Two common topics here at Techdirt are about to converge in what will likely serve as a lovely example of how piracy is often a scapegoat rather than a legitimate business issue. The first topic is Denuvo, the once-unbeatable DRM that has since become a DRM that has been defeated in sub-zero days before game releases. The exception that used to prove the rule that DRM is always defeated has become another example that yet again proves that rule. On the other hand, we've also talked at length that the real antidote for piracy is creating a great product and connecting with fans to give them a reason to buy. The flipside of that formula is that no amount of piracy protection is going to result in big sales numbers for a product that sucks.

While that's typically obvious, we're all about to watch what happens when a game both has its piracy protection fail completely and is deemed to be a shitty product, with Just Cause 4 having its Denuvo protection defeated a day after launch while the game is suffering from withering reviews.

This long-anticipated AAA action-adventure title is the follow-up to Just Cause 3, which was also protected by Denuvo. That game was released in December 2015 but wasn’t cracked until the end of February 2017.

Compare that with Just Cause 4. The game was released on December 4, 2018 then cracked and leaked online December 5, 2018. Just Cause 3 and Just Cause 4 were both defeated by cracking group CPY, who are clearly getting very familiar with Denuvo’s technology.

Okay, so the game is available on all the regular torrent forums, fully cracked in a day. This again raises the question as to why game publishers even bother with Denuvo any longer. The instances in which Denuvo games are defeated immediately after release are so commonplace at this point that I don't even bother writing them all up. The assumption at this point should be that Denuvo is useless. Somehow, game publishers don't appear to be getting the memo.

But Just Cause 4 is also being thoroughly panned by reviews.

While having the game appear online the day after release is bad enough, another problem is raising its head. According to numerous reviewers on Steam, the game is only worthy of a ‘thumbs down’ based on complaints about graphics, gameplay, and numerous other issues.

While these things are often handled via early patches from developers, the negative reviews mean that the average score on Steam is currently just 5/10. That, combined with the availability of a pirated version online, seems like a possible recipe for disaster and something that could raise its head later should sales fail to impress.

And if that in fact happens, we'll all get a front row seat to watch a game publisher decide exactly how to respond to all of this. On the one hand, the focus could be on the quality of the product, with reasonable communications sent out acknowledging customer concerns and promising to address them with quality patching and updating. On the other hand, the company could simply point to the pirated versions available online and scapegoat piracy as the reason for all that ails the sales numbers.

Given that this is Square we're talking about, it seems practically inevitable that what we'll see is the latter. But when you do see that, keep in mind that customers didn't like this game and reviewed it poorly. And recognize it for what it is: blame-shifting.

Atlanta, Georgia, August 23, 2016:

Officials are promising more transparency on the part of law enforcement, and greater trust between cops and the community. The body cameras “will strengthen trust among our officers and the communities they serve by providing transparency to officer interactions,” said Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed this past week in announcing a purchase.

Oh, we were all so very young then. Look at us (including me!), pointing to the increasing adoption of body cameras as the ushering in of a new era of transparency and accountability. Didn't take long for this lily to get unceremoniously de-gilded.

Cameras are great tools of accountability. They just can't be controlled and maintained by cops. Two years after promising a better police force brimming with accountable officers steadily working to rebuild relationships with the citizens they police, Atlanta residents are being informed their servants/protectors are cheats and liars.

The audit looked at a random sample of 150 videos from officers’ body cameras. In more than half the cases, officers failed to activate and deactivate their cameras at the required time, the audit said.

Officers also miscategorized 22 of the videos, including a use of force incident. Auditors said mislabeling the videos may have led to some being deleted prematurely.

And the audit said that officers failed to capture two-thirds of dispatched calls between November 2017 and May 2018.

These results shouldn't shock Atlanta residents or readers of this site. It doesn't even shock Atlanta Police officials. Police Chief Erika Shields says she's "not happy" with the results of the audit, but also "not surprised." She excuses her officers actions in the worst possible way:

"I knew that what we are asking of officers is a culture shift."

It's your job to make sure the "culture" actually "shifts," Chief Shields. That it hasn't budged despite the addition of body cameras says a whole lot about the culture at the top of the PD. Whatever discipline Shields has meted out (she only says it happens, not how frequently or severely) clearly isn't enough. And the culture that remains in place in the Atlanta PD is downright nasty.

Auditors identified 64 videos “that were deleted by users who should not have had been authorized to delete videos from the system” from November 2016 to 2018.

Officer use-of-force incident videos are supposed to be handled differently. Supervisors are supposed to upload them and they to be labeled properly in case the department or the public needs to review them later.

But the audit found APD supervisors routinely didn’t understand their responsibilities. One zone supervisor told auditors he was unaware that it was his job to upload use of force videos.

Officers know the system is flawed and abuse it. Those in charge of securing recordings officers may not want retained either don't know what they're doing or are playing dumb when questioned by auditors. At the top of the miserable heap is a chief who has allowed flagrant policy violations to occur under her watch.

An official worth a damn would never express their lack of surprise at this sort of behavior from underlings. There should be shock and dismay at these results, not a shrug of "They're cops, what can you do?" emanating from the top person in Atlanta law enforcement. If that's the official reaction, the next audit will just find more of the same.

