Get your First & Fourth Emojiment gear in the Techdirt store on Threadless »Earlier this week, we added two of our popular old designs to our line of face masks in the Techdirt store on Threadless: the First and Fourth Amendments, translated into the language of emojis. Both are available as standard and premium masks and in youth sizes, plus all kinds of other gear: t-shirts, hoodies, phone cases, notebooks, buttons, and much more.
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At the same time, it appears that another SNK-published title, Art of Fighting 2 on the PC, received a similar update this week, where a depiction of the controversial “Rising Sun” Japanese flag was replaced with a white flag that says “KARATE”:This one is harder to pin on China. After all, most complaints about this flag, which occasionally shows up in real-world sporting events, come from South Korea. During plans for the 2020 Olympics, in fact, South Korea requested the flag be banned from the games entirely due to the sordid history of the Japanese Navy during Japanese occupation of South Korea. But South Korea wasn't the only country occupied and terrorized under that flag.
Based on a historical experience of Japanese invasion, China's reaction to the rising sun flag at the Olympics could be similar to South Korea's. After the Japanese military took the Chinese city of Nanjing in 1937, Japanese troops embarked on a months-long campaign of murder, rape and looting in what became one of the worst massacres of the war.According to Chinese estimates, around 300,000 people were killed, many of them women and children, and around 20,000 women raped. Yet there's little protest from China about the flag.So which country was this change made to appease: China or South Korea? We don't know, but neither answer is good. If it's China, this is now at least the third instance of the trend of appeasing that country's government in a way that effects art worldwide. If South Korea, then it indicates that the trend instead might be for other countries that want to engage in the same kind of censorship jumping on the bandwagon.We're still at the "video game art and trailers" level of all of this, so it's understandable for some not to care all the much. But how much further does this have to go before people will care?
ALDI have jsut confirmed that our fake ALDI beer is now going to be sold in @AldiUK stores.Plus, for every case we sell both @BrewDog & @AldiUK are going to plant one extra tree in the new BrewDog Forest. pic.twitter.com/exXCKdFyEu— James Watt (@BrewDogJames) August 27, 2020
New Orleans has the fourth highest murder rate in the nation but clears only 35 percent of homicide cases. In 2018, the city’s police cleared only 2 percent of all rapes. The country at large isn’t much better. Last year, the Washington Post launched an investigation into murder clearance rates in 50 cities over the course of 10 years. The results were bracing. “Despite a nationwide drop in violence to historic lows,” the Post reported, “34 of the 50 cities have a lower homicide arrest rate than a decade ago.” In St. Louis, during the period the Post studied, it calculated that 54 percent of all homicides resulted in no arrest. In Baltimore, during the period it studied, the Post calculated that only 35 percent of all homicides resulted in an arrest. In Chicago the rate was 26 percent. The “line” isn’t just thin and blue—it’s porous and arbitrary.What was a handy way to keep slaves (and then former slaves) in line evolved into the law enforcement community we have today. We may no longer send out police officers to round up slaves but we do allow a bunch of racist garbage data to decide where they should focus their efforts. Predictive policing is impossible to differentiate from the low-tech policing of yesteryear. In both cases, enforcement efforts focus on poor residents and minorities.And, like employees everywhere in every business, far too many cops look for the path of least resistance. Meaningful busts that actually reduce criminal activity are the exception. Low-level BS busts are better. They kill time, look busy, and turn citizens into junk content for the justice system. Clickbait churn but for human beings.It's the sort of thing that led to Charleston resident Henry Earl becoming a late night talk show punchline and the subject of nationwide ridicule. Earl was arrested more than 1,500 times -- almost always for public intoxication. Every two or three days, cops would pick up Earl and toss him in jail for three to five days. This happened over and over again for fifty years. And for what? What was the societal net gain of arresting the same man 1,500 times for a low-level violation? Well, it kept the cops paid and they got to look like they were doing something to earn their paychecks.This is how the "thin blue line" actually operates. And it bears no resemblance to the lofty statements they make in defense of their own profession. Most police work is busywork. But in this nation, the busywork tends to negatively affect certain people the most. This is the fact cops and law enforcement officials can't admit to themselves:
It would be at least honest if we said that enduring arbitrary harassing, beating, tasing, and strangulation by the state was the price of being “associated with reduction in violent crime relative to control areas.” That we don’t say this, and that we only imply it for certain classes of people, exposes the assumptions built into American policing. It’s those assumptions that, on the one hand, allow Henry Earl to be arrested more than a thousand times, and on the other offer a sporting chance for anyone who’d like to try their hand at murder or rape.Given the history and the current state of policing, it makes sense to start stripping law enforcement down to its basic components and rebuild it to serve the public, rather than its own interests.
CBS and Netflix re-affirmed an earlier win in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit over a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against both companies due to a plotline in the first season of Star Trek: Discovery that a video game creator alleged infringed upon the plot of his unreleased game. The video game was about a giant tardigrade who traveled through outer space and a similar creature played a key role in Star Trek Discover Season 1.After the Second Circuit lower court had already dismissed the claims, the Court of Appeals agreed in upholding the lower court ruling that both the video game and the TV show were relying on uncopyrightable scientific facts about tardigrades and their ability to survive in outer space.While it's a wonder the lawsuit was ever filed in the first place, why in the world Anas Osama Ibrahim Abdin went on to appeal that initial ruling is a complete mystery. The issue at hand was a story arch in the first season of Discovery which dealt with a giant tardigrade. Tardigrades are real life, tiny creatures that typically survive within water droplets. The most interesting aspect of tardigrades is that they have been shown to have been able to survive in the vacuum of outer space. Abdin's video game also dealt with tardigrades that survived the outer reaches of space. On essentially this basis alone, Abdin filed both his original suit and the appeal.This is yet another instance where the idea/expression dichotomy of copyright law comes into play. This dichotomy dictates that copyright can be afforded to specific expression, but not to a general idea. And certainly not to an idea comprised essentially of real life scientific discovery. So, if Discovery told the same story about the same tardigrade creature, merely having a tardigrade in its plot is not somehow infringement just because both works are set in space.
While "[t]he distinction between an idea and its expression is an elusive one," Crichton, 84 F.3d at 587-88, Abdin's space-traveling tardigrade is an unprotectible idea because it is a generalized expression of a scientific fact -namely, the known ability of a tardigrade to survive in space.While the court's opinion is 40 pages long, that one paragraph does all of its work in affirming the lower court's ruling.
"The U.S. Army eSports Team follows the guidelines and policies set by Twitch, and they did ban a user from their account," a representative of the U.S. Army esports team said in a statement. "Team members are very clear when talking with potential applicants that a game does not reflect a real Army experience. They discuss their career experiences in real terms with factual events. Team members ensure people understand what the Army offers through a realistic lens and not through the lens of a game meant for entertainment. This user's question was an attempt to shift the conversation to imply that Soldiers commit war crimes based on an optional weapon in a game, and we felt that violated Twitch's harassment policy. The U.S. Army offers youth more than 150 different careers, and ultimately the goal of the Army eSports Team is to accurately portray that range of opportunities to interested youth."Decisions to be made by the US Army:
Because of the serious public health issues involved here, and pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P.65, ASU seeks a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to prohibit the“asu_covid.parties” account holder (i) from using the ASU Marks and the maroon and gold schoolcolors trade dress as part of any account username, profile name, profile picture, and/or biodescription, and (ii) from using the ASU Marks and the maroon and gold school colors trade dressin connection with the promotion of any parties, events, or other goods and services. ABOR alsoseeks relief against Facebook, Inc., the owner and operator of the Instagram platform and service,temporarily and preliminarily enjoining it from continuing to provide any services to the“asu_covid.parties” account holder as a means for infringing upon the ASU Marks and schoolcolors trade dress.As dumb and dangerous as the account may be that remains no excuse for abusing trademark law for this purpose. The use by the account is clearly not "in commerce" and certainly is not likely to create confusion. No moron in a hurry is going to think this is coming from an official ASU account. Indeed, the filings admit that the account itself (falsely) claims that it won a legal fight with ASU... which proves that it's separate from ASU:
In addition to the instances of infringement of the ASU Marks, the John Doedefendant has engaged in a series of offensive and false statements about ASU. The accounthas posted objectively false statements and information about ASU, including, for example,the following post in which it claims that the account owner has “won the battle in court”and that ASU has been ordered to pay its legal fees plus $500,000 in damages.... No such lawsuit or claim for damages exists.... If thatwere not enough, in several posts the owner of this account portrays ASU and its leadershipas Nazis, referring to ASU's President Crow as Fuhrer Crow and comparing ASU's maskrequirement to forcing Jews to wear a yellow Star of David...While this is being used to argue tarnishment, it's difficult to see how that's a legit claim either. No one is believing these silly claims.Furthermore, making the trademark claim against Facebook, rather than just the account holder seems particularly stupid. Now, it is true that trademark claims are a kind of loophole when it comes to Section 230. Intellectual property is exempted from 230. And while copyright has the DMCA safe harbors, trademark has no official safe harbor of that nature -- so, in theory, if you want to get around Section 230, trademark is one way to do so. But, in reality, it doesn't work that well because courts are still quick to recognize when someone is trying to blame a third party for actions of their users.Here, ASU is claiming that when it complained to Instagram about the account over trademark claims, Instagram responded that it did not appear to violate ASU"s trademarks. That's correct. It does not violate ASU's trademarks. It may violate other Facebook/Instagram policies, but the company made the right call on the specific trademark complaint. But ASU claims this makes Facebook liable:
On August 12, 2020, undersigned counsel on behalf of ASU submitted a trademarkinfringement report using Instagram's reporting tool and identifying the federally registeredASU Marks as being infringed by the “asu_covid.parties” account.... On August 14, 2020, Instagram responded that “the reported party appears to beusing your trademark to refer to or comment on your goods and services” and that it wouldnot take any action regarding this account.... Instagram'sresponse mischaracterized the account's use of the ASU Marks because neither the accountprofile nor any of the referenced posts refer to or comment on any of ASU's goods orservices....Of course, soon after the lawsuit was filed, Instagram did shut down the account. This was the right move because the account violated other policies that Instagram and Facebook have regarding COVID-19 disinformation -- but that's separate from a trademark claim.While Facebook taking down the account may make most of the rest of this moot, we should be concerned about the fact that ASU filed this in the first place (or if it does somehow go forward, what happens). Imagine a ruling in favor of ASU here and how it could be abused to silence many different student groups or organizations criticizing a university (or just to pressure Facebook and other platforms to delete such groups and accounts).I can completely understand why ASU wanted this account shut down. But it shouldn't abuse trademark law to do so.
