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Within hours on Friday, the Pentagon blacklisted one AI company for refusing to drop its safety commitments on surveillance and autonomous weapons, then turned around and praised a competitor for signing a deal that supposedly preserved those exact same commitments. This confused some people. Why would the Pentagon seek to destroy one company over the [...]

Wow. Imagine if you could just make this shit up. The U.S. military used a laser Thursday to shoot down a seemingly threatening" drone flying near the U.S.-Mexico border. It turned out the drone belonged to Customs and Border Protection, lawmakers said. It is to LOL. Not only did the military friendly fire a CBP [...]

Adobe Lightroom is a cloud-based photo editing and organizing tool designed for photographers of all levels. With an intuitive interface and advanced features, it allows you to create stunning images, manage your photo library, and work seamlessly across desktop, mobile, and web. Lightroom Classic provides robust tools for handling large volumes of images, offering precise [...]

Last year, in Fascism For First Time Founders, I warned the tech industry what happens when you cozy up to authoritarians. As I wrote then: Innovation requires trust. Not just between individuals, but institutional trust. People need to believe that contracts will be enforced, that property rights will be protected, that the rules won't change [...]

You might recall that when political news website Semafor entered the media industry on the back of $25 million in private money, they made all kinds of promises about how they were somehow going to revolutionize U.S. media. In reality most of their promises were relatively inane, and it didn't take long before the outlet [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is danderbandit with a very straightforward reaction to the fallout from Ring's Super Bowl commercial: Fuck Ring Exactly why I would never own a cloud based camera system. In second place, it's MrWilson with a piece-by-piece reply to a comment about DHS demanding social media [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2021, Australian news sites were reacting bizarrely to Facebook's withdrawal from sharing news in the country, just before Facebook caved and decided to restore news links. The whole ordeal was surrounded by silly reactions so we pointed to the best summary of everything, and also looked at how it [...]

One of the unfortunate knock on effects of being generally insufferable is that many people don't want to be associated with you in any way. And when you're both insufferable and happen to be the most divisive American political figure in modern history, all the more so. And that is certainly why, during both of [...]

Full disclosure up front: I sit on the board of Bluesky. That said, I had absolutely no idea this lawsuit existed until recently. Which, honestly, tells you something about how much of a legal non-event it was. But the underlying story here-about the NFL treating social media the way it treats television broadcast rights-is worth [...]

ICE can't keep up with the baseline set by resident ghoul/White House advisor Stephen Miller. Miller has demanded 3,000 arrests per day, which he presented as the minimum he would be satisfied with. To reach this goal, tons of talent from other federal law enforcement agencies have been added to the mix. The results have [...]

Earlier this yearwe noted how the Trump FCC, at the direct request of wireless phone giants, destroyed popular phone unlocking rules making it easier and cheaper to switch wireless carriers. The rules, applied via spectrum acquisition and merger conditions after years of activism, required that Verizon unlock your phone within 60 days after purchase so [...]

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If you run a company whose entire value proposition is the ability to see patterns, predict outcomes, and connect dots that others miss, you'd think someone in the building might have flagged that suing a small independent magazine over unflattering-but-accurate reporting would only guarantee that millions more people read it. And yet, here we are. [...]

Netflix has retreated from its protracted bidding war with Larry Ellison for control of Warner Brothers, giving the Trump ally likely control of Warner, CNN, and HBO. In a statement, Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said that Paramount's latest offer made the acquisition financially irresponsible: The transaction we negotiated would have created shareholder [...]

Measles. Yes, yes, I know you're sick of hearing about it. For that, though, you must lay the blame at the feet of Donald Trump, RFK Jr., and this entire administration of clown-tools that isn't bothering to do anything about what has become the worst continuous outbreak of the disease in America in several decades. [...]

