Techdirt

Just a few weeks back we talked about how the US’s unwillingness to fix the way the NSA collects internet data could basically mean that most of the big US internet services cannot work in the EU. That article was about Google, and it goes through the background and history of the various US/EU privacy […]

Over the last few months we’ve been covering this bizarre story of how Republican politicians, pushed by their preferred spamming provider (which misrepresented a study on how email providers treat political spam), have been falsely claiming that Google is “censoring” their political emails. They’ve also been pushing a law that would require email providers not […]

We’ve long noted how U.S. broadband maps are a bit of a dumpster fire. U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $350 million for FCC broadband maps that overstate broadband availability and speeds, downplay widespread monopolization and consolidation, and can’t even be bothered to measure affordability, one of the biggest obstacles to widespread adoption. You only […]

Charge your device or illuminate your desk with this innovative 6-in-1 Wireless Charger. It’s easy to use with its touch buttons and Qi wireless charging for Qi-enabled devices. Beautifully made with a modern look, it can quickly charge your device and is touch-sensitive allowing you to show the digital clock and calendar. For your convenience, […]

Courts (with the rare exception) are in agreement: there’s a First Amendment right to film cops. With every citizen carrying a camera these days, there’s a lot more filming happening. And those recordings have often proven key when cops face criminal charges for violating rights or, you know, murdering people. It’s little wonder cops aren’t […]

When last we checked in with right-wing propaganda network One America News (OAN), it was suffering some kind of embolism for being kicked off of DirecTV. Despite a lot of attention, not that many people actually watch the channel, so DirecTV finally kicked it aside. This was distorted by OAN and numerous key Republicans into […]

The public expects cops to be better people than they are. Maybe they have the same weaknesses but having the training and experience to overcome them. But when you’re a cop, you’re encouraged to turn interactions into altercations and solve most problems with violence. And when all else fails, you can always just lock someone […]

While we were just discussing how everyone occasionally gets reminded that for many digital goods these days you simply don’t actually own what you’ve bought, all thanks to Sony disappearing a bunch of purchased movies and shows from its PlayStation platform, this conversation has been going on for a long, long time. Whereas the expectation […]

It’s no secret that Donald Trump’s Trump Media and Technology Group — which was launched with big plans, but so far only has a total flop of a barely used social media app, Truth Social, to show for it — was struggling. But then came the news that the ponzi-scheme-esque reverse merger deal was actually […]

How many times have you shared a link today? How many times have you used a search engine to look for information? We use links and snippets to gain and share information so often that we don’t even think about it. It’s an essential component of the internet, so intrinsic that an internet without links […]

For a few months now, we’ve been following this nonsense story, driven almost entirely by executives at the GOP’s favorite digital marketing (read: spamming) operation, that Google is censoring political spam from Republicans. This was all based on either an incompetent, or deliberate, misreading of a study, which did find that an untouched Gmail account […]

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 […]

Israeli malware maker NSO Group’s frequent targeting of iPhones has led to multiple rounds of patches, a federal lawsuit, and Apple instituting a notification program to inform customers their devices have been compromised. Apple’s next move in this particular arms race will help defend users against malware deployment by government agencies, many of which use […]

The core GOP belief in “small government” and “free markets” and “no taxpayer waste” doesn’t hold up quite as well as it used to to scrutiny, assuming it ever did at all. Case in point: in North Carolina, Trump GOP lawmaker Ben Moss has pushed forward a ridiculous bill (HB 1049) that would require towns […]

The Vallejo PD kills people. That’s an undeniable fact. It does so with alarming frequency, considering the size of its force. Between 2010 and 2020, the PD’s officers killed 19 people. But the PD is uninterested in reducing the number of times its officers kill. Vallejo police have killed 19 people since 2010, renewing calls […]

Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem strikes again! The idea put forth by Mike is that the moment a platform really starts to scale upward, doing any actual content moderation well becomes inherently impossible. There are a ton of examples of this, as some reasons as to why it’s so difficult. The spoiler alert on this is that […]

You know the drill. Company X over-collects user data in the hopes of monetizing it, then does a poor job securing it or giving their customers control over it. If you’re lucky, Company X comes clean about its failures, whether it’s a hack or just leaving customer data openly accessible on an unsecured Amazon cloud […]

