We’ve noted a few times how the political push to ban TikTok is a dumb performance largely designed to distract people from our failure to pass even a basic internet privacy law or regulate data brokers. We’ve also noted how college bans of TikTok are a dumb extension of that dumb performance, and don’t accomplish anything of meaningful […]
The old saying goes: there’s only two things that are permanent, death and taxes. For quite a while now, we could have added a third item to the list: Intuit annoying us to death with its bullshit advertisement about filing for taxes for “free.” You really should go back and read our posts on this […]
There have been a whole bunch of antitrust lawsuits filed against Google over the last few years (in fact, one just settled last week though we don’t yet know the details, though when that case was first filed, we noted some problems with it). The very first, though, seemed like the weakest. As you may […]
Earlier this year, we had an episode looking at Canada’s proposed social media link tax and the many ways it would be terrible. Since then, that link tax has become law (though not yet come into effect), and unsurprisingly proven that the dire predictions were correct. Also since then, the Cato Institute’s Paul Matzko published […]
We’ve talked about this case – American Society for Testing and Materials et al v. PublicResource.org – a few times before. It was one of two cases brought against Carl Malamud’s Public Resource organization for posting the Code of Federal Regulations on its website, and including with the CFR language the standards promulgated by various […]
If you read this morning’s story about Elon Musk’s impulsive decision to move servers out of Sacramento and up to Portland in a dangerous and wholly unsecure manner, and wondered if the FTC (who has two consent decrees with the company regarding how it protects users’ private data) was aware of it, we already have […]
As the name suggests, classification algorithms are what allow computers to well… classify new observations, like how your inbox decides which incoming emails are spam or how Siri recognizes your voice. The Essential MATLAB & Simulink Training Course will show you how to implement classification algorithms using MATLAB, one of the most powerful tools inside […]
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 […]
Want to level up your game development skill? This series of highly-rated Unreal Engine courses, created in collaboration with Epic Games, can help! Anyone who wants to learn to create games: Unreal Engine is a fantastic platform that enables you to make AAA-quality games. You’ll get full lifetime access for a single one-off fee. The […]
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 […]
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