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You may have heard some talk in the last week or so regarding a criminal case against two former FBI agents, supposedly having something to do with Hunter Biden's infamous laptop." On Monday, a magistrate judge dismissed the case, noting that it was pure political hackery. A federal judge on Monday tossed out a criminal [...]

For years I've noted that while Elon Musk's low-Earth-orbit (LEO) Starlink satellite broadband system can be very useful for people with no other options (war zones, RVs, boats, rural Americans), the network has struggled to maintain performance as it grows into more mainstream markets, resulting in not only widespread slowdowns, but also the company socking [...]

The midterms are over and the Republicans got their asses waxed. We can point to any number of reasons why the country delivered a stinging rebuke to the GOP across the union. It was a slap to Donald Trump. It was about the economy. It was the war in Iran. It was all of the [...]

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 [...]

Recently, two federal appeals courts issued opinions that will allow Florida and Georgia to start enforcing laws that will age-gate and block young people from accessing social media. The laws do not adequately respect minors' rights to play, speak, and learn online. More fundamentally, these laws don't help young people stay safe online-a goal that [...]

We all know ICE officers can't be trusted. Neither can the agency that heads up most of Trump's anti-migrant activities. Every murder by immigration officers is immediately greeted with self-justifying lies about threats" to officers. Every assault gets the same treatment. Every recorded instance of abuse is immediately rebutted by bullshit claims about violent resistance [...]

Take your design skills to the next level with the 2026 Canva Creator Mastery Course. This program teaches you how to use Canva effectively to produce professional-quality visuals for any purpose. You'll explore practical design techniques, creative workflows and branding strategies that make your content stand out. It removes the complexity of design and replaces [...]

Well it's now been a couple days since the Democrats obliterated Donald Trump and MAGA in the midterm. It turns out that the messaging of price hikes, soldiers in the street, new forever wars, and diarrhea for everyone, with a side of enriching the rich while protecting pedophiles" somehow failed to resonate. Which is how [...]

Israeli spy outfit Discover-Tech spied on internet users through a sprawling network of dodgy online ads that it used to track, surveil, and geolocate internet users. In some instances simply having the firm's zero click" spyware ads displayed by devices resulted in infection. The company seemed particularly interested in using ads to surveil and geolocate [...]

The impact of the midterm election result is going to be felt for years, to be sure. But some of the effects will be far more swift than that, likely kicking off right after the new Congress is sworn in. We're mere hours removed from the election, with some votes still being tallied, but already [...]

A last minute attempt to throw the midterm election into chaos failed. Leading up to this point, the signs were never good in the Magic 8 Ball way. The Trump administration wants people to believe California was overrun with non-citizen voters. The facts, however, refuse to comply with the narrative. This particular ship has been [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. On the evening of Oct. 11, just weeks before the 2026 midterm elections, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to stop airing taxpayer-funded television advertisements praising President Donald Trump. Yet two of the ads continued running past the court's deadline, including [...]

US federal court have overwhelmingly ruled (10,000 orders and counting) that migrants are - just like natural-born citizens - entitled to constitutional rights. Among them is the right to due process. This means that detained migrants have a right to a hearing to see whether they can be held in custody until a hearing on [...]

We have all wanted to learn a language at some point but it's hard to get started. Some language learning tools can be complicated and very time-consuming. But with uTalk, you'll be speaking keywords and phrases in no time, and will start to see the results straight away. It helps you overcome the language barrier [...]

Last week, Ofcom, the UK regulator in charge of all this stuff, released its rapid assessment of highly effective age assurance at 16." That came right on the heels of its quietly released (only because the law required it) report showing that the Online Safety Act's duty of care wasn't actually having any noticeable impact [...]

One cornerstone of Elon Musk's fraud-packed SpaceX IPO prospectus includes the claim that they'll extremely quickly (as in a year or two) boost Starlink subscriber totals from 13 million to something closer to 300 million. Given the network's congestion problems and physics constraints, that's simply not realistic. Also: more users means even greater capacity problems [...]

It's very gross for this to be any sort of I told you so" opening to this post, but the measles outbreak in America continues to get worse, as predicted. While last years case counts and deaths from the disease, which had been vaccinated to the point of eradication back in 2000, were a record-breaking [...]

Incourts across the country, publishers and creators are suing large AI companies for training generative AI models on copyrighted works. It's easy to see these cases as a David-and-Goliath showdown between authors and publishers fighting for a cut of Big Tech company profits. But this fight is actually much larger. It affects billions of people [...]

Support us on Patreon For the past few weeks on Techdirt, we've been publishing The Metric Is Not The Mission, a ten-part series by internet governance and digital policy expert Konstantinos Komaitis which is now available as a single, complete paper. This week, Konstantinos joins the podcast to talk all about his argument in the [...]

So, it's come to this. The good ship USS Revenge Prosecution is sinking. And the deserting rats are deciding which rats should desert first, apparently based on nothing more than the current state of the organizational chart. Two people figured heavily into the disastrous attempt to prosecute a handful of Chicago residents for engaging in [...]

The Luminar Web and Mobile Bundle provides new users with full browser-based access to Skylum's complete editing toolkit, along with full access mobile app access for streamlined cross-application editing. The bundle also includes an instructional video teaching you a complete, practical photo editing workflow in Luminar for Mobile from photographer and filmmaker Nikolaj Green, in [...]

While Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian have tried to downplay Aaron Swartz's role in founding" Reddit, he was still an instrumental part of the company's early journey. His infogami" project was rolled into Reddit, and the founder credit was a part of the deal. Part of the point of infogami was to support open access [...]

For more than a generation, U.S. media academics have warned anybody who'd listen that the death of your local newspaper and the steady consolidation of local TV broadcasters was creating either news deserts," or local news that's mostly just low-quality infotainment and agitprop. Despite claims that the internet would fix this," doing quality local journalism [...]

As I continue to say, you may be done with the measles, but the measles is not done with you, nor the entire country. Coinciding with the profane installment of RFK Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services, 2025 saw the largest number of cases of measles in America in 3 decades. After decades [...]

Walled Culture has just written about the possibility that recent AI breakthroughs might accelerate a move to open access, at least in the field of mathematics. It would be particularly welcome against a backdrop of relatively slow progress in the open access world. That is not because the need for different business models that provide [...]

Last week Cathy wrote about the amicus brief we filed in the big multi-district litigation (MDL) that consolidated a bunch of different lawsuits claiming that OpenAI and Microsoft infringed the plaintiffs' copyrights by training AI models on their works. A lot of people and groups offered proposed amicus briefs. For boring procedural reasons, unlike in [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. With the U.S. midterms this week, about 1 in 5 voters has asked AI chatbots about elections and politics, a recent survey found. But many voters may not know that governments around the world increasingly shape what chatbots can say. And because [...]

The Ultimate Electric Circuits Engineer Course Bundle is designed for beginners and students wanting to build knowledge in electrical engineering and circuit analysis. You'll start by learning the fundamentals like Ohm's law and Kirchhoff's Laws before moving into advanced network theorems. You will learn how essential components like operational amplifiers, capacitors, and inductors behave, while [...]

By now it's likely you've heard of the whole concept of the AI paperclip maximizer problem - a hypothetical first put forth by Nick Bostrom - suggesting that a misaligned AI system that looks to optimize on the wrong single thing (in this case creating paperclips) could lead to the end of humanity. Specifically, the [...]

Recently, reports emerged that LG TVs are sniffing around your local network, and even listening to your local environment, even when the TV is purportedly off." Some of those voice commands were then stored in plain text and uploaded to the internet. LG's response? To deny everything. For decades now we've documented how while smart" [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is the first of several comments about Trump's voting fraud squad proudly announcing the arrest of... 28 people in California. It's an anonymous comment summing up their attitude: Republicans just want election fraud. That's it. In second place, it's a double-winning comment that also took [...]

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If you go through all of the bloviations from RFK Jr. when it comes to his stance on vaccines, one of his chief refrains is that vaccines that have been in wide use for many years haven't been tested properly for safety, or that data about their safety has been hidden or ignored. He's generally [...]

There's a lot wrong with AI. But bad things happen when we try to use copyright law to fix it. Which is what we just told the Southern District of New York, where OpenAI and Microsoft are defending themselves in several cases alleging that their training violated the copyrights of the works the AI models [...]

