This Blog is Dead and All of the Posts are Old

I have retired this blog.  Things change. Please do not read further, as This Blog is Dead and All of the Posts are Old.

(We’re are still at it of course — ten years+  now.  See our newish secure site:  https://tcjohnston.com)

Revenge Porn Conviction (the part where I was on TV)

When Kevin Bollaert was convicted for running a Revenge Porn site (no … he wasn’t!) in early February, KUSI News San Diego called me for an interview.  My info was sketchy – reports that he was convicted for extortion and identity theft, usually accompanied by wrong statements (again) that Bollaert was busted for running a revenge porn site.  Of course, the site itself would be immune from liability for user-generated content per the CDA §230.  So it must have been the part where the poor victims whose private photos ended up on the site could get them removed for a modest fee; and the part where Bollaert solicited private information from the perps regarding the victims.

Anyway … the news truck came down and I yakked at them for 20 minutes or so.  They kept the “Just be careful,” advice.  I supposed it plays better on TV than where I advised, “Be alert; be vigilant; be circumspect; be judicious.”  (That was a little experiment for my own personal edification.)

And reporter Kristen Cusato paid attention and absorbed and pretty much got it right.   Which was refreshing compared to the other reports saying the conviction was for running the website itself (see above).

Can’t embed the video on this not-self-hosted blog (I’ll get to it someday), so > Here’s a Link

… a delayed feeding (12.10.14)

Got caught up in real life again, and haven’t been posting – about which I do not apologize, as my guitar and piano chops are coming back.   But, here’s some links from my feeds … some of which may be relevant and/or useful, or not, in no particular order, except I suppose we should open with CIA Torture Report (the general contents of which, btw, is quite old news, we just hadn’t seen the details yet).

• There Is Something Worse Than Torture in the Senate Torture Report — David Corn / MoJo
  • Hint:  It’s the lying to Congress part
• Profiting Massively From Torture: Designers Of CIA Torture Program Raked In $81 Million (And Are Still Getting Money) — Mike Masnick / Techdirt
• The Torture Report and the possibility of International Criminal Court charges — Eugene Kontorovich / The Volokh Conspiracy
• An Inside View On The Purpose And Implications Of The Torture Report — Jennifer Hoelzer / Techdirt
  • Read this one.  It’s a different take on much of what’s out there.

That’s enough of that.  Now for some less depressing stuff.

• Why Is It That Zombies Eat Brains? — Karl Smallwood – TodayIFoundOut.com / Gizmodo
  • I actually knew this already because I was fully into zombies before they became all mainstream and stuff.
• Uber sued by SF and LA, shut down in Spain and Thailand — Cyrus Farivar / Ars Technica
  • (Probably should have toned down the arrogance a bit too…)
• Jay Z crushes sample troll who claimed copyright in word “oh” — Jeff John Roberts / GigaOm
  • Man this makes me happy.  More case law supporting fair use in sampling context.  And f*** trolls.
• Billion-dollar trial against Apple loses all plaintiffs—then gets a new one — Joe Mullin / Ars Technica
• Kim Dotcom Is Not a Fugitive, Court Hears — Ernesto / TorrentFreak
  • This is part of the continuing tawdry US prosecution of Dotcom, who is in NZ.  A quote, seriously!:  
    • [Defendants] are deliberately avoiding prosecution by declining to enter the United States where the criminal case is pending,” U.S. Attorney Dana Boente noted.
• Net neutrality’s cost to consumers pegged at $17B — or zero — Jeff John Roberts / GigaOm
• Copyright Law as a Tool for State Censorship of the Internet — Maira Sutton / EFF
• Quoted: Sony hacking as ‘righteous deed’; plus another attack — Levi Sumagaysay / SiliconBeat
• Broken Windows And Broken Lives — Ken White / Popehat

Next time, we give you, ah, maybe I’ll link to some all-wrong cover tunes I’ve been doing instead of all this.

 

Lazy Random Feed Time…

I know it has been several weeks.   …   I’m busy and stuff.   And so for this post I will try to show fairly fresh feeds I’ve been reading, but in no particular order and with no particular theme … because, I’m busy and stuff.

