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It's pretty common knowledge at this point that the Chinese government spends a great deal of time and effort attempting to censor the internet at its own whim. And, while the walls of censorship erected are penetrable with enough effort, it still results in much of the population being unable to search out information that might be embarrassing to the Chinese government, such as references to the Tiananmen Square incident, for instance. But while examples like that can make some measure of sense to outside observers, even as they still decry the censorship, the fact is that the Chinese government's application of this censorship has been managed so erratically and unpredictably that the result is everyone watches where they step for fear of a takedown.Which naturally brings us to Lady Gaga, whose meeting with the Dalai Lama recently resulted in the Chinese government attempting to wipe her off of the China-facing interwebz.

Our planet's environment is in a delicate balance with the ecosystem that's largely invisible. We have a thin ozone layer protecting everything from harmful UV rays. Plants seem to be doing a great job of supplying breathable oxygen. It's a bit concerning when human activity throws off something in the atmosphere on a large scale, but we might be able to do something about it. The first step, though, is admitting that we have a problem.

A brief review of the many, many posts we've done here about the DMCA and its notice and takedown platform will reveal to even the casual reader that the whole thing is rife with complications, abuse, and inconsistencies. It can be a difficult realm to navigate, but there are times when an entity's claims of ignorance just don't ring true.Which brings us to one independent Ford dealership that decided to simply yoink an image from a relatively new video game and use it to advertise automobiles.

In what is likely a sign of the coming government-rent-seeking apocalypse, a 19-year-old Stanford student from the UK has created a bot that assists users in challenging parking tickets. The inevitable result of parking nearly anywhere can now be handled with something other than a) meekly paying the fine or b) throwing them away until a bench warrant is issued.While a variety of bots have been created to handle a variety of tasks, very few have handled them quite as well as Joshua Browder's "robot lawyer" -- which is certain to draw some attention from disgruntled government agencies who are seeing this revenue stream drying up.

Eleven months ago, we wrote about a lawsuit filed by the Freedom of the Press Foundation seeking to get a copy of the DOJ's infamous new rules for spying on journalists. The new rules came about after it had come out that the DOJ had spied on Associated Press reporters as well as lied to a court to claim that Fox News reporter James Rosen was a co-conspirator in a leak investigation. To date, the DOJ has steadfastly refused to reveal the rules.

One of several problems with hastily-enacted laws meant to deal with advances in technology is that they often skip a step or several when being written. In many cases, the step skipped is an important one: the consideration of intent. By crafting laws that cater to subjective views of a situation -- whether it's meant to address cyberbullying or other forms of online harassment -- the laws blow past, sometimes intentionally, the requirement that there be malicious intent behind the targeted actions.This has led to courts striking down newly-enacted laws as unconstitutional because they have skipped this step. Without this requirement in place, the laws curb free speech by enacting new limits on First Amendment expression based almost solely on subjective reading of the allegedly "criminal" content.The Illinois Appeals Court is the latest to find a cyberstalking/harassment law invalid. The problem here is, again, the lack of a mens rea requirement. (h/t Orin Kerr)The stalking case that triggered this review [PDF] deals with a former intern at a Christian radio station who apparently couldn't take "no" for an answer, or just genuinely had no idea how to obtain a definitive answer on his current job status. It all depends on who you ask. But as the law was written, the only person who needed to be asked was the complainant.

For years now, broadcasters have waged an unrelenting legal war on Dish network for giving consumers what they want: namely a DVR that automatically skips advertisements users weren't watching anyway. Fox, CBS and NBC Universal collectively sued Dish back in 2012, claiming that the ad-skipping technology embedded in its "Hopper" DVR violated copyright. CBS took this fight to some bizarre and troubling lengths, going so far as to pressure CBS-owned CNET to avoid reviewing the device and even demanding CNET back down from giving Hopper a CES award back in 2013.

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This is perhaps not surprising, but still disappointing. Former NYC mayor and current billionaire media/tech company boss Michael Bloomberg has come down on the wrong side of the "going dark" encryption fight. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (possible paywall link) he scolds tech execs for daring to side with Apple over the FBI and the Justice Department on the question of backdooring encryption. Bloomberg does not appear to actually understand the issues at play.

