messaging – Techdirt (original) (raw)

Justice Department Wants To Take Its Bite Out Of Apple

from the the-doj-wants-its-super-apps dept

Over the course of the last few years, it feels like the FTC & DOJ have slowly started getting better at figuring out how to craft a better antitrust lawsuit. The earliest attempts were often beyond silly, but the more recent cases (while far from perfect) have finally started alleging things that seem like potential actual anticompetitive behavior.

The problem, to me, though, is that nearly every one of them overreaches, such that even when they allege things that seem potentially anti-competitive, they burden down the complaint with nonsense. But still, it feels like at least some of the early failures are leading to at least some more careful pleading in more recent cases. Not everyone agrees, though. An analysis by Daniel Crane, based on surveying various antitrust experts, seems to suggest that some of the more recent antitrust cases are on shaky ground (though it sounds like many of the experts think all the big tech antitrust cases are poorly argued).

As you’ve likely heard, the latest is last week’s move by the Justice Department and a bunch of states to sue Apple for a variety of antitrust violations. Depending on who you talk to, the case is “even stronger than imagined” or it’s patently “absurd.”

After spending a few days reading and rereading the complaint, talking to various experts, and thinking about it, I come down somewhere in the middle. There are parts of the complaint that do seem pretty ridiculous. And there are parts that at least raise legitimate concerns. But, even those legitimate concerns may still fail due to the market definition which, in this case, seems… aggressive?

The complaint itself is surprisingly readable for an antitrust complaint. That’s often a sign of a weakness in the underlying antitrust case. The more readable antitrust complaints frequently seem designed to sway the public by telling a good narrative, rather than getting to the heart of the legal issues in court.

The key part that makes this case stronger than others is that it actually shows the real potential for consumer harm, rather than relying on some of these newfangled competition theories that you don’t need to show consumer harm for an antitrust case.

But, still, some of the claims seem overblown. The DOJ’s lead argument is that the lack of super apps seems proof of Apple suppressing competition:

Super apps provide a user with broad functionality in a single app. Super apps can improve smartphone competition by providing a consistent user experience that can be ported across devices. Suppressing super apps harms all smartphone users—including Apple users—by denying them access to high quality experiences and it harms developers by preventing them from innovating and selling products.

The argument here is basically that if so-called “super apps” were allowed, users would let those apps mostly take over everything important on a phone. This would make the hardware layer less important, making it easier to switch from an iPhone to any other phone.

But… what a weird argument. The only major “super app” is WeChat in China. And there really are no super apps in the US. I guarantee that if there was a super app… the DOJ would likely be suing it for anticompetitive behavior. The fact that we don’t have super apps in the US seems like a sign of more healthy competition in the app market, and not proof of anti-competitive behavior by Apple.

It is true that the DOJ has emails from Apple execs fearing the rise of potential super apps, but this still doesn’t make much sense in the context of the larger complaint:

Apple recognizes that super apps with mini programs would threaten its monopoly. As one Apple manager put it, allowing super apps to become “the main gateway where people play games, book a car, make payments, etc.” would “let the barbarians in at the gate.” Why? Because when a super app offers popular mini programs, “iOS stickiness goes down.”

The lack of an anti-competitive app at the app level doesn’t seem like a particularly strong argument for anti-competitive behavior at the hardware/OS level.

The second concern also seems weak, at best. It’s the lack of success of cloud streaming games on iOS devices:

Cloud streaming game apps provide users with a way to play computing intensive games in the cloud. Cloud streaming games (and cloud streaming in general) can improve smartphone competition by decreasing the importance of expensive hardware for accomplishing high compute tasks on a smartphone. Suppressing cloud streaming games harms users by denying them the ability to play high-compute games, and it harms developers by preventing them from selling such games to users.

Once again, this all seems very speculative. People have been predicting big things for cloud gaming for many, many years now, and it’s never really caught on anywhere. And it’s not just because Apple doesn’t like them. Remember, Google had a whole big cloud gaming initiative that fizzled. It’s hard to blame that on Apple’s iOS policies.

From there, though, we get to a few arguments that should at least raise some eyebrows. Some of the decisions seem to have little purpose other than to limit competition and harm end users. I’ve gotten sick of antitrust cases trying to take things that have perfectly legitimate reasons for being done and casting them as being done for anti-competitive reasons, but here there are a few decisions that seem hard to justify by Apple (of course, we still need to hear Apple’s side of the story).

The strongest of these is how Apple has deliberately degraded messaging services. We’ve discussed this somewhat in the context of Apple and Beeper, where Beeper offered a third-party service that would make anyone’s messaging more secure by end-to-end encrypting messages between iMessage users and non-iMessage users. Apple blocked Beeper from doing so, claiming it was necessary for security purposes. But that made little sense.

And here, the DOJ calls out Apple’s behavior:

Messaging apps are apps that allow users to communicate with friends, family, and other contacts. Messaging apps that work equally well across all smartphones can improve competition among smartphones by allowing users to switch phones without changing the way they communicate with friends, family, and others. Apple makes third-party messaging apps on the iPhone worse generally and relative to Apple Messages, Apple’s own messaging app, by prohibiting third-party apps from sending or receiving carrier-based messages. By doing so, Apple is knowingly and deliberately degrading quality, privacy, and security for its users and others who do not have iPhones. Apple also harms developers by artificially constraining the size of their user base.

It seems likely that Apple will claim it does this for security reasons, but those reasons seem flimsy. There are many ways in which Apple could make sure that third-party messaging is more secure, but it chooses not to do so.

Again, here, the DOJ has pretty clear evidence that Apple is making that experience worse at least in part to build lock-in and to avoid competitive pressure.

Apple recognizes that its conduct harms users and makes it more difficult to switch smartphones. For example, in 2013, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering explained that supporting cross-platform OTT messaging in Apple Messages “would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.” In March 2016, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing forwarded an email to CEO Tim Cook making the same point: “moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us.”

In 2022, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook was asked whether Apple would fix iPhone-toAndroid messaging. “It’s tough,” the questioner implored Mr. Cook, “not to make it personal but I can’t send my mom certain videos.” Mr. Cook’s response? “Buy your mom an iPhone.”

While many will claim Cook was joking with that last quip, there is a valid point here. The reasons Apple made this decision appear to be not for the benefit of users, but for anti-competitive reasons.

