‘Destiny 2’ DLC Suddenly Results In Copyright Strikes For Streamers

Copyright

from the oops dept

We haven’t always spoken in glowing terms about Bungie, the game studio behind the Destiny franchise. That being said, in more recent days, Bungie has also taken some very positive steps when it comes to protecting its fans from copyright takedown abuse, while also highlighting for the record that the DMCA takedown process employed by streaming sites absolutely sucks out loud. So, when it comes to how Bungie generally behaves on matters of intellectual property, it’s kinds of like an annoying Facebook relationship status: it’s complicated.

Well, the Destiny 2 streaming community is getting hit with more copyright issues, this time over on Twitch. It appears that anyone who is streaming some recently released DLC for the game is finding their streams getting muted due to the game’s soundtrack.

Apparently, these copyright strikes are a result of the in-game music, and streamers on Twitch are getting muted as a result of this. Some users have even received repeated notifications from Twitch after instances of copyrighted audio were found in their VODs. It is believed that this was never the case with the previous streams and has only occurred with the new DLCs.

Now, several of those streamers have pushed back on Twitch, indicating that they have never had a problem streaming Destiny games in the past. Twitch responded to several of them with a confirmation that copyrighted music was being played during their streams and that that was the reason for the mute.

The problem is that the Destiny team apparently didn’t intend for any of this to be happening.

As of the time of this writing, the cause of all of this hasn’t been publicly identified, nor a fix for it issued. But it seems pretty clear based on the Destiny team’s response and how it has handled streaming for its games previously that this wasn’t intended.

Which sucks! And highlights again that, even with the best of intentions, enforcing copyright automagically at scale is, well, impossible.

Filed Under: copyright, destiny, dlc, dmca, streaming
Companies: bungie, twitch

Oregon’s DMV Database Is Broken And That Means Innocent People Are Spending Months Behind Bars

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the hey-it's-only-the-little-people dept

The Oregon Department of Motor Vehicles is pretty much just renting a car from Hertz. Participating in either system greatly increases your chances of spending time jailed for crimes you didn’t commit.

Hertz’s inability to perform basic inventory control functions means renters in good standing are being treated to guns out traffic stops and felony accusations on their permanent records. In Oregon, the state’s inability to run an accurate drivers license database means people are being locked up even though their vehicles are properly registered. (h/t BentFranklin via Insider Chat)

Nicholas Chappelle spent nearly a year at Snake River Correctional Institution after he was arrested and convicted for driving with a suspended license.

But he never should have spent a day behind bars.

Chappelle is one of untold numbers of Oregonians stopped by police, arrested, put in jail and even wrongfully convicted based on faulty DMV information– a breakdown in record-keeping that has existed for years but the state never fixed.

By the time a Columbia County prosecutor realized Chappelle was innocent, he had lost his job as a union ironworker and missed the birth of his son while held at the medium-security prison in eastern Oregon, far from his family in Scappoose.

Oh, well. It’s just little people. They can weather everything the justice system throws at them and expect little in the way of recourse if they decide to make a federal case of it.

Chappelle pled guilty to a felony he didn’t commit in hopes of speeding this process up. It didn’t work. Days are critical when you have a job and a place to live. Months are untenable. Nearly a year behind bars is catastrophic.

But will the state feel the pain? It seems like it should. Its improperly configured database does not recognize suspended licenses that have been reinstated due to math errors.

The DMV has improperly recorded approximately 3,000 driver’s licenses in the last two decades as suspended indefinitely through either 12/31/9999 or 00/00/0000, according to data obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive through a public records request.

I don’t want to assume the state is using Excel to track suspended licenses, but come on! This is classic Excel butchery. Compounding the math error is the alternate tracking system, which relies solely on convicted drivers to inform the state of their current status — a system that inverts the justice system to place the burden on former convicts to make the state aware of their current, lawful status.

Some of you may think this is how it should be. But allow me to inform you that you are wrong. The state inhales tax dollars to oversee an accurate database. Those being taxed should not be expected to correct the state’s errors. The state is being paid to do this job. People accused of license violations aren’t being paid anything to ensure the state doesn’t fuck their shit up. That’s completely backward.

