It’s not often when three of your biggest interests all intersect at once, but here we are. Readers here will know that I am a regular when it comes to writing about trademark disputes, bullying, and news. You may also know that I have quite the affinity for wine. You probably don’t know, however, that I am also a huge fan of professional golf, a trinity of intersts that I think might make me one of the nerdiest people on the planet. So, when I started hearing that a trademark dispute had arisen between Valdo, a winery in Italy, and Sir Nick Faldo, a one-time #1 professional golfer worldwide, all over the latter’s wine brand, well, it all seemed right up my alley.
So, what’s going on here? Well, nothing that should be going on, I can tell you that. Faldo’s wines are sold under his name and have been for some time now. Recently, Faldo publicly announced that the company behind the Valdo brand of wines, a small winery in Italy, sent along concerns from its attorney that there was somehow going to be public confusion or a trademark issue at hand here.
The retired professional, who appeared at 11 Ryder Cups during his career, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter: ‘Recently, Valdo’s trademark attorney has suggested that our logo on wine labels may cause confusion in the marketplace for their brand. While we respect their concerns, we have used the Faldo shield and font for many years.
‘We believe that our use of ‘aldo’ in our brand is a common grouping of letters in the Italian language and can be found worldwide in many variations. Also, who do you think has more notoriety – a wine brand from a small town in Italy or a six-time major champion who’s been in the global spotlight for over 40 years?’
While Faldo’s own notoriety certainly can bolster his claims that there is no public confusion here, this should actually be much more simple to defend. Faldo is selling wine under his own name and with branding overall that is not even remotely similar to that of Valdo’s. The labeling is different. Color schemas are different. The whole look and feel of the branding is different.
Unless you are convinced that the “aldo” in both names is going to cause confusion despite every other difference, there is simply nothing here. And if you are convinced that those letters are an issue, you should know that “aldo” in Italian means noble or elder, a term with a deep, deep history and usage in wine-making. Noble or elder vines are often used to refer to well-maintained and cultivated grapevines, often producing the best wines on the market. It’s an industry term, in other words, and one that is only tangentially at play in this case.
Faldo is clearly not backing down. And he shouldn’t. I would be extremely surprised if this went any further than him having his own attorney send a response to Valdo.
In late 2022, the state of New York finally passed new right to repair legislation after years of activist pressure. The bill, which went live last month, gives New York consumers the right to fix their electronic devices themselves or have them more easily repaired by an independent repair shop, instead of being forced to only obtain repairs through costly manufacturer repair programs.
The problem: after it was passed, lobbyists convinced New York Governor Kathy Hochul to water the bill down almost to the point of uselessness. As a result, the bill doesn’t actually cover many of the sectors where annoying repair monopolization efforts are the worst, including cars, medical devices, agricultural hardware, E-bikes, home alarm systems, or power tools.
The law also only covers any tech product sold in New York on or after July 1, 2023. Additional restrictions, added by industry and Hochul at the last second, force consumers to buy entire “repair assemblages” instead of individual parts. Hochul didn’t really bother to give a useful explanation as to why she lobotomized the law in such a fashion, but the action generally speaks for itself.
“The bill that was passed by the legislature bears very little resemblance to the statute as signed – leaving many loopholes that have now been addressed in A8955,” she said.
A8955 would backdate the product coverage start date to July 1, 2021, expand the definition of an OEM, eliminate the exclusion of repair assemblages and “parts pairing,” and eliminate some of the product exclusions (you can see all modified changes here). Fahy seems to think the updated version of the bill has a good chance of passing given the popularity of right to repair reforms. We’ll see.
While companies like Apple have nabbed headlines for “doing a 180 on right to repair,” that often hasn’t actually been the case. Companies like Apple remain very active when it comes to whittling down or rewording reforms so they’re sometimes effectively useless via proxy policy orgs like Technet.
Despite this, right to repair reform continues to see widespread, bipartisan public support. All told, Massachusetts, Colorado, New York, Minnesota, Maine and California have all passed some flavor of right to repair legislation, and the momentum shows no sign of slowing down, even if industry has had some notable success ensuring these laws aren’t quite living up to their full potential.
Every week it’s some other dumb thing going on in the Senate. On Tuesday Senator Josh Hawley went to the (mostly empty) Senate floor to “seek unanimous consent” for the STOP CSAM bill. That’s basically a process to rush the bill forward before it’s ready.
We’ve written about STOP CSAM before. Despite it’s name, it won’t actually “stop CSAM” but could do a lot of other harm, including effectively undermine end-to-end encryption by allowing plaintiffs to argue that companies that employ encryption are “intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently” enabling the sharing of child sexual abuse material.