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 have talked about the Wyden Siren many times before. Senator Ron Wyden learns, through classified briefings, that the intelligence community is doing something most Americans would consider a clear violation of their civil liberties - often justified by interpreting plain English words to mean something no other English speaker would recognize. But because that [...]

The best way to learn Raspberry Pi is by doing and in this course, you'll get familiar with specific features by building your own GPS tracking system. From setup and configuration to location tracking through Google Maps, this course will help you go from beginner to advanced with Raspberry Pi. It's on sale for $50. [...]

Well well well. All it took was a regime change and the persistent abuse of camera networks by police officers to change MapQuest from Remember MapQuest?" nostalgia to hey where can I download MapQuest" demands. First, there's the regime change. Trump has been stupid as fuck all the time since day one but nothing was [...]

Ideally, I think it makes sense to open up the U.S. market to Chinese goods (AI, EVs, robots), but have functional and well-funded regulators that police all labor, competition, environmental, privacy, national security, and consumer rights abuses. But big U.S. companies don't much like that because it would boost competition and regulatory accountability, eroding quarterly [...]

To state that RFK Jr. says things that are just plainly wrong is to state the obvious. His waffling claims about the dangers of vaccines are wrong. His various other pet conspiracy theories, such as chemtrails and damage to humans from EMF, are also wrong. The data HHS is putting out under his leadership about [...]

What is covered by freedom of thought in the AI age is being decided by courts that are hearing cases about something entirely different. The Chapter 11 filing of Character.ai on October 12 is the second such case in a year, and it shows that the record of how a person thought can be produced [...]

Civil rights groups like the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) have noted how Elon Musk's Colossus xAI data centers in Memphisdisproportionately pollute the air in minority neighborhoods. Ajoint lawsuitby SELC, Earthjustice, and the NAACP filed last April argued that Musk and friends didn't bother to get the necessary permits to run the 57 gas turbines [...]

As you may know, The Streisand Effect was originally coined right here on Techdirt in 2005, though it referred back to an event from 2003 when Barbra Streisand sued Ken Adelman, because his project to map how erosion impacted the California coastline incidentally included a photo of Streisand's Malibu mansion. Streisand demanded $50 million in [...]

This Interactive Self-Rotating Cat Toy Ball is a USB-rechargeable toy featuring 360-degree rolling movements, obstacle avoidance, and changing LED lights to help keep cats entertained. It's built out of scratch-resistant and bite-resistant materials, the ball is tough enough to withstand rough play from high-energy kittens and adult cats alike. It's on sale for $20. Note: [...]

The Fifth Circuit has shown itself to be especially subservient to the Trump administration since his return to office. And it's certainly not going to rock Trump's mass deportation boat - not when it's sitting right on top of Texas, which contains almost two-thirds of the US-Mexico border, as well as some of ICE's largest [...]

I recently noted how California's being told by the Trump administration that it can't enforce any of its own telecom consumer protection laws if it wants to receive $1.4 billion dollars Congress already earmarked for broadband expansion under the 2021 infrastructure bill. That means if California wants money it was already supposed to receive from [...]

It's probably a good thing for Tim Sweeney that Epic Games is a privately held company and he has a majority ownership stake, because I can't imagine any Board of Directors would appreciate this AI rager he's been on as of late. And, somehow, it keeps getting worse. It all started with Sweeney absurdly claiming [...]

Over the last few months, we've been running the wonderful ten part series on The Metric is Not the Mission" by Konstantinos Komaitis. It's a deep exploration of how Big Tech moved from building and expanding the open internet to increasingly shaping it around its own metrics, incentives and assumptions. The resulting series explores how [...]

Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoS) has been steadily pushing the limits of transparency and accountability for several years now. The project - spearheaded by Emma Best - does what other activists won't... or perhaps simply don't have the expertise to carry out. DDoS made a name for itself by hitching Best's non-stop FOIA onslaught to [...]

It seems that every election cycle over the last decade has had concerns being raised about the state of political deepfakes" and their ability to impact the election. So far, these have always been overblown, and there's been little evidence of deepfakes having any real impact at all - perhaps other than creating the concept [...]