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Elon Musk sure has a way of fucking over anyone who trusts him. A bunch of current and former employees, including some who agreed to stick around at Twitter with the explicit promise that they would receive the bonuses they were owed, are suing Twitter saying that those bonuses were never given (story found via [...]

The California legislature is competing with states like Florida and Texas to see who can pass laws that will be more devastating to the Internet. California's latest entry into this Internet death-spiral is theCalifornia Journalism Protection Act (CJPA, AB 886). CJPA has passed the California Assembly and is pending in the California Senate. The CJPA [...]

Full disclosure time, Techdirt peeps! I am a resident of this state. And, as such, I am painfully familiar with the governor's pro-Trump performativeness, as well as the state legislature's general disdain for the people it serves. South Dakota is basically an on-shore tax shelter camouflaged by farmland and ultra-patriotic tourist traps. Governor Kristi Noem [...]

The Agile Expert Project Management Bundle has three courses to help you master Agile. 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 [...]

We already knew that Twitter had stopped paying its cloud computing bills from Google and Amazon as Elon continues his pursuit of profitability" that he himself destroyed in Twitter (remember, Twitter was profitable in 16 of the previous 20 quarters before Elon took over at a much higher run rate, before Elon drove away somewhere [...]

We've noted several times how European telecom giants have somehow convinced European policymakers that technology giants like Netflix and Google should annually give them billions of dollars...for no coherent reason. The proposal is dressed up to sound like a sensible adult policy aimed at shoring up broadband access to the downtrodden. In reality it's net [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is TFG responding to the suggestion that the Reddit protest will be quelled by simply removing the mods: As the polls show: the mods aren't alone. The mods aren't the only ones posting the john oliver pics - there's no way that they could do [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, Ajit Pai was trying to pretend that everybody supported repealing net neutrality, while ISP lobbyists were trying and then succeeding at derailing California's own net neutrality law. Pai was also pushing for rule changes that would benefit Sinclair Broadcasting, while being under investigation for his relationship with the [...]

Any investigative report of any police department in the United States composed by the DOJ's Civil Rights division can be described as scathing." Bad cops doing bad things trigger these investigations, which invariably find evidence of biased policing, excessive force deployment, and a general disregard - if not actual disdain - for the people these [...]

We've noted for years how the steady, mindless consolidation by telecom monopolies has resulted in patchy broadband access, slow speeds, and high prices. But another longstanding trademark of the industry has been its abysmal customer service, created by mindless growth and a subsequent refusal to scale customer service to match. The latest customer satisfaction rankings [...]

It's hardly a secret that the Chinese government is obsessed with controlling everything that its citizens see or do online - Techdirt has written dozens of stories on the topic over the years. But control within China's borders isn't enough, it seems: the authorities there now want the ability to censor material globally. The latest [...]

Two weeks ago, Canada's Heritage Minister, Pablo Rodriguez, who has been the main Canadian government official pushing for C-18, the bullshit link tax bill, that is just a corrupt wealth transfer from one disliked industry to a favored industry, insisted that it was unacceptable" that Meta might stop allowing links to news if the bill [...]

Things are getting heated in the city that never sleeps stops bitching. Private business owners don't much care for the city telling them how to run their business, even when said business involves perhaps careless use of problematic tech. Grocery store owners in New York City oppose abillthat would limit use of facial recognition software, [...]

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The lawyers who ridiculously did not check the citations ChatGPT gave them, and when called on it, doubled down with having ChatGPT make up the matching opinions, have now been sanctioned: they have to pay $5k. That may seem light, but with all of the details, it kinda makes sense. So, yes, by now you've [...]

We've noted for several years how the race to 5G" was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager tosell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it's more of an evolution than a revolution. But that's not what telecom giants [...]

Actions, as they say, have consequences. Or potential consequences, at least, in the case of Microsoft battling with the FTC. In the ongoing drama that is Microsoft's attempted purchase of Activision, the FTC filed for a temporary restraining order barring the consummation of the purchase while its lawsuit remains unresolved. The first trial date in [...]

