Techdirt

Last week, the Senate released yet another version of the Kids Online Safety Act, written, reportedly, with the assistance of X CEO Linda Yaccarino in a flawed attempt toaddress the critical free speechissues inherent in the bill. This last minute draft remains, at its core, an unconstitutional censorship bill that threatens the online speech and [...]

In this new era of censorship - aided and abetted by people who think they can make America great again" by destroying the rights that actually make America great - almost every state is dealing with mass censorship efforts. Most of these involve libraries because motivated bigots have found leverage points to maximize their efforts [...]

Donald Trump has made it quite clear that he views his reelection as not just a vindication of his views, but as a blessing for his plan to bring vengeance on those who disagree with him. His cabinet picks are following in his footsteps on that, with various threats of lawsuits flying this way and [...]

To completely understand computer security, it's vital to step outside the fence and to think outside the box. Computer security is not just about firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, or anti-viruses. It's also about tricking people into doing whatever a hacker wishes. A secure system, network, or infrastructure is also about informed people. The All-in-One Super-Sized [...]

Tomorrow is the last day of our Kickstarter campaign for One Billion Users. We're still beneath the funding threshold, so unless there's a big closing rush, this campaign won't reach our goal. Still, if we can get that big closing rush, we'd love your support for the campaign. At the very least, supporting it now [...]

I've covered the cable TV and broadband industries for a long while, and for the vast majority of that time, U.S. regulators have looked the other way while companies rip consumers off with hidden fees. At some point the U.S. just decided that this type of false advertising was a form of acceptable creativity. And [...]

Monster Energy. Go ahead, I'll wait for your eyes to finish rolling. The trademark bullying company with a side business in making beverages has been the subject of discussion here for years and years and years. Monster Energy is one of the most prolific trademark bullies I've ever come across. It behaves so absurdly in [...]

I apologize in advance for the non-specific nature of this headline. But there's too much going on here to be summed up pithily in a few hundred words or less. No one here gets paid by the word, but we're going to need a whole lot of them to get to the bottom of this [...]

Long beforeTikTok histrionicstook root, you might recall that numerous members of Congress spent numerous years freaking about another Chinese company: Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei. The argument, made without much in the way of public evidence, was that Huawei was systematically using its network gear to spy on Americans at a massive scale. Congress then [...]

As a non-fan, non-supporter of Donald Trump, I don't have much left after discovering a disturbing number of my fellow Americans prefer fascism to liberty. But I still have these things I will forever hold near and dear to my heart: schadenfreude and irony. And, if you're like me, you get both of these things [...]

Costco is your one-stop shop for everything you want and offers a wide range of merchandise that will likely cover all of your shopping needs! With hundreds of locations across the country, Costco is the ideal place to shop without the hassle of having to run numerous errands around town. AGold Star Membershipincludes a FREE [...]

Katie Couric recently claimed that repealing Section 230 would help combat online misinformation. The problem is, she couldn't be more wrong. Worse, as a prominent voice, she's contributing to the widespread misinformation around Section 230 herself. A few years ago, for reasons that are unclear to me, Katie Couric chaired a weird Aspen Institute Commission [...]

For the better part of the last thirty years, telecom giants and free market" libertarian think tanks have told anybody who'd listen that gutting regulatory oversight of the U.S. wireless and broadband markets would result in near-Utopian outcomes across innovation and competition. Instead, the reduction in both competition and real oversight resulted in regional telecom [...]

A few years back, Karl Bode wrote about YouTube TV's 2020 price hike, going from $50/month for its base package, to $65/month. The framing of that post was spot on: Google was behaving much like that of a cable company, with the exact customer-angering actions being taken that drove so many people into YouTube TV's [...]

If you've ever wondered how the right-wing media ecosystem operates and why it's effective, try viewing it as a form of improvisational theater or improv. In the wake of the 2024 U.S. elections, everyday people and political pundits alike have been trying to make sense of the results and the related observation that many Americans [...]

Quite famously, snarkier-than-thou music review site Pitchfork posted a brief, incisive review of Australian band Jet's second album in 2006. The review contained nothing more than the 0.0 score and this embedded video: This, my friends, epitomizes the legal travails of Mr. Jason Fyk, a self-made millionaire" who leveraged Facebook's reach to turn his websites [...]

