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Persuasion plays a key role in society. Whether it is political or financial decisions, workplace or family choices, or simply reading a book or article (like this one), often someone is trying to persuade someone else to agree with them, possibly by changing their mind. This raises an interesting question: if persuasion is such an [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries. To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes [...]

We all know this administration is more than willing to reward red" states and punish blue" states. There will always be an administration official on hand to claim the incredibly transparent vindictiveness of this administration is actually just regular government business devoid of animus. No one believes these officials, of course. And the officials mouthing [...]

Back in December we called out Google for filing a DMCA 1201 lawsuit over companies scraping Google's results. Almost everything about the lawsuit seemed problematic, not the least of which is that Google's entire business was built on scraping the web. To sue another company for scraping Google just felt... obnoxious. And now a judge [...]

ExamsDigest isn't just another study tool-it's your ultimate certification training partner. With over 3,000 exam simulators and more than 50,000 practice questions across 70+ learning paths, this platform is designed to help you train the way you'll be tested. Whether you're diving into IT for the first time or leveling up in cloud, cybersecurity, networking, [...]

Atlanta, Georgia's attempt to erect a law enforcement officer training center in Atlanta was met by months of concerted protests. As the months stretched into years (the center was announced in 2021 but did not complete construction until 2025), opposition efforts ranged from peaceful protests to heated exchanges during public comment sessions to attacks on [...]

Earlier this year the Trump administration decided to illegally dismantle the 2021 Digital Equity Act, which was intended to help push internet access into long-neglected parts of the U.S. The Act took very vague aim at digital redlining, or the longstanding practice by telecom giants of refusing to upgrade (or at times even timely repair) [...]

This week, both top comments on the insightful side come in response to our post about the attempted murder charges that were dropped after bystander recordings exposed the lies of ICE officers. First, it's Citizen with a reminder that the word of law enforcement officers shouldn't be trusted: In second place, it's Pixelation with a [...]

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Stop me if you've heard this one: Federal judges in the Western District of Washington had unanimously appointed Roger Rogoff to be the Justice Department's top official there, filling a vacancy that the president has never addressed. But the Trump administration has largely defied attempts by federal judges to fill vacancies, leading to Mr. Rogoff's [...]

Just last week we had the story of the Trump DOJ issuing very questionable subpoenas of NY Times journalists while trying to track down who leaked information to those reporters regarding the potentially catastrophic security flaws of the gift" 747 plane he received from Qatar. As we noted in that original post, this appeared to [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

Will Elon Musk actually face legal consequences for illegally paying voters in an attempt to interfere in an election? We're at least one step closer to finding out. Back during the 2024 Presidential election, he got away with offering $1 million to a random" (not actually random) voter who would sign his petition in an [...]

Learn Raspberry Pi and start building Amazon Alexa projects with The Complete Raspberry Pi and Alexa A-Z Bundle. Catered for all levels, these project-based courses will get you up and running with the basics of Pi, before escalating to full projects. Before you know it, you'll be building a gaming system to play old Nintendo, [...]

No punishment is too vindictive. No cruelty is too small. The administration that is openly seeking to create a white Christian nationalist autocracy will do whatever it can to expel as many non-white people from this nation as possible. Trump and his cabinet members constantly claim the country has been overrun by dangerous foreign migrants, [...]

Earlier this year FCC boss Brendan Carr launched a series of fake investigations into ABC because the network (1) hosted Democratic Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico on The View, (2) aired comedians who made fun of the president and his wife, and (3) occasionally engaged in journalism critical of Trump corruption. The details of these [...]

If you're not a particular kind of sports fan, a certain trademark dispute may have escaped your attention. The Chicago Bears quarterback is Caleb Williams and he's pretty great. He also has acquired a nickname: Iceman." This nickname has become so associated with him that it is even referenced on Williams' appearance on the cover [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Frank Ssekamwa says the United States presented his country with an impossible choice. If it accepted the terms of a new health agreement, Uganda would have to give the U.S. access to the data of millions of his fellow citizens - a decision he worries would [...]

