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Though the notion of the Facebook "filter bubble" has been around for a while, it's picked up a huge amount of steam following the election of Donald Trump — perhaps just a little too much steam. While Techdirt has long been of the opinion that pointing fingers at Facebook is misguided, there are plenty of people who disagree. This week, we're joined by one such person — long-time media commentator and senior editor at Fortune Mathew Ingram — for a lively debate about just how much of a problem the filter bubble really is, and how you'd go about solving it.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.

I've already argued that the rush to point fingers at Facebook for allowing lots of fake news to get passed around is greatly overhyped by people searching for explanations for last week's election results. That doesn't mean that people shouldn't be looking to do something about fake news on various platforms. On Monday, Google also faced some controversy over fake news, when its top result for people searching for "final election results" pointed to a fake news site with made up numbers. In response, a few hours later, Google announced that it was going to start banning fake news sites from using Google's AdSense ad product. A few hours after that, Facebook announced a similar pledge to stop allowing those sites to make money from Facebook.

Last week I wrote a bit about the ridiculous and misguided backlash against Facebook over the election results. The basis of the claim was that there were a bunch of fake or extremely misleading stories shared on the site by Trump supporters, and some felt that helped swing the election (and, yes, there were also fake stories shared by Clinton supporters -- but apparently sharing fake news was nearly twice as common among Trump supporters than Clinton supporters). I still think this analysis blaming Facebook is wrong. There was confirmation bias, absolutely, but it's not as if a lack of fake news would have changed people's minds. Many were just passing along the fake news because it fit the worldview they already have.

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Throughout the campaign, we noted how Donald Trump's views on the First Amendment and free speech were horrific. While some of his supporters insist that he's wonderful for free speech because he's not "politically correct," in almost every way he's positioned himself as an enemy of free speech and the First Amendment (even the whole "political correctness" thing is misleading, because if you mention certain other words, Trump supporters seem to get just as worked up as the "PC police"). He (along with Clinton) promised to censor the internet and brushed off the free speech concerns about doing so, calling people who bring up free speech in that context to be "foolish people." And, then of course, there is the long list of threats to sue his opponents for their ads, news organizations for their articles and other critics as well. Those are all protected speech. It didn't help matters that his very first post-election tweet complained about protesters exercising their First Amendment right to assemble and protest, and the press for supposedly "inciting" them to protest.

A few weeks back, Ken "Popehat" White lit the famed Popehat Signal to seek pro bono legal help for the creators of a new Kickstarter project called "Oh The Places You'll Boldly Go" -- which was a parody mashup of Dr. Seuss and Star Trek.As White wrote at the time, this seemed like a clear case of a big corporate bully -- Dr. Seuss Enterprises -- bullying a small group of artists having some fun, creating a parody that was almost certainly protected by fair use.

For some time now broadband providers have taken a page out of the banking playbook and hitting consumers with sneaky, below-the-line fees for TV and broadband service. Whether it's the use of "regulatory recovery fee" (a bogus fee designed to sound like it's government-mandated to misdirect blame) or an entirely pointless and nonsensical fee like CenturyLink's "Internet Cost Recovery Fee," these surcharges exist for one purpose: they let the ISP advertise one price, then charge something dramatically different.

FBI Director James Comey believes encryption is perhaps the biggest threat to public safety yet. So big, in fact, that he can only engage in hyperbole about it. There's been very little done to quantify the problem, even by the agency that seems to fear it most.In 2015, Comey told senators that a "vast majority" of devices seized by US law enforcement "may no longer be accessible" due to encryption. Comey has a very strange definition of "vast majority," as Marcy Wheeler points out.

Techdirt has been covering China's relentless clampdown on every aspect of the online world for some time, culminating in the new "cybersecurity" law that's just been passed. But if you think the Chinese authorities are now done, you'd be wrong. They are branching out into an entirely new field -- cinema -- with a law that the official Xinhua News Agency calls "the first of its kind in China":

When Colorado made recreational marijuana use legal, neighboring states were quick to predict lasting damage would be done by this flouting of federal law. "It's still illegal here," they sued briefly, before being booted back to reality by the Supreme Court.

