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In the year 2,000 (cue the Conan O'Brien music), America had so successfully defeated measles as a disease that we were awarded elimination status for the disease. Then Trump was elected to a second term, for reasons I still can't fully explain, after which RFK Jr. somehow was confirmed as the Secretary of HHS. Almost [...]

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 special episode, Mike and Ben reflect on 100 [...]

Back when Netflix was proposing a takeover of Warner Brothers, you might recall that director James Cameron had no shortage of critical things to say. Cameron went so far as to write a heavily publicized letter to Senator Mike Lee, lamenting the Netflix Warner Brothers merger (andonlythe Netflix merger) as disastrous to the motion [...]

Back in 2011 and 2012, one of the central technical objections that helped kill SOPA and PIPA was about DNS blocking. Engineers, internet architects, and cybersecurity experts all lined up to explain, in painstaking detail, why blocking at the DNS layer was a terrible idea. It would break the fundamental architecture of how the internet [...]

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The government needs more funding than ever, which is kind of hilarious when you realize the Tea Party of the Obama era was the predecessor of this Big Government version of the GOP. The DHS can't even get itself a budget at the moment. Sure, it will get some money thrown to it sooner or [...]

There's some endless, curious tensions within the corrupt Trump administration when it comes to their effort to completely destroy the government's ability to hold corporations accountable for dodgy, nefarious, or even illegal behavior. Their own, lazy, circular logic and bad faith legal interpretations are creating vast new legal minefields we'll be untangling for decades. The [...]

Iran's internet has beenintermittently disruptedfor months. After years of bombardment, Gaza's telecommunications infrastructureremains fragile. In India,recurring shutdownsand throttling have become a routine response to protests and unrest, cutting millions off from news, work, and basic services. Acrossdozens of other countries, governments increasingly treat connectivity itself as something that can be weaponized-cut, slowed, or selectively restored [...]

Back in 2023, Arkansas passed a social media age verification law so poorly drafted that the bill's own sponsor couldn't accurately describe who it covered. The law appeared to exempt TikTok, Snapchat, and YouTube while the sponsor publicly claimed those were the exact platforms being targeted. When the state's own expert witness testified that Snapchat [...]

I originally began this headline with the word ironically." But it would only be ironic if it wasn't by design. Irony suggests something slightly out of the control of the principal figures resulted in something somewhat unexpected. That isn't the case here. This was by design. The New York Times has obtained the behind-the-scenes memos [...]

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Disclaimer: This post talks about Bluesky and an offering from Bluesky and I am on the Bluesky board. Take everything I say with whatever size grains of salt you feel is appropriate. I've written a few times now about how I think that AI tools, used carefully and thoughtfully, represent our best chance at taking [...]

This Saturday is the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner (WHCA). And there's been ample criticism of journalists that plan to have giggles and cocktails with overt fascists, given this helps normalize of one of the most racist, censorial, and corrupt administrations in U.S. history. This year, because an actual comedian might get somewhere close to [...]

With the streaming world turning into a wild, chaotic, fractured mess, there is no better example of how terrible this can all be than with live sports. We've already seen all kinds of issues among streaming services when it comes to sports. Buffering live games piss people off. Exclusivity deals worked out among several services [...]

There are defamation lawsuits designed to win, and then there are defamation lawsuits designed to generate headlines for your fans on social media, punish journalists, and maybe - if you're lucky - force a settlement or intimidate future reporting. FBI Director Kash Patel's brand new defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic is very obviously the second [...]

For nearly twenty years, I've used Google Docs for most of my writing: class notes, personal notes, a novel in progress, research, activism, and my day job. It's become an essential piece of infrastructure for me, an archive of my life and evolving interests. In order to sign up for Google Drive, I presumably had [...]

Last fall, an Alabama police officer decided he wasn't going to allow a 62-year-old woman to exercise her First Amendment rights - not if she was going to do so from inside an inflatable penis costume. Yes, these are sentences we actually have to write here at Techdirt - things that seem so implausible you'd [...]

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A couple weeks back, Jonathan Haidt published another entry in his ongoing campaign to convince the world that social media is inherently ruining kids' lives. This one was a victory lap titled Seven Lines of Evidence Against Social Media," treating recent developments - including the social media addiction verdicts against Meta that most people are [...]

Talk about pathetic. CBS has announced that the now-Larry Ellison owned network will be hosting a lavish dinner this week praising Donald Trump and his (nonexistent) dedication to the First Amendment. The dinner will be hosted at the United States Institute of Peace in Washington, which the State Department claimed in December 2025was being renamed [...]

It's barely been a few days back since we discussed just how open to mistakes and abuse YouTube's copyright takedown system is, when NVIDIA's demo video for its controversial DLSS 5 tech got briefly pulled down because an Italian news channel did a piece featuring the footage which it copyrighted. The copyright bots took it [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica and Frontline.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The National Guard soldiers in desert camo piled out of unmarked vans in East Los Angeles last June, cordoning off East Sixth Street, a residential street lined with single family houses, and blocking a nearby road leading to an elementary school. A squad of [...]

Earlier this month, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!" - notably including the stock ticker, because why not just make the market manipulation explicit. The stock popped after that and has continued to rise in the past [...]

Despite a bunch of Republican lawmakers being extremely (and mostly performatively) upset that their communications were accessed during investigations of the January 2021 insurrection attempt, the current version of the Trump administration seems to prefer a clean re-authorization of the surveillance powers it so recently deemed a dangerous part of the deep state." The FISA [...]

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 [...]

