Techdirt

The 2022 School of Graphic Design Bundle has 8 courses to help you start on your path to becoming a digital artist. Courses cover Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Figma, and more. You’ll learn how to edit and enhance your photos and videos, how to create a portfolio, how to build a mobile app without coding, and […]

So there has been lots of talk about Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter. I’ve written multiple things about how little he understands about free speech and how little he understands content moderation. I’ve also written (with giant caveats) about ways in which his takeover of Twitter might improve some things. Throughout this discussion, […]

For more than a decade, cable TV executives brushed aside the idea of cable TV “cord cutting” as either a nonexistent threat or a temporary phenomenon that wound end once Millennials started procreating. Of course, none of that wound up being true, and consumer defections from the bloated, pricey traditional cable TV bundle continue to set records during […]

Field drug tests are awful. They’re insanely unreliable. Sure, sometimes the tests are correct: the suspected drugs are actual drugs. Broken clocks and all that. But they’re so often wrong they should be considered as scientifically sound as hiring a full-time psychic and promoting them to detective. Here’s a short list of things drug field […]

I’ll admit I’ve written some posts of praise here for Sega, usually due to the company’s more lax attitude on fan-made creations alongside the company’s habit of making fun of Nintendo for going the opposite route. But taking a look at the wider number of posts we’ve done involving Sega, the company is by and […]

More case law on compelled passcode production and the Fifth Amendment has been generated by a New Jersey appeals court. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do anything to strengthen Fifth Amendment protections against compelled production. And that’s largely because this court can’t. The state’s Supreme Court handed down a ruling in August 2020 that limited the “foregone […]

Update: After this post went up, Tech Review appears to have done a major edit to that article, and added a correction about the completely false claim regarding Section 230 protecting CSAM. The article still has problems, but is no longer quite as egregiously wrong. The post below is about the original article. MIT’s Tech […]

Earlier this year, we covered what appears to be the first of several lawsuits filed on behalf of parents by the Social Media Victims Law Center. In that lawsuit, the mother of an eleven-year-old who committed suicide sued Meta and Snap, claiming SnapChat’s algorithmically enabled feedback loops drove her daughter to her death. The suit […]

The Complete 2022 Microsoft Office Master Class Bundle has 14 courses to help you learn all you need to know about MS Office products to help boost your productivity. Courses cover SharePoint, Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, Teams, and more. The bundle is on sale for $75. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. […]

Play the game and test your skills » Can you survive the Startup Trail? Today we’re launching a browser-playable startup policy simulator game called Startup Trail, developed in partnership with Engine. Here’s your chance to learn about all the challenges of building a successful tech startup in the face of all sorts of obstacles. Over […]

If you listened to Verizon fifth-generation wireless (5G) marketing at any time during the last three years, it went something like this: fifth generation (5G) wireless was going to absolutely transform the world by building the smart cities of tomorrow, revolutionizing medicine, and driving an ocean of innovation. In reality, US 5G has largely landed with […]

When it comes to fan-created video games utilizing established IP, the vast majority of instances tend to result in a narrow set of responses from the original creators or publishers. The Nintendo route is to go fully nuclear as often and immediately as possible, destroying any and all attempts. Take 2 follows a similar path, […]

The idea that there is a link between the exclusivity period on patents and higher drug prices is about as noncontroversial as a view can be. It is the easy question on an ECON 101 exam on monopolies, supply and demand. Yet, somehow, this has come under attack thanks to big PhRMA and their minions. […]

An in-depth report on Israeli malware manufacturer NSO Group has (again) exposed the company’s lies about its activities (and the activities of its customers). Here’s what NSO said to Calcalist in July of last year as the steady drip of bad news became a cascade. According to [NSO founder and CEO Shalev] Hulio, “the average […]

Hey, finally time for a little bit of good news in the world of free speech: the Kentucky General Assembly recently passed the Kentucky Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. It’s a kind of anti-SLAPP bill that is based on a model bill, the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA), and similar to a bill passed […]

A couple of weeks ago, a police transparency activist caught something on video: a cop trying not to get caught on video. That isn’t the interesting part. Lots of cops hate being recorded, even by their own cameras. This Santa Ana police officer was rolling through a neighborhood — supposedly to investigate a stolen car […]

