Techdirt

It’s no secret to long term Techdirt readers that Australia truly is the upside down when it comes to internet laws and policy. We’ve discussed in the past things like Australia’s news link tax (they hate when you call it a tax, and insist it’s just a “bargaining code,” but the bargaining is to force […]

Americans received 4.4 billion robocalls in June. It never quite stops being weird how we’ve had to effectively stop using a core voice communications platform because it’s been hijacked by scammers and debt collectors. As we’ve noted numerous times, there are several reasons why our nationwide robocall hell never quite seems to end despite new […]

For many years we’ve written stories regarding various lawsuits over scraping the web. Without the ability to scrape the web, we’d have no search engines, no Internet Archive, and lots of other stuff wouldn’t work right either. However, more importantly, the ability to scrape the web should result in a better overall internet, potentially reversing […]

The Ultimate Excel VBA Bundle and Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2021 for Windows will take you from Excel beginner to expert in no time. Over 13 courses, you’ll learn how to use Excel VBA to do a variety of tasks: how to create your first macro from scratch, how to control mouse and keyboard commands, […]

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) — Canada’s federal Dudley Do-Whatevers — is again belatedly admitting it has access to powerful surveillance tech its supposed oversight seems unaware the RCMP possessed. This is par for the RCMP course. The agency tends to admit it has surveillance tech only after extended deployment periods. And, like its […]

Last week FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr made headlines by sending a letter to Apple and Google demanding they ban TikTok. Journalists couldn’t be bothered to mention the FCC has no authority over app stores or social media, the letter had no legal backing, or that Carr (a captured regulator largely loyal to AT&T) has no […]

Nearly two years ago, we discussed a fascinating project spearheaded by one dedicated person, going by the moniker Peebs, to digitize every video game manual’s English version for the Super Nintendo system. For those of you not of a certain age, video games used to come in the form of cartridges that you would load […]

Once you’re in jail, you’re just meat the government can abuse with near impunity. You belong to the state now and whatever happens to you is well-deserved — a sentiment not only felt by jailers but by an unfortunately large percentage of the US population. You can be pressed into service, providing nearly free labor […]

Following through on a request by the Biden administration to defend right to repair, the FTC has demanded that Harley Davidson and Westinghouse stop voiding customer warranties over repairs. In an announcement, the FTC noted that both companies used fine print to void a customer’s warranty if they used independent dealers for parts and repairs: […]

This should surprise no one, but Joshua Benton, over at Nieman Lab, has a really fantastically well-reported article about how Facebook basically wants out of the news business entirely. It goes through multiple reasons why this is the case, but a big one is that Rupert Murdoch’s decade-long demands that Facebook and Google simply fork […]

Most of the time, China’s crushing, dystopian, inescapable surveillance/censorship apparatus is terrifying and deeply disturbing. On rare occasions, it’s merely amusing. This is one of those times and South China Morning Post has the details. (h/t The Honest Courtesan) A device that can detect when a man is watching pornography by “reading his mind” has […]

Latitude laptops enable all-day productivity, with the most secure and manageable features, all in a beautiful design you will be proud to carry. The 14″ full HD display is anti-glare and features a narrow border. Built with high-end materials like magnesium alloy, the Latitude E7470 combines premium design with best-in-class durability. This refurbished laptop lets […]

It truly is incredible just how much of a moral panic the media and politicians have created around social media. Once again, the actual research is basically inconclusive that social media is bad. If it were truly awful, it should be showing up in the data, but for the most part it’s not. At all. […]

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Roe, U.S. tech companies didn’t much want to talk about their role in securing women’s data. And they didn’t want to talk much about it because they know that the privacy standards and oversight of the entire US snoopvertising economy, from adtech and telecom to app […]

There’s a fascinating article by Rebecca Jennings on Vox which explores the vexed question of plagiarism. Its starting point is a post on TikTok, entitled “How to EASILY Produce Video Ideas for TikTok.” It gives the following advice: Find somebody else’s TikTok that inspires you and then literally copy it. You don’t need to copy it […]

This isn’t the kind of response one expects from a firefighter arriving at the scene of a fire. (via Courthouse News Service) In August 2019 [Brad] Cox and other DFD [Dallas Fire Rescue Department] personnel were called to extinguish a grass fire. When Cox and other DFD personnel arrived, [Kyle] Vess, who is mentally ill, […]

An increasingly important theme around here is how various laws to regulate the internet are often in conflict with each other. Privacy law is leading to less competition, for example. And from TorrentFreak, we have another, somewhat amusing example. The incredibly aggressive Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has yet another hare-brained scheme to try to prevent […]

