Techdirt

Writer Seamas O'Reilly published his weekly column at the Irish Examiner on Saturday, talking about how spam, scams, and manipulation attempts are flooding the internet. It's a good article and well worth reading, basically just talking about the proliferation of nonsense online, much of which includes scammers trying to steal money from people. Here's just [...]

Every few weeks for the last fifteen years there's been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app makerover-collectingyour detailedpersonal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information toany nitwit with a nickel. And despite theadded risks this creates in the post-Roe era, we've still done little to [...]

Usually when I write about trademark disputes, it's at least the case that if I really squint at an accuser's claims, or perhaps hit myself in the head with a hammer for several minutes, I can at least see their perspective in a dispute. I may still call the whole thing very stupid, as is [...]

Last month we wrote about Netchoice suing Ohio over its Parental Notification by Social Media Act," in which I filed a declaration highlighting how problematic the law would be for a site like Techdirt. By the time we'd finished the article about the lawsuit, a federal judge had already granted a temporary injunction, blocking the [...]

Stop-start. Push-pull. Yank-tug. That's the way things have been going in the UK. One would expect better performance from lawmakers with a hard-on for porn. No. Not that way. (Although, maybe that way.) The UK government has spent several years trying to talk service providers, recalcitrant legislators, and the general public into trading away a [...]

In the fall of 2022 an apparent investor in a cryptocurrency called Bitcoin Latinum" sued the guy behind the currency, Donald Basile. You can see the whole case here. There has been a bunch of back and forth on the docket, but it appears the remaining parties at some point went to binding arbitration. Soon [...]

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Last fall, we detailed the many, many, many, many problems of Elon Musk's absolutely bullshit ridiculous lawsuit against Media Matters. Again, if you don't recall, Media Matters found some examples of neo-Nazi content on ExTwitter appearing next to ads from big name brands. Elon got extra mad about this because it also happened a day [...]

Every few weeks for the last fifteen years there's been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app makerover-collectingyour detailedpersonal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information toany nitwit with a nickel. And despite theadded risks this creates in the post-Roe era, we've still done little to [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment on our post about Elon Musk funding a SLAPP suit against Disney, responding piece by piece to another commenter: According to MM, every lawsuit by someone right of Bernie is SLAPP" No. It's just for whatever reason, the right wing is [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, as quickly as it went away, Article 13 was back in the EU. And now somehow the Copyright Directive was even worse than before, but still not bad enough for the copyright industries. Meanwhile, we wrote about the failings of YouTube's ContentID, the ongoing fight to make PACER [...]

Here we go again. In so many of these trademark disputes, the disputer far too often is wielding overly broad trademarks granted by the USPTO to suggest that having that registered mark is all they need to shut down the use of those broad terms by others. Nowhere do you find any claims of actual [...]

Dropshipping - memorably described by Sirin Kale in Wired as people selling products they've never handled, from countries they've never visited, to consumers they've never met" - is one of the best examples of pure" Internet activity around. As Kale explains: Dropshipping is a fulfilment" method. At one end of the supply chain, an entrepreneur [...]

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (who is still indicted and facing a trial later this year) has argued in court that governments both should never, ever try to influence what content social media sites take down, but also that Texas should be able to tell social media websites what content they must keep up and [...]

At the end of last month, a federal court judge decided to throw the First Amendment out the window to engage in a bit of the old prior restraint. At the center of this case (but not the case actually before the judge) was The Oregonian, a newspaper that found itself in possession of documents [...]

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The free speech absolutist" is at it again. Despite his claim to be an absolutist, Elon Musk has an uncanny ability to magically keep finding himself involved in lawsuits that are attempts to suppress the free speech rights of others. And he's at it again. Earlier this week, actor Gina Carano sued Disney almost exactly [...]

Back in 2019, when fifth generation (5G) wireless was getting a lot of dumb (and as it turned out, unwarranted) marketing hype, the cable industry came up with an amazing idea: they'd simply call their existing cable broadband service a 10G technology" in a bid to (1) piggyback on the hype 5G was getting, and [...]

Maintaining some sort of database of known criminals and their criminal associates is undoubtedly a smart thing to do. Cross-referencing detainees makes sense, especially when it comes to larger criminal organizations. Ensuring databases are up to date, both in terms of adding new associates as well as removing people who aren't connected to criminal activity, [...]

I don't know what it is or why it is, but the Xbox team just can't seem to communicate clearly when it comes to how it's going to handle exclusivity in games for its console. After it gobbled up several game studios and publishers, most recently Activision Blizzard, the messaging from the Xbox team about [...]

For decades, frustrated towns and cities all over the country have responded to telecom market failure by building their own fiber broadband networks. Data routinely shows that not only do these networks providefaster, better, and cheaper service, the networks are generally more accountable to the public - because they're directly owned and staffed by locals [...]

Earlier this week I posted two examples of people falsely being told that a post or a search was deemed connected to child sexual abuse material. Earlier this week, I thought I had spotted another example, when someone on Bluesky alerted me that they had searched for techdirt" and the results included a line saying [...]

This would be the second time in recent months that a cop tech purveyor with a heavily checkered past has shelled out big bucks to expand the reach of its own tech, as well as expand the reach of existing police surveillance capabilities. Last October, ShotSpotter - the company whose shoddy shot spotting has been [...]

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Over the last few days there have been a few stories making the rounds on right wing media sites, claiming that Rep. Jim Jordan had exposed the White House pressuring Amazon to remove books related to COVID disinformation. This is based on a thread Jordan posted to ExTwitter. If it's true that the White House [...]

