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This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Rico R. with a comment about the Surgeon General's call for a warning label on social media: In second place, it's an anonymous comment about the fictional crime wave: There's another factor underlying this A lot of the people wailing about a historic crime wave" [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we reiterated the all-important point that there is no legal distinction between a platform" and a publisher", and explained why the freedom to decide what content to facilitate is essential to Section 230, while the Supreme Court signaled its recognition that social media sites don't have to allow [...]

When school students are tested, those overseeing the tests seemingly are willing to do whatever it takes to prevent cheating, even if it means utilizing extremely intrusive spyware to lower the risk of dishonesty. Students are just supposed to take this in stride, but the lessons they'll often learn of just how little respect school [...]

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 [...]

Definitely loving all of this. And right up front (just in case the defendant thinks she can rob Peter Techdirt to pay Paul Eric Posey), I'll make it clear this post will be filled with colorful expression, hyperbole, highly opinionated takes on the lawsuit, and... possibly... archaic slang. A lot of people (especially the most [...]

If ExTwitter is the bastion of free speech, you would think that it would allow for the publishing of newsworthy documents revealing a politician's funding briefings, right? Apparently not when that politician is politically aligned with Elon Musk, whose commitment to open discourse appears to be about as floppy as the Cybertruck's giant windshield wiper. [...]

New York Governor Kathy Hochul's response to the horrifying shootings in Buffalo in 2022 was not to look for ways to limit access to guns or improve mental health care. It was not to look into why law enforcement ignored the threats that the shooter had made, which they were aware of. It was not [...]

Fire up a wild ride across the cosmos with a fresh take on Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. In this third-person action-adventure game, you are Star-Lord, and thanks to your bold yet questionable leadership, you have persuaded an oddball crew of unlikely heroes to join you. Some jerk (surely not you) has set off a [...]

The inevitable is upon us: a police officer has been caught using Clearview AI for non-law enforcement purposes. That wouldn't mean anything if the officer had private access to the most ethically dubious player in the facial recognition tech market. But he didn't. He was using access purchased by his employer, so it wasn't only [...]

Back in 2018 (pre-brunchlord owned) Deadspin posted the definitive video on Sinclair Broadcasting, highlighting in less than two and a half minutes how the local broadcaster is a right wing propaganda mill pretending to be a local news organization and the poster child for why media consolidation limits still matter: Like Fox News, OAN, Newsmax, [...]

As the line from the Bill Murray movies goes, It's Groundhog Day... again." Back in 2015, Valve launched its Paid Creations" platform on the Steam client, through which those who made game mods could list them in a marketplace for a cost. This was done at least in coordination with, if not at the behest [...]

Shortly after the company's $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit in 2019, Google Senior VP Rick Osterloh wrote a blog post proclaiming that the merger would result in better and cheaper fitness tracking tech: We're confident the combination of Fitbit's leading technology, product expertise and health and wellness innovation with the best of Google's AI, software [...]

ShotSpotter isn't having a great year. Or two. Its tech has been called into question - both for its ability to truly detect gunshots and for its contribution (if any) to public safety. What is known about ShotSpotter isn't great. The most in-depth examination of the tech was performed by the Inspector General of the [...]

If you found out that 500,000 books had been removed from your local public library, at the demands of big publishers who refused to let them buy and lend new copies, and were further suing the library for damages, wouldn't you think that would be a major news story? Wouldn't you think many people would [...]

We had a post earlier this week about the silliness of the Surgeon General's idea for a warning on social media, and that linked to a longer piece Mike wrote about it at The Daily Beast, which talked about a similar push by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop getting upset about video games. The [...]

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 [...]

There's a large contingent of people who want you to believe each successive year is worse than the last one. Despite being the beneficiary of a two-decade run of historically low crime rates, the United States is often portrayed as a crime-ridden wasteland where only the bravest dare to police the mean streets. This year [...]

Like so many of Elon Musk's accomplishments, the importance of his Starlink low-Earth orbit efforts is quite often overstated. While a great option for those in remote locations who can actually afford the steep price tag (affordability often tops access as the top barrier to broadband adoption), the network hasstruggled with speed issuesdue to satellite [...]

If you're in any way interested in tabletop board games, you will likely be familiar with the term meeple." If you're not, the term refers to the small game piece that represents the player or the player's people, to be moved around the board or gameset during play. It has become a ubiquitous term in [...]

In terms of percentages, does the law enforcement community employ a larger number of sexual abusers? Or is it something else? It's difficult to prove any of this with statistics, especially since most law enforcement agencies in the nation are able to bury this information, citing state laws, confidentiality agreements with police unions, or the [...]

In the conversation about keeping kids safe online, the actual experts with the most to offer are all too often treated as outsiders and interlopers. One such expert is Candice Odgers, Professor of Psychological Science and Informatics at the University of California Irvine, who has recently been involved in a lot of debates against people [...]

We've noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate AI" into journalism have proven to be acomical mess, resulting in no shortage ofshoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It's thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and [...]

This lawsuit might be a long shot, but it's not completely a foregone conclusion at this point. The state of Illinois has tougher privacy laws than most states, which may factor into the judge's decision. On the other hand, this lawsuit - filed by two Illinois residents with the assistance of the Liberty Justice Center [...]

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You may have heard that yesterday the Surgeon General of the US, Vivek Murthy, announced that Congress should mandate Surgeon General warnings" on social media, saying that it is harmful to kids. Over at the Daily Beast I went into great detail about just how far from the actual science this suggestion is. As with [...]

We've noted repeatedly how T-Mobile simply hasn't been the same company since its controversial 2020 merger with Sprint. All of the pre-merger concerns deal critics warned about came true, whether it was 9,000 layoffs, worse service, or higher wireless prices. Long gone is the company's John Legere-era pretense that it was ever seriously interested in [...]

