A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how Bethesda’s latest opus, Starfield, was shipping without support for Nvidia’s DLSS technology, but did have a deal to support AMD’s version of that upscaling technology. And after plenty of commenters pointed out that I was coming at that post from the wrong angle, I jumped into the comments thanking them and admitting so, particularly when it comes to how FSR is open source and works on all graphics cards, as well as several other particulars I wasn’t informed enough to recognize. Whoops! My fault!
Now that that’s out of the way, I also mentioned in that post that an enterprising modder, PureDark, had uploaded their own mod to add in DLSS support for the game to Nexusmods.com. And that’s true, though I hadn’t noticed at the time that there were versions of the mod free to download and one that sits behind PureDark’s Patreon paywall. And that created some controversy, both with the public and with PureDark themselves.
“Starfield Upscaler” is the second-most popular mod for Bethesda’s open-world RPG, but its creator sparked controversy earlier this month because the best version of it was locked behind a $5 Patreon subscription paywall. In a new interview with IGN he defends the practice, and threatens users who try to pirate his work with “hidden mines” that will break the mod.
He released a free version that supported DLSS 2, but access to DLSS 3 support, the newest version, was exclusive to his personal Patreon. Drama ensued and pirates who normally focus on “cracking” the DRM protecting games like Starfield instead took a moment to “crack” the “Starfield Upscaler” mod itself.
Those hidden mine threats? Essentially think of it as some of the more creative forms of DRM we’ve seen publishers put in their games. The idea is to make the game completely unpredictable if you’re using a cracked version of the mod. PureDark essentially said if you used a cracked version, the game would sometimes work, sometimes wouldn’t, would randomly crash, and in other ways would essentially just mess with the player’s experience.
And that’s kind of shitty. The reaction to PureDark’s comments was fairly negative as well. After all, are “pirated” versions of a mod really worth all the extra trouble that is essentially laying these traps?
As it turns out, the answer to that is no. A conclusion reached by PureDark themselves, it seems.
“The interview with IGN was conducted more than a week ago, and it was what I said back when I was angry at haters and those who cracked my Starfield mod,” he now says. “I did think about doing that at some point, but then I stopped doing it. It’s been a long time, and I’ve calmed my mind.”
He added that actually booby-trapping the mod would be a lot of work and not worth the effort. “It’s really not worth it to waste my time fighting or getting back to those people,” PureDark said. “I might as well focus on making new mods and updates.”
Glad they got there. It would also be nice if all the game studios that spend their time and money on things like DRM and anti-piracy enforcement could reach the same conclusion.
While technologies like low orbit satellite can help shore up broadband access, they come with their own additional challenges. One being that services like Space X’s Starlink have cause potentially unavoidable light pollution, harming scientific research. The other being the exponential growth in space detritus, aka space junk, that will make space navigation increasingly difficult.
The FCC has generally been an absentee landlord on both issues, though late last year the agency finally announced it would be taking some basic steps to tackle the space junk problem. That included a newly proposed (and rather generous) five year limit for letting older satellites just sit around in orbit:
“The Commission will consider a Second Report and Order that would adopt rules requiring low-Earth orbit space station operators planning disposal through uncontrolled atmospheric re-entry to complete disposal as soon as practicable, and no more than five years following the end of their mission.“
This week the FCC took its first action under the new guidelines, fining Dish Network (which has had no shortage of problems trying to shift from satellite TV to wireless) $150,000 for not cleaning up one of its older, neglected satellites:
“The FCC’s investigation found that the company violated the Communications Act, the FCC rules, and the terms of the company’s license by relocating its direct broadcast satellite (“DBS”) service EchoStar-7 satellite at the satellite’s end-of-mission to a disposal orbit well below the elevation required by the terms of its license. At this lower altitude, it could pose orbital debris concerns.”
