Techdirt

Amazon Ring's upcoming face recognition tool has the potential to violate the privacy rights of millions of people and could result in Amazon breaking state biometric privacy laws. Ring plans to introduce a feature to its home surveillance cameras called Familiar Faces," to identify specific people who come into view of the camera. When turned [...]

This isn't even the end of the fallout, but it's a lot of it. A small Nebraska town that basically conspired to silence local journalists who were asking too many questions continues to face the consequences of its actions. That's a relief. Far too often, power gets abused and the justice system sides with the [...]

A federal judge just ruled that computer-generated summaries of novels are very likely infringing," which would effectively outlaw many book reports. That seems like a problem. The Authors Guild has one of the many lawsuits against OpenAI, and law professor Matthew Sag has the details on a ruling in that case that, if left in [...]

Not content to simply deport as many South American migrants from this country as possible, the Trump administration leaned into its lies about the latent threat to national security the mere existence of foreign people poses to national security. This administration pretends everything is a war," even as it actively avoids seeking congressional approval to [...]

MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That's all well and good, but it means nothing if you don't have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you'll [...]

Democratic Senator Mark Kelly and Republican Senator John Curtis want to gut Section 230 to combat political radicalization"-in honor of Charlie Kirk, whose entire career was built on political radicalization. Kirk styled himself as a free speech warrior" because he would show up on college campuses to debate" people, but as we've covered, the debate [...]

Donald Trump and his earlobe nibbler (FCC boss Brendan Carr) are threatening to try and censor some more comedians after their efforts to cancel Jimmy Kimmel went so well (read: not well at all). Over at the right wing white propaganda website formerly known as Twitter, Brendan Carr retweeted some whining from Donald Trump calling [...]

There is an incredible dearth of nuance when it comes to how some companies attempt to enforce their trademarks. A couple of things are true. First, an entity risks losing their marks if they don't rigorously enforce them against actual infringement. Second, the USPTO is far too lenient in granting marks that are non-creative or [...]

More than 80 law enforcement agencies across the United States have used language perpetuating harmful stereotypes against Romani people when searching the nationwide Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) network, according to audit logs obtained and analyzed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. When police run a search through the Flock Safety network, which links [...]

You know this is a spectacle, right? A show. That's what it is. A performance for social media. With blood. Pete Hegsethjust orderedthe twenty-first strike on a suspected drug boat. Three more bodies. Another video posted to X showing a vessel bursting into flames. Three male narco-terrorists" dead, the military announces. No trial. No evidence [...]

Imagine you're writing an article about a popular policy trend. The trend is expensive to implement, disruptive to normal operations, and-here's the key part-there's substantial research showing it doesn't actually work and can cause other significant problems. How would you structure that article? One approach: Lead with the evidence. Despite growing enthusiasm for [policy proposal], [...]

Well, well, well. If it isn't the system of checks and balances. We've missed you, buddy! Long story somewhat short: ICE has been terrible for years, but it's been much worse under Trump. During Trump's first regime (~2016-2020), ICE got rocked by a court decision that prevented it from engaging in traffic stops just so [...]

The SunFounder Raspberry Pi Pico W Ultimate Starter Kit offers a rich learning experience for beginners aged 8 and up. Withover 450 components, 117 projects, and expert-led tutorials, this kit makes learning microcontroller programming engaging and accessible. It also features 27 video lessons by renowned educator Paul McWhorter, simplifying microcontroller programming and IoT concepts. Packed [...]

It has been frustrating, to say the least, to watch many of the big Silicon Valley tech firms bow down to Trump and do his bidding, especially when it directly contradicts things they've said and done in the past. I've tried to explain to tech company execs why this doesn't end well for them, but [...]

A coalition of former FCC officials are pushing for the elimination of a longstanding FCC rule the Trump administration abused to bully" ABC and CBS into kissing the president's ass (I'll use the term bully loosely since both companies seemed very eager to roll over for the far right wing). Last October,Trump sued CBSclaiming (falsely) [...]

This week, all our winning comments came in response to our post about Donald Trump falling for satire from a website called The Dunning-Kruger Times. In first place on the insightful side, it's That One Guy with a comment about how this is hardly surprising: He fell for it because he WANTS to believe it(and [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we looked at election polls as an example of the challenges involved in defining and handling misinformation. We noted how Trumpland seemed to have entirely forgotten about its own manufactured TikTok hysteria, at which point the Commerce Department suddenly remembered it was supposed to ban the app. Following [...]

