Techdirt

We’ll get to Chris Wray in a moment, but first let’s do a throwback to May 29, 2018 — the date the FBI first promised to correct its miscount (estimated to be off by as much as 4,000 devices) of uncrackable devices in its possession. Multiple statements utilizing the FBI’s bad stats were edited, with […]

For decades, we’ve discussed how U.S. broadband is generally spotty, expensive, and slower than many countries due to regional monopolization. And, for just as long, we’ve highlighted how U.S. policymakers in both parties comically go out of their way to not even acknowledge that monopolies are a problem, often instead employing vague, causation-free rhetoric about […]

Clearview wants to be the best in a shady business. As facial recognition tech has undergone increasing public scrutiny, Clearview has chosen to be the turd floating in the government surveillance punchbowl. Clearview scrapes public websites for pictures and data, and sells access to its immense database and the AI to exploit it to whoever […]

This blog has just written about the likely loss of a very particular kind of culture – K-pop live streams. Culture is culture, and a loss is a loss. But potentially we are facing the disappearance of a cultural resource that is indisputably more important. I’m talking about Twitter, and its vast store of tweets that […]

We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: it cannot make sense to extend copyright terms retroactively. The entire point of copyright law is to provide a limited monopoly on making copies of the work as an incentive to get the work produced. Assuming the work was produced, that says that the bargain that […]

The Copia Institute was back at the Supreme Court last week with a new amicus brief urging it to grant review of the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in NetChoice v. Moody. That case, if you remember, took issue with the Florida’s attempt to regulate the Internet with its social media bill (this was the one with […]

Ohio cops just can’t seem to get their head around First Amendment protections. A case hopefully en route to a Supreme Court review involves Parma, Ohio cops who decided it was completely legal to arrest a town resident for creating a clearly satirical Facebook page that suggested the Parma PD was offering free abortions in […]

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We’ve been somewhat critical of Elon Musk‘s tenure as Twitter owner and CEO (I think for fairly good reasons), but he does have a few good ideas. Lead among them, wanting to enable encrypted direct messages (DMs). He’s mentioned it before, but also had this slide in a recent internal presentation he gave: There’s not […]

The “cord cutting” phenomenon the cable and broadcast sector long denied or downplayed simply shows no sign of slowing down. According to the latest data by Leichtman Research, the top U.S. pay TV companies lost another 785,000 subscribers last quarter as younger Americans continue to shift to streaming video, over the air antennas, or free […]

When cops decide they’ve found the right perp, very little can persuade them to look elsewhere. This tunnel vision has the tendency to take years of freedom away from innocent people. And it would be terrible enough if officers simply refused to consider exonerative evidence. But in this case (like far too many others), the […]

A clear demonstration that the EU Copyright Directive is a badly-drafted law is the fact that it has still not been implemented in national legislation by all the EU Member States three years after it was passed, and over a year after the nominal deadline for doing so. That’s largely because of the upload filters of Article 17. The requirement […]

We’ve written a number of posts about the problems of KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act from Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn (both of whom have fairly long and detailed histories for pushing anti-internet legislation). As with many “protect the children” or “but think of the children!” kinds of legislation, KOSA is built around […]

The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental, historical disaster. AT&T spent $200 billion (including debt) to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and basically stumbled around […]

Lots of people like to pretend California is home to certifiable Communists — a socialist collective masquerading as a state. But California is not beholden to socialist ideals. It has its own dictatorial ideological bent, one that’s only slightly tamed by its election of liberal leaders. Every move towards the left is greeted by an […]

Microsoft Office Home & Business for Mac 2021 (2-Pack) This bundle is for families, students, and small businesses who want classic MS Office apps and email. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and OneNote. Get 2 licenses for Microsoft Office Home and Business for Mac for $55. The Million Dollar Puzzle Are you a fan […]

There’s this narrative out there that “it has been decided” that social media is “bad for children” and that it is such a big danger that “regulation is needed.” A few months ago, we wrote about a Berkeley professor who claimed that this was settled and that there was “no longer any question as to […]

