FlashBooks publishes top self-help and business book summaries you can read or listen to in about 20 minutes or less. Formatted for every device: Kindle, iPhone, Android, iPad, iPods, and more. The audiobooks are formatted as downloadable MP3 files so that you can listen to them’ on the go via your favorite mobile device. Get more […]

There’s plenty of human work to be done, but there never seems to be enough humans to do it. When things need to be processed in bulk, we turn it over to hardware and software. It isn’t better. It isn’t smarter. It’s just faster. We can’t ask humans to process massive amounts of data because […]

The Wall Street Journal has offered up a helpful report (outside the paywall, for now) on the giant mess that is U.S. broadband subsidy efforts. Like many previous studies, it points out how we’ve spent just countless billions of dollars on expanding broadband access with decidedly mixed results. Also like many previous mainstream stories of […]

Nintendo’s war on its own fans’ love of Nintendo game music continues. The company has certainly made headlines over the past few years (with a big ramp up recently) by going on DMCA and threat blitzes for YouTube videos and channels that have uploaded what are essentially just the music from various Nintendo games. The […]

Field drug tests are notoriously unreliable. False positives abound. But law enforcement agencies still use them. First and foremost, they use them because no court, policy, or legislation has told them they can’t. But they also use them because they’re cheap (~$2/per), portable, and, most importantly, prone to producing false positives that allow cops to […]

We’ve already discussed how the expected overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court may impact the debate on encryption, but it has a likelihood of impacting lots of other important tech debates as well. Senator Ron Wyden has written a thoughtful piece over at Slate, explaining how important Section 230 is in a […]

Well, this is ugly. Lots of states and cities have considered bail reform in recent years, given the system’s propensity for punishing the poorest people while allowing the more fortunate to buy their way out of jail. The criminal justice system is built on the presumption of innocence — something that’s often ignored by law […]

StreamSkill.com is a specialist in software and technology training. They’ve been helping make software simple for people to understand for over 14 years and have comprehensive beginner to advanced courses in Microsoft Office, Data Analysis, Workplace Productivity, QuickBooks, Photoshop, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and various coding languages like HTML, PHP, and JavaScript. With Membership, you get access to […]

The latest in stupid, unconstitutional, performative, nonsense legislation from Republicans comes from Senator John Thune, and it would break your email spam filters. It’s called the “Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting Emails Act of 2022” and it’s possibly even dumber than it sounds. First, this is all based on a bogus, cooked up, deliberately misinterpreted-by-people-who-know-better […]

Critics of modern tech often lean towards hyperbole when discussing “surveillance capitalism” and the seemingly omniscient power of advertisers and adtech. In reality, as journalists who cover the space for any amount of time can attest, it’s all frequently much dumber and clumsier than that: A new study, first reported by The Wall Street Journal […]

I have talked for years at Techdirt about how the cord cutting trend, while still continuing, was going to run into a wall due to the way that major sports broadcasts have always been done through cable TV deals. I have also covered the steps, baby or otherwise, different sports leagues and teams have taken […]

The federal judiciary system has pretty much blown off taxpayers’ (and legislators’) complaints about PACER for years. The online system that was supposed to make access to court documents fair and equitable is instead a paywalled, outdated heap of barely functioning junk that charges citizens $0.10/page for questionable search results from PACER’s broken search engine. […]

The US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) system needs plenty of useful reforms to actually work correctly and properly. Despite limited time frames in which the government is required to provide information, they often take years. They regularly redact stuff they shouldn’t. Or refuse to hand over documents they are required to. Generally speaking, the […]

Any shift in the balance of power away from law enforcement almost always results in law enforcement claiming we’re headed towards a criminal apocalypse. The NYPD — via union reps and police commissioners — have made these claims for years, targeting everything from “stop and frisk” reform to more recent efforts made to treat accused […]

Okay, so this bill is nowhere near as bad as the Texas and Florida bills, or a number of other bills out there about content moderation. But that doesn’t mean it’s still not pretty damn bad. New York has passed a variation of a content moderation bill in that state that requires websites to have […]

The Complete 2022 Java Coder Bundle has 9 courses to help you kick-start your Java learning, providing you with the key concepts necessary to write code. You’ll learn about Java, Oracle, Apache Maven, and more. From applying the core concepts of object-oriented programming to writing common algorithms, you’ll foster real, employable skills as you make your way […]

