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For decades, federal regulators have turned a blind eye while your cable and broadband provider rips you off with a bevy of misleading fees. The fees usually come with nonsensical names like “regulatory recovery fee” or “internet cost recovery surcharge,” and are tacked below the line post sale, letting cable and broadband providers covertly jack […]

I’m not going to open this by stating I assume the Shasta County (CA) Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) has better things to do with its time. I know it has better things to do with its time. I’m also not going to pretend the SCSO didn’t have enough personnel to deal with local crime while sending […]

Cops love a good warrant exception. Anything that allows them to bypass the Constitution is considered a pretty good deal (I mean… at least for cops). Good faith? Love it. Plain view? Fantastic. Odor of marijuana? Your car is getting tossed, buddy. Exigent circumstances? Don’t even know what the word means, but let’s get it […]

We’ve got one more cross-post episode this week. If you’ve been following Techdirt recently, you’ve surely heard about California’s recently-passed bill, the Age Appropriate Design Code, and all its massive problems. Recently, Mike appeared on This Week In Google to discuss these problems, and you can listen to the whole conversation on this week’s episode […]

The government of Turkey, headed by exceedingly thin-skinned President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has devolved into a corrupt, anti-democratic state that still respects the freedom of the press in theory, but, in practice, only respects the freedoms of its favored press outlets, which are free to write anything the government allows them to write. Journalists who […]

I originally wrote a version of this post last week before Cloudflare decided to block Kiwi Farms, intending to post it after the long weekend, but I needed to rewrite a significant portion of it after Cloudflare’s decision. None of the salient points have changed (nor has my mind on how to think about all […]

MonsterWriter makes the process of writing and editing a thesis or paper easy and enjoyable. Just focus on the content and structure of your document, MonsterWriter takes care of the final appearance for you. With MonsterWriter you can write large documents quickly. In contrast to other solutions and markdown editors, MonsterWriter provides features for complex […]

A new book written by journalist Richard Kerbaj, detailing the history of the so-called “Five Eyes” surveillance collaboration between the NSA and surveillance agencies in the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, is revealing a few more postscripts to the Ed Snowden story. Snowden’s first leak appeared nearly a decade ago. Since then, spy agencies […]

It took fifteen years filled with constant scandal, but the FCC finally recently announced that it would be “cracking down on” wireless carrier abuse of consumer location data, thanks to pressure from our new post-Roe reality. This “crackdown” involves politely asking the nation’s top wireless carriers to disclose what kind of location data they were […]

This week, both our winning comments on the insightful side come from our post about the Texas activist who weaponized a law requiring religious posters in schools by submitting one written in Arabic. In first place, it’s Thad responding to the suggestion that Hebrew would have been a better choice for annoying the right: Nah. […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, experts were weighing in on how SESTA would harm trafficking victims, while the California case against Backpage moved forward over money laundering claims. A look at the original comments sent to the FCC showed that 98.5% of them were opposed to killing net neutrality rules, and even many […]

Putting cops in schools is still a bad idea. It turns regular disciplinary problems — ones handled for decades by administrators, teachers, and parents — into police matters, subjecting students to the whims of armed officers who have been trained to react with violence to nearly any misbehavior. That’s what happened in this case [PDF] […]

You may recall that a few weeks back we discussed Ubisoft’s decision to shutdown game servers for several titles, including major AAA titles like Assassin’s Creed 3 and Far Cry 3. While server shutdowns are the norm after some period of time, as is the loss of certain online gaming features, notable in Ubisoft’s announcement […]

We’ve noted more times than I can count how you no longer really own the things you buy. Whether it’s smart home hardware, or routers that become useless paperweights when the manufacturer implodes, or post-purchase firmware updates that actively make your device less useful, you simply never know if the product you bought yesterday will […]

Over the past few years, international law enforcement has been cracking down on encrypted device purveyors. We’re not just talking about regular device encryption, which has been mainstream for several years now. These would be specialized manufacturers that appear to cater to those seeking more protection than the major providers offer — services that ensure […]

The GameCreators Mega Maker Pack Bundle will help you develop your own dream video game, and publish it on multiple platforms with thousands of royalty-free, 2D and 3D assets. You get AppGameKit Studio, a fully featured game development toolset with two asset packs. The bundle also has GameGuru, a non-technical and fun game maker that offers an […]

