News of the Week; October 18, 2018

MEDIA, COMMUNICATIONS & NET NEUTRALITY

1. Trump’s threats amount to a First Amendment violation
2. Trump May Not Be Serious About His NBC Threats… But He May Have Violated The First Amendment
3. FCC Chair Ajit Pai’s Silence On Trump Tweets Speaks Volumes
4. Tom Wheeler to Ajit Pai: “Why the silence” about Trump’s media threats? – Meanwhile, Trump continued attacks on NBC, media: “Sadly, they and others are Fake News.”
5. FCC chair “refused” to rebuke Trump over threat to take NBC off the air: Lawmakers want Pai to “publicly disavow President Trump’s repeated threats.”
6. Six days later, FCC chair says Trump can’t order FCC to revoke TV licenses: Pai response is “better than nothing,” but critics want stronger rebuke of Trump.
7. FCC Republican says Trump is “rightfully venting” anger at the press: O’Rielly sympathizes with Trump but says “politics” shouldn’t affect TV licenses.
8. Republican fight against municipal broadband heats up in Michigan; Michigan bill says no “federal, state, or local funds” can pay for broadband.
9. FCC’s DDoS claims will be investigated by government: GAO will investigate after Democrats asked for evidence that attacks happened.
10. ISPs don’t want to tell the FCC exactly where they offer Internet service: Better data collection could tell us which homes have broadband and which don’t
11. Big ISPs Lobby To Kill Attempts At More Accurate Broadband Mapping
12. Groups Battle Trump FCC’s Claim That One ISP In A Market Means There’s Effective Competition
13. Charter accuses its employees of cutting cables 125 times during strike – Lawsuit: Tens of thousands of New Yorkers lost service because of vandalism.
14. Comment Dates Set on FCC Proposal to Abolish Requirement for Paper Copies of FCC Rules
15. DOJ Staffers: The T-Mobile Sprint Merger Will Reduce Competition And Should Be Blocked
16. T-Mobile Dials Back Major ‘Un-carrier’ Perk
17. AT&T Spent Hundreds Of Billions On Mergers And All It Got Was A Big Pile Of Cord Cutters
18. Comcast found a way to raise other cable companies’ prices, rivals say: Comcast/NBC contract demands allegedly make it hard to sell basic TV package.
19. Google Fiber Gives Up On Traditional TV, And Won’t Be The Last Company To Do So
20. Weather Forecast Title Not Significantly Inaccurate, Says Canadian Broadcast Standards Council
21. Ah Statism, how we love thee! (Timothy Denton) 

