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What began in Los Angeles and Washington DC is being expanded to any other place the president thinks is being run by people who just aren't subservient enough to the GOP. The next city in line for the Trump Treatment is Memphis, Tennessee, which is (of course) run by a member of the Democratic party, [...]

This is part two of a two-part series about the recent settlement between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the Utah Consumer Protection Division (CPD), and Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub. The order (which has now been approved by a federal court) settled allegations that Aylo let child sex abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual intimate [...]

Well, they finally did it. A federal agency finally shattered the precarious base that upholds the edifice of prosecutions for child sex abuse material (CSAM) in America. That agency is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which just entered into a deeply problematic settlement with a major online content platform for doing little to block" CSAM [...]

I am not here to celebrate the death of Charlie Kirk. I will not, however, engage in the completely unearned celebration of his life that is happening pretty much everywhere in the wake of his murder. What's happening now would normally be considered inexplicable in any other political climate. But this one is front-loaded to [...]

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As a reminder, I'm on the board at Bluesky, which means you should consider me extremely biased, even as this article isn't really about Bluesky. The writer Jerusalem Demsas wants you to stay on Twitter. In The case for staying on Twitter," she admits the site is effectively overrun by neo-Nazis, but she argues that [...]

Long beforethe great TikTok moral panic of 2021 to 2024, you might recall that numerous members of Congress spent a solid decade freaking about another Chinese company: Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei. The argument, made without much in the way of public evidence, was that Huawei was systematically using its network gear to spy on [...]

This week, we've got a double-win on the insightful side for MrWilson. In first place, it's a comment about walling off the open internet to stop AI: The thing is, everyone is a victim, not just the sites getting hammered. The value of the internet is its openness. You can always route around one obstacle [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we learned about how the White House supposedly blocked Walmart from buying TikTok, and we asked why amidst all the fear around the site, nobody was equally worried about advertising tech and location data sales. GOP Senators released the latest stupid attempt to reform Section 230, the FISA [...]

As you will hopefully recall, that very strange patent lawsuit between Nintendo and PocketPair over the latter's hit game, Palworld, is ongoing. At the heart of that case is a series of overly broad patents for what are generally considered generic game mechanics that also have a bunch of prior art from before their use [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The Trump administration has vowed to go after anyone who got lower mortgage rates by claiming more than one primary residence on their loan papers. President Donald Trump has used it as a justification to target political foes, includinga governoron the Federal Reserve Board,a Democratic U.S. [...]

We've been tracking the growing judicial revolt against the Supreme Court's shadow docket nonsense, from individual district judges getting snarky in footnotes to anonymous judges speaking to reporters. But what happened Thursday at the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals crosses into entirely new territory: a full en banc panel of federal judges openly criticizing the [...]

The Himalayan nation of Nepal has featured only rarely on Techdirt. The first time was back in 2003, with a story about an early Internet user there. According to the post, he would spend five hours walking down the mountain to the main road, and then another four hours on a bus to get to [...]

Rep. Clay Higgins wants to use his government power to ban Americans from the internet for life if they say unkind things about Charlie Kirk's death. Yes, the same Clay Higgins who just two years ago co-sponsored the Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act-a performative bill that did literally nothing except restate that government actors [...]

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This news - you know, the stuff that shows National Guard troops aren't exactly happy to be expendable pieces in Trump revenge schemes - is unsurprising. No one signed up for this, but Donald Trump and a bunch of suck-ups scattered across a handful of red states have made Trump's War on DC the new [...]

For many, many years security experts have warned that the internet of things" (IOT) (or the myriad smart home" devices we have scattered around our homes) was a security and privacy dumpster fire. A lot of these devices are made in China (often poorly) introducing new network attack vectors and widespread national security concerns. So [...]