Some more great reporting based on public records has emerged from ProPublica. This one shows how willing cops are to exploit the system they're supposed to be protecting and upholding. Now former officer Jeffrey Kriv certainly isn't one of Chicago's worst cops. There's simply too much competition, given the PD's long history of internal corruption [...]

If you're a Techdirt reader, a Reddit user, or both, then you probably know all about the chaos engulfing the site as users and moderators of popular subreddits protest CEO Steve Huffman's recent changes to the site's API. This week, we're joined by Jay Peters from The Verge to talk about the situation, the protests, [...]

We talk a lot about the concept of trust & safety" at internet companies, but the entire concept is relatively new, and still very confusing to many, including some who work in the field! Over the last few years we've seen a growing movement to organize and somewhat professionalize" the space, with very important and [...]

The smart" internet of things era was supposed to usher forth a new era of convenience. Instead, it often manages to advertise how dumber technology can be the smarter option, and you're not being particularly innovative if your product actually makes life harder. From smart" door locks that areeasily hackableto hackable smart" TVs that are [...]

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. To help you master Microsoft Office, the Microsoft Training Bundle is [...]

The enshittification of Reddit continues. Yesterday we wrote about the next move from protesting mods to switch their subs to NSFW, which strips those subreddits of ads, and how Reddit was experimenting with removing the mods who did that. For what it's worth, just a few days ago, Reddit insisted in a comment that it [...]

By now we've well established that the series of mergers that began with AT&T's doomed acquisition of Time Warner and ended with Time Warner's subsequent spin off and fusion with Discovery was some of the dumbest, most pointless business" exercises ever conceived by man. The idiotic saga burned through hundreds of billions in debt, saw [...]

To say that developments in the realm of artificial intelligence are coming fast at this point is a wild understatement. There's a ton going on in the space, some of it showcasing amazing things we can now do using AI, some of it showing where humans are still very much needed, and much of the [...]

The recently released files of the late Associate Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens reveal interesting details concerning some of the Court's significant copyright decisions, but leave important questions unanswered. Justice Stevens (1920-2019) left his papers to the Library of Congress, which opened them to the public inMay 2023. (Seeherefor a blog post on Justice [...]

Terrible people who represent terrible people are making terrible laws. Catering to the base is never a good idea because all it does is elevate the lowest common denominator. Utah isn't an outlier. It has competition from several other state governments that aren't necessarily as subordinate to the unofficial state religion. The separation of church [...]

It seems that we've had a rash of formerly loved internet services going down the enshittification curve. As coined (brilliantly) by Cory Doctorow, enshittification is the process by which a company gets gradually worse. As he puts it: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for [...]

The government of Malaysia isn't too concerned about free speech. It may be a tourist destination, but it's still subservient to a ruling class that likely can thank inbreeding for its current place at the top of the heap. Because it's still ruled by people who've never been elected to their positions, those with the [...]

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Reddit's ongoing war with its volunteer moderators (and users) has moved up a notch. As you'll recall, last week, the ever tone-deaf CEO Steve Huffman insisted that the protests were just a blip, would be over by last Wednesday, and were having no real impact on the site anyway. That hasn't gone quite to plan. [...]

For the better part of the decade, the generally feckless FCC has been trying to require that broadband ISPs be a little more honest about broadband fees and limits at the point of sale. The FCC has been pondering implementing a nutrition label for broadband" for years but could never quite get around to it. [...]

Seward County is distinguished from Nebraska's many blink-and-you'll-miss-it counties by its penchant for seizing cash from motorists. The county's population checks in at under 18,000 but its overly enthusiastic law enforcement still manages to rake in millions of dollars every year from pretextual traffic stops. The only other thing notable in its Wikipedia article is [...]

Our posts on Katy Perry in the past have been all over the place. Sometimes Perry is an intellectual property bully. Sometimes she's more the victim of intellectual property bullying. But what is not in dispute is the Katy Perry is a cultural icon worldwide with an extremely famous, albeit misspelled, name. In Australia, Katie [...]

