Techdirt

The 2023 Complete Cybersecurity Ethical Hacking Bundle has 10 courses to help you go from beginner to expert in cybersecurity. You’ll learn about penetration testing, AWS Security Management, how to use Metasploit, how to protect Wi-Fi networks, and more. The bundle is on sale for $25. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated […]

In the last few weeks I’ve written about how Elon Musk’s “changes” to how Twitter is running have done an amazing job convincing people to join Mastodon. And I’ve also noted how many more people (including myself!) are realizing how much better social media can be when it’s decentralized, rather than owned and run by […]

When last we checked in with One America News (OAN), it was trying (with the help of numerous Republican AGs) to pretend that DirecTV’s decision to boot the barely watched conspiracy network from its cable lineup was part of a vast, diabolical cabal to censor conservatives. The AG lawsuit filed last March pulls out the traditional “Conservatives […]

Shirking accountability is a standard law enforcement pattern and practice. Those enforcing laws often feel they’re not obligated to follow the law. This attitude is internalized in every sense of the word. It’s not just blowing off outside oversight. The police refuse to police themselves, allowing good officers to go bad and bad officers to […]

A decade or so ago there was a wave of warnings by privacy advocates about how modern toys had become major surveillance devices. Makers of voice recognition toys in particular had a nasty habit, researchers warned, of collecting everything your child says, poorly “anonymizing” the data (a meaningless term), then failing to secure that data […]

Josh Browder — the creator of the DoNotPay AI lawbot that helped users dodge $4 million in parking tickets — thinks his AI is ready to head to the big leagues. Up until now, the bot’s progress (and its creator’s claims) have been incremental. Browder created a version of the bot to assist people in […]

Now that the House is (barely) in the control of the Republican Party, we expected an awful lot of dumb anti-tech laws (the Democrats are also pushing dumb anti-tech laws, but of a different nature). The GOP has, in the recent past, laid out a big long list of bills as part of its “big […]

If you want access to content and communications, it seems pretty obvious you should get a warrant. There are plenty of warrant exceptions, but rooting around in things pretty much everyone believes have an expectation of privacy — whether it’s their house, their phones, or their online document storage services — generally requires a warrant. […]

The 2023 Agile and Scrum Master Training Bundle has 7 courses to help you master various skills needed to be an expert project manager. Courses focus on handling difficult team members, risk management, creating user stories, and more. It’s on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A […]

Back when Elon Musk was first exploring taking over Twitter, he spoke with Jack Dorsey who (as text messages released as part of Musk’s lawsuit over the purchase revealed) told Musk that the “original sin” of Twitter was setting it up as a private company, rather than being an open source protocol. This wasn’t a […]

The auto industry in Massachusetts has successfully stalled consumer technology repair reform in the state, after repeatedly and falsely claiming that shoring up consumer repair options would be a massive boon to the state’s sexual predators. In late 2020, Massachusetts lawmakers (with overwhelming public support) passed an expansion of the state’s “right to repair” law. The original […]

At the beginning of the year, we launched the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! We’re calling on game designers of all stripes to build analog or digital games based on the works that have entered the public domain this year, including: Check out Duke’s Public Domain Day article or Copyright […]

Every year, a little after New Years, I try to do a post looking at the previous years results on Techdirt, what people were interested in, what commenters were rated highly and whatnot. I always wait until after New Years (unlike some other sites!) to make sure I have the full year’s data. This year, […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a response to someone who compared Saudi Arabia jailing Wikipedia administrators to the FBI content flagging revealed in the Twitter Files: One involves a government jailing people for years if not decades for saying unflattering things about the people in […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, Germany’s new hate speech law was straight out the gates with two incidents of collateral damage. Trump was complaining about the US’s “very weak” libel laws, perhaps because Steve Bannon’s publisher was very unimpressed with Trump’s defamation threats. Meanwhile, Dennis Prager was seeking an injunction against YouTube and […]

Over the summer, we discussed what looked to be a fascinating trademark dispute between NBA superstar Luka Doncic and his mother, Mirjam Poterbin. As a quick summary, Doncic consented to have trademarks referring to him registered to his mother, as he’d become a star overseas at age 13. That itself isn’t all that odd. But […]

Last night, I saw a bunch of folks complaining that the various apps through which they accessed Twitter, were no longer working. People using Tweetbot, Twitteriffic, Tweeten, and others all noted that they were blocked from actually using those services to read Twitter. It quickly became clear that Twitter’s API was completely down. There was […]

