Techdirt

It has been known for years that polygraph tests can be beaten. This supposed thing of science can be manipulated to clear guilty people if guilty people know how to trick it. But law enforcement still likes polygraph tests because they can also be exploited in the other direction. When it's your word against the [...]

We've been writing about the problem of judge shopping" for years in a variety of contexts. While there used to be concerns about forum shopping," in which plaintiffs would seek out specific courts that were deemed more favorable (such as the Eastern District of Texas for patent troll cases), it got more ridiculous in recent [...]

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it's processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch - whatever your needs are. The free Microsoft Training Bundle is [...]

As Trump's favored performing monkey during his elected years, former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani managed to set a lot of precedent. Sure, none of this precedent was set in court, but it's been all of NEVER since Americans have been blessed by the omnipresence of a TOP LAW GUY who has (1) leaked dark fluid [...]

We just got done noting how Dish Network's long-hyped 5G wireless network islikely doomed. While they're technically building a wireless network," the network's coverage, phone selection, and overall quality has provenlaughableso far, and there have been growing worries that Dish isrunning out of cash as it tries to meet regulatory deadlines for 5G deployment. Hoping [...]

It appears I slightly exaggerated the state of the Taco Tuesday trademark saga in my last post. After decades of ridiculous bullying coming from Taco John's concerning the trademark it somehow was granted on Taco Tuesday" - a term that is generic on its face, became more generic over time, and is also at least [...]

I do understand why so many people, especially creative folks, are worried about AI and how it's used. The future is quite unknown, and things are changing very rapidly, at a pace that can feel out of control. However, when concern and worry about new technologies and how they may impact things morphs into mob-inspiring [...]

While I can comprehend the fact that Donald Trump has access to money (even if it's unlikely he's playing with house money at this point), I cannot understand how he hasn't been reduced to a pro se litigant at this point. This man has a headful of bad legal ideas and somehow - despite his [...]

This keeps coming up in different contexts, so I thought I might write a short (ha, as if I can write short things!) blog post that I can point to on various occasions. I spend a lot of time here on Techdirt highlighting why your favorite solution to (*waves hands*) some big societal problem won't [...]

Luminar Neo is 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 its [...]

Students rights are limited on school grounds. But they don't cease to exist. And what they do off-campus is subject to even fewer limitations. These are long-held facts backed by years of court precedent, the most famous of which is the Supreme Court's 1969 Tinker decision. This is the baseline for school-student interactions when it [...]

Every six months or so the FCC announces it has taken some major new step to thwart annoying robocalls. Yet Americans still receive more than 4.5 billion such calls every month, the vast majority of FCC fines are never collected, scammers elude meaningful accountability, and the problem persists. Last week for example, the FCC announced [...]

There's nothing particularly novel when it comes to showrunners of media properties blaming all these damned kids and their internet for why their productions aren't as successful as they wanted. Everything from broadway productions to viewership of the damned Olympics have had young people and social media blamed for declining or terrible viewership/attendance numbers. In [...]

In 2014, NYC officials decided to replace the city's dated pay phones with information kiosks" providing free public Wi-Fi, phone calls, device charging, and a tablet for access to city services, maps and directions. The kiosks were to be funded by context-aware" ads based on a variety of data collected from kiosk users and NYC [...]

Cops really hate policing protests that target police. But that has been the reality since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin ripped the bandage off an unhealed wound by placing his knee on the neck of unarmed black man George Floyd, choking the life out of him during an act that played out like an anthropomorphized [...]

There's an interesting thing that happens all too often in trademark cases, whereby people seem to flip the underlying argument. We see it in cases where someone opposes the registration of a certain trademark, and the party seeking the trademark complains that the government is trying to censor" them or limit their speech, when more [...]

There are no incentives in place to encourage accurate reporting of force deployment by law enforcement agencies. Tracking use of force means agencies are basically generating evidence for civil rights lawsuits. That's why force reporting is, at best, inconsistent. At its worst, it's simply dishonest. The lack of solid deterrents means agencies simply won't generate [...]