The government of India continues to pretend it’s a democracy while doing everything it can to satisfy an elected leader who now apparently has aspirations to become “dictator for life.” Under Prime Minister Narendra Mohdi, India has moved away from its democratic ideals and closer to the ideals held by one of its closest neighbors, […]

We’ve noted several times how there are a few reasons why the U.S. government can’t get a handle on robocalls, despite big announcements every six months or so about how they’re cracking down on the practice and really mean it this time. One of the biggest reasons is that neither the discourse, nor our solutions, […]

Funny what a little public shaming can accomplish. It was merely a week or so ago that we were discussing one bakery in California threatening other bakeries for using the term “mochi muffin”, for which the USPTO had somehow granted it a trademark. If you didn’t read the last post and need a quick recap […]

The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was a flashpoint for police reform efforts around the nation. Cops had been killing unarmed minorities for years but this one was so spectacularly brutal and symbolic of institutional racism (a white cop pressing his knee to a black man’s neck), it couldn’t be […]

The Washington Post dropped what it pretended was a bit of a bombshell. In the story, Google software engineer Blake Lemoine implied that Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) system, which pulls from Google’s vast data and word repositories to generate realistic, human-sounding chatbots, had become fully aware and sentient. He followed that up with […]

The Uvalde Police Department — which currently avails itself of 40% of the town’s budget — did nearly nothing to stop an extremely horrific school shooting that resulted in 19 dead children, two dead teachers, and 17 others being wounded. While Robb Elementary turned into a bloodbath, Uvalde officers retreated after a couple of flesh […]

The Supreme Court has been very reluctant to handle cases that might expand protections for American citizens. It has instead, in recent years, chosen to hand down decisions that curtail rights and make it far easier for government employees to escape lawsuits. This Supreme Court’s decision in a lawsuit filed by a US citizen versus […]

Are you a fan of solving puzzles? Do you like winning money? Then MSCHF has a treat for you. MSCHF, the makers of THE ONE MILLION DOLLAR PUZZLE, now brings you THE TWO MILLION DOLLAR PUZZLE. All you have to do is buy this 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, complete it, and get a chance to win […]

Here on Techdirt, we’ve written about a bunch of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight shows that are quite frequently directly in agreement with what we write about on Techdirt. We’re often impressed at the level of detail and nuance he’s able to approach complex issues with, while (of course) keeping things quite funny. I know […]

Usually when people start whining about the propaganda dumpster fire that is Fox News, several things predictably happen. First, somebody with no idea how any of this works will yell out something about how the FCC should ban Fox from doing this (which is unconstitutional), or restore the mythologized Fairness Doctrine (which wouldn’t have applied […]

One of deep-seated problems with copyright is that its supporters believe everything created should be “owned” by someone and protected from being “stolen” by others. We’ve already written about how that’s a bad fit for writing music, and NBC News has a fascinating story about how the same issue is plaguing a very different world – […]

A new report on asset forfeiture arrives at the same conclusions every other report on the subject has: forfeiture makes money for cops, does almost nothing to stop illegal activity, and rarely, if ever, results in criminal convictions. (via CJ Ciaramella at Reason) The new report [PDF], put together by the Americans for Prosperity Foundation […]

Don’t think this headline is hyperbole; as this post will explain, it is not. But what follows here isn’t just about books, Amazon, or even Paxton himself. What the headline captures is but one example of the catastrophic upshot to the long-concerning INFORM Act bill, should it get passed, as may now happen, what with […]

Remember when Republicans pretended they were the party of fiscal responsibility, not wasting taxpayer money, and limited government? Sure, sure, you say, that was all just sloganeering, and never actually true in practice, but it’s really starkly on display in Florida, where governor (and wannabe 2024 Presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis has taken this all to […]

ID.me hasn’t always been a government contractor powerhouse. For more than a decade, it wasn’t really on anybody’s radar. The personal identification software began as a Craigslist for military personnel before morphing into an ID service designed to combat fraud and ensure military members could access the many government programs available to them. Not exactly […]

The Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows And MBA/Finance Courses Bundle comes with a lifetime license for Microsoft Office 2021 Professional. It also includes three courses: one covers starting a business, another covers finance, accounting, modeling, and valuation, and the third covers financial analysis and investing. The bundle is on sale for $60. Note: The […]

A whole bunch of people over the last month have sent me Jonathan Haidt’s essay in The Atlantic, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” and asked for my thoughts. Haidt’s basic premise is that the problem is social media. It’s more complex and nuanced than that, and there are […]