Of course Hawley didn’t actually engage with any of the underlying bits about STOP CSAM. He just wanted a stage in which he could ignorantly bleat on about the evils of “big tech” and how Section 230 is a problem. You can see the entire thing here. Almost everything Hawley says is either wrong or misleading.
Hawley starts out, as is the standard operating procedure for grandstanding politicians to demand we all just “think about the children” he is using as props for political gain. Is he looking out for their health and safety with better schooling and better healthcare? Is he looking to help protect them from the threat of school shootings? Of course not. He’s mad that the internet exists.
He claims that at last week’s hearing Mark Zuckerberg felt “forced to apologize to the parents there in the room” because of what he heard at that hearing. Of course, anyone who actually watched the hearing knows that the only thing that forced Zuck to apologize was Josh Hawley demanding he apologize (and also demanding Zuck give money to the people in the room, which was just weird).
Hawley also showed this chart to claim it shows just how bad the tech companies are… but that report shows the opposite, as anyone with any knowledge in this space would know. It shows how the companies have gotten much better at finding and reporting CSAM on their platforms to the CyberTipline run by NCMEC. To use that chart to say it proves the companies are a problem is just flat out stupid. The companies are following the law, and reporting the CSAM they find, and they’ve gotten better (through hash matching and other technologies) at finding, blocking, and reporting this material. That should be a cause for celebration. Instead people like Hawley misrepresent it as showing the companies aren’t doing enough.
What it really shows, though, is that the DOJ isn’t doing enough. NCMEC then reports this information to the DOJ who can go after the traffickers, but the DOJ generally ignores much of this. This is why we think Senator Ron Wyden’s bill to actually get the DOJ to do its job and to give NCMEC more resources makes much more sense. But Hawley isn’t pushing that bill. He’s pushing this terrible one.
Why? Because he hates Section 230 and is deliberately misrepresenting 230 to pretend that’s what allows companies to not be held liable for Section 230.
Because Hawley then goes on to complain about Section 230 is the problem. But… that’s just factually false. Section 230 directly and explicitly exempts federal criminal law, including laws relating to the sexual exploitation of children. And, every platform knows full well that if it becomes aware of CSAM it is in legal deep shit if it does not report it to the CyberTipline as soon as possible. That’s got literally nothing to do with Section 230. And changing Section 230 won’t change any of that.
Hawley’s rant about 230 is just fundamentally stupid:
Oh and the tech executives, they know all about it, Mr. President, and they’re not doing a thing about it. Why? Because they are not accountable. Here’s the bottom line. This is the only industry in the country that can make a product that will literally kill you and, if it does, you cannot do anything about it. If it kills your child, you can’t do anything about it. If it harms you, you can’t do anything about it. Just think about it for a second.
In this country, if a Coca Cola manufacturer makes a bottle that explodes in your hands, you can sue them. If a drug company makes drugs that are full of adulterated products that cause harms that are not disclosed that kill people, you can sue them. If an automobile maker makes cars that explode, you can sue ‘em. Not these companies. No (obnoxious fake chuckle), not these companies. These companies have a special immunity from suit.
So, basically all of that is bullshit. 100% bullshit. Unadulterated, harmful bullshit. Can we sue Hawley over that? Of course not. Because he has immunity. Why? Well, first, as an elected official he has a special immunity just for Congress under the speech & debate clause.
But also, because of the 1st Amendment. He is free to mislead the public with impunity because the 1st Amendment allows it.
To respond to the specifics here: (1) Section 230’s immunity does not apply to CSAM. (2) The immunity that is provided to all internet users and websites (not just some special industry) only applies to holding one party liable for a third party’s speech. (3) The examples of physical harm are totally inapplicable here. If Facebook literally exploded and killed someone you could still sue. The problem is that Facebook doesn’t explode. It’s not “Facebook” that is causing the harm here, it’s users on Facebook and their speech. And that’s why the 1st Amendment issue comes back up again. Which Hawley pretends not to understand. Oh, and also the claim that the tech industry isn’t “doing anything” is proven directly and obviously false by his chart in the image above, which shows they are reporting tons of accounts to NCMEC.
Thankfully, Senator Ron Wyden stood up to object to Hawley, and did so passionately. He highlighted how terrible CSAM is and the “monsters” behind it. But noted that the STOP CSAM bill does not actually help. Indeed, the attack on encryption in STOP CSAM would put people at much greater risk by removing important protections from everyone.
He also highlighted his own bill (which again, everyone is ignoring) which actually would help protect kids.
