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Last week, exTwitter's CEO-in-name-only Linda Yaccarino gave what is the cringiest interviews I've ever seen at the Code Conference. Multiple people told me they couldn't watch more than a few minutes of it. It's so bad. She is barely listening, extremely dismissive of important questions, and acting as if people are lucky to hear her. [...]

During peak pandemic, the FCC launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB program), giving lower income Americans a $50 ($75 for those in tribal lands) discount off of their broadband bill. Under the program, the government gave money to ISPs, which then doled out discounts to users if they qualified. But (and I'm sure this will [...]

Adidas has a reputation as a jealous defender, and at times is better described as an aggressor, when it comes to enforcing its trademark rights, specifically around its admittedly famous 3 stripes logo. Famous mark or not, the company has far too often shown itself willing to go to absurd ends in protecting those marks. [...]

Elon Musk really seems to hate paying legal bills (or, really, any bills), but now he's got a few more to cover. Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Kathaleen McCormick, Chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery (who is quite familiar with Elon Musk and Twitter) has ruled that exTwitter has to cover the legal [...]

A federal district judge in Louisiana dismissed a lawsuitchallenging the state's mandatory age verification statute in order to access adult content on the internet. The lawsuit was brought by the Free Speech Coalition and stakeholders in and adjacent to the adult entertainment industry. Plaintiffs intended to block the age verification statute passed by the state [...]

I've been asked a few times now what to do about online safety if the Kids Online Safety Act is no good. I will take it as a given that not enough is being done to make the Internet safe, especially for children. I think there is enough evidence to show that while the Internet [...]

Aspiring filmmakers, YouTubers, bloggers, and business owners alike can find something to love about theComplete Video Production Super Bundle. Video content is fast changing from the future marketing tool to the present, and in these 10 courses you'll learn how to make professional videos on any budget. From the absolute basics to the advanced shooting [...]

There's no way to write this article without some people yelling angrily at me, so I'm just going to highlight that point up front: many, many people are going to disagree with this article, and I'm going to get called all sorts of names. I actually avoided commenting on this topic because I wasn't sure [...]

Clearly keen to not miss another opportunity to show how they're slowly turning into Comcast, Netflix this week indicated they'd be pushing yet another price hike in the wake of the recently successful writers' strike: Netflix is planning to increase the cost of its streaming service yet again,according to a report fromThe Wall Street Journal. [...]

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about how Bethesda's latest opus, Starfield, was shipping without support for Nvidia's DLSS technology, but did have a deal to support AMD's version of that upscaling technology. And after plenty of commenters pointed out that I was coming at that post from the wrong angle, I jumped [...]

While technologies like low orbit satellite can help shore up broadband access, they come with their own additional challenges. One being that services like Space X's Starlink have causepotentially unavoidable light pollution, harming scientific research. The other being the exponential growth in space detritus, aka space junk, that will make space navigation increasingly difficult. The [...]

Look, I don't want to suggest that maybe the 5th Circuit's analysis on issues in the Missouri v. Biden case is not particularly well considered, but, um, it's not at all clear that the 5th Circuit's analysis on the Missouri v. Biden case is well considered. After all, the original ruling made a series of [...]

For the children. For the children. For the children. That's all we hear. And it's always from people arguing to expand government power. It's never from anyone who actually cares about protecting children from their government. Instead, it's almost always used as leverage to increase government power using the theory that only a monster would [...]

This DevDojo Pro subscription gives you access to a set of tools to help you build your next great idea. Start with the Page Creator, where you'll find Tailwind CSS Page Builder, a tool for crafting beautiful landing pages. Then, move on to Wave SAAS Starter Kit, where you'll learn how to build your Software [...]

I know many of you have heard this before, but Cory Doctorow's enshittification" concept is such a useful framework to think about things: first, companies are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value [...]

The modern authoritarian GOP knows its radical policies are widely unpopular, which is why it increasingly needs to rely on propaganda. That's also why the party pretends that absolutely any effort to moderate online political propaganda is censorship." With young voters turning away from the GOP in record numbers, propaganda, gerrymandering, and race-baiting anti-democratic bullshit [...]

