I’ve written a few times now about how the Trump administration hijacked a $42.5 billion broadband investment fund included in the 2021 infrastructure bill, stripped away requirements that the resulting broadband be fairly deployed and affordable, and instead redirected billions of dollars to Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos in exchange for slower, more expensive satellite […]
A couple of weeks ago we discussed how the cuts made to HHS and specifically the CDC’s FoodNet tracking platform were making it much harder to track and back trace the source of the country’s current cyclosporiasis outbreak. You’ll have heard about this outbreak in the news by now. It’s the one where you begin […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. On an afternoon in mid-May, dozens of Microsoft engineers and their managers gathered online and in a conference room at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to discuss Project Glasswing. The tech giant was racing to fix weaknesses in its code that a new AI model known […]
Donald Trump took possession of a $400 million “gift” plane from the Qatari government earlier this year. Trump claimed it was a coup for taxpayers and a boon for America, even as he made it clear this was all about him. According to Trump, no plane was more luxurious than this graft-y replacement for the […]
The rise of AI is bringing a bunch of fascinating legal questions that are harder to answer than many expect. The latest one: who is liable if an agentic system running on its own hacks someone? That’s the question a bunch of people have been asking this past week in the wake of multiple stories […]
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The Trump administration has been shut down more than 10,000 times by federal courts over its novel interpretation of the law — one it claims allows it to indefinitely detain migrants without giving them a bond hearing. Some of those 10,000 adverse decisions have been significant, with implications that stretch far beyond single cases or […]
Last month we reported how Meta had decided to try and sloppily nickel-and-dime its AI glasses customers. More specifically, the company decided it would be a good idea to introduce new “rate limits” to smart glasses usage, forcing customers to pony up a $20 per month Meta One Premium subscription if they didn’t want their glasses’ “conversation […]
This post is going to come with something of a warning label. RFK Jr. went on CNN this past weekend for an interview with Dana Bash. I’m going to post the entirety of that interview immediately below. Before you watch it, get yourself a bib, or some paper towels, or wrap yourself in one of […]
Early in the media law and ethics course I teach, as I shift gears from the ethics section to the law and core free speech issues, I try to build a foundation by introducing the many kinds of legal issues they may face as communicators. By this time, we have already discussed social media platforms […]
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The State Department on July 16, 2026, hosted what officials billed as a ministerial on the resurgence of left-wing political terrorism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio invited representatives from more than 60 countries to Washington to hear an argument that many of them appear not to […]
For much of Techdirt’s nearly three decades in existence we’ve covered attacks on the media by the rich and powerful. And sometimes we’ve been on the receiving end of such attacks ourselves. But I have never seen or heard of anything quite as extreme as what happened to Ina and David Steiner, proprietors of the […]
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I don’t know but when your best argument is “we got locked out of our accounts for supporting violent insurrectionists,” maybe it’s time to stop arguing. But if there’s anything Trump likes, it’s being a plaintiff in a lawsuit. So, that’s exactly what the Trump Organization argued, in hopes of pressuring Capital One into a […]
It’s hard to not have noticed that a key enabler of U.S. authoritarianism was our consolidated corporate media, which (with scattered exception) was more than happy to throw the entirety of journalistic integrity in the toilet for a chance to please a mad, idiot king. In large part because our press is increasingly owned by […]
Just a few weeks ago, Sony announced that it would stop producing games on physical media starting in 2028 and a very loud portion of Sony’s customers lost their freaking minds. And, in this writer’s opinion, for very good reason. Having no physical media option for your games is going to make game preservation efforts […]
Last week we wrote about how Elon Musk’s xAI had filed a lawsuit to attempt to block Minnesota’s anti-nudify app law. As we tried to explain, even if you (reasonably, understandably) dislike both Elon and “nudify” apps, there were real problems with the Minnesota law. In particular, it was not narrowly tailored to just target […]
The Senate Commerce Committee is set to consider S. 737, the SCREEN Act, a sweeping age-verification bill that would require online services to verify users’ ages before they can access any sexually explicit content. If this bill passes, it will force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before they […]
Hail to the Chief. Our country is being run by paranoid conspiracy theorist megalomaniac who openly wishes to kick-start America’s first autocracy. Nothing that goes wrong is ever the president’s fault. It’s always the fault of officials with insufficient loyalty or the criminal acts of people out to get him. Trump decided the Lincoln Reflecting […]
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