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It wasn't until after immigration officers started murdering US citizens that the Trump administration finally agreed to do anything about it. First, Trump turfed Kristi Noem, setting her up with a special envoy" dead end job (which has also now come to an end). Then it elevated Markwayne Mullin, who first insisted his priority was [...]

The big Meta settlement with a bunch of states got most of the headlines, but state AGs have gone all in on suing tech companies of late, and it shows no signs of slowing down. Last week things went ballistic when the judge in New Mexico's case (New Mexico being one of the few states [...]

Browse, plan, and prep every trip from one library. You get 30 Lonely Planet travel eBooks in one bundle, packed with bucket-list destinations, must-see sights, and insider tips for your next trip. Instead of buying guides one at a time, you build a full travel library in a single purchase. Your guides live in one [...]

The thing about being in power is that there's not much room left between the floor and the ceiling. The administration can fall, but only so far, because it's still the administration. Conversely, it can only rise so far. The system of checks and balances - even when broken - limits upward trajectories. Bureaucracy generates [...]

Last week Elon Musk arbitrarily started throttling the LEO (low-Earth orbit) satellite connections of Ukraine's military, preventing it from engaging in offensive and defensive operations. The decision blindsided the White House, caused significant financial and operational headaches for Ukraine, and created no shortage of bipartisan backlash. After spending a week blaming one another, both the [...]

I've taken a lot of shots at Nintendo over the years, often times under various versions of headlines that start with Nintendo Hates You. And those shots were well earned, given the company's apparent policy of being as anti-fan as it possibly can be on all matters related to intellectual property. Nintendo never misses an [...]

Michael Nicolls, SpaceX's vice president for Starlink and president of xAI, appeared recently at the International Astronautical Congress in Turkey to lament the rise of space collisions as Musk and Bezos flood the night sky with low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellites. According to Nicolls, there's been a decided lack of coordination among space companies as they've [...]

For American democracy to survive, we are going to have to do something about the current operation of our judicial system. But what is needed to fix it is more than just packing" the Supreme Court, as many have proposed, because the problems we're facing extend far beyond just its current personnel line-up. There are [...]

It's essential to understand that this isn't about protecting the integrity of elections from people who don't have the right to vote. This is a suppression effort meant to intimidate people who do have the legal right to vote by making it seem like it might be better to sit out the mid-terms than be [...]

The Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2024 and Windows 11 Pro Bundle provides perpetual licenses of each for 1 Windows PC (not compatible with Mac or macOS). Microsoft Office 2024 Professional Plus provides a comprehensive and stable productivity suite for organizations that prefer a traditional perpetual license model. This version offers the complete set of Office [...]

Ofcom's media relations people know how to email me. I have ten press releases from them this year. They emailed me when they launched investigations of or took actions on X/Grok, Telegram, Pornhub, and Sanctioned Suicide. But when they recently published their required report on how the Online Safety Act is going... suddenly they've lost [...]

Earlier this month we noted how Meta's launch of its cutesy agentic AI software Muse arrived with all sorts of major privacy and security screw ups, despite the company's repeated, breathless claims that privacy and security were at the forefront of the company's thinking during development. Like most AI agents, Muse is supposed to help [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about the Canadian YouTuber who was visited by the cops after building a Flock-like camera to track cop cars: If the cops are doing nothing wrong, then they have nothing to hide. In second place, it's a comment about Malcolm Gladwell's [...]

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In all of our coverage of the disastrous tenure RFK Jr. has had as Secretary of HHS, we have not yet discussed a bonkers study the CDC planned to fund in Guinea-Bissau. This hepatitis B vaccine trial" was supposed to already have been kicked off, but it has been suspended since January instead because of [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. On March 3, 2020, Sen. Lindsey Graham walked into a private dining room at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C. Graham's time was expensive. He was meeting with two executives and a lobbyist from a Hawaiian naval defense contractor called Navatek. And he had required them [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

Remember back when Elon Musk was handed the keys of our federal government with basically zero accountability or oversight? All sorts of bad stuff happened, but one of the lawsuits we've been covering was the American Federation of Gov't Employees (AFGE) along with the Association of Administrative Law Judges and a few individual federal workers [...]

The MOGICS Bagel has 5 international AC sockets, dual USB ports, 3ft integrated length-adjustable power cord, and an ergonomic AC plug. Unlike ordinary power strips, the bagel design makes it easier to charge multiple devices giving ample space for each plug. It has a LED power indicator that emits brilliant blue light when power is [...]

One of America's foremost thinkers hasn't done enough thinking. Instead, he's delivered a handful of thoughtful-sounding stuff that simply doesn't hold up the minute readers start actually thinking about what he's saying. Malcolm Gladwell has a new book about gun violence in the United States. I haven't read it, so I can't comment on the [...]

The Washington Post recently had some interesting additional insight into the various pay to play" shenanigans related to Trump's $330 million ballroom. They got a hold of a broader donor list, noting that Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million, the top contribution amount. As did GOP donor mainstay the Adelson family. Crypto companies are [...]

It seems that burying reports because he doesn't like the data within them is becoming a habit for Donald Trump and his administration. This practice didn't begin during Trump 2.0, of course. He was burying reports he didn't like all the way back in 2017. More recently, of course, a lot of the games being [...]

The Metric Is Not the Missionis a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy-from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around [...]

Last year you might recall how Elon Musk's far right wing extremism (and endlessly incoherent behavior) had many countries reconsidering their use of his low-Earth orbit satellite company, Starlink. It was driven by the fact that Musk had restricted Ukraine's access to the service near Crimea because he personally opposed Ukraine's military aims (defending itself [...]

On Wednesday, JD Vance did the one thing JD Vance knows how to do with full commitment: lie through his teeth about something he fully knows is bullshit. In this case, claiming that Donald Trump hates the idea of people enriching themselves fraudulently over access to the government." Remember, this is the same Donald Trump [...]

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 [...]

Not that we really needed any more evidence of bad faith by ICE and the officer who decided to drive his car across a city street and into an adjacent parking lot for the apparent sole purpose of running over a fleeing migrant, but here it is anyway. As we covered last week, ICE officers [...]

Brendan Carr is a silly, hypocritical fascist who splits his time between destroying U.S. consumer protection standards and media consolidation limits, and abusing his position as FCC boss to threaten broadcast networks for airing stuff like comedy. Or journalism. Or politicians that the increasingly-unpopular President is clearly afraid of. Lately Trump has been complaining about [...]

Alright, I don't quite know what to make of what Epic Games is doing with this AI-driven nonsense, but it's not great. I've spent a bit of time trying to argue that new AI technology has some place in this industry, but Epic and its leadership appears to be trying to personify every last thing [...]

A quick update on a story we mentioned earlier this month. Much of the attention in the whole Bricks & Minifigs saga has focused on Reckless Ben and his attempts to expose sketchy behavior by the company, but the fight has also put a lot more scrutiny on Bricks & Minifigs Corporate (BAM), including the [...]

Sam Altman is not punk. He's no revolutionary. Jensen Huang wears a black leather jacket, the uniform of Brando and the Ramones, but that doesn't make him a rebel. The scientists and engineers we might have looked to as the new hackers are well on their way to becoming among the richest people in history. [...]

For the past several months, the DHS and DOJ have been pushing hard to make Trump's illegal voter election conspiracy theories a reality. Trump continues to claim millions of non-citizen voters are participating in federal elections - something he persists in proclaiming despite having won two of the last three presidential races. This isn't really [...]

CyberTraining 365 is the best training destination for you and your team. Here you can Master Cyber Security techniques such as Analyzing Malware, Penetration Testing, Advanced Persistent Threats, Threat Intelligence Research, Reverse Engineering, and much more. This online academy offers 3,877 up-to-date modules on all the latest technologies and industry standards. These courses are aligned [...]

A few weeks ago we wrote about how the lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft in the massive multi-district litigation (MDL) against the companies over how they trained their AI had called for the exclusion of an expert witness report after it was revealed that lawyers for the plaintiffs had apparently surreptitiously paid for the report, [...]