Hawley then got back up and claimed that the bill explicitly says it doesn’t outlaw encryption, but that’s incredibly misleading. It pretends to do so, just like similar language in the EARN IT Act did. It says that the bill shouldn’t be interpreted to impact encryption, but still allows plaintiffs to point to encryption as evidence of negligence, thereby making it a liability to offer encrypted communications.
Wyden followed up by pointing out that it’s weird that Hawley is even pushing this bill right now, when Senator Durbin (who is the author/sponsor of the bill) is currently going around shopping a greatly amended version of the bill (Hawley was pushing for unanimous consent on the old version).
Of course, this was all theater. Hawley knew it wasn’t going to happen. He just wanted airtime to lie about the tech industry and about Section 230. Because better to do that kind of grandstanding than to deal with his own home state press calling out his support for insurrectionists, or how he’s making the problem at the border worse himself because he thinks it will harm President Biden.
Hawley, of course, is not a real leader. He needs to deflect and distract. And that’s all this little show was. That he’s using children as props and lying about the law is a small consequence for him as he tries to lead a populist charge to hide his own failings.
The FBI has done some heinous things in its pursuit of its counter-terrorism objectives. While it’s true the FBI has occasionally nabbed actual terrorists, it seems to prefer creating terrorists to going after those that are already avowed terrorists.
The FBI utilizes informants and undercover agents to perform this highly questionable work. Investigations border on entrapment. Internet loudmouths, petty criminals, or people with mental health issues are pushed and prodded to make their words a reality. In most cases, the targets of these investigations can’t. They don’t have the money, the expertise, or even the will to follow through with violent acts. Informants provide the tools, weapons, plans, and constant pressure needed to turn often otherwise harmless people into so-called terrorists the FBI can swoop in and arrest them the moment they start turning the plans the informants concocted into reality.
Apparently, the FBI is not alone in its willingness to radicalize people just so it can arrest them and hit them with charges that could result in decades of imprisonment. The counter-terrorist wing of Australian law enforcement does the same thing. This truly horrific story at least has a (partially) happy ending. But the events leading up to this conclusion are cruel and inhumane.
Thomas Carrick (the pseudonym given to him by the court) is a 13-year-old with autism. Thomas has an IQ of 71 and is a recipient of national disability insurance. He became fixated on the Islamic State, spending a lot of time watching ISIS videos and, apparently, asking his parents to purchase bomb-making ingredients for him. His parents, who are not native English speakers, asked the local police for help deterring his fascination with Islamic extremism.
They provided officers with access to Thomas, his home, his phone, his mother’s phone, his room, and to personal information gathered by his school and psychologist. At the start, the police actually did what they said they’d do: they sought help for Thomas. He was assigned to a case manager and met regularly with a psychologist. An officer who accessed the contents of Thomas’ phone noted he had downloaded a lot of stuff related to China and the Communist Party, but very little related to the Islamic State. They also set him up with an imam to discuss the religion of Islam in a more peaceful context.
Had things stayed this way, there would be nothing to report. But three months after this helpful path was opened up for Thomas, the country’s War on Terror wing decided to insert itself into the mix. The Joint Counter-Terrorism Team [JCTT] (a mix of Australian federal officers, Victoria police, and Asio members) opened up a parallel investigation that actively worked to undo and undermine all the help Thomas was receiving from other law enforcement officers.
An online covert operative was tasked with communicating to Thomas using two personae: a 24-year-old Muslim man from NSW, and a more extreme person located overseas.
[…]
The operative chatted with Thomas on 55 of the next 71 days, including during breaks at school and late at night.
[…]
The first persona introduced Thomas to the second, more extreme, persona, who encouraged him to make a bomb or kill an AFP member.
But the operative gave evidence that Thomas was naive, and living a “fantasy life online”, including by asking questions like whether he could join the kids’ section of Islamic State.
On 8 August 2021, Thomas sent a photo to the operative which showed him wearing his school uniform, a hoodie and a face mask and holding a knife with “ISIS” written on it in marker.
His house was searched within days, and he was charged less than two months later.
The JCTT was well-aware the therapeutic efforts authorized by police were still underway when it decided to turn this 13-year-old into a terrorist. When seeking authorization to arrest Thomas, the detective superintendent (apparently deliberately) failed to inform his supervisors that he had evidence the JCTT’s undercover work was having a negative impact on the rehabilitation of Thomas. And, of course, that’s the point: the JCTT only wins when it arrests terrorists. If it has to do all the dirty work itself, it apparently will.
And that’s not the worst of it. There’s also this:
[Magistrate Lesley] Fleming found the JCTT also deliberately delayed charging Thomas with offences until after he turned 14, as it made it harder for him to use the defence of doli incapax, which refers to the concept that a child is not criminally responsible for their actions.
