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A pair of conservative Republican lawmakers in the Utah state legislature have introduced legislation that would require porn filteringon all mobile devices sold within the state. Technically, the bill would require retailers and manufacturers to enable parental controls on phones and tablets sold in the Beehive State in a bid to protect minors from adult [...]

Back in April, we were joined on the podcast by Chris Riley, the Executive Director of the new nonprofit Data Transfer Initiative that aimed to promote data portability and empower users to transfer their data from one service to another. Today, the Initiative has released its first annual report (pdf link), and Chris is back [...]

So as you probably know, yesterday, the Senate held one of its semi-regular let's call tech CEOs to Congress and make ourselves look out of touch and foolish" hearings. This time the focus of the discussion was on children's safety," but there was little to no discussion on what it actually takes to protect children [...]

US Private Vaults has an interesting business model. It offered something akin to end-to-end-encryption for physical goods. Unlike banks and their safety deposit boxes, US Private Vaults did not collect or retain information about its customers. Nor did it retain master keys that would allow it to access stored goods. This lack of master keys [...]

Dive into Godot - a rising star in the game engine world. You'll learn to create platformers, RPGs, strategy games, FPS games, and more as you master this free and open-source engine with easily expandable systems. Plus, you'll also explore techniques for game design and game asset creation - giving you the ultimate techniques to [...]

Back in December, we wrote about Appin. We were not writing about the reports (of which there have been many) that the organization that started as a sort of cybersecurity training school, but morphed into a kind of hack-for-hire" scheme was involved in all sorts of nefarious activity. Rather we wrote about their (ab)use of [...]

When last we checked in with right wing propaganda mill One America News (OAN), the conspiratorial gibberish farm was busy trying to pretend (with the help of numerous Republican AGs) that DirecTV's decision to boot the network from its cable lineup was part ofa vast, diabolical cabalto censor conservatives (it wasn't, the channel simply isn't [...]

Here we go again. In the long and vaunted history of DRM in software, and especially in video games, there is one general truism: DRM tends to effect only legitimate buyers while so-called pirates" route around it completely. There are all kinds of anecdotal stories as to the annoyances at best, and game-crippling outcomes at [...]

One of the things we talk about quite a lot on Techdirt is how the easy" policy ideas that many people have aren't quite so easy, because everything has tradeoffs. You want strict privacy laws? Well, that might create issues for free speech and competition. You want stronger liability on social media services? Well, that's [...]

Last November, Maine residents voted overwhelmingly (83 percent) to pass a new state right to repair law designed to make auto repairs easier and more affordable. More specifically, the law requires that automakers standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical datato consumers and third-party independent repair shops. But as [...]

As you've likely heard, this morning the Senate did one of its semi-regular hearings in which it drags tech CEOs in front of clueless Senators who make nonsense pronouncements in hopes of getting a viral clip to show up on the very social media they're pretending to demonize, but which they rely on to pretend [...]

Lots of things look pretty great up front but completely terrible in retrospect. Most of us, however, tend to weather our worst decisions without getting a foreign military force involved. Unfortunately for UK resident Aditya Verma, something that seemed funny at the moment soon turned into an international incident. Here's how it started, as reported [...]

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Starting this week, Amazon Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) will be charged $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn't previously exist. Shifting toward ad-based tiers has been popular among streaming companies like Netflix, Max, Disney+, and Paramount. But whereas those services make a cheaper ad-based tier an opt-in [...]

Well, this is not that much of a surprise, but in the leadup to the Senate child safety" dog and pony show that will be happening in a few hours, Microsoft decided to twist the knife in to some of its competitors. Microsoft's Vice Chair and President, Brad Smith (who was formerly the company's general [...]

And here we go. We have spent the past couple of years discussing Microsoft's acquisition, and all the trials and tribulations that led to it, of Activision Blizzard. This deal, that faced mostly flaccid opposition from several national regulatory bodies throughout the world, cost Microsoft $69 billion, with a b", to consummate. And that's just [...]

