Techdirt

No one's more willing to abuse a law than a cop. They pretend they don't understand the complexities of laws when it suits them. But they're always right on top of any law that might protect them from the consequences of their own actions. Enter the somewhat infamous Marsy's Laws" that have been passed in [...]

As you know, the Supreme Court is now considering the NetChoice/CCIA cases challenging two similar (but not identical) state laws regarding social media moderation. The laws in Florida and Texas came about around the same time, and were clearly written to target ideological speech. Both of them put restrictions on how certain social media apps [...]

Possibly legally-obtained funds traveling from Point A to Point B? Those belong to the law enforcement middlemen. That's how Wyoming's top court explains things, in a decision [PDF] that says money obtained from legal drug sales in other states can be stolen by cops who operate in a state where this drug isn't legal. Those [...]

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Over the years we've written about plenty of cyberespionge" companies. Some engage in spyware or surveillance ware. Others actively hack devices. Almost all of these eventually get exposed through dogged investigative reporting. A few people reached out to point to this rather concerning Editor's note that was posted to Reuters this week: Reuters has temporarily [...]

Back in September Mozilla released a scathing report showing how modern vehicles are a privacy shitshow. After studying vehicle systems for over 600 hours, researchers found that most cars hoover up vast swaths of sensitive location and other information on consumers, then, like most companies, sell access to that data to pretty much any nitwit [...]

In October, California became the first state in the nation to ban excited delirium" as an official cause of death. While this was a positive development, the question remains: why did it take so long? Excited delirium" was never a real thing. It has always been a convenient excuse for deaths at the hands of [...]

For some reason, there are enough people who are ignorant enough about trademark law such that every once in a while you get people who don't like a thing trying to trademark that thing thinking they can prevent that thing from being done or used. It's a form of trademark squatting. Confused? An example would [...]

We've seen lots of... shall we say... misguided libel lawsuits here at Techdirt. We've also seen plenty of lawsuits filed for the sole purpose of bullying someone into silence for reporting inconvenient facts. This case is more of the misguided" variety. Someone who clearly doesn't understand the basics of libel law filed a lawsuit against [...]

Twitch has announced that the company is shutting down in Korea after regulators there imposed a ridiculous new regulatory framework that drove the company's operational costs through the roof. Basically: Korean telecoms convinced gullible regulators to pass a new regulatory framework wherein edge providers and content companies are forced to pay telecoms additional fees just [...]

This Apple Watch Portable USB Charger allows you to charge anytime, anywhere. With a built-in magnetic adsorption module, you can charge your watch immediately after contact. This charger has the ability to charge your watch within 2 to 3 hours fully. It's lightweight and portable, so you can charge your watch while traveling, when working [...]

Over the past few days I've been hearing lots of buzz claiming that either today or tomorrow Senator Josh Hawley is going to push to hotline" the bill he and Senator Richard Blumenthal introduced months back to explicitly exempt AI from Section 230. Hotlining a bill is basically an attempt to move the bill quickly [...]

Americans pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for broadband due to consolidated monopoly power and feckless regulators. It's a problem the U.S. government lacks the competence or political integrity to fix. So what we usually get are strange Band-Aids that treat the symptoms of the underlying problem (unchecked corporate power muting [...]

Thank you for joining us for your latest lesson in how you don't actually own the things you buy when you buy them digitally. Over a year ago, we discussed a story out of Germany and Austria where a deal expired between Sony and movie distributor StudioCanal, which resulted in 100s of movies being delisted [...]

Last week we wrote about how Montana's ridiculous TikTok ban was blocked by a judge for being fairly obviously unconstitutional. But in the rush of the moral panic over TikTok coming from all over, I had missed that Indiana had sued the company. The argument was that TikTok had violated child safety laws," and in [...]

We've got another cross-post episode this week! Recently, Mike joined the debut episode of the new Dot Social podcast from Flipboard CEO Mike McCue for a discussion about decentralized social media and the open social web, and the ways in which they are poised to spur widespread innovation. You can listen to the whole conversation [...]

