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It hasn’t been a great few weeks for CNET. If you hadn’t seen, the company was busted using AI to generate dozens of stories without informing readers or the public. Despite newfound hype, the AI wasn’t particularly good at its job, creating content that had persistent issues with both accuracy and plagiarism. Of the 77 […]

There’s been this weird series of articles lately, trying to frame the rapid growth of the fediverse (mainly Mastodon), as somehow now failing. It started last month, with the Guardian’s Josh Nicholas leaping in with a provocative headline: “Elon Musk drove more than a million people to Mastodon – but many aren’t sticking around” and […]

Mr. “I’m going to open up the libel laws” never got around to opening them up. It was another pet project for Trump, one constantly just another couple weeks away from achieving. “Strong looks” were presumably taken by Trump’s legal experts, but even their collective incompetence couldn’t overcome the First Amendment. Neither can Donald Trump, […]

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Soon after he announced his plans to buy Twitter, Elon Musk’s investor pitch leaked, and it was every bit as ridiculous as people have come to expect from Musk. One thing it included was a plan to reduce Twitter’s reliance on advertising, which (in a vacuum) is not a terrible idea. However, he seemed very, […]

We’ve noted for a while how most of the hyperventilation about TikTok is of the manufactured moral panic variety. We’ve also noted how the folks who’ve been the loudest about TikTok’s privacy and security threats spent decades fighting against competent oversight or privacy legislation, yet now want to pretend that banning a single app somehow […]

It’s always fun when the USPTO demonstrates its internal multiple personality disorder on intellectual property concerns. That’s probably a tad harsh; after all, the USPTO is made up of people, and different people will view similar situations differently. Unfortunately, part of what the USPTO is supposed to uphold and set are standards for intellectual property […]

Tonight is President Biden’s State of the Union address, and according to notes released from the White House, he will (for the second year in a row) throw in something blaming the internet for harming kids’ mental health, and pushing for things like a ban on targeted advertising. He did the same thing last year […]

So, over the last few weeks, we’ve written a bunch of articles about DoNotPay, highlighting some pretty significant questions about the company, its CEO, and the services it offers. To date, the CEO of the company, Josh Browder, has not responded particularly well to the concerns people are raising, and is acting like someone trying […]

Last week, we wrote about the positively ridiculous lawsuit filed by the Seattle Public School district against basically all of social media claiming social media was “a public nuisance.” As we noted, the school district appeared to be wasting taxpayer money, that could have gone to educating their kids, on this lawsuit that screamed out […]

Maybe the problem isn’t the stacks of classified documents sitting around the houses of presidents, vice presidents, and other administration officials. Maybe the problem is the system that declares all these pieces of paper too secretive to be handled carelessly or hoarded impertinently. That’s the thrust of David Dayen’s excellent piece for The American Prospect, […]

Transcribe any voice or audio to text with up to 99% accuracy in easy 3 steps using Voicetapp, a powerful AI speech to text transcriber. Voicetapp uses a deep learning process called automatic speech recognition (ASR), provided by AWS and GCP. It covers more than 170 international languages and accents for recorded audios, and 12 […]

You might recall that during pandemic lockdowns, AMC executives threw a massive temper tantrum because companies like Comcast/NBC began experimenting with slightly more innovative release windows. AMC was mad because the pandemic highlighted how the 90-day gap between the time a movie appears in theaters and its streaming or DVD release was exposed as both […]

About a month ago, we wrote an article pulling together a variety of sources, including an NBC News investigation, that suggested that Elon Musk’s Twitter was doing a terrible job dealing with child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the platform. This was contrary to the claims of a few very vocal Elon supporters, including one […]

NYPD detective Joseph Franco developed a late career habit of letting perps walk. Very late career. He was fired. But not before wreaking enough havoc, prosecutors were forced to toss nearly 100 convictions. Franco spent two decades working for the NYPD. How much of that was honest work is unknown. He was charged with perjury […]

If you’re not familiar with Dwarf Fortress, you’ve missed out on a legendary story about a labor of love. The game, a minimalist experience in which you are managing a colony of dwarves as they live their lives and conduct their dwarf-y business, was created by two brothers sixteen years ago. It’s an incredibly deep […]