•  Uber Greases The Wheel With Obama’s Old Campaign Manager — Aarti Shahani / NPR All Tech Considered
• Two goldfish duke it out playing Street Fighter on Twitch — Amanda Kooser
  • Just because I love it when folks use tech to do stupid but very cool stuff
• Darknet drug markets kept alive by great customer service — WIRED UK
  
  • Hear that, Comcast?
• German Regulator Backs Google Over Publishers, As Europe Gets Embarrassing — Mike Butcher / TechCrunch
• Monkey see, monkey do, monkey no copyright — David Post / The Volokh Conspirace
  • i.e., Copyright Office weighs in on photos taken by … nature (not just apes)
• The FBI’s Criminal Database Is Filling Up With Non-Criminals And No One In Law Enforcement Seems To Care— Tim Cushing / Techdirt
• Judge Kozinski Calls Out Former FISC Judge John Bates For Claiming To Speak For The Entire Judicial Branch— Tim Cushing / Techdirt
  • oh, that nutty NSA and its nutty rubber-stamp judges
• Can You Trust The Media To Get Legal Stories Right? — Ken White / Popehat
  • A: No.  I’ve been ranting about this for years.  Reading/seeing a legal story by laymen on the news usually confuses the hell out of the lawyer me, and annoys the expletive out of the other me.
• It’s Not Possible To Steal Facebook ‘Likes’–Mattocks v. BET — Venkat Balasubramani / Technology & Marketing Law Blog
  
  • “[If you listen closely, you can hear the sound of a million social media consultants weeping.]”
• Congressional staffers banned again from Wikipedia after “transphobic” edits — Joe Mullin / Ars Technica
  • Yo, Congress, do something other than edit wiki pages to show bias, k?
• FCC Republican wants to let states block municipal broadband — Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica
  • Yeah, because the best way to curb abuse of monopoly is to keep others from entering the market…
• EFF, ACLU Demolish “It’s Just Metadata” Claim in NSA Spying Appeal — Dave Maas / EFF Deeplinks
  
• Google is distorting right to be forgotten debate, EU Justice head claims — Jeff John Roberts / Gigaom
• U.S. Court Grants Order to Wipe Pirate Sites from the Internet — Ernesto / TorrentFreak
  • More wholly overbroad judicial overreach… yay
• On Net Neutrality, California Cares; Texas? Not So Much — Elise Hu / NPR All Tech Considered

Man, there was tons more, but … That’s it for this week.  Later.

bucket ‘o tech/law feeds (week of 7.27.2014)

And here we are again with some of the stuff I was reading last week – in no order whatsoever.

• Cell phone unlocking legal again as president signs measure — Troy Wolverton / SiliconBeat
• The Phone Unlocking Victory Should Be the First Step Towards Real Copyright Reform — Parker Higgins / EFF
  
• Watch Drought Take Over the Entire State of California in One GIF — Julia Lurie, AJ Vicens, and Alex Park / MoJo Blogs
  • Just because this affects me personally.
• Earth is in the early stages of a sixth mass extinction, says the journal Science –  News.com.au
• Now you can tell the FCC to overturn state limits on municipal broadband — Jon Brodkin / Ars Technica
  
• Google Protects Chilling Effects From Takedown Notices — Andy / TorrentFreak
• Do You Search Differently Since Snowden? — Brian Barrett / Gizmodo
• NSA Surveillance Chilling Effects: HRW and ACLU Gather More Evidence — Cindy Cohn / EFF
• EFF Asks Court To Declare NSA’s ‘Internet Backbone’ Collections Unconstitutional — Tim Cushing / Techdirt
• The New Senate USA FREEDOM Act: A First Step Towards Reforming Mass Surveillance — Nadia Kayyali / EFF
• Please Stop Saving Me A Click — Charlie Warzel / BuzzFeed
• Socrates Takes a Back Seat to Business and Tech — John Schwartz / NYT Tech
• Science Says You Should Leave Work at 2 p.m. and Go for a Walk — Chris Mooney / MoJo
• Judge upholds warrant for Microsoft e-mail on foreign server — Orin Kerr / The Volokh Conspiracy
•  Microsoft ordered to give US customer e-mails stored abroad — David Kravetss / Ars Technica
• Why Minecraft is a phenomenon: it requires its players to co-create it – Robin Sloan / Medium

That’ll do…

f-fuh f-fuh f-f-feeds

Well it’s been two weeks, and my collection of links is pretty expansive.  So I’ll just keep most of them to myself, and here’s some random stuff that’s not too old…

