Techdirt. Stories filed under "suspension" Easily digestible tech news... http://www.techdirt.com/ en-us Techdirt. Stories filed under "suspension"http://www.techdirt.com/images/td-88x31.gifhttp://www.techdirt.com/ Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:40:14 PDT School Suspends Students For Finding 'Racy' Photo Teacher Accidentally Put On Their iPads Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121018/16295620755/school-suspends-students-finding-racy-photo-teacher-accidentally-put-their-ipads.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20121018/16295620755/school-suspends-students-finding-racy-photo-teacher-accidentally-put-their-ipads.shtml suspend their students for videotaping misdeeds by staff or faculty... but this latest story is really bizarre. A female middle school teacher in Anderson, Indiana somehow (and the details are not at all clear) put a "racy" photo of herself onto a school-issued iPad that students were using. They found the photo... and the school suspended the students. Again, the details are pretty hazy. The photo was described by one of the students as a "topless" photo, but a police report on the incident said it was "from the neck down, with partial exposure." At the link above, Kash Hill suggests this sounds more like "a classic no-face, no-shirt shot that involved a bra and possible cleavage but no actual nudity."

It's also not entirely clear how it got onto the iPad, though the suggestion is that it may have had something to do with Apple's iCloud syncing across devices. It's entirely possible that the teacher used her own account for her own iPhone and the school iPad, leading to the images from her phone syncing to the iPad. No matter what, it makes no sense that the students are suspended and may face even more punishment:
Those students have been suspended and threatened with expulsion.
The students, quite reasonably, are infuriated at this:
"It's not our fault that she had the photo on there," Troutt said. "We couldn't do anything not to look at it, if it just popped up when he pressed the button. It was her fault that she had the photo on there. Her iPhone synched to it. She had to have pressed something to make all of her photos synch on there."
When asked about it, the school district's assistant superintendent Beth Clark told the media "the students' punishment will not be changed." Hopefully the students will seek to get the suspension overturned in some way, because based on the details this seems absolutely ridiculous.

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]]> that-seems-backwards http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20121018/16295620755 Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:04:00 PDT Twitter Suspends, Unsuspends, Suspends, Unsuspends CascadedBug Account That Mocked Its Downtime Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120622/12041919437/twitter-suspends-unsuspends-suspends-unsuspends-cascadedbug-account-that-mocked-its-downtime.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120622/12041919437/twitter-suspends-unsuspends-suspends-unsuspends-cascadedbug-account-that-mocked-its-downtime.shtml little sensitive about a parody account called CascadedBug, after the supposed cascade bug that caused quite a bit of downtime. Apparently Twitter suspended the account. Then unsuspended it. Then suspended it again. Then unsuspended it again. No matter what, it seems ridiculous that the account was ever suspended. Twitter, whose execs normally have a decent sense of humor, would have won a lot more points with the public by just tweeting at the account, rather than suspending it...

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]]> where's-the-humor? http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120622/12041919437 Fri, 17 Feb 2012 06:09:35 PST US Returns JotForm.com Domain; Still Refuses To Say What Happened Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120216/17043717784/us-returns-jotformcom-domain-still-refuses-to-say-what-happened.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120216/17043717784/us-returns-jotformcom-domain-still-refuses-to-say-what-happened.shtml shutting down JotForm.com through a request to GoDaddy. It appears that the suspension is now ending, though it hasn't fully propagated. What's amazing is that no one in the US government (or at GoDaddy) seems to be willing to explain what happened. When GoDaddy completely shut down JotForm.com with no notice, the folks at JotForm had to inquire as to what the hell happened to their entire website. They were merely told to contact a Secret Service agent. That agent then told JotForm she was too busy to respond to them and would get back to them within a week.

Think about that for a second. The US government completely takes down a small business' website and then is too busy to explain why.

JotForm noted that it was willing to cooperate fully if there were specific users that were a problem, but the Secret Service did not seem to care that it had almost destroyed an entire startup's business:
When I contacted the Secret Service, the agent told me she is busy and she asked for my phone number, and told me they will get back to me within this week. I told them we are a web service with hundreds of thousands of users, so this is a matter of urgency, and we are ready to cooperate fully. I was ready to shutdown any form they request and provide any information we have about the user. Unfortunately, she told me she needs to look at the case which she can do in a few days. I called her many times again to check about the case, but she seems to be getting irritated with me. At this point, we are waiting for them to look into our case.
So far, the Secret Service still isn't talking, returning a bland and meaningless statement to press requests:
"We are aware of the incident and we're reviewing it internally to make sure all the proper procedures and protocols were followed."
GoDaddy, similarly, appears to be staying almost entirely silent.

All of this is completely unacceptable. Almost everything about this sets off alarm bells about over aggressive (and potentially illegal) censorship by the US government of protected free speech. We've been seeing a much more aggressive and overreaching effort by US officials against websites over the past 18 months or so, and at some point, they're going to get smacked down by a court who will explain to them the nature of the First Amendment and the fact that you can't unilaterally take down entire websites without recognizing the collateral damage on legitimate web businesses.

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]]> not-cool http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120216/17043717784 Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:40:58 PST US Government 'Suspends' JotForm.com Over User Generated Forms; Censorship Regime Expands Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120215/18044017773/us-government-suspends-jotformcom-over-user-generated-forms-censorship-regime-expands.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120215/18044017773/us-government-suspends-jotformcom-over-user-generated-forms-censorship-regime-expands.shtml "suspended" by the US government, due to "an ongoing investigation." Because of this JotForm is forcing all of its users to change their forms to use their .net domain rather than their .com.
Many people on the comments assumed the content was posted by us. This can happen to any site that allows public to post content. SOPA may not have passed, but what happened shows that it is already being practiced. All they have to do is to ask GoDaddy to take a site down. We have 2 millions user generated forms. It is not possible for us to manually review all forms. This can happen to any web site that allows user generated content.
I'm at a loss as to how this possibly makes sense. Even if the forms were being used for some illegal purpose (and it's important to note that Section 230 does not apply to criminal activity -- just civil offenses), I still can't fathom a reason why it should lead to everyone else getting censored and an internet startup facing a massive hardship wherein tons of users have had their service disrupted with millions of useful forms being suddenly disappeared.

