I didn’t realize the past week’s verification saga could get sillier, but here we are, watching Dril fight Elon Musk to keep a checkmark off his name. You know you’re selling a great product when you start punishing your most popular users by giving it to them for free.
Remember the total nonsense checkmarks Tumblr started selling in the early days of Twitter’s paid blue checks? Well, they’ve evolved. And you can put (almost) as many of them next to your blog name as you want.
Twitter might be a mess, but the CPSC is still a gem.
Rep. Anna Eshoo and Sen. Cory Booker have reintroduced the Community Broadband Act, which removes prohibitions on building local broadband networks. Makena Kelly talked to them about a previous version in 2021, along with interviewing other advocates of expanding community broadband protections:
“To tell people who are willing and able to invest the money in good fiber infrastructure for their residents that they can’t do it, but also that the incumbent ISPs will not provide it for them either? It’s just ridiculous.”
If you follow intellectual property policy, you may have seen the somewhat surprising news that longtime IP reformist Larry Lessig has come out in favor of letting AIs be awarded patents. Patent expert Matthew Lane makes an opposing case:
We are already seeing this flood of content from AI text and art generators, and it should be pretty easy to train an AI model on a body of research and ask it to spit out patent applications. If those applications could be filed with little human intervention, then well-resourced patent filers could quickly and easily crowd out entire fields.
You can find some excellent context from Mike Masnick at Techdirt, too.
[ontheinternet.substack.com]
