Techdirt

The Chicago Police Department continues to give the city, its residents, and its oversight the finger. Officers just want to do what they want to do, without having to respect rules, regulations, state laws, or civil rights. Much like the NYPD, the Chicago PD got itself in Constitutional hot water by indiscriminately stopping pedestrians. Its [...]

Last month, we shared the details of a really good Dear Colleague" letter that Senator Rand Paul sent around urging other Senators not to vote for KOSA. While the letter did not work and the Senate overwhelmingly approved KOSA (only to now have it stuck in the House), Paul has now expanded upon that letter [...]

The FBI has been pulled right up to the national security table for years. Having switched from regular law enforcement agency to being a major player in the counter-terrorism field has seen it avail itself of vast collections of data obtained by the NSA. While its own contributions to combating terrorism have been questionable at [...]

Two bits of news came out of the letter Mark Zuckerberg sent to Rep. Jim Jordan this week (and how people responded to it), neither of which are what you're likely to have heard about. First, Donald Trump seems to be accusing himself of rigging the 2020 election against himself. And, second, Mark Zuckerberg has [...]

The FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, provided23+ millionlow-income households a $30 broadband discount every month. But the roughly 60 million Americans benefiting from the program are now facing much higher broadband bills because key Republicans - who routinely dole out billions of dollars onfardumberfare-refused to fund a $4-$7 billion [...]

I'll admit, when I've been able to witness some of the fuckery around the use of artificial intelligence in stupid ways, some part of me has always gotten some amusement at those being fooled. I've gotten to witness most of this from afar, after all. It feels a bit different when you write about a [...]

The fallout came fast and hard for New College of Florida and its administrators after multiple videos were posted of books dealing mainly with sexual identity and race found filling a dumpster behind the school library. The immediate reaction from the school's spokesperson, Nathan Marks, was nonsensical. Marks claimed two things, neither of them believable. [...]

There's been plenty of conversation over the past decade about how unprepared the mainstream media was for the shifts that have happened in politics and political discourse, especially when it comes to finding... well... the truth. As we move towards the 2024 election, the challenges of reporting and fact checking are once again in the [...]

Elon sure seems to enjoy making employees humiliate themselves on his behalf. After massively overpaying for Twitter, firing most of the staff, and then making bad decision after bad decision, Elon did promise remaining employees that they would get equity in the new Twitter, now renamed X (even as its valuation kept dropping). Quite some [...]

More and more politicians have decided the only way to make America great is to abandon the things that made America great in the first place. The free and open exchange of ideas is getting shut down. The First Amendment is being remade and remodeled to only protect the ideas those in power are in [...]

The Ninth Circuit appeals court seems to have figured out the best way to reform" Section 230: by pretending it doesn't apply to some stuff that the judges there just randomly decide it doesn't apply to anymore. At least that's my reading of the recent ruling against YOLO Technologies. Now, let's start by making something [...]

For many many years now we've noted how internet-connectivity (and greed) have changed the consumer equation sometimes for the worse, resulting in people no longer truly owning the things they buy. Expensive gadgets can become less useful (or bricked completely) in an instant due to an inconveniently timed merger, company closure, greed, or just rank [...]

It's no secret that Peloton, one of the corporate darlings of the pandemic, has since been viewed as a company in serious decline. While the company has had to contend with several IP disputes, it has also been subject to cybersecurity incidents and product safety recalls due to its treadmills occasionally deciding to eat human [...]

Clearview's status as an international pariah really hasn't changed much over the past few years. It may be generating fewer headlines, but nothing's really changed about the way it does business. Clearview has spent years scraping the web, compiling as much personal info as possible to couple with the billions of photos it has collected. [...]

Is the arrest of Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, a justified move to combat illegal activities, or is it a case of dangerous overreach that threatens privacy and free speech online? We had hoped that when French law enforcement released the details of the charges we'd have a better picture of what happened. Instead, we're [...]

Yet another federal judge has blocked a censorial, vindictive government investigation" into Media Matters for having the temerity to report on seeing ads on ExTwitter showing up next to neo-Nazi content. To recap: in November, Media Matters released an article written by Eric Hananoki. The article detailed an investigation in which they found ads from [...]

