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People keep claiming that Mastodon isn’t scaring Elon Musk, but it’s pretty clear that he’s worried about the exodus of people from Twitter. With his bizarrely short-sighted decision to end free access to the Twitter API, driving developers over to Mastodon, some people realized that the various tools that people use to find their Twitter […]

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The evidence-free moral panic over social media keeps getting stupider, and when things get particularly stupid about the internet, you can pretty much rely on Utah politicians being there to proudly embrace the terrible ideas. The latest are a pair of bills that seem to be on the fast track, even in Utah’s short legislative […]

Last August, cable giant Charter Communications (Spectrum) was slapped with a $7 billion lawsuit after one of the company’s cable technicians murdered an 83-year-old customer after hours. The lawsuit (pdf) claims that Charter had eliminated a more rigorous screening process when they merged with Time Warner Cable, letting the employee and his history slip through the cracks. […]

Back in August last year, Techdirt covered a major announcement by the US government that all taxpayer-supported research should be immediately available to the public at no cost. As Mike wrote at the time, this is really big, not least for the following key element mentioned in the press release: This policy guidance will end […]

With the rise of ChatGPT over the past few months, the inevitable moral panics have begun. We’ve seen a bunch of people freaking out about how ChatGPT will be used by students to do their homework, how it will replace certain jobs, and other claims. Most of these are totally overblown. While some cooler heads […]

Last November, The Verge discovered that Anker, the maker of popular USB chargers and the Eufy line of “smart” cameras, had a bit of a security issue. Despite the fact the company advertised its Eufy cameras as having “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, security researcher Paul Moore and a hacker named Wasabi found it was pretty easy to intercept […]

Huh. It had actually felt like quite some time since Elon Musk had last done something so stupid as to send a new bunch of users to Mastodon. But, apparently he can’t go that long without helping to do so. Last night, I had actually started working on a story about how developers were increasingly […]

If you’re a good company, you try to make customers happy and deal honestly with their complaints. If you’re Liberty Bell Moving and Storage, Inc., you threaten unhappy customers with lawsuits and steadily escalating fees for expressing their displeasure with your service. It seems only the worst entities insist on tucking non-disparagement clauses into their […]

The Complete Excel, VBA, and Data Science Training Bundle has 13 courses to introduce you to the basics of data science. You’ll start with beginner courses on Excel, Python, Machine Learning, and VBA. You’ll move on to more advanced skills like automating spreadsheets, working with Pivot Tables, creating financial models, and more. It’s on sale […]

Believe it or not, there are some interesting, if confusing, unsettled copyright law questions regarding interviews. A few times in the past we’ve written about the subjects of interviews claiming copyright over those interviews (or the estate’s of deceased individuals making such claims). There was even a law journal article a few years back exploring […]

For a while there, everybody’s least favorite cable company, Comcast, was weathering the cord cutting revolution fairly well. The company’s losses on the cable TV side could simply be recouped over on its broadband side, where a monopoly protected it from having to actually, you know, try. Things have shifted. Last year, Comcast saw a […]

For sports fans in general, one of the great benefits of social media sites, particularly Twitter, has been the way highlights are shared across those platforms, both by individuals and, more commonly, by the leagues and teams themselves. Both Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) have been particularly good at this, […]

What’s being presented by ShotSpotter as good news for people who feel they’ve been wrongly accused, doesn’t actually appear to be all that comforting. ShotSpotter’s mic tech and AI combine forces to report possible gunshots to law enforcement customers. It’s very hit or miss, he said with all possible puns intended. ShotSpotter says it’s nearly […]

At the beginning of the year, we kicked off the latest edition of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! Last night, the jam came to a close, with a few submissions sneaking in right before the deadline and bringing us to a total of 20 entries this year. We’ve only just […]

Here’s a weird one. With the rapid pickup of Mastodon and other ActivityPub-powered federated social media, there has been some movement among those in the media to make better use of the platform themselves. For example, most recently, the German news giant Heise announced it was setting up its own Mastodon server, where it will […]

