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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has long made its own case for abolishment. Before ICE earned its current reputation as a fake-school running, report-altering, rogue agency interested in ejecting as many non-white people from America as possible, ICE ran interference for entrenched industries. This led to things like ICE officers raiding small repair shops to […]

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One of the more frustrating things about the various “debates” regarding “free speech” lately, is how little they are actually about free speech. Quite often, they are actually about people who are quite upset about having to face social consequences for their own free speech. But facing social consequences has always been part of free […]

Back in early 2016, Parma, Ohio resident Anthony Novak decided to have a little fun. He created a parody of the Parma Police Department’s Facebook page and began posting obviously satirical announcements, like the following: The Parma Civil Service Commission will conduct a written exam for basic Police Officer for the City of Parma to […]

We had just discussed PlayStation Boss Jim Ryan’s somewhat bizarre email to his staff in the wake of the leaked SCOTUS draft opinion that signaled an end to Roe v. Wade being the law of the land. What started off as a reasonable request to respect the spectrum of opinions on a contentious social issue […]

Clearview’s facial recognition AI business model has always been “fuck everything.” The company scraped the open web of all the data it could find, working its way towards a 100 billion image database that alchemizes social media posts into “intel” gold for Clearview. Not giving a damn about anything is starting to eat into Clearview’s […]

All of this was easily predictable for, well, basically anyone. The already Orwellian-named Department of Homeland Security last month announced the even more Orwellian-named Disinformation Governance Board, with no details, no explanation, and no nothing, other than naming a somewhat controversial researcher to lead it. We called out just how ridiculous the whole thing was […]

As we’ve previously noted, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will dole out an historic $65 billion to shore up broadband access. $42 billion of that total will directly fund a Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) grant program overseen by the NTIA. It’s a massive infusion of money, and much of it should have […]

Last summer, the Supreme Court finally applied some common sense to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The government has long read this law to apply to pretty much any computer access it (or federal court litigants) doesn’t like, jeopardizing the livelihood of security researchers, app developers, and anyone who might access a system […]

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch – whatever your needs are. You’ll also get 3 courses teaching […]

I recognized that lots of people are angry and frustrated over the mass murdering jackass who killed ten people at a Buffalo grocery store last weekend. I’m angry and frustrated about it as well. But, the problem with anger and frustration is that it often leads people to lash out in irrational ways, and to […]

When a tragedy happens, lawsuits tend to follow. This is no exception. And while it’s understandable that grieving survivors often seek justice — whether it’s closure or compensation — through the legal system, the legal system is not there to provide solace. It’s there to determine whether anyone was legally culpable for the death. This […]

Will racism ever be over in the United States? Nah. We’re just too damn good at it. Sheriff’s deputies in Georgia stopped a bus carrying a mostly Black women’s lacrosse team under the apparent assumption there was marijuana on board, and the players and their coaches were humiliated and angered by the experience. The Delaware State University team was […]

The FCC has announced that it would be backing a plan to put WiFi on school busses in an attempt to bridge that pesky rascal ambiguously called the “digital divide.” According to the plan, the proposal would use the dwindling money available in the FCC’s E-Rate program to deploy hotspots on busses, allowing them to […]

Google’s market share and capacity to gather billions of data points has made it the most popular target for so-called warrants that seem to elude both particularity requirements and the Supreme Court’s decision in the Carpenter case. To be a reasonable search, law enforcement is supposed to be able to show the information it seeks […]

Last week a bizarre one-line order from the Fifth Circuit lifted the injunction on Texas’s social media law, allowing it to go into effect, despite all the massive problems with it – including the extent to which it violates the First Amendment and Section 230. So NetChoice and CCIA filed an emergency application with the […]

Everyone these days seems to want to regulate social media. I mean, the reality is that social media is such a powerful tool for expression that everyone wants to regulate that expression. Sure, they can couch it in whatever fancy justifications they want, but at the end of the day, they’re still trying to regulate […]

