Techdirt

If you’re not a part of a small but passionate group of emulation enthusiasts, you may not be aware that Microsoft has long waged a battle to keep emulators off of its Xbox consoles and the Xbox Store. Going back all the way to 2020, one particular app and developer has played something of a […]

A worldwide pandemic trapped students in their own homes to stop the spread of the coronavirus. They didn’t ask for this. Neither did educators. But educators made the worst of it in far too many cases. Aptitude tests and other essentials for continued funding (and bragging rights) were now out of their control. Any student […]

California passed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) nominally to protect children’s privacy, but at the same time, the AADC requires businesses to do an age “assurance” of all their users, children and adults alike. (Age “assurance” requires the business to distinguish children from adults, but the methodology to implement has many of the same […]

The only surprising thing here is that it took this long: NPR has officially announced that it has quit Twitter. This is in response to Elon’s chaotic decision to first label the account “state-affiliated media,” a label that was designed to help users understand if a media organization was actually a dedicated mouthpiece of the […]

All hail the pariah. If Clearview is only at 30 billion images, it just means social media users haven’t been posting enough. The little scraper that could has pushed its way to the next plateau of unacceptableness, turning the 10 billion images it had as recently as October 2021 to 30 billion before EOY2024. Plaudits […]

Users are juggling huge amounts of data, so it makes sense that you’re taking care of that data responsibly. Degoo is an AI-based cloud storage that helps you rediscover your best photos. With Degoo, you get 10TB of supremely secured storage space from which to manage and share files with awesome simplicity. With high-speed transfers […]

Read our new report on The Unintended Consequences Of Internet Regulation » Over the last decade or so, there’s been a growing chorus of people insisting (misleadingly) that the internet is a “wild west” that needs regulation. The reasons stated for this apparently necessary regulation change over time, but the underlying discussion tends to be […]

The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and stumbled around incompetently for several years […]

To err is human. To forgive is beyond me. Sorry. That’s just the way it is. If we’re paying outsized portions of local budgets to law enforcement agencies more interested in selective enforcement, rights violations, complete abdication of personal/professional responsibility, and seeing what hot war kit they can acquire via 1033.gov, it behooves us to […]

Just recently we had Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders on the Techdirt podcast to discuss their very own podcast mini-series “Silicon Valley v. Science Fiction.” Some of that discussion was about this spreading view in Silicon Valley, often oddly coming from AI’s biggest boosters, that AI is an existential threat to the world, and […]

Data portability is an important front in the war for an open internet. A few years ago, it seemed like some major movement was coming, with the joint announcement of the Data Transfer Project from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter — but recently, news of any progress was running thin. That is, until now: the […]

A few weeks ago we wrote about how Elon Musk’s Twitter was now blocking tweets in India at the request of the government. As we noted, there’s a lot of important history here. India had demanded such blocking in early 2021 and the old regime at Twitter had pushed back strongly on it. After fighting […]

For years, California residents were allowed to know almost nothing about some of their public servants. While most of the government was a (relative) open book, law enforcement officers and their misconduct records were shielded from public view by a law that exempted plenty of police wrongdoing from public records requests. That changed in 2019 […]

An InfoSec4TC Platinum Membership gives you lifetime access to online, self-paced certification courses on cybersecurity. Courses cover ethical hacking, GSEC, CISSP, and other internationally recognized IT certifications. You’ll also get access to the latest exam questions as well as extra course materials that you’ll need to learn and practice. You’ll get future updates at no […]

This is so bizarre. Last month, we highlighted the ridiculousness of Arkansas’ age verification for social media bill. These bills are showing up everywhere, from California to Utah and lots of other places as well. It’s bipartisan nonsense. It’s pretty clear that these bills are unconstitutional: they seek to suppress the free speech rights of […]

You might recall that the FCC under both Trump and Biden has made a big deal about forcing U.S. telecoms to rip out Huawei gear from their networks, under the allegation that the gear is used to spy on Americans (you’re to ignore, of course, that the United States spies on everyone, constantly, and has […]

One of the most pernicious effects of today’s copyright maximalism is the idea that every element of a creative work has to be owned by someone, and protected against “unauthorized” – that is, unpaid – use by other artists. That goes against several thousand years of human creativity, which only exists thanks to successive generations […]

Ever since Tesla first made the news, I had thought it would be a great car to own. The last few years have really disabused me of that notion, given the serious questions raised about the integrity of the company’s CEO. But even so, I’m pretty shocked by this latest Reuters report detailing how Tesla […]