• File-Sharing Doesn’t Hurt Box Office Revenue, Research Finds — Ernesto / TorrentFreak
• An Amusing Explanation of Why Net Neutrality Is So Serious — Jamie Condliffe / Gizmodo
• Tech Blogger Tries To Cancel Comcast Service, Hilarity Ensues — John Biggs / TechCrunch
  
• Comcast admits its policies are responsible for customer harassment — Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge
• Google, Netflix, and Facebook ask FCC to intervene in fight over internet ‘congestion’ — Ben Popper / The Verge
• Biggest “patent troll” slapped down hard by appeals court — Joe Mullin / Ars Technica
• Yet another evidence that Germans run US trolling operations — SJD / Fight Copyright Trolls
  
• Verizon will start restricting LTE speeds for its heaviest unlimited-plan customers — Kevin Fitchard / Gigaom
  
• Musician Whose Works Are At Center Of Copyright Lawsuit Against YouTube Star Slams Lawsuit And Copyright — Mike Masnick / Techdirt
  
• Some really crazy people made the entire Star Wars movie in Minecraft — Jesus Diaz on Sploid, shared by Eric Limer to Gizmodo
• Latest CAFC Ruling Suggests A Whole Lot Of Software Patents Are Likely Invalid — Mike Masnick / Techdirt
  
• Another Blogger Wins a Fair Use Defense For a Photo–Leveyfilm v. Fox Sports — Eric Goldman / Technology & Marketing Law Blog
  
• Amended aggravation: Garcia v. Google — Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log
• Suing File-Sharers Doesn’t Work, Lawyers Warn — Ernesto / TorrentFreak
• Yelp statements about its filters not protected by anti-SLAPP law or CDA — Rebecca Tushnet

Yeah, pretty mixed up… next time perhaps a thematic approach again.

 

feederishly (week of 7.6.14)

I’m thinking, meh … don’t really have a lot to say this time round.  Much of the big ugly same, and the NSA.  So here’s some of this week’s feeds maybe clustered by subject, but that’s about it:

•  Want To Encourage Gossipy Content Online? Go For It–Jones v. TheDirty (Forbes Cross-Post) — Eric Goldman | Technology & Marketing Law Blog
• Microsoft drops case that severed DNS hosting for millions of No-IP nodes — Dan Goodin | Ars Technica
  
• Four Unanswered Questions From Aereo’s Supreme Court Loss (Forbes Cross-Post) — Eric Goldman | Technology & Marketing Law Blog
  
• Taylor Swift is right about music, and the industry should act on her ideas — Jeff John Roberts | Gigaom
  
• Security company says your data can easily be recovered from ‘wiped’ Android phones — Chris Welch | Android
  
• Seth Rogen and James Franco are ‘shocking the world community’ (and don’t fear ‘any punishment from Heaven’) — Eugene Volokh | The Volokh Conspiracy
  
• Billionaire Elon Musk giving $1M to Nikola Tesla museum – San Jose Mercury News
• “Loopholes for Circumventing the Constitution”, the NSA Statement, and Our Response — Axel Arnbak
• True or false: NSA snooping disclosures hurt cloud adoption — Barb Darrow | Gigaom
  
• FBI Directly Spying On Prominent Muslim-American Politicians, Lawyers And Civil Rights Activists — Mike Masnick | Techdirt
  
• What Were They Thinking? Microsoft Seizes, Returns Majority of No-IP.com’s Business — Nate Cardozo | EFF

… More Disruptive Innovation v. Entrenched Interests …

• Lyft will launch in NYC Jul 11, cars can be hailed initially from Brooklyn and Queens but not from Manhattan – Mike Isaac / New York Times
• Lyft defies New York City taxi agency’s ban, to launch Friday — Cyrus Farivar | Ars Technica
  
• Lyft hit with restraining orders from NY attorney general, Taxi Commission — Josh Lowensohn | The Verge
  
• Lyft reverses under legal pressure, cancels Friday night New York launch — Cyrus Farivar | Ars Technica
  
• Lyft blocked at city gates by New York Attorney General, Taxi Commission
  VentureBeat

And this is just hilarious…

• Aereo: Hey, we’re a cable company after all! — Joe Mullin | Ars Technica 
• Aereo: Okay, Fine, If You Say We Look Like A Duck, We’ll Quack Like A Duck — Mike Masnick | Techdirt