a Better Bubble™

TechDirt 🕸

Amazon Takes On Three Shady Retailers, Suing Them For Abusing The DMCA Process

2 years 4 months ago
DMCA abuse is never going to go away. Plenty of IP protection firms send out unvetted takedown notices in bulk, resulting in the targeting of non-infringers by takedown demands. To maintain their safe harbor protections, entities hosting third-party content tend to side with those sending the notices. For platforms hosting millions or billions of uploads, […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: Curiosity Stream HD Plan

2 years 4 months ago
Curiosity Stream is the award-winning streaming and on-demand viewing destination where you can journey through our world and beyond. Its immersive experiences feature experts like David Attenborough, who will teach you about the natural world, Michio Kaku, and Brian Greene, who will broaden your perspective on space, time, and the future with stunning visuals, and […]
Gretchen Heckmann

NPR Was Twitter’s Example Of What Should NOT Be Labeled ‘State-Affiliated Media.’ Then Musk Added The Label And Retconned The Policy

2 years 4 months ago
For years I’ve joked that everyone who hasn’t thought about trust & safety thinks that it’s easy: just do what I would do. The assumption is that there’s a “right” set of ways to handle these questions, when the reality is that there’s a very broad set of unclear areas, where there are reasonable arguments […]
Mike Masnick

Senators: Gosh, Maybe We Should Accurately Map Broadband Before Deploying $50 Billion In Telecom Subsidies?

2 years 4 months ago
We’ve noted for years how, despite a lot of political lip service to “bridging the digital divide,” the U.S. still doesn’t truly know where broadband is or isn’t available. Despite spending $400 billion and counting, the FCC has done an abysmal job accurately mapping broadband speeds and availability, or holding monopolies responsible for false coverage […]
Karl Bode

The 404 Awards: Honoring The Worst Of The Worst Tech Policy Ideas

2 years 4 months ago
Today is April 4th, or 04/04 no matter which direction you use for showing dates (and, look, while it’s ingrained in my head, I think we can all admit that the US version of month/day/year is kinda weird.). But, error code 404 is (somewhat famously) the HTML code for “page not found.” In the early […]
Mike Masnick

Techdirt Podcast Episode 349: Link Taxes Are Bad, Canada Edition

2 years 4 months ago
Legacy media operations really, really want tech companies that send them traffic to pay them as well. From Rupert Murdoch’s link tax in Australia to the very bad JCPA in America, these requirements are nonsensical and run directly counter to the core functioning of the internet. Currently, one of the biggest pushes for such a […]
Leigh Beadon

Without Verification, What Is The Point Of Elon Musk’s Twitter?

2 years 4 months ago
Elon Musk’s Twitter fundamentally misunderstands what made Twitter useful in the first place. In an attempt to wring blood from a stone, Twitter’s announced that all the original “blue checks”—initially created as a way to verify that someone was who they said they were—will disappear on April 1st. Instead, blue checks will once again be […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: PlayStation Plus Essential 12-Month Subscription

2 years 4 months ago
Unleash the power of PlayStation and explore hundreds of incredible games with a new choice of membership plan. With PlayStation Plus Essential, you’ll get to enjoy all the core PlayStation Plus benefits: join your friends in online multiplayer, add new games to your collection every month, get incredible deals from PlayStation Store, and more. Relive some […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Google Fiber Returns From The Dead To Deliver Actual Broadband Competition To Iowa

2 years 4 months ago
Back in 2016, Alphabet executives made it pretty clear they had grown tired of trying to disrupt the U.S. broadband industry with Google Fiber. Executives were fired, hundreds of employees were laid off, and any real expansion in the project was effectively frozen. Alphabet and Google Fiber executives then just pretended none of this had happened […]
Karl Bode

Canada Follows U.S. Lead On Mindless Consolidation With Rogers, Shaw Merger Approval

2 years 5 months ago
In both Canada and the U.S., there’s no shortage of evidence that consolidation in telecom and media hasn’t been great for telecom and media — or employers, competition, or consumers. That’s not really stopping regulators in either country, who continue to approve massive harmful megadeals with only the pretense of meaningful review. Canada’s just approved […]
Karl Bode

Far Right Troll ‘Ricky Vaughn’ Convicted Of Election Interference For Tricking People Into Voting By Phone

2 years 5 months ago
Earlier this year, a federal court dismissed almost all of a far right troll’s challenge to the criminal case brought against him by the DOJ. “Ricky Vaughn” is a notorious social media presence — one who’s been repeatedly suspended and banned for his never-ending string of shitheelishness. I don’t sympathize with Douglass Mackey, better known […]
Tim Cushing

The DEA Has Added Apple’s AirTags To Its Surveillance Arsenal

2 years 5 months ago
Apple tried to create something useful and ended up empowering awful people. Meant to help its users keep an eye on things that were important to them, the small tracking devices known as AirTags were soon exploited by stalkers to track and harass their targets, leading to a class action lawsuit against the company by […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: Deepstash Bite-Sized Knowledge

2 years 5 months ago
Deepstash is a platform for finding and organizing the ideas that matter to you. It helps you become more inspired and productive through bite-sized ideas. In Deepstash, you find ideas on topics like personal development, art and culture, mindfulness, and more. These ideas are represented as little cards you can read at a glance. All […]
Gretchen Heckmann