We were both surprised and happy when President Obama nominated the obviously well qualified Carla Hayden to be the new Librarian of Congress to succeed James Billington, whose tenure was considered such a disaster that staffers literally celebrated when he left:

At this point it's pretty much a monthly event: Comcast does something stupid, then only bothers to correct the problem once the press gets involved. We then get a breathless explanation from Comcast about how this sort of thing is the exception instead of the norm, despite being able to set your watch to the dysfunction.

Last month, Techdirt noted that the Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, had broadened his assault on free speech in Germany with even more ridiculous actions. As well as demanding that the German comedian Jan Böhmermann should be punished for an admittedly rather coarse satirical poem, Erdoğan went on to seek an injunction against the German media boss Mathias Döpfner for daring to say he laughed out loud when he read the ditty in question. Fortunately, not just one but two German courts have now (politely) told the Turkish president what he can do with his request, as EurActiv reports:

How do you store your paper files? Perhaps you leave them scattered on your desk or piled on the floor. If you're more organized, you might keep them in a cabinet. This month's stupid patent, US Patent No. 6,690,400 (the '400 patent), claims the idea of using "virtual cabinets" to graphically represent data storage and organization. While this is bad, the worse news is that the patent's owner is suing just about anyone who runs a website.The '400 patent is owned by Global Equity Management (SA) Pty. Ltd. ("GEMSA") which seems to be a classic patent troll. GEMSA is incorporated in Australia and appears to have no business other than patent litigation. The patent began its life with a company called Flash VOS. This company once offered a product that allowed users to run multiple operating systems on personal computers with x86-compatible processors. The '400 patent describes a graphical user interface for this system. The interface allows users to interact with "graphical depictions of cabinets" that represent memory partitions and different operating systems.GEMSA says that Flash VOS moved the computer industry a "quantum leap forwarded in the late 90's when it invented Systems Virtualization." But Flash VOS didn't invent partitions, didn't invent virtual machines, and didn't invent running multiple operating systems on a single computer. All of these concepts predate its patent application, some by decades. In any event, the '400 patent claims only a very specific, and in our view, quite mundane user interface.Importantly, the '400 patent's claims require very specific structures. For example, claim 1 requires "a secondary storage partitions window" and "at least one visible cabinet representing a discrete operating system." A user interface must have allof these features to infringe the claim.In the past year, GEMSA has sued dozens of companies, ranging from Airbnb to Zillow. In each case, it makes the bare assertion that the defendant's website infringes the '400 patent. For example, it simply states that "AIRBNB maintains, controls and/or operates a website with a graphical user interface ("GUI") at www.airbnb.com that infringes one or more claims of the '400 patent."GEMSA doesn't explain how Airbnb's website satisfies highly specific claim limitations like "a virtual cabinet representing a discrete operating system." In fact, the accused website bears almost no similarity to GEMSA's supposed invention:As far as we can tell, GEMSA seems to think that anyone with a website that links to hosted content infringes its patent. Complaints with such sparse, and implausible, infringement allegations should be thrown out immediately for failure to state a claim.There will be no prizes for guessing where GEMSA has filed its litigation. Every one of its cases was filed in the Eastern District of Texas, where we have long complained that local rules favor patent trolls like GEMSA. Venue reform legislation currently before Congress would stop trolls flocking to the Eastern District of Texas. That might help reduce abusive patent trolling. But we still need broader patent reform to ensure that such weak patents don't lead to abusive troll litigation.Reposted from the EFF's Stupid Patent of the Month series.

Helium is a fascinating element that most people recognize as the stuff that you can inhale to make your voice sound funny. However, it has some really serious uses in MRI machines and rocket engines -- and if we're not careful, we could waste this precious material and not have any kind of replacement for it. Once we run out of helium on earth, there aren't a lot of great options for obtaining more. It's not like we can just swing by Jupiter and bring some back. Maybe we can recycle and conserve for a bit, and perhaps someday we'll figure out fusion.

