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Normally we only have one t-shirt available at a time, but thanks to a big order that rebooted one of our Teespring campaigns, this weekend there are two to choose from! First, there's our new Vote2016() t-shirt, which is only available until Monday night:Then there's also our highly popular Takedown t-shirt, which is available only until tomorrow night:As usual, in addition to men's and women's t-shirts for $20, we've got hoodies at the low price of $35. For the Vote2016() design, you can also pick up a high-quality sticker! After these campaigns end, we can't be sure when they'll relaunch — so hurry up and grab your Vote2016() t-shirt or your Takedown t-shirt (or both!)

Some bad ideas never seem to die. It appears that the French government is working to enlist other countries to try to undermine encryption and put us all at much greater risk. That's about the only way to read the news that French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve is promoting a "global initiative" to "fight" messaging encryption used by ISIS.

Chances are, I can name five tech devices that are in your home — or pocket — right now. That's because about half of all U.S. households today own at least one television, smartphone, tablet and laptop/desktop.

We know what automatic license plate readers are good for: collecting massive amounts (billions of records) of plate/location data housed by private companies and accessed by law enforcement for indefinite periods of time. What we don't know is how effective ALPRs are at fighting/investigating crime.George Joseph at Citylab has done some digging into the effectiveness of license plate readers and hasn't found much that justifies the expense, much less the constant compilation of plate info.

This is a crosspost from Professor Eric Goldman's website.For over a decade, I've blogged about 1-800 Contacts' campaign to suppress competitive keyword advertising, including its legislative games (e.g., those times when 1-800 Contacts asked the Utah legislature to ban competitive keyword advertising) and at least 15 lawsuits against competitors costing millions of dollars in legal fees. I've also marveled at its duplicity; 1-800 Contacts historically employed the same competitive keyword advertising practices it subsequently sought to suppress.Things have been quiet on the 1-800 Contacts front for the past several years, after it suffered a major blow in the 10th Circuit's Lens.com ruling, but sometimes the machinery of justice keeps turning quietly in the background. This week, the FTC sued 1-800 Contacts for antitrust violations. I believe this is the FTC's first foray into keyword advertising issues, and it's left some folks scratching their heads.The FTC's AllegationsLet's take a closer look at the FTC's allegations. (As you know, pleadings by government entities are usually a mixture of truth, half-truth and fiction). The complaint says 1-800 Contacts has 50% share of the online retail market for contact lenses. Facing emerging competition from lower-priced entrants, starting in 2004, 1-800 Contacts pursued trademark enforcement against advertisers engaged in competitive keyword advertising. 14 advertisers agreed to settlement terms; only Lens.com didn't give in. (The complaint redacts the names of the settling advertisers, but in a supplement to this blog post, I identify many of them). The settlement agreements barred the competitors from bidding on "1-800 Contacts" or variants; and 1-800 Contacts reciprocally agreed not to bid on the competitors' trademarks.13 agreements also required the competitors to put "1-800 Contacts" on the negative keyword list. Thus, a search for "1-800 Contacts Cheaper Competitors" -- which strongly implies that the consumer sought competitive alternatives to 1-800 Contacts -- would not display these competitors' ads. The FTC provides a screenshot of that search, shown at the right. As you can see, 1-800 Contacts is the only keyword advertiser. However, the top organic result is a link to AllAboutVision.com, which claims to be "an unbiased source of trustworthy information on eye health and vision correction options" and possibly would be a helpful aggregator for consumers. The organic search results also link to some deep pages on 1-800 Contacts' site, none of which consumers would find responsive to the query. While these search results seem a little funky, the search term "1-800 Contacts Cheaper Competitors" is a VERY long-tail query that few, if any, consumers actually tried. The settlement agreements had reciprocal negative keyword obligations for 1-800 Contacts.The complaint alleges that "1-800 Contacts has aggressively policed the Bidding Agreements, complaining to competitors when the company has suspected a violation, threatening further litigation, and demanding compliance."1-800 Contacts' campaign to restrict competitive keyword advertising could potentially hurt three different marketplace players: (1) the competitors who are hamstrung in their efforts to reach interested consumers, (2) consumers who suffer from a less competitive market, and (3) search engines whose ad auctions are rendered less efficient (and less profitable) when interested bidders choose not to participate. The complaint recaps some of the harms allegedly caused by 1-800 Contacts' conduct, including:

And... for our latest example for why requiring companies to build backdoors into encryption or similar technologies is a bad idea comes from automaker Volkswagen. Researchers are now revealing that approximately 100 million VW vehicles can be easily opened via a simple wireless hack. The underlying issue: a static key used on basically all of the wireless locks in VWs.

