The Microsoft Office Professional 2021 for Windows And MBA/Finance Courses Bundle comes with a lifetime license for Microsoft Office 2021 Professional. It also includes three courses: one covers starting a business, another covers finance, accounting, modeling, and valuation, and the third covers financial analysis and investing. The bundle is on sale for $60. Note: The […]
A whole bunch of people over the last month have sent me Jonathan Haidt’s essay in The Atlantic, “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid,” and asked for my thoughts. Haidt’s basic premise is that the problem is social media. It’s more complex and nuanced than that, and there are […]
We’ve noted a few times how there’s an absolutely historic amount of money being thrown at the “digital divide” this year. The broadband infrastructure bill alone designates $42 billion to expanding broadband access. Billions more in COVID relief money started flowing this week courtesy of the Treasury Department. According to an announcement by the agency, […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Toom1275 with a comment about the USPS seizing “defund the police” facemasks: Oh look, an actual rights violation by an actual common carrier. In second place, it’s a comment from Naughty Autie (that also won second place for Funny), responding to another commenter’s thoughts […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2017, the Sixth Circuit was the latest court to say real-time cellphone location tracking is not a Fourth Amendment issue, and the Supreme Court finally decided to take up the question. Tom Cotton introduced a bill to renew Section 702 surveillance forever, just as Congress was getting pretty mad […]
We have written several times about the “true fans” idea as an alternative approach to the traditional remuneration models employed by the copyright industry players, such as publishers, recording companies and film studios. It’s a simple approach: get the people who really love an artist’s work to support it directly, and in advance, rather than […]
In news that will surprise basically no one, Truth Social, Trump’s social network that was pitched as being about bringing free speech back and not doing any “viewpoint discrimination,” even as its terms of service promised it would be heavily moderated, is now banning users for trying to spread some “truths” about the January 6 […]
Last week, New York State became the first state to pass right to repair legislation. The bill was the culmination of years of consumer frustration with repair monopolies, obnoxious DRM, shrinking repair access, high repair costs, and impossible to find tools, parts, and documentation. While the bill only covered some consumer electronics, activists hope it […]
It’s no secret that China wants to erase from history the student protests at Tiananmen Square, and the resulting massacre by the government, but it keeps proving more and more difficult in the internet age. Even with China’s infamous Great Firewall. The latest example is really quite striking. Li Jiaqi is an astoundingly popular social […]
The Third Party doctrine has helped invert/pervert probable cause. Third parties (Google, AT&T, Facebook, etc.) gather tons of data that can be useful to law enforcement. When cops are looking for suspects but have no idea who to suspect, they turn to these third parties. In some cases, they can get plenty of data with […]
MiniTool Power Data Recovery Personal is the most cost-effective data recovery program for all common Windows system users. The 100% clean data recovery software for Windows enables you to recover unlimited data (deleted or lost) from Windows computers, memory/SD cards, USB flash drives, external hard drives, etc. It supports various data loss situations with fast […]
We spent a few years warning people about the terrible EU Terrorist content regulation law, but as of this week, it’s now in effect, and websites will have one hour to remove any terrorist content that is flagged to them by any government official. If they fail to remove the content, they could face fines […]
For years we’ve written about how unchecked telecom and media monopolization and consolidation results in all manner of problems, from sparse broadband connectivity to high prices. We’ve also discussed how the speed of that consolidation over the decades, combined with Wall Street’s insatiable thirst for quarterly returns at any cost, comes with a sacrifice of […]
While trademark disputes regularly annoy me for a variety of reasons which I cover on this site, the most annoying ones of all are usually over trademarks that the USPTO never should have granted in the first place. Remember the Square Donuts thing? That mark was descriptive. ESPN’s “Saturday Night Football” mark? Also descriptive. Or […]
Last chance to get your boxed copy of CIA: Collect It All! Two months ago, we posted what seemed like a last call on selling out the remaining stock of our version of the CIA’s card training game (that we originally Kickstarted a few years ago). A few people complained that they didn’t want to […]
We’ve been talking about the problems of the US government setting up a copyright trolling small claims court for over a decade now. But, Congress finally passed a law to create one (with no debate and no hearings) by sneaking it into a “must-pass” funding bill at the end of the year in 2020. It’s […]
The federal government has unlimited money to burn. That’s how we end up here with the federal government being told for a second time that it can’t walk away from a civil lawsuit just because it unilaterally decided to stop violating the plaintiff’s rights. US citizen Yonas Fikre’s lawsuit made its way to the Ninth […]
Could Paramount Pictures have actually lost the copyright to Top Gun, even as it was releasing a new Top Gun movie? That’s the claim in a new lawsuit that goes pretty deep into the copyright weeds, touching on two ridiculous topics that we like to write about on Techdirt: termination rights and movie rights. For […]
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With the whole Congressional January 6th Committee effort moving into prime time this week, this is probably pretty far down on the list of issues around it, but apparently Twitter is quietly fighting demands from the Committee to reveal internal communications. The social media giant is asserting a First Amendment privilege to push back on […]
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