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If you're a cable customer you've probably been met with at least one cable retrans blackout. It's what happens when broadcasters and cable operators can't behave like adults and agree on rates for a new programming contract, so instead decide that whining and punishing paying customers is the best course of action. The feuds usually involve months of public bickering, public announcements, ads and on-screen tickers declaring that the other guy is the villain, then blacked out content for paying customers, who almost never see refunds for the inconvenience.

If all goes according to these legislators' plans, Flyover Country will have something the coasts don't: encrypted cell phones. Because there's always room for one more bad idea, California assemblyman Jim Cooper is following up New York assemblyman Matthew Titone's call for a ban on encrypted phones with one of his own.

The Supreme Court's Rileydecision made it clear: law enforcement cannot search cell phones without a warrant. Seems pretty straightforward. Cell phones aren't mere "containers" -- they contain a great deal of information that has historically been afforded a reasonable expectation of privacy. Get a warrant.

We've already talked a couple of times about the intersection with the UK's disastrous Counter-Terrorism and Security Act and its intersection with the country's educational system. As part of its effort to weed out terrorists, the UK tasked teachers with keeping a watchful eye on their students to try to identify those that would be radicalized in the future, a concept that sounds like something out of Airstrip One rather than England. Shortly thereafter it was discovered that a software package that teachers had been given to help with this was exploitable in the typically laughable ways. But the tech isn't the only shortfall here. As one would expect when you take a group of people whose profession has in absolutely no way prepared them to act as counter-terrorism psychologists and ask them to be just that, it turns out that the human intelligence portion of this insane equation is off by several integers as well.

Body cameras are working as intended. Of course, this is a very limited sampling and the fact that anything happened at all to the abusive cop was reliant on him being either too stupid or too arrogant to shut his body-worn camera off.

Textbooks are surprisingly expensive items. The classic example is an introductory math textbook: where the math hasn't changed significantly for over a hundred years, but the price of the newest edition seems to suggest that there should be a lot of new material added to the book. Sure, there's a used book market -- and even rental books nowadays -- but the trend of rising textbook prices has some students and faculty questioning some of the publishing industry's practices.

A former cop is trying to legislate some First Amendment-violating protection for his blue-clad brothers. Everyone's carrying a camera these days and Arizona Senator John Kavanaugh wants them to be as far away as possible from police officers performing their public duties. Ken White (aka Popehat) summarizes the proposed legislation for FaultLines.

You may recall that Activision's Call of Duty games have already been the subject of a lawsuit by a historical figure. Previously, notorious figure Manuel Noriega brought a publicity rights case against the game company in the United States, claiming that the game depicted him without his permission. Pretty much everyone agreed that Activision was on solid First Amendment grounds in depicting a historical figure, including Rudy Giuliani, who galloped in to represent Activision and quickly got the case summarily dismissed.

Last week, NBC executive Alan Wurtzel boldly claimed that Netflix and YouTube weren't threats to traditional cable. His only evidence? Data purchased from a company named Symphony that guesstimates Netflix's closely guarded viewership numbers. That data actually showed Netflix's viewership numbers for its original series are impressive, but found that viewership wanes a little once users get done binge watching. That's it. The data didn't really support Wurtzel's claim that Netflix doesn't pose a threat to traditional cable, NBC was just boasting that it had figured out Netflix's viewership tallies.

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.

Have we mentioned lately that when it comes to the so-called "internet of things," security is an afterthought? Whether it's your automobile, your refrigerator or your tea kettle, so-called "smart" internet of things devices are consistently and alarmingly showing that they're anything but. If these devices aren't busy giving intruders access to your networks and passwords, they're often making life more difficult than so-called dumb devices. Last week, for example, the popular Nest smart thermostat simply stopped working after a software update, resulting in thousands of customers being unable to heat their homes.

