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Thankfully, the Stop Killing Games movement isn't stopping this time. YouTuber Ross Scott kicked the movement off in 2024 to generate political action around the disappearance of games that people had bought purely because the company that sold them decided to no longer support them or run backend infrastructure needed play them. While the movement [...]

When Congress eventually reopens, the 2026National Defense Authorization Act(NDAA) will be moving toward a vote. This gives us a chance to see the priorities of the Secretary of Defense and his Congressional allies when it comes to the military-and one of those priorities is buying technology,especially AI, withless of an obligation to prove it's effective [...]

Within twenty-four hours of Republicans getting crushed in elections they'd convinced themselves were winnable,Fox Newsdeployed the counter-move. Not denial-the losses were too visible for that. Bret Baier had already explained toFox & Friendsviewers how bad it was. It's a big loss," he said. Not just the results, but the spreads are surprising." Not acceptance-that would [...]

VPN company CyberGhost just sent Cloudflare a bogus DMCA takedown demand, claiming that our article about their last bogus copyright takedown demand, somehow violates their copyright. I'm not sure I'd trust a VPN company that fucks up this badly. There are a lot of sketchy VPN companies out there, and it's sometimes tricky to tell [...]

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This news should be far more heartening than it is. In any normal version of the United States, it might have been. The administration's willingness to perpetrate immoral and illegal evil on a daily basis has outpaced efforts by citizens and the judicial branch to stem the tide. Still, maybe this is hopeful? I mean, [...]

Last year almost a dozen major U.S. ISPs were the victim ofa massive, historic intrusion by Chinese hackerswho managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The Salt Typhoon" hack was so severe, the intruders spent much of the last year rooting around the ISP networkseven after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, [...]

We knew this was coming, but it doesn't make it any less stupid. The road to the IRS' Direct File program was long and hard-fought. We here at Techdirt have been talking about, and advocating for, something like the Direct File program for at least 15 years. The concept behind the program is a simple [...]

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 round-up of the latest news in online [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. This story contains videos showing violence. President Donald Trump and officials in his administration say National Guard troops are needed in War ravaged" Portland, Oregon, to protect a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office that he described as being under siege. But a ProPublica review [...]

Last week, I wrote about how the Trump administration has replaced any sort of concept of governance with governance-by-trolling-a government optimized purely for making a huge segment of the country angry while the base cheers them on. The entire apparatus of federal power has been repurposed into a machine for generating engagement through cruelty, with [...]

Tuesday, Republicans got crushed in elections across New Jersey, Virginia, and New York. Not close races. Not razor-thin margins. Massive defeats in states they'd convinced themselves were winnable after Trump's 2024 victory. Bret Baier-onFox News, toFox & Friends-had to explainto his audience how bad it was. It's a big loss," he said. Not just the [...]

The Complete Big Data and Power BI Bundle has 5 courses to help you learn how to effectively sort, analyze, and visualize all of your data. Courses cover Power BI, Power Query, Excel, and Access. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all [...]

Nothing survives a purge. Especially not the truth. The DOJ secured a conviction for Washington state resident Taylor Taranto. According to the DOJ's May 21, 2025 press release, Taranto had committed several federal crimes, including carrying two guns without a license and engaging in false information and hoaxes." Here are the details: On June 28, [...]

U.S. media mergers always follow the same trajectory. Pre-merger, executives promise all manner of amazing synergies and deal benefits. Post-merger, not only do those benefits generally never arrive, the debt from the acquisition spree usually results in significant layoffs, lower quality product, and higher rates for consumers. The Time Warner Discovery disasterwas the poster child [...]

Well, this is actually pretty fascinating. We've been discussing the somewhat bizzare patent lawsuit Nintendo is waging against PocketPair in Japan for some time now. PocketPair is the company behind the hit game Palworld, which has obviously drawn inspiration from the Pokemon franchise, without doing any direct copying. Powering this attack were several held or [...]

We've long established that modern smart" devices aren't always all that smart. Whether it's smart" door locks that are easily hacked to gain entry, smart" refrigerators that leak your Gmail credentials, or smart" vehicles that sell data to insurance companies without your permission, the act of modernizing something with internet access and a CPU isn't [...]

