Judge Smacks NYPD For Its 'Gotcha' Tactics In Forfeiture Public Records Lawsuit

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New York's court system is finally pushing back against the NYPD's refusal to provide better accounting of its forfeiture programs. Late last year, the NYPD informed people requesting information on seizures it had no way of compiling this data for them. Its $12 million software -- meant to provide "cradle-to-grave" tracking of seized property -- apparently couldn't handle routine inquiries about seizure totals.When the NYPD did decide to talk about its forfeiture operations, it used incomplete and misleading numbers. It claimed to have forfeited only around $12,000 in 2015, something miles away from the $69 million estimate of seized cash-on-hand others had cobbled together using info the NYPD had managed to turn over. According to numbers the NYPD said its software couldn't compile, the department had generated $6 million in revenue in 2015 alone.The Bronx Defenders, a group of public defenders, has been trying for nearly four years to force the NYPD to turn over documents related to its forfeiture programs. The NYPD has a few of these, including an unofficial program that turns personal belongings into "evidence" upon arrest and forces those with dismissed charges or acquittals to jump through a number of time-consuming and expensive hoops to reclaim their belongings -- which include things like cellphones, cash, credit cards, and prescription medication.The NYPD's refusal to cooperate with the Bronx Defenders' FOIL request has led to a lawsuit. The city moved to have it dismissed, but Judge Arlene Bluth doesn't see much merit in the NYPD's arguments. Or actions.

Displeased by what she described as the New York City Police Department’s “troublesome” litigation tactics, a judge advanced a lawsuit that asks what happens to millions of unclaimed dollars seized in civil forfeitures.[...]Rejecting a motion to dismiss the case in Manhattan Supreme Court, Judge Arlene Bluth accused the NYPD and its former Commissioner Bill Bratton on Friday of playing games to avoid disclosures.

Respondents have effectively changed their argument from stating that no responsive documents exist to insisting that producing the information would be too burdensome. This argument directly relates to a troubling assertion by petitioner that respondents refused to confer with petitioner about the way in which these records are kept. 21 NYCR 1401.2(b)(2) requires the records access officer to "assist persons seeking records to identify the records sought, if necessary, and when appropriate, indicate the manner in which the records are filed, retrieved or generated to assist persons in reasonably describing records." It is obvious that it would be necessary to assist a petitioner seeking records from a database under the complete control of the agency and a database not available for public use.Otherwise, petitioner is forced to make requests without any knowledge of the capabilities of the database. That is what has occurred here. Respondents do not directly contest this point in their reply to the cross-motion and simply assert that they have no duty to solicit additional information about the requests. While that might be true, there is a difference between soliciting more information and assisting the requestor in reasonably describing the records sought especially, where, as here, the records are kept on a specialized database.

The record before this Court shows that respondents have only now, more than two years after petitioner's FOIL request, attempted to describe the ways in which these records are kept. This type of "gotcha" litigation tactic is especially troublesome in a FOIL proceeding where petitioner does not have access to the database containing the requested information. Respondents' claims about the burdensome nature of producing individual invoices clearly demonstrates the purpose of assisting a requestor--it is consistent with the spirit of FOIL to let a requestor know how records are kept so that the petitioner can conform requests to receive the information sought and try to avoid unduly burdening an agency.

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Congress Fast-Tracks Bill That Would Give DHS Agencies Access To NSA Collections

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As a parting gift to the incoming president, Barack Obama approved information-sharing rules which gave sixteen federal agencies access to unminimized NSA collections. The whole list of agencies involved in the information sharing can be found at the ODNI's (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) website:

Two independent agencies—the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA);Eight Department of Defense elements—the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial- Intelligence Agency (NGA), the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), and intelligence elements of the four DoD services; the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force.Seven elements of other departments and agencies—the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counter-Intelligence; the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis and U.S. Coast Guard Intelligence; the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Office of National Security Intelligence; the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research; and the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis.

Introduced on April 26 by Rep. John Katko (R-NY), the “Improving Fusion Centers’ Access to Information Act” (HR 2169) is designed to plug any “information gaps” in state “fusion centers” by modifying the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to require DHS to

identify Federal databases and datasets, including databases and datasets used, operated, or managed by Department components, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the Department of the Treasury, that are appropriate, in accordance with Federal laws and policies, to address any gaps identified pursuant to paragraph (2), for inclusion in the information sharing environment and coordinate with the appropriate Federal agency to deploy or access such databases and datasets;

The Department of Homeland Security estimated that it had spent somewhere between $289 million and $1.4 billion in public funds to support state and local fusion centers since 2003, broad estimates that differ by over $1 billion.The investigation found that DHS intelligence officers assigned to state and local fusion centers produced intelligence of “uneven quality – oftentimes shoddy, rarely timely, sometimes endangering citizens’ civil liberties and Privacy Act protections, occasionally taken from already-published public sources, and more often than not unrelated to terrorism.”

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This Week In Techdirt History: May 21st - 27th

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Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, the jury in the Oracle/Google patent trial ruled that there was no infringement, while Judge Alsup revealed his coding knowledge on the copyright side. MPAA boss Chris Dodd was saying they should stop calling infringement "theft" despite the MPAA's own website doing exactly that many times, Congress proposed giving ICE another ten million dollars to fight intellectual property infringement, and TV networks were suing DISH with the insane argument that skipping commercials is copyright infringement. Meanwhile, five years before its recent successful reusable rocket tests, SpaceX was making its first successful cargo run to the ISS, marking a significant milestone in private space travel.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, the proprietary video services launched by various companies were continuing to struggle and die off, with CNN dropping its paid online video service while Time Warner struggled with its own, and Budweiser got ready to kill the ill-fated Bud.TV. The RIAA was trying to close the "radio loophole" by convincing Congress to force radio stations to pay royalties for playing music (leading some to notice that the industry was similarly worried about the "jukebox loophole" nearly half a century earlier), even while it was carefully backing down on new webcasting royalty rates that would have killed smaller webcasters.Fifteen Years AgoThe webcasting battle was not new — five years earlier this week in 2007, an equally disastrous attempt to enact webcasting royalties fell through. Meanwhile, a virus that aimed to stop the trading of infringing material was spreading on the Kazaa network, Hollywood was trying to get copy protection built into all analog-to-digital converters, and you could cut the tension between Silicon Valley and Hollywood with a knife. Google launched its now-defunct Labs page, authoritarian regimes were wielding the power of the internet in frightening new ways, and the still-DVD-based Netflix went public, joining the ranks of stocks-you-really-wish-you'd-bought.One-Hundred And Seventy-One Years AgoThey've done good reporting and bad, they've struggled to adapt to the digital world, and we've often criticized them here on Techdirt — but nevertheless the Associated Press is an old and proud fixture of the journalistic world, and it was on May 22nd, 1846 that it was founded by five New York City dailies to share the cost of covering the Mexican-American War.

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More Legislators Jump On The 'Blue Lives Matter' Bandwagon

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Not wanting to be outdone by idiots in Congress, two idiot senators from the great state of Texas* are pushing their own "Blue Lives Matter" legislation. Senators Cruz and Cornyn have (re)introduced the Backed and Blown "Back the Blue Act," which adds mandatory minimums to any act of violence against most government officials. Oh, and for extra fun, automatic death penalty considerations for anyone charged under this act.^{*Federal law requires the descriptor "great state of" to be appended to any state name, but especially Texas.}I'll get out of the way and allow Senator Cornyn to toot his own horn:

“Our law enforcement officers put their lives on the line every day to protect and serve families across Texas. Violent criminals who deliberately target those who protect and serve our communities should face swift and tough penalties and the Back the Blue Act sends that clear message. Every day, and particularly during National Police Week, we must give the men and women in blue our unparalleled support,” Sen. Cornyn said.

Creates a new federal crime for killing, attempting to kill, or conspiring to kill a federal judge, federal law enforcement officer, or federally funded public safety officer. The offender would be subject to the death penalty and a mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years if death results; the offender would otherwise face a minimum sentence of 10 years.Creates a new federal crime for assaulting a federally funded law enforcement officer with escalating penalties, including mandatory minimums, based on the extent of any injury and the use of a dangerous weapon. However, no prosecution can be commenced absent certification by the Attorney General that prosecution is appropriate.Creates a new federal crime for interstate flight from justice to avoid prosecution for killing, attempting to kill, or conspiring to kill a federal judge, federal law enforcement officer, or federally funded public safety officer. The offender would be subject to a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years for this offense.

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Samsung's 'Airtight' Iris Scanning Technology For The S8 Defeated With A Camera, Printer, And Contact Lens

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The thing about biometric scanning as a security practice is it is one of those things that sounds great. "Lock your phone with your fingerprint or facial scan", shout the manufacturers and security companies that came up with the scans. Well, shit, thinks the average person, if nobody else has my face I'm in the clear. Even when movies and television tackle the subject, the methods for breaking the biometric security typically involve convoluted plans and insane stunts so brazen they would make Danny Ocean's jaw drop.The problem is that the hype around this tech is typically more effective than the tech itself. Fingerprint scanners are easily fooled and facial recognition software has been shown to be defeatable by, and I swear this is true, printouts of a person's face. That isn't security, it's a punchline. So, when Samsung and its security partner decide to pimp the iris-scanning security feature of the Galaxy S8 with language like "airtight" and suggestions that owners of the phone can "finally trust that their phones are protected", one would expect those claims to be backed up by strong technology.It isn't.

Hackers have broken the iris-based authentication in Samsung's Galaxy S8 smartphone in an easy-to-execute attack that's at odds with the manufacturer's claim that the mechanism is "one of the safest ways to keep your phone locked."The cost of the hack is less than the $725 price for an unlocked Galaxy S8 phone, hackers with the Chaos Computer Club in Germany said Tuesday. All that was required was a digital camera, a laser printer (ironically, models made by Samsung provided the best results), and a contact lens. The hack required taking a picture of the subject's face, printing it on paper, superimposing the contact lens, and holding the image in front of the locked Galaxy S8. The photo need not be a close up, although using night-shot mode or removing the infrared filter helps. The hackers provided a video demonstration of the bypass.

"Iris recognition is the next big thing with mobile devices," Starbug wrote in an e-mail. "The technology, especially with the packed space and low computing power of mobile devices, is hard to make hack proof. You can't hide your iris, and it's even worse than fingerprints." At the same time, "mobile devices are holding more and more sensitive data."

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DOJ Officials Express An Interest In Prosecuting Leakers And Whistleblowers

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We've already discussed a memo read by some FBI officials that supposedly was a record of an Oval Office conversation between former FBI Director James Comey and Donald Trump apparently contains the president asking after the possible prosecution of journalists for publishing leaks. Hearsay squared, but still in line with Trump's antagonistic relationship with free speech.There's not much popular support for treating journalists like criminals just for doing their job, but there appears to be plenty of administrative support for the idea. Comey claimed he wouldn't go after journalists for publishing leaks -- something he said with one side of his mouth while redefining journalism to exclude Julian Assange and Wikileaks, which the DOJ is apparently considering pursuing charges against.But that's not the extent of the new administration's Bullets For Messengers™ program. As Betsy Woodruff reports for The Daily Beast, the DOJ is looking to crack down on leaks, leakers, and -- given its inability/unwillingness to subject itself to accountability -- whistleblowers.