The debut trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has been blocked in China, and subsequently edited everywhere else, after featuring around one second’s worth of footage from the Communist government’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in 1989. When the game was first announced last week, a trailer running for 2:02 was released to the world and hosted on the official Call of Duty and Xbox YouTube pages, along with major trailer sites like IGN and Gamespot.On August 21, however, the videos on Call of Duty and Xbox’s YouTube pages were replaced with a much shorter, 1:00 version. This isn’t an additional trailer, it’s a replacement, which we know because...the original 2:02 video we embedded in our own story is no longer working, having been marked as “private”.So here's the, ahem, tik-tok on this. Activision, which also owns Blizzard, releases a new trailer for a new Call of Duty game. That trailer includes a single second of an image from Chinese protests against the government from three decades ago. The Chinese government, true to form, flips the fuck out and bans the trailer entirely. One imagines there were also threats of banning the game entirely, but that is yet to be confirmed. Activision then, seeing the Chinese government go full carpet bomb over the trailer in its country, decides to try to out-carpet-bomb the carpet bomb by doing a delete/replace of the offending trailer worldwide.While we're talking about a mere video game trailer here, the implications aren't as insignificant as they might seem. Games are a subset of culture and commerce. While much of the discourse over how companies do business in China is overstated to say the least, what Activision did here is something different. Indeed, it could probably be best summarized as: Activision allowed the Chinese government to censor the company's art throughout the world.And, sinophobia aside, that is a very dangerous precedent to set. That it was an action taken on a trailer for a game called Call of Duty: Cold War, in fact, is probably proof that the universe is not without a sense of irony.
Phase 1: Brewdog makes Punk IPA
Phase 2: Aldi makes Establishment IPA
Phase 3: Brewdog makes Yaldi IPA
Phase 4: ? pic.twitter.com/zvq5FKBMzs— Brendan Palfreyman Esq. (@B_Palfreyman) August 20, 2020
We would have gone with ALD IPA, send us a crate and we’ll talk? https://t.co/seFaTVmRlv— Aldi Stores UK (@AldiUK) August 20, 2020
Deal @AldiUK 🙂We have changed the name to ALD IPA & we will send a case your way. Looking forward to making this happen 🍻 https://t.co/b4OvYnNwLV pic.twitter.com/1z0owyxnOn— James Watt (@BrewDogJames) August 21, 2020
"Since the manufacturers have yet to fix all but one of the 11 vulnerabilities we discovered, we can't fully describe the issues since we want to avoid supplying information to potential hackers. However, we can tell you which models are affected, some of the risks facing consumers, and how the manufacturers responded to our findings."The report also found that most models of smart doorbells collect way more data than is actually needed to function (Amazon/Ring's relationship with law enforcement has been well documented by Tim Cushing). Beyond that, barely a quarter of the brands could be bothered to implement two-factor authentication, considered a fairly basic necessity to prevent your account from being compromised:
"Our tests also revealed that most video doorbells lack two-factor authentication, a widely used security feature that sends users a temporary, onetime passcode typically via text message, email, phone, or mobile app to use in addition to their password for logging into their accounts. With this feature enabled, a hacker can't log in to your video doorbell account even if they have your password. In fact, barely a quarter of the brands we tested have two-factor authentication. The only ones that have it are Arlo, August, Google Nest, Ring, and SimpliSafe."As some security analysts like Bruce Schneier have long noted, there's market failure here in that consumers can't be bothered to research what they buy, manufacturers can't be bothered to properly secure their gear before moving on to hype the next model, and government guidance or punishment for lax security is inconsistent at best. Most of these products are advertised as smarter alternatives to older, dumber tech. But they inadvertently advertise how, in many instances, dumb technology (like a deadbolt, traditional doorbell, or a dog) is consistently the smarter option.
Black lives matter.
You are not alone.
Everyone should feel safe in their neighborhood.
Reach out. Listen. Take action. pic.twitter.com/PVCYdA9Xrj— Nextdoor (@Nextdoor) May 31, 2020
In an attempt to quell the furor, Gordon Strause, the company's director of community, wrote on the leads forum on Monday from his “own perspective” and not “on behalf of Nextdoor.” Noting that “it's of course absolutely true all live [sic] matters, whether they are black, white, brown, blue, or any other color,” he explained his views on Black Lives Matter.“The goal of the BLM movement, at least as I understand it, is simply to make the point that black lives matter as much as any other lives but too often in America that isn't actually what happens in practice and this dynamic needs to change,” he wrote.“While no one that I know or respect believes that looting helps anything, there are folks that I respect (including people in my own family) who believe that riots may be a necessary step to help the country finally understand the scale of injustice that has been happening," he wrote, "while other folks I respect believe that the riots will be counterproductive and will only undermine the goals they are meant to achieve.” Strause then went on to recommend a book from psychologist Jonathan Haidt and urged leads “to listen and not to judge.”“While Nextdoor is generally not the place for discussions of national issues, I think it's going to [sic] hard to restrain those discussions in the coming days without being perceived as taking sides. So rather than trying to do so, I would recommend that Leads instead focus on a different goal: keeping the discussions as civil and issue focused (rather than personality focused) as possible,” he wrote.
However, despite the petition now having hit 200,000 signatures, it doesn’t look like Apple is about to let this one go. As further evidence of Apple’s intransigence in this area, iPhone in Canada, which broke the original story earlier this month, is reporting that Apple has in fact doubled-down in its efforts to block the pear-shaped logo trademark registration, taking the fight beyond the U.S. and into Canada, likely as the next step in continuing its opposition to the logo globally.Worth noting is that Prepear, the threat to Apple as it is, has five employees. That's one less than it previously had, actually, since it had to lay off one staff member due to the ongoing legal fees to fight for its right to have a trademark that is a pear. To try to put public pressure on Apple to stop being the trademark bully, Prepear started an online petition to Apple to back off. After getting thousands of signatures to the petition, Prepear sent it to Apple's PR wing and suggested that everyone get in a room and find an amicable way to end this stupid fight.Apple's PR group didn't even bother to respond.
This is not just Apple’s lawyers being lawyers, it appears that the organization at Apple stands behind its lawyers. As is the case in all bullying, silence about the behavior of the bully is the same thing as support.Now, Prepear could just go ahead and change its logo, though what type of pear-based logo Apple would find acceptable is an open question. And, besides, that should be entirely besides the point. Prepear is right to think it should be able to use a pear logo. It doesn't look like Apple, isn't going to create any confusion, and Apple is purely a bully here.
While Prepear expects that its fight with Apple will still cost tens of thousands of dollars before it can see it through to the end, it’s stated that it has no plans to do any kind of fundraising through services like GoFundMe, although they’re still asking for moral support via their Change.org petition, and of course still hoping more people will show their support by downloading and using their app.How this will turn out is anyone's guess. Prepear seems to want to fight, but Apple can almost certainly squeeze the company out in court until it dies if it really wants to. More public pressure might help, I suppose, but Apple has thus far seemed perfectly willing to ignore the will of the same public it claims to be defending from confusion.This is how trademark bullying works and it's a lesson being taught by a master at the art.
According to the State, its Telephone Intelligence Unit was unable to search Andrews’s iPhones -- an iPhone 6 Plus and an iPhone 5s -- because they “had iOS systems greater [than] 8.1, making them extremely difficult to access without the owner/subscriber’s pass code.” A State detective contacted and conferred with the New York Police Department’s (NYPD) Technical Services unit, as well as a technology company called Cellebrite, both of which concluded that the cellphones’ technology made them inaccessible to law enforcement agencies. The detective also consulted the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory, which advised that it employed “essentially the same equipment used by” the State and NYPD and would be unable to access the phones’ contents. The State therefore moved to compel Andrews to disclose the passcodes to his two iPhones.Apple implemented encryption-by-default in September 2014. Andrews was arrested in July 2015. This would be about the same time the DOJ was trying to force Apple to crack open an iPhone for it in the San Bernardino shooting case. This was ultimately resolved by an outside contractor (most likely Cellebrite), but it appears that no one had a workable solution when investigators in this case attempted to crack the seized phones.Andrews challenged the compelled production of passcodes, claiming this violated his Fifth Amendment rights. The trial court disagreed, as did the state appeals court. The state's top court arrives at the same conclusion.The state argued it actually knew far more than what's needed to clear the "foregone conclusion" bar.