We've written about Buc-ee's a couple of times recently, given the famed convenience store chain of the south's aspirations to become the Monster Energy of convenience stores when it comes to nonsense trademark bullying. Buc-ee's has gone after all kinds of other companies, almost always for the crime of having a cartoon animal in their [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. This year, when states began using an expanded Department of Homeland Security system to check their voter rolls for noncitizens, it was supposed to validate the Trump administration's push to harness data from across federal agencies to expose illicit voting and stiffen immigration enforcement. DHS had [...]

A couple months ago we offered up the few remaining copies of our social media card game, One Billion Users, after fulfilling orders from our Kickstarter backers. Quite a few of you took the chance to snag one, and now we're down to an extremely small number remaining: at time of writing, we only have [...]

The Trump administration has been ramping up its rhetoric against Venezuela since Day 1. Efforts to arrest up to 3,000 migrants a day focused on Venezuelans, many of whom had fled to the United States seeking a land with actual freedom. Those who weren't simply locked up in ICE's many forever prisons were sent to [...]

A key theme of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) is that copyright, born in an analogue age of scarcity, works poorly in today's digital world of abundance. One manifestation of that is how lawmakers struggle to adapt the existing copyright rules to deal with novel technological developments, like the new generation of [...]

Last year, we wrote about Donald Trump's bullshit lawsuit against Iowa pollster Ann Selzer for releasing surprising polls right before the 2024 election suggesting that Kamala Harris might actually beat Donald Trump in Iowa. The polls turned out to be wrong-as polls sometimes are-and Trump decided this was grounds for a lawsuit. That case continues [...]

The Complete IT Exams Training Bundle covers five platforms - Cisco, AWS, CompTIA, Microsoft, Google, and Linux - with expert-led courses, labs, and exam prep. The bundle comes with access to multiple exam preparation platforms including LinuxPath, DojoLab, CodeDirect, and ExamsDigest. You'll be able to train for CompTIA Security+, AWS Solutions Architect, Cisco CCNA, Linux+, [...]

Gregory Bovino's star will continue to rise. Admitting you lied to a court no longer matters when the entire administration does it on a daily basis. All that matters is that you serve the fascist cause. And the Border Patrol commander sent to handle things in Chicago certainly has the right look for the job. [...]

It's not hyperbole to say that after decades of hard work and lobbying, companies like AT&T have effectively destroyed whatever was left of federal U.S. consumer protection and corporate oversight. It's a victory" that's going to result in concussive harms that resonate for a generation. Under Trump 2.0, the company has not only seen the [...]

One of my favorite things in all of professional sports is the unofficial holiday referred to as Bobby Bonilla Day." The short version of it is that Bonilla played for the New York Mets decades ago and eventually bought out his contract in 2000 when they decided they were done with him. Rather than pay [...]

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. In this week's roundup of the latest news in online [...]

I love America. You're so fucked up. But I love you. You're built upon a beautiful and preposterous idea: that ordinary people-you and I-can govern ourselves. Together. Not through superior intelligence. Not through noble birth. Not through accumulated wealth. But through the messy, difficult, glorious work of reasoning together when no one has final answers [...]

Here comes more pathetic, childish bullshit from an administration that has made petty bullshit its brand. The just completed government shutdown caused problems everywhere. The Trump administration knew its refusal to compromise on the budget bill was going to hurt it, so it did everything it could to reshape the narrative, even as it somehow [...]

A federal magistrate judge just ordered that the private ChatGPT conversations of 20 million users be handed over to the lawyers for dozens of plaintiffs, including news organizations. Those 20 million people weren't asked. They weren't notified. They have no say in the matter. Last week, Magistrate Judge Ona Wang ordered OpenAI to turn over [...]

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, [...]

Last night the House passed, and then Donald Trump signed, the funding bill that reopened the government after the longest government shutdown in history. Amazingly, the Republican's sketchy demands to fill their personal bank accounts with undeserved taxpayer money almost scuttled the deal. But, don't worry: those Senators got their corrupt boondoggle and they plan [...]

You might recall that right wing propaganda broadcaster Sinclair Broadcasting recently tripped over its own ass after working with the Trump administration to try and censor Jimmy Kimmel for criticizing the President. The flood of outrage at the Disney/FCC/ABC collaborative effort ultimatelyforced the company to retreatand put Kimmel back on the air. Even after ABC [...]

