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The US Postal Service has been retaining metadata on snail mail for years. Back before mass scanning of every piece of mail was a reality, law enforcement requests had to be a bit more targeted. Investigators had to put in requests that required the postal service to log information about any mail sent to/from certain […]

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Just when you thought the internet was safe from the meddling minds of the Supreme Court, the Justices have decided to take another crack at reviewing whether or not a new set of state regulations of the internet violates the First Amendment. And this time, it has a “but won’t you think of the children […]

Things aren’t too exciting if you’re a telecom executive right now. All the hype in tech is singularly fixated on the more headline catching, stock fluffing, and usually very broken aspects of “AI.” 5G, hyped as a transformative world changing tech by overly eager telecom marketing departments, wound up being a consumer dud that users […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment on our post about clarifying robots.txt in the age of AI crawlers: As I understand it, the crux of the debate is that AI tools are not making bulk requests to servers. They’re making very limited requests to specific pages based […]

Five Years Ago This week in 2019, the Wall Street Journal came out with an op-ed in defense of Section 230, while we wrote about implementation questions around the few good parts of the EU Copyright Directive. A California college decided to start targeting its own student newspaper with public records requests, and a Massachusetts […]

It’s no secret that Ukraine is having a hard time in its fight against Russia at the moment. That’s in part because Ukraine is being limited in how deep into Russia it can attack using Western-supplied weapons. But mostly it is a matter of numbers: Russia has more men that it is willing to sacrifice […]

Showing yet again that you can lead a cop to a court order but you can’t make them follow it, Matthew Petti reports for Reason that the Baltimore PD apparently barely paused its scraping of seized cell phones following a court order telling it to get its warrant particularity house in order. Less than a […]

Perplexity is an up-and-coming AI company that has broad ambition to compete with Google in the search market by providing answers to user queries with AI as its core technology.  They’ve been in the news because their news feature repurposed content published on the Forbes website in an investigative article, which severely annoyed the Forbes […]

The House Oversight Committee is investigating NewsGuard, a private company, for supposed “censorship” for the crime of… offering its own opinions on the quality of news sites. The old marketplace of ideas seems to keep getting rejected whenever Republicans find that their ideas aren’t selling quite as well as they’d hoped. Up is down, left […]

All facial recognition tech is flawed. Some offerings may be less flawed than others, but the underlying problems (mainly, the inability to be as accurate when identifying minorities and women) remain. In Detroit, the problems became problematic fairly quickly and dramatically. Hundreds of US law enforcement agencies utilize facial recognition tech, but the Detroit PD […]

You probably already know the benefits of learning a language, so let’s focus on the app. Right off the bat, let’s be clear about one thing: When we say “app” we don’t mean that you’re limited to using Babbel on your phone. You can use Babbel on desktop, too, and your progress is synchronized across […]

I guess I should start this out by noting that I like Tim Wu quite a bit, and always felt like I learned something in the past when I spoke with him. He was even one of the people who reviewed and provided feedback on my big “protocols, not platforms” article months before it was […]

Four years years ago AT&T, a company that for years cheapened out on upgrading its broadband lines to fiber, effectively stopped selling DSL. While that’s understandable given the limitations of the dated copper-based tech, the problem is that thanks to concentrated telecom monopolization, many of these customers were left without any replacement options due to a […]

When it comes to policy decisions generally, and with technology platforms specifically, all we can really ask is that a policy be coherently stated and implemented in a uniform fashion. You may dislike said policy, but at a minimum it should be legible and enforced sensibly. Take, for instance, Apple’s updated policy on allowing emulation […]

There is still hope that California’s perilous, protectionist legislation for news could be reformed, but not without effort.  I just returned from Sacramento, where I was invited to testify (video below) in opposition to an Assembly bill by Buffy Wicks, which I analyzed in depth in this paper and later criticized as amended. It has passed the Assembly and […]

The Supreme Court’s opinions in the NetChoice/CCIA cases have been leading to some bizarre interpretations, as many people try to read into it things they wanted to see but just aren’t there. Cathy already covered some of the oddities of Justice Alito’s concurrence (which Justices Thomas and Gorsuch signed onto), but I wanted to dig […]

Things are not looking great for SoundThinking, which hasn’t been able to outrun the reputation it earned when it was still known as ShotSpotter. More and more major cities are choosing to ditch the technology because it simply does not appear to be worth paying for. What lots of cities are finding out is that […]

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BREAKING NEWS: Florida’s Attorney General says the Supreme Court unanimously sided with her in a case where they unanimously ruled against her arguments. Perhaps there’s a reason that Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody is so vigorously defending a Florida law that would block social media companies from diminishing the reach of disinformation: she loves spreading […]