Techdirt

If capturing a bird’s eye view of your favorite places is a fun way for you to unwind when you have some time, then the Vivitar VTI Phoenix Foldable Camera Drone (certified refurbished) is a great choice for updating your hobby’s capabilities. All the pieces come secured in the sided carrying case, which helps protect them from […]

Based on (admittedly scattershot) case law, the best protection for your phone (and constitutional rights) seems to depend on whatever device owners feel is the most persistent (or dangerous) threat. If you, a regular phone owner, feel the worst thing that could happen to you is the theft of your phone, then using biometric features […]

The US has always had a fairly pathetic definition of “broadband.” Originally defined as anything over 200 kbps in either direction, the definition was updated in 2010 to a pathetic 4 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up. It was updated again in 2015 by the FCC to a better, but still arguably pathetic 25 Mbps downstream, […]

For a few years now, uninformed police officials have been making America stupider by pushing the narrative that fentanyl is so dangerous, simply being near it is possibly fatal. Ignoring the fact that drugs must be ingested in some form to do what they’re supposed to do, law enforcement agencies have repeatedly made absurd, completely […]

The Chinese government often seems like an unstoppable force of evil. Perhaps the word “seems” needs to be removed from the previous sentence. The government seems all too capable of keeping a few billion people in line, strongly suggesting it has obtained the oppression cheat codes. But there are still signs of life. Residents of […]

We’ve highlighted for years the problems with the data protection regime in the EU, mainly the GDPR, but other aspects as well. The underlying idea — that people have a right to have their data protected — may seem sound and logical, but in practice it’s generally been a total mess*, that has likely caused […]

Given the seemingly endless privacy scandals that now engulf the tech and telecom sectors on a near-daily basis, many consumers have flocked to virtual private networks (VPN) to protect and encrypt their data. One study found that VPN use quadrupled between 2016 and 2018 as consumers rushed to protect data in the wake of scandals, breaches, and […]

The 2022 Premium IT Asset and Risk Management Certification Prep Bundle has 11 courses on IT asset management, server backup, network security, ethical hacking and more. You’ll learn how to protect the integrity of the databases, how to better prevent malicious exploitation, how to build simple LANs, and more. It’s on sale for $59. Note: […]

Judicial immunity is one of a handful of absolute immunities. Like the name suggests, absolute immunity is a pretty tough shield to pierce. Every so often, someone will do something terrible enough to be stripped of immunity they assumed was absolute. But those cases are extremely rare. Rarer still is hearing of a judge being […]

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 Chile, Costa Rica, and Peru, where users were forced to pay an additional fee if they shared their password with […]

There are a great many things that tend to annoy me about the sorts of trademark disputes we cover here at Techdirt. Overly aggressive parties policing trademarks in ways that extend far beyond the reasonable. A USPTO that seems all too happy to grant trademarks for things that it simply shouldn’t have, causing all kinds […]

About a week ago, a Florida judge decided a local law superseded the First Amendment. The judge granted an injunction to law enforcement officers, barring a Florida newspaper from publishing their names. The names were of public interest. The officers, deputies for the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Office, had arrived at an apartment to serve an […]

Yesterday, we released a new report from the Copia Institute, written by Karl Bode, about the state of broadband competition and the great potential of an open access fiber model: Just A Click Away: Broadband Competition In America. On today’s episode, Karl joins the podcast to dig into the details of the report and explain […]

Things move fast in the Delaware Chancery Court and if you blink, you just might miss it. A week and a half ago, you’ll recall, Musk sought to terminate the deal using the exact pretextual excuses most of us assumed he would be using, and which he telegraphed in his letter to Twitter. Days later, […]

California has officially joined the growing list of states attempting to regulate how social media companies run their platforms. The state’s proposed legislation, however, faces a major legal obstacle: the Constitution. California lawmakers are marching ahead with AB 2408, the Social Media Platform Duty to Children Act. On June 28, the Judiciary Committee unanimously passed […]

Whether you’re checking emails or watching a great movie, the Lenovo N22 Chromebook delivers enhanced browsing and streaming. Powered by a 1.6GHz Intel Celeron dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM, the N22 can handle multitasking and everyday computing needs. If you need more processing power, the CPU can achieve a burst speed of 2.16 GHz. […]

The FBI’s shift from law enforcement to counter-terrorism began shortly after the 9/11 attacks in 2001, but really took off about a decade later, when it got into the business of radicalizing internet randos to turn them into “terrorists” worth hitting with material support charges. While the FBI continued to pretend it was making the […]