Last year, there was a series of very troubling rulings by a district court in a case related to the criminal prosecution of Kim Dotcom. This wasn't, technically, part of the actual criminal case against him, but rather a separate effort by the government to steal his money. We've been covering the ridiculous process of civil asset forfeiture for a while, and it's really problematic in general. In Dotcom's case, it's something of a farce. Remember, civil asset forfeiture is the situation where the US government effectively files a civil (not criminal) lawsuit against inanimate objects, rather than people. In this case, it basically filed a lawsuit against all of Kim Dotcom's money, arguing that it was the proceeds of a crime and therefore, the government should just get it all. Again, this is entirely separate from the actual criminal trial of Kim Dotcom, which has been put on hold while the extradition battle plays out in New Zealand (determining if Dotcom can be forcibly sent to the US to stand trial).

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BuzzFeed had a long and interesting article earlier this week noting Twitter's ongoing difficulty in figuring out an appropriate way to deal with harassment and abuse that is often heaped upon certain users -- especially women and minorities. The article is interesting -- even as Twitter disputes some of its claims. It's also noteworthy that this debate is not even remotely new. Last year, I wrote about it, suggesting that one possible solution is to switch Twitter from being a platform into being a protocol -- on which anyone could then build services. In that world, Twitter could then offer various filters if it wanted -- while other providers could compete with different filters or services. Then the tweets could flow without Twitter having to take responsibility, but there would be options (possibly many options) for those who were dealing with abuse or harassment.

We've noted a few times recently that the Copyright Office has inserted itself into policy disputes where it has no business being. It's important to note that the role of the Copyright Office is supposed to be a rather specific one: to handle the registration of copyrights. It has little official roles in terms of actual policymaking -- the role is more about executing on the policy decisions of Congress. And, yet, over the years the Copyright Office has become a revolving door way station for execs from the entertainment industry, where they seek to use the Copyright Office as something of a taxpayer funded pro-legacy industry lobbying arm. Just in the last few months, we've reported on how the Copyright Office was flat out lying to the FCC about how copyright works in an effort to support the cable industry's plan to stop competition in set top boxes. Then there's its plan to strip websites of their safe harbors by making it a bureaucratic nightmare. Oh, and also its new plan to mess up the part of copyright law that protects libraries and archives. And let's not forget the absolutely ridiculous hearings the Copyright Office held a few months ago about the DMCA safe harbors, where they seemed 100% focused on pushing the RIAA/MPAA's plan to blame Google for everything.

Another day, another case of Facebook disappearing a video that it should have left up. A politician in Hong Kong says that Facebook banned him from the site for 24 hours for a "terms of service violation" after he posted a video of him confronting men who had been following him around for weeks.

Readers here likely have begun to associate the attempted twisting of copyright law to go after video game cheaters with Blizzard. After all, between its StarCraft and Overwatch properties, the gamemaker has made something of a name for itself by attempting to assert a combination of "you only bought a license" and "breaking the EULA creates a copyright violation" theories into a "we can sue you for hacking our games" legal sandwich. It's a terribly frustrating thing to watch Blizzard do, as it tries to pretzel copyright law in a way never intended, and typically to achieve little if any legal success by doing so.Well, everyone knew that Blizzard wouldn't be pulling this act solo forever, and now we know who the next game company to take up this loser of a strategy will be: Riot Games. Yes, the maker of the popular League of Legends is asserting copyright violations to go after those who create and use cheats and hacks. The complaint specifically targets a cheat called "LeagueSharp," which apparently allows players to automate aspects of gameplay, including targeting other players and seeing game objects that should be hidden.