Spotted by Eriq Gardner over at The Hollywood Reporter, Sony has applied for a patent measuring how accurate reporters are. From the patent abstract:

Back when most people still expected Hillary Clinton to be our next President, there was a lot of talk about how President Obama would try to shove through the ratification of the TPP agreement in the lame duck session between the election and the inauguration -- so that Clinton wouldn't have to flip flop on the agreement yet again. Of course, with Trump elected, that was going to be even more difficult, and now basically everyone in the administration and Congress has agreed that the TPP is dead. There will be no effort to ratify it in the lame duck session, and it certainly seems unlikely that President Trump will push to revive it. While other countries in the agreement may move forward, it doesn't matter unless the US ratifies. It's expected that the other major trade deal, the TTIP, is also unlikely to move forward at this point.

Anti-Muslim troll and self-proclaimed First Amendment warrior Pam Geller's stupid lawsuit against the DOJ for social media companies' removal of her Islamophobic posts has reached an end (if only temporarily). DC District Court Judge James Boasberg's decision pretty much aligns with the DOJ's motion to dismiss: in short, Geller is wrong about Section 230, wrong about the DOJ's "enforcement" of this affirmative defense, and not even close to targeting the right entity(ies) in her lawsuit. (via Eric Goldman)A very short recap: Geller routinely posted anti-Mulism content to social media platforms. These platforms would take her posts down and occasionally suspend her accounts. Geller felt this was censorship (it isn't) so she sued not Facebook, not Twitter, not any other social media service but the federal government. In her view Section 230 of the CDA is not a defense, but an excuse for social media platforms to remove her dubious contributions. What Geller ignores is that Section 230 is likely the only reason her posts stay live at any platform for any length of time, simply because it shields Facebook et al from being held civilly liable for content created by users.Boasberg's opinion [PDF] only runs 11 pages but it's more than enough to dispense with Geller's ridiculous legal arguments. He gets right to the crux of the issue in the first paragraph.

After making it a key plank of the Trump/Pence campaign that the public needed to see what was in Hillary Clinton's emails, it does seem somewhat ironic that VP Elect Mike Pence is now headed to court to protect what's in some of his emails as governor of Indiana.

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Long-time readers may remember our coverage of a slow-moving copyright case over public domain images from The Wizard of Oz and other movies. In brief: back in 2006, Warner Bros. sued vintage/nostalgia merchandise company AVELA, which had obtained restored images from old promotional posters for the films and was selling them for T-shirts and other products. Nobody disputed that these specific images were in the public domain, because the promo materials had not been registered for copyright even though the films were -- but Warner claimed that the images nevertheless infringed on the copyright in the characters established by the film. The court originally sided with Warner in full, but on appeal found that the exact two-dimensional reproductions of the images on T-shirts and the like were not infringing, but instances where they were combined with text and other images or used to create three-dimensional models were, and awarded some pretty huge damages. To complicate matters, there's also a trademark claim wrapped up in all this. There was another appeal, and now a court has upheld the ruling and the damages, giving movie studios another weapon in their war on the public domain (here's a PDF of the full ruling).Now, there are a lot of layers here, and I'm going to focus on The Wizard Of Oz, since it provides the most interesting example. The 1900 book is in the public domain. The 1939 movie is still under copyright held by Warner. The associated 1939 promo materials were not registered (a requirement at the time) and are in the public domain. And many characters and other elements of the movie are also covered by trademark, also owned by Warner. Absolutely none of these facts are in dispute -- but put them all together and you have a giant mess that illustrates the flimsiness of the idea/expression dichotomy, and how something can supposedly remain in the public domain while being gutted of all its usefulness to the public.Let's consider the line the court drew between different kinds of use, because it's one of those things that makes a certain amount of legal and logical sense but produces an utterly absurd result. Basically, the court said that Warner can't stop someone from making unmodified reproductions of material that is undisputedly in the public domain -- that is clearly non-infringing -- but since that material includes images of characters from a work that is not in the public domain, modifying it (by combining it with other images or turning it into 3D objects) violates those other copyrights and becomes infringement. The existence and limits of character copyright are highly complex and questionable to begin with (Warner does not in fact own the characters, because those are from the book, but only the original elements of the film's expression of those characters) but if you believe in them to any extent this makes some sense: a single image of a character entering the public domain does not invalidate all copyrights associated with that character. But... consider what this means: if you are remixing copyrighted material, making your own creative changes to it weighs in your favor in a determination of infringement; if you're making use of public domain material, creative changes might magically turn it into infringement. That's not how the public domain is supposed to work.This latest ruling is mostly upholding the last one, so let's go see what the court said in 2011:

