Every week it’s some other dumb thing going on in the Senate. On Tuesday Senator Josh Hawley went to the (mostly empty) Senate floor to “seek unanimous consent” for the STOP CSAM bill. That’s basically a process to rush the bill forward before it’s ready. We’ve written about STOP CSAM before. Despite it’s name, it […]
The FBI has done some heinous things in its pursuit of its counter-terrorism objectives. While it’s true the FBI has occasionally nabbed actual terrorists, it seems to prefer creating terrorists to going after those that are already avowed terrorists. The FBI utilizes informants and undercover agents to perform this highly questionable work. Investigations border on […]
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 […]
We’ve written a few times now about how the misleadingly named House “Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government” is not actually looking into the “weaponization of the federal government,” but rather is very much about allowing Chairman Jim Jordan to go about weaponizing the powers of the subcommittee himself to threaten and intimidate […]
Back in December I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring the FCC’s long overdue effort to stop race and class discrimination in broadband deployment. For decades, big telecoms have not only refused to evenly upgrade broadband in low income and poor areas (despite billions in subsidies for this exact purpose), they’ve charged poor and […]
Well, this is a new one for me. In all the stories we’ve done over the years on concerns over real life violence and violent video games, one point we’ve made over and over again is that people certainly can tell the difference between video games and real life. I, for one, abhor guns in […]
Predictive policing programs were supposed to make police work smarter and more efficient. It was supposed to trim down on hours wasted where a police presence wasn’t needed and increase enforcement in areas where crime was a problem. But it hasn’t done this. It hasn’t made cops smarter. It’s possibly just made them lazier. No […]
A couple weeks ago, we released the 2024 edition of our Sky Is Rising report about the state of the entertainment industries. Last week, Mike and I joined Corbin Barthold on Techfreedom’s Tech Policy Podcast for a discussion about the report and, more broadly, the state of culture in the internet era and the conversations […]
Bluesky is now open to anyone without an invite. And a bunch of other exciting things are coming soon. As many of you know, I’ve been pretty excited about where Bluesky is going as a social media offering, not just because of the people who have been using it (who have mostly been great, making […]
I’m not a religious man, but Jesus Fucking Christ. Yet another insane decision that allows the government to ignore constitutional rights has been handed down by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals — the one nationally known as the most cop-friendly circuit in the nation. The long journey to this horrible ending begins in 2018. […]
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Last week, as you likely heard, the Senate had a big hearing on “child safety” where they grandstanded in front of a semi-random collection of tech CEOs, with zero interest in actually learning about the actual challenges of child safety online, or what the companies had done that worked, or where they might need help. […]
Last month you probably saw the story about how somebody used a (sloppy) deepfake of Joe Biden in a bid to try and trick voters into staying home during the Presidential Primary. It wasn’t particularly well done; nor was it clear it reached all that many people or had much of an actual impact. But […]
Cops will charge someone with assault, whether or not they’ve been actually assaulted. It’s a charge often added on top of resisting arrest and can be triggered by any movement or action that results in physical contact with an officer. Throwing a snowball in the direction of a cop can be considered assault, depending on […]
Earlier this year, we discussed a frustrating story regarding one company in the UK, Cornices Centre, threatening a cyclist over a YouTube video showing what purports to be a near miss by a truck with the company’s name and logo on it. Those threats centered on a very confused understanding of trademark law, such that […]
Things remain troubling in Los Angeles. The city is still trying to somehow punish investigative journalist Ben Camacho and activist group Stop LAPD Spying Coalition for a mistake its own police department made. Camacho made a public records request for LAPD officers’ photos. After some litigation, the LAPD finally complied. Camacho — who writes for […]
There are a number of people, both those who agree with me and those who disagree with me, who seem to think I have some sort of personal dislike of Elon Musk. That’s not true. I find it amazing that he gets away with some of the stuff he gets away with, and I am […]
Facial recognition may be helping law enforcement catch bad guys, but inherent flaws in these systems ensure it’s only a matter of time before the AI coughs up yet another unforced error. That sort of error rate might be acceptable when the AI is doing nothing more than pitching in to refine Google search results […]
This handy, pocket-sized recording device fits in your wallet, bag, and purse. It comes with a high-capacity battery that can be charged in under two hours and stores up to 750 hours of audio. With a super-clear audio quality, this recorder offers 24-hour battery life and is equipped with digital noise reduction technology that is […]
Amidst all of the attention paid to last week’s Senate hearing on child safety online, it remains stunning just how little time was actually spent on how to help children online. Instead, we saw pure theatrical nonsense, with Senators insisting (falsely) that these five tech CEOs could magically stop bad things from happening to kids, […]
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