Well this is dumb. First off, let's just remind everyone that in a moment of pure stupidity, Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff called for Section 230 to be abolished." Specifically, he claimed that websites must have standards and practices decided by law" and that websites need to be held accountable" for what users do [...]

Cable executives spent years denying that cord cutting" (ditching traditional TV) was real. For years they insisted it was a fiction," or that it was a fad that would end once Millennials started procreating. Whatever gave them permission to not meaningfully evolve their often predatory, anti-competitive business strategies. Yeah, about that. Major cable companies continue [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple response to an attempt to defend Elon Musk's reinstatement of an account that posted CSAM, on the basis of the motivations for posting: I hate to tell you this, but legally speaking the intent doesn't matter - even if it was done [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, not long after the settlement in the Dancing Baby case, Universal was straight back to issuing DMCA takedowns, this time over a reporter's video of Prince fans singing Purple Rain (though it didn't take long for them to back down). Sony found itself in court after bullying a [...]

Mozilla's Open Policy & Advocacy blog has news abouta worrying proposal from the French government: In a well-intentioned yet dangerous move to fight online fraud, France is on the verge of forcing browsers to create a dystopian technical capability. Article 6 (para II and III) of the SREN Bill would force browser providers to create [...]

The state of Texas was sued in a federal district court by the Free Speech Coalition, a trade group representing the adult entertainment industry, and a slate of other companies including subsidiaries of Canadian firm MindGeek (owner of Pornhub). Other plaintiffs include the parent companies of popular adult sites like XVideos and Bang Bros, and [...]

Ah, copyright. Eric Goldman alerts us to to a new bit of copyright nonsense. Jieun Kiaer, an Oxford professor of Korean linguistics, recently published an academic book called Emoji Speak: Communications and Behaviours on Social Media. As you can tell from the name, it's a book about emoji, and about how people communicate with them: [...]

Donald Trump can't win consecutive elections. And he certainly can't win lawsuits. Pretty much every bit of litigation Trump has engaged in since he was elected president has been tossed out on its proverbial ear, the completely expected outcome for lawsuits engaged in angrily, but not coherently. About a year ago, Trump's legal team issued [...]

A few weeks ago, the Progress Action Fund released a political ad in Ohio that went somewhat viral on social media. I saw one person refer to it as the most effective political ad" they'd ever seen. And, I mean, even if you don't agree with the message, you have to admit that (1) it [...]

Originally developed for the software industry, Agile is the project management methodology that leverages quick, iterative sessions to rapidly identify defects and improve a product. Now that more companies are going digital, Agile is seeing even more popularity in the working world. The Agile Expert Project Management Bundle will get you up to speed with [...]

Lots of discussion about Wikipedia's public utility has occurred since its inception. On one hand, it's true: just about anyone can make edits to the information, unlike physical encyclopedias or websites owned by the former purveyors of these informative hardbound reams of paper. On the other hand, the editing process is not some Wild West. [...]

More than 600 communities across the U.S. have decided to build their own broadband networks after decades of predatory behavior, slow speeds, and high prices by regional telecom monopolies. That includes the city of Bountiful, Utah, which earlier this year voted to build a $48 million fiber network to deliver affordable, gigabit broadband to every [...]

And here we go again. we've been talking about how copyright has gotten in the way of cultural preservation generally for a while, and more specifically lately when it comes to the video game industry. The way this problem manifests itself is quite simple: video game publishers support the games they release for some period [...]

Over the last few years, as we've seen state legislatures and governors focusing on culture war legislating, rather than sensible policy legislating, one thing that's become popular - kicked off by Texas's anti-abortion law, but gladly embraced by Democrats as well - is the idea of trying to avoid judicial scrutiny by taking enforcement out [...]

As information started to leak out from the... everywhere about NSO Group's secondhand contribution to surveillance abuses all over the world, the world (except for the worst of NSO's customers) began taking action. Even the government that facilitated many of NSO's sales to human rights violators decided it might be time to toss a few [...]

