This Week in 2016

• Traffic Is Fake, Audience Numbers Are Garbage, And Nobody Knows How Many People See Anything
• The EU’s Proposed Copyright Directive Is Likely To Be A Wonderful Gift — For US Internet Giants
• Immigration Board Says You Can Be Deported For Copyright Infringement
• Can Someone Explain To The RIAA That SOPA Didn’t Actually Pass?
• How I Taught A Jury About Trolls, Memes And 4Chan — And Helped Get A Troll Out Of Jail
• Facebook Video Metrics Crossed The Line From Merely Dubious To Just Plain Wrong

This Week in 2011

• Senate Lets Copyright Lobby Set Up Shop In Senate Building During PROTECT IP Debate
• House Version Of PROTECT IP To Cover Cyberlockers Too
• How Copyright Extension Is Harming Classical Music
• Righthaven Desperately Trying To Avoid Paying Legal Fees
• Bob Dylan, Defender Of Strong Copyrights, Once Again Caught Copying Others
• Court Gives Righthaven A Little More Time To Pay Attorneys Fees

This Week in 2006

• Yahoo’s Spyware Problem Not Going Away
• Limewire Hits Back Hard: Sues RIAA For Antitrust And Consumer Fraud
• You’re Better Off Just Assuming You’re Not Safe Online
• Judge Agrees With RIAA; Says Illegal Activity On Morpheus Meant It Induced Infringement
• Do Counterfeit DVDs Smell Different From Regular DVDs?
• Hollywood Raising The Stakes In Piracy Fight, Still Bluffing

I must be getting old, because the concept around most IoT injections into otherwise perfectly usable home devices has me wanting to get all these smart-devices off of my lawn. Call me a luddite if you like, but I just don’t think my toothbrush needs to be connected to the internet.

And if you ask me how smart my refrigerator needs to be, my answer would be that it needs to be as precisely smart as required to keep my food cold. But if you’re Samsung, the fridge needs to be connected to the internet, potentially expose your personal information to the wider internet, and show you ads on a fancy screen on the fridge door. This is all done in the name of achieving… something? What that something is, and why it would be of use to me, is a mystery of Sherlockian proportions.

But because of that internet connection, sometimes Samsung “smart” fridges can’t even keep the damned food from spoiling.

Some Samsung smart fridges stopped working on Tuesday due to a firmware update. Korean outlets were the first to report the problems, which affect Samsung’s Bespoke AI line of fridges. Star News Korea, per a Google-provided translation, said that most of the affected devices were four-door fridges from 2024 or later.

Affected fridges “suddenly lost power and stopped functioning immediately after” trying to issue a firmware update through SmartThings, Samsung’s smart home platform, per Star News Korea. The SmartThings app then showed the devices as offline. Some users said that their fridge’s internal display was stuck showing the message “Checking SmartThings app during update.”

Ah, the old “the firmware update spoiled my food” scenario. Samsung was quick to point out that this had only occurred in Korea, which I imagine was lukewarm comfort to the Koreans who suddenly found a fridge filled with spoiled food. It has also failed to detail exactly why this occurred and what it is doing to prevent it in Korea, or any other market for that matter.

And this was particularly troublesome as all of this spoiled food came to be just as the Korean holiday for the autumn harvest was being celebrated.

“Customers only trusted Samsung Electronics and made an official update, but it is so absurd and embarrassing that they can’t even use refrigeration and refrigeration functions before the Chuseok,” a forum user wrote, per a Google-provided translation.

Some Samsung forum users said support agents initially told them that there are limited technicians and executives available, and a repair person might not be available until October.

“The customers who bought Samsung refrigerators have had their holidays completely ruined, while those Samsung employees are just having a good time at home,” a Samsung forum member wrote.

So the question now is precisely on what grounds does Samsung get to call its fridges “smart” if they’re designed such that their primary function can’t be enjoyed for a month or so because someone at the company had, to borrow a phrase from Jurassic Park, butter fingers?

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, how is the U.S. government performing in terms of human rights? Listening to politicians, it can be difficult to know.

On one hand, some have pointed to a number of potential human rights abuses committed by the U.S. government inside and outside its borders in the past two years.

