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This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. New laws in Georgia and New Mexico are requiring harsher punishments for students - or anyone else - who make threats against schools, despite growing evidence that a similar law is ensnaring students who posed no risk to others. ProPublica and WPLN News have documented how [...]

Much of what we've written about regarding the Trump regime's nonsensical and ridiculous immigration policies have focused on how they're grabbing people off the streets, or disappearing them to random foreign gulags without due process. But we've also talked about the absolute insanity of US immigration policy as it pertains to foreigners traveling to the [...]

Just because a constitutional violation is easy to ignore doesn't make it any less of a constitutional violation. And yet, that was the first defense of Louisiana's Ten Commandments mandate offered by the governor of the state, Jeff Landry. When asked what he would say to parents who are upset about the Ten Commandments being [...]

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The Supreme Court this morning took a chainsaw to the First Amendment on the internet, and the impact is going to be felt for decades going forward. In the FSC v. Paxton case, the Court upheld the very problematic 5th Circuit ruling that age verification online is acceptable under the First Amendment, despite multiple earlier [...]

In a day full of terrible Supreme Court rulings there was one bit of good news: in their FCC v. Consumers' Research ruling, the court rejected a bid by radical right wing Republicans to destroy a popular $8 billion FCC program that connects poor and rural schools and communities to the internet. The plaintiff in [...]

Last week we noted how the Trump administration had cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. Even calling it a phone company is generous: It's basically a licensing agreement and a lazy coat of paint on another, half-assed MVNO effort (Patriot Mobile), which in turn just resells T-Mobile service. A cornerstone of the supposed company [...]

Well, RFK Jr.'s reconstructed Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), just concluded its first day of meetings in Atlanta. This was over the objection of GOP Senator Bill Cassidy, who confirmed RFK Jr. to his appointment but called for a delay to ACIP's meeting after Kennedy terminated all 17 panel members weeks ago and replaced [...]

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 [...]

For years, we've written about the concept of soft corruption," which is the idea that there are certain actions that may not mean the full definition of corrupt practices in the legal sense, but are so obviously corrupt that they make people more cynical towards those who claim to represent our interests in the government. [...]

Within days of each other, two federal judges in the same district reached completely opposite conclusions about AI training on copyrighted works. Judge William Alsup said it's likely fair use as transformative. Judge Vince Chhabria said it's likely infringing because of the supposed impact on the market. Both rulings came out of the Northern District [...]

To call the administration's worst of the worst" claims a ruse is to give this administration too much credit. It's not clever enough to run a con. Going after criminals was never the point during Trump's first term. And mass deportation was the platform Trump ran on to get back to the Oval Office for [...]

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 [...]

While dozens of AI copyright lawsuits wind their way through courts nationwide, Judge William Alsup's ruling this week in Bartz v. Anthropic stands out - not just because it's from one of the most thoughtful tech judges on the federal bench, but because it charts a somewhat nuanced path through the copyright minefield that could [...]

So you may have seen that Elon Musk's long-hyped Robotaxis have finally launched" in Austin. And it's going just about how you'd expect if you're familiar with the fit and finish of Elon Musk promises. There are about a dozen Robotaxis now operating; Model Ys with a human observer in the front seat to try [...]

A year ago, Walled Culture wrote about a growing risk that we willlose access to the world's knowledge, because of a failure by traditional academic publishers to place copies of the articles they publish in key backup archives. Although unacceptable, that oversight is more a matter of laziness and cost cutting on the part of [...]

We've noted more than a few times that media and streaming execs are all out of original ideas. Now that the market has saturated and subscriber growth has slowed, streaming companies have decided to stop giving the public what it wants (few restrictions, low prices, better quality content) in order to provide Wall Street with [...]

It's a bit jarring to be reminded that it was only on June 10th that RFK Jr. decided to fire every member of ACIP, the CDC's immunization advisory panel. Those 14 experts had a variety of backgrounds all related to and demonstrating industry experience specifically dealing with vaccination science and policy. They were replaced by [...]

There are a few thousand military troops in Los Angeles now, thanks to Trump's Martial Plan. Local law enforcement officials pointed out they had the situation under control, what with most of the violence (what there was of it that isn't police violence) limited to a few blocks in downtown LA. The rollout of National [...]

Here's a fun corporate governance puzzle for you. Suppose you're a foreign company trying to buy an American steel producer. The previous administration blocked your deal. The current president promised during his campaign to block it too, saying he'd stop it instantaneously. Absolutely." How do you get the deal approved? If you guessed write the [...]

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Using statistics to lie is so commonplace, it's hardly worth noting. But the DHS can't even be bothered to use statistics to lie. Instead, it just repeats the lie and uses this lie to engage in circular reasoning. Washington Post columnist Philip Bump angered ICE by asking a simple question: why are so many ICE [...]

Republicans are currently trying to force through a massive and cruel new legislation package that will impose historic cuts in public services to the benefit of the nation's richest assholes. The bill will add $3.8 trillion to the deficit over a decade and includes an unlimited number of major hand outs to the wealthiest individuals [...]

There's an old joke that dog and cat owners may be familiar with that goes something like this. What is the difference between dogs and cats? With a dog, you give it a comfortable place to live, give it lots of love and attention, feed it food and water, and it therefore assumes you must [...]

The Trump Administration(s) aren't simply content to declare satire dead. Trump's reappearance in the Oval Office demands we dig up the corpse and desecrate it. And while we're desecrating that corpse, why not desecrate a few national landmarks? That's the pitch from the National Park Service under Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Spring-boarding off Trump's revisionist [...]

