Techdirt

The DOJ promised it wouldn't target journalists and their sources during leak investigations. It also said wouldn't engage in questionable CFAA prosecutions that appeared to involve nothing more than unapproved (or unexpected) access to data. Both of those self-imposed restrictions seem to have been ignored in a case involving former Deadspin contributor Tim Burke and [...]

You may recall that early on in Elon's ownership of Twitter, he insisted that removing child exploitation is priority #1" while exhorting his supporters to reply in the comments" if they saw any. Leaving aside that this is a ridiculously terrible process for having people report potential CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) or, as some [...]

A few months ago, Jack Yan pointed out to me that if they did a search for Techdirt on DuckDuckGo, it showed only one single link which was (bizarrely) to a random story from like eight years ago. There were literally no other results for Techdirt. I replicated it, but was travelling, and by the [...]

The benefits of learning to speak a second language (or third) are immeasurable! With its intuitive, immersive training method, Rosetta Stone will have you reading, writing, and speaking new languages like a natural in no time. You'll start by matching words with images just like when you learned your native language as a child. Then [...]

On Wednesday, the Senate revealed an amended version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) for today's hearing over the bill. One would hope with so much public pushback over the bill, they might do something crazy like trying to fix the bill. That is, apparently, way too much to ask. Earlier today, the Senate [...]

Giant automakers continue to try and scuttle a popular Massachusetts law aimed at making repairing your own cars easier and more affordable. And they're once again using some familiar, misleading tactics to do it. In late 2020, Massachusetts lawmakers (with overwhelming public support) passed anexpansion of the state's right to repair" law, requiring that all [...]

For years, Kansas Highway Patrol troopers have stopped motorists on interstate highways. That's the job. But the job became much more interesting when neighboring states legalized marijuana. Colorado led the way, with others following, but Colorado's actions have had the most impact on the KHP. Missouri's more recent legalization has only compounded the problem facing [...]

As Walled Culture the book (free digital versions) details, for decades the copyright industry has lobbied consistently (and successfully) for more and harsher laws targeting alleged infringement. Against that background, it is hardly surprising that these laws are used on a massive scale every day. But some companies take this to extremes. Here, for example, [...]

A collective of assholes d/b/a the Florida legislature recently passed another very bad law. I realize I may need to be more specific. Florida has been passing bad laws by the fistful under Governor (and presidential hopeful) Ron DeSantis. The bad ideas - all of them unconstitutional - range from regulating social media via compelled [...]

Over the last few months there have been a flurry of lawsuits against AI companies, with most of them being focused on copyright claims. The site ChatGPTIsEatingTheWorld has been tracking all the lawsuits, which currently lists 11 lawsuits, seven of which are copyright claims. Five of those are from the same lawyers: Joseph Saveri and [...]

DEA Administrator Anne Milgram's tenure has been marked by increasingly alarmist proclamations about fentanyl, social media, fentanyl, the children," fentanyl, drug dealers want to kill their customers," and... fentanyl. Without a doubt, fentanyl is killing people. It's not killing cops, even though they often pretend that it is. But a lack a clarity as to [...]

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Well, this is not surprising, but unfortunate. With the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to be debated in a Congressional hearing on Thursday, the White House had President Joe Biden come out and give a full throated endorsement of the horrible, dangerous, bill that will damage privacy and harm children. We've got to hold - [...]

Last March, popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn's appointment to the FCC fell apart, after telecom and media giants (with the GOP's help) waged a year long lobbying and propaganda campaign falsely framing her as a radical (The Verge has a good new interview with Sohn on what happened, in case you missed it). [...]

What is plain view?" Cops claim it's anything anyone could see if they happened to be in the same place at the same time, including those moments when citizens deploy their own air force. Force your way into the house under the community caretaking" exception to the Fourth Amendment? Anything out in the open is [...]

Let me start this post with an anecdote. I'm in my 40s and have been a Chicago Cubs fan my entire life. If you know anything about baseball, then you know that means that for more than 30 years, my entire fandom was wrapped in an identify of losing, and I was also saddled with [...]

