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When It Comes To TikTok Hyperventilation, Financial Conflicts Of Interest Abound

3 hours 50 minutes ago
Earlier this month we noted how despite all of the sound, fury, and hyperventilation surrounding the push to ban TikTok, most Americans don’t actually support such a move (you know, the whole representative democracy thing). Support is particularly lacking among young Democrats, a demographic the Biden administration has struggled to connect with in the wake […]
Karl Bode

Nigerian Woman Faces Jail Time For Facebook Review Of Tomato Sauce

13 hours 22 minutes ago
Nigeria doesn’t exactly have a stellar reputation when it comes to respecting the speech rights of its own citizens, nor the rights of platforms that its citizens use. By way of examples, there was the time that the country suspended Twitter for several months for the crime of taking down a tweet from its president […]
Dark Helmet

ShotSpotter Pitches In To Help Cops Open Fire On A Teen Setting Off Fireworks

17 hours 39 minutes ago
Back in 2021, the Chicago Office of the Inspector General released a report on the PD’s ShotSpotter tech. The acoustic detection system was apparently mostly useless, no matter what ShotSpotter may have commented in response. Residents of Chicago are paying nearly $11 million a year for this system. But it’s obvious they’re not getting much […]
Tim Cushing

Dodgy Group That Targeted Gigi Sohn FCC Nomination Now Under IRS Inquiry For Lying About Ad Spending

19 hours 42 minutes ago
You might recall how popular telecom and media consumer advocate Gigi Sohn saw her nomination to the FCC scuttled after a variety of right wing and telecom-tethered lobbying groups ran a successful, year-long public smear campaign. The campaign tried to frame Sohn as an unhinged radical extremist, giving corrupt Republican and Democrat lawmakers the flimsy […]
Karl Bode

Why Bluesky Remains The Most Interesting Experiment In Social Media, By Far

21 hours 15 minutes ago
These days, everyone hates big tech, and that’s often for very good reasons. You shouldn’t trust giant centralized companies that have collected a ridiculous amount of data on you. There are few reasonable alternatives, so they can keep you stuck in their silos. They just move more and more rapidly along the enshittification curve, extracting […]
Mike Masnick

Last Week Missouri Told The Supreme Court No Gov’t Should EVER Interfere With Speech; This Week It Sues Media Matters For Its Speech

22 hours 26 minutes ago
“[W]hether you call this coercion, if that’s the label you attach, you call it encouragement, you call it promotion, you call it inducement, whatever it is, if the government is attempting to abridge the speech rights of a third party, that has to be unconstitutional because that falls within the plain text of the First […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The Advanced Cyber Security Bundle

22 hours 29 minutes ago
Take your basic knowledge of cybersecurity to a whole new level with the Advanced Cyber Security bundle. This bundle offers you 6 courses on industry-standard certifications on cybersecurity so you can enjoy the wonders of modern tech without compromising your data and privacy. Courses cover CISA, CCSP, CISM, and CISSP certification prep. You’ll also get […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Justice Department Wants To Take Its Bite Out Of Apple

23 hours 54 minutes ago
Over the course of the last few years, it feels like the FTC & DOJ have slowly started getting better at figuring out how to craft a better antitrust lawsuit. The earliest attempts were often beyond silly, but the more recent cases (while far from perfect) have finally started alleging things that seem like potential […]
Mike Masnick

If You’re Worried About How Elections Might Play Out This Year, We Can Help You Prepare With Threatcast 2024

1 day 21 hours ago
There are a lot of elections worldwide, and these events invariably raise significant concerns regarding potential manipulation, particularly in light of emerging technologies such as generative AI. To help address these concerns, we are reintroducing our innovative “election threatcasting” game, Threatcast 2024, which has been designed to help users anticipate and counteract such threats. In […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: Rosetta Stone

1 day 22 hours ago
Embark on the journey of language learning with the Rosetta Stone lifetime subscription for all languages. Rosetta Stone has been the go-to software for language learning for the past 27 years. With its immersive and intuitive training method, you might be reading, writing, and speaking a new language with confidence in no time. It’s on […]
Gretchen Heckmann

Elon Discovers When Content Moderation Makes Sense: When He Can Use It To Protect Racist Bigots From Being Called Out

2 days ago
Right after Elon took over Twitter, we published what we had hoped would be a useful “speed run” through the content moderation learning curve that most platforms figure out along the way. We’ve seen other “free speech!” platforms learn these basic lessons, though not always quickly enough to survive. The basic idea is that no […]
Mike Masnick

Senators ‘Shocked’ To Learn TikTok Does Things Only Made Possible By Their Corrupt Failure To Pass A Real Privacy Law

2 days 3 hours ago
We’ve noted a few times now how the quest to ban TikTok is heavily peppered with bad faith actors who historically don’t care about consumer privacy or national security. We’ve also noted how it’s performative to hyperventilate about one single sometimes-dodgy app, but ignore the broader dysfunction and corruption (like our lack of a modern […]
Karl Bode

Tennessee Senate Votes To Ban Chemtrails Because What Even The Fuck

2 days 19 hours ago
Look, I’m nearing 50. I’ve been around. I have seen some absolute clown shit from politicians. I have witnessed years of things like “bridges to nowhere” and self-aggrandizement taking the form of renamed airports or whatever. I have seen any number of candidates step into the arena with a headful of moronic ideas. But things […]
Tim Cushing