That was the week that was, 2017 revival* |
(Heavy sigh.)
1. The Intercept's Mehdi Hasan in an August 15, 2017, article: "Donald Trump has been a racist all his life, and he isn't going to change after Charlottesville." This compilation of 40 years of racist statements by Trump tells the story better than I ever could. 2. Stanford Law Professor Mark Lemley on Twitter: "I'm sorry, my Republican friends, but unless you stand up right now and disavow him, you own this. History will not judge you kindly." 3. "Chilling signs are everywhere," says 94-year-old Harry Leslie Smith in an August 14, 2017, post on the Guardian. Smith writes that this summer resembles the summer of 1939, "the last summer of peace until 1945." "It is as foolish for Americans to believe that their generals will save them from Trump as it was for liberal Germans to believe the military would protect the nation from Hitler’s excesses." 4. Via Axios, your CEO scorecard for who's out and who's still in Trump's special councils. (Update: The Hill reports Trump's business councils are disbanding.) 5. "Now is an era of sadness and despair in America," says Salon's Bob Cesca in an August 14, 2017, post on AlterNet. Guess who bears all the fault? 6. Democratic politician Bill Curry on the "damaged, pathetic personality" that is Donald Trump, in an August 12, 2017, article on Salon. 7. And just in case you are still uncertain about where I stand on the matter, allow me to quote John Scalzi: "You know, when the history of this era is written, I want the record to show I was firmly on the side of 'Fuck this fucking Nazi bullshit.'" ------------------------------------------- Web-hosting company DreamHost responds -- in the negative -- to a blanket request from Jeff Sessions' Department of Justice for all information about all visitors to an anti-Trump site, including IP addresses. The complete response is an August 14, 2017, post entitled, "We Fight for the Users." ------------------------------------------- Two ways to "reduce your exposure to web tracking," based on research (pdf) by Steven Englehardt and Arvind Narayanan of Princeton University: Use your browser's built-in tracker-blocking features; and install a tracker-blocking extension such as Ghostery or uBlock Origin. The best browser for keeping trackers at bay is Firefox. The September 8, 2015, Weekly describes how to block third-party cookies and delete all cookies on exit in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome. Also, the Princeton researchers take a deep dive into the various forms of system fingerprinting used by web services, ad networks, and other third parties to record our online activities. Cookies are so 2005. ------------------------------------------- A California Court of Appeal reverses the decision in Cross v. Facebook that extended the right of publicity to social media. The Electronic Frontier Foundation's Daniel Nazer writes in an August 10, 2017, article that a "country-rap" artist known as Mikel Knight claimed a Facebook account that criticized his marketing practices (selling CDs out of the trunks of his employees' cars) violated his right of publicity -- to capitalize on the commercial use of his name -- among oher claims against the company. Only the right-of-publicity claim survived Facebook's Anti-SLAPP motion. The trial court ruled that Facebook's use of Knight's image alongside ads was unauthorized commercial use of a person's identity. As Nazer explains, if the ruling had stood, it would have "given people a veto right over speech about them that they didn’t like (as long as that speech appeared on a platform with advertising)." Limits on defamation laws and protection of web services for the content users post (via Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) would also have been affected by the trial court's decision. ------------------------------------------- The Free Law Project has collected all free orders and opinions offered by the PACER service that provides public access to Federal court cases. In an August 15, 2017, post, the project explains that it worked with the U.S. Department of Labor and Georgia State University to collect the orders and opinions using PACER's Written Opinion Report. All the documents can be searched via the RECAP Archive of PACER documents, as well as by using the project's own APIs. For the first time, according to the Free Law Project, "legal scholars, lawyers, journalists, and the public" have free access to PACER documents, which "are a critical part of America’s legal system," according to the project. ------------------------------------------- Victims of data breaches may finally have standing to sue the breaching party -- maybe. Following the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Spokeo Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540 (2016), plaintiffs have had to show "actual or imminent harm" as a result of the loss of their private information in a data breach. Adam Bridgers and Meredith Weisler Norvill of Fisher Phillips write in an August 15, 2017, post on JDSupra that a "plaintiff's heightened risk of future identity theft was sufficient to show standing at the pleading stage." (Note that the plaintiff's burden to show standing at the pleading stage is only the beginning. Standing must also be demonstrated at each stage of the litigation, "through summary judgment, and trial," according to Jeffrey S. Gutman in the Federal Practice Manual for Legal Aid Attorneys.) That was the court's decision in Attias v. CareFirst, Inc., Case No. 16-7108, in U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. As Bridgers and Weisler Norvill write, this is the second time a U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled as such, following Remijas v. Neiman Marcus Grp., 794 F.3d 688 (7th Cir. 2015). The upshot, according to the authors, is that "plaintiffs will now use CareFirst to break through the motion to dismiss phase and move more quickly to class certification and discovery." In addition, they foresee "increased litigation and settlement costs to companies." ------------------------------------------- A "new technology for internet freedom" is under development by a group of engineers and researchers, as David Robinson reports in an August 14, 2017, post on Medium. A technology called refraction networking is an attempt to "help people around the world learn and communicate online in the face of censorship," according to Robison. Freedom House's Freedom on the Net report for 2016 found that internet censorship has increased in each of the last six years, and two-thirds of internet users face punishment "if they speak out online about the government, military or ruling family in their country." Refraction networking puts the proxy function used by anonymizing services "to the core of the network," which makes blocking sites more expensive because censors would have to monitor "whole networks outside the censored country." Robinson writes that "any encrypted data exchange between a censored nation’s Internet and a participating friendly network can become a conduit for the free flow of information." As Leonard Cohen might have sang, "Democracy is coming to the U.S.A." ------------------------------------------- *"That Was the Week That Was" was a short-lived news satire series produced by and starring David Frost that ran in the mid-1960s, first in Britain and then in the U.S. Only the pilot survives of the American version, according to Wikipedia. I know it primarily for a 1965 comedy recording by Tom Lehrer, one of the show's cast members, called "That Was the Year that Was." The record featured satirical songs like "The Vatican Rag," "Pollution," and "New Math." |
