5G's Latest Problem: Summer Temps Are Causing 5G Phones To Overheat

from the this-is-all-going-really-well dept

Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that 5G won't be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon's falsely telling everyone 5G will help cure cancer, but its actual deployments have been spotty and expensive.

5G device support barely exists. Apple is in no rush to get its first phones to market. The promise of 5G as a competitive and rural coverage panacea has been vastly overstated. And most surveys suggest US consumers (who already pay some of the highest data prices in the developed world) are more interested in lower bills than faster speeds. All of which is to say that 5G isn't quite the Earth-shattering revolution it has been heralded as by carriers and network vendors eager to sell more cell phones and network hardware.

There's another wrinkle being noticed by some of the folks putting these networks through their paces. Qualcomm's first generation 5G modem chipsets appear prone to overheating in summer temps, something oddly missing from the industry's marketing hype. It's a problem that's plaguing numerous carriers, according to Sascha Segan and PCMag:

"On a hot Las Vegas morning, my two Galaxy S10 5G phones kept overheating and dropping to 4G. This behavior is happening with all of the millimeter-wave, first-generation, Qualcomm X50-based phones when temperatures hit or exceed 85 degrees. We saw it with T-Mobile in New York, with Verizon in Providence, and now with AT&T in Las Vegas. It's happened on Samsung and LG phones, with Samsung, Ericsson, and Nokia network hardware."

Current 4G LTE smartphones integrate everything into one chip. Early 5G chipsets require numerous chips including a chip for the 5G mmWave modem and the mmWave antenna modules. As a result, current 5G chipsets take up a lot more room and generate notably more heat than their 4G equivalent. And while better chips are expected to arrive in time, it's another example of how early 5G adoption isn't really worth it, especially given this connectivity is being priced at a steep premium over already costly 4G LTE plans.

Again, faster, more reliable networks are always a good thing, and in time 5G will be an important natural evolution, whenever it's fully cooked and widely available. But the absurd hype we've been subjected to up to this point (5G will cure cancer! 5G will result in four day work weeks!) is actually undermining the technology. Instead of showing consumers why 5G is important, carriers and hardware vendors rushed 5G tech to market, overstated what it can do, and misrepresented where it's available, leaving consumers with the distinct impression 5G is largely just undercooked bullshit.

Filed Under: 5g, hype, overheating

EU Looking To Regulate Everything Online, And To Make Sites Proactively Remove Material

from the if-you-thought-Copyright-Directive-was-bad,-just-wait-for-Digital-Services-Act dept

One of the reasons that Techdirt and many others fought so hard against the worst ideas of the EU Copyright Directive is that it was clearly the thin end of the wedge. If things like upload filters and the imposition of intermediary liability become widely implemented as the result of legal requirements in the field of copyright, it would only be a matter of time before they were extended to other domains. Netzpolitik has obtained a seven-page European Commission paper sketching ideas for a new EU Digital Services Act (pdf) that suggests doing exactly that. The Act's reach is extremely wide:

The scope would cover all digital services, and in particular online platforms. This means the clarification would address all services across the internet stack from mere conduits such as ISPs to cloud hosting services; while a special emphasis in the assessment would be dedicated to updated rules for online platforms such as social media, search engines, or collaborative economy services, as well as for online advertising services.

A core aim is to replace the e-Commerce Directive, passed in 2000. This is presented as "outdated", but the suggestions in the paper are clearly a continuation of attacks on the fundamental principles underlying the open Internet that began with the Copyright Directive.

One of the problems for the EU when pushing through the upload filters of Article 13/17 in the Copyright Directive is that Article 15 of the e-Commerce Directive explicitly states that there is "No general obligation to monitor". Constant surveillance is the only way that upload filters can work -- if you don't monitor all the time, you can't be sure you block everything that the law requires. Furthermore, Article 14 of the e-Commerce Directive emphasizes that "the service provider is not liable for the information stored at the request of a recipient of the service". That's subject to certain conditions, such as being required to remove material that infringes on copyright, but only after being informed of its presence on their servers. The new Digital Services Act wants to force Internet companies to move beyond reactive behavior:

a binding "Good Samaritan provision" would encourage and incentivise proactive measures, by clarifying the lack of liability as a result of Such measures

The paper goes on to repeat the EU's earlier attempts to pretend that upload filters are not a glaring example of general monitoring -- something that EU courts may well be asked to rule on. The leaked document says:

While the prohibition of general monitoring obligations should be maintained as another foundational cornerstone of Internet regulation, specific provisions governing algorithms for automated filtering technologies -- where these are used -- should be considered, to provide the necessary transparency and accountability of automated content moderation Systems.

