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I'm not sure why any nation with at least a passing respect for civil liberties would continue treating Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan as a world leader worth discussing ideas with. Erdogan rolled into the United States with his entourage of thugs and thought he could have critics beaten and unfriendly journalists tossed from press conferences. He continually petitions other countries to punish their own citizens for insulting him.

Back at home, Erdogan is jailing journalists by the hundreds, claiming they're terrorists. A failed coup set off the latest wave of censorial thuggery, with Erdogan bolstering his terrorist claims by pointing to criminal acts like… robbing ATMs. A massive backlog of "insulting the president" cases sit in the country's court system -- a system that's certainly aware it's not supposed to act as a check against executive power.

And yet, world leaders continue to act as though Erdogan is an equal, rather than an overachieving street thug with an amazingly fragile ego. UK Prime Minister Theresa May, hoping to strike a trade deal with Turkey, invited Erdogan to not only discuss a possible deal, but speak publicly.

May tried to keep Erdogan from being Erdogan…

May said that while it was right that those who sought to overthrow a democratically elected government were brought to justice, “it is also important that in the defence of democracy… Turkey does not lose sight of the values it is seeking to defend”.

May added: “That is why today I have underlined to President Erdoğan that we want to see democratic values and international human rights obligations upheld.”

But Erdogan was always going to be Erdogan:

At a press conference in Downing Street alongside May, Erdoğan made no reference to May’s remarks about human rights, but instead urged her to do more to extradite Turkish exiles from the Gulenist or Kurdish movements, saying that if she did not act act against terrorists, it would come back to bite her.

And went on to make it clear that by "terrorists," he also meant journalists who may or may not have been caught engaging in burglary, but otherwise can be assumed to be political targets jailed to ensure silence.

You can't keep treating an overgrown child like an adult. No one should be doing business with Turkey until it cleans up its civil rights violation record. And that's not going to happen as long as Erdogan is president. Gently nudging him towards not being a completely evil asshole obviously doesn't work. All it does is make the government's hosting his off-the-cuff remarks on censorship and jailing journalists look like enablers of oppression.

You may recall that way back in early 2015, we discussed the absurd story of the New Jersey Turnpike Authority suing Jersey Boardwalk Pizza for trademark infringement. At issue was that the pizza joint's owners, both from New Jersey, had crafted a clever logo that mimicked the logo for the Garden State Parkway, except it altered all the words to be the parlor's name and the food it served. It was a clear homage. Nobody denied it. That didn't change the fact, however, that the NJ Turnpike Authority is both not in the business of selling pizza, nor is it in the business of being in Florida. As such, there was zero potential for customer confusion, and the court dismissed the case.

You would have thought that would be the end of this story. But, no, the NJTPA decided to go the trademark office and try to have the pizza parlor's trademark invalidated. Why in the hell it bothered doing so is anyone's guess. Regardless, it didn't work out well for the Garden State.

Three administrative judges with the United States Patent and Trademark Office ruled Monday that Jersey Boardwalk Pizza can continue to use its logo, which the New Jersey Turnpike Authority argued was confusingly similar to the Parkway logo.

In dismissing the authority's claims, the patent office's governing board noted the similarities, but the restaurant's business is unrelated to the roadway. The case was heard in February and took three months to decide.

All sorts of questions leap to mind. What exactly did the folks at the NJTPA think was going to happen at the PTAB after a U.S. District Court refused to entertain this bullshit? Who exactly makes up the legal staff for the NJTPA and are they, or are they not, fully functioning human beings? Is there some kind of gas leak we should be aware of, or perhaps some sort of underground radiation resting just under this legal team's offices?

The most important question, however, is this: how much taxpayer money was flushed down the litigious toilet, all because a couple of New Jersey transplants wanted a callback to their home state for a Florida pizza business? If the answer to that question is greater than zero, it sure feels like there should be exit interviews going on post-haste.

It's kind of incredible how frequently we see people who seem to think that the fact that social media platforms are so bad at moderating the content on those platforms is because they just don't care or don't try hard enough. While it is true that these platforms can absolutely do a much better job (which we believe often involves providing the end user more tools themselves), it's still amazing at how many people think that deciding what content "belongs" and what content doesn't belong is somehow easy. Earlier this month, in Washington DC there was the Content Moderation at Scale "COMO" conference. It was a one day event in which a bunch of companies revealed (sometimes for the first time) how they go about handling questions around content moderation. It was a followup to a similar event at Santa Clara University held back in February (for which we published a bunch of the papers that came out of the event).