I will never tire of judges handing down benchslaps to IP trolls. Perhaps I'll never tire of it because it just doesn't happen often enough. Or perhaps it cannot happen often enough, given the sheer amount of troll litigation judges preside over. Not every dismissed case can be given the court's full attention. But this opinion, from Judge Royce Lamberth, should certainly get Strike 3 Holding's attention.

The brutal nine-page opinion [PDF] opens with this caustic appraisal of the porn company's business model. (h/t Eric Goldman)

Strike 3 is [...] a copyright troll. Its swarms of lawyers hound people who allegedly watch their content through Bittorrent, an online service enabling anonymous users to share videos despite their copyright protection. Since Bittorrent masks users' identities, Strike 3 can only identify an infringing Internet protocol (IP) address, using geolocation technology to trace that address to a jurisdiction. This method is famously flawed: virtual private networks and onion routing spoof IP addresses (for good and ill); routers and other devices are unsecured; malware cracks passwords and opens backdoors; multiple people (family, roommates, guests, neighbors, etc.) share the same IP address; a geolocation service might randomly assign addresses to some general location if it cannot more specifically identify another. [...]

Simply put, inferring the person who pays the cable bill illegally downloaded a specific file is even less trustworthy than inferring they watched a specific TV Show. But in many cases, the method is enough to force the Internet service provider (ISP) to unmask the IP address's subscriber. And once the ISP outs the subscriber, permitting them to be served as the defendant, any future Google search of their name will turn up associations with the websites Vixen, Blacked, Tushy, and Blacked Raw. The first two are awkward enough, but the latter two cater to even more singular tastes.

The court goes on to point out it isn't copyright law that vindicates the plaintiff but rather "the law of large numbers." Strike 3 has filed 1,849 copyright infringement lawsuits across the nation (according to Judge Lamberth's count), resulting in an untold number of settlements. And that's all this really is: another attempt to force someone, anyone, to cough up some money rather than face off in court. As Judge Lamberth notes, copyright trolls "consume 58%" of the federal court system's copyright lawsuit docket. They're a burden on the courts and a burden on the public. Judge Lamberth calls Strike 3 on its copious bullshit:

These serial litigants drop cases at the first sign of resistance, preying on low-hanging fruit and staying one step ahead of any coordinated defense. They don't seem to care about whether defendant actually did the infringing, or about developing the law. If a Billy Goat Gruff moves to confront a copyright troll in court, the troll cuts and runs back under its bridge. Perhaps the trolls fear a court disrupting their rinse-wash-and-repeat approach: fie a deluge of complaints; ask the court to compel disclosure of the account holders; settle as many claims as possible; abandon the rest.

Rather than be an accomplice in Strike 3's shady game, Judge Lamberth denies its request for discovery. Without further discovery, Strike 3 can't serve anyone with a lawsuit, which will prevent Strike 3 from refiling in this court at least, even with a dismissal without prejudice that leaves that door open.

No copyright troll is going to try to keep a case alive in Lamberth's court, not after this damning summation of their collective efforts:

Armed with hundreds of cut-and-pasted complaints and boilerplate discovery motions, Strike 3 floods this courthouse (and others around the country) with lawsuits smacking of extortion. It treats this Court not as a citadel of justice, but as an ATM.

This will limit Strike 3's litigation in this particular jurisdiction. But that's what venue shopping is for. At least defendants have another opinion to quote when fighting back against trolls like Strike 3.

As we've been discussing the "Trilogue" negotiations between the EU Commission, EU Council and EU Parliament over the EU's Copyright Directive have continued, and a summary has been released on the latest plans for Article 13, which is the provision that will make upload filters mandatory, while (and this is the fun part) insisting that it doesn't make upload filters mandatory. Then, to make things even more fun, another document on the actual text suggests the way to deal with this is to create a better euphemism for filters.

When we last checked in on this, we noted that the legacy film and television industry associations were freaking out that Article 13 might include some safe harbors for internet platforms, and were asking the negotiators to either drop those protections for platforms, or to leave them out of Article 13 altogether and only have it apply to music.

The latest brief description of the recommendations for Article 13 appear to be an attempt by bureaucrats who have no understanding of the nuances of this issue to appease both the legacy copyright industries and the tech companies. Notably absent: any concern for the public or independent creators. We'll dig in in a moment, but frankly, given the state of Article 13 demonstrated in this two-page document, it is horrific that these discussions are considered almost concluded. It is obvious that the vast majority of people working on this have no idea what they're talking about, and are pushing incredibly vague rules without any understanding of their impact. And rather than taking in the criticism and warning from knowledgeable experts, they're just adding in duct-taped "but this won't do x" for every complaint where people warn what the actual impact of the rules will be for the internet.

That's why, throughout this document, they keep insisting that there will be no mandate for filters. But, there's no way you can actually avoid liability without filters. Indeed, in order to appease the film and TV folks, the proposal now includes a notice-and-staydown provision. We've spent years explaining why a notice-and-staydown provision is not only unworkable, but would lead to tremendous amounts of non-infringing content being removed. Copyright is extremely context specific. The exact same content may be infringing in one instance, but protected in another. Yet a notice-and-staydown does not allow the protected versions. It requires they be blocked. That is outright censorship.

