Techdirt

Designing a game world takes time and can get quite repetitive. Why not have the game build its world for you? That's the goal of procedural content generation, and you'll come to grips with it in the Complete Unity Game Developer Course. Focusing on the tile-based method for procedural level creation, you'll explore how to [...]

The best Streisanding is the Streisanding you give yourself, as the adage goes. The adage is even enshrined at Wikipedia, where it points to the creator of the term: Mike Masnick. Perhaps you've heard of him. The best thing to do to counter negative content is presenting your own side of the case. The worst [...]

For the better part of the decade, the generally feckless FCC has been trying to require that broadband ISPs be alittlemore honest about broadband fees and limits at the point of sale. So they cooked up the idea of a nutrition label for broadband," detailing all of the little caveats and restrictions (real world speeds, [...]

The gears of justice turn slowly, but they do turn. Late last year we discussed a delightful gentleman named Roland Macher, who goes by Spanky", because of course he does. Spanky was a restaurant owner and real estate businessman who found himself in prison for over 2 years because paying your taxes is hard or [...]

Some unfortunate news. AZ Central reported yesterday that James Larkin, who was a free speech pioneer who built an alt-weekly newspaper empire, and then spun out the controversial classifieds ads site Backpage, died by suicide, one week before his latest trial. While there's been plenty of discussion about Backpage, related to questions around Section 230, [...]

For years, we've pointed out that the FBI is more interested in easy wins than actually securing the nation. And for years, the FBI has maddeningly refused to take our harsh criticism into consideration. It has done its own thing, because of course it has. Who could possibly stop it? A mass violators of rights [...]

This is not a surprise, because the company made it clear it planned to do exactly this, but Meta has now begun the process of stopping links to news sources from appearing in Canada, something that Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez insisted would never happen. The company says it will take a few weeks to [...]

For several years, the government was able to route around the Fourth Amendment by turning cell service providers into proxy tracking devices. Thanks to the Third Party Doctrine, location data generated by cell phones wasn't given an expectation of privacy. A Supreme Court decision handed down in 2012 strongly suggested the government needed to obtain [...]

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, [...]

The grand old enshittification curve strikes again. Remember, as stated by Cory Doctorow, the process of enshittification entails these steps: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Way [...]

While Elon Musk's Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) broadband technology is too expensive and capacity-constrained to seriously put a dent in US broadband problems, it's helpful in low connectivity situations like disasters, select parts of rural America, or the war in Ukraine. But Musk's growing power over the fledgling LEO satellite sector has started to [...]

More than a decade ago, it came to our attention that the NFL was out in the streets of New Orleans threatening small businesses for the crime of using New Orleans related language alongside the use of images of the fleur de lis. Those actions were quite silly, given that the symbol and much of [...]

Last month we noted how media reform activists had petitioned the FCC to revoke Fox News' local broadcast license in Philadelphia. More specifically, the group argued that Fox News' rampant election fraud propaganda technically violated the character clause" embedded in the Communications Act the FCC is supposed to use to determine whether an organization should [...]

We've long believed in the power of online platform interoperability and the power it gives to users to curate their own experiences. One of the prime examples of this is Block Party, created by Tracy Chou, which has had to suspend its operations following ExTwitter's API changes. Tracy joined us on the podcast once before [...]

There's so much to dig into on this one. First off, just to state my own bias upfront, I'm not a fan of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). Literally just a few days ago I wrote about one of its highly questionable studies and how it's being used (badly) to justify a terrible [...]

Censorship has always been the name of the game when governments push fake news" laws. First of all, laws like these allow governments to decide which news is fake" and which news is credible." Those pushing these laws claim they just want to ensure citizens aren't misled. But, in reality, governments just want more options [...]

The Little Wonder Solo Stereo Bluetooth Speaker may look small, but it produces as clear and powerful a sound as any other speaker. It comes in a a variety of colors that are great for any setting and decor and you can connect multiple speakers together. Connect this speaker to your smartphone or tablet via [...]

Speech has consequences. Elon Musk has decided to reenable accounts suspended for posting CSAM while at the same time allowing the most basic of CSAM scanning systems to break. And, that's not even looking at how most of the team who was in charge of fighting CSAM on the site were either laid off or [...]

Transparency is good, actually. For decades numerous sensitive infrastructure, military, and first responder systems in Europe and the U.S. have utilized a radio standard dubbed TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), which is used in radios made by Motorola, Damm, Hytera,and other major vendors. For 25 years secrecy surrounding the encryption algorithms used in TETRA kept researchers [...]

As some of you might have seen, this past weekend, the NY Times ran a very nice profile about me, written by Kashmir Hill. There's not much to say about it, other than it was an interesting (if somewhat awkward-feeling) experience to be the subject of a story, rather than the journalist covering it. But [...]