It's become common game by many in America and elsewhere to crap on lawyers whenever the opportunity presents itself. This is done unfairly in many cases, with a lack of understanding of what the adversarial nature of our legal system requires of legal advocates. For instance, a lawyer that strongly advocates for a client accused of something terrible isn't himself or herself terrible. That's the duty of the job.But for one of the lawyers on the staff of Johnny Manziel, the seemingly troubled and frequent guest of the court who was once primarily known as a football player, it appears both that proper lawyer-ing is a bit more difficult than for most and that he's a bully to boot. As you may have heard, Bob Hinton, who had been tasked with representing Manziel in his domestic abuse court case, accidentally texted the Associated Press information about his attempts to settle the case in a rather unfavorable light with respect to his client.

In an unexpected turn of events, Rhode Island's governor has chosen the First Amendment over the hot button issue of revenge porn. One of several bad bills recently introduced by legislators (the others being a dreadful CFAA clone and badly-written "cybercrime" bill) is dead, killed by a politician who actually realized the potential damage to free speech it might have caused.

As you may know, last month, we ran a t-shirt campaign for our "Nerd Harder" t-shirt, in response to various folks in governments and legacy companies thinking that if only the techies "nerd harder" they can solve everything from terrorism to copyright infringement. The campaign was super successful, with hundreds of folks buying shirts. But, apparently, some of you (you know who you are) somehow missed that campaign. Teespring has a feature where if enough people reserve a t-shirt from a campaign that's completed, the campaign will reopen for a short time -- and that's exactly what's happened with our Nerd Harder t-shirt:But it's for a very limited time: just a few hours left until that campaign closes, and who knows if there will be enough demand to reopen it. So don't miss out. We've already seen lots and lots and lots of happy customers from the first round, so here's a chance to join them. But only for a few more hours.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the possibility of discrimination being built into the algorithms that determine our lives. In the past year, multiple publications have discussed what happens when algorithms are racist in a time when algorithms decide more and more of our lives. Just recently, we talked about judges using proprietary algorithms in sentencing, and how those algorithms themselves may judge people based on things like skin color. And just a few days ago, there was a fascinating NY Times article about inherent bias in artificial intelligence systems. I even went to a conference recently, where there was a whole discussion on the question of what do you do "if your algorithm is racist." It's not an easy question to answer, honestly, but one thing that we should not be doing is holding back research into these systems.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has been going through something of an awkward phase the last few years. The Office, which is a part of the White House, and is supposed to direct and coordinate various parts of the intelligence community, has been trying to figure out how to be more open and "transparent" to the public since the Snowden documents began flowing. Given that historically the intelligence community has focused on being as secret as is humanly possible, it's not very good at this whole transparency thing. And sometimes it's just really, really awkward. Just try (really) to watch this video it put out on Wednesday, telling US travelers abroad to fear everyone and everything.That's not to say that there isn't some good advice mixed in there, but it's mixed in with some ridiculous claims, an overreaching level of paranoia, and some incredibly bad acting. The basic premise, though, is that wherever you go, even if you're visiting a US ally country, basically every person you meet has an ulterior motive, and it's to get your digital stuff. The border patrol guy who welcomes you to the country clicks a button that says "INITIATE SURVEILLANCE" (literally) and apparently suddenly every living human being in this foreign country now knows to spy on Frank.He checks into his hotel, and the person at the front desk is friendly, but apparently having been tipped off by border patrol to spy on Frank, she immediately texts his room number to a sketchy guy. We know he's sketchy because he wears a leather jacket. When Frank heads out of his hotel room, he puts his tablet in the room safe, and as soon as he's gone, Mr. Sketchy comes in and opens the safe and downloads everything. To be clear: hotels are not very secure and people get electronics stolen all the time. And, yes, if you're a serious target, people may target your electronics. Of course, many of those people may actually work for the US government. Isn't that part of how the NSA hacks into various global companies? It seems like this video is giving up more US procedures than anything else.

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You may have seen last week a website called ShareTheSafety.org, which was an impressively detailed parody site, pretending to be from the National Rifle Association (NRA) and gunmaker Smith & Wesson about a "buy one, give one" handgun program -- where it claimed you'd buy a handgun, and a free handgun would then be sent to an inner city individual "in need" of a gun. The parody was deep and thorough -- including setting up another domain, NRApress.org, in order to post a single press release about this program, and which cleverly is designed with actual links to actual NRA press releases and, if you just go to the main domain, it redirects to the NRA's actual press site. The site definitely fooled a few people, and there were lots of questions popping up on Twitter about whether or not it was real or parody.

