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PEN America published recent data on book bans and removals just in time for Banned Books Week. Key findings indicate that most books challenged by censorship advocates this past year focus on LGBTQ+ subject matter. Additionally, Iowa and Florida are currently the two worst states for book bans amid Republican-backed content restriction laws. The PEN [...]

This would seem like a truly extraneous nail in the coffin of ShotSpotter deployment in Chicago, but there are far too many city council members still willing to prop up under-performing tech with faith-based arguments. And there's the company itself, which has shifted narratives (along with redoing the company letterhead) over the past several months [...]

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It's been all of [checks calendar] one freaking day since we wrote about Elon Musk's hypocrisy on free speech compared to the old Twitter regime, and he has to go and make another example. Twitter, under old management: Briefly limits sharing of (at the time) unverified Hunter Biden laptop story. Elon: Outrageous censorship!" and possibly [...]

Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime in both theUSandEU, trying to get policymakers to force internet companies to pay them billions of extra dollars for no coherent reason. These efforts, routinely dressed up as serious adult policy, usually involve false claims that tech companies are getting a free ride" on the Internet, and should therefore [...]

TheGates Foundationis one of the most influential funding bodies in the world. According to one ranking, it is thesecond largest charitable foundation, and as of 31 December 2023 had an endowment of around$75.2 billion. That makes a shift in its publishing policy hugely important. An article in Chemical & Engineering Newsexplains that hitherto the Gates [...]

Here's a phrase I have to use but hate doing so: let's go back to the 2020 presidential campaign. During what was essentially a multi-year advertisement for just how absolutely petty, stupid, and disingenuous a political system could possibly be, the 2020 American presidential election also featured a video sent out by the Trump campaign [...]

Remember DoNotPay"? They were the company, run by Joshua Browder, claiming to be the world's first robot lawyer." There were all sorts of sketchy things going on, some of which dated back to DoNotPay's" earliest days. But things really came to a head last year when legal investigator extraordinaire, Kathryn Tewson, started digging in and [...]

One of the most horrific acts of police brutality has now resulted in two DOJ investigations. The first concerned the torture of Michael Jenkins and Eddie Parker by six white deputies who referred to themselves as the Goon Squad" for their willingness to break rules and violate rights. The first investigation involved the incident itself [...]

uTalk can help you start speaking like a native within minutes. Using the uTalk learning App you can listen to real native speakers to help you navigate through your next vacation or business trip.With more than 2,500 words and phrases to learn in each of our 140+ languages, the app gives you a running start [...]

Among the key reasons Elon Musk insisted he had to buy Twitter were (1) that it was too political in how it was managed and how content moderation was done, (2) the company was not as transparent as it should be, and (3) it was too quick to censor. Since taking over, Elon has been [...]

Two years ago, Techdirt's Copia Institute released a report discussing how open access fiber networks were a potential path toward boosting fiber competition in the United States. Such networks, sometimes community owned, involve collaboratively building a centralized fiber infrastructure that multiple competitors can come in and compete over. In instances where this has been successfully [...]

We've talked a great deal about the trademark adventurism of famed burger chain In-N-Out. While In-N-Out has shown itself to be a happy trademark bully in several ways, most of our posts on the company have to do with the trademark tourism it engages in. This is the process by which the company puts up [...]

Efforts in Congress to ban the use of AI in political ads have largely stalled. So, naturally, the White House is attempting an end-around through the Federal Communications Commission. While not an outright ban, the FCC's proposal to regulate the use of artificial intelligence in political ads is an example of Washington bureaucrats not understanding [...]

This is pretty harrowing all the way through. No one's getting away with anything, so there's that small comfort. But what motivates a well-liked sheriff of a small county in Kentucky to cross every possible line and kill a judge in his own chambers? The facts, as they were first presented by numerous sources, did [...]

One of the reasons that today's copyright is such a bad fit for the modern digital world is that its roots lie deep in 18th-century law and analogue objects like books. This fact has created a kind of legislative drag that means copyright is always decades behind the latest technological developments. A case in point [...]

