The thin blue line between cops and cop-friendly tech continues to be erased, mostly by cops. No longer content to underserve the public, law enforcement agencies are welcoming the warm embrace of consumer surveillance products in hopes of adding private tech to their publicly-funded surveillance mesh networks. Ring, Amazon’s home surveillance tech acquisition, was one […]
We’ve documented in detail how the whole AT&T–>Time Warner–>Warner Brothers Discovery merger process has been a pointless mess, resulting in no limits of layoffs and damage to the underlying brands. What was supposed to be a gambit by these companies to dominate streaming TV, wound up being a very expensive act of seppuku by over-compensated […]
If you — like Florida governor Ron DeSantis and his hateful little legislative buddies — want to oppress certain people, you’re going to have to do it on your own time. The state isn’t allowed to help you be shitty. Florida passed an anti-drag show law earlier this year. Legislators were careful to ensure the […]
A few weeks back we wrote about a report that the EU Commission, in its push for dangerous client-side scanning mandates, had started buying highly targeted ads to try to influence people to support the policy. The ads, first revealed by Wired, were incredibly misleading. But, also, as we noted, appeared to violate EU’s privacy […]
After years of continuous, unrepentant abuse of surveillance powers, the FBI is facing the real possibility of seeing Section 702 curtailed, if not scuttled entirely. Section 702 allows the NSA to gather foreign communications in bulk. The FBI benefits from this collection by being allowed to perform “backdoor” searches of NSA collections to obtain communications […]
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So, yesterday we covered Elon Musk’s ridiculous censorial threat to sue Media Matters “the split second the court opens on Monday.” Of course, as we noted, you can file lawsuits 24/7. And yet, as the courts opened on Monday, there was nothing. As mentioned in the original post, I was away from internet access for […]
“AI” (or more accurately language learning models nowhere close to sentience or genuine awareness) has plenty of innovative potential. Unfortunately, most of the folks actually in charge of the technology’s deployment largely see it as a way to cut corners, attack labor, and double down on all of their very worst impulses. Case in point: […]
The NYPD has plenty of problems with accountability and transparency. The main problem is this: the public wants some of this and the NYPD wants none of this. So, it does stupid things repeatedly that do little more than remind the public it’s not to be trusted. Like any cop shop, it’s manned by cops […]
The copyright system is flawed at many levels, as hundreds of posts on this blog make clear. One particular class of problems concern takedowns. The best known of the ‘notice and takedown’ systems, that of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), allows the copyright industry to send takedown notices when they discover infringements on […]
Holy shit. So, in 2021 there was a car accident in Atwater California that killed a married couple, Pam and Joe Juarez. According to police reports at the time, a 20-year-old Stanford student, King Vanga, struck their car from behind. Here’s how ABC 30 reported on the matter: The California Highway Patrol says Pam, 56, […]
Some city officials in Illinois are now engaged in a round of “How Can I Get Sued?” Sounds like fun, but Calumet City officials might do well to remember the only way to win is not to play. That’s the upshot of the latest bit of officious nonsense to surface in the Chicago area. Granted, […]
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The fakest “free speech absolutist” who ever lived is at it again. As you may recall, earlier this year, Elon Musk sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claiming that its report documenting an alleged “surge of hateful content” on exTwitter somehow violated contracts (after first threatening to sue for defamation, but not actually […]
Right to repair reform continues to have a moment here in the U.S., with four states (California, Minnesota, New York, and recently Maine) having passed state level protections. The goal: to fight repair monopolies and make it easier and more affordable to repair the technology you own, whether it’s your car, game console, cell phone, […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with with a comment about Elon Musk citing The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as the inspiration for his new “Grok” AI product, and our point that the titular guide was compiled by humans: Yeah, if you want a real-life equivalent of the […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the RIAA made a court filing where it warned about overprotection from copyright, Nintendo secured a huge settlement against ROM site (probably just to scare other ROM sites), and the Girl Scouts sued the Boy Scouts over trademark. CNN filed a lawsuit seeking to show that Trump can’t […]
The things said by law enforcement when trying to keep evidence from being tossed all sound the same. There are only a handful of acceptable excuses for performing warrantless searches and, man, do they get used so frequently we can probably all repeat them in our sleep. “Exigent circumstances.” This one means things were happening […]
Video game addiction. Sigh. Big sigh, even. Like, the biggest of sighs. We’ve talked about claims that video game addiction is a documentable affliction in the past, as well as the pushback that claim has received from addiction experts, who have pointed out that much of this is being done to allow doctors to get […]
We’ve done this a few times now where people start talking about a social media trend that actually only went viral because of the media coverage of the supposed (but not really) social media trend. And each time there’s some outrage moral panic about how “social media” is destroying the children or whatever, when it’s […]
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