In early December 2022, a former Israeli Minister of Defense and Chief of Staff of the Israel Defense Forces, three other retired Israeli generals, a former Commissioner of the Israeli Police, and a former head of the Mossad’s Intelligence Directorate filed an amicus brief before the U.S. Supreme Court in Gonzalez v. Google arguing that Internet platforms should be civilly […]

Right after the 2016 election that saw Donald Trump elected President, there was this collective wail among many who were unable to comprehend how this could have happened, searching for someone to blame. Two targets quickly emerged: social media and Russia. Often the two were combined into “Russian trolls on social media.” As we’ve noted, […]

Last year, the Supreme Court handed down a ruling in a school free speech case that came down squarely, if very narrowly, on the side of the student. The student suing over being kicked off the cheerleading squad for sending a snapchat message saying “fuck school fuck softball fuck cheer fuck everything” prevailed, with the […]

This refurbished Dell Chromebook is an 11.6” touchscreen 2-in-1 laptop that performs tasks like browsing, video watching, and more. Built with the durability to withstand scholastic environments and multiple modes that adjust to varying learning needs, this device offers powerful multitasking performance for your daily tasks with its Intel Celeron processor. Its 32GB of memory […]

For all the talk of the “Twitter Files,” as we’ve detailed, they’ve mostly been, at best, misleading, and frequently actively wrong. One of the big reveals, we were told, was that the Files were going to expose the political machinations of how Twitter banned former President Trump. And, indeed, Bari Weiss’s “Part Five” of the […]

We’ve noted more than a few times that U.S. taxpayers have spent nearly $400 million on mapping U.S. broadband, yet the FCC still somehow routinely produces maps that greatly overstate broadband coverage, and greatly understate the obvious impact of monopolization and stunted broadband competition. All U.S. broadband policy is then based on data that doesn’t […]

Leave it to the NYPD to suggest some people’s rights just don’t matter. The NYPD has resisted pretty much every reform effort shoved in its general direction and this one — which would affect questioning of juvenile detainees — is being resisted as well. (“Stop resisting!” only works in one direction, unfortunately.) Here’s C.J. Ciaramella […]

If you go back and review Techdirt stories about Dungeons & Dragons, the beloved tabletop fantasy roleplaying game, you will see that most of them focus on the stupidity of moral panics, in which D&D is often swept up. This post is decidedly different. Wizards of the Coast (WotC) recently announced there would be changes […]

Law enforcement officers have a disturbing propensity for abusing their power. And far too many abuse this power to engage in things entirely unrelated to police work, like browsing databases for information about members of the opposite sex. When someone with a lot of power expresses an unprofessional interest in someone, the power imbalance makes […]

If you’ve been reading Techdirt over the past few months, literally nothing in this latest Cody Johnston video will be surprising or new, but it does do a really nice job of laying it all out in a pretty clear way in just 52 minutes of humorous exposition: It sounds like Part II will be […]

This is always going to be a thing with facial recognition. Hundreds of algorithms have been tested. Pretty much every single one does worse “recognizing” minorities than it does recognizing the predominant deployers of facial recognition tech: white males. In 2020, the Detroit PD managed to rack up consecutive false arrests by relying far too […]

The Complete 2022 AWS Certification Training Bundle will help you learn all about AWS while also helping to prepare you to sit 6 certification exams. Courses cover Route53, EC2, S3, CloudFront, Autoscaling, Load Balancing, RDS, RedShift, DynamoDB, EMR, VPC, and more. You’ll also learn about basic security and compliance aspects of AWS, and be able […]

President Biden has a new Congress, specifically with an already dysfunctional House of Representatives likely to explode at a moment’s notice. But he’s still pushing his own slightly confused tech agenda, which is a mix of accurately diagnosing some problems, misdiagnosing others, and being vastly confused about potential solutions for all of them. It’s unfortunate […]

England has taken a big step toward crushing the digital divide with new rules requiring that all new home builds must include gigabit (1000 Megabits per second, Mbps) broadband. Estimates suggest that around 12 percent of the 171,190 new homes constructed in England last year didn’t have gigabit broadband capabilities upon completion. Amendments to Building Regulations […]

We’ve been talking a lot about video game exclusivity over the past couple of years. The sudden uptick in concern over a longstanding practice that ebbs and flows with time is largely related to industry consolidation of studios coming out of the COVID pandemic. In times of financial stress in an industry, that is often […]

As you’re probably aware, now that it’s January, we’re running our annual public domain game jam, for games based on works from 1927. This is the 5th year we’ve done this, ever since the public domain (finally) returned to the US after decades with no works ever reaching the public domain, due to never-ending copyright […]

