One of the more frustrating things about content streaming has been how quickly we went from having a conversation about cord-cutting to the realization that all of the streaming services that enabled said cord-cutting have morphed into the very cable providers that people wanted to escape. You can see this in a variety of ways. […]
In what may be the least surprising news in the world of copyright and the internet, Anthropic just agreed to settle the copyright lawsuit that everyone’s been watching, but not for the reasons most people think. This isn’t about AI training being found to infringe copyright—in fact, Anthropic won on that issue. Instead, it’s about […]
Support us on Patreon » The goal of Bluesky and the ATProtocol, and of the push for protocols over platforms in general, has always been to see more people building their own communities in a modular fashion. One of the most interesting projects demonstrating this potential is Blacksky, created by Rudy Fraser, which started as a […]
Eight months ago, those of us actually paying attention—not just scrolling outrage bait about Biden’s age or the latest campus controversy, but genuinely tracking the systematic preparation for authoritarian rule—warned that Trump represented an existential threat to democratic governance. We were diagnosed with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The reasonable people explained, with infinite patience, that we […]
Here’s how things are going in Washington D.C. ever since some former DOGE employee known as “Big Balls” got his ass handed to him by a couple of teenagers during an alleged failed carjacking: Now that one of DOGE’s dipshits was almost carjacked, Trump thinks it’s time to federalize the policing of Washington, DC. Utilizing the same racist […]
The Learn to Code with React Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn more about React, Redux, and JavaScript. Used by the likes of Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, and Imgur, React is an efficient and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Meanwhile, Redux is a predictable state container that helps you manage the data […]
How do you comply with a law that prohibits collecting personal information from children under 13? If you said “by not collecting personal information from children under 13,” congratulations, you understand the law better than Louisiana’s Attorney General. The state of Louisiana has filed a lawsuit against Roblox that includes what might be one of […]
Late last year, eight major U.S. telecoms were the victim of a massive intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent a year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparently didn’t […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase […]
Is throwing a sandwich at someone a felony? Well, that all depends on a few factors. The most important considerations are these: What would normally be rhetorical questions were answered in Washington, D.C. recently. A (now-former) DOJ employee allegedly (well, the video makes it pretty clear there’s nothing “alleged” about it) threw a sandwich at […]
Trump’s quest to stress-test every line in the Constitution continues apace, with his declaration that the government now owns 10% of Intel looking like nothing but a great, big, gigantic taking. Of course, it is also terrible policy. While there are sometimes compelling arguments that companies should be in public hands, like for utilities, where […]
Last week, FBI agents raided the home of John Bolton—former National Security Advisor, lifelong Republican, and one of the most establishment figures in American foreign policy. His crime? Writing a book critical of Donald Trump and opposing the president’s surrender summit with Vladimir Putin. The justification? A “national security investigation in search of classified records”—the […]
The 2025 AI Super Skills Bundle has 8 courses to help you get familiar with how to use some of the latest and coolest artificial intelligence tools out there. Courses cover ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Leonardo AI, Quillbot, and more. It’s on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. […]
You may recall that Donald Trump and his supporters have insisted that he’s the “free speech” President. His first day in office this term, he issued an executive order “restoring free speech” saying that “no Federal Government officer, employee, or agent engages in or facilitates any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of […]
With Fox being Fox, and CBS having just paid Trump a $16 million bribe and now owned by Trump’s friends the Ellison family, there’s little worry that either network will be doing serious journalism anytime soon. So Trump, over the weekend, redirected his ire at the remaining two “big four” broadcasters, ABC and NBC, for […]
The volume of stories about Ryan Walters, State Superintendent of Oklahoma, seems to be increasing. Walters is a Christian Nationalist by name, though the first of those words goes against all of what I learned about Christianity as a Catholic minor and curious adult. While he certainly wants to inject bibles into public schools for […]
Not content to rewrite American history to better serve white people, the Trump administration is now rewriting world history on the fly by recasting terminal human rights violators as “not all that bad, actually” and adding stuff to other human rights reports just because some MAGA people had some bad experiences in a few select […]
The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn’t going very well. There’s been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely […]
Even though Trump says it’s about the crime rates, it’s not actually about the crime rates. Just like he used the hallucination that the entirety of Los Angeles was under siege by “violent” protesters to justify sending in the troops, the reality was that any violence was contained to a few small blocks in the […]
Full disclosure: I am on the Bluesky board. Bluesky made a major statement last week when it announced that it would be geoblocking Mississippi IP addresses from accessing its site—making it the first major social media platform to completely block access from a US state. Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we’re a small team […]
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