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The DOJ has gone past bleeding talent. Now, it's just bleeding whatever. It's one thing to do a bit of MAGA swagger before a captive audience and walk out with a criminal indictment that contains no evidence of criminal activity. It's quite another thing to present that case to a court, where you'll have to [...]

John Deere is facing a second class action lawsuit for its ongoing, ham-fisted effort to monopolize tractor repair and drive up costs for its customers. The latest lawsuit was filed in mid-May in the Northern District of Illinois against John Deere by Christy Webber Landscaping of Chicago, which alleges that the company actively makes it [...]

Most legal experts seemed pretty skeptical about the tactic of 35 former federal judges asking federal judge Kathleen Williams to reopen the case where Trump sued his own IRS demanding $10 billion. Turns out they were wrong - on Friday, Judge Williams reopened the case, not going so far as to investigate whether fraud had [...]

CBP Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino made that title literal by showing up wherever Trump needed trouble started. Once he had arrived far north of the southern border he was supposed to be patrolling, Bovino (and the people he was commanding") found themselves on the receiving end of several lawsuits. Not only did they find themselves on [...]

Five years years ago AT&T effectively stopped selling DSL and started hanging up on DSL and copper phone line customers. While killing landlines and DSL is understandable given the limitations of the dated copper-based tech, the problem is that thanks to concentrated telecom monopolization, many of these customers were left without any replacement options due [...]

We've got a double-winner this week, but also a very very slow week overall on the funny side, so this will be a somewhat truncated post. On the insightful side, both top comments are similar thoughts in response to the judge dismissing charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, starting with this first-place winning comment from Huntly: [...]

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It was just a week or so ago that we were talking about the absurd situation in Knox County, Tennessee, where local government used Tennessee's book-banning laws to remove the book Roots from school libraries. Yes, this is the book by Alex Haley that spawned the 1970s miniseries of the same name and served as [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. In Baltimore County, Maryland on Oct. 20, 2025, a 17-year-old student named Taki Allen was sitting outside his high school after football practice when an artificial intelligence-enhanced surveillance camera falsely identified the Doritos bag in his pocketas a gun. Within moments police [...]

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 less than two weeks since the Justice Department created the obviously illegal and unconstitutional $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off MAGA loyalists and January 6th insurrectionists. There are a variety of lawsuits looking to put a stop to it, and we just wrote about dozens of former federal judges asking the original [...]

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Flock Safety has made its bed. It has courted homeowners associations and gated communities since it first arrived on the market, apparently hoping to convert inherent racism into perpetual revenue streams. Then it went to where the real bias has always existed: US law enforcement agencies. It promised to tie their systems in with those [...]

Last month the FCC quietly issued a public notice saying the Brendan Carr run agency was demanding that the TV Oversight Management Board (TVOMB) create new TV ratings to alert viewers to transgender and gender non-binary programming" and the discussion or promotion of gender identity themes" included in children's programming. You are to ignore that [...]

I've written quite a bit about the Stop Killing Games movement, in no small part because I think it's way more important than most people think. Preserving cultural output is both important and, frankly, a key part of the bargain that is supposed to be copyright law. The fact that we offer video game publishers [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. The United States is experiencing one of thesteepest declines in violent crimein modern history, including a murder rate at itslowest point in more than a century. Homicides across 35 major American citiesfell 21% in 2025, amounting to 922 fewer people killed. Robberies [...]

There are two major reasons that the U.S. doesn't pass an internet-era privacy law or regulate data brokers despitea parade of dangerous scandals. One, lobbied by a vast web of interconnected industries with unlimited budgets, Congressis too corrupt to do its job. Two, the U.S. government is disincentivized to do anything because it exploits this [...]

Thirty-five (thirty-five!) former federal judges are asking a current federal judge to reopen the case where Donald Trump sued his own IRS, and then settled" the case on terms extremely favorable to himself, his family, and his MAGA loyalists. Law schools are famous for coming up with hypotheticals" to try to test students' knowledge of [...]

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Poll everyone you can. Even the most MAGA never dreamed up this scenario. There's no single-issue voter whose kink is surely the people wanting green cards can get that done in their own countries." Nope, this is Trump's kink. This is a blatant attempt to juice the deportation numbers to soothe the throbbing bald skull [...]

The Trump Organization still hasn't shipped their promised Trump phone to most customers who laid down a $100 deposit a year ago. But rubes patriots who signed up did get something else instead: their private data leaked to the public. According to Techcrunch, the Trump Mobile website openly shared customer emails, addresses, phone numbers, and [...]

Alright, this is getting dire. In addition to all of the anti-vaxxer bullshit that has infected HHS thanks to RFK Jr.'s appointment to run the department, we have also made the point recently that an equally big problem is the talent drain occurring at HHS as well. Between the voluntary exits by smart people who [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. In the months leading up to the implementation of Australia's social media ban in December 2025, there was much discussion about the possible negative consequences. Among these were concerns that teenagers would consume less news. Asmost young adultsuse social media for news [...]

Like most of the U.S., Western Massachusetts towns and cities have spent decades dealing with expensive, spotty, and slow broadband from private telecom monopolies like Comcast and Verizon. As a result, a lot of these towns and cities have explored building their own community owned fiber networks. Community broadband has been increasingly popular since COVID, [...]

