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Indian Government Cuts Off Internet Access To 27 Million Punjab Residents As It Continues Its Targeting Of Sikhs

2 years 8 months ago
The Indian government under Narendra Modi has become an even worse version of itself. It has expanded its power unilaterally to silence critics and oppress citizens Modi doesn’t care for. It has continued to do this despite courts finding these actions illegal. The government has, on more than one occasion, cut millions of people’s access […]
Tim Cushing

As Free Speech Enthusiast Elon Plans To Release Twitter’s Source Code, Twitter Desperately Seeking Identity Of FreeSpeechEnthusiast Who Leaked Twitter Source Code

2 years 8 months ago
Ever since Elon Musk made his initial bid to buy Twitter, he’s talked about “open sourcing” the algorithm. He mentioned it last April in the first interview he gave, on the TED stage, to talk about his plans with Twitter. And since taking over the company at the end of October, he’s mentioned it over […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: Microsoft Office Pro 2021

2 years 8 months ago
Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch – whatever your needs are. You’ll get Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Publishers Get One Step Closer To Killing Libraries

2 years 8 months ago
Last Monday was the day of the oral arguments in the Big Publishers’ lawsuit against libraries in the form of the Internet Archive. As we noted mid-week, publishers won’t quit until libraries are dead. And they got one step closer to that goal on Friday, when Judge John Koetl wasted no time in rejecting every […]
Mike Masnick

Tech Press Slowly Figuring Out That Banning TikTok Doesn’t Fix The Actual Problem

2 years 8 months ago
The great TikTok moral panic of 2023 is largely a distraction. It’s a distraction from the fact we’ve refused to meaningfully regulate dodgy data brokers, who traffic in everything from your daily movement habits to your mental health diagnosis. And it’s a distraction from our corrupt failure to pass even a baseline privacy law for the internet era. Until […]
Karl Bode

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

2 years 9 months ago
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is a statement about a particular presence in the comment sections that most of you are surely familiar with. And a lot of people seem to agree! It comes from an anonymous account, but is signed by sumgai (and later confirmed with a logged in […]
Leigh Beadon

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: The Pigeon Wager

2 years 9 months ago
So far in our series of posts showcasing the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927, we’ve featured Best Remix winner Lucia, Best Visuals winner Urbanity, and Best Adaptation winner To And Again. Today, we’re taking a closer look at the winner of the Best […]
Leigh Beadon

Man Loses Maine Vanity Plates Describing His Love For Bean Mush

2 years 9 months ago
It’s absolutely stupid just how often we’ve had to write about issues surrounding license plates. For convoluted reasons that involve how plates, which are mandated on all cars by states, are government property, that means that a state disallowing a vanity plate therefore does not violate the First Amendment. There are caveats to that that […]
Dark Helmet

Utah’s Governor Live Streams Signing Of Unconstitutional Social Media Bill On All The Social Media Platforms He Hates

2 years 9 months ago
On Thursday, Utah’s governor Spencer Cox officially signed into law two bills that seek to “protect the children” on the internet. He did with a signing ceremony that he chose to stream on nearly every social media platform, despite his assertions that those platforms are problematic. Yes, yes, watch live on the platforms that your […]
Mike Masnick

How Forcing TikTok To Completely Separate Its US Operations Could Actually Undermine National Security

2 years 9 months ago
Back in August 2020, the Trump White House issued an executive order purporting to ban TikTok, citing national security concerns. The ban ultimately went nowhere — but not before TikTok and Oracle cobbled together “Project Texas” as an attempt to appease regulators’ privacy worries and keep TikTok available in the United States. The basic gist […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The ChatGPT By OpenAI Training Bundle

2 years 9 months ago
The ChatGPT By OpenAI Training Bundle has four courses to introduce you to ChatGPT. You will learn the fundamentals of working with ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI. You’ll gain hands-on experience using ChatGPT to generate text that is coherent and natural, and you will explore the many possibilities for using this tool […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Jim Jordan Weaponizes The Subcommittee On The Weaponization Of The Gov’t To Intimidate Researchers & Chill Speech

2 years 9 months ago
As soon as it was announced, we warned that the new “Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” (which Kevin McCarthy agreed to support to convince some Republicans to support his speakership bid) was going to be not just a clown show, but one that would, itself, be weaponized to suppress speech (the […]
Mike Masnick

The US Government Has Not Justified A TikTok Ban

2 years 9 months ago
Freedom of speech and association include the right to choose one’s communication technologies. Politicians shouldn’t be able to tell you what to say, where to say it, or who to say it to. So we are troubled by growing demands in the United States for restrictions on TikTok, a technology that many people have chosen […]
Karl Bode

The Imbued Test, Or How To Know Whether Section 230 Applies

2 years 9 months ago
The biggest mistakes people make about Section 230 involve thinking that it is somehow a complicated law. In reality, its operation is not all that complex. Accordingly, determining whether it applies to any particular situation should not be all that difficult to evaluate, even when we think about hard or edge cases. Ultimately what we […]
Cathy Gellis