Techdirt

One of the central arguments for a recent rash of age verification laws across the country is to “protect the children.” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called his signing of controversial social media laws a means for “protecting our kids from the harms of social media.” Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a press conference that her […]

It’s always a mixed bag when entertainment industry stars get roped into supporting this or that internet regulation. Remember how there was a Hollywood-backed campaign to have a bunch of big name stars support FOSTA, the bill that sounded good to people who didn’t understand intermediary liability law, but has literally ended up killing women […]

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As you likely know, Elon Musk has been shilling Twitter Blue as his plan to save Twitter since basically four hours after he took over the company. In theory, pushing Twitter Blue was a good idea. Twitter Blue was the plan to offer a premium service to loyal Twitter users by upselling them on some […]

Former T-Mobile CEO John Legere repeatedly promised in print that the Sprint merger would result in a massive surge in new jobs. In a rambling missive that took aim at critics of the deal who predicted job losses, the former potty-mouth CEO proclaimed that critics were lying, and that the deal would be “job positive from day one” and […]

Some politicians never learn. Congress has been trying to shove through the EARN IT Act for the past two sessions, and thankfully it’s failed both times. But, now it’s back. Kinda. Far be it for the politicians looking to destroy the internet and encryption that keeps us safe to actually reveal the latest version of […]

With a ruling that basically said not only did Fox lie about Dominion, it did so despite being well aware of the truth, the Delaware court basically dared the alleged “news” agency to keep fighting Dominion’s defamation lawsuit. The evidence Dominion had already obtained was damning, as the court pointed out in its denial of […]

We’ve featured lots of coverage of the frankly insane deluge of “protect the children” type social media laws popping up in several states, and recently Mike was a guest on TechFreedom’s Tech Policy Podcast, hosted by Corbin K. Barthold. You can listen to the whole conversation right here on this week’s episode of the Techdirt […]

Larry Lessig’s views and thoughts on things like copyright law, internet freedom, and government corruption have been tremendously influential on myself and many others in the tech and tech policy worlds. His books are still worth reading and thinking about. But he’s taken some odd turns of late. A few years ago I called him […]

Texas has always been a bit weird about stuff. It sometimes views itself as a separate nation or, at least, openly expresses its desire to secede from this apparently abhorrent liberal village of hundreds of millions known as the United States. Fuck it. Maybe we just let it float off into the political sea as […]

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Elon Musk went on Tucker Carlson this week and spewed some utter nonsense, claiming that one thing he discovered upon taking over Twitter was that federal agencies had full access to everything at Twitter, including DMs. “The degree to which various government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on at Twitter […]

The Canadian government is hopping aboard the right to repair bandwagon. The Canadian federal government’s 2023 budget includes language indicating that it will attempt to implement meaningful right to repair reforms by 2024, alongside a new five-year tax credit worth $4.5 billion for Canadian clean tech manufacturers, and the potential adoption of Canadian federal guidelines mandating a […]

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin isn’t done hurting city residents. He may be imprisoned but he’s still costing the city millions of dollars. And these cases aren’t related to the brutal act that saw him charged and convicted for murder. Officer Chauvin did this to himself. He may have been aided and abetted by […]

Ah, remember Parler? They were the first of the “alternative” social media companies targeting the Trumpist crowd, in which I pointed out that their whole “we don’t moderate” schtick wasn’t going to work. The company speed ran the content moderation learning curve faster than most. But even from the beginning, the Trumpists who joined admitted […]

Here we go again. Another NSO-alike, founded in Israel by former government snoops, is selling powerful phone exploits to bad people who, unsurprisingly, use it to do bad things. And, as usual, it’s Citizen Lab doing the heavy lifting, sifting through code, identifying targets, and seeking information to find the source of these attacks. NSO’s […]

Elon Musk keeps talking about how he’s saving Twitter, but it’s difficult to see how. He’s made the site much more unstable, has been messing up basically every part of “trust & safety 101,” is now facing a growing number of lawsuits (including many over unpaid bills), has no idea how the site actually works, […]