For much of the last year we've talked about how the FCC's decision not to ban zero rating (or the practice of exempting some content from usage caps) when crafting net neutrality rules was a horrible oversight. As we warned initially, it simply opened the door to wireless carriers and ISPs abusing net neutrality in entirely new and creative ways. As a result, despite having net neutrality rules, we now have companies like AT&T, Verizon and Comcast all exempting their own streaming content from the caps while still penalizing smaller streaming startups and competitors.

Hillary Clinton has stepped forward to officially (such as it were...) blame FBI Director James Comey for robbing her of an election win.

Despite turning LabMD into a stone -- based on some suspect data breach allegations by a data protection company engaged in shady sales tactics -- the FTC is still seeking to extract as much blood as possible. Thanks to the FTC's ongoing efforts against LabMD, the company has been closed, has less than $5000 to its name, and is fighting back against the commission with pro bono help.The FTC wants to punish LabMD for a patient file that ended up file sharing services thanks to an employee's use of Limewire at work. (The file was in folder that end up being "shared" by default Limewire settings [My Documents].) Tiversa, a company that prowled file sharing services for sensitive documents in hopes of leveraging these into data security contracts, took this info to the FTC when LabMD refused to purchase its offerings.Since that point, the FTC has bankrupted LabMD by forcing it to defend itself against a supposed breach that never resulted in the misuse of patient data. Tiversa has seen its own fortunes diminish, culminating in an FBI raid of its offices in March of this year.The FTC overturned an Administrative Law Judge's (ALJ) decision in July, giving itself permission to restore its charges against LabMD for the breach -- ones the ALJ had dismissed. The FTC claims LabMD "left" the mistakenly-shared file out somewhere in the internet, as if the company actually had any way to "retrieve" it once it had been uploaded.Seemingly unconcerned that LabMD is now a defunct company, the FTC still wants it to implement a series of expensive steps to ensure the data it won't be collecting in the future is better protected.

This week, after a congressman and former Trump advisor raised the spectre of pulling FCC licenses over media bias and noted that only 32% of people trust the media and only 37% think it was balanced in its handling of the election, That One Guy won most insightful comment of the week by drawing a comparison to another important public opinion figure:

Five Years AgoOne topic naturally dominates this week's look at 2011, and will for several weeks to come: SOPA. The industry's plan was becoming clear: pretend the bill doesn't say what it says and offer up nonsensical interpretations. Pay no attention to the studies showing it will harm investment and innovation, the fact that it will not solve infringement, the loud voice of Rep. Darrel Issa opposing the voice, the huge censorship concerns summarized in Time magazine, or the opposition of the American Library Association. The House of Representatives certainly seemed to have no problem ignoring all these concerns either. No effort was made to resolve the convoluted language in the bill, and we pointed out that it also massively expands the copyright industries' diplomatic corp. Soon, the internet began planning the first of many protests.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2006, Australia was facing its own copyright reform, but began to smarten up as Google explained how it would kill the internet and the government actually looked into (and debunked) the industry's absurd claims of losses. Meanwhile, much like today, people in the US were discussing what the recent election would mean for various policy issues — in this case, the Democratic takeover of the House in 2006. It actually offered some encouragement, but lots of questions, for areas like copyright policy and telecom policy and net neutrality.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, the world was still reeling from September 11th while also preparing for the holiday seasons. These things intersected in the occasional prediction that fear of going to malls would drive shoppers online — but evidence didn't back this up, and besides, there were a lot of other factors in what the e-holidays would bring. As for physical retailers selling high-tech equipment, they were facing their own crisis. Meanwhile, Microsoft was under the anti-competitive microscope and negotiating with the DOJ, while the Hewlett-Packard/Compaq merger met with disapproval from both the Hewlett family and the Packard family.One-Hundred Years AgoThis week we can note an interesting centennial in the history of technology and politics. On November 7th, 1916, an experimental New York radio station broadcast the U.S. election results in audio for the very first time (they had previously only been broadcast in morse code). Amusingly, this first ever broadcast also called the election wrong, declaring Charles Evan Hughes the winner before signing off at 11 PM, only to find out the next day Woodrow Wilson had actually won.

