We’ve noted in detail how the AT&T/Time Warner/Discovery mergers have been an apocalyptic mess that aptly demonstrates the U.S. obsession with utterly pointless megadeals and a “growth for growth’s sake” mindset. Hundreds of billions of dollars later and the companies have produced a product that’s notably shittier than when they started, laying off thousands of people, cancelling popular brands, […]
For more than a decade, the Massachusetts State Police crime lab hid information from judges, prosecutors, and criminal defendants. This is nothing unusual for this state and its crime labs. The words “Massachusetts,” “crime lab,” and “scandal” have gone hand-in-hand for years. [Heads up, I will be using “state” to refer to the Massachusetts government […]
There are lots of reasons why trademark disputes get really stupid, really fast. The mother of all those reasons is, of course, the USPTO’s inability to cast a critical eye towards the applications its receives. Far too many trademarks are granted for words and terms that are not unique source-identifiers of goods and services. But […]
Having figured out the internet is a great place to find things, cops are increasingly relying on warrants that target tech companies in hopes of finding suspects, rather than finding suspects first and working forward from there. Thanks to the Third Party Doctrine, there’s very little expectation of privacy in what people share with the […]
Recently artist and actor David Choe made headlines by citing alleged copyright violations to scrub the internet — including journalists’ social media accounts — of clips from a 2014 podcast where he seemingly admitted raping a masseuse. He later claimed that he made up the story for shock value and said it should be taken as performance art. The […]
Lots of ideas have been floated by legislators and others in hopes of limiting the distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Very few of these ideas have been good. Most have assumed that the problem is so horrendous any efforts are justified. The problem here is that governments need to actually justify mandated mass […]
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We tend to think of McSweeney’s as a satire magazine, but on this one, it’s dead on: I Will Defend Free Speech to the Death. Or Until an Autocrat Asks Me to Stop. They say that if you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything. So today, I’m drawing a line in the sand and […]
As the U.S. has tried to untether itself from Chinese tech, one major policy goal by both parties has been to purge U.S. telecom networks of Chinese telecom gear. The worry (sometimes substantiated, sometimes not) is that Chinese intelligence has embedded all manner of nefarious backdoors in sensitive telecommunications gear (you’re to ignore that the […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about Elon Musk’s latest Twitter misadventure: Musk’s just announced that he’s going to start deleting unused profiles. As always, he has completely failed to consider the ramifications of this (people are going to be just thrilled when their dead loved […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the Defense Department was looking for another exemption from compliance with FOIA, while police were dropping charges against a 19-year-old who downloaded public documents from a FOI portal. The FCC’s Ajit Pai was celebrating as net neutrality got an official end date, while several companies were responding to […]
Iron Maiden, the band, is not a band I have thought about much in the last, oh, let’s call it 20 years. They have made it onto our pages before, specifically for behaving like trademark bullies, which is apropos. I say that as the band most recently is opposing the trademark application for a lingerie […]
I have to admit that I’d lost track of the whole White House IP Czar position. Officially, the “Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator” or IPEC, the job was created by the “Pro-IP Act” in 2008, and we warned that the whole thing was an attempt to turn the White House into Hollywood’s private copyright police force. […]
Clearview has been giving web scraping a bad name since its arrival on the scene a couple of years ago. Scraping isn’t necessarily bad. Web scraping can provide data sets that help improve things for people everywhere. But this effort can also be used to do the sort of thing Clearview has been doing: grabbing […]
Defamation cases are having quite a moment. The threat of a likely loss in a big defamation suit resulted in Fox News settling for $787 million just as trial was set to begin in the Dominion case, And then, this week, we saw E. Jean Carroll win her defamation (and sexual abuse) lawsuit against Donald […]
It has been more than 1,800 days since the FBI said it would correct its incorrect total of (allegedly) uncrackable encrypted devices in its possession. Back in the glory days of its “going dark” narrative, the FBI claimed it had more than 7,800 impenetrable devices in its possession. Some congressional scrutiny, much of it spearheaded […]
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What if the media and the politicians threw a moral panic about kids and social media… and the actual experts didn’t come along? The American Psychological Association has put out a thoughtful, nuanced study, about kids and social media, that suggests that the hyperventilating we’ve heard about is misplaced, and that there are some simple […]
You might recall how when U.S. telecom giants lobbied the Trump FCC to kill net neutrality, they hired a bunch of PR firms to flood the FCC with fake comments from a bunch of fake and dead people. The goal: create the illusion of support for shitty, unpopular policies. It’s a pretty popular tactic by […]
Guess who doesn’t want to police themselves. If you guessed “police,” you win nothing but more years of zero accountability. Everybody seems to know cops don’t want to be held responsible for their actions, but those capable of forcing cops to be accountable for their actions seem willing to let the status quo remain in […]
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