Techdirt

We should all know at this point that RFK Jr. is bad at his job as Secretary of HHS. But that simplistic statement apparently needs something of a qualifier. Instead, it appears we should say that RFK Jr. is bad at the parts of his job that he chooses to do. Because, according to a [...]

What's most disturbing about Trump's Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" executive order isn't its fully-blinkered, jingoistic take on American history where America does no wrong and is almost always white right. I mean, that's pretty awful on its own, but it's the flip side of pretending whites do no wrong: pretending any victims [...]

The Trump Department of Justice's" antitrust division" dumped its unsurprising approval of the terrible Paramount Warner Brothers merger late on Friday in the hopes people wouldn't notice it. As we've noted the $111 billion megadeal is a historically harmful mess. Backed by billions in Saudi and Chinese cash (raising all sorts of foreign media influence [...]

Late Friday, Anthropic shut down access to its just-released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after the Trump administration slapped export controls on them - treating cutting-edge AI, in other words, like weapons. The trigger, it turns out, was a jailbreak. And the entity that tipped off the government? Amazon - one of Anthropic's biggest [...]

The Lifetime Learner Bundle feature access to uTalk and Stack Skills. Through uTalk, you'll be able to speak keywords and phrases in no time and will start to see the results straight away. You can pick 6 languages to learn from their library of 140+ languages. You also get access to Stack Skills, the premier [...]

Cops are human beings. Despite constantly pretending they're on a higher plane (see also: Thin Blue Line, etc.), they're just as fallible as anyone else. Especially now. This occupation is self-selecting. Righting wrongs is rarely the main draw. It's almost always the immense of amount of power that comes coupled with nearly zero accountability. There [...]

Last month I noted how the Trump FCC had unveiled a brand new plan to stop robocalls." As with most efforts the proposal doesn't actually do much to stop robocalls because a well-lobbied U.S. government (1) refuses to hold big companies accountable or collect fines, (2) constantly embraces weak rules that make telemarketers and debt [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Robert Freetard with a comment on our post about AI replacing workers: Ultimately the the best positions to replace in a company with AI The best positions to replace in a company with AI is the CEO and other C* positions. They do NO [...]

This Week in 2016 This Week in 2011 This Week in 2006

As we near the halfway point in the second Trump presidential term, there's something that is worth remembering: Donald Trump, like most nasty viruses, is a temporary condition. Trumpism may not be, though I have my doubts as to how long a cult of personality can survive without that specific personality leading the cult. But [...]

A couple weeks ago I wrote 6,000 words about the Reckless Ben/Bricks & Minifigs LEGO mess and concluded that pretty much everyone involved had made serious mistakes - with the Utah contingent (Bricks & Minifigs corporate, Joshua Johnson, Brandon Best, and the American Fork police) looking the worst of all. That take upset basically everyone: [...]

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 [...]

Michigan lawmakers are pushing legislation that wouldn't just ban the sales of Chinese-made cars in the The Great Lakes State, it would ban cars with Chinese tags from even visiting. The Protecting America From Chinese Cars Act joins the Connected Vehicle Security Act aiming to protect U.S. car companies from cheaper Chinese EV competition in [...]

The Learn to Code with React Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn more about React, Redux, and JavaScript. Used by the likes of Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, and Imgur, React is an efficient and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Meanwhile, Redux is a predictable state container that helps you manage the data [...]

Good news! (Maybe?) Federal legislators have introduced a bill that, if passed, would finally guarantee the right to record law enforcement officers. Here's Reason's CJ Ciaramella with the details: Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) introduced the Right to Record Act of 2026," which they say would create new consequences for individual [...]

Back in MarchI noted howthe Trump FCC under Brendan Carr had announced a new ban" on all routers made overseas (which is pretty much all of them). At the time we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for [...]

It appears Bill Cassidy is going to make every effort to ignore his own culpability for RFK Jr. on his way out the door. In case you need to be reminded, Cassidy was a key, if not deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. to his current role as Secretary of HHS. Cassidy's background is as [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. The American academic research engine has long been theenvy of the world.Generally well-funded, labs in the United States have been able toattract the best mindswho generate breakthroughsand train the next generation workforce thatpowers the U.S. economy. But since the start of the [...]

To lose one speech-suppressing SLAPP suit may be regarded as thoughtless. To lose two looks like you're a censorial hack. Last month we wrote about how supposed free speech warrior" Matt Taibbi (who spent years misrepresenting the work of people who study disinformation as inherently censorial, while getting pretty basic facts wrong) had lost his [...]

Google didn't invent full-text search of the Internet - that honor belongs to early pioneers such asWebCrawler,LycosandAltaVista. But for the last 25 years or so, Google has been synonymous with online searching, providing the quickest and most effective way to find things online (althoughits results may be getting worse.) More recently, it has been adding [...]

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 [...]

If federal officers are going to murder another person, it will likely happen here. Newark, New Jersey is the newest battleground for the administration, as Trump goes to war with his own constituents. The foundation was laid months ago, when ICE officers assaulted, arrested, and illegally refused to grant access to detention facilities to congressional [...]

I've noted repeatedly how the Trump administration is going out of its way to not only destroy all oversight of the country's shitty and predatory telecom monopolies, but to eliminate any and all systems that try to ensure that U.S. broadband access is actually affordable. This stuff often runs in parallel to the administration's brutal [...]

