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Once again, we need good anti-SLAPP laws in every state and a strong federal anti-SLAPP law. It’s the best defense against vexatious, censorial lawsuits. Reveal News from the Center for Investigative Reporting does some really good reporting, with a focus on big, important issues. Reveal wrote a series of articles about the non-profit Planet Aid. […]

It’s that time of the year again. Time for cops to start up their periodic whining about not being liked as much as they thought they were — something that happens any time stats show a crime spike. The FBI has released its admittedly incomplete national compilation of 2021 crime statistics. “Admittedly incomplete,” because the […]

Back in May, it seemed fairly obvious how all of this was going to go down. Following on the horrific mass murder carried out at a supermarket in Buffalo, we saw NY’s top politicians all agree that the real blame… should fall on the internet and Section 230. It had quickly become clear that NY’s […]

The all-new Magic Trackpad 2 is a faster, more responsive trackpad for your Mac. The built-in battery and four force sensors underneath the trackpad surface allow you to click anywhere, and detect subtle differences in the amount of pressure you apply, bringing increased functionality to your fingertips. Magic Trackpad 2 also features an edge-to-edge glass […]

We’ve all seen how immigration agencies (but especially ICE) shifted away from enforcement that mattered (removing the worst of worst) to engaging in nothing more than as much removal as possible under Trump. There’s a new Commander-in-Chief in town, but that doesn’t mean ICE is just going to stop being routinely terrible. But this isn’t […]

Former New York Times reporter Ben Smith and friends have launched a new media company named Semafor on the back of $25 million in donations. You might recall that one of the organization’s launch events didn’t go particularly well: a “trust in news” event that somehow didn’t see the problem with platforming and amplifying millionaire propagandist Tucker Carlson […]

J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is one of the best-known and best-loved modern works of literature, not least thanks to Peter Jackson’s films based on the cycle. Given that popularity, it’s no surprise that there was interest in creating adaptations of other Tolkien works. The result is “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings […]

Law enforcement officers have plenty of unfettered access to expansive databases containing plenty of personal information. This access is instrumental to law enforcement work, including ongoing investigations, attempts to locate wanted criminals, and the routine minutia of validating drivers licenses and registration. The problem is there’s so little oversight of officers’ use of these databases. […]

Do you remember all the nonsense from earlier this year, in which executives from the Republicans’ favorite spamming operation misread a study about how various email providers handled political mailings and absolutely flipped out? The study didn’t say what they claimed it said: that Google was nefariously sending GOP emails to spam filters. It showed […]

Emoji Co. GmbH has registered trademarks in the dictionary word “Emoji.” They mostly are a licensing organization, and their registrations are in a wide range of classes: “from articles of clothing and snacks to ‘orthopaedic foot cushions’ and ‘[p]atient safety restraints.’” (Raise your hand if you’ve ever seen Emojico-branded patient safety restraints). Indeed, the court […]

The Chinese government is being weird again. Most of this weirdness springs naturally(?) from its desire to suppress dissent and control the narrative. That desire sometimes leads to bizarre outcomes, like the brief banning of the letter “N” on social media platform Weibo. The government’s concerns were related to online displeasure with Xi Jinping’s moves […]

Magic Mouse is wireless and rechargeable, with an optimized foot design that lets it glide smoothly across your desk. The Multi-Touch surface allows you to perform simple gestures such as swiping between web pages and scrolling through documents. The rechargeable battery will power your Magic Mouse for about a month or more between charges. It’s […]

Ye, formerly Kanye West, has had quite a week or so. He got locked out of both his Instagram and Twitter accounts for posting anti-semitic nonsense. Immediately following that, he went on the Drink Champs podcast/video show and spouted even more such nonsense. He’s continuing to spew similar nonsense in other interviews as well. Indeed, […]

In just the last decade or so AT&T has been fined $18.6 million for helping rip off programs for the hearing impaired; fined $10.4 million for ripping off a program for low-income families; fined $105 million for helping “crammers” rip off their customers; fined $60 million for lying to customers about the definition of “unlimited” data; and accused of ripping off U.S. […]

Late last year, a trove of records was obtained by transparency activists Distributed Denial of Secret (DDoS). Those records showed what the Washington DC Metro PD hoped to hide: that the internal disciplinary process was apparently irreparably broken. The joint report by DCist and The Reveal made sense of the DDoS-liberated data. What it showed […]

As noted previously, I’ve got some mixed feelings on the Biden COVID relief and infrastructure bills’ plan to throw more than $50 billion dollars at U.S. broadband. Mostly because we still haven’t mapped U.S. broadband properly (meaning we don’t know where money should be prioritized), and the U.S. has a rich history of failing to […]

