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You are here: Home / Archives for Science & Technology / Tech News and Issues

Tech News and Issues

Tech Reform Watch: Pre-Inauguration Edition

by Major Major Major Major|  January 18, 20216:55 pm| 99 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues

The Washington Post today has several articles about the incoming administration’s, and new congress’s, thoughts and priorities on regulating tech companies. If you’re interested in this–and you should be if you’re reading this on, say, the Internet–I recommend checking them out, or at least reading the overview. Silicon Valley braces for tougher regulation in Biden’s new Washington:

Democratic leaders for years have proposed a bevy of new legislation to shrink Silicon Valley’s corporate footprint, restrict its insatiable appetite for data and stop the spread of falsehoods online. But the party’s calls for regulation have grown more urgent in the days since Biden won the presidency, his party took control of the House and the Senate, and Trump and his allies further exposed the risks of a largely unregulated Web.

[…]“I think for the Internet industry, in particular, it’s going to be tough sledding for the next two years at least,” predicted Rob Atkinson, the president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank that counts companies including Google and Microsoft on its board.

The accompanying articles drill down into “gig work” reform, making contractors into employees; net neutrality, the policy that internet service providers must treat all traffic equally regardless of origin or destination; antitrust; and Section 230 reform.

Of these, I think net neutrality will obviously happen, and gig work reform will probably not. Antitrust I can’t speak to. But Section 230 reform, well, damn near every politician wants a bite at that apple. I hate to both sides this, but in terms of the literal words that come out of their mouths, it’s sort of true: Trump vetoed the NDAA because he wanted a version that repealed Section 230 outright; Biden spoke in 2020 about how we should repeal Section 230 outright.

What is Section 230, you ask? I have a primer here. tl;dr: Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act says that tech companies aren’t liable for content posted by their users, and can moderate it as they choose. You can comment about violent insurrection here without us being liable; we have the right to ban your ass.

The WaPo Article does a good job outlining the power players in this coming fight. The person to really keep an eye on is Brian Schatz (D-HI), chair of the Internet subcommittee. His current legislation, the Platform Accountability and Consumer Transparency (PACT) Act, is offered in good faith, and sounds nice on the surface, but has a number of significant flaws. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a good explainer:

The PACT Act ends Section 230(c)(1)’s immunity for user-generated content if services fail to remove the material upon receiving a notice claiming that a court declared it illegal. Platforms with more than a million monthly users or that have more than $25 million in annual revenue have to respond to these takedown requests and remove the material within 24 hours. Smaller platforms must remove the materials “within a reasonable period of time based on size and capacity of provider.”

[…]On first blush, this seems uncontroversial—after all, why should services enjoy special immunity for continuing to host content that is deemed unlawful or is otherwise unprotected by the First Amendment? The problem is that the PACT Act poorly defines what qualifies as a court order, fails to provide strong protections, and sets smaller platforms up for even greater litigation risks than their larger competitors.

I will refer you to the link if you’d like to learn more. One very important point is that this, like many regulations, would benefit entrenched companies and make it harder for competitors to form and grow. There are ways to write regulations that minimize this, and we need to be very careful that we are doing so, unless we want Facebook and Twitter to be even more powerful. Indeed, Facebook is pushing for many of these regulations, for this reason. So if you find yourself on their side, maybe reconsider.

“Oh please don’t throw us into the complicated briar patch you’ll need to pay our lobbyists to help plant. We would just be soooo sad if you created regulations only large companies had the resources to follow!” pic.twitter.com/7lmHKGn2Ya

— ☃️ Tynan 🌨 (@TynanPants) January 18, 2021

Twitter, by contrast, is literally invested in creating and elevating open standards for distributed social networks that would limit the coercive power of companies like Twitter. By all accounts Dorsey didn’t ask for this power and doesn’t want it. TechCrunch has a good writeup of where they are in the process, as well as a general discussion of what the heck I’m talking about. (You can also read my own post on distributed social networks.)

Section 230 reform will need sixty votes to pass, which will either doom it or mean we need to fold in Republican priorities, such as legally mandating that Republicans can say whatever the hell they want, anywhere, at any time. I wish I were joking:

Social media is our generation’s public forum. It ought to be subject to the same protections provided to all public forums.

I am calling for First Amendment protections to be applied to this New Town Square.

Censorship of elected officials by unelected elites is UNAMERICAN!

