Techdirt

The moral high ground is almost impossible to hold. The United States has portrayed itself as the world ideal for personal freedom and government accountability, despite those holding power working tirelessly to undermine both of those ideals. It’s not that other world governments aren’t as bad or worse. It’s that “whataboutism” isn’t an excuse for […]

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Get access to our special online anniversary event » Techdirt began in 1997 as a simple newsletter about the latest technology news. Now, over 75,000 posts and nearly 2-million comments later, we’re celebrating our 25th anniversary! To mark the occasion, we’re holding a special online event on September 9th, 2022 at 11am PT / 2pm ET, where […]

Donald Trump has spent much of this week raging over on Truth Social and passing on nonsense QAnon conspiracy theory bullshit. And now it comes out that Google has so far refused to approve the Android app of Truth Social for the Google Play store, in large part over Truth Social’s failure to moderate violent […]

As a publicly traded company, it’s simply not good enough to provide an affordable service that people genuinely like. The pressure to deliver quarter over quarter growth often takes on a tendency toward auto-cannibalism; price hikes, customer support cuts, dumb ideas justified through greed, all designed to goose growth, but often at the cost of […]

As humanity marches on towards the expansion of artificial intelligence, we are finding many ways to use this technology while waiting for it to get smart enough to kill us all and bring on the Age of the Robot. Platforms have attempted to solve the impossibility of moderation at scale by employing AI, with no […]

Were you ever so terrible at your job that your entire place of employment was put out of business? Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that none of you are that inept or unprofessional. But it only takes one bad apple to result in the tossing of the whole bunch, provided that the […]

Chattanooga, Tennessee is one of a growing number of U.S. cities to build its own broadband network. The ISP, tacked on to the city’s existing EPB electricity utility, has routinely delivered speeds faster and more affordable than the services provided by regional utilities like Comcast. While community-run broadband is portrayed as boondoggle socialism by telecom […]

Israeli exploit developer NSO Group has drawn a lot of heat over the past several months after it was revealed its malware had been deployed by its customers to target dissidents, journalists, opposition leaders, and other people governments don’t like but aren’t normally considered to be terrorists or criminals. The sleek, award-winning Pegasus malware developed […]

You may have heard last week that Moderna is suing Pfizer, claiming that Pfizer’s COVID vaccine violates Moderna’s patents. You can read the legal complaint which is full of bluster about how brilliant Moderna is and how it saved the world and blah blah blah. While it does mention that Moderna teamed up with the […]

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More than nine years of news cycles ago, the initial Snowden leak dropped. The next few years were filled with lawsuits, extensive news coverage, reform efforts (some better than others), the unplanned retirement of one bulk collection program, and an uptick in public outcry against large-scale government surveillance programs. Nearly a decade later, the NSA’s […]

The reversal of Roe is resulting in dramatic new pressures on privacy reform, given how easily consumer location data can be weaponized against abortion seekers and those helping them. Not just by authoritarian-leaning state governments, but potentially by vigilantes who’ll find little trouble buying such data on the cheap from a wide array of irresponsible […]

Denuvo is back! While the company only got a single mention in 8 months thus far in 2022, the once-vaunted antipiracy DRM company made quite the splash in the years prior. If you don’t want to go through tens and tens of posts about Denuvo, I can give you a quick breakdown. Denuvo DRM was […]

Police accountability has been a hot topic for years now. Recent events have increased demands for accountability. And, as demands have increased, so have legislative efforts to shield cops from accountability. Arizona lawmakers have been doing what they can for cops for a few years now. With plenty of court precedent upholding a First Amendment […]

We’ve got a cross-post episode for you this week! Recently, Mike appeared on the Walled Culture podcast to discuss a wide range of topics including reflections on the SOPA/PIPA fight, ways to support creators, and the world of NFTs. You can listen to the entire interview on this week’s episode of the Techdirt Podcast. Follow […]

The pattern is pretty common: young companies innovate, older companies litigate. When you can’t keep up and you can’t succeed by beating the market, you turn to the courts to try to squeeze cash out of those more successful than you. Often this involves patent lawsuits or handing your unused patents off to patent trolls […]

