Update: After this post went up, Tech Review appears to have done a major edit to that article, and added a correction about the completely false claim regarding Section 230 protecting CSAM. The article still has problems, but is no longer quite as egregiously wrong. The post below is about the original article. MIT’s Tech […]
Earlier this year, we covered what appears to be the first of several lawsuits filed on behalf of parents by the Social Media Victims Law Center. In that lawsuit, the mother of an eleven-year-old who committed suicide sued Meta and Snap, claiming SnapChat’s algorithmically enabled feedback loops drove her daughter to her death. The suit […]
The Complete 2022 Microsoft Office Master Class Bundle has 14 courses to help you learn all you need to know about MS Office products to help boost your productivity. Courses cover SharePoint, Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, Teams, and more. The bundle is on sale for $75. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. […]
Play the game and test your skills » Can you survive the Startup Trail? Today we’re launching a browser-playable startup policy simulator game called Startup Trail, developed in partnership with Engine. Here’s your chance to learn about all the challenges of building a successful tech startup in the face of all sorts of obstacles. Over […]
If you listened to Verizon fifth-generation wireless (5G) marketing at any time during the last three years, it went something like this: fifth generation (5G) wireless was going to absolutely transform the world by building the smart cities of tomorrow, revolutionizing medicine, and driving an ocean of innovation. In reality, US 5G has largely landed with […]
When it comes to fan-created video games utilizing established IP, the vast majority of instances tend to result in a narrow set of responses from the original creators or publishers. The Nintendo route is to go fully nuclear as often and immediately as possible, destroying any and all attempts. Take 2 follows a similar path, […]
The idea that there is a link between the exclusivity period on patents and higher drug prices is about as noncontroversial as a view can be. It is the easy question on an ECON 101 exam on monopolies, supply and demand. Yet, somehow, this has come under attack thanks to big PhRMA and their minions. […]
An in-depth report on Israeli malware manufacturer NSO Group has (again) exposed the company’s lies about its activities (and the activities of its customers). Here’s what NSO said to Calcalist in July of last year as the steady drip of bad news became a cascade. According to [NSO founder and CEO Shalev] Hulio, “the average […]
Hey, finally time for a little bit of good news in the world of free speech: the Kentucky General Assembly recently passed the Kentucky Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. It’s a kind of anti-SLAPP bill that is based on a model bill, the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA), and similar to a bill passed […]
A couple of weeks ago, a police transparency activist caught something on video: a cop trying not to get caught on video. That isn’t the interesting part. Lots of cops hate being recorded, even by their own cameras. This Santa Ana police officer was rolling through a neighborhood — supposedly to investigate a stolen car […]
CramWise has compiled CompTIA certification exam simulators into one comprehensive bundle for your convenience. This bundle includes only exam simulators with Performance-Based Questions (PBQs) and CompTIA labs following the Official CompTIA exam objectives. The bundle includes exam prep for, CompTIA A+ Core 1 (220-1001), CompTIA A+ Core 2 (220-1002), CompTIA Network+ (N10-008), CompTIA Security+ (SY0-601), CompTIA […]
For all the talk of how Elon Musk wanted to buy Twitter to make it more supportive of free speech, there remain a ton of questions about what it will actually mean in practice. I’ve explained why his conception of free speech is incredibly naïve and his ideas around content moderation are not just outdated […]
U.S. wireless company T-Mobile hasn’t had what you’d call a stellar track record on privacy or security. Last year, the company was forced to acknowledge that hackers had obtained the personal details (including social security numbers) of more than 53 million T-Mobile customers, the sixth time the company had been meaningfully compromised in as many […]
It really feels like we shouldn’t have to have discussions about how companies should handle information that leaks onto the internet in 2022. Or, to be more precise, we should at least not have to remind them that attempting to re-bottle the leak-genie just isn’t going to work and will almost certainly have the opposite, […]
Feeling the crunch of this economy? Why not leverage government power to create a sustainable revenue stream? That’s the plan in Vietnam, a country not unfamiliar with regular deployments of censorial efforts by the government. The Vietnamese government keeps the internet — and its citizens — on a short leash. Only so much free expression […]
We’ve written numerous posts about the EU Copyright Directive, because it contains two extremely harmful ideas. The first is the “snippet tax“, an attempt by some press publishers to make sites like Google pay for the privilege of displaying and linking to newspaper publishers’ material – an assault on the Web’s underlying hyperlink technology. The second […]
In recent months, a lot of attention has been paid to private companies who assist governments with surveillance. Most of this has been focused on companies like Clearview (a company that scrapes the public web for data to sell to its customers) and NSO Group (an Israeli company that sells powerful cell phone exploits to […]
With it looking almost certain that Elon Musk will own Twitter in the very near future, a lot of people are freaking out, and I did think it was worthwhile to explore ways in which this might actually be good. At this point, I think it’s quite clear that Elon Musk’s comments about Twitter show […]
The 2022 Ultimate Ethical Hacker Training Bundle gives you access to 13 courses focused on bug bounty hunting and penetration testing. You’ll learn about Python, Kali Linux, Burp Suite, Nmap, and more. To keep up with the ever-evolving digital world, all future updates for all courses are included for free. The bundle is on sale […]
For many, many, many years we’ve been talking about the idea of advertising as content and content as advertising on Techdirt. The basic idea is that in today’s world, where there are so many things competing for our attention, rather than trying to force annoying ads on people, advertisers should look to turn their advertising […]
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