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As Elon Fires More Trust & Safety Staff, Twitter’s Moderation Efforts Fall Apart

2 years 11 months ago
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 […]
Mike Masnick

John Deere Once Again Pinky Swears It Will Stop Monopolizing Repair

2 years 11 months ago
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 […]
Karl Bode

Independent Reporting Shows Cops Are Still Killing People At An Alarming Rate

2 years 11 months ago
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 […]
Tim Cushing

AI Lawyer Will Represent Client In Traffic Court, Threatening Nonexistent Market For Traffic Court Lawyers

2 years 11 months ago
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 […]
Tim Cushing

Decades Late, The FCC Might Start Cracking Down On Terrible Telecom Prison Monopolies. Maybe.

2 years 11 months ago
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 […]
Karl Bode

Arizona Government Thinks It Should Be Able To Decide What You Wear And When

2 years 11 months ago
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 […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: iBrave Cloud Web Hosting

2 years 11 months ago
If you’re doing anything online, then you need web hosting. Normally hosting costs hundreds to thousands of dollars a year. But iBrave Hosting is changing that by making the best web hosting technology in the world available for the lowest price you’ve ever seen. iBrave has been designed for you by experts with over twenty […]
Gretchen Heckmann

It’s 2023 And The FCC Only Just Proposed Rules Requiring Telecoms Immediately Inform Consumers When Their Data Is Compromised

2 years 11 months ago
Back in 2015, the nation’s top telecom regulator attempted to create some very basic (by international standards) privacy guidelines for telecom providers, demanding they do things like (gasp) be transparent about the consumer data they were collecting and selling, while also requiring that consumers (gasp) opt in to the sale of any particularly sensitive data. […]
Karl Bode

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

2 years 11 months ago
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment about the FBI advisor who attacked Signal for its refusal to collect user metadata: ‘How dare you close the curtains, I was looking in those!’ I love how a company that collects as little as possible information on […]
Leigh Beadon

This Week In Techdirt History: January 1st – 7th

2 years 11 months ago
Five Years Ago This week in 2018 (yes, 2018 is now five years ago) Comcast rang in the new year with a flurry of price increases while we looked at what the death of net neutrality would bring as California joined the list of states proposing their own net neutrality rules. At the same time, […]
Leigh Beadon

Copyright Has Kept De La Soul’s Classic 1st Album Off Streaming… Until Now

2 years 11 months ago
For years, we’ve written about the copyright nonsense around sampling in hip hop music, and how it was treated with very, very different rules than things like cover songs and paying homage to previous artists in other forms of music. As we’ve mentioned for over a decade, filmmaker Kembrew McCleod did a full (fascinating) exploration […]
Mike Masnick

FTC Proposes Banning Non-Competes, Which Would Unleash Innovation

2 years 11 months ago
For years, I’ve been highlighting the overwhelming evidence that non-compete agreements are horrible for innovation. There are multiple studies on this, which show how much of Silicon Valley’s success can be attributed to an almost accidental interpretation of the California business code that outlawed non-compete agreements, while other studies have strongly suggested that a big […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: InfoSec4TC Platinum Membership

2 years 11 months ago
InfoSec4TC understands the security essentials, needs, and concerns of not only today’s businesses but tomorrow’s challenges, and will work closely with you to ensure your target is met. If it’s a certificate you’re after, InfoSec4TC has the highest passing rate, and if you are after career shifting or advancing your current position, they are your […]
Gretchen Heckmann