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Now that subscriber growth has slowed, streaming TV giants have taken the predictable turn of making their services shittier and more expensive to deliver Wall Street (impossibly) unlimited quarterly revenue growth. That means higher prices, annoying new surcharges, greater restrictions, more layoffs, more cut corners, worse customer service, and a lot of pointless mergers designed [...]

As anyone paying attention to the video game industry will already know, the last couple of weeks have seen a great deal of rumor and speculation as to the state of Xbox-istan. What started as unsubstantiated rumors suggesting that Xbox was about to make some of its Microsoft-exclusive titles crossplatform to other consoles morphed into [...]

Generative AI continues to be thehot topicin the digital world - and beyond.A previous blog postnoted that this has led to people finally asking the important question whether copyright is fit for the digital world. As far as AI is concerned, there are two sides to the question. The first is whether generative AI systems [...]

I'm normally not a ends justifies the means" sort of guy, but ever since some House Republicans started getting shitty about Section 702 surveillance after some of their own got swept up in the dragnet, I've become a bit more pragmatic. Section 702 is long overdue for reform. If it takes a bunch of conveniently [...]

Ever since he first started to make moves to purchase Twitter, Elon Musk has framed his interest in rigorously adhering to" principles of free speech. As we've noted, you have to be ridiculously gullible to believe that's true, given Elon's long history of suppressing speech, but a new book about Elon's purchase suggests that from [...]

The authors of the dangerous Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) unveiled anamended version last week, but it's still an unconstitutional censorship bill that continues to empower state officials to target services and online content they do not like. We are asking everyone reading this tooppose this latest version, and todemand that their representatives oppose it-even [...]

The Python and Django Web Development Bundle has 7 courses to help you learn how to build your own sites and apps. Courses cover the basics of Django and Python and then build upon those skills by having you create your own to do list app and user authentication app, and more. It's on sale [...]

Former Rep. George Santos, kicked out of Congress last year for being an irredeemable liar, has spent his time since expulsion pulling in the big bucks making videos on Cameo for anywhere between $350 and $500 a pop. Last year, Senator John Fetterman made news when he got Santos to record a Cameo video trolling [...]

Last month we noted how deteriorating quality over at Google search and Google news was resulting in both platforms being flooded by AI-generated gibberish and nonsense, with money that should be going to real journalists instead being funneled to a rotating crop of lazy automated engagement farmers. This collapse of online informational integrity is happening [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous piece-by-piece reply to another comment about the reporter who was suspended from ExTwitter hours after publishing an article about it: In other words, he either bot boosted an article about botting, or else the botting services are giving him a freebie." You [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the EU was stalwartly moving forward with Article 13 as part of its terrible copyright directive. Trump was preparing to ban Huawei, Monster Energy lost its trademark fight with Mosta Pizza, and a lawsuit against Bloomberg brought the hot news doctrine" back into the conversation. A report showed [...]

Cops see themselves as the roughest, toughest warriors to ever hit the mean streets. They adorn themselves with blue line" flags and Punisher logos (hilarious, that last one), gear up in military garb, wave weapons at all and sundry whilst shouting at the top of their lungs. But when it comes to doing regular police [...]

The chaos for Xbox keeps on rolling, it seems. We were just talking about how years of muddled communication coming from Microsoft's Xbox team over exclusives and game ports to other consoles is resulting in a ton of confusion and speculation among the gaming public. The responsibility for all of this lies squarely at the [...]

Look, I'm getting exhausted trying to follow every attempt around the country (coming from both Democrats and Republicans) to pass obviously, blatantly, unconstitutional bills to protect the children on social media," that make it clear that their authors have no idea (1) how the 1st Amendment works, (2) how social media works, or (3) how [...]

The beginning of the year is a great time for the public domain, since it sees thousands of copyrighted works released from the intellectual monopoly that prevents their free creative use. Which works enter the public domain depends on the details of local copyright law, which varies around the world. But there's a liberation that [...]

States keep trying to make the Internet a teenager-free zone. Which means that lawsuits keep needing to be filed because these laws are ridiculously unconstitutional. And courts are noticing: just this week a court enjoined the law in Ohio, and a different court had already enjoined the California AB 2273 AADC law a few months [...]