As we’ve long noted, the Trump era attack on net neutrality was one of the more grotesque examples of regulatory capture and corruption in Internet policy history. The rules, which imposed some very modest restrictions on giant telecom monopolies to prevent them from abusing market power, were very popular among consumers of all political stripes. […]

Beyond the overproduced marketing videos and janky product prototypes closely associated today with “the metaverse” lies a bright and boundless future. In a pandemic-stricken world that imposes more and stronger barriers at every turn—whether they be medical, social, legal, economic, or geopolitical—there is magic in transposing the spirit of a global free and open internet […]

A lawsuit filed by four protesters against three Boston police officers can move forward, following a federal judge’s determination that the cops’ counterarguments were too ridiculous to be granted credence. The plaintiffs were participating in one of thousands of protests that erupted following the murder of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, by a white […]

I guess it’s only natural that the UK’s Online Safety Bill — brilliantly dubbed the bill to Brexit the internet by Heather Burns — is getting delayed, just like the regular Brexit. And, no surprise, Boris Johnson is part of the issue again. As you’ll have likely heard, if you haven’t been under a rock, […]

Welcome back to the negative news cycle, Ring! It’s been awhile. Ring has spent years cultivating so-close-they’re-incestuous relationships with law enforcement agencies. Ring hands out free/cheap cameras to cop shops, asking in return that they hand them out to the townsfolk and nudge them towards sharing footage via Ring’s own highly problematic social media platform, […]

Last week, I wrote about Twitter’s opening legal salvo in its case to try to force Elon Musk to pay the $44 billion he agreed to pay for Twitter (or, more likely, to try to force him to pay a very large settlement to walk away). As we noted, it was a very strongly argued […]

Get started in the exciting world of electronics with this complete Arduino Uno compatible starter kit. It’s specifically designed for those new to electronics and the Arduino Uno ecosystem. It has everything you need to learn about electronics and comes with FUN projects you can build right out of the box. It’s on sale for […]

Read our new report on broadband competition in America » We’re excited today to release the Copia Institute’s latest report, written by Karl Bode, on the benefits of an open access fiber model to enable much more widespread competition in the broadband space. As I’m sure you know, for huge parts of the US, there […]

One of the reasons that propaganda mills like Fox News don’t take a bigger hit from advertising boycotts is because U.S. consumers pay billions of dollars annually for the channel, even if they don’t watch it. More specifically, Fox rakes in $1.8 billion in carriage fees to include the channel in bloated cable bundles, despite […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Toom1275 with a comment about the GOP’s push to force Google to stop filtering political spam: This sounds like great idea if you’re a malware spammer – just dress up your payload delivery like a political email to get straight in everyone’s inbox, and […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, as a new study shed more light on America’s terrible broadband access situation, many people were gearing up for a day of protest in support of net neutrality. After long being holdouts, Facebook and Google finally joined, followed by the laughable move of AT&T getting on board, though […]

Another school has learned it can’t discipline students for off-campus behavior, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s “fuck cheer” decision. Teens do stupid things. Sometimes they do them at school and the school is free to punish them. Sometimes they do them elsewhere and that’s where the limits kick in. That’s what the Cherry […]

It’s no secret that Techdirt believes YouTube’s copyright enforcement program is an absolute mess. On the one hand, it’s difficult to be too hard on the company. After all, it is trying to figure out how to enforce draconian copyright laws in countries like America at a scale that is absolutely absurd. On the other […]

Just a few weeks back we talked about how the US’s unwillingness to fix the way the NSA collects internet data could basically mean that most of the big US internet services cannot work in the EU. That article was about Google, and it goes through the background and history of the various US/EU privacy […]

Over the last few months we’ve been covering this bizarre story of how Republican politicians, pushed by their preferred spamming provider (which misrepresented a study on how email providers treat political spam), have been falsely claiming that Google is “censoring” their political emails. They’ve also been pushing a law that would require email providers not […]

We’ve long noted how U.S. broadband maps are a bit of a dumpster fire. U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $350 million for FCC broadband maps that overstate broadband availability and speeds, downplay widespread monopolization and consolidation, and can’t even be bothered to measure affordability, one of the biggest obstacles to widespread adoption. You only […]

Charge your device or illuminate your desk with this innovative 6-in-1 Wireless Charger. It’s easy to use with its touch buttons and Qi wireless charging for Qi-enabled devices. Beautifully made with a modern look, it can quickly charge your device and is touch-sensitive allowing you to show the digital clock and calendar. For your convenience, […]