[T]he State argues that communication between co-conspirators has no special privacy status, that the State “has established . . . that it already knows what is on the phone[s],” and that the State has a superior right to the contents of the phones because of the unchallenged search warrant.The court finds in favor of the state, but it does recognize that passcodes are more testimonial than fingerprints or other biometric features used to unlock devices.
A cellphone’s passcode is analogous to the combination to a safe, not a key. Communicating or entering a passcode requires facts contained within the holder’s mind -- the numbers, letters, or symbols composing the passcode. It is a testimonial act of production.It also recognizes there may be no clear way to distinguish between passcodes and biometrics when dealing with compelled production.
We also share the concerns voiced by other courts that holding passcodes exempt from production whereas biometric device locks may be subject to compulsion creates inconsistent approaches based on form rather than substance. The distinction becomes even more problematic when considering that, at least in some cases, a biometric device lock can be established only after a passcode is created, calling into question the testimonial/non-testimonial distinction in this context.The court says the state has proven enough to be granted the "foregone conclusion" exception to the Fifth Amendment.
The State’s demonstration of the passcodes’ existence, Andrews’s previous possession and operation of the cellphones, and the passcodes’ self-authenticating nature render the issue here one of surrender, not testimony, and the foregone conclusion exception to the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination thus applies. Therefore, the Fifth Amendment does not protect Andrews from compelled disclosure of the passcodes to his cellphones.The dissent disagrees. It says that although the tech has changed, the underlying principles of the Fifth Amendment haven't. And it's not just the dissent saying this. It's also the nation's top court, which has never held that the compelled production of incriminating testimony complies with the Constitution.
In a world where the right to privacy is constantly shrinking, the Constitution provides shelter to our innermost thoughts -- the contents of our minds -- from the prying eyes of the government. The right of individuals to be free from the forced disclosure of the contents of their minds to assist law enforcement in a criminal investigation, until now, has been an inviolate principle of our law, protected by the Fifth Amendment and our state common law. No United States Supreme Court case presently requires otherwise. No case from this Court has held otherwise. That protection deserves utmost respect and should not be lessened to authorize courts to compel a defendant to reveal the passcode to a smartphone so law enforcement can access its secured contents.Given the current split in both federal district courts and state courts on the issue, the dissent says the New Jersey Supreme Court shouldn't be an enabler of potential Fifth Amendment violations in the absence of US Supreme Court precedent.
Until the Court clarifies its intentions about application of the act of production doctrine in this setting, I would follow the only sure directional signs the Court has given…Things may be slightly harder for investigators at the moment, but it's not the court's role to make things easier for the government. They're supposed to be a check against government power grabs, not an ally in its attempts to limit the protections it supposedly granted to its citizens. We live in a "golden age of surveillance." There's more information available in unencrypted form than there's ever been. And the arms race between device makers and encryption crackers is ongoing. It hasn't ended and device encryption has not been declared the winner.
Law enforcement must find another means of obtaining access to the encrypted substantive information on two cell phones whose contents it wishes to search and for which the government has a search warrant. Technological barriers must be overcome without sacrificing constitutional, deep-seated historical protections against governmental intrusions forcing individuals to become assistants in their own prosecutions. Modern technology continues to evolve, bringing new problems; but it also may bring new solutions.But that's just the dissent. The majority says the Fifth Amendment can be bypassed if the state can find enough connective tissue between the locked device and the person who refuses to unlock it.
CCI, a Florida corporation, owns two trademarks related to Coral Castle, which is “a limestone structure created by an eccentric Latvian-American named Edward Leedskalnin.” According to the filing, Coral Castle, “often referred to as ‘Florida’s Stonehenge’ … comprises numerous megalithic stones, mostly limestone formed from coral, each weighing several tons.” The two trademarks cover “[o]n-line retail services” like Coral Castle replicas, collectible spoons, thimbles, t-shirts, and CCI’s logo, according to the complaint.So, merch for the landmark, got it. What that has to do with a video game map is quite literally anyone's guess, but CCI seems to think that between the name of the map and what the filing itself refers to as thematic elements, this is somehow both trademark infringement and going to cause confusion in some kind of manner.
The virtual Coral Castle, CCI contended, “shares common themes with the real Coral Castle,” like castle structures and partial walls, stone objects, and nautical motifs. The complaint avers that both the real and virtual Coral Castle “evoke the feeling of a centuries old mysterious place.”CCI argued that Epic has caused it harm by “utilizing the vast goodwill associated with the [t]rademarks” to promote Fortnite and the sale of in-game purchases without CCI’s consent. Too, Epic has purportedly “used reproductions, counterfeits, copies and/or colorable imitations of the Trademarks in commerce or in connection with the sale, offering for sale, distribution and/or advertising of Defendant’s goods and services, and such use is likely to cause confusion, to cause mistake, and/or to deceive.”All of which is monumentally silly. Whatever fame Coral Castle might have regionally, it feels quite unlikely that the general populace is going to even know that the landmark exists, never mind somehow connect it to Fortnite's new map. In the absolute worst case scenario, perhaps some gamers might think, true or not, that the map is in some way inspired by the Florida spot. But some sort of confusion in commerce? Where? How?Add to all of this that the map isn't a likeness of the real life landmark what are we even debating this for? Epic made its map different. As in distinct. As in not really trying to fool the public into thinking there was any association here.What CCI could have done, however, would have been to have some fun with this and use it to draw attention to its real life landmark. It went legal instead, foregoing all of the potential good publicity it could have generated.
We do not allow reviews on behalf of a person or company with a financial interest in the product or a directly competing product. This includes authors, artists, publishers, manufacturers, or third-party merchants selling the product. As a result, we've removed your reviews for this title. Any further violations of our posted Guidelines may result in the removal of this item from our website.Multiple authors sought to have their legitimate reviews reinstated (including reviews of their books written by readers), but Amazon refused, insisting that authors reviewing other authors' books constituted a violation of its review guidelines, even if authors had no financial interest in the books they were reviewing.Amazon's handling of reviews in response to sock puppet activity continues to be criticized periodically, most recently over the mass removal of one-star reviews for Hillary Clinton's 2017 book about her presidential election run.Decisions to be made by Amazon:
"The District is in possession of responsive documents," the response, signed by W. Thomas Cable in their role as the attorney for the Paulding County School District, reads. "However, pursuant to Georgia law, the following categories of information have not been produced, via redaction or removal, to the extent a statutory exclusion is directly applicable."The public records request response also says the records are "specifically required by the federal government to be kept confidential." School districts often attempt to reject freedom of information requests on the grounds of student privacy, but districts and individual schools should be able to produce redacted records that protect privacy while still giving information about how specific decisions were made behind the scenes.Without question, the district has the ability to disclose the documents requested without violating any student or faculty privacy. What this is instead is a fairly brazen attempt to refuse a records request that will almost certainly be embarrassing for the district. Due to this, the refusal has gotten the attention of the Georgia First Amendment Foundation, which doesn't sound like the kind of group that is going to simply let this go.The cover up is always worse than the crime, as they say. However bad those records would have made Paulding County School District look, it's now going to look all the worse with this attempt to bury the truth, should those documents eventually come out. And, given the speed with which the district retreated from the suspensions when challenged, you have to imagine a little bit of public pressure is all it's going to take here as well.
U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain said Tiffany deserves $11.1 million, plus interest, representing triple the lost profit from Costco's trademark infringement, plus the $8.25 million in punitive damages awarded by a jury last October.The Manhattan judge also permanently barred Costco from selling anything that Tiffany did not make as "Tiffany" products, unless it uses modifiers suggesting that the products have, for example, a Tiffany "setting," "set" or "style."The reason for that last bit is that Costco's argument against the judgement was that its references to "Tiffany" were about an iconic setting for engagement rings. Tiffany & Co. did indeed make that setting famous, but tons of non-Tiffany rings are sold with that style. In fact, it's become such a generic term in the industry after nearly 150 years of use that articles discussing the setting essentially note that there is no trademark concern to have here. From Forbes, for instance:
The formula was immensely successful. So much so that the term “Tiffany setting” has reached Kleenex status—it’s now used colloquially throughout the jewelry industry to describe any multi-pronged solitaire setting, Tiffany or no.So, even if there were a trademark claim to be had here at one point in history, that ship has sailed. Except in the lawsuit against Costco, the court disagreed, leading to an appeal by Costco.And with that appeal comes a reversal of the lower court's decision.
A federal appeals court Monday overturned a $21 million verdict against Costco Wholesale Corp. for trademark infringement over its marketing of diamond rings labeled as “Tiffany,” ruling that the lower court judge who had issued an initial ruling in the case had failed to adequately consider contrary evidence.Costco’s evidence “was sufficient to raise a question as to whether potential buyers of Costco’s diamond engagement rings were actually confused by the appearance of the word “Tiffany” on Costco’s signs,” the ruling said.Now, this was the overturning of a summary judgement by the lower court. In other words, this ruling is essentially stating that the lower court improperly kept this from going to a full trial, where Costco would be allowed to present evidence that its use was proper given the generic nature of the term, as well as evidence that there was little to no customer confusion to be had. And that evidence is quite good, actually.Here again we go back to the beginning of this post, where we lay out that trademark law is supposed to be about keeping customers from being fooled as to the source of a good or service. Well, Costco decided to run a real life experiment on this of its use of the term "Tiffany."
