Techdirt

The state of streaming is... bad. It's very bad. The first step in wanting to watch anything is a web search: Where can I stream X?" Then you have to scroll past an AI summary with no answers, and then scroll past the sponsored links. After that, you find out that the thing you want [...]

We've noted how Larry Ellison, as part of his attempt to control the entirety of media, had launched a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers. Larry, as we've seen with CBS and his interest in TikTok, is trying to convert what's left of U.S. media into a giant safe space for affluent right [...]

Not this shit again. A bipartisan group of the most anti-internet Senators around have released their latest version of a plan to sunset Section 230." We went over this last year when they floated the same idea: they have no actual plan for how to make sure the open internet can continue. Instead, their plan" [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Rose Natabo needs to leave one of her starving sons behind. At dawn, she squeezes her firstborn goodbye, then wraps her youngest, Santo, to her back, his legs akimbo at her waist. Taking the hand of her middle child, James, she hurries away toward help, her [...]

Dive into the world of robotics, programming, and electronics with the PiCar-X, an engaging and versatile smart car designed for learners from elementary school to advanced hobbyists. Combining powerful features, exceptional quality, and a cool design, this robot car kit delivers an engaging learning experience in robotics, AI, and programming. Beyond being an educational tool, [...]

If there's anything the GOP/MAGA party can't stand, it's people who won't fall in line. It openly courts fascism while still pretending its ultimate concern is the protection of (certain) civil liberties. It cheers on politically motivated prosecutions while still making mouth noises about activist judges." It's a land of contrasts, to be sure. But [...]

There were rumblings about this for a while, but it looks like the Trump TikTok deal is done, and it's somehow the worst of all possible outcomes, amazingly making all of the biggest criticisms about TikTok significantly worse. Quite an accomplishment. The Chinese government has signed off on the deal, which involves offloading a large [...]

As RFK Jr. continues to dismantle public health in this country policy brick by policy brick, there have fortunately been some consistent sources of sanity for the public to turn to. One of those sources has been the American Academy of Pediatrics, an important organization that provides guidance and dispenses funds to healthcare professionals and [...]

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 the last Ctrl-Alt-Speech of the year, Mike and Ben [...]

We filed our own comment with the USPTO regarding their attempt to weaken the important inter partes review (IPR) process that has been hugely helpful in getting rid of bad patents. Over at EFF, Joe Mullin wrote up an analysis of some of the comments to the USPTO, which we're running here as well. A [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. On July 18, a mild, overcast night in Nairobi, Kenya, a team of President Donald Trump's top foreign aid advisers ducked into a meeting room at the Tribe Hotel, their luxury accommodations in the city's diplomatic quarter, for a private dinner. The visitors from Washington included [...]

FCC boss Brendan Carr was dragged before Congress this week for some light questioning about his repeated, often-illegal abuses of FCC power. It was the first time the FCC has had to appear before Congress in five years, and the questioning, unsurprisingly, mostly dealt with Carr's failed attempts to censor comedian Jimmy Kimmel for making [...]

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 [...]

President Trump, who keeps pretending he's for free speech, but who has filed more defamation lawsuits against more media organizations than any president in history (combined), has done so again. This time, he has sued the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in Florida (naturally). For context: the only other president to come anywhere close was Teddy [...]

Shortly after Netflixannounced a $82.7 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers, the Ellison family, alongside Jared Kushner and the Saudis, unveiled their own hostile takeover bid to pre-empt the deal. As we've discussed, Larry Ellison is trying to gobble up what's left of old media (CBS, Paramount, Warner Brothers, CNN) and fuse it with new media [...]

I've said it roughly a zillion times: trademark bullying exists because it works. One of the unfortunate inequities of our system is that having a large legal warchest simply allows someone to push around others over trademark concerns" that aren't valid. The formula for this is consistent. Large corporate interest with lawyers at the ready [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The original has additional imagery which is worth checking out as well. On the one-month anniversary of President Donald Trump's inauguration earlier this year, a group of his appointed aides gathered to celebrate. For four weeks, they had been working overtime to dismantle the U.S. Agency [...]

