Techdirt

We've been discussing for some time how John Deere, Apple, Sony and Microsoft are among a laundry list of companies fighting against so-called "right to repair" bills. The bills, currently being pushed in a handful of different states, make it easier for consumers to repair their own products and find replacement parts and tools. The bills are an organic consumer response to the attempts of many of these companies to monopolize repair, driven in large part by John Deere's draconian lockdown on "unauthorized repairs" -- forcing tractor owners to pirate tractor firmware and maintenance tools just to repair products they thought they owned.Apple's been notably vocal on this subject, recently trying to shut down a Nebraska right to repair bill by proclaiming that it would turn the state into a dangerous hacker playground. Of course, propped up by the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules, Apple has utilized a rotating crop of tools to try and protect this repair monopoly. Last year, for example, Apple caused a bit of a shitstorm due to "Error 53", part of an iOS update that bricked phones that had their screens replaced by third party repair vendors.Having apparently learned no lessons from the backlash from that use of repair locks, Apple is once again taking heat for new software locks cooked into the iPhone 7, which prevent the device's home button from working after it has been replaced. Unless, that is, the replacement is performed by a certified Apple technician with the proper "re-calibration" software. The home button is used to unlock the phone, and to return the user to the home screen when pressed.In previous iPhone versions (iPhone 5S, 6, and 6S) if you replaced the home button you lost the security function, but users could still login via pin -- and the button still worked to bring users "home." But with the iPhone 7, replacing the home button via third-party vendor results in the button not working at all -- unless you take the device to Apple's Genius bar. This is, independent repair shops claim, just part of Apple's overall strategy of monopolizing repair, hampering third-party repair vendors, and restricting consumer choice:

Keep your information safe while browsing with the $39 unlimited subscription to VPNSecure. You can connect up to 5 devices at once to any of their servers in over 46 countries. VPNSecure proudly assures that ZERO logs are recorded, and they provide a warrant canary as well.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

It's no secret that the hotel industry hates competition from Airbnb. Hell, politicians have even admitted to crafting anti-Airbnb policies to keep hotels from being disrupted. But, now, the NY Times has got its hands on a specific plan from the hotel industry to basically hamper Airbnb and burden it with legal and policy challenges (I should note, by way of some sort of disclosure, that I'm typing this while sitting at a desk at an Airbnb apartment in Washington DC -- and, similarly, that it's much nicer and significantly cheaper than comparable hotels, but I digress...).

Back in 2008, Comcast sued the city of Chattanooga shortly after the city-owned utility (Electric Power Board, or EPB) announced plans to deliver the kind of cheap, ultra-fast broadband Comcast long refused to. After being saddled with legal expenses, EPB ultimately won that lawsuit, and in 2010 began offering ultra-fast fiber broadband. But it wasn't long before the community-owned broadband network ran into another obstacle: a Tennessee state protectionist law -- quite literally written by AT&T and Comcast -- that hamstrung the operation and prohibited it from expanding.Fast forward nearly a decade, and EPB now offers symmetrical gigabit connections for around $70 a month -- at least to the parts of Chattanooga ISP lobbyists have allowed it to. A 2016 survey by Consumer Reports ranked EPB, outside of Google Fiber, as the only ISP with a truly positive consumer satisfaction rating among the 30 national ISPs ranked by the magazine. Chattanooga's Mayor, meanwhile, has cited EPB as a major contributor to the city's reinvention.Facing this weird new phenomenon known as competition, Comcast this year finally broke down and brought its own gigabit offering (technically 1 Gbps down, 35 Mbps up) to the city. But Comcast being Comcast, it simply couldn't help but saddle the offering with a number of restrictions. Specifically, Comcast's offering the gigabit option to Chattanooga residents for $70 a month -- but only if they're willing to sign a three year contract. If users refuse -- the price of the service not only is jacked to $140 per month -- but you'll face usage caps and overage fees -- which are only avoidable if you sign the absurdly long contract.Hoping to get Chattanooga residents excited about the new option when it finally arrived a few weeks ago, Comcast posted an announcement to Facebook "introducing" the city to gigabit broadband service. It didn't go well. The company began taking an absolutely ferocious beating from area locals tired of Comcast's high prices and legendarily-bad customer service:Take note of the automated Comcast "support" representative that appears to believe they're "helping" without any understanding of the context of the concerns. The beating proceeds like this for an amazingly long time, consistently citing slow speeds, high prices and poor service:You may notice a consistent theme or two brought up by Chattanooga locals. The beating was so severe it made the Chattanooga Times Free Press, via which Comcast tried to claim that the response to the company's quickly-backfiring ad campaign was a "misunderstanding":

The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has affirmed a lower court's stripping of a federal officer's qualified immunity in a… moon rock sting case. This is a thing. Relatives and friends of NASA personnel have received what they believe are gifts from them -- items containing moon rock pieces, or heat shield fragments, or whatever. The problem here is the government believes it owns anything related to its exploration missions.It's not always illegal to be in possession of these items, but as Lowering the Bar's Kevin Underhill explains, it's almost always going to be treated as illegal by the federal government.

Some more forward progress has been made against civil asset forfeiture, this time in Arizona. Governor Doug Ducey put his signature on a reform bill late last week, raising the evidentiary bar for seizures in the state.

With Steam's policy for providing refunds on digital game purchases being roughly two years old, many people forget the context of the time when Valve began offering those refunds. It's worth being reminded that at that time nobody in the neighborhood of the Steam client's popularity was offering any real avenue for getting refunds on digital game purchases. Those that did mostly did so under the most restrictive conditions, with insane single-digit day windows in which a refund could be had, and only for certain reasons, of which the game being shitty was not included. Steam's criteria was that you could request a refund during a two-week period for any reason, be it the game not living up to expectations, the gamer's machine not being able to run it properly, or anything else. The other contextual aspect to keep in mind was that Steam had endured several weeks of absolutely brutal PR, with awful customer service ratings and the whole fiasco over its attempt at creating a paid-mod system.Still, Valve broke the mold in some respects with the new policy, forcing the competition to keep up. It took two years, but Microsoft recently announced that both its Xbox and Windows 10 marketplaces will likewise offer refunds on digital purchases, with the same fourteen-day window and the same requirement that the game not have been played for more than two hours.

We've talked before about how the very nature of work is changing thanks to technology, with telecommuting being an obvious trend — but despite some early predictions about the death of the physical office, the reality is offices have been evolving and changing thanks to technology and innovation too. This week, we discuss co-working spaces and other trends in the evolution of offices.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.

