For many years now we’ve had two regular posts that come out on the weekends: our This Week In Techdirt History posts on Saturdays, and our Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week posts on Sundays. Sometimes we switch it up a little bit, replacing the history post with a special promotion or (as will be […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2021, while AT&T was apparently committed to being comically hypocritical about Section 230, Utah was prematurely trying to dance on 230’s grave with a new and extremely horrible “free speech” bill that was a disaster in the making, and we had Ron Wyden and Chris Cox on the Techdirt […]
The ten year war over Iceland is over and Iceland has come out the victor. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, be prepared to listen to a whole bunch of stupid. In 2016, we wrote about Iceland Foods, a UK grocer, which had somehow convinced the EU to give it a trademark for […]
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool […]
Republican lawmakers in Utah have long been on the cutting edge of shitty policymaking when it comes to regulating the internet. The latest chapter in that legacy is a proposed tax on porn and adult content purchased in the state’s digital space. Originally proposed by a pair of Republican lawmakers in the Utah state legislature […]
We’ve been covering the ongoing saga of the Trump administration’s attempt to destroy Anthropic for the sin of having modest ethical guidelines around its AI technology. The short version: Anthropic said it didn’t want its AI making autonomous kill decisions without human oversight. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded by declaring the company a supply chain […]
Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it’s processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch – whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, […]
ICE has been telling itself all it needs to do is write its own paperwork and it can do whatever it wants. Memos — passed around secretively and publicly acknowledged by no one but whistleblowers — told ICE agents they don’t need judicial warrants to arrest people or enter people’s homes. All they need — […]
You might recall that Paramount and CBS had only just started to lay off workers in the wake of the merger with David Ellison’s Skydance. Now, after Ellison (or more accurately his dad and the Saudis) dramatically overpaid for Warner Brothers ($111 billion plus numerous incentives), the overall debt load at the company is so […]
We should all know by now that this iteration of the Trump administration absolutely loves using pop culture imagery, including that of video games, to help message its horrible policies. Want to gloat about ICE terrorizing American cities and generally pissing everyone off when they’re not too busy perforating innocents? Let’s use images from Pokémon […]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s Ben Whitelaw. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, YouTube, or your podcast app of choice — or go straight to the RSS feed. In a special episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Ben and Mike discuss […]
In less than a week, the Pentagon blacklisted an AI company for having ethics, declared it a supply chain risk, watched its preferred replacement face a massive user revolt, and then sat down to amend the replacement’s contract to address the very concerns the blacklisted company had been raising all along. Meanwhile, the blacklisted company […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem misled Congress on Tuesday about the powers of her controversial top aide Corey Lewandowski, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and four current and former DHS officials. Lewandowski has an unusual role at DHS, where he is not a paid government […]
Yet another one to add to the “it’s OK if we do it” file for the Trump administration. This administration is cool with censoring speech, nationalizing elections, seizing the means of production, and blackmailing law firms and universities. It would be heated AF if any other administration did these things, but since it’s the one […]
Become a language expert with a Babbel Language Learning subscription. With the app, you can use Babbel on desktop and mobile, and your progress is synchronized across devices. Want to practice where you won’t have Wi-Fi? Download lessons before you head out, and you’ll be good to go. However you choose to access your 10K+ […]
Section 230 remains one of the most misunderstood laws in America, and that misunderstanding keeps producing policy proposals that would make the internet worse, not better. Last year, I wrote a lengthy response to reporter Brian Reed’s claims about Section 230, and this week Sam Seder brought us both onto The Majority Report to hash […]
Hey look everyone! More of that famous populism Trump rode into power on! The Trump FCC has announced they’re rubber stamping the approval of a merger between two of the nation’s biggest cable companies (Charter, Cox), creating the biggest cable company in the U.S. Struggling Americans were surely clamoring in support of their local shitty […]
It was plainly obvious when RFK Jr. decided to fully remake ACIP, the CDC committee that advises the nation on immunization schedules and practices, that it was done so to place Kennedy sycophants that would enact his batshit theories on vaccinations. ACIP, now chockablock with anti-vaxxer, anti-science grift-gremlins, has been slowly chipping away at decades […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Several high-ranking federal election officials attended a summit last week at which prominent figures who worked to overturn Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election pressed the president to declare a national emergency to take over this year’s midterms. According to videos, photos and social media […]
We’ve been pointing out the fundamental contradiction at the heart of mandatory age verification laws for years now. To verify someone’s age online, you have to collect personal data from them. If that someone turns out to be a child, congratulations: you’ve just collected personal data from a child without parental consent. Which is a […]
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