Techdirt

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, […]

We’ve noted repeatedly that despite a steady stream of breathless rhetoric about America’s “dedication to bridging the digital divide,” U.S. government leaders still don’t actually know where broadband is or isn’t available. It only takes a few minutes perusing the FCC’s $350 million broadband map to realize government data completely hallucinates both speeds and competitors, and […]

The Microsoft Azure Fundamentals, Administration, and Security Certification Bundle has 4 courses to help you learn about Azure Cloud Computing Services. You’ll learn how to implement virtual networking, manage access and security, manage storage, and more. It’s on sale for $49. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of […]

So, I already had a quick post on the bizarre decision by the 5th Circuit to reinstate Texas’ social media content moderation law just two days after a bizarrely stupid hearing on it. However, I don’t think most people actually understand just how truly fucked up and obviously unconstitutional the law is. Indeed, there are […]

Florida and Texas both passed blatantly unconstitutional laws limiting the ability of social media websites to moderate. Lawsuits were filed challenging both laws. In both cases, the district courts correctly blocked the laws from going into effect, noting that it was obviously a 1st Amendment violation to tell websites how they could and could not […]

The thing about absolute immunity is it tends to be absolute. Except when it isn’t. This immunity — one that protects prosecutors, judges, and certain politicians — can be stripped, but it happens so rarely it’s little more than a rounding error in the totality of civil rights lawsuits. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, another case involving stripped […]

Malibu Media. Okay, I’ll wait while your eyes finish rolling all the way. Anyway, the makers of porn under the banner of X-Art have also attempted to build a business in the far stickier industry of copyright trolling. Malibu has a long history of using potentially fake witnesses, failing to serve defendants properly, and running […]

The country that promised to allow Hong Kong to choose its own leadership until at least 2047 is putting the finishing touches on its ahead-of-schedule oppression. Pro-democracy protests greeted China’s incursion into the area, alerting the world to the fact the ultra-profitable region was being invaded by forces indistinguishable from those that had turned China […]

Look, we’ve tried to explain over and over again that Elon Musk doesn’t understand free speech or content moderation. He also seems entirely clueless about the incredible lengths that Twitter has gone to in order to actually protect free speech online (including fighting in court over it) and what it has done to deal with […]

Some (mostly) good news has arrived, courtesy of Hayley Tsukayama and Eva Galperin of the EFF. The Maryland legislature has passed a bill that would require law enforcement officers to be trained to better spot stalkerware deployment and give them a better understanding of applicable laws related to electronic surveillance and tracking. The bill, S.B. […]

The Complete Microsoft Windows, 365, and Teams Training Bundle has 7 courses covering all things Microsoft to help you become an MS expert. You’ll learn how to support and configure Windows 10 desktops in an organizational environment, how to plan a mobile application management strategy, how to set up, implement, and manage Office 365 workloads […]

Apparently, I never should have wished on that old monkey’s paw for copyright term reduction. One of the very reasons why Techdirt exists in the first place, and why it was started nearly 25 years ago, was to fight back against over expansive copyright laws, and, as such, we’ve spent many years and many posts […]

As we recently noted, Netflix is preparing for a big crackdown on users who share account passwords with folks outside of their home. When Netflix was a pesky upstart it declared password sharing a good thing and a form of free advertising. Now that it’s facing Wall Street pressure to keep quarterly earnings up in […]

China’s longstanding war on the internet, especially relating to children’s use of it, continues. Readers here will be well aware of the plethora of actions taken by China over the years to limit what its residents can see and do with the internet. From the Great Firewall of China to the country’s more targeted approach […]

Last week the European Union’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), handed down its judgment on whether upload filters should be allowed as part of the EU Copyright Directive. The answer turned out to be a rather unclear “yes, but…“. Martin Husovec, an assistant professor of law at the London […]

From the Internet of very broken things to telecom networks, the state of U.S. privacy and user security is arguably pathetic. It’s 2022 and we still don’t have even a basic privacy law for the Internet era, in large part because over-collection of data is too profitable to a wide swath of industries, which, in […]

We’ve talked a fair bit about Australia’s ridiculous “News Bargaining Code,” which is literally nothing more than a tax on Facebook and Google for sending traffic to media organizations. Again, the law requires Facebook and Google (and just Facebook and Google) to pay media organizations for sending them web traffic. This is, of course, backwards […]

Laura Loomer still thinks she can sue her way back onto Facebook and Twitter. In support of her argument, she brings arguments that failed in the DC Appeals Court as well as a bill for $124k in legal fees for failing to show that having your account reported is some sort of legally actionable conspiracy […]

