You know, it was just a few weeks ago that we posted an open letter to Elon Musk laying out just some of the basics of speedrunning the content moderation learning curve. And, as people keep reminding me, he seems to be doing all the levels all at once. But here’s the incredible bit: unlike […]
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In March 2019, we reported that a Washington federal court has tossed (definitively) a lawsuit brought by two Seattle police officers who believed being called murderers gave them a cause of action. It did not. Seattle councilwoman Kshama Sawant did not actually call these two cops — Scott Miller and Michael Spaulding — murderers. Instead, […]
Back in 2014, Comcast introduced a new $1.50 per month surcharge on cable bills it called its “Broadcast TV Fee.” Said fee was really just a portion of the cost of doing business for Comcast (programming costs), busted out of the full bill and hidden below the line — designed specifically to let the company […]
It’s a lesson that apparently keeps needing to be re-learned over and over again: for far too many types of digital purchases, you simply don’t own the thing you bought. The arena for this perma-lesson are varied: movies, books, music. And, of course, video games. The earliest lesson in that space may have been when […]
DNA collection at the time of arrest may make sense in certain cases. If it’s a violent crime — rape, murder, home invasion, etc. — it probably is smart to take some sort of a sample which may help place the suspect at the scene of the crime. Not that DNA evidence is infallible. It’s […]
The good news: there’s more than $50 billion in broadband subsidies coming down the road courtesy of COVID relief and infrastructure legislation. The bad news: monopoly ISPs are working overtime using every trick in the lobbying book to ensure this money goes to them, and not to any number of smaller, local competitors. If money […]
Some people just don’t understand social media. Or the Constitution. Or moderation efforts. Former president Donald Trump is one of those people. Last July, he sued Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube under the theory that the suspension of his accounts was the result of the Biden administration’s direct interference. Because his successor approached social media services […]
We keep seeing it show up in a variety of places: laws to “protect the children” that, fundamentally begin with age verification to figure out who is a child (and then layering in a ton of often questionable requirements for how to deal with those identified as children). We have the Online Safety Bill in […]
We’ll get to Chris Wray in a moment, but first let’s do a throwback to May 29, 2018 — the date the FBI first promised to correct its miscount (estimated to be off by as much as 4,000 devices) of uncrackable devices in its possession. Multiple statements utilizing the FBI’s bad stats were edited, with […]
For decades, we’ve discussed how U.S. broadband is generally spotty, expensive, and slower than many countries due to regional monopolization. And, for just as long, we’ve highlighted how U.S. policymakers in both parties comically go out of their way to not even acknowledge that monopolies are a problem, often instead employing vague, causation-free rhetoric about […]
Clearview wants to be the best in a shady business. As facial recognition tech has undergone increasing public scrutiny, Clearview has chosen to be the turd floating in the government surveillance punchbowl. Clearview scrapes public websites for pictures and data, and sells access to its immense database and the AI to exploit it to whoever […]
This blog has just written about the likely loss of a very particular kind of culture – K-pop live streams. Culture is culture, and a loss is a loss. But potentially we are facing the disappearance of a cultural resource that is indisputably more important. I’m talking about Twitter, and its vast store of tweets that […]
We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: it cannot make sense to extend copyright terms retroactively. The entire point of copyright law is to provide a limited monopoly on making copies of the work as an incentive to get the work produced. Assuming the work was produced, that says that the bargain that […]
The Copia Institute was back at the Supreme Court last week with a new amicus brief urging it to grant review of the Eleventh Circuit’s decision in NetChoice v. Moody. That case, if you remember, took issue with the Florida’s attempt to regulate the Internet with its social media bill (this was the one with […]
Ohio cops just can’t seem to get their head around First Amendment protections. A case hopefully en route to a Supreme Court review involves Parma, Ohio cops who decided it was completely legal to arrest a town resident for creating a clearly satirical Facebook page that suggested the Parma PD was offering free abortions in […]
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We’ve been somewhat critical of Elon Musk‘s tenure as Twitter owner and CEO (I think for fairly good reasons), but he does have a few good ideas. Lead among them, wanting to enable encrypted direct messages (DMs). He’s mentioned it before, but also had this slide in a recent internal presentation he gave: There’s not […]
The “cord cutting” phenomenon the cable and broadcast sector long denied or downplayed simply shows no sign of slowing down. According to the latest data by Leichtman Research, the top U.S. pay TV companies lost another 785,000 subscribers last quarter as younger Americans continue to shift to streaming video, over the air antennas, or free […]
When cops decide they’ve found the right perp, very little can persuade them to look elsewhere. This tunnel vision has the tendency to take years of freedom away from innocent people. And it would be terrible enough if officers simply refused to consider exonerative evidence. But in this case (like far too many others), the […]
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