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Earlier this week, we wrote about how the EU seemed to practically be salivating over getting its hands on Elon Musk now that he owned Twitter. The first half of that post was about how he was at risk of running afoul of his GDPR commitments, potentially allowing the jurisdiction over GDPR enforcement to fall […]

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The Chinese government hates its Muslim residents. It won’t even pretend otherwise. The Uyghur Muslim population has been targeted for years, resulting in disappearances, violence, oppressive surveillance, and other efforts that demonstrate that finding the country’s “EXIT” sign isn’t even an option. It’s everything we’ve come to hate about China, albeit something that follows a […]

Telecom monopolies have spent decades trying to kill off public broadband efforts. Whether it’s outright lies about what municipal broadband will do or shitty protectionist laws specifically designed to undermine the will of voters, U.S. telecom monopolies have long been absolutely terrified of your long-neglected town or city voting to build its own broadband network. […]

We all know field drug tests are inaccurate. The cheap, portable tests turn everything from diesel to humans ashes to contraband, resulting in the wrongful arrests of people who’ve done nothing wrong. Cases often get tossed once these substances are tested by drug labs, but the harm has often already been done. The faulty tests […]

Techdirt has written many times about the dysfunctional state of academic publishing. The main issue is that academics do most of the work required to publish a paper, but the publishers reap most of the benefit. Profit margins are extremely high for top publishers — typically 30-40%. And yet academics are routinely forbidden from sharing […]

Over the last week or so, I keep hearing about a big push among activists and lawmakers to try to get the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) into the year-end “must pass” omnibus bill. Earlier this week, one of the main parents pushing for the bill went on Jake Tapper’s show on CNN and stumped […]

It’s 2022 and somehow nearly half the nation still has some form of criminal defamation law on the books. This is a holdover from the days before the US went independent — laws that allowed (usually) the government to treat speech it didn’t like as a criminal act. Once the First Amendment went into effect, […]

Sam’s Club is a membership warehouse club that offers members quality products at great value. From groceries and kitchen supplies to electronics and furniture, Sam’s Club has great deals on the items you want! By redeeming and signing up as a member, you’ll be paying just $24.99 for a 1 year Sam’s Club membership (normally […]

Quite possibly you heard that former President Donald Trump, who has spent the past two years in delusional denial about the fact that he lost the last election, and who continues to lead a dwindling coterie of equally delusional fans, has now announced his plans to run for re-election in 2024. This was widely expected, […]

Back in 2015, the FCC announced that it would be adopting rules for shared commercial use of the 3550-3700 MHz band (3.5 GHz band), creating an unlicensed Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) and a system to manage shared government, private, and public access to this spectrum. The move was a broadly welcomed one, as it […]

Courts are cool with pretextual stops. As long as a cop can make up a reasonably good excuse for pulling someone over, they can start casting their lines in hopes of bigger fish. Given enough time and bullshit, cops can often talk people into warrantless roadside searches. But the pretext needs to be reasonable. And, […]

The somehow both long-running and surprisingly quick death of Stadia is now complete. We have been covering Google’s attempt at a video game cloud-streaming service for several years now. Frankly, it’s been a mess from the jump, from a banal launch that was rife with user experience issues, to poor game performance, and a laughably […]

So far, the biggest genius idea from Elon Musk for Twitter was to try to make people pay for blue checks. He keeps insisting that this will somehow solve the “bot/spam” problem, but no one has come up with a credible explanation for how or why. Musk himself has compared it to a spam filter: […]

Thanks to a steady stream of reports of abusive uses of its powerful Pegasus malware, Israel’s NSO Group saw its reputational stock drop precipitously as it became more and more apparent the company didn’t really care who it sold its products to. The list of customers included several notorious human rights abusers and leaked data […]

The 2023 Ultimate XBox Game Developer Bundle will teach you all you need to know about game development using Unreal Engine. Known for its ability to render high-fidelity graphics, Unreal Engine is one of the most popular engines available for creating video games. With its easy-to-use Blueprints Visual Scripting system and overall quality performance, it […]

