Five Years Ago This week in 2017, as a new study shed more light on America’s terrible broadband access situation, many people were gearing up for a day of protest in support of net neutrality. After long being holdouts, Facebook and Google finally joined, followed by the laughable move of AT&T getting on board, though […]
Another school has learned it can’t discipline students for off-campus behavior, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s “fuck cheer” decision. Teens do stupid things. Sometimes they do them at school and the school is free to punish them. Sometimes they do them elsewhere and that’s where the limits kick in. That’s what the Cherry […]
It’s no secret that Techdirt believes YouTube’s copyright enforcement program is an absolute mess. On the one hand, it’s difficult to be too hard on the company. After all, it is trying to figure out how to enforce draconian copyright laws in countries like America at a scale that is absolutely absurd. On the other […]
Just a few weeks back we talked about how the US’s unwillingness to fix the way the NSA collects internet data could basically mean that most of the big US internet services cannot work in the EU. That article was about Google, and it goes through the background and history of the various US/EU privacy […]
Over the last few months we’ve been covering this bizarre story of how Republican politicians, pushed by their preferred spamming provider (which misrepresented a study on how email providers treat political spam), have been falsely claiming that Google is “censoring” their political emails. They’ve also been pushing a law that would require email providers not […]
We’ve long noted how U.S. broadband maps are a bit of a dumpster fire. U.S. taxpayers have spent more than $350 million for FCC broadband maps that overstate broadband availability and speeds, downplay widespread monopolization and consolidation, and can’t even be bothered to measure affordability, one of the biggest obstacles to widespread adoption. You only […]
Charge your device or illuminate your desk with this innovative 6-in-1 Wireless Charger. It’s easy to use with its touch buttons and Qi wireless charging for Qi-enabled devices. Beautifully made with a modern look, it can quickly charge your device and is touch-sensitive allowing you to show the digital clock and calendar. For your convenience, […]
Courts (with the rare exception) are in agreement: there’s a First Amendment right to film cops. With every citizen carrying a camera these days, there’s a lot more filming happening. And those recordings have often proven key when cops face criminal charges for violating rights or, you know, murdering people. It’s little wonder cops aren’t […]
When last we checked in with right-wing propaganda network One America News (OAN), it was suffering some kind of embolism for being kicked off of DirecTV. Despite a lot of attention, not that many people actually watch the channel, so DirecTV finally kicked it aside. This was distorted by OAN and numerous key Republicans into […]
The public expects cops to be better people than they are. Maybe they have the same weaknesses but having the training and experience to overcome them. But when you’re a cop, you’re encouraged to turn interactions into altercations and solve most problems with violence. And when all else fails, you can always just lock someone […]
While we were just discussing how everyone occasionally gets reminded that for many digital goods these days you simply don’t actually own what you’ve bought, all thanks to Sony disappearing a bunch of purchased movies and shows from its PlayStation platform, this conversation has been going on for a long, long time. Whereas the expectation […]
It’s no secret that Donald Trump’s Trump Media and Technology Group — which was launched with big plans, but so far only has a total flop of a barely used social media app, Truth Social, to show for it — was struggling. But then came the news that the ponzi-scheme-esque reverse merger deal was actually […]
How many times have you shared a link today? How many times have you used a search engine to look for information? We use links and snippets to gain and share information so often that we don’t even think about it. It’s an essential component of the internet, so intrinsic that an internet without links […]
For a few months now, we’ve been following this nonsense story, driven almost entirely by executives at the GOP’s favorite digital marketing (read: spamming) operation, that Google is censoring political spam from Republicans. This was all based on either an incompetent, or deliberate, misreading of a study, which did find that an untouched Gmail account […]
Aspiring filmmakers, YouTubers, bloggers, and business owners alike can find something to love about the Complete Video Production Super Bundle. Video content is fast changing from the future marketing tool to the present, and in these 10 courses you’ll learn how to make professional videos on any budget. From the absolute basics to the advanced shooting […]
Israeli malware maker NSO Group’s frequent targeting of iPhones has led to multiple rounds of patches, a federal lawsuit, and Apple instituting a notification program to inform customers their devices have been compromised. Apple’s next move in this particular arms race will help defend users against malware deployment by government agencies, many of which use […]
The core GOP belief in “small government” and “free markets” and “no taxpayer waste” doesn’t hold up quite as well as it used to to scrutiny, assuming it ever did at all. Case in point: in North Carolina, Trump GOP lawmaker Ben Moss has pushed forward a ridiculous bill (HB 1049) that would require towns […]
The Vallejo PD kills people. That’s an undeniable fact. It does so with alarming frequency, considering the size of its force. Between 2010 and 2020, the PD’s officers killed 19 people. But the PD is uninterested in reducing the number of times its officers kill. Vallejo police have killed 19 people since 2010, renewing calls […]
Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem strikes again! The idea put forth by Mike is that the moment a platform really starts to scale upward, doing any actual content moderation well becomes inherently impossible. There are a ton of examples of this, as some reasons as to why it’s so difficult. The spoiler alert on this is that […]
You know the drill. Company X over-collects user data in the hopes of monetizing it, then does a poor job securing it or giving their customers control over it. If you’re lucky, Company X comes clean about its failures, whether it’s a hack or just leaving customer data openly accessible on an unsecured Amazon cloud […]
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