This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous response to a comment arguing that Cloudflare isn’t very important to the internet: I would like to hear your argument as to why DDoS mitigation is not an essential part of hosting a website in 2024. In second place, it’s an anonymous […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2019, some investors were getting sick of AT&T’s obsession with mergers, leading the company to think about dumping DirecTV. Nintendo was ramping up its war on ROM websites, while Congress was moving forward with plans to massively increase copyright trolling. The DOJ helped boost Ed Snowden’s memoir by suing […]
As we just talked about the joint lawsuit filed in Japan by Nintendo and The Pokémon Co. against Pocketpair, the company behind the hit game Palworld, we still don’t have all the details. But one of the strange things about the suit is that is not a copyright or trademark suit, which is what everyone […]
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 […]
MAGA world’s false belief that Joe Biden is “censoring conservatives” on social media may actually kill the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA). As we mentioned earlier this week, while KOSA has already passed the Senate and advanced in a different form out of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, there were still big concerns among […]
We all hate data brokers. I mean, those of us who aren’t in law enforcement. Law enforcement tends to love data brokers because they allow investigators to collect a bunch of stuff (including location info) without having to whip up a subpoena or (the horror…) ask a judge to sign off on a warrant. Nope, […]
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Elon Musk fought the Brazilian law, and it looks like the Brazilian law won. After making a big show of how he was supposedly standing up for free speech, Elon caved yet again. Just as happened back in April when he first refused to comply with court orders from Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes, […]
Cable broadband giants like Charter Communications (Spectrum) and Comcast (Xfinity) generally don’t have to try very hard, because they enjoy a monopoly over broadband access across vast swaths of the U.S. That lack of competition traditionally results in high prices, spotty access, slow speeds, and some of the worst customer satisfaction ratings of any sector […]
Oh, these “law and order” types. What a joke. The self-proclaimed “law and order” candidate is Donald Trump, a convicted felon and open supporter of those who committed federal crimes during the January 6th raid of the Capitol building. And, of course, he’s earned the endorsement of another “law and order” figurehead, the Fraternal Order […]
The United States is already a global leader in traffic-related fatalities, with a thirty-percent jump in the last decade. That’s in contrast to every other developed country, which saw a decline. 40,000 Americans die every year in traffic fatalities. And while tech advancements have made life safer for drivers and passengers, the same can’t be true for […]
Well, it took awhile, but we finally got here. Earlier this year, we discussed the game Palworld shortly after its release. It made our pages because the game is clearly partially inspired by the Pokémon series of video games, with some very stark differences. Similarities aside, the characters in the game are certainly different than […]
As California edges closer to enacting SB 1047, the state risks throwing the entire AI industry into turmoil. The bill has already cleared the legislative process and now sits on Governor Newsom’s desk, leaving him with a critical decision: veto this ill-conceived policy or sign away the U.S.’ future in AI. While Newsom appears skeptical […]
The FBI and DOJ have always felt comfortable going after Islamic extremists. That’s the sort of thing they like to do. They like it so much they’ll radicalize vulnerable people for the sole purpose of locking them up for multiple decades. A lot of digital ink has been spilled covering the FBI’s success rate in […]
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Automation and language learning models aren’t inherently bad. But when half-cooked automation is layered on top of very broken systems by greedy, incompetent people, it certainly can be. See, for example, the way brunchlords are using “AI” to cut corners or undermine labor in journalism, or the way insurance companies are using it to automatically […]
Have you been missing patent trolls destroying innovation and making products you like more expensive? Have you felt that, maybe, some lawyers who did nothing but send extortionate shakedown letters weren’t getting rich enough? Well then, good news for you, Congress is looking to bring all that back! In the early years of Techdirt, we […]
Update: Annnnnnnnd… Cloudflare has already said it will isolate and block Brazilian IP addresses from reaching ExTwitter. Original story below. It appears that Elon has decided to take the Brazilian hornet’s nest he’d already kicked over the last few weeks and start slamming it with a baseball bat. It’s unlikely this will end well. I’ve […]
This morning, the House Energy and Commerce Committee held a pretty long markup about KOSA, COPPA 2.0, and other bills. The quick summary is that both of those bills passed out of committee and could be taken to the House floor this session. The longer version, though, is that cracks in the coalition pushing these […]
Wikipedia seems such an essential and benign aspect of the online world that it is hard to understand why people would want to attack it in the courts. But it is nonetheless subject to lawsuits that try to force it to censor its articles because they contain facts that are inconvenient for someone. The Wikimedia […]
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