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February 2018
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DOJ Tells Congress SESTA/FOSTA Will Make It MORE DIFFICULT To Catch Traffickers; House Votes For It Anyway

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As we've been discussing, this afternoon, the House voted both on Rep. Mimi Walters' bad amendment to attach SESTA to FOSTA, and then on the combined bill -- and both sailed through Congress. Somewhat incredibly, this happened even though the Justice Department weighed in with a last minute letter saying that the language in the combined SESTA/FOSTA is so poorly drafted that it would actually make it more difficult to prosecute sex traffickers, and also calling into question whether or not the bill was even Constitutional.You would think that with the DOJ pointing out these fairly fatal flaws with the bill, that perhaps (just perhaps), the House would delay voting on this. As noted last week, bringing the amendment to the floor without having it go through the House Judiciary Committee (as is supposed to happen), seemed to be the House's way of washing its hands of the bill, and tossing the issue back to the Senate. But rushing through a bill with huge implications is no way to make law. As Rep. Lofgren noted on the floor:

The justice department says in this letter that they believe any revision to define participation in a venture is unnecessary and in fact that the new language would impact prosecutions by effectively creating additional elements in fact they say the amendment will make it harder to prosecuteThere's a thing we get told in law school: Bad cases make bad law. One of the ways to avoid that is to have the committee process work through it. That didn't happen....
And thus, Walters' amendment prevailed 308 to 107 and then the combined (terrible) bill sailed through the whole House 388 to 25. Kudos the to the 25 Representatives who actually understand how CDA 230 works and why this bill is so bad, but it's depressing to think that it was just 25.In response to this, Senator Ron Wyden has already put out a statement scolding the House for failing to understand what they've just done:
History shows that politicians have been remarkably bad at solving technological problems. I have written laws in the past, including Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and the Internet Tax Freedom Act, that have kept politicians and special interests from sinking the internet.This bill will only prop up the entrenched players who are rapidly losing the public's trust. The failure to understand the technological side effects of this bill - specifically that it will become harder to expose sex-traffickers, while hamstringing innovation - will be something that this congress will regret.I take a backseat to no one when it comes to fighting sex trafficking and locking up the monsters who prey on the defenseless. I have authored laws to support victims and provide ongoing funding paid for by those convicted of heinous crimes against children, and authored laws to improve the child welfare system to help prevent children from becoming victims in the first place. However, the bill passed today by the House will make it harder to catch bad actors and protect victims by driving this vile crime to shadowy corners of society that are harder for law enforcement to reach.
This is the perfect encapsulation of a broken Congress. They "did something" for the grandstanding feature alone. Lots of Congressional Representatives will now claim that they "voted to stop sex trafficking" or some such, without bothering to understand or care why this bill actually will harm the victims of sex trafficking, making it more difficult for law enforcement to go after actual traffickers, creating serious incentives for websites not to stop sex traffickers from using their platforms and not to help law enforcement, and (as a side effect) seriously undermining free speech on the internet.The bill now moves back to the Senate, which has already passed its version of SESTA out of Committee where Wyden put a hold on it. It appears likely that a vote will happen sometime soon on the bill, so now might be a good time to call your Senator and let them know that as good as this bill may sound from its title, its actual impact will be a total disaster.

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posted at: 12:00am on 28-Feb-2018
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Now It's The Turn Of Mercedes-Benz To Grovel Before China, Over An Instagram Post Quoting The Dalai Lama

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A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about Marriott International kowtowing to China because of a drop-down menu that dared to suggest that Tibet might be a country. We noted that a newly-confident and increasingly aggressive China might well start finding more of these alleged "insults" to use as pretexts for asserting itself internationally. And sure enough, that's already happened again, this time with Mercedes-Benz. As a New York Times story explains, the German car maker posted an image of a white car parked on a beach, along with a quotation popularly ascribed to the Dalai Lama -- "Look at the situations from all angles, and you will become more open. #MondayMotivation" -- to its official Instagram account.Becoming "more open" by looking at things from this particular angle didn't go down at all well in China, where the authorities regard Tibetan veneration of the Dalai Lama as a threat to political stability in the region. According to the New York Times, the post provoked an "outcry" from Chinese internet users, many of whom pledged to boycott the Mercedes brand. It's hard to gauge to what extent Chinese citizens did this spontaneously, or whether some of those protesting online were part of the authorities' well-oiled Internet surveillance and propaganda machine. In any case, what mattered was that the Chinese government was not happy at all, and Mercedes-Benz realized that if it wanted to carry on selling its cars in China, it had better start apologizing quickly and deeply. This it did by posting to its official Weibo account, translated here by the Shanghaiist:

This morning, we noticed that our company's international social media had posted an extremely erroneous message. For this, we sincerely apologize.Although we deleted the post as soon as possible, we fully understand how it has hurt the feelings of people in this country, including our colleagues who work in the country. For this, we express our sincerest apologies.
The Chinese government evidently wanted to make the most of this new opportunity to humiliate a Western company. The People's Daily, the ruling Communist Party's official newspaper, went so far as to berate Mercedes-Benz thus in a headline (original in Chinese):
If you do like this, you are an enemy of the Chinese people!
What makes the situation even more absurd is that Instagram is blocked in China, and so in theory nobody in the country could even see the ad. As with the Marriott International story, it underlines that the Chinese government now believes it has a right to dictate what should happen outside its borders, as well as within them.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

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Jan/Feb 2018 Magazine

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Cover Story - Spotlight: 4GL

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Jan/Feb 2018 - Spotlight: 4GL

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We're going to kick off a series of spotlight articles on various 4GLs by offering a crash course on why you want a 4GL. Whether your challenge is integrating with new technologies, accelerating development time, embracing RAD, or working with bigger teams, 4GLs can help you build bigger, better, and faster applications.

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