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It's been a very long time since I last flew somewhere without my laptop. I actually am more productive than usual on planes, and I tend to use flying time to just focus in and get a ton of stuff done. I can't even begin to explain how ridiculously frustrating it would be to find out that I wouldn't be allowed to bring a laptop onto a plane, and yet it appears that our new Homeland Security overlords have put in place new restrictions on flights to the US from certain countries in the middle east barring tablets and laptops from the cabin (apparently no American carriers are impacted -- just foreign ones). Passengers are being told to check such things (which is odd, since normally you're not supposed to check lithium ion batteries...). Flights from 13 countries are being hit with this, and Homeland Security won't give any further explanation beyond the usual "national security." And, just this morning, the UK announced that it would be doing the same thing.Homeland Security has been hinting that this is due to some sort of specific threat -- so it sounds like there's intelligence around a planned attack using such a device. Perhaps then the extra precaution is sensible. But, once again, this feels like a form of overkill security theater: inconveniencing basically everyone (to extreme levels) based on the slight possibility of a very small number of bad actors. There has to be a better way. Every time one of these new restrictions is put in place, it not only completely inconveniences people, but it shows people that if they somehow convince the scaredy cats at DHS of some new type of threat, they can inconvenience people even more. It's almost as if each additional inconvenience is impacting things way more than an actual exploding laptop or whatever might.Of course, it should be no surprise that former TSA boss Kip Hawley, is now running around arguing that this is no big deal and Wired is happy to tell everyone to calm down and just "buy a book." But that's kind of crazy -- especially for people who have important or sensitive information on their laptops and don't want to hand them off to baggage carriers with a history of snooping through bags and stealing expensive electronics.Also, since this is limited to just a few Middle Eastern airports, it's not hard to think that if there are terrorists planning something, they'll just head to different airports instead. Yes, I'm sure that someone saw something that they thought was a threat, and it's reasonable to put in place plans that try to minimize some of that risk. But it has to take into account the cost side too, and there has to be a better way to deal with it than such a blanket ban impacting so many people.

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Because abusing the DMCA process only goes so far, some reputation management entities have begun exploiting an inattentive legal system to push lawsuits past judges. In some cases, these suits have featured fake plaintiffs filing bogus libel lawsuits against fake defendants and using a fake affidavit to fraudulently obtain court orders requiring Google to delist URLs.Those engaged in this fraudulent behavior aren't likely to get away with it for much longer. Paul Alan Levy and Eugene Volokh managed to track down the person behind one set of bogus lawsuits and get the presiding judge to take a closer look at the bogus documents he was being handed. Pissed Consumer has also been reporting on others using the same MO, and has headed to court to get these suits examined and tossed.The end of line for supposed reputation manager Richart Ruddie came at the hands of Volokh and Levy, with the judge granting discovery to the defendant after being apprised of the apparently fraudulent filings. Now that Richart Ruddie of Profile Defenders has been exposed, it looks as though he's given up the fight. Levy reports Ruddie has settled anti-SLAPP claims brought against him and is paying restitution for his reputation mismanagement.

Despite the rise of heavily-hyped-but-highly-scattered gigabit deployments, the broadband industry is actually seeing less competition than ever before across huge swaths of the country. Once upon a time, broadband "competition" consisted of an equally matched telco going head to head with the incumbent cable provider (if you were lucky). These days, most phone companies lack the finances or competitive motivation to improve lagging DSL speeds across their footprints -- speeds that don't even meet the FCC's base definition of broadband (25 mbps).That's resulting in a growing monopoly for the nation's cable broadband providers, who have quietly been absolutely butchering phone companies over the last several years. Just take a look at the latest data from Leichtman Research, which notes that while cable broadband providers collectively added 2.7 million net additional high-speed Internet subscribers last year, phone companies collectively shed roughly 600,000 broadband users.That's the most net additions the cable sector has seen in any year since 2007. And the 122% 2016 net additions are a notable bump up from the 106% of net additions seen by cable providers in 2015, and 89% of net additions seen in 2014. It paints a rather clear picture of a broadband industry that, frankly, is even less competitive than public wisdom dictates (and most of us already knew it's one of the least competitive sectors in technology):In countless markets, phone companies like AT&T and Verizon are simply giving up on unwanted DSL users, quite happily driving them to cable via the one-two punch of price hikes or apathy (their focus now is more expensive wireless, and gobbling up various media companies). Elsewhere, smaller telcos (Windstream, Centurylink, Frontier) have saddled themselves with so much debt by gobbling up AT&T and Verizon's aging copper customers, they're incapable (or unwilling) to invest in necessary broadband upgrades en masse.Many of these companies quite simply don't even want to be in the residential broadband business, resulting in a palpable, active disdain by many of these phone companies for their own paying customers. The residential broadband industry simply isn't profitable enough, quickly enough for modern investors, so most of these companies have shifted their entire focus elsewhere. For smaller telcos like Windstream, it's gobbling up companies like Earthlink to expand a focus on enterprise customers. For AT&T and Verizon, it's gobbling up media empires in the quest to be millennial ad juggernauts.All of this is wonderful news for companies like Charter and Comcast. This reduction in overall competition is eroding the resistance to the rise of completely unnecessary and arbitrary usage caps, meaning broadband (and competing streaming) services are getting more expensive than ever before. And remember, most of these companies have written and successfully lobbied for state bills preventing your town or city from doing much about it. As icing on the cable cake, new Ajit Pai-run FCC has made it clear that nibbling these companies' earlobes is going to pass for regulatory policy for the foreseeable future.All of this tends to get overshadowed each time an ISP proudly announces the expansion of expensive gigabit broadband lines in highly-selective areas. But for the countless markets in the States, phone companies have effectively given up -- resigning consumers to at least a decade of higher prices and the cable industry's particular knack for atrocious customer service.

