To say that AI-generated art is controversial would be something of an understatement. The appearance last year of free tools like Stable Diffusion has not just thrown the world of art into turmoil, it has raised profound questions about the nature of human creativity. AI art also involves thorny issues of copyright that have piqued the interest […]
Telecom and media giants have been working overtime to block Gigi Sohn from being seated at the FCC. That has involved a sleazy smear campaign, seeded in the press by non-profits linked to companies like News Corporation, AT&T, and Comcast, falsely accusing Sohn of being a radical extremist who hates Hispanics, rural Americans, cops, puppies, and freedom. With Sohn freshly […]
We’ve got a double-header of cross-post episodes for you this week! Recently, Mike joined two different podcasts to discuss Congress’s response to the Twitter Files and the dumpster fire of a hearing held by the House Oversight Committee: The New Abnormal podcast from the Daily Beast, and The Sunday Show podcast from Tech Policy Press. […]
Over the last few weeks, you may have noticed that the world’s most tenacious paralegal, Kathryn Tewson, has been carefully dismantling claim after claim after claim from the company DoNotPay and its CEO Joshua Browder. I won’t rehash all of her discoveries, but many of them called into question Browder’s apparent tendency to massively overstate […]
After years of portraying tech companies as havens for nerd antagonists, FBI Director Chris Wray is trying to build a few extremely belated bridges. The rift between FBI and tech companies started with the rollout of default encryption for phones. Apple was the first to market with by-default encryption, something that became the focus of […]
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Last week we highlighted an amazing story of how Elon apparently threw a tantrum at Twitter HQ because the amount of “engagement” on his tweets was declining. Also in that article were details about how Musk sends engineers totally random bullshit requests all the time and they feel they have to deal with it, dropping […]
We’ve noted for a long while that the performative hysteria surrounding TikTok is basically a giant distraction from our failures on consumer protection and privacy legislation. Case in point: the growing number of mental health apps that routinely collect and monetize sensitive consumer mental health data, yet fail to meaningfully protect the data they collect. […]
New York’s Finest continue to set the sort of records New York residents would rather the NYPD didn’t. The NYPD is not too big to fail. But it’s apparently too big to curtail. In 2019, it capped off a spectacular two-year run in which it racked up over a half-billion in lawsuit settlements. That’s on […]
The Church of Latter Day Saints has made it onto our pages before for trying to abuse intellectual property laws, typically to keep content out of the public eye that it finds undesirable. I do like to note in posts like this that the LDS Church has also occasionally been quite lenient when it comes […]
The Supreme Court — years after the ubiquity of cell phones and their cameras — has yet to provide nationwide guidance on a topic that should be considered settled: the right to record public officials while they engage in their public duties. If cops can assert anything happening on a public street has no reasonable […]
We were just talking about how Twitter’s ad revenue woes may be even worse than previously expected. Earlier reports had suggested that ad revenue was down 40% as many of the biggest advertisers had abandoned ship in the name of protecting their own brand safety. But the more recent report said that advertising was actually […]
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To hear consecutive FBI directors tell it, unless legislators are willing to mandate encryption backdoors, the criminals (including terrorists!) will win. That’s the only option — at least according to Jim Comey and Chris Wray — given that the FBI, with its billions in funding and wealth of brainpower, is apparently unable to decrypt files […]
Not this again… a few years ago we wrote a post about Senator Joe Manchin’s very, very, very bad “See Something Say Something” Act. The bill would remove Section 230 for companies that don’t file a shit ton of nonsense busywork filings for anything they see online that might be bad having to do with […]
We’ve mentioned more than a few times how the great moral panic over TikTok is a hollow performance by unserious people who have little actual interest in consumer privacy. Folks like the FCC’s Brendan Carr, who’ve spent years opposing funding privacy regulators or passing a meaningful Internet privacy law, yet now suffer repeated, performative embolisms […]
This week, both our winners on the insightful side are comments about the expert consensus that Elon Musk has made Twitter’s CSAM problem worse. In first place it’s Thad responding to a Musk apologist offering up a nonsensical defense: Did you read the article? Did you read the headline? In second place, it’s Rocky responding […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the FCC was patting itself on the back for a historically stupid year, while it issued a report falsely claiming that killing net neutrality helped broadband competition, just as New Jersey became the latest state to protect net neutrality by executive order. Meanwhile, Hollywood was pushing some wild […]
Over a year ago, as the world was still largely reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, we wrote about the trend beginning to form for consolidation in the video game industry. Industry consolidation is very typical in times of economic strife and it appears the video game industry is not immune to it. We heard about […]
To be sure, SWAT operations are pulled off flawlessly around the nation every day. The right addresses are hit. The right windows are smashed. The right doors are destroyed. The correct perps are arrested. The proper people are filled with bullets if needed, etc. But, far too often, they go wrong. Often more concerned with […]
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