Techdirt

Last week Techdirt wrote about an important development in the long-running saga of the UK's Online Safety Act, which has just become law. The UK government said at that time it would not use controversial powers in the new law to break end-to-end encryption until it was technically feasible" to do so while preserving users' [...]

Linux is the most fundamental technology required by all real developers. It is required in almost all fields of Software engineering. DevOps, Cloud, Full Stack, and App developers must have a working knowledge of Linux. With five comprehensive modules and over 40 Linux technologies covered, the 2023 Complete Linux Training Bundle offers a detailed program [...]

Some good news! Federal Judge Beth Labson Freeman has recognized what some of us have been screaming about for over a year now: California's Age Appropriate Design Code (AB 2273) is an unconstitutional mess that infringes on the 1st Amendment. We can add this to the pile of terrible moral panic protect the children!" laws [...]

We've noted a few times now how the 2021 infrastructure bill includes more than $42.5 billion to shore up broadband access. And while a huge chunk of that money will absolutely be going to giant telecom monopolies with a long history of subsidy fraud, a lot of the funding is genuinely going to help fund [...]

The world of the cosmetics industry is no stranger to trademark disputes. Without really diving in, I can think of several reasons why this would be. It is a saturated market in which both very large and much smaller companies play. It's an industry which produces products that basically beg for descriptive product names and [...]

Wayne County, Michigan cops and prosecutors love seizing property. According to law enforcement, seizing cash and cars from people (while often not charging them with crimes) is the best way to break up criminal organizations and disrupt the illegal drug market. What's left unexplained is how Wayne County's forfeiture program does anything more than make [...]

For many, many years we've detailed how big pharma companies, who only care about the monopoly rents they can receive on medicine while under patent, have concocted all sorts of scams and schemes to avoid having to compete with generic versions, even after their patents have expired (or been invalidated). But one of their older [...]

You hate to see it. But you know it's always there. And it's not even hidden below the surface. It's right there on top: the disdain expressed by law enforcement officers for the people they're supposed to be serving. If you believe the people you swore to serve and protect are worth less than the [...]

I don't think I've ever had a story sent in to me more than Bill Willingham's Substack/press release announcing that he was putting the Fables comic book property into the public domain, as part of a dispute he's having with DC Comics. As of now, 15 September 2023, the comic book property called Fables, including [...]

Designed for the world of hybrid work, Windows 11 can help you work more simply and seamlessly from anywhere. Windows 11 Pro also includes a number of productivity-focused features, such as the ability to snap multiple windows together and create custom layouts, improved voice typing, and a new, more powerful search experience. Personal and professional [...]

Who among us has not considered shoving a camera into our underwear... but for the greater good... on the public's dime? No need to raise your hands. We already know where they are. The only thing better than lots of surveillance is even more surveillance. That's the unofficial tagline of the Intelligence Community, as headed [...]

The cord cutting" trend cable execs spent a decade claiming was a fad just broke another round of new records. According to Leichtman Research, major cable TV providers lost another 1.7 million subscribers last quarter, as users flock to streaming, over the air TV, TikTok, or, you know, books. Roughly 17,700 customers cut the cord [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is James Burkhardt, responding to a commenter who compared Elon Musk's silly server-destroying adventure to Alexander cutting the Gordian knot, and taking the analogy further: Except after Alexander cut this knot, the ox cart kept dumping goods on the road, because the knot kept the [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, ISPs were using new tactics to try to stop California's net neutrality bill on the home stretch, while California was also eyeing a more questionable bill to fix the internet of broken things, and Ajit Pai was falsely claiming that states are powerless to protect broadband consumers. We [...]

Well, this is a bit of a doozy. This case - via the Institute for Justice - involves a possible First Amendment violation but somehow ends with a judicial blessing of cops who make things up after the fact to justify an arrest that has already taken place. That's literally what happened here. Mason Murphy [...]

Back in March we were greatly dismayed by the the ruling in Hachette v. the Internet Archive over the legality of controlled digital lending" and the Archive's Open Library." It seemed clear that Judge John Koeltl did not understand some of the fundamentals of fair use (it also appeared that he went into their oral [...]

