It’s been a decade since a federal court declared the New York Police Department’s stop-and-frisk program (mostly) illegal. Judge Shira Scheindlin, in a 195-page decision, pointed out everything that was wrong with the program, which ignored the “Terry stop” parameters defined by the Supreme Court in its 1968 decision to engage in stops of anyone […]
I must admit that before even beginning to write this story up about Bungie losing in court in the summary judgement phase on copyright and trademark infringement claims against cheat-seller Aimjunkies, I had to check the dates on the TorrentFreak post several times. That’s because we already talked about this a year ago, when Bungie […]
Why do people still file these lawsuits? For years now, we see lawsuits filed against websites over their content moderation decisions, despite Section 230 barring them (and the 1st Amendment rights of the platform backing that up). These lawsuits always fail. Perhaps the reason we’re seeing a bunch more of these lately was because a […]
Last week we discussed how a contract dispute between Charter (Spectrum) and Disney resulted in 15 million Charter customers losing access to more than 20 ABC and ESPN channels they pay for. We also noted how despite a lot of weird claims this standoff would somehow dramatically reshape television, that nothing would actually change and […]
The UK government is still pushing a bill that would give it more direct control of the internet, but it has, at least for the time being, decided against mandating broken encryption. For months now, supporters of the Online Safety Bill have insisted the only way to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material […]
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So, we’ve been talking a lot about age verification of late, as governments around the world have all (with the exception of Australia?!?) seemed to settle on that as a solution to “the problem” of the internet (exactly what that problem is they cannot quite identify, but they’re pretty sure there is one). Of course, […]
We’ve noted a few times how the political push to ban TikTok is a dumb performance largely designed to distract people from our failure to pass even a basic internet privacy law or regulate data brokers. We’ve also noted how college bans of TikTok are a dumb extension of that dumb performance, and don’t accomplish anything of meaningful […]
The old saying goes: there’s only two things that are permanent, death and taxes. For quite a while now, we could have added a third item to the list: Intuit annoying us to death with its bullshit advertisement about filing for taxes for “free.” You really should go back and read our posts on this […]
There have been a whole bunch of antitrust lawsuits filed against Google over the last few years (in fact, one just settled last week though we don’t yet know the details, though when that case was first filed, we noted some problems with it). The very first, though, seemed like the weakest. As you may […]
Earlier this year, we had an episode looking at Canada’s proposed social media link tax and the many ways it would be terrible. Since then, that link tax has become law (though not yet come into effect), and unsurprisingly proven that the dire predictions were correct. Also since then, the Cato Institute’s Paul Matzko published […]
We’ve talked about this case – American Society for Testing and Materials et al v. PublicResource.org – a few times before. It was one of two cases brought against Carl Malamud’s Public Resource organization for posting the Code of Federal Regulations on its website, and including with the CFR language the standards promulgated by various […]
If you read this morning’s story about Elon Musk’s impulsive decision to move servers out of Sacramento and up to Portland in a dangerous and wholly unsecure manner, and wondered if the FTC (who has two consent decrees with the company regarding how it protects users’ private data) was aware of it, we already have […]
As the name suggests, classification algorithms are what allow computers to well… classify new observations, like how your inbox decides which incoming emails are spam or how Siri recognizes your voice. The Essential MATLAB & Simulink Training Course will show you how to implement classification algorithms using MATLAB, one of the most powerful tools inside […]
Back on Christmas Eve of last year there were some reports that Elon Musk was in the process of shutting down Twitter’s Sacramento data center. In that article, a number of ex-Twitter employees were quoted about how much work it would be to do that cleanly, noting that there’s a ton of stuff hardcoded in […]
We’ve noted several times now how automakers have started taking basic car functions and trying to make them subscription services in a bid to please Wall Street. Mercedes, for example, has started hiding better engine performance behind subscription paywalls. BMW last year decided it was going to make heated seats an $18 per month subscription […]
Techdirt has been writing about “evergreening” for many years. It refers to the practice by pharmaceutical companies of making small changes to a drug, often about to come off patent, in order to gain a new patent that extends its manufacturer’s monopoly control over it. The New York Times has a story about the Big […]
“Probable cause on four legs.” That’s the nickname for drug dogs, which give cops permission to perform searches just by performing a neat little trick cops call an “alert.” What constitutes an “alert” is pretty much up to the dog’s handler, who can claim any movement is the drug dog detecting contraband or (deliberately or […]
A few years back we had an article about the “The Green Smoothie Girl” aka Robyn Openshaw, who went on this weird SLAPPy binge of threatening people who left negative reviews of her brand of woo woo nonsense. Apparently since that time, Openshaw went down the unsurprising path of being a COVID anti-vaxxer (natch) and […]
The ends aren’t always supposed to justify the means. And a federal agency that already raised the hackles of defense lawyers around the nation during a CSAM investigation probably shouldn’t be in this much of hurry to start sending out unsolicited software to unknowing recipients. But that’s the way things work now. As a result […]
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