Even if you don't live in California you've probably heard about the California primary coming up on June 2 (although early voting has already begun). In particular, you've probably heard about it because everyone and their brother has thrown their hat into the ring for governor, and, because it's a top-two" primary. Sometimes called a [...]

The Academy of Game Art Bundle teaches you the basics of how to create video game art. You'll learn how to use Inkscape to create logos, 2D backgrounds, pre-defined modules, UI designs, and characters. A course on using DragonBones will teach you how to animate your characters as well. The bundle is on sale for [...]

There are many (negative) things this Trump administration is known for. It's a long list and I would encourage everyone to add as many negative things to that list. His DOJ is specifically known for vengeful prosecutions of those who dare to oppose the guy who thinks he's a king. The nation's top law enforcement [...]

As we've previously noted, Brendan Carr recently launched a series of phony inquiries into ABC because Jimmy Kimmel made fun of the president's wife. Carr can't just come out and say that, so he's launched a series of fake (and legally laughable) investigations" into the company. They're all designed to scare ABC, and other big [...]

I'm starting to wonder if RFK Jr. can do anything right at all. After the courts put an injunction on Kennedy's overhaul of the CDC's ACIP panel on vaccines, as well as pretty much all of their recommendations since it was rebuilt on a foundation of anti-vaxxers, the government sprung into action to try to [...]

I've spoken to enough teachers and professors to know that LLM tools are absolutely a challenge for many of them in the classroom. Many struggle with making sure they're actually teaching students how to learn, worrying that the tools are doing the work for them, and skipping over the actual learning. Many are (understandably) resorting [...]

It's one thing to accuse the government of engaging in vindictive prosecutions. It's quite another thing to prove it. The deck is stacked against those making these claims. These allegations rarely succeed. The government gets the benefit of the doubt and has the ability to make evidence against its position simply disappear. It didn't work [...]

The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was one of the few genuinely good things Donald Trump was talked into doing during his first term. It was an agency within the Department of Homeland Security that was focused on coordination between the government and industry when there were larger cybersecurity threats that needed coordination to [...]

The Complete Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and ESP32 Bundle has 14 courses covering what you need to get started on building out your own smart home. After learning the basics, courses show you how to create a weather monitoring system, a smart home security system, a plant watering system, and more. Courses also cover getting familiar [...]

Our war on drugs began with a simple man with a simple plan. That plan was this: give the government more powers at the expense of civil rights, all under the leadership" of soon-to-be-deposed president Richard Nixon and known drug enthusiast, Elvis Presley. While that summary is long on pithiness and short on detail, it's [...]

NPR is imposing a new round of buyouts and layoffs as it tries to survive the brutal Trump GOP attacks on public broadcasting. According to NPR, it's being forced to trim $8 million of its $300-million annual budget because of the illegal (for whatever that word is worth any more) Trump administration attacks on NPR, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad pushing back on some of our criticism about John Oliver's AI chatbot segment and his call for regulation: Isn't the logical conclusion of this argument that we shouldn't have government regulations on vaccines or antidepressants? Like, you're arguing that we shouldn't put this [...]

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The fuckery that is going on across HHS and vaccine programs is just plain incredible. As the Trump administration continues to provide whatever cover it can so that RFK Jr. can wreck shop on the health of Americans, the damage Kennedy is doing to our inoculation programs is going to take years, if not decades, [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. In October, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued pharmaceutical companies tied to Tylenol in state court, repeating claims made a month earlier by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that the pain relief drug was linked to autism and ADHD in children. Paxton, [...]

It's hard to believe we once were shocked to hear a government figure proudly declare that we kill people based on metadata. What's happening now is even more disturbing. We're killing people simply because they happen to be in boats spotted exiting certain shores and headed towards international waters. The War on Drugs has always [...]

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Elon Musk, business genius. When Elon Musk announced his plans to buy Twitter, some of his billionaire friends rushed to text him to say they'd throw whatever money they wanted into the deal. Larry Ellison casually offered a billion... or whatever you recommend." Marc Andreessen offered $250 million, no questions asked. This all came out [...]

Late last year we wrote about a new startup that was flooding the internet with AI-generated podcast slop. Featuring fake hosts having fake discussions, the startup proudly stated it was creating about 3,000 new AI-generated podcasts every single week. The owners of the startup (who called critics of AI slop Luddites,") stated that because they [...]

Just a few days ago, I wrote a post about how Bill Cassidy had been primaried out of returning as a senator for Louisiana and how all of this bootlicking of the Trump administration obviously didn't do the job he hoped it would do. As a result, he has been left as a lame duck [...]

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 roundup of the latest news in online [...]

As statehouses ramp up for 2026, we're seeing a familiar and concerning trend of lawmakers rushing to regulate the internet based on shockingly shaky science. From theCalifornia State Assemblyto theMassachusettsandMinnesotalegislatures, a wave of bills is crashing against the digital lives of young people, with proponents of these measures framing social media access as a public [...]

Last week I read this excerpt of Steven Rosenbaum's new book in Wired. His book is titled The Future of Truth" and the Wired article has the attention grabbing headline: Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth." I debated writing about the article, because it read to me like pretty typical older generation [...]

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 [...]