It’s tough to be considered a trusted partner in the resistance against the Russian invasion of Ukraine if you can’t keep your most secret documents secret. No source for the embarrassing (and possibly harmful) leak has been identified, but that’s presumably what the US government hopes to find out ASAP. The Justice Department has joined […]

Never a dull moment in Elonland. Last week, as you’ll recall, he decided that NPR should be labeled as “state-affiliated media” even though NPR was literally Twitter’s prime example of what kinds of independent media outlets don’t deserve that label. What seemed to have happened is that some of the weird coterie of foolish people […]

I’ve been meaning to cover this for a few days now, but it’s finally off the backburner! And back on the afterburner! I have no idea what any of that means other than this is bad, bad, incredibly bad news for Fox News and (possibly) its parent corporation. Donald Trump and his voting bloc refused […]

You can use this ultra portable 4-in-1 Smart Flash Drive to transfer photos, videos, and files from your devices to your PC. It’s also great for saving your music or videos from Mac or PC to PC, or USB stick. It has ports for USB 3.0, lightning, micro-USB, and type-C. It’s on sale for $29. […]

The refrain to remember with Twitter under Elon Musk: it can always get dumber. Quick(ish) recap: On Thursday, Musk’s original hand-picked Twitter Files scribe, Matt Taibbi, went on Mehdi Hasan’s show (which Taibbi explicitly demanded from Hasan, after Hasan asked about Taibbi’s opinions on Musk blocking accounts for Modi in India). The interview did not […]

Montana is currently one of seventeen states that have passed laws—usually ghost written by telecom monopolies—banning local community broadband networks. As a result in many states, entrenched incumbent monopolies see zero incentive to lower rates, expand access, or improve service, thanks to muted competition and regulatory capture. COVID lockdowns highlighted the counterproductive stupidity of such […]

This week, both our top comments on the insightful side come in response to another commenter’s attempt to defend Twitter labeling NPR as “state-affiliated media”. In first place, it’s an anonymous commenter pointing to the site’s own definition: Going by Twitter 2.0’s updated definition (emphasis mine): State-affiliated media is defined as outlets where the state […]

Well, here we are at the last of our series of posts showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927. So far we’ve featured Best Remix winner Lucia, Best Visuals winner Urbanity, Best Adaptation winner To And Again, Best Deep Cut winner The Pigeon […]

It’s been a while since we’ve talked about Google’s Stadia product. What was originally billed as a forthcoming world class cloud video game streaming platform launched terribly, never gained much traction, and eventually was announced to be pivoting to serving as the backend platform for other companies that actually knew what the hell they were […]

When NSO Group began making the wrong kind of headlines all over the world, suddenly lots of governments began at least feigning an interest in caring about what third-party tools their intelligence and security agencies were using to conduct surveillance. The problem wasn’t just NSO Group. True, the Israel-based firm was more than happy to […]

Poor Matt Taibbi. He destroyed his credibility to take on the Twitter Files, and did so in part to raise the profile of his Substack site, Racket News. Indeed, Substack has become a home for nonsense peddlers of all kinds to create their own little bubbles of nonsense. In congressional testimony, Taibbi admitted that having […]

The use of facial recognition far outpaces its proven track record. Prone to false positives and negatives, especially when it comes to anyone else but white males, the tech continues to make inroads with the law enforcement community which has never seen a black man it can’t prosecute for crimes he didn’t commit. That’s the […]

Scrivener is the go-to app for writers of all kinds, used every day by best-selling novelists, screenwriters, non-fiction writers, students, academics, lawyers, journalists, translators, and more. Scrivener won’t tell you how to write—it simply provides everything you need to start writing and keep writing. Scrivener makes it easy to structure ideas, write a first draft, […]

So here’s the deal. If you think the Twitter Files are still something legit or telling or powerful, watch this 30 minute interview that Mehdi Hasan did with Matt Taibbi (at Taibbi’s own demand): Hasan came prepared with facts. Lots of them. Many of which debunked the core foundation on which Taibbi and his many […]

Despite several years of blistering hype about the rise of the “Metaverse” (read: Facebook’s clumsy attempt to dominate a market simply by rebranding video games, AR, and VR as…something else), new data from Piper Sandler indicates that there’s little real interest among younger Americans. According to the firm’s latest survey of 5,600 teens (part of […]

