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MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, [...]

For decades, the government has used the Third Party Doctrine to obtain massive amounts of phone records without a warrant. Even prior to the creation of the Third Party Doctrine by the Supreme Court in 1979, government agencies were obtaining phone records using pen register requests that provided them with info on numbers called and [...]

The rushed integration of half-baked AI" (aka not at all sentient language learning models) into journalism has been a gargantuan mess. Execs at companies like Red Ventures (CNET) and G/O Media (Gizmodo) have made it very clear they see LLMs primarily as a way to attack labor and cut corners, resulting in soulless and low [...]

The problem with putting cops in schools isn't necessarily that there are never things that happen in schools that require a law enforcement response. (Unfortunately, a lot of those things are school shootings, which cops aren't all that capable of responding to.) The problem is that school administrators tend to think that because they have [...]

Back in 2015, Techdirt wrote about one of China's many attempts to control the online world, in this case by requiring everyone to use real names when they register for online services. As that post noted, the fact that the Chinese authorities had announced similar initiatives several times since 2003 suggests that implementing the policy [...]

The world of generative AI has been changing rapidly, and that's not something that's going to stop any time soon. Today, we're joined on the podcast by Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (no, not Elon Musk's new bot called Grok) - a company working on a new technology stack that drastically speeds up [...]

We keep pointing out just how incredible it is that Elon Musk is personally responsible for the destruction of so much of ExTwitter's business model. Even if you believe that the company was too bloated, or that it's business model needed to change, as you look at how the company is flailing, it can be [...]

New York City residents will, once again, be asked to foot the bill for NYPD efforts that solely benefit the nation's largest police department. It's not enough that they've been asked to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to bail out officers hit with civil rights lawsuits. It's not enough that they've been [...]

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A month ago we wrote about Google effectively pulling up the ladder" on the open internet by embracing age verification mandates as part of a regulatory approach to child safety. As we pointed out at the time, this is bizarre and stupid for a variety of reasons, but also not too surprising. It's bizarre because [...]

For decades, the FCC has maintained an arguably pathetic definition of broadband," allowing the telecom industry to under-deliver substandard access. And despite some new rhetoric from the agency under Biden, that doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon. Broadband was originally defined as any 200 kbps connection. In 2010, that pathetic definition was changed to [...]

I don't know what it is about US law enforcement culture, but it far too often seems to be that officers deployed to help people choose to hurt people instead. When people are suffering mental distress, cops become first responders. Unlike other first responders, like EMTs or firefighters, the desire to harm tends to surpass [...]

With almost zero public notice, the Board of Supervisors of Marin County, California (just to the north of San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge) is on the verge of approving tomorrow a demand by the county sheriff's department to install license plate cameras throughout the county. As a county resident, I object. My comment [...]

We've noted how the GOP's obsession with TikTok is... weird and superficial. Guys like Ted Cruz or Brendan Carr will suffer absolute embolisms about TikTok (and TikTok only) to get on cable news where they'll be portrayed as good faith privacy reformers. While simultaneously refusing to pass a privacy law or regulate dodgy data brokers [...]

Facial recognition tech has slowly gone mainstream over the past half-decade. Not just in acceptance, but also in opposition. Kashmir Hill exposed perhaps the worst purveyor of this tech - Clearview - with a series of articles exposing the company's tactics as well as its far right backers. Clearview has managed to become a pariah [...]

Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative AI-driven tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different from previous Luminar editors. It keeps your favorite LuminarAI tools and expands your arsenal with more state-of-the-art technologies and important changes at [...]

We've already discussed the extremely censorial nature of ExTwitter's lawsuit against Media Matters for accurately describing ads from major brands that appeared next to explicitly neoNazi content. The lawsuit outright admits that Media Matters did, in fact, see those ads next to that content. Its main complaint is that Elon is mad that he thinks [...]