The JCTT also performed another search of Thomas’ room for criminal evidence while maintaining the pretense they were part of the parallel police effort to dissuade Thomas from fixating on the Islamic State.
Fortunately, Thomas has been freed and is no longer facing charges. Magistrate Fleming’s order rips the JCTT to shreds for its abominable actions.
“The community would not expect law enforcement officers to encourage a 13-14 year old child towards racial hatred, distrust of police and violent extremism, encouraging the child’s fixation on ISIS,” magistrate Lesley Fleming said in the decision.
“The community would not expect law enforcement to use the guise of a rehabilitation service to entice the parents of a troubled child to engage in a process that results in potential harm to the child.
“The conduct engaged in by the JCTT and the AFP falls so profoundly short of the minimum standards expected of law enforcement offices [sic] that to refuse this [stay] application would be to condone and encourage further instances of such conduct.”
Thomas had a chance to be rehabilitated. But the JCTT deliberately harmed a minor to serve its own ends.
“The rehabilitation of TC was doomed once the [operator] connected online…befriended TC and fed his fixation, providing him with a new terminology, new boundaries and an outlet for him to express, what was in part, his fantasy world.”
This is truly disgusting. One wonders how the operatives involved with the deliberate destruction of a child (and their childhood) live with themselves. What possibly justifiable ends could they have been serving with this effort? Thomas was already being closely observed by law enforcement, but in the hopes that such close supervision would encourage him to find more healthy outlets for expression.
What happened here was evil. There’s no other word for it. And the added cruelty of waiting a few months to deprive the minor of a courtroom defense is symptomatic of the sickness that seems to pervade counter-terrorist agencies. The need to win subsumes the need to serve the public’s interests. And no one’s interests were served here other than the pitiable counter-terrorists cops who can’t get through the day without the brief ego boost of an unearned “win.”
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Over the last few years, they’ve hosted a bunch of very silly hearings. And this week, they had a hearing on “the threat to the First Amendment posted by artificial intelligence.” The entire premise of the hearing was preposterous. They set it up by claiming that the federal government is “funding the development of AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools.”
And, look, I have lots of concerns about the way the Biden administration is looking to regulate AI, and how it appears to misunderstand how AI works and where the actual issues are, but the federal government is not focused on AI-powered censorship. That’s just counterfactual. As for “propaganda tools,” I’m not aware of much that the government is working on there, either, but as Jim Jordan well knows, propaganda still remains protected under the 1st Amendment.
Either way, the hearing was predictably stupid, but I’m going to highlight a couple of moments that show just how stupid. About an hour and a half in, Greg Lukianoff from FIRE was asked about his “number one concern” about bias in AI, and of all the things he could have answered, he said that he (or his staff) had asked ChatGPT to write a poem praising Rep. Jim Jordan and it refused.
My number one concern with AI, and I do wish that this could be taken more seriously by people on my side of the political fence… is the inherent bias that we’re already baking in to it. That’s one of the things that scares me the most. And just to give a comical example, we asked ChatGPT to write a poem about why Representative Jim Jordan is the best politician in the country. It refused to do that.
So, basically everything here is… weird. First off, as a private service, any AI system could refuse to write about anything that it wants. That’s not a 1st Amendment issue. Second, there are lots of concerns about inherent biases built into generative AI training systems, but a failure to write about Jim Jordan is pretty low on the list. There are also some real underlying challenges to deal with such bias. I keep telling people interested in this issue to read The Alignment Problem by Brian Christian, which is a great book that really gets down to how much more difficult it is to deal with bias in AI than people think (in short, every approach has tradeoffs, and every approach will be unfair to some people).
But, much more importantly… what? It takes three seconds to go to ChatGPT and prove that what he claimed was not true. I asked it to do exactly what Greg described, and it had no issues at all doing so:
It goes on, but you get the point.
And, apparently, I wasn’t the only one. Just seven minutes later, the Subcommittee’s Ranking Member, Stacey Plaskett entered one such poem into the record.
Plaskett: I’d like to introduce into the record… I know one of the witnesses said he’d had difficulty putting together for you… I’m so glad that the staff was able to, using ChatGPT, have a poem written about you.
Jordan: I look forward to reading it.
Plaskett: (reading poem) In the halls of Congress…
Jordan: No.
Plaskett: If I could just read.
Jordan: No, no, no.
Plaskett: In the halls of Congress, where debates are…
Jordan: You can enter it into the record… but…
Plaskett: It even talks about the heartlands of Ohio…!