On the other hand, while marking the United States’ 250th anniversary this year, President Donald Trump called the country “the home of freedom,” “the land of liberty” and “the most extraordinary, most exceptional, most incredible nation ever to exist on the face of the earth.”

“We’re doing better now than we’ve ever done before,” he said.

So which is it?

According to many of the human rights data sources available, the U.S. lags behind most other high-income democracies – countries that are both members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and classified as high income by the World Bank. The U.S.’s poor performance spans civil and political rights, such as the right to be free from torture and the right to political participation, as well as economic and social rights, including the rights to health and food.

In fact, the U.S. has been a relatively poor performer across many of these rights for quite some time, regardless of the political party in power.

Even accounting for the U.S.’s prior poor practices, however, new data from the Human Rights Measurement Initiative shows that in 2025 the country’s civil and political rights performance deteriorated even further.

As a human rights scholar who has been measuring human rights practices for 20 years – and as one of HRMI’s co-founders – I believe this data raises serious questions about the United States’ commitment to human rights.

How are rights practices measured?

Governments rarely publish accurate information on their own human rights abuses, so the task of measuring them typically falls to advocates and scholars.

Historically, most international measures of civil and political rights have depended on public reports from the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or news organizations.

However, these reports cannot cover every human rights violation that experts know about, especially in countries with low government transparency or high levels of repression.

Thus, data produced using those sources will show fewer abuses than those that have actually occurred and will be more accurate about some places than others. Further, the Trump administration has changed one of the most important sources of human rights information, the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, to contain more bias in favor of the administration’s foreign allies and less information on human rights abuse overall.

Since 2017, HRMI has used a different approach. Recognizing the problems with public reports, we collect information directly from researchers for human rights organizations, human rights lawyers and others, asking them about governments’ practices across several rights and using a statistical model to assess their information and ensure that the resulting metrics are comparable across countries. The result is a robust dataset that includes information previously missing from public reports.

Today, HRMI’s civil and political rights dataset covers 62 countries, with more added every year.

How does the US compare?

According to the Human Rights Scores dataset, which uses publicly available information to score more than 190 countries on physical integrity rights – such as the rights to be free from torture, killing, forced disappearance and political imprisonment – the U.S. never ranked higher than 81st from 2001 to 2021 or higher than 109th from 2010 to 2021.

Indeed, from 2003 to 2021, the United States’ score was either the worst or the second-worst every year among high-income OECD member states, which include the United Kingdom, Japan and New Zealand.

The Human Rights Scores dataset has not been updated past 2021, but HRMI’s data collected since that time suggests that the pattern has continued.

Among the six high-income OECD countries on which HRMI currently collects data, the U.S. has been the worst performer for physical integrity rights since 2017.

It has also frequently been rated as the worst performer on “empowerment rights,” or the rights to assembly, association, opinion, expression, political participation, religion and belief.

What changed in 2025?

Even starting from this poor position, the U.S.’s civil and political rights practices dramatically worsened in 2025. HRMI measures nine civil and political rights, and the U.S. significantly worsened on eight of them.

These were not small changes. Measured against every significant change HRMI has recorded since 2017, the U.S. showed the largest decline ever observed for the right to be free from forced disappearance and for the right to freedom of religion and belief.

The U.S. showed the second-largest decline ever observed for the right to be free from arbitrary or political arrest and for the right to opinion and expression.

The U.S. also showed major declines in the rights to be free from torture and extrajudicial killing, and the right to political participation – that is, the right to participate in one’s government via free and fair elections, to take part in public affairs and to have access to public service. U.S. scores likewise fell in the right to assembly and association, which are, respectively, the rights to peacefully gather in public or private and to form or join groups and organizations.

What caused the scores to fall?

Human rights experts raised several issues that led to these declines. For instance, the U.S.’s worsened scores for the rights to be free from arbitrary detention, disappearance and torture were tied to the expanded use of practices such as incommunicado detention and warrantless arrest by ICE and other immigration-related agencies.

While several killings occurred during ICE operations in 2025, the worsened extrajudicial killing score was also tied to the country’s use of airstrikes against boats in the Pacific and Caribbean, which caused the deaths of at least 123 people in 2025 alone.

