Techdirt

It’s no surprise the government cheats when it prosecutes people. Judge Jed Rakoff pointed this out while resigning from the DOJ’s Forensic Science Committee when it became clear the DOJ was not interested in rooting out junk science. He called the government’s refusal to allow defendants to examine forensic means and methods “trial by ambush.” […]

So, yes, I’ve written a few things now on Elon’s silly excuses for his frantic speedrun through the content moderation learning curve. It’s getting more mainstream press because of journalist accounts getting banned (including, this morning, Insider’s Linette Lopez, who did not post any “doxing” info but has reported critically on Musk for years, which […]

Every so often, Techdirt writes about the long-standing problem of orphan works, the huge collection of older creations that are out of circulation and have no obvious owners. Arguably, they should be called “hostage works”, since they remain uselessly locked away by rigid and outdated copyright laws, to no one’s benefit. Despite that, the copyright […]

The 2023 CISSP Security and Risk Management Training Bundle has 8 courses to help you prepare for 8 different CISSP certification exams. CISSP is the gold standard for security certifications. It covers the breadth of information security’s deep technical and managerial concepts. You’ll be learning to effectively design, engineer, and manage the overall security posture […]

Look, I fucking warned Elon that this is exactly how it would go. It’s how it always goes. Remember Parler? They promised that they would moderate “based off the FCC and the Supreme court of the United States” (a nonsensical statement for a variety of reasons, including that the FCC does not regulate websites). Then, […]

We’ve written a bunch of posts concerning KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, which is one of those moral panic kinds of bills that politicians and the media love to get behind, without really understanding what they mean, or the damage they’d do. We’ve covered how it will lead to greater surveillance of children (which […]

Well. Just after finishing that last post about Twitter banning the official Mastodon account on Twitter for tweeting about the ElonJet tracking account existing on Mastodon, it seems that whatever brakes or controls were in place at the new “free speech absolutist” Twitter have really come off. In quick succession, a whole bunch of high […]

Oh, Elon. Following on yesterday’s nonsense in banning the ElonJet account that robotically posted the public information regarding Elon’s private plane flights, and then trying to justify it later (after initially promising to keep the account alive to demonstrate his “commitment to free speech”), it appears that Elon’s commitment to free speech continues to dwindle. […]

This is some kind of ugly. When law enforcement starts talking about being “proactive,” it’s time to start worrying about your rights. Here’s what happened to Myriam Parada after a routine traffic stop. Parada ended up in the Anoka County Jail after an officer discovered that she had been driving without a license. While going […]

We’ve noted several times how telecom and media giants are running a sleazy year-long smear campaign against Biden FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, in the hopes of blocking her confirmation vote and miring the agency in perpetual consumer protection gridlock. The attacks have been carefully seeded across the US press through various think tanks and nonprofits, and accuse […]

The US Supreme Court has a big year ahead with lots of weighty matters to consider in 2023. But the seriousness of their job doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate each justice’s special day! If you would like to know when to fill your heart with warm birthday wishes for your favorite justice, here are all […]

Get hands-free access to your phone conveniently displayed from your rearview mirror. Phone Vine Plus will maintain a steady grip on your device with the adjustable power grippers that expand to accommodate a phone up to 3.75 inches wide. The added pop-down feet give your phone extra support. Phone Vine Plus has the 360-degree rotating […]

Malware and exploit developers are generating a seemingly endless number of headlines, thanks to misuse of their products by government entities. Israel’s NSO Group has made the most headlines, but other Israel-located malware purveyors have made the news as well. Candiru, another Israeli exploit developer, was hit with the same sanctions the US Commerce Department […]

Techirt has long discussed how in the modern era, the things you buy aren’t actually the things you buy. And the things you own aren’t actually the things you own. Things you thought you owned can be downgraded, bricked, or killed off entirely without much notice. That game console with backward compatibility? It no longer has backward compatibility. That smart home […]

Square Enix, the game studio behind famous video game franchises like the Final Fantasy series, is well known to be a big believer in intellectual property enforcement. Just on our pages alone, we’ve talked about the times they struck out against folks selling replica swords from its games, or fan-made productions featuring Square IP in […]

Hilarious Update: A few minutes ago, the @ElonJet account returned to Twitter, but that came about 20 minutes after Elon himself justified the ban, saying it violated the company’s (new) doxxing policies (see the original update to this story at the bottom. Hilarious Update 2: And, a couple hours later, the account was suspended a […]

