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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 [...]

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 [...]

Remember back when Elon Musk was handed the keys of our federal government with basically zero accountability or oversight? All sorts of bad stuff happened, but one of the lawsuits we've been covering was the American Federation of Gov't Employees (AFGE) along with the Association of Administrative Law Judges and a few individual federal workers [...]

The MOGICS Bagel has 5 international AC sockets, dual USB ports, 3ft integrated length-adjustable power cord, and an ergonomic AC plug. Unlike ordinary power strips, the bagel design makes it easier to charge multiple devices giving ample space for each plug. It has a LED power indicator that emits brilliant blue light when power is [...]

One of America's foremost thinkers hasn't done enough thinking. Instead, he's delivered a handful of thoughtful-sounding stuff that simply doesn't hold up the minute readers start actually thinking about what he's saying. Malcolm Gladwell has a new book about gun violence in the United States. I haven't read it, so I can't comment on the [...]

The Washington Post recently had some interesting additional insight into the various pay to play" shenanigans related to Trump's $330 million ballroom. They got a hold of a broader donor list, noting that Nvidia and Apple each committed $25 million, the top contribution amount. As did GOP donor mainstay the Adelson family. Crypto companies are [...]

It seems that burying reports because he doesn't like the data within them is becoming a habit for Donald Trump and his administration. This practice didn't begin during Trump 2.0, of course. He was burying reports he didn't like all the way back in 2017. More recently, of course, a lot of the games being [...]

The Metric Is Not the Missionis a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy-from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around [...]

Last year you might recall how Elon Musk's far right wing extremism (and endlessly incoherent behavior) had many countries reconsidering their use of his low-Earth orbit satellite company, Starlink. It was driven by the fact that Musk had restricted Ukraine's access to the service near Crimea because he personally opposed Ukraine's military aims (defending itself [...]

On Wednesday, JD Vance did the one thing JD Vance knows how to do with full commitment: lie through his teeth about something he fully knows is bullshit. In this case, claiming that Donald Trump hates the idea of people enriching themselves fraudulently over access to the government." Remember, this is the same Donald Trump [...]

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 [...]

Not that we really needed any more evidence of bad faith by ICE and the officer who decided to drive his car across a city street and into an adjacent parking lot for the apparent sole purpose of running over a fleeing migrant, but here it is anyway. As we covered last week, ICE officers [...]

Brendan Carr is a silly, hypocritical fascist who splits his time between destroying U.S. consumer protection standards and media consolidation limits, and abusing his position as FCC boss to threaten broadcast networks for airing stuff like comedy. Or journalism. Or politicians that the increasingly-unpopular President is clearly afraid of. Lately Trump has been complaining about [...]

Alright, I don't quite know what to make of what Epic Games is doing with this AI-driven nonsense, but it's not great. I've spent a bit of time trying to argue that new AI technology has some place in this industry, but Epic and its leadership appears to be trying to personify every last thing [...]

A quick update on a story we mentioned earlier this month. Much of the attention in the whole Bricks & Minifigs saga has focused on Reckless Ben and his attempts to expose sketchy behavior by the company, but the fight has also put a lot more scrutiny on Bricks & Minifigs Corporate (BAM), including the [...]

Sam Altman is not punk. He's no revolutionary. Jensen Huang wears a black leather jacket, the uniform of Brando and the Ramones, but that doesn't make him a rebel. The scientists and engineers we might have looked to as the new hackers are well on their way to becoming among the richest people in history. [...]

For the past several months, the DHS and DOJ have been pushing hard to make Trump's illegal voter election conspiracy theories a reality. Trump continues to claim millions of non-citizen voters are participating in federal elections - something he persists in proclaiming despite having won two of the last three presidential races. This isn't really [...]

CyberTraining 365 is the best training destination for you and your team. Here you can Master Cyber Security techniques such as Analyzing Malware, Penetration Testing, Advanced Persistent Threats, Threat Intelligence Research, Reverse Engineering, and much more. This online academy offers 3,877 up-to-date modules on all the latest technologies and industry standards. These courses are aligned [...]

A few weeks ago we wrote about how the lawyers for OpenAI and Microsoft in the massive multi-district litigation (MDL) against the companies over how they trained their AI had called for the exclusion of an expert witness report after it was revealed that lawyers for the plaintiffs had apparently surreptitiously paid for the report, [...]

You may have noticed that under corrupt Trumpist courts, if a regulator like the FCC engages in literally anything that threatens corporate power or aids workers, competition, or consumers (say, net neutrality, for example), or even school kids, it's clearly illegal and a dramatic overreach of regulatory power. If an agency does things like launch [...]

Court reform cannot come soon enough, because unless and until it does we cannot count on the Supreme Court to dispense justice. For many reasons, but this week brought the focus to one in particular, one we've long known was a problem, because we've seen it be once before: the Court fails to take up [...]