Techdirt

The Complete 2022 Microsoft Office Master Class Bundle has 14 courses to help you learn all you need to know about MS Office products to help boost your productivity. Courses cover SharePoint, Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, Teams, and more. The bundle is on sale for $75. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. […]

Normally, there wouldn’t be much need to insert yourself into lawsuits involving seriously flawed claims about social media moderation. But these two lawsuits — both losses for plaintiffs claiming the Biden administration conspired to ban their social media accounts — are now in the hands of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which has delivered […]

To be clear, the shift from traditional cable television to streaming TV has been a very good thing. Consumers had grown irritated with bloated, expensive bundles of channels they never watched, and customer service that was literally ranked some of the worst of any industry in America. Based on recent data, it’s not a trend […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That Anonymous Coward with a comment about religious rules, regulations, and exemptions: I enjoy how their deeply held beliefs can never ever be questioned, because that would be a burden on them and open a can of worms… Like when Hobby Lobby was screaming […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Apple sort of threw its support behind net neutrality, while the CEOs of large ISPs and tech companies were absent from a round of public hearings, and Senators were blasting the FCC for weakening its definition of broadband. A court found the FBI’s malware deployments to be perfectly […]

And here we are again, with more exclusivity drama coming out of the recent acquisitions Microsoft has undertaken in the video game space. After the announcements of the Zenimax/Bethesda and Activision Blizzard acquisitions, which are still going through review, Microsoft came out with a bunch of conflicting statements on what those buys would mean for […]

One of the more notable announcements at Apple’s event this week was that the iPhone 14 lineup won’t have a physical SIM tray to swap out SIM cards. Instead, the devices will embrace eSIM, a technology that’s supposed to make it easier than ever to switch carriers without consumers needing to buy and install a […]

Alongside death and taxes, one of life’s great certainties is a constant flow of absurd copyright claims. Here’s one from the world of live videogame streaming on the popular Twitch platform, owned by Amazon. A group of Spanish-speaking streamers organized a gaming event featuring “Project Zomboid“, a zombie survival role-playing game. TorrentFreak explains how copyright spoilt their fun: The […]

Chancellor Kathaleen McCormick, who is overseeing the Twitter v. Musk case in the Delaware Chancery Court, has a bit of a reputation as a no-nonsense judge who isn’t one to put up with much crap. And so far, that’s definitely been clear from how she’s handled the case. She isn’t showing favoritism, but every time […]

The Supreme Court may have extended constitutional protection to historical cell site location info, but that’s not going to stop our public servants — and the private companies that serve them — from finding ways to elude the ramifications of the Carpenter decision. Over the past couple of years, court documents and public records have […]

If you’re looking for a tablet that can also double as a laptop, the refurbished Surface Pro 12.3″ 256GB is your best bet. This device weighs just 1.73 pounds and measures just 0.33″ thin, so it’s one of the lightest and smallest laptops available on the market today. The device features a 7th-Gen (Kaby Lake) […]

During the 2020 campaign, there were a few times when candidate Joe Biden insisted he wanted to get rid of Section 230 entirely, though he made it clear he had no idea what Section 230 actually did. When I wrote articles highlighting all of this, I had some Biden supporters (even folks who worked on […]

Today’s the day! We’re hosting an online party to celebrate Techdirt’s 25th Anniversary, and we hope all of you will join us. The event begins at 11am PT / 2pm ET and attendance is free for anyone with an active Crystal Ball, Watercooler, or Behind The Curtain membership from our Insider Shop, or the equivalent […]

New Politico owner and Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner has been craving U.S. press attention, and got more of it than he wanted this week. Döpfner was the focus of a not particularly flattering profile in the Washington Post showing, among other things, that the German billionaire was excited by the prospect of a second […]

Consent can mean a lot of things when you’re accosted by cops. Law enforcement officers tend to feel it’s always voluntary, even when you’re sitting in an interrogation room for what the “good cop” refers to as a “friendly chat” meant to “clear everything up.” Whenever a seizure is challenged, if cops didn’t have the […]

It’s no secret that copyright trolls have been a scourge on many countries for some time now. The typical method of the copyright troll is quite simple. You buy or acquire the rights to some media, you watch for any of that media to show up on the internet illicitly, and then you attempt to […]