We've long documented how there's a growing array of websites that seem intent on shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to "defeating" ad blocking. Quite often that includes punishing customers for a website's own misdeeds, or using ham-fisted (and frankly often broken) systems that attempt to block the ad blockers. Of course, this tends to obfuscate why these users are using blockers in the first place, whether it's to keep ads from eating their broadband usage allotments, or simply as an attempt to protect themselves from "ads" that are often indistinguishable from malware.The bottom line is that thanks to aggressive, poorly designed or downright hostile ads, many consumers quite justly now feel that ad blockers are an essential part of their privacy and security. Here at Techdirt, we long ago decided to let our visitors decide what their ad experience looks like, letting visitors disable ads entirely if that's they're preference (we just, of course, hope they'll try to support us in other ways). Elsewhere though, websites are engaged in what feels like a futile game of Whac-a-Mole that seems increasingly obvious (to some) won't be "winnable."New developments on the ad block front seem to indicate this game of Whac-a-Mole may soon end up with the mole being -- well -- most decidedly whacked.Princeton and Stanford researchers say they've developed a new method of blocking advertisements that detects ads the same way human beings do -- by simply looking at things like container sizes, graphical layout, and words like "Sponsored" (usually mandated by regulations or voluntary, cross-industry commitments). Computer scientist Arvind Narayanan and his colleagues have published a new paper (pdf) and proof-of-concept code for something they're calling a Perceptual Ad Blocker. Their paper describes the new technology as such:

Dive into the world of self-driving cars, speech recognition technology and more with the $40 Complete Machine Learning Bundle. Over 10 courses, you will learn about pattern recognition and prediction and how to harness the power of machine learning to take your programming to the next level. Discover quant trading, how to use Hadoop and MapReduce to tackle large data sets, how to create a sentiment analyzer with Twitter and Python and much more.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Last week, we wrote twice about sculptor Arturo Di Modica and his claim that the "Fearless Girl" statue, that was placed last month in front of his "Charging Bull" statue, violates his rights. As we explained, in detail, he has almost no legal case here. His letter to New York City argues three possible claims of action -- all of which would almost certainly be losers in court (as we detailed in that last post).However, I still have seen a bunch of people arguing in support of Di Modica, claiming that he "has a point." Many have pointed to a blog post by Greg Fallis that is literally titled "Seriously, the guy has a point." Others have raised other issues in discussions I've seen (and taken part in...) on Twitter and Facebook. I still don't think he has any point at all, but I wanted to do a post addressing each of the key issues I've seen raised, and explaining why I think they fail as legitimate arguments.Fearless Girl is an adI had debated mentioning this in the first post (and only obliquely noted that "there have been some criticisms" of Fearless Girl), but decided it was really meaningless. But people keep bringing it up, so let's address it. Yes, the Fearless Girl statue is an advertisement of sorts. The whole thing was created and financed by State Street, a massive investment firm, with help from McCann, one of the giant ad agencies. And a big part of the criticism is that State Street has a "gender diversity index" whose ticker symbol is SHE, focused on tracking the performance of "companies with the highest levels within their sectors of gender diversity on their boards of directors and in their senior leadership." And Fearless Girl has a plaque that says: "Know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference." Many have, quite reasonably, argued that (especially given the capitalization of SHE) Fearless Girl is just an advertisement.And the response to that should be... so what? As we've pointed out for many, many years, all content is advertising in some sense. It may be advertising for the artist. It may be advertising some idea. It may be advertising a theme. Di Modica's bull was "advertising" the resiliency of American capitalism. Just because it's advertising doesn't mean it's not artwork. And even advertising can have a positive social message. So, the claim that it's "advertising" doesn't really impact anything here. Yes. It's advertising. So what? It's also still art, and was created by a real artist whose own work and talents are unfairly diminished when you say that it's not art just because someone paid for it and it advertises something else. Or as our own Leigh Beadon points out:

The current administration is back to threatening free speech. On his way to being elected, Trump's passion for bogus defamation suits led him to declare he would "open up" libel laws to make it easier for him to sue people for saying things he didn't like.This continued after the election. Trump tweeted his opposition to "fake news," calling out pretty much any major network that wasn't Fox News and calling them "enemies of the people." His new CIA director, Mike Pompeo, is similarly threatening the First Amendment. In his remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Pompeo went on a rant about Wikileaks -- one no doubt motivated by the site's recent data dumps on CIA computer exploits.

We've noted repeatedly how modern toys aren't immune to the security and privacy dysfunction the internet-of-broken-things has become famous for. A new WiFi-enabled Barbie, for example, has come under fire for trivial security that lets the toy be modified for use as a surveillance tool. We've also increasingly noted how the data these toys collect isn't secured particularly well either, as made evident by the Vtech incident, where hackers obtained the names, email addresses, passwords, and home addresses of 4,833,678 parents, and the first names, genders and birthdays of more than 200,000 kids.Last fall a lawsuit was filed against Genesis Toys, maker of the My Friend Cayla doll and the i-Que Intelligent Robot. The lawsuit accuses the company of violating COPPA (the Childrens' Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998) by failing to adequately inform parents that their kids' conversations and personal data collected by the toys are being shipped off to servers and third-party companies for analysis. A report by the Norwegian Consumer Council (pdf) also found that a lot of the data being transmitted by these toys is done so via vanilla, unencrypted HTTP connections that could be subject to man-in-the-middle attacks.In Germany, where surveillance fears run a little deeper for obvious reasons, regulators last February went so far as to urge German parents to destroy the My Friend Cayla doll, highlighting that hackers can use an unsecure bluetooth device embedded in the toy to listen to and to talk to the child playing with it. Since then, Germany's Federal Network Agency has clarified its position further. It's not only banning the sale, purchase, and ownership of the toy, but it's warning families that they face fines up to $26,500 if they don't comply with demands that the toy be destroyed:

Microsoft is the latest to publish a National Security Letter, following Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Calyx, Cloudflare, and… the Internet Archive. Microsoft's NSL [PDF] was issued by the FBI (of course) and demanded the usual subscriber info.In the post accompanying the disclosure, Microsoft points out the USA Freedom Act is the only reason it's been able to release the NSL. This is one of the benefits of the recent law: a better, faster way to compel review of NSL gag orders, which used to take place almost never.In addition, Microsoft notes FISA orders are on the rise. Of course, its reporting is limited to useless "bands," so the only thing that can definitely be determined is Microsoft's FISA interactions have at least doubled.

