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Daily Deal: PlayStation Plus Essential 12-Month Subscription

2 years 8 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

Unfortunately, Paying For The Public Domain Already Exists In Many Countries

2 years 8 months ago
A couple of weeks ago, we reported on a terrible idea in France: requiring companies to pay for the use of public domain material. As the post explained, this is a subversion of what it means for something to enter the public domain, and a betrayal of the implicit bargain of copyright. Fortunately, the plan was dropped, […]
Mike Masnick

Signal Says It Will Exit India Rather Than Compromise Its Encryption

2 years 8 months ago
Signal ensures its users’ security and privacy by encrypting their messages and refusing to collect a bunch of data governments or malicious hackers might find useful or interesting. That hasn’t made it many friends in governments (except with government officials who utilize the service to dodge public records requests). An FBI official once compared Signal […]
Tim Cushing

Why Embedding Content Matters

2 years 8 months ago
Imagine waking up in the morning, grabbing your hot cup of coffee, and scrolling your favorite blog post or website, only to find it looking like this: Images are missing. Video content is not there. Nothing but an empty black void staring back at you. This is what could happen if a recent case brought […]
Mike Masnick

Brazil’s Governments Amps Up Anti-Free Speech Tactics Ahead Of National Election

2 years 8 months ago
The Brazilian government — under the “leadership” of Donald Trump Mutual Admiration Society member Jair Bolsonaro — has been steadily cracking down on free speech under the guise of saving the public from “fake news” and other misinformation. Over the past few years, it has ramped up efforts to eradicate content and reporting that it […]
Tim Cushing

Daily Deal: Restflix — Restful Sleep Streaming

2 years 8 months ago
Restflix is a revolutionary streaming service designed to help users fall asleep faster and rest better. With 10+ personalized channels full of sleep meditations, bedtime stories, calming visuals, and binaural beats to harness the brain’s responsiveness to sound and help create a meditative, restful state. Through the use of sleep meditations, bedtime stories, peaceful and […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Comcast Forces Users To Buy Comcast Hardware If They Want Faster Upload Speeds

2 years 8 months ago
For decades, consumers have mostly wanted one thing from their ISP: a semi-affordable dumb pipe connection for the Internet. For just as long, US ISPs have bucked this demand, routinely trying to saddle users with higher costs and additional services consumer never asked for, while finding strange new ways to make an additional buck on […]
Karl Bode

Another Person Is Archiving Every English PS2 Game Manual

2 years 8 months ago
A couple of years ago, we discussed the work being done, essentially by one enterprising individual going by the handle “Peebs,” to archive a bunch of retro video game manuals for the sake of preservation. Earlier this year, we updated you all with the fairly impressive news that every SNES game manual had been digitized […]
Dark Helmet

If GitHub Copilot Is A Copyright Problem, Perhaps The Problem Is Copyright

2 years 8 months ago
Last week a new GitHub Copilot investigation website created by Matthew Butterick brought the conversation about GitHub’s Copilot project back to the front of mind for many people, myself included. Copilot, a tool trained on public code that is designed to auto-suggest code to programmers, has been greeted by excitement, curiosity, skepticism, and concern since it was announced. The GitHub […]
Mike Masnick

Techdirt Podcast Episode 345: Can An Oversight Board Solve Infrastructure Moderation Questions?

2 years 8 months ago
We’ve often talked about the importance of distinguishing content moderation at the infrastructure layer of the internet stack from that which happens on platforms at the edge, and this issue was brought to the forefront recently when Cloudflare took down Kiwi Farms. This week, we’re joined by internet policy expert Konstantinos Komaitis to discuss an […]
Leigh Beadon

Saudi Arabia Imprisons An American Citizen For 16 Years Over Critical Tweets

2 years 8 months ago
The Saudi government, led by crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, doesn’t care to be criticized. It routinely punishes its own citizens for insulting the nation’s ruler. It occasionally murders and dismembers critics for refusing to be silenced. And now it’s prosecuting and imprisoning US citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights. Last month, the Saudi […]
Tim Cushing

ByteDance Spying Scandal Isn’t So Much About TikTok, But About The US’s Failure To Pass A Comprehensive Privacy Law

2 years 8 months ago
Emily Baker-White has quite the story over at Forbes, revealing how ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, apparently planned to have its “Internal Audit and Risk Control” department spy on the location of some American citizens: The team primarily conducts investigations into potential misconduct by current and former ByteDance employees. But in at least […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The 2022 CompTIA & AWS Practice Exam E-Book Bundle

2 years 8 months ago
Whether you’re just starting out your IT journey or wanting to boost your IT skills, this 2022 CompTIA and AWS Practice Exam E-Book Bundle, full of practice exam questions and theory, is just the right package for you! With 14 eBooks from ExamsDigest, it will give you a walkthrough of the basics to advanced aspects […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Missouri Attorney General Appears To Be Using Open Records Requests To Intimidate His Critics

2 years 8 months ago
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt is involved in some questionable use of the state’s public records laws. Following the AG’s dubious decision to sue schools over what he called “illegal” mask mandates, he raised his controversy level considerably earlier this year. He continued this assault on his own credibility by suing schools and educational non-profits […]
Tim Cushing

Court: No Immunity For Cops Who Waited Months To Test Heart Shaped Candy They Claimed Were Drugs

2 years 8 months ago
We know cops often can’t differentiate innocuous substances from actual drugs. These from-the-hip determinations are just the manufacturing of reasonable suspicion and probable cause, something that allows cops to perform the searches and seizures they were planning to do anyway. Whether it’s the “odor of marijuana” (something that can rarely be objectively examined in court) […]
Tim Cushing