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Trump - perhaps more than other presidents - often feels compelled to present his religious bona fides. Of course, he naturally has none. But as often as evangelical figureheads proclaim him to be (their) God's personal pick for POTUS, even Donald Trump occasionally feels obligated to give something back to a community that has given [...]

Well, well, well. The age assurance" part of the UK's Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week and a half ago. And what do you know? It's turned out to be exactly the privacy-invading, freedom-crushing, technically unworkable disaster that everyone with half a brain predicted [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News.Republished under ProPublica'sCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Now that he's free, Leonardo Jose Colmenares Solorzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his [...]

We're becoming everything we (perhaps naively) assumed most Americans didn't want America to be: a backwater burg on the world map, overseen by a corrupt sheriff and known mostly for our routine rights violations and unwillingness to treat facts as facts. Bigotry is again the national sport and people bringing inconvenient facts are just fodder [...]

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Back in April 2023, when Substack CEO Chris Best refused to answer basic questions about whether his platform would allow racist content, I noted that his evasiveness was essentially hanging out a Nazis Welcome" sign. By December, when the company doubled down and explicitly said they'd continue hosting and monetizing Nazi newsletters, they'd fully embraced [...]

We've noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate AI" into journalism have proven to be acomical mess, resulting in no shortage ofshoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It's thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about the failure to get indictments in supposed ICE assaults: And the fact that prosecutors and grand juries didn't find evidence of actual assault in so many cases proves ICE's assault statistics are bullshit. If you read other articles on [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we took a look at tech in the pandemic, from the big ways people were using it to stay connected to the strange details like Fox putting fake videogame crowds in sports broadcasts and how it was finally forcing Hollywood to change some practices. The House Judiciary Committee [...]

This isn't going to stop happening unless governments finally get involved to do their most basic job: protect their citizens. This habit among digital and tech companies of selling a thing only to claw back some of the function of that thing after the purchase is both rampant and, frankly, getting ridiculous. It's bad enough [...]

Thisseries of postsexplores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential of technological [...]

Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has quietly joined the parade of tech giants rolling back basic protections for transgender users, removing explicit prohibitions against deadnaming and misgendering from its hate speech policies this week. The change, first spotted by the nonprofit Open Terms Archive, eliminates language that previously listed misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals" as examples of [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. In the early days of President Donald Trump's second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago's immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention. Albert Jesus Rodriguez Parra [...]

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A whole lot of bad faith arguing continues [and is amplified!] now that Donald Trump has somehow regained his position as The Person Most Likely To Abuse His Power While Serving As The Most Powerful Man In The World. [Cut to yearbook photo of an 18-year-old Donald Trump with a magnificent head of hair and [...]

There's $42.5 billion in broadband grants are headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yet routinely try to take credit for among their constituents). But Republicans, despite a supposed feud between Trump and Elon Musk, have been rewriting the grant program's guidance to eliminate provisions ensuring the resulting [...]

A week or so ago, Karl Bode wrote about Vice Media's idiotic decision to disappear several articles that had been written by its Waypoint property concerning Collective Shout. Collective Shout is an Australian group that pretends to be a feminist organization, when, in reality, it operates much more like any number of largely evangelical groups [...]

This too will be swept away by this administration's steady stream of injustices, but it's still worth highlighting before it's buried by even worse news later. The mass deportation program enacted by Trump - one that intends to turn ICE into the nation's largest federal law enforcement agency - has already seen innocent foreigners declared [...]

Let's say you're a federal judge, and you need to write an opinion about a securities case. You could do it the time-tested old-fashioned way: read the briefings, read the relevant caselaw, check your quotes, make sure you've got the holdings right. Or you could try one of these new AI tools that everyone's talking [...]

The worst of the worst" ruse was never taken seriously by anyone, least of all those who performatively repeated it to serve as cover for their hatred and bigotry. The mantra means nothing. The same agency that claims it's doing God's work" is going all out to rob the meek of their inheritance. Because there [...]

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Here's the contradiction at the heart of the internet: everyone complains about content moderation, but no one wants to use an unmoderated platform. Everyone thinks trust & safety professionals are either censorial scolds or corporate lackeys, but everyone expects them to magically solve the inherent problems of human behavior at scale. I spent last week [...]

A new study from researchers at X-Lab shows that Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband service lacks the capacity to put a serious dent in U.S. broadband. Despite recent efforts by the Trump administration to rewrite a $42 billion subsidy program with an eye on giving Musk billions in taxpayer dollars. The researchers found that given [...]

Here we go again. The idea that, at least in the realm of digital goods or IoT devices, we no longer own what we've bought has been a long-running theme here at Techdirt. While the practice of pulling back features available upon purchase via firmware updates has been a regular occurrence in the video game [...]

For weeks, ICE and DHS have been claiming there's been an outsized outbreak in violence against ICE officers. The government preferred to use a misleading stat: the percentage. That way it could claim assaults were up 500, 600, 790%(!!!) in successive press releases and Fox News appearances, leading many to believe being an ICE officer [...]

The Canadian government is preparing to give away Canadians' digital lives-to U.S. police, to the Donald Trump administration, and possibly to foreign spy agencies. Bill C-2, the so-called Strong Borders Act, is a sprawling surveillance bill withmultiple privacy-invasive provisions. But the thrust is clear: it's a roadmap to aligning Canadian surveillance with U.S. demands. It's [...]

