Social media can be an extremely powerful tool for gathering, finding and sharing the news. It can also be... a bit of a disaster. It would be nice if such an important question had a simple answer, but they never do, do they? So this week, we're discussing and dissecting whether or not social media is "good" for the way we consume the news.

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A tough case dealing with some horrendous behavior and a pretty broad reading of Minnesota's harassment/stalking laws has resulted in a sustained conviction on felony charges against a minor. The state appeals court summarizes the events in its decision [PDF]:

In March 2016, high school students, W.K., B.L., and appellant A.J.B., discussed that M.B., a fellow student who had been diagnosed with autism and ADHD, had recently posted some tweets discussing girls at school. B.L. and A.J.B. told W.K. that they wanted to post materials on M.B.’s Twitter page to elicit a “negative response.” A.J.B. created a Twitter account with no identifying information called “Jeb Bush’s Guac Bowl.” A.J.B. then began tweeting messages tagging M.B.’s account over two to three hours, with several referring to autism. One post contained a sign saying “Autistic Children Play Here” with a caption reading “Meanwhile at [M.B.]’s Daycare.” Another post contained a checkerboard of images with M.B.’s face and a caption reading “Click the Autistic Child.” Another post encouraged M.B. to “try a new cologne called ‘Anthrax.’” One post encouraged M.B. to “consider suicide,” while another contained an image stating “Consider the following” with a picture of a person holding a Clorox Bleach bottle. A.J.B. also posted an image of Pepe the Frog, “a known hate symbol,” hanging by the neck on a rope.

Another fine example of man's inhumanity to man: high school edition. Trash rando A.J.B. ended up with two misdemeanor charges and one felony stalking charge -- the latter predicated on the victim's disabilities. There are a few concerns with the resulting ruling, not to mention the events leading up to the criminal charges.

To begin with, the victim was not even aware of the tweets until a school administrator brought them to his attention. The administrator had presumably been tipped off by other students. This led to the victim expressing suicidal thoughts and an extreme reluctance to return to school.

This dovetails into the court's weird interpretation of Twitter mechanics. This confusion over how Twitter operates may have played a part in upholding the charges and finding A.J.B.'s speech unprotected by the Constitution. Eric Goldman points out this misapprehension allows the court to bypass the student's free speech defenses, one of which compared tweeting unpleasant messages was no different than "posting flyers on walls."

The court’s technological description of @tweeting is... garbled. It recounts evidence that “the act of tagging someone means that the messages are ‘on their wall. Anyone can see it but [the poster is] just making sure that the [tagged] person sees it.'” The reference to “their wall” in this passage is confusing. I cannot appear in someone else’s Twitter timeline unless they retweet me, whereas in Facebook and LinkedIn, my posts can show up on other people’s walls (at least in some cases) just by including their name in my post. Furthermore, AJB’s barrage of @tweets would NOT appear in AJB’s main newsfeed (as opposed to the “tweets and replies” option), and and would not seen by most readers, if the @ reference was the tweet’s first character; and none of MB’s followers would have seen AJB’s tweets unless they were also followers of AJB. Plus, MB would see the @tweets only if MB hadn’t blocked AJB and only if MB looks in the notifications area (which not everyone does). There’s a lot of technological complexity about how content appears on Twitter that the court glossed over.

As Goldman notes, blocking accounts is one remedy that doesn't involve law enforcement. It's of limited utility, considering new accounts can be created in a manner of minutes, but Twitter does give users some tools to deal with harassment and other unwanted interactions.

Second, this could have been handled by the school, rather than turning it into a criminal case. The school was the entity that brought the tweets to the attention of the student and a case could be made the harassment interfered with M.B.'s ability to continue attending school. While this education interference would have engaged school policies and discipline, this would not be without its own problems. Doing so would effectively punish someone for acts committed off-campus, which would raise its own Constitutional concerns.

The law itself is no help. It's written broadly enough the court finds it easy to criminalize otherwise-protected speech.

Per this court’s interpretation, it’s criminal stalking in Minnesota to send two or more @tweets to a person knowing they would cause the person to “feel frightened, threatened, oppressed, persecuted, or intimidated.” The Minnesota criminal harassment statute is equally dubious, applying when a person sends two or more @tweets “with the intent to abuse, disturb, or cause distress.”

As Goldman notes, many of us are subjected to "criminal" behavior every day on the platform. Perhaps some of us even engage in it, as "causing distress" may mean little more than vehemently disagreeing with someone's statements, views, political/religious preferences, etc.

