Techdirt

For decades, entrenched U.S. regional monopolies have refused to deliver affordable, reliable, fast broadband in any sort of uniform way. That’s just kind of how monopolies work. In response, roughly a thousand towns and cities have decided to build their own broadband networks instead, either themselves, via a local cooperative, through a city-owned utility, or […]

Cops kill pets. This is an inarguable fact. None other than the US Department of Justice has declared the (unofficial) War on Dogs to be a law enforcement epidemic. If a cop encounters a family dog while doing cop stuff, chances are the dog is going to die. Sure, some people may claim cops encounter […]

It amazes me that the narrative is still out there about how China is an “intellectual property thief” and that the US and other western nations need to “convince China to respect intellectual property.” We heard that for decades, but for over a decade now, we’ve been pointing out that China responded to all that […]

The problem with gathering tons of sensitive data and storing it indefinitely is sooner or later someone with even worse intentions is going to come looking for it. And China’s massive surveillance apparatus collects oh so much data. It’s far too tempting to resist. Someone with the guts and audacity to go after one of […]

We have done many, many posts explaining how, unfortunately, it seems the idea of a person owning the things they’ve bought has become rather passe. While in the age of antiquity, which existed entire tens of years ago, you used to be able to own things, these days you merely license them under Ts and […]

The internet is about speech. That’s basically all the internet is. It’s a system for communicating, and that communication is speech. What’s becoming increasingly frustrating to me is how in all of these attempts to regulate the internet around the globe, policymakers (and many others) seem to ignore that, and act as if they can […]

JBL Live Free NC+ TWS earbuds deliver JBL Signature Sound with supreme comfort. Stay in the groove all day long without noise or any distractions thanks to Active Noise Cancelling, while TalkThru and Ambient Aware keep you in touch with your friends and surroundings. Up to 21 hours of battery life and in-case wireless charging […]

Cops have been running to Google for years, warrants and subpoenas in hand, asking the data behemoth to give them info they can sift through to find criminal suspects. Location data is a big one. Comparable to cell phone tower dumps, geofence warrants allow law enforcement to obtain a certain amount of data on every […]

T-Mobile hasn’t been what you’d call competent when it comes to protecting its customers’ data. The company has been hacked numerous different times over the last few years, with hackers going so far as to ridicule the company’s lousy security practices. A responsible company might slow down on data collection until it was certain it […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about how Murdoch-pushed social media news taxes in some countries have made Facebook lose interest in news: Appeasement doesn’t work? What a surprise Give an inch and they demanded a mile, who could have seen that coming from […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the NSA was continuing to dodge questions about “incidental collection” while trying to get one of its surveillance programs back, and Twitter got to move forward in its First Amendment lawsuit over NSL reporting limitations. The House Appropriation Committee demolished Hollywood’s arguments for moving the Copyright Office out […]

In news that is not surprising at all, and seems to be playing out just as people predicted a month ago, Elon Musk has officially claimed that Twitter is in breach of its merger agreement and says he’s pulling out of the deal. The actual details, of course, are not that simple. There is no […]

We’re talking a lot these days about competition and antitrust, and the narrative over the past few years is that four companies — Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google — have basically sewn up the entire internet market, and no new entrants can ever succeed. Of course, we keep seeing that argument challenged by reality. First […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently submitted testimony [PDF] to the House Subcommittee on [takes deep breath] Investigations and Oversight and Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Candace Wright, the GAO’s Director of Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics explained the findings of previous GAO reports on facial recognition use by federal agencies. Two of those […]

Former Buzzfeed and New York Times reporter Ben Smith is poised to launch a new media company named Semafor on the back of $25 million in donations. To grab some attention for the venture’s looming launch, Semafor recently partnered with the Knight Foundation to launch the company’s first event: The Future of News: Trust and […]

Over the last year and a half, we’ve had plenty of stories about how various state legislators are shoving each other aside to pass laws to try to regulate speech online. Of course, that’s generally not how they put it. They claim that they’re “regulating social media,” and making lots of (highly questionable) assumptions insisting […]

If you’re looking to get a job in IT or advance your career in the field, the 2022 CompTIA, AWS, And Cisco Certification Prep Bundle is an easy way to prepare for certifications that’ll help you stand out from the crowd. The courses included in this bundle cover a range of topics from cloud computing […]

If you like your dystopia, you can keep your dystopia. That’s where we are right now: dealing with a gunshot AI company that felt compelled to sue journalists for (accurately) reporting on things the company has done as well as offering their opinions on the company’s actions. The company is ShotSpotter. Utilizing microphones and AI […]

Most of the politicians you currently see in the headlines having an absolute embolism over TikTok privacy concerns, don’t seem to appreciate (or don’t want you to understand) how they helped create the problem they’re pretending to be so upset about. The FCC’s Brendan Carr, for example, has been enjoying massive press coverage for weeks […]

Bucking a trend set by two separate Appeals Courts (Ninth and Tenth), a federal court in Texas has said it is actually a violation of rights when cops destroy an innocent person’s home to effect an arrest. What’s more, a jury has backed up that decision with actual compensation. (h/t The Honest Courtesan) Today, a […]

Ten years ago, Techdirt was one of the few sites to be following closely some obscure but important machinations at the UN’s International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to create a top-down regulatory scheme for the Internet. The fact that the two main proponents of this move were Russia and China gives an idea of the underlying […]

It’s no secret to long term Techdirt readers that Australia truly is the upside down when it comes to internet laws and policy. We’ve discussed in the past things like Australia’s news link tax (they hate when you call it a tax, and insist it’s just a “bargaining code,” but the bargaining is to force […]

Americans received 4.4 billion robocalls in June. It never quite stops being weird how we’ve had to effectively stop using a core voice communications platform because it’s been hijacked by scammers and debt collectors. As we’ve noted numerous times, there are several reasons why our nationwide robocall hell never quite seems to end despite new […]

For many years we’ve written stories regarding various lawsuits over scraping the web. Without the ability to scrape the web, we’d have no search engines, no Internet Archive, and lots of other stuff wouldn’t work right either. However, more importantly, the ability to scrape the web should result in a better overall internet, potentially reversing […]

The Ultimate Excel VBA Bundle and Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2021 for Windows will take you from Excel beginner to expert in no time. Over 13 courses, you’ll learn how to use Excel VBA to do a variety of tasks: how to create your first macro from scratch, how to control mouse and keyboard commands, […]

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) — Canada’s federal Dudley Do-Whatevers — is again belatedly admitting it has access to powerful surveillance tech its supposed oversight seems unaware the RCMP possessed. This is par for the RCMP course. The agency tends to admit it has surveillance tech only after extended deployment periods. And, like its […]

Last week FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr made headlines by sending a letter to Apple and Google demanding they ban TikTok. Journalists couldn’t be bothered to mention the FCC has no authority over app stores or social media, the letter had no legal backing, or that Carr (a captured regulator largely loyal to AT&T) has no […]

Nearly two years ago, we discussed a fascinating project spearheaded by one dedicated person, going by the moniker Peebs, to digitize every video game manual’s English version for the Super Nintendo system. For those of you not of a certain age, video games used to come in the form of cartridges that you would load […]

Once you’re in jail, you’re just meat the government can abuse with near impunity. You belong to the state now and whatever happens to you is well-deserved — a sentiment not only felt by jailers but by an unfortunately large percentage of the US population. You can be pressed into service, providing nearly free labor […]

Following through on a request by the Biden administration to defend right to repair, the FTC has demanded that Harley Davidson and Westinghouse stop voiding customer warranties over repairs. In an announcement, the FTC noted that both companies used fine print to void a customer’s warranty if they used independent dealers for parts and repairs: […]

This should surprise no one, but Joshua Benton, over at Nieman Lab, has a really fantastically well-reported article about how Facebook basically wants out of the news business entirely. It goes through multiple reasons why this is the case, but a big one is that Rupert Murdoch’s decade-long demands that Facebook and Google simply fork […]

Most of the time, China’s crushing, dystopian, inescapable surveillance/censorship apparatus is terrifying and deeply disturbing. On rare occasions, it’s merely amusing. This is one of those times and South China Morning Post has the details. (h/t The Honest Courtesan) A device that can detect when a man is watching pornography by “reading his mind” has […]

Latitude laptops enable all-day productivity, with the most secure and manageable features, all in a beautiful design you will be proud to carry. The 14″ full HD display is anti-glare and features a narrow border. Built with high-end materials like magnesium alloy, the Latitude E7470 combines premium design with best-in-class durability. This refurbished laptop lets […]

It truly is incredible just how much of a moral panic the media and politicians have created around social media. Once again, the actual research is basically inconclusive that social media is bad. If it were truly awful, it should be showing up in the data, but for the most part it’s not. At all. […]

