Techdirt

The World Baseball Classic is currently going on and I absolutely adore it. Essentially a World Cup for baseball, 20 nations are playing against one another in a banger of a tune-up for the Major League Baseball season. It's a flamboyant delight, with cultural celebrations such as the Italian team doing a shot of espresso [...]

We're a couple weeks late to this one, but it deserves more attention than it received. As the Washington Post first reported, a federal judge has found that the IRS violated federal law 42,695 times when it handed over confidential taxpayer addresses to ICE last summer. But the raw number, staggering as it is, undersells [...]

The power of the latest generation of AI systems is such that previously impractical applications are not just possible, but scalable. For example, moving beyond basic early AI text translation tools, it is now possible to use live translation to communicate in another language in real time. For many people that will be a real [...]

Roughly a year ago - as Trump was trying to turn anti-genocide protests into deportable antisemitism - his administration made it clear it was only willing to support white people with antisemitic views. The administration threw some anti-Israel filters into the mix for DHS vetting of incoming migrants, blending them with the anti-Trump filters that [...]

Luminar Mobile is your all-in-one creative companion designed for iOS, Android OS, and Chrome OS. Powered by an intuitive, touch-responsive interface, it lets you enhance photos effortlessly-anytime, anywhere. Whether you're adjusting lighting, perfecting portraits, or adding artistic flair, Luminar Mobile delivers pro-level results in the palm of your hand. It's on sale for $20. Note: [...]

It's been a little while since we last wrote about California's deeply problematic Age Appropriate Design Code," which tried to force internet companies into taking blatantly unconstitutional steps to pressure companies into magically preventing all harms" to kids. The law has bounced between the district court and the Ninth Circuit multiple times - and yesterday, [...]

Last election season, you might recall how the Trump campaign lied to everyone repeatedly about how his second administration would rein in big tech," and be a natural extension of the Lina Khan antitrust movement. As we noted at the time, that was always an obvious fake populist lie, but it was propped up anyway [...]

If you agree with me that what RFK Jr. has done at HHS - particularly when it comes to altering vaccine schedules, approvals, research, and access - is bad well, you ain't seen nothing yet. Kennedy rode Trump's coattails, building his own Make America Health Again (MAHA) movement on the back of the wider MAGA [...]

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 [...]

OpenAI, the maker of ChaptGPT, is rightfully facing widespread criticism for its decisions to fill the gap the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) created when rival Anthropicrefused todrop its restrictions against using its AI for surveillance and autonomous weapons systems. After protests from bothusersand employees who did not sign up to support government mass surveillance-early [...]

Laws prohibiting minors from accessing AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT would violate the First Amendment. But that's not stopping lawmakers from trying. Senator Josh Hawley has introduced the Guidelines for User Age-verification and Responsible Dialogue Act of 2025 (GUARD Act), which would require AI companies to prohibit" minors under 18 years of age" from accessing or [...]

Senator Ron Wyden says that when a secret interpretation of Section 702 is eventually declassified, the American public will be stunned" to learn what the NSA has been doing. If you've followed Wyden's career, you know this is not a man prone to hyperbole - and you know his track record on these warnings is [...]

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 [...]

Every phone is a narc whether you realize it or not. The private sector certainly knows what information a cell phone can divulge and has leveraged the always-on nature of these devices to maximize profitability. The public sector - mainly law enforcement agencies, both local and federal - have caught onto this as well. With [...]

We've already all seen what the Ellison family's version of editorial independence" looks like over at CBS, where contrarian troll Bari Weiss has turned the already very Republican friendly news giant into a safe space for right wing zealots and autocrats. All overseen by a Brendan Carr chosen censor tasked with ensuring the channel always [...]

Alright, I think it might be time for a wellness check on the people running Buc-ee's. I realize that these chain of gas and convenience stores has a strange cult following in the south. I won't pretend to understand why that is, but whatever. Unfortunately, the company also appears to be run by a bunch [...]