Cases of measles in American continue to rise. As of June 5th of this year, the official case count in the country stood at 2,030 confirmed cases. In 2025's record breaking year for measles cases, the most we'd had in 3 decades, there were 2,288 confirmed cases. We're going to speed right past that number [...]

California lawmakers areagainconsideringA.B. 412, a bill that would require AI developers to identify and disclose copyrighted works used to train generative AI systems. The problem this year is thesame as last year: it's practically impossible to comply with this law. The bill demands information that often does not exist, and cannot realistically be obtained. EFF [...]

The more things change, the more they remain the same. That could be said of anywhere in this country, now that the Trump administration is trying to turn the clock back to 1940, if not 1840. But it's especially true in Los Angeles, where law enforcement agencies have apparently learned nothing, despite being the ignition [...]

Last month Terry Godier published a great essay on his website about the boring internet," discussing how the internet that many of us grew up with, the wonderful, empowering, exciting internet that moved power to the edges of the network rather than the center, is still there. It's just hidden beneath enshittified commercial layers put [...]

The 2026 Data Engineering Bundle has 7 online courses designed to help learners build skills that align directly with industry expectations.The focus is on practical tools and languages used by data professionals: Python for programming, Pandas and NumPy for data manipulation, foundational certification prep and specialized work with Databricks, an industry-standard platform for data engineering [...]

The Trump administration has thrown billions at purging non-white people from this country. Most of that has ended up in the hands of ICE, which has - in turn - thrown hundreds of millions at a number of private companies offering bespoke and/or off-the-shelf surveillance solutions. The slide down the slippery slope began less than [...]

On one hand, the Trump administration wants to destroy most corporate oversight, consumer protection, labor rights, and regulatory autonomy. On the other hand, the administration very much wants to abuse government power and wield regulatory oversight in all sorts of terrible ways that censor speech, stifle journalism, and enable corrupt cronyism. I've long noted how [...]

Back in January of this year, RFK Jr. clearly strong armed the CDC into changing the childhood vaccination schedules in America to mimic those of Denmark. The public messaging was crafted to sound as reasonable as possible and amounted to a claim that America was going to revise vaccination schedules to match those of another [...]

President Trump's highly politicized appointment of an entirely unqualified acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) underscores why the government's warrantless mass spying power must be reformed. Congress now faces a deadline of Friday, June 12 to reauthorizeSection 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an unconstitutional program rife with problems, loopholes, and compliance issues. Section [...]

Support us on Patreon The concept of enshittification" has helped illuminate why companies and their products so often get worse over time, but the causes of this process are complex and multifaceted. In his new book Incorruptible, author Eric Ries presents a related but contrasting take on how good companies go bad, and how to [...]

In the last three months I've had people forward me four separate examples of a CEO losing his or her mind over AI. What's been striking to me is the similarity in each case: It would be an all hands" email in which the CEO talks up how amazing LLM tools are and saying that [...]

The Ultimate Python and Artificial Intelligence Bundle has 9 courses to help you take your Python and AI knowledge to the next level. You'll learn about data pre-processing and visualization, artificial neural networks, how to use the Keras framework, and more. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated [...]

Trump has loved travel bans" since his first term in office. It has nothing to do with making America safer or better and everything to do with making America whiter. People were opposed to Trump's blanket bans all the way back in 2017, when the heads of tech companies managed to collectively grow enough spine [...]

So last week we noted how Meta's AI support assistant doled out access to high-profile Instagram accounts after hackers simply asked for it. Outside of using a VPN to match the account holder's region, the hackers didn't have to do literally anything of note to convince the Meta AI chatbot to provide access, suggesting like [...]

Back in March of 2025, when Elon Musk was spearheading his bullshit DOGE non-agency and running around cutting funding to all kinds of government programs under the notion that they were a blatant waste of taxpayer money, the cuts were so obviously haphazard and ill-informed that it was making everyone's head spin. Then, after cuts [...]

In totally sane and not-crazy anti-pornography activism news, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) considers online pornography a national security threat. This may be the stupidest thing NCOSE has ever claimed in its decades' long fascistic fight against sexuality. The group's president and chief executive officer, Marcel van der Watt, wrote for the Washington [...]

Scott Pelley just gave an interview to the NY Times that reveals two damning things at once: Bari Weiss tried to get him to falsely describe a shooting victim as driving toward the officer who killed her - and Pelley had already bent over backwards to make protesters look as bad as possible before she [...]

Get Microsoft Office 2024 for one price-no monthly subscriptions, no recurring fees. Install Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote on your PC or Mac, and you're set. This is the complete Office suite with a one-time purchase model instead of Microsoft 365's ongoing costs. This version includes all 5 apps-Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook for email [...]

There's hardly anyone left in the Justice Department that has any deeper desire than just giving Trump what he wants. The few lawyers Trump didn't purge resigned soon after it became clear the DOJ would be little more than personification of Trump's vengeful whims. Lawyers with decades of experience were replaced with Trump loyalists, former [...]

A quick refresher: There was originally $42.5billionin taxpayer-funded broadband grants headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yetroutinely try to take credit for among their constituents). Last election season, Republicans (with Ezra Klein's help) made a giant stink about how this program, the Broadband, Equity, Access and Deployment [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment offering a theory about ICE's addiction to masks: Let me suggest a different reason... Let's say that all of those J6 dumbfucks who livestreamed their crimes, and who now have received pardons for acting like trailer trash are looking to start [...]

This Week in 2016 This Week in 2011 This Week in 2006

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 [...]