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When the Trump administration killed net neutrality, telecom industry giants convinced them to push their luck and declared that not only would federal regulators no longer try to meaningfully oversee telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T, but that states couldn't either. They got greedy. The courts didn't like that much, repeatedly ruling that the FCC [...]

It's been nearly a year, but I won't pretend that the outcome of this isn't quite satisfying. Last summer, grocerer Trader Joe's filed an absolute bullshit lawsuit against the union for its own employees claiming that the name of and merchandise sold by the union represented trademark infringement and would cause confusion with the public [...]

Because it sells so very well to a certain percentage of the population, ridiculous people are saying ridiculous things about crime rates in the United States. And, of course, the first place to post this so-called news" is Fox News. An independent group of law enforcement officials and analysts claimviolent crimerates are much higher than [...]

Last year Mozilla released a report showcasing how the auto industry has some of the worst privacy practices of any tech industry in America (no small feat). Massive amounts of driver behavior is collected by your car, and even more is hoovered up from your smartphone every time you connect. This data isn't secured, often [...]

Apparently, the world needs even more terrible bills that let ignorant senators grandstand to the media about how they're protecting the kids online." There's nothing more serious to work on than that. The latest bill comes from Senators Brian Schatz and Ted Cruz (with assists from Senators Chris Murphy, Katie Britt, Peter Welch, Ted Budd, [...]

Taser long ago locked down the market for less than lethal" (but still frequently lethal) weapons. It has also written itself into the annals of pseudoscience with its invocation of not-an-actual-medical condition excited delirium" as it tried to explain away the many deaths caused by its less than lethal" Taser. These days Taser does business [...]

The Complete ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Training Bundle has 4 beginner-friendly courses to help you become more comfortable with the capabilities of OpenAI and ChatGPT. You'll learn how to write effective prompts to get the best results, how to create blog posts and sales copy, and how to create your own chatbots. It's on sale [...]

There's a fascinating new lawsuit against Meta that includes a surprisingly novel interpretation of Section 230. If the court buys it, this interpretation could make the open web a lot more open, while chipping away at the centralized control of the biggest tech companies. And, yes, that could mean that the law (Section 230) that [...]

We've noted repeatedly that while AI" (language learning models) hold a lot of potential, the rushed implementation of half-assed early variants are causing no shortage of headaches across journalism, media, health care, and other sectors. In part because the kind of terrible brunchlord managers in charge of many institutions primarily see AI as a way [...]

Artificial Intelligence is all the rage these days, so I suppose it was inevitable that major world religions would try their holy hands at the game eventually. While an unfortunate amount of the discourse around AI has devolved into doomerism of one flavor or another, the truth is that this technology is still so new [...]

For years and years, Congress has been pushing a parade of horrible protect the children online" bills that seem to somehow get progressively worse each time. I'm not going through the entire list of them, because it's virtually endless. One of the most frustrating things about those bills, and the pomp and circumstance around them, [...]

In a haste to do something about the growing threat of AI-fueled disinformation, harassment, and fraud, lawmakers risk introducing bills that ignore some fundamental facts about the technology. For California lawmakers in particular, this urgency is compounded by the fact that they preside over the world's most prominent AI companies and are able to pass [...]

The Supreme Court has made it pretty clear that age verification laws for websites violate the First Amendment. It's had a couple of shots at this and really seemed to indicate that such laws are unconstitutional because age verification would block First Amendment-protected content from people who should be allowed to see it. So, it [...]

The best response to speech you don't like is more speech. It definitely isn't whatever the hell happened here. And that not only includes the Seattle Police Department's decision to go after the person being physically harassed by other protesters, but the actions of the protesters themselves, whose physical aggression somehow encouraged police officers to [...]

This DevDojo Pro subscription gives you access to a set of tools to help you build your next great idea. Start with the Page Creator, where you'll find Tailwind CSS Page Builder, a tool for crafting beautiful landing pages. Then, move on to Wave SAAS Starter Kit, where you'll learn how to build your Software [...]

Donald Trump, who has demanded both that we open up our libel laws" and that we repeal Section 230," was just protected from a defamation claim thanks to Section 230. How about that? One thing that many people forget (or deliberately ignore?) regarding Section 230 is that it not only protects Big Tech" as some [...]

