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Maybe this won’t actually mean anything when all is said and done. Maybe what we’re seeing here is the last dying breaths of a democracy as its current owners sell it off for parts and consolidate their power. But maybe it’s the other thing: the checks and balances putting down as much damaging stuff on the permanent record that it may head off the collapse of the republic and provide plenty of...
Two headlines walked into a UK courtroom: the BBC says “Wikipedia loses challenge,” while the Guardian says “Wikipedia can challenge if the strictest rules apply.” Annoyingly, both are true—and that split-screen is a perfect microcosm of what’s wrong with the UK’s Online Safety Act.
The core issue is whether or not Wikipedia would be considered a “Category 1” service, which, while size-gated like...
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It’s no surprise that Donald Trump thinks El Salvador president Nayib Bukele is a fun hang. After all, Bukele has already referred to himself as the world’s “coolest dictator” — two descriptors Trump definitely aspires to. (Although he’ll take the latter in the lieu of the former…)
Bukele — the recent recipient of (apparently illegal) federal payments in exchange for opening up his torture prison...
The sort of executives who fail upward into positions of prominence at major media and streaming companies are all out of original ideas. So as the Wall Street pressure for impossible, perpetual quarterly growth mounts, they’ve increasingly resorted to the same tactics we’ve long seen at major shitty cable companies like Comcast.
For streaming video that has meant a lot of pointless mergers (and...
This past Friday, August 8th, Patrick Joseph White allegedly opened fire on the CDC campus in Atlanta, killing a police officer while expending nearly 200 shots that sprayed the office buildings. This being America, this news in and of itself is not particularly compelling. We do mass shootings and attempted mass shootings better than anyone else in the world, after all. USA! USA!
But the...
“Hysterical.” “Alarmist.” “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” “He’ll be constrained by institutions.” “There are adults in the room.” “You’re overreacting.” “The generals won’t let him.” “Stop being so dramatic.”
Every single person who said we were being hysterical about Trump being an existential threat should be forced to explain how the President seizing control of the capital’s police force and...
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One of the most troubling things about this era in American history is the number of institutions that have caved to Trump’s bullying and given him what he wants, especially when it comes to media organizations. The folks over at the non-profit Free Press have done a lot of research and put together the new Media Capitulation Index, which aims to track and dissect this...
Amidst the current batch of child safety bills in Congress, a familiar name appears: the STOP CSAM Act. It was previously introduced in 2023, when I wrote about the threat the bill posed to the availability of strong encryption and consequently to digital privacy in the post-Roe v. Wade era. Those problems endure in the 2025 version (which has passed out of committee), as explained by the EFF,...
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