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What do EFF staffersSarah Chen,Javier Morales,Caitlin Chin,Emma Rodriguez, andMikko Kopponenhave in common? For one thing, they don't exist. For another, all have been quoted as EFF experts in articles published in the past two months on a site calledNews-USA Today, whichdescribes itselfas an independent news publisher focused on clear, accurate, and useful journalism." Uh... (Please [...]

In mid-May, the Todd Blanche-run DOJ agreed to settle" the fake case Donald Trump had brought against his own IRS. The settlement"? A $1.776 billion fund to pay reparations to the MAGA faithful. Much of that money was expected to flow to January 6th insurrectionists - many of them convicted of actual crimes that Trump [...]

The Trump Organization still hasn't shipped their promised Trump made in America" phone to most of the customers who laid down a $100 deposit a year ago. But they did recently start to ship early review copies to a handful of outlets and preferred cultists. What outlets generally found wasn't surprising: it's a pretty substandard [...]

MagStack is the perfect on-the-go wireless charging station that also transforms into a floating stand for smartphone FaceTime or video playback while charging. This 3-in-1 foldable design featuring 3 wireless charging spots, enables charging for up to 3 devices simultaneously, including iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods Pro, AirPods with Wireless Charging Case, other Qi-compatible Android phones, [...]

The Sixth Circuit just handed Ohio a win on its social media law restricting minors, and reading the majority opinion, it's immediately obvious why: the court fell hook, line, and sinker for the moral panic that social media is inherently poisonous to children. The first few pages of the decision are nothing but cherry-picked, out-of-context [...]

It's no secret ICE officers are using their phones and their tech toys to do way more than they'll openly admit to doing. Tech tools that can be abused will be abused. And ICE has plenty of those, including an app that's supposed to be used for verification" of migrant status, but is just facial [...]

This week, MrWilson takers both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it's a comment about the growing global threat of internet age gates: One of the biggest benefits of the internet is the ability to talk to people outside your personal sphere. It's similar to the exposure to diversity that a lot [...]

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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 [...]

I can't say I know for sure that Stephen Colbert is a Techdirt reader, but I very much believe he is. His interests align somewhat with ours, he often comments on some of the same topics we do, and, it turns out, he decided to troll his previous employer during his last show in a [...]

In a voice vote last week, the House of Representatives passedH.R. 6028, the Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act." The legislation is presented as a technical reorganization of some government agencies, but it's much more than that. H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office, and not in a good way. The bill removes the [...]

Senators Ron Wyden and Ted Cruz have released the JAWBONE Act (Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression Act") as a way to prevent government suppression of speech. While some of the premises behind it are silly and nonsensical, the actual law is not bad. Of course, if it became law, the Trump admin [...]

Here it is: the dumbest defense of automatic license plate readers I've ever read. While we can subtract some points because the person writing it has no power to install/un-install/cover in garbage bags surveillance tech, he's a regular contributor to a long-running newspaper in a major city. And since this paper is still willing to [...]

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If there's one thing that Donald Trump has shown over the years, it's that he will get his most sycophantic MAGA loyalists to insist there are perfectly obvious reasons why whatever he's about to do is absolutely necessary... and then Trump will do the opposite, and all those hangers-on will magically change their story within [...]

For a long time organizations like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk's xAI data center in Memphis disproportionately pollutes the air in minority neighborhoods. A joint lawsuit by SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn't even bother to get the necessary permits to [...]

We were just talking about how angry RFK Jr. was at a report that he's been out to lunch on most of what HHS' work entails, choosing instead to focus his time and attention on his own pet interests, like curtailing vaccine programs in America, chasing chemtrails, and a newfound love for snake-handling. Kennedy denied [...]

The internet is anessential resourcefor young people and adults to access information, explore community, and find themselves-both inside countries and across continents. Yet governments around the world continue to introduce and implement legislation requiring all online users to verify their ages before accessing the digital space. In some cases, politicians are going further, putting forth [...]

