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TikTok, the short-video company with Chinese roots, did the most American thing possible on May 7, 2024: Itsued the U.S. government, in the person of Attorney General Merrick Garland, in federal court. The suit claims the federal law that took effect on April 24, 2024,banning TikTok unless it sells itselfviolates the U.S. Constitution. The law [...]

We've long been critics of facial recognition tech here at Techdirt. Even though the steady march of technology inevitably means the tech will get faster and better, the problem is the first part: faster. The tech has proven to be very fallible. And it has made things even worse for the sort of people most [...]

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Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed free speech absolutist,' rarely gets it right when it comes to actual free speech. But he deserves a rare round of applause in his fight against Australia's global speech injunction. We've had many posts detailing Elon Musk's somewhat hypocritical understanding of free speech. This included his willingness to fold and give [...]

The U.S. yet yet to pass even a basic internet-era privacy law - or regulate data brokers. And while there's a lot of misdirection and pretense to the contrary, the primary reason is (1) because the U.S. government is too corrupt; and (2) because the U.S. government really enjoys being able to purchase massive amounts [...]

And here we go again. It used to be that when you bought a thing, you owned the thing. You could do whatever you wanted with the thing, so long as you didn't violate the law with the thing, because you owned the thing. And I recognize I'm using the word thing" a lot here, [...]

Never underestimate the coercive power of law enforcement. Officers were so convinced Thomas Perez Jr. had murdered his missing" father, they spent 17 hours torturing him into confessing to a crime no one had actually committed. Perez Jr. initiated this. He called the police to report his father was missing, mistakenly assuming they'd help him, [...]

I wonder if Gina Rinehart, an Australian mining magnate, is a fan of Barbra Streisand? It's been a bit since we had a straight-up classic Streisand Effect story like the good old days, where someone powerful saw something they didn't like and insisted that it must be disappeared because they didn't like it. Meet Gina [...]

You have to feel tremendous sympathy for the families of the victims in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. As has been well documented, there was a series of cascading failures by law enforcement that made that situation way worse and way more devastating than it should have been. So who should be blamed? Apparently, [...]

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It's no fun when your friends ask you to take sides in their disputes. The plans for every dinner party, wedding, and even funeral arrive at a juncture where you find yourself thinking, Dang, if I inviteher, thenhewon't come." It's evenlessfun when you're running an online community, from a groupchat to a Mastodon server (or [...]

Just recently we discussed a new report showing how U.S. wireless price competition effectively ground to a halt immediately in the wake of the Sprint and T-Mobile merger. Consolidating the U.S. wireless sector from four to three major providers immediately muted price competition, much like every credible academic, consumer group, and deal critic predicted. It [...]

This week, Stephen T. Stone takes both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it's a preemptive comment on our post about five Section 230 cases that made online communities better: In second place, it's a comment about laws that aim to ban library books: The best libraries offend everyone. The worst libraries [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, people were jumping on the bandwagon of fearmongering about Huawei, while we pointed out that the real security threat is the internet of things. Another federal magistrate said that compelled production of passwords and biometrics violates the Fifth Amendment, ICE spent another $820,000 on cellphone cracking tools, and [...]

The last time we saw German-based grocer Aldi get into a trademark tiff over an alcohol product, it was with Brew Dog in the UK and it was one of the most good-natured trademark disputes" on the record. While that whole thing was refreshing to see, not every company chooses to approach things in a [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice - or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week's round-up of the latest news in online [...]

ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) tends to treat the Constitution as some ticky-tack policy its officers can safely ignore. That's not to say ICE believes the Constitution does not exist. It probably at least realizes it exists. After all, it's a US federal agency. What it firmly believes is that the Constitution provides no protection [...]

Another day, another dumb lawsuit against TikTok. We've seen school districts and parents suing TikTok on the basis of extremely weird claims of kids used TikTok, some bad stuff happened to kids, TikTok should be liable." But in the past year, it seems that a bunch of state AGs have decided to sue TikTok as [...]

None of this makes sense. At least, not when you attempt to reconcile what's being said with the university's actions. It makes more sense later. But we'll get to that in a moment. A non-profit called the Atlanta Police Foundation, which claims to be interested in building a better relationship between Atlanta's police and the [...]

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Public libraries are supposed to be places for communities to gather and learn, with an important focus on being a place for kids to gain access to information. But thanks to a moral panic in the GOP about indoctrination" in libraries, it seems that at least one library has decided to shut its door to [...]

Earlier this year you probably sawthe storyabout how a political consultant 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. [...]

A couple of months back, we talked about an odd decision Warner Bros. Discovery made to simply retire" a bunch of games it published, mostly from small indie studios, from the various online stores where they were sold, such as Steam. This resulted in anger from those who bought these games and confusion from those [...]

Hey Google, can you spare a few hundred million to keep Rupert Murdoch's yacht afloat? That's essentially what some legislators are demanding with their harebrained schemes to force tech companies to fund journalism. It is no secret that the journalism business is in trouble these days. News organizations are failing and journalists are being laid [...]

While the celebrity-driven allure of the Scarlett Johansson voicealike story might be an easier headline grab, it is in the dark arts of election dirty trickery where you're more likely to find the kinds of election misinformation concerns that have an impact on society. Indeed, experts have been warning for some time that fake text, [...]

