A few weeks ago, I highlighted how EU chief Digital Services Act enforcer, Thierry Breton, was making a mess of things sending broadly threatening letters (which have since been followed up with opening official investigations) to all the big social media platforms. His initial letter highlighted the DSA’s requirements regarding takedowns of illegal content, but […]
A burglary case that included evidence found at the scene (broken glass, a canister of pepper spray) and an apparent eyewitness has fallen apart because the government decided going right to Google meant it could ignore Supreme Court precedent and the Constitution. That’s the story here. Angelique Grace was indicted on burglary charges. Ultimately, a […]
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Back in March of this year, Elon Musk effectively admitted that he had set fire to more than half of Twitter’s value in telling employees that they’d be getting stock grants with the company valued around $20 billion. That’s a pretty steep discount from the $44 billion he paid for the company. Now, some would […]
When Google Fiber launched back in 2010, it was heralded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive U.S. telecom sector. Initially, things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to […]
The LAPD’s handling of gang violence hasn’t gone well. For years, gang task forces roamed the city, violating rights repeatedly. Adding insult to these injuries, the city spent millions funding a predictive policing program that did little more than encourage biased policing. Then there’s the LAPD’s gang database, a horrendous mess filled with people designated […]
Welcome to the modern world, where the thing you bought that worked a particular way at the time you purchased it isn’t actually fully owned you, which means the thing you bought could work totally differently tomorrow! This dystopia for consumers was perhaps most famously demonstrated to exist when Sony famously removed the ability to […]
The good news is Americans are concerned about data privacy. Some Americans always have been but it looks like more people are concerned than usual, which could be a good thing. I’m not sure it will be. As is often the case here in America, our views on privacy — especially when combined with our […]
We all remember the infamous case from earlier this year, in which lawyer Steven Schwartz had to admit that he had used ChatGPT to help construct a brief (which was then signed by another lawyer, a partner at his firm), and that neither lawyer bothered to check whether or not the citations were made up […]
Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident journalist often critical of the Saudi government, was murdered by Saudi government agents while inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey. He wasn’t just murdered. His body was dismembered. All of this was captured by hidden recording devices placed by the Turkish government in the Saudi consulate. The Saudi government is […]
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There are now a bunch of these lawsuits accusing AI companies of some sort of copyright infringement for training their models on works of plaintiffs. However, the first high profile one was the case brought by Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz against Stability AI, MidJourney, and (bizarrely) DeviantArt. We covered the case back […]
The Trump era was very, very good to the country’s giant telecom monopolies. Trump officials doled out billions in tax breaks (AT&T nabbed $42 billion alone) and billions more in poorly tracked subsidies. It also approved anticompetitive mergers without even reading the details, and handed out all manner of regulator favors like the dismantling of […]
It’s over. It’s finally over. The battle to end the trademark registrations for “Taco Tuesday” began years and years ago, mostly after Taco John’s wielded the trademark haphazardly to occasionally threaten other taco joints with legal action. Less spotlighted was Gregory’s Bar & Restaurant, which held the trademark for the phrase in the one state […]
The list of things law enforcement officers consider reasonably suspicious could fill a decent-sized book. Pretty much anything anyone does or says when being accosted by an officer is usually deemed to be indicative of illegal activity. It’s not just cops. It’s the courts, too. A list of things considered to be “reasonably suspicious” enough […]
As you hopefully know, we recently launched (and then released a podcast about) our new game, Trust & Safety Tycoon, which we created in association with the Atlantic Council’s Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web. This week, we’ve got two people from the Atlantic Council joining us on the podcast: Democracy & Tech Initiative Director […]
When Twitter first launched what it called “Birdwatch,” I was hopeful that it would turn into a useful alternative approach to helping with trust & safety/content moderation questions, but I noted that there were many open questions, in particular with how it would deal with malicious actors seeking to game the system. When Elon took […]
For months, it has seemed as though retailers are under siege, raided on a daily basis by organized groups of thugs who walk off with hundreds, if not thousands of dollars of merchandise. This has been amplified by all forms of media. Clips from security cameras circulate social media with viral spread outpacing reality. This […]
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We’ve spent plenty of time over the last year or so on Missouri and Louisiana’s lawsuit against the Biden administration for apparently suggesting how sites like Meta should moderate content on their platforms. That case has had its twists and turns and is now going before the Supreme Court. I’m sure we’ll have plenty more […]
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