As I continue to say, you may be done with the measles, but the measles is not done with you, nor the entire country. Coinciding with the profane installment of RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, 2025 saw the largest number of cases of measles in America in 3 decades. After decades […]
Walled Culture has just written about the possibility that recent AI breakthroughs might accelerate a move to open access, at least in the field of mathematics. It would be particularly welcome against a backdrop of relatively slow progress in the open access world. That is not because the need for different business models that provide […]
Last week Cathy wrote about the amicus brief we filed in the big multi-district litigation (MDL) that consolidated a bunch of different lawsuits claiming that OpenAI and Microsoft infringed the plaintiffs’ copyrights by training AI models on their works. A lot of people and groups offered proposed amicus briefs. For boring procedural reasons, unlike in […]
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. With the U.S. midterms this week, about 1 in 5 voters has asked AI chatbots about elections and politics, a recent survey found. But many voters may not know that governments around the world increasingly shape what chatbots can say. And because […]
The Ultimate Electric Circuits Engineer Course Bundle is designed for beginners and students wanting to build knowledge in electrical engineering and circuit analysis. You’ll start by learning the fundamentals like Ohm’s law and Kirchhoff’s Laws before moving into advanced network theorems. You will learn how essential components like operational amplifiers, capacitors, and inductors behave, while […]
By now it’s likely you’ve heard of the whole concept of the AI paperclip maximizer problem — a hypothetical first put forth by Nick Bostrom — suggesting that a misaligned AI system that looks to optimize on the wrong single thing (in this case creating paperclips) could lead to the end of humanity. Specifically, the […]
Recently, reports emerged that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly “off.” Some of those voice commands were then stored in plain text and uploaded to the internet. LG’s response? To deny everything. For decades now we’ve documented how while “smart” […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is the first of several comments about Trump’s voting fraud squad proudly announcing the arrest of… 28 people in California. It’s an anonymous comment summing up their attitude: Republicans just want election fraud. That’s it. In second place, it’s a double-winning comment that also took […]
If you go through all of the bloviations from RFK Jr. when it comes to his stance on vaccines, one of his chief refrains is that vaccines that have been in wide use for many years haven’t been tested properly for safety, or that data about their safety has been hidden or ignored. He’s generally […]
There’s a lot wrong with AI. But bad things happen when we try to use copyright law to fix it. Which is what we just told the Southern District of New York, where OpenAI and Microsoft are defending themselves in several cases alleging that their training violated the copyrights of the works the AI models […]
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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […]
We have talked about the Wyden Siren many times before. Senator Ron Wyden learns, through classified briefings, that the intelligence community is doing something most Americans would consider a clear violation of their civil liberties — often justified by interpreting plain English words to mean something no other English speaker would recognize. But because that […]
The best way to learn Raspberry Pi is by doing and in this course, you’ll get familiar with specific features by building your own GPS tracking system. From setup and configuration to location tracking through Google Maps, this course will help you go from beginner to advanced with Raspberry Pi. It’s on sale for $50. […]
Well well well. All it took was a regime change and the persistent abuse of camera networks by police officers to change MapQuest from “Remember MapQuest?” nostalgia to “hey where can I download MapQuest” demands. First, there’s the regime change. Trump has been stupid as fuck all the time since day one but nothing was […]
Ideally, I think it makes sense to open up the U.S. market to Chinese goods (AI, EVs, robots), but have functional and well-funded regulators that police all labor, competition, environmental, privacy, national security, and consumer rights abuses. But big U.S. companies don’t much like that because it would boost competition and regulatory accountability, eroding quarterly […]
To state that RFK Jr. says things that are just plainly wrong is to state the obvious. His waffling claims about the dangers of vaccines are wrong. His various other pet conspiracy theories, such as chemtrails and damage to humans from EMF, are also wrong. The data HHS is putting out under his leadership about […]
What is covered by freedom of thought in the AI age is being decided by courts that are hearing cases about something entirely different. The Chapter 11 filing of Character.ai on October 12 is the second such case in a year, and it shows that the record of how a person thought can be produced […]
Civil rights groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk’s Colossus xAI data centers in Memphis disproportionately pollute the air in minority neighborhoods. A joint lawsuit by SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn’t bother to get the necessary permits to run the 57 gas turbines […]
As you may know, The Streisand Effect was originally coined right here on Techdirt in 2005, though it referred back to an event from 2003 when Barbra Streisand sued Ken Adelman, because his project to map how erosion impacted the California coastline incidentally included a photo of Streisand’s Malibu mansion. Streisand demanded $50 million in […]
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