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A little more than a year ago, the Trump administration pushed a novel legal theory in order to juice its migrant arrest stats. It was a two-part process. First, the administration unilaterally declared expansive areas near US military bases to be national defense areas." This meant that areas surrounding bases - like (especially) Fort Bliss [...]

When we look back at this time and history words like courage," integrity," and ethics" aren't words you're going to be associating with U.S. tech industry leadership. Everywhere you look you have tech sector executives either openly embracing fascism and the frontal assault on representative democracy, or too feckless and timid to take any sort [...]

Sony's ability to generate anger lately is pretty impressive. After the company announced that there would be no more physical media versions of games made starting in 2027, to the resounding anger of many people, Sony also demonstrated yet again that it's capable of ripping away the digital purchases" people had made once its own [...]

Meta's settlement with 52 state attorneys general is a bad deal for all internet users, and especially for teens. That's whatwe saidthe day the settlement was announced. In this post, we go through the Settlement's provisions in detail and explain why that is so, including how: Note: A chunk of the settlement addresses unauthorized users [...]

This was inevitable. ICE has billions of new money to spend, zero shame, and not a single adult in a leadership position capable (or willing!) to talk the agency off the ledge. ICE decided the neat new tool of cruelty it absolutely had to have were gloves that behave like stun guns or low-powered Tasers. [...]

Even as Donald Trump regularly uses mail-in ballots himself, he has decided that mail-in ballots are a system by which voting fraud occurs. To be quite clear, this is bullshit. There is astoundingly little evidence of significant voter fraud, and that's equally true between in-person and voting-by-mail. And there's zero evidence that mail-in voter fraud [...]

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Law enforcement is often self-selecting. If you like the things you've seen cops get away with (violence, brutality, open racism, multiple rights violations, etc.), you'll probably like being a cop. And before the pedants get carried away in the comments, I'm using cop" as shorthand for the whole of the law enforcement profession, even if [...]

Back in June, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 inNational Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commissionthat federal limits on coordinated expenditures by political parties violate the First Amendment, opening the floodgates to a much broader array of political ads funded via no limit of rich assholes and their preferred dark money groups. In preparation for [...]

There are plenty of reasons to call for RFK Jr. to resign or be fired. There are plenty of reasons to call for him to be investigated. There's his complete dereliction of duty when it comes to the American measles outbreak. There's his sneaky misrepresentations carried out as he moonlights on a government-funded cooking show [...]

Initially the idea of the smart television" seemed like a good idea. That is until TV makers realized they could make significantly more money loading the television with spyware, tracking your every online choice, then selling all that data to a global assortment of unregulated data brokers. It didn't take long for product quality to [...]

The worst of the worst" are coming for the worst of the worst." Of course, this administration has completely given up on this pretense, despite sending out lots of noisy messaging otherwise every time an immigration officer murders a person. For the entirety of Trump's anti-migration surge, it's been obvious that it's all about expelling [...]

When Twitter launched, it was originally designed to be just like an open protocol. In the early days, the company eagerly supported third party development, building on that protocol. But, because it was a new communications protocol totally controlled by a single company, eventually commercial pressure led the company to close off the openness. Jack [...]

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 [...]

As the Trump administration continues to chase away actual talent in order to staff federal agencies with loyalists and/or people who don't know any better, it has had to lower hiring standards to keep the federal cupboards stocked. ICE went on a hiring surge following the imposition of impossible arrest quotas and a few billion [...]

Our full-diapered mad king is at it again, this time urging FCC boss Brendan Carr to go after media companies for the crime of....simply pointing out his terrible, crashing polling numbers: Trump last week also posted a long, rambling screed on his personal propaganda website, vowing that NBC NewsMeet the PressmoderatorKristen Welker would be reported [...]

When we just discussed the two recent deaths in Pennsylvania that came as a result of measles infections, we noted that there was very little information about the deceased. Some additional information has since been released, in particular the fact that one of those that died was a newborn child. This is the sort of [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. In April 2026, a federal grand jury returnedindictments charging the Southern Poverty Law Centerwith wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering. The indictment alleges the SPLC, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, secretly funneled more thanUS$3 million in donated fundsto [...]

I can't assume the Trump administration hoped this would happen. But I can't believe no one in the administration (Trump, Stephen Miller, Tom Homan) isn't secretly thrilled that this has happened. The administration managed to revoke temporary protected status for Haitian refugees in America, a decision that affects nearly 350,000 people. The revocation of this [...]

Earlier this year, one of the smartest internet rights people around, Heather Burns, suggested the Darnella Test" regarding any kind of kid safety" rule online. It's named after Darnella Frazier. You might not recognize her name, but you've seen her work. She was the 17-year-old who was walking to the corner shop when she happened [...]

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The Trump administration has been working steadily to remove protected status for asylum seekers that even Trump admits are deadly shitholes." Trump makes claims about countries that seem to indicate they're too dangerous to live in, but then insists there's no reason we shouldn't be allowed to deport migrants to places where they're likely to [...]

Back in June I wrote a feature for The Verge about how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos had convinced Republicans to redirect billions in taxpayer money away from future-proof fiber optic upgrades, and toward their low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite broadband networks they'd already planned to deploy. Curious behavior for two extremely-rich gentlemen who both repeatedly [...]

This week, MrWilson scores another double-win with both top spots on the insightful side. In first place, it's a piece-by-piece response to a commenter who defended ICE's failed illegal raid on an immigration law office: In second place, it's a comment about the first two measles deaths of 2026: Then: Nobody has died. It's not [...]

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We've been detailing the trademark bullying ways of Buc-ee's, famous gas station and convenience store chain in the American south and infamous IP bully, for over a year now. Buc-ee's seems to think that any semi-related business that has branding that involves a cartoon animal or in any way references beavers somehow violates its trademark [...]

There's stilla massive effort afootto implement statewide right to repair" laws that try to make it cheaper, easier, and environmentally friendlier for you to repair the technology you own.All fifty states have at least flirted with the idea, though only Massachusetts, New York, Texas, Minnesota, Colorado,California, Oregon, and Washington have actually passed laws. US PIRG [...]

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. To get extended episodes with additional coverage, support us on [...]

When Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a national security risk because it wouldn't agree to his dangerously unethical demands for what Claude should be able to do, Anthropic sued to challenge the directives. One of the challenges was brought in the Northern District of California, where Anthropic has now notched another significant win. While the previous [...]

The SunFounder Raspberry Pi Pico With the Ultimate Starter Kit offers a rich IoT learning experience for beginners aged 8 and up. Withover 450 components, 117 projects, and expert-led tutorials, this kit makes learning microcontroller programming and IoT engaging and accessible. It also features 27 video lessons by renowned educator Paul McWhorter, simplifying microcontroller programming [...]

Compliant Technologies probably would have preferred to keep flying under the radar. But a gaudy new no-bid contract with ICE (worth up to $20 million!) made it impossible. Prior to ICE's big purchase, it may as well have never existed. It only had a few clients, and those few clients purchased a few pairs for [...]

Back in June, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission that federal limits on coordinated expenditures by political parties violate the First Amendment. Which is every bit as stupid and corrupt as it sounds. