Elon Musk’s favorite lawyer, Alex Spiro, isn’t having a great week. Sure, sure, he just signed up embattled NYC mayor Eric Adams as a new client, but he seems to have royally fucked up in defending Elon. One of Elon’s many legal fights currently is a defamation lawsuit filed by a California man, Ben Brody. […]
So you might recall that both Gannett and Sports Illustrated were caught recently creating fake, “AI” generated journalists to create fake, plagiarism-prone “journalism.” In both instances the kind of brunchlord executives that fail upward at these kind of companies thought it would be great to replace real human journalism with automated junk — without informing […]
Back when Vladimir Putin launched his aggressive war on Ukraine, even before western government sanctions began rolling out, the video game industry started its own mini warfront on Russia. Companies began suspending sales in Russia entirely and otherwise disallowing Russian citizens to participate in global gaming culture. Groups like Itch.io began selling game bundles with […]
Oregon recently became the seventh state to pass “right to repair” legislation making it easier, cheaper, and more convenient to repair technology you own. The bill’s passage came on the heels of legislation passed in Massachusetts (in 2012 and 2020), Colorado (in 2022 and 2023), New York, Minnesota, Maine and California. U.S. consumer protection has […]
Elon Musk is like the most gullible confirmation bias sucker who has ever existed. If you present him with literally anything that confirms his priors, no matter how obviously bullshit, he’ll run with it as truth. His Twitter feed is just non-stop stupid people feeding him nonsense, and when he sees something he agrees with, […]
We’ve long known no one cares what happens to people who are incarcerated. The indifference flows through the so-called criminal justice system to the private sector to tons of voters who firmly believe the nation could be better served by stripping certain Americans of all their rights. The fact that we jail more people than […]
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It’s been twelve years since the big SOPA/PIPA fight. I’ve been talking with a few folks lately about how it feels like many people have either forgotten that story or weren’t paying attention when it happened. Two years ago, we did a 10-year retrospective on the fight, and it feels like some people need a […]
However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they’re arguably worse in prisons. For decades, journalists and researchers have outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resulting sky high rates (upwards of $14 per minute at some prisons) for […]
The shift from analogue to digital has had a massive impact on most aspects of life. One area where that shift has the potential for huge benefits is in the world of academic publishing. Academic papers are costly to publish and distribute on paper, but in a digital format they can be shared globally for […]
The best place to be the sort of cop who thinks it’s a good idea to associate yourself with the Punisher remains the Fifth Circuit. Cops in Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana are blessed with the most forgiving appellate court in the land — one even capable of irritating the same Supreme Court that has spent […]
One very important thing to understand in the conversation about online speech is that there are many different kinds of online communities, big and small, and they all have their own needs when it comes to rules and governance. This fact is a key element of a new book, Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online […]
This headline is like a version of Mad Libs for Techdirt titles. We’ve been covering the problem of copyright trolls for many years. And lately, we’ve been covering the scammy uses of generative AI tools. And we’ve absolutely covered quite a few SEO scam stories, where people try to use some scam or another to […]
I guess being incarcerated isn’t dehumanizing enough. Being treated like barely sentient meat deserving of any abuse perpetrated by guards or other inmates just isn’t enough oppression, apparently. This country talks a big game about rehabilitation and “paying your debt to society,” but when it comes to the day-to-day business of incarcerating people at a […]
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Over the last few years, Elon Musk has repeatedly said that his definition of free speech means “that which matches the law.” He says this whenever anyone calls out that he’s not actually the free speech absolutist he claims to be. He regularly and expeditiously caves in to censorship demands, without any protest, from authoritarian […]
The FCC is expected to vote to restore net neutrality rules on April 25. And while there’re early indications that the rules may be slightly weaker than those stripped away by the Trump administration — and absolutely no indication the rules could meaningfully impact telecom revenues — telecom giants have already begun their whining about […]
In all of the posts we have done on the topic of video game preservation, I have often made the point that it’s probably long past time that there be some sort of political action to address the real or potential disappearance of cultural output that is occurring. The way this works far too often […]
While it’s not ultimately a factor in the court’s decision, it’s nice to see a court call out biased policing while discussing the merits of the case. This decision [PDF], handed down by an Illinois state appellate court, makes it pretty clear the court believes this stop would never had happened if the driver happened […]
As Mike has already chronicled, Meta has managed to alienate itself from reasonable people by first suppressing links to an independent Kansas journalism outlet, then links to others reporting on the suppression, and eventually entire accounts discussing the episode. I tend to be of the view that what happened was an error caught in a […]
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