Tag Archive for: stupid

Slack Banning Random Iranian Ex-Pats Shows Why Making Tech Companies Police The Internet Is Crazy Stupid

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On Thursday morning, I started seeing a bunch of tweets pop up in my feed from people of Iranian backgrounds, who no longer lived in Iran, who were having their entire Slack groups shut down, with the company blaming US laws regarding sanctions on Iran.

There are a lot more reports like this, but that was just the first batch I found with a quick search. Slack’s explanation to the press seems… lacking:

“We updated our system for applying geolocation information, which relies on IP addresses, and that led to the deactivations for accounts tied to embargoed countries,” the representative said. “We only utilize IP addresses to take these actions. We do not possess information about nationality or the ethnicity of our users. If users think we’ve made a mistake in blocking their access, please reach out to [email protected] and we’ll review as soon as possible.”

All of the blocked people talking about it on Twitter note that they don’t live in any sanctioned country — though many admit to having visited those countries in the past (often years ago) and probably checking in on Slack while they were there. That… is not how the sanctions system is supposed to work. In another press statement Slack tries to pin the blame on the US government:

“Slack complies with the U.S. regulations related to embargoed countries and regions. As such, we prohibit unauthorized Slack use in Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and the Crimea region of Ukraine. For more information, please see the US Department of Commerce Sanctioned Destinations , The U.S. Department of Treasury website, and the Bureau of Industry and Security website.”

But that’s bullshit. The sanctions rules don’t say you have to cut off completely anyone who ever connected from a sanctioned country. The Verge (linked above) spoke to an Oxford researcher with knowledge in this area:

“They are either incompetent at OFAC interpretation or racist,” said Oxford researcher Mahsa Alimardani, who specializes in communication tools in Iran.

[….]

“Detecting an Iranian IP address on a paid account (which is presumed to be for business) login as a violation of sanctions is a wrong interpretation of these regulations,” Alimardani says. “At best it’s over-regulation to prevent any sort of misunderstanding or possible future hassle with OFAC.”

Of course, as former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos notes in his own tweet on this topic, this is exactly what happens when you have vague rules with strong punishment, and expect internet platforms to magically police the web:

And of course, we’re seeing more and more and more of that. FOSTA does that in the US. The GDPR is doing that around the globe. The EU Copyright Directive will do that. The EU Terrorist Content Regulation will do it. And a bunch of other regulations targeting the internet as well. That’s why some of us keep warning that these laws are going to lead to widespread censorship and suppression of free speech. Because that’s how it always works out. If you threaten internet platforms with huge penalties for failing to block content, but leave the details pretty vague, they’re going to make decisions like that and simply kick people off their services entirely, rather than face liability. It’s a recipe for disaster — and one that seems to be favored by tons of clueless regulators, politicians, and plenty of people who just don’t realize how much harm they will cause.

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What Do Pot And Software Have In Common? Stupid Patent Thickets Based On A Lack Of Patented Prior Art

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Recently Reuters had a fascinating article all about the new patent thicket in pot that is appearing, thanks to legalization efforts in the US and around the globe.

With marijuana now fully legal in Canada and at least partially legalized in the majority of U.S. states, companies are rushing to patent new formulations of the age-old botanical. This year, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued 39 patents containing the words cannabis or marijuana in their summaries, up from 29 in 2017 and 14 in 2016.

And, of course, with patents come the inevitable lawsuits:

The first U.S. case is now winding its way through the courts. In a July lawsuit, Colorado-based United Cannabis Corp accused Pure Hemp Collective Inc of infringing its patent covering a liquid formulation with a high concentration of CBD, a non-psychoactive cannabis ingredient touted for its health benefits.

One of the key issues in this case and others, experts say, is whether the patent is overly broad or obvious in light of “prior art,” the existing level of science or technology against which an invention’s novelty can be judged.

Basically, there hasn’t been that much official prior art because pot was considered illegal for so many years, and no one was rushing to patent anything. And, of course, patent examiners are somewhat limited in what they’re set up to research regarding prior art, and they often rely on earlier patents and scientific articles as the basis for prior art searches. And, with pot, there aren’t so many of those.

Of course, this is actually quite reminiscent of the mess that came with software patents. For a long time, most people didn’t consider most software to be patentable (this is not entirely accurate, as there are software patents going back many decades, but many people considered it limited to a few special cases of software). However, in 1998, we got the State St. Bank case, in which the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit basically threw open the doors on patenting almost any software. And those doors remained completely wide open until the Alice v. CLS Bank decision in 2014 (which hasn’t totally cleaned up the mess of the State Street ruling, but has certainly helped dial back the insanity).

But, for nearly two decades after the State Street ruling, the US Patent Office was patenting software willy nilly — often despite much of it having tons of prior art or being completely obvious. A big part of the problem was that examiners, again, focused on mainly looking at earlier patents and scientific journals for evidence of prior art. But because so many people didn’t think that most software was patentable, there were very few patents to look at, and it’s pretty rare for anyone to write up the details of software in scientific journals (they just make the damn software).

That resulted in tons of broad software patents that covered things that had been done for decades or that were entirely obvious. And thus, we had huge patent thickets and massive patent fights that cost billions of dollars, caused innovative companies to go out of business, and generally were a massive tax on innovation, where almost all of the proceeds went into a few patent lawyers’ pockets. To this day it is a huge black mark on how the patent system works, and how it actually did significantly more to harm innovation than to help it.

