Andrew Cook's Techdirt Profile

Andrew Cook

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  • Mar 20, 2026 @ 06:26am

    I'm pretty sure the telcos will just lay off their offshored customer service, and when the time comes to stand up an America-based replacement, they just... won't. They'll just whine about overly burdensome regulation or some other such nonsense, and pocket the money that used to go towards that. Meanwhile, customers will be locked in a chatbox with an AI that can barely even pull up their account information and is powerless to enact change, assuming they can even get that far.

  • Jan 29, 2026 @ 06:25am

    Frontier is the company that got as giant as it did because it picked up all of the infrastructure Verizon divested as "not profitable enough". Funny how Verizon wants it now...

  • Jan 09, 2026 @ 06:45am

    In the case of Anthem, releasing server and client software would probably be what fans(however few) would like to see.
    I would settle for far less disclosure, if slightly more engineering support.
    • Almost everything in Anthem revolves around four-man squads. The lone exception is an LFG lobby called the Launch Bay. Turn that off.
    • There's a post-campaign mission set that's gated behind performing 100 Quick Play missions. Since Quick Play won't work anymore, ungate that. Or not, since it's post-campaign.
    • Turn off matchmaking and the "always online" requirement. From what I can tell, all content is local and outside the Launch Bay everything's P2P anyway, so "always online" is just there for policing the looter-shooter number-go-up part, which doesn't matter post-sunset.
    • (Bonus, not required but would be chef's kiss) Rewrite the system people use to join each other's squad to solely depend on Origin's services, without requiring game-specific server support. Otherwise the game will be limited to a single-player experience, but there doesn't seem to be anything that specifically requires squadmates, so that's fine.

  • Jul 17, 2025 @ 06:15am

    Also makes it hard to read on tablet and zoomed in, and undermines the "variable width" option. document.querySelectorAll("#storywrap-507925 br").forEach(el => el.remove())

  • Feb 28, 2022 @ 07:22am

    The comment scrubber overlaps and obscures the comments when in variable width view.

  • Mar 10, 2021 @ 01:13pm

    So, fun fact about the social media moderation bill. "Social media corporations" are companies that have over 20 million "account holders". "Account holders" are Utah residents with an account. There are *checks Wikipedia* 3.2 million residents of Utah.

    There are no social media corporations.

  • Dec 10, 2020 @ 06:51pm

    Correction

    So, the argument is that the "narrow" tailoring here is such that it only applies to websites, not users, if that site is "primarily" engaged in streaming unlicensed copyright-covered works, has no significant purpose other than that, **or** intentionally markets itself as such.

    Though I'm pretty sure any legitimate illicit site will hit all three, it's entirely possible that prosecutors will happily target innocent sites using only the middle prong.

  • Aug 06, 2020 @ 12:15pm

    * gets out magnifying glass for the embedded tweet *
    * gets frustrated at the blurriness as it isn't a tweet *
    * finds actual tweet *

    https://twitter.com/earleyedition/status/1272400149952655360

  • Nov 15, 2019 @ 06:21am

    For some reason, [Elsevier] seems to think it has a right to a profit margin of 35-40% arising from its role as a gatekeeper to the papers that the public has paid for.

    It does have that right, because we gave it to them. Theoretically, they in return act as a gatekeeper against non-rigorous or fraudulent papers via peer review, and a distributor at a scale beyond what an individual institution can handle. Except, y'know, they're not gatekeeping and with the advent of the Internet anyone can distribute at massive scale.

    So... why do we keep giving them that right, exactly?

  • Aug 23, 2019 @ 07:23am

    W3W doesn't even have a monopoly. There's a competing service, What 3 F***s, that works just as well, has a much more appropriate vocabulary for emergencies, has a fractal pattern so you can choose an arbitrary level of precision, and is open source so people can expand and innovate.

  • May 23, 2018 @ 05:14am

    I might know how they came up with such a large number for so few still-possessed devices. Let's tweak the premise slightly and then fill in some of the blanks...

    "Last year, the FBI was unable to [immediately] access investigation-related content on more than 7,700 devices..." ... but they obtained access to the iCloud/Google Drive accounts and the backups just came through. ... but the suspect used the same PIN on a less secure device. ... but they convinced her she'd get a reduced sentence if she told them the password. ... but they got the data from a co-conspirator's device. ... but the data they were interested in they got from $telco instead. ... but it wasn't actually* an FBI investigation; they were just holding a device for the local police. * ... but Harris just came out with a new cracking device and it's super awesome* but they can't tell you about it :shh:.

  • Aug 07, 2017 @ 08:59am

    Reading Comprehension

    Judge Chhabria also disputed Comcast's claim that users technically agree to pay these fees by agreeing to the Comcast subscriber agreement, which only references "permitted fees and cost recovery charges," and not these additional surcharges Comcast appears to have hallucinated out of whole cloth:

    That's not what the judge said, only that this isn't the right time to deal with those issues.

    • Motion to Dismiss: The case needs to go away because there is something procedurally or facially wrong with it. ← The judge is ruling here.
    • Motion for Summary Judgement: The case needs to go away because even if what the other guy says is 100% true I'm still okay. ← The judge said that whether the plaintiffs agreed to the contract should be determined here.
    • Judgement on Merits: The case needs to go away because I'm right and the other guy's wrong. ← The judge implied that whether the contract lets Comcast pile on the charges should be determined here.

    I would really, really love for a judge to rule that those fees are barred, since that would open the door to all sorts of legal fun for them, but that's not what Judge Chhabria ruled yet. We'll just have to keep waiting.

  • Jun 14, 2017 @ 04:51am

    Re: A cheap pass on an easy case

    And Justice Thomas murdered five and a half pages saying that that's what he would say if he could. Sadly, he realized he couldn't:

    Unfortunately, petitioner raises her due process arguments for the first time in this Court. As a result, the Texas Court of Appeals lacked the opportunity to address them in the first instance.
    The court can't rule on appeal on issues that no prior court has addressed, so they have to wait until another case makes it way up to them, one that argues this from the start.

  • May 25, 2017 @ 04:45am

    > But as is often the case when trade agreements are used to expand copyright law, the agreement only exported the U.S.’ extreme criminal penalties; it didn’t export our broad fair use provisions.

    Don't worry, it's a *trade* agreement. We've been exporting our extreme criminal penalties, so soon we'll be *importing* restrictions on fair use. The USTR will be ecstatic about having that kind of balance...

  • Apr 21, 2017 @ 05:32am

    Antitrust didn't seem to be an issue back in 2002, when Netscape implemented popup ad blocking but exempted their own sites, including (hilariously) their own homepage.

  • Feb 22, 2017 @ 05:16am

    Let's look at what the media companies are giving up by making this request:

    • Google News/Bing News links
    • "Smart snippets" in organic Google/Bing/Yahoo searches
    • Twitter/Facebook cards
    • Skype/iMessage cards
    • Cortana/Siri/Google Now integration
    • Link previews in GMail/Outlook.com/Yahoo Mail
    • Pretty much everything else that uses the Open Graph metadata they enthusiastically provide

    In short, everything that makes people want to click the link, or helps them discover that those articles exist. I wonder how they'll feel when they have to tell their advertisers that "social media engagement" is down 80-90%...

  • Jul 29, 2016 @ 12:41pm

    Re: Forget the monkey

    Send in the clowns.
    Already done. It's in the Ninth Circus, after all.

  • Jul 06, 2016 @ 04:43am

    ... every single one of the 4,148 federal wiretap requests was granted in 2015.


    The picture is just as bleak when you look at the whole decade + 1. Out of 30,694 warrants, only 8 were denied. That's less than ¾ of a warrant per year, or about 0.02 percent.

  • Jun 03, 2016 @ 04:38am

    And that someone will likely not be found, as the State Department appears to be uninterested in investigating this any further.

    If the only evidence is a sticky note saying "plz cut per b(6)", how can they investigate that? At least they're going to try to be more accountable in the future, or so they say.

  • Sep 28, 2015 @ 08:48am

    Re:

    What Rightscorp did at their own computers has zero bearing on the DMCA notices that Cox stupidly ignored.
    First, Cox wasn't stupid to ignore them. Would you spew wrong, legally-threatening garbage to your customers just because some moron with dollar signs in his eyes says so?

    Second, it's very relevant to the case at hand. Or have you forgotten about the unclean hands doctrine?

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