Back in April Substack founder/CEO Chris Best gave an interview to Nilay Patel in which he refused to answer some fairly basic questions about how the company planned to handle trust & safety issues on their new Substack Notes microblogging service. As I noted at the time, Best seemed somewhat confused about how all this […]
We’ve noted repeatedly how the Republican obsession with TikTok is a hollow performance. This is a party that refuses to pass a useful privacy law (or to regulate data brokers). This is a party that generally couldn’t care less about widespread corruption, or its impact on national security. Yet over the last three years, the […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Mamba with a response to a comment mischaracterizing a lot of what happened in the last several years: Why do you lie so transparently. It’s fucking pathetic. The Muller Special Counsel indicted 34 people: 26 Russian nationals(some, known members of the GRU), 3 Russian […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, a bunch of entertainment industry lobbyists were given a chance to pay $5000 to attend the Grammys with two congressmen, an appeals court handed another loss to MP3 reseller ReDigi, and copyright lobbyists were failing to keep their story straight on the EU Copyright Directive (the problems of […]
We’ve posted about Swedish oat milk maker Oatly several times here at Techdirt and never for good reasons. The company has a reputation as a trademark bully and abuser, starting with its failed attempt to lock out rival companies from using the word “oat”, even though that is a product descriptor, as well as its […]
Qualified immunity rulings are an unqualified mess. The question doesn’t revolve around whether or not rights were violated. In most cases, they were. Instead, the question revolves around whether or not the rights violation was “clearly established.” The Supreme Court created this doctrine decades ago. And ever since then, it has been making it more […]
Half a decade ago we documented how the U.S. wireless industry was caught over-collecting sensitive user location and vast troves of behavioral data, then selling access to that data to pretty much anybody with a couple of nickels to rub together. It resulted in no limit of abuse from everybody from stalkers to law enforcement […]
In 2023, the extreme ideology of “human extinction from AI” became one of the most prominent trends. It was followed by extreme regulation proposals. As we enter 2024, let’s take a moment to reflect: How did we get here? 2022: Public release of LLMs The first big news story on LLMs (Large Language Models) can […]
Back in April we noted that the EU had designated 17 sites as “VLOPs” (Very Large Online Platforms), the “ROUSs” (Rodents of Unusual Size) of the internet. Some of those sites are still contesting the designation, but in the meantime, the EU Commission has dug deep into its porn viewing habits and designated three more […]
In the rapidly evolving world of digital learning, having access to the right resources can make all the difference. Enter Headway, 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 […]
Governments know the difference between right and wrong. It’s just that they often don’t seem to care. This is a small-ish wrong, but it’s a wrong nonetheless. Like far too many other state bodies charged with policing vanity plate messages, the South Dakota Motor Vehicle Division has a problem giving its tacit blessing to other […]
By now we’ve well established that this particular series of media mergers — which began with AT&T’s doomed acquisition of Time Warner and ended with Time Warner’s subsequent spin off and fusion with Discovery — were some of the dumbest, most pointless “business” exercises ever conceived by man. The idiotic saga burned through hundreds of billions in […]
The saga of former Nikola CEO Trevor Milton has come to a close. We began talking about Nikola, a company that bill itself as “decarbonizing” the trucking industry by selling electric long-haul trucks, back in 2020 when it was revealed that a very slick demo of its products had been totally staged. Like, hilariously staged. […]
Last week in the Error 402 series on the past, present, and future of web monetization, we talked about the whole “information wants to be expensive, information wants to be free” dilemma, that partially explained why early paywalls failed, and why display and search ads seemed to be the primary way in which internet content […]
Copyright has always been about money. That’s why the copyright industry fights so hard to strengthen legal protections, in order to boost its profits. However, getting detailed information about how much money is involved, and who receives it, is hard, because there are so many small pieces to the overall copyright ecosystem. That makes a […]
People keep accusing me of criticizing Elon Musk because I “hate” him. But I don’t hate him, nor do I criticize him out of any personal feelings at all, beyond thinking that he often is hypocritical in his decision making, and makes decisions that defy common sense and logic. But when he does the right […]
Earlier this month the Biden FCC announced that it was exploring banning early termination fees, which ISPs use to punish you for switching to competitors. It was a long overdue action in a country where cable and broadband giants routinely rip off consumers with a rotating bevy of fees, all designed to let them falsely […]
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the most popular enterprise cloud computing solutions, used by businesses around the world to manage data, promote effective communication, secure proprietary information, and more. The Amazon Web Services Training course aims to make you completely proficient in navigating the Management Console. It’s on sale for $40. Note: The […]
There have been all sorts of overblown fears and moral panics raised by the availability of new generative AI tools. And one that I keep hearing about, which many people have accepted as obviously true, is that it will damage school education, as kids will just use ChatGPT to do their work. This has always […]
Back in July, Reuters released a bombshell report showing that not only has Tesla aggressively lied about its EV ranges for the better part of the last decade, it created teams whose entire purpose was to lie to customers about it when they called up to complain. The story lasted all of two days in […]
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