At the beginning of the year, we kicked off the latest edition of our annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927! Last night, the jam came to a close, with a few submissions sneaking in right before the deadline and bringing us to a total of 20 entries this year. We’ve only just […]
Here’s a weird one. With the rapid pickup of Mastodon and other ActivityPub-powered federated social media, there has been some movement among those in the media to make better use of the platform themselves. For example, most recently, the German news giant Heise announced it was setting up its own Mastodon server, where it will […]
This is some bad looking precedent here. Everyone is right to be concerned about election disinformation, especially if that disinformation is intended to keep certain people from voting, but historically, it has been public officials facing criminal charges for voter suppression, rather than toxic Twitter trolls. And Douglas Mackey, known as “Ricky Vaughn” on Twitter, […]
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We’ve been writing a bunch lately about DoNotPay, the massively hyped up “AI lawyer” run by Stanford dropout* Joshua Browder. Again, the company has received a ton of publicity regarding its “robot lawyer,” often from some of the publicity stunts that Browder pulls. Again, I think the underlying concept of using technology to help people […]
Frustrated by factual reality, science, and an independent press, the GOP and its wealthy backers have spent the better part of forty years building an alternative reality propaganda machine across AM radio, local broadcasting (with the help of Sinclair Broadcasting), fake “pink slime” local newspapers, cable news (OANN, Newsmax, Fox), and now the Internet. While […]
If you haven’t been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you will be familiar with the concept of the anti-“woke” culture war the Republican Party grows and farms for its own purposes. This isn’t to say there aren’t real cultural conflicts we need to work out as a country, but that […]
You might recall that Aereo founder Chaitanya Kanojia’s attempt to disrupt the TV industry ran face-first into an army of broadcaster lawyers and a notably ugly ruling by the Supreme Court. Undaunted, Kanojia returned with a new plan to try and disrupt the broken U.S. broadband industry. But that plan isn’t going so hot either. Kanojia’s new […]
Patent trolls make patents, and argue over them. They don’t have to ever make the thing described in their patents, if it’s even possible to determine what those things are. Instead, they generate legal threats and waste the time and money of companies that do do these things. This month’s Stupid Patent of the Month is a […]
For years now, I’ve talked about the impossibility of doing content moderation well at scale. I know that execs at various tech companies often point to my article on this, and that includes top executives at Meta, who have cited my work on this issue. But it still amazes me when those companies act as […]
Late last year, it was revealed that MSG Entertainment (the owner of several New York entertainment venues, including the titular Madison Square Garden) was using its facial recognition tech to, in essence, blacklist its owner’s enemies. Those targeted included lawyers working for firms currently engaged in litigation against MSG Entertainment. Owner James Dolan, through his […]
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Have you noticed that everything that Elon Musk insisted was “bad” about the old Twitter (often incorrectly) are things… he’s now doing himself, but in even more ridiculous ways? He insisted that Twitter was run by people who were promoting ideological political views. Yet… it was Elon Musk (not old Twitter management) who publicly insisted […]
After years of saying password sharing wasn’t really a big deal and was akin to free advertising, Netflix recently announced it would be cracking down on password sharing. It started with a new trial in the global south where users were nagged until they paid an additional fee if they shared their password with users outside of […]
We’ve written a few stories lately about DoNotPay, the “robot lawyer” service whose gimmick of an automated AI-driven tool that would help users deal with challenges like getting out of parking tickets or cancelling subscription services that are difficult to get out of sounds like a really enticing idea. But there have long been questions […]
I just want to share some back-of-the-envelope math. I’m increasingly convinced that Twitter (or at least the network neighborhoods that comprise my Twitter experience) is becoming a ghost town. Here’s why: A couple months ago, I spoke with Nancy Scola for her story about why DC-types can’t seem to quit Twitter. One of my comments […]
There have been a bunch of stories about how one of Elon’s big “cost saving” techniques was to stop paying for basically anything, including rent. To cut costs, Twitter has not paid rent for its San Francisco headquarters or any of its global offices for weeks, three people close to the company said. Twitter has […]
It’s rare to see a cop charged with murder. Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was not only charged but convicted (!) of murder after kneeling on the neck of George Floyd for nearly 10 minutes, and for three minutes after another officer told Chauvin he could no longer detect Floyd’s pulse. Officer Chavin — an […]
If it can conceivably be considered a “third party record,” the government is going to seek warrantless access to it. The Third Party Doctrine — ushered into existence by the Supreme Court in 1979 — says there’s no expectation of privacy in information shared with third parties. That case dealt with phone records. People may […]
ByteBoi is an open-source retro game console that you can assemble and code yourself. It can be coded in Make Code Arcade – an awesome online coding interface with a bunch of examples and tutorials. You can even use your ByteBoi for remote controlling your Wheelson because of the built-in Wi-Fi chipset. Build your own […]
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