It's well-established that students still have Constitutional rights, even if some school administrators clearly believe otherwise. But they are limited, especially when on school grounds. There's a lot of nuance in play. When those nuances are ignored, lawsuits get filed. There's plenty of nuance in this case, but not a lot of subtext. We all [...]

There's plenty of news flying around over the past few days after it was reported on Saturday that Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of Telegram, had been arrested at Bourget airport in France after taking his private plane there from Azerbaijan. Durov, who got a French citizenship in 2021 apparently knew that there was [...]

Popular flight tracking app FlightAware says that they accidentally leaked the personal data of its 10,000 aircraft operators and 12 million users. According to an announcement by the company sent to users, a configuration error" resulted in the company exposing user usernames, passwords, email addresses, names, billing addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, aircraft ownership records, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That Anonymous Coward with a comment about the obvious connection between Tesla and ExTwitter that raises some questions about the judge in the Media Matters laswsuit: What stock was it Elmo was going to have to sell to keep X running again?? In second [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, Beto O'Rourke (remember him?) joined the silly parade of politicians looking to destroy Section 230, while the Wall Street Journal was rightly calling out Josh Hawley's nannyish" internet law ideas. A Russian troll farm was taking a second shot at suing Facebook after its first attempt was dismissed [...]

Earlier this year, we discussed a trademark infringement suit in India between two eBike companies. One was Yulu, which operates the kind of eBike rental stations you can find in all kinds of cities throughout the world. The other was Kinetic Green, which sells a line of eBikes that it branded the Zulu" bike. As [...]

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 [...]

Earlier this year, you probably sawthe storyabout how a political consultant used a (very sloppy) AI" generated deepfake of Joe Biden in a bid to try and trick New Hampshire voters into staying home during the Presidential Primary. It wasn't particularly well done; nor was it clear it reached all that many people or had [...]

Over the last few years, we've seen a bunch of politicians trying to frame their regulation of the internet as not being about regulating speech, but about design" or process" or some such. But when you scratch beneath the surface, they're always really about regulating speech. Whether it's KOSA or California's Age Appropriate Design Code [...]

No doubt encouraged by the governor and state legislature's hatred of anything not aligned with their hetero-first principles, a Florida college not only shuttered its Gender and Diversity Center, but threw out hundreds of books dealing with, you know, gender and/or diversity. The Stop WOKE Act is likely to blame here, even if it's not [...]

Level up your creative projects with this Adobe Elements Bundle. If you are new to it, or even a seasoned pro, the intuitive tools are designed to edit your photos and videos with precision. Photoshop Elements 2023 allows you to easily combine your photos into a collage, enhance them with artistic effects, and create overlays [...]

Dear California Governor Newsom and Attorney General Bonta: you really don't have to be the opposite end of the extremists in Florida and Texas. You don't have to lie to your constituents and pretend losses are wins. Really. Trust me. You may recall that the Attorneys General of Texas and Florida have taken to lying [...]

The streaming sector has historically been home to no shortage of failures that most people forgot. There was of course Quibi, the $1.75 billion Hollywood streaming project that lasted all of 199 days before executives had to throw in the towel. There was also Verizon's joint streaming venture with Redbox, which lasted about as long [...]

Way back in 2020, Tim Cushing wrote about the Las Vegas police and its habit of running low-resolution images through facial recognition software in order to generate leads when conducting investigations. While his post focused on just how those low-res images were used, and sometimes misused, the important thing to recognize for the purposes of [...]

Back in February, the FCC announced new rules that would prohibit the use of AI-generated deep fake robocalls. The proposal would make such calls illegal under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which it already uses to combat robocalls. It was prompted by that very sloppy AI deep fake that targeted the Democratic Presidential primary [...]

Last week, the NY Times had an article about how Georgia's Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, is being targeted in a SLAPP suit by a podcaster" who claims Raffensperger defamed her in his book about the 2020 election. (For reasons unknown, the NY Times links to none of the legal filings in the case, [...]

Oh, Fifth Circuit, you crazy, crazy kid. I take back almost all the bad things I've said about you. The cop-friendliest circuit in the nation has done the unimaginable: set up a circuit-on-circuit showdown that can only be resolved by a Supreme Court decision. Until that happens (don't hold your breath), you and your Google [...]