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Last summer Elon Musk sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) over its report about a rise in hate speech on ExTwitter. A few months ago, he sued Media Matters for their report about how ads can appear next to neoNazi content on the site. If he thought those two SLAPP suits would intimidate [...]

Last week Amazon began charging Amazon Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) an extra $3 extra per month to avoid ads that didn't previously exist. One added wrinkle: apparently Amazon also pulled Dolby Vision and Atmos audio support from Prime Video unless users pay the additional toll to avoid ads, a change [...]

Late last year, we discussed how the FTC had appealed the court's decision to allow Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard to move forward. I said at the time that I don't think this appeal is going anywhere, and I still don't thanks to the general toothless nature of regulators in America, but the FTC has [...]

Can't say we didn't warn everyone. Last summer we pointed out that Sarah Silverman and a bunch of other authors suing AI companies for copyright infringement seemed to only demonstrate that they didn't understand how copyright works. And, now Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, has dismissed most of the claims in three related cases from authors against [...]

As lots of folks are reporting, Senator Richard Blumenthal, this morning, released an updated version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). He and co-author Senator Marsha Blackburn are also crowing how they've now increased the list of co-sponsors to 62 Senators, including Senators Chuck Schumer and Ted Cruz among others. Blumenthal, as he always [...]

Cops shouldn't be able to arrest you for saying things to them, even if they're things they don't like. But it still happens with alarming frequency. This is unconstitutional retaliation. But even if courts admit that much, if this retaliation doesn't match up with the facts of a previous case they've handled, they'll acknowledge the [...]

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What is going on at Wired Magazine? A few years ago, the magazine went on a bit of a binge with some articles that completely misrepresented Section 230. While I felt those articles were extraordinarily misleading, at least they seemed to mostly live in the world of facts. Its latest piece goes so far beyond [...]

Every few weeks for the last 20 years there's been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app makerover-collectingyour detailedpersonal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information toany nitwit with a nickel. And despite theadded risks this creates in the post-Roe authoritarian era, Congress refuses to pass [...]

And here we go again. I have spent some time pointing out that the Xbox team has demonstrated an unfortunate inability to properly communicate both internally and externally about its various plans. Whether it comes to how it's going to handle exclusives, game ports, or just the overall direction of the division's plans, what comes [...]

The colossal catastrophe that is the Marion County PD's raid of a small town newspaper's offices (along with a raid of the home of its 98-year-old co-owner [who died shortly thereafter]) continues to generate national (and international!) headlines. The PD claimed this was all above-board. Supposedly computer crime laws were broken by local journalists when [...]

Makers of new smart" technologies keen on reinventing the wheel keep inadvertently sending the same message: sometimes dumber technology is smarter. The latest case in point: a company named Livall makes smart" bike helmets for skiers and cyclists that includes features like auto-fall detection, GPS location monitoring, and integrated braking lights. The problem: the company [...]

As you may recall, almost two years ago, Elon Musk announced, somewhat out of the blue, that he had accumulated somewhere close to 10% of Twitter's equity, making him the single largest shareholder, and kicking off a chain of bizarre events that eventually put him in charge of the platform that he has rapidly driven [...]

London is covered with cameras. They're everywhere people are. That includes the London Underground, the city's massive subway system. But these days, it's not enough to have thousands of unblinking, passive eyes watching Londoners go about their days. AI is the special sauce. Facial recognition is pretty much a given in London. Added to the [...]

Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative AI-driven tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different from previous Luminar editors. It keeps your favorite LuminarAI tools and expands your arsenal with more state-of-the-art technologies and important changes at [...]

It never ends. We just wrote about Ohio having its parental consent/age verification" bill tossed out as unconstitutional, and pointed out that it is the latest in a long series of similar bills being declared unconstitutional. The internet/kid bills are a bipartisan mess, as legislatures dominated by both parties have passed similar bills, and all [...]

AI" (or more accurately language learning models nowhere close to sentience or genuine awareness) has plenty of innovative potential. Unfortunately, most of the folks actually in charge of the technology's deployment largely see it as a way to cut corners, attack labor, and double down on all of their very worst impulses. Case in point: [...]

