Techdirt

Government transparency is once again in default operation mode. If you want the records you're seeking, you're welcome to sue us. Or, in this case, the government is more than happy to sue the requester, if that's what it takes to keep records from being released.

So, last week we launched our new Copying is Not Theft t-shirts (and hoodies, and stickers and mugs). It's a nice shirt:We thought the message was fairly straightforward, building of the wonderful song and animation done by Nina Paley: Copying Is Not Theft:That doesn't necessarily mean that copying is always legal or morally correct. But it pretty clearly is not theft.

We're still pretty skeptical about paywalls for most newspapers, because they really tend to limit the audience for your offering, and limit people sharing that content as well (which is pretty important for growing your audience these days). But, some newspapers have really embraced them, including the Washington Post, which lately has ramped up its paywall efforts. And, apparently with that, come sneaky fees. First noticed by an editor at the WSJ (another paywall site, though one that has been designed to be much more porous), Tim Hanrahan, it appears that the Washington Post now has an "activation fee" to subscribe to get around the paywall:

While over-shadowed by the net neutrality vote the same day, the FCC's decision last year to protect municipal broadband was potentially more important. For more than fifteen years incumbent ISPs have quite literally been allowed to buy state laws that hinder communities from improving their broadband networks, or even in some instances from striking public/private partnerships with the likes of Google Fiber. These protectionist laws, passed in nineteen different states, are a huge reason why you currently only have the choice of one shitty cable provider and one shitty telco for broadband service (if you're lucky).

Learn to program in C, C++, and C# with this $39 Complete C Family Programming Bundle. The 6 courses cover basic information on C and C++, and then focus the remaining time helping you learn C#, which is one of the leading programming languages for developing Windows business applications, and is especially powerful in building quick and efficient desktop applications. It enables developers to build secure and robust applications running on the .NET framework, and provides a range of solutions to programming problems. Get up to date with the C Family Suite.

Oh, James Comey. The FBI Director seems to have staked out his reputation on being the guy who will go to his grave refusing to understand what basically every technology expert has been telling him for the past couple of years: his desire to backdoor encryption will make everyone less safe. But Comey is pot committed on his belief that encryption is bad and that Silicon Valley just needs to nerd harder and it'll somehow come up with encryption that has a magic golden key for him. His latest is saying that it's time for an "adult conversation" on encryption:

As you may recall, earlier this year we wrote about a good ruling in a ridiculous lawsuit by the notoriously overaggressive trademark enforcers at luxury goods giant Louis Vuitton. You can look back at some of their earlier lawsuits, but the one we wrote about this year was particularly ridiculous. It sued a small bag maker called "My Other Bag" who made a simple tote bag that played on the famous joke bumper sticker "My Other Car is A...." with some sort of luxury car brand listed as the final point. People would put those on not-nearly-as-nice cars. In fact, when I was a kid, my dad had a Ford Pinto (yes, the exploding kind) and it had "My Other Car is a Porsche" as a bumper sticker. It's not a very funny joke (and I totally didn't get it as a kid), but it's a joke. And a fairly common one. So My Other Bag did the same thing with the following tote:Got it? That's a picture of a bag that looks like a Louis Vuitton bag on the side of a tote. It's obviously a joke, and the district court made that point to LV:

The one-two punch of incompetent IT administrators and botched connected device security has resulted in an unsurprising spike in ransomeware attacks across the medical industry. And while the rise in easily hacked "smart" TVs, tea kettles, and kids toys is superficially funny in the consumer internet of things space, it's less amusing when you're a patient relying on poorly secured pace makers and essential medical equipment. But much like the internet of things space these devices are not only poorly secured, they're supported by companies that aren't very good at releasing timely security updates.

As we noted last October, the European Union passed net neutrality rules that not only don't really protect net neutrality, but actually give ISPs across the EU member countries the green light to violate net neutrality consistently -- just as long as ISPs are relatively clever about it. Just like the original, overturned 2010 net neutrality rules in the States, Europe's new rules (which took effect April 30) are packed with all manner of loopholes giving exemption for "specialized services" and "class-based discrimination," as well as giving the green light for zero rating.