Under intense pressure from the White House, the Justice Department is prepared to aggressively prosecute government officials who leak classified information. Justice Department officials told The Daily Beast that targeting leakers will be a priority during Jeff Sessions’ time as attorney general—a posture that will hearten national security hawks, while concerning advocates of whistleblower protections.“As the Attorney General has said, the Department of Justice takes unlawful leaks very seriously and those that engage in such activity should be held accountable,” an official told The Daily Beast.

“The fact that the president shared classified information with a foreign government official, in and of itself, is classified,” a former senior intelligence official told The Daily Beast. “So whoever was trying to burn him for thinking he’s doing something wrong actually is the only one that committed a crime here.”

“I expect we’ll get to the bottom of this,” Sessions replied. “This is not right. We’ve never seen this kind of leaking. It’s almost as if people think they have a right to violate the law, and this has got to end, and probably it will take some convictions to put an end to it.”

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World Of Tanks Developer Gets Negative Review Video Taken Down Under Threat Of Copyright Claim, Backlash Ensues

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We've heard many stories at this point about video game producers attempting to use copyright and the DMCA as a censorship tool against criticism. As it happens, the frequency of these stories has tapered off somewhat as best as I can tell, even as the indie gaming scene has resulted in an explosion of small gaming studios. The reason for that delta is probably that the gaming community as a whole has become both far more educated and vocal about any attempts to use copyright as a censorship tool. Rightly or wrongly, honesty and transparency in gaming reviews and commentary has become something of a thing the past few years and one of the possibly unintentional results of that campaign has been for attempts at stifling criticism about games to be top of the average gamer's mind.Which brings us to Wargaming, the studio behind World of Tanks. If you have not heard about the drama from last week yet, it began with a YouTuber called SirFoch, who issued a scathing and expletive-laden review of a specific tank customers could purchase withing the game.

In the video, which was re-posted on another YouTube channel, SirFoch said things like, “Fuck Wargaming, fuck their terrible way of making these premium tanks lately, and fuck this premium tank in particular.” Specifically, he criticized the tank’s lack of weak points behind the machine gun ports by showing viewers its collision model which he argued made the Chrysler K overpowered.

In the wake of the video attacking Wargaming for its perceived use of pay-to-win mechanics, a community manager at the company who goes by Zoltan “Ph3lan” Sipos contacted SirFoch over Discord. Ph3lan explained, according to screenshots of the conversation provided by SirFoch, that the YouTuber would be dropped from the program giving him early access to content and would need to take down his video or else Wargaming would be forced to have YouTube remove it for copyright infringement.

We have further reviewed the incident of last Friday involving SirFoch and his “Chrysler K GF rant” video, and know we could have handled the situation a lot better. We strongly support our players’, including our Community Contributors’, right to speak critically about us and our games. We acted too quickly and over the line when we threatened to have YouTube remove SirFoch’s video through a copyright infringement complaint and we are apologizing for that.We’re committed to doing a better job on this front. We’re going to improve the way we communicate with our Community and our Community Contributors, and as part of that effort we will work with them on more detailed, specific guidelines to help ensure incidents like this don’t happen again.Our official position is that Wargaming will not take copyright action against opinions based on our publicly released content.Over the weekend we released a statement to some media outlets regarding the content of SirFoch’s video that inferred that SirFoch’s videos contained hate speech and homophobia. While we would obviously not want such content to be associated with any of our games – this video clearly did not. We apologize for this statement, and we don't stand behind those claims.

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Senate Should Either Fix Or Get Off The Pot On Copyright Office Bill

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The U.S. Senate is about to consider mostly pointless legislation that would make the nation's register of copyrights—the individual who heads the U.S. Copyright Office, officially a part of the Library of Congress—a presidential appointment that would be subject to Senate confirmation.While the measure has earned praise from some in the content industry, including the Motion Picture Association of America, unless senators can find better ways to modernize our copyright system, they really should just go back to the drawing board.The Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act of 2017 already cleared the U.S. House in April by a 378-48 margin. Under the bill and its identical Senate companion, the power to select the register would be taken away from Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden. Instead, the president would select an appointment from among three names put forward by a panel that includes the librarian, the speaker of the House and the majority and minority leaders of both the House and Senate. And the register would now be subject to a 10-year term with the option of multiple reappointments, like the Librarian of Congress.The legislation is ostensibly the product of the House Judiciary Committee's multiyear series of roundtables and comments on modernizing the U.S. Copyright Office. In addition to changes to the process of selecting the register, the committee had recommended creating a stakeholder advisory board, a chief economist, a chief technology officer, making information technology upgrades at the office, creating a searchable digital database of ownership information to lower transaction costs in licensing and royalty payments, and creating a small claims court for relatively minor copyright disputes.Alas, while it’s billed as a “first step,” the current legislation gives up most of those more substantive reforms and instead amounts largely to a partisan battle over who will have the power to select the next register: Hayden, who was appointed by Barack Obama, or President Donald Trump.Opponents argue the bill will make the register and the Copyright Office more politicized and vulnerable to capture by special interests, while ceding more power to the executive. They argue that vetting the register through the nomination process could delay modernization efforts. Hayden needs the position to be filled expeditiously to implement her modernization program, and Trump already faces a sizable confirmation backlog.Meanwhile, proponents argue a more independent register, less tethered to the will of the Library of Congress, will make USCO more accountable. They say it will make the office run more efficiently and allow it to modernize. They also believe it will address important constitutional questions, such as the separation of powers and oversight by the president.At the heart of these constitutional questions is the fact the Library of Congress has both significant legislative and executive functions. Housed within the legislative branch, it also sets royalty rates and rules on exemptions from the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Critics have derided the Copyright Office for being slippery about whether it is serving a legislative or executive role, depending on who’s asking. The contention is that this unusual arrangement renders USCO a “constitutional chameleon.”Of course, it is not uncommon for entities in one branch to perform the functions of another. The president has a role in the legislative process through his veto power. The International Trade Commission performs judicial functions, but is an independent agency housed within the executive branch. The federal government's separation of powers is not absolute. But there does come a point where those lines become so blurred as to call the original classification into question. In that respect, Congress should consider taking certain functions—such as the Copyright Royalty Board or the Triennial Section 1201 Proceeding—out of the Copyright Office.Some would propose moving the entire Copyright Office out of the Library of Congress and rendering it a standalone agency, which would elevate the register’s position to one of an officer of the United States. Under that highly controversial scenario, the Constitution's Appointments Clause definitely would require the job be filled by the president. But for now, since the librarian still has ultimate authority over the substantive regulatory powers surrounding copyright, changing who appoints the register won’t change anything outside of a short-term political calculation of who the next register is.The bottom line is that the current bill simply doesn’t do that much, good or bad. Making the position a presidential appointment is unlikely to speed up IT modernization efforts, at a time when the office has faced numerous setbacks and problems getting that IT infrastructure in place. The original policy proposal drafted by the House Judiciary Committee was a more comprehensive and substantial approach to modernization and many of its provisions were supported broadly. First step or not, this is a feeble try.As the Senate considers the bill in the coming weeks, they should either amend the legislation so that it will do something to modernize copyright, or just jettison it entirely. As currently written, the bill serves no purpose, and Congress shouldn’t waste its time on it.Sasha Moss is Technology Policy Manager for the R Street Institute

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Titan Note Continues Trying To Sell Its Questionable Device: Its Own Actions Keep Raising More Questions

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A few weeks back, I wrote about IndieGogo shutting down a crowdfunding project for a small notetaking/speaker device called Titan Note. As I pointed out at the time, there were a lot of alarm bells about the product, but I had still backed it just to see if it might actually work. IndieGogo shutting it down actually had me relieved because the more I thought about it, the less sure I was the project was legit. Making things even more bizarre -- and leading to my post about it -- was the news that the guy behind Titan Note had sent a bogus DMCA takedown notice to the Verge over its skeptical take on the product. The DMCA notice targeted the use of Titan Note's promotional images -- which are clearly fair use for news publications.A few days after that all went down, I went to see if the guy behind Titan Note had anything to say about it. There was a post on Facebook claiming that it was all IndieGogo's fault and promising it would be on another "more trusted" platform soon:

As you have noticed, your orders on Indiegogo have been refunded. We got into a dispute with Indiegogo and we decided to use another platform instead. Indiegogo doesn't have your best interest in mind and we decided to find a better solution for both you and ourselves.

The dispute was regarding the payment and the fees. Moreover, Indiegogo has a history of not taking responsibility for the users on its platform. Many are dissatisfied with the Indiegogo platform. It was a wrong move from our side to take orders on the Indiegogo platform in the first place and we truly apologize about that. We promise that we will make it up to you when we relaunch Titan Note on a more trusted platform next week. Please let us know if you have any other questions.

We are in the process of pursuing legal action against Indiegogo for their misconduct. Because of this, neither we or them can go into more specific details. We appreciate your understanding and we apologize for the inconvenience this has caused you.

About the DMCA: We sent the DMCA notice to the verge because they used our copyrighted images without our permission. No reputable publication would do that. They stole our property and we had to take action.

Campaign Owners are not permitted to create a Campaign to raise funds for illegal activities, to cause harm to people or property, or to scam others. If the Campaign is claiming to do the impossible or it's just plain phony, don't post it.

To clarify, Neither of those platforms have seen our product. The outcome is not a reflection of Titan Note's quality and again, they have not seen our product. We have had competitors that have posted slanderous information to the platforms and we are in the process of bringing legal action against one of those platforms for their misconduct. We will not let a bump in the road stop our passion.

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Trademark Has Come To This: Tinder Opposes Dating App With Only One Lonely Dude On Its Dating Roster

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By now, Tinder is probably in the common lexicon. The dating app has been fairly successful, boasting something like 50 million people using it and managing to make something like 12 million matches per day. It's a household name, in other words, which is what makes it a bit strange to see the company bother to oppose a fairly silly trademark application by one guy who designed a dating app to get dating matches for exactly one person: himself.

Shed Simove called the app Shinder and said he built it to find himself a partner. However, when he tried to trademark it, a Notice of Threatened Opposition was filed to the Intellectual Property Office by dating giant Tinder."I think it's a case of a big corporate giant looking at an entrepreneur who sees the world differently and being punitive," he said. "It's unlikely that the female population will stop using Tinder and start using Shinder."

"If it was 'white label ' - that would mean if I chose to I could take the raw guts of the code and allow people to have their own versions. Jane could have Jinder, and so on."

He also received a letter from lawyers representing the elevator firm Schindler. Schindler asked him to commit to refraining from entering the elevator or escalator market.

