Techdirt

As we mentioned previously, the Stop Killing Games movement has come to America and there is currently an effort to get some legislation based on the movement's goals on the books in California. The movement hit a snag recently when the written version of the bill failed to make it out of committee on a [...]

Last week marks four years sinceDobbs v. Jackson Women's Health OrganizationoverturnedRoe v. Wade's constitutional protections for people seeking abortion care. Anniversaries are a moment to take stock, and over the last four years, EFF has seen firsthand how digital rights and reproductive rights have become increasingly intertwined. One major way this has happened: the fight [...]

Oh boy do the Nazi-esque dudes running rampant in our country hate being called Nazis. They love the Nazi chic and the Nazi talk about securing the nation for white, blue-eyed males, but they hate being compared to the thing(s) they resemble most, even when they're promoting people for actively generating these comparisons. Like any [...]

For many, many years on Techdirt we've bemoaned the fact that federal court documents are not available for free as they should be. Instead, we have PACER, a bloated, expensive, difficult to use system that charges you for every page" it loads up for you (including search results). The whole thing is a sham. Indeed, [...]

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it's processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch. You receive licenses for MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, [...]

Yet another way Trump was going to make America great again was by giving one of his pool boys a no-bid contract to make the Lincoln Reflecting Pool even greater than it always had been. Rather than allow it to remain - at the very least - serviceable, Trump insisted the bottom needed to be [...]

Earlier this yearI noted how the Trump FCC, at the direct request of wireless phone giants, destroyed popular phone unlocking rules that would have made it easier and cheaper to switch wireless carriers. The rules, applied via spectrum acquisition and merger conditions after decades of activism, required that Verizon unlock your phone within 60 days [...]

As you will recall, the combination of RFK Jr.'s announcement that he'd find a root cause for all this autism going around combined with Donald Trump's idiotic claim that there must be some external environmental cause of all this autism going around resulted in both of these clowns telling America that pregnant women taking Tylenol [...]

At some point in a PR crisis, someone decides the solution is to hire a crisis communications person. The corporation behind Bricks & Minifigs (BAM Franchising) is in a bit of a pickle and has apparently reached that point in the Reckless Ben/Bricks & Minifigs saga - and their crisis communications person decided the way [...]

In Larry Sanger's recent failed attempt to start a WikiProject Intellectual Diversity", he tried to recruit his followers to help him change Wikipedia's rules around representation of viewpoints, religions, parties, and nationalities (a version of his earlier Nine Theses"). The draft WikiProject was not itself a bannable offense, but his approach broke rules that were [...]

Trump-appointed Louisiana federal judge Terry Doughty has spent years bending over backwards trying to help some MAGA faithful manufacture nonsense claims about censorship" for some grifters getting moderated on social media. As you'll recall, he issued a bizarrely problematic ruling on July 4th three years ago, in which he said of perfectly reasonable, non-coercive communication [...]

The Soundfreaq Sound Spot II combines wireless audio performance, ambient lighting, and relaxing sound features in a compact design built for modern lifestyles. Featuring a Bamboo and White finish with eco-friendly materials, this Bluetooth speaker complements bedrooms, offices, living rooms, and personal spaces while delivering both style and functionality. Engineered with a custom-designed audio driver, [...]

The authoritarianism has been out in the open pretty much since day one with this presidency. Things that leak out around the edges - unaccompanied by official statements, announcements, or randomly-capitalized Truth Social posts - would embarrass any normal administration. But with this administration, new information about new awfulness rarely manages to provoke even a [...]

Despite a lot of pretense, Meta, permanently deadbolted to Mark Zuckerberg's outsized ego, simply isn't an interesting, ethical, competent, or innovative company. They're mostly an ad monopoly pretending to be Apple. They poured untold billions of dollars into their soggy and broadly uninteresting metaverse gambit, now they're pouring untold billions of dollars into their fourth-place [...]

This week, both our winners on the insightful side come in response to the German court ruling that Google is liable for false claims in its AI overviews. In first place, it's an anonymous comment about Bruce Schneier's reaction to the ruling: In second place, it's A Guy with the first comment on the post: [...]

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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 [...]

