Mike Masnick has a great piece at TechDirt running down just how stupid everything about Trump’s tariff trade war is: Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula should turn in their econ degree, because this is not how anything works. Even if they then go on to … | Continue reading
Mike Masnick debunks the myth of Trump's mandate, a slim margin of victory made possible only through deception # | Continue reading
New Yorker’s ‘Social Media Is Killing Kids’ Article Waits 71 Paragraphs To Admit Evidence Doesn’t Support The Premise. | Continue reading
Cable TV In Free Fall As Industry Loses Another 1.62 Million Viewers. | Continue reading
Gannett’s ‘AI’ Scandals Result In Closure Of Wirecutter-esque Review Website, Layoffs. | Continue reading
New Trump Book Threatens To Jail Zuckerberg, Putting Zuck’s Groveling Letter In New Light. | Continue reading
Meta Moves To More Directly Connect To ActivityPub, But Is It Really Open? | Continue reading
Bluesky Is Building The Decentralized Social Media Jack Dorsey Wants, Even If He Doesn’t Realize It. | Continue reading
Was There A Trojan Horse Hidden In Section 230 All Along That Could Enable Adversarial Interoperability? | Continue reading
People Are Slowly Realizing Their Auto Insurance Rates Are Skyrocketing Because Their Car Is Covertly Spying On Them. | Continue reading
Reporters don’t own the facts they report. That is when they actually report facts. | Continue reading
Why Bluesky Remains The Most Interesting Experiment In Social Media, By Far. | Continue reading
Oregon has officially become the seventh state (behind New York, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Maine, and Minnesota) to pass “right to repair” legislation, making it easier and m… | Continue reading
Article URL: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/03/13/auto-makers-are-selling-data-on-your-driving-habits-to-your-insurer-without-properly-informing-you/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39691921 Points: 73 # Comments: 30 | Continue reading
"If you’ve spent any time in journalism, it’s completely wild to think about what a small team of smart, hungry journalists and editors could do with $50 million. It’s enough to staff a team of hard-nosed ProPublica-esque journalists for the better part of the next decade." While … | Continue reading
Elon Musk, Once Again, Tries To Throttle Links To Sites He Dislikes by Mike Masnick. Originally published 15 Aug, 2023.Another strength of a decetralised service: you can’t attack it in this way as it lives on thousands of different URLs.Reply to this link on my website → | Continue reading
Meta’s Threads Didn’t Launch In The EU: Is That Showing The Failure Or Success Of The Digital Markets Act? by Mike Masnick. Originally published 17 Jul, 2023.This speculation is off. Meta made the decision pre-emptively, providing no detail… Besides, what’s “innovative” about a b … | Continue reading
Play Moderator Mayhem in your browser » Today, we’re excited to announce the launch of our newest game in partnership with Engine. Moderator Mayhem is a mobile, browser-based game that lets y… | Continue reading
Six Months In: Thoughts On The Current Post-Twitter Diaspora Options. | Continue reading
On Wednesday there was yet another major global outage at Twitter, something that feels like it’s becoming a recurring issue and bringing us back to the days when Twitter regularly crashed an… | Continue reading
So, it's been quite a year for legacy, centralized social media - and all without any really big change to the laws that govern it (yet - the EU's are coming into force shortly, but possibly too late to matter). Meta seems to be collapsing into its own gravity.(techdirt.com) | Continue reading
So, it’s been quite a year for legacy, centralized social media — and all without any really big change to the laws that govern it (yet — the EU’s are coming into force shortly, but pos… | Continue reading
Look, I fucking warned Elon that this is exactly how it would go. It's how it always goes. Remember Parler? They promised that they would moderate "based off the FCC and the Supreme court of the United States" (a nonsensical statement for a variety of reasons, including that the … | Continue reading
Well. Just after finishing that last post about Twitter banning the official Mastodon account on Twitter for tweeting about the ElonJet tracking account existing on Mastodon, it seems that whatever… | Continue reading
Hello! Someone has referred you to this post because you've said something quite wrong about Twitter and how it handled something to do with Hunter Biden's laptop. If you're new here, you may not know that I've written a similar post for people who are wrong about Section 230.(te … | Continue reading
