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We've well established how the $111 billion Paramount and Warner Brothers merger is terrible for labor, creatives, consumers, and markets. But the kind of behaviors Paramount leadership have been engaged in to sell the deal also give a pretty clear indication what kind of company we're dealing with, and why they shouldn't be allowed to [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with a comment about calls for RFK Jr.'s resignation coming entirely from Democrats: And that's why trying to distill partisan politics down to just team blue" vs. team red" is reductive at best and false equivalence at worst. This and many other life-or-death [...]

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I have mostly stayed away from the whole saga surrounding the drip-drip leaks of Grand Theft Auto 6 content prior to the big reveal on Netflix because, frankly, I am quite wary of giving companies the kind of guerilla marketing wins that sometimes look like this sort of thing. That being said, I really don't [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. You might assume that what you tell a doctor stays between you, your physician and perhaps your insurer. But the reality is more complicated. TheHealth Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the federal privacy law that governs health information and iscommonly known as [...]

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 [...]

There is a flood of lawsuits against social media, from a variety of different parties, all claiming some kind of harm. Would you feel differently about some of those lawsuits if you found out the plaintiffs bringing them were talking amongst themselves about how they were doing it just to become rich? Because we just [...]

CyberTraining 365 is the best training destination for you and your team. Here you can Master Cyber Security techniques such as Analyzing Malware, Penetration Testing, Advanced Persistent Threats, Threat Intelligence Research, Reverse Engineering, and much more. This online academy offers 3,877 up-to-date modules on all the latest technologies and industry standards. These courses are aligned [...]

You have to know you're fucking up when your largest and best-paying customer base is increasingly noping out of contract renewals. That more than anything is probably what provoked ALPR maker Flock Safety to start implementing a few guardrails for use. It seemingly had no problem with being the target of negative press for most [...]

Just so we're clear: pre-merger promises (especially in the media and telecom sectors) are absolutely worthless. There's fifty years of indisputable evidence that all of the synergies" and innovative improvements promised on the front end of major media mergers mean absolutely nothing. Especially in a country dead-set on defanging its labor and consumer protection regulators. [...]

To quote the opening line from the court opinion that this post is based upon, Millions of American teenagers have sex." This post is has nothing to do with whether that sort of thing is good or bad, natural or otherwise, nor the moral implications of it all. Whatever you think about that opening line, [...]

At this point all fifty states have considered passing right to repair" law aimed at making it easier and cheaper for consumers (and independent repair shops) to repair their tech. That said, only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado,California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. And of those states, none have seen any enforcement [...]

If you're worried about the bad optics of working with ICE, the federal government is here to help subsidize your recovery from mass deportation conjunctivitis. If you're worried about the personal negative side effects of buddying up to ICE's masked kidnapping squads, the administration is here to assure cops that it might cover some of [...]

From the very beginning of this recent obsession with identifying everyone online (yes, they like to call it age" verification, but it always ends up as identity verification), we've been pointing out that it was a huge privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Or maybe it wasn't waiting. Maybe it was already happening. This week a [...]

Become a language expert with a Babbel Language Learning subscription. With the app, you can use Babbel on desktop and mobile, and your progress is synchronized across devices. Want to practice where you won't have Wi-Fi? Download lessons before you head out, and you'll be good to go. However you choose to access your 10K+ [...]

A little more than a year ago, the Trump administration pushed a novel legal theory in order to juice its migrant arrest stats. It was a two-part process. First, the administration unilaterally declared expansive areas near US military bases to be national defense areas." This meant that areas surrounding bases - like (especially) Fort Bliss [...]

When we look back at this time and history words like courage," integrity," and ethics" aren't words you're going to be associating with U.S. tech industry leadership. Everywhere you look you have tech sector executives either openly embracing fascism and the frontal assault on representative democracy, or too feckless and timid to take any sort [...]

Sony's ability to generate anger lately is pretty impressive. After the company announced that there would be no more physical media versions of games made starting in 2027, to the resounding anger of many people, Sony also demonstrated yet again that it's capable of ripping away the digital purchases" people had made once its own [...]

