After 33 Years, GameStop Shuts Down And Disappears ‘Game Informer’

Failures

from the poof-it's-gone dept

Well this is a real punch in the gut. For years, we have been talking about a strange lack of interest within the video game industry when it comes to game preservation. In far, far too many cases, both single player and multiplayer video games that rely on backend checks to start the game, or online servers on which to play them, or games being available in digital storefronts essentially disappear at the whim of game publishers’ desire to keep them available. Never mind that this can mean that games people purchased become unavailable to them. Never mind that these publishers could make their games’ source code available so that fans could keep them running. It all just goes away without recourse for the public, due to the fact that these games remain protected by copyright, despite their being unavailable to the public, thereby breaking the supposed copyright contract. It’s a massive problem if you care about the preservation of culture.

But surely when it comes to something like journalism surrounding the games industry the thinking would be different… right? Nobody is going to let decades of journalistic output just suddenly get disappeared out of nowhere… right?

When it comes to Game Informer, the GameStop owned video game magazine that has been in production for over three decades, that’s exactly what just happened.

Staff at the magazine, which also publishes a website, weekly podcast, and online video documentaries about game studios and developers, were all called into a meeting on Friday with parent company GameStop’s VP of HR. In it they were told the publication was closing immediately, they were all laid off, and would begin receiving severance terms. At least one staffer was in the middle of a work trip when the team was told.

The sudden closure of Game Informer means that issue number 367, the outlet’s Dragon Age: The Veilguard cover story, will be its last. The entire website has been taken offline as well.

This isn’t link rot. It’s link decapitation. Every single URL from the Game Informer website now points only to the main site URL, with the following message posted on it.

After 33 thrilling years of bringing you the latest news, reviews, and insights from the ever-evolving world of gaming, it is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of Game Informer.

From the early days of pixelated adventures to today’s immersive virtual realms, we’ve been honored to share this incredible journey with you, our loyal readers. While our presses may stop, the passion for gaming that we’ve cultivated together will continue to live on.

Thank you for being part of our epic quest, and may your own gaming adventures never end.

Barring anyone with physical copies of the magazine, or those that created their own online scans of those magazines, or whatever you can still get out of the Internet Archive, it’s all just gone. Thousands of articles and features, millions of words of journalistic output, simply erased. Even the ExTwitter account for the publication has been disappeared, even after it was used to post the same message as on the website. What you will see if you go that link for the disappeared tweet is an outpouring of sadness from all sorts of folks, including famed voice actors, content creators like Mega Ran, and even game studios, all eulogizing the beloved magazine.

And it seems that this shut down, almost certainly at the hands of CEO Ryan Cohen, occurred without any opportunity for those who produced all of this content to take backups for archive purposes.

This comes as GameStop is experiencing two things. First, the decline of physical game sales that has cut deeply into GameStop’s business. Second, the massive infusion of cash the company has on hand as a result of the memestock fin-bro infatuation with the company’s stock. In other words, the company has a massive problem on its hands… but that problem is not immediate. There were ways to do this that didn’t result in the effacement of decades of cultural content that is, of course, all still protected under copyright law, limiting the public’s ability to mitigate any of this.

And, because cultural disasters like this tend to be sprinkled with at least a dash of irony:

A recent in-depth feature on the retro game studio Digital Eclipse about gaming’s history and preservation is one of the stories that is no longer accessible. A write-up about Game Informer’s famous game vault, containing releases from across its decades long history, is also inaccessible.

So a gaming journalism outfit failed to preserve its own features on game preservation. That would actually be funny if it weren’t so infuriating.

Filed Under: archives, game informer, journalism, preservation
Companies: gamestop

Dogged By ‘AI’ ClickBait Scandals, CNET (Once Valued At $1.8 Billion) Sold For $100 Million

Journalism

from the how-the-mighty-have-fallen dept

It hasn’t been a fun few years for once-respected tech news outfit CNET. After being purchased by private equity backed marketing firm Red Ventures in 2020, the company has been in a downward spiral due to brunchlord mismanagement, facing scandal after scandal surrounding everything from softening its coverage to please advertisers, to using fake “AI” generated journalists to craft lazy clickbait.

In what might hopefully be some sort of turnaround for the once respected brand, The New York Times reports that CNET was just sold for $100 million to Ziff Davis (whose reputation similarly isn’t quite what it used to be). It’s a steep fall for CNET, which back in 2008 was valued at $1.8 billion, thanks, ironically, to CNET’s earlier, 2000 acquisition of… ZDNET (which was created by Ziff Davis) for $1.6 billion.

CNET has always had a bit of a history with scandal, thanks to managers and owners that routinely blurred the firewall between editorial and marketing. Perhaps best exemplified by a 2013 scandal in which then parent company CBS forced CNET to retract a CES award for Dish’s ad-skipping DVR technology because CBS didn’t like Dish’s innovations on that particular front.

But things go so much dumber under private equity ownership.

Like so many fail-upward brunchlord types (who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing in the realm of tech journalism), Red Ventures quickly got to work trashing the CNET brand further. Ownership was quick to adopt fabulism-prone “AI” to generate fake journalists and lazy error-prone clickbait — without telling any of the outlet’s human employees any of this was happening.

In fact the AI generated so many mistakes and errors, it actually cost CNET more money in human editing manpower to correct the mistakes than they were saving on using AI in the first place. The sloppy automation CNET rushed to embrace also resulted in widespread plagiarism at the site. Things got so bad that Wikipedia recently had to downgrade CNET’s reliability score.