You may have noticed that under corrupt Trumpist courts, if a regulator like the FCC engages in literally anything that threatens corporate power or aids workers, competition, or consumers (say, net neutrality, for example), or even school kids, it's clearly illegal and a dramatic overreach of regulatory power. If an agency does things like launch [...]

Court reform cannot come soon enough, because unless and until it does we cannot count on the Supreme Court to dispense justice. For many reasons, but this week brought the focus to one in particular, one we've long known was a problem, because we've seen it be once before: the Court fails to take up [...]

Artificial intelligence is a powerful tool for free expression. And it keeps improving. As the saying goes, it's the worst it will ever be. People use it to receive ever-smarter speech and to create ever-better speech of their own. AI is now an important part of the marketplace of ideas-a market that, in America, is [...]

It's never a good idea to just print whatever the government tells you to print, not when you have the First Amendment to rely on. On the other hand, if you're CBS News, it's probably in your best interest to run whatever the government says to run because it's probably going to be the same [...]

This past weekend was the latest in an ongoing series of (massive) No Kings" protests held around the country (and in some cases around the globe). The latest one was part of a get out the (early) vote" campaign to make sure people are voting in the upcoming midterm elections. And, in the middle of [...]

We'd all like to learn something new, but long courses or heavy reading can feel too time consuming. Nibble transforms your screen time into short, interactive learning experiences designed to fit your daily routine. With bite sized lessons, quizzes, audio, and games, you can explore knowledge in a way that feels simple and engaging. Whether [...]

At best, most Trump administration officials can be called sycophants." At BEST. But so many of them can be called a lot of other things a bit more insulting. We have a lot of shoe options to work with. Most of them fit multiple people. Rubes, hucksters, useful idiots, bigots, charlatans, window lickers, narcissists, anthropomorphic [...]

I've documented for years how major media consolidation is simultaneously completely pointless and incredibly harmful. Such deals exist exclusively so that unremarkable rich men with no real ideas can grab some tax breaks, create the illusion of perpetual growth, and pretend they're savvy dealmakers." Yet every single time a major media merger is completed the [...]

The Stop Killing Games movement appears to still be alive and well. The grassroots campaign to legislate out the practice of gaming companies selling games that they neuter or render unplayable in whole or part later when shutting down backend server support has had its ups and downs, to be sure. An effort to pass [...]

The Metric Is Not the Missionis a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy-from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around [...]

Last year, Sling TV unveiled a rare bit of innovation in an increasingly enshittified streaming video market. They began offering what they called mini-subscriptions," allowing users to subscribe to live streaming TV for the day, weekend, or a full week for prices starting at around $5. It was a nice option for folks who don't [...]

We've been covering a bunch of stories related to the saga of Reckless" Ben Schneider and Bricks & Minifigs (BAM"), which began with a series of videos Schneider produced about his increasingly more extreme attempts to get back the Lego sets that someone had given to a BAM franchise on a consignment deal, and which [...]

The Soundfreaq Sound Spot II combines wireless audio performance, ambient lighting, and relaxing sound features in a compact design built for modern lifestyles. Featuring a Bamboo and White finish with eco-friendly materials, this Bluetooth speaker complements bedrooms, offices, living rooms, and personal spaces while delivering both style and functionality. Engineered with a custom-designed audio driver, [...]

If most cops had a sense of irony, they wouldn't be cops. By that I mean that there's little in the job that attracts people with tons of self-awareness or a finely developed sense of humor. Both of those traits generally contain a sense of irony. And since most cops don't have that, this is [...]

Shane Mac, a tech entrepreneur and CEO of the software developer XMTP Labs, decided to connect Grok Bot to his personal bank account. Like many people who attach undercooked big tech agentic AI agents to their personal accounts without reading the instructions (see: Muse's rough last few weeks), it didn't go well. Mac soon found [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is n00bdragon with a comment about Florida's age-gating law and its esoteric definition of addiction: Is anyone else bothered by this incredibly strange definition of addiction"? Is YMCA soccer addicting if 10% of a youth soccer team (one player) plays soccer for more than two [...]