Comment A flawed consultation into Section 230 – America’s safety blanket that shields online platforms like Google and Facebook – has already devolved into a mess dangerously reminiscent of the net neutrality debate.
ETA:
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has ruled [PDF] that the National Security Agency’s phone-call slurping was indeed naughty, seven years after former contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the tawdry affair.
AWS has come out with guns blazing after the US Department of Defense’s (DoD) reaffirmed Microsoft’s JEDI contract win on Friday, with the cloud vendor alleging the award was a “flawed, biased, and politically corrupted decision,” that had been directly and improperly influenced by US President Donald Trump.
Why is that a picture of Star Trek toys in a story about JEDI?
Odd that the picture is only in the thumbnail, but not the article itself.
Maybe it was deliberate to get angered Star Trek fans to rage-click?
I noticed that, too.
Probably. Worked on me, I guess.
Analysis With studied ignorance, yet another piece of proposed legislation targeting social media, and invoking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, has emerged this week.
This time, three Republican senators – Roger Wicker (R-MS), Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) – are behind the effort “to hold Big Tech accountable” by proposing a change to US law that right now gives online platforms legal protections for content posted by their users.
The draft Online Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Act [PDF] continues to promote the fiction that social media platforms are censoring conservative viewpoints, that they are hiding behind the 26 words in the 1996 law that makes up Section 230, and that the law needs to be changed to introduce a concept of “neutrality” to ensure such censorship doesn’t continue in future.
Any bill with Freedom or Patriot in its title is usually bad news.
Tova Noel and Michael Thomas now face a June 14, 2021 trial date, five months later than previously planned, after pleading not guilty last November to falsely certifying they conducted inmate counts during Epstein’s final hours.
The safety driver who was behind the wheel of a self-driving Uber car when it hit and killed a pedestrian has been charged with negligent homicide.
Prosecutors in Maricopa, Arizona, today said that following her grand jury indictment, Rafaela Vasquez will go on trial for the death of Elaine Herzberg. Vasquez, who was charged [PDF] under the name Rafael, pleaded not guilty. She was released with an ankle tracker ahead of her October 27 trial in the United States.
Oracle has been formally announced as TikTok’s new technology partner and will also become a co-owner of a new entity that will run the made—in-China social network in the USA and other parts of the world. US president Donald Trump has backed the deal publicly.
Tesla has successfully torpedoed a countersuit brought against it by a former employee accused of stealing confidential internal info from the luxury electric carmaker.
Nevada US District Court Judge Miranda Du on Thursday granted a summary judgment [PDF] in favor of Tesla, dismissing counterclaims from ex-technician Martin Tripp.
[…]
So while Oracle will get the cloud contract, Walmart the merch, and the public market ownership, there is no way that TikTok’s core technology will move outside China. If the US government decides to insist on the algorithm shifting to US interests, it will fail.
And so all you need to understand the deal from this point on is that literally everything else you hear will be calibrated to appease an audience of one: Donald Trump. And that is what happens when you put a narcissist in the White House.
The British Airline Pilots’ Association (BALPA) has told American aviation regulators that the Boeing 737 Max needs better fixes for its infamous MCAS software, warning that a plane crash which killed 149 people could happen again.
Airlines, in contrast, are broadly happy with proposed changes to the Boeing 737 Max, even as trade unions bellow at the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that more needs to be done.
In public comments submitted to the FAA’s notice of proposed rulemaking (NPRM), BALPA warned that one of the proposed workarounds for a future MCAS failure could lead to a repeat of the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET302.
It was a typical Trump shakedown for his friends.
So, in summary: the DoJ’s proposals are not bad, and certainly don’t attempt to write political hyperbole or Trumpian nonsense into the law. But it is highly debatable whether limiting content moderation to a specific set of criteria is a good idea, and if Congress does take up the DoJ’s proposals, hopefully wiser heads will prevail and add an additional broader category to both provide flexibility and future-proof Section 230.
TikTok has asked the courts for a preliminary injunction that would prevent the the Trump administration from banning the video-sharing app in America this weekend.
In its filing [PDF] on Wednesday, Tiktok said it had “made extraordinary efforts to try to satisfy the government’s ever-shifting demands and purported national security concerns.” Any ban would break the First and Fifth Amendments of the United States Constitution, it claimed, as well as multiple other laws. Said amendments, broadly speaking, cover freedom of speech and right to assemble and petition the government; and the right to due process, respectively.
