Yesterday we wrote about how all of the terrible anti-internet bills we were worried about being slipped into the “must pass” National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) bill were, thankfully, left on the cutting room floor. However, within the 4,400 pages, there was still plenty of other nonsense added, including a variation on a bill that […]
Hungry to boost municipal budgets, a growing roster of states and cities have spent the last five years or so trying to implement a tax on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services. Sometimes (like in Chicago) this has involved expanding an existing amusement tax (traditionally covering book stores, music stores, ball games and other brick and mortar […]
It will come as no surprise to any regular reader here when I say that Nintendo is roughly the most annoyingly draconian protector of IP in the video game space. At this point, Techdirt posts discussing Nintendo’s copyright and trademark antics are legion. Notable among those posts for the purposes of this discussion are several […]
For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk’s Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations are harming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimed would never happen in the first place is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated. Musk […]
Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you’ve said something quite wrong about Twitter and how it handled something to do with Hunter Biden’s laptop. If you’re new here, you may not know that I’ve written a similar post for people who are wrong about Section 230. If you’re being wrong about Twitter […]
Update: So we had this post about SF supervisors approving the killer robots in their initial vote, and had a note at the end that it still needed one more round of approvals by the Supervisors… and apparently widespread protests last night convinced the board to drop the proposal! The original (mostly obsolete) post is […]
iScanner turns your device into a powerful digital office and even more. It makes high quality scans of documents, educational materials, and to-do lists, and helps to edit, markup, and share them. The scanner app also can count similar objects and solve math problems and equations. Scan anything you need using your iPhone or iPad […]
Phew. As we’ve noted over the past few weeks, there’s been a big push by some in Congress over the last couple of weeks to sneak in some really terrible bills, among them JCPA, KOSA, INFORM, and SHOP SAFE. We’ve covered the problems with each of these bills and the very serious problem with trying […]
Anker, the popular maker of device chargers and the Eufy smart camera line, proudly proclaims on its website that user data will be stored locally, “never leaves the safety of your home,” footage only gets transmitted with “end-to-end” military-grade encryption, and that the company will only send that footage “straight to your phone.” Yeah, about that. Security […]
It was only some weeks back that we were discussing how a group of hobbyists were once again doing the culture preservation work that content creators should be doing in the form of a scan of every single Nintendo Power magazine and uploading it to the Internet Archive. At the time, you could go to […]
You might have seen some headlines recently suggesting that former congressional representative and current flailing social media CEO (and serial suer of the media) Devin Nunes had some sort of legal victory over Rachel Maddow and MSNBC. And he did get a very, very small victory while piling up more losses at the same time. […]
There is a serious problem in the way many tech-focused bills are drafted these days. Whether it’s a lack of trust or simply a desire to punish, those working on tech-bills are not talking to the right industry people about how things actually work in practice. This leads to simple mistakes like requiring something that […]
NSO Group is objectively awful. For years — with the assistance of the Israeli government — NSO sold to whoever wanted powerful phone exploits to deploy against targets. Ostensibly sold to investigate violent crimes and acts of terrorism, the less-than-savory customers of NSO flipped the script, deploying zero-click malware that allowed government employees to target […]
The 2022 Complete Renewable Energy Engineer Preparation Bundle features 12 courses to help you learn all about renewable energy sources and how to design, develop, and build renewable energy technologies. Courses cover wind turbines, solar energy, ETAP software, and more. It’s on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by […]
We’ve written many times about the many problems of the JCPA (the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act). As noted, the bill is a really sketchy bit of corruption: creating a link tax to force internet companies to funnel money to news organization owners for… sending them traffic. Everything about the JCPA is wrong and broken. […]
Back in 2020, New York City officials unveiled an aggressive plan to revolutionize broadband in the city. The centerpiece of this Internet Master Plan involved building a $156 million open access fiber network that competitors could easily join at low cost, driving some much needed competition — and lower rates, faster speeds, and better coverage — to […]
For years, cars have collected massive amounts of data. And for years, this data has been extraordinarily leaky. Manufacturers don’t like to discuss how much data gets phoned home from vehicle systems. They also don’t like to discuss the attack vectors these systems create, either for malicious hackers or slightly less malicious law enforcement investigators. […]
While it seems difficult for some to balance these things, it remains entirely possible to think that Julian Assange is, generally speaking, a horrible human being, who was likely easily played like a fiddle by foreign nation states looking to play influence games in other nations… and that the US’s charges against him remain absolute […]
Last Friday evening, Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi dropped a non-bombshell on everyone, with the revelation of internal Twitter documents about the content moderation around Hunter Biden’s laptop that showed… nothing particularly unusual or notable happened, and there’s no evidence of government interference. Over the weekend, Mike was interviewed by Justin Hendrix for the Tech […]
Geofence warrants are popular. They’re also controversial. Cops have discovered Google houses plenty of location data. Going to cell phone providers is a bit tricky, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision, which erected a warrant requirement for acquiring weeks or months of location data. But geofence warrants don’t have a particular target. The only […]
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