Techdirt

Plenty of countries have vulnerability disclosure requirements in place. This is supposed to increase the security of all users by requiring notification of affected platforms or software of exploits that may be used by malicious entities. Define “malicious entity” tho. The NSA has never abided by these requirements, despite being the free world leader in […]

I sent this notice around internally here at Techdirt, but figured it might be useful to state this publicly. Historically, Techdirt would often embed tweets using the embed feature from Twitter. This was always somewhat risky for a few reasons, including that people could (and often did) delete tweets. Though Twitter’s embed feature had a […]

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The government of India continues to increase its monitoring of residents’ day-to-day lives. Like pretty much every other country in the world, India relies on the internet to handle communications, data, and multiple services used by residents. The government, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has become less democratic and more authoritarian. To keep dissent to […]

Last week yet another study indicated that Apple’s heavily hyped new dedication to privacy was somewhat hollow, with the company’s apps often extensively tracking user behavior despite claims that doesn’t happen. It was the latest in a series of studies showcasing how Apple’s pivot to a privacy-dedicated company is often a bit performative once you […]

Loveland, Colorado has a police problem. The problem isn’t that there are too few, or that they’re being underfunded. The problem is the ones they already have — the ones that keep getting sued. On July 20, 2020, Target contacted Loveland PD to deal with a man (Keenan Stuckey) suffering from mental health issues in […]

Spaceboy Elon Musk promised the Twitter he was pretty much sued into purchasing would bring an end to all the free speech violations he claimed were happening every day under its liberal overlords. But being an edgelord troll rarely converts into competent management. Musk is speedrunning the moderation learning curve. But he is also discovering […]

Meet Roland “Spanky” Macher. Spanky, a name by which I really must insist on calling him throughout this post, was a restaurant owner and real estate businessman before going to prison for 30 months for failing to pay his taxes and lying to the bankruptcy court. While in prison, he crafted his a how-to-business opus, […]

About 18 months after he lost the 2020 election, Election Conspiracist in Chief Donald Trump sued Hillary Clinton and dozens of other Democrats over the election he had won nearly six years earlier. That lawsuit went nowhere. But going nowhere meant tying up a lot of the court’s time, what with Trump’s lawyers dumping 193-page […]

The all-new 2022 Ninja Dragon Blade X PRO 4K Dual Camera Quadcopter Drone, with built-in 3-side intelligent obstacle avoidance, can be operated just by touch through your mobile phone or tablet. You don’t need any instruction manual for the operation, simply take off and stay in the air by pressing one button. It has a […]

Look, by now it’s pretty clear that Elon Musk is deeply, deeply in above his head at Twitter, in ways that could have some pretty significant legal consequences. Even so, it’s still not the job of politicians to make decisions for him. He is free to destroy the company (and a good chunk of his […]

Despite a lot of political lip service paid toward bridging the digital divide, U.S. policymakers still don’t fully know where broadband is or isn’t available in the U.S. They have some well-informed notions, but outside analysts have long made it clear that the maps the government uses to shape policy and award subsidies are often […]

This week, we kick off the most insightful side of things with a comment from That One Guy on my post about how I still hope Twitter succeeds, where the comment highlights the biggest single thing that might get Elon to stop from burning the site to the ground: getting past his own ego. Step […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Comcast joined the chorus of ISPs trying to stop states from protecting privacy and net neutrality, and also targeted Colorado’s thoughts of building its own broadband network, though it was failing to overpower the voters there. Meanwhile, the SESTA fight was heating up: we talked more about how […]

In 2019, Houston police officers — relying on information generated by narcotic squad office Gerald Goines (who is now facing multiple criminal charges) — raided the home of Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle. Both occupants of the home were killed during the raid — one predicated on lies from Officer Goines. The fallout resulted in […]

You’ll be shocked to learn that the same MoviePass executives that routinely misled investors (and once even covertly changed user passwords to try and keep them from using a service they paid for) are now in even more trouble for their dodgy business practices. According to an announcement by the DOJ, former MoviePass executives Theodore […]

It’s always fun when copyright gets in the way of preservation efforts, especially when it comes at the hands of a mega-corporation like Apple. Many of you are likely to be familiar with WWDC, Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. This is one of those places where you get a bunch of Apple product reveals and news […]

