Techdirt

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 [...]

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We're going to go slow on this one, because there's a lot of background and details and nuance to get into in Friday's 5th Circuit appeals court ruling in the Missouri v. Biden case that initially resulted in a batshit crazy 4th of July ruling regarding the US government jawboning" social media companies. The reporting [...]

We've already noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill aims to spend a whopping $42 billion on broadband deployments via the Broadband Equity and Deployment program (BEAD). We've also noted how big regional monopolies are doing everything in their power to ensure the lion's share of that money goes to them, and not smaller ISPs or [...]

This week, both our top comments on the insightful side are about Elon Musk going to war with the ADL. In first place, it's Thad with some thoughts about the situation: There are some legitimate criticisms of the ADL, as Mike points out. I tend to agree that they're too aggressive, and too quick to [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, despite the best efforts of lobbyists, California passed its net neutrality law and sent it to the governor's desk, while at the federal level, Ajit Pai was busy coddling big telecom and demonizing big tech. The automated DMCA systems of Hollywood studios were targeting IMDb for some reason, [...]

Long time Techdirt readers may recall the iterative changes that Japanese copyright laws have undergone over the course of the last several years. While they aren't the only changes to have occurred, the topline summary was to turn copyright infringement from a predominantly civil law issue into a criminal one, particularly in cases that prosecutors [...]

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

Hey, Techdirt haters: hold onto your hats, because I'm going to praise Elon Musk for doing the right thing, even though many of you insist that my complaints about him are motivated by personal dislike. But, as I've noted repeatedly, I'm happy to highlight when he does the right thing, such as here where he [...]

If asked to name the absolute worst Democratic and Republican Senators when it comes to technology and innovation policy, it would be difficult to come up with any worse than Richard Blumenthal from the Democratic side and Josh Hawley from the GOP side. Both have extremely long histories of having absolutely terrible, free speech destroying, [...]

It's great to see hateful people being shut down by little things like, you know, the Constitution. Would that it happened more frequently. Or, more hopefully, would that the mere existence of the Constitution prevent hateful legislators from passing hateful laws that have zero chance of surviving a constitutional challenge. It's the land of the [...]

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Common Sense Media provides some really useful tools if you're a parent looking to see if certain content is age appropriate. I've used it for years. But... also, for years, the organization has been way out over its skis in supporting all sorts of absolutely horrible laws that would do real damage to the internet, [...]

While government leaders spent the last three years hyperventilating about TikTok, less talked about has been the dodgy internet of things" (IOT) space; a broad assortment of mostly overseas-made techno doodads with paper-grade security and privacy standards that Americans connect to home and business networks with reckless abandon. Smart" TVs, fridges, and other internet-connected devices [...]

The Ultimate Fighting Championship people are certainly no strangers to readers here at Techdirt. The league that puts on both mixed martial arts events and, incredibly, events where participants take turns slapping the shit out of each other has been one of the most aggressive pushers of greater and greater IP enforcement programs in professional [...]

The two big EU attempts to overly regulate the internet are starting to go into effect. The Digital Services Act (DSA), along with all its associated problems, is about six months ahead of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) and all of its associated problems. Six months ago, the EU designated 17 sites as Very Large [...]

You might recall that Biden's first nominee to the FCC, Gigi Sohn, found her nomination torn apart after an industry-funded smear campaign successfully derailed the nomination. Sohn is an extremely competent and popular reformer, but a homophobic lobbying campaign by media and telecom giants (Comcast, News Corp.) falsely framed Sohn as a radical extremist, eroding [...]

Governments are weird. Maybe weird" isn't the right word. The more accurate word may be opportunistic." When it comes to speech they don't like, they move into this mode. If they think they can silence it, they will try to. And they'll do this while still pretending the speech they're trying to control is nothing [...]

A few weeks ago, we had director Alex Winter on the podcast to talk about his latest documentary, The YouTube Effect. In that film he spoke with a young man who talked about getting radicalized" on YouTube and going down the alt-right rabbit hole." One thing that Alex talked about in the podcast, but was [...]

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Do not go gentle into that mass surveillance night, as the phrase goes. The EU Commission is sure something needs to be done about the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). And it's not wrong! Things need to be done. But these are not the things. While the spread of CSAM is definitely something [...]

Mozilla's latest *Privacy Not Included report isn't subtle when it comes to calling out the shortcomings of modern, internet-connected vehicles: All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label - making cars the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed. After studying vehicle systems for over [...]

Of all the things in the gaming industry that annoy me, exclusivity deals have to rank near the very top. The idea that any title, but in particular third-party titles, could be exclusive to certain platforms, such as Xbox or PlayStation, is anathema to how art and culture distribution is meant to work. I understand [...]

Earlier this year the White House put out a document articulating a National Cybersecurity Strategy. It articulates five pillars," or high-level focus areas where the government should concentrate its efforts to strengthen the nation's resilience and defense against cyberattacks: (1) Defend Critical Infrastructure, (2) Disrupt and Dismantle Threat Actors, (3) Shape Market Forces to Drive [...]

We've covered the quixotic campaign of Stephen Thaler, who has filed lawsuits around the world arguing that he deserves to get copyrights and patents on writings and inventions created by DABUS, which Thaler claims is an AI that he created. He's lost nearly every case as he attempts to do so, often embarrassingly, including one [...]