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As we head into another Presidential election, one thing has been consistent from the last two such elections as well: the tech policies of both major parties are terrible. The Donald Trump Republican platform for 2025 is beyond crazy with all sorts of nonsense. The tech" part of it is barely worth a mention, but [...]

I spent decades as a telecom beat reporter watching the mainstream press cover the telecom industry. I had a front row seat to the endless promises big telecoms like AT&T and Comcast made before a merger, and the way the U.S. business press repeatedly parroted pre-merger claims entirely unskeptically, without pointing out the harms of [...]

One of many ideas floated as a solution to police misconduct issues is the requirement that officers carry their own insurance. Almost every law enforcement officer is currently indemnified by the towns and cities that employ them, ensuring they're never personally responsible for any judgments or settlements stemming from their misconduct. And that's a very [...]

Because of the wonderful world in which we live, we get to learn about certain unhappy terms and practices, one of which is the concept of collective punishment." As a matter of war, collective punishment is a war crime. The idea is that a belligerent force cannot punish an entire population or group merely for [...]

The U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals has allowed Indiana's age verification law to go into effect - even as the Supreme Court has suggested a similar law in Texas might be unconstitutional. The Seventh Circuit panel handed down this ruling, letting the law go into effect just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court decided [...]

For as long as the evening news has existed, America has been portrayed as a dangerous place to live. Reminding people we're a very safe country - especially over the past 30 years - doesn't draw in viewers. And it doesn't draw in voters, either. Among the many, many, many things Donald Trump lied about [...]

There are many things to say about Disney's recent self-induced litigation disaster. Not the case that good Disney lawyering just helped win; I am referring to the case where bad Disney lawyering tried to press the now-withdrawn legal argument that a plaintiff, suing over the death of their spouse allegedly stemming from an allergic reaction [...]

This 2-in-1 Keychain Wireless Charger with 2,500mAh battery will charge your Apple Watch 3-5 times on a full charge. Its magnetic design ensures perfect alignment and it works seamlessly with all Apple Watch series. It features Type-C port for versatile charging options for other devices. It's on sale for $19. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store [...]

So we just wrote about how advertising on ExTwitter remains in freefall and is likely down between 75 and 85% from when Elon took over. And now the Wall Street Journal has a piece recognizing that the banks that financed about $13 billion of the $44 billion Musk needed are admitting that it may be [...]

Americans are, apparently, tired of having every last shred of personal data over-collected, hyper monetized, then improperly secured by a rotating crop of ethics-optional corporations and lazy executives. A new survey from U.S. News and World Report took a look at prevailing U.S. consumer privacy beliefs, and found, among other things, that 84% of the [...]

We've written a ton about Taylor Swift's various adventures in intellectual property law and the wider internet. Given her sheer popularity and presence in pop culture, that isn't itself particularly surprising. What has been somewhat interesting about her as a Techdirt subject, though, has been how she has straddled the line between being a victim [...]

Like far too many legislators in far too many states, Tennessee's lawmakers have jumped on the book banning bandwagon. For years, public libraries and school libraries were stocked at the discretion of librarians and largely operated without a lot of interference from state governments. While attempts to ban certain books happened now and then, there [...]

Location and surveillance technologypermeatesthedriving experience. Setting aside external technology like license plate readers, there is some form of internet-connected service or surveillance capability built into or on many cars, from GPS tracking to oil-change notices. This isalready a dangerous situation for many drivers and passengers, and a bill in California requiring GPS-tracking in digital license [...]

Would you believe that Disney's famously copyright-maximalist lawyers have just brought us a nice victory for fair use? Earlier this year, we wrote about disgraced former Congressman George Santos suing Disney and Jimmy Kimmel after Kimmel used some of Santos' Cameo videos (that Kimmel had secretly requested) in a, well, somewhat trollish fashion. Santos, who [...]

It's never about the children. Supporters of age verification laws, book bans, drag show bans, and abortion bans always claim they're doing these things to protect children. But it's always just about themselves. They want to impose their morality on other adults. That's all there is to it. Abortion bans are just a way to [...]

The Python and Django Web Development Bundle has 7 courses to help you learn how to build your own sites and apps. Courses cover the basics of Django and Python and then build upon those skills by having you create your own to do list app and user authentication app, and more. It's on sale [...]