There are a lot of free speech implications in play. The court threads the needle, but not in a helpful way. In order to find A.J.B.'s speech unprotected, it seizes on A.J.B.'s "targeting" of the autistic student by "tagging" him in the tweets.

The law is bad and the court is reading the law as the legislators wrote it. This could also be the way the legislators intended it to be read, rationalizing that no prosecutor would move forward with questionable charges predicated on a broadly-written law with an absurdly low bar for engagement (two tweets). Legislators either don't know or don't care that prosecutorial discretion means pursuing ridiculous prosecutions and overcharging defendants. It almost never means refusing to move forward with questionable cases. If the ruling is bad, it's because the law invites bad rulings. The fact that the court doesn't understand how Twitter works only makes it worse.

Comcast-owned MSNBC this week took a bit of a beating for an eight-minute "news" segment that was effectively little more than a sappy love letter to their parent company. The segment featured top Comcast lobbyist David Cohen, who years ago began calling himself the company's "Chief Diversity Officer" to tap dance around federal lobbying rules (Comcast yells at us whenever we point that out). The program, aired during the company's Morning Joe program, waxed poetic about Comcast's altruism, at one point using Al Sharpton to compare Comcast’s corporate volunteerism with Nelson Mandela’s lifetime of civil rights work:

Several news outlets were quick to point out this glorified Comcast ad also saw prominent air time from numerous other Comcast-owned media properties, once again highlighting the perils of mindless media consolidation:

"But MSNBC wasn’t alone in covering Comcast Cares Day. NBC affiliates across the nation “pitched in.” NBC Bay Area, for example, ran a PR–sounding segment that was a lot like all of the other ones. So did NBC 5 in Fort Worth, TX, NBC 10 in Philadelphia, NBC 4 in Los Angeles, NBC 5 in Chicago, and NBC Connecticut, to name a few. Other media outlets joined in, including ABC’s WTXL in Tallahassee, FL, The Denver Post, and The Tennessean, among others."

Those of us that track Comcast for a living have been highlighting Cohen and Comcast's disingenuous behavior on this front for several years now. While Comcast volunteer programs certainly can and do help people in some limited capacities, Cohen has perfected the act of using Comcast's minority and low-income advocacy as a grotesque lobbying weapon to perpetuate policies that actively harm the communities Comcast professes to be helping.

For example, Comcast routinely pays some less ethical minority advocacy groups to parrot policies that actively harm their constituents, whether that's supporting the death of net neutrality, the company's latest megamerger, or the elimination of privacy protections for consumers. And Jesse Jackson has been used on occasion to actively oppose things like more cable box competition. This cozy quid pro quo is never put explicitly in writing, letting Cohen and friends become breathlessly indignant when reporters point out the disingenuous, cash-compromised nature of these relationships.

It's a schtick larger media outlets are comically (perhaps intentionally) oblivious to, but one that has been immeasurably successful for Comcast and Cohen.

Cohen played the starring role in selling regulators on Comcast's acquisition of NBC Universal in 2011, crafting conditions it would later be discovered Comcast ignored at its leisure. Cohen's secret weapon during that transaction was Internet Essentials, a program that promised low-income households $10, 5 Mbps broadband for a limited time should they jump through a laundry list of conditions. The program was frequently criticized for being intentionally hard to qualify for, though it provided Cohen an endless sea of photo opportunities to help portray Comcast as a bottomless well of pure altruism.

Cohen's minority and low-income advocacy schtick was so effective, he ultimately nabbed the title of "Chief Diversity Officer" to help further advertise his selfless altruism. Of course that title also conveniently lets Cohen tap dance around flimsy federal lobbying rules, which require an employee register as a lobbyist if they spend more than 20% of their time lobbying for a single client during any three-month span. And again, when you point this out, I've found that Comcast tends to get really upset with you.

The reality is that Comcast would need to do a hell of a lot more volunteering and donating to counter the obvious harm most of the company's terrible policies have on the country. It's indisputable that the company's attacks on net neutrality and privacy protections will drive up costs and harm diverse media outlets and smaller businesses. Comcast's support of protectionist state laws also routinely undermine efforts to bring competition to under-served broadband markets, driving up costs for everybody in the internet ecosystem (but especially the downtrodden parts of the country Comcast professes to adore).