U.S. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Even in instances where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly refused to. In some cases, these industry ghost written […]

For at least 3 months in early 2020, France-based EncroChat wasn’t in sole control of its communication services. Its servers had been compromised by European law enforcement — a joint effort involving law enforcement agencies located in France, the UK, and the Netherlands. Authorized by a single court order from a French court, the Joint […]

They say you should never stop learning, and at Stone River, that mantra is a way of life. Through this unlimited subscription, you’ll get full access to 800+ courses and 4,800 hours of online learning, covering everything from iOS mobile development to graphic design. Plus, you’ll get a range of VIP perks, including unlimited eBooks, […]

Elon Musk insisted that a key reason he took over Twitter was in support of “free speech.” As we noted, it was pretty clear that he never really understood what free speech actually means. Musk likes to say that his focus as the owner of Twitter has been to allow all legal speech, but as […]

Last year BMW took ample heat for its plans to turn heated seats into a costly $18 per month subscription in numerous countries. As we noted at the time, BMW is already including the hardware in new cars and adjusting the sale price accordingly. So it’s effectively charging users a new, recurring fee to enable […]

It’s amazing how some people think trademarks work. In the last week or so, several media outlets briefly went into a frenzy over a trademark application that was filed for Tesla’s yet to be released Cybertruck specifically for vehicle categories other than “on land” vehicles. Notably, Elon Musk made some questionable claims that the Cybertruck, […]

Rap artist Afroman’s biggest hit is “Because I Got High,” a track that details how his best intentions were undone by his weed intake. So, one might reasonably suspect marijuana might be found at his residence. But there’s very little that’s reasonable about what happened to Afroman four months ago. Earlier this year, he became […]

There have long been attacks on the global, open nature of the internet. Traditionally these came from authoritarian regimes looking to wall off portions of the internet and exert greater control of them, but lately we’ve also been seeing growing threats from democratic countries in the form of problematic laws and regulations. Recently, we wrote […]

Shot-spotting tech is notoriously unreliable. The industry leader, ShotSpotter, continues to claim it’s helping solve gun crime even as many law enforcement customers shift from “current” to “former.” In Newark, New Jersey, three-quarters of “gunshots” “detected” by ShotSpotter were false positives. In another city, the failure rate wasn’t quite as spectacular, but it was little […]

Despite having already fired a huge percentage of Twitter’s trust & safety team handling issues around content moderation, including the teams handling child sexual abuse material and election denialism, last week Elon apparently fired another chunk of the team. Just in time for organizers of the insurrection in Brazil to make use of social media […]

Buy 1, get 1 free! Each order comes with 2 drones. 1 Alpha Z PRO Ultra HD Dual-Camera Drone and 1 Flying Fox Ultra HD Dual-Camera Drone. Both drones are equipped with a 4K front camera and a 720P bottom camera. The Alpha Z PRO comes in a sleek black color, while the Flying Fox […]

There are plenty of governments operating on platforms of pure evil, but the Saudi government is one the few that continues to be given a pass by other governments who fear alienating a source of oil located in the Mideast. North Korea may be evil but it’s limited by its lack of a functioning economy. […]

Once just the concern of pissed off farmers and nerdy tinkerers, the last two years have seen a groundswell of broader culture awareness about “right to repair,” and the perils of letting companies like Apple, John Deere, Microsoft, or Sony monopolize repair options, making repairing things you own both more difficult and way more expensive. John Deere’s draconian repair […]

Law enforcement agencies have no interest in tracking how often officers kill people. Despite all the talk about police reform, very few states require accurate reporting on deadly force deployments. Even the DOJ doesn’t care. The federal face of law enforcement has been required to compile this data for over two decades. It has yet […]

It’s the rise of the lawbots, something not even foretold by Futurama, which allowed a “simple hyper-chicken from a backwoods asteroid” to perform much of the series’ criminal justice work. AI-in-everything is on the rise. And that includes lowball court cases, as Lauren Leffer reports for Gizmodo. An AI-based legal advisor is set to play […]

However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they’re arguably worse in prisons. For decades, journalists have outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resulting sky high rates (upwards of $14 per minute) for inmate families. Efforts to […]

Trying to legislate sexual identity is a fool’s errand. Plenty of Arizona state fools are backing a bill that attempts to do that, though. When you can’t figure out how to stop people from outward displays of their sexual identity, you start getting unconstitutional in a hurry. This bill — now being booted about by […]