We’ve noted a few times how there’s an absolutely historic amount of money being thrown at the “digital divide” this year. The broadband infrastructure bill alone designates $42 billion to expanding broadband access. Billions more in COVID relief money started flowing this week courtesy of the Treasury Department. According to an announcement by the agency, […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Toom1275 with a comment about the USPS seizing “defund the police” facemasks: Oh look, an actual rights violation by an actual common carrier. In second place, it’s a comment from Naughty Autie (that also won second place for Funny), responding to another commenter’s thoughts […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the Sixth Circuit was the latest court to say real-time cellphone location tracking is not a Fourth Amendment issue, and the Supreme Court finally decided to take up the question. Tom Cotton introduced a bill to renew Section 702 surveillance forever, just as Congress was getting pretty mad […]

We have written several times about the “true fans” idea as an alternative approach to the traditional remuneration models employed by the copyright industry players, such as publishers, recording companies and film studios. It’s a simple approach: get the people who really love an artist’s work to support it directly, and in advance, rather than […]

In news that will surprise basically no one, Truth Social, Trump’s social network that was pitched as being about bringing free speech back and not doing any “viewpoint discrimination,” even as its terms of service promised it would be heavily moderated, is now banning users for trying to spread some “truths” about the January 6 […]

Last week, New York State became the first state to pass right to repair legislation. The bill was the culmination of years of consumer frustration with repair monopolies, obnoxious DRM, shrinking repair access, high repair costs, and impossible to find tools, parts, and documentation. While the bill only covered some consumer electronics, activists hope it […]

It’s no secret that China wants to erase from history the student protests at Tiananmen Square, and the resulting massacre by the government, but it keeps proving more and more difficult in the internet age. Even with China’s infamous Great Firewall. The latest example is really quite striking. Li Jiaqi is an astoundingly popular social […]

The Third Party doctrine has helped invert/pervert probable cause. Third parties (Google, AT&T, Facebook, etc.) gather tons of data that can be useful to law enforcement. When cops are looking for suspects but have no idea who to suspect, they turn to these third parties. In some cases, they can get plenty of data with […]

MiniTool Power Data Recovery Personal is the most cost-effective data recovery program for all common Windows system users. The 100% clean data recovery software for Windows enables you to recover unlimited data (deleted or lost) from Windows computers, memory/SD cards, USB flash drives, external hard drives, etc. It supports various data loss situations with fast […]

We spent a few years warning people about the terrible EU Terrorist content regulation law, but as of this week, it’s now in effect, and websites will have one hour to remove any terrorist content that is flagged to them by any government official. If they fail to remove the content, they could face fines […]

For years we’ve written about how unchecked telecom and media monopolization and consolidation results in all manner of problems, from sparse broadband connectivity to high prices. We’ve also discussed how the speed of that consolidation over the decades, combined with Wall Street’s insatiable thirst for quarterly returns at any cost, comes with a sacrifice of […]

While trademark disputes regularly annoy me for a variety of reasons which I cover on this site, the most annoying ones of all are usually over trademarks that the USPTO never should have granted in the first place. Remember the Square Donuts thing? That mark was descriptive. ESPN’s “Saturday Night Football” mark? Also descriptive. Or […]

Last chance to get your boxed copy of CIA: Collect It All! Two months ago, we posted what seemed like a last call on selling out the remaining stock of our version of the CIA’s card training game (that we originally Kickstarted a few years ago). A few people complained that they didn’t want to […]

We’ve been talking about the problems of the US government setting up a copyright trolling small claims court for over a decade now. But, Congress finally passed a law to create one (with no debate and no hearings) by sneaking it into a “must-pass” funding bill at the end of the year in 2020. It’s […]

The federal government has unlimited money to burn. That’s how we end up here with the federal government being told for a second time that it can’t walk away from a civil lawsuit just because it unilaterally decided to stop violating the plaintiff’s rights. US citizen Yonas Fikre’s lawsuit made its way to the Ninth […]

Could Paramount Pictures have actually lost the copyright to Top Gun, even as it was releasing a new Top Gun movie? That’s the claim in a new lawsuit that goes pretty deep into the copyright weeds, touching on two ridiculous topics that we like to write about on Techdirt: termination rights and movie rights. For […]

The Ultimate Project and Quality Management Certification Training Bundle has 10 courses to help you become a better project manager. Courses cover CompTIA Project+, Agile, PMI, and more. It’s on sale for $59. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. […]