In my time covering internet speech issues, I've seen some truly ridiculous arguments regarding Section 230. I even created my ever-handy Hello! You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About Section 230 Of The Communications Decency Act" article four years ago, which still gets a ton of traffic to this day. But I'm not sure [...]

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Well, it worked. We'll have to see how this plays out in the lawsuit WhatsApp brought against NSO Group, but it has managed to shed one litigant thanks to intervention from the home team: the Israeli government. In July, documents obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) revealed the desperate measures NSO Group deployed to [...]

Back in 2017, the Trump administration signed new rules banning Russian-based Kaspersky software on all government computers. Last June, the Biden administration took things further and banned distribution and sale of the software, stating that the company's ties to the Russian government made its intimacy with U.S. consumer devices and data a national security threat. [...]

I don't know why the press feels the need to provide cover for law enforcement officers who screw up so badly they injure innocent people and their own coworkers. But they do. It's not even the view from nowhere." It's the view mostly likely to exonerate cops by the end of the headline." And since [...]

Agree with them or not, the folks behind Cards Against Humanity certainly do have a penchant for flair. As you may recall, back during the Trump presidency, when we were still hearing about how a border wall would be built and then billed back to a sovereign nation that was absolutely never going to pay [...]

Elon Musk's superpower does not appear to be rocket science or electric cars-it's an uncanny ability to misunderstand why ExTwitter's features exist. The clear takeaway from the book Character Limit" about his Twitter takeover was that he only views the platform's features through the lens of whether or not he, the richest man in the [...]

Tennessee's government cranks out a lot of stupid laws. It's been doing it for years, but things have accelerated recently as the state's legislators seek to curtail rights for, well, pretty much everyone but white men. It has enacted book bans, anti-trans laws, and the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision triggered its long-dormant anti-abortion law. But [...]

The Ultimate Learn Unity Game Development Bundle has 10 courses to help you learn how to create your own games. Unity allows you to easily make cross-platform 2D, 3D, VR, AR, and mobile games. It powers indie and AAA games, films, job training apps, and much more - making it a versatile program that's used [...]

I do not understand why California Governor Gavin Newsom thinks he has to be the Democratic equivalent of Texas Governor Greg Abbott or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, signing obviously unconstitutional laws for the sake of winning culture war arguments. It's really shameful. It's cheap political pandering, while disrespecting the rights of everyone he's supposed to [...]

Last July the FCC announced it was moving forward with plans that should make unlocking your mobile phone easier than ever. According tothe FCC announcement, the agency, with broad and bipartisan public support, has been working on new rules requiring that wireless carriers unlock customers' mobile phones within 60 days of activation. Wireless carriers, trying [...]

It happened again and it has to stop. Back in 2014, we talked about how a UK woman had trouble getting her passport approved because her middle name was Skywalker" and the UK's passport office for some reason thought that Disney would have to give its permission to have the passport approved. There is nothing [...]

The writing was on the wall, or rather, on the City of Chicago's Inspector General's report: The CPD data examined by OIG does not support a conclusion that ShotSpotter is an effective tool in developing evidence of gun-related crime. Kind of a big problem when the tech was acquired specifically to address Chicago's years-long acceleration [...]

Back in March, Walled Culture wrote about theterrible jobthat academic publishers are doing in terms of creating backups of the articles they publish. We also mentioned there two large-scale archives that are trying to help,Sci-HubandAnna's Archive. Legal action by publishers against the former seems to have led to a halt to new items being added [...]

If it can be accessed via the internet, it will be. That's a fact too many entities learn far too late. Amazingly, this wholly expected outcome often comes as a surprise to entities with lots power, money, or expertise - the sort of people you'd think would have considered all possible outcomes before giving a [...]