On to the document. It starts with seven "guidelines."

The Commission was requested to follow these guidelines indicated by the Rapporteur:

• Platforms should follow high standards of duty of care;
• Cooperation should not be unidirectional;
• Non infringing content should remain on the platform online;
• Automatic blocking, albeit non forbidden, should be avoided as much as possible
• Existing measures should not be excluded
• Platforms should not always be released from liability by merely applying content identification measures
• Rightholders should not be in a worse position than they are currently. In this context the audiovisual sector was singled out. On this basis, the following ideas, which are based on a logical grouping of the above guidelines, are outlined for the consideration of the co-legislators:

This can be summed up as... all infringing content must disappear, but you don't have to use filters and you must make sure that non-infringing content remains online. This is the "nerd harder" approach to regulating. It is magic wand regulating: make the bad stuff go away, and magically don't have any collateral damage.

This is not sound policy making. This is technically illiterate bureaucrats trying to cover their asses. Because the liability requirements in the document will certainly lead to massive overblocking and widespread unintended consequences, these spineless technocrats are trying to avoid that by just tacking on "but let those consequences happen." They don't explain how this is possible. They just are going to put these rules out into the world, and tell the tech industry to wave a magic wand and make one type of content disappear without impacting other content (even if they're impossible to distinguish, and if the penalties for getting it wrong are dire).

From there, the document provides "details" never apparently recognizing just how contradictory the plans are:

High standard of duty of care and bilateral cooperation (1 + 2) Online content sharing service providers, as defined in the directive, are considered to communicate to the public and as such need to obtain licences from the relevant rightholders. Where no licences are granted, online content sharing service providers and rightholders should cooperate in good faith to prevent the availability of protected content online.

Cooperation should take place according to appropriate standards of professional diligence, which ought to take into account the size of the service, the number and type of works or other subject matter uploaded by users, the potential economic harm caused to rightholders, the availability of suitable and effective technologies and their cost for service providers. In practice, this means that the standards of cooperation should be particularly high for high value content. Cooperation should not lead to a general monitoring obligation as defined under the e-Commerce Directive.

Magic wand thinking: Either your entire platform needs to be licensed (i.e., no user-generated content) or you need to "prevent the availability" of any copyright-covered content with "good faith." But how? Well, the bureaucrats insist that this shouldn't require "general monitoring" (i.e., an upload filter). But... um... how do you prevent availability of copyright covered content if you're not monitoring? This is an impossible situation and either the bureaucrats know this and are just ignoring that they're demanding the impossible, or they don't understand this and shouldn't be allowed within 10 miles of any regulation over the internet.

Rightholders should provide content sharing service providers with specific information (e.g. metadata) allowing identification of their content.

The cooperation could include content identification measures (e.g. for high value content) but should not prevent other forms of cooperation if agreed by the parties (e.g. ex post content moderation for low value content, see also letter B).

When unauthorised content becomes available on their websites, content sharing service providers would in general not be liable if they have cooperated in good faith according to the relevant standards of professional diligence. However, within an adequate framework to ensure legal certainty, when despite such cooperation the availability of content online has caused significant economic harm to rightholders the Directive could consider the provider liable in any event, but at a reduced level taking into account the good faith of the provider. Alternatively, the Directive could allow rightholders to claim restitution of the benefits appropriated by the providers (e.g. using unjust enrichment claims under national law) (see point C below).

So, again, we see the general incomprehensibility of what is being pushed here. The first paragraph is an attempt to appease the platforms, basically saying "if copyright holders are going to demand takedowns, they should at least be required to supply the details of what content they actually hold a copyright over." That's reasonable given a plan to demand mandatory filters, because the only thing such metadata is actually useful for is... a filter.

The second paragraph is basically saying "okay, yes, we mean filters for loosely defined 'high value' content, but maybe loosely defined 'low value content' doesn't require filters." Again, this appears to be an attempt to split the baby. Who the hell is going to self-describe their own content as "low value content?" The whole concept of "high value" and "low value" is elitist claptrap from the legacy content industries who basically believe that anything that comes from the legacy recording, TV and film studios is "high value" and all that independent, amateur, and user-generated content is "low value." The paragraph here is supposed to be an attempt to say "well, okay, if your platform is just publishing garbage memes and stuff maybe it doesn't need a filter, but if you happen to include any of Hollywood's precious brilliance, you must put in place a filter."

The third paragraph is, yet again, an attempt to give special extra rights to the legacy recording, TV, and film companies. It basically says that if platforms try to "cooperate in good faith" (i.e., censor at the drop of a hat) then maybe they would be considered not liable... but only if it's that riff-raff low value content that slips through the filters (though we're not demanding filters!). If any content slips through the filters that "caused significant economic harm" (i.e., comes from the big copyright industries), well then, it doesn't fucking matter how much you tried to stop it, you're still liable.

In other words, if any internet platform makes a single mistake with Hollywood's content, no matter how hard they tried to stop it, too bad, you're liable.

