Techdirt

It's no secret that I think this FTC has been pretty disappointing and has missed a ton of opportunities to actually make things better for the public. For reasons I really don't understand, it has filed a lot of antitrust cases against tech companies that have almost always seemed half-baked, resulting in a losing streak [...]

As we're all too well aware, there's plenty of money to be made in the surveillance business. The best surveillance businesses, though, are those that rely on captive markets. Sure, kids aren't actually captive," but they're in school often enough it's tempting to let tech pick up the slack when it comes to keeping tabs [...]

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What the fuck is going on with the 5th Circuit? Last week we wrote about it putting a law into effect just after a district court had laid out why it was unconstitutional (this was about mandatory made up health warnings" and age verification on adult content websites). This followed on the 5th Circuit doing [...]

With the Biden FCC now having a voting majority, the telecom industry is clearly worried about the agency's plans to restore popular net neutrality rules stripped away by the Trump administration. To prep the lobbying field, the industry has started using its various proxy groups to seed the press with a bunch of bullshit arguments [...]

A little over a year ago, Liberty Tax Service filed a trademark and defamation lawsuit against AMC. At issue was the depiction of a shady tax prep company run by con-men in the final season of the hit show Better Call Saul. In the show, the name of the tax prep company is Sweet Liberty [...]

Hey, remember when a bunch of unpopular broadband monopolies convinced a corrupt reality TV star to dismantle most oversight of their very broken industry? And remember how to accomplish this companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast spread endless lies about what was actually happening, going so far as to use fake and even dead people [...]

The trust and safety conversation tends to focus on the huge platforms, and the millions of smaller websites (some still quite big!) get ignored. But those websites have trust and safety needs too, and they use a lot of different tools to meet them. Most of these tools are proprietary, but there's a growing push [...]

We're increasingly at the mercy of bigots in this country. That's an upsetting turn of events, considering our history, which includes a long list of enshrined rights as well as the assertion that all people are created equal. Thanks to the aberration that was the Donald Trump presidency, the worst people in the nation suddenly [...]

We've been covering the multi-pronged ridiculousness around the Missouri/Louisiana jawboning" cases, regarding whether or not the White House was overstepping the bounds of the 1st Amendment and pressuring private websites to moderate in a manner they deemed appropriate. Again, almost everything about this case is bizarre -and getting more bizarre with each move. Last night, [...]

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It's been eight years since the Authors Guild was thoroughly and totally embarrassed by losing its big lawsuit against Google over the Google Books scanning project. I guess they're missing the feeling of embarrassment, as they've filed what is effectively the same damn suit against OpenAI over that company's book scanning. Now, I know, some [...]

It can't be said often enough: it's stunning that we've let scammers and scumbags hijack the nation's top voice communications platform. And that we've let marketing and telecom industry lobbyists slowly degrade the authority of the one U.S. regulator capable of actually doing something about it. Every six months or so the FCC comes out [...]

Are you familiar with felony murder?" Let's talk about it. It's a handy way to send more people to prison for more years just because they participated in a crime that contained a murder. While I can (sort of) understand the deterrent effect of laws like these, the simple fact is felony murder laws hold [...]

Last week, we wrote about a federal district judge in California, Beth Labson Freeman, tossing out California's Age Appropriate Design Code (AB 2273) as unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. The ruling was careful and thorough, which did not surprise me, having sat through the oral arguments on the matter, where it seemed that the judge [...]

Last week, it appeared ever so briefly, the UK government might be finally giving up on its desires to legislate at least one end of messaging services' end-to-end encryption. Having faced resistance from nearly every encrypted service (all of which threatened to exit the UK if anti-encryption mandates were put in place) as well as [...]

It is quite incredible to me how, over the last five years or so, the California legislature has pushed over a dozen absolutely horrific, dangerous (and often unconstitutional) laws to completely undermine the very principles of an open internet... and it gets basically no attention at all. Last year, it felt like we at Techdirt [...]

Most laws and policies banning drag shows are experiencing swift judicial blowback thanks to their obvious regulation of expressive speech. Some legislators have attempted to work around this expected roadblock to oppression by avoiding any mention of drag shows or drag performers when crafting unconstitutional laws, instead pretending they're simply strengthening existing obscenity laws. None [...]