Look, when it was revealed that Elon Musk’s first big plan was to make blue checks available for purchase for $8 a month, some of us quickly pointed out that the blue checks weren’t supposed to be about status, but about verification that someone is who they say they are. And, that’s kind of important. […]

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Yesterday I tweeted out a question about whether or not there was anyone left at Twitter who remembered that the company was under a pretty strict FTC consent decree: Apparently the answer was yes, but they didn’t include Elon Musk. Late last night, a few hours after that tweet, the Chief Information Security Officer, the […]

For the last few years Apple has worked overtime trying to market itself as a more privacy-focused company. 40-foot billboards of the iPhone with the slogan “Privacy. That’s iPhone” have been a key part of company marketing for years. The only problem: researchers keep highlighting how a lot of Apple’s well-hyped privacy changes are performative […]

Although trade deals are nominally about, well, trade, Techdirt readers know that they have become an important way to force through changes in areas like copyright and patents without any meaningful democratic scrutiny. That’s because trade deals are negotiated in secret, and then presented as done and dusted once talks have been concluded. The argument […]

We’ve noted for a while that the laws of physics would prohibit Elon Musk’s satellite broadband service from being truly disruptive at any real scale. Analysts had been quietly noting for a while that Starlink lacked the capacity to handle its projected user load. That recently resulted in obvious slowdowns, raising the question of when […]

We’ve talked in the past about “soft corruption,” a term I first heard from Larry Lessig. Lots of people have a general sense of what actual corruption is, but less understanding of the specifics. But, in general, people feel uncomfortable with the ways in which money can influence politics, even when it’s legal. Lessig’s concept […]

Jeff German, a forty-year veteran investigative reporter residing in Las Vegas, Nevada, was murdered earlier this year, allegedly by a local government official whose actions had received recent criticism in articles bylined by German. Robert Telles, a county official, has been arraigned in the murder of the journalist, something prosecutors claim was prompted by German’s […]

Text to speech enables brands to deliver an enhanced end-user experience while minimizing costs. Speechnow lets you create voice recordings and audio versions of content for YouTube videos, Facebook ads, Instagram posts, and more, in just a few steps. All you have to do is add text, choose voice and language, and wait for your […]

I keep pointing out that Twitter was already doing most of what Elon seems to want to do, but he (and his fans) has not quite realized that. Also, while Twitter was often slow in rolling stuff out, and not the best at explaining what it was doing, many of its features were created pretty […]

After years of explosive growth, Netflix lost nearly a million subscribers between April and July of this year. In part due to new competition in streaming, but also because Netflix executives are stuck in this auto-cannibalism loop; sacrificing what’s popular about the service (affordability, no ads, few weird restrictions, decent content) to feed Wall Street’s insatiable […]

Courts have continually said pretextual stops are a cool way to engage in law enforcement fishing expeditions. But there are a few caveats. First, there needs to be a reason to stop the person, even if that reason exists largely in the imaginative readings of local statutes by police officers. Second, the stop cannot be […]

For years we’ve been firing no shortage of low-Earth orbit satellites into space without the federal government showing much concern about the the impact of these new technologies at scale. Like, the navigational hazards of unchecked space junk, or the way scientists warned that Starlink causes significant light pollution that seriously harms scientific research and […]

Fascist kleptocrats sure do love their lists, don’t they? Way back in March, when Vladimir Putin decided to invade a sovereign neighbor, we discussed how Russia was contemplating simply legalizing software piracy in the wake of crippling sanctions to try to keep the Russian economy as stable as possible. That Russia would take such a […]

The last few weeks of Elon craziness regarding Twitter has been kind of shocking in all sorts of ways. We knew, going in, that he didn’t appear to understand the challenges of running a social media website. His statements regarding free speech suggested that he really didn’t understand that concept either. But, every time I […]

The Mini Wireless Bluetooth adapter is an ideal solution for many situations and uses. This dual-purpose device comes with a transmission mode which wirelessly transmits audio from non-Bluetooth TV, home stereo system, or CD player to a Bluetooth headset or speakers, and a receiver mode that wirelessly transmits audio from a Bluetooth-enabled phone, tablet, or […]

Law enforcement needs probable cause to effect arrests and engage in searches. In most cases, a warrant is also required. It’s a bit of paperwork that allows the government to bypass Fourth Amendment protections to serve the greater good, i.e., the invasion of privacy (a search) or the removal of personal freedom (an arrest). For […]