The Supreme Court’s decision to say “fuck it” to reproductive rights has resulted in plenty of firmly protected First Amendment expression. People are angry and have decided to let the Supreme Court, along with the rest of the federal government, know that they aren’t happy. Twitter user mattie daddy did the same thing, only using […]

Now that the Supreme Court has given states the freedom to police women’s bodies, it only makes sense that police are out there literally policing women’s bodies. It’s summer. Temperatures are high pretty much everywhere. And when temps go up, the amount of clothing people are willing to put on goes down. For some reason, […]

The Apple MacBook Air 13.3″ features a 22-nm “Ivy Bridge” 1.8GHz Intel “Core i5” processor, 4GB of onboard 1600 MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM, 128GB storage, and an Intel HD Graphics 4000 graphics processor, making your browsing experience better than ever. No more lagging or freezing. This all is packed in a razor-thin aluminum case with an […]

We’ve talked about the unfortunate bipartisan attacks on free speech, which are best understood as attempts to control the narrative. Republicans have been attacking free speech in multiple ways — from trying to ban books and take away teacher autonomy to trying to compel websites to host content against their will. Democrats, on the flip […]

We’ve spent years laying out mountains of documented evidence on how the U.S. broadband is a heavily monopolized mess largely protected and pampered by captured lawmakers and regulators. The impact of this lack of meaningful competition is everywhere, from historically terrible customer satisfaction rates, to high prices, slow speeds, and spotty coverage. 83 percent of […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MathFox with a comment about the troubles at Truth Social: What ‘Truth Social’ shows is how easy it is easy to create an Internet platform. It also shows how hard it is to make an Internet platform successful. In second place, it’s Thad with […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Zillow got very angry about the McMansion Hell blog and sent a ridiculous legal threat, then followed up with a second equally wrong letter, then finally kinda-sorta backed down a little bit after the EFF got involved. The copyright office was recognizing that the DMCA is a problem […]

Sigh, here we go. Back in 2014, Wreal LLC filed a trademark infringement suit against Amazon. Why? Well, Wreal has a product called FyreTV that it describes as “the Netflix of porn.” Amazon has a streaming service for decidedly non-pornographic content called Fire TV. Wreal came into court armed with a couple of social media […]

Some days, it has got to suck to be a judge. Well, actually a lot of days. Most judicial work is tedious, including contractual disputes or bankruptcy proceedings or maritime law or any dozens of other aspects of litigation that would put most people to sleep. On other days though, it’s a particular kind of […]

As you’ll recall, a year and a half ago, much of the world who didn’t live on the WallStreetBets forum were introduced to the concept of meme stocks. As we discussed at the time, much of the embrace of such stocks by retail investors was really about people who were fed up with feeling like […]

It is utterly and completely irrational for people who defend the vulnerable to call for the destruction of Section 230. Section 230 helps protect vulnerable people by making it possible to speak out against those who would hurt them. Weakening the critically important protection it provides online platforms would only weaken these platforms’ ability to […]

Devin Nunes’ campaign to intimidate and silence his critics with a flood of SLAPP suits has hit another stumbling block. While he and his lawyer, Steven Biss, had mostly avoided filing lawsuits in states with strong anti-SLAPP laws, including his “home” state of California, for some reason in the fall of 2020 he sued Twitter […]

Are you a fan of solving puzzles? Do you like winning money? Then MSCHF has a treat for you. MSCHF, the makers of THE ONE MILLION DOLLAR PUZZLE, now brings you THE TWO MILLION DOLLAR PUZZLE. All you have to do is buy this 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, complete it, and get a chance to win […]

In 2018, the Supreme Court declared warrantless access to historical cell site location information unconstitutional, given the privacy implications of being able to track someone’s movements over days or weeks without bothering to secure a warrant. Prior to this decision, cell site location info (CSLI) was treated as a third party record, requiring neither a […]

For literally twenty-five years now, telecom monopoly executives the world over have been trying to force big tech companies billions of dollars for no coherent reason. It began with AT&T’s attempt to double dip on Google; which spurred the entire net neutrality war. The complaint by telecoms has long since moved global, as they try […]

It’s kind of weird that in some convoluted way, the NSA may be killing Google Analytics, at least in the EU. You may recall that back in 2020, Max Schrems won his second big data privacy effort against the EU/US Privacy Shield agreement, which allowed data from people in the EU to be transferred to […]

When I repeatedly use Nintendo as something of a virtual punching bag, it pisses off some of the company’s loyal fans. This has never made sense to me. Those fans should be pissed at Nintendo and all the different avenues the company takes just to make sure being a Nintendo fan is as difficult as […]

