What could possibly go wrong? Earlier this week we wrote about an Arkansas bill, SB396, which was modeled after Utah’s recent unconstitutional social media bill, and tries to ban kids from social media. Except, as we noted, it appeared to explicitly exempt pretty much all of social media, except for maybe Facebook and Twitter. The […]
In just the last five years, the “right to repair” movement has shifted from nerdy niche to the mainstream, thanks in part to significant support from the Biden FTC. We’ve seen numerous state bills make significant inroads in passing laws opening the door to undermining repair monopolies, even though industry lobbying has, at times, neutered […]
It will never stop being humorous uncovering just how many smart products are run by dumb companies. If you’re going to roll out a product that connects to the internet, you would think that the very basics of IT/internet security in those products would be taken into account. You would also think that there would […]
It’s not at all surprising why tons of people, including journalists, are sticking around Twitter even if they shouldn’t. Part of it is inertia. People were settled into what worked before, and change is difficult. Partly because of that, people are loathe to switch. Even those who have switched over to alternatives like Mastodon in […]
China and India are widely expected to be two of the most powerful global players in the decades to come. In some ways, they are alike. As Techdirt has reported, both have dismal records when it comes to Internet freedom, online censorship and privacy. But they differ in terms of their impact on the IT […]
It doesn’t look like Fox News is going to get away with badmouthing Dominion Voting Systems for weeks following Donald Trump’s unsurprising loss in the 2020 election. Evidence already handed over to Dominion in its libel lawsuit shows many Fox News executives — as well as anchors and commentators — were aware the claims were […]
Various treaties and multi-national proposals to combat cybercrime have been around for years. I’m not exaggerating. These have been floating around for more than a decade. (Do you want to feel old? This cybercrime treaty proposal would be old enough to legally obtain a social media account in the United States if it were still […]
The easy-to-use, ultra-portable, and durable external hard drive gives you the freedom to save your files on any device that has available storage space, from computers to tablets and more. This external hard drive can be used with your computer for data backup or moved to another device for cross-platform file compatibility. With USB 3.0 […]
The Supreme Court is currently deliberating whether or not algorithms deserve protections under Section 230. And I hear from lots of people that maybe Section 230 wasn’t meant to cover algorithmic policing and recommendations of content. But that’s utter nonsense. The whole area of content moderation first came about as a response to the earliest […]
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 the “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 […]
If you’re not a part of a small but passionate group of emulation enthusiasts, you may not be aware that Microsoft has long waged a battle to keep emulators off of its Xbox consoles and the Xbox Store. Going back all the way to 2020, one particular app and developer has played something of a […]
A worldwide pandemic trapped students in their own homes to stop the spread of the coronavirus. They didn’t ask for this. Neither did educators. But educators made the worst of it in far too many cases. Aptitude tests and other essentials for continued funding (and bragging rights) were now out of their control. Any student […]
California passed the California Age-Appropriate Design Code (AADC) nominally to protect children’s privacy, but at the same time, the AADC requires businesses to do an age “assurance” of all their users, children and adults alike. (Age “assurance” requires the business to distinguish children from adults, but the methodology to implement has many of the same […]
The only surprising thing here is that it took this long: NPR has officially announced that it has quit Twitter. This is in response to Elon’s chaotic decision to first label the account “state-affiliated media,” a label that was designed to help users understand if a media organization was actually a dedicated mouthpiece of the […]
All hail the pariah. If Clearview is only at 30 billion images, it just means social media users haven’t been posting enough. The little scraper that could has pushed its way to the next plateau of unacceptableness, turning the 10 billion images it had as recently as October 2021 to 30 billion before EOY2024. Plaudits […]
Users are juggling huge amounts of data, so it makes sense that you’re taking care of that data responsibly. Degoo is an AI-based cloud storage that helps you rediscover your best photos. With Degoo, you get 10TB of supremely secured storage space from which to manage and share files with awesome simplicity. With high-speed transfers […]
Read our new report on The Unintended Consequences Of Internet Regulation » Over the last decade or so, there’s been a growing chorus of people insisting (misleadingly) that the internet is a “wild west” that needs regulation. The reasons stated for this apparently necessary regulation change over time, but the underlying discussion tends to be […]
The AT&T Time Warner and DirecTV mergers were a monumental disasters. AT&T spent $200 billion to acquire both companies thinking it would dominate the video and internet ad space. Instead, the company lost 9 million subscribers in nine years, fired 50,000 employees, closed numerous popular brands (including Mad Magazine), and stumbled around incompetently for several years […]
To err is human. To forgive is beyond me. Sorry. That’s just the way it is. If we’re paying outsized portions of local budgets to law enforcement agencies more interested in selective enforcement, rights violations, complete abdication of personal/professional responsibility, and seeing what hot war kit they can acquire via 1033.gov, it behooves us to […]
Just recently we had Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders on the Techdirt podcast to discuss their very own podcast mini-series “Silicon Valley v. Science Fiction.” Some of that discussion was about this spreading view in Silicon Valley, often oddly coming from AI’s biggest boosters, that AI is an existential threat to the world, and […]
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