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Actress Junie Hoang may have lost her legal battle against IMDb for revealing her age, but the California Assembly is ensuring she'll win the war. Hoang sued IMDb for $1 million, claiming the publication of facts without her permission had resulted in her being a victim of Hollywood ageism. IMDb won the lawsuit, but Governor Jerry Brown has just signed a bill into law that will prevent sites like IMDb from publishing actors' ages.

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How many living, breathing human beings really read Techdirt? The truth — the most basic, rarely-spoken truth — is that we have no earthly idea. With very few exceptions, no media property big or small, new or old, online or off, can truly tell you how big its audience is. They may have never thought about it that way — after all, we all get as close as we can to what we think is a reasonably accurate estimation, though we have no way of confirming that — but all these numbers are actually good for (maybe) is relative comparisons. What does it really mean when someone says "a million people" saw something? Or ten or a hundred million? I don't know, and neither do you. (Netflix might, but we'll get to that later.)Where should we start? How about this: internet traffic is half-fake and everyone's known it for years, but there's no incentive to actually acknowledge it. The situation is technically improving: 2015 was hailed (quietly, among people who aren't in charge of selling advertising) as a banner year because humans took back the majority with a stunning 51.5% share of online traffic, so hurray for that I guess. All the analytics suites, the ad networks and the tracking pixels can try as they might to filter the rest out, and there's plenty of advice on the endless Sisyphean task of helping them do so, but considering at least half of all that bot traffic comes from bots that fall into the "malicious" or at least "unauthorized" category, and thus have every incentive to subvert the mostly-voluntary systems that are our first line of defence against bots... Well, good luck. We already know that Alexa rankings are garbage, but what does this say about even the internal numbers that sites use to sell ad space? Could they even be off by a factor of 10? I don't know, and neither do you. Hell, we don't even know how accurate the 51.5% figure is — it could be way off... in either direction.Okay, so what about TV ratings? Well, there's a reason they've been made fun of on the shows themselves for as long as our culture has been able to handle "meta" jokes without getting a headache. Nielsen ratings in their classic form are built on monitoring such a tiny sample of households that the whole country's viewing profile can probably be swayed because someone forgot to turn off the TV before going on vacation. They sucked before DVRs and digital distribution began transforming the single household television into a quaint anachronism, and now it's just chaos. Nielsen was slow to catch up with DVRs, and now the TV industry juggles scattered measurements including three or seven days of viewing beyond live air, and constantly complains that the ratings are off — specifically, that they're too low. And they might be right, in the sense that they are too low by comparison to the garbage ratings from the pre-digital age that everyone eventually embraced as a standard for relative rankings. How big are these audiences really, in terms of real living breathing human beings? I don't know, and neither do you.YouTube view counts? Subject to all the same fake internet traffic problems, plus the fact that there's an opaque system for supposedly ignoring too-short incomplete views according to the genre and nature of the video, but good luck finding out how accurate that is. Channel operators know their length-of-view statistics, but you don't see them bandying them about much. Plus, how often have you heard public view counts casually referred to as the number of "people" who watched something, even though (especially when it comes to short-and-cute viral animal hits and their ilk) the bulk of them probably come from obsessive re-watching? Yeah.So what about Facebook stats? Everything from impressions to simultaneous live video viewers is padded out by the most transient of idly-scrolling-through-the-newsfeed interactions. Twitter followings and tweet stats? Dig into the bowels of any list of followers, or any trending link, and see how much of it is mindless bots. Print readerships? Don't even get me started. Did you know it's common practice for newspapers to calculate their readership by applying a multiplier to their actual circulation, to account for an imaginary surplus of "readers per copy"? Yes, that soggy "local" paper that's been sitting out in the rain on your porch for two days, and that only exists to give them an excuse to deliver flyers to your door, is not only being counted — it's probably being counted five times. So are all the free/cheap copies that big national papers give to hotels. Oh, and when these companies distribute multiple publications in different channels — with newspapers, magazines and paywalled websites all being given away with each other as free cross-subscriptions, in order to pad out all three subscriber numbers — they add them all up and then try to determine the actual number of individual people they are reaching. How? By applying an opaque "deduplication" formula. I once pressed a newspaper's stats person about what this formula could possibly entail, but details were not forthcoming — because I suspect they just knock off 20% and call it a day, despite the fact that the magazine is distributed inside the newspaper whose audience they are supposedly "deduplicating" it from, and half the website subscriptions were free add-ons with print delivery. That's awfully generous when the truth is they don't know, and neither do I, and neither do you.So who does know how big of an audience they really have? Well, maybe Netflix, Amazon and other digital subscription services. Their paywalls insulate them from the bulk of random bot traffic, and their proprietary ecosystems give them the ability to closely monitor all activity. Netflix, of course, is famously secretive about viewer numbers and insists on the inaccuracy of those who claim to have worked them out. The most common assumption is that they do this to avoid giving content creators too much leverage, and because the data can be seen as a valuable commodity — but I propose another reason: Netflix's likely-more-accurate statistics, if made public, would have zero context in the topsy-turvy world of nonsense TV ratings. They would probably look exceptionally low, giving the legacy bosses who would like nothing more than to downplay the importance of digital distribution (and there are as many of those as there are record execs who can't spell mp3) a chance to project whatever narrative they wanted onto the numbers.So why does any of this matter? Because advertising is a multibillion dollar industry, and whenever an industry is worth that much, you have to ask: is that because there are billions of dollars of worthwhile transactions happening, or because every bloodsucker in a ten-industry radius wanted in on the action? So, so much of the advertising industry is pure waste. How much exactly is as impossible to determine as the audience sizes themselves. This is hardly a new idea (in fact it's a century-old quote) but it's probably more true now than ever, despite the fact that in theory technology could have delivered us from uncertainty.Finally, what can be done about this? There's no simple answer, and maybe no answer at all. Here at Techdirt, we've been working to come up with good advertising solutions by focusing almost entirely on what we know our community likes and might be interested in (as in, our real community of people who talk in our comments and we can say, with confidence, exist) and paying less attention to raw numbers — both a luxury and a necessity for a smaller publication, depending on how you look at it. That's not always easy though, as we face an advertising industry ruled by metrics, where there are often ten spreadsheet-wielding interns between us and someone who might actually care about our creativity. In our experiments with more traditional algorithmic display advertising to monetize the raw traffic numbers we do have, we keep running up against what appears to be a universal truth: the bulk of the global internet ad ecosystem runs on trash. Gigantic prestigious online media brands can sell display campaigns straight to the same people who buy Superbowl ads — everyone else receives a hundred pitches a week from new ad networks that claim to deliver great, relevant content but in fact litter your site with ads for fad diets and ambulance-chasers (at best). And this lowest-common-denominator filler appears to be the only reliably successful form of internet advertising! At least, it never goes away when the good stuff does, and the proud quality networks eventually embrace their roles as crap-peddlers. "Good" internet advertising is a rickety ship navigating an endless roiling ocean of spam, clickbait and outright fraud — but it couldn't float at all without it.I realize I've painted a grim picture, but these are (more or less) the facts. I'm surely wrong in some of my guesses, but like everything discussed here, nobody knows how wrong or in which direction. We'll never even really know how many people read this — we'll just have a vague estimate that can be compared to other posts on Techdirt. But for now that's the reality, so maybe more people should stop worrying about the supposed size of their audience, and focus on making the content they want to make.

Every so often, we hear a story about actions taken by someone who is just so upset about someone else doing something that it seems to border on obsessive. For example, when we hear about copyright holders who spend all their time sending DMCA takedowns -- while whining about how they're unable to produce new content and aren't making any money from sending all those takedowns. The obvious response is: maybe stop sending all those takedowns and focus on something that's actually productive, like creating new works and building a fan base willing to support you.

So, the CFAA strikes again, and this time right in the heart of a Silicon Valley political fight. If you live in or around the Silicon Valley tech industry, you probably know who Ro Khanna is. He's often been described as the "candidate for Congress that Silicon Valley prefers." It feels like he's been running for Congress against incumbent Rep. Mike Honda forever, but it's really just in the past two elections. Here's a big Bloomberg profile of him from 2013 when he first challenged Honda, losing narrowly to him in the 2014 election, despite having support from many Silicon Valley tech industry stars. This year, he's running again, and in the primary, Khanna narrowly beat Honda, suggesting good things in the general election in November (the top two candidates in the open primary move on to the general election, regardless of party).

More information is surfacing on the source of the NSA's hacking tools discovered and published by the Shadow Brokers. Just as Ed Snowden pointed out shortly after the tools first appeared online, the problem with sticking a stash of hacking tools on equipment you don't own is that others can access the tools, too… especially if an operative doesn't follow through on the more mundane aspects of good opsec.

