Sennett Devermont is a police accountability activist whose streams police encounters to his Instagram followers. When he visited the @BeverlyHillsPD last Fri to obtain a form, BHPD Sergeant Billy Fair began blasting music from of his phone.

instagram.com/p/CLCpHBQjX8r/

1/
Fair was following the example of other BHPD officers who have made a habit of playing copyrighted music during encounters with the public, apparently to trigger automated copyright takedowns on the major social media platforms.

vice.com/en/article/bvx…

2/
As @dexdigi writes for @vicenews, this form of copyfraud has a failsafe: if the filter doesn't block the livestream, the archived footage might be easily removed through copyright complaints.

3/
Instagram's copyright policy suggests that videos with incidental music are permitted, but the company's filters are incapable of distinguishing "incidental" and "non-incidental" use, while its appeals process is longrunning production Kafka's Trial.

pluralistic.net/2020/05/17/che…

4/
Moreover, the platforms use a "copystrike" system, which means that cops who successfully deploy this tactic can chip away at activists' presence on the system - three strikes and their accounts are permanently removed.

5/
Thomas: "...[P]laying copyrighted music as a deterrent to the First Amendment-guaranteed right to openly film police is, if not BHPD official protocol, at least a technique that has been deployed by more than one officer."

6/
Back in 2019, anti-racist activists experimented with playing copyrighted music at Nazi rallies to make them unpostable on social media. At the time, I warned that this would end badly.

memex.craphound.com/2019/07/23/cle…

7/
Exactly a year later, BLM protest videos started disappearing from the internet thanks to copyfraud and overactive copyright filters.

pluralistic.net/2020/07/23/cir…

8/
Copyright filters are a terrible idea, not just because they have all but eliminated the ability of musicians to perform classical music online:

pluralistic.net/2020/05/22/cri…

9/
Nor merely because they allow giant companies to steal from independent video creators:

pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fai…

10/
They're a bad idea because they create a backdoor system for censorship of any and all material - because they fray the fabric of our online speech forums, and give bullies a devastating weapon to use against those who document their crimes.

eof/

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More from @doctorow

11 Feb
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Dependency Confusion; Adam Curtis on criti-hype; Catalytic converter theft; Apple puts North Dakota on blast; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/02/11/rho…

#Pluralistic

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This weekend, I'll be participating in Boskone 58, Boston's annual sf convention, where I'm doing panels and a reading.

boskone.org

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Dependency Confusion: A completely wild supply-chain hack.



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Read 20 tweets
11 Feb
Republican North Dakota legislators have introduced #SB2333, a bill that prohibits large tech companies from locking their users into a single app store or payment processor.

legis.nd.gov/assembly/67-20…

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While his has implications for Android and other large tech platforms, its most immediate and far-reaching effects with be on Apple, whose Ios platform uses lock-in to monopolize both apps and payments (and another domain, not mentioned in the bill: repairs).

2/
Predictably, this has thrown Apple into a fury, with Apple's privacy chief @erikn telling the SD legislature that Apple uses its monopoly over the app store to protect its users' privacy and security.

macrumors.com/2021/02/10/app…

3/
Read 22 tweets
11 Feb
Back in the early 2010s, people started falling into open sewer entrances in New York City and other large metros - because a China-driven spike in the price of scrap metal, combined with post-2008 unemployment, gave rise to an army of metal-thieves.

reuters.com/article/instan…

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A decade later, there's a new precarity- and bubble-fuelled metal-theft epidemic: stealing catalytic converters out of parked cars to harvest their palladium and rhodium for re-use in the global auto-sector, which is facing strict emissions controls.

nytimes.com/2021/02/09/cli…

2/
Palladium and rhodium prices are soaring: palladium is up from $500/oz in 2016 to $2000-$2500/oz; rhodium rose from $640/oz to $21,900/oz (!). This puts a serious dent in auto profits - in 2019, the industry spent an extra $18b on metals (it was higher in 2020).

3/
Read 8 tweets
11 Feb
Adam Curtis is a brilliant documentarian, and films like Hypernormalization and series like All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace had a profound effect on my thinking about politics, technology and human thriving.

1/ Image
In this interview with The @idler's @TWHodgkinson, Curtis lays out a compact, incisive and important critique of the big social media platforms - and of their critics, who give these companies far too much credit.

idler.co.uk/article/adam-c…

2/
Curtis puts Big Tech's self-serving boasts about how good it is at manipulating public opinion in the same bucket as other outlandish claims of secret, astounding accomplishments, such as those made by British spy agencies.

3/
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10 Feb
In "Dependency Confusion," security researcher @alxbrsn describes how he made a fortune in bug bounties by exploiting a new supply-chain attack he calls "dependency confusion," which allowed him to compromise "Apple, Microsoft and dozens of others."

medium.com/@alex.birsan/d…

1/ Image
Dependency Confusion is incredibly, delightfully clever. It is grounded in the fact that software developers rely on "dependencies" (prebuilt, modular code libraries) when they build new versions of their software.

2/
The javascript files used to build new versions are often public, and by looking inside them, you can find out the names of the libraries used to build popular applications, from Uber to Yelp to Netflix.

3/
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10 Feb
Today's threads (a thread).

Inside: Crooked cops play music to kill livestreams; Duke is academia's meanest trademark bully; Tory donors reap 100X return; A criminal enterprise with a country attached; and more!

Archived at: pluralistic.net/2021/02/10/duk…

#Pluralistic

1/ Image
This weekend, I'll be participating in Boskone 58, Boston's annual sf convention, where I'm doing panels and a reading.

boskone.org

2/ Image
Crooked cops play music to kill livestreams: Beverly Hills Police Department Sergeant Billy Fair blasting Sublime's Santeria.



3/ Image
Read 20 tweets

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