Techdirt

Last week T-Mobile annoyed customers everywhere by not only informing them they'd soon be facing a steep price hike, but by pretending it wasn't actually a price hike. The company announced it would be moving customers to a more expensive plan unless they opted out (hoping that users wouldn't notice the change). Leaked support docs [...]

Back in February, a copyright case that somehow made it past me, but embedded below, was filed by BMG against MGA Entertainment over a song the latter used for one of its toys. That song was called My Poops" and is a parody of The Blackeyed Peas' My Humps." You can go hear the song, [...]

This case contains multitudes. Let me explain. There's an exception to the Fourth Amendment known as inevitable discovery." That theory says the evidence obtained by possibly unlawful means would still have been discovered by lawful means. That means the evidence is still usable. The most common source of inevitable discovery" is the inventory search." If [...]

Landmark Technology's U.S. Patent No.7,010,508, and its predecessor, are very likely two of the most-abused patents in U.S. history. These patents, under two different owners, have been used to threaten thousands of small businesses since 2001. In just one 18-month period, the 508 patent was the subject of more than 1,800 patent demand letters sent [...]

Way back in 2016, Ken White posted a lawsplainer" about opening up our libel laws,' as Donald Trump had promised on the campaign trail. In it, he noted that unlike (for example...) Roe v. Wade, there was no decades-long effort by the Federalist Society to undermine 1st Amendment principles, such as those established by the [...]

Minors attending public schools may find their rights are limited, due to a variety of factors: school safety, access to learning, etc. But they're not nonexistent. This much courts have made clear, including the top court in the land. Nevertheless, school administrators seem to feel students should be treated as suspects until proven otherwise. In [...]

With its intuitive, immersive training method, Rosetta Stone will have you reading, writing, and speaking new languages like a natural in no time. You'll start by matching words with images just like when you learned your native language as a child. Then you'll move onto interactive lessons where speech recognition technology works to evaluate and [...]

It seemed pretty blatantly obvious that a state can't just ban a popular app used for speech, but Montana insisted otherwise earlier this year, and gleefully passed a law banning TikTok. The law was immediately challenged, and there's been a lot of back and forth on the docket, including a ridiculous amicus brief from Virginia [...]

Groups like the National Digital Inclusion Alliance have consistently released studies showing that telecom giants like AT&T, despitebillions in subsidiesandtax breaks, routinely avoid upgrading minority and low income neighborhoodsto fiber. Not only that, the group has documented how users in those neighborhoods even struggle to have their existing (older and slower) DSL lines repaired. Regional [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about disinformation and censorship on ExTwitter: Anyone remember Musk happily censoring content for Modi instead of challenging the censorship order as Dorsi would have? His justification was that he believes in free speech up to, but not beyond, the law (and [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, a federal court dumped another lawsuit accusing Twitter of contributing to worldwide terrorism, a law firm made the stupid decision to threaten Somthing Awful over a hot-linked picture, and it appeared that Epic Games DMCA'd its own Fortnite trailer. Washington State laughed at the federal attack on net [...]

It is a deal that has been two years in the making, but Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has been completed. If you haven't followed along for the full play by play of this saga, you can go back and look at all the posts we've done on the topic. But the primer on this [...]

Body cameras can't possibly solve all the problems of current US law enforcement. No single thing can. But even though body cameras have so far proven more useful to prosecutors than lawsuit litigants and accountability efforts, that doesn't mean they're mostly useless. They're still capable of creating incontrovertible evidence. That's why prosecutors love them, even [...]

California Governor Gavin Newsom has been on a bit of a tear lately vetoing bills that successfully pass the state legislature, including an effort to legalize psychedelics, an attempt to provide free condoms to high school students, an effort to cap insulin prices at $35, an attempt to provide severance to grocery store workers laid [...]

There's an interesting story on Wired about functional music" - things likewhite noiseandbrown noise- which is widely available on music streaming platforms. These kind of streams are causing a problem that arises from the fact that the money earned by streaming platforms is allotted in a rather odd way. All the revenues are put together, [...]

Elon Musk has made it clear that he's no fan of the media. And while he seems to whine and pout when big media sites leave exTwitter, he keeps insisting that exTwitter doesn't need journalists, because the his view of citizen journalism will magically be so much better. Of course, at the same time, he [...]

The 7-Day Android Pie App Bootcamp will give brand-new programmers all of the skills that they need to create an app and submit it to the Google Play store! Other mega courses online offer 40+ hours of video content, but this course that specially created to be more manageable for beginners, without the fluff.You'll learn [...]

Alt-right semi-personality Laura Loomer just can't win. And she shouldn't! She's ridiculous. She's perhaps most famous for treating her own unwillingness to perform routine car maintenance as an act of anti-Loomer terrorism. When you think your decaying tires are somehow evidence of Islamic violence, it's probably time for you to get off the internet (or, [...]

For decades now, cable TV has been plagued by programming contract feuds that routinelyend with users losing access to TV programming they pay for. Basically, media companies will demand a rate hike in new content negotiations, the cable TV provider will balk, and then each side blames the other guy for failing to strike a [...]

We've talked about this sort of thing before, but here we go again, I guess. For the last decade or so, video games have gotten realistic enough in terms of how they visually depict wartime scenarios that misinformation utilizing video game footage has become a somewhat regular thing. Regular enough that the larger world has [...]

As we're all painfully aware by now, former Israeli intelligence analysts are capable of producing private sector malware companies faster than the CIA can produce successful coups. While both are capable of handing over inordinate amounts of power to truly terrible people, only the Israeli companies have been formally asked by the US federal government [...]

A month ago, we explained how California bill AB 1394, kind of a mini-FOSTA for California, was so problematic, and was likely to be found unconstitutional, just like last year's Age Appropriate Design Code." AB 1394 is yet another of those but think of the children" laws that California loves these days, and it passed [...]

Conservatives are making the rounds again, placing op-eds and analytical pieces explaining how book bans aren't really book bans. For example, Education Weekpublished a columnby a pair of authors from the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation trying to justify laws across the country that restrict and even remove certain texts from many public [...]

It never ends with these moral-panic-driven, blatantly unconstitutional state bills for the children." The latest, from New York state Senator Andrew Goundardes and Assemblymember Nily Rozic was announced this week with direct support from NY Governor Kathy Hochul (who has been pushing for such unconstitutional bills for a while now, mainly to redirect attention away [...]

The Premium (ISC) SSCP And CISSP Training Bundle has 2 courses with 67 hours of instruction to help you learn about cybersecurity. The CISSP course is crafted around eight pivotal domains of information security, encompassing everything from risk management to software development security. This ensures that candidates emerge with a holistic understanding of the cybersecurity [...]

This report [PDF], obtained by the newly-formed 404 Media, contains a lot of what we know, some of what we don't know, and confirms a lot of suspicions. The reliance on data brokers for cell location data very likely predates the Supreme Court's 2018 Carpenter decision. But it's safe to assume this market really took [...]

As a reporter who has covered telecom for the better part of two decades, I've spent much of that time watching broadband giants like AT&T and Comcast sock their captive customers with a wide variety of bullshit, sneaky fees designed to help them advertise one price, then charge you with a higher rate. It's a [...]

It's been a bad run of weeks lately for the company behind game engine Unity, stemming from a ham-fisted plan to drastically alter its pricing model for developers. When that plan was announced, which involved previously free tiers of the engine going away or being changed, per-install fees to developers that could essentially bankrupt a [...]

There's a whole chapter of Walled Culture the book (free digital versionsavailable) devoted to the serious attack on libraries and their traditional functions that is being carried out by major publishers. The latter are using digital copyright law to take advantage of the shift to eBooks by moving from one-off sales to a recurrent licensing [...]

I realized recently that I had now passed 30 years on the internet, having obtained my first internet access in August of 1993 - the same year that many consider to be the year that the internet became commercial. That was back when you had to obtain access to the internet, rather than just... having [...]

Last week, we highlighted how it appears that exTwitter's ad revenue remains in freefall. We noted that exTwitter CEO-in-name-only Linda Yaccarino had just gone on stage at the Code Conference to try to dismiss the idea that the ad revenue was in trouble, claiming that reports of a 60% decline were months and months old" [...]

As was always going to be the case with tech that can more reliably identify white middle-aged males than anyone else, another minority has been nabbed because of a facial recognition fuck up. The only good news pertains to the city of Detroit and its law enforcement agencies, which are finally not the perpetrators in [...]

The Internet is extremely important in modern life today and this reliance is only predicted to continue with the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the next few years. The Cisco CCNA 200-301 Exam Complete Course will teach you how networks actually work and how you are able to connect to websites like [...]

Some of us have been warning about the dangers of the Digital Services Act (DSA) in the EU for quite some time, and pointed out that Elon Musk was effectively endorsing censorship in May of 2022 (after announcing his plans to purchase then-Twitter) by meeting with the EU's Thierry Breton and saying that the DSA [...]

AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire Time Warner and DirecTV, believing this would turn the dodgy old phone company into an innovative new media juggernaut. But despite$42 billion in tax breaksand oodles ofregulatory favorsfrom the Trump administration (like killing net neutrality), AT&T simply couldn't overcome its own nature as a bumbling, government-pampered telecom monopoly. As [...]

There is so much nuance to trademark law that it's not surprising when some in the public don't understand how it all works. This leads to all kinds of mistakes in terms of people thinking trademark law works in ways it does not. But the worst of these aren't mistakes, but instead when opportunists think [...]

There's no reason to make fascist small talk a reality, but sometimes folks just do what they do. Six weeks ago, a small town police department raided a small town newspaper in a vicious demonstration of boots-on-a-human-face-forever thuggery. The supposed crime? Digging up public records showing a local business owner in search of a liquor [...]

Last week I found myself assigned to speak on a streaming piracy" panel that had gotten bolted onto an event otherwise focused on trademark counterfeiting, despite the latter being a completely separate legal issue connected with a completely separate legal doctrine. It was all part of the USPTO's roundtable on future strategies in anti-counterfeiting and [...]

The DOJ - following a period of questionable leadership under Donald Trump - said it has little interest in prosecuting journalists. It has also made it clear it will not abuse the CFAA to punish people who did nothing more than access sites in ways not intended by the sites' creators. Why? Because there are [...]

From very early on in Elon Musk's ownership of exTwitter a few things became clear regarding his understanding of the FTC. First, he clearly had no idea that the company has a consent decree with the FTC (the kind of thing you learn about during due diligence, which he waived in the purchasing process) and [...]

The Apple Watch Wireless Charger Keychain is the perfect accessory for Apple Watch users on-the-go. With a built-in 950mAh lithium-ion battery, it can charge all series of Apple Watch. The technology allows it to be used as a base for a bedside table or table for convenient charging. Its portable, pocket-size design makes it easy [...]

Two years ago we wrote about Rep. Jerry Nadler's SHOP SAFE Act, which we noted would basically cement into place Amazon's position as a dominant online marketplace, because no one else would be able to afford the associated liability. The bill is based on the massively exaggerated claims that online marketplaces are full of counterfeit" [...]

Generally, when you talk about disinformation or propaganda, big tech" companies like Facebook, or media giants like Fox News get the lion's share of the attention. But as I've often noted, local news outlets in the U.S. were hollowed out years ago by mindless consolidation, and were ultimately replaced with something thatlookslike news, but is [...]

This week, Stephen T. Stone takes both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it's a comment about Yelp asking the court to stop the Texas AG from suing them because they warn users about Crisis Pregnancy Centers, in response to a (snarky) question about what the issue is: Sincere answer to what [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the DOJ filed a new net neutrality lawsuit against California that was a giant middle finger to consumers and competition, while the entire broadband soon followed suit with its own lawsuit. On another front, the DOJ failed at another attempt to obtain an encryption-breaking precedent in federal court. [...]

We tend to talk a lot around here about advertising, given how closely intertwined tech and digital industries tend to be with ads and the like. And frankly, given how often we've beat the drum that advertising is content and content is advertising, it's become all the more clear in these modern times that good [...]

Although copyright is mainly thought of as concerning books, music and films, it applies to other kinds of creativity in a fixed form. That includes apparently trivial material such as early commercial television programs. These are important cultural artefacts, but unlike books, music or films, there are very few formal schemes for collecting and conserving [...]

Using Protect the children!" as their rallying cry, red states are enacting digital pornography restrictions. Texas's effort, H.B. 1181, requires commercial pornographic websites-and others, as we'll see shortly-to verify that their users are adults, and to display state-drafted warnings about pornography's alleged health dangers. In late August, a federal district judge blocked the law from [...]

In August we wrote about a rumored plan of Elon Musk to remove headlines from the TwitterCards (are they now X-cards? who the hell knows?), basically making the site completely useless for news consumption. At the time Musk claimed it was somehow more aesthetically pleasing. Because that's what everyone looks for in their news links: [...]

Former officer/current prisoner Derek Chauvin decided to personify endemic police racism by pressing his knee to the neck of an unarmed black man for nearly ten minutes. This display of power continued for three minutes after another officer told Officer Chauvin he could no longer detect a pulse. This act saw Officer Derek Chauvin join [...]