Techdirt

A few people have been asking me about last week's release of something called the Westminster Declaration," which is a high and mighty sounding declaration" about freedom of speech, signed by a bunch of journalists, academics, advocates and more. It reminded me a lot of the infamous Harper's Letter" from a few years ago that [...]

The TSA was imposed on us following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Supposedly necessitated by this new" terrorist threat, the TSA shrugged into action, becoming another layer of irritating bureaucracy standing between benign travelers and their freedom of movement. Since then, it has gotten worse. The TSA has spent billions on tech, training, [...]

I really wish we could fast forward a few decades to the point where we look back on the moral panic over kids and social media and laugh about it, the same way we now laugh about similar moral panics regarding television, Dungeons & Dragons, rock & roll music, comic books, pinball, chess, novels, and [...]

So we've been talking a lot about how as the streaming video market matures, it's increasingly behaving a lot like the old, shitty cable companies the sector once disrupted. Instead of innovation and risk taking, we're seeing endless price hikes, lower quality catalogs, strange new catalog gaps, labor issues, ethically flimsier policy positions, annoying new [...]

The tradition of game developers trolling those who pirate or otherwise use their games rather than immediately going the legal route has a long history. There are lots of ways to do this, most of which involve either breaking the game in certain ways, or inputting Easter eggs into games that cause those pirating it [...]

This blog has written a number of times about the reaction of creators togenerative AI. Legal academic and copyright expertAndres Guadamuzhas spotted what may be the first attempt to draw upa new law to regulate generative AI. It comes from French politicians, who have developed something of a habit of bringing in new laws attempting [...]

We've written plenty about facial recognition here on Techdirt, and especially the infamous Clearview AI. Now, journalist Kashmir Hill, who wrote the original New York Times story that brought the company to the public's attention, has written a new book all about the subject: Your Face Belongs To Us. This week, she joins us on [...]

I am so frequently confused by companies that sue other companies for making their own sites and services more useful. It happens quite often. And quite often, the lawsuits are questionable CFAA claims against websites that scrape data to provide a better consumer experience, but one that still ultimately benefits the originating site. Over the [...]

The Complete 2023 Microsoft Power BI Super Bundle has 9 courses to teach you all about Power BI. Power BI allows the everyday Excel user to become a Business Intelligence Analyst. This hands-on course will prepare you to start your data analytics career and prepare you to implement Power BI in your organization successfully. Create [...]

Perception matters more than reality, especially when your budget is on the line. Law enforcement agencies like to portray criminal activity as constantly rising, especially now that they're facing additional scrutiny and the occasional so-called defunding" effort. It's a weird way to handle (government) business. On one hand, the cops claim rising crime necessitates more [...]

Last week, the New York Times reported that Apple had cancelled The Problem With Jon Stewart." More importantly, the Times noted that Apple executives, clearly not at all worried about the need for a healthy editorial firewall, had grown uncomfortable with the way that the program was planning to cover issues such as China and [...]

In the middle of last year, we talked about an odd lawsuit between two bakeries, Crumbl and Dirty Dough. Crumbl's suit against Dirty Dough claimed both theft of trade secrets and trademark infringement, the latter of which revolved around two major claims. First, the owner of Dirty Dough used to work for Crumbl. That obviously [...]

Here's how things went for the world's most infamous purveyor of facial recognition tech when it came to its dealings with the United Kingdom. In a word: not great. In addition to supplying its scraped data to known human rights abusers, Clearview was found to have supplied access to a multitude of UK and US [...]

The fog of war" is a phrase that has been used for over a hundred years to describe the profound uncertainty that envelops armed conflicts while they are happening. Today, the uncertainty for non-combatants is exacerbated by the rapid-fire nature of social media, where people often like or re-post dubious war-related material without scrutinizing it [...]

You'd think this legal question would be settled by now. Smartphones have been in everyday use for more than a decade. Citizen journalists have been part of our daily life ever since the advent of affordable portable cameras. The internet has democratized publication, lowering the barrier between observation and accountability. Cops hate this. But the [...]

It's pretty much the way of the world: beyond the basic enshittification story that has been so well told over the past year or so about how companies get worse and worse as they get more and more powerful, there's also the well known concept of successful innovative companies pulling up the ladder" behind them, [...]

