I’ve never been a member of the “information wants to be free” club. That’s because I create content (this stuff you’re reading), and as much as I choose not to monetize it by putting advertisements on SJ, though there is the donate button on the sidebar, it pisses me off when someone else decides to take my content, put it on their website and make money off it. I give it for free. You don’t get to steal my content so you can make money.  Is that wrong of me?

At Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow writes about a new browser called Brave.

Brave is a new experimental browser from Brendan Eich, inventor of Javascript and co-founder of Mozilla. It comes with a built-in ad-blocker that only blocks third party ads, and replaces them with non-tracking ads from its own inventory, whose revenue is then shared with publishers and users, on better terms than most ad networks give.

If my understanding is correct, Brave takes OPC (“other people’s content”), strips out the advertising that the original source of the content uses, and replaces it with its own advertising.  There is one additional aspect, but it needs to be addressed separately, that the revenue from the replaced ads are “shared with publishers and users.”

For obvious and self-serving reasons, one can understand why users would love that. Instead of finding themselves in the constant position of having to suffer advertising to enjoy the internet, they would get something out of it.  And publishers too? Well, that’s not as simple. Continue reading →

My bad.  When I argued that the Senate had a constitutional duty to provide “advice and consent” on the president’s Supreme Court nomination, but that there was no enforcement mechanism to compel it to do so, I blew off the notion that the failure to perform this duty could constitute a waiver.  And yet, Gregory Diskant, a senior partner at Patterson Belknap and former clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, argues exactly that in the Washington Post.

If you took the view that the Senate’s failure to act could constitute a waiver, then you, too, could be a senior partner at a major law firm. You would still be wrong, but well paid, and given the opportunity to publish sentences like this:

The Constitution glories in its ambiguities, however, and it is possible to read its language to deny the Senate the right to pocket veto the president’s nominations.

Glories in its ambiguities? Pretty darned poetic, but what he’s probably trying to say is that the vagaries of the Constitution’s language should be read with sufficient flexibility to address unforeseen problems and provide answers. This is the “living Constitution” view, that it’s meant to be interpreted, and re-interpreted, by each generation in light of its priorities, concerns, experiences and sensibilities.  It’s the opposite of the textualist and/or originalist view.  Continue reading →

For reasons that aren’t clear, it seemed as if the “Shaken Baby Syndrome” had been thoroughly debunked and, like its predecessor, the Satanic Cult Hysteria, as best reflected in the outrageous McMartin Preschool prosecutions, somehow faded out of the legal system as another of our horribly misguided leaps into the abyss.  Sorry. It’s not gone. While the name has been changed a bit to “Abusive Head Trauma,” it’s still very much with us.

The Syndrome, a new documentary by director/producer Meryl Goldsmith and investigative reporter Susan Goldsmith, provides a deep dive into its origins, its promoters and, of course, the fact that it is based entirely on flawed science that has managed to grip the imagination of the legal system and public, neither of which is well known for its high expectations of reason.

And unironically, one detail which is both shocking and yet wholly unsurprising is that the same physicians who were at the heart of the ritualistic cult hysteria went on to create this new “diagnosis” to explain the unexplainable, to provide a means to prosecute and convict based upon the mythology that a trio of symptoms* could not be explained except as the result of the violent shaking of a baby, homicide. Continue reading →

I once suggested that the reason gender and deviant sexuality majors were underemployed and underappreciated was because it was a less than useful endeavor. I was taken to task, naturally, for my anti-intellectualism and lack of interest in how other genders feel.  I was not convinced.

But now that there is a twitter account called Peer Reviewed, I have seen the error of my ways.

On the misogyny of intellectual property laws https://t.co/IgbWntieJ2 pic.twitter.com/LL7CoiqZ4n

— Peer-reviewed (@real_peerreview) April 9, 2016

Social marginalization of women in heavy metal… https://t.co/DMTg5OyqKu pic.twitter.com/hg4E16DJNK

— Peer-reviewed (@real_peerreview) April 9, 2016

Continue reading →

As video began emerging of police encounters, some embraced it as the solution, the thing that would answer all questions, solve all problems, fix everything. Others warned that it was a good thing, but hardly the solution. A little thought, and the issues with video became, well, apparent. From missing video, to doctored video, to incomplete video, to distorted video, problems were manifest.

In the New York Times, police law prof Seth Stoughten did a demonstration of why, sometimes, your eyes do deceive when there is a video that appears to answer questions but really doesn’t.  His point wasn’t that video was unhelpful or a bad thing, but that the unsophisticated reliance on video, the view that video is the solution, fails to grasp that it’s not without flaws.

Tim Cushing at Techdirt explains how the police have figured this out as well, and are now busy exploiting the flaws.