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I've covered telecom giants like AT&T for most of an adult life. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that the company all but owns most state legislatures, who are happy to pass no limit of terrible, anti-consumer, anti-competitive legislation in exchange for a nice vacation trip or campaign contribution. AT&T lawyers and executives [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous response to a comment arguing that Cloudflare isn't very important to the internet: I would like to hear your argument as to why DDoS mitigation is not an essential part of hosting a website in 2024. In second place, it's an anonymous [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, some investors were getting sick of AT&T's obsession with mergers, leading the company to think about dumping DirecTV. Nintendo was ramping up its war on ROM websites, while Congress was moving forward with plans to massively increase copyright trolling. The DOJ helped boost Ed Snowden's memoir by suing [...]

As we just talked about the joint lawsuit filed in Japan by Nintendo and The Pokemon Co. against Pocketpair, the company behind the hit game Palworld, we still don't have all the details. But one of the strange things about the suit is that is not a copyright or trademark suit, which is what everyone [...]

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 [...]

MAGA world's false belief that Joe Biden is censoring conservatives" on social media may actually kill the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). As we mentioned earlier this week, while KOSA has already passed the Senate and advanced in a different form out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, there were still big concerns among [...]

We all hate data brokers. I mean, those of us who aren't in law enforcement. Law enforcement tends to love data brokers because they allow investigators to collect a bunch of stuff (including location info) without having to whip up a subpoena or (the horror...) ask a judge to sign off on a warrant. Nope, [...]

The Ultimate Adobe CC Training Bundle has 12 courses to help you get the most out of the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite. Courses cover Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, After Effects, and more. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt [...]

Elon Musk fought the Brazilian law, and it looks like the Brazilian law won. After making a big show of how he was supposedly standing up for free speech, Elon caved yet again. Just as happened back in April when he first refused to comply with court orders from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, [...]

Cable broadband giants like Charter Communications (Spectrum) and Comcast (Xfinity) generally don't have to try very hard, because they enjoy a monopoly over broadband access across vast swaths of the U.S. That lack of competition traditionally results in high prices, spotty access, slow speeds, and some of the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any sector [...]

Oh, these law and order" types. What a joke. The self-proclaimed law and order" candidate is Donald Trump, a convicted felon and open supporter of those who committed federal crimes during the January 6th raid of the Capitol building. And, of course, he's earned the endorsement of another law and order" figurehead, the Fraternal Order [...]

The United States is already a global leader in traffic-related fatalities, with athirty-percent jump in the last decade. That's in contrast toevery other developed country, which saw a decline. 40,000 Americans die every year in traffic fatalities. And while tech advancements have made life safer for drivers and passengers, the same can't be true for [...]

Well, it took awhile, but we finally got here. Earlier this year, we discussed the game Palworld shortly after its release. It made our pages because the game is clearly partially inspired by the Pokemon series of video games, with some very stark differences. Similarities aside, the characters in the game are certainly different than [...]

As California edges closer to enacting SB 1047, the state risks throwing the entire AI industry into turmoil. The bill has already cleared the legislative process and now sits on Governor Newsom's desk, leaving him with a critical decision: veto this ill-conceived policy or sign away the U.S.' future in AI. While Newsom appears skeptical [...]

The FBI and DOJ have always felt comfortable going after Islamic extremists. That's the sort of thing they like to do. They like it so much they'll radicalize vulnerable people for the sole purpose of locking them up for multiple decades. A lot of digital ink has been spilled covering the FBI's success rate in [...]

Learn how to improve your data skills with the 2024 Beginner Data Science Bundle. The bundle has 9 courses covering Python, SQL, Power BI, Tableau, and more. It's on sale for $36. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The [...]

Automation and language learning models aren't inherently bad. But when half-cooked automation is layered on top of very broken systems by greedy, incompetent people, it certainly can be. See, for example, the way brunchlords are using AI" to cut corners or undermine labor in journalism, or the way insurance companies are using it to automatically [...]

Have you been missing patent trolls destroying innovation and making products you like more expensive? Have you felt that, maybe, some lawyers who did nothing but send extortionate shakedown letters weren't getting rich enough? Well then, good news for you, Congress is looking to bring all that back! In the early years of Techdirt, we [...]