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A couple of weeks back, we discussed the implosion of startup company Embodied and the resulting bricking of its $800 emotional support" robots designed for children. Like many other stories about IoT-type products, the post focused on how these robots would cease functioning as designed once the backend support infrastructure for the shuttered business was [...]

Last December, we published a recap, 2023: The Year of AI Panic." Now, it's time to ask: What happened to the AI panic in 2024? TL;DR - It was a rollercoaster ride: AI panic reached a peak and then fell down. Two cautionary tales: The EU AI Act and California's SB-1047. Please note: 1. Thefocushere [...]

The inevitable has happened and Elon has started banning and suppressing the speech of folks who were on his team," leading to many suddenly realizing that maybe he wasn't such a free speech supporter after all. Look, we've spent the better part of the last three years pointing out that Elon Musk does not understand [...]

Age verification laws saw an unfathomable renaissance in 2024. It's quite frightening to see a political class of predominately far-right Christian nationalistsimplement the anti-porn vision of Project 2025 without President-elect Donald Trump yet entering the White House. These laws coming out of state legislatures are scripted like how Russell Vought, a controversial architect of Project [...]

Visio is Microsoft's ultimate tool for diagramming. Large, complex data can be too technical and overwhelming. That's where Visio comes in. With dozens of premade templates, starter diagrams, and stencils, presenting is way easier. Flowcharts, org charts, floor plans, diagrams, and more! Create easy-to-understand visuals with confidence. It's on sale for $19.97 for a limited [...]

For the better part of thirty years telecom giants (and the consultants, think tanks, and lobbyists paid to defend them) have fought against every effort at coherent federal oversight. It didn't matter whether it was modest privacy standards or basic pricing transparency, the argument that was if you stripped away coherent state and federal government [...]

Updated: This post has been updated, as the original potentially overclaimed both what the FTC settlement said regarding what Evolv could market as well as Evolv's response to it (suggesting it would try to limit the settlement it agreed to). We regret the misleading descriptions and have updated the article accordingly. Evolv might be new [...]

The new year is approaching fast, and that means it's time for our annual look at the highest-voted comments of the year on Techdirt (as usual, including the top three in each category). This year's list is something of an inverse of last year's: while 2023 had only a couple winning comments from anonymous commenters, [...]

As we announced earlier this month, we're once again celebrating the new year with the latest edition of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1929! With 2025 just a few days away, it's time to get ready. Whether you're an experienced game designer, a total newbie, or anything in between, we want you [...]

Earlier this year, we talked about a fairly silly trademark dispute in the UK between beverage company Thatchers and German grocer Aldi. At issue was competing lemon cider products offered by both companies. Thatchers makes a product named its Cloud Lemon Cider", while Aldi sells its Taurus Cloud Cider." Thatchers complained that the products were [...]

It takes a pretty weird string of coincidences to turn a Google Street View car into a potential witness for the prosecution. But that's what has happened here. Street View is pervasive. Some may also call it intrusive. Millions of miles are logged by drivers and pedestrians, year after year. And while those efforts to [...]

I had seen this story before Christmas making the rounds on Bluesky, claiming that United Healthcare had sent DMCA takedowns to Teepublic to remove artist Rachel Kenaston's illustration of Luigi Magione, the guy arrested for shooting and killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. While it does appear that Teepublic did, in fact, remove the image [...]

A central theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versionsavailable) and this blog is that the copyright industry is never satisfied. Now matter how long the term of copyright, publishers and recording companies want more. No matter how harsh the punishments for infringement, the copyright intermediaries want them to be even more severe. Another [...]

This DevDojo Pro subscription gives you access to a set of tools to help you build your next great idea. Start with the Page Creator, where you'll find Tailwind CSS Page Builder, a tool for crafting beautiful landing pages. Then, move on to Wave SAAS Starter Kit, where you'll learn how to build your Software [...]

As much as I write about cops, you'd think I'd rarely be surprised by them or their thought processes. But, every so often, they surprise even me. Let's take a ride back to early 1989, when the Broward County (FL) Sheriff's Office was actually bragging about this sort of thing: A chemist with the Broward [...]