Another terrorism-related database has leaked -- this one produced by an entity best known for its news agency. Security researcher Chris Vickery first unveiled it on Reddit.

If you live in an apartment complex, there's still a pretty good chance you've only got the choice of one broadband provider, thanks in part to payola schemes between owners and ISPs preventing competitors from entering the building. The FCC passed rules in 2007 prohibiting such exclusive broadband deals, and the FCC's rules even held up to a 2009 legal challenge by cable providers and real estate companies. But because of the overly vague language used in the rules, broadband providers have been tap dancing over, around and under the rules ever since, giving incumbent broadband ISPs yet another avenue to stifle real broadband competition -- even in rare markets where said competition actually exists.

It had to happen. There was no avoiding it. It's quite common for individuals, and sometimes even businesses, to surf the wave of a popular news cycle and attempt to translate some story into a trademark to exploit. A good percentage of the time, this is done as something of a short-term squatting attempt, where some word or phrase becomes suddenly popular and someone races to trademark it in order to license or sell it to another entity. Other times, it's simply done to capitalize on the sudden popularity of a word or phrase directly.You already know where this is going. Yes, the "Brexit" trademarks are starting to pour in, almost literally in the case of Sam Adams Boston Lager maker Boston Beer.

After the dramatic and largely unexpected victory of the "Brexit" (Britain Exit) camp in the UK -- those who want the country to leave the European Union -- politicians around the world are trying to work out what the implications will be. For the UK, of course, it meant an immediate trashing of the UK pound against the US dollar; for the US, it meant the loss of a reliable ally within the EU camp. As The New York Times puts it:

Lab mice aren't really a great model model for studying human health, but we use them anyway. And every so often, researchers stumble on drugs that seem to make lab mice live longer. Unfortunately, no one has found a reliable treatment for significantly extending a human lifespan just yet -- but if you want to raise old mice, there are plenty of things that'll work. Check out a few of these potential fountains of youth for mice.

The cable industry's relentless lobbying assault on the FCC's plan to bring competition to the cable box appears to be working. As we've been covering, cable lobbyists have been filling editorial sections nationwide with all manner of misleading dreck, claiming the FCC's plan (which you can read here (pdf)) will increase piracy, hinder innovation, hurt minorities, and rip giant holes in the time-space continuum. They've also engaged in the time-honored tradition of paying lawmakers that have no idea how technology works to make all manner of false claims about what the FCC's plan actually does.

In the aftermath of what is generally considered to be a Bad Idea, the forces behind the UK's exit from the European Union has pulled up stakes on its website and shut the whole thing down. The problem is that it looks more like an attempt to bury the past than to warmly greet the future it helped create, as Wired's Matt Kamen notes.

The market for red light cameras obviously can't sustain itself, even with certain legislators drooling over the prospect of installing these revenue generators at every intersection.Part of the problem is the technology is still incredibly fallible. Cameras have issued tickets to walls, parked vehicles, and many, many drivers obeying all traffic laws. Millions of dollars of refunds have been paid out by municipalities who once thought they'd have to do nothing more than sit back and let the cash roll in.Citizens aren't fans, so legislators have often pushed these through with a minimum of discussion. Major players in the traffic cam industry lobby hard for placement of their products -- sometimes going as far as to engage in good old analog bribery and corruption.Officials, both public and private, have been indicted (and convicted) for their participation in the proliferation of traffic cams. Not that the cameras themselves were necessarily illegal, but because the only thing better than an uptick in public funds is an uptick in private funds.Out in Texas, a judge is facing charges for sneaking ATS (American Traffic Solutions) in through the back door.

