Techdirt

Apparently, everything really is bigger in Texas, including the audacity of federal judges who think they're above the rules. In a stunning display of hypocrisy, the Northern District of Texas has decided that new judicial shopping rules just don't apply to them. Because that would make it harder to win culture war fights. But if [...]

404 Media, the new news outlet formed by excellent journalists kicked to the curb by the successive brunchlord regimes overseeing Vice Media, continues to stake its claim as the best investigative media outlet in the country. Their latest effort digs deep into dubious claims made by up-and-coming surveillance tech company, Flock. Flock made its entry [...]

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 [...]

Elon Musk claims to be a free speech absolutist," but almost every time we look more closely at that claim, we discover that he's one of the most censorial, free speech suppressors around. He just got called out by a judge for filing a SLAPP suit seeking to punish an organization for its speech. And [...]

AT&T is under fire after a hacker last month posted the personal information (names, addresses, phone numbers, and social security numbers) of roughly 73 million customers to the open web. Troy Hunt, security researcher and owner ofdata breach notification site Have I Been Pwned, notes the data first appeared a few years ago courtesy of [...]

This week, our first place winner is an anonymous comment invoking a famous quote in response to Missouri suing Media Matters: Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes [sic] but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." -Frank Wilhoit In [...]

We're closing in on the end of our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! We've already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, Best and Deep Cut [...]

Almost exactly two years ago, we discussed a strange story in which video game publisher Bungie sued a bunch of John Does specifically for inputting fraudulent DMCA takedown claims on YouTube videos that contained Bungie content. Those notices purported to be from Bungie in some cases, but even Bungie's own YouTube channel was hit by [...]

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, Amazon Music, 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 [...]

One of the commonest arguments from supporters of copyright is that creators need to be rewarded and that copyright is the only realistic way of doing that. The first statement may be true, but the second certainly isn't. As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) notes, most art was created without copyright, when [...]

We know that a lot of politicians (and media folks) in the US are pushing to ban TikTok. It has seemed notable, of course, that European countries don't seem all that worried about TikTok, which should raise questions about how serious the threat" really is. However, one major country did decide to ban TikTok a [...]

Earlier this week, reporting by Thomas Brewster for Forbes uncovered yet another way law enforcement is expecting companies like Google to perform their investigative work for them. For a few years now, we've covered the use of geofence warrants capable of turning multiple people into criminal suspects, as well as the even more dubious keyword" [...]

Headway is the revolutionary app designed to help you turn personal growth into a habit. With a lifetime subscription, you get unlimited access to a huge number of non-fiction bestsellers, summarized into 15-minute reads. Be it personal development, business strategies, or health insights, Headway has you covered. It's on sale for $60. Note: The Techdirt [...]

Here's how people advocating for internet regulations for bad speech" think things will work: an enlightened group of pure-minded, thoughtful individuals will carefully outlaw dangerous speech that invokes hatred, or encourages bad behavior. Then, that speech will magically and cleanly disappear from the internet, and the internet will be a better place. What could go [...]

Last week you'll recall that after a closed-door intelligence briefing, some members of Congress leaked word to Axios that they were shocked" by various TikTok behaviors. Upon closer inspection, most of the stuff TikTok had been up to wasn't at all different from the behaviors of a wide variety of foreign and domestic telecoms, app [...]

The EU's much-touted Digital Services Act, hailed as the gold standard for whipping those unruly internet platforms into shape, has hit an embarrassing snag. Apparently, the EU forgot to cc a few member states on the Pretty Please Appoint a DSA Regulator' memo. The internet sites under the thumb of the DSA aren't allowed to [...]

The battle The Pokemon Co. decided to wage against its own best fans in the form of DMCA takedowns on video game mods and fan-created content has now escalated into a full-blown war. This has all the hallmarks of Nintendo's anti-emulation war from a few years ago, except this probably makes even less sense than [...]

Last month we noted how Mozilla had launched a new privacy protection tool dubbed Mozilla Monitor Plus. According to Mozilla, the new service scours the web for your personal information at over 190 sites where brokers sell information they've gathered from online sources like social media sites, apps, and browser trackers. We noted that the [...]