Here’s some potentially very big news in the world of the mobile internet: after years of refusing to do so, Apple is finally going to allow third party app stores on iOS devices. This has been a discussion for a long, long time. Many people forget now, but the app store didn’t even exist until […]

All’s well OK that ends well OK. Months of reporting tied to lawsuits filed by Hertz renters falsely accused of theft should now come to a halt. Maybe. Here’s the company’s statement on the multi-million dollar settlement, which doesn’t say much about Hertz’s culpability, nor any plans it has in place to prevent something that […]

MasterWriter is a powerful collection of writing tools, reference and organization assembled in one easy-to-use program. Why struggle to find the right word when you can have all the possibilities in an instant? Their Word Families dictionary is like having a thesaurus on steroids. Also included are Phrases, Synonyms, Rhymes, Definitions, Metaphors, Similes, Onomatopoeia, Idioms, […]

The good folks over at Platformer broke the news that Twitter is experimenting with Elon’s desperate attempt to make money: forcing people to “opt-in” to share personal info so they can better target ads. And, yes, there’s a contradiction between “force” and “opt-in.” As everyone already knows, Elon is desperate for revenue, seeing as he […]

For several years we’ve noted how most of the calls to ban TikTok are bad faith bullshit made by a rotating crop of characters that not only couldn’t care less about consumer privacy, but are directly responsible for the privacy oversight vacuum TikTok (and everybody else) exploits. Right on cue, Texas Senator Marco Rubio and […]

It’s no secret that Nintendo is one of my common targets to slap around for its draconian enforcement of intellectual property, much to the annoyance of some Nintendo fans. It’s just that it’s… hard not to? This is an enormous player in the video game industry that wields IP as a method for taking down […]

While Space X’s Starlink is a promising broadband option if you’re out of range of traditional options (and can afford the $710 first month price tag), many users who’ve pre-ordered aren’t having a great time. Some say they’ve been waiting for service more than a year, during which time Starlink has often refused to answer basic […]

It’s been a little over a year since we learned about Meta’s “X-Check” program for whitelisting high-profile Facebook accounts from various content moderation efforts. Now, after a long wait, the Oversight Board has released the results of its review of the use of the tool, and there’s plenty to dig in into. This week, we’re […]

For years, attempts have been made to make access to federal court records free. To date, not one of these efforts have been successful. The federal judiciary likes its antiquated cash cow, raking in PACER fees meant to improve and free up (as in “free”) document access and redistributing the profit amongst itself, (illegally) blowing […]

So, look, it’s been quite clear for a while now that Elon Musk has no clue what “free speech” actually means. We’ve covered this point from so many different angles that at this point anyone claiming that Elon Musk “supports free speech” is ignorant or stupid. Constitutional scholar Steve Vladeck has a short, but useful […]

Get ready to master Excel for Mac. Excel Everest is an interactive Excel tutorial that is part text book, part problem set, part computer program, and part video repository. This Microsoft Excel training course teaches you by doing — 160+ interactive exercises across 40+ critical concepts. It’s on sale for $99. Note: The Techdirt Deals […]

Last month, Facebook/Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees as part of the company’s attempt to recover from sagging ad revenues, inflation, and Zuckerberg’s clumsy, poorly executed, and widely ridiculed pivot toward virtual and augmented reality. Buried in that announcement was the fact that Facebook had also shut down “MetaConnectivity,” its decade-old attempt to shore […]

A deadly fire in an Urumqi apartment complex has led to something rarely seen in China: massive protests across the nation against the Chinese government’s actually draconian COVID restrictions. Most of the city of Urumqi is on lockdown, with residents banned from leaving their homes. These restrictions may have contributed to the death toll. Witnesses […]

The Los Angeles Sheriffs Department (LASD) has been overseen by a succession of terrible elected officials. Sheriff Lee Baca presided over a department that filled its ranks with criminals, ignored the proliferation of deputy gangs, and ran a jailhouse informant program so unlawful it resulted in an FBI investigation and the conviction of Sheriff Baca […]

It’s beginning to get quite comical watching various rightwing folks and groups bang on constantly about how pro-free-speech they are, often talking about situations that have nothing to do with free speech, only to engage in anti-speech behavior themselves. The new owner of a mountain of debt that is called Twitter has become something of […]

The TSA has been working towards this goal for nearly a half-decade. Its parent agency, the DHS, has already deployed facial recognition tech, most of it aimed at foreigners. The CBP uses it all the time. In 2020, the CBP’s facial recognition scanners at US borders captured 50 million facial images and less than 300 […]

