Back on Christmas Eve of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees were quoted about how much work it would be to do that cleanly, noting that there’s a ton of stuff hardcoded in […]
We’ve noted several times now how automakers have started taking basic car functions and trying to make them subscription services in a bid to please Wall Street. Mercedes, for example, has started hiding better engine performance behind subscription paywalls. BMW last year decided it was going to make heated seats an $18 per month subscription […]
Techdirt has been writing about “evergreening” for many years. It refers to the practice by pharmaceutical companies of making small changes to a drug, often about to come off patent, in order to gain a new patent that extends its manufacturer’s monopoly control over it. The New York Times has a story about the Big […]
“Probable cause on four legs.” That’s the nickname for drug dogs, which give cops permission to perform searches just by performing a neat little trick cops call an “alert.” What constitutes an “alert” is pretty much up to the dog’s handler, who can claim any movement is the drug dog detecting contraband or (deliberately or […]
A few years back we had an article about the “The Green Smoothie Girl” aka Robyn Openshaw, who went on this weird SLAPPy binge of threatening people who left negative reviews of her brand of woo woo nonsense. Apparently since that time, Openshaw went down the unsurprising path of being a COVID anti-vaxxer (natch) and […]
The ends aren’t always supposed to justify the means. And a federal agency that already raised the hackles of defense lawyers around the nation during a CSAM investigation probably shouldn’t be in this much of hurry to start sending out unsolicited software to unknowing recipients. But that’s the way things work now. As a result […]
So, I already wrote a long post walking through the mostly very good 5th Circuit ruling in the Missouri v. Biden case, in which the court threw out most of the district court judge’s injunction against the government communicating with social media companies and academics. The end result is a very good, straightforward ruling on […]
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We’re going to go slow on this one, because there’s a lot of background and details and nuance to get into in Friday’s 5th Circuit appeals court ruling in the Missouri v. Biden case that initially resulted in a batshit crazy 4th of July ruling regarding the US government “jawboning” social media companies. The reporting […]
We’ve already noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill aims to spend a whopping $42 billion on broadband deployments via the Broadband Equity and Deployment program (BEAD). We’ve also noted how big regional monopolies are doing everything in their power to ensure the lion’s share of that money goes to them, and not smaller ISPs or […]
This week, both our top comments on the insightful side are about Elon Musk going to war with the ADL. In first place, it’s Thad with some thoughts about the situation: There are some legitimate criticisms of the ADL, as Mike points out. I tend to agree that they’re too aggressive, and too quick to […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, despite the best efforts of lobbyists, California passed its net neutrality law and sent it to the governor’s desk, while at the federal level, Ajit Pai was busy coddling big telecom and demonizing big tech. The automated DMCA systems of Hollywood studios were targeting IMDb for some reason, […]
Long time Techdirt readers may recall the iterative changes that Japanese copyright laws have undergone over the course of the last several years. While they aren’t the only changes to have occurred, the topline summary was to turn copyright infringement from a predominantly civil law issue into a criminal one, particularly in cases that prosecutors […]
While recent evolutions in “AI” have netted some profoundly interesting advancements in creativity and productivity, its early implementation in journalism has been a sloppy mess thanks to some decidedly human-based problems: namely greed, incompetence, and laziness. If you remember, the cheapskates over at Red Ventures implemented AI over at CNET without telling anybody. The result: […]
Hey, Techdirt haters: hold onto your hats, because I’m going to praise Elon Musk for doing the right thing, even though many of you insist that my complaints about him are motivated by personal dislike. But, as I’ve noted repeatedly, I’m happy to highlight when he does the right thing, such as here where he […]
If asked to name the absolute worst Democratic and Republican Senators when it comes to technology and innovation policy, it would be difficult to come up with any worse than Richard Blumenthal from the Democratic side and Josh Hawley from the GOP side. Both have extremely long histories of having absolutely terrible, free speech destroying, […]
It’s great to see hateful people being shut down by little things like, you know, the Constitution. Would that it happened more frequently. Or, more hopefully, would that the mere existence of the Constitution prevent hateful legislators from passing hateful laws that have zero chance of surviving a constitutional challenge. It’s the land of the […]
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Common Sense Media provides some really useful tools if you’re a parent looking to see if certain content is age appropriate. I’ve used it for years. But… also, for years, the organization has been way out over its skis in supporting all sorts of absolutely horrible laws that would do real damage to the internet, […]
While government leaders spent the last three years hyperventilating about TikTok, less talked about has been the dodgy “internet of things” (IOT) space; a broad assortment of mostly overseas-made techno doodads with paper-grade security and privacy standards that Americans connect to home and business networks with reckless abandon. “Smart” TVs, fridges, and other internet-connected devices […]
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