It said after the complaint was filed, Costco sent a letter to all customers who had purchased the engagement rings with Tiffany settings and reminded them that its return policy entitled them to return their rings for a full refund at any time, but only 1.3% of its customers returned their rings.Tiffany & Co. is already making noises about trying this case again, but hopefully it will instead simply bask in the glory that is a setting so popular that it's become generic. If not, I'd expect Costco to win out on the merits.
The Washington, D.C., police union said on Monday it asked a court to block the mandatory release of body camera footage and names of police officers involved in shootings.According to the union, releasing the names of officers will do bad things to the good names of cops who kill people.
“The release of the body-camera footage and names of officers will unjustly malign and permanently tarnish the reputation and good name of any officer that is later cleared of misconduct concerning the use of force,” the union said in a statement.First off, it's almost impossible to "permanently tarnish" a cop's reputation. Even the worst cops often have little trouble resuming their law enforcement careers after engaging in egregious misconduct. They may have to shop their resumes around a little bit, but lots of PDs and Sheriffs' offices are more than willing to hire bad cops no longer welcome at their original agency.Second, nothing about this should hinge on whether or not the force deployment was justified. If an officer is later cleared of wrongdoing, they'll be able to go back to work. If not, they'll probably still be able to go back to work -- either with the DCPD or with any other agency more interested in staffing their forces than performing due diligence.And it's a little rich for the union to ask that officers' names be withheld on the off chance they might be found innocent. The names of people arrested or cited are public records, even if they're ultimately never convicted of a crime. Suing to get cops held to a lower standard is a terrible use of taxpayer funds. Public sector unions collect dues from paychecks and build their litigation war chests using donations from officers -- all of which can ultimately be traced back to the same public the union is trying to keep in the dark.The lawsuit [PDF] (which inexplicably isn't included in multiple articles about the lawsuit) raises the specter of vengeful vigilantes hunting down cops who killed or maimed friends or family members.
When officers justifiably use force against a criminal suspect, the immediate public release of the officer's name and the body-worn camera footage will allow the suspect and their associates to identify the officer and potentially seek retribution against the officer and his or her family.This is a ridiculous reason to withhold officers' names. This is Hollywood rationale -- an uninspired trope that's best left in an undeveloped screenplay. It's not that it never happens. It's that it happens so rarely it can't be raised as a plausible argument for blanket secrecy.The lawsuit also argues -- equally implausibly -- that there's an inherent right to privacy contained in actions performed by public servants in public.
The release of the officer's name and other identifying information contained in the body-worn camera footage will further impermissibly invade the officer's fundamental right to privacy.Doesn't seem there would be that much privacy in performing public service, especially when someone gets serviced to death by an officer's force deployment. But that's the argument the union will make to shield its fan base from public criticism. Hopefully, the DC court will route this lawsuit to its OUT box as quickly as possible so DC residents can start benefiting from the transparency the district has finally forced on its police force.
Let's start with the model used by Ofqual to predict grades (p85 onwards of their 319 page report). Each school submits a list of their students from worst student to best student (it included teacher suggested grades, but they threw those away for larger cohorts). Ofqual then takes the distribution of grades from the previous year, applies a little magic to update them for 2020, and just assigns the students to the grades in rank order. If Ofqual predicts that 40% of the school is getting an A [the top grade] then that's exactly what happens, irrespective of what the teachers thought they were going to get. If Ofqual predicts that 3 students are going to get a U [the bottom grade] then you better hope you're not one of the three lowest rated students.As this makes clear, the inflexibility of the approach guarantees that there will be many cases of injustice, where bright and hard-working students will be given poor grades simply because they were lower down in the class ranking, or because the school did badly the previous year. Twitter and UK newspapers are currently full of stories of young people whose hopes have been dashed by this effect, as they have now lost the places they had been offered at university, because of these poorer-than-expected grades. The problem is so serious, and the anger expressed by parents of all political affiliations so palpable, that the UK government has been forced to scrap Ofqual's algorithmic approach completely, and will now use the teachers' predicted grades in England. Exactly the same happened in Scotland, which also applied a flawed algorithm, and caused similarly huge anguish to thousands of students, before dropping the idea.The idea of writing algorithms to solve this complex problem is not necessarily wrong. Other solutions -- like using grades predicted by teachers -- have their own issues, including bias and grade inflation. The problems in England arose because people did not think through the real-life consequences for individual students of the algorithm's abstract rules -- even though they were warned of the model's flaws. Haines offers some useful, practical advice on how it should have been done:
The problem is with management: they should have asked for help. Faced with a problem this complex and this important they needed to bring in external checkers. They needed to publish the approach months ago, so it could be widely read and mistakes found. While the fact they published the algorithm at all is to be commended (if possibly a legal requirement due to the GDPR right to an explanation), they didn't go anywhere near far enough. Publishing their implementations of the models used would have allowed even greater scrutiny, including bug hunting.As Haines points out, last year the UK's Alan Turing Institute published an excellent guide to implementing and using AI ethically and safely (pdf). At its heart lie the FAST Track Principles: fairness, accountability, sustainability and transparency. The fact that Ofqual evidently didn't think to apply them to its exam algorithm means its only gets a U grade for its work on this problem. Must try harder.Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.
Normally we expect a government agency like NTIA to provide an intellectually honest assessment of the pros/cons of its actions and not engage in brazen partisan advocacy. Not any more. This petition reads like an appellate brief that would get a C- in a 1L legal writing course. It demonstrated a poor understanding of the facts, the law, and the policy considerations; and it ignored obvious counterarguments. The petition is not designed to advance the interests of America; it is designed to burn it all down.As we mentioned, it seemed likely that the petition was written by Adam Candeub, a lawyer who was only hired a few months ago by the NTIA. Readers may recognize Candeub's name because he represented the white nationalist Jared Taylor in a failed lawsuit against Twitter for kicking him off the platform. At the time of the lawsuit, I engaged in an email discussion with Candeub in which he tried to justify his lawsuit, and it included the same sort of nonsense and debunked legal theories we now see in the NTIA petition. In that email exchange, he told me that "Section 230 doesn't help Twitter" because "if an internet firm starts to edit or curate others' comments -- creating its own content, it loses this immunity." That, of course, is incorrect.Indeed, the California courts agreed with me (and basically every other court) in ruling that Section 230 protected Twitter's decision to remove Candeub's client.Of course, in the past couple of years since all of that went down, Candeub has continued his quixotic quest to reimagine Section 230 to say what he wants it to say, rather than what the plain language of the law, and basically every court on record (and the authors of the law) have said that it actually says.And now he'll get to do that as the guy in charge of NTIA. Axios is reporting that Candeub has been promoted to become the acting head of NTIA. Given Candeub's activism on this issue it's an odd role for him, and, as has happened so often in this particular administration, a destruction of historical norms. NTIA has historically been extremely balanced and avoids direct political advocacy type positions. It certainly appears that it will be taking a different approach under Candeub, and that approach includes a blatant misrepresentation of key laws about the internet. Historically, NTIA has been an important agency in protecting the open internet -- but now it should be seen as hostile to such an open internet. And that's disappointing for its legacy.
"They want three and a half billion dollars for something that'll turn out to be fraudulent, that's election money basically. They want three and a half billion dollars for the mail-in votes. Universal mail-in ballots. They want $25 billion, billion, for the Post Office. Now they need that money in order to make the Post Office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots," Trump said, repeating his false claims that mail-in voting would be "fraudulent.""But if they don't get those two items that means you can't have universal mail-in voting because you they're not equipped to have it," Trump added.Except, again, there is no evidence to support the claims of mail-in ballot fraud. Indeed, Trump and the first lady themselves have requested mail-in ballots in Florida (where he does not reside) and when questioned as to why it was okay for their to be mail-in ballots there, has said it works in Florida because there's a Republican governor.
So Florida has got a great Republican governor, and it had a great Republican governor. Ron DeSantis, Rick Scott, two great governors. And over a long period of time, they've been able to get the absentee ballots done extremely professionally. Florida is different from other states.He's also supported mail-in ballots among his supporters in North Carolina. Of course, it's notable that North Carolina is basically the one place where there was some evidence of mail-ballot fraud... conducted by Republican operatives.At the same time, however, beyond just blocking funding for the USPS, other efforts have been made to harm the ability to handle mail-in ballots. The Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, who was only just appointed in May, fired a bunch of top USPS execs in a "Friday Night Massacre" a week ago. And this week, it seems like there's been a new story every hour or so. All over the country, the USPS started removing and dismantling expensive postal sorting machines for now clear reason.There have also been reports in places like Montana and Oregon that the familiar blue postal boxes were being removed for unclear reasons.To drive all of this home, the USPS has directly warned 46 states (and Washington DC) that it may have delays in handling mail-in ballots.But have no fear (or, really, have lots and lots of fear), because in the midst of all of this, a USPS patent application for blockchain-based mail-in ballots has been released. Applied for back in February, but just now revealed, the patent application first noticed by Jamie Love is for:
A voting system that can use the security of blockchain and the mail to provide a reliable voting system. A registered voter receives a computer readable code in the mail and confirms identity and confirms correct ballot information in an election. The system separates voter identification and votes to ensure vote anonymity, and stores votes on a distributed ledger in a blockchain.Of course, as we've highlighted in the past, while some people keep pushing for blockchain-based voting it solves none of the problems of actual online voting, and leverages none of the benefits of the blockchain. Indeed, basically every blockchain-based voting system to date has been a dumpster fire of security concerns and, given everything else discussed above, you can bet the same would be true for any USPS-based blockchain voting system.Even so, the timing of this release of this patent, in the midst of everything else going on with the USPS and efforts to suppress mail-in ballots (well, at least from those who don't support the President) is the kind of coincidental timing that even the worst Hollywood writers would reject as just too on the nose. Alas...