Red Ventures ownership of CNET was highly reflective of an era in tech journalism where ethics have become passé. An excellent Verge feature last year found that the private equity firm not only had little respect for its workers or audience, they routinely softened coverage and reviews to try and please advertisers and tech companies:

“Multiple former employees told The Verge of instances where CNET staff felt pressured to change stories and reviews due to Red Ventures’ business dealings with advertisers. The forceful pivot toward Red Ventures’ affiliate marketing-driven business model — which generates revenue when readers click links to sign up for credit cards or buy products — began clearly influencing editorial strategy, with former employees saying that revenue objectives have begun creeping into editorial conversations.“

This is all a pointed illustration of the vision these kinds of gentlemen have for journalism. Namely that they don’t care about journalism at all; they care about building an ethics-optional, badly automated engagement-chasing, clickbait advertising machine that effectively shits money.

A machine that has little to no meaningful respect for audience, employees, truth, or much of anybody else. Driven by owners and managers that don’t see AI as a way to ease the administrative burden of journalism or improve the lives of journalists, but as a way to lazily cut corners and undermine labor.

CNET/Red Ventures certainly aren’t alone. Vice, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek and countless other brands have been repurposed and reanimated as the worst sort of lazy clickbait mills. There’s now no shortage of companies filling the internet with automated garbage, in the process shifting a dwindling amount of ad revenues away from real, meaningful journalism.

You’d like to think that Ziff Davis might take CNET in a better direction. But reading the New York Times’ conversation with Ziff Davis’ Vivek Shah, you don’t really get any sense that Shah is thinking about things all that differently, because there’s no real financial incentive to think about things differently:

“Mr. Shah said he decided to acquire CNET partly because it is well-known industry brand, and its sizable audience will give Ziff Davis greater clout with advertisers looking to reach tech consumers.”

In short, while CNET might occasionally stumble into tech journalism by accident, its primary mission will be to please advertisers, which usually, sooner or later, undermines the act of journalism.

It’s a bad habit that’s increasingly driving readers to worker-owned independent news outlets and newsletters (which, contrary to industry narratives, can be profitable once you eliminate outsized executive compensation from the equation) if they’re looking for anything with even a fleeting foundational relationship with the actual truth.

Filed Under: ai, artificial intelligence, clickbait, enaggement, journalism, media
Companies: cnet, red ventures, zdnet

Appeals Court Rejects DMCA Constitutional Challenge, Because Apparently Fair Use Means Nothing Good Will Ever Be Published

Copyright

from the first-amendment-takes-a-backseat-again dept

What began as an attempt to challenge the constitutionality of the DMCA’s terrible anticircumvention provision has now backfired. A court ruling will limit our rights to fair use and free expression in favor of Hollywood’s ability to lock stuff down with digital locks.

It’s not great.

I had thought we had gotten past the era when courts would deal with copyright cases by accepting the Hollywood copyright extremist position — that without copyright nothing at all would ever get published — as fact. But the DC Circuit appeals court has done exactly that, in a case that wasn’t even suggesting that copyright should go away, just that fair use should be applied to all of it.

The DC Circuit appeals court has now rejected a challenge to the DMCA’s Section 1201 (the anti-circumvention bit) based on how it suppresses First Amendment-protected speech.

This case goes back a ways. Eight years ago, the EFF filed a lawsuit challenging Section 1201. The lawsuit represented security professor Matthew Green and hardware hacker Bunnie Huang. It said that Section 1201 was chilling their speech in preventing them from doing the kind of work they wanted to do.

A big part of the argument was that even though the government has its ridiculous triennial review process, in which the Librarian of Congress gets to designate specific uses that are exempt from 1201, there is no fair use defense for 1201 violations. And, since the Supreme Court has long argued that fair use is the important “safety valve” that makes copyright law compatible with the First Amendment, the lack of fair use here suggests that 1201 might be unconstitutional.

There was more to the argument, but that was the crux of it. The case has bounced around the courts, with parts of it getting dismissed and parts of it being allowed to proceed.

And that brings us to the ruling last week. The panel from the DC Circuit readily admits that copyright law and the First Amendment are “in tension,” but says they’re mostly in alignment in promoting the creation of new works. It recognizes that fair use has been deemed to be an important safety valve here as well:

That said, to avoid impeding robust expression, courts have long recognized a common-law doctrine of “fair use” that implies an “author’s consent to a reasonable use of his copyrighted works” by other speakers

It also notes that because fair use is judged on a case-by-case basis, it’s often unclear to speakers whether or not they’re truly protected:

Fair use plays a key role in striking a balance between expression and prohibition in copyright law. But because the line between uses that are fair and those that are infringing eludes crisp definition, creators relying on fair use as a defense against claims of copyright infringement inevitably face some uncertainty. Courts determine case by case whether use of a copyrighted work constitutes fair use, sometimes based on subsidiary factual determinations made by juries. See Google LLC v. Oracle Am., Inc., 593 U.S. 1, 23-26 (2021). Indeed, the Supreme Court has described reliance on a “potential fair use defense” as a “roll [of] the dice,” subjecting the user of copyrighted material to a “notoriously fact sensitive” analysis that typically cannot be resolved “without a trial.” Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255, 275 (2020).

You might think that a statement like this bodes well for the challenge to the law here, in which fair use isn’t even an option. Here, the court is already admitting to the chilling effects of unclear boundaries on fair use:

That uncertainty risks chilling some privileged speech

But, the court then shifts and basically presents Hollywood’s line about the importance of robust copyright protection against the plebes and their fair uses. It explains the history of 1201 (which was demanded by Hollywood in order to support the wider DMCA and its notice-and-takedown provisions). Unsurprisingly, the court leaves out the history, which is that Congress originally rejected the DMCA. This led the copyright maximalists to run to Geneva and get DMCA-like provisions included in an international treaty, so they could run back to Congress and tell them they had to pass the DMCA to “meet their international obligations.” But… details.

From there, we get a bunch of scary quotes from the court, arguing that fair use is not, in fact, protected by the First Amendment:

In plaintiffs’ view, a mismatch in protection for fair use under traditional copyright law and under the DMCA renders the latter unconstitutional. They assert that all fair use is protected by the First Amendment, so section 1201(a) cannot validly prohibit circumvention by individuals for the purpose of making fair use of copyrighted works. And they argue that Congress’s explicit attempt to build fair-use accommodations into section 1201(a) via the triennial rulemaking process merely compounded the First Amendment injury: In its effort to alleviate the Act’s burden on fair users, plaintiffs contend, Congress transformed the Librarian of Congress into a censor who wields broad discretion to grant exemptions to favored messages and speakers.

Key to plaintiffs’ theory is their view that fair use of copyrighted work is necessarily protected by the First Amendment. We later explain why that assumption is erroneous, but it is worth considering at the outset what it would mean for plaintiffs’ theory if true.

Saying that fair use is not protected by the First Amendment… seems problematic. The Supreme Court had made it clear in earlier cases, like Eldred, that other challenges to copyright failed almost entirely because of the existence of fair use. For the DC Circuit to now say that fair use isn’t really about the First Amendment seems to be taking a huge step backwards for free speech.

And to get there, the panel gets a lot of stuff backwards. It suggests that if it were true that such users were fair use, then the triennial review for exemptions would be “redundant” because why would anyone need the exemptions if they were protected by fair use. But that gets everything wrong. First, not all uses exempted under the triennial review would be considered fair use. And, second, the value of the triennial review is it makes it clearer which uses are exempted unlike fair use (as the court has already admitted) which involves having to go through an expensive trial to figure it out.

Bizarrely, the court takes this point to support the argument against fair use. They say that fair use is too risky, but the triennial review is clearer:

An irony of appellants’ challenge to the DMCA is that the triennial rulemaking exemption scheme—which identifies in advance and immunizes categories of likely fair uses—may be less chilling of the fair uses to which it applies than the after-the-fact operation of the fair use defense itself. Recall that the Supreme Court has referred to the use of copyrighted materials under the protection of a “potential fair use defense” as a “roll [of] the dice.”

But that gets it backwards again. The fact that the triennial reviews make some stuff clear, while leaving other uses to be fought out as fair use does not mean that fair use should not apply. Indeed, it seems like an even bigger reason as to why we need fair use.

The court seems wholly confused in suggesting that anyone is arguing that any use for violating 1201 is deemed fair use, which is not something anyone is arguing.

More fundamentally, if appellants were correct that the First Amendment protected circumvention undertaken for fair use ends, then section 1201(a)’s regulatory exemptions would simply serve as an additional layer of protection for fair users, providing up-front confirmation to those fair users who fall within the scope of the exemptions that their circumvention is permitted. What is more, even as to actions not covered by a DMCA statutory or regulatory exemption, under plaintiffs’ view, the filmmaker would have a First Amendment right to circumvent: She would be free to take her chances by circumventing and proving that her use of the clip is fair use and thus constitutionally protected. So it is hard to see how, under plaintiffs’ view of the law, section 1201(a) operates to chill speech.

This makes no sense and seems to fundamentally confuse nearly all of the issues at play here. This is one of the most confused decisions I’ve seen regarding the intersection of the First Amendment and copyright.

From there, the court drifts into copyright maximalist tropes, including the idea that copying is a form of theft:

The “heartland” conduct the anticircumvention and antitrafficking provisions criminalize is piracy of digital property—a modern form of theft.

But, it’s not. Not even remotely. Anticircumvention is just getting around a digital barrier which is not equivalent to “theft” in any sense. It does not lead to anyone “losing” anything they own at all. All it does is allow someone who does possess the work to make use of it.

There are also other oddities:

The First Amendment protects a right to read, but it does not grant unimpeded access to every reading material a reader might wish for. Similarly, the First Amendment does not guarantee potential fair users unfettered or privileged access to copyrighted works they seek to use in their own expression. To hold otherwise would defy the First Amendment’s solicitude of speakers’ control over their own speech. See Harper & Row, 471 U.S. at 559 (noting that copyright serves the First Amendment value of the “right not to speak”).

Yes, the First Amendment includes the right not to speak, but that is not even remotely implicated by saying that fair use is allowed. Fair use does not force someone to speak who doesn’t wish to speak. So this seems wholly unrelated to the issue at hand. Indeed, I’m confused as to how the panel could possibly think that fair use is the equivalent of forcing someone to speak. That shows an extremely problematic understanding of “speaking.”

And then we get into the even more ridiculous and long-disproved tropes: that without strict copyright protection, nothing new would be published.

If every work that the public might wish to access “could be pirated away” via circumvention, soon nothing worth reading would be published electronically.

Someone alert Shakespeare that his works were impossible since they were created in the days before copyright law. There are many non-copyright law business models for which they did not need copyright to produce them. Everything I write here is released into the public domain, yet this court seems to think that’s impossible, and that copyright is the only possible incentive to create something “worth reading.”

But, even more directly, nothing in what this case is arguing says that all access is fair use. I am perplexed at how the court interprets the argument this way. Indeed, much of what the DC Circuit is saying here is an argument against the entire existence of any fair use:

Plaintiffs’ premise that fair users are entitled to make unauthorized use of copyrighted works assumes away the very entitlements copyright law validly protects. Consumers’ access to copyrighted work routinely requires consent from the copyright owner—typically obtained by paying for access subject to certain limitations on use.

This is just not what’s being argued at all. The argument is that if they meet the qualifications for fair use (i.e., that are adjudicated to be fair use under the four factors test) then they do not need to be licensed. So why is the court treating it like the argument is that everything must automatically be fair use?

The fact that some copyright-covered works are licensed is wholly unrelated to the actual question at play here. The fact that the court doesn’t seem to understand that is scary.

As the EFF notes in their writeup about this ruling, it seems to stem from the faulty belief that copyright is there solely to serve Hollywood’s profit motive.

The upshot of this ruling is that fair use is diminished and put at risk. I imagine we will begin to see more citations to this ruling by copyright maximalists arguing against fair use. The opinion has many quotes that basically pretend that fair use is simply the stripping away of all copyright and leads to the vast destruction of content-producing industries.

It’s a ridiculous ruling that will continue to have a negative impact on speech.

Filed Under: anti-circumvention, bunnie huang, copyright, dc circuit, digital locks, dmca, dmca 1201, drm, fair use, matthew green

Georgia’s Voter Registration Cancellation Site Briefly Exposes Data, With Predictable Results

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the do-better-or-prepare-for-the-worst dept

Election security is still an issue that demands close attention. Unfortunately, the political rhetoric in this country has been controlled by Republicans who continue to insist the last election was “stolen,” despite a complete lack of evidence. This isn’t helping anything. And raiding the Capitol to overturn election results accomplished little else than allowing people to proclaim themselves “patriots” when not being actively prosecuted for federal law violations.

Georgia has been a political hot spot and an area of some concern in terms of election security. This dates back prior to Trump’s false “stolen election” claims, but not before Trump started converting Republican politicians into toadies willing to echo whatever dumb bullshit came out of his mouth.

So, on one hand, we have Governor Brian Kemp’s BS claim that Democrats were “hacking the voter registration system” — something he first declared in 2018 following Trump’s election two years earlier. On the other hand, we have Trump remora/former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani doing whatever he can to prevent his money from ending up in the pockets of the Georgia election workers he spent several months defaming during TV appearances on FOX News and other far-right news outlets.

While it might seem more diplomatic to say the truth lies between these two extremes, the fact is the truth lies much closer to the actual truth than the conspiracy theories pushed by people like Georgia governor Brian Kemp, disgraced former mayor Rudy Giuliani, and the odds-on favorite for Grover Cleveland-ing the nation, Donald Trump.

What’s happening now isn’t helping anything. Georgia’s voter registration system has some problems, like many others across the nation. But Georgia is making headlines because it left some key voter registration data briefly exposed, which has now led to people who think they’re more subversive than they actually are to start cancelling registrations of people they don’t like. Here’s Doug Clark with more details for ProPublica:

On Friday, four days after Georgia Democrats began warning that bad actors could abuse the state’s new online portal for canceling voter registrations, the Secretary of State’s Office acknowledged to ProPublica that it had identified multiple such attempts — including unsuccessful efforts to cancel the registrations of two prominent Republicans, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

[…]

Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for Georgia’s Secretary of State’s Office, said the state had been monitoring cancellation requests for abuse and that’s how it spotted the ones targeting Greene’s and Raffensperger’s registrations.

The Democrats issued the first warning. At first glance, it might appear Democrats were the first to exploit this exposed data. I’m not an idiot so I’m not going to claim this is a false flag operation meant to portray Democrats as cheaters willing to steal the vote. But there’s an equally likely chance this has nothing to with the Democrat party and everything to do with The Internet. It could have been a staffer at a Democratic rep’s office. Or it could have been someone who frequents 8chan. While this is obviously a bad thing, there’s no reason to believe this is the result of a coordinated effort by Democrat party operatives.

Rest assured, it will be portrayed as a conspiracy as soon as it’s politically expedient to do so. And that moment might come sooner than later, what with Trump spending part of his campaign visit to Atlanta, Georgia bad-mouthing the extremely popular (and extremely Republican) governor of the state.

“He’s a bad guy, he’s a disloyal guy and he’s a very average governor,” Trump told supporters, eliciting boos toward Kemp from the crowd.

These comments — along with the state’s failure to protect information that would allow people to cancel other people’s voter registrations — are sure to resurface if Trump loses the 2024 election. It will be served up as evidence the election was rigged against him.

And that’s the biggest problem here. This was careless and stupid. But it wasn’t a deliberate attempt to undermine the integrity of the upcoming election. But because it introduces doubt — no matter how thin and easily rebuttable — it just adds fuel to the fire that has been carefully tended since the failed insurrection attempt that greeted the results of the last presidential election. Mistakes will be made because that’s an inescapable fact of life. But these errors matter more now because there’s a considerable percentage of people willing to believe any mistake is a conspiracy and are willing to commit violence to prove their point.

Filed Under: e-voting, elections, georgia, vulnerabilties

Daily Deal: DevDojo Pro, Premium Content, Tools, and Courses for Devs

Deals

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

This DevDojo Pro subscription gives you access to a set of tools to help you build your next great idea. Start with the Page Creator, where you’ll find Tailwind CSS Page Builder, a tool for crafting beautiful landing pages. Then, move on to Wave SAAS Starter Kit, where you’ll learn how to build your Software as a Service app and make money from it. With Ninja Training Program, you will learn the basics before you get started building your business. It’s on sale for $150.

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

Filed Under: daily deal

Why I’m Joining The Bluesky Board To Support A Vision Of A More Open, Decentralized Internet

Techdirt

from the making-the-internet-a-better,-more-decentralized-place dept

I am excited to announce that I am joining the board of Bluesky, where I will be providing advice and guidance to the company to help it achieve its vision of a more open, more competitive, more decentralized online world. 

In the nearly three decades that I’ve been writing Techdirt I’ve been writing about what is happening in the world of the internet, but also about how much better the internet can be. That won’t change. I will still be writing about what is happening and where I believe we should be going. But given that there are now people trying to turn some of that better vision into a reality, I cannot resist this opportunity to help them achieve that goal.

The early internet had tremendous promise as a decentralized system that enabled anyone to build what they wanted on a global open network, opening up all sorts of possibilities for human empowerment and creativity.

But over the last couple of decades, the internet has moved away from that democratizing promise. Instead, it has been effectively taken over by a small number of giant companies with centralized, proprietary, closed systems that have supplanted the more open network we were promised.

There are, of course, understandable reasons why those centralized systems have been successful, such as by providing a more user-friendly experience on the front-end. But there was a price to pay: losing user autonomy, privacy and the benefits of decentralization (not to mention losing a highly dynamic, competitive internet).

The internet need not be so limited, and over the years I’ve tried to encourage people and companies to make different choices to return to the original promise and benefits of openness. With Bluesky, we now have one company who is trying.

For me to get involved with Bluesky now, to help its efforts, is a logical next step, given how we got here. Nine years ago, right here on Techdirt, I wrote about a “half-baked” idea of separating out the “protocol” of social media from the companies providing social media services. And, almost exactly five years ago, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University published my much deeper dive on “Protocols, Not Platforms.”

That paper laid out a more complete (though still not fully baked) theory of how a decentralized, protocol-based social media system might work to create a better (though not perfect) world for online speech. It would be a world where we retain the lessons we’ve learned about from giant, centralized players about how to make platforms so user-friendly, but which brings back the promises of user autonomy, privacy, competition, and empowerment.

I’ve been clear all along that such an approach can never solve all problems, because that’s impossible. But it could create a better framework and better incentives for a better, more open internet, where user control is more important and impactful than centralized control.  As power over the online experience moves to the ends of the network, rather than the center, it allows for more expression, more creativity, and more solutions that everyone is now free to develop and use.

That 2019 paper received plenty of attention, and many people reached out to say they wanted to make that vision a reality. But the most serious and thoughtful person I spoke to about the paper was Jay Graber, who is now Bluesky’s CEO.  She had already been thinking deeply and researching similar ideas. Unlike most others I spoke to, she not only believed in the vision of a more decentralized internet, but saw a clear path to making it a reality.

Over the years since then, I watched as Jack Dorsey & Parag Agrawal at Twitter embraced the ideas of my paper and funded Jay to try to build a decentralized social protocol that actually worked and could achieve mainstream adoption. Importantly, Bluesky is not alone in trying to pursue this new reality for the internet, and I’ve chronicled many of the various developments being made by many others engaged in this world-improving project of decentralizing the internet. And while I support many of the attempts at building decentralized social media systems, Bluesky remains the most interesting experiment in the space.

Bluesky is the service that is coming closest to making the vision I articulated in my paper a reality. And while I’ve offered informal support and advice in the past when asked, I’ve never had any formal or official connection with the company, until now. When the opportunity arose to join the board it seemed, after some thoughtful conversations with Jay and others on the board and at the company, to make sense to make that relationship more formal, allowing me to better help Bluesky make this vision a reality.

The challenges are already exciting. One of the key things that has fascinated me about Bluesky is that they have made it clear from the beginning that they recognize how a future version of the company could, itself, be a threat to the vision the current team has. As a result, they are designing the system to be technically resistant to such a threat — which is why building an open protocol is so important. In my view, one of my roles as a board member is to ensure the company stays true to that more open vision, and resists the pressures that could lead it down the more enclosed, centralized path that has captured so many of its predecessors.

One other aspect that has kept me interested in Bluesky is how the team there understands that most users not only don’t care about that decentralized vision, and shouldn’t have to care about that vision. Those users just want a service that works well, and works for them. Many other decentralized social media networks have focused on different approaches to building their communities, which is great. Experimentation and differentiation is how we will figure out what works for which communities. But I particularly appreciate the emphasis that Bluesky places on building a system that works for a wide spectrum of users.

And, while there have been hiccups along the way (and more will come), the company has consistently built thoughtfully with users in mind, while still staying true to the underlying vision. As a result it’s built unique and exciting features like algorithmic choice, an open source labeling system, and “hidden” federation — most users have no idea the system is federated, and that’s the way it should be. You should be able to build a decentralized, open, protocol-based social network without most users knowing or even caring about it. You should be able to build a system just as usable and feature-filled as traditional, centralized social media systems, while still creating underlying technology and infrastructure that prevents it from exploiting users like those centralized platforms do.

It is, of course, exciting to see thoughts I’ve expressed for how to fix the Internet actually start to become tangible reality, which is why I’m excited to be involved with Bluesky to help it continue to move forward.  

But I am still a writer, with many more thoughts to continue to express.  Including here at Techdirt, which won’t change.  We’ll still be writing about the Internet as it is, and as it should be, as well as the legal, technological, and sociological forces that keep shaping it, just as we have for more than a quarter of a century.  