China's censorship of the Internet is both impressively thorough, and yet surprisingly subtle at times. For example, we've already written about ways in which the boundary between censored and non-censored is often vague, which paradoxically encourages people to be even more cautious than they would be with well-defined limits. But hidden among all the uncertainty, are there perhaps some fixed rules about when posts will definitely get censored?A team of researchers at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab decided to find out by investigating one of the topics considered most controversial by the Chinese authorities, the so-called "709 Crackdown." This refers to a major government clampdown that began on July 9 in 2015, when more than 250 Chinese rights lawyers, law firm staff, activists, and their relatives were detained by public security agents across China. Internet users are understandably keen to discuss this important event, and many of those conversations take place on the main blog site in China, Weibo, and using the messaging service WeChat, which is even more popular. But as the researchers discovered, those online conversations were subject to subtle but consistent interference:

In the wake of the success of Nintendo's Mario Maker game, Nintendo fans almost immediately began clamoring for similar versions of other classic Nintendo properties. The obvious choice for the next franchise to get the treatment was the Zelda series, of course. The desire for a Zelda Maker title reached enough of a pitch that Game Informer asked Nintendo reps in 2015 about whether the company would be producing such a game.

A number of statutes and practices have created perverse incentives for law enforcement, but none are nearly so blatant as this Alabama state law governing the feeding of inmates. The law, passed over 100 years ago, says law enforcement personnel -- mainly sheriffs -- can keep whatever's left over from state and federal inmate food stipends. This doesn't mean the leftover money is routed to a general fund or used to defray law enforcement/jail-related expenses. No, this means the money flows from taxpayers, (mostly) bypasses prisoners, and ends up in sheriffs' personal checking accounts. (via Radley Balko)This legalized skimming has resulted in the obvious: underfed inmates and sheriffs with overfed bank accounts. The law first received national attention in 2008, when Morgan County sheriff Greg Bartlett found himself in federal court, defending himself against a lawsuit brought by his prisoners. Inmates were dropping weight and going hungry while Bartlett increased his personal income by $212,000 over three years, taking home a great deal of the $1.75 per prisoner per day state funds. (Federal prisoners housed in state jails are allowed $3 per day, which can also be rerouted to sheriffs' checking accounts.)This resulted in Bartlett spending one night in his own jail. Even then, Sheriff Bartlett was violating an earlier consent decree with the federal government, which ordered his office to use *all* food funds for feeding inmates. The agreement Bartlett reached with the court (after a night in jail) promised his office would do the same thing: spend all the funds on food, rather than diverting them for personal use.Even with two consent decrees in place and a previous sheriff being hauled into court for personally profiting from inmates' hunger, another Morgan County sheriff (Ana Franklin) has repeated her predecessor's misdeeds.

Late last week (beyond filing a new document in the lawsuit against us), we also filed an amicus brief, put together by Stanford's IP law clinic and Paul Levy at Public Citizen regarding a terrible and dangerous ruling for free speech in California. We wrote about it last summer and how dangerous it is -- but let's hold off on the details of the case right now.Instead, I'd like to go back one more year to May of 2015, when we wrote about a bizarre case in which the Phi Sigma Sigma sorority was officially suing a "Jane Doe" former member, who had apparently posted the sorority's super secret handshake to the Penny Arcade forums.

As you've probably heard by now, on Sunday a horrific act of violence happened when a clearly disturbed individual apparently decided to (1) randomly murder an elderly man walking down the street, (2) film the entire process from searching for the guy, approaching him, talking to him and then shooting him, and (3) upload it to Facebook for people to see. The police initially reported that he streamed the murder live, but it was later clarified that, while he had streamed some other commentary live earlier in the day, the murder was filmed separately and then uploaded. Still, as happens all too often in these situations, people are immediately jumping to the moral panic stage and asking, as Wired did quickly after, what kind of responsibility Facebook should take. The title of the article says that Facebook "must now face itself" for streaming the murder -- but then seems to have trouble explaining just what it needs to face (perhaps because... there isn't anything for it to face).

Upgrade your Lightning cable game with two Toughlink MFi-Certified Metal Braided Lightning Cables for only $30. These metal braided MFi-Certified Lightning to USB cables are optimized for data syncing and charging, and boast a rugged aluminum crush-proof plug design that will make them last as long as you've got an iPhone.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

It will never be said that the Trump presidency began with a presumption of openness. His pre-election refusal to release his tax returns set a bit of precedent in that regard. The immediate post-election muffling of government agency social media accounts made the administration's opacity goals… um… clearer.So, in an unsurprising move, the Trump administration will be doing the opposite of the Obama administration. The American public will no longer have the privilege of keeping tabs on White House visitors. (h/t Alex Howard)

As we've explained, with Congress voting (and the President signing) a bill to kill off the FCC's broadband privacy rules, things are not necessarily as bad as some might have you believe, but they're still bad. And lots and lots of people seem to be asking their elected representatives why they did this. After all, despite the fact that the vast majority of both Republican and Democratic voters supported the rules (as they did with net neutrality rules as well...), in Congress everyone lined up along party lines over this issue, with Republican members of Congress voting down the rules.At least some are now facing backlash over this... and they don't seem to be handling it well. Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner seems to have what may be the worst possible take on this after being asked about it. He told a constituent, to maybe just not use the internet if you don't like it. That linked article only has part of the quote, but here's the video of the question and the response:

The Shadow Brokers -- having failed to live up to half their name -- released more NSA exploits last week when it became apparent no one was willing to purchase the exploits from them. This dump was far more interesting than previous releases, as it contained a large number of Windows exploits and -- for some -- a very handy, easy-to-use front end for malware deployment.This dump probably ruined a few Easter weekends at Microsoft, but not nearly as many as was first presumed. While the exploits targeted older versions of Windows, they would have caused trouble for government and corporate networks still relying those versions. Those targeting unsupported versions are the most dangerous, as those holes will never be patched. They're also the ones with the smallest user bases, so that mitigates the damage somewhat.As Marcy Wheeler points out, the NSA had plenty of time to warn Microsoft about unpatched holes prior to the Shadow Brokers' latest dump.