This week, Hillary Clinton more or less told Silicon Valley to, once again, "nerd harder!" to find ways to stop terrorists from radicalizing people online. Norahc won first place for insightful with some fair play turnabout:

Five Years AgoThis week in 2011, the Pirate Party scored another big victory when it took 9% of the vote and a bunch of seats in parliament in Berlin. Their influence was badly needed across Europe, what with Italy proposing a one-strike law to ban people from the internet based on a single accusation of infringement (prompting questions about whether that was even legal in Europe), and the EU Commissioner straight-up asking big entertainment companies to step up their lobbying for more draconian copyright law.Also this week in 2011: the now-tiresomely-ubiquitous "Keep Calm And Carry On" poster was at the height of its popularity, and the trademark battles were heating up.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2006, HP was still grappling with the massive spying scandal that hit it last week. First, more details came out that exposed even more elaborate spying and made the company look even worse, although it still wasn't clear whether or not California law actually made any of the activities illegal. Chairperson Patricia Dunn's pleas of ignorance began to fall apart when more documents suggested she was closely involved, and by the end of the week she resigned from the company only to be replaced by CEO Mark Hurd. But... additional leaked memos implicated him in the scandal too.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2001, Techdirt (and the world) was still reeling from the events of September 11th. The FBI was already moving to expand its wiretapping abilities, companies with poor taste were already moving to capitalize on the tragedy, scammers with even fewer morals were doing the same in their own way and, of course, the conspiracy theories were already flowing. Publishers of violent video games were delaying their launches, and after every store sold out of American flags it turned out they were pretty hard to find online in 2001.Seventy Years AgoThe Cannes Film Festival is one of the oldest and most prestigious institutions in the world of film, and generally seen as a bastion of movie artistry and creativity in a Hollywood-dominated world. The first ever festival was supposed to happen in 1939, until a pesky global conflict got in the way — but the dream survived the war, and the long-delayed Cannes Film Festival debuted on September 20th, 1946.

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So, yesterday, we noted that the Senate at least seemed to come (at least somewhat) to its senses in choosing not to include the ridiculous and dangerous proposal from Ted Cruz (and supported by Donald Trump) to block the transition of the IANA functions of internet governance away from the Commerce Department. I won't go into (once again) why this is important and not a problem, or even why Cruz's objections to it are so backwards that his plan will actually make it more likely that the "bad" result he keeps warning about will actually come to pass. You can reread the older articles on that.

We were just talking about Bahnhof, the Swedish ISP with a reputation for protecting its customers privacy, and its script-flipping battle with a copyright troll called Spridningskollen. At issue is that Bahnhof has for some time operated a website, Spridningskollen.org, and has applied for a trademark registration for it more recently. The copyright troll is new in town, so to speak, and Bahnhoff is relying on common law trademark rights while its application goes through the process, but that isn't keeping the ISP from continuing to give Spridningskollen a taste of its own medicine.In a move laced with irony, Bahnhof has sent Spridningskollen a settlement letter on the basis of its trademark infringement.

In which the government argues that avowedly suspicionless behavior is reasonable suspicion.Carlos Velazquez was pulled over by Officer Ken Scott, a "traffic investigator" patrolling the Ft. Bragg military base in North Carolina. Scott observed Velasquez make a right-hand turn at a stop sign, then reverse course when he encountered a gate preventing traffic from entering the Ft. Bragg Special Operations Compound. The stop resulted in the search of the vehicle and, eventually, the discovery of illegal drugs.Velazquez moved to suppress the evidence, arguing that the stop was suspicionless. The government disagreed, but Scott's own testimony indicates it was a suspicionless stop. Scott claimed the stop was justified because he believed Velazquez was "intoxicated or lost." That last part Scott himself ignored, even during his testimony as the government's sole witness. The actions Scott viewed as "suspicious" during his justification of the traffic stop were also actions Scott had witnessed numerous times while patrolling the area around the military base.

It's not like the NYPD's earned enough trust to be given the benefit of a doubt, but it's latest excuse as to why it can't come up with requested data sounds about as believable as a soaking wet teen's explanation as to why the family car is currently lying at the bottom of the backyard pool isn't his fault.