As law enforcement and politicians still keep pushing American companies to backdoor encryption, making the technology less secure and more dangerous for everyone, no one has explained how this will actually help in stopping terrorists from communicating secretly. Back in December, the Open Technology Institute released a paper that detailed how so many encrypted messaging systems were either open source or not controlled by US companies. It even took a WSJ report on the messaging apps that ISIS apparently was "recommending" to people and noted how most of them are not controllable by US laws: And, of course, it should come as little surprise that some security folks are reporting that they've spotted a new secure messaging app that appears to have been created by ISIS itself:

Pay what you want for the Complete 2016 Coder Bundle. The basic bundle includes two courses on Android Marshmallow and Ruby programming. If you beat the average price paid, you gain access to eight other courses. These cover topics like building Apple Watch apps, AngularJS, HTML, CSS, web development and much more.

About once a week now you'll see a legacy broadcast executive take to the media to try and "change the narrative" surrounding cord cutting. Usually this involves claiming that things are nowhere near as bad as the data clearly shows, with a little bit of whining about an unfair media for good measure. ESPN, which has lost 7 million subscribers in the last two years, has been particularly busy on this front. The broadcast giant has been trying to argue that cord cutting worries (which caused Disney stock to lose $22 billion in value in just two days) are simply part of some kind of overblown, mass hallucination.

Over the last few weeks, there's been increasing focus on what "else" Silicon Valley can do in the fight against ISIS. Backdooring encryption is a dumb idea that won't work and will make everyone less safe. So, a second idea keeps getting floated: what if we just stopped letting ISIS use the internet. Hell, both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump supported the idea recently. And then you have some wacky law professors suggesting the same thing.

Last year, you might recall that Netflix took some heat for striking zero rating deals with Australian ISPs, exempting Netflix content from broadband usage caps. Australia was a relatively unique scenario in that the cost of transit is so high, most big content services had struck similar deals, and Netflix didn't want to put itself at a disadvantage in the newly launched Australian market by stubbornly holding on to neutrality principles. Still, it's worth recalling what Netflix said after a few weeks of criticism:

Years back, Georgia dentist Gordon Austin was indicted on 12 counts "with multiple counts of simple battery, aggravated assault, and cruelty to children." The details of the case were pretty horrifying, involving claims of Medicare fraud, along with multiple claims that Austin hit his patients when they would complain loudly (apparently after the anesthesia did not work properly). When he was indicted, the local news covered the story as you can see below: That video was uploaded by a user named "gordonaustinsacoward," and it was uploaded on March 1, 2009, while the case was still ongoing. Eventually, Austin appeared to have worked out a plea deal, in which he pled guilty to Medicare fraud, while the assault and cruelty to children charges were dropped. His dental license was pulled and he got five years probation, along with $15,000 in fines.

Sometimes the courts realize today's smartphones can't be reasonably compared to anything else people have historically carried with them, like wallets, address books and the contents of their pockets. In the Supreme Court's Rileydecision, it noted that searching a smartphone is roughly analogous to searching someone's house -- people's entire livesare contained in these devices. Hence, the warrant requirement, which turns phones from a "container" to the most sacrosanct domain under the Fourth Amendment.

One aspect of the open educational resources movement (OER) is open textbooks that are free to use -- content in the public domain or with copyright terms that require only attribution (or attribution and share-alike clauses). Open textbooks have taken some time to get written, reviewed and adopted -- but now that there are hundreds of these books available, students should be able to use them freely and benefit from (and even contribute to) these educational materials.

[Update: as has been pointed out by Ars Technica's Joe Mullin, Judge Mosman is not a chief judge yet and could not have signed those orders. As was correctly noted by Fight Copyright Trolls [and in the part I quoted!], these are only drafts. So, these have not been implemented at this point, but appear to be in the works. My apologies for raising the hopes of those on the receiving end of Crowell's tactics and for failing to note that these were drafts in my post.]

It looks like Voltage Pictures' hired gun, Carl Crowell, may soon need to find another state to ply his copyright trolling wares. Crowell has already established a reputation as being both shady and willfully obtuse. That reputation appears to have finally reached the federal court system.