For several decades, major wireless carriers AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile collected vast troves of sensitive user location and movement data, then sold access to any random nitwit with two nickels to rub together. The result was a parade of scandals wherein everybody from stalkers to law enforcement (or pretending to be law enforcement) abused the [...]

I talk quite a bit about video game preservation efforts for a couple of reasons. First, I'm just a huge gaming nerd and it is almost physically painful to think that the cultural output of this artform can be lost to history at the whim of publishers that have the ability to shutdown backend servers [...]

Cops will apparently beat their own, especially if they're bigoted cops and willing to beat the next black person they see. St. Louis police officer was working undercover during protests following the acquittal of Officer Jason Stockley, who had been charged with murder for the killing of a black St. Louis resident, Anthony Lamar Smith. [...]

We've got one more cross-post episode for you today, then next week we're back with a brand new discussion. Recently, Mike joined the Daily Beast's The New Abnormal podcast with host Andy Levy for a conversation about the big news from last week: Biden signing a bill that will ban TikTok in the US if [...]

It's been a long two years since theDobbsdecision to overturnRoe v. Wade. Between May 2022 when the Supreme Court accidentally leaked the draft memo and the following June when the case was decided, there was a mad scramble to figure out what the impacts would be. Besides the obvious perils of stripping away half the [...]

The most populous city in the United States has a crime problem. What kind of problem depends on who you ask. The DEA will say it's fentanyl. The NYPD will claim it's terrorism. The former Manhattan DA will say it's device encryption (not actually a crime!). But the Metropolitan Transit Authority - which oversees the [...]

Embark on the journey of language learning with the Rosetta Stone lifetime subscription for all languages. Rosetta Stone has been the go-to software for language learning for the past 27 years. With its immersive and intuitive training method, you might be reading, writing, and speaking a new language with confidence in no time. It's on [...]

Well, hey, let's start this article by noting that Techdirt has no paywall, no annoying or intrusive advertising. And we almost never even bug people about the fact that there are many ways to support the site, including getting early access to some articles, the ability to join our Insider Discord, and other features as [...]

The FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, provided 23+ million low-income households a $30 broadband discount every month. But the roughly 60 million Americans benefiting from the program are poised to soon lose the discount because key Republicans - who routinely dole out billions of dollars onfardumberfare-refuse to fund a [...]

It's a drum I've been beating for some time now: the only reason cord-cutting hasn't led the traditional cable television market into full capitulation has been television rights for live sports broadcasts. While major sports leagues and college conferences have certainly been trending into the streaming market like the rest of traditional television, it's typically [...]

When it comes to Backpage.com, the truth has been buried beneath a mountain of political grandstanding and legal theatrics. There's the public narrative about Backpage.com, and then there's the real story. We've discussed this before, but if you're not familiar with the details, you might think that Backpage was a huge sex trafficking operation that [...]

The European government has spent a few years trying to break encryption. The results have been, at best, mixed. Of course, the EU government claims it's not actually interested in breaking encryption. Instead, it hides its intentions behind phrases like client-side scanning" and chat control." But it all just means the same thing: purposefully weakening [...]

The Effective Altruism movement Effective Altruism (EA) is typically explained as a philosophy that encourages individuals to do the most good" with their resources (money, skills). Its effective giving" aspect was marketed as evidence-based charities serving the global poor. The Effective Altruism philosophy was formally crystallized as a social movement with the launch of the [...]

The Raspberry Pi and Arduino Bootcamp Bundle has 5 courses to help you dive into the world of hands-on programming. Courses cover Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and ROS2. It's on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The [...]

Let's start off this post by noting that I know that some people hate anything and everything having to do with generative AI and insist that there are no acceptable uses of it. If that describes you, just skip this article. It's not for you. Ditto for those who insist (incorrectly) that AI is nothing [...]

By now we've well established that this particularseries of media mergers- which began with AT&T's doomed acquisition of Time Warner and ended with Time Warner's subsequent spin off and fusion with Discovery - were some of the dumbest, most pointless business" exercises ever conceived by man. The pointless saga burned through hundreds of billions in [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about link taxes: It seems to me that the best way to expose the link tax for what it is (a money grab), is to educate the legislators that a news site (in fact, any site) can use a robots.txt file [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, another attempt to hold Twitter responsible for terrorist attacks was tossed out of court (but it didn't stop the trend of rushing to blame social media for every tragedy) while we got a look behind the scenes of how Facebook dealt with the Christchurch shooting. Another Hollywood company [...]