As you may have heard, YouTube has announced a new program called YouTube Heroes that offers the community incentives to help "create the best possible YouTube experience for everyone." There's one part of the system that set off alarm bells for every content creator on the site — see if you can guess which one:Yes, one of the main pillars of the incentive system is moderation as both an activity and a reward: users can gain points by "reporting inappropriate videos accurately", and can then unlock the ability to mass-flag videos with a special moderation interface. Naturally, this freaked out creators who deal with abuse of the reporting system on a daily basis, and the response has been almost unanimously negative. But as with any incentive system, the details matter, and a video by Folding Ideas digs in to how the points and levels work and offers what I think is the most nuanced and accurate perspective:Whether or not you watched the video, let's discuss its points. Firstly, though my initial instinct was that moderation was the primary goal of YouTube Heroes, the rewards make it clear this isn't the case: adding closed captioning or translated subtitles to videos is by far the most efficient way to rack up points. Internationalizing its huge library of videos, and making them accessible, is a big deal for YouTube and it makes sense that this is the main thrust of the program. In this sense (and perhaps this sense alone) it's a great idea.There are still three main complaints, each of a different nature: one is based on a complete misunderstanding, one is legitimate but likely to never come to fruition, and one (yes, the moderation) represents a genuine concern, at least in part.First, the misunderstanding: the graphics and vague language in YouTube's promotional video give the distinct impression that in addition to mass-flagging videos, 'Heroes' will gain the ability to moderate comments. Not only does this sound ripe for abuse (the YouTube commenting community is frequently toxic and hardly above gaming the system), it also irritated content creators who (unlike on many similar platforms) are unable to even designate their own community moderators for their YouTube channels. But: it isn't true. Heroes only gain the ability to moderate posts on a YouTube creators forum that is barely-known and comically hard to find (watch the video to see what I mean). So let's put that one aside.Second, creators were similarly irritated to learn that high-level Heroes would gain the ability to talk to YouTube staff. If you've ever tried to speak to a human at YouTube or anything else connected to Google, you understand why. If even top content creators and channel operators still can't get in touch with anyone at YouTube, why should community busybodies get to? This represents an utter failure of YouTube on the creator-relations and communications front, but the reason it's so frustrating is the same reason it's likely not to matter, because who really believes these Heroes will get any kind of meaningful access? Many of you have been laughing non-stop ever since I wrote the words "talk to YouTube staff". So let's file this one away with the broader nightmare of Google customer service.Finally, there's the real source of ire: incentives for the reporting of videos, and the potential ability to do so on a mass scale. The latter half has drawn the most fire, but it's actually the first half that's likely to matter more: mass-flagging videos is a slight bump in efficiency, but getting points for flagging them is a small incentive that could potentially balloon into an entire army of wanton community police. In theory there's still the safeguard that all flagged videos will be reviewed by YouTube staff (I know, there's that joke again) but, if the purpose here is to increase the quantity of flagged videos and identify "trusted" moderators, how effective will that screening really be? Besides, we've seen how easily that stuff can go wrong, such as with Facebook's removal of a famous war photo that we discussed in this week's podcast.Will YouTube Heroes lead to a combination of widespread abuse (or wider-spread abuse) of the reporting system by angry trolls, and a general watering down of YouTube's content by zealous morality police? Possibly. But it's not clear that the incentives are meaningful enough compared to the ones that already exist (dickishness and righteousness, respectively) to really boost those activities. Then again, sometimes gamification like this has a deep psychological impact. It seems like the possible outcomes only range from "bad" to "nothing much".Why did YouTube include moderation activities that it surely knew were unpopular, and at least have the potential to go awry, in the Heroes program? Why did it fail to explain the role of a forum that it surely knew was underexposed and underutilized, and use a graphic that strongly suggested comment moderation? Why did it promise to Heroes rewards that it probably can't deliver and already consistently fails to deliver to its top content creators? And why did it wrap all these things up with the one really positive idea — which also appears to be the main idea — of encouraging more subtitles and captions? I'm not sure — you'd really think they could have done a better job of designing and launching this program. But the truth is it's probably not going to be a disaster, and it might even do some good.

Secrecy still continues to shroud law enforcement Stingray use, in large part because courts have been far too receptive to the government's insistence that the release of any details at all would result in the expensive tech being rendered instantly useless.The NYPD has decided to go past the usual "law enforcement means and methods" obfuscatory tactics and push a rather novel narrative about why it would be "dangerous" for IMSI catcher info to make its way into the public domain. (I mean more so… I guess.)Joseph Cox of Motherboard reports the NYPD's latest opacity play involves hoodie-wearing males operating laptops in underlit rooms and comic book supervillain-esque levels of coordinated criminal activity.

