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Full disclosure: this post is going to pose way more questions than answers. That's because the story of the Tomb Raider remake being produced by Crystal Dynamics and its inclusion of an AI disclosure on Steam makes no sense to me. So, let's start at the beginning. Crystal Dynamics is making an updated version of [...]

ICE never needed officers to disguise themselves with masks and strip themselves of identification before Trump took office for the second time. What ICE is doing now isn't what ICE was doing during Trump's first term, even though it's the same hateful bigot sitting behind the Resolute Desk he thinks should be covered in gold [...]

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 [...]

Earlier this year Nieman Labbroke the storythat major news publishers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co., had started blocking the Internet Archive for fear that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit's repositories for training data. As one of the last bastions of archival history, that is, in case you're not [...]

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 [...]

MAGA got itself a martyr when Charlie Kirk was killed. The violent left," etc. as they say. One of it's own practiced what he preached and his life was ended prematurely by someone practicing what Kirk preached. I mean, this is a direct quote of Charlie Kirk: Kirk argued that the benefits of having guns [...]

Paramount is clearly getting nervous about the growing opposition to its $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers, which is being intensely criticized for dodgy overseas funding, its dire impact on journalism, and the inevitable mass layoffs, consumer price hikes, and shittier overall product that always results from debt-fueled mega-media consolidation. There's a certain desperation creeping [...]

Early last year, when America's measles outbreaks were still being counted in three-digit numbers, we talked about how RFK Jr. and his misinformation campaign were making things worse. A lot of focus has been on Kennedy's anti-vaxxer views, and for good reason. If people would just get the MMR vaccine, and had done so in [...]

Flock Safety doesn't seem to care about anyone. Not its customers, not those captured by its cameras, not even the legislators trying to find a balance between safety and privacy. Flock started out by pitching its cameras - with built-in license plate readers - to the kind of people with money to blow on unproven [...]

It seems hardly a day goes by when another state doesn't try to keep young people off the Internet. These attempts not only violate their First Amendment rights to interact with lawful speech, but everyone else's as well, because the things platforms would need to do to comply with these laws inevitably impinge on everyone [...]

In January 2011, a man in Tahrir Square held up a handwritten sign that read Facebook: against every unjust." Fourteen years later, almost to the day, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a place of honor at the inauguration of Donald Trump, ahead of the incoming cabinet. Same exact platform. Radically different relationship to power. That contrast [...]

The Luminar Neo Bundle includes a one time purchase of the software, an introductory course on how to use it, and 6 add-ons. Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different [...]

History is written by the winners, they say. But it can also be written by losers. Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. In response, he told everyone the election had been rigged, if not actually stolen. He said some of this to his faithful MAGA followers the morning the election results were to be certified. [...]

While we've focused a great deal on RFK Jr.'s war on vaccines in America, it's worth remembering that his ambitions for making people sicker extend beyond the American border. We've already discussed Kennedy's 2019 trip to Samoa, where he used the unfortunate accidental mixing of vaccine doses with muscle relaxers that killed two young children, [...]

There were some rumors earlier this week that, as it was facing a lot of pushback in court, in the media, and even among (a few) fellow Republicans in Congress, Donald Trump was going to drop his blatantly unconstitutional, illegal, and corrupt $1.776 billion slush fund for MAGA insurrectionists. And now it's... sorta officially dead... [...]

Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison hired blogtroller Bari Weiss to turn what was left of CBS News into a right wing safe space for oligarchs and autocrats like Trump and Netanyahu. If the patient died during surgery, I don't think Ellison would lose any sleep. But I do think Ellison hoped that Weiss could at least [...]

Discover the innovative 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 recognition, [...]

The Supreme Court's conservatives have spent years systematically dismantling the Voting Rights Act, but the last seven months have been something else - a rapid-fire series of emergency docket rulings, procedural maneuvers, and carefully worded opinions that, taken together, make it effectively impossible to challenge racial gerrymandering. Not difficult. Impossible. And Justice Alito, in particular, [...]

404 Media reports that hackers were simply able to ask Meta AI for access to high-profile Instagram accounts, and the AI agent simply... well... obliged: Hackers say that they used Meta's AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with [...]

After public outrage, California lawmakers are moving closer to exempting open-source operating systems from the sweeping age-bracketing regime mandated by last year's Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043). Nonetheless, the current bill still jeopardizes internet users' speech, privacy, and security. While the open source exemption, if passed, would improve the law, the remaining amendments proposed [...]

On Techdirt, we often complain about lawyers and bad lawyering and bad cases. But there are times when lawyers are helpful, and my one-sentence summary after spending many days trying to understand a viral dispute about [checks notes] some old Star Wars LEGO sets is that a lot of people should have spoken to competent [...]

Before the current wave of laws banning mobile phones in schools, we had published a piece from some researchers who had looked at how similar bans had worked in Australia, with the conclusion that... they didn't. At best, the research showed the evidence on school phone bans to be weak and inconclusive." Those authors suggested [...]

