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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 [...]

As we're all too well aware, there's plenty of money to be made in the surveillance business. The best surveillance businesses, though, are those that rely on captive markets. Sure, kids aren't actually captive," but they're in school often enough it's tempting to let tech pick up the slack when it comes to keeping tabs [...]

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What the fuck is going on with the 5th Circuit? Last week we wrote about it putting a law into effect just after a district court had laid out why it was unconstitutional (this was about mandatory made up health warnings" and age verification on adult content websites). This followed on the 5th Circuit doing [...]

With the Biden FCC now having a voting majority, the telecom industry is clearly worried about the agency's plans to restore popular net neutrality rules stripped away by the Trump administration. To prep the lobbying field, the industry has started using its various proxy groups to seed the press with a bunch of bullshit arguments [...]

A little over a year ago, Liberty Tax Service filed a trademark and defamation lawsuit against AMC. At issue was the depiction of a shady tax prep company run by con-men in the final season of the hit show Better Call Saul. In the show, the name of the tax prep company is Sweet Liberty [...]

Hey, remember when a bunch of unpopular broadband monopolies convinced a corrupt reality TV star to dismantle most oversight of their very broken industry? And remember how to accomplish this companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast spread endless lies about what was actually happening, going so far as to use fake and even dead people [...]

The trust and safety conversation tends to focus on the huge platforms, and the millions of smaller websites (some still quite big!) get ignored. But those websites have trust and safety needs too, and they use a lot of different tools to meet them. Most of these tools are proprietary, but there's a growing push [...]

We're increasingly at the mercy of bigots in this country. That's an upsetting turn of events, considering our history, which includes a long list of enshrined rights as well as the assertion that all people are created equal. Thanks to the aberration that was the Donald Trump presidency, the worst people in the nation suddenly [...]

We've been covering the multi-pronged ridiculousness around the Missouri/Louisiana jawboning" cases, regarding whether or not the White House was overstepping the bounds of the 1st Amendment and pressuring private websites to moderate in a manner they deemed appropriate. Again, almost everything about this case is bizarre -and getting more bizarre with each move. Last night, [...]

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It's been eight years since the Authors Guild was thoroughly and totally embarrassed by losing its big lawsuit against Google over the Google Books scanning project. I guess they're missing the feeling of embarrassment, as they've filed what is effectively the same damn suit against OpenAI over that company's book scanning. Now, I know, some [...]

It can't be said often enough: it's stunning that we've let scammers and scumbags hijack the nation's top voice communications platform. And that we've let marketing and telecom industry lobbyists slowly degrade the authority of the one U.S. regulator capable of actually doing something about it. Every six months or so the FCC comes out [...]

Are you familiar with felony murder?" Let's talk about it. It's a handy way to send more people to prison for more years just because they participated in a crime that contained a murder. While I can (sort of) understand the deterrent effect of laws like these, the simple fact is felony murder laws hold [...]

Last week, we wrote about a federal district judge in California, Beth Labson Freeman, tossing out California's Age Appropriate Design Code (AB 2273) as unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. The ruling was careful and thorough, which did not surprise me, having sat through the oral arguments on the matter, where it seemed that the judge [...]

Last week, it appeared ever so briefly, the UK government might be finally giving up on its desires to legislate at least one end of messaging services' end-to-end encryption. Having faced resistance from nearly every encrypted service (all of which threatened to exit the UK if anti-encryption mandates were put in place) as well as [...]

It is quite incredible to me how, over the last five years or so, the California legislature has pushed over a dozen absolutely horrific, dangerous (and often unconstitutional) laws to completely undermine the very principles of an open internet... and it gets basically no attention at all. Last year, it felt like we at Techdirt [...]

Most laws and policies banning drag shows are experiencing swift judicial blowback thanks to their obvious regulation of expressive speech. Some legislators have attempted to work around this expected roadblock to oppression by avoiding any mention of drag shows or drag performers when crafting unconstitutional laws, instead pretending they're simply strengthening existing obscenity laws. None [...]

Most modern companies put a lot of stock into data when making crucial business decisions. As such, they require employees who understand how to work with mass amounts of data, and effectively analyze it to get a holistic view of the company. These skills aren't just reserved for analysts, they're valuable for professionals in any [...]

There's a pretty well known scene from The Office, when Michael Scott (played by Steve Carrell) follows his GPS device's instructions (incorrectly, obviously) and drives into a lake: The writer of that scene says the inspiration was a number of stories of people doing exactly that. In fact, in the earlier days of Techdirt, we [...]

While the California legislature often screws up tech policy, they've generally been pretty good on broadband. At least in relation to most U.S. states. California was among the first in the country to pass a net neutrality law after the telecom industry got Trumpists to dismantle federal rules. The state also unveiled a major broadband [...]

We've got one commenter taking both top spots on the insightful side this week, but also... not really. Because in what I believe is a first, our top winner on the insightful side is Samuel Abram commenting on the previous comments post to celebrate a comment from last week, by Stephen T. Stone, that didn't [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, Ajit Pai was whining about California's net neutrality effort, while a court ordered the FCC to hand over data on bogus public comments about net neutrality, and Congress failed to invite a single consumer advocate to its upcoming hearings about broadband privacy rules. A Swedish ISP gave us [...]

If you only listened to executives from the content industries, you might think that copyright infringement, or online piracy, is and has been a growing threat in dire need of stricter and stricter enforcement measures. But I'll let you in on a secret: that's been bullshit for the better part of a decade now. In [...]

Law enforcement officers rarely care about enforcing traffic laws. Moving violations may produce a little extra revenue for the city or state, but it doesn't do much for the officers performing the stops. Pretextual stops? The leveraging of any perceived moving violation in hopes of performing a vehicle search? That's where the money is, thanks [...]

Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, the streaming industry has started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from enshittification," that generally means imposing obnoxious new restrictions (see: Netflix password sharing), endless price hikes, and obnoxious and dubious new fees geared toward pleasing Wall Street. [...]