That's a classic: affirming that general monitoring is prohibited, while bringing in rules for proactive automated filtering technologies -- aka general monitoring. It would tilt the playing field even more in favor of big, mostly US companies, and would guarantee that the EU never produces its own digital giants like Google or Facebook. The other main proposal of the paper is to bring in mandatory pan-European rules for tackling online hate speech and disinformation, drawing on ideas in national laws:

Uniform rules for the removal of illegal content such as illegal hate speech would be made binding across the EU, building on the Recommendation on illegal content and case-law, and include a robust set of fundamental rights safeguards. Such notice-and-action rules could be tailored to the types of services, e.g. whether the service is a social network, a mere conduit, or a collaborative economy service, and where necessary to the types of content in question, while maintaining the maximum simplicity of rules.

Simplicity? - hardly. This all sounds like a recipe for a completely unworkable set of complex requirements that once again will favor big companies with deep pockets and big legal departments. The authors of the leaked note have managed to come up with an option for making these plans even worse: creating a "central regulator" for the whole EU to enforce this locked down, permissioned Internet they want to create. Although this is only an internal paper, not a formal proposal from the EU, it shows the kind of really bad ideas that are already floating around the European Commission, and being seriously considered there. If you thought the EU Copyright Directive was bad, just wait until you see the new EU Digital Services Act.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter, Diaspora, or Mastodon.

Filed Under: copyright directive, digital services act, e-commerce directive, eu, filters, general monitoring, intermediary liability, notice and action, open internet, takedowns

New Study Points Out What A Boon Sports Streaming Piracy Could Be To Leagues

from the making-use dept

When it comes to cable cord-cutting and the set box vs. streaming revolutions, I have always argued that professional and college sports plays an outsized roll. In fact, sports programming is one of the few threads by which the cable television industry is currently hanging. Some leagues have made better use of these trends than others, with Major League Baseball still representing the gold standard in sports streaming, with the other major sports leagues riding along in its wake. And, yet, one of the most common complaints about streaming copyright infringement one can find out there is that of live-streaming professional sports. While much of this comes from the broadcast partners of these leagues, the leagues themselves still make a significant amount of noise about pirated sports streaming.

It's never made sense to me. Sports league revenues generally are dominated by two categories: merchandise and advertising revenue. The former gets boosted with the maximum number of eyeballs on the product while the latter becomes something of a complicated mess, given that ad revenues have traditionally gone to broadcast partners, which translate into large contracts with revenue going from the broadcasters to the leagues. Despite that complication, the interest here is in advertising revenue. I wrote the following paragraph way back in 2012:

Here's my question: why is any of this necessary? With that same smart phone, I could have gone to one of dozens of websites (evil, evil websites) that would simply stream the games I wanted directly to my device for free. More to the point, they'd stream the local broadcast that I wanted, complete with commercials. Why wouldn't the major sports leagues do the same thing? If advertising is still the major money-maker for professional sports (and, along with merchandise, it is), why wouldn't they want to increase their reach by offering their own free advertisement-laden stream? Coupled with location identifiers, I'd think the leagues could partner with local broadcasters to make sure that people were getting the same geographical broadcast they'd get watching at home. Again, the same commercials can be in place, so what's lost? Why charge me $50 a season to watch the game on my phone or tablet, but not levy that same charge for watching on my television? It's the ads that matter, isn't it?

The ads, and the eyeballs, of course. Pirate streams increase reach, full stop. Why wouldn't leagues and broadcasters see that reach as a good thing? Well, according to a recent MUSO study, they absolutely should.

In their study, the companies looked at eight matches of the previous Premier League season. They found that these matches had an average pirate audience of 7.1 million viewers across as many as 149 countries. Most of these unauthorized viewers came from China, where nearly a million people tuned in per match, followed by Vietnam, Kenya, India and Nigeria. The U.S. and the U.K. took 10th and 11th places among the piracy audience.

These numbers were complemented with GumGum’s marketing and sponsorship insights. After factoring in the exposure of different brands in various regions, they came to the conclusion that there is £1 million in uncaptured sponsorship media value per match. The majority of value is linked to field-side LED advertising and the sponsorship placements on the front of the players’ jerseys. While pirates may not pay, they definitely see these sponsored messages.

Based on the study, it seems that even a lack of localized advertising still leaves an enormous amount of money on the table in the form of on-the-field sponsorships. I would add that, at least for large global brands, there is value in the commercials as well in pirated streaming. Per the study, the retort from broadcasters and leagues thus far appears to be complaints that, because they cannot control or directly count the streams in question, those viewers aren't represented in advertising or sponsorship contracts.

But all that tells me is that that's the problem. Not the pirated streams themselves, but the failure to capture the boon of those streams in the contracts with sponsors and advertisers. Given that, and considering the laughable game of whac-a-mole that is blocking pirate streams, how is it not the better solution to put these pirate stream numbers in front of sponsors and increase contract costs for sponsorships as a result? When MUSO, an antipiracy outfit, states the following, it's probably time for rightsholders to listen.

