Techdirt

I'm not going to go through all the background on this story, because we just did that yesterday. If you missed that post, it will help to go read it before reading this one. I concluded that post by noting that, thanks to district court Judge Terry Doughty petulantly claiming he can't stay an obviously [...]

PHP is an invaluable tool to help web developers build powerful websites. The beginner-to-advanced Ultimate PHP Training Bundle will teach you all things PHP so you'll be able to build seamless, interactive sites before you know it. It's on sale for $20. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion [...]

It's a problem that likely dates back to the department's inception, but in 2015, the New York City Inspector General released a report that explained why residents were forced to shell out millions every year to foot the bill for police misconduct: Historically, NYPD has frequently failed to discipline officers who use force without justification. [...]

Back in April the Biden FCConce again voted along party linesto restore net neutrality rules stripped away by the Trump FCC in a flurry of sleazy industry behavior that included using fake and dead peopleto create the illusion of public support. The Trump FCC was also caughtmaking up a DDOS attackto explain away public outrage [...]

Most people would respond to a possible drug overdose by seeking immediate medical attention and following up with medical professionals to see how the victim is faring. I mean, that's what the EMTs who responded to a drug overdose call did. They took Corban Elmore's son to the emergency room and, from there, medical professionals [...]

On any given Sunday there's simply no shortage of U.S. antitrust violations, where some giant predatory corporation leverages its consolidated power to derail price competition and harm consumers. But because U.S. antitrust enforcement is a feckless and inconsistent mess, in most instances (see: telecom), a company can engage in these kinds of practices for decades [...]

There's a stunning degree of fear mongering and lack of humility about what California AI bill SB 942 can or can't do. Honest conversation about this bill's limitations are essential to ensuring we don't pass this ineffective law. But its proponents have obstructed reasoned policy development by injecting panic into that conversation and pretending it [...]

RFK Jr. seems to believe that being a Kennedy and spouting anti-vax nonsense qualifies him to be President. Now, he's taking his delusions to a whole new level by arguing that the Supreme Court's Murthy decision means the government can't even talk to social media companies anymore. Buckle up, folks, this is going to be [...]

The Complete 2024 Penetration Testing & Ethical Hacking Training Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn to fight back against cyber threats. Courses include hands-on lessons on penetration testing for AWS, IoT, and web apps, along with hacking basics and a few certificate exam prep courses. It's on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt [...]

An ex-big city cop who blew into a small town under suspicious circumstances to become police chief. A business owner seeking a liquor license who spent a lot of time driving around with a suspended license due to DUI violations. A small town paper that dug into all of these stories and more to the [...]

We've illustrated repeatedly how as streaming subscriber growth has slowed, streaming giants have had to pivot to some bad industry habits to ensure Wall Street gets those sweet improved quarterly returns. That's included everything from utterly pointless layoff-creating mergers and price hikes, to annoying new restrictions and a steady increase in ads (that you have [...]

As all DOJ investigations of law enforcement agencies are, the one targeting the Phoenix, Arizona Police Department was scathing in its assessment of the department's officers and tactics. It led off with this, before providing graphic details covering everything from routine abuse of force to unchecked biased policing that led the DOJ to conclude PhxPD [...]

Last month we noted how the brunchlords in charge of Paramount (CBS) decided to eliminate decades of MTV News journalism history as part of their ongoing cost saving" efforts. It was just the latest casualty in an ever-consolidating and very broken U.S. media business routinely run by some of the least competent people imaginable. We've [...]

It was over six years ago when we last had Renee DiResta on the podcast for a detailed discussion about misinformation and disinformation on social media. Since then, she's not only led extensive research on the subject, she's also become a central figure in the fever-dream conspiracy theories of online disinformation peddlers. Her new book [...]

Remember that SLAPP suit, financed by Elon Musk, that actor Gina Carano filed against Disney after they chose not to renew her contract for the Mandalorian? That's the one where Carano seems to be insisting that failing to renew her contract after she made some controversial political comments is somehow a violation of her First [...]