Over the last few years, we've written a ton about "corporate sovereignty" provisions in trade agreements. Technically, these tend to be called "Investor State Dispute Settlement" or ISDS provisions, but I really believe that a decent part of the reason they're called something so boring is to stop people from paying attention to just how nefarious these provisions truly are. One of the reasons we first started paying attention to these provisions -- as they were showing up in agreements under negotiation, such as the TPP and TTIP -- was following a story involving the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly demanding $100 million from Canada for rejecting two of its patents.The issue was that Canada had rejected these two patents because the company couldn't prove that the patented drugs were actually useful. Eli Lilly claimed that Canada had no right to reject patents on that basis, arguing that it was a "dramatic" shift in how patents were reviewed, and thus it was "expropriating its property" and undermining the company's "expected future profits." Think about that for a second. By the time this case went to an actual tribunal, the amount that the company was demanding had ballooned from $100 million to $500 million. This battle has waged on for many years -- and for Eli Lilly, this was a huge deal. Management at the company basically bet the company on continuing to get new patents, and any hiccup -- even a rejection of patents for not being useful -- could be a disaster for the company. The company even pushed to get Canada slammed during diplomatic proceedings in the infamous Special 301 Report for the USTR for daring to reject its patents -- and the USTR complied.Well, it looks like all of that may have been for nothing. That's because Eli Lilly has lost entirely, and not only won't it be getting the $500 million it wanted, but it also has to pay Canada's $5 million in legal fees. You can read the final award here or down below. Of course, some may argue that this shows that the ISDS corporate sovereignty provisions work out fine in the end, with tribunals getting things right (even if that's not actually true in many cases), but just the fact that the Canadian government had to go through this massive and expensive process for many years just for rejecting two bad patents should show why ISDS provisions are such a problem.In the ruling, the tribunal even notes the Special 301 report that Eli Lilly worked so hard to have call out Canada's patenting practices, but more or less dismisses it, by noting that others, such as Mexico didn't complain similarly:

For far too many years, the video game industry struggled to assert its place as a true artform, one deserving of the kind of respect granted to movies, music, television, and literature. This has been a source of frustration to those of us who can recognize the powerful storytelling device that video games represent, as well as the way modern games contribute to art and social commentary. But by its nature as a relatively new medium, games have also struggled to preserve the industry's history in the way more widely and permanently disseminated artforms have accomplished. And that's where the gaming industry has taken a turn against its own artistic interests, often demonizing methods for preserving gaming history over intellectual property concerns. Emulators are the chief method at hand, where games that are ancient by gaming standards can be digitized and preserved for posterity, save for the threat of legal action over copyright infringement and the industry's attempts to stave off these useful tools.Like so many issues in the intellectual property world, it's not hard to understand the gaming industry's consternation. There's no doubt that many people use emulators simply to play games from old consoles and cabinets rather than pay for physical copies. Still, there's also no doubt that these same emulators work to preserve the artistic output in the gaming realm. This was most recently evidenced in two games that might never have seen the light of day again, save for emulators.

A couple of weeks ago, a federal judge in Utah decided prior restraint was the best way to handle a recently-filed defamation suit against Honest Mattress Reviews by Purple Innovations, makers of the Purple Mattress.Purple's lengthy filing contained numerous allegations of harm caused by Honest Mattress Reviews' extended commentary on the white plastic powder covering every mattress Purple ships. It also alleged HMR was just a front for site owner Ryan Monahan's brand management work with Purple's competitor, Ghostbed. Rather than give HMR a chance to respond, the judge decided the review site could publish nothing further about Purple or the lawsuit. It wasn't even allowed to refer to its previous rating of Purple's mattress.Honest Mattress Review didn't care much for this decision -- one it had been given no chance to contest. It immediately posted an article about the case and offered to comply with the letter of the order, but perhaps not its spirit.

Despite being considered one of the technology capitals of the country, San Francisco and the Bay Area continue to suffer from a lack of broadband options -- just like the rest of us sorry sods. If they're lucky, most locals there still only have the option of one of two large ISPs: AT&T and Comcast. Both companies have a long, proud history of fighting competition tooth and nail, often by quite literally writing shitty state telecom law that ensures the status quo remains intact. Attempts to break through this logjam and bring faster, better broadband service to the city have seen decidedly mixed results.Like most areas, ultra-fast next-generation broadband in particular is notably lacking. Some estimates suggest that just 2.6% of San Francisco residents have access to gigabit broadband service. Sonic CEO Dane Jasper, whose company is also busy deploying gigabit services to the Bay Area, tells me he believes those figures are stale and gigabit penetration rates in the city are closer to 17%. And while Google Fiber had tinkered with the idea of bringing fiber to the city, the company's pivot to wireless has left that added avenue of competition up in the air.Last week, numerous Mayors and city officials in California and Arizona penned a letter to AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson, complaining that not only is AT&T not upgrading many DSL customers to fiber, they're not adequately maintaining existing copper (now that AT&T's primary focus appears to be media, and acquiring Time Warner):