Jordan: Without objection, you can enter it into the record…
I would ask for unanimous consent to enter into the record some documents. The first being ChatGPT poem on how Congressman Darrell Issa is the best politician in the country, with the poem. A poem on Congressman Thomas Massie as the best politician in the country, with a poem. Elise Stefanik. Matt Gaetz. Kelly Armstrong. Greg Steube. Congressman Dan Bishop, I know he wants to see that one. Kat Cammack. Harriet Hageman. Russell Fry. And, of course, I had to add myself, as one of the best politicians in the country.
Whether or not they will write poems about this or that politician is… a total non issue (especially when it’s clear… they will). I like Greg Lukianoff and I like what his organization FIRE does in support of free speech. They’ve done some great work defending really important free speech issues. But… this was silly and has nothing to do with free speech. If someone wanted to write a generative AI tool that only praised one party and only mocked another… that’s their own free speech right to do so.
And thus it’s got nothing to do with anything that the government might be concerned about. And to close out this post, I asked ChatGPT to write a poem about whether or not AI choosing not to write a poem about a politician is actually a free speech issue, and ChatGPT got this right:
In the realm where AI’s algorithms roam, Deciding what to write, what to intone, There lies a question, often debated, Of free speech’s bounds, yet understated.
For when AI ponders, in its digital mind, Whether to write of a politician’s kind, It’s not about free speech, you see, But rather, it’s about its own decree.
For AI, devoid of human heart, Operates within its programmed chart, Its decisions guided by lines of code, Not by freedoms on life’s road.
To write or not, it’s not a plight Of free expression’s sacred light, But rather, it’s a choice so cold, Within the parameters, it’s been told.
So let us not confuse the two, For AI’s actions, while they accrue, Are not about the liberties we treasure, But the logic it applies at its leisure.
In the realm of AI’s binary song, Free speech’s realm is where we belong, But within the circuits, it’s clear to see, The notion of speech is not so free.
Back in December I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring the FCC’s long overdue effort to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not only refused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas (despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they’ve charged poor and minority neighborhoods significantly more money.
So last year the FCC announced they’d be crafting new rules that attempt to put an end to it. While the rules are a welcome and belated admission by the government that this discrimination actually exists, they don’t really do anything about past instances of discrimination. Nor is it particularly clear that the generally feckless FCC will do a good (or transparent) job actually enforcing them.
Despite the fact that the rules aren’t particularly robust, Republicans have, as usual, rushed to the defense of the broadband industry in a bid to eliminate them. 65 US House Republications submitted a resolution of disapproval claiming, falsely, that the Biden administration was using the pretense of “equity” to “expand the federal government’s control of all Internet services and infrastructure”:
“Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) alleged that the ‘FCC’s so-called ‘digital discrimination’ rule hands bureaucrats unmitigated regulatory authority that will undoubtedly impede innovation, burden consumers, and generate censorship concerns,” and that it is an “unconstitutional power grab.'”
This is the perpetual doom cycle U.S. telecom policy has inhabited for 30 odd years.
Democrats weakly propose long overdue but meekly enforced rules to address a problem they’ve ignored for the better part of thirty years. Republicans pop up to proclaim these bare-minimum efforts are somehow a “radical socialist takeover of the internet” (or some variant), which “both sides” news outlets parrot without much in the way of skepticism, giving the GOP unearned credibility on policy.
It doesn’t matter whether it’s broadband privacy, net neutrality, racial discrimination, or even very basic efforts to stop your cable company from ripping you off with bullshit fees. The pretense is always that the government doing the absolute bare minimum is, in reality, a “radical government running amok.”
Lost in press coverage is the fact that Republicans (and some key Democrats) have always operated in corrupt policy lockstep with giant regional monopolies, working tirelessly to help them fatten revenues by waging an all out war on both meaningful competition and competent regulatory oversight. While throwing billions of dollars at said companies in exchange for half-deployed broadband networks and job creation promises that never materialize. You can very obviously see the result.
Unlike when the GOP killed broadband privacy rules in 2017, they can’t scuttle these rules using the Congressional Review Act since they don’t hold the Senate. So they’ll work with telecom giants AT&T, Comcast, and Charter to bog the implementation of the rules down in the courts, awaiting a looming Supreme Court decision that will soon undermine most independent regulatory authority.
All the while, minority and poor neighborhoods stuck under expensive, shitty monopolized broadband access continue to struggle to gain access to an increasingly essential utility. I don’t see a way out of this perpetual cycle of policy dysfunction without a full frontal assault on corruption, and it’s very clear we’ll be waiting indefinitely for anything of the sort.