Most modern companies put a lot of stock into data when making crucial business decisions. As such, they require employees who understand how to work with mass amounts of data, and effectively analyze it to get a holistic view of the company. These skills aren't just reserved for analysts, they're valuable for professionals in any [...]

There's a pretty well known scene from The Office, when Michael Scott (played by Steve Carrell) follows his GPS device's instructions (incorrectly, obviously) and drives into a lake: The writer of that scene says the inspiration was a number of stories of people doing exactly that. In fact, in the earlier days of Techdirt, we [...]

While the California legislature often screws up tech policy, they've generally been pretty good on broadband. At least in relation to most U.S. states. California was among the first in the country to pass a net neutrality law after the telecom industry got Trumpists to dismantle federal rules. The state also unveiled a major broadband [...]

We've got one commenter taking both top spots on the insightful side this week, but also... not really. Because in what I believe is a first, our top winner on the insightful side is Samuel Abram commenting on the previous comments post to celebrate a comment from last week, by Stephen T. Stone, that didn't [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, Ajit Pai was whining about California's net neutrality effort, while a court ordered the FCC to hand over data on bogus public comments about net neutrality, and Congress failed to invite a single consumer advocate to its upcoming hearings about broadband privacy rules. A Swedish ISP gave us [...]

If you only listened to executives from the content industries, you might think that copyright infringement, or online piracy, is and has been a growing threat in dire need of stricter and stricter enforcement measures. But I'll let you in on a secret: that's been bullshit for the better part of a decade now. In [...]

Law enforcement officers rarely care about enforcing traffic laws. Moving violations may produce a little extra revenue for the city or state, but it doesn't do much for the officers performing the stops. Pretextual stops? The leveraging of any perceived moving violation in hopes of performing a vehicle search? That's where the money is, thanks [...]

Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, the streaming industry has started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from enshittification," that generally means imposing obnoxious new restrictions (see: Netflix password sharing), endless price hikes, and obnoxious and dubious new fees geared toward pleasing Wall Street. [...]

Over the last few months, Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino keep trying to claim that exTwitter is actually growing and more used than ever. Yaccarino has talked about largest usage days" without defining the term, and Elon says it's user-seconds per day of phone screentime as reported by iOS & Android" even though that's not [...]

As we noted last week, the Supreme Court put on hold the injunction issued by the 5th Circuit regarding the administration's efforts to influence how social media companies deal with misinformation. As you'll recall, Louisiana and Missouri and a variety of nonsense peddlers all sued the Biden administration, claiming that their 1st Amendment rights were [...]

Charge more devices while saving space with Adam Element's Mag 3 Magnetic 3-in-1 Foldable Travel Charging Station. This charging station replenishes your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods in one shot. The foldable design minimizes the size for storage and traveling, while the included USB-C charging cable supports up to 15W of power. Charging both vertically [...]

In 2018, the Supreme Court handed down the Carpenter decision. That decision built on the one declaring phones off limits without a warrant - one delivered four years earlier. The rationale was this: phones are always on, all-knowing, and everywhere all the time. Given the amount of data generated by everyday smartphone use, the Supreme [...]

A few years ago we noted how a South Korean ISP named SK Broadband had sued Netflix, demanding that the streaming giant pay it more money simply because the hit series Squid Game was so popular. It was one small part of a global push by broadband providers to force streaming companies to pay them [...]

As many of you are probably already aware, a massive leak of internal documents at Microsoft occurred this week, all of which came out of the FTC's challenge to Microsoft's purchase of Activision Blizzard. We discussed a small portion of that leak a few days ago when we talked about Microsoft's decision to take the [...]

The United States is already a global leader in traffic-related fatalities, with athirty-percent jump in the last decade. That's in contrast toevery other developed country, which saw a decline. So of course it's a perfect time to flood American highways with a parade of extremely heavy EVs with unprecedented acceleration. Some of which are extremely [...]

