TechDirt 🕸

If you agree with me that what RFK Jr. has done at HHS — particularly when it comes to altering vaccine schedules, approvals, research, and access — is bad well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Kennedy rode Trump’s coattails, building his own Make America Health Again (MAHA) movement on the back of the wider MAGA […]

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 this week’s round-up of the latest news in online […]

OpenAI, the maker of ChaptGPT, is rightfully facing widespread criticism for its decisions to fill the gap the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) created when rival Anthropic refused to drop its restrictions against using its AI for surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. After protests from both users and employees who did not sign up to support government mass surveillance—early […]

Laws prohibiting minors from accessing AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT would violate the First Amendment. But that’s not stopping lawmakers from trying. Senator Josh Hawley has introduced the Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue Act of 2025 (GUARD Act), which would require AI companies to “prohibit” minors under “18 years of age” from “accessing or […]

Senator Ron Wyden says that when a secret interpretation of Section 702 is eventually declassified, the American public “will be stunned” to learn what the NSA has been doing. If you’ve followed Wyden’s career, you know this is not a man prone to hyperbole — and you know his track record on these warnings is […]

To completely understand computer security, it’s vital to step outside the fence and to think outside the box. Computer security is not just about firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, or anti-viruses. It’s also about tricking people into doing whatever a hacker wishes. A secure system, network, or infrastructure is also about informed people. The All-in-One Super-Sized […]

Every phone is a narc whether you realize it or not. The private sector certainly knows what information a cell phone can divulge and has leveraged the always-on nature of these devices to maximize profitability. The public sector — mainly law enforcement agencies, both local and federal — have caught onto this as well. With […]

We’ve already all seen what the Ellison family’s version of “editorial independence” looks like over at CBS, where contrarian troll Bari Weiss has turned the already very Republican friendly news giant into a safe space for right wing zealots and autocrats. All overseen by a Brendan Carr chosen censor tasked with ensuring the channel always […]

Alright, I think it might be time for a wellness check on the people running Buc-ee’s. I realize that these chain of gas and convenience stores has a strange cult following in the south. I won’t pretend to understand why that is, but whatever. Unfortunately, the company also appears to be run by a bunch […]

Who should be directly liable for online infringement – the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever controls the server that hosts […]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life. Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed […]

Last month we reported on a strange story in two strange parts: first, a coder had his AI agent create an entire smear campaign against a coding repository volunteer because he rejected AI code. Second, an Ars Technica journalist named Benj Edwards used a bunch of quotes made up by ChatGPT in a story about […]

From the very beginning of the DOGE saga, many of us raised alarms about what would happen when a bunch of inexperienced twenty-somethings were handed unfettered access to the most sensitive databases in the federal government with essentially zero oversight and zero adherence to the security protocols that exist for very good reasons. We wrote […]

Learn key concepts, from data preprocessing to building and evaluating models, with hands-on projects to cement your skills with the 2026 Ultimate Web Development and Coding Bundle. The 13 courses cover C++, Pythong, HTML5, Git and GitHub, Power BI, MySQL, and more. It’s on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and […]

Flooding cities with federal officers more used to dealing with border crossings and customs enforcement has led to multiple killings by these officers. They’re not trained to do what they’re being ordered to do. And their new hires aren’t being given the training they need because, apparently, the job of ejecting non-whites from this country […]

The President of Larry Ellison’s “new and improved” Paramount, Jeff Shell, has been conspicuously absent from recent events heralding the company’s problematic acquisition of Warner Brothers. The reason? Shell is being accused by a “whistleblower” and former partner of leaking company info, including early word of the company’s $7.7 billion August 2025 deal to obtain […]

I’ve spent a lot of digital ink detailing just how bad RFK Jr. has been in his post at HHS. Everything from his attempts to entirely remake vaccine policies in the country, to his neutered response to the ongoing measles outbreak in the country, up to and including his attempts to strong-arm the entire federal […]

Ideally, the U.S. public is supposed to be able to comment on government policy proceedings, and the government is supposed to listen to that input. Of course, it doesn’t really work that way: For years we’ve noted how U.S. regulatory comment proceedings are full of bots and fake comments from industries trying to game regulators, and […]

We’ve been covering Stephen Thaler’s quixotic quest to get copyright (and patent) protection for works generated entirely by his AI system “DABUS” for years now. If there’s one thing Thaler has proved beyond all reasonable doubt, it’s that you can be comprehensively, thoroughly, and repeatedly wrong at every level of the American legal system and […]

We have met the enemy and he is us. When a teenage boy in Orlando started texting Character.AI’s chatbot, it started as an innocent use of a new tool. Sewell Setzer III customized the chatbot to have the Game of Thrones-inspired persona of Daenerys Targaryen, the series’ prominent dragon-riding queen. In the months that followed, […]