MUSO co-founder and CEO Andy Chatterley hopes that the findings will change the perception of pirates. He emphasizes that this audience should certainly not be disregarded.

“Piracy audiences have too long been disregarded as offering no real value to rights holders and distributors, but the reality is that these huge audiences still see the same shirt sponsors and commercials as people watching the game via a licensed channel,” Chatterley says.

In other words, these streams are not an enemy, but an opportunity, if only the leagues would finally take notice.

Filed Under: opportunity, piracy, promotion, sports, streaming

Another Way In Which Patents Contributed To The Opioid Crisis: Hospitals Ordered Not To Use Better, Less Problematic Medicines

from the this-is-fucked-up dept

Two years ago, we wrote about a stunning (and horrifying) study that explained how patents deeply contributed to the opioid crisis. It described the lengths that drug companies -- including OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma -- went through to block any and all generic competition. It was quite a story.

However, on a recent episode of Terry Gross's "Fresh Air" she interviewed medical bioethicist Travis Rieder about his new book, In Pain. It tells the story of how, even as a "medical bioethicist," Rieder himself got addicted to opioids after being in a severe motorcycle accident -- and then was shocked to find that none of his doctors either knew how or cared enough to help him get off the painkillers. The story is fascinating -- and harrowing.

Deep into the discussion, however, one part caught my attention. Rieder tells a story about how, rather than putting him on opioids, they could have just given him acetaminophen:

GROSS: One of the pain killers that you were given when you were in the hospital was intravenous acetaminophen. And you thought that that was really, surprisingly effective as a painkiller, but you were only given a few doses, even though you kind of begged for more more because it was effective and not habit-forming. So why couldn't you get more of it?

RIEDER: Yeah, this is such a wild story. I didn't know for a long time, and so all I had was this immediate experience where, after that fifth surgery, when I was really behind the pain, the pain management team upped all of the doses of everything I was on, but then also gave me three doses over 24 hours of IV acetaminophen. And for me, the way I described it at the time, it was as good as morphine in the short term, but it didn't knock me out. It didn't sedate me. I didn't have to worry about my breathing. And so I really liked it for that reason, and I asked for more.

And I remember one of the residents being kind of hesitant - you know, one of these young doctors in training - and kind of mumbling something about, I don't think you can have more because of your liver, or something. I didn't question it.

But, turns out, it's got nothing to do with his liver:

Months later, I'm an invited speaker at an anesthesiology conference, and I'm hanging out with some of the docs over a coffee break. And I'm telling them the story because I'm like, hey, I've got these, you know, really smart people. I'm going to pick their brains. And I get to the point where the resident mumbles this excuse to me, and they all chuckle. And I look at them, and I say, what? Is that not the reason? And I can tell in that moment that they all know something and that they all know that they all know. And one of them looks up at me and says, they're not giving it to you because it's too expensive.

(Laughter) And my mind was blown. I was like, wait a minute - what do you mean it's too expensive? It's just Tylenol, right? They said, yeah, but the IV form is still on patent. And so once it goes off patent, it'll be standard of care because it works great. But, you know, for now, it's too expensive, so most of us have hospital orders not to use it.

So, let's get everyone hopped up on addictive and destructive opioids, because this form of Tylenol is still on patent. That's just great. He continues:

I think what it started for me was a dive down the rabbit hole of, how does money play a role in how we treat pain and how we overutilize opioids for pain, right? Because what it made really clear is that opioids are dirt-cheap because a bunch of them have been off patent for decades, and that these other sorts of therapies can be really expensive.

For all the talk of how patents create incentives for new life-saving medicines, it's important to recognize that they create some pretty fucked up incentives at times as well.

Filed Under: acetaminophen, drug prices, healthcare, opioids, pain medicine, patents, travis rieder

EFF Hits AT&T With Lawsuit Over Sale Of User Location Data

from the ill-communication dept

We've noted a few times now that while Facebook gets a lot of justified heat for its privacy scandals, the stuff going on in the cellular data and app market in regards to location data makes many of Facebook's privacy issues seem like a grade-school picnic. That's something that was pretty well highlighted by a wave of massive scandals showing how your daily location data has long been collected by cellular data companies, then sold to a laundry list of dubious individuals and organizations. Outfits that have repeatedly failed to prevent this data from being abused by everyone from law enforcement to stalkers.

The Ajit Pai FCC has yet to lift a finger or so much as scold the companies for their cavalier treatment of private user data. And while cellular giants like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile say they've stopped the practice in light of these scandals, nobody has actually bothered to confirm this fact. Given the billions to be made, it's certainly possible these companies may have just made a few modest changes to what's collected, who they sell this data to, and what they call this collection, but are still engaged in monetizing your daily location habits in some fashion.

