It’s almost laughable that these two stories happened so close to one another. The Australian government has just announced a pilot program to test an online age verification system: And then, just hours later, it was reported that law enforcement is investigating an apparent breach of club and bar patrons’ personal data, which the venues […]
When the Trump administration killed net neutrality, telecom industry giants convinced them to push their luck and declared that not only would federal regulators no longer try to meaningfully oversee telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T, but that states couldn’t either. They got greedy. The courts didn’t like that much, repeatedly ruling that the FCC […]
It’s been nearly a year, but I won’t pretend that the outcome of this isn’t quite satisfying. Last summer, grocerer Trader Joe’s filed an absolute bullshit lawsuit against the union for its own employees claiming that the name of and merchandise sold by the union represented trademark infringement and would cause confusion with the public […]
Because it sells so very well to a certain percentage of the population, ridiculous people are saying ridiculous things about crime rates in the United States. And, of course, the first place to post this so-called “news” is Fox News. An independent group of law enforcement officials and analysts claim violent crime rates are much higher than […]
Last year Mozilla released a report showcasing how the auto industry has some of the worst privacy practices of any tech industry in America (no small feat). Massive amounts of driver behavior is collected by your car, and even more is hoovered up from your smartphone every time you connect. This data isn’t secured, often […]
Apparently, the world needs even more terrible bills that let ignorant senators grandstand to the media about how they’re “protecting the kids online.” There’s nothing more serious to work on than that. The latest bill comes from Senators Brian Schatz and Ted Cruz (with assists from Senators Chris Murphy, Katie Britt, Peter Welch, Ted Budd, […]
Taser long ago locked down the market for “less than lethal” (but still frequently lethal) weapons. It has also written itself into the annals of pseudoscience with its invocation of not-an-actual-medical condition “excited delirium” as it tried to explain away the many deaths caused by its “less than lethal” Taser. These days Taser does business […]
The Complete ChatGPT Artificial Intelligence OpenAI Training Bundle has 4 beginner-friendly courses to help you become more comfortable with the capabilities of OpenAI and ChatGPT. You’ll learn how to write effective prompts to get the best results, how to create blog posts and sales copy, and how to create your own chatbots. It’s on sale […]
There’s a fascinating new lawsuit against Meta that includes a surprisingly novel interpretation of Section 230. If the court buys it, this interpretation could make the open web a lot more open, while chipping away at the centralized control of the biggest tech companies. And, yes, that could mean that the law (Section 230) that […]
We’ve noted repeatedly that while “AI” (language learning models) hold a lot of potential, the rushed implementation of half-assed early variants are causing no shortage of headaches across journalism, media, health care, and other sectors. In part because the kind of terrible brunchlord managers in charge of many institutions primarily see AI as a way […]
Artificial Intelligence is all the rage these days, so I suppose it was inevitable that major world religions would try their holy hands at the game eventually. While an unfortunate amount of the discourse around AI has devolved into doomerism of one flavor or another, the truth is that this technology is still so new […]
For years and years, Congress has been pushing a parade of horrible “protect the children online” bills that seem to somehow get progressively worse each time. I’m not going through the entire list of them, because it’s virtually endless. One of the most frustrating things about those bills, and the pomp and circumstance around them, […]
In a haste to do something about the growing threat of AI-fueled disinformation, harassment, and fraud, lawmakers risk introducing bills that ignore some fundamental facts about the technology. For California lawmakers in particular, this urgency is compounded by the fact that they preside over the world’s most prominent AI companies and are able to pass […]
The Supreme Court has made it pretty clear that age verification laws for websites violate the First Amendment. It’s had a couple of shots at this and really seemed to indicate that such laws are unconstitutional because age verification would block First Amendment-protected content from people who should be allowed to see it. So, it […]
The best response to speech you don’t like is more speech. It definitely isn’t whatever the hell happened here. And that not only includes the Seattle Police Department’s decision to go after the person being physically harassed by other protesters, but the actions of the protesters themselves, whose physical aggression somehow encouraged police officers to […]
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Donald Trump, who has demanded both that we “open up our libel laws” and that we “repeal Section 230,” was just protected from a defamation claim thanks to Section 230. How about that? One thing that many people forget (or deliberately ignore?) regarding Section 230 is that it not only protects “Big Tech” as some […]
For several decades, major wireless carriers AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile collected vast troves of sensitive user location and movement data, then sold access to any random nitwit with two nickels to rub together. The result was a parade of scandals wherein everybody from stalkers to law enforcement (or pretending to be law enforcement) abused the […]
I talk quite a bit about video game preservation efforts for a couple of reasons. First, I’m just a huge gaming nerd and it is almost physically painful to think that the cultural output of this artform can be lost to history at the whim of publishers that have the ability to shutdown backend servers […]
Cops will apparently beat their own, especially if they’re bigoted cops and willing to beat the next black person they see. St. Louis police officer was working undercover during protests following the acquittal of Officer Jason Stockley, who had been charged with murder for the killing of a black St. Louis resident, Anthony Lamar Smith. […]
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