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This is a strange one, for sure. Often times when we discuss disputes from copyright licensing or collection groups, which will universally complain that they are not collecting enough money when given any opportunity, some will comment that the artists should just pull their music from all broadcasts if they're not happy with the arrangement. This kind of nuclear option is rarely, if ever, invoked for a whole host of reasons that include compulsory licensing arrangements and rules, the sincerity of the complaints from the licensing groups, and the simple business interests behind the benefits of having music heard on the radio.But in Macedonia, one such licensing group has quite literally taken its musical ball and stomped home. This whole spat has been initiated by ZAMP, previously the sole music copyright collection organization in all of Macedonia, all because a second collection group has been started in the country, alongside more strict rules governing how much money ZAMP can collect for the artists it represents. As a result, ZAMP has informed Macedonia's broadcasters that they are henceforth banned from playing any music created by Macedonian artists, whom ZAMP claims to represent.

The Guardian's Roy Greenslade recently published a column about "why Facebook is public enemy number one for newspapers in journalism." It's a bunch of complete nonsense. I won't go through the whole thing, but here's just a snippet:

When we talk about young people filing lawsuits over "oversharing" of information and/or media on social media sites, schools are typically the targets of the suits. Inevitably, whether school personnel originally sought access to a student's social media accounts for good intentions or simply to be a slut-shaming dick, the contents within the accounts are then weaponized for humiliation purposes.But a recent lawsuit filed by an eighteen year old woman in Austria must have parents the world over wincing. At issue wasn't some random person or school official attempting to shame the girl. It was just her parents' sharing photos of a family member and now they face a lawsuit.

The DOJ is finally addressing some long-ignored problems with the forensic evidence its prosecutors rely on. For two decades, FBI forensics experts handed out flawed testimony in hundreds of criminal cases, routinely overstating the certainty of conclusions reached by forensic examination. Of those cases, 28 ended in death penalty verdicts.An earlier attempt to address issues with flawed science and flawed testimony swiftly ran aground. Federal judge Jed S. Rakoff very publicly resigned from a committee formed to examine these issues after he was informed by the attorney general's office that he wasn't actually supposed to be examining these issues.

More alcohol industry trademark news for you folks, except this time the ridiculous party in the story is not in the alcohol industry. This particular dispute revolves around a new liquor from Bacardi called "Tang," and if you thought the most likely party to object to Bacardi's trademark application for the new brand was from a soda company, you aren't alone. Unfortunately, the Texas Rangers, who I'm fairly certain are still in the baseball business, beat everyone else to the punch.

In a victory that's only sure to add more entities to the list of government agencies wishing Jason Leopold was dead, a federal judge has decided to roll back some of the opacity surrounding electronic surveillance.

Drive it like you stole seized it.

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So, just a few hours ago, the reports were still spreading that the Senate would absolutely include Ted Cruz's preferred language that would block the (largely symbolic, but really important) transfer of control over the IANA functions of ICANN away from the Commerce Department. We've explained over and over and over again why this is important -- including once this morning in response to Donald Trump suddenly taking a stand (an incredibly ignorant one, but a stand) on the issue.

Apparently the legal battle between a bunch of contractors providing "smart meter" equipment to the city of Seattle and FOIA clearinghouse MuckRock isn't over. The last time we checked in, a judge had overturned his own hastily-granted injunction, relieving MuckRock of the impossible demands placed on it by miffed tech provider Landis+Gyr -- which included handing over the details of everyone who might have seen Landis+Gyr's documents and "retrieving protected information that may have been downloaded" from the site.MuckRock was allowed to reinstate the documents and Landis+Gyr walked away from a debacle of its own making. Another contractor utilized by Seattle Power and Light (Ericsson) had pursued a similar injunction but dropped MuckRock from its complaint, following Landis+Gyr into battle against the entity that had released the documents to requester Phil Mocek: the city of Seattle.But there's still one company pursuing a case against MuckRock. The EFF, on its way back into court to fight the tenacious litigant, points out that Elster Solutions, LLC is still hoping to hold MuckRock accountable for publishing documents received from the city of Seattle. But it's impossible to ascertain why it's going after MuckRock.First off, Section 230 shields MuckRock from this sort of litigation.

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We've been discussing for a while now about how the MPAA, with the help of the Copyright Office, has been propping up the complete myth that the FCC's plan to create more competition in the cable set top box space involves violating the copyrights of studios. It's a complete myth. The cable industry has been leading the charge here, mainly because it makes billions of dollars by charging people to "rent" its crappy boxes. But it found a strong ally in copyright maximalists who have repeatedly misrepresented the proposal. As we noted, the Copyright Office put out a report that flat out lied about what the FCC's proposal entailed and about how copyright itself works (arguing that contracts between two third parties could somehow eliminate the fair use rights of private citizens). And, incredibly, the basic argument being put forth by copyright maximalists, if taken to its logical conclusion, would mean that VCRs and DVRs are illegal too.