Lean Six Sigma is one of the most popular business strategies for reducing waste, accelerating product delivery, and ultimately driving profit. With 4 courses, this bundle will help you learn lean project management principles and implement them with your organization's overall business process. This will contribute to making data-driven decisions, saving more time, and improving [...]

In the annals of law enforcement's neglect - if not actual disdain - for its alleged desire to serve and protect," this is surely on of the weirdest and most specific episodes in its ongoing infamy. It hearkens back to a simpler time when smartphones were mere extensions of people's desire to catch digital creatures [...]

Cleveland has spent years being dubbed the worst connected city in the U.S." thanks to expensive, patchy, and slow broadband. Why Cleveland broadband sucks so badly isn't really a mystery: consolidated monopoly/duopoly power has resulted in a broken market where local giants like AT&T and Charter don't have to compete on price, speeds, availability, customer [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Clarence Thomas using an originalism argument against the actual malice standard: I once again note that if Clarence Thomas truly believed in constitutional originalism-i.e., the notion that the ghosts of the Founding Fathers and the original form [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, we featured a pair of posts examining the recent court ruling in the copyright lawsuit over Stairway to Heaven. A new study on the FCC public comment fiasco showed that 99.7% of the real, original comments opposed the net neutrality repeal, while the New York AG was trying [...]

Excited delirium is a very unique medical condition. It almost always kills its victims. The victims of this apparent sudden cause of death are almost always in the presence of police officers when they die. And the victims are almost always of a certain... type. A 2021 data analysis found that at least 56% of [...]

We've been following the bizarre and frequently problematic case initially brought by Louisiana and Missouri against the Biden administration, claiming that the administration's coordination with researchers and pressure on social media companies regarding how they moderate content violates the first amendment. As we've said for quite some time, there are legitimate and important questions about [...]

As you hopefully know by now, earlier this week we launched our new game, Trust & Safety Tycoon. It's a free, browser-based game (playable on desktop or mobile, though we recommend desktop for the best experience) that puts you in the shoes of the head of trust and safety at a rapidly growing social media [...]

We have long detailed through a series of posts, most of them based on fantastic reporting from Pro Publica, Intuit's shady bullshit when it comes to its supposed Free to File" program offered through a longstanding deal with the IRS. The summary is: massive tax prep companies cut a deal with the IRS so that [...]

Make enough bad choices and, sooner or later, those decisions are going to come back to haunt you. Or, at least, haunt the 50 or so employees you've laid off because your past performance has made it all but impossible to pitch your tech to US government agencies. That's the case here, as reported by [...]

This 4-In-1 Apple Watch & iPhone Charging Cable will allow you to charge up to 4 devices at the same time while saving space. It comes with 2 Lightning, 1 USB-C & 1 Watch charger ports, and the watch port is magnetic. It's a perfect cable to carry when traveling or just to keep around [...]

We've highlighted in great detail how KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act), sponsored by Senators Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn, which currently has an astounding 46 cosponsors, will be used to stifle LGBTQ voices. We know this because Republicans keep telling us that's exactly how they plan to use it. But, that's not the only [...]

Back in 2019 the cable industry, envious of all the attention 5G wireless was getting, pulled a new marketing term completely out of its ass. It simply started calling ordinary cable broadband upgrades 10G, based on absolutely no real-world standards or definitions. It was a hollow attempt to capitalize on wireless 5G hype because these [...]

The trend continues. One of the things we've noticed more frequently as of late has been larger companies attempting to use trademark law as some kind of cudgel against employee unions. This has taken several forms, from Wal-Mart attempting to shut down a union website for accurately calling itself a union of Wal-Mart employees, Medieval [...]

By any means necessary" has been determined to be the same thing as minimal intrusion" by far too many courts. When cops are searching for suspects, they're pretty much free to destroy anything that stands between them and their (wanted) man, even if it means a wholly innocent house gets leveled in the process. It's [...]

For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk's Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations areharming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimedwould never happen in the first placeis making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can bemitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated. Now [...]

Do you all remember Ricky Schroder? He is a former child actor who became prominent thanks to TV series like Silver Spoonsand NYPD Blue. While I could reminisce about old TV for hours, it is worth noting that Ricky Schroder has become a darling for the far-right. You might remember himfrom his greatest hits of [...]

Florida's legislative bigots have already been told twice. I guess they need to hear a third time. The state passed a law that outlawed drag shows, resulting in it being sued by a venue that often hosted drag shows, Hamburger Mary's. The lawsuit claimed the new law violated several rights, first and foremost being the [...]