In July of 1995, Time Magazine published one of its most regrettable stories ever. The cover just read “CYBERPORN” with the subhead reading: “EXCLUSIVE A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?” The author of that piece, Philip Elmer-Dewitt later admitted that it was his […]

We’re just going to keep getting kids killed in America. We’ll never stop throwing money in the direction of the problem, but not directly at the problem. Nothing gets safer. It just gets more budget line items. The problem with school shootings is uniquely American. The proposed solutions — and the industry that has sprung […]

Well, that was quick. We had recently discussed an athiest activist who had planned to have some fun pointing out the veiled nature of a Texas law that requires a school to display any donated poster featuring the phrase “In God We Trust” along with the American and Texas flags. How was the fun to […]

The COVID pandemic changed the way America does business. And that includes the educational business. Many schools are publicly funded but those public funds are used to purchase intrusive surveillance tools for the sole purpose of preventing distance learners from somehow “cheating” on their own education. Never mind the fact that cheating doesn’t guarantee success. […]

As we highlighted recently, despite press coverage saying otherwise, former Twitter security boss Peiter “Mudge” Zatko’s whistleblowing report about the company actually supported Twitter’s underlying legal argument regarding how it counts spam in the mDAU. Remember, Musk doesn’t really have an escape clause here and the spam stuff is made up nonsense. The underlying issue […]

The moral high ground is almost impossible to hold. The United States has portrayed itself as the world ideal for personal freedom and government accountability, despite those holding power working tirelessly to undermine both of those ideals. It’s not that other world governments aren’t as bad or worse. It’s that “whataboutism” isn’t an excuse for […]

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Get access to our special online anniversary event » Techdirt began in 1997 as a simple newsletter about the latest technology news. Now, over 75,000 posts and nearly 2-million comments later, we’re celebrating our 25th anniversary! To mark the occasion, we’re holding a special online event on September 9th, 2022 at 11am PT / 2pm ET, where […]

Donald Trump has spent much of this week raging over on Truth Social and passing on nonsense QAnon conspiracy theory bullshit. And now it comes out that Google has so far refused to approve the Android app of Truth Social for the Google Play store, in large part over Truth Social’s failure to moderate violent […]

As a publicly traded company, it’s simply not good enough to provide an affordable service that people genuinely like. The pressure to deliver quarter over quarter growth often takes on a tendency toward auto-cannibalism; price hikes, customer support cuts, dumb ideas justified through greed, all designed to goose growth, but often at the cost of […]

As humanity marches on towards the expansion of artificial intelligence, we are finding many ways to use this technology while waiting for it to get smart enough to kill us all and bring on the Age of the Robot. Platforms have attempted to solve the impossibility of moderation at scale by employing AI, with no […]

Were you ever so terrible at your job that your entire place of employment was put out of business? Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that none of you are that inept or unprofessional. But it only takes one bad apple to result in the tossing of the whole bunch, provided that the […]

Chattanooga, Tennessee is one of a growing number of U.S. cities to build its own broadband network. The ISP, tacked on to the city’s existing EPB electricity utility, has routinely delivered speeds faster and more affordable than the services provided by regional utilities like Comcast. While community-run broadband is portrayed as boondoggle socialism by telecom […]

Israeli exploit developer NSO Group has drawn a lot of heat over the past several months after it was revealed its malware had been deployed by its customers to target dissidents, journalists, opposition leaders, and other people governments don’t like but aren’t normally considered to be terrorists or criminals. The sleek, award-winning Pegasus malware developed […]

You may have heard last week that Moderna is suing Pfizer, claiming that Pfizer’s COVID vaccine violates Moderna’s patents. You can read the legal complaint which is full of bluster about how brilliant Moderna is and how it saved the world and blah blah blah. While it does mention that Moderna teamed up with the […]

The Complete Microsoft Windows, 365, and Teams Training Bundle has 7 courses covering all things Microsoft to help you become an MS expert. You’ll learn how to support and configure Windows 10 desktops in an organizational environment, how to plan a mobile application management strategy, how to set up, implement, and manage Office 365 workloads […]

More than nine years of news cycles ago, the initial Snowden leak dropped. The next few years were filled with lawsuits, extensive news coverage, reform efforts (some better than others), the unplanned retirement of one bulk collection program, and an uptick in public outcry against large-scale government surveillance programs. Nearly a decade later, the NSA’s […]

