While Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have tried to downplay Aaron Swartz's role in founding" Reddit, he was still an instrumental part of the company's early journey. His infogami" project was rolled into Reddit, and the founder credit was a part of the deal. Part of the point of infogami was to support open access [...]

For more than a generation, U.S. media academics have warned anybody who'd listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters was creating either news deserts," or local news that's mostly just low-quality infotainment and agitprop. Despite claims that the internet would fix this," doing quality local journalism [...]

As I continue to say, you may be done with the measles, but the measles is not done with you, nor the entire country. Coinciding with the profane installment of RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, 2025 saw the largest number of cases of measles in America in 3 decades. After decades [...]

Walled Culture has just written about the possibility that recent AI breakthroughs might accelerate a move to open access, at least in the field of mathematics. It would be particularly welcome against a backdrop of relatively slow progress in the open access world. That is not because the need for different business models that provide [...]

Last week Cathy wrote about the amicus brief we filed in the big multi-district litigation (MDL) that consolidated a bunch of different lawsuits claiming that OpenAI and Microsoft infringed the plaintiffs' copyrights by training AI models on their works. A lot of people and groups offered proposed amicus briefs. For boring procedural reasons, unlike in [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. With the U.S. midterms this week, about 1 in 5 voters has asked AI chatbots about elections and politics, a recent survey found. But many voters may not know that governments around the world increasingly shape what chatbots can say. And because [...]

The Ultimate Electric Circuits Engineer Course Bundle is designed for beginners and students wanting to build knowledge in electrical engineering and circuit analysis. You'll start by learning the fundamentals like Ohm's law and Kirchhoff's Laws before moving into advanced network theorems. You will learn how essential components like operational amplifiers, capacitors, and inductors behave, while [...]

By now it's likely you've heard of the whole concept of the AI paperclip maximizer problem - a hypothetical first put forth by Nick Bostrom - suggesting that a misaligned AI system that looks to optimize on the wrong single thing (in this case creating paperclips) could lead to the end of humanity. Specifically, the [...]

Recently, reports emerged that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly off." Some of those voice commands were then stored in plain text and uploaded to the internet. LG's response? To deny everything. For decades now we've documented how while smart" [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is the first of several comments about Trump's voting fraud squad proudly announcing the arrest of... 28 people in California. It's an anonymous comment summing up their attitude: Republicans just want election fraud. That's it. In second place, it's a double-winning comment that also took [...]

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If you go through all of the bloviations from RFK Jr. when it comes to his stance on vaccines, one of his chief refrains is that vaccines that have been in wide use for many years haven't been tested properly for safety, or that data about their safety has been hidden or ignored. He's generally [...]

There's a lot wrong with AI. But bad things happen when we try to use copyright law to fix it. Which is what we just told the Southern District of New York, where OpenAI and Microsoft are defending themselves in several cases alleging that their training violated the copyrights of the works the AI models [...]

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 [...]

We have talked about the Wyden Siren many times before. Senator Ron Wyden learns, through classified briefings, that the intelligence community is doing something most Americans would consider a clear violation of their civil liberties - often justified by interpreting plain English words to mean something no other English speaker would recognize. But because that [...]

The best way to learn Raspberry Pi is by doing and in this course, you'll get familiar with specific features by building your own GPS tracking system. From setup and configuration to location tracking through Google Maps, this course will help you go from beginner to advanced with Raspberry Pi. It's on sale for $50. [...]

Well well well. All it took was a regime change and the persistent abuse of camera networks by police officers to change MapQuest from Remember MapQuest?" nostalgia to hey where can I download MapQuest" demands. First, there's the regime change. Trump has been stupid as fuck all the time since day one but nothing was [...]

Ideally, I think it makes sense to open up the U.S. market to Chinese goods (AI, EVs, robots), but have functional and well-funded regulators that police all labor, competition, environmental, privacy, national security, and consumer rights abuses. But big U.S. companies don't much like that because it would boost competition and regulatory accountability, eroding quarterly [...]

