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Journalists have long used Google News to track news cycles. But for years users have documented a steady decline in product quality parallel to similar complaints about the quality of Google's broader search technology. Many stories and outlets are often no longer indexed, low quality clickbait and garbage are everywhere, and customization seems broken as [...]

They're not sending their best." - Donald Trump, June 26, 2015 I hear ya, Donnie. Just look at the jamokes you've inspired to set fire to the Constitution, if only because they failed to set fire to Capitol Hill following the 2020 election. Florida's full of them. The state legislature is infested with people who [...]

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It's kind of pathetic how desperate Elon Musk is to convince people that ExTwitter is a good platform for posting their video content. I assume it's a perfectly okay place to post videos, but it's hardly where most people go to watch videos, and Elon may discover sooner or later just how difficult it is [...]

Read the latest edition of The Sky Is Rising at The Copia Institute Twelve years ago, we released our very first research report, the Sky is Rising. Back then, in 2012, the commonly accepted wisdom was that the internet was killing various creative industries, from the music industry (especially!) to movies, TV, and books [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Ubisoft saying people need to get used to not owning games they play: What the world needs is a DRM-ed digital currency you can use for buying DRM-ed digital content. If the seller makes the product vanish, the buyer can [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, an appeals court let the FBI off the hook for breaking the law during its Playpen investigation, while a federal judge said compelling people to unlock their phones with fingerprints or faces violates the Fifth Amendment, and another judge recommended vacating the sentence of one of the FBI's [...]

We've done a metric ton of posts here over the years pointing out one unfortunate trend that has come along with the move from physical products to digital purchases: you don't own what you've bought. In some cases, it's you don't own what you think you've bought, because nobody actually reads EULAs and all the [...]

Join our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! The latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928, is well underway. As always, we're calling on designers of all stripes and all levels of experience to put this year's newly public domain works to use in digital and analog [...]

The state-based attacks on social media take all different forms. And the specific attacks on TikTok are some of the most notable in how little state officials seem to care about basic concepts like the 1st Amendment. The most obvious example is Montana's failed attempt to just outright ban TikTok, but we've also seen other [...]

Things become heated and tangled when it comes to free speech, religion, and the government's attempt to control either of these things. Government entities tend to feel the best way to avoid the appearance of favoring any religion is to stay out of it completely. A wise move by the government, but not the best [...]

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Here are two separate stories regarding the mess that is modern copyright law, that is now mostly mediated" by companies that half-ass randomly deal with things and sometimes do not. While this is, perhaps, a better setup than stupidly suing kids for daring to like or share a song, it still suggests the entire copyright [...]

We've noted numerous times how U.S. communities are increasingly tired of substandard, expensive broadband caused by market failure, so they're building their own broadband networks at a record pace. These efforts take a wide variety of forms, whether it's via a local cooperative, a collection of municipalities, or a city owned utility (see Chattanooga's huge [...]

Last summer, we brought to you the delightful news that Trader Joe's had joined the list of bad-acting companies that were attempting to play stupid trademark games with their own employees' unions through bullshit trademark disputes and lawsuits. This appears to be something of a trend brewing, with other companies engaging in this same sort [...]

We're back with another post in our ongoing series on web monetization, the Error 402 series. Before the holidays, we had talked about some of the earlier attempts at monetizing content, which included paywalls, banner ads, search ads, and eventually concepts around upselling into premium services under the banner of freemium." I originally was going [...]

There's nothing more urbane than omnipresent surveillance, apparently. London is considered one of the classiest places on earth, what with its wealth of history, iconic landmarks, and... thousands and thousands of surveillance cameras. It's also home to knife crime, pervasive racism, and soccer hooligans, with plenty of residents exhibiting all three of these traits simultaneously. [...]

Ron DeSantis continues to govern Florida as though the Constitution doesn't exist. It may froth the voting base a bit, but it's doing almost nothing for DeSantis, much less the people he's supposed to be serving. Law after unconstitutional law has been passed by the legislature, followed almost immediately by lawsuits and injunctions blocking the [...]

The 2024 AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner and Architect Bundle has 7 courses to help you learn about the world's leading cloud infrastructure. There are courses for complete beginners and some for those who already have a basic knowledge but want to level up. It's on sale for $25. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered [...]

The Florida legislature (with the support of goon-in-chief Ron DeSantis) really has a thing for unconstitutional bills that piss on the 1st Amendment. I mean, the state is still in a 1st Amendment fight with Mickey Mouse, which should tell you something. The Florida legislature is only in session at the beginning of the year, [...]

We've long established that U.S. broadband is expansive, patchy, and slow thanks to mindless consolidation, regulatory capture, regional monopolization, and limited competition. That's resulted in a growing number of towns, cities, cooperatives, and city-owned utilities building their own, locally-owned and operated broadband networks in a bid for better, cheaper, faster broadband. Regional giants like Comcast, [...]

Field drug tests often seem to be more a triumph of imagination than a triumph of science. They're cheap. Some popular tests run less than $3/per. That's the literal selling point. When in doubt, a cop can get probable cause by grabbing a substance, dumping it into a field test, and deciding whatever results are [...]

Big tech companies have long attempted to monopolize repair options to boost their profits, whether we're talking about tractors, phones, or game consoles. But in recent years companies like Apple and Microsoft appear to have realized that with state and federal lawmakers and regulators cracking down on this behavior, and right to repair seeing widespread, [...]

Last month, we wrote about Apple's nonsensical attack on Beeper, a universal messaging app that exemplifies many of the things we talk about here on Techdirt, like adversarial interoperability and the value of embracing open protocols over walled platforms. This week, Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky joins us on the podcast to talk about the app, [...]

