Notices by Blake E. Reid 🍍🍕🥫🏁 (blakereid@mastodon.lawprofs.org)

I feel for and am grateful to Joe Biden for what must have been as wrenching a decision as any of us have ever made.

I know @profcarroll is just trying to help, but this is the wrong way to fix your computer that is suffering from the Crowdstrike BSoD. The real fix is:
1) Unplug your computer
2) Place it in your trunk
3) Drive to the nearest ocean or other body of water
4) Throw the computer in
5) Fling yourself on the ground and scream “WHAT HAVE WE DONE” to the heavens

https://federate.social/@profcarroll/112813880690963810

@ntnsndr @robin @mnot report immediately to my office

@robin @luis_in_brief @ntnsndr @mnot Bart Simpson writing “the internet was a mistake" over and over again on the chalkboard

@robin @luis_in_brief @ntnsndr @mnot you're not wrong but I try and stick to one lesson per detention

It is critical to understand that this dramatically shifts the role and power of lawyers. There is no amount of carefully crafted legal argumentation or strategy that can lead to different results in these cases. That does not mean that lawyers do not have important work to do in bringing forth good-faith arguments and bearing witness to the derogation of of the rule of law. (That’s part of the oath lawyers in most (all?) states take to support the Constitution.) 3/

But once judges have broken bad and abandoned their commitment to perform their critical role in upholding the rule of law to become overtly political actors, there is no legal remedy left—only political ones. At a federal level, they basically boil down to Congress exercising its prerogative to reshape the judiciary, impeachment proceedings, and the constitutional amendment process. 4/

It is important for lawyers, academics, journalists, and other commentators to understand that these cases do not represent some faithful, learned, good-faith, balls-and-strikes interpretation of primary legal materials applied to the facts at hand. They are an exercise of political power. And they need to be understood as such. 2/

Judge Cannon’s ruling is disturbing and alarming. But it should not be surprising. That it is suggests a lack of awareness of what is happening. Here it is: there is a sizable chunk of the American judiciary scattered across the trial and appellate courts (particularly the 5th Circuit) and a majority of Supreme Court Justices that are overtly willing to depart the rule of law toward overtly partisan ends in cases involving President Trump and radiating outward to other partisan priorities. 1/

ChatGPT locally storing conversations in plaintext is in one sense not as bad as the Recall fiasco (not an OS-level fail) but also worse because OpenAI reportedly went out of its way to avoid the macOS sandbox that would have prevented this automatically. Bad omen for OpenAI’s approach to privacy. https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/07/chatgpts-much-heralded-mac-app-was-storing-conversations-as-plain-text/?utm_source=bsky&utm_medium=social

ICYMI in the maelstrom of Internet law news over the last week, the #SupremeCourt today denied cert in Doe v. Snap, an important case about #Section230 out of the Fifth Circuit. The denial was accompanied by a notable dissent from Justice Thomas and Justice Gorsuch; here's a post dismantling the dissent's unpersuasive arguments about the supposed legal tension between assertions of Section 230 and the #FirstAmendment. https://blakereid.org/scotus-passes-on-230-review-in-doe-v-snap/

Here's a new #NetChoice blog post summarizing today's SCOTUS's opinion. TLDR: it's mostly good news for fans of a balanced #FirstAmendment, but significantly kicks the can back to the Fifth and Eleventh Circuit and leaves non-trivial uncertainty about how the next round of litigation will unfold. https://blakereid.org/netchoice-approved-for-season-2/

Also, very interesting speculation that in the face of an adverse fair use ruling, Google would condition inclusion in Google Search on assent to AI training. Yikes. Huge antitrust problems.
Complex technical/legal questions about how you would structure the transaction—are lines in robots.txt enough to form a binding contract? And is Google going to degrade search so much that it will start to lose leverage before this moment arrives? But a provocative possibility.
@jsnell @upgrade

@inthehands AFAIK, optical audio is a straight pass through of the digital audio stream, so adjusting the volume is something that typically happens downstream (as opposed to via some kind of DSP). If it were me, I would just buy an inexpensive receiver that supports HDMI-CEC to replace the DAC and drive the speakers.

@inthehands I might give Firefox a shot too. "Chromium" is really code for "Safari alternative.”

@inthehands Safari's my usual jam, but I like to keep a Chromium browser on hand for the various institutional sites that don't play nice with Safari. Thanks for the recs!

@inthehands d'oh. I had no idea about Brave. Any other suggestions for a privacy-protective Chromium browser?

The devolution of #BeeperMini into increasingly absurd bubble-gum-and-chicken-wire architecture is a good illustration of why you shouldn’t send technologists to do a policymaker’s job https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/21/beeper-mini-jailbroken-iphones-rescue-imessage/

While I’m at it, antitrust is the wrong vehicle for #BeeperMini because the courts are in a bad position to fashion remedies for complex interop. We need interop regulation overseen by an expert regulator, which actually could be the #FCC. Title II is a fairly good fit for E2EE messaging! People think about Title II as the regulatory hook for the phone system as the basic communications network, but often forget that the phone system was also a point-to-point app. https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/22/doj-and-ftc-looking-into-beeper-controversy/

@fgbjr I’m concerned about second-order interactions (i.e., Threads getting access to my posts via users/domains who don’t block it).