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As you probably recall, several months ago, after going to court to try to force Apple to write some software to allow the FBI to hack into Syed Farook's work iPhone, the DOJ and FBI abruptly called off the case, claiming that it had been able to get an exploit that let it into the phone. A few weeks later, FBI Director James Comey suggested that the government paid over $1.2 million to get that exploit from some "hackers." Some later news reports indicated that the FBI quietly tried to talk down those numbers, and suggested that perhaps Comey was just bad at math (rather than name a number, he said that the FBI had paid "more than I will make in the remainder of this job, which is seven years and four months....").

So much for attorney-client privilege. According to a report by Dan Christensen of Florida Bulldog, the feds' insistence that defendants utilize its contracted document duplication system has led to FBI access of privileged work product.

The good news for Comcast? The latest edition of the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) indicates that the nation's largest cable company actually has a slightly better customer satisfaction rating than last year. The bad news? Comcast remains among the worst-rated companies of any industry in America thanks to limited competition. According to the firm's full ratings for cable providers, Comcast saw an eight point rise in customer satisfaction, thanks in part to crazy ideas like actually showing up on time for appointments and a website that actually works.

It took a little less than a week, but the EFF, with the invaluable assistance of Venkat Balasubramani of FOCAL PLLC, has persuaded a Washington state judge to strike down the temporary restraining order against MuckRock he hastily granted back on May 27th.Landis+Gyr, a multinational corporation owned by Toshiba, recently secured a contract to upgrade Seattle's "dumb" meters to smart meters. Privacy activist Phil Mocek requested information on the city's smart meter plan through MuckRock and was handed two Landis+Gyr documents in unredacted form by the city.These documents worth suing over spent a month uploaded to MuckRock before Landis+Gyr took notice. Once it had secured the city contract, L+G then demanded -- via a request for a temporary restraining order -- that MuckRock take the documents down, turn over info on site users who may have seen/downloaded them, and somehow help L+G shove its smart meter genie back into the bottle.Fortunately, the judge has now struck down the restraining order he issued earlier in the week.

This week the voting was extra close, with the top six comments all coming amazingly tight to each other in votes. But sneaking into the winner's circle was an anonymous commenter responding to the story of a ridiculous company claiming that its facial recognition software could determine if you were a terrorist or a criminal with amazing accuracy. Our anonymous commenter explained how that might actually be true:

Five Years Ago:

Okay, I've been meaning to do this post for a long, long time, but I kept wanting to wait until the setup was "more complete," but I'm finally realizing that it will likely never be complete, so I'll just go with what we've got so far. Here's the deal: I end up traveling or working from the road quite a bit, and a few years back I started focusing on perfecting my "office in a bag" setup. It's gone through many iterations and experiments (some more successful than others), but whenever I show up at conferences and set myself up people seem to marvel at it (especially journalists), so I figured I might as well give an accounting of what it entails (and also some background on it). Here's journalism professor Dan Gillmor seeing me at a conference last year:

We've noted numerous times now that a cornerstone of the Putin regime has been the use of internet trolls to flood the internet with propaganda. These armies of paid sockpuppets get paid 40,000 to 50,000 rubles ($800 to $1,000) a month to create proxied, viable fake personas -- specifically tasked with pumping the internet full of toxic disinformation 24 hours a day. The practice was recently exposed by journalist, activist and mother Lyuda Savchuk, who spent three months employed as such a troll -- before successfully suing the Russian government for a single ruble on principle.

It probably goes without saying that the word "emoji" is now a full member of the popular lexicon. So popular, in fact, that Sony is apparently going to release an animated film called The Emoji Movie, which will follow the "lives" of a bunch of emojis, for reasons I cannot possibly fathom. But, as the release of the film is currently in the works, Sony is also apparently preparing to fend off a trademark claim from Marco Husges, a game developer and emoji creator.

The number of calories you can ingest as soda or juice can be surprisingly high, if you're not accustomed to accounting for your caloric intake. There's a reason why so many diet soft drinks exist -- and why a few low-cal beers are on the market. Drinking fewer calories just seems like an easier path to consuming fewer calories.

Lenovo hasn't had what you'd call a great track record over the last few years in terms of installing insecure crapware on the company's products. You'll recall that early last year, the company was busted for installing Superfish adware that opened all of its customers up to dangerous man-in-the-middle attacks, then tried to claim they didn't see what all the fuss was about. Not too long after that, the company was busted for using a BiOS trick to reinstall its bloatware on consumer laptops upon reboot -- even if the user had installed a fresh copy of the OS.

