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Daily Deal: PlayStation Plus Essential 12-Month Subscription

3 years ago
Unleash the power of PlayStation and explore hundreds of incredible games with a new choice of membership plan. With PlayStation Plus Essential, you’ll get to enjoy all the core PlayStation Plus benefits: join your friends in online multiplayer, add new games to your collection every month, get incredible deals from PlayStation Store, and more. Relive some […]
Gretchen Heckmann

T-Mobile Hacked For The Eighth Time In Five Years

3 years ago
T-Mobile hasn’t been what you’d call competent when it comes to protecting its customers’ data. The company has now been hacked numerous times just since 2018, with hackers at one point going so far as to publicly ridicule the company’s lousy security practices. Case in point: T-Mobile just revealed in an SEC filing (spotted by TechCrunch) that the company was […]
Karl Bode

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

3 years ago
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy on our post about the FEC tossing out the GOP’s complaint about Google spam filters, where he called extra attention to the fact that no Republicans used Google’s special spam-filter evading program: That really needs to be hammered home any time […]
Leigh Beadon

This Week In Techdirt History: January 15th – 21st

3 years ago
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, Rep. Marsha Blackburn was pushing a fake net neutrality law, while the Senate push to save net neutrality was one vote short, and lawsuits were lining up against the FCC over the repeal: first from 22 state Attorneys General, and then from Mozilla and consumer groups like Public […]
Leigh Beadon

Another Israeli Exploit Developer Caught Selling Malware To Blacklisted Countries

3 years ago
Maybe it’s time for the Israeli government to put a moratorium on Mossad-based startups. Israeli intelligence services have been the petri dishes for a particular strain of techbro — ones who have the smarts to create zero-click exploits but none of the common sense needed to cull baddies from their customer lists. The Israeli government […]
Tim Cushing

Starlink Is ‘Forced’ To Finally Start Caring About The System’s Light Pollution And Harm To Scientific Research

3 years ago
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 […]
Karl Bode

Twitter’s ‘Fixed’ Blue Verification Program Still Horribly Broken, As The Taliban Gets Verified

3 years ago
As you’ll recall, Elon Musk’s first “big idea” for “saving Twitter” was to get rid of the existing verification program, oddly and uncomfortably merge it with Twitter’s subscription program, Twitter Blue, and… um… profit? Lots and lots of people (including Twitter’s existing trust and safety team) explained why this was a stupid idea, but Musk […]
Mike Masnick

Activists Blast NY Governor Hochul For Screwing up State’s Right To Repair Efforts

3 years ago
The good news: New York State recently passed landmark right to repair legislation that should improve consumer access to independent repair options. The bad news: despite passing the state assembly 147–2 and the senate 59–4, lobbyists managed to convince NY Governor Kathy Hochul to dramatically water down the legislation before it was passed, rendering it […]
Karl Bode

Daily Deal: Clocky, The Runaway Alarm Clock

3 years ago
An alarm on wheels. Clocky, the runaway alarm clock, is the rolling, jumping, moving alarm. He’s the durable bedside alarm that will run away, hide, move, roll, wheel, beep, and jump (from up to a 3-foot nightstand). He moves on carpet or wood, and changes directions over and over until you get up to turn […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Twitter Makes It Official: No More 3rd Party Clients Allowed

3 years ago
Last week, Twitter (with no notice or explanation) seemed to cut off API access to the most popular 3rd party Twitter clients. It was unclear if this was done on purpose or not. Earlier this week, it became pretty damn clear that it was done on purpose, after one of those providers, Tweetbot, dug up […]
Mike Masnick

Telecom Giants Head To Court To Kill NY State’s Demand They Give Poor People $15 Broadband

3 years ago
Recently, New York State passed a new law (pdf) demanding that regional broadband providers (Verizon, Charter Spectrum, and Altice) provide low-income consumers $15, 25 Mbps broadband tiers to help them survive COVID. The goal: to try and help struggling Americans afford the high cost of broadband during an historic health crisis. Under the proposal ISPs are also […]
Karl Bode

Experian’s Treasure Trove Of PII Breached By Simply Altering URLs

3 years ago
Data brokers like Experian and Equifax pose tempting targets for malicious hackers looking to find another source for personal info they can hawk online to other malicious people. The sad thing is, no one really needs to hack their databases. They’re more than willing to just leave them exposed. In 2017, Equifax leaked personal info […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: MiniTool Power Data Recovery Personal

3 years ago
MiniTool Power Data Recovery Personal is the most cost-effective data recovery program for all common Windows system users. The 100% clean data recovery software for Windows enables you to recover unlimited data (deleted or lost) from Windows computers, memory/SD cards, USB flash drives, external hard drives, etc. On one hand, it covers all the functions […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Desperation Sets In: Twitter Offers To Match $250,000 In Ad Spending To Lure Pissed Off Advertisers Back

3 years ago
Things are going great in Twitterland, apparently. The company has been facing lawsuits, tech outages, government investigations, bailing partners, not to mention departing users and advertisers. We had noted that 40% of advertising had gone away last month, and this week reporters are noting that an internal Twitter presentation confirms that number, while noting that […]
Mike Masnick