Techdirt

Most tech companies handling data requests from governments now publish transparency reports. As everything moves towards always-online status (including, you know, your fridge), social media platforms and other online services have become the favored targets of government data requests. It just makes sense to look there first rather than out there in the real world, […]

Science fiction has always served as a source of inspiration for real technological progress. Sometimes that’s great, but other times it enables abuse or leads people to make terrible assumptions that result in harmful decisions. This week we’re joined by the hosts of the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct, authors Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane […]

Elon Musk says he’s against a “lords and peasants” system on Twitter. And he thinks celebrities on the platform should be treated equal: And he’s really mad about shadowbanning: Even as he uses the shadowban features all the time, mainly against accounts he dislikes. But now it turns out that, all along, he’s set up […]

It was by no means certain that the internet would enjoy full First Amendment protection. The radio is not shielded from the government in that way. Nor is broadcast television. Both Congress and the President supported placing online speech under some degree of state control. In Reno v. ACLU (1997), however, the Supreme Court could […]

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Okay, this is just getting silly. We just explained why the various attempts to tax Google and Meta to fund the owners of news organizations (often hedge funds who have a long history of pocketing any cash and cutting jobs) is a clear attack on the open web. And yet, many people keep pushing these […]

For numerous years, automakers have been keen to boost consistent monthly income by pushing users subscription services. The problem: whether it’s a specific in-car 5G wireless broadband connection (made kind of irrelevant by the fact everyone has a tetherable smartphone), or subscriptions for app-based services like remote starting: consumers aren’t really interested. A new survey […]

We’ve spilled a great deal of ink thus far on the subject of Microsoft’s proposed purchase of Activision Blizzard. The discussion around this whole thing began with the acquisition itself, before quickly moving into the topic of how Microsoft was going to get past the narrow glares of several regulatory bodies that all made noises […]

For months, Elon Musk has been promising the rapidly dwindling workforce at Twitter that he’d give them stock grants. He’d promised that those grants would come on March 24th, and I can tell you that when normal business hours ended on the 24th with no details, some of those remaining employees were pissed off. However, […]

The Indian government under Narendra Modi has become an even worse version of itself. It has expanded its power unilaterally to silence critics and oppress citizens Modi doesn’t care for. It has continued to do this despite courts finding these actions illegal. The government has, on more than one occasion, cut millions of people’s access […]

Ever since Elon Musk made his initial bid to buy Twitter, he’s talked about “open sourcing” the algorithm. He mentioned it last April in the first interview he gave, on the TED stage, to talk about his plans with Twitter. And since taking over the company at the end of October, he’s mentioned it over […]

While NSO Group made most of the headlines in the cell phone malware market, it had plenty of competition back at home. Israel is also home to its competitors. Candiru — another malware company with more talent than ethics — managed to make headlines of its own while being blacklisted by the US Commerce Department […]

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 – whatever your needs are. You’ll get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, […]

Last Monday was the day of the oral arguments in the Big Publishers’ lawsuit against libraries in the form of the Internet Archive. As we noted mid-week, publishers won’t quit until libraries are dead. And they got one step closer to that goal on Friday, when Judge John Koetl wasted no time in rejecting every […]

The great TikTok moral panic of 2023 is largely a distraction. It’s a distraction from the fact we’ve refused to meaningfully regulate dodgy data brokers, who traffic in everything from your daily movement habits to your mental health diagnosis. And it’s a distraction from our corrupt failure to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era. Until […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a statement about a particular presence in the comment sections that most of you are surely familiar with. And a lot of people seem to agree! It comes from an anonymous account, but is signed by sumgai (and later confirmed with a logged in […]

So far in our series of posts showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927, we’ve featured Best Remix winner Lucia, Best Visuals winner Urbanity, and Best Adaptation winner To And Again. Today, we’re taking a closer look at the winner of the Best […]

It’s absolutely stupid just how often we’ve had to write about issues surrounding license plates. For convoluted reasons that involve how plates, which are mandated on all cars by states, are government property, that means that a state disallowing a vanity plate therefore does not violate the First Amendment. There are caveats to that that […]

