Axon Enterprise’s Draft One — a generative artificial intelligence product that writes police reports based on audio from officers’ body-worn cameras — seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public, an EFF investigation has found. Our review of public records from police agencies already using the technology — including […]
Trump claims to love the military. Of course, he loves himself even more. And he tends to view those injured, killed, or captured by enemy forces as “suckers” and “losers.” He also considers people who volunteer to serve this country as idiots, since the idea of self-sacrifice for the greater good is the antithesis of […]
A little over a year ago we discussed YouTuber Ross Scott’s attempt to build political action around video game preservation. Scott started a campaign and site called Stop Killing Games when Ubisoft shut down support for The Crew, rendering this game that people bought unplayable. The goal of the site was to build political action […]
Belkin is the latest company to painfully demonstrate that you no longer own what you buy, and the whims of corporate executives can very often leave you with expensive paperweights. In a recent statement to customers, Belkin says that it will no longer be providing support or software updates for the company’s Wemo “smart home” […]
The Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to expedite its ejection of anyone not white enough to be considered worthy of citizenship. ICE raids occur daily, performed by masked officers who look more like cartel thugs than US law enforcement officers. The excuse for evoking a law last used to dump anyone looking vaguely […]
When your CEO gets murdered and half the internet celebrates, most companies might pause and ask “why do so many people hate us?” But UnitedHealth had a different response: hire more lawyers to silence the critics. The New York Times has an excellent piece by David Enrich detailing UnitedHealth’s ridiculously aggressive campaign to quiet critics […]
In the Trump administration, every political appointee is now their own personal Richard Nixon. Simply being some of the most powerful people in the world is never enough for Trump and those in his inner circle. If you can’t demand complete loyalty from everyone you oversee, than what is even the point of ascending to […]
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When Joe Biden wanted the Department of Education to forgive student loans, the Supreme Court shut him down hard. The Court spent pages in Biden v. Nebraska explaining why the Department lacked authority under the HEROES Act, demanding “clear congressional authorization” for such a significant policy change. But when Donald Trump wants to dismantle the […]
I’ve mentioned more than a few times that the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (2021) wound up funding a lot of very good things. The very sort of everyday “abundance” a lot of high-profile pundits claimed was no longer possible under American leadership. ARPA helped shore up infrastructure, housing, and sewage upgrades across countless U.S. […]
It’s no secret that starting during the onset of the pandemic, as well as in its aftermath, the video game industry has undergone a period of consolidation. This is quite common during times of economic flux and/or turmoil, but Microsoft/Xbox appeared to go after acquisitions in something of a blitz. While Xbox gobbled up several […]
Two recent statements from the surveillance company—one addressing Illinois privacy violations and another defending the company’s national surveillance network—reveal a troubling pattern: when confronted by evidence of widespread abuse, Flock Safety has blamed users, downplayed harms, and doubled down on the very systems that enabled the violations in the first place. Flock’s aggressive public relations campaign to salvage […]
It is a measure of how fast the field of AI has developed in the three years since Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) was published that the issue of using copyright material for training AI systems, briefly mentioned in the book, has become one of the hottest topics in the copyright world, as numerous […]
The Supreme Court may have suddenly decided nationwide injunctions are bad now that they’re bad for Trump, but it will need to cook up new arguments if it hopes to allow the open racism of its mass deportation program to continue in California. Trump has sent the National Guard and Marines to California to be […]
Last week, Elon Musk’s Grok AI started spewing extreme antisemitism, calling itself “MechaHitler” and pushing conspiracy theories about Jewish people. But that wasn’t the most revealing part of the story. The real smoking gun came courtesy of AI researcher Simon Willison, who discovered something far more insidious: when you ask Grok controversial questions, it quietly […]
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That an agency overseen by former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem would fail to handle flooding capably shouldn’t come as a surprise. That sort of thing is directly on brand for Noem, who did this to her own state because she was trying to score points with (then) ex-president Donald Trump. Severe weather brought a deluge to […]
With the Trump administration openly destroying whatever is left of U.S. federal corporate oversight, regulatory independence, and consumer protection standards, Verizon sees an opportunity. It’s asking the Trump FCC to roll back longstanding phone unlocking requirements, something consumer groups say will drag America back to the dark ages of cell phone enshittification. Longtime Techdirt readers probably […]
This week, both our top winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about DOGE and the disaster in Texas. In first place, it’s That Anonymous Coward with a reaction to the government’s response: Devoting a large portion of a press conference to patting themselves on the back & praising the god […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we looked at the encryption dilemma created by the EARN IT Act, while a federal case showed that cops already had plenty of options when dealing with device encryption. There was pushback against the Trump administration’s attempt to corrupt the Open Technology Fund, the FCC’s assault on a […]
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