The Death of the Mind

Bird Scooter tried to censor a Boing Boing post. So that’s going well:Last month, I published a post discussing the mountains of abandoned Bird Scooters piling up in city impound lots, and the rise of $30 Chinese conversion kits that let you buy a scooter at auction, swap out the motherboard, and turn it into a personal scooter, untethered from the Bird company.In response, Bird sent us a legal threat of such absurdity that we…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/01/today-in-landfill-capitalism-bringing-a-scooter-to-a-knife-fight/

The last time he was attorney general, Barr proclaimed that only prisons reduce crime, and that we need a lot more of them. In 1992, a little less than a year into his new job, Attorney General William P. Barr added to the zeitgeist of “tough-on-crime” policies when he issued the Bush administration’s “24 Recommendations to Strengthen Criminal Justice.” Barr’s harsh approach, which included expanding capacity for pretrial detention and offsetting the cost of such…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.aclu.org/blog/smart-justice/mass-incarceration/william-barr-was-ardent-champion-mass-incarceration

Back in October, we wrote about how Google had declared — with no details — that an earlier post we had done was “dangerous or derogatory” and that it would no longer allow AdSense ads on that page. The real irony? The original post (which contains nothing dangerous or derogatory) was about the “impossible choices” platforms have to make when moderating speech on their platforms. So, what better example than “moderating” an article about how…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190108/00410741352/google-still-says-our-post-content-moderation-is-dangerous-derogatory.shtml

The Senate wants to provide legal cover to the many states violating the First Amendment by punishing people for their views on Israel. In the middle of a government shutdown, the Senate leadership’s first order of business in the 116th Congress is not legislation to reopen the government. Instead, and incredibly, the Senate is again trying to slip a measure intended to suppress protected political expression past public scrutiny. The bill is the “Combatting BDS…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/instead-ending-shutdown-senators-plan-encourage-punishment-israel-boycotts

Going back more than five years, we’ve been warning about the dangers of moving copyright enforcement down the stack, away from the actual hosting companies deeper and deeper into infrastructure. This was, of course, part of the goal of SOPA — to make infrastructure companies liable for infringement, and to force them to shut down entire sites. But that’s exactly a key part of our concern. Infrastructure players have only a single remedy: shut down…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20181227/17232641303/it-is-both-ridiculous-dangerous-to-make-domain-registrars-liable-content-domains.shtml

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is looking to keep his ex-girlfriend Grimes and alleged acquaintance Azealia Banks out of the official record of a lawsuit concerning his “420” “joke” that brought the SEC down on him. An attempt to subpoena both Grimes and Banks was met with stiff opposition by Musk’s lawyer, who accused the plaintiffs of attempting to sensationalize the case. As you may remember — though it seems so long ago now — Musk…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/04/elon-musk-angles-to-keep-his-ex-and-420-twitter-drama-out-of-lawsuit/