The Complete AWS Cloud Engineer, Developer and Architect Course Bundle has 10 courses to help you learn all about AWS. You’ll learn about AWS storage and database services, AWS network services, AWS security, identity & compliance services, and more. It’s on sale for $39.97. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A […]

On Friday, Montana’s very silly legislature passed the first law in the nation banning Tiktok. The bill’s title is not subtle: SB 419: Ban tik-tok in Montana (they couldn’t even get the name right). The way the bill works is that it prohibits mobile app stores from offering TikTok to Montana residents and also just […]

ISPs for years have struck cozy deals with landlords effectively elbowing out competitors and allowing them to create building-by-building broadband monopolies. That stifled competition in turn results in higher costs for access to an essential utility. And while the FCC passed rules in 2007 trying to ban this, the rules were so full of loopholes […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is weevie833 with a reaction to our post about Substack CEO Chris Best’s failure to answer some important basic questions: The data First, this is the most sharply concise confrontation with a CEO I have ever seen on this issue and I appreciate the author […]

Five Years Ago During the hiatus from history posts, we missed an important event last week in 2018, when Backpage was shut down by the DOJ. It should have resulted in people realizing that FOSTA/SESTA was unnecessary (as the indictment made clear), but of course this week in 2018 was all about politicians pretending it […]

Readers of this site will know by now that Nintendo polices its intellectual property in an extremely draconian fashion. However, there are still differences in the instances in which the company does so. In many cases, Nintendo goes after people or groups in a fashion that stretches, if not breaks, any legitimate intellectual property concerns. […]

You know the drill by now. In October of 2020, the NY Post ran a story about the contents of a laptop hard drive that Hunter Biden apparently left at a computer repair store. There were questions about the provenance of that hard drive, and, given the history of foreign election interference, as well as […]

So, we’re just handing out top secret security clearance to everyone, I guess. It was clear from the documents posted to Discord (before spreading everywhere), the person behind them would soon be located. The folded security briefings were obviously smuggled out of secure rooms in someone’s pocket and then photographed carelessly, in one case on […]

AI Doomerism is becoming mainstream thanks to mass media, which drives our discussion about Generative AI from bad to worse, or from slightly insane to batshit crazy. Instead of out-of-control AI, we have out-of-control panic. When a British tabloid headline screams, “Attack of the psycho chatbot,” it’s funny. When it’s followed by another front-page headline, […]

I get it. I totally get it. Every tech dude comes along and has this thought: “hey, we’ll be the free speech social media site. We won’t do any moderation beyond what’s required.” Even Twitter initially thought this. But then everyone discovers reality. Some discover it faster than others, but everyone discovers it. First, you […]

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What could possibly go wrong? Earlier this week we wrote about an Arkansas bill, SB396, which was modeled after Utah’s recent unconstitutional social media bill, and tries to ban kids from social media. Except, as we noted, it appeared to explicitly exempt pretty much all of social media, except for maybe Facebook and Twitter. The […]

In just the last five years, the “right to repair” movement has shifted from nerdy niche to the mainstream, thanks in part to significant support from the Biden FTC. We’ve seen numerous state bills make significant inroads in passing laws opening the door to undermining repair monopolies, even though industry lobbying has, at times, neutered […]

It will never stop being humorous uncovering just how many smart products are run by dumb companies. If you’re going to roll out a product that connects to the internet, you would think that the very basics of IT/internet security in those products would be taken into account. You would also think that there would […]

It’s not at all surprising why tons of people, including journalists, are sticking around Twitter even if they shouldn’t. Part of it is inertia. People were settled into what worked before, and change is difficult. Partly because of that, people are loathe to switch. Even those who have switched over to alternatives like Mastodon in […]