Meta's settlement with 52 state attorneys general is a bad deal for all internet users, and especially for teens. That's whatwe saidthe day the settlement was announced. In this post, we go through the Settlement's provisions in detail and explain why that is so, including how: Note: A chunk of the settlement addresses unauthorized users [...]

This was inevitable. ICE has billions of new money to spend, zero shame, and not a single adult in a leadership position capable (or willing!) to talk the agency off the ledge. ICE decided the neat new tool of cruelty it absolutely had to have were gloves that behave like stun guns or low-powered Tasers. [...]

Even as Donald Trump regularly uses mail-in ballots himself, he has decided that mail-in ballots are a system by which voting fraud occurs. To be quite clear, this is bullshit. There is astoundingly little evidence of significant voter fraud, and that's equally true between in-person and voting-by-mail. And there's zero evidence that mail-in voter fraud [...]

The Adobe Graphic Design Bundle has 3 courses designed to help you learn the essentials of graphic design and how to apply those skills to your projects. Courses cover Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. You'll learn all aspects of the design process. It's on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated [...]

Law enforcement is often self-selecting. If you like the things you've seen cops get away with (violence, brutality, open racism, multiple rights violations, etc.), you'll probably like being a cop. And before the pedants get carried away in the comments, I'm using cop" as shorthand for the whole of the law enforcement profession, even if [...]

Back in June, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 inNational Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commissionthat federal limits on coordinated expenditures by political parties violate the First Amendment, opening the floodgates to a much broader array of political ads funded via no limit of rich assholes and their preferred dark money groups. In preparation for [...]

There are plenty of reasons to call for RFK Jr. to resign or be fired. There are plenty of reasons to call for him to be investigated. There's his complete dereliction of duty when it comes to the American measles outbreak. There's his sneaky misrepresentations carried out as he moonlights on a government-funded cooking show [...]

Initially the idea of the smart television" seemed like a good idea. That is until TV makers realized they could make significantly more money loading the television with spyware, tracking your every online choice, then selling all that data to a global assortment of unregulated data brokers. It didn't take long for product quality to [...]

The worst of the worst" are coming for the worst of the worst." Of course, this administration has completely given up on this pretense, despite sending out lots of noisy messaging otherwise every time an immigration officer murders a person. For the entirety of Trump's anti-migration surge, it's been obvious that it's all about expelling [...]

When Twitter launched, it was originally designed to be just like an open protocol. In the early days, the company eagerly supported third party development, building on that protocol. But, because it was a new communications protocol totally controlled by a single company, eventually commercial pressure led the company to close off the openness. Jack [...]

To completely understand computer security, it's vital to step outside the fence and to think outside the box. Computer security is not just about firewalls, Intrusion Prevention Systems, or anti-viruses. It's also about tricking people into doing whatever a hacker wishes. A secure system, network, or infrastructure is also about informed people. The All-in-One Super-Sized [...]

As the Trump administration continues to chase away actual talent in order to staff federal agencies with loyalists and/or people who don't know any better, it has had to lower hiring standards to keep the federal cupboards stocked. ICE went on a hiring surge following the imposition of impossible arrest quotas and a few billion [...]

Our full-diapered mad king is at it again, this time urging FCC boss Brendan Carr to go after media companies for the crime of....simply pointing out his terrible, crashing polling numbers: Trump last week also posted a long, rambling screed on his personal propaganda website, vowing that NBC NewsMeet the PressmoderatorKristen Welker would be reported [...]

When we just discussed the two recent deaths in Pennsylvania that came as a result of measles infections, we noted that there was very little information about the deceased. Some additional information has since been released, in particular the fact that one of those that died was a newborn child. This is the sort of [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. In April 2026, a federal grand jury returnedindictments charging the Southern Poverty Law Centerwith wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment alleges the SPLC, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, secretly funneled more thanUS$3 million in donated fundsto [...]