In 1978, the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that regulates unfair or deceptive advertising, proposed limiting TV ads for sugary foods on programs targeted at children. The Washington Post's editorial board scoffed that the plan would turn the agency into a great national nanny." Congress clipped the agency's wings, and kidvid" entered history as a [...]

We spent a few years pointing out the ridiculousness of the whole TikTok ban" moral panic, and the fact that all of the concerns" magically melted away after Trump became president and then effectively gifted a controlling stake to some of his friends should raise some pretty big questions. However, most people seem to have [...]

The Modern No-Code Creator Bundle is an extensive online curriculum specifically developed to enable individuals to construct professional websites, applications & automated workflows without the necessity of writing any code. It has five courses, covering leading no-code platforms and tools like ChatGPT, Mendix, and Tabnine. It is ideally suited for novices and non-technical professionals, empowering [...]

The Trump administration's continual trend towards maximum awfulness means that every report seems to be I've got bad news and I've got worse news." What was already bad has become even worse now that more of the administration's actions have been exposed during court proceedings. Last July, the Trump administration unilaterally decided ICE should have [...]

Last month I wrote a feature for The Verge exploring how Republicans had hijacked the Biden-era infrastructure bill to redirect billions of dollars away from next-generation fiber, and instead funnel it into the pockets of billionaires Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos - in exchange for congested, expensive, satellite broadband service they'd already planned to deploy. [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. Concerns surrounding young people's screen time are widespread. Australia became the first country toban social media for users under 16in December 2025, andDenmark,Franceand the U.K.have since announced similar restrictions to begin this year. In the U.S., as of mid-2026, more than 30 [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

We've written in the past that people online often get way too excited about theoretical pending discovery" in frivolous lawsuits filed by bad actors. Because while there are certainly a few cases where (1) a frivolous case even reaches discovery and (2) some elements of that discovery are revealed to the public, in the vast [...]

You'd think that watching multiple lawyers get caught red-handed using AI to file briefs full of made-up citations would cause everyone in the legal profession - especially prosecutors - to double-check their own. You would, of course, be wrong. And the latest offender is not just some random lawyer. It's the DOJ itself, which cited [...]

StreamSkill has combined seven of their best Office 2021/365 courses to create this awesome Ultimate Microsoft Office 2021/365 Bundle. Whether you're a student, an office professional, a business owner, a freelancer, or just someone who wants to get started with the most widely used Microsoft programs, this course bundle is for you. Join now and [...]

Former DHS head Kristi Noem got permanently sidelined for being unable to do two impossible things at once: be the anti-migrant hardliner Trump appointed her to be and massage the message when shit went sideways. Two murders in less than a month in Minneapolis may have made plenty of administration figures secretly happy, but once [...]

You might recall how the press and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers suffered a four-year embolism about the purported privacy and national security threat of TikTok, before fixing" the problem by ultimately offloading TikTok to Trump's billionaire friends. You know, the exact sort of authoritarian-friendly people keen on doing everything critics had previously accused ByteDance [...]

Walled Culture the book (digital versions available free) is about the incompatibility of the traditional copyright system with the digital world, and its failure to reward creators fairly. That raises the question of what might replace it, and the book's last chapter offers one solution in the form oftrue fans. These are people who love [...]

Reversing course, Flock Safety-the surveillance technology vendor most known for its extensive network ofautomated license plate readers-has announcedthat it will end a pilot for itsacoustic gunshot detection devicesto identify signs of human distress." In October 2025,EFF warned the publicthat Flock was rolling out a new feature called Distress Detection" that would be deployed through their [...]

You may recall that at the end of last year and very beginning of this year there was a big story over Elon Musk's LLM tool Grok being willing to produce non-consensual images of people (including children) in bikinis or otherwise stripped down in objectifying ways. Elon played into and promoted this trend" at one [...]