Who should be directly liable for online infringement - the entity that serves it up or a user who embeds a link to it? For almost two decades, most U.S. courts have held that the former is responsible, applying a rule called the server test. Under the server test, whomever controls the server that hosts [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life. Parents wept over their children's bodies. Crushed [...]

Last month we reported on a strange story in two strange parts: first, a coder had his AI agent create an entire smear campaign against a coding repository volunteer because he rejected AI code. Second, an Ars Technica journalist named Benj Edwards used a bunch of quotes made up by ChatGPT in a story about [...]

From the very beginning of the DOGE saga, many of us raised alarms about what would happen when a bunch of inexperienced twenty-somethings were handed unfettered access to the most sensitive databases in the federal government with essentially zero oversight and zero adherence to the security protocols that exist for very good reasons. We wrote [...]

Learn key concepts, from data preprocessing to building and evaluating models, with hands-on projects to cement your skills with the 2026 Ultimate Web Development and Coding Bundle. The 13 courses cover C++, Pythong, HTML5, Git and GitHub, Power BI, MySQL, and more. It's on sale for $40. Note: The Techdirt Deals Store is powered and [...]

Flooding cities with federal officers more used to dealing with border crossings and customs enforcement has led to multiple killings by these officers. They're not trained to do what they're being ordered to do. And their new hires aren't being given the training they need because, apparently, the job of ejecting non-whites from this country [...]

The President of Larry Ellison's new and improved" Paramount, Jeff Shell, has been conspicuously absent from recent events heralding the company's problematic acquisition of Warner Brothers. The reason? Shell is being accused by a whistleblower" and former partner of leaking company info, including early word of the company's $7.7 billion August 2025 deal to obtain [...]

I've spent a lot of digital ink detailing just how bad RFK Jr. has been in his post at HHS. Everything from his attempts to entirely remake vaccine policies in the country, to his neutered response to the ongoing measles outbreak in the country, up to and including his attempts to strong-arm the entire federal [...]

Ideally, the U.S. public is supposed to be able to comment on government policy proceedings, and the government is supposed to listen to that input. Of course, it doesn't really work that way: For years we've noted how U.S. regulatory comment proceedings arefull of bots and fake comments from industries trying to game regulators, and [...]

We've been covering Stephen Thaler's quixotic quest to get copyright (and patent) protection for works generated entirely by his AI system DABUS" for years now. If there's one thing Thaler has proved beyond all reasonable doubt, it's that you can be comprehensively, thoroughly, and repeatedly wrong at every level of the American legal system and [...]

We have met the enemy and he is us. When a teenage boy in Orlando started texting Character.AI's chatbot, it started as an innocent use of a new tool. Sewell Setzer III customized the chatbot to have the Game of Thrones-inspired persona of Daenerys Targaryen, the series' prominent dragon-riding queen. In the months that followed, [...]

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I come here to celebrate the apparently permanent sidelining of former DHS head, Kristi Noem. I know the adage usually does some hedging before damning with faint praise, but I'm not interested in praise, faint or otherwise, much less pretending this isn't worth celebrating. Noem openly pined for the VP position, but shot herself in [...]

You might recall that during the great mass TikTok hyperventilation of 2021-2025, there was no limit of face fanning by Republicans like Brendan Carr about overseas involvement in social media. Carr was so particular on this subject, he scuttled an FCC program aimed at shoring up smart" home device security standards because one of the [...]

There's this insane subset of people who, when they talk about Donald Trump, I'll never understand. It's the ones who claim that taking what Donald Trump says seriously is a mistake that most people are unlikely to make. It's also expressed by the crowd that claims something to the effect of: you shouldn't take Trump [...]

On Wednesday of last week, I wrote a post about how the Trump administration had quietly given up defending its unconstitutional executive orders targeting law firms. The DOJ was dropping its appeals, the firms that fought had won, and the firms that capitulated-led by Paul Weiss and their nearly $1 billion in groveling pro bono [...]