Two years ago the state of California unveiled amajor broadband planthat, among other things, aims to spend $3.5 billion to create a massive, open access middle mile" fiber network in a bid to boost competition. It's part of a broader quest to make broadband bothmore affordable and more competitive(see ourCopia report from last yeardiscussing the [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a simple comment about Elon Musk's extremely terrible lawsuit against Media Matters: Of course, as you know firsthand, a suit doesn't have to have any merit to make life miserable for its targets. In second place, it's Mechanical Rhizome with a comment [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the government agreed to delete data copied from a traveler's phone after being hit with a motion for return of property" while, in something of an inverse situation, prosecutors charged a suspect with evidence tampering after a seized iPhone was remotely wiped. Cord-cutting was setting more records while [...]

Given that the overwhelming majority of DMCA takedown notices are generated by copyright bots that are only moderately good at their job, at best, perhaps it's not terribly surprising that these bots keep finding new and interesting ways to cause collateral damage unintentionally. From publishers taking down YouTubers because of an oopsie to Viacom DMCAing [...]

For years we've talked about the growing threat of SIM hijacking, which involves a criminal covertly porting out your phone number from right underneath your nose (quite often with the help of bribed or connedwireless carrier employees). Once they have your phone identity, they have access to most of your personal accounts secured by two-factor [...]

It's somewhat incredible when you look at the full story, but once again, the DOJ has failed in its attempt to claim that Backpage founder/editor Michael Lacey was facilitating sex trafficking with the site. They did convict him on one count of money laundering, for transferring $16.5 million to a bank in Hungary right around [...]

In Italy, an age-verification coalition against porn is getting traction. On September 4th, the Minister of Family Eugenia Roccella, representing the right-wing majority,initiatedconsultations for introducing a law to prevent minors from accessing pornographic content. On November 13th, the Democratic Party (currently the main opposition party)presentedthe Digital Innovation Act, whoseArticle 17aims to prevent minors from accessing [...]

There are few moves that make reporting more credible than suing the reporter for defamation and losing. It not only revives the negative reporting that might have faded into the white noise of constant internet churn, but also exposes the plaintiff as someone unable to handle being the subject of factual reporting. The Streisand Effect, [...]

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Over the last few years, we've highlighted study after study after study showing that, contrary to the public narrative, claims by politicians, the media, and plaintiffs in many, many lawsuits, the actual evidence just does not show at all that social media/internet is doing damage to kids. In a recent post we highlighted just a [...]

We've noted many times how the GOP's obsession with TikTok is stupid, performative, and utterly hollow. For example, the party desperately wants to ban TikTok for privacy reasons," yet consistently opposes passing privacy laws, or regulating data brokers that traffic in far more data - at a far greater international scale - than TikTok executives [...]

The thin blue line between cops and cop-friendly tech continues to be erased, mostly by cops. No longer content to underserve the public, law enforcement agencies are welcoming the warm embrace of consumer surveillance products in hopes of adding private tech to their publicly-funded surveillance mesh networks. Ring, Amazon's home surveillance tech acquisition, was one [...]

We've documented in detail how the whole AT&T->Time Warner->Warner Brothers Discovery merger process has been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku by over-compensated [...]

If you - like Florida governor Ron DeSantis and his hateful little legislative buddies - want to oppress certain people, you're going to have to do it on your own time. The state isn't allowed to help you be shitty. Florida passed an anti-drag show law earlier this year. Legislators were careful to ensure the [...]

A few weeks back we wrote about a report that the EU Commission, in its push for dangerous client-side scanning mandates, had started buying highly targeted ads to try to influence people to support the policy. The ads, first revealed by Wired, were incredibly misleading. But, also, as we noted, appeared to violate EU's privacy [...]

After years of continuous, unrepentant abuse of surveillance powers, the FBI is facing the real possibility of seeing Section 702 curtailed, if not scuttled entirely. Section 702 allows the NSA to gather foreign communications in bulk. The FBI benefits from this collection by being allowed to perform backdoor" searches of NSA collections to obtain communications [...]