And this is where there's such a massive disconnect between the framers (and supporters) of Article 13 and reality. When you're told that any mistake will lead to liability, you are put in a position of trying to prevent any mistakes. And the only ways to do that are to (1) stop accepting any user-uploaded content or (2) filter the hell out of all of it, and take down anything that even might possibly be considered infringing, meaning tons of perfectly legitimate content will get shut down.

No matter how many times these technocrats say "don't take down non-infringing works", it's totally meaningless if the only way to avoid liability is to take down tons of non-infringing works. Which brings us to the next part:

Non infringing content should remain online and automatic blocking to be avoided as much as possible (3+4)

Content that does not infringe copyright, for example because it is covered by exceptions, should stay on the services’ websites. In addition, the co-legislators could provide that minor uses of content by amateur uploaders should not be automatically blocked (in the context of the cooperation and professional diligence referred to under A) nor trigger the liability of the uploader. This should be without prejudice to the remedies under point C and the rules on liability of the providers and cooperation under A.

The need to allow legitimate content to remain available, should be strengthened through a robust redress mechanism which should ensure that users can contest measures taken against their legitimate uploads. The Commission already provided possible suggestions to the co-legislators which are currently under discussions in the trilogue process.

Again, this is setting up a laughable impossibility. First they say you're liable if you let anything through, and then they say "but don't accidentally take down stuff you shouldn't." How the hell do you do that? The rules don't say. Hollywood and Article 13's supporters don't care. It's great if they add a "redress mechanism" for bogus takedowns, but that only will apply to content that first gets up and then is taken down. It says nothing for content that is blocked from being uploaded in the first place due to overaggressive filters, which are only overaggressive due to the earlier parts of Article 13 that say you're liable if you let anything "high value" through.

This is the ultimate in cowardice from the EU regulators. Rather than address the actual problems that their own regulations will create, these regulators have decided to just append a bit to their regulation that says "and don't let this create the problems it will obviously create." That's fucking useless.

Rightholders should keep benefiting from existing measures; and platforms not released from liability by merely applying content identification technologies. Rightholders, notably audiovisual sector, not worse off (5+6+7)

Rightholders should in any event retain the ability to request removal of infringing content from the websites of the content sharing services. Building on and complementing the current ecommerce rules, rightholders should be allowed to request that unauthorised content is expeditiously removed and that best efforts are made to ensure that it stays down. As indicated in A, the co-legislators may provide for an additional safeguard for rightholders when despite the good faith cooperation the availability of content online causes significant economic harm to them.

There's something really big hidden in here. A "notice and stay down" requirement. That was not what was being pushed before. Notice and staydown creates all sorts of problems, in that by its very nature it obliterates the points in the previous paragraph. If you have a notice and staydown regime, you cannot allow content that is "covered by exceptions" because you've already designated all such content must stay down. And unless these bureaucrats in Brussels have magically invented a filter that can understand context and correctly judge whether or not something is covered by an exception (something that normally takes a years-long adversarial judicial process) it is difficult to see how this is possible.

Then we get to the other document, leaked earlier today by Politico, that attempts to wordsmith the actual language of Article 13. It's basically the same stuff we discussed above, but with an attempt to put it into actual legalese. Two things stand out in the document. First, they try to rebrand mandatory upload filters, by now discussing "suitable and effective technologies" to "ensure the non-availability on the websites of the service providers of unauthorised works or other subject matter..." How is that not a filter?

This document also includes some language "as an option" that would require "best effort to prevent their future availability." That's putting the notice-and-staydown into the law. I will note that there is no real language being discussed that explains how to prevent the blocking of non-infringing works. Just more hand waving and magical thinking about how it shouldn't block non-infringing works... even though it absolutely will.

This leaves me with two key takeaways:

1. The bureaucrats putting this together are doing the worst kind of regulating. They appear to be utterly ignorant of what it is that they are regulating, how it works, and the inevitable impact of their new rules. And, rather than trying to take the time to actually understand the concerns, they are simply writing "but don't do that" into the law every time someone explains the impact. But you can't regulate internet platforms not to overblock when everything else in your law requires them to overblock or face crippling liability. This is like a law that says "you must immediately dump out the bathwater without looking to see what's in the bath... but don't throw out the baby with the bathwater." How do you do that? The law doesn't say because the regulators don't have the slightest clue. And they don't have the slightest clue because it's impossible. And, they don't seem to care about that because once they pass the law they can celebrate and the mess they create is left for the internet platforms (and the public) to deal with.
2. Given the massive changes and broad and unclear mandates being tossed around, Article 13 is nowhere near a condition which should be put into a binding regulation. What's being debated now is so unclear, so vague and such a mess, that it would be practically criminal to put such nonsense into law. They are rushing to get this done (perhaps before the next EU Parliamentary elections next spring), and the fact that they're about to make massive changes to a fundamental part of society (the internet) without clearly comprehending what they're doing is incredibly frightening. This is like a bad first draft of a bad proposal. This is not just "this is a bad bill that went through a comprehensive process and I disagree with it." This is an utter mess. It keeps shifting, it has vague and contradictory definitions, it tells companies to wave magic wands, and tells companies not to let the very thing the law compels actually happen. This is not regulating. This is why the public hates regulators.

