market really works, you should take a close look at West Virginia. As in most states, a lack of competition keeps broadband prices high and speeds slow, with far too many consumers forced to pay a tidy sum for DSL speeds circa 2002. But the state has also been embroiled in scandal after scandal involving Frontier Communication's mismanagement of taxpayer subsidies that were intended to try and resolve this problem.Local Charleston Gazette reporter Eric Eyre has quietly done an amazing job the last few years chronicling West Virginia's immense broadband dysfunction, from the State's use of broadband stimulus subsidies on unused, overpowered routers and overpaid, redundant consultants, to state leaders' attempts to bury reports supporting allegations that Frontier engaged in systemic, statewide fraud on the taxpayer dime.Eyre is back again directing readers to a new report by the US Commerce Department's Office of Inspector General (pdf) which found that Frontier pretty consistently tried to game the subsidy system, imposing various "loading" and "invoice processing" fees -- outlawed by federal grant rules governing stimulus funding -- on to invoices submitted to the state. Frontier consistently used these fees to pad their bills to the tune of $4.7 million, and internal memos feature employees clearly demonstrating that Frontier saw this bill padding as a way to glean some additional profit on the taxpayer's dime:

Everything anyone has ever said about staying safe while interacting with the police is wrong. That citizens are told to comport themselves in complete obeisance just to avoid being beaten or shot by officers is itself bizarre -- an insane inversion of the term "public servant." But Philando Castile, who was shot five times and killed by (now former) Officer Jeronimo Yanez, played by all the rules (which look suspiciously like the same instructions given to stay "safe" during an armed robbery). It didn't matter.Castile didn't have a criminal record -- or at least nothing on it that mattered. Otherwise, he wouldn't have been allowed to own a weapon, much less obtain a permit to conceal the gun. Castile told Yanez -- as the permit requires -- he had a concealed weapon. He tried to respond to the officer's demand for his ID, reaching into his pocket. For both of these compliant efforts, he was killed.Castile's shooting might have gone unnoticed -- washed into the jet stream of "officer-involved killings" that happen over 1,000 time a year. But his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, immediately live-streamed the aftermath via Facebook. Her boyfriend bled out while responding officers tried to figure out what to do, beyond call for more backup to handle a dead black man sitting in his own vehicle. Only after Yanez fired seven bullets into the cab of the vehicle did officers finally remove his girlfriend's four year old daughter.To "win" at killing citizens, you must start the spin immediately. Yanez spun his own, speaking to a lawyer less than two hours after killing Castile. Local law enforcement did the same thing. Documents obtained by Tony Webster show Special Agent Bill O'Donnell issued a warrant to Facebook for "all information retained" by the company on Diamond Reynolds, Castile's girlfriend. This was to include all email sent or received by that account, as well as "chat logs," which presumably means the content of private messages. The warrant also demands any communications that may have been deleted by Reynolds, as well as metadata on photos or videos uploaded to Facebook. It came accompanied with an indefinite gag order.Why would law enforcement want (much less need) information from the victim's girlfriend's Facebook account? It appears officers were looking to justify the killing after the fact. The following sworn statement was contained in the affidavit:

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Yesterday we wrote about coal company Murray Energy and its CEO, Bob Murray, actually following through and suing John Oliver -- something that Murray's lawyers had threatened to do when Oliver and his team had reached out to Murray for a piece Oliver was doing on coal. The result of being threatened was that Oliver spent nearly half of the 24 minute segment on Murray, carefully detailing some of Murray's history and positions. If you missed it, watch it again here:Anyway, when we wrote about the case yesterday, we noted that we had to do it based solely on the reporting of the Daily Beast, as they broke the story and -- for reasons I still don't understand -- refused to post the actual complaint. However, now we've obtained the full complaint and can dig in on how incredibly silly it is. It appears to be a quintessential SLAPP lawsuit, where the entire point is not to bring a legitimate cause of action, but to chill free speech that criticizes Bob Murray. As Ken "Popehat" White notes, it's "lawsuit as theater" and "an unapologetic political screed" -- that is, apparently designed to rile people up, rather than to present a reasonable legal argument.Let's dig in. It certainly starts out on a high note with the rhetoric:

Here on Techdirt we've written much about the way Western pharma companies fight for their "right" to charge unaffordable prices for medicines in emerging and developing economies. In particular, they routinely take governments and local generic suppliers to court in an attempt to shore up highly-profitable monopolies on life-saving drugs. But to be fair, it's not only poorer people who are dying as a result of Big Pharma's desire to maximize profits: Western drug companies are equally happy to charge even higher prices in richer countries -- notably in the US. That's old news. But there is a pharmaceutical saga unfolding that manages to combine all the worst aspects of this kind of behavior, and to throw in a few new ones.It concerns something really exciting and important: a vaccine that shows great promise against the devastating Zika virus, which can cause microcephaly, blindness, deafness, and calcification of the brain in children whose mothers were infected during their pregnancy. If effective, such a vaccine could be a tremendous boon not just for developing countries, but for Western ones too, since the Zika virus has already begun to spread in the US, and Europe. The vaccine was developed at the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research, and the Department of the Army funded its development. Great news, you might think: the US public paid for it, so it's only right that it should have low-cost access to it. Moreover, as an act of compassion -- and to burnish its international image -- the US could allow other countries to produce it cheaply too. But an article in The Nation reports that the US Army has other ideas:

Wall Street is finally starting to realize there's a storm brewing on the horizon for the nation's biggest cable companies. Cable stocks took a notable dip this week after MoffettNathanson analyst Craig Moffett downgraded the entire cable sector because of worries surrounding cord cutting and streaming video competition. Moffett, who not that long ago used to mock cord cutters for being irrelevant basement dwellers, has seen the light -- more recently noting that 2016's 1.7% decline in traditional cable TV viewers was the biggest cord cutting acceleration on record.And in a lengthy research note to investors this week, the analyst warned that the cable industry's approach to cord cutting (raising rates and offering horrible customer service while hoping it all works out) simply isn't going to cut it given the competitive threats to come:

The history of Wikileaks and its founder Julian Assange is a tortured one, to be sure. Once the darling of the left for exposing important misdeeds by the American government, the site then became a tool for the right in the last Presidential election with the publishing of emails stolen in a hack of the DNC. From there, some have accused Wikileaks of being an arm of Moscow's intelligence efforts, while the America government has made noise about prosecuting the site and Assange under the Espionage Act. Still others support the site for its efforts in exposing the secrets governments wish to keep hidden from the citizens to whom they are beholden.Through it all, Assange and Wikileaks have remained firm in their mission to expose information and secrets that were previously kept from the public. Except, it seems, when that information has to do with Wikileaks itself. According to the makers of a documentary about Wikileaks entitled Risk, on the topic of Wikileaks, Wikileaks is chiefly interested not in open journalism and unvarnished truth, but rather on its own image. And apparently the site is willing to wield legal threats and lawyers in a way that is almost absurdly hypocritical.

Facial recognition software is getting to the point where there are some very interesting things that can be done with it in everyday life. That includes really bad ideas like enabling the police to run record checks on everyone who passes in front of their body-worn cameras. But it also means that businesses can start applying the technology in novel ways. Here's what is happening on a trial basis in some German supermarkets and post offices, as reported by Deutsche Welle:

The Miami-Dade Police Department has decided to drop its wide-area surveillance plan in the face of public backlash. The MDPD tried to slip it past residents and the county government by claiming the acquisition of a secret spy plane was too important to be done properly.

With the ubiquity of social media presence in people's daily lives, the past few years has seen the rise of concern over people's privacy of their social media accounts, as well as concern over how content shared on those accounts could be used against the account holder. In America, this commonly breaks mostly into concerns about prospective employers reviewing social media accounts during the hiring process and how government reviews social media accounts for law enforcement purposes. While there are real concerns to be had in both cases, however, it's useful to be reminded that there are places where it is so much worse. Useful in that it's good to be reminded what privacy advocates are fighting to keep us from. Such as death.In Pakistan, the government there has reached the unfortunate milestone of sentencing its first ever person to death over content he put on Facebook.

Under the guise of fighting sex trafficking, legislators have been offering up a slew of bills that will make things much worse for plenty of people not involved in this heinous crime. Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who is the go-to expert on all sorts of government abuse done in the name of sex-trafficked children, has tallied up the current stack of legislative paperwork floating around the halls of Congress. Spoiler alert: it's a lot.

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We've covered a lot of ridiculous defamation lawsuits here at Techdirt. A ton. MANY. We like covering them so much we bought the company. But this defamation lawsuit passed on to us by Adam Steinbaugh is just baffling. Even more baffling, it's been filed with professional representation. Its attempt to fashion a libel lawsuit out of nothing bears far more resemblance to those filed by plaintiffs with fools for lawyers.In March of last year, Jim Myers of the The Tennessean wrote an article about some staff changes at a local university's culinary arts program. If this seems like extraordinarily innocuous subject matter, you're obviously not former director Tom Loftis or his legal representation. Loftis has formally shouted "defamation" in a crowded courthouse. But his accusations aren't levied against Myers or The Tennessean, but rather against someone featured in the article: new culinary arts director Randy Rayburn.His complaint [PDF] tries to turn Rayburn into the libelous villain by attributing things Myers wrote about Loftis and Rayburn into direct quotes by Rayburn.

Some enterprising Colorado residents have turned a small tech panic into a stupid ballot measure. (via Free Range Kids)Dr. Timothy J. Farnum apparently doesn't like the way his teenaged kids act. He blames this on smartphones.