Dish was supposed to bring down its EchoStar-7 satellite to 186 miles (300 kilometers) above its operational geostationary orbit, using its remaining fuel to bring the satellite out of orbit on May 2022. Instead, Dish parked the satellite 75 miles (122 kilometers) above the geostationary arc instead and left it there, creating “space junk” concerns.
Having the FCC wake up from its multi-decade nap here is a decidedly good thing. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), there are roughly 34,580 large debris objects currently being tracked, with thousands of more smaller chunks also posing a risk. Apparently, just leaving a bunch of garbage in space and then doing absolutely nothing about it wasn’t working as a mitigation strategy; imagine that.
Look, I don’t want to suggest that maybe the 5th Circuit’s analysis on issues in the Missouri v. Biden case is not particularly well considered, but, um, it’s not at all clear that the 5th Circuit’s analysis on the Missouri v. Biden case is well considered. After all, the original ruling made a series of embarrassing factual errors, falsely presenting comments by White House officials as being about content moderation when they were not, and failing to highlight how certain speech was coercive beyond “we think it is.” It also failed to attribute many of the comments it quoted, so it was impossible to backtrack who said what and in what context, and further failed to distinguish between different platforms who acted very differently.
Even more pointedly, one of the big criticisms of the 5th Circuit ruling was that it provided no standards for understanding what activity crossed the line from government attempts at persuasion (legal) to government attempts at coercion (not legal). It just said that the activity by the White House, FBI, and CDC were over the line and coercive, while the activity of CISA, the State Department, and NIAID were not over the line (and therefore those entities were not limited by the injunction).
This lack of clarity as to why some agencies were included in the injunction and some were excluded is part of why the White House went to the Supreme Court to ask it to put the injunction on hold.
The Supreme Court did put the ruling on hold for a few days (and then a few more days) and then… did nothing. Really. If you look at the docket for this case at the Supreme Court site, you see that Justice Alito initially stayed the 5th Circuit injunction until Friday, September 22nd at 11:59pm.
Then, on the On the 22nd, he gave himself more time, to the following Wednesday the 27th at 11:59pm.
And on the 27th… he did… nothing. Nothing at all. To date that docket has not been updated, other than by the respondents in the case (basically Louisiana and Missouri) updating the court on things. I don’t know if this is because Alito forgot about it, or thought that it didn’t matter any more? Or because of some other confusion over what the 5th Circuit did in the interim.
On September 25th, the 5th Circuit withdrew the original injunction from the 8th. On September 26th, it withdrew the order from the 25th which withdrew the order from the 8th. It was suggested that it did this upon realizing that the order from the 8th was currently under review by the Supreme Court.
So… I guess the fact that Alito has ignored the docket and let his stay expire on the 27th meant that the injunction went back into effect… and now the 5th Circuit can issue another new injunction? Because that’s what it’s done. Yesterday the 5th Circuit basically issued more or less the same injunction that it issued on the 8th… except that this time, CISA is included among the enjoined parties (which was a piece of what the states had asked for whenthey asked the 5th Circuit to review the original ruling).
But all of this is procedurally weird. Not even getting into the injunction withdrawals and withdrawal of withdrawals, this new ruling wasn’t done en banc (with all the judges) or with any oral arguments. Just with the petition from the plaintiffs and the reply from the White House.
I mean, maybe that’s how the 5th Circuit rolls, but it all seem ridiculously ad hoc.
As is the case with the new ruling, which now adds in CISA as an enjoined party. I ran the two opinions through a diff checker, and they are literally the same, except where the original ruling said that while CISA did flag content to social media websites and hold meetings with them, it wasn’t coercive, now it suddenly says that it is. With basically no explanation whatsoever.
Seriously.
The new ruling includes ONE new paragraph saying “oh yeah, CISA too.”