It would be sort of fun to watch the more authoritarian governments of the world attempt to combat internet memes with censorship if it weren't both so damaging to the free speech ideals I hold so dear and if recent, ahem, events weren't making these stories hit a little closer to home than they would have but a few months ago. Countries like Russia and Indonesia have both taken steps to attempt to make illegal the time-honored tradition of putting up a famous person's picture and then typing words across it. Despite both governments' insisting that these legislative attempts are all to do with protecting people's honor and/or quelling false information about the subjects of these memes, the truth is that the aims behind them are more to do with clamping down on dissident speech and protecting those in power from criticism. That, indeed, is why these laws tend to be worded so vaguely. Vague enough, in fact, that it's quite clear that they can be used to criminalize pretty much any speech that the ruling government doesn't like.And joining in on this fascist fun now is Spain, which is attempting to criminalize memes in the vaguest manner possible.

As was expected, IMDb is suing the state of California over its new "ageism" law. The law has its genesis in actress Junie Hoang's lawsuit against the website, in which she claimed that the site's publication of her actual age caused her to be passed over by producers looking for younger women.

Earlier this year, we noted that a bunch of cities were looking to make Airbnb liable for residents in those cities using the platform without following certain city rules. As we noted at the time, this seemed to pretty clearly violate Section 230 of the CDA, which says that platforms cannot be liable for the actions of their users. San Francisco went ahead with such a law anyway, even though it tried to rework it at the last minute to deal with Airbnb's points on why it was illegal. The case ended up in court either way -- and unfortunately, the initial ruling has sided with San Francisco over Airbnb.

Floyd Abrams is one of, if not the most famous First Amendment lawyers in the country. He gets and deserves a ton of respect. His most famous case was defending the NY Times against the US government when Richard Nixon tried to block the NY Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers. And he's been involved in many other seminal First Amendment cases as well. That doesn't mean he doesn't sometimes make mistakes -- like the time he insisted that SOPA wouldn't violate the First Amendment because it was censorship for a good cause (i.e., for his clients at the MPAA). Or the time he falsely accused Wikileaks of indiscriminately leaking information that was actually being more carefully distributed.

This election year may have been something of a clusterfuck for just about everyone... but it was damn good for CNN. The cable news channel that was generally filled with some of the most idiotic and meaningless banter made out like a bandit, apparently bringing in a billion dollars in profit by being the country's official organ player in a grand circus of political entertainment. The hiring of direct partisans on both sides, the failure to do very much actual deep looking at anything, and the complete pointlessness of whatever a Wolf Blitzer is all seemed to delight in turning anything about issues into horse race he said/she said soundbites.

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The Lawfare blog, run by the Brookings Institution, has long reliably been a good source to go to for reading what defenders of mass surveillance and the surveillance state are thinking -- in a non-hysterical way. While I disagree with much of what's posted on there, it tends to be thoughtful and interesting reading. Its founder and Editor-in-Chief is Ben Wittes, who's always good for an impassioned defense of the NSA's surveillance on Americans, and was all in on forcing tech companies to break encryption. He wasn't worried, you see, because he was quite sure the NSA would never spy on him. Because, you know, he's a good guy.

I get that this is how politics works, but this is just a pretty stark and extreme example. A big part of Donald Trump's pitch to the public was about getting rid of the "corruption" in DC, that was sure to follow with Clinton, and her close connections to various lobbyists and Wall Street in particular. Here's what Trump campaign CEO (and, apparently, lead candidate for White House Chief of Staff) Steve Bannon told Bloomberg this week about the campaign:

Since being declared the winner of the Presidential election, Donald Trump has actually played the part of an actual President-elect quite well. His victory speech was quite gracious and welcoming. His meeting with President Obama appeared to go well. Of course, anyone who's watched him during the campaign knew it couldn't last, but perhaps, maybe, he'd actually be presidential for a few weeks or (could we dare?) a few months? But, nope. All it took was about 48 hours and the man who four years ago demanded that people "march on Washington" because President Obama was re-elected, used his very first tweet as the President elect to shit all over the First Amendment.Compare that to his tweet from four years ago:It's true that there are lots of protests going on, some of which have turned violent. It's also true that there's been a wave of attacks on minorities across the US by Trump supporters. An actual leader would seek to tell his supporters that's not how Americans should act. But that's not what we got.

