Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident journalist often critical of the Saudi government, was murdered by Saudi government agents while inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. He wasn't just murdered. His body was dismembered. All of this was captured by hidden recording devices placed by the Turkish government in the Saudi consulate. The Saudi government is [...]

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There are now a bunch of these lawsuits accusing AI companies of some sort of copyright infringement for training their models on works of plaintiffs. However, the first high profile one was the case brought by Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz against Stability AI, MidJourney, and (bizarrely) DeviantArt. We covered the case back [...]

The Trump era was very, very good to the country's giant telecom monopolies. Trump officials doled out billions in tax breaks (AT&T nabbed $42 billion alone) and billions more in poorly tracked subsidies. It also approved anticompetitive mergers without even reading the details, and handed out all manner of regulator favors like the dismantling of [...]

It's over. It's finally over. The battle to end the trademark registrations for Taco Tuesday" began years and years ago, mostly after Taco John's wielded the trademark haphazardly to occasionally threaten other taco joints with legal action. Less spotlighted was Gregory's Bar & Restaurant, which held the trademark for the phrase in the one state [...]

The list of things law enforcement officers consider reasonably suspicious could fill a decent-sized book. Pretty much anything anyone does or says when being accosted by an officer is usually deemed to be indicative of illegal activity. It's not just cops. It's the courts, too. A list of things considered to be reasonably suspicious" enough [...]

As you hopefully know, we recently launched (and then released a podcast about) our new game, Trust & Safety Tycoon, which we created in association with the Atlantic Council's Task Force for a Trustworthy FutureWeb. This week, we've got two people from the Atlantic Council joining us on the podcast: Democracy & Tech Initiative Director [...]

When Twitter first launched what it called Birdwatch," I was hopeful that it would turn into a useful alternative approach to helping with trust & safety/content moderation questions, but I noted that there were many open questions, in particular with how it would deal with malicious actors seeking to game the system. When Elon took [...]

For months, it has seemed as though retailers are under siege, raided on a daily basis by organized groups of thugs who walk off with hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of merchandise. This has been amplified by all forms of media. Clips from security cameras circulate social media with viral spread outpacing reality. This [...]

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We've spent plenty of time over the last year or so on Missouri and Louisiana's lawsuit against the Biden administration for apparently suggesting how sites like Meta should moderate content on their platforms. That case has had its twists and turns and is now going before the Supreme Court. I'm sure we'll have plenty more [...]

Groups like the National Digital Inclusion Alliance have consistently released studies showing that telecom giants like AT&T, despitebillions in subsidiesandtax breaks, routinelyavoid upgrading minority and low income neighborhoodsto fiber. Not only that, the group has documented how users in those neighborhoods even struggle to have their existing (older and slower) DSL lines repaired. Regional telecom [...]

Here are two things that cannot simultaneously be true: a company is very confident in the product it produces and that same company is very afraid of public discussion of its product on social media. This is generally true of pretty much every product in every category, but it gets a little more serious when [...]

Decades of somewhat-restrained conflict between Israel and Palestine erupted into war again at the beginning of the month. Islamist militant group Hamas followed rocket strikes with a physical invasion, the latter of which included the massacre of hundreds of Israeli civilians. Israeli civilians were also tortured and mutilated. Hamas also allegedly kidnapped around 200 Israelis, [...]

Earlier this month we noted how everything critics of the T-Mobile and Sprint merger predicted has come true, whether it's 10,000 employees who have lost their jobs, the steady implementation of fees and price hikes, a lower overall quality product, or the company's boring new branding. Those inevitable outcomes recently culminated in a new suite [...]

I have no idea how the current Google antitrust trial will turn out, and frankly, I'm not sure it much matters. I mean, I'm sure it matters for Google, but I don't see how either outcome will change all that much for anyone else. I have noted, repeatedly, that I'm much more interested in a [...]

Google is an internet powerhouse. It's home to the most-used search engine in the world. It has its own operating system and its own line of cell phones. It also has its own cell phone service. It has ad services, a suite of web-based productivity apps that are (somewhat compatible) with a bunch of Microsoft [...]

The ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence Open AI Training Bundle has four courses to help you get up to speed. In the first two courses, you will learn the fundamentals of working with ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI. You will gain hands-on experience using ChatGPT to generate text that is coherent and natural, and [...]

Yes, I'm well are of Betteridge's Law, and yes, this headline is designed to deliberately obey it. It's no surprise that Elon's grand vision for exTwitter was to try to turn it into a financial services everything app. He's been talking about such an app for years. It's what he wanted his original X.com to [...]

We've long noted how absurd it is that scammers, debt collectors, and greedy telemarketers have ruined our voice communications networks. We've also noted how a big reason our robocall problem never gets fixed is because the regulator in charge of it (the FCC) routinely fixates on scammers and not the legit" companies that use the [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about one detail in Google's push for anti-open-internet regulation: Goody. Mandating porn ID and, by association, tying porn use with that ID. Sounds like Google is advocating for, among other things, government mandated collection of adults' fetishes tied to their names. [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the broadband industry sued Vermont over consumer protections and net neutrality, while a few states got into the broadband fight on the side of the FCC, and we noted how perfect the coordination was between the agency and telecom lobbyists. Another report showed that FOSTA increased sex trafficking, [...]

There's a lot to get to in this post, so we're going to dive right in. Shawn Layden is a former CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America, otherwise known as essentially the boss of Playstation. He has made several appearances as of late, both in a keynote speech for a video game industry summit and [...]

Losing must be the new winning. With a single exception (and that was only a public college), every state (or city) that has passed an anti-drag show law has seen it blocked by a federal court. And yet, this string of losses doesn't seem to be deterring performative legislators from trying to violate the First [...]

While recent evolutions in AI" have netted some profoundly interesting advancements in creativity and productivity, its early implementation in journalism has been a comically sloppy mess thanks to some decidedly human problems: namely greed, incompetence, and laziness. If you remember, the cheapskates over at Red Ventures implemented AI over at CNET without telling anybody. The [...]

Last year, we wrote about the really bizarre case of a website called Business Casual" that filed a couple of copyright infringement lawsuits. One was against TV-Novosti, the Russian state-owned news organization that runs RT (formerly Russia Today). While there was a brief period of time in which RT pretended that it wanted to be [...]

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Law enforcement agencies aren't used to oversight or accountability. That's something that has rarely been deemed essential to the act of policing. After all, if the Supreme Court can create qualified immunity" out of thin air to protect (most) cops from the consequences of their unconstitutional actions, surely podunk locals shouldn't assume they're more qualified [...]

Today is the official one year anniversary of Elon getting control over what used to be called Twitter, and now is simply exTwitter. It was supposed to be tomorrow, but in a sign of what was to come, Elon and his buddies maneuvered to close the deal in the afternoon a day early, just to [...]

Now that growth is saturated in the streaming sector, companies are increasingly behaving like the cable TV giants they once disrupted in a bid to deliver Wall Street improved quarterly returns at any cost. Even if it means annoying consumers and damaging the company's long-term brand. Netflix now wants to harass you for doing something [...]

For nearly a decade now, we've discussed Nintendo's oddly combative relationship with the eSports community, specifically as it revolves around Super Smash Bros. tournaments. Whereas other game publishers have fully embraced these tournaments and the attention they bring to their games, Nintendo does what Nintendo always does instead: exert more and more control, pissing everyone [...]

Eager to maintain a lucrative repair monopoly over its products, Apple has had a long history ofbullying independent repair shops. Apple lobbyists have also falsely claimed that making its products easier and less expensive to repair would result in vast untold consumer privacy and security nightmares, turning states that consider right to reform" legislation intolawless [...]

Walled Culture recently wrote about anunrealistic French legislative proposalthat would require the listing of all the authors of material used for training generative AI systems. Unfortunately, the European Parliament has inserted a similarly impossible idea in its text for the upcomingArtificial Intelligence (AI) Act. The DisCo blog explains thatMEPs added new copyright requirementsto the Commission's [...]