The last two areas are a bit more middle-ground: smartwatches and digital wallets. I don’t think that Apple should need to go out of its way to allow third parties to build tools, but the DOJ again suggests that Apple has deliberately, for anti-competitive reasons, sought to limit access to important functionality. On the smartwatch front, Apple has limited access to certain functionality that the Apple Watch gets access to to guarantee that third party smartwatches can’t compete:

Smartwatches are an expensive accessory that typically must be paired to a smartphone. Smartwatches that can be paired with different smartphones allow users to retain their investment in a smartwatch when switching phones thereby decreasing the literal cost associated with switching from one smartphone to another, among other things. By suppressing key functions of third-party smartwatches—including the ability to respond to notifications and messages and to maintain consistent connections with the iPhone—Apple has denied users access to high performing smartwatches with preferred styling, better user interfaces and services, or better batteries, and it has harmed smartwatch developers by decreasing their ability to innovate and sell products.

And, with digital wallets becoming a key payment system, Apple also appears to be limiting third parties from doing much that is useful:

Digital wallets are an increasingly important way that smartphones are used and are a product in which users develop a great deal of comfort and trust as they typically contain users’ most sensitive information. Digital wallets that work across smartphone platforms allow users to move from one smartphone brand to another with decreased frictions, among other things. Apple has denied users access to digital wallets that would have provided a wide variety of enhanced features and denied digital wallet developers—often banks—the opportunity to provide advanced digital payments services to their own customers.

There may be a stronger “security” argument for that last one, but some of it sure looks like it’s only being done for anti-competitive purposes. For example, blocking anyone else from tapping into the NFC tap-to-pay feature:

Multiple app developers have sought direct NFC access for their payment or wallet apps. Yet Apple prohibits these developers from incorporating tap-to-pay functionality in their apps for fear that doing so would “be one way to disable [A]pple [P]ay trivially,” leading to the “proliferation of other payment apps” that might operate cross-platform and ultimately undermine Apple’s smartphone monopoly.

There is no technical limitation on providing NFC access to developers seeking to offer third-party wallets. For example, Apple allows merchants to use the iPhone’s NFC antenna to accept tap-to-pay payments from consumers. Apple also acknowledges it is technically feasible to enable an iPhone user to set another app (e.g., a bank’s app) as the default payment app, and Apple intends to allow this functionality in Europe.

So, in the end, this case strikes me as having some good parts and some questionable parts.

In every antitrust case, the big question is going to be about market definition. Because if Apple doesn’t have a dominant position in whatever market is accepted, then it’s pretty much free to do those anti-competitive things, and if people don’t like it, they should vote with their feet. The DOJ will claim, of course, that many of the decisions above were designed to block the ability to vote with their feet, and I’m sure Apple will insist that the market should be as widely construed as possible and… that could work? Perhaps they can convince a judge (or eventually a jury) that the iPhone isn’t necessarily as dominant as it might otherwise seem. In an era where we’re seeing more and more devices come on the market, some of which you could argue compete with smartphones in new and novel ways, perhaps the market is that broad.

All that is to say, we’ve seen some pretty ridiculous antitrust cases over the last few years. This one, though, seems more on the serious side of the ledger — but with some holes that Apple will look to push back on. Still, this case isn’t a slam dunk either way, and I think Apple has a real fight on its hands.

Filed Under: anti-competitive behavior, antitrust, competition, digital wallets, doj, messaging, messaging apps, smart watches, super apps
Companies: apple

Will Nevada Kill End-To-End Encryption Next Week?

from the what-happens-in-nevada-makes-everyone-less-safe dept

Last month, we wrote about Nevada’s Attorney General filing an absolutely preposterous, but extremely dangerous, legal filing, demanding that a court bar Meta from offering end-to-end encryption for its messaging apps. Almost everything about this request was crazy. First, Nevada sued Meta, with vague, unsubstantiated claims of “harm to children,” and then it filed a demand for a temporary restraining order, blocking Meta from using encryption, giving the company basically a day to respond.

This all seemed weird, given that encryption has been available in tons of places for many, many years, including on some of Meta’s messaging offerings going back years. Why was it suddenly so necessary to stop them immediately? Nevada also claimed that Meta offering encryption was a “deceptive trade practice” because it says it’s offering encryption to keep people safer when, according to Nevada, it’s inherently harmful.

Thankfully, the court did not issue the immediate TRO, but asked the parties to brief the issue and appear for a hearing next Wednesday. Earlier this week, a bunch of organizations, including the ACLU, EFF, Fight for the Future, Internet Society, Signal, and Mozilla all filed an amicus brief that I’d describe as 43-pages of “what the fuck is this, I don’t even…”

The State’s motion for a preliminary injunction attempts to substitute the judgment of the Attorney General’s office for a national policy developed over decades of discussion with multiple stakeholders. The State paints a picture of E2EE as solely a danger to children. But the reason that E2EE has been widely adopted is that it prevents crime-crime affecting both children and adults. The State has many avenues for pursuing its child-safety investigations without this extraordinary order. It is especially ill-advised to upend decades-old, encryption- specific policies based on a reinterpretation of a broad, general purpose law such as the Nevada Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act, N.R.S. 598.0903-598.0947.

While the Attorney General may disagree, the assertion that E2EE is good for children is a mainstream point of view and not properly classified as “deceptive” (Mot. at 16-17). Millions of children have long used E2EE platforms such as WhatsApp and iMessage. It can hardly be “unconscionable” for Meta to upgrade its product to meet the security and privacy standards that other exceedingly popular products-ones the Attorney General has not challenged have offered to the public for years.

The motion for a preliminary injunction that would stop Meta from providing secure communications to its users is baseless and dangerous. Meta’s provision of end-to-end encryption by default to all Messenger users is not deceptive or unconscionable, meaning the State is unlikely to succeed on the merits. To the contrary, because E2EE protects consumers, its continuation will not cause irreparable harm and in fact benefits the public interest (a preliminary injunction factor the State does not discuss). Clark Cnty. Sch. Dist. v. Buchanan. 112 Nev. 1146, 1150, 924 P.2d 716, 719 (1996). The Court should reject the State’s request.

The overall brief is fantastic. It points out, among other things, that historically most conversations were ephemeral and not recorded, and law enforcement didn’t think that people talking to each other was an inherent threat to children.

Society has long recognized that people thrive when we have the ability to engage in private, unmonitored conversations. Sharing confidences enables people to form friendships and intimate relationships, obtain information about sensitive matters, and construct different identities depending on the audience. We know this from our own lives, whether engaging in pillow talk, meeting a friend for a walk, or forming an invitation-only club. Important, human things happen when we can be confident that no one is listening in.

Before the Internet, these conversations were not recorded or preserved. Our words vanished into the air as they were spoken. Unless someone was eavesdropping, conversations were private, secret, and unrecoverable. Police could not access these interactions. Mail carriers did not make copies of letters and senders and recipients were free to write in code or foreign languages and to destroy the documents after they had been received.

