TECHDIRT IS ALL ABOUT INNOVATION
IT'S NOT JUST WHAT WE WRITE ABOUT—IT'S IN EVERYTHING WE DO.
Techdirt is known for a lot of different things by a lot of different people. Some see us as a source for business editorial and economic research, some as a place for legal analysis and debate, and some as a key player in the fight for free speech and privacy online. But for us and our dedicated community of readers, all our subjects have roots in one core value: innovation.
We're constantly amazed by human ingenuity—the things people build, the problems we solve, and the way we're always coming up with ideas for improving the world around us. We believe there's nothing people can't achieve when given the freedom to innovate, and that principle guides everything we do.
Our focus on innovation is what lets us navigate the ever-changing landscape of technology, business, law, politics and society with confidence, and it's the reason our readership includes so many hackers, makers, creators, inventors and influencers. As long-time observers and participants in media innovation, we've also refined our own advertising philosophy to help you engage our discerning and highly valuable audience.
Techdirt Insider Discord
The latest chatter on the Techdirt Insider Discord channel...
- BentFranklin: Strong temptation to blame the victim here.
- What Happens When a Romance Writer Gets Locked Out of Google Docs
- https://www.wired.com/story/what...
- mildconcern: I do love that Google can find what you write in a nominally private document "inappropriate"
- That's just terrific.
- Samuel Abram: Not to mention Orwellian
- But the great thing about documents is that Google doesn’t have a monopoly on documents. There’s open office, Microsoft word, Apple Pages…
- mildconcern: If I were to buy a bunch of Maple Leafs jerseys and embroider them with "OFFICIAL PROPERTY OF THE BOSTON BRUINS" for sale, that wouldn't get me into any trademark trouble, would it?
- Samuel Abram: I can’t see how it WOULDN’T get you into ™️ trouble…
- Also, it would be an international incident covered by trade agreements
- USCME? NAFTA?
- candescence: TikTok is suing the US government, entirely as expected
- Samuel Abram: Like clockwork
- [article]
- Are you writing a story on this or have you written a story on this, @Mike Masnick?
- Mike Masnick: Yup
- Samuel Abram: Can't wait to read it! And if you have a podcast episode on it, can't wait to listen to it!
- John Roddy: State legislatures stop being suck challenge
- mildconcern: Hertz hasn't stopped with just charging people with stealing the cars they rented. Now they're charging a guy $277 for not bringing his rental back full of gas. It was a Tesla.
- And no it wasn't just a category error. The battery was full, and the max surcharge for charging they claim is $35.
- BentFranklin: Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content
- [link]
- This guy gets it.
- mildconcern: there's wanted AI generated content?
- John Roddy: I actually came across an example the other day that makes a lot more sense than you'd have thought.
- If you're commissioning an artist to draw something that's a little difficult to explain, but you can get an AI to generate something resembling it, just about everyone wins there.
- mildconcern: That's fair. I mean there are cases.
- But they're fewer and further between than claimed. And often not worth the actual case of the computing involved, if the pricing were honest
- In a striking example, a friend of mine who writes actual bullshit for a living finds it's not useful
- He does campaign emails and texts for fundraising type stuff in most local political campaigns
- text he freely admits is among the most content free repeatable writing you'd ever want to see
- and it still isn't useful for that.
- candescence: https://youtu.be/dDUC-LqVrPU?si=...
- A peer-reviewed study looking at pretty much every LLM out there is suggesting that there's a _severe_ diminishing returns point, especially in terms of how much training data can be provided
- BentFranklin: There are some legitimate uses of AI/LLMs. For example I would like to see two AIs rap battle each other as Drake and Lamar.
- John Roddy: Inventing an AI bot to chat with the all the AI bots that have taken over the chats.
- It's like hiring private investigators to secretly investigate each other.
- candescence: Not saying there aren't, just that there's a good chance the technlogy may be close to peaking in terms of overall capability
- Samuel Abram: SLAPPs against campus protesters: [article]
- John Roddy: Anyone recognize the lawyers?
- Samuel Abram: > The major corporate law firm Greenberg Traurig has taken on the latest case.
- FUCK YES!!!!! [article]
- This doesn't just kick the llama's ass, this blows the llama to smithereens!
- Just so you know, Winamp is not becoming FOSS, but source-available. Winamp will still have the last word on any changes.
