Last month we noted how the brunchlords in charge of Paramount (CBS) decided to eliminate decades of MTV News journalism history as part of their ongoing “cost saving” efforts. It was just the latest casualty in an ever-consolidating and very broken U.S. media business routinely run by some of the least competent people imaginable. We’ve […]
It was over six years ago when we last had Renée DiResta on the podcast for a detailed discussion about misinformation and disinformation on social media. Since then, she’s not only led extensive research on the subject, she’s also become a central figure in the fever-dream conspiracy theories of online disinformation peddlers. Her new book […]
Remember that SLAPP suit, financed by Elon Musk, that actor Gina Carano filed against Disney after they chose not to renew her contract for the Mandalorian? That’s the one where Carano seems to be insisting that failing to renew her contract after she made some controversial political comments is somehow a violation of her First […]
Microsoft Windows 11 Pro is designed with the modern professional in mind. Whether you are a developer who needs a secure platform, an artist seeking a seamless experience, or an entrepreneur needing to stay connected effortlessly, Windows 11 Pro is your solution. This version is designed for PCs that need a new license for Windows […]
Daniel Horwitz — who has fought plenty of free speech battles for Tennesseans — has secured an extremely quick victory for his client, Lakeland resident Julie Pereira. According to the complaint [PDF], which was filed June 6 of this year, the city of Lakeland took offense to a sign Pereira had placed in her yard. […]
The Supreme Court issued a recent ruling that could take an absolute wrecking ball to everything from consumer protection and environmental reform to public safety. It was a ruling that dismantled decades of precedent and puts nearly all regulatory enforcement efforts at risk, yet it somehow barely warranted much coverage by a largely disinterested, billionaire-owned […]
I don’t often praise law enforcement agencies, generally because they rarely do anything praise-worthy. And the Chicago PD is so fraught with problems and problematic tactics that it’s difficult to give it credit even when credit is due. But here we are, doing the difficult thing. After years of fighting to keep this information secret […]
Here we go again. The Streisand Effect has become so noticeably prevalent these days that I quite often hear the term being discussed in all manner of media. Hell, I came across it on a local Chicago sports radio broadcast a couple of weeks back. If the term and its implications aren’t being taught in […]
Have we considered giving Supreme Court justices their own blogs in which they can vent their ill-informed brain farts, rather than leaving them to use official Supreme Court order lists as a form of a blog? Justice Clarence Thomas has been the absolute worst on this front, using various denials of certiorari on other topics […]
The US Postal Service has been retaining metadata on snail mail for years. Back before mass scanning of every piece of mail was a reality, law enforcement requests had to be a bit more targeted. Investigators had to put in requests that required the postal service to log information about any mail sent to/from certain […]
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Just when you thought the internet was safe from the meddling minds of the Supreme Court, the Justices have decided to take another crack at reviewing whether or not a new set of state regulations of the internet violates the First Amendment. And this time, it has a “but won’t you think of the children […]
Things aren’t too exciting if you’re a telecom executive right now. All the hype in tech is singularly fixated on the more headline catching, stock fluffing, and usually very broken aspects of “AI.” 5G, hyped as a transformative world changing tech by overly eager telecom marketing departments, wound up being a consumer dud that users […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment on our post about clarifying robots.txt in the age of AI crawlers: As I understand it, the crux of the debate is that AI tools are not making bulk requests to servers. They’re making very limited requests to specific pages based […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the Wall Street Journal came out with an op-ed in defense of Section 230, while we wrote about implementation questions around the few good parts of the EU Copyright Directive. A California college decided to start targeting its own student newspaper with public records requests, and a Massachusetts […]
It’s no secret that Ukraine is having a hard time in its fight against Russia at the moment. That’s in part because Ukraine is being limited in how deep into Russia it can attack using Western-supplied weapons. But mostly it is a matter of numbers: Russia has more men that it is willing to sacrifice […]
Showing yet again that you can lead a cop to a court order but you can’t make them follow it, Matthew Petti reports for Reason that the Baltimore PD apparently barely paused its scraping of seized cell phones following a court order telling it to get its warrant particularity house in order. Less than a […]
Perplexity is an up-and-coming AI company that has broad ambition to compete with Google in the search market by providing answers to user queries with AI as its core technology. They’ve been in the news because their news feature repurposed content published on the Forbes website in an investigative article, which severely annoyed the Forbes […]
The House Oversight Committee is investigating NewsGuard, a private company, for supposed “censorship” for the crime of… offering its own opinions on the quality of news sites. The old marketplace of ideas seems to keep getting rejected whenever Republicans find that their ideas aren’t selling quite as well as they’d hoped. Up is down, left […]
All facial recognition tech is flawed. Some offerings may be less flawed than others, but the underlying problems (mainly, the inability to be as accurate when identifying minorities and women) remain. In Detroit, the problems became problematic fairly quickly and dramatically. Hundreds of US law enforcement agencies utilize facial recognition tech, but the Detroit PD […]
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