It should be well-known by readers of this site that copyright trolls are essentially bullies. They send out their settlement threat letters, hoping to extort money from a public that typically doesn't know better than to be terrified by the legalese claims within the letters. It's a practice fraught with deception, as the evidence referenced in the letters typically amounts to nothing more than an IP address -- which itself may or may not be correct -- while the threats themselves can often times include consequences not remotely plausible. Still, the bullying goes on, because it works enough to make it profitable.That's why it's important to highlight how these bullies tend to respond when a target decides to stand up to them. Much like the bullies we've had in our personal lives, they tend to run away as quickly as possible. One recent example of this is James Collins, who received a troll letter from LHF Productions, the company behind the movie London Has Fallen. The company accused Collins of both downloading the movie via BitTorrent, as well as then making it available to others via the same means. Rather than acquiescing, however, Collins got himself a lawyer and had him punch back.

Last year, we discussed a really dumb trademark lawsuit against two guys running a pizza company brought by the Garden State Parkway, of all things, because the pizza company's logo was a clear homage to the GSP logo. You see, the two pizza-making guys were originally from New Jersey, and so thought that fashioning their company logo as a tribute to their shared roots was a good idea. The GSP seemed to think that this amounted to trademark infringement, despite the fact that managing the New Jersey Turnpike and slinging delicious pizza pies are fairly distinct marketplaces. A federal judge disagreed with them, however, and dismissed the lawsuit.That hasn't stopped the Turnpike Authority from threatening others, it seems. A winery, one that also uses labels that are a clear homage to the GSP logo, is seeking a declaratory judgement that it too is not committing trademark infringement after it had received a cease-and-desist letter.

The Louisiana legislature decided to help out its most underprivileged constituents -- law enforcement officers -- by making it a felony to "attack" them using nothing more than words.When New Orleans police officers arrived at the scene of a disturbance to arrest an intoxicated man for banging on a hotel's windows and harassing the employees, the situation devolved into the totally expected.

You all should be familiar with a Rubik's Cube, the three-dimensional puzzle toy that for some reason your grandmother kept on her coffee table to frustrate you while she watched Matlock. This invention of the 1970s still enjoys widespread popularity, with hundreds of millions of them being sold every year. The toy has been patented for some time, but ten years ago, a British company that manages the intellectual property rights for the toy also applied for trademark protection on the cube's design in the EU. The reason for this should be obvious: patent protections last for limited amounts of time, while trademark rights exist essentially in perpetuity, so long as it's actively used in the marketplace. It's an end-around to patent law designed to lock up a monopoly.But, in the case of the Rubik's Cube, it didn't work, as the European Union Court of Justice has correctly determined that the trademark applied for by Seven Towers was for a functional and technical solution, not one of branding. German competitor Simba Toys had challenged the trademark, and it won.

It appears some members of law enforcement are coming up with creative interpretations of the Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision. The decision said that officers could not extend traffic stops for unrelated purposes. When the objective of the traffic stop is complete, the detainment ends and the driver is free to go, no matter how much an officer might want to seek consent for a vehicle search or run a dog around the outside of it.What the court never said is that officers could violate citizens' Fourth Amendment rights as long as they were quick about it. But that seems to be the conclusion some are drawing. A Kentucky Appeals Court decision [PDF] drives the Supreme Court's point home. The key word in the Supreme Court's phrase "unnecessarily prolong" isn't "prolong," but "unnecessarily." (via FourthAmendment.com)Damion Lane ran a stop sign and was pulled over by officers. As they approached the car, he appeared to be fumbling with something. Officers ordered him out of the car, cuffed and searched him (for officer safety, according to the officers). While this was happening, an officer ran a K-9 unit around Lane's vehicle. The dog alerted on the car but nothing was found. The officer searching Lane did come across some cocaine in Lane's pants pocket.Lane moved to suppress evidence as being the result of an unconstitutional search. The state argued that the officers did have reasonable suspicion based on the totality of the circumstances, citing the "fumbling" movement in the car and Lane's attempt to reach into his pocket while in the process of being cuffed. Also the usual stuff: dark outside, "high crime neighborhood."The state responded to the challenge of the evidence by pointing out the stop had not been "unreasonably prolonged." This is true. The drug sniff occurred during Lane's cuffing and conversation with the other officer. But that's not what's important.