This is a company that has proven time and time again that it doesn't have your best interests at heart. But thanks to American M&A mania and our collective obliviousness to disinformation, the pretense that Comcast is a Robin-Hood-esque champion of the poor and downtrodden has proven immeasurably successful and profitable for what's arguably the least liked company in America.

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Last week, Gizmodo's Dell Cameron has a great report on how the DOJ's Amber Alert site was configured so stupidly that it could be used to redirect people to any website (this was also true of weather.gov and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). And it was being used. To redirect people to hardcore porn. Basically, the sites were designed such that just by knowing the right URL and adding a new URL to the end, it would redirect to those sites. Porn sites used this for a couple of reasons: first, since they'd now be getting referrals from high ranking sites, it can help their Google ranking. Second, because the primary URL would come from a trusted source again, it would help their Google ranking. And, finally, the links may look much more legit to people doing searches (though that would be more true of scam sites than porn sites).

Redirect scripts like this used to be fairly common, but they died off long ago. Except in the federal government. From Cameron's article:

“This is like the 1990s called and wants its vulnerable redirect script back,” said Adriel Desautels, founder of the penetration testing firm Netragard.

But, here's the thing: does this mean that the DOJ (and the NOAA) could be violating SESTA/FOSTA? It's possible! And that just goes to show how poorly drafted the law is. Remember, under the law, it is now illegal to "participate in a venture" that "knowingly" is "assisting, supporting, or facilitating" a violation of sex trafficking laws. So, if someone were to create a DOJ Amber Alert redirect to a sex trafficking website (or just an escort site, since people keep insisting those serve little purpose other than sex trafficking) would the DOJ be in violation?

The obvious response is that the DOJ isn't "knowingly" doing this. But... is that true? As Cameron's article notes, every time you hit one of those Amber Alert redirects, the DOJ gives you a nice little parting message:

Is that enough to "knowingly" participate? Maybe. I would bet that if non-governmental websites popped up similar messages, SESTA/FOSTA supporters would argue it's proof of knowledge. After all, Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers claimied that merely "turning a blind eye" was enough to prove "knowledge." And here, clearly, the DOJ must be logging those exit pages. Is it ignoring them? Is that turning a blind eye? Does that count as knowledge?

Maybe it's a stretch, but the fact that the language of the bill even makes this a possibility just demonstrates how poorly drafted the bill is, and shame on all the politicians who refused to step up and fix it.

Numerous news outlets this week proudly, but inaccurately, declared that net neutrality was now officially dead. CNET was one of several outlets forced to walk back its headline and story proclaiming net neutrality's premature demise after industry watchers pointed out that wasn't actually the case. If you look at the actual net neutrality repeal order, you'll note that it's actually pretty wishy washy in terms of the actual repeal date:

"Effective dates: April 23, 2018, except for amendatory instructions 2, 3, 5, 6, and 8, which are delayed as follows. The FCC will publish a document in the Federal Register announcing the effective date(s) of the delayed amendatory instructions, which are contingent on OMB approval of the modified information collection requirements in 47 CFR 8.1 (amendatory instruction 5). The Declaratory Ruling, Report and Order, and Order will also be effective upon the date announced in that same document."

Consumer advocate Harold Feld, who arguably knows more about FCC policy than anybody else in the States, dug deep into the policy weeds over at his blog explaining what's going on. The overly-simplistic version: Before net neutrality gets formally repealed and flimsy replacement policies take effect, the FCC will wait for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to review the much weaker transparency rule under the Paperwork Reduction Act. Once OMB signs off, the FCC will publish a second notice in the Federal Register announcing when everything goes into effect.

That's expected sometime in the next month or two, but it hasn't happened yet, meaning that net neutrality rules remain on the books, for now. Feld, meanwhile, notes this odd bureaucratic delay is not normal, but appears to be very much by design:

"This is, to say the least, highly unusual. There is absolutely no reason for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai to have stretched out this process so ridiculously long. It is especially puzzling in light Pai’s insistence that he had to rush through repeal of net neutrality over the objections of just about everyone but the ISPs and their cheerleaders because every day — nay every minute! — ISPs suffer under the horrible, crushing burden of Title II is another day in which Princess Comcast Celestia, Princess Twilight Verizon Sparkle, and all the other Broadband Equestria Girls must endure the agonies of a blasted regulatory Hellscape rather than provide us all with wonderful new innovative services at even lower cost than they do now."

The question then becomes: why is Ajit Pai's FCC taking so long to formally repeal rules he (falsely) claims are devastating Comcast, AT&T and Verizon?