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) was voted out of committee with a long list of amendments. Advocates had been warning about some severe unintended consequences that could arise out of this bill, the most concerning of which was forcing tech companies to out LGBTQ+ minors to their parents — potentially against their wishes. The […]

Earlier today, there was a Senate Judiciary Committee markup on the JCPA — the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act — put forth by Senator Amy Klobuchar. Last week I wrote a long post about just how broken the bill is. It does almost everything it seeks to do badly, in ways that are genuinely dangerous. […]

Get your Old Logo and Retro Logo gear on Threadless » As we continue our celebration of Techdirt’s 25th anniversary and gear up for our anniversary party this Friday, it’s time to launch some new gear in our Threadless store! First, it’s the return of something we offered for a limited time on our 20th anniversary […]

The terrorists won. And it wasn’t a small victory. It was one that managed to make the American way of life significantly worse for anyone attempting to fly. Flying is how we get around in this sprawl of a nation that encompasses 50 states and ~3,000 miles between the coasts. And that’s just 48 of […]

New Politico owner and Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner has called for a ban on TikTok at the Vox Media Code conference. In fact, the lion’s share of the conference involved folks hyperventilating in one form or another over the existential threat posed by a popular social media app: Like most of the folks freaking […]

This keeps getting better and better. We have been discussing a Texas law requiring that a school district display any posters that are donated by outside parties, so long as they follow a couple of defined rules. Those rules are that the posters can display no words beyond “In God We Trust”, that it must […]

As we’ve been noting for years now, the global internet is at risk. China walled off its part of the internet early on, and other authoritarian regimes followed suit, with Russia and Iran taking the lead. But, at the same time, we’ve seen other regimes start to layer on their own regulatory regimes that effectively […]

Some DEA agent field-tested sidewalk chalk and managed to arrive at this conclusion: Rainbow fentanyl is being sold in multiple forms, according to the DEA, including as pills, powder and blocks that resemble sidewalk chalk. This is from The Hill’s stenography of DEA bullshit, which doesn’t even remain consistent over the course of the six […]

As you know, Techdirt recently marked its 25th anniversary, and we’re celebrating with a special online party this Friday, September 9th at 11am PT / 2pm ET, where you can mix and mingle with Techdirt staff and other fans, and get the inside story on the history of the blog from Mike Masnick. Attendance is […]

I rather expected that not everyone would agree with the points I raised in my recent post on Cloudflare and my thinking regarding both Cloudflare’s statement of principles on content moderation at the infrastructure layer and, secondly, its decision to block Kiwi Farms. That turned out to be an accurate expectation. It has also resulted […]

Ace the AWS Certified Exam and start your career with the 4-part AWS Certified Dev and Ops Engineer Professional Training Bundle. You’ll learn how to use CloudFormation, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudTrail, how to protect your AWS resources from threats, and much more. It’s on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and […]

Called it! Virginia Attorney, Congressional Hopeful File Doomed Lawsuit Against Barnes & Noble Over ‘Obscene’ Books But I’m not here to pat myself on the back. Anyone (well, anyone other than the people filing the lawsuit) could have seen this coming. It really doesn’t take more than a mere acquaintance with the First Amendment to […]

For decades, federal regulators have turned a blind eye while your cable and broadband provider rips you off with a bevy of misleading fees. The fees usually come with nonsensical names like “regulatory recovery fee” or “internet cost recovery surcharge,” and are tacked below the line post sale, letting cable and broadband providers covertly jack […]

I’m not going to open this by stating I assume the Shasta County (CA) Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) has better things to do with its time. I know it has better things to do with its time. I’m also not going to pretend the SCSO didn’t have enough personnel to deal with local crime while sending […]

Cops love a good warrant exception. Anything that allows them to bypass the Constitution is considered a pretty good deal (I mean… at least for cops). Good faith? Love it. Plain view? Fantastic. Odor of marijuana? Your car is getting tossed, buddy. Exigent circumstances? Don’t even know what the word means, but let’s get it […]

We’ve got one more cross-post episode this week. If you’ve been following Techdirt recently, you’ve surely heard about California’s recently-passed bill, the Age Appropriate Design Code, and all its massive problems. Recently, Mike appeared on This Week In Google to discuss these problems, and you can listen to the whole conversation on this week’s episode […]

The government of Turkey, headed by exceedingly thin-skinned President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has devolved into a corrupt, anti-democratic state that still respects the freedom of the press in theory, but, in practice, only respects the freedoms of its favored press outlets, which are free to write anything the government allows them to write. Journalists who […]