Most Techdirt readers probably surround themselves with the latest technology. But there's a slightly unusual class of professionals who are only now beginning to grapple with things like CP/M, 8-inch floppy disk drives and the Apple Lisa. These are the archivists, whose job is preserving cultural artifacts from all periods of history. That includes the recent past, whose technologies now seem paradoxically so strange and distant. The real-life consequences of that growing chasm between today's digital technologies, and those that were commonplace 10, 20 or 30 years ago, are made evident in an article published by the Guardian last week:

In a polarized America, quite often the claim is made that this or that news organization is making stuff up and calling it news. These claims usually fall along partisan lines, leading those of us that don't consider ourselves affiliated with any side to shake our heads. And, while nobody should ever be so bold as to claim that no bias exists at all, accusations of purely making up news tend to pale in comparison to what goes on in some other nations out there.Let's take Turkey, for instance. Yes the country with the petulant and easily-upset President Tayyip Erdogan, also has some reporters that truly just make stuff up. For instance, you can read about one reporter who managed to find some secret documents from the plotters of the recently failed coup attempt against Erdogan, and you can see an image of the secret codes she found below.If any of that looks familiar but you're still having trouble placing exactly what, here's a basic transcription of the words on the page.

Earlier this year, we noted that Facebook had launched its own ContentID clone, called Rights Manager, which was a response to a bunch of angry YouTubers who were annoyed at people "freebooting" popular YouTube videos onto Facebook. We noted that, like ContentID, we fully expected the system to be abused to take down content. While we haven't heard examples of that just yet, it does appear that Rights Manager had some serious vulnerabilities that enabled anyone else who was signed up for Rights Manager to manipulate the information and rules on any other video in the system (including, obviously, those claimed by other users).

Instead of the reading list, this week we're reminding folks that two of our most popular t-shirts are available on Teespring, but only if you order quickly. Our popular copyright takedown t-shirt is available again, after someone pre-ordered a whole bunch yesterday, tipping the campaign and re-opening it. But you've only got 3 more days to get in on that one.And then we've got our new Vote2016() t-shirt explaining your Presidential voting choices this year in code (and, yeah, yeah, we've already heard all your comments about third parties, but let's keep this real here and admit that the code here is what most people are actually looking at). That one's available for just four more days, and you should order soon so you can wear it as much as you want this election season (that one also has stickers which have proven to be quite popular as well!).Either way, once these campaigns end, that's it for getting those t-shirts, unless there's suddenly a major new influx of demand -- so don't miss out. Get yours today -- and help support Techdirt in the process.

When federal judge Shira Scheindlin ordered a number of stop-and-frisk reforms three years ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Chief Ray Kelly both predicted a drop in unconstitutional stops would result in a dramatic rise in criminal activity.Bloomberg:

Earlier this week, we wrote about how the Australian census was looking like a complete mess, with the government deciding that it was going to retain all the personal info that it was collecting, including linkages to other data, rather than destroying it after it got the aggregate census numbers. There were lots of concerns about privacy and security -- and we highlighted some ridiculous statements from people in the Australia Bureau of Statistics (ABS) who are running the census, insisting their security was "the best security" while at the same time they were storing passwords as plaintext.

Keep yourself safe online with the Dashlane Premium And Hotspot Shield Elite VPN Bundle. You get a three-year subscription to each service for only $69. Dashlane allows you to import passwords from browsers to an extremely secure, intuitive interface. It even scans your passwords for weak links, and provides you with a password generator to create new, stronger ones to keep your digital identity safe. With Hotspot Shield Elite, you'll be able to hide your data from hackers and safely browse on public Wi-Fi, while still maintaining fast Internet speeds. Combine these two and your important information will be more secure than ever.

