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America tires of big telecom’s shit, driving boom in community-owned broadband networks::For decades, frustrated towns and cities all over the country have responded to telecom market failure by building their own fiber broadband networks. Data routinely shows that not only do these networks provide faster, better, and...

Politicians Are Using Kids As Props To Pass Terrible, Harmful Legislation. Don’t Let Them Get Away With It::Amidst all of the attention paid to last week’s Senate hearing on child safety online, it remains stunning just how little time was actually spent on how to help children online. Instead, we saw pure theatrical...

Kids Don’t Think Congress Has Their Best Interests In Mind With Their Grandstanding ‘Protect The Children’ Hearing::We’ve covered a few stories this week related to the Senate hearing on “kids safety” and there’s going to be a lot more in the coming weeks as those same Senators grandstand and yell about “protect...

As a Walled Culture explained back in 2021, open access (OA) to published academic research comes in two main varieties. “Gold” open access papers are freely available to the public because the researchers’ institutions pay “article-processing charges” to a publisher. “Green” OA papers are available because the...

The city of Bountiful, Utah voted to build a $48 million fiber network to provide affordable gigabit broadband for its residents and businesses. Regional internet providers Comcast and CenturyLink opposed the plan and tried to force a public vote through a taxpayer group they fund. However, communities often build their own...

Porn sites must have government health warning in Texas from September 1st::Just when we didn’t think the state of Texas could get any more wacko on tech policy, this latest bill really suggests otherwise. House Bill 1181 is an age verification measure that is similar to what we’ve seen in the state legislatures across...

The landed gentry are only in charge until the king comes to town and chops off a few heads. At least that seems to be the case at Reddit, where CEO Steve Huffman pretended his complaints about current moderators — who were protesting his decision to effectively cut off API access to tons of useful…

ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) tends to treat the Constitution as some ticky-tack policy its officers can safely ignore. That’s not to say ICE believes the Constitution does not exist. It probably at least realizes it exists. After all, it’s a US federal agency. What it firmly believes is that the Constitution...

Another day, another dumb lawsuit against TikTok. We’ve seen school districts and parents suing TikTok on the basis of extremely weird claims of “kids used TikTok, some bad stuff happened to kids, TikTok should be liable.”...

I’ll admit, I had to read this story a couple of times, since it’s so unbelievable. With the explosion of AI tools that have come out over the past couple of years, coming along for the ride are all kinds of concerns over how that AI gets used. In the realm of higher education, this means a great deal of consternation over...

While lawmakers, looking to get on cable TV, spent much of the last few years performatively hyperventilating about TikTok privacy and national security issues, few of those same folks seem quite as bothered by the parade of obvious, nasty vulnerabilities in the nation’s telecom networks.

Bit of a weird one here. So, there’s the assumption made by all cops and most courts that any area visible to passersby does not have an expectation of privacy. That means front yards, open garages, etc. Courts and cops have mostly agreed this expectation of privacy does not suddenly appear no matter how long the government...