This whole attempted censorship of adult games on gaming platforms is becoming a thing. Collective Shout—a group out of Australia that wraps itself in a feminist flag while behaving like the religious right to get anything it doesn’t like out of the video game industry—put on a pressure campaign with payment processors, writing in to […]
As the Jeffrey Epstein scandal continues apace, and MAGA grapples with the gaslit reality they live in, the Trump Administration continues to negotiate so-called trade deals, which are negotiated and implemented using pure executive fiat, under emergency powers, under an emergency declaration which has no rational basis, while everyone pretends this isn’t an example of […]
Anyone with the tiniest bit of humanity would have found a better way to mass deportations, if they even felt compelled to do it all. Under Trump, the extra layers of cruelty are an essential part of the package — something that piles the deliberate infliction of misery on top of the thick crust of […]
Watch the tech oligarchs who lined up behind Donald Trump at his inauguration, and you’ll see the most important story of our time: the fascists are winning because they’ve built a direct pipeline from concentrated technological power to concentrated political power. This isn’t about technology being inherently dangerous—it’s about how distorted Wall Street incentives drove […]
Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to full projects. Before you know it, you’ll be building a gaming system to play old Nintendo, […]
The Trump administration wants you to know they’re very, very tough. So tough, in fact, that they’re launching a comprehensive purge of the Naval Academy to eliminate “corrosive DEI programs” and restore what they call the “warrior ethos.” Because nothing says “fearless military leadership” like being absolutely terrified of books about civil rights and the […]
Section 706 of the Telecom Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed “on a reasonable and timely basis” to everyone. If the answer is no, the law says the FCC must “take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications […]
Trump — perhaps more than other presidents — often feels compelled to present his religious bona fides. Of course, he naturally has none. But as often as evangelical figureheads proclaim him to be (their) God’s personal pick for POTUS, even Donald Trump occasionally feels obligated to give something back to a community that has given […]
Well, well, well. The “age assurance” part of the UK’s Online Safety Act has finally gone into effect, with its age checking requirements kicking in a week and a half ago. And what do you know? It’s turned out to be exactly the privacy-invading, freedom-crushing, technically unworkable disaster that everyone with half a brain predicted […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica, along with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga, and Cazadores de Fake News. Republished under ProPublica’s CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Now that he’s free, Leonardo José Colmenares Solórzano, a 31-year-old Venezuelan, wants the world to know that he was tortured over four months in a Salvadoran prison. He said guards stomped on his […]
We’re becoming everything we (perhaps naively) assumed most Americans didn’t want America to be: a backwater burg on the world map, overseen by a corrupt sheriff and known mostly for our routine rights violations and unwillingness to treat facts as facts. Bigotry is again the national sport and people bringing inconvenient facts are just fodder […]
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Back in April 2023, when Substack CEO Chris Best refused to answer basic questions about whether his platform would allow racist content, I noted that his evasiveness was essentially hanging out a “Nazis Welcome” sign. By December, when the company doubled down and explicitly said they’d continue hosting and monetizing Nazi newsletters, they’d fully embraced […]
We’ve noted repeatedly how early attempts to integrate “AI” into journalism have proven to be a comical mess, resulting in no shortage of shoddy product, dangerous falsehoods, and plagiarism. It’s thanks in large part to the incompetent executives at many large media companies, who see AI primarily as a way to cut corners, assault unionized labor, and […]
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about the failure to get indictments in supposed ICE assaults: And the fact that prosecutors and grand juries didn’t find evidence of actual assault in so many cases proves ICE’s assault statistics are bullshit. If you read other articles on […]
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we took a look at tech in the pandemic, from the big ways people were using it to stay connected to the strange details like Fox putting fake videogame crowds in sports broadcasts and how it was finally forcing Hollywood to change some practices. The House Judiciary Committee […]
This isn’t going to stop happening unless governments finally get involved to do their most basic job: protect their citizens. This habit among digital and tech companies of selling a thing only to claw back some of the function of that thing after the purchase is both rampant and, frankly, getting ridiculous. It’s bad enough […]
This series of posts explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking approach that acknowledges the potential of technological […]
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn has quietly joined the parade of tech giants rolling back basic protections for transgender users, removing explicit prohibitions against deadnaming and misgendering from its hate speech policies this week. The change, first spotted by the nonprofit Open Terms Archive, eliminates language that previously listed “misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals” as examples of […]
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. In the early days of President Donald Trump’s second term, I spent a few weeks observing Chicago’s immigration court to get a sense of how things were changing. One afternoon in March, the case of a 27-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker caught my attention. Albert Jesús Rodríguez Parra […]
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