Techdirt

A few months ago, I attended a wonderful conference put on by the “Global Freedom of Expression” program at Columbia University discussing decentralized social media and regulations around social media. One of the speakers, Alison McCauley from Unfinished Labs, gave a very interesting presentation on the first day of the conference, October 3rd, (which kindly […]

Meet Bittle, the palm-sized open-source bionic robot dog. Have fun watching it play tricks like a real animal, moving with 4 legs rather than wheels. Legged motion gives it more freedom to navigate unstructured terrains. Bittle is an open platform to fuse multiple makers’ gadgets into one organic system. With a customized Arduino board coordinating […]

Careful, kids. The FBI is recommending something useful. The same entity that thinks encryption is the enemy has delivered a message suggesting it may still care about the safety and security of internet users… at least those it doesn’t consider to be persons of interest. Here’s Daniel Sims of Techspot with more details. The FBI issued a […]

Back in August, password storage app LastPass vaguely admitted that hackers had accessed the company’s systems. In the company’s original August reveal, the company generally tap danced around the subject, claiming that while they had identified some “unusual activity,” consumer data had not been accessed. By November, LastPass had begun shifting its story a bit, […]

It’s not often a cop gets criminally charged for killing someone. In most cases, cops are cleared of wrongdoing. Even when they aren’t, their employers and overseers aren’t interested in establishing deterrents to bad police behavior or holding bad cops accountable for their wrongdoing. There are notable exceptions, of course. The most recent notable case […]

It’s been many, many years since we were regularly covering what we referred to as the ITC loophole in patent enforcement. The issue was that patent holders could get two totally separate at bats to try to force a company that was actually innovating to pay up over dubious patents. They could go to court, […]

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 short-term growth, but often at the cost […]

The Ultimate Python and Artificial Intelligence Bundle has 9 courses to take you from beginner to expert in Python, and learn how to apply that knowledge to AI. You’ll learn about data visualization, deep learning, artificial neural networks, and more. It’s on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by […]

Colleen Huber M.D. thinks she can cure cancer by altering patients’ sugar intake. She also believes baking soda is better than chemotherapy when it comes to fighting this disease. Rational people think she’s endangering people’s lives and have said as much. Repeatedly. In response, Colleen Huber has filed lawsuits. Repeatedly. She feels she speaks from […]

[INT: Midwestern living room, Christmas morning 2022]: Children: Thanks for all of these consumer goods, Daddy. We know you mean well. But we just want to know whether we’ll ever see free access to federal courtroom documents in our lifetime. Me: [long pause while stroking my magnificent beard] I don’t know, kids. I just don’t […]

Hopefully, you already know who Tom Lehrer is, and are already familiar with his music, but if you’re somehow in the dark, I suggest you read this excellent profile, or visit his unofficial official YouTube channel. Or, visit his website where you can download everything for free (he even begs you not to send him […]

Back in June we wrote about a blockbuster article in Buzzfeed by Emily Baker-White detailing how ByteDance engineers in China were still accessing data on US TikTok users. That was notable, given that ByteDance had signed this big deal with Oracle, while former President Trump held a proverbial gun to its head, to try to […]

A private company can legally declare it has the right to refuse service to anyone (with a very small number of limitations under the law, mostly around discrimination against protected classes). The application of facial recognition tech makes it much easier to do. Rather than post photos and bad checks on the back wall to […]

The 2023 Ultimate Cybersecurity Analyst Bundle has 8 courses to help you become a cybersecurity expert. You’ll learn about social engineering, working with enterprise architecture, bug hunting, penetration testing, ethical hacking, and more. The bundle is on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all […]

Soon after Elon took over Twitter and fired everyone, we wondered (somewhat jokingly) if there was anyone left at the company who was aware of the FTC’s consent decree with the company, signed originally in 2011, but which runs for 30 years, and which was updated back in May of 2022. These documents have some […]

The UK Government’s Intellectual Property Office published new piracy guidance this week claiming that Netflix password sharing is illegal. Back when Netflix was a pesky upstart trying to claw subscribers away from entrenched cable providers, the company had a pretty lax approach to users who shared streaming passwords. At one point CEO Reed Hastings went so far […]