Elon Musk’s next big revenue bet is that companies really, really, really want to show up as “verified.” All evidence suggests that very few Twitter users are interested in paying Elon $8/month to constantly break the site or engage in ego-driven experiments that make the general experience worse. A few weeks ago, we found out […]

We’ve noted how agricultural machinery giants like John Deere have spent several years waging war on independent tractor repair shops in a bid to monopolize maintenance and drive up costs. We’ve also noted that every time industry promises to stop doing this, it turns out they’re largely full of shit. With John Deere now facing […]

On Thursday, Utah’s governor Spencer Cox officially signed into law two bills that seek to “protect the children” on the internet. He did with a signing ceremony that he chose to stream on nearly every social media platform, despite his assertions that those platforms are problematic. Yes, yes, watch live on the platforms that your […]

Back in August 2020, the Trump White House issued an executive order purporting to ban TikTok, citing national security concerns. The ban ultimately went nowhere — but not before TikTok and Oracle cobbled together “Project Texas” as an attempt to appease regulators’ privacy worries and keep TikTok available in the United States. The basic gist […]

The ChatGPT By OpenAI Training Bundle has four courses to introduce you to ChatGPT. You will learn the fundamentals of working with ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI. You’ll gain hands-on experience using ChatGPT to generate text that is coherent and natural, and you will explore the many possibilities for using this tool […]

As soon as it was announced, we warned that the new “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” (which Kevin McCarthy agreed to support to convince some Republicans to support his speakership bid) was going to be not just a clown show, but one that would, itself, be weaponized to suppress speech (the […]

Earlier this month we noted how a successful, often homophobic smear campaign scuttled the nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC. The GOP and telecom sector, as usual, worked in close collaboration to spread all manner of lies about Sohn, including claims she was an unhinged radical that hated Hispanics, cops, puppies, and […]

Well, well. The fight between Sony and Microsoft over the latter’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard continues to get more and more interesting. As three regulatory bodies have been poking at the deal — the European Commission for the EU, the Competition and Market Authority (CMA) in the UK, and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) […]

A middle school in California has screwed up. And now it’s getting taken to court. Hillel Aron gives us the background over at Courthouse News Service: It was, perhaps, inevitable that the strange incident at a Ventura County middle school last year when dozens of students were banned from wearing T-shirts reading “Justice for Lil […]

Freedom of speech and association include the right to choose one’s communication technologies. Politicians shouldn’t be able to tell you what to say, where to say it, or who to say it to. So we are troubled by growing demands in the United States for restrictions on TikTok, a technology that many people have chosen […]

The biggest mistakes people make about Section 230 involve thinking that it is somehow a complicated law. In reality, its operation is not all that complex. Accordingly, determining whether it applies to any particular situation should not be all that difficult to evaluate, even when we think about hard or edge cases. Ultimately what we […]

Well, this is unfortunate. Back in May of last year we wrote about how Missouri and Louisiana had sued the Biden administration, claiming “censorship” over social media based on a bunch of convoluted and nonsensical claims, most of which were about events that happened during the Trump administration. We noted that, when viewed in the […]

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The international sign language for “go fuck yourself” isn’t just a protected right in the US of A. Although we may make more use of it than most, a Canadian court has declared this particular form of expression to be blessed by [insert deity of choice here]. Canadians may have a reputation for civility, but […]

If you recall, the Trump FCC under Ajit Pai spent several years stripping away popular media consolidation limits established over decades with bipartisan approval. The push was ironically to directly help aid Sinclair broadcasting’s steady consolidation of local broadcast news, which resulted in a homogenized soup of well-funded propaganda and the erosion of real, local […]

Not literally, of course. Let’s get that out of the way. The company was not sending people out to dig up bodies to take photos to add to its facial recognition database. I mean, how would that even work. Not only that, but very few desiccated corpses utilize subscription-based facial recognition services. It’s not a […]

It won’t surprise any regular read here when I say that Marvel is notoriously aggressive on matters of intellectual property. Equally unsurprising will be my reminding our dear readers that this includes the company attempting to use IP laws in the past to un-ring the leak-bell when content has been leaked early. Hell, Marvel gets […]

