As you’ll recall, last Wednesday, the 5th Circuit surprised lots of people by immediately reinstating Texas’s ridiculous content moderation law that basically creates an open season to sue large social media sites for any moderation choices those sites make. The surprise wasn’t necessarily the judges’ decision, which had been telegraphed two days earlier via the […]
We’ve long discussed how if you really want to understand how the highly monopolistic U.S. broadband industry really works, you should look at regional phone monopoly Frontier Communications. Especially in states like West Virginia, where the company has spent decades lagging on fiber upgrades and DSL and phone repairs under a regime of regulatory capture that rarely holds them accountable […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a response to another commenter claiming they “occasionally post the censorship highlights of the week”: No, you don’t. You whine about “conservative views” being “censored” from Twitter, then you disappear (which I expect you to do now) when asked about […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Europe was putting free speech at risk as it struggled to figure out what to do with the GDPR, but stateside the big fight was over net neutrality. A John Oliver segment on the issue appeared to cripple the FCC website for a second time, but the agency […]
The NYPD has long been a stalwart opponent of transparency and accountability. It has spent years trying to rebrand as a national security agency, drafting on former mayor Rudy Giuliani’s unearned reputation as the post-9/11 savior of New York City. Journalists have noted the NYPD is even more secretive than the CIA and NSA, two […]
One of the most dramatic differences between the traditional, analogue world of creation, and the modern, digital one, is the democratization that has taken place in this sphere. Until recently, writers, musicians, artists and filmmakers collectively formed a relatively select group that was hard to enter as a professional. Today, anyone with an Internet connection […]
It never fails. We’ve been talking about the EU’s Digital Services Act for a few years now, looking at how the EU’s technocratic desire to overregulate the internet is going to cause real problems. And while at least they took a more systematic process to figuring out how to write the law, the end result […]
The boiling frog syndrome suggests that if a frog jumps into a pot of boiling water, it immediately jumps out — but if a frog jumps into a slowly heating pot, it senses no danger and gets cooked. Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook has been gradually coming to a boil of dysfunction for a decade – some are horrified, […]
For literally more than a decade researchers warned that global satellite telecommunications networks were vulnerable to attack. These attacks vary in nature but several allowed an intruder miles away to both intercept and disrupt satellite communications. In 2020 hackers again clearly demonstrated how these perpetually unresolved vulnerabilities were putting millions of people at risk. Fast forward to 2022 […]
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At a time when Russia and Russian oligarchs should be facing more scrutiny and careful work by investigative reporters, it is actually becoming that much more difficult to do so. And the main reason is that EU and UK “data protection” laws, passed in a flurry with promises of protecting your privacy from the greedy […]
Earlier this week, the Biden administration announced a “new” broadband plan that wasn’t actually new. The rose garden event featured executives from twenty ISPs who all got a pat on the back in front of the cameras for voluntarily and temporarily participating in a Biden plan to provide a $30 discount off of the broadband […]
The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department is home to several gangs. Even though the current sheriff, Alex Villanueva, thinks this is up for debate (via a threatened lawsuit against the LA City Council), enough evidence (anecdotal and otherwise) points to deputies forming cliques that turn the Thin Blue Line from defensive to offensive. Like any gang, […]
Our own Glyn Moody has written several posts about how exceptions that have been made to copyright laws throughout the world have picked up steam, but also appear to have left the visually impaired hung out to dry. That finally began to change in 2013 with the Marrakesh Treaty, which was specifically designed to restore […]
Jurisprudence on warrantless long-term surveillance is still all over the place. On one hand, some courts feel anything observable by passersby shouldn’t be off limits to law enforcement officers who haven’t secured a search warrant. Other courts have determined lengthy surveillance — especially when using cameras that can zoom, enhance, move, and record every minute […]
What the actual fuck, EU? While they pretend to be all about protecting privacy, they then push out this bit of utter nonsense: a bill to “protect the children” by literally requiring online services scan all messaging all the time. In some ways, the bill is similar to the EARN IT Act in the US, […]
We’ve noted repeatedly that despite a steady stream of breathless rhetoric about America’s “dedication to bridging the digital divide,” U.S. government leaders still don’t actually know where broadband is or isn’t available. It only takes a few minutes perusing the FCC’s $350 million broadband map to realize government data completely hallucinates both speeds and competitors, and […]
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So, I already had a quick post on the bizarre decision by the 5th Circuit to reinstate Texas’ social media content moderation law just two days after a bizarrely stupid hearing on it. However, I don’t think most people actually understand just how truly fucked up and obviously unconstitutional the law is. Indeed, there are […]
Florida and Texas both passed blatantly unconstitutional laws limiting the ability of social media websites to moderate. Lawsuits were filed challenging both laws. In both cases, the district courts correctly blocked the laws from going into effect, noting that it was obviously a 1st Amendment violation to tell websites how they could and could not […]
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