CramWise has compiled CompTIA certification exam simulators into one comprehensive bundle for your convenience. This bundle includes only exam simulators with Performance-Based Questions (PBQs) and CompTIA labs following the Official CompTIA exam objectives. The bundle includes exam prep for, CompTIA A+ Core 1 (220-1001), CompTIA A+ Core 2 (220-1002), CompTIA Network+ (N10-008), CompTIA Security+ (SY0-601), CompTIA […]

For all the talk of how Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter to make it more supportive of free speech, there remain a ton of questions about what it will actually mean in practice. I’ve explained why his conception of free speech is incredibly naïve and his ideas around content moderation are not just outdated […]

U.S. wireless company T-Mobile hasn’t had what you’d call a stellar track record on privacy or security. Last year, the company was forced to acknowledge that hackers had obtained the personal details (including social security numbers) of more than 53 million T-Mobile customers, the sixth time the company had been meaningfully compromised in as many […]

It really feels like we shouldn’t have to have discussions about how companies should handle information that leaks onto the internet in 2022. Or, to be more precise, we should at least not have to remind them that attempting to re-bottle the leak-genie just isn’t going to work and will almost certainly have the opposite, […]

Feeling the crunch of this economy? Why not leverage government power to create a sustainable revenue stream? That’s the plan in Vietnam, a country not unfamiliar with regular deployments of censorial efforts by the government. The Vietnamese government keeps the internet — and its citizens — on a short leash. Only so much free expression […]

We’ve written numerous posts about the EU Copyright Directive, because it contains two extremely harmful ideas. The first is the “snippet tax“, an attempt by some press publishers to make sites like Google pay for the privilege of displaying and linking to newspaper publishers’ material – an assault on the Web’s underlying hyperlink technology. The second […]

In recent months, a lot of attention has been paid to private companies who assist governments with surveillance. Most of this has been focused on companies like Clearview (a company that scrapes the public web for data to sell to its customers) and NSO Group (an Israeli company that sells powerful cell phone exploits to […]

With it looking almost certain that Elon Musk will own Twitter in the very near future, a lot of people are freaking out, and I did think it was worthwhile to explore ways in which this might actually be good. At this point, I think it’s quite clear that Elon Musk’s comments about Twitter show […]

The 2022 Ultimate Ethical Hacker Training Bundle gives you access to 13 courses focused on bug bounty hunting and penetration testing. You’ll learn about Python, Kali Linux, Burp Suite, Nmap, and more. To keep up with the ever-evolving digital world, all future updates for all courses are included for free. The bundle is on sale […]

For many, many, many years we’ve been talking about the idea of advertising as content and content as advertising on Techdirt. The basic idea is that in today’s world, where there are so many things competing for our attention, rather than trying to force annoying ads on people, advertisers should look to turn their advertising […]

We’ve noted for a long time how data makes it clear that, contrary to claims by telecom monopolies, community broadband networks are hugely beneficial. They generally offer faster speeds at lower prices with better customer service than regional monopolies, and they also tend to push said monopolies to try a little harder to compete on […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Naughty Autie with a comment about Peter Brimelow and VDARE, and specifically their past statements about how “America is not a melting pot”: Correct, America is not a ‘melting pot’. However, it has been multicultural ever since white people first invaded and occupied it […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, new CIA director Mike Pompeo went on a hypocritical rant about Wikileaks and free speech, the administration killed Open.Gov, and the DOJ boss was railing against encryption. Tech companies were fighting against Trump’s travel bans in two different courts, and Roku was getting into the lobbying world to […]

A case involving a DUI stop that somehow morphed into the search of a passenger has earned a couple of cops a rebuke from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and a couple of handy reminders in a precedential decision that will make it that much tougher for law enforcement officers in this circuit to […]

Well, this one is moving fast. It was only a few days ago that we talked about a lawsuit filed by Sycamore Brewing against Stone Brewing for what sure looked like a pretty blatant ripoff of the former’s trademarked slogan, “Keep It Juicy”. What made this story notable was that Stone Brewing is just coming […]

Law enforcement officers are more used to violating rights than having theirs violated, so this case — brought to us by Courthouse News Service — is something of an anomaly. But it is a good discussion of some issues that don’t receive a lot of attention. Like, how is “reasonable” defined in terms of searches […]

We had mentioned just how pathetically ridiculous it was that the Florida legislature was considering stripping the already unconstitutional Disney theme park exemption fully from the unconstitutional social media bill that was passed, with the help of Disney, just last year. And on Thursday, as expected, the Republicans in Florida’s legislature went ahead and approved […]

On Thursday, former President Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford University talking about “Challenges to Democracy in the Digital Information Realm.” It’s worth watching, even if I have some issues with it. My very short summary is that he’s much more willing than most of the pundit class to grapple with the nuances and […]

The 2022 Complete Raspberry Pi and Arduino Developer Bundle has 9 courses to teach you everything you need to know to start creating your own projects. Courses cover Linux, C++, Python 3, ROS, and more. You’ll learn through a combination of lectures and hands-on projects. The bundle is on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store […]

There has been a push over the last few months by some pro-patent academics and (of course) the pharmaceutical industry to insist that high drug prices and high healthcare costs have nothing whatsoever to do with our broken patent system that grants drug and device makers a full on monopoly. That claim doesn’t just defy […]

We’ve noted several times how the Trump FCC spent four years being little more than a giant rubber stamp for the nation’s biggest 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. The Trump GOP and Congress killed efforts […]

In February, cash transport business Empyreal Logistics sued the DOJ and a California sheriff for the lifting of nearly $1.2 million in cash from its drivers during two traffic stops. Empyreal, which notes that it follows all federal guidance for the transport of cash generated by legal marijuana sales, was hit twice in California, resulting […]

Angry Joe, real name Jose Antonio Vargas, has appeared on our pages several times in the past. In addition to being a famed YouTube creator with a huge following, Angry Joe also regularly rages against the DMCA machine. Whether he’s criticizing Twitch’s takedown policies, swearing off Nintendo for being bullies, or battling CBS over television […]

We’ve written a bunch about Carl Malamud, who has devoted so much of his time and energy towards freeing the law. While that may sound ridiculous that the law needs to be “freed,” Malamud noticed, before most others, different forces that were looking to lock up (and often from) the actual text of the laws. […]

In most people’s heads, electric vehicles are going to very quickly supplant gas-powered vehicles in the next few years, resulting in massive disruption and a massive boost to climate change mitigation. But there’s trouble in paradise: experts continue to warn that we lack the elements and supply chain necessary to ramp up production of electric […]

For years now we’ve been following cases related to scraping data off of websites and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). The CFAA is an extremely poorly drafted law, that has been stretched by both law enforcement and civil plaintiffs alike to argue that all sorts of things are “unauthorized access” and therefore hacking. […]

The 2022 Ultimate Big Data Bundle has 10 courses to help you learn about software development and data visualization. You’ll learn about Python, Pandas, Numpy, Raspberry Pi, and more. It’s on sale for $25. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support […]

Back in 2017, the Indian government — having collected at least some biometric records from most of its 1.2 billion citizens — did what was previously considered unthinkable: it opened up access to these records to anyone willing to pay for the privilege. What had been collected involuntarily was sold to private companies for use […]

Given the seemingly endless privacy scandals that now engulf the tech, telecom, and adtech sectors on a near-daily basis, many consumers have flocked to virtual private networks (VPN) to protect and encrypt their data. One study found that VPN use quadrupled between 2016 and 2018 as consumers rushed to try and protect themselves in the wake of […]

The opportunistic actions of drug warriors has often been encouraged by courts, which have been willing to grant considerable leeway to law enforcement, even when their articulated suspicion is contradictory or could be read to cover nearly 100% of the American public. (And when that fails, there’s always the ever-popular “odor of marijuana” claim which […]

What is it about producing champagne that turns you into a trademark bullying jackwagon? Readers here will know that the Comite Champagne, or CIVC, is purely a trademark bully for champagne producers out of France, policing the rest of the world to ensure nobody dares call anything not produced by one of its constituents anything […]

Last week, Zoom announced its plans to add emotion detecting tech to its virtual meeting platform, something it apparently felt would facilitate the art of the deal. Here’s Kate Kaye, breaking the news for Protocol. Virtual sales meetings have made it tougher than ever for salespeople to read the room. So, some well funded tech […]

For a while there in 2019, it seemed like a month couldn’t go by without (then) Rep. Devin Nunes suing some critic or another (including, somewhat infamously, a satirical cow). After kicking it off by suing mocking livestock, he quickly moved on to suing news organizations. A big one was suing CNN, a favored punching […]

God help you if you lie to a cop. We’re not even talking about court, where everyone swears to tell the whole truth, etc. before being subjected to testilying by law enforcement officers. We’re talking about the questioning that happens after law enforcement decides someone is a person of interest. Cops are terrible at solving […]