Enter the EFF, who this week filed a new class action lawsuit against AT&T (pdf). The suit seeks an injunction to ensure that AT&T can no longer collect and sell this data. The class action represents several California AT&T users who say they were never informed, nor gave consent, for their location data to be used in this fashion:

"Defendants’ practices allow Plaintiffs and other AT&T customers to be tracked and targeted by unknown third parties without their knowledge. AT&T leverages the technology embedded within a customer’s phone and its own network infrastructure to locate its customers without any indication that AT&T is tracking them in order to sell their precise location to third parties for non-911 purposes. Indeed, AT&T’s practices were only publicly exposed after an FBI investigation revealed that a sheriff in Missouri had used carrier location data to stalk a Circuit Court Judge and fellow law enforcement officers without their knowledge or consent and without any legal authority to do so. This highly sensitive data has also been used to harass AT&T customers and bypass the rights afforded by the Fourth Amendment."

The lawsuit also demands that AT&T delete the oceans of data that the carrier has collected and sold over the last decade (a bit tricky given the number of companies this data has long been shared with). It also alleges that AT&T violated the Federal Communications Act by not protecting location data, and California's Unfair Competition Law and the Consumers Legal Remedies Act by misleading consumers as to the sale of this data. The EFF also states that both the cellular carriers and proxy aggregator companies violated the California Constitutional Right to Privacy.

In a statement to Motherboard, AT&T unsurprisingly promised to fight the lawsuit, and again insisted it had already ceased selling location data to third-party aggregators:

"While we haven’t seen this complaint, based on our understanding of what it alleges we will fight it. Location-based services like roadside assistance, fraud protection, and medical device alerts have clear and even life-saving benefits. We only share location data with customer consent. We stopped sharing location data with aggregators after reports of misuse."

Having covered AT&T for the better part of several decades, I can promise you that AT&T's not going to give up this multi-billion dollar market without some form of shenanigans, and that an objective third-party audit confirming AT&T's claims will be essential in putting these scandals to rest.

Filed Under: ajit pai, bounty hunters, fcc, location data, oversight, privacy
Companies: at&t, eff

The Sixth Circuit Also Makes A Mess Of Section 230 And Good Internet Policy

from the no-good-deed-goes-unpunished dept

Yesterday we wrote about a bad Section 230 decision against Amazon from the Third Circuit. But shortly before it came out the Sixth Circuit had issued its own decision determining that Section 230 could not protect Amazon from another products liability case. But not for the same reason.

First, the bad facts, which may even be worse: the plaintiffs had bought a hoverboard via Amazon, and it burned their house down (and while two of their kids were in it). So they sued Amazon, as well as the vendor who had sold the product.

From a Section 230 perspective, this case isn't quite as bad as the Third Circuit Oberdorf decision. Significantly, unlike the Third Circuit, which found Amazon to be a "seller" under Pennsylvania law, here the Sixth Circuit did not find that Amazon qualified as a "seller" under the applicable Tennessee state law. [p. 12-13] This difference illustrates why the pre-emption provision of Section 230 is so important. Internet platforms offer their services across state lines, but state laws can vary significantly. If their Section 230 protection could end at each state border it would not be useful protection.

But although this case turned out differently than the Third Circuit case and the Ninth Circuit's decision in HomeAway v. City of Santa Monica, it channeled another unfortunate Ninth Circuit decision: Barnes v. Yahoo. In Barnes Yahoo was protected by Section 230 from liability in a wrongful user post. After all, it was not the party that had created the wrongful content. Because it couldn't be held liable for it, it also couldn't be forced to take it down. But Yahoo had offered to take the post down anyway. It was a gratuitous offer, one it didn’t have to make. But, per the Ninth Circuit, once having made it, Section 230 provided no more protection from liability arising from how Yahoo fulfilled that promise.

Which may, on the surface, sound reasonable, except consider the result: now platforms don't offer to take posts down. It just doesn't pay to try to be so user-friendly, because if the platform can't get things exactly right on that front, they can be sued since, per the Ninth Circuit, Section 230 ceases to provide any protection. (And even if the platform might not ultimately face liability, it would still have to face an expensive lawsuit to get there.) So thanks to this case the Ninth Circuit ended up chilling platform behavior that we would have been better off instead encouraging to get more of. It may have won the battle for this person (their lawsuit could proceed) but it lost the war for the rest of the public.

This case from the Sixth Circuit presents a similar problem. Amazon did not have to do anything with respect to hoverboard sales, but it created liability problems for itself when it tried to anyway. Eventually it banned them, but more at issue is that it sent an email to purchasers indicating that there had been reports of problems with them:

“There have been news reports of safety issues involving products like the one you purchased that contain rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. As a precaution, we want to share with you some additional information about lithium-ion batteries and safety tips for using products that contain them.” The email included a link for the “information and safety tips,” a link “to initiate a return,” and a request that the recipient “pass along this information” to the proper person if the hoverboard was purchased for someone else. [p. 5]

The plaintiffs argued that the email Amazon sent was not enough of a warning and that it should have been more clear about the fire hazard. [p. 6] The Sixth Circuit did not decide whether it was adequate or not. What it did decide, however, was that Section 230 was no obstacle to the litigation continuing to explore that question.

Tennessee tort law provides that an individual can assume a duty to act, and thereby become subject to the duty of acting reasonably.

[…]

In this case, Plaintiffs allege that Defendant gratuitously undertook to warn Plaintiff Megan Fox of the dangers posed by the hoverboard when it sent her the December 12, 2015 email, that Defendant was negligent in that undertaking, and that Defendant’s negligence caused them harm. The district court held that § 324A was inapplicable to Plaintiffs’ claims because it “contemplate[d] liability to third parties.” (RE 161, PageID # 2221–22.) And the district court also held that Plaintiffs forfeited any § 323 claim. The first holding was erroneous, and the second we need not address.

[…]

Plaintiffs argue that Defendant undertook to warn Plaintiff Megan Fox when it sent her the December 12, 2015 email, and that Defendant’s negligent warning caused physical harm to the other members of her family. Accordingly, while Defendant’s liability to Plaintiff Megan Fox is properly governed by § 323, Defendant’s liability to the other members of her family is properly governed by § 324A.7 See Grogan, 535 S.W.3d at 872–73. Thus, the district court’s holding that § 324A was inapplicable to Plaintiffs’ Tennessee tort law claim was erroneous.

Applying § 324A to the facts of this case, Defendant chose to send the December 12, 2015 email to Plaintiff Megan Fox, and in doing so plainly sought to warn her of the dangers posed by the hoverboard.

[…]

Thus, we hold that Defendant assumed a duty to warn Plaintiff Megan Fox of the dangers posed by the hoverboard when it sent her the December 12, 2015 email. [p. 13-16]

The decision's explanation of how tort law works is not striking. The problem is that all sorts of state tort law could reach the Internet, and strangle it, if state tort law could reach platforms. And here is a court saying it can, despite the existence of Section 230 generally saying that it can't.

In a way, though, this case is much less dire for the Internet than some of the other cases we've discussed, like Oberdorf, HomeAway, and the Court of Appeals ruling in Armslist. Platforms can still avoid liability. But they will avoid it by curtailing the sort of beneficial activity Section 230 normally wants to encourage. In letting these state law tort claims go forward the decision reads as a big warning sign for platforms not to bother trying to help their users in similar ways. Amazon did not have to send an email, but by trying to reach out to users anyway it tempted trouble for itself it could have avoided if it had instead done nothing.

But if that fact doesn't pull at the heartstrings, remember that the precedent will apply to any other platform, no matter how small. The moral of this story is that it is much safer for all platforms to do nothing than to try to do something. If trying to be helpful to users causes platforms pick up duties that they otherwise would not have had and face liability for not fulfilling them well enough, they won't. They will be discouraged from trying, even though the public would be much better off if they were instead encouraged to continue these efforts. Curtailing Section 230 to allow state tort law to reach platforms now means that instead of getting more of the user-friendly behavior Section 230 tried to encourage, we will now get less.

Filed Under: 3rd circuit, e-commerce, liability, section 230
Companies: amazon

Gab, Mastodon And The Challenges Of Content Moderation On A More Distributed Social Network

from the experimentation-through-federation dept

While so many of the discussions and debates about content moderation focus on a few giant platforms -- namely Facebook, YouTube and Twitter -- it's fascinating to see how they play out in other arenas. Indeed, one of the reasons why we're so concerned about efforts to "regulate" content moderation practices on social media is that focusing on the manner in which those big, centralized platforms work could serve to stifle newer, more innovative platforms, whose very set up may inherently deal with the "problems" in the first place (see my protocols, not platforms discussion for one example).

There are a few interesting platforms out there trying to take a different approach to nearly everything -- and one of the more well known is Mastodon, an open source "federated" system that is sort of somewhat like Twitter. If you somehow have missed the Mastodon boat, I'd recommend the long piece Sarah Jeong wrote about it two years ago, which is a pretty good intro to the topic. The really short version, though, is that anyone can set up their own Mastodon community and, if others so choose, they may "federate" with other Mastodon communities. You could build a Mastodon instance that is totally isolated from others, or you could build one that connects to others and allows "toots" to go from one instance of Mastodon to others. And, of course, the federating can change over time. It's kind of neat in that it allows for multiple communities, who can set different rules, norms and standards, and thus you get much more widespread experimentation. And, unlike a fully centralized system, like Twitter, the ability for different instances to just "go there own way" if they disagree, allows for much greater flexibility, without a centralized content moderation impossibility.

I'm still more interested in much more fully decentralized protocol-based systems, but a federated system like Mastodon, that allows for a distributed set of mini-centralized instances that can join together or separate as needed, is still pretty fascinating.

