A Pennsylvania legislator with little to lose but his remaining reputation has decided to burn that down on his way out of office. State rep Will Tallman wants to exit in a blazing cloud of idiocy and is asking his fellow reps to be as stupid as he is. (h/t Max Kennerly)

On Friday, Tallman sent a memo to the 203-member state House seeking support for a bill he dubbed the “Teacher Code of Ethics,” which legal experts questioned as unconstitutional overreach.

In the memo, Tallman said his bill would forbid public school teachers from endorsing, supporting or opposing candidates or incumbents for local, state and federal offices while in the classroom. On the job, teachers could not discuss enacted or pending legislation, regulations, executive orders or court cases involving any level or branch of government. They could not talk about activities “that hamper or impede” law enforcement actions or military recruiters on campus.

Tallman actually believes children as young as the age of 5 are being "indoctrinated" by teachers with ideological axes to grind. His conclusion appears to be based on things people like him have said in the recent past without offering citations or evidence.

As a member of the House Education Committee, he said, he has received “half a dozen to a dozen” complaints about teachers inserting their political beliefs into non-germane topics. His adult children and grandchildren also complained to him about the same issue, he said.

So, the braintrust behind this assertion includes three missionaries and their children and 6-12 complaints over the past decade. Obviously, the only conclusion to draw is that indoctrination is out of hand and only the powerful velvet fist of government regulation can stop it. If the First Amendment must be destroyed to save the children, it's a sacrifice Tallman is willing to make on behalf of the few that agree with him and the large majority of non-idiots who don't.

Everyone who isn't Tallman has already greeted his proposed legislation with Constitution-based ridicule. The law will never pass. If something goes horribly wrong and the bill does pass, the courts will strike it down immediately.

Tallman believes it won't. Tallman -- again without offering supporting evidence -- firmly believes this same sort of unconstitutional garbage is already law elsewhere in the country.

Tallman stood by his bill, saying four other states, which he could not name, have enacted similar legislation, and that it would be up to the courts to determine if the enacted laws and his bill are legal.

Follow-up?

"This will have to play out in court," he said.

Sorry, but the game goes to The Morning Call.

It already has.

The Morning Call offers far more than cases it can't name in support of its statement. Readers are given a list of precedential Supreme Court decisions striking down similar unconstitutional restrictions on speech.

The bill has zero chance to survive a Constitutional challenge should it somehow make its way from half-formed brain fart to actual law. No one else in the legislature appears willing to push Tallman's Folly along, meaning the legislator will have to handle all of his own agitating while short-timing his way through his last few months in office.

Tallman could have exited office gracefully -- remembered vaguely as that one guy who did the government thing for nine years. Instead, he chose to be remembered for the hill he chose to retire on -- a stupid law so facially unconstitutional it could only have been dreamed up by someone who uses family members as focus groups.

On September 14th, we wrote about a draft executive order basically tasking the executive branch with "investigating" the major internet companies for evidence of "bias" that might lead to antitrust activity. As we wrote at the time, the draft executive order was poorly drafted, didn't make much sense, and was almost certainly unconstitutional. It took a week, but the rest of the tech policy world finally discovered the same draft executive order this past Friday (amusingly with some insisting that they had the "scoop" a week after we wrote about it).

Now, the White House has admitted that the document is "real", though they're not entirely sure who crafted it, it hasn't gone through any of the normal processes, and there's no intention of moving forward with it. In other words, it sounds like a pet project of someone in the White House to have in a drawer in case it was needed at some future date. From the Washington Post:

But three White House aides soon insisted they didn’t write the draft order, didn’t know where it came from and generally found it to be unworkable policy. One senior White House official confirmed the document had been floating around the White House but had not gone through the formal process, which is controlled by the staff secretary.

Asked about the document, Lindsay Walters, the deputy White House press secretary, said of the digital-age ‘whodunit’ on Saturday: “Although the White House is concerned about the conduct of online platforms and their impact on society, this document is not the result of an official White House policymaking process.”

There is some speculation in the article that the document actually originated from Yelp, which has spent the past decade or so trying to get any government anywhere to bring the antitrust hammer down on Google. If that turns out to be true, it speaks very poorly of Yelp, as a company trying to leverage an obviously bullshit claim of "search bias" to try to achieve its unrelated goals. It would also almost certainly backfire on Yelp in a big way, as the biggest tool that the government has to try to "punish" Google would be to modify Section 230 of the CDA -- which, arguably, Yelp relies on much more than Google does.