A year ago, we wrote about an unfortunate decision by a judge rejecting a motion to dismiss in a copyright lawsuit regarding bananas taped to walls. There was, of course, the high profile banana taped to wall" artwork by Maurizio Cattelan that got tons of public attention at Art Basel in 2019 when it sold [...]

Over the past two years, there has been a concerted push by state legislatures to regulate the Internet, the likes of which has not been seen since the late 90s/early aughts. Content moderation, financial relationships between journalists and platforms, social media design and transparency, national security," kids being exposed to bad" Internet speech-you name it, [...]

The First Amendment protects speech, even the horrible stuff. It can't protect the speaker from being criticized for being abhorrent, despite what many abhorrent people believe. It can, however, in certain cases, protect the speaker from being punished for this speech. It's not blanket coverage. The person engaging in the speech generally has to be [...]

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 [...]

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman really seems to underestimate the kinds of people who sign up to be Reddit mods, and their willingness to go to extreme lengths if you start pushing them. We've discussed the nonsensical nature of Huffman's new API efforts, as well as his stupid response to the subreddit blackout which caused many [...]

Satellite TV provider Dish Network isn't having much fun. Despite oodles ofdirect government assistanceduring the Trump era, the company's attempt to pivot from mediocre satellite TV provider to modern streaming TV and 5G wireless giant has been a consistent dumpster fire. Both the company's dying satellite TV service and its streaming TV platform (SlingTV) have [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is radix with a summary of Reddit CEO Steve Huffman's comments about the blackout protest: We don't do things for free, so all the unpaid mods should get back to work" is quite the statement. In second place, it's miked with some additional info on [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018 began with a much-anticipated day: the official end of net neutrality rules. We took a long look at Ajit Pai's latest comments about the change, while the FCC was busy fending off questions about the DDoS attack it made up (and also, randomly, about Pai's big coffee mug), [...]

Amazon-owned Twitch appears to be running something of an experiment to see just how much it can piss off its creative community before a mass exodus occurs. Reading back through our posts on the platform, you will be left with the understanding that there are two types of policy rollouts when it comes to Twitch. [...]

Via Tarah Wheeler (who just destroyed the EARN IT Act recently) we find out that, while the White House has announced that it wants public comment on AI regulation, it hasn't made it at all easy to figure out how to actually comment. I'm smashblogging on a Saturday because I came across this story on [...]

NSO Group is irredeemable. It must know that by know. Its investors know it. The public knows it. Even the government of the country it set up shop in - a shop filled with ex-government employees - can hardly seem to stomach being associated with it. At any point, this could have been prevented. The [...]

Back in college, I took an arbitration class, and it was one of my favorite classes. The professor (James Gross, who just retired last year after teaching for an astounding 56 years) was amazing, and I became a little obsessed with the entire idea and process of arbitration as an alternative to the costly and [...]

It's renewal time again, and this time the snooper squad is facing unprecedented push back. Sure, a lot of it is politically motivated, what with the post-Trumpians still getting high on their own deep state" supply. Even as opportunistic as they are, they still have a point: some of their own have been subjected to [...]

Tableau 10 is the data visualization tool that breaks mounds of information down into clear, actionable insights, making it a valuable tool for any data-driven guru. This course will show you how to get started with Tableau 10, so you can create powerful visualizations and guide your business with solid, accessible answers. It's on sale [...]

Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit, has decided to just keep on talking. After his disastrous AMA helped inspire more subreddits to join a 48 hour blackout, and his dismissal of the protesting subreddits as something not worth paying attention to resulted in many subreddits extending their protests indefinitely, Huffman apparently thought it would make […]

You may have noticed that for-profit healthcare in the U.S. is already a hot mess, especially in the most already marginalized parts of the country. Giant, mismanaged health care conglomerates have long pushed their underfunded staffers to the brink, while routinely under-investing in necessary technical upgrades and improvements. It’s getting consistently worse everywhere, but in […]