In late 2020, Massachusetts lawmakers (with overwhelming public support) passed an expansion of the state’s “right to repair” law. The original law was the first in the nation to be passed in 2013. The update dramatically improved it, requiring that all new vehicles be accessible via a standardized, transparent platform that allows owners and third-party repair shops […]
When talking about content moderation, it’s easy to focus entirely on centralized platforms. But now, with the rise of more federated and decentralized systems like ActivityPub and Bluesky (and many others), it’s becoming more and more important to talk about how content moderation works in a decentralized space. This week we’re joined by Yoel Roth, […]
A few weeks back, we wrote about the Supreme Court’s decision in the case between the Andy Warhol Foundation and Lynn Goldsmith, regarding the copyright on certain images that Warhol painted based on a Goldsmith photograph, and exploring under what conditions it was protected by fair use. We felt that the Court completely ignored the […]
On Monday we wrote about the changes that Reddit was making to their API pricing, causing some services to shut down, and leading thousands of subreddits to choose to blackout (some temporarily, some indefinitely). Apparently, all those sites going private resulted in… Reddit itself falling over. According to Reddit, the blackout was responsible for the […]
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No matter what differences of opinion I might have with Volokh Conspiracy contributors, it must be said the site (now hosted at Reason after a brief run at the Washington Post) manages to surface truly interesting cases on a regular basis. This is one of them. I’ll let Ilya Somin of the Volokh Conspiracy lead […]
Last week, when Elon Musk hosted conspiracy theory nonsense peddler RFK Jr. on a Twitter Spaces, he admitted that, despite firing somewhere around 85% of Twitter staff at the point he took the company over and just no longer paying rent or many other bills, he’s still struggling to get the company to break even. […]
A couple of weeks back, we discussed how Google had delisted the app Downloader from the Play Store after a DMCA notice was issued by a firm representing several Israeli TV networks. The problem with all of this is simple: Downloader doesn’t have anything to do with copyright infringement or piracy. All it does is […]
The Supreme Court’s Riley decision has been the law of the land since 2014. If cops want to search seized cell phones, they need a warrant. Nearly a decade on, cops are still violating it. The inability to follow the rules has seen evidence in this criminal case (brought to us by FourthAmendment.com) tossed twice. […]
Back in November last year, Walled Culture reported on the shocking opinion by a top EU court advisor that copyright was more important than privacy. The case in question was brought by four French associations for the protection of rights and freedoms on the Internet (La Quadrature du Net, the Federation of Associative Internet Access Providers, […]
Every so often, I see somebody, who has no idea what they’re talking about, say some variant of: “well, the internet still works despite all of that freaking out by consumer groups, therefore net neutrality must not have been important.” I’ve noted repeatedly how that statement is the claim of deeply unserious people for a […]
All sorts of interesting things can happen in the process of a lawsuit. What’s going on here may seem complex, but stick with it, as it’s worth following… You may recall that back in April, it was revealed (first in a court filing, and later in an announcement to partners) that Twitter had been merged […]
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The EARN IT Act (the tortured acronym stands for Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act) has been bad news ever since its introduction way back in March of 2020. The bill’s original backers were all people who either hated encryption (AG Bill Barr, Sen. Dianne Feinstein) or “Big Tech” (Trump acolytes Josh […]
Aaron Swartz was, perhaps by technicality, a co-founder of Reddit. The more complete story is that he was working on a different project, infogami, that got merged into Reddit, which was created by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, but it’s been said that part of the deal was that all three would get founder credit. […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is kallethen with a simple response to the question of whether a private platform’s right to enforce its rules would allow them to ban groups of people for discriminatory reasons: Did they violate the site’s rules? That’s the important distinction you keep missing. In second […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, broadband satisfaction scores were plummeting while California was pushing forward with its tough net neutrality law and the hype around Google Fiber was giving way to delays and frustration. Emails revealed more about the FCC’s “DDoS attack” claims, and AT&T ended its quest to erode FTC authority over […]
How does simple communication and the rollout of new polices remain so very, very difficult for Amazon’s Twitch platform? Over the past several years, we have written up many posts of all the ways that Twitch has sucked out loud when it comes to communicating with its creators, particularly when it comes to policy changes […]
It’s always interesting to me to watch and see what gets attention in the security and privacy space. For example, everybody spent the last two years suffering absolute embolisms at the idea that TikTok was a threat to privacy, but nobody much seems to care that an absolute ocean of “smart devices,” from your router […]
NSO Group is on the ropes after years of self-inflicted damage metastasized into months of negative news coverage. Since worldwide exposure of its customers’ abuse of its malware, as well as exposing the sort of people NSO chose to deal with, the company has discussed getting out of the offensive spyware business — a move […]
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