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This DevDojo Pro subscription gives you access to a set of tools to help you build your next great idea. Start with the Page Creator, where you'll find Tailwind CSS Page Builder, a tool for crafting beautiful landing pages. Then, move on to Wave SAAS Starter Kit, where you'll learn how to build your Software [...]

It's not unheard of for us, or other publications, to paraphrase what a court ruling says at times. This time, however, the quote in the headline is actually 100% a direct quote from Judge Mark Walker, the Chief Judge of the Northern District of Florida federal court in a ruling against the state of Florida. [...]

States are poised to receive $42.5 billion in broadband grants thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill. While a lot of this money will be going to the usual entrenched monopoly incumbents, a lot of it is also going to a growing list of popular cooperatives, municipalities, and city-owned utilities to expand affordable fiber. This Broadband [...]

After the ACLU obtained a settlement from the city of Chicago over the PD's unconstitutional stop and frisk" program, the Chicago PD decided to take the show on the road. Literally. The number of traffic stops in Chicago surged after the settlement with ACLU Illinois over stop-and-frisk pedestrian stops, while pedestrian stops fell from a [...]

We've been writing stories about how, when it comes to digital purchases, we typically do not own what we've bought. Instead of buying a product, such as the digital version of a video game, what we are instead buying is a non-transferable license to use that product. While readers here will be largely familiar with [...]

Felony murder" laws are still problematic, even if that law has led to a corrupt drug warrior finally being punished for the evil he has committed under the color of law. Gerald Goines headed up a Houston PD drug squad for years and was never one to let facts or a lack of evidence stand [...]

We are living under a sea of AI-generated slop, where AI deepfakes and non-consensual intimate content abound. Congress, a self-interested creature, naturally wants to create protections for themselves, their favorite celebrities, and their wealthy donors against online impersonation. But until now, visions of so-called AI protections have been limited. From my lair, I've seen how [...]

There are few things the government loves less than admitting wrongdoing, especially when the admission might affect multiple levels of government. That's why nearly every settlement paid out to litigants includes a disavowment of any wrongdoing. And that's why courts - at multiple levels - are so extremely reluctant to give possibly innocent people an [...]

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It has been rumored for a while that Elon wants to remove the official block" functionality on ExTwitter, but now it's official. The company has announced that it will soon start rolling out a new version of block" that no longer blocks content, only interactions. That's ExTwitter's engineering team saying: Soon we'll be launching a [...]

While FTC boss Lina Khan certainly has had some growing pains, she's fought for consumer protection and antitrust reform in a way that U.S. regulators haven't seen for the better part of a generation. Whether it's taking on automaker privacy abuses, supporting right to repair reforms, or taking aim at Amazon's attempt to dominate the [...]

It can be easy for people to dislike the secondary market if they aren't the ones selling into it. Commonly referred to as scalpers", the fact is that the secondary market is a very important part of the economy. It's how goods retain some of their value, for instance. And when goods are sold several [...]

There is simply too much going on here to pretend there's a way to succinctly sum up what's led us to this point in our coverage. A small Kansas newspaper's offices, the home of its 98-year-old owner (who died shortly after the raid), and the home of Marion vice mayor Ruth Herbel were all raided [...]

Over the summer we noted how the brunchlords in charge of Paramount (CBS) decided toeliminate decades of MTV News journalismandComedy Central historyas part of their ongoing and utterly mindless cost saving" efforts. It was just the latest casualties in an ever-consolidating and very broken U.S. media business routinely run by some of the least competent [...]

Of course, Elon Musk had to take Twitter private. If he had to answer to shareholders, he would have been ousted months ago for his systematic, single-minded destruction of the company's value. Pretty much every move he's made has been some level of bad, ranging from confusing to annoying to infuriating to catastrophic. Alienating long-term [...]

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 [...]

When Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) in 1994, they were assured by then-FBI Director Louis Freeh that the mandated wiretap backdoors posed no security risks. Fast forward to today, following the news of a massive CALEA hack and Senator Ron Wyden is reminding the DOJ of that history, while urging [...]