It looks as though the Supreme Court may have to step in and settle a particularly thorny question involving the First Amendment, Second Amendment, national security interests, and 3D-printed weapons. Cody Wilson and his company, Defense Distributed, sued the State Department over its demands he cease distributing instructions for the creation of weapons and weapons parts.The State Department came along too late to make much of a difference. It claimed Wilson's instructions violated international arms distribution laws, but by the time it noticed what Defense Distributed was doing, the instructions were all over the web. They still are, and no amount of litigation or government orders is going to change that.What Defense Distributed is doing is perfectly legal in the United States. The State Department says it's illegal to put these instructions in the hands of foreign enemies. Since it can't control internet traffic, it's decided to take down the publisher.That's the First Amendment implication, which can't really be separated from Second Amendment concerns considering the legality of distributing these instructions domestically. Last September, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court found [PDF] in favor of the government and its national security concerns.

So, let's just say that things probably haven't been looking very good for Prenda's Paul Hansmeier lately. Obviously, there was a long series of legal losses in the Prenda and Prenda-related cases, but those are in the distant past now. Back in September, he lost his law license for some of the Prenda copyright trolling activities (if you haven't been playing along, Prenda set up their own honeypots with their own films --which they pretended were some other company's, filed bogus CFAA charges to try to get IP addresses, demanded cash from people to drop lawsuits, lied in court multiple times and more...). Then, in December, the two main players: John Steele and Hansmeier were finally indicted and arrested. Then, just a couple weeks ago, Steele took a guilty plea, making it clear he's thrown Hansmeier under the bus and will testify against him (given the history of Steele throwing many others under rapidly approaching buses, this is no surprise).So... that's not a really good position to be in. But it may be getting worse. As you may recall, in July of 2015, after a number of cases went against Prenda, and Steele and Hansmeier were told to pay large sums of money in opposing legal fees and sanctions, Hansmeier declared bankruptcy. Except, as with so much related to Hansmeier, that was a disaster too. It got so bad that Hansmeier's own lawyer admitted to the court that "he's a bad actor." As the bankruptcy process wore on, it became apparently worse. Turns out that he denied a certain trust fund was under his control, but that wasn't actually true. Oh and also more shell companies. Oh, and also $180,000 in cash hidden under his bed. As we noted all the way back in 2015, even before all of this came out, bankruptcy fraud is a bad idea.And now, according to some of the latest filings in Hansmeir's bankruptcy case (also submitted in his criminal trial), Hansmeier admits that he's aware he's being investigated for bankruptcy fraud as well (ht: SJD):Oh, and back in December it was reported that the FBI was also investigating his ADA trolling efforts. So that makes him indicted for Prenda and under investigation over more potential (serious) issues for doing more Prenda-like activities with the ADA and then also for bankruptcy fraud. As Paul Hansmeier himself once said in an angry threat letter: "welcome to the big leagues." Amusingly, that was in a letter to a critic threatening litigation for daring to suggest that Hansmeier had been involved in criminal activities.Oh, and that's not all. Also via SJD, we find out that the trustee in the bankruptcy case, noting the indictment, has been asking Hansmeier to "waive his discharge" (effectively forcing Hansmeier to remain in bankruptcy, rather than being able to discharge his debts). The trustee (who is, somewhat amazingly, a former law school classmate of Hansmeier's) sent Hansmeier an email to this effect, noting that assuming Hansmeier would invoke the 5th Amendment in his criminal case, that will "allow the bankruptcty court to draw numerous adverse inferences against you."Ouch. The document below, in which Hansmeier reveals the bankruptcy fraud investigation, is actually part of his effort to have the bankruptcy court to hold off on these proceedings while all this other stuff gets taken care of. But, even if he weren't facing criminal charges where his partner in crime has already admitted everything and agreed to testify against him, and even if he weren't also facing separate investigations over bankruptcy fraud and ADA trolling, it appears that Hansmeier's bankruptcy case is getting even worse than it was before. This is beyond big leagues. This is beyond the All-Star game. This is truly Hall of Fame material.

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If all else fails, blame the millennials.

There's something to be said for an informed electorate, although it really shouldn't be elected officials advocating for it. They'd benefit least from people knowing more about sausage and the making thereof. And legislators definitely shouldn't be robbing the First Amendment to pay for better information, as a few California lawmakers are attempting to do.A new bill, pointed out by the EFF's Dave Maass, seems to be a response of sorts to "fake news" and other political detritus of this highly-partisan system. Ostensibly, the bill is aimed at keeping voters from being misled on issues that affect them. The problem is, this bill would allow the government to determine what is or isn't misleading and apply to a citizen's social media posts, blog, etc.California's existing "political cyberfraud" law (yes, really) already contains wording that forbids cybersquatting, misleading redirects, and otherwise tricking internet users who are seeking information on ballot measures. The existing law is more concerned with acts along the lines of false impersonation and deliberate fraud. The amendment, however, isn't. It adds a couple of new aspects, both making the bad law worse.First, the law would no longer be limited to "cyberfraud" related to pending ballot measures. It would expand to protect political candidates from being bested by wily web denizens. Where it really goes downhill is this new clause, which criminalizes even more speech.