The reversal of Roe is resulting in dramatic new pressures on privacy reform, given how easily consumer location data can be weaponized against abortion seekers and those helping them. Not just by authoritarian-leaning state governments, but potentially by vigilantes who’ll find little trouble buying such data on the cheap from a wide array of irresponsible […]

Denuvo is back! While the company only got a single mention in 8 months thus far in 2022, the once-vaunted antipiracy DRM company made quite the splash in the years prior. If you don’t want to go through tens and tens of posts about Denuvo, I can give you a quick breakdown. Denuvo DRM was […]

Police accountability has been a hot topic for years now. Recent events have increased demands for accountability. And, as demands have increased, so have legislative efforts to shield cops from accountability. Arizona lawmakers have been doing what they can for cops for a few years now. With plenty of court precedent upholding a First Amendment […]

We’ve got a cross-post episode for you this week! Recently, Mike appeared on the Walled Culture podcast to discuss a wide range of topics including reflections on the SOPA/PIPA fight, ways to support creators, and the world of NFTs. You can listen to the entire interview on this week’s episode of the Techdirt Podcast. Follow […]

The pattern is pretty common: young companies innovate, older companies litigate. When you can’t keep up and you can’t succeed by beating the market, you turn to the courts to try to squeeze cash out of those more successful than you. Often this involves patent lawsuits or handing your unused patents off to patent trolls […]

While this ruling [PDF] is likely correct under current Fourth Amendment case law, it does raise questions about the propriety of mass data grabs that aren’t particularized to suspected criminals or investigation targets. (h/t Orin Kerr) Tennessee resident Matthew Bledsoe was recently convicted during a jury trial for his participation in the January 6, 2021 […]

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Next Friday, September 9th, we’ll be hosting our 25th anniversary event. We’ll post the actual details later this week, but the best way to make sure you can attend is to be a regular paying subscriber to Techdirt. You can back us via the qualifying Techdirt Insider packages (Crystal Ball, Watercooler, or Behind the Curtain — or the equivalent […]

Unfortunately, last night, the California Senate passed some horribly dangerous bills that we’ve been warning about the past few weeks — and they’re heading to Governor Newsom’s desk for signing. It seems likely he will sign them, even as that will be a huge, and dangerous mistake. First up was AB 2273 the “Age Appropriate […]

The challenge with passing a functional, useful privacy law for the Internet era is several fold. One is the need for baseline competency in lawmakers, an increasing challenge in U.S. politics. But the other issue is corruption, and the fact that any meaningful privacy law first has to run a gantlet of lobbyists with unlimited […]

Secularists teaching the state of Texas a lesson in unintended consequences appears to be becoming something of a theme. To be fair, this is a problem of Texas’ own making, as the state continues to churn out laws that aren’t just conservative, which would be fine, but at least questionable from a constitutionality standpoint. The […]

It appears that free speech absolutist Elon Musk is, once again, not such a fan of free speech when it criticizes him or his companies. Perhaps he’s too busy penning columns for China’s official internet censor to know this, but given other reports about how much he micromanages things happening at Tesla, you have to […]

Vic Mignogna is an American voice actor specializing in English dubs of Japanese anime. His career dates back to the early 2000s. Unfortunately for Mignogna, he’s now mostly known as a serial sexual harasser. Those accusations began surfacing in 2019, with some accusations dating back nearly a decade before he became a successful voice actor. […]

Look, I’m a small journalism outfit. A very small one. So, in theory, a law that effectively lets me demand free cash from Google and Facebook should be a good thing for me. But, it would actually be a disaster. That’s why I spoke out against the idea last year when Senator Amy Klobuchar and […]

If you thought cookie pop-ups were an annoying nuisance, just wait until you have to scan your face for some third party to “verify your age” after California’s new design code becomes law. On Friday, I wrote about the companies and organizations most likely to benefit from California’s AB 2273, the “Age Appropriate Design Code” […]

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It’s not often you see a civil forfeiture case handled by an appeals court. Most cases are never given their day in court. Many go completely unchallenged. The evidentiary bar for the government is low and the obligations placed on those whose property has been taken is high. Most people can’t afford to fight forfeitures, […]