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most popular enterprise cloud computing solutions, used by businesses around the world to manage data, promote effective communication, secure proprietary information, and more. Professionals who can work and manage AWS platforms are always in high demand, and the Amazon Web Services Technical Training course aims to make [...]

This course of events was all too predictable. In May of 2022, while Elon was still in the trying to buy Twitter" stage, we pointed out the absolute ridiculousness of him meeting with the EU's Thierry Breton and saying that he fully endorsed the EU's DSA approach. As we noted at the time, the whole [...]

As noted last month, the Biden FCC is finally getting ready to restore net neutrality rules stripped away during the Trump administration amidst a lot of bullshit and fraud. And unpopular telecom giants, with the usual support of the GOP, are already busy trying to undermine the effort with a whole new list of manufactured [...]

As the American market continues to expand on rights for Americans to enjoy being super high on cannabis, the industry around those rights are expanding quickly as well. And, in a way that is somewhat akin to the craft beer explosion that occurred last decade, more and more trademark scuffles are popping up as these [...]

Last week, we kicked off our Error 402 series on the history (and hopefully future) of web monetization, by talking about much of the framing of what this series will be about. I started it out by noting that it has been 30 years since I first got online in 1993. That also happened to [...]

Elon Musk keeps insisting that stopping spam bots is a huge priority. After all, he said he'd either stop them or die trying. And, apparently one way to try to stop spam is to stop allowing people to report spam. I'm guessing this is just a mistake on a site that has massive errors pretty [...]

His heart is probably in the right place. That's the best thing I can say about Berkeley professor Dr. Hany Farid, who has spent the last couple of years being wrong about CSAM (child sexual abuse material) detection. That he's been wrong has done little to shut him up. But he appears to deeply feel [...]

The Complete Photoshop Master Class Bundle has 6 courses to teach you what you need to know to create amazing projects. It's no secret that Photoshop can be a bit dense when you're first getting your feet wet with it. That's why it pays to have an expert instructor show you the ropes. Led by [...]

You will recall that, last month, Elon Musk mentioned in passing that he'd decided the only way to stop bots and spam on Twitter (which he'd already claimed to have stopped a few times earlier) was to paywall the entire site with a small monthly payment for use of the X system." This statement apparently [...]

Once a year like clockwork, the telecom industry trade association releases a study claiming that if you squint just right-broadband prices have dropped year after year. It's their annual attempt to pretend (and to help the politicians that coddle them pretend) that the U.S. broadband market isn't heavily monopolized and woefully uncompetitive. Last week, AT&T-backed [...]

ShotSpotter may consider itself to be a solid contributor to the fight against crime, but the facts don't really bear that out. What it is capable of doing is sending cops to any place a gunshot is (possibly) detected, but that hasn't really shown to have any meaningful impact on solving gun-related crimes, much less [...]

One of the copyright world's key weapons is a constant barrage of propaganda about the alleged benefits of this intellectual monopoly, and of the supposed horrors of its infringement. This is typically conducted through massive lobbying of politicians, funded using the copyright companies' generous profits that could have been distributed to the poorly paid creators [...]

Over the last year, we've covered a whole bunch of truly ridiculous, vexatious, bullshit lawsuits filed by school districts against social media companies, blaming them for the fact that the school boards don't know how to teach students (the one thing they're supposed to specialize in!) how to use the internet properly. Instead of realizing [...]

Plenty of legislators and law enforcement officials seem to believe there's only one acceptable solution to the CSAM (child sexual abuse material) problem: breaking encryption. They may state some support for encryption, but when it comes to this particular problem, many of these officials seem to believe everyone's security should be compromised just so a [...]

Think about the things you lose most often. Your keys and your phone, right? Well the Nut Find 3 was built to resolve that little forgetfulness issue. Thanks to Bluetooth 4.0 and Smart Anti-Loss, you won't be anxious about your losing or misplacing your stuff. Just attach the tiny, portable Nut to whatever you lose [...]

Play Trust & Safety Tycoon in your browser on desktop or mobile Today we're super excited to launch Trust & Safety Tycoon, a video game simulating what it's like to run a trust & safety team at a fictitious, rapidly scaling social media company called Yapper*. If you've ever wanted to see how you'd [...]