It is quite incredible to me how, over the last five years or so, the California legislature has pushed over a dozen absolutely horrific, dangerous (and often unconstitutional) laws to completely undermine the very principles of an open internet… and it gets basically no attention at all. Last year, it felt like we at Techdirt […]
Most laws and policies banning drag shows are experiencing swift judicial blowback thanks to their obvious regulation of expressive speech. Some legislators have attempted to work around this expected roadblock to oppression by avoiding any mention of drag shows or drag performers when crafting unconstitutional laws, instead pretending they’re simply strengthening existing obscenity laws. None […]
Most modern companies put a lot of stock into data when making crucial business decisions. As such, they require employees who understand how to work with mass amounts of data, and effectively analyze it to get a holistic view of the company. These skills aren’t just reserved for analysts, they’re valuable for professionals in any […]
There’s a pretty well known scene from The Office, when Michael Scott (played by Steve Carrell) follows his GPS device’s instructions (incorrectly, obviously) and drives into a lake: The writer of that scene says the inspiration was a number of stories of people doing exactly that. In fact, in the earlier days of Techdirt, we […]
While the California legislature often screws up tech policy, they’ve generally been pretty good on broadband. At least in relation to most U.S. states. California was among the first in the country to pass a net neutrality law after the telecom industry got Trumpists to dismantle federal rules. The state also unveiled a major broadband […]
We’ve got one commenter taking both top spots on the insightful side this week, but also… not really. Because in what I believe is a first, our top winner on the insightful side is Samuel Abram commenting on the previous comments post to celebrate a comment from last week, by Stephen T. Stone, that didn’t […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, Ajit Pai was whining about California’s net neutrality effort, while a court ordered the FCC to hand over data on bogus public comments about net neutrality, and Congress failed to invite a single consumer advocate to its upcoming hearings about broadband privacy rules. A Swedish ISP gave us […]
If you only listened to executives from the content industries, you might think that copyright infringement, or online piracy, is and has been a growing threat in dire need of stricter and stricter enforcement measures. But I’ll let you in on a secret: that’s been bullshit for the better part of a decade now. In […]
Law enforcement officers rarely care about enforcing traffic laws. Moving violations may produce a little extra revenue for the city or state, but it doesn’t do much for the officers performing the stops. Pretextual stops? The leveraging of any perceived moving violation in hopes of performing a vehicle search? That’s where the money is, thanks […]
Thanks to industry consolidation and saturated market growth, the streaming industry has started behaving much like the traditional cable giants they once disrupted. As with most industries suffering from “enshittification,” that generally means imposing obnoxious new restrictions (see: Netflix password sharing), endless price hikes, and obnoxious and dubious new fees geared toward pleasing Wall Street. […]
Over the last few months, Elon Musk and Linda Yaccarino keep trying to claim that exTwitter is actually growing and more used than ever. Yaccarino has talked about “largest usage days” without defining the term, and Elon says it’s “user-seconds per day of phone screentime as reported by iOS & Android” even though that’s not […]
As we noted last week, the Supreme Court put on hold the injunction issued by the 5th Circuit regarding the administration’s efforts to influence how social media companies deal with misinformation. As you’ll recall, Louisiana and Missouri and a variety of nonsense peddlers all sued the Biden administration, claiming that their 1st Amendment rights were […]
Charge more devices while saving space with Adam Element’s Mag 3 Magnetic 3-in-1 Foldable Travel Charging Station. This charging station replenishes your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods in one shot. The foldable design minimizes the size for storage and traveling, while the included USB-C charging cable supports up to 15W of power. Charging both vertically […]
In 2018, the Supreme Court handed down the Carpenter decision. That decision built on the one declaring phones off limits without a warrant — one delivered four years earlier. The rationale was this: phones are always on, all-knowing, and everywhere all the time. Given the amount of data generated by everyday smartphone use, the Supreme […]
A few years ago we noted how a South Korean ISP named SK Broadband had sued Netflix, demanding that the streaming giant pay it more money simply because the hit series Squid Game was so popular. It was one small part of a global push by broadband providers to force streaming companies to pay them […]
As many of you are probably already aware, a massive leak of internal documents at Microsoft occurred this week, all of which came out of the FTC’s challenge to Microsoft’s purchase of Activision Blizzard. We discussed a small portion of that leak a few days ago when we talked about Microsoft’s decision to take the […]
The United States is already a global leader in traffic-related fatalities, with a thirty-percent jump in the last decade. That’s in contrast to every other developed country, which saw a decline. So of course it’s a perfect time to flood American highways with a parade of extremely heavy EVs with unprecedented acceleration. Some of which are extremely […]
Almost everyone I’ve seen talking about this new Insider article about how Elon had a special layoff just of trust and safety employees has shared it with the line “wait, there are still trust & safety employees?” Elon Musk recently laid off more Twitter employees working on the platform’s trust and safety efforts, roles typically […]
Note: Since the publication of this article, the iBorderCtrl website has disappeared. We have updated the links in the post to point to an archived version of the site. Four years ago, Techdirt wrote about iBorderCtrl, a research project funded by the EU under the Horizon 2020 framework. According to the project’s Web site: iBorderCtrl […]
So, for all of the nonsense about what level of coercive power governments have over social media companies, it’s bizarre how little attention has been paid to the fact that TikTok is apparently proposing to give the US government control over its content moderation setup, and the US government is looking at it seriously. As […]
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