As you may have heard, yesterday Meta finally launched Threads, its Twitter-like microblogging service, built on ActivityPub, but using Instagram account credentials for login. The reaction from across the internet has been fascinating. I’ve seen everything from people insisting that this will clearly finally be the one single “Twitter killer” everyone’s been waiting for, to […]
Last week’s 6-3 decision in the 303 Creative v. Elenis case, with all the conservative justices vindicating a website designer’s ability to refuse to build a website celebrating gay marriage, may seem at first glance to be a blow to gay rights. And maybe that’s what some or all of the six justices in the […]
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One has to think that Donald Trump judicial appointee Judge Terry Doughty deliberately waited until July 4th (when the courts are closed) to release his ruling on the requested preliminary injunction preventing the federal government from communicating with social media companies. The results of the ruling are not a huge surprise, given Doughty’s now recognized […]
We’ve documented extensively how the AT&T—>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers Discovery mergers have been a gargantuan pointless mess, resulting in tens of thousands of layoffs, widespread animosity across Hollywood, the death or decay of numerous popular brands (from Mad Magazine to HBO), weird holes in streaming catalogs, and just a shittier, dumber product overall. While the first […]
Does this look like someone carrying a gun? That’s from a recent federal court decision [PDF], granting defendant Luis Cerda’s motion to suppress. NYPD sergeant Christopher Colon saw something else. He saw a gun. He needed to see a gun. He was so desperate to bust someone else entirely (Alberto Santiago, a.k.a. “Dot Com”) that […]
One of the most pernicious ideas that copyright maximalism has spread is that preventing people from freely accessing creative material is not just a good thing to do, but should be the natural state of affairs. This has made questioning whether copyright is really the best way to support artists and promote creativity hard. Against […]
We, as a nation, spend hundreds of billions every year to ensure law enforcement agencies are staffed well enough to provide, at best, semi-competent service. We spend billions every year on lawsuit settlements generated by officers who can’t even manage to provide semi-competent service without violating constitutional rights. You get what you pay for, they […]
Way back in 2005 I wrote about the launch of Amazon Prime, talking about the trade offs of joining this “shipping club” as I called it then. If you look at that post now, it has nearly 600 comments. However, the first comment didn’t even get added until over a year after I posted the […]
Cyber security. It’s complicated. Protecting against threats means determining what your threat level is. Demanding everyone utilize a 53-character password with uppercase letters, numbers, and “special symbols” generally just makes people more irritated, rather than more secure. Obviously, things must be secured. And passwords shouldn’t be so simple that anyone with an off-the-shelf HP desktop […]
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Our most popular post last year was my post attempting to help Elon Musk “speedrun” the content moderation learning curve. People still talk to me about that post to this day. What’s been somewhat surprising to me, however, is that while nearly every other social media site eventually figures out the basics of the content […]
One of the benefits of the shift to streaming music and video was supposed to be (and often is), convenience. As in, you’d have access to any show you’d like, at any time, without having to go hunting and pecking through old VHS archives. And while streaming delivered on many of its original promises, as […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone passing on an update on the Reddit protests: Also worth noting: The official subreddit for Minecraft got a little less official earlier this week: “As you have no doubt heard by now, Reddit management introduced changes recently that have led to […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, a court shut down attempts by ISPs to use the net neutrality repeal to dodge lawsuits for bad service, while California was trying to keep its push for its own net neutrality law alive (at the same time as lobbyists were descending on the state to shape a […]
The ignorance of cops is almost always their saving grace. If they can’t “reasonably” know the intricacies of the laws they uphold or the rights they’re supposed to respect, they’re too stupid to be punished for their wrongdoing. That’s how qualified immunity works. And that’s why it behooves police departments to keep officers in the […]
I continue to be fascinated in watching how the various decentralized protocol-based social media systems are evolving — in particular how they’re dealing with the challenges of content moderation. There was an interesting discussion a recently on nostr over whether or not moderation should be best handled by relays or clients*. ActivityPub has, of course, […]
Mandatory age verification rules are entering force in Mississippi and Virginia. Mississippi has a population of barely 3 million people. Virginia has a population of over 8.6 million people. Like Utah (population over 3 million) back in May, one of the world’s most popular adult tube websites chose to block IP addresses from both of […]
Lots of states are pitching, passing, or enacting bills effectively banning drag shows. Piggybacking on existing regulations governing adult entertainment, hateful people are seeking to punish people who don’t happily abide by the “there are two genders” social construct. Fortunately, these people are losing. A federal court recently dumped Utah’s attempt to punish drag performers […]
This isn’t a huge surprise, as they’d already suggested they would do this, but Google has announced officially that it will block news links in Canada to avoid having to pay to send traffic to Canadian news sources. We have now informed the Government that when the law takes effect, we unfortunately will have to […]
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