Techdirt

It's been a while since this last happened, but we've got a double-winning comment this week, taking the first place spot on both the funny and insightful leaderboards. And it's an anonymous comment too, responding to Elon Musk's plans to add ID-based verification to Twitter: I have complete confidence that the man notorious for not [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, after years of fighting, Prenda boss Paul Hansmeier followed the path of John Steele and pleaded guilty to mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The DOJ was trying to force Facebook to break encryption on voice calls, the EU was moving forward with legislation [...]

It's always nice when you get several stories in a row that contrast with one another in order to make a point. We were just discussing Rockstar's decision to scoop up a roleplaying and modding community in order to build in new and interesting ways to play GTA and Red Dead Redemption games. What I [...]

Back in 2015 domain registrar Tucows announced it would hope to modestly kickstart stagnant broadband competition bybuying a small Virginia ISPby the name of Blue Ridge InternetWorks (BRI). Operating under the Ting brand name, the company said the goal was to bring a shockingly human experience and fair, honest pricing" to a broken broadband market [...]

As you'll recall, Montana passed a law earlier this year to ban TikTok (and ban mobile app stores from offering TikTok for download). The bill has lots of problems, not the least of which was that Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen flat out told the NY Times that the purpose of the bill was to [...]

In 2014, the Supreme Court made it clear: phone searches require warrants. While it did note the case involved a search incident to an arrest," the precedent was undeniable. If a phone search attached to an arrest requires a warrant, it would logically follow that any phone search by law enforcement - even those not [...]

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 enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, and Bluetooth earbuds. With its [...]

There is no space for nuanced discussion about reality any more, as it seems that nonsense floods the zone. So, please try to follow along here as there needs to be some nuance to finally get down to the details of this issue. It's nonsense, piled on top of nonsense, piled on top of nonsense, [...]

We've noted repeatedly how the hyperventilation about TikTok privacy is largely just a distraction from the U.S.' ongoing failure to pass even a basic privacy law or meaningfully regulate data brokers. We haven't done those things for two reasons. One, the dysfunctional status quo (where companies mindlessly over-collect data and fail to secure it, resulting [...]

Earlier this summer, we talked about Trader Joe's joining the list of large companies combatting unionization efforts through the most petty of methods: complaining about those unions over trademark infringement." Trader Joe's isn't the first company to go down this route of course, as we've seen Walmart and Medieval Times have behaved similarly. Nor will [...]

This case involves both civil forfeiture and criminal forfeiture. First one, then the other. Not that the order matters as much as the government's unwillingness to do much more than sit on the $30,000 in cash they took from an Ohio couple during a supposed drug investigation. Civil forfeiture allows the government to keep seized [...]

Back in June, we wrote about a ridiculously weak lawsuit from the big music publishers against exTwitter, claiming that the platform, mostly known for text, and which barely has any reasonable system for posting or listening to music, was a music piracy haven. As we noted, the publishers' lawsuit seemed misguided in multiple ways, beyond [...]

I guess the feeling was that some protesters needed to be arrested. And when most protesters are protesting cops, it's probably a whole lot easier to go after those that aren't. That's how this lawsuit got started. Following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, protests against police violence began all [...]

Podurama is a leading podcast player with a collection of more than 30 million podcasts in every genre. The app makes it easy to organize your podcasts into folders or create multiple playlists of your favorite episodes. You can also take notes or bookmark within an audio. Very few podcast players have the ability to [...]

Stephen Thaler has spent years trying, and almost always failing, to convince both patent and copyright bodies to give him patents and copyrights on works he says are created by AI systems he's built. He's failed at this process. A lot. I mean, really, a lot. His latest attempt was to sue the Copyright Office [...]

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has backed off of its ill-advised opposition to right to repair after presumably getting an earful from reformers and the Biden administration. This past June, NHTSA issued guidance advising the auto industry to basically ignore Massachusetts' new right to repair law, which required that all modern vehicle systems [...]

Pretextual stops are law enforcement's favorite way to fish for larger catches. Any minor moving violation can predicate a stop. That leads to conversations - often non-consensual - with drivers and passengers. Any number of factors can be opportunistically read by officers to add up to reasonable suspicion." Once that develops," the party begins. Cars, [...]

