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The polarization over any and all uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning continues. And, to be clear, I very much understand why this is all so controversial. Any new technology that has the chance to be transformative will also necessarily be disruptive and that causes fear. Fear that is not entirely unfounded, no matter [...]

As many of theAI stories on Walled Cultureattest, one of the most contentious areas in the latest stage of AI development concerns the sourcing of training data. To create high-quality large language models (LLMs) massive quantities of training data are required. In the current genAI stampede, many companies are simply scraping everything they can off [...]

Support us on Patreon Last month, Mike participated in the Cato Institutes Section 230 at 30 event to mark the 30th anniversary of the passage of Section 230. The event featured a series of fireside chats and panels that went deep on the past, present, and future of the all-important law, and you can watch [...]

All the people who have always brushed off concerns about surveillance tech, please come get your kids. And then let someone else raise them. Lots of people are fine with mass surveillance because they believe the horseshit spewed by the immediate beneficiaries of this tech: law enforcement agencies that claim every encroachment on your rights [...]

The Washington Post just published a deeply reported story about the Trump administration's campaign to expand free speech" in Europe. That headline alone should tell you something about how the story is framed - it takes the administration's self-description at face value, as though we're watching some noble effort to export the First Amendment across [...]

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 [...]

Exhaustion" is a legal term. It means plaintiffs need to explore the rest of their options before asking a court to handle their case or ask a higher court to handle a case the lower court has declared not quite exhausted enough. Exhaustion" is also a human term. And that's where we are with this [...]

All modern major U.S. media mergers follow the same trajectory. Executives pump out a bunch of pre-merger lies about job creation and innovation that are parroted by a lazy access press, followed by the rubber stamping by corrupt regulators, followed by oodles of price hikes, layoffs, and quality erosion caused by panicked efforts to pay [...]

I've obviously talked a great deal about how RFK Jr. and his activity as the Secretary of HHS has been a massive health liability for the American public. The implementation of his batshit anti-vaxxer stances have, of course, grabbed most of the headlines here, especially given the recent pushback he received from the courts, but [...]

Two years ago, Congress passed the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America" Act (RISAA) that included nominal reforms toSection 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The bill unfortunately included some problematic expansions of the law-but it also included a relatively big victory for civil liberties advocates: Section 702 authorities were only extended for two [...]

This was extremely wild shit to be happening anywhere, much less in the land of the First Amendment. No sooner had Donald Trump decided it was time to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War than the head of DoD operations decided it would be sorting news agencies by level of subservience. [...]

The internet has been rightfully enjoying videos from the defamation trial against Afroman, a musician known for his humorous songs including Because I got high." The lawsuit involves songs he wrote about a 2022 raid police conducted on his house, which was based on flimsy evidence. The songs justifiably mock the officers involved. Mike Masnick [...]

With the partial shutdown still ongoing and no budget resolution in sight because the GOP is simply unwilling to endure any oversight of its anti-migrant programs, the TSA is leaking personnel. A whole lot of TSA agents walked off the job the moment their paychecks failed to arrive, leaving travelers to deal with scenarios that [...]

Embedded systems are at the heart of modern innovation, powering everything from smart devices to automotive technology. This Embedded Systems Engineer Mastery Bundle equips you with the skills to design, program, and implement microcontroller-based solutions. Gain hands-on experience with Arduino, PIC, and ESP32, master C programming for embedded applications, and explore circuit design, PCB fabrication, [...]

Senator Bernie Sanders has a viral video making the rounds in which he interviews" Anthropic's Claude chatbot about the dangers of AI and privacy. It has over two million views. Plenty of people are sharing it. And it might be one of the most unintentionally revealing demonstrations of AI's actual problems that a politician has [...]

Back in early 2024, Amazon announced that Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) would be charged$3 extra every month just to avoid adsthat didn't previously exist. It was just the latest example of enshittification" in a streaming sector all out of original ideas, desperate to provide Wall Street with impossible skyward quarterly [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Bloof with a reply to a commenter who defended the DOGE kids cutting all kinds of useful humanities grants for being DEI bullshit": Giving well paid government jobs to unqualified kids based on their skin colour and willingness to commit crimes for bigots is [...]

It's finally time! Once again it took us a little while to get through all the entries this year, but we've now selected the winners in the latest installment of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1930! As usual, we've got winners in six categories. Plus, at the end, we've got some honorable [...]

With RFK Jr. and his version of HHS entirely out to lunch on the ongoing measles issue in America, it's been left to states and local medical professionals to try to figure out how to do combat with one of the most infectious diseases on the planet. In a sane world with a real, big [...]

When Rep. Leigh Finkespoke last month beforethe Minnesota House Commerce Finance and Policy Committee to testify againstHF1434, a broad-sweeping proposal to age-gate the internet, she began with something disarming: agreement. I want to support the basic part of this," she said, the shared goal of protecting young people online. Because that is not controversial: everyone [...]

Last June, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court upheld a lower court's ruling declaring a Louisiana law mandating the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools to be a violation of the Constitution. This decision made immediate sense, given that courts elsewhere in the nation (including the US Supreme Court) had repeatedly ruled that laws [...]

We've been covering Australia's under-16 social media ban since before it went into effect, first noting the confusion and obvious implementation problems as pretty much everyone realized it was a total mess, and then documenting how the ban was actively harming kids with disabilities by cutting them off from critical support communities. None of this [...]

The 2026 C# Course Bundle offers 8 courses that cover everything C#. You'll master the fundamentals, explore object-oriented programming, and start building your own apps in no time. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. [...]

Black Lives Matter. All Cops Are Bastards. These are not temporary catchphrases. These are universal and forever. And leave it to a cop to ensure we never forget either of these concepts. A foot pursuit that ended in the shooting of Connecticut resident Dyshan Best would otherwise just be a footnote in cop history if [...]

When he's not busy trampling free speech, crushing the First Amendment, and destroying media consolidation and consumer protection standards, Brendan Carr has other hobbies. Like helping the telecom industry patriotically sell a brutal coming wave of new layoffs caused by the kind of industry consolidation he regularly rubber stamps. Carr recently began circulating plans for [...]

There is an old axiom you will have heard of before: don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. If we wanted to boil this down to a math equation, it might be described as something like: 0 < any positive integer. It's not a difficult concept to grasp, typically, until you add [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations 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. In this week's round-up of the latest news in online [...]

We've all had the unsettling experience of seeing an ad online that reveals just how much advertisers know about our lives. You're right to be disturbed. Those very same online ad systems have been used by the government to warrantlessly track peoples' locations, new reporting has confirmed. For years, the internet advertising industry has been [...]

There's a concept in economics known as Goodhart's Law, often summarized as: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." The idea, originally about monetary policy, has proven remarkably durable across domains. When you attach high enough stakes to a single metric, people stop trying to accurately reflect reality and [...]

Shortly after Trump took office for a second time, his administration made it clear that it felt constitutional rights were merely privileges it would extend only to those who fully supported whatever the hell the administration happened to be doing. At the time, the administration was not only engaged in a full-blown, bigoted war against [...]

Discover the innovative Zeus Smart Car Kit, a versatile robot equipped with 4WD omnidirectional movement, FPV (First Person View), app-based remote control, RGB lighting, and a durable metal frame. Powered by an Arduino Uno-compatible main board, this all-in-one kit delivers multi-functional capabilities, including obstacle avoidance, line tracking, IR remote control, face detection, gesture recognition, voice [...]

As we wrote just yesterday, the defamation trial brought by seven Adams County, Ohio deputies against rapper Afroman was going about as well for the officers as their original botched raid on his home. Today we can report the inevitable conclusion: the jury sided entirely with Afroman, clearing him of all liability after just hours [...]

Brunchlords can only fail upward. It's physics. Warner Brothers CEO David Zaslav is poised to get as much as $550 million in compensation and tax reimbursement as the company prepares to be acquired by Larry Ellison's CBS/Paramount: Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, is set to receive $34.2 million in cash severance; $517.2 [...]

It was mere days ago that we were discussing an interesting lawsuit brought by the American Academy of Pediatrics, among others, challenging RFK Jr. and HHS for violating the Administrative Procedures Act in making changes to the CDC's ACIP panel and immunization schedules. If you're not up on what the APA is and does, the [...]

We've been following the saga of Afroman (real name Joseph Foreman) and the Adams County Sheriff's Office for a few years now, and I'm delighted to report that the defamation trial is currently underway and it is delivering everything you could possibly hope for, starting with this absolutely astounding suit that he's wearing in court [...]

Obviously, this headline owes everything to The Onion, which generated this masterpiece years ago: And so it is here: someone you'd never think would oppose fascism and bigotry deciding to speak up, despite knowing he could have just kept his head down and maintained his position as Sheriff For Life in Polk County, Florida. I'm [...]

EFF announced last week that it has stepped in to defend yet another anonymous Jehovah's Witness critic from having their identity exposed through bogus copyright claims. The Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society - the organizational arm of the Jehovah's Witnesses - has sent DMCA subpoenas to both Google and Cloudflare seeking information to unmask [...]

The Modern No-Code Creator Bundle is an extensive online curriculum specifically developed to enable individuals to construct professional websites, applications & automated workflows without the necessity of writing any code. It has five courses, covering leading no-code platforms and tools like ChatGPT, Mendix, and Tabnine. It is ideally suited for novices and non-technical professionals, empowering [...]

The boat strike program the Trump administration is engaged in isn't actually supported by law. Even his own in-house counsel can't seem to agree on what justification to use. Shortly after being threatened with a little congressional oversight, the Office of Legal Counsel shrugged together a legal memo that basically said that the less of [...]

We've noted repeatedly how the U.S. authoritarian right is buying up all of our new and old media companies because they're trying to mimic what Viktor Orban created in Hungary. Namely, a media where all the major outlets are owned by rich autocratic allies, who spew propaganda 24/7 while the government strangles real, independent journalism [...]

It's been a long and winding road to mostly get us right back to where we started in the battle between pop star Katy Perry and Aussie clothing designer Katie Perry. If you're not familiar with this saga, here is a brief summary. Note that I will be mostly using only Katy and Katie when [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens. Government officials said the changes could give the [...]

Support us on Patreon There's a notion that pops up in the comments here on Techdirt that Mike and our writer Karl Bode are deeply opposed in their opinions on AI and engaged in an epic ongoing debate. Alas, the truth is a little less spectacular: while they might have some differences of opinion here [...]

TheSAFE act,introduced by Senators Mike Lee and Dick Durbin, is the first of many likely proposals we will see to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008-and while imperfect, it does propose a litany of real and much-needed reforms of Big Brother's favorite surveillance authority. The irresponsible 2024 [...]

The DOJ is filled with grossly incompetent prosecutors these days. It's a bunch of subservients acting in obeisance to the zenith of gross incompetence: the current President of the United States. When not being sidelined by judges for not being legally appointed, the handpicked losers of Trump's DOJ Revenge Squad are being shut out by [...]

The Academy of Game Art Bundle teaches you the basics of how to create video game art. You'll learn how to use Inkscape to create logos, 2D backgrounds, pre-defined modules, UI designs, and characters. A course on using DragonBones will teach you how to animate your characters as well. The bundle is on sale for [...]

Look, I get it. Government waste is real. Bureaucratic bloat is real. The desire to have a federal government that spends taxpayer money wisely and operates without unnecessary friction? That's a pretty standard and quite reasonable desire in American politics. So when Elon Musk showed up promising he could cut $2 trillion in federal spending [...]

Brendan Carr is once again doing Brendan Carr stuff. Carr has threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of broadcasters that tell the truth about Trump's disastrous war in Iran. In a post over at Elon Musk's right wing propaganda website, Carr insists that news outlets that are running hoaxes and news distortions" (read: telling the [...]

Normally, a post about the signing of an NFL free agent wouldn't make it anywhere near these here Techdirt pages. Today, that is not the case. The site For The Win posted a mildly interesting report on the Tennessee Titans signing wide receiver Wan'Dale Robinson to a 4 year, $78 million contract. But wait, you're [...]

It has long been clear: Trump needs to be removed from office before he can inflict even more damage than he already has. But he doesn't just need to be stopped; for America to have a future he also needs to be repudiated. Impeachment speaks to each need, to both make clear his behavior is [...]