- BTW, @Mike Masnick, you might be interested in this: [article]
- It's a visual timeline of how popular web browsers have been since March of 1994
- candescence: I'm noticing a few things from that visual timeline: * It took until around mid-1998 for Internet Explorer to finally overtake Netscape, and then it basically only two a little over a couple of years for it to gain 90% marketshare. * Firefox started eating into IE's marketshare _fast_ around 2004, shortly after Netscape's demise, when it first popped up, and capped out at roughly 47%. If Chrome hadn't come onto the scene, Firefox probably would've single-handedly killed IE, which is probably poetic considering how IE killed Netscape. * Chrome basically spelled the death knell for IE, which had _briefly_ regained marketshare at times in the 2000s. * Opera has been maintaining a steady niche of a userbase for its whole lifespan. It's been active longer than _IE_ was at this point.
- Samuel Abram: Also, I legit thought that Safari had a bigger market share than it actually did.
- candescence: Well, the page itself stipulates that the numbers are somewhat biased towards desktops
- Samuel Abram: Ah.
- BTW, when you say "desktops", do you mean "as opposed to laptops" or "as opposed to smartphones"?
- candescence: PCs, as opposed to smartphones
- Samuel Abram: Ah.
- Thanks for clarifying!
- I figured that’s what you meant by the context but I wasn’t sure.
- BentFranklin: Samsung Requires Independent Repair Shops to Share Customer Data, Snitch on People Who Use Aftermarket Parts, Leaked Contract Shows
- [article]
- Protecting their sources too: *404 Media has verified the authenticity of the original contract and has recreated the version embedded at the bottom of this article to protect the source.*
- I'm really impressed with 404. They deserve support.
- mildconcern: quote of the morning: "Twitter lately feels like I'm running a vegan food stall at a Ku Klux Klan barbecue."
- candescence: BTW Bluesky _finally_ has DMs
- Now I'm waiting for deck.blue to add them lol
- BentFranklin: When privacy expires: how I got access to tons of sensitive citizen data after buying cheap domains
- [article]
- "Cybersecurity has always been transient: what is deemed to be secure today, may be considered easily hackable tomorrow. Domain names in web and e-mail addresses, such as info@inti.io, are leased in time. This means that if nobody thinks of renewing them after they expire, they will be put up for sale. It made me wonder what would happen to the graveyard of cloud accounts attached to the e-mail addresses that once belonged to these expired domains."
- Samuel Abram: BTW, Donald Trump found guilty on all 34 counts of fraud
- I'm happy.
- Cathy Gellis: I need these little moments to remind me that going to law school wasn't a waste and law still exists...
- BentFranklin: Stealing everything you’ve ever typed or viewed on your own Windows PC is now possible with two lines of code — inside the Copilot+ Recall disaster.
- [article]
- mildconcern: Man it's been a while since I was last this smug about having used Linux as my primary OS for decades now.
- though I gather later editions of Windows now show you ads, so that helps too.
- John Roddy: My computer keeps telling me I can upgrade to Windows 11.
- I keep telling it "that's nice dear"
- Samuel Abram: If you don’t mind me asking, what Distro do you have?
- mildconcern: I run Ubuntu
- not because it's necessarily the best desktop or distro
- but the servers of the web application I work to develop are also on it
- and it's the path of least resistance for me to just run the same
- Samuel Abram: Ah. I had Mint for a while, now I have SteamOS
- Both secondary
- mildconcern: I've mostly been using debanish flavored things since 1999
- we'd been using redhat before and the apt repo switched us over from RPM then and I've never looked back
- Samuel Abram: I password-encrypted the hard drive to my Linux Mint laptop and then forgot the password.
- mildconcern: god the days of custom compling kernels for network cards and finding RPMs on rpmfind.net because you were in dependency hell.... brother.
- ugh that sucks
- Samuel Abram: It was at that moment I stopped using my Linux Mint computer
- mildconcern: right now I don't think I can upgrade to Win11 because they require something something security mode in the BIOS
- and I think that would hork my existing Linux partition
- if I remember right you can install Linux onto a machine like that but you have to do it from scratch if you switch between modes
- so that struck me as a good enough reason to skip Win 11 at least until I get a new machine.
- I call that my Wintendo partition anyway. I only use it for rare gaming moments.
- Samuel Abram: Thanks to wine and proton, your Linux pc can be a gaming pc!
- mildconcern: It depends on the game. I play some games on Linux side but others stress the hardware too much.
- generally speaking the graphical and driver support is superior enough on Windows that there is a class of games I can play on Windows on the same hardware that won't run them on Linux
- but I'm not much of a gamer.
- current uptime on my laptop is 178 days so it's been at least that long since I rebooted into Windows
- BentFranklin: The Viral Story About a Defendant Driving With a Suspended License Was Fake News
- [article]
- *"It turns out all those stories, however, were based on a falsehood. Harris' license had been reinstated years prior and was only registering as suspended due to a clerical error. As of this writing, there has been no spate of additional articles, corrections, or a reinvigorated news cycle based around this information, because the truth here doesn't lend itself to virality and engagement."*
.jfif)
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