NSO Group is objectively awful. For years — with the assistance of the Israeli government — NSO sold to whoever wanted powerful phone exploits to deploy against targets. Ostensibly sold to investigate violent crimes and acts of terrorism, the less-than-savory customers of NSO flipped the script, deploying zero-click malware that allowed government employees to target […]
The 2022 Complete Renewable Energy Engineer Preparation Bundle features 12 courses to help you learn all about renewable energy sources and how to design, develop, and build renewable energy technologies. Courses cover wind turbines, solar energy, ETAP software, and more. It’s on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by […]
We’ve written many times about the many problems of the JCPA (the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act). As noted, the bill is a really sketchy bit of corruption: creating a link tax to force internet companies to funnel money to news organization owners for… sending them traffic. Everything about the JCPA is wrong and broken. […]
Back in 2020, New York City officials unveiled an aggressive plan to revolutionize broadband in the city. The centerpiece of this Internet Master Plan involved building a $156 million open access fiber network that competitors could easily join at low cost, driving some much needed competition — and lower rates, faster speeds, and better coverage — to […]
For years, cars have collected massive amounts of data. And for years, this data has been extraordinarily leaky. Manufacturers don’t like to discuss how much data gets phoned home from vehicle systems. They also don’t like to discuss the attack vectors these systems create, either for malicious hackers or slightly less malicious law enforcement investigators. […]
While it seems difficult for some to balance these things, it remains entirely possible to think that Julian Assange is, generally speaking, a horrible human being, who was likely easily played like a fiddle by foreign nation states looking to play influence games in other nations… and that the US’s charges against him remain absolute […]
Last Friday evening, Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi dropped a non-bombshell on everyone, with the revelation of internal Twitter documents about the content moderation around Hunter Biden’s laptop that showed… nothing particularly unusual or notable happened, and there’s no evidence of government interference. Over the weekend, Mike was interviewed by Justin Hendrix for the Tech […]
Geofence warrants are popular. They’re also controversial. Cops have discovered Google houses plenty of location data. Going to cell phone providers is a bit tricky, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision, which erected a warrant requirement for acquiring weeks or months of location data. But geofence warrants don’t have a particular target. The only […]
We’ve been covering the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), which is a blatant handout by Congress in the form of a link tax that would require internet companies pay news orgs (mainly the vulture capitalist orgs that have been buying up local newspapers around the country, firing most of the journalists and living off […]
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Cops gonna cop, as Rachel Cheung reports for Vice. Hundreds of police officers in Hong Kong improperly accessed a woman’s case file after she was arrested for allegedly having sex on the balcony of a high-rise residential building, local media reported this week. A clip that showed a naked couple fornicating on the balcony of […]
We’ve noted for a long time how the “race to 5G” was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager to sell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it’s more of an evolution than a revolution. But that’s not what telecom […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Ben Jones with a comment on our post about the appeals court denying immunity to officers in the harrowing case of Floyd Bledsoe: So, these cops acted as accomplices of the murderer, aided in his escape from justice, obstructed the investigation, submitted fraudulent evidence […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, we wrote about Ajit Pai’s big lie about net neutrality. His FCC had lots of little lies too, which was why the NY Attorney General was investigating how dead people submitted comments supporting the repeal. Comcast was also lying, of course, and promising that even though it spent […]
Denying qualified immunity to law enforcement officers who violate rights is a rarity. It doesn’t mean the sued cops lose. It just means they can’t dismiss the lawsuit. In theory, that means officers alleged to have violated rights will now make their case in front of a jury. But a cop facing a jury is […]
There’s a great post by Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive blog with the title “Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books“. He makes an important point about the work involved in providing and preserving digital books: The Internet Archive processes and reprocesses the books it has digitized as new optical character recognition technologies […]
The FTC and four state attorneys general this week struck a $9.4 million settlement with Google over allegations that Google covertly paid celebrities money to promote a phone none of them had ever used. The FTC’s announcement states that the agency had previously filed suit against Google and iHeartMedia for airing nearly 29,000 deceptive endorsements […]
Rolling Stone has a fun article quoting multiple former Twitter employees highlighting that polls are the least secure tool on the platform, and are regularly open to manipulation by bots: “Polls are more prone to manipulation than almost anything else [on Twitter]. It’s interesting, given his [Elon’s] use of polls,” he added. Several other ex-Twitter […]
ID.me made its disastrous news cycle debut as COVID-19 continued to wreak havoc worldwide. With ID verification and other government services mostly still being handled remotely, multiple governments continued to wrestle with these unprecedented logistical problems. ID.me appeared to be such a solution. It wasn’t. In June 2021, it was reported that ID.me was locking […]
Now, you can understand any book or reading material of your choice regardless of its language. The NEWYES Scan Reader can recognize 3,000 characters per minute, has 0.3s translation speed, and its accuracy rate is as high as 98%. It also supports 9 UI languages, 55 OCR languages, 112 text translation languages, and 112 voice […]
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