Techdirt

In writing online about a case about online expression, I’ll open with a reference to some more online expression: the popular meme featuring the caption, “The worst person you know just made a great point.” And that’s where we are with this case just heard by the US Supreme Court: 303 Creative v. Elenis, where […]

The people who are here to help are still in harm’s way. The Supreme Court may have mitigated a bit of this damage in its 2021 Van Buren decision, but its limitations on readings of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act’)’s (CFAA) language means more on paper than it does in real life. All this […]

You may have had some fun toys growing up, but even the most nostalgic adult would admit that the Toybox 3D Printer blows their childhood toys out of the water. Designed as an easy-to-use, 3D printer, ToyBox empowers both kids and adults alike to design and print their very own toys. It can be controlled […]

Yesterday we wrote about how all of the terrible anti-internet bills we were worried about being slipped into the “must pass” National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bill were, thankfully, left on the cutting room floor. However, within the 4,400 pages, there was still plenty of other nonsense added, including a variation on a bill that […]

Hungry to boost municipal budgets, a growing roster of states and cities have spent the last five years or so trying to implement a tax on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services. Sometimes (like in Chicago) this has involved expanding an existing amusement tax (traditionally covering book stores, music stores, ball games and other brick and mortar […]

It will come as no surprise to any regular reader here when I say that Nintendo is roughly the most annoyingly draconian protector of IP in the video game space. At this point, Techdirt posts discussing Nintendo’s copyright and trademark antics are legion. Notable among those posts for the purposes of this discussion are several […]

For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk’s Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations are harming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimed would never happen in the first place is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated. Musk […]

Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Twitter and how it handled something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. If you’re new here, you may not know that I’ve written a similar post for people who are wrong about Section 230. If you’re being wrong about Twitter […]

Update: So we had this post about SF supervisors approving the killer robots in their initial vote, and had a note at the end that it still needed one more round of approvals by the Supervisors… and apparently widespread protests last night convinced the board to drop the proposal! The original (mostly obsolete) post is […]

iScanner turns your device into a powerful digital office and even more. It makes high quality scans of documents, educational materials, and to-do lists, and helps to edit, markup, and share them. The scanner app also can count similar objects and solve math problems and equations. Scan anything you need using your iPhone or iPad […]

Phew. As we’ve noted over the past few weeks, there’s been a big push by some in Congress over the last couple of weeks to sneak in some really terrible bills, among them JCPA, KOSA, INFORM, and SHOP SAFE. We’ve covered the problems with each of these bills and the very serious problem with trying […]

Anker, the popular maker of device chargers and the Eufy smart camera line, proudly proclaims on its website that user data will be stored locally, “never leaves the safety of your home,” footage only gets transmitted with “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, and that the company will only send that footage “straight to your phone.” Yeah, about that. Security […]

It was only some weeks back that we were discussing how a group of hobbyists were once again doing the culture preservation work that content creators should be doing in the form of a scan of every single Nintendo Power magazine and uploading it to the Internet Archive. At the time, you could go to […]

You might have seen some headlines recently suggesting that former congressional representative and current flailing social media CEO (and serial suer of the media) Devin Nunes had some sort of legal victory over Rachel Maddow and MSNBC. And he did get a very, very small victory while piling up more losses at the same time. […]

There is a serious problem in the way many tech-focused bills are drafted these days. Whether it’s a lack of trust or simply a desire to punish, those working on tech-bills are not talking to the right industry people about how things actually work in practice. This leads to simple mistakes like requiring something that […]

NSO Group is objectively awful. For years — with the assistance of the Israeli government — NSO sold to whoever wanted powerful phone exploits to deploy against targets. Ostensibly sold to investigate violent crimes and acts of terrorism, the less-than-savory customers of NSO flipped the script, deploying zero-click malware that allowed government employees to target […]

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We’ve written many times about the many problems of the JCPA (the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act). As noted, the bill is a really sketchy bit of corruption: creating a link tax to force internet companies to funnel money to news organization owners for… sending them traffic. Everything about the JCPA is wrong and broken. […]

Back in 2020, New York City officials unveiled an aggressive plan to revolutionize broadband in the city. The centerpiece of this Internet Master Plan involved building a $156 million open access fiber network that competitors could easily join at low cost, driving some much needed competition — and lower rates, faster speeds, and better coverage — to […]

For years, cars have collected massive amounts of data. And for years, this data has been extraordinarily leaky. Manufacturers don’t like to discuss how much data gets phoned home from vehicle systems. They also don’t like to discuss the attack vectors these systems create, either for malicious hackers or slightly less malicious law enforcement investigators. […]

While it seems difficult for some to balance these things, it remains entirely possible to think that Julian Assange is, generally speaking, a horrible human being, who was likely easily played like a fiddle by foreign nation states looking to play influence games in other nations… and that the US’s charges against him remain absolute […]

Last Friday evening, Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi dropped a non-bombshell on everyone, with the revelation of internal Twitter documents about the content moderation around Hunter Biden’s laptop that showed… nothing particularly unusual or notable happened, and there’s no evidence of government interference. Over the weekend, Mike was interviewed by Justin Hendrix for the Tech […]

Geofence warrants are popular. They’re also controversial. Cops have discovered Google houses plenty of location data. Going to cell phone providers is a bit tricky, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision, which erected a warrant requirement for acquiring weeks or months of location data. But geofence warrants don’t have a particular target. The only […]

We’ve been covering the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), which is a blatant handout by Congress in the form of a link tax that would require internet companies pay news orgs (mainly the vulture capitalist orgs that have been buying up local newspapers around the country, firing most of the journalists and living off […]

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Cops gonna cop, as Rachel Cheung reports for Vice. Hundreds of police officers in Hong Kong improperly accessed a woman’s case file after she was arrested for allegedly having sex on the balcony of a high-rise residential building, local media reported this week. A clip that showed a naked couple fornicating on the balcony of […]

We’ve noted for a long time how the “race to 5G” was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager to sell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it’s more of an evolution than a revolution. But that’s not what telecom […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Ben Jones with a comment on our post about the appeals court denying immunity to officers in the harrowing case of Floyd Bledsoe: So, these cops acted as accomplices of the murderer, aided in his escape from justice, obstructed the investigation, submitted fraudulent evidence […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, we wrote about Ajit Pai’s big lie about net neutrality. His FCC had lots of little lies too, which was why the NY Attorney General was investigating how dead people submitted comments supporting the repeal. Comcast was also lying, of course, and promising that even though it spent […]

Denying qualified immunity to law enforcement officers who violate rights is a rarity. It doesn’t mean the sued cops lose. It just means they can’t dismiss the lawsuit. In theory, that means officers alleged to have violated rights will now make their case in front of a jury. But a cop facing a jury is […]

There’s a great post by Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive blog with the title “Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books“. He makes an important point about the work involved in providing and preserving digital books: The Internet Archive processes and reprocesses the books it has digitized as new optical character recognition technologies […]

The FTC and four state attorneys general this week struck a $9.4 million settlement with Google over allegations that Google covertly paid celebrities money to promote a phone none of them had ever used. The FTC’s announcement states that the agency had previously filed suit against Google and iHeartMedia for airing nearly 29,000 deceptive endorsements […]

Rolling Stone has a fun article quoting multiple former Twitter employees highlighting that polls are the least secure tool on the platform, and are regularly open to manipulation by bots: “Polls are more prone to manipulation than almost anything else [on Twitter]. It’s interesting, given his [Elon’s] use of polls,” he added. Several other ex-Twitter […]

ID.me made its disastrous news cycle debut as COVID-19 continued to wreak havoc worldwide. With ID verification and other government services mostly still being handled remotely, multiple governments continued to wrestle with these unprecedented logistical problems. ID.me appeared to be such a solution. It wasn’t. In June 2021, it was reported that ID.me was locking […]

