It seems that we’ve had a rash of formerly loved internet services going down the enshittification curve. As coined (brilliantly) by Cory Doctorow, enshittification is the process by which a company gets gradually worse. As he puts it: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for […]
The government of Malaysia isn’t too concerned about free speech. It may be a tourist destination, but it’s still subservient to a ruling class that likely can thank inbreeding for its current place at the top of the heap. Because it’s still ruled by people who’ve never been elected to their positions, those with the […]
The benefits of learning to speak a second language (or third) are immeasurable! With its intuitive, immersive training method, Rosetta Stone will have you reading, writing, and speaking new languages like a natural in no time. You’ll start by matching words with images just like when you learned your native language as a child. Then […]
Reddit’s ongoing war with its volunteer moderators (and users) has moved up a notch. As you’ll recall, last week, the ever tone-deaf CEO Steve Huffman insisted that the protests were just a blip, would be over by last Wednesday, and were having no real impact on the site anyway. That hasn’t gone quite to plan. […]
For the better part of the decade, the generally feckless FCC has been trying to require that broadband ISPs be a little more honest about broadband fees and limits at the point of sale. The FCC has been pondering implementing a “nutrition label for broadband” for years but could never quite get around to it. […]
Seward County is distinguished from Nebraska’s many blink-and-you’ll-miss-it counties by its penchant for seizing cash from motorists. The county’s population checks in at under 18,000 but its overly enthusiastic law enforcement still manages to rake in millions of dollars every year from pretextual traffic stops. The only other thing notable in its Wikipedia article is […]
Our posts on Katy Perry in the past have been all over the place. Sometimes Perry is an intellectual property bully. Sometimes she’s more the victim of intellectual property bullying. But what is not in dispute is the Katy Perry is a cultural icon worldwide with an extremely famous, albeit misspelled, name. In Australia, Katie […]
A year ago, we wrote about an unfortunate decision by a judge rejecting a motion to dismiss in a copyright lawsuit regarding bananas taped to walls. There was, of course, the high profile “banana taped to wall” artwork by Maurizio Cattelan that got tons of public attention at Art Basel in 2019 when it sold […]
Over the past two years, there has been a concerted push by state legislatures to regulate the Internet, the likes of which has not been seen since the late 90s/early aughts. Content moderation, financial relationships between journalists and platforms, social media design and transparency, “national security,” kids being exposed to “bad” Internet speech—you name it, […]
The First Amendment protects speech, even the horrible stuff. It can’t protect the speaker from being criticized for being abhorrent, despite what many abhorrent people believe. It can, however, in certain cases, protect the speaker from being punished for this speech. It’s not blanket coverage. The person engaging in the speech generally has to be […]
Luminar Neo is 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 its […]
Reddit CEO Steve Huffman really seems to underestimate the kinds of people who sign up to be Reddit mods, and their willingness to go to extreme lengths if you start pushing them. We’ve discussed the nonsensical nature of Huffman’s new API efforts, as well as his stupid response to the subreddit blackout which caused many […]
Satellite TV provider Dish Network isn’t having much fun. Despite oodles of direct government assistance during the Trump era, the company’s attempt to pivot from mediocre satellite TV provider to modern streaming TV and 5G wireless giant has been a consistent dumpster fire. Both the company’s dying satellite TV service and its streaming TV platform (SlingTV) have […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is radix with a summary of Reddit CEO Steve Huffman’s comments about the blackout protest: “We don’t do things for free, so all the unpaid mods should get back to work” is quite the statement. In second place, it’s miked with some additional info on […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018 began with a much-anticipated day: the official end of net neutrality rules. We took a long look at Ajit Pai’s latest comments about the change, while the FCC was busy fending off questions about the DDoS attack it made up (and also, randomly, about Pai’s big coffee mug), […]
Amazon-owned Twitch appears to be running something of an experiment to see just how much it can piss off its creative community before a mass exodus occurs. Reading back through our posts on the platform, you will be left with the understanding that there are two types of policy rollouts when it comes to Twitch. […]
Via Tarah Wheeler (who just destroyed the EARN IT Act recently) we find out that, while the White House has announced that it wants public comment on AI regulation, it hasn’t made it at all easy to figure out how to actually comment. I’m smashblogging on a Saturday because I came across this story on […]
NSO Group is irredeemable. It must know that by know. Its investors know it. The public knows it. Even the government of the country it set up shop in — a shop filled with ex-government employees — can hardly seem to stomach being associated with it. At any point, this could have been prevented. The […]
Back in college, I took an arbitration class, and it was one of my favorite classes. The professor (James Gross, who just retired last year after teaching for an astounding 56 years) was amazing, and I became a little obsessed with the entire idea and process of arbitration as an alternative to the costly and […]
It’s renewal time again, and this time the snooper squad is facing unprecedented push back. Sure, a lot of it is politically motivated, what with the post-Trumpians still getting high on their own “deep state” supply. Even as opportunistic as they are, they still have a point: some of their own have been subjected to […]
stLouIST