I'm still hopeful that common sense eventually shows up in the EU, but at this point the only way for common sense to survive is to simply dump Article 13 entirely.

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The Australian Parliament has passed a law ordaining compelled access to encrypted devices and communications. The legislation was floated months ago and opened up for comment, but it appears the Australian government has ignored the numerous complaints that such a law would violate civil liberties and otherwise be an all-around bad idea. But that's OK. It's completely justified, according to the Prime Minister.

Scott Morrison, Australia’s prime minister, told local radio on Thursday that encryption laws were necessary to target Islamist terrorism, paedophile networks and organised crime. “These laws are used to catch the scum that try to bring our country down and we can’t give them a leave pass,” he said.

Sure, and if innocent people find their communications compromised by government-mandated holes, so be it. The law was rushed through Parliament in a late evening session since every moment wasted was just one more leave pass for scum. Legislators promise to review the law in 18 months to ensure it hasn't been abused or created more problems than it's solved, but let's be honest here: how often does legislation like this get clawed back after a periodic review? It's never happened in the history of the laws governing our surveillance programs, even after leaked docs exposed unconstitutional practices and widespread abuse of surveillance authorities.

Here's a short summary of the new powers the legislation hands over to law enforcement and national security agencies:

The law enables Australia’s attorney-general to order the likes of Apple, Facebook, and Whatsapp to build capability, such as software code, which enables police to access a particular device or service.

Companies may also have to provide the design specifications of their technology to police, facilitate access to a device or service, help authorities develop their own capabilities and conceal the fact that an agency has undertaken a covert operation.

This law will go into effect before the end of the year. How it will go into effect is anyone's guess. The law provides for compelled access -- including the creation of new code -- but no one seems to have any idea what this will look like in practice. The new backdoors-in-everything-but-name will be put in place by developers/manufacturers at the drop of a court order, with the onus on the smart people in the tech business to iron out all of the problems.

The law only prevents the government from demanding that "systemic weaknesses" be built into devices or programs. Everything else is left to the imagination, including the actual process of introducing code changes in multi-user platforms or targeted devices.

An actual software developer, Alfie John, has put together a splendid Twitter thread pointing out the flaws in the government's assumptions about software development. Since the compelled participants are forbidden from discussing surveillance court orders with anyone (which would include coworkers, supervisors, the general public, etc.), these requested alterations would have to be implemented in secret. The problem is coding changes go through a number of hands before they go live. Either everyone involved would need to be sworn to secrecy (which also means being threatened with jail time) or the process falls apart. Changes ordered by a court could be rejected by those higher up on the chain. Worse, the planned encryption hole could see the compelled coder being viewed as a data thief or foreign operative or whatever.

Law enforcement is going to have to make everyone involved in the product/device complicit and covered under the same prison threat for this to work. The more people its exposed to, the higher the chance of leakage. And if the code will break other code -- or the request simply can't be met due to any number of concerns -- the government make ask the court to hold the company and its personnel in contempt for their failure to achieve the impossible.

To make matters worse, the company targeted with a compelled access request may be monitored for leaks before and after the request is submitted, putting employees under surveillance simply because of their profession.

In some cases, the only weakness that can be introduced will be systemic, which will run contrary to the law. How will the government handle this inevitable eventuality? Will it respect the law or will it simply redefine the term to codify its unlawful actions?

Even if all of this somehow works flawlessly, users of devices and communications platforms will be put at risk. Sure, the compelled access might be targeted, but it will teach users to distrust software/firmware updates that may actually keep them safer. The government may even encourage the forging of credentials or security certificates to ensure its compelled exploits reach their targets. And just because these backdoors theoretically only allow one government agent in at a time, that doesn't mean they aren't backdoors. They may be slightly more difficult for malicious actors to exploit, but once the trust is shattered by compelled access, other attack vectors will present themselves.

It's a terrible law justified by the spoken equivalent of a bumper sticker. And it's going to end up doing serious damage -- not just in Australia, but all over the world. Bad legislation spreads like a communicable disease. If one democracy says this is acceptable, other free-world leaders will use its passage as a permission slip for encryption-targeting mandates of their own.

While AT&T's marketing wing often likes to pat itself on the back for "innovation," the company's real skill set revolves around finding creative and ways to nickel-and-dime its own customers. Like the multiple times the company was caught aiding drug dealing directory assistance scammers, IP Relay credit card scammers, or crammers because it was getting a cut of the profits. Or the time the company started charging everybody more money for broadband if they wanted to protect their own personal privacy. Or the company's well-documented net neutrality shenanigans.

This week, AT&T's under fire yet again for some new bill changes that will, once again, result in users paying the company significantly more money. More specifically, the company has announced that it will now keep broadband and TV customers' money if you cancel in the middle of a billing cycle:

"AT&T will start charging customers for the full month after they cancel TV or Internet service, ending its customer-friendly practice of providing a prorated credit for the final month. Even if you cancel on the first day of a new billing period, you'll be charged for the full month and service will continue for the rest of the month whether you want it or not. To avoid paying for a month of service you don't want, you'd need to cancel by the last day of the previous billing period. The change will take effect on January 14, 2019 and apply even when a customer is paying on a month-to-month basis and no longer under contract.

