Techdirt

It’s no secret that Nintendo is one of my common targets to slap around for its draconian enforcement of intellectual property, much to the annoyance of some Nintendo fans. It’s just that it’s… hard not to? This is an enormous player in the video game industry that wields IP as a method for taking down […]

While Space X’s Starlink is a promising broadband option if you’re out of range of traditional options (and can afford the $710 first month price tag), many users who’ve pre-ordered aren’t having a great time. Some say they’ve been waiting for service more than a year, during which time Starlink has often refused to answer basic […]

It’s been a little over a year since we learned about Meta’s “X-Check” program for whitelisting high-profile Facebook accounts from various content moderation efforts. Now, after a long wait, the Oversight Board has released the results of its review of the use of the tool, and there’s plenty to dig in into. This week, we’re […]

For years, attempts have been made to make access to federal court records free. To date, not one of these efforts have been successful. The federal judiciary likes its antiquated cash cow, raking in PACER fees meant to improve and free up (as in “free”) document access and redistributing the profit amongst itself, (illegally) blowing […]

So, look, it’s been quite clear for a while now that Elon Musk has no clue what “free speech” actually means. We’ve covered this point from so many different angles that at this point anyone claiming that Elon Musk “supports free speech” is ignorant or stupid. Constitutional scholar Steve Vladeck has a short, but useful […]

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Last month, Facebook/Meta laid off more than 11,000 employees as part of the company’s attempt to recover from sagging ad revenues, inflation, and Zuckerberg’s clumsy, poorly executed, and widely ridiculed pivot toward virtual and augmented reality. Buried in that announcement was the fact that Facebook had also shut down “MetaConnectivity,” its decade-old attempt to shore […]

A deadly fire in an Urumqi apartment complex has led to something rarely seen in China: massive protests across the nation against the Chinese government’s actually draconian COVID restrictions. Most of the city of Urumqi is on lockdown, with residents banned from leaving their homes. These restrictions may have contributed to the death toll. Witnesses […]

The Los Angeles Sheriffs Department (LASD) has been overseen by a succession of terrible elected officials. Sheriff Lee Baca presided over a department that filled its ranks with criminals, ignored the proliferation of deputy gangs, and ran a jailhouse informant program so unlawful it resulted in an FBI investigation and the conviction of Sheriff Baca […]

It’s beginning to get quite comical watching various rightwing folks and groups bang on constantly about how pro-free-speech they are, often talking about situations that have nothing to do with free speech, only to engage in anti-speech behavior themselves. The new owner of a mountain of debt that is called Twitter has become something of […]

The TSA has been working towards this goal for nearly a half-decade. Its parent agency, the DHS, has already deployed facial recognition tech, most of it aimed at foreigners. The CBP uses it all the time. In 2020, the CBP’s facial recognition scanners at US borders captured 50 million facial images and less than 300 […]

In the light of the continuing mayhem on Twitter under Elon Musk, lovingly chronicled by Mike in ever-longer posts, it’s no surprise that many people are looking at alternatives. One of the main options is Mastodon. Although offering similar micro-blogging functionality to Twitter, one of its chief attractions is that it nonetheless does certain things […]

Apple has always been a market leader in user security. Things haven’t changed, no matter how much the FBI wishes/litigates. What’s most important to Apple is that users can trust it to keep their personal info and communications private and secure. What’s most important to federal law enforcement agencies — pretty much just the FBI […]

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch. You’ll get MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, Publisher, and […]

So, yeah, I wrote a big long thing debunking the first round of the “Twitter Files” but there’s no way I’m going to make myself do more of that for every stupid thread of the “Twitter Files” being tweeted out. Just know that, having read all of the released “Twitter Files” threads so far, they […]

