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Updated 2025-07-18 21:32
Creative Industries, Creators & Creatives
Thisseries of postsexplores 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 From examining outdated regulatory metaphors to questioning copyright norms and highlighting the risks of stifling innovation, each post addresses a different piece of the AI puzzle.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 of technological [...]
DHS: Filming Cops, ICE Officers is A ‘Violent Tactic’
The DHS has been hyping assault stats for weeks, making it sound like there's an actual war on ICE officers. The reality was much more underwhelming: the 700% increase touted in press releases reflected a mere 69 more assaults on officers than during the same period in 2024. Hardly worth remarking on, especially since ICE [...]
Appeals Court Judge Claims (Against All Historical Evidence) That The First Amendment Doesn’t Apply To Non-Citizens
We've written before about how attacks on free speech often start with unpopular speakers who lack political power. That's why a new dissenting opinion from Trump-appointed Judge Paul Matey should set off alarm bells for anyone who cares about the First Amendment. In a case involving an imam's immigration status, Judge Matey penned a remarkable [...]
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DHS, ICE To Expedite Ejecting Migrants Into Whatever Hellhole Will Have Them
The Trump administration's maximum cruelty version of immigration enforcement has sent swarms of masked officers to anywhere someone looking kind of foreign might be found. Due process has been eliminated, with the administration relying on its invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to do its dirty, unconstitutional work for it. To make things even worse, [...]
Dem Senators Use Epstein Scandal To ‘Pressure’ Trump FCC To Drop Bogus Inquiry Into CBS
When last we checked with CBS/Paramount, company executives had just paid Trump $16 million in bribe money to settle a completely baseless lawsuit, effectively purchasing regulatory approval of their $8 billion merger with Skydance. It was arguably one of the biggest acts of corporate cowardice in recent memory, resulting in many CBS journalists and executives [...]
RFK Jr. Promotes Meal Delivery Company That Serves Ultra-Processed Food
Nobody who has read any of my posts about RFK Jr., particularly since his vulgar appointment as Secretary of Health and Human Services, will be under any misunderstandings about my opinion of the man. I have made it clear that I believe he is a health crackpot, dealing in wildly dangerous conspiratorial theories, the adoption [...]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: The UK Wants Us To Ask Your Age Before You Listen
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 [...]
The IRS Is Building A Vast System To Share Millions Of Taxpayers’ Data With ICE
This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data. ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an on demand" process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of [...]
DHS Abandons Fighting Actual Crime To Focus All Of Its Attention On Undocumented Migrants
Even during the (relatively more sane) first Trump administration, it was clear there just weren't enough dangerous criminals residing in this country illegally to back up Trump's bloated, fact-free invasion" claims. Statistics continually show migrants commit fewer crimes than American citizens while doing other useful things like paying taxes and providing an incredibly reliable workforce. [...]
Fascism For First Time Founders
Over the last year or so I've seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump train. Yes, there are the big name folks who everyone knows about and who didn't really surprise anyone-Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, [...]
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T-Mobile Proud To Be More Racist In Exchange For Trump Merger(s) Approval
T-Mobile has long kissed the ass of the Trump regime. You might recall when the company wanted its competition-eroding merger with Sprint approved, it spent hundreds of thousands of dollars at Trump hotel properties. It hired Trump advisor Corey Lewandowski not long after he publicly mocked a child with Down Syndrome. It worked with Trump [...]
We Deserve Better: A New Social Media Bill of Rights
Earlier this year, I was a part of a CNN documentary, Twitter: Breaking the Bird, which gave me much pause for reflection about the state of social media and how we got here. This year alone we've witnessed an unprecedented wave of disruption across these platforms. Government workers, locked out of their jobs, struggled to [...]
‘Stop Killing Games’ Finds An Ally In An EU Politician
We just talked about Ross Scott's Stop Killing Games initiative, started last year, which has found new life recently due to an online back and forth with some gaming industry veterans. As a short primer, Scott's campaign centers around game preservation and ownership, two topics we discuss here regularly. It's not a complicated set of [...]