We've always been wary of putting cops in schools. Putting cops in schools just means administrative issues (i.e., student discipline) get the law enforcement treatment, which turns misbehavior into criminal acts and generates exactly the sort of school cop overreactions you'd expect. Adding AI-assisted tech was never going to improve anything. Administrators were certainly told [...]

The faux party of free speech" strikes again. For years, the MAGA GOP has insisted that it is the true party of free" speech even as all evidence suggests this administration is the most censorial and the most dismissive of the First Amendment in modern history. Over and over and over and over and over [...]

The Ultimate AWS Data Master Class Bundle has 9 courses to get you up to speed on Amazon Web Services. The courses cover AWS, DevOPs, Kubernetes Mesosphere DC/OS, AWS Redshift, and more. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt [...]

The FBI is currently flying at half-staff. A bunch of its field agents are now just immigration officers, thanks to this administration's desire to eject as many brown people from countries south of our border from the US as possible. But there are enough people left in the FBI to go after the brown people [...]

As we've documented, Trump's right wing billionaire friend Larry Ellison (and his nepobaby son, David) recently acquired CBS and likely co-ownership of TikTok. Like Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, the goal isn't really subtle: Rich right wingers want to own the entirety of U.S. new and old media, then convert it into a giant propaganda [...]

If I had to pick one iconic line spoken by Darth Vader in the Star Wars franchise, it would be this one. The confident evil of a villain who calmly acknowledges that the deal struck with him is changing and there is nothing that can be done about it strikes a chord. What's odd is [...]

Knowledge production doesn't happen in a vacuum. Every great scientific breakthrough is built on prior work, and an ongoing exchange with peers in the field. That's why we need to address the threat of major publishers and platforms having an improper influence on how scientific knowledge is accessed-or outright suppressed. In the digital age, the [...]

Support us on Patreon For two decades, the landscape of social media has been constantly changing, and the discourse about free speech" has been changing alongside it. This week, we've got a bit of an open-ended discussion with TechFreedoms Corbin Barthold, host of the Tech Policy Podcast, about social media's history and future, and the [...]

Another fuck you" has been delivered to federal courts by the Trump administration. This time, the extended middle finger is embodied by (extremely recently now-former) US Attorney Bill Essayli. Essayli has made headlines here before, mainly for yelling ineffectively at prosecutors who were unable to convert bullshit cases against anti-ICE protesters into federal indictments. Essayli [...]

Fox News has a problem: when you build your entire editorial model around feeding your audience's biases, you stop asking whether the stories feeding those biases are actually true. Case in point: last week, they published-and then quietly rewrote-a story about SNAP recipients threatening to ransack stores," based entirely on AI-generated videos that never happened. [...]

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 [...]

CBP commander Gregory Bovino has been given a temporary free pass by the Seventh Circuit Appeals Court to continue violating a court order he's been violating since the lower court first issued it. So, that's how things continue to go in terms of checks and balances here in the United States. You know, poorly. Not [...]

The Trump administration is promising to block billions in already-awarded infrastructure bill broadband grants to any states that enforce net neutrality or try to impose any sort of meaningful oversight on the country's unpopular, predatory broadband monopolies. That was the promise of Commerce Department official Arielle Roth, a former Ted Cruz staffer now in charge [...]

Nintendo and the Pokemon Company's lawsuit in Japan against PocketPair, makers of the hit game Palworld, is still ongoing. As we've reported previously, this isn't the copyright or trademark lawsuit that everyone expected when Palworld was first released. Instead, probably knowing that they couldn't get around the idea/expression dichotomy in copyright, at least, Nintendo filed [...]

Why do some people endorse claims that can easily be disproved? It's one thing to believe false information, but another to actively stick with something that's obviously wrong. Our new research, published in the Journal of Social Psychology, suggests that some people consider ita win" to lean in to known falsehoods. We aresocial psychologistswho study [...]

We know there's a concerted effort to punish anyone who dares to show anything but complete, unqualified reverence for Charlie Kirk's corpse. The man who made millions by denigrating anyone who wasn't as white, straight, and Christian" as he was is apparently above reproach now that he's been murdered. That would be stupid enough on [...]

60 Minutes is under new management and things are getting stupid faster than you might expect. Last night's episode featured President Trump, which is currently being described as nuts." There are all sorts of crazy moments to call out, but let's start with the recursively meta nonsense. 60 Minutes edited out a segment where Donald [...]

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To say the irony was lost on them would be to assume they ever thought some irony might exist. DC resident Sam O'Hara came across a bunch of out-of-state National Guard troops and put his own spin on their Trump-enabled interloping. As he followed the troops through the neighborhood, O'Hara engaged in protected expression - [...]

Much of the federal government is shuttered, but that's not preventing the Trump administration from finding new ways to screw over struggling Americans. Last week, the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr voted to indefinitely suspend efforts to impose new, lower price caps on predatory U.S. prison monopolies that would have prevented them from over-billing inmate [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is an anonymous comment on our post about how neutrality" and free speech" become excuses for bigotry: You can't be neutral about bigotry Neutrality" is for elements of policy, like What should be the top tax rate" or should we build a new interstate highway" [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the RIAA tossed out a bogus DMCA claim to get a YouTube downloading tool pulled from Github, and was still flooding Twitch with takedowns that the company was responding to by freaking out and courting a lot of outrage from the users it failed to defend. Meanwhile, YouTuber [...]

Both Google and Apple are cramming new AI features into their phones and other devices, and neither company has offered clear ways to control which apps those AI systems can access. Recent issues around WhatsApp on both Android and iPhone demonstrate how these interactions can go sideways, risking revealing chat conversations beyond what you intend. [...]

ICE can generate multiple horrible stories a day but it still can't seem to find enough brown people to deport daily to satisfy White House advisor Stephen Miller's demands for 3,000 arrests per day. Trump and the GOP threw a lot of money at this problem with the Big Beautiful Bill. A lot of money: [...]

When it comes to RFK Jr., I tend not to find much humor in the chaos he creates. The man's work involves American health and illness, life and death, so it's just generally not funny. And that holds true to Kennedy's wielding of incomplete, inaccurate, and unsettled science to go before all of America and [...]

As anyone who has read Techdirt for any length of time knows full well, there's been a years-long campaign to demonize kids and social media. Never mind that actual experts have said the data doesn't support the claims of inherent harm, politicians around the globe are rushing to ban kids from social media as fast [...]

The Ultimate Unity Game Development Bundle has 4 courses are designed to designed to teach about game dev and how to create your own games using the Unity engine. You'll learn about the fundamentals of C# programming, 2D and 3D game development, mobile game development, how to build amazing cutscenes, and more. It's on sale [...]

It surprises absolutely no one that the Trump administration lies. Trump himself has been lying constantly ever since his first spin in the resolute desk chair. His new administration is right there with him this time around, ensuring we see nothing but a flood of falsehoods all the time. The administration knows it's lying. We [...]

While AI" certainly has some useful applications, a lot of the folks in charge of the trajectory of LLMs clearly want to use it to build a giant, badly automated ouroboros of lazy internet slop that shits out ad money without the need for pesky labor. You see this most profoundly in media, where a [...]

As of this moment, the National Guard is indefinitely prevented from deploying within the Chicagoland area. The court order was issued pending the Supreme Court's decision to rule on the matter. And because this administration is a walking, talking clown show, the information that SCOTUS is getting on the matter is hilariously stratified depending on [...]

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 round-up of the latest news in online [...]

Going forward, the only thing you'll hear reported from the Pentagon will be delivered by subservient, right-wing stenographers. The War Department has its own Ministry of Truth, staffed by people whose organizations have seen their fortunes rise along with Trump's. The bootlicking was always there. The only change is that it's now officially state-sanctioned. The [...]

A wave of proposed social media bans for young people has swept the globe recently, fuelled by mounting concern about the apparent harm the likes of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat can cause to vulnerable minds. Australia was the first toannounce restrictionson people under 16 having a social media account. New Zealand maysoon follow, and Denmark's [...]