A collective of assholes d/b/a the Florida legislature recently passed another very bad law. I realize I may need to be more specific. Florida has been passing bad laws by the fistful under Governor (and presidential hopeful) Ron DeSantis. The bad ideas — all of them unconstitutional — range from regulating social media via compelled […]
Over the last few months there have been a flurry of lawsuits against AI companies, with most of them being focused on copyright claims. The site ChatGPTIsEatingTheWorld has been tracking all the lawsuits, which currently lists 11 lawsuits, seven of which are copyright claims. Five of those are from the same lawyers: Joseph Saveri and […]
DEA Administrator Anne Milgram’s tenure has been marked by increasingly alarmist proclamations about fentanyl, social media, fentanyl, “the children,” fentanyl, “drug dealers want to kill their customers,” and… fentanyl. Without a doubt, fentanyl is killing people. It’s not killing cops, even though they often pretend that it is. But a lack a clarity as to […]
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Well, this is not surprising, but unfortunate. With the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) to be debated in a Congressional hearing on Thursday, the White House had President Joe Biden come out and give a full throated endorsement of the horrible, dangerous, bill that will damage privacy and harm children. We’ve got to hold — […]
Last March, popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn’s appointment to the FCC fell apart, after telecom and media giants (with the GOP’s help) waged a year long lobbying and propaganda campaign falsely framing her as a radical (The Verge has a good new interview with Sohn on what happened, in case you missed it). […]
What is “plain view?” Cops claim it’s anything anyone could see if they happened to be in the same place at the same time, including those moments when citizens deploy their own air force. Force your way into the house under the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment? Anything out in the open is […]
Let me start this post with an anecdote. I’m in my 40s and have been a Chicago Cubs fan my entire life. If you know anything about baseball, then you know that means that for more than 30 years, my entire fandom was wrapped in an identify of losing, and I was also saddled with […]
Okay, now we’re getting back to the plan. Two weeks ago we featured an excerpt from the audiobook of Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow’s new (and excellent) novel, and promised that we’d soon be joined by Cory himself. And now, we deliver! Listen to this week’s episode for a long and far-reaching conversation between Mike […]
We’ve talked a lot about just how bad the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is. Yet some people (including people who, frankly, should know better) keep trying to tell me how well meaning it is. It’s not. It’s dangerous. But it has real momentum. A massive bipartisan group of Senators are co-sponsors of the bill. […]
For the first time in a long time, the Intelligence Community is facing an uphill battle to getting one of its most invasive surveillance powers renewed. Not even during the heyday of the Snowden leaks has the IC seen this much resistance to a clear reauthorization of its Section 702 program. This surveillance grabs everything […]
The TruGolf Mini is a new approach to learning the game of golf. Paired with E6 CONNECT software, this interactive swing studio analyzes and displays swing data after every shot, helping golfers of all skill levels understand the game. With TruGolf Mini, every shot you take is a lesson. It’s on sale for $230. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store […]
Reddit CEO’s insistence that the protests from Reddit would simply “pass” certainly hasn’t come to pass just yet. While increasing pressure from the company against protest mods has resulted in some backing down, many are continuing to engage in malicious compliance, making it clear they’re still protesting. And, a few days ago, after many threats […]
Language learning technology’s (aka “AI”) introduction into journalism has been a blistering mess. And not just because the technology is undercooked (which it is), but because the folks in charge of most major media outlets are incompetent cheapskates who simply see the tech as a way to cut corners, wage war on labor, and automate […]
Well, well, this may be a story that is starting to come to a close. With the EU having already approved Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the two remaining hurdles Microsoft had to jump through were with the UK’s CMA agency and the FTC here in the States. After a recent loss in court blocking […]
Biased policing is just the way things are done. Decades of targeting minorities for being minorities has resulted in tons of garbage data now being used to justify “smarter” policing guided by AI that has been fed nothing but garbage. Every so often, law enforcement agencies are forced to reckon with their racist brand of […]
I wasn’t going to write about Elon changing Twitter’s name and branding to X, because… who cares? I’m not sure what the point is. But, a lot of people have been asking me my thoughts, and the more I was trying to parse it all out, the more confused I became. It basically only makes […]
Police officers are quick to argue that anything people do in public doesn’t have an expectation of privacy. They have also been quick to argue (until precedent made it mostly futile) that anything they do in public shouldn’t be documented, recorded, and disseminated. These cops are, of course, wrong. But that doesn’t stop them from […]
As the name suggests, classification algorithms are what allow computers to well… classify new observations, like how your inbox decides which incoming emails are spam or how Siri recognizes your voice. The Essential MATLAB Training Bundle will show you how to implement classification algorithms using MATLAB, one of the most powerful tools inside a data […]
Elon Musk seems infatuated with bots and scrapers as the root of all his problems at Twitter. Given his propensity to fire engineers who tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, it’s not difficult to believe that engineers afraid to tell Musk the truth are conveniently blaming “scraping” on the variety of problems that […]
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