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The moral panic about kids and technology these days is just getting dumber and dumber. The latest is that MPs in the UK are considering an outright ban on smartphones for kids under 16.
Just last week, we posted about a thorough debunking of the “mobile phones are bad for kids” argument making the rounds. We highlighted how banning phones can actually do significantly more harm than good. This...
TikTok, the short-video company with Chinese roots, did the most American thing possible on May 7, 2024: It sued the U.S. government, in the person of Attorney General Merrick Garland, in federal court. The suit claims the federal law that took effect on April 24, 2024, banning TikTok unless it sells itself violates the U.S. Constitution.
The law names TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance Ltd...
We’ve long been critics of facial recognition tech here at Techdirt. Even though the steady march of technology inevitably means the tech will get faster and better, the problem is the first part: faster.
The tech has proven to be very fallible. And it has made things even worse for the sort of people most often targeted by cops: minorities. Pretty much every option offered by facial recognition...
The Speed Reading Mastery Bundle has 6 courses to help you learn to absorb new information faster by learning speed reading methods used by top universities and Guinness World Record holders. These skills will not only help you with your everyday tasks, but open doors to take on any new interest or career. Within minutes, you’ll have the skills to absorb pages of information without spending...
Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed ‘free speech absolutist,’ rarely gets it right when it comes to actual free speech. But he deserves a rare round of applause in his fight against Australia’s global speech injunction.
We’ve had many posts detailing Elon Musk’s somewhat hypocritical understanding of free speech. This included his willingness to fold and give into censorial demands from governments in...
The U.S. yet yet to pass even a basic internet-era privacy law — or regulate data brokers. And while there’s a lot of misdirection and pretense to the contrary, the primary reason is (1) because the U.S. government is too corrupt; and (2) because the U.S. government really enjoys being able to purchase massive amounts of sensitive citizen data from data brokers without having to get a pesky...
And here we go again. It used to be that when you bought a thing, you owned the thing. You could do whatever you wanted with the thing, so long as you didn’t violate the law with the thing, because you owned the thing. And I recognize I’m using the word “thing” a lot here, but it’s with good reason. See, Spotify recently announced that it would be unilaterally bricking every “Car Thing” product...
Never underestimate the coercive power of law enforcement. Officers were so convinced Thomas Perez Jr. had murdered his “missing” father, they spent 17 hours torturing him into confessing to a crime no one had actually committed.
Perez Jr. initiated this. He called the police to report his father was missing, mistakenly assuming they’d help him, rather than hurt him. That initiated nearly a full...
I wonder if Gina Rinehart, an Australian mining magnate, is a fan of Barbra Streisand?
It’s been a bit since we had a straight-up classic Streisand Effect story like the good old days, where someone powerful saw something they didn’t like and insisted that it must be disappeared because they didn’t like it.
Meet Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest woman.
Apparently, she didn’t like a portrait of...
You have to feel tremendous sympathy for the families of the victims in the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. As has been well documented, there was a series of cascading failures by law enforcement that made that situation way worse and way more devastating than it should have been.
So who should be blamed? Apparently, Meta and Activision!
Yes, the families also went after the city of Uvalde and...