Since Kevin Martin took over the FCC, one area where he's been especially active is in trying to get "indecent" material off television. However, so far, things haven't gone all that well. A recent fine only got the content in question much more attention, and there are serious questions about just how offended people really are by what the FCC calls indecent. Most of the complaints to the FCC seem to be generated by form letter campaigns, pushed by people who never actually saw the content in question (or only saw it afterwards on the web). Last summer, an appeals court smacked down some FCC fines after it pointed out that the FCC seemed rather "arbitrary and capricious" in doling out fines for "fleeting expletives." Since there seemed to be no actual rules on what the FCC considered indecent, the court found it difficult to see how the fines were constitutional. Not surprisingly, the ruling was appealed and the Supreme Court will now take up the issue in a case that could have a major impact on the FCC's ability to fine networks for broadcasting "fleeting expletives."

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Since Kevin Martin took over the FCC, one area where he's been especially active is in trying to get "indecent" material off television. However, so far, things haven't gone all that well. A recent fine only got the content in question much more attention, and there are serious questions about just how offended people really are by what the FCC calls indecent. Most of the complaints to the FCC seem to be generated by form letter campaigns, pushed by people who never actually saw the content in question (or only saw it afterwards on the web). Last summer, an appeals court smacked down some FCC fines after it pointed out that the FCC seemed rather "arbitrary and capricious" in doling out fines for "fleeting expletives." Since there seemed to be no actual rules on what the FCC considered indecent, the court found it difficult to see how the fines were constitutional. Not surprisingly, the ruling was appealed and the Supreme Court will now take up the issue in a case that could have a major impact on the FCC's ability to fine networks for broadcasting "fleeting expletives."

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Catching up on my reading, I recently came across this post from the University of Chicago's Saul Levmore about the merits of touchscreen voting. Levmore thinks that "the future is surely with the touch-screen or some other form of online voting." Levmore doesn't go into any detail about why he thinks this; I assume he's simply not familiar with the many e-voting problems we've covered here at Techdirt. He may not know, for example, that voting machines are susceptible to viruses that can allow a single person to corrupt every machine in a county or even an entire state. Levmore makes an interesting analogy to automatic teller machines. He points out that we've been using ATMs without any serious problems for decades, and wonders why we can't use the same technologies for voting machines.

What Levmore is missing is that the security model of an ATM is totally different from the security model of a voting machine. The most important line of defense against ATM fraud is not the machines themselves, but the fact that they produce a lengthy paper trail. If a hacker breaks into a bank's network and transfers funds from someone else's account to his own, two important things will happen. First, the victim will notice an unauthorized transaction and complain. And second, the perpetrator will need to pick up the money somehow, which will create a paper trail that will help the police find him. For example, a hacker trying to physically steal the cash from an ATM has to be physically present to pick up the cash, which increases the risk that he'll be caught in the act -- especially if he tries to knock off several machines in a row. It is the likelihood that fraud will be detected and punished, not the inherent unhackability of the machines themselves, that makes ATMs secure. In contrast, nobody knows what the "right" election outcome is supposed to be, so there's no one in a position to object if the results get altered. And because peoples' votes have to be kept secret, voting machines can't create the same kind of personally-identifiable paper trails that ATMs do. Unlike stolen cash, a stolen election doesn't need to be physically delivered to the beneficiary, so there's no way to trace the loot to find the perpetrator. That means that even if election fraud is detected, there's not going to be any straightforward way to figure out either who did it or what the result should have been. We can be pretty sure, for example, that something went wrong in the 2006 election in Sarasota County, but we have no way to be sure if foul play might have been involved or if (as seems more likely) the software was just flaky.

There's a more fundamental issue that should be especially familiar to the folks at the University of Chicago: banks have much stronger incentives to get things right than election officials. If a criminal succeeds in knocking off an ATM machine, the bank that owns that ATM machine stands to lose a lot of money. As a result, the bank has a strong incentive to take the steps necessary to secure the ATM, or to not deploy the ATM at all if it thinks that securing it would be too difficult. Banks have both the incentives and the resources to hire computer security experts to advise them on fixing potential problems with their ATM machines. In contrast, state officials have only a weak incentives to get voting machine security right. A stolen election will be a rare occurrence even with insecure voting machines, and if it does occur, state officials can easily shift blame to other people -- county election officials, vendors, poll workers. It's not surprising, therefore, that states have rushed to deploy electronic voting systems that virtually every computer securit expert on the planet says are insecure. Without strong accountability, election officials tend to be swayed by the superficial impression that computerized processes are inherently better than older technologies, or even by lobbying by voting machine vendors. Peoples' opposition to e-voting is not, as Levmore seems to think, a result of knee-jerk opposition to new technologies. It's a recognition that the e-voting problem is much harder than is generally supposed, and it's better to err on the side of caution until e-voting technology has had a chance to mature.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Again? State after state after state has passed laws that ban the sale of certain video games to children, and time after time after time those laws are struck down as unconstitutional. Not a single one has passed muster, and yet court time and taxpayer money is wasted over and over again on these same issues, with at least 10 states having gone through the same process with the same results. States cannot ban the sale of video games to children. It's a violation of the First Amendment. This does not mean that stores themselves can't make such a policy, just as movie theaters have voluntarily (not based on a law) agreed not to let kids see movies of certain ratings. But to pass a law is unconstitutional. A lower court in Minnesota made that clear in 2006 -- but it didn't stop the politicians from appealing... and losing. Yes, a federal appeals court has agreed with the lower court that banning the sale of video games is not constitutional. While the lower court had noted:

"There is a paucity of evidence linking the availability of video games with any harm to Minnesota's children at all.... It is impossible to determine from the data presented whether violent video games cause violence, or whether violent individuals are attracted to violent video games."