It's been a while since we checked in on the Nintendo patent suit in Japan against Pocketpair, the company behind the hit game Palworld. If you need a quick refresher, here you go. Pocketpair made a game that was clearly inspired by the Pokemon series of games, but which also did no direct copying of [...]

Qualified immunity - crafted out of thin air by the US Supreme Court - has rarely been anything but an easy way for government employees to duck out of lawsuits before they're actually asked to defend themselves against allegations of rights violations. The Supreme Court has continually narrowed this doctrine, pretty much ensuring that if [...]

In the wake of the Sprint T-Mobile merger, wireless carriersimmediately stopped trying to compete on price(exactly what deal critics had warned would happen when you reduce sector competition). T-Mobile, which once tried to differentiate itself as the consumer-friendly uncarrier," almost immediately began behaving just like AT&T and Verizon, starting with firing 9,000+ people. It's how [...]

Earlier this year we wrote about the ridiculous thin-skinned executives at Palantir suing a small independent Swiss online magazine, Republik, that had reported on the great lengths the company had gone to, trying to get the Swiss government to purchase Palantir's surveillance technology. Palantir knew they couldn't sue for defamation because, you know, everything Republik [...]

The MYNT3D 3D Printing Pen is a handheld creative tool that allows users to draw in three dimensions using heated plastic filament. Instead of printing from a machine, this pen lets you manually create 3D objects by extruding melted plastic that quickly hardens. It uses FDM technology similar to 3D printers and is designed for [...]

Some readers might look at this headline and think there's something off about it. And I'll grant you that. There are several ways music can be played: to, for, not at all. Sometimes though, the only way to describe the playing of music is at." One of Trump's many vindictive surges" targeting cities and states [...]

Last month, SpaceX began making lobbying filings in support of phone unlocking rules making it easier to switch your phone between wireless providers. You might recall that the Biden FCC was on the cusp of installing such rules before the Trump administration, hand in hand with giant telecoms, dismantled them (Trump's FCC will have to [...]

There are bad takes on AI, and then there are bad takes on AI. Some of you think my takes on the use of AI in gaming are bad. Cool, love you, kiss kiss. I think the takes from folks on both extremes, the never-AI-ers and the AI evangelists, are pretty awful most of the [...]

Legal systems have always struggled to keep up with rapid technological change, and things are no different in the world of generative AI. There are still relatively few rulings on the new issues that the roll-out of AI-based services is raising. That makes a ground-breaking judgment from a court in Germany particularly important. It concerns [...]

While we've been discussing a bunch of other Supreme Court end-of-term decisions this week, we should also call out two decisions the Supreme Court thankfully decided not to make. These non-decisions continue to help preserve First Amendment speech protections. First, and most importantly, they rejected Alan Dershowitz's attempt to appeal his laughably embarrassing SLAPP suit [...]

Plenty of people are going to disagree with this headline. But why should I bother defending it when I can let the government dig its own hole? From Executive Order 14367, issued by President Trump last December: Illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic. Two milligrams, an almost undetectable trace amount [...]

The Luminar Neo Bundle includes a one time purchase of the software, an introductory course on how to use it, and 6 add-ons. Luminar Neo is an easy-to-use photo editing software that empowers photography lovers to express the beauty they imagined using innovative tools. Luminar Neo was built from the ground up to be different [...]

Look, 5-4 Supreme Court decisions count just as much as 9-0 ones, and a 5-4 decision getting it right is still a win, but for a number of reasons, the 5-4 decision in Trump v. Barbara, regarding the issue of birthright citizenship is terrifying. This isn't a complicated issue. This isn't an issue that should [...]

Last fall, Ezra Klein was getting a lot of attention for his book Abundance, which basically argued that America had become bureaucracy-obsessed and fallen out of love with building things. I thought it was mostly simplistic cack, downplaying or ignoring the fact that the U.S. government has become so blisteringly corrupt, it clearly no longer [...]

It should be obvious at this point that JD Vance is a purely political creature. There's no virtue to find in there, no moral stances firmly taken, nor anything resembling a true political ideology. There is only the attainment and retention of more and more power. You need look no further than Vance's prior status [...]

Call me crazy, but I tend to think when Supreme Court Justices make a big sweeping statement in one case, they should actually follow it through with other cases. You may recall, for example, that in the Dobbs case, where the right to an abortion was overturned, Justice Samuel Alito took the history and tradition' [...]