This week, the silver lining on a horrible story of police battering an arrestee was that the deputy, at least, lost his immunity. One anonymous commenter won most insightful comment of the week by giving a nod to the victim's courage and resilience:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, Congress (apparently having learned nothing from SOPA) was pushing forward with CISPA, the new cybersecurity bill. In its original form it was really, really bad — then a new draft was released that was slightly better but still full of problems. Nevertheless, the House Intelligence Committee launched a new Twitter account to misleadingly plug the bill, and it was even supported by companies like Facebook along with a promise not to abuse it — though we challenged them to go a step further and withdraw support until it was fixed to prevent anyone from abusing it.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, the lacklustre response to the Windows Vista launch was sending ripple effects through the computer hardware industry, though it appeared to be a bad time for consumer electronics in general. Though while some were chattering about Microsoft's demise, cooler heads pointed out that might be going a bit too far.Also this week in 2007: Perfect 10 reared its head with a shotgun spray of lawsuits, a court pointed out the should-have-been-obvious fact that the First Amendment applies on MySpace as much as it does anywhere else, and Techdirt was nominated for a Webby award.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, plenty of folks were busy hacking the iPod to do new things and helping chart the future of mobile devices — right at the same time that thumb keyboards were becoming all the rage in the wake of the popularity of the Blackberry. Google was still in its pre-IPO days and trying to pin down a business model, and this was long before it came into conflict with the Authors Guild which, at the time, was moaning about Amazon for showing used book prices next to new book listings. But we took a look at the other side of that equation and saw how empowering a used book selling platform can be.One-Hundred And Twenty-Three Years AgoWe've all heard of the early "nickelodeon" movie houses where five cents in a machine let you enjoy a brief kinetoscope of a butler falling over or whatever. It was on April 14, 1894 that this started with the first paid exhibition of motion pictures at Andrew M. Holland's phonograph store in New York City.

Oregon residents will be opening up their wallets and handing out $85,000 to a citizen and her ACLU representation, thanks to a police officer being the only cop on the scene unable to handle being filmed while effecting an arrest.Carrie Medina sued the city of Portland in early 2015 after an officer seized her camera and ended her livestream of an arrest two years earlier. The lawsuit [PDF], filed by the ACLU, contains the full conversation between Officer Taylor Letsis and Medina during the livestream's premature conclusion.It contains some choice highlights in law enforcement overreach and the assertion of nonexistent authority. The confrontation starts with Officer Letsis claiming Medina's phone probably contains "evidence of a crime," and continues on through to Letsis claiming his seizure and search of the phone is neither a seizure or a search but is very definitely something he has the "legal jurisdiction" to do.After some back and forth with Medina about his supposed "legal jurisdiction," Letsis decided to seize the phone and view the recording of the arrest. And by "seize," I mean "rip Medina's phone out of her hand."

It's seems like just yesterday that I was writing about how Denuvo's DRM, the once-vaunted but since defeated DRM unicorn, had been patched to Version 4 with the company proclaiming that it was once again out ahead of the pirate groups that had cracked its previous versions. Oh, wait. That actually was yesterday.Anywho, the latest version of Denuvo is being used on several recently released games, out since January, with much made about how those games were once again taking quite a bit of time before cracks for them appeared in the wild. With the company pushing the narrative that protecting the first few weeks of a game's release was where the value of Denuvo really stood, companies using the DRM likely cheered. This week, however, things took a familiar turn for the DRM unicorn.

As you probably know, each month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) posts its "Stupid Patent of the Month" post, highlighting particularly egregious patents that never should have been approved and/or particularly egregious patent litigation around those patents. You might know about this even if you don't follow the EFF's own website, because we almost always repost those posts here on Techdirt, under EFF's Creative Commons' license. In fact, last summer, we reposted EFF's article about US Patent 6,690,400, held by Global Equity Management (SA) Pty. Ltd. ("GEMSA"), an Australian company that has all the hallmarks of a classic patent troll. You can read that post for the details of the patent in question, but suffice it to say, EFF described it as "storage cabinets on a computer" and GEMSA has sued dozens of companies, rarely explaining how they possibly infringe. For example, in suing Airbnb, all GEMSA notes is that the site's user interface "infringes one or more of the claims of the '400 patent."Not surprisingly, GEMSA was not particularly thrilled about being named the holder of a "stupid patent of the month" or to have EFF make fun of its lawsuits. Unlike, say, IBM, who upon being named a stupid patentholder of the month appeared to see the error of its ways, GEMSA decided to really double down. It went to court. In Australia. And got an order telling EFF to take down the article and barring EFF from publishing anything about any of GEMSA's patents.Now, we've written multiple times in the past about Australia's questionable views on internet free speech and prior restraint. However, we've also noted -- quite directly, that the SPEECH Act quite clearly bars such Australian court orders from being valid in the US.It appears that the good folks at the EFF will now be putting that to the test. They've filed for declaratory judgment in federal court in the Northern District of California to have the court say that the court order from Down Under is unenforceable here. You can check out the full filing here or embedded below.The filing goes into fairly great detail about just how really upset GEMSA is. It literally claims that calling its patent "stupid" is "misleading" because the patent "is not in fact 'stupid.'" Very convincing. There are also some bizarre conspiracy theory claims, including saying that the filings in some of GEMSA's lawsuits against Airbnb and Zillow "are not available in the public domain" despite them being available on PACER (and "GEMSA's own press release announcing its first wave of lawsuits attaches a copy of one of the complaints and explicitly notes that they are public records available on PACER.")Whether or not Australians' somewhat twisted views on free speech say that you cannot give your opinion that a patent is stupid, in the US that's very clearly protected speech. Furthermore, here in the US, you cannot bar someone from ever talking about your patents. That's known as prior restraint and, as good old Walter Sobchak from the Big Lebowski eloquently stated: "The Supreme Court has roundly rejected prior restraint."That said, as EFF notes, without a declaratory judgment, GEMSA can continue to threaten EFF with enforcement (it is already demanding that EFF remove the article, pay it money, and get others to remove links). Or, worse, GEMSA might use the Australian court order to get the article delisted from search engines. There is a real possibility of chilling effects:

XenApp is an industry-leading solution for virtual application delivery, allowing people to access Windows apps on any device, anywhere. With XenDesktop, business is borderless, giving employees the freedom to work from anywhere while also cutting IT costs. With XenApp built in, XenDesktop can deliver full desktops or just applications to any device. These tools, combined with XenServer create an extensive server virtualization and hypervisor management platform that greatly reduces costs. The $39 Citrix Xen Cloud Mastery Bundle will teach you how to implement and manage the Citrix tools effectively and effeciently.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

