Larry Lessig’s views and thoughts on things like copyright law, internet freedom, and government corruption have been tremendously influential on myself and many others in the tech and tech policy worlds. His books are still worth reading and thinking about. But he’s taken some odd turns of late. A few years ago I called him […]
Texas has always been a bit weird about stuff. It sometimes views itself as a separate nation or, at least, openly expresses its desire to secede from this apparently abhorrent liberal village of hundreds of millions known as the United States. Fuck it. Maybe we just let it float off into the political sea as […]
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Elon Musk went on Tucker Carlson this week and spewed some utter nonsense, claiming that one thing he discovered upon taking over Twitter was that federal agencies had full access to everything at Twitter, including DMs. “The degree to which various government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on at Twitter […]
The Canadian government is hopping aboard the right to repair bandwagon. The Canadian federal government’s 2023 budget includes language indicating that it will attempt to implement meaningful right to repair reforms by 2024, alongside a new five-year tax credit worth $4.5 billion for Canadian clean tech manufacturers, and the potential adoption of Canadian federal guidelines mandating a […]
Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin isn’t done hurting city residents. He may be imprisoned but he’s still costing the city millions of dollars. And these cases aren’t related to the brutal act that saw him charged and convicted for murder. Officer Chauvin did this to himself. He may have been aided and abetted by […]
Ah, remember Parler? They were the first of the “alternative” social media companies targeting the Trumpist crowd, in which I pointed out that their whole “we don’t moderate” schtick wasn’t going to work. The company speed ran the content moderation learning curve faster than most. But even from the beginning, the Trumpists who joined admitted […]
Here we go again. Another NSO-alike, founded in Israel by former government snoops, is selling powerful phone exploits to bad people who, unsurprisingly, use it to do bad things. And, as usual, it’s Citizen Lab doing the heavy lifting, sifting through code, identifying targets, and seeking information to find the source of these attacks. NSO’s […]
Elon Musk keeps talking about how he’s saving Twitter, but it’s difficult to see how. He’s made the site much more unstable, has been messing up basically every part of “trust & safety 101,” is now facing a growing number of lawsuits (including many over unpaid bills), has no idea how the site actually works, […]
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On Friday, Montana’s very silly legislature passed the first law in the nation banning Tiktok. The bill’s title is not subtle: SB 419: Ban tik-tok in Montana (they couldn’t even get the name right). The way the bill works is that it prohibits mobile app stores from offering TikTok to Montana residents and also just […]
ISPs for years have struck cozy deals with landlords effectively elbowing out competitors and allowing them to create building-by-building broadband monopolies. That stifled competition in turn results in higher costs for access to an essential utility. And while the FCC passed rules in 2007 trying to ban this, the rules were so full of loopholes […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is weevie833 with a reaction to our post about Substack CEO Chris Best’s failure to answer some important basic questions: The data First, this is the most sharply concise confrontation with a CEO I have ever seen on this issue and I appreciate the author […]
Five Years Ago During the hiatus from history posts, we missed an important event last week in 2018, when Backpage was shut down by the DOJ. It should have resulted in people realizing that FOSTA/SESTA was unnecessary (as the indictment made clear), but of course this week in 2018 was all about politicians pretending it […]
Readers of this site will know by now that Nintendo polices its intellectual property in an extremely draconian fashion. However, there are still differences in the instances in which the company does so. In many cases, Nintendo goes after people or groups in a fashion that stretches, if not breaks, any legitimate intellectual property concerns. […]
You know the drill by now. In October of 2020, the NY Post ran a story about the contents of a laptop hard drive that Hunter Biden apparently left at a computer repair store. There were questions about the provenance of that hard drive, and, given the history of foreign election interference, as well as […]
So, we’re just handing out top secret security clearance to everyone, I guess. It was clear from the documents posted to Discord (before spreading everywhere), the person behind them would soon be located. The folded security briefings were obviously smuggled out of secure rooms in someone’s pocket and then photographed carelessly, in one case on […]
AI Doomerism is becoming mainstream thanks to mass media, which drives our discussion about Generative AI from bad to worse, or from slightly insane to batshit crazy. Instead of out-of-control AI, we have out-of-control panic. When a British tabloid headline screams, “Attack of the psycho chatbot,” it’s funny. When it’s followed by another front-page headline, […]
I get it. I totally get it. Every tech dude comes along and has this thought: “hey, we’ll be the free speech social media site. We won’t do any moderation beyond what’s required.” Even Twitter initially thought this. But then everyone discovers reality. Some discover it faster than others, but everyone discovers it. First, you […]
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