Techdirt

On August 11, the Marion County PD - with the assistance of the Kansas Department of Revenue, the county sheriff's office, and (for some fucking reason) the local fire marshal - raided the office of the Marion County Record, along with the home of its co-owner, 98-year-old Joan Meyer. The raid was prompted by the [...]

Last week, we wrote about the potential for Senator Josh Hawley to hotline" the bill that he put together with Senator Richard Blumenthal to remove Section 230 from anything touching artificial intelligence. As we noted at the time, even if you hate both generative AI technology and Section 230, the bill was so poorly drafted [...]

Turn any text or script into a lifelike natural human voice in easy 3 steps using Textalky, a powerful AI text-to-speech synthesizer. No robotic voices. TexTalky uses the latest cloud-based AI technology powered by Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon. It covers more than 140 international languages and dialects, and over 900 kinds of lifelike human [...]

Oh Elon. As we've discussed, Elon is infatuated with Community Notes as a sort of crowdsourced alternative to actually funding a trust & safety staff and tooling. And while we actually like Community Notes and think more social media should use similar tools, it's simply not a full trust & safety replacement. But, over the [...]

We've long noted how the FCC (regardless of party) largely ignores how muted competition and monopolization drives up prices for consumers. The agency often talks a good (if ambiguous) game about bridging the digital divide," but they don't collect and share pricing data proving market failure, nor are they capable of admitting monopolies exist and [...]

The NYPD's refusal to engage in nearly any form of accountability means it's up to the city's residents to pay billions for police work that adds tens of millions to the tab with lawsuit settlements. In 2022, the NYPD cost residents $121 million in settlements. This came on top of the NYPD's budget, which cleared [...]

One of my favorite ways that lame trademark fights end is when the victim of the bullying makes slight changes to their branding such that it pokes the bully in the eye while still getting the victim out of legal harm's way. When you couple that with the beer industry, all the more so. After [...]

As is the case any time surveillance powers are up for renewal, there's always a chance to reform them. Most of these efforts tend to get derailed by a majority of legislators who just want to push things through before any lively discussion takes place. Every so often, legislation is passed that modifies authorized powers [...]

We've already talked a bit about Elon Musk's obvious censorial bullshit lawsuit against Media Matters. It's quite obvious from the lawsuit that his intent is to intimidate critics and suppress speech about hateful content on ExTwitter. So far, it's not working, as that lawsuit seems to have inspired more people to find more ads next [...]

If nothing else, Senator Ron Wyden is keeping us on top of the surveillance curve. The privacy-focused senator has asked more uncomfortable questions of more federal agencies than anyone since the Church Committee. Sometimes it's new stuff. Sometimes it's stuff that's been around for years, but no one bothered to question it until Wyden. Sometimes [...]

Apple has spent the past few years pushing the marketing message that it, alone among the big tech companies, is dedicated to your privacy. This has always been something of an exaggeration, but certainly less of Apple's business is based around making use of your data, and the company has built in some useful encryption [...]

It wasn't that long ago that cable TV execs were trying to claim that cord cutting" was either outright fiction, or a fad that would end once Millennials started procreating. The willful denial among cable execs was downright palpable for the better part of the last decade. Now they all just pretend like they never [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad, expanding on the fact that Iowa's book ban demonstrates hatred of LGBTQ people: Or women. Denying information on the HPV vaccine is more inline with the notion that women who are sexually active deserve to get STDs. In second place, it's Toom1275 responding [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, we looked at the utter failure of FOSTA as more lives were put at risk, while we learned more about why Facebook changed its priorities to support the bill, and then one of the most high-profile impacts happened with Tumblr banning sexual content (and then Facebook unveiled new [...]

Uh, well, okay then. I really thought we were done with the whole Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard saga. Hell, I even wrote what I thought was a final post on the matter, called the post a curtain call, and discussed how the deal had passed all the regulatory barriers and had been consumated. That happened [...]

Here we go again, everyone. Another far-right state lawmaker has introduced a bill requiring age verification in order to access porn sites from within state limits. This time it is Tennessee state Rep. Patsy Hazlewood who introduced yet another extreme age verification proposal that essentially makes it a crime to own a legally operating porn [...]