We've been explaining this since it was first proposed two years ago: but the IANA transfer away from the Commerce Dept. is a good thing on a variety of important levels. Earlier this year, we did a more thorough explaination on why it was a good thing, and then a further post earlier this month explained why Ted Cruz, who was leading the charge in blocking the transition, was basically wrong on every point about it. And not just wrong, dangerously so. Cruz keeps claiming that the transition makes it easier for Russia, China and the UN to "take control" over internet governance. The exact opposite is true. But we'll get there.

We've long noted how the FCC's decision to avoid prohibiting zero rating (exempting your own or a paid partner's content from usage caps) opened the door to letting incumbent ISPs trample net neutrality -- if they're just creative enough about it. And that's precisely what has happened, with Comcast and Verizon now exempting their own content from usage caps, while T-Mobile and Sprint explore throttling all video, games and music unless users pay a $20 to $25 leave me the hell alone fee.

As you may have heard, Chelsea Manning, who leaked a ton of State Department cables to Wikileaks and is now in jail for decades, attempted suicide earlier this year. And the Army's response is to threaten her with indefinite solitary confinement to punish her for the attempt. Really. Of course, Manning has been held in solitary confinement in the past -- under conditions that the UN itself declared to be torture. And just last year, Manning was also threatened with indefinite solitary confinement for "disrespecting" corrections officers and for having a toothbrush and certain books and magazines that she wasn't supposed to have.

Over the last few years, we've well documented the abysmal security in the internet of things space. And while refrigerators that leak your Gmail credentials are certainly problematic, the rise in exploitable vehicle network security is exponentially more worrying. Reports emerge almost monthly detailing how easy it is for hackers to bypass vehicle security, allowing them to at best fiddle with in-car systems like air conditioning, and at worst take total control of a compromised vehicle. It's particularly problematic given these exploits may take years to identify and patch.

You might be forgiven if you were under the impression that the Russian government is a bit behind the times when it comes to modern technology and its never ending desire to stifle every last bit of dissent possible. Between the bouts its had with internet censorship and some strange claims about how binge-watching streaming services are a form of United States mind-control, it would be quite easy to be left with the notion that this is all for comedy. Alas, blunders and conspiracy theories aside, much of this technological blundering is mere cover for the very real iron grip the Russians place upon free speech, with all manner of examples in technology used as excuses to silence its critics.And now it's no longer just human beings that need fear the Russian government, it seems. Just this past week, a robot was arrested at a political rally. And, yes, I really do mean a robot, and, yes, I really do mean arrested.

In recent days, megalith digital games platform Steam found itself making headlines with a tweak to its game reviews system. At issue was Steam's prioritizing reviews from customers who bought a game on Steam over anyone else. Asked for an explanation for the move, Valve suggested that some game developers were attempting to game the reviews system by exchanging download codes for positive reviews. While this explanation omitted the prevalence of crowdsource funding of games, such as Kickstarter funding, Valve at least was putting on a public face of trying to treat its gaming customers well.And now we have the second such story of Valve looking out for its gaming customers, as the platform has chosen to entirely drop a game developer known for its anti-consumer behavior off of the Steam store. You may recall that Digital Homicide is a game developer that has been featured on these pages before, having decided that the best way to deal with some mildly scathing reviews of its games was to sue the reviewer for ten million dollars, alleging emotional, reputational and financial distress. It seems that lawsuit wasn't a one-off, as Digital Homicide has now apparently filed suit against a whole bank of Steam users (at least 100), who reviewed Digital Homicide games, to the tune of $18 million, with a court recently granting a subpoena requesting that Steam turn over identification data for those users.And, as a result, Valve has dropped Digital Homicide completely from the Steam platform.

Cyrus Farivar of Ars Technica reports that another federal judge has found the warrant used by the FBI to deploy its Tor-busting malware is invalid. This finding isn't unique. Multiple judges in various jurisdictions have found the warrant invalid due to Rule 41, which limits execution of warrants to the jurisdiction where they were issued. But only in a few of the dozens of cases stemming from the FBI's child porn investigation has a judge ruled to suppress the evidence obtained by the FBI's NIT.

