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Here’s yet another worrying development in the world of privately-owned security cameras. Flock Safety has made aggressive in-roads in both the private and public sector, something aided greatly by the company’s ability to blend the two.
Much like Ring before it, Flock is pitching cheap cameras with local law enforcement buy-in, nudging residents towards leaving their cameras (some of which have...
Bring your tech skills up to 21st-century snuff with the Modern Tech Skills Bundle. This 2,000+ class series combines subject areas that every aspiring tech pro needs to know to get ahead and stay ahead. Broken out into cybersecurity, AI and machine learning, and information technology and cloud computing, you’ll be able to zero in on specific courses for your current field and branch out into...
Picture this: You’re a researcher who has spent years developing a grant proposal, gone through layers of expert review, and received National Science Foundation (NSF) approval. Then some kid barely out of college — whose main qualification appears to be founding a company that puts ads on the blockchain — logs into a Zoom meeting, pays more attention to his fingernails than the discussion, and...
We recently noted how U.S. telecom giant Verizon was more than happy to kiss Trump’s ass in exchange for FCC approval of its $20 billion merger with Frontier. That included quickly kowtowing to the administration’s demands that it do its best to be more racist and sexist.
For its part, Verizon counterpart AT...
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is PB...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, there was something of a spat between Donald Trump and Twitter. Trump announced a panel to study “anti-conservative bias” on social media, and went on some crazy Twitter tirades that raised complicated content moderation questions, and we wrote about what a mess the whole thing was. Then, Trump released a draft of an executive order about social media that was...
There’s a great deal that is absurd about copyright law in America, but its most basic absurdity remains the length of time for which the copyright monopoly applies. The length of copyright protection a work gets depends on a number of factors. Was the work published before or after 1978? Was it renewed, if the former? Was it published anonymously or by a named individual? Was it work for hire?...
When NPR sued Donald Trump Tuesday, it had an easy argument to go with. Normally, in First Amendment retaliation cases against the government, you have to pull together a bunch of disparate strands to prove the retaliatory intent of the actions. But as NPR noted in its filing, and as Justice Scalia once wrote about obvious constitutional violations: “this wolf comes as a wolf.” Trump’s executive...
Elon Musk may claim he’s leaving the government, but regardless of whether he or anyone DOGE leaves the damage has been done, and their potential legal exposure to it remains. And with this decision earlier this week, some of the litigation pursuing it made headway.
As we’ve written before, Judge Chutkan has had Musk and DOGE’s number for months, noting early on in this case, New Mexico v. Musk...
Any bit of data that isn’t nailed down by court precedent will apparently find its way into the hands of the US government.
For years, the DEA has been data mining traveler data in hopes of finding people carrying around “too much” cash. This effort has been such a windfall for the DOJ that the DEA has paid hundreds of thousands in rewards to airline and Amtrak employees that tip them off to...