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This headline is like a version of Mad Libs for Techdirt titles. We've been covering the problem of copyright trolls for many years. And lately, we've been covering the scammy uses of generative AI tools. And we've absolutely covered quite a few SEO scam stories, where people try to use some scam or another to [...]

I guess being incarcerated isn't dehumanizing enough. Being treated like barely sentient meat deserving of any abuse perpetrated by guards or other inmates just isn't enough oppression, apparently. This country talks a big game about rehabilitation and paying your debt to society," but when it comes to the day-to-day business of incarcerating people at a [...]

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Over the last few years, Elon Musk has repeatedly said that his definition of free speech means that which matches the law." He says this whenever anyone calls out that he's not actually the free speech absolutist he claims to be. He regularly and expeditiously caves in to censorship demands, without any protest, from authoritarian [...]

The FCC is expected to vote to restore net neutrality rules on April 25. And while there're early indications that the rules may be slightly weaker than those stripped away by the Trump administration - and absolutely no indication the rules could meaningfully impact telecom revenues - telecom giants have already begun their whining about [...]

In all of the posts we have done on the topic of video game preservation, I have often made the point that it's probably long past time that there be some sort of political action to address the real or potential disappearance of cultural output that is occurring. The way this works far too often [...]

While it's not ultimately a factor in the court's decision, it's nice to see a court call out biased policing while discussing the merits of the case. This decision [PDF], handed down by an Illinois state appellate court, makes it pretty clear the court believes this stop would never had happened if the driver happened [...]

As Mike has already chronicled, Meta has managed to alienate itself from reasonable people by first suppressing links to an independent Kansas journalism outlet, then links to others reporting on the suppression, and eventually entire accounts discussing the episode. I tend to be of the view that what happened was an error caught in a [...]

Every few years, it seems, we're reminded of the incredible number of dependencies built into the software we all rely on. Remember kik? Or Chef Sugar? Or any number of similar situations? The xkcd comic on dependency is so well known for a reason. So, the backdoor that was discovered in xz utils a week [...]

While it's understandable to desire someone be held responsible for brutal acts of terrorism, the responsibility for those actions lies with those who committed them. That's hardly satisfying because it can be almost impossible to extract anything from the terrorists themselves, other than the limited recompense of seeing them arrested and jailed. And that's something [...]

Demand for Python is booming in the job market and it is a skill that can help you enter some of the most exciting industries, including data science, web applications, home automation, and many more. The 2024 Python for Software Engineering Bootcamp Bundle has 7 courses to take you from beginner to expert in no [...]

Truth matters. Even if it's inconvenient for your narrative. I'm going to do a question and answer style post, because I want to address a bunch of questions that came up on this story over the weekend, but let's start here. So what happened? Last Thursday, the Kansas Reflector, a small local news non-profit in [...]

You might recall that, back in February, Senator Ron Wyden's office revealed how a data broker named Near Intelligence had collected the data of women visiting abortion clinics, then sold that data (via a proxy) to right wing activists. Those activists then turned around and used it to target vulnerable women with health care misinformation. [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Jim Jordan demanding major ad companies explain why they won't advertise on Truth Social: Far right: we support free speech and free markets!Businesses: We've decided it's not in our best interest to advertise on this far-right website.Far right: Advertise there [...]

And here we are! We've arrived at the end of our series of posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! We've already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, Best and [...]

It is often said that ignorance of the law is no defense." But the corollary of this statement is that laws must be freely available so that people can find them, read them and obey them. Secret laws, or laws that are hard to access, undermine the ability and thus the willingness of citizens to [...]

The saga of former Hamilton County Deputy Daniel Wilkey is incredible, in all the worst senses of that word. A law enforcement officer simply doesn't start doing these sorts of things at the beginning of their careers. The stuff detailed in multiple lawsuits (and 44 criminal charges!) against Deputy Wilkey shows someone who just kept [...]

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 [...]

