Techdirt

We entrust plenty of our personal data to the US government at all levels. And, at all levels, they fail to protect this information on a far too regular basis. For instance, there’s the Office of Personnel Management hacking. Well, hackings. It happened twice, with the second breach being worse than the first. The two […]

There’s a very strange opinion piece over at The Hill by the chair of something called The Institute for Free Speech, Bradley Smith, basically arguing that because courts are finding that websites are protected by Section 230 while moderating in ways that some people (read: him and his friends)… Congress may take away Section 230, […]

Last June, the president of Nigeria, Muhannadu Buhari, issued a tweet that looked a lot like a call for genocide in response to often violent anti-government protests: Many of those misbehaving today are too young to be aware of the destruction and loss of lives that occurred during the Nigerian Civil War. Those of us […]

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You may recall back in May we wrote about a batshit crazy proposal out of the EU Commission to “protect the children” by mandating no encryption and full surveillance of all communications. Those behind the proposal would argue it’s not technically surveilling all messages, but all messages have to be surveillable, should the government decide […]

We just got done noting how the patriotic quest to purge all Chinese hardware from U.S. networks was a a bit of an incoherent mess. The U.S. demand to purge all Huawei and ZTE equipment imposed huge costs on many mid- and small sized telecom vendors (read: their customers), and the U.S. now says it […]

Welcome to America, where not only are people subject to frisks by cops when things seem reasonably suspicious, but their vehicles are as well. A “Terry stop” is generally understood to apply to a person. When cops have enough reasonable suspicion, they can stop a person, ask questions, and pat them down to search for […]

You might recall that almost exactly a year ago, Netflix announced that it would be getting into the “gaming” business. While the announcement led many to believe that Netflix was going to jump into competing with Google’s Stadia platform and offer streaming AAA video games, in actuality, it turns out to be… not so much. […]

WTF, TikTok? Time and time again we see that TikTok does weird things regarding content moderation. More than most firms in the space, TikTok often does things that suggest that it hasn’t bothered to speak to other experts in trust and safety, and they want to reinvent the wheel… but with terrible, terrible instincts. Apparently […]

As surveillance tech has become cheaper, it has become ubiquitous. Lots of people believe they can solve education-related problems, and most frequently their “solutions” involve tech replacing people and AI replacing common sense. Even before the COVID pandemic forced most students to engage in studies remotely, human problems were being addressed with inhuman, error-prone tech. […]

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Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who heads something called the “House Republican Big Tech Task Force” has teamed up with Seth Dillon, the CEO of the deeply unfunny “conservative” Onion wannabe, The Babylon Bee, to whine in the NY Post about “how to end big tech censorship of free speech.” The answer, apparently, is to remove […]

Hungry to boost municipal budgets, a growing roster of states and cities have spent the last five years or so trying to implement a tax on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services. Sometimes (like in Chicago) this has involved expanding an existing amusement tax (traditionally covering book stores, music stores, ball games and other brick and mortar […]

To be in law enforcement is to be almost criminally obtuse. (We haven’t criminalized that. YET! But when we do…) They can’t stay out of their own way. The public may be willing to cut them some slack but they constantly make moves that dis-endear them to the people they’re supposed to be serving. DNA […]

This post will serve as the start of what will be a familiar cycle for fans of Nintendo. I’m going to show you something cool that Nintendo fans did, you’re going to get moderately excited, and then you’ll immediately become depressed when you realize that Nintendo will absolutely shut this cool project down in the […]

There’s very little that seems to anger public servants more than mandates requiring them to serve the public. For years, the San Diego police department has expanded its surveillance programs. And for years, these expansions have gone unchallenged. But now that the city has passed an ordinance requiring more direct oversight of police activity, cops […]

Project Veritas, the faux conservative group of pranksters pretending to be journalists likes to pretend that they’re “free speech” supporters. But they’re not. They appear to really only support their own free speech, and have a much more flexible view of free speech when it includes speech critical of themselves. Over the past few years, […]

