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Musk’s Takeover Of The Government’s Computer Systems Needs To Be Understood As A Cyberattack, Or Worse

2 months 1 week ago
People sometimes think that cybersecurity is just about defending computer systems from remote adversaries. But it’s broader than that; cybersecurity has always been about protecting computer systems more generally from any sort of misuse, no matter how the adversary might access them. So that Elon Musk and his minions have managed to walk right into […]
Cathy Gellis

Daily Deal: Rosetta Stone (All Languages)

2 months 1 week ago
Embark on the journey of language learning with the Rosetta Stone lifetime subscription for all languages. Trusted by top-tier organizations like NASA, Calvin Klein, and TripAdvisor, Rosetta Stone has been the go-to software for language learning for the past 27 years. With its immersive and intuitive training method, you might be reading, writing, and speaking […]
Daily Deal

The Twitter Files Playbook Comes For The US Government

2 months 1 week ago
Remember the Twitter Files? That carefully orchestrated “exposé” where incredibly gullible hand-picked journalists were given selective access to internal documents to manufacture misleading outrage about Twitter’s content moderation? Get ready for the government edition. If you want to predict what’s coming next in Elon Musk’s governmental power grab, look no further than his Twitter takeover […]
Mike Masnick

Big Telecom Again Begs Trump Supreme Court To Kill State Laws Requiring They (Gasp) Provide Affordable Broadband To Poor People

2 months 1 week ago
During peak COVID lockdowns in 2021, New York State passed a law requiring that big ISPs (with over 20k users) offer low-income residents 25 Mbps broadband for $15. It wasn’t a huge ask; it costs major ISPs little to nothing to provide that speed over modern fiber networks, but the broadband industry sued anyway. Without […]
Karl Bode

Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt

2 months 1 week ago
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment about Trump’s Department of Education rolling back anti-book-ban guidance: Remember, kids. If a government is trying this hard to ban books, you should damn well be interested in finding out what those books actually say! In second place, it’s That One […]
Leigh Beadon

Check Out The Entries In This Year’s Public Domain Game Jam

2 months 2 weeks ago
It’s February, which means this year’s edition of the public domain game jam, Gaming Like It’s 1929, has come to a close. And we got a record-breaking number of entries this time around, with 34 games submitted (edging out the previous record of 31). That means we’ve got a lot of work to do judging […]
Leigh Beadon

Elon’s Twitter Destruction Playbook Hits The US Government, And It’s Even More Dangerous

2 months 2 weeks ago
Remember how Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by ripping apart its infrastructure without understanding it? Now imagine that same playbook applied to the federal government. It’s happening, and the stakes are exponentially higher. When reviewing Kate Conger and Ryan Mac’s book “Character Limit” last fall, I highlighted two devastating patterns in Musk’s management: his authoritarian impulse […]
Mike Masnick

DeepSeek App Blocked In Italy After Privacy Complaint Under EU’s GDPR, Irish Data Protection Commission Also Investigating

2 months 2 weeks ago
Last week Techdirt wrote about leading Chinese tech companies being hit with GDPR complaints from noyb.eu concerning the transfer of personal data from the EU to China. More recently, much of the world has been obsessed with another Chinese company, DeepSeek, which operates in the fashionable area of AI chatbots. Most of the discussions have […]
Glyn Moody

LA Times Flips Anti-RFK Jr. Op-Ed Into Pro-Kennedy Propaganda

2 months 2 weeks ago
Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times, has been promising to restore trust in media over the last few months. Instead, he has launched an escalating campaign of editorial interference that accomplishes exactly the opposite. First, he blocked the paper from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris. Then, he demanded to personally approve all op-ed […]
Mike Masnick

The Faux Free Speech Warriors Attacking Free Speech

2 months 2 weeks ago
There’s a particularly insidious and cynical form of censorship gaining prominence in America: the weaponization of “free speech” rhetoric, combined with abuses of the judicial system and executive power, to actually suppress speech. It’s a strategy that turns the First Amendment’s principles inside out, using the language of liberty to justify silencing critics and opponents. […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: The Python & Django Web Development Bundle

2 months 2 weeks ago
The Python and Django Web Development Bundle has 7 courses to help you learn how to build your own sites and apps. Courses cover the basics of Django and Python and then build upon those skills by having you create your own to do list app and user authentication app, and more. It’s on sale […]
Daily Deal

Gun Detection Tech Fails To Detect Gun, Prevent School Shooting

2 months 2 weeks ago
There are lots of things we could be doing to limit school shootings. But none of those have been tried because most people, lobbyists, and politicians continue to believe issuing “thoughts and prayers” statements while standing on children’s graves is the absolute utmost they should be expected to do. Instead of common sense measures that […]
Tim Cushing

Ctrl-Alt-Speech: This Episode Has Masculine Energy

2 months 2 weeks 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

No, Conscripting The App Stores Doesn’t Solve The Problems With Age Verification

2 months 2 weeks ago
Lawmakers show no sign of slowing down with laws to limit minors’ use of social media. State and federal legislation mandating that sites verify users’ age and adjust their social media experiences accordingly are still popular, despite the fact that they have repeatedly failed court challenges. As of late, policymakers have turned to a different model where parents […]
Mike Masnick

Daily Deal: Voicetapp AI Speech to Text Transcription

2 months 2 weeks ago
Transform any speech into written words with an impressive accuracy rate of up to 99% in just three simple steps using Voicetapp, an AI-driven voice to text transcription tool. Voicetapp harnesses the capabilities of a deep learning method called automatic speech recognition (ASR), backed by leading platforms like AWS and GCP. It supports over 170 […]
Daily Deal

Meta Pays Trump $25M Protection Money After Mar-a-Lago ‘Offer’

2 months 2 weeks ago
In what looks increasingly like a protection racket, Meta has agreed to pay Donald Trump $25 million to settle a lawsuit that multiple courts had already indicated was completely meritless. The settlement, which directs $22 million toward Trump’s presidential library, comes after a dinner at Mar-a-Lago where Trump reportedly told Zuckerberg this needed to be […]
Mike Masnick