As you probably noticed, the House just passed the controversial ban on TikTok, with 352 Representatives in favor, and 65 opposed. The bill is now likely to be slow-walked to the Senate where its chance of passing is murky, but possible. Biden (which has been using the purportedly “dangerous national security threat” to campaign with) […]
It’s been a long and incredibly frustrating road to get here, but the IRS’ free Direct File pilot program is now live this tax season in 12 states. We have had a list of posts we have done on the topic of tax filings, most of which revolve around Intuit and some other tax-prep organizations’ […]
While countless lawmakers looking to get on cable TV spent much of the last few years freaking out about TikTok privacy issues, none of those same folks seem bothered by the parade of nasty vulnerabilities in the nation’s telecom networks. Hackers are still happily exploiting the SS7 flaw that lets governments and bad actors spy on […]
Last year, we wrote about a very silly lawsuit that some big music publishers had filed against ExTwitter, making some silly claims about how copyright law works. It basically ignored the existence of the DMCA, which was designed to prevent lawsuits like this one, where there is some infringement happening on the platform, but no […]
As the debate over Section 702 continues, more weird stuff keeps happening. For once, there’s serious opposition to a clean renewal, and it’s coming from both sides of the legislature. Then there are things like this, which is one of the stranger incidents to accompany a surveillance fight, as reported by Dell Cameron for Wired. […]
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Over the last few days, we’ve had a few posts about the latest attempt to ban TikTok in the US (and to people who say it’s only a divestiture bill: there is a ban in the language of the bill if ByteDance won’t divest). Yesterday, unsurprisingly, the House voted overwhelmingly, 352 to 65, to pass […]
Ever since AT&T’s 2011 Supreme Court victory, the courts have declared it perfectly legal for a corporation to erode your legal rights using fine print. As a result, most every service and company in the U.S. now uses contract fine print to try and prevent you from suing the company (either alone or in a […]
Well, this is interesting. As part of our many posts about the cord-cutting trend that has been on the increase over the past decade or so, I have long made the point that the only thing keeping cable television looking even remotely like it did twenty years ago has been live sports. With the advent […]
Oregon has officially become the seventh state (behind New York, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota) to pass “right to repair” legislation, making it easier and more affordable for consumers to independently repair their own electronics. The bill, which passed the Oregon Senate last month 25-5 and the House on Monday 42-13, is a bit […]
As is tradition, now that we’ve announced the winners of our latest public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1928, it’s time for a special episode of the podcast taking a closer look at them. Just like in past years, Mike is joined by myself and our game design partner Randy Lubin to discuss our […]
The last time we wrote about an interaction between the Supreme Court and the famed art collective/pranksters/social commentators/cultural marketing jammers MSCHF, it was covering their interesting choice of amicus briefs. They sought to comment on the “Bad Spaniels” case by making the Justices and their clerks complete “connect the dot” artwork as an attempt to […]
NSO Group rang the bell. Despite all of its ex-intelligence service expertise and backing from its government, it can’t un-ring it. What’s done is done. And the repercussions just keep on coming, paying back NSO for years of selling powerful phone exploits to some of the worst people on earth. NSO got sanctioned, along with […]
Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative AI-driven tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different from previous Luminar editors. It keeps your favorite LuminarAI tools and expands your arsenal with more state-of-the-art technologies and important changes at […]
Last week, we wrote about Senator Dick Durbin going on the floor of the Senate and spreading some absolute nonsense about Section 230 as he continued to push his STOP CSAM Act. His bill has some good ideas mixed in with some absolutely terrible ideas. In particular, the current language of the bill is a […]
Last September, Mozilla came out with a privacy study indicating that the auto industry was the worst tech industry the organization tracked. Mozilla found that not only does the industry hoover up a ton of data from your use of vehicles, it collects and monetizes most of the data on your phone. Often without transparency […]
And here we go again. It’s time for another abject lesson in how you don’t actually own the things you’re “buying” in this here digital age. We’ve covered a ton of these stories at this point, obviously. But there are examples of people learning that they don’t actually own the thing they spent their money […]
The time has come to pay the discovery piper for NSO Group. The phone exploit firm formed by former Israeli spies was supported unilaterally by the Israeli government as it courted human rights abusers and autocrats. The Israeli government apparently felt selling powerful phone exploits to its enemies got caught with its third-party pants down […]
It’s not surprising, but still disappointing, to see companies like Google and Meta, which used to take strong stands against bad laws, now showing a repeated willingness to cave on such principles in the interests of appeasing policymakers. It’s been happening a lot in the last few years and it’s happened again as Google has […]
MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That’s all well and good, but it means nothing if you don’t have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In this course you’ll cover not just data […]
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