To keep an eye on what the UK government considers to be dangerous migrants, it’s turning to some questionable tech provided by a company that’s long been in the business of tracking people for more altruistic reasons. Migrants who have been convicted of a criminal offence will be required to scan their faces up to […]

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As I type this, I’m sitting in a (fairly uncomfortable) chair in the lobby of a Holiday Inn, having read through nearly 300 pages of legal filings of sniping between Elon Musk (165 pages) and Twitter (127 pages) trying to figure out how to best explain what’s in the filings in a meaningful and accurate […]

Roughly 83 million Americans currently live under a broadband monopoly. In most instances, their only choice is Comcast or Charter Communications, which sells service under the “Spectrum” brand. And in both cases, users pay significantly higher prices for spotty, slow, service with statistically terrible customer service, because that’s how monopolization works. But the nation’s two […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the EU’s new office in Silicon Valley that aims to work with tech companies on EU law compliance: I know it won’t happen because money, but the tech companies really need to just stop trying to placate these people. If […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Russia banned VPNs, Australian prosecutors were seeking to make it illegal to refuse to turn passwords over to law enforcement, the UK Home Secretary wanted companies to stop offering encryption altogether, and another US federal court said cops can get historic cell site location info without a warrant. […]

We had a depressing number of Techdirt stories on this site that involve Shaquille O’Neal. I say that as a basketball fan who absolutely adores Shaq’s contributions to the TNT studio broadcasts for the NBA. On the other hand, the times Shaq has made it onto our pages hasn’t been for the best of reasons. […]

There are a few questionable assumptions made by the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court in its denial [PDF] of a suppression request, but the opening suggests drug cartels might want to vet their employees a little better. David Sierra Orozco was paid to drive a car with over $100,000 in drug-tainted cash hidden in a secret […]

The EU is well on its way to fundamentally destroying the internet. Two giant new regulations are set to become law soon: the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. And while neither is ridiculous in the same way that laws in the US and the UK and some other places are just pandering […]

A few years back, the Trump DOJ and FCC rubber-stamped the Sprint T-Mobile merger without heeding expert warnings that it would stifle competition, kill jobs and eventually raise rates. Working closely with T-Mobile and Dish, the FCC and DOJ “antitrust enforcers” unveiled what they claimed was a “fix” for these problems: they’d cobble together a fourth major […]

Pretty much everyone who has ever gone to college hates educational publishers. There’s an oligopoly of just five giant publishers, and they long ago learned that they are in the best market ever: the buyers of their textbooks (the students) have no choice and are forced to buy the books if their professors assign them […]

The 2022 Data-Driven Decisions Bundle is designed to help you become a data expert. The courses are self-paced and interactive, so you can begin right away. This data-driven bundle takes you through the step-by-step process of creating, manipulating, and analyzing data. Master data and make better, smarter decisions. It’s on sale for $49. Note: The […]

The Australian government doesn’t care much for encryption. It has, for years, tried to legislate encryption out of the picture. A law passed in 2018 gives the government the power to compel encryption-breaking efforts from tech companies. The law survived a cursory review by the Parliamentary Joint Committee. Its 2021 report said the law was […]

For years, we’ve noted how one of the greasier lobbying tactics in telecom is the co-opting of civil rights groups to provide cover for anti-competitive and anti-consumer policies. Such groups are given cash for a shiny new event center in exchange for parroting any policy position that comes across their desks, even if it dramatically […]

In an extremely rare move, a federal court has ordered a jail into receivership, placing it under the direct control of a court-appointed third party that will (hopefully) carry out the needed changes Hinds County, Mississippi either can’t or won’t do. (h/t Scott Greenfield) Receivership is uncommon. As Hernandez Stroud of the Brennan Center points […]

At this point, every reader here should be aware that YouTube has a copyright/DMCA problem it has yet to solve. Going through the myriad of posts we’ve done about DMCA and ContentID takedowns on YouTube, the theme is abundantly clear: YouTube’s automated systems are wide open for mistakes, fraud, and abuse. If you don’t think […]