The appeals court was a little less direct:

"Whatever our intuitive (dare we say commonsense) feelings regarding the effect of violent video games, precedent requires undeniable proof that such violence causes psychological dysfunction...."

Despite claims to the contrary by some activists, there still is no evidence linking violent video games to violent behavior. In fact, as has been pointed out repeatedly, violent crime has continued to drop as violent video games have become more and more popular. At most, studies have shown that violent video games make people emotional, but that doesn't lead to increased violent activity outside of the game itself. Of course, that won't stop grandstand politicians from pushing for such violent video game bans, despite the knowledge that they're clearly wasting taxpayer money every time they do so.

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Last May, we noted that spammer Robert Alan Soloway had been arrested and the book was being thrown at him: mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft, tax fraud and money laundering were included in the charges. On Friday he pleaded guilty to three of the charges: mail fraud, wire fraud and failure to file a tax return. The rest of the charges were dropped, and he now faces up to 26 years in jail. It's not like he didn't know everyone was on to him. He had previously lost civil lawsuits from Microsoft and some others. Still, when he was arrested last May federal authorities actually claimed that the arrest might lead to a decrease in spam. How did that work out?

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It's become quite common these days for various local governments to pass laws forbidding the use of mobile phones while driving (though, most allow the use of a hands free kit, which might not be any safer). However, one truck driver in Germany figured out a loophole that got him off the hook: he claimed he wasn't talking on the phone, but just using a recently charged mobile phone to warm his ears -- and the court believed him after he showed an itemized bill that showed no phone call at the time (found via Fark, of course). The man claims he had an earache, and that the heater in the truck cab took too long to warm up, so he was using the phone instead -- though, you can understand why the police officer might not have believed him.

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While Phorm has gone on a charm offensive to try to convince people that its efforts are not as bad as some are making them out to be (including, by the way, using my post as a de facto forum), it appears that the effort still isn't convincing skeptics. Tim Berners-Lee made some news last week for suggesting he would switch ISPs if his started using a service like Phorm, but the bigger backlash may be coming from the legal arena. First, there was the news that BT (who had originally denied this) tested Phorm's technology, without letting users know, last summer. That has resulted in some people threatening a lawsuit. And, speaking of lawsuits, a bunch of scholars and think tankers are pointing out that Phorm may actually be illegal based on current UK laws, if it's used without first getting users to "opt-in."

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Over and over again, we've seen studies that have shown that red light cameras tend to increase, not decrease auto accidents, and certainly don't do much to improve safety. The Agitator points us to yet another study, this time from researchers at the University of South Florida, who again point out that red light cameras tend to increase the number of accidents. The research also points out that accidents from running red lights are rather rare, and it's hardly a problem that requires automation. As for the few studies that have shown better safety from red light cameras, every single one came from a group poised to make money off of the cameras -- and they certainly do make money. It's just unfortunate that it seems to come at the expense of more car accidents, all in the bogus name of public safety. Update: Of course, just after publishing this, I see a story on Engadget about how Dallas has found that red light cameras are effective in preventing red light violations (no word on rear end collisions from people slamming on the brakes however). Yet, here's the irony: because of that, the city gov't doesn't want to install any more, as it's cutting into revenue.

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I'm probably biased since our blog is our primary communications vehicle here at Techdirt, but I thought Mark Cuban's suggestion that mainstream media outlets like the New York Times should shun the word "blog" to describe their work was pretty silly. Cuban thinks mainstream media outlets should make up a term like "RealTime Reporting" to describe their blog-like products. The Times's Saul Hansell makes the essential point: "blog" describes a medium, like "column" or "newsletter." Calling something a blog doesn't imply anything about its level of quality. To the contrary, one of the advantages of blogs is that people can subscribe to them on an individual basis. This allows them to make fine distinctions. Not only are readers perfectly capable of distinguishing between the New York Times blogs and 15-year-old girls on LiveJournal, but readers will also learn to distinguish among the blogs on the Times itself. If some of the Times's blogs are brilliant and the others are mediocre, readers will figure that out and the best blogs will get more traffic over time. Another way to illustrate how silly Cuban's line of reasoning is is to put the shoe on the other foot. The New York Times company publishes a "newspaper." There are thousands and thousands of bad "newspapers" out there, from the National Enquirer to those free weekly papers that get tossed in peoples' front yards. So by Cuban's logic, the Times should avoid the word "newspaper" in describing its product to avoid associating itself with the riff-raff. Perhaps it should begin describing it as "PaperBased Reporting" instead.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Well, it had to happen sooner or later. With the press going nuts printing photos of the call girl at the center of the Eliot Spitzer affair, her lawyers are suddenly making some noise about how using these photos violates her copyrights on them. Most of the photos were taken from her MySpace page, which ties back to a recent story here about how the press is trying to determine what's fair game in a social networking profile when the subject becomes newsworthy. While some think that a fair use claim by the newspapers is weak, US laws on copyright do allow a fair use defense in news reporting, which would seem to apply to the photos. They're certainly not printing these photos for their artistic value.

The Associated Press, who has syndicated many of the photos in question has defended its use of the photos saying: "The Associated Press discussed the photos obtained from the MySpace page in great detail and found that they were newsworthy. We distributed the photos that were relevant to the story." Of course, as the What's Fair Use? blog points out, there's a bit of irony here. Just a few weeks ago, the AP used legal threats to get a photo-journalism criticism blog to stop using AP photos, claiming that it was copyright infringement. Apparently, the AP has different rules for itself than it has for others.

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