For several years now, we've had a running series of posts discussing how, when it comes to digital goods, you often don't own what you've bought. This ugliness shows up with all kinds of content, including purchased movies, books, and shows on digital platforms. But it has reared its head acutely as of late in [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice - or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week's round-up of the latest news in online [...]

Well, this ought to prompt another round of police-protecting legislation in Florida. Governor Ron DeSantis recently signed two bills into law - one that creates a 25-foot no go" zone around police officers and one that strips police oversight boards of their independence. And that's on top of the immediate effort made by the legislature [...]

Over the last few years, there have been a ton of lawsuits, pretty much all of them dubious, arguing that social media is inherently harmful to children (something the research does not show) and that therefore there is some sort of magic product liability claim that will hold social media companies responsible. A bunch of [...]

The FCC on Thursday once again voted along party lines to restore popular net neutrality rules stripped away during the Trump administration in a flurry of protest and sleazy industry behavior. You might recall the 2017 repeal was so unpopular that telecom giants were caught using fake and dead people to create the illusion of [...]

Envy those picture-perfect vlogs and YouTube channels? You can easily re-create them Aduro's U-STREAM Home Streaming Studio. The 10'' ring light offers 3 distinct lighting options - white, warm yellow, and warm white. The brightness feature on the remote offers 10 different levels of brightness so you can choose what's best for you. Not only [...]

Apparently TikTok is so evil and pernicious that it must be banned from the United States... and so useful that the man who signed the ban, President Joe Biden, made sure to post a few new videos to the platform. It feels like maybe his concerns are a bit overblown? It seems that TikTok users [...]

Last month the New York Times' Kashmir Hillpublished a major storyon how GM collects driver behavior data then sells access (through LexisNexis) to insurance companies, which will then jack up your rates. Theabsolute bare minimumyou could could expect from the auto industry here is that they're doing this in a way that's clear to car [...]

MAGA SLAPP suits apparently aren't going out of style, but yet another one has been tossed out of court. Remember lawyer Steven Biss? He was the grand filer of tons of SLAPP suits for the MAGA crowd against media outlets. He had quite a losing streak, with nearly all of those cases failing. Last fall, [...]

The capricious nature of Nintendo's IP enforcement practices are, if you're a regular reader here, quite legendary. In this case, however, it seems like Nintendo's reputation is what played a part in some copyright fuckery, rather than the company engaging in said fuckery itself. If you're not familiar with Garry's Mod, then you obviously weren't [...]

Back in October last year, Walled Culture wrote about a proposed law in France that would seea tax imposed on AI companies, with the proceeds being paid to a collecting society. Now that the EU's AI Act has been adopted, it is being invoked as another reason why just such a system should be set [...]

As case law continues to be developed, it continues to look as though the best way to hold onto your Fifth Amendment rights is to secure your devices with a passcode. There's no solid consensus at this point, and the Supreme Court has yet to set precedent, but unless law enforcement really screws up while [...]

The failures of the NCMEC CyberTipline to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as well as it could are extremely frustrating. But as you look at the details, you realize there just aren't any particularly easy fixes. While there are a few areas that could improve things at the margin, the deeper you look, the [...]

This Little Wonder Solo Bluetooth Speaker may look small, but it produces as clear and powerful a sound as any other speaker. It comes in a solid and metallic look that is great for any setting and decor at your home, office, pool, picnic spot, and more! Connect this speaker to your smartphone or tablet [...]

The system meant to stop online child exploitation is failing - and misaligned incentives are to blame. Unfortunately, today's political solutions, like KOSA and STOP CSAM, don't even begin to grapple with any of this. Instead, they prefer to put in place solutions that could make the incentives even worse. The Stanford Internet Observatory has [...]

When the Apple Vision Pro launched back in February, the press had a sustained, two-month straight orgasm over the product's potential to transform VR and the world of spatial computing. Downplayed were little sticking points like the lack of app support; the short battery life (despite a bulky external battery pack Steve Jobs would have [...]