Techdirt

President Biden has a new Congress, specifically with an already dysfunctional House of Representatives likely to explode at a moment’s notice. But he’s still pushing his own slightly confused tech agenda, which is a mix of accurately diagnosing some problems, misdiagnosing others, and being vastly confused about potential solutions for all of them. It’s unfortunate […]

England has taken a big step toward crushing the digital divide with new rules requiring that all new home builds must include gigabit (1000 Megabits per second, Mbps) broadband. Estimates suggest that around 12 percent of the 171,190 new homes constructed in England last year didn’t have gigabit broadband capabilities upon completion. Amendments to Building Regulations […]

We’ve been talking a lot about video game exclusivity over the past couple of years. The sudden uptick in concern over a longstanding practice that ebbs and flows with time is largely related to industry consolidation of studios coming out of the COVID pandemic. In times of financial stress in an industry, that is often […]

As you’re probably aware, now that it’s January, we’re running our annual public domain game jam, for games based on works from 1927. This is the 5th year we’ve done this, ever since the public domain (finally) returned to the US after decades with no works ever reaching the public domain, due to never-ending copyright […]

U.S. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Even in instances where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly refused to. In some cases, these industry ghost written […]

For at least 3 months in early 2020, France-based EncroChat wasn’t in sole control of its communication services. Its servers had been compromised by European law enforcement — a joint effort involving law enforcement agencies located in France, the UK, and the Netherlands. Authorized by a single court order from a French court, the Joint […]

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Elon Musk insisted that a key reason he took over Twitter was in support of “free speech.” As we noted, it was pretty clear that he never really understood what free speech actually means. Musk likes to say that his focus as the owner of Twitter has been to allow all legal speech, but as […]

Last year BMW took ample heat for its plans to turn heated seats into a costly $18 per month subscription in numerous countries. As we noted at the time, BMW is already including the hardware in new cars and adjusting the sale price accordingly. So it’s effectively charging users a new, recurring fee to enable […]

It’s amazing how some people think trademarks work. In the last week or so, several media outlets briefly went into a frenzy over a trademark application that was filed for Tesla’s yet to be released Cybertruck specifically for vehicle categories other than “on land” vehicles. Notably, Elon Musk made some questionable claims that the Cybertruck, […]

Rap artist Afroman’s biggest hit is “Because I Got High,” a track that details how his best intentions were undone by his weed intake. So, one might reasonably suspect marijuana might be found at his residence. But there’s very little that’s reasonable about what happened to Afroman four months ago. Earlier this year, he became […]

There have long been attacks on the global, open nature of the internet. Traditionally these came from authoritarian regimes looking to wall off portions of the internet and exert greater control of them, but lately we’ve also been seeing growing threats from democratic countries in the form of problematic laws and regulations. Recently, we wrote […]

Shot-spotting tech is notoriously unreliable. The industry leader, ShotSpotter, continues to claim it’s helping solve gun crime even as many law enforcement customers shift from “current” to “former.” In Newark, New Jersey, three-quarters of “gunshots” “detected” by ShotSpotter were false positives. In another city, the failure rate wasn’t quite as spectacular, but it was little […]

Despite having already fired a huge percentage of Twitter’s trust & safety team handling issues around content moderation, including the teams handling child sexual abuse material and election denialism, last week Elon apparently fired another chunk of the team. Just in time for organizers of the insurrection in Brazil to make use of social media […]

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There are plenty of governments operating on platforms of pure evil, but the Saudi government is one the few that continues to be given a pass by other governments who fear alienating a source of oil located in the Mideast. North Korea may be evil but it’s limited by its lack of a functioning economy. […]

Once just the concern of pissed off farmers and nerdy tinkerers, the last two years have seen a groundswell of broader culture awareness about “right to repair,” and the perils of letting companies like Apple, John Deere, Microsoft, or Sony monopolize repair options, making repairing things you own both more difficult and way more expensive. John Deere’s draconian repair […]

