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Not content to rewrite American history to better serve white people, the Trump administration is now rewriting world history on the fly by recasting terminal human rights violators as not all that bad, actually" and adding stuff to other human rights reports just because some MAGA people had some bad experiences in a few select [...]

The rushed integration of half-cooked automation into the already broken U.S. journalism industry simply isn't going very well. There's been just countless examples where affluent media owners rushed to embrace automation and LLMs (usually to cut corners and undermine labor) with disastrous impact, resulting in lots of plagiarism, completely false headlines, and a giant, completely [...]

Even though Trump says it's about the crime rates, it's not actually about the crime rates. Just like he used the hallucination that the entirety of Los Angeles was under siege by violent" protesters to justify sending in the troops, the reality was that any violence was contained to a few small blocks in the [...]

Full disclosure: I am on the Bluesky board. Bluesky made a major statement last week when it announced that it would be geoblocking Mississippi IP addresses from accessing its site-making it the first major social media platform to completely block access from a US state. Unlike tech giants with vast resources, we're a small team [...]

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The man who never expected to be the public face of the Trump administration's shotgun approach to deportation is, yet again, being given a set of untenable options and expected to pick one of them. And when he refused to accept the bad choice they gave him, they arrested him this morning at his mandated [...]

Ideally, the U.S. public is supposed to be able to comment on government policy proceedings, and the government is supposed to listen to that input. Of course it doesn't really work that way: for years we've noted how U.S. regulatory comment proceedings are full of bots and fake comments from industries trying to game regulators, [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Heart of Dawn with a comment about the idea that ICE and the Trump administration are stupid: You don't abduct people and put them in concentration camps (foreign or domestic) by simply doing something stupid. Don't let their gross incompetence fool you. They are [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, a judge forbade a Facebook user being sued by a cop from publishing the cop's name on social media, the DC police union was suing to block the release of the names of officers involved in shootings, and we wrote about how Section 230 protects the ability of [...]

When the Techdirt community has had to hear so much about a single state's education superintendent, you know something has gone horribly wrong. The horribly wrong in this case is Ryan Walters of Oklahoma. Walters appears to be doing some sort of combo-impression of Joseph McCarthy mixed with Donald Trump. In his role running Oklahoma [...]

This is the final piece in aseries of poststhat explores how we can rethink the intersection of AI, creativity, and policy. From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle. Together, they advocate for a more balanced, forward-thinking [...]

Earlier this year, an Army helicopter collided with a passenger plane over the Potomac River in Washington, DC. All sixty-seven people aboard both vehicles were killed. While the FAA focused its investigation on the failures that led to this mid-air collision, local investigators in Virginia were somehow far more concerned about identifying who had leaked [...]

The White House's recently-unveiled AI Action Plan" wages war on so-called woke AI"-including large language models (LLMs) that provide information inconsistent with the administration's views on climate change, gender, and other issues. It also targets measures designed to mitigate the generation of racial and gender biased content and evenhate speech. The reproduction of this bias [...]

In theory, the nice thing about having a Supreme Court is that it provides some level of legal certainty. You know how the system works: lower courts make decisions based on law and precedent, parties can appeal, and eventually the highest court issues careful, reasoned opinions that other courts can follow. It's not a perfect [...]

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The number of assaults on ICE officers was always going to increase. There's no way it wouldn't, not when ICE was sending out a task force composed of multiple federal law enforcement agencies daily to multiple locations in the United States, hoping to finally hit the baseline number of 3,000 arrests per day by Stephen [...]

In a rare win for U.S. consumer privacy, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuithas ruled unanimouslyagainst T-Mobile and its subsidiary Sprint, upholding (for now) a $92 million 2020 FCC fine against the company for selling sensitive wireless customer location data without consumer consent. For decades now major wireless companies have [...]

As you will recall, a single gunmen opened fire on a CDC campus in Atlanta earlier this month, claiming to have been injured by COVID vaccines. The rhetoric he had used prior to the shooting closely aligned with what RFK Jr. had been spouting for years. While Kennedy took nearly a day to even publicly [...]

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. This is the second of our special episodes for the [...]

The UK government has reportedly backed down from its dangerous demand that Apple build encryption backdoors, following pressure from the Trump administration. But the secretive nature of this mutually beneficial" agreement should make us deeply suspicious about what was actually traded away. The UK government has backed down on a controversial demand for Apple to [...]

The Trump administration has been described as many things, none of them good. What no one will ever accuse it of being is competent." Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants, most of them known only for waving the MAGA flag when not hosting shows on Fox or podcasts celebrating the debut of American fascism. Case [...]

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Senator Amy Klobuchar is one of the top Democrats in the Senate. She could be fighting to protect democracy against fascists. She could be working on a new, better vision for Americans. But instead, she's focused on breaking the internet. And now we know why: someone made a stupid satirical video about her, and her [...]

I don't mean to harp on this, but a central promise of the Trump administration during the last election season was that a second Trump term would take aim at big tech," protect the little guy, rein in corporate power, and even continue the legacy of antitrust enforcers like Lina Khan." The press was filled [...]

If you're tired of Techdirt posts about RFK Jr.'s inability to competently lead HHS, I'm tired of him leading that organization, so too bad. The problem is that RFK Jr. represents something of a national health emergency, one that is multi-faceted. The most obvious bucket of fuckery in which he is operating is, of course, [...]

During the last year of the Trump administration, there was this weird period where the Bill Barr DOJ decided that it could destroy the internet. It came out of Donald Trump declaring that Section 230 was bad for whatever reason Donald Trump thinks anything is bad, and telling his Attorney General to do something about [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. A New York business frozen out of its checking account. A Georgia chemotherapy patient denied a credit card refund after a product dispute. A New Jersey service member defrauded out of their savings. These consumers - along with hundreds of others - reached out to their [...]

Petty thugs. That's all ICE is. Masked officers too cowardly to show their faces and too aware they're in the wrong to dare approach judges with warrant requests. Even ICE's lawyers are doing what they can to keep themselves from being added to the permanent record. Idiots are running the agencies and assholes are staffing [...]

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When I was in DC last week, everyone seemed to be talking about the brewing drama at the Department of Justice's antitrust division. The HPE/Juniper merger settlement had raised eyebrows, two senior officials had been fired, and rumors were swirling about political interference playing a role in ending what had appeared to be a decently [...]

There are $42.5billionin broadband grants that are headed to the states thanks to the 2021 infrastructure bill most Republicans voted against (yetroutinely try to take credit for among their constituents). But Republicans, despite a supposed feud between Trump and Elon Musk, have been rewriting the grant program's guidance toeliminate provisions ensuring the resulting broadband is [...]

We've already demonstrated over the course of plenty of posts that RFK Jr. is wildly incapable of running Health and Human Services. The fact that he was even nominated for a role in managing American health is absolutely bonkers, but that a Senate filled with supposed grown adults voted to confirm his appointment to HHS [...]

Back in 2023 we wrote about how regional Polish rail company and a train manufacturer NEWAG had taken to using DRM to lock down trains that are repaired by independent technicians, in a bid to both monopolize - and drive up the costs of repair. This kind of effort to monopolize repair is common across [...]

Support us on Patreon As we've been thinking and writing about the intersection of democracy and technology, especially burgeoning AI technology, we always come back to the core issues of user control and user freedom. Recently, Chris Riley of the Data Transfer Initiative wrote an excellent piece for Tech Policy Press about the need for [...]

Since it's easier to jump people who aren't criminals than to actually track down criminals, ICE - especially in certain parts of the country - is sending its masked officers to hang around courtrooms and arrest people who are just trying to follow the rules to gain permanent residence in the United States. This tactic [...]

Here we go again. Whenever policy makers insist that there's some nerd harder" solution to tricky societal problems, actual experts have to spend a ridiculous amount of time explaining basic realities to them. Sometimes those are realities about the technology. And sometimes it's realities about the technology. This time it's age verification's turn. Steve Bellovin-one [...]

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Suck it up, shitbirds. You're the beneficiaries of full-throated support from a megalomaniac who has just untied the purse strings and dumped pretty much everything in it into ICE's back pocket. ICE is on its way to becoming the largest law enforcement recipient of federal tax dollars, and yet the head of its controlling entity [...]

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 to 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 disaster was the poster [...]

How much vodka would you have to drink before you mistakenly and drunkenly believed you were drinking it out of a shoe? That is essentially the question that has been raised by a vodka distillery that sued an online sneaker marketplace for declaratory judgment that no trademark infringement exists between them. I'm sure you're confused; [...]

Western allies are abandoning American leadership while we stand by, morally bankrupt and intellectually spent, watching children starve in Gaza with weapons we provided to a corrupt authoritarian we're too cowardly to constrain. Meanwhile, the same brilliant minds who assured us Trump was a master negotiator who'd never actually implement his policies are already preparing [...]

Few areas of law have lately been as relevant, and the focus of so much dispute, as preliminary injunctive relief. Because the subject has come up so many times already, and is inevitably bound to come up again in the near future, this post takes a moment to discuss what is meant by preliminary injunctive [...]

While this latest bit of low-key embarrassment may not be a black eye for the administration, it certainly isn't putting any more lipstick on this pig. Whatever you may think about the recent summit meeting between these two international besties, you can be assured that some of the attendees thought even less of it than [...]

A federal judge has delivered an extraordinary rebuke to the FTC's Andrew Ferguson, finding that his investigation into Media Matters was motivated by retaliatory animus" rather than legitimate antitrust concerns. In a scathing ruling, Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan granted Media Matters' motion for a preliminary injunction, calling out not just the investigation's pretextual nature, but [...]

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Trump and his GOP enablers wouldn't know subtlety if it held them down and punched them in the face repeatedly. Being a little bit crafty is never an option for an administration that prides itself on its performances. A little subtlety tends to go a long way, especially when you're already fighting dozens of federal [...]

A fusion of authoritarianism and corporatism is destroying what's left of already soggy U.S. federal consumer protection and corporate oversight. You might not know this because the U.S. press and many policymakers genuinely don't appear to care, but it's happening all the same. Whether bydodgy Supreme Court ruling,executive order, orcaptured regulators, the U.S. authoritarians, often [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Strawb with a reply to a couple parts of a comment on our post about Trump derangement syndrome" turning out to be pretty damn correct: In second place, it's Rocky with a comment about the FCC installing a babysitter at CBS: And here it [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we wrote about how the idea that banning TikTok thwarts Chinese intelligence was ridiculous, and how any real threat probably comes from America's feebly secured infrastructure. As for failed security, we looked at the incredible waste of Baltimore's aerial surveillance program, and as for worrying security", we looked [...]

We've talked a bunch about the lawsuit drama between Nintendo and the Pokemon Co. against PocketPair, the makers of the hit game Palworld. The short version goes something like this. Palworld is clearly inspired by the Pokemon world and games, but does not directly copy anything from those properties. Nintendo in particular seems very annoyed [...]