Every report delivered by the DOJ's Civil Rights Division can be described as scathing" or damning." There are simply no exceptions to this rule. It's not like the Civil Rights unit picks a US law enforcement agency out of the hat and then initiates an investigation. (Maybe it should? I mean, I'm sure there's plenty [...]

Last Halloween, thousands of users for U.S. broadband provider Windstream began complaining online about the fact that their routers simply stopped working. At the time, Windstream (one of the worst ranked ISPs in the country) sent users replacement routers, but couldn't be bothered to transparently inform customers what was happening. More than half a year [...]

Clearview was probably its healthiest when it was still flying under the radar. It courted billionaires with a new facial recognition tech plaything - one capable of searching millions (and, ultimately, billions) of images for a match for any uploaded photo. The dirty secret? All of the images and data had been scraped from the [...]

You know those lawsuits where you kinda hope everyone can lose? Yeah. This is one of those. Some crypto bros are suing the world's most hated pharma bro, who jacked up prices on some essential pharmaceuticals before eventually being arrested and sentenced to jail. And the lawsuit is about a Wu-Tang album that almost no [...]

The Complete Cisco Training Bundle has 6 courses to help you get ready to become certified. Courses cover al you need to know as a CCNA, CCEA, 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 Deals helps support [...]

Sheriffs answer to no one but voters. Consequently, they often answer to no one. Voters tend to gravitate towards names they recognize. Sheriffs count on this form of loyalty" to ensure years or decades at the helm of a county law enforcement agency. And this loyalty continues to pay off even when sheriffs are less [...]

We've noted more than a few times that for all of the government's talk about wanting to bridge the digital divide," it's consistently struggled to even map where broadband access is or isn't available. The government has spent more than $400 million on trying to map broadband access to date, and while there certainly have [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous reply to someone comparing Black History Month to white power celebrations: Black people: celebrating overcoming slavery and other historical injustices Nazis: celebrating having white skin, and committing historical injustices Idiots on the internet: these are the same thing" In second place, it's [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, we looked at the two-sided political attacks on Section 230, while an appeals court issued a strong but easily-misrepresented Section 230 ruling, and the law was also used to begin smackin down a lawsuit from Craig Brittain. A prominent copyright troll ran away when finally challenged, the NY [...]

We know cops kill dozens of dogs every day. This much has been verified by the US Department of Justice, which called it an epidemic." It's not just anecdotal evidence generated by a handful of court cases. We also know most cops who kill dogs get away with it, even though multiple courts have ruled [...]

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 [...]

Whether intentional or not, the process for tech companies to fall to the process of enshittification seems to be a very real trend. The term, coined by Cory Doctorow, describes the process by which once good and useful technology platforms devolve to become worse and less useful as the owners of those platforms move on [...]

Reminding everyone that racism is just a thing we do in the United States, six Rankin County deputies were indicated on criminal charges related to the literal torture of two black men. All six pleaded guilty. Deputy Hunter Elward was sentenced to 17.5 years in prison. The other officers are also currently serving prison time. [...]

For not the first time, the Supreme Court seems to regard the First Amendment as secondary when it comes to cases involving some form of intellectual property. This has happened all too frequently. Perhaps most famously, in Eldred v. Ashcroft, the Court more or less said that the First Amendment gets a pass in copyright [...]

Demand for Python is booming in the job market and it is a skill that can help you enter some of the most exciting industries, including data science, web applications, home automation, and many more. The 2024 Python for Software Engineering Bootcamp Bundle has 7 courses to take you from beginner to expert in no [...]

Certain government agencies are of the opinion that records requesters shouldn't even be able to pry the documents they're seeking from their cold, dead fingers. Long after anyone could be affected and long after the people who've created the documents have passed on to the Great Bureaucracy in the Sky, agencies are still refusing to [...]

Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime for years in both theUSandEU, trying to get policymakers to support the idea of Big Tech" paying Big Telecom" billions of additional dollars for no coherent reason. This taxation effort always involves some variant of the claim that popular tech services are getting a free ride" on the Internet, [...]

There seems to be a direct correlation between the size of a sports league or group and the degree to which that same entity will jealously protect" anything to do with its intellectual property. The International Olympic Committee is probably the apotheosis of this theory, though both FIFA and the NFL are strong showings as [...]

Here comes a little more bad news for a company that's seen quite a lot of it lately. SoundThinking, which formerly did business as ShotSpotter, is seeing another high-profile, would-be customer walk away from the table after determining the costs would outweigh the benefits. As Matt Markovich reports for KIRO News, Seattle has decided to [...]

A suggestion for Elon: next time you take over a company and decide to immediately fire three-quarters of the staff, maybe hold onto a few of the payroll staff before you do. It might help you avoid some mistakes. You may recall that early on Musk laid off well over half of the staff at [...]

A lot of laws have been passed in Europe that regulate the content American companies can carry. Most of these laws were passed to tamp down on speech that would be otherwise legal in the United States, but not so much in Europe where free speech rights aren't given the same sort of protections found [...]

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Forget everything you think you know about Mark Zuckerberg and his army of lobbyists blocking any attempt to regulate social media. The truth is more nuanced (but perhaps less complicated). Meta is actually happy with internet regulations: they keep down competitive threats. I've been trying to make this point for a while: while politicians and [...]

Canadian Regulators are leaning on new authority built into the 2023 Online Streaming Act to impose a new 5 percent tax on streaming TV and music services like Netflix and Spotify; funding that the regulator says will then be used to help fund Canadian broadcasting. According to the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announcement, [...]