Every once in a while, we get some good news out of a government agency. Based on a 2013 directive from the White House, NASA had finally announced early this year that it would be following the NIH model and making its publicly funded research available for free online. With the only caveat being a restriction on research that relates to national security, NASA has made good on plans to publish the rest of this research on Pubspace, its new publicly-facing portal for sharing this research.

The Fourth of July is long in our rearview mirrors, but for some folks the holiday haunts them still. Such is the case with NFL football player Jason Pierre-Paul, who quite famously managed to celebrate our nation's independence by blowing apart a good chunk of his hand a year and a half ago. So too does the holiday likely remain top of mind for ESPN and its reporter, Adam Schefter, who found themselves in a bit of controversy after reporting on Pierre-Paul's condition and tweeting out a copy of the player's medical chart, revealing that he had no digits where there previously had been fingers. Pierre-Paul sued Schefter and ESPN for invading his privacy, arguing that he'd suffered great harm as a result and suggesting that, though Schefter had received the medical chart from a source, the publication of such information might make it less likely for other famous persons to seek medical treatment in the future. ESPN, meanwhile, attempted to spike the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds under an anti-SLAPP statute, arguing that journalists have always been free to provide evidence for stories gained from sources.Well, the court has ruled against ESPN's attempt to have the suit dismissed, saying the lawsuit will proceed.

Following two lawsuits against the NYPD for its pervasive, rights-violating surveillance of the city's Muslims, the department's Inspector General took a look at a sampling of cases from 2010-2015 to see if the Handschu Agreement -- crafted in 1985 and heavily modified in 2002 -- was being followed. The short answer is "No." So is the long answer [PDF].The guideline was part of a consent decree created in response to pervasive NYPD surveillance of activities protected by the First Amendment, even when no unlawful activity was suspected. The guideline worked for awhile, but the 9/11 attacks changed that. The NYPD brought in two former CIA employees who decided to turn a domestic law enforcement agency into Langley on the Hudson. Former CIA officer David Cohen used terrorism fears to compel a judge to significantly modify the Handschu Agreement.From that point on, the NYPD steadily abused the revamped agreement. Its "Demographics Unit" designated entire mosques as terrorist entities, placed the city's Muslims under surveillance, and -- best of all -- generated zero leads.The Inspector General's report points out that the NYPD couldn't even comply with the relaxed, post-9/11 Handschu Agreement. Instead, the Demographics Unit copy-pasted justifications for pervasive surveillance and passed them up the ladder to the rubber stamps handling the approval process.

Gawker's gone, and that's that. And yet, whenever we've expressed concerns over the billionaire vendetta that brought it down, we've faced a huge amount of pushback from people who had problems with the site and its reporting practices. This week, we're joined by Parker Thompson aka Startup L. Jackson for a friendly debate about whether the Gawker shutdown really is a big deal.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

When popular messaging app Whatsapp was acquired by Facebook in 2014 for $19 billion, the company responded to the obvious privacy implications with a blog post promising to "set the record straight" about the acquisition, while debunking all of the "inaccurate and careless information" being circulated online. In it, co-founder Jan Koum promised that the app, which has tried to build a reputation on respecting user privacy, would keep privacy at the heart of its operations under Facebook. Privacy was, Koum promised, simply "coded into our DNA":

The ongoing saga that is the monkey selfie lawsuit has continued to move forward, with the lawyers for photographer David Slater filing their brief in response to PETA's. As you probably recall, PETA had teamed up with a primatologist named Antje Engelhardt claiming to be "next friends" for the Indonesian macaque monkey named Naruto, who is alleged to have taken the following selfie with David Slater's camera.Slater has claimed to hold the copyright on the photo for a long time, though he's wrong. But PETA is much more wrong in arguing that it can step in and claim both (a) that there is a copyright on the image and (b) that the monkey holds it. Slater is just wrong about the copyright existing.

Conveniently add storage to your MacBook with the $34 Nifty MiniDrive Air, a MicroSD card adapter that seamlessly plugs into your MacBook. The MiniDrive integrates with Time Machine to add up to 200 GB of extra space to store important files. You won't have to carry cumbersome storage devices anymore. Simply plug in MiniDrive and you're good to go. Available for the 13" Air, 13/15" Pro, and 13/15" Pro Retina MacBooks.