My informed guess (supported by at least two industry lawyers I've spoken to) is that Pai is trying to buy time. Why? ISPs know that the FCC's repeal is on shaky legal ground thanks in large part to bizarre FCC behavior and numerous ethical gaffes. ISPs like Comcast are also nervous about the fact that more than half the states in the country are now pursuing their own net neutrality rules. As such, ISP lobbyists and hired wonks are pushing for a fake, loophole-filled net neutrality law with one real purpose: pre-empting tougher state laws and preventing the 2015 rules from being re-established should the FCC lose in court.

It's likely the FCC bogged things down in bureaucracy intentionally to buy time for ISP lobbyists to try and drum up support for this bogus law. Unfortunately, as they have throughout this entire affair, ISPs appear to have misjudged the political environment here, and have faced a steep uphill climb in getting support for the crap law they wrote (incarnations of which are being pushed by Marsha Blackburn in the House and John Kennedy in the Senate).

As ISPs grow more nervous about losing in court and state net neutrality efforts, calls for an ISP crafted "Congressional solution" have only grown. But by and large most net neutrality supporters on the streets and in Congress appear to not be falling for this little ruse, knowing full well that the chance of this cash-compromised Congress actually passing tough rules are virtually nonexistent.

If you're a fan of net neutrality, the best chance in saving the rules rests with a reversal by the courts during the looming court battle. Failing that, your best bet is voting in politicians that prioritize healthy competition, truly open markets, and consumer and small business welfare over monopoly protectionism and cronyism.

A couple of years after it happened, Australian citizens are finally being (indirectly) informed their government harvested cell site location info to track their daily activities. This isn't the work of an intelligence agency or a secretive law enforcement effort. Instead, it's an (unannounced) partnership between the Australian Bureau of Statistics (which handles the Australian Census) and a cellphone service provider. The provider apparently willingly turned over cell site info without a court demand, government mandate, or consultation with its customers. Asher Wolf has the details at Medium:

The ABS claims population estimates have a “major data gap” and so they’ve been a busy bee figuring out a way to track crowd movement. Their solution? Mobile device user data.

“…with its near-complete coverage of the population, mobile device data is now seen as a feasible way to estimate temporary populations,” states a 2017 conference extract for a talk by ABS Demographer Andrew Howe.

While the “Estimated Resident Population” (ERP) is Australia’s official population measure, the ABS felt the pre-existing data wasn’t ‘granular’ enough. What the ABS really wanted to know was where you’re moving, hour by hour, through the CBD, educational hubs, tourist areas.

Third-party records are almost always easily-accessible. They are subject to very limited protections. But generally when the government wants access to records, it's because they're targeting someone in a criminal or national security investigation. What few people expect is for the government to obtain this data en masse, then proudly proclaim its usefulness a couple of years after it's already made use of it.

Cellphone users weren't informed of the government's plans. And the telco made no effort to inform affected customers or give them an opportunity to opt out. While it may look like an innocuous effort to gauge temporary population increases linked to special events and holiday weekends, the information obtained could easily be mined to gain insight on traffic to places of worship, government buildings, airports, workplaces, and protests.

Supposedly, the information has been anonymized. It obviously hasn't been completely stripped of personal information. The slide deck [PDF] detailing the effort notes the data can be broken down by age and sex. The anonymization claim is made without any support from the ABS, which still has yet to provide any further info -- much less a privacy impact assessment -- via its website.

As Wolf points out, the ABS doesn't exactly have a great track record on either data anonymization or protecting the massive amount of data it collects.

Considering the last attempt by a government department to roll-their-own-crypto resulted in the MBS/PBS data breach of 2.5 million Australians, it’d be nice to know exactly how the ABS or telco anonymised and aggregated the data — especially since the ABS on-sells micro-data, from time to time.

As other rights agencies and activists note, the collection of personal info in bulk by the government is always alarming. At best, the techniques deployed here are "deeply unethical." At worst, they conjure images of the worst government behavior: the use of personal info to target specific groups for additional surveillance or internment (as was done with the Japanese during World War II using US Census data). The entire project was undertaken with zero public notice by an agency already known for being cavalier in its treatment of the wealth of personal information obtained through the Census.

ABS has promised more answers but has ignored Wolf's direct questions about study -- including the telco involved and the method used to anonymize the data. When it finally delivers its "detailed information paper" -- two years after the fact -- it's unlikely the details will include the answers Wolf is seeking.

