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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 [...]

One of the most remarkable staffing decisions of the second Trump administration has been to allow the anti-vaxxers to run America's health agencies. While RFK Jr. and his cadre of lieutenants prattle on about how they're going to be super transparent, data-driven stewards of American health, their actions have put the lie to all of [...]

A few years ago agricultural equipment giant John Deere found itselfon the receiving end of multiple state, federal, and class action lawsuitsfor its efforts to monopolize tractor repair. The lawsuits noted that the company consistently purchased competing repair centers in order to consolidate the sector and force customers into using the company's own repair facilities, [...]

Support us on Patreon As we work our way towards a better future for the internet, the most encouraging and exciting part is the people out there building towards that future. Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler is one such person, and his new company Metalabel has some extremely interesting projects in the works, including the Dark [...]

In early March, 438 security and privacy researchers from 32 countries signed a massive open letter warning that age verification mandates for the internet are technically impossible to get right, easy to circumvent, a serious threat to privacy and security, and likely to cause more harm than good. While many folks (including us at Techdirt) [...]

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If you're not corrupt, you generally don't have to say certain things. Let's take a look at ex-NYC mayor Eric Adams who, while dealing with plenty of corruption investigations and allegations, protested his innocence by saying stuff no one who wasn't hip deep in corruption would ever say: Investigators have not indicated to us the [...]

More than 1,000 top Hollywood professionals ranging from Glenn Close to Denis Villeneuve have signed off on a new letter opposing the merger between Larry Ellison's Paramount/CBS and Warner Brothers, warning that the massive $111 billion deal will result in unprecedented layoffs at a time when Hollywood, and American consumers, are already reeling from layoffs [...]

With all that RFK Jr. has done, and failed to do, as the Secretary of HHS, he should be terribly busy cleaning up mess after mess. The measles outbreak that is going to cause America to lose its elimination status is still ongoing and on pace to quadruple last year's case total, so he could [...]

The Trump administration has restricted the First Amendment right to record law enforcement by issuing an unprecedentednationwide flight restrictionpreventing private drone operators, including professional and citizen journalists, from flying drones within half a mile of any ICE or CBP vehicle. In January, EFF and media organizations includingThe New York TimesandThe Washington Postresponded to this blatant [...]

The government's reliance on grand juries to bring charges against activists, protesters, and the president's personal enemies has been misplaced. Increasingly, grand juries are refusing to give the government what it wants: rubber-stamped indictments that will allow it to move forward with vindictive prosecutions. But there's still something grand juries offer that regular courts can't: [...]

We've been warning for a while now that Section 230 is dying by a thousand legal workarounds rather than a straightforward repeal, and the hits just keep coming. A few weeks ago, I wrote about how two jury verdicts against Meta in New Mexico and California should scare anyone who cares about the open internet, [...]

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 [...]

More of the same for the Trump administration - one that seems incapable of achieving its goals without breaking the law or disregarding the Constitution. Hundreds of judges handling thousands of cases have already told the administration it can't do the things it thinks it can when it comes to satisfying its anti-migrant bloodlust/Stephen Miller's [...]

VPNs (when integrity is maintained and the owners aren't sleazy scammers) have long been the mortal enemy of shitty, surveillance-happy governments. And when shitty, surveillance-happy governments try to block or degrade the use of VPNs, bad things can happen. As Russia found out recently when a ham-fisted effort to block VPN users from accessing Telegram [...]

This week, we've got a double-winning comment from Shannon Vanshoon that took first place on the insightful side and second place on the funny side. It's a response to a particular passage in our post about the scammy AI company that fooled the New York Times: In second place on the insightful side, it's a [...]

It's time for the third 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 and Best Deep Cut winners, and this week we're looking at the winner of Best Visuals: As I Lay Flying by Geouug. [...]

Last month, we discussed NVIDIA's demo video for its forthcoming DLSS 5 technology and the controversy surrounding it. While I'm going to continue to be of the posture that an injection of nuance is desperately needed in the reaction to AI tools and the like, our comments section largely disagreed with me on that post. [...]