Back in 2011, AT&T stopped selling unlimited wireless data plans, and began heavily pushing more expensive capped and metered plans. Existing unlimited users at the time were grandfathered, but the company engaged in all manner of sneaky behavior to try and make life as unpleasant as possible for these users, ranging from blocking them from using Facetime unless they migrated to metered plans, to heavily throttling these "unlimited" users after only consuming a few gigabytes of data. Ultimately AT&T faced a $100 million fine by the FCC (currently being contested by AT&T), and a 2014 lawsuit by the FTC for misleading consumers and dramatically changing the terms of service while users were under contract.

We've seen it so often over the years, it's probably now time to accept the fact that this will never change: when entities are presented evidence of security holes and breaches, far too often the initial reaction is to shoot the messenger.A school whose online student portal exposed a lot of sensitive data decided the best way to handle a concerned parent's repeated questions about how it was handling the problem was to file a criminal complaint against the parent. (via the Office of Inadequate Security)The details of the breach (since closed) were reported by independent journalist Sherrie Peif.

While T-Mobile has certainly done some good things for the wireless industry, the company's ongoing tone deafness on net neutrality isn't doing the carrier any favors. T-Mobile fought against real net neutrality rules, then, once passed anyway, got right to work trying to find creative ways around the rules using zero rating (exempting only some content from usage caps). When net neutrality advocates and scholars repeatedly pointed out T-Mobile was violating net neutrality and being a bit hypocritical ("we're edgy and love consumers but not real net neutrality!"), the company dug a deeper hole by attacking groups like the EFF.

Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica has obtained court documents showing the Oakland Police Department had to call in the feds -- and their IMSI catcher -- to track down a suspect wanted in connection with a shooting of an off-duty police officer.

Earlier this year, Moosehead Brewery made the wonderful decision to get into a trademark dispute with the makers of a different beer, called Müs Knuckle, I imagine because trademark lawyers now know both that I'm paying attention to these cases and that I have the sense of humor of a high school sophomore. Moosehead essentially asserted that it owned the trademark rights to anything remotely close to "moose", including made up words that are homonyms but which have delightfully vulgar connotations. Other than the issue of the word "moose", none of the trade dress in question had anything remotely to do with one another.Which is slightly different in another trademark suit that Moosehead Brewery has initiated. In the case of Moosehead Brewery v. Moose Wizz Root Beer, the labels are somewhat similar in color and logo, though there is certainly differentiation within them as well. The real issue here, instead, is that one of these is an alcoholic drink while the other is just a soda.

The Kim Dotcom extradition appeal is now under way, with the first question being whether or not the courtroom drama could be livestreamed on the internet for a global public to watch. The request was originally made by Kim Dotcom and his lawyers, but the lawyers for the US government opposed... because... well, just because.

We've written probably hundreds of stories on just what a dumb idea electronic voting systems are, highlighting how poorly implemented they are, and how easily hacked. And, yet, despite lots of security experts sounding the alarm over and over again, you still get election officials ridiculously declaring that their own systems are somehow hack proof.

The Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeals has just ended Terrebonne Parish Sheriff Jerry "Censorious Dumbass" Larpenter's attempt to silence a critic through the magic of abusing his power. The sheriff obtained a warrant to raid a blogger's house, using the state's mostly-unconstitutional criminal defamation law to justify the search. The blogger had pointed out that Larpenter's wife works for an insurance agency that provides coverage for the local government -- something that looked just a wee bit corrupt.Larpenter didn't care for this, so he took his search warrant application -- and a complaint by Tony Alford, who runs the insurance company that Larpenter's wife works for -- to an off-duty judge to get it signed. This same judge later declared the warrant to be perfectly legal when challenged by lawyers representing the blogger. The blogger's lawyers appealed [PDF] this decision, which has resulted in the warrant [PDF] being killed. Naomi Lachance of The Intercept has more details.