How badly did the arguments in the Murthy v. Missouri case go for the states last week? So badly that the FBI has already re-established communications with social media companies that had stopped in light of the earlier rulings in that case. The FBI has resumed some of its efforts to share information with some [...]

Earlier this week, we covered a truly insane and insane bill being pushed by the Tennessee State Senate that vowed to ban something that actually isn't happening and, indeed, has never happened. Stapled to rote effort to ensure the state's Air Pollution Control Board didn't remain understaffed for more than 30 days was some batshit [...]

Listening to your favorite tunes coming out of a mini Gramophone style Bluetooth speaker is fun and this speaker is small enough to have on your desk while you do your work or as a part of the decor in your den while you are enjoying Sunday brunch and lounge around the house! Enjoy Olden [...]

What the fuck is wrong with state lawmakers? It seems that across the country, they cannot help but to introduce the absolute craziest, obviously unconstitutional bullshit, and seem shocked when people suggest the bills are bad. The latest comes from California state Senator Steve Padilla, who recently proposed a ridiculous bill, SB 1228, to end [...]

Earlier this month we noted how despite all of the sound, fury, and hyperventilation surrounding the push to ban TikTok, most Americans don't actually support such a move (you know, the whole representative democracy thing). Support is particularly lacking among young Democrats, a demographic the Biden administration has struggled to connect with in the wake [...]

Nigeria doesn't exactly have a stellar reputation when it comes to respecting the speech rights of its own citizens, nor the rights of platforms that its citizens use. By way of examples, there was the time that the country suspended Twitter for several months for the crime of taking down a tweet from its president [...]

Back in 2021, the Chicago Office of the Inspector General released a report on the PD's ShotSpotter tech. The acoustic detection system was apparently mostly useless, no matter what ShotSpotter may have commented in response. Residents of Chicago are paying nearly $11 million a year for this system. But it's obvious they're not getting much [...]

You might recall how popular telecom and media consumer advocate Gigi Sohn saw her nomination to the FCC scuttled after a variety of right wing and telecom-tethered lobbying groups ran a successful, year-long public smear campaign. The campaign tried to frame Sohn as an unhinged radical extremist, giving corrupt Republican and Democrat lawmakers the flimsy [...]

These days, everyone hates big tech, and that's often for very good reasons. You shouldn't trust giant centralized companies that have collected a ridiculous amount of data on you. There are few reasonable alternatives, so they can keep you stuck in their silos. They just move more and more rapidly along the enshittification curve, extracting [...]

[W]hether you call this coercion, if that's the label you attach, you call it encouragement, you call it promotion, you call it inducement, whatever it is, if the government is attempting to abridge the speech rights of a third party, that has to be unconstitutional because that falls within the plain text of the First [...]

Take your basic knowledge of cybersecurity to a whole new level with the Advanced Cyber Security bundle. This bundle offers you 6 courses on industry-standard certifications on cybersecurity so you can enjoy the wonders of modern tech without compromising your data and privacy. Courses cover CISA, CCSP, CISM, and CISSP certification prep. You'll also get [...]

Over the course of the last few years, it feels like the FTC & DOJ have slowly started getting better at figuring out how to craft a better antitrust lawsuit. The earliest attempts were often beyond silly, but the more recent cases (while far from perfect) have finally started alleging things that seem like potential [...]

Earlier this month the New York Timespublished a major storyconfirming that automakers collect driver behavior data then sell it to a long list of companies. That includes insurance companies, who are now jacking up insurance rates if they see behavior in the dataset they don't like. Theabsolute bare minimumyou could could expect from the auto [...]

Take-Two Interactive has already established itself as an IP bully. There are plenty of examples of this from the past several years, but my favorite remains the company's opposition of a trademark for Rockstar Axe Throwing merely because it had the name Rockstar" in it. No concern was given to how similar the logos and [...]

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who failed miserably in his run for president, signed a very controversial bill into law that requires age verification for porn websites and bans social media for minors under the age of 14. The act, House Bill (HB) 3, is one of the most restrictive laws of its kind to be [...]

Last year in September, we released a cross-post episode of Mike's appearance on the DWeb Decoded podcast with Danny O'Brien. If you listened to that episode, you know that Mike and Danny go way back, and Danny played an important role in the founding of Techdirt. This week, we've got the inverse counterpart to that [...]