Earlier, Karl wrote about a bill from Senator Ron Wyden which would put pressure on big telcos to actually protect our privacy (following the news of Chinese hackers abusing backdoor access to our wiretapping systems to spy on tons of people). Sadly, despite the obvious need in the wake of this massive privacy breach, that [...]

Demand for Python is booming in the job market and it is a skill that can help you enter some of the most exciting industries, including data science, web applications, home automation, and many more. The 2024 Python for Software Engineering Bootcamp Bundle has 7 courses to take you from beginner to expert in no [...]

This week, the United Nations General Assembly is set to adopt the UN Cybercrime Convention, almost exactly five years after it approved a resolution to launch its negotiation. The Convention text has been widely panned by digital security experts, human rights organizations, industry, even the UN's own human rights office, among many others. Yet still [...]

We've noted for decades that U.S. telecom security and privacy standards aren't great. T-Mobile has been hacked so many times in the last five years it's easy to lose count. AT&T not long ago had a breach impacting the data of 73 million users it initially tried to pretend hadn't happened. Telecoms have lobbied relentlessly [...]

It's a big week for anonymous commenters. We start out with our first place winner on the insightful side, an anonymous reply to an irrelevant comment: Speaking of bad actors, will you stop acting like your pet issue justifies spamming unrelated comments? In second place, it's an anonymous comment about those who pledge to protect [...]

If you've been following the Kickstarter campaign for our new card game, One Billion Users, then you know we're not quite on track on to hit our goal - but we haven't given up! We've now passed the halfway mark in funds raised, and we're doing everything we can to make a final push before [...]

Those of you who still believe the nation's courts are capable of handling the constitutionally-guaranteed redress of grievances, prepare to be disabused of those notions. While the courts may occasionally care about rights, they're far more willing to protect the government status quo than allow mere citizens to upset the status quo apple cart. We've [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice - or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week's round-up of the latest news in online [...]

The Pasco County Sheriff's Office in Florida thinks (or, at least, thought) it could make a dent in crime by engaging in broken windows policing" by way of an Excel spreadsheet. I wish I was making this up but I'm absolutely not. The end result of this ad hoc predictive policing" program was... well... predictable. [...]

There are lots of ways for an individual person or entity to err when it comes to intellectual property enforcement such that it negatively impacts a website or business. But if you want to get really frustrated, what you need is several entities demonstrating complete incompetence in how they do business and making a victim [...]

Whether you're a science enthusiast, history buff, or technology geek, Curiosity Stream has something for everyone. Unleash the power of on-demand streaming that allows you to choose what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, and where you want to watch it. From the comfort of your living room to the remote [...]

There are few Senators quite as pathetic as Richard Blumenthal. He has a long history of an ignorant vendetta against tech companies (even pre-dating his time in the Senate), and he never ever bothers to actually understand the underlying policy issues or the implications of the legislation he passes. In his latest cynical ploy, Blumenthal [...]

Four years years ago AT&T, a company that, for years, cheapened out on upgrading its broadband lines to fiber,effectively stopped selling DSL. While that's understandable given the limitations of the dated copper-based tech, the problem is that thanks to concentrated telecom monopolization, many of these customers were left without any replacement options due to a [...]

Confidential informants (CI) are considered useful to law enforcement investigations, so society is just expected to bear the burden of criminal acts committed by informants in (dubious) furtherance of public safety goals. CI's are just criminals with more immunity than most - even when they happen to be some of the worst criminals imaginable. In [...]

It's been thebiggest yearfor elections in human history: 2024 is a super-cycle" year in which 3.7 billion eligible voters in 72 countries had the chance to go the polls. These are also thefirst AI elections, where many feared that deepfakes and artificial intelligence-generated misinformation would overwhelm the democratic processes. As 2024 draws to a close, [...]

You ain't seen nothing yet regarding how some MAGA politicians are going to harass and attack journalists. This week, it was revealed that Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (who already has a history of trying to punish speech he dislikes) had issued a subpoena to 404 Media, an independent, journalist-owned-and-run news site that we link [...]

ShotSpotter spent a few years feeling really sure its tech was capable of detecting gunshots. It felt so confident it didn't mind (allegedly) fudging detection data to help cops secure criminal charges against people who might not have been actual criminals. Then it all started falling apart. Lots of cop shops and the cities that [...]

Project Management is global. This is one of those professions similar to being an accountant, where your skills and talents can be applied to any industry in any place. The 10-course Complete PMP Training Bundle provides a comprehensive training path for all things project management, including the most update to date courses including PMP 6th [...]

