This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. In the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, how is the U.S. government performing in terms of human rights? Listening to politicians, it can be difficult to know. On one hand, some have pointed to a number of potential human rights abuses committed by the U.S. government […]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […]

A few days ago I wrote about the anti-SLAPP motion filed by “Reckless” Ben Schneider against Bricks & Minifigs (BAM Franchising) over the ridiculous RICO suit they filed against him for his efforts to get BAM to pay back the money owed to Bryan Mansell. The original suit was based on the laughable claim that […]

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, […]

Flock is in the middle of a long losing streak. It’s one thing to lose hearts and minds via PR work. It’s quite another to lose actual dollars because you’ve lost a ton of hearts and minds by being on the losing end of mainstream media coverage for most the past two years. If it […]

Trump FCC boss Brendan Carr endlessly pays empty lip service to the “public interest” and the “value of broadcasting integrity” as he engages in ham-fisted censorship of comedians and journalists the president doesn’t like. Or the illegal dismantling of media consolidation limits. Or helps the president and his friends steal TikTok. But any time there’s […]

Among the many promises that RFK Jr. offered in his confirmation hearings, promises that he has gone about breaking in spectacular fashion, one was a promise of “radical transparency”. His approach, in his own words, was laid out directly to Congress. My approach to administration HHS will be transparency. If members of this committee or […]

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around […]

Donald Trump has been claiming for years that all elections he hasn’t (or won’t) win are rigged. This also goes for mid-terms — especially this one — where Republicans seem likely to lose seats to Democratic Party members. We won’t know if Trump will try to become President For Life until 2028, but it seems […]

Every so often a piece of reporting is so thorough that I don’t have much to add. So let me start with this: everyone should watch Mikhail Klimentov’s comprehensive investigation, into how former Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick appears to have used the infamous lawyers at Clare Locke to suppress negative reporting about himself. The […]

The Plantum app is a digital tool that helps to identify plants, diagnose plant diseases, and improve plant care. The app can identify over 40,000 plant species, assess their health, and give specific care advice. Plantum offers a suite of digital tools that help users improve plant care by considering light conditions, soil, water schedule, […]

Riverside County, California sheriff Chad Bianco is definitely one of those guys. You know the ones I mean. The kind of “law and order” hypocrite who loves the law as long as it can be used to hurt the people he doesn’t like and protect the people he does like. In other words, he’s a […]

Corporations have long enjoyed creating toothless “self-regulatory” regimes that exist primarily to pre-empt real government oversight. While the quality of these orgs can vary somewhat, generally they’re just a toothless pantomime designed to pretend that corporate power can effectively police itself for ethical and competitive breaches. U.S. history has a thing or two to say […]

It’s been a bit tough to watch how Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has behaved regarding its beloved TTRPG Dungeons & Dragons the past couple of years. A game that was built from its inception on encouraging fans and creators to use the game to do new and interesting things suddenly saw its shepherd turn […]

“Defund the police” has come for at least one local law enforcement agency in one of the reddest states in the nation. This police department could have avoided this ignominious fate simply by not being generally awful. But the person leading the now-defunct department couldn’t seem to do his job without violating rights on the […]

As arguments rage about the possible or real threats of AI, there is one domain that AI has already turned on its head, and in the space of just the last few weeks: mathematics. The first hint of what was coming arrived in May, when OpenAI announced that one of its models had disproved a […]

Eleven months ago, I wrote about what I thought was a truly fascinating find: that some kids appeared to be using some random old NPR podcasts on Spotify as a personal chat room to get around various restrictions. It was mentioned, somewhat in passing, on the “How to do Everything” podcast last October, where someone […]

The Microsoft Access Complete Course combines four different courses in one. Jump in, and you’ll walk through everything from the absolute Access basics to more advanced concepts, like building dynamic user data forms and effective reports. By the end of the course, you’ll have the know-how required to create effective database tables, automate tasks, and […]