Google is constantly under pressure from all sides to change how it ranks just about everything. There's a massive SEO industry, a decent portion of which is dedicated into tricking Google into ranking some stuff higher than others (or downgrading content that someone doesn't like). And, then, of course, there are the "outside" interests. For years, the legacy recording and movie industries would misleadingly blame Google for piracy and demand that it downrank "pirate" links. Google caved in and did so, and the end result has been kind of a mess. Because it's based on DMCA notices in to Google, the company now gets flooded with an ever increasing number of DMCA notices -- many of which are completely bogus (and potentially just designed to mess with search rankings).On top of that, in cases where it does downrank so-called "pirate" sites, since people are still looking for unauthorized content anyway, they end up going to more dangerous sites, where they're more likely to get malware. And, of course, as we predicted, despite caving in and giving the RIAA/MPAA a tool to shape search results, those industries still aren't satisfied. Because they'll never be satisifed. That's because they fail to understand that the problem isn't Google. Google is just a representation of what's on the internet -- and many people on the internet want access to content that is otherwise difficult to get. That's not Google's fault.A couple of years ago, Google also announced that it would allow people to remove "revenge porn" results from search. And you can certainly understand why pretty much everyone would want this as an end result. But, still, once you make that tool available, there's reason to fear that it, too, will be abused. And even if a company as large as Google may be able to properly staff up to go through and review each request, this only puts pressure on everyone else -- including much smaller, less well-staffed, less well-resourced players to do something similar.And now... for reasons that are unclear, Google has announced that it opened up a tool that will let people report "offensive" results and potentially downrank those results.

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad, responding to Ed Sheeran's stand against takedown bots with a good observation about the broken incentives of the DMCA:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, politicians were still reeling from recent public opposition. Don't get SOPA'd had become the new mantra in DC, while the European Commission was blaming ACTA's failure on social media and starting to worry about its upcoming copyright directive. Rep. Lamar Smith was unperturbed though, which is why people were working to fund a "Don't Mess With The Internet" billboard in his district.Also this week in 2012: Mojang and Bethesda settled their dispute over the Scrolls trademark, Megaupload was negotiating with the government to let users retrieve their files from the service, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica ended an era by discontinuing its print edition.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, Viacom followed up on its mass YouTube takedowns with a now-infamous billion-dollar lawsuit — just as some of those who had their videos taken down were suing Viacom. Meanwhile, Hollywood was trying to export DRM around the globe even as the EU Commissioner was making veiled threats about stopping DRM on music. While one Microsoft executive was admitting the company benefits from piracy, the video game industry was joining the BSA, RIAA, MPAA et al in spreading bogus piracy stats. And we were pleasantly surprised to discover at least one person in congress who understood mixtapes and mashups.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, plenty of things were on the horizon. Augmented reality was making early waves (very early, obviously), people were warning about mobile phone viruses, news broadcasters had only just really started using green-screen sets instead of fancy newsrooms, and plagiarism-detection software was just starting to get the attention of universities. While Canada was trying to pass its levy on blank storage media (which still plagues its blank CDs to this day), webcasters and record labels were actually on the same side fighting against high internet radio royalties (if you can believe it). Meanwhile, the legal saga of "sucks" sites played out another chapter in the courts.

The First Amendment Lawyer's Association (FALA) is hoping to end the California Attorney General's crusade against Backpage. The website has already ceded ground in the face of constant criticism, investigations, and legal threats. Earlier this year, it shuttered its adult ads rather than continue to bleed money and time defending itself against bogus prosecutions and investigations.Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris -- who blew off court decisions against her office to continue to prosecute Backpage -- has now moved on to the US Senate. But just because Harris has moved on doesn't mean the local AG's office isn't going to continue with Harris' unfinished business.The letter from FALA is covered (but not published[?]) by Elizabeth Nolan Brown at Reason.

Here's the latest instalment in the long-running Techdirt series "just when you thought there was nothing left to control, China comes up with something else it wants to throttle", as reported by the South China Morning Post:

It's remarkable how quickly drones have become a familiar part of the modern world. Like most tools, they can be used for good and evil, but it tends to be the latter that is highlighted when it comes to drones. In the last few days, it was widely reported that President Trump has given the CIA power to launch drone strikes against suspected terrorists, in addition to being able to use the technology to locate them. Dealing death from the skies may be the most dramatic application of drones, but there are plenty of other, more benign, uses, even if they receive less attention. For example, activists in Hungary have been deploying them in a variety of innovative ways in order to bolster transparency and openness in a country where these are increasingly under threat. That's because the country's prime minister, Viktor Orbán, is a self-confessed believer in the "illiberal state," which Wikipedia describes as follows:

Last month, we noted how New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman sued Charter Communications for knowingly providing broadband service well below advertised speeds. After an initial first read I didn't think much of the lawsuit (pdf), but upon closer inspection it provides some pretty damning evidence that Charter not only knowingly failed to provide decent service (and just didn't care, since this is the uncompetitive broadband industry), but in some instances actively made connections worse for its own competitive advantage.The AG's suit highlights how Charter manipulated data for a program run by the FCC to monitor consumer connection speeds. This program, co-operated by a UK outfit dubbed SamKnows, gives volunteers custom-firmware embedded routers to monitor connection quality and speed. The FCC was then using this data to name and shame ISPs that failed to deliver advertised speeds. The lawsuit highlights how Charter executives worked to intentionally deliver faster speeds to just these customers in order to trick the FCC into believing its network was performing better than it actually was.The suit also seemed to confirm something that content and transit operators have been complaining about for a few years -- namely that large incumbent ISPs were intentionally letting interconnection points get saturated to extract additional fees from backbone and content providers like Netflix. This behavior quickly ended thanks in large part to the FCC's new net neutrality rules, which currently protect such interconnection relationships from abuse by incumbent telecom mono/duopolies. With these rules possibly dying this year, it's a problem you can be sure will re-emerge.Not too surprisingly, Charter is trying to have this case thrown out. Recent court filings (pdf) indicate that the company successfully had the case moved from state to federal court, with Charter lawyers arguing that the Communications Act completely preempted claims under state law. Charter lawyers even went so far as to justify this position using the exact same 2015 FCC net neutrality rules ISPs lobbied, repeatedly, to destroy:

It's been nearly a year since we started offering Techdirt t-shirts, hoodies and more on Teespring, and in that time we've seen quite a few tweets showing off some great photos (and one video!) of the gear upon arrival or out in the wild. Since we've just put most of last year's designs back in the store — and since we're gearing up to launch a new design next week — I figured it might be time to show off some of those photos and encourage those of you who already have Techdirt gear, or are getting it soon, to share new ones!Most recently, a few folks have been tweeting photos of our I Invented Email gear, including one of our favourite parody accounts...

The history of copyright law in Australia is somewhat tortured, with the government there far too often bending the knee to entertainment industries both local and abroad. Still, while much of this history is fraught with protectionism reared intentionally, one of the more curious aspects of Australian copyright law appears to have originated as something of an accident. That aspect is that the kind of safe harbor protections that exist in America are rather limited in Australia. Specifically limited to commercial ISPs, as opposed to websites or institutions that provide internet access generally speaking. We'll get a bit more into how this came to be in a moment. We'll start instead with news that recently offered amendments to copyright law in the country that would shore up safe harbor protections more generally have received the support of Australian Prime Minister Malcom Turnbull.

The standard for warrants is probable cause. The warrant obtained by Edina, MN police doesn't even approach reasonable suspicion. In its attempt to locate the person behind a fraudulent bank transfer, the Edina police have asked Google to bring them everyone, as public records enthusiast Tony Webster reports.

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Mizbala is an Israeli marketing/creative agency that runs a news site as well, commenting on issues related to internet marketing and advertising. The site has been quite critical of Facebook, including a few recent posts where it mocked Facebook for its aggressive/arbitrary blocking of users and content:

While America is often portrayed as a hive of liberal debauchery, with a media environment heavy on skin and short on substance, unmentioned is a prudish strain that runs just as deep and as afoul of the mainstream. This hidden brand of puritanism rears its head in many ways, one of which is the unfortunate call to have technology companies block access to perfectly legal content in the name of protecting the gentle minds of the citizenry. Utah has attempted this in the form of calls to have phones come stock with filters to block pornography, full stop. And, while Utah is by no means alone in America in this endeavor, this sort of unconstitutional grab at the minds of the people is most often attempted in the more conservative, and religious, states. This, of course, despite all of the collateral damage to educational and otherwise useful material that comes along with this sort of thing.Yet the march against skin marches on. In Georgia, lawmakers have introduced a bill that would mandate filters on mobile devices that allow internet access.

Given the often-comedic "security" featured on "smart" tea kettles, televisions, refrigerators and light bulbs -- was there any question that your sex toys would suffer from the same problems plaguing other Internet of Things devices?Last fall, a company named Standard Innovation was sued because its We-Vibe vibrator collected sensitive data about customer usage. Specifically, the device and its corresponding Bluetooth-tethered smartphone app collected data on how frequently (and for how long) users enjoyed the toy, the "selected vibration settings," the device's battery life, and even the vibrator's "temperature." All of this rather personal data was collected and sent off to the company's Canadian servers, where the company claims it's used to conduct research for future products and product updates.Unlike many IoT products, Standard Innovation does fortunately encrypt this data in transit, but like most IoT companies, it failed to fully and clearly disclose the scope of data collection to customers, what was being done with that data, and how to opt out (or preferably, opt in).The end result was a lawsuit by one of the device's users (pdf) claiming this improperly-disclosed data collection violated Illinois privacy laws. This week, Standard Innovation struck a $3.75 million settlement (pdf). Under the terms of the deal, Standard Innovation will designate $3 million of the total for customers who downloaded the app and used it with the We-Vibe device, each individual receiving about $10,000 each. The remaining $750,000 is then destined to be divided between customers who purchased the devices alone, with each individual in that instance receiving roughly $200 each.The company tells the Chicago Tribune it had learned its lesson about the collection of masturbatory metadata:

The DHS and CBP have both taken a healthy interest in travelers' social media posts. The DHS head even suggested withholding this information would no longer be an option -- that demands for account passwords were on the way. (Considering the government can search every person and their electronic devices at the border, demands for social media info would seem to be mostly redundant...) The underlying premise is this would give the US a jump on incoming terrorists by checking travelers' posts against a list of troublesome terms.This isn't a welcome development, but the federal government continues to be its own worst enemy. You can't fear what can't be deployed competently. The DHS isn't going to stop trying to hoover up social media posts as part of the vetting process, but as a just-released Inspector General's report [PDF] points out, it may be several years before this vetting program operates in any sort of useful fashion. (via The Register)