Take your basic knowledge of cybersecurity to a whole new level with the Advanced Cyber Security bundle. This bundle offers you 6 courses on industry-standard certifications on cybersecurity so you can enjoy the wonders of modern tech without compromising your data and privacy. Courses cover CISA, CCSP, CISM, and CISSP certification prep. You'll also get [...]

So, yesterday we covered Elon Musk's ridiculous censorial threat to sue Media Matters the split second the court opens on Monday." Of course, as we noted, you can file lawsuits 24/7. And yet, as the courts opened on Monday, there was nothing. As mentioned in the original post, I was away from internet access for [...]

AI" (or more accurately language learning models nowhere close to sentience or genuine awareness) has plenty of innovative potential. Unfortunately, most of the folks actually in charge of the technology's deployment largely see it as a way to cut corners, attack labor, and double down on all of their very worst impulses. Case in point: [...]

The NYPD has plenty of problems with accountability and transparency. The main problem is this: the public wants some of this and the NYPD wants none of this. So, it does stupid things repeatedly that do little more than remind the public it's not to be trusted. Like any cop shop, it's manned by cops [...]

The copyright system is flawed at many levels, as hundreds of posts on this blog make clear. One particular class of problems concern takedowns. The best known of the notice and takedown' systems, that of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), allows the copyright industry to send takedown notices when they discover infringements on [...]

Holy shit. So, in 2021 there was a car accident in Atwater California that killed a married couple, Pam and Joe Juarez. According to police reports at the time, a 20-year-old Stanford student, King Vanga, struck their car from behind. Here's how ABC 30 reported on the matter: The California Highway Patrol says Pam, 56, [...]

Some city officials in Illinois are now engaged in a round of How Can I Get Sued?" Sounds like fun, but Calumet City officials might do well to remember the only way to win is not to play. That's the upshot of the latest bit of officious nonsense to surface in the Chicago area. Granted, [...]

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The fakest free speech absolutist" who ever lived is at it again. As you may recall, earlier this year, Elon Musk sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claiming that its report documenting an alleged surge of hateful content" on exTwitter somehow violated contracts (after first threatening to sue for defamation, but not actually [...]

Right to repair reform continues to have a moment here in the U.S., with four states (California, Minnesota, New York, and recently Maine) having passed state level protections. The goal: to fight repair monopolies and make it easier and more affordable to repair the technology you own, whether it's your car, game console, cell phone, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with with a comment about Elon Musk citing The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy as the inspiration for his new Grok" AI product, and our point that the titular guide was compiled by humans: Yeah, if you want a real-life equivalent of the [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the RIAA made a court filing where it warned about overprotection from copyright, Nintendo secured a huge settlement against ROM site (probably just to scare other ROM sites), and the Girl Scouts sued the Boy Scouts over trademark. CNN filed a lawsuit seeking to show that Trump can't [...]

The things said by law enforcement when trying to keep evidence from being tossed all sound the same. There are only a handful of acceptable excuses for performing warrantless searches and, man, do they get used so frequently we can probably all repeat them in our sleep. Exigent circumstances." This one means things were happening [...]

Video game addiction. Sigh. Big sigh, even. Like, the biggest of sighs. We've talked about claims that video game addiction is a documentable affliction in the past, as well as the pushback that claim has received from addiction experts, who have pointed out that much of this is being done to allow doctors to get [...]

We've done this a few times now where people start talking about a social media trend that actually only went viral because of the media coverage of the supposed (but not really) social media trend. And each time there's some outrage moral panic about how social media" is destroying the children or whatever, when it's [...]

There's nothing new about cop shops letting their tech providers write their press releases for them. Law enforcement officers love power but often think nothing of surrendering their autonomy to the providers of the snooping tools. For years, Harris Corporation - the maker of Stingray devices - told cops what they could or couldn't say [...]

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