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Things Going Great At Ellison’s Paramount As President Gets Mired In Accusations Of Press Manipulation And Leaking Company Info The President of Larry Ellison’s “new and improved” Paramount, Jeff Shell, has been conspicuously absent from recent events heralding the company’s problematic acquisition of Warner Brothers. The reason? Shell is being accused by a “whistleblower” and former partner of leaking company info, including early word of the company’s $7.7 billion August 2025 deal to obtain […]
11.03.2026 12:29 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
DOJ Lawyer: RFK Jr.’s Authority Shall Not Suffer Any Checks & Balances From The Courts I’ve spent a lot of digital ink detailing just how bad RFK Jr. has been in his post at HHS. Everything from his attempts to entirely remake vaccine policies in the country, to his neutered response to the ongoing measles outbreak in the country, up to and including his attempts to strong-arm the entire federal […]
11.03.2026 03:04 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
37,000 Fake AI Comments Mysteriously Oppose Washington State’s Effort To Tax The Rich Ideally, the U.S. public is supposed to be able to comment on government policy proceedings, and the government is supposed to listen to that input. Of course, it doesn’t really work that way: For years we’ve noted how U.S. regulatory comment proceedings are full of bots and fake comments from industries trying to game regulators, and […]
10.03.2026 22:21 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Stephen Thaler’s Legendary AI Copyright Losing Streak Ends With Nowhere Left To Appeal We’ve been covering Stephen Thaler’s quixotic quest to get copyright (and patent) protection for works generated entirely by his AI system “DABUS” for years now. If there’s one thing Thaler has proved beyond all reasonable doubt, it’s that you can be comprehensively, thoroughly, and repeatedly wrong at every level of the American legal system and […]
10.03.2026 20:08 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Human Problems: It’s Not Always The Technology’s Fault We have met the enemy and he is us. When a teenage boy in Orlando started texting Character.AI’s chatbot, it started as an innocent use of a new tool. Sewell Setzer III customized the chatbot to have the Game of Thrones-inspired persona of Daenerys Targaryen, the series’ prominent dragon-riding queen. In the months that followed, […]
10.03.2026 18:09 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
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10.03.2026 18:04 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Trump Kicks Kristi Noem To The Curb For Being Exactly The Sort Of Person Trump Wanted Her To Be I come here to celebrate the apparently permanent sidelining of former DHS head, Kristi Noem. I know the adage usually does some hedging before damning with faint praise, but I’m not interested in praise, faint or otherwise, much less pretending this isn’t worth celebrating. Noem openly pined for the VP position, but shot herself in […]
10.03.2026 16:24 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
MAGA Suddenly Quiet About Overseas Influence Now That Larry Ellison’s Warner Bros Bid Has Saudi, Chinese Backing You might recall that during the great mass TikTok hyperventilation of 2021-2025, there was no limit of face fanning by Republicans like Brendan Carr about overseas involvement in social media. Carr was so particular on this subject, he scuttled an FCC program aimed at shoring up “smart” home device security standards because one of the […]
10.03.2026 12:25 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Real Consequences: Trump’s Bullshit Claim About Tylenol Is Seeing Real World Results There’s this insane subset of people who, when they talk about Donald Trump, I’ll never understand. It’s the ones who claim that taking what Donald Trump says seriously is a mistake that most people are unlikely to make. It’s also expressed by the crowd that claims something to the effect of: you shouldn’t take Trump […]
10.03.2026 03:05 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
DOJ Un-Drops Its Appeal Against Law Firms, Files Brief That Gets The First Amendment Exactly Backwards On Wednesday of last week, I wrote a post about how the Trump administration had quietly given up defending its unconstitutional executive orders targeting law firms. The DOJ was dropping its appeals, the firms that fought had won, and the firms that capitulated—led by Paul Weiss and their nearly $1 billion in groveling pro bono […]
09.03.2026 22:12 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Congressional Republicans Push Bills That Would Block Kids Access To Content For Ideological Reasons Should parents have a right to monitor and control which sites and apps their kids use? Today, parents do have that legal right under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The 1998 law requires verifiable parental consent before websites or apps can collect, use or share personal information from teens 13 or under. In […]
09.03.2026 20:03 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
ICE Detainment Center Guards Allegedly Set Up Suicide Death Pools Say what you will about cops — even the federal ones — but they have nothing on the people charged with guarding people who have been detained or imprisoned. The cruelty of cops is slightly tempered by the fact that anyone with a cell phone, dash cam, or doorbell surveillance device might catch them in […]
09.03.2026 18:03 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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09.03.2026 17:57 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The Government Told Courts It Could Easily Refund Unlawful Tariffs. Now It Says It Can’t. When companies sued to block Trump’s IEEPA tariffs last year, one of the key arguments they made was obvious: if these tariffs turn out to be illegal, we’ll never get our money back. We need an injunction now. The government had an equally confident response: relax, if the tariffs are struck down, we’ll just issue […]
09.03.2026 16:31 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
If You’re Going To Defend AI And Whine About Its Critics, You Should Probably Be Honest About Its Actual Harms I think this recent post by AI industry CEO Matt Shumer is worth a read. In it, he basically explains how quickly LLMs (large language models) are evolving to supplant many developers and programmers, and how that disruption is coming to other industries quickly. He also warns critics of AI to adjust their priors and realize […]
09.03.2026 12:27 👍 0 🔁 4 💬 0 📌 0
Rethinking And Refreshing Techdirt’s Weekend Posts: We Want Your Feedback For many years now we’ve had two regular posts that come out on the weekends: our This Week In Techdirt History posts on Saturdays, and our Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week posts on Sundays. Sometimes we switch it up a little bit, replacing the history post with a special promotion or (as will be […]
08.03.2026 19:00 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
This Week In Techdirt History: March 1st – 7th Five Years Ago This week in 2021, while AT&T was apparently committed to being comically hypocritical about Section 230, Utah was prematurely trying to dance on 230’s grave with a new and extremely horrible “free speech” bill that was a disaster in the making, and we had Ron Wyden and Chris Cox on the Techdirt […]
07.03.2026 20:00 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Iceland Foods Finally Surrenders In Trademark Fight With Iceland, The Country The ten year war over Iceland is over and Iceland has come out the victor. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, be prepared to listen to a whole bunch of stupid. In 2016, we wrote about Iceland Foods, a UK grocer, which had somehow convinced the EU to give it a trademark for […]
07.03.2026 03:39 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid’s experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron—a story about a dystopian society that enforces “equality” by handicapping anyone who excels—and the AI detection tool […]
06.03.2026 23:13 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Utah’s Proposal To Tax Online Pornography Is A Civil Liberties Disaster Waiting To Happen Republican lawmakers in Utah have long been on the cutting edge of shitty policymaking when it comes to regulating the internet. The latest chapter in that legacy is a proposed tax on porn and adult content purchased in the state’s digital space. Originally proposed by a pair of Republican lawmakers in the Utah state legislature […]
06.03.2026 20:58 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Anthropic’s Statement To The ‘Department Of War’ Reads Like A Hostage Note Written In Business Casual We’ve been covering the ongoing saga of the Trump administration’s attempt to destroy Anthropic for the sin of having modest ethical guidelines around its AI technology. The short version: Anthropic said it didn’t want its AI making autonomous kill decisions without human oversight. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded by declaring the company a supply chain […]
06.03.2026 18:54 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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06.03.2026 18:49 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Oregon Federal Judge Says ICE’s Warrantless Arrests Are Illegal ICE has been telling itself all it needs to do is write its own paperwork and it can do whatever it wants. Memos — passed around secretively and publicly acknowledged by no one but whistleblowers — told ICE agents they don’t need judicial warrants to arrest people or enter people’s homes. All they need — […]
06.03.2026 17:37 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The Double Whammy Of The CBS, Warner Brothers Mergers Will Be A Layoff Nightmare You might recall that Paramount and CBS had only just started to lay off workers in the wake of the merger with David Ellison’s Skydance. Now, after Ellison (or more accurately his dad and the Saudis) dramatically overpaid for Warner Brothers ($111 billion plus numerous incentives), the overall debt load at the company is so […]
06.03.2026 13:31 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Trump Administration Using Gross Video Game Footage To Cheerlead Its War Efforts We should all know by now that this iteration of the Trump administration absolutely loves using pop culture imagery, including that of video games, to help message its horrible policies. Want to gloat about ICE terrorizing American cities and generally pissing everyone off when they’re not too busy perforating innocents? Let’s use images from Pokémon […]
06.03.2026 03:59 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: The (Content Moderation) Eras Tour 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 a special episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Ben and Mike discuss […]
05.03.2026 23:35 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
OpenAI Rewrites Contract, Anthropic Returns to Negotiate—The Chaos Continues In less than a week, the Pentagon blacklisted an AI company for having ethics, declared it a supply chain risk, watched its preferred replacement face a massive user revolt, and then sat down to amend the replacement’s contract to address the very concerns the blacklisted company had been raising all along. Meanwhile, the blacklisted company […]
05.03.2026 21:38 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Kristi Noem Misled Congress About Corey Lewandowski’s Role In DHS Contracts This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem misled Congress on Tuesday about the powers of her controversial top aide Corey Lewandowski, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and four current and former DHS officials. Lewandowski has an unusual role at DHS, where he is not a paid government […]
05.03.2026 20:02 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
Judges To AG Pam Bondi: It’s OK For The Gov’t To Dox People, But Not OK For People To Dox Gov’t Employees? Yet another one to add to the “it’s OK if we do it” file for the Trump administration. This administration is cool with censoring speech, nationalizing elections, seizing the means of production, and blackmailing law firms and universities. It would be heated AF if any other administration did these things, but since it’s the one […]
05.03.2026 19:01 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0
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05.03.2026 18:56 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0