Amidst all the conversation around regulating social media, algorithmic amplification, and disinformation, one idea that tends to get a lot of broad support is mandating editorial transparency. After all, it sounds nice, since transparency is usually a good thing. But in fact, there are huge legal and conceptual problems with mandated transparency. Santa Clara Law’s […]

Turkey continues to fall back in the freedom field. Or maybe it’s surging ahead in the oppression field! Maybe that’s the list it wants to top. Whatever the case, Turkey’s government has followed the lead of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, converting critics to criminals and seizing control of a large percentage of the press apparatus so […]

Over the summer I got a copy of the new book from Lee Bollinger and Geoffrey Stone, two formerly staunch 1st Amendment supporters who have apparently decided to go back on their earlier views, with a collection of essays by a variety of authors about “social media, freedom of speech, and the future of our […]

This refurbished iPad 7 is an excellent choice for anyone who loves to read, surf the web, and play games. This 10.2-inch A10 Fusion powerhouse has a beautiful “Retina” display, is powered by a four-core 2.4GHz Apple A10 Fusion processor, and has up to 10 hours of battery life. With 8MP back camera, 1.2MP FaceTime […]

Trump threw his unquestioning support behind law enforcement. He did it right after he was elected, promising to elevate cops above the people they served. He claimed the “anti-police atmosphere” police had created themselves was “dangerous” (he didn’t specify to whom, however) and that he, the newly-elected dumpster fire, would get this fixed. Even if […]

We’ve noted several times how telecom and media giants are running a sleazy smear campaign against Biden FCC nominee Gigi Sohn, in the hopes of keeping the agency in perpetual consumer protection gridlock. The attacks have been carefully seeded across the US press, and accuse the highly popular and qualified candidate of everything from hating […]

Ever since a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, there has been a lot of discussion about dismantling or defunding police departments. Some of this discussion occurred at the flashpoint. But it wasn’t limited to Minneapolis. Efforts to limit the damage caused by law enforcement by, say, farming out mental health calls to health care […]

Trademark bullying usually takes a pretty typical form. Someone with a trademark decides to interpret the need to enforce their mark in an extreme way and goes off threatening and/or suing everyone that even comes mildly close to using the registered trademark. It’s annoying, although perhaps mildly understandable if you squint your eyes just right. […]

I always find it vaguely amusing when the government realizes that the system of monopoly rights it created is used to restrain competition. The latest is over in the EU, where the European Commission has gone after pharmaceutical giant Teva, for abusing the patent system to limit competition for its multiple sclerosis medicine. Of course, […]

Lawsuits like these are filed all the time. Why? Because, just like out in the open world, opportunistic officers find it easy to coerce people into questioning and searches with the implication they’ll be delayed reaching their destination (or worse) if they don’t. And, like everywhere else in the US, many of these stops are […]

Last March, the FBI raided a storefront safety deposit box service owned by US Private Vaults. US Private Vaults is all about privacy. It offers customers something akin to end-to-end encryption for their physical goods. Very little customer information is retained and only customers have access to their possessions. The company does not carry a […]

This refurbished iPad 6th Gen features a full-sized 9.7″ tablet with a 2048×1536 LED-backlit Retina display, allowing you to surf the web, stream videos, or read files on a sharper, wider screen. It contains a dual-core 2.3 GHz Apple A10 processor, 2GB of RAM, and 32GB of flash memory storage, allowing the iPad to run […]

Early on in the pandemic, the World Health Organization warned that the world was facing an “infodemic,” a mass outbreak of false and misleading information. While the WHO did not coin the term, it certainly made it popular, and contributed to the idea that it was the internet that was the leading cause of this […]

Late last year, we noted how the FAA and the FCC (the agency that actually knows how spectrum works) had gotten into a bit of an ugly tussle over the FAA’s claim that 5G could harm air travel safety. The FAA claimed that deploying 5G in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz “C-Band” would cause interference with certain […]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side are similar and understandably frustrated anonymous replies to the claim that Section 230 predates content sorting and recommendation algorithms. Here’s first place: I’m old enough to remember using CompuServ and GEnie for online services, both of which had search functions that returned results, that guess what…. […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, a proposed bill would have exempted Customs and Border Protection from FOIA compliance until reporting on the issue got the problem fixed, the DOJ was fighting against a FOIA lawsuit and arguing that not even the courts have any right to question the administration’s handling of records, and […]

For obvious reasons, we’ve covered a metric ton of Streisand Effect stories here at Techdirt over the years, but I honestly didn’t think we’d get to one about a judge not wearing pants. Yet, unfortunately, here we are. Meet Judge Jamie Jameson, of the 42nd Judicial Circuit court in Kentucky. Jameson is currently suspended from […]