Roughly a year ago, we discussed one of a few instances of a company filing a trademark infringement lawsuit against its own employees as a retaliation tactic for those employees forming a union. In this specific case, it was the company behind Medieval Times, an organization that builds fake castles and sells food and drink [...]

Adding to the case law of small, but significant, Fourth Amendment law is this decision [PDF] handed down by a Maine federal court. (h/t FourthAmendment.com) The Fourth Amendment makes things pretty clear: to perform invasive searches, cops need warrants. But over the years since the erection of that standard, we've seen it loosened. A host [...]

To hear Texas legislators (and the 5th Circuit) view the world, it is apparently wholly unconstitutional to share information from the government with websites in any manner that might pressure them in how they moderate, yet at the same time, the government is absolutely free to compel companies to post messages that they want on [...]

Dominating a field is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it gives you extensive reach, immensely profitable products, and - if you're just too good at it - the horrific realization your brand name has been commodified to the point that hundreds of millions of people now use your proper noun as a verb. (It [...]

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At this point, any Senator signing on to support KOSA cannot deny that the bill has been written explicitly to suppress LGBTQ+ voices. The Heritage Foundation said so directly earlier this year. And Senator Marsha Blackburn flat out said that KOSA was important in order to protect minor children from the transgender [sic] in our [...]

We've noted a few times now how as the streaming sector consolidates and grows, it's becoming more and more like the traditional cable industry it disrupted. This enshittification includes a lot of endless price hikes, a steady degradation of product quality, pointless mergers that cause endless layoffs, and the implementation of new restrictive efforts to [...]

ShotSpotter has long presented itself as a reliable detector of gunshots. Mileage, however, has varied. Law enforcement customers that have gotten disgruntled with this limited service have pointed out - en route to terminated contracts - that (a) detected gunshots are not always gunshots, (b) detected gunshots are rarely useful intel, and (c) detecting gunshots [...]

The fallout from game engine Unity's decision to try to cram a completely new and different pricing structure down the throats of game developers continues. Originally announced in mid-September, Unity took a bunch of its tiered structures of its offerings and suddenly instituted per-install fees, along with a bunch of other fee structures and requirements [...]

We've written a bunch of stuff about the obvious to anyone who understands the internet problems of Canada's C-18, now dubbed the Online News Act. The fundamental premise behind it is to break the open internet, as an obviously corrupt forced wealth transfer from one disfavored industry to an industry that helps get politicians elected. [...]

When it comes to the children, Wu-Tang Europol is for the children. According to a recent report by Balkan Insight, Europol (Interpol but without the across-the-pond component), the only thing that should matter is the kids. Europeans' rights and privacy should be sidelined - possibly forever! - until European law enforcement can put a dent [...]

Learn Unreal, C++, and game development with the Ultimate Learn Unreal Game Development Bundle. This series of highly-rated Unreal Engine courses, created in collaboration with Epic Games, can help! Anyone who wants to learn to create games: Unreal Engine is a fantastic platform that enables you to make AAA-quality games. It's on sale for $35. [...]

As you've likely heard, earlier this week the WGA worked out a tentative agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) on a new contract that ended their months-long strike. By all accounts, this looks like a big win for the WGA, which is fantastic and long overdue. The AMPTP seemed to [...]

A few years ago during one of our Greenhouse forums, activist Terique Boyce wrote about how an all-volunteer army had been spending their days deploying free broadband to NYC residents. It's the latest example of frustrated communities building their own infrastructure after decades of being ripped off and underserved by powerful, local broadband monopolies. NYC [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy deploying an overused (and often abused) quote for, in this case, a very apt purpose - responding to right wing denial about Republicans pushing to censor the internet: Sure all the evidence shows it's republicans censoring things but... The Party told [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, a district court ignored the real issues when it dismissed the EFF's constitutional challenge to FOSTA, while we looked at how the law was becoming another tool for silencing people you dislike, legislators were pushing for even more draconian laws under the guise of fighting sex trafficking, and [...]

You can be a law enforcement officer without being a complete asshole. I know it rarely seems to be the case, but it's completely possible to command respect while still treating others with respect. And while assholery tends to go hand-in-hand with enforcing the law far too often, the end result of being vindictive and [...]

As a Walled Cultureexplainedback in 2021,open access(OA) to published academic research comes in two main varieties. Gold" open access papers are freely available to the public because the researchers' institutions pay article-processing charges" to a publisher. Green" OA papers are available because the authors self-archive their work on a personal Web site or institutional repository [...]

This isn't exactly a surprise. Everyone has expected this pretty much from about the time that Ron DeSantis insisted he had a plan to regulate social media, but it got delayed by a year, because it seemed that the Supreme Court just didn't want to deal with it yet, and punted by asking the White [...]

The most cynical take on this period of historic lows in US crime rates isn't that we've locked up so many people that most crime now takes place in prisons where no one cares (or tabulates) how many criminal acts are still being committed. No, the most cynical take is this: people just got sick [...]

Your future is here with the Ninja Dragon 4K Smart Drone. It's super simple to take off and land with an optical flow positioning system that allows you to keep your hands off the controls when flying, especially if you have trouble taking off/landing from high places like trees. This model also has intelligent gesture [...]

We've been on this soapbox for over 15 years now. There are reams upon reams of evidence that the single greatest reason why California became the innovation hub that it became (in both Silicon Valley and Hollywood) was because it effectively outlawed non-compete agreements in the late 19th century. I have long been a vocal [...]

Back in July, Reuters released a bombshell report documenting how Tesla not only spent a decade falsely inflating the range of their EVs, but created teams dedicated to bullshitting Tesla customers who called in to complain about it. If you recall, Reuters noted how these teams would have a little, adorable party every time they [...]

Marijuana has been legalized pretty much everywhere in the United States. Even the DEA seems somewhat willing to move this source of easy busts off its drug schedule. At this point, there are only four states that have yet to legalize (or decriminalize) marijuana possession. So, how is it that cops still think the odor [...]

We've spilled a great deal of ink discussing the GDPR and its failures and unintended consequences. The European data privacy law that was ostensibly built to protect the data of private citizens, but which was also expected to result in heavy fines for primarily American internet companies, has mostly failed to do either. While the [...]

Accessing consensually created and distributed online pornography is a human right. Do you know why? The consensual production and viewing of porn online is a protected form of sexual expression between two or more adults. Laugh your asses off, sure. But there is a point to my ludicrous statement. It's not about porn per se. [...]

What is it with real life stories matching satirical online TV shows lately? We just had a story match one from The Office, and now we've got one (that's much dumber) that is copied from a Futurama episode about how dating robots will lead to the downfall of civilization: Recently, the Hill published a truly [...]

Two years ago, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its initial review of federal use of facial recognition tech. That report found that at least half of the 20 agencies examined were using Clearview's controversial facial recognition tech. A follow-up released two months later found even more bad news. In addition to widespread use of [...]

You may be young and modern in your thinking but you are going to love this Olden Golden Retro Mini Gramophone Bluetooth Speaker. This vintage style Bluetooth speaker is fun to have on your desk while you do your work or as a part of the decor in your den while you are enjoying Sunday [...]

There is no doubt that it's not always easy to figure out what social media websites should do about election disinformation. There are those who believe that websites need to very actively remove such content, but there's little evidence that straight removal does very much productive, which is why it wasn't that surprising that YouTube [...]

When it comes to the early implementation of AI," it's generally been the human beings that are the real problem. Case in point: the fail-upward incompetents that run the U.S. media and journalism industries have rushed to use language learning models (LLMs) to cut corners and attack labor. They've made it very clear they're not [...]

As you may recall, starting a little over 3 years ago we discussed Stone Brewing's transformation from one-time icon of the craft brewing scene into a trademark bully. What kicked this whole thing off was Stone's win in a trademark lawsuit against macro-brewer Molson Coors (then Miller Coors, but I will be using the company's [...]

Last April, Utah Governor Spencer Cox noted that Kids are smart, they'll find ways around" Utah's new social media bans. But that's not the reason why these laws will fail teens in Utah, Arkansas, and Texas. These laws will fail teens because state leaders don't believe kids are smart enough to learn to use social [...]

It's no secret that I think this FTC has been pretty disappointing and has missed a ton of opportunities to actually make things better for the public. For reasons I really don't understand, it has filed a lot of antitrust cases against tech companies that have almost always seemed half-baked, resulting in a losing streak [...]