Although blogging may have lost its early excitement for many, in some countries it still represents a vital channel for news that may not be available elsewhere. For example, as Global Voices explains:

Blogging emerged in Tanzania around 2007 and became popular as an alternative news platform with educated, middle class people, as well as politicians and political parties. In Tanzania, where media historically holds strong ties to government interests, blogging opened up possibilities for individuals to establish private news outlets that proved immensely powerful in terms of reach and readership.

The current Tanzanian government is not very happy about this uncontrolled flow of information to the people. But instead of anything so crude as shutting down blogs directly, it has come up with a more subtle, but no less effective, approach:

On March 16, 2018, the United Republic of Tanzania issued the Electronic and Postal Communications (Online Content) Regulations demanding that bloggers must register and pay over USD $900 per year to publish online.

To put that in context, Tanzania's GDP per capita was under $900 in 2016, so the new fees are completely out of reach for the majority of people in the country. As Quartz notes, in addition, the registration process is onerous, and the fines for infringement serious:

applicants are expected to fill a form detailing the estimated cost of investment, the number of directors and stakeholders in the platform, their share of capital, staff qualifications, expected dates of commencing operations, besides future growth plans.

But even after providing this documentation, authorities still reserve the right to revoke a permit if a site publishes content that "causes annoyance, threatens harm or evil, encourages or incites crimes" or jeopardizes "national security or public health and safety." Officials could also force managers to remove "prohibited content" within 12 hours or face fines not less than five million shillings ($2,210) or a year in prison.

The situation is slightly easier in Tanzania's northern neighbor, Uganda. Under a new order there (pdf), "All online data communication service providers, including online publishers, online news platforms, online radio and television operators" are required to register with the Uganda Communications Commission. However, there's no mention of fees, or punishments for non-compliance. But if life for Ugandan bloggers seems to be easier than for those in Tanzania, a new daily tax on social media is designed to discourage ordinary users from engaging in what Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni calls "lugambo", or gossip, online. A report in the local Daily Monitor newspaper quotes the President as saying:

"I am not going to propose a tax on internet use for educational, research or reference purposes... these must remain free. However, olugambo on social media (opinions, prejudices, insults, friendly chats) and advertisements by Google and I do not know who else must pay tax because we need resources to cope with the consequences of their lugambo"

The amount of the daily tax is not clear -- a BBC report on the move says it might be either 100 or 200 Ugandan shillings ($0.013 or $0.027) a day -- and there are no details yet on how the new law will be enforced and the taxes collected for services deemed to involve "gossip". But as another Global Voices post notes, this social media tax is just the latest clampdown on the online world in Uganda. It quotes a January 2018 report from Unwanted Witness, a Ugandan NGO, which said:

2017 registered the highest number of Ugandans ever arrested for their online expression and these arrests are clearly targeted crackdown on free flow of information and speech on the Internet.

Different as they are, what the moves in Tanzania and Uganda both show is African governments coming up with new ways to muzzle online commentators that seek to tell people what the official media don't.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+.

Remember GEMSA (Global Equty Management (SA) Pty. Ltd.)? That's the Australian patent troll who "won" a Stupid Patent of the Month award from EFF for its silly patent (US Patent 6,690,400 on "virtual cabinets representing a discrete operating system." GEMSA sued a bunch of companies, including Airbnb and Zillow for supposedly violating the patent. Oh, and then it sued EFF in Australia, getting an order from the court demanding that EFF take down its article and barring EFF from ever publishing anything about any GEMSA patents.

That kinda thing is not going to fly in the US, and so EFF went to court in the US, seeking declaratory judgment that such an Australian court order was totally unenforceable in the US under the SPEECH Act. Late last year, the court gave a thorough and complete victory to EFF, making it clear that GEMSA could not, in any way, hope to enforce its Australian order in the US, as it clearly would violate EFF's First Amendment rights.

And now, the US Patent Office has basically killed GEMSA's patent that EFF called out in the first place, via the all important inter partes review system that is currently being challenged at the Supreme Court (ruling coming soon...).

The ’400 patent described its “invention” as “a Graphic User Interface (GUI) that enables a user to virtualize the system and to define secondary storage physical devices through the graphical depiction of cabinets.” In other words, virtual storage cabinets on a computer. E-Bay, Alibaba, and Booking.com, filed a petition for inter partes review arguing that claims from the ’400 patent were obvious in light of the Partition Magic 3.0 User Guide (1997) from PowerQuest Corporation. Three administrative patent judges from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) agreed.