But fear not, Oregon residents! The state has no idea how long things have been fucked up, nor does it have a plan to make things less fucked up in the immediate future.

The DMV has no idea how many people have been charged and prosecuted because of the erroneous records…

It appears DMV officials learned of the lapse at some point in the past, Joyce said. But it’s not clear exactly when and it “wasn’t at a high enough level to understand the urgency” to figure out a remedy, she told The Oregonian/OregonLive.

So, that’s the “solution.” Who knows and who cares, as long as it only affects the most powerless state residents? Shrugs are followed by shrugs from state officials who acknowledge there’s a problem, but have yet to take the problem seriously because it only affects people who, every few years or so, decide to talk to journalists.

Chapelle spent 11 months in jail before prosecutors recognized there was something wrong with the state’s database. He cannot possibly be the only victim of the state’s inability to do its job properly. Case in point: the Multnomah County prosecutor’s office has already identified at least 30 cases where the database might be wrong and falsely accused drivers might be right.

That’s the tip of the iceberg. No one in the state paid attention to this failure until journalists and a man falsely jailed for nearly a year brought it to the government’s attention.

The government gets paid well to do what it does. Given the funding that flows to law enforcement, the government should be on the leading edge, finding and addressing problems before they result in rights violations and the destruction of innocent people’s lives. But that’s never the case. It’s always outside parties discovering things the government should have been aware of for months, if not years. And when the government finally comes riding to the rescue, all it’s really doing is performing the bare minimum of un-fuckery. That’s not acceptable.

Filed Under: dmv, jail, oregon

White House Anonymously Throws Gigi Sohn Under The Bus After Screwing Up Her FCC Nomination

Politics

from the you're-not-helping dept

Earlier this month we noted how a sleazy telecom and media giant smear campaign successfully derailed the FCC nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn, keeping the agency gridlocked (quite intentionally) without the voting majority to do much of anything deemed “controversial” by industry.

While the GOP and telecom giants deserve the lion’s share of the blame for Sohn’s derailed nomination (they want a feckless FCC that can’t hold AT&T and Comcast accountable for anything), there were also plenty of screw ups on the Democratic side and in the White House, where there’s also no shortage of folks without the courage or integrity to stand up to telecom lobbyists.

Biden’s White House nominated Sohn nine months late (that there was any delay at all was a surprise to one White House communications staffer I interacted with last year).

From there, Maria Cantwell repeatedly buckled to Republican calls for unnecessary, redundant show hearings. Chuck Schumer failed to whip the votes. Senators Masto, Kelly, and Manchin all ultimately buckled to bad faith industry attacks, preventing her from getting the 51 votes needed in the Senate. Sohn’s future colleagues at the FCC, Jessica Rosenworcel and Geoffrey Starks, couldn’t be bothered to offer a single instance of meaningful support as she faced down attacks, alone.

The whole thing was an embarrassing, corrupt mess, and a clear example of why government struggles to hire game-changing reformers, especially at major regulatory agencies. Yet via an anonymous quote in the Washington Post this week, some White House staffer apparently thought it would be a good idea to throw Sohn even further under the bus:

A White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the nomination, said they “worked tirelessly to move Gigi’s nomination” and that at her hearings Sohn “had the chance to push back and dispel the misconceptions that dark money and influence were trafficking in.”

Except numerous sources have informed me that they did not “work tirelessly.” And it’s kind of a giant middle finger to Sohn to suggest that the onus for shaking off a massive, well-coordinated smear campaign rested entirely on her shoulders.

As Sohn notes to the Post, you’re limited as to what you can say publicly when facing such attacks, especially if you care about your personal safety as an LGBTQ+ person in the current political environment:

Sohn, who would have been the first openly gay FCC commissioner, said the implication in the articles were “clearly tied to QAnon themes about LGBTQ+ people as groomers, as perverts, as sex traffickers.” And she said she felt it put her and her loved ones at risk. 

“That was the first time I felt like ‘Oh my god, this could really rile up some crazies to come to my house … and threaten me and my family,’” Sohn said. 