The nation's courts continue to ensure that the less you know as a law enforcement officer, the more leeway you'll be granted. USA Today's Brad Heath tweeted out a screenshot from a Medicare fraud case that shows ignorance of the law is no excuse… unless you're in law enforcement.

I'm going to dispense with any introduction here, because the meat of this story is amazing and interesting in many different ways, so we'll jump right in. Blade Runner, the film based off of Philip K. Dick's classic novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep, is a film classic in every last sense of the word. If you haven't seen it, you absolutely should. Also, if you indeed haven't seen the movie, you've watched at least one less film than an amazing artificial intelligence software developed by Terrance Broad, a London-based researcher working on his advanced degree in creative computing.

A Dallas pet-sitting company had a small problem. HAD. But it approached it badly and now it has a much larger one.It tried to enforce a "non-disparagement" clause to silence an unhappy customer. Copied nearly word-for-word from what is now known as "KlearGear boilerplate," the clause forbade customers from uttering a discouraging word under pain of whatever Prestigious Pets might come up with (including wholly made-up damages on top of legal fees, etc.), and awarded itself "sole discretion" to determine what words/actions would trigger the clause.An unhappy couple posted a review to Yelp with some mild criticisms of the company -- the worst of it being that the "independent contractor" the company provided had not taken care of the customer's fish particularly well and that Prestigious Pets was difficult to get ahold of.First, the company's legal rep sent a letter to the customers disputing every claim made in the Yelp review and informing them that their refusal to discuss the issues with Prestigious Pets "violated the spirit" of its bogus non-disparagement clause.Then it filed a claim for $6,766 against the couple in small claims court, listing everything from "lost work opportunities" to "libelous and slandurous [sic] harm" to violation of the non-disparagement clause. This action produced completely predictable results. The couple aired their grievances even more publicly as the story of Prestigious Pets' clause and retaliatory legal actions began to make its way from local news stations to nationally-read websites.The couple retained counsel to file an anti-SLAPP motion against the company's claims. But Prestigious Pets, stung by the backlash to its attempted enforcement of its clause, withdrew its small claims court filing (instantly mooting the anti-SLAPP motion) and filed a million dollar lawsuit instead.Its new lawsuit may contain more detail than its small claims court filing, but it's not any more valid than its earlier effort. And its reasons for filing a "larger" lawsuit are questionable, as Paul Alan Levy of Public Citizen (who is assisting in the legal battle against Prestigious Pets) points out.

As I've noted a few times, telecom sector investor conferences are amusing for the simple fact that many cable executives -- notably those of the old guard -- haven't yet figured out that what they say at them can be heard by the general public. As a result we'll often see companies make candid statements they'd never say otherwise, forcing PR departments to then try and backpedal away from the comments.

Learn how to take truly great photos with the $29 Adobe Digital Photography Training Bundle. The first course will teach you all about your camera, how to frame shots, how light affects your compositions, and more. After that, the other three courses cover how to use Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop and introduce you to concepts in graphic design.

Late last year, UK Parliament members held an "emergency debate" over the GCHQ's surveillance programs after learning that [gasp] their data and communications could be legally hoovered up as if they were mere commoners. Of course, were there any actual oversight of GCHQ's activities, this shock would have been blunted by years of foreknowledge. But the GCHQ, like other intelligence agencies, preferred to keep its overseers in the dark about its access to the NSA's PRISM firehose.The mortified Parliament members claimed the GCHQ's decision to include them in its data haul violated a long-held "gentlemen's agreement" between the two entities -- one that had no legitimate legal basis. Supposedly, this "agreement" forbade GCHQ from targeting Parliament members for surveillance. (Any incidental collection was considered unavoidable.) A panel review found GCHQ's targeting of Parliament members to be completely legal, if a bit on the rude side.Duncan Campbell and Bill Goodwin of Computer Weekly have performed their own examination of MP's communications, finding that both GCHQ and the NSA have access to intercepted emails sent to and from Parliament members, including communications with their constituents.GCHQ wouldn't normally have access to these emails as it is not supposed to be collecting information about purely domestic communications. But thanks to the software Parliament uses and the location of data centers used to route the emails, it can comply with its surveillance restrictions while still collecting email data/communications sent from UK email addresses to other UK email addresses.Part of the process involves Microsoft's willing assistance in past domestic spying efforts, which preceded both Snowden's document dumps and its current, more combative stance.