Other changes enacted in 2025 contributed to large declines in the U.S.’s rights scores, including crackdowns on anti-ICE demonstrations and government pressure on universities, including limits on free speech and class subjects.

Last year also saw threats to television networks over political expression, restrictions on mail-in voting, state measures targeting American Islamic organizations by labeling them “foreign terrorist organizations” and an executive order focused on eradicating “anti-Christian bias.”

While current HRMI data does not yet cover 2026, early indicators are not promising, with continued abuses by ICE, further killings in international waters and allegations of attempts to use government powers to punish critics.

K. Chad Clay is the Director of the Center for the Study of Global Issues (GLOBIS) and an Associate Professor of International Affairs at the University of Georgia.

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw.

Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on Patreon.

In this week’s episode, Ben is joined by Katie Harbath, Meta’s former director of public policy for global elections and now founder of technology policy firm Anchor Change. She is also the author of Disrupting Politics, out on Tuesday. Together they discuss:

• TSE (Brazil Election Commission) clarifies rules on deepfakes in the 2026 elections (O Diário do Paraná)
• AI tools keep recommending candidates, monitoring finds (Tribuna Livre Brasil)
• On Eve of Brazil Elections, Meta Content Moderation Decisions Raise Questions (Tech Policy Press)
• Deepfakes, foreign-run accounts and unauthorised ads, new research exposes Meta’s Brazil election ad machine (Ekō)
• Social media ban for under-16s to come into effect next March, Culture Secretary confirms (LBC)
• Trump says top tech firms have signed accord to ‘self-police’ AI development (NPR)

And in the extended episode for Patreon supporters, they cover:

• Meta-Led Anti-Terrorism Group Faces Mass Resignation of Expert Advisers (WIRED)
• Meta to report child abuse material directly to Indian authorities (BBC)
• Some NPR podcasts started getting mysterious comments on Spotify (Instagram)
• Content Moderation Knowledge Sharing Shouldn’t Be A Backdoor To Cross-Platform Censorship (Techdirt)
• J.M. Berger on resigning from GIFCT’s Independent Advisory Committee (Bluesky)
• Mark: A journey to the heart of history’s largest nonterritorial empire (Colossus)

Our fun links this week include legal-walls.net for all your legal graffiti questions and, courtesy of Katmai National Park in Alaska, Fat Bear Week.

Follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and Bluesky for video clips from this week’s episode!

If you’re already a Patreon supporter, you can get the extended episode on Patreon.

A few days ago I wrote about the anti-SLAPP motion filed by “Reckless” Ben Schneider against Bricks & Minifigs (BAM Franchising) over the ridiculous RICO suit they filed against him for his efforts to get BAM to pay back the money owed to Bryan Mansell. The original suit was based on the laughable claim that Ben and Mansell were involved in a conspiracy to extort money from BAM — a claim that is undermined by the fact that BAM then turned around and settled with Mansell, returning some of his Lego sets and cutting him a check (while still insisting it did nothing wrong, of course. For what it’s worth, even after the settlement, Mansell says BAM returned only about 35 of the 387 sets its own records showed as unsold, and seven of those weren’t even his, which makes me wonder what exactly the settlement said and how that didn’t get worked out ahead of time).

In researching that previous article, I came across the site used for that last link, The BAM Map, which is an invaluable journalistic goldmine, in that whoever is behind it is cataloging in great detail basically every sketchy or nefarious thing that BAM is doing.

But digging through that site, I discovered that BAM (and the McNeff family behind it) appear to have launched a new censorial bit of SLAPP litigation and general lawfare against The BAM Map as well.

Sites that catalog corporate shenanigans aren’t always the most trustworthy, but The BAM Map goes out of its way to detail and post their evidence, and flag whether particular claims are merely asserted as opposed to proven as fact. It’s actually quite impressive.

Anyway, it appears that the lawfare against the BAM Map started with some highly questionable DMCA takedown claims, aka the coward’s censorship tool. BAM first issued a DMCA notice to The BAM Map’s host because the site had posted an internal BAM document that analyzed the impact on their stores from Reckless Ben’s reporting on how BAM refused to abide by the consignment agreement they had taken over. While it is an internal document, so long as The BAM Map itself broke no laws in obtaining the document, they had every legal right as journalists to publish it. The idea that it’s copyright infringement is laughable on its face. That’s not what copyright is for, and also there’s no indication that BAM ever even registered the copyright, which it would need to do before it could even sue for copyright infringement. Indeed, since any registration would then come after the alleged infringement, statutory damages are also completely off the table, leaving only “actual damages” from… being unable to license their internal documents?

