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Over the last few days, we've had a few posts about the latest attempt to ban TikTok in the US (and to people who say it's only a divestiture bill: there is a ban in the language of the bill if ByteDance won't divest). Yesterday, unsurprisingly, the House voted overwhelmingly, 352 to 65, to pass [...]

Ever since AT&T's 2011 Supreme Court victory, the courts have declared it perfectly legal for a corporation to erode your legal rights using fine print. As a result, most every service and company in the U.S. now uses contract fine print to try and prevent you from suing the company (either alone or in a [...]

Well, this is interesting. As part of our many posts about the cord-cutting trend that has been on the increase over the past decade or so, I have long made the point that the only thing keeping cable television looking even remotely like it did twenty years ago has been live sports. With the advent [...]

Oregon has officially become the seventh state (behind New York, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota) to pass right to repair" legislation, making it easier and more affordable for consumers to independently repair their own electronics. The bill, which passed the Oregon Senate last month 25-5 and the House on Monday 42-13, is a bit [...]

As is tradition, now that we've announced the winners of our latest public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1928, it's time for a special episode of the podcast taking a closer look at them. Just like in past years, Mike is joined by myself and our game design partner Randy Lubin to discuss our [...]

The last time we wrote about an interaction between the Supreme Court and the famed art collective/pranksters/social commentators/cultural marketing jammers MSCHF, it was covering their interesting choice of amicus briefs. They sought to comment on the Bad Spaniels" case by making the Justices and their clerks complete connect the dot" artwork as an attempt to [...]

NSO Group rang the bell. Despite all of its ex-intelligence service expertise and backing from its government, it can't un-ring it. What's done is done. And the repercussions just keep on coming, paying back NSO for years of selling powerful phone exploits to some of the worst people on earth. NSO got sanctioned, along with [...]

Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative AI-driven tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different from previous Luminar editors. It keeps your favorite LuminarAI tools and expands your arsenal with more state-of-the-art technologies and important changes at [...]

Last week, we wrote about Senator Dick Durbin going on the floor of the Senate and spreading some absolute nonsense about Section 230 as he continued to push his STOP CSAM Act. His bill has some good ideas mixed in with some absolutely terrible ideas. In particular, the current language of the bill is a [...]

Last September, Mozilla came out with a privacy study indicating that the auto industry was the worst tech industry the organization tracked. Mozilla found that not only does the industry hoover up a ton of data from your use of vehicles, it collects and monetizes most of the data on your phone. Often without transparency [...]

And here we go again. It's time for another abject lesson in how you don't actually own the things you're buying" in this here digital age. We've covered a ton of these stories at this point, obviously. But there are examples of people learning that they don't actually own the thing they spent their money [...]

The time has come to pay the discovery piper for NSO Group. The phone exploit firm formed by former Israeli spies was supported unilaterally by the Israeli government as it courted human rights abusers and autocrats. The Israeli government apparently felt selling powerful phone exploits to its enemies got caught with its third-party pants down [...]

It's not surprising, but still disappointing, to see companies like Google and Meta, which used to take strong stands against bad laws, now showing a repeated willingness to cave on such principles in the interests of appeasing policymakers. It's been happening a lot in the last few years and it's happened again as Google has [...]

MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That's all well and good, but it means nothing if you don't have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In this course you'll cover not just data [...]

After hearing consecutive FBI directors (James Comey, Chris Wray) drone on and on about how device and communication encryption are nudging us ever closer to the criminal apocalypse, it's kind of refreshing to hear from someone else equally as misguided. An op-ed written by Steven Wasserman recently appeared at The Hill. Wasserman opens his piece [...]

It's potentially forgotten in all the other nonsense that has happened over the past four years, but the initial push to ban TikTok" in the US started right after a bunch of TikTokers reserved fake seats for a rally that Trump's campaign people thought was going to be mobbed by people and ended up being [...]

We've documented in detail how the whole AT&T->Time Warner->Warner Brothers Discovery merger processhas been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku byover-compensated executivesclearlyout of [...]

