We're a few weeks into our end of year crowdfunding campaign—donate $100 or more (check out that $230 option!) and we'll send you our first commemorative challenge coin celebrating 30 years of Section 230. I've already laid out why our coverage matters, why we're not selling out (because we’re not like Bari Weiss), and why we're one of the only sites getting Section 230 right…

It’s nearly the end of 2025, and half of the US and the UK now require you to upload your ID or scan your face to watch “sexual content.” A handful of states and Australia now have various requirements to verify your age before you can create a social media account. Age-verification laws may sound straightforward to some: protect young people online by making everyone prove their age.

While each iteration presents a chance to improve, there are some very real reasons why facial recognition tech will do a bit of stagnating. And that reason is the biggest market for this tech: law enforcement agencies. In 2019, the US National Institute for Science and Technology studied 189 different facial recognition algorithms. The results were conclusive: every single one of them performed worse when asked to "recognize" anything other than white male faces.

If your product is even a third as innovative and useful as you claim it is, you shouldn't have to go around trying a little too hard to convince people. The product's usefulness should speak for itself. And you definitely shouldn't be forcing people to use products they've repeatedly told you they don't actually appreciate or want. LG and Microsoft learned that lesson recently when LG began installing Microsoft's Copilot "AI" assistant on people's televisions, …

Last week, Google filed suit against SerpApi, a scraping company that helps businesses pull data from Google search results. The lawsuit claims SerpApi violated DMCA Section 1201 by circumventing Google's "technological protection measures" to access search results—and the copyrighted content within them—without permission. There's just one problem with this theory: Google built its entire business on scraping the web without asking permission first.

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Yeah, the economy sucks and trade-war tariff agendas are only making things worse. But as Trump promised/threatened during a recent national address from the White House, things are turning around, even if you (MAGA voters especially) are too stupid to see it. It looks like the first growth market to see a significant increase might be law firms specializing in maritime law.

We’ve noted how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison, as part of his attempt to control the entirety of media, had launched a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for Warner Brothers backed by Saudi cash. Larry, as we’ve seen with CBS and his interest in TikTok, is trying to convert what’s left of U.S. media into a giant safe space for affluent right wing autocrats and the right wing culture war grievance and infotainment complex (as we…

One of the little-known but extremely telling episodes in the history of modern copyright, discussed in Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available), concerns the Marrakesh Treaty. A post on the Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) site from 2017 has a good summary of what the treaty is about, and why it is important: It sets out exceptions and limits to copyright rules so that people unable to use print media (including blind, visually impaired, and dyslexic people) can access a far greater range of books and other written materials in accessible formats.

Here's a fun game the Trump administration keeps playing: destroy a successful government program, wait a few months, then breathlessly announce you've "invented" the exact same thing but with obvious corruption mechanisms baked in. Last week, the administration excitedly announced a new "Tech Force"—a program to bring tech talent into government for two-year stints to modernize federal technology. If that sounds familiar, it's because that's precisely what the US Digital Service (USDS) and 18F successfully did for over a decade.

If you've been around a while, you might remember that Verizon used to be completely obnoxious when it came to forcing you to use their phones and their shitty apps. At one point, Verizon wouldn't even let you use a competing GPS mapping app, locking you to Verizon's substandard VCAST apps. The company also adored locking you into long-term contracts and expensive phone payment plans, making it expensive, annoying, or impossible to switch carriers.

Once again, this administration is demonstrating it has zero interest in serving the public. The administration acts together to serve a single person: Donald Trump. Anything that looks like it might benefit the public more than it benefits Trump is unacceptable. The man at the top considers everything to be zero sum. And that means he must always win, because anything else is just losing.

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If you're wondering what independent journalism that won't bend to White House pressure looks like, you're looking at it. On Sunday night, CBS News' newly imported "editor in chief," Bari Weiss, killed a 60 Minutes story about Trump's illegal deportations to a Salvadoran concentration camp—hours before it was set to air. Why? Because it might upset the White House. And because Weiss apparently doesn't understand how television production works, she waited so long to kill it that it still got sent to foreign partners, meaning the story she tried to bury…

Brendan Carr was dragged before Congress last week for some light questioning about all the terrible, illegal bullshit he's been up to. While the hearing mostly focused on FCC independence and Carr's failed bid to try and censor Jimmy Kimmel, it didn't touch on the other extremist nonsense Carr's been up to, including his assault on public media and destruction of consumer protection.

I guess I'm a masochist, so here we go. In my recent post about Let It Die: Inferno and the game developer's fairly minimal use of AI and machine learning platforms, I attempted to make the point that wildly stratified opinions on the use or non-use of AI was making actual nuanced conversation quite difficult. As much as I love our community and comments section -- it's where my path to writing for this site began, after all -- it really did look like some folks were going to try as hard as possible to prove me right.

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. On the morning of Thursday, July 31, James B. Milliken was enjoying a round of golf at the remote Sand Hills club in Western Nebraska when his cellphone buzzed. Milliken was still days away from taking the helm of the sprawling University of California system, but his new office was on the line with disturbing news: The Trump administration was freezing hundreds of millions of dollars of research funding at the University of California, Los Angeles, UC’s biggest campus.

You generally don't see criminal charges filed against judges at any level of the court system. If it does happen, it's used to address egregious and constant criminal activity by sitting judges. The most common path towards discipline relies on the court system itself, which allows courts to punish judges for misbehavior and, in rare cases, have them removed via internal processes.

Fourteen years ago, right after the FCC issued its order on net neutrality, Marsha Blackburn flipped out and released a video talking (misleadingly!) about how wonderful Facebook and Twitter were and how they would be destroyed if the big evil government interfered in any way with the internet. As she says “there has never been a time when a consumer needed a federal bureaucrat to intervene…”

We've noted repeatedly how right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired Bari Weiss to run CBS for a very obvious set of reasons: to coddle wealth and power, validate and amplify right wing grievance bullshit, divide and distract the electorate, and undermine real journalism. And she's doing all of those things incredibly well. Weiss' first major move was to host a town hall with…

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Imagine having all the power but none of the brains. That's the current administration, the one that behaves like a blind, enraged bull set loose in its own china shop. "We can always get more china," says the administration, shortly before realizing it really can't, thanks to tariff efforts that ensure China won't be buying from the US…

I’ve written a lot about the AOL–>AT&T–>Time Warner–>Discovery mergers simply because I think they perfectly encapsulate the pointless, destructive incompetence at the heart of modern media consolidation, and the cannibalistic nature of Wall Street’s obsession with illusory quarterly growth propped up by smoke, mirrors, and complex accounting. Ever since the original AOL Time Warner merger back in 2001, an endless wave of pointless mergers promised no limit of innovative “synergies,” but instead resulted in…

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about Trump announcing all the things he's going to spend his tariff tax revenue on: Behold, the Party of Fiscal Responsibility Corruptibility! In second place, it's Thad with a comment about what's going on with AI: Also, the problem isn’t that AI costs too much, it’s that people fucking don’t want it.

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, USA Today published its latest bogus oped against Section 230 that misrepresented the law, a district court rejected CDT's challenge of Trump's ridiculous executive order about 230, and Trump appointed an unqualified 230-hater to a top DOJ role. Lindsay Graham threatened to repeal 230 if it wasn't reformed, a prelude to the repeat of this attack happening now, while Brendan Carr was doing his own part in…