It's good that this document is clearly going nowhere, though it still is worth noting that at least someone in the White House thought it was worth passing around for discussion as they try to determine "what to do" about the made up problem of "bias" in search.

It all seems so far away now, but in 2013, during the early days of the Snowden revelations, a story about the NSA's activities emerged that apparently came from a different source. Bloomberg reported (behind a paywall, summarized by Ars Technica) that Microsoft was providing the NSA with information about newly-discovered bugs in the company's software before it patched them. It gave the NSA a window of opportunity during which it could take advantage of those flaws in order to gain access to computer systems of interest. Later that year, the Washington Post reported that the NSA was spending millions of dollars per year to acquire other zero-days from malware vendors.

A stockpile of vulnerabilities and hacking tools is great -- until they leak out, which is precisely what seems to have happened several times with the NSA's collection. The harm that lapse can cause was vividly demonstrated by the WannaCry ransomware. It was built on a Microsoft zero-day that was part of the NSA's toolkit, and caused very serious problems to companies -- and hospitals -- around the world.

The other big problem with the NSA -- or the UK's GCHQ, or Germany's BND -- taking advantage of zero-days in this way is that it makes it inevitable that other actors will do the same. An article on the Access Now site confirms that China is indeed seeking out software flaws that it can use for attacking other systems:

In November 2017, Recorded Future published research on the publication speed for China's National Vulnerability Database (with the memorable acronym CNNVD). When they initially conducted this research, they concluded that China actually evaluates and reports vulnerabilities faster than the U.S. However, when they revisited their findings at a later date, they discovered that a majority of the figures had been altered to hide a much longer processing period during which the Chinese government could assess whether a vulnerability would be useful in intelligence operations.

As the Access Now article explains, the Chinese authorities have gone beyond simply keeping zero-days quiet for as long as possible. They are actively discouraging Chinese white hats from participating in international hacking competitions because this would help Western companies learn about bugs that might otherwise be exploitable by China's intelligence services. This is really bad news for the rest of us. It means that China's huge and growing pool of expert coders are no longer likely to report bugs to software companies when they find them. Instead, they will be passed to the CNNVD for assessment. Not only will bug fixes take longer to appear, exposing users to security risks, but the Chinese may even weaponize the zero-days in order to break into other systems.

Another regrettable aspect of this development is that Western countries like the US and UK can hardly point fingers here, since they have been using zero-days in precisely this way for years. The fact that China -- and presumably Russia, North Korea and Iran amongst others -- have joined the club underlines what a stupid move this was. It may have provided a short-term advantage for the West, but now that it's become the norm for intelligence agencies, the long-term effect is to reduce the security of computer systems everywhere by leaving known vulnerabilities unpatched. It's an unwinnable digital arms race that will be hard to stop now. It also underlines why adding any kind of weakness to cryptographic systems would be an incredibly reckless escalation of an approach that has already put lives at risk.

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

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A few weeks back, we did a post trying to explain how the planned meeting between Attorney General Jeff Sessions and a group of state Attorneys General to "discuss" how to deal with the imaginary problem of "political bias" on social media platforms actually represented a serious First Amendment problem. The government simply isn't allowed to pressure companies into any sort of compelled speech, and yet it appears that's exactly what these law enforcement officials were trying to do.

Late last week, we signed onto a detailed letter put together by the think tank TechFreedom, explaining why this meeting is so problematic.

We write to express our concern over your plans to convene a meeting of state attorneys general later this month “to discuss a growing concern that [operators of popular social media services and search engines] may be hurting competition and intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms.” The First Amendment bars the government from attempting to “correct” the first alleged problem, political bias, including through the antitrust laws, and sharply limits how the antitrust laws can be used against anticompetitive behavior beyond editorial bias. Essentially, antitrust law can prescribe anticompetitive economic conduct but “cannot be used to require a speaker to include certain material in its speech product.” … For all these reasons, we are skeptical that there are any grounds for legal action that could arise out of your inquiry.

The letter also highlights why the very idea of a "fairness doctrine" for the internet is Constitutionally impossible, not to mention ridiculous, given that the push for it is coming from the very same Republicans who have spent years falsely "warning" that the Democrats wanted to bring back a "fairness doctrine" for broadcast TV.