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If Net Neutrality Dies, Comcast Can Just Block A Protest Site Instead Of Sending A Bogus Cease-And-Desist

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It appears that a vendor working for Comcast sent a totally bullshit cease-and-desist letter regarding a pro-net neutrality site: Comcastroturf.com, created by our friends over at Fight for the Future. The Comcastroturf website was set up as a tool to see if someone filed bogus FCC comments in your name. As you probably recall, there is a bot that has been flooding the FCC comment site with bogus anti-net neutrality comments, filed in alphabetical order. Reporters contacted some of the individuals whose names appear on these comments, and they had no idea what it was about. People are still trying to track down who is actually responsible for the bogus comments, but Fight for the Future set up this neat site to let you check if your name was used by whoever is behind it.And, of course, the name "Comcastroturf" is pretty damn clever, given the topic. Kudos to Fight for the Future for coming up with that one. It is, of course, totally legal to use the domain name of a company that you're protesting in your own domain. There are numerous cases on this issue, normally discussed as the so-called "Sucks Sites." There's clearly no legal issue with Comcastroturf, and any reasonably informed human being would know that. Unfortunately, it would appear that Comcast hired a company that employs some non-reasonably informed humans.The cease-and-desist letter was sent by a company called "Looking Glass Cyber Solutions" (no, really), which used to be called "Cyveillance" (only marginally less bad). We've written about Cyveillance twice before -- and both times they were about totally bogus takedown requests from Cyveillance that caused serious problems. The most recent was the time that Cyveillance, working for Qualcomm, filed a bogus DMCA notice that took down Qualcomm's own Github repository. Nice move. The earlier story, however was in 2013, and involved Cyveillance -- again representing Comcast -- sending a threatening takedown demand to some more of our friends over at TorrentFreak, claiming (ridiculously) that public court filings were Comcast's copyright-covered material, and threatening serious legal consequences if it wasn't taken down. Eventually, Comcast stepped in and admitted the cease-and-desist was "sent in error." You'd think that maybe this would have caused Comcast to think twice about using Cyveillance for such things. But, nope.The rebranded Looking Glass Cyber Solutions has told Fight for the Future that "Comcastroturf" violates Comcast's "valuable intellectual property rights" and that failure to take down the site may lead to further legal action around cybersquatting and trademark violations.Of course, there's no way that Comcast would actually move forward with any legal action here. In fact, I'm pretty sure it already regrets the fact that the numbskulls at this vendor they hired to police their brand online just caused (yet another) massive headache for their brand online. Maybe, this time, Comcast will finally let Cyveillance/Looking Glass Cyber go, and find partners who don't fuck up so badly. Meanwhile, the fact that Looking Glass Cyber can't even figure out that Comcastroturf is a perfectly legal protest site makes the company's website -- which is chock full of idiotic buzzwords about "threat mitigation" and "threat intelligence" -- look that much more ridiculous. The only "threat" here is Looking Glass/Cyveillance and their silly cluelessness sending out censorious threats based on what appears to be little actual research.Of course, without true net neutrality, if Comcast really wanted to silence Comcastroturf, it would just block everyone from accessing the site...

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Financial Times Editorial: Time To 'Ditch' Corporate Sovereignty In Trade Deals

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The European Union's top court has just handed down an important ruling about an otherwise minor trade deal between the EU and Singapore. The two sides initialled the text of the agreement in September 2013, and since then it has been waiting for the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to hand down its judgment. The issue is who gets to sign off on the deal: is it just the European Union, or do all 28 Member States of the EU need to agree too? There's clearly a big difference there, because in the latter case, there are 28 opportunities for the deal to be blocked, whereas in the former situation, the EU can simply wave it through on its own.The CJEU ruling (pdf) is fairly straightforward: the EU can sign and conclude trade deals covering most areas, but not for a few that must involve the EU Member States. Of most significance is the following:

The regime governing dispute settlement between investors and States also falls within a competence shared between the EU and the Member States. Such a regime, which removes disputes from the jurisdiction of the courts of the Member States, cannot be established without the Member States' consent.

[The CJEU's ruling] would be an excellent opportunity for the EU to go further, and reverse one of its bigger recent errors in trade policy. It should ditch the whole idea of having rules on investment, or at least rules allowing companies to sue a government directly, in FTAs. Such "investor-state" provisions have attracted intense opposition, not just from the Walloons but also from anti-corporate campaigners.Removing these rules would ease the way for future deals. As they do not seem to encourage foreign direct investment, they are more trouble than they are worth. Freed from this unnecessary encumbrance, the EU would find it easier to sustain with its quiet run of closing bilateral tradepacts.

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Law Enforcement 'Training And Expertise' On Parade!

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This is just a periodic reminder that these are the sort of people whose "experience" and "expertise" are routinely granted massive amounts of deference by judges (and stenographers pretending to be journalists). Warrant affidavits providing more detail about the requesting officer's law enforcement career than the target of the search are often rubberstamped into actionable pieces of paper. (But not always!) And yet, these experienced experts look far more mortal when their actions are given something more than a cursory examination.Exhibit A: the Odessa PD's crack team of trained experts who participated in a daring no-knock raid of an empty motel room.

The search warrant was executed on Jan. 29 at the America's Best Value Inn, 3023 E. Highway 80.Police officials say the officers involved in executing the warrant "used an unauthorized cooperating individual," and the cooperating individual did not have the required file.The Professional Standards Unit Investigation also found that the officers involved failed to correctly identify and confirm the location of the criminal activity.During the search, officers entered room #225 which was vacant, according to previous reports.Officers then reportedly made a "split-second" decision and breached the next room (#226) at the hotel where suspects were located.When reviewing the warrant, officers realized that on the warrant room #225 had been listed, police say.The suspects in the room were held "pending the production of a second search warrant," police say in a release.

In the investigation, police determined that the breach of room #226 was "not illegal because the conduct of the officers prior to their entry into room #226 was lawful, there was no violation or threatened violation of the Fourth Amendment, and therefore the exigent circumstance rule applied and allowed for the entry and securing of room #226," the release reads.

Officer Kim’s testimony about seeing the handle of a gun protruding from Smith’s pocket is not credible. At the evidentiary hearing, Officer Kim testified that she could see the black handle of a gun protruding from Smith’s pocket. However, in her arrest report, written shortly after the incident, Officer Kim wrote “[t]he handgun was concealed inside his pocket in such a manner as not to be discernible by ordinary observation.” (ECF No. 18-1 at 3) This statement directly contradicts her testimony. It is unlikely that Officer Kim, approaching a poorly lit landing in the wee hours of the morning, would have been able to discern a black gun handle allegedly sticking out of Smith’s pocket.[...]Indeed, Officer Kim acknowledged in her police report she only became aware of the handgun after she began the pat down.

"Everybody's like, 'Don't move, don't move or we'll shoot you,'" Noel Navarete told local 4 News. His brother Isaias, 18, said he was in the bathroom when police kicked down the door.According to family matriarch Maria Navarete, police told her to "shut up, you have no rights" when she asked what was happening. She claims police never showed her or anyone in the household a warrant.Police apologized, explaining that a mysterious heroin-addicted woman in a local hospital said she and several underage girls had been held against their will and forced into prostitution; the woman (visually) identified the Navarete's place as where it went down. That night, police began observing the house, soon witnessing two girls get dropped off by an SUV and go inside. Apparently, that was enough to warrant a furtive, middle-of-the-night raid on the place.

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This Week In Techdirt History: May 14th - 20th

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Five Years AgoThis week in 2012, a Microsoft-funded effort to disrupt BitTorrent was drawing scrutiny, EMI was gloating over the demise of MP3Tunes, and the MPAA was cheering on legal rulings against the Pirate Bay. Of course, one of those rulings was called into question when a Dutch judge's connections to anti-piracy groups drew accusations of corruption, and one of TPB's founders was taking the legal fight over a Swedish ruling to the EU courts. Meanwhile, protestors against the TPP were getting creative, Chile was threatening to drop out of the negotiations all together, Rep. Darrell Issa posted an old leaked version of the agreement for discussion, and the USTR was still attempting to claim that listening to people counts as "transparency".Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, while the MPAA was making some curious changes to its opaque and esoteric ratings system, the RIAA was getting journalists to parrot its propaganda about its copyright shakedowns, and Microsoft was spreading unoriginal FUD about Linux infringing on its patents (prompting Sun to remind it that real companies don't litigate, they innovate). Cinemas were lashing out at the idea of getting rid of movie release windows, CBS was learning why trying to build its own online video destination was a bad idea, and the latest update to AACS was cracked before it even hit the market. We also witnessed the birth of The Copyright Alliance at the hands of the RIAA, MPAA, Disney, Viacom and more.Fifteen Years AgoSometimes — such as this week in 2002 — cracking CD protection was as easy as using a black marker or some electrical tape. Then again, other times the CD might lock up your iMac and force you to take it in for repairs. While the copyright world was discussing big, sweeping ideas like blanked licensing fees paid to ISPs and compulsory licenses for music downloads, the recently-announced Creative Commons was launching in earnest.Also, you know that oft-mentioned fact about how everyone from Europe is descended from Charlemagne as a matter of mathematical inevitability? It was this week in 2002 that those numbers were first crunched.One-Hundred And Fifteen Years AgoMost of you are probably at least vaguely familiar with the Antikythera mechanism, an shockingly advanced astronomical calculator/analog computer from Ancient Greece. It was on May 17th, 1902 that the mechanism was discovered by an archaeologist examining the remnants of a ship, itself discovered on the sea floor two years earlier by sponge divers.

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China To Require Drone Owners To Register, Just As Similar US Requirements Are Struck Down

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The South China Morning Post has a story about a new requirement for drone owners in China to register with the country's civilian aviation regulator starting next month. So is this yet another example of the Chinese authorities clamping down on a potentially subversive new technology by ensuring that drone use can be tracked? Well, that might be one reason, but it's probably also to do with this:

The move is the latest by Chinese authorities to tackle the drone safety threat after the illegal use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) made headlines at least a dozen times since the beginning of 2017.The latest case was in April when more than 240 flights were disrupted by drones flying near Chongqing Jiangbei International Airport in southwest China, leaving 10,000 travellers delayed.

Once the preserve of the military, they are now used in a wide range of industries, from aerial surveillance of crops to search operations and delivery of medical supplies to remote or otherwise inaccessible regions. For Chinese consumers, drones have become the favoured gadget for taking aerial videos and photos.

The overall UAV market in China is expected to reach 75 billion yuan (US$10.9 billion) by 2025, of which consumer drones will contribute 30 billion yuan while agricultural and forestry drones, as well as security drones, are likely to account for 20 billion yuan and 15 billion yuan respectively, iiMedia Research said in a report last year.

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Senate Given The Go-Ahead To Use Encrypted Messaging App Signal

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Certain senators have repeatedly pushed for encryption bans or encryption backdoors, sacrificing personal security for national security in a move that will definitively result in less of both. Former FBI Director James Comey's incessant beating of his "Going Dark" drum didn't help. Several legislators always managed to get sucked in by his narrative of thousands of unsearched phones presumably being tied to thousands of unsolved crimes and free-roaming criminals.It will be interesting if the anti-encryption narratives advanced by Sens. Feinstein and Burr (in particular -- although others equally sympathetic) continue now that senators can officially begin using an encrypted messaging system for their own communications.

Without any fanfare, the Senate Sergeant at Arms recently told Senate staffers that Signal, widely considered by security researchers and experts to be the most secure encrypted messaging app, has been approved for use.The news was revealed in a letter Tuesday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), a staunch privacy and encryption advocate, who recognized the effort to allow the encrypted messaging app as one of many "important defensive cybersecurity" measures introduced in the chamber.ZDNet has learned the policy change went into effect in March.