For the better part of five years, we've been treated to an elaborate performance about the unprecedented constitutional horror of jawboning." Jim Jordan held hearings. Missouri's AG sued. The Supreme Court heard Murthy v. Missouri and concluded there wasn't enough evidence of government coercion to establish standing, let alone a First Amendment violation. None of [...]

Late last month we noted how the Trump FCC under Brendan Carr announced a new ban" on all routers made overseas (which means 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 [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is dfbomb with a comment about the insane charges being brought against adults who assist students during anti-ICE protests: These fucking assholes terrorized our schools. They approached our people observing schools during morning and afternoon drop offs, pretending to be locals. We saw through them. [...]

We're past the halfway point in our series of spotlight posts looking at the winners of our eighth annual public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1930! We've already covered the Best Adaptation, Best Deep Cut, and Best Visuals winners, and this week we're looking at the winner of Best Remix: Lilac Song by Autumn [...]

Two trends that I'm very interested in are about to collide and it's going to be a mess. By now, some of you will be tired of my calling for a more nuanced discussion about the use of AI and machine learning tools in the video game industry. I get it, but I'm also not [...]

Back in January, we covered Trump's audacious lawsuit demanding $10 billion from his own IRS over the 2019-2020 leak of his tax returns by IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn (who is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for the leak, meaning the system that Trump claims failed him actually worked just fine). It's also worth remembering [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim,fortified roomat the Justice Department's downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters. They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr. Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump's claims that the presidential election had [...]

We've been covering Brendan Carr's censorial ambitions for a long time now. When Trump first picked him to chair the FCC, we warned people that the free speech warrior" branding was a total sham. We later dug into the letter from a massive coalition of 80+ legal scholars, former FCC officials, and civil liberties groups [...]

The Python Crash Course is a guide on how to get started in Python, why you should learn it, and how you can learn it. The syntax of the language is clean and the length of the code is relatively short. In this comprehensive course, you will get in-depth knowledge in data types, loops, python [...]

Just to be clear, when I refer to Trump" in terms of his administration, I'm referring to the collective hive mind of dangerous enablers he employs. Trump, by himself, is incapable of closing an umbrella. It's the people around him that are dangerous, since they're able to convert his rants and brain stem impulses into [...]

As the boss of the country's media and telecom regulators, there's plenty of corporate malfeasance and corrupt shenanigans Brendan Carr could be targeting on any given day at the country's biggest media and telecom companies. But because Carr's never been all that interested in the public interest, he's once again spending his time trying to [...]

Several years ago, Rockstar Games suffered an intrusion into its corporate network. During that intrusion, a trove of data, files, and information about the in-development and unfinished Grand Theft Auto 6 game was exfiltrated. Under monetary threat of that data leaking, Rockstar completely lost its mind and went on a DMCA takedown campaign to try [...]

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 [...]

I think it's important to understand that, despite claims to the contrary, age verification is, inherently, a right-wing effort. While it's currently true that age verification laws are being supported globally by those on the political right and left, they started as very much a right wing effort to suppress disliked speech by claiming it [...]

We've got a throwback administration that wants to bring us back to halcyon days of early 1950s America, that preceded Supreme Court-ordered school desegregation. If it could, I'm sure it would go back even further, taking at least another 100 years off the clock. The Trump administration has no problem with embracing bigotry. That much [...]

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We've been covering the Trump administration's escalating campaign against NewsGuard for a while now. It started with the House Oversight Committee's absurd investigation of the company for the crime of expressing opinions about news reliability. But then there was the FTC's burdensome fishing expedition and blocking of the merger of two advertising giants - Omnicom [...]

I cut my teeth as a telecom reporter, so I spent a lot of time writing about how broadband monopolies and cable TV giants rip off consumers with sleazy, misleading fees. I also spent a lot of that time writing about how lobbying and regulatory capture have ensured that big companies see no meaningful penalties [...]

We've talked for many years about Nintendo's shotgun approach to IP enforcement, as well as its heavy-handed ToS enforcement policies that can include bricking customer consoles and/or banning their accounts if they do something Nintendo doesn't like, even if it's not strictly illegal. This has all set up an ecosystem where being a Nintendo fan [...]

War does not only reshape borders. It also reshapes what can be seen, said, and remembered. When governments invoke misinformation" during wartime, they often mean something simpler: speech they do not control. Since the escalation of conflict between the United States, Israel, Iran, and related spillover attacks in the Gulf, several governments haveintensified effortsto silence [...]

While the Trump administration's extremely aggressive, thoroughly bigoted attempts to eliminate as many non-white people from this country as possible have resulted in some periodic push back from law enforcement officials, we can never forget that federal law enforcement officers are still just law enforcement officers. And, more often than not, they'll always have the [...]

Back in January of last year, the Wall Street Journal published a story about a leather-bound birthday book that Ghislaine Maxwell had assembled for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003. The book included letters from various associates, and one of them bore Donald Trump's name. According to the article, it featured a hand-drawn outline of [...]

Geekey is an innovative, compact multi-tool like nothing seen before. It's truly a work of art with engineering that combines everyday common tools into one sleek little punch that delivers endless capability. Geekey features many common tools that have been used for decades and proven essential for everyday fixes. It's on sale for $23. Note: [...]

It wasn't all that long ago that GOP legislators were collectively stonewalling a clean reauthorization of Section 702. Three years ago, these legislators were seeking to end the FBI (and other IC components') access to Americans' communications via backdoor" searches of the NSA's supposedly foreign facing" collections. It wasn't that the Republicans cared that Joe [...]

Last year the fraud-prone Trump organization announceda half-assed wireless phone company. As we noted at the time, calling this a phone company" was generous; it was a lazy marketing rebrand of another, half-assed, MAGA-focused" mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resold T-Mobile service. So basically just another lazy Trump brand [...]