The FTC and four state attorneys general this week struck a $9.4 million settlement with Google over allegations that Google covertly paid celebrities money to promote a phone none of them had ever used. The FTC’s announcement states that the agency had previously filed suit against Google and iHeartMedia for airing nearly 29,000 deceptive endorsements […]
Rolling Stone has a fun article quoting multiple former Twitter employees highlighting that polls are the least secure tool on the platform, and are regularly open to manipulation by bots: “Polls are more prone to manipulation than almost anything else [on Twitter]. It’s interesting, given his [Elon’s] use of polls,” he added. Several other ex-Twitter […]
ID.me made its disastrous news cycle debut as COVID-19 continued to wreak havoc worldwide. With ID verification and other government services mostly still being handled remotely, multiple governments continued to wrestle with these unprecedented logistical problems. ID.me appeared to be such a solution. It wasn’t. In June 2021, it was reported that ID.me was locking […]
Now, you can understand any book or reading material of your choice regardless of its language. The NEWYES Scan Reader can recognize 3,000 characters per minute, has 0.3s translation speed, and its accuracy rate is as high as 98%. It also supports 9 UI languages, 55 OCR languages, 112 text translation languages, and 112 voice […]
We’ve talked about the mess that is the UK’s Online Safety Bill a few times now, focusing mostly on the extremely serious concerns over requiring websites to take down “legal but harmful” speech, which is a ridiculous and impossible to meet standard that would lead to massive over-blocking of perfectly reasonable content. Many people, including […]
South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem put on a bit of a performance this week by announcing that the state would be banning government employees from installing TikTok on their phones. The effort, according to the Governor, is supposed to counter the national security risk of TikTok sharing consumer data with the Chinese government: “South Dakota […]
It’s been a long while since we last discussed the platform war that started between Steam and Epic several years back. The crux of the situation was that Epic began offering a far better revenue split for game publishers compared with Steam, with something like a 10-20% delta in how much of the revenue Epic […]
We should always be wary when a government entity charged with ending [insert issue here] declares said issue ended. We should be doubly wary when a Chinese government agency says anything about anything. So, it’s with a huge amount of skepticism that we greet this announcement by a Chinese regulator, which claims the thing it’s […]
A few weeks ago the FBI and DOJ seized a bunch of domain names associated with Z-Library, an online repository of millions of unauthorized copies of ebooks. The DOJ also issued an indictment of the two Russian nationals (who were arrested in Argentina), who were accused of running the site. I still have significant reservations […]
Congress has a bad habit. They have stopped passing substantive legislation through normal procedure, debate and votes. The legislative process as designed by our Founders is not happening. Instead, Congress is saving most of its actual policy-making legislation for large end-of-the-year bills that can combine hundreds of separate pieces of legislation. And if reports are […]
You know, it was just a few weeks ago that we posted an open letter to Elon Musk laying out just some of the basics of speedrunning the content moderation learning curve. And, as people keep reminding me, he seems to be doing all the levels all at once. But here’s the incredible bit: unlike […]
Send pictures and videos from your smartphone to eco4life Wi-Fi Digital Photo Frame, from anywhere in the world using the eco4life App. This 10.1″ smart frame displays your photos in 1280×800 resolution, has built-in 16GB memory, and supports SD cards and USB. It’s on sale for $150. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and […]
In March 2019, we reported that a Washington federal court has tossed (definitively) a lawsuit brought by two Seattle police officers who believed being called murderers gave them a cause of action. It did not. Seattle councilwoman Kshama Sawant did not actually call these two cops — Scott Miller and Michael Spaulding — murderers. Instead, […]
Back in 2014, Comcast introduced a new $1.50 per month surcharge on cable bills it called its “Broadcast TV Fee.” Said fee was really just a portion of the cost of doing business for Comcast (programming costs), busted out of the full bill and hidden below the line — designed specifically to let the company […]
It’s a lesson that apparently keeps needing to be re-learned over and over again: for far too many types of digital purchases, you simply don’t own the thing you bought. The arena for this perma-lesson are varied: movies, books, music. And, of course, video games. The earliest lesson in that space may have been when […]
DNA collection at the time of arrest may make sense in certain cases. If it’s a violent crime — rape, murder, home invasion, etc. — it probably is smart to take some sort of a sample which may help place the suspect at the scene of the crime. Not that DNA evidence is infallible. It’s […]
The good news: there’s more than $50 billion in broadband subsidies coming down the road courtesy of COVID relief and infrastructure legislation. The bad news: monopoly ISPs are working overtime using every trick in the lobbying book to ensure this money goes to them, and not to any number of smaller, local competitors. If money […]
Some people just don’t understand social media. Or the Constitution. Or moderation efforts. Former president Donald Trump is one of those people. Last July, he sued Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube under the theory that the suspension of his accounts was the result of the Biden administration’s direct interference. Because his successor approached social media services […]
We keep seeing it show up in a variety of places: laws to “protect the children” that, fundamentally begin with age verification to figure out who is a child (and then layering in a ton of often questionable requirements for how to deal with those identified as children). We have the Online Safety Bill in […]
We’ll get to Chris Wray in a moment, but first let’s do a throwback to May 29, 2018 — the date the FBI first promised to correct its miscount (estimated to be off by as much as 4,000 devices) of uncrackable devices in its possession. Multiple statements utilizing the FBI’s bad stats were edited, with […]
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