This refurbished EliteBook from HP pairs a fast processor with 8GB of RAM to help make multitasking easier, and its speedy 256 solid-state drive can house your essential media, games, and other data. It also features three USB ports so you can make the most of your system by expanding it with peripheral devices. This […]

Almost exactly a year ago, Senator Amy Klobuchar (with Senator Ben Ray Lujan) introduced a bill to create a giant hole in Section 230 for “medical misinformation.” The bill would make social media sites like Facebook and Instagram potentially liable for any “health misinformation” found on their platforms. Of course, as we explained at the […]

A couple of months ago, the parents of a 10-year-old who died of asphyxiation while allegedly “participating” in a “blackout challenge” sued TikTok, alleging their child’s death was directly related to the social media platform’s moderation efforts (or lack thereof) and content recommendation algorithms. The suit, filed in a Pennsylvania federal court, claimed the death […]

As we fully expected, Twitter is going to the Delaware Court of Chancery to force Elon Musk to give them the $44 billion he promised. There’s a lot of misinformation being spewed about this case, but let’s go through the details of why Musk is basically in deep shit, and will be lucky if he’s […]

If you’re a publicly traded company, it’s not enough to make a decent profit selling products people like. You have to deliver endless quarter over quarter improvements to please investors. So countless companies engage in an act of self-cannibalization, where they begin to cut back on things like customer service (see: U.S. telecom), or annoy […]

Over the past couple of years, we’ve discussed several battles in the war on the modding community Take-Two and Rockstar Games launched. I’ve never seen a coherent explanation for why this war was needed at all, from either the publishers or speculators. Almost without warning, Take-Two went on a DMCA blitz on sites hosting these […]

The FBI has switched to a new crime reporting system to collect crime data from all over the nation. Despite being given a long runway (the 2021 switch was announced in 2015), the FBI is still seeing an incredible lack of contribution. The new system is more granular, eliminating the past reduction of crime reporting […]

As advocates of decentralization and a protocols-not-platforms approach to the web, there’s a lot about the concept of Web3 that sounds appealing to us at Techdirt — but the details usually leave a lot to be desired. A new project called TBD from Block aims to move beyond all that, and while its invocation of […]

No one is ever going to confuse Hollywood giant Universal Studios with, say, EFF’s view on more permissive copyright. However, Polygon recently had a really interesting article on how Universal’s comparatively minimal focus on cracking down on the incidental (and fun) uses of its Minions characters have made the characters well known, ubiquitous… and well […]

The government of India continues to hew closer to the ideals of nearby China, led by the Mohdi government, which has been pushing for greater control of the country’s population. Its favorite means and methods are surveillance and censorship — the tool set of authoritarians all over the world. Indian citizens may have greater access […]

Microsoft Office Home and Business for Mac 2021 is for families, students, and small businesses who want classic MS Office apps and email. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and OneNote. A one-time purchase installed on 1 Mac for lifetime Microsoft Office use at home or work. It’s on sale for $40 (available for […]

How many times can we write about bananas and copyright? Even assuming the monkey selfie case doesn’t count, it’s come up surprisingly often here on Techdirt. A few years ago, there was a high profile copyright case about whether or not a banana Halloween costume was covered by copyright (it was). But, this latest case […]

For decades, entrenched U.S. regional monopolies have refused to deliver affordable, reliable, fast broadband in any sort of uniform way. That’s just kind of how monopolies work. In response, roughly a thousand towns and cities have decided to build their own broadband networks instead, either themselves, via a local cooperative, through a city-owned utility, or […]

Cops kill pets. This is an inarguable fact. None other than the US Department of Justice has declared the (unofficial) War on Dogs to be a law enforcement epidemic. If a cop encounters a family dog while doing cop stuff, chances are the dog is going to die. Sure, some people may claim cops encounter […]

It amazes me that the narrative is still out there about how China is an “intellectual property thief” and that the US and other western nations need to “convince China to respect intellectual property.” We heard that for decades, but for over a decade now, we’ve been pointing out that China responded to all that […]