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It’s becoming quite clear that Elon Musk’s approach to dealing with complex issues is not to actually understand the complex realities behind them, but to simply say what he thinks an audience wants to hear, and perhaps relatedly, to simply accept the last thing that someone presented to him as the official state of things. […]

This week the Biden administration spent some time celebrating its accomplishments on broadband. The nation’s about to invest $42 billion in expanding broadband access (even though we still haven’t mapped broadband accurately). The administration also implemented the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), which doles out a $30 discount on broadband for qualifying low income households. In […]

In news that is altogether so unsurprising it needs a “resigned sob” emoji attached, a Reuters investigation has found that far-right extremists are training cops because of course they are. Given law enforcement’s beginnings as an entity tasked with ensuring plantation owners maintained their access to free labor, it’s little wonder that cop shops have […]

We’re still pretty much in the dark about Elon Musk’s real plans for Twitter. He had talked a little about changing how Twitter’s subscription product worked, and then the only other idea that had leaked was a weird one about trying to charge media organizations to quote or embed tweets. However, late last week, the […]

There are several reasons law enforcement agencies would take care not to associate themselves with Clearview. First off, Clearview is the NSO Group of the facial recognition tech world. Its actions — which begin with scraping data from any publicly accessible website and end with selling its product to whoever expresses an interest — have […]

Last week the recently formed California Privacy Protection Agency held “pre-rulemaking stakeholder sessions” to solicit input on the regulations it intends to promulgate. I provided the following testimony on behalf of the Copia Institute. Thank you for the opportunity to speak at these hearings. My name is Cathy Gellis, and I’m here representing myself and […]

Like other EU Member States, Finland is grappling with the problem of how to implement the EU Copyright Directive’s Article 17 (upload filters) in national legislation. A fascinating post by Samuli Melart in the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice reveals yet another attempt by the copyright industry to make a bad law even worse. […]

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As you probably recall, former President Donald Trump sued various social media companies for kicking him off their platforms, claiming (absolutely ridiculously) that private companies deplatforming the President of the United States violated his 1st Amendment rights, and claiming that Section 230 was unconstitutional. As we noted at the time, this is not how any […]

The Trump FCC spent four years being a giant rubber stamp for giant U.S. telecom monopolies. That included rubber stamping mergers before even reading the details, gutting FCC consumer protection authority, and demolishing decades-old media consolidation rules crafted with broad bipartisan consensus, and stripping away your town and city’s ability to stand up to giant carriers. The Trump GOP […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a response to Josh Hawley’s tweet saying “woke corporations shouldn’t get sweetheart deals”: This statement heavily implies that non-“woke” corporations should get sweetheart deals. Someone would do well to ask him about that. In second place, it’s Jeffrey Nonken with […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the NSA was shutting down its 702 program, but with a whole lot of caveats and some questionable statements, while the public dump of the agency’s hacking toolkit was causing privacy problems. Meanwhile, James Comey was testifying in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee and hinting at expanded […]

Prosecutors have an obligation to turn over evidence — exculpatory or otherwise — to criminal defendants. They often don’t. In rare cases, this refusal to play by the rules results in dismissals or sanctions. But, for the most part, they tend to get away with it, allowing the government to stack the prosecutorial deck in […]

There has been a trend over the past decade or so in which a very specific part of America’s political spectrum appears to be simultaneously advocating for “free speech” in ways that have nothing to do with the American system while also attacking all kinds of other speech and insisting that speech not happen. Hypocrisy […]

Putting cops in schools is a terrible idea. It tends to encourage school administrators to abdicate their disciplinary duties and allow cops to decide which school policy violations should be treated as criminal acts. Turns out it’s also a bad idea to have compliant cops adjacent to schools. A new report from ProPublica, sourced from […]

This one is just absolutely bizarre. The Attorneys General of Missouri and Louisiana are now suing President Joe Biden and a whole bunch of his administration, including press secretary Jen Psaki, Dr. Anthony Fauci, DHS boss Alejandro Mayorkas, and newly appointed Disinfo czar Nina Jankowicz, in a nearly incomprehensible complaint that the Biden administration forced […]

Following the brutal killing of an unarmed black man (George Floyd) by a Minnesota police officer (convicted murderer Derek Chauvin), protests against police violence erupted around the country. Police agencies reacted predictably. Rather than dial back their aggression in response to vocal complaints about their aggression, they gave protesters everything they wanted: more violence. This […]