I will admit it’s always a special kind of fun when a topic we cover here at Techdirt gets the John Oliver treatment. He and his writing team generally gets things right, which helps. And I’m not saying that Oliver and his crew are definitely Techdirt readers, but, well, hi John and crew! Readers here […]
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. This year, Wikipedia is celebrating 25 years as the Internet’s encyclopedia that anyone can edit. In its first decade, the quirky experiment for passionate nerds exploded in popularity. It became a ubiquitous information resource and a homework helper for schoolkids, much to the dismay of skeptical […]
It’s not that AI can’t be useful or helpful in certain contexts. And this is certainly not to say AI can’t take over repetitive tasks to allow people to focus on things that need more of human touch. The problem with AI isn’t necessarily AI itself. It’s that far too many tech companies are pitching […]
There’s been a bunch of news this week regarding Minnesota’s new law that purports to prohibit “nudification” technology, and the fact that xAI has sued to have the law blocked as unconstitutional. A few things need to be said upfront, because it’s very, very easy to just say the tech is terrible, that Elon Musk […]
It’s time you get up to speed with Ruby on Rails! This full-stack web framework is all about letting you build applications quickly. Its elegance, flexibility, and speed make Ruby on Rails a popular choice for businesses, so taking the time to master it can pay huge dividends down the road. In this course, you’ll […]
The on-again, off-again, new forever war we’ve been cursed with because Donald Trump felt people just weren’t paying attention to him enough is going to be headache for years to come. Trump assumes that if he acts like a bully, everyone will just back down. But now he’s dealing with a regime just as willing […]
Quick background: the $8 billion FCC Universal Service Fund (USF) applies a small surcharge on traditional phone lines to fund broadband expansion to unserved rural homes, schools, and libraries (of which the U.S. has a lot thanks to rampant telecom monopolization). While the USF, like all government programs, hasn’t been absent of fraud (usually at the hands of […]
The American healthcare system and the portion of the government in charge of our health have been a failure of record proportions for the second consecutive year. In 2025, America set a record for collecting the most confirmed cases of measles since 1991, with 2,289 confirmed cases. This year, America already blew past last years […]
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. A little-noticed presidential national security directive is now the legal engine behind a wave of terrorism prosecutions against left-wing protesters. That domestic campaign now has an international dimension, one that American officials had been planning for months, culminating on July 16, 2026, when […]
Flock Safety’s aggressive expansion into the law enforcement market has been coupled with nearly constant negative coverage of its tech and its practices. Multiple cities have paused or cancelled their agreements with Flock following public outcry over the surveillance tech. Flock’s willingness to allow law enforcement agencies to search a nationwide network of cameras has […]
Just recently Karl warned that we were going to see some absolute nonsense as the US sought to somehow “ban” Chinese AI models from being used in the US. That seems to already be happening. It kicked off with talk that the US might “fight Chinese AI” using nearly identical arguments to what was used […]
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There are several layers of bullshit in operation here, so we’ll walk through it all. But keep in mind the only reason this is all being exposed is because Trump administration officials feel they’re more obligated to “own the libs” than actually do their damn jobs. Last October, “conservative influencer” Nick Sortor was arrested by […]
A bipartisan roster of former top-level FCC officials have submitted a filing to the Trump FCC blasting the agency’s ongoing violations of the First Amendment and urging it to terminate its phony “investigations” into ABC — including the unprecedented early ownership review of the company’s broadcast licenses. In the filing, former FCC officials allied under […]
Sony’s decision to stop producing PlayStation discs starting in 2028 was met with a ton of initial backlash, especially in the wake of Sony reminding its customers yet again that a digital purchase of content isn’t actually a purchase of content at all and what you’ve bought can be ripped away from you with the […]
For a long time, cell site simulators, a.k.a. “Stingrays” made headlines on nearly a daily basis. Then they just kind of fell off the map. L3Harris — the manufacturer of cell site simulators that commanded enough market share to see its flagship product become the victim of genericide — saw the writing on the wall […]
Just as Larry Ellison and Paramount executives had worried, the state antitrust challenge to their $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers has resulted in significant delays that could prove terminal. Two weeks ago California and eleven other states filed an antitrust lawsuit to block the merger, pointing out that the consolidation would undermine market competition, […]
On Friday this week the FTC’s open comment period regarding its “Policy Statement Addressing AI Accuracy” will close, which means that a bunch of very smart, very busy people are wasting a ton of time this week writing up comments that will mostly be ignored by the FTC — but still matter for the record. […]
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The always-invaluable 404 Media has scored another minor coup. We all know ICE is heavily invested in surveillance tech, ranging from its purchases of cell location data from data brokers to throwing money at Clearview AI, the most notorious of facial recognition tech firms. But there’s so much more to it than that. On top […]
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