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The EARN IT Act (the tortured acronym stands for Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act) has been bad news ever since its introduction way back in March of 2020. The bill’s original backers were all people who either hated encryption (AG Bill Barr, Sen. Dianne Feinstein) or “Big Tech” (Trump acolytes Josh […]
Aaron Swartz was, perhaps by technicality, a co-founder of Reddit. The more complete story is that he was working on a different project, infogami, that got merged into Reddit, which was created by Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, but it’s been said that part of the deal was that all three would get founder credit. […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is kallethen with a simple response to the question of whether a private platform’s right to enforce its rules would allow them to ban groups of people for discriminatory reasons: Did they violate the site’s rules? That’s the important distinction you keep missing. In second […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, broadband satisfaction scores were plummeting while California was pushing forward with its tough net neutrality law and the hype around Google Fiber was giving way to delays and frustration. Emails revealed more about the FCC’s “DDoS attack” claims, and AT&T ended its quest to erode FTC authority over […]
How does simple communication and the rollout of new polices remain so very, very difficult for Amazon’s Twitch platform? Over the past several years, we have written up many posts of all the ways that Twitch has sucked out loud when it comes to communicating with its creators, particularly when it comes to policy changes […]
It’s always interesting to me to watch and see what gets attention in the security and privacy space. For example, everybody spent the last two years suffering absolute embolisms at the idea that TikTok was a threat to privacy, but nobody much seems to care that an absolute ocean of “smart devices,” from your router […]
NSO Group is on the ropes after years of self-inflicted damage metastasized into months of negative news coverage. Since worldwide exposure of its customers’ abuse of its malware, as well as exposing the sort of people NSO chose to deal with, the company has discussed getting out of the offensive spyware business — a move […]
One of the most important tools for trust and safety efforts is the “block” feature, allowing a user to entirely block someone else from following them. Yes, on Twitter you can get around this by going into incognito mode, but overall, the feature is a very useful tool for those being harassed to limit access […]
For searches to be compliant with the Constitution, their underlying warrants need to be just as compliant. Warrants have been required for cell phone searches since 2014, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Riley decision. Nearly a decade on, and the government is still suffering periodic bouts of unreasonableness when performing phone searches. We recently covered […]
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By now you’ve heard of the lawyer who used ChatGPT for his legal research, and it made up fake cases. We’ll again remind you that Joshua Browder, the founder of DoNotPay insisted that this same underlying technology was so sophisticated that he offered $1 million to a lawyer who would let it make arguments in […]
It’s never fully appreciated the way we’ve let scammers, scumbags, and assorted bullshit artists hijack the nation’s top voice communications platform. Or that we’ve let marketing industry lobbyists slowly degrade the authority of the one U.S. regulator capable of actually doing something about it. Case in point: the FCC this week announced that it has […]
So, this is bad. Over the last few years, we’ve written plenty about the so-called “inter partes review” or “IPR” that came into being about a decade ago as part of the “America Invents Act,” which was the first major change to the patent system in decades. For much of the first decade of the […]
There have been lots of legal battles fought over proprietary blends of numbers and letters. States collecting a premium for vanity plates claim this is government speech, since it’s a state-issued plate. Or, if it’s not quite government speech, it’s the government’s tacit approval of this speech, even if the vanity plate really only contains […]
Lots of people have been waiting for this, but it’s finally happened: someone has sued ChatGPT maker OpenAI over an AI “hallucination” (i.e., confidently spewing out something that is blatantly wrong). The complaint, filed by Mark Walters, in state court in Georgia, argues that OpenAI made up false and defamatory claims about himself. From the […]
Being abnormally suspicious of anything Chinese isn’t new. There’s a wave of hysteria-based lawmaking happening right now involving TikTok, but deciding Chinese nationals and Chinese entities are inherently suspicious has been part of this nation’s cultural fabric since the construction of railroads back in the mid-19th century. That supposition that foreigners — especially the exotic-looking […]
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Rep. Jim Jordan is at it again. You’ll recall that Jordan ignored subpoenas from the January 6th Committee and was referred to the House Ethics Committee for his failure to respond to those subpoenas. Of course, since being handed the keys to the brand new (created just for him) “Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the […]
By now we’ve noted several times how the folks most vocally calling for a nationwide TikTok ban are putting on a dumb performance designed to distract you from our lack of competent internet privacy laws and our complete unwillingness to regulate the sleazy data broker space. As in, banning TikTok doesn’t actually fix much because […]
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