Here we go again. Late last year we talked about how revisions Japan made to copyright law within the country, predominantly as a gift to the manga and anime industries, was resulting in some absurd arrests. Specifically, the law was amended to pull copyright issues from the civil realm and into a criminal offense, which is combined with copyright law in Japan being overly protective to begin...
Hamilton Vagi, head of Papua New Guinea’s National Cyber Security Centre, apparently never learned the first rule of trying to bury embarrassing information: threatening journalists just makes them dig in harder. And quite often leads to Streisanding the very information you were hoping would go away.
Back in February, DDoSecrets published around a million emails from Papua New Guinea’s Mineral...
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In something of a followup to our last episode about Elon Musk’s playbook, today we’re digging deeper into the comparison between Washington and Silicon Valley and what it tells us about DOGE. Johns Hopkins International Affairs professor Henry Farrell has been looking specifically at the concept of “blitzscaling”, and this week he joins us on the podcast to talk about how...
For much of the 20th century, young Americans were seen as free speech’s fiercest defenders. But now, young Americans are growing more skeptical of free speech.
According to a March 2025 report by The Future of Free Speech, a nonpartisan think tank where I am executive director, support among 18- to 34-year-olds for allowing controversial or offensive speech has dropped sharply in recent years....
When five Supreme Court Justices recuse themselves from a single case, that’s news. When they do it because most of them have book deals with the same publisher, that’s potentially a problem.
Last week’s Monday order list included this unusual admission: five Justices recused from Baker v. Coates, a silly plagiarism case involving Ta-Nehisi Coates (that both lower courts dismissed). The reason?...
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Note: The...
Earlier this month, the federal government — multiple wings of it — went apeshit when dealing with routine oversight of ICE detention facilities. Three New Jersey Congressional reps (of the federal variety) made an unannounced visit to inspect an ICE detention center run by inappropriately gleeful private prison contractor, GeoGroup.
As the Congressional reps tried to carry out their completely...
Last year Trumplicans killed a popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) was, unsurprisingly, very popular, with more than 23 million Americans benefitting at its peak.
At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason the program was killed, of course, was that the ACP...
This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about the head of ICE saying journalists should stop asking questions about ICE officers. In first place, it’s Justinfinity with a comment about the fear of officers being targeted:
That’s especially wild when held up next to the very common justification for our loose gun laws: “only a good guy with a gun can stop a...
This may seem like the sort of statement usually delivered by an overblown narrator as rockets and lasers go zooming* by, but here goes: In the world of journalism, the future is now! Granted, it's the kind of future that often makes waves in the present and raises at least as many questions as it answers, but if you wanted a bright, problem-free future, you'd have to travel back to the...