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It's that time... Get ready for the Gaming Like It's 1928! public domain game jam! The game jam, like all our public domain game jams, runs from January 1st through January 31st, and we're eager to see what kinds of games, both digital and analog, you'll make by building on newly public domain works. As [...]

While not super common, we have seen issues surrounding copyright claims or negative reactions to so-called reaction videos." These videos essentially take content that is out there, typically on the internet, and then react to them in a video providing either additional context for the content or a reaction to it. Sometimes those reaction videos [...]

Traditional newspapers have been complaining about the rise of the digital world for decades. Their discontent derives from the fact that they failed to recognize opportunities early on, leaving the field open for a new generation of born-digital companies to meet the demand for alternative ways to access the news. Rather than trying to understand [...]

Last month, Sports Illustrated found itself at the center of a firestorm after it was busted using fake computer-generated authors and (shitty) computer-generated content - without telling employees and readers. The scandal came shortly after Gannett (which likely owns whatever's left of your hometown newspaper) was busted doing the exact same thing. We've noted how [...]

The Italians are the new Israelis... at least in terms of hawking phone exploits and other spyware. NSO Group crashed hard following leaks showing its customers (many of which were, shall we say, questionable) were targeting political rivals, dissidents, human rights activists, journalists, lawyers, and religious leaders with powerful exploits that completely exposed the contents [...]

The Complete Python Programmer Bundle has nine courses to help you learn more about programming. This bundle starts with fundamental Python functionality such as arithmetic, conditional statements, and working with basic data structures. It then expands upon your working knowledge of data structures to work with full-blown datasets in the Pandas package. You'll learn all [...]

It seems like the only bipartisan" support around regulations and the internet these days is... over the false, widely debunked moral panic that the internet is inherently harmful to children. Study after study has said it's simply not true. Here's the latest list (and I have one more to write up soon): And yet, if [...]

We just got done noting how 2023 was finally the year that streaming fully surpassed traditional TV in terms of overall paying subscribers. A very obvious cord cutting" trend that executives spent years claiming wasfake or a fad is now the majority norm. But what's left of traditional cable TV isn't doing so well. Broadcast [...]

I will admit, after my last post on Russian game developer Fntastic shutting down operations days after the release of the much-hyped The Day Before, I really thought it would be my last post on the this whole fiasco. But, no, it turns out that the developer has given us more to write about. If [...]

We took a few weeks off in our Error 402 series on the history of web monetization, but we're back. If you're just catching up, we've talked about the earliest monetary transactions online, the rise of e-commerce, the initial failed attempts at paywalls for content, and the rise of internet ads followed quickly by the [...]

Well, this was a bit of a surprise. Over the past couple of weeks I wrote about how Senator Josh Hawley was planning to try to hotline his terrible No Section 230 Immunity for AI Act. As we have explained multiple times, the bill is so poorly drafted that it would make a mess of [...]

We've repeatedly noted how the Republican quest to ban TikTok is both stupid and performative. Stupid, in that banning TikTok doesn't fix the deeper privacy rot caused by a corrupt Congress' ongoing refusal to pass a privacy law or regulate data brokers (who do much worse, at much greater scale). Dumb, in that the ban" [...]

You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let's focus on the app. Right off the bat, let's be clear about one thing: When we say app" we don't mean that you're limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across [...]

We just wrote up a story about Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and his bullshit censorial investigation into Media Matters, and I think we just got a preview of what he should expect. Back in November, Texas' (still criminally indicted, still waiting for trial) Attorney General Ken Paxton launched a similar investigation to buddy up [...]

You might recall that Elon Musk claims to hate taxpayer subsidies. They should all be deleted." Except for the subsidies given to his companies (often for doing nothing), of course. Back in 2020, Musk's satellite broadband venture, Starlink, gamed a Trump-era FCC subsidy program to try and grab $886 million in taxpayer dollars. It was [...]

It's not like cops needed any more help being intolerant. It seems to come with the job. A badge, a gun, and a sense of superiority tends to turn even marginal cops into people who spend their entire careers adding to the us vs. them" chip on their shoulders. But even cops with the best [...]

As the old saying goes, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, then it's probably a scammy game developer you shouldn't trust. Here at Techdirt, we started paying attention to The Day Before, pitched as an ambitious MMO survival game by Russian developer Fntastic nearly five years ago, when the company [...]

There's plenty of discussion right now about what approach, regulatory or otherwise, could rein in the potential harms of AI systems. This week, we're joined by professor and researcher Chinmayi Sharma to discuss her brand new article that offers an interesting idea: professionalizing the AI field with engineer licensing and a malpractice standard. Follow the [...]

When Epic went after both Apple and Google a few years ago with antitrust claims regarding the need to go through their app stores to get on phones, we noted that it seemed more like negotiation-by-lawsuit. Both Apple and Google have cut some deals with larger companies to lower the 30% cut the companies take [...]

Call it regulatory capture." Call it the revolving door." Just don't call it acceptable. At best, moves like this give an appearance of impropriety. At best, that's what they do. At worst, they look like what they almost always are: government officials moving directly to the positions within the industry they just recently regulated, carrying [...]

The Ninja Dragon Blade K is equipped with cutting-edge technology that ensures a smooth and stable flight experience. With its 4-way anti-collision system, you can confidently navigate through any obstacle in your path. The optical flow sensor enables precise hovering and accurate positioning, making it easier than ever to capture stunning aerial shots. Designed with [...]

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey is currently engaged in numerous legal battles over speech which can more or less be summarized as criticism of people Andrew Bailey likes is censorship," but criticism of people Andrew Bailey doesn't like is good and just and important to the marketplace of ideas." Andrew Bailey is a hypocrite. But [...]

We've noted for years how the race to 5G" was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager tosell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it's more of a modest evolution than a revolution. But that's not what telecom giants [...]

A few years ago, hacktivist group Anonymous liberated a ton of documents from law enforcement agencies all over the world. These were published by transparency activists DDoS (Distributed Denial of Secrets). Journalists and other activists continue to dive into this 269 gigabyte treasure trove, teasing out additional information law enforcement agencies certainly wish was still [...]

The estate of Dr. Seuss is obviously no stranger to playing the intellectual property maximalist, having appeared on our pages many times in the past. But more specifically for this post, the estate has also, ironically enough, been more than happy to stomp on the Christmas joy of others in favor of jealously guarding its [...]

Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, a key Achilles' heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ever engage constructively with users the company fucks over. At the time, I dubbed it Google's big, faceless, white monolith" problem, because [...]

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 [...]