— Madison Cawthorn (@CawthornforNC) January 9, 2021

If we’re negotiating with people like this… maybe we’ll get lucky and nothing will happen. I don’t know, what do you folks think?

Tech Reform Watch: Pre-Inauguration EditionPost + Comments (99)

The Web Is Broken, Everybody Knows It, And Donald Trump Has Proven It

by Major Major Major Major|  January 9, 20214:44 pm| 121 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues, Riveted By The Sociological Significance Of It All

I’m sure we’ve all seen the news that Donald Trump has been banned from Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, Shopify, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. Pinterest, Discord, and Reddit have similarly cracked down on Trumpy content. Parler, a social network for people that find Twitter insufficiently extreme, has been banned from the Google Play store, and Apple has fired a shot across Parler’s bow that will probably end with the app being banned from the App Store. (Thanks to commenter Wyatt Salamanca for the above link and the reminder to write this post.)

Is this good? That is a difficult question. It isn’t hard to whip up a slippery-slope argument. It also isn’t hard to say that Trump’s social media accounts present a truly unique problem at this time, which justifies a unique response. But is that special pleading? It’s easy to argue the importance of free speech, just as it’s easy to ask what the true goal of enlightenment principles were, and whether slavish adherence to them will get us where we want to go. But is ditching principles for two weeks going to weaken them? Should it? Reasonable people can disagree (not that all of the people disagreeing are reasonable).

I’m interested in a different question, though. How did we find ourselves grappling with this problem in the first place? Much as I’d like it to be Donald Trump’s fault, it really isn’t. This is an inevitable result of how the Web works 2021: walled gardens and closed protocols have concentrated informational power in the hands of a few companies, companies whose every action affects the structure of our press and our democracy. As a wise man once said, “Every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.”

So, what’s to be done? I don’t know, but I do know one way we could have done it better. So, if you’re interested, join me below the fold for a discussion of distributed social networks.

show full post on front page

What is a social network? In a nutshell, it’s just people, forming connections, posting content, and reacting to said content. We know these mostly as centralized systems like Twitter, where a single organization controls all of the content and user accounts. It is completely predictable that such an organization, of sufficient size, will find itself in a constant, morally fraught fight against extremism, harassment, and illegal content. This architecture will always have a serious problem via Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: “Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well.”

So what is a distributed social network? Let’s talk about the most popular one: Mastodon. Mastodon is, essentially, a series of communication protocols that are woven together to link decentralized communities.

Huh?

One protocol you might know is HyperText Transfer Protocol, or HTTP. Anybody can set up an HTTP server, and if you send it the right text, it sends you a web page, or whatever. You can link websites together, form informational networks, and so on, very easily with this protocol. This is what the Web is, or was, back in the day: a mostly-open collection of linked documents encoded in HTML, an open standard. We would later call this Web 1.0, and it was very different from the walled gardens of today.

Mastodon occupies a space somewhere between Twitter and Web 1.0. Anybody can set up a Mastodon instance; think of it as their own personal Twitter. Mastodon instances can form voluntary connections with one another, and all instances, user accounts, and posts (“toots”) share an open data format and communication protocol.

The key word here is interoperability. It’s a little like Reddit, where people run subreddits with their own rules, except in this case, there would be nobody who actually runs Reddit–it’s like a community of linked subreddits.

Here’s a toy example. Let’s say I run a Balloon-Juice Mastodon instance, and Scott Lemieux runs a Lawyers, Guns, & Money Mastodon instance. We both have public timelines, and can post replies to each other, etc.

Now let’s say that the people from some troll or Nazi instance discover ours, and we want to get rid of them. We can block individual users or even their entire instance, preventing them from reading (and therefore replying to) our posts. Their Mastodon account is still around–it’s just formatted data, after all–it just won’t do them any good here.

In a system like this, you deal with a Donald Trump not by deleting his Mastodon account–which you cannot do–but by banning that account from the respectable instances. He’s still welcome at any instance that does choose to deal with him, which in this case would be something like Parler (or for a real example, Gab, which is a Mastodon fork). We’ve reduced the moral footprint of this decision dramatically, even as we’ve achieved a similar result.

I hold little hope that we will end up in an open, decentralized informational utopia any time soon–it’s just too hard to monetize, compared to the alternatives–but a man can dream.

Update: I just remembered that Twitter is funding a small, dedicated team to explore this space and either develop a new standard or bring an existing one to the next level. So, good for them!