Next, we examine CISA. We find that, for many of the same reasons as the FBI and the CDC, CISA also likely violated the First Amendment. First, CISA was the “primary facilitator” of the FBI’s interactions with the social-media platforms and worked in close coordination with the FBI to push the platforms to change their moderation policies to cover “hack-and-leak” content. Second, CISA’s “switchboarding” operations, which, in theory, involved CISA merely relaying flagged social-media posts from state and local election officials to the platforms, was, in reality, “[s]omething more.” Roberts, 742 F.2d at 228. CISA used its frequent interactions with social-media platforms to push them to adopt more restrictive policies on censoring election-related speech. And CISA officials affirmatively told the platforms whether the content they had “switchboarded” was true or false. Thus, when the platforms acted to censor CISA-switchboarded content, they did not do so independently. Rather, the platforms’ censorship decisions were made under policies that CISA has pressured them into adopting and based on CISA’s determination of the veracity of the flagged information. Thus, CISA likely significantly encouraged the platforms’ content-moderation decisions and thereby violated the First Amendment. See Blum, 457 U.S. at 1008; Howard Gault, 848 F.2d at 555.
This replaces the following paragraph in the original ruling:
Finally, although CISA flagged content for social-media platforms as part of its switchboarding operations, based on this record, its conduct falls on the “attempts to convince,” not “attempts to coerce,” side of the line. See Okwedy, 333 F.3d at 344; O’Handley, 62 F.4th at 1158. There is not sufficient evidence that CISA made threats of adverse consequences— explicit or implicit—to the platforms for refusing to act on the content it flagged. See Warren, 66 F.4th at 1208–11 (finding that senator’s communication was a “request rather than a command” where it did not “suggest[] that compliance was the only realistic option” or reference potential “adverse consequences”). Nor is there any indication CISA had power over the platforms in any capacity, or that their requests were threatening in tone or manner. Similarly, on this record, their requests— although certainly amounting to a non-trivial level of involvement—do not equate to meaningful control. There is no plain evidence that content was actually moderated per CISA’s requests or that any such moderation was done subject to non-independent standards.
There is no discussion as to why the court changed its mind. There is no discussion about the details of what made it persuasion in the first opinion, but coercion in the second opinion. There is… nothing.
To the argument that the White House made that this ruling provides them with no actionable details of how the line is drawn, the fact that the new ruling just rewrites this one paragraph, without details, to switch from “persuasion” to “coercion” is a disaster of jurisprudence.
It’s basically the 5th Circuit admitting that its decision on the difference is not driven by any test (like the rest of the opinion pretended it was setting up), but rather by its somewhat arbitrary whims.
That is not at all how courts should rule.
Beyond replacing that one paragraph with another, the opinions are effectively the same (a few other references to CISA were removed from the rest of the ruling about entities that were not violating 1st Amendment rights).
That does mean that the State Department and NIAID are still excluded from the injunction. But… it gives the government literally nothing to work from in determining what is allowed and what is stomping on people’s rights.
You have to imagine that the White House is going to turn around and go right back to Alito to say “yo, put this on hold until you can review.”
For the children. For the children. For the children.
That’s all we hear. And it’s always from people arguing to expand government power. It’s never from anyone who actually cares about protecting children from their government. Instead, it’s almost always used as leverage to increase government power using the theory that only a monster would oppose something that may, albeit only theoretically, help the children.
Enter facial recognition, which is (unbelievably) now a fixture in schools around the nation. Moving far past the RFID tracking of attendance and movement, facial recognition is now being deployed to determine whether or not someone can actually enter a school.
Years of “stranger danger” misinformation delivered by schools has convinced school administrators predators will actually attempt to breach these relative fortresses to abscond with children when, in fact, most sexual abuse of children is perpetrated by people these same educational entities have already determined to be benign (family members, clergy, family friends, other close acquaintances).
Schools are also hoping to deter school shootings. But rather than align behind gun control legislation (which would certainly alienate a large percentage of parents), schools decide to spend tax dollars on automation that’s rarely capable of deterring actual threats to student safety.