In the wake of the unexpected win of Donald Trump, people in many fields are starting to re-examine their assumptions about what might happen in the next few years. One of the areas impacted by Trump's success is trade in general, and trade deals in particular. For perhaps the first time, the 2016 election campaign put trade deals front and center. They may even have contributed to Hillary Clinton's downfall, since many found her sudden conversion to the anti-TPP movement unconvincing, to say the least.Given Trump's vocal antipathy to TPP, even its strongest supporters are recognizing that it is now in trouble. Here, for example, is John Key, Prime Minister of New Zealand, and one of the cheerleaders for the deal:

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I should say up front that I'm a big supporter of Fight for the Future and the work they do, and while some may take this post as a slam on them, it is anything but. We're very much on the same page on nearly everything, but it caught my attention when FftF's Evan Greer wrote a piece asking President Obama to "shut down" the NSA's mass surveillance systems before Donald Trump gets control of it all. Specifically the article says "before it's too late." While I'd love to see Obama shut down the NSA's mass surveillance system, it's time to admit that it is too late. Anything the President does to that effect in this lame duck session can, and will, be reversed on day one of the Trump administration. Perhaps there's some value in the symbolic gesture, but let's face the facts: it's too late.

Yesterday I wrote that people rushing to blame Facebook for the election results were being ridiculous, and it generated a fair bit of discussion (much of it on Twitter). And this was before NYMag's Max Read went out and wrote an article literally titled Donald Trump Won Because of Facebook. Here's the crux of Max's argument, which is similar to the argument many others have been making:

We've talked a lot about how while the lack of security in Internet of Things devices was kind of funny at first, it quickly became less funny as the dramatic scope of the problem began to reveal itself. Whether it's cars being taken over from an IP address up to ten miles away, to the rise in massive new DDoS attacks fueled by your not-so-smart home appliances, folks like security expert Bruce Schneier have made it abundantly clear the check is coming due.

Encryption remains a hot issue, with politicians repeatedly claiming that it allows bad people to hide bad things, although there isn't much evidence this is really a problem. More recently, WhatsApp has become a favorite target since it introduced end-to-end encryption that allegedly not even the company can decrypt. David Cameron vaguely threatened to block it, and Brazil actually tried. Against that background, the following story from the Guardian offers a welcome contrast of government officials using -- and loving -- WhatsApp, not least for its end-to-end encryption:

Data, even lots of it, can be useful. But it also leads to erroneous conclusions and questionable correlations. Ever been baffled by the content of a "targeted" ad? Just imagine the fun you'll have when "lol 'targeted' ad" is replaced with nearly-incessant "interactions" with law enforcement.

For some time now we've noted how one of the biggest reasons the broadband market remains uncompetitive is protectionist state law written by and lobbied for by incumbent ISPs. These laws take various forms, but usually they prevent towns or cities from building their own networks -- or partnering with private companies -- even in instances where the incumbent ISP refuses to service them. Nineteen such laws have been passed, and an FCC attempt to pre-empt these laws on a federal level was recently scrapped by the courts as over-reach, leaving the issue as problematic and unresolved as ever.

With Donald Trump now the President elect, all eyes in telecom have turned to what happens now in regards to FCC telecom enforcement generally, and our shiny new net neutrality rules specifically. Trump has proclaimed he opposes net neutrality, despite making it abundantly clear he doesn't appear to actually know what it is (he appears to falsely believe it has something to do with the fairness doctrine). As such most people believe he'll work to gut the current FCC, which as we've noted has, for the first time in arguably twenty years or so, actually been doing a few things to actually help broadband consumers and sector competition.