Officers are actors and directors in their own scenes. Even when performances are captured by bystanders and their cell phones, there’s still plenty of “drama.” Multiple cops swarm the same suspect, blocking the body from view. Officers shout “Stop resisting!” even when subjects are prone with hands behind their back and under the weight of four or five cops. This allows officers to deliver extra amounts of force, instantly justified by the repeated shouts about resistance. Continue reading →

It was quiet. Calm. A couple of weeks ago, the government claimed it found a hack and no longer needed Apple’s help, though it deeply appreciated Mag. Sherri Pym’s time. Thanks, but no thanks. We’re good, said the government.

All those amici, the arguments, the op-eds, the TV appearances by Jim Comey and Cy Vance, explaining why terrorism was Apple’s fault; all for naught.  So we turned our attention back to what Kim Kardashian had to say. But while we were snoozing, the government was getting ready to clean up loose ends.

The government has notified EDNY Judge Margo Brodie that it will challenge Magistrate Judge James Orenstein’s adverse Apple order.  The government has obtained a new order from Boston Mag. Marianne B. Bowler requiring Apple to crack an iPhone.  Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein have released a “discussion draft” of a proposed bill to require a backdoor be built into encryption and a new op-ed will appear in the New York Times by some ex-government counterterrorism guys explaining why Apple is hurting its customers by refusing to be a good corporate citizen.

What? You thought this was done? Continue reading →

The Concord Monitor makes a point in its opening line:

Owen Labrie refuses to go down quietly.

And, indeed, why should he?  His sentence is a year in jail, and now that Judge Larry Smuckler has revoked his bail pending appeal, forcing him into solitary “for his own protection,” there isn’t a lot of time to wait for an appellate court to reverse his conviction for being the high school boy hated, no, despised, for being little different than every high school boy prior to the Great Neutering.

Hate the Great Neutering all you like, but don’t make Owen Labrie responsible for your angst over rape culture.  He’s just a kid, a scholarship student at St. Paul’s who worked hard enough, was smart enough, to get into Harvard.  He’s a young man who did what young men have done for generations, seduce a young woman to engage in a sexual liaison. Like your father did. Like your grandfather did.

It’s horribly wrong? That’s a discussion to have going forward, but this one young man is not the embodiment of all that you despise about males. He’s just a kid, like all the others, except paying the price for your Utopian vision of gender relations.  And so one young man, one family, is doing everything they can to not let women slit the throat of this young man in the name of all that anger and hatred of women toward males. Continue reading →

It’s another one of those things that’s the “worst thing ever,” wrongthink on climate change.  Granted, many, myself included, do not share their position, but that is not the issue. No matter what you feel, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a conservative libertarian think tank dedicated to free enterprise and limited government, is absolutely entitled to take the views that it does, to argue its views, and to be as wrong as it wants to be.

And for the offense of thinking wrong about climate change, CEI has become the target of a subpoena to reveal the culprits of its “worst thing ever” ideas.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) today denounced a subpoena from Attorney General Claude E. Walker of the U.S. Virgin Islands that attempts to unearth a decade of the organization’s materials and work on climate change policy. This is the latest effort in an intimidation campaign to criminalize speech and research on the climate debate, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and former Vice President Al Gore…. Continue reading →

New Hampshire may be small, but it’s feisty.  And when it comes to jury nullification, it’s been a leader before, and it’s doing so again.

[T]here’s been a lot of cheering about a new bill in New Hampshire, recently passed by the New Hampshire House of Representatives, that would allow juries to learn that:

Even if you find that the state has proved all of the elements of the offense charged beyond a reasonable doubt, you may still find that based upon the facts of this case a guilty verdict will yield an unjust result, and you may find the defendant not guilty.

This is New Hampshire’s second try at making jury nullification the law. Continue reading →

Most non-criminal defense lawyers have never seen an actual, true-to-life, rap sheet. It’s a bundle of jargon and numbers, largely incomprehensible to untrained eyes, that tells a story of prior arrests, convictions and dispositions. And warrants.

The New York Times tried to decipher Nicholas Bowen’s rap sheet nightmare. Bowen as busted for trespassing at a friend’s home in the projects, because the cops could.

Though Mr. Bowen’s criminal citation was eventually dismissed (on the condition that he not commit a crime for a year), State Supreme Court in the Bronx, for unknown reasons, issued a warrant for the charge. Mr. Bowen claims he never knew about the warrant until almost three months later when he received a call about it from the police. Shortly after the call, he said, he went to court again, and on Feb. 11, 2009, a second judge determined that the warrant was erroneous and the matter was dismissed.

Annoying, time-wasting, stupid and wrong? Sure. Problem solved? Not quite. Continue reading →