There's that old saying that goes something like: when you've dug yourself into a hole, the very first thing you have to do is stop digging. Or, if you're Trader Joe's, you tell the foreman to hold your beer and grab the shovel to get back to work. Last summer, the grocer decided to take [...]

Prior restraint but it's a law. Everyone saw this coming. Marsy's Laws" began popping up all over the nation, written to prevent the naming of crime victims, especially when the victims were minors. It was perceived as a way to protect victims' privacy and, hopefully, head off harassment from the not-inconsequential portion of humanity that [...]

As we've written about repeatedly, efforts to protect kids online and improve their mental health at the moment all seem to be focused on taking social media away from them, even though all the evidence suggests this would be harmful, not helpful. Today, we're joined by Rob Morris, who aims to take a different approach [...]

Earlier this year, we wrote about about another free speech absolutist" and Elon Musk buddy (and investor in ExTwitter), Bill Ackman threatening to file a SLAPP suit over reporting he didn't like. He's still promising such a lawsuit against Business Insider, and when it comes, it seems unlikely to succeed. He's yet to show any [...]

Well, NSO Group really made a mess of this for everyone. Ever since the devastating leak showing its customers routinely targeted journalists, government critics, dissidents, and human rights activists (you know, rather than the violent criminals and terrorists they said they'd use the spyware to track), things have gone from bad to worse to career-ending [...]

The Ultimate Adobe CC Training Bundle has 12 courses to help you get the most out of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. Courses cover Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, After Effects, and more. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt [...]

Writer Seamas O'Reilly published his weekly column at the Irish Examiner on Saturday, talking about how spam, scams, and manipulation attempts are flooding the internet. It's a good article and well worth reading, basically just talking about the proliferation of nonsense online, much of which includes scammers trying to steal money from people. Here's just [...]

Every few weeks for the last fifteen years there's been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app makerover-collectingyour detailedpersonal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information toany nitwit with a nickel. And despite theadded risks this creates in the post-Roe era, we've still done little to [...]

Usually when I write about trademark disputes, it's at least the case that if I really squint at an accuser's claims, or perhaps hit myself in the head with a hammer for several minutes, I can at least see their perspective in a dispute. I may still call the whole thing very stupid, as is [...]

Last month we wrote about Netchoice suing Ohio over its Parental Notification by Social Media Act," in which I filed a declaration highlighting how problematic the law would be for a site like Techdirt. By the time we'd finished the article about the lawsuit, a federal judge had already granted a temporary injunction, blocking the [...]

Stop-start. Push-pull. Yank-tug. That's the way things have been going in the UK. One would expect better performance from lawmakers with a hard-on for porn. No. Not that way. (Although, maybe that way.) The UK government has spent several years trying to talk service providers, recalcitrant legislators, and the general public into trading away a [...]

In the fall of 2022 an apparent investor in a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Latinum" sued the guy behind the currency, Donald Basile. You can see the whole case here. There has been a bunch of back and forth on the docket, but it appears the remaining parties at some point went to binding arbitration. Soon [...]

The 2024 Cybersecurity Mastermind Training Bundle utilizes a top-down approach to teach participants the essential skills for implementing cybersecurity measures in real-world business environments. Recognizing that hands-on experience on actual projects accelerates learning more effectively than traditional training or online courses, the program provides you with the opportunity to work on real cybersecurity projects, offering [...]

Last fall, we detailed the many, many, many, many problems of Elon Musk's absolutely bullshit ridiculous lawsuit against Media Matters. Again, if you don't recall, Media Matters found some examples of neo-Nazi content on ExTwitter appearing next to ads from big name brands. Elon got extra mad about this because it also happened a day [...]

Every few weeks for the last fifteen years there's been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app makerover-collectingyour detailedpersonal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information toany nitwit with a nickel. And despite theadded risks this creates in the post-Roe era, we've still done little to [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment on our post about Elon Musk funding a SLAPP suit against Disney, responding piece by piece to another commenter: According to MM, every lawsuit by someone right of Bernie is SLAPP" No. It's just for whatever reason, the right wing is [...]