Five Years Ago This week in 2018, we wrote about a session of our election simulation game, Machine Learning President, that we played in Chicago. The EFF sued cops in California for refusing to hand over stingray documents, a Florida appeals court said handing over passwords is protected by the fifth amendment, and Senator Wyden […]
This is not a fun case. It’s instructional, but it involves some pretty noxious criminal behavior. And that’s how these things work, usually. People who aren’t facing criminal charges rarely need to challenge warrants. They never need to challenge the evidence used against them because, well, no one’s using any evidence against them. (h/t FourthAmendment.com) […]
After being discussed for years and years, the Online Safety Act in the UK is now law, after receiving “royal assent” last week. Hilariously, the UK’s announcement declared that children and adults will now be safer online, as if that’s absolutely true. It’s not, though. The law includes many provisions that will make both children […]
These days everyone seems to be talking about AI, and the Copyright Office is no exception, although it may make sense for it to speak here because people keep trying to invoke copyright as a concept implicated by various aspects of AI, including, and perhaps especially, with regard to “training” AI systems. So the Copyright […]
The EU is currently updating eIDAS (electronic IDentification, Authentication and trust Services), an EU regulation on electronic identification and trust services for electronic transactions in the European Single Market. That’s clearly a crucial piece of legislation in the digital age, and updating it is sensible given the fast pace of development in the sector. But […]
The Chinese government has spent years placing its hands around the collective neck of its Uighur minority. For some reason, the massive government fears a small minority of Muslims and has subjected it to constant surveillance and outright oppression. The Chinese government has been assisted in these efforts by Huawei, a tech company that realizes […]
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Somehow I missed this (and I’m surprised it didn’t get much attention) but last month was the 25th anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) being signed into law. I only spotted it because The Register just had an article looking back at 25 years of the DMCA. Given how central to various internet […]
We’ve well established that the AT&T–>Time Warner–> Warner Brothers Discovery mergers were some of the dumbest, most pointless “business” exercises ever conceived, resulting in more than 50,000 layoffs, the death of popular properties like Mad Magazine, and an overall erosion of brands like HBO and CNN. Very much on brand, HBO’s CEO and chairman Casey Bloys […]
Cord-cutting, referred to as some sort of myth for many years, is now an obvious trend. And as I have personally claimed for years now, the last thread that is keeping the cable business in a state that’s anything remotely like its heyday is live sports broadcasts. In the past several years, however, more and […]
Over the past few weeks of our Error 402 series on the history of web monetization, we talked about the rise of the commercialized internet, and how it enabled transactions online, leading to the original dot com bubble around e-commerce. But, as we noted, nearly all of that was based on using the internet as […]
As far back as I can remember, cell site location info (CSLI) was always covered by the Third Party Doctrine. That court-created doctrine said anything “voluntarily” handed over to third parties can be obtained by the government. Without a warrant. That not only includes bank records, phone records, and other transactional records we possibly haven’t […]
A few weeks ago, I highlighted how EU chief Digital Services Act enforcer, Thierry Breton, was making a mess of things sending broadly threatening letters (which have since been followed up with opening official investigations) to all the big social media platforms. His initial letter highlighted the DSA’s requirements regarding takedowns of illegal content, but […]
A burglary case that included evidence found at the scene (broken glass, a canister of pepper spray) and an apparent eyewitness has fallen apart because the government decided going right to Google meant it could ignore Supreme Court precedent and the Constitution. That’s the story here. Angelique Grace was indicted on burglary charges. Ultimately, a […]
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Back in March of this year, Elon Musk effectively admitted that he had set fire to more than half of Twitter’s value in telling employees that they’d be getting stock grants with the company valued around $20 billion. That’s a pretty steep discount from the $44 billion he paid for the company. Now, some would […]
When Google Fiber launched back in 2010, it was heralded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive U.S. telecom sector. Initially, things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to […]
The LAPD’s handling of gang violence hasn’t gone well. For years, gang task forces roamed the city, violating rights repeatedly. Adding insult to these injuries, the city spent millions funding a predictive policing program that did little more than encourage biased policing. Then there’s the LAPD’s gang database, a horrendous mess filled with people designated […]
Welcome to the modern world, where the thing you bought that worked a particular way at the time you purchased it isn’t actually fully owned you, which means the thing you bought could work totally differently tomorrow! This dystopia for consumers was perhaps most famously demonstrated to exist when Sony famously removed the ability to […]
The good news is Americans are concerned about data privacy. Some Americans always have been but it looks like more people are concerned than usual, which could be a good thing. I’m not sure it will be. As is often the case here in America, our views on privacy — especially when combined with our […]
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