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Last week, Elon Musk’s Grok AI started spewing extreme antisemitism, calling itself “MechaHitler” and pushing conspiracy theories about Jewish people. But that wasn’t the most revealing part of the story.
The real smoking gun came courtesy of AI researcher Simon Willison, who discovered something far more insidious: when you ask Grok controversial questions, it quietly searches X for Elon Musk’s...
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That an agency overseen by former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem would fail to handle flooding capably shouldn’t come as a surprise. That sort of thing is directly on brand for Noem, who did this to her own state because she was trying to score points with (then) ex-president Donald Trump.
Severe weather brought a deluge to southeast South Dakota recently and exposed Gov. Kristi Noem’s...
With the Trump administration openly destroying whatever is left of U.S. federal corporate oversight, regulatory independence, and consumer protection standards, Verizon sees an opportunity. It’s asking the Trump FCC to roll back longstanding phone unlocking requirements, something consumer groups say will drag America back to the dark ages of cell phone enshittification.
Longtime Techdirt...
This week, both our top winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about DOGE and the disaster in Texas. In first place, it’s That Anonymous Coward with a reaction to the government’s response:
Devoting a large portion of a press conference to patting themselves on the back...
Five Years Ago
This week in 2020, we looked at the encryption dilemma created by the EARN IT Act, while a federal case showed that cops already had plenty of options when dealing with device encryption. There was pushback against the Trump administration’s attempt to corrupt the Open Technology Fund, the FCC’s assault on a low-income broadband program was making the COVID-19 crisis worse, and we...
This isn’t the first state court to reach this conclusion, but so few courts bother to examine the science-y sounding stuff cops trot out as “evidence” that this decision is worth noting.
There’s no shortage of junk science that has been (and continues to be) treated as actual science during testimony, ranging from the DNA “gold standard” to seriously weird shit like “I can identify a suspect by...
Two weeks ago the Supreme Court rejected an effort by a dodgy right wing activists to destroy an $8 billion FCC program that connects poor and rural communities to the internet. The plaintiff in the case, a fake right wing “consumer group,” had tried to argue that the bipartisan subsidy (the Universal Service Fund, or USF) was an “illegal tax” the FCC lacked the authority to charge. They lost the...
There is an epidemic of magical thinking. An unwillingness to confront reality. Because reality is scary.
This affliction cuts across all ideological lines, manifesting in different forms but serving the same function: allowing us to avoid the difficult truths about what it will actually take to preserve human dignity, meaning, and freedom in the face of forces designed to eliminate all three.
We...
We haven’t talked about the numbers in America’s measles outbreak in a couple of months, but that certainly doesn’t mean the problem has gone away. It was back in April that we wrote about how the numbers were on pace to eclipse the outbreak in 2019, which was largely driven by unvaccinated religious groups in New York State, in large part due to both the long-term advocacy against vaccination by...