So we've noted more than once that as the streaming sector is saturated and new user growth slows, streaming giants will follow on a fairly predictable path that got their predecessors (cable TV companies) in trouble. Namely, shifting away from innovation and disruption and consumer welfare, and toward nickel-and-diming customers in a bid to give [...]

It's not often when three of your biggest interests all intersect at once, but here we are. Readers here will know that I am a regular when it comes to writing about trademark disputes, bullying, and news. You may also know that I have quite the affinity for wine. You probably don't know, however, that [...]

In late 2022, the state of New Yorkfinally passednew right to repair legislation after years of activist pressure. The bill, which went live last month, gives New York consumers the right to fix their electronic devices themselves or have them more easily repaired by an independent repair shop, instead of being forced to only obtain [...]

Every week it's some other dumb thing going on in the Senate. On Tuesday Senator Josh Hawley went to the (mostly empty) Senate floor to seek unanimous consent" for the STOP CSAM bill. That's basically a process to rush the bill forward before it's ready. We've written about STOP CSAM before. Despite it's name, it [...]

The FBI has done some heinous things in its pursuit of its counter-terrorism objectives. While it's true the FBI has occasionally nabbed actual terrorists, it seems to prefer creating terrorists to going after those that are already avowed terrorists. The FBI utilizes informants and undercover agents to perform this highly questionable work. Investigations border on [...]

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 [...]

We've written a few times now about how the misleadingly named House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government" is not actually looking into the weaponization of the federal government," but rather is very much about allowing Chairman Jim Jordan to go about weaponizing the powers of the subcommittee himself to threaten and intimidate [...]

Back in December I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring the FCC's long overdue effort to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not only refused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas (despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they've charged poor and [...]

Well, this is a new one for me. In all the stories we've done over the years on concerns over real life violence and violent video games, one point we've made over and over again is that people certainly can tell the difference between video games and real life. I, for one, abhor guns in [...]

Predictive policing programs were supposed to make police work smarter and more efficient. It was supposed to trim down on hours wasted where a police presence wasn't needed and increase enforcement in areas where crime was a problem. But it hasn't done this. It hasn't made cops smarter. It's possibly just made them lazier. No [...]

A couple weeks ago, we released the 2024 edition of our Sky Is Rising report about the state of the entertainment industries. Last week, Mike and I joined Corbin Barthold on Techfreedom's Tech Policy Podcast for a discussion about the report and, more broadly, the state of culture in the internet era and the conversations [...]

Bluesky is now open to anyone without an invite. And a bunch of other exciting things are coming soon. As many of you know, I've been pretty excited about where Bluesky is going as a social media offering, not just because of the people who have been using it (who have mostly been great, making [...]

I'm not a religious man, but Jesus Fucking Christ. Yet another insane decision that allows the government to ignore constitutional rights has been handed down by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals - the one nationally known as the most cop-friendly circuit in the nation. The long journey to this horrible ending begins in 2018. [...]

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Last week, as you likely heard, the Senate had a big hearing on child safety" where they grandstanded in front of a semi-random collection of tech CEOs, with zero interest in actually learning about the actual challenges of child safety online, or what the companies had done that worked, or where they might need help. [...]

Last month you probably saw the story about how somebody used a (sloppy) deepfake of Joe Biden in a bid to try and trick voters into staying home during the Presidential Primary. It wasn't particularly well done; nor was it clear it reached all that many people or had much of an actual impact. But [...]

Cops will charge someone with assault, whether or not they've been actually assaulted. It's a charge often added on top of resisting arrest and can be triggered by any movement or action that results in physical contact with an officer. Throwing a snowball in the direction of a cop can be considered assault, depending on [...]

Earlier this year, we discussed a frustrating story regarding one company in the UK, Cornices Centre, threatening a cyclist over a YouTube video showing what purports to be a near miss by a truck with the company's name and logo on it. Those threats centered on a very confused understanding of trademark law, such that [...]

Things remain troubling in Los Angeles. The city is still trying to somehow punish investigative journalist Ben Camacho and activist group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition for a mistake its own police department made. Camacho made a public records request for LAPD officers' photos. After some litigation, the LAPD finally complied. Camacho - who writes for [...]

There are a number of people, both those who agree with me and those who disagree with me, who seem to think I have some sort of personal dislike of Elon Musk. That's not true. I find it amazing that he gets away with some of the stuff he gets away with, and I am [...]

Facial recognition may be helping law enforcement catch bad guys, but inherent flaws in these systems ensure it's only a matter of time before the AI coughs up yet another unforced error. That sort of error rate might be acceptable when the AI is doing nothing more than pitching in to refine Google search results [...]

This handy, pocket-sized recording device fits in your wallet, bag, and purse. It comes with a high-capacity battery that can be charged in under two hours and stores up to 750 hours of audio. With a super-clear audio quality, this recorder offers 24-hour battery life and is equipped with digital noise reduction technology that is [...]

Amidst all of the attention paid to last week's Senate hearing on child safety online, it remains stunning just how little time was actually spent on how to help children online. Instead, we saw pure theatrical nonsense, with Senators insisting (falsely) that these five tech CEOs could magically stop bad things from happening to kids, [...]

For decades now, airlines, hotels, cable companies, banks and a long list of other companies have bilked U.S. consumers out of billions of dollars annually via bullshit fees that unfairly jack up the advertised price of service. More interesting perhaps is the fact that it it took until 2023 for a U.S. federal regulator to [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is also our second place winner on the funny side. It's from That One Guy in response to our refusal to take down our posts about Appin: Someone didn't do their homework... If only there had been some way for Rajat Khare and Appin to [...]