Geofence warrants are just part of day-to-day cop business these days. Rather than moving forward with a list of suspects, law enforcement agencies just ask for data on everyone in a certain area at a certain time and move backwards to probable cause to investigate and arrest. When a bunch of violent jackasses stormed the […]

It’s been clear since the takeover, that Elon’s running Twitter entirely based on his fleeting and oft-changing whims. The weird decision last week to suddenly, with one week’s notice, remove the free tier for Twitter’s basic API, has create a bit of an uproar, as tons of tools, services, and useful bots made use of […]

Netflix’s password sharing crackdown hasn’t even launched yet in the States, but is already a public relations mess. The plan is to try to force Netflix customers to pay an extra $2-$3 every month for service for any users using your credentials outside of the home. An accidentally leaked Netflix help guide last week indicated […]

Deepstash is a platform for finding and organizing the ideas that matter to you. It helps you become more inspired, wiser, and productive, through bite-sized ideas. These ideas are represented as little cards you can read at a glance, and all ideas have a source: a book, an article, a podcast, etc. Topics covered include: personal […]

In 2018, Laredo (TX) police officers arrested independent journalist Priscilla Villarreal after she published the name of a Border Patrol agent who had committed suicide. The alleged crime was “misuse of official information.” But all Villarreal had done was perform an act of journalism: she had asked Laredo police officer Barbara Goodman to verify information […]

For all the misleading claims about “free speech under attack” in place where it is definitively not under attack (i.e., on social media sites, or via “cancel culture”), there are many areas in which free speech absolutely is under attack, and there may be no bigger one than the (relatively new!) movement to overturn the […]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about Elon Musk’s new API pricing plan for Twitter. The first place winner is actually a response to the second place winner, so we’ll present them in reverse order. First off, in second place, it’s James Burkhardt responding to Twitter’s […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, while Theresa May was repeating her demands that tech companies control more speech on social media, we hosted a series of posts about content moderation surrounding an event at Santa Clara University, with essays by Eric Goldman, Mike Godwin, Kate Klonick, and more. A UK appeals court said […]

There are plenty of valid reasons to seek a search warrant. Investigating a crime you can’t punish anyone for (because you’ve killed them) isn’t one of them. That’s the upshot of this recent federal court decision — one that will no doubt be appealed to the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court to see if the cop-friendly […]

Roughly a year ago, we discussed Russia’s response to some of the sanctions the West was placing upon it, including its plan to simply legalize copyright infringement, so as to keep the country running despite the crippling sanctions. That blanket legalization plan morphed somewhat months later, when Russia instead pivoted to a plan to create […]

As we noted recently in reporting on the FEC dismissing the Republican’s laughably ridiculous complaint that Google was dumping their fundraising emails into the spam folder as an “in-kind contribution” to Democrats, there was still the GOP’s even more ridiculous lawsuit. Last week, Google filed its response, and it’s… worth reading to see how thoroughly […]

Geofence warrants get all the hype. But Google also stores other data of interest to law enforcement: Google searches. With these warrants, law enforcement asks Google to search its repositories for certain searches performed by users. Once the government has this data in hand, it will start asking Google to narrow things down. And, once […]

People keep claiming that Mastodon isn’t scaring Elon Musk, but it’s pretty clear that he’s worried about the exodus of people from Twitter. With his bizarrely short-sighted decision to end free access to the Twitter API, driving developers over to Mastodon, some people realized that the various tools that people use to find their Twitter […]

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The evidence-free moral panic over social media keeps getting stupider, and when things get particularly stupid about the internet, you can pretty much rely on Utah politicians being there to proudly embrace the terrible ideas. The latest are a pair of bills that seem to be on the fast track, even in Utah’s short legislative […]

Last August, cable giant Charter Communications (Spectrum) was slapped with a $7 billion lawsuit after one of the company’s cable technicians murdered an 83-year-old customer after hours. The lawsuit (pdf) claims that Charter had eliminated a more rigorous screening process when they merged with Time Warner Cable, letting the employee and his history slip through the cracks. […]

Back in August last year, Techdirt covered a major announcement by the US government that all taxpayer-supported research should be immediately available to the public at no cost. As Mike wrote at the time, this is really big, not least for the following key element mentioned in the press release: This policy guidance will end […]