Despite being the somewhat crispied face of (extremely limited) unrest in Los Angeles in response to ICE activity, Waymo hasn't suddenly decided it's time to get snitchin'. In fact, it's chosen to go the other direction, as Riley McDermid reports for Gizmodo: Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakanarecently emphasizedthat the company will challenge, limit, or reject robotaxi [...]

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.

When the U.S. government signs contracts with private technology companies, the fine print rarely reaches the public.Palantir Technologies, however, has attracted more and more attention over the past decade because of the size and scope of its contracts with the government. Palantir's two main platforms are Foundry and Gotham. Each does different things. Foundry is [...]

Last week, we wrote about two federal judges who were clearly fed up with the Supreme Court's shadow docket nonsense-one sarcastically apologizing" to Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, the other flat-out calling their approach Calvinball." Turns out those weren't isolated incidents. They were canaries in the coal mine. Soon after that, NBC News dropped a remarkable [...]

I know it's never great to blame the victim, but this all could have been avoided if ICE officers hadn't decided they all needed to act like paramilitary death squad members while raiding Home Deport parking lots. If you're in the sort of business you feel you can't do safely with your entire face exposed, [...]

MATLAB allows matrix manipulations, plotting of functions and data, implementation of algorithms, creating of user interfaces, and interfacing with programs written in other languages. That's all well and good, but it means nothing if you don't have a firm grasp of the data types used within MATLAB. In the Complete MATLAB Programming Master Class, you'll [...]

I didn't like Charlie Kirk. His morals and principles, as expressed through his rhetoric and actions, disgusted me. I've no reason to mourn his death-and no plans to celebrate it. Kirk was killed in what is most likely an act of politically inspired violence. He was shot during one of his usual speaking events; at [...]

Earlier this month, we noted how Wired and Business Insider were among a half-dozen or so major news organizations that were busted publishing fake journalism by fake journalists using AI to make up completely bogus people, narratives, and stories. The Press Gazette found that at least six outlets were conned by a fraudster going by [...]

The fact that this is still going is absolutely insane. If you haven't followed along with us in the saga of Katy Perry, the famous pop star, and Katie Perry, a local Australian clothing designer, and the trademark dispute between the two, I will happily catch you up in truncated form. Please note that I [...]

Qualified immunity" is included nowhere in the Bill of Rights. But that's because it's not your right. It's a right that only exists because the Supreme Court said it should exist. And ever since it made this proclamation, it's done everything it can to ensure this judicial doctrine can swallow nearly any rights violation thrown [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration's Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security's many [...]

This is the sort of thing any organized government would consider truly embarrassing. We don't have one of those at the moment, so if there's any embarrassment to be had, it has to be experienced on behalf of the Trump administration because this administration is thoroughly incapable of feeling shame itself. Let's lay a bit [...]

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The verdict is in on Jonathan Haidt's The Anxious Generation," and it's devastating. A new piece in TES Magazine systematically demolishes Haidt's claims by doing something revolutionary: actually asking experts who study this stuff what they think. The result reads like an academic execution: When I read the book, I found it really hard to [...]

What if I told you the Trump FCC just leveraged a fake investigation into an American company to force it to sell valuable assets to companies and billionaires loyal to the administration? Well that's exactly what's happening with the news that Dish Network and Echostar are selling $17 billion in valuable spectrum to Elon Musk, [...]

Ohio State University has had a history of being fairly ridiculous when it comes to trademarks. Whether its trademarking the word the" (yes, seriously) or stretching the concept of public confusion so far that the school challenged the trademark for a random brand of vodka, the Buckeyes sure love some trademark shenanigans. But I guess [...]

CBS has decided it likes being in an abusive relationship. A few months ago, it laid the groundwork for perpetual extortion by settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump over allegedly deceptive editing of an interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Trump claimed this was election interference and sued, despite winning the election, re-taking power, and [...]

Support us on Patreon In what feels like something of a throwback to much earlier days of Techdirt, the Supreme Court is getting into the weeds of the DMCA. Cox v. Sony is a case centered around questions of repeat infringers and intermediary liability, and we've submitted an amicus brief from the Copia Institute, written [...]

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals did something remarkable last week-they followed binding Supreme Court precedent. In 2025. Involving Trump. Which, predictably, got them immediately overruled by the Supreme Court just days later. In a 2-1 decision, the court dissolved the government's stay and ordered that FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter be reinstated to her [...]

The fresh hell" administration keeps on rolling. There's no need to actually ask what fresh hell awaits. You need do nothing more than exist and a new fresh hell will be delivered, almost daily. Here's the freshest: the US military decided to blow up a boat traveling in international waters - one carrying eleven people, [...]

Splunk is a powerful data platform used to gather information from multiple sources and index it for efficient access. You can then use collected data to create visualizations, analytics, and a variety of automated and security-related functions. With its web-style interface, Splunk is easy to use and is utilized by many companies worldwide.The 2025 Complete [...]

You know that Family Guy meme where they have the skin color chart to determine how suspicious someone should be? Yeah, you know the one. Well, the Supreme Court just essentially codified that into constitutional law. And they did it on the lawless shadow docket without a real explanation, because of course they did. In [...]

For fifty years or so, U.S. media academics warned anybody who would listen about the perils of letting your media companies consolidate in the hands of a bunch of rich assholes and giant, amoral corporations. Not only did America ignore those recommendations every step of the way, the avoidable issues our ignorance created are rearing [...]

Cory Gardner, who spent a decade as a Republican senator, has been freshly announced as the CEO of the NCTA-The Internet & Television Association-the cable industry's biggest lobbying organization. As the revolving door spins you might recall that Gardner is replacing Michael Powell, former FCC boss, whose stint at the agency has largely destroyed government [...]

New data from the UK's age verification rollout provides hard evidence of what internet governance experts have been warning about for years: these laws don't protect children-they systematically drive users from regulated, compliant platforms to unregulated, non-compliant ones while accomplishing nothing except creating a massive privacy surveillance apparatus. The Washington Post has done the legwork [...]

Good lord, here comes another act of preemptive cowardice in service of ensuring the most powerful man in the world enjoys his appearance before a crowd he can't control or doesn't own. Here's Ben Rothenburg of tennis-focused blog Bounces with the scoop: An internal email sent by the U.S. Tennis Association leadership to U.S. Open [...]

A longtime open internet activist recently asked me whether I'd reversed my position on internet openness and copyright because of AI. The question caught me off guard-until I realized what he was seeing. Across the tech policy world, people who spent decades fighting for an open, accessible internet are now cheering as that same internet [...]

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I, for one, cannot wait for the commenters to show up to call this headline hyperbole. mfers please. Why don't you just read it for yourselves, in your own god-king's words and images: So, what are we looking at here, you might be asking if the embed didn't load or you've averted your eyes in [...]

Last yearTrump Republicans killeda popular program that provided poor people with $30 off of their monthly broadband bill. The FCC'sAffordable Connectivity Program(ACP) had broad, bipartisan support, and more than 23 million Americans received the discount at its peak. At the time, the GOP claimed they were simply looking to save money. The real reason, of [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Shannon Vanshoon with a comment about RFK Jr's congressional hearing: So, yeah, I'd say on one hand that it's nice Senator Cassidy is railing against Kennedy like this for all the unmitigated and horrifically dangerous decisions he's making. But hey, you know what would've [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, AT&T was hypocritically calling for Section 230 reform and astroturfing the FCC in support of Trump's attack on social media, while we submitted FCC comments both from Mike and from the Copia Institute on the NTIA petition calling for 230 to be reinterpreted. We also wrote about how [...]

For years, scientific researchers have warned that Elon Musk's Starlink low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband constellations areharming scientific research. Simply put, the light pollution Musk claimedwould never happen in the first placeis making it far more difficult to study the night sky, a problem researchers say can bemitigated somewhat but never fully eliminated. And [...]