Back in 2011 and 2012, one of the central technical objections that helped kill SOPA and PIPA was about DNS blocking. Engineers, internet architects, and cybersecurity experts all lined up to explain, in painstaking detail, why blocking at the DNS layer was a terrible idea. It would break the fundamental architecture of how the internet […]
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The government needs more funding than ever, which is kind of hilarious when you realize the Tea Party of the Obama era was the predecessor of this Big Government version of the GOP. The DHS can’t even get itself a budget at the moment. Sure, it will get some money thrown to it sooner or […]
There’s some endless, curious tensions within the corrupt Trump administration when it comes to their effort to completely destroy the government’s ability to hold corporations accountable for dodgy, nefarious, or even illegal behavior. Their own, lazy, circular logic and bad faith legal interpretations are creating vast new legal minefields we’ll be untangling for decades. The […]
Iran’s internet has been intermittently disrupted for months. After years of bombardment, Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure remains fragile. In India, recurring shutdowns and throttling have become a routine response to protests and unrest, cutting millions off from news, work, and basic services. Across dozens of other countries, governments increasingly treat connectivity itself as something that can be weaponized—cut, slowed, or selectively restored […]
Back in 2023, Arkansas passed a social media age verification law so poorly drafted that the bill’s own sponsor couldn’t accurately describe who it covered. The law appeared to exempt TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube while the sponsor publicly claimed those were the exact platforms being targeted. When the state’s own expert witness testified that Snapchat […]
I originally began this headline with the word “ironically.” But it would only be ironic if it wasn’t by design. Irony suggests something slightly out of the control of the principal figures resulted in something somewhat unexpected. That isn’t the case here. This was by design. The New York Times has obtained the behind-the-scenes memos […]
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Disclaimer: This post talks about Bluesky and an offering from Bluesky and I am on the Bluesky board. Take everything I say with whatever size grains of salt you feel is appropriate. I’ve written a few times now about how I think that AI tools, used carefully and thoughtfully, represent our best chance at taking […]
This Saturday is the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner (WHCA). And there’s been ample criticism of journalists that plan to have giggles and cocktails with overt fascists, given this helps normalize of one of the most racist, censorial, and corrupt administrations in U.S. history. This year, because an actual comedian might get somewhere close to […]
With the streaming world turning into a wild, chaotic, fractured mess, there is no better example of how terrible this can all be than with live sports. We’ve already seen all kinds of issues among streaming services when it comes to sports. Buffering live games piss people off. Exclusivity deals worked out among several services […]
There are defamation lawsuits designed to win, and then there are defamation lawsuits designed to generate headlines for your fans on social media, punish journalists, and maybe — if you’re lucky — force a settlement or intimidate future reporting. FBI Director Kash Patel’s brand new defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic is very obviously the second […]
For nearly twenty years, I’ve used Google Docs for most of my writing: class notes, personal notes, a novel in progress, research, activism, and my day job. It’s become an essential piece of infrastructure for me, an archive of my life and evolving interests. In order to sign up for Google Drive, I presumably had […]
Last fall, an Alabama police officer decided he wasn’t going to allow a 62-year-old woman to exercise her First Amendment rights — not if she was going to do so from inside an inflatable penis costume. Yes, these are sentences we actually have to write here at Techdirt — things that seem so implausible you’d […]
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A couple weeks back, Jonathan Haidt published another entry in his ongoing campaign to convince the world that social media is inherently ruining kids’ lives. This one was a victory lap titled “Seven Lines of Evidence Against Social Media,” treating recent developments — including the social media addiction verdicts against Meta that most people are […]
Talk about pathetic. CBS has announced that the now-Larry Ellison owned network will be hosting a lavish dinner this week praising Donald Trump and his (nonexistent) dedication to the First Amendment. The dinner will be hosted at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, which the State Department claimed in December 2025 was being renamed […]
It’s barely been a few days back since we discussed just how open to mistakes and abuse YouTube’s copyright takedown system is, when NVIDIA’s demo video for its controversial DLSS 5 tech got briefly pulled down because an Italian news channel did a piece featuring the footage which it copyrighted. The copyright bots took it […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica and Frontline. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. The National Guard soldiers in desert camo piled out of unmarked vans in East Los Angeles last June, cordoning off East Sixth Street, a residential street lined with single family houses, and blocking a nearby road leading to an elementary school. A squad of […]
Earlier this month, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!” — notably including the stock ticker, because why not just make the market manipulation explicit. The stock popped after that and has continued to rise in the past […]
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