Pretty much everyone who has ever gone to college hates educational publishers. There’s an oligopoly of just five giant publishers, and they long ago learned that they are in the best market ever: the buyers of their textbooks (the students) have no choice and are forced to buy the books if their professors assign them […]
The 2022 Data-Driven Decisions Bundle is designed to help you become a data expert. The courses are self-paced and interactive, so you can begin right away. This data-driven bundle takes you through the step-by-step process of creating, manipulating, and analyzing data. Master data and make better, smarter decisions. It’s on sale for $49. Note: The […]
The Australian government doesn’t care much for encryption. It has, for years, tried to legislate encryption out of the picture. A law passed in 2018 gives the government the power to compel encryption-breaking efforts from tech companies. The law survived a cursory review by the Parliamentary Joint Committee. Its 2021 report said the law was […]
For years, we’ve noted how one of the greasier lobbying tactics in telecom is the co-opting of civil rights groups to provide cover for anti-competitive and anti-consumer policies. Such groups are given cash for a shiny new event center in exchange for parroting any policy position that comes across their desks, even if it dramatically […]
In an extremely rare move, a federal court has ordered a jail into receivership, placing it under the direct control of a court-appointed third party that will (hopefully) carry out the needed changes Hinds County, Mississippi either can’t or won’t do. (h/t Scott Greenfield) Receivership is uncommon. As Hernandez Stroud of the Brennan Center points […]
At this point, every reader here should be aware that YouTube has a copyright/DMCA problem it has yet to solve. Going through the myriad of posts we’ve done about DMCA and ContentID takedowns on YouTube, the theme is abundantly clear: YouTube’s automated systems are wide open for mistakes, fraud, and abuse. If you don’t think […]
When Google Fiber launched back in 2010, it was heralded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive telecom sector. Initially, things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to the […]
Yes, yes, copyright is a tool for censorship. Contrary to the claims of copyright system supporters that copyright can’t be used for censorship, the reality is that is basically the only thing that copyright is good for. I mean, at this point, you are either not paying attention, or are just outright lying if you […]
Real problems are what legislators are supposed to be solving. The Philippines has plenty of those, ranging from (government-endorsed) extrajudicial killings of drug dealers and drug users to abuses of state power to silence journalists to the actual murders of human rights activists. But legislators with their own axes to grind will always find ways […]
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A while back, we noted that there was something of a Rorschach test in how you viewed basically everything about Nick Sandmann, the MAGA-hat wearing high school student who became front page news after a video of him standing in front of a Native American demonstrator, Nathan Phillips, went viral. Everyone had their own interpretations. […]
INCOMPAS, the DC trade policy and lobbying group primarily steered by tech giants, is urging the FCC to finally boost the U.S.’ pathetic definition of broadband. The FCC’s current definition of broadband, 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up, is looking a bit pathetic, particularly on the upstream side. And the lower standard helps the uncompetitive […]
A couple of weeks ago, Techdirt wrote about how an anonymous user had put up for sale the data of an estimated one billion Chinese citizens, probably obtained from the Shanghai police. Back then, what exactly had happened was a little unclear — not least because the Chinese authorities were shutting down any discussion of […]
Just a few weeks we noted that this was inevitable, but Facebook has now made it official that it’s no longer interested in dumping money on news publishers. “A lot has changed since we signed deals three years ago to test bringing additional news links to Facebook News in the U.S. Most people do not […]
We’ve noted for years how U.S. consumer location data is routinely abused by a long list of bad actors, including wireless carriers, broadband providers, app makers, adtech companies, data brokers, police, people pretending to be police, governments, and more. It’s also, not too surprisingly, a problem in Canada. Restaurant chain Tim Hortons was recently found to […]
Civil asset forfeiture has shown us the government has a weird way of instigating lawsuits. In rem forfeiture cases allow government agencies to file suits against objects, rather than the people they’ve been seized from. This leads to some very amusing case names (even if the underlying process verges on legalized theft), like South Dakota […]
Early last year, Indonesia implemented a new internet regulation law. Referred to as “MR5,” the law gave the government the power to engage in widespread blocking of content. Not only did the law create intermediary liability, it required any site offering services to Indonesian representatives to register with the government. On top of that, service […]
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As you’ll recall, the defining moment that lead to Donald Trump creating his Truth Social Twitter clone was his being banned from Twitter for potentially egging on further violence on January 6th. Even before Truth Social was started, Trump’s most vocal and loyal… well, let’s just call them “fans,” kept insisting that what was needed […]
This week we noted how the Democratic party had introduced a new two-page bill that would simply give the FCC even clearer authority to restore net neutrality. Of course the bill won’t pass this corrupt Congress, was barely noticed in the summer heat, and couldn’t be implemented anyway because the telecom industry and GOP have […]
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