An increasingly important theme around here is how various laws to regulate the internet are often in conflict with each other. Privacy law is leading to less competition, for example. And from TorrentFreak, we have another, somewhat amusing example. The incredibly aggressive Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN has yet another hare-brained scheme to try to prevent […]
The Supreme Court’s decision to say “fuck it” to reproductive rights has resulted in plenty of firmly protected First Amendment expression. People are angry and have decided to let the Supreme Court, along with the rest of the federal government, know that they aren’t happy. Twitter user mattie daddy did the same thing, only using […]
Now that the Supreme Court has given states the freedom to police women’s bodies, it only makes sense that police are out there literally policing women’s bodies. It’s summer. Temperatures are high pretty much everywhere. And when temps go up, the amount of clothing people are willing to put on goes down. For some reason, […]
The Apple MacBook Air 13.3″ features a 22-nm “Ivy Bridge” 1.8GHz Intel “Core i5” processor, 4GB of onboard 1600 MHz LPDDR3 SDRAM, 128GB storage, and an Intel HD Graphics 4000 graphics processor, making your browsing experience better than ever. No more lagging or freezing. This all is packed in a razor-thin aluminum case with an […]
We’ve talked about the unfortunate bipartisan attacks on free speech, which are best understood as attempts to control the narrative. Republicans have been attacking free speech in multiple ways — from trying to ban books and take away teacher autonomy to trying to compel websites to host content against their will. Democrats, on the flip […]
We’ve spent years laying out mountains of documented evidence on how the U.S. broadband is a heavily monopolized mess largely protected and pampered by captured lawmakers and regulators. The impact of this lack of meaningful competition is everywhere, from historically terrible customer satisfaction rates, to high prices, slow speeds, and spotty coverage. 83 percent of […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MathFox with a comment about the troubles at Truth Social: What ‘Truth Social’ shows is how easy it is easy to create an Internet platform. It also shows how hard it is to make an Internet platform successful. In second place, it’s Thad with […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Zillow got very angry about the McMansion Hell blog and sent a ridiculous legal threat, then followed up with a second equally wrong letter, then finally kinda-sorta backed down a little bit after the EFF got involved. The copyright office was recognizing that the DMCA is a problem […]
Sigh, here we go. Back in 2014, Wreal LLC filed a trademark infringement suit against Amazon. Why? Well, Wreal has a product called FyreTV that it describes as “the Netflix of porn.” Amazon has a streaming service for decidedly non-pornographic content called Fire TV. Wreal came into court armed with a couple of social media […]
Some days, it has got to suck to be a judge. Well, actually a lot of days. Most judicial work is tedious, including contractual disputes or bankruptcy proceedings or maritime law or any dozens of other aspects of litigation that would put most people to sleep. On other days though, it’s a particular kind of […]
As you’ll recall, a year and a half ago, much of the world who didn’t live on the WallStreetBets forum were introduced to the concept of meme stocks. As we discussed at the time, much of the embrace of such stocks by retail investors was really about people who were fed up with feeling like […]
It is utterly and completely irrational for people who defend the vulnerable to call for the destruction of Section 230. Section 230 helps protect vulnerable people by making it possible to speak out against those who would hurt them. Weakening the critically important protection it provides online platforms would only weaken these platforms’ ability to […]
Devin Nunes’ campaign to intimidate and silence his critics with a flood of SLAPP suits has hit another stumbling block. While he and his lawyer, Steven Biss, had mostly avoided filing lawsuits in states with strong anti-SLAPP laws, including his “home” state of California, for some reason in the fall of 2020 he sued Twitter […]
Are you a fan of solving puzzles? Do you like winning money? Then MSCHF has a treat for you. MSCHF, the makers of THE ONE MILLION DOLLAR PUZZLE, now brings you THE TWO MILLION DOLLAR PUZZLE. All you have to do is buy this 500-piece jigsaw puzzle, complete it, and get a chance to win […]
In 2018, the Supreme Court declared warrantless access to historical cell site location information unconstitutional, given the privacy implications of being able to track someone’s movements over days or weeks without bothering to secure a warrant. Prior to this decision, cell site location info (CSLI) was treated as a third party record, requiring neither a […]
For literally twenty-five years now, telecom monopoly executives the world over have been trying to force big tech companies billions of dollars for no coherent reason. It began with AT&T’s attempt to double dip on Google; which spurred the entire net neutrality war. The complaint by telecoms has long since moved global, as they try […]
It’s kind of weird that in some convoluted way, the NSA may be killing Google Analytics, at least in the EU. You may recall that back in 2020, Max Schrems won his second big data privacy effort against the EU/US Privacy Shield agreement, which allowed data from people in the EU to be transferred to […]
When I repeatedly use Nintendo as something of a virtual punching bag, it pisses off some of the company’s loyal fans. This has never made sense to me. Those fans should be pissed at Nintendo and all the different avenues the company takes just to make sure being a Nintendo fan is as difficult as […]
What a dumb news cycle. As we noted, mainly driven by the preferred political spam mongers for Republicans, a study from some computer scientists was completely misrepresented to argue (falsely) that Google was deliberately censoring Republican politician emails. As we’ve repeatedly noted, the study actually found that while a clean Gmail account would flag more […]
Italian malware developer Hacking Team began making headlines in 2014. Infections uncovered by researchers at Toronto’s Citizen Lab and Russia’s Kaspersky Lab were traced back to servers located in the United States, Canada, UK, and Ecuador. The US servers topped the list. The second place finisher, however, was Kazakhstan. Here’s a summary of the Kazakhstan […]
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