Most of Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr’s time lately has been split between destroying all consumer protection oversight and threatening media companies with fake investigations if they’re not appropriately deferential to our mad idiot king. The latter has tended to overshadow the former, but it’s all been an ugly combination of authoritarianism, regulatory capture, and […]
It will only take a few moments perusing all the headlines of posts we’ve done on the collective group that owns the Pokémon properties to know that they really, really care about intellectual property. It doesn’t matter if it’s patents, copyright, or trademark, these people will wield it all if they sniff out even the […]
We’ve been saying this for years now, and we’re going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that […]
Support us on Patreon » Late last year, Mike was a guest on Seb Agertoft’s Humans in the Loop podcast for a wide-ranging discussion all about restoring the promise of the decentralized internet. That interview was just released, and we’re dropping the whole conversation here as well on this week’s episode of the Techdirt Podcast. You […]
Well, we always knew it would come to this. In a blow to the First Amendment and privacy, the Trump administration last week approved a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) plan to collect social media handles from people applying to change their immigration status. The new requirement, which was approved for one year, comes after the administration has […]
The Secretary of Defense has given an ultimatum to the artificial intelligence company Anthropic in an attempt to bully them into making their technology available to the U.S. military without any restrictions for their use. Anthropic should stick by their principles and refuse to allow their technology to be used in the two ways they have publicly […]
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West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey wants you to think he’s protecting children. His press release says so. His legal complaint opens with the genuinely horrific line that Apple has, in internal communications, described itself as the “greatest platform for distributing child porn.” He makes sure you know that Google made 1.47 million CSAM reports […]
I’ve long written about how the U.S. establishment press no longer genuinely serves the public interest. Years of consolidation at the hands of (usually) rich, white, male, Conservative owners has resulted in a lazy U.S. press that reflects the interests of ownership. As a result you get a lot of feckless “he said, she said” […]
Way back in the ancient days of the year 2020, the world went through this pandemic thing called COVID-19. For those of you not old enough to remember such ancient history, it was a fairly significant health issue that caused a few disruptions throughout the world, including in these here United States. Trump was president […]
There’s not a single conservative left in the GOP. The ideals that were formerly considered “conservative” — small government, fiscal responsibility, etc. — have been replaced by white Christian nationalism, water-carrying for would-be autocrats, and immense amounts of deficit spending for the sole purpose of making America whiter. That’s not the same as making it […]
We’ve explained in detail how Larry Ellison is trying to scuttle Netflix’s planned merger with Warner Brothers because he wants to buy CNN and HBO, and, as he’s doing with CBS (and now TikTok) turn them into a safe space for right wing zealots, autocrats, and oligarchs. He’s unsubtly trying to build the kind of […]
Checks and balances. That’s the mantra. That’s what makes America great. That’s the system we deployed to prevent being just another iteration of the British empire. It was never perfect, but it seemed to get the job done most of the time. The gentleman’s agreement underlying this system tended to hold up even when bad […]
Opusonix is the workflow-first platform built for music producers and engineers who are tired of endless email chains and scattered files. By centralizing feedback, versions, and tasks in one structured workspace, it helps you cut email traffic by up to 90% so you can focus more on creating and less on chasing approvals. From time-coded […]
For the better part of a decade, conservative politicians—and Texas politicians in particular—have been absolutely apoplectic about the state of free speech on college campuses. You’ve heard the greatest hits: students are coddled snowflakes who can’t handle the real world, trigger warnings are destroying intellectual rigor, safe spaces are turning universities into daycare centers, and […]
We’ve noted repeatedly how Trump wants to scuttle Netflix’s proposed merger with Warner Brothers because his friend and key donor, billionaire Larry Ellison wants to buy Warner Brothers (and CNN) instead. In fact the two have already purportedly met to discuss which CNN anchors they’d like to fire once Larry (who just bought CBS and […]
One of the more perplexing questions in all of the coverage I’ve done on RFK Jr. has been whether or not Kennedy is some misguided true believer or if this is all some grift for power, influence, and/or money. While most people who watch how RFK Jr. has operated on the topic of vaccines, for […]
“The Diary of a Young Girl” is a Dutch language diary written by the young Jewish writer Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Although the diary and Anne Frank’s death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp are well known, few are aware that the text has […]
If you’ve spent any time in my Section 230 myth-debunking guide, you know that most bad takes on the law come from people who haven’t read it. But lately I keep running into a different kind of bad take—one that often comes from people who have read the law, understand the basics passably well, and […]
Eight million ways to die. According to AdWeek, the price for a 30-second commercial during Super Bowl LX has soared to $8 million, after NBC opened in the summer by offering spots for $7 million. As AdWeek notes, “due to demand, the company has already reached its cap for the number of spots that were available for advertisers […]
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