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 […]
This isn’t the first state court to reach this conclusion, but so few courts bother to examine the science-y sounding stuff cops trot out as “evidence” that this decision is worth noting. There’s no shortage of junk science that has been (and continues to be) treated as actual science during testimony, ranging from the DNA […]
Two weeks ago the Supreme Court rejected an effort by a dodgy right wing activists to destroy an $8 billion FCC program that connects poor and rural communities to the internet. The plaintiff in the case, a fake right wing “consumer group,” had tried to argue that the bipartisan subsidy (the Universal Service Fund, or […]
There is an epidemic of magical thinking. An unwillingness to confront reality. Because reality is scary. This affliction cuts across all ideological lines, manifesting in different forms but serving the same function: allowing us to avoid the difficult truths about what it will actually take to preserve human dignity, meaning, and freedom in the face […]
We haven’t talked about the numbers in America’s measles outbreak in a couple of months, but that certainly doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. It was back in April that we wrote about how the numbers were on pace to eclipse the outbreak in 2019, which was largely driven by unvaccinated religious groups in […]
Techdirt has just written about how people are using Ring doorbell cameras to warn others in the area about the presence of ICE agents and the risk of possible ICE raids. That’s a good example of using existing technology to monitor the increasingly widespread and brutal activities of ICE teams. But driven by a desire […]
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