I’m reminded of this mess in reading about the situation with patents around pot. While the situations are not entirely the same — the reasons for a lack of earlier patents are quite different — the overall impact is similar. The lack of earlier patents is creating an open field where things that have been done for years, or that are considered obvious, are still getting through the patent office with a stamp of approval. And it’s only going to create a pretty big mess with lawsuits. You would have hoped that the USPTO would have caught on by now, but apparently not.

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The Chinese Are Spying on Trump’s Calls, but Don’t Worry, He’s Too Stupid to Reveal Anything Important …

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  1. The Chinese Are Spying on Trump’s Calls, but Don’t Worry, He’s Too Stupid to Reveal Anything Important …  Vanity Fair

  2. Chinese spies are reportedly listening to Trump’s phone calls with the goal of stopping US-China trade war  CNBC
  3. China: To Avoid Spying, Trump Should Swap iPhone for a Huawei  PCMag
  4. Transcript of President Trump’s Interview With The Wall Street Journal  Wall Street Journal
  5. MORICI: China unlikely to embrace free trade with Americans  Toronto Sun

    6. Full coverage

china espionage – read more

Stupid Patent Of The Month: Upaid Sues ‘Offending Laundromats’ For Using Prepaid Cards

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When patent trolls threaten and sue small businesses, their actions draw the public’s attention to the worst abuses of the patent system. In 2013, a company called MPHJ Technology got called out in a U.S. Senate hearing as a “bottom feeder” engaged in “garden-variety extortion” after it sent out thousands of demand letters demanding payments from small businesses that dared to use printers with “scan-to-email” functions. Lawmakers, understandably, found it incomprehensible that broad, stupid patents were being used to sue burger stands and grocery stores.

There’s a good reason for that concern. It’s hard to see how lawsuits against small businesses using basic technology do anything to “promote the progress of science and the useful arts.” By contrast, it is easy to see how these lawsuits harm companies and consumers by increasing the costs and risks of doing business.

But the intermittent public attention hasn’t stopped this most basic abuse of the patent system. Upaid Ltd., a shell company based in the British Virgin Islands, has been filing patent infringement lawsuits throughout 2018, including 14 against laundromats—yes, laundromats—from California to Massachusetts.

Upaid says that laundromats are infringing U.S. Patent No. 8,976,947. Claim 1 of the patent describes a computer system that performs “pre-authorized communication services and transactions,” after checking an account to see if a user “has a sufficient amount currently available for the … transaction.” It’s essentially a patent on having a prepaid account for—well, anything.

Right now, Upaid lawyers are focused on systems run by Card Concepts, Inc., a service provider that markets a system called Laundry Card to laundromats. Many of the Upaid’s complaints simply point to online photos of the laundromats and the relevant card dispensers as evidence of infringement.

This incredibly broad patent was granted in 2015, but dates to a series of applications stretching back to 1998. Even in 1998, a prepaid account was not an inventive concept. It’s a basic and longstanding idea, that isn’t improved by adding verbiage about a “plurality of external networks” and a “computer readable medium.”

And that’s exactly the argument that lawyers for Card Concepts Inc. made [.pdf] when they got sued by Upaid last year. CCI has rightly argued that the patent should be invalidated as abstract under the Alice decision. CCI’s motion may well succeed in defending their customers—at some point.

Meanwhile, though, Upaid has unleashed 14 lawsuits against laundromats in different states, and has promised more. Faced with the prospect of paying a lawyer, even if just to buy time, some of those small businesses are likely to pay unjustified licensing fees for this patent.

In fact, it has begun to happen. Last week, UPaid put out a press release boasting that a Houston-based facility called 24 Hour Laundry had agreed to pay them. Laundromats in Kansas, Massachusetts, and Monterey, California are next up on the list.

“When required, we will strenuously enforce our rights through litigation against offending laundromats,” warned Upaid CEO Simon Joyce. “Our recent settlement reveals that many parties are not aware that the card equipment critical to their successful laundry business infringes our patents.”

Upaid’s behavior is brazen, but it is not an anomaly. Other patent trolls have waged campaigns against small businesses that merely use off-the-shelf technology. For example, Innovatio IP Ventures sent thousands of letters targeting hotels and cafes that provide Wi-Fi for customers. In Upaid’s case, the company’s website doesn’t list any products or services, but states that it is engaged in “ongoing development” of “intellectual property related to mobile commerce systems.”

Lawsuits against small, non-technology business show how trolls exploit the patent system. The costs to challenge a wrongly granted patent are high—defending a patent lawsuit through a jury trial can cost millions of dollars. Faced with the possibility of that kind of “winning,” small businesses will often fold.

Yet this year, patent maximalists are actually talking about rolling back the key changes to patent law that give small businesses a fighting chance. The Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank decision has stopped hundreds of “do it on a computer” style patents in their tracks. Meanwhile, inter partes review, a process that can get wrongly issued patents thrown out at a lower cost, are also under attack.

Instead of considering patent bills that move in exactly the wrong direction, like last year’s STRONGER Patents Act, Congress should consider legislation focused on how to help the smallest businesses from being roped into unjustified and expensive patent disputes.

Reposted from EFF’s Stupid Patent of the Month series.

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