A Fairness Doctrine for the Internet Would Be Unconstitutional. The President and top congressional Republicans have talked about the need to ensure the “fairness” of social media platforms and search engines. Consciously or otherwise, this invokes not antitrust law but the “Fairness Doctrine” imposed on radio and television broadcasters by the Federal Communications Commission from 1949 until 1987. In theory, the Fairness Doctrine required broadcasters to represent a wide spectrum of opinion on controversial issues of public importance. The Supreme Court upheld this Doctrine in Red Lion (1969) — but only because it declined to extend the full protection of the First Amendment to broadcasters on the grounds that they received government licenses to use a scarce public resource: the airwaves. Five years later, the Court categorically rejected mandating that newspapers offer a right of reply.

Anything like the Fairness Doctrine would undoubtedly be struck down as unconstitutional if applied to any other media — whether to Fox News (the cable network) or Internet media....

Ironically, it was conservatives who led the fight to repeal the Fairness Doctrine over four decades — because it hurt conservatives most: The threat of losing an FCC license discouraged broadcasters from including non-mainstream voices in their coverage and made impossible alternative media offerings with an unabashed conservative “bias.” Indeed, it was President Reagan’s FCC that repealed the Fairness Doctrine in 1987.

The letter, targeted at Jeff Sessions repeatedly reminds him how such a tool might be used in the other direction as well:

The last thing conservatives should want is a Democratic administration with such arbitrary power (or a Republican administration, for that matter). A Warren administration, say, could use such powers to coerce existing social media sites and search engines to disadvantage conservatives (in the name of neutrality and fairness, and stopping “fake news,” of course) and also to prohibit the “Facebook for conservatives” network recently called for by Donald Trump, Jr.

It's quite incredible that we're even discussing this. A fairness doctrine doesn't make any sense, and is broadly unconstitutional for a whole host of reasons. What's bizarre and troubling is how quickly those who like to wear blue or red uniforms like to rush to it as soon as they feel one area of the media is "biased" against them, not recognizing how it would clearly be used in other areas of the media as well.

While it appears that Sessions' gathering with Attornerys General will happen, hopefully all it serves to do is remind them all that the First Amendment exists, and that they are Constitutionally prohibited from messing with how online platforms present content.

So we've pretty well established that somebody flooded the FCC's website with bogus comments during the agency's unpopular attack on net neutrality last year. Many of these comments were made using lifted identities (like Senators Jeff Merkley and Pat Toomey, or my own). Other comments were made using the identities of dead people. Many of the comments were made by a bot that pulled some of these fake identities in alphabetical order from a hacked database of some kind. Exactly 444,938 of those comments were made using Russian e-mail addresses.

The general consensus among activists and journalists is that it was broadband providers or a partisan advocacy group linked to broadband providers, though the FCC's total refusal to aid investigations have made proving this rather difficult. This week, the New York Times sued the FCC for its ongoing refusal to adequately respond to FOIA requests regarding the incident. In an interesting twist however, the Times seems more interested in the Russian angle of the story than the wholesale fraud that occurred:

"The request at issue in this litigation involves records that will shed light on the extent to which Russian nationals and agents of the Russian government have interfered with the agency notice-and-comment process about a topic of extensive public interest: the government’s decision to abandon “net neutrality.” Release of these records will help broaden the public’s understanding of the scope of Russian interference in the American democratic system."

It's unclear whether the Times actually thinks the Russian angle to this story is really the heart of the matter, or whether they're using concerns surrounding other Russian disinformation efforts to help bring some additional national security gravitas to the effort to expose home-grown graft and disinformation.

It's certainly possible Russia saw the net neutrality fight as another opportunity to sow division. But it's also worth noting that bogus comments supporting bad, usually anti-consumer policy is something that's been a problem across numerous agencies for several years, from fake consumers supporting efforts to rein in the banking industry, to the NFL submitting fake comments in opposition to efforts to eliminate the so-called black out rule.

On its face, those mostly likely responsible are the companies trying to shape the policies in question, and here too the most likely culprits in the net neutrality fracas are telecom monopolies with long histories of precisely this sort of nonsense.

