Techdirt

We’re in the midst of a full blown mass hysteria moral panic claiming that the internet is “dangerous” for children, despite little evidence actually supporting that hypothesis, and a ton arguing the opposite is true. States are passing bad laws, and Congress has a whole stack of dangerous “for the children” laws, from KOSA to […]

Last year BMW took ample heat for its plans to turn heated seats into a costly $18 per month subscription in numerous countries. As we noted at the time, BMW is already including the hardware in new cars and adjusting the sale price accordingly. So it’s effectively charging users a new, recurring fee to enable […]

If cops screw up enough, they may get blacklisted by prosecutors. These lists — known as “Brady” or “Giglio” lists (depending on jurisdiction) — inform prosecutors that they may not want to ask these officers to testify due to their long histories of misconduct. Most lawsuits generated by cops appearing on these lists deal with […]

Back in March, we discussed a fairly silly request, made by several film producers who are suing RCN for not being their copyright police, that the court subpoena Reddit to unmask 9 users of that site. There were several aspects of the request that made it all very dumb: half the Reddit users never mentioned […]

U.S. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either banned or heavily hamstrung towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Even in instances and areas where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly failed to upgrade or expand their broadband […]

It seems like every day this week a new bill has been introduced in Congress with the grandstanding politicians behind the bill insisting that it’s necessary to protect the children online. It seems like no elected official wants to be left behind on this particular moral panic train. The latest, from Senators Ed Markey and […]

Never mind the Supreme Court. Never mind the case law finding warrantless phone tracking not quite constitutional. Never mind the self-imposed restrictions enacted by federal law enforcement agencies that place warrant requirements on real-time location tracking or the federal court decisions codifying these voluntary efforts. Forget all of that. North Carolina is going to go […]

This LED Bluetooth speaker is built to last and strike a chord with your friends. With its 1800mAh battery capacity, you can enjoy music for up to 10 hours of continuous playtime, making it perfect for outdoor use. The speaker also has a TF memory card slot, allowing you to listen to your favorite beats […]

A few weeks ago I wrote about an interview that Substack CEO Chris Best did about his company’s new offering, Substack Notes, and his unwillingness to answer questions about specific content moderation hypotheticals. As I said at the time, the worst part was Best’s unwillingness to just own up to what he was saying were […]

The cable and broadband industry spent the better part of a decade pretending that “cord cutting” (ditching traditional television in favor for streaming or antenna-based alternatives) either didn’t actually exist or was a fad that would end when Millennials started procreating. Now, they like to pretend they saw the trend coming all along. With most […]

Money can’t buy you everything. Not even the kind of money that’s apparently infinite, if our current federal deficit is any indication. The US Marshals Service was hit with ransomware in February. And, despite drastic measures being taken by the USMS, the breached system still has yet to return to service. And it wasn’t just […]

There are all sorts of anti-internet bills making the rounds lately, and one of the many on the docket and apparently set to move quickly is the Cooper Davis Act, which aims to create a mandatory reporting rule for websites where promotion of the sale of illegal drugs may occur. As with basically any law […]

We’re getting into the warmer seasons, which means AAA games are coming up for release dates. It also means that leaks of content, or sometimes the entire games, for those AAA games are coming out as well. We just talked about several leaks coming out for Nintendo’s latest Zelda title. And now, right on the […]

It’s truly incredible what a childish person Elon Musk can be. As you’ll recall, he thought it was the funniest thing in the world to misleadingly label NPR as “state affiliated media,” a label that had been previously reserved for media organizations that were voices of the state, rather than independent. He did it because […]

In 2005, the US Postal Service (USPS) began to get into the crowdsourcing business. For a fee, anyone could create custom stamps that could be sold through the government’s approved stamp portal (Stamps.com), provided they survived a cursory review by inattentive public servants. While internet-as-tapwater was still on the cusp — not quite everywhere but […]

Aspiring filmmakers, YouTubers, bloggers, and business owners alike can find something to love about the Complete Video Production Super Bundle. Video content is fast changing from the future marketing tool to the present, and in these 10 courses you’ll learn how to make professional videos on any budget. From the absolute basics to the advanced shooting […]