As we mentioned a few months ago, we are currently in a First Amendment fight for our very survival against Shiva Ayyadurai, who has announced his desire to shut us down for explaining, in detail, why we feel he did not invent email (given the long history of the development of email that preceded Ayyadurai's particular software application). Ayyadurai has retained the lawyer Charles Harder in this lawsuit, and Harder has been successful in getting another media property, much larger than Techdirt, to go bankrupt and be sold off in the face of a number of similar lawsuits. Last month, we asked for the case to be dismissed for a variety of reasons, including under California's anti-SLAPP law. Ayyadurai has opposed these motions. Yesterday, we filed our reply to Ayyadurai's opposition.We recommend reading our reply carefully, along with all of the other filings in the case, and familiarizing yourself with all of the details in order to make up your own mind. If you believe that free speech and a free press matter in holding powerful people accountable -- or if you are worried about claims by public officials that it's time to "open up" or change our libel laws to go after a press that may report less than flattering things about them -- then please consider contributing to our Survival Fund at ISupportJournalism.com. As I have noted before, this lawsuit has been a massive distraction. It has already forced us to delay multiple projects that we were working on, and to postpone other projects that we were scheduled to begin. It has, similarly, limited our time and resources to continue reporting on a variety of topics that we would normally cover. In short, no matter what the outcome of the actual case, the lawsuit alone has already been tremendously costly for us in terms of how we operate.At a time like this when truly independent reporting is so important, especially on a variety of matters concerning free speech online, net neutrality, copyright, patents, innovation and more, we hope you'll consider supporting our continued ability to report on these topics.

So if you've not been paying attention, broadband ISPs (with help from new FCC boss Ajit Pai) are slowly but surely working to eliminate oversight of one of the least-competitive sectors in American industry. It began with Pai killing off a number of FCC efforts piecemeal, including plans to beef up cable box competition, investigate zero rating, and FCC attempts to stop prison telco monopolies from ripping off inmate families. From there, Congress used the Congressional Review Act to kill FCC privacy protections for broadband consumers. Next up: reversing the FCC's 2015 Title II reclassification and gutting net neutrality.Between this, cable's growing monopoly over broadband (including the rise in usage caps), the sunsetting of Comcast NBC merger conditions and a looming wave of new megamergers and sector consolidation, you should begin to notice there's a bit of a perfect storm brewing on the horizon when it comes to broadband and media competition, anti-competitive behavior, and oversight -- one that's not going to be particularly enjoyable for broadband consumers, or the numerous companies that compete and/or do business with the likes of AT&T, Comcast and Verizon.To that end, most of the internet industry's heaviest hitters -- including Reddit, Google, Amazon, and Netflix -- under the umbrella of the Internet Association (IA) -- met with the FCC this week to urge Ajit Pai to keep the existing net neutrality rules in place. At the meeting, IA CEO Michael Beckerman and General Counsel Abigail Slater argued that things are working well with the rules in place, and that the long-standing industry claim that net neutrality hurt broadband investment is a canard:

As long-time Techdirt readers will know, Thailand does love it some lèse-majesté punishments. The country's lèse-majesté law -- literally "injured majesty" -- is used to protect Thailand's monarch from any kind of insult, however slight. It's been applied time and again over the years -- we first wrote about it back in 2007. In the past, the Thai government has done all the obvious things like demanding that local ISPs block sites, snooping on its citizens to find out who might be disrespecting the king, and threatening to throw even foreigners in prison for a very long time. But its latest move on the lèse-majesté front is rather a bold one: it has forbidden its citizens from having any online contact with three critics of the Thai monarchy and government. As the Guardian reports:

We've just written about widespread frustration at the slow pace of the shift to open access publishing of academic papers, and about how some major funding organizations are trying to address that. Open access aims to make entire publications publicly available, and that is meeting considerable resistance from traditional publishers who derive their healthy profits from charging for subscriptions. Rather than continue to tackle publishers head-on, an interesting new project seeks instead to liberate only a particular part of each article, albeit an important one. The new Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) seeks to promote the unrestricted availability of the list of citations that form a key part of most academic articles:

I will occasionally get a common question when discussing stories about trademark bullies: why do these bullies actually do this? The easy answer is, of course, because it works. And it works on many levels. For example, the primary targets in actual lawsuits can be bullied out of using names and terms for their businesses or brands, so it works on that level. But that's really just the tip of the iceberg. Where being a trademark bully really works is when it makes lawsuits unnecessary, because other businesses and people are so fearful of the bully tactic.To see that in practice, one need only look at the brewery formerly named Mooselick Brewing Co., which is now rebranding itself as Granite Roots Brewing without putting up a fight against, you guessed it, Moosehead Breweries.

By now everyone should know that the IOC and USOC have completely perverted the concept of trademark law surrounding any mentioning of the Olympic Games. It's gotten so bad that the USOC has taken to threatening businesses that tweet out congratulatory messages to athletes, even when those businesses supported those athletes getting to the Olympics in the first place. The USOC seems to be under the impression that tweeting about the Olympics as a business is trademark infringement. It's not. It never was.Yet those social media guidelines put forward by the USOC still exist and, coupled with the USOC's appetite for legal threats and lawsuits, that's typically enough to keep companies from challenging it on the matter. But one carpet cleaning business in Minnesota actually sued the USOC over the social media policy and its violation of that and other companies' free speech rights. Sadly that company, Zereorez, has had that suit tossed by the court on jurisdictional grounds, with the court essentially telling the company to come back after it's been sued by the USOC.

By now everyone should know that the IOC and USOC have completely perverted the concept of trademark law surrounding any mentioning of the Olympic Games. It's gotten so bad that the USOC has taken to threatening businesses that tweet out congratulatory messages to athletes, even when those businesses supported those athletes getting to the Olympics in the first place. The USOC seems to be under the impression that tweeting about the Olympics as a business is trademark infringement. It's not. It never was.Yet those social media guidelines put forward by the USOC still exist and, coupled with the USOC's appetite for legal threats and lawsuits, that's typically enough to keep companies from challenging it on the matter. But one carpet cleaning business in Minnesota actually sued the USOC over the social media policy and its violation of that and other companies' free speech rights. Sadly that company, Zereorez, has had that suit tossed by the court on jurisdictional grounds, with the court essentially telling the company to come back after it's been sued by the USOC.