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Mike just wrote about how, in the wake of the abhorrent mass shooting that occurred in upstate New York over the weekend, some of our leaders have begun the normal cleansing ritual: blame the things we already hated for the new bad thing that happened whether that makes any sense at all or not. In […]

For several years now there’s been an endless amount of clamor in DC about how we “need to regulate big tech.” Unfortunately, many of the solutions on this front have ranged from incoherent to performative, failing utterly to actually shore up genuine problems in the sector (catch and kill tactics, mindless consolidation, vast privacy and […]

In the wake of the SCOTUS draft leak of a decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade, plenty of tech companies have begun scrambling to get public and internal messaging out. We recently discussed how game studio Bungie had put out a statement disagreeing with the draft ruling and committing to its own staff to […]

If a shackled suspect asks to speak to a lawyer and this request is ignored, is that a violation of their rights? Cops — especially the ones in this case — would likely say “No.” Cops don’t consider themselves legal experts because having any legal expertise makes it more difficult to hassle people over imagined […]

It’s no secret that Elon Musk’s statements about his plans for Twitter have been confused to say the least. It has become abundantly clear that he doesn’t know much at all about how a service like Twitter operates, especially when it comes to content moderation, and doesn’t seem to have much interest in learning. On […]

Tech journalism is evolving, including how it reports on and critiques tech companies. At the same time, tech journalists should still serve as bullshit detectors and hype slayers. The following tips are intended to help navigate the terrain. As a general rule, beware of overconfident techies bragging about their innovation capabilities AND overconfident critics accusing that innovation […]

Well, this is awkward. Yesterday I wrote about how there was a strong argument that Twitch’s removal of the mass murderer in Buffalo’s livestream of his murder spree violated Texas’s ridiculous social media law. The main saving grace for Twitch would be that it was possible (though it’s unclear) its userbase was just under the […]

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Section 230 isn’t just some unearned privilege enjoyed by tech companies to shield them from angry, incoherent lawsuits filed by banned white nationalists. It’s also for the little people, as Eric Goldman points out while bringing us this recent decision by the New Hampshire Supreme Court. This ruling is a fabulous reminder that Section 230 […]

Several years ago you might recall that a bunch of eBay executives were busted waging a bizarre harassment campaign against a blogging couple who had been critical of the company. David and Ina Steiner, the folks behind Ecommerce Bytes, had occasionally (and fairly tamely) criticized some eBay business practices. Instead of addressing those practices, numerous […]

Conde Nast has shown itself to be heavy-handed in the past when it comes to IP laws. And like any other large publisher, Conde Nast makes a habit of policing its IP, including its trademarks. But when you do that policing, you really do have to commit to at least having the bare minimum of […]

Maybe it’s occasionally OK to shoot the messenger. You know, maybe one to the knee to help determine whether or not they can be trusted. The NSA — which has undermined encryption standards in the past — says it won’t undermine the next strain of encryption, one being built to withstand the inevitable arrival of […]

With the Supreme Court poised to rip away a constitutional right that’s been the law of the land for nearly half a century by overturning Roe v. Wade, it’s time for the gloves to come off in the encryption debate. For a quarter of a century, it has been an unspoken prerequisite for “serious” discussion […]

In the past, we’ve talked about how much of politicians’ obsession with regulating internet companies seems to stem from it being an easy way to deflect attention from their own policy failings. So many aspects of the complaints about social media are really just because social media has shined an extraordinarily bright light on the […]

As you’ve no doubt heard, on Saturday there was yet another horrific shooting, this one in Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding more. From all current evidence, the shooter, a teenager, was a brainwashed white nationalist, spewing nonsense and hate in a long manifesto that repeated bigoted propaganda found in darker corners of the internet… […]