Axon’s Draft One Is Designed To Defy Transparency
Axon Enterprise's Draft One - a generative artificial intelligence product that writes police reports based on audio from officers' body-worn cameras - seems deliberately designed to avoid audits that could provide any accountability to the public, an EFF investigation has found. Our review of public records from police agencies already using the technology - including [...]
Trump Administration Injects Even More Bigotry Into The US Military
Trump claims to love the military. Of course, he loves himself even more. And he tends to view those injured, killed, or captured by enemy forces as suckers" and losers." He also considers people who volunteer to serve this country as idiots, since the idea of self-sacrifice for the greater good is the antithesis of [...]
How One 1990s Browser Decision Created Big Tech’s Data Monopolies (And How We Might Finally Fix It)
There's a fundamental architectural flaw in how the internet works that most people have never heard of, but it explains nearly every frustration you have with modern technology. Why your photos are trapped in Apple's ecosystem. Why you can't easily move data between apps. Why every promising new service starts from scratch, knowing nothing about [...]
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ICE Again Gives The Law The Finger, Denies Member Of Congress Access To Detention Facility
The Trump administration continues to demonstrate it cares nothing for the law, despite repeated claims that it's here to restore respect for the rule of law. It's been clear since the early days of Trump's first term that he only respects the laws that let him do what he wants. For everything else, there's the [...]
California Proposed A Law Making Broadband Affordable For Poor People. Telecom Lobbyists Have Already Destroyed It.
Last January, Democratic California Assemblymember Tasha Boerner introduced the California Affordable Home Internet Act(AB 353), which mandated that large ISPs in the state needed to provide broadband service at speeds of 100 Mbps down, 20 Mbps up for $15 a month to California residents who qualify for existing low-income assistance programs. Right now, families are [...]
Ross Scott Gets A Second Chance For His ‘Stop Killing Games’ Crusade
A little over a year ago we discussed YouTuber Ross Scott's attempt to build political action around video game preservation. Scott started a campaign and site called Stop Killing Games when Ubisoft shut down support for The Crew, rendering this game that people bought unplayable. The goal of the site was to build political action [...]
Belkin Bricks Most Wemo Smart Home Devices, Again Demonstrating You Don’t Own What You Buy
Belkin is the latest company to painfully demonstrate that you no longer own what you buy, and the whims of corporate executives can very often leave you with expensive paperweights. In a recent statement to customers, Belkin says that it will no longer be providing support or software updates for the company's Wemo smart home" [...]
DHS Dumps Intel Office Because Actual Intel Keeps Contradicting Trump’s Bigoted Narrative
The Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act to expedite its ejection of anyone not white enough to be considered worthy of citizenship. ICE raids occur daily, performed by masked officers who look more like cartel thugs than US law enforcement officers. The excuse for evoking a law last used to dump anyone looking vaguely [...]
UnitedHealth’s Response To People Cheering Their CEO’s Murder: Silence The Critics
When your CEO gets murdered and half the internet celebrates, most companies might pause and ask why do so many people hate us?" But UnitedHealth had a different response: hire more lawyers to silence the critics. The New York Times has an excellent piece by David Enrich detailing UnitedHealth's ridiculously aggressive campaign to quiet critics [...]
Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard Are Wasting Resources Trying To Root Out Gov’t Employees Who Just Aren’t MAGA Enough
In the Trump administration, every political appointee is now their own personal Richard Nixon. Simply being some of the most powerful people in the world is never enough for Trump and those in his inner circle. If you can't demand complete loyalty from everyone you oversee, than what is even the point of ascending to [...]
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The Complete 2025 Cloud Computing Bundle has 4 courses focused on security, compliance and infrastructure. Courses cover AWS, Azure, and more. It's on sale for $20. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of all sales from Techdirt Deals helps support Techdirt. The products featured do not reflect endorsements [...]