Over the last few months we’d been wondering if it was worth pulling Techdirt posting from Twitter altogether, but had been too busy with other stuff to make a decision, and now it looks like Twitter has made the decision for us. Last week, Automattic informed us that Elon Musk was demanding a ridiculous amount […]

The US has always had a fairly pathetic definition of “broadband.” Originally defined as anything over 200 kbps in either direction, the definition was updated in 2010 to a pathetic 4 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up. It was updated again in 2015 by the FCC to a better, but still arguably pathetic 25 Mbps downstream, […]

Nintendo hates whenever it loses even a modest amount of control over its properties. Lately, Nintendo has been making a ton of noise bullying YouTubers over all kinds of uses of Zelda content, with Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom having been slated for release mid-May. The company even attempted to subpoena Discord to unmask a […]

Passing blatantly unconstitutional dangerous laws “to protect the children” based on totally unsubstantiated moral panics appears to be part of a bipartisan mass hysteria these days. The Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, is officially back. And, with it, the recognition that over a quarter of the Senate has bought into this dangerous, unconstitutional nonsense: […]

Some politicians get elected and think they’re heading up the musical equivalent of vaporware. Just a heads up: you may have more power than you’re used to but it’s constrained by the Constitution: both the one ratified by the nascent US federal government and the one adopted by individual states, which are required to use […]

Portable, sleek and sophisticated, the Nix Mini 2 Color Sensor is engineered with life in mind. It’s perfect for those who find inspiration wherever they go. The Nix Mini can easily identify any color with a simple scan, ideal for those who work with color, or for those who simply want to bring it into […]

We’ve already talked about Montana’s extraordinarily unconstitutional “ban TikTok” bill that raises a huge number of constitutional issues. Lots of individuals and organizations pointed this out to governor Greg Gianforte (who came to office as a former tech exec of an internet company, and was supposed to be someone who understand the internet). Gianforte has […]

We’ve noted repeatedly how Netflix’s password sharing crackdown is a stupid cash grab that alienates and annoys loyal customers, duplicates existing efforts to restrict “freeloaders,” won’t give the company the financial windfall it thinks, and just generally represents how the company has inevitably shifted from innovative disruptor to the kind of tone deaf cable giants […]

A few weeks back, we talked about a lawsuit Chipotle filed against Sweetgreen, a restaurant chain dedicated mostly to serving salads and grain bowls. The suit centered on Sweetgreen announcing a new menu item: a “Chipotle Burrito Bowl.” We found the entire suit quite odd, given that Sweetgreen’s menu item is named in a way […]

Only people can get patents. There’s a good reason for that, which is that the patent grant—a temporary monopoly granted by the government—is supposed to be given out only to “promote the progress of science and useful arts.” Just like monkeys can’t get a copyright on a photo, because it doesn’t incentivize the monkey to take more photos, […]

The GOP is currently trying to hold the global economy hostage by using the debt ceiling debate as a bludgeon. Mostly to implement budget cuts nobody likes (like major budget cuts at the VA, or cuts to vast swaths of the country’s already faltering social safety net). If it goes badly, economists warn the net […]

Recently, I wrote for Lawfare about Sen. Dick Durbin’s new STOP CSAM Act bill, S.1199. The bill text is available here. There are a lot of moving parts in this bill, which is 133 pages long. (Mike valiantly tries to cover them here.) I am far from done with reading and analyzing the bill language, […]

There are few things I enjoy writing about more than cops who feel waving around a piece of paper will ensure they can get what they want. I’ve handled a few of these stories before, most of them centered on Signal, the little messaging service that could — one that does not collect user data […]

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To hear Elon and his biggest fans tell the story, pre-Elon Twitter was a hellhole of censorship often driven by government demands, and he had to take over the company to “bring free speech back.” As astute observers not easily misled by nonsense peddlers knew, however, in actuality, old Twitter was actually one of the […]

