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Failures When we last checked in with what’s left of Sports Illustrated, its owner, The Arena Group, had just got done baring its ass as part of a giant ‘AI’ related scandal. Company executives apparently thought it would be a great idea to create a bunch of fake, AI-generated writers to shit out lazy, uninteresting...

Broadband The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), part of the 2021 infrastructure bill, currently provides 23 million low-income Americans a $30 broadband discount. While it didn’t get much hype, that’s a big deal in a country where broadband affordability is a massive obstacle due to muted competition. But...

Copyright Here are two separate stories regarding the mess that is modern copyright law, that is now mostly “mediated” by companies that half-ass randomly deal with things and sometimes do not. While this is, perhaps, a better setup than stupidly suing kids for daring to like or share a song, it still suggests the e...

Business Models We’ve done a metric ton of posts here over the years pointing out one unfortunate trend that has come along with the move from physical products to digital purchases: you don’t own what you’ve bought. In some cases, it’s you don’t own what you think you’ve bought, because nobody actually reads EULAs ...

(Mis)Uses of Technology There’s nothing more urbane than omnipresent surveillance, apparently. London is considered one of the classiest places on earth, what with its wealth of history, iconic landmarks, and… thousands and thousands of surveillance cameras. It’s also home to knife crime, pervasive racism, and socce...

Failures Field drug tests often seem to be more a triumph of imagination than a triumph of science. They’re cheap. Some popular tests run less than $3/per. That’s the literal selling point. When in doubt, a cop can get probable cause by grabbing a substance, dumping it into a field test, and deciding whatever result...

Failures Among the various promises that Elon made regarding his takeover of ExTwitter, was that he was there to clean up the spam and bot problem. He seemed to think that the previous regime had fallen down on the job, and that somehow he would have the magical answer to dealing with such things. About that. Origin...

Legal Issues Just when it finally looked like the FBI’s year of abuse might catch up to it, it (along with the NSA and other beneficiaries of this surveillance authority) has been granted a four-month reprieve. The FBI made a lot of enemies with its continuous abuse of this surveillance authority — a foreign-facing ...

Policy The war on China’s video game industry by the Chinese government continues, but it appears that its casualties aren’t only within the industry itself. Over the last couple of years, the Chinese government has put more and more restrictions on the gaming industry, primarily aimed at youths, that were designed ...

Free Speech Regulatory agencies can often be an essential part of day-to-day life, preventing people from engaging in activities they have no expertise in — something that could potentially endanger a lot of people. But they can also be overbearing brutes whose only concern is whether or not they’ve managed to extra...

Failures During Trump’s tenure, his FCC took at absolute hatchet to what was left of media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely owned) competitors underfoot. The ...