Facial recognition is (nearly) omnipresent. But many states and cities have actually taken action to prevent always-on surveillance from becoming the new day-to-day reality for their residents. Facial recognition bans have been enacted around the nation. They’re still anomalies, but the fact that these bans exist is heartening. It shows governments aren’t always interested in doing whatever’s easiest for them. Sometimes, they actually care about the people they represent.
In the state of New York, schools and their students are no longer considered to be fair game for this form of biometric surveillance, as the Associated Press reports:
New York state banned the use of facial recognition technology in schools Wednesday, following a report that concluded the risks to student privacy and civil rights outweigh potential security benefits.
Education Commissioner Betty Rosa’s order leaves decisions on digital fingerprinting and other biometric technology up to local districts.
Good news and bad news. But, hey… good news! This moratorium (which means it’s not actually a ban, but will do until an actual ban comes along) was prompted by judicial challenges filed by concerned parents as well as well as a government report showing one such tech deployment was completely useless.
The Lockport school district deployed facial recognition tech in 2020 with the stated aim of detecting “disgruntled employees, sex offenders, or certain weapons.” The detection of “disgruntled employees” could surely be handled by non-disgruntled employees. (Disgruntled school employees rarely, if ever, return to their former employers to engage in acts of violence, most likely because schools are relative fortresses when compared to other public employment venues.)
Sex offenders, as noted above, aren’t just going to try to walk through the doors. And (as also noted above), the people most likely to engage in sex offenses won’t be recognized as sex offenders, either by school personnel or their tech.
All that leaves is the “certain weapons,” which — it must be noted — AREN’T FUCKING FACES.
So, what is it for? It’s almost useless for the reasons stated, which must mean it’s more useful for reasons school administrators and the companies they buy tech from aren’t willing to state publicly. Not that any of that matters, at least for the moment, now that the state of New York has declared schools off limits for facial recognition tech.
That seems like the right thing to do, especially given all the factors in play. But, somehow, across the nation in a state where criminal activity of all kinds is far less likely (if we don’t consider the robber baron-esque activities of wealthy Hollywood figures), it has been decided by state legislators that children should be first (and possibly only) people first against the (facial recognition) wall. This is what’s going on in Montana at the moment.
The state Legislature earlier this year passed a law barring state and local governments from continuous use of facial recognition technology, typically in the form of cameras capable of reading and collecting a person’s biometric data, like the identifiable features of their face and body. A bipartisan group of legislators went toe-to-toe with software companies and law enforcement in getting Senate Bill 397 over the finish line, contending public safety concerns raised by the technology’s supporters don’t overcome individual privacy rights.
Cool cool cool. Except:
School districts, however, were specifically carved out of the definition of state and local governments to which the facial recognition technology law applies.
Oh, wow. The state decided those legally incapable of consent should be subjected to biometric surveillance the legislature wasn’t willing to deploy against actual adults.
Public schools are government entities. A ban covering government use of this tech should absolutely have prevented schools from using this tech. But instead of protecting the kids, the legislature decided only minors were unworthy of being protected by this so-called “ban.”
According to estimates by education groups and school administrators, at least 50 schools in Montana are currently deploying facial recognition tech. That may seem like a small number, but Montana is home to less than 700 schools with an enrollment of nearly 109,000 students. Compare that to New York, which has more than 4,300 public schools hosting nearly 2.5 million students.
The asshattery of this legislated exception is backed by the asshattery of school administrators who seem to believe subjecting everyone to facial recognition in a largely rural area is a net good for students and the society they exist in.
For Sun River School District Superintendent Dave Marzolf, school safety superseded any hesitancy about installing facial recognition technology around the school.
“I just like to have the comfort to know if somebody’s buzzing at our door, and facial recognition comes up showing they’re not supposed to be on school property, it’s a good safety feature,” Marzolf said.
I would love to know how often this is actually a problem in a school district that oversees three schools and less than 300 students. The number of people not allowed on school property must number into the low 1’s. And yet, this small district that presumably has limited public funding still feels it’s worth blowing bucks on tech more likely to misidentify the FedEx driver than actually detect any real threat to school safety.