Going back many, many years, we’ve argued that paywalls are not a particularly sustainable model for most journalism enterprises. There are some exceptions. They seem to work in cases where breaking news and timely access are extremely important (e.g., financial news), and in cases where there is a strong community built up around the news […]

The FBI has a long history of misconduct, dating back to the J. Edgar Hoover years when agents were writing letters to civil rights leaders encouraging them to kill themselves. Since then, investigations and leaks have exposed the FBI’s insular attitude that values incremental law enforcement wins over respect for enshrined rights. The addition of […]

Last week, we wrote about how publisher Wiley had removed 1,379 textbook titles from the list of books that academic libraries could lend out, thereby forcing students to have to buy the textbooks, rather than take them out of the library. As we noted, this was an example of how damaging copyright has been on […]

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has been problematic pretty much ever since its inception. Its prior iteration — headed up by Sheriff Lee Baca — was an abhorrent mess. The LASD was (and still is!) home to gangs formed by deputies — cliques that encouraged members to violate rights and abuse those incarcerated in the […]

Cybersecurity is one of the fastest-growing IT fields. The A-Z Cybersecurity Developer Bundle contains 10 courses that cover everything from ethical hacking to penetration testing to securing networks, 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 Deals helps […]

You may recall that a year ago, pretend libertarian, John Stossel, who talks a big game about free speech and the “marketplace of ideas,” decided to sue Meta/Facebook and some of its fact checking partners for, oh right, daring to fact check him in a way he didn’t like. For this job, he hired the […]

We’ve noted for years how “Big Telecom” is desperate to have “Big Tech” pay them billions of dollars for no coherent reason. This effort is what began the net neutrality wars, and, despite the fact it’s routinely dressed up as adult policy making, it’s little more than a lobbyist-fueled cash grab. The effort always starts […]

There is something about when corporate brands get used in political advertisements that seems to make everybody forget about the very concept of fair use or international equivalents. One previous example would be when a bunch of foodstuff brands claimed trademark infringement over an anti-littering campaign in Canada, arguing that the use of their own […]

Within every conversation about technology lies the moral question: is a technology good or bad? Or, is it neutral? In other words, are our values part of the technologies we create or is technology valueless until someone decides what to do? This is the kind of dilemma Cloudflare, the Internet infrastructure company, found itself in […]

Last summer, a blockbuster leak of data allegedly related to NSO Group’s customers made it crystal clear that earlier rumors about routine abusive use of powerful phone-targeting malware were likely true. Israel’s NSO Group swiftly issued a denial that was more angry than coherent and did nothing to persuade its many critics that NSO just […]

Normally, this wouldn’t be surprising, and normally, this wouldn’t even require a blog post, but because nothing in the 5th Circuit makes sense these days, it is a little surprising and it is worth a post to note that despite the insanity of Judge Andy Oldham’s ruling putting Texas’ content moderation law back on the […]

Everyone thinks America’s favorite pastime is baseball. In reality, it’s mindless mergers and acquisitions that promise boundless new “synergies,” then deliver a parade of harmful consolidation, job cuts, closures, chaos, and competitive harms, all buried under a giant mountain of bullshit. If you recall, AT&T’s massive $200 billion acquisition of DirecTV and Time Warner wound […]

Take your Office skills to the next level with the eight courses in the Premium Microsoft Office Training Bundle. You’ll learn how to use Excel, Word 365, Outlook, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, and Publisher 365. You’ll also get a license for Microsoft Office 2021 Professional good for use on one computer. The courses and the license […]

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas… in that politicians who couldn’t pass their terrible and destructive bills through normal means are trying to light up various must pass funding and omnibus end-of-year bills with those failed bills as amendments. It happens every year like clockwork, and I’m sure we’ll be noting some other […]

There’s a routine assumption that U.S. partisan division is something that’s just inherent in the American DNA. In reality, the nation’s divisions are routinely and intentionally cultivated and encouraged by powerful and wealthy individuals and corporations to stall consensus and reform. Both parties are culpable, though it’s the GOP that has perfected the tactic as […]

Buckle in, because there are essentially two ways to write this post but both of them start off the same way. Regular readers here will be familiar with Nintendo’s now years-long war on emulation. The whole thing is ultimately quite stupid, because there is no indication that emulator and ROM sites ever really had a […]

You may recall that, back in 2016, a lawsuit was filed against the US federal judiciary and how it charges for PACER. If you don’t know, PACER is the court system’s electronic filing/records system, that allows users to access documents in federal court. It looks and acts like it was designed in the 1990s, and […]