It seems the madness just never stops on Elon Musk’s Twitter, and it’s almost impossible to keep up. Recently, Mike joined the Daily Beast’s podcast, The New Abnormal, for a discussion with host Andy Levy about just what exactly is going on with Twitter under Musk’s erratic leadership. The conversation first appeared as part of […]
Sigh. Look. I want to stop writing about Twitter. I want to write about lots of other stuff. I have a huge list of other stories that I’m trying to get through, but then Elon Musk does something dumb again, and people run wild with it, and (for reasons that perplex me) much of the […]
Maybe, just maybe, before we rush to pass questionable new laws about “protecting children online,” we should look to make use of the old ones? The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) has been in place for years, and it has problems, but so many companies ignore it. I’ve mentioned in the past how I […]
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Is this irony? It kind of seems like it is. Maybe it isn’t. It could just be a coincidence. An extremely unfortunate, ironic coincidence. Whatever it is, it doesn’t look good for the FBI, which encouraged pretty much every private company to register as reporting entities so the FBI could (theoretically, it appears) respond to […]
Much like the company’s dedication to women, AT&T’s dedication to not funding people eager to overthrow democracy appears to be somewhere between inconsistent and nonexistent. And the company certainly isn’t alone. Shortly after January 6 a number of companies, including telecom giants like AT&T, publicly crowed about how they’d be ceasing all funding to politicians who […]
One of the reasons that copyright is so unbalanced in favor of companies, especially Big Content, is that the process of bringing in new copyright laws is hard for ordinary members of the public to engage with. Typically, new laws come about after government consultations. Although these are public in the sense that they are […]
No matter what you may have heard on certain social media outlets, this is how the First Amendment actually works. Free speech “heroes” can freely curb your speech. The government, however, may not. So, if you’re a government account operating on social media services, when you fuck around, you find out. This decision [PDF] — […]
The last few days on Twitter have been, well, chaotic, I guess? Beyond the blocking of the ElonJet account, followed by the blocking of the @JoinMastodon account, then the blocking of journalists asking about all this and the silly made up defense of it, over the weekend, Twitter announced a new policy banning linking to […]
Maybe if enough cases pile into the federal court system, the Supreme Court might decide to actually establish a First Amendment right to record public officials as they engage in their public duties. Until then, we’re stuck with a patchwork of precedent that recognizes this right only in certain parts of the nation. Fortunately for […]
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Last week when Elon Musk banned the ElonJet account, then banned a bunch of reporters for talking about it, and then insisted that they had tweeted out his “assassination coordinates” leading to a crazed stalker to jump on a car with his child in it, some were… skeptical. I wasn’t sure it made sense to […]
From the Internet of very broken things to telecom networks, the state of U.S. privacy and user security is arguably pathetic. It’s 2022 and we still don’t have even a basic privacy law for the Internet era, in large part because over-collection of data is too profitable to a wide swath of industries, which, in turn, lobby Congress […]
This week, as you might expect, the comments are dominated by responses to Elon Musk’s ongoing craziness at Twitter. On the insightful side, our first place winner is an anonymous summation of the ElonJet situation: Twitter: It’s really, really bad if you share other people’s location information. If you do, we will ban your account. […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the NY Attorney General found that two million fake comments flooded the FCC’s call for feedback on net neutrality, while two separate studies found that the fakes made up the majority of comments supportive of the repeal, all while Ajit Pai was making a tone-deaf “joke” about being […]
There’s a long way to go before the electric car revolution even comes close to the version that currently exists in everybody’s heads. Getting enough rare-Earth minerals to ramp up EV production at the scale most have in mind will be a big challenge. Then there are other issues related to safety thanks to EVs’ […]
It’s no surprise the government cheats when it prosecutes people. Judge Jed Rakoff pointed this out while resigning from the DOJ’s Forensic Science Committee when it became clear the DOJ was not interested in rooting out junk science. He called the government’s refusal to allow defendants to examine forensic means and methods “trial by ambush.” […]
So, yes, I’ve written a few things now on Elon’s silly excuses for his frantic speedrun through the content moderation learning curve. It’s getting more mainstream press because of journalist accounts getting banned (including, this morning, Insider’s Linette Lopez, who did not post any “doxing” info but has reported critically on Musk for years, which […]
Every so often, Techdirt writes about the long-standing problem of orphan works, the huge collection of older creations that are out of circulation and have no obvious owners. Arguably, they should be called “hostage works”, since they remain uselessly locked away by rigid and outdated copyright laws, to no one’s benefit. Despite that, the copyright […]
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