Well, this certainly isn't an outcome I would have predicted. While the saga of Microsoft's attempt to acquire Activision Blizzard has certainly taken a long and winding road, as it stands today all the regulatory hurdles have seemingly been cleared save for the UK's Competition & Markets Authority (CMA). Unlike the FTC's challenge to the [...]

Clearview has suffered tons of self-inflicted damage during its relatively short life as a viable, if execrable, product. Always willing to put its worst foot forward, the company built an AI backbone to support its voluminous webscraping, gathering up everything that wasn't locked down on the internet and applying its facial recognition algorithm to it. [...]

So, yesterday we had the story of how, at Elon's personal request, exTwitter is moving to get rid of link and snippet text in what had been known as Twitter Cards for news organizations. Musk claims that it's for esthetic" reasons, though in our article, we noted the uncanny timing of this decision coming just [...]

As a child, nothing warmed me more than my mother's Three C's Soup": Cabbage, Carrot, Carraway from Jane Brody's Good Food Book: Living the High Carbohydrate Way (published in 1980 and still in print, no ebook version has yet been licensed). And when my mother died in late fall 2018, there was nothing I wanted [...]

Headway is an app that will help you develop the most powerful learning habits and make sure you're always armed with the best book ideas, bite-sized learning for fun and easy growth, and essential knowledge to crush your goals. Whether you want to build a business, improve your health, or succeed at work, we've got [...]

Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut wrote an NY Times op-ed piece a few weeks ago (there's so much nonsense all the time that it takes a little while to find the time to respond to all of it), claiming that Algorithms are Making Kids Desperately Unhappy." He wrote this in support of his The Protecting [...]

Having clearly not learned many lessons from the ongoing and growing repercussions for false claims of election fraud, election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindelllast week unveiled his new plan (see video) to monitor" election polling places by using... drones. According to Ars Technica, Lindell claimed he'd developed a first-of-its-kind drone technology to monitor for election fraud: [...]

Writing as much as I do about trademark disputes and, more specifically, lawsuits, these are always the most frustrating ways for these disputes to end. I will spend some time examining a dispute, analyzing the merits on both sides, only to find that the suit is settled without any of the pertinent details of the [...]

As you'll surely recall, Elon's first big brilliant idea upon taking over Twitter was to conflate two separate offerings that Twitter had: Twitter Blue, a premium upsell with extra features (some of which were useful) with Twitter's blue check verification program, which was created to help more well known users avoid impersonation. The original blue [...]

For all of the hype Silicon Valley gets as the birthplace of American technological innovation, the broadband networks in cities like Palo Alto have never kept pace. Like most towns and cities across the U.S., Palo Alto residents have long complained about the slow speeds, high prices, and comically terrible customer service they get from [...]

This is just so painfully obnoxious. The legacy news media, spurred on by a welfare system that pretend free market supporter Rupert Murdoch dreamed up and convinced governments to implement, whereby the government would force internet companies, which had innovated and created new business models that worked, to suddenly be required to pay for sending [...]

This is a bit of an oddity. We've seen lots of lawsuits against social media services filed by bigots who are upset their accounts have been banned or their content removed because, well, they're loaded with bigotry. You know, conservative views," as they say. This one goes the other direction. It claims YouTube's moderation algorithm [...]

Experience unparalleled gaming with the Mini Docking Station for Nintendo Switch. This docking station supports 4K, 1080P, and 720P video output, making your gaming experience clearer and more immersive. With one-touch display switching, easily switch from TV to tabletop mode for versatile gameplay. This docking station is compact yet powerful, with wide compatibility and uncompromising [...]

Look, I know some folks get annoyed that I write as much about Elon Musk and exTwitter as I do, but he's really been the most fascinating case study in sheer wrongness regarding the running of a modern internet company and it's just endlessly fascinating. And, really, if he just stopped doing stupid things, I [...]

We've noted a few times that there are two major reasons that the U.S. still hasn't passed even a basic privacy law for the internet era or regulated data brokers. One, the government is corrupt, and has repeatedly buckled to the lobbying of multiple industries that find the current dysfunction very profitable. Two, the government [...]

Well, that was quick. We had just been discussing the encouraging news that Rockstar had scooped up Cfx.re, a community dedicated to roleplaying within GTA and Red Dead Redemption games, as well as several mods made within that community. The only thing that made this newsworthy at all is that Rockstar has had an awful [...]