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'll take my joy where I can. And this iteration of the Trump DOJ continues to provide bright bursts of schadenfreude-tinted sunshine. Any competent DOJ can close cases. Any barely competent prosecutor can push a case past a grand jury. Any sufficiently slippery solicitor (mixing in some British for the sheer alliteration of it all) [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. When county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the county's voter roll as potential noncitizens, she was taken aback. Lennon, who'd run elections in Boone County, Missouri, for seven years, had heard the [...]

We wrote recently about the FBI's pre-dawn raid on Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson's home, in which agents seized two laptops, a phone, a portable hard drive, a recording device, and even a Garmin watch. Natanson covers the federal workforce and had cultivated nearly 1,200 confidential sources across more than 120 government agencies. She was [...]

Most of Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr's time lately has been split between destroying all consumer protection oversight and threatening media companies with fake investigations if they're not appropriately deferential to our mad idiot king. The latter has tended to overshadow the former, but it's all been an ugly combination of authoritarianism, regulatory capture, and [...]

It will only take a few moments perusing all the headlines of posts we've done on the collective group that owns the Pokemon properties to know that they really, really care about intellectual property. It doesn't matter if it's patents, copyright, or trademark, these people will wield it all if they sniff out even the [...]

We've been saying this for years now, and we're going to keep saying it until the message finally sinks in: mandatory age verification creates massive, centralized honeypots of sensitive biometric data that will inevitably be breached. Every single time. And every single time it happens, the politicians who mandated these systems and the companies that [...]

Support us on Patreon Late last year, Mike was a guest on Seb Agertoft's Humans in the Loop podcast for a wide-ranging discussion all about restoring the promise of the decentralized internet. That interview was just released, and we're dropping the whole conversation here as well on this week's episode of the Techdirt Podcast. You [...]

Well, we always knew it would come to this. In a blow to the First Amendment and privacy, the Trump administration last weekapproveda U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)planto collect social media handles from people applying to change their immigration status. The new requirement, which was approved for one year, comes after the administration has [...]

The Secretary of Defense has givenan ultimatumto the artificial intelligence company Anthropic in an attempt to bully them into making their technology available to the U.S. military without any restrictions for their use. Anthropic should stick by their principles and refuse to allow their technology to be used in the two ways they have publicly [...]

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West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey wants you to think he's protecting children. His press release says so. His legal complaint opens with the genuinely horrific line that Apple has, in internal communications, described itself as the greatest platform for distributing child porn." He makes sure you know that Google made 1.47 million CSAM reports [...]

I've long written about how the U.S. establishment press no longer genuinely serves the public interest. Years of consolidation at the hands of (usually) rich, white, male, Conservative owners has resulted in a lazy U.S. press that reflects the interests of ownership. As a result you get a lot of feckless he said, she said" [...]

Way back in the ancient days of the year 2020, the world went through this pandemic thing called COVID-19. For those of you not old enough to remember such ancient history, it was a fairly significant health issue that caused a few disruptions throughout the world, including in these here United States. Trump was president [...]

There's not a single conservative left in the GOP. The ideals that were formerly considered conservative" - small government, fiscal responsibility, etc. - have been replaced by white Christian nationalism, water-carrying for would-be autocrats, and immense amounts of deficit spending for the sole purpose of making America whiter. That's not the same as making it [...]

We've explained in detail how Larry Ellison is trying to scuttle Netflix's planned merger with Warner Brothers because he wants to buy CNN and HBO, and, as he's doing with CBS (and now TikTok) turn them into a safe space for right wing zealots, autocrats, and oligarchs. He's unsubtly trying to build the kind of [...]

Checks and balances. That's the mantra. That's what makes America great. That's the system we deployed to prevent being just another iteration of the British empire. It was never perfect, but it seemed to get the job done most of the time. The gentleman's agreement underlying this system tended to hold up even when bad [...]

Opusonix is the workflow-first platform built for music producers and engineers who are tired of endless email chains and scattered files. By centralizing feedback, versions, and tasks in one structured workspace, it helps you cut email traffic by up to 90% so you can focus more on creating and less on chasing approvals. From time-coded [...]

For the better part of a decade, conservative politicians-and Texas politicians in particular-have been absolutely apoplectic about the state of free speech on college campuses. You've heard the greatest hits: students are coddled snowflakes who can't handle the real world, trigger warnings are destroying intellectual rigor, safe spaces are turning universities into daycare centers, and [...]

We've noted repeatedly how Trump wants to scuttle Netflix's proposed merger with Warner Brothers because his friend and key donor, billionaire Larry Ellison wants to buy Warner Brothers (and CNN) instead. In fact the two have already purportedly met to discuss which CNN anchors they'd like to fire once Larry (who just bought CBS and [...]

One of the more perplexing questions in all of the coverage I've done on RFK Jr. has been whether or not Kennedy is some misguided true believer or if this is all some grift for power, influence, and/or money. While most people who watch how RFK Jr. has operated on the topic of vaccines, for [...]

The Diary of a Young Girl" isa Dutch language diarywritten by the young Jewish writerAnne Frankwhile she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Although the diary and Anne Frank's death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp are well known, few are aware that the text has [...]

If you've spent any time in my Section 230 myth-debunking guide, you know that most bad takes on the law come from people who haven't read it. But lately I keep running into a different kind of bad take-one that often comes from people who have read the law, understand the basics passably well, and [...]

Eight million ways to die. According toAdWeek, the price for a 30-second commercial during Super Bowl LX has soared to $8 million, after NBC opened in the summer by offering spots for $7 million. AsAdWeeknotes, due to demand, the company has already reached its cap for the number of spots that were available for advertisers [...]

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Debates on how the media should be covering what Donald Trump says have been going on for over a decade now. A few months ago, we wrote about the regularity with which the mainstream media sanewashes" his more ridiculous statements, taking the incoherent ramblings of a madman and pretending to translate them into actual policy [...]

You might recall that acentralpillar of the Trump administration during the last election season was that a second Trump term would take aim at big tech," protect the little guy, rein in corporate power, and even continue the legacy of antitrust enforcers like Lina Khan." The press was filled with endless storiescredibly parroting these sorts [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson (who racked up a lot of wins this week) with a comment about the Twitter Files crew staying quiet when there are real attacks on free speech: Free speech absolutists": You're absolutely free to shut up and listen to my speech. Also, your [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2021, we looked at how state laws around community broadband were harming communities during the pandemic, just as one Congressional representative introduced a new such law to do so nationwide. Minneapolis joined the list of cities banning facial recognition tech, while it was revealed that CBP's use of the [...]

The Trump administration's project for erasing the parts of American history they find inconvenient continues unabated. But that doesn't mean it doesn't hit the occasional roadblock. In January, the administration removed portions of an exhibit at the former Philadelphia home of George Washington that made reference to 9 slaves he owned that spent time at [...]

We are calling on technology companies like Meta and Google to stand up for their users by resisting the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) lawless administrative subpoenas for user data. In the past year, DHShas consistently targeted people engaged in First Amendment activity. Among other things, the agency has issued subpoenas to technology companies to [...]

It's all well and good that we have a system of laws and rules in place. For the most part, the bumpers on the bowling lane help keep a lot of stuff on the field of play (to mix metaphors), even if powerful politicians would rather have the rules apply to everyone else but them. [...]

I seem to recall a years-long freakout among MAGA folks about the Biden administration pressuring social media companies to remove content. You may have heard about it. Anyway. In unrelated news FIRE (the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), has filed suit against Attorney General Pam Bondi and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem on behalf of [...]

Trump couldn't accept the fact that he lost the 2020 election. So he stood idly by (if you believe his narrative) or urged on (if you believe your own eyes and ears) his supporters to raid the Capitol building to seize the election from the electorate. If that meant killing his own vice president, so [...]

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