Aggregator

不正アクセス行為の発生状況及びアクセス制御機能に関する技術の研究開発の状況

情報通信審議会 電気通信事業政策部会 接続政策委員会（第70回）配布資料

不適正利用対策に関するワーキンググループ（第2回）

活力ある地域社会の実現に向けた情報通信基盤と利活用の在り方に関する懇談会（第4回）

公正競争ワーキンググループ（第3回）配布資料・議事概要

情報通信審議会　情報通信技術分科会　技術戦略委員会（第45回）

宇宙通信アドバイザリーボード（第2回）

ユニバーサルサービスワーキンググループ（第4回）配布資料・議事概要

Welcome to your U.S. presidential election year, when all kinds of bad actors will flood the internet with election-related disinformation and misinformation aimed at swaying or suppressing your vote in November. 

So… what’re you going to do about it? 

As EFF’s Corynne McSherry wrote in 2020, online election disinformation is a problem that has had real consequences in the U.S. and all over the world—it has been correlated to ethnic violence in Myanmar and India and to Kenya’s 2017 elections, among other events. Still, election misinformation and disinformation continue to proliferate online and off. 

That being said, regulation is not typically an effective or human rights-respecting way to address election misinformation. Even well-meaning efforts to control election misinformation through regulation inevitably end up silencing a range of dissenting voices and hindering the ability to challenge ingrained systems of oppression. Indeed, any content regulation must be scrutinized to avoid inadvertently affecting meaningful expression: Is the approach narrowly tailored or a categorical ban? Does it empower users? Is it transparent? Is it consistent with human rights principles? 

 While platforms and regulators struggle to get it right, internet users must be vigilant about checking the election information they receive for accuracy. There is help. Nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica published a handy guide about how to tell if what you’re reading is accurate or “fake news.” The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions infographic on How to Spot Fake News is a quick and easy-to-read reference you can share with friends:

how_to_spot_fake_news.jpg

To make sure you’re getting good information about how your election is being conducted, check in with trusted sources including your state’s Secretary of State, Common Cause, and other nonpartisan voter protection groups, or call or text 866-OUR-VOTE (866-687-8683) to speak with a trained election protection volunteer. 

And if you see something, say something: You can report election disinformation at https://reportdisinfo.org/, a project of the Common Cause Education Fund. 

 EFF also offers some election-year food for thought: 

• On EFF’s “How to Fix the Internet” podcast, Pamela Smith—president and CEO of Verified Voting—in 2022 talked with EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley about finding reliable information on how your elections are conducted, as part of ensuring ballot accessibility and election transparency.
• Also on “How to Fix the Internet”, Alice Marwick—cofounder and principal researcher at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s Center for Information, Technology and Public Life—in 2023 talked about finding ways to identify and leverage people’s commonalities to stem the flood of disinformation while ensuring that the most marginalized and vulnerable internet users are still empowered to speak out. She discussed why seemingly ludicrous conspiracy theories get so many views and followers; how disinformation is tied to personal identity and feelings of marginalization and disenfranchisement; and when fact-checking does and doesn’t work.
• EFF’s Cory Doctorow wrote in 2020 about how big tech monopolies distort our public discourse: “By gathering a lot of data about us, and by applying self-modifying machine-learning algorithms to that data, Big Tech can target us with messages that slip past our critical faculties, changing our minds not with reason, but with a kind of technological mesmerism.” 

An effective democracy requires an informed public and participating in a democracy is a responsibility that requires work. Online platforms have a long way to go in providing the tools users need to discern legitimate sources from fake news. In the meantime, it’s on each of us. Don’t let anyone lie, cheat, or scare you away from making the most informed decision for your community at the ballot box. 

