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The latest in stupid, unconstitutional, performative, nonsense legislation from Republicans comes from Senator John Thune, and it would break your email spam filters. It’s called the “Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting Emails Act of 2022” and it’s possibly even dumber than it sounds. First, this is all based on a bogus, cooked up, deliberately misinterpreted-by-people-who-know-better […]
Critics of modern tech often lean towards hyperbole when discussing “surveillance capitalism” and the seemingly omniscient power of advertisers and adtech. In reality, as journalists who cover the space for any amount of time can attest, it’s all frequently much dumber and clumsier than that: A new study, first reported by The Wall Street Journal […]
I have talked for years at Techdirt about how the cord cutting trend, while still continuing, was going to run into a wall due to the way that major sports broadcasts have always been done through cable TV deals. I have also covered the steps, baby or otherwise, different sports leagues and teams have taken […]
The federal judiciary system has pretty much blown off taxpayers’ (and legislators’) complaints about PACER for years. The online system that was supposed to make access to court documents fair and equitable is instead a paywalled, outdated heap of barely functioning junk that charges citizens $0.10/page for questionable search results from PACER’s broken search engine. […]
The US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) system needs plenty of useful reforms to actually work correctly and properly. Despite limited time frames in which the government is required to provide information, they often take years. They regularly redact stuff they shouldn’t. Or refuse to hand over documents they are required to. Generally speaking, the […]
Any shift in the balance of power away from law enforcement almost always results in law enforcement claiming we’re headed towards a criminal apocalypse. The NYPD — via union reps and police commissioners — have made these claims for years, targeting everything from “stop and frisk” reform to more recent efforts made to treat accused […]
Okay, so this bill is nowhere near as bad as the Texas and Florida bills, or a number of other bills out there about content moderation. But that doesn’t mean it’s still not pretty damn bad. New York has passed a variation of a content moderation bill in that state that requires websites to have […]
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The government of India continues to pretend it’s a democracy while doing everything it can to satisfy an elected leader who now apparently has aspirations to become “dictator for life.” Under Prime Minister Narendra Mohdi, India has moved away from its democratic ideals and closer to the ideals held by one of its closest neighbors, […]
We’ve noted several times how there are a few reasons why the U.S. government can’t get a handle on robocalls, despite big announcements every six months or so about how they’re cracking down on the practice and really mean it this time. One of the biggest reasons is that neither the discourse, nor our solutions, […]
Funny what a little public shaming can accomplish. It was merely a week or so ago that we were discussing one bakery in California threatening other bakeries for using the term “mochi muffin”, for which the USPTO had somehow granted it a trademark. If you didn’t read the last post and need a quick recap […]
The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was a flashpoint for police reform efforts around the nation. Cops had been killing unarmed minorities for years but this one was so spectacularly brutal and symbolic of institutional racism (a white cop pressing his knee to a black man’s neck), it couldn’t be […]
The Washington Post dropped what it pretended was a bit of a bombshell. In the story, Google software engineer Blake Lemoine implied that Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) system, which pulls from Google’s vast data and word repositories to generate realistic, human-sounding chatbots, had become fully aware and sentient. He followed that up with […]
The Uvalde Police Department — which currently avails itself of 40% of the town’s budget — did nearly nothing to stop an extremely horrific school shooting that resulted in 19 dead children, two dead teachers, and 17 others being wounded. While Robb Elementary turned into a bloodbath, Uvalde officers retreated after a couple of flesh […]
The Supreme Court has been very reluctant to handle cases that might expand protections for American citizens. It has instead, in recent years, chosen to hand down decisions that curtail rights and make it far easier for government employees to escape lawsuits. This Supreme Court’s decision in a lawsuit filed by a US citizen versus […]
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Here on Techdirt, we’ve written about a bunch of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight shows that are quite frequently directly in agreement with what we write about on Techdirt. We’re often impressed at the level of detail and nuance he’s able to approach complex issues with, while (of course) keeping things quite funny. I know […]
Usually when people start whining about the propaganda dumpster fire that is Fox News, several things predictably happen. First, somebody with no idea how any of this works will yell out something about how the FCC should ban Fox from doing this (which is unconstitutional), or restore the mythologized Fairness Doctrine (which wouldn’t have applied […]
One of deep-seated problems with copyright is that its supporters believe everything created should be “owned” by someone and protected from being “stolen” by others. We’ve already written about how that’s a bad fit for writing music, and NBC News has a fascinating story about how the same issue is plaguing a very different world – […]
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