There are supposed to be limits on what the federal government can do with all the data it forces people to hand over in exchange for government services. But much of the limiting appears to be left up to the discretion of federal agencies. Discretion is the better part of valor, as they say. If […]

The early months of 2021, following Trump’s loss at the polls and the subsequent raid of the Capitol building by his supporters, were periodically punctuated by disturbing revelations about the DOJ under the former reality show star. Seeking to plug multiple leaks originating in his administration, the Trump DOJ began targeting journalists, hoping to use […]

Some news outlets engage in journalism. Others just engage in hype. The latter tend to repeat press releases verbatim, only ask for statements from law enforcement when law enforcement screws up, and otherwise cater to the “if it bleeds, it leads” maxim that has allowed mass media to portray America as a criminal dystopia despite […]

Last week, we posted a cheat sheet on how to speedrun the content moderation learning curve. It went a bit viral, but I don’t think Elon got to check it out. In the meantime, he seems to be doing his actual speedrunning in public. Anyhoo… let’s just say that the next few paragraphs are known […]

Micmonster multilingual library is the largest online library of voiceovers. You can find the perfect voice for your project in just a few clicks. Features such as multi-voice and rate/pitch fine-tuning allow you to find just what you’re looking for in your script, whether it be a character or some extra detail. It’s on sale […]

Prior to the turn of the century, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a formative decision that helped craft the contours of Section 230 immunity. The case — Zeran v. America Online — dealt with a tricky question: whether or not a platform’s failure to moderate content (in this case, posts that contained […]

We’d noted a few times how Elon Musk’s Starlink isn’t really as disruptive as it pretends to be. For one, the service keeps getting more expensive thanks to price hikes, and with a $710 first month price tag ($600 hardware fee, $110 a month) it’s too expensive for the struggling rural Americans it’s purportedly aimed […]

This week, both our top comments on the insightful side come from our post about helping Elon Musk speed run the content moderation learning curve. In first place, it’s Christenson responding to a “suggestion” that really appears to be a complaint about Techdirt’s own comment voting system: You are going to have to add some […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, declassified documents revealed the NSA’s efforts to prosecute a journalist for successful FOIA requests, a judge refused a boilerplate request from the DOJ for a gag order, Dianne Feinstein was trying to get Twitter to just hand over a bunch of private communications, and we took a closer […]

It just occurred to me as I was preparing to start writing this post that the volume of trademark conflicts I’ve seen in the craft beer industry seems to have finally calmed the hell down. There are still disputes, obviously, but it used to be that I could count on writing several posts a month […]

This is all kinds of hilarious if you’re aware of the history of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), formerly the MPAA. Basically, the group’s entire existence has been built around lobbying government for ever more ridiculous laws that protect the bottom line of the movie studios. In the late aughts, the studios decided they needed […]

Welcome to America! Fuck everything! And not in the sexual sense, as any person would immediately understand unless, of course, they just want to hit people with criminal charges for maximizing the use of limited space to criticize the government. Local governments tend to get pretty weird about “community standards” and “protecting children,” something that […]

One of the striking features of the copyright industry is the fact that enough is never enough. Give companies stronger enforcement of copyright, and they will still start pushing for more. An example is the EU’s Copyright Directive. Even when upload filters were approved against all expert advice, on the grounds that sufficient safeguards were […]

The Complete Computer Science Master Class Bundle has 11 courses to help you learn various programming languages. Courses cover C#, Scala, JavaScript, Golang, MySQL, and more. You’ll learn how to build a voice app with Amazon Alexa, how to test software, and how to ace programming job interviews. It’s on sale for$39. Note: The Techdirt […]

The Freedom of Information Act was enacted 55 years ago. To its credit, it has resulted in an unprecedented amount of access to documents and communications created by federal agencies. But there has been a lot of resistance. Government agencies continue to abuse FOIA exemptions to withhold documents that shouldn’t be withheld. These efforts far […]

Cable giants like Comcast and Charter continue to struggle to retain traditional TV subscribers, so they’re extracting their pound of flesh from their captive cable broadband customers that have no alternative ISPs to flee to thanks to a continued lack of competition in the United States. Both companies were quick to jack up broadband prices […]