While this ruling [PDF] is likely correct under current Fourth Amendment case law, it does raise questions about the propriety of mass data grabs that aren’t particularized to suspected criminals or investigation targets. (h/t Orin Kerr) Tennessee resident Matthew Bledsoe was recently convicted during a jury trial for his participation in the January 6, 2021 […]

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Next Friday, September 9th, we’ll be hosting our 25th anniversary event. We’ll post the actual details later this week, but the best way to make sure you can attend is to be a regular paying subscriber to Techdirt. You can back us via the qualifying Techdirt Insider packages (Crystal Ball, Watercooler, or Behind the Curtain — or the equivalent […]

Unfortunately, last night, the California Senate passed some horribly dangerous bills that we’ve been warning about the past few weeks — and they’re heading to Governor Newsom’s desk for signing. It seems likely he will sign them, even as that will be a huge, and dangerous mistake. First up was AB 2273 the “Age Appropriate […]

The challenge with passing a functional, useful privacy law for the Internet era is several fold. One is the need for baseline competency in lawmakers, an increasing challenge in U.S. politics. But the other issue is corruption, and the fact that any meaningful privacy law first has to run a gantlet of lobbyists with unlimited […]

Secularists teaching the state of Texas a lesson in unintended consequences appears to be becoming something of a theme. To be fair, this is a problem of Texas’ own making, as the state continues to churn out laws that aren’t just conservative, which would be fine, but at least questionable from a constitutionality standpoint. The […]

It appears that free speech absolutist Elon Musk is, once again, not such a fan of free speech when it criticizes him or his companies. Perhaps he’s too busy penning columns for China’s official internet censor to know this, but given other reports about how much he micromanages things happening at Tesla, you have to […]

Vic Mignogna is an American voice actor specializing in English dubs of Japanese anime. His career dates back to the early 2000s. Unfortunately for Mignogna, he’s now mostly known as a serial sexual harasser. Those accusations began surfacing in 2019, with some accusations dating back nearly a decade before he became a successful voice actor. […]

Look, I’m a small journalism outfit. A very small one. So, in theory, a law that effectively lets me demand free cash from Google and Facebook should be a good thing for me. But, it would actually be a disaster. That’s why I spoke out against the idea last year when Senator Amy Klobuchar and […]

If you thought cookie pop-ups were an annoying nuisance, just wait until you have to scan your face for some third party to “verify your age” after California’s new design code becomes law. On Friday, I wrote about the companies and organizations most likely to benefit from California’s AB 2273, the “Age Appropriate Design Code” […]

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It’s not often you see a civil forfeiture case handled by an appeals court. Most cases are never given their day in court. Many go completely unchallenged. The evidentiary bar for the government is low and the obligations placed on those whose property has been taken is high. Most people can’t afford to fight forfeitures, […]

We’ve noted a few times how there’s an absolutely historic amount of money being thrown at the U.S. broadband “digital divide” this year. The broadband infrastructure bill alone designates $42 billion to expanding broadband access. Billions more in COVID relief money started flowing this week courtesy of the Treasury Department. But there’s a tiny problem. Despite a […]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about the impossibility of complying with the child protection bill being pushed in California. In first place, it’s That One Guy with a comment focusing on the carve-out for telcos and broadband providers: ‘They paid us off so of course […]

Five Years Ago As you probably know, this week was Techdirt’s 25th anniversary! And this week in 2017, of course, we were marking the 20th anniversary (and also published a podcast reflecting on the history of the site). As for other events this week in 2017: we saw yet another example of the problems with […]

The Los Angeles Police Department is one of the largest in the United States. To say it’s resistant to change would be an understatement. It — like the NYPD — is also resistant to oversight, transparency, and accountability. It may not be as openly antagonistic as the NYPD but it has a multitude of problems […]

After imploding in a spectacular fireball several years ago, MoviePass is giving things another try. The service has announced that it’s preparing to relaunch on Labor Day, nearly three years after the company was effectively shamed out of existence in spectacular fashion. While the remnants of MoviePass were sold to a private equity firm in […]