We’ve already pointed out that the new Twitter under Elon Musk may be facing some big challenges from the FTC in the US. The company is under a consent decree, and it’s not clear that Musk is complying with the terms of the consent decree. And unlike SEC violations, violating an FTC consent decree can […]

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 […]

In-N-Out is In-N-At it again. In our many posts on the burger chain, we’ve discussed the company’s habit of what I’ll call trademark tourism. In posts that have focused primarily on its trademarks in Australia, we’ve detailed out how In-N-Out will conduct a popup restaurant in these countries that it otherwise has zero brick and […]

Well, well, well. As you may recall, back in 2019 Devin Nunes and his bumbling lawyer Steven Biss sued Esquire magazine and reporter Ryan Lizza because Nunes really did not like this article about Nunes’ parents and their family farm, which is actually in Iowa, rather than California as many people believed. It’s an interesting […]

Plenty of countries have vulnerability disclosure requirements in place. This is supposed to increase the security of all users by requiring notification of affected platforms or software of exploits that may be used by malicious entities. Define “malicious entity” tho. The NSA has never abided by these requirements, despite being the free world leader in […]

I sent this notice around internally here at Techdirt, but figured it might be useful to state this publicly. Historically, Techdirt would often embed tweets using the embed feature from Twitter. This was always somewhat risky for a few reasons, including that people could (and often did) delete tweets. Though Twitter’s embed feature had a […]

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The government of India continues to increase its monitoring of residents’ day-to-day lives. Like pretty much every other country in the world, India relies on the internet to handle communications, data, and multiple services used by residents. The government, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has become less democratic and more authoritarian. To keep dissent to […]

Last week yet another study indicated that Apple’s heavily hyped new dedication to privacy was somewhat hollow, with the company’s apps often extensively tracking user behavior despite claims that doesn’t happen. It was the latest in a series of studies showcasing how Apple’s pivot to a privacy-dedicated company is often a bit performative once you […]

Loveland, Colorado has a police problem. The problem isn’t that there are too few, or that they’re being underfunded. The problem is the ones they already have — the ones that keep getting sued. On July 20, 2020, Target contacted Loveland PD to deal with a man (Keenan Stuckey) suffering from mental health issues in […]

Spaceboy Elon Musk promised the Twitter he was pretty much sued into purchasing would bring an end to all the free speech violations he claimed were happening every day under its liberal overlords. But being an edgelord troll rarely converts into competent management. Musk is speedrunning the moderation learning curve. But he is also discovering […]

Meet Roland “Spanky” Macher. Spanky, a name by which I really must insist on calling him throughout this post, was a restaurant owner and real estate businessman before going to prison for 30 months for failing to pay his taxes and lying to the bankruptcy court. While in prison, he crafted his a how-to-business opus, […]

About 18 months after he lost the 2020 election, Election Conspiracist in Chief Donald Trump sued Hillary Clinton and dozens of other Democrats over the election he had won nearly six years earlier. That lawsuit went nowhere. But going nowhere meant tying up a lot of the court’s time, what with Trump’s lawyers dumping 193-page […]

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Look, by now it’s pretty clear that Elon Musk is deeply, deeply in above his head at Twitter, in ways that could have some pretty significant legal consequences. Even so, it’s still not the job of politicians to make decisions for him. He is free to destroy the company (and a good chunk of his […]

Despite a lot of political lip service paid toward bridging the digital divide, U.S. policymakers still don’t fully know where broadband is or isn’t available in the U.S. They have some well-informed notions, but outside analysts have long made it clear that the maps the government uses to shape policy and award subsidies are often […]

This week, we kick off the most insightful side of things with a comment from That One Guy on my post about how I still hope Twitter succeeds, where the comment highlights the biggest single thing that might get Elon to stop from burning the site to the ground: getting past his own ego. Step […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Comcast joined the chorus of ISPs trying to stop states from protecting privacy and net neutrality, and also targeted Colorado’s thoughts of building its own broadband network, though it was failing to overpower the voters there. Meanwhile, the SESTA fight was heating up: we talked more about how […]