DIGITAL

1. It’s 11 p.m., do you know where your ads are?:
2. B.C. businesses and schools hurry to distance themselves from controversial media organizations after activists raise alarm over advertising with Breitbart and others
3. An open letter to Mr Bezos, Mr Pichai and Mr Zuckerberg to tear down Breitbart News
4. New Whistleblowers Highlight How Russia’s Information War On U.S. Was Larger Than Initially Reported
5. The mysterious group that wants to kill Breitbart’s ad revenue, one tweet at a time
6. Amazon isn’t one of the 2,575 companies to pull ads from Breitbart
7. Amazon Suspends Video Head Roy Price Over Sexual Harassment Claims
8. Due to legal settlement, Amazon customers now get a few extra bucks: Ars staffers got as little as $0.76 and as much as $12.02. How much did you get?
9. Memo To Facebook: How To Tell If You’re A Media Company
10. Sheryl Sandberg’s Russia talk was an insult to our intelligence
11. Did Facebook delete Russian bought ads because of a bug? 
12. Facebook apologizes for allowing Russian ads to interfere with 2016 campaign – COO: Company must “prevent everything we can from this happening on our platforms.”
13. What Facebook Did to American Democracy: And why it was so hard to see it coming
14. Facebook is testing a resume feature to take on LinkedIn
15. How Facebook’s Ad System Works
16. Man acquitted of felony charge over Facebook police parody page sues: Fake account said police would offer abortions and anybody could become a recruit.
17. Court To Guy Who Sued News Stations Over His Facebook Live Video: Pay Their Legal Fees… And Maybe Sue Your Lawyers
18. U.S. Supreme Court Rejects CFAA Appeal by Power Ventures against Facebook 
19. The Problem With #MeToo And Viral Outrage
20. Nova Scotia introduces new Cyber-bullying Legislation
21. Incentivizing Better Speech, Rather Than Censoring ‘Bad’ Speech
22. Cheap Speech and What It Has Done (To American Democracy) (Richard Hasen)
23. Ninth Circuit Upholds Enforceability of Arbitration Agreements in Click-Through Agreements
24. Age of consent in the GDPR: updated mapping
25. Ex-workers: Supervisors at Tesla factory routinely called us the n-word – Tesla slams such abuse but expresses doubts regarding the men’s claims.
26. There’s Blood In The Water In Silicon Valley: The bad new politics of big tech.
27. African rulers’ weapon against web-based dissent: the off switch
28. Saskatchewan Court of Appeal confirms that emails can extend limitation periods under the Limitations Act
29. China congress: How authorities censor your thoughts
30. DOJ indicts Chinese fentanyl distributors selling to Americans online: “They use multiple identities to disguise their activities and their shipments.”
31. Reddit’s unlikely first edit partner: Time magazine
32. Supreme Court refuses to hear case questioning Google’s trademark: Lawsuit claimed “google” had become synonymous with “search the Internet.”
33. Google Bombs Are Our New Normal
34. Google Offers Help To Industries It Helps To Destroy
35. Google’s Learning Software Learns To Write Learning Software
36. Twitter Says It Will Finally Do Something About Those Hordes of Nazis
37. Harvey Weinstein Is Hollywood’s Silicon Valley Moment
38. Eight takes on sexual harassment and Harvey Weinstein 
39. Twitter Says Rose McGowan Account Was Suspended Over Phone Number in Tweet
40. Twitter’s suspension of Rose McGowan epitomizes the site’s most infuriating problem: It’s a double standard at its most divisive.
41. Women Are Boycotting Twitter Today in Solidarity with Rose McGowan
42. Twitter CEO after Rose McGowan account suspension: ‘We need to be a lot more transparent’
43. Rose McGowan back on Twitter
44. @jeffbezos I told the head of your studio that HW raped me. Over & over I said it. He said it hadn’t been proven. I said I was the proof. (rose mcgowan)
45. Rose McGowan says Amazon knew Weinstein had raped her
46. Silicon Valley Can’t Handle Its Own Toxic Culture. Is It Really Ready to Tackle Hollywood’s, Too?
47. Black members of Congress push for more diversity in Silicon Valley hires – Rep. Barbara Lee: “Coding jobs will become the blue collar jobs of the future.”
48. We should stop tech firms from screening extremist videos: Internet giants have a duty to help counter-terrorism efforts
49. Another Ridiculous Lawsuit Hopes To Hold Social Media Companies Responsible For Terrorist Attacks
50. The ‘Gawker Effect’ Is Chilling Investigative Reporting Across The US
51. Inside The Weird World Of Social Media Marathon Cheating
52. Dutch privacy regulator says Windows 10 breaks the law: Regulator says Microsoft doesn’t offer enough information to enable informed consent.
53. Judge Agrees – YouTube Mockery Protected by Fair Use 