In any other era, a claim that government may obligate us to record and preserve our conversations, just in case investigators wanted to review them later. would be laughably ridiculous. It would simply have been beyond the pale to suggest that people could be required to record their conversations in a language that law enforcement could readily understand and access. Basic conversational privacy was assumed, and rightly so.

The brief gives many examples of why end-to-end encryption makes everyone, including children, more secure. It highlights how many government agencies have endorsed encryption.

But also, importantly, it highlights just how stupid this demand is, given that Nevada law enforcement has plenty of ways to investigate criminal actions, even when there is encryption in messaging. After all, Meta has access to metadata, and any victims can directly provide the content to law enforcement as well.

Riana Pfefferkorn (who also signed onto the brief as an amicus) also wrote a column about this case. She notes that Nevada’s request would not only make children less safe, but it’s extremely unlikely that this destruction of encryption would remain local to Nevada.

If the court grants the Nevada AG’s latter-day request after this month’s hearing, the resulting injunction won’t just affect Nevada’s children. Anyone (adult or child) who talks to them, or is mistakenly identified by Meta as being one of them, will no longer get default E2EE on Messenger either. Plus, a successful request in Nevada might inspire copycat demands elsewhere. That multi-state social media addiction lawsuit against Meta that I mentioned above? It has 42 state AGs as plaintiffs. A copycat injunction for Messenger would mean no more default E2EE for most of the country’s children (and a significant number of adults, as said).

Hopefully those other state AGs would pick a wiser course than this one rogue state AG has chosen. Consumer protection regulators have spent years telling Meta to do better at protecting user privacy. Making Messenger E2EE by default is the best thing Meta has done in that regard in a long time. The Nevada AG’s own complaint against Meta says that “[i]n the digital privacy ecosystem, this is a move that might be lauded.” Yet rather than laud it, the Nevada AG is trying to undo it. He would rather force Meta to give the state’s youngest users worse digital privacy and security than everyone else. That isn’t promoting child safety online; it’s undermining it. Even more astonishing, he’s trying to rebrand default E2EE as an unconscionable and deceptive trade practice. Strong encryption isn’t a violation of consumer protection; it’s a vindication of it.

The Nevada AG’s request is so wildly contrary to well-established best practices and long-standing interpretations of consumer protection law that it would almost be funny if it weren’t so dangerous. We can only hope the judge in Nevada laughs him out of court. The children of Nevada deserve better than this.

Hopefully, the court agrees.

Filed Under: aaron ford, encryption, law enforcement, messaging, nevada, riana pfefferkorn
Companies: meta

Apple’s Nonsensical Attack On Beeper For Making Apple’s Own Users Safer

from the weakening-security-to-lock-up-users dept

Apple has spent the past few years pushing the marketing message that it, alone among the big tech companies, is dedicated to your privacy. This has always been something of an exaggeration, but certainly less of Apple’s business is based around making use of your data, and the company has built in some useful encryption elements to its services (both for data at rest, and data in transit). But, its actions over the past few days call all of that into question, and suggest that Apple’s commitment to privacy is much more a commitment to walled gardens and Apple’s bottom line, rather than the privacy of Apple’s users.

First, some background:

Back in September, we noted that the EU had designated which services were going to be “gatekeepers” under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which would put on them various obligations, including regarding some level of interoperability. Apple had been fighting the EU over whether or not iMessage would qualify, and just a few days ago there were reports that the EU would not designate iMessage as a gatekeeper. But that’s not final yet. This also came a few weeks after Apple revealed that, after years of pushing back on the idea, it might finally support RCS for messaging (though an older version that doesn’t support end-to-end encryption).

Separately, for years, there has been some debate over Apple’s setup in which messaging from Android phones shows up in “green bubbles” vs. iMessage’s “blue bubbles.” The whole green vs. blue argument is kind of silly, but some people reasonably pointed out that by not allowing Android users to actually use iMessage itself, it was making communications less secure. That’s because messages within the iMessage ecosystem can be end-to-end encrypted. But messages between iMessage and an Android phone are not. If Apple actually opened up iMessage to other devices, messaging for iPhone users and the people they spoke to would be much more protected.

But, instead of doing that, Apple has generally made snarky “just buy an iPhone” comments when asked about its unwillingness to interoperate securely.

That’s why Apple’s actions over the last week have been so stupidly frustrating.

For the past few years, some entrepreneurs (including some of the folks who built the first great smartwatch, the Pebble), have been building Beeper, a universal messaging app that is amazing. I’ve been using it since May and have sworn by it and gotten many others to use it as well. It creates a very nice, very usable single interface for a long list of messaging apps, reminiscent of earlier such services like Trillian or Pidgin… but better. It’s built on top of Matrix, the open-source decentralized messaging platform.

Over the last few months I’ve been talking up Beeper to lots of folks as the kind of app the world needs more of. It fits with my larger vision of a world in which protocols dominate over siloed platforms. It’s also an example of the kind of adversarial interoperability that used to be standard, and which Cory Doctorow rightfully argues is a necessary component of stopping the enshittification curve of walled garden services.

Of course, as we’ve noted, the big walled gardens are generally not huge fans of things that break down their walls, and have fought back over the years, including with terrible CFAA lawsuits against similar aggregators (the key one being Facebook’s lawsuit against Power.com). And ever since I started using Beeper, I wondered if anyone (and especially Apple) might take the same approach and sue.

There have been some reasonable concerns, about how Beeper handled end-to-end encrypted messaging services like Signal, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It originally did this by basically setting up a bunch of servers that it controls, which has access to your messages. In some ways, Beeper is an “approved” man-in-the-middle attack on your messages, with some safeguards, but built in such a way that those messages are no longer truly end-to-end encrypted. Beeper has taken steps to do this as securely as possible, and many users will think those tradeoffs are acceptable for the benefit. But, still, those messages have not been truly end-to-end encrypted. (For what it’s worth, Beeper open sourced this part of its code so if you were truly concerned, you could also host the bridge yourself and basically man in the middle yourself to make Beeper work, but I’m guessing very few people did that).

That said, from early on Beeper has made it clear that it would like to move away from this setup to true end-to-end encryption, but that requires interoperable end-to-end encrypted APIs, which (arguably) the DMA may mandate.

Or… maybe it just takes a smart hacking teen.

Over the summer, a 16-year-old named James Gill reached out to Beeper’s Eric Migicovsky and said he’d reimplemented iMessage in a project he’d released called Pypush. Basically, he reverse engineered iMessage and created a system by which you could message securely in a truly end-to-end encrypted manner with iMessage users.

