Post No Evil: Content Moderation Decisions Are Always Trickier Than You Think

Two years ago, we told anyone who wanted to understand the impossibility of content moderation to listen to an episode of the podcast/radio show Radiolab. Obviously, content moderation questions are back in the news again, and Radiolab recently re-released the episode with some updated content. Most of it is the same, but there's some more at the end...

34m

Hong Kong's National Security Law Allows Police To Censor The Internet, Compel Decryption

The national security law the Hong Kong government passed solely with the intent of shutting down protests and local dissent is amazingly bad. It criminalizes secession, subversion, terrorism, and foreign interference. Violators of any of these purposely vaguely defined terms face potential life imprisonment. Demonstrators protesting against...

2h

Why Does Richard Blumenthal Always Feel The Need To Lie About Section 230?

Richard Blumenthal has spent years trying to undermine Section 230 of the CDA. Unlike some Senators who have only just jumped onto the silly, counterproductive bandwagon, Blumenthal has been mad about 230 since long before he was even a Senator. Back in 2008, when he was Connecticut's ambitious grandstanding Attorney General, he attacked Craigslist...

4h

News Company's 'Digital Audience Director' Fails To Understand Embedding, Issues Bogus DMCA Takedown Notices

Here comes DMCA abuse to ruin everyone's retweeting. T. Greg Doucette -- who has been covering acts of violence by police officers in response to George Floyd protests -- was recently hit with a bogus takedown notice on behalf of Seattle's King 5 television station. Here's the start of Doucette's thread on the bogus takedown, during which he begs for...

5h

Daily Deal: The Pro Photography & Photoshop 20 Course Bundle

Grab your camera, capture amazing photos, and learn to process them in Photoshop, Lightroom, and GIMP with the Pro Photography and Photoshop 20 Course Bundle. You'll learn how to take your camera skills to the next level, and then how to process those photos to truly capture the look you were envisioning. From layers and filters to levels and curves,...

5h

Harper's Gives Prestigious Platform To Famous Writers So They Can Whine About Being Silenced

There's a slightly bizarre Letter on Justice and Open Debate that Harper's Magazine is publishing, signed by a long list of famous people (many of whom I respect, and plenty of whom I think are terribly entitled wannabe "controversial" intellectuals who are really just assholes). The framing of the letter is one I've heard quite a lot of late: concerns...

6h

House Passes Massive Broadband Bill That Surprisingly Doesn't Suck

The majority of broadband bills that wind their way through Congress don't actually address the most pressing problem in US telecom: a lack of meaningful broadband competition. Often the bills focus almost exclusively on heavy subsidization of incumbent telecom monopolies, an approach that requires a level of diligence the U.S. has historically not...

9h

New Indictment Tries To Tie Julian Assange To A Hacking He Had Nothing To Do With

The government is still trying to get Julian Assange out of the UK so it can ring him up on a variety of charges related to obtaining and publishing a large number of sensitive documents. Most of the charges are still related to the documents obtained from Chelsea Manning. The DOJ wants to use the oft-abused CFAA to put Assange behind bars because he...

12h

Sci-Hub Downloads Boost Article Citations -- And Help Academic Publishers

Techdirt readers know that Sci-Hub is a site offering free online access to a large proportion of all the scientific research papers that have been published -- at the time of writing, it claims to hold 82,605,245 of them. It's an incredible resource, used by millions around the world. Those include students whose institutions can't afford the often...

20h

Court Shoots Down AT&T, Comcast Attempt To Crush Maine Privacy Law

Over at our Tech Policy Greenhouse, former FCC official and consumer advocate Gigi Sohn just got done discussing a landmark privacy case in Maine that hasn't been getting enough attention. The short version: back in 2017, the GOP killed some pretty modest FCC broadband privacy rules at the telecom lobby's behest. Despite a lot of whining from telecom...

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