I've written extensively that U.S. broadband is slow, spotty, and expensive thanks to regulatory capture and regional monopoly power. Republicans have propped up this broken status quo at every opportunity, routinely working to undermine state and federal consumer protection, while letting companies like AT&T and Comcast quite literally write terrible state and federal telecom law. [...]

There's no evidence anywhere that even remotely suggests registered sex offenders leverage Halloween to lure victims to their homes. It's just as untrue and ridiculous as the annual assertions people are lacing (cheap) candy with (expensive) drugs for... well, those reasons go completely unexplored. Sex offenders are already subject to a considerable number of restrictions, [...]

We're coming right up to the election here in America, so it is obviously time for all kinds of intellectual property strife surrounding political campaigns and advocacy groups. We see all kinds of ways these disputes happen, from campaigns making use of music at rallies, to political ads that use music, up to and including [...]

As far back as 2017, Techdirt was warning that robot vacuum cleaners represented a threat to privacy. In that instance, it concerned the possibility that iRobot, makers of the robot vacuum Roomba, might sell the data that its device collected about the size and layout of a home. Five years later, it was becoming clear [...]

How should we feel when an AI journalist operation falsely accuses someone of murder? How about if the person falsely accused is a public figure? I know there are some questions lately about where liability should land when an AI system hallucinates, but here it seems pretty clear who is at fault: a nonsense peddling [...]

A couple of years ago, private prison giant CoreCivic decided it had had enough. It went to court to secure an order blocking noted First Amendment lawyer Daniel Horwitz from talking about it. Horwitz was then currently engaged in multiple lawsuits against the private prison company, the most prominent being his representation of the family [...]

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There is a widely believed but totally false claim by Trumpists that the Biden administration" told Twitter to censor" the NY Post article about the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop four years ago. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump himself accused the Biden administration of doing as much: Of course, in 2020 Donald [...]

A favorite tactic of U.S. corporations looking to dismantle consumer protection reforms (or anything they don't like, really) is to create entirely fake consumer groups custom-built to confuse voters and journalists. Such groups are usually used in combination with think tanks and other pseudo-objective organizations to muddy the waters, confuse constituents, and mislead the press [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is DisgruntledAnonymous with a comment on our post about Elon Musk seizing people's Twitter accounts to promote Donald Trump: This just solidified my decision to delete and deactivate my accounts (primary and burner) on that site. I would advise those who haven't fallen into the [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Deupty AG Jeffrey Rosen was complaining about companies like Facebook offering encryption, while FBI Director Chris Wray was deploying straw men arguments about the tech, and the DOJ was conflating the content moderation debate with the encryption debate. We learned more about ICE's massive surveillance network, and the [...]

You all know the playbook when it comes to shady copyright shakedown outfits that work with or for pornography companies. Groups like Malibu Media and others built an infamous reputation for using the legal system to extract IP address-based information on customers whom they then claim downloaded porn illegally, they then mail settlement offers to [...]

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. In this week's round-up of the latest news in online [...]

A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itselfon the receiving end of an antitrust lawsuitfor its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company's own repair facilities, driving up costs and [...]

While we still lament the fact that the DMCA's Section 512(f) has no real teeth to punish people for filing bogus DMCA takedown notices, at least some companies are still trying to use it against the most egregious offenders. Last year, Google went after two people in Vietnam, who Google accused of creating at least [...]

Get ready for some more unexpected uses of the world's most controversial facial recognition tech. Clearview has amassed a 10-billion-image database - not through painstaking assembly but by sending its bots out into the open web to download images (and any other personal info it can find). It then sells access to this database to [...]

Project Management is global. This is one of those professions similar to being an accountant, where your skills and talents can be applied to any industry in any place. The 10-course Complete PMP Training Bundle provides a comprehensive training path for all things project management, including the most update to date courses including PMP 6th [...]