For the DC event, we teamed up with the Center for Democracy and Technology to produce a live game for everyone at the event to play -- turning them all into a trust & safety team, tasked with responding to "reported" content on a fictional social media platform. Emma Llanso from CDT and I ran the hour-long session, which included discussions of why people chose their decisions. The video of our session has now been posted which helpfully edits out the "thinking/discuss amongst yourselves" part of the process:

Obviously, many of the examples we chose were designed to be challenging (many based on real situations). But the process was useful and instructive. With each question there were four potential actions that the "trust & safety" team could take and on every single example at least one person chose each option. In other words, even when there was a pretty strong agreement on the course of action to take, there was still at least some disagreement.

Now, imagine (1) having to do that at scale, with hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands or even millions of pieces of "flagged" content showing up, (2) having to do it when you're not someone who is so interested in content moderation that you spent an entire day at a content moderation summit, and (3) having to do it quickly where there are trade-offs and consequences to each choice -- including possible legal liability -- and no matter which option you make, someone (or perhaps lots of someones) are going to get very upset.

Again, this is not to say that internet platforms shouldn't strive to do better -- they should. But one of the great things about attending both of these events is that it demonstrated how each internet platform is experimenting in very, very different ways on how to tackle these problems. Google and Facebook are trying to throw a combination of lots and lots of people plus artificial intelligence at the problem. Wikipedia and Reddit are trying to leverage their own communities to deal with these issues. Smaller platforms are taking different approaches. Some are much more proactive, others are reactive. And out of all that experimentation, even if mistakes are being made, we're finally starting to get some ideas on things that work for this community or that community (and remember, not all communities work the same way).

As I mentioned at the event, we're looking to do a lot more with this concept of getting people to understand the deeper questions involved in the tradeoffs around moderating content. Setting it up as something of a game made it both fun and educational and we'd love some feedback as we look to do more with this concept.

It appears the concept of "extreme vetting" at our borders has been backburnered. The Washington Post is reporting ICE has scrapped plans to acquire software capable of strip-mining immigrants' social media accounts and converting this info into a RATE MY DANGEROUSNESS number. However, it does not appear the concept is being done away with entirely.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials told tech-industry contractors last summer they wanted a system for their “Extreme Vetting Initiative” that could automatically mine Facebook, Twitter and the broader Internet to determine whether a visitor might commit criminal or terrorist acts or was a “positively contributing member of society.”

But ICE quietly dropped the machine-learning requirement from its request in recent months, opting instead to hire a contractor that can provide training, management and human personnel who can do the job. Federal documents say the contract is expected to cost more than $100 million and be awarded by the end of the year.

No more one-click snooping on entrants. Instead, this job will be farmed out to vendors who will probably never accidentally leak the large amount of personal data they're collecting for the government. This isn't a case of ICE/DHS realizing this isn't just intrusive but unnecessary and quite possibly useless. Instead, this is a case of ICE not liking what vendors had to offer on the software front.

An ICE official briefed on the decision-making process said the agency found there was no “out-of-the-box” software that could deliver the quality of monitoring the agency wanted.

For the time being, it won't be AIs and algos doing the vetting. Instead, it will be a government contractor doing the work, presumably using some live humans. What ICE was seeking was a mythical piece of software. It wanted a rigorous vetting system that predetermines the risk levels of immigrants at a touch of a button -- all without troubling civil liberties and/or conflicting with numerous other databases ICE controls or has access to.

There's no doubt the government can acquire something that harvests massive amounts of data. The problem is making that data useful, something even our most experienced data harvesters in the NSA frequently have trouble doing. But ICE wanted it to be more than a database of past social media behavior. It wanted the program to hand it a thumbs up/down rating on visa applicants, something that's not really advisable, if even actually possible. And there doesn't appear to be anything that fits the description.

“Have they realized only that it doesn’t exist now, which is important in its own right, or have they also recognized that this really was an idea that was built on a complete fantasy?” said Rachel Levinson-Waldman, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning policy institute. “That you can somehow take these hugely disparate sources of information, in lots of different languages, and make a prediction about what somebody’s value and worth is?”

Content moderation, but for humans. That hasn't worked well anywhere. It usually leads to profiling, false positives, and wastes of the government's human resources, which are far more limited than its data-hauling capabilities. Extreme vetting isn't going away. It's just going be far more iterative than ICE would like, however. Visions of "Minority Report" (and for actual minorities!) have been dashed by the cold water of tech reality. Concerns about mass violations of privacy and civil liberties had nothing to do with this partial reversal of course.

