As surveillance tech has become cheaper, it has become ubiquitous. Lots of people believe they can solve education-related problems, and most frequently their “solutions” involve tech replacing people and AI replacing common sense. Even before the COVID pandemic forced most students to engage in studies remotely, human problems were being addressed with inhuman, error-prone tech. […]
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Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, who heads something called the “House Republican Big Tech Task Force” has teamed up with Seth Dillon, the CEO of the deeply unfunny “conservative” Onion wannabe, The Babylon Bee, to whine in the NY Post about “how to end big tech censorship of free speech.” The answer, apparently, is to remove […]
Hungry to boost municipal budgets, a growing roster of states and cities have spent the last five years or so trying to implement a tax on Netflix, Hulu, and other streaming services. Sometimes (like in Chicago) this has involved expanding an existing amusement tax (traditionally covering book stores, music stores, ball games and other brick and mortar […]
To be in law enforcement is to be almost criminally obtuse. (We haven’t criminalized that. YET! But when we do…) They can’t stay out of their own way. The public may be willing to cut them some slack but they constantly make moves that dis-endear them to the people they’re supposed to be serving. DNA […]
This post will serve as the start of what will be a familiar cycle for fans of Nintendo. I’m going to show you something cool that Nintendo fans did, you’re going to get moderately excited, and then you’ll immediately become depressed when you realize that Nintendo will absolutely shut this cool project down in the […]
There’s very little that seems to anger public servants more than mandates requiring them to serve the public. For years, the San Diego police department has expanded its surveillance programs. And for years, these expansions have gone unchallenged. But now that the city has passed an ordinance requiring more direct oversight of police activity, cops […]
Project Veritas, the faux conservative group of pranksters pretending to be journalists likes to pretend that they’re “free speech” supporters. But they’re not. They appear to really only support their own free speech, and have a much more flexible view of free speech when it includes speech critical of themselves. Over the past few years, […]
To keep an eye on what the UK government considers to be dangerous migrants, it’s turning to some questionable tech provided by a company that’s long been in the business of tracking people for more altruistic reasons. Migrants who have been convicted of a criminal offence will be required to scan their faces up to […]
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As I type this, I’m sitting in a (fairly uncomfortable) chair in the lobby of a Holiday Inn, having read through nearly 300 pages of legal filings of sniping between Elon Musk (165 pages) and Twitter (127 pages) trying to figure out how to best explain what’s in the filings in a meaningful and accurate […]
Roughly 83 million Americans currently live under a broadband monopoly. In most instances, their only choice is Comcast or Charter Communications, which sells service under the “Spectrum” brand. And in both cases, users pay significantly higher prices for spotty, slow, service with statistically terrible customer service, because that’s how monopolization works. But the nation’s two […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the EU’s new office in Silicon Valley that aims to work with tech companies on EU law compliance: I know it won’t happen because money, but the tech companies really need to just stop trying to placate these people. If […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, Russia banned VPNs, Australian prosecutors were seeking to make it illegal to refuse to turn passwords over to law enforcement, the UK Home Secretary wanted companies to stop offering encryption altogether, and another US federal court said cops can get historic cell site location info without a warrant. […]
We had a depressing number of Techdirt stories on this site that involve Shaquille O’Neal. I say that as a basketball fan who absolutely adores Shaq’s contributions to the TNT studio broadcasts for the NBA. On the other hand, the times Shaq has made it onto our pages hasn’t been for the best of reasons. […]
There are a few questionable assumptions made by the Fourth Circuit Appeals Court in its denial [PDF] of a suppression request, but the opening suggests drug cartels might want to vet their employees a little better. David Sierra Orozco was paid to drive a car with over $100,000 in drug-tainted cash hidden in a secret […]
The EU is well on its way to fundamentally destroying the internet. Two giant new regulations are set to become law soon: the Digital Services Act and the Digital Markets Act. And while neither is ridiculous in the same way that laws in the US and the UK and some other places are just pandering […]
A few years back, the Trump DOJ and FCC rubber-stamped the Sprint T-Mobile merger without heeding expert warnings that it would stifle competition, kill jobs and eventually raise rates. Working closely with T-Mobile and Dish, the FCC and DOJ “antitrust enforcers” unveiled what they claimed was a “fix” for these problems: they’d cobble together a fourth major […]
Pretty much everyone who has ever gone to college hates educational publishers. There’s an oligopoly of just five giant publishers, and they long ago learned that they are in the best market ever: the buyers of their textbooks (the students) have no choice and are forced to buy the books if their professors assign them […]
The 2022 Data-Driven Decisions Bundle is designed to help you become a data expert. The courses are self-paced and interactive, so you can begin right away. This data-driven bundle takes you through the step-by-step process of creating, manipulating, and analyzing data. Master data and make better, smarter decisions. It’s on sale for $49. Note: The […]
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