This is some bad looking precedent here. Everyone is right to be concerned about election disinformation, especially if that disinformation is intended to keep certain people from voting, but historically, it has been public officials facing criminal charges for voter suppression, rather than toxic Twitter trolls. And Douglas Mackey, known as “Ricky Vaughn” on Twitter, […]

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We’ve been writing a bunch lately about DoNotPay, the massively hyped up “AI lawyer” run by Stanford dropout* Joshua Browder. Again, the company has received a ton of publicity regarding its “robot lawyer,” often from some of the publicity stunts that Browder pulls. Again, I think the underlying concept of using technology to help people […]

Frustrated by factual reality, science, and an independent press, the GOP and its wealthy backers have spent the better part of forty years building an alternative reality propaganda machine across AM radio, local broadcasting (with the help of Sinclair Broadcasting), fake “pink slime” local newspapers, cable news (OANN, Newsmax, Fox), and now the Internet. While […]

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you will be familiar with the concept of the anti-“woke” culture war the Republican Party grows and farms for its own purposes. This isn’t to say there aren’t real cultural conflicts we need to work out as a country, but that […]

You might recall that Aereo founder Chaitanya Kanojia’s attempt to disrupt the TV industry ran face-first into an army of broadcaster lawyers and a notably ugly ruling by the Supreme Court. Undaunted, Kanojia returned with a new plan to try and disrupt the broken U.S. broadband industry. But that plan isn’t going so hot either. Kanojia’s new […]

Patent trolls make patents, and argue over them. They don’t have to ever make the thing described in their patents, if it’s even possible to determine what those things are. Instead, they generate legal threats and waste the time and money of companies that do do these things. This month’s Stupid Patent of the Month is a […]

For years now, I’ve talked about the impossibility of doing content moderation well at scale. I know that execs at various tech companies often point to my article on this, and that includes top executives at Meta, who have cited my work on this issue. But it still amazes me when those companies act as […]

Late last year, it was revealed that MSG Entertainment (the owner of several New York entertainment venues, including the titular Madison Square Garden) was using its facial recognition tech to, in essence, blacklist its owner’s enemies. Those targeted included lawyers working for firms currently engaged in litigation against MSG Entertainment. Owner James Dolan, through his […]

The 2023 Metaverse and AR Developer Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn the core skills needed for Augmented Reality development. You’ll learn how to build websites, apps, games and more using A-Frame, and XR Interaction Toolkit. There’s also a course dedicated solely to explaining the Metaverse. This bundle is on sale for $29. […]

Have you noticed that everything that Elon Musk insisted was “bad” about the old Twitter (often incorrectly) are things… he’s now doing himself, but in even more ridiculous ways? He insisted that Twitter was run by people who were promoting ideological political views. Yet… it was Elon Musk (not old Twitter management) who publicly insisted […]

After years of saying password sharing wasn’t really a big deal and was akin to free advertising, Netflix recently announced it would be cracking down on password sharing. It started with a new trial in the global south where users were nagged until they paid an additional fee if they shared their password with users outside of […]

We’ve written a few stories lately about DoNotPay, the “robot lawyer” service whose gimmick of an automated AI-driven tool that would help users deal with challenges like getting out of parking tickets or cancelling subscription services that are difficult to get out of sounds like a really enticing idea. But there have long been questions […]

I just want to share some back-of-the-envelope math. I’m increasingly convinced that Twitter (or at least the network neighborhoods that comprise my Twitter experience) is becoming a ghost town. Here’s why: A couple months ago, I spoke with Nancy Scola for her story about why DC-types can’t seem to quit Twitter. One of my comments […]

There have been a bunch of stories about how one of Elon’s big “cost saving” techniques was to stop paying for basically anything, including rent. To cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks, three people close to the company said. Twitter has […]

If it can conceivably be considered a “third party record,” the government is going to seek warrantless access to it. The Third Party Doctrine — ushered into existence by the Supreme Court in 1979 — says there’s no expectation of privacy in information shared with third parties. That case dealt with phone records. People may […]

ByteBoi is an open-source retro game console that you can assemble and code yourself. It can be coded in Make Code Arcade – an awesome online coding interface with a bunch of examples and tutorials. You can even use your ByteBoi for remote controlling your Wheelson because of the built-in Wi-Fi chipset. Build your own […]

We knew that Elon Musk had driven away tons of top advertisers, which is kind of a big deal, as the company has been desperate for revenue, if only to cover the interest payments Elon loaded the company with by using a $13 billion loan as part of his $44 billion purchase. Elon keeps talking […]

Apple has never looked too kindly upon users actually repairing their own devices. The company’s ham-fisted efforts to shut down, sue, or otherwise imperil third-party repair shops are legendary. As are the company’s efforts to force recycling shops to shred Apple products (so they can’t be refurbished and re-used). That’s before you get to Apple’s often comical attacks on […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is PaulT with a comment about just one of the many problematic details about the DoNotPay “AI lawyer”: “Josh added a clause to the TOS prohibiting users from testing the website prior to using it in a live dispute.” Because if there’s anything a software […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the FCC was backing off its plans to weaken the definition of broadband, but still couldn’t admit that limited competition is a problem, and was apparently hoping that some phony dedication to rural broadband would distract people from how it just killed net neutrality. The State of Montana […]

You will recall that we spent a great deal of words and posts in 2021 discussing the problems Twitch created for itself by deciding to suddenly change the way it enforces copyright infringement claims for its streaming community, mostly without informing that community of those changes and remaining extremely opaque and vague about the standards […]

Well, a lot has happened since I first started looking into the “World’s First Robot Lawyer,” from DoNotPay. First, Joshua Browder, DoNotPay’s CEO, reached out to me via direct message (DM) and told me he would get me access to my documents by 2 PM the next day – Tuesday, January 24th – saying that […]

About a half-decade ago, major social media companies finally did something to prevent their platforms from being used to engage in mass surveillance. Prompted by revelations in public records, Twitter and Facebook began cutting off API access to certain data scrapers that sold their services to government agencies. Twitter blocked both Dataminr and Geofeedia from […]

It’s impossible to be the “aggressor” of the free world. Those words just don’t make sense together. “Defender of the free world,” maybe. If you’re going on the offensive, it seems unlikely you’re there to protect anyone’s freedoms. But that appears to be where America is heading: the aggressor that somehow protects rights and freedoms […]

We’ve explained how telecom and media giants have pulled out all the stops trying to block Gigi Sohn from being seated at the FCC. That has involved a sleazy smear campaign, seeded in the press by non-profits linked to companies like News Corporation, AT&T, and Comcast, falsely accusing Sohn of being a radical extremist who […]

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There have been a whole bunch of antitrust lawsuits filed against Google over the last few years. The DOJ filed one in October of 2020 that was pathetically weak. That one seemed like it was Attorney General Bill Barr appeasing then President Trump with what Trump hoped would be an election-boosting attack on “evil woke […]

We’ve already noted how HBO and Discovery executives keep demonstrating the immense, pointless harm of media megamergers. You’ll recall AT&T’s $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV wound up being a hot mess, forcing AT&T to take a huge loss and run for the exits after laying off more than 50,000 employees. The subsequent […]

In a move that shouldn’t really surprise anyone, Meta has said that both Facebook and Instagram will be restoring Donald Trump’s accounts, which it had “indefinitely” suspended in the wake of the January 6th insurrection two years ago. As you’ll recall, after that suspension, the Oversight Board had agreed to hear Trump’s appeal of the […]

You might recall how struggling satellite TV network DirecTV recently kicked right wing propaganda channel OANN off of its cable lineup because it simply wasn’t profitable. That prompted weeks of performative hysteria by the GOP about how they were being “unfairly censored,” even prompting involvement of numerous Republican AGs who apparently had nothing better to […]

Who is the Barbra Streisand of Bollywood? There’s a new documentary, produced by the BBC about India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. Specifically, the documentary is focused on Modi’s relationship with India’s Muslim community, including his apparent role during some anti-Muslim riots (where over 1,000 people were killed) two decades ago. And, apparently, it doesn’t make […]

The TSA isn’t great at catching terrorists. It isn’t even great at catching contraband, failing nearly 100% of the time in audits of its efficiency. What it is good at is catching eye-catching things, most of them completely unrelated to providing safer travel. Just recently, the TSA sent out a press release detailing the contraband […]