If you've been following how much the record labels stumbled around the internet for the past couple of decades, then you know the basics here. But time has a way of erasing some of the nuances of history, and I find it incredible to watch the RIAA and the record labels these days walking around proudly acting as if they were the ones who "saved" the music industry by embracing streaming services that now make up the bulk of the recording industry's revenues. Indeed, as we've pointed out for years, the recording industry has a very long history of overvaluing the music and undervaluing the services that people want. They've spent so long insisting that the music is the sole source of the value of what they produce, that they always downplay (or entirely erase) the rest of the equation: getting the music to fans in a manner that is convenient, reasonable, and non-burdensome. Instead, they always focus on killing the golden goose -- insisting that any successful music tech service pay them more and more until they're squeezed dry.

Over at Motherboard, Ernie Smith, has a good history of how the recording industry screwed up streaming in the early days (unfortunately he does what most people do and refers to what's really the "recording industry" as the "music industry" -- and also simplifies the history to be just one round of mistakes, rather than many, many mistakes leaving a graveyard of dead tech companies in its wake -- but the overall article is still excellent). It's a very instructive piece in detailing exactly how the record label bosses were so focused on making sure that they had control and limits, that they didn't care at all about providing a service that people actually wanted. Much of it focuses on the two idiotic music label-approved streaming services that the industry tried to launch MusicNet and PressPlay (which we dubbed MusicNot and PressPause way back in 2001). Smith details how both services were built entirely focused on "how do we protect our revenue stream" rather than "how do we serve the customer." Thus, you had lots of DRM and lots of stupid limits:

Their offerings were slightly different—for a $9.95-per-month fee MusicNet allowed for 100 temporary downloads and 100 on-demand streams at launch, according to Billboard, while Pressplay allowed for 300 streams and 30 downloads and offered limited CD-burning capabilities at higher price points—but the tissue tying the two approaches together was DRM.

It certainly wasn’t music, as the services made no effort to collaborate with one another. In the post-Napster era, the combination of limited libraries and competition from peer-to-peer file sharing services put the companies at a major disadvantage.

Incredibly, inside the industry, executives so believed their own bullshit that they really thought these consumer-unfriendly services would win over piracy:

Stephen Witt, in his 2015 book How Music Got Free, portrayed Universal Music’s then-CEO, Doug Morris, as being overly excited about PressPlay, to the point where Recording Industry Association of America President Hilary Rosen, frequently portrayed as an “enemy combatant” of the Napster era during this time, had a hard time talking him off the ledge. (Rosen, it should be said, was simply sharing the company line because it was her job.)

“On several occasions he told Rosen to stop talking to Napster, to stop negotiating with the Fannings, to stop worrying so much, because he had something that would ‘make it all go away,’” Witt wrote. “In later years, PressPlay would be a reliable starting point for listicles of the ‘Top All-Time Tech Busts.’”

If you don't remember Doug Morris, he was the guy who, back in 2007, gave a stunning interview where he insisted that the reason why the labels missed the boat on the internet was... because they didn't know anyone who understood technology and then blatantly admitted that he didn't know how to hire someone who would have understood technology. To me, that seemed like evidence for why the board should have fired him and brought in someone who actually understood the market. For Morris it just meant he remained a revered leader of the recording industry.

But really the thing that screams out through Smith's piece is the same old thing: the record labels seem to believe that the only thing that matters -- the only thing that provides any value at all -- is the music (which, coincidentally, is the one thing they have some element of control over thanks to copyright). And thus, the idea that the technology or service matters, or that making a service that people actually want is considered barely even worth considering.

Indeed, reading through the article, it basically shows how the tech industry -- in the form of Apple and Spotify -- more or less rescued the recording industry from their own incompetence. And the incredible thing today is that the record labels still whine and complain that the tech industry that saved them is "taking advantage" of them, rather than showing them the way forward.

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The government is still trying to land a conviction from its mass arrest of participants in last year's Inauguration Day protests in Washington, DC. So far, it has nothing to show for its efforts but a far-too-casual disregard for civil liberties.

The prosecutions began with the government's breathtaking demand for the personal info of all 1 million+ visitors to the Disrupt J20 website. From there, things did not improve. The government's prosecutors accused protest participants of "hiding behind the First Amendment" while attempting to strip away First Amendment protections. One of those charged by the government with rioting was journalist Alexi Wood, who had filmed the protests and had the footage to show he wasn't a participant in violent or destructive acts.

The government compounded its unconstitutional behavior in court when its lawyer (Jennifer Kerkhoff) tried to downplay the significance of a foundational part of our justice system -- that the accusers must prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" the accused committed a crime.