Back when Verizon first began expressing interest in pivoting from broadband duopolist to media and advertising, you might recall that it launched a short-lived technology blog named Sugarstring. Sugarstring quickly made headlines for all the wrong reasons however, after it was revealed that Verizon was banning any new hires from writing about hot-button subjects like net neutrality, or the fact that companies like Verizon and AT&T are now bone-grafted to the nation's intelligence and surveillance apparatus.Sugarstring is long-since dead, replaced in large part by Verizon's acquisitions of Yahoo and AOL, which also brought Huffpo, Engadget, and Techcrunch under the Verizon umbrella. And while Verizon itself has been busy using fake reporters to blatantly lie about the company's ongoing role in killing net neutrality, there's no indication (yet) that the company has pressured any of its own news outlets to quiet down on the subject. In fact, we've noted previously that some of the best reporting on net neutrality in recent months has originated at TechCrunch (this piece in particular is worth a read).But while Verizon hasn't yet tried to get its own news outlets to quiet down on net neutrality, other now-Verizon-owned companies that used to be very active on the subject have gone dead quiet. Case in point: Tumblr, which was an integral ally in the SOPA/PIPA fight and an outspoken protector of net neutrality, is now utterly radio silent as FCC boss Ajit Pai attempts to kill the popular consumer protections. Insiders at the company this week expressed their concern to the Verge that Verizon is pressuring CEO David Karp to keep his mouth shut on the subject:

This one is clearly no surprise at all, given that -- as we wrote about just a couple days ago -- Bob Murray and his company Murray Energy were threatening John Oliver with a SLAPP suit if Oliver's satirical report about the coal industry was used to "defame, harass, or otherwise injure Mr. Murray or Murray Energy." Of course, Oliver's report did no such thing... but, alas, Murray has now sued Oliver, HBO, Time Warner... and the writers of the story. The lawsuit was filed in West Virginia state court. In my original post, I suggested it might be filed in Ohio, where Murray Energy is headquartered, but it does also have operations in West Virginia as well. Either way, as with Ohio, West Virginia is a state with no anti-SLAPP law.Unfortunately, I don't have the full lawsuit. The Daily Beast, which first wrote about the case has chosen -- for whatever reason -- not to post the document, which is pretty lame. However, having watched the John Oliver piece multiple times, I can't see how any of it comes anywhere even remotely near defamatory. It falls into a variety of clearly protected categories, including opinion, satire and rhetorical hyperbole. The idea that there were materially false and defamatory statements that were put forth knowing they were false (or with reckless disregard for the truth) is laughable. There is no way that this lawsuit succeeds -- but, as we've been pointing out -- that's not really the point of most of these kinds of lawsuits. SLAPP lawsuits are designed to create a chill on free speech, by making that speech costly. Obviously, HBO/Time Warner can afford this, and have access to great lawyers, so there's almost no chance that Murray wins the lawsuit, but that's not the point. It will still cost money and lots of time to deal with the lawsuit and that's a hassle.Murray Energy put out a bizarre statement that does little to support the idea that Murray has an actual case here:

Remember CETA, the "Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement" between the EU and Canada? After years of on-off moments, including one last burst of uncertainty in March of this year, it finally seemed that everything had been settled, and that the deal would soon come into force. But it turns out that there is another, hitherto-unsuspected problem -- cheese:

The Orange County (CA) District Attorney's office remains in the news. It's not often an entire prosecutors' office gets booted off a high-profile murder case, but that's what happens when misconduct occurs on a massive scale. An open-and-shut murder case with eight victims is now the DA's perpetual nightmare. Judge Thomas Goethals kicked the agency to the curb after uncovering repeated discovery violations committed by prosecutors.But the problems go back further than this case. The office has hidden the existence of a law enforcement database from defense lawyers (and judges) for a quarter century -- a database holding all sorts of information about jailhouse snitches that may have made the difference in a number of cases.A quarter-century of obfuscation followed by outright lying on the stand by prosecution witnesses is something you'd think would be addressed by a swift housecleaning. You'd be wrong. So far, there have been no announcements from the DA about pending investigations -- either into its own misconduct, or the repeated abuses of the jail's snitch program run by the local sheriff's office.Add to that yet another revelation from the current criminal case: the sheriff's office shredded documents ahead of an announced investigation by the DOJ.

While Congress is still doing its thing to try to make the US healthcare system an even bigger laughingstock around the world, the White House is apparently considering an executive order targeting high drug prices. Of course, it handed this power over to Joe Grogan, a (very recent) former lobbyist for a giant pharma company, Gilead, that has been at the center of some controversy over its highly priced drugs. Grogan is apparently leading this effort despite not having an ethics waiver, which means he's supposed to recuse himself from these discussions, rather than lead them. But, you know, that's not happening in the swampy, swampy waters of Washington DC. So just what would Grogan suggest as a way to lower drug prices? How about extending pharmaceutical patents? Yes. Extending.

James Comey may have been unceremoniously dumped by the Commander-in-Chief, but his device encryption legacy lives on.

Earlier this week, we wrote about the details of the Supreme Court's ruling in Packingham v. North Carolina -- the case that said a North Carolina law that barred convicted sex offenders from using social media was unconstitutional. There were some good lines in the ruling, but this may be the most important: