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Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

1 month 1 week ago
This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about the head of ICE saying journalists should stop asking questions about ICE officers. In first place, it’s Justinfinity with a comment about the fear of officers being targeted: That’s especially wild when held up next to the very common […]
Leigh Beadon

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: This Is Not A Game About A Pipe

1 month 1 week ago
We’ve now arrived at the end of our series of posts about the winners of this year’s public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929! We’ve already covered the Best Remix, Best Deep Cut, Best Visuals, Best Adaptation, the honorable mentions, and the Best Digital Game. Today, we wrap things up with a look at […]
Leigh Beadon

The Baldoni/Lively Case Is Still Going And Getting Much, Much Sillier

1 month 1 week ago
We talked about the celebrity fight du jour between actors Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively when it started, as it seemed for all the world like your typical Streisand Effect story. What began as a workplace harassment complaint of sorts, with Lively initially alleging several instances of inappropriate workplace behavior by Baldoni, has now exploded […]
Dark Helmet

Homeland Security Defies Orders, Engages In More Human Trafficking

1 month 1 week ago
Eight men were put on a plane from Texas, bound for South Sudan — a country the State Department warns Americans not to travel to because of “crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict.” None of these men were from South Sudan. The Trump administration shipped them there anyway, in direct violation of a federal court order. […]
Mike Masnick

Kids Don’t Have IDs And Age-Estimation Tech Is Frequently Very Wrong

1 month 1 week ago
Lawmakers continue to propose new bills that would require social media companies and app stores to segment users by age and obtain parental consent for minors. Laws like Utah’s new App Store Accountability Act and an identically named piece of federal legislation are being pushed across the country. Other bills, such as the Rhode Island Social Media Regulation Act, would […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The Complete Machine Learning Bundle

1 month 1 week ago
Dive into the world of self-driving cars, speech recognition technology, and more with the Complete Machine Learning Bundle. Over 10 courses, you will learn about pattern recognition and prediction, and how to harness the power of machine learning to take your programming to the next level. Discover quant trading, how to harness large data sets, […]
Daily Deal

DHS Strips Harvard’s Foreign Student Program Just As Judge Blocks Separate Mass Student Expulsion Scheme

1 month 1 week ago
DHS announced yesterday that Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, stripping the university of its Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification. The timing is particularly brazen: around the same time, a federal judge in California had blocked DHS from a separate scheme to mass-revoke thousands of student visas based on fifteen minutes of review. […]
Mike Masnick

Verizon Gets $20 Billion Frontier Merger Approved By FCC After Promising To Be More Racist And Sexist

1 month 1 week ago
Back in March, Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr announced he was “investigating” Verizon because the company hadn’t scaled back its diversity and inclusion efforts quickly enough for the bigots in the Trump administration. Despite the investigation being completely baseless, Verizon was quick to comply, yanking materials related to its fleeting efforts to diversify its workforce […]
Karl Bode

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Moderation Without Representation

1 month 1 week ago
Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderation‘s 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 […]
Mike Masnick

Trump Admin Forcing African Countries To Embrace Elon Musk’s Starlink If They Want To Continue Receiving Lifesaving Aid

1 month 1 week ago
You can’t say that Elon Musk hasn’t gotten his money’s worth after spending $277 million to help buy Donald Trump an election victory (that’s not including the $44 billion Musk spent on turning Twitter into a right wing propaganda mill). The end of the numerous investigations into labor, environmental, and consumer fraud abuses alone have […]
Karl Bode

Musk Adviser May Make as Much as $1 Million a Year While Helping to Dismantle Agency that Regulates Tesla and X

1 month 1 week ago
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. One of Elon Musk’s employees is earning between $100,001 and $1 million annually as a political adviser to his billionaire boss while simultaneously helping to dismantle the federal agency that regulates two of Musk’s biggest companies, according to court records and a financial disclosure report obtained by ProPublica. […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The Complete Circuit Design And Simulation Super Bundle

1 month 1 week ago
The Complete Circuit Design and Simulation Super Bundle has 19 courses on electronics, 3D simulation, and PCB builds. You’ll learn what tools you need to set up your own home lab, how to build your own Arduino board, how to solder, how to create a customized printed circuit board, and more. It’s on sale for […]
Daily Deal

We Shouldn’t Have To Explain To The FTC Why Content Moderation Is So Crucial To Free Speech, But We Did

1 month 1 week ago
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson begged Donald Trump for his job by promising he would “end Lina Khan’s politically motivated investigations.” And, yet, one of his first orders of business upon getting the job was to… kick off a politically motivated investigation regarding “big tech censorship,” which he (falsely) claimed was potentially illegally targeting conservative speech […]
Mike Masnick

States Forced To Kill Millions In Rural Broadband Investment After Trump Illegally Kills The Digital Equity Act… Simply For Having The Word ‘Equity’ In It

1 month 1 week ago
Last week we noted how Trump illegally declared he was killing the $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act. The law, passed as part of the infrastructure bill, was slated to bring millions in new broadband grants and digital literacy tools to Americans of all kinds long stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide. The […]
Karl Bode

Fifth Circuit Says It’s Fine For A Judge To Funnel Parolees To His Campaign Donors’ Ankle Monitor Service

1 month 2 weeks ago
Every so often, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court will surprise you with a well-reasoned decision that cuts against the grain of its usual pro-cop, pro-censorship, pro-“conservative values” output. This one, brought to us by Raffi Melkonian, unfortunately isn’t one of those exceptions. This one is more aligned with the rule. This potential class-action lawsuit, brought […]
Tim Cushing

The U.S. Copyright Office’s Draft Report On AI Training Errs On Fair Use

1 month 2 weeks ago
Within the next decade, generative AI could join computers and electricity as one of the most transformational technologies in history, with all of the promise and peril that implies. Governments’ responses to GenAI—including new legal precedents—need to thoughtfully address real-world harms without destroying the public benefits GenAI can offer. Unfortunately, the U.S. Copyright Office’s rushed draft report on AI […]
corynne.mcsherry