This is somewhat new territory for me. While I am on my own company’s board, as well as the boards of two non-profits, this is the first outside corporate board position I’ll be taking. So because I am now wearing that second hat I will endeavor to be as transparent as possible when wearing this other hat.  I don’t foresee it being an issue in most cases, including when writing about any of the larger, centralized commercial platforms — the editorial independence that has always left us willing to call things as we see them, to either praise or criticize, as warranted, isn’t going anywhere.  I still want a better internet for users, and getting there still requires being able to speak the truth about where we are right now.  But for stories involving Bluesky, decentralization, or other competing decentralized platforms I promise to be as transparent as possible, and if necessary hand off stories to others (and even remove myself from the editing process) when my two hats may be in conflict.

But I don’t plan to shy away from those stories altogether.  Over the years we’ve tried to chronicle here at Techdirt as much as we can about the internet we have, because that record is itself important to be able to reflect on, especially if better choices for the future are to be made.  And I still have that job to do.

Filed Under: atprotocol, decentralized, jay graber, open, protocols, protocols not platforms
Companies: bluesky

9th Circuit: No Immunity For Officers Who Answered Distress Call By Killing Distressed Person

Legal Issues

from the first,-do-all-harm dept

Here’s yet more anecdotal evidence demonstrating why we’re be better off routing mental health calls to mental health professionals, rather than to people who tend to respond to things they can’t immediately control with violence. The good news is more cities are experimenting with multiple options for 911 response. The better news is that those experiments have been successful.

The bad news is everything else. Most cities aren’t willing to do this. And because they’re unwilling to explore their options, more people suffering mental health crises are going to end up dead. That’s what happened to Roy Scott, a Las Vegas resident who was “helped” to death by Las Vegas police officers Kyle Smith and Theodore Huntsman.

Here’s another story that’s all too familiar here in the United States, as recounted at the opening of the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court decision [PDF]:

Early in the morning on March 3, 2019, Roy Scott called the police for help. But he did not get it. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Officers Kyle Smith and Theodore Huntsman came to the scene. Scott was unarmed and in mental distress. Though he complied with the officers’ orders and was not suspected of a crime, Smith and Huntsman initiated physical contact, forced Scott to the ground, and used bodyweight force to restrain him. Shortly after, Scott lost consciousness and he was later pronounced dead.

The one-two punch of “called for help”/”but he did not get it” makes it clear the officers’ response to the situation was objectively terrible, at least in the Appeal Court’s eyes. The phrase “initiated physical contact” gives a hint of what’s to follow in the narrative: an unwarranted deployment of force against an unarmed person who was already experiencing distress long before these officers decided to end his life.

The district court nailed it on the first pass, denying qualified immunity to both officers. The officers appealed, but are greeted with more of the same at the next judiciary level.

The first two paragraphs recounting the violent incident in greater detail contain some pretty chilling facts. First, the evidence shows both officers clearly understood they were dealing with someone in mental distress, rather than some sort of dangerous criminal.

Scott was distressed and hallucinating when Officers Smith and Huntsman arrived at his apartment. After Smith and Huntsman knocked and identified themselves, Scott yelled to the officers to “break the door down” claiming that there were people inside his house. The officers did not break the door in because they did not hear anyone inside the apartment. Instead, they continued to knock and order Scott to come to the door. About two minutes after first knocking on the door, Smith told Huntsman, “this is a 421A for sure,” using the department code to indicate he believed Scott was mentally ill. Huntsman then called through the door: “Sir, have you been diagnosed with any mental diseases?” After Scott did not come to the door, Smith asked dispatch to call Scott back to ask him to come to the door, noting again that Scott appeared to be mentally ill. Smith then said to Huntsman: “I ain’t going in there. That’s too sketchy.” Huntsman agreed, “That dude’s wacky.” Peering into Scott’s window, Huntsman asked Smith if he could see the “crazed look in [Scott’s] eye.” They could not see anyone else in Scott’s apartment.

While it’s obviously possible for someone to both be in mental distress and pose a safety threat to others, the first fact that matters is that both officers affirmed (in their own body cam recordings) that they believed they were dealing with a mental health issues, rather than actual criminal activity.

The next paragraph contains a pretty damning fact — one that is a leading indicator that police violence, misconduct, or rights violations will be the most likely outcome of any encounter.

When Scott did not open the door, Smith called their sergeant, turning off his body worn camera. On Huntsman’s camera, Smith can be heard telling their sergeant that Scott sounds mentally ill. After ending the call, Smith told Huntsman that their sergeant said that “at the end of the day we can’t do anything if we don’t hear any reason to have an exigent circumstance.” Smith also explained that their Sergeant suggested they try again to get Scott to come to the door.

Never a good sign. Fortunately for Scott’s survivors, the other officer continued recording and captured the rest of Roy Scott’s killing. Scott finally answered the door carrying a metal pipe — one that he immediately dropped when the officers asked him to. They asked if he had any other weapons. Scott handed them a knife he had in pocket — handle-first — and said “I am sorry.” The officers pushed him up against a wall, shining a flashlight in his face. Scott asked to be put in the cop car, telling officers he had schizophrenia and that the light was bothering him. This request was ignored. The officers told Scott, “We are out here to help you.”

They didn’t.