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NY Senate Passes Bill That Would Add Cops And Firemen To List Of Protected Classes Under State's Hate Crime Law

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Because good ideas are rare but bad ideas eternal, the New York State Senate has just given its blessing to a stupid bill aimed at protecting people armed with guns, power, the weight of the law, and numerous immunity options. The "justification" for New York's addition of cops and first responders to the state's hate crime law is this:

There has been an increase in mortality rates of law enforcement officers, firefighters, corrections officers and emergency medical services personnel, within the past decade. In a report by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund in 2014, statistics showed that approximately "126 federal, state, local, tribal and territorial officers died in the line of duty" which exhibited an increase in comparison to 2012 and 2013. The increase in the death toll has been in part, due to offenses intentionally aimed to harm first responders.

Fred Akshar [R] - Longtime law enforcement officer, having served as undersheriff for Broome County before turning to politics.Patrick M. Gallivan [R] - former Erie County Sheriff (1998-2005), preceded by 15 years with the New York State Police, and followed by a stint on the state parole board. One of several state legislators found to have faked leadership positions in the Senate to get a little unearned extra pay added onto their paychecks.Tony Avella [D] - Last seen at Techdirt killing off his horrendous "Right to Be Forgotten" bill… but not in an honorable way. Rather than remove it from consideration, he simply revoked his sponsorship, leaving the orphaned bill to wander the Senate halls unattended.Martin J. Golden [R] - A retired NYPD officer who has been instrumental in adding even more New Yorkers to the state's sex offender registry, as well as expanding the state's DNA databank to include people convicted of nothing more than a misdemeanor.John J. Bonacic [R] - Former assistant district attorney and one of those guys who thinks something must be done about "anti-law enforcement rhetoric." Apparently, this bill is part of the solution -- a bill that could conceivably be twisted to turn "resisting arrest" into a felony-level hate crime. (Because what is "resisting arrest" if not "targeting" of law enforcement for abuse/violence/etc.?)

section 1, states that a person has committed a hate crime, when he or she commits a specified offense and either intentionally selects the person against whom the offense is committed or intended to be committed to, or in part because of a belief or perception regarding race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, religion, religious practice, age, disability, sexual orientation of a person, or because of actual or perceived employment as a law enforcement officer, firefighter, or emergency medical services personnel.

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New EU Lawsuit Claims Google Failed To Forget 'Sensitive' Information, Such As Their 'Political Affiliation'

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For years, we've pointed out that the "Right to be Forgotten" (RTBF) in Europe is a dangerous tool that has been and will continue to be abused as a tool to censor freedom of expression, while hiding behind a claim that it is to protect "privacy." While the concept has been around for a while, it really took off online with a EU Court of Justice (CJEU) ruling from three years ago, saying that Google's search results index counted as a data repository on someone, and thus, an individual could force Google to "delink" certain results from searches on their names. But, the court left some leeway to Google to decide whether or not the requests were valid. Basically, if the information is no longer relevant for the public to know about the person, then Google should delink it. Now, obviously, that's a horribly subjective standard, and Google has had to staff up on people to determine whether or not any requested delinking qualifies.Part of the problem with all of this is that it seems to produce tremendous liability. Fail to get a delinking request "right" and Google is right back in court, which is exactly where we are today. Google has rejected just under 60% of requests to delink info in Europe, and four individuals in France were so upset by this, that they complained that their rights were being violated. The French data protection regulator, CNIL, actually agreed with Google that the information shouldn't be "forgotten." However, the four have appealed their case, and it's been kicked back to the European Court of Justice. The four individuals are claiming that the information is "sensitive data" and are suggesting that just being "sensitive data" alone is enough to require forgetting -- no matter what the "public interest" may be in that info.As Google has noted in a blog post, there are serious questions here about whether or not people can hide information from their past that may be relevant:

The CJEU now has to decide whether "sensitive personal data"such as the political allegiance of an individual, or a past criminal conviction reported in the pressshould always outweigh the public interest.The tricky thing with this kind of information is that it is often important for people to know and it is frequently reported in newspapers and elsewhere. Requiring automatic delisting from search engines, without any public interest balancing test, risks creating a dangerous loophole. Such a loophole would enable anyone to demand removal of links that should remain up in the public interest, simply by claiming they contain some element of sensitive personal data.

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Appeals Court Pretty Sure DOJ Use-Of-Force Guidelines Don't Violate Police Officers' 2nd And 4th Amendment Rights

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A few years ago, some Seattle police officers came up with a novel plan to battle DOJ-imposed limits on their use-of-force. Since their union wisely decided to steer clear of this ridiculous legal battle, the officers chose to crowdfund their way into the federal court system.Armed with a little over $3,000 and some particularly dubious arguments, the protesting cops filed a lawsuit claiming their Second and Fourth Amendment rights were being violated by the DOJ's use-of-force restrictions. It did not go well.

The officers' arguments were unsupported by the Constitution or case law, Chief U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman said in an opinion issued Monday.[...]Plaintiffs can point to no case establishing that the Second Amendment codified a free-standing right to self-defense, as opposed to case law interpreting the textual Second Amendment rights to “keep and bear arms” in light of their purposes…[...]Nor did she agree with the officers' insistence that the policy violated a "right of self-defense as embedded in the Fourth Amendment," which protects against unreasonable search and seizures. Pechman said the argument grossly misconstrued Fourth Amendment law.

The Ninth Circuit seemed skeptical of Seattle police officers’ claims that a new use-of-force policy mandated by the Department of Justice violates their Second Amendment rights.U.S. Circuit Judge N. Randy Smith told the officers’ attorney he didn’t “have much of an argument” at a three-judge panel appellate hearing on Monday.

If the officers had real concerns about the use-of-force policy, they should have brought them before the federal judge overseeing the police reforms rather than asking an appellate panel to “create a new fundamental constitutional right,” [city attorney Gregory] Narver said.

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US Court Upholds Enforceability Of GNU GPL As Both A License And A Contract

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Free software dominates modern computing, from smartphones to supercomputers -- only the desktop remains a stronghold of proprietary code. Most of that free software has the Linux kernel at its heart, and a key element in the success of Linux -- and of thousands of other coding projects -- is the GNU General Public License. Although the first version of the GNU GPL was released by Richard Stallman back in 1989, and version 3 was issued in 2007, there have been surprisingly few court cases examining it and other open source licenses, and whether they are legally watertight.A key case is Jacobsen v. Katzer from 2008. As a detailed Groklaw post at the time explained, the US appeals court held that open source license conditions are enforceable as a copyright condition. Now we have another important judgment, Artifex v. Hancom, that clarifies further the legal basis of open source licenses. It concerns the well-known Ghostscript interpreter for the PostScript language, written originally by L. Peter Deutsch, and sold by the company he founded, Artifex Software. Artifex was a pioneer in adopting a dual-licensing approach for Ghostscript. That is, you could either use the software under the GNU GPL, or you could avoid copyleft's redistribution requirements by taking out a conventional proprietary license.Hancom is a South Korean company that produces Hangul, word-processing software that is primarily used in South Korea as an alternative to Microsoft Word. Artifex says that Hancom incorporated Ghostscript into its Hangul software, but neither sought a proprietary license, nor complied with the terms of the GPL by releasing the source code for the application that incorporated Ghostscript. As a result, Artifex took legal action, alleging copyright infringement and breach of contract. Hancom asked the court to dismiss Artifex's complaint on several grounds, but they were all denied. The most significant ruling is on Hancom's claim that the GNU GPL was not a contract. In her order, embedded below, Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley wrote:

The GNU GPL, which is attached to the complaint, provides that the Ghostscript user agrees to its terms if the user does not obtain a commercial license. Plaintiff alleges that Defendant used Ghostscript, did not obtain a commercial license, and represented publicly that its use of Ghostscript was licensed under the GNU GPL. These allegations sufficiently plead the existence of a contract.

there is harm which flows from a party's failure to comply with open source licensing.

Generally, copyright claims may afford plaintiffs more damages and stronger remedies than contract claims. However, contract claims may help a plaintiff pursue a violator's worldwide conduct in a way that jurisdictional limits on copyright claims might not allow. Breach of contract claims may also be able to address reputational harm and other indirect non-economic benefits that a plaintiff might derive from enforcing open source license conditions. A breach of contract claim might also, in certain instances, allow for specific performance of open source obligations.

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Paul Levy Hoping To Wake Up Maryland Courts To The Numerous Fraudulent Libel Lawsuits Filed There

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Something's rotten in Maryland. Not conspiracy-level rotten, but rotten nonetheless. As we've discussed recently, Paul Alan Levy (along with Eugene Volokh) have done a ton of legwork to flush out the perpetrator of several bogus libel lawsuits filed in Baltimore courts, designed for the purpose of "reputation management" (i.e., convincing Google to stop linking to posts someone doesn't like). The man behind many of these appears to be Richart Ruddie, who runs a reputation management company called Profile Defenders.As we discussed earlier this week, one of the judges in Baltimore handling one of those cases has refused to fix things and overturn his rubber-stamped order. But there are other, similar cases in front of other judges there as well, and they seem equally unwilling to make proactive efforts to deter this sort of abuse. Because of this, Levy has worked with Myvesta (a company indirectly affected by a bogus libel lawsuit, thanks to bogus delisting orders targeting one of its websites) to file an amicus brief detailing Ruddie's fraudulent reputation management efforts.

We had several reasons for filing an amicus brief in support of the plaintiffs’ motion to vacate. First, it seemed to us that the motion to vacate understated the extent of the fraud that had been perpetrated on the court — it did not frankly admit that Bryan Levin was an invented name created for the purpose of justifying the consent order, and it did not admit that the consent order sought the plaintiffs’ objective — suppression of critical articles — by the device of suing over allegedly defamatory comments. The motion did not admit that in additional to victimizing the court by the fraud, the person who arranged for the case to be filed was actually victimizing a speaker whose rights are protected by the First Amendment, and the motion did not call the consent order by its proper name — a prior restraint of protected speech.

A second reason for submitting the amicus brief was to ensure that the judge not hear this motion to vacate judgment in isolation – we know of a raft of other cases like Smith v. Levin that were filed in the Maryland courts and, in particular, in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City. Some of these other cases also sought relief suppressing other articles on the Get Out of Debt Guy blog, in the apparent interest of other debt relief companies that the blog had criticized. Our brief identifies several other such cases, and Professor Volokh’s research has identified several more.

[I]t has come to Myvesta’s attention that Bennett Wills has filed two additional “fake lawsuits” in Maryland circuit courts that are comparable to this case. Visionstar, Inc. v. Perez, No. 24C15005743 (Cir. Ct. Balt. City); Cohen v. Wilkerson, No. 06C15070022 (Cir. Ct. Carroll Cy). (Copies of these two complaints are attached). The papers use very similar language, and an investigation conducted by a private detective retained by UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh to assist in his investigation of the phenomenon of fake litigation established that, as in this case, neither of the two individuals who were named as defendants and whose signatures appear on the consent orders live at the addresses shown for them. See attached Declaration of Giles Miller. Moreover, both cases show obvious signs of being fake: the signatures of defendants “Mark Wilkerson” and “Daniel Perez” appear to have been written by the same hand; and the very carefully handwritten signature of “Mark Wilkerson” spells his name as “Wilerkson.”And in the Visionstar case, the allegation in paragraph 13 about the IP address from which the supposedly defamatory reviews were posted to the Ripoff Report website is a highly implausible. Generally speaking, a subpoena can be issued in connection with a case seeking to identify the poster of an anonymous comment, but that is something that happens after the complaint is filed, not something that can be listed in the complaint. Undersigned counsel has contacted inside counsel for Xcentric Ventures, the company that operates Ripoff Report, and ascertained that his client has never received any subpoena to identify the anonymous author of the reports cited in the Visionstar complaint; that attorney also represented that he checked the IP addresses for the reports cited in the complaint, and that none of them was associated with the address 12.4.33.71 as the complaint alleges.

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Makers Of Payday 2 Donating DLC Profits To Help 2 YouTubers Fight Copyright Lawsuit

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The landscape of YouTubers who do reviews or takes on video games, including Let's Plays, and their interactions with the game makers themselves is one that lacks any sort of norm or uniformity. Some game developers understand the value these YouTubers bring to their businesses, while some tend to go on the attack with copyright claims. Some developers appreciate an open and honest ecosystem of reviews, including snarky reviews, while others attempt to suppress any sort of negativity.But, as far as I'm aware of, Overkill Software, makers of Payday 2, is the first studio to donate proceeds from its DLC content to defend YouTubers from copyright lawsuits.

Ethan [Klein] and Hila [Klein], who run the YouTube channel H3H3Productions, make sketch comedy and “reaction” videos in which they comment on internet and YouTube culture. Last year, the husband-wife team filmed a video mocking YouTuber Matt Hosseinzadeh, or “Bold Guy,” for his video about picking up girls using parkour. In response, Hosseinzadeh filed a complaint with the Southern District of New York District Court alleging copyright infringement. In the complaint, Hosseinzadeh accuses the Kleins of “purporting to discuss the Work in what they believe to be a humorous manner but in fact reproduces virtually all of the Work as nothing more than a prop.”

On April Fools, Overkill Software introduced Ethan Klein into first-person shooter Payday 2. Yesterday, Overkill, who are fans of the Kleins, announced they’ll be making the joke a permanent, and charitable, reality. This Fall, the faces behind H3H3Productions will be playable characters in Payday 2, and Overkill studios will donate all of the DLC’s revenue to the Kleins as they continue to fight their legal battle that, they say, could financially ruin them even if they win.While the Kleins were initially represented pro bono, a year later, after switching firms, the price of fighting the lawsuit has reportedly snowballed, with the first month allegedly costing over $50,000. And they will continue to fight it, the Kleins say, to protect fair use and prevent a bad precedent. (YouTube personality Philip DeFranco helped raise $170,000 for them in a GoFundMe, arguing that the lawsuit is “an attempt to step on freedom of speech via a broken copyright system and most people’s confusion over Fair Use.”)

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Nier Automata Modder Includes Piracy Checks In Mod, Causing An Uproar, But Should It?

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Nier: Automata is a multiplatform game that I know almost nothing about at all, other than it was released relatively recently and that the PC version of the game was shipped out with some rather frustrating bugs. Apparently the game on PCs doesn't actually ship with true 1080p resolution and has some severe frame rate issues. But, because this is a PC game we're talking about, a fan going by the handle Kaldaien went ahead and released a patch that seems to fix these issues. There is just one problem.Kaldaien's patch checks to make sure the game it's patching hasn't been pirated. And that caused something of an uproar on the Steam forums.

On neoGAF, Kaldaien explains that “Nothing malicious happens if you fail this check, you’re just presented with an infinite license screen that you can click Accept on but since you don’t respect licenses the license doesn’t respect your click.” In short, you can’t use the official mod if you pirate the game.On the Steam forums, this news caused quite the commotion. The thread that originally shared the mod burst into arguments and insults, and Kaldaien himself even got temporarily banned from posting, allegedly because he called someone a “pirate moron.” The thread has since been removed from Steam, but reactions to the piracy check can be found all around the web. Some people actually feel entitled to use the mod no matter how they obtained the game.

“My anti-piracy measures actually have nothing to do with my personal views on individual piracy,” Kaldaien wrote on neoGAF. “I don’t condone the practice, I don’t generally think highly of people who do it, but this is not done to punish them. It is to protect me against asset injection of copyrighted material.” On Steam, Kaldaien said, “I will not be thrown under the bus when some user uses my software to inject DLC they didn’t purchase.” It’s also worth noting that locking pirates out means Kaldaien doesn’t have to waste time trying to troubleshoot problems with people that don’t even have the game legally.

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Thailand Demands More Proxy Censorship From Facebook

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More foreign censorship is coming to American social media companies. Back in January, Facebook hinted it would be at least partially receptive to the government of Thailand's desire to be free from criticism. Fortunately, the Thailand government has been slightly more rational than, say, Austria's by not demanding offending content be removed everywhere. So far, it seems amenable to Facebook just preventing Thailand's citizens from seeing anything deemed insulting to their rulers (dead or alive).The problem right now (at least in the minds of Thailand government officials) is that Facebook isn't making with the targeted censorship quickly enough.

The social media giant has been given until next Tuesday to remove more than 130 items from pages viewable in Thailand.Facebook says it does consider requests from governments to block material, and will comply if it breaks local laws.

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This Week In Techdirt History: May 7th - 13th

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Five Years AgoIt was the previous week in 2012 that we learned the sad news of the death of the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch (better known as MCA), and it was this week that the EFF called for an end to the war on sampling as a tribute to his legacy. Little did we know that, the very next day, Tuf America would sue the Beastie Boys over an unauthorized sample, which is some stunningly insensitive timing. And that wasn't the only copyright fuckup related to MCA's death — the co-creator of The Chappelle Show uploaded a previously unaired video of the Beastie Boys preforming for the show, only to have it taken down by a Viacom copyright claim.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007, NBC was getting in on the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit with an amicus brief against the latter, while the government of Thailand was blocking the site entirely and considering its own lawsuit. Newspaper publishers, struggling to adapt to the web, were alternately scraping together data to portray their digital efforts as successful and blaming the internet for all their industry's woes. And "psychic" (read: mediocre magician) Uri Geller was abusing the DMCA and filing lawsuits in an attempt to censor a popular debunking of his little tricks by James Randi.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, we took a look at the absolute mess that was MusicNet, the attempt by major labels to offer a competitive digital music platform. The world was still for some reason debating whether video games are free speech, and a judge ruled that the DMCA was constitutional via an odd distinction regarding speech and software. Before mobile phones replaced the landline all but entirely, there was an earlier fear about them replacing people's second phone lines. And long, long before the west would see anything similar, Japan was adding wi-fi to 4000 McDonald's locations.One-Hundred And Seventy-One Years AgoAmerica's oldest weekly newspaper that is still in publication is the Cambridge Chronical, and it was on May 7th, 1846 that the first issue was published, just a few days after Cambridge was incorporated as a city. Of course, like most old community newspapers, its recent history of sales and mergers has left it somewhat disconnected from its roots.

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Leaked NSA Hacking Tool On Global Ransomware Rampage

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Welp. What was that we were saying about the problems of the NSA creating hacking tools that leak, rather than helping patch security flaws? Oh, right. That it would make everyone less safe.And here we are. With a global ransomware rampage, referred to as "WannaCry" putting tons of people at risk, thanks to leaked NSA malware:

Leaked alleged NSA hacking tools appear to be behind a massive cyberattack disrupting hospitals and companies across Europe, Asia and the U.S., with Russia among the hardest-hit countries.The unique malware causing the attacks which been spotted in tens of thousands of incidents in 99 countries, according to the cyber firm Avast have forced some hospitals to stop admitting new patients with serious medical conditions and driven other companies to shut down their networks, leaving valuable files unavailable.

1. The NSA's dual-hatted offensive & defensive structure is damaging: The NSA plays both offense and defense on computer security. That is, it is supposed to hack into other systems, but also help protect our systems. But it's quite clear that the offensive capabilities are valued much more than the defensive ones -- and that's a problem. Once again, it appears that people in the intelligence community are not doing a clear cost-benefit analysis of the tools that they use. They like their toys, but they rarely seem to take into consideration what happens should those toys get out.
2. Once again, this reinforces why we should not allow backdoors to encryption or any other such vulnerability. Over and over again, the proponents of backdooring encryption have insisted that it can be built in a "safe" way, where only government will get the backdoor access to encryption. The fact that some of the NSA's most powerful hacking tools have not only been leaked but are now wreaking havoc around the world, should put a complete end to the "going dark" debate. But it won't. It's not safe, but many in the law enforcement community, in particular, are in denial about this.

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Now Canceled Crowdfunding Project Sent DMCA Notice Following Skeptical Review

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A few months back, I saw some news about a crowdfunding project on IndieGogo, called Titan Note. It was a little a cylindrical device that acted as a microphone, and the guys behind the project insisted that it could transcribe notes with fairly incredible levels of accuracy. The device got some press coverage -- including a quite reasonably skeptical piece at The Verge, entitled "No way this transcription gizmo is as good as it claims to be." There was a lot more skepticism around the project in the comments to the project as well. On top of that, the project's marketing pitch seemed... wrong. That is, it positioned the device as a thing that you could use to "stop taking notes" in classes and meetings in order to pay better attention and learn more. But... that's just wrong. Because the process of taking notes yourself actually helps you commit things to memory. That is, taking notes helps you pay better attention, and thus if you actually used the device the way it was advertised, you might get less out of lectures and meetings.All that said, here's a confession: I still backed it. I was already skeptical -- in part because of the mis-targeted marketing and because the video looked too good to be true, given the state of transcription products in the market, and I had read that Verge article. But, there was an early bird deal that made it pretty cheap, and I figured that even if it was just a so-so product, it could have some use, such as making it easier to transcribe videos and podcasts for posts here on Techdirt. Given the low price of the early bird, I figured maybe it was worth the risk that the product sucked... or didn't exist at all.Eventually, the product raised over $1.1 million -- as it announced in a press release. But, late last night I got an email from IndieGogo saying that the project had been shut down and all funds refunded. IndieGogo told the Verge that the project had violated its terms of service -- which could mean lots of things. If anything, I'm more relieved than anything else. I had kind of regretted backing it in the first place, given the skepticism I had over the product.But, that alone wouldn't make this much of a Techdirt story. Instead, what made this a Techdirt story is this, from the Verge:

When we covered the Titan Note in March, we suggested the company was perhaps exaggerating the capabilities of its product. After all, we said, if Apple or Amazon can't produce transcription software as accurate and speedy as this, what chance does a company with no commercial history have? We later received a DMCA takedown notice for using of Titan Note's product imagery to illustrate our story.

