AJ’s Techdirt Profile

On the post: Rethinking And Refreshing Techdirt’s Weekend Posts: We Want Your Feedback

AJ ( profile ), 08 Mar, 2026 @ 01:21pm

My £0.02

I never read the Saturday ‘history’ posts. Having lived through the whole period and read Techdirt for a lot of it I don’t personally feel the need to be reminded of it myself. I’m not objecting to them, but I wouldn’t miss these at all. I do enjoy the Sunday ‘Comment review’ posts, since I don’t follow the comments very much during the week. I’d be quite happy if you dropped categories that don’t reach some minimum standard though, that’s just the nature of random selection that is life.

On the post: Vinay Prasad: The One Man Roadblocking An mRNA Flu Vaccine

AJ ( profile ), 18 Feb, 2026 @ 08:41pm

FDA Reversed already

See Ars Technica: FDA reverses surprise rejection of Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine from earlier today.

On the post: Why Powerful But Hard To Detect Backdoors Could Become A Routine Problem For Open Source Projects Because Of AI

AJ ( profile ), 04 Sep, 2025 @ 09:00pm

Not convinced

The commenters on the lwn.net website don’t think very much of this FastCode story. They’re certainly not panicking as you might expect if they accepted the reasoning, several there calling it clickbait.

On the post: Community And Choice Are Not Bubbles

AJ ( profile ), 20 Jun, 2025 @ 12:28pm

Dog-food?

Someone should do a search for complaints about Bluesky that appear on Bluesky, and about ExTw. on ExTw. and see whether they’re comparable, or suppressed by the platform. I doubt if a comparison of cross-platform complaints would be as useful though.

On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

AJ ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2025 @ 12:25pm

Rudyard Kipling on Carr

And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane. Kipling’s Dane-Geld

On the post: House Looks To Make KOSA And COPPA Worse

AJ ( profile ), 18 Sep, 2024 @ 05:48am

The new version of KOSA adds in new language that will absolutely lead to abuse by Republicans to force companies to remove LGBTQ+ content.

Why have you been calling them “Republicans”, since there are those with other political affiliations who also support and aim to make use of this kind of cr*p. Please find a better term to describe them.

On the post: Warner Bros. Takes Down LOTR Fan Film From 2009, Apologizes, Puts It Back Up

AJ ( profile ), 17 May, 2024 @ 07:26am

Malice, or just incompetence?

I see this as just another incompetence story — "don't attribute to malice something that can be explained as incompetence". Nobody at WB who was dealing with the new release likely knew about the fan film at all (different departments for new releases vs. IP protection), so their automated protection systems weren't told about it and immediately kicked in once activated.

On the post: The FCC’s New ‘Broadband Nutrition Label’ Doesn’t Solve The Actual Problem: Unchecked Telecom Monopoly Power

AJ ( profile ), 12 Apr, 2024 @ 06:33pm

The long game?

So the nutrition label can make it clearer to these users that they’re being abused and ripped off, but it doesn’t come anywhere close to stopping them from being abused and ripped off.

The democratic members of the FCC know they have almost no power. Maybe they’re thinking that informing the public this way might get them to persuade their representatives to do something about the problem one way or another?

On the post: FCC Slowly Stumbles Toward Updating Its Pathetic, Industry-Friendly Definition Of ‘Broadband’

AJ ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2023 @ 06:21pm

SamKnows FCC Broadband Monitoring Ends

For quite a long time I’ve had a SamKnows Whitebox device in my home network, monitoring the bandwidth that my ISP actually provides me, as part of an FCC-sponsored program. I just got an email saying that the program is ending as of today.

On the post: Have We Considered That Maybe Elon Musk Just Hated Twitter & The People Who Use It All Along?

AJ ( profile ), 24 Jul, 2023 @ 07:21pm

Is he trying to get bought out …

… by Alphabet (Google) perhaps?

On the post: UK Eyes Scaling Back Net Neutrality Rules For No Coherent Reason

AJ ( profile ), 24 Oct, 2022 @ 08:02pm

Cable TV isn’t as common

I haven’t lived there for over 20 years but when I did cable TV was only just starting to get installed in the built-up areas. Many households probably still get OTA digital TV or have a satellite dish.

On the post: Please Don’t Normalize Copyright As A Tool For Censorship

AJ ( profile ), 04 Aug, 2022 @ 07:57pm

Possibly but not trivial

I was thinking this too, but it might be hard to do well enough to keep the lawyers at bay. Identifying and syncing with the song is probably fairly trivial, but any relative movement between the source of music and the microphone would have a dynamic effect on the gain and phase of what you’d have to apply to subtract out the song. Then if you’re sufficiently successful at it the subjects might claim that you’ve processed the sound so much that your reproduction is no longer a recording of what they actually said, which could have been something different. It might be possible to build a multi-mic setup with digital recording from which you could extract a very finely focused beam of just the speaker. Modern laptops can have those kinds of setups, but this isn’t likely to be possible with a regular phone camera.

On the post: Welcome To The New Techdirt!

AJ ( profile ), 28 Feb, 2022 @ 07:16am

RSS Feed encoding?

Reading the new RSS feed via Feedly looks to have the character encoding set wrong, all non-ASCII punctuation appears as a ‘?’ character in my view of the feed.

On the post: Seven Years After Discovering Rogue Stingray Devices In DC, The Federal Gov't Still Doesn't Have Any Idea What To Do About It

AJ ( profile ), 10 Nov, 2021 @ 06:50pm

Why not the FCC?

I would have expected anyone operating a cell-site simulator to need a license from the FCC to do that, so why isn’t this firmly in their court? The cellphone companies pay lots of money for licenses to use frequencies in those wave-bands after all, so if this isn’t their jurisdiction to chase did someone write the associated regulations without this kind of thing in mind? Or is it just that their funding doesn’t allow them to actually enforce those regulations…

On the post: Trump Given 30 Days To Have His Social Media Site Comply With Open Source License

AJ ( profile ), 25 Oct, 2021 @ 12:57pm

Re: Re: You got the wrong clause.

The GPLv3 and hence also the AGPLv3 very explicitly define what they mean by “convey” (they deliberately don’t use a standard legal term, IIRC there’s an annotated version which explains why if you’re interested). Trump probably is in violation of the AGPL clause 13, but that’s not the clause cited in the article as David explained.

On the post: States Wouldn't Be Pushing Inconsistent Tech Laws If Congress Wasn't So Corrupt

AJ ( profile ), 27 Aug, 2021 @ 08:59am

Lessig’s Point

IIRC this was Larry Lessig’s problem #1, or close to it at least. Make it so that politicians don’t have to spend much of their time fundraising for their re-elections and they might spend it on understanding the actual problems and how to solve them (maybe, if we’re lucky, once the existing job-holders are out or at least no longer feeling beholden to their buddies!).

On the post: Trumpist Republicans Latest Freakout A Total Self-Own, As They Reveal They Don't Read What They Tweet

AJ ( profile ), 22 Oct, 2020 @ 12:51pm

Twitter’s wording could be 5% to blame

It would be clearer that they are requiring you to read the tweet first if the notice said “You MUST read the article on Twitter before retweeting”. Using “can” implies it’s optional when it apparently isn’t.

Not that I’m trying to excuse the idiots though...

On the post: The FBI Is Abusing The All Writs Act To Gain Access To Millions Of Travel Records

AJ ( profile ), 21 Jul, 2020 @ 12:05pm

Do they pay?

Is there a legal difference between the FBI demanding the data and them paying for it? If Sabre is willing to sell this data and it is being paid for, is there anything (short of passing New US Privacy legislation) that the courts could do to stop the FBI from buying it from them anyway?

On the post: Masnick's Impossibility Theorem: Content Moderation At Scale Is Impossible To Do Well

AJ ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2019 @ 04:12pm

The wishy-washy part of the theorem:

"to do well."

It's a pity the last 3 words can't be made stronger somehow, although I have no suggestions how...

On the post: Why Is Congress Moving Forward With Its Plan To Encourage Copyright Trolling?

AJ ( profile ), 28 May, 2019 @ 11:23am

Taste their own medicine?

How legal/illegal is copyright trolling? If the only real cost of doing it is the court filings, why haven't opponents to the copyright maximalists ever sued politicians pushing this kind of thing for (possibly fake) copyright violations using the laws they wrote?

This might make some interesting blog stories: Politicians indicted/convicted by the laws they wrote (or voted for at least).

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