The PTAB opinion notes that Partition Magic’s user guide teaches each part of the patent’s Claim 1, including the portrayal of a “cabinet selection button bar,” a “secondary storage partitions window,” and a “cabinet visible partition window.”

The opinion demonstrated this graphically as well:

The PTAB laughed off GEMSA's argument that the original owner of the patent, Flash Vos, somehow "moved the computer industry a quantum leap forward in the late 90's" by pointing out that GEMSA "has put forth no evidence that Flash Vos or GEMSA actually had any commercial success." Ouch.

I'm curious if GEMSA will now seek to sue the US Patent Office in Australia as well...

It's said that there is no honor among thieves, but it should be obvious that such a blanket axiom is bound to be at least partially bullshit. Still, this mantra gets applied to the pirating community by its enemies, with those that rip and/or view pirated content labeled as ungrateful kid-slobs, simply looking for any content they can gobble up without any payment whatsoever. Any value or benefit derived from this community is denied or ignored, with the spotlight being only on the inflated injury this same community inflicts on unimaginably wealthy companies and studios.

Again, it should be obvious that this is all bound to be bullshit.

In fact, we've discussed the potential benefits to be found within these communities often in the past. Pirate communities can be viewed as a sort of market study companies get for free, serve as a spotlight on under-served potential customers, and not to mention that this community often buys more content then does their non-pirating cousins. None of this is to excuse copyright infringement, of course, but rather serves to remind us that the world is not black and white, and is instead muddled, complicated, and mushy.

Much like Amazon's streaming service the past few weeks, actually. A fact we only really know about due to this same pirating community doing the investigative work for free.

This week there’s been a sustained chorus of disapproval over the quality of pirate video releases sourced from Amazon Prime. The anger is usually directed at piracy groups who fail to capture content in the correct manner but according to a number of observers, the problem is actually at Amazon’s end.

Discussions on Reddit, for example, report that episodes in a single TV series have been declining in filesize and bitrate, from 1.56 GB in 720p at a 3073 kb/s video bitrate for episode 1, down to 907 MB in 720p at just 1514 kb/s video bitrate for episode 10. Numerous theories as to why this may be the case are being floated around, including that Amazon is trying to save on bandwidth expenses. While this is a possibility, the company hasn’t made any announcements to that end.

Reports suggest the drop in quality is no small thing. Further investigation has shown that the streaming quality via Amazon Prime has had something like a 50% drop. Given how clear it is that the quality of legitimate services has a direct impact on the public's willingness to engage in piracy, we can only speculate on why Amazon thought that downgrading its streaming quality was a good idea. What doesn't seem to be in question, however, is that it did so on purpose.

With Amazon distancing itself from the issues, piracy groups have already begun to dig in the knife. Release group DEFLATE has been particularly critical.

“Amazon, in their infinite wisdom, have decided to start fucking with the quality of their encodes. They’re now reaching Netflix’s subpar 1080p.H264 levels, and their H265 encodes aren’t even close to what Netflix produces,” the group said in a file attached to S02E07 of The Good Fight released on Sunday. “Netflix is able to produce drastic visual improvements with their H265 encodes compared to H264 across every original. In comparison, Amazon can’t decide whether H265 or H264 is going to produce better results, and as a result we suffer for it.”

An expert in video encoding that TorrentFreak spoke with took things further into the technical realm, but the upshot is that the stream quality has been cut in half in a way that looks to be an attempt to serve videos at reduced bandwidth. We still can only guess, because Amazon isn't talking. Unlike the pirate community, however.

With the situation failing to improve during the week, by the time piracy group DEFLATE released S03E14 of Supergirl on Tuesday their original criticism had transformed into flat-out insults.

“These are only being done in H265 because Amazon have shit the bed, and it’s a choice between a turd sandwich and a giant douche,” they wrote, offering these images as illustrative of the problem and these indicating what should be achievable.

With DEFLATE advising customers to start complaining to Amazon, the memes have already begun, with unfavorable references to now-defunct group YIFY (which was often chastized for its low quality rips) and even a spin on one of the most well known anti-piracy campaigns.

As of the past few days, it seems that Amazon has made changes on its end, restoring the original quality of Prime's streams. The company is still refusing to provide any kind of explanation as to why any of this happened to begin with, but it seems quite clear that without the pirating community calling them out, Amazon's customer service claims that all issues were at the end-user and not with the stream itself would have been accepted for much longer, if not indefinitely. Without the pirate hobbyists, they would have gotten away with it.