It’s weird. One would expect a very populated state to be more willing to subject people to mass surveillance for supposed “safety” reasons. Instead, we have this bizarre dichotomy where a “liberal” state cares more about protecting students from itself, while a “conservative” state thinks only children should be exempt from limits on government surveillance. But I guess it just goes to show that this era of so-called “conservatives”only cares about children until they’re born. After that, they’re unworthy of being protected from their government.
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Update: Wired has since pulled the underlying story, after Google released the document at issue, which it appears may have been misread. The original story is still visible below, but with much of it now having strikethroughs, but we’ll be writing a follow up.
I know many of you have heard this before, but Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” concept is such a useful framework to think about things:
first, companies are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.
As I’ve highlighted, much of this is driven by the ridiculous demands of Wall St. and the belief that companies have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to increase profits at the expense of everything else, but that’s not just wrong, it’s incredibly short-sighted. Because the conclusion to the enshittification concept is that once companies go down the enshittification curve, at some point they die. This is why one of the keys to avoiding enshittification is knowing how and when to tell Wall St. to piss off.
There was a time when it looked like Google understood this lesson. When the company filed to go public, Sergey and Larry started the S1 with a letter in which they basically insisted that they wouldn’t go down this path, and would always put users first — and that anyone looking to buy shares in the company needed to understand that. Among many similar statements, the letter said:
As a private company, we have concentrated on the long term, and this has served us well. As a public company, we will do the same. In our opinion, outside pressures too often tempt companies to sacrifice long term opportunities to meet quarterly market expectations. Sometimes this pressure has caused companies to manipulate financial results in order to “make their quarter.” In Warren Buffett’s words, “We won’t ‘smooth’ quarterly or annual results: If earnings figures are lumpy when they reach headquarters, they will be lumpy when they reach you.”
If opportunities arise that might cause us to sacrifice short term results but are in the best long term interest of our shareholders, we will take those opportunities. We will have the fortitude to do this. We would request that our shareholders take the long term view.
There was a time when it felt like Google kept that promise, but that time seems long past. As the company grew and grew it’s clear that it started to go down the enshittification curve just like everyone else, and started to prioritize Wall St.’s quarterly demands over serving users.
I’ve noted that I don’t think the current Google antitrust case (where the trial is currently ongoing) is all that strong, though I think a more recent case that was filed earlier this year seems much stronger. That stronger case is the one involving how Google’s ad team manipulated the ads market in a way that it could extract more value out of it, while attempting to block effective competition.
The ongoing case is more about how Google sought to have its search included as the default on various browsers and phones and such.
However, it looks like some of the ad shenanigans are showing up in this case too. Megan Gray (who worked at the FTC and as General Counsel at DuckDuckGo) has been attending the trial and wrote a piece for Wired about a bit of evidence that flashed on the projector screen, suggesting that Google is secretly altering search queries to drive more ads and commerce. If accurate, this is (1) quintessential late stage enshittification and (2) obnoxiously evil:
This onscreen Google slide had to do with a “semantic matching” overhaul to its SERP algorithm. When you enter a query, you might expect a search engine to incorporate synonyms into the algorithm as well as text phrase pairings in natural language processing. But this overhaul went further, actually altering queries to generate more commercial results.
There have long been suspicions that the search giant manipulates ad prices, and now it’s clear that Google treats consumers with the same disdain. The “10 blue links,” or organic results, which Google has always claimed to be sacrosanct, are just another vector for Google greediness, camouflaged in the company’s kindergarten colors.
Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.
I’m guessing that Google would claim that it’s not so much “replacing” your search as doing an additional search alongside it that (it will claim) helps provide more relevant answers. But, it sure sounds like the line between “more relevant” and “better for our short-term revenue” got pretty blurry.