However, it got more fascinating and interesting earlier this month when the social network Gab moved to Mastodon. If you haven't followed this space at all, Gab likes to call itself the "free speech alternative" to Twitter, but in practice that has meant that it's the place that many trolls, racists and other general assholes have gathered after being kicked off of Twitter. Gab announced, back in May, that it was planning to shift its platform to Mastodon, setting up its own instance. In theory, this solved some "problems" that Gab had been facing -- starting with the fact that Apple and Google had removed Gab's mobile app from their app stores (something Gab sued over, in a strategy that was not very successful). Since there are a bunch of Mastodon apps that allow users to log into any particular Mastodon instance, Gab itself made it clear that this was a key reason for the move:

Of course, building on top of someone else's better tested open source code probably also helps Gab with the long list of technical issues the site was having. And then there's the pure troll factor. Besides harboring social media trolls, Gab, as a company has always sort of gleefully taken on a trollish roll in the way it works as a company as well. And, considering that part of the very reason that Mastodon's creator, Eugen "Gargron" Rochko, set up Mastodon in the first place was to build an alternative to Twitter that was free of Nazis, assholes and trolls... it was a truly trollish move to jump onto that platform and at least imply to many a plan to "invade" (or, perhaps we should say brigading) the wider "fediverse" of Mastodon.

The switch over happened earlier this month and it's been fascinating to watch how it's all played out. The shortest summary might be that the federated model has shown to be somewhat resilient so far. Mastodon itself put out a statement urging various Mastodon instances not to federate with Gab and also suggesting that the various Mastdodon app developers choose to blacklist Gab's domains from their apps (meaning that Gab's plan to use this to get back into the app store might not work as well as planned).

The Verge has a long, in-depth article about how all of this is playing out, and it seems like, as a federated system is designed to do, different parts of the system are experimenting and figuring out what makes sense. Most of the other instances have decided they don't want to federate with Gab.

If you join a major Mastodon instance right now, chances are you won’t be connected to Gab. “All the admins that I know, that I interact with myself, have already blocked Gab,” says Rochko — including Mastodon.Social. “Essentially, they’re isolated.”

As for the various app makers, they're figuring out what they want to do:

This has turned app access into a battlefield. Developers can lock Gab out by disabling login options to the instance or completely blocking content from its servers. And several have done just that. Mastodon lists six major mobile apps on its homepage. Four of them — the Android client Tusky and the iOS apps Toot!, Mast, and Amaroq — block Gab in some fashion.

Amaroq developer John Gabelmann banned Gab to avoid potential problems with the App Store. “My core objective is to keep Amaroq publicly available and to abide by all Apple policies, which keep unmoderated extremist/hateful content off the store,” he tells The Verge. “If your network is large enough and unmoderated enough to get the negative attention of Apple, Amaroq will follow Apple’s policies.”

Mast’s creator Shihab Mehboob, by contrast, blocked Gab after users requested it. He’s gotten one-star reviews from angry Gab users, but “if hate speech is masquerading as free speech on an app I’ve built, it’s upon myself to somehow moderate that and reduce it where possible,” he says. “I understand that the Fediverse is intended to be open and entirely at the user’s discretion as to what they want to see/use/partake in, but that shouldn’t cover Nazi-based ideologies. There has to be a line drawn somewhere.”

Other app developers maintain that this blocking doesn’t fit Mastodon’s mission. The Android-based Fedilab app’s free version initially blocked Gab because of Play Store content policy fears. But the ban has since been lifted. “I will simply not block instances with the app,” wrote Fedilab’s developer. “I clearly think that’s not my role … If you want a strong block, it’s in the hands of social network developers or your admins.”

And the developer of Subway Tooter, who goes by Tateisu, is skeptical that stores will censure apps for supporting Gab. “They can run their web app on a web browser,” Tateisu points out. “If Google wants to ban it, they should start from their Chrome web browser.”

This is all quite interesting. It's also the kind of experimentation and more distributed decision-making we'd like to see more of online. This is not a truly distributed system where the power is moved all the way out to the ends, but it is a federated system where the power is moved to various nodes -- leading to more competition and variety. The fact that most of the major Mastodon instances have said they don't want to federate or deal with Gab is an expression of preferences, and in many ways a better overall system than one in which a single company is making the decisions. And it's much better than politicians telling companies what they need to do. Of course, in a world without Section 230 -- or one with a nonsensical requirement for "neutrality" in platform moderation -- would these options even be available?

Filed Under: content moderation, distributed systems, federation, mastodon, moderation, platforms, protocols, social media
Companies: apple, gab, google, mastodon, twitter

Daily Deal: SunFounder Robotic Arm Edge Kit for Arduino

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

The SunFounder Robotic Arm Edge Kit for Arduino is designed for DIY electronics hobbyists to learn robot arm control. With the open-source MCU Arduino UNO and a servo expansion board, the robot arm is easy to use and full of fun. You can control its four axes by the 4 potentiometer buttons, as well as make them move on your computer. In addition, it can memorize the movements it has made and repeat again and again, making it a great tool for repeated tasks. It is on sale for $55.