I can't assume the Trump administration hoped this would happen. But I can't believe no one in the administration (Trump, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan) isn't secretly thrilled that this has happened. The administration managed to revoke temporary protected status for Haitian refugees in America, a decision that affects nearly 350,000 people. The revocation of this [...]

Earlier this year, one of the smartest internet rights people around, Heather Burns, suggested the Darnella Test" regarding any kind of kid safety" rule online. It's named after Darnella Frazier. You might not recognize her name, but you've seen her work. She was the 17-year-old who was walking to the corner shop when she happened [...]

Enjoy calming sounds, bedtime music, audiobooks, or podcasts without wearing headphones or disturbing a sleeping partner. The Ultrathin Sleep Aid speaker fits comfortably beneath or beside your pillow, delivering clear, localized audio while remaining virtually unnoticeable during sleep. Whether you're winding down after a long day, taking a quick afternoon nap, or helping children drift [...]

The Trump administration has been working steadily to remove protected status for asylum seekers that even Trump admits are deadly shitholes." Trump makes claims about countries that seem to indicate they're too dangerous to live in, but then insists there's no reason we shouldn't be allowed to deport migrants to places where they're likely to [...]

Back in June I wrote a feature for The Verge about how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had convinced Republicans to redirect billions in taxpayer money away from future-proof fiber optic upgrades, and toward their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband networks they'd already planned to deploy. Curious behavior for two extremely-rich gentlemen who both repeatedly [...]

This week, MrWilson scores another double-win with both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it's a piece-by-piece response to a commenter who defended ICE's failed illegal raid on an immigration law office: In second place, it's a comment about the first two measles deaths of 2026: Then: Nobody has died. It's not [...]

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We've been detailing the trademark bullying ways of Buc-ee's, famous gas station and convenience store chain in the American south and infamous IP bully, for over a year now. Buc-ee's seems to think that any semi-related business that has branding that involves a cartoon animal or in any way references beavers somehow violates its trademark [...]

There's stilla massive effort 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.All fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, though only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado,California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. US PIRG [...]

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 [...]

When Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a national security risk because it wouldn't agree to his dangerously unethical demands for what Claude should be able to do, Anthropic sued to challenge the directives. One of the challenges was brought in the Northern District of California, where Anthropic has now notched another significant win. While the previous [...]

The SunFounder Raspberry Pi Pico With the Ultimate Starter Kit offers a rich IoT learning experience for beginners aged 8 and up. Withover 450 components, 117 projects, and expert-led tutorials, this kit makes learning microcontroller programming and IoT engaging and accessible. It also features 27 video lessons by renowned educator Paul McWhorter, simplifying microcontroller programming [...]

Compliant Technologies probably would have preferred to keep flying under the radar. But a gaudy new no-bid contract with ICE (worth up to $20 million!) made it impossible. Prior to ICE's big purchase, it may as well have never existed. It only had a few clients, and those few clients purchased a few pairs for [...]

Back in June, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission that federal limits on coordinated expenditures by political parties violate the First Amendment. Which is every bit as stupid and corrupt as it sounds. Previously, under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), political parties were subjected to strict [...]

The country is continuing to reel from multiple infectious disease outbreaks in America, even as childhood vaccination rates continue to fall. Measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough: you don't actually need me to go on. With RFK Jr. using his position as Secretary of HHS to further muddy the waters on vaccines and their safety, some states [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. In his White House Correspondents' Association dinner speech on July 24, 2026,President Donald Trump made his usual diatribes against the news media. He derided the failing" New York Times and reiterated his complaint that CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins doesn't smile enough. He [...]

The unpopular Paramount Warner Brothers merger should have been a perfect opportunity for Democrats to demonstrate they are finally serious about stuff like media consolidation, right wing propaganda, media reform, and antitrust after decades of policy incoherence. Instead, numerous prominent California Democrats have been buckling to Paramount demands aimed at settling a 12-state antitrust lawsuit [...]