Insurrectionist sprinter Josh Hawley has joined the growing chorus of GOP politicians who’ve spent years doing jack shit about U.S. consumer privacy abuses, and now want to pretend that banning a single app — TikTok — will protect American consumers from a problem they themselves created. Hawley, who also enjoys pretending that he cares about […]
One of the more annoying aspects of how the video game industry conducts its relationships with gaming journalists is the concept of embargos. The idea goes something like this: publishers will furnish journalists and/or game streamers with advanced copies of games, but include an embargo on any reporting, reviews, or streaming those games prior to […]
So, we’ve written a few times about DoNotPay, the supposedly AI-powered “robot lawyer” that was initially designed to help you contest parking tickets but then expanded to helping (usefully) with a bunch of consumer annoyances, like cancelling accounts, obtaining owed refunds, and the like. But it’s also got some shadiness in its past, like the […]
For a brief and interesting time, the New York Times employed a Public Editor to serve as a liaison with its readers. One of the most interesting of these was the fifth, Margaret Sullivan, who would go on to become a media columnist with the Washington Post and then, as of today, a weekly columnist […]
I just wrote about Utah’s ridiculously silly plans to sue every social media company for being dangerous to children, in which I pointed out that the actual research doesn’t support the underlying argument at all. But I forgot that a few weeks ago, Seattle’s public school district actually filed just such a lawsuit, suing basically […]
The truth remains the best defense against bogus defamation claims. And strong anti-SLAPP laws ensure the person being wrongfully accused of defamation gets to walk away with some of the anti-speech bully’s money. That’s what happened here in this case highlighted by Eric Goldman. In an extremely ill-advised move, plaintiff Chad Burmeister created a Facebook […]
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Utah, as a state, has a pretty long history of having terrible policy proposals regarding laws about the internet. And now it’s getting dumber. On Monday, the state’s Attorney General Sean Reyes and Governor Spencer Cox, hosted a very weird press conference. It was billed by them as an announcement about how Utah is suing […]
To be clear: the Chinese government is a violent authoritarian mess, and making U.S. networks more resilient to Chinese attacks is an important thing. But U.S. telecom policy is bizarrely obsessed with China to the point where all other policies, especially any policies that might upset the nation’s powerful and entrenched telecom monopolies, are routinely […]
Over a year ago, we discussed an annoying and strange set of actions taken by Rockstar and Take2, the companies behind the popular Grand Theft Auto series of games. Two actions were taken in sequence by those companies that were clearly related. First was that they worked to get a fan-made GTA 4 mod taken […]
Note: This post is an adaptation of what started initially as a Twitter thread. I’ve been going pretty hard on DoNotPay and its founder/CEO Joshua Browder for the past couple of days, and I’ve had a lot of people defending the service, saying that it could be a real boon to those who can’t otherwise […]
Automated web scraping can be problematic. Just look at Clearview, which has leveraged open access to public websites to create a facial recognition program it now sells to government agencies. But web scraping can also be quite useful for people who don’t have the power or funding government agencies and their private contractors have access […]
We recently wrote about Cory Doctorow’s great article on how the “enshittification” of social media (mainly Facebook and Twitter) was helping to lower the “switching costs” for people to try something new. In something of a follow up-piece on his Pluralistic site, Doctorow explores the process through which basically all large companies eventually hit the […]
Another Section 230 case has made its way into the federal court system. Of course, the plaintiffs really doesn’t want this to be a Section 230 case, since their lawsuit is predicated on content created by users of two chat apps. The lawsuit alleged that the developers of YOLO (an anonymous chat app) and LMK […]
Super Vectorizer Pro is used to vectorize images for personal and professional projects alike, whether you are a hobbyist or a graphic design company. With technological advances in raster-to-vector conversion, this image vectorizer program for Mac does an impressive job of vectorizing raster bitmap images and converting them to crisp, clean, scalable fine-line art illustrations […]
You may have heard last week that Amazon has announced the end of its “AmazonSmile” program, in which you could shop at Amazon, and a portion of all of the money you paid would actually go to the charity of your choice. Amazon claimed that the program “has not grown to create the impact we […]
We’ve noted a few times how the political push to ban TikTok is a dumb performance designed to do several things, none of which have to do anything with consumer privacy and security. We’ve also noted how college bans of TikTok are a dumb extension of that dumb performance, and don’t accomplish anything of meaningful […]
Cops in Nevada had better start behaving. The state’s Supreme Court has handed down a ruling that not only guarantees residents the right to sue under state law, but won’t allow officers to easily escape lawsuits by asking for qualified immunity. Here’s the background of the case, as summarized by Nick Sibilla at Forbes: What […]
We’ve long covered the trend of communities building their own broadband networks. It’s a movement directly created by decades of anger at telecom market failure, poor service, and monopolization. But since 2015, Vermont officials have taken things to an entirely different level. In 2015, the state legislature greenlit the creation of Communications Utilities Districts (CUDs). […]
Lots of people were expecting the Supreme Court to obviously agree to take the appeals of Florida’s and Texas’s social media content moderation laws. As you’ll probably recall, both Texas and Florida passed slightly different laws that effectively said that they could bar social media platforms from moderating certain types of content. Both laws were […]
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