Taser -- manufacturer of law enforcement's favorite electronic battle weapon and the "I'm not a doctor but I play one in courtroom proceedings" creator of arrestee-specific medical condition "excited delirium" -- is branching out and (sort of) rebranding.It's not like Taser doesn't have the less-lethal market sewn up. Its titular device is in the latter stages of genericide -- a catch-all term for any sort of stun gun. It's been busy building a new market: law enforcement body cameras. Under the name Axon, Taser has introduced a number of body-worn cameras, some of them with more advanced feature sets that tie their activation to weapon deployment by officers.Now, Axon is hoping to increase its dominance of the body camera market. Its latest move is to offer free cameras and footage storage to any law enforcement agency that requests it. The pay-nothing-now offer lasts for a year. Once the offer expires, agencies are free to look elsewhere for cameras.But will they? It seems unlikely. Axon claims it will make it easy to migrate stored recordings from its Evidence.com access platform, but data migration of this type is easier said than done. Add to that the fact that this is no ordinary data. It includes footage needed as evidence in criminal trials, etc. Sticking to a system officers and supervisors are already used to would seem like the most prudent move, even if it's not the most affordable option.Axon has gathered a lot of positive press over the past few days. The offer allows cash-strapped law enforcement agencies the opportunity to get into the accountability and transparency business with no initial investment. But this push to deploy "free*" cameras isn't really about cameras. Matt Stroud -- who has tracked Taser/Axon for years via FOIA requests -- points out at The Daily Dot that this business model is nothing new. Axon has been giving away cameras for a few years now. The real moneymaker is access, storage and licensing.Stroud's FOIA work has uncovered multiple cases where agencies have received free cameras. Axon is only charging agencies for Evidence.com usage. Albuquerque's police department received $500,000 worth of cameras for free. But it's paying $223,000 a year just for access to Evidence.com. Storage provided by Axon also comes at a premium: $1.50/GB. More cameras means more storage, which means this part of the revenue stream will just keep growing. On top of that, there's a yearly licensing fee that increases with the number of cameras in use.It's an interesting approach: one that gives away the finite (cameras) but charges a premium for the infinite (licensing, access, storage). But here's the actual insidiousness of the deals Axon's making:

If you want to understand what's wrong with the American broadband industry, you need look no further than Tennessee. The state is consistently ranked as one of the least connected, least competitive broadband markets in the country, thanks in large part to Comcast and AT&T's stranglehold over politicians like Marsha Blackburn. Lawmakers like Blackburn have let Comcast and AT&T lobbyists quite literally write protectionist state laws for the better part of a decade with an unwavering, singular focus: protecting incumbent revenues from competition and market evolution.The negative impact of this pay-to-play legislature is non-negotiable. One state-run study last year ranked Tennessee 40th in terms of overall broadband investment and availability (pdf), and found that 13% of households (or 834,545 Tennesseans) lack access to any high-speed broadband internet service whatsoever. The study found that the vast majority of Tennessee residents still get internet access through slower services like DSL, wireless or dial-up connections, either because that's all that's available, or because they couldn't afford faster options.Like twenty other states, Tennessee long ago passed a state law hamstringing towns and cities looking to improve regional broadband networks. As a result, popular municipal broadband providers like Chattanooga's utility-run ISP, EPB, have been banned from expanding its up to 10 Gbps offerings into any more markets. Attempts to repeal the law earlier this year went nowhere after mammoth pressure from incumbent ISP lobbyists. When that didn't work, one lawmaker tried to pass a compromise bill that would have allowed EPB to expand into just one neighboring county.That proposal was shot down as well, one of the dissenting votes being that of Rep. Patsy Hazlewood, a former AT&T executive.Tennessee residents have increasingly seen through Tennessee's unwavering fealty to some of the most despised brands in America. Some annoyed state residents have gone so far as to spend their own money to wire the state glacially, hilltop by hilltop. In a feeble attempt to try and placate those tired of expensive, slow broadband, Tennessee lawmakers recently passed HB 0529 or the "Broadband Accessibility Act of 2017." The centerpiece of the bill: throwing $45 million in additional subsidies at ISPs, the majority of which will be enjoyed by AT&T.Motherboard correctly points out that the state banned EPB from expanding service to those same users without any cost to taxpayers, but was willing to throw additional subsidies at two giant companies with a mixed track record on putting government subsidies to work:

Learning how to best manage a team while tackling projects can be invaluable in any work setting. Grab the $39 deal on the Project Management Institute Training Bundle and be well on your way to becoming a project management master. You will learn how to properly plan projects within allotted budgets, how to select the right team, how to best manage risk and much more. The courses will have you prepared to sit the Associate in Project Management (CAPM) Certification from the Project Management Institute (exam fees not included), which will earn you internationally recognized qualifications.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Yesterday, we wrote about reports that Arturo Di Modica, the artist behind the famous "Charging Bull" statue near Wall St., was claiming that the new "Fearless Girl" statue that was put up in front of the bull infringed on his copyrights. As we noted in our piece, the only possible claim we could see was a weak moral rights claim, under VARA -- the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. However, as we noted in an update to the post (with a helping hand from law professor James Grimmelmann) VARA shouldn't apply. If you read the actual law, it applies to works created after VARA went into effect or to works created before the law went into effect if the title to the artwork has not been transferred from the artist.But, of course, the history here is that Di Modica dumped the statue in front of the NY Stock Exchange as a surprise in 1989, only to have it moved by the city and given a "temporary permit" in a nearby park that is continually renewed. 1989 is, obviously, prior to the enactment of VARA in 1990. And, Grimmelmann argues, Di Modica "transferred the title by accession when he installed it."Of course, Di Modica's lawyers don't appear to care. Late Wednesday, the letter that they sent Bill de Blasio, Mayor of New York, was released, and their legal theories... are... well... let's just say some might compare them to what comes out of the back of a bull. Yes, it does include a VARA claim, but it's not the main claim of the letter. However, since that was the focus of our post yesterday, let's deal with that one first:

So we've been talking a lot about new FCC boss Ajit Pai and his plan to not only kill net neutrality, but eliminate FCC oversight of broadband providers almost entirely. Reports recently surfaced indicating Pai has been busy meeting with large ISPs behind closed doors to replace hard net neutrality rules with "voluntary commitments" from ISPs (insert laugh track). This won't cause any problems, Pai and ISP lobbyists have argued in perfect unison, because the FTC will rush in to protect broadband consumers -- and net neutrality -- in the wake of the FCC's dismantling.We've already noted how this entire narrative is exquisitely-crafted bullshit.The FTC doesn't have any real authority over broadband without Congress passing a new law, which ISP campaign contributions will ensure won't be happening. And thanks to some lovely tap dancing by AT&T lawyers (looking to help the company dodge accountability for lying about throttling), a recent court ruling declared that broadband ISPs are largely immune to FTC oversight courtesy of common carrier exemptions. Former FCC staffer Gigi Sohn drove that point home this week in a piece over at The Verge:

The recent saga of Denuvo DRM has been fairly fast moving as these things go. Once thought to be the DRM unicorn that video game makers had dreamed of for years, the time it took for cracks to be released for Denuvo-protected games shrunk to months, then weeks, and finally days. It seemed for all the world like Denuvo was destined for the grave.But these things don't always progress in linear fashion. The recently released Bioware title Mass Effect: Andromeda was patched recently for a variety of gameplay functions. Unheralded in the patch notes was the updated version of Denuvo included within it. That updated version appears to be setting back cracking groups, forcing Mass Effect pirates into using the older, pre-patched version of the game.