The Supreme Court just keeps giving Trump a free pass to engage in what Mike Masnick correctly called “human trafficking.” It’s stuff this nation has never done before because it’s never been run by someone quite like Trump before. To maximize the cruelty inflicted on immigrants, the Trump administration (steered directly by its chief ghoul, […]

When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son David) hired blog-troll Bari Weiss to run CBS News, Weiss arrived with the promise of “balanced, fact-based news,” “independent, principled journalism,” and a unique “entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision” that would modernize the network and reach the “everyday Americans” they claimed were “traditionally ignored by […]

While the game-playing that RFK Jr.’s CDC has conducted is ongoing, they can only keep up the charade for so long. The nation is undergoing the worst outbreak of measles in over three decades, with Pennsylvania currently the hardest hit of all the states. As we’ve discussed, there have now been four measles-related deaths in […]

I’m sure whoever thought this might be a good idea — that would be the Dallas city council members who approved this contract — thought no one would ever find out about it. But nothing stays secret for long, not even furtive movements like this one, which added AI-addled cameras to garbage trucks with the […]

The EU Commission draft law to restrict young people’s access to the internet that it presented last week will come at a high cost: it will put online services behind age gates, expand the use of intrusive age verification, and undermine the privacy of all users. The EU Kids Act aims to protect children from risks associated […]

Last week, “Reckless” Ben Schneider did Wired’s “Autocomplete Interview” which is always fun. At one point, one of the questions is “Does Reckless Ben have a law degree?” and his answer is amusing (for anyone who isn’t one of Reckless Ben’s current lawyers): Does Reckless Ben have a law degree? My whole thing with when […]

We have all wanted to learn a language at some point but it’s hard to get started. Some language learning tools can be complicated and very time-consuming. But with uTalk, you’ll be speaking keywords and phrases in no time, and will start to see the results straight away. It helps you overcome the language barrier […]

Let’s start this off by clearing the air: Stephen Miller looks exactly like the sort of person who wants to elevate white people above everyone else. Sure, he doesn’t have the Hitler ‘stache or a blond pompadour, but he’s the same bit of unspectacular “whiteness” Hitler was. Miller is bald, mostly chinless, and looks like […]

In the piece Dave Willner and I published last week about why “the apocalypse won’t be sexy,” we discussed how the real threat wasn’t “rogue” out of control AI tools, but rather humans doing stupid shit, sometimes because they stop thinking in the presence of these AI machines. A deeply reported Bloomberg article by Ben […]

I’m starting to think we have unknowingly entered the age of great American civic nihilism. The impetus for that belief most recently has been RFK Jr. and the wider government’s complete acquiescence to his bald-faced lies and betrayals. If nobody can be bothered to lift a finger over that man, then they obviously don’t think […]

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around […]

Content moderation is impossible to do well at scale. Which also means it’s sometimes difficult to tell garden variety fuckups apart from the rich and powerful putting their finger on the scale. On Friday, the Hollywood Reporter revealed that all of the major social media platforms were rejecting attempts by distributor Bleecker Street to advertise […]

Last week California Democrats — including Governor Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass, and AG Rob Bonta buckled under pressure and got 12 states to drop their antitrust lawsuit against Paramount’s $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers. Worse: they did so without affixing any meaningful conditions or divestments, ensuring that the deal, as with all […]

The Complete Ethical Hacking Boot Camp has 11 courses cover python programming and ethical hacking from scratch. You’ll learn how to build custom penetration testing tools and how to establish secure virtual environments to practice tactics. Courses also cover Wireshark, Kali Linux, Metasploit, and more. It’s on sale for $45. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store […]

We’ve moved past cops doing stuff because a dog gave them permission to do it. Now, we’re at the post-truth era of policing, where cops will do stuff because a machine told them to do it. We already know ALPRs (automated license plate readers) generate false positives. And we know that these false positives can […]

Remember the Disinformation Governance Board? As we were quick to point out, this organization was named in the dumbest possible way by some incompetent people within the Biden administration, which only fed into the [ahem] disinformation around it. The program, a part of DHS, was an advisory group with no enforcement capabilities, and was tasked […]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about the data on improving mental health among teens: But this contradicts my agenda! Can’t you just ignore the facts “for the sake of the children?!?” …and my political and business aspirations? Notice that all the proposed “do something” solutions […]

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Pete Hegseth and Trump got a dubious win today: a 2-1 panel of the DC Circuit found that the designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was not unlawful. It dismissed Anthropic’s challenge despite (1) a different court having found the exact opposite not that long ago; (2) being predicated on a statutory interpretation […]

The Metric Is Not the Mission is a ten-part examination of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. Across the series, the argument follows the evolution of the platform economy—from the optimism of the early internet to the growing tensions around […]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on […]

A ton of attention was paid recently to some offhand statements from OpenAI and Microsoft employees that surfaced in filings in the NY Times’ ongoing case against OpenAI, which has been consolidated into a much larger class action lawsuit. As I argued earlier, that struck me as something of a nothingburger of a story, because […]

This Smart & Interactive Self-Rotating Cat Toy Ball is a USB-rechargeable toy featuring 360-degree rolling movements, obstacle avoidance, and changing LED lights to help keep cats entertained. It’s built out of scratch-resistant and bite-resistant materials, the ball is tough enough to withstand rough play from high-energy kittens and adult cats alike. It’s on sale for […]

On Monday we wrote about Donald Trump’s direct attack on the First Amendment and the free press by banning reporters from the White House. As we expected, a judge on Thursday morning issued a Temporary Restraining Order, blocking the White House from continuing this unconstitutional action, though (as happened the last time Trump tried this) […]

I’ve written a lot this year about how Republicans hijacked the $42.5 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program (created by the 2021 infrastructure bill) and immediately set about weakening oversight standards, eliminating enforcement of stuff like broadband affordability, speed, and equitable deployment, and making it a priority to heavily subsidize Elon Musk for […]

The velocity with which RFK Jr. continues to break the promises he made during his confirmation hearings is simply incredible. As we get further and further away from those hearings, which amazingly occurred only 21 months ago, we may lose sight of the assurances Kennedy gave directly to Congress about his plans if appointed to […]

Over the last few years, it has become accepted knowledge that the internet — mainly social media and, lately, AI tools — was damaging the mental health of kids and increasing the suicide rate among that demographic. To hear the media and politicians talk about it, this was the biggest issue on the planet and […]

Originally published as an op-ed in The Mercury News. Republished here with permission from the author. Meta’s settlement with the state attorneys general (currently awaiting court approval) has been touted as industry-redefining. Indeed, Meta desperately hopes it will be. Although Meta was the only industry player to negotiate its terms, the settlement agreement is structured […]

You may recall that after he had won the 2024 Presidential election, the sorest winner in the history of sore winners, Donald Trump sued retiring pollster Ann Selzer and the Des Moines Register for… having reported the — admittedly surprising and, in retrospect, wildly off — poll results suggesting that Kamala Harris actually had a […]

LabsDigest is built for those who learn best by doing. Whether you’re preparing for a CompTIA certification or diving into Python development, our platform offers interactive labs that simulate real-world tasks—no passive watching or reading, just real experience. Work through performance-based exercises for CompTIA A+, Network+, Security+, and more, or sharpen your coding skills with […]

Guantanamo Bay has always been shorthand for disappearing people. It’s a place where people cease to exist, along with any rights they may have been afforded if they’d been imprisoned inside the United States. Its name is synonymous with torture and indefinite detention. And the excuse has always been the same: it’s impossible to secure […]

After burning $80 billion on the failed metaverse pivot — and billions more on desperate “me too” offerings in the AI space — Meta is looking to leverage its massive ad dominance to colonize the agentic AI (or personal assistant) market. So they recently introduced Muse, an AI agent represented by cutesy and personalized avatars, […]