In the light of the continuing mayhem on Twitter under Elon Musk, lovingly chronicled by Mike in ever-longer posts, it’s no surprise that many people are looking at alternatives. One of the main options is Mastodon. Although offering similar micro-blogging functionality to Twitter, one of its chief attractions is that it nonetheless does certain things […]

Apple has always been a market leader in user security. Things haven’t changed, no matter how much the FBI wishes/litigates. What’s most important to Apple is that users can trust it to keep their personal info and communications private and secure. What’s most important to federal law enforcement agencies — pretty much just the FBI […]

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch. You’ll get MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Publisher, and […]

So, yeah, I wrote a big long thing debunking the first round of the “Twitter Files” but there’s no way I’m going to make myself do more of that for every stupid thread of the “Twitter Files” being tweeted out. Just know that, having read all of the released “Twitter Files” threads so far, they […]

With federal telecom oversight both intentionally gridlocked and crippled courtesy of the Trump era, the closest telecom monopolies get to seeing accountability are often state attorneys general. Case in point: telecom giants routinely sell service speeds that they can’t actually deliver across all fifty states. But only in a handful of states where AGs actually […]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our long post about Twitter and the Hunter Biden laptop story. In first place, it’s a simple anonymous comment: A terrific essay, which will never be read by the target audience because it’s longer that a tweet….. In second place, it’s Jonny […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, New York’s AG rolled out a tool to help people check if their name was used to support killing net neutrality, while we looked at why Ajit Pai had been spending his time attacking Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Pai also didn’t want people talking about a court ruling […]

Once again, law enforcement’s enthusiasm for violent warrant service has combined with its disinterest in responsible policing to result in a civil rights lawsuit. Here’s how that all played out, as reported by The Denver Post. (h/t Techdirt reader BentFranklin) Ruby Johnson, 77, is afraid to be alone in the house where she’s lived for […]

The EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is one of several long-running trade deal sagas covered by Techdirt. It seemed to be almost over in 2017. After a constant on-off excitement about whether CETA would survive, it was ratified by the European Union. But it still needed to be approved by all the EU […]

This is a very cool development in the world of government transparency. It’s not often a government entity forces another entity to expose information it would desperately like to keep secret. But it happened in Switzerland, following an open records court battle by Tagblatt, which sought information on export licenses granted to local surveillance tech […]

Strong privacy rights are a crucial first step to a healthy and productive online ecosystem. The European Union figured this out years ago, enacting the General Data Protection Regulation. In contrast, the U.S., the land of tech innovation, is tripping over its own feet at the finish line and hoping nobody notices we’ll be without […]

You may recall that, back in August, we wrote about the bizarre situation of a company called “Business Casual” and its CEO, Alex Edson. Business Casual makes highly produced videos. It made a few on historical topics, including taking some public domain images and modifying them significantly to make “paralax images” that added a sort […]

The 2022 Ultimate Big Data Bundle has 10 courses to help you learn how to analyze and to understand large data sets. Courses cover Python, Pandas, Cluster Analysis, and more. It’s on sale for $25. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps […]

The Los Angeles Police Department is here to serve and protect… the powerful. The rest of you are on your own. Earlier this year, someone leaked an audio recording of a closed-door meeting attended by the city’s Latino lawmakers. The comments made during this meeting were extremely disturbing, exposing the racism and bigotry of the […]

For decades, U.S. politicians leaders utterly refused to support most meaningful privacy protections for consumers. They opposed any nationwide privacy law, however straightforward. They opposed privacy rules for broadband ISPs. They also fought tooth and nail to ensure the nation’s top privacy enforcement agency, the FTC, lacked the authority, staff, funds, or resources to actually […]

Since cops are trained to view everything as suspicious, they tend to believe everything is suspicious. The list of things considered to be suspicious often contradicts other things on the list of things considered suspicious. That should be considered suspicious, but somehow cops never think it is. Even if they don’t believe everything is suspicious, […]

There are lots of shitty ways game developers and publishers can handle their games getting crappy reviews. The best bet would obviously be to read the reviews from customers, learn something from them, and make a better product. Far too often, however, developers and publishers instead try to disappear bad reviews, fake reviews, or otherwise […]

In March, the Italian government not-so-politely asked Clearview to leave, bestowing upon the toxic facial recognition tech company a $21 million fine as a parting gift. Citing the company’s, um, clear violations of the GDPR, the government added to the tab Clearview has racked up in Europe, now surpassing $50 million. The company, of course, […]