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Without Verification, What Is The Point Of Elon Musk’s Twitter?

2 years 3 months ago
Elon Musk’s Twitter fundamentally misunderstands what made Twitter useful in the first place. In an attempt to wring blood from a stone, Twitter’s announced that all the original “blue checks”—initially created as a way to verify that someone was who they said they were—will disappear on April 1st. Instead, blue checks will once again be […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: PlayStation Plus Essential 12-Month Subscription

2 years 3 months ago
Unleash the power of PlayStation and explore hundreds of incredible games with a new choice of membership plan. With PlayStation Plus Essential, you’ll get to enjoy all the core PlayStation Plus benefits: join your friends in online multiplayer, add new games to your collection every month, get incredible deals from PlayStation Store, and more. Relive some […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Canada Follows U.S. Lead On Mindless Consolidation With Rogers, Shaw Merger Approval

2 years 3 months ago
In both Canada and the U.S., there’s no shortage of evidence that consolidation in telecom and media hasn’t been great for telecom and media — or employers, competition, or consumers. That’s not really stopping regulators in either country, who continue to approve massive harmful megadeals with only the pretense of meaningful review. Canada’s just approved […]
Karl Bode

Far Right Troll ‘Ricky Vaughn’ Convicted Of Election Interference For Tricking People Into Voting By Phone

2 years 3 months ago
Earlier this year, a federal court dismissed almost all of a far right troll’s challenge to the criminal case brought against him by the DOJ. “Ricky Vaughn” is a notorious social media presence — one who’s been repeatedly suspended and banned for his never-ending string of shitheelishness. I don’t sympathize with Douglass Mackey, better known […]
Tim Cushing

The DEA Has Added Apple’s AirTags To Its Surveillance Arsenal

2 years 3 months ago
Apple tried to create something useful and ended up empowering awful people. Meant to help its users keep an eye on things that were important to them, the small tracking devices known as AirTags were soon exploited by stalkers to track and harass their targets, leading to a class action lawsuit against the company by […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: Deepstash Bite-Sized Knowledge

2 years 3 months ago
Deepstash is a platform for finding and organizing the ideas that matter to you. It helps you become more inspired and productive through bite-sized ideas. In Deepstash, you find ideas on topics like personal development, art and culture, mindfulness, and more. These ideas are represented as little cards you can read at a glance. All […]
Gretchen Heckmann

New Boss Same As The Old Boss: Elon’s Twitter Locks NY Post Account Over Tweet That Broke Twitter’s Rules

2 years 3 months ago
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the NY Post tweets a link to one of its own news stories, and Twitter decides that it violates the company’s rules (perhaps very questionably so), and in response, locks the NY Post’s Twitter account. Also, as part of the same “crackdown” on sharing certain media, Twitter […]
Mike Masnick

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

2 years 3 months ago
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is weevie833 bringing some facts to the conversation about the perception of Conservative bias in Twitter content moderation: Here is a research study (like, actual research) that provides nuance to the perception of Conservative bias in Twitter account deplatforming. Keep in mind that (as obvious […]
Leigh Beadon

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Escape From 1927

2 years 3 months ago
We’re nearing the end of our series of posts showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927. So far we’ve featured Best Remix winner Lucia, Best Visuals winner Urbanity, Best Adaptation winner To And Again, and Best Deep Cut winner The Pigeon Wager. Today, […]
Leigh Beadon

Stupid Patent Of The Month: Traxcell Tech Gets Ordered To Pay Attorneys’ Fees 

2 years 3 months ago
If someone loses a patent lawsuit very badly—to the point where they face orders to pay attorneys’ fees—you wouldn’t think they would be eager to come back to court with a nearly identical lawsuit. But that’s what has happened with this month’s patent. What’s more, the lawyer representing the patent owner, William Ramey, has been […]
Mike Masnick

News Publishers Admit They Get Value From Search Traffic, Even As They Demand Extra Compensation For It

2 years 3 months ago
In recent years, major media organizations have been lobbying Congress to enact legislation, the â€œJournalism Competition and Preservation Act,” requiring search engine providers to engage in a form of collective bargaining about the tax they would pay to media publishers for the privilege of providing links to their news articles, backed up by mandatory interest arbitration in which […]
Mike Masnick

DeSantis May Be Learning What The Copyright World Has Always Known: Disney’s Lawyers Don’t Fuck Around

2 years 3 months ago
We’ve already covered how Florida man Governor Ron DeSantis flipped out that Disney, the largest employer in his state, offered some mild criticism over one of his unconstitutional censorship bills, and decided to retaliate by (1) removing the stupid questionable “theme park exemption” his office had directly worked with Disney to insert into his unconstitutional […]
Mike Masnick

Midjourney CEO Says ‘Political Satire In China Is Pretty Not Okay,’ But Apparently Silencing Satire About Xi Jinping Is Pretty Okay

2 years 3 months ago
As a rule, it’s a good idea to be particularly suspicious of defenses of censorship that — coincidentally — materially benefit the people espousing them. In this case, the argument in favor of censorship is coming from founder and CEO of AI image generator Midjourney, David Holz. And Holz makes clear that he is willing […]
Mike Masnick