At first, the officers held Scott’s arms at his sides while he was lying on his back. In this position, Scott screamed, struggled, and pled with the officers to leave him alone for over two minutes. The officers then eventually rolled Scott onto his stomach, repeatedly ordering Scott to “stop.” With Scott on his stomach and with his hands restrained behind his back, Huntsman put his bodyweight on Scott’s back and neck for about one to two minutes. At the same time Smith put his weight on Scott’s legs, restraining his lower body. Scott’s pleas turned increasingly incoherent and breathless as Huntsman applied his bodyweight. After handcuffing him, the officers attempted to roll Scott on his side, as he continued to incoherently cry out that he wanted to be left alone. When they rolled Scott over, his face was bloody from contact with the ground. Scott stopped yelling and thrashing around after a few minutes. Scott did not respond when Smith and Huntsman tried to wake or revive him. Shortly after, when the paramedics arrived, Scott was still unresponsive. Scott was pronounced dead after paramedics removed him from the scene. Plaintiffs’ expert found that Scott had died from restraint asphyxia.

From there, the fact-finding is simple, especially since it was recorded. While the officers presented their one-sided argument for qualified immunity, the appeals court shuts this attempt down. First of all, the facts are on the side of the non-moving party’s assertions at this point. Second, the body cam footage takes care of most of the questions of fact and what’s left to be decided should be done in front of a jury.

The officers’ attempt to portray Scott as a threat falls flattest, in terms of appellate arguments. The officers claimed Scott was a threat because he was carrying two weapons — a metal pipe and a knife. The court reminds the officers that one had been dropped and the other voluntarily handed to officers well before the officers decided to take Scott to the ground and restrain him to death.

The law was clearly established when the officers ended Scott’s life. And the precedent is almost directly on point.

The similarities between this case and Drummond are striking. Scott was not suspected of a crime. Instead, he was taken into custody because of his mental health. Though they were presented with an individual experiencing a mental health crisis and presenting no obvious danger to others, Smith and Huntsman crushed Scott’s back and neck to subdue him while handcuffing him. Scott also cried out with increasing distress and incoherence as the officers’ force escalated. Reasonable officers would have known that their force was not reasonable and that it created a serious risk of asphyxiating Scott.

When the law is clearly established and any facts that might help the officers push their version of the events still in dispute (not including those caught on camera, which are indisputable), qualified immunity is not an option. This will return to the lower court to be argued in front of a jury, assuming the city of Los Angeles doesn’t decide to settle first. No matter how this ends up being resolved, the city and the PD would be wise to look into alternative response options for mental health calls. It’s pretty clear police officers can’t — or won’t — handle these calls responsibly.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, 9th circuit, excessive force, kyle smith, las vegas pd, police killing, police violence, qualified immunity, roy scott, theodore huntsman

NYC Proudly Announces Rollout Of Gun-Detecting Tech Even Tech Producer Says Won’t Reliably Detect Guns

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the here's-something-else-doomed-to-fail! dept

There’s nothing more self-congratulatory than a government announcing it’s DOING SOMETHING ABOUT SOMETHING. That’s the New York City government at the moment, lauding its efforts to reduce crime in the city’s subways by installing tech even the tech manufacturer has stated isn’t capable of doing what’s being asked of it.

In mid-May, Mayor Eric Adams and the city government told New Yorkers something was being done. And that “something” was the installation of gun detection tech. Eric Adams (and I’m sure some city residents) appears to believe the city’s subways are awash in a flood of criminal activity, apparently forgetting the city actually has seen much, much worse over the years.

In addition to scrambling National Guardsmen to subway stations to police (state) passengers, the city has done a whole lot of handwringing over a perceived uptick in subway-related crime. It has also claimed the spike in fare jumpers presents an existential threat to city funding, which is a weird thing for an entity that has always paid for stuff with other people’s money to be saying.

The latest proposal is gun detection tech produced by Evolv. The problem with this supposed solution is that even Evolv says deploying its tech in subways is going to be of extremely limited utility. Georgia Gee’s scathing report for Wired on the tech and the company’s ties to Mayor Adams and several current and former NYPD law enforcement officials made several things clear.

First, this seems to have less to do with keeping subway passengers safe and more to do with pleasing people with high-level connections in the New York government, including the nation’s largest police force.

Second, this tech isn’t going to do what Mayor Adams and other city officials claim it will:

In an investor call on March 15, 2024, Peter George, the [Evolv’s] CEO, admitted that the technology was not geared toward subway stations. “Subways, in particular, are not a place that we think is a good use case for us,” George said, due to the “interference with the railways.

Not great! And it’s not entirely clear any future failures should be blamed on the rails. As Gee’s reporting for Wired notes, a previous test run at a Bronx hospital resulted in an 85 percent false positive rate.

But this is what New York’s getting, whether it wants it or not. And whether it works or not. More details here, via reporting by Ana Ley and Hurubie Meko for the New York Times.

New York City officials will begin testing gun-detecting scanners inside subway stations in the coming days in what they say is an effort to address riders’ concerns about crime.

The weapon-detection devices, produced by Evolv Technology, a Massachusetts-based start-up, roughly resemble the metal detectors often found at the entrances of courthouses and concerts. Representatives for Mayor Eric Adams, who announced the pilot, said that a single set of roving scanners would be used to search for weapons at various stations throughout the subway system for one month beginning Thursday or Friday. City Hall officials later corrected Mr. Adams and said that the pilot would begin on an unspecified date.

Speaking of not great, it’s kind of a problem when the mayor himself doesn’t seem to know when these devices will be rolled out. What’s worse is they’re being rolled out without guardrails. The city apparently has nothing in place to track the hit rate of these scanners. Nor does it seem immediately interested in engaging in any form of oversight that might let city residents know whether or not their money is being wasted.

