We’ve finally got a Stalin to call our own. Just like Soviet Russia, homelessness is now basically a criminal offense, thanks to Trump’s latest executive order, which pretends it’s about crime but actually just wants to put homelessness people in places where other Americans won’t be inconvenienced by them. Like most Trump executive orders, it’s […]
One of the bigger Trump election season lies was that Trump 2.0 would be “serious about antitrust,” and protect blue collar Americans from corporate predation. You’d have to be a turnip to not see that was an aggressive lie, pushed by a lot of folks (even supposed antitrust buster Matt Stoller), who seemed hellbent on […]
It’s been a while since we checked in on Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s Superintendent and all around assbag fascist. If you’ve read any of our previous posts featuring Walters, you know that he loves himself two things, and in this order of importance: Donald Trump and god. You can tell this because, while it was always […]
We’ve noted repeatedly how the U.S. is dominated by regional telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast that have spent decades working tirelessly to crush regional broadband competition, and have also spent millions of dollars to crush state and federal regulatory oversight. The result is a patchwork of monopolies that don’t try very hard on availability, […]
President Trump wanted a war on Latin Americans and found an obliging partner in El Salvador, currently headed by President Nayib Bukele. Bukele has managed to bring down El Salvador’s homicide rate since he became president, but it’s more due to routine rights violations than any social programs Bukele managed to squeeze in between sieges […]
The Trump administration’s war on higher education has reached new levels of authoritarian absurdity. Not content with merely investigating George Mason University and its president Gregory Washington for his diversity efforts, the Department of Justice has now decided to investigate the faculty members who dared to support him. Yes, you read that correctly. Federal agents […]
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I know it often seems like it’s bad news all the time on the Techdirt channel. And I’m sorry it’s that way. I wish we weren’t dealing with a daily deluge of new awfulness from the current president and his enablers. But that’s what’s happening so that’s how it ends up looking here, as well […]
Last week Trump’s FCC lackey, Brendan Carr, quickly set about rubber stamping approval for the $8 billion CBS Skyance merger, now that CBS execs paid their $16 million bribe to the king. One of the key merger conditions to net approval was the installation of a sort of FCC “bias ombudsman,” who’ll be installed at […]
(To all readers: the use of “God” in this post refers to the generically Christian ideal of God, and not any particular god or gods referenced/respected by other religions. The capitalization is there to make a point to the kind of people who insist on capitalizing God while cherry-picking the Bible for justifications for their […]
Valve Corporation recently came under pressure from payment processors to purge Steam, the popular PC gaming storefront, of “certain kinds of adult-only content.” The news rippled across tech and gaming news media, even for adult entertainment industry journalists like myself. But if it weren’t for the reporting of Ana Valens (which Vice then deleted) then we […]
Tom Lehrer’s passing this weekend at age 97 has rightfully sparked tributes to his brilliant satirical songs. But amid all the well-deserved praise for “The Elements” and “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,” there’s another aspect of Lehrer’s legacy that deserves equal celebration: his decision to dump his entire catalog into the public domain. In an […]
I wasn’t wrong when I wrote that Apple, Google, Akamai, and others faced tremendous liability risk if they continued to provide any of their hosting services to TikTok. Of course, not because it should be illegal – the operative law is incredibly unconstitutional, despite the trite reasoning by the Supreme Court finding it otherwise. But […]
Donald Trump is a notorious media bully. He uses lawsuits, executive power, and political pressure to punish critics and bend institutions to his will. Disney, Meta, and Paramount have since paid out multi-million-dollar settlements over content disputes. CBS News leaders resigned. Colbert’s show was canceled. The AP was barred from the White House. Even Rupert […]
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Sure, “Department of Justice” has always been a misnomer, what with its blessing of things like civil asset forfeiture, bogus CFAA prosecutions, cop junk science, the 1033 program, and the complete inability to successfully sue federal officers for blatant Constitutional violations. But it also used to have things like a civil rights division that investigated […]
Earlier this month we noted how California was attempting to pass a new law ensuring that broadband would be affordable to poor people. The original law proposed that the biggest ISPs would need to make sure they offered speeds of at least 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up for $15 a month to California residents […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about our call for the government to accept accountability for the power it wields: Bold of you to assume that Republicans will ever place responsibility for their actions on their own shoulders instead of on the backs of […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the DHS was going full gestapo in response to protests in Portland, then quickly expanding the tactics to other cities, starting with Chicago, and was also engaging in domestic surveillance to protect statues and monuments. We asked why the US was trying to punish hackers for accessing vaccine […]
It seems to be part of human nature to try to game systems. That’s also true for technological systems, including the most recent iteration of AI, as the numerous examples of prompt injection exploits demonstrate. In the latest twist, an investigation by Nikkei Asia has found hidden prompts in academic preprints hosted on the arXiv […]
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