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When your CEO gets murdered and half the internet celebrates, most companies might pause and ask why do so many people hate us?" But UnitedHealth had a different response: hire more lawyers to silence the critics. The New York Times has an excellent piece by David Enrich detailing UnitedHealth's ridiculously aggressive campaign to quiet critics [...]

In the Trump administration, every political appointee is now their own personal Richard Nixon. Simply being some of the most powerful people in the world is never enough for Trump and those in his inner circle. If you can't demand complete loyalty from everyone you oversee, than what is even the point of ascending to [...]

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When Joe Biden wanted the Department of Education to forgive student loans, the Supreme Court shut him down hard. The Court spent pages in Biden v. Nebraska explaining why the Department lacked authority under the HEROES Act, demanding clear congressional authorization" for such a significant policy change. But when Donald Trump wants to dismantle the [...]

I've mentioned more than a few times that the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (2021) wound up funding a lot of very good things. The very sort of everyday abundance" a lot of high-profile pundits claimed was no longer possible under American leadership. ARPA helped shore up infrastructure, housing, and sewage upgrades across countless U.S. [...]

It's no secret that starting during the onset of the pandemic, as well as in its aftermath, the video game industry has undergone a period of consolidation. This is quite common during times of economic flux and/or turmoil, but Microsoft/Xbox appeared to go after acquisitions in something of a blitz. While Xbox gobbled up several [...]

Two recent statements from the surveillance company-oneaddressing Illinois privacy violationsand anotherdefending the company's national surveillance network-reveal a troubling pattern: when confronted by evidence of widespread abuse, Flock Safety has blamed users, downplayed harms, and doubled down on the very systems that enabled the violations in the first place. Flock's aggressive public relations campaign to salvage [...]

It is a measure of how fast the field of AI has developed in the three years since Walled Culture the book (free digital versionsavailable) was published that the issue of using copyright material for training AI systems, briefly mentioned in the book, has become one of the hottest topics in the copyright world, asnumerous [...]

The Supreme Court may have suddenly decided nationwide injunctions are bad now that they're bad for Trump, but it will need to cook up new arguments if it hopes to allow the open racism of its mass deportation program to continue in California. Trump has sent the National Guard and Marines to California to be [...]

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 [...]

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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 adelugeto [...]

With the Trump administrationopenly 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 readers probably [...]

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 & praising the god [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Techdirt has just written about how people are using Ring doorbell cameras to warn others in the area about the presence of ICE agents and the risk of possible ICE raids. That's a good example of using existing technology to monitor the increasingly widespread and brutal activities of ICE teams. But driven by a desire [...]

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Martial law still appears to be the plan. The rollout has been limited, but the wholly unnecessary deployment of military troops to California sent a message our performative president wanted to get across. Trump sent an even more explicit one days later, following up on DHS boss Kristi Noem's quasi-declaration of war on this democrat" [...]

Techdirt has always made it very clear that broadband usage caps on fixed-line broadband are bullshit. The costly and confusing restrictions serve no legitimate technical function. They don't help your ISP manage congestion." They exist simply as a way for giant companies like Comcast to nickel-and-dime captive customers in uncompetitive broadband markets. Market failure created [...]

Sheriff Christina Corpus is on the cusp of being an ex-sheriff and the first sheriff removed from office in San Mateo County via a county board vote. But her term as sheriff started a lot more promisingly. Running as a reformer, Corpus won the primary and the job, defeating Carlos Bolanos, who had definitely done [...]

Ctrl-Alt-Speech is a weekly podcast about the latest news in online speech, from Mike Masnick and Everything in Moderations 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. In this week's round-up of the latest news in online [...]

Washington State recently became the eighth U.S. state to pass new right to repair legislation making it cheaper and easier to repair technology you own. At this point, roughly one-third of Americans now live in a state where some form of right to repair law has been passed, usually with broad, bipartisan, overwhelming public support. [...]

It's been interesting to watch the current administration and its GOP backers contort themselves into logical pretzels to explain to Americans why their policies, which are clearly either steeped or tinged with racist elements, are not in fact racist. Immigration policies and practices that are conducted without such annoyances as due process are waved off [...]

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey just sent threatening letters to Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta, claiming their AI chatbots violated Missouri's consumer protection laws. The crime? When asked to rank presidents on antisemitism, some of the AIs had the temerity to suggest Donald Trump might not be great on that front. Yes, you read that [...]

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Like far too many states in the current Trump era, Oklahoma has also decided the Constitution is meaningless and that whatever the government wants, it can have. In this case, it means mandating every school classroom contain a Bible that must be taught" from, as well as expanding the concept of social studies" to include [...]

Have I mentioned lately that the U.S. no longer has functional federal consumer protection and corporate oversight thanks to Donald Trump? And how that should probably be more of a story across journalism? Last fall you might recall that the FTC created a popular new rule that barred corporations from making it annoying or difficult [...]

I've been an MLB.TV evangelist for some time now. My deep love for the game of baseball has led me to subscribe to baseball's streaming service, still probably the best in sports, for over a decade now. While the local blackouts are still a nuisance, I really do love the ability to stream almost any [...]

It's not every day you watch a company faceplant so theatrically in public, but Cloud Innovation's latest stunt deserves a slow clap. Cloud Innovation, which you'd probably never heard of unless you're neck-deep in African IP registry battles (stay tuned), just managed to make a legal play whose end result should be calling a lot [...]

I recently sat through this hour-longinterviewbetweenNew York Timesopinion columnist Ross Douthat and Peter Thiel. It was honestly a somewhat hypnotic experience for me. And on reflection, deeply disturbing. Not because Thiel said anything overtly monstrous-quite the opposite. He was thoughtful, articulate, intellectually sophisticated. He demonstrated genuine insight into technological stagnation, political decay, and civilizational risk. [...]

This week, Elon Musk's Grok AI started spewing extreme antisemitism, responding with conspiracy theories about Jewish people, and for a brief period telling people to call it MechaHitler." The incident perfectly illustrates why Alex Komoroske's manifesto about the dangers of centralized AI, which we ran less than a month ago, has been making waves. When [...]

Lawmakers seem to think they're capable of solving every perceivable social media problem via legislation. Sometimes, the intents are pure but the execution is lacking. In many more cases - especially recently - the intent is to harm social media companies with legislation, all while pretending it's about protecting free speech" or the children" or [...]

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For months, the DOJ has insisted to US courts that it has no jurisdiction over the people it rendered to Salvadoran detention facilities. But when the UN came asking, El Salvador told a very different story: these detainees are exclusively" under US jurisdiction and legal responsibility. The contradiction is so blatant it's almost insulting to [...]

Trump recently launched a wireless phone service," which as we mentioned, isn't so much a real phone service as it is a quick licensing agreement and a lazy rebranding of other services. He's also exploiting the presidency by launching a vast array of new, clumsily branded Trump home goods, including a new Trump-branded Instantpot. If [...]

Nestle certainly hasn't been shy about engaging in aggressive trademark enforcement in the past, but this one is something different. We've already covered several stories in which a person or company has attempted to trademark the name of a city for a particular market designator. Not use the name of the city in a larger [...]

In Trump's eyes, anything that doesn't make white people appear to be the saviors of the world is something that should be buried. Whatever the phrase fake news" won't make go away is subject to seemingly daily government edicts that declare any recognition of racial diversity or America's racist past (and present) to be un-American [...]

Support us on Patreon We've got one more cross-post episode for you this week! A few weeks ago, Mike joined host Aaron Ross Powell on the ReImagining Liberty podcast for a discussion that digs into the the philosophy and principles underlying the push for internet decentralization and protocols over platforms, and why this shift is [...]

The New York Times has had a rough few decades when it comes to being manipulated by bad actors. But their latest embarrassment-a complete non-story about NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani's college application to Columbia University from 2009-represents a new low in journalistic malpractice that combines hacked materials, racist sources, and a breathtaking willingness to [...]

Trump advisor/subhuman ghoul Stephen Miller wants ICE to be arresting 3,000 people a day. So far, ICE has only managed to top out at 2,200 arrests in a single day, despite going full black ops in neighborhoods and businesses, driving unmarked cars, and leaving nothing exposed on officers' bodies but their lifeless eyes. Stephen Miller [...]

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With apologies to Dorothy Thompson, whose 1941 essay in Harper's, Who Goes Nazi?" remains a worthwhile read on the cultural archetypes of who is drawn to fascism, and who would never go down such a path. It felt like it could use a modern updating, however. Update: Just after I finished writing this, it occurred [...]

However terrible telecom monopolies are in the free world, they're arguably worse in prisons. For decades,journalistsandresearchershave outlined how a select number of prison telecom giants like Securus have enjoyed a cozy, government-kickback based monopoly over prison phone and teleconferencing services, resultingsky high rates(upwards of $14 per minute at some prisons) for inmate families. Most of [...]

The conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled 6-3 in favor of upholding an age verification measure targeting adult content platforms on the internet that the state legislature of Texas adopted during the 2023 legislative session. As a quick reminder, the case isFree Speech Coalition et al. v. Paxtonand featured the parent companies of [...]

The Trump Administration's constant escalation of its mass deportation programs now means ICE, CBP, and other federal agencies must come up with thousands of arrests a day. This never had anything to do with removing criminals from the country and, even if you once believed that might be the case, an unending string of raids [...]

Both New York and Minnesota just passed laws requiring social media platforms to slap warning labels on their sites-warning labels based on zero scientific evidence, likely to be struck down as unconstitutional compelled speech, and designed solely to let politicians pretend they're protecting children" while actually making their lives worse. You'd think lawmakers would learn. [...]