If you want to understand the gory details, and why this setup is actually secure (and not just secure-like), Snazzy Labs has a great video:

Over the last few months, Beeper had upgraded the bridge setup it used for iMessage within its offering to make use of Pypush. Beeper also released a separate new app for Android, called Beeper Mini, which is just for making iMessage available for Android users in an end-to-end encrypted manner. It also allows users (unlike the original Beeper, now known as Beeper Cloud) to communicate with iMessage users just via their phone number, and not via an AppleID (Beeper Cloud requires the Apple ID). Beeper Mini costs $2/month (after a short free trial), and apparently there was demand for it.

I spoke to Migicovsky on Sunday and he told me they had over 100k downloads in the first two days it was available, and that it’s the most successful launch of a paid Android app ever. It was a clear cut example of why interoperability without permission (adversarial interoperability) is so important, and folks like Cory Doctorow rightfully cheered this on.

But all that attention also seems to have finally woken up Apple. On Friday, users of both Beeper Cloud and Beeper Mini found that they could no longer message people via iMessage. If you watch that YouTube video above by Snazzy Labs, he explains why it’s not that easy for Apple to block the way Beeper Mini works, but, Apple still has more resources at its disposal than just about anyone else and devoted some of them to doing exactly what Snazzy Labs (and Beeper) thought it was unlikely to do: blocking Beeper Mini from working.

So… with that all as background, the key thing to understand here is that Beeper Mini was making everyone’s messaging more secure. It certainly better protected Android users in making sure their messages to iPhone users were encrypted. And it similarly better protected Apple users, in making sure their messages to Android users were also encrypted. Which means that Apple’s response to this whole mess underscores the lie that Apple cares about users’ privacy.

Apple’s PR strategy is often to just stay silent, but it actually did respond to David Pierce at the Verge and put out a PR statement that is simply utter nonsense, claiming it did this to “protect” Apple users.

At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe. We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.

Almost everything here is wrong. Literally, Beeper Mini’s interoperable setup better protected the privacy of Apple’s customers than Apple itself did. Beeper Mini’s setup absolutely did not “pose significant risks to user security and privacy.” It effectively piggybacked onto Apple’s end-to-end encryption system to make sure that it was extended to messages between iOS users and Android users, better protecting both of them.

When I spoke to Eric on Sunday he pledged that if Apple truly believed that Beeper Mini somehow put Apple users at risk, he was happy to agree to have the software fully audited by an independent third party security auditor that the two organizations agreed upon to see if it created any security vulnerabilities.

For many years people like myself and Cory Doctorow have been talking up the importance of interoperability, open protocols, and an end to locked-down silos. Big companies, including Apple, have often made claims about “security” and “privacy” to argue against such openness. But this seems like a pretty clear case in which that’s obviously bullshit. The security claims here are weak, given that from the way Beeper Mini is constructed, it seems significantly more secure than Apple’s own implementation, which puts less security on iOS-Android interactions.

And for Apple to do this just as policymakers are looking for more and more ways to ensure openness and interoperability seems like a very stupid self-own. We’ll see if the EU decides to exempt iMessage from the DMA’s “gateekeeper” classification and its interop requirements, but policymakers elsewhere are certainly noticing.

While I often think that Elizabeth Warren’s tech policy plans are bonkers, she’s correctly calling out this effort by Apple.

Image

She’s correct. Chatting between different platforms should be easy and secure, and Apple choosing to weaken the protections of its users while claiming it’s doing the opposite is absolute nonsense, and should be called out as such.

Filed Under: adversarial interoperability, blue bubbles, end to end encryption, green bubbles, imessage, interoperability, messaging, open source, protocols, pypush, silos
Companies: apple, beeper

UK Government Pauses Demands For Broken Encryption In Its Online Safety Bill

from the citizens-briefly-allowed-continued-access-to-widely-used-services dept

The UK government is still pushing a bill that would give it more direct control of the internet, but it has, at least for the time being, decided against mandating broken encryption.

For months now, supporters of the Online Safety Bill have insisted the only way to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is to engage in always-on scanning of user content. Services that utilized end-to-end encryption (like Signal, WhatsApp, and Apple’s iMessage) would be forced to break encryption to scan content.

That mandate has provoked an intense amount of backlash from the affected service providers. The three listed above have all informed the UK government that they would pull their services from the UK, rather than comply with this mandate.

As these entities pointed out (on multiple occasions), introducing deliberate security flaws makes everyone less secure, not just those engaged in criminal activity. The government’s own Information Commissioner arrived at the same conclusion: that breaking end-to-end encryption would actually make children less safe and more likely to be targeted/located by sexual abusers.

The good news is that, for the moment, the UK government has decided to drop this mandate, as 9to5Mac reports, quoting from a (paywalled) Financial Times article.

The Financial Times reports that the government has now agreed to drop from the Online Safety Bill the requirement to scan messaging apps for illegal content.

The UK government will concede it will not use controversial powers in the online safety bill to scan messaging apps for harmful content until it is “technically feasible” to do so, postponing measures that critics say threaten users’ privacy.

A planned statement to the House of Lords on Wednesday afternoon will mark an eleventh-hour bid by ministers to end a stand-off with tech companies, including WhatsApp, that have threatened to pull their services from the UK over what they claimed was an intolerable threat to millions of users’ security.

It’s a win, especially for UK citizens, who were facing loss of access to some of the most popular communication services on the planet. But it’s not a complete victory for anyone. Minister Lord Stephen Parkinson still seems to believe it’s possible to compromise encryption without, you know, compromising it. The big nerds at Big Tech just need to work harder at ushering this magical form of technology into existence.

Parkinson said that Ofcom, the tech regulator, would only require companies to scan their networks when a technology was developed that was capable of doing so.

[…]

“As has always been the case, as a last resort, on a case-by-case basis and only when stringent privacy safeguards have been met, [the legislation] will enable Ofcom to direct companies to either use, or make best efforts to develop or source, technology to identify and remove illegal child sexual abuse content — which we know can be developed,” the government said.

Pressing pause on the mandate, but still living in denial. There’s no such thing as securely compromised encryption. Either it’s secure or it isn’t. Just because the security flaws have been introduced by a government mandate doesn’t make these flaws any less exploitable by more malicious entities. And it doesn’t make it any less likely governments with histories of human rights abuses will leverage these mandates and the resulting broken encryption to engage in even more human rights abuses.

It either works or it’s broken. The UK government needs to fully accept this fact if it’s ever going to move on towards actually doing something useful to protect children from sexual abusers. As long as it continues to pretend the impossible is constantly just over the tech horizon, it will only reduce its citizens communication options and put every user of these services — no matter where they’re located — at risk.

Filed Under: csam, encryption, messaging, online safety bill, uk

The EU Designates The Six Companies You Already Expected As ‘Gatekeepers’ Under The Digital Markets Act

from the who-has-the-key? dept

The two big EU attempts to overly regulate the internet are starting to go into effect. The Digital Services Act (DSA), along with all its associated problems, is about six months ahead of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and all of its associated problems. Six months ago, the EU designated 17 sites as “Very Large Online Platforms” under the DSA (though a few of those sites are protesting the designation, including Zalando, which is the only company on the list mainly targeting EU users).