Law enforcement agencies have no interest in tracking how often officers kill people. Despite all the talk about police reform, very few states require accurate reporting on deadly force deployments. Even the DOJ doesn’t care. The federal face of law enforcement has been required to compile this data for over two decades. It has yet […]

It’s the rise of the lawbots, something not even foretold by Futurama, which allowed a “simple hyper-chicken from a backwoods asteroid” to perform much of the series’ criminal justice work. AI-in-everything is on the rise. And that includes lowball court cases, as Lauren Leffer reports for Gizmodo. An AI-based legal advisor is set to play […]

However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they’re arguably worse in prisons. For decades, journalists have outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resulting sky high rates (upwards of $14 per minute) for inmate families. Efforts to […]

Trying to legislate sexual identity is a fool’s errand. Plenty of Arizona state fools are backing a bill that attempts to do that, though. When you can’t figure out how to stop people from outward displays of their sexual identity, you start getting unconstitutional in a hurry. This bill — now being booted about by […]

It took a week of nonsense, in which we got to see just how dysfunctional this session of the House of Representatives will be, but late last week, Kevin McCarthy sold just enough of what was remaining of his soul to get the Speaker of the House gavel. And, apparently, part of the many favors […]

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Yeah, this is not great. This is yet more case law basically saying don’t bother suing federal agents because, unless they’ve very specifically done the same thing other federal agents have been held accountable for, they’re just going to walk away from lawsuits. The Supreme Court’s 1971 Bivens decision may have created a cause of […]

Back in 2015, the nation’s top telecom regulator attempted to create some very basic (by international standards) privacy guidelines for telecom providers, demanding they do things like (gasp) be transparent about the consumer data they were collecting and selling, while also requiring that consumers (gasp) opt in to the sale of any particularly sensitive data. […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about the FBI advisor who attacked Signal for its refusal to collect user metadata: ‘How dare you close the curtains, I was looking in those!’ I love how a company that collects as little as possible information on […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018 (yes, 2018 is now five years ago) Comcast rang in the new year with a flurry of price increases while we looked at what the death of net neutrality would bring as California joined the list of states proposing their own net neutrality rules. At the same time, […]

For years, we’ve written about the copyright nonsense around sampling in hip hop music, and how it was treated with very, very different rules than things like cover songs and paying homage to previous artists in other forms of music. As we’ve mentioned for over a decade, filmmaker Kembrew McCleod did a full (fascinating) exploration […]

In April 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a ruling that made things clear to the two states (Oregon and Louisiana) still inexplicably allowing people to be convicted by non-unanimous juries: to continue to do so violated the Sixth Amendment rights of the accused. The only two states affected applied the ruling, […]

For years, I’ve been highlighting the overwhelming evidence that non-compete agreements are horrible for innovation. There are multiple studies on this, which show how much of Silicon Valley’s success can be attributed to an almost accidental interpretation of the California business code that outlawed non-compete agreements, while other studies have strongly suggested that a big […]

Cops like science. Not in the way that say, scientists like science. They just like science-y sounding mumbo jumbo that paves the way for criminal convictions. And, sure, maybe you’re thinking this only applies to backwoods agencies that prefer to use a combination of Aunt Cleo and questionable testimony to lock people up. But it’s […]

Last summer, I mocked the EU a bit for setting up a new office in Silicon Valley, and sending an official here to “liaise with Silicon Valley companies affected by EU tech regulation,” noting how it felt weird to have EU internet police setting up shop in Silicon Valley. Given that, I was a bit […]

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For years, governments around the world have deployed powerful malware to hack the phones of their targets. Most of these deployments went unnoticed, as many governments were less interested in performing oversight than pursuing ends (read: wars on terror, drugs) they felt justified the means. But as people began coming forward with evidence of suspected […]