Qualified immunity is a mess. It's a mess the Supreme Court created and, to date, seems largely unwilling to fix (despite the occasional remand). The theory of QI is this: law enforcement officers (and other government employees) should be granted forgiveness for blowing constitutional calls during rapidly evolving situations potentially involving life and death. And [...]

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The internet is the wild west! Kids are dying! AI is scary and bad! Algorithms! Addiction! If only there was more liability and we could sue more often, internet companies would easily fix everything. Once, an AI read my mind, and it's scary. No one would ever bring a vexatious lawsuit ever. Wild west! The [...]

Annoyed by the kind of expensive, shitty, slow, and spotty broadband access caused by limited competition and monopoly power, hundreds of U.S. communities have been building their own broadband networks. These networks come in a variety of forms, including direct municipal ownership, cooperatives, extensions of city-owned electrical utilities, or public private partnerships. While there's certainly [...]

Pretextual stops. Let's talk about it. Cops who perform traffic stops are rarely performing traffic stops because they care about traffic safety. They're looking for something - anything - else. Driving a car on public roads puts you on the outside of the Fourth Amendment. Warrants aren't required. Reasonable suspicion is the low bar that [...]

I'll admit, I had to read this story a couple of times, since it's so unbelievable. With the explosion of AI tools that have come out over the past couple of years, coming along for the ride are all kinds of concerns over how that AI gets used. In the realm of higher education, this [...]

How much harm is done to children in the name of protecting" them? Entirely too much. What if we drive them further into dangerous corners of the internet by cutting them off from their support networks? Since the release of Jonathan Haidt's book, The Anxious Generation," a few months back, there has been plenty of [...]

Generally speaking, a private company's press release is not news." If anyone wants to watch companies stroke themselves off in public, there are plenty of sites dedicated to that kink. If it's cop tech purveyors seeking to redeem themselves after a bunch of negative press and/or the loss of high-profile government contracts, we should be [...]

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While lawmakers, looking to get on cable TV, spent much of the last few years performatively hyperventilating about TikTok privacy and national security issues, few of those same folks seem quite as bothered by the parade of obvious, nasty vulnerabilities in the nation's telecom networks. For example, we still haven't somehow addressed longstanding flawsin Signaling [...]

If Congress doesn't get Google and Meta to agree to Section 230 reforms, it's going to destroy the rest of the open internet, while Google and Meta will be just fine. If that sounds stupidly counterproductive, well, welcome to today's Congress. As we were just discussing, the House Energy and Commerce committee is holding a [...]

Are you an NFL fan? If you are, are there particular teams or games you want to watch? The obvious answer to that second question would be yes", though the answer to whether you'll actually be able to watch those games is much less obvious and much more convoluted. It depends which team, and which [...]

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is holding ahearingtomorrow on sunsetting" Section 230. Despite facing criticism, Section 230 has undeniably been a cornerstone in the architecture of the modern web, fostering a robust market for new services, and enabling a rich diversity of ideas and expressions to flourish. Crucially, Section 230 empowers platforms tomaintain community [...]

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It's been a while since we last mentioned Craig Wright here on Techdirt. We've been pretty clear all along, like pretty much everyone else, that Wright was so obviously full of shit in claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto, and then trying to claim patents and copyrights over all kinds of Bitcoin/cryptocurrency related things. Over the [...]

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There are few groups of people cops like less than people who don't like cops. But it's not that these people don't like cops, per se. It's that they're tired of cops doing whatever they want whenever they want with near-zero accountability. Cops continue to bad things, like murder unarmed people while effecting arrests." These [...]

Is Google signaling the end of the open web? That's some of the concern raised by its new embrace of AI. While most of the fears about AI may be overblown, this one could be legit. But it doesn't mean that we need to accept it. These days, there is certainly a lot of hype [...]

In 2023, Mozilla released a report noting that modern cars had the worst security and privacy standards of any major technology industry the organization tracks. That was followed by a NYT report earlier this year showing how automakers routinely hoover up oodles of consumer driving and phone info, then sell access to that data to [...]

The Supreme Court has recognized there's something definitely wrong with asset forfeiture. But, so far, it has yet to attempt to put a full stop to it. A recent case dealt with criminal asset forfeiture. In that case, the nation's top court ruled it was unconstitutional for the government to seize assets worth far more [...]

It should come as no shock to anyone when I say that DC Comics and Marvel both behave in a very aggressive manner when it comes to all things intellectual property. These two companies have engaged in all kinds of draconian behavior when it comes to everything from copyright to trademark. But one thing that [...]

It's been almost an article of faith among many (especially since 2016) that social media has been a leading cause of our collective dumbening and the resulting situation in which a bunch of fascist-adjacent wannabe dictators getting elected all over the place. But, we've always found that argument to feel massively, if not totally overblown. [...]

God forbid any of you peons break a law. It doesn't matter if you only do it once. If you get caught, it's all on you. But if you're a cop, laws are, at best, suggestions. Break them if you can. Ignore them when they're inconvenient. And treat any law or court ruling that reins [...]

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It's no secret that Elon Musk can be petty and vindictive over the dumbest shit. You may have heard that he fired the entire Supercharger team a few weeks ago entirely due to him getting upset at what the woman who led that team told him (he's now scrambling to try to rehire the team [...]