Regardless, the Times suit makes it abundantly clear that the FCC refused to lift a finger to help reporters (or law enforcement) get to the bottom of the matter, and has routinely tried to use inapplicable FOIA exemptions (6, B5, 7E) to avoid having to share any real data:

"Repeatedly, the FCC has responded to The Times’s attempt to resolve this matter without litigation with protestations that the agency lacked the technical capacity to respond to the request, the invocation of shifting rationales for rejecting The Times’s request, and the misapplication of FOIA’s privacy exemption to duck the agency’s responsibilities under FOIA."

While it will likely take a while, slow progress is being made to force the FCC's hand on this issue. Journalist Jason Prechtel enjoyed a legal victory this week after he also sued the FCC for refusing to adequately respond to FOIA requests, data from which (largely the e-mail addresses and .CSV files utilized in the bot campaign) should surface in a few months. It's pretty obvious that there's something the FCC doesn't want explored here, and that something may just be exposed in time for not only the midterm elections, but also for the wide array of lawsuits headed the FCC's way this fall.

The DHS says assaults on CBP and Border Patrol officers have been steadily increasing since 2015, with a 46.3% surge in violence against officers in 2017 alone. Sure, it fits the current narrative that undocumented immigrants are inherently dangerous. But is it true? Not even remotely.

The CBP and Border Patrol are using new math to report assaults, allowing the DHS to portray patrolling the border as far more dangerous than it actually is. The Intercept exposed the bogus math earlier this year, thanks to a CBP official's inadvertently frank admission the numbers were incredibly inflated.

Almost the entire increase — 271 purported assaults — was said to have occurred in one sector, the Rio Grande Valley, in South Texas. A large number of the assaults supposedly occurred on a single day, according to charts and details provided by Christiana Coleman, a CBP public affairs spokesperson. In response to questions from The Intercept, Coleman explained in an email that “an incident in the Rio Grande Valley Sector on February 14, 2017, involved seven U.S. Border Patrol Agents assaulted by six subjects utilizing three different types of projectiles (rocks, bottles, and tree branches), totaling 126 assaults.”

What should have been classified as six or seven assaults at the most was recast as 126 assaults during a single incident. This should have prompted some Congressional concern about the CBP's reporting processes. It didn't. Instead, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs "expressed concern" about the perceived increase in assaults and asked the DHS Inspector General to get to the bottom of it.

This "concern" predated the Intercept's exposure of the bogus math, so it might explain why the IG believes under-reporting might be the problem, rather than the Jesus-like ability to feed hundreds of dangerous foreigner narratives using only a couple of larger altercations. The report [PDF] says the numbers are "unreliable," but doesn't focus on the real reason the yearly assault totals are suddenly increasing after a period of steady decline.

Here are the numbers since 2010:

And here's what the IG feels the problem is.

In response to a request from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs for information on assaults on CBP and ICE law enforcement officers, we determined that, from fiscal years 2010 to 2017, the number of assaults against CBP law enforcement officers decreased from 1,089 to 856. During the same time period, assaults of ICE law enforcement officers remained the same at 48. However, the data does not show a clear trend over that time period and the number of assaults varied widely from year to year. Our analysis also shows that, for a number of reasons, the data is unreliable and does not accurately reflect whether assaults have increased or decreased. For example, although both components introduced new reporting systems in FY 2016, law enforcement officers continue to use informal methods instead to document assaults and remain unfamiliar with these reporting systems. Further, the officers do not always report acts of physical resistance or attempted assaults, even when required to do so.

Unsurprisingly, the DHS, CBP, Border Patrol, and ICE are all willing to take steps to increase the number of reported assaults. If these agencies can gain the sympathies of Congressional committees by inflating numbers and over-reporting assaults, they have everything to gain. The recommendations include more training for officers to help them recognize assaults and expanding the definition of assault to include "physical touch" or resisting arrest. If someone picks up a rock or tree branch but never uses it against an officer, that's also an assault.

This should ensure the number of reported assaults continues to increase, shoring up the administration's fear-based immigration platform. Adding the expanded "assault" definition to the CBP's bogus math, a single subject resisting arrest has "assaulted" every officer involved in the takedown, whether they were injured or not. The CBP's force multiplier can turn one strenuous arrest into a half-dozen assaults and "concerned" Congressional committees can take it from there.

The use of bogus multiplication is completely ignored in this report. Someone in Congress needs to send a letter to the IG telling the office to take a look at the sketchy math behind the "unreliable" numbers. CBP et al can't be trusted to tell the truth about officer safety until this has received a thorough examination.

