California legislators finally lifted the opacity shrouding police misconduct records in early 2019. The new law eliminated exemptions, making police misconduct and use-of-force records available to records requesters for the first time in decades. Full grown adults clothed in uniforms and armed with guns reacted like children. They sued. They shredded records. They pretended they […]
We’ve written a couple times about Andy Parker, whose story is truly tragic. His daughter, a local TV news reporter, was murdered on air by a former colleague, in the middle of a live news broadcast. Truly horrific stuff. Parker has now spent years trying to remove the video of his daughter’s murder from social […]
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There’s plenty of human work to be done, but there never seems to be enough humans to do it. When things need to be processed in bulk, we turn it over to hardware and software. It isn’t better. It isn’t smarter. It’s just faster. We can’t ask humans to process massive amounts of data because […]
The Wall Street Journal has offered up a helpful report (outside the paywall, for now) on the giant mess that is U.S. broadband subsidy efforts. Like many previous studies, it points out how we’ve spent just countless billions of dollars on expanding broadband access with decidedly mixed results. Also like many previous mainstream stories of […]
Nintendo’s war on its own fans’ love of Nintendo game music continues. The company has certainly made headlines over the past few years (with a big ramp up recently) by going on DMCA and threat blitzes for YouTube videos and channels that have uploaded what are essentially just the music from various Nintendo games. The […]
Field drug tests are notoriously unreliable. False positives abound. But law enforcement agencies still use them. First and foremost, they use them because no court, policy, or legislation has told them they can’t. But they also use them because they’re cheap (~$2/per), portable, and, most importantly, prone to producing false positives that allow cops to […]
We’ve already discussed how the expected overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court may impact the debate on encryption, but it has a likelihood of impacting lots of other important tech debates as well. Senator Ron Wyden has written a thoughtful piece over at Slate, explaining how important Section 230 is in a […]
Well, this is ugly. Lots of states and cities have considered bail reform in recent years, given the system’s propensity for punishing the poorest people while allowing the more fortunate to buy their way out of jail. The criminal justice system is built on the presumption of innocence — something that’s often ignored by law […]
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The latest in stupid, unconstitutional, performative, nonsense legislation from Republicans comes from Senator John Thune, and it would break your email spam filters. It’s called the “Political Bias in Algorithm Sorting Emails Act of 2022” and it’s possibly even dumber than it sounds. First, this is all based on a bogus, cooked up, deliberately misinterpreted-by-people-who-know-better […]
Critics of modern tech often lean towards hyperbole when discussing “surveillance capitalism” and the seemingly omniscient power of advertisers and adtech. In reality, as journalists who cover the space for any amount of time can attest, it’s all frequently much dumber and clumsier than that: A new study, first reported by The Wall Street Journal […]
I have talked for years at Techdirt about how the cord cutting trend, while still continuing, was going to run into a wall due to the way that major sports broadcasts have always been done through cable TV deals. I have also covered the steps, baby or otherwise, different sports leagues and teams have taken […]
The federal judiciary system has pretty much blown off taxpayers’ (and legislators’) complaints about PACER for years. The online system that was supposed to make access to court documents fair and equitable is instead a paywalled, outdated heap of barely functioning junk that charges citizens $0.10/page for questionable search results from PACER’s broken search engine. […]
The US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) system needs plenty of useful reforms to actually work correctly and properly. Despite limited time frames in which the government is required to provide information, they often take years. They regularly redact stuff they shouldn’t. Or refuse to hand over documents they are required to. Generally speaking, the […]
Any shift in the balance of power away from law enforcement almost always results in law enforcement claiming we’re headed towards a criminal apocalypse. The NYPD — via union reps and police commissioners — have made these claims for years, targeting everything from “stop and frisk” reform to more recent efforts made to treat accused […]
Okay, so this bill is nowhere near as bad as the Texas and Florida bills, or a number of other bills out there about content moderation. But that doesn’t mean it’s still not pretty damn bad. New York has passed a variation of a content moderation bill in that state that requires websites to have […]
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The government of India continues to pretend it’s a democracy while doing everything it can to satisfy an elected leader who now apparently has aspirations to become “dictator for life.” Under Prime Minister Narendra Mohdi, India has moved away from its democratic ideals and closer to the ideals held by one of its closest neighbors, […]
We’ve noted several times how there are a few reasons why the U.S. government can’t get a handle on robocalls, despite big announcements every six months or so about how they’re cracking down on the practice and really mean it this time. One of the biggest reasons is that neither the discourse, nor our solutions, […]
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