The Trump administration continues to pretend migrants don't have due process rights. It does this despite racking up nearly 10,000 rulings to the contrary - losing in roughly 90% of the petitions brought by ICE detainees. While the Fifth Circuit continues to play coy about the 14th Amendment's existence, the rest of nation's courts have [...]

Welcome to the world of seamless browsing with AdGuard Personal or Family plans. This intuitive ad blocker offers an unparalleled web experience, powered by its three core features: an advanced ad-blocking module, a comprehensive privacy protection tool, and a robust parental control system. Say goodbye to annoying banners, intrusive pop-ups, and disruptive video ads as [...]

Earlier this year Border Czar" Tom Homan, with an apparently straight face, told the media that if Democrats didn't stop calling ICE murderers for the murders they committed, then they would have no choice but to murder more people. A few weeks later, when ICE did murder another person, he doubled down and blamed people [...]

Paramount has been forced to pause consummation of its controversial $111 billion merger with Warner Brothers after a state antitrust lawsuit resulted in the courts granting a 14-day restraining order. There's a not insubstantial chance that the pause could prove fatal for the deal. California and eleven other states last week filed an antitrust lawsuit [...]

There is no shortage of examples of Major League Baseball attempting to wield overly broad trademarks its obtained to bully others, nor examples of MLB attempting to stretch its trademark rights much further than they go. MLB opposed a trademark for a Brooklyn burger joint on behalf of the Dodgers, a team that hadn't played [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. Youth sports have a significant impact on the development of all children. Sports provide children opportunities to build their social skills and confidence, as well as improve their sense of belonging and physical fitness. What happens to these spaces when adults are [...]

Over the last few months especially, there has been renewed attention to the sheer scale of Donald Trump's ability to profit off the presidency. The efforts to do so only become more brazen every week. Leaving aside the crypto business that he got a ton of people to fund, the free airplane from a foreign [...]

Record law enforcement officers whenever you can. Sure, they'll hate it, but it helps all the people they seek to do harm to. Last summer, recordings and other evidence undercut a lot of the administration's attempts to convert First Amendment activity into criminal charges. Prosecutors who dropped cases after watching recordings or talking directly to [...]

Equipped with a 1.2mm fine tip, the Digi Pen for iPads provides durability, sensitivity, and pixel precision. No lagging, no skips, no scratches. Perfect for drawing, sketching, painting, and writing. With palm rejection technology, you can use it directly without wearing gloves and write on the screen as if you're writing on paper. You can [...]

We - and plenty of others - have been warning that the global rush to mandate age verification wouldn't stop at let's make sure kids can't see porn" or even just keep kids off of social media." It would inevitably expand into treating anonymity and privacy tools themselves as the enemy. Australia is now proving [...]

Brendan Carr and the Trump FCC are finalizing plans to illegally eliminate what's left of the country's already barely functional media consolidation limits; a specific gift to Trump-friendly right wing broadcasters that are hoping to monopolize what's left of local U.S. broadcast news so they can more efficiently spread propaganda and kiss the president's ass. [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a simple comment about the judicial smackdown of Trump's IRS settlement: Bar referrals. Finally. In second place, it's Stephen T. Stone with a comment about J. K. Rowling threatening to sue Amnesty International: Transphoba destroys an otherwise normal person from the inside [...]

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I don't think it's terribly controversial to say that this second Trump administration has never shown much concern for the Hatch Act. If you're not familiar with that particular law, it makes it illegal for most of the members of the executive branch of the federal government, and some state representatives, to engage in partisan [...]

This article first appeared on The Texas Tribune. Two weeks before this year's primary elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud. Free and fair elections are a cornerstone of a thriving republic, and with the authority granted [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

JK Rowling has spoken about how she wrote the first Harry Potter book while she was employed at Amnesty International and how much that experience influenced her writing, and how she learned the power of human empathy" from working there. Rowling was also, you'll recall, one of the high profile signers of the infamous Harper's [...]