With federal telecom oversight both intentionally gridlocked and crippled courtesy of the Trump era, the closest telecom monopolies get to seeing accountability are often state attorneys general. Case in point: telecom giants routinely sell service speeds that they can’t actually deliver across all fifty states. But only in a handful of states where AGs actually […]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our long post about Twitter and the Hunter Biden laptop story. In first place, it’s a simple anonymous comment: A terrific essay, which will never be read by the target audience because it’s longer that a tweet….. In second place, it’s Jonny […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, New York’s AG rolled out a tool to help people check if their name was used to support killing net neutrality, while we looked at why Ajit Pai had been spending his time attacking Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Pai also didn’t want people talking about a court ruling […]

Once again, law enforcement’s enthusiasm for violent warrant service has combined with its disinterest in responsible policing to result in a civil rights lawsuit. Here’s how that all played out, as reported by The Denver Post. (h/t Techdirt reader BentFranklin) Ruby Johnson, 77, is afraid to be alone in the house where she’s lived for […]

The EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) is one of several long-running trade deal sagas covered by Techdirt. It seemed to be almost over in 2017. After a constant on-off excitement about whether CETA would survive, it was ratified by the European Union. But it still needed to be approved by all the EU […]

This is a very cool development in the world of government transparency. It’s not often a government entity forces another entity to expose information it would desperately like to keep secret. But it happened in Switzerland, following an open records court battle by Tagblatt, which sought information on export licenses granted to local surveillance tech […]

Strong privacy rights are a crucial first step to a healthy and productive online ecosystem. The European Union figured this out years ago, enacting the General Data Protection Regulation. In contrast, the U.S., the land of tech innovation, is tripping over its own feet at the finish line and hoping nobody notices we’ll be without […]

You may recall that, back in August, we wrote about the bizarre situation of a company called “Business Casual” and its CEO, Alex Edson. Business Casual makes highly produced videos. It made a few on historical topics, including taking some public domain images and modifying them significantly to make “paralax images” that added a sort […]

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The Los Angeles Police Department is here to serve and protect… the powerful. The rest of you are on your own. Earlier this year, someone leaked an audio recording of a closed-door meeting attended by the city’s Latino lawmakers. The comments made during this meeting were extremely disturbing, exposing the racism and bigotry of the […]

For decades, U.S. politicians leaders utterly refused to support most meaningful privacy protections for consumers. They opposed any nationwide privacy law, however straightforward. They opposed privacy rules for broadband ISPs. They also fought tooth and nail to ensure the nation’s top privacy enforcement agency, the FTC, lacked the authority, staff, funds, or resources to actually […]

Since cops are trained to view everything as suspicious, they tend to believe everything is suspicious. The list of things considered to be suspicious often contradicts other things on the list of things considered suspicious. That should be considered suspicious, but somehow cops never think it is. Even if they don’t believe everything is suspicious, […]

There are lots of shitty ways game developers and publishers can handle their games getting crappy reviews. The best bet would obviously be to read the reviews from customers, learn something from them, and make a better product. Far too often, however, developers and publishers instead try to disappear bad reviews, fake reviews, or otherwise […]

In March, the Italian government not-so-politely asked Clearview to leave, bestowing upon the toxic facial recognition tech company a $21 million fine as a parting gift. Citing the company’s, um, clear violations of the GDPR, the government added to the tab Clearview has racked up in Europe, now surpassing $50 million. The company, of course, […]

In writing online about a case about online expression, I’ll open with a reference to some more online expression: the popular meme featuring the caption, “The worst person you know just made a great point.” And that’s where we are with this case just heard by the US Supreme Court: 303 Creative v. Elenis, where […]

The people who are here to help are still in harm’s way. The Supreme Court may have mitigated a bit of this damage in its 2021 Van Buren decision, but its limitations on readings of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act’)’s (CFAA) language means more on paper than it does in real life. All this […]

You may have had some fun toys growing up, but even the most nostalgic adult would admit that the Toybox 3D Printer blows their childhood toys out of the water. Designed as an easy-to-use, 3D printer, ToyBox empowers both kids and adults alike to design and print their very own toys. It can be controlled […]

Yesterday we wrote about how all of the terrible anti-internet bills we were worried about being slipped into the “must pass” National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bill were, thankfully, left on the cutting room floor. However, within the 4,400 pages, there was still plenty of other nonsense added, including a variation on a bill that […]