Support Techdirt and get Math Is Not A Crime gear! Order by Oct. 3rd »Our latest Techdirt t-shirt is the Math Is Not A Crime shirt (also available as women's tees, hoodies, v-necks, mugs and stickers), which was initially inspired by some of the debates around outlawing strong encryption -- but also refers to much, much more. One of the key points that defenders of strong encryption have been making in response to attempts to outlaw strong encryption or to demand backdoors is that encryption is just math, and it should never be a crime to do math. But the message actually goes beyond that. It's pointing out that since it is just math, someone else can do the math too and create their own encryption. One of the key legal fights around encryption, Bernstein v. United States, basically centered around the question of whether or not the government could declare a mathematical encryption algorithm a "munition" in order to block its export. Eventually it was determined that source code (and with it, math) are protected by the First Amendment.

It often seems like the modern cable industry often goes out of its way to remain decidedly un-modern. Thanks to regulatory capture and limited competition, the sector consistently ranks among the very worst industries in terms of customer satisfaction and support. And whether it's opposing net neutrality or fighting efforts to bring competition to the cable box, you'll often find the industry's top lobbying organization -- the National Cable and Telecommunications Association at the forefront of fighting nearly every pro-consumer initiative that comes down the pike.

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A thread on Reddit is getting a fair bit of attention today, claiming that Lenovo has set up some of its Yoga laptops to block anyone from installing Linux -- and a Lenovo representative then pointed the finger at Microsoft, saying that it's part of what Lenovo was required to do as part of the Microsoft "Signature Edition" Windows 10 program, though there are reasons to doubt this is true. What is clearly true is that there's a problem installing Linux on a bunch of Lenovo machines. Here's a giant thread on the problems (which apparently disappeared for a while, but is back as I write this). And here's another. And here's another. Some of these threads go back many months. But the issue that has suddenly made it big news is a comment supposedly from a Lenovo "product expert" that the company is forced to block it as a part of the Signature Edition program:If you haven't heard of the Windows "Signature Edition," it's a program from Microsoft to offer a "clean" (read: no annoying bloatware) version of Windows. Think of it like a Google Nexus phone with a clean Android install, as compared to one from a carrier or handset maker stuffed with annoying bloatware you'll never use. The Signature Edition PCs have received some fairly glowing reviews -- and many (ironically given this story today) of the news stories about the Signature Edition program use the Lenovo Superfish malware fiasco as a reason for why people should look at a Signature Edition computer if they want to run Windows.

With the explosive devices in NY and NJ from this past weekend, Hillary Clinton has decided, once again, that it's time to blame Silicon Valley for not doing more to magically stop terrorists from terroristing.

As you may have heard, earlier this week, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted out a ridiculous image comparing Syrian refugess to poisoned Skittles. No, really.FWIW, this is an old and a dumb and meaningless meme. It's not always Skittles, though. Last year failed Presidential contender Mike Huckabee used the same concept, but with Peanuts -- and John Oliver mocked him for it, noting that "peanuts themselves have killed far more people than terrorist refugees." Another version involved M&Ms, and it was used by a variety of groups -- including a feminist "Yes All Women" campaign. Some are arguing that the switch from M&Ms to Skittles is even more racist, because it's based on the fact that when Trayvon Martin was shot dead by George Zimmerman, Martin had a pack of Skittles in his pocket. And, of course, the Intercept argues that this meme goes all the way back to a top Nazi propagandist making sure that the meme is sufficiently Godwined.

It's not like many of us haven't been saying this for years: but fighting piracy through greater copyright enforcement doesn't work. It's never worked and it's unlikely to ever work. A year ago, we released our big report, The Carrot or the Stick? that explored at a macro level what appeared to lead to reduced levels of piracy -- enforcement or legal alternatives -- and found overwhelming evidence that enforcement had little long-term impact (and a small short-term impact), but that enabling legal alternatives had a massive impact in reducing piracy. This should sound obvious, but it was important to look at the actual data, which backed it up.