Okay, now we're getting back to the plan. Two weeks ago we featured an excerpt from the audiobook of Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow's new (and excellent) novel, and promised that we'd soon be joined by Cory himself. And now, we deliver! Listen to this week's episode for a long and far-reaching conversation between Mike [...]

We've talked a lot about just how bad the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is. Yet some people (including people who, frankly, should know better) keep trying to tell me how well meaning it is. It's not. It's dangerous. But it has real momentum. A massive bipartisan group of Senators are co-sponsors of the bill. [...]

For the first time in a long time, the Intelligence Community is facing an uphill battle to getting one of its most invasive surveillance powers renewed. Not even during the heyday of the Snowden leaks has the IC seen this much resistance to a clear reauthorization of its Section 702 program. This surveillance grabs everything [...]

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Reddit CEO's insistence that the protests from Reddit would simply pass" certainly hasn't come to pass just yet. While increasing pressure from the company against protest mods has resulted in some backing down, many are continuing to engage in malicious compliance, making it clear they're still protesting. And, a few days ago, after many threats [...]

Language learning technology's (aka AI") introduction into journalism has been a blistering mess. And not just because the technology is undercooked (which it is), but because the folks in charge of most major media outlets are incompetent cheapskates who simply see the tech as a way to cut corners, wage war on labor, and automate [...]

Well, well, this may be a story that is starting to come to a close. With the EU having already approved Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the two remaining hurdles Microsoft had to jump through were with the UK's CMA agency and the FTC here in the States. After a recent loss in court blocking [...]

Biased policing is just the way things are done. Decades of targeting minorities for being minorities has resulted in tons of garbage data now being used to justify smarter" policing guided by AI that has been fed nothing but garbage. Every so often, law enforcement agencies are forced to reckon with their racist brand of [...]

I wasn't going to write about Elon changing Twitter's name and branding to X, because... who cares? I'm not sure what the point is. But, a lot of people have been asking me my thoughts, and the more I was trying to parse it all out, the more confused I became. It basically only makes [...]

Police officers are quick to argue that anything people do in public doesn't have an expectation of privacy. They have also been quick to argue (until precedent made it mostly futile) that anything they do in public shouldn't be documented, recorded, and disseminated. These cops are, of course, wrong. But that doesn't stop them from [...]

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 Training Bundle will show you how to implement classification algorithms using MATLAB, one of the most powerful tools inside a data [...]

Elon Musk seems infatuated with bots and scrapers as the root of all his problems at Twitter. Given his propensity to fire engineers who tell him things he doesn't want to hear, it's not difficult to believe that engineers afraid to tell Musk the truth are conveniently blaming scraping" on the variety of problems that [...]

Last February, a report in Politico found that Crisis Text Line, one of the nation's largest nonprofit support options for the suicidal, had been monetizing user data. More specifically, the nonprofit was collecting all sorts of data on customer interactions" (ranging from the frequency certain words are used, to the type of distress users are [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side are responses to tiresome comments from some... prolific commenters. In first place, it's Rocky tackling some platform/publisher nonsense: Fox News and the NY Post are publishers, not platforms. We don't care to control what they publish." The 1A doesn't care if a private company is a [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, Ajit Pai was pretending to care about the identity fraud that plagued the net neutrality repeal, Netflix's CEO was proclaiming the death of net neutrality to be no big deal, while the government in India was moving in the opposite direction and embracing full net neutrality (though the [...]

The Supreme Court made it clear in 2018 with its Carpenter decision: gathering historical cell site location info in bulk was impermissible under the Fourth Amendment. If law enforcement wanted to engage in third-party-enabled long term tracking of suspects via this info, it needed to get a warrant first. That ruling seemed to make everything [...]

While the telecom industry did manage to successfully defang U.S. consumer protection regulators for the better part of the last decade, they're still facing some notable headwinds. Broadband growth has dramatically slowed, their cable TV customers are leaving in droves, and while they are getting a ton of new subsidies via the infrastructure bill, a [...]

