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Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the RIAA tossed out a bogus DMCA claim to get a YouTube downloading tool pulled from Github, and was still flooding Twitch with takedowns that the company was responding to by freaking out and courting a lot of outrage from the users it failed to defend. Meanwhile, YouTuber [...]

Both Google and Apple are cramming new AI features into their phones and other devices, and neither company has offered clear ways to control which apps those AI systems can access. Recent issues around WhatsApp on both Android and iPhone demonstrate how these interactions can go sideways, risking revealing chat conversations beyond what you intend. [...]

ICE can generate multiple horrible stories a day but it still can't seem to find enough brown people to deport daily to satisfy White House advisor Stephen Miller's demands for 3,000 arrests per day. Trump and the GOP threw a lot of money at this problem with the Big Beautiful Bill. A lot of money: [...]

When it comes to RFK Jr., I tend not to find much humor in the chaos he creates. The man's work involves American health and illness, life and death, so it's just generally not funny. And that holds true to Kennedy's wielding of incomplete, inaccurate, and unsettled science to go before all of America and [...]

As anyone who has read Techdirt for any length of time knows full well, there's been a years-long campaign to demonize kids and social media. Never mind that actual experts have said the data doesn't support the claims of inherent harm, politicians around the globe are rushing to ban kids from social media as fast [...]

The Ultimate Unity Game Development Bundle has 4 courses are designed to designed to teach about game dev and how to create your own games using the Unity engine. You'll learn about the fundamentals of C# programming, 2D and 3D game development, mobile game development, how to build amazing cutscenes, and more. It's on sale [...]

It surprises absolutely no one that the Trump administration lies. Trump himself has been lying constantly ever since his first spin in the resolute desk chair. His new administration is right there with him this time around, ensuring we see nothing but a flood of falsehoods all the time. The administration knows it's lying. We [...]

While AI" certainly has some useful applications, a lot of the folks in charge of the trajectory of LLMs clearly want to use it to build a giant, badly automated ouroboros of lazy internet slop that shits out ad money without the need for pesky labor. You see this most profoundly in media, where a [...]

As of this moment, the National Guard is indefinitely prevented from deploying within the Chicagoland area. The court order was issued pending the Supreme Court's decision to rule on the matter. And because this administration is a walking, talking clown show, the information that SCOTUS is getting on the matter is hilariously stratified depending on [...]

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 [...]

Going forward, the only thing you'll hear reported from the Pentagon will be delivered by subservient, right-wing stenographers. The War Department has its own Ministry of Truth, staffed by people whose organizations have seen their fortunes rise along with Trump's. The bootlicking was always there. The only change is that it's now officially state-sanctioned. The [...]

A wave of proposed social media bans for young people has swept the globe recently, fuelled by mounting concern about the apparent harm the likes of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat can cause to vulnerable minds. Australia was the first toannounce restrictionson people under 16 having a social media account. New Zealand maysoon follow, and Denmark's [...]

A couple weeks ago, as millions of Americans took to the streets in what may have been the largest single day of protest in U.S. history, the President of the United States responded by... posting a video of himself literally dumping shit on citizens. Not a policy response. Not an attempt at dialogue. Not even [...]

The 2025 AI Super Skills Bundle has 8 courses to help you get familiar with how to use some of the latest and coolest artificial intelligence tools out there. Courses cover ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, Leonardo AI, Quillbot, and more. It's on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. [...]

Like far too many people in the Trump administration - including the 79-year-old child currently sitting in the Oval Office - Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth thinks he's owed respect simply because of the position he holds. While a certain amount of deference is expected when you're the boss, it's much more difficult to earn [...]

As promised, the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr this week voted to begin dismantling rules requiring that your ISP offer clear and transparent details on the cost and limitations of your broadband connection. The rules, originally mandated by Congress as part of the infrastructure bill, required that ISPs affix a sort of nutrition label" to [...]

It's sort of funny in a way to see how ownership culture has specifically invaded the realm of the culinary arts. If ever there was a place for cultural fusion and an openness culture, it surely should be in cooking. And, yet, we have seen many instances of businesses and/or people attempting to trademark generic [...]

