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While our attention is focused on a handful of Israeli malware purveyors that have the capability to turn phones into state witnesses, plenty of others are operating under the radar. Israel doesn’t have a monopoly on powerful phone exploits. It’s a crowded market and everybody — from totalitarian states to the FBI — wants some. […]

The 2022 Premium Python Programming PCEP Certification Prep Bundle will help you master the essentials of today’s digital literacy with 12 courses on beginner, intermediate, and professional Python training. You’ll learn how to build your own apps and websites, get an introduction to Machine Learning, and more. It’s on sale for $35. Note: The Techdirt […]

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is at it again. Over the last few years, he’s taken to using the Supreme Court’s denial of cert in various cases as his own personal blog, to randomly muse on legal issues without any briefing. He’s done it to attack long standing defamation/1st Amendment precedent, and has used it […]

It’s really hard to overstate what a colossal failure AT&T’s $200 billion acquisition of Time Warner and DirecTV was. And if you’re an AT&T executive with a bruised ego in the wake of the implosion, the hits just keep on coming. The megadeals were supposed to cement AT&T as a powerhouse in media and video […]

Over the last few weeks, as Russia invaded Ukraine, you’ve probably heard some version of the story about how carefully Putin prepared for economic sanctions against the country. Whether or not those preparations actually have helped protect Russia is another story, but it wasn’t just the economics part of the equation that Russia was preparing […]

Back in 2019, Reps. Ro Khanna and Barbara Lee along with Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden introduced a bill to study the actual impact of FOSTA on sex workers. While that bill unfortunately went nowhere, the same group is now back and have reintroduced the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act (SSWSA). This is an […]

The ice cream machines used by a majority of McDonald’s franchise owners are notoriously flaky. Produced by Taylor Restaurant Equipment, the machines are so unreliable even the McDonald’s corporate Twitter account has made jokes about them. This unreliability has created a (very small) cottage industry of solutions. One solution is web-based: it simply tells you […]

Last week the world watched in horror as Russia illegally launched a brutal war in Ukraine. Online videos and eyewitness accounts evoked a terrible throwback to WWII, with tanks rolling over borders, frightened refugees, and bomb blasts in a major European capital. While the visuals look hauntingly familiar, this war is very different: it is […]

An astounding number of people seem to think that having a “fake news” law would be a good idea, even as we’ve shown over and over and over again how those kinds of laws are always abused by authoritarian goons to silence criticism. As part of its ongoing offensive on both Ukraine and the truth, […]

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The federal government would prefer information not want quite so badly to be free. It has obligations under the Freedom of Information Act to set information free, but it also has a handy stack of exemptions to ensure not too much information is freed. Citizens are free to ask for information. And the government is, […]

For years a growing number of US towns and cities have been forced into the broadband business thanks to US telecom market failure. Frustrated by high prices, lack of competition, spotty coverage, and terrible customer service, some 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of community broadband option. While the telecom industry routinely insists these […]

Well, that’s a wrap on our first week with Techdirt running on WordPress. Overall things have been working pretty well, but as expected there have also been several issues and some things that need improvement. We’ve been tracking user feedback in the comments and via the contact form, and I want to assure everyone that […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2017, new FCC boss Ajit Pai was getting down to work: moving to kill broadband privacy protections, falsely claiming benefits from his attacks on net neutrality (which he also called a mistake), and scaling back rules that forced ISPs to be clear about usage caps and hidden fees. On […]

I’ve banged on for quite a while about how video games have long not gotten the recognition they deserve as a major and growing part of the cultural landscape throughout the world. While there is no doubt that there has been a shift in this as time has gone on, it’s still the case that […]

Over the last five to six years, The NarrativeTM has been that Russia has built up such powerful propaganda and social media disinformation peddlers that it could effectively drive its own narrative and convince entire populations to go along with its preferred version of reality (i.e., not reality). There have always been reasons to question […]

Thanks to the one-two punch of the infrastructure bill and COVID relief, there’s more money sloshing around in the U.S. broadband ecosystem than perhaps any time in history. $46 billion (with a b) is slated to be distributed by the government over the next year, much of it overseen by the National Telecommunications and Information […]

At Tuesday’s State of the Union address, one of President Joe Biden’s pledges regarding the internet, was that he wanted to ban targeted advertising. Lots of people cheered this on, because lots of people absolutely loathe targeted advertising — which is sometimes, misleadingly, referred to as “surveillance capitalism.” My own opinion on this is that […]

Remember how Texas passed a social media content moderation law which was then blocked as unconstitutional by a federal court? Apparently people in Texas remember the passing of the law, but not the fact that it was blocked. Incredibly, this includes a judge as well. If it had been allowed to be come law, Texas’ […]

Now, you can understand any book or reading material of your choice regardless of its language! This state-of-the-art device is designed to translate up to 112 languages accurately and efficiently. The NEWYES Scan Reader can recognize 3000 characters per minute, has 0.3s fast translation speed, and its accuracy rate is as high as 98%. It […]