I keep hearing people pretend that the GOP in general, and Florida GOPers more specifically, and Governor Ron DeSantis most specifically, are fighting for “free speech,” when they continually seem to push blatantly unconstitutional legislation designed to attack free speech and the 1st Amendment in a way that keeps getting Florida shot down in court […]
Facial recognition tech needs more work. It’s not great. Even when it’s good, it’s still pretty bad. While it performs well when identifying people not often considered to be criminal suspects (middle-aged white men), it’s far less accurate when identifying everyone else (minorities, women). Cops don’t often see what the problem is. Their job usually […]
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Well, this will be fun. As you’ll recall, in 2021, Texas signed into law a bill that effectively banned the right of companies to moderate content on social media. That law has been challenged in court, and while a district court tossed it out as unconstitutional (and obviously so), the 5th Circuit reversed in a […]
Early this week reports began to emerge that Dish Network was suffering from a widespread outage that effectively prevented a large chunk of the company’s employees from being able to work for more than four days. Initially, Dish tried to downplay the scope of the problem in press reports, only stating that they’d experienced an […]
This will be a quick one, but we now have a name and confirmation of a detail from a previous post. A couple of weeks back, we discussed how an unreleased game from developer Fntastic, The Day Before, was both having its release date pushed back and dealing with takedowns of a bunch of footage […]
Over the last few months we’ve had a few articles highlighting the pretty serious questions raised regarding how much of DoNotPay’s (“the world’s first robot lawyer”) marketing is pure bullshit and nonsense. It’s not surprising that there might be a bit of puffery from a startup, but DoNotPay’s claims are so outlandish, and its CEO, […]
One of the (many) villains in “Walled Culture” the book (free ebook versions) is the publishing industry, specifically in the context of the transition from analogue books to ebooks. What could have been one of the most important expansions of the power and possibility of the book form became instead its opposite – a diminishment […]
The cost of having a bad cop on the force never ends once the officer is no longer employed. The bleeding continues for years, either as tangible costs related to ongoing civil rights lawsuits or, less tangibly, the aftershocks of their negative effect on their coworkers. Former Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio is still […]
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On Wednesday there was yet another major global outage at Twitter, something that feels like it’s becoming a recurring issue and bringing us back to the days when Twitter regularly crashed and had to put up a “Fail Whale” graphic. In response, Twitter spent a few years hiring some fantastic engineers and building up a […]
Back in January, we noted that T-Mobile had recently revealed it had been hacked eight times over the last five years. But a new report by security expert Brian Krebs suggests it could be far worse than that. According to Krebs, hackers are making a compelling case that they’ve managed to compromise the wireless giant’s […]
What amazing timing! Merely a few weeks back we were discussing the major regulatory hurdles the United States, the EU, and the UK were putting in front of Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68 billion. Agencies from all three governing bodies, while differing on some specifics, generally had the same concerns: lessening the […]
Between Sydney “tried to break up my marriage” and “blew my mind because of her personality,” we have had a lot of journalists anthropomorphizing AI chatbots lately. TIME’s cover story decided to go even further and argued: “If future AIs gain the ability to rapidly improve themselves without human guidance or intervention, they could potentially wipe […]
After all these years, the Supreme Court is finally weighing in on Section 230 in the Gonzalez and Taamneh cases, and the outcome could have a very significant impact. Our organization, the Copia Institute, filed an amicus brief in the case, as did many other parties. This week, we’re joined by Jess Miers from the […]
It’s become the in thing to do everywhere, these days: try to institute age verification for the internet. There’s been an ongoing, unsubstantiated, moral panic that the internet is somehow “dangerous” for children, even as most of the evidence suggests… it’s actually mostly good for kids and the evidence has supported that for years. And, […]
For years, companies have been offering questionable services to downrank and bury information their customers don’t want surfacing during Google searches. And for years, these tactics have routinely involved abuse of copyright law, forged/faked court orders, and the filing of bogus lawsuits in hopes of securing default judgments from inattentive judges. This is more of […]
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Last week I wrote some initial thoughts on the Supreme Court hearing in Gonzalez v. Google. Of course, as lots of people mentioned, it was tied at the hip with another case, Taamneh v. Twitter, as both were granted cert together. The two cases have been connected for a while, as the decisions in the […]
The Biden administration has given all federal agencies 30 days to ensure staffers do not have TikTok on any federal devices. All agency vendors are to adhere to the same rules within 90 days. It’s the latest evolution in a growing planetary moral panic that’s gotten well out ahead of its skis, resulting in often-performative solutions that […]
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