The Trump administration's AI policy is two-faced, torn between deregulation and despotism. In March, the administration released its National AI Legislative Framework, directing Congress to prevent the United States government from coercing technology providers, including AI providers, to ban, compel, or alter content based on partisan or ideological agendas." This policy against government interference with [...]

In case you've been asleep, what appears to be an increasingly mentally unstable Donald Trump has further destabilized the middle east with a war nobody asked for or wanted. Most U.S. media coverage of Trump's disastrous Iran war hasn't been great, but they've still occasionally managed to communicate the pointlessness of the endeavor to the [...]

First, some of the good news: certain AI models-currently Anthropic's Mythos, but surely others are well on their way if they haven't already arrived-turn out to be really good at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities. As Anthropic itself reported: During our testing, we found that Mythos Preview is capable of identifying and then exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in [...]

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I'm not here to cut the Trump administration any slack or engage in both-sides bullshit, but this is something that has always been true: we treat anyone imprisoned or detained as less than human. The dehumanization begins with something we call processing" - a word that separates a human from their humanity by making them [...]

A little over a year ago, we wrote about a fairly silly lawsuit filed against Netflix (and Warner Bros.) by Pepperdine University in California for trademark infringement. At issue is the Netflix show Running Point, which is a fictionalized story of a female executive thrust into ownership of a professional basketball team, inspired by 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. In this week's roundup of the latest news in online [...]

Copyright law is supposed to encourage creativity. Too often, it's used to extract payouts from others. Higbee & Associates, a law firmknown for sending copyright demand lettersto website owners, targeted May First Movement Technology, accusing it of infringing a photograph owned by Agence France-Presse (AFP). The claim was baseless. May First didn't post the photo. [...]

We've talked for years about how the DMCA's notice-and-takedown system is ripe for abuse. The legal structure of the law practically begs for such abuse: send a notice, content disappears, and the target has to fight through a slow counter-notice process to maybe get it back. The system rewards speed of takedowns over accuracy because [...]

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Forgive me for this digression. I know it's usually left to Mike Masnick to lift us up from our collective doldrums when things seem even more hopeless than they did last year. His New Year's posts are never wrong. There are always silver linings, even if the filigree is more difficult to detect with each [...]

Elon Musk is desperate to dominate the Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite broadband market. So is Jeff Bezos. And now the two billionaires are engaged in proxy fights at Trump's FCC over who'll get the honor. Amazon's LEO offering, Project Leo, is significantly behind Musk's Starlink, and has been rushing to build out its LEO satellite constellation. [...]

After RFK Jr. found himself getting a rebuke from the court system over his ACIP reorganization from last year, in which the courts issued a preliminary injunction on the vaccine schedule changes ACIP recommended and staying further work from the panel, I've been waiting for the government to appeal the order. That appeal has not [...]

There'sa meaningful push afootto implement statewide right to repair" laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own. Unfortunately, whileall fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado,California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. Passage can [...]

Never underestimate the stupidity of law enforcement. When things could just be left alone and everything would turn out OK, officers insist on inserting themselves into the equation, ensuring maximum pain and humiliation for everyone involved. In this case, a Fairhope, Alabama officer decided he couldn't simply do nothing when coming across a grandmother at [...]

Remember when the Biden administration set up something called the Disinformation Governance Board" and the entire MAGA universe lost its collective mind? It was the Ministry of Truth." It was government speech police." It was the single most Orwellian thing any American administration had ever done in the history of civilization. Nina Jankowicz, the researcher [...]

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The courts keep pounding the nails home. What this government is engaged in is illegal, on multiple levels. If you subtract the pro-MAGA Fifth Circuit and 6/9ths of the Supreme Court, you have a judicial quorum that says rights are still rights, despite this administration's claims otherwise. DHS has issued memos claiming (without facts or [...]