Courts (with the rare exception) are in agreement: there’s a First Amendment right to film cops. With every citizen carrying a camera these days, there’s a lot more filming happening. And those recordings have often proven key when cops face criminal charges for violating rights or, you know, murdering people. It’s little wonder cops aren’t […]

When last we checked in with right-wing propaganda network One America News (OAN), it was suffering some kind of embolism for being kicked off of DirecTV. Despite a lot of attention, not that many people actually watch the channel, so DirecTV finally kicked it aside. This was distorted by OAN and numerous key Republicans into […]

The public expects cops to be better people than they are. Maybe they have the same weaknesses but having the training and experience to overcome them. But when you’re a cop, you’re encouraged to turn interactions into altercations and solve most problems with violence. And when all else fails, you can always just lock someone […]

While we were just discussing how everyone occasionally gets reminded that for many digital goods these days you simply don’t actually own what you’ve bought, all thanks to Sony disappearing a bunch of purchased movies and shows from its PlayStation platform, this conversation has been going on for a long, long time. Whereas the expectation […]

It’s no secret that Donald Trump’s Trump Media and Technology Group — which was launched with big plans, but so far only has a total flop of a barely used social media app, Truth Social, to show for it — was struggling. But then came the news that the ponzi-scheme-esque reverse merger deal was actually […]

How many times have you shared a link today? How many times have you used a search engine to look for information? We use links and snippets to gain and share information so often that we don’t even think about it. It’s an essential component of the internet, so intrinsic that an internet without links […]

For a few months now, we’ve been following this nonsense story, driven almost entirely by executives at the GOP’s favorite digital marketing (read: spamming) operation, that Google is censoring political spam from Republicans. This was all based on either an incompetent, or deliberate, misreading of a study, which did find that an untouched Gmail account […]

Aspiring filmmakers, YouTubers, bloggers, and business owners alike can find something to love about the Complete Video Production Super Bundle. Video content is fast changing from the future marketing tool to the present, and in these 10 courses you’ll learn how to make professional videos on any budget. From the absolute basics to the advanced shooting […]

Israeli malware maker NSO Group’s frequent targeting of iPhones has led to multiple rounds of patches, a federal lawsuit, and Apple instituting a notification program to inform customers their devices have been compromised. Apple’s next move in this particular arms race will help defend users against malware deployment by government agencies, many of which use […]

The core GOP belief in “small government” and “free markets” and “no taxpayer waste” doesn’t hold up quite as well as it used to to scrutiny, assuming it ever did at all. Case in point: in North Carolina, Trump GOP lawmaker Ben Moss has pushed forward a ridiculous bill (HB 1049) that would require towns […]

The Vallejo PD kills people. That’s an undeniable fact. It does so with alarming frequency, considering the size of its force. Between 2010 and 2020, the PD’s officers killed 19 people. But the PD is uninterested in reducing the number of times its officers kill. Vallejo police have killed 19 people since 2010, renewing calls […]

Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem strikes again! The idea put forth by Mike is that the moment a platform really starts to scale upward, doing any actual content moderation well becomes inherently impossible. There are a ton of examples of this, as some reasons as to why it’s so difficult. The spoiler alert on this is that […]

You know the drill. Company X over-collects user data in the hopes of monetizing it, then does a poor job securing it or giving their customers control over it. If you’re lucky, Company X comes clean about its failures, whether it’s a hack or just leaving customer data openly accessible on an unsecured Amazon cloud […]

This refurbished EliteBook from HP pairs a fast processor with 8GB of RAM to help make multitasking easier, and its speedy 256 solid-state drive can house your essential media, games, and other data. It also features three USB ports so you can make the most of your system by expanding it with peripheral devices. This […]

Almost exactly a year ago, Senator Amy Klobuchar (with Senator Ben Ray Lujan) introduced a bill to create a giant hole in Section 230 for “medical misinformation.” The bill would make social media sites like Facebook and Instagram potentially liable for any “health misinformation” found on their platforms. Of course, as we explained at the […]

A couple of months ago, the parents of a 10-year-old who died of asphyxiation while allegedly “participating” in a “blackout challenge” sued TikTok, alleging their child’s death was directly related to the social media platform’s moderation efforts (or lack thereof) and content recommendation algorithms. The suit, filed in a Pennsylvania federal court, claimed the death […]