I originally wrote a version of this post last week before Cloudflare decided to block Kiwi Farms, intending to post it after the long weekend, but I needed to rewrite a significant portion of it after Cloudflare’s decision. None of the salient points have changed (nor has my mind on how to think about all […]

MonsterWriter makes the process of writing and editing a thesis or paper easy and enjoyable. Just focus on the content and structure of your document, MonsterWriter takes care of the final appearance for you. With MonsterWriter you can write large documents quickly. In contrast to other solutions and markdown editors, MonsterWriter provides features for complex […]

A new book written by journalist Richard Kerbaj, detailing the history of the so-called “Five Eyes” surveillance collaboration between the NSA and surveillance agencies in the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, is revealing a few more postscripts to the Ed Snowden story. Snowden’s first leak appeared nearly a decade ago. Since then, spy agencies […]

It took fifteen years filled with constant scandal, but the FCC finally recently announced that it would be “cracking down on” wireless carrier abuse of consumer location data, thanks to pressure from our new post-Roe reality. This “crackdown” involves politely asking the nation’s top wireless carriers to disclose what kind of location data they were […]

This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side come from our post about the Texas activist who weaponized a law requiring religious posters in schools by submitting one written in Arabic. In first place, it’s Thad responding to the suggestion that Hebrew would have been a better choice for annoying the right: Nah. […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, experts were weighing in on how SESTA would harm trafficking victims, while the California case against Backpage moved forward over money laundering claims. A look at the original comments sent to the FCC showed that 98.5% of them were opposed to killing net neutrality rules, and even many […]

Putting cops in schools is still a bad idea. It turns regular disciplinary problems — ones handled for decades by administrators, teachers, and parents — into police matters, subjecting students to the whims of armed officers who have been trained to react with violence to nearly any misbehavior. That’s what happened in this case [PDF] […]

You may recall that a few weeks back we discussed Ubisoft’s decision to shutdown game servers for several titles, including major AAA titles like Assassin’s Creed 3 and Far Cry 3. While server shutdowns are the norm after some period of time, as is the loss of certain online gaming features, notable in Ubisoft’s announcement […]

We’ve noted more times than I can count how you no longer really own the things you buy. Whether it’s smart home hardware, or routers that become useless paperweights when the manufacturer implodes, or post-purchase firmware updates that actively make your device less useful, you simply never know if the product you bought yesterday will […]

Over the past few years, international law enforcement has been cracking down on encrypted device purveyors. We’re not just talking about regular device encryption, which has been mainstream for several years now. These would be specialized manufacturers that appear to cater to those seeking more protection than the major providers offer — services that ensure […]

The GameCreators Mega Maker Pack Bundle will help you develop your own dream video game, and publish it on multiple platforms with thousands of royalty-free, 2D and 3D assets. You get AppGameKit Studio, a fully featured game development toolset with two asset packs. The bundle also has GameGuru, a non-technical and fun game maker that offers an […]

In July of 1995, Time Magazine published one of its most regrettable stories ever. The cover just read “CYBERPORN” with the subhead reading: “EXCLUSIVE A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?” The author of that piece, Philip Elmer-Dewitt later admitted that it was his […]

We’re just going to keep getting kids killed in America. We’ll never stop throwing money in the direction of the problem, but not directly at the problem. Nothing gets safer. It just gets more budget line items. The problem with school shootings is uniquely American. The proposed solutions — and the industry that has sprung […]

Well, that was quick. We had recently discussed an athiest activist who had planned to have some fun pointing out the veiled nature of a Texas law that requires a school to display any donated poster featuring the phrase “In God We Trust” along with the American and Texas flags. How was the fun to […]

The COVID pandemic changed the way America does business. And that includes the educational business. Many schools are publicly funded but those public funds are used to purchase intrusive surveillance tools for the sole purpose of preventing distance learners from somehow “cheating” on their own education. Never mind the fact that cheating doesn’t guarantee success. […]

As we highlighted recently, despite press coverage saying otherwise, former Twitter security boss Peiter “Mudge” Zatko’s whistleblowing report about the company actually supported Twitter’s underlying legal argument regarding how it counts spam in the mDAU. Remember, Musk doesn’t really have an escape clause here and the spam stuff is made up nonsense. The underlying issue […]