There's a fairly long history of lawsuits over songs sounding too "similar" -- from the lawsuit over George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" sounding too much like "He's So Fine" to the Verve getting sued by The Rolling Stones for the hit "Bittersweet Symphony" sounding similar to the Stones' "The Last Time." But after last year's verdict in favor of Marvin Gaye's estate in the "Blurred Lines" case, the floodgates seem to have opened, with a bunch of similar lawsuits over songs that sound vaguely similar, but not much more. A couple of months ago, in a bit of a surprise, Led Zeppelin actually won its case over whether or not it had infringed on someone's copyright in "Stairway to Heaven," so there's at least some hope that not every "similar sounding" song will face a copyright lawsuit -- but even then the arbitrariness of these decisions seems problematic.

This is not a surprise, but the judge overseeing the case where Twitter was sued by a woman because her husband was killed in an ISIS attack has tossed out the case. We fully expected this when the lawsuit was first filed, and the judge was clearly skeptical of the case during a hearing on it back in June. The order dismissing the case comes in at slightly longer than 140 characters, but you get the feeling that was really about all that was needed to point out how ridiculous this case was. As we expected, Twitter pointed to CDA Section 230 to say it's simply immune from such a claim and the judge agrees:

Smart refrigerators that leak your e-mail credentials. Smart TVs that collect but then fail to secure your living room conversations. Smart thermostats that can be loaded with ransomware. Smart vehicles that can be hacked and potentially kill you. This is the end result of "Internet of Things" evangelists and companies that for the last half-decade put hype and profit (the cart) well ahead of consumer privacy and security (the horse), in the process exposing us all to thousands of new attack vectors in homes and businesses around the world.

Nothing's going to stop Louisiana sheriff Jerry Larpenter from defending his good name. If you "print lies" about the sheriff, he'll "come after you." He'll have to use a criminal complaint filed by someone else (insurance agent Tony Alford) and an unconstitutional law to do it... but he's still coming after you.The "you" in this case is a local police officer who allegedly runs a blog that allegedly made defamatory comments with claims of corruption involving the sheriff, his wife, and the insurance agency she works for.Defamation isn't normally a criminal offense. Louisiana, for some reason, still has a criminal defamation statute on the books, but it only applies to non-public figures, which the sheriff -- and the parish's insurance agent, Tony Alford -- are not. Alford, who filed the complaint, not only holds two government positions but his agency also secured a no-bid contract to provide insurance services to the parish.Never mind all that, though. Sheriff Larpenter found an off-duty judge to sign a search warrant and raided Officer Wayne Anderson's home, seeking evidence that he was the author of the posts. Anderson denies having anything to do with the blog posts, not that it matters. Larpenter's deputies have already made off with five electronic devices, including a laptop belonging to the officer's kids.It would seem that after the initial raid and seizure, cooler judicial heads might prevail. No luck here. Abusing power to oppress speech is something embraced by at least two-thirds of the governmental checks-and-balances system. The judge (Randall Bethancourt) presiding over the case is none other than the judge Larpenter sought to sign his questionable search warrant -- a judge who wasn't on duty for criminal cases when the sheriff pushed his affidavit through.

Cameras have been referred to as "unblinking eyes." When operated by law enforcement, however, they're eyes that never open.Dash cams were supposed to provide better documentation of traffic stops and other interactions. So were lapel microphones, which gave the images a soundtrack. Officers who weren't interested in having stops documented switched off cameras, "forgot" to turn them back on, or flat out sabotaged the equipment.Body cameras were the next step in documentation, ensuring that footage wasn't limited solely to what was in front of a police cruiser. Cautiously heralded as a step forward in accountability, body cameras have proven to be just as "unreliable" as dash cams. While some footage is being obtained that previously wouldn't have been available, the fact that officers still control the on/off switch means footage routinely goes missing during controversial interactions with the public.The on/off switch problem could be tempered with strict disciplinary policies for officers who fail to record critical footage. Or any disciplinary procedures, actually.

The NFL is almost a perfect study in how the combination of an attempt at strict control of its content and a complete lack of understanding of the Streisand Effect will produce the opposite of the intended result. Past versions of this have included the NFL's insane claim of copyright on the only footage that exists of the original Super Bowl, meaning nobody actually gets to see the footage, as well as the league's attempt to bury an ESPN documentary about head trauma as it relates to football. In both cases, the NFL comes out looking petty at best, and much worse in the case of trying to hide the negative health effects of the game from the parents of children who might otherwise play it.But even that kind of evil and petty takes a back seat to the NFL deciding to cut out a portion of Orlando Pace's Hall of Fame induction speech in which he gives a shout-out to the city of St. Louis, former host of the Rams.