The DMA’s equivalent is being designated as a “gatekeeper,” and that’s now happened with the exact six companies you probably would have guessed being designated as such: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, ByteDance (TikTok), Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and Microsoft. The DMA gatekeeper designation process is… somewhat arbitrary. It’s basically any platform the EU Commission thinks is “important” for “core services.” What could go wrong?

That said, it came out just before the release of the gatekeeper list that Apple is fighting to keep iMessage off the messaging list (which the EU, in truly EU-fashion, calls “N-IICS” for “Number Independent Interpersonal Communications Services”). And also that Microsoft is trying to keep Bing off the search list, Edge off the browser list, and its ads platform off the ads list. In both cases, the companies are suggesting that their offerings are not nearly as large and “gatekeepery” as the others. Also in both cases (or all four cases, if you count each service as separate), the EU has instead “launched an investigation” before making the final designation.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see the EU end up using the investigation to say all four of those are, in fact, gatekeepers, which would create an interesting scenario in which Apple is told it needs to open up iMessage, rather than locking it to the Apple ecosystem. Wouldn’t that be something?

The EU also announced that it’s also launching a separate investigation into Apple’s iPadOS to see if it should also be included in the Operating System category (I honestly thought that the iPad just used iOS as well… which shows how not closely I follow the ins and outs of the Apple ecosystem).

The EU also says it spared three products that “met the thresholds,” but wherein the companies convinced the EU that they weren’t really gatekeepery: Gmail, Outlook.com, and Samsung’s browser.

Notably… unlike with the DSA, the EU Commission didn’t even bother to put a token EU company on the list, because why bother? These laws have always been about controlling foreign internet companies.

Again, all of this feels both somewhat arbitrary, and somewhat theater. Everyone knew what services the DMA was targeting, so this isn’t much of a surprise.

Now these offerings have until March of next year to comply with the requirements of the DMA’s rules for gatekeepers. It will be interesting to see how that will go. Some elements will be quite interesting, such as the requirements for interoperability, and enabling access to data to business users (though it’s not at all clear how that won’t lead to another Cambridge Analytica kind of scenario). There are also prohibitions on favoring their own offerings, blocking users from making use of 3rd party interoperable tools, and blocking users from uninstalling pre-installed software.

There are plenty of very interesting ideas, and I’m all in favor of more interoperability and less lock-in. So I’m intrigued (and maybe even a little bit hopeful?) about how that might play out.

However, this is a massive experiment in how the internet will work going forward, and I have zero faith that the EU technocrats who put all this together have a good grasp on the consequences of all of this, meaning that my excitement about better interop and less lock-in is greatly tempered by the reality that, in practice, there are many reasons why the DMA seems likely to just be one giant clusterfuck of problems.

Filed Under: competition, dma, eu, gatekeepers, imessage, interoperability, messaging, search
Companies: amazon, apple, bytedance, google, meta, microsoft

Content Moderation Case Study: Kik Tries To Get Abuse Under Control (2017)

from the kids-will-be-kids dept

Summary: The messaging service Kik was founded in 2009 and has gone through multiple iterations over the years. However, it seemed to build a large following for mostly anonymous communication, allowing users to create many new usernames not linked to a phone number, and to establish private connections via those usernames. This privacy feature has been applauded by some as being important for journalists, activists and at-risk populations.

However, the service has also been decried by many as being used in dangerous and abusive ways. NetNanny puts it as the number one dangerous messaging apps for kids, saying that it ?has had a problem with child exploitation? and highlighting the many ?inappropriate chat rooms? for kids on the app. Others have said that, while the service is used by many teenangers, many feel that it is not safe for them and full of sexual content and harassment.

Indeed, in 2017, a Forbes report detailed that Kik had a huge ?child exploitation problem.? It described multiple cases of child exploitation that we found on the app, and claimed that it did not appear that the company was doing much to deal with the problem, which seemed especially concerning given that over half of its users base was under 24 years of age.

Soon after that article, Kik began to announce some changes to its content moderation efforts. It teamed up with Microsoft to improve its moderation practices. It also announced a $10 million effort to improve safety on the site and named some high profile individuals to its new Safety Advisory Board.

A few months later the company announced updated community standards, with a focus on safety, and a partnership with Crisis Text Line. However, that appeared to do little to stem the concerns. A report later in 2018 said that, among law enforcement, the app that concerned them most was Kik, with nearly all saying that they had come across child exploitation cases on the app, and that the company was difficult to deal with.

In response, the company argued that while it was constantly improving its trust & safety practices, it also wanted to protect the privacy of its users.

Decisions to be made by Kik:

Questions and policy implications to consider:

Resolution: Despite the claims from Kik that it was improving its efforts to crack down on abuse, reports have continued to suggest that little has changed on the platform. A detailed report from early 2020 — years after Kik said it was investing millions in improving the platform — suggested that it was still a haven for sketchy content, even noting that just posting a Kik address publicly (on Twitter) resulted in near immediate abuse.

Despite an announcement in late 2019 that the company was going to shut down the messaging service to focus on a new cryptocurrency plan, it reversed course soon after and sold off the messenger product to a new owner. In the year and half since the sale, Kik has not added any new content to its safety portal, and more recent articles still highlight how frequently child predators are found on the site.

Originally published on the Trust & Safety Foundation website.

Filed Under: content moderation, messaging, privacy, safety
Companies: kik

Inauguration Has Happened, Google And Facebook Should End The Ban On Political Advertisements

from the it's-not-all-presidential-campaigns-and-nonsense dept

In light of the events at the Capitol, social media and other online companies have been reevaluating who they let speak on their platforms. The ban of President Trump from Twitter, Facebook, and various other platforms has sparked fierce debate over moderation and free speech. But Google?s recently reinstituted ban on political advertisements until at least inauguration day and the continued ban from Facebook are silencing voices that need to be heard the most ? those speaking about state and local political issues.

Before last November?s election, both Google and Facebook restricted the ability of political advertisers to submit and run new ads. This policy was implemented to prevent situations like those in 2016, when Russian agents were able to purchase $100,000 in Facebook ads related to that year?s presidential election. Although these ads did nothing to affect the outcome of the election, they gave rise to the spurious narrative that Russia ?hacked? the election.

But Facebook?s ban has continued far past election day under the stated purpose of preventing ads claiming the election results were rigged or that the election had been stolen. Google eventually returned to allowing ads and Facebook made an exception for the Georgia runoff. However, the companies? most recent bans leave many smaller speakers without two of their most important platforms, despite the policies? failure to prevent the spread of doubt over the 2020 election results.

Politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Cruz, while certainly benefiting from social media, can reach an audience without these platforms. But many other speakers who want to speak to local audiences about important political issues have come to rely on them.

Before the advent of targeted online advertisements, communicating and organizing locally required going door-to-door or hanging flyers in your neighborhood. If you could find enough support, perhaps you could even set up a meeting in a public space. The old system was not only inefficient, but often costly in terms of time and money.

This is what makes advertising on Facebook and Google so valuable to those wanting to engage on important issues. Want to inform your neighbors about a city board meeting over a key issue for your community? Want to build a coalition of people to support or oppose an issue at your state capitol? Facebook and Google can do so more successfully, and at a fraction of the cost.

This is often the most important kind of political engagement – forming relationships with your fellow citizens to make your voices heard on issues that carry major personal impacts and are far too often under-reported and less understood.

And make no mistake, the last year has featured no shortage of critical state and local issues.

State legislatures are already in session dealing with important and contentious topics like education, budget cuts, and of course, the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. Local governments are still dealing with shutdowns and business closures as the pandemic continues into 2021. And as organizing in person gets increasingly difficult, if not impossible, digital tools are becoming even more important.

Key state and local issues are also too often drowned out by politics at the national level. Given the turbulent times we are living through, who can blame people for being glued to the events unfolding in Washington? That?s why Facebook and Google ads are important tools to draw attention to state and local issues.

Inauguration is over and the stated purpose of banning these ads has passed. But more importantly our federalist system of government means that politics don?t only happen at the national level. Rather, the political issues that most greatly affect our lives are those closest to home. Facebook and Google should recognize this fact and end its political ad ban which puts national politics ahead of state and local issues.

The internet is at its best when it informs and connects local communities on the issues that impact them. Blanket political ad bans lessen the opportunity for this kind of much-needed engagement while also failing to improve the national discourse.

Eric Peterson lives in New Orleans where he is the Director of the Pelican Center for Technology and Innovation

Filed Under: messaging, political ads, politics, social media
Companies: facebook, google, twitter

Emergency Room Doctor: Getting Best COVID-19 Treatment Ideas Via WhatsApp

from the don't-stop-believin' dept

The excellent podcast Radiolab has been running some shorter (from its normal fare) “dispatches” from the pandemic that have been quite interesting, but I wanted to take a quick look at one recent such episode that is mostly a discussion between host Jad Abumrad and ER doctor Avir Mitra, who, in a prior life, had interned at Radiolab, in which Mitra plays some of the voice memos he’s been recording for himself as he deals with being an ER doctor on the frontlines in a hospital in NYC, where the largest number of COVID-19 cases are happening.

The whole episode is quite interesting, and they get into discussions about how doctors are recognizing that COVID-19 is not acting like other respiratory diseases, and they’re finding all sorts of oddities — like patients who should be passed out due to low blood oxygen levels acting like there’s nothing wrong at all:

AVIR MITRA: The biggest thing that struck me is patient comes in, you measure their oxygen level with a pulse ox. And to take a step back, the pulse ox is that little thing you put on your finger with a laser light.

JAD: It shines a laser through your finger and reads the color of your blood. And from that …

AVIR MITRA: It tells you your oxygen concentration. If normal is, you know, 97 to 100 percent, you know, we’re seeing patients that are at 60, 70 percent routinely. Normally, if someone’s oxygen saturation is anything close to 70 percent, they’re not awake. They’re — they’re out of it completely. They’re grasping at anything, trying to get oxygen. But these patients we?re seeing routinely that are looking at us, talking to us, they?re wide awake, texting on their phone, and their oxygen saturations are at these super low levels.

JAD: I remember you sent me a text message of somebody who had a — an oxygen saturation reading of, like, in the 50s and they were on their phone.

AVIR MITRA: Exactly. That one got circulated around because we were all seeing the same thing and it’s like you look at someone with a 54, that’s a person that you’re like, “Okay ma’am, you’re gonna be taking a long nap. You know, you’re going on a ventilator.” And they may be like, “Well, can I just finish posting on Instagram first?” You know, it’s just so surreal.

But what struck me about the story — and which made it worth posting about here — is that Mitra discusses how he and other doctors are all using WhatsAspp to discuss theories and possible treatments. In a voice memo he recorded, Mitra first discusses how doctors are all communicating and sharing info through WhatsAspp:

AVIR MITRA: April 10, 2020. I’ve never in my short career seen people spreading information amongst ER doctors and ICU doctors literally by WhatsApp, texting each other images of charts that people have written, kind of really just figuring it out as it goes, which is kind of incredible because in medicine in general, we’re very cautious. We’ll sit in journal club meetings and debate whether we should give somebody 162 milligrams of aspirin or 325 milligrams of aspirin. We’ll — we’ll literally debate that for hours.

JAD: Hmm.

AVIR MITRA: But — but right now we’re just trying different things out almost on a whim.

JAD: So these WhatsApp groups you were telling me about where you’re …

AVIR MITRA: Yeah.

JAD: … you’re exchanging information with doctors in Italy and China.

AVIR MITRA: Yeah. And a lot from Washington also.

JAD: Washington state, right.

AVIR MITRA: Their outbreak started, I don?t know. What was it? A week or two before ours?

And later in the episode, Mitra and others start exploring a completely different approach to treatment, again based on their discussions on WhatsApp:

JAD: One of the things he says that’s been puzzling is just the crazy array of symptoms he’s seeing in people with COVID. There’s the usual cough, fever, breathing issues, but you also have people reporting neurological issues. Some people, including a few folks that I work with, lost their sense of taste and smell for a while. Others are reporting skin issues on their fingers and toes. Migraines.

AVIR MITRA: Trying to understand what’s going on and more importantly what to do about it. So one hypothesis that has been kind of floating around, and I’ve been thinking about and a lot of people have been thinking about is this idea of a coagulopathy.

JAD: He said the idea started again on a WhatsApp group.

AVIR MITRA: I first heard about it from Washington. It may have gone back even to Italy or China, I’m not sure.

JAD: Doctor on one of these groups says, “Hey, I’m seeing these weird lab values in my COVID patients. I’m not sure what it means.” Avir and his colleagues start to investigate, and ultimately notice that COVID patients often seem to have very high levels of this one enzyme in their blood. It’s an enzyme that’s often associated with clotting.

AVIR MITRA: If someone’s making clots and breaking down clots and just going through that clotting process. So that kind of brought up this theory of could it be that this virus is somehow inducing little clots all over the body?

JAD: Thousands and thousands of these micro-clots that might be jamming up the highways and preventing the oxygen in the blood from getting where it needs to go.

