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I’ve talked before about the utter stupidity (and danger) of trying to turn the internet into Disneyland: a safe space for little kids, where they’ll never encounter any content that makes them upset, but plenty of states (and many people in Congress) are trying to do it anyway. Wisconsin is the latest, and its Senate […]
If you hadn’t noticed, it’s not just good enough for a publicly traded company to provide an excellent, affordable product that people like. Wall Street demands improved quarterly returns at any cost, which, sooner or later, causes any successful company to begin cannibalizing itself to feed the “growth for growth’s sake” gods. Mergers, price hikes, […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is jmcken with a comment about Benji Smith taking down his “Prosecraft” tool, and specifically the frequent assertion that it matters where/how he got the books that formed its dataset: Think of it this way: If someone pirates a movie, that’s unlawful. But if that […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, there were a few interesting studies and reports that deserved attention. One built on previous research showing that you beat piracy with innovation, not enforcement, and was echoed by similar results coming from the UK. On another front, a new report outlined how US telcos abandoned rural American […]
Cops love shooting dogs almost more than they like casually violating constitutional rights. Even the DOJ called cop-on-dog violence an “epidemic.” Cops dress like warriors, plaster their cars with Punisher logos, declare themselves the “thin blue line”… and then act like small woodland creatures the moment they encounter anything slightly unexpected. Guns, tasers, body armor, […]
Microsoft has long been one of several companies that attempted to monopolize repair in a bid for profit, particularly when it has come to the company’s game consoles. But in recent years the company appears to have realized that with state and federal lawmakers and regulators cracking down on this behavior, it might be smart […]
This is and will keep happening. As complicated a landscape as copyright law is, the idea of automating the policing of copyright infringement without creating all kinds of collateral damage is simply absurd. Our pages are absolutely brimming with example after example of all kinds of entities issuing copyright claims and strikes on all kinds […]
Three years ago we had the CEO of Jungle Scout, Greg Mercer, on our podcast, to debunk the claim that Amazon was unfairly competing with third party sellers in the Amazon marketplace. It’s become somewhat accepted wisdom that Amazon is engaged in some sort of predatory behavior, looking at what products sell well with data […]
It’s a fact: You can violate a government employee’s rights while being a government employee. Sure, it’s more tricky than violating rights as a government employee (when targeting non-government employees), but it can still be done. Constitutional protections are a bit more limited for government employees, but they don’t cease to exist. Every American has […]
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Here on Techdirt we’ve chronicled the rise of a bunch of terrible age verification laws, including many focused specifically on adult content. We’ve also highlighted how MindGeek, the company behind a bunch of largest adult content sites, including Pornhub, have started geoblocking entire states in response to these problematic laws, while the Free Speech Coalition […]
We’ve documented in detail how the series of mergers (AT&T—>Time Warner—>Discovery) that created the Warner Brothers Discovery entertainment empire may just be one of the most destructive, pointless, and incompetently managed “business” transactions in modern media history. Since its beginning in 2016, the absurd saga has generated hundreds of billions in debt, saw more than 50,000 […]
There’s a massive gap between how the policed view “reasonable” policing and the view held by those who do the policing. While most of us would prefer more accountability, transparency, and de-escalation, those who claim to “serve and protect” seem to prefer the polar opposite. We get opacity, violence, and insular behavior any time we […]
Massachusetts is now poised to make calls for prison inmates and their families free. The decision comes after decades where the government’s coddling of prison telecom monopolies resulted in inmate families being charged an arm and a leg simply to chat briefly with their incarcerated loved ones. According to Bolts, the reforms are part of […]
Professor Andrew Przybylski from the Oxford Internet Institute is one of the best, most important researchers out there providing thorough, comprehensive, empirical evidence that every tech moral panic is not supported by the data. We’ve covered his work before, including the complete lack of evidence that social media makes kids unhappy, how there’s actually some […]
Facial recognition tech is faulty. It’s an unavoidable fact, especially when it comes to women and minorities. No matter how good the tech, the potential for false positives and negatives remains. And pre-existing biases are amplified by things the tech simply can’t do well: reliably identify people who aren’t white and male. Detroit law enforcement […]
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So, you might have heard the news about how Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a warrant for Donald Trump’s Twitter account data, that Twitter resisted, and was fined $350,000 before handing over the data, and (finally) that Twitter lost an appeal about all of this, leading to most of the details being unsealed by the […]
Pretty much every time Verizon wanders outside of its core competencies (operating telecom networks, lobbying to hamstring competition, undermining the most basic of regulatory oversight), the telco amusingly falls flat on its face. It’s quite honestly starting to get a little weird. Whether it’s the company’s Go90 video streaming platform, its video joint venture with RedBox, its news website Sugarstring (which […]
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