Hoo-boy, if you pay even mild attention to the video game industry, you're already going to be aware of the complete shitshow famed game-engine Unity has on its hands right now. By way of throat-clearing, you need to know how Unity got to where it is to understand what's happening now. The game engine has [...]

As the US government stumbles around to try to come up with an AI regulatory policy, it seems like they're focused on trying every bad idea on for size. You may have heard how Senator Schumer just had the first of his AI Summits, including a bunch of big name folks, who probably are not [...]

The US government may try to prosecute you for violating sites' terms of service. But it won't be handling its own actions the same way. Instead, the government embraces fakery of all sorts, from fake colleges used to eject immigrants just trying to further their education to setting up fake drug stash houses to entrap [...]

Say goodbye to the hassle of multiple cords and hello to a simplified, streamlined charging experience. With the 3-in-1 USB-C cord, you can now charge your iPhone, AirPods, and Apple Watch all at the same time. With three ports for dual charging, this versatile cable cuts back on wire clutter while boasting extra length for [...]

So, last Friday, the 5th Circuit released its opinion in the appeal of an absolutely ridiculous Louisiana federal court ruling that insisted large parts of the federal government were engaged in some widespread censorial conspiracy with social media, and barred large parts of the government from talking to social media companies and even academic researchers. [...]

To be clear: SpaceX's Starlink service is a game changer for those out of range of broadband access. Getting several hundred megabits per second in the middle of nowhere is a decidedly good thing, assuming you can afford the $600 hardware and $110 a month subscription cost. That said, a few telecom analysts had quietly [...]

It shouldn't surprise anyone that the NCAA has appeared all over Techdirt, representing itself as a jealous and prolific defender of all the intellectual property rights the college athletics organization has, or imagines it has. Like any good cabal, the NCAA is both extremely insular and also aggressive when it comes to anyone else using [...]

California is poised to be the third state in the U.S. (behind New York and Minnesota) to pass right to repair" legislation after the state's Right to Repair Act SB 244 passed 50-0 vote in the Assembly followed by a 38-0 vote in the Senate. Those three states alone comprise roughly 20 percent of all [...]

One of the things we've tried to get across over the years (perhaps unsuccessfully), is that not only are laws to get rid of hate speech almost always abused, they're also counterproductive in the actual fight against hate. For those who support those laws, they seem to think that without them, that means that there [...]

Like it or not, there are a lot of unconstitutional harassment laws on the books. While it's always nice to see the First Amendment protect speech we like, it's just as likely to protect speech we don't like. And harassment laws are often written far more broadly than they should be, given the First Amendment [...]

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As we've discussed widely, the entire premise of various link tax bills has never made sense. They're pushed by the media and politicians insisting that Google and Facebook are unfairly profiting" off of their news. Except that's never made any sense at all to anyone who looked at the situation carefully. First of all, links [...]

For decades AT&T has sought to shovel its broadband network upgrade costs on to the shoulders of other companies. It was the primary catalyst for the net neutrality wars, after AT&T made it clear it wanted to (ab)use its monopoly over broadband access to force companies like Google to pay an extra troll toll if [...]

It's been a decade since a federal court declared the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk program (mostly) illegal. Judge Shira Scheindlin, in a 195-page decision, pointed out everything that was wrong with the program, which ignored the Terry stop" parameters defined by the Supreme Court in its 1968 decision to engage in stops of anyone [...]

I must admit that before even beginning to write this story up about Bungie losing in court in the summary judgement phase on copyright and trademark infringement claims against cheat-seller Aimjunkies, I had to check the dates on the TorrentFreak post several times. That's because we already talked about this a year ago, when Bungie [...]

Why do people still file these lawsuits? For years now, we see lawsuits filed against websites over their content moderation decisions, despite Section 230 barring them (and the 1st Amendment rights of the platform backing that up). These lawsuits always fail. Perhaps the reason we're seeing a bunch more of these lately was because a [...]

Last week we discussed how a contract dispute between Charter (Spectrum) and Disney resulted in 15 million Charter customers losing access to more than 20 ABC and ESPN channels they pay for. We also noted how despite a lot of weird claims this standoff would somehow dramatically reshape television, that nothing would actually change and [...]

The UK government is still pushing a bill that would give it more direct control of the internet, but it has, at least for the time being, decided against mandating broken encryption. For months now, supporters of the Online Safety Bill have insisted the only way to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material [...]

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So, we've been talking a lot about age verification of late, as governments around the world have all (with the exception of Australia?!?) seemed to settle on that as a solution to the problem" of the internet (exactly what that problem is they cannot quite identify, but they're pretty sure there is one). Of course, [...]

We've noted a few times how the political push to ban TikTok is adumb performancelargely designed to distract people from our failure to pass even a basic internet privacy law or regulate data brokers. We've also noted how college bans of TikTok are adumb extension of that dumb performance, and don't accomplish anything of meaningful [...]

The old saying goes: there's only two things that are permanent, death and taxes. For quite a while now, we could have added a third item to the list: Intuit annoying us to death with its bullshit advertisement about filing for taxes for free." You really should go back and read our posts on this [...]

There have been a whole bunch of antitrust lawsuits filed against Google over the last few years (in fact, one just settled last week though we don't yet know the details, though when that case was first filed, we noted some problems with it). The very first, though, seemed like the weakest. As you may [...]

Earlier this year, we had an episode looking at Canada's proposed social media link tax and the many ways it would be terrible. Since then, that link tax has become law (though not yet come into effect), and unsurprisingly proven that the dire predictions were correct. Also since then, the Cato Institute's Paul Matzko published [...]

We've talked about this case - American Society for Testing and Materials et al v. PublicResource.org - a few times before. It was one of two cases brought against Carl Malamud's Public Resource organization for posting the Code of Federal Regulations on its website, and including with the CFR language the standards promulgated by various [...]

If you read this morning's story about Elon Musk's impulsive decision to move servers out of Sacramento and up to Portland in a dangerous and wholly unsecure manner, and wondered if the FTC (who has two consent decrees with the company regarding how it protects users' private data) was aware of it, we already have [...]

As the name suggests, classification algorithms are what allow computers to well... classify new observations, like how your inbox decides which incoming emails are spam or how Siri recognizes your voice. The Essential MATLAB & Simulink Training Course will show you how to implement classification algorithms using MATLAB, one of the most powerful tools inside [...]

Back on Christmas Eve of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter's Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees were quoted about how much work it would be to do that cleanly, noting that there's a ton of stuff hardcoded in [...]

We've noted several times now how automakers have started taking basic car functions and trying to make them subscription services in a bid to please Wall Street. Mercedes, for example, has started hiding better engine performance behind subscription paywalls. BMW last year decided it was going to make heated seats an $18 per month subscription [...]

Techdirt has been writing about evergreening" for many years. It refers to the practice by pharmaceutical companies of making small changes to a drug, often about to come off patent, in order to gain a new patent that extends its manufacturer's monopoly control over it. The New York Times has a story about the Big [...]

Probable cause on four legs." That's the nickname for drug dogs, which give cops permission to perform searches just by performing a neat little trick cops call an alert." What constitutes an alert" is pretty much up to the dog's handler, who can claim any movement is the drug dog detecting contraband or (deliberately or [...]

A few years back we had an article about the The Green Smoothie Girl" aka Robyn Openshaw, who went on this weird SLAPPy binge of threatening people who left negative reviews of her brand of woo woo nonsense. Apparently since that time, Openshaw went down the unsurprising path of being a COVID anti-vaxxer (natch) and [...]

The ends aren't always supposed to justify the means. And a federal agency that already raised the hackles of defense lawyers around the nation during a CSAM investigation probably shouldn't be in this much of hurry to start sending out unsolicited software to unknowing recipients. But that's the way things work now. As a result [...]

So, I already wrote a long post walking through the mostly very good 5th Circuit ruling in the Missouri v. Biden case, in which the court threw out most of the district court judge's injunction against the government communicating with social media companies and academics. The end result is a very good, straightforward ruling on [...]