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Netflix executives this week announced that they would finally be putting their traditional DVD rental service out to pasture starting on September 25 after 25 years of little, red envelopes. From a blog post by Netflix co-CEO Ted Serandos’ intern: Our goal has always been to provide the best service for our members but as […]

It’s been quite some time since we’ve talked about Denuvo and its once-vaunted anti-piracy DRM for video games. If I’m being totally honest, I had thought that part of the company’s business was simply gone, so poorly did the DRM perform. By the end, cracking groups were getting around Denuvo-protected games in days, sometimes a […]

We just wrote about Substack’s issue with content moderation and the Nazi bar problem. As I highlighted in that piece, any centralized service is going to be defined by their moderation choices. If you cater to terrible, abusive people, you become “the site that caters to terrible abusive people.” That’s not a comment on “free […]

Starting next year, Colorado farmers will have a much easier time repairing their equipment thanks to a new state law protecting their “right to repair.” Colorado’s new bill, the Consumer Right to Repair Agricultural Equipment Act, requires that agricultural equipment giants like John Deere provide consumers and independent repair shops the “parts, embedded software, firmware, […]

Elon Musk seems to take a personal affront to anyone who says “dude, we’re not going to pay your crazy prices for stuff.” For example, he pulled the NY Times “verified” badge weeks before everyone else was set to lose it after they announced they wouldn’t pay. Now, Microsoft has announced that it is dropping […]

A number of stupid lawmakers have attempted to basically outlaw filming cops by proposing imaginative legislation that would prevent all but the most ineffective documentation of public employees performing their public duties. You can’t outlaw filming police. The First Amendment pretty much prevents that, even if case law in judicial circuits is still not completely […]

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Elon Musk has been on a tear of late, attacking the “mainstream media” at every turn. It’s true that this started about five years ago, when Tesla started getting some negative press (after about a decade of extremely positive press), and Musk seemed to absolutely lose his shit. It kinda comes with the territory, though, […]

We’ve long noted how entrenched broadband providers have historically refused to upgrade areas that don’t deliver immediate, favorable returns (quite often poor, minority, and low income neighborhoods). That, combined with a monopoly assault on competition and regulatory oversight in most markets, has left the U.S. with patchy, substandard broadband networks we’re still struggling to track […]

It’s nothing new that famous and recognizable sports figures have gotten into the business of filing all kinds of trademarks around their names, nicknames, and other terms and phrases associated with them. Anthony Davis trademarked “Fear The Brow” as a result of his identifiable unibrow, for instance. Remember Jeremy Lin? You might not if you’re […]

The nonsense never ends. As you’ll recall, there was a big kerfuffle (that still hasn’t fully ended) over a decision by Twitter in October of 2020 to block the sharing of a NY Post article about the contents of what was then alleged to be (and since mostly confirmed) Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop hard drive. […]

You know you’re fucked when the only way out of your current SEO/PR nightmare is to distance yourself… well, from yourself. Some of this predates Google’s search engine stranglehold. But altering public perception sometimes means hoping someone will look at your shiny new logo, rather than your disturbing past. After killing innocent people while providing […]

One of the central arguments for a recent rash of age verification laws across the country is to “protect the children.” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called his signing of controversial social media laws a means for “protecting our kids from the harms of social media.” Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a press conference that her […]

It’s always a mixed bag when entertainment industry stars get roped into supporting this or that internet regulation. Remember how there was a Hollywood-backed campaign to have a bunch of big name stars support FOSTA, the bill that sounded good to people who didn’t understand intermediary liability law, but has literally ended up killing women […]

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As you likely know, Elon Musk has been shilling Twitter Blue as his plan to save Twitter since basically four hours after he took over the company. In theory, pushing Twitter Blue was a good idea. Twitter Blue was the plan to offer a premium service to loyal Twitter users by upselling them on some […]

Former T-Mobile CEO John Legere repeatedly promised in print that the Sprint merger would result in a massive surge in new jobs. In a rambling missive that took aim at critics of the deal who predicted job losses, the former potty-mouth CEO proclaimed that critics were lying, and that the deal would be “job positive from day one” and […]

