For decades, the government has used the Third Party Doctrine to obtain massive amounts of phone records without a warrant. Even prior to the creation of the Third Party Doctrine by the Supreme Court in 1979, government agencies were obtaining phone records using pen register requests that provided them with info on numbers called and […]
The rushed integration of half-baked “AI” (aka not at all sentient language learning models) into journalism has been a gargantuan mess. Execs at companies like Red Ventures (CNET) and G/O Media (Gizmodo) have made it very clear they see LLMs primarily as a way to attack labor and cut corners, resulting in soulless and low […]
The problem with putting cops in schools isn’t necessarily that there are never things that happen in schools that require a law enforcement response. (Unfortunately, a lot of those things are school shootings, which cops aren’t all that capable of responding to.) The problem is that school administrators tend to think that because they have […]
Back in 2015, Techdirt wrote about one of China’s many attempts to control the online world, in this case by requiring everyone to use real names when they register for online services. As that post noted, the fact that the Chinese authorities had announced similar initiatives several times since 2003 suggests that implementing the policy […]
The world of generative AI has been changing rapidly, and that’s not something that’s going to stop any time soon. Today, we’re joined on the podcast by Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (no, not Elon Musk’s new bot called Grok) — a company working on a new technology stack that drastically speeds up […]
We keep pointing out just how incredible it is that Elon Musk is personally responsible for the destruction of so much of ExTwitter’s business model. Even if you believe that the company was too bloated, or that it’s business model needed to change, as you look at how the company is flailing, it can be […]
New York City residents will, once again, be asked to foot the bill for NYPD efforts that solely benefit the nation’s largest police department. It’s not enough that they’ve been asked to spend hundreds of millions of dollars every year to bail out officers hit with civil rights lawsuits. It’s not enough that they’ve been […]
The Complete 2024 CompTIA Certification Training Super Bundle by IDUNOVA has 15 courses to help you prepare for various CompTIA certification exams. Courses cover everything from the fundamentals to cloud essentials to cybersecurity. The bundle is on sale for $80. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all […]
A month ago we wrote about Google effectively “pulling up the ladder” on the open internet by embracing age verification mandates as part of a regulatory approach to child safety. As we pointed out at the time, this is bizarre and stupid for a variety of reasons, but also not too surprising. It’s bizarre because […]
For decades, the FCC has maintained an arguably pathetic definition of “broadband,” allowing the telecom industry to under-deliver substandard access. And despite some new rhetoric from the agency under Biden, that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon. Broadband was originally defined as any 200 kbps connection. In 2010, that pathetic definition was changed to […]
I don’t know what it is about US law enforcement culture, but it far too often seems to be that officers deployed to help people choose to hurt people instead. When people are suffering mental distress, cops become first responders. Unlike other first responders, like EMTs or firefighters, the desire to harm tends to surpass […]
With almost zero public notice, the Board of Supervisors of Marin County, California (just to the north of San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge) is on the verge of approving tomorrow a demand by the county sheriff’s department to install license plate cameras throughout the county. As a county resident, I object. My comment […]
We’ve noted how the GOP’s obsession with TikTok is… weird and superficial. Guys like Ted Cruz or Brendan Carr will suffer absolute embolisms about TikTok (and TikTok only) to get on cable news where they’ll be portrayed as good faith privacy reformers. While simultaneously refusing to pass a privacy law or regulate dodgy data brokers […]
Facial recognition tech has slowly gone mainstream over the past half-decade. Not just in acceptance, but also in opposition. Kashmir Hill exposed perhaps the worst purveyor of this tech — Clearview — with a series of articles exposing the company’s tactics as well as its far right backers. Clearview has managed to become a pariah […]
Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative AI-driven tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different from previous Luminar editors. It keeps your favorite LuminarAI tools and expands your arsenal with more state-of-the-art technologies and important changes at […]
We’ve already discussed the extremely censorial nature of ExTwitter’s lawsuit against Media Matters for accurately describing ads from major brands that appeared next to explicitly neoNazi content. The lawsuit outright admits that Media Matters did, in fact, see those ads next to that content. Its main complaint is that Elon is mad that he thinks […]
Two years ago the state of California unveiled a major broadband plan that, among other things, aims to spend $3.5 billion to create a massive, open access “middle mile” fiber network in a bid to boost competition. It’s part of a broader quest to make broadband both more affordable and more competitive (see our Copia report from last year discussing the […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a simple comment about Elon Musk’s extremely terrible lawsuit against Media Matters: Of course, as you know firsthand, a suit doesn’t have to have any merit to make life miserable for its targets. In second place, it’s Mechanical Rhizome with a comment […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the government agreed to delete data copied from a traveler’s phone after being hit with a “motion for return of property” while, in something of an inverse situation, prosecutors charged a suspect with evidence tampering after a seized iPhone was remotely wiped. Cord-cutting was setting more records while […]
Given that the overwhelming majority of DMCA takedown notices are generated by copyright bots that are only moderately good at their job, at best, perhaps it’s not terribly surprising that these bots keep finding new and interesting ways to cause collateral damage unintentionally. From publishers taking down YouTubers because of an oopsie to Viacom DMCAing […]
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