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Turns Out They Didn’t Really Want You To Bring Your Whole Self To Work

1 week 2 days ago
For years, we watched Silicon Valley executives perform elaborate corporate theater about “values” and “belonging” and “bringing your whole self to work.” If you were skeptical that any of that was real, well, congrats. Aaron Zamost, a longtime tech communications exec, has a piece in the NY Times that should be required reading for anyone […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The Complete Raspberry Pi And Alexa A-Z Bundle

1 week 2 days ago
Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to full projects. Before you know it, you’ll be building a gaming system to play old Nintendo, […]
Daily Deal

MN Police Chief Intervenes To Free A US Citizen Arrested By Federal Officers

1 week 2 days ago
No doubt this will be spun as some form of Minnesota-specific obstruction, but until that happens, let’s just appreciate the fact that not all cops are willing to be appendages of the Trump administration’s bigoted migrant purge. Here are the details, courtesy of Minnesota Public Radio: MPR News has learned that the police chief in […]
Tim Cushing

Whoops, Websites Realize That Killing Their Comment Sections Was A Mistake

1 week 2 days ago
So for years we pointed out how the trend of news websites killing off their comment section (usually because they were too cheap or lazy to creatively manage them) was counterproductive. One, it killed off a lot of local community value and engagement created within your own properties. Two, it outsourced anything vaguely resembling functional conversation with […]
Karl Bode

The CDC Has Mysteriously Frozen Vaccine Databases Without Explanation

1 week 2 days ago
In any war, information is power. Be it kinetic wars, cyberwarfare, or information wars, data is everything. And since RFK Jr. has clearly declared war on vaccines in America, it’s not a huge surprise that he is looking to control information about vaccines. Or, as it turns out, simply sweep that information away. Nearly half […]
Timothy Geigner

Beware: Government Using Image Manipulation For Propaganda

1 week 3 days ago
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem last week posted a photo of the arrest of Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of three activists who had entered a St. Paul, Minn. church to confront a pastor who also serves as acting field director of the St. Paul Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office.  A short while later, the White […]
Josh Richman

ICE, CBP Brag About Stealing A Legally-Impossible $14,000 From US Citizens At The Minneapolis Airport

1 week 3 days ago
Let’s just clear the air right up front: this is just the government mugging Somalis because they’re currently at the top of Trump’s shitlist. Prior to last month’s escalation (and subsequent murder) because some white MAGA shitbird became famous for supposedly uncovering a whole lot of Somali-based fraud in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it’s possible ICE would […]
Tim Cushing

Six Months Of ‘AI CSAM Crisis’ Headlines Were Based On Misleading Data

1 week 3 days ago
Remember last summer when everyone was freaking out about the explosion of AI-generated child sexual abuse material? The New York Times ran a piece in July with the headline “A.I.-Generated Images of Child Sexual Abuse Are Flooding the Internet.” NCMEC put out a blog post calling the numbers an “alarming increase” and a “wake-up call.” […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: Rosetta Stone (All Languages)

1 week 3 days ago
Embark on the journey of language learning with the Rosetta Stone unlimited subscription for all languages. Rosetta Stone has been the go-to software for language learning for the past 27 years. With its immersive and intuitive training method, you might be reading, writing, and speaking a new language with confidence in no time. Get access […]
Daily Deal

Hey Gavin Newsom! Investigating TikTok’s Moderation Is Just As Unconstitutional As When Texas & Florida Tried It

1 week 3 days ago
We called bullshit when Republicans tried to order websites to carry content. We’re calling bullshit now when Democrats are trying to do the same. We spent years explaining to politicians across both parties why the government can’t dictate how private platforms moderate content. During the Biden admin, GOP governors seemed most aggressive about trying to […]
Mike Masnick

Trump Is Helping Elon Musk’s Starlink Get Billions In Taxpayer Dollars With No Oversight

1 week 3 days ago
We’ve long noted how the 2021 infrastructure bill included $42.5 billion for broadband grants dubbed the Broadband, Equity, Access And Deployment (BEAD) program. The program wasn’t without its warts, but it had the potential to be truly transformative for U.S. broadband access. But Republicans illegally rewrote the program to redirect money away from stuff like affordable, gigabit, […]
Karl Bode

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

1 week 4 days ago
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Raphael with a comment about Trump demanding billions from the IRS: This reminds me, Trump loves to rant and rave about how poorly and dysfunctionally the countries of origin of many migrant to the USA are run, and how bad things look like there. […]
Leigh Beadon

This Week In Techdirt History: January 25th – 31st

1 week 5 days ago
Five Years Ago This week in 2021, we looked at the future of net neutrality under the new interim FCC boss, and at how broadband monopolies continued to get money for networks they never fully deployed. Twitter got immunity from a banned user’s lawsuit thanks to Section 230, while dozens of human rights groups were […]
Leigh Beadon

DOJ Arrests Journalists Don Lemon & Georgia Fort For Acts Of Journalism, Even After Courts Rejected Arrest Warrants

1 week 5 days ago
Last week, a federal magistrate judge told the DOJ it could not arrest journalist Don Lemon. The DOJ appealed and lost that appeal too. The legal system said no. So the DOJ arrested him anyway. On January 18th, protesters interrupted services at a Minnesota church after discovering its pastor leads a nearby ICE field office. […]
Timothy Geigner and Mike Masnick

Search Engines, AI, And The Long Fight Over Fair Use

1 week 6 days ago
Long before generative AI, copyright holders warned that new technologies for reading and analyzing information would destroy creativity. Internet search engines, they argued, were infringement machines—tools that copied copyrighted works at scale without permission. As they had with earlier information technologies like the photocopier and the VCR, copyright owners sued. Courts disagreed. They recognized that […]
Joe Mullin

Bari Weiss Pauses Her Pathetic Podcast To Focus Full Time On Ruining CBS

1 week 6 days ago
If you’ve been napping, Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison and his nepobaby son David hired an unqualified troll named Bari Weiss to “run” CBS News. And by “run” CBS news, I mean destroy what little journalism was left at the media giant and create an alternate-reality safe space for radical right wing billionaire extremists. While pretending to […]
Karl Bode

The Casual Cruelty Of The GOP’s Migrant Purge

1 week 6 days ago
Yeah, there’s the overt cruelty. There’s the murder of protesters. The chasing of day laborers across Home Depot parking lots. The snatching and separation of children from parents. The day-in, day-out portrayal of migrants as filthy leeches from “shithole” countries by [vomits] the Commander-in-Chief. Then there’s everything surrounding it. The camping out at immigration courts […]
Tim Cushing