Hype around blockchain has risen to an all-time high. A technology once perceived to be the realm of crypto-anarchists and drug dealers has gained increasing popular recognition for its revolutionary potential, drawing billions in venture-capital investment by the world's leading financial institutions and technology companies.Regulators, rather than treating blockchain platforms (such as Bitcoin or Ethereum) and other "distributed ledgers" merely as tools of illicit dark markets, are beginning to look at frameworks to regulate and incorporate this important technology into traditional commerce.That progress was challenged recently, when more than $54 million was stolen from The DAO (short for "decentralized autonomous organization") — an experimental and unregulated investment fund built on the blockchain platform Ethereum. As people realized The DAO was being drained, the ensuing panic also crashed the price of Ether (or ETH), Ethereum's cryptocurrency.Beyond potentially making a lot of people poorer – who probably should have known better than to invest in an experimental "robotic corporation" — the theft has created a massive political rift within the blockchain community, and threatens to undermine trust in a technology described as the "trust machine". In addition, this event raises serious questions about the cybersecurity risks of distributed applications, the (lack of) enforcement of existing securities laws and the potential for increased scrutiny by regulators looking to protect unwary investors.Prior to last week, The DAO was widely considered a phenomenal success. It enjoyed the largest crowdfunding in history, raising the equivalent of more than $150 million, or about a tenth of the value of the Ethereum blockchain platform on which it was built. While you could conceivably build a DAO for anything, since it was a piece of software, The DAO was created for the purpose of developing the Ethereum platform and other decentralized software projects. According to its "manifesto" on daohub.org:

In late 2013, Microsoft launched Xbox Fitness for the then-new Xbox One. The fitness program leaned heavily on the Kinect motion sensor you'll recall Microsoft initially and ingeniously forced everybody to buy -- even though many users had no interest in the accessory. Xbox Fitness included 30 free training sessions, but also allowed users to pay significantly more for additional workouts, including shelling out $60 for P90X routines, to individual Jillian Michaels videos that cost users $12 each. These users likely assumed that once they bought these workouts, they'd be able to use them indefinitely.

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All aboard the schadenfreude express! It appears that when you base your business model on dubious litigation, you also to attract dubious litigators. (See also: Righthaven, Prenda Law.) So, this latest development in the Malibu Media saga -- brought to our attention by Sophisticated Jane Doe of Fight Copyright Trolls -- is perhaps less surprising than inevitable.

Sudhir Yadav appears to be a bundle of contradictions. He claims to be a "right to information" activist, yet he's now trying to stomp out encryption. He argues that he's addicted to WhatsApp, but he wants the Indian Supreme Court to ban it. He's filed a "public interest" lawsuit with the Supreme Court arguing that (1) he's addicted to WhatsApp because of its recently implemented end-to-end encryption and (2) that it should be banned because bad people might use it to, you know, plans raves and stuff:

Yesterday, Karl covered Hillary Clinton's newly released platform on technology & innovation as it related to broadband policy and encryption. Today I wanted to look through what it said on another set of key issues to folks around Techdirt: copyright and patent policy. And, as with Karl's post yesterday, there appear to be some things that sound good, but are so vague and devoid of actual nuance as to be laughable. I get it: this is the political platform of someone running for President, and thus it's going to be worded in a vague and noncommital way on these issues, because these aren't issues that lead people to decide whether or not to vote for someone as President.

Microsoft's decision to offer Windows 10 as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 made sense on its surface. It was a nice freebie for users happy to upgrade, and an effective way to herd customers on older Windows iterations onto the latest platform to help consolidate support expense. But Microsoft's upgrade in practice has seen no shortage of criticism from users annoyed by a total lack of control over the update, and Microsoft's violent tone deafness in response to the complaints.

There's a bit of a battle going on in an obscure part of the World Trade Organization (WTO) called the Appellate Body, which has extremely wide-ranging powers within the WTO:

After the Cold War ended, the space race enthusiasm evaporated as the funding for ambitious projects to explore space dried up. Launching dozens of satellites into space to form communications networks was (and still is) a risky business -- with a lot of upfront costs and a lot of equipment that's nearly obsolete by the time it reaches orbit. But it's becoming a bit cheaper to get stuff into space, and maybe we're seeing a bit more of a commercial space race. Check out a few of these space-bound projects.

Fight Copyright Trolls has tracked down two more court decisions that reach an obvious conclusion: an IP address is not a person. In both cases, the normal trolling tactics were used: legal threats against alleged infringers, based on nothing more than IP addresses. In the first case, New Jersey Judge Kevin McNulty disagreed with Malibu Media's request for default judgment, pointing out that the limited info it was working with could not rule out a successful defense being raised by the accused infringer.As Raul of FCT puts it, it is simply not enough for Malibu Media to obtain an IP address and then bring a claim against any household member with a penis. The judge writes [PDF]:

We've mentioned and linked to the wonderful SCOTUSblog many times in the past, and have even mentioned its annual running of the trolls, in which the site's Twitter account responds sarcastically to people who think that it is the Supreme Court's twitter account, rather than a blog of some journalists and lawyers covering the court. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that the Supreme Court doesn't have its own Twitter feed, combined with Twitter's eagerness to suggest alternate accounts when people are assuming SCOTUS must have a Twitter feed. But, really, a big part of the problem is people tweeting inane things at SCOTUSblog without realizing it's not SCOTUS.