Russia’s fighting a war in Ukraine and a war at home. As residents express their displeasure with their government, the government’s cameras and facial recognition AI are going into overdrive to ensure Putin and his pals control the narrative. Unfortunately, the Russian government is getting some help from the United States, albeit inadvertently. Russia has […]

If there is one aspect of trademark law that should be the most understandable for business leaders and their lawyers, if not for the general public, it’s that you generally cannot get trademarks on purely descriptive terms. Yes, you can name your product Coca-Cola and get a trademark on that term, but you cannot get […]

A leak of alleged customers’ targets — a list that included journalists, human rights activists, religious leaders, government critics, and political figures — turned a trickle of news about Israel-based NSO Group into a steady stream of harrowing revelations. NSO was the best in the spyware business, offering customers a zero-click exploit that almost fully […]

Elon Musk has repeatedly referred to himself as a “free speech absolutist” and promised that on his Twitter even his “worst critics” would be welcome. Of course, as we noted from early on, Elon actually has a horrible track record regarding punishing his own employees for their speech. That includes using ridiculously broad NDAs to […]

Using the uTalk Learning App you can listen to real native speakers to help you navigate through your next vacation or business trip. With more than 2,500 words and phrases to learn in each of our 150+ languages, the app gives you a running start on your journey to language fluency. Simple and easy to […]

There’s something about some government agencies that make them revolt against the notion of checks and balances. Some federal agencies have extra privileges that make it much, much easier. A large number of agencies can issue their own subpoenas, demanding data, recordings, and other information from their targets — self-issued documents that bypass the court […]

While there’s a lot of talk about how getting privacy legislation right is hard (it is), or that doing it wrong could pose many problems (it could), that should never derail attention from the real reason the U.S. has no federal privacy law in 2023: Congress is blisteringly, comically corrupt. And with numerous, deep-pocketed industries […]

Policing copyright infringement is hard. Hard for those operating websites that allow for the public to input content and hard for the rightsholders that far too often use automated systems that suck out loud at determining what is actually infringing and what isn’t. This is a lesson currently being learned by the European Union, as […]

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. – L.P. Hartley, The Go-Betweens Accurate. And sometimes a foreign country wants to be the past. Somewhere between a faded photo of Benito Mussolini’s inverted corpse and an ill-received performance by the Stormtroopers of Death at the Teatro alla Scala lies this inexplicable decision […]

“Evergreening” refers to the practice by pharmaceutical companies of making small changes to a drug, often about to come off patent, in order to gain a new patent that extends its manufacturer’s monopoly control over it. The first Techdirt post about evergreening appeared almost exactly ten years ago. It concerned the rejection by the Indian […]

DMCA abuse is never going to go away. Plenty of IP protection firms send out unvetted takedown notices in bulk, resulting in the targeting of non-infringers by takedown demands. To maintain their safe harbor protections, entities hosting third-party content tend to side with those sending the notices. For platforms hosting millions or billions of uploads, […]

Curiosity Stream is the award-winning streaming and on-demand viewing destination where you can journey through our world and beyond. Its immersive experiences feature experts like David Attenborough, who will teach you about the natural world, Michio Kaku, and Brian Greene, who will broaden your perspective on space, time, and the future with stunning visuals, and […]

For years I’ve joked that everyone who hasn’t thought about trust & safety thinks that it’s easy: just do what I would do. The assumption is that there’s a “right” set of ways to handle these questions, when the reality is that there’s a very broad set of unclear areas, where there are reasonable arguments […]

We’ve noted for years how, despite a lot of political lip service to “bridging the digital divide,” the U.S. still doesn’t truly know where broadband is or isn’t available. Despite spending $400 billion and counting, the FCC has done an abysmal job accurately mapping broadband speeds and availability, or holding monopolies responsible for false coverage […]

Huntsville, Alabama police officer William Darby was the only officer on the scene who felt a suicidal man needed to be murdered. And he was the last to arrive, uninvited, to a scene apparently under control, handled by two other officers who were doing an admirable job de-escalating the situation. Darby made his decision to […]

Today is April 4th, or 04/04 no matter which direction you use for showing dates (and, look, while it’s ingrained in my head, I think we can all admit that the US version of month/day/year is kinda weird.). But, error code 404 is (somewhat famously) the HTML code for “page not found.” In the early […]

Legacy media operations really, really want tech companies that send them traffic to pay them as well. From Rupert Murdoch’s link tax in Australia to the very bad JCPA in America, these requirements are nonsensical and run directly counter to the core functioning of the internet. Currently, one of the biggest pushes for such a […]