For decades, frustrated towns and cities all over the country have responded to telecom market failure by building their own fiber broadband networks. Data routinely shows that not only do these networks provide faster, better, and cheaper service, the networks are generally more accountable to the public — because they’re directly owned and staffed by locals […]
Earlier this week I posted two examples of people falsely being told that a post or a search was deemed connected to child sexual abuse material. Earlier this week, I thought I had spotted another example, when someone on Bluesky alerted me that they had searched for “techdirt” and the results included a line saying […]
This would be the second time in recent months that a cop tech purveyor with a heavily checkered past has shelled out big bucks to expand the reach of its own tech, as well as expand the reach of existing police surveillance capabilities. Last October, ShotSpotter — the company whose shoddy shot spotting has been […]
Go from absolute zero to GIMP pro with this comprehensive 9 course bundle. Jump into the Complete Master GIMP Design Bundle, and you’ll go all the way from installing the GIMP software and configuring it to run on Windows, to producing banners, book covers and even memes that you’ll display using Facebook and other social […]
Over the last few days there have been a few stories making the rounds on right wing media sites, claiming that Rep. Jim Jordan had exposed the White House pressuring Amazon to remove books related to COVID disinformation. This is based on a thread Jordan posted to ExTwitter. If it’s true that the White House […]
So we’ve noted more than once that as the streaming sector is saturated and new user growth slows, streaming giants will follow on a fairly predictable path that got their predecessors (cable TV companies) in trouble. Namely, shifting away from innovation and disruption and consumer welfare, and toward nickel-and-diming customers in a bid to give […]
It’s not often when three of your biggest interests all intersect at once, but here we are. Readers here will know that I am a regular when it comes to writing about trademark disputes, bullying, and news. You may also know that I have quite the affinity for wine. You probably don’t know, however, that […]
In late 2022, the state of New York finally passed new right to repair legislation after years of activist pressure. The bill, which went live last month, gives New York consumers the right to fix their electronic devices themselves or have them more easily repaired by an independent repair shop, instead of being forced to only obtain […]
Every week it’s some other dumb thing going on in the Senate. On Tuesday Senator Josh Hawley went to the (mostly empty) Senate floor to “seek unanimous consent” for the STOP CSAM bill. That’s basically a process to rush the bill forward before it’s ready. We’ve written about STOP CSAM before. Despite it’s name, it […]
The FBI has done some heinous things in its pursuit of its counter-terrorism objectives. While it’s true the FBI has occasionally nabbed actual terrorists, it seems to prefer creating terrorists to going after those that are already avowed terrorists. The FBI utilizes informants and undercover agents to perform this highly questionable work. Investigations border on […]
MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That’s all well and good, but it means nothing if you don’t have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In this course you’ll cover not just data […]
We’ve written a few times now about how the misleadingly named House “Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government” is not actually looking into the “weaponization of the federal government,” but rather is very much about allowing Chairman Jim Jordan to go about weaponizing the powers of the subcommittee himself to threaten and intimidate […]
Back in December I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring the FCC’s long overdue effort to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not only refused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas (despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they’ve charged poor and […]
Well, this is a new one for me. In all the stories we’ve done over the years on concerns over real life violence and violent video games, one point we’ve made over and over again is that people certainly can tell the difference between video games and real life. I, for one, abhor guns in […]
Predictive policing programs were supposed to make police work smarter and more efficient. It was supposed to trim down on hours wasted where a police presence wasn’t needed and increase enforcement in areas where crime was a problem. But it hasn’t done this. It hasn’t made cops smarter. It’s possibly just made them lazier. No […]
A couple weeks ago, we released the 2024 edition of our Sky Is Rising report about the state of the entertainment industries. Last week, Mike and I joined Corbin Barthold on Techfreedom’s Tech Policy Podcast for a discussion about the report and, more broadly, the state of culture in the internet era and the conversations […]
Bluesky is now open to anyone without an invite. And a bunch of other exciting things are coming soon. As many of you know, I’ve been pretty excited about where Bluesky is going as a social media offering, not just because of the people who have been using it (who have mostly been great, making […]
I’m not a religious man, but Jesus Fucking Christ. Yet another insane decision that allows the government to ignore constitutional rights has been handed down by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — the one nationally known as the most cop-friendly circuit in the nation. The long journey to this horrible ending begins in 2018. […]
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Last week, as you likely heard, the Senate had a big hearing on “child safety” where they grandstanded in front of a semi-random collection of tech CEOs, with zero interest in actually learning about the actual challenges of child safety online, or what the companies had done that worked, or where they might need help. […]
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