Unlike the Lina Khan nomination to the FTC (which involved a prompt nomination and then shock promotion to Chair to pre-empt industry resistance), Sohn’s FCC nomination was nine months late — the biggest delay in FCC history. That provided the telecom and media industries, spooked by the Khan pick, ample runway to manufacture its ultimately successful propaganda campaign, which involved using various seedy nonprofits to falsely accuse Sohn of being a radical cop hating enemy of Hispanics and rural Americans.

The White House offered zero meaningful public messaging support of their nominee aimed at debunking any of this. Several sources have suggested to me that Sohn’s nomination could have likely succeeded if the White House had also applied more meaningful pressure on Senators Manchin, Masto, and Kelly (several of whom themselves parroted industry propaganda about Sohn). They didn’t.

That said, I also have been told that Biden personally strongly supported Sohn, prompting her to be re-nominated early this year after a contentious 2022. Even then, you never genuinely got the sense from anyone on the Democratic side that seating Sohn (or the FCC’s consumer protection authority more generally) was a meaningful priority of any kind.

That’s not just a problem for hot button issues like net neutrality. The FCC is at the heart of the White House’s plan to throw an historic $45 billion in new broadband subsidies at the nation’s digital divide. Without a functioning voting majority, the FCC can’t meaningfully hold monopolies accountable when they inevitably take subsidies for networks they fail to deliver. Or much of anything else.

Putting all of this on Sohn’s shoulders because she didn’t “push back and dispel the misconceptions” being seeded in a gullible press by telecom monopolies with unlimited budgets is a final fuck you footnote on one of the most embarrassing tech/telecom policy failures in modern history. This one will leave a mark, and sends a very clear message to popular, good faith reformers eyeing government posts.

Filed Under: broadband, digital divide, fcc, ftc, gigi sohn, high speed internet, joe biden, joe manchin, lina khan, regulatory capture, telecom, the white house

Yes, The US Government Threatening To Block TikTok Violates The 1st Amendment

Free Speech

from the free-speech-until-china-builds-a-successful-app? dept

You may have heard that the Biden administration has told TikTok that it must be divested from ByteDance or it will be banned in the US. At least that’s what TikTok said the administration has said. The end result of this might well be that ByteDance divests of TikTok, but we should be clear: the threat, and any potential block, would be a clear, blatant, dangerous violation of the 1st Amendment.

We already know this, from back when former President Trump tried the same damn thing and (rather sloppily) tried to ban both TikTok and WeChat in the US. We called it unconstitutional at the time, and the courts agreed. There were a bunch of lawsuits, and none of them went well. WeChat users argued it violated their own 1st Amendment rights, and the judge agreed, noting that banning WeChat would “burden substantially more speech than is necessary to serve the government’s significant interest in national security.”

That line seems… kinda relevant?

TikTok also sued and won, though the court didn’t even get to the 1st Amendment claims, tossing it out for violating the Administrative Procedure Act by being arbitrary and capricious.

Especially given that the threats of TikTok remain entirely hypothetical to date, and many seem to be whipped up around a moral panic regarding China, rather than based on any fact. Banning the site outright will only raise these very same issues yet again.

The WeChat ruling focused on the 1st Amendment issues in cutting off its users entirely from an app they used to communicate. But, there’s a separate issue of shutting down the speech of TikTok itself. Shutting down any website has to raise 1st Amendment issues. We’ve highlighted this before with regard to domain seizures. And blocking an entire website is the same thing.

There many relevant cases on the books, but a big one is Ft. Wayne Books v. Indiana. That ruling found that you can’t shut down an entire book store just because some of the books might violate the law, because in the process you’d be shutting down lots of protected, permissible speech. Similarly, Near v. Minnesota is a case where the Supreme Court noted that you can’t just declare a publication “malicious, scandalous and defamatory” and bar it from publishing (though anyone defamed could still sue directly for defamation).

Blocking TikTok entirely over mostly theoretical issues is the same sort of thing. Shutting down an entire speech operation because of some vague, nebulous claim of bad speech.

But it’s actually even worse than that. It’s no secret that China bans lots of American websites. In the past, we may have been able to point to US openness to free speech, showing the moral high ground. But in now threatening to ban TikTok, all we’re doing is justifying the Chinese approach, and basically saying we’re happy to do the same. And you can bet that China is already gloating about this, and how it shows that even the Americans are coming around to the Chinese approach of banning foreign websites that we’re scared about.