U.S. automakers have long tried to monopolize repair, in a bid to cash in on captive customers. But they also want to cash in on user behavior, driving, and phone data without much in the way of oversight, transparency, or consumer privacy. That's why they've historically been so opposed to right to repair" reforms that [...]

I have to thread the needle a bit on this one. On the one hand, I have very much evangelized how much sports video games has done to educate lots of people on some of the finer points of professional and college sports, myself included. Even though, at times, I like to poke fun about [...]

In an era where digital devices are everywhere, the term screen time" has become a buzz phrase in discussions about technology's impact on people's lives. Parents areconcerned about their children's screen habits. But what if this entire approach to screen time is fundamentally flawed? While researchers have made advances in measuring screen use, a detailed [...]

Few things have been more enjoyable than watching the collapse of New York City mayor Eric Adams' personal, cop-focused empire. Granted, if you're a NYC resident, your mileage will vary because violently disintegrating governments rarely later resolve as fully functional enterprises. But there's still something incredibly satisfying as watching a law-and-order mayor bind himself to [...]

Walled Culture has been following the sorry saga of Italy's automated blocking systemPiracy Shieldfor a year now. Blocklists are drawn up by copyright companies, without any review, or the possibility of any objections, and those blocks must be enforced within 30 minutes. Needless to say, such a ham-fisted and biased approach to copyright infringement is [...]

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Few things seem to push government officials to become officious faster than the mild irritation of people making a slight mockery of government machinery. In the grand scheme of things, the scofflawishness is almost imperceptible. But it's the scoffing part that bothers these officious entities the most. And that is almost always greeted with a [...]

I've noted for years how the U.S. is simply too corrupt to pass a modern internet-era privacy law or regulate dodgy data brokers. So we are subjected to a parade of privacy and security scandals thanks to numerous industries that over-collect your data, fail to properly secure it, then sell access to any random asshole [...]

Funny enough, it was only a few weeks back that we last discussed Dr. Keith Bell and the slew of lawsuits he has filed over depictions and/or retweets on social media of a passage he wrote, referred to as The Winning Isn't Normal" passage. These suits, which largely are over retweets of the passage, are [...]

Copyright is built on a lie that most people seem to accept: artists can make a decent living from the current system of rewards that copyright provides. As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) explores, all the data about artist remuneration shows that isn't true. Alongside such dry statistics, it's good to hear [...]

There's usually only one reason government officials use personal email accounts: to dodge FOIA requests. The excuses offered by those caught doing it are never credible. And those who do opt for personal email - especially at the federal level - are putting themselves in peril. There are also practical security reasons for using government [...]

While Congress still can't get its act together to pass an anti-SLAPP law, the Ohio legislature has stepped up and done so in the Buckeye state. Most of the reporting on this has noted that it passed unanimously, and the expectation was that Governor Mike DeWine would sign it, though his big list of bills [...]

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WhatsApp has scored a limited win in its lawsuit against NSO Group. The allegations were that NSO used WhatsApp's servers - located in California - to deliver its malware to targeted devices. NSO argued several things and failed in almost every case, including the deployment of diametrically-opposed assertions. First, it argued it couldn't be held [...]

During peak COVID in 2021, when everybody was freaking out about how shitty and expensive U.S. broadband was for telecommuting and home education, NY state officials had an idea: what if we pass a law demanding that ISPs try to provide cheap broadband (a piddly 25 Mbps for $15) to low income families. Some particulars [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side That One Guy with a comment about Congress ignoring bills to protect the press: Gee, I wonder why they'd fear honest reporting so much... When the head of your party is a convicted felon and a core pillar of said party is that any criticism [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the biggest copyright trolls were facing some issues in court and trying new strategies, while the Sons of Confederate Veterans were sued over a bogus DMCA takedown and we analyzed the choice of venue. We also saw some particularly insane copyright damages against Cox. Avast was downplaying its [...]