Given Wall Street’s insatiable demand for improved quarterly returns at any cost, a growing number of companies seem intent on nickel-and-diming once happy customers into oblivion. For many companies, that means taking a feature that was free or already paid for as part of the device’s retail price, then shoving it into a subscription tier […]

Over the last few months, Elon Musk’s handpicked journalists have continued revealing less and less with each new edition of the “Twitter Files,” to the point that even those of us who write about this area have mostly been skimming each new release, confirming that yet again these reporters have no idea what they’re talking […]

There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) pretty much unregulated use of surveillance technology. Courts have given considerable leeway to border agencies, reasoning that national security concerns outweigh the countless violations of constitutional rights. The protections the highest court in the land erects are waved away anywhere CBP […]

Portable, sleek and sophisticated, the Nix Mini 2 Color Sensor is engineered with life in mind. It’s perfect for those who find inspiration wherever they go. The Nix Mini can easily identify any color with a simple scan, ideal for those who work with color, or for those who simply want to bring it into […]

Earlier this week there was finally a hearing in the case brought by the big book publishers to kill off libraries. That, of course, is not how the publishers describe the lawsuit, but it’s absolutely what the lawsuit is about. We’ll get to some of the details in a moment, but we’ve joked in the […]

Earlier this month a homophobic smear campaign seeded in the press by the likes of AT&T, Comcast, and News Corporation successfully killed the FCC nomination of popular reformer Gigi Sohn. The goal: to keep the FCC in perpetual partisan gridlock, preventing the agency from making any decisions deemed even remotely controversial by the media and […]

A little over a year ago, we discussed Nintendo’s shutdown of the eShop for its 3DS and Wii U consoles. That shutdown ended up being delayed due to a metric ton of outcry from the gaming public, but that was only a stay of execution. In a matter of days, those shops will be discontinued, […]

In the days after Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the social media platform saw a “surge in hateful conduct,” which its then safety chief put down to a “focused, short-term trolling campaign.” New research suggests that when it comes to antisemitism, it was anything but. Rather, antisemitic tweets have more than doubled over the months since Musk took […]

Playing to a crowd no one should desire to associate with, Donald Trump understudy Ron DeSantis has been saddling his constituents with a variety of noisy, performative legislation. First, he tried to bypass the First Amendment and Section 230 immunity by hustling through a law aimed at preventing private companies from booting his buddies off […]

Well, here we go again. For years now, the legacy news industry, often led by lobbyists for Rupert Murdoch, have been pushing a bizarre plan to tax links on the internet. The entire rationale for this plan seems to be “news organizations used to be rolling in easy money, they failed to innovate with the […]

Ah, mission creep. The government loves it. Keeps people employed, keeps citizens on their toes, keeps privacy-focused sites in business, etc. In 2017, the DHS began quietly rolling out its facial recognition program, starting with international airports and aimed mainly at collecting/scanning people boarding international flights. Even in its infancy, the DHS was hinting this […]

The 2023 Complete Python Certification Bootcamp Bundle has 12 courses to help you become a Python expert. These courses will take you from beginner to expert in Python. They cover major topics including Object-Oriented Programming, Web Scraping, GUI development, and more. Courses also cover how to build your own smart devices, how to build your […]

Back in January, we wrote about the Seattle public school district filing an absolutely laughable lawsuit against basically all of big social media, based on a bunch of misread and misunderstood studies, and general moral panic that social media must be “bad” for kids. In February, we wrote about the school district in Mesa, Arizona […]

We’ve noted for a while now how the great TikTok moral panic of 2023 is largely a distraction. It’s a distraction from the fact we’ve refused to meaningfully regulate dodgy data brokers, who traffic in everything from your daily movement habits to your mental health diagnosis. And it’s a distraction from our corrupt failure to […]

Searching out stories we have done on intellectual property conflicts surrounding the Pokémon franchise will give you no shortage of results. Part of that is that there is simply a ton of content out there: books, cards, video games, animated TV shows, movies, and mobile games. It is also the case that there are a […]