The Web Is Broken, Everybody Knows It, And Donald Trump Has Proven ItPost + Comments (121)

Let’s Talk About Section 230 of the CDA (Or: Why You’re Allowed to Comment on This Post)

by Major Major Major Major|  December 28, 20201:05 pm| 52 Comments

This post is in: Science & Technology, Tech News and Issues

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has been in the news a lot lately. Conservatives hate it!

As I told @jack, by labeling posts, @twitter is taking a policy position. When taking a policy position, you’re acting as a publisher (even under current law). #BigTech can’t pretend to not be a publisher & get special benefits under #Section230.https://t.co/I3yebollh1

— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) December 7, 2020

Liberals hate it!

It is now broadly recognized that Joe Biden doesn’t like Section 230 and has repeatedly shown he doesn’t understand what it does. Multiple people keep insisting to me, however, that once he becomes president, his actual tech policy experts will understand the law better, and move Biden away from his nonsensical claim that he wishes to “repeal” the law.

In a move that is not very encouraging, Biden’s top tech policy advisor, Bruce Reed, along with Common Sense Media’s Jim Steyer, have published a bizarre and misleading “but think of the children!” attack on Section 230 that misunderstands the law, misunderstands how it impacts kids, and which suggests incredibly dangerous changes to Section 230. If this is the kind of policy recommendations we’re to expect over the next four years, the need to defend Section 230 is going to remain pretty much the same as it’s been over the last few years.

Well… not all liberals.

Just look at the #BlackLivesMatter movement. So many cases of unjust use of force against Black Americans have come to light via videos on social media. Not a single #MeToo post accusing powerful people of wrongdoing would be allowed on a moderated platform without 230.

— Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) December 11, 2020

Jeez, this must be a really complicated law if nobody can even agree on what it says. What’s that? It’s not? This is the only part that isn’t basically statements of principles, a glossary, or footnotes?

(c) Protection for “Good Samaritan” blocking and screening of offensive material

(1) Treatment of publisher or speaker

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

(2) Civil liability

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of—

(A) any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected; or
(B) any action taken to enable or make available to information content providers or others the technical means to restrict access to material described in paragraph (1).[1]

(d) Obligations of interactive computer service

A provider of interactive computer service shall, at the time of entering an agreement with a customer for the provision of interactive computer service and in a manner deemed appropriate by the provider, notify such customer that parental control protections (such as computer hardware, software, or filtering services) are commercially available that may assist the customer in limiting access to material that is harmful to minors. Such notice shall identify, or provide the customer with access to information identifying, current providers of such protections.

People are wrong about this law in myriad ways. The most popular misconception seems to be that websites must act as “platforms, not publishers” if they want this protection; making editorial decisions, this argument goes, turns them into publishers. You will notice that this does not appear in the law.

It is very, very straightforward. A website–ANY website–which allows user-generated content is (broadly speaking) not liable for that content and can moderate it however the hell they want. In other words, Section 230 grants the people who run any website the right, under the first amendment, to control what happens on their own property, and shields them from liability should a user, without the site’s knowledge, post illegal content.

Many of the suggested “reforms”, such as those by butthurt conservatives, are offered in bad faith. But even legislators we like more, such as Brian Schatz (D-HI), are introducing bills that would compel censorship and lead to regulatory capture by the largest businesses, like Facebook and Twitter. (Do you want Facebook stamping on a human face forever? Because this is how you get it.)

What would a world without Section 230 look like? We actually have a great case study. In 2018, a package known as FOSTA-SESTA was signed into law, with the stated intent of cutting down on online sex trafficking. It removes Section 230 protections for user-posted content found to be promoting “sex trafficking”. This opened websites up to huge potential liabilities, mostly around advertisements for sex work. Rather than figure out how to proactively prevent this content from being posted, sites like Craigslist simply shut down their entire Personals section, and sites like Backpage simply shut down entirely. This probably does not decrease the amount of sex trafficking, but, as the DOJ argued at the time, probably does make it harder to detect and prosecute. This doubtless also contributed to Tumblr’s decision to ban all adult content (as well as “female-presenting nipples”), and Facebook’s decision to start shutting down communities that kinda sorta hint at porn or sex work, even in jest. Needless to say this has been to the detriment of online communities for sexual minorities.

So, keep an eye on this. If you like commenting on political blogs, it may soon be relevant to you.