This week, in two different countries, we got two very good rulings concerning copyright on "sampling" of music into other songs. As you may know, the law on sampling, especially in the US, has been a bit of a mess. There was a great documentary on this a few years ago called Copyright Criminals that I highly recommend watching if you can find it. Here's the trailer:A big part of the problem was a horrible ruling in the 6th Circuit in one of the (many) Bridgeport cases (a company that is alleged to have forged records to get control over heavily sampled works, and then sued lots of artists over their samples). In Bridgeport v. Dimension Films, a confused 6th Circuit appeals court made a bunch of nutty comments in a ruling, including "Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this as stifling creativity in any significant way." That case, which didn't even look at the fair use issue, effectively wiped out another legal defense against accusations of copyright infringement, known as "de minimis use." The court's bizarre ruling contradicted plenty of others in basically saying there's no such thing as de minimis use because each sampled note has value or it wouldn't have been sampled. This tautological reasoning is directly in that awful ruling:

One of the less well-known outposts of the European Commission is the EUIPO Observatory. Here’s how it describes its objectives:

We have covered all kinds of Streisand Effect type stories here at Techdirt, but I don't recall a whole ton of them featuring the actual United States federal government. Typically, those stories mostly deal with individuals and companies trying to keep something hidden and instead mega-upping the interest in that very would-be-hidden thing. This is different, as this story consists of the State Department apparently attempting to disappear some tough questioning by a Fox News employee. And, man, is it stupid.Some background is in order. Back in 2013, the State Department held regular media briefings on the Iran nuclear deal. During one of those briefings, Fox News' James Rosen pressed then State Dept. spokeswoman Victoria Nuland as to whether the negotiations had begun in 2013, as the administration indicated, or in 2011, as some reports were indicating. The reason why the question is important is because the Obama administration has always portrayed this deal as having coincided with the ouster of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, considered a hardliner, and the introduction of new Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, considered a moderate. If it was found that Obama's State Department was actually negotiating with the hardliner, well, that's a story of public interest. Nuland denied to the press that any such previous negotiations had taken place.Fast forward to later that same year, where we have another press briefing conducted by new spokeswoman Jen Psaki. Rosen, having continued to hear reports of previous negotiations, recited the previous exchange with Nuland for Psaki and then posed the same question to her. She didn't answer directly, prompting Rosen to then ask if it is the State Department's view that lying to the press to facilitate this kind of foreign affairs negotiation was kosher. Psaki's response was illuminating.

Usually when we talk about professional or college sports participants running into trademark issues, it has to do with the nicknames they have taken on and either attempted to trademark for themselves, or prohibit others from using. But the case of soccer coach Jose Mourinho is different in that respect: at issue is his own, natural name. And, to truly see how trademark has been perverted from its original purpose, one can simply watch Mourinho, who was supposed to take the helm of Manchester United, have his hiring delayed because another team he formerly coached holds the trademark for his name.

Nature has plenty of surprises left for us. Life exists in some extreme environments that you wouldn't think anything would survive, but somehow little creatures are still thriving in some of the coldest, darkest, most acidic, hottest and just unusual places. Life just needs to be able to feed on something -- light, sugar, electricity. Here are just a few bizarre discoveries in biology.

We've done enough posts on apartment complex owners and property management companies to know that too many of them think that they can wage some kind of insane war on negative reviews that might be posted on social media and websites. To combat this, rather than simply addressing the concerns of their tenants, these misguided companies instead attempt to put social media and review policies as riders on the leases they offer. When that fails, some will either sue the critical parties, or will write in five-figure fines for posting anything that could possibly be deemed as critical.But to see a really brazen attempt to shut up tenants, we can thank Dave Blevins for pointing us to the story of how one apartment owner tried to unilaterally force residents not only to keep quiet with any of their critiques online, but required them to "like" the apartment company on Facebook.