54. AT&T Researchers Share Map Depicting Top YouTube Channels In Each State
55. Blame The Cord-Cutters For AT&T’s Sudden Drop In Share Price
56. YouTube Revamps Website For Creators, Rolls Out ‘Master Class’ Video Advice Series
57. Here’s Why YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki Started Her Very Own Channel
58. Casey Neistat: YouTube Doesn’t Do Enough To Take Care Of Creator Community
59. Advertising Practices Land Tinder in Hot Water
60. Snapchat Stories Usage Among Top Influencers Has Dipped 33% In 6 Months 
61. Influencers Sound Off on Why They Do Not Want to Disclose Sponsored Posts
62. Vice Media To Launch Sub-Saharan African Operation In 2018
63. Major Studios, Streamers Declare Legal War on TickBox: “What TickBox actually sells is nothing less than illegal access to Plaintiffs’ copyrighted content,” a lawyer for the studios and streamers says.
64. Netflix, Amazon, movie studios sue over TickBox streaming device: TickBox TV says it’s a “100% legal” directory of everything ever made.
65. Netflix Now Says It Will Spend Up To $8 Billion On Original Content Next Year 
66. Two months after Disney split, Netflix pledges $8B for original content: What’s cooler than spending $6 billion (in 2017) on original content?
67. Another German decision questions reasonableness of GS Media presumption if generally applied
68. Revealed: How copyright law is being misused to remove material from the internet – When Annabelle Narey posted a negative review of a building firm on Mumsnet, the last thing on her mind was copyright infringement
69. Copyright Isn’t a Tool for Removing Negative Reviews
70. Sorry, You Can’t Abuse Copyright Law To Make A Negative Review Disappear
71. New Copyright Trolling Operation Lowers The Settlement Demands And Calls Them Fines To Improve Conversion Rate
72. Native American tribe sues Amazon and Microsoft over patents: Can “patent trolls” advance their cause using Native American legal rights?
73. Vladimir Putin: Russia Will Issue its Own Cryptocurrency
74. Sweden’s Tax Authority Accepts Bitcoin As Settlement: The Swedish government agency responsible for the collection of taxes has, for the first time, accepted bitcoin from a debtor.
75. The Difference between Blockchain and Bitcoin
76. Waymo’s staggering settlement demand for Uber: $1 billion: Holding fast on massive cash demand suggests Waymo wants to cripple its competitor.
77. Uber And Lyft Haven’t Revolutionized The American City—Yet
78. The Crowdsourced Maps Guiding Puerto Rico’s Recovery
79. New neural network teaches itself Go, spanks the pros: This time, the Go-playing algorithm didn’t need any human players to help it.
80. Artificial Intelligence – With Very Real Biases: According to AI Now co-founder Kate Crawford, digital brains can be just as error-prone and biased as ours
81. Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence
82. Stunning AI Breakthrough Takes Us One Step Closer to the Singularity
83. The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions: Mistaken extrapolations, limited imagination, and other common mistakes that distract us from thinking more productively about the future.
84. AI Experts Want To End ‘Black Box’ Algorithms In Government
85. Can we teach robots ethics?
86. You Aren’t Ready For The Weirdness Of Working With Robots
87. Love in the Time of Robots: Hiroshi Ishi­guro builds androids. Beautiful, realistic, uncannily convincing human replicas. Academically, he is using them to understand the mechanics of person-to-person interaction. But his true quest is to untangle the ineffable nature of connection itself.
88. Apple’s Tim Cook On iPhones, Augmented Reality, And How He Plans To Change Your World: In a wide-ranging interview, the CEO of the biggest tech company in the world explains how AR will change our lives, and why he thinks the world is actually getting better
89. First iPhone X batch reportedly only contains 46,500 units: Apple’s TrueDepth camera may be holding things up.
90. Apple and GE partner to make industrial analytics iOS-accessible: GE thinks the software will result in $12 billion in revenue by 2020.
91. Udacity to focus on individual student projects 
92. Many patent-holders stop looking to East Texas following Supreme Court ruling: Can Delaware handle the incoming caseload?
93. The Case for CASL: My Appearance Before the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology (Michael Geist)
94. First Circuit Rejects Copyright Workaround to Section 230–Small Justice v. Ripoff Report (Eric Goldman)
95. Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?: More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

