Cops may have only the vaguest grasp on the laws they use to initiate stops, but they sure as hell understand copyright law. With algorithms doing the heavy lifting to prevent copyright infringement, cops have deployed a new tactic in hopes of preventing accountability activists from livestreaming or uploading their interactions with officers. When the […]
Last week, about the same time I posted by giant post on all the things that Elon Musk didn’t understand about content moderation, former Reddit CEO Yishan Wong posted a really long, but completely worth reading thread about content moderation on social networks. I’m not going to go through the whole thing, but did want […]
A world leader not known for shying away from truly terrible ideas about speech and the internet is back at it again. A few years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered, as Cathy Gellis put it, “a speech only an autocrat would love,” decrying pretty much everything that’s good and open about the internet while […]
Agenda is a date-focused note-taking app for macOS, iPadOS, and iOS, which helps you plan and document your projects. Agenda gives you a complete picture of the past, present, and future, driving your projects forward. Whether you’re a business manager noting decisions in a meeting, a teacher planning next week’s lessons, or a blogger brainstorming […]
Behold! An actually interesting academic study exploring whether or not Twitter moderation has an anti-conservative bias! This is something many of us have been asking for for a while, but it’s a very difficult thing to study in any meaningful way. The results of this study are actually really fascinating, but it’s important to dig […]
We’ve long covered how cable and broadband companies use a rotating array of bullshit fees to covertly jack up advertised rates, hitting you with a much higher bill after you’ve subscribed. We’ve also noted how new streamlined technologies have been turning the binding arbitration process on its head, making it easier and more affordable for […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is PaulT with a comment about Ed Sheeran filming his songwriting sessions to avoid copyright complaints, in response to a commenter saying it’s unfair to malign the copyright holders who went after him, because they legitimately own the rights they own: The legitimacy of the […]
Here we are at the last in our series of posts about the winners of the fourth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1926. So far, we’ve looked at The Wall Across The River, The Obstruction Method, Dreaming The Cave, Mr. Top Hat Doesn’t Give A Damn!, and A Drunk Man Looks at […]
On February 2, 2022, Minneapolis PD officers executed a no-knock raid on an apartment. Officer Mark Hanneman then summarily executed Amir Locke within seconds of his entry into the apartment. The Minneapolis PD suggested Amir Locke had plenty of time to realize police officers were in the apartment. The body cam time stamps showed something […]
Cops lie. It’s a statement more factual than statements cops — the people given the biggest benefit of a doubt in “your word against mine” courtroom showdowns — tend to make when testifying or filling out reports. Here’s the most recent example of cops lying. And it’s only one of several. A Missouri State Highway […]
In the pantheon of aggressive intellectual property bullies, Disney certainly would be one of the companies that would be competing to be Zeus. Disney has simply never seen an opportunity for IP enforcement that it hasn’t acted upon, be it copyright, trademark, or anywhere in between. More to the point for this post, Disney also […]
A few months after the snippet tax was agreed to as part of the EU Copyright Directive, Australia indicated it wanted to take the same route. The government there planned to make Internet companies pay newspapers for sending the latter extra traffic, by imposing something called the News Media Bargaining Code. In a blog post […]
Last week, federal agents took down two alleged baddies for doing the thing: impersonating federal agents. Two men have been arrested for allegedly impersonating federal agents over the course of several years. The FBI alleges that Arian Taherzadeh, 40, and Haider Ali, 35, have been pretending to be various officers and employees of the U.S. […]
The Z2 headphones earned their name because they feature twice the sound, twice the battery life, and twice the convenience of competing headphones. This updated version of the original Z2s comes with a new all-black design and Bluetooth 5.0. Packed with TREBLAB’s most advanced Sound2.0 technology with aptX and T-Quiet active noise-cancellation, these headphones deliver goose bump-inducing […]
Lots of talk yesterday as Elon Musk made a hostile takeover bid for all of Twitter. This was always a possibility, and one that we discussed before in looking at how little Musk seemed to understand about free speech. But soon after the bid was made public, Musk went on stage at TED to be […]
While the press and some policy circles have made a large stink the last few years about massive new “bipartisan support for antitrust reform,” we’ve noted that the push isn’t quite what’s being advertised. While some of the bills being proposed might help correct some competitive imbalances online, the push in general is bizarrely narrow […]
This reads like a film script and plays like a farce. It is one of the most insane decisions you’ll ever read. And it’s not because the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court did something insane. It’s because everything leading up to the decision plays out like a Coen brothers crime film and keeps escalating from there. […]
Historically, “smart” TVs aren’t always particularly smart. They’ve routinely been shown to have lax security and privacy standards. They also routinely feature embedded OS systems that don’t age well, aren’t always well designed, don’t perform particularly well over time, are slathered with ads, and are usually worse than most third-party game streaming devices or video […]
We’ve written a few times about the serious problems of the “SMART Copyright Act” from Senators Thom Tillis and Pat Leahy. However, Cory Doctorow alerts us to yet another reason why the bill is extremely problematic. As you’ll recall, the bill would allow the Copyright Office to basically designate “technical measures” that websites would have […]
Last year, we wrote about the Canadian government’s efforts to push a bill regulating social media content like broadcast television and, soon after, their work on new “Online Harms” legislation that (among many provisions) would require platforms to report certain content to law enforcement and national intelligence services. These efforts and the government’s general approach […]
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