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s dismantling of Roe, U.S. tech companies didn’t much want to talk about their role in securing women’s data. And they didn’t want to talk much about it because they know that the privacy standards and oversight of the entire US snoopvertising economy, from adtech and telecom to app […]

There’s a fascinating article by Rebecca Jennings on Vox which explores the vexed question of plagiarism. Its starting point is a post on TikTok, entitled “How to EASILY Produce Video Ideas for TikTok.” It gives the following advice: Find somebody else’s TikTok that inspires you and then literally copy it. You don’t need to copy it […]

This isn’t the kind of response one expects from a firefighter arriving at the scene of a fire. (via Courthouse News Service) In August 2019 [Brad] Cox and other DFD [Dallas Fire Rescue Department] personnel were called to extinguish a grass fire. When Cox and other DFD personnel arrived, [Kyle] Vess, who is mentally ill, […]

An increasingly important theme around here is how various laws to regulate the internet are often in conflict with each other. Privacy law is leading to less competition, for example. And from TorrentFreak, we have another, somewhat amusing example. The incredibly aggressive Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has yet another hare-brained scheme to try to prevent […]

The Supreme Court’s decision to say “fuck it” to reproductive rights has resulted in plenty of firmly protected First Amendment expression. People are angry and have decided to let the Supreme Court, along with the rest of the federal government, know that they aren’t happy. Twitter user mattie daddy did the same thing, only using […]

Now that the Supreme Court has given states the freedom to police women’s bodies, it only makes sense that police are out there literally policing women’s bodies. It’s summer. Temperatures are high pretty much everywhere. And when temps go up, the amount of clothing people are willing to put on goes down. For some reason, […]

The Apple MacBook Air 13.3″ features a 22-nm “Ivy Bridge” 1.8GHz Intel “Core i5” processor, 4GB of onboard 1600 MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM, 128GB storage, and an Intel HD Graphics 4000 graphics processor, making your browsing experience better than ever. No more lagging or freezing. This all is packed in a razor-thin aluminum case with an […]

We’ve talked about the unfortunate bipartisan attacks on free speech, which are best understood as attempts to control the narrative. Republicans have been attacking free speech in multiple ways — from trying to ban books and take away teacher autonomy to trying to compel websites to host content against their will. Democrats, on the flip […]

We’ve spent years laying out mountains of documented evidence on how the U.S. broadband is a heavily monopolized mess largely protected and pampered by captured lawmakers and regulators. The impact of this lack of meaningful competition is everywhere, from historically terrible customer satisfaction rates, to high prices, slow speeds, and spotty coverage. 83 percent of […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MathFox with a comment about the troubles at Truth Social: What ‘Truth Social’ shows is how easy it is easy to create an Internet platform. It also shows how hard it is to make an Internet platform successful. In second place, it’s Thad with […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Zillow got very angry about the McMansion Hell blog and sent a ridiculous legal threat, then followed up with a second equally wrong letter, then finally kinda-sorta backed down a little bit after the EFF got involved. The copyright office was recognizing that the DMCA is a problem […]

Sigh, here we go. Back in 2014, Wreal LLC filed a trademark infringement suit against Amazon. Why? Well, Wreal has a product called FyreTV that it describes as “the Netflix of porn.” Amazon has a streaming service for decidedly non-pornographic content called Fire TV. Wreal came into court armed with a couple of social media […]

Some days, it has got to suck to be a judge. Well, actually a lot of days. Most judicial work is tedious, including contractual disputes or bankruptcy proceedings or maritime law or any dozens of other aspects of litigation that would put most people to sleep. On other days though, it’s a particular kind of […]

As you’ll recall, a year and a half ago, much of the world who didn’t live on the WallStreetBets forum were introduced to the concept of meme stocks. As we discussed at the time, much of the embrace of such stocks by retail investors was really about people who were fed up with feeling like […]

It is utterly and completely irrational for people who defend the vulnerable to call for the destruction of Section 230. Section 230 helps protect vulnerable people by making it possible to speak out against those who would hurt them. Weakening the critically important protection it provides online platforms would only weaken these platforms’ ability to […]

Devin Nunes’ campaign to intimidate and silence his critics with a flood of SLAPP suits has hit another stumbling block. While he and his lawyer, Steven Biss, had mostly avoided filing lawsuits in states with strong anti-SLAPP laws, including his “home” state of California, for some reason in the fall of 2020 he sued Twitter […]