Over the last few years, we’ve written a number of stories about a (somewhat silly) trademark dispute between Jack Daniels, makers of whiskey, and VIP Products, makers of doggy chew toys, including one for “Bad Spaniels” that is a pretty clear parody of Jack Daniels. When we had last mentioned the case it was in […]
We’ve known for a while that the Fifth Circuit is staunchly pro-cop. But, in recent months, it’s also shown itself to be no friend of the First Amendment. In September, it suddenly decided the First Amendment doesn’t have anything to do with online speech. It refused to block a Texas law targeting social media services […]
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I know, I know, there are no room for facts in the modern GOP, just feelings. But, still, it’s kind of remarkable just how much they seem committed to the bit that Twitter was actively trying to suppress Republicans to help Joe Biden. There remains zero proof of this. Zero. Over the course of the […]
For much of the last year, European telecom giants have been pushing for a tax on Big Tech company profits. They’ve tried desperately to dress it up as a reasonable adult policy proposal, but it’s effectively just the same thing we saw during the U.S. net neutrality wars: telecom monopolies demanding other people pay them an additional […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Rocky with a lengthy, structured response to a complaint about our coverage of Twitter: “Trolling!? You must mean like gossiping about one minute service outages, and leading the readers to infer that the collapse of Twitter is imminent.” A quick search for “twitter outage” […]
On Tuesday, we announced the winners in all six categories of the fifth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1927. Now, as in past years, we’ll be spending the next few weeks taking a closer look at each of the winning games (in no particular order). First up, it’s the winner of the […]
A lawsuit filed over exploitation of content moderators will be allowed to continue, according to a recent ruling by a Kenyan court. Former employees of Meta sued the company in the Kenya Employment and Labour Relations Court last year, alleging being subjected to a “toxic work environment” while performing the often unpleasant task for removing […]
As we’re right at the 1 year anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of its sovereign neighbor, Ukraine, regular readers here will have followed along with all kinds of posts we’ve done on the subject, be it on tech-related items or some of the ways the video game industry has organized to help the country get […]
This isn’t about Bob Murray. I mean, it sure seems like it is. It involves a baseless defamation lawsuit against journalists, a West Virginia coal company CEO, and court losses for a litigious coal boss. This isn’t about “Eat Shit” Bob Murray, the head of (the now-bankrupted) Murray Energy who sued John Oliver for saying […]
I keep hearing people pretend that the GOP in general, and Florida GOPers more specifically, and Governor Ron DeSantis most specifically, are fighting for “free speech,” when they continually seem to push blatantly unconstitutional legislation designed to attack free speech and the 1st Amendment in a way that keeps getting Florida shot down in court […]
Facial recognition tech needs more work. It’s not great. Even when it’s good, it’s still pretty bad. While it performs well when identifying people not often considered to be criminal suspects (middle-aged white men), it’s far less accurate when identifying everyone else (minorities, women). Cops don’t often see what the problem is. Their job usually […]
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Well, this will be fun. As you’ll recall, in 2021, Texas signed into law a bill that effectively banned the right of companies to moderate content on social media. That law has been challenged in court, and while a district court tossed it out as unconstitutional (and obviously so), the 5th Circuit reversed in a […]
Early this week reports began to emerge that Dish Network was suffering from a widespread outage that effectively prevented a large chunk of the company’s employees from being able to work for more than four days. Initially, Dish tried to downplay the scope of the problem in press reports, only stating that they’d experienced an […]
This will be a quick one, but we now have a name and confirmation of a detail from a previous post. A couple of weeks back, we discussed how an unreleased game from developer Fntastic, The Day Before, was both having its release date pushed back and dealing with takedowns of a bunch of footage […]
Over the last few months we’ve had a few articles highlighting the pretty serious questions raised regarding how much of DoNotPay’s (“the world’s first robot lawyer”) marketing is pure bullshit and nonsense. It’s not surprising that there might be a bit of puffery from a startup, but DoNotPay’s claims are so outlandish, and its CEO, […]
One of the (many) villains in “Walled Culture” the book (free ebook versions) is the publishing industry, specifically in the context of the transition from analogue books to ebooks. What could have been one of the most important expansions of the power and possibility of the book form became instead its opposite – a diminishment […]
The cost of having a bad cop on the force never ends once the officer is no longer employed. The bleeding continues for years, either as tangible costs related to ongoing civil rights lawsuits or, less tangibly, the aftershocks of their negative effect on their coworkers. Former Maricopa County, Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio is still […]
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