The end result will simply justify more internet splintering, more geographical blocks, and hasten the end of a global, open internet. The US used to stand for that open internet but admitting that we toss those principles out the window just because China finally built a successful global internet service is incredibly pathetic and will lead to all sorts of backlash.

Finally, as we’ve been saying all along, rather than moral panics and fear mongering, let’s focus on the actual problem. Banning TikTok won’t solve the issue of any potential privacy violations. As we’ve noted over and over and over again, the supposed data that TikTok is “collecting” on its users is available from basically anywhere to basically anyone with a few bucks. Want to fix that? Pass a real privacy law.

What about the idea that China might pressure TikTok to tweak its famed (but massively overhyped) algorithm to warp the minds of our children? Beyond being a silly moral panic, have we really done such a shit job of educating the youth that we think that the flow of TikTok videos will turn their brains into mush? I mean, hell, if we noticed that TikTok was doing that, it wouldn’t even be that difficult for people and politicians to call out what they were actually doing and push back on it.

This whole thing is just yet another moral panic, and one that opens up some huge 1st Amendment issues, because if the White House can magically declare TikTok a national security threat, it can do that for other sites and apps as well. It’s not something the government should be able to do.

Of course, TikTok’s current management may have to weigh all of this against the cost of fighting the government, meaning that it wouldn’t surprise me if the company does separate from ByteDance in the end. But the government shouldn’t be doing this, and we should call out such nonsense when we see it.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, china, free speech, global internet, global open internet, joe biden, moral panic, open internet, prior restraint, privacy
Companies: tiktok

Daily Deal: The All-In-One Microsoft Excel Certification Training Bundle

Deals

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

The All-In-One Microsoft Excel Certification Training Bundle has 10 courses to help you master advanced Excel dashboards, Google Sheets, data science, and more. You’ll learn about data visualization, VBA programming, business intelligence, Pivot Tables, and more. It’s on sale for $34.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.

Filed Under: daily deal

FBI Latest To Admit To Bypassing Warrant Requirements By Purchasing Location Info From Data Brokers

Privacy

from the do-whatever-the-fuck dept

Well… fuck the Supreme Court, I guess.

That’s how law enforcement is working these days, bypassing the restraints of the Carpenter decision to do what they want, when they want, with whatever location data they can purchase from private third-party brokers.

It’s the “third party” that counts. It’s also the narrower aspects of the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision, which limited the warrant requirement to obtaining “long term” (not specifically defined in the decision) location data from cell service providers.

The implications of the decision suggested finding alternate routes for long-term tracking of US citizens via cell phone location data was off limits without a warrant. But specificity matters and this decision just didn’t have it. Thanks to the limitations of this ruling, federal agencies are violating the spirit of the decision en masse because the justices failed to consider the existence of third-party data brokers which hoover up location data from popular apps and sell access to this data to whoever wants it: advertisers, marketers, CBP, ICE, the US Secret Service, the IRS, state prisons, etc.

The latest to admit to bypassing the implications of Supreme Court precedent is (to the surprise of nobody) the FBI. And that revelation comes from an expected source: Senator Ron Wyden, who has always made a point of staying on top of rights violations and government surveillance overreach. This is from Dell Cameron’s latest article for Wired, which covers the FBI’s admission it has joined its fed counterparts in paying private companies to access to massive amounts of location data.

The disclosure came today during a US Senate hearing on global threats attended by five of the nation’s intelligence chiefs. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, put the question of the bureau’s use of commercial data to its director, Christopher Wray: “Does the FBI purchase US phone-geolocation information?” Wray said his agency was not currently doing so, but he acknowledged that it had in the past. He also limited his response to data companies gathered specifically for advertising purposes. 

FBI Director Wray offered more details, albeit not actual details contained in actual FBI paperwork. BUT DETAILS NONETHELESS!

“To my knowledge, we do not currently purchase commercial database information that includes location data derived from internet advertising,” Wray said. “I understand that we previously—as in the past—purchased some such information for a specific national security pilot project. But that’s not been active for some time.” He added that the bureau now relies on a “court-authorized process” to obtain location data from companies. 