You probably recall the subreddit WallStreetBets from the whole GameStonks! episode three years ago. Over the last year or so there's been a different legal issue related to that subreddit, though. Jaime Rogozinski, who created the WSB subreddit, ended up suing Reddit, after they shut down his account. There were a few different issues at [...]

First Amendment principles are nothing new. A ton of precedent has been established that firmly limits what the government can do to stop someone from saying something (and, less often, to force someone to say something). Prior restraint is pretty easy to recognize. And yet, every so often, a judge decides to rewrite the First [...]

The DOJ can be some vindictive sons of bitches. This has nothing to do with justice at all. This is just pure spite. As has been detailed over and over again, while the public story was that Backpage was taken down for facilitating sex trafficking, the real story is very, very different. The site actually [...]

Hey, everyone makes mistakes. Ring certainly did. Amazon's home surveillance acquisition realized there was no one in the residential space willing to slavishly cater to cops. Ring decided it would provide this supposed public service." It gave cops cheap/free cameras and urged them to hand them out to as many private citizens as possible. The [...]

You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let's focus on the app. Right off the bat, let's be clear about one thing: When we say app" we don't mean that you're limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across [...]

It is no secret that Senator Lindsey Graham hates Section 230. It's also no secret that he has no clue how the internet or Section 230 actually work. He's pushed bills to repeal 230 directly, and he's pushed bills to repeal 230 indirectly. He does not like Section 230 in a house, or with a [...]

Despite a lot of rhetoric by customers about how they were sick of Netflix price hikes and headed to the exits, the company's latest earnings report showed impressive growth. The company added 13.1 million customers worldwide in the fourth quarter, up from the 8.76 million added the previous quarter. All told, the once-disruptive streaming upstart [...]

The latest generative AI tools are certainly impressive, but they bring with them a wide range of complex problems, as numerous posts on Techdirt attest. A new academic paper, published on arXiv, raises more of them, but from a new angle. Entitled A Shocking Amount of the Web is Machine Translated: Insights from Multi-Way Parallelism", [...]

Just days ago, we were talking about the release of PC game Palworld, an open-world monster collecting game that has often been described as Pokemon, but with guns." The point of my post was that this game served as a great example of the idea/expression dichotomy in practice. This game, whatever similarities it may have [...]

Despite all evidence to the contrary, law enforcement officials continue to pretend being in the same room as dread drug fentanyl is enough to hospitalize officers, if not actually kill them. This myth has been irresponsibly perpetrated by a number of law enforcement agencies. To date, not a single case of contact overdose has been [...]

The Supreme Court is about to review Texas' HB20 law, that (among other unworkable things) says that websites cannot moderate based on viewpoint." Of course, websites don't moderate based on viewpoint, but rather whether or not they think you've violated their rules/terms of service. Should the law be allowed to go into effect, it's not [...]

Buying domestic data from data brokers is just something the government does all the time. Bypassing restraints enacted by the Supreme Court, federal agencies (along with local law enforcement agencies) are hoovering up whatever domestic data they can from private companies all too happy to be part of the problem. Sure, the government can pretend [...]

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Over and over again, we see politicians browbeat companies until they agree to support terrible legislation. Back when FOSTA was being debated, there was tremendous pressure from the media and Congress for tech to support it, falsely claiming that without it they were enabling sex trafficking. Eventually, after a ton of pressure was put on [...]

When last we checked in with Hewlett Packard (HP), the company had just been sued (for the second time) for crippling customer printers if owners attempt to use cheaper, third-party printer cartridges. It was just the latest in a long saga where printer manufacturers use DRM or dodgy software updates to wage all out war [...]

This week, both our top comments on the insightful side come in response to our post about the misrepresentation of Ben Franklin's opinion on content moderation by private platforms. In first place, it's an anonymous commenter with some clarification: So you, too, are unable to comprehend pretty basic sentences. Franklin is explaining that he can [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we took a close look at an interesting and challenging case about Section 230, while Google asked the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling about copyright in APIs. We wrote about the decline in broadband network investment post-net-neutrality despite promises from Ajit Pai and the telecoms. US media [...]