And I won't even bother spending any time on the fact that apparently it was GoDaddy who helped the US government "suspend" the domain.

For a government that insists it's trying to help small businesses and startups, to go and disrupt one and all of its users over some possible illegal usage by a small number of users is just crazy. It's this kind of overly broad censorship (and, yes, this is clear censorship) that is what people were afraid of under SOPA. As JotForm notes, it's important to recognize that the US government already believes it has these powers. And the damage here for a small business is massive. JotForm has been filling its Twitter feed with customer service attempts at helping upset customers, and making it clear it has no information on why the .com disappeared. It looks like the US government asked, and GoDaddy just took away the domain. If you've never worked for a startup, perhaps you can't imagine just how insanely disruptive and destructive such a situation can be. Everyone is so busy working and building a company -- but something like this means suddenly all of their time has to switch over to help all of those upset customers (and doing so without being able to use the site that everyone will go look at first!).

Activities like this will chill innovation and entrepreneurship in the US. Why locate here or even setup under a .com if the US government might kill your business with no explanation at any moment?

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]]> not-cool http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20120215/18044017773 Thu, 1 Sep 2011 14:11:33 PDT Twitter Keeps Suspending Accounts Based On Highly Questionable DMCA Claims Mike Masnick http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110825/03485715680/twitter-keeps-suspending-accounts-based-highly-questionable-dmca-claims.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110825/03485715680/twitter-keeps-suspending-accounts-based-highly-questionable-dmca-claims.shtml a ton of DMCA takedown notices. That seemed pretty strange to us, because with such short messages, there's little that could be covered by copyright. For the most part, such notices seemed like an abuse of the DMCA, literally claiming that a link to a URL was infringing itself, which is a pretty big stretch. A link by itself hardly passes the inducement test. Twitter, as we noted a year and a half ago, unfortunately, appears to be giving too much credence to such notices -- especially in cases where the tweet is a link to a webpage which possibly links to content elsewhere. That's so far removed, arguing that Twitter is responsible in any way is just ridiculous.

Yet it appears that Twitter hasn't just kept up this practice, but has made it worse. There was a bit of a fuss among some popular hiphop blogs in the last few days as certain Twitter feeds connected to one such blog disappeared. That is, they didn't just take down the tweets in question, but flat out suspended the account. RapRadar, whose twitter feeds were impacted, was not at all pleased, posting this complaint on its website:
If you can't read that, it says:
This lil blue bird keeps fuckin' with us! First you shut down our @RapRadar account cuz 50 and Em went "Psycho" and last night you wanna pull the plug on @RapRadarDotCom with no fair warning. Man, I thought it was gonna be smooth sailing like Chris Cross after a yellow nigga got verified. The kid @ElliottWilson is creepin' on 40K followers but you won't let my company breathe. This damn DMCA ain't nuthin' ta f' wit. For the record: No site has supported the consumption of music legally more than RapRadar.com. Yeah we've provided free streams from day one but no download links unless its a free release. We also link back to iTunes constantly. We play the game the right way and what do we get for it? Shit, I'm not opposed to a lil preferential treatment. Ha! Can we live?
So... at this point, it looks like a totally and completely ridiculous DMCA takedown claim. Let's connect the dots:
  • DMCA notice goes to Twitter, complaining about a tweet with a link in it
  • Rather than pointing out that a mere link is not infringing, Twitter suspends the account
  • That link doesn't even link to infringing content. Instead it links to a blog page
  • That blog page doesn't even link to infringing content. Instead, it links to official free releases, official streams... and iTunes for purchases.
Now, I recognize that Twitter is just playing the legal game here. If it receives a DMCA notice, it goes straight to takedown mode. Thanks to the way the DMCA safe harbors are written, it's tough not to obey a DMCA takedown notice, because otherwise you face legal liability if there is infringement. But it doesn't mean you have to take down the content. In bogus situations you can say so and refuse to take down the content (something that we've done in the past).

I reached out to Twitter to see if I could understand why they would suspend such accounts, and got a link to their DMCA policy, which states:
We respond to valid claims of alleged copyright infringement such as the unauthorized use of a copyrighted image as an account background or account avatar, or Tweets containing a link to allegedly infringing materials.
But that doesn't actually respond to the issue here. These were not links to infringing material. They were links to blog posts that linked to authorized material. Furthermore, Twitter told me that they provide those who are targeted with a takedown with "all info" from the claim including "who made it." This appears to be untrue. I've now seen a few of the takedown notices and they provide no such info, which makes this worse. Twitter users are forced to respond to questionable DMCA takedown claims on links to blog posts that aren't infringing, without even knowing who is issuing the takedown.

It seems like Twitter would have really strong reasons for refusing such takedowns. Twitter could easily point out that a link to a webpage is simply not infringing, thus they're not hosting any infringing content included in the DMCA notice. Instead, it doesn't just block that single tweet but suspends an entire account? That's ridiculous overkill... and exactly what whoever is issuing the takedown notice wants. Even worse, by not providing the information on who filed the takedown, the whole process is completely blind. It's censorship by DMCA takedown with Twitter helping out. That's really unfortunate for a company that has a history of standing up to legal bullies.

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]]> come-on-twitter,-stand-up-for-your-users http://www.techdirt.com/comment_rss.php?sid=20110825/03485715680