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Over the last decade, increasing numbers of automated license plate readers (ALPR) have been installed on roads, bringing with them a variety of privacy problems, as Techdirt has reported. It’s easy to see why ALPR is popular with the authorities: license plate readers seem a simple way to monitor driving behavior and to catch people […]

Law enforcement investigators and prosecutors have overwhelmingly embraced plenty of pseudoscience over the years, treating everything from bite marks to hair samples as conclusive evidence capable of singling out guilty parties. Most claims were specious, backed only by “expert” statements from law enforcement crime lab employees solely interested in confirming prevailing law enforcement theories. And […]

The Utah state legislature recently adopted a new bill that now requires the pre-installed pornography filters found on mobile devices to be turned on at the point of sale. If a device sold doesn’t have these filters enabled, liability for device manufacturers and retailers is quite severe. I wrote about this bill earlier this month […]

Every year, the President lays out the administration’s major agenda in the State of the Union address. For those of us who cover tech policy, there’s always some fear that something dumb will be said. In the last couple of years, Biden pushed nonsense moral panics about the evils of the internet. So, in some […]

The NYPD has a problem with encryption, as do some of its preferred prosecutors. Back in 2010, Deputy Commissioner for Counterterrorism and Intelligence told NBC news reporters that the city was filled with terrorists willing to leverage everything from “rocks, bottles, and accelerants” to wage war on New York — something aided by these speculative […]

Dive into Godot – a rising star in the game engine world. You’ll learn to create platformers, RPGs, strategy games, FPS games, and more as you master this free and open-source engine with easily expandable systems. Plus, you’ll also explore techniques for game design and game asset creation – giving you the ultimate techniques to […]

Can the 5th Circuit ever do anything not crazy? You may recall that Texas, like so many states, passed a law, HB 1181, that required age verification for adult content sites. This law also required nonsense “health warnings” to be plastered on those sites, which did not come from any actual health experts. The Free […]

While it seemed like our national policy hysteria over TikTok had waned slightly in 2024, it bubbled up once again last week upon rumors that the White House is supporting a “welcome and important” new bill that would effectively ban TikTok from operating in the United States. The bipartisan bill (full text) — which moved […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side Toom1275 with a comment about Missouri’s new speech police: Teaching kids the reality that trans people exist and are normal is no more grooming them than teaching kids that frogs exist is grooming them to become amphibians. In second place, we’ve got a double-winning comment […]

It’s time for the second entry in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of the sixth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928! We’ve already featrued Best Visuals winner Flight from Podunk Station, and today we’re taking a closer look at the winner of Best Adaptation: Mickey Party by Benjamin […]

Remember Wordle? I sure do and one of the ways I start my days at work is to pull up the site and give it a quick play. But I honestly may just need to stop, given the behavior of the current owners of the game. For this discussion, you really do need to recall […]

Just imagine how petty and vindictive you have to be to change someone with murder just because they weren’t arrested easily. Imagine how self-centered you have to be to present someone as an assailant just because they were unable to comprehend your instructions. Imagine just how inhumane you have to be to present a false […]

Last fall, we wrote about Yelp going to court in California to try to block Texas’s indicted and facing trial shortly Attorney General Ken Paxton from suing the company for using its speech to accurately warn users that “Crisis Pregnancy Centers” do not generally offer any actual medical care. As you may know, anti-abortion advocates […]

Say what you will about the general politeness of Canadians and the genteel nature of their secondhand Britishness, but never forget their cops can be just as petty and vindictive as our cops. Law enforcement entities everywhere have a massive sense of entitlement. Officers and officials tend to think that people should comply with whatever […]

This DevDojo Pro subscription gives you access to a set of tools to help you build your next great idea. Start with the Page Creator, where you’ll find Tailwind CSS Page Builder, a tool for crafting beautiful landing pages. Then, move on to Wave SAAS Starter Kit, where you’ll learn how to build your Software […]

Flooding Congress with phone calls can work wonders to stop bad bills at times. The SOPA blackout 12 years ago was one of the most effective advocacy campaigns in history. Coincidentally, I was at the Capitol that day, and wandering the halls between meetings, hearing phones ringing non-stop was amazing. However, that process was carefully […]

Aging satellite TV provider Dish Network is supposed to be undergoing a major transformation from tired old satellite TV provider to streaming and wireless juggernaut. It was a cornerstone of a Trump administration FCC and DOJ plan to cobble together a new wireless carrier out of twine and vibes as a counter-balance to the competition-eroding […]

It’s a point we have to make far more often than we should: trademark law is not designed to allow anyone or any company to simply lock up common language as their own. There are lots of ways the confusion around that expresses itself, but one of the most common concerns generic terms for goods […]

Axon, most famous for producing Tasers, is again making the sort of headlines it really shouldn’t make. Everyone knows Taser. The company produces the most-used “less lethal” weapons cops deploy. “Less” is the key word here. It’s basically a cattle prod for humans but one that’s routinely deployed with less care than a cattle prod, […]

Senator Ron Wyden is a one-man defense for preventing horrible bills from moving forward in the Senate. Last month, he stopped Josh Hawley from moving a very problematic STOP CSAM bill from moving forward, and now he’s had to do it again. A (bipartisan) group of senators traipsed to the Senate floor Wednesday evening. They […]