This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side come in response to Ajit Pai's whining about California's net neutrality effort — and, more specifically, in response to a commenter making the silly blanket statement that all regulation fails and governments cannot do anything right. In first place, ShadowNinja with some counterexamples:

Black and white statements like that are always wrong. There's literally tons and tons of government programs that worked great and didn't backfire in the long run. Here's just a short list of what things I can think of off the top of my head that you can thank the government for, that you can't say anything bad about how they backfired.

• Having safe food that's not laced with poison or other things that will make you sick.
• Knowing that up to $250,000 worth of assets will the safe in the event of your bank going under thanks to FDIC insurance required by law.
• Not having rivers and oceans that literally catch on fire because of how polluted they are with harmful chemicals/etc. that businesses dumped in them (yes, this really happened in the US).
• Having much cleaner air because of the same environmental regulations, and not having air so polluted that people have to wear smog masks just to go outside, and some wealthy literally go on 'clean air vacations' where it's less polluted (this is the reality today in China in a number of cities thanks to lack of regulation).
• Knowing that any car you purchase has passed rigorous government safety inspections when it was designed, and any used car you purchased was inspected as well to make sure that it's still safe to drive. Such regulations are responsible for a consistent decline in automobile accidents (which has long been the #1 killer in America).

In second place, it's Jeremy Lyman with a similar point:

I bought a gallon of milk in the grocery store last week, and I actually got a measured gallon of the listed substance for the posted price. It also didn't make me ill when I consumed it.

https://www.fda.gov/downloads/food/guidancecomplianceregulatoryinformation/guidancedocuments/food labelingnutrition/foodlabelingguide/ucm265446.pdf

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/ cfcfr/CFRSearch.cfm?fr=101.7

https://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/GuidanceDocumentsRegulatoryInformation/Milk/default.htm

I'd wager that the government does thousands of things right in your life, it's just transparent when it's running smoothly.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with one more comment from that post, this time from Anonymous Anonymous Coward and directed at one of Pai's statements:

He know what the truth is, it just won't fit in his mouth.

"Of course, those who demand greater government control of the Internet haven’t given up."

Pai's disingenuous characterization is not very subtle. In fact the demand is not for government control of the Internet, but for control over internet providers, no matter what flavor.

Control to keep the expected dumb pipes dumb. Control to encourage actual competition to keep quality high and prices low.

Control to keep those offering service honest in their advertising and billing practices.

Control to separate content from access.

Control to keep corporations from overly influencing Government in their favor rather than the owners of this country, the people.

Next, we've got a quick comment from Gary about an attempt to use the GDPR to hide a public US court document:

And also weird how the ISP is putting the pressure on the website. It's almost as if there should be some law to limit intermediary liability...

Over on the funny side, our first place winner comes after we clarified what happened with the Apple movie "deletion" kerfuffle, which turned out to be about dumb regional copyright restrictions. One commenter feared they might have to give back an earlier "most insightful" award for a comment on the subject, so Anonymous Anonymous Coward checked the criteria:

Did you move to another country?

In second place, it's one more response to the Ajit Pai post, this time from Chip in full parody mode targeting a particular commenter:

I "told" you that This would "happen"! Idiots! Sycophants! MINIONS!

I "told" you that when there were REGULATIONS, that "meant" that SOMEDAY there would be Elections, and other "people" might get "elected" and Undo the REGULATIONS. You did not Praise me for my BRILLIANCE in "understanding that Elections "exist" and sometimes different Parties get Elected, which doesn't matter anyway because oth Parties are the "same", as you would know if you were Interested in Truth and in "history" such as GEORGE WASHINGTON'S FAREWELL ADDRESS, which is one of Many historical Things that I have read because I am very "very" Smart.

The "regulations" in California are BAD, and the FCC's repeal of the REGULATIONS from Wheeler is also BAD, and Wheeler's regulations were "also" BAD. That is OBVIOUS to anyone who is very VERY "smart" like "me". Don't you Sycophantic "idiots" Get it? Someay in California there will be an ELECTION. And different PEOPLE might get "elected". And those different "people" might repeal this "law". You're all so Stupid! Stupid! for not recognizing my obvious GENIOUS in understanding that sometimes different "people" get Elected to things. You did not learn about History like I learne about History, at Smilin' Jim's Unaccredited Forth Grade Academy.

Every Nation eats the Paint chips it Deseves!