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As you’ll recall, last Wednesday, the 5th Circuit surprised lots of people by immediately reinstating Texas’s ridiculous content moderation law that basically creates an open season to sue large social media sites for any moderation choices those sites make. The surprise wasn’t necessarily the judges’ decision, which had been telegraphed two days earlier via the […]

We’ve long discussed how if you really want to understand how the highly monopolistic U.S. broadband industry really works, you should look at regional phone monopoly Frontier Communications. Especially in states like West Virginia, where the company has spent decades lagging on fiber upgrades and DSL and phone repairs under a regime of regulatory capture that rarely holds them accountable […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a response to another commenter claiming they “occasionally post the censorship highlights of the week”: No, you don’t. You whine about “conservative views” being “censored” from Twitter, then you disappear (which I expect you to do now) when asked about […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Europe was putting free speech at risk as it struggled to figure out what to do with the GDPR, but stateside the big fight was over net neutrality. A John Oliver segment on the issue appeared to cripple the FCC website for a second time, but the agency […]

The NYPD has long been a stalwart opponent of transparency and accountability. It has spent years trying to rebrand as a national security agency, drafting on former mayor Rudy Giuliani’s unearned reputation as the post-9/11 savior of New York City. Journalists have noted the NYPD is even more secretive than the CIA and NSA, two […]

One of the most dramatic differences between the traditional, analogue world of creation, and the modern, digital one, is the democratization that has taken place in this sphere. Until recently, writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers collectively formed a relatively select group that was hard to enter as a professional. Today, anyone with an Internet connection […]

It never fails. We’ve been talking about the EU’s Digital Services Act for a few years now, looking at how the EU’s technocratic desire to overregulate the internet is going to cause real problems. And while at least they took a more systematic process to figuring out how to write the law, the end result […]

The boiling frog syndrome suggests that if a frog jumps into a pot of boiling water, it immediately jumps out — but if a frog jumps into a slowly heating pot, it senses no danger and gets cooked. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has been gradually coming to a boil of dysfunction for a decade – some are horrified, […]

For literally more than a decade researchers warned that global satellite telecommunications networks were vulnerable to attack. These attacks vary in nature but several allowed an intruder miles away to both intercept and disrupt satellite communications. In 2020 hackers again clearly demonstrated how these perpetually unresolved vulnerabilities were putting millions of people at risk. Fast forward to 2022 […]

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At a time when Russia and Russian oligarchs should be facing more scrutiny and careful work by investigative reporters, it is actually becoming that much more difficult to do so. And the main reason is that EU and UK “data protection” laws, passed in a flurry with promises of protecting your privacy from the greedy […]

Earlier this week, the Biden administration announced a “new” broadband plan that wasn’t actually new. The rose garden event featured executives from twenty ISPs who all got a pat on the back in front of the cameras for voluntarily and temporarily participating in a Biden plan to provide a $30 discount off of the broadband […]

The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is home to several gangs. Even though the current sheriff, Alex Villanueva, thinks this is up for debate (via a threatened lawsuit against the LA City Council), enough evidence (anecdotal and otherwise) points to deputies forming cliques that turn the Thin Blue Line from defensive to offensive. Like any gang, […]

Our own Glyn Moody has written several posts about how exceptions that have been made to copyright laws throughout the world have picked up steam, but also appear to have left the visually impaired hung out to dry. That finally began to change in 2013 with the Marrakesh Treaty, which was specifically designed to restore […]

Jurisprudence on warrantless long-term surveillance is still all over the place. On one hand, some courts feel anything observable by passersby shouldn’t be off limits to law enforcement officers who haven’t secured a search warrant. Other courts have determined lengthy surveillance — especially when using cameras that can zoom, enhance, move, and record every minute […]

What the actual fuck, EU? While they pretend to be all about protecting privacy, they then push out this bit of utter nonsense: a bill to “protect the children” by literally requiring online services scan all messaging all the time. In some ways, the bill is similar to the EARN IT Act in the US, […]