As this election's perfect argument for the dismantling of the two-party system has shuddered to a halt, the overriding issue appeared not to be a race run pretty much on no issues at all, but an unhealthy amount of paranoia.Between the FBI's inadvertently bipartisan investigation (and reinvestigation) of Hillary Clinton's emails, the constant cry that the Russians are coming (two if by underwater cable), and Donald Trump's insistence that the election is rigged (until he won), voting (and voting machines) are the cyber-est thing of all this election season.If no one's tampering with the machines, someone's tampering with the voters. Trump greeted early returns with a lawsuit over the supposed illegality of letting everyone lined up to vote actually vote before closing the booths. The bold new face of bounty-based "journalism" -- spearheaded by Pax Dickinson and questionable lawsuit enthusiast Chuck Johnson -- spent all day offering a $6720 bounty for evidence of voter fraud. At this point it remains uncollected, and the law of diminishing returns has sapped the energy from retweeters.Add into the fun a set of researchers finding (SHOCKER!) voting machines to be terribly insecure. That in itself isn't new, but letting everyone in on how exactly to do it certainly is.

Yeah, okay, I know there are a million and one "hot takes" going on across the media about what happened yesterday and "what went wrong." I already wrote about what the election means for tech policy and civil liberties, but the trite setup of the blame game is getting really stupid, really fast. I had already started writing up a response to this silly Vox article about how "Facebook is harming our democracy" before the election (the story came out over the weekend), but now that I'm seeing more and more people (especially in the media) blaming Facebook and "algorithms" for the results of the election, I'm turning it into this post: if you're blaming Facebook for the results of this election, you're an idiot.

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If the FBI seems especially out of control lately, what with Mad Dog Comey constantly on the prowl and his underlings acting like an unofficial wing of Wikileaks, it's not just you. The FBI's director is swiftly gaining a reputation for being uncontrollable -- the head of a law enforcement agency that has also periodically been viewed as a rogue force.Of course, it's hardly just a "law enforcement" agency at this point. It tends to view itself as an intelligence agency first, and its efforts are almost universally focused on expanding these powers and capabilities. To that end, it has turned its investigatory aims on their head, shifting away from digging into suspicious activity to basically looking into anyone it wants simply because it can.Two documents [PDF 1, PDF 2] obtained by The Intercept show the reach of the FBI's "HUMINT" (Human Intelligence) efforts. One thing the FBI wants is a vast army of informants.

I have to admit at the start of this post that I rather like Mark Cuban. Not his reality show shtick, but rather what I've seen from him in interviews and his positions. On matters of innovation and intellectual property, I've found him rather refreshing, even as we at this site have poked him on the topic of net neutrality. That admiration makes it all the more jarring when Cuban goes somewhat off the rails on unrelated matters.For instance, Cuban, who owns the NBA's Mavericks organization, recently pulled the press credentials of two sports journalists. Due to the vacuum of explanation for the move, those that covered it were left to speculation to explain why Cuban would do something like this. That speculation amounted mostly to Cuban either punishing ESPN, the employer of both journalists, for moving Mavs beat journalists into a national coverage role and thereby decreasing the exposure of the team, or pulling an ego trip on the journalists over the type of coverage the team was receiving. The latter was a rather unfair and an all too easy potshot at Cuban, while the former didn't make a great deal of sense as one of the journalists hadn't been on the Mavs beat for at least a decade.But when Cuban finally commented publicly on his motives, they were revealed to make even less sense, which I wouldn't have thought possible.

I have to admit at the start of this post that I rather like Mark Cuban. Not his reality show shtick, but rather what I've seen from him in interviews and his positions. On matters of innovation and intellectual property, I've found him rather refreshing, even as we at this site have poked him on the topic of net neutrality. That admiration makes it all the more jarring when Cuban goes somewhat off the rails on unrelated matters.For instance, Cuban, who owns the NBA's Mavericks organization, recently pulled the press credentials of two sports journalists. Due to the vacuum of explanation for the move, those that covered it were left to speculation to explain why Cuban would do something like this. That speculation amounted mostly to Cuban either punishing ESPN, the employer of both journalists, for moving Mavs beat journalists into a national coverage role and thereby decreasing the exposure of the team, or pulling an ego trip on the journalists over the type of coverage the team was receiving. The latter was a rather unfair and an all too easy potshot at Cuban, while the former didn't make a great deal of sense as one of the journalists hadn't been on the Mavs beat for at least a decade.But when Cuban finally commented publicly on his motives, they were revealed to make even less sense, which I wouldn't have thought possible.