At long last, the federal government is getting serious about tracking the use of deadly force by law enforcement officers.For most of the last two decades, the DOJ has been collecting this information from local law enforcement agencies, but only on a voluntary basis. As a result, the federal numbers have nearly no relation to the real numbers -- which have been compiled by a handful of private actors, including The Guardian, a UK-based journalistic entity.Last June, legislators introduced a bill (that promptly went nowhere) which would replace voluntary reporting with mandatory reporting. The FBI expressed its concern about the government's inability to collect accurate information on citizens killed by police officers, offering on multiple occasions to replace its voluntary system with a better voluntary system.The Guardian is reporting that the voluntary system is finally being replaced with something that will create actual accountability.

For years we've discussed how incumbent broadband providers protect their duopoly by writing and lobbying for awful protectionist state laws. These laws, passed in nineteen different states, either significantly hamstring or outright ban towns and cities looking to build their own networks, or strike public/private partnerships with companies like Google Fiber. In most instances, these towns and cities only jumped into the broadband business after being under-served for a decade -- if they were able to get broadband in the first place.

When it comes to intellectual property bullying, the unholy alliance between the USOC and NBC seems to be trying to see exactly how far it can push things. Between NBC's "most live ever" broadcast of the games that still has unnecessary delays in both its television and streaming product and the USOC's strange belief that companies that sponsor athletes year-round somehow can't tweet out factual results or news images of those athletes as it relates the games due to trademark law, it's enough to make you laugh.But it's not only the antics of the USOC and NBC that is chuckle-worthy. Local sports coverage of the Olympics is too, thanks to the laughable restrictions NBC has put in place. Here's my hometown sports anchor, for instance, who came up with a creative way to cover the Olympics by not covering them at all in protest.Yes, instead of actually reporting on the games at all, Pat Tomasulo of Chicago's WGN decided to relay just how insane NBC is with its demands for how its footage is used and how other news groups are allowed to cover the Olympics. He decided to cover a different international competition run by "one of the most corrupt organization's in the world", whose logo is a series of interconnected triangles and whose theme song is Bump and Grind by R. Kelly. Then he read some Olympics results over footage of his own high school wrestling days, fully crediting his own mother.Now, this isn't just funny, it's also a wonderful little push back against NBC for its frankly insane restrictions on Olympics coverage. As a reward for being that restrictive, at least one local news organization decided not to report on the Olympics at all. So, NBC... mission accomplished?

In a recent ruling in a child porn investigation case, a judge declared that the FBI's Network Investigative Technique (NIT) -- which sent identifying user info from the suspect's computer to the FBI -- was the equivalent of a passing cop peering through broken blinds into a house.

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For nearly two years now, we've been following an important DMCA-related case between music publisher BMG and the ISP Cox Communications. While the issues are a bit down in the weeds, what it really comes down to is a question of whether or not internet access providers are required to have a "repeat infringer" policy that removes customers who are seen to have been engaged in too much copyright infringement. Most people had assumed that the DMCA's requirements for a repeat infringer policy only applied to hosting providers -- i.e., those who help people host content -- as opposed to transit providers, who are merely providing the connectivity. In this case, though, that important nuance seemed to have gotten lost in the shuffle, mainly because of some stupid behavior on the part of Cox. Amazingly, Cox is basically the only major ISP out there that has a history of actually kicking people off its service for infringement. Most others have historically refused to do so. But Cox's policy is ridiculously complex, and involves something around 13 steps... and, on top of that, Cox admitted that once it's kicked people off they can just sign up for new service. Seeing all that, the court basically decided that Cox was acting in bad faith, and thus jumped right over the question of whether or not the repeat infringer policy even applied to Cox.