We're still waiting for the lawsuit in Japan between Nintendo, The Pokemon Co., and Pocketpair to get rolling, but that doesn't keep the dispute out of the news. The patent lawsuit, itself a surprise as everyone thought it would be a copyright gambit that Nintendo would try, centers around several patents that all relate to [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice - or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week's round-up of the latest news in online [...]

At some point, I'll have time to write more thoroughly about how the wonderful and supportive Bluesky community effectively willed One Billion Users over the funding threshold, but it's quite amazing. We were around 50% of the funding threshold just a few days before the campaign was set to close (which generally means the campaign [...]

A second appeals court has now said that Section 230 doesn't protect Salesforce, the online software giant, from being held liable for sex trafficking, because Backpage... used Salesforce's software. If all of this sounds a bit crazy, buckle up. First, you need to understand the background here, before we can get into the details of [...]

It often seems that when people have no good ideas or, indeed, any ideas at all, the next thing out of their mouths is maybe some AI?" It's not that AI can't be useful. It's that so many use cases are less than ideal. Enter Axon, formerly Taser, which has moved from selling modified cattle [...]

The Cybersecurity Projects Bundle offers a hands-on program featuring five real-world cybersecurity projects, totaling 35 tasks. Participants start with an introductory video for each project, detailing objectives and requirements, followed by task completion that mirrors real cybersecurity challenges. Support from industry professionals ensures personalized feedback and guidance. Upon completing the program, participants gain practical experience, [...]

We've been warning for years that the UK's Online Safety Act would be a disaster for the open internet. Its supporters accused us of exaggerating, or shilling" for Big Tech. But as we've long argued, while tech giants like Facebook and Google might be able to shoulder the law's immense regulatory burdens, smaller sites would [...]

For many many years, experts have warned about massive longstanding flawsin Signaling System 7 (SS7, or Common Channel Signaling System 7), a series of protocols hackers can exploit totrack user location, dodge encryption, and even record private conversations. Governments and various bad actorsroutinely exploit the flaw to covertlyspy on wireless users around the planetwithout them [...]

I'll preface this post by saying a part of me hates writing posts like this. We recently talked about a trademark lawsuit brought by KFC against Church's Chicken centered on Church's advertisements of a return to its original recipe" for some of its chicken. Powering the suit was the trademark KFC has on the term [...]

The perennial attempts to widen the reach of copyright in the pursuit of yet more revenue is something that is to be expected from companies. After all, maximizing profits is basically what companies do. But as previous Walled Culture posts have lamented, there is also a widespread tendency among non-profit cultural institutions - museums, art [...]

Update: We did it! The threshold has been passed and the game will go into production! You can still back the campaign through midnight tonight, but thank you to everyone who backed us! I know I posted earlier today about a lovely review of One Billion Users, our exciting new social media card game which, [...]

TikTok is famous for its short attention span theater aspect of just watching some very short videos, without often having the time to go all that deep. The Supreme Court, however, is more known for being slow and methodical. However, the Supreme Court surprised many people yesterday by embracing its inner vertical screen dance moves, [...]

You may have heard that the US government has a bit of a mess on its hands after House Speaker Mike Johnson worked out a somewhat carefully crafted compromise continuing resolution funding plan to keep the government open, only to have it collapse after Elon Musk screamed about how bad it was and how anyone [...]

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As we mentioned yesterday, our crowdfunding campaign for One Billion Users is in its final hours. Although we're still below the funding threshold, we did get a decent bump yesterday, so there's still a chance we'll reach our goal. And just in time, Adi Robertson at The Verge has written a very nice review of [...]

We've documented in detail how the whole AT&T->Time Warner->Warner Brothers Discovery merger processhas been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku byover-compensated executivesclearlyout of [...]

It's the same as it has always been. Some cops do something horrible, the DOJ steps in, the DOJ finds plenty of things wrong with the place housing the cops, the DOJ imposes its will on the cop shop... and years later, no one can really tell that anything happened. Even less will happen now [...]

In our stories about how you don't actually own what you've bought in the digital and IoT world, one of the sub-genres of those stories concern products bought by customers that become entirely or partially useless due to the decisions made by the seller. This itself can take a variety of forms, from video games [...]