Okay, we've been trying to raise the alarm bells about "ISDS" -- "Investor State Dispute Settlement" -- systems for many, many years, even helping to push the term "corporate sovereignty" to help describe it, since people's brains seem to turn to mush when you spell out ISDS. We've pointed out over and over again the problems of such a system where it basically allows companies to sue countries for passing regulations they don't like. We've noted over and over and over again how problematic this is... and yet people still tell us it's no big deal and the system is fair and "necessary" to keep countries from doing things like simply nationalizing an industry that foreign companies build up. Of course, that doesn't happen that often. ISDS corporate sovereignty cases are happening quite frequently, over subjects like Eli Lilly being upset that Canada rejected some patents and Philip Morris suing lots of countries for passing anti-smoking health regulations.

Every so often when people find out about the position we tend to take on copying, they hit back with what they think is a "gotcha" of something along the lines of "you wouldn't feel that way if someone copied your stuff." They really do. All the time. There are a number of scraper/spam blogs that copy and repost Techdirt's content, and it's really no big deal. As we've noted for a long time, all of the content that we publish directly we've declared to be in the public domain, so feel free to copy it with some caveats (which we'll discuss below). Last week, we launched our latest T-shirt, the "Copying is Not Theft" shirt:So far there's been a great response to it, but some people seem really upset by the basic message. On Twitter and in our comments, we've had a few people pull out the "Oh, well how will you feel when I copy that shirt!" line of thinking that they'd found some sort of gotcha. The oddest, of all, however, was John Anderson, who apparently runs something called the "Global Anti-Counterfeiting Group" insisting that he's going to counterfeit our shirt.

Pay what you want for the Programming Into the Future Bundle and receive two courses covering Sass for CSS and Bootstrap 4. If you beat the average price, you get an additional 6 courses. They cover Angular 2, Node.js, Python, Docker and more to help keep your skills up to date.

There are still people out there who think it's a good idea for the government -- whether it's the FBI, NSA, or other agency -- to hoover up exploits and hoard vulnerabilities. This activity is still being defended despite recent events, in which an NSA operative apparently left a hard drive full of exploits in a compromised computer. These exploits are now in the hands of the hacking group that took them… and, consequently, also in the hands of people who aren't nearly as interested in keeping nations secure.The problem is you can't possibly keep every secret a secret forever. Edward Snowden proved that in 2013. The hacking group known as the Shadow Brokers are proving it again. The secrets are out and those who wish to use exploits the NSA never disclosed to affected developers are free to wreak havoc. Lily Hay Newman of Wired examines the aftermath of the TAO tools hacking.

The internet is for porn terrorism.That's according to a report by the UK's Home Ministry, which claims the medium is inseparable from the message, especially if it's a US tech company.

Hillary Clinton has been somewhat hard to pin down on the encryption debate -- because she's done what she's done with plenty of issues, generally spoken in broad platitudes without ever making a statement that allows her position to actually be clear. But she's certainly said some pretty concerning stuff. Last fall she said:

Well, here we go again with the bad EU copyright proposals. Just a few days ago, Mozilla actually launched a petition to call on the EU to update its copyright laws for the 21st century, to make it "so we can tinker, create, share, and learn on the internet." Apparently the EU's answer to this is "Fuck You!"

This week, officials in Nice reacted in the worst way possible by threatening to sue people sharing photos of the fashion police doing their anti-burka duty. Some of the conversation turned to refugees, and Uriel-238 won most insightful comment of the week by getting serious about things:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2011, the mainstream press was waking up en masse to the fact that the patent system was terribly broken, with even the Wall Street Journal joining the fray. The patent system was, of course, getting in the way of health care, and attempts to convince Silicon Valley that software patents are great were unsurprisingly unsuccessful. Amidst all this the most notable patent battle going on was, of course, the one between Oracle and Google — and this was the week that we got our first whiff of the side-fight over API copyrights that would end up becoming so important.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2006, we had several early discussions about things that would grow to become major subjects of concern. There was the fact that content takedown laws were sneaking censorship into the traditionally censorship-proof internet; there was the RIAA following in DirecTV's footsteps and starting to automate the process of sending out mass copyright shakedown letters; and perhaps most perniciously, there was the quiet fallout of a Supreme Court ruling that told courts not to rush to issue injunctions over patent infringement: companies began exploiting the now-well-known "ITC Loophole" to route around the courts and ban a competitor's imports. Meanwhile, we all waited to see who would buy YouTube, and the platform's recent MySpace-esque branded offerings led us to incorrectly speculate that News Corp. might be the answer.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, Windows XP was beginning its takeover of the PC scene. Bluetooth was all the trendy rage, but some were declaring it dead on arrival while others defended it — not that the world's wireless visionaries really had any idea what to expect (except, perhaps, more wi-fi security breaches). Oh, and remember when computers only came with one little branded sticker on the outside, proudly declaring the Intel processor and nothing else? That all started to change this week when IBM adopted the same strategy and opened the floodgates.One-Hundred And Twenty-Eight Years AgoAdding machines have a history that dates back to the 17th century, but they didn't really become useful and popular until the late 1800s. One of the two main trailblazers was the machine patented by William Seward Burroughs on August 25th, 1888. His company would go on to become what we know today as Unisys — and his grandson would become an author who helped define the beat generation.