Net neutrality has a long and complicated history, and despite some recent victories, that story is far from over. This week, Mike is joined by resident broadband expert Karl Bode to discuss what's next for net neutrality, and what we need to do to fight for it.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

Net neutrality has a long and complicated history, and despite some recent victories, that story is far from over. This week, Mike is joined by resident broadband expert Karl Bode to discuss what's next for net neutrality, and what we need to do to fight for it.Follow the Techdirt Podcast on Soundcloud, subscribe via iTunes, or grab the RSS feed. You can also keep up with all the latest episodes right here on Techdirt.

We've noted in the last month or so a series of court rulings in California all seem to be chipping away at Section 230. And now we've got another one. As we noted last month, revenge porn extortion creep Kevin Bollaert had appealed his 18-year sentence and that appeal raised some key issues about Section 230. As we noted, it seemed clear that the State of California was misrepresenting a bunch of things in dangerous ways.

Back in May, we noted that large cities around the country were rushing to put in place anti-Airbnb laws designed to protect large hotel companies. In that post, we noted that many of the bills almost certainly violated Section 230 of the CDA by making the platform provider, Airbnb, liable for users failing to "register" with the city. Section 230, again, says that a platform cannot be held liable for the actions (or inactions) of its users. San Francisco was the first city to get this kind of legislation pushed through. And while the city's legislators insisted that Section 230 didn't apply, they're now going to have to test that theory in court. Airbnb has asked a court for a preliminary injunction blocking the law, based mainly on Section 230, but also mentioning the Stored Communications Act and tossing in a First Amendment argument just in case.

Dive into the world of self-driving cars, speech recognition technology and more with the $40 Complete Machine Learning Bundle. Over 10 courses, you will learn about pattern recognition and prediction and how to harness the power of machine learning to take your programming to the next level. Discover quant trading, how to use Hadoop and MapReduce to tackle large data sets, how to create a sentiment analyzer with Twitter and Python and much more.

Hillary Clinton's tech policy plan has been released, and it includes some new, potentially hollow broadband promises, a pledge to continue defending the FCC's net neutrality rules from telecom industry attack, some feel good commentary on the sharing and innovation economies, and continued support for the candidate's absurd war on encryption.

American folk hero Woody Guthrie famously put the following anti-copyright notices on one of his records once:

If you've been distracted by something like a coma, you may have noticed that the cable industry has developed an atrocious reputation for poor customer service, built over a generation of regulatory capture, prioritizing growth over customer service, and just generally not giving much of a damn. By and large, a Congress slathered in telecom and cable campaign contributions has ensured that nothing much changes on that front, with most politicians taking every opportunity to in fact defend this dysfunctional status quo from innovation, competition, or change.

It's a good thing to think about the technology of the future. Especially if you're politicians and the future may have a big impact. Considering how frequently we see politicians ignore future technological change, it might be encouraging that the EU Parliament is at least considering what happens when our new robot overlords enslave us. Except that the report that the EU Parliament has come out with... is ridiculous. Most of the headlines are focusing on the ideas raised around making robots "electronic persons" for the purposes of paying social security or taxes, but the part that gets me is the plan to give them access to copyright as well.

As we've discussed, some surveillance/law enforcement hawks have tried to rush through a law to expand the power of national security letters (NSLs) to paper over the long standing abuse of NSLs, by saying that they can use those documents (which have basically no oversight and don't require a warrant) to collect a ton of private info, including email info and web browsing histories. The rushed vote on this -- stupidly citing the Orlando attacks, despite the fact it would have done nothing to stop that -- failed but just barely. Basically, if Senator Dianne Feinstein were able to attend the vote, it likely would have passed. The support for it was one vote shy, and then Sen. Mitch McConnell changed his vote for procedural reasons to be able to bring it back for a quick follow up vote.