We’ve been pointing out for a long time now that the main antitrust bill making its way through the Senate has a hidden content moderation trojan horse in it. Indeed, it seems likely the main reason the bill has significant Republican support is that they know the bill will be abused to file vexatious lawsuits […]
CoreCivic is one of the nation’s largest private prison companies. And while it should already be concerning that we even have private prison companies, CoreCivic appears to be particularly awful. Just last week, CoreCivic was in the 9th Circuit appeals court trying to overturn a dismissal of its SLAPP lawsuit that it filed against investment […]
It appears all but inevitable that Julian Assange will be receiving an all-expenses-paid (except for his defense!) one-way trip to the United States to face espionage charges for, mostly, performing acts of journalism. The Wikileaks founder has done plenty of self-inflicted damage to his reputation over the past few years, but his organization was instrumental […]
Intego Mac Washing Machine is a Mac cleaner that makes it easy to get rid of junk files that slow down your Mac—duplicate files and programs you never use. It also helps you automatically organize things, so both you and your Mac operate more efficiently. It’s on sale for $20. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store […]
Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well says my impossibility theorem. And, basically every day we see more examples of this in action. The latest is that the NY Times reports how YouTube took down a video that the January 6th House Select Committee had posted to the site, detailing many of the […]
A few years ago the Trump DOJ and FCC rubber-stamped the Sprint T-Mobile merger without heeding expert warnings that it would stifle competition, kill jobs and slowly raise rates. Working closely with T-Mobile and Dish, the FCC and DOJ “antitrust enforcers” unveiled what they claimed was a “fix” for these problems: they’d cobble together a fourth major […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the Republican attempt to legislate against spam filtering of political emails: Nothing new See: The exemption that gave themselves around Texting unsolicited political spam. In second place, it’s another anonymous comment in response to a certain prolific commenter: Hyman has […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, while Diane Feinstein was calling for Section 702 reforms and the EFF was suing the FBI for withholding NSL guideline documents, UK Prime Minister Theresa May was trying to push forward with plans to kill encryption, she and French President Emmanuel Macron were both supporting internet censorship, and […]
I guess it’s time to pay get robbed by the piper. The state of Michigan has periodically enacted forfeiture reforms, often in response to bad press or lawsuit losses. Michigan law enforcement has made the most of forfeiture privileges. Thanks to a reform passed in 2015, the public finally had access to data showing just […]
It’s no secret that the Russian government has been working overtime to try to block out accurate information about its invasion of Ukraine from reaching the citizenry. That’s part of why we found it so frustrating that some supporters of Ukraine sought to make it even more difficult for Russian’s to reach the wider internet. […]
Modern reviewers put modern televisions through a gamut of different tests to determine display brightness, quality, power consumption, and other factors. Samsung, apparently thought it would be a brilliant idea to try and cheat the benchmarking system used by many reviewers to give their TVs an unfair advantage in comparison. First spotted by HDTVTest then […]
California legislators finally lifted the opacity shrouding police misconduct records in early 2019. The new law eliminated exemptions, making police misconduct and use-of-force records available to records requesters for the first time in decades. Full grown adults clothed in uniforms and armed with guns reacted like children. They sued. They shredded records. They pretended they […]
We’ve written a couple times about Andy Parker, whose story is truly tragic. His daughter, a local TV news reporter, was murdered on air by a former colleague, in the middle of a live news broadcast. Truly horrific stuff. Parker has now spent years trying to remove the video of his daughter’s murder from social […]
FlashBooks publishes top self-help and business book summaries you can read or listen to in about 20 minutes or less. Formatted for every device: Kindle, iPhone, Android, iPad, iPods, and more. The audiobooks are formatted as downloadable MP3 files so that you can listen to them’ on the go via your favorite mobile device. Get more […]
There’s plenty of human work to be done, but there never seems to be enough humans to do it. When things need to be processed in bulk, we turn it over to hardware and software. It isn’t better. It isn’t smarter. It’s just faster. We can’t ask humans to process massive amounts of data because […]
The Wall Street Journal has offered up a helpful report (outside the paywall, for now) on the giant mess that is U.S. broadband subsidy efforts. Like many previous studies, it points out how we’ve spent just countless billions of dollars on expanding broadband access with decidedly mixed results. Also like many previous mainstream stories of […]
Nintendo’s war on its own fans’ love of Nintendo game music continues. The company has certainly made headlines over the past few years (with a big ramp up recently) by going on DMCA and threat blitzes for YouTube videos and channels that have uploaded what are essentially just the music from various Nintendo games. The […]
Field drug tests are notoriously unreliable. False positives abound. But law enforcement agencies still use them. First and foremost, they use them because no court, policy, or legislation has told them they can’t. But they also use them because they’re cheap (~$2/per), portable, and, most importantly, prone to producing false positives that allow cops to […]
We’ve already discussed how the expected overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court may impact the debate on encryption, but it has a likelihood of impacting lots of other important tech debates as well. Senator Ron Wyden has written a thoughtful piece over at Slate, explaining how important Section 230 is in a […]
Well, this is ugly. Lots of states and cities have considered bail reform in recent years, given the system’s propensity for punishing the poorest people while allowing the more fortunate to buy their way out of jail. The criminal justice system is built on the presumption of innocence — something that’s often ignored by law […]
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