Last night, Elon Musk closed his on-again, off-again, on-again deal to buy Twitter, and his very first order of business was to fire a bunch of top executives. This was not necessarily unexpected. When new owners come in, they will often clean house, and the text messages revealed as part of the lawsuit while Musk […]
Telecom lobbyists have been working overtime in both the US and EU, trying to get policymakers to support the idea of “Big Tech” paying “Big Telecom” billions of additional dollars for no coherent reason. This taxation effort always involves some variant of the claim that popular tech services are getting a “free ride” on the […]
Long-time readers here will know that one of the consistent themes over the years when it comes to video game DRM has been the absolute plethora of anecdotal stories you get about how DRM screwed up the playing experience for legitimate customers. Performance issues, inability to play online or single-player campaigns due to DRM failures, […]
Open records laws were passed because governments simply aren’t interested in voluntarily sharing their documents with the people that foot the bill for both the people and the paper. But governments have to pass these laws, in essence forcing transparency upon themselves. Since most governments seem to be more interested in opacity, massive holes in […]
I’ll start this post with a bit of whimsy before alarming you with the sense of doom portended by the stakes involved with last week’s oral argument at the US Supreme Court in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts v. Lynn Goldsmith. In this case the Warhol Foundation is trying to get SCOTUS to […]
Last month, Florida officially asked the Supreme Court to review the detailed 11th Circuit ruling which mostly upheld the district court ruling saying that Florida’s social media content moderation law was unconstitutional under the 1st Amendment. Earlier this week, NetChoice and CCIA argued that the 11th Circuit was (mostly) correct in trashing the law, but […]
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It seems like every couple of weeks there’s another report of a Hertz customer being treated like a thief because the car rental company can’t be bothered to do even the most minimal of due diligence or follow-up. At this point, there are more than 100 plaintiffs involved in class action lawsuit claiming Hertz has […]
Early in the pandemic, the FCC launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit (EBB program), which gives low income Americans a $50 discount off of their broadband bill. Under the program, the government gave money to ISPs, which then doled out discounts to users — if they qualified. But (and I’m sure this will be a surprise […]
Governments set up rules governing how they govern. Then they ignore them. So, what’s the point? Is it a nod to decorum before the proverbial government party guest throws up in the bathtub and hits on your mom? If the law says an entry order or warrant is needed to enter people’s homes to investigate […]
A couple of weeks ago, we reported on a terrible idea in France: requiring companies to pay for the use of public domain material. As the post explained, this is a subversion of what it means for something to enter the public domain, and a betrayal of the implicit bargain of copyright. Fortunately, the plan was dropped, […]
Signal ensures its users’ security and privacy by encrypting their messages and refusing to collect a bunch of data governments or malicious hackers might find useful or interesting. That hasn’t made it many friends in governments (except with government officials who utilize the service to dodge public records requests). An FBI official once compared Signal […]
Imagine waking up in the morning, grabbing your hot cup of coffee, and scrolling your favorite blog post or website, only to find it looking like this: Images are missing. Video content is not there. Nothing but an empty black void staring back at you. This is what could happen if a recent case brought […]
The Brazilian government — under the “leadership” of Donald Trump Mutual Admiration Society member Jair Bolsonaro — has been steadily cracking down on free speech under the guise of saving the public from “fake news” and other misinformation. Over the past few years, it has ramped up efforts to eradicate content and reporting that it […]
Restflix is a revolutionary streaming service designed to help users fall asleep faster and rest better. With 10+ personalized channels full of sleep meditations, bedtime stories, calming visuals, and binaural beats to harness the brain’s responsiveness to sound and help create a meditative, restful state. Through the use of sleep meditations, bedtime stories, peaceful and […]
There’s this weird thing that people who hate Section 230 continue to ignore: that if you just take away Section 230, it doesn’t magically make companies liable for the actions of their users. If you studied the history of Section 230 (i.e., read Jeff Kosseff’s excellent book on the topic) or just had a passing […]
For decades, consumers have mostly wanted one thing from their ISP: a semi-affordable dumb pipe connection for the Internet. For just as long, US ISPs have bucked this demand, routinely trying to saddle users with higher costs and additional services consumer never asked for, while finding strange new ways to make an additional buck on […]
A couple of years ago, we discussed the work being done, essentially by one enterprising individual going by the handle “Peebs,” to archive a bunch of retro video game manuals for the sake of preservation. Earlier this year, we updated you all with the fairly impressive news that every SNES game manual had been digitized […]
Last week a new GitHub Copilot investigation website created by Matthew Butterick brought the conversation about GitHub’s Copilot project back to the front of mind for many people, myself included. Copilot, a tool trained on public code that is designed to auto-suggest code to programmers, has been greeted by excitement, curiosity, skepticism, and concern since it was announced. The GitHub […]
We’ve often talked about the importance of distinguishing content moderation at the infrastructure layer of the internet stack from that which happens on platforms at the edge, and this issue was brought to the forefront recently when Cloudflare took down Kiwi Farms. This week, we’re joined by internet policy expert Konstantinos Komaitis to discuss an […]
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