AVIR MITRA: And it also could potentially explain why we’re seeing heart damage, because the blood that?s supposed to go to the heart is getting clotted before it can get there. Same thing with the brain. And as a matter of fact, we see problems with the kidneys. We’re seeing problems with every end organ. Maybe it’s not a problem with the organ, maybe it’s a problem with the blood supply that should be getting to the organ.

As the story makes clear, they don’t know any of this for sure, and some of the early tests around this haven’t worked out, but it’s given them a path to explore, which might have some potential.

There were a few key points that struck me about this. First is that it’s yet another example of how the internet has been incredibly useful to doctors on the frontlines. A few weeks back we wrote about how oncologists were getting their best info from Twitter in how to deal with cancer patients with COVID-19, and now we hear about ER doctors on the frontlines using WhatsApp, and getting ideas and real time info from other doctors around the world (some of whom are a little further ahead in making their way through the pandemic).

The second thing that struck me about this was that for the past few years, all we’ve been hearing about WhatsApp have been stories about people wanting to blame the app for violence in India and elsewhere after groups spread misinformation that may have contributed to physical attacks. This, of course, is the nature of a tool that allows for communication (especially encrypted communications). Some of that communication can be for a good purpose, and some of it may be the ongoing flow of disinformation. And when we’re focusing on how to deal with the latter, we should be pretty damn careful that it not cut off the possibility of the former.

The third thing that I found notable about this is how quickly these informal networks seem to have sprung up. There are, already in existence, a bunch of professional organizations and “established” channels of communication to share medical research and ideas… and none of those seem to be as useful or effective in the short term as jumping onto these social media and messaging apps to establish informal networks of experts in a hurry. That’s really quite amazing and worth celebrating. For all the complaints and anger over the negative and problematic uses of social media and messaging apps, we shouldn’t forget how absolutely vital they’ve been for many people working hard to actually save lives.

Filed Under: avir mitra, covid-19, information, information sharing, messaging, radiolab
Companies: whatsapp

Censorship Kills: US Government's Focus On COVID-19 'Messaging' Over Actual Protection Did Real Damage

from the free-speech-saves-lives dept

We’ve been writing a lot about the need for real transparency in the midst of a pandemic. The lessons to be learned from Taiwan’s transparency compared to China’s censorship and speech stifling are important. Tragically, it has become abundantly clear that the US is following the path of China, not Taiwan.

We’ve already covered hospitals trying to silence doctors and nurses from revealing what’s actually happening within their hospitals, Jared Kushner hiding his coronavirus task force efforts in a private email account, and the CDC’s tragic media gag order for its staff, but it’s looking much, much worse.

A bunch of stories came out on Wednesday that more or less show how hard the government is working towards silencing anyone “off message” within the administration. First came a NY Times report that head of the the HHS group working on a COVID-19 vaccine was dismissed from his job for daring to question Trump’s weird infatuation with hydroxychloroquine as the “miracle cure” to COVID-19 (which studies now suggest actually may be killing more patients than it’s saving). Dr. Rick Bright, who had been the director of the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, released quite a statement about what happened:

?I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit. I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science ? not politics or cronyism ? has to lead the way.

I have spent my entire career in vaccine development, in the government with CDC and BARDA and also in the biotechnology industry. My professional background has prepared me for a moment like this ? to confront and defeat a deadly virus that threatens Americans and people around the globe. To this point, I have led the government?s efforts to invest in the best science available to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

Unfortunately, this resulted in clashes with H.H.S. political leadership, including criticism for my proactive efforts to invest early into vaccines and supplies critical to saving American lives. I also resisted efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections. Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit.

While I am prepared to look at all options and to think ?outside the box? for effective treatments, I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public. I insisted that these drugs be provided only to hospitalized patients with confirmed COVID-19 while under the supervision of a physician.

These drugs have potentially serious risks associated with them, including increased mortality observed in some recent studies in patients with COVID-19.

Sidelining me in the middle of this pandemic and placing politics and cronyism ahead of science puts lives at risk and stunts national efforts to safely and effectively address this urgent public health crisis.

I will request that the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services investigate the manner in which this administration has politicized the work of BARDA and has pressured me and other conscientious scientists to fund companies with political connections and efforts that lack scientific merit.

Rushing blindly towards unproven drugs can be disastrous and result in countless more deaths. Science, in service to the health and safety of the American people, must always trump politics.?

But, that’s not all. Around the same time that story came out, the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration wanted to fire Nancy Messonnier, the CDC official who had spoken out in February about the likelihood of COVID-19 becoming a global pandemic. Rather than heeding her words, they wanted to fire her (and did appear to gag her from speaking to the media).

On Feb. 25, Nancy Messonnier, a CDC official, said the agency was preparing for a potential pandemic and that community spread of the virus was likely. The stock market plunged.

At a media briefing later that day, Mr. Azar sought to quell concerns, saying the virus was ?contained.?

But it was too late. A furious Mr. Trump, flying back to Washington from India, called Mr. Azar and threatened to oust Dr. Messonnier.

The next day, the president announced he was putting Vice President Pence in charge of the federal response?news Mr. Azar learned a few hours before the announcement.

And then, soon after those reports came out, in his daily political rally press conference, the President hauled out CDC director, Robert Redfield, asking him say that the Washington Post misquoted him in its story warning that a second wave of COVID-19 infections could be even more problematic, as it could be timed to coincide with next winter’s flu season. Here’s what the Washington Post said:

?There?s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,? CDC Director Robert Redfield said in an interview with The Washington Post. ?And when I?ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don?t understand what I mean.?

?We?re going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time,? he said.

Trump claimed that Redfield was “totally misquoted” saying that he spoke to Redfield and that Redfield told him “it was ridiculous.”:

?I do want to mention, Dr. Robert Redfield was totally misquoted in the media about the fall season and the virus. Totally misquoted. I spoke to him and he said it was ridiculous,? the president said during the daily Coronavirus Task Force briefing at the White House.

?He was talking about the flu and coronavirus coming together at the same time, and we will knock it out. We?ll knock it out fast. That?s what he was referring to, coming together at the same time,? Trump continued.

?I would ask Dr. Redfield to straighten out. He didn?t say it was a big explosion. The headline in the Washington Post was ridiculous, which is, as I say, ?fake news? and CNN is fake news, which they knew.?

Except that he then called Redfield up to the podium… and he noted that he had been quoted accurately, but did want to “clarify” his quotes:

“The issue I was talking about being more difficult is that we’re going to have two viruses circulating at the same time. This spring we had a benefit of having the flu season ending so we could use all our flu surveillance systems to say this is coronavirus, we need to focus. Next fall and winter, we are going to have two viruses circulating and we are going to have to distinguish between which is flu and which is coronavirus. And so the comment that I made ? it’s more difficult. It doesn’t mean it’s impossible, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be worse. It just means it’s more difficult because we have to distinguish between the two.”