Microsoft Windows 11 Pro is designed with the modern professional in mind. Whether you are a developer who needs a secure platform, an artist seeking a seamless experience, or an entrepreneur needing to stay connected effortlessly, Windows 11 Pro is your solution. This version is designed for PCs that need a new license for Windows [...]

Daniel Horwitz - who has fought plenty of free speech battles for Tennesseans - has secured an extremely quick victory for his client, Lakeland resident Julie Pereira. According to the complaint [PDF], which was filed June 6 of this year, the city of Lakeland took offense to a sign Pereira had placed in her yard. [...]

The Supreme Court issued a recent ruling that could take an absolute wrecking ball to everything from consumer protection and environmental reform to public safety. It was a ruling that dismantled decades of precedent and puts nearly all regulatory enforcement efforts at risk, yet it somehow barely warranted much coverage by a largely disinterested, billionaire-owned [...]

I don't often praise law enforcement agencies, generally because they rarely do anything praise-worthy. And the Chicago PD is so fraught with problems and problematic tactics that it's difficult to give it credit even when credit is due. But here we are, doing the difficult thing. After years of fighting to keep this information secret [...]

Here we go again. The Streisand Effect has become so noticeably prevalent these days that I quite often hear the term being discussed in all manner of media. Hell, I came across it on a local Chicago sports radio broadcast a couple of weeks back. If the term and its implications aren't being taught in [...]

Have we considered giving Supreme Court justices their own blogs in which they can vent their ill-informed brain farts, rather than leaving them to use official Supreme Court order lists as a form of a blog? Justice Clarence Thomas has been the absolute worst on this front, using various denials of certiorari on other topics [...]

The US Postal Service has been retaining metadata on snail mail for years. Back before mass scanning of every piece of mail was a reality, law enforcement requests had to be a bit more targeted. Investigators had to put in requests that required the postal service to log information about any mail sent to/from certain [...]

The Ultimate Adobe CC Training Bundle has 12 courses to help you get the most out of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. Courses cover Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, After Effects, 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 [...]

Just when you thought the internet was safe from the meddling minds of the Supreme Court, the Justices have decided to take another crack at reviewing whether or not a new set of state regulations of the internet violates the First Amendment. And this time, it has a but won't you think of the children [...]

Things aren't too exciting if you're a telecom executive right now. All the hype in tech is singularly fixated on the more headline catching, stock fluffing, and usually very broken aspects of AI." 5G, hyped as a transformative world changing tech by overly eager telecom marketing departments, wound up being a consumer dud that users [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment on our post about clarifying robots.txt in the age of AI crawlers: As I understand it, the crux of the debate is that AI tools are not making bulk requests to servers. They're making very limited requests to specific pages based [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the Wall Street Journal came out with an op-ed in defense of Section 230, while we wrote about implementation questions around the few good parts of the EU Copyright Directive. A California college decided to start targeting its own student newspaper with public records requests, and a Massachusetts [...]

It's no secret that Ukraine is having a hard time in its fight against Russia at the moment. That's in part because Ukraine is being limited in how deep into Russia it can attack using Western-supplied weapons. But mostly it is a matter of numbers: Russia has more men that it is willing to sacrifice [...]

Showing yet again that you can lead a cop to a court order but you can't make them follow it, Matthew Petti reports for Reason that the Baltimore PD apparently barely paused its scraping of seized cell phones following a court order telling it to get its warrant particularity house in order. Less than a [...]

Perplexity is an up-and-coming AI company that has broad ambition to compete with Google in the search market by providing answers to user queries with AI as its core technology. They've been in the news because their news feature repurposed content published on the Forbes website in an investigative article, which severely annoyed the Forbes [...]

The House Oversight Committee is investigating NewsGuard, a private company, for supposed censorship" for the crime of... offering its own opinions on the quality of news sites. The old marketplace of ideas seems to keep getting rejected whenever Republicans find that their ideas aren't selling quite as well as they'd hoped. Up is down, left [...]

All facial recognition tech is flawed. Some offerings may be less flawed than others, but the underlying problems (mainly, the inability to be as accurate when identifying minorities and women) remain. In Detroit, the problems became problematic fairly quickly and dramatically. Hundreds of US law enforcement agencies utilize facial recognition tech, but the Detroit PD [...]