The mice finally agreed how they wanted the cat to behave, and congratulated each other on the difficult consensus. They celebrated in lavish cheese island retreats and especially feted those brave heroes who promised to place the bells and controls.The heroes received generous funding, with which they first built a safe fortress in which to [...]

As you may recall, Utah was the first of a bunch of states to pass one of the now increasingly popular laws trying to ban kids from social media. Utah legislators knew they'd get sued over it, and for that reason set a date for the law to go into effect in March of this [...]

The FBI's counter-terrorism work has always been noted for its willingness to radicalize people just to arrest them. The FBI has a lot of wins in the win column, but many of those wins have been obtained through... well, let's call it what it is: cheating. People with mental issues or deep wells of insecurity [...]

Okay, look, this post is basically a repost of a post from two years ago. But, because David Mamet has decided to refile the exact same amicus brief he filed for the 5th Circuit again at the Supreme Court, I figured we can repost the same exact post ripping it apart (with a few tiny [...]

There's not much that's more inadvertently hilarious than the efforts of law enforcement officials to convince the general public that simply being in the immediate area of fentanyl could result in instant death. That's not how drugs work. Drugs need to be ingested. While some drugs can obviously be absorbed through the skin, it takes [...]

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Nikko D'Ambrosio has had a pretty rough week, but apparently that's not going to stop him from texting the court from a new number. You may recall this dude bro from the Chicago area, for his decision to sue basically everyone he could think of after a few women he dated wrote about their experiences [...]

Neither the FCC nor FTC has a particularly good track record of standing up to broadband and cable giants when it comes to their longstanding track record of anticompetitive behavior, price gouging, or nickel-and-diming their often captive customers with bogus, hidden fees. Though occasionally one of the two agencies does step in to try make [...]

When it comes to copyright suits or conflicts that never should have existed, one of the most common misunderstandings that births them is not understanding the idea/expression dichotomy in copyright law. Even to most laypeople, once you explain it, it's quite simple. You can copyright a specific expression of something, such as literature, recorded music, [...]

In our continuing Error 402 series on the monetization of web content, we've been talking a lot about things that haven't worked and a few things that have (kinda?) worked, but not in a particularly appealing way (ads, mainly). We will eventually get to more examples of things that are working - along with some [...]

We've got a nice fresh live recording for you today! Just yesterday, Mike was at the Knight Foundation's INFORMED Conference to participate in a panel discussion with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, moderated by former Twitter Trust & Safety head Yoel Roth. The subject was decentralized and federated social media, especially its implications for content moderation, [...]

It seems that if anything has gone wrong in the world, ignorant and foolish politicians have a readymade scapegoat: it's all social media's fault. NYC Mayor Eric Adams is facing a pretty big list of crises, some of his own making. He's facing what appears to be a pretty serious corruption investigation. He's cutting a [...]

Pretty much every law enforcement agency gets exactly what it wants during budget discussions. The spending on policing always seems to increase, despite years of diminishing returns. The money flows in, but very little flows back out in terms of community relations, accountability, or transparency. In recent years, there have been discussions about defunding" law [...]

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Well, here's a weird one. I was going through the various amicus briefs filed in support of the governments of Texas and Florida's ability to tell websites that they must host speech that violates their rules, and, damn, there are some ridiculous ones (more posts coming on that front soon...). However, one of them - [...]

You might recall that back during the net neutrality wars Netflix was a notable supporter of the concept, arguing that big ISPs shouldn't be able to pick and choose winners and losers on their networks, or use their monopoly over broadband access to undermine competition over their networks. Then, you might recall that as Netflix [...]

The saga of PC title The Day Before is finally over. Like, completely over. Whatever this game was, and that is still very much an open question at a 10,000 foot level, it's now gone. And I can't say that I know for sure that the speed with which this game went from being launched [...]