For several years now, we've put out the steady warning that the alcohol industries have a trademark problem. In some ways, it's one of those kinda sorta good problems to have in a goods industry, in that the reason there is a problem at all is because of how well the alcohol business is doing. Not just well in terms of total sales, but also in terms of being an ecosystem that encourages new businesses, startups, and expansion. Those are all signs of a healthy market, but with that comes the trademark problem. With so many new players and and a finite amount of language with which those players can brand themselves, trademark disputes in what has previously been known to be an IP congenial industry have exploded in number.It's become bad enough that the North Bay Business Journal in Santa Rosa, California, smack dab in the middle of wine country, conducted a written Q&A with a couple of intellectual property attorneys to get their thoughts. You can practically hear the frustration at how this is all progressing dripping off of their responses.For instance, when asked about just how many more trademark disputes there are now than there were before, one attorney stated:

This is an interesting opinion from the Texas Supreme Court on citing Wikipedia as a dictionary. The underlying case involves an article in D Magazine titled "The Park Cities Welfare Queen." The article purports to show that the plaintiff, Rosenthal, "has figured out how to get food stamps while living in the lap of luxury." After publication, evidence emerged that the plaintiff had not committed welfare fraud. She sued the magazine for defamation.The appeals court denied the magazine's anti-SLAPP motion in part because it held the term "Welfare Queen," as informed by the Wikipedia entry, could be defamatory. The Texas Supreme Court affirms the anti-SLAPP denial, but it also criticizes the appeals court for not sufficiently examining the entire article's gist. Along the way, the court opines on the credibility and validity of Wikipedia as a dictionary. TL;DR = the Supreme Court says don't treat Wikipedia like a dictionary.Apologies for the block quoting, but here's the detail:

The absolute scariest cab ride of my life happened in Rome a few years back, and I'd prefer not to relive that experience, but apparently I might not have much of a choice next time I'm in Italy, as the country recently banned Uber completely, claiming that it was "unfair competition." Now, let's be clear: there are many, many reasons to not like or trust Uber. You certainly have every right to not like the way it goes about its business or the way it treats drivers. You can refuse to use the service all you want and you can tweet #DeleteUber and whatever else you like... and yet you still should be concerned about this.Uber isn't being blocked in Italy because of its business practices. It's being blocked in Italy because the taxicabs there don't like the competition, and a court has ruled that those cabs shouldn't face competition. Again, no matter what you think of Uber's own business practices, it's pretty damn clear that everywhere that Uber or similar services operate, what everyday people tend to get are better options for transportation. It makes it easier for people to get a ride when they need it, it adds much needed supply to the market, and it tends to be a better overall experience (and there's at least some evidence that it also prevents drunk driving).In the end, when it comes to innovation, our general stance around here is that what you need more than anything else is competition. Competition drives innovation. It drives better customer service. Having courts come in and block competition in favor of an organization famous for limiting the number of competitors in the market is never going to be a good thing. If you're upset by Uber's business practices, target those business practices. But doing an outright ban on competition doesn't seem to help anyone, other than the legacy taxi providers.

You're probably quite familiar with the famous Charging Bull statue (also known as the "Wall Street Bull") which is found in Bowling Green Park right off Wall St. in lower Manhattan. The statue was originally placed there as a "guerilla sculpture" by artist Arturo Di Modica without permission.

It appears the DOJ will no longer be in the business of policing the police. A memo issued by every cop's new best friend, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, states the DOJ will be doing more to empower police and will conduct fewer civil rights investigations of law enforcement agencies. On one hand, it makes sense to have the locals handle their own problems. On the other hand, the locals have repeatedly shown a willingness to ignore abusive policing until the feds are forced to step in.It may be difficult to roll back DOJ agreements and oversight of investigated agencies immediately. It may, in fact, be impossible. Those consent decrees that have made their way through the court system on the way to being put into force would take some serious litigating to roll back. It's not clear the DOJ's interested in attempting an expensive clawback of police oversight and policy changes.It's those that haven't been formalized through this process that are in danger of being scaled back, if not removed completely. The DOJ has filed a motion asking for time to review its proposed consent decree with the Baltimore PD in light of AG Sessions' memo. The DOJ also just finished wrapping up an investigation of the Chicago PD, but statements made by Sessions and President Trump indicate the White House and DOJ are more interested in solving Chicago's crime problem, rather than its police problem.Sessions himself has no interest in police misconduct or systemic civil liberties violations and abuse the DOJ has uncovered over the past eight years. He claimed the lengthy investigation the DOJ's civil rights division performed produced nothing more than "anecdotal" evidence. He made this claim while admitting he hasn't read any of the investigative reports.By not reading the reports, Sessions won't have to deal with contradictory thoughts while shifting the DOJ towards its new position as a law enforcement booster club. Adam Serwer of The Atlantic points out the vast amount of denial Sessions is swimming in.

We all know that driving while distracted is dangerous. Keep your devices handy and hands-free with the $13 ARMOR-X One-Lock Air Vent Car Mount. Its easy one-lock mounting system locks to your phone and hooks up to the air vent quickly for immediate access, and it rotates 360 degrees so you can find the optimal viewing angle. It's designed to work with most vehicle vent blades and can hold most cell phones even in their cases.Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