In 2019, Houston police officers — relying on information generated by narcotic squad office Gerald Goines (who is now facing multiple criminal charges) — raided the home of Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle. Both occupants of the home were killed during the raid — one predicated on lies from Officer Goines. The fallout resulted in […]

You’ll be shocked to learn that the same MoviePass executives that routinely misled investors (and once even covertly changed user passwords to try and keep them from using a service they paid for) are now in even more trouble for their dodgy business practices. According to an announcement by the DOJ, former MoviePass executives Theodore […]

It’s always fun when copyright gets in the way of preservation efforts, especially when it comes at the hands of a mega-corporation like Apple. Many of you are likely to be familiar with WWDC, Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. This is one of those places where you get a bunch of Apple product reveals and news […]

Look, when it was revealed that Elon Musk’s first big plan was to make blue checks available for purchase for $8 a month, some of us quickly pointed out that the blue checks weren’t supposed to be about status, but about verification that someone is who they say they are. And, that’s kind of important. […]

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Yesterday I tweeted out a question about whether or not there was anyone left at Twitter who remembered that the company was under a pretty strict FTC consent decree: Apparently the answer was yes, but they didn’t include Elon Musk. Late last night, a few hours after that tweet, the Chief Information Security Officer, the […]

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 for years. The only problem: researchers keep highlighting how a lot of Apple’s well-hyped privacy changes are performative […]

Although trade deals are nominally about, well, trade, Techdirt readers know that they have become an important way to force through changes in areas like copyright and patents without any meaningful democratic scrutiny. That’s because trade deals are negotiated in secret, and then presented as done and dusted once talks have been concluded. The argument […]

We’ve noted for a while that the laws of physics would prohibit Elon Musk’s satellite broadband service from being truly disruptive at any real scale. Analysts had been quietly noting for a while that Starlink lacked the capacity to handle its projected user load. That recently resulted in obvious slowdowns, raising the question of when […]

We’ve talked in the past about “soft corruption,” a term I first heard from Larry Lessig. Lots of people have a general sense of what actual corruption is, but less understanding of the specifics. But, in general, people feel uncomfortable with the ways in which money can influence politics, even when it’s legal. Lessig’s concept […]

Jeff German, a forty-year veteran investigative reporter residing in Las Vegas, Nevada, was murdered earlier this year, allegedly by a local government official whose actions had received recent criticism in articles bylined by German. Robert Telles, a county official, has been arraigned in the murder of the journalist, something prosecutors claim was prompted by German’s […]

Text to speech enables brands to deliver an enhanced end-user experience while minimizing costs. Speechnow lets you create voice recordings and audio versions of content for YouTube videos, Facebook ads, Instagram posts, and more, in just a few steps. All you have to do is add text, choose voice and language, and wait for your […]

I keep pointing out that Twitter was already doing most of what Elon seems to want to do, but he (and his fans) has not quite realized that. Also, while Twitter was often slow in rolling stuff out, and not the best at explaining what it was doing, many of its features were created pretty […]

After years of explosive growth, Netflix lost nearly a million subscribers between April and July of this year. In part due to new competition in streaming, but also because Netflix executives are stuck in this auto-cannibalism loop; sacrificing what’s popular about the service (affordability, no ads, few weird restrictions, decent content) to feed Wall Street’s insatiable […]

Courts have continually said pretextual stops are a cool way to engage in law enforcement fishing expeditions. But there are a few caveats. First, there needs to be a reason to stop the person, even if that reason exists largely in the imaginative readings of local statutes by police officers. Second, the stop cannot be […]

For years we’ve been firing no shortage of low-Earth orbit satellites into space without the federal government showing much concern about the the impact of these new technologies at scale. Like, the navigational hazards of unchecked space junk, or the way scientists warned that Starlink causes significant light pollution that seriously harms scientific research and […]