You have less than a week to weigh in on Brendan Carr's obviously bullshit retaliatory censorial attack on Disney. While it's quite clear that Carr is likely to ignore the comments, they still very much matter. It needs to be in the public record that the public is against this attack on free speech and [...]

The US military has engaged in extrajudicial killings via drone strikes since it was first shown this tech could be used to murder people. The War on Terror has given us more than two decades of drone strikes - all of which have used war-related justifications to excuse them without the actual authorization of Congress. [...]

The Adobe Graphic Design Bundle has 3 courses designed to help you learn the essentials of graphic design and how to apply those skills to your projects. Courses cover Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. You'll learn all aspects of the design process. It's on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated [...]

On Friday, the government's Section 702 surveillance authority lapsed! It may be temporary, but it's still an important milestone. Section 702 was one of the surveillance programs Ed Snowden exposed in 2013 - and even after the exposure, the NSA has continued abusing it to spy on Americans. It's the tool that lets the NSA [...]

CNN brass have been waiting to get federal approval of their problematic $111 billion merger with Paramount. As we've detailed exhaustively, the high debt load from the CBS/Paramount and Warner Brothers merges is going to result in mass layoffs, higher consumer prices, and sagging quality control at the resulting company. It's what always happens. It's [...]

There's something going on over in Microsoft's Xbox division and it isn't good. Don't take my word on that. Apparently the bosses over there are circulating an email to staff talking about how properly fucked everyone is if something doesn't change soon. Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty just sent [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. Duringa Washington Nationals baseball gameon May 17, 2026, three peopleunfurled a large bannerfrom the upper deck of Nationals Park displaying a link to a white nationalist website. The website, warning of the replacement of whites by people of color, called forthe deportation [...]

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is not having a particularly good time of being the UK's leader. Basically everyone thinks he's doing a terrible job and it seems unlikely that he'll be in the role much longer. Apparently desperate to turn the tide on being historically disliked, he's decided to grab the most reliable life [...]

Yesterday we wrote about the Trump administration forcing Anthropic to shut down Fable 5 and Mythos 5. The short version: dumb. Today, Axios got White House officials on the record, and it turns out the real reason is even dumber than we thought. In that original piece, we had pointed out that cybersecurity expert Katie [...]

To completely understand computer security, it's vital to step outside the fence and to think outside the box. Computer security is not just about firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, or anti-viruses. It's also about tricking people into doing whatever a hacker wishes. A secure system, network, or infrastructure is also about informed people. The All-in-One Super-Sized [...]

Just once I'd like to see this administration engage in the slightest bit of subtlety. Just once. It would be a refreshing change from literally everything it has done during this current iteration. Sure, it's easier to prove actions are vindictive if they're transparently vindictive. On the other hand, too many courts and judges (which [...]

Last week Elon Musk successfully conned America and U.S. regulators into signing off on his preposterous SpaceX IPO, which immediately generated Musk $75 billion by comically over-stating the value of SpaceX, xAI, and Starlink. Then bone-grafting the entire pile of bullshit to the U.S. economy and your retirement account under the pretense that space data [...]

We should all know at this point that RFK Jr. is bad at his job as Secretary of HHS. But that simplistic statement apparently needs something of a qualifier. Instead, it appears we should say that RFK Jr. is bad at the parts of his job that he chooses to do. Because, according to a [...]

What's most disturbing about Trump's Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History" executive order isn't its fully-blinkered, jingoistic take on American history where America does no wrong and is almost always white right. I mean, that's pretty awful on its own, but it's the flip side of pretending whites do no wrong: pretending any victims [...]

The Trump Department of Justice's" antitrust division" dumped its unsurprising approval of the terrible Paramount Warner Brothers merger late on Friday in the hopes people wouldn't notice it. As we've noted the $111 billion megadeal is a historically harmful mess. Backed by billions in Saudi and Chinese cash (raising all sorts of foreign media influence [...]