You're just a commodity in Trump's marketplace of horrific ideas. Sure, criminal informants are seldom the trustworthiest of people, what with their stay-out-of-jail free cards being reliant on their steady production of evidence against other people. But the government does make promises to criminal informants that it's expected to keep, not only to fulfill its [...]

It was just last month that Brett Kavanaugh gave his explanation for why it was perfectly okay for Homeland Security goons to profile brown people and detain them based on nothing more than the color of their skin. While his cowardly colleagues in the majority on that shadow docket decision refused to explain their thinking, [...]

There are two big reasons why the lawsuit the State of Arizona and Adelita Grijalva has brought against the House of Representatives to force Grijalva to be sworn in ultimately might not succeed: (A) because even if it seems to succeed initially it's likely to end up before this slate of Supreme Court justices, whose [...]

For the first time in ten months of near-total congressional capitulation to Trump, five Republican Senators broke ranks on Tuesday, siding with Democrats to block the nonsense tariffs Trump unilaterally declared on Brazil as punishment for their treatment of Trump buddy Jair Bolsonaro. The US Senate on Tuesday approved a measure that would terminate Donald [...]

Sam's Club is a membership warehouse club, a limited-item business model that offers members quality products at an exceptional value unmatched by traditional retail. From groceries and kitchen supplies to electronics and furniture, Sam's Club has great deals on the items you want! By redeeming and signing up as a member, you'll be paying just [...]

If there was anyone with any spine, honesty, or morality in the Trump administration, these astounding gaffes would have been headed off. But there's no one left with any of these traits in the White House, so we get the sort of thing we're now seeing with increasing frequency: Trump (deliberately or not) forgetting who [...]

Thanks to the government shutdown, federal employees are stuck sitting in long food bank lines just to survive. While President Trump is destroying the White House east wing to install a ballroom nobody asked for. Without any of the sort of approvals or security clearances you'd need to do it properly. Trump falsely claims to [...]

The whole blame video games for everything" theme seems to be resurfacing more and more these days. It's a bit strange, as I honestly thought that this bizarre reflex would be waning as each new generation that increasingly grew up with video games came to be adults. But apparently this needs to be reiterated: law [...]

I'm not saying this unholy matrimony wouldn't have occurred under any other regime, but it's definitely the sort of thing that plays well with the Oval Office while it's housing Donald Trump. Both Flock Safety and Ring have weathered plenty of negative press, largely because they were doing the sort of thing they're going back [...]

Support us on Patreon It was nearly 400 episodes ago when Catherine Bracy joined the podcast for a two part discussion (one, two) to talk about Silicon Valley culture and what investors are willing to fund. Now, more than a decade later, Catherine has released a new book, World Eaters: How Venture Capital Is Cannibalizing [...]

The US attended the UN Cybercrime Treaty signing ceremony in Hanoi this weekend, where 72 countries signed on to a Russia-backed framework for global surveillance cooperation. Whether the US actually puts pen to paper (and all the reporting on this is kind of cagey) is almost beside the point-by showing up and legitimizing the proceeding, [...]

Bari Weiss walked into60 Minutesandasked the staff: Why does the country think you're biased?" The question stunned them into awkward silence. And it should have-not because it caught them off guard, but because it reveals everything wrong with what passes for journalistic sophistication in our moment. Let's be precise about what Weiss is doing. She's [...]

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Gregory Bovino probably only answers to two people. The first person would be himself. If he wants to do it, he does it, no matter what the actual chain of command is. On the morning of Jan. 7, Jesus Ramirez and other day laborers huddled in a Home Depot parking lot in Bakersfield, California, hoping [...]

Whether it's Jeff Bezos lobotomizing the Washington Post, Elon Musk turning Twitter into a far right propaganda mill, or Larry Ellison buying CBS, CNN, and TikTok, the country's shittiest right wing billionaires aren't being subtle about their quest to dominate what's left of U.S. media. And Trump's FCC is paving the way by destroying whatever [...]

I very much promise that you don't need to know about, or even care about, American football in any way for this post. We should all know at this point that the blame video games" crowd has not gotten any smaller recently and that video games are blamed for just about everything you can think [...]

In a further sign of where the generative AI world is heading, OpenAI has launched ChatGPT Atlas, a new web browser built with ChatGPT at its core." It's not the first to do something like this: earlier browsers incorporating varying degrees of AI include Microsoft Edge (with Copilot), Opera (with Aria), Brave (with Leo), The [...]

Be the Duterte you want to see in the world, I guess. That's the new line from Donald Trump, the guy who once told supporters he could personally commit murder and he wouldn't lose any supporters. He said that last time. He's president again, so apparently it's time to see if this adage holds up. [...]

Mike Brock's piece on Sequoia Capital last week laid out a pretty damning case study: a well-respected COO complains about a partner's Islamophobic posts, senior leadership invokes institutional neutrality" and declines to act, she resigns, he stays because he made them billions on SpaceX. Brock correctly calls this out as a choice, not neutrality-a calculation [...]

Become a language expert with a Babbel Language Learning subscription. With the app, you can use Babbel on desktop and mobile, and your progress is synchronized across devices. Want to practice where you won't have Wi-Fi? Download lessons before you head out, and you'll be good to go. However you choose to access your 10K+ [...]

A lot of GOP politicians align themselves with Christianity, especially the offshoot that believes the richer you are, the more God loves you. (That it tends to dovetail nicely with white Christian nationalism is just a bonus in these Trumpian times.) But somehow they never seem to be able to spend a dime of their [...]

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector isfalling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless growth for growth's sake" megamergers, imposing bottomless price hikes and newannoying restrictions, undermining labor, and cutting corners on product quality in a [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is danderbandit with a comment about Trump's assertions regarding the Insurrection Act: 50%? I don't think so! I'm allowed as you know as president, like 50% of the presidents have used the Insurrection Act." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_invocations_of_the_Insurrection_Act#:~:text=The%20act%20has%20been%20invoked,the%201992%20Los%20Angeles%20riots. Per that article, the Insurrection Act has been invoked 31 [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, hypocrisy was on full display as the GOP went from whining about net neutrality to supporting Trump's attack on social media (which the FCC was too afraid to go on record in support of while also rejecting its own legal arguments about net neutrality), and from defanging the [...]

Way back in Trump's first term, back when he was still claiming he was going to build some enormous border wall and get Mexico to pay for it (neither happened), the lovely people over at Cards Against Humanity bought a parcel of land along the boarder with the intention of taking every possible action to [...]

Donald Trump just cut off all trade negotiations with Canada because an Ontario ad campaign quoted Ronald Reagan accurately. The quotes are real. The context is accurate. But Trump called them fake" and fraudulent," and the Reagan Foundation-the institution literally tasked with preserving Reagan's legacy-backed him up by lying about what their own guy said [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stormed through Santa Ana, California, in June, panicked calls flooded into the city's emergency response system. Recordings of those calls, obtained by ProPublica, captured some of the terror residents felt as they watched masked men ambush people and force them [...]

On Tuesday, I wrote about how we were upgrading our daily email newsletter-the one we've had for decades but never actually promoted. Thousands of you had signed up just by spotting the little email icon. We figured more might be interested if we actually talked about it. We'd upgraded the tech, written a whole post [...]

When Reddit sued data scraper" companies and AI firm Perplexity earlier this week, I assumed it was another predictable skirmish over AI training data-the kind of case we've been tracking as companies try to wall off the open internet and set up toll booths. But reading the actual complaint made it clear this is something [...]

This 3-in-1 Magnetic Wireless Charging Pad integrates three charging modules for cell phones, headphones, and watches-a maximum power of 15W for cell phone charging, 5W for Airpods charging, and 2.5W for Apple Watch charging. Charge three devices at the same time, conveniently and efficiently. To add more, this charging pad can be folded and used [...]

Earlier this year, Donald Trump declared (without facts in evidence) that Chicago was a crime-ridden hellhole that could only be saved by sending in the literal troops. This happened during a year which has been one of the safest (in terms of crime rates) in Chicago's recent history. And, of course, actual crime rates were [...]

U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only to those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disasterwas the poster child [...]

Several years ago, DC Comics opposed the trademark sought by Unilever for the term Wonder Mum" with the UKIPO over its trademarks for Wonder Woman". Now, DC Comics is notoriously draconian when it comes to policing its IP, trademarks included, but this one was fairly ridiculous, as the UKIPO pointed out. There is no actual [...]