Jim Jordan, who heads the House Judiciary Committee and its subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government," continues to use weaponize the power of the federal government" to punish his enemies and support his friends. He's done this before. Many times before. The latest seems particularly pathetic. You would have to be particularly wedded [...]

On February 8, Francois-Philippe Champagne, the Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry,announced Canada would ban devicesused in keyless car theft. The only device mentioned by name was the Flipper Zero-the multitool device that can be used to test, explore, and debug different wireless protocols such as RFID, NFC, infrared, and Bluetooth. While it is [...]

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There is something amazingly humorous in watching Elon Musk work his way ass-backwards and blindly to recreating (but much worse) the mostly-functional systems he destroyed blindly upon taking over Twitter. As we've been pointing out since basically day one, Musk never understood the whole verification concept. Early on, before he'd even taken over the company, [...]

Countless sectors are rushing to implement AI" (undercooked language learning models) without understanding how they work - or making sure they work. The result has been an ugly comedy of errors stretching from journalism to mental health care thanks to greed, laziness, computer-generated errors, plagiarism, and fabulism. NYC's government is apparently no exception. The city [...]

We've had a couple of posts about Ohio State University's theories on trademark law over the past couple of years, with all of them centering on the school's application, ultimately somehow granted by the USPTO, to trademark the word the." The whole thing was so absurd that even noted college football cheerleader Kirk Herbstreit thought [...]

In a bizarre turn of events over the past few weeks, Spain's high court ordered a ban on Telegram because some users (gasp!) used the tool to share copyright-protected content. The judge then suspended his own order a few days later after receiving a lot of criticism. Then, the judge asked the police to investigate [...]

Last week we noted how AT&T was being rather cagey about the leak of the personal data of 73 million AT&T customers to the open web. The data, which includes customer social security addresses, names, phone numbers, and email addresses, first popped up back in 2021 after a hacker somehow obtained the data, encrypted it, [...]

Remember Nick Sandmann? He was the dude who became something of a Rorschach Test for how much your political beliefs (in any direction) influence your views of a short video, when EVERYONE HAD OPINIONS on his MAGA-hat wearing encounter with a Native American demonstrator, Nathan Phillips. Also, everyone magically became experts in reading body language [...]

Just recently, we covered a case involving a bogus raid of someone's home based on nothing more than a ping from Apple's find my device' feature. The Denver (CO) PD's SWAT team raided the home of 77-year-old Ruby Johnson, destroying her garage door and some ceiling panels (?) in the process. The raid was predicated [...]

It's been a few years since I last did a Let me rewrite that for you" post. This idea was first suggested by the brilliant press critic Dan Froomkin. Basically, when he finds a bit of journalistic malpractice, he rewrites it the way a good journalist would, to show why the original was so wrong. [...]

The FCC has announced that it will vote to restore the net neutrality rules stripped away by the Trump administration during an agency meeting on April 25. A reminder: net neutrality rules prevent giant telecoms from abusing their market power to disadvantage competitors and consumers alike. Either by degrading the performance of a service that [...]

I'm going to kick this post off by stipulating to a couple of facts. First, the primary subject of this post is YouTuber Andrew Callaghan. Callaghan has both something of a checkered past as a YouTuber, having had his most recent channel briefly taken down over claims of spreading COVID-19 misinformation, but in which he's [...]

It appears the New Jersey Department of Health still believes the state's residents are better served by giving law enforcement another way to dodge the Constitution. The Department of Health was sued two years ago by the state's Office of the Public Defender (OPD). That lawsuit targeted the state's peculiar practice of holding on to [...]

We've written a lot about the Murthy case at the Supreme Court, and especially how poor of a job the states did in making their argument. Now, as we await the ruling, there are a lot of questions about what it will look like and how consequential it will be. This week, we're joined by [...]

After several years of litigation across the federal appellate courts, the U.S. Supreme Court in a unanimous opinion has finallycrafted a testthat lower courts can use to determine whether a government official engaged in state action" such that censoring individuals on the official's social media page-even if also used for personal purposes-would violate the First [...]