Which is what the Washington Post article said. Some have argued that Redfield and Trump’s complaints are about the Washington Post’s headline, which claimed: “CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating” and it appears they’re taking issue with the use of the word “devastating.” But that seems to be a perfectly reasonable word to sum up what Redfield is saying. Indeed, as many people noted, before Trump threw this little temper tantrum, Redfield himself had retweeted the Washington Post article approvingly, saying nothing about the headline:

So, yet again, all of these stories suggest a similar theme: the President and the administration are — like the Chinese government — heavily focused on controlling the message, and making things look rosier than they really are, and not accurately telling the public and the press what is going on. And, once again, that’s a very real life or death situation. In times of crisis like this, leadership is the ability to tell the truth, no matter how bad, and put forth a plan of action to deal with the situation and to chart the best path forward while acknowledging the challenges. That’s not what this administration is doing. It’s trying to silence dissent, and look for any silly scrap of “positive spin” it can find.

And people are dying because of it.

Filed Under: cdc, china, covid-19, donald trump, free speech, hhs, messaging, nancy messonnier, rick bright, robert redfield, silencing, transparency, us

BlackBerry Continues Its Shameful Descent Into Patent Trolling By Suing Twitter

from the those-who-can't-innovate,-litigate dept

BlackBerry (under its original name RIM) was always a bit of a patent troll. While it did have some early innovations in the mobile device space, and had popular actual products on the market for a while, it always had a habit of vindictively suing any company that seemed to be offering anything remotely similar to its products. Perhaps the company should have spent more time focused on its actual product rather than suing for patent infringement. Otherwise, its market share chart wouldn’t have looked like this, courtesy of Statista:

However, now that its business of selling actual products has bottomed out, it’s gone back to its earlier focus of suing totally random companies for doing fairly obvious things, and claiming that they violate Blackberry’s patents. Last year, we covered its silly lawsuit against Facebook that only got them hit with an equally silly countersuit from Facebook.

And now BlackBerry has sued Twitter as well (incredibly, TechCrunch — and nearly all other publications writing about this — did not actually post the filing, but you can find it here). The lawsuit is completely silly, and should be embarrassing and shameful for Blackberry and its high priced lawyers (who know better). It claims that it invented “mobile messaging” and that Twitter, as a “latecomer” to the market, has “diverted” people away from Blackberry.

BlackBerry Pioneers Mobile Messaging – BlackBerry has been a leading innovator in the field of mobile communications for the past 30 years, having invested substantial sums into research and development of communications technologies. BlackBerry?s innovations led to the commercialization of some of the earliest models of smartphones in the United States, enabling its users to, among other things, send and receive e-mails securely and surf the internet anytime and anywhere. These same innovations prompted the rise of the smartphone as a necessary everyday accessory for businesspersons and ordinary consumers alike.

One example of BlackBerry?s innovations is the BlackBerry Messenger technology, which revolutionized instant messaging by providing users with secure, user-friendly, point-to-point instant messaging on their mobile devices. In many respects, through BlackBerry Messenger and other research and development, BlackBerry helped pioneer modern mobile messaging?secure, instant and user friendly on a mobile device. The appeal and success of BlackBerry Messenger led consumers to consider instant messaging functionality as an integral aspect of mobile communications, resulting today in billions of people worldwide engaging in instant messaging over their mobile devices.

Lots of folks developed mobile messaging, mostly by taking fairly obvious cues from existing computer messaging and email, which was created decades earlier, often borrowing from other types of messages, like the physical mail. There was no magic invention in taking messaging “mobile” that deserves any sort of patent. But then to suggest that Twitter “copied” Blackberry is laughable as well:

Defendant, on the other hand, is a relative latecomer to the mobile messaging world. Defendant created mobile messaging applications that co-opt BlackBerry?s innovations, using a number of the innovative user interface and functionality enhancing features that made BlackBerry?s products such a critical and commercial success in the first place.

Even more insane: claiming that Twitter’s messaging features somehow drive users away from Blackberry — a company whose business dried up for tons of reasons having absolutely nothing to do with Twitter.

Defendant?s use of BlackBerry?s inventions, and infringement of the Patents-in-Suit, has succeeded in diverting consumers away from BlackBerry?s products and services and toward those of Defendant. This has resulted in a substantial and undeserved windfall for Defendant as these users drive Defendant?s revenue. Defendant?s gain comes at BlackBerry?s expense, depriving BlackBerry of revenue to which it is entitled as a result of its inventions.

Oh come on, Blackberry. Don’t make me laugh. Actually, clearly, Blackberry does want me to have a good chuckle, because check out these “innovations” it claims are oh so precious and unique to Blackberry:

User Interface Improvements For Mobile Devices?including (i) improvements in message notification techniques that streamline and optimize reception of new message notifications that prevent users from being inundated with numerous messaging notifications, (ii) resetting a new message indicator when a user accesses their inbox list of messaging conversations, which saves users from having to individually view each conversation in which there is a new message in order to reset their new message indicator;

(b) Messaging and Social Networking Improvements for Mobile Devices? including (i) improved techniques for determining whether a recipient has read messages in a conversation by inferring the status of one or more of the messages, thereby reducing data transmissions, power consumption and improving battery life in mobile devices, and (ii) improved techniques for making informational content, selected by one user, available to one or more other users via a data hub server that avoids users having to download and reupload content that they wish to share, thereby reducing unnecessary data transmissions, power consumption and improving battery life in mobile devices; and

(c) Mobile Advertising?improved techniques of delivering targeted advertising and content to mobile devices based on user demographics and interest, as well as the location of the user?s mobile device and time-based triggers.

If you don’t want to read that wall of text, Blackberry’s big inventions — which it claims Twitter copied and is using to deprive it of tons of income — are:

  1. New message notifications
  2. Resetting the new message indicator when someone checks their inbox
  3. Message read status
  4. Server hosting to make sharing messages easier without having to upload
  5. Mobile advertising

Really? To argue that all of these are (1) patent worthy (2) non-obvious and (3) key revenue or even usage drivers is literally crazy. Someone go check in on the folks at Blackberry and their lawyers to make sure they’re still in touch with reality. This is an obnoxious patent trolling experience, and Blackberry should be embarrassed. If you want to look at the actual patents in this suit they are:

I hope that Twitter gets each and every one of these patents invalidated and people continue to shun and mock BlackBerry for being an obnoxious patent troll, spitefully suing others for innovating where it fell down on the job and flopped.

Filed Under: messaging, patent trolling, patents
Companies: blackberry, twitter