Support us on Patreon This week, we've got a cross-post episode of Mike's appearance on Kevin Williamson's How The World Works podcast. Kevin conducted a wide-ranging interview that covers some of the earliest days of Techdirt, the blog's evolution, and many of the important topics we cover today - and you can listen to the [...]

I'm going to say something that will make many of you deeply uncomfortable: our culture has confused ironic detachment with intelligence. We've mistaken cynicism for sophistication, distance for depth, and the refusal to commit to anything for wisdom itself. This is killing us. Not metaphorically. Not in some abstract cultural sense. It is literally destroying [...]

The cops are rioting and the military is swarming. That's how things are going in Los Angeles, despite anything resembling a violent protest" being confined to a few blocks near federal buildings in the downtown area. ICE, meanwhile, continues to carry out Trump's mass deportation plans by acting like drug cartel members. Agents wear masks, [...]

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The Supreme Court just gave the Trump administration a green light to traffic humans to random countries around the world-including war zones where migrants face torture, slavery, or death. And they did so while offering literally zero explanation for why this is legal or constitutional. In a shadow docket ruling yesterday, the Court stayed a [...]

When last we checked it with the feckless execs at CBS/Paramount, they were preparing to pay Donald Trump tens of millions of dollars to settle a completely bogus lawsuit designed to bully the media giant into compliance. CBS desperately wants the Trump administration to sign off on their pointless $8 billion merger with Skydance. Trump [...]

By now, it is common knowledge that RFK Jr. had a brain worm that consumed a portion of his brain. It's actually not as rare or crazy as it sounds at first blush, mind you, but it's also not terribly common in the United States. And, at the end of the day, a worm ate [...]

After months of what can only be described as government kidnapping, Mahmoud Khalil is finally out of detention and released on bail. The Columbia grad student and green card holder was detained by ICE for the heinous crime of participating in pro-Palestinian protests-or as Marco Rubio apparently sees it, having opinions Rubio doesn't like. It [...]

What a surprise. The most intellectually dishonest people in the nation still have the biggest bullhorns. That's why a regular-ass drug raid that occurred in Tucson, Arizona somehow makes headlines in New York City. Here's the New York Post, disingenuously reporting the (Arizona) news: A massive raid on a suspected cartel member found in Arizona [...]

The normalization of authoritarianism is happening in real time in federal courtrooms. While district court judges try to apply actual legal standards to Trump's near constant attempts to find ever more constitutional crises to create, appeals courts are busy treating the wholesale dismantling of constitutional constraints as just another political disagreement. Take, for example, what's [...]

This was never an issue before, but it's suddenly an issue now that ICE has gone full Gestapo to keep up with Trump's mass deportation demands. ICE's tactics - unmarked vehicles, masked officers, and untargeted raids of any place that might contain foreigners - have earned it all the criticism and hatred it now faces. [...]

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The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia (who we now find out, via his lawyer, prefers to be called Kilmar Abrego) keeps getting more and more bizarre. After being accidentally" shipped to El Salvador - despite a judge's order directly barring such a move - the Trump regime has spent months (1) denying that they could [...]

Back in early 2024 Amazon announced that Prime Video customers (who already pay $140 per year) would be charged $3 extra every month just to avoid ads that didn't previously exist. It was just the latest example of enshittification" in a streaming sector all out of original ideas, desperate to provide Wall Street with impossible [...]

This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is MrWilson with a comment about ICE arresting Brad Lander: Republicans keep saying no one is above the law, but they keep referring only to other people and not themselves. They don't need warrants. They don't need to provide due process. They get to assault [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2020, the killing of George Floyd and subsequent protests were having an impact, with one court citing the incident in denying immunity to officers in another case, more schools moving to end contracts with cops, and Minneapolis city council voting unanimously to disband its police department. Meanwhile, Devin Nunes's [...]

A couple of weeks back, we discussed famed southern convenience store chain Buc-ee's and its penchant for initiating all kinds of trademark related threats and lawsuits. While we talk about this sort of thing a lot around here, the company's actions have been particularly silly. When taken in sum total, you're left with the idea [...]

This series of posts 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 approach that acknowledges the potential [...]

I need to say something that will be deeply uncomfortable for many of you: if you have friends, family, or colleagues defending what's happening right now, their old sane selves may not be coming back. Let me be specific about what I mean. This week, Donald Trump postedexplicit orderson Truth Social directing federal law enforcement [...]

It has never been about removing dangerous criminals - the worst of the worst" - from the United States. Under Donald Trump, immigration enforcement has been about removing immigrants from the country. Period. That's the whole thing. (And, apparently the only immigrants welcome to seek shelter in the US are those of the whiter variety [...]

Disclosure: I am on the board of Bluesky and am inherently biased. Adjust your skepticism of what I write on this topic accordingly. It seems a bit odd: when something is supposedly dying or irrelevant, journalists can't stop writing about it. Consider the curious case of Bluesky, which, according to various pundits, is a failed [...]

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As Mike Masnick noted late last week while covering yet another extremely disturbing development in the ongoing horror show that is our current government, the Trump Administration isn't fucking around. It wants to destroy America so it can have the only kind of America it's willing to put up with: one it can rule, rather [...]

Late last year, eight major U.S. telecoms were the victim ofa massive intrusion by Chinese hackerswho managed to spy on public U.S. officials for more than a year. The Salt Typhoon" hack was so severe, the intruders spent a year rooting around the ISP networkseven after discovery. AT&T and Verizon, two of the compromised companies, [...]

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 [...]