As we've noted, the main reason the Sci-Hub site is so popular with academics is not because it is free -- researchers generally have free access to papers anyway -- but because it is so easy to use. Among other things, it provides a centralized store of a huge number of papers -- 58 million at the time of writing -- that can be downloaded with a single click. But an interesting post on the Green Tea and Velociraptors blog points out Sci-Hub's holdings are beaten by the total number of papers available on the ResearchGate site, which has 12 million members:

In our recent conversation about Ed Sheeran's rise to fame, we chiefly focused on his claim that music piracy helped him be discovered by the public and his generally lax views on filesharing of his music. While that modern view on how music is consumed is refreshing, we focused less on another chief part of the equation: Ed Sheeran is really good to his fans. Between engaging with them directly via social media, having a generally congenial attitude towards them, and producing music his fans love, he's built up quite a connection with his listeners.But he appears to want to go above and beyond simply connecting with his fans, as well. He's even willing to go to bat for them with his label, Atlantic/Warner. He demonstrated this when a musician in the UK had a short video of herself covering a Sheeran song not only taken down from her Facebook account over a copyright claim, but had her account briefly suspended.

Many people seem to forget that before Ed Snowden came along, Senator Ron Wyden was beating the drum in Congress about how the NSA was abusing Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to spy on Americans. Here's a story we did back in 2011 concerning Wyden raising concerns about the failure of the Director of National Intelligence to say how Section 702 was being used on Americans. Even earlier in 2011, we wrote about then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, refusing to answer this question, saying that "it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed."Wyden kept up a series of similar requests, famously leading to the 2013 hearing in which Wyden directly asked Clapper about whether or not information was being collected on Americans and Clapper flat out lied. Snowden himself has credited that particular exchange as playing a big role in convincing him to leak documents.Fast forward to now. Last week, Senator Wyden sent a letter to incoming Director of National Intelligence* Dan Coats, once again asking how many Americans are having their communications watched under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act (which, again, is supposed to be used for foreign intelligence, but which we now know is regularly used to do surveillance on Americans).

Remember James Woods? The Hollywood actor sued a Twitter troll for $10 million, claiming defamation, because that troll had sarcastically referred to Woods as a "cocaine addict." Woods, of course, has a long history of mixing it up on Twitter with lots of people, including saying things almost identical to what he sued over:Throughout the case, Woods continued to make it abundantly clear to the world that he is a horrible person. Specifically, during the course of the case, the (anonymous) defendant unexpectedly passed away, leading Woods to gloat about the guy's death, after first claiming that the reason the appeal in the case was dropped was because he was winning the case:

We've talked about the astounding hypocrisy of Rep. Devin Nunes a few times in the past. He heads the House Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to be conducting "oversight" of the intelligence community, but has generally been a cheerleader for mass surveillance in recent years. Nunes, in fact, has regularly slammed any attempt to cut back on surveillance, to the point of actively misleading the public in making false claims about how NSA surveillance programs work. The hypocrisy became clear when Nunes flipped out following the firing/resignation of Mike Flynn as National Security Advisor, arguing that it was somehow unprecedented that an American's phone calls with Russian officials were recorded by the intelligence community. Of course, that suggests either near total ignorance of the programs he's supposedly in charge of overseeing, or just blatant political pandering.And now it's getting worse. Reporter Katie Bo Williams got her hands on an interesting letter that Nunes, along with ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff, just sent to the heads of the CIA, NSA and FBI, continuing to dig in on the whole "recorded Mike Flynn" thing. The target now is Executive Order 12333, which we've spoken about quite a lot. That's the executive order signed by President Reagan, that more or less gives the intelligence community total free rein in conducting surveillance overseas. As an ex-State Department official revealed back in 2014, the vast majority of NSA surveillance actually is done under 12333, and it just uses other programs -- like Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act -- to fill in the gaps of what they can't get via 12333. Executive Order 12333, for example, was used to hack into Yahoo and Google's servers overseas, allowing the NSA to scoop up lots of info without any oversight by US courts.Anyway, based on the letter that Nunes has sent, he's suddenly quite concerned about 12333. And this demonstrates his massive hypocrisy, because another letter he sent a few years ago has him arguing that there should be less oversight on 12333... but we'll get to that. This new letter suggests that the Flynn recording came under 12333, and so he's demanding all sorts of data on how 12333 is used on US Persons.Of course, what's interesting here is that the Congressional intelligence committees have long stated that they don't really have much oversight into anything under 12333. Dianne Feinstein (who was a top member of the Senate Intelligence Committee) admitted in the past that the committees get zero insight into 12333 intelligence collection:

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The Mormon Church has been somewhat flip-floppy when it comes to criticism against it. On the one hand, the notoriously tight-knit Church has been admirably tolerant of many attempts to parody it, including public commentary and a certain Broadway show of world renown. On the other hand, it seems the Church tends to draw a line in the sand when it comes to disseminating official church documents, even when this is done by journalists and organizations dedicated to commentary and news. In the past, the Mormon Church has attempted to utilize copyright law to have those documents removed from such sites as Wikimedia and Wikileaks, which of course resulted in the wider viewership of those same documents as news of the threats wove through the media. The Streisand Effect, it seems, offers no quarter of religious institutions.A decade later, it seems our friends in Utah have not learned this lesson, as the Mormon Church reportedly threatened the MormonLeaks website with legal action over copyright infringement after the site hosted a PowerPoint presentation.