Some politicians never learn. Congress has been trying to shove through the EARN IT Act for the past two sessions, and thankfully it’s failed both times. But, now it’s back. Kinda. Far be it for the politicians looking to destroy the internet and encryption that keeps us safe to actually reveal the latest version of […]

With a ruling that basically said not only did Fox lie about Dominion, it did so despite being well aware of the truth, the Delaware court basically dared the alleged “news” agency to keep fighting Dominion’s defamation lawsuit. The evidence Dominion had already obtained was damning, as the court pointed out in its denial of […]

We’ve featured lots of coverage of the frankly insane deluge of “protect the children” type social media laws popping up in several states, and recently Mike was a guest on TechFreedom’s Tech Policy Podcast, hosted by Corbin K. Barthold. You can listen to the whole conversation right here on this week’s episode of the Techdirt […]

Larry Lessig’s views and thoughts on things like copyright law, internet freedom, and government corruption have been tremendously influential on myself and many others in the tech and tech policy worlds. His books are still worth reading and thinking about. But he’s taken some odd turns of late. A few years ago I called him […]

Texas has always been a bit weird about stuff. It sometimes views itself as a separate nation or, at least, openly expresses its desire to secede from this apparently abhorrent liberal village of hundreds of millions known as the United States. Fuck it. Maybe we just let it float off into the political sea as […]

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Elon Musk went on Tucker Carlson this week and spewed some utter nonsense, claiming that one thing he discovered upon taking over Twitter was that federal agencies had full access to everything at Twitter, including DMs. “The degree to which various government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on at Twitter […]

The Canadian government is hopping aboard the right to repair bandwagon. The Canadian federal government’s 2023 budget includes language indicating that it will attempt to implement meaningful right to repair reforms by 2024, alongside a new five-year tax credit worth $4.5 billion for Canadian clean tech manufacturers, and the potential adoption of Canadian federal guidelines mandating a […]

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin isn’t done hurting city residents. He may be imprisoned but he’s still costing the city millions of dollars. And these cases aren’t related to the brutal act that saw him charged and convicted for murder. Officer Chauvin did this to himself. He may have been aided and abetted by […]

Ah, remember Parler? They were the first of the “alternative” social media companies targeting the Trumpist crowd, in which I pointed out that their whole “we don’t moderate” schtick wasn’t going to work. The company speed ran the content moderation learning curve faster than most. But even from the beginning, the Trumpists who joined admitted […]

Here we go again. Another NSO-alike, founded in Israel by former government snoops, is selling powerful phone exploits to bad people who, unsurprisingly, use it to do bad things. And, as usual, it’s Citizen Lab doing the heavy lifting, sifting through code, identifying targets, and seeking information to find the source of these attacks. NSO’s […]

Elon Musk keeps talking about how he’s saving Twitter, but it’s difficult to see how. He’s made the site much more unstable, has been messing up basically every part of “trust & safety 101,” is now facing a growing number of lawsuits (including many over unpaid bills), has no idea how the site actually works, […]

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On Friday, Montana’s very silly legislature passed the first law in the nation banning Tiktok. The bill’s title is not subtle: SB 419: Ban tik-tok in Montana (they couldn’t even get the name right). The way the bill works is that it prohibits mobile app stores from offering TikTok to Montana residents and also just […]

ISPs for years have struck cozy deals with landlords effectively elbowing out competitors and allowing them to create building-by-building broadband monopolies. That stifled competition in turn results in higher costs for access to an essential utility. And while the FCC passed rules in 2007 trying to ban this, the rules were so full of loopholes […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is weevie833 with a reaction to our post about Substack CEO Chris Best’s failure to answer some important basic questions: The data First, this is the most sharply concise confrontation with a CEO I have ever seen on this issue and I appreciate the author […]

Five Years Ago During the hiatus from history posts, we missed an important event last week in 2018, when Backpage was shut down by the DOJ. It should have resulted in people realizing that FOSTA/SESTA was unnecessary (as the indictment made clear), but of course this week in 2018 was all about politicians pretending it […]