There are a lot of elections worldwide, and these events invariably raise significant concerns regarding potential manipulation, particularly in light of emerging technologies such as generative AI. To help address these concerns, we are reintroducing our innovative election threatcasting" game, Threatcast 2024, which has been designed to help users anticipate and counteract such threats. In [...]

All you need is Google. That's how things have been going in the law enforcement world. If you don't know who you're looking for, just ask Google to do it for you. A variety of warrants that demand Google search its data stores for personal information (that might lead investigators to find potential suspects [who [...]

Embark on the journey of language learning with the Rosetta Stone lifetime subscription for all languages. Rosetta Stone has been the go-to software for language learning for the past 27 years. With its immersive and intuitive training method, you might be reading, writing, and speaking a new language with confidence in no time. It's on [...]

Right after Elon took over Twitter, we published what we had hoped would be a useful speed run" through the content moderation learning curve that most platforms figure out along the way. We've seen other free speech!" platforms learn these basic lessons, though not always quickly enough to survive. The basic idea is that no [...]

We've noted a few times now how the quest to ban TikTok is heavily peppered with bad faith actors who historically don't care about consumer privacy or national security. We've also noted how it's performative to hyperventilate about one single sometimes-dodgy app, but ignore the broader dysfunction and corruption (like our lack of a modern [...]

Well, that's the way it goes. Courts have been extremely reluctant to disrupt the long-term surveillance plans of law enforcement. If investigators can mount a camera on public property and keep it focused on areas visible by members of the public, no harm, no foul. Not every court has reached this same conclusion. Notably, one [...]

Welcome to the realm of the very, very stupid. There are a couple of purposes of trademark law. The first and most obvious of them is that they are used to make sure the public knows from whom or from where a particular good or service comes from. It's a measure to protect the public, [...]

Look, I'm nearing 50. I've been around. I have seen some absolute clown shit from politicians. I have witnessed years of things like bridges to nowhere" and self-aggrandizement taking the form of renamed airports or whatever. I have seen any number of candidates step into the arena with a headful of moronic ideas. But things [...]

Self-described free speech absolutist" Elon Musk has just had a judge slam him for trying to punish and suppress the speech of critics. Judge Charles Breyer did not hold back in his ruling dismissing Musk's utterly vexatious SLAPP suit against the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a [...]

Open up the libel laws!" the man who can't win consecutive elections (much less a defamation lawsuit) once proclaimed. The Republican Party (or at least its voting bloc) appears willing to give a man who's enjoyed nothing but unearned opportunities throughout his professional and governmental career yet another shot in 2024. But he's not going [...]

This Little Wonder Solo Stereo Multi Connect Bluetooth Speaker may look small, but it produces as clear and powerful a sound as any other speaker. It comes in a solid and metallic look that is great for any setting and decor at your home, office, pool, picnic spot, and more! Connect this speaker to your [...]

I know that some people, including Elon Musk recently, have claimed that trust & safety" is some sort of euphemism for censorship." That is not true, and has never been true. The role of trust & safety has always been about building trust in the platform and making sure that users feel safe on the [...]

Asthe Vice andMessenger collapsejust got done illustrating in glorious technicolor, the problem with online U.S. journalism isn'tthat it's inherently unprofitable. The problem is usually that the worst, least competent, shallowest people imaginable routinely fail upward into positions of management, then treat the brands they acquirelike disposable napkins. That's certainly been the case over at Sports [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson, replying to another commenter who was bandying about the court rulings that erroneously agreed that Biden and the FBI violated the first amendment by coercing platforms: You mean a conservative think tank shopped for a favorite Trump-appointed judge known for his willingness to [...]

We're past the halfway mark in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928! We've already featured Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station and Best Adaptation winner Mickey Party, and Best Remix winner The Burden Of Creation, and today we're taking [...]

Ah, the idea/expression dichotomy strikes again! It really is incredible just how many copyright lawsuits and disputes are launched due to the fundamental lack of understanding of this particular nuance of copyright law. As a very quick reminder: you cannot copyright an idea, but you can copyright specific expression. For example, you cannot copyright the [...]