It's no secret that Sony has never been shy about wielding trademark like a cudgel. That said, there seems to be something new brewing with the company in its recent attempts to trademark fairly common terms, worrying some that it would use those trademarks in the same heavy-handed way. The first of those attempts was the recent Sony filing for a trademark on the term "Let's Play", which any gamer will recognize as the term for popular YouTube videos showing games being played, often offered by well-known YouTube personalities. While the USPTO had already refused the trademark on the grounds that a prior mark for "Let'z Play" had already been registered, a law firm that specializes in gaming law jumped in to try and have the court instead declare that "Let's Play" is now a generic term.

In a move that seems pretty clearly designed to piss off journalists (but will likely backfire seriously), South Carolina State Rep. Mike Pitts, has introduced a bill to "register journalists" supposedly to make a "point" about gun control. The bill is, laughably, called South Carolina Responsible Journalism Registry Law which would "establish requirements for persons before working as a journalist for a media outlet and for media outlets before hiring a journalist. It would fine people for conducting journalism without registration or for hiring a "journalist" not on the registry.

Over the last year, ESPN's decision to laugh off cord cutting has truly come home to roost. The company has had to engage in numerous "belt tightening measures" after losing around 7 million subscribers in just two years. Where are these subscribers going? Many are cutting the TV cord entirely. Others are opting for so-called "skinny bundles" that pull pricier channels like ESPN out of the core cable lineup, moving them to additional, premium channel packs. Companies like Verizon that have experimented with skinny bundles have been rewarded for their efforts with with lawsuits from ESPN.

One of the reasons why many people are opposed to various "site blocking" laws, is that inevitably such things get abused. And while the US successfully stopped SOPA's site blocking plan, plenty of other countries went ahead and implemented something similar -- including, apparently, Portugal. Yet, earlier today, reports came out that the Portuguese site-blocking system was now blocking the website of an American video game development shop called Carbon Games. Now, it does appear that someone just screwed up here. It's not happening on all Portuguese connections, but it did happen on multiple ISPs according to the initial report on Reddit. Also, it seems they only blocked the version of the website where the URL starts with "www." Get rid of that and people could access the website without a problem -- again adding to the likelihood of a general screwup. Oh yeah, also, it looks like if you use any other DNS provider, such as Google's DNS, you'd avoid the blocks (another reason why blocking at the DNS level is kind of stupid).

You don't have to worry about keeping your devices charged up with this $45 Solar 30000mAh Battery Pack. This battery pack uses the power of the sun to charge its high-capacity rechargeable Li-ion battery. It has a built-in flashlight and it's small and light enough to slip into your bag so you can always keep it nearby.

Late last year, Senator Richard Burr, who is painfully wrong on encryption, announced that he and Senator Dianne Feinstein were working on new legislation that would mandate backdoors to encryption. Most people recognized that such a bill had little-to-no chance of actually passing Congress, as there are at least enough folks up on Capitol Hill who realize that such a law is incredibly stupid. Given that, it's little surprise that reporter Jenna McLaughlin from The Intercept is reporting that such legislation "has been delayed."

Verizon has joined the chorus of companies testing the FCC's willingness to enforce its own net neutrality rules. The telco just unveiled something it's calling FreeBee sponsored data, which effectively lets content companies pay to have their content exempt from wireless user usage caps. Much like AT&T's controversial sponsored data service, the service makes a mockery of net neutrality in that it lets companies pay to give their content a leg up in the marketplace, putting other competitors at a distinct disadvantage.

Last week, we noted that the press spent much of the week hysterically claiming Netflix was waging a massive new war on VPNs and proxies to crack down on out-of-region viewing. Of course if you bothered to actually read Netflix's blog post on the subject, you'd note that Netflix wasn't actually implementing anything new. It was simply taking the same, modest attempts to block VPNs it has been using for several years into the 130 countries it just expanded into. These are, it should be noted, the same systems that Netflix's Neil Hunt just got done telling CES that they don't actually work:

As numerous Techdirt stories make clear, the particular words used to describe something can make a big difference in how it is perceived. For example, intelligence agencies like to avoid the use of the bad-sounding "mass surveillance," with its Orwellian overtones, and prefer to talk about "bulk collection," which can be presented as some kind of cool big data project. No one is more vociferous in insisting that they are not engaged in mass surveillance, but merely bulk collection, than the UK's Home Secretary, Theresa May. She was pushing that line again last week, during a grilling by a UK Parliamentary committee about her proposed Snooper's Charter. As BBC News reported:

Last week we wrote about a World Bank report that predicted that TPP would produce negligible boosts to the economies of the US, Australia and Canada. Of course, that's just one study, and it could be argued that it might be unrepresentative, or unduly pessimistic. That makes the publication of yet more econometric modelling of what could happen particularly welcome. It comes from Jerome Capaldo and Alex Izurieta at Tufts University, and starts off by making an important point that is too often overlooked when considering other TPP predictions:

The price of oil is surprisingly low -- dipping below $30 a barrel recently. That's not a bad thing for consumers who like to drive and have warm homes in the winter and for the prices of a whole lot of other things. But let's not get too comfortable with hydrocarbon-based fuels for too long. There are a few concerning things about burning fossil fuels -- even if we're not worried about carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. However, the alternatives might not be that great, either.

Students don't sacrifice their Constitutional rights when they walk through the school's door. Their protections are somewhat diminished but they don't evaporate completely. There are reasons their rights aren't eliminated and those are tied to the operation of government employees outsideof the school doors.

In the quest for ad dollars and viewer eyeballs over the last decade, there's a laundry list of cable channels that veered off course, deciding that the quick and easy money made from airing shocking garbage was worth more than having a respected brand. And that worked, for a while. The Weather Channel began airing shows about gold prospectors. The History Channel started airing -- whatever the hell this is. And The Discovery Channel made a small fortune by airing shows like Honey Boo Boo, highlighting assorted nitwits in various stages of mental and verbal incontinence.

Lately, there's been a lot of talk about cooperation between the government and the technology industry in the fight against terrorism, radicalization and, specifically, ISIS. A lot of this talk consists of the hugely problematic requests we discuss here regularly, like compromising encryption and cooperating with mass surveillance — but is that all there is to it? This week, we discuss what role Silicon Valley actually could play in combating ISIS. 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.

As you may recall, back in 2013, soon after the Snowden revelations, the UK detained David Miranda at Heathrow Airport and took a bunch of his electronics, as he was flying through (from Germany on his way back home to Brazil). Miranda is Glenn Greenwald's partner, and the claim by the UK was that in Berlin he had picked up copies of Snowden documents. The UK claimed that the detention was okay under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act, which allows for detaining terrorists, not journalists. But the UK said that it was okay, because it classified publishing Snowden documents as an act of terrorism.

Hillary Clinton certainly has a reputation as a true "politician" -- able to say things without actually saying things. And it appears that's absolutely true when it comes to questions about encryption and backdoors. Back in November, she made comments that pretty clearly suggested that she supported undermining encryption, even as her tech advisers flipped out in arguing she said no such thing. Of course, it was all political tap dancing, signalling things to both sides without actually being pinned down on anything. The key was after saying that encryption was "a particularly tough problem" she said:

Get the $19 Linux Power User Bundle and start on your way to becoming a Linux expert. The bundle features over 22 hours of courses covering core concepts, commands and jargon essential to learning how to make Linux work for you. It also covers Linux alternatives to Windows apps and LAMP stack solutions to ensure your sites and apps run smoothly.

Here you are: written evidence that asset forfeiture leads to law enforcement activity, rather than the other way around. (h/t Brad Heath)

A little over a year ago, the MPAA pulled out all the stops in announcing and promoting its new WhereToWatch.com website, which provides lots of information on where you can watch authorized versions of various movies and TV shows. The idea behind it was certainly a noble one. One of the big arguments made by many concerning accessing unauthorized copies of such content is that there aren't real legal alternatives. So the MPAA figured that if it makes it easier to find such authorized alternatives that would be helpful. And, indeed, that's a good idea.

