This week, we kick off the most insightful side of things with a comment from That One Guy on my post about how I still hope Twitter succeeds, where the comment highlights the biggest single thing that might get Elon to stop from burning the site to the ground: getting past his own ego. Step […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Comcast joined the chorus of ISPs trying to stop states from protecting privacy and net neutrality, and also targeted Colorado’s thoughts of building its own broadband network, though it was failing to overpower the voters there. Meanwhile, the SESTA fight was heating up: we talked more about how […]
In 2019, Houston police officers — relying on information generated by narcotic squad office Gerald Goines (who is now facing multiple criminal charges) — raided the home of Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle. Both occupants of the home were killed during the raid — one predicated on lies from Officer Goines. The fallout resulted in […]
You’ll be shocked to learn that the same MoviePass executives that routinely misled investors (and once even covertly changed user passwords to try and keep them from using a service they paid for) are now in even more trouble for their dodgy business practices. According to an announcement by the DOJ, former MoviePass executives Theodore […]
It’s always fun when copyright gets in the way of preservation efforts, especially when it comes at the hands of a mega-corporation like Apple. Many of you are likely to be familiar with WWDC, Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. This is one of those places where you get a bunch of Apple product reveals and news […]
Look, when it was revealed that Elon Musk’s first big plan was to make blue checks available for purchase for $8 a month, some of us quickly pointed out that the blue checks weren’t supposed to be about status, but about verification that someone is who they say they are. And, that’s kind of important. […]
The 2022 Complete Microsoft Excel Expert Bundle has 12 courses to help you learn how to get the most out of Excel. Courses cover advanced formulas, VBA, pivot tables, power queries, and more. The bundle is on sale for $25. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all […]
Yesterday I tweeted out a question about whether or not there was anyone left at Twitter who remembered that the company was under a pretty strict FTC consent decree: Apparently the answer was yes, but they didn’t include Elon Musk. Late last night, a few hours after that tweet, the Chief Information Security Officer, the […]
For the last few years Apple has worked overtime trying to market itself as a more privacy-focused company. 40-foot billboards of the iPhone with the slogan “Privacy. That’s iPhone” have been a key part of company marketing for years. The only problem: researchers keep highlighting how a lot of Apple’s well-hyped privacy changes are performative […]
Although trade deals are nominally about, well, trade, Techdirt readers know that they have become an important way to force through changes in areas like copyright and patents without any meaningful democratic scrutiny. That’s because trade deals are negotiated in secret, and then presented as done and dusted once talks have been concluded. The argument […]
We’ve noted for a while that the laws of physics would prohibit Elon Musk’s satellite broadband service from being truly disruptive at any real scale. Analysts had been quietly noting for a while that Starlink lacked the capacity to handle its projected user load. That recently resulted in obvious slowdowns, raising the question of when […]
We’ve talked in the past about “soft corruption,” a term I first heard from Larry Lessig. Lots of people have a general sense of what actual corruption is, but less understanding of the specifics. But, in general, people feel uncomfortable with the ways in which money can influence politics, even when it’s legal. Lessig’s concept […]
Jeff German, a forty-year veteran investigative reporter residing in Las Vegas, Nevada, was murdered earlier this year, allegedly by a local government official whose actions had received recent criticism in articles bylined by German. Robert Telles, a county official, has been arraigned in the murder of the journalist, something prosecutors claim was prompted by German’s […]
Text to speech enables brands to deliver an enhanced end-user experience while minimizing costs. Speechnow lets you create voice recordings and audio versions of content for YouTube videos, Facebook ads, Instagram posts, and more, in just a few steps. All you have to do is add text, choose voice and language, and wait for your […]
I keep pointing out that Twitter was already doing most of what Elon seems to want to do, but he (and his fans) has not quite realized that. Also, while Twitter was often slow in rolling stuff out, and not the best at explaining what it was doing, many of its features were created pretty […]
After years of explosive growth, Netflix lost nearly a million subscribers between April and July of this year. In part due to new competition in streaming, but also because Netflix executives are stuck in this auto-cannibalism loop; sacrificing what’s popular about the service (affordability, no ads, few weird restrictions, decent content) to feed Wall Street’s insatiable […]
Courts have continually said pretextual stops are a cool way to engage in law enforcement fishing expeditions. But there are a few caveats. First, there needs to be a reason to stop the person, even if that reason exists largely in the imaginative readings of local statutes by police officers. Second, the stop cannot be […]
For years we’ve been firing no shortage of low-Earth orbit satellites into space without the federal government showing much concern about the the impact of these new technologies at scale. Like, the navigational hazards of unchecked space junk, or the way scientists warned that Starlink causes significant light pollution that seriously harms scientific research and […]
Fascist kleptocrats sure do love their lists, don’t they? Way back in March, when Vladimir Putin decided to invade a sovereign neighbor, we discussed how Russia was contemplating simply legalizing software piracy in the wake of crippling sanctions to try to keep the Russian economy as stable as possible. That Russia would take such a […]
The last few weeks of Elon craziness regarding Twitter has been kind of shocking in all sorts of ways. We knew, going in, that he didn’t appear to understand the challenges of running a social media website. His statements regarding free speech suggested that he really didn’t understand that concept either. But, every time I […]
stLouIST