A little over a month ago we told the Copyright Office in a comment that there was no role for copyright law to play when it comes to training AI systems. In fact, on the whole there's little for copyright law to do to address the externalities of AI at all. No matter how one [...]

For many, many years we've been calling on companies to enable end-to-end encryption by default on any messaging/communications tools. It's important to recognize that doing so correctly is difficult, but not impossible (similarly, it's important to recognize that doing so poorly is dangerous, as it will lead people to believe their communications are secure when [...]

New York law enforcement agencies have always considered transparency to be something to be foisted on other government entities. The NYPD spends a lot of its time screwing over public records requests, in one notable case rejecting a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request for a copy of its FOIL response guidelines. For years, these [...]

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 the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you'll [...]

When Elon filed his recent ridiculous SLAPP suit against Media Matters, it was noteworthy (but not surprising) to me to see people who not only claimed to be free speech supporters," but who made that a key part of their persona, cheering on the lawsuit, even though its only purpose was to use the power [...]

Last year agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itself on the receiving end of an antitrust lawsuit for its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company's own repair facilities, driving up costs and [...]

The killing of Eric Garner - an unarmed black man - by white NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo was yet another in long and unending series of flashpoints that generated nationwide protests against police violence. Of course, the NYPD felt its officer, one in plainclothes who choked Eric Garner to death over the alleged crime of [...]

Two years ago Techdirt wrote about an attempt by Sony Music in Germany to implicate Quad9, a free anycast DNS platform (Cloudflare has technical details on what recursive" means in this context), in copyright infringement at the domains it resolves. That was bad news for at least two reasons. First, because Quad9 is operated by [...]

No one's more willing to abuse a law than a cop. They pretend they don't understand the complexities of laws when it suits them. But they're always right on top of any law that might protect them from the consequences of their own actions. Enter the somewhat infamous Marsy's Laws" that have been passed in [...]

As you know, the Supreme Court is now considering the NetChoice/CCIA cases challenging two similar (but not identical) state laws regarding social media moderation. The laws in Florida and Texas came about around the same time, and were clearly written to target ideological speech. Both of them put restrictions on how certain social media apps [...]

Possibly legally-obtained funds traveling from Point A to Point B? Those belong to the law enforcement middlemen. That's how Wyoming's top court explains things, in a decision [PDF] that says money obtained from legal drug sales in other states can be stolen by cops who operate in a state where this drug isn't legal. Those [...]

Embrace the evolution of image scanning technology with the Kodak Slide N Scan Digital Film Scanner. This state-of-the-art device is designed to digitally preserve and enhance your cherished memories, ensuring they stay vivid for years to come. The Slide N Scan Digital Film Scanner can effortlessly scan color and B&W negatives (135, 110, 126) and [...]

Over the years we've written about plenty of cyberespionge" companies. Some engage in spyware or surveillance ware. Others actively hack devices. Almost all of these eventually get exposed through dogged investigative reporting. A few people reached out to point to this rather concerning Editor's note that was posted to Reuters this week: Reuters has temporarily [...]

Back in September Mozilla released a scathing report showing how modern vehicles are a privacy shitshow. After studying vehicle systems for over 600 hours, researchers found that most cars hoover up vast swaths of sensitive location and other information on consumers, then, like most companies, sell access to that data to pretty much any nitwit [...]

In October, California became the first state in the nation to ban excited delirium" as an official cause of death. While this was a positive development, the question remains: why did it take so long? Excited delirium" was never a real thing. It has always been a convenient excuse for deaths at the hands of [...]

For some reason, there are enough people who are ignorant enough about trademark law such that every once in a while you get people who don't like a thing trying to trademark that thing thinking they can prevent that thing from being done or used. It's a form of trademark squatting. Confused? An example would [...]

We've seen lots of... shall we say... misguided libel lawsuits here at Techdirt. We've also seen plenty of lawsuits filed for the sole purpose of bullying someone into silence for reporting inconvenient facts. This case is more of the misguided" variety. Someone who clearly doesn't understand the basics of libel law filed a lawsuit against [...]

Twitch has announced that the company is shutting down in Korea after regulators there imposed a ridiculous new regulatory framework that drove the company's operational costs through the roof. Basically: Korean telecoms convinced gullible regulators to pass a new regulatory framework wherein edge providers and content companies are forced to pay telecoms additional fees just [...]

This Apple Watch Portable USB Charger allows you to charge anytime, anywhere. With a built-in magnetic adsorption module, you can charge your watch immediately after contact. This charger has the ability to charge your watch within 2 to 3 hours fully. It's lightweight and portable, so you can charge your watch while traveling, when working [...]

Over the past few days I've been hearing lots of buzz claiming that either today or tomorrow Senator Josh Hawley is going to push to hotline" the bill he and Senator Richard Blumenthal introduced months back to explicitly exempt AI from Section 230. Hotlining a bill is basically an attempt to move the bill quickly [...]

Americans pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for broadband due to consolidated monopoly power and feckless regulators. It's a problem the U.S. government lacks the competence or political integrity to fix. So what we usually get are strange Band-Aids that treat the symptoms of the underlying problem (unchecked corporate power muting [...]

Thank you for joining us for your latest lesson in how you don't actually own the things you buy when you buy them digitally. Over a year ago, we discussed a story out of Germany and Austria where a deal expired between Sony and movie distributor StudioCanal, which resulted in 100s of movies being delisted [...]

Last week we wrote about how Montana's ridiculous TikTok ban was blocked by a judge for being fairly obviously unconstitutional. But in the rush of the moral panic over TikTok coming from all over, I had missed that Indiana had sued the company. The argument was that TikTok had violated child safety laws," and in [...]

We've got another cross-post episode this week! Recently, Mike joined the debut episode of the new Dot Social podcast from Flipboard CEO Mike McCue for a discussion about decentralized social media and the open social web, and the ways in which they are poised to spur widespread innovation. You can listen to the whole conversation [...]

On one hand, the Lina Khan FTC has been the toughest agency in history when it comes to right to repair" reform - or efforts to let you affordably repair your own tech. On the other hand, given past regulatory actions have been minimal, that's not historically saying much. Still, the FTC under Khan's leadership [...]

It seems that every other day or so we get another story of big tech companies tossing principles out the window and caving to ridiculous government demands. The latest is Google, yet again, which has cut a deal with the Canadian government to bribe news orgs with $100 million to pay them off to avoid [...]

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Looks like everybody who's anybody has got a set of hacking tools in Canada. Well, at least in terms of the federal government. Documents obtained by the CBC shed some light on the prevalence of phone-cracking tech within the government. And what that light shows isn't all that flattering. Tools capable of extracting personal data [...]

Automakers are increasingly obsessed with turning everything into a subscription service in a bid to boost quarterly returns. We've noted how BMW has embracedmaking heated seats and other features already in your car a subscription service, and Mercedes has been makingbetter gas and EV engine performancesomething you have to pay extra for - even if [...]

Earlier this year we discussed an app being removed from the Google Play store over copyright concerns and a DMCA notice that was sent in by a firm representing several Israeli television networks. The app, called Downloader," was created by Elias Saba, and he was very confused by the takedown. The reason for his confusion [...]

I continue to be sickened and saddened that this country - considered the Land of the Free - continues to devolve (rapidly!) into a place where intolerance and bigotry are being written into law. And all it took was a four-year calamity headed up by one of the worst presidents in history, Donald Trump. His [...]

About a year ago, the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web asked if I would help edit and compile a magazine" talking about decentralization and why it's important. It was a fun and interesting challenge, and now the final product is out, the D-Web Digest. There are a bunch of fascinating articles in there, which [...]

It's simply not enough to be part of one problem. The DEA feels the need to be part of several problems. You'd think it would have its hands full blowing billions of dollars on a lost drug war and filling people's heads with hysterical stupidity about the magical powers of fentanyl. But, as FOIA terrorist [...]

Linux is the most fundamental technology required by all real developers. It is required in almost all fields of Software engineering. DevOps, Cloud, Full Stack, and App developers must have a working knowledge of Linux. With five comprehensive modules and over 40 Linux technologies covered, this Linux Training Bundle offers a detailed program tailored for [...]