Limited Time Offer:

So, Slate has a weird article by Nat Meysenburg suggesting that everyday people should run their own email servers. He admits up front that he doesn't think Hillary Clinton should have run her own email server, but for lots of other people he declares it to be "a good idea."

As you may recall, earlier this year a well-known hacking group that specializes in cracking PC games made the bold prediction that cracking games would no longer be a thing in another year or two. Contrasting with what seems like the neverending trend concerning DRM in software, 3DM stated that the software industry had apparently found its unicorn in a DRM called Denuvo, which was increasingly elongating the time between a game hitting the market and the crack for it becoming available. A practice that usually took days or weeks was suddenly being measured in months, pushing to a year. 3DM made the case that this amount of time and effort to crack a Denuvo-protected game made the practice too costly and, more importantly, that the DRM software was being updated and getting so good that it might essentially become uncrackable.This prediction, of course, flew in the face of the history of DRM and the speed with which it has always been defeated, leading me to be more than a bit skeptical of the prediction. Skepticism well-founded, it appears, now that Denuvo appears to have been neutered in the days since.

For many, many years we've talked about why the US should have an entrepreneur's visa to let in smart entrepreneurs who are able to build companies and create jobs in the US, rather than kicking out the very people who are helping to build out the US economy. However, because immigration is such a touchy issue, attempts to do so via Congress have gone nowhere. And while we've had some concerns about the actual implementation (in particular the focus on requiring the entrepreneurs to raise a fair amount of venture capital), the general concept is a good one.

The Disruptive Competition Project is detailing yet another bad copyright law change in Europe -- France, in particular, this time. Called the Freedom of Creation Act, it actually passed a few months ago, but people are just beginning to understand and comprehend the full horror of what's happening. Basically, it will now require any site that indexes images on the internet (i.e., any image search engine) to pay royalties for each image to a collection society.

Limited Time Offer:

While the United States' net neutrality rules are certainly better than nothing, we've noted a few times how they contain enough loopholes (and ignore enough hot button topics) as to be more than a little problematic. More specifically, they contain so much wiggle room they let ISPs of all stripes violate net neutrality -- just so long as they're a bit more creative about it. Verizon and Comcast were quick to highlight this when they began cap-exempting their own content, while still penalizing their competitors (without so much as a real peep from the FCC).

Well, we know the FBI is particularly adept at hosting porn on the internet. After all, just a few days ago it was revealed that in the short time it was running a child porn site as a honeypot, it actually made the site run much faster. But now Torrentfreak points us to the news that some other FBI sites are serving up porn as well, though mostly out of FBI incompetence, rather than competence. Apparently the domain the FBI was using for its nameservers for the domains it seized from Megaupload expired, and someone else snapped it up and redirected all the sites using those nameservers to advertisements basically for porn. So, the FBI is now essentially pointing people to porn via Megaupload.Here's the really amazing thing, though: this is not the first time this has happened. The same exact thing happened last year for Megaupload.com. And after Torrentfreak reported on that, the FBI removed the namerservers completely. But just for the .com. The rest of the Megaupload domains continued pointing to the same nameserver... and the domain for that nameserver expired again and has been snapped up by another company pushing porn sites.Now, the FBI apologists will argue that this is no big deal. Obviously, the FBI didn't do this on purpose. But it certainly does continue to raise questions about the FBI's competence on tech matters. Why the hell were they using nameservers that they either didn't control in the first place, or that were held by someone so incompetent that they were allowed to expire and be snapped up by someone else? Having nameserver domains expire is not a particularly common occurrence. Maybe it's time for the FBI to admit that seizing websites isn't exactly a core competence. Unless it's operating child porn websites. Then, apparently, it has super skills.