When Google Fiber launched back in 2010, it was heralded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive telecom sector. Initially, things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to the […]

Yes, yes, copyright is a tool for censorship. Contrary to the claims of copyright system supporters that copyright can’t be used for censorship, the reality is that is basically the only thing that copyright is good for. I mean, at this point, you are either not paying attention, or are just outright lying if you […]

Real problems are what legislators are supposed to be solving. The Philippines has plenty of those, ranging from (government-endorsed) extrajudicial killings of drug dealers and drug users to abuses of state power to silence journalists to the actual murders of human rights activists. But legislators with their own axes to grind will always find ways […]

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A while back, we noted that there was something of a Rorschach test in how you viewed basically everything about Nick Sandmann, the MAGA-hat wearing high school student who became front page news after a video of him standing in front of a Native American demonstrator, Nathan Phillips, went viral. Everyone had their own interpretations. […]

INCOMPAS, the DC trade policy and lobbying group primarily steered by tech giants, is urging the FCC to finally boost the U.S.’ pathetic definition of broadband. The FCC’s current definition of broadband, 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up, is looking a bit pathetic, particularly on the upstream side. And the lower standard helps the uncompetitive […]

A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about how an anonymous user had put up for sale the data of an estimated one billion Chinese citizens, probably obtained from the Shanghai police. Back then, what exactly had happened was a little unclear — not least because the Chinese authorities were shutting down any discussion of […]

Just a few weeks we noted that this was inevitable, but Facebook has now made it official that it’s no longer interested in dumping money on news publishers. “A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the U.S. Most people do not […]

We’ve noted for years how U.S. consumer location data is routinely abused by a long list of bad actors, including wireless carriers, broadband providers, app makers, adtech companies, data brokers, police, people pretending to be police, governments, and more. It’s also, not too surprisingly, a problem in Canada. Restaurant chain Tim Hortons was recently found to […]

Civil asset forfeiture has shown us the government has a weird way of instigating lawsuits. In rem forfeiture cases allow government agencies to file suits against objects, rather than the people they’ve been seized from. This leads to some very amusing case names (even if the underlying process verges on legalized theft), like South Dakota […]

Early last year, Indonesia implemented a new internet regulation law. Referred to as “MR5,” the law gave the government the power to engage in widespread blocking of content. Not only did the law create intermediary liability, it required any site offering services to Indonesian representatives to register with the government. On top of that, service […]

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As you’ll recall, the defining moment that lead to Donald Trump creating his Truth Social Twitter clone was his being banned from Twitter for potentially egging on further violence on January 6th. Even before Truth Social was started, Trump’s most vocal and loyal… well, let’s just call them “fans,” kept insisting that what was needed […]

This week we noted how the Democratic party had introduced a new two-page bill that would simply give the FCC even clearer authority to restore net neutrality. Of course the bill won’t pass this corrupt Congress, was barely noticed in the summer heat, and couldn’t be implemented anyway because the telecom industry and GOP have […]

Yikes. Deputy Boyd stayed for approximately two hours, during which time he made numerous inappropriate sexual statements and commands, which the district court found were neither invited nor consensual. For example, Deputy Boyd told Tyson that he and fellow officers had recently seen her at a restaurant, and he repeated sexual comments that the officers […]

For the last few months we’ve been writing a lot about AICOA, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, being pushed for by Senator Amy Klobuchar. It’s an antitrust bill, but not an antitrust bill designed to fix the whole host of problems we have today with industrial consolidation and anticompetitive practices. No, it’s just […]

It’s an election year, and like clockwork, legislators around the country want to show they care about protecting kids online. This pre-election frenzy leads performative bills that won’t actually help any kids. Today I’m blogging about one of those bills, California AB 2408, “Social media platform: child users: addiction.” (For more on how the California legislature […]