For years we've noted how as a product of the cable and broadcast industry, Hulu has often gone out of its way to avoid being truly disruptive. Owners 21st Century Fox, Disney and Comcast/NBC have worked hard to ensure the service is never too interesting -- lest it cannibalize the company's legacy cable TV cash cow. So Hulu has been doomed to walk the halls of almost but not quite compelling purgatory, a rotating crop of execs for years trying to skirt the line between giving consumers what they actually want -- and being a glorified ad for traditional cable television.

It's no secret that big publishing companies (especially academic publishing companies) really really dislike Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub, of course, is the quite interesting site that enables academics to access and share PDFs of published scientific research. We've written about it a bunch, including Elsevier's ridiculous legal crusade against the site, which has only served to act as a huge advertisement for the site. As we noted, using copyright to shut down Sci-Hub seemed to go entirely against the purpose of copyright, which was officially designed to promote "learning" and scientific knowledge.

The question the government doesn't want to answer is whether we're better off pursuing fake criminals or capturing the real ones. Law enforcement does both, but sting operations -- both of the terrorist and the drug variety -- have been increasing over the years, turning officers and agents into actors and stage directors.The FBI has been crafting "terrorists" from a collection of outcasts, retirees, and the developmentally disabled for years. Canada's law enforcement is just as willing to score on unguarded nets, traipsing happily over the line between "highly questionable" and "actual entrapment" in its own terrorist "investigations."The ATF and DEA have combined forces to drag weapons into drug dealing using elaborate sting operations to entice no small number of people to get prepped to rob a nonexistent stash house of imaginary drugs. This would be bad enough, as it often appears the ATF is willing to bust anyone that engages in speculation about stash house robberies. Adding insult to injury, the federal government recommends sentences based on the fake amount of fake drugs not actually found in the fake stash house suspects talked about robbing.Judge Otis Wright tore into the government for its willingness to craft imaginary stash house robberies and followed it up by asking for convicted suspects to be locked up for real years, based on nothing more than what the government told defendants would be located in the fake stash house.

The question the government doesn't want to answer is whether we're better off pursuing fake criminals or capturing the real ones. Law enforcement does both, but sting operations -- both of the terrorist and the drug variety -- have been increasing over the years, turning officers and agents into actors and stage directors.The FBI has been crafting "terrorists" from a collection of outcasts, retirees, and the developmentally disabled for years. Canada's law enforcement is just as willing to score on unguarded nets, traipsing happily over the line between "highly questionable" and "actual entrapment" in its own terrorist "investigations."The ATF and DEA have combined forces to drag weapons into drug dealing using elaborate sting operations to entice no small number of people to get prepped to rob a nonexistent stash house of imaginary drugs. This would be bad enough, as it often appears the ATF is willing to bust anyone that engages in speculation about stash house robberies. Adding insult to injury, the federal government recommends sentences based on the fake amount of fake drugs not actually found in the fake stash house suspects talked about robbing.Judge Otis Wright tore into the government for its willingness to craft imaginary stash house robberies and followed it up by asking for convicted suspects to be locked up for real years, based on nothing more than what the government told defendants would be located in the fake stash house.

A couple of years ago, we noted that one lesson from Snowden's leaks was that the NSA and GCHQ were listening in to all the major pipes and nodes that go to make up the Internet. Mesh networks seemed one way to make things harder for the snoopers, but they have been slow to develop on a scale large enough to make a difference. A fascinating article on the Wireless Week site offers tantalizing glimpses of a new generation of wireless technologies that could make meshes easy to set up and hard to monitor. The basic technology is software-defined radio (SDR):

Earlier this year, we noted that the federal government was looking to further embrace open source software in its process of contracting out for (or creating in house) code. It released a draft policy which was good, though we hoped the final product would be much stronger (for example, it pushed for a portion of any code to be released under an open source license, but didn't consider that to be the default. I was also concerned about it allowing software developed by federal government employees to be locked up by a license -- something that I'm pretty sure is not allowed, since works created by federal government employees are automatically in the public domain.