US law enforcement agencies engage in some pretty shifty behavior while pursuing criminals. The DEA and ATF love pushing randos into planning fake raids on fake drug houses containing zero weapons, cash, or drugs. (Better yet, made-up quantities of theoretical contraband are used to determine sentence length during prosecution!)There's more than a coin flip's chance that a teen in a chatroom is actually a law enforcement officer between the age of 25 and 50 -- and quite possibly operating extra-jurisdictionally as one of Florida sheriff Grady Judd's child porn warriors.Speaking of child porn, the FBI is not above seizing kiddie porn sites and letting them run as honeypots. And that's when it's not doing worse things -- like shoving a mixture of the mentally challenged and the easily-persuaded towards terrorism... or impersonating journalists to serve up malware to investigation targets.The FBI pretended to be the Associated Press in order to send malware to a 15-year-old bomb threat suspect. The payload was delivered via a "draft" version of an "article" by an "AP writer," sent to the suspect for his "review." The FBI defended its unorthodox investigative technique by saying it was something it "rarely" did and that it only did so in the interest of public safety.James Comey went further, saying it was all by the (2007) book, while noting that DOJ policies had since changed and the FBI wouldn't be allowed to impersonate journalists in the future. Comey also expressed his displeasure that this apparent abuse of authority had been given a "one-sided" presentation by the press -- completely ignoring the fact that his agency (and the DOJ) issues hundreds of "one-sided" press releases every year.It appears the FBI's own internal investigation of the incident disagrees with Comey's assertions that its impersonation conformed with DOJ policies. A report obtained by the AP and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (via a FOIA lawsuit) says the FBI's journalistic ruse shows the agents involved skipped a crucial step or two when deploying the malware.

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.

Given its history of battling gag orders from the government, there's some cosmic justice contained in the fact that Yahoo is the first company to publicly disclose the contents of National Security Letters it has received. Before the passage of the USA Freedom Act, NSLs came bundled with a presumptive lifetime ban on disclosure. This wasn't statutorily-required. It's just the way things worked out when the FBI was allowed to decide if and when it was going to allow NSL recipients to publicly discuss them.The surveillance reform law requires the FBI to "periodically" assess its NSL nondisclosure demands, which appears to have led directly to the first publication of these letters by any company. Yahoo's accompanying statement notes it will continue to publicly disclose whatever it's allowed to in the future.

Whoo boy. Did not expect this one. For a while now, we've noted a variety of lawsuits over pre-1972 sound recordings, due to a quirk in copyright law. You see, for a long time, sound recordings were not covered by federal copyright at all (the compositions were, but the recordings were not). State laws did jump in to fill the gap (often in terrible ways), but in the 1970s, when the Copyright Act was updated, it finally started covering sound recordings as well... but only for songs recorded in 1972 or later. This has left all songs recorded before that in a weird state, where they're the only things still covered by a mess of confusing state copyright laws. The easy way to fix this would be to update the law to just put all such sound recordings under federal copyright law. But the RIAA has resisted this heavily, recognizing that keeping them away from federal copyright law is allowing them the ability to keep them under copyright even longer and to squeeze a lot of extra money out of music streaming companies.

Listen to your music anywhere, even on the water, with the $29 FRESHeBUDS Bluetooth Earbuds. They are sweat and water resistant and boast up to 8 hours of playing time. These earbuds sit securely in your ears, connect with your devices via Bluetooth from up to 30 feet away, and feature noise canceling technology to help block out the outside world. They are lightweight and ready to go with you wherever your summer takes you.

Back in late 2014, we wrote about a case where the somewhat horrifying details were likely leading to a bad result that would undermine Section 230 of the CDA (the most important law on the internet). Again, the details here are appalling. It involves two guys who would use other people's accounts on a website called "Model Mayhem" to reach out to aspiring models, then lure them to their location in South Florida, drug them, and then film themselves having sex with the drugged women to then offer as online porn. Yes, absolutely everything about this is horrifying and disgusting. But here's where the case went weird. A victim of this awful crime decided to sue the large company Internet Brands, who had purchased Model Mayhem, arguing that it knew about these creeps and had failed to warn users of the service. Internet Brands had argued that under Section 230 it was not liable and the appeals court said no. The case was then reheard en banc (with a large slate of 9th Circuit judges) and they've now, once again, said that Section 230 does not apply.

Federal judge Andrew Hanen recently benchslapped the DOJ for lying about the central element in an ongoing lawsuit between twenty-six states and the US government over changes to immigration policies. The strongly-worded order (which, despite its accusations, never once used the word "lie") chastised DOJ lawyers for hiding information about the processing of certain immigrants -- something that happened over 100,000 times even as (a) the DOJ said no such processing would take place until February 2015, and (b) the states had obtained a temporary restraining order against this processing until the courts could sort it out.

Last year, the FCC made it abundantly clear in an announcement (pdf) that it was giving the green light to carriers that wanted to offer consumers robocall blocking technologies. Numerous companies like Time Warner Cable and Verizon quickly complied, integrating services like Nomorobo in order to help consumers block annoying telemarketers from disrupting dinner time. Independent California ISP Sonic even went so far as to praise the FCC in a blog post, welcoming the FCC's clarification that offering call blocking technology won't violate call-completion rules.