Readers of this site will know by now that Nintendo polices its intellectual property in an extremely draconian fashion. However, there are still differences in the instances in which the company does so. In many cases, Nintendo goes after people or groups in a fashion that stretches, if not breaks, any legitimate intellectual property concerns. […]

You know the drill by now. In October of 2020, the NY Post ran a story about the contents of a laptop hard drive that Hunter Biden apparently left at a computer repair store. There were questions about the provenance of that hard drive, and, given the history of foreign election interference, as well as […]

So, we’re just handing out top secret security clearance to everyone, I guess. It was clear from the documents posted to Discord (before spreading everywhere), the person behind them would soon be located. The folded security briefings were obviously smuggled out of secure rooms in someone’s pocket and then photographed carelessly, in one case on […]

AI Doomerism is becoming mainstream thanks to mass media, which drives our discussion about Generative AI from bad to worse, or from slightly insane to batshit crazy. Instead of out-of-control AI, we have out-of-control panic. When a British tabloid headline screams, “Attack of the psycho chatbot,” it’s funny. When it’s followed by another front-page headline, […]

I get it. I totally get it. Every tech dude comes along and has this thought: “hey, we’ll be the free speech social media site. We won’t do any moderation beyond what’s required.” Even Twitter initially thought this. But then everyone discovers reality. Some discover it faster than others, but everyone discovers it. First, you […]

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What could possibly go wrong? Earlier this week we wrote about an Arkansas bill, SB396, which was modeled after Utah’s recent unconstitutional social media bill, and tries to ban kids from social media. Except, as we noted, it appeared to explicitly exempt pretty much all of social media, except for maybe Facebook and Twitter. The […]

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 from the Biden FTC. We’ve seen numerous state bills make significant inroads in passing laws opening the door to undermining repair monopolies, even though industry lobbying has, at times, neutered […]

It will never stop being humorous uncovering just how many smart products are run by dumb companies. If you’re going to roll out a product that connects to the internet, you would think that the very basics of IT/internet security in those products would be taken into account. You would also think that there would […]

It’s not at all surprising why tons of people, including journalists, are sticking around Twitter even if they shouldn’t. Part of it is inertia. People were settled into what worked before, and change is difficult. Partly because of that, people are loathe to switch. Even those who have switched over to alternatives like Mastodon in […]

China and India are widely expected to be two of the most powerful global players in the decades to come. In some ways, they are alike. As Techdirt has reported, both have dismal records when it comes to Internet freedom, online censorship and privacy. But they differ in terms of their impact on the IT […]

It doesn’t look like Fox News is going to get away with badmouthing Dominion Voting Systems for weeks following Donald Trump’s unsurprising loss in the 2020 election. Evidence already handed over to Dominion in its libel lawsuit shows many Fox News executives — as well as anchors and commentators — were aware the claims were […]

Various treaties and multi-national proposals to combat cybercrime have been around for years. I’m not exaggerating. These have been floating around for more than a decade. (Do you want to feel old? This cybercrime treaty proposal would be old enough to legally obtain a social media account in the United States if it were still […]

The easy-to-use, ultra-portable, and durable external hard drive gives you the freedom to save your files on any device that has available storage space, from computers to tablets and more. This external hard drive can be used with your computer for data backup or moved to another device for cross-platform file compatibility. With USB 3.0 […]

The Supreme Court is currently deliberating whether or not algorithms deserve protections under Section 230. And I hear from lots of people that maybe Section 230 wasn’t meant to cover algorithmic policing and recommendations of content. But that’s utter nonsense. The whole area of content moderation first came about as a response to the earliest […]

We’ve noted in detail how the AT&T/Time Warner/Discovery mergers have been an apocalyptic mess that aptly demonstrates the U.S. obsession with utterly pointless megadeals and the “growth for growth’s sake” mindset. Hundreds of billions of dollars later and the companies have produced a product that’s notably shittier than when they started, laying off thousands of […]