Techdirt

The Trump DOJ retribution tour has begun, as Ed Martin, Trump's interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia, launches a series of politically motivated investigations targeting critics of Trump and Elon Musk. Martin, a former talk radio host and Stop the Steal" supporter with no prosecutorial experience, is transforming what should be an independent [...]

The Trump administration's dumbest saga so far just got a bit more serious, thankfully. For the past couple of weeks, we have been talking about how, after Donald Trump ordered the government to change the name of the continental shelf extending from American land be renamed from the all-encompassing Gulf of Mexico," as the whole [...]

Republican senators have seen the mass graves. They've met Zelensky. They've walked through bombed cities and witnessed firsthand the evidence of Russian atrocities. Yet now, faced with Trump's embrace of Putin and denunciation of Ukraine, they can't even muster the courage to state simple truths they know from direct personal experience. While Trump openlydeclaresthe Ukrainian [...]

Across the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has already begun increasing enforcement operations, includinghighly publicized raids. As immigrant communities, families, allies, and activists think about what can be done to shift policy and protect people, one thing is certain: similar tofilming the policeas they operate, you have the right to film ICE, as [...]

While an unelected tech billionaire is effectively orchestrating a coup of the US government, violating federal law with apparent impunity, and disclaiming all responsibility for the chaos he's causing, the Democrats have identified their top priority: repealing Section 230. You might think - in a moment when democracy itself seems to be unraveling and the [...]

The 2025 Graphic Design for Beginners Bundle has 4 courses to help you learn about graphic design. Courses cover working with Adobe Illustrator, using your iPhone for filming, and starting your own graphic design business. It's on sale for $30. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all [...]

Utah state Rep. Trevor Lee is not going to like this headline. Too bad. It's accurate, even if he'd like to pretend it isn't. Trevor Lee is again pushing a bill that would ban government agencies from displaying pride flags, but would allow Nazi and Confederate flags to be displayed in classrooms, so long as [...]

Welcome to the golden age of corruption. Last year I warned repeatedly how a concussive series of Supreme Court rulings like Loper Bright were poised to dismantle already shaky regulatory authority and corporate oversight, turning most U.S. regulators into the legal and policy equivalent of decorative seasonal gourds. It was the ultimate victory in a [...]

For twenty years, a great war has raged. A console war, between the two great powers, Sony and Microsoft. Sure, there were other regional powers in play, such as Nintendo. And it's true that Sony won nearly every campaign in this war, to varying degrees. But the war raged on right up until this week, [...]

Donald Trump spent the four years between presidential terms complaining about a stolen" election. He - and his enablers - made multiple baseless claims about election fraud and claimed the entire system was rigged against him. His lawyers and supporters suggested voting machines were so insecure that the Venezuelan government itself might have been involved [...]

Automation can be helpful, yes. But the story told to date by large tech companies like OpenAI has been that these new language learning models would be utterly transformative, utterly world-changing, and quickly approaching some kind of sentient superintelligence. Yet time and time again, data seems to show they're failing to accomplish even the bare [...]

Here's another win for free speech that probably isn't going to please most people. But that's how it goes. Fourth Amendment rulings reinforce protections while coming down on the side of accused criminals. First Amendment jurisprudence tends to be generated by people who seem to have nothing worthwhile to say. That's the way it goes. [...]

There's a peculiar form of blindness that comes from prolonged safety. Like a frog in slowly heating water, people who have known only stability become incapable of recognizing existential threats until they're already overwhelmed by them. This isn't just normal human shortsightedness-it's a specific kind of cognitive failure bred by generations of relative peace and [...]

Unlock a world of knowledge with a Headway Premium subscription. This exclusive deal gives you unlimited access to Headway's massive library of1500+ book summaries, with30-50 new ones added monthly. Cover any topic you can imagine, from personal development and business strategies to health and wellness. It's on sale for $60 and use code LEVELUP20 to [...]

Trump's first presidency brought a lot of latent human ugliness to the surface. It stayed there during the four years he sat, sulked, broke laws, lost lawsuits, and continued to stoke the fires of hate. Now, he's leveraging the hatred his last term in office turned into part of everyday politics to inflict further misery [...]

We've long noted how the race to 5G" was largely just hype by telecoms and hardware vendors eager tosell more gear and justify high U.S. mobile data prices. While 5G does provide faster, more resilient, and lower latency networks, it's more of an evolution than a revolution. But that's not what telecom giants like Verizon, [...]

The phrase no harm, no foul" doesn't apply to law enforcement personnel, whether they're patrol officers or the chief local prosecutor. Instead - thanks to the qualified immunity doctrine - the phrase is: whatever amount of harm, no foul." As long as the harm isn't something specifically covered by precedent, the general feeling of courts [...]

America, which used to be a serious country run by adults, has since devolved into something else. We were just talking about how the White House had made the brilliant decision to bar AP News reporters from all kinds of official briefings. Why? Well, because the AP refused to update its influential Stylebook to refer [...]

First, the bad news: a court yesterday declined to immediately enjoin Musk and DOGE, as New Mexico and 13 other states had asked it to do. But don't panic: it was a heavy lift to get what they were asking for, and even though they didn't get it now, their quest continues. With this case [...]

Here's a dumb thing that happened: Elon Musk's ExTwitter just agreed to pay Donald Trump $10 million to settle a lawsuit that ExTwitter had already won. (Yes, you read that right: already won.) This is becoming something of a pattern in tech and media these days - call it the digital-age protection racket. The plot [...]

Apparently, ICE is feeling it might deal with a bit more backlash than normal now that Trump is back in charge and promising to expel as many immigrants as he can as quickly as he can. Rather than deal with it like grownups with big boy pants and black ICE shirts, the agency has decided [...]

Microsoft Office 2021 Professional is the perfect choice for any professional who needs to handle data and documents. It comes with many new features that will make you more productive in every stage of development, whether it's processing paperwork or creating presentations from scratch - whatever your needs are. Office Pro comes with MS Word, [...]

Here's a neat trick for saving taxpayers billions of dollars: just make stuff up! I mean, sure, you could do all the hard work of actually finding government waste and fixing inefficient processes. But why bother when you can just... invent numbers? (This is not financial advice.) The innovator of this approach - and I [...]

Last November you might recall that Wiredreleased an excellent reportdocumenting how it was trivial to buy the sensitive and detailed movement data of U.S. military and intelligence workers as they moved around Germany. The culprit, as usual, was a global collection of super dodgy data brokers and adtech firms that see little in the way [...]

Long time readers of Techdirt will recall the deluge of posts we did years ago on trademark disputes within the craft beer industry. While trademark issues in that industry certainly haven't gone entirely away, they are nothing like what was occurring between 2015 and 2020. In that time period, it felt like I was writing [...]

The NYPD is proving it's impossible to fix an entity that doesn't want to improve. It has engaged in more than a decade of straight-up ignoring court-ordered reforms of its stop-and-frisk program. The program's original form was declared unconstitutional in 2013. Since then, it has only marginally improved. And much of that improvement is probably [...]

You probably saw that one of Donald Trump's early executive orders was to demand that the Gulf Of Mexico be renamed the Gulf Of America. It's pointless pseudo-productivity, and an obvious effort to excite his base's nationalist and racist tendencies. Amoral cowards at Google got right to work making the change in their map products, [...]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a fairly wild suggestion: if you spend years calling yourself a free speech absolutist" while decrying government censorship," maybe one of your first moves after taking over the government shouldn't be demanding prison sentences for journalists who report things you don't like. But that's [...]

Germany's history informs its current laws. That much is undeniable. But it doesn't excuse the over-correction applied by legislators in hopes of heading off another Hitler. And it certainly doesn't excuse prosecutors who are prosecuting hate speech" in Germany. The country's hate speech law has been problematic since its inception. Within days of its debut [...]

Become a language expert with the Babble Language Learning deal. However you choose to access your 10K+ hours of online language education, you'll be able to choose from 14 languages. Want to try your hand at all of them? Knock yourself out - you'll have a lifetime to get it done. And you can tackle [...]

Here's a silly thing that happens sometimes: A powerful person says something obviously false, and everyone pretends not to notice. This is the plot of The Emperor's New Clothes," where an entire kingdom maintains a collective delusion until one child (who, importantly, hasn't yet learned the sophisticated art of lying to yourself) points out that [...]