Flock Safety - a relatively recent entrant to the surveillance tech arena - is branching out. It's courting cops with cheap ALPR cameras, unproven claims about crime reduction, and a little lawbreaking of its own. But it hasn't abandoned its roots. It first hit the scene with plate readers it pitched to the Fun Police: [...]

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a phone stand for FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, and [...]

Forget Mars colonies and self-driving cars. Elon Musk's greatest challenge yet? Defeating Twitter's relentless pussy in bio' spam army. And let's just say, it's not going well. It has really been quite incredible to watch Elon rediscover some of the basics of trust & safety best practices (though while consistently messing it up) as ExTwitter [...]

There's an historic $50 billion in broadband subsidies currently heading to the states courtesy of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). There are plenty of potential hiccups on stuff likemappingthat could screw things up, but, any way you slice it, this money should still have an amazing, [...]

Nearly seven years ago, we discussed a copyright dispute between Riot Games and a Chinese game publisher, Moonton. At issue were mobile games published by Moonton, such as Mobile Legends, that sure looked like fairly straight clones of Riot Games titles, chiefly League of Legends. We don't typically cover what look like legit copyright disputes, [...]

On the Neglected Books site, there is a fine meditation onrescuing forgotten writers and their worksfrom oblivion, and why this is important. As its author Brad Bigelow explains: I have been searching for neglected books for over forty years and the one thing I can say with unshakeable confidence is that there are more great [...]

Apparently, the one thing that can unite Democrats and Republicans in 2023 is a shared desire to destroy the internet's legal framework. Hillary Clinton is the latest to jump on the Repeal Section 230' bandwagon. It's truly stunning how Section 230 has switched from being a crowning achievement of US tech policy to something that [...]

No matter who's pitching the system, gunshot detection just doesn't seem to be having any affect on crime rates or clearing investigations. The biggest player in the business - ShotSpotter (now known as SoundThinking) - has seen some major contracts cancelled because it can't live up to the promises it made. Chicago is dumping the [...]

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For the last eight years or so, one thing has become quite clear: the media has been effectively unable to deal with Donald Trump and Trumpism. He is unique to our political system. He has no shame, is willing to lie without concern, convince himself that his lies are true, and will stop at nothing [...]

Lobbyists for Charter Communications (Spectrum) have snuck some sneaky language into New York State's latest budget bill in an effort to undermine popular community-owned broadband networks. Part of the budget bill addresses the state's ConnectALL Initiative, which waslaunched in 2022to help direct the billions in broadband funding contained in the 2021 COVID relief and infrastructure [...]

I really cannot believe it's 2024 and there are still video game publishers out there that want to go to war on their own modding communities. I expect this sort of thing from the Nintendos of the world, but those that publish to the PC gaming market really need to stop it with this crap. [...]

Regular readers of Techdirt will know that we've never done any sort of April 1st jokes, even though people often send us ideas for them each year. The simple fact is: nearly all April Fools' jokes are terrible, especially the silly corporate ones. They're just bad. With one exception. Twenty years ago today, Google announced [...]

Facial recognition tech is probably improving as time goes on. Given enough providers, controversy, and individuals who definitely want this tech to stop being so terrible at correctly identifying women and minorities, anything is possible. Rather than wait for the tech to catch up to the promises made by promotional materials, cops are apparently moving [...]

Apparently, everything really is bigger in Texas, including the audacity of federal judges who think they're above the rules. In a stunning display of hypocrisy, the Northern District of Texas has decided that new judicial shopping rules just don't apply to them. Because that would make it harder to win culture war fights. But if [...]

404 Media, the new news outlet formed by excellent journalists kicked to the curb by the successive brunchlord regimes overseeing Vice Media, continues to stake its claim as the best investigative media outlet in the country. Their latest effort digs deep into dubious claims made by up-and-coming surveillance tech company, Flock. Flock made its entry [...]