As Gray notes:
It’s unclear how often, or for how long, Google has been doing this, but the machination is clever and ambitious. I have spent decades looking for examples of Google putting its enormous thumb on the scale to censor or amplify certain results, and it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better. Most scams follow an elementary bait-and-switch technique, where the scoundrel lures you in with attractive bait and then, at the right time, switches to a different option. But Google “innovated” by reversing the scam, first switching your query, then letting you believe you were getting the best search engine results.
It’s also how you destroy trust. I’d move to Bing or DuckDuckGo, but considering both still have Techdirt mostly deleted from their index, that won’t work. Guess it’s finally time to try Kagi (which people keep telling me is great).
The modern authoritarian GOP knows its radical policies are widely unpopular, which is why it increasingly needs to rely on propaganda. That’s also why the party pretends that absolutely any effort to moderate online political propaganda is “censorship.” With young voters turning away from the GOP in record numbers, propaganda, gerrymandering, and race-baiting anti-democratic bullshit is all the party has.
It’s an argument that bleeds into pretty much everything these days, even net neutrality.
After the Biden FCC last week announced it would be restoring net neutrality, Trump FCC pick Nathan Simington came out with a rambling missive claiming that efforts to keep Comcast from screwing you over is, you guessed it, somehow an attempt to censor conservatives. Net neutrality is, Simington claims, secretly a way to help “big tech” censor poor, unheard right wingers:
“The leaders of Big Tech companies have anointed themselves the arbiters of which ideas are allowed to be expressed and which are not. These companies are, without a doubt, the biggest threat against freedom of speech that our country has faced in decades.”
So one, you’ll notice that Simington is incapable of talking honestly about telecom monopoly power and his party’s 40 year track record of coddling it. But his core thesis, that this is all secretly a favor to “big tech,” simply isn’t true. Why not? Because “big tech” companies documentably stopped caring about net neutrality a long time ago.
The GOP knows this, they just think (or hope) that you’re stupid.
Simington also tries to argue that because the internet didn’t explode into a rainbow of bright colors after the 2017 repeal of net neutrality (which required the use of fake and dead people to pretend the repeal had public support), that the consumer protection rules must not have mattered:
“It has now been nearly six years since we repealed the net neutrality rules, and as far as I know, no one has died yet, nor have any other of the solemnly predicted catastrophes come to pass.”
Folks opposed to basic consumer protection love to make this claim, but they’re actively ignoring that big telecom didn’t behave worse post repeal because numerous states rushed in to pass state level laws. Companies like Comcast didn’t want to implement major anti-competitive practices on their network, because they now risk running afoul of state net neutrality laws all along the west coast.
This gets conflated into “gosh, our removal of federal guidelines must not have mattered,” which is misleading bullshit. The FCC repeal of net neutrality didn’t just kill net neutrality rules, it gutted much of the FCC’s consumer protection authority. The GOP’s repeal even tried to ban states from protecting broadband consumers entirely, an effort the courts have subsequently shot down.
Focus on what matters: Net neutrality rules were imperfect, stopgap efforts to keep giant telecom monopolies from using their power over internet access to harm consumers and competitors. If you don’t support net neutrality, what’s your solution for concentrated telecom monopoly power? The GOP actively supports concentrated telecom monopoly power. There are 40 years of documentable evidence.
From Simington’s missive, do you gather he cares one fleeting shit about the problems created by telecom monopoly power? The high costs? They slow speeds? The patchy access in rural markets? The comically terrible customer service? The refusal of ISPs to upgrade poor, minority neighborhoods?
Simington can’t even be bothered to actually discuss the actual issue he’s trying to counter. Because what the modern GOP cares about is protecting its own power, and, at the moment, that requires propping up the delusion that anything the GOP doesn’t like is somehow “big tech censorship.” Even some basic, popular consumer protections designed to protect the public from big telecom.
Then, on the On the 22nd, he gave himself more time, to the following Wednesday the 27th at 11:59pm.