Hungry to boost municipal budgets, a growing roster of states and cities have spent the last five years or so trying to implement a tax on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services. Sometimes (like in Chicago) this has involved expanding an existing amusement tax (traditionally covering book stores, music stores, ball games and other brick and mortar […]

It will come as no surprise to any regular reader here when I say that Nintendo is roughly the most annoyingly draconian protector of IP in the video game space. At this point, Techdirt posts discussing Nintendo’s copyright and trademark antics are legion. Notable among those posts for the purposes of this discussion are several […]

For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk’s Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations are harming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimed would never happen in the first place is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated. Musk […]

Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Twitter and how it handled something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. If you’re new here, you may not know that I’ve written a similar post for people who are wrong about Section 230. If you’re being wrong about Twitter […]

Update: So we had this post about SF supervisors approving the killer robots in their initial vote, and had a note at the end that it still needed one more round of approvals by the Supervisors… and apparently widespread protests last night convinced the board to drop the proposal! The original (mostly obsolete) post is […]

iScanner turns your device into a powerful digital office and even more. It makes high quality scans of documents, educational materials, and to-do lists, and helps to edit, markup, and share them. The scanner app also can count similar objects and solve math problems and equations. Scan anything you need using your iPhone or iPad […]

Phew. As we’ve noted over the past few weeks, there’s been a big push by some in Congress over the last couple of weeks to sneak in some really terrible bills, among them JCPA, KOSA, INFORM, and SHOP SAFE. We’ve covered the problems with each of these bills and the very serious problem with trying […]

Anker, the popular maker of device chargers and the Eufy smart camera line, proudly proclaims on its website that user data will be stored locally, “never leaves the safety of your home,” footage only gets transmitted with “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, and that the company will only send that footage “straight to your phone.” Yeah, about that. Security […]

It was only some weeks back that we were discussing how a group of hobbyists were once again doing the culture preservation work that content creators should be doing in the form of a scan of every single Nintendo Power magazine and uploading it to the Internet Archive. At the time, you could go to […]

You might have seen some headlines recently suggesting that former congressional representative and current flailing social media CEO (and serial suer of the media) Devin Nunes had some sort of legal victory over Rachel Maddow and MSNBC. And he did get a very, very small victory while piling up more losses at the same time. […]

There is a serious problem in the way many tech-focused bills are drafted these days. Whether it’s a lack of trust or simply a desire to punish, those working on tech-bills are not talking to the right industry people about how things actually work in practice. This leads to simple mistakes like requiring something that […]

NSO Group is objectively awful. For years — with the assistance of the Israeli government — NSO sold to whoever wanted powerful phone exploits to deploy against targets. Ostensibly sold to investigate violent crimes and acts of terrorism, the less-than-savory customers of NSO flipped the script, deploying zero-click malware that allowed government employees to target […]

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We’ve written many times about the many problems of the JCPA (the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act). As noted, the bill is a really sketchy bit of corruption: creating a link tax to force internet companies to funnel money to news organization owners for… sending them traffic. Everything about the JCPA is wrong and broken. […]

Back in 2020, New York City officials unveiled an aggressive plan to revolutionize broadband in the city. The centerpiece of this Internet Master Plan involved building a $156 million open access fiber network that competitors could easily join at low cost, driving some much needed competition — and lower rates, faster speeds, and better coverage — to […]

For years, cars have collected massive amounts of data. And for years, this data has been extraordinarily leaky. Manufacturers don’t like to discuss how much data gets phoned home from vehicle systems. They also don’t like to discuss the attack vectors these systems create, either for malicious hackers or slightly less malicious law enforcement investigators. […]

While it seems difficult for some to balance these things, it remains entirely possible to think that Julian Assange is, generally speaking, a horrible human being, who was likely easily played like a fiddle by foreign nation states looking to play influence games in other nations… and that the US’s charges against him remain absolute […]