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Lawsuit Claiming Fyre Festival Sent Cease & Desist Letters To Online Critics Doesn't Show Any Actual Evidence

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If, somehow, you've avoided all the news about the Fyre Festival from the past few weeks... well... you've been missing out. There's a ton of coverage basically everywhere, but what was promoted as an upscale music festival on a private island in the Bahamas, complete with private flights, luxury lodging, and fine dining... turned out to be... nothing. Despite having lots of rich and famous folks (especially Instagram stars) promoting the festival for months, it eventually appears that promoting and hyping was about all that was done for the festival, rather than actually organizing stuff. The festival was "canceled" but not before a bunch of people made their way to a not-so-private island in the Bahamas (Great Exumas) and discovered... that there was effectively nothing there. There was no music festival. The "lodging" was emergency relief structures. The "fine dining" was slices of bread and cheese with some lettuce. It's been quite a story.As you can imagine there have been lawsuits filed. Oh so many lawsuits. The sixth of these lawsuits, filed by Kenneth and Emily Reel, is getting a bunch of attention, in part because it includes the festival's PR agency, 42West, rather than just the "startup" behind the festival, Fyre Media (it was supposed to offer some sort of app), its founder Billy McFarland, and the musician Ja Rule, who was supposedly also a creator of the festival. But, even more interesting for those of us here at Techdirt is that he latest filing also claims that Fyre Festival has been threatening social media posters with cease-and-desist letters for posting negative things about the festival. That's what puts this squarely into Techdirt/Streisand Effect territory.You can read the full filing here or below. Admittedly, the filing is... kinda weak. There seem to be many claims that are little more than cut-and-pasted from media reports (without citation or credit). For example, the social media cease-and-desist threats are not shown with much detail (and don't appear to be included as an exhibit). Here's what the lawsuit says:

As for those individuals who elected to speak negatively about the Defendants on social media, they are now being threatened with legal action via cease and desist letters. Specifically, if the social media comments were not taken down, the Defendants claim they could incite violence, rioting, or civil unrest, with the caveat that if someone innocent does get hurt as a result Fyre Festival will hold you accountable and responsible.

Would you prefer to exchange your 2017 ticket(s) for additional 2018 VIP passes, as opposed to receiving a refund (Ex: If you purchased 3 passes for 2017 you would receive 6 total 2018 VIP passes).As you likely know, we've been through the ringer on social media and this has been a challenging week for us as we were unable to realize our dream on the first try. We are now one of the world's most famous festivals, for all the wrong reasons. We want to reverse that sentiment by producing something amazing. We are fully committed to this event next year, and to producing it in the most professional way, with experienced professionals. We have received support and commitments from several musicians to perform at next year's event. We would be so thankful to have your support as well.

Yes, let it ride. I'd love to support you all in creating something amazing!

No, I'm not down for the adventure

Meanwhile the event planners were holed up indoors putting together a game plan and a budget. With so little having been prepared ahead of time, the official verdict was that it would take $50 million to pull off. Planners also warned that it would be not be up to the standard they had advertised. The best idea, they said, would be to roll everyone's tickets over to 2018 and start planning for the next year immediately. They had a meeting with the Fyre execs to deliver the news. A guy from the marketing team said, Let's just do it and be legends, man.

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Bethesda's Pete Hines Shrugs His Shoulders About Trademark Dispute With No Matter Studios

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If any single aspect of common trademark disputes has become the thing that annoys me the most about them, it's how often the canard from trademark bullies that they have to be bullies by order of trademark law is trotted out for public consumption. You can almost set your watch to it: trademark bully does trademark bullying, public backlash ensues, trademark bully falsely explains that if it doesn't bully it loses its trademark rights, the public usually backs off. While it would be unreasonable to expect the general public to be up on the nuances of trademark law to the degree of someone who is paid to write about it, it's not unreasonable to smack down attempts by those who know better but who actively attempt to misinform that same general public.Which brings us to Bethesda. We recently discussed an indie studio called No Matter Studios, which had launched a successful Kickstarter campaign for its game Prey for the Gods, being bullied into changing that name to Praey for the Gods by Bethesda. Bethesda recently released a AAA title called simply Prey and is enforcing its laughably broad trademark rights, acquired by Bethesda from 3D Realms, on that name. Faced with a trademark dispute by a much larger company, No Matter Studios caved and made the requested changes which, as we pointed out in the original post, are so absurdly inconsequential as to beg the quesiton of how much real customer confusion was Bethesda actually concerned about in the first place. Right on time, the public backlash began, with much of it directed at Pete Hines, who is in charge of PR and marketing for Bethesda games. And, right on time again, Hines trotted out the shrugging excuse blaming the law rather than his company's actions.

Many contacted Bethesda' Pete Hines on Twitter and voiced their concerns over the development, in response to which he said that ZeniMax had contacted No Matter Studios in 2015 to warn them of potential implications but ZeniMax's letter was ignored. He said that neither companies are responsible for how trademark laws work and that there have been countless times when ZeniMax's own studios had to change game titles to accommodate the same laws that No Matter Studios is now having to comply with."We reached out in Nov 2015. We tried talking to them. Well before their Kickstarter. And they could have used a name that didn't infringe on our mark like we have 1,000 times when we came up with something another company marked. I'm not a trademark lawyer. Or any kind of lawyer. They disagree. Doesn't matter what I think about any of this."

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Bethesda Trademark Bullying Results In Indie Game Adding A Whole Letter To Its Name, But Not Its Logo

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One of the most infuriating aspects of typical trademark disputes is how often the dire nature of the supposed infringement is ratcheted up in the threat rhetoric, while the eventual settlement reached seems laughably inconsequential. Bethesda, which has built a reputation for itself in terms of trademark bullying over its video game franchises, has been an example of this sort of thing in the past. When it decided that it owned the term "scrolls" generally after trademarking its Elder Scrolls franchise, it launched a dispute with developer Mojang over its game which was titled Scrolls. Much was made about the potential for customer confusion, except the eventual settlement allowed Mojang to keep the name for its game. One wonders why such a settlement would be agreed to by Bethesda were its original assertions remotely accurate.But where Mojang's settlement was at least cut and dry, such is not the case with indie studio No Matter Studios. No Matter held a successful Kickstarter campaign for its game Prey for the Gods, but ran into trouble when it tried to trademark the name for its title.

In a post mostly about updates made to the game following its successful Kickstarter, No Matter Studios also announce that the project will now be known as Praey for the Gods after Bethesda "chose to oppose our [trademark].""We could've fought this and we did think about it for quite a while", the statement says. "Something like a trademark opposition can be long and depending on how far someone wants to fight it can be very expensive. We didn't want to spend our precious Kickstarter funds, nor did we want to have to ask for additional funds to fight this in court."

"While we disagree with their opposition we were able to come to an agreement", No Matter say. That agreement means that they can continue to use a logo that says Prey For The Gods, with a stylised "e" that's actually the silhouette of a woman praying, but must use Praey for the Gods every time the game's name is written.

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This Makes No Sense: US To Ban Laptops On All Flights From Europe

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Earlier this year we wrote about the nonsensical move by the Department of Homeland Security to ban laptops and tablets in the cabin on flights from a bunch of cities in the Middle East. The rumored reason was discoveries that terrorists had learned how to make bombs out of laptops. As we noted, this made almost no sense at all when you challenged any of the assumptions. But, never let logic and reason get in the way of a bit of inane security theater. Because now Homeland Security is about to announce that it's now banning laptops in the cabins on all flights from Europe (it's unclear if this will also apply on flights from the US to Europe, but it seems likely that European airports will reciprocate).While this does answer one of the questions raised by the original ban ("why won't potential terrorists just fly out of other countries?") it still raises a host of other questions. Again: why won't this apply to flights from other countries? Or domestic flights? Or all flights? But, really, that just raises an even larger issue, which is that if you want to protect 100% of all flights 100% of the time from ever having a problem in which people might die, the answer is ground all flights and never let anyone fly anywhere ever. Problem solved. Of course, the cost of such a solution would be horrendous -- which is why we don't do it. But that's the key issue: all of these things involve tradeoffs. All too frequently, it appears that government officials -- especially those on the national security side of things -- don't care at all about the tradeoffs. They just care about blocking any possible attack no matter how unlikely or how remote the chance of such an attack might be, and without any consideration of the costs and inconveniences to everyone else. And, yes, it's reasonable to point out that a single attack would be very, very costly as well. And there's clearly a reason to protect heavily against attacks. But there's still a balance.And there must be a better solution. If laptops are a risk factor, it's difficult to see how putting them in the cargo hold -- where there's no one to stop a fire -- is a better solution. Hell, most current airline rules require passengers to store all lithium ion batteries in carry-on luggage for exactly that reason. Putting them all in the hold would seem to increase the risk of accidental explosions and fires that might cause just as much, if not more, damage. And, of course, forcing people to give up their laptops has a secondary (but very serious) problem: for anyone traveling with sensitive information (lawyers, doctors, reporters, business execs, public officials, etc.) giving up your laptop is a massive security risk.In other words, the "cost" of this solution is ridiculously high for a very large number of people, for whom flying to or from Europe has just become a massive inconvenience and tremendously problematic to justify given the personal risk. And for what? Vague and unclear threats about "possible" exploding laptops? I'm sure that no one wants to be on a flight with a laptop that will explode (whether on purpose or not), but there has to be a better way to tackle the problem than doing a blanket ban on laptops in the cabin. And, yes, perhaps this sounds like saying nerd harder back to Homeland Security, but this is a case where there clearly are more reasonable tradeoffs that can and should be explored, well short of inconveniencing everyone and creating a very different (but very serious) kind of security threat by forcing people to give up their laptops.

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Trump Fires FBI Director Comey

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So... not quite sure what to make of this yet, but according to the NY Times, just a little while ago, Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey (of course, just after our podcast came out talking about how Comey seemed to be hopeful the Trump administration would approve his encryption backdoor plans).

While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the bureau, Mr. Trump said in a letter dated Tuesday to Mr. Comey.It is essential that we find new leadership for the F.B.I. that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission, Mr. Trump wrote.

Dear Director Comey:I have received the attached letters from the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General of the United States recommending your dismissal as the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I have accepted their recommendation and you are hereby terminated and removed from office, effective immediately.While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgement of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau.It is essential that we find new leadership for the FBI that restores public trust and confidence in its vital law enforcement mission.I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.Donald J. Trump

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Half Of NBA Teams Jump Into The NBA's New eSports NBA2K League, FIFA League To Start Soon

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With eSports exploding into a legitimate spectator event, both for in-person viewership and televised events, it was only a matter of time before professional sports leagues got in on the act. As it has been on so many things, the NBA became the first American league to announce it was creating its own eSports league, partnering with Take-Two Interactive and its NBA2K series to power its sponsored competition. When commissioner Adam Silver announced all of this in February, however, he was speaking for the league, but not the individual teams that make up that league. Asked at the time what he expected the participation level to be from individual teams, he said he expected about half to jump into this.It turns out that projection was pretty much spot on, as 17 NBA teams ave officially agreed to participate in the league, lending their jerseys and branding to the games. Also released were some details about how the league will operate and how the games will be conducted.

The league will draft teams of five players to compete in a five-month season, which will mirror the NBA with a regular season, bracketed playoffs, and a final championship match to wrap it all up. Players will create their own avatars for competition, so no one will be using avatars of the recognizable basketball stars that appear in NBA 2K, like LeBron James or Kyrie Irving.