Last week I noted that the improperly named Common Sense Media had submitted a very problematic and dangerous California ballot initiative that aims to hold social media companies liable should any harm that happens to any child be loosely connected to social media. As we noted, the research out there does not support the underlying [...]

Most courts recognize prior restraint as a First Amendment violation. Most courts. Not all. And the lower you go on the judicial organization chart, the more likely you are to run into a judge who doesn't seem to realize the Constitution exists. The problem for people being sued in state and county courts is that [...]

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If you buy products on Amazon, you're well aware of the Amazon brand spammers. These tend to be drop shippers or small (often Chinese) operations trying to sell knockoffs of whatever products might sell. But the products need brand names. In early 2020, the NY Times did an article about the phenomenon, All Your Favorite [...]

While the telecom industry did manage to successfullydefang U.S. consumer protection regulatorsfor the better part of the last decade, they're still facing some notable headwinds. Broadband growth hasdramatically slowed, cable TV customers areleaving in droves, and while they are getting a ton of new subsidies via the infrastructure bill, a lot of that money is [...]

Techdirt has been covering the UK's awful Online Safety Act for nearly five years now. During that time it has changed name - it was originally called the Online Harms Bill - but the many bad ideas have remained. Some have even become worse. For example, the UK government said that it wouldn't enforce the [...]

We've expressed our displeasure with geofence warrants multiple times. I've often referred to them as reverse" warrants, a term that implies how these warrants invert probable cause. Those in the business of protecting rights (ACLU, EFF) aren't fans of that term, but it is useful shorthand. Rather than show a court probable cause exists to [...]

Every year a little after New Years, I do a post about the previous year of Techdirt traffic and comments, looking at what people were interested in, what commenters were highly rated, etc. I know most sites put this out towards the end of the year, but I remain a purist and wait until after [...]

Even though the blog is now often given over to Trump did nothing wrong" posts and suggestions that social media services engage in censorship" of so-called conservatives" (and don't even think about wandering into the comment section), Eugene Volokh's Volokh Conspiracy still surfaces some very interesting cases. And this one has a lot going on. [...]

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On Monday, Elon Musk tweeted To fear parody or criticism is a sign of weakness." If true, then this is Elon admitting to an astounding level of weakness. I mean, we've been chronicling for nearly two years now how Elon Musk talks a good game on free speech, but at every opportunity he's had, he [...]

It's extremely weird that we've somehow normalized the fact that scammers, scumbags, debt collectors, and marketers have made the U.S.' primary voice communication platform largely unusable. There is some good news: according to data from the YouMail Robocall Index, U.S. consumers received just under 3.8 billion robocalls during the month of December, a 16.3% decrease [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple anonymous comment about the dangerous protect the children" ballot initiative in California: That is not a protect the children law, that is an I hate social media and it must be destroyed law. In second place, it's Blake Stacey passing on the [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we looked at how Ajit Pai's FCC often battled FOIA requests for no reason, while the Department of the Interior was trying to rewrite FOIA law to make it easier to reject requests. We saw fresh examples of copyright abuse as a means of silencing criticism of a [...]

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has something of a rollercoaster history when it comes to the enforcement of its real, or perceived, intellectual property rights. On the one hand, the church has occasionally been quite lenient when it comes to not trying to battle every use of its name, traditions, or religious [...]

Dating can be difficult, but there are certain things you can do to not make things worse on yourself. Don't be a creep. Be kind. Take no for an answer. Actually listen to the people you date. I mean, that's kinda the standard stuff. But also, if things go bad and they complain about you [...]

Everyone's aware (or should be) that all calls made from jail are monitored. Not all calls are recorded. There are exceptions, with the biggest being the one for calls made to attorneys representing jailed people. Those are completely off-limits. These are privileged communications that cannot be monitored or recorded by the government. And yet, it [...]

It's pretty amazing to me just how wrong one Senator can be about the internet for years and years and years. But we've been writing about Senator Richard Blumenthal and never, ever letting his own confusion about the internet get in the way of him boldly making foolish claims about the internet since before he [...]

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There are lots of things you can call veteran Cincinnati police officer Ryan Olthaus. Some people called him a racist, after he appeared to flash the ok" sign (something associated with [but not limited to] white supremacists) at anti-police violence protesters. You can also call him a coward. After all, he couldn't be bothered to [...]

We've long noted how the U.S. has generally proven too corrupt to pass even a baseline privacy law or regulate data brokers. The result has been a long line of companies that over-collect all manner of sensitive consumer location and behavior data, fail to secure it, and sell access to it to pretty much any [...]

The bad times for Unity continue, it seems. Or, at the very least, for the ostensibly hardworking men and women that called the company home. The bad times really began late last summer when Unity decided to drastically change its pricing scheme both for future projects that used the game engine, and, somehow, retroactively as [...]

A law passed last year has now taken effect in California. This attempt to limit pretextual stops and biased policing means California law enforcement officers will no longer be able to start every traffic stop with an impromptu Q&A session. They'll have to get right to the point. Here's what the law says: (a) A [...]

In late 2022, the state of New York finally passed new right to repair legislation after years of activist pressure. The bill, which went live this week, gives New York consumers the right to fix their electronic devices themselves or have them more easily repaired by an independent repair shop, instead of being forced to [...]

Among the various promises that Elon made regarding his takeover of ExTwitter, was that he was there to clean up the spam and bot problem. He seemed to think that the previous regime had fallen down on the job, and that somehow he would have the magical answer to dealing with such things. About that. [...]

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