The FBI has never not been abusing its access to Section 702 collections. This collection includes communications, scooped up by the NSA during its so-called “foreign facing” surveillance. The thing about this collection is it also obtains communications from US persons to foreign individuals. The NSA can collect the latter, but not without grabbing the […]
We’ve noted more than a few times that Netflix’s password sharing crackdown is a dumb cash grab, and illustrative of the company’s inevitable transition from innovative disruptor to the type of nickel-and-diming cable company Netflix originally disrupted. Netflix’s biggest innovation in the last five years is this new plan to sock you with a $2-3 extra […]
There is a long history of trademark silliness concerning the phrase “Taco Tuesday.” As with many trademark stories, the original sin in all of this was committed by the USPTO , which in the ’80s somehow managed to grant the Taco John’s chain a trademark on the term, despite it being both very descriptive and, […]
After Donald Trump was forced to vacate the Oval Office to make way for its newest tenant, he apparently decided to cement his legacy by walking off with boxes full of classified documents. When the National Archive and Records Administration began filing away the records Trump actually deigned to turn over to it, it found […]
Free Speech Coalition, a trade group representing the adult entertainment industry, filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah to overturn Senate Bill (SB) 287 – the new law that requires age verification for all adult websites. As I wrote about in my last entry for this site, SB 287 prompted the leadership of […]
There have been various chapters in the new large language models (LLMs) story. First, people were amazed that systems like ChatGPT could write a sonnet about bananas in the style of Shakespeare, and in just a few seconds. Soon, though, they realized that chatbots’ replies might be grammatically correct, but they were frequently peppered with […]
Remember, according to Elon Musk, one of the worst things that old Twitter did was “shadowban” people. There was a whole “Twitter Files” about the practice, which Musk insisted was a horrible practice that was censorship. Except… at the same time he had no problem using it to silence accounts he personally disliked. Hilariously, he […]
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A lawsuit [PDF] against a cheat creator has swung almost completely in Bungie’s direction, mainly thanks to the Danish defendant being unwilling to travel across the pond to defend himself in court. The claims are numerous, ranging from copyright infringement to trademark infringement to CFAA violations to the ever-popular (but rarely successful) RICO. While Bungie […]
We’ve noted in detail how the AT&T/Time Warner/Discovery mergers have been an apocalyptic mess that aptly demonstrates the U.S. obsession with utterly pointless megadeals and a “growth for growth’s sake” mindset. Hundreds of billions of dollars later and the companies have produced a product that’s notably shittier than when they started, laying off thousands of people, cancelling popular brands, […]
For more than a decade, the Massachusetts State Police crime lab hid information from judges, prosecutors, and criminal defendants. This is nothing unusual for this state and its crime labs. The words “Massachusetts,” “crime lab,” and “scandal” have gone hand-in-hand for years. [Heads up, I will be using “state” to refer to the Massachusetts government […]
There are lots of reasons why trademark disputes get really stupid, really fast. The mother of all those reasons is, of course, the USPTO’s inability to cast a critical eye towards the applications its receives. Far too many trademarks are granted for words and terms that are not unique source-identifiers of goods and services. But […]
Having figured out the internet is a great place to find things, cops are increasingly relying on warrants that target tech companies in hopes of finding suspects, rather than finding suspects first and working forward from there. Thanks to the Third Party Doctrine, there’s very little expectation of privacy in what people share with the […]
Recently artist and actor David Choe made headlines by citing alleged copyright violations to scrub the internet — including journalists’ social media accounts — of clips from a 2014 podcast where he seemingly admitted raping a masseuse. He later claimed that he made up the story for shock value and said it should be taken as performance art. The […]
Lots of ideas have been floated by legislators and others in hopes of limiting the distribution of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Very few of these ideas have been good. Most have assumed that the problem is so horrendous any efforts are justified. The problem here is that governments need to actually justify mandated mass […]
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We tend to think of McSweeney’s as a satire magazine, but on this one, it’s dead on: I Will Defend Free Speech to the Death. Or Until an Autocrat Asks Me to Stop. They say that if you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything. So today, I’m drawing a line in the sand and […]
As the U.S. has tried to untether itself from Chinese tech, one major policy goal by both parties has been to purge U.S. telecom networks of Chinese telecom gear. The worry (sometimes substantiated, sometimes not) is that Chinese intelligence has embedded all manner of nefarious backdoors in sensitive telecommunications gear (you’re to ignore that the […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about Elon Musk’s latest Twitter misadventure: Musk’s just announced that he’s going to start deleting unused profiles. As always, he has completely failed to consider the ramifications of this (people are going to be just thrilled when their dead loved […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2018, the Defense Department was looking for another exemption from compliance with FOIA, while police were dropping charges against a 19-year-old who downloaded public documents from a FOI portal. The FCC’s Ajit Pai was celebrating as net neutrality got an official end date, while several companies were responding to […]
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