A recent decision by the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reaches two conclusions: one obvious, and one not quite so obvious.The defendant, Walter Ackerman, appealed the district court's denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained through a warrantless search of his email. Unsurprisingly, the court finds [PDF] that the content of his emails are subject to Fourth Amendment protections. More surprisingly (and apparently to the government's complete surprise), it finds a private entity to be a government entity -- one unable to perform "private searches." (via FourthAmendment.com)First, some background. Ackerman's AOL email account was flagged by the service provider when messages containing hashes known to be related to child porn images were discovered. AOL turned over the flagged email to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) as it is required to do by federal statute. NCMEC is the clearinghouse for any suspected child porn discovered by ISPs and works directly with law enforcement to locate suspects.NCMEC is not a government entity. It is a nonprofit started and run (for the most part) by private citizens. However, it has additional duties imposed on it by Congress -- a total of "22 programs and services to assist law enforcement." The opinion details the close relationship NCMEC enjoys with the government, including the fact that 75% of its funding comes from the federal government and a number of government officials sit on its board. It also details the mandates Congress has handed to it, which require it to do exactly what it did in this case: confirm that flagged images were child porn and alert authorities.

Algorithms have become a powerful force in the world, but for all the impressive good they do, they sometimes show some worrying tendencies. Algorithms that discriminate are a problem that nobody's found a solution for yet. This week, we discuss why some algorithms appear to be racist, and whether there's anything that can be done about it.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.

The first rule of science journalism is to read the study before you write about it. Alas, that hasn't stopped media outlets from routinely misreporting, exaggerating or exercising insufficient skepticism about scientific research, particularly in the service of clickbait headlines and extra views.

As you may have heard, in an effort to refocus his Presidential campaign, this week, Donald Trump erased his original economic plan (literally, it just disappeared from his website) and launched a brand new plan with a speech in Detroit. The speech came across as a mishmash of semi-random ideas, pulled from whatever that crazy list of folks he's calling his advisors are these days. However, for the folks around here, what may be interesting is that this is really the first time I can recall Trump even mentioning intellectual property, and his entire summary of it is basically "China bad, we need more protection."

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While Comcast gets the lion's share of the public's loathing, there's an argument to be made for AT&T actually being a worse company. Think Comcast, but with slower broadband speeds, more dubious executive ethics, and an even greater disdain for its paying customers. In just the last few years AT&T has been: fined $18.6 million for helping rip off programs for the hearing impaired; fined $10.4 million for ripping off a program for low-income families; and fined $105 million for helping "crammers" by intentionally making such bogus charges more difficult to see on customer bills.

Last month, we looked at the criminal complaint against the alleged operator of the torrent search engine Kickass Torrents (KAT) and raised a number of questions about the complaint. We noted that it appeared that the alleged operator, Arten Vaulin, was getting the "Megaupload treatment," as there were a number of similarities between the two cases and the legal leaps of logic employed by the Justice Department in making their case. Thus, it was little surprise that Ira Rothken, who has managed the legal efforts for Kim Dotcom/Megaupload, has now signed on to represent Vaulin as well. His first move, last week, was to send the DOJ a letter, asking it to drop the case. While I would imagine that the request resulted in some hearty laughter among DOJ lawyers, it does lay out some of the key arguments that Vaulin will likely make as the case moves forward.

We've noted time and time again how the much ballyhooed "internet of things" is a privacy and security dumpster fire, and the check is about to come due. Countless companies and "IoT" evangelists jumped head first into the profit party, few bothering to cast even a worried look over at the reality that basic security and privacy standards hadn't come along for the ride. The result has been an endless parade of not-so-smart devices and appliances that are busy either leaking your personal details or potentially putting your life at risk.

There are two subjects we write about frequently on Techdirt that we didn't think would ever have all that much overlap: copyright and people using their mobile phones to record events in real time. This can cover a lot of stuff, but lately it's been getting extra attention in the world of police shootings and police protests. We didn't necessarily think these two kinds of stories would overlap very often, but when you've got video, you've got copyright. Last year, for example, there was a bit of a copyright dustup when the guy who shot the infamous video of Walter Scott being shot in the back by police officer Michael Slager, started demanding to get paid. As we pointed out at the time, news programs using the video were almost certainly protected by fair use.

