Earlier this year a new journalism outlet named “The Messenger” launched to great fanfare. The brainchild of former The Hill owner Jimmy Finkelstein, the new news empire launched with $50 million in backing and a lot of chatter about how it was going to do things differently, with Finkelstein claiming he wanted to build “an […]
The Intercept has an interesting article that reveals another reason why some newspaper publishers are not great fans of the site: The New York Times tried to block a web crawler that was affiliated with the famous Internet Archive, a project whose easy-to-use comparisons of article versions has sometimes led to embarrassment for the newspaper. As the […]
Last week in our Error 402 series on the history of web monetization, we talked about the earliest secure monetary transactions on the web, soon after the National Science Foundation opened up the early internet for commercialization. There were electronic transactions over networks that pre-dated this (such as on proprietary online services like CompuServe, but […]
It’s always been easy for cops to take stuff from people. Civil asset forfeiture allows law enforcement to bypass most of the Constitution so long as they imply things about the supposedly illegal source of the property they’ve taken from citizens. The Fourth Amendment is almost worthless in these cases. Since there are no criminal […]
A few people have been asking me about last week’s release of something called the “Westminster Declaration,” which is a high and mighty sounding “declaration” about freedom of speech, signed by a bunch of journalists, academics, advocates and more. It reminded me a lot of the infamous “Harper’s Letter” from a few years ago that […]
The TSA was imposed on us following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Supposedly necessitated by this “new” terrorist threat, the TSA shrugged into action, becoming another layer of irritating bureaucracy standing between benign travelers and their freedom of movement. Since then, it has gotten worse. The TSA has spent billions on tech, training, […]
I really wish we could fast forward a few decades to the point where we look back on the moral panic over kids and social media and laugh about it, the same way we now laugh about similar moral panics regarding television, Dungeons & Dragons, rock & roll music, comic books, pinball, chess, novels, and […]
So we’ve been talking a lot about how as the streaming video market matures, it’s increasingly behaving a lot like the old, shitty cable companies the sector once disrupted. Instead of innovation and risk taking, we’re seeing endless price hikes, lower quality catalogs, strange new catalog gaps, labor issues, ethically flimsier policy positions, annoying new […]
The tradition of game developers trolling those who pirate or otherwise use their games rather than immediately going the legal route has a long history. There are lots of ways to do this, most of which involve either breaking the game in certain ways, or inputting Easter eggs into games that cause those pirating it […]
This blog has written a number of times about the reaction of creators to generative AI. Legal academic and copyright expert Andres Guadamuz has spotted what may be the first attempt to draw up a new law to regulate generative AI. It comes from French politicians, who have developed something of a habit of bringing in new laws attempting […]
We’ve written plenty about facial recognition here on Techdirt, and especially the infamous Clearview AI. Now, journalist Kashmir Hill, who wrote the original New York Times story that brought the company to the public’s attention, has written a new book all about the subject: Your Face Belongs To Us. This week, she joins us on […]
I am so frequently confused by companies that sue other companies for making their own sites and services more useful. It happens quite often. And quite often, the lawsuits are questionable CFAA claims against websites that scrape data to provide a better consumer experience, but one that still ultimately benefits the originating site. Over the […]
The Complete 2023 Microsoft Power BI Super Bundle has 9 courses to teach you all about Power BI. Power BI allows the everyday Excel user to become a Business Intelligence Analyst. This hands-on course will prepare you to start your data analytics career and prepare you to implement Power BI in your organization successfully. Create […]
Perception matters more than reality, especially when your budget is on the line. Law enforcement agencies like to portray criminal activity as constantly rising, especially now that they’re facing additional scrutiny and the occasional so-called “defunding” effort. It’s a weird way to handle (government) business. On one hand, the cops claim rising crime necessitates more […]
Last week, the New York Times reported that Apple had cancelled “The Problem With Jon Stewart.” More importantly, the Times noted that Apple executives, clearly not at all worried about the need for a healthy editorial firewall, had grown uncomfortable with the way that the program was planning to cover issues such as China and […]
In the middle of last year, we talked about an odd lawsuit between two bakeries, Crumbl and Dirty Dough. Crumbl’s suit against Dirty Dough claimed both theft of trade secrets and trademark infringement, the latter of which revolved around two major claims. First, the owner of Dirty Dough used to work for Crumbl. That obviously […]
Here’s how things went for the world’s most infamous purveyor of facial recognition tech when it came to its dealings with the United Kingdom. In a word: not great. In addition to supplying its scraped data to known human rights abusers, Clearview was found to have supplied access to a multitude of UK and US […]
“The fog of war” is a phrase that has been used for over a hundred years to describe the profound uncertainty that envelops armed conflicts while they are happening. Today, the uncertainty for non-combatants is exacerbated by the rapid-fire nature of social media, where people often like or re-post dubious war-related material without scrutinizing it […]
You’d think this legal question would be settled by now. Smartphones have been in everyday use for more than a decade. Citizen journalists have been part of our daily life ever since the advent of affordable portable cameras. The internet has democratized publication, lowering the barrier between observation and accountability. Cops hate this. But the […]
It’s pretty much the way of the world: beyond the basic enshittification story that has been so well told over the past year or so about how companies get worse and worse as they get more and more powerful, there’s also the well known concept of successful innovative companies “pulling up the ladder” behind them, […]
stLouIST