The rise of AI is bringing a bunch of fascinating legal questions that are harder to answer than many expect. The latest one: who is liable if an agentic system running on its own hacks someone? That’s the question a bunch of people have been asking this past week in the wake of multiple stories […]

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The Trump administration has been shut down more than 10,000 times by federal courts over its novel interpretation of the law — one it claims allows it to indefinitely detain migrants without giving them a bond hearing. Some of those 10,000 adverse decisions have been significant, with implications that stretch far beyond single cases or […]

Last month we reported how Meta had decided to try and sloppily nickel-and-dime its AI glasses customers. More specifically, the company decided it would be a good idea to introduce new “rate limits” to smart glasses usage, forcing customers to pony up a $20 per month Meta One Premium subscription if they didn’t want their glasses’ “conversation […]

This post is going to come with something of a warning label. RFK Jr. went on CNN this past weekend for an interview with Dana Bash. I’m going to post the entirety of that interview immediately below. Before you watch it, get yourself a bib, or some paper towels, or wrap yourself in one of […]

Early in the media law and ethics course I teach, as I shift gears from the ethics section to the law and core free speech issues, I try to build a foundation by introducing the many kinds of legal issues they may face as communicators. By this time, we have already discussed social media platforms […]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The State Department on July 16, 2026, hosted what officials billed as a ministerial on the resurgence of left-wing political terrorism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio invited representatives from more than 60 countries to Washington to hear an argument that many of them appear not to […]

For much of Techdirt’s nearly three decades in existence we’ve covered attacks on the media by the rich and powerful. And sometimes we’ve been on the receiving end of such attacks ourselves. But I have never seen or heard of anything quite as extreme as what happened to Ina and David Steiner, proprietors of the […]

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I don’t know but when your best argument is “we got locked out of our accounts for supporting violent insurrectionists,” maybe it’s time to stop arguing. But if there’s anything Trump likes, it’s being a plaintiff in a lawsuit. So, that’s exactly what the Trump Organization argued, in hopes of pressuring Capital One into a […]

It’s hard to not have noticed that a key enabler of U.S. authoritarianism was our consolidated corporate media, which (with scattered exception) was more than happy to throw the entirety of journalistic integrity in the toilet for a chance to please a mad, idiot king. In large part because our press is increasingly owned by […]

Just a few weeks ago, Sony announced that it would stop producing games on physical media starting in 2028 and a very loud portion of Sony’s customers lost their freaking minds. And, in this writer’s opinion, for very good reason. Having no physical media option for your games is going to make game preservation efforts […]

Last week we wrote about how Elon Musk’s xAI had filed a lawsuit to attempt to block Minnesota’s anti-nudify app law. As we tried to explain, even if you (reasonably, understandably) dislike both Elon and “nudify” apps, there were real problems with the Minnesota law. In particular, it was not narrowly tailored to just target […]

The Senate Commerce Committee is set to consider S. 737, the SCREEN Act, a sweeping age-verification bill that would require online services to verify users’ ages before they can access any sexually explicit content. If this bill passes, it will force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before they […]

Hail to the Chief. Our country is being run by paranoid conspiracy theorist megalomaniac who openly wishes to kick-start America’s first autocracy. Nothing that goes wrong is ever the president’s fault. It’s always the fault of officials with insufficient loyalty or the criminal acts of people out to get him. Trump decided the Lincoln Reflecting […]

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Sometimes it helps to just write out everything that happened leading up to a situation so we don’t lose sight of just how ridiculous it is. I mean, would you believe that a President would sue his own IRS for something that happened under his own watch and did him no harm, demand $10 billion, […]

Ideally, I think it makes sense to open up the U.S. market to Chinese goods (AI, EVs, robots), but have functional and well-funded regulators that policy all labor, competition, environmental, privacy, and consumer rights abuses. But big companies don’t much like that because it would boost competition and accountability, eroding quarterly revenues. So instead we […]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to the protestor who is charged with destroying property for giving CBP agents the “duress mode” password to wipe his phone. In first place, it’s an anonymous comment extending our characterization of what the DOJ is doing here: While simultaneously pushing to institute […]

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RFK Jr. has a lot on his plate at the moment as the head of HHS. America is currently dealing with a record breaking outbreak of the measles, for instance. His agency has had a very hard time getting people confirmed for key roles. There’s that whole cyclosporiasis thing going around, which you’ll know you’ve […]

On a laptop screen in a dimly lit tent near the Donetsk front, a Ukrainian drone team steers its aircraft into the turret of a Russian T-72 and glimpses the start of an explosion before the picture dissolves into static. The strike is uploaded, verified, and scored against the point value assigned to the tank. […]

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 […]

This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license. Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms. From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, […]

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Donald Trump swore he could turn the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool into something he could use to bask in his own reflected glory. Instead, it turned out to be everything we expect from Trump: braggadocio followed by abject failure. Trump hired some guys he used to do some stuff to his personal pool(s) back in […]

Earlier this week we noted how the Trump administration’s unpopular ban on Chinese drones had become a crony capitalist mess, with Brendan Carr and his FCC struggling to fine or ban companies for violations. The ban is a stupid, protectionist mess that has far more to do with coddling the president’s sons’ drone investments than […]

I will admit it’s always a special kind of fun when a topic we cover here at Techdirt gets the John Oliver treatment. He and his writing team generally gets things right, which helps. And I’m not saying that Oliver and his crew are definitely Techdirt readers, but, well, hi John and crew! Readers here […]

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. This year, Wikipedia is celebrating 25 years as the Internet’s encyclopedia that anyone can edit. In its first decade, the quirky experiment for passionate nerds exploded in popularity. It became a ubiquitous information resource and a homework helper for schoolkids, much to the dismay of skeptical […]

It’s not that AI can’t be useful or helpful in certain contexts. And this is certainly not to say AI can’t take over repetitive tasks to allow people to focus on things that need more of human touch. The problem with AI isn’t necessarily AI itself. It’s that far too many tech companies are pitching […]