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start out with another comment from Gary, this time in response to the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce engaging in some trademark bullying over the Hollywood sign:

Hey isn't Hollywood that obscure California city that all those film studios moved to in order to escape draconian patent lawsuits from Edison?

And finally, it's an anonymous comment about Tanzania's plan to outlaw the fact-checking of government statistics:

Statistics show that 100% of leaders who demonize fact-checking are honest and deserve to be reelected.

That's all for this week, folks!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, we learned that in addition to communications the NSA was keeping millions of credit card transaction records, and then we finally got a look at the secrett FISA court ruling that permitted bulk phone data collection, in which it was revealed that Verizon and AT&T never fought back. The court also made the untrue claim that all of congress already knew all the details, and of course we wondered why the ruling was ever secret to begin with. Meanwhile, Michael Hayden was making some crazy claims about terrorists using Gmail and the US's right to spy on the internet it invented, while also making some childish prognostications about Ed Snowden's likely future of alcoholism — though other defenders of the agency were sticking to the same tired talking points, plus the new euphemism that Snowden's activities were "masked by his job duties".

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, Apple made the decision to block a competitive podcast app from the App Store, leading to significant backlash, while a court in Germany was getting in on similar action in its own way by banning VOIP on the iPhone at the behest of T-Mobile. NBC was bragging about its ability to lock down online Olympic footage, the movie industry was making yet another attempt to build the mythical "good" DRM, and the cops were continuing to bring in the RIAA to help with investigations where it would clearly be biased. There was a glimmer of light for online entertainment though: this was also the week that BandCamp launched, and its easy-to-build pages quickly became one of the best tools for musicians to distribute their work online.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2003, as file-sharers were going deeper underground, a study showed that most online copies of movies were coming from industry insiders — which perhaps explains the industry's insane plan for self-destructing DVDs. While RIAA head Carey Sherman was struggling to defend the agency's lawsuit strategy (and totally missing the point), the Senate was gearing up for hearings over the lawsuits, and considering a bill to close the DMCA's special subpoena powers — also a major issue in the ongoing court battle between the RIAA and Verizon.

Strangest trademark story of the month? Strangest trademark story of the month! As you may have heard, back in March, a former Russian spy who had been a double agent for the UK, Sergei Skirpal (and his daughter), was poisoned in the UK with a nerve agent. Earlier this month, UK officials moved to charge two Russians with attempted murder over that event. They named Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov as being behind the plot. Along with the announcement, the Crown Prosecution Service admitted that it will not seek to extradite the men from Russia, as Russia will not extradite its own nationals.

Somewhat bizarrely, the two men (who many believe are not actually named Petrov and Boshirov) then decided to go on Russian TV to profess their innocence, claiming, improbably, that they were just tourists with no connections to Russian intelligence who had really wanted to go visit a cathedral in Salisbury where the attacks took place. A somewhat fascinating Bellingcat investigation has torn to shreds most of their story and suggested pretty strong evidence connecting them to the Russian government (and that their names are fake).

That TV interview has been mocked and described as a farce, but as the NY Times described, it may have been intentionally so, with the hope of mocking the west. And, that leads us to a story that's more normal for us around here: one about trademarks. Apparently, a Russian company, "Golden Brand," decided to apply for a trademark in the two suspects' "names" and (har har) have that trademark cover "production of chemical compounds and perfume." And the idea is that the trademark will then be handed over to the guys to do what they want with it. According to the Moscow Times:

Russia’s Golden Brand company has applied to trademark the phrase “Petroff & Boshiroff,” its spokesperson told The Moscow Times on Wednesday.

"After the name gets registered, we will gift it to Bashirov and Petrov, and they can start a company if they want,” a spokesperson for the company said.

"We did it as a marketing tool; it's good for public relations," she added.

The trademark will allow its holders to manufacture and sell industrial chemicals and perfume, as well as operate fitness centers and travel agencies

At least they admit it's a publicity stunt. But what a bizarre use of trademark. Trademark law in Russia may be different than elsewhere, but in the US, you're supposed to actually be intending to actually use the mark in commerce in order to register it. And, uh, while these two guys may have "used" a chemical, it wasn't in commerce (not to mention, they deny having done so). Also, if they wanted a trademark, they could file it for themselves, without needing some random company to file it for them. The whole story is obviously bizarre, but I didn't expect trademark to play a role in it.