Techdirt has written hundreds of stories about TPP over the years. So many of those have revealed troubling aspects of the deal that it's hard to single out the worst. But there can be no doubt that one of the most extraordinary facts is that the US and the other TPP nations were negotiating for eight years the biggest so-called trade deal in history with only the sketchiest idea about its likely benefits. Instead, politicians and supporters simply assured the public that it would all be great, honest. And yet when the rigorous econometric studies began to appear, they consistently showed that TPP would produce almost no benefits whatsoever.Upon hearing that a planned course of action designed to bring financial gains would do nothing of the kind, most rational people in ordinary life would try something else. But not the politicians and TPP negotiators, who carried on despite these clear signs that TPP was simply not worth the effort. They either ignored these studies completely, or at most said that the only reliable predictions worth considering were the official ones, which would come from the US International Trade Commission (USITC) once TPP's text had been finalised. Last week, the USITC released its massive 792-page report (pdf). Here's a key part of the summary:

Whenever we talk about trademark bullies, especially those aggressively pursuing smaller businesses on shaky claims of brand confusion, a common question arises: what can we do to make this kind of thing stop? There are potentially several answers to this question, but one of the most simple is to behave in a way that makes trademark bullying a bad business decision.Take Caribou Coffee, for instance. America's second-largest coffee retailer recently sued a tiny Michigan business called Blue Caribou Cafe, which is exactly the kind of small-market coffee and diner that you're picturing in your head right now. Caribou Coffee won its lawsuit, meaning that Blue Caribou Cafe will have to change its name, its branding, its storefront signage, and pay some $5,000 in attorney's fees. The basis for the lawsuit was the claim by Caribou Coffee that customers would be confused by the similar nature of the two names.Well, those same customers are now speaking up, as they are mighty pissed off at Caribou Coffee's actions.

It's not an uncommon question to wonder if it's okay to wear the same clothes every day under varying circumstances. Many folks don't think it's a big deal to wear the same outfit (as long as it's clean) all the time because it's like a uniform. But just don't "steal" the black turtleneck and jeans look -- come up with your own signature outfit, please.

This month features not only a stupid patent, but also a stupid trademark to go along with it.My Health, Inc. is the owner of U.S. Patent No. 6,612,985, which is entitled "Method and system for monitoring and treating a patient." My Health also holds a trademark in the term "My Health." My Health claims that it is "the only person or entity entitled to use... ‘My Health' in commerce."Since getting patent and trademark rights, My Health has been pretty active in federal court. It has sued at least 30 companies for patent infringement and has been involved in another three lawsuits involving allegations of trademark infringement. But regardless of what type of case it is, we think both the patent and trademark are stupid.First, My Health's stupid patent. The patent is generally directed to "a method and system for monitoring and treating a patient who has one or more diagnosed conditions and is located at a remote location from a treatment processing system." If that sounds mundane, that's because it is.Here is claim 1 of the patent, annotated for clarity:

If you're a consumer, that piece of digital wordsmithery you purchased probably isn't worth the paper it isn't printed on. Like most digital media available for "purchase," ebooks are often "sold" as licenses that allow the publisher to control use of the product indefinitely, whether through DRM or by simply attaching EULAs no one will ever read to every download.This works out great for publishers, who can make irrational, unilateral decisions to pull their catalogs from platforms as a "bargaining tool," leaving purchasers without access to their purchased goods. But publishers (including music publishers like UMG) only use the term "license" when it's most advantageous for them. When it comes to paying authors, the terminology suddenly changes. Now it's a "sale," with all the disadvantages for authors that entails."Sales" is a historical term, meant to reference physical sales and the additional costs (printing, packaging, shipping) built into the process. Licenses -- and the ebooks attached to them -- have none of these costs, hence the higher payout rate. But, according to a recently-filed lawsuit, Simon and Schuster is treating ebooks like physical sales in order to pay authors lower royalties.Lloyd Jassin of CopyLaw points out why this is worth litigating:

Burned by negative reviews, some health providers are casting their patients' privacy aside and sharing intimate details online as they try to rebut criticism.In the course of these arguments -- which have spilled out publicly on ratings sites like Yelp -- doctors, dentists, chiropractors and massage therapists, among others, have divulged details of patients' diagnoses, treatments and idiosyncrasies.One Washington state dentist turned the tables on a patient who blamed him for the loss of a molar: "Due to your clenching and grinding habit, this is not the first molar tooth you have lost due to a fractured root," he wrote. "This tooth is no different."In California, a chiropractor pushed back against a mother's claims that he misdiagnosed her daughter with scoliosis. "You brought your daughter in for the exam in early March 2014," he wrote. "The exam identified one or more of the signs I mentioned above for scoliosis. I absolutely recommended an x-ray to determine if this condition existed; this x-ray was at no additional cost to you."And a California dentist scolded a patient who accused him of misdiagnosing her. "I looked very closely at your radiographs and it was obvious that you have cavities and gum disease that your other dentist has overlooked. ... You can live in a world of denial and simply believe what you want to hear from your other dentist or make an educated and informed decision."Health professionals are adapting to a harsh reality in which consumers rate them on sites like Yelp, Vitals and RateMDs much as they do restaurants, hotels and spas. The vast majority of reviews are positive. But in trying to respond to negative ones, some providers appear to be violating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal patient privacy law known as HIPAA. The law forbids them from disclosing any patient health information without permission.Yelp has given ProPublica unprecedented access to its trove of public reviews -- more than 1.7 million in all -- allowing us to search them by keyword. Using a tool developed by the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, we identified more than 3,500 one-star reviews (the lowest) in which patients mention privacy or HIPAA. In dozens of instances, responses to complaints about medical care turned into disputes over patient privacy.The patients affected say they've been doubly injured -- first by poor service or care and then by the disclosure of information they considered private.The shock of exposure can be effective, prompting patients to back off."I posted a negative review" on Yelp, a client of a California dentist wrote in 2013. "After that, she posted a response with details that included my personal dental information. … I removed my review to protect my medical privacy."The consumer complained to the Office for Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which enforces HIPAA. The office warned the dentist about posting personal information in response to Yelp reviews. It is currently investigating a New York dentist for divulging personal information about a patient who complained about her care, according to a letter reviewed by ProPublica.The office couldn't say how many complaints it has received in this area because it doesn't track complaints this way. ProPublica has previously reported about the agency's historic inability to analyze its complaints and identify repeat HIPAA violators.Deven McGraw, the office's deputy director of health information privacy, said health professionals responding to online reviews can speak generally about the way they treat patients but must have permission to discuss individual cases. Just because patients have rated their health provider publicly doesn't give their health provider permission to rate them in return."If the complaint is about poor patient care, they can come back and say, 'I provide all of my patients with good patient care' and 'I've been reviewed in other contexts and have good reviews,' " McGraw said. But they can't "take those accusations on individually by the patient."McGraw pointed to a 2013 case out of California in which a hospital was fined $275,000 for disclosing information about a patient to the media without permission, allegedly in retaliation for the patient complaining to the media about the hospital.Yelp's senior director of litigation, Aaron Schur, said most reviews of doctors and dentists aren't about the actual health care delivered but rather their office wait, the front office staff, billing procedures or bedside manner. Many health providers are careful and appropriate in responding to online reviews, encouraging patients to contact them offline or apologizing for any perceived slights. Some don't respond at all."There's certainly ways to respond to reviews that don't implicate HIPAA," Schur said.In 2012, University of Utah Health Care in Salt Lake City was the first hospital system in the country to post patient reviews and comments online. The system, which had to overcome doctors' resistance to being rated, found positive comments far outnumbered negative ones."If you whitewash comments, if you only put those that are highly positive, the public is very savvy and will consider that to be only advertising," said Thomas Miller, chief medical officer for the University of Utah Hospitals and Clinics.Unlike Yelp, the University of Utah does not allow comments about a doctor's medical competency, and it does not allow physicians to respond to comments.In discussing their battles over online reviews, patients said they'd turned to ratings sites for closure and in the hope that their experiences would help others seeking care. Their providers' responses, however, left them with a lingering sense of lost trust.Angela Grijalva brought her then 12-year-old daughter to Maximize Chiropractic in Sacramento, Calif., a couple years ago for an exam. In a one-star review on Yelp, Grijalva alleged that chiropractor Tim Nicholl led her daughter to "believe she had scoliosis and urgently needed x-rays, which could be performed at her next appointment. … My daughter cried all night and had a tough time concentrating at school."But it turned out her daughter did not have scoliosis, Grijalva wrote. She encouraged parents to stay away from the office.Nicholl replied on Yelp, acknowledging that Grijalva's daughter was a patient (a disclosure that is not allowed under HIPAA) and discussing the procedures he performed on her and her condition, though he said he could not disclose specifics of the diagnosis "due to privacy and patient confidentiality.""The next day you brought your daughter back in for a verbal review of the x-rays and I informed you that the x-rays had identified some issues, but the good news was that your daughter did not have scoliosis, great news!" he recounted. "I proceeded to adjust your daughter and the adjustment went very well, as did the entire appointment; you made no mention of a 'misdiagnosis' or any other concern."In an interview, Grijalva said Nicholl's response "violated my daughter and her privacy.""I wouldn't want another parent, another child to go through what my daughter went through: the panic, the stress, the fear," she added.Nicholl declined a request for comment. "It just doesn't seem like this is worth my time," he said. His practice has mixed reviews on Yelp, but more positive than negative.A few years ago, Marisa Speed posted a review of North Valley Plastic Surgery in Phoenix after her then–3-year-old son received stitches there for a gash on his chin. "Half-way through the procedure, the doctor seemed flustered with my crying child. ...," she wrote. "At this point the doctor was more upset and he ended up throwing the instruments to the floor. I understand that dealing with kids requires extra effort, but if you don't like to do it, don't even welcome them."An employee named Chase replied on the business's behalf: "This patient presented in an agitated and uncontrollable state. Despite our best efforts, this patient was screaming, crying, inconsolable, and a danger to both himself and to our staff. As any parent that has raised a young boy knows, they have the strength to cause harm."Speed and her husband complained to the Office for Civil Rights. "You may wish to remove any specific information about current or former patients from your Web-blog," the Office for Civil Rights wrote in an October 2013 letter to the surgery center.In an email, a representative of the surgery center declined to comment. "Everyone that was directly involved in the incident no longer works here. The nurse on this case left a year ago, the surgeon in the case retired last month, and the administrator left a few years ago," he wrote.Reviews of North Valley Plastic Surgery are mixed on Yelp.Health providers have tried a host of ways to try to combat negative reviews. Some have sued their patients, attracting a torrent of attention but scoring few, if any, legal successes. Others have begged patients to remove their complaints.Jeffrey Segal, a one-time critic of review sites, now says doctors need to embrace them. Beginning in 2007, Segal's company, Medical Justice, crafted contracts that health providers could give to patients asking them to sign over the copyright to any reviews, which allowed providers to demand that negative ones be removed. But after a lawsuit, Medical Justice stopped recommending the contracts in 2011.Segal said he has come to believe reviews are valuable and that providers should encourage patients who are satisfied to post positive reviews and should respond -- carefully -- to negative ones."For doctors who get bent out of shape to get rid of negative reviews, it's a denominator problem," he said. "If they only have three reviews and two are negative, the denominator is the problem. ... If you can figure out a way to cultivate reviews from hundreds of patients rather than a few patients, the problem is solved."ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter. Reposted from ProPublica via its CC-BY-NC-ND license.