Sign up for the Public Domain Game Jam on itch.io » It’s that time of year! Ever since works in the US finally started entering the public domain again, we’ve been hosting an annual game jam for designers to create games based on the year’s newly copyright-free works. This year, it’s Gaming Like It’s 1927! There […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is rinzewind (shout out for the Discworld reference!) with a simple comment about the Twitter Files: The most disappointing thing of this whole Twitter Files fiasco, for me, has been Taibbi. He had made some questionable editorial decisions as of late, but this has already […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the chips started to fall in the wake of the net neutrality appeal. A tonedeaf video starring Ajit Pai led to one of those internet situations where everyone is wrong, while Pai was insisting net neutrality supporters were wrong about everything since Twitter hadn’t immediately died. Comcast began […]

You will hopefully recall our ongoing discussions about one of the strangest trademark disputes I’ve ever encountered between Iceland Foods, a grocer in the EU, and Iceland, the country. Way back in 2016, Iceland petitioned to remove a trademark Iceland Foods had for its company name, arguing that the trademark had allowed the company to […]

The deliberate “failure” of a Vallejo, California police officer to respect the rights of a Marine veteran filming him from his own porch will cost city residents $300,000. And that’s on top of the money the city spent defending Officer David McLaughlin from the lawsuit filed by the victim of his brutality, Adrian Burrell. Here’s […]

Elon Musk keeps trying to tell people that he’s saving Twitter. But, he may have just accidentally admitted how much he’s screwed it up. In yet another Twitter Spaces where he spoke about things happening at the site, he actually provided some numerical details, as covered by the Financial Times. He said that the platform […]

You may have noticed the world getting excited about the capabilities of ChatGPT, a text-based AI chat bot. Similarly, some are getting quite worked up over generative AI systems that can turn text prompts into images, including those mimicking the style of particular artists. But less remarked upon is the use of AI in the […]

AirPods are pretty great, but they also require a little TLC to keep them in top-notch shape. They’re constantly in your ears, and you don’t want to be the person who reaches for their headphones only to find that they’ve turned into a dirty mess—or worse, that their battery is dead. That’s why we’ve put […]

This is an unwelcome development. The Fifth Circuit Appeals Court is already the home of Rights Roulette. Everyone is free to take it for a spin, but should be aware the odds heavily favor the house. The government comes out a winner more often than not, no matter how long the odds may seem when […]

Back in June New York state was the first state in the country to pass “right to repair” legislation taking direct aim at repair monopolies. The bill mandates that hardware manufacturers make diagnostic and repair information available to consumers and independent repair shops at “fair and reasonable terms.” The final version of the bill enjoyed rare bipartisan support, […]

We’re a tad early for our annual season in which we point out that the NFL likes to play make believe as to its trademark rights for the Super Bowl. You can go read through the history of our posts on the topic, but essentially the NFL seems to think that its trademark rights allow […]

We finally have an interesting edition of the Twitter files! When the Twitter Files began, I actually expected something interesting to come out of them. All of the big tech companies have been unfortunately unwilling to be as transparent as they could be about how their content moderation practices work. Much of the transparency we’ve […]

Back in 2014, the Chicago PD’s chief of detectives had this to say about Apple’s plan to roll out device encryption by default: “Apple will become the phone of choice for the pedophile,” said John J. Escalante, chief of detectives for Chicago’s police department. “The average pedophile at this point is probably thinking, I’ve got […]

So, it’s been quite a year for legacy, centralized social media — and all without any really big change to the laws that govern it (yet — the EU’s are coming into force shortly, but possibly too late to matter). Meta seems to be collapsing into its own gravity. Twitter has been taken over by […]

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There are all kinds of stalkerware out there. Some of it is actually deployed by government entities — like the spyware that infests computers used by remote workers and school students. Some of it is deployed by parents led to believe that if they don’t shoulder surf by proxy, their kids will become the sort […]

A few weeks ago, 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 […]