To state that RFK Jr. says things that are just plainly wrong is to state the obvious. His waffling claims about the dangers of vaccines are wrong. His various other pet conspiracy theories, such as chemtrails and damage to humans from EMF, are also wrong. The data HHS is putting out under his leadership about [...]

What is covered by freedom of thought in the AI age is being decided by courts that are hearing cases about something entirely different. The Chapter 11 filing of Character.ai on October 12 is the second such case in a year, and it shows that the record of how a person thought can be produced [...]

Civil rights groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk's Colossus xAI data centers in Memphisdisproportionately pollute the air in minority neighborhoods. Ajoint lawsuitby SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn't bother to get the necessary permits to run the 57 gas turbines [...]

As you may know, The Streisand Effect was originally coined right here on Techdirt in 2005, though it referred back to an event from 2003 when Barbra Streisand sued Ken Adelman, because his project to map how erosion impacted the California coastline incidentally included a photo of Streisand's Malibu mansion. Streisand demanded $50 million in [...]

This Interactive Self-Rotating Cat Toy Ball is a USB-rechargeable toy featuring 360-degree rolling movements, obstacle avoidance, and changing LED lights to help keep cats entertained. It's built out of scratch-resistant and bite-resistant materials, the ball is tough enough to withstand rough play from high-energy kittens and adult cats alike. It's on sale for $20. Note: [...]

The Fifth Circuit has shown itself to be especially subservient to the Trump administration since his return to office. And it's certainly not going to rock Trump's mass deportation boat - not when it's sitting right on top of Texas, which contains almost two-thirds of the US-Mexico border, as well as some of ICE's largest [...]

I recently noted how California's being told by the Trump administration that it can't enforce any of its own telecom consumer protection laws if it wants to receive $1.4 billion dollars Congress already earmarked for broadband expansion under the 2021 infrastructure bill. That means if California wants money it was already supposed to receive from [...]

It's probably a good thing for Tim Sweeney that Epic Games is a privately held company and he has a majority ownership stake, because I can't imagine any Board of Directors would appreciate this AI rager he's been on as of late. And, somehow, it keeps getting worse. It all started with Sweeney absurdly claiming [...]

Over the last few months, we've been running the wonderful ten part series on The Metric is Not the Mission" by Konstantinos Komaitis. It's a deep exploration of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. The resulting series explores how [...]

Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) has been steadily pushing the limits of transparency and accountability for several years now. The project - spearheaded by Emma Best - does what other activists won't... or perhaps simply don't have the expertise to carry out. DDoS made a name for itself by hitching Best's non-stop FOIA onslaught to [...]

It seems that every election cycle over the last decade has had concerns being raised about the state of political deepfakes" and their ability to impact the election. So far, these have always been overblown, and there's been little evidence of deepfakes having any real impact at all - perhaps other than creating the concept [...]

JavaScript began as a web scripting language and has now expanded to include a game, mobile app, server, and database development. This JavaScript Crash Course is a great choice if you want to pursue a career in web design. You'll learn the ins and outs of React, how to use Formik to manage forms, Material-UI [...]

Who wouldn't love the chance to clear themselves of misconduct? I guess not the Trump DOJ, which decidedly won't be investigating itself, even though it could cook the books to an acceptable temperature (155-170 internally) to let itself off the hook in the Reflecting Pool prosecution debacle. It's too many metaphors to be sure, at [...]

Anna Gomez is the only Democrat at the current FCC because Republicans simply refuse to seat any new ones (or even formally renew her term, which technically was supposed to end over the summer). And while Gomez may not have much voting authority, she's done a good job criticizing the Brendan Carr-run agency for its [...]

If there are good, nuanced ways to make use of generative AI in gaming, as I think there are, that doesn't change the fact that there are nuance-free and terrible ways for advocating for AI in gaming. Tim Sweeney and Epic Games have emerged as helpful foils for the never-AI crowd, given just how cartoonishly [...]

Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all? This is particularly a problem when users are required to prove their age with identity documents. Age-related [...]

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 [...]