There's been a lot of hype and confusion about Congress's decision (supported by the new FCC) to kill off the broadband privacy rules that were put in place late last year by the Tom Wheeler FCC, though they had not yet been officially implemented. As we noted, it's an unfortunate exaggeration (pushed by some well meaning folks) to say that ISPs will now be packaging up and selling individuals' specific browsing history. That's just not true. Some people responded to us by noting that just because that's not how the ad market works today, it doesn't mean that won't change. But... that's probably not the case. Don't get me wrong: getting rid of these privacy rules is still a really bad idea, but let's look a little deeper at what ISPs can't do, before we explain why those privacy rules are still important.First off, as we noted, the market for internet data is not in sharing some sort of dossier on what you like, but rather connecting into a marketplace, where the information is shared for the purpose of displaying ads, but not in a way where your actual info goes to the advertiser. That is, when you, say, go shopping for a camera, and then start seeing ads for cameras everywhere, it's not that the camera makers now know that you, Joe Schmoe, like cameras. Instead, what happens is that some company took that info (Joe Schmoe is shopping for cameras) and that gets put into a marketplace where some real time bidding happens for ad placement, such that when Joe Schmoe visits another site, there's a near instantaneous call out for who will pay the most for the ad slot, and with that info is, effectively, this otherwise anonymous person was just looking at cameras, and the camera company will say "I'll pay an extra $0.0002 for that ad compared to the TV maker" and thus the camera ad gets shown. The camera maker or retailer never knows its Joe Schmoe, and doesn't somehow "know" anything more about Joe.But... but... but... people say. There are data brokers out there who do sell more personalized profiles on you. And... that's true. Many of those companies are pretty awful. But that's unrelated to any of this. And, no, the ISPs can't just turn themselves into the next big data brokers.Even without the privacy rules, there are rules that prevent that from happening. Section 222 of the Communications Act still stops carriers from selling your info. Of course, that's part of Title II of the Telecom act, so if the FCC or Congress figure out a way to roll back Title II, there is at least some greater concern. Separately, as Orin Kerr notes at the Washington Post, certain other "surveillance" activities by service providers are limited by the Wiretap Act -- and there are some fairly stiff penalties should a broadband provider end up on the wrong side of that. Kerr (and others) have used these laws to suggest that the privacy rules repeal isn't that big of a deal. That's inaccurate.Both of these things can be true: repealing the privacy rules does not magically create a free-for-all with your ISPs out there "selling" your browsing history to the highest bidder and the privacy rules were useful and should not have been repealed.The issues are -- as with so many things -- a bit more nuanced than folks on either side of the debate are making them out to be. Again, part of this goes back to the way in which online advertising works and the ways in which your data is mined and used.Broadband providers have a fairly terrible history in respecting your privacy. No, they haven't been directly selling browsing history dossiers, but they do have long histories of snooping on you in ways that were (1) totally hidden from you and (2) extremely difficult to block. Both AT&T and Verizon, for example, were caught using nearly undetectable "super cookies" to secretly track users across multiple devices and networks -- which (despite promises that they couldn't be abused) were abused by advertisers.And this gets back to another point that I've made repeatedly over the years: privacy is not a "thing," rather privacy is about a set of trade-offs, in which individuals recognize that they give up some privacy for some benefit and then get to decide if it's worth the trade-off. The extreme example I've used in the past is that if you leave your home to go to the store to buy some milk, you are giving up a tiny bit of privacy. Someone may see you leaving your house. They may recognize you. They may see that you're buying some milk. For most people, it's easy to judge the costs and benefits of that trade-off and to decide that the minimal loss of privacy is worth it for the ability to buy the milk (some people -- such as celebrities with paparazzi followings -- may view the trade-off differently).But the really important thing in privacy settings is making sure that two things are true for individuals: (1) that they have the information necessary to weigh the benefits and costs of the trade-offs and (2) they have some control over those trade-offs and can adjust at least some aspects of them, by having the options be more granular and controllable.The problem with ISP snooping and the related advertising efforts is that neither of these conditions tends to be met. The snooping is done in a way that is surreptitious and not at all clear to the end user, and their ability to control how it's done, and perhaps change some of the factors involved, is basically non-existent. The FCC's rules (somewhat weakly) were put in place to change that. First, they required more transparency about what your access provider was actually doing and, second, gave the end user more control by requiring opt-ins to particularly "expensive" behavior and opt-outs to less privacy-invasive offerings.This is what makes people -- quite reasonably -- upset. If they were given transparent understanding of what was happening, with at least some ability to control the situation, then they could decide for themselves what information is worth giving up for what services. But, instead, the internet access industry and the online ad industry apparently continue to believe that the only way they can do what they want to do is to trick people into letting themselves be spied on, and to hide the reality of the situation. This is dumb, and will do much more harm than good to the internet in the long run.The danger here is not so much that Verizon will be selling me the websites that you visited. It's that these ISPs, which get tremendous insight into where you surf, will make use of that data in ways you don't understand and don't control, and do things that make you feel more and more uncomfortable, and less interested in using services that can and do provide tremendous benefit. That is not good for anyone. It makes people less trustful of their services, and less willing to use the internet in unique and innovative ways. If there were a truly competitive broadband market, then that situation would be limited. Verizon or AT&T's bad behavior would be limited, because people could go elsewhere. But the issue we have today, in the US especially, is that for many users, there really are no other options -- which is why those companies have been repeatedly caught doing those kinds of sketchy, privacy-invasive things in ways that its paying subscribers both are kept in the dark about and given little to no way to block.So, no, these new privacy rules won't create new data markets of your browsing history -- and, yes, there are other laws in place that block them from doing truly egregious activity. But the lack of a competitive market, and the nature of online advertising, combined with the fairly stupid belief that people need to be tricked into giving up their info, creates a dangerous environment, one that will harm both end users and innovation. The former FCC privacy rules took a (very small) baby step towards preventing that kind of situation... and now they're dead.

The DOJ is proud to announce it's flexing its new Rule 41 muscle. The changes proposed in 2015 sailed past a mostly-uninterested Congress and into law, giving the FBI and other DOJ entities permission to hack computers anywhere in the world with a single warrant.With the new rules, the law has finally caught up with the FBI's activities. It deployed a Network Investigative Tool -- the FBI's nifty nickname for intrusive malware that sends identifying info from people's computers to FBI investigators -- back in 2012 during a child porn investigation and mostly got away with it. It tried it again in 2015 and ran into a bit more resistance.Rule 41's (former) jurisdictional limitations meant the FBI wasn't supposed to be able to "search" computers all over the US using a single warrant issued in Virginia. This activity was supposed to be confined to the state of Virginia. The aftermath of the Playpen investigation has led to a multitude of conflicting judicial opinions. Some have found the warrant invalid and the evidence obtained worthless. Others have granted good faith exceptions or determined no privacy violation took place. In at least one case, the government has dismissed the charges rather than expose any information about its Rule 41-flouting NIT.In this case, the FBI isn't hacking computers to uncover child porn site visitors. Instead, it's going to be fiddling with a lot of computers to take down a botnet. The DOJ press release makes particular note of how lawful this all is now, post-Rule 41 amending: