Новости за 01.02.2024

So as you probably know, yesterday, the Senate held one of its semi-regular “let’s call tech CEOs to Congress and make ourselves look out of touch and foolish” hearings. This time the focus of the discussion was on “children’s safety,” but there was little to no discussion on what it actually takes to protect children […]

US Private Vaults has an interesting business model. It offered something akin to end-to-end-encryption for physical goods. Unlike banks and their safety deposit boxes, US Private Vaults did not collect or retain information about its customers. Nor did it retain master keys that would allow it to access stored goods. This lack of master keys […]

Back in December, we wrote about Appin. We were not writing about the reports (of which there have been many) that the organization that started as a sort of cybersecurity training school, but morphed into a kind of “hack-for-hire” scheme was involved in all sorts of nefarious activity. Rather we wrote about their (ab)use of […]

When last we checked in with right wing propaganda mill One America News (OAN), the conspiratorial gibberish farm was busy trying to pretend (with the help of numerous Republican AGs) that DirecTV’s decision to boot the network from its cable lineup was part of a vast, diabolical cabal to censor conservatives (it wasn’t, the channel simply isn’t […]

Here we go again. In the long and vaunted history of DRM in software, and especially in video games, there is one general truism: DRM tends to effect only legitimate buyers while so-called “pirates” route around it completely. There are all kinds of anecdotal stories as to the annoyances at best, and game-crippling outcomes at […]

One of the things we talk about quite a lot on Techdirt is how the “easy” policy ideas that many people have aren’t quite so easy, because everything has tradeoffs. You want strict privacy laws? Well, that might create issues for free speech and competition. You want stronger liability on social media services? Well, that’s […]

Last November, Maine residents voted overwhelmingly (83 percent) to pass a new state right to repair law designed to make auto repairs easier and more affordable. More specifically, the law requires that automakers standardize on-board diagnostic systems and provide remote access to those systems and mechanical data to consumers and third-party independent repair shops. But as […]