Loveland, Colorado has a police problem. The problem isn’t that there are too few, or that they’re being underfunded. The problem is the ones they already have — the ones that keep getting sued. On July 20, 2020, Target contacted Loveland PD to deal with a man (Keenan Stuckey) suffering from mental health issues in […]
Spaceboy Elon Musk promised the Twitter he was pretty much sued into purchasing would bring an end to all the free speech violations he claimed were happening every day under its liberal overlords. But being an edgelord troll rarely converts into competent management. Musk is speedrunning the moderation learning curve. But he is also discovering […]
Meet Roland “Spanky” Macher. Spanky, a name by which I really must insist on calling him throughout this post, was a restaurant owner and real estate businessman before going to prison for 30 months for failing to pay his taxes and lying to the bankruptcy court. While in prison, he crafted his a how-to-business opus, […]
About 18 months after he lost the 2020 election, Election Conspiracist in Chief Donald Trump sued Hillary Clinton and dozens of other Democrats over the election he had won nearly six years earlier. That lawsuit went nowhere. But going nowhere meant tying up a lot of the court’s time, what with Trump’s lawyers dumping 193-page […]
The all-new 2022 Ninja Dragon Blade X PRO 4K Dual Camera Quadcopter Drone, with built-in 3-side intelligent obstacle avoidance, can be operated just by touch through your mobile phone or tablet. You don’t need any instruction manual for the operation, simply take off and stay in the air by pressing one button. It has a […]
Look, by now it’s pretty clear that Elon Musk is deeply, deeply in above his head at Twitter, in ways that could have some pretty significant legal consequences. Even so, it’s still not the job of politicians to make decisions for him. He is free to destroy the company (and a good chunk of his […]
Despite a lot of political lip service paid toward bridging the digital divide, U.S. policymakers still don’t fully know where broadband is or isn’t available in the U.S. They have some well-informed notions, but outside analysts have long made it clear that the maps the government uses to shape policy and award subsidies are often […]
This week, we kick off the most insightful side of things with a comment from That One Guy on my post about how I still hope Twitter succeeds, where the comment highlights the biggest single thing that might get Elon to stop from burning the site to the ground: getting past his own ego. Step […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Comcast joined the chorus of ISPs trying to stop states from protecting privacy and net neutrality, and also targeted Colorado’s thoughts of building its own broadband network, though it was failing to overpower the voters there. Meanwhile, the SESTA fight was heating up: we talked more about how […]
In 2019, Houston police officers — relying on information generated by narcotic squad office Gerald Goines (who is now facing multiple criminal charges) — raided the home of Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle. Both occupants of the home were killed during the raid — one predicated on lies from Officer Goines. The fallout resulted in […]
You’ll be shocked to learn that the same MoviePass executives that routinely misled investors (and once even covertly changed user passwords to try and keep them from using a service they paid for) are now in even more trouble for their dodgy business practices. According to an announcement by the DOJ, former MoviePass executives Theodore […]
It’s always fun when copyright gets in the way of preservation efforts, especially when it comes at the hands of a mega-corporation like Apple. Many of you are likely to be familiar with WWDC, Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. This is one of those places where you get a bunch of Apple product reveals and news […]
Look, when it was revealed that Elon Musk’s first big plan was to make blue checks available for purchase for $8 a month, some of us quickly pointed out that the blue checks weren’t supposed to be about status, but about verification that someone is who they say they are. And, that’s kind of important. […]
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Yesterday I tweeted out a question about whether or not there was anyone left at Twitter who remembered that the company was under a pretty strict FTC consent decree: Apparently the answer was yes, but they didn’t include Elon Musk. Late last night, a few hours after that tweet, the Chief Information Security Officer, the […]
For the last few years Apple has worked overtime trying to market itself as a more privacy-focused company. 40-foot billboards of the iPhone with the slogan “Privacy. That’s iPhone” have been a key part of company marketing for years. The only problem: researchers keep highlighting how a lot of Apple’s well-hyped privacy changes are performative […]
Although trade deals are nominally about, well, trade, Techdirt readers know that they have become an important way to force through changes in areas like copyright and patents without any meaningful democratic scrutiny. That’s because trade deals are negotiated in secret, and then presented as done and dusted once talks have been concluded. The argument […]
We’ve noted for a while that the laws of physics would prohibit Elon Musk’s satellite broadband service from being truly disruptive at any real scale. Analysts had been quietly noting for a while that Starlink lacked the capacity to handle its projected user load. That recently resulted in obvious slowdowns, raising the question of when […]
We’ve talked in the past about “soft corruption,” a term I first heard from Larry Lessig. Lots of people have a general sense of what actual corruption is, but less understanding of the specifics. But, in general, people feel uncomfortable with the ways in which money can influence politics, even when it’s legal. Lessig’s concept […]
Jeff German, a forty-year veteran investigative reporter residing in Las Vegas, Nevada, was murdered earlier this year, allegedly by a local government official whose actions had received recent criticism in articles bylined by German. Robert Telles, a county official, has been arraigned in the murder of the journalist, something prosecutors claim was prompted by German’s […]
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