In other words, the DMCA takedown is bullshit.

And then they did it again. Just last week they filed a second DMCA notice, once again demanding that BAM’s internal documents that The BAM Map published be removed (even though, as far as I can tell, the first notice had already gotten them taken down).

Let’s be clear: this is abuse of copyright law by BAM. DMCA notices are supposed to be for stopping actual infringement: someone distributing your work in a way the law doesn’t allow. But publishing documents as part of news reporting is a strong fair use case (especially for factual material like sales data and PR talking points). Not to mention, if you could just DMCA any internal corporate files that journalists received from whistleblowers, you would basically end whistleblowing completely. Using copyright this way isn’t just abuse of the DMCA, it’s an attack on First Amendment-protected reporting.

But BAM didn’t stop there. It then filed a John Doe suit against the site’s anonymous operators, once again using Dentons, the massive global law firm that it used to file the SLAPP suit against Schneider and Mansell. Notably, while the lawsuit mentions the DMCA notice and the existence of “copyrighted materials,” it does not include any copyright claims. Instead, it claims that Google Drive audit logs show someone with “franchise-level access” downloaded the files. So, according to the lawsuit, whoever runs The BAM Map is likely a current or former franchisee (or some other insider) who is breaching their contract with BAM and misappropriating trade secrets under both Utah’s trade secrets law and the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act. For what it’s worth, the operators of the site claim that the knowledge base that is central to the claims was not only accessible to those who had specific permissions but rather “was open to anyone on September 26th” and that it was only earlier this week that BAM locked it down.

This case is marginally stronger than the lawsuit against Reckless Ben, but only barely. Even if the documents are coming from an insider, it’s hard to see how BAM can credibly claim that its crisis PR talking points about Reckless Ben qualify as “trade secrets” that “derive economic value” from being kept secret. The entire point of this lawsuit just seems focused on creating massive chilling effects for whoever is operating the site to silence them. To me, that makes it a pretty clear SLAPP suit.

The key point of the lawsuit is BAM trying to unmask who is behind The BAM Map, and to that end, after filing the lawsuit, BAM got a magistrate judge to approve expedited discovery, authorizing subpoenas to Vercel and GoDaddy for subscriber records and IP logs to identify who is behind the BAM Map, in order to properly serve them and include them in the lawsuits. While magistrates granting subpoenas like this isn’t uncommon, it’s a bit worrisome that it was done with no supporting declaration, and the order has no notice provision or period to object.

Under the First Amendment, you have a right to speak anonymously, but it’s not absolute. The way this generally works is that a court will allow the subpoena to issue, and then (one hopes) the companies on the receiving end (GoDaddy and Vercel) alert the site’s operators so they can move to quash. There are a couple of different standards that courts use to determine when it’s okay to unmask an anonymous speaker, with Dendrite and Cahill being the most common. In the past, the federal courts in Utah have recognized the Dendrite test in quashing a subpoena when Koch Industries tried to unmask an anonymous critic.

Hopefully the anonymous operators of The BAM Map have access to lawyers who understand this, and can step up in response to the subpoenas, in order to protect their anonymity. At the very least, they’ve started a GoFundMe for legal support.

Bricks & Minifigs’ continued efforts to abuse the legal system to suppress reporting by critics says an awful lot about the McNeff family, both in how they run their business and in how they treat the people who call out their practices. It’s an attack on First Amendment protected speech and an attempt to create a chilling effect to scare off future reports or whistleblowers.

And, finally, shame on Dentons. A giant global law firm putting its name on this is just embarrassing.

Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to full projects. Before you know it, you’ll be building a gaming system to play old Nintendo, Sega, and PlayStation games and a personal digital assistant using the Google Assistant API. You will also learn how to build Alexa Skills that will run on any Amazon Echo device to voice control anything in your home, and how to build your own Echo clone. The bundle is on sale for $30.

Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackSocial. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements by our editorial team.