For $29, the Ultimate Computer Security Bundle gives you access to a 7-course bundle focusing on IT security certifications and more. You will work towards CISSP Certification, learn how to monitor and to secure VoIP, and learn how to Use the Java Cryptography Architecture to implement document hashing and secure password hashing into Java applications. The other courses cover ethical hacking and penetration testing, encryption technologies and terminology, and TCP for computer networks.

Another day, another case of copyright being used to lock up information, rather than make it more accessible. In this case, it's the news archives of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, according to an interesting piece by Henry Grabar over at Slate. A decade or so ago, the newspaper partnered with Google to digitize all of its archives and make them publicly accessible.

Bloomberg has an interesting article noting how the US Patent Office is (rightfully!) rejecting lots of software and business method patent applications these days, thanks to the Supreme Court's excellent ruling in the Alice case.

I'll admit I've had some fun in these pages with my friends over in the Iran over the years. In my defense, they have at times made the job quite easy for me, between trying to bolster their military reputation through video game footage, trying to suggest that the West carve out a non-free speech zone when it comes to criticizing Islam or members of its faith, and the country's policy of futility in trying to block its citizens from using the wider internet. These are actions worth criticism and scorn.But things got a just a bit more dangerous for some in Iran this past week, as the country has announced it is cracking down on its citizens for actions against Islam and for infractions of fashion on display on several social media services. It seems some portion of the Revolutionary Guard has quite literally become the Fashion Police.

Facial recognition software is the wave of the future present. The FBI -- acting without a required Privacy Impact Assessment -- rolled out its system in 2014, finding that a 20% false hit rate was good enough for government (surveillance) work.Following in the footsteps of Facebook, governments slanting towards the authoritarian side (that's you, Russia!) have deployed facial recognition software to help ensure its citizens are stripped of their anonymity.Other governments not so seemingly bent on obedience to the state have done the same. UK law enforcement has quietly built a huge facial recognition database and Brazil experimented with police equipment that would turn officers into Robocops -- providing real-time facial recognition to cops via some sort of Google Glass-ish headgear. If what we know about facial recognition software's accuracy rates holds true, the goggles will, indeed, do nothing.Germany has maintained an arm's-length relationship with its troublesome past. The Stasi and Gestapo's lingering specters still haunt current legislators, occasionally prompting them to curb domestic surveillance efforts. Concerns for the privacy of its citizens has also sometimes resulted in the government making angry noises at tech companies it feels are overstepping their boundaries.Four years ago, it demanded Facebook destroy data on German citizens in its facial recognition database. Judging from the current push by German officials, it could just be thata the government didn't want any competition.

Well, one of the big Prenda cases may finally be over. As you may recall, the first truly scathing legal ruling against Team Prenda came a little over three years ago when Judge Otis Wright basically lit Team Prenda on fire. If you haven't read that whole decision in a while, it's still a thing of beauty. Here's just one paragraph:

Lyft just announced an interesting partnership with MARTA, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority to basically help get more people to and from MARTA stations. It's an interesting approach to try to help make public transit more convenient:

We're back again with another in our weekly reading list posts of books we think our community will find interesting and thought provoking. Once again, buying the book via the Amazon links in this story also helps support Techdirt.

As you may have heard, if you have an iOS device (iPhone, iPad, even iPod Touch) you should be updating your devices, like a few hours ago. Seriously, if you haven't done it yet, stop reading and go update. The story behind this update is quite incredible, and is detailed in a great article over at Motherboard by Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai. Basically after someone (most likely a gov't) targeted Ahmed Mansoor, a human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates with a slightly questionable text (urging him to click on a link to get info about prison torture), a team of folks from Citizen Lab (who have exposed lots of questionable malware) and Lookout (anti-malware company) got to work on the text and figured out what it did. And, basically the short version is that the single click exploits three separate 0days vulnerabilities to effectively take over your phone in secret. All of it. It secretly jailbreaks the phone without you knowing it and then accesses basically everything.