Russia’s fighting a war in Ukraine and a war at home. As residents express their displeasure with their government, the government’s cameras and facial recognition AI are going into overdrive to ensure Putin and his pals control the narrative. Unfortunately, the Russian government is getting some help from the United States, albeit inadvertently. Russia has […]
If there is one aspect of trademark law that should be the most understandable for business leaders and their lawyers, if not for the general public, it’s that you generally cannot get trademarks on purely descriptive terms. Yes, you can name your product Coca-Cola and get a trademark on that term, but you cannot get […]
A leak of alleged customers’ targets — a list that included journalists, human rights activists, religious leaders, government critics, and political figures — turned a trickle of news about Israel-based NSO Group into a steady stream of harrowing revelations. NSO was the best in the spyware business, offering customers a zero-click exploit that almost fully […]
Elon Musk has repeatedly referred to himself as a “free speech absolutist” and promised that on his Twitter even his “worst critics” would be welcome. Of course, as we noted from early on, Elon actually has a horrible track record regarding punishing his own employees for their speech. That includes using ridiculously broad NDAs to […]
Using the uTalk Learning App you can listen to real native speakers to help you navigate through your next vacation or business trip. With more than 2,500 words and phrases to learn in each of our 150+ languages, the app gives you a running start on your journey to language fluency. Simple and easy to […]
There’s something about some government agencies that make them revolt against the notion of checks and balances. Some federal agencies have extra privileges that make it much, much easier. A large number of agencies can issue their own subpoenas, demanding data, recordings, and other information from their targets — self-issued documents that bypass the court […]
While there’s a lot of talk about how getting privacy legislation right is hard (it is), or that doing it wrong could pose many problems (it could), that should never derail attention from the real reason the U.S. has no federal privacy law in 2023: Congress is blisteringly, comically corrupt. And with numerous, deep-pocketed industries […]
Policing copyright infringement is hard. Hard for those operating websites that allow for the public to input content and hard for the rightsholders that far too often use automated systems that suck out loud at determining what is actually infringing and what isn’t. This is a lesson currently being learned by the European Union, as […]
The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. – L.P. Hartley, The Go-Betweens Accurate. And sometimes a foreign country wants to be the past. Somewhere between a faded photo of Benito Mussolini’s inverted corpse and an ill-received performance by the Stormtroopers of Death at the Teatro alla Scala lies this inexplicable decision […]
“Evergreening” 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 first Techdirt post about evergreening appeared almost exactly ten years ago. It concerned the rejection by the Indian […]
DMCA abuse is never going to go away. Plenty of IP protection firms send out unvetted takedown notices in bulk, resulting in the targeting of non-infringers by takedown demands. To maintain their safe harbor protections, entities hosting third-party content tend to side with those sending the notices. For platforms hosting millions or billions of uploads, […]
Curiosity Stream is the award-winning streaming and on-demand viewing destination where you can journey through our world and beyond. Its immersive experiences feature experts like David Attenborough, who will teach you about the natural world, Michio Kaku, and Brian Greene, who will broaden your perspective on space, time, and the future with stunning visuals, and […]
For years I’ve joked that everyone who hasn’t thought about trust & safety thinks that it’s easy: just do what I would do. The assumption is that there’s a “right” set of ways to handle these questions, when the reality is that there’s a very broad set of unclear areas, where there are reasonable arguments […]
We’ve noted for years how, despite a lot of political lip service to “bridging the digital divide,” the U.S. still doesn’t truly know where broadband is or isn’t available. Despite spending $400 billion and counting, the FCC has done an abysmal job accurately mapping broadband speeds and availability, or holding monopolies responsible for false coverage […]
Huntsville, Alabama police officer William Darby was the only officer on the scene who felt a suicidal man needed to be murdered. And he was the last to arrive, uninvited, to a scene apparently under control, handled by two other officers who were doing an admirable job de-escalating the situation. Darby made his decision to […]
Today is April 4th, or 04/04 no matter which direction you use for showing dates (and, look, while it’s ingrained in my head, I think we can all admit that the US version of month/day/year is kinda weird.). But, error code 404 is (somewhat famously) the HTML code for “page not found.” In the early […]
Legacy media operations really, really want tech companies that send them traffic to pay them as well. From Rupert Murdoch’s link tax in Australia to the very bad JCPA in America, these requirements are nonsensical and run directly counter to the core functioning of the internet. Currently, one of the biggest pushes for such a […]
Elon Musk’s Twitter fundamentally misunderstands what made Twitter useful in the first place. In an attempt to wring blood from a stone, Twitter’s announced that all the original “blue checks”—initially created as a way to verify that someone was who they said they were—will disappear on April 1st. Instead, blue checks will once again be […]
Nothing kills cops like fentanyl. I mean, I don’t think it’s actually killed any cops yet, but any cop in the general vicinity of it acts like they’re dying and heads off the ER, surrounded by enablers, cop shop PR staff, and journalists willing to act as stenographers. To be sure, this opioid is killing […]
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