Back in July, BMW raised a bit of a ruckus when the company announced that it would be making heated seats a luxury option for an additional $18 per month. Now, Mercedes aims to take the concept one step further by announcing that buyers of the company’s new Mercedes EQ electric models will need to pay […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is WarioBarker, responding to our post that suggested Elon Musk’s fans will never realize his actions at Twitter are exactly what they accused Jack Dorsey of doing before: I disagree – they’ll recognize it, but consider it perfectly fine because Musk’s on their side. In […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, it became clear the FCC was gearing up for an attempt to hide its attack on net neutrality just before the Thanksgiving weekend. While Comcast once again falsely claimed there was nothing to worry about, the agency did exactly that and released its order on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the […]

Two years ago, the DOJ opened up an investigation into the Springfield, Massachusetts police department, targeting its troubled Narcotics Unit. Like far too many other drug-focused units, the Springfield Narcotics Unit was filled with officers who routinely engaged rights violations. Narcotics Bureau officers regularly punch subjects in the head and neck area without legal justification. […]

When people speak of culture, and preserving it, they usually mean the works of recognized artistic giants like Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, Charlie Chaplin, and Miles Davis. They rarely mean things like live streams of Korean pop music, generally known as K-pop. And yet K-pop is undoubtedly an expression – some would say a particularly […]

This week, we have a special joint episode with The Neoliberal Podcast, discussing the question on a lot of minds: just what the hell is going on at Twitter now that Elon Musk is in charge? He’s owned the company for less than a month, and it’s already in chaos. Mike sits down with Neoliberal […]

A new report claims that more than a third of Twitter’s biggest advertisers have now pulled their ads from the platform, as the unstable and unpredictable nature of the new owner, combined with his implicit encouragement for hate, has made the site less and less welcoming to the brands with money to spend. Dozens of […]

Soon after Musk took over Twitter, he announced that no big content moderation changes would occur until after he had convened a “content moderation council” made up of “diverse” perspectives. Never mind that Twitter had actually done that years earlier. Musk will reinvent anything and take credit for it if he can. Of course, it […]

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To save the children, we must destroy everything. That’s the reality of the EARN IT Act. I mean, you can get some sort of sense of what you’re in store for just by reading the actual words behind the extremely labored acronym: Eliminating Abuse and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act. Whew. It’s a mouthful. […]

For the last few years, Apple has worked overtime trying to market itself as a more privacy-focused company. 40-foot billboards of the iPhone with the slogan “Privacy. That’s iPhone” have been a key part of company marketing. The only problem: researchers keep highlighting how a lot of Apple’s well-hyped privacy changes are performative in nature. […]

You may think you can take a hands-off approach to local law enforcement. But you’d be wrong. Trusting the police to police themselves has never worked out. If you don’t end up targeted by a DOJ investigation, all the work you didn’t do to oversee your police officers can (and will) be used against you […]

After posting the following AI-generated images, I got private replies asking the same question: “Can you tell me how you made these?” So, here I will provide the background and “how to” of creating such AI portraits, but also describe the ethical considerations and the dangers we should address right now. Background Generative AI – […]

Back in 2014, New York City officials decided they would replace the city’s dated pay phones with “information kiosks” providing free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging, and a tablet for access to city services, maps and directions. The kiosks were to be funded by “context-aware” ads based on a variety of data collected from […]

There is a Korean proverb that says: “There is always a way out, look for it.” South Korea’s recent revision of its Telecommunications Business Act (TBA) might, however, be the one thing South Korea is not able to get out of, unless it abandons its plans for redistributing the monopoly power back to telecommunication providers. […]

There was an interesting post on Blind recently from an advertiser who said that, while some big name advertisers had quickly paused their advertising on Twitter while they waited to see what Elon Musk’s plans for the site were, they’ve decided to pause their $750k per month ad spend on the site after seeing what […]