CREATIVITY

1.  Statute Of Limitations Has Run Out On Trump’s Bogus Promise To Sue The NY Times
2. At Core of 5Pointz Trial: Is Graffiti Art Protected by Law?
3. Will Recent Court Rulings Endanger the Future of Biopics and Documentaries?: A Lynyrd Skynyrd movie ban and Olivia de Havilland’s recent legal victory are causing Hollywood studios, press organizations and others to speak up, lest they lose that right.
4. Disney: The Only Fun Allowed At Children’s Birthday Parties Is Properly Licensed Fun
5. Internet Archives Liberates Old Books Using Never Used Before Provision Of Copyright Law
6. Freedom of panorama: would it hurt architects? Survey among Italian-based architects says NO
7. “Haters Gonna Hate, Hate . . . .” Can Taylor Swift “Shake it Off”?
8. CEIPI Opinion on copyright limitations’ reform in the European Digital Single Market
9. (The cult of) personality rights in Canada
10. Guide to Doing Business in Canada: Intellectual property
11. Prioritizing the Public Interest: My Submission on Copyright Board of Canada Reform (Michael Geist)
12. NDAs: A Logistical and Legal Nightmare

SURVEILLANCE & PRIVACY

1. Details Emerge Of World’s Biggest Facial Recognition Surveillance System, Aiming To Identify Any Chinese Citizen In Three Seconds
2. Supreme Court to decide if US has right to data on world’s servers: Feds claim legal right to reach into the world’s servers with a valid US warrant.
3. Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Case Involving US Demands For Emails Stored Overseas
4. Justices to Hear DOJ Appeal on Microsoft Ruling: Is Email Stored Abroad Subject to a U.S. Warrant?
5. Microsoft never disclosed 2013 hack of secret vulnerability database: Database contained details required to carry out highly advanced software attacks.
6. Attack of the Hack Back: The worst idea in cybersecurity is back again.
7. “OK, Google. Send a Letter to the CPSC.”: Privacy Groups Request Recall of Google Home Mini 
8. Judge shocked to learn NYPD’s evidence database has no backup: City says cash forfeitures not in flagship PETS system; police say PETS backed up.
9. DreamHost Wins Challenge Against DOJ’s Overbroad Data Demands
10. DOJ Continues Its Push For Encryption Backdoors With Even Worse Arguments
11. There’s No Good Decision in the Next Big Data Privacy Case
12. Could a child sue their parents for sharenting?
13. Viral video of man being dragged from United flight gets officers fired: “Our cell phones are the best deterrent to ensure mistreatment becomes a rarity.”
14. It Takes Just $1,000 To Track Someone’s Location With Mobile Ads
15. Millions of high-security crypto keys crippled by newly discovered flaw: Factorization weakness lets attackers impersonate key holders and decrypt their data.
16. Details around controversial surveillance unknown
17. Equifax website borked again, this time to redirect to fake Flash update: Malware researcher encounters bogus download links during multiple visits.
18. After second bungle, IRS suspends Equifax’s “taxpayer identity” contract
19. Federal watchdog tells Equifax – no $7.25 million IRS contract for you: Equifax-IRS ordeal exposes the strangeness of the government contracting system.
20. There’s No Good Decision in the Next Big Data Privacy Case
21. Equifax rival TransUnion also sends site visitors to malicious pages: People visiting TransUnion’s Central American site redirected to potpourri of badness.
22. Accenture The Latest To Leave Sensitive Customer Data Sitting Unprotected In The Amazon Cloud
23. Don’t Panic, But Wi-Fi’s Main Security Protocol Has Been Broken
24. How the KRACK attack destroys nearly all Wi-Fi security: Android 6.0 hit especially hard, but all devices are vulnerable.
25. Serious flaw in WPA2 protocol lets attackers intercept passwords and much more: KRACK attack is especially bad news for Android and Linux users.
26. The Flawed System Behind The Krack Wi-Fi Meltdown
27. Why The Krack Wi-Fi Mess Will Take Decades To Clean Up
28. Australian defense firm was hacked and F-35 data stolen, DOD confirms
29. Australian Police Ran A Dark Web Child Porn Site For Eleven Months
30. Australian Government Claims That Facial Recognition Systems Increase Privacy…
31. Google’s ‘Advanced Protection’ Locks Down Accounts Like Never Before
32. Google now offers special security program for high-risk users: The new opt-in program requires authentication with a physical security key.
33. The search for painless Internet privacy gets another boost with InvizBox 2: Successor to Tor “travel router” focuses on protecting traffic from “harvesting” by ISPs.
34. In 3-1 vote, LA Police Commission approves drones for LAPD – ACLU: new policy “fails to take into account public mistrust” of police surveillance.
35. Would the United States Be Responsible for Private Hacking? (Kristen Eichensehr)

Jon