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 [...]

I guess I should start this out by noting that I like Tim Wu quite a bit, and always felt like I learned something in the past when I spoke with him. He was even one of the people who reviewed and provided feedback on my big protocols, not platforms" article months before it was [...]

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 [...]

When it comes to policy decisions generally, and with technology platforms specifically, all we can really ask is that a policy be coherently stated and implemented in a uniform fashion. You may dislike said policy, but at a minimum it should be legible and enforced sensibly. Take, for instance, Apple's updated policy on allowing emulation [...]

There is still hope that California's perilous, protectionist legislation for news could be reformed, but not without effort. I just returned from Sacramento, where I was invited to testify (video below) in opposition to an Assembly bill by Buffy Wicks, which I analyzed in depth inthis paperand latercriticizedas amended. It has passed the Assembly and [...]

The Supreme Court's opinions in the NetChoice/CCIA cases have been leading to some bizarre interpretations, as many people try to read into it things they wanted to see but just aren't there. Cathy already covered some of the oddities of Justice Alito's concurrence (which Justices Thomas and Gorsuch signed onto), but I wanted to dig [...]

Things are not looking great for SoundThinking, which hasn't been able to outrun the reputation it earned when it was still known as ShotSpotter. More and more major cities are choosing to ditch the technology because it simply does not appear to be worth paying for. What lots of cities are finding out is that [...]

Go from absolute zero to GIMP pro with this comprehensive 9 course bundle. Jump into the Complete Master GIMP Design Bundle, and you'll go all the way from installing the GIMP software and configuring it to run on Windows, to producing banners, book covers and even memes that you'll display using Facebook and other social [...]

BREAKING NEWS: Florida's Attorney General says the Supreme Court unanimously sided with her in a case where they unanimously ruled against her arguments. Perhaps there's a reason that Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is so vigorously defending a Florida law that would block social media companies from diminishing the reach of disinformation: she loves spreading [...]

For decades there has been endless policy wrangling over whether unlocking your phone" (removing restrictions allowing you to take the device with you to another carrier) should be allowed. Giant carriers have generally supported onerous phone locks because it hampers competition by making it harder to switch providers. Consumer rights groups and the public broadly [...]

You know, rather than paying out thousands or millions in lawsuits for retaliatory arrests, maybe states should just spend more money on skin thickening for their police officers. It's not like case law isn't pretty much completely established at this point. Flipping the bird to a cop is protected speech. So is complaining, however profanely, [...]

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.

I was worried after oral argument in the NetChoice cases that we were going to get a mess of a decision. Maybe it would give us the right result (the Florida and Texas laws remaining canceled), but with dicta that pulled its punches and gave future would-be censors some cover for their continued attacks on [...]

We keep pointing out that, contrary to the uninformed opinion of lawmakers across both major parties, laws that require age verification are clearly unconstitutional*. * Offer not valid in the 5th Circuit. Such laws have been tossed out everywhere as unconstitutional, except in Texas (and even then, the district court got it right, and only [...]

If you had an extra $100k on hand and happened to be on eBay at the right time, you could have become the proud(?) owner of tech that was once so secretive and controversial, both the manufacturer and the FBI would make you sign restrictive non-disclosure agreements just to purchase one. A lot has changed [...]

StackSkills is the premier online learning platform for mastering today's most in-demand skills. Now, with this exclusive limited-time offer, you'll gain access to 1000+ StackSkills courses for life! Whether you're looking to earn a promotion, make a career change, or pick up a side hustle to make some extra cash, StackSkills delivers engaging online courses [...]

Today, the Supreme Court made it pretty clear that websites have First Amendment rights to do content moderation as they see fit, but decided to send the cases challenging laws in Florida and Texas back to the lower courts to be litigated properly, effectively criticizing the litigation posture of the trade groups, NetChoice and CCIA, [...]

You might recall that way back" in 2007 Comcast here in the U.S. was caught throttling BitTorrent uploads and subsequently lying about it. Since BitTorrent was popular, hoovering up network resources, and posed a threat to traditional cable TV, Comcast execs thought their best approach would be to make an entire file transfer system less [...]