Feed Items
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, AT...
For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk’s Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations are harming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimed would never happen in the first place is making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can be mitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated.
And it appears to...
Well, that was certainly a thing. We mentioned yesterday that RFK Jr. was scheduled to go before the Senate Finance committee to answer all kinds of questions as to just what in the holy hell is happening at HHS. As we said, this was always going to be a contentious hearing, given that the Democrat Senators are aligned, and in fact demanded his resignation before the hearing, while even GOP...
Below is the brief, in Cox Communications v. Sony Music Entertainment, I have been waiting my career to write, to finally tell the Supreme Court that when it comes to platform liability for their users’ alleged copyright infringement, we’ve been doing it wrong.
While I’ve already had a chance to tell the Supreme Court that copyright and the First Amendment have to play nice together, and that...
Well, the RFK Jr. congressional hearing is now over. And, to the shock of very few thinking persons, it was a complete and total shitshow. I’m sure I will be writing something up on the hearing soon, but the short version is that Congress members on both sides of the aisle went in fairly directly and hard on Kennedy, who attempted to play word games and/or lie in response, when he wasn’t delving...
Trump continues to wield everything he controls like a weapon against his enemies, even when the law says he can’t. Trump sent thousands of National Guard troops (and a couple hundred Marines) to Los Angeles to quell nonexistent riots and otherwise get in the way of local law enforcement.
Of course, it was nothing but a show of force: a petty president doing things to his perceived enemies just...
The Ultimate AWS Data Master Class Bundle has 9 courses to get you up to speed on Amazon Web Services. The courses cover AWS, DevOPs, Kubernetes Mesosphere DC/OS, AWS Redshift, and more. It’s on sale for $40.
Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect...
Let’s be clear upfront: 4chan and Kiwi Farms are not the heroes of internet freedom. Both sites are notorious cesspools that have enabled harassment campaigns, doxxing, and some genuinely awful behavior over the years. They’re the kinds of places where maladjusted people gather to egg each other on toward increasingly toxic actions. Most reasonable people wouldn’t shed a tear if they disappeared...
Last year, the Biden FCC passed a new rule that would help bring Wi-Fi access to school kids who struggle to do their homework online. More specifically, the rule allowed schools to leverage the FCC’s E-Rate program funds to pay for mobile hotspots in things like busses, making it easier for kids who lack broadband (or can’t afford broadband) to get online.
The FCC E-Rate budget was not...
Last year, Andres Freund, a Microsoft engineer, spotted a backdoor in xz Utils, an open source data compression utility that is found on nearly all versions of GNU/Linux and Unix-like operating systems. Ars Technica has a good report on the backdoor and its discovery, as well as a visualization by another Microsoft employee, Thomas Roccia, of what Ars calls “the nearly successful endeavor to...