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Filed Under: daily deal

Section 230 Is Not Exceptional, It Is Not Unique, It Is Not A Gift: It's The Codification Of Common Law Liability Principles

from the get-it-straight dept

There are so many myths about Section 230 that seem to need debunking. There's the myth that it requires platforms to be neutral. There's the myth that if you moderate too much you "lose" your status as a "platform." There's the myth that Section 230 of the CDA was "a gift" to big tech. None of those are true, and we've gone into great detail over the past few years about how Section 230 is designed to encourage the most "good" content, and discourage the most "bad" content. It's designed as a pretty straightforward balance, and it actually does a pretty good job of that.

However, along with the claims that 230 is a "gift" to tech companies, is the unfortunate similar myth that 230 is somehow "exceptional" or that it treats internet companies "different than any other company." This has never been true. Instead, it's really about properly applying liability to the party actually violating the law, rather than putting the blame on the tools and services they use to violate the law. Brent Skorup and Jennifer Huddleston at the Mercatus Center have now put out an interesting paper, highlighting how -- far from being a "unique gift" to internet companies -- Section 230 was merely the codification of basic common law principles regarding liability.

The paper carefully traces the history of liability in common law, finding that for decades preceding Section 230, the general common law principles had converged on a concept of "conduit liability," which is more or less what we see in Section 230: you don't blame the "conduit" for merely passing along the message.

As shown above, even before the creation of Section 230, many courts had shifted from the strict liability regime toward conduit liability protections and fault-based requirements. In many circumstances, liability would not have attached even if the distributor had known of the tortious material, because the social and judicial norms favoring practicable moderation practices and free speech had eroded the traditional liability standards. Section 230, in effect, codified the conduit liability protection that was being applied to traditional media distributors and was sometimes applied even after 1996.

As one federal district court noted in 1994, conduit liability “[p]rotection for republication . . . has not been rigorously circumscribed within the wire service context.” In its 1999 Lunney v. Prodigy decision, the highest court in New York expressly classified an internet bulletin board operator as a common-law conduit. An internet service provider and bulletin board operator, the court held, “like a telephone operator, is merely a conduit.” It made no difference to the court, and the “conduit designation” was still applied, even when the bulletin board operator “reserves for itself broad editorial discretion to screen its bulletin board messages” and occasionally exercises that discretion. The court explained that even if Prodigy “exercised the power to exclude certain vulgarities from the text of certain [bulletin board] messages, this would not alter its passive character in the millions of other messages in whose transmission it did not participate, nor would this, in our opinion, compel it to guarantee the content of those myriad messages.”

This doesn't mean, however, that Section 230 serves no purpose. Having 230 the way it is provides significant procedural benefits, in the form of having cases kicked out of court quickly, before they become too expensive. Without that, many of these cases, even though they would ultimately be unsuccessful if the court were able to decide, would be prohibitively expensive for internet platforms, creating, in effect, a censorship-by-lawsuit system. While we discussed that (link above) in a previous paper, the authors of this paper actually put dollar amounts on it:

Still, Section 230 had a salutary effect at a critical time. A report by Engine estimated that without Section 230, the costs of litigation might be prohibitive for many startups even if they might win the case.155 According to the in-house and external attorneys consulted for the report, having to respond to a user-generated content liability claim through a motion to dismiss could cost $15,000 to $80,000, and having to take such a case through discovery could cost a firm $100,000 to more than half a million dollars.

On top of that, Section 230 took away the uncertainty that some random judge might buck the trend -- as happened in the infamous Stratton Oakmont case:

As Ardia points out, the statutory protection provided a “breathing space” and legal certainty after Stratton Oakmont when online providers made decisions regarding third-party content. Stratton Oakmont derailed the legal trend represented by Cubby and the conduit liability cases. A period of uncertainty—and massive “collateral censorship”—would have ensued because online providers do not know in advance where their users are located. Any provider with users in New York would have been potentially subject to liability for users’ posts under the Stratton Oakmont decision. Section 230 precluded that turn of events.

However, the idea that Section 230 is somehow "exceptional" or provides some rare gift that would not otherwise exist is not supported by the history laid out in this paper. Conduit liability -- protecting the conduit for passing on such information -- was (as the paper lays out in great detail) very much the consensus view among courts, thereby making it the accepted common law, even prior to 230.

