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The 2024 elections in India are widely regarded as the largest in history, with nearly a billion people eligible to cast a vote. Alongside the sheer human scale, there's another aspect of the Indian elections that is surprising for its magnitude. This is the use of millions of deepfakes by Indian politicians in an attempt [...]

Well... this is a fun one. The FBI requested a warrant, got it shot down, and thought it would just try to bypass the proper judicial process by pitching the same warrant to another judge all the way across the country. (h/t FourthAmendment.com) This saga/debacle begins in Washington D.C. The FBI is building a case [...]

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Donald Trump getting mad at an unflattering portrayal of himself in a movie isn't that interesting. But how that anger may make people rethink laws against AI recreating real people and the Citizens United case, highlights how gut reactions to these laws may lead people astray. At Cannes Film Festival, journalist Gabriel Sherman's independently produced [...]

Just two weeks ago a new report showed how U.S. wireless price competitioneffectively ground to a haltimmediately in the wake of the Sprint and T-Mobile merger. Consolidating the U.S. wireless sector from four to three major providers immediately muted price competition, much like every credible academic, consumer group, and deal critic predicted. It alsoresulted in [...]

It should not be controversial to state that, as it stands today, YouTube's ContentID platform for policing copyright on YouTube videos is hopelessly broken. The system is wide open to abuse from bad actors who might lay claim to content that simply isn't theirs, sometimes to the tune of raking in millions of dollars. ContentID [...]

The ultimate lesson here is one that's been taught over and over again by the government of a free nation: if you attempt to bypass government revenue generation mechanisms, expect to get put in your place, citizen. Back in 2021, North Carolina resident Michael Jones - with the assistance of the Institute for Justice - [...]

The moral panic about kids and technology these days is just getting dumber and dumber. The latest is that MPs in the UK are considering an outright ban on smartphones for kids under 16. Just last week, we posted about a thorough debunking of the mobile phones are bad for kids" argument making the rounds. [...]

TikTok, the short-video company with Chinese roots, did the most American thing possible on May 7, 2024: Itsued the U.S. government, in the person of Attorney General Merrick Garland, in federal court. The suit claims the federal law that took effect on April 24, 2024,banning TikTok unless it sells itselfviolates the U.S. Constitution. The law [...]

We've long been critics of facial recognition tech here at Techdirt. Even though the steady march of technology inevitably means the tech will get faster and better, the problem is the first part: faster. The tech has proven to be very fallible. And it has made things even worse for the sort of people most [...]

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Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed free speech absolutist,' rarely gets it right when it comes to actual free speech. But he deserves a rare round of applause in his fight against Australia's global speech injunction. We've had many posts detailing Elon Musk's somewhat hypocritical understanding of free speech. This included his willingness to fold and give [...]

The U.S. yet yet to pass even a basic internet-era privacy law - or regulate data brokers. And while there's a lot of misdirection and pretense to the contrary, the primary reason is (1) because the U.S. government is too corrupt; and (2) because the U.S. government really enjoys being able to purchase massive amounts [...]

And here we go again. It used to be that when you bought a thing, you owned the thing. You could do whatever you wanted with the thing, so long as you didn't violate the law with the thing, because you owned the thing. And I recognize I'm using the word thing" a lot here, [...]

Never underestimate the coercive power of law enforcement. Officers were so convinced Thomas Perez Jr. had murdered his missing" father, they spent 17 hours torturing him into confessing to a crime no one had actually committed. Perez Jr. initiated this. He called the police to report his father was missing, mistakenly assuming they'd help him, [...]

I wonder if Gina Rinehart, an Australian mining magnate, is a fan of Barbra Streisand? It's been a bit since we had a straight-up classic Streisand Effect story like the good old days, where someone powerful saw something they didn't like and insisted that it must be disappeared because they didn't like it. Meet Gina [...]

You have to feel tremendous sympathy for the families of the victims in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. As has been well documented, there was a series of cascading failures by law enforcement that made that situation way worse and way more devastating than it should have been. So who should be blamed? Apparently, [...]

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It's no fun when your friends ask you to take sides in their disputes. The plans for every dinner party, wedding, and even funeral arrive at a juncture where you find yourself thinking, Dang, if I inviteher, thenhewon't come." It's evenlessfun when you're running an online community, from a groupchat to a Mastodon server (or [...]

Just recently we discussed a new report showing how U.S. wireless price competition effectively ground to a halt immediately in the wake of the Sprint and T-Mobile merger. Consolidating the U.S. wireless sector from four to three major providers immediately muted price competition, much like every credible academic, consumer group, and deal critic predicted. It [...]

This week, Stephen T. Stone takes both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it's a preemptive comment on our post about five Section 230 cases that made online communities better: In second place, it's a comment about laws that aim to ban library books: The best libraries offend everyone. The worst libraries [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, people were jumping on the bandwagon of fearmongering about Huawei, while we pointed out that the real security threat is the internet of things. Another federal magistrate said that compelled production of passwords and biometrics violates the Fifth Amendment, ICE spent another $820,000 on cellphone cracking tools, and [...]

The last time we saw German-based grocer Aldi get into a trademark tiff over an alcohol product, it was with Brew Dog in the UK and it was one of the most good-natured trademark disputes" on the record. While that whole thing was refreshing to see, not every company chooses to approach things in a [...]

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 [...]

ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) tends to treat the Constitution as some ticky-tack policy its officers can safely ignore. That's not to say ICE believes the Constitution does not exist. It probably at least realizes it exists. After all, it's a US federal agency. What it firmly believes is that the Constitution provides no protection [...]

Another day, another dumb lawsuit against TikTok. We've seen school districts and parents suing TikTok on the basis of extremely weird claims of kids used TikTok, some bad stuff happened to kids, TikTok should be liable." But in the past year, it seems that a bunch of state AGs have decided to sue TikTok as [...]

None of this makes sense. At least, not when you attempt to reconcile what's being said with the university's actions. It makes more sense later. But we'll get to that in a moment. A non-profit called the Atlanta Police Foundation, which claims to be interested in building a better relationship between Atlanta's police and the [...]

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Public libraries are supposed to be places for communities to gather and learn, with an important focus on being a place for kids to gain access to information. But thanks to a moral panic in the GOP about indoctrination" in libraries, it seems that at least one library has decided to shut its door to [...]

Earlier this year you probably sawthe storyabout how a political consultant used a (sloppy) deepfake of Joe Biden in a bid to try and trick 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 much of an actual impact. [...]

A couple of months back, we talked about an odd decision Warner Bros. Discovery made to simply retire" a bunch of games it published, mostly from small indie studios, from the various online stores where they were sold, such as Steam. This resulted in anger from those who bought these games and confusion from those [...]

Hey Google, can you spare a few hundred million to keep Rupert Murdoch's yacht afloat? That's essentially what some legislators are demanding with their harebrained schemes to force tech companies to fund journalism. It is no secret that the journalism business is in trouble these days. News organizations are failing and journalists are being laid [...]

While the celebrity-driven allure of the Scarlett Johansson voicealike story might be an easier headline grab, it is in the dark arts of election dirty trickery where you're more likely to find the kinds of election misinformation concerns that have an impact on society. Indeed, experts have been warning for some time that fake text, [...]

Qualified immunity is a mess. It's a mess the Supreme Court created and, to date, seems largely unwilling to fix (despite the occasional remand). The theory of QI is this: law enforcement officers (and other government employees) should be granted forgiveness for blowing constitutional calls during rapidly evolving situations potentially involving life and death. And [...]

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 [...]

The internet is the wild west! Kids are dying! AI is scary and bad! Algorithms! Addiction! If only there was more liability and we could sue more often, internet companies would easily fix everything. Once, an AI read my mind, and it's scary. No one would ever bring a vexatious lawsuit ever. Wild west! The [...]

Annoyed by the kind of expensive, shitty, slow, and spotty broadband access caused by limited competition and monopoly power, hundreds of U.S. communities have been building their own broadband networks. These networks come in a variety of forms, including direct municipal ownership, cooperatives, extensions of city-owned electrical utilities, or public private partnerships. While there's certainly [...]

Pretextual stops. Let's talk about it. Cops who perform traffic stops are rarely performing traffic stops because they care about traffic safety. They're looking for something - anything - else. Driving a car on public roads puts you on the outside of the Fourth Amendment. Warrants aren't required. Reasonable suspicion is the low bar that [...]

I'll admit, I had to read this story a couple of times, since it's so unbelievable. With the explosion of AI tools that have come out over the past couple of years, coming along for the ride are all kinds of concerns over how that AI gets used. In the realm of higher education, this [...]

How much harm is done to children in the name of protecting" them? Entirely too much. What if we drive them further into dangerous corners of the internet by cutting them off from their support networks? Since the release of Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation," a few months back, there has been plenty of [...]

Generally speaking, a private company's press release is not news." If anyone wants to watch companies stroke themselves off in public, there are plenty of sites dedicated to that kink. If it's cop tech purveyors seeking to redeem themselves after a bunch of negative press and/or the loss of high-profile government contracts, we should be [...]

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While lawmakers, looking to get on cable TV, spent much of the last few years performatively hyperventilating about TikTok privacy and national security issues, few of those same folks seem quite as bothered by the parade of obvious, nasty vulnerabilities in the nation's telecom networks. For example, we still haven't somehow addressed longstanding flawsin Signaling [...]

If Congress doesn't get Google and Meta to agree to Section 230 reforms, it's going to destroy the rest of the open internet, while Google and Meta will be just fine. If that sounds stupidly counterproductive, well, welcome to today's Congress. As we were just discussing, the House Energy and Commerce committee is holding a [...]

Are you an NFL fan? If you are, are there particular teams or games you want to watch? The obvious answer to that second question would be yes", though the answer to whether you'll actually be able to watch those games is much less obvious and much more convoluted. It depends which team, and which [...]

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding ahearingtomorrow on sunsetting" Section 230. Despite facing criticism, Section 230 has undeniably been a cornerstone in the architecture of the modern web, fostering a robust market for new services, and enabling a rich diversity of ideas and expressions to flourish. Crucially, Section 230 empowers platforms tomaintain community [...]

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It's been a while since we last mentioned Craig Wright here on Techdirt. We've been pretty clear all along, like pretty much everyone else, that Wright was so obviously full of shit in claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and then trying to claim patents and copyrights over all kinds of Bitcoin/cryptocurrency related things. Over the [...]

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There are few groups of people cops like less than people who don't like cops. But it's not that these people don't like cops, per se. It's that they're tired of cops doing whatever they want whenever they want with near-zero accountability. Cops continue to bad things, like murder unarmed people while effecting arrests." These [...]