This week, our first place winner on the insightful side That One Guy with a comment about Congress ignoring bills to protect the press: Gee, I wonder why they’d fear honest reporting so much… When the head of your party is a convicted felon and a core pillar of said party is that any criticism […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the biggest copyright trolls were facing some issues in court and trying new strategies, while the Sons of Confederate Veterans were sued over a bogus DMCA takedown and we analyzed the choice of venue. We also saw some particularly insane copyright damages against Cox. Avast was downplaying its […]
We’re still waiting for the lawsuit in Japan between Nintendo, The Pokémon Co., and Pocketpair to get rolling, but that doesn’t keep the dispute out of the news. The patent lawsuit, itself a surprise as everyone thought it would be a copyright gambit that Nintendo would try, centers around several patents that all relate to […]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. In this week’s round-up of the latest news in online […]
At some point, I’ll have time to write more thoroughly about how the wonderful and supportive Bluesky community effectively willed One Billion Users over the funding threshold, but it’s quite amazing. We were around 50% of the funding threshold just a few days before the campaign was set to close (which generally means the campaign […]
A second appeals court has now said that Section 230 doesn’t protect Salesforce, the online software giant, from being held liable for sex trafficking, because Backpage… used Salesforce’s software. If all of this sounds a bit crazy, buckle up. First, you need to understand the background here, before we can get into the details of […]
It often seems that when people have no good ideas or, indeed, any ideas at all, the next thing out of their mouths is “maybe some AI?” It’s not that AI can’t be useful. It’s that so many use cases are less than ideal. Enter Axon, formerly Taser, which has moved from selling modified cattle […]
The Cybersecurity Projects Bundle offers a hands-on program featuring five real-world cybersecurity projects, totaling 35 tasks. Participants start with an introductory video for each project, detailing objectives and requirements, followed by task completion that mirrors real cybersecurity challenges. Support from industry professionals ensures personalized feedback and guidance. Upon completing the program, participants gain practical experience, […]
We’ve been warning for years that the UK’s Online Safety Act would be a disaster for the open internet. Its supporters accused us of exaggerating, or “shilling” for Big Tech. But as we’ve long argued, while tech giants like Facebook and Google might be able to shoulder the law’s immense regulatory burdens, smaller sites would […]
For many many years, experts have warned about massive longstanding flaws in Signaling System 7 (SS7, or Common Channel Signaling System 7), a series of protocols hackers can exploit to track user location, dodge encryption, and even record private conversations. Governments and various bad actors routinely exploit the flaw to covertly spy on wireless users around the planet without them […]
I’ll preface this post by saying a part of me hates writing posts like this. We recently talked about a trademark lawsuit brought by KFC against Church’s Chicken centered on Church’s advertisements of a return to its “original recipe” for some of its chicken. Powering the suit was the trademark KFC has on the term […]
The perennial attempts to widen the reach of copyright in the pursuit of yet more revenue is something that is to be expected from companies. After all, maximizing profits is basically what companies do. But as previous Walled Culture posts have lamented, there is also a widespread tendency among non-profit cultural institutions – museums, art […]
Update: We did it! The threshold has been passed and the game will go into production! You can still back the campaign through midnight tonight, but thank you to everyone who backed us! I know I posted earlier today about a lovely review of One Billion Users, our exciting new social media card game which, […]
TikTok is famous for its short attention span theater aspect of just watching some very short videos, without often having the time to go all that deep. The Supreme Court, however, is more known for being slow and methodical. However, the Supreme Court surprised many people yesterday by embracing its inner vertical screen dance moves, […]
You may have heard that the US government has a bit of a mess on its hands after House Speaker Mike Johnson worked out a somewhat carefully crafted compromise continuing resolution funding plan to keep the government open, only to have it collapse after Elon Musk screamed about how bad it was and how anyone […]
The Complete Photoshop Master Class Bundle has 6 courses to help you learn all you need to know about Photoshop. Courses cover basic editing, layers, retouching, light effects, outdoor portraiture, web design, and more. It’s on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales […]
As we mentioned yesterday, our crowdfunding campaign for One Billion Users is in its final hours. Although we’re still below the funding threshold, we did get a decent bump yesterday, so there’s still a chance we’ll reach our goal. And just in time, Adi Robertson at The Verge has written a very nice review of […]
We’ve documented in detail how the whole AT&T–>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers Discovery merger process has been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku by over-compensated executives clearly out of […]
It’s the same as it has always been. Some cops do something horrible, the DOJ steps in, the DOJ finds plenty of things wrong with the place housing the cops, the DOJ imposes its will on the cop shop… and years later, no one can really tell that anything happened. Even less will happen now […]
In our stories about how you don’t actually own what you’ve bought in the digital and IoT world, one of the sub-genres of those stories concern products bought by customers that become entirely or partially useless due to the decisions made by the seller. This itself can take a variety of forms, from video games […]
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