It has been a busy day for Arkansas. Pornhub.com geo-blocked IP addresses in Arkansasin the latest protest against unworkable age verification laws. Arkansas is the fifth state to have an age-gating statute enter force and is the fourth to be geo-blocked by the parent company of Pornhub, the Montreal-based firm MindGeek owned by Ethical Capital [...]

I didn't think we had much reason to write about all of the Harlan Crow / Clarence Thomas stuff that I'm sure you've read elsewhere. But the latest (in a now increasingly long series) of mind-blowing revelations from ProPublica regarding the relationship between the billionaire and the Supreme Court Justice... actually has a somewhat bizarre [...]

The regulation will continue until internet freedom improves, apparently. Last year we wrote about Senator Michael Bennet pushing a terrible Digital Platform Commission" to be the new internet speech police, and now we have the bipartisan free speech hating duo of Senators Elizabeth Warren and Lindsey Graham with their proposal for a Digital Consumer Protection [...]

The self-proclaimed free speech warriors of the Republican party have spent much of the past half-decade trying to find some way to force social media platforms to carry their often-objectionable speech. That's what these asshats and hypocrites consider to be the real censorship:" the actions of private companies these same people have long stated should [...]

The Ultimate UX/UI Designer Bundle has 8 courses to help you start to develop user friendly websites. Courses cover HTML5 Canvas, Bootstrap4, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe XD, and more. These beginner-friendly courses are designed to get you building modern, beautiful, fully functional websites with absolutely zero experience required.The bundle is on sale for $30. Note: The [...]

We've talked a few times about California's Age Appropriate Design Code." This is a bill in California that was sponsored" and pushed for by a UK Baroness (who is also a Hollywood filmmaker and has fallen for moral panic myths about evil technology). As we explained there is no way for a site like Techdirt [...]

Under the Communications Act, the FCC is supposed to occasionally survey the state of the broadband industry to ensure that affordable broadband is being deployed on a reasonable and timely basis," and do something about it if it isn't. Of course the captured, bumbling agency doesn't actually do that. Despite spending $400 million on the [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is ThatOneOtherGuy with a simple response to the push in California for protect the children" internet regulations: The argument everyone forgets... The PROMISE of safety of children (or any other group) is not more important than the Rights of the whole. The only thing that [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2018, a bad new bill sought to create a nationwide exception to subpoena and warrant requirements for cellphone location data, while a court in Canada was affirming that there's still an expectation of privacy in devices being repaired by third parties, and FBI boss Chris Wray infamously called for [...]

There's an interesting post on TorrentFreak that concernsso-called pirate" subtitlesfor films. It's absurd that anyone could consider subtitles to be piracy in any way. They are a good example of how ordinary people can add value by generously helping others enjoy films and TV programs in languages they don't understand. In no sense do pirate" [...]

Copyright royalty collection societies don't exactly have a stellar reputation for operating on the ethical up and up. Our pages are filled with these collection societies pulling all sorts of bullshit. Some of my favorites are things like when one society insisted on collecting royalties from a bar that was shut down due to COVID, [...]

One of a long series of laws written to limit police officer accountability has been not only rejected by a federal judge, but also the cops it was supposed to protect" and Arizona's top prosecutor. Last March, the Arizona legislature decided cops simply can't do their job with the public looking over their shoulders. So, [...]

It's no secret that Elon Musk is desperate for advertisers to return to the platform. He just recently admitted that the company is still cashflow negative and that around 50% of advertisers have left (other reports say the number is bigger). This is despite his earlier claims that the company would break even on a [...]

Here's Part Two of my two parter about the Satanic Panic-level moral panic that has befallen the disconnected-from-reality California legislature (in a bipartisan way) as they seek to destroy the internet to protect the children). In my previous post, I covered the opening remarks by California Senator Nancy Skinner in support of her bill, SB [...]

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What you see below is part one of a two parter about a terrible bill in California. It started out as a single post, but there was so much nonsense, I decided to break it up into two parts. Stay tuned for part two. You may recall last year that California, in addition to the [...]

Elon Musk's companies are routinely heralded for unbridled innovation, but when it comes to very basic customer service, most of them are an incompetent nightmare. Starlink customers looking for refunds after being on waiting lists for years are routinely ghosted. Tesla Solar customers often have it even worse; shelling out huge sums of money only [...]

Over the last decade, a small handful of large platforms have become de facto arbiters of how people communicate and share information with one another. As concerns about that concentrated power and those platforms' decisions have piled up, so too have calls for greater competition and choice in social media and other services for communication [...]

And here we go again. We have been talking about both the concept of video game preservation being lost to the copyright gods, as well as how copyright often prevents fan-made creations and content around game franchises, for years and years now. Both topics are quite frustrating and both serve as examples of how copyright [...]

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 [...]