On Friday, the government’s Section 702 surveillance authority lapsed! It may be temporary, but it’s still an important milestone. Section 702 was one of the surveillance programs Ed Snowden exposed in 2013 — and even after the exposure, the NSA has continued abusing it to spy on Americans. It’s the tool that lets the NSA […]
CNN brass have been waiting to get federal approval of their problematic $111 billion merger with Paramount. As we’ve detailed exhaustively, the high debt load from the CBS/Paramount and Warner Brothers merges is going to result in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and sagging quality control at the resulting company. It’s what always happens. It’s […]
There’s something going on over in Microsoft’s Xbox division and it isn’t good. Don’t take my word on that. Apparently the bosses over there are circulating an email to staff talking about how properly fucked everyone is if something doesn’t change soon. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty just sent […]
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. During a Washington Nationals baseball game on May 17, 2026, three people unfurled a large banner from the upper deck of Nationals Park displaying a link to a white nationalist website. The website, warning of the replacement of whites by people of color, called for the deportation […]
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is not having a particularly good time of being the UK’s leader. Basically everyone thinks he’s doing a terrible job and it seems unlikely that he’ll be in the role much longer. Apparently desperate to turn the tide on being historically disliked, he’s decided to grab the most reliable life […]
Yesterday we wrote about the Trump administration forcing Anthropic to shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The short version: dumb. Today, Axios got White House officials on the record, and it turns out the real reason is even dumber than we thought. In that original piece, we had pointed out that cybersecurity expert Katie […]
To completely understand computer security, it’s vital to step outside the fence and to think outside the box. Computer security is not just about firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, or anti-viruses. It’s also about tricking people into doing whatever a hacker wishes. A secure system, network, or infrastructure is also about informed people. The All-in-One Super-Sized […]
Just once I’d like to see this administration engage in the slightest bit of subtlety. Just once. It would be a refreshing change from literally everything it has done during this current iteration. Sure, it’s easier to prove actions are vindictive if they’re transparently vindictive. On the other hand, too many courts and judges (which […]
Last week Elon Musk successfully conned America and U.S. regulators into signing off on his preposterous SpaceX IPO, which immediately generated Musk $75 billion by comically over-stating the value of SpaceX, xAI, and Starlink. Then bone-grafting the entire pile of bullshit to the U.S. economy and your retirement account under the pretense that space data […]
We should all know at this point that RFK Jr. is bad at his job as Secretary of HHS. But that simplistic statement apparently needs something of a qualifier. Instead, it appears we should say that RFK Jr. is bad at the parts of his job that he chooses to do. Because, according to a […]
What’s most disturbing about Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order isn’t its fully-blinkered, jingoistic take on American history where America does no wrong and is almost always white right. I mean, that’s pretty awful on its own, but it’s the flip side of pretending whites do no wrong: pretending any victims […]
The Trump “Department of Justice’s” “antitrust division” dumped its unsurprising approval of the terrible Paramount Warner Brothers merger late on Friday in the hopes people wouldn’t notice it. As we’ve noted the $111 billion megadeal is a historically harmful mess. Backed by billions in Saudi and Chinese cash (raising all sorts of foreign media influence […]
Late Friday, Anthropic shut down access to its just-released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after the Trump administration slapped export controls on them — treating cutting-edge AI, in other words, like weapons. The trigger, it turns out, was a jailbreak. And the entity that tipped off the government? Amazon — one of Anthropic’s biggest […]
The Lifetime Learner Bundle feature access to uTalk and Stack Skills. Through uTalk, you’ll be able to speak keywords and phrases in no time and will start to see the results straight away. You can pick 6 languages to learn from their library of 140+ languages. You also get access to Stack Skills, the premier […]
Cops are human beings. Despite constantly pretending they’re on a higher plane (see also: Thin Blue Line, etc.), they’re just as fallible as anyone else. Especially now. This occupation is self-selecting. Righting wrongs is rarely the main draw. It’s almost always the immense of amount of power that comes coupled with nearly zero accountability. There […]
Last month I noted how the Trump FCC had unveiled a brand new plan to “stop robocalls.” As with most efforts the proposal doesn’t actually do much to stop robocalls because a well-lobbied U.S. government (1) refuses to hold big companies accountable or collect fines, (2) constantly embraces weak rules that make telemarketers and debt […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Robert Freetard with a comment on our post about AI replacing workers: Ultimately the the best positions to replace in a company with AI The best positions to replace in a company with AI is the CEO and other C* positions. They do NO […]
As we near the halfway point in the second Trump presidential term, there’s something that is worth remembering: Donald Trump, like most nasty viruses, is a temporary condition. Trumpism may not be, though I have my doubts as to how long a cult of personality can survive without that specific personality leading the cult. But […]
A couple weeks ago I wrote 6,000 words about the Reckless Ben/Bricks & Minifigs LEGO mess and concluded that pretty much everyone involved had made serious mistakes — with the Utah contingent (Bricks & Minifigs corporate, Joshua Johnson, Brandon Best, and the American Fork police) looking the worst of all. That take upset basically everyone: […]
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