Boston University asked a group of communications students for help encouraging their peers to follow the school’s strict COVID-19 safety guidelines when they return to campus for the upcoming semester.What it got back was a slogan that did not mince words.Last week, BU officials filed a trademark application for the slogan “F*ck It Won’t Cut It” in order to promote “public awareness of safe and smart actions and behaviors for college and university students in a COVID-19 environment.” The filing first garnered attention after a trademark lawyer flagged it Tuesday morning on Twitter.On the slogan, fuck yeah! In fact, pretty good for a Methodist school! But on the trademark application, what the fuck? I have serious questions as to whether the application even meets the criteria for a valid mark to begin with. How, precisely, is this being used in commerce? What good or service is this trademark supposed to identify a source for? Schooling? Not really. Healthcare? Nah. What precisely are we doing here?
“Our slogan is a powerful phrase that sparks a reminder for students to make safe choices at decision points each day, because saying ‘F-it’ to responsible protocols won’t keep us on campus,” Hailey McKee, a BU graduate student and public relations manager for the campaign, told the Boston Business Journal.Well, sure, but why hell does this need to be siloed to Boston U via trademark? The school really doesn't want its sister universities to be able to raise effective awareness using the slogan as well? Why not?This feels ultimately like another long-tail outcome of permission culture and expansive IP enforcement, where an entity just defaults to wanting to claim IP on all the things. But the world would be better if leading institutions like BU... you know... did better.
Plaintiff's attorney, Richard Liebowitz has become quite well known for his failures to comply with court rules and orders, for having been sanctioned, and in a couple of cases for having lied to judges.When an order starts that way, you know that it's not going to go well for Liebowitz.Judge Kaplan notes that right as Liebowitz was required to send notices to every docket of the benchslap ruling he had received from Judge Jesse Furman, he dismissed this particular case (as he did with a bunch of others), claiming that a settlement had been reached. But, thanks to Liebowitz's reputation, Judge Kaplan wanted more info. This is... not particularly common. If you tell a judge you have a settlement they usually don't squint questionably at you. But here:
The Court, concerned in light of Mr. Liebowitz's history as to whether he in fact had been retained by the plaintiff and authorized to sue and to settle, entered an order stating in relevant part, the following:Judge Kaplan appears well aware of Liebowitz's history of not actually following instructions and felt the need to spell things out rather specifically in the order, rather than leave any chance for vagueness or confusion. Did Richard Liebowitz comply with the order? I'll give you one guess, and I know you'll get it right... because, no, of course Richard Liebowitz did not actually comply with the order. He did submit two declarations -- one from himself, and another from Josiah Kamau, who is a principal for Chosen Figure LLC -- but neither fulfilled the requirements of the order. First, as to Liebowitz's own declaration:On or before August 6, 2020, Mr. Liebowitz shall file (1) a personal affidavit or declaration (a) stating whether and when the plaintiff in this case specifically authorized him to (i) file this action and (ii) settle it, and (b) attaching any retainer agreement or other documentary evidence as to the foregoing, as well as (2) a personal affidavit or declaration of the plaintiff (a) stating whether and when the plaintiff in this case specifically authorized Mr. Liebowitz to (i) file this action and (ii) settle it, and (b) attaching any documentary evidence as to the foregoing. Failure to comply in all respects may result in the imposition of sanctions."
The Liebowitz declaration asserts that "[o]n February 28, 2019, Plaintiff, via itsprincipal Josiah Kamau, signed a retainer agreement with Liebowitz Law Firm, PLLC, ('LLF') inwhich Plaintiff authorized LLF to file copyright infringement lawsuits on his behalf." It goes on tostate that Mr. Liebowitz filed this action on June 23, 2020 (almost 16 months after the allegeddate of the retainer agreement), that he notified plaintiff on June 23, 2020 that he had broughtthis action, and that Mr. Liebowitz had plaintiffs authority to settle the case. It attaches whatMr. Liebowitz claims are copies of the signature page of the retainer agreement and an email toMr. Kamau notifying Kamau that he had brought this action in the name of an entity.Several points are notable about this declaration. First, Mr. Liebowitz did not complywith the Court's direction to submit the retainer agreement. The purported signature page revealsnothing whatsoever about the alleged retainer agreement, and Mr. Liebowitz did not submit anydocumentary evidence as to anything beyond this page and the notification email. Second, Mr.Liebowitz claims that plaintiff (Chosen Figure, LLC) authorized him to file this action, but thepurported signature page of the retainer agreement that he submitted was executed on behalf of Mr.Kamau personally and not on behalf of any corporate or other entity. Third, the purported retaineragreement was signed on February 28, 2019. This is nearly a year before the alleged infringementin this case took place, which the complaint makes clear was February 12, 2020. Whatever theterms of the agreement may be - the Court does not know because Mr. Liebowitz failed to submitit, despite a clear order requiring him to do so under threat of sanctions - the agreement cannotpossibly serve as evidence that "the plaintiff in this case specifically authorized him to (i) file thisaction and (ii) settle it."That's not good, Richard. Not good at all. For what it's worth, I'll just note that since this is a case from this year, in other cases, Liebowitz has insisted that since having an epic benchslap back in November of last year, he had put in place better case management tools. So, he has no excuse this time around.As for the other declaration, well, that's not going to cut it either:
The Kamau declaration avers that, "[o]n February 28, 2019, [Kamau]personally signed a retainer agreement with Liebowitz Law Firm, PLLC ('LLF') in which[he] authorized LLF to file copyright infringement lawsuits on [his] behalf"; that Mr. Liebowitz"had [his] authority to file the present copyright infringement lawsuit as of March 17,2020"; that Mr. Liebowitz notified him of the filing of this action on June 23, 2020 byemail; and that Mr. Liebowitz had authority to settle the case. The declaration contains twoexhibits, which are the same signature page and notification email attached to Mr. Liebowitz'sdeclaration. It does not include any evidence supporting Kamau' s claim that he gave Mr.Liebowitz permission to file this lawsuit on March 17, 2020 or to settle it at a later time.This declaration raises additional questions. Mr. Liebowitz claims that he hadauthority to bring this action by virtue of the purported February 28, 2019 retainer agreement. Mr.Kamau, however, declares that Mr. Liebowitz "had authority to file the present ... lawsuit as ofMarch 17, 2020," thus implying that the retainer agreement of February 28, 2019 did not authorizethe filing of this action. And Mr. Kamau, like Mr. Liebowitz, has submitted no documentation apartfrom the purported signature page and the June 23, 2020 email.Given Liebowitz's history, which this judge is well acquainted with, let's just say Judge Kaplan is not happy:
This Court's order of July 30 required - and still requires - production of the fullretainer agreement or agreements and all documentary evidence with respect to Mr. Liebowitz'sauthority to bring and settle this case. That includes all emails, letters, notes and other writings orelectronically stored information bearing on the retention, the scope of the engagement (includingas it may have changed from time to time), and the settlement.All of this material shall be filed by Messrs. Liebowitz and Kamau no later thanAugust 18, 2020.Get your popcorn ready...
Even in 1996, we knew that text-filters are no good at solving this kind of problem, so I asked for a clarification: "I'm confused. What standard should we use to decide if a message would be a problem for Disney?"The response was one I will never forget: "Disney's standard is quite clear:No kid will be harassed, even if they don't know they are being harassed."..."OK. That means Chat Is Out of HercWorld, there is absolutely no way to meet your standard without exorbitantly high moderation costs," we replied.One of their guys piped up: "Couldn't we do some kind of sentence constructor, with a limited vocabulary of safe words?"Before we could give it any serious thought, their own project manager interrupted, "That won't work. We tried it for KA-Worlds.""We spent several weeks building a UI that used pop-downs to construct sentences, and only had completely harmless words - the standard parts of grammar and safe nouns like cars, animals, and objects in the world.""We thought it was the perfect solution, until we set our first 14-year old boy down in front of it. Within minutes he'd created the following sentence:In that initial 1996 project, chat was abandoned, but as they continued to develop HercWorld, they quickly realized that they still had to worry about chat, even without a chat feature:I want to stick my long-necked Giraffe up your fluffy white bunny.