A year ago, we wrote about how TPP's requirement for "data exclusivity" risked undermining one of science's fundamental principles: that facts cannot be owned. Data exclusivity is just the latest attempt by Big Pharma to extend its monopoly over drugs, whether using patents or other means. To a certain extent, you might expect that: after all, companies are designed to maximize profits, and if it means more people suffer or die along the way, well, that's regrettable but sort of beside the point. However, it's surprising to see a group of medical researchers writing in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) calling for just the same kind of data exclusivity. The post is in response to an earlier NEJM article by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), entitled "Sharing Clinical Trial Data":

You may have seen that on Sunday, John Oliver's main bit this week was about the collapse of the local newspaper business.It's a pretty typical John Oliver piece -- and definitely on a topic that we've discussed many times in the past -- media business models. However, we didn't see much of a need to write about it... until the Newspaper Association of America decided to whine about it, mainly complaining that Oliver (1) didn't offer any solutions and (2) mocked companies that are trying, no matter how ridiculous their efforts are:

The magical, wonderful, oft-abused National Security Letters have been deemed Constitutional, thanks to the vague promise of reviews by courts and government agencies to determine whether or not the normally-indefinite gag orders accompanying them can stay in place.The USA Freedom Act took away the "indefinite" part of the equation, stipulating that NSL gag orders must be justified by periodic reviews. Unfortunately, "periodic" was left open-ended. The language only specifies "appropriate intervals." It does place the burden on the government to prove that a NSL's gag order is still necessary, but makes no specific demands on how often the government should have to make these assertions.The FISA DC District Court, however, has specified what a "periodic review" should entail -- at least narrowing down what period "periodic" should mean.In this order [PDF], a redacted company exercised its USA Freedom Act option to demand a review of gag orders connected to two NSLs it had received. After some in camera presentations to the FISA court, along with some discussion between the NSL recipient and the FBI, it was agreed that the gag orders could stay in place for the time being, but that the FBI should be given the burden of specifying a time frame for periodic reviews, rather than forcing the recipient to file petitions repeatedly until the gag orders were finally determined to be no longer necessary.The order redacts the number of years these gag orders have been in place, but it's safe to assume the number hidden behind the gray box is larger than one. The court looks to the Attorney General's own gag order termination policy, crafted in response to stipulations in the USA Freedom Act. Unfortunately, it doesn't do much to narrow down what sort of "period" a "periodic review" covers. The policy says the FBI only needs to review its NSL gag orders every three years or at the close of an investigation. As the court notes, this is far from satisfactory.

The magical, wonderful, oft-abused National Security Letters have been deemed Constitutional, thanks to the vague promise of reviews by courts and government agencies to determine whether or not the normally-indefinite gag orders accompanying them can stay in place.The USA Freedom Act took away the "indefinite" part of the equation, stipulating that NSL gag orders must be justified by periodic reviews. Unfortunately, "periodic" was left open-ended. The language only specifies "appropriate intervals." It does place the burden on the government to prove that a NSL's gag order is still necessary, but makes no specific demands on how often the government should have to make these assertions.The FISA court, however, has specified what a "periodic review" should entail -- at least narrowing down what period "periodic" should mean.In this order [PDF], a redacted company exercised its USA Freedom Act option to demand a review of gag orders connected to two NSLs it had received. After some in camera presentations to the FISA court, along with some discussion between the NSL recipient and the FBI, it was agreed that the gag orders could stay in place for the time being, but that the FBI should be given the burden of specifying a time frame for periodic reviews, rather than forcing the recipient to file petitions repeatedly until the gag orders were finally determined to be no longer necessary.The order redacts the number of years these gag orders have been in place, but it's safe to assume the number hidden behind the gray box is larger than one.The court looks to the Attorney General's own gag order termination policy, crafted in response to stipulations in the USA Freedom Act. Unfortunately, it doesn't do much to narrow down what sort of "period" a "periodic review" covers. The policy says the FBI only needs to review its NSL gag orders every three years or at the close of an investigation. As the court notes, this is far from satisfactory.