Ridiculous, unhinged, anti-internet legislation is a bipartisan affair. The latest such examples is California’s new (awkwardly named) Social Media Platform Duty to Children Act. As you can likely tell from the name, this is yet another moral panic “think of the children!” bill. It argues that social media is addictive and that we need to […]
Hoping to pretend that the U.S. broadband industry is vibrant and competitive, every so often the broadband industry will issue a broad proclamation that U.S. broadband is secretly amazing and super affordable. Unfortunately data uniformly, clearly shows that it’s not. The availability of fast speeds remains spotty, prices remain high, and customer service, while improving […]
It rarely seems obvious, but you can just walk away from (some) unwanted interactions with law enforcement. People with badges and guns often make this option seem untenable, what with their badges and guns and often profane shouting. But law enforcement officers need a certain amount of reasonable suspicion to detain people. But the less […]
It appears that Donald Trump’s social network, at least in its initial form, is following the pattern of many of Donald Trump’s other business ventures: lots of hype, but little in the way of an actual business. As Politico has detailed, even the MAGA world isn’t exactly rushing to make Truth Social the Trumpist paradise […]
Over the last few years, the entertainment industry and big copyright have ramped up a war against VPN providers here in the U.S., culminating in a lawsuit against VPN provider Torguard by nearly two-dozen movie studios. The same studios had demanded $10 million in damages from another VPN provider, LiquidVPN, earlier last year. In both […]
There aren’t many ways to make something as objectively awful as civil asset forfeiture worse, but the FBI has found a way to do it. As it stands now, forfeiture allows law enforcement to take cash and property from people under the (unproven) theory that it was illegally obtained. The rest of the process does […]
Today is the 12th anniversary of the release FCC’s National Broadband Plan (NBP). In March of 2010, the FCC responded to Congress’s direction to develop a plan for broadband with the intent to ensure every American has “access to broadband capability.” This proposal was assembled with input across 36 public workshops, 31 public notices, 9 […]
The Microsoft Office Home & Business Bundle is for families and small businesses who want classic Office apps and email. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and OneNote. A one-time purchase installed on 1 computer for use at home or work. Available for Mac or PC, it’s on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt […]
You may have noticed a whole bunch of stories about copyright lawsuits lately against famous musicians for having songs that sound just kind of like some other songs. I’d been meaning to write up something talking about all of these stories about how Ed Sheeran is supposedly a “magpie” who “borrows” songs, or about how […]
The U.S. is preparing to spend $42 billion to shore up broadband access, despite not actually knowing where broadband is or isn’t available. U.S. broadband maps have stunk for decades, and we’ve spent that entire time trying to fix mediocre U.S. broadband without using real world data to actually do it. Much of the problem was extremely […]
There are lots of reasons to have fallen in love with Wordle. The simple nature of the game. The ability to post spoiler-friendly brags for how you did on any given puzzle. The clean design. But here at Techdirt, we obviously became smitten with how Wordle’s creator, Josh Wardle, professed no interest in the ongoing […]
The New York Post editorial team has apparently decided some rights are more important than others. The Post has the First Amendment right to publish its opinion on other rights, even when it’s clearly in the wrong. And it’s willing to do so because it has long enjoyed an unhealthy relationship with the city’s police […]
Five years ago, we were joined on the podcast by author and law professor Aaron Perzanowski to discuss his book about the impact of copyright on property in the digital age, The End of Ownership. That book touched on the issue of repairing devices and the ways companies make it difficult, but his new book, […]
In 2021, Columbia Law professor Philip Hamburger, whose own website at the school describes him as “one of the preeminent scholars writing today on constitutional law,” beclowned himself in the pages of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages (which seem always open for a beclowning, so long as the beclowning supports Rupert Murdoch’s blinkered worldview). […]
ICE wants data and doesn’t care how it gets it. Its recently-elevated pursuit of all things not considered naturally American has increased its demands for information on… well, everybody. It works with private sector data brokers and data analysts to hoover up location info — something not strictly limited to movements at or near borders. […]
Degoo is AI-based cloud storage that helps you rediscover your best photos. With Degoo you get supremely secured backup space from which to manage and share files with awesome simplicity. With high-speed transfers from a database that offers more backup space than Dropbox, OneDrive, and Google Drive combined, you’ll love how easy it is to […]
The UK’s euphemistically named Online Safety Bill is a disaster waiting to happen. The crux of the bill: any time anything bad happens online, we blame internet companies for it and take some of their money. As the bill has continued to go through discussions, it’s been getting worse and worse. The latest is that […]
Last week we noted how telecom backbone provider Cogent had decided to “punish Putin” for slaughtering Ukrainian civilians by severing the company’s transit routes to Russia. Cogent insisted that sanctions and an “uncertain security situation” made it “impossible for Cogent to continue to provide you with service.” While the goal is usually to apply pressure […]
Pretextual stops are law enforcement at its most shameless. The laws and the courts have blessed this activity, which involves cops claiming stops are justified for one reason while using the stop to go fishing for evidence or info related to a completely different criminal act. The Supreme Court curbed these stops a bit, preventing […]
Private companies have a lot of people to answer to. When you ask them, they’ll claim its either shareholders or customers that they owe their ultimate duty to. Ask them a couple of more times and they may admit they’re only accountable to their shareholders. But there’s more to it than this. The term “private” […]
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