On one hand, the Lina Khan FTC has been the toughest agency in history when it comes to right to repair" reform - or efforts to let you affordably repair your own tech. On the other hand, given past regulatory actions have been minimal, that's not historically saying much. Still, the FTC under Khan's leadership [...]

It seems that every other day or so we get another story of big tech companies tossing principles out the window and caving to ridiculous government demands. The latest is Google, yet again, which has cut a deal with the Canadian government to bribe news orgs with $100 million to pay them off to avoid [...]

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Looks like everybody who's anybody has got a set of hacking tools in Canada. Well, at least in terms of the federal government. Documents obtained by the CBC shed some light on the prevalence of phone-cracking tech within the government. And what that light shows isn't all that flattering. Tools capable of extracting personal data [...]

Automakers are increasingly obsessed with turning everything into a subscription service in a bid to boost quarterly returns. We've noted how BMW has embracedmaking heated seats and other features already in your car a subscription service, and Mercedes has been makingbetter gas and EV engine performancesomething you have to pay extra for - even if [...]

Earlier this year we discussed an app being removed from the Google Play store over copyright concerns and a DMCA notice that was sent in by a firm representing several Israeli television networks. The app, called Downloader," was created by Elias Saba, and he was very confused by the takedown. The reason for his confusion [...]

I continue to be sickened and saddened that this country - considered the Land of the Free - continues to devolve (rapidly!) into a place where intolerance and bigotry are being written into law. And all it took was a four-year calamity headed up by one of the worst presidents in history, Donald Trump. His [...]

About a year ago, the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web asked if I would help edit and compile a magazine" talking about decentralization and why it's important. It was a fun and interesting challenge, and now the final product is out, the D-Web Digest. There are a bunch of fascinating articles in there, which [...]

It's simply not enough to be part of one problem. The DEA feels the need to be part of several problems. You'd think it would have its hands full blowing billions of dollars on a lost drug war and filling people's heads with hysterical stupidity about the magical powers of fentanyl. But, as FOIA terrorist [...]

Linux is the most fundamental technology required by all real developers. It is required in almost all fields of Software engineering. DevOps, Cloud, Full Stack, and App developers must have a working knowledge of Linux. With five comprehensive modules and over 40 Linux technologies covered, this Linux Training Bundle offers a detailed program tailored for [...]

There's been this weird idea lately, even among people who used to recognize that copyright only empowers the largest gatekeepers, that in the AI world we have to magically flip the script on copyright and use it as a tool to get AI companies to pay for the material they train on. But, as we've [...]

Every few weeks for the last fifteen years there's been a massive scandal involving some company, telecom, data broker, or app maker over-collecting your detailed personal location data, failing to secure it, then selling access to that information to any nitwit with a nickel. And despite the added risks this creates in the post-Roe era, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple anonymous response to the claim that Elon Musk fights censorship: Remember when Elon happily complied with the Turkish government's request to censor anti-Erdogan content during its presidential election? In second place, it's a double-winning comment from Thad that also takes first place [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, consumer groups accused the FCC of weakening oversight of cell carriers under the pretense of battling text message spam, activists were making one last push to restore net neutrality via the Congressional Review Act, and senators were continuing to point out that US broadband maps suck. The FBI [...]

Law enforcement for profit is an ugly proposition. Most of us immediately think of civil asset forfeiture, which is generally just cops going shopping for stuff they want or cash to buy the stuff they want that isn't subject to outside oversight. But there's another undercurrent of corruption that runs through small town America - [...]

Hormel, the foodstuffs company that makes Spam, amongst other items, has made it onto our pages before. And not for good reasons. Ages ago, the company attempted to sue anti-spam proprietors, arguing that its Spam" trademark somehow translated into the world of IT and email. Separately, the company also bullied a Canadian brewery into changing [...]

We've long known the Fifth Circuit is the worst circuit to hear your case involving rights violations by law enforcement. Despite one particularly blistering dissent from Judge Don Willett calling qualified immunity a rigged game" litigants almost always lose, the Fifth Circuit continues to coddle cops and overreaching government officials to give them what they [...]