What a dumb news cycle. As we noted, mainly driven by the preferred political spam mongers for Republicans, a study from some computer scientists was completely misrepresented to argue (falsely) that Google was deliberately censoring Republican politician emails. As we’ve repeatedly noted, the study actually found that while a clean Gmail account would flag more […]

Italian malware developer Hacking Team began making headlines in 2014. Infections uncovered by researchers at Toronto’s Citizen Lab and Russia’s Kaspersky Lab were traced back to servers located in the United States, Canada, UK, and Ecuador. The US servers topped the list. The second place finisher, however, was Kazakhstan. Here’s a summary of the Kazakhstan […]

You know things are going just great in crypto-land when a cryptocurrency company has to post a vague cease-and-desist letter to its own blog. Everything about this is bizarre, but it culminated in this very strange cease-and-desist blog post by Nexo. There is a separate blog post that sort of, but not quite, tries to […]

China is choked by surveillance. It’s everywhere and it touches every aspect of its citizens’ lives. The government uses it to stifle dissent, control the population, and persecute undesirables. Law enforcement has been doing pre-crime for years, but China’s version is amped up and all-consuming. “Guilty until forever” is the guideline in China, where massive […]

Users are juggling huge amounts of data, so it makes sense that you’re taking care of that data responsibly. With Degoo you get up to 50TB of secured storage space from which to manage and share files with simplicity. With high-speed transfers, you’ll love how easy it is to keep tabs on all of your […]

We’ve written about Rappler, the very successful Filipino investigative news organization founded by reporter Maria Ressa, multiple times over the past few years. Rappler was very critical of the Rodrigo Duterte administration, but it’s reporting was solid. Back in 2018, the Filipino SEC announced that it was going to shut down Rappler, in a move […]

A week or two ago we noted how there was a mass panic because TikTok was found to be sharing U.S. user data with executives at the company’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance. This was in stark contrast to the strict, U.S.-based data management controls the company claimed to be implementing, and, to be clear, was […]

In April, Donald Trump insisted he had no interest whatsoever in getting back on Twitter (in response to questions about whether or not Elon Musk would allow him back, should he ever close his Twitter purchase). In May, Donald Trump lost his lawsuit trying to force Twitter to reinstate him. In June, Donald Trump (who […]

Michael E. Karpeles, Program Lead on OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive, spotted an interesting blog post by Michael Kozlowski, the editor-in-chief of Good e-Reader. It concerns Amazon and its audiobook division, Audible: Amazon owned Audible ceased selling individual audiobooks through their Android app from Google Play a couple of weeks ago. This will prevent anyone from buying […]

The terrible, awful, no good, horrible plans to regulate the internet keep coming faster and furiouser these days. So, it’s worth remembering a time back when Congress passed one of the worst laws about the internet: the Communications Decency Act. Yes, these days we talk about the CDA more reverently, but that’s only because we’re […]

The world can be an awful, horrible place. Lately, it feels like, in America, things are only getting more difficult. And, because my country loves its scapegoats, the internet has been routinely blamed for all the country’s, perhaps the world’s, ills. Insurrections, political radicalization, obesity, poor socialization, literally any sub-optimal thing to do with children: […]

I’m continuing my coverage of dangerous Internet bills in the California legislature. This job is especially challenging during an election year, when legislators rally behind the “protect the kids” mantra to pursue bills that are likely to hurt, or at least not help, kids. Today’s example is AB 2273, the Age-Appropriate Design Code Act (AADC), Before we get […]

The Ultimate Excel VBA Bundle and Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2021 for Windows will take you from Excel beginner to expert in no time. Over 13 courses, you’ll learn how to use Excel VBA to do a variety of tasks: how to create your first macro from scratch, how to control mouse and keyboard commands, […]

Israeli phone malware manufacturer NSO Group has plenty of customers. Or at least it did until the Israeli government edited the company’s list of approved customers and the US government slapped sanctions on it. NSO has sold its malware to plenty of abusive governments with long histories of human rights violations. It has also sold […]

As we’ve discussed before, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas really does not like the “actual malice” standard required to make a defamation claim against a public figure, as laid out in the extremely important NY Times v. Sullivan case. The actual malice standard confuses many people, because it’s not actually about malice. The standard is […]

On the one hand, content moderation at the scale modern social media companies operate at is an impossible nightmare. Companies are always going to lack the staff and resources to do it well (raising questions about the dangers of automation at scale), and they’re always going to screw things up for reasons well discussed. At […]