The news org Axios launched in 2017, just as the first Trump administration began, created by some ex-Politico folks, claiming that they would be an antidote to this madness" and talking about how the world needed smarter, more efficient coverage" of important news stories. The reality is that Axios launders rightwing talking points in ugly [...]

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 [...]

We've finally got a Stalin to call our own. Just like Soviet Russia, homelessness is now basically a criminal offense, thanks to Trump's latest executive order, which pretends it's about crime but actually just wants to put homelessness people in places where other Americans won't be inconvenienced by them. Like most Trump executive orders, it's [...]

One of the bigger Trump election season lies was that Trump 2.0 would be serious about antitrust," and protect blue collar Americans from corporate predation. You'd have to be a turnip to not see that was an aggressive lie, pushed by a lot of folks (even supposed antitrust buster Matt Stoller), who seemed hellbent on [...]

It's been a while since we checked in on Ryan Walters, Oklahoma's Superintendent and all around assbag fascist. If you've read any of our previous posts featuring Walters, you know that he loves himself two things, and in this order of importance: Donald Trump and god. You can tell this because, while it was always [...]

We've noted repeatedly how the U.S. is dominated by regional telecom monopolies like AT&T and Comcast that have spent decades working tirelessly to crush regional broadband competition, and have also spent millions of dollars to crush state and federal regulatory oversight. The result is a patchwork of monopolies that don't try very hard on availability, [...]

President Trump wanted a war on Latin Americans and found an obliging partner in El Salvador, currently headed by President Nayib Bukele. Bukele has managed to bring down El Salvador's homicide rate since he became president, but it's more due to routine rights violations than any social programs Bukele managed to squeeze in between sieges [...]

The Trump administration's war on higher education has reached new levels of authoritarian absurdity. Not content with merely investigating George Mason University and its president Gregory Washington for his diversity efforts, the Department of Justice has now decided to investigate the faculty members who dared to support him. Yes, you read that correctly. Federal agents [...]

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I know it often seems like it's bad news all the time on the Techdirt channel. And I'm sorry it's that way. I wish we weren't dealing with a daily deluge of new awfulness from the current president and his enablers. But that's what's happening so that's how it ends up looking here, as well [...]

Last week Trump's FCC lackey, Brendan Carr, quickly set about rubber stamping approval for the $8 billion CBS Skyance merger, now that CBS execs paid their $16 million bribe to the king. One of the key merger conditions to net approval was the installation of a sort of FCC bias ombudsman," who'll be installed at [...]

(To all readers: the use of God" in this post refers to the generically Christian ideal of God, and not any particular god or gods referenced/respected by other religions. The capitalization is there to make a point to the kind of people who insist on capitalizing God while cherry-picking the Bible for justifications for their [...]

Valve Corporation recently came under pressure from payment processors to purge Steam, the popular PC gaming storefront, of certain kinds of adult-only content."The news rippled across tech and gaming news media, even for adult entertainment industry journalists like myself. But if it weren't for the reporting of Ana Valens (which Vice then deleted) then we [...]

Tom Lehrer's passing this weekend at age 97 has rightfully sparked tributes to his brilliant satirical songs. But amid all the well-deserved praise for The Elements" and Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," there's another aspect of Lehrer's legacy that deserves equal celebration: his decision to dump his entire catalog into the public domain. In an [...]

I wasn't wrong when I wrote that Apple, Google, Akamai, and others faced tremendous liability risk if they continued to provide any of their hosting services to TikTok. Of course, not because it should be illegal - the operative law is incredibly unconstitutional, despite the trite reasoning by the Supreme Court finding it otherwise. But [...]

Donald Trump is a notorious media bully. He uses lawsuits, executive power, and political pressure to punish critics and bend institutions to his will. Disney, Meta, and Paramount have since paid out multi-million-dollar settlements over content disputes. CBS News leaders resigned. Colbert's show was canceled. The AP was barred from the White House. Even Rupert [...]

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Sure, Department of Justice" has always been a misnomer, what with its blessing of things like civil asset forfeiture, bogus CFAA prosecutions, cop junk science, the 1033 program, and the complete inability to successfully sue federal officers for blatant Constitutional violations. But it also used to have things like a civil rights division that investigated [...]

Earlier this month we noted how California was attempting to pass a new law ensuring that broadband would be affordable to poor people. The original law proposed that the biggest ISPs would need to make sure they offered speeds of at least 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up for $15 a month to California residents [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Stephen T. Stone with a comment about our call for the government to accept accountability for the power it wields: Bold of you to assume that Republicans will ever place responsibility for their actions on their own shoulders instead of on the backs of [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the DHS was going full gestapo in response to protests in Portland, then quickly expanding the tactics to other cities, starting with Chicago, and was also engaging in domestic surveillance to protect statues and monuments. We asked why the US was trying to punish hackers for accessing vaccine [...]

It seems to be part of human nature to try to game systems. That's also true for technological systems, including the most recent iteration of AI, as the numerous examples of prompt injection exploits demonstrate. In the latest twist, an investigation by Nikkei Asia has found hidden prompts in academic preprints hosted on the arXiv [...]

Thisseries of postsexplores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential of technological [...]

We've spent years documenting the challenges of crafting sensible AI policy, from Biden's misguided plan, to various state-level attempts at regulation. Now Trump's AI Action Plan has landed, offering a striking example of how even potentially useful policy ideas can be corrupted by political theater and special interests. The plan reflects the deep influence of [...]