With the rise of ChatGPT over the past few months, the inevitable moral panics have begun. We’ve seen a bunch of people freaking out about how ChatGPT will be used by students to do their homework, how it will replace certain jobs, and other claims. Most of these are totally overblown. While some cooler heads […]
Last November, The Verge discovered that Anker, the maker of popular USB chargers and the Eufy line of “smart” cameras, had a bit of a security issue. Despite the fact the company advertised its Eufy cameras as having “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, security researcher Paul Moore and a hacker named Wasabi found it was pretty easy to intercept […]
Huh. It had actually felt like quite some time since Elon Musk had last done something so stupid as to send a new bunch of users to Mastodon. But, apparently he can’t go that long without helping to do so. Last night, I had actually started working on a story about how developers were increasingly […]
If you’re a good company, you try to make customers happy and deal honestly with their complaints. If you’re Liberty Bell Moving and Storage, Inc., you threaten unhappy customers with lawsuits and steadily escalating fees for expressing their displeasure with your service. It seems only the worst entities insist on tucking non-disparagement clauses into their […]
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Believe it or not, there are some interesting, if confusing, unsettled copyright law questions regarding interviews. A few times in the past we’ve written about the subjects of interviews claiming copyright over those interviews (or the estate’s of deceased individuals making such claims). There was even a law journal article a few years back exploring […]
For a while there, everybody’s least favorite cable company, Comcast, was weathering the cord cutting revolution fairly well. The company’s losses on the cable TV side could simply be recouped over on its broadband side, where a monopoly protected it from having to actually, you know, try. Things have shifted. Last year, Comcast saw a […]
For sports fans in general, one of the great benefits of social media sites, particularly Twitter, has been the way highlights are shared across those platforms, both by individuals and, more commonly, by the leagues and teams themselves. Both Major League Baseball (MLB) and the National Basketball Association (NBA) have been particularly good at this, […]
What’s being presented by ShotSpotter as good news for people who feel they’ve been wrongly accused, doesn’t actually appear to be all that comforting. ShotSpotter’s mic tech and AI combine forces to report possible gunshots to law enforcement customers. It’s very hit or miss, he said with all possible puns intended. ShotSpotter says it’s nearly […]
At the beginning of the year, we kicked off the latest edition of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! Last night, the jam came to a close, with a few submissions sneaking in right before the deadline and bringing us to a total of 20 entries this year. We’ve only just […]
Here’s a weird one. With the rapid pickup of Mastodon and other ActivityPub-powered federated social media, there has been some movement among those in the media to make better use of the platform themselves. For example, most recently, the German news giant Heise announced it was setting up its own Mastodon server, where it will […]
This is some bad looking precedent here. Everyone is right to be concerned about election disinformation, especially if that disinformation is intended to keep certain people from voting, but historically, it has been public officials facing criminal charges for voter suppression, rather than toxic Twitter trolls. And Douglas Mackey, known as “Ricky Vaughn” on Twitter, […]
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We’ve been writing a bunch lately about DoNotPay, the massively hyped up “AI lawyer” run by Stanford dropout* Joshua Browder. Again, the company has received a ton of publicity regarding its “robot lawyer,” often from some of the publicity stunts that Browder pulls. Again, I think the underlying concept of using technology to help people […]
Frustrated by factual reality, science, and an independent press, the GOP and its wealthy backers have spent the better part of forty years building an alternative reality propaganda machine across AM radio, local broadcasting (with the help of Sinclair Broadcasting), fake “pink slime” local newspapers, cable news (OANN, Newsmax, Fox), and now the Internet. While […]
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you will be familiar with the concept of the anti-“woke” culture war the Republican Party grows and farms for its own purposes. This isn’t to say there aren’t real cultural conflicts we need to work out as a country, but that […]
You might recall that Aereo founder Chaitanya Kanojia’s attempt to disrupt the TV industry ran face-first into an army of broadcaster lawyers and a notably ugly ruling by the Supreme Court. Undaunted, Kanojia returned with a new plan to try and disrupt the broken U.S. broadband industry. But that plan isn’t going so hot either. Kanojia’s new […]
Patent trolls make patents, and argue over them. They don’t have to ever make the thing described in their patents, if it’s even possible to determine what those things are. Instead, they generate legal threats and waste the time and money of companies that do do these things. This month’s Stupid Patent of the Month is a […]
For years now, I’ve talked about the impossibility of doing content moderation well at scale. I know that execs at various tech companies often point to my article on this, and that includes top executives at Meta, who have cited my work on this issue. But it still amazes me when those companies act as […]
Late last year, it was revealed that MSG Entertainment (the owner of several New York entertainment venues, including the titular Madison Square Garden) was using its facial recognition tech to, in essence, blacklist its owner’s enemies. Those targeted included lawyers working for firms currently engaged in litigation against MSG Entertainment. Owner James Dolan, through his […]
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