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Moderation at scale is impossible. This truism has been enshrined on the pages of Techdirt. Anyone working for a platform with thousands of users — much less millions or billions of users — knows this is true. Meta, the rebrand now controlling Facebook, certainly knows this to be true. Facebook has billions of users and […]

After countless years pondering the idea, the FCC has finally announced that it’s going to politely ask the nation’s lumbering telecom monopolies to affix a sort of “nutrition label” on to broadband connections. The labels will clearly disclose the speed and latency (ping) of your connection, any hidden fees users will encounter, and whether the […]

One of the wonders of a digital world is that art preservation in many forms suddenly gets much, much easier. For all kinds of art, be it video games, music, drawings/paintings, etc., at the very least an uploaded digital simulacrum of the art means that it can’t be easily lost due to the pernicious lack […]

Let’s get this out of the way right up front: Senator Josh Hawley is not a Good Person. The former attorney general had the chance to be a good person, but instead became the poster boy for insurrection by raising his fist in support of Trump fans on their way to raiding the Capitol building […]

One chapter of my Walled Culture book (free download available in various formats) looks at how the bad ideas embodied in the EU’s appalling Copyright Directive – the worst copyright law so far – are being taken up elsewhere. One I didn’t include, because its story is still unfolding, is Canada’s Bill C-18: “An Act respecting online communications […]

There are a variety of myths about how the world works that get people really screwed up when they make big bets on trying to “fix” things. I think Elon Musk has fallen prey to a few of them in how he’s trying to run Twitter. First, he falsely believes (as was the widespread myth […]

Florida governor Ron DeSantis appears to believe he’s the successor to Donald Trump’s short-lived throne. While Trump was president, DeSantis did everything he could to appeal the same voter base. Trump rather listlessly announced he’ll run again in 2024, but it’s a fair bet DeSantis will try to become Trump 2.0 if it appears the […]

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Going to put this up front, because I expect a bunch of people to not read and assume something very incorrect: I think there are valid arguments (even pretty strong ones) for why it makes sense for social media platforms to allow Donald Trump on them (there are also valid arguments against it). But, conducting […]

We’ve noted for decades how, despite all the political lip service paid toward “bridging the digital divide,” the U.S. doesn’t actually have any idea where broadband is or isn’t available. The FCC’s past broadband maps, which cost $350 million to develop, have long been accused of all but hallucinating competitors, making up available speeds, and […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone responding to the accusation that our coverage of Elon Musk suggests some kind of vendetta: A rich moron bought a thing he didn’t understand for a price that makes him an even bigger moron. He has since done everything possible to […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the assault on the ability of states to protect broadband privacy and net neutrality continued with the wireless industry jumping into the fray, while the FCC was moving to gut rules protecting DSL users. The DOJ was still demanding the identity of Twitter users in an insane crusade, […]

In Chicago, fall lasts roughly fifteen minutes. That means that it’s not even Thanksgiving yet and this morning we woke up to 2 inches of snow on the ground and more of it gently falling to Earth. It looks like Christmas already, which is appropriate as I also woke up to an update on Mariah […]

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been spending much more time using Mastodon, and shifting much of what I used to use Twitter for to that other platform. It’s not an exact replacement, nor is it meant to be, but it’s been growing incredibly rapidly as Twitter seemingly crumbles under Elon Musk. Lots of people […]

This week, I testified remotely before the Colombian Constitutional Court in the case of Esperanza Gómez Silva c. Meta Platforms, Inc. y Facebook Colombia S.A.S. Expediente T-8.764.298. In a procedure I don’t understand, the court organized a public hearing to discuss the issues raised by the case. (The case involves Instagram’s termination of an adult film star’s […]

Writing about the terrible ideas Congress has is often like babysitting a toddler bent on sticking his finger in a socket. At a certain point there is the temptation to say, “Fine! Learn the hard way!” But in the case of the INFORM Act it won’t be Congress who learns the hard lesson but all […]