Over the last decade, increasing numbers of automated license plate readers (ALPR) have been installed on roads, bringing with them a variety of privacy problems, as Techdirt has reported. It's easy to see why ALPR is popular with the authorities: license plate readers seem a simple way to monitor driving behavior and to catch people [...]

Law enforcement investigators and prosecutors have overwhelmingly embraced plenty of pseudoscience over the years, treating everything from bite marks to hair samples as conclusive evidence capable of singling out guilty parties. Most claims were specious, backed only by expert" statements from law enforcement crime lab employees solely interested in confirming prevailing law enforcement theories. And [...]

The Utah state legislature recently adopted a new bill that now requires the pre-installed pornography filters found on mobile devices to be turned on at the point of sale. If a device sold doesn't have these filters enabled, liability for device manufacturers and retailers is quite severe. I wrote about this bill earlier this month [...]

Every year, the President lays out the administration's major agenda in the State of the Union address. For those of us who cover tech policy, there's always some fear that something dumb will be said. In the last couple of years, Biden pushed nonsense moral panics about the evils of the internet. So, in some [...]

The NYPD has a problem with encryption, as do some of its preferred prosecutors. Back in 2010, Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism and Intelligence told NBC news reporters that the city was filled with terrorists willing to leverage everything from rocks, bottles, and accelerants" to wage war on New York - something aided by these speculative [...]

Dive into Godot - a rising star in the game engine world. You'll learn to create platformers, RPGs, strategy games, FPS games, and more as you master this free and open-source engine with easily expandable systems. Plus, you'll also explore techniques for game design and game asset creation - giving you the ultimate techniques to [...]

Can the 5th Circuit ever do anything not crazy? You may recall that Texas, like so many states, passed a law, HB 1181, that required age verification for adult content sites. This law also required nonsense health warnings" to be plastered on those sites, which did not come from any actual health experts. The Free [...]

While it seemed like our national policy hysteria over TikTok had waned slightly in 2024, it bubbled up once again last week upon rumors that the White House is supporting a welcome and important" new bill that would effectively ban TikTok from operating in the United States. The bipartisan bill (full text) - which moved [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Toom1275 with a comment about Missouri's new speech police: Teaching kids the reality that trans people exist and are normal is no more grooming them than teaching kids that frogs exist is grooming them to become amphibians. In second place, we've got a double-winning comment [...]

It's time for the second entry 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 featrued Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station, and today we're taking a closer look at the winner of Best Adaptation: Mickey Party by Benjamin [...]

Remember Wordle? I sure do and one of the ways I start my days at work is to pull up the site and give it a quick play. But I honestly may just need to stop, given the behavior of the current owners of the game. For this discussion, you really do need to recall [...]

Just imagine how petty and vindictive you have to be to change someone with murder just because they weren't arrested easily. Imagine how self-centered you have to be to present someone as an assailant just because they were unable to comprehend your instructions. Imagine just how inhumane you have to be to present a false [...]

Last fall, we wrote about Yelp going to court in California to try to block Texas's indicted and facing trial shortly Attorney General Ken Paxton from suing the company for using its speech to accurately warn users that Crisis Pregnancy Centers" do not generally offer any actual medical care. As you may know, anti-abortion advocates [...]

Say what you will about the general politeness of Canadians and the genteel nature of their secondhand Britishness, but never forget their cops can be just as petty and vindictive as our cops. Law enforcement entities everywhere have a massive sense of entitlement. Officers and officials tend to think that people should comply with whatever [...]

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 [...]

Flooding Congress with phone calls can work wonders to stop bad bills at times. The SOPA blackout 12 years ago was one of the most effective advocacy campaigns in history. Coincidentally, I was at the Capitol that day, and wandering the halls between meetings, hearing phones ringing non-stop was amazing. However, that process was carefully [...]

Aging satellite TV provider Dish Network is supposed to be undergoing a major transformation from tired old satellite TV provider to streaming and wireless juggernaut. It was a cornerstone of a Trump administration FCC and DOJ plan to cobble together a new wireless carrier out of twine and vibes as a counter-balance to the competition-eroding [...]