China and India are widely expected to be two of the most powerful global players in the decades to come. In some ways, they are alike. As Techdirt has reported, both have dismal records when it comes to Internet freedom, online censorship and privacy. But they differ in terms of their impact on the IT […]

It doesn’t look like Fox News is going to get away with badmouthing Dominion Voting Systems for weeks following Donald Trump’s unsurprising loss in the 2020 election. Evidence already handed over to Dominion in its libel lawsuit shows many Fox News executives — as well as anchors and commentators — were aware the claims were […]

Various treaties and multi-national proposals to combat cybercrime have been around for years. I’m not exaggerating. These have been floating around for more than a decade. (Do you want to feel old? This cybercrime treaty proposal would be old enough to legally obtain a social media account in the United States if it were still […]

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The Supreme Court is currently deliberating whether or not algorithms deserve protections under Section 230. And I hear from lots of people that maybe Section 230 wasn’t meant to cover algorithmic policing and recommendations of content. But that’s utter nonsense. The whole area of content moderation first came about as a response to the earliest […]

We’ve noted in detail how the AT&T/Time Warner/Discovery mergers have been an apocalyptic mess that aptly demonstrates the U.S. obsession with utterly pointless megadeals and the “growth for growth’s sake” mindset. Hundreds of billions of dollars later and the companies have produced a product that’s notably shittier than when they started, laying off thousands of […]

If you’re not a part of a small but passionate group of emulation enthusiasts, you may not be aware that Microsoft has long waged a battle to keep emulators off of its Xbox consoles and the Xbox Store. Going back all the way to 2020, one particular app and developer has played something of a […]

A worldwide pandemic trapped students in their own homes to stop the spread of the coronavirus. They didn’t ask for this. Neither did educators. But educators made the worst of it in far too many cases. Aptitude tests and other essentials for continued funding (and bragging rights) were now out of their control. Any student […]

California passed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) nominally to protect children’s privacy, but at the same time, the AADC requires businesses to do an age “assurance” of all their users, children and adults alike. (Age “assurance” requires the business to distinguish children from adults, but the methodology to implement has many of the same […]

The only surprising thing here is that it took this long: NPR has officially announced that it has quit Twitter. This is in response to Elon’s chaotic decision to first label the account “state-affiliated media,” a label that was designed to help users understand if a media organization was actually a dedicated mouthpiece of the […]

All hail the pariah. If Clearview is only at 30 billion images, it just means social media users haven’t been posting enough. The little scraper that could has pushed its way to the next plateau of unacceptableness, turning the 10 billion images it had as recently as October 2021 to 30 billion before EOY2024. Plaudits […]

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Read our new report on The Unintended Consequences Of Internet Regulation » Over the last decade or so, there’s been a growing chorus of people insisting (misleadingly) that the internet is a “wild west” that needs regulation. The reasons stated for this apparently necessary regulation change over time, but the underlying discussion tends to be […]

The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and stumbled around incompetently for several years […]

To err is human. To forgive is beyond me. Sorry. That’s just the way it is. If we’re paying outsized portions of local budgets to law enforcement agencies more interested in selective enforcement, rights violations, complete abdication of personal/professional responsibility, and seeing what hot war kit they can acquire via 1033.gov, it behooves us to […]

Just recently we had Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders on the Techdirt podcast to discuss their very own podcast mini-series “Silicon Valley v. Science Fiction.” Some of that discussion was about this spreading view in Silicon Valley, often oddly coming from AI’s biggest boosters, that AI is an existential threat to the world, and […]

Data portability is an important front in the war for an open internet. A few years ago, it seemed like some major movement was coming, with the joint announcement of the Data Transfer Project from Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter — but recently, news of any progress was running thin. That is, until now: the […]

A few weeks ago we wrote about how Elon Musk’s Twitter was now blocking tweets in India at the request of the government. As we noted, there’s a lot of important history here. India had demanded such blocking in early 2021 and the old regime at Twitter had pushed back strongly on it. After fighting […]