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“Twitter has become the de facto town square,” proclaims Elon Musk. “So, it’s really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they’re able to speak freely within the bounds of the law.” When pressed by TED’s Chris Anderson, he hedged: “I’m not saying that I have all the answers here.” Now, […]

With the leaked Supreme Court ruling indicating the court is poised to effectively overturn Roe V. Wade, you can expect a new wave of worry about the weaponization and abuse of consumer location data, as states increasingly seek to criminalize abortion — and those aiding others seeking such services. As if on cue: Motherboard’s latest […]

Nearly the entire online-game-playing world hates the fact that cheating in online games exist. The cheaters don’t, obviously. Nor do those that make money by selling cheats and hacks for online games. Given the majority/minority situation here, it’s perhaps not terribly surprising that efforts to combat online cheating very often go way, way too far. […]

The New Yorker magazine is famous for its fact checking effort. Indeed, the New Yorker itself has written multiple pieces about how ridiculously far its fact checking team will go. And when people want to present the quintessential example of how “fact checking” should work, they often point to The New Yorker. Of course, I […]

Courthouse News Service, as its name would imply, relies heavily on court documents to create content. Over the past few years, however, random court clerks around the nation have suddenly decided the old way of doing things was no longer acceptable. For years, reporters have been given access to filings the day that they’re filed. […]

We’ve noted for a while now how Elon Musk’s Starlink low-orbit satellite broadband service isn’t going to have the impact many think. For one thing, the service can currently only provide service to a maximum of around 800,000 subscribers globally. For context, around 20-40 million people in the U.S. lack broadband, and 83 million live under a broadband monopoly […]

The government of India still claims to be a democracy, but its decade-long assault on the internet and the rights of its citizens suggests it would rather be an autocracy. The country is already host to one of the largest biometric databases in the world, housing information collected from nearly every one of its 1.2 […]

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It would be nice if we could go at least a day or two without Republicans playing absolutely pathetic victims over made up moral panics. A few weeks ago, we debunked the nonsense story making the rounds in Trumpist media that a new study “proved” that “Gmail censored conservatives” by catching their campaign emails in […]

Eight years ago, prompted by the Snowden revelations (and Senator Ron Wyden’s persistent questions), then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper finally provided the public with some insight into the FBI’s warrantless searches of Americans’ data collected (supposedly inadvertently) by the NSA. The report delivered to Sen. Wyden was surprisingly redaction-free. But that didn’t mean it was […]

For those that run online video game services, there have been plenty of ways to deal with those who cheat in-game. Some, like Blizzard, look to twist copyright law into a pretzel to argue that cheating in an online game somehow constitutes infringement. Other companies have gone for more creative options. Cheaters in Pokémon Go […]

We’ve noted a few times now that while Facebook gets most of the heat for its privacy scandals, the stuff going on in the telecom, app, and adtech markets in regards to location data makes many of Facebook’s privacy issues seem like a grade school picnic. That was well highlighted by the recent Securus, LocationSmart, and numerous T-Mobile […]

Back in December we wrote about just how absolutely, pathetically ridiculous Alex Berenson’s lawsuit against Twitter was. As you’ll recall, Berenson, who has accurately been described as the “pandemic’s wrongest man“, got kicked off Twitter after posting a non-stop stream of utter nonsense, completely misinterpreting vaccine data in ways that weren’t just embarrassing but that […]

Late last year, more than 165 Hertz customers sued the company over false allegations of theft. Multiple plaintiffs claimed they had been stopped by law enforcement for supposedly having stolen a rental car. In some cases, customers were jailed for months before criminal charges were dropped. One former Hertz employee claims this is just how […]

As everyone’s trying to read the tea leaves of what an Elon Musk-owned Twitter will actually look like, it’s been reported that in his presentation to Wall St. banks to get the financing he needs to complete the deal, he suggested the deal would be profitable because of some of his new business model ideas. […]

Free up space on your phone, tablet, laptop, or home computer. Prism Drive is a lightning fast hot storage solution that allows you to store all of your files in one place, and access them from any device. Easily share large files, like video, graphics, images, and audio. Access files from your computer, your phone, […]