Should parents have a right to monitor and control which sites and apps their kids use? Today, parents do have that legal right under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). The 1998 law requires verifiable parental consent before websites or apps can collect, use or share personal information from teens 13 or under. In [...]

Say what you will about cops - even the federal ones - but they have nothing on the people charged with guarding people who have been detained or imprisoned. The cruelty of cops is slightly tempered by the fact that anyone with a cell phone, dash cam, or doorbell surveillance device might catch them in [...]

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When companies sued to block Trump's IEEPA tariffs last year, one of the key arguments they made was obvious: if these tariffs turn out to be illegal, we'll never get our money back. We need an injunction now. The government had an equally confident response: relax, if the tariffs are struck down, we'll just issue [...]

I think this recent post by AI industry CEO Matt Shumeris worth a read. In it, he basically explains how quickly LLMs (large language models) are evolving to supplant many developers and programmers, and how that disruption is coming to other industries quickly. He also warns critics of AI to adjust their priors and realize [...]

For many years now we've had two regular posts that come out on the weekends: our This Week In Techdirt History posts on Saturdays, and our Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week posts on Sundays. Sometimes we switch it up a little bit, replacing the history post with a special promotion or (as will be [...]

Five Years Ago This week in 2021, while AT&T was apparently committed to being comically hypocritical about Section 230, Utah was prematurely trying to dance on 230's grave with a new and extremely horrible free speech" bill that was a disaster in the making, and we had Ron Wyden and Chris Cox on the Techdirt [...]

The ten year war over Iceland is over and Iceland has come out the victor. If you don't know what I'm talking about, be prepared to listen to a whole bunch of stupid. In 2016, we wrote about Iceland Foods, a UK grocer, which had somehow convinced the EU to give it a trademark for [...]

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about my kid's experience with an AI checker tool that was pre-installed on a school-issued Chromebook. The assignment had been to write an essay about Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron-a story about a dystopian society that enforces equality" by handicapping anyone who excels-and the AI detection tool [...]

Republican lawmakers in Utah have long been on the cutting edge of shitty policymaking when it comes to regulating the internet. The latest chapter in that legacy is a proposed tax on porn and adult content purchased in the state's digital space. Originally proposed by a pair of Republican lawmakers in the Utah state legislature [...]

We've been covering the ongoing saga of the Trump administration's attempt to destroy Anthropic for the sin of having modest ethical guidelines around its AI technology. The short version: Anthropic said it didn't want its AI making autonomous kill decisions without human oversight. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth responded by declaring the company a supply chain [...]

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, [...]

ICE has been telling itself all it needs to do is write its own paperwork and it can do whatever it wants. Memos - passed around secretively and publicly acknowledged by no one but whistleblowers - told ICE agents they don't need judicial warrants to arrest people or enter people's homes. All they need - [...]

You might recall that Paramount and CBS had only just started to lay off workers in the wake of the merger with David Ellison's Skydance. Now, after Ellison (or more accurately his dad and the Saudis) dramatically overpaid for Warner Brothers ($111 billion plus numerous incentives), the overall debt load at the company is so [...]

We should all know by now that this iteration of the Trump administration absolutely loves using pop culture imagery, including that of video games, to help message its horrible policies. Want to gloat about ICE terrorizing American cities and generally pissing everyone off when they're not too busy perforating innocents? Let's use images from Pokemon [...]

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 a special episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech, Ben and Mike discuss [...]

In less than a week, the Pentagon blacklisted an AI company for having ethics, declared it a supply chain risk, watched its preferred replacement face a massive user revolt, and then sat down to amend the replacement's contract to address the very concerns the blacklisted company had been raising all along. Meanwhile, the blacklisted company [...]

This story wasoriginally publishedby ProPublica.Republished under aCC BY-NC-ND 3.0license. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem misled Congress on Tuesday about the powers of her controversial top aide Corey Lewandowski, according to records reviewed by ProPublica and four current and former DHS officials. Lewandowski has an unusual role at DHS, where he is not a paid government [...]