If you've never watched it, Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix" series (which was recently updated from the original version that came out years ago) is an excellent look at how stupid our copyright laws are, and how they have really warped our view of creativity. As the series makes clear, creativity is all about [...]

It's been clearly acknowledged by a majority of courts (but not the Supreme Court, alas) that filming cops while they perform their duties is protected by the First Amendment. Most legislators know this. But some legislators still yearn to protect cops from accountability. So, they push bills that install time and place" restrictions in hopes [...]

You might have heard late last week or over the weekend, that Elon was getting rid of the block" feature on exTwitter. Elon had tweeted on Friday claiming Block is going to be deleted as a feature", except for DMs." But, uh, he had said basically the same thing back in June. I know this [...]

Customer service matters. Suing patients unhappy with your work just ain't it. That's what Texas cosmetic surgeon Dr. Wilbur Hah has just learned, after being handed a loss in four concurrent opinions dealing with four anti-SLAPP motions filed by unhappy patients the (allegedly not-so-good) doctor sued for daring to besmirch his reputation with social media [...]

Noiselab is an online community dedicated to Ableton producers and electronic musicians. With a team of experienced instructors, including Ableton Certified Trainers and industry-recognized producers, Noiselab offers high-quality Ableton tutorials, sample packs, loops, and an extensive sound library. Joining the Noiselab community gives you unlimited access to over 500 lessons and resources to enhance your [...]

A few days Elon Musk tweeted that X as humanity's collective consciousness" and then pinned that meaningless platitude that would only sound profound to a stoned high schooler. Anyway, if you're going to be humanity's collective consciousness" you should maybe try to to avoid making years worth of images inaccessible. But that's what Musk did [...]

When it comes to obnoxious DRM and bizarre, greedy restrictions, nobody does it better than printer manufacturers. The industry has long waged a not-so-subtle war on its own customers, routinely rolling out firmware updates or DRM preventing them from using more affordable, competitor printer cartridges. A few years ago, printer manufacturers took this tactic one [...]

This week, we've got a double winner on the insightful side with Stephen T. Stone taking both top spots. In first place, it's a comment about how, whatever you might think about old Twitter, its moderation practices were sure better than they are now: Maybe I didn't hear about it, but I don't recall any [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, we looked forward to the Senate oversight committee hearing that would force Ajit Pai to explain why the FCC made up a DDoS attack, but were disappointed (if not at all surprised) when it utterly failed to hold him accountable. Pai was also busy opposing the effort to [...]

As a writer of opinion pieces, sometimes you go hard in the paint and the result isn't precisely what you expected. Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote about Netflix's announced decision to dip its toe into the video game market. At that point, word had gotten out about it all, though that word can [...]

XKCD has multiple comics about how hacking isn't quite the way they make it out to be in movies: And: Both of these demonstrate how actual hacking is often a lot less sophisticated than people make it out to be. And, indeed, for years we've pointed out that social engineering is generally more effective than [...]

Just fucking weird. Seems illegal. How do we get away with this in a constitutional republic? Rights exist. And et cetera. Those are the responses that tend to be generated by anyone attempting to explain civil asset forfeiture to normal people who just assume the government needs to prove something, anything before taking money (or [...]

We've covered the many problems of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) for years now (this is the second Congress it has been introduced in), and it appears that more and more people are realizing the myriad problems with the bill which, ridiculously, has broad bipartisan support, with an astoundingly disappointing 43 cosponsors in the [...]

Jordan will never be mistaken for a human rights haven. The State Department's assessment of the kingdom of Jordan's human rights environment is, at best, extremely dismal. Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment by government authorities; arbitrary arrest and detention; political prisoners or [...]

The Complete Adobe Mastery Bundle has 11 courses designed to help you get the most out of Adobe's offerings. You'll learn about Photoshop, After Effects, Premier Pro, and Lightroom. The bundle is on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals [...]

Let's start from the basics here: if you tax something, you will get less of it. That's how taxes work. If you want less of something, you add a tax to it. In Canada, some very, very clueless politicians (pushed by the news media) passed a tax on Facebook and Google linking to news. Both [...]

For thirty-plus years, giant telecom monopolies have worked tirelessly to crush all broadband competition. At the same time, they've lobbied state and federal governments so extensively, that the vast majority of politicians are feckless cardboard cutouts with little real interest in market or consumer health. The result has been fairly obvious: Americans pay some of [...]