Olives @olives@qoto.org

https://reason.com/2023/11/29/a-los-angeles-jail-let-a-woman-die-of-withdrawal-then-a-coroner-allowed-her-body-to-decompose/

"Amanda Bews was arrested last September after shoplifting from a Los Angeles-area liquor store. Within two days, she would be found unresponsive in a jail cell, dead from apparent alcohol and drug withdrawal.

According to a lawsuit filed this month, that wasn't the only way jail employees mishandled Bews' case. Not only did jail employees fail to treat Bews, despite numerous medical records stating she would need withdrawal medications, but once she had died, the jail mishandled her remains, leading to major decomposition that Bews' mother said made her daughter look "mummified""

https://reason.com/2023/12/01/judge-halts-montanas-first-amendment-violating-tiktok-ban/

"A TikTok ban in Montana is likely unconstitutional, a federal judge ruled on Thursday.

Judge Donald Molloy, with the U.S. District Court for the District of Montana, issued a temporary halt to enforcing the ban. It was scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2024, and would have meant $10,000 penalties per day for app stores or TikTok "each time that a user accesses TikTok, is offered the ability to access TikTok, or is offered the ability to download TikTok."

The ruling "is a welcome victory in the face of a relentless and illiberal campaign against the First Amendment and the Internet," said Ari Cohn, free speech counsel with TechFreedom. "Wholesale bans on speech-enabling platforms are an affront to the First Amendment, and it is deeply troubling that so many have cheered them on based on panic, fear, or a general disdain for the platform.""

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/12/latest-draft-un-cybercrime-treaty-big-step-backward The EFF has a take on the newest draft of the proposed cybercrime treaty here.

https://qoto.org/@olives/111497528228022091 I wrote about a couple of provisions here.

I'm also concerned about a provision which encourages states to surveil bank accounts. Britain conveniently forced through a bill suddenly (after the new draft dropped) which allows the monitoring of all bank accounts without due process of law. It is currently in the Lords.

How hard is it not to insert creepy Nazi shit in a comic book about cute girls, LO?

While I wonder whether you really need to buy an engine to make a 2D game, hey, if your competitors are tripping on their faces like that, that is a great time to get in and use that to your advantage, lol.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/11/29/unity-becomes-marketing-punching-bag-for-other-game-engine/ Lol.

I'm not a fan of Australia trying to ban / restrict vaping. Maybe, better enforcement to prevent minors from doing so would be better than going down the tracks of another prohibition. I could see an environmental argument against non-reusable ones.

More people coming online is also a plausible explanation for more abuse but it also underscores the importance of proportionality (as obviously all these people coming online aren't coming online just to do that).

Apparently, New Zealand are dropping their smoking ban. I'm honestly not a fan of prohibitions, so I'm okay with this (although, I would still recommend against actually doing so, everyone knows cigarettes aren't healthy).

It looks like the E.U. Elections are coming up, so please vote for someone who is against censorship and spying on people when it does. #chatcontrol

Please no more Censor Ursula.

Apparently, the E.U. Election is coming up, so hopefully you will vote for someone who is decent (against censorship and for privacy would be a good start).

For a U.S. parallel, the chat control "compromise" in the E.U. would still be a violation of the First and Fourth Amendments.

Unless, they've changed it radically, it still has that privacy invasive "age verification" clause, and the other things which I previously covered. I know why EDRi did that, it's the so-called "lesser of two evils", but it also obscures the issues with it.

You should celebrate that we're violating your rights because we're doing it in a less brazen manner.

https://edri.org/our-work/csar-european-parliament-rejects-mass-scanning-of-private-messages/

"With strong support for this position from all seven European political groups, this marks a positive development for human rights in one of the most controversial draft European Union (EU) laws in recent memory."

Last I checked, it's still a pretty bad proposal.

I should watch more JoJo.

https://www.unodc.org/documents/Cybercrime/AdHocCommittee/Concluding_session/Documents/A_AC.291_22_Rev.1_E.pdf

For now, I'm commenting on Article 13 (no, not the horrible copyright law, ugh, I hate that) of this proposed treaty.

"include written or audio content"

Once again, this is a very bad idea. If someone writes a story about anything that happened to themselves, that would fall under that. If they talk about it, that would fall under the "audio" term (although, for the purposes of discussion, this post will mainly refer to the "written" term).

I suspect this might refer to that one case where someone admitted to their crimes in their diary (in which case, it should be possible to prosecute *those* crimes without this clause...). This passage is extremely abusable and seems to serve no legitimate purpose. It seems to solve for a "problem" which doesn't seem to exist.

This is so-called "real person" bloat where someone thinks they can justify clearly suspicious (and abusable) terms by tossing a bone in later (and still encouraging countries to not adopt the bone, or to otherwise engage in state harassment).

This also still risks sweeping up fantasies, particularly private fantasies, and could even constitute a threat to the use of telehealth services. Could you *please* stop to think about these terms before throwing them in for the sake of "completeness"? It's not going to be used for anything "good", it's very likely going to be primarily used in scenarios where it is clearly and plainly ridiculous.

"A State Party may require that the material identified in paragraph 2 be limited to material that 3. (a) Depicts, describes or represents a real child"

I'd add an element of intent here, these terms seem rather vague to me. This clause should be mandatory (as well as deleting "describes"), otherwise it still encourages countries to do something harmful.

Article 53 3.(h)

"as well as making efforts to guarantee the immediate removal of child sexual abuse and exploitation material"

I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean, but intermediary liability / hasty removal can be problematic for free expression.

I don't think that case is going particularly well for the feds, but that speaks to the weakness of the underlying case more than anything else.

It's interesting to see someone claim it was FOSTA which brought down Backpage. It actually wasn't. It was the Travel Act (in other words, FOSTA wouldn't have made a difference in that particular case).

Rather, what the feds did, was they waited until right before FOSTA passed to apprehend the people who ran Backpage. They could have done it at any time prior to that, but they waited until there was a big censorship bill already being pushed out the door. Think about that for a moment.