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FBI: Making America Great Means Lowering The Bar For New Hires

1 month 2 weeks ago
Trump’s desire to punish, oust, and eject anyone who isn’t white and/or MAGA enough from this country means the preferred outlets for his aggression are running out of manpower. Tons of federal officers have already been rerouted to immigration enforcement, leaving those left with the unenviable task of actually catching the kinds of criminals Trump […]
Tim Cushing

Republicans Like Nancy Mace Keep Shamelessly Taking Credit For Infrastructure Bill Improvements They Voted Against

1 month 2 weeks ago
Back in 2021, Congress passed both the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the infrastructure bill. While getting the latter right has taken a lot of time (causing no limit of whining by election-season Republicans and some segments of the “abundance” set), ARPA has already funded a lot of amazing stuff, from local community centers […]
Karl Bode

Trump Administration Approves New COVID Vaccines… For Barely Anyone At All

1 month 2 weeks ago
I’m starting to think that American is suffering from some sort of collective amnesia. Look, whatever your opinions on how the government handled the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in its early days, I would hope we can all agree that it sucked. Think the government was far too restrictive, or lacked nuance in how it put […]
Timothy Geigner

DOGE Falsely Targeted Him On Social Media. Then The Taliban Took His Family

1 month 2 weeks ago
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, […]
Avi Asher-Schapiro and Christopher Bing

From Book Bans To Internet Bans: Wyoming Lets Parents Control The Whole State’s Access To The Internet

1 month 2 weeks ago
If you’ve read about the sudden appearance of age verification across the internet in the UK and thought it would never happen in the U.S., take note: many politicians want the same or even more strict laws. As of July 1st, South Dakota and Wyoming enacted laws requiring any website that hosts any sexual content to implement age verification measures. These […]
Rindala Alajaji and Jason Kelley

Risky Bet: Colorado Gives $35 Million In Taxpayer Broadband Subsidies To Elon Musk And Jeff Bezos

1 month 2 weeks ago
So I’ve noted how Republicans are rewriting the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants wind up in the back pocket of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (and their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband ventures, Starlink and Project Kuiper). I’ve also explained in detail why that’s […]
Karl Bode

Here We Go Again: German Courts Reopen The “Is Ad Blocking Copyright Infringement?” Nonsense We Thought We’d Put To Bed

1 month 2 weeks ago
It’s no secret that most publishers (though not us!) hate ad blockers. The idea that ad blockers are illegal or “an attack on free speech” get trotted out every so often, and they’re always silly. You should have control over how your own browser on your own computer works. That’s an important freedom. And that […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: Headway Premium

1 month 2 weeks ago
Unlock a world of knowledge with a Headway Premium subscription. This exclusive deal gives you unlimited access to Headway’s massive library of 1500+ book summaries, with 30-50 new ones added monthly. Cover any topic you can imagine, from personal development and business strategies to health and wellness. It’s on sale for $60. Use the code READ20 at […]
Daily Deal

GOP-Friendly Local ‘News’ Broadcasters Plan More Harmful Mergers After Trump Destroys What’s Left Of Media Consolidation Limits

1 month 2 weeks ago
During Trump 1.0, his FCC took at absolute hatchet to media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely-owned) competitors underfoot. The result of their destruction has been a rise in local news deserts, a lot of right wing […]
Karl Bode

YouTube TV, Fox Play Carriage Dispute Chicken Right Before The NFL Season Starts

1 month 2 weeks ago
One of the more frustrating things about content streaming has been how quickly we went from having a conversation about cord-cutting to the realization that all of the streaming services that enabled said cord-cutting have morphed into the very cable providers that people wanted to escape. You can see this in a variety of ways. […]
Timothy Geigner

The Threat Of Extreme Statutory Damages For Copyright Almost Certainly Made Anthropic Settle With Authors

1 month 2 weeks ago
In what may be the least surprising news in the world of copyright and the internet, Anthropic just agreed to settle the copyright lawsuit that everyone’s been watching, but not for the reasons most people think. This isn’t about AI training being found to infringe copyright—in fact, Anthropic won on that issue. Instead, it’s about […]
Mike Masnick

Were A Few Random DEI Programs Worth Killing Democracy?

1 month 2 weeks ago
Eight months ago, those of us actually paying attention—not just scrolling outrage bait about Biden’s age or the latest campus controversy, but genuinely tracking the systematic preparation for authoritarian rule—warned that Trump represented an existential threat to democratic governance. We were diagnosed with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The reasonable people explained, with infinite patience, that we […]
Mike Brock

Daily Deal: The Learn to Code with React Bundle

1 month 2 weeks ago
The Learn to Code with React Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn more about React, Redux, and JavaScript. Used by the likes of Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, and Imgur, React is an efficient and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Meanwhile, Redux is a predictable state container that helps you manage the data […]
Daily Deal

Louisiana Sues Roblox For Violating Privacy Law By Not Violating Privacy Law

1 month 2 weeks ago
How do you comply with a law that prohibits collecting personal information from children under 13? If you said “by not collecting personal information from children under 13,” congratulations, you understand the law better than Louisiana’s Attorney General. The state of Louisiana has filed a lawsuit against Roblox that includes what might be one of […]
Mike Masnick

Senator Wyden Slams U.S. Judiciary For Incompetent, Nontransparent Cybersecurity Practices

1 month 2 weeks ago
Late last year, eight major U.S. telecoms were the victim of a massive intrusion by Chinese hackers who managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The “Salt Typhoon” hack was so severe, the intruders spent a year rooting around the ISP networks even after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, apparently didn’t […]
Karl Bode

RFK Jr. Vowed To Find The Environmental Causes Of Autism. Then He Shut Down Research Trying To Do Just That.

1 month 2 weeks ago
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase […]
Sharon Lerner

Federal Prosecutors: Thrown Sandwiches Are A Felony But Openly Carrying Rifles Isn’t A Problem

1 month 2 weeks ago
Is throwing a sandwich at someone a felony? Well, that all depends on a few factors. The most important considerations are these: What would normally be rhetorical questions were answered in Washington, D.C. recently. A (now-former) DOJ employee allegedly (well, the video makes it pretty clear there’s nothing “alleged” about it) threw a sandwich at […]
Tim Cushing