Thailand's government has never been considered a friend of internet services or users, thanks to its interest in suppressing dissent/ensuring its king remain unoffended. It has often claimed it has no interest in censoring the internet -- sometimes in statements delivered while shutting down livestreams of discussions with ISPs on how to better censor the internet.Unsurprisingly, it's not a fan of encryption. The Thai government is currently amending its Computer Crimes Act in hopes of updating its censorship abilities. In addition to codifying ISP compliance with government demands, it's also looking to destroy anything standing between it and full control of internet activity.

Twitter is getting the wrong kind of attention this week for its decision to ban a number of Russian parody accounts before the global internet shamed the company into restoring them. The @DarthPutinKGB account, which before it was deleted had more than 50,000 followers, was struck down mercilessly by the Twitter ban hammer on Tuesday. The account deletion came alongside a flurry of Twitter bans on several such accounts, including one making fun of Russian Ambassador to the UK Alexander Yakovenko -- and @SovietSergey, an account poking fun at Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.

For $49, you can grab a 2-year membership to the Career Academy. It features over a thousand courses on cyber security, IT service management, project management, and business skills, and you can access them all from wherever you have an internet connection. You can earn Continuing Education Credits, and prepare for certification exams such as Network+, PMP, Security+, Agile, CCNA and more. Career Academy is a PMI Registered Education Provider and you can earn up to 611 contact hours/PDUs towards various Project Management Certifications. Whatever your goals for your career in business or IT are, these courses can help you get closer to them than ever.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals was one of the few appeals courts to rule on the constitutionality of obtaining cell site location info without a warrant. And it was -- was -- the only appeals court to find warrantless access violated the Fourth Amendment. The decision was limited to the collection of historical cell site data for extended periods of time (the court appeared to believe anything beyond two weeks was questionable), mainly because there was a good chance the records would contain considerable detail about a person's movements in private places.The government immediately requested an en banc hearing by the Appeals Court. The hearing was granted and the court has patched up its split with the other circuits by finding in favor of the government and the Third Party Doctrine. [PDF link]