Music streaming services are great – for listeners, who gain access to huge quantities of music, even if they don’t end up owning any of it. But it’s hardly a secret that streaming services produce very little income for the musicians involved – even the big names earn a pittance – with most of the money ending […]

It seems the madness just never stops on Elon Musk’s Twitter, and it’s almost impossible to keep up. Recently, Mike joined the Daily Beast’s podcast, The New Abnormal, for a discussion with host Andy Levy about just what exactly is going on with Twitter under Musk’s erratic leadership. The conversation first appeared as part of […]

Sigh. Look. I want to stop writing about Twitter. I want to write about lots of other stuff. I have a huge list of other stories that I’m trying to get through, but then Elon Musk does something dumb again, and people run wild with it, and (for reasons that perplex me) much of the […]

Maybe, just maybe, before we rush to pass questionable new laws about “protecting children online,” we should look to make use of the old ones? The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has been in place for years, and it has problems, but so many companies ignore it. I’ve mentioned in the past how I […]

AIR NEO from AirSelfie is the easiest and most fun way to take stunning, high definition photos and videos from the air completely hands-free. It lets you focus on your fiercest pose, silliest dance, or trickiest stunt while it tracks your motion using AI to get the perfect shot which you can instantly post to […]

Is this irony? It kind of seems like it is. Maybe it isn’t. It could just be a coincidence. An extremely unfortunate, ironic coincidence. Whatever it is, it doesn’t look good for the FBI, which encouraged pretty much every private company to register as reporting entities so the FBI could (theoretically, it appears) respond to […]

Much like the company’s dedication to women, AT&T’s dedication to not funding people eager to overthrow democracy appears to be somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent. And the company certainly isn’t alone. Shortly after January 6 a number of companies, including telecom giants like AT&T, publicly crowed about how they’d be ceasing all funding to politicians who […]

One of the reasons that copyright is so unbalanced in favor of companies, especially Big Content, is that the process of bringing in new copyright laws is hard for ordinary members of the public to engage with. Typically, new laws come about after government consultations. Although these are public in the sense that they are […]

No matter what you may have heard on certain social media outlets, this is how the First Amendment actually works. Free speech “heroes” can freely curb your speech. The government, however, may not. So, if you’re a government account operating on social media services, when you fuck around, you find out. This decision [PDF] — […]

The last few days on Twitter have been, well, chaotic, I guess? Beyond the blocking of the ElonJet account, followed by the blocking of the @JoinMastodon account, then the blocking of journalists asking about all this and the silly made up defense of it, over the weekend, Twitter announced a new policy banning linking to […]

Maybe if enough cases pile into the federal court system, the Supreme Court might decide to actually establish a First Amendment right to record public officials as they engage in their public duties. Until then, we’re stuck with a patchwork of precedent that recognizes this right only in certain parts of the nation. Fortunately for […]

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Last week when Elon Musk banned the ElonJet account, then banned a bunch of reporters for talking about it, and then insisted that they had tweeted out his “assassination coordinates” leading to a crazed stalker to jump on a car with his child in it, some were… skeptical. I wasn’t sure it made sense to […]

From the Internet of very broken things to telecom networks, the state of U.S. privacy and user security is arguably pathetic. It’s 2022 and we still don’t have even a basic privacy law for the Internet era, in large part because over-collection of data is too profitable to a wide swath of industries, which, in turn, lobby Congress […]

This week, as you might expect, the comments are dominated by responses to Elon Musk’s ongoing craziness at Twitter. On the insightful side, our first place winner is an anonymous summation of the ElonJet situation: Twitter: It’s really, really bad if you share other people’s location information. If you do, we will ban your account. […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the NY Attorney General found that two million fake comments flooded the FCC’s call for feedback on net neutrality, while two separate studies found that the fakes made up the majority of comments supportive of the repeal, all while Ajit Pai was making a tone-deaf “joke” about being […]

There’s a long way to go before the electric car revolution even comes close to the version that currently exists in everybody’s heads. Getting enough rare-Earth minerals to ramp up EV production at the scale most have in mind will be a big challenge. Then there are other issues related to safety thanks to EVs’ […]