Interestingly, the same company that has whined fairly incessantly about the logistical impossibility of adhering to state level privacy or net neutrality rules in the wake of federal repeals (a problem its own lobbyists created), isn't imposing the new rate system on users in states with tougher consumer protection standards:

"The new policy of charging for the full final month does not apply to any accounts in California, Illinois, and New York. The change also doesn't apply to "U-verse TV, AT&T Phone, or AT&T Internet accounts in Michigan," AT&T said.

AT&T is applying different policies in those states in order to comply with local regulations. “A limited number of customers will continue to receive prorated credits, either as a result of local or state regulations or for other specific reasons," AT&T told Ars.

Standing alone this may not be that big a deal, but cumulatively AT&T's nickel-and-diming matters very much to consumers.

You'll recall AT&T just got done jacking up streaming TV prices on the heels of its massive merger with Time Warner, just like deal critics had warned. AT&T then quickly doubled an already bogus "administrative fee" on the company's wireless customers, alone netting AT&T an additional estimated $800 million per year. AT&T's now hinting it will raise streaming prices even higher (AT&T's version of competition). This is of course on top of existing TV and broadband rate hikes, usage caps, hidden fees, and other soaring consumer costs.

Most of this is occurring for two reasons. One, AT&T's desperately trying to bounce back from the utterly massive debt load it incurred from the one-two punch of the DirecTV and Time Warner mergers. As is usually the case, the one paying for our mindless merger mania is usually... you. Two, because AT&T and other telecom and media giants have been on a tear effectively neutering all federal oversight of their efforts, there's nobody really in power interested in doing much about it. The above example makes it pretty clear why AT&T and Ajit Pai have also tried to neuter state consumer protection authority.

Getting ripped off in this fashion is the price tag for the nation's mindless obsession with merger mania, and the entirely false, yet oddly persistent, dogma that blindly deregulating the telecom sector somehow creates a free market connectivity Utopia. After several decades of this approach clearly not working in telecom you'd think more people would be keyed into the fact that letting natural monopolies dictate policy only really benefits investors and executives. But our collective, almost willful ignorance on this subject is nothing if not stubbornly persistent.

If anything might make police-community relations better, the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (PBA) -- the union representing NYPD officers -- is against it. PBA President Pat Lynch has come out against body cameras, community policing, and even his own union members.

The battle over the court-ordered revamping of the NYPD's stop-and-frisk program rages on five years after Judge Scheindlin found it to be unconstitutional. So does the PBA, which is now arguing keeping data on stops is throwing sand in the NYPD's gears.

The Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association swiftly condemned an order issued Nov. 20 by a Federal Judge concerning stop-and-frisk data that it said would further discourage “proactive policing in New York City.”

The directive from U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres requires the NYPD, in consultation with an outside monitor, to submit for approval a plan to implement “a program for systematically receiving, assessing, and acting on information regarding adverse findings on the conduct of police officers involving illegal stops or illegal trespass enforcements.”

The NYPD has been ordered to document its stops numerous times since the 2013 decision. And it has continued to fail to do so. Officers blame a lack of instruction and/or clarity from upper management. Upper management blames multiple court orders and outside oversight for its inability to deliver clear instructions. And the PBA blames the whole mess on officers being forced to engage in Constitutional policing, which apparently is the opposite of "proactive" policing.

What the PBA is agitating for is the return to halcyon days of stop-and-frisk when NYPD officers performed hundreds of thousands of stops a year, a majority of them targeting the city's minorities. Constitutional policing would trim hundreds of man hours from the production of mandated reports, but the PBA wants nothing to do with keeping officers on patrol, rather than tied up doing internal bookkeeping for the DA's office.

Judge Torres said she was requiring that the plan to provide extensive information on the program include “(a) declinations of prosecutions by the District Attorneys in New York City; (b) suppression decisions by courts precluding evidence as a result of unlawful stops and searches; (c) court findings of incredible testimony by police officers; (d) denials of indemnification and/or representation of police officers by the New York City Law Department; and (e) judgments and settlements against police officers in civil cases where, in the opinion of the New York City Law Department, there exists evidence of police malfeasance.”

The PBA's response? To deride the accountability mandates as "unnecessary" -- an abuse of the court's "narrow authority" that will somehow wreak havoc on the NYPD's rank-and-file. This production of information will "end proactive policing in New York City," according to PBA president Pat Lynch.

Fortunately, Pat Lynch has long been recognized as a blowhard who seldom has the full support of the officers he represents. According to this report, the PBA was "quietly critical" of the PD's stop-and-frisk program when it was being abused to its fullest extent. Now that it's being deployed in a more Constitutional fashion -- resulting in a severe decline in stops -- the PBA wants to pretend the same program it criticized as "overused" is now a critical aspect of New York law enforcement.

