Well, this certainly isn’t an outcome I would have predicted. While the saga of Microsoft’s attempt to acquire Activision Blizzard has certainly taken a long and winding road, as it stands today all the regulatory hurdles have seemingly been cleared save for the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority (CMA). Unlike the FTC’s challenge to the […]
Clearview has suffered tons of self-inflicted damage during its relatively short life as a viable, if execrable, product. Always willing to put its worst foot forward, the company built an AI backbone to support its voluminous webscraping, gathering up everything that wasn’t locked down on the internet and applying its facial recognition algorithm to it. […]
So, yesterday we had the story of how, at Elon’s personal request, exTwitter is moving to get rid of link and snippet text in what had been known as Twitter Cards for news organizations. Musk claims that it’s for “esthetic” reasons, though in our article, we noted the uncanny timing of this decision coming just […]
As a child, nothing warmed me more than my mother’s “Three C’s Soup”: Cabbage, Carrot, Carraway from Jane Brody’s Good Food Book: Living the High Carbohydrate Way (published in 1980 and still in print, no ebook version has yet been licensed). And when my mother died in late fall 2018, there was nothing I wanted […]
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Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut wrote an NY Times op-ed piece a few weeks ago (there’s so much nonsense all the time that it takes a little while to find the time to respond to all of it), claiming that “Algorithms are Making Kids Desperately Unhappy.” He wrote this in support of his “The Protecting […]
Having clearly not learned many lessons from the ongoing and growing repercussions for false claims of election fraud, election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell last week unveiled his new plan (see video) to “monitor” election polling places by using… drones. According to Ars Technica, Lindell claimed he’d developed a first-of-its-kind drone technology to monitor for election fraud: […]
Writing as much as I do about trademark disputes and, more specifically, lawsuits, these are always the most frustrating ways for these disputes to end. I will spend some time examining a dispute, analyzing the merits on both sides, only to find that the suit is settled without any of the pertinent details of the […]
As you’ll surely recall, Elon’s first big brilliant idea upon taking over Twitter was to conflate two separate offerings that Twitter had: Twitter Blue, a premium upsell with extra features (some of which were useful) with Twitter’s blue check verification program, which was created to help more well known users avoid impersonation. The original blue […]
For all of the hype Silicon Valley gets as the birthplace of American technological innovation, the broadband networks in cities like Palo Alto have never kept pace. Like most towns and cities across the U.S., Palo Alto residents have long complained about the slow speeds, high prices, and comically terrible customer service they get from […]
This is just so painfully obnoxious. The legacy news media, spurred on by a welfare system that pretend free market supporter Rupert Murdoch dreamed up and convinced governments to implement, whereby the government would force internet companies, which had innovated and created new business models that worked, to suddenly be required to pay for sending […]
This is a bit of an oddity. We’ve seen lots of lawsuits against social media services filed by bigots who are upset their accounts have been banned or their content removed because, well, they’re loaded with bigotry. You know, “conservative views,” as they say. This one goes the other direction. It claims YouTube’s moderation algorithm […]
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Look, I know some folks get annoyed that I write as much about Elon Musk and exTwitter as I do, but he’s really been the most fascinating case study in sheer wrongness regarding the running of a modern internet company and it’s just endlessly fascinating. And, really, if he just stopped doing stupid things, I […]
We’ve noted a few times that there are two major reasons that the U.S. still hasn’t passed even a basic privacy law for the internet era or regulated data brokers. One, the government is corrupt, and has repeatedly buckled to the lobbying of multiple industries that find the current dysfunction very profitable. Two, the government […]
Well, that was quick. We had just been discussing the encouraging news that Rockstar had scooped up Cfx.re, a community dedicated to roleplaying within GTA and Red Dead Redemption games, as well as several mods made within that community. The only thing that made this newsworthy at all is that Rockstar has had an awful […]
If you’ve never watched it, Kirby Ferguson’s “Everything is a Remix” series (which was recently updated from the original version that came out years ago) is an excellent look at how stupid our copyright laws are, and how they have really warped our view of creativity. As the series makes clear, creativity is all about […]
It’s been clearly acknowledged by a majority of courts (but not the Supreme Court, alas) that filming cops while they perform their duties is protected by the First Amendment. Most legislators know this. But some legislators still yearn to protect cops from accountability. So, they push bills that install “time and place” restrictions in hopes […]
You might have heard late last week or over the weekend, that Elon was getting rid of the “block” feature on exTwitter. Elon had tweeted on Friday claiming “Block is going to be deleted as a “feature”, except for DMs.” But, uh, he had said basically the same thing back in June. I know this […]
Customer service matters. Suing patients unhappy with your work just ain’t it. That’s what Texas cosmetic surgeon Dr. Wilbur Hah has just learned, after being handed a loss in four concurrent opinions dealing with four anti-SLAPP motions filed by unhappy patients the (allegedly not-so-good) doctor sued for daring to besmirch his reputation with social media […]
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