It's a point we have to make far more often than we should: trademark law is not designed to allow anyone or any company to simply lock up common language as their own. There are lots of ways the confusion around that expresses itself, but one of the most common concerns generic terms for goods [...]

Axon, most famous for producing Tasers, is again making the sort of headlines it really shouldn't make. Everyone knows Taser. The company produces the most-used less lethal" weapons cops deploy. Less" is the key word here. It's basically a cattle prod for humans but one that's routinely deployed with less care than a cattle prod, [...]

Senator Ron Wyden is a one-man defense for preventing horrible bills from moving forward in the Senate. Last month, he stopped Josh Hawley from moving a very problematic STOP CSAM bill from moving forward, and now he's had to do it again. A (bipartisan) group of senators traipsed to the Senate floor Wednesday evening. They [...]

Florida legislators - urged on by failed presidential candidate and governor for life" hopeful Ron DeSantis - have passed plenty of unconstitutional laws in hopes of marginalizing or silencing anyone who isn't straight, white, or voting straight-ticket Republican. Much like it's true anyone can break any law they like until they get caught, legislators can [...]

One frustrating thing in following everything that has happened in the case that started out as Missouri v. Biden and is now Murthy v. Missouri at the Supreme Court, is that the case is full of lies. The whole case is kind of a mess for a variety of reasons. This includes the original plaintiffs [...]

The Complete 2024 CompTIA Certification Training Super Bundle by IDUNOVA has 15 courses to help you prepare for various CompTIA certification exams. Courses cover everything from the fundamentals to cloud essentials to cybersecurity. The bundle is on sale for $59.97. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all [...]

I'm super excited to announce our brand new podcast, created in partnership with Ben Whitelaw, who runs the brilliant Everything in Moderation newsletter: Ctrl-Alt-Speech. It's a weekly news podcast that Ben and I will be co-hosting, exploring what's happening in the world of online speech. It will cover issues related to trust & safety, content [...]

When last we checked in with Hewlett Packard (HP), the companyhad just been sued(for the second time) for crippling customer printers if owners attempt to use cheaper, third-party printer cartridges. It was just the latest in a long saga where printer manufacturers use DRM or dodgy software updates to wage all out war on consumer [...]

Whatever your thoughts on policing in general in America, I would hope it would be largely uncontroversial to state that a huge percentage of Americans believe that police are generally over-militarized and at least slightly a little too trigger happy, especially when it comes to engaging minority communities. If you somehow think that there isn't [...]

As we've noted for a very long time, sometimes dumb" tech is often the smarter option. In the rush to connect every conceivable technology and device to the internet (while seeing ever-improving revenues), smart technology" companies routinely cut corners. And the first sacrifice usually made (behind customer service) tends to be consumer privacy and device [...]

It might not be the smartest idea to have Walter Isaacson trailing you and taking notes on your everyday moves when one of those moves is trying to breach the contract the top execs of the social media company you just overpaid for on a whim. In his book on Musk, Isaacson talked about how [...]

The gracious leeway of the Terry stop - as set down by the Supreme Court's 1968 decision - gave a lot a law enforcement agencies a permission slip for suspicionless stops of pedestrians. Random people got braced, patted down, aggressively questioned, and otherwise hassled. Very few arrests followed. Very little contraband was discovered. But it [...]

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It's no secret that I'm often skeptical of antitrust actions, many of which feel like bureaucrats doing a general punishment" for disliking a successful company, rather than an actual response to abusive, anti-competitive behavior by a large company. However, that does not mean that there is no place for antitrust enforcement. It's just that it [...]

The FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, currently provides 23+ million low-income Americans a $30 broadband discount every month. While it didn't get much hype, that's a big deal in a country where broadband affordability is a massive obstacle to adoption due to muted competition and high service prices. But [...]

Usually when we discuss trademark disputes, we tend to highlight examples and stories where the dispute is initiated by a party where we really, really don't think they have much of a leg to stand on. This story is different in that respect. In India, an eBike company called Yulu has sued a company called [...]