(But don’t take my word for it. TechDirt has a wonderful post going over all this: Hello! You’ve Been Referred Here Because You’re Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act)

Let’s Talk About Section 230 of the CDA (Or: Why You’re Allowed to Comment on This Post)Post + Comments (52)

Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: Sarah Cooper Fans Rejoice – TikTok Is *SAVED!*

by Anne Laurie|  September 19, 20208:45 pm| 234 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Open Threads, Republican Venality, Tech News and Issues, Trump Crime Cartel

BREAKING: Trump admin delays implementation of Tiktok curbs by a week, Commerce Dept says.

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) September 19, 2020

TRUMP wants the $5 billion from the Tiktok Global deal to pay for "patriotic education" via his envisioned "1776 Commission."

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) September 19, 2020

Repubs have been putting the ‘less’ in ‘shameless’ any time these past fifty years, but you’d think this kind of blatant ‘Anything you want, as long as I get a little taste in return’ would at least prompt some *token* pretense at embarrassment…

Every single GOP legislator is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Trump Crime Cartel, Inc.

Wow, China just seized a US company's local assets in China, gave it to a senior party official, and the whole thing was done in exchange for a $5bn bribe to a charity associated with the party apparatus.

Oh wait, no, got America and China confused in that sentence right there

— Pwn All The Things (@pwnallthethings) September 20, 2020

show full post on front page

"Comrades, we will dedicate the resources of our national income to combat the bourgeois falsifiers who wish to stain our patriotic history and poison the education of our people with their deviationist and anti-Party lies." https://t.co/hTZr5VqMNs

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 20, 2020

JUST IN: Trump approves new concept deal for TikTok that would see Oracle and Walmart as partners.

The latest: https://t.co/e2Wq9j7XtZ pic.twitter.com/svDfQ1jm5P

— Complex (@Complex) September 19, 2020

Again, why is everyone not GOING CRAZY over the fact that we had to literally wait for *THE PRESIDENT* to give a thumbs up or thumbs down to a biz deal that *he forced* and which was dumped a huge contract on a big donor? https://t.co/dlYQOwZfW9

— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) September 19, 2020

going to be telling to see which prominent pro-Trump China hawks endorse this https://t.co/ZMI7uoet6V

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) September 19, 2020

Trump Crime Cartel Open Thread: Sarah Cooper Fans Rejoice – TikTok Is *SAVED!*Post + Comments (234)

BJ Hive Mind: Android Phone and Windows Laptop Request

by WaterGirl|  September 7, 20208:00 pm| 89 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads, Tech News and Issues

One of our jackals has an ancient Android phone that needs to be replaced, and needs our help.

Wyatt would love to draw upon the collective wisdom of the Balloon Juice community and cast the widest possible net in order to thoroughly research options before making a decision.

One thing is absolute:  He wants to stay with an Android phone and a laptop running Windows 10.

In his own words:

I’m not working and don’t have a gazillion $$$ for a high end model, but still want to do as much research as possible to find the best available model for my budget.  I also need to buy a laptop, though the smartphone is my first priority.

Fellow jackals, when you want to find a thorough/authoritative review of a new smartphone, laptop, tablet, or software program are there any sources that you would consult in addition to the ones listed below?

CNET, ComputerWorld, Consumer Reports, PC Magazine, PCWorld, Techradar, Tom’s Guide, Wirecutter, and ZDNet

Suggestions for specific hardware are also most welcome and appreciated!

BJ Hive Mind: Android Phone and Windows Laptop RequestPost + Comments (89)

Monday Morning Open Thread: Tick… Tock…

by Anne Laurie|  August 3, 20206:53 am| 179 Comments

This post is in: Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Tech News and Issues, Trumpery

EXCLUSIVE: President Donald Trump has agreed to give China’s ByteDance 45 days to negotiate a sale of popular short-video app TikTok to Microsoft – sources https://t.co/GXNOJ7rvA1 @GregRoumeliotis @DEER_ECHO_ pic.twitter.com/ILSzEIQvv4

— Reuters (@Reuters) August 3, 2020

I don’t know how seriously anyone took the Squatter-in-Chief’s weekend threat to ‘ban TikTok’, but the most likely route to doing so would be getting some Big Swinging Dork like Mike Pompeo to declare it a national security threat. (Yes, it may even *be* a security threat, but so is Donald Trump and just about every member of the Trump crime family and the Republican Party, and you don’t see Pompeo bitching about them.)

Well, threat ‘temporarily’ averted, and who knows where we’ll all be by mid-September?