Suing Elon Musk and DOGE has finally led to at least one thing: the White House now finally defining Musk's role in government. On Monday night, in the New Mexico v. Musk, it claimed him as a an employee of the White House Office" with only the ability to advise the President, or communicate the [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about the Trump administration suing Illinois over state laws around immigration enforcement: Republicans believe in states rights up until states start doing things Republicans don't like. In second place, it's Maura with thoughts on whether or not people voted for [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, copyright troll Richard Liebowitz dropped a case after suing on behalf of the wrong party and trying to swap plaintiffs, while copyright troll Strike 3 got shut down by a judge and hit with $40k in legal fees. We looked at how US antitrust enforcement was clearly broken, [...]

I'm going to keep pounding the drum for personal liability against Musk and DOGE, partly to scare them into backing off from their unlawful seizure of our government, and eventually to compensate us for the immense harm they've caused. So far it doesn't seem like anyone has tried to personally sue them for damages, but [...]

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 [...]

Updated: make sure you read the update at the end of this story. Here's a fun thing about corruption investigations: Usually when prosecutors uncover one quid pro quo, they don't resolve it by offering an even bigger quid pro quo. And yet, that appears to be exactly what's happening with NYC Mayor Eric Adams, who [...]

Perhaps the only headline just as repeatable as No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens" is this other banger from The Onion: Drugs Win Drug War. 50+ years of hardline prohibition have only resulted in better prices, better purity, and a slew of states legalizing or decriminalizing personal use amounts [...]

When you're playing with house money, playing one losing hand after another isn't a sign of tenacity. It's just a way of signaling you can't be trusted with the house's money. That's why appeal after appeal from government entities don't tend to indicate that they're in the right. It just means they don't care how [...]

Linux and UNIX operating systems have become increasingly popular in commercial computing environments. Due to their rapid growth in today's businesses, Linux/UNIX administrators have also become very much in demand. This Linux/UNIX Training Bundle will help you learn the knowledge and skills to install, configure, & support a Linux/UNIX server, and more. It's on sale [...]

If you want to write something on the U.S. government's official DOGE website, apparently you can just... do that. Not in the usual way of submitting comments through a form, mind you, but by directly injecting content into their database. This seems suboptimal. The story here is that DOGE - Elon Musk's collection of supposed [...]

Now that streaming subscriber growth has slowed, we've noted repeatedly how the streaming TV sector is falling into all of the bad habits that ultimately doomed traditional cable TV. That has involved chasing pointless growth of growth's sake" megamergers and imposing bottomless price hikes and new annoying restrictions (like equating password sharing with piracy") - [...]

There are things you can and can't do when setting up checkpoints. If it's DUI enforcement, you can talk to drivers and see if they seem intoxicated. If it's near a border, you can stop every vehicle to search for undocumented immigrants or contraband. What you can't do, however, is just set up a checkpoint [...]

While democracy burns, corporate America is busy checking the wind direction. Googlerenamesthe Gulf of Mexico to flatter a wannabe autocrat's ego. Business leaders draft contingency plans for the end of constitutional government. And the Democratic Party, funded by these same genuflecting corporations, responds with all the urgency of someone scheduling a dental cleaning. This isn't [...]

Way back in the far more innocent times of 2012, we covered a brief but tense dispute between Google and Iran over the lack of a label for the Persian Gulf on Google Maps. Ostensibly so as not to upset anyone about the name of that body of water, given that there was some dispute [...]

Last July, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals appeared to have shut the door on constitutional discussions of geofence warrants. These so-called warrants operate from a point of ignorance. Investigators have no idea who they're looking for. So, they ask Google to do some of the work for them. Casting a small dragnet around a [...]

Given that there does not seem to have been a single thing Trump has done since entering office that has been legal, nor has his lackey Musk (or is it Trump that's the lackey...?), there is not a single thing that doesn't require litigation to challenge and enjoin. But we're starting to see the floodgates [...]

Go from absolute zero to GIMP pro with this comprehensive 9 course bundle. Jump into the Complete Master GIMP Design Bundle, and you'll go all the way from installing the GIMP software and configuring it to run on Windows, to producing banners, book covers and even memes that you'll display using Facebook and other social [...]

Here's a story about being wrong. Not just regular wrong - we're all wrong sometimes! - but spectacularly, publicly, I'm going to double down again and again and again on this obviously false thing even after being corrected" wrong. This week, Elon Musk stood in the Oval Office at the White House and was finally [...]

Since his appointment by Trump in 2017, the FCC's Brendan Carr has never stood up to telecom giants on any issue of substance to consumers. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about the company's destruction of net neutrality, privacy violations, bullshit hidden fees, or its technically unnecessary usage caps, there's nothing a company like Comcast [...]