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The Legal Case Against Ring’s Face Recognition Feature

16 hours 23 minutes ago
Amazon Ring’s upcoming face recognition tool has the potential to violate the privacy rights of millions of people and could result in Amazon breaking state biometric privacy laws. Ring plans to introduce a feature to its home surveillance cameras called “Familiar Faces,” to identify specific people who come into view of the camera. When turned […]
Mario Trujillo

Book Reports Potentially Copyright Infringing, Thanks To Court Attacks On LLMs

19 hours 46 minutes ago
A federal judge just ruled that computer-generated summaries of novels are “very likely infringing,” which would effectively outlaw many book reports. That seems like a problem. The Authors Guild has one of the many lawsuits against OpenAI, and law professor Matthew Sag has the details on a ruling in that case that, if left in […]
Mike Masnick

DOJ Memo Says It Won’t Prosecute US Troops No Matter How Illegal Trump’s Boat Strike Program Is

21 hours 3 minutes ago
Not content to simply deport as many South American migrants from this country as possible, the Trump administration leaned into its lies about the latent threat to national security the mere existence of foreign people poses to national security. This administration pretends everything is a “war,” even as it actively avoids seeking congressional approval to […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: The Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class

21 hours 8 minutes ago
MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That’s all well and good, but it means nothing if you don’t have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you’ll […]
Daily Deal

Bipartisan Senators Want To Honor Charlie Kirk By Making It Easier To Censor The Internet

22 hours 26 minutes ago
Democratic Senator Mark Kelly and Republican Senator John Curtis want to gut Section 230 to combat “political radicalization”—in honor of Charlie Kirk, whose entire career was built on political radicalization. Kirk styled himself as a “free speech warrior” because he would show up on college campuses to “debate” people, but as we’ve covered, the “debate […]
Mike Masnick

Formula 1, Others Oppose Arena Football One’s Logo Trademark Application

1 day 11 hours ago
There is an incredible dearth of nuance when it comes to how some companies attempt to enforce their trademarks. A couple of things are true. First, an entity risks losing their marks if they don’t rigorously enforce them against actual infringement. Second, the USPTO is far too lenient in granting marks that are non-creative or […]
Timothy Geigner

License Plate Surveillance Logs Reveal Racist Policing Against Romani People

1 day 16 hours ago
More than 80 law enforcement agencies across the United States have used language perpetuating harmful stereotypes against Romani people when searching the nationwide Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) network, according to audit logs obtained and analyzed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  When police run a search through the Flock Safety network, which links […]
Rindala Alajaji and Dave Maass

Pete Hegseth Has Turned State Violence Into TikTok Content

1 day 18 hours ago
You know this is a spectacle, right? A show. That’s what it is. A performance for social media. With blood. Pete Hegseth just ordered the twenty-first strike on a suspected drug boat. Three more bodies. Another video posted to X showing a vessel bursting into flames. “Three male narco-terrorists” dead, the military announces. No trial. No evidence […]
Mike Brock

NY Times Runs Defense For Social Media Bans, Buries Evidence They Don’t Work Until Paragraph 14

1 day 19 hours ago
Imagine you’re writing an article about a popular policy trend. The trend is expensive to implement, disruptive to normal operations, and—here’s the key part—there’s substantial research showing it doesn’t actually work and can cause other significant problems. How would you structure that article? One approach: Lead with the evidence. “Despite growing enthusiasm for [policy proposal], […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: Raspberry Pi Pico W Ultimate Starter Kit

1 day 21 hours ago
The SunFounder Raspberry Pi Pico W Ultimate Starter Kit offers a rich learning experience for beginners aged 8 and up. With over 450 components, 117 projects, and expert-led tutorials, this kit makes learning microcontroller programming engaging and accessible. It also features 27 video lessons by renowned educator Paul McWhorter, simplifying microcontroller programming and IoT concepts. Packed […]
Daily Deal

Courage Doesn’t Scale

1 day 22 hours ago
It has been frustrating, to say the least, to watch many of the big Silicon Valley tech firms bow down to Trump and do his bidding, especially when it directly contradicts things they’ve said and done in the past. I’ve tried to explain to tech company execs why this doesn’t end well for them, but […]
Mike Masnick

Former FCC Officials Push To Kill Dated ‘News Distortion’ Rule Trump Abused To Bully CBS And ABC Into Feckless Compliance

2 days 2 hours ago
A coalition of former FCC officials are pushing for the elimination of a longstanding FCC rule the Trump administration abused to “bully” ABC and CBS into kissing the president’s ass (I’ll use the term bully loosely since both companies seemed very eager to roll over for the far right wing). Last October, Trump sued CBS claiming (falsely) […]
Karl Bode

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

2 days 19 hours ago
This week, all our winning comments came in response to our post about Donald Trump falling for satire from a website called The Dunning-Kruger Times. In first place on the insightful side, it’s That One Guy with a comment about how this is hardly surprising: He fell for it because he WANTS to believe it(and […]
Leigh Beadon

This Week In Techdirt History: November 9th – 15th

3 days 19 hours ago
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we looked at election polls as an example of the challenges involved in defining and handling misinformation. We noted how Trumpland seemed to have entirely forgotten about its own manufactured TikTok hysteria, at which point the Commerce Department suddenly remembered it was supposed to ban the app. Following […]
Leigh Beadon

Nut Huggers Apparel Plans To Battle Back Against Bullshit Buc-ee’s Bullying

4 days 12 hours ago
We’ve written about Buc-ee’s a couple of times recently, given the famed convenience store chain of the south’s aspirations to become the Monster Energy of convenience stores when it comes to nonsense trademark bullying. Buc-ee’s has gone after all kinds of other companies, almost always for the crime of having a cartoon animal in their […]
Timothy Geigner