NSO Group’s reputation continues to decline, tracked inversely by the rise of Citizen Lab, a team of Canadian security researchers working out of the University of Toronto. Citizen Lab has exposed plenty of abuse by NSO’s customers, and saved plenty of malware targets from remaining compromised by NSO-crafted spyware. This obviously hasn’t made NSO Group […]

You may have heard that Republican politicians have been celebrating Elon Musk’s announced plans to purchase Twitter, in the belief that his extraordinarily confused understanding of free speech and content moderation will allow them to ramp up the kinds of nonsense, abuse, and harassment they can spread on Twitter. I’m still not convinced that will […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side comes in the form of a reply that builds on the second place winner. So for clarity’s sake, we’ll present them in reverse order! In second place, it’s Stephen T. Stone with a piece-by-piece reply to yet another comment on our post about how Twitter […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Ajit Pai unveiled his plan to replace net neutrality rules with fluff, while Canada was trying to defend net neutrality. Congress was trying (and then succeeding) to strip oversight from the Copyright Office, while a Texas lawamaker was looking for the power to decide who counts as a […]

Now this one surprises me. We’ve been talking recently about a trademark infringement suit brought against Stone Brewing by Sycamore Brewing, a much smaller brewery. Fresh off a massive win against Molson Coors over its decision to alter the branding for Key Stone beer to feature the word “stone” in very big letters, Stone Brewing […]

There was recently an absolutely fascinating episode of the NPR podcast Planet Money, all about how Tai Verdes became a pop star. It actually appears to be a rerun of a different podcast, called Switched On Pop, which originally ran back in December of last year, but I first heard it on Planet Money. The […]

Citing a post-pandemic shutdown surge in violent crime and some other shaky reasoning, the city council of Houston, Texas has decided the time has come to violate the rights of business owners. Here’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown for Reason: Officials in Houston, Texas, have voted to require an array of businesses—including bars, convenience stores, and strip clubs—to install […]

The Biden Administration just announced the creation of a DHS subagency apparently intended to confront “disinformation.” The biggest problem with it is that it is impossible, right now, to even know whether it’s a good idea or not, because it is so unclear what this board is intended to do. Further, its name does not […]

Earlier this week, law professor Orin Kerr raised an alert. The 9th Circuit appeals court had come out with a ruling in a case regarding the question of whether or not preservation requests counted as a seizure under the 4th Amendment, and basically said “nope.” As Kerr notes, this ruling effectively could allow the government […]

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When law enforcement officials get caught saying something extremely troublesome at press conferences, the first page of the police playbook is to accuse everyone reporting/retweeting the news of misinterpreting the statements made and/or spreading misinformation. It’s the “my account was hacked” of the Thin Blue Line — a claim no one believes but one that […]

The U.S. is about to spend an historic $42.5 billion on expanding affordable broadband access courtesy of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). While this spending is largely being organized by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), much of it involves grants that will need to be managed by the states. The problem: […]

Over the past few years, we’ve seen a flurry of activity centering around video game emulation. Much of that has been focused on how a few companies, namely Nintendo, have reacted to emulation sites. Almost universally, these companies see emulation as a threat and try to get them shut down. Often times those same companies […]

Bogus lawsuits are a form of bullying. (Hence the need for a federal anti-SLAPP law.) Some lawsuits are merely frivolous, filed by people who have no idea how the law works. Others, like this one, are filed solely to silence critics and remind them who actually has the power in this relationship. That’s what has […]

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) set aside $42.5 billion to be spent by the states on expanding access to affordable broadband. But state by state, telecom lobbyists are working hard to ensure that this money only goes toward “unserved” locations, and can’t be used to potentially create competition in markets they already serve. […]

Content ID isn’t really the villain here. But it’s an accomplice. YouTube content moderation — including the prevention of copyright infringement — is almost completely automated. It has to be. As of 2019, more than 500 hours of content were uploaded to YouTube every minute. Machines have to do the work because human moderation is […]

Last chance to get your boxed copy of CIA: Collect It All! If you’ve been around Techdirt for a while, you’ll probably recall that almost exactly four years ago, we launched our Kickstarter for CIA: Collect It All. This was our version of an internal CIA training card game, called “Collection Deck” that was partially […]