For someone who's a lawyer, a former prosecutor, a former mayor, and a former presidential confidant, Rudy Giuliani sure doesn't seem to know his way around a lawsuit. It's perhaps that last thing on that list that's gotten him in the most trouble. Rather than recognize the peaceful transition of power that followed the 2020 [...]

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It still amazes me that KOSA has any Democratic co-sponsors, let alone 21 Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate led by lead Democratic sponsor (and embracer of any bill that will undermine the internet it it lets him ignorantly grandstand about how terrible the internet is), Senator Richard Blumenthal. This includes some big names who purport [...]

For the last decade or so, U.S. cable TV customers have been plagued by a steady parade of content blackouts as cable providers and broadcasters bicker over new programming contracts. For the end user, so-called retransmission feuds" usually go something like this: a broadcaster demands a cable company pay significantly more money to carry the [...]

Never let it be said the NYPD doesn't know how to have a good time. The question remains as to whether it's possible for the NYPD to allow others to have a good time. The NYPD has always been in the business of acquiring the latest in law enforcement tech. The arrival of easily affordable [...]

Shocking the conscience. That's the legal term for government actions that are so far from acceptable no one, not even cop-friendly courts, can deem them acceptable. A small Kansas PD - the one presiding over the town of Marion - managed to shock the national conscience by raiding the office of the Marion County Record, [...]

We've got a another cross-post episode for you this week, on a subject near and dear to our hearts: protocols over platforms, and restoring decentralization online. Mike recently joined Danny O'Brien on the DWeb Decoded podcast to talk all about these topics, as well as tell a little story about Danny's role in the founding [...]

After years of irritating the DOJ with its refusal to compromise encryption, Apple suddenly went the other way after receiving criticism over its perceived inability to stop the distribution of CSAM (child sexual abuse material) via its devices and services. For a very brief moment, Apple decided it would no longer be a world leader [...]

Not this shit again. A month ago, free speech absolutist" Elon Musk sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) in an obvious SLAPP suit. As we said at the time, CCDH is, generally speaking, not a great organization. Their methodology is awful, and their reports are often silly. But they have a free speech [...]

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I know that we've already pointed to a whole bunch of studies, using a variety of different methods that all show no evidence of any link at all between social media and teen depression, but it's time to highlight another one. I mean, we just interviewed Professor Andy Przybylski, who published a study showing no [...]

In 2017 the Wisconsin GOP, with Donald Trump and Paul Ryan at the head of the parade, struck what they claimed was an incredible deal with Foxconn to bring thousands of high paying jobs to the state. The project, which Trump dubbed the the eighth wonder of the world," provided the former president with several [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a simple anonymous comment about porn addiction": Funny, porn is addictive is a line pushed by religious fascists who wish to tell everybody what is good or bad based on a book that has its fair share of porn. In second place, it's Stephen [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, a security flaw at Charter Spectrum exposed the private data of millions of subscribers, while Big Telecom was trying out new tactics in its fight against net neutrality in California. An appeals court ruled that forcing someone to unlock their phone violates the fifth amendment, while another ruled [...]

If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide, right? That's what law enforcement and surveillance agencies tell us, coaxing us into letting our guard down so they can dig into our stuff without worrying about little things like probable cause. Cops like to do their work without creating narratives they can't challenge. Hence [...]

There may come a time when journalists around the world are left to point at massive datacenters housing AI journo-bots that have perfectly replicated what human journalists can do, screaming Dey took er jerbs!" like a South Park episode, but today is not that day. And frankly, it doesn't feel particularly close to being that [...]

You may have noticed that there's a massive, bipartisan push afoot to pass right to repair" laws in many states making it easier and cheaper to repair the things you buy. In a bid to undermine those laws, automakers and companies like John Deere have been using a fairly consistent playbook. One, they'll lie about [...]

For years we've covered the silly triennial review process associated with Section 1201 of the DMCA. If you don't know, Section 1201 is the part that makes circumvention of any technological measures" a form of infringement, even if bypassing those technological measures is not for copyright infringing reasons. It's actually even worse than that, because [...]

Censorship is a priority for prison systems. Despite publicly claiming to be instrumental in the act of rehabilitation," correctional facilities generally engage in the sort of non-productive paranoia that ensures the only resources prisoners have are... other prisoners. And we're all supposed to act like it's a surprise when people re-offend. Or worse, exit this [...]

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Just after a judge granted an injunction against Texas' adult content age verification law on 1st Amendment grounds, a judge in Arkansas did the same to that state's social media age verification law. Trade organization NetChoice had challenged the law, and the court basically gave them a complete and total victory. Just like the ruling [...]

We've noted for years how there's no limit of companies and organizations that over-collect data on your daily movement patterns, then fail to adequately secure that data. Whether it's your mobile phone carrier, your smartphone maker, your favorite app, or a rotating crop of dodgy data brokers, our corrupt failure to pass even a baseline [...]

Given enough time and attention, informal parlance just becomes... parlance. And so it is for the Kansas State Police. For years, troopers have evaded the Constitution and applicable Supreme Court decisions to make the Fourth Amendment irrelevant. There's a term for this: Kansas two step." Enough drivers have encountered it that it is no longer [...]

A Texas federal district judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking the enforcement of a controversial age verification law set to enter force September 1. The court determined that House Bill (HB) 1181 was overly broad, even in the narrowest interpretations, and violated the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. [...]

One down, many more to go. We've been talking a lot by the rush of states to push for age verification laws all over the world, despite basically every expert noting that age verification technology is inherently a problem for privacy and security, and the laws mandating it are terrible. So far, it seems that [...]