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　新宿東口アルタ前では、「ガザの虐殺すぐやめろ」「イスラエルは虐殺やめろ」とシュプレヒコールで訴える集会が開かれた。「岸田内閣打倒」などのリレーアピール後、「ガザ大虐殺やめろ！」の横断幕を掲げて、新宿駅一周のデモ行進を行なった。主催の改憲・戦争阻止！大行進東京によれば、参加者は二百七十名。　　　　　　　ＪＣＪ月刊機関紙「ジャーナリスト」２０２４年２月２５日号

Schneider Electricが提供するEcoStruxure Power Designには、信頼できないデータのデシリアライゼーションの脆弱性が存在します。

Intelから各製品向けのアップデートが公開されました。

Congress is fast-tracking a bill that would effectively ban TikTok in the US, but do little for its alleged goal of protecting our private information and the collection of our data by foreign governments. Tell Congress: Instead of giving the President the power to ban entire social media platforms based on their country of origin, our representatives should focus on what matters—protecting our data no matter who is collecting it.

株式会社東横インIT集客ソリューションが提供するスマートフォンアプリ「東横INN公式アプリ」には、サーバ証明書の検証不備の脆弱性があります。この問題は、当該アプリを修正済みのバージョンに更新することで解決します。詳細は、開発者が提供する情報を参照してください。

Congress’ unfounded plan to ban TikTok under the guise of protecting our data is back, this time in the form of a new bill—the “Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” H.R. 7521 — which has gained a dangerous amount of momentum in Congress. This bipartisan legislation was introduced in the House just a week ago and is expected to be sent to the Senate after a vote later this week.

A year ago, supporters of digital rights across the country successfully stopped the federal RESTRICT Act, commonly known as the “TikTok Ban” bill (it was that and a whole lot more). And now we must do the same with this bill. 

TAKE ACTION

TELL CONGRESS: DON'T BAN TIKTOK

As a first step, H.R. 7521 would force TikTok to find a new owner that is not based in a foreign adversarial country within the next 180 days or be banned until it does so. It would also give the President the power to designate other applications under the control of a country considered adversarial to the U.S. to be a national security threat. If deemed a national security threat, the application would be banned from app stores and web hosting services unless it cuts all ties with the foreign adversarial country within 180 days. The bill would criminalize the distribution of the application through app stores or other web services, as well as the maintenance of such an app by the company. Ultimately, the result of the bill would either be a nationwide ban on the TikTok, or a forced sale of the application to a different company.

The only solution to this pervasive ecosystem is prohibiting the collection of our data in the first place.

Make no mistake—though this law starts with TikTok specifically, it could have an impact elsewhere. Tencent’s WeChat app is one of the world’s largest standalone messenger platforms, with over a billion users, and is a key vehicle for the Chinese diaspora generally. It would likely also be a target. 

The bill’s sponsors have argued that the amount of private data available to and collected by the companies behind these applications — and in theory, shared with a foreign government — makes them a national security threat. But like the RESTRICT Act, this bill won’t stop this data sharing, and will instead reduce our rights online. User data will still be collected by numerous platforms—possibly even TikTok after a forced sale—and it will still be sold to data brokers who can then sell it elsewhere, just as they do now. 

The only solution to this pervasive ecosystem is prohibiting the collection of our data in the first place. Ultimately, foreign adversaries will still be able to obtain our data from social media companies unless those companies are forbidden from collecting, retaining, and selling it, full stop. And to be clear, under our current data privacy laws, there are many domestic adversaries engaged in manipulative and invasive data collection as well. That’s why EFF supports such consumer data privacy legislation. 

Congress has also argued that this bill is necessary to tackle the anti-American propaganda that young people are seeing due to TikTok’s algorithm. Both this justification and the national security justification raise serious First Amendment concerns, and last week EFF, the ACLU, CDT, and Fight for the Future wrote to the House Energy and Commerce Committee urging them to oppose this bill due to its First Amendment violations—specifically for those across the country who rely on TikTok for information, advocacy, entertainment, and communication. The US has rightfully condemned other countries when they have banned, or sought a ban, on specific social media platforms.