Apparently, Elon Musk has little to no interest in paying ex-employees the $500 million in severance he owes them (which was included in the purchase agreement he signed, but which it's unclear if he ever read), but he (and the close friends and family he stuffed the Tesla board with) need to pay back $735 [...]

Apple fought the law and - contrary to the song lyrics - it won. Years later, Apple decided it would get ahead of the law enforcement curve by attempting to engage in client-side scanning of iPhone users' content. That worked out less well for Apple, which (at least momentarily) decided making governments happy was more [...]

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It seems to happen over and over again, and the mainstream media always makes it worse. The mainstream media hears about a TikTok challenge," reports on it like crazy, and people freak out that TikTok is destroying the children or some such. And every single time, it turns out that the media got the story [...]

In just the last five years, the right to repair" movement has shifted from nerdy niche to the mainstream, thanks in part to significant support fromthe Biden FTC and efforts in states like Minnesota and New York to pass new right to repair laws, making it easier and less expensive for consumers and independent repair [...]

So much of what is considered [cough] bulletproof evidence in criminal cases is nothing more than pseudoscience dressed in a lab coat. For years, prosecutors have presented science-y sounding evidence" derived from lab techniques that had never undergone any sort of peer review or blind testing. The government - especially the DOJ - has also [...]

Reading through the increasing number of Techdirt articles about AI, the overwhelming impression is that many people think AI is bad, and needs to be reined in before it destroys journalism/creativity/society/humanity (delete as applicable). To see an interesting new phase of an old technology attacked in this way is rather depressing, since it seems to [...]

Protests ignited by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin's murder of an unarmed black man (George Floyd) spread across the nation following that horrific event. And these protests against police violence went on for months, prompting a federal response from an irked president, who declared Portland, Oregon one of many anarchy jurisdictions." The Portland police had [...]

One thing that should be evident by now is that every online community eventually learns the need for some level of trust & safety" or basic moderation to take place. And they quickly find that things are a lot more complex than they seem from the outside. Just try to moderate a medium sized Facebook [...]

Because cops are the frailest of creatures and are actively harmed by people, you know, looking at them, legislators have made sure they're ultra-protected by enacting super shitty laws that elevate cops above the people they serve. Blue Lives" laws insist cops' lives are worth more than anyone else's lives. They add years to sentences [...]

The Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Bundle has 8 courses to help you learn how to get the most out of your data. Courses cover subjects like basic terminology and processes for beginners, Tensorflow, regression analysis, Kersa, and more. It's on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. [...]

There have been some ongoing debates (going back many years) in the copyright space regarding whether or not embedding infringing content into a website could be infringing in and of itself. If you understand what's happening technically, this seems ludicrous. An embed is basically the same thing as a link. And merely linking to infringing [...]

We noted how as Netflix growth has stalled internationally, the company has turned to nickel-and-diming its existing customers in order to give Wall Street its beloved quarterly returns at any cost. That has included not only last year's price hikes, but this week's decision to eliminate the company's cheapest ad-free tier in both the US [...]

Last fall, a few people sent me this fun video from YouTuber Allen Pan, which briefly talks about how he ended up with a MythBusters trademark for clothing and apparel. I didn't write it up at the time because, while amusing, the discussion of the trademark (and, for that matter, copyright) issues was so confused [...]

As we just noted, satellite TV provider Dish Network's planned pivot into streaming video and wireless isn't going great. The company continues to bleed traditional satellite TV subscribers, new streaming subscribers, and wireless customers. And the company's supposed 5G network (spawned during the Trump FCC era) has, by most accounts, proven to be a bit [...]

A few months back, I got added to a group chat of Hollywood writers/actors/directors, all seeking to understand what the fuck was going on with AI. And one topic that came up consistently early on was will copyright protect us" and, if not, how can copyright be changed to better protect us?" I've already made [...]

ShotSpotter has routinely claimed its system of mics and location info is crucial to reducing gun crime. The theory is that if you can hear it, you can respond to it, even if officers can't physically hear these gunshots themselves. The problem with this assertion is that there's a margin of error. The system can't [...]