It was not immediately clear how the city would gauge the pilot’s efficacy and whether there were plans to deploy the gadgets more widely. A representative for the mayor said that the city had not entered into a contract with Evolv and that it was not spending any money on the gadgets for the pilot. Officials have said that they are only experimenting with Evolv and that they are still seeking proposals from other companies with similar products.

While this may be a trial run of a proposed “solution” to what is only a perception of an increase in violent crime, there’s nothing in this statement that indicates the city won’t move forward with Evolv even if it does nothing to lower crime rates or even the perception itself.

Trials of products by government agencies generally involve some form of tracking to ensure the product delivers what’s been promised. In New York City, these baselines have been replaced by shrugs and vague assertions about “experiments.” But the word “experiment” means something. (Or, at least it used to.) It’s a scientific term that means current results will not only be tracked, but retained and compared to similar offerings from other companies.

But what’s being said here appears to be nothing more than vague assurances meant to stop journalists from asking further questions, rather than solid assurances that this is the beginning of a thorough process that will ultimately result in the best solution for the subway safety problem, even if that means walking away from gun detection tech entirely.

The most likely outcome is that Evolv will become a permanent part of the subway ecosystem. The company’s incestuous relationship with NYPD officials and the mayor himself strongly suggests the “experiment” will be deemed a success and the company granted a long, lucrative contract. And with nothing having been tracked during the supposed trial run, it will be impossible for anyone to claim Evolv’s system adds nothing to the security of the city’s subways. And that part is definitely by design.

Filed Under: ai, eric adams, gun detection, new york city, nyc, nyc subway
Companies: evolv

Neil Gorsuch Highlights Aaron Swartz As An Example Of Overreach In Criminal Law

Say That Again

from the wasn't-expecting-that dept

Well, here’s something unexpected. Apparently Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has a new book coming out this week called “Over Ruled: The Human Toll of Too Much Law.” And, one of the examples in the book is about the ridiculous criminal case against Aaron Swartz and his eventual tragic decision to take his own life while facing the possibility of decades in prison for the “crime” of downloading too many research papers while on a college campus that had an unlimited subscription to those research papers.

At the time, we wrote about the travesty of the case and the tragedy of how it all ended.

But it’s still somewhat surprising to find out that the case has been wedged in Gorsuch’s mind as an example of prosecutorial overreach and over-criminalization.

David French has an interview with Gorsuch about the book in the NY Times, and the Swartz case is the first example Gorsuch brings up:

French: This was an interesting element of the book to me and something that people who are not familiar with your jurisprudence might not know — it’s that you’ve long been a champion of the rights of criminal defendants. It struck me that some of the stories here in the book, of the way in which the complexity of criminal law has impacted people, are among the most potent in making the point. Is there a particular story about the abuse of criminal law that stands out to you as you’re reflecting back on the work?

Gorsuch: I would say Aaron Swartz’s story in the book might be one example. Here’s a young man, a young internet entrepreneur, who has a passion for public access to materials that he thinks should be in the public domain. And he downloads a bunch of old articles from JSTOR.

His lawyer says it included articles from the 1942 edition of the Journal of Botany. Now, he probably shouldn’t have done that, OK?

But JSTOR and he negotiated a solution, and they were happy. And state officials first brought criminal charges but then dropped them. Federal prosecutors nonetheless charged him with several felonies. And when he refused to plea bargain — they offered him four to six months in prison, and he didn’t think that was right — he wanted to go to trial.

What did they do?

They added a whole bunch of additional charges, which exposed him to decades in federal prison. And faced with that, he lost his money, all of his money, paying for lawyers’ fees, as everybody does when they encounter our legal system. And ultimately, he killed himself shortly before trial. And that’s part of what our system has become, that when we now have, I believe, if I remember correctly from the book, more people now serving life sentences in our prison system than we had serving any prison sentence in 1970. And today — one more little item I point out — one out of 47 Americans is subject to some form of correctional supervision (as of 2020).

I disagree with Gorsuch on many, many things. On the two big internet cases from this last term, Gorsuch joined the Lalaland takes of Justices Alito and Thomas (in both the Moody and the Murthy case Gorsuch was a third vote besides Alito and Thomas towards nonsense). So, it seems a bit shocking for Gorsuch to be somewhat on the side of Swartz, who would have eviscerated Gorsuch’s position in both of those cases.

Of course, Gorsuch is also wrong that Swartz “probably shouldn’t have done that.” MIT had a site license that enabled anyone on campus to download as many articles from JSTOR as they wanted. It didn’t say “unless you download too many.”

But, at least he recognizes how ridiculous the criminal lawsuit that Swartz faced a dozen years ago is. For well over a decade, we’ve been highlighting how dangerous the CFAA is as a law. It is so easily abused by prosecutors that it’s been dubbed “the law that sticks.” It sticks because when there is no real criminal prosecution under other laws, prosecutors will often cook up a CFAA violation, as they did with Aaron. And it remains ridiculous that, to this day, nothing has ever been done to prevent another Aaron Swartz-type scenario from happening again.

Perhaps, with Gorsuch bringing it up again in his book and in this interview, it can renew some of the interest that showed up in the months following Aaron’s untimely death to make real changes to the laws that caused it. Having a Justice like Gorsuch calling out the terrible and ridiculous situation the CFAA caused seems like a good reason for Congress to revisit that law, rather than cooking up new nonsense like KOSA.

Filed Under: aaron swartz, cfaa, criminal overreach, david french, neil gorsuch, too much law