Montana’s ban was as unprecedented as it was unconstitutional

And it’s not just civil society saying this. Late last year, the courts blocked Montana’s TikTok ban, SB 419, from going into effect on January 1, 2024, ruling that the law violated users’ First Amendment rights to speak and to access information online, and the company’s First Amendment rights to select and curate users’ content. EFF and the ACLU had filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support of a challenge to the law brought by TikTok and a group of the app’s users who live in Montana. 

Our brief argued that Montana’s ban was as unprecedented as it was unconstitutional, and we are pleased that the district court upheld our free speech rights and blocked the law from going into effect. As with that state ban, the US government cannot show that a federal ban is narrowly tailored, and thus cannot use the threat of unlawful censorship as a cudgel to coerce a business to sell its property. 

TAKE ACTION

TELL CONGRESS: DON'T BAN TIKTOK

Instead of passing this overreaching and misguided bill, Congress should prevent any company—regardless of where it is based—from collecting massive amounts of our detailed personal data, which is then made available to data brokers, U.S. government agencies, and even foreign adversaries, China included. We shouldn’t waste time arguing over a law that will get thrown out for silencing the speech of millions of Americans. Instead, Congress should solve the real problem of out-of-control privacy invasions by enacting comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation.

The U.S. Senate is moving forward with two bills that would enrich patent trolls, patent system insiders, and a few large companies that rely on flimsy patents, at the expense of everyone else. 

One bill, the Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (PERA) would bring back some of the worst software patents we’ve seen, and even re-introduce types of patents on human genes that were banned years ago. Meanwhile, a similar group of senators is trying to push forward the PREVAIL Act (S. 2220), which would shut out most of the public from even petitioning the government to reconsider wrongly granted patents. 

Take Action

Tell Congress: No New Bills For Patent Trolls

Patent trolls are companies that don’t focus on making products or selling services. Instead, they collect patents, then use them to threaten or sue other companies and individuals. They’re not a niche problem; patent trolls filed the majority of patent lawsuits last year and for all the years in which we have good data. In the tech sector, they file more than 80% of the lawsuits. These do-nothing companies continue to be vigorous users of the patent system, and they’ll be the big winners under the two bills the U.S. Senate is considering pushing forward. 

Don’t Bring Back “Do It On A Computer” Patents 

The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act, or PERA, would overturn key legal precedents that we all rely on to kick the worst-of-the-worst patents out of the system. PERA would throw out a landmark Supreme Court ruling called the Alice v. CLS Bank case, which made it clear that patents can’t just claim basic business or cultural processes by adding generic computer language. 

The Alice rules are what—finally—allowed courts to throw out the most ridiculous “do it on a computer” software patents at an early stage. Under the Alice test, courts threw out patents on “matchmaking”, online picture menus, scavenger hunts, and online photo contests. 

The rules under Alice are clear, fair, and they work. It hasn’t stopped patent trolling, because there are so many patent owners willing to ask for nuisance-value settlements that are far below the cost of legal defense. It’s not perfect, and it hasn’t ended patent trolling. But Alice has done a good job of saving everyday internet users from some of the worst patent claims. 

PERA would allow patents like the outrageous one brought forward in the Alice v. CLS Bank case, which claimed the idea of having a third party clear financial transactions—but on a computer. A patent on ordering restaurant food through a mobile phone, which was used to sue more than 100 restaurants, hotels, and fast-food chains before it was finally thrown out under the Alice rules, could survive if PERA becomes law. 

Don’t Bring Back Patents On Human Genes 

PERA goes further than software. It would also overturn a Supreme Court rule that prevents patents from being granted on naturally occurring human genes. For almost 30 years, some biotech and pharmaceutical companies used a cynical argument to patent genes and monopolize diagnostic tests that analyzed them. That let the patent owners run up the costs on tests like the BRCA genes, which are predictive of ovarian and breast cancers. When the Supreme Court disallowed patents on human genes found in nature, the prices of those tests plummeted. 

