a Better Bubble™

TechDirt 🕸

Gigabyte Motherboards Came With Sloppy Backdoor Users Had No Idea About

2 years 3 months ago
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 […]
Karl Bode

Court Tosses Phone Evidence After First Warrant Was Too Vague And Second Warrant Was Too Late

2 years 3 months ago
For searches to be compliant with the Constitution, their underlying warrants need to be just as compliant. Warrants have been required for cell phone searches since 2014, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Riley decision. Nearly a decade on, and the government is still suffering periodic bouts of unreasonableness when performing phone searches. We recently covered […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: StackSkills Unlimited

2 years 3 months ago
StackSkills is the premier online learning platform for mastering today’s most in-demand skills. Now, with this exclusive limited-time offer, you’ll gain access to 1000+ StackSkills courses for life! Whether you’re looking to earn a promotion, make a career change, or pick up a side hustle to make some extra cash, StackSkills delivers engaging online courses […]
Gretchen Heckmann

The Sanctions Hearing For ChatGPT Using Lawyers… Did Not Go Well

2 years 3 months ago
By now you’ve heard of the lawyer who used ChatGPT for his legal research, and it made up fake cases. We’ll again remind you that Joshua Browder, the founder of DoNotPay insisted that this same underlying technology was so sophisticated that he offered $1 million to a lawyer who would let it make arguments in […]
Mike Masnick

FCC ‘Fines’ Right Wing Bullshitters Wohl, Burkman $5 Million For Voter Robocall Scam

2 years 3 months ago
It’s never fully appreciated the way we’ve let scammers, scumbags, and assorted bullshit artists hijack the nation’s top voice communications platform. Or that we’ve let marketing industry lobbyists slowly degrade the authority of the one U.S. regulator capable of actually doing something about it. Case in point: the FCC this week announced that it has […]
Karl Bode

US Patent Office Proposes Rule To Make It Much Harder To Kill Bad Patents

2 years 3 months ago
So, this is bad. Over the last few years, we’ve written plenty about the so-called “inter partes review” or “IPR” that came into being about a decade ago as part of the “America Invents Act,” which was the first major change to the patent system in decades. For much of the first decade of the […]
Mike Masnick

Tennessee Appeals Court Says Vanity License Plates Are Likely Protected Speech

2 years 3 months ago
There have been lots of legal battles fought over proprietary blends of numbers and letters. States collecting a premium for vanity plates claim this is government speech, since it’s a state-issued plate. Or, if it’s not quite government speech, it’s the government’s tacit approval of this speech, even if the vanity plate really only contains […]
Tim Cushing

OpenAI Sued For Defamation Over ChatGPT ‘Hallucination’; But Who Should Actually Be Liable?

2 years 3 months ago
Lots of people have been waiting for this, but it’s finally happened: someone has sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI over an AI “hallucination” (i.e., confidently spewing out something that is blatantly wrong). The complaint, filed by Mark Walters, in state court in Georgia, argues that OpenAI made up false and defamatory claims about himself. From the […]
Mike Masnick

Appeals Court Awards Half A Win To Professor Wrongfully Arrested For Sharing ‘Secret’ Tech With Chinese Entities

2 years 3 months ago
Being abnormally suspicious of anything Chinese isn’t new. There’s a wave of hysteria-based lawmaking happening right now involving TikTok, but deciding Chinese nationals and Chinese entities are inherently suspicious has been part of this nation’s cultural fabric since the construction of railroads back in the mid-19th century. That supposition that foreigners — especially the exotic-looking […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: Sketch Packs App Design Elements Bundle

2 years 3 months ago
Design your app in minutes with Sketch Packs. 100% customizable and optimized for the user experience, Sketch Packs’ elements empower you to design pixel-perfect products for mobile and desktop applications. This bundle includes the social media, ecommerce, menu builder, analytics, and navigation packs. The bundle is on sale for $20. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Many Of The States Endlessly Freaking Out About TikTok Still Have State Websites That Funnel Sensitive Data To TikTok

2 years 3 months ago
By now we’ve noted several times how the folks most vocally calling for a nationwide TikTok ban are putting on a dumb performance designed to distract you from our lack of competent internet privacy laws and our complete unwillingness to regulate the sleazy data broker space. As in, banning TikTok doesn’t actually fix much because […]
Karl Bode

A Natural History Of Trust & Safety

2 years 3 months ago
In the beginning, there were harms. No, not yet. First, there’s an idea, a product, a company. You’ve made an app where people can express themselves in some way (text, images, videos, something else, some combo of them…) and with some ingenious and distinctive features (everything is ephemeral… or permanent … or upside down … […]
Mike Masnick

Federal Judge Rules Tennessee Anti-Drag Law Unconstitutional

2 years 3 months ago
Tiny hateful people are trying to convert their small-mindedness into actual laws all around the nation. On the public’s dime, bigots are advancing bills targeting the free expression of anyone who doesn’t fall into the hetero container these asshats think everyone should fit into. At least twelve state legislatures have introduced bills designed to criminalize […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: The Complete Project Management Training Bundle

2 years 3 months ago
Project Management is global. This is one of those professions similar to being an accountant, where your skills and talents can be applied to any industry in any place. This 10-course Complete Project Management Training bundle provides a comprehensive training path for all things project management, including courses covering PMP 6th Edition, CAPM 6th edition, […]
Gretchen Heckmann