Feed Items
If you’ve read about the sudden appearance of age verification across the internet in the UK and thought it would never happen in the U.S., take note: many politicians want the same or even more strict laws. As of July 1st, South Dakota and Wyoming enacted laws requiring any website that hosts any sexual content to implement age verification measures. These laws would potentially capture a broad...
So I’ve noted how Republicans are rewriting the 2021 infrastructure bill (they voted against) to ensure that billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded broadband grants wind up in the back pocket of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (and their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband ventures, Starlink and Project Kuiper).
I’ve also explained in detail why that’s a problem: these networks may be initially...
It’s no secret that most publishers (though not us!) hate ad blockers. The idea that ad blockers are illegal or “an attack on free speech” get trotted out every so often, and they’re always silly. You should have control over how your own browser on your own computer works. That’s an important freedom. And that means you should be able to install apps that protect you from potentially malicious...
Unlock a world of knowledge with a Headway Premium subscription. This exclusive deal gives you unlimited access to Headway’s massive library of 1500+ book summaries, with 30-50 new ones added monthly. Cover any topic you can imagine, from personal development and business strategies to health and wellness. It’s on sale for $60. Use the code READ20 at checkout for an additional 20% off.
Note:...
This was pretty much inevitable. While the Trump’s band of bigots struggled mightily to expel brown people from this country, the rest of his sycophants are doing everything they can to prevent non-white foreigners from entering the country.
It’s counterproductive, especially when the end goal is at least 3,000 ICE arrests per day. If you don’t let enough migrants in, you’re going to run out of...
During Trump 1.0, his FCC took at absolute hatchet to media ownership limits. Those limits, built on the back of decades of bipartisan collaboration, prohibited local broadcasters and media from growing too large, trampling smaller (and more diversely-owned) competitors underfoot. The result of their destruction has been a rise in local news deserts, a lot of right wing propaganda outlets...
One of the more frustrating things about content streaming has been how quickly we went from having a conversation about cord-cutting to the realization that all of the streaming services that enabled said cord-cutting have morphed into the very cable providers that people wanted to escape. You can see this in a variety of ways. More packaged bundles that include content people don’t actually...
In what may be the least surprising news in the world of copyright and the internet, Anthropic just agreed to settle the copyright lawsuit that everyone’s been watching, but not for the reasons most people think. This isn’t about AI training being found to infringe copyright—in fact, Anthropic won on that issue. Instead, it’s about how copyright’s broken statutory damages system can turn a narrow...
Support us on Patreon »
The goal of Bluesky and the ATProtocol, and of the push for protocols over platforms in general, has always been to see more people building their own communities in a modular fashion. One of the most interesting projects demonstrating this potential is Blacksky, created by Rudy Fraser, which started as a custom feed within Bluesky but has grown into something much bigger...
Eight months ago, those of us actually paying attention—not just scrolling outrage bait about Biden’s age or the latest campus controversy, but genuinely tracking the systematic preparation for authoritarian rule—warned that Trump represented an existential threat to democratic governance. We were diagnosed with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” The reasonable people explained, with infinite patience...