This week, we covered the fallout of FOSTA, which can be summarized as "nothing positive accomplished, plus dumb new rules at sites like Tumblr". Both our winning comments on the insightful side came in response to people attacking this evaluation in various flawed ways. In first place, it's Wyrm correcting an incorrect assertion about the impact on sex trafficking ads:

Trolling or just misunderstanding?

The article doesn't attribute the raise in ads to FOSTA (ie "they raised because of FOSTA"), but notes that they still raised after FOSTA (ie "they raise despite FOSTA"). Hence, the law didn't accomplish this objective and introduced a lot of other negative side effects (censorship, more difficult investigations, ...) that were indeed attributed to this failure of a law.

It also points out that the supporters lie about the result both in effect ("raise" instead of "drop") and cause ("it dropped because of FOSTA", when the small-term drop that did occur happened before FOSTA).

I'll pass on commenting the rest of the ridiculous rant.

In second place, it's Stephen T. Stone with a lengthy refutation of those who would celebrate Tumblr's sex ban:

Stephen T. Stone (profile), 5 Dec 2018 @ 11:19am I always enjoy dismantling these little treatises—especially when they hit upon something I am intimately familiar with: sexual content in general and queer content in particular.

So what's the "problem"? Less pornography?

Nudity, sexuality, and discussions thereof also fall under this ban. And since LGBT/queer content is, by nature of our wonderful society, damn near always seen as explicitly “sexual” in nature even if it were otherwise innocuous (e.g., a gay couple kissing), that content tends to get axed first.

Tumblr was a place where queer people could have frank discussions about their sexual orientations and gender identities with other queer people and not worry (too much) about being censored in some way. Queer artists of all kinds found an audience on Tumblr that they might not have found elsewhere before Tumblr became a thing, thanks in large part to Tumblr’s reblogging functionality. So yes, the ban on mature/“NSFW”/“adult” content disproportionately affects queer people because it is their content that will likely be axed well before straight content of similar (or greater) levels of sexual activity. This whole situation goes beyond mere “pornography”; if you were more interested in growing your perspective of the world instead of trying (and failing) to make yourself seem like a superior person, you might understand that.

prostitutes are hampered and even endangered by FOSTA, with clear implication that open solicitation should be permitted

Oh, a diversion into something else? Okay, I got time to kill. So! Two things:

1. Prostitutes who work for pimps and traffickers are explicitly endangered by FOSTA because FOSTA makes harder the job of finding those pimps and traffickers.
2. If an adult willingly wants to exchange sex for cash, I fail to see the issue.

Several pieces bewailing that convictions for downloading child pornography gained under a warrant should be thrown out because of a mere Court Rule that hadn't been updated for the internet where actual location of downloader cannot be known in advance.

Yeah, you’re gonna have to provide links for that, because you’re either pulling shit out of your ass or exceedingly simplifying things so as to remove important context and make yourself sound superior.

Many other pieces wanting convictions of drug dealers thrown out on sheerly technical grounds, with underlying premise that the law is to protect the known guilty. Similarly, pieces cheering when such convictions are overturned on technicality.

Drug dealers are not inhuman monsters that we can lock up without trials, regardless of whether you want to believe that. They are people—and so long as we have laws that protect the rights of the people, those drug dealers are afforded both the presumption of innocence before they enter a courtroom and the same protections that the law affords to everyone else. You might wish to suspend their rights for the sake of putting them in prison; the courts, however, will not abide by your unconstitutional actions.

After the riot at Trump Inauguration causing much property destruction, with apparent organizing in advance, you resisted Facebook being required to provide evidence of what persons of own free will had published to the entire world.

What Techdirt resisted was an overreach by prosecutors to discover evidence that had nothing to do with convicting people of a crime and everything to do with finding more people to arrest on trumped-up charges because they happened to be at the protest at the same time as said destruction of property. (Also you should be happy that only property was destroyed. A car can be replaced; a human life cannot.)

According to your corporatist assertions elsewhere, Tumblr is fully within its "rights" to so manage its "platform". You claim that "platforms" can deny access for their own definitions of "hate speech", BUT YOU COMPLAIN when what's forbidden is well within traditional limitations, widely accepted as "not safe for work".

And here…we…go.

Verizon is fully within its rights to manage Tumblr however it sees fit. (Reminder that Yahoo bought Tumblr and Verizon bought Yahoo. Verizon owns Tumblr as a result. Ha Ha! Corporate vore.) Their decisions, however, can be criticized by anyone—including the very userbase that would be alienated by those decisions.

For the past few years, Tumblr had several problems. The porn bot issue aside, it also had issues with refusals to mitigate on-site harassment, rampant spreading of White nationalist/Nazi propaganda, and—yes—the child pornography problem. Tumblr management chose to sidestep all those issues until circumstances forced their hand into addressing them, then it chose to use a supposedly one-size-fits-all solution in banning “NSFW” content and declaring that to be nothing but pornography, then it enacted a shitty filter that tagged completely innocuous images as “NSFW”. Never mind when it initially removed “sensitive” content from its search results and “accidentally” targeted LGBT/queer content as a result (e.g., searching for “queer” bringing up few-to-no results).