It was standard fare: Collect stuff, ride stuff, shoot at stuff, build stuff… Oops, what was that last thing again?"…kids can push around Roman columns and blocks to solve puzzles, make custom shapes, and buildings.", one of the designers said.I couldn't resist, "Umm. Doesn't that violate the Disney standard? In this chat-free world, people will push the stones around until they spell Hi! or F-U-C-K or their phone number or whatever. You've just invented Block-ChatTM. If you can put down objects, you've got chat. We learned this in Habitat and WorldsAway, where people would turn 100 Afro-Heads into a waterbed." We all laughed, but it was that kind of awkward laugh that you know means that we're all probably just wasting our time.Decisions for family-friendly community designers:
"The Disney Standard" (now a legend amongst our employees) still held. No harassment, detectable or not, and no heavy moderation overhead.Brian had an idea though: Fully pre-constructed sentences - dozens of them, easy to access. Specialize them for the activities available in the world. Vaz Douglas, our project manager working with Zoog, liked to call this feature "Chatless Chat." So, we built and launched it for them. Disney was still very tentative about the genre, so they only ran it for about six months; I doubt it was ever very popular.The same interview notes that Disney tried once again in 2002 with a new world called “ToonTown”, with pulldown menus that allowed you to construct very narrowly tailored speech within the chat to try to avoid anything that violated the rules.As the story goes, Disney still had problems with this. To make sure people were only communicating with people they knew in real life, one of the restrictions in this new world was that you had to have a secret code from any user you wished to chat with. The thinking was that parents would print these out for kids who could then share them with their friends in real life, and they could link up and “chat” in the online world.And yet, once again, people figured out how to get around the restrictions:
Sure enough, chatters figured out a few simple protocols to pass their secret code, several variants are of this general form:User A:"Please be my friend."Incredibly, there was an entire Wiki page on the Disney Online Worlds domain that included a variety of other descriptions on how to exchange your secret number within the game, even as users were not supposed to be doing so:
User A:"Come to my house?"
User B:"Okay."
A:[Move the picture frames on your wall, or move your furniture on the floor to make the number 4.]
A:"Okay"
B:[Writes down 4 on a piece of paper and says] "Okay."
A:[Move objects to make the next letter/number in the code] "Okay"
B:[Writes…] "Okay"
A:[Remove objects to represent a "space" in the code] "Okay"
[Repeat steps as needed, until…]
A:"Okay"
B:[Enters secret code into Toontown software.]
B:"There, that worked. Hi! I'm Jim 15/M/CA, what's your A/S/L?"
For example, let's say you have a secret code (1hh 5rj) which you would like to give to a toon named Bob.First, you should make clear that you want to become their SF.So even though Disney eventually did enable a very limited chat, with strict rules to keep people safe, it still left open many challenges for early trust & safety work.Images from HabitChronicles
You: Please be my friend!
You: (random SF chat)
You: I can't understand you
You: Let's work on that
Bob: Yes
Now, start the secret.
You: (Jump 1 time and say OK. Jump 1 time because that is the first thing in your code. Say OK to confirm that was part of your secret.)
Bob: OK (Wait for this, as this means he has written down or otherwise recorded the 1)
You: Hello! OK (Say hello because the first letter of hello is h, which is the second part of your secret.)
Bob: OK (again, wait for confirmation)
Repeat above step, as you have the same letter for the third part of your secret.
Bob: OK (by now you should know to wait for this)
You: (Jump 5 times and say OK. Jump 5 times as this is the 4th part of your secret)
Bob: OK
You: Run! OK (The 5th part of your secret is r, and "Run!" starts with r)
Bob: OK
You: Jump! OK (Say this because j is the last part of your secret.)
Bob: OK
At this point, you have successfully transmitted the code to Bob.
Most likely, Bob will understand, and within seconds, you will be Secret Friends!
In 2019, the LVMPD conducted 924 facial recognition searches using the system it purchased from Vigilant Solutions, according to data obtained by Motherboard through a public records request. Vigilant Solutions—which also leases its massive license plate reader database to federal agencies—was bought last year by Motorola Solutions for $445 million.Of those searches, 471 were done using images the department deemed “suitable,” and they resulted in matches with at least one “likely positive candidate” 67% of the time. But 451 searches, nearly half, were run on “non-suitable” probe images. Those searches returned likely positive matches—which could mean anywhere from one to 20 or more mugshots, all with varying confidence scores assigned by the system—only 18% of the time.Fortunately, low-quality images seemingly rarely return anything investigators can use. (Although that 18% is still 82 "likely positive matches...") If the system did, we'd be seeing far more bogus arrests than we've seen to this point. Of course, prosecutors and police aren't letting suspects know facial recognition software contributed to their arrests, so courtroom challenges have been pretty much nonexistent.Although most of the information in the documents is redacted -- making it difficult to verify LVMPD claims about the software's contribution to arrests and prosecutions -- enough details remained to provide a suspect facing murder charges with information the LVMPD had never turned over to him or admitted to in court.
Clark Patrick, the Las Vegas attorney representing [Alexander] Buzz, told Motherboard that neither the LVMPD nor the Clark County District Attorney’s office ever informed him that investigators identified Buzz as a suspect using, at least in part, facial recognition technology. The Clark County District Attorney’s office did not respond to an interview request or written questions.Had this information been given to Buzz and his attorney at the beginning of the trial, he likely would not have waived his right to a preliminary evidentiary hearing. If this had taken place -- along with knowledge of a private company's contribution to the investigation -- prosecutors may have had to produce information about the tech and the surveillance footage it pulled images from.The documents don't appear to show a reliance on low-quality images to make arrests, but they do show investigators will run nearly any image through the software to see if it generates some hits. The precautions taken after this matter most. If investigators are only considering matches to be leads, it will head off most false arrests. But if investigators take shortcuts -- as appears to have happened in Detroit -- the outcome is disastrous for those falsely arrested. A person's rights and freedoms shouldn't be at the mercy of software that performs poorly even when given good images to work with. The use of this software is never going to go away completely, but agencies can mitigate the damage by refusing to treat matches as probable cause.
In an Instagram post, the app's developer said Apple has objected to the firm's logo, claiming that the pear used is "too close" to the Apple logo and hurts the Apple brand. The filing also cites brand confusion and dilution caused by "blurring." According to the publication, the trademark was filed in 2017 and accepted by the US Trademark Office. It was only on the last day possible for objections to be filed that Apple did so.This is a pear. Some enormous corporations might tell you morons in a hurry would think it was an apple. They might scream apple, apple, apple. Over and over and over again. They might put their apple next to your pear and insist they look alike. You might even start to believe that someone out there could mistake the pear for the apple. But they won't. Because a pear is not a fucking apple.Also because the logos don't actually look anything alike. The color scheme is wildly different, the drawing lines totally distinct, and the style fully unique. There is literally no reason to think there is any chance of confusion here, not to mention that the companies are quite distinct in how the public perceives their product offerings.But, of course, trademark bullying doesn't work on the merits. It works on the size of the legal war chest.
"To fight this it will cost tens of thousands of dollars," Prepear claims. "The CRAZY thing is that Apple has done this to dozens of other small business fruit logo companies, and many have chosen to abandon their logo or close doors."Prepear has launched a change.org petition in an attempt to convince Apple to drop legal action as the process reaches the discovery phase, a particularly expensive part of the process. The company has only five members and says that fighting Apple on this matter could cost tens of thousands of dollars.Yeah. And, unless Prepear gets some kind of rescue here, the most likely scenario is that it will need to change its logo. Losing all kinds of time and money in developing its branding. Or, it can risk bankrupting itself by fighting back.Trademark bullying works. Again, not because of any legitimate legal or market concern. But purely as a matter of who can fight the fight and who cannot.
Plaintiff Rafaeli, LLC, owed $8.41 in unpaid property taxes from 2011, which grew to $285.81 after interest, penalties, and fees. Oakland County and its treasurer, Andrew Meisner (collectively, defendants), foreclosed on Rafaeli’s property for the delinquency, sold the property at public auction for $24,500, and retained all the sale proceeds in excess of the taxes, interest, penalties, and fees.That's right. It only took $8.41 to initiate these proceedings. Even after accounting for the additional fees, the county turned less than $300 in delinquencies into a $24,200 profit.Rafaeli, LLC isn't the only plaintiff. Another property owner, Andre Ohanessian, saw $6000 in taxes, fines, and fees turn into a $76,000 net gain for the county when it auctioned his property for $82,000 and kept everything above what it was owed.The lower court said there was nothing wrong with the government keeping thousands of dollars property owners didn't owe it.
The circuit court granted summary disposition to defendants, finding that defendants did not “take” plaintiffs’ properties because plaintiffs forfeited all interests they held in their properties when they failed to pay the taxes due on the properties. The court determined that property properly forfeited under the GPTA [General Property Tax Act] and in accordance with due process is not a “taking” barred by either the United States or Michigan Constitution. Because the GPTA properly divested plaintiffs of all interests they had in their properties, the court concluded that plaintiffs did not have a property interest in the surplus proceeds generated from the tax-foreclosure sale of their properties.The appeals court felt the same way about the issue, resulting in this final appeal to the state's top court. The Michigan Supreme Court says this isn't proper, going all the way back to English common law that had been adopted by the new nation more than two hundred years ago.