The Supreme Court’s Shadow Docket Has Become A Lawless, Explanation-Free Rubber Stamp For Trump’s Authoritarian Agenda
When Joe Biden wanted the Department of Education to forgive student loans, the Supreme Court shut him down hard. The Court spent pages in Biden v. Nebraska explaining why the Department lacked authority under the HEROES Act, demanding clear congressional authorization" for such a significant policy change. But when Donald Trump wants to dismantle the [...]
Ignorant And Paranoid MAGA Politics Kept Texas Republicans From Spending ARPA Money On Weather Warning Systems
I've mentioned more than a few times that the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (2021) wound up funding a lot of very good things. The very sort of everyday abundance" a lot of high-profile pundits claimed was no longer possible under American leadership. ARPA helped shore up infrastructure, housing, and sewage upgrades across countless U.S. [...]
Xbox Layoffs, Game Cancellations After Acquisition Blitz Continue
It's no secret that starting during the onset of the pandemic, as well as in its aftermath, the video game industry has undergone a period of consolidation. This is quite common during times of economic flux and/or turmoil, but Microsoft/Xbox appeared to go after acquisitions in something of a blitz. While Xbox gobbled up several [...]
Flock Safety’s Feature Updates Cannot Make Automated License Plate Readers Safe
Two recent statements from the surveillance company-oneaddressing Illinois privacy violationsand anotherdefending the company's national surveillance network-reveal a troubling pattern: when confronted by evidence of widespread abuse, Flock Safety has blamed users, downplayed harms, and doubled down on the very systems that enabled the violations in the first place. Flock's aggressive public relations campaign to salvage [...]
Tackling The AI Bots That Threaten To Overwhelm The Open Web
It is a measure of how fast the field of AI has developed in the three years since Walled Culture the book (free digital versionsavailable) was published that the issue of using copyright material for training AI systems, briefly mentioned in the book, has become one of the hottest topics in the copyright world, asnumerous [...]
Federal Court Says ICE Can’t Round Up People Just Because They Seem Vaguely Foreign
The Supreme Court may have suddenly decided nationwide injunctions are bad now that they're bad for Trump, but it will need to cook up new arguments if it hopes to allow the open racism of its mass deportation program to continue in California. Trump has sent the National Guard and Marines to California to be [...]
Twitter Is Dead, X Is Elon’s Personal Propaganda Platform, Where Grok Checks His Feed Before Answering
Last week, Elon Musk's Grok AI started spewing extreme antisemitism, calling itself MechaHitler" and pushing conspiracy theories about Jewish people. But that wasn't the most revealing part of the story. The real smoking gun came courtesy of AI researcher Simon Willison, who discovered something far more insidious: when you ask Grok controversial questions, it quietly [...]
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The Coding with Python Bundle is great training for aspiring developers. The 6 courses cover Python basics, how to build web apps, how to work with APIs, how to automate software testing, and more. The bundle is on sale for $50. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and curated by StackCommerce. A portion of [...]
DHS Lets Contract Expire During A Flood, Leading To Thousands Of Missed FEMA Calls
That an agency overseen by former South Dakota governor Kristi Noem would fail to handle flooding capably shouldn't come as a surprise. That sort of thing is directly on brand for Noem, who did this to her own state because she was trying to score points with (then) ex-president Donald Trump. Severe weather brought adelugeto [...]
Verizon Wants Trump To Kill Phone Unlocking. Consumer Groups Say That Will Drag U.S. Wireless Back To The Stone Age
With the Trump administrationopenly destroying whatever is left of U.S. federal corporate oversight, regulatory independence, and consumer protection standards, Verizon sees an opportunity. It's asking the Trump FCC to roll back longstanding phone unlocking requirements, something consumer groups say will drag America back to the dark ages of cell phone enshittification. Longtime Techdirt readers probably [...]
Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
This week, both our top winners on the insightful side come in response to our post about DOGE and the disaster in Texas. In first place, it's That Anonymous Coward with a reaction to the government's response: Devoting a large portion of a press conference to patting themselves on the back & praising the god [...]
This Week In Techdirt History: July 6th – 12th
Five Years Ago This week in 2020, we looked at the encryption dilemma created by the EARN IT Act, while a federal case showed that cops already had plenty of options when dealing with device encryption. There was pushback against the Trump administration's attempt to corrupt the Open Technology Fund, the FCC's assault on a [...]
Oregon Appeals Court Says Bullet Cartridge Matching Is Just More Junk Science
This isn't the first state court to reach this conclusion, but so few courts bother to examine the science-y sounding stuff cops trot out as evidence" that this decision is worth noting. There's no shortage of junk science that has been (and continues to be) treated as actual science during testimony, ranging from the DNA [...]
Prepare For A New Dodgy Trump-Era Tax On Netflix And Other Streaming Services
Two weeks ago the Supreme Court rejected an effort by a dodgy right wing activists to destroy an $8 billion FCC program that connects poor and rural communities to the internet. The plaintiff in the case, a fake right wing consumer group," had tried to argue that the bipartisan subsidy (the Universal Service Fund, or [...]
The Magical Thinking That’s Killing Our Humanity
There is an epidemic of magical thinking. An unwillingness to confront reality. Because reality is scary. This affliction cuts across all ideological lines, manifesting in different forms but serving the same function: allowing us to avoid the difficult truths about what it will actually take to preserve human dignity, meaning, and freedom in the face [...]
America’s Measles Counts Surpass 2019 Outbreak, Highest In Over Three Decades
We haven't talked about the numbers in America's measles outbreak in a couple of months, but that certainly doesn't mean the problem has gone away. It was back in April that we wrote about how the numbers were on pace to eclipse the outbreak in 2019, which was largely driven by unvaccinated religious groups in [...]
Crowd-Sourced ICE Tracking Alerts Aim To Provide Local Communities With Early Warning Of Immigration Raids
Techdirt has just written about how people are using Ring doorbell cameras to warn others in the area about the presence of ICE agents and the risk of possible ICE raids. That's a good example of using existing technology to monitor the increasingly widespread and brutal activities of ICE teams. But driven by a desire [...]
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Trump Administration Sends In The Marines… To Do Paperwork?
Martial law still appears to be the plan. The rollout has been limited, but the wholly unnecessary deployment of military troops to California sent a message our performative president wanted to get across. Trump sent an even more explicit one days later, following up on DHS boss Kristi Noem's quasi-declaration of war on this democrat" [...]
Comcast Forced To Retreat From Broadband Data Caps (Sort Of) Due To Competition From 5G Wireless And Community Fiber
Techdirt has always made it very clear that broadband usage caps on fixed-line broadband are bullshit. The costly and confusing restrictions serve no legitimate technical function. They don't help your ISP manage congestion." They exist simply as a way for giant companies like Comcast to nickel-and-dime captive customers in uncompetitive broadband markets. Market failure created [...]
CA Sheriff Who Ran As A Reformer Now Facing Removal From Office
Sheriff Christina Corpus is on the cusp of being an ex-sheriff and the first sheriff removed from office in San Mateo County via a county board vote. But her term as sheriff started a lot more promisingly. Running as a reformer, Corpus won the primary and the job, defeating Carlos Bolanos, who had definitely done [...]
Ctrl-Alt-Speech: Move Fast And Mistake Things
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 [...]
Despite A Flood Of New State Laws, Most Industries Still Suck On ‘Right To Repair’
Washington State recently became the eighth U.S. state to pass new right to repair legislation making it cheaper and easier to repair technology you own. At this point, roughly one-third of Americans now live in a state where some form of right to repair law has been passed, usually with broad, bipartisan, overwhelming public support. [...]
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