Patenting naturally occurring human genes is a horrific practice and the Supreme Court was right to ban it. The fact that PERA sponsors want to bring back these patents is unconscionable. 

Allowing extensive patenting of genetic information will also harm future health innovations, by blocking competition from those who may offer more affordable tests and treatments. It could affect our response to future pandemics. Imagine if the first lab to sequence the COVID-19 genome filed for patent protection, and went on to threaten other labs that seek to create tests with patent infringement. As an ACLU attorney who litigated against the BRCA gene patents has pointed out, this scenario is not fantastical if a bill like PERA were to advance. 

Take Action

Tell Congress To Reject PERA and PREVAIL

Don’t Shut Down The Public’s Right To Challenge Patents

The PREVAIL Act would bar most people from petitioning the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to revoke patents that never should have been granted in the first place. 

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issues hundreds of thousands of patents every year, with less than 20 hours, on average, being devoted to examining each patent. Mistakes happen. 

That’s why Congress created a process for the public to ask the USPTO to double-check certain patents, to make sure they were not wrongly granted. This process, called inter partes review or IPR, is still expensive and difficult, but faster and cheaper than federal courts, where litigating a patent through a jury trial can cost millions of dollars. IPR has allowed the cancellation of thousands of patent claims that never should have been issued in the first place. 

The PREVAIL Act will limit access to the IPR process to only people and companies that have been directly threatened or sued over a patent. No one else will have standing to even file a petition. That means that EFF, other non-profits, and membership-based patent defense companies won’t be able to access the IPR process to protect the public. 

EFF used the IPR process back in 2013, when thousands of our supporters chipped in to raise more than $80,000 to fight against a patent that claimed to cover all podcasts. We won’t be able to do that if PREVAIL passes. 

And EFF isn’t the only non-profit to use IPRs to protect users and developers. The Linux Foundation, for instance, funds an “open source zone” that uses IPR to knock out patents that may be used to sue open source projects. Dozens of lawsuits are filed each year against open source projects, the majority of them brought by patent trolls. 

IPR is already too expensive and limited; Congress should be eliminating barriers to challenging bad patents, not raising more.

Congress Should Work For the Public, Not For Patent Trolls

The Senators pushing this agenda have chosen willful ignorance of the patent troll problem. The facts remain clear: the majority of patent lawsuits are brought by patent trolls. In the tech sector, it’s more than 80%. These numbers may be low considering threat letters from patent trolls, which don’t become visible in the public record. 

These patent lawsuits don’t have much to do with what most people think of when they think about “inventors” or inventions. They’re brought by companies that have no business beyond making patent threats. 

The Alice rules and IPR system, along with other important reforms, have weakened the power of these patent trolls. Patent trolls that used to receive regular multi-million dollar paydays have seen their incomes shrink (but not disappear). Some trolls, like Shipping and Transit LLC finally wound up operations after being hit with sanctions (more than 500 lawsuits later). Trolls like IP Edge, now being investigated by a federal judge after claiming its true “owners” included a Texas food truck owner who turned out to be, essentially, a decoy. 

There’s big money behind bringing back the patent troll business, as well as a few huge tech and pharma companies that prefer to use unjustified monopolies rather than competing fairly. Two former Federal Circuit judges, two former Directors of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and many other well-placed patent insiders are all telling Congress that Alice should be overturned and patent trolls should be allowed to run amok. We can’t let that happen. 

Take Action

Tell Congress: Don't Work For Patent Trolls

Nevada Makes Backward Argument That Insecure Communication Makes Children Safer

LAS VEGAS — The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a coalition of partners urged a court to protect default encrypted messaging and children’s privacy and security in a brief filed today.

The brief by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Nevada, the EFF, Stanford Internet Observatory Research Scholar Riana Pfefferkorn, and six other organizations asks the court to reject a request by Nevada’s attorney general to stop Meta from offering end-to-end encryption by default to Facebook Messenger users under 18 in the state. The brief was also signed by Access Now, Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), Fight for the Future, Internet Society, Mozilla, and Signal Messenger LLC.