We've been waiting for this one for a long time. And while it doesn't disappoint, it doesn't leave a whole lot of room for celebration. Okello Chatrie has been challenging the geofence warrant that led to his arrest and prosecution since 2019(!). Nearly seven years later, he's a step closer to... well, maybe setting precedent [...]

It is zero surprise that the Supreme Court officially overturned its 91-year-old precedent first created in Humphrey's Executor. That case held that when Congress designates an agency as independent of the executive branch, the president cannot just fire its commissioners. The Humphrey's Executor opinion stopped FDR from trying to fire an FTC Commissioner he didn't [...]

The Courses Digest, Labs Digest, and Exams Digest Bundle gives you unlimited access to expertly crafted online courses, interactive labs and study tools. Whether you're aiming for industry-recognized certifications or expanding your tech expertise, this bundle will help you get there with courses on CompTIA, AWS, Microsoft, Cisco, Salesforce, and more. It's on sale for [...]

DOGE was always designed to provide flimsy pseudo-efficiency cover for wholesale corruption. It was designed to pretend that the government was cutting waste and fraud" while a bunch of velour tracksuit wearing con men stripped the country for parts and sold what was left off the back loading dock. As we've since explored, DOGE also [...]

The folks at the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) have spent decades demonizing technology (and speech) they don't understand, so it seems particularly ironic that they're now getting benchslapped for allowing AI hallucinated citations in legal filings. First, some background: NCOSE has gone through a few different branding phases, but for a long while [...]

It's no secret that Donald Trump has been waging an Orwellian war on knowledge and information for most of his second term thus far. While purging history of American racism, slavery, and anything else that makes us look less than perfect has been the primary focus in this war, so too has Trump attempted to [...]

Several U.S. states are pushing to ban young people from social media entirely. This marks the latest wave of censorship bills masquerading as children's online safety" measures, with states likeMassachusetts,Idaho,Minnesota,North Carolina,South Carolina,Illinois, and EFF's home state ofCalifornialeading the charge. Just a few years ago, lawmakers supporting age-gating lawsinsistedtheir efforts were narrowly targeted at limiting young [...]

Back in July of 2024, when two of the biggest big shots in venture capital, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, explained why they had decided to go all in to back Donald Trump's campaign for re-election, they talked up a good game about how they would support any candidate who supported their little tech" agenda. [...]

It just wasn't enough to pardon hundreds of people who raided the Capitol building to overturn Trump's 2020 election loss - people who assaulted police officers, smashed windows to gain entrance, shut down election proceedings for several hours, stole stuff from federal offices, and generally acted liked they intended to kill Vice President Mike Pence [...]

The SunFounder GalaxyRVR Mars Rover Kit is your gateway to hands-on learning on robotics, coding, and Mars-like adventures! Its durable aluminum frame and rocker-bogie suspension easily handle tough terrains, while smart sensors ensure smooth navigation. It's compatible with the Arduino UNO R3, runs on solar power, and includes real-time FPV with app-based control for day [...]

A month ago, I wrote that the Supreme Court's six conservative Justices have exactly one consistent rule on whose votes count: Black people's votes shouldn't count. The pattern was simple. If a ruling would help Black votes count, the Court - led by Justice Samuel Alito - found a reason to block it. If it [...]

When right wing billionaire Larry Ellison hired trolling blogger Bari Weiss to run CBS News, Weiss arrived with the promise of balanced, fact-based news," independent, principled journalism," and a unique entrepreneurial drive and editorial vision" that would completely modernize the network and reach the everyday Americans" she claimed were being ignored by mainstream media." In [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a reply to another comment about the charges against the guy who just got 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines: First I was just going to excoriate you for taking an FBI agent's sworn testimony at face value [...]

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When we talk about the scourge of anti-vaxxer philosophy within the federal government, we naturally spend a great deal of that time talking about RFK Jr. He's the Secretary of Health and Human Services and perhaps the most infamous anti-vaxxer on the planet, after all. But if you thought HHS was the only part of [...]

Within the next week, Congress is preparing to vote on theKIDS Act, a sprawling package of legislation that seeks to control Americans' web browsing and private messaging. The package includes a revised version of theKids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. [...]

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 [...]