Here on Techdirt, we write a lot about content moderation and even did a whole big series of content moderation case studies. However, here's an interesting one that involves Techdirt itself from a couple weeks ago. It's also a perfect example of Masnick's Impossibility Theorem in action and a reminder of how the never-ending flood [...]

As we recently noted, the Biden FCC has announced that it is finally taking a look at" broadband usage caps. We've noted for decades how such limits are completely artificial, technically unnecessary constructs that exist specifically soyour local telecom monopoly can rip you off. They don't manage congestion" or anything else; they exist exclusively to [...]

Here we go again. Another cop given a free pass on brutality because established law had yet to inform Deputy Vincent Castoro that body-slamming a 13-year-old weighing less than 120 lbs. to the ground might violate the minor's right to be free of immediate and permanent injuries simply because he didn't immediately comply with an [...]

Of all the kinds of stupid that exist out there, certainly it's the predictable stupid that is the most frustrating. And of all the kinds of predictable stupid that exist, one of the most predictable forms of stupid is how video games are linked to mass shootings and murders on a clockwork-like cadence. As I've [...]

NSO Group may be on the ropes but its flagship product continues to satisfy its customers - customers that include some of the worst human rights abusers in the world. Sure, recent developments have managed to land the company on US blacklists and forced the Israeli government to limit who the home team can sell [...]

As part of our final push to get our Kickstarter campaign for our new card game over the line, we've added a new limited tier for backers who want to show their support while getting more involved. We're inviting 5 superbackers to work with us to co-design new cards that will be included in the [...]

On Tuesday, Trump announced Andrew Ferguson as the next chair of the Federal Trade Commission, elevating him from his current commissioner role. Ferguson's plans for the agency, laid out in a leaked one-page memo, make clear that he intends to use antitrust and consumer protection authority not to protect competition and consumers, but to punish [...]

Way back during the battle during net neutrality, you might recall all the sleazy shit telecom giants did to tip the scales in their favor. Like making up dead and fake people to stuff regulatory websites with phony support for telecom giants. Or creating fake consumer groups to oppose net neutrality. Or hiring dodgy companies [...]

It was almost exactly a year ago that we discussed a trademark dispute in the UK between Oatly, the sometimes IP bully and maker of oat-based milk products, and Dairy UK, a British trade association for dairy farmers. At issue was the trademark application of Oatly's for its Post Milk Generation" slogan. In its opposition [...]

The Memphis (TN) police department is the latest law enforcement agency to be the subject of DOJ civil rights investigation. Prompted by the brutal killing of Tyre Nichols by five SCORPION" (Street Crimes Operations to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, and no I am not making that up) unit members in early 2023, the DOJ [...]

While AI" (language learning models) certainly couldhelpjournalism, the fail upward brunchlords in charge of most modern media outlets instead see the technology as a way to cut corners, undermine labor, badly automate low-quality, ultra-low effort, SEO-chasing clickbait, and rush undercooked solutions to nonexistent problems to market under the pretense of progress. For example, The Washington [...]

Thanks to government-mandated backdoors in US telecom/broadband services, the FBI - at least in the form of an official who refused to identify themself - has had to recommend (albeit extremely half-heartedly) that encrypted communications are perhaps the only thing keeping phone owners from being actively surveilled by Chinese hackers. The news of a massive [...]

Advance your programming skills and start building responsive apps with the 2024 MERN Full Stack Developer Bundle. The 10 courses cover HTML, Bootstrap, CSS, React, MongoDB, Express, NodeJS, and more. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps [...]

Over at MSNBC, I have a new piece debunking the false claims from many that Donald Trump's pick to run the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya, is somehow taking over the government agency that he believes coordinated censorship" of his views on social media. Bhattacharya and his supporters have been making that claim for [...]

Academics have spent generations warning about what happens when you let journalism and media consolidate in the hands of rich people and corporations. As this season's election coverage demonstrated, the end result is usually a lazy simulacrum of journalism that looks like real reporting, but tends to reflect ownership interests and (usually) lacks the courage [...]

The war on stream-ripping sites waged by the music industry continues. And, as with any war, there is collateral damage. Now, as we've said for some time, this is an entirely unnecessary war to begin with. There are a host of absolutely legitimate uses for sites like this, none of which would be infringing upon [...]