With the rise of ChatGPT over the past few months, the inevitable moral panics have begun. We’ve seen a bunch of people freaking out about how ChatGPT will be used by students to do their homework, how it will replace certain jobs, and other claims. Most of these are totally overblown. While some cooler heads […]

Last November, The Verge discovered that Anker, the maker of popular USB chargers and the Eufy line of “smart” cameras, had a bit of a security issue. Despite the fact the company advertised its Eufy cameras as having “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, security researcher Paul Moore and a hacker named Wasabi found it was pretty easy to intercept […]

Huh. It had actually felt like quite some time since Elon Musk had last done something so stupid as to send a new bunch of users to Mastodon. But, apparently he can’t go that long without helping to do so. Last night, I had actually started working on a story about how developers were increasingly […]

If you’re a good company, you try to make customers happy and deal honestly with their complaints. If you’re Liberty Bell Moving and Storage, Inc., you threaten unhappy customers with lawsuits and steadily escalating fees for expressing their displeasure with your service. It seems only the worst entities insist on tucking non-disparagement clauses into their […]

The Complete Excel, VBA, and Data Science Training Bundle has 13 courses to introduce you to the basics of data science. You’ll start with beginner courses on Excel, Python, Machine Learning, and VBA. You’ll move on to more advanced skills like automating spreadsheets, working with Pivot Tables, creating financial models, and more. It’s on sale […]

Believe it or not, there are some interesting, if confusing, unsettled copyright law questions regarding interviews. A few times in the past we’ve written about the subjects of interviews claiming copyright over those interviews (or the estate’s of deceased individuals making such claims). There was even a law journal article a few years back exploring […]

For a while there, everybody’s least favorite cable company, Comcast, was weathering the cord cutting revolution fairly well. The company’s losses on the cable TV side could simply be recouped over on its broadband side, where a monopoly protected it from having to actually, you know, try. Things have shifted. Last year, Comcast saw a […]

For sports fans in general, one of the great benefits of social media sites, particularly Twitter, has been the way highlights are shared across those platforms, both by individuals and, more commonly, by the leagues and teams themselves. Both Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) have been particularly good at this, […]

What’s being presented by ShotSpotter as good news for people who feel they’ve been wrongly accused, doesn’t actually appear to be all that comforting. ShotSpotter’s mic tech and AI combine forces to report possible gunshots to law enforcement customers. It’s very hit or miss, he said with all possible puns intended. ShotSpotter says it’s nearly […]

At the beginning of the year, we kicked off the latest edition of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! Last night, the jam came to a close, with a few submissions sneaking in right before the deadline and bringing us to a total of 20 entries this year. We’ve only just […]

Here’s a weird one. With the rapid pickup of Mastodon and other ActivityPub-powered federated social media, there has been some movement among those in the media to make better use of the platform themselves. For example, most recently, the German news giant Heise announced it was setting up its own Mastodon server, where it will […]

This is some bad looking precedent here. Everyone is right to be concerned about election disinformation, especially if that disinformation is intended to keep certain people from voting, but historically, it has been public officials facing criminal charges for voter suppression, rather than toxic Twitter trolls. And Douglas Mackey, known as “Ricky Vaughn” on Twitter, […]

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We’ve been writing a bunch lately about DoNotPay, the massively hyped up “AI lawyer” run by Stanford dropout* Joshua Browder. Again, the company has received a ton of publicity regarding its “robot lawyer,” often from some of the publicity stunts that Browder pulls. Again, I think the underlying concept of using technology to help people […]

Frustrated by factual reality, science, and an independent press, the GOP and its wealthy backers have spent the better part of forty years building an alternative reality propaganda machine across AM radio, local broadcasting (with the help of Sinclair Broadcasting), fake “pink slime” local newspapers, cable news (OANN, Newsmax, Fox), and now the Internet. While […]

If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you will be familiar with the concept of the anti-“woke” culture war the Republican Party grows and farms for its own purposes. This isn’t to say there aren’t real cultural conflicts we need to work out as a country, but that […]

You might recall that Aereo founder Chaitanya Kanojia’s attempt to disrupt the TV industry ran face-first into an army of broadcaster lawyers and a notably ugly ruling by the Supreme Court. Undaunted, Kanojia returned with a new plan to try and disrupt the broken U.S. broadband industry. But that plan isn’t going so hot either. Kanojia’s new […]