The estate of Dr. Seuss is obviously no stranger to playing the intellectual property maximalist, having appeared on our pages many times in the past. But more specifically for this post, the estate has also, ironically enough, been more than happy to stomp on the Christmas joy of others in favor of jealously guarding its […]
Over a decade ago, I pointed out that as Google kept trying to worm its way deeper into our lives, a key Achilles’ heel was its basically non-existent customer service and unwillingness to ever engage constructively with users the company fucks over. At the time, I dubbed it Google’s “big, faceless, white monolith” problem, because […]
On August 11, the Marion County PD — with the assistance of the Kansas Department of Revenue, the county sheriff’s office, and (for some fucking reason) the local fire marshal — raided the office of the Marion County Record, along with the home of its co-owner, 98-year-old Joan Meyer. The raid was prompted by the […]
Last week, we wrote about the potential for Senator Josh Hawley to “hotline” the bill that he put together with Senator Richard Blumenthal to remove Section 230 from anything touching artificial intelligence. As we noted at the time, even if you hate both generative AI technology and Section 230, the bill was so poorly drafted […]
Turn any text or script into a lifelike natural human voice in easy 3 steps using Textalky, a powerful AI text-to-speech synthesizer. No robotic voices. TexTalky uses the latest cloud-based AI technology powered by Google, IBM, Microsoft, and Amazon. It covers more than 140 international languages and dialects, and over 900 kinds of lifelike human […]
Oh Elon. As we’ve discussed, Elon is infatuated with Community Notes as a sort of crowdsourced alternative to actually funding a trust & safety staff and tooling. And while we actually like Community Notes and think more social media should use similar tools, it’s simply not a full trust & safety replacement. But, over the […]
We’ve long noted how the FCC (regardless of party) largely ignores how muted competition and monopolization drives up prices for consumers. The agency often talks a good (if ambiguous) game about “bridging the digital divide,” but they don’t collect and share pricing data proving market failure, nor are they capable of admitting monopolies exist and […]
The NYPD’s refusal to engage in nearly any form of accountability means it’s up to the city’s residents to pay billions for police work that adds tens of millions to the tab with lawsuit settlements. In 2022, the NYPD cost residents $121 million in settlements. This came on top of the NYPD’s budget, which cleared […]
One of my favorite ways that lame trademark fights end is when the victim of the bullying makes slight changes to their branding such that it pokes the bully in the eye while still getting the victim out of legal harm’s way. When you couple that with the beer industry, all the more so. After […]
As is the case any time surveillance powers are up for renewal, there’s always a chance to reform them. Most of these efforts tend to get derailed by a majority of legislators who just want to push things through before any lively discussion takes place. Every so often, legislation is passed that modifies authorized powers […]
We’ve already talked a bit about Elon Musk’s obvious censorial bullshit lawsuit against Media Matters. It’s quite obvious from the lawsuit that his intent is to intimidate critics and suppress speech about hateful content on ExTwitter. So far, it’s not working, as that lawsuit seems to have inspired more people to find more ads next […]
If nothing else, Senator Ron Wyden is keeping us on top of the surveillance curve. The privacy-focused senator has asked more uncomfortable questions of more federal agencies than anyone since the Church Committee. Sometimes it’s new stuff. Sometimes it’s stuff that’s been around for years, but no one bothered to question it until Wyden. Sometimes […]
Apple has spent the past few years pushing the marketing message that it, alone among the big tech companies, is dedicated to your privacy. This has always been something of an exaggeration, but certainly less of Apple’s business is based around making use of your data, and the company has built in some useful encryption […]
It wasn’t that long ago that cable TV execs were trying to claim that “cord cutting” was either outright fiction, or a fad that would end once Millennials started procreating. The willful denial among cable execs was downright palpable for the better part of the last decade. Now they all just pretend like they never […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad, expanding on the fact that Iowa’s book ban demonstrates hatred of LGBTQ people: Or women. Denying information on the HPV vaccine is more inline with the notion that women who are sexually active deserve to get STDs. In second place, it’s Toom1275 responding […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, we looked at the utter failure of FOSTA as more lives were put at risk, while we learned more about why Facebook changed its priorities to support the bill, and then one of the most high-profile impacts happened with Tumblr banning sexual content (and then Facebook unveiled new […]
Uh, well, okay then. I really thought we were done with the whole Microsoft buying Activision Blizzard saga. Hell, I even wrote what I thought was a final post on the matter, called the post a curtain call, and discussed how the deal had passed all the regulatory barriers and had been consumated. That happened […]
Here we go again, everyone. Another far-right state lawmaker has introduced a bill requiring age verification in order to access porn sites from within state limits. This time it is Tennessee state Rep. Patsy Hazlewood who introduced yet another extreme age verification proposal that essentially makes it a crime to own a legally operating porn […]
A little over a month ago we told the Copyright Office in a comment that there was no role for copyright law to play when it comes to training AI systems. In fact, on the whole there’s little for copyright law to do to address the externalities of AI at all. No matter how one […]
For many, many years we’ve been calling on companies to enable end-to-end encryption by default on any messaging/communications tools. It’s important to recognize that doing so correctly is difficult, but not impossible (similarly, it’s important to recognize that doing so poorly is dangerous, as it will lead people to believe their communications are secure when […]
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