Losing must be the new winning. With a single exception (and that was only a public college), every state (or city) that has passed an anti-drag show law has seen it blocked by a federal court. And yet, this string of losses doesn’t seem to be deterring performative legislators from trying to violate the First […]
While recent evolutions in “AI” have netted some profoundly interesting advancements in creativity and productivity, its early implementation in journalism has been a comically sloppy mess thanks to some decidedly human problems: namely greed, incompetence, and laziness. If you remember, the cheapskates over at Red Ventures implemented AI over at CNET without telling anybody. The […]
Last year, we wrote about the really bizarre case of a website called “Business Casual” that filed a couple of copyright infringement lawsuits. One was against TV-Novosti, the Russian state-owned news organization that runs RT (formerly Russia Today). While there was a brief period of time in which RT pretended that it wanted to be […]
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Law enforcement agencies aren’t used to oversight or accountability. That’s something that has rarely been deemed essential to the act of policing. After all, if the Supreme Court can create “qualified immunity” out of thin air to protect (most) cops from the consequences of their unconstitutional actions, surely podunk locals shouldn’t assume they’re more qualified […]
Today is the official one year anniversary of Elon getting control over what used to be called Twitter, and now is simply exTwitter. It was supposed to be tomorrow, but in a sign of what was to come, Elon and his buddies maneuvered to close the deal in the afternoon a day early, just to […]
Now that growth is saturated in the streaming sector, companies are increasingly behaving like the cable TV giants they once disrupted in a bid to deliver Wall Street improved quarterly returns at any cost. Even if it means annoying consumers and damaging the company’s long-term brand. Netflix now wants to harass you for doing something […]
For nearly a decade now, we’ve discussed Nintendo’s oddly combative relationship with the eSports community, specifically as it revolves around Super Smash Bros. tournaments. Whereas other game publishers have fully embraced these tournaments and the attention they bring to their games, Nintendo does what Nintendo always does instead: exert more and more control, pissing everyone […]
Eager to maintain a lucrative repair monopoly over its products, Apple has had a long history of bullying independent repair shops. Apple lobbyists have also falsely claimed that making its products easier and less expensive to repair would result in vast untold consumer privacy and security nightmares, turning states that consider “right to reform” legislation into lawless […]
Walled Culture recently wrote about an unrealistic French legislative proposal that would require the listing of all the authors of material used for training generative AI systems. Unfortunately, the European Parliament has inserted a similarly impossible idea in its text for the upcoming Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act. The DisCo blog explains that MEPs added new copyright requirements to the Commission’s […]
The EU Commission has been pushing client-side scanning for well over a year. This new intrusion into private communications has been pitched as perhaps the only way to prevent the sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Mandates proposed by the EU government would have forced communication services to engage in client-side scanning of content. […]
The Complete PHP & MySQL Web Development Bundle has 7 courses teach you about web development. PHP and MySQL are two important tools used in web development, allowing you to create interactive content that integrates with databases to manage large amounts of data. Learning both will help you create login pages, check details from a […]
We’ve been covering, at great length, the moral panic around the claims that social media is what’s making kids depressed. The problem with this narrative is that there’s basically no real evidence to support it. As the American Psychological Association found when it reviewed all the literature, despite many, many dozens of studies done on […]
Earlier this year a new journalism outlet named “The Messenger” launched to great fanfare. The brainchild of former The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein, the new news empire launched with $50 million in backing and a lot of chatter about how it was going to do things differently, with Finkelstein claiming he wanted to build “an […]
The Intercept has an interesting article that reveals another reason why some newspaper publishers are not great fans of the site: The New York Times tried to block a web crawler that was affiliated with the famous Internet Archive, a project whose easy-to-use comparisons of article versions has sometimes led to embarrassment for the newspaper. As the […]
Last week in our Error 402 series on the history of web monetization, we talked about the earliest secure monetary transactions on the web, soon after the National Science Foundation opened up the early internet for commercialization. There were electronic transactions over networks that pre-dated this (such as on proprietary online services like CompuServe, but […]
It’s always been easy for cops to take stuff from people. Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement to bypass most of the Constitution so long as they imply things about the supposedly illegal source of the property they’ve taken from citizens. The Fourth Amendment is almost worthless in these cases. Since there are no criminal […]
A few people have been asking me about last week’s release of something called the “Westminster Declaration,” which is a high and mighty sounding “declaration” about freedom of speech, signed by a bunch of journalists, academics, advocates and more. It reminded me a lot of the infamous “Harper’s Letter” from a few years ago that […]
The TSA was imposed on us following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Supposedly necessitated by this “new” terrorist threat, the TSA shrugged into action, becoming another layer of irritating bureaucracy standing between benign travelers and their freedom of movement. Since then, it has gotten worse. The TSA has spent billions on tech, training, […]
I really wish we could fast forward a few decades to the point where we look back on the moral panic over kids and social media and laugh about it, the same way we now laugh about similar moral panics regarding television, Dungeons & Dragons, rock & roll music, comic books, pinball, chess, novels, and […]
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