What is “plain view?” Cops claim it’s anything anyone could see if they happened to be in the same place at the same time, including those moments when citizens deploy their own air force. Force your way into the house under the “community caretaking” exception to the Fourth Amendment? Anything out in the open is […]
Let me start this post with an anecdote. I’m in my 40s and have been a Chicago Cubs fan my entire life. If you know anything about baseball, then you know that means that for more than 30 years, my entire fandom was wrapped in an identify of losing, and I was also saddled with […]
Okay, now we’re getting back to the plan. Two weeks ago we featured an excerpt from the audiobook of Red Team Blues, Cory Doctorow’s new (and excellent) novel, and promised that we’d soon be joined by Cory himself. And now, we deliver! Listen to this week’s episode for a long and far-reaching conversation between Mike […]
We’ve talked a lot about just how bad the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) is. Yet some people (including people who, frankly, should know better) keep trying to tell me how well meaning it is. It’s not. It’s dangerous. But it has real momentum. A massive bipartisan group of Senators are co-sponsors of the bill. […]
For the first time in a long time, the Intelligence Community is facing an uphill battle to getting one of its most invasive surveillance powers renewed. Not even during the heyday of the Snowden leaks has the IC seen this much resistance to a clear reauthorization of its Section 702 program. This surveillance grabs everything […]
The TruGolf Mini is a new approach to learning the game of golf. Paired with E6 CONNECT software, this interactive swing studio analyzes and displays swing data after every shot, helping golfers of all skill levels understand the game. With TruGolf Mini, every shot you take is a lesson. It’s on sale for $230. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store […]
Reddit CEO’s insistence that the protests from Reddit would simply “pass” certainly hasn’t come to pass just yet. While increasing pressure from the company against protest mods has resulted in some backing down, many are continuing to engage in malicious compliance, making it clear they’re still protesting. And, a few days ago, after many threats […]
Language learning technology’s (aka “AI”) introduction into journalism has been a blistering mess. And not just because the technology is undercooked (which it is), but because the folks in charge of most major media outlets are incompetent cheapskates who simply see the tech as a way to cut corners, wage war on labor, and automate […]
Well, well, this may be a story that is starting to come to a close. With the EU having already approved Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the two remaining hurdles Microsoft had to jump through were with the UK’s CMA agency and the FTC here in the States. After a recent loss in court blocking […]
Biased policing is just the way things are done. Decades of targeting minorities for being minorities has resulted in tons of garbage data now being used to justify “smarter” policing guided by AI that has been fed nothing but garbage. Every so often, law enforcement agencies are forced to reckon with their racist brand of […]
I wasn’t going to write about Elon changing Twitter’s name and branding to X, because… who cares? I’m not sure what the point is. But, a lot of people have been asking me my thoughts, and the more I was trying to parse it all out, the more confused I became. It basically only makes […]
Police officers are quick to argue that anything people do in public doesn’t have an expectation of privacy. They have also been quick to argue (until precedent made it mostly futile) that anything they do in public shouldn’t be documented, recorded, and disseminated. These cops are, of course, wrong. But that doesn’t stop them from […]
As the name suggests, classification algorithms are what allow computers to well… classify new observations, like how your inbox decides which incoming emails are spam or how Siri recognizes your voice. The Essential MATLAB Training Bundle will show you how to implement classification algorithms using MATLAB, one of the most powerful tools inside a data […]
Elon Musk seems infatuated with bots and scrapers as the root of all his problems at Twitter. Given his propensity to fire engineers who tell him things he doesn’t want to hear, it’s not difficult to believe that engineers afraid to tell Musk the truth are conveniently blaming “scraping” on the variety of problems that […]
Last February, a report in Politico found that Crisis Text Line, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit support options for the suicidal, had been monetizing user data. More specifically, the nonprofit was collecting all sorts of data on “customer interactions” (ranging from the frequency certain words are used, to the type of distress users are […]
This week, both our winners on the insightful side are responses to tiresome comments from some… prolific commenters. In first place, it’s Rocky tackling some platform/publisher nonsense: “Fox News and the NY Post are publishers, not platforms. We don’t care to control what they publish.” The 1A doesn’t care if a private company is a […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, Ajit Pai was pretending to care about the identity fraud that plagued the net neutrality repeal, Netflix’s CEO was proclaiming the death of net neutrality to be no big deal, while the government in India was moving in the opposite direction and embracing full net neutrality (though the […]
The Supreme Court made it clear in 2018 with its Carpenter decision: gathering historical cell site location info in bulk was impermissible under the Fourth Amendment. If law enforcement wanted to engage in third-party-enabled long term tracking of suspects via this info, it needed to get a warrant first. That ruling seemed to make everything […]
While the telecom industry did manage to successfully defang U.S. consumer protection regulators for the better part of the last decade, they’re still facing some notable headwinds. Broadband growth has dramatically slowed, their cable TV customers are leaving in droves, and while they are getting a ton of new subsidies via the infrastructure bill, a […]
Apparently, Elon Musk has little to no interest in paying ex-employees the $500 million in severance he owes them (which was included in the purchase agreement he signed, but which it’s unclear if he ever read), but he (and the close friends and family he stuffed the Tesla board with) need to pay back $735 […]
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