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Long before the great TikTok moral panic of 2021 to 2024, you might recall that numerous members of Congress spent a solid decade freaking about another Chinese company: Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei.
The argument, made without much in the way of public evidence, was that Huawei was systematically using its network gear to spy on Americans at a massive scale. Congress then proposed a...
This week, we’ve got a double-win on the insightful side for MrWilson. In first place, it’s a comment about walling off the open internet to stop AI:
The thing is, everyone is a victim, not just the sites getting hammered. The value of the internet is its openness. You can always route around one obstacle to your own education and freedom by finding another path, but if it all starts to get...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, we learned about how the White House supposedly blocked Walmart from buying TikTok, and we asked why amidst all the fear around the site, nobody was equally worried about advertising tech and location data sales. GOP Senators released the latest stupid attempt to reform Section 230, the FISA court decided to loosen the restrictions on searching 702 collections,...
As you will hopefully recall, that very strange patent lawsuit between Nintendo and PocketPair over the latter’s hit game, Palworld, is ongoing. At the heart of that case is a series of overly broad patents for what are generally considered generic game mechanics that also have a bunch of prior art from before their use by Nintendo in its Pokémon games. These include concepts like throwing a...
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
The Trump administration has vowed to go after anyone who got lower mortgage rates by claiming more than one primary residence on their loan papers.
President Donald Trump has used it as a justification to target political foes, including a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, a Democratic U.S....
We’ve been tracking the growing judicial revolt against the Supreme Court’s shadow docket nonsense, from individual district judges getting snarky in footnotes to anonymous judges speaking to reporters. But what happened Thursday at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals crosses into entirely new territory: a full en banc panel of federal judges openly criticizing the Supreme Court’s approach during...
The Himalayan nation of Nepal has featured only rarely on Techdirt. The first time was back in 2003, with a story about an early Internet user there. According to the post, he would spend five hours walking down the mountain to the main road, and then another four hours on a bus to get to the nearest town that had an Internet connection he could use. As a recent Ctrl-Alt-Speech podcast explained...
Rep. Clay Higgins wants to use his government power to ban Americans from the internet for life if they say unkind things about Charlie Kirk’s death. Yes, the same Clay Higgins who just two years ago co-sponsored the “Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act“—a performative bill that did literally nothing except restate that government actors cannot engage in censorship.
Back then, he...
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This news — you know, the stuff that shows National Guard troops aren’t exactly happy to be expendable pieces in Trump revenge schemes — is unsurprising. No one signed up for this, but Donald Trump and a bunch of suck-ups scattered across a handful of red states have made Trump’s War on DC the new day-to-day operation for troops who’d probably rather be doing anything else than this.
And what...