As Techdirt noted back in January, it is astonishing that the TPP negotiations proceeded for years with almost no detailed analysis of whether they would be beneficial. It was only recently, after the text had been finalized, that a number of studies started to appear which explored the likely impact of TPP in some depth. Strikingly, every single one of them predicted almost no benefit for the US economy from the deal.The situation for TPP is rather better than for the other big US trade negotiations currently underway, TAFTA/TTIP, where attempts to model its impact are thin on the ground. The same is true for CETA, the EU-Canada trade deal that was supposedly "finished" two years ago, and yet still hasn't been passed because of the text's deep problems, not least because of its corporate sovereignty provisions. Despite the fact that CETA may be quite close to final ratification -- although growing resistance to it in Europe may still stop it -- we have very few studies of what benefits it might bring. The main one is the official analysis that was used to kick off the talks (pdf) in the first place, published in 2008. Here's the key result:

Usually, when we see stupid and dangerous DMCA errors like Warner Bros. taking down its own website and Paramount taking down legitimate Linux torrents, it's the studios we call out first for their wanton abuse of the system. But of course that's only part of the story — there is a system of broken incentives both inside and outside the studios that has created an entire "anti-piracy" ecosystem. It started with the third parties that many studios and other rightsholders hire: self-styled copyright enforcement experts who charge a fee to piss an endless stream of DMCA notices into the wind of piracy. Some studios, like NBCUniversal (who we'll be talking about in a moment) choose instead to build this function into their internal structure with anti-piracy divisions staffed by the same kind of folks. Thanks to the willingness of copyright holders to pay out for this pointless service, it's grown into a whole industry — and it's an industry for which the never-ending, whac-a-mole nature of the takedown game is a plus, since it means the job will never be done. While there's plenty of blame to go around among media companies and lawmakers, it's these takedown "experts" who are the most directly responsible for the epidemic of botched and fraudulent takedown notices.And it's easy to see why: they need to pad the numbers. If we accept that the whole exercise is pointless (it is) and there's no actual end goal (there isn't) then what makes one anti-piracy outfit better than another? Why, sheer volume of pointlessness, of course! The executive who hired the firm that takes down two-million links can brag about his competence compared to the executive who only got one-million for the same price, and the executive who designed the internal division that hit three-million for even less is a damn hero — even though they're all just futilely pecking away at "infinity". And so, since there's no real penalty for abusing the DMCA, these groups have zero incentive to fret about only sending fair and accurate takedowns. But that's not all — they also have every incentive to actively pad their numbers with takedowns they know are bullshit, and as TorrentFreak discovered last month and recently demonstrated again in pretty undeniable terms, that's exactly what they're doing:

The Intercept has obtained user manuals for Harris Corporation's IMSI catchers, colloquially known as Stingrays, thanks to an anonymous leaker. The documents appear to have come from a Florida law enforcement agency. This would be the public's first chance to see these documents in unredacted form. These operating manuals have been held onto tighter by law enforcement agencies than nondisclosure agreements or info on investigations utilizing this technology.The documents show what's so attractive about Stingrays: their power and their ease of use.

Facebook's efforts to moderate content that appears on the social network have run into numerous problems, most recently with a famous war photo and a bunch of blog posts. Some have made absurd demands in response, such as giving old-school media editors special posting privileges, while others have objected to the idea of Facebook censoring any content whatsoever. But is that objection realistic? This week, we discuss the complicated question of Facebook moderation, and what the company's role can and should be.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.

We've been talking about how the next great battlefield in broadband is utility pole attachment reform. In many cities, the incumbent broadband provider owns the utility poles, giving them a perfect opportunity to hinder competitors. In other cities, the local utility or city itself owns the poles, but incumbent ISPs have lobbied for laws making it more difficult for competitors to access them quickly and inexpensively. Google Fiber has been pushing "one touch make ready" rules in several cities aimed at streamlining this bureaucracy by letting a licensed, third-party installer move any ISP's gear (often a matter of inches).

Every so often, we see (probably) well-intentioned, but incredibly stupid, attempts to "fight" online harassment and bullying through laws that make saying things that are "offensive" against the law. In the US, such laws (if they actually get passed) are usually thrown out once someone makes a First Amendment challenge over them, but elsewhere in the world there's no First Amendment to fall back on. Over in Italy, some officials have proposed what may be one of the dumbest such laws in history, written so broadly that it will outlaw a lot more than the kind of "cyberbullying" it's supposedly intended to combat:

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For decades now, consumers have been lured into a sour deal: pay for a relatively inexpensive printer, then spend a lifetime paying an arm and a leg for viciously overpriced printer cartridges. As most have learned first-hand, any attempt to disrupt this obnoxious paradigm via third-party printer cartridges has been met with a swift DRM roundhouse kick to the solar plexus. In fact if there's an area where the printer industry actually innovates, it's most frequently in finding new, creative and obnoxious methods of preventing cartridge competition.