Bad news for BlackBerry. Its PGP phones -- considered much more secure than its off-the-shelf versions -- are compromised. On January 11th, Motherboard reported that Dutch law enforcement officials claimed to be able to bypass/crack the phones' encryption.

While much of the focus in the past few years has been on surveillance conducted by the NSA for the US, it should be noted that many European countries do a ton of surveillance too -- often with fewer restrictions (though they may not be as good at it). And while there have been some high profile legal attacks on the surveillance done by the UK's GCHQ (a close partner of the NSA), CDT is noting that some little-watched cases in the European Court of Human Rights may have technically outlawed mass surveillance without most people even realizing it. It's two separate cases in particular, Roman Zakharov v. Russia and Szabo and Vissy v. Hungary:

We've got another double winner this time around, and it comes in response to recent sad news: the death of David Bowie. As we examined some of the copyright questions surrounding his work, one anonymous commenter achieved first place for both insightful and funny with a simple comment:

Five Years Ago This week in 2011, much of the news on the Wikileaks front was centered on Twitter, which the government had ordered to reveal information on people connected with the site. This drew the ire of Iceland officials (among others), and not unlike the recent domain seizures, the government's approach was full of mistakes. But, at least, we learned that Twitter would stand up for its users rights. Of course, that wasn't the only attack Wikileaks faced: customs officers were intimidating Wikileaks volunteers, a congressional rep was asking the Treasury Department to put the site on the terrorist list (a request that was thankfully refused), and one bold man from Florida was suing Wikileaks for personal distress. On the flipside, the EFF was debunking the myth that the leaked cables didn't help anything while On The Media was seeking out the anonymous senator who killed a recent whistleblowing bill and the press at large was starting to realize that Bradley Manning was being tortured. Also of note this week in 2011, we covered the beginnings of a now-infamous incident when Sony got a restraining order against George Hotz for jailbreaking the PS3. Ten Years Ago Netflix was the unstoppable giant this week in 2006, and it was still just focused on mailing DVDs — which unscrupulous postal workers would occasionally steal. The main victim, however, was clearly going to be Blockbuster. Google was trying to wow the world with a new online video offering, but it was sadly all about copy protection and not very impressive. MySpace revealed that it had its own video strategy in the works, which explained why it had recently started blocking YouTube. This dismal state of affairs even led some to wonder if AOL was the one with the most interesting and innovative video offering. That title certainly didn't belong to the world of mobile TV, which was wrecked by fragmentation and walled gardens like so much mobile content. Meanwhile, efforts were still underway to plug the analog hole, and Tim Lee pointed out that the most insidious effect might come from the exception for so-called "professional" equipment. We bemoaned the fact that DRM was still endearing itself to artists as Sony's CEO attempted to brush off the recent rootkit fiasco. Fifteen Years Ago In these early days of 2001, calls for regulating the internet were much simpler — and even more absurd. Case in point: one novelists request that everything online be officially labelled as "true" or not. Case in point the second: a legislative attempt to deem the actions of spiders and other online bots as "trespassing". But hey, this was a time when one of the biggest intellectual property questions on the internet was the legality of "framing" content from other sites. Blogs, which were still often given their forgotten full name of weblogs, were still new enough that a different news organization would "discover" them every few weeks, leading to strange ideas like blog-based print magazines. Also this week in 2001: we heard the very first murmurs of what would grow into immense hype about "IT", also known as "Ginger". Remember that? Yeah, it turned out to be the Segway. Hurrah. Eighty-Nine Years Ago With all the obligatory and uninteresting hype surrounding the recently-announced Oscar nominations, perhaps it's worth noting that the Academy was founded on January 11th, 1927 by Louis B. Mayer and a room of his 36 hand-picked guests. If I understand correctly, those people all became immortal in their 60s and continue to choose every Oscar winner to this day.

