The GOP is currently trying to hold the global economy hostage by using the debt ceiling debate as a bludgeon. Mostly to implement budget cuts nobody likes (like major budget cuts at the VA, or cuts to vast swaths of the country’s already faltering social safety net). If it goes badly, economists warn the net […]
Recently, I wrote for Lawfare about Sen. Dick Durbin’s new STOP CSAM Act bill, S.1199. The bill text is available here. There are a lot of moving parts in this bill, which is 133 pages long. (Mike valiantly tries to cover them here.) I am far from done with reading and analyzing the bill language, […]
There are few things I enjoy writing about more than cops who feel waving around a piece of paper will ensure they can get what they want. I’ve handled a few of these stories before, most of them centered on Signal, the little messaging service that could — one that does not collect user data […]
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To hear Elon and his biggest fans tell the story, pre-Elon Twitter was a hellhole of censorship often driven by government demands, and he had to take over the company to “bring free speech back.” As astute observers not easily misled by nonsense peddlers knew, however, in actuality, old Twitter was actually one of the […]
For decades, academics have been trying to warn anybody who’d listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters has created either “news deserts,” or local news reporting that’s mostly just low-calorie puffery and simulacrum. Despite claims that the “internet would fix this,” fixing local news just wasn’t […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone responding to the allegation that we have been inconsistent about whether or not Twitter blue checks have value: The value of the blue check under Old Twitter was “verification”—i.e., “this person is who they say they are”. Was the system perfect? […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, we announced one of our most exciting and unusual projects: a Kickstarter to fund the production and release of a training card game developed by the CIA and uncovered via FOIA. We were blown away by the response when we hit our goal in 40 hours, and we’re […]
Phew. We’ve written a bunch about Stephen Thaler’s quixotic and dangerous quest to allow AI created works and inventions to receive copyrights and patents. It’s repeatedly failed to convince people, especially US judges, that Congress intended anyone other than human beings as the creators and inventors to receive such monopolies. Thankfully, Thaler’s loss streak continues. […]
Law enforcement loves cheap drug tests. First, they’re cheap, around $2/per. Second, they can turn a whole host of legal substances into probable cause for searches and arrests. Field drugs tests have converted everything from a deceased child’s ashes to bird poop (on a car hood, no less) into illicit substances justifying the removal of […]
We’ve noted for decades how telecom monopolies convinced corrupt state legislatures to pass counterproductive bans on creative community broadband networks. The bills are protectionist crap that are ghost written by telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast, and designed to protect their regional broadband monopolies from grass roots competitive disruption on a town by town level. […]
Today is six months since Elon took over Twitter and began this bizarre speedrun of the content moderation learning curve in which he seems to repeatedly… not learn a damn thing. Over and over again he makes ridiculous choices that have made the entire platform less welcoming for speech, more willing to obey government demands, […]
Grope. Grope. Grope grope grope. Grope. Andddddddd… some humiliating of people with rare medical conditions just because. That’s just how the Transportation Security Administration (est. one-month-post-9/11 2001) operates. Americans are forced to subject themselves to groping, humiliation, unjustified questioning/searches, seizures of explosive breast milk, etc. just because the federal government thought the only way to […]
Surprise Mom with a farmer’s choice bouquet: 24 exquisite long-stem roses or 12-14 daylillies handpicked by farmers for their vibrant colors and beauty. For $44.99, you’ll get these dozens delivered anywhere in the continental US. Whether you’re near or far, these roses are the perfect way to let her know that she is loved and […]
Almost exactly a year ago, we pointed out that Ron DeSantis deliberately trying to punish Disney for making some mild criticism of an (obviously unconstitutional) bill that he was endorsing was, itself, a 1st Amendment problem. And that was true even if the underlying idea to get rid of Disney’s control over the land in […]
Between COVID relief and the recently passed infrastructure bill, there’s an historic influx of more than $60 billion being thrown at this country’s substandard broadband networks. And, as you might expect, there’s a lot of heavy lobbying and maneuvering by various parties to obtain that money, and/or ensure that it’s actually utilized for the greater […]
We’ve been following the entire saga of Microsoft’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard for some time now. The whole thing has been decidedly messy, for various reasons. For starters, there are three main regulatory bodies that most of us have been waiting to hear from: the UK’s CMA, the USA’s FTC, and the EU. And […]
As you may have noticed, headlines are full of the wonders of chatbots and generative AI these days. Although often presented as huge breakthroughs, in many ways they build on machine learning techniques that have been around for years. These older systems have been deployed in real-life situations for some time, which means they provide […]
I’ve been criticizing the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) approach to internet regulations, because they’re doing this “wink, wink, nudge, nudge” bit in which they insist that the DSA is not regulating speech, but then they admit that the point of the DSA is to see less “bad” speech on the internet. But, whether we […]
A few years ago AT&T, a company that tried to cheap out on upgrading its broadband lines to fiber, effectively stopped selling DSL. While that’s understandable given the dated copper-based tech, the problem is that thanks to concentrated telecom monopolization, many of these customers were left without any replacement options due to a lack of […]
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