While I understand the desire to knock pornography off the platform—high-end corporate advertisers don’t like their products appearing next to “female-presenting nipples” and all—I also understand that the “NSFW” designation (or any substitute or variation thereof) is also used to stifle legitimate conversations and information about sexuality, including educational content. It also makes creating works that either include or focus on sex much harder to share (let alone monetize). And that presents an issue for adults who want to create/experience these works, because it drives them off major platforms like Tumblr (and Twitter and Livejournal…) and back into smaller, more marginalized platforms where they cannot find/be an audience for such works.

Tumblr has every right to ban pornography, nudity, and talk of sexuality. Those of us with an ounce of goddamn sense recognize and understand this. But that does not mean we agree with the decision to do so—not if it means “hate speech” goes unpunished because it does not cross any boundaries into “NSFW” territory on first glance, and especially if queer content is the first (and possibly primary) target for the filters. We will criticize this decision for being heavy-handed, short-sighted corporate bullshit that is going to kill Tumblr faster than the spambots and the App Store lockout ever would have.

If you do not like our criticisms, well…join Tumblr and whine about it there. Come December 17th, you’ll have plenty of yelling space where all the people who were on the service used to be!

For editor's choice on the insightful side, first we've got Steven with a reminder about the constitutional basis of copyright:

"To promote the progress of science and useful arts..."

As in the purpose of copyright is to promote progress as a benefit to society. It is not for the purpose of lining the pockets of large companies who leach off the creative works of others.

Next, we've got Gwiz with a response to the false dichotomy of copyright holders versus the public:

You do realize that pretty much everyone is a copyright holder in the US, right? Please explain why only some copyright holders should have a say.

Also, this is a public matter that impacts the public. Are you really saying something along the lines of: "You drink alcohol, so you should have no say concerning drunk driving laws."? Because if you are, that is simply plum dumb.

Over on the funny side, for first place we head back to last week's comment post, where the conversation about turning comment Markdown on by default (we're going to do so soon!) continued with David clarifying the fact that we retired the option of HTML formatting:

<blockquote>I always assumed that HTML was no longer supported with the markdown ox checked, but <em>is</em> supported with it unchecked. Was I wrong in this?
</blockquote>
<em>Yes</em>

In second place, our winner is mcinsand with thoughts on Twitter's response to Rudy Giuliani's hilarious URL fail:

Perhaps Twitter's statement could get a little modification at the end:

"This incident shows how difficult it is to make software idiot-proof, especially when facing idiocy of this magnitude."

One commenter on that post accused us of being petty and nitpicking over nothing, asking if we'd also harangue an official for "improper use of an Oxford comma". Our first editor's choice on the funny side is an excellent anonymous response:

Sure, if the person using an Oxford comma incorrectly is the Presidential Advisor on grammar, runs a grammar consulting firm, and goes on a laughable, false, conspiratorial rant about how Microsoft Word grammar check is out to get him.

Finally, with winter settling in up here in Toronto, I sympathize with this anonymous commenter who opted to strategically schedule their rage over ICE/CBP's constitution-free zone in America:

Well given the time of year, I will allow ICE to dominate Buffalo. Come spring though, we will see how long ICE stays around.

That's all for this week, folks!

Five Years Ago

This week in 2013, we saw a spate of worrying changes around the world, with a German court telling Wikimedia that it's liable for user content, a French court ordering a search engine to make an entire website disappear over copyright infringement, and Italian politicians looking to have copyright handled by regulators, not courts — but at least in the UK, a court was also ruling that software functionality is not subject to copyright. Back in the US, just before the MPAA reached a settlement with Hotfile that would assuredly not actually help any artists, the agency was surprisingly told it couldn't use the words "piracy", "theft" or "stealing" during the trial. And there were developments in two major long-term IP court battles, with the appeals court overturning the ruling exempting APIs from copyright in the Oracle/Google case, and the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the Alice software patent case.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2008, before Denuvo became the leading name in the useless and annoying DRM world, it was SecuROM driving gamers nuts while failing to stop pirates — and so nobody was happy when RockStar decided to use it for Grand Theft Auto (apparently having learned nothing from seeing the high-profile failure of Spore's DRM). Warner Music was trying to talk universities into making students pay a piracy tax, while copyright apologists were arguing that schools which refuse to do so were protecting "terrorists, pedophiles, phishing-scheme operators, hackers [and] identity thieves". The MPAA, meanwhile, was trying to claim that its desire for selectable output control on media devices was a pro-innovation stance being opposed only by the luddites at the CEA...

We also saw a few key copyright developments in the courtroom: the banning of Bratz dolls (we covered this fascinating fight in a podcast this year), and Joe Satriani's lawsuit against Coldplay.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2003, the spam wars heated up as the world headed into the holiday shopping season, with spammers using new techniques to get around filters and even designing extensive spam campaigns just to annoy and hinder anti-spam companies — which were themselves becoming a lucrative industry. Alongside all this, we were beginning to realize just how much spam was coming from networks of hijacked computers. Meanwhile, with every damn tech company trying to launch an online music store, even Hewlett Packard was trying to get in on the action, while the RIAA was filing more insane filsharing lawsuits including one infamously targeting a 79-year-old retiree with no computer.