Kerkhoff: The defense has talked to you a little bit about reasonable doubt. You're going to get an instruction from the Judge. And you can tell it's clearly written by a bunch of lawyers. It doesn't mean a whole lot. But look at the last line.

The Court: So wait...

Kerkhoff: I apologize.

The Court: I know she didn't mean to say what she just said. But --

Kerkhoff:: It means a lot.

The Court: I just need to say, ladies and gentlemen, you will be instructed on reasonable doubt. You must follow each and every word of my instructions on reasonable doubt.

Kerkhoff: Yes.

The Court: Ms. Kerkhoff did not mean to trivialize any portion of it, and it's just as important that you understand --

Kerkhoff: I apologize.

The Court: -- that every word of the reasonable doubt instructions, like all the rest of my instructions, are very important.

Kerkhoff: It's an important instruction.

After these horrendous actions and the acquittal of its first batch of J20 prosecutees, the DOJ is finally going to attempt something a bit more targeted.

After a DC Superior Court jury acquitted the first group, prosecutors announced they were dropping charges against 129 remaining defendants, saying they would focus on defendants who allegedly engaged in "identifiable acts of destruction, violence, or other assaultive conduct," who planned violence, or who participated in "black bloc" tactics to aid the property destruction that day.

Unfortunately, that still leaves a whole lot of defendants. The prosecutions began with more than 200 people charged. Only about a quarter of the original defendants are still awaiting their day in court.

[...]58 defendants remain charged and will face a judge and jury in at least nine more trials; jury selection for the next of these is scheduled to begin Monday.

The government is still giving itself plenty of leeway, though. It's not simply interested in jailing those who actually committed property destruction during the J20 protests, but anyone it thinks it can pin a conspiracy to riot charge on.

The "conspiracy" angle is only going to do more damage to First Amendment rights. Simply having contact with someone charged with property damage/rioting could net defendants jail time. This is an effective way to deter future dissent, as it casts a chill on participating in protests against the government simply because the possibility of some participants engaging in criminal activity will always exist.

Denver civil rights attorney Jason Flores-Williams was a legal observer at the demonstration, but was disqualified from representing arrested protesters because the court saw this as a conflict of interest. In his view the prosecution means to send an even more pernicious message, which is that protest of the sort that the defendants engaged in is prohibited full stop.

[...]

"The important aspect here is that they're going after fundamental associative rights. They implant the idea in the minds of the citizenry that even to discuss dissent or even 'like' a dissenting comment on Facebook can lead to prosecution. When that happens, democracy dies.”

It's highly unlikely the last 58 defendants all engaged in property damage or destruction. That means a lot of the government's targets will be facing nothing more than conspiracy charges. If the government succeeds in convincing a jury simply discussing participation in a protest that ultimately resulted in destructive acts from a small subset of participants is a criminal act in and of itself, the First Amendment is going to suffer. Given the history of these prosecutions, it's clear the government either isn't aware of the damage it's doing or, more likely, does not care.

By now you've probably been informed that the next-generation of wireless broadband technology is going to revolutionize everything. Much like they did with 3G and 4G, wireless carriers like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile have repeatedly hyped the fifth-generation (5G) wireless standard, insisting that the technology will somehow usher forth a "societal transformation" that's going to have a magical, cascading impact on every sector in technology, from the internet of (broken) things to the smart cities and self-driving car technologies of tomorrow.

The idea that we're in a "race to 5G" with other nations has been a cornerstone of the Trump administration's factually-dubious protectionism aimed at blacklisting Chinese hardware vendors. And hoping to pander to this sentiment, both T-Mobile and Sprint have played up this rhetoric in public statements as they seek approval of their job and competition killing megamerger:

"Ubiquitous high-speed 5G service and Internet of Things (“IoT”) capabilities will ignite innovation across industries and create the conditions for U.S. firms and innovators to lead the globe in the 5G era.

“Going from 4G to 5G is like going from black and white to color TV,” added Claure. “It’s a seismic shift – one that only the combined company can unlock nationwide to fuel the next wave of mobile innovation."

Time and time again, the two companies insist that 5G will somehow create a world of innovation and new technology (though only if the government agrees to reduce competition and approve their $23 billion merger):

"5G for All will unleash incredible benefits and capabilities for consumers and businesses. Imagine, for example, augmented reality heads-up displays that see everything you do, and provide real-time cloud-driven information about the people and objects around you. Imagine never losing anything again because low-cost sensors with decade long battery life are embedded in everything you own. Imagine an earpiece providing real-time translation as a friend speaks to you in another language. Imagine environmental sensors in infrastructure and for agriculture having a profound impact on productivity."