The lawsuits against Elon Musk's ex-Twitter continue to pile up, but here's one where the law itself is ridiculous and unjust. As you'll recall, the EU Copyright Directive included a link or snippet tax for news (which they call a neighboring right") similar to the link taxes we've discussed in Australia and Canada. The main [...]

Designing a game world takes time and can get quite repetitive. Why not have the game build its world for you? That's the goal of procedural content generation, and you'll come to grips with it in the Complete Unity Game Developer Course. Focusing on the tile-based method for procedural level creation, you'll explore how to [...]

The best Streisanding is the Streisanding you give yourself, as the adage goes. The adage is even enshrined at Wikipedia, where it points to the creator of the term: Mike Masnick. Perhaps you've heard of him. The best thing to do to counter negative content is presenting your own side of the case. The worst [...]

For the better part of the decade, the generally feckless FCC has been trying to require that broadband ISPs be alittlemore honest about broadband fees and limits at the point of sale. So they cooked up the idea of a nutrition label for broadband," detailing all of the little caveats and restrictions (real world speeds, [...]

The gears of justice turn slowly, but they do turn. Late last year we discussed a delightful gentleman named Roland Macher, who goes by Spanky", because of course he does. Spanky was a restaurant owner and real estate businessman who found himself in prison for over 2 years because paying your taxes is hard or [...]

Some unfortunate news. AZ Central reported yesterday that James Larkin, who was a free speech pioneer who built an alt-weekly newspaper empire, and then spun out the controversial classifieds ads site Backpage, died by suicide, one week before his latest trial. While there's been plenty of discussion about Backpage, related to questions around Section 230, [...]

For years, we've pointed out that the FBI is more interested in easy wins than actually securing the nation. And for years, the FBI has maddeningly refused to take our harsh criticism into consideration. It has done its own thing, because of course it has. Who could possibly stop it? A mass violators of rights [...]

This is not a surprise, because the company made it clear it planned to do exactly this, but Meta has now begun the process of stopping links to news sources from appearing in Canada, something that Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez insisted would never happen. The company says it will take a few weeks to [...]

For several years, the government was able to route around the Fourth Amendment by turning cell service providers into proxy tracking devices. Thanks to the Third Party Doctrine, location data generated by cell phones wasn't given an expectation of privacy. A Supreme Court decision handed down in 2012 strongly suggested the government needed to obtain [...]

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, [...]

The grand old enshittification curve strikes again. Remember, as stated by Cory Doctorow, the process of enshittification entails these steps: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Way [...]

While Elon Musk's Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband technology is too expensive and capacity-constrained to seriously put a dent in US broadband problems, it's helpful in low connectivity situations like disasters, select parts of rural America, or the war in Ukraine. But Musk's growing power over the fledgling LEO satellite sector has started to [...]

More than a decade ago, it came to our attention that the NFL was out in the streets of New Orleans threatening small businesses for the crime of using New Orleans related language alongside the use of images of the fleur de lis. Those actions were quite silly, given that the symbol and much of [...]

Last month we noted how media reform activists had petitioned the FCC to revoke Fox News' local broadcast license in Philadelphia. More specifically, the group argued that Fox News' rampant election fraud propaganda technically violated the character clause" embedded in the Communications Act the FCC is supposed to use to determine whether an organization should [...]

We've long believed in the power of online platform interoperability and the power it gives to users to curate their own experiences. One of the prime examples of this is Block Party, created by Tracy Chou, which has had to suspend its operations following ExTwitter's API changes. Tracy joined us on the podcast once before [...]

There's so much to dig into on this one. First off, just to state my own bias upfront, I'm not a fan of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Literally just a few days ago I wrote about one of its highly questionable studies and how it's being used (badly) to justify a terrible [...]

Censorship has always been the name of the game when governments push fake news" laws. First of all, laws like these allow governments to decide which news is fake" and which news is credible." Those pushing these laws claim they just want to ensure citizens aren't misled. But, in reality, governments just want more options [...]