For decades, academics have been trying to warn anybody who’d listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters has created either “news deserts,” or local news reporting that’s mostly just low-calorie puffery and simulacrum. Despite claims that the “internet would fix this,” fixing local news just wasn’t […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone responding to the allegation that we have been inconsistent about whether or not Twitter blue checks have value: The value of the blue check under Old Twitter was “verification”⁠—i.e., “this person is who they say they are”. Was the system perfect? […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, we announced one of our most exciting and unusual projects: a Kickstarter to fund the production and release of a training card game developed by the CIA and uncovered via FOIA. We were blown away by the response when we hit our goal in 40 hours, and we’re […]

Phew. We’ve written a bunch about Stephen Thaler’s quixotic and dangerous quest to allow AI created works and inventions to receive copyrights and patents. It’s repeatedly failed to convince people, especially US judges, that Congress intended anyone other than human beings as the creators and inventors to receive such monopolies. Thankfully, Thaler’s loss streak continues. […]

Law enforcement loves cheap drug tests. First, they’re cheap, around $2/per. Second, they can turn a whole host of legal substances into probable cause for searches and arrests. Field drugs tests have converted everything from a deceased child’s ashes to bird poop (on a car hood, no less) into illicit substances justifying the removal of […]

We’ve noted for decades how telecom monopolies convinced corrupt state legislatures to pass counterproductive bans on creative community broadband networks. The bills are protectionist crap that are ghost written by telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast, and designed to protect their regional broadband monopolies from grass roots competitive disruption on a town by town level. […]

Today is six months since Elon took over Twitter and began this bizarre speedrun of the content moderation learning curve in which he seems to repeatedly… not learn a damn thing. Over and over again he makes ridiculous choices that have made the entire platform less welcoming for speech, more willing to obey government demands, […]

Grope. Grope. Grope grope grope. Grope. Andddddddd… some humiliating of people with rare medical conditions just because. That’s just how the Transportation Security Administration (est. one-month-post-9/11 2001) operates. Americans are forced to subject themselves to groping, humiliation, unjustified questioning/searches, seizures of explosive breast milk, etc. just because the federal government thought the only way to […]

Surprise Mom with a farmer’s choice bouquet: 24 exquisite long-stem roses or 12-14 daylillies handpicked by farmers for their vibrant colors and beauty. For $44.99, you’ll get these dozens delivered anywhere in the continental US. Whether you’re near or far, these roses are the perfect way to let her know that she is loved and […]

Almost exactly a year ago, we pointed out that Ron DeSantis deliberately trying to punish Disney for making some mild criticism of an (obviously unconstitutional) bill that he was endorsing was, itself, a 1st Amendment problem. And that was true even if the underlying idea to get rid of Disney’s control over the land in […]

Between COVID relief and the recently passed infrastructure bill, there’s an historic influx of more than $60 billion being thrown at this country’s substandard broadband networks. And, as you might expect, there’s a lot of heavy lobbying and maneuvering by various parties to obtain that money, and/or ensure that it’s actually utilized for the greater […]

We’ve been following the entire saga of Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard for some time now. The whole thing has been decidedly messy, for various reasons. For starters, there are three main regulatory bodies that most of us have been waiting to hear from: the UK’s CMA, the USA’s FTC, and the EU. And […]

As you may have noticed, headlines are full of the wonders of chatbots and generative AI these days. Although often presented as huge breakthroughs, in many ways they build on machine learning techniques that have been around for years. These older systems have been deployed in real-life situations for some time, which means they provide […]

I’ve been criticizing the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) approach to internet regulations, because they’re doing this “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” bit in which they insist that the DSA is not regulating speech, but then they admit that the point of the DSA is to see less “bad” speech on the internet. But, whether we […]

A few years ago AT&T, a company that tried to cheap out on upgrading its broadband lines to fiber, effectively stopped selling DSL. While that’s understandable given the dated copper-based tech, the problem is that thanks to concentrated telecom monopolization, many of these customers were left without any replacement options due to a lack of […]

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Senator Brian Schatz is one of the more thoughtful Senators we have, and he and his staff have actually spent time talking to lots of experts in trying to craft bills regarding the internet. Unfortunately, it still seems like he still falls under the seductive sway of this or that moral panic, so when the […]

There’s an historic $50 billion in broadband subsidies currently heading to the states courtesy of the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). There are plenty of potential hiccups on stuff like mapping that could screw things up, but, any way you slice it, this money should still have […]