This week we’ve been writing about California bill AB 2273, a dangerous bill that has effectively sailed through the California legislature with little pushback, because it’s wrapped up in “protect the children” language and no one wants to be seen as not wanting to “protect the children.” But, like so many bills that frame themselves […]

Most protest activity targets government entities. So, it’s really no surprise that government entities prefer to target protesters. While most “free” nations won’t go so far as to introduce life sentences for protesting and/or fire a majority of local officials and replace them with handpicked loyalists, the general understanding is that protests targeting government entities […]

As was to be expected, the Twitter / Elon Musk showdown has been zooming ahead. With a trial set for mid-October (after the Chancellor overseeing the case mostly sided with Twitter on the preferred timeline), we’re deep in the discovery process, and there have been some disputes over how that’s going. On Wednesday, there was […]

The Microsoft Office Pro for Windows 2021 + HP EliteBook + Office Courses Bundle is pretty self-explanatory. You get one license for Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows and 8 courses to help you learn how to get the most out of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Publisher, and Access. You also get a refurbished HP […]

Here’s some amazingly good news amidst all of the nonsense of late. On Thursday, the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) at the White House announced that they were updating policy guidance to mandate that all taxpayer-supported research should be immediately available to the public at no cost. According to the actual policy guidelines, […]

Thanks to their dominance over broadband access in the U.S., cable companies had spent the last decade seeing significant broadband subscriber growth each and every quarter, since, well, there weren’t any other options. That ended during the second quarter of 2022, when companies like Comcast failed to add any new broadband subscribers for the first […]

Xbox’s management team’s inability to put out a clear public message regarding exclusive titles is becoming a real thing. When the season of acquisitions kicked off last year and Microsoft bought up Zenimax/Bethesda studios, the muddled messaging began. First were conflicting statements over the exclusivity of those studios’ titles, then came Microsoft saying those titles […]

There’s presumptive access to court records under the First Amendment. But that presumption presumes a lot of other things, as this recent Sixth Circuit Appeals Court ruling demonstrates. Just because something is open doesn’t necessarily mean it’s accessible. But the Sixth Circuit has decided access (no matter how limited) is still access, and that’s all […]

As you may recall, in his response to Twitter’s lawsuit trying to force him to fulfill the terms of the purchase agreement he made, Elon Musk relied on the findings of a tool called Botometer to argue that there were more bots on Twitter than Twitter was claiming. Again, I have to remind everyone, as […]

Four years ago, the Laredo Police Department arrested a citizen journalist for the crime of receiving an answer to a question she asked. Priscilla Villarreal patrols the streets of Laredo with her camera, reporting on police activity simply by turning on her camera during traffic stops, arrests, and other incidents, and providing commentary. Her reporting […]

Would you be surprised to find out that the censorial, moral panic bill based on hype and nonsense, but very likely to pass in California and potentially change how the internet functions… was actually written by a British noble with a savior complex? Yesterday I wrote about California’s AB 2273 bill and how it is […]

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Earlier this week, the popular Australian news publication Crikey, published what it is referring to as “The Lachlan Murdoch letters.” Lachlan Murdoch, as you likely know, is one of Rupert Murdoch’s sons, and who has increasingly been taking over the worst aspects of Murdoch’s approach to dividing society and profiting off of the carnage: namely […]

We’ve frequently noted how stupid it is that we’ve ceded a major communications platform to robocalling scammers and scumbags. We’ve noted for just as long that many regulatory “solutions” to the robocall problem have been dumb and half-hearted. Every six months the FCC will announce some new plan they promise will demolish robocalls, and every […]

I love this story so much I want it to find other similar vulgar stories so that those stories can have little baby vulgar stories for me to read. You may recall the saga of Erik Brunetti, founder of FUCT, a fashion brand with a name supposedly standing for Friends U Can’t Trust. We wrote […]

We have discussed at great lengths the many problems of the UK’s Online Safety Bill, in particular how it will be a disaster for the open internet. Unfortunately, it appears that important politicians seem to think that the Online Safety Bill will be a sort of magic wand that will make the “bad stuff” online […]