Late Friday, Anthropic shut down access to its just-released Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models after the Trump administration slapped export controls on them - treating cutting-edge AI, in other words, like weapons. The trigger, it turns out, was a jailbreak. And the entity that tipped off the government? Amazon - one of Anthropic's biggest [...]

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Cops are human beings. Despite constantly pretending they're on a higher plane (see also: Thin Blue Line, etc.), they're just as fallible as anyone else. Especially now. This occupation is self-selecting. Righting wrongs is rarely the main draw. It's almost always the immense of amount of power that comes coupled with nearly zero accountability. There [...]

Last month I noted how the Trump FCC had unveiled a brand new plan to stop robocalls." As with most efforts the proposal doesn't actually do much to stop robocalls because a well-lobbied U.S. government (1) refuses to hold big companies accountable or collect fines, (2) constantly embraces weak rules that make telemarketers and debt [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Robert Freetard with a comment on our post about AI replacing workers: Ultimately the the best positions to replace in a company with AI The best positions to replace in a company with AI is the CEO and other C* positions. They do NO [...]

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As we near the halfway point in the second Trump presidential term, there's something that is worth remembering: Donald Trump, like most nasty viruses, is a temporary condition. Trumpism may not be, though I have my doubts as to how long a cult of personality can survive without that specific personality leading the cult. But [...]

A couple weeks ago I wrote 6,000 words about the Reckless Ben/Bricks & Minifigs LEGO mess and concluded that pretty much everyone involved had made serious mistakes - with the Utah contingent (Bricks & Minifigs corporate, Joshua Johnson, Brandon Best, and the American Fork police) looking the worst of all. That take upset basically everyone: [...]

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 [...]

Michigan lawmakers are pushing legislation that wouldn't just ban the sales of Chinese-made cars in the The Great Lakes State, it would ban cars with Chinese tags from even visiting. The Protecting America From Chinese Cars Act joins the Connected Vehicle Security Act aiming to protect U.S. car companies from cheaper Chinese EV competition in [...]

The Learn to Code with React Bundle has 9 courses to help you learn more about React, Redux, and JavaScript. Used by the likes of Instagram, Facebook, Netflix, and Imgur, React is an efficient and flexible JavaScript library for building user interfaces. Meanwhile, Redux is a predictable state container that helps you manage the data [...]

Good news! (Maybe?) Federal legislators have introduced a bill that, if passed, would finally guarantee the right to record law enforcement officers. Here's Reason's CJ Ciaramella with the details: Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) introduced the Right to Record Act of 2026," which they say would create new consequences for individual [...]

Back in MarchI noted howthe Trump FCC under Brendan Carr had announced a new ban" on all routers made overseas (which is pretty much all of them). At the time we also noted how this was less of a ban and more of a shakedown, with router manufacturers required to beg the Trump FCC for [...]

It appears Bill Cassidy is going to make every effort to ignore his own culpability for RFK Jr. on his way out the door. In case you need to be reminded, Cassidy was a key, if not deciding vote to confirm RFK Jr. to his current role as Secretary of HHS. Cassidy's background is as [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. The American academic research engine has long been theenvy of the world.Generally well-funded, labs in the United States have been able toattract the best mindswho generate breakthroughsand train the next generation workforce thatpowers the U.S. economy. But since the start of the [...]

To lose one speech-suppressing SLAPP suit may be regarded as thoughtless. To lose two looks like you're a censorial hack. Last month we wrote about how supposed free speech warrior" Matt Taibbi (who spent years misrepresenting the work of people who study disinformation as inherently censorial, while getting pretty basic facts wrong) had lost his [...]

Google didn't invent full-text search of the Internet - that honor belongs to early pioneers such asWebCrawler,LycosandAltaVista. But for the last 25 years or so, Google has been synonymous with online searching, providing the quickest and most effective way to find things online (althoughits results may be getting worse.) More recently, it has been adding [...]