Communications are safer when third parties can’t listen in on them. That’s why the EFF and others who care about privacy pushed Meta for years to make end-to-end encryption the default option in Messenger. Meta finally made the change, but Nevada wants to turn back the clock. As the brief notes, end-to-end encryption “means that even if someone intercepts the messages—whether they are a criminal, a domestic abuser, a foreign despot, or law enforcement—they will not be able to decipher or access the message.” The state of Nevada, however, bizarrely argues that young people would be better off without this protection.

“Encryption is the best tool we have for safeguarding our privacy and security online — and privacy and security are especially important for young people,” said EFF Surveillance Litigation Director Andrew Crocker. “Nevada’s argument that children need to be ‘protected’ from securely communicating isn’t just baffling; it’s dangerous.”

As explained in a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the EFF and others today, encryption is one of the best ways to reclaim our privacy and security in a digital world full of cyberattacks and security breaches. It is increasingly being deployed across the internet as a way to protect users and data. For children and their families especially, encrypted communication is one of the strongest safeguards they have against malicious misuse of their private messages — a safeguard Nevada seeks to deny them.

“The European Court of Human Rights recently rejected a Russian law that would have imposed similar requirements on services that offer end-to-end message encryption – finding that it violated human rights and EU law to deny people the security and privacy that encryption provides,” said EFF’s Executive Director Cindy Cohn. “Nevada’s attempt should be similarly rejected.”

In its motion to the court, Nevada argues that it is necessary to block end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger because it can impede some criminal investigations involving children. This ignores that law enforcement can and does conduct investigations involving encrypted messages, which can be reported by users and accessed from either the sender or recipient’s devices. It also ignores law enforcement’s use of the tremendous amount of additional information about users that Meta routinely collects.

The brief notes that co-amicus Pfeffercorn recently authored a study that confirmed that Nevada does not, in fact, need to block encryption to do its investigations. The study found that “content-oblivious” investigation methods are “considered more useful than monitoring the contents of users’ communications when it comes to detecting nearly every kind of online abuse.” 

“The court should reject Nevada’s motion,” said EFF’s Crocker. “Making children more vulnerable in just to make law enforcement investigators’ jobs slightly easier is an uneceesary and dangerous trade off.”

For the brief: https://www.eff.org/document/nevada-v-meta-amicus-brief

Contact:  AndrewCrockerSurveillance Litigation Directorandrew@eff.org

The First Amendment requires courts to apply a robust balancing test before unmasking anonymous online speakers, EFF explained in an amicus brief it filed recently in a New York State appeal.

In the case on appeal, GSB Gold Standard v. Google, a German company that sells cryptocurrency investments is seeking to unmask an anonymous blogger who criticized the company. Based upon a German court order, the company sought a subpoena that would identify the blogger. The blogger fought back, without success, and they are now appealing.

Like speech itself, the First Amendment right to anonymity fosters and advances public debate and self-realization. Anonymity allows speakers to communicate their ideas without being defined by their identity. Anonymity protects speakers who express critical or unpopular views from harassment, intimidation, or being silenced. And, because powerful individuals or entities’ efforts to punish one speaker through unmasking may well lead others to remain silent, protecting anonymity for one speaker can promote free expression for many others.

Too often, however, corporate or human persons try to abuse the judicial process to unmask anonymous speakers. Thus, courts should apply robust evidentiary and procedural standards before compelling the disclosure of an anonymous speaker’s identity. 

Under these standards, parties seeking to unmask anonymous speakers must first show they have meritorious legal claims, to help ensure that the litigation isn’t a pretext for harassment. Those parties that meet this first step must then also show that their interests in unmasking an anonymous speaker outweigh the speaker’s interests in retaining their anonymity. In this case, the trial court didn’t require the German company to meet this standard, and it could not have in any event.

Courts around the United States have adopted various forms of this test, with EFF often participating as amicus or counsel. We hope that New York follows their lead.