President Donald Trump only agreed to allow Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) to negotiate the acquisition of popular short-video app TikTok if it could secure a deal in 45 days, three people familiar with the matter said on Sunday.

The move represents an about-face for Trump and prompted the U.S. tech giant to declare its interest in the blockbuster social media deal that could further inflame U.S.-China relations. Trump said on Friday he was planning to ban TikTok amid concerns that its Chinese ownership represents a national security risk because of the personal data it handles.

The proposed acquisition of TikTok, which boasts 100 millions U.S. users, would offer Microsoft a rare opportunity to become a major competitor to social media giants such as Facebook Inc (FB.O) and Snap Inc (SNAP.N). Microsoft also owns professional social media network LinkedIn.

Trump had dismissed the idea of a sale to Microsoft on Friday. But following a discussion between Trump and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the Redwood, Washington-based company said in a statement on Sunday that it would continue negotiations to acquire TikTok from ByteDance, and that it aimed to reach a deal by Sept. 15.

This is a deadline that was put to ByteDance and Microsoft by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which scrutinizes deals for potential national security risks, according to the sources.

Trump changed his mind following pressure from some of his advisers and many in his Republican party, one of the sources said. Banning TikTok would alienate many of its young users ahead of the U.S. presidential election in November, and would likely trigger a wave of legal challenges. Several prominent Republican lawmakers put out statements in the last two days urging Trump to back a sale of TikTok to Microsoft…

show full post on front page

Is your teenager asking you what law would let the Trump Administration take action against TikTok? I'm here to help.
Just posted a primer for @lawfare, focusing on the CFIUS and IEEPA aspects.#tiktokban #TikTok https://t.co/V9cXVtQRfA

— Bobby Chesney (@BobbyChesney) August 2, 2020

Factfile on Chinese video-sharing social networking app TikTok@AFPgraphics pic.twitter.com/RND3Caz2Jt

— AFP news agency (@AFP) August 3, 2020

So we can, for the moment, continue to enjoy Sarah Cooper and other TikTok commentors…

Response to this video has been absolutely insane! Cannot thank everyone enough! 4.5 Million views on TikTok! #COVID19 #covid #corona pic.twitter.com/8i8F8ktJvD

— Blake Pavey (@BlakePavey) July 30, 2020

Monday Morning Open Thread: Tick… Tock…Post + Comments (179)

I’m Beginning to Think Facebook is in a Spot of Bother

by Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix|  June 26, 20207:27 am| 96 Comments

This post is in: Tech News and Issues

When I read that REI, Patagonia and North Face pulled their Facebook and Instagram ads over Facebook being Facebook and letting Trump and Trumpists spew hate, I thought it was probably a limited campaign. Those high end outdoor brands are quick to boycott, but none of them are behemoths. Ben and Jerry’s is another brand that boycotted shortly thereafter, and they’re in the same boat as the first three.

Then, Verizon, which spent about $2 million on Facebook and Instagram in the last 30 days, said they’re out. They’re the 78th biggest advertiser on Facebook, so that’s kind of a big deal. They were one of the specific targets of the Anti-Defamation League’s campaign against Facebook.

Now there’s this:

The messaging service Viber, the fifth biggest with more than a billion users around the world, is severing all ties to Facebook as part of a growing boycott of the company by commercial partners. […]

On Wednesday, Viber pulled all advertising from Facebook and its sister app Instagram. Now, the company has begun the more labour-intensive process of removing all Facebook technology from Viber’s own apps.

The company uses a number of Facebook tools, [CEO] Agaoua said. Facebook Connect enables a “login with Facebook” button, common in apps and on websites across the world, while Viber also integrates with Giphy, an animated gif search engine that Facebook bought in May.

It’s one thing to kill ads, but quite another to disable single-signon with Facebook. I’ll wager that feature isn’t coming back, and it’s a big deal when a billion-person platform decides to reject signons from your multi-billion-person platform. And disabling Giphy might seem like a joke, but it’s still another instance of Facebook losing market penetration. (Since Viber competes with Facebook Messenger, this is probably a good competitive move, too, but Facebook gave them a good excuse.)

I don’t get Zuckerberg’s angle here. He could have done what Twitter did –walk away from political ads and give Trump a couple of tiny slaps on the wrist — and probably skated by. Instead, he decided to throw his lot in with the haters and the dummies, showing the world that Facebook is where stupid old people go to read an Internet of hot garbage.

I’m Beginning to Think Facebook is in a Spot of BotherPost + Comments (96)

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