Netherlands’ Eredivisie, the country's highest soccer league, will launch its own esports league, the organization announced earlier today. All 18 clubs, among them the “Big Three” (Ajax Amsterdam, PSV Eindhoven, and Feyenoord) will participate in the league. The “E-Divisie” launched in association with EA SPORTS and Endemol Shine Netherlands, a TV production company.

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House Subcommittee Passes Police-Protecting 'Thin Blue Line' Bill

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There's no shortage of existing laws protecting law enforcement officers. So, of course, there's no shortage of new legislation being introduced to further protect a well-protected subset of government employees. Using a nonexistent "War on Cops" as impetus, legislators all over the nation are submitting bills designed to make harming a cop more of a crime than harming anyone else.This isn't just happening at the state level. Last year, Colorado representative Ken Buck introduced a federal "Blue Lives Matter" law, which would have turned attacks on cops into "hate crimes." The bill is a ridiculous extension of protection to officers who aren't in any more danger than they were a decade ago, histrionic statements by various federal officials notwithstanding.Buck's bill has gone nowhere in the last year. It's been sitting in a House subcommittee since April of last year. But one bill's failure doesn't predict the future performance of similar legislation. As Reason's C.J. Ciaramella reports, a similar bill -- Florida rep Vern Buchanan's "Thin Blue Line Act" -- has cleared the House Judiciary Committee.

The House Judiciary Committee advanced a bill Thursday, the Thin Blue Line Act, by a 19-12 vote that would make the killing of a state or local law enforcement officer during the commission of a federal crime an aggravating factor for juries to consider when weighing a death penalty sentence.

The legislation would be largely symbolic. Federal death penalty cases are exceedingly rare, and executions at the federal level are even rarer. The last federal execution took place in 2001, when Timothy McVeigh was executed for the Oklahoma City bombing. Most homicide cases are prosecuted by states.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions introduced similar legislation in 2015, when he was a U.S. senator, saying "the alarming spike in violence directed against the men and women entrusted with ensuring the safety and order of our society must be stopped..."

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China's New Online Encyclopedia Aims To Surpass Wikipedia, And To 'Guide And Lead' The Public

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China has a long history of producing encyclopedias that goes back thousands of years. One of the most famous works is the fifteenth-century Yongle encyclopedia, which had over 15,000 volumes, and is still the largest paper-based general encyclopedia ever created. More recently, the main publication in this field was the Encyclopedia of China, whose first edition had 74 volumes. Later, CD-ROM and online versions were added. The third edition has just been announced, and although it is not quite on the scale of the Yongle encyclopedia, it is ambitious in its scope:

The third edition of the Chinese Encyclopaedia is currently China's largest publication project, with more than 20,000 authors from universities and research institutes contributing to articles in more than 100 disciplines.Designed to be the nation's first digital book of "everything", it will feature more than 300,000 entries, each about 1,000 words long, making it twice as large as the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and about the same size as the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia.

"The Chinese Encyclopaedia is not a book, but a Great Wall of culture," Yang Muzhi, the editor-in-chief of the project and the chairman of the Book and Periodicals Distribution Association of China, told senior scientists at a meeting at the headquarters of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing on April 12, according to a report on the academy's website the next day....Yang told the meeting China was under international pressure and felt an urgent need to produce its own encyclopaedia to "guide and lead the public and society".

"The readers regarded it to be authoritative, accurate, and it branded itself as a 'free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit', which is quite bewitching," he wrote. "But we have the biggest, most high-quality author team in the world ... our goal is not to catch up, but overtake."

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This Week In Techdirt History: April 30th - May 6th

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Five Years AgoThis week in 2012 the USTR, as it does every year, released its ridiculous Special 301 list of naughty countries, right around the same time that Chris Dodd was rewriting Hollywood history to thank IP laws for all of it. The UK was doing its part to stay off the list, apparently, with the High Court ordering The Pirate Bay to be blocked (and, of course, driving record traffic to the site). Techdirt friend Dan Bull — an artist whose single had just hit the charts with the help of piracy — shared his thoughts on the block with a guest post.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2007 started the same way: with a silly Special 301 "watch list". The Pirate Bay was just beginning its growth as a political movement, and the author of a major UK copyright report was admitting that the evidence supports shortening copyright terms. The folks behind AACS, the new copyright protection scheme for DVDs, were learning all about the Streisand Effect in their attempt to suppress information about the technology — and also giving the Digg community a chance to demonstrate its control over the site. Meanwhile, the Google/Viacom lawsuit was moving slowly forward, and the UK's Premier League was getting in on the action.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2002, record labels were still excitedly announcing lacklustre digital music services, online radio stations were protesting onerous fees, and the new Eminem album was gearing up to be the largest copy-protected release to date. Deep linking reared its head again as a legal issue, online scams were going strong (and working as decent retirement plans for some, it seemed) and the crazy new idea of phones with WiFi was just on the horizon.Eight-Hundred And Two Years AgoToday we look back on the Magna Carta as a pivotal moment in the history of law (or just as an archetypal piece of general knowledge trivia), but at the time it was a stopgap solution in the midst of a political dispute between King John of England and some rebellious Barons. An important milestone in that dispute came on May 3rd, 1215 when the rebels officially declared against the King and issued their legal demands.

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US Entertainment Firm Milks Croatian Concert Promoter With Trademark Rights It May Never Have Owned

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We see all kinds of dumb and frustrating examples of trademark bullying here at Techdirt. From questionable claims of infringement entirely, to the over-policing of broad or generic terms that never should have been granted trademark protection to begin with, to vice-like licensing terms that appear to be designed more to put licensees out of business rather than building any kind of long-term business model out of trademark rights. That said, at least in most of these stories the offending party has the trademark its bullying with. That may not be the case when it comes to Worldwide Entertainment Group Inc., which is being sued by a Coatian festival promoter after being milked over a trademark the promoter says Worldwide doesn't actually have.

In a federal complaint filed in Miami, plaintiff Adria MM Productions Ltd. says it has been the exclusive promoter of “Ultra Europe” and other “Ultra”-branded events since July 2013. It claims the inaugural electronic music festival attracted 100,000 fans, and that the audience has grown with each successive event. The defendant Worldwide Entertainment Group Inc., also identified as “Ultra” in the complaint, is the organizer and promoter of the Ultra Music Festival that takes place every year in Miami.The complaint says Ultra entered into various licensing agreements to grow its brand around the world, and sought out AMM ” because AMM is one of the largest promotion companies in Croatia and holds exclusive licenses and rights to venues in Croatia and was a successful promoter of musical events in Croatia.” AMM says that Ultra made it believe that it owned the mark “Ultra Europe,” and the five-year licensing agreement required it to pay the defendant licensing and promotional fees for the use of its proprietary marks in Europe.

AMM says that at that time it discovered that Ultra didn’t have any rights over proprietary marks in Europe, specifically in Croatia.

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How Moral Panics Can Turn Into Therapeutic Tools: The Dungeons And Dragons Edition

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It seems there must be something in our human DNA, something that hasn't been filtered out over the generations, that causes the masses to engage in moral panics. When you peruse our previous posts about moral panics new and old, it highlights how laughably absurd they tend to be. Specifically, if past is prologue, you get a fair understanding of how our current moral panics will be viewed in the future, as we laugh now at the consternation caused by such demons as telephones, comic books, chess, and pencils. And that laughter causes no pause about the current moral panics surrounding social media, certain forms of music, and video games.Sandwiched in between antiquity and modernity is Dungeons & Dragons, the popular tabletop role playing game that experienced its own moral panic decades ago, but which has since risen dramatically in popularity. This game, once thought by parents to create potential Satan worshipers out of their little darling children, has already been pushed as a fantastic starting point for would-be creative writers. More recently, however, therapists have begun using the game as a therapeutic tool in sessions with patients. Adam Davis runs one of these groups using D&D in therapy, called the Wheelhouse Workshop, and details one story in which he uses the game as a therapy tool.

Davis, who runs Wheelhouse Workshop out of an office in a large, brick arts building in Seattle, is used to seeing sides of kids that don't usually come out in school. He, along with co-founder Adam Johns, designs D&D games that are less like hack-and-slash dungeon-crawls and more like therapy with dragons. In D&D's Forgotten Realms world, the kids' psyches run amok. Earlier this month, over the phone, Davis told me about Frank (not his real name), a tall, lanky teenager who barely spoke above a whisper. In school, he tended to sit with his feet in front of his face, so no one could really see him. He hated to take up space. After his parents and teachers noticed that his body language seemed a little stand-offish to peers, they enrolled him in Wheelhouse Workshop."The character he chose was a dwarf barbarian," Davis recalled. "He was really loud and bumbling and unapologetic. It was a really obvious opportunity for this kid to play with qualities other than his." Adam had Frank sit like his character, spreading his legs apart and slamming his elbows onto the table. In dwarf-barbarian mode, Frank could experiment with new modes of relating to others.

Because D&D is inherently cooperative and escapist, it urges players to re-imagine the ways they interact with peers. And because each player has their own specialty, like communicating with dragons, they'll have their moment to feel valuable in a group setting.At worst, kids who are socially isolated can enjoy hacking up some goblins after a crappy school day. "For someone who never leaves their house except for school, to have a peer say, 'I need your help picking a lock' makes a huge difference," Johns told me.

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Sad Raiders Fans Fail To Keep Team In Oakland By Squatting On Trademark

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It was way back in the early part of 2016 that the rumors came out that the Oakland Raiders football team would be moving to a new home city. Fans were understandably upset and voiced their displeasure in a variety of ways, but the dumbest of those ways certainly must have been Lane Blue's attempt to trademark the team name in conjunction with all of the different potential landing cities the team was rumored to be moving to, including the "Las Vegas Raiders." Lane wasn't the only sad Raiders fan to attempt this, it seems, as we now see reporting on his and other trademark applications being denied for obvious reasons.

Lane Blue, an air-freight company owner from Fresno, Calif., said that he applied for the trademark in an effort to stop the Raiders from relocating to Las Vegas."If I own the trademark that’s worth possibly millions of dollars, maybe I can talk them into staying," Blue said, per KCBS.Blue's application was denied, as is likely with everyone else who applied for the trademark.

"These people think they’re going to cash in, and 99.9 percent of the time, they’re wrong," sports-trademark attorney Patrick Jennings said, per KCBS. "For a trademark lawyer, it doesn’t take much effort to knock those (applications) out separate from the patent and trademark office."The only effect these applications are likely to have on the Raiders is a delay on them receiving the trademark. That could still be damaging, though, as knock-off "Las Vegas Raiders" gear is already flooding the marketplace.

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Atlus Loosens Streaming Restrictions For Persona 5, Still Has In-Game Checkpoints For Streaming Rules

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Recently, we discussed an odd post by the American division of Atlus, the company behind the recently released game Persona 5. The post basically outlined restrictions on streaming the game in the popular "let's play" format. Those restrictions were pretty clearly geared towards keeping spoilers for the game's stories off of the internet, with indications that discussing or streaming game content that occur after an in-game date was verbotten. The post was also couched in threats for DMCA notices, which is odd because spoilers aren't what copyright law was designed to combat. The public backlash was fairly uniform, with Atlus coming out not looking particularly good as a result.It took a while, but Atlus has finally responded. While it positions this response as a loosening of the restrictions on streaming, it still keeps all of the worst aspects of the original restrictions in place.

