Sometimes it feels like every story we see these days about kids and the internet is all about how it’s evil, making them depressed, and a huge problem for society. We keep trying to remind people that the actual science on this finds no support of the internet being so horrible. Indeed, the research suggests […]
Call a right “enshrined” all you want, but if a judge decides it’s better to protect law enforcement officers from their own actions than to allow the public to view killings performed in the name of “public safety,” the public gets nothing. Neither do the people serving the public and providing them with information, like […]
The Cybersecurity Projects Bundle offers a hands-on program featuring five real-world cybersecurity projects, totaling 35 tasks. Participants start with an introductory video for each project, detailing objectives and requirements, followed by task completion that mirrors real cybersecurity challenges. Support from industry professionals ensures personalized feedback and guidance. Upon completing the program, participants gain practical experience, […]
You may have seen the news yesterday about 14 attorneys general filing lawsuits against TikTok. It was covered in a bunch of places, including Reuters, CNBC, the NY Times, the Washington Post, NPR, CNN and more. And, bizarrely, none of them seemed to include links to any actual complaint. It took me a little while […]
U.S. wireless giant T-Mobile gets hacked a lot. In fact, the company has been hacked eight times in the last five years, with several of the intrusions exposing the sensitive personal data of millions of T-Mobile customers. The last hack, revealed in a 2023 SEC filing, exposed the names, addresses, social security numbers, and other […]
So by now, assuming you’ve spent any decent amount of time reading Techdirt, you likely know that Nintendo has a reputation for being aggressive and litigious when it comes to intellectual property enforcement. Someone makes a game that is inspired by Pokémon, but does not directly copy it? Lawsuit. Mods for that same game make […]
Trumpist Republican outrage (most of it manufactured) over being spied on by the US government almost led to significant reforms to Section 702 surveillance powers, specifically the loophole the FBI abuses to search for Americans’ communications in the NSA’s foreign-facing haystack. But that all got scuttled during the infighting and increasing desperation to just give […]
Though the current popular narrative about social media seems to be that it is harmful and has little or no redeeming value, the truth (which a lot of people know) is that it also has a lot of value, and the potential to be even better. A recent research report from New_Public finds some ideas […]
Creating surveillance backdoors for law enforcement is just asking for trouble. They inevitably become targets for hackers and foreign adversaries. Case in point: the US just discovered its wiretapping system has been compromised for who knows how long. This should end the encryption backdoor debate once and for all. The law enforcement world has been […]
The EU Commission is the definition of insanity. It has tried for years to convince all EU members the best way to fight crime is to undermine the security and privacy of millions of EU residents. And, for years, it has failed to make an argument capable of convincing a majority of the 27 European […]
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How quickly do you think we’d be having Congressional hearings about “election interference” if Mark Zuckerberg so much as posted a “Harris/Walz” lawn sign in front of his house? Yet, Elon Musk is now directly tweaking the site he owns to push his favored political candidate, even seizing people’s accounts to promote Trump. One of […]
Though Republicans are the worse of the two offenders, neither Democrats nor Republicans have cared all too much about preventing media consolidation. As a result, U.S. journalism and media has increasingly fallen into the hands of a handful of wealthy corporations and billionaires; and it’s routinely reflected in terrible journalism (especially political journalism) and bumbling […]
It’s not just the Rankin County (MS) Sheriff’s Office being scrutinized by the US DOJ. While that’s the main concern following the conviction of six deputies of a self-proclaimed “Goon Squad” who spent hours brutalizing and torturing two black men, the rest of Mississippi apparently isn’t in great shape either. This recently-released report [PDF] details […]
In the process of enshittification, it seems that the process will not stop until the customer has been well and truly pissed off. It was merely earlier this year that we discussed Amazon taking its Prime Video offering, after gobbling up a huge number of adopters, and suddenly introducing everyone’s favorite thing about television: advertisements! […]
You know how little kids sometimes play a game where they claim they’ve changed their name, and you can no longer blame them for what they did under their previous name? You know how that never actually works? Well, about that… Elon seems to be trying a corporate version of that trick in Australia, and […]
Cheap thrills? Perhaps not so much. A report from Joseph Cox for 404 Media not only points out there’s no such thing as a free meal AI-generated deepfake nude, but that this is exactly the sort of thing Vice Media would have been all over if it hadn’t been burnt to the ground by string […]
You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let’s focus on the app. Right off the bat, let’s be clear about one thing: When we say “app” we don’t mean that you’re limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across […]
Hillary Clinton has no clue how Section 230 works. She seems to think that repealing it will make websites more likely to remove misinformation (which is backwards). But what law do we need repealed to stop Clinton from spreading misinformation about Section 230 (and social media)? In April, we wrote about some comments from Hillary […]
Lina Khan has most certainly faced some growing pains as the head of the FTC, occasionally filing some undercooked cases and raising the hackles of some staff (some grumbling about real missteps, some simply grumbling about reform). At the same time, she’s the closest the U.S. has gotten to a competent antitrust enforcer any time […]
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