In December 2025, the world crossed a threshold. For the first time ever, access to the major social media platforms was no longer guaranteed by interest, connection, or curiosity - but by a birth date. A new law in Australia decrees that people under 16 may no longer legally hold accounts on major social-media services. [...]

Trump was always going to target Minnesota and, specifically, the home of its most liberal residents, Minneapolis. Trump hates the state's governor, Tim Walz. He also hates one of the state's congressional reps, Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia. This is only part of Trump's recent hateful statements targeting Somalians, Tim Walz, and Rep. [...]

Mastering a new language has never been this fun or effective. Whether you are learning for travel, school, career, or family, Duolingo is the ultimate tool to get you there. Super Duolingo gives you uninterrupted, ad-free learning, unlimited hearts to keep practicing without limits, tailored mistake reviews, access to the toughest legendary levels, and offline [...]

Yesterday, Rep. Harriet Hageman released her bill to repeal Section 230. She's calling it reform," but make no mistake-it's a repeal, and I'll explain why below. The law turns 30 in February, and there's a very real chance this could be its last anniversary. Which is why we're running Techdirt's fundraising campaign right now, offering [...]

We've noted how Republicansare rewriting the 2021 infrastructure bill(they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants wind up in the back pocket of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (and their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband ventures, Starlink and Project Kuiper). This is billions of taxpayer dollars being paid to billionaires [...]

There are lots of good reasons to call for the impeachment or ouster or RFK Jr. He's flatly unqualified for the role. He's introducing all kinds of health risks for diseases we shouldn't even have to worry about any longer because he's an anti-vaxxer con-artist. He's so bad at his job that high level administrators [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. After years of struggling to find enough workers for some of the nation's toughest lockups, the Federal Bureau of Prisons is facing a new challenge: Corrections officers are jumping ship for more lucrative jobs at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. This is one of the unintended consequences [...]

Support us on Patreon The relationship between journalism and AI has been off to an antagonistic start, with multiple court cases underway and plenty of discourse about what should happen next. There are various proposed approaches to setting up a better interplay between the two, but one person with an especially unique idea is Professor [...]

Although the field of artificial intelligence (AI) goes back more than half century, its latest incarnation - generative AI - is still very new: ChatGPT was launched just three years ago. During that time a wide variety of issues have been raised, ranging from concerns about the impact of AI on copyright, people's ability to [...]

The President of the United States is currently promising to spend the same pot of money on at least nine different things. The pot in question: revenue from all the random and fluctuating tariff duties that are almost certainly unconstitutional, which means he's likely going to have to pay some or all of it back. [...]

The 2025 AI Super Skills Bundle has 8 courses to help you get familiar with how to use some of the latest and coolest artificial intelligence tools out there. Courses cover ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Leonardo AI, Quillbot, and more. It's on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. [...]

There is no doubt that fentanyl is a dangerous drug. It has long since surpassed heroin on the list of drugs people only do once. That its prevalence has more to do with pharma companies irresponsibly pushing opioids than drug pushers pushing a new drug often goes ignored during this heated, ongoing debate that is [...]

We've already explored at length how Bari Weiss was hired by the billionaire Ellison family to make CBS even more friendly to billionaires and authoritarians after their embarrassing capitulation to (and bribery of) U.S. autocrats. This isn't really a pivot real people were actually asking for, it's simply extension of the right wing extraction class's [...]

On the topic of artificial intelligence, like far too many topics these days, it seems that the vast majority of opinions out there are highly polarized. Either you're all about making fun of AI not living up to the hype surrounding it, and there are admittedly a zillion examples of this, or you're an AI [...]

In late September, the United Kingdom's Prime Minister Keir Starmerannouncedhis government's plans to introduce a new digital ID scheme in the country to take effect before the end of the Parliament (no later than August 2029). The scheme will,according tothe Prime Minister, cut thefaff" in proving people's identities by creating a virtual ID on personal [...]

When Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and his wife Michele Singer Reiner were murdered Sunday evening-allegedly by their son, who was arrested-you might (had you been living in another time with a different President) have expected the President of the United States to either stay silent or offer condolences. Instead, Donald Trump saw an opportunity to [...]

The Trump Administration's murder-in-international-waters program debuted far ahead of its legal rationale. Many people inside the administration were blindsided by this sudden escalation. Those expected to stay on top of these things - military oversight, congressional committees, etc. - found they were even further behind the curve than the late-arriving justification" for extrajudicial killings of [...]

The Complete Big Data and Power BI Bundle has 5 courses to help you learn how to effectively sort, analyze, and visualize all of your data. Courses cover Power BI, Power Query, Excel, and Access. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all [...]

We've talked about the Australian social media ban that went into effect last week, how dumb it is, and why it's already a mess. But late last week, some additional news broke that makes the whole thing even more grotesque: turns out the campaign pushing hardest for the ban was run by an ad agency [...]

In the enshittification era, companies rushing to profit off the gold mine of mass commercial surveillance are routinely intent on pushing their luck. Automakers spy on your driving habits (without telling you) to sell that data to insurance companies that raise your rates. Your ISP, phone, and even electrical meter all report on your every [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is drew repeating an important point about how ICE keeps deporting people while blowing off court rulings: Nothing will change Until the courts charge some people with contempt and issue some prison time. In second place, it's MrWilson with thoughts on the assertion that calling [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the ACLU told congress not to add a terrible copyright bill to the must-pass government funding bill, Senator Tillis was trying to slide a dangerous felony streaming bill in as well (the details of which showed it was a weird gift to Hollywood at the expense of taxpayers), [...]

I'm certain some people are getting tired of this refrain, but I'm going to keep repeating it to make the point: we shouldn't have to talk about measles in this country in 2025. This is a disease that had been officially put in elimination status for America over two decades ago. We were done with [...]

It's no secret that 2025 hasgivenAmericansplentytoprotestabout. But as news cameras showed protesters filling streets of cities across the country, law enforcement officers-including U.S. Border Patrol agents-were quietly watching those same streets through different lenses: Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that tracked every passing car. Through an analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches [...]

The mainstream media just failed a basic civics test so badly that you'd think their brains have been pickled by the kinds of folks who spend all their time on X (oh, wait...). Headlines across major outlets are breathlessly reporting that Donald Trump blocked states from passing AI laws" with an executive order. Except, that's [...]

This week Representative Al Green (Texas) filed another set of impeachment articles against Trump. They didn't move forward; in fact, they failed an initial vote for Congress to decide to even think about moving them forward. But that impeachment didn't move forward this time is not the story, because even though it didn't, pursuing it [...]

This 3-in-1 Magnetic Wireless Charging Pad integrates three charging modules for cell phones, headphones, and watches-a maximum power of 15W for cell phone charging, 5W for Airpods charging, and 2.5W for Apple Watch charging. This charging pad can be folded and used as a phone stand. It's slim and compact, easy to put in your [...]

The government of India - especially under Prime Minister Narendra Modi - has never been shy about wanting to know what every one of its billion-plus citizens are up to at any given time. Not only does the government apparently have access to pretty much every bit of internet traffic generated by its citizens, it [...]

The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn't going very well. There have been justcountless exampleswhere affluent media ownersrushed to embrace automationand LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) withdisastrous impact, resulting inlots of plagiarism, completelyfalse headlines, and a giant, completely avoidable mess. Earlier this year, we [...]

We've obviously done a ton of coverage on RFK Jr. as the head of Health and Human Services because, well, he's an unmitigated disaster. Between all the chaos he's created with his hiring/firing practices at HHS and its child agencies, the mass exodus of talent from those agencies, and all the anti-vaxx bullshit he's pulled [...]

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 round-up of the latest news in online [...]

We've already written several times about the danger posed by adding AI to law enforcement incident/arrest reports. There are a lot of obvious problems, ranging from AI misinterpreting what it's seeing to it adding so much unsupported gibberish it isn't the time-saver companies like Axon (formerly Taser) claim it will be. The cost-effectiveness of relying [...]

Eric Migicovsky, who basically invented the smartwatch category with the original Pebble, just announced something much simpler: a $99 ring with one button that records voice memos. That's it. No internet connection required, no cloud storage, no subscription fees, no wake words. Press the button, talk, release. Your note is saved locally-either on the ring's [...]