a Better Bubble™

TechDirt 🕸

Courage Doesn’t Scale

6 days 20 hours ago
It has been frustrating, to say the least, to watch many of the big Silicon Valley tech firms bow down to Trump and do his bidding, especially when it directly contradicts things they’ve said and done in the past. I’ve tried to explain to tech company execs why this doesn’t end well for them, but […]
Mike Masnick

Former FCC Officials Push To Kill Dated ‘News Distortion’ Rule Trump Abused To Bully CBS And ABC Into Feckless Compliance

1 week ago
A coalition of former FCC officials are pushing for the elimination of a longstanding FCC rule the Trump administration abused to “bully” ABC and CBS into kissing the president’s ass (I’ll use the term bully loosely since both companies seemed very eager to roll over for the far right wing). Last October, Trump sued CBS claiming (falsely) […]
Karl Bode

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

1 week ago
This week, all our winning comments came in response to our post about Donald Trump falling for satire from a website called The Dunning-Kruger Times. In first place on the insightful side, it’s That One Guy with a comment about how this is hardly surprising: He fell for it because he WANTS to believe it(and […]
Leigh Beadon

This Week In Techdirt History: November 9th – 15th

1 week 1 day ago
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we looked at election polls as an example of the challenges involved in defining and handling misinformation. We noted how Trumpland seemed to have entirely forgotten about its own manufactured TikTok hysteria, at which point the Commerce Department suddenly remembered it was supposed to ban the app. Following […]
Leigh Beadon

Nut Huggers Apparel Plans To Battle Back Against Bullshit Buc-ee’s Bullying

1 week 2 days ago
We’ve written about Buc-ee’s a couple of times recently, given the famed convenience store chain of the south’s aspirations to become the Monster Energy of convenience stores when it comes to nonsense trademark bullying. Buc-ee’s has gone after all kinds of other companies, almost always for the crime of having a cartoon animal in their […]
Timothy Geigner

Details Of DHS Agreement Reveal Risks Of Trump Administration’s Use Of Social Security Data For Voter Citizenship Checks

1 week 2 days ago
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. This year, when states began using an expanded Department of Homeland Security system to check their voter rolls for noncitizens, it was supposed to validate the Trump administration’s push to harness data from across federal agencies to expose illicit voting and stiffen immigration enforcement. DHS had […]
Jen Fifield

Copyright Is The Wrong Tool To Deal With Deepfake Harms

1 week 2 days ago
A key theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is that copyright, born in an analogue age of scarcity, works poorly in today’s digital world of abundance. One manifestation of that is how lawmakers struggle to adapt the existing copyright rules to deal with novel technological developments, like the new generation of […]
Glyn Moody

Judge Dismisses Bullshit Lawsuit Claiming Pollster Committed Fraud By Being Wrong

1 week 2 days ago
Last year, we wrote about Donald Trump’s bullshit lawsuit against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for releasing surprising polls right before the 2024 election suggesting that Kamala Harris might actually beat Donald Trump in Iowa. The polls turned out to be wrong—as polls sometimes are—and Trump decided this was grounds for a lawsuit. That case continues […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The Complete IT Exams Training Bundle

1 week 2 days ago
The Complete IT Exams Training Bundle covers five platforms — Cisco, AWS, CompTIA, Microsoft, Google, and Linux — with expert-led courses, labs, and exam prep. The bundle comes with access to multiple exam preparation platforms including LinuxPath, DojoLab, CodeDirect, and ExamsDigest. You’ll be able to train for CompTIA Security+, AWS Solutions Architect, Cisco CCNA, Linux+, […]
Daily Deal

After Destroying Federal Regulators, AT&T Wages War On Industry ‘Self-Regulation’ Regimes Like NARB, NAD

1 week 3 days ago
It’s not hyperbole to say that after decades of hard work and lobbying, companies like AT&T have effectively destroyed whatever was left of federal U.S. consumer protection and corporate oversight. It’s a “victory” that’s going to result in concussive harms that resonate for a generation. Under Trump 2.0, the company has not only seen the […]
Karl Bode

‘No One Lives Forever’ Turns 25 & You Still Can’t Buy It Legitimately

1 week 3 days ago
One of my favorite things in all of professional sports is the unofficial holiday referred to as “Bobby Bonilla Day.” The short version of it is that Bonilla played for the New York Mets decades ago and eventually bought out his contract in 2000 when they decided they were done with him. Rather than pay […]
Timothy Geigner

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Deviation From The Teen

1 week 3 days ago
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 roundup of the latest news in online […]
Mike Masnick

A Love Letter To America

1 week 3 days ago
I love America. You’re so fucked up. But I love you. You’re built upon a beautiful and preposterous idea: that ordinary people—you and I—can govern ourselves. Together. Not through superior intelligence. Not through noble birth. Not through accumulated wealth. But through the messy, difficult, glorious work of reasoning together when no one has final answers […]
Mike Brock

Judge Orders OpenAI To Give Lawyers 20 Million Private Chats, Thinks ‘Anonymization’ Can Keep Them Private

1 week 3 days ago
A federal magistrate judge just ordered that the private ChatGPT conversations of 20 million users be handed over to the lawyers for dozens of plaintiffs, including news organizations. Those 20 million people weren’t asked. They weren’t notified. They have no say in the matter. Last week, Magistrate Judge Ona Wang ordered OpenAI to turn over […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: MagStack Foldable 3-in-1 Wireless Charging Station with Floating Stand

1 week 3 days ago
MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, […]
Daily Deal

GOP Threatened To Keep The Government Shut Down If 8 GOP Senators Couldn’t Profit From Being Investigated

1 week 3 days ago
Last night the House passed, and then Donald Trump signed, the funding bill that reopened the government after the longest government shutdown in history. Amazingly, the Republican’s sketchy demands to fill their personal bank accounts with undeserved taxpayer money almost scuttled the deal. But, don’t worry: those Senators got their corrupt boondoggle and they plan […]
Tim Cushing