Finally the paper notes (as have we) that killing Section 230 will harm competition against the big internet companies at a time when we clearly need more competition:

In summary, Section 230 provides a blanket liability shield for big and small firms. Change that cuts down the liability protection will thus impose compliance costs on all firms. Such change should be explicit about those social costs and also explicit about the advantage it will grant larger firms that have the resources to become compliant. In other words, going from a blanket to a tailored shield, however well intended, must account for the chilling effect it will have on innovation by startups and small firms, and for the artificial barrier to entry in the market that will grant additional protection to incumbent firms.

Either way, as the paper concludes, Section 230 merely was codifying basic common law principles of liability:

The Section 230 reform movement is growing, and many of the reform arguments complain that online intermediaries receive a special dispensation regarding publisher liability. The truth is more complicated. Starting in 1931 and for six subsequent decades, courts gradually chipped away the regime of strict liability for publishers and content distributors owing to the practical difficulties of screening all tortious content and to the potential for restricting First Amendment rights. Those courts found that mass media distributors warranted extensive liability protections, including an important protection for conduit liability. The anomalous 1995 Stratton Oakmont decision risked reversing that legal precedent. Yet Congress solved the dissonance by enacting a law that affirmed the precedent and its rationales—the impracticality of holding online content distributors liable and the potential violations of freedom of speech that would ensue from strict liability. Section 230 established a regime of liability protection for online content distributors just when it was needed—at the time internet firms had started to reach audiences of tens of millions—and still provides liability protection for large and small distributors alike. For all the foregoing reasons, we have argued that Section 230 is good policy.

I will note that the authors do make a few suggestions on ways they think Section 230 could be amended in a few specific cases, though they note that the situations where that makes sense should be narrow and well-defined. An interesting read all around.

Filed Under: cda 230, common law, conduit liability, intermediary liability, liability, section 230

AT&T Will Now Filter Robocall Spam, If You Pay Them Extra

from the ill-communication dept

When the FCC recently released its "new" robocall plan, consumer groups quickly noted how it wasn't really new, and didn't actually accomplish much of anything. Outside of making it clear that carriers could implement robocall blocking tech by default, most of the plan was just a rehash of past (inadequate) FCC policies. Worse, the plan fixates almost exclusively on "scam" calls (when "legit" telemarketers and debt collectors are the biggest culprits of unwanted calls), and does absolutely nothing to punish carriers that fail to implement either call blocking tech, or call authentication tech (to thwart number "spoofing").

Another criticism of the plan was that it opened the door to letting carriers using the robocall scourge as an excuse to charge consumers even more money for protection that most think should be included free by default. For example Harold Feld, a lawyer for consumer group Public Knowledge, recently predicted just this thing when I spoke to him about the FCC's (not really) new plan back in May:

"Feld said the plan also opens the door to U.S. mobile data customers — who already pay some of the highest prices in the developed world — paying even more money to mobile carriers for tools consumer groups argue should be free and part of existing service by default.

“Pai can’t resist giving carriers more goodies at consumer expense,” Feld says. “While we will need to see the actual language of the proposed order, this appears to allow carriers to have complete discretion to filter calls however they want in the name of blocking robocalls, and then insert a ‘robocall blocking’ line item fee on your bill.”

Last week, AT&T demanded a hefty pat on the back for finally offering consumers robocall blocking tools. Many in the press were happy to praise the company for being "the first major wireless company to automatically block spam calls." But a closer inspection showed that not only was AT&T's new offering not really new, the company was doing exactly what Feld warned about. While AT&T did offer some limited robocall blocking functionality for free, to actually block suspected spam calls consumers need to pay an additional $4 per month:

"Despite the change, customers will still have to manually add undesired phone numbers to block lists or pay $4 a month to send all suspected spam calls to voicemail. That's because this is little more than an expansion of AT&T's Call Protect service, which has a basic free tier and a paid tier with automatic blocking of spam calls.

Phone companies can block robocalls by default starting today, FCC says Call Protect has been available since 2016 but only if customers opted in to it. The difference now is that Call Protect will be added to AT&T phone lines automatically."

Outlets like CNN somehow forgot to mention to readers that actually protecting yourself from annoying spam calls would cost extra. They also failed to note how AT&T has spent the better part of the last decade blaming everybody but themselves for their own failure to do more to police robocalls. Nor did anybody much mention AT&T's long history of turning a blind eye on scams perpetrated on the company's own customers, especially in instances where they've netted a cut of the proceeds.

Most news outlets seem to have bought the FCC and industry claim that the only thing preventing us from ending robocall hell was murky FCC policy regarding the carrier ability to deploy robocall blocking tools by default. In reality, the lion's share of our robocall problems stem from carriers which don't want to pay for the tech, and/or want to turn fixing the problem into yet another profit center. Another major problem is that while the FCC is happy to fixate on easier smaller scam operations, they're not really keen on holding larger and more politically powerful telemarketers and debt collectors, many of which ignore existing law, harass consumers, and use the same tactics as scam outfits, accountable for the exact same behavior.

Filed Under: blocking, fcc, fees, robocalls
Companies: at&t