England has taken a big step toward crushing the digital divide with new rules requiring that all new home builds must include gigabit (1000 Megabits per second, Mbps) broadband. Estimates suggest that around 12 percent of the 171,190 new homes constructed in England last year didn’t have gigabit broadband capabilities upon completion. Amendments to Building Regulations […]
We’ve been talking a lot about video game exclusivity over the past couple of years. The sudden uptick in concern over a longstanding practice that ebbs and flows with time is largely related to industry consolidation of studios coming out of the COVID pandemic. In times of financial stress in an industry, that is often […]
As you’re probably aware, now that it’s January, we’re running our annual public domain game jam, for games based on works from 1927. This is the 5th year we’ve done this, ever since the public domain (finally) returned to the US after decades with no works ever reaching the public domain, due to never-ending copyright […]
U.S. telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast spent millions of dollars and several decades quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. Even in instances where AT&T and Comcast have repeatedly refused to. In some cases, these industry ghost written […]
For at least 3 months in early 2020, France-based EncroChat wasn’t in sole control of its communication services. Its servers had been compromised by European law enforcement — a joint effort involving law enforcement agencies located in France, the UK, and the Netherlands. Authorized by a single court order from a French court, the Joint […]
They say you should never stop learning, and at Stone River, that mantra is a way of life. Through this unlimited subscription, you’ll get full access to 800+ courses and 4,800 hours of online learning, covering everything from iOS mobile development to graphic design. Plus, you’ll get a range of VIP perks, including unlimited eBooks, […]
Elon Musk insisted that a key reason he took over Twitter was in support of “free speech.” As we noted, it was pretty clear that he never really understood what free speech actually means. Musk likes to say that his focus as the owner of Twitter has been to allow all legal speech, but as […]
Last year BMW took ample heat for its plans to turn heated seats into a costly $18 per month subscription in numerous countries. As we noted at the time, BMW is already including the hardware in new cars and adjusting the sale price accordingly. So it’s effectively charging users a new, recurring fee to enable […]
It’s amazing how some people think trademarks work. In the last week or so, several media outlets briefly went into a frenzy over a trademark application that was filed for Tesla’s yet to be released Cybertruck specifically for vehicle categories other than “on land” vehicles. Notably, Elon Musk made some questionable claims that the Cybertruck, […]
Rap artist Afroman’s biggest hit is “Because I Got High,” a track that details how his best intentions were undone by his weed intake. So, one might reasonably suspect marijuana might be found at his residence. But there’s very little that’s reasonable about what happened to Afroman four months ago. Earlier this year, he became […]
There have long been attacks on the global, open nature of the internet. Traditionally these came from authoritarian regimes looking to wall off portions of the internet and exert greater control of them, but lately we’ve also been seeing growing threats from democratic countries in the form of problematic laws and regulations. Recently, we wrote […]
Shot-spotting tech is notoriously unreliable. The industry leader, ShotSpotter, continues to claim it’s helping solve gun crime even as many law enforcement customers shift from “current” to “former.” In Newark, New Jersey, three-quarters of “gunshots” “detected” by ShotSpotter were false positives. In another city, the failure rate wasn’t quite as spectacular, but it was little […]
Despite having already fired a huge percentage of Twitter’s trust & safety team handling issues around content moderation, including the teams handling child sexual abuse material and election denialism, last week Elon apparently fired another chunk of the team. Just in time for organizers of the insurrection in Brazil to make use of social media […]
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There are plenty of governments operating on platforms of pure evil, but the Saudi government is one the few that continues to be given a pass by other governments who fear alienating a source of oil located in the Mideast. North Korea may be evil but it’s limited by its lack of a functioning economy. […]
Once just the concern of pissed off farmers and nerdy tinkerers, the last two years have seen a groundswell of broader culture awareness about “right to repair,” and the perils of letting companies like Apple, John Deere, Microsoft, or Sony monopolize repair options, making repairing things you own both more difficult and way more expensive. John Deere’s draconian repair […]
Law enforcement agencies have no interest in tracking how often officers kill people. Despite all the talk about police reform, very few states require accurate reporting on deadly force deployments. Even the DOJ doesn’t care. The federal face of law enforcement has been required to compile this data for over two decades. It has yet […]
It’s the rise of the lawbots, something not even foretold by Futurama, which allowed a “simple hyper-chicken from a backwoods asteroid” to perform much of the series’ criminal justice work. AI-in-everything is on the rise. And that includes lowball court cases, as Lauren Leffer reports for Gizmodo. An AI-based legal advisor is set to play […]
However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they’re arguably worse in prisons. For decades, journalists have outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resulting sky high rates (upwards of $14 per minute) for inmate families. Efforts to […]
Trying to legislate sexual identity is a fool’s errand. Plenty of Arizona state fools are backing a bill that attempts to do that, though. When you can’t figure out how to stop people from outward displays of their sexual identity, you start getting unconstitutional in a hurry. This bill — now being booted about by […]
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