What do you get when you cross a Kennedy, a brain worm, and a social media giant? Apparently, another ridiculous lawsuit destined to be laughed out of court. In 2020, RFK Jr. sued Meta (then Facebook) claiming that when the company fact-checked and moderated his anti-vax nonsense, it was a state actor. This was, he […]
Before T-Mobile acquired Sprint, activists, consumer groups, and deal critics (including me) warned repeatedly that the telecom sector megadeal would result in layoffs, less competition, higher prices, and a lower quality product overall. The Trump FCC and DOJ very clearly didn’t care; they rubber stamped the deal without even reading deal impact reports. T-Mobile CEO […]
For years and years we have documented here the trend of cord-cutting from traditional cable television services. And we all know where those previous subscribers have gone: to streaming services, particularly as those services have matured and performed better than they did in the early days. But if cord-cutting was a thing the cable industry […]
Tired of being underserved and overbilled by shitty regional broadband monopolies, back in 2002 a coalition of local Utah governments formed UTOPIA — (the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency). The inter-local agency collaborative venture then set about building an “open access” fiber network that allows any ISP to then come and compete on the shared […]
Is there any law that Elon Musk actually understands? The latest is that he’s lost yet another lawsuit, this time (in part) for not understanding copyright law. There have been a variety of lawsuits regarding data scraping over the past decade, and we’ve long argued that such scraping should be allowed under the law (though […]
Oh, man. There’s so much going on here. The headline is only part of it. We’ll get to it (and through it) as efficiently as possible but expect multiple stops along the way. Georgia Gee’s reporting on this for Wired is devastating. There’s so much stupidity and wrongness going on here, the article almost reads […]
MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That’s all well and good, but it means nothing if you don’t have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In this course you’ll cover not just data […]
Who has a stronger case that the TikTok ban is unconstitutional? TikTok itself… or its users? We may find out, as both are trying. Last week, TikTok officially filed a petition to challenge the Constitutionality of the TikTok ban law. I’ve heard a few people say that they don’t believe TikTok has that strong of […]
Streaming video still provides some meaningful advantages to traditional cable: it’s generally cheaper (assuming you don’t sign up for every service under the sun); customer satisfaction ratings are generally higher; and users have more power to pick and choose and cancel services at a whim. But the party simply isn’t going to last. Thanks to […]
For all the pissing and moaning I did during the acquisition of Activision Blizzard by Microsoft — principally over the latter’s routine desire to talk about non-exclusivity in its games only to make them exclusive — Sony sure does know how to shit the bed when it comes to cross-platform titles and how to treat […]
Walled Culture has been warning about the financialization and securitization of music for two years now. Those obscure but important developments mean that the owners of copyrights are increasingly detached from the creative production process. They regard music as just another asset, like gold, petroleum or property, to be exploited to the maximum. A Guest Essay in the New […]
There’s no shortage of prognostication about the future of generative AI, including plenty of predictions that it won’t actually be around forever for various reasons. A lot of these takes are a little too speculative or just not very interesting, but one that stands out comes from law professor and returning podcast guest Eric Goldman, […]
You may recall last month’s hilarious story of lawyer Mike Dunford’s response to a vexatious angry demand letter from IMG, representing the LAPD Foundation, claiming that a t-shirt with the following “Fuck the LAPD” logo violated its IP rights: The response was as simple as it was direct: Lol, no. As we highlighted in our […]
Flock Safety wants in on the law enforcement surveillance action. It began making inroads by appealing to the next best fascists: homeowners associations. Pitching its ALPRs (automatic license plate readers) to gated communities, Flock promises a crime-free future its pseudo-research can’t back up. Not that any of that mattered to any of these suburban authoritarians. […]
Headway Premium is the revolutionary app designed to help you turn personal growth into a habit. With a lifetime subscription, you get unlimited access to a huge number of non-fiction bestsellers, summarized into 15-minute reads. Be it personal development, business strategies, or health insights, Headway has you covered. It’s on sale for $60. Note: The […]
Former FCC Chair Ajit Pai seems to have forgotten the First Amendment in his rush to support the TikTok ban. In a recent Fox Business interview, Pai stumbled through a series of perplexing statements, leaving us wondering if he’s ever actually read the bill he’s defending. And look, we’ve criticized Pai a lot here on […]
One of the primary reasons U.S. consumers pay some of the highest prices in the developed world for mobile data is because U.S. regulators — from both parties — routinely sign off on “growth for growth’s sake” mergers that reduce competition, lower product quality, raise prices, and trigger waves upon waves of layoffs. Usually under […]
We may not have Supreme Court precedent (yet!), but a number of cases handled by appellate circuits all over the nation have made it resoundingly clear: there’s a First Amendment right to film police officers. Of course, lawmakers caping for cops have done their best to make this act more difficult. Multiple attempts have been […]
Unless you’ve been living under a rock somewhere, you’ve likely caught wind of a rap beef that has taken the internet by storm. I won’t pretend to be enough of a pop culture expert to have any idea why both Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been lobbing frequent shots at each other in the form […]
There was a bit of news in the world of decentralized social media over the past few weeks. It kicked off with the announcement that Jack Dorsey had left the board of Bluesky. This was followed by an interview Jack gave to Mike Solana where he explained his thinking on all of this. There was […]
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