How exciting! The problem: none of those ideas really require "5G" to function, and can be easily developed on existing 4G infrastructure and technologies. 5G might modestly help make data delivery a little faster and more resilient, but 5G technology is not the technology equivalent of Doctor Strange.

You'll find the same rhetoric over at the website of the CTIA, the lobbying arm for major wireless companies. There, you'll find the "race to 5G" prominently hyped alongside all manner of breathless claims about how America must win said race or people could lose their jobs:

"The next generation of wireless is coming. The race to lead the world in 5G is underway and countries like China, South Korea, and Japan are doing everything they can to win. The competition carries real stakes. Today, the wireless industry supports over 4.7 million jobs and contributes roughly $475 billion annually to the American economy. 5G will be even more transformative—making our lives better, our communities safer, and our nation more prosperous. It’s important the United States do everything we can to maintain our wireless leadership. Because when we win the race to 5G, we all win."

It's simply not a race. Yes, companies like Cisco may see it as a race in terms of selling more routers than their overseas competitors, but deployment of 5G networks and handsets (which won't even truly take off until 2020 or thereafter) isn't like a 100 meter dash. It's a lengthy, convoluted process that's going to take years to define, test and implement.

The reality, which simply doesn't sound as sexy in company press releases, is that 5G is less a seismic shift, and more of a modest, natural evolution. Yes, 5G technology will involve all manner of new core network, virtualization, and antenna technologies that should make existing wireless networks faster, more resilient, with lower latency. But the standard is not going to magically eliminate all of the problems that make American wireless networks some of the slowest (we're ranked somewhere around 62 in 4G LTE speeds) and most expensive (40th) among all developed nations.

The reasons we're lagging behind in wireless price, speed and innovation isn't because of software and hardware standards. It's because the entire broadband sector suffers from regulatory capture, where entrenched, wealthy players dictate nearly all meaningful spectrum and competition policy with state and federal lawmakers and regulators. It's also because just a few companies (AT&T, Verizon), enjoy a government protected monopoly over the business data service market that feeds everything from cellular tower backhaul to ATMs.

So will 5G be an improvement over 4G? Sure. But unless we address the underlying problems that keep the U.S. wireless notably broken (spectrum policy, regulatory capture, our fascination with mindless, competition and job killing megamergers), we're not going to be "winning" much of anything beyond higher mobile data bills.

The UK government's continuing efforts to save the country's children from the evils of internet porn are increasingly ridiculous. Filtering efforts applied by ISPs have managed to seal off access to plenty of non-porn sites while still remaining insanely easy to circumvent. The government -- with a straight face -- suggested there was nothing not normal about internet customers turning over personal information to ISPs in exchange for the permission to view porn. It's as if building a database of the nation's porn aficionados was the government's original intent.

Since nothing about this was working about the way the porn filter's architects (one of whom was arrested on child porn charges) imagined, the UK government decided the same non-functioning tech could be put to work filtering out "terrorist content." Bad ideas have repeatedly been supplanted by worse ones, and now it appears UK citizens may be able to opt out of ISP porn-related data harvesting by [squints at press report] buying a porn license from their local newsjobber.

High street newsagents are to sell so-called “porn passes” that will allow adults to visit over-18 websites anonymously.

The 16-digit cards will allow browsers to avoid giving personal details online when asked to prove their age.

Instead, they would show shopkeepers a passport or driving licence when buying the pass.

Trench coats are coming back! Somewhat of an ironic turn of events, given how much government effort was expended trying to limit the amount of public porn consumption by shutting down theaters and heavily regulating distribution of pornography. Instead of heading to porn shops in shady areas of town, porn consumers will be headed to newspaper kiosks to publicly announce their desire to consume porn in the privacy of their own homes.

I would imagine this will be regulated as well, with the government needing occasional access to porn license buyer lists to verify that newsagents are properly vetting porn license purchasers. Fortunately, the privacy-minded porn fan will now be providing personal info to someone other than their ISP. Unfortunately, they will be providing this to people in their neighborhood, possibly in front of their neighbors.

There is, however, a chance the purchase of a porn license may be treated as no different than a purchase of a pornographic publication: age verification only and no retention of records needed. Given the UK government's incessant push for a sanitized web, it seems unlikely this will be the case. Once you've gotten into the business of controlling access to legal content, the tendency is to continue expansion, rather than treat this as simply as a voluntary exchange between buyer and seller with only very limited government interest.