On Tuesday Atlus announced that they will allow players to stream or post videos from up until the in-game date of November 19, just before the story's final act. The post wrote it was in response to "numerous reactive news articles," opinion videos and "many emails" asking them to loosen the restrictions."We also want to apologize to those of you who saw the previous guidelines as threatening," Atlus wrote. "It was never our intention to threaten people with copyright strikes, but we clearly chose the wrong tone for how to communicate this."

This being a Japanese title with a single-playthrough story means our masters in Japan are very wary about it. Sharing is currently blocked through the native PS4 UI. However, if you do plan on streaming, video guidelines above apply except length. If you decide to stream past 7/7 (I HIGHLY RECOMMEND NOT DOING THIS, YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED), you do so at the risk of being issued a content ID claim or worse, a channel strike/account suspension.

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Mounting Privacy Problems In Europe For Facebook's Acquisition Of WhatsApp

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When it comes to online privacy, the European data protection authorities tend to be quite interventionist as they try to police the movement of personal data within and out of the EU. The concerns over the Safe Harbor and Privacy Shield frameworks are one manifestation of this. Another is the increasing EU scrutiny of Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp.A couple of years after Facebook acquired WhatsApp, the latter announced that it was updating its terms and privacy policy so as to allow user data to be transferred to its parent company. Johannes Caspar, the Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information in Hamburg, where Facebook has its German headquarters, was unhappy with that move. He saw it as harmful to users' privacy, not least because there was no way to opt out of the data sharing. In September last year, he ordered Facebook to stop collecting data from WhatsApp, and to delete anything it had already brought across. Facebook appealed against the decision, and the Administrative Court of Hamburg has now handed down its ruling, which is to deny the US giant's request for Caspar's order to be revoked (pdf):

Facebook has appealed to the administrative court against the order in the preliminary proceedings. The goal was to repeal the immediate enforcement. The court rejected this request today and clarified the fact that it does not see any legal basis for the planned data exchange. Facebook can not invoke interests of its own business because the complete data exchange is neither necessary for the purpose of network security or business analysis nor for advertising optimization. Furthermore, the court clarifies that there is no effective consent from WhatsApp users for a data exchange with Facebook. As a result, the administrative court is making a clear consideration in the context of the preliminary legal proceedings: the interests of the approximately 35 million German WhatsApp users predominates the economic interest of Facebook in a suspension of immediate enforceability.

the company provided incorrect or misleading information during the Commission's 2014 investigation under the EU Merger Regulation of Facebook's planned acquisition of WhatsApp.

When reviewing Facebook's planned acquisition of WhatsApp, the Commission looked, among other elements, at the possibility of Facebook matching its users' accounts with WhatsApp users' accounts. In its notification of the transaction in August 2014 and in a reply to a request of information, Facebook indicated to the Commission that it would be unable to establish reliable automated matching between the two companies' user accounts.

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At Senate Hearing, Comey Hints At Expanded NSL Powers And Encryption Backdoors

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James Comey testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee today where he faced an oddly-unified bipartisan group of senators irritated with the FBI (but for different reasons). Most senators took a large amount of the their time during the first round of questions to not actually ask questions, but to express their displeasure with the Clinton email investigation and the ongoing Trump-Russia investigation.The opening statements varied depending on the party of the senator addressing James Comey. Comey had very few answers about various Trump-related investigations (which are still ongoing), but made the most of his opening statement by dodging the questions and making a sales pitch for the renewal of Section 702 -- the statute permitting the NSA's internet data/communications collection the FBI makes frequent use of.According to Comey, the 702 collection is essential to national security. Possibly true. But not so essential that concerns about Fourth Amendment violations should be swept aside. This was only one of the sales pitches Comey managed to squeeze in during questioning.He also touched on a couple of other issues worth noting. Both involve legislation. After pitching a clean Section 702 renewal, Comey spent some time talking around the subject of backdoor 702 searches, noting that "all courts" have found the FBI's secondhand domestic surveillance lawful… without specifying the only court to really reach this conclusion is the FISA Court. And this court also found the NSA had abused its collection repeatedly. This court also approved zero 702 applications in 2016 and the NSA itself has shut down part of its upstream collection because it kept grabbing too many communications from US persons.This shutdown will affect the FBI's backdoor searches. Comey, of course, didn't refer to them as backdoor searches, but did make it clear the FBI would be ever so pleased if Section 702 was renewed with a minimum of legislator interference.The FBI's own collection efforts were a concern to Comey as well. Comey continued his misrepresentation of the statutes governing what the FBI can collect with National Security Letters. According to the FBI director, the only thing standing between what the FBI can legally get with NSLs (subscriber info and billing records) and what it wants (a very long list of things, including web history and geolocation data) is a "typo." Not sure which part of the statute contains the typo, but Comey claimed to be able to channel the intent of legislators who passed it back in 1986.Not that the lack of statutory authority has prevented the FBI from demanding more than it's supposed to get. An NSL published by Yahoo contained a much longer list of requested data than is permissible under the law. Comey expressed his desire to have Congress take another look at the statute and see if it doesn't agree with Comey's assessment.The other legislative issue near and dear to Comey's heart was addressed a bit more obliquely, but managed to make it clear the current administration would be far more sympathetic to Comey's other backdoor plan. Both Sen. Orin Hatch and Sen. Dianne Feinstein spoke favorably about encryption backdoors. Comey noted the Obama Administration wasn't interested in passing bills containing encryption bans or backdoors, but the new team in the White House has possibly expressed an interest in doing just that.

The Obama administration was not in a position where they were seeking legislation. I don't know yet how President Trump intends to approach this. I know he spoke about it during the campaign, I know he cares about it, but it's premature for me to say.

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New Tools Allow Voice Patterns To Be Cloned To Produce Realistic But Fake Sounds Of Anyone Saying Anything

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Fake images, often produced using sophisticated software like Photoshop or the GIMP, were around long before so-called "fake news" became an issue. They are part and parcel of the Internet's fast-moving creative culture, and a trap for anyone that passes on striking images without checking their provenance or plausibility. Until now, this kind of artful manipulation has been limited to the visual sphere. But a new generation of tools will soon allow entire voice patterns to be cloned from relatively small samples with increasing fidelity such that it can be hard to spot they are fake. For example, in November last year, the Verge wrote about Adobe's Project VoCo:

"When recording voiceovers, dialog, and narration, people would often like to change or insert a word or a few words due to either a mistake they made or simply because they would like to change part of the narrative," reads an official Adobe statement. "We have developed a technology called Project VoCo in which you can simply type in the word or words that you would like to change or insert into the voiceover. The algorithm does the rest and makes it sound like the original speaker said those words."

Utter 160 or so French or English phrases into a phone app developed by CandyVoice, a new Parisian company, and the app's software will reassemble tiny slices of those sounds to enunciate, in a plausible simulacrum of your own dulcet tones, whatever typed words it is subsequently fed. In effect, the app has cloned your voice.

Lyrebird will offer an API to copy the voice of anyone. It will need as little as one minute of audio recording of a speaker to compute a unique key defining her/his voice. This key will then allow to generate anything from its corresponding voice. The API will be robust enough to learn from noisy recordings. The following sample illustrates this feature, the samples are not cherry-picked.Please note that those are artificial voices and they do not convey the opinions of Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Voice recordings are currently considered as strong pieces of evidence in our societies and in particular in jurisdictions of many countries. Our technology questions the validity of such evidence as it allows to easily manipulate audio recordings. This could potentially have dangerous consequences such as misleading diplomats, fraud and more generally any other problem caused by stealing the identity of someone else.

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Personal Security Takes A Hit With Public Release Of NSA's Hacking Toolkit

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Former members of Team Espionage recently expressed their concern that the Shadow Brokers' dump of NSA Windows exploits had done serious damage to the security of the nation. The unwanted exposure of NSA power tools supposedly harmed intelligence gathering efforts, even though the tools targeted outdated operating systems and network software.However, there are still plenty of computers and networks online using outmoded software. This makes the released exploits a threat (especially those targeting XP users, as that version will never be patched). But not much of a threat to national security, despite the comments of anonymous former Intelligence Community members. It makes them a threat to personal security, as Chris Bing at CyberScoop points out:

One of these hacking tools, a backdoor implant codenamed DOUBLEPULSAR — which is used to run malicious code on an already compromised box — has already been installed on 30,000 to 50,000 hosts, according to Phobos Group founder Dan Tentler. Other researchers have also engineered different detection scripts to quickly scan the internet for infected computers.John Matherly, the CEO of internet scanning-tool maker Shodan.io, said that upwards of 100,000 computers could be affected.

“The presence of DOUBLEPULSAR doesn’t mean they’re infected by the NSA, it means there is a loading dock ready and waiting for whatever malware anyone wants to give it,” Tentler said. “The chances are none that all theses hosts [were hacked by] the NSA.

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Chris Dodd 'Stepping Down' From MPAA

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It appears that Chris Dodd's reign atop the MPAA is coming to an end. As you may recall, he took the job in 2011 to become the head of the MPAA -- directly contrasting a statement he'd made just months earlier that he'd never become a lobbyist. Dodd's first move was to preside over the MPAA's first legislative Titanic. After years of easily passing every copyright law it wanted, Dodd helped turn a slam dunk, easy-to-pass SOPA/PIPA into a huge disaster that has consistently scared Congress away from making any substantial copyright law changes. And, yes, it was Dodd's failed leadership that was a big part of the problem.Other "highlights" from the Chris Dodd era include near complete silence after the Sony hack, a leaked plan on how the MPAA would help pay for lawyers to do the legwork for elected officials to attack Google, and even leading the movie studios to begin to question why they send many millions of dollars to the MPAA each year for very little return.With that as backdrop, it's been announced that Dodd is stepping down from the MPAA and will be replaced by Charles Rivkin, who has worked in both government and in the entertainment industry. Dodd's contract ran through 2018, and news reports say he'll "transition" out of his role between now and September of this year. Hopefully Rivkin will be more forward-looking, and will recognize that (1) the public and (2) the internet are not enemies of the movie industry. That would go a long way towards improving the MPAA's approach to things, but we'll see.

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Stupid Patents Of The Month: Taxi Dispatch Tech

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With all the attention ride-sharing has been getting lately, some might think Uber and Lyft were highly inventive apps. But according to at least one company, the apps are just highly infringing. Who's right? Probably neither.Hailo Technologies, LLC ("Hailo") has recently sued both Uber and Lyft, alleging they infringed Hailo's taxi dispatch patent, U.S. Patent No. 5,973,619 ("the '619 patent"). The patent claims a method for a "computer system" that: (1) displays a list of transportation options; (2) asks the customer for a number of passengers; (3) shows destinations graphically; (4) displays the approximate fare; (5) calls a selected taxi company up for a ride; and (6) gives an estimated arrival time.  A few months ago, Hailo also sued a few other companies for infringing a different patent, U.S. Patent No. 6,756,913 ("the '913 patent"), which claims a method for keeping track of available taxis on the road. More specifically, it claims a method where a computer (1) determines if a taxi is free (i.e. currently has no rider); and if free (2) sends the current location of the taxi to the taxi dispatch server.

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