The problem with gathering tons of sensitive data and storing it indefinitely is sooner or later someone with even worse intentions is going to come looking for it. And China’s massive surveillance apparatus collects oh so much data. It’s far too tempting to resist. Someone with the guts and audacity to go after one of […]

We have done many, many posts explaining how, unfortunately, it seems the idea of a person owning the things they’ve bought has become rather passe. While in the age of antiquity, which existed entire tens of years ago, you used to be able to own things, these days you merely license them under Ts and […]

The internet is about speech. That’s basically all the internet is. It’s a system for communicating, and that communication is speech. What’s becoming increasingly frustrating to me is how in all of these attempts to regulate the internet around the globe, policymakers (and many others) seem to ignore that, and act as if they can […]

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Cops have been running to Google for years, warrants and subpoenas in hand, asking the data behemoth to give them info they can sift through to find criminal suspects. Location data is a big one. Comparable to cell phone tower dumps, geofence warrants allow law enforcement to obtain a certain amount of data on every […]

T-Mobile hasn’t been what you’d call competent when it comes to protecting its customers’ data. The company has been hacked numerous different times over the last few years, with hackers going so far as to ridicule the company’s lousy security practices. A responsible company might slow down on data collection until it was certain it […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about how Murdoch-pushed social media news taxes in some countries have made Facebook lose interest in news: Appeasement doesn’t work? What a surprise Give an inch and they demanded a mile, who could have seen that coming from […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the NSA was continuing to dodge questions about “incidental collection” while trying to get one of its surveillance programs back, and Twitter got to move forward in its First Amendment lawsuit over NSL reporting limitations. The House Appropriation Committee demolished Hollywood’s arguments for moving the Copyright Office out […]

In news that is not surprising at all, and seems to be playing out just as people predicted a month ago, Elon Musk has officially claimed that Twitter is in breach of its merger agreement and says he’s pulling out of the deal. The actual details, of course, are not that simple. There is no […]

We’re talking a lot these days about competition and antitrust, and the narrative over the past few years is that four companies — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google — have basically sewn up the entire internet market, and no new entrants can ever succeed. Of course, we keep seeing that argument challenged by reality. First […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently submitted testimony [PDF] to the House Subcommittee on [takes deep breath] Investigations and Oversight and Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Candace Wright, the GAO’s Director of Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics explained the findings of previous GAO reports on facial recognition use by federal agencies. Two of those […]

Former Buzzfeed and New York Times reporter Ben Smith is poised to launch a new media company named Semafor on the back of $25 million in donations. To grab some attention for the venture’s looming launch, Semafor recently partnered with the Knight Foundation to launch the company’s first event: The Future of News: Trust and […]

Over the last year and a half, we’ve had plenty of stories about how various state legislators are shoving each other aside to pass laws to try to regulate speech online. Of course, that’s generally not how they put it. They claim that they’re “regulating social media,” and making lots of (highly questionable) assumptions insisting […]

If you’re looking to get a job in IT or advance your career in the field, the 2022 CompTIA, AWS, And Cisco Certification Prep Bundle is an easy way to prepare for certifications that’ll help you stand out from the crowd. The courses included in this bundle cover a range of topics from cloud computing […]

If you like your dystopia, you can keep your dystopia. That’s where we are right now: dealing with a gunshot AI company that felt compelled to sue journalists for (accurately) reporting on things the company has done as well as offering their opinions on the company’s actions. The company is ShotSpotter. Utilizing microphones and AI […]

Most of the politicians you currently see in the headlines having an absolute embolism over TikTok privacy concerns, don’t seem to appreciate (or don’t want you to understand) how they helped create the problem they’re pretending to be so upset about. The FCC’s Brendan Carr, for example, has been enjoying massive press coverage for weeks […]

Bucking a trend set by two separate Appeals Courts (Ninth and Tenth), a federal court in Texas has said it is actually a violation of rights when cops destroy an innocent person’s home to effect an arrest. What’s more, a jury has backed up that decision with actual compensation. (h/t The Honest Courtesan) Today, a […]

Ten years ago, Techdirt was one of the few sites to be following closely some obscure but important machinations at the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to create a top-down regulatory scheme for the Internet. The fact that the two main proponents of this move were Russia and China gives an idea of the underlying […]