The 2022 School of Graphic Design Bundle has 8 courses to help you start on your path to becoming a digital artist. Courses cover Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Figma, and more. You’ll learn how to edit and enhance your photos and videos, how to create a portfolio, how to build a mobile app without coding, and […]

So there has been lots of talk about Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter. I’ve written multiple things about how little he understands about free speech and how little he understands content moderation. I’ve also written (with giant caveats) about ways in which his takeover of Twitter might improve some things. Throughout this discussion, […]

For more than a decade, cable TV executives brushed aside the idea of cable TV “cord cutting” as either a nonexistent threat or a temporary phenomenon that wound end once Millennials started procreating. Of course, none of that wound up being true, and consumer defections from the bloated, pricey traditional cable TV bundle continue to set records during […]

Field drug tests are awful. They’re insanely unreliable. Sure, sometimes the tests are correct: the suspected drugs are actual drugs. Broken clocks and all that. But they’re so often wrong they should be considered as scientifically sound as hiring a full-time psychic and promoting them to detective. Here’s a short list of things drug field […]

I’ll admit I’ve written some posts of praise here for Sega, usually due to the company’s more lax attitude on fan-made creations alongside the company’s habit of making fun of Nintendo for going the opposite route. But taking a look at the wider number of posts we’ve done involving Sega, the company is by and […]

More case law on compelled passcode production and the Fifth Amendment has been generated by a New Jersey appeals court. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do anything to strengthen Fifth Amendment protections against compelled production. And that’s largely because this court can’t. The state’s Supreme Court handed down a ruling in August 2020 that limited the “foregone […]

Update: After this post went up, Tech Review appears to have done a major edit to that article, and added a correction about the completely false claim regarding Section 230 protecting CSAM. The article still has problems, but is no longer quite as egregiously wrong. The post below is about the original article. MIT’s Tech […]

Earlier this year, we covered what appears to be the first of several lawsuits filed on behalf of parents by the Social Media Victims Law Center. In that lawsuit, the mother of an eleven-year-old who committed suicide sued Meta and Snap, claiming SnapChat’s algorithmically enabled feedback loops drove her daughter to her death. The suit […]

The Complete 2022 Microsoft Office Master Class Bundle has 14 courses to help you learn all you need to know about MS Office products to help boost your productivity. Courses cover SharePoint, Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, Teams, and more. The bundle is on sale for $75. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. […]

Play the game and test your skills » Can you survive the Startup Trail? Today we’re launching a browser-playable startup policy simulator game called Startup Trail, developed in partnership with Engine. Here’s your chance to learn about all the challenges of building a successful tech startup in the face of all sorts of obstacles. Over […]

If you listened to Verizon fifth-generation wireless (5G) marketing at any time during the last three years, it went something like this: fifth generation (5G) wireless was going to absolutely transform the world by building the smart cities of tomorrow, revolutionizing medicine, and driving an ocean of innovation. In reality, US 5G has largely landed with […]

When it comes to fan-created video games utilizing established IP, the vast majority of instances tend to result in a narrow set of responses from the original creators or publishers. The Nintendo route is to go fully nuclear as often and immediately as possible, destroying any and all attempts. Take 2 follows a similar path, […]

The idea that there is a link between the exclusivity period on patents and higher drug prices is about as noncontroversial as a view can be. It is the easy question on an ECON 101 exam on monopolies, supply and demand. Yet, somehow, this has come under attack thanks to big PhRMA and their minions. […]

An in-depth report on Israeli malware manufacturer NSO Group has (again) exposed the company’s lies about its activities (and the activities of its customers). Here’s what NSO said to Calcalist in July of last year as the steady drip of bad news became a cascade. According to [NSO founder and CEO Shalev] Hulio, “the average […]

Hey, finally time for a little bit of good news in the world of free speech: the Kentucky General Assembly recently passed the Kentucky Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. It’s a kind of anti-SLAPP bill that is based on a model bill, the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA), and similar to a bill passed […]

A couple of weeks ago, a police transparency activist caught something on video: a cop trying not to get caught on video. That isn’t the interesting part. Lots of cops hate being recorded, even by their own cameras. This Santa Ana police officer was rolling through a neighborhood — supposedly to investigate a stolen car […]