It's easy to say that "hate speech" is bad and that we, as a society, shouldn't tolerate it. But, reality is a lot more complicated than that, which is why we're concerned about various attempts to ban or stifle "hate speech." In the US, contrary to what many believe to be true, "hate" speech is still protected speech under the First Amendment. In Europe, that's often not the case, and hate speech bans are more common. But, as we've noted, while it seems like a no brainer to be against hate speech, the vagueness in what counts as "hate speech" allows that term to be expanded over and over again, such that laws against hate speech are now regularly used for government censorship over the public saying things the government doesn't like.

We've noted how the FCC recently voted to bring some much-needed competition to the cable set top box market. Thanks to limited competition consumers still pay $231 annually for what's often garbage hardware -- hardware used to lock consumers inside the increasingly out-dated cable walled garden. As a fact sheet circulated by the agency (pdf) makes clear, the effort will simply involve cable companies delivering their content to third-party hardware using any generally accepted technology and the copy protection of their choice.

Techdirt has written a number of posts about the controversial "right to be forgotten" idea -- strictly speaking, a right to be de-listed from search engine results. As Mike noted a couple of months ago, there is no doubt that this idea is starting to "infect" an increasing number of governments and legal systems around the world. The Fei Chang Dao site has a fascinating post about what appears to be China's first "right to be forgotten" case. It includes a translation of the following background information provided by the court itself:

Normally, when we talk about any issue involving how realistic video games are becoming as an art form, those stories revolve around either the decrying of realistic violence within the games or occasionally governments attempting to use realistic game footage to pimp their own fictional military capabilities. But, while those stories often come off as silly, those examples and their like are not the only benchmarks for just how realistic gaming is becoming. Other examples involve games reaching a realism level high enough to open the door to real-life application.Serving as a recent example of this is the latest from racing game giant Gran Turismo, which has achieved enough realism to earn it a partnership with Formula One Racing as a sort of proving ground for racers to get their license with the professional racing organization.

Bugs! Most people hate them, we'll all probably be eating them eventually, and few people envy those who spend their lives studying them up close — but in truth there are few creatures on earth more varied and fascinating (not to mention critical to our ecosystems). Here are some of the latest dispatches from the world of creepy-crawlies:

Companies increasingly hoover up larger and larger oceans of consumer data, promising that security and privacy aren't much of a worry because data is "anonymized." But as research has shown time and time again, anonymous data isn't all that anonymous -- since it takes only a modicum of effort to either analyze the data -- or cross reference it with other data -- to ferret out personal identities. It doesn't really matter whether we're talking about NSA surveillance troves or social networking data: anonymous data just isn't anonymous.

Back in 2014, erotica publisher Ellora's Cave sued the person behind the influential and respected website Dear Author for defamation in response to a post questioning the imprint's financial stability and detailing multiple authors' claims that the publisher wasn't paying out royalties in a timely manner.Dear Author based its post on statements from Ellora's Cave writers, as well as public records, which included a handful of tax liens against EC founder Tina Engler (a.k.a. Jaid Black). The post was a balanced and sobering examination of the publisher's financial problems and included plenty of citations for every assertion it made. Rather than address the issues raised by the post, EC/Jaid Black decided to sue.Marc Randazza stepped up to defend Dear Author and roughly a year after the lawsuit was filed, a settlement was reached. The terms were confidential, so there's no telling who "won," but information uncovered during the lawsuit suggested Dear Author's claims that Ellora's Cave was underwater had plenty of factual basis.

Over the past few weeks, a jury heard the second round of the copyright fight between Oracle and Google over whether Google's use of the Java APIs in Android constituted copyright infringement, or whether it was fair use. In the end, the jury went with fair use. Reporter Sarah Jeong watched the entire trial from the courtroom and joins us on the Techdirt podcast this week to discuss both the legal details and the various oddities of this particular trial.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.

There is a regular experience I have that I assume is common for anyone that operates within the technology industry: I will often hear non-technical people make claims about a specific kind of technology that are wildly overstated. To clarify, I am technically proficient in the barest sense, mostly meaning that I have enough of an understanding of the underlying process by which things work that I can explain them, but not implement them. To those without even that barest understanding, I can understand how technology can simply seem like magic. That can open the doors for others who know better to try to take advantage of this.Enter into the conversation Israeli startup company Faception, which claims its facial recognition software can look at your features and then determine if you're a terrorist, pedophile, or criminal.