Jonathan Haidt's incredibly well-timed decision to surf on the wave of a moral panic about kids and social media has made him a false hero for many parents and educators. In my review, I noted that his book, The Anxious Generation," is written in a way that makes adults struggling with the world today feel [...]

One foundational belief of the right to repair" movement is that consumers should actually own the technology they pay for. Unfortunately that's increasingly not the case when it comes to carmakers, who are utterly insistent on not only charging people a flat retail price for a vehicle - but are also increasingly charging you additional [...]

If there's anything that's going to severely reduce the number of pretextual stops performed by cops, it probably won't be the handful of traffic stop reform efforts being made by legislators. It's going to be the continued legalization (or decriminalization) of marijuana possession. One of law enforcement's favorite tricks is to pull over a car [...]

When it comes to how you include religious texts in public school classrooms and libraries, the devil, as they say, is in the details. Want those texts of various world religions in place for secular teaching of topics they pertain to? All good! But picking one particular religion's iconography and injecting it into public schools [...]

Back before T-Mobile merged with Sprint you might recall that academics, consumer groups, and beat reporters like myself warned that the deal would immediately result in less competition, higher prices, and a whole bunch of layoffs. Captured Trump regulators ignored those worries, but it didn't take long before the deal's critics were proven indisputably correct [...]

What if the reason we're so worried about teens on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat is because we've fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the digital world? What if we're confusing the everyday risks of growing up online with the specter of unavoidable harm? No one is better at covering the moral panic about the kids these [...]

The spectacular collapse of the Mayor Adams' administration is still in progress. Pretty much everyone with ties to the ex-cop, current mayor has either been informed of an ongoing investigation or managed to infer that following multiple raids by the FBI. The mayor's handpicked police commissioner, Edward Caban, resigned shortly after these raids occurred, most [...]

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Three years ago, we updated Vizzini's list of classic blunders" from The Princess Bride to include never try to patent troll Cloudflare." That was when the company announced that patent troll Sable Networks had made that mistake and now needed to be taught a lesson. That lesson is now complete, and Cloudflare has successfully destroyed [...]

Last week I noted how Elon Musk saw fit to inject himself in the middle of the Helene hurricane disaster by falsely claiming that hurricane victims died because the FCC refused to give Starlink a billion dollars in subsidies. I explained at length why that claim was grotesque and incorrect, in part because the subsidies [...]

The Fifth Circuit seems to love nothing more than creating more distance between cops and accountability. But, every so often, it finds a law enforcement member that even it is not willing to redeem. That's how far Louisiana state trooper Kasha Domingue went off the rails in the incident leading to this lawsuit. The ruling [...]

It shouldn't be news to any regular readers here that Warner Bros. has been a ridiculously jealous protector of all things intellectual property when it comes to the Harry Potter franchise. Harry Potter themed fan festivals? That's banned magic, according to Warner Bros. Want to make a parody condom called Harry Poppers"? Here comes Warner [...]

Sometimes it feels like every story we see these days about kids and the internet is all about how it's evil, making them depressed, and a huge problem for society. We keep trying to remind people that the actual science on this finds no support of the internet being so horrible. Indeed, the research suggests [...]

Call a right enshrined" all you want, but if a judge decides it's better to protect law enforcement officers from their own actions than to allow the public to view killings performed in the name of public safety," the public gets nothing. Neither do the people serving the public and providing them with information, like [...]

The Cybersecurity Projects Bundle offers a hands-on program featuring five real-world cybersecurity projects, totaling 35 tasks. Participants start with an introductory video for each project, detailing objectives and requirements, followed by task completion that mirrors real cybersecurity challenges. Support from industry professionals ensures personalized feedback and guidance. Upon completing the program, participants gain practical experience, [...]

You may have seen the news yesterday about 14 attorneys general filing lawsuits against TikTok. It was covered in a bunch of places, including Reuters, CNBC, the NY Times, the Washington Post, NPR, CNN and more. And, bizarrely, none of them seemed to include links to any actual complaint. It took me a little while [...]