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This is hardly the worst thing about the administration's aliens.gov website but it's still worth noting. Let's get to the worst stuff first. The site URL is aliens.gov, which would lead most normal people to believe it has something to do with the ongoing declassification of UFO-related files. That's something Trump actually made happen, which [...]

If you recall, Trump FCC censor Brendan Carr recently launched numerous sham investigations of Disney/ABC because a comedian made fun of the President. One of those sham investigations includes the bogus claim that Disney should be stripped of its eight broadcast licenses because the company is sometimes nice to women and minorities. Another involves the [...]

The whole conversation around AI is about to get much, much worse. We've been talking a lot about AI, generative AI, LLMs, or whatever your preferred moniker has become, for some time now. And for good reason. This is a still-emerging technology that has begun to infiltrate many parts of our lives, willingly or otherwise. [...]

The DOJ has gone past bleeding talent. Now, it's just bleeding whatever. It's one thing to do a bit of MAGA swagger before a captive audience and walk out with a criminal indictment that contains no evidence of criminal activity. It's quite another thing to present that case to a court, where you'll have to [...]

John Deere is facing a second class action lawsuit for its ongoing, ham-fisted effort to monopolize tractor repair and drive up costs for its customers. The latest lawsuit was filed in mid-May in the Northern District of Illinois against John Deere by Christy Webber Landscaping of Chicago, which alleges that the company actively makes it [...]

Most legal experts seemed pretty skeptical about the tactic of 35 former federal judges asking federal judge Kathleen Williams to reopen the case where Trump sued his own IRS demanding $10 billion. Turns out they were wrong - on Friday, Judge Williams reopened the case, not going so far as to investigate whether fraud had [...]

CBP Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino made that title literal by showing up wherever Trump needed trouble started. Once he had arrived far north of the southern border he was supposed to be patrolling, Bovino (and the people he was commanding") found themselves on the receiving end of several lawsuits. Not only did they find themselves on [...]

Five years years ago AT&T effectively stopped selling DSL and started hanging up on DSL and copper phone line customers. While killing landlines and DSL is understandable given the limitations of the dated copper-based tech, the problem is that thanks to concentrated telecom monopolization, many of these customers were left without any replacement options due [...]

We've got a double-winner this week, but also a very very slow week overall on the funny side, so this will be a somewhat truncated post. On the insightful side, both top comments are similar thoughts in response to the judge dismissing charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, starting with this first-place winning comment from Huntly: [...]

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It was just a week or so ago that we were talking about the absurd situation in Knox County, Tennessee, where local government used Tennessee's book-banning laws to remove the book Roots from school libraries. Yes, this is the book by Alex Haley that spawned the 1970s miniseries of the same name and served as [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. In Baltimore County, Maryland on Oct. 20, 2025, a 17-year-old student named Taki Allen was sitting outside his high school after football practice when an artificial intelligence-enhanced surveillance camera falsely identified the Doritos bag in his pocketas a gun. Within moments police [...]

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 [...]

It's been less than two weeks since the Justice Department created the obviously illegal and unconstitutional $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off MAGA loyalists and January 6th insurrectionists. There are a variety of lawsuits looking to put a stop to it, and we just wrote about dozens of former federal judges asking the original [...]

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Flock Safety has made its bed. It has courted homeowners associations and gated communities since it first arrived on the market, apparently hoping to convert inherent racism into perpetual revenue streams. Then it went to where the real bias has always existed: US law enforcement agencies. It promised to tie their systems in with those [...]

Last month the FCC quietly issued a public notice saying the Brendan Carr run agency was demanding that the TV Oversight Management Board (TVOMB) create new TV ratings to alert viewers to transgender and gender non-binary programming" and the discussion or promotion of gender identity themes" included in children's programming. You are to ignore that [...]

I've written quite a bit about the Stop Killing Games movement, in no small part because I think it's way more important than most people think. Preserving cultural output is both important and, frankly, a key part of the bargain that is supposed to be copyright law. The fact that we offer video game publishers [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. The United States is experiencing one of thesteepest declines in violent crimein modern history, including a murder rate at itslowest point in more than a century. Homicides across 35 major American citiesfell 21% in 2025, amounting to 922 fewer people killed. Robberies [...]

There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn't pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despitea parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congressis too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this [...]

Thirty-five (thirty-five!) former federal judges are asking a current federal judge to reopen the case where Donald Trump sued his own IRS, and then settled" the case on terms extremely favorable to himself, his family, and his MAGA loyalists. Law schools are famous for coming up with hypotheticals" to try to test students' knowledge of [...]

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Poll everyone you can. Even the most MAGA never dreamed up this scenario. There's no single-issue voter whose kink is surely the people wanting green cards can get that done in their own countries." Nope, this is Trump's kink. This is a blatant attempt to juice the deportation numbers to soothe the throbbing bald skull [...]

The Trump Organization still hasn't shipped their promised Trump phone to most customers who laid down a $100 deposit a year ago. But rubes patriots who signed up did get something else instead: their private data leaked to the public. According to Techcrunch, the Trump Mobile website openly shared customer emails, addresses, phone numbers, and [...]