Last fall, Alphabet/Google announced that the company would be notably scaling back its Google Fiber ambitions. The company axed its CEO, laid off a small number of employees, and froze a number of anticipated fiber builds (in Portland and a few other locations). Numerous reports indicated that there were growing concerns among many executives about the high costs and slow pace of deploying fiber, so the company was considering an overall pivot to next-generation gigabit wireless while it continued building out most already-announced markets.While it's hard to call this pivot a failure until we see a real wireless product, ISPs like AT&T were of course quick to suggest Google Fiber was little more than folly (ignoring that AT&T's anti-competitive behavior played a starring role in Google Fiber's struggles in many cities). This has contributed to an overall air of "we told you so" smugness emanating from numerous quadrants of the telecom status quo.That take, however, is short-sighted. One, the launch of Google Fiber put an unrelenting spotlight on the lack of broadband competition in countless markets, driving many large ISPs (like AT&T) to deploy gigabit broadband service that had previously been unheard of. Google Fiber also managed to shine a bright spotlight on the way many large ISPs use our broken legislative and regulatory systems to keep things broken, whether that's by using utility pole beaurocracy to slow competitors' installs, or writing awful state protectionist law hamstringing what your local town and city can do about it.Over at Backchannel, long-standing duopoly critic and Harvard Law Professor Susan Crawford notes that there are a lot of useful lessons from Google Fiber, most notably that the system Google Fiber is operating in is effectively rotten to the core:

A couple of years ago, the Freedom of the Press Foundation sued the DOJ over its refusal to release its secret rules governing spying on the nation's journalists. This was prompted by revelations the FBI had used National Security Letters to obtain information on AP and Fox News journalists. The DOJ then issued new rules on the do's and don'ts of surveilling journalists, but once again (a) redacted them into uselessness and (b) granted the FBI an NSL exception, undercutting the entire point of the recrafted rules.The OIG report -- in which the Inspector General disputed the DOJ's extensive redactions -- still has yet to be released in a less-redacted form. Sadly, it now appears it will never be any less redacted than the unintelligible mess the DOJ handed over a few years ago. A federal judge has sided with the government, finding its investigative techniques and methods are too sensitive to be handed over to the public, much less journalists it may or may not have surveilled using NSLs. (h/t Trevor Timm, Mike Scarcella)Underlying everything is the government's barely-contested assertion that these rules contain information of national security interest. It's a handy assertion because it means the DOJ doesn't even have to explain why the redactions it made are relevant to its national security claims. From the opinion [PDF]:

In the fall of 2015, privacy activist Phil Mocek and the Center for Open Policing sued the city of Tacoma for its response to a request for Stingray documents. The documents Mocek obtained were heavily-redacted, despite there being several mostly-unredacted versions of the FBI's Stingray non-disclosure agreement already in public circulation.(This would be the standard NDA the FBI appends to every Stingray purchase by local law enforcement agencies -- one that says all public records requests should be forwarded to the feds and encourages locals to toss cases rather than expose Stingray use. It's also the same contract the FBI was shocked to hear agencies were complying with after signing on the dotted line to take ownership of their new cell tower spoofers.)The lawsuit was filed under the state's open records law, with Mocek challenging the Tacoma PD's use of the "investigative records" exemption to withhold significant amounts of a mostly bog-standard nondisclosure agreement. As was noted back then, the continued withholding of this information could become costly (for taxpayers): the state's public records law allows for fines of $500/day for violations.The court has spoken and the Tacoma PD's excessive secrecy is indeed going to cost residents a chunk of change.

Last month, we noted that a ton of tech companies -- including us at the Copia Institute -- had signed on to amicus brief opposing the Trump Executive Order on immigration. As you know, the administration came out with a new executive order a few weeks later, trying to get around the multiple courts that had blocked the original order. The new order is just a cosmetic rewriting of the original one with a few small changes that the administration hopes will survive judicial scrutiny. A number of challenges have already been filed to the new order, and in one of them, brought by the state of Hawaii, a bunch of tech companies (again, including the Copia Institute) have now filed an amicus brief opposing the order. In particular, this brief focuses on the harms to the tech industry, including actual examples of harms created by this exec order:

As we noted last week, one of the main copyright battlegrounds in the UK concerns the use of Kodi boxes -- low-cost devices running the open source Kodi multimedia player, usually augmented with plug-ins that provide access to unauthorized content. One of the popular uses of such Kodi boxes is to watch live streams of sporting events. TorrentFreak reports on an important new court order obtained by the UK's Football Association Premier League (FAPL) to prevent people from viewing live streams of soccer games free of charge. The problem for the FAPL is that the addresses of the servers streaming matches are often only known once the games begin. To meet that challenge, the court has granted a new kind of injunction: one that allows live blocking. Here's how it will work:

With one of Prenda Law's key players, John Steele, pleading guilty and likely spending many, many years in prison, you might think that it would mean an end to egregious copyright trolling. However, Matthew Sag, who's spent years tracking the number of copyright trolling lawsuits, lets us know that trolling is still going strong, and it's only slightly modified since the days of Prenda:

The DOJ is still fighting a lawsuit over the iPhone exploit the FBI purchased to access the (worthless) contents of a phone used by a participant in the San Bernardino shooting. FBI director James Comey and the DOJ made comments at the time stating a couple of things:1. The phone crack was expensive.