For the past few weeks, we've been looking at selections of cool Kickstarter projects — but this week we're going back to taking a closer look at one interesting offering: the nOb, a multi-functional control peripheral with a unique approach to what it does. The Good There are no shortage of USB knobs, sliders and switches out there, and they pretty much all come to us from the music production world, and are all MIDI-based. In fact, in the past, I've criticized devices for bucking that standard — but the nOb does so for a good reason: it's not just about music. Instead of MIDI-over-USB, the nOb uses a USB serial standard and is designed to interact with all sorts of software interfaces. Anything that can be clicked-and-dragged onscreen can be controlled with the nOb by simply hovering your cursor over it. Thus, far beyond just music software, it can control things like the playhead in video editing software, or the adjustment sliders and canvas panning in Photoshop, or for that matter any scroll-bar in any app. Its exact input style is controlled by two switches on the device, and both these switches as well as the knob are all touch-sensitive, allowing for an additional layer of customizable control with various taps and double-taps. The simple flexibility of the nOb is what makes it noteworthy. Though it probably seems like a simple toy to casual users, it has a lot of potential for a wide variety of professional tasks in music, video, design, illustration, photography, animation, 3D modelling and anything else that requires hours hunched over a keyboard and mouse, navigating a complex project and tweaking hundreds of settings to perfection. The Bad For now, I have few if any reservations. It seems a little on the pricey side at €150, but once you look at the quality of construction and consider the touch-sensitive controls, it's pretty justifiable. It would be nice to see it include a MIDI-based option (and indeed, this is one of the stretch goals) since the mouse-hover control system will not always be ideal for music applications, especially complex workflows that rely on MIDI as a near-universal standard — but this isn't a case of ignoring a good standard out of hubris or ignorance. It's a conscious choice to try something different that opens up huge new possibilities, and the nOb's USB serial interface is also open and developer-friendly. The Beautiful & Hackable It can't go entirely unmentioned that the nOb looks very nice — and there's no reason to doubt the claim that it feels very nice too, given the mahogany enclosure and the solid aluminum knob. Also, in keeping with the tradition of the great analog synthesizers and mixer boards of old, it's designed to be easily physically hackable for the tinkerers out there: everything is screwed together and easily disassembled.

As they say, with great power comes great responsibility. Facebook, being a dominant force in the social media industry, certainly has a great deal of power, but how does it do in the responsibility department. It's an important question, because as a platform essentially designed to facilitate speech and expression, it would seem necessary to treat with care how it collides with that speech when controversy arises. Unfortunately, we've seen time and time again how Facebook treats the question bureaucratically rather than with any kind of nuance. Between bending the knee to national interests, promising to censor speech deemed to be hateful, or just flat out hiding behind a wall of corporate speak in order to take down photos, the trend for Facebook is one of grip-tightening rather than free expression.

Body cameras have become democratized, for lack of a better word. They're relatively cheap, easy to use and can be deployed with minimal setup. They hold the promise of increased transparency and accountability, but legislators seem far more interested in ensuring the new technology will have zero net positive effects.

Eating healthier is a common new year's resolution, and it might be good to start simple and stop consuming one unhealthy snack item. However, a completely healthy diet is a totally different task. There are countless fad diets that don't really work or aren't as healthy as they're supposed to be. On top of all that, we should also keep an eye out for the outbreaks of foodborne illnesses and food safety recommendations. Maybe people who drink all their calories aren't totally crazy....

Late last year, we relayed the story of Ai Weiwei, an artist who had previously used Legos to create political art in the form of portraits, being refused a bulk order of Lego blocks by the company. At issue was a long-standing company policy prohibiting its facilitation of blocks being used for political speech. As a result of Weiwei going public about the refusal, the story was Streisanded into the public consciousness, resulting in condemnation and shaming from more of the masses than would have ever been aware of the project otherwise.

As asset forfeiture's popularity continues to decline in the eyes of the public and certain legislators (but not in the eyes of its beneficiaries), arguments against reform efforts are becoming more desperate and strained. Hartford County state's attorney Joseph I. Cassilly has been granted a pile of pixels at the Baltimore Sun to defend the "right" of Maryland's law enforcement agencies to take money from people without charging them, much less convicting them.