One of the many interesting aspects of the new wave of artificial intelligence systems is that with them, copyright has moved from the fringe to center stage. There are continuing debates about what role copyright should play in the world of generative AI, not to mention various lawsuits asking the courts to rule on that […]
T-Mobile has long been a hot mess on issues of security and privacy. Distracted by its problematic merger with Sprint, T-Mobile was hacked eight times in less than five years, leaking oodles of sensitive customer information onto the open web. The company was also a key player in gobbling up user sensitive location data to […]
Welcome to the arena, Phi Theta Kappa Honor Society! Here’s your Streisand Beachfront Property commemorative dinner plates which, we must inform you, contain massive amounts of lead and should never, for any reason, be used as dinner plates. PTK (as its abbreviated everywhere, even by the “society” itself) considers itself to be above the frat […]
No coding experience? This is the course for you. Whether you’ve dabbled in HTML or never touched a single line of code in your life, the Complete Web Developer Bootcamp will prepare you to take on programming jobs big and small. From basic CSS styling to popular frameworks like Bootstrap, this training will help you […]
Every little thing the current administration does furthers the ultimate goals of Trump and his enablers: homogenization of the population and elevation of Trump to the position of a demigod. While a lot of that was on display during his first term, the massive acceleration of these efforts during the first few months of Trump […]
The Supreme Court yesterday effectively provided the executive branch with a technical manual for legally disappearing people to foreign slave labor camps. While claiming to require “due process,” the Court’s ruling dismantles real protections by treating fundamental human rights violations as mere procedural technicalities that can be overcome with minimal paperwork. We’ve been covering this […]
We came a bit too close to losing one of the most important First Amendment protections in American history — but at least for now we have a tiny bit of good news. Billionaire Steve Wynn, joining a growing chorus of the wealthy and powerful who want to make it easier to sue critics into […]
Last week, Mike put together a detailed post explaining the Trump tariff rollout, how the calculations for it were built, some of the more idiotic aspects of it, and basically how stupid the whole program is. If you haven’t read the whole thing, you really should. If you want the briefest of summaries: Trump based […]
Some days, you just have to take the small victories. As the Trump Administration continues to barrage the nation with every terrible thing it can think of doing, it’s clear there’s no level of reprisal capable of keeping pace. This is one of the small victories, even if it — at first glance — it […]
More than a decade ago, Congress tried to pass SOPA and PIPA—two sweeping bills that would have allowed the government and copyright holders to quickly shut down entire websites based on allegations of piracy. The backlash was immediate and massive. Internet users, free speech advocates, and tech companies flooded lawmakers with protests, culminating in an “Internet Blackout” […]
A fusion of authoritarianism and corporatism is destroying what’s left of U.S. federal consumer protection. Whether by dodgy Supreme Court ruling, executive order, or captured regulators, the U.S. right, often in lockstep with consolidated corporate power, are making massive, historic, and potentially irreversible inroads in destroying federal corporate oversight, labor protections, public safety provisions, environmental […]
In what might be the most perfectly on-brand Elon Musk move yet, at the end of March on a Friday evening, Elon Musk suddenly declared that xAI, his AI company that was always connected at the hip with X (which we’d been calling ExTwitter to avoid confusion), was officially “acquiring” X at a valuation of […]
It’s no secret that Photoshop can be a bit dense when you’re first getting your feet wet with it. That’s why it pays to have a expert instructors show you the ropes. Led by a Photoshop pro, the Complete Photoshop Master Class Bundle will help you master Photoshop CC and become an expert—no prior experience […]
Less than a week ago, the Trump Administration and its assorted haters undermined one of their own lies. Among the many smears leveled against immigrants, the one that claims they’re lazy freeloaders who take more than they give back to the US is one of the stupidest. Immigrants pay taxes, even if they’re not here […]
When most people make a serious mistake that harms someone else, they try to fix it. That’s basic human decency. But when the Trump administration admits to “mistakenly” trafficking someone with protected status to an El Salvador slave labor camp, their response is to mock the judge who ordered them to try to fix it. […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about Trump’s unhinged trade war that includes uninhabited islands: Reminder: This policy was spearheaded and implemented by a man who thinks nobody says the word “groceries” these days because “it’s an old-fashioned word” and he somehow brought it […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the COVID news continued. Some hospital administrators were trying to silence doctors and nurses from commenting on pandemic shortages, voluntary virus tracking apps were trying to get a grip on the spread, and the UK’s NHS was enlisting Palantir to analyze data. We wrote about the tone deafness […]
Israel-located NSO Group may no longer be a malware option for the US and other discerning governments around the world, thanks to blacklists, lawsuits, and its disturbing willingness to sell to some of the most abhorrent governments of earth. But the market for powerful phone exploits isn’t dying up. Governments still want powerful surveillance tech, […]
If you’re the President of the United States and you don’t like a law, you can apparently just… decide not to enforce it for a while? I mean, it’s not supposed to work that way, but for the past 74 days, that’s exactly what’s happened with the TikTok ban. Not just ignoring it quietly — […]
Healthcare.gov, the government health insurance marketplace website, launched in October 2013 only to buckle under the weight of just 2,000 simultaneous users. As millions of Americans stared at error messages and frozen screens, a political crisis unfolded, but so did a new era of government technology. The result was 18F, an in-house digital services consulting agency that […]
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