The EU Commission has been pushing client-side scanning for well over a year. This new intrusion into private communications has been pitched as perhaps the only way to prevent the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Mandates proposed by the EU government would have forced communication services to engage in client-side scanning of content. [...]

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We've been covering, at great length, the moral panic around the claims that social media is what's making kids depressed. The problem with this narrative is that there's basically no real evidence to support it. As the American Psychological Association found when it reviewed all the literature, despite many, many dozens of studies done on [...]

Earlier this year a new journalism outlet named The Messenger" launched to great fanfare. The brainchild of former The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein, the new news empire launched with $50 million in backing and a lot of chatter about how it was going to do things differently, with Finkelstein claiming he wanted to build an [...]

The Intercept has an interesting article that revealsanother reasonwhy some newspaper publishers are not great fans of the site: The New York Times tried to block a web crawler that was affiliated with the famous Internet Archive, a project whose easy-to-use comparisons of article versions has sometimes led to embarrassment for the newspaper. As the [...]

Last week in our Error 402 series on the history of web monetization, we talked about the earliest secure monetary transactions on the web, soon after the National Science Foundation opened up the early internet for commercialization. There were electronic transactions over networks that pre-dated this (such as on proprietary online services like CompuServe, but [...]

It's always been easy for cops to take stuff from people. Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement to bypass most of the Constitution so long as they imply things about the supposedly illegal source of the property they've taken from citizens. The Fourth Amendment is almost worthless in these cases. Since there are no criminal [...]

A few people have been asking me about last week's release of something called the Westminster Declaration," which is a high and mighty sounding declaration" about freedom of speech, signed by a bunch of journalists, academics, advocates and more. It reminded me a lot of the infamous Harper's Letter" from a few years ago that [...]

The TSA was imposed on us following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Supposedly necessitated by this new" terrorist threat, the TSA shrugged into action, becoming another layer of irritating bureaucracy standing between benign travelers and their freedom of movement. Since then, it has gotten worse. The TSA has spent billions on tech, training, [...]

I really wish we could fast forward a few decades to the point where we look back on the moral panic over kids and social media and laugh about it, the same way we now laugh about similar moral panics regarding television, Dungeons & Dragons, rock & roll music, comic books, pinball, chess, novels, and [...]

So we've been talking a lot about how as the streaming video market matures, it's increasingly behaving a lot like the old, shitty cable companies the sector once disrupted. Instead of innovation and risk taking, we're seeing endless price hikes, lower quality catalogs, strange new catalog gaps, labor issues, ethically flimsier policy positions, annoying new [...]

The tradition of game developers trolling those who pirate or otherwise use their games rather than immediately going the legal route has a long history. There are lots of ways to do this, most of which involve either breaking the game in certain ways, or inputting Easter eggs into games that cause those pirating it [...]

This blog has written a number of times about the reaction of creators togenerative AI. Legal academic and copyright expertAndres Guadamuzhas spotted what may be the first attempt to draw upa new law to regulate generative AI. It comes from French politicians, who have developed something of a habit of bringing in new laws attempting [...]

We've written plenty about facial recognition here on Techdirt, and especially the infamous Clearview AI. Now, journalist Kashmir Hill, who wrote the original New York Times story that brought the company to the public's attention, has written a new book all about the subject: Your Face Belongs To Us. This week, she joins us on [...]

I am so frequently confused by companies that sue other companies for making their own sites and services more useful. It happens quite often. And quite often, the lawsuits are questionable CFAA claims against websites that scrape data to provide a better consumer experience, but one that still ultimately benefits the originating site. Over the [...]

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Perception matters more than reality, especially when your budget is on the line. Law enforcement agencies like to portray criminal activity as constantly rising, especially now that they're facing additional scrutiny and the occasional so-called defunding" effort. It's a weird way to handle (government) business. On one hand, the cops claim rising crime necessitates more [...]