Well, then I assume the FBI will be presenting the paper trail for this “court-authorized process” immediately. And it will presumably be presenting Senator Wyden (and the general public by extension) with contractual information about its past purchases and its termination of said contracts in the near future.

Look, I know I sound patently ridiculous. But the FBI director swore before God and country the g-men were on the up and up. What better way to demonstrate that then by… you know… actually demonstrating that.

Without supporting documentation, all we have are Chris Wray’s (untrustworthy) words that the FBI may have misbehaved in the past but is all good and constitutional at this particular point in its timeline. And if there’s anything the FBI has demonstrated over the years, it’s that when it says everything is above-board, everything absolutely isn’t.

The FBI is known for backdoor searches of NSA collections, encouraging civil rights leaders to kill themselves, engaging in massive amounts of domestic surveillance abuse, and refusing — for years now — to address cell phone encryption with anything approaching good faith or honesty. For it to claim its abuses are behind it when it comes to patronizing data brokers, the FBI should absolutely not be trusted until it can publicly demonstrate — with supporting documents — that it can be. Until we hear otherwise, assume the FBI is still doing the thing it just told Senator Ron Wyden it isn’t doing.

Filed Under: 3rd party data, 4th amendment, christopher wray, data, fbi, ron wyden, warrant

CFPB Launches Long Overdue Probe Of Unaccountable Data Broker Market

Privacy

from the belated-and-likely-doomed-efforts-to-competently-regulate dept

We’ve noted for a while that the performative histrionics surrounding TikTok are really just a distraction from our corrupt failure to police dodgy data brokers or pass even a basic privacy law for the internet era. U.S. companies don’t want to lose money by empowering consumers or being ethical, and the U.S. government doesn’t want to get warrants for data it can buy cheaply from brokers.

As a result, story after story after story showcases how the intentionally convoluted data broker market now routinely traffics in all manner of sensitive consumer data, whether it’s your daily movements (say, the last time you visited an abortion clinic), your granular browsing habits, or even your mental health data. Any efforts to change this dynamic are quickly dismantled by data broker lobbyists, forcing the dwindling number of policymakers who actually care about this stuff to get creative.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), one of numerous privacy-adjacent regulators industry giants have attempted to lobotomize, has announced that it’s going to finally start conducting an inquiry into the data broker space, and whether any of these companies are violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act:

“Modern data surveillance practices have allowed companies to hover over our digital lives and monetize our most sensitive data,” said CFPB Director Rohit Chopra. “Our inquiry will inform whether rules under the Fair Credit Reporting Act reflect these market realities.”

Whether this actually results in anything substantive remains to be seen. Like most of the regulatory state, the CFPB has been under relentless attack by policymakers who like to pretend that letting giant, predatory companies and industries run amok results in near-mystical Utopian outcomes, despite two straight generations’ worth of data violently debunking the concept.

For decades data brokers have been hoovering up vast troves of sensitive consumer data, and selling it to any nitwit with a nickel. That’s resulted in just a steady parade of ugly scandals U.S. policymakers do little to nothing about. Post-Roe, it’s a problem that’s only going to get dumber and more dangerous, yet, by and large, federal leaders have proven too corrupt and captured to do literally anything about it.

Since there’s no meaningful U.S. privacy law for the Internet, and government regulators have pretty widely been lobotomized via corruption, most data brokers really don’t see much in the way of actual oversight or scrutiny. As such it’s fairly easy for them to brush off complaints simply by claiming that the sensitive data they collect is “anonymized” (a meaningless term).

Given that this data can easily be sold to any number of global governments (including Chinese intelligence), the myopic fixation on TikTok as somehow the most pressing of all tech policy issues, continues to be a massive distraction from the actual problem.

This is just the opening phase of a CFPB inquiry, and any substantive action could be years away, assuming it arrives at all. And like most such pursuits, any actual fine will likely be a pittance compared to the money made by being unethical. The CFPB says its request for information will be published in the Federal Register, and the public will have until June 13, 2023 to submit their comments.

Filed Under: abortion, cfpb, data brokers, location data, mental health, privacy, regulation, roe, social media, warrants