Almost everyone I've seen talking about this new Insider article about how Elon had a special layoff just of trust and safety employees has shared it with the line wait, there are still trust & safety employees?" Elon Musk recently laid off more Twitter employees working on the platform's trust and safety efforts, roles typically [...]

Note: Since the publication of this article, the iBorderCtrl website has disappeared. We have updated the links in the post to point to an archived version of the site. Four years ago, Techdirt wrote about iBorderCtrl, a research project funded by the EU under the Horizon 2020 framework. According to the project's Web site: iBorderCtrl [...]

So, for all of the nonsense about what level of coercive power governments have over social media companies, it's bizarre how little attention has been paid to the fact that TikTok is apparently proposing to give the US government control over its content moderation setup, and the US government is looking at it seriously. As [...]

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The First Amendment doesn't just protect what you say. It also protects your right to hear what others say. It guarantees a right to published information. It protects a whole lot of stuff certain politicians sincerely wish it didn't because it gets in the way of pushing their bigoted ideals. Right now, there's a wave [...]

Apple has never looked too kindly upon users actually repairing their own devices, or using lower cost independent repair services. The company's ham-fisted efforts to shut down, sue, or otherwise imperil third-party repair shops arelegendary. As are the company's efforts to force recycling shops toshred Apple products(so they can't be refurbished and re-used). Recently, Apple [...]

It should be pretty well established by now that you just can't go around arresting people for expressing their displeasure with their fingers. It's not like it's a new issue or even an uncommon issue ([extremely laconic cowboy voice]: least not round these parts). It's something we've seen quite a bit of here at Techdirt. [...]

Almost exactly seven years ago, we discussed the absolute silliness that was Boise State University somehow getting the USPTO to grant it a trademark for a football field that is non-green." If you're not a college football fan, some context is in order. Decades back, the school didn't want to pay to have its field [...]

I mean, that's what we all were thinking, right? When you carve out a niche selling to outlaws, there's a good chance your product will be used illegally, no matter who's buying it. That's how it all plays out for NSO Group and its infamous Pegasus zero-click phone exploit - one capable of fully compromising [...]

It can always get dumber. And when we're talking about the 5th Circuit, you have to assume it will always get dumber. And that's what has happened now with the 5th Circuit issuing a stay on an injunction that had blocked an obviously unconstitutional law. But we'll get to those details in a moment. Just [...]

It's hard to keep your devices clean. And if you have any AirPods, you'll know how difficult it can be to clean the nooks and crannies of the device-especially when they're so tiny! Now it's a whole lot easier with the Multi-Use AirPods Cleaning Pen. It helps you clean hard-to-reach areas or any other corners. [...]

Former president Donald Trump has been engaged in plenty of questionable litigation. And not just during and following his mercifully short-lived stint as the supposed leader of the free world. But this still remains one of the weirdest lawsuits Trump has filed. This lawsuit - which he has already lost - claims the Democratic Party [...]

With the Biden FCC now having a full slate of commissioners and a full voting majority, the net neutrality debate has already started to heat back up. That means a renewed effort by broadband giants to try and downplay the need for net neutrality rules, usually via lazy op-eds run in lazy publications like The [...]

So, the fact that Microsoft would be taking the next game in the Elder Scrolls series, the 6th game, to Xbox and PC exclusively isn't the world's biggest surprise. Xbox chief Phil Spencer made waves back in 2021 (before all the drama surrounding Microsoft's future acquisition of Activision Blizzard) noting that he saw advantages to [...]

As has been noted here before, it's often the worst people that generate the best case law. People staring down the barrel of several years in prison are extremely motivated to find any reason to have the evidence against them dismissed. People not faced with the same reality rarely find a reason to trouble the [...]

We've got a slightly unusual (at first glace) crosspost episode for you this week! Recently, Mike joined Dave Cooper, CEO and Founder of brand protection agency IPSecure, on the company's Owning The Buy Box podcast. As you probably know, we're pretty skeptical of brand protection companies here at Techdirt, but Dave has a history of [...]

So, remember when Elon first announced his plans to buy Twitter, and he claimed that it was the de facto town square" and his top priority was to eliminate spam and scam bots? A top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter. They [...]