You might recall how AT&T spent nearly $200 billion on megamergers thinking it was going to dominate the online video advertising space. But after spending a fortune on DirecTV and Time Warner, laying off 50,000 people, and killing off popular properties like Mad Magazine, it quickly became clear that AT&T executives had absolutely no idea what they […]

Back in December we discussed how Nintendo got a video on the DidYouKnowGaming YouTube channel taken down via a DMCA notice. While Nintendo is notorious for being an intellectual property bully and enforcing what it thinks are its rights in as draconian a manner as possible, what stood out about this particular story is that […]

We’ve spent years criticizing many politicians, especially in Congress, for trying to regulate technology that they don’t seem to understand and often falling prey to wild moral panics about the technology. That’s why it’s quite refreshing to see this story that the Washington Post had in the waning days of 2022 about Rep. Don Beyer, […]

One of the common themes here at Techdirt over the last decade is how the very meaning of “ownership” and “property” has changed — often for the worse. In the broadband connected era, firmware updates can often eliminate functionality promised to you at launch, as we saw with the Sony PlayStation 3. And with everything now […]

Recently, Apple announced some quality of life updates for services and devices used by millions. The company opted to give its users more privacy and security by offering them the option to fully encrypt data stored in its cloud service. For years, iCloud accounts have been the endaround for encrypted devices, allowing law enforcement (and […]

Some big news out of the EU this week as the Irish data protection authority has fined Meta over $400 million, claiming it violated the GDPR. The full details of the ruling are not yet out (apparently, the officials are working with Meta over what needs to be redacted — which is not out of […]

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There’s only so much domestic surveillance the government can engage in before it starts running into problems. The Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision strongly suggested gathering data in bulk to track people might run afoul of the Fourth Amendment. Lower courts have delivered a variety of opinions on the subject. Meanwhile, a few privacy-oriented legislators are […]

For much of the last year, European telecom giants have been pushing for a tax on Big Tech company profits. They’ve tried desperately to dress it up as a reasonable adult policy proposal, but it’s effectively just the same thing we saw during the U.S. net neutrality wars: telecom monopolies demanding other people pay them […]

You might think that perusing Techdirt posts on the topic of fan-made video games using the IP of others would yield you only one kind of story in which threats and lawsuits abound. Fortunately, that’s something of a misconception. While there are indeed plenty of stories of that nature, there are also examples of studios […]

The War on Terror will never end. It’s a multi-billion dollar boondoggle that ensures we will always live in fear, even if we realistically have nothing to fear. The war we waged for the hearts and minds of Afghanistan residents lasted long enough that soldiers participating in another US losing effort weren’t even born when […]

Summary: Elon Musk has demonstrated contempt for free speech in general, and journalism in particular, with his behavior at Twitter. He is also demonstrating why it is foolhardy for anyone to rely on centralized platforms to create and distribute vital information. Journalists — among many information providers and users — should move to decentralized systems […]

It’s no secret that Elon Musk is desperately trying to cut costs at Twitter, the company he overpaid for and saddled with approximately an extra billion dollars a year in interest payments by leveraging the buyout. He’s cut staff somewhere around 75% and we still keep hearing rumors of further cuts. He’s turning off data […]

The Microsoft Surface 3 features a quad-core Intel Atom x7-Z8700 processor. The device comes with 2GB of RAM and 64 of storage, which is expandable up to 200GB by adding a microSD card. The display on the device supports up to 4K at 1920×1280 resolution. The device has two USB 3.0 ports and a kickstand […]

Nearly a half-decade ago, the DHS began rolling out biometric scanning at international airports. The early efforts targeted foreign travelers, but it was always clear the DHS (and its underling, the TSA) ultimately desired facial recognition tech to be the status quo in US airports. The slow rollout that began with scanning foreigners’ faces was […]

Back in 2016 we noted how U.S. power utilities like Florida Power & Light created entirely fake consumer groups to try and derail legislation that would have brought more competition to market. Six years later and the company has again found itself in the middle of another scandal, this time for buying favorable news coverage […]