I sent this notice around internally here at Techdirt, but figured it might be useful to state this publicly. Historically, Techdirt would often embed tweets using the embed feature from Twitter. T… | Continue reading
Do not believe everything you read. Even if it comes from more "respectable" publications. The Intercept had a big story this week that is making the rounds, suggesting that "leaked" documents prove the DHS has been coordinating with tech companies to suppress information. The st … | Continue reading
It's kind of a right of passage for any new social media network. They show up, insist that they're the "platform for free speech" without quite understanding what that actually means, and then they quickly discover a whole bunch of fairly fundamental ideas, institute a bunch of … | Continue reading
Last night, Elon Musk closed his on-again, off-again, on-again deal to buy Twitter, and his very first order of business was to fire a bunch of top executives. This was not necessarily unexpected. When new owners come in, they will often clean house, and the text messages reveale … | Continue reading
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 has… | Continue reading
It seems quite likely that Elon Musk will own Twitter in a few days. One thing that has remained very much up in the air through all of this is how Musk views Bluesky. As you’ll recall, Blues… | Continue reading
Okay, let’s get this out of the way first: Republican politicians send a shit-ton of spam. And, no, it’s not just standard political messaging. It’s spam. And it’s often ful… | Continue reading
Ye, formerly Kanye West, has had quite a week or so. He got locked out of both his Instagram and Twitter accounts for posting anti-semitic nonsense. Immediately following that, he went on the Drink… | Continue reading
Ye, formerly Kanye West, has had quite a week or so. He got locked out of both his Instagram and Twitter accounts for posting anti-semitic nonsense. Immediately following that, he went on the Drink Champs podcast/video show and spouted even more such nonsense. He's continuing to … | Continue reading
You may recall that, back in 2016, a lawsuit was filed against the US federal judiciary and how it charges for PACER. If you don’t know, PACER is the court system’s electronic filing/re… | Continue reading
These days, the conspiracy-minded GOP candidates (who seem to be an increasing majority of the party right now) seem to believe that there needs to be a conspiracy against them or they’re jus… | Continue reading
Last year we noted how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had launched a bad faith effort suggesting that “big tech” gets a “free ride” on the internet, and should be forced to fund broadband … | Continue reading
There are a number of different tools out there that let you download YouTube videos. These tools are incredibly useful for a number of reasons and should be seen as obviously legal in the same man… | Continue reading
On Friday, we wrote about hundreds of authors signing a letter calling out the big publishers’ attacks on libraries (in many, many different ways). The publishers pretend to represent the bes… | Continue reading
We’ve noted how, as Netflix gets bigger and more powerful, it has increasingly behaved more like the cable giants (Comcast) it used to disrupt. For example, once it was big enough to pay tele… | Continue reading
Last year, I tried to create a "test suite" of websites that any new internet regulation ought to be "tested" against. The idea was that regulators were so obsessively focused on the biggest of the big guys (i.e., Google, Meta) that they never bothered to realize how it might imp … | Continue reading
Last year, I tried to create a “test suite” of websites that any new internet regulation ought to be “tested” against. The idea was that regulators were so obsessively focus… | Continue reading
Elon Musk hates government subsidies. That’s what he says, right? He claims that we should “just delete them all,” and that “the federal budget deficit is insane.” Of … | Continue reading
We have long lamented how the current method for many streaming platforms to enforce copyright laws, be they via automated systems like ContentID at YouTube or DMCA reporting platforms, is wide ope… | Continue reading
Yes, yes, copyright is a tool for censorship. Contrary to the claims of copyright system supporters that copyright can’t be used for censorship, the reality is that is basically the only thin… | Continue reading