At Techdirt, Karl Bode reports on efforts to get the Federal Trade Commission to do something about companies that ruin hardware with software updates. Some will remove features or limit functionality; some will outright turn what you bought into a brick to avoid the costs of maintenance or to get you shopping for more. — Read the rest

Oregon is the fourth state to pass a bill giving consumers the right to fix their own appliances and gadgets, reports The Oregonian. The right to repair is building steam.

The bill passed the Oregon Senate last month 25-5 and the House on Monday 42-13.

Karl Bode set out to buy a "dumb" TV set: one that didn't constantly try to go online, surveill him and shovel advertisements, offers and other useless crap in his face while he tried to watch some shows. They're out there, but they're not much good…

Of course it's challenging because TV manufacturers now make more money collecting and monetizing your personal data than they do selling the actual hardware.

Now that many online services rely on sending SMSes to your phone to authenticate your identify, thieves and stalkers have created a whole "SIM swap" industry where they defraud your phone company or bribe employees to help them steal your phone account so they can break into all your other accounts.

Trump's FCC Chairman Ajit Pai rammed through an illegal Net Neutrality repeal by claiming that the Obama-era Net Neutrality rules slowed down investment in broadband, depriving Americans of fast internet.

Apple was at the vanguard of the massive corporate spending that killed Right to Repair bills in 20 state legislatures last year, and while the company claims that it wants to protect its users from evil repair dudes who secretly hack their devices while claiming to fix them, Apple's CEO's frank warning to investors that profits are expected to slide if people keep fixing their Iphones instead of replacing them points at a much more likely answer.

In 2018, Steve Bannon teamed up with a group called Catholicvote to acquire mobile phone location-tracking data to identify people in Iowa who'd visited a Catholic church and target them with political ads.

An article of faith among neoliberals is that monopolies are efficient because they are so profitable that they can offer better prices to their customers as well as better services.

NYC Mesh — the meshing, neutral, community based wireless ISP in New York City — has undergone a drastic expansion beyond its initial supernode.

You know those 'Presidential Alerts' and the Hawaii oops? Bad guys could weaponize the mobile alert system, and here's how.

Karl Bode is a respected and talented tech journalist, but he labors under a tremendous burden: for nearly a decade he has struggled with "post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome" — colloquially known as "chronic Lyme disease" — enduring the twin struggles of a largely untreatable debilitating illness and skeptical dismissals from much of the medical establishment.

A year ago, Trump FCC Chairman (and former Verizon exec) Ajit Pai killed Net Neutrality, leveraging illegal, fraudulent industry dirty tricks to ram his rule through the process; all along, he claimed that Net Neutrality was a drag on investment, competition and service improvements, and that Americans would see immediate benefits once he was done killing Net Neutrality.

I'm 100% down for the trend toward trustbusting, and I'm very glad to see it applied to Big Tech, because, like Tom Eastman, I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four. — Read the rest

The American Law Institute is a group of 4,000 judges, law profs and lawyers that issues incredibly influential "restatements" of precedents and trends in law, which are then heavily relied upon by judges in future rulings; for seven years they have been working on a restatement of the law of consumer contracts (including terms of service) and now they're ready to publish.

More than half of the US states have passed laws that ban or severely restrict local governments from investing in broadband: many of these laws were copypasted from "model legislation" circulated by corporate telcoms lobbyists (this is a disturbing, widespread practice in America's state houses); and many of the states that have passed these bills have large areas where every ISP is a Net Neutrality violator, and all across America, ISPs are underinvesting in network buildout (especially for rural subscribers) while raising prices and refusing to sell high-speed service to customers who don't also buy cable TV.

It's been 20 years since Napster burst on the scene, and after decades of lawsuits, draconian criminal penalties, even no-knock gunpoint search warrants, there remains no evidence that "copyright enforcement" has a measurable impact on copyright infringement — and at the same time, there's persistent, credible evidence that infringement goes down when product offerings get better and prices get more reasonable.

The Truth-In-Billing, Remedies, and User Empowerment over Fees Act [TRUE Fees] has been introduced by Rep Anna Eshoo [D-CA] and Sen Ed Markey [D-MA]; if passed, it will force ISPs and cable operators to advertise the true costs of their packages, including all surcharges.

More than a decade of foot-dragging on fiber rollout has left millions of Americans dependent on taxpayer-funded copper-line infrastructure for landlines and DSL, but it's not like the carriers are plowing their no-fiber savings into copper maintenance, instead, as a report released by Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson details, incumbent telcos are literally leaving their infrastructure to rot: wires are draped across customers' lawns (and over their propane tanks!), — Read the rest

There have been several attempts to force the US telcoms industry to respect our privacy: to stop our ISPs from spying on us and selling our usage data to marketers, to stop the mobile carriers from spying on our location and selling the data to marketers (and, it turns out, stalkers and bounty hunters), and every attempt has fizzled, as telcoms lobbyists and telcoms-funded lawmakers have sold us out, saying that the privacy rules are unnecessary because the carriers wouldn't do anything too sketchy lest they suffer reputational damage.

The same year that Trump's FCC Chairman Ajit Pai killed broadband privacy and cheated Network Neutrality to death, the Trump tax plan delivered a $20B windfall to AT&T — both Trump and Pai claimed that the measures would stimulate the economy and trickle down to the rest of us.