Now, you can understand any book or reading material of your choice regardless of its language. The NEWYES Scan Reader can recognize 3,000 characters per minute, has 0.3s translation speed, and its accuracy rate is as high as 98%. It also supports 9 UI languages, 55 OCR languages, 112 text translation languages, and 112 voice […]

We’ve talked about the mess that is the UK’s Online Safety Bill a few times now, focusing mostly on the extremely serious concerns over requiring websites to take down “legal but harmful” speech, which is a ridiculous and impossible to meet standard that would lead to massive over-blocking of perfectly reasonable content. Many people, including […]

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem put on a bit of a performance this week by announcing that the state would be banning government employees from installing TikTok on their phones. The effort, according to the Governor, is supposed to counter the national security risk of TikTok sharing consumer data with the Chinese government: “South Dakota […]

It’s been a long while since we last discussed the platform war that started between Steam and Epic several years back. The crux of the situation was that Epic began offering a far better revenue split for game publishers compared with Steam, with something like a 10-20% delta in how much of the revenue Epic […]

We should always be wary when a government entity charged with ending [insert issue here] declares said issue ended. We should be doubly wary when a Chinese government agency says anything about anything. So, it’s with a huge amount of skepticism that we greet this announcement by a Chinese regulator, which claims the thing it’s […]

A few weeks ago the FBI and DOJ seized a bunch of domain names associated with Z-Library, an online repository of millions of unauthorized copies of ebooks. The DOJ also issued an indictment of the two Russian nationals (who were arrested in Argentina), who were accused of running the site. I still have significant reservations […]

Congress has a bad habit. They have stopped passing substantive legislation through normal procedure, debate and votes. The legislative process as designed by our Founders is not happening. Instead, Congress is saving most of its actual policy-making legislation for large end-of-the-year bills that can combine hundreds of separate pieces of legislation. And if reports are […]

You know, it was just a few weeks ago that we posted an open letter to Elon Musk laying out just some of the basics of speedrunning the content moderation learning curve. And, as people keep reminding me, he seems to be doing all the levels all at once. But here’s the incredible bit: unlike […]

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In March 2019, we reported that a Washington federal court has tossed (definitively) a lawsuit brought by two Seattle police officers who believed being called murderers gave them a cause of action. It did not. Seattle councilwoman Kshama Sawant did not actually call these two cops — Scott Miller and Michael Spaulding — murderers. Instead, […]

Back in 2014, Comcast introduced a new $1.50 per month surcharge on cable bills it called its “Broadcast TV Fee.” Said fee was really just a portion of the cost of doing business for Comcast (programming costs), busted out of the full bill and hidden below the line — designed specifically to let the company […]

It’s a lesson that apparently keeps needing to be re-learned over and over again: for far too many types of digital purchases, you simply don’t own the thing you bought. The arena for this perma-lesson are varied: movies, books, music. And, of course, video games. The earliest lesson in that space may have been when […]

DNA collection at the time of arrest may make sense in certain cases. If it’s a violent crime — rape, murder, home invasion, etc. — it probably is smart to take some sort of a sample which may help place the suspect at the scene of the crime. Not that DNA evidence is infallible. It’s […]

The good news: there’s more than $50 billion in broadband subsidies coming down the road courtesy of COVID relief and infrastructure legislation. The bad news: monopoly ISPs are working overtime using every trick in the lobbying book to ensure this money goes to them, and not to any number of smaller, local competitors. If money […]

Some people just don’t understand social media. Or the Constitution. Or moderation efforts. Former president Donald Trump is one of those people. Last July, he sued Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube under the theory that the suspension of his accounts was the result of the Biden administration’s direct interference. Because his successor approached social media services […]

We keep seeing it show up in a variety of places: laws to “protect the children” that, fundamentally begin with age verification to figure out who is a child (and then layering in a ton of often questionable requirements for how to deal with those identified as children). We have the Online Safety Bill in […]