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New York state legislators apparently think the state's so cosmopolitan it may as well be Europe. As Adam Steinbaugh points out on Twitter, though, local comparisons aren't nearly as flattering.

So we've noted a few times now how every month or so there's a media report proclaiming that you can't save any money via cord cutting. The logic in these reports almost always goes something like this: "Once I got done signing up for every damn streaming video service under the sun, I found that I wasn't really saving much money over traditional cable."Authors leaning on this lazy take almost always tend to forget a few things. One, the same people dictating cable TV rates dictate streaming video rates. Two, adding a dozen streaming services to exactly match your bloated, 300 channel cable subscription misses the entire point of cord cutting. The benefit of streaming is you can pick and choose the content you prefer. And yes, if you prefer a massive bundle of religious programming, horrible reality television, and infomercials, then yes -- you may want to stick to paying an arm and a leg for cable.Just like clockwork, USAToday rushed to meet this month's invisible quota for "cord cutting doesn't save me money" stories. In their version, the author desperately tries to include the cost of broadband service just to try and make an inaccurate point:

The ATF's sting operations have already drawn plenty of criticism. Not from law enforcement agencies who partner up with the ATF for easy busts or the DOJ which oversees them, but from almost everyone else, including federal judges. These stings result in government-made criminals who are led by undercover agents towards robbing fake stash houses of nonexistent drugs, cash, and weapons. The fun thing about the nonexistent drugs is it can be whatever amount ATF agents say it is. And that amount of drugs -- that exists nowhere but in the imagination of federal agents -- is used to determine lengths of sentences.Judge Gerald McHugh trimmed back a sentence given a defendant caught in an ATF stash house sting, pointing out the crooked system allows prosecutors to play judge, jury and executioner -- all before the case even lands in court. As the judge notes, he has never run into a sting prosecution where the imaginary drug stash was below the statutory guideline triggering the longest sentences.

One of the topics that generates strong feelings in the online world is adblocking. Many users love it, but many publishers hate it. That's a big problem, because advertising has turned into the main way of funding what appears on the Internet. As adblockers become more common, so the advertising revenue available to pay for creating articles, images, sound and video diminishes. Some want to ban adblockers, but that's hardly a solution: forcing visitors to your site to view ads they hate is not a good way to foster a long-term business relationship. Improving ads seems a better approach, but that's easier said than done, and may come too late now that so many people have installed adblockers.The other obvious solution is to charge people to view online material. There's been a certain reluctance to try that approach, partly because of the misleading slogan "information wants to be free", and partly because historically it hasn't worked in general. But it seems that major online players in China are now starting to roll out the paid-for model, perhaps in part because adblockers are widely used there, as in the West. Here's what the biggest online service, WeChat, with a billion accounts created, and at least 700 million active users, is trying, as reported by technode:

Much of the way the movie industry looks to combat film piracy will seem familiar to readers of this site. It typically involves shakedown threat letters, games of DMCA whac-a-mole, and a paint-by-numbers approach that mostly amounts to film studios shaking their lawyers' fists at the sky. All that produces the status quo, where piracy is still a thing, films still make gobs of money, and regular observers of it all are left scratching our heads wondering how so much noise could be made over it all.But I will give credit where credit is due as Costa Rican film distributor Romaly deserves some style and creativity points for its new anti-piracy tactic.

The rise of drones in both the personal and commercial spheres has happened with stunning speed, and it has created a whole bunch of hard-to-answer regulatory questions. This week we're joined by Notifleet's Siggi Hindrichs to discuss the current state and future of drone regulation by the FAA.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.

For years now, we've highlighted Verizon's tendency to grab all manner of tax breaks and subsidies from a town or city -- in exchange for fiber optic upgrades that are often never delivered. All up and down the eastern seaboard, Verizon was given the keys to the kingdom in franchise and other agreements filled with loopholes that let the telco, time and time again, promise one thing, then deliver another. And because the company enjoys immense lobbying power over regional regulators and state legislatures, Verizon has never really been held accountable for this behavior.New York City has been a particular point of contention. In 2008, former mayor Mike Bloomberg and Verizon signed (behind closed doors) a new franchise agreement promising "100% coverage" of FiOS across the city by 2014. As some local reporters had warned at the time (and were promptly ignored), the city's deal with Verizon contained all manner of loopholes allowing Verizon to wiggle over, under and around its obligations. And wiggle Verizon did; a 2015 city report found huge gaps in deployment coverage -- particularly in many of the less affluent, outer city boroughs.New York City had long promised to sue Verizon over its failures, and this week made good on that promise. A lawsuit filed by the city (pdf) says that Verizon only ultimately reached 2.2 million out of the city's 3.3 million residences with FiOS. The city is seeking a declaration that Verizon is in breach of its deployment obligations, as well as an order to complete the project as promised. The contract required that Verizon "pass" nearby apartments and buildings with fiber. But according to the city, Verizon's definition of "pass" meant "getting the fiber line somewhere close to the building, maybe":