While we've talked quite a bit about the horror show that is RFK Jr.'s position as Secretary of HHS, most of the focus of those posts has been around what is happening at the CDC. And for good reason, too. The ongoing measles outbreak, the quick hiring/firing of Susan Monarez, and all the anti-vaxx bullshit [...]

For all its talk about trimming down government spending, an untold amount of money has been blown just to keep one person from getting one over on the Trump administration. That man would be Kilmar Abrego Garcia. He became the poster boy for the regime's bigotry when he fought back against his sudden deportation to [...]

Support us on Patreon Three years ago, Mike Brock joined us on the podcast to discuss a decentralized web project, and more recently we've published several cross-posts from his Substack about the horrifying goings-on in American politics and media. Today, Mike joins the podcast once again for a far-ranging conversation about the state of democracy [...]

On Friday it was announced that my alma mater, Cornell, had caved to the Trump administration and agreed to a deal" the federal government had offered them to get back the funding it had illegally cut off from Cornell as part of its authoritarian efforts to bully top universities into submission. This capitulation came just [...]

We'll see where this goes from here, but for the moment, this order [PDF], issued by federal judge Karin Immergut still stands: For the above reasons, this Court concludes that Plaintiffs have demonstrated that Defendants violated 10 U.S.C. 12406 and the Tenth Amendment and satisfy the requirements for a permanent injunction. Therefore, this Court [...]

Costco is your one-stop shop with a wide range of merchandise that will likely cover all of your shopping needs! With hundreds of locations across the country, Costco is the ideal place to shop without the hassle of having to run numerous errands around town. Purchase a 1-Year Costco Gold Star Membership for $65 and [...]

Reagan-appointed federal judge Mark Wolf has resigned from the bench in Massachusetts, and his explanation is blunt: he can no longer bear the ethical constraints that prevent judges from speaking out publicly while Trump dismantles the rule of law. This doesn't happen. Federal judges-especially Reagan appointees-don't quit to become activists. They stay in their robes [...]

You might recall that not that long ago Trump managed to get CBS to pay him a $16 million bribe based entirely on a lie: that the network's 60 Minutes program had unfairly edited an interview with Kamala Harris. In reality it was a minor, ordinary edit, and CBS could have easily fought the case [...]

Earlier this year, I wrote about how ICE had decided to publish a horrifying recruitment video that mixed in footage of ICE raids, including one that got Kristi Noem in some hot water, along with the introduction to the Pokemon animated series, complete with the theme music behind it. The video itself wasn't terribly surprising. [...]

After forty days. Forty days of the longest government shutdown in American history. Forty days of Democrats sayingthisis the line-healthcare for twenty-two million Americans. Forty days of holding firm while Republicans bet Democrats would break first. Chuck Schumerjust taughtDonald Trump that hostage-taking works. Not because he had to. Because the framework he operates within cannot [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to add state driver's license information to a swiftly expanding federal system envisioned as a one-stop shop for checking citizenship. The plan, outlined in apublic notice posted Thursday, is the latest step in an unprecedented Trump administration initiative [...]

Over the weekend, the President of the United States fell for obvious satire from a website literally called The Dunning Kruger Times." Donald Trump-a man with access to the best, most accurate information on basically any subject-posted to Truth Social a screenshot claiming that DOGE halts yearly payments of $2.5 million to Barack Obama for [...]

Upgrade your workspace with the Turonic TP1 - a wireless touchpad designed for seamless navigation, precision gestures, and multi-device flexibility. Whether you're working on a laptop, desktop, or tablet, the TP1 offers smooth, intuitive control across Windows, Android, and Linux devices. With both Bluetooth 5.0 and 2.4GHz wireless connectivity, you can switch between devices in [...]

This administration isn't content to be normal awful. It insists on being ghastly awful as often as possible. Not content to eject hundreds of migrants into foreign torture prisons, the administration has decided it's time to start killing foreign people in boats just because. That's not me using a worn-out turn of phrase. That was [...]

For the last decade or so, U.S. cable TV customers have been plagued by a steady parade of content blackouts as cable providers and broadcasters bicker over new programming contracts. For the end user, so-called retransmission feuds" usually go something like this: a TV broadcaster demands a cable company pay significantly more money to carry [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is That One Guy with a comment on our post about receiving a bogus DMCA takedown from CyberGhost over our previous post about receiving a bogus DMCA takedown from CyberGhost: Sometimes the cover-up's worse than the crime I'm really struggling to think of a non-damning [...]