At the same time that it was common for any surplus proceeds to be returned to the former property owner, it was also generally understood that the government could only collect those taxes actually owed and nothing more.[...]This Court recognized a similar principle in 1867, stating that “[n]o law of the land authorizes the sale of property for any amount in excess of the tax it is legally called upon to bear.” Indeed, any sale of property for unpaid taxes that was in excess of the taxes owed was often rendered voidable at the option of the landowner. Rather than selling all of a person’s land and risk the sale being voided, officers charged with selling land for unpaid taxes often only sold that portion of the land that was needed to satisfy the tax debt. That is, early in Michigan’s statehood, it was commonly understood that the government could not collect more in taxes than what was owed, nor could it sell more land than necessary to collect unpaid taxes.That all changed with the General Property Tax Act. The current version of the GPTA unilaterally declares all ownership rights "extinguished" the moment the government begins proceedings against the property, well before the foreclosure sale occurs.This law -- as exercised in these forfeitures and auctions -- is unlawful, the Supreme Court says.
We conclude that our state’s common law recognizes a former property owner’s property right to collect the surplus proceeds that are realized from the tax-foreclosure sale of property. Having originated as far back as the Magna Carta, having ingratiated itself into English common law, and having been recognized both early in our state’s jurisprudence and as late as our decision in Dean in 1976, a property owner’s right to collect the surplus proceeds from the tax-foreclosure sale of his or her property has deep roots in Michigan common law. We also recognize this right to be “vested” such that the right is to remain free from unlawful governmental interference.The government argued that without being able to take everything (even when less is owed), it does not have a stick of sufficient size to wield against delinquent taxpayers. Nonsense, says the state's top court. The state can still collect what is owed. What it can't do is take more than that.
We recognize that municipalities rely heavily on their citizens to timely pay real-property taxes so that local governments have a source of revenue for their operating costs. Nothing in this opinion impedes defendants’ right to hold citizens accountable for failing to pay property taxes by taking citizens’ properties in satisfaction of their tax debts. What defendants may not do under the guise of tax collection is seize property valued far in excess of the amount owed in unpaid taxes, penalties, interest, and fees and convert that surplus into a public benefit. The purpose of taxation is to assess and collect taxes owed, not appropriate property in excess of what is owed.If the county wants its eight dollars, it can take its eight dollars. Everything above that still belongs to the original property owner. This should seem obvious, but it isn't. It took the state's top court 49 pages to arrive at this conclusion. What seems obvious to citizens is far too often deliberately unclear to government agencies. Legislation is rarely written in plain language. And it's crafted by people who have a vested interest in ensuring their employer's financial stability. The end result -- years down the road -- is the government turning a $285 foreclosure into a $24,000 surplus. The final insult is taxpayers paid for county officials to argue against the taxpayers' best interests. But, from now on, the government will have to share its takings with the people it's taking property from.
In a move already being roundly criticized on social media, Crystal Dynamics’ Jeff Adams revealed today that Spider-Man will be available as a free update for PlayStation players of this September’s Marvel’s Avengers game in “early 2021.” PC and Xbox One players, apparently, won’t get to play as him.Adams announced the move in a PlayStation blog post, offering no insight as to why PC and Xbox players would miss out and outlining no exclusive content for those games. It doesn’t appear to be a timed exclusive. When Kotaku reached out to Square Enix, the game’s publisher, for comment, about that and the rest of the deal, we were directed to Adams’ blog post—which didn’t answer any of our questions.Now, there is some complicated licensing potentially at issue here. While Disney owns the rights to The Avengers generally, Sony has retained many of the publishing rights for the Spider-Man character. In 2018, the excellent Spider-Man video game came out as a PlayStation and many assumed that Sony had the sole game publishing rights to the character. But that doesn't seem to be true, no matter what noises Sony's made in the past. Instead, these rights still seem to reside with Marvel, which has tended to lean towards the PlayStation. But, as the Kotaku article points out, it's not as though Spider-Man has never made an appearance on other systems. He's been in Nintendo games, along with other games, such as Marvel's Lego series of games.The idea behind these exclusive deals, be it for entire game franchises or for characters like Spider-Man, is to try to engender some kind of loyalty among the fan-base by having this exclusive content. And perhaps at one point that worked. But these days, the only thing Sony seems to be getting for its trouble is backlash. And when Forbes is out here saying that this character exclusive isn't just bad for the other platforms the game will appear on, but bad for PlayStation players as well, then maybe it's time to rethink this whole thing.
The problem with exclusives is that they not only hurt the obvious suspects, the platforms that are not getting X or Y exclusive, which in this case is Xbox and PC players, but they even hurt the platform that’s supposed to benefit from them.With Avengers, it’s easy to see how this could play out in a similar fashion. While the main storyline of Avengers seems to be playing out around six launch heroes, Black Widow, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and Ms. Marvel, the entire point of the game is that it will be an ongoing story that unfolds in time. It’s easy to see how a character like Spider-Man, a prominent Avenger in both the MCU and the comics, could have been integrated into a major storyline at some point in the future as the game expands. But the fact that he’s exclusive to PlayStation essentially insures that he cannot be a major player in the story, relegated to some sort of introductory side mission, and that’s it, or as a tag-along to other missions without a major active role.So why do this at all? Because old habits are hard to shake, probably. And, frankly, Sony's gonna Sony. But that doesn't make any of this less dumb, less bad for the gaming community, or less bad for even those who will get this exclusive character.
So the beauty of Spider-Man, and what Spider-Man represents as a character, and as a world is...again, it comes back to the relationship with PlayStation and Marvel. We happened to be...once you can execute and deliver, when it comes down to choices of where and what Spider-Man can be, that’s a relationship question that PlayStation absolutely has the rights to, that as you guys know, with Sony’s ownership there, and Marvel with Sony saying, ‘Hey, this is something we can do. This is something we can do on this platform.’If anything was deserving of a Jonathan Swan meme, this must surely be it. I have read the above paragraph no less than ten times and I have no idea what the hell it is saying. There seems to be some nod to Sony's publishing rights for video games and Spider-Man, but, as we've said previously, those rights don't seem to actually exist. Then there's some talk about how special Spider-Man is, alongside "Hey, this is something we can do."...okay. It doesn't get any better as it goes on.
And so, what we do as creators is say, ‘This is an opportunity that we can make something unique, and fun, and awesome that we all...you just talked about Black Widow, and to be able to have that experience. So we love the idea of being able to bring this character to the PlayStation players.Blink, blink. But why exclusively? Why wouldn't you love to bring that character to Xbox owners? PC gamers? Nothing in this dump truck of words strung together seems to have anything to do with the exclusivity deal this man's studio struck with Sony. What the hell?
But I really do think people will look at this and say, ‘Yeah, okay, we get that, we can understand the business behind that’, but in general, we’re making this game for everybody.They sure as shit don't. The response to this deal has been nearly universally negative. Which makes all the sense in the world. Owners of other platforms don't get to play the character. PlayStation owners might be glad they do, but does anyone really think they're also cheering on owners of other systems not getting to play Spider-Man? Why in the world would they even care?Whatever else, the studio should try harder to explain its decisions rather than simply trot out an ill-prepared studio head to weave a tangled web of words.
This is absolutely nuts, @TwitterSupport. My account was locked for quoting and fact-checking Trump, and I was forced to delete this tweet. Why am I getting punished for shining a light on the president's falsehoods? pic.twitter.com/UtbsGBe3cd— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 6, 2020
Twitter locked my account due to covid-19 misinformation -- from President Trump's Fox & Friends interview 🙃 pic.twitter.com/26IL2nkAOF— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) August 6, 2020
Financial Moxie is a financial advisory catering to working moms. Or at least I think it is… the website also lists multiple fitness instructors on staff so I don’t know what that’s all about. The “moxie” term aligns with the phenomenon of “Moxie Tribes” which seem to be groups for working moms to talk about how awesome they are. It’s basically Goop with fewer vagina candles. Meanwhile “Southtown Moxie” is a law firm in Tennessee and North Carolina.After receiving a cease and desist letter demanding that Southtown Moxie withdraw its trademark application, Kevin Christoper of Rockridge Venture Law (Southtown Moxie’s sibling firm) sat down with a beer to pen a response.Which is how we get to the response. The full letter is embedded below, but you damn well know you're in for a treat when the response to a C&D notice begins with:
Dear Ms. Harper,THANK YOU SO MUCH for your C&D letter and notice of opposition to our trademark application! This case presents a wonderful training opportunity for our noob associates. (And, lawyer-to-lawyer I must add it’s an honor to correspond with you. You are obviously a sensational salesperson-attorney to convince your client to pay you for challenging another law firm’s trademark application—I’m truly in awe and look forward to learning a thing or two from you. When I think of it, your client is paying you, and also giving us good trademark cannon fodder for our noobs, so it’s a win-win all around.)And we're off! The letter then goes into noting all of the things Ms. Harper's client could buy instead of wasting everyone's time on a losing potential lawsuit. Examples include: a speedboat, glamorous clothing and jewelry, or hiring a social media influencer. The most important part of all of this, I have to stress, is that each example comes with an embedded photo of a barbie doll pantomiming these suggestions.With that throat-clearing complete, the response goes on to note in creative terms that financial and legal services are not the same thing, nor in the same markets, and therefore any trademark concern evaporates.
But I wouldn’t be drinking a Purple Haze in my skivvies if I didn’t point out the irony that your client has hired you to represent her BECAUSE SHE IS NOT LICENSED TO PRACTICE LAW. Based on your letter, she claims that our mark, limited to the provision of legal services, infringes upon her financial advisory, personal coaching, and tribal businesses and causes her great harm. Basically she thinks someone looking for “Moxie Tribe” fellowship is going to get sucked up into our vortex of intellectual property services.The notice then goes on to note that Financial Moxie has a disclaimer listed on its site that all communication is intended for select states in America, none of which include North Carolina or Tennessee, where Southtown Moxie is located. So, different industries and different geographic locations. None of this adds up to a valid trademark dispute and it seems likely that Southtown Moxie is going to win in front of the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board.But, hey, we should at least thank Financial Moxie and its legal team for setting things up for this gem of a C&D response.
Kidnapped, ripped from the arms of their loved ones and forced into back-breaking labour: The brutal reality of life as a Kanaka worker - but Scott Morrison claims 'there was no slavery in Australia'Facebook removed the post and image for violation of their policy against nudity, although no genitals are visible, and restricted the user's account. The Guardian Australia contacted Facebook to determine if this decision was made in error and, the following day, Facebook restored the post and apologized to the user, explaining that it was an erroneous takedown caused by a false positive in the automated nudity filter. However, at the same time, Facebook continued to block posts that included The Guardian's news story about the incident, which featured the same photo, and placed 30-day suspensions on some users who attempted to share it. Facebook's community standards report shows that in the first three months of 2020, 39.5-million pieces of content were removed for nudity or sexual activity, over 99% of those takedowns were automated, 2.5-million appeals were filed, and 613,000 of the takedowns were reversed.Decisions to be made by Facebook:
Amira Rasool, founder of the online retailer The Folklore, accused the pop star last week of selling merchandise that ripped off the logo of her company, which sells apparel, accessories and other products by designers in Africa and the diaspora.Rasool shared photos on Twitter and Instagram that showed cardigans and sweatshirts with the words "The Folklore Album" for sale on Swift's website.
The EARN IT Act will not protect children. It will not stop the spread of child sexual abuse material, nor target the monsters who produce and share it, and it will not help the victims of these evil crimes. What it will do is threaten the free speech, privacy, and security of every single American. This is because, at its core, the amended EARN IT Act magnifies the failures of the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act--SESTA--and its House companion, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act--FOSTA. Experts believe that SESTA/FOSTA has done nothing to help victims or stop sex trafficking, while creating collateral damage for marginalized communities and the speech of all Americans. A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of FOSTA on First Amendment grounds is proceeding through the courts, and there is bicameral Federal legislation to study the widespread negative impacts of the bill on marginalized groups.Yet, the authors of the EARN IT Act decided to take this kind of carveout and expand it further to State civil and criminal statutes. By allowing any individual State to set laws for internet content, this bill would create massive uncertainty, both for strong encryption and constitutionally protected speech online. What is worse, the flood of State laws that could potentially arise under the EARN IT Act raises strong Fourth Amendment concerns, meaning that any CSAM evidence collected could be rendered inadmissible in court and accused CSAM offenders could get off scot-free. This is not a risk that I am willing to take.Let me be clear: The proliferation of these heinous crimes against children is a serious problem. However, for these reasons and more, the EARN IT Act is not the solution. Moreover, it ignores what Congress can and should be doing to combat this heinous crime. The U.S. has a number of important evidence-based programs in existence that are proven to keep kids safe, and they are in desperate need of funding to do their good work. Yet the EARN IT Act doesn't include a single dollar of funding for these important programs. It is time for the U.S. Government to spend the funds necessary to save children's lives now.While a Wyden hold would block any attempt to get unanimous consent via the hotlining process, it would help quite a lot if other Senators were willing to speak up and stand with him as well. If it's just Wyden, then he'll face tremendous pressure to remove the hold. If more Senators join Wyden in saying this isn't okay, then Graham and Blumenthal will realize they have a bigger challenge in front of them.Again, if you haven't been following this debate closely, everything that Wyden says above is accurate. EARN IT is an attack on both free speech and privacy (a twofer) without doing anything to actually deal with the problem of child sexual abuse material online. That is very much a law enforcement issue, and it's one which Congress has failed to provide the funds to law enforcement that it promised on this issue, and (even worse) the DOJ has simply ignored its requirement mandates to deal with this issue as required by Congress. The DOJ seems more focused on attacking tech companies and blaming them for its own failure to do its job.The EARN IT Act is an incredibly dangerous piece of legislation, but it's also a complicated one -- one that many people don't understand. But Senators see something that says "protect the children" and they immediately think "well, of course we support that." But this bill doesn't protect children. It attacks free speech and privacy online in very insidious ways. Please call your Senators and ask them not to let this through.
Today, I would like to address a particularly ominous development in this space. To be clear, thefollowing critique is not in any way directed toward President Trump or those in the White House, whoare fully within their rights to call for the review of any federal statute's application, the result of whichwould be subject to applicable statutory and constitutional guardrails. Rather, I am very troubled bycertain opportunists elsewhere who claim to be the First Amendment's biggest heroes but only come toits defense when convenient and constantly shift its meaning to fit their current political objectives. Theinconsistencies and contradictions presented by such false prophets would make James Madison's headspin, were he alive to witness them.The First Amendment protects us from limits on speech imposed by the government—not privateactors—and we should all reject demands, in the name of the First Amendment, for private actors tocurate or publish speech in a certain way. Like it or not, the First Amendment's protections apply tocorporate entities, especially when they engage in editorial decision making. I shudder to think of a dayin which the Fairness Doctrine could be reincarnated for the Internet, especially at the ironic behest ofso-called free speech “defenders.” It is time to stop allowing purveyors of First Amendment gibberish toclaim they support more speech, when their actions make clear that they would actually curtail itthrough government action. These individuals demean and denigrate the values of our Constitution andmust be held accountable for their doublespeak and dishonesty. This institution and its members havelong been unwavering in defending the First Amendment, and it is the duty of each of us to continue touphold this precious protection.To be clear: I agree 100% with that statement, and am glad that O'Rielly was willing to stand up on principle to defend it.And then, today, it was announced that the White House is pulling his renomination to the FCC. In other words, the White House is being a petty asshole, again, and firing anyone for not being in lockstep with the President's ridiculous unconstitutional whims.There was some talk last week about how Senator James Inhofe's office was blocking O'Rielly's renomination over a different issue: the approval of L-Band spectrum for use by Ligado (formerly LightSquared). A variety of government organizations had opposed the use of this spectrum, fearing that it might interfere with GPS systems. However, the Ligado deal was unanimously approved by all five commissioners, so it's difficult to see why O'Rielly would be singled out, other than his nomination was up. The Inhofe/Ligado thing feels like a smokescreen for the 230 issue.The question now is whether or not O'Rielly will serve out his term, or if he'll leave now that his renomination is not being considered. One hopes that he'll at least stick it out long enough to vote down the Petition on 230. Even if he did leave, it's unclear if a new Commissioner would get through any confirmation process prior to the election. Either way, at least it's nice to see one Republican Commissioner willing to stand up to Trump. We've criticized O'Rielly plenty of times in the past, but at least he's not taking the path of Carr (and even Pai) in dealing with this nonsense.
I hated this fucking book. I hated it while I was writing it. I didn't think that would happen. But I did....And yet...There was a secret in that book. It's a secret that I've kept for half a decade, and while I've loved the wonderful messages and notes of support from people who've benefitted from this work, the puzzles I hid in it are the only unmitigated, unsoured, pure joy I've experienced in creating this Frankenstein's Creature of a book.I filled it with puzzles. I plastered it with puzzles. I was filled with anticipation at the thought that someday, people would see it.Then some people noticed the codes and puzzles. A few people tried to solve them. Teams formed on Reddit and Twitter and Discord. And one small crew of four people finally journeyed to the end of the epic. And that's how they won the secret buried treasure of pounds of precious silver.The link above has some examples of the hidden puzzles, but here's just one:Tarah then worked with Jon Callas (a familiar name!) to create amazing cipher wheels out of silver. You can see the wheels demonstrated in a video that Tarah put up recently:Even better, she put up details on how to make your own cipher wheels, including 3D printing files to make your own as well at Github. This is a very cool project that, along with everything else that's fun about it, is a neat way to demonstrate how encryption works and why it's so important.
Hillsborough State Attorney Andrew Warren filed 30 felony charges against the teen this week for “scamming people across America” in connection with the Twitter hack that happened on July 15. The charges he's facing include one count of organized fraud, 17 counts of communications fraud, one count of fraudulent use of personal information with over $100,000 or 30 or more victims, 10 counts of fraudulent use of personal information and one count of access to computer or electronic device without authority.Hillsborough County Jail records show Clark was booked into jail shortly after 6:30 a.m. Friday.Warren's office says the scheme to defraud “stole the identities of prominent people” and “posted messages in their names directing victims to send Bitcoin” to accounts that were associated with the Tampa teen. According to the state attorney, the scheme reaped more than $100,000 in Bitcoin in just one day.Once again, it's looking like we got incredibly lucky -- that it was just some young hackers mostly messing around, rather than anyone with serious ill-intent and the ability to plan something bigger. It now appears that Twitter's internal security controls were kind of a mess. Over 1,000 employees had access to the control panel that would allow people to make the changes that enabled the hack -- and even that some staffers and contractors somehow made it a game to abuse their powers to spy on users.Once again, it seems that Twitter needs to fix up a lot of things on the security side, including figuring out how to do end-to-end encryption for direct messages.