This wasn't hard to predict. When Montana passed its TikTok ban in April we called it laughably unconstitutional." Montana's very silly Attorney General, Austin Knudsen, who claimed to have been the driving force behind the bill, had insisted that the state would be vindicated in court. As we noted when the bill passed, his public [...]

Most people seem to understand the First Amendment protects their right to say stupid or offensive things, especially when they're the ones saying them. These same people often forget the First Amendment does not protect them from counter-speech, during which they may be publicly decried as stupid or offensive. The same goes for most government [...]

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Okay, okay, I think this is the last of my posts about Elon Musk's unhinged appearance at the DealBook Summit with ill-prepared interviewer Andrew Ross Sorkin. We already covered his cursing out advertisers, while predicting that earth will judge" them, as well as his statement that AI copyright lawsuits don't matter because Digital God" will [...]

For decades, cable TV giants have nickel-and-dimed customers with a rotating assortment of bullshit cable TV fees, whether it's regulatory recovery" fee (a misleadingly named fee designed to have you blaming government for industry greed), regional sports fees (charged whether or not you watch sports), or the completely meaningless broadcast TV fee" (which has ballooned [...]

One of the more famous, and my favorite, quotations attributed to Winston Churchill is: Americans will always do the right thing, only after they have tried everything else." My second favorite Churchill quote, by the way, is: Dammit, I can't decide between these three fingers of whiskey and this tankard of champagne!" Anyway, the point [...]

One of things we enjoy here at Techdirt is when even those with legitimate gripes about trademark law take a bemused view about the whole thing, rather than immediately jumping to angry and overly aggressive threats. No one likes a trademark bully, even when the trademark holder might have a legitimate claim. A few weeks [...]

A few months ago a California court of appeals issued a really terrible decision in Liapes v. Facebook. Liapes, a Facebook user, was unhappy that the ads delivered to her correlated with some of her characteristics, like her age. As a result there were certain ads, like one provided by an insurer offering a particular [...]

The Stored Communications Act - enacted in 1986 - is not only outdated, it's also pretty weird. An amendment to the ECPA (Electronic Communications Privacy Act), the SCA added and subtracted privacy from communications. It's the subtractions that are bothersome. Law enforcement wasn't too happy a lot of electronic communications were now subject to warrant [...]

So, we already wrote about the biggest headline grabbing moment from Elon Musk's Dealbook interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin yesterday, but there was another crazy, Techdirt-relevant one involving copyright and AI. As we've explained over and over again, copyright is the wrong tool to use to regulate AI, and using it will lead to bad [...]

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I'm not sure Elon quite understands the concept of damage control." Advertisers are bailing, and the rate increases every time he says something stupid or endorses this or that conspiracy theory. It's costing the company tons of money, but he still can't admit that he's the problem. So, instead, he's blaming everyone else. And sometimes [...]

The 2021 infrastructure bill set aside an historic $42.5 billion for broadband deployment. It also tasked the FCC with creating rules aimed at ending decades of race and class based-discrimination in broadband deployment, which have been well documented by The Markup, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), and others. The goal was to try and [...]

Unity has had a tough time of it recently. After the company decided to put in place a major pricing scheme shift for users of its game engine back in September, the company has since experienced all kinds of fallout over the changes, ousted its CEO, and has generally been vilified for not bothering to [...]

There are few things I enjoy more than watching cocksure cops trip over their own hubris. And it happens so often. Cops believe that since they are (affirmatively) law enforcement officers and the people they target are (only allegedly) criminals, they are firmly in the right, no matter what they do or what rights they [...]

Copyright policy is a sticky tricky thing, and there are battles that have been fought for decades among public and corporate interests. Typically, it's the corporate interests that win - especially the content industry. We've seen power, and copyrights, collect among a small group of content companies because of this. But there is one significant [...]

I mean, it's not like we didn't warn Elon Musk. Free speech is not about creating a single private space where everyone gets to speak, because that doesn't support free speech. It enables the worst of society to browbeat, harass, and abuse anyone they dislike, creating a total garbage dump that drives people away and [...]