Late last year, we noted how the FAA and the FCC (the agency that actually knows how spectrum works) had gotten into a bit of an ugly tussle over the FAA’s claim that 5G could harm air travel safety. The FAA claimed that deploying 5G in the 3.7 to 3.98 GHz “C-Band” would cause interference […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous response to some bargain-basement transphobic bigotry: I could point you at a trans discussing what its like to be a trans, but you are so aggressive towards trans people that i will not set an rabid dog on their case. Suffice to […]
Five Years Ago Although there’s no joy in thinking about the Supreme Court right now, it offered a mixed bag of decisions this week in 2017 that should be highlighted: it reminded the government that hate speech is 1A protected, it declined to hear the Dancing Baby copyright case despite the government’s admission of “serious […]
We’ve been talking about the importance of patent quality, and one of the points made in our podcast discussion, was that many companies felt the unfortunate need to patent something just to avoid having someone else patent it later and create problems. One thing we didn’t really get to discuss about that is that this […]
Prime Minister Nahendra Mohdi’s government has apparently peered over the Great Wall of China (to pedants: figuratively, of course) and liked what it was seeing. China is the world leader in pervasive surveillance — something the government uses to shield the government from criticism and to keep the people the government considers to be undesirable […]
Clearview has never had a great reputation. Its first appearance in the public eye — via a Kashmir Hill report for the New York Times — was inauspicious, to say the least. The company’s database was composed of data and photos scraped from thousands of websites. This image database — which has now passed 10 […]
Back in March of this year, we discussed a somewhat odd story involving a bunch of DMCA takedowns for YouTube videos that included fan-content mixed with Destiny 2 music or footage. DMCA takedowns aren’t themselves strange, but in this case the makers of the game, Bungie Inc., publicly stated that it was aware of the […]
Give anyone access to tons of sensitive personal information and it’s bound to result in abuse. Give cops access to this data and abuse is guaranteed. Why? Because law enforcement officers — for reasons unfathomable to regular people — face far fewer consequences for violating internal policies and breaking laws. Regular people get fired. Cops […]
The 2022 Google Flutter and Solidity Development Bundle has 7 courses to help you become a skilled developer of cross-platform apps. Courses cover Flutter, Solidity, Dart, and more. The bundle is on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps […]
We’ve covered on here former President Donald Trump’s ridiculous lawsuit against Twitter for kicking him off the platform for violating its terms of service (a lawsuit that is not going well at all), but I had missed that some random person, Maria Rutenberg, had also sued Twitter for the same thing. No, not for kicking […]
For more than a decade, cable and broadcast executives brushed aside the threat of cable TV “cord cutting” (ditching traditional cable TV) as either a nonexistent threat or a temporary phenomenon. There were endless reports about how these users were poor and unimportant (they weren’t), or how the phenomenon would end once Millennials bought homes and […]
The saga of Ed Sheeran and the copyright case over his Shape of You song may finally be coming to a close. The case, brought by Sami Chokri, was very thin, largely centering on a two-word refrain line repeated 3 times both Sheeran’s song and Chokri’s Oh Why. Sheeran prevailed, with the court stating that […]
We’ve been highlighting the one big problem with Amy Klobuchar’s AICOA antitrust bill being that it has a trojan horse to enable lawsuit challenges over content moderation — and that this is the main reason why Republicans are supporting it. Still, with a big push to get the bills over the finish line, Adam Conner […]
Well, this is an unwelcome development. The US defence contractor L3Harris is in talks to take over NSO Group’s surveillance technology, in a possible deal that would give an American company control over one of the world’s most sophisticated and controversial hacking tools. Multiple sources confirmed that discussions were centred on a sale of the […]
Last week we wrote about a truly silly bill, introduced by a bunch of Republican Senators, that would basically ban email providers from letting political mailings go to spam. It’s quite a move to make it a key part of your political platform that politicians need to get special rights to spam people, but, alas, […]
This post analyzes California AB 587, self-described as “Content Moderation Requirements for Internet Terms of Service.” I believe the bill will get a legislative hearing later this month. A note about the draft I’m analyzing, posted here. It’s dated June 6, and it’s different from the version publicly posted on the legislature’s website (dated April 28). I’m not […]
The 2022 CompTIA Trifecta Course Bundle has four courses to help you prepare for three CompTIA exams. The courses cover the CompTIA A+, Network+, & Security+ exams. The bundle is on sale for $29. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support […]
For a while now, as Democrats have insisted that the two main antitrust bills that have been able to scrape together bipartisan support won’t have any impact on content moderation, we keep pointing out that the only reason they have Republican support is because Republicans want it to impact content moderation. After all, Ted Cruz […]
U.S. consumers face a parade of major privacy and security problems. Poorly secured routers, Internet things devices with zero privacy and security safeguards, major telecom network vulnerabilities, a massive unaccountable adtech and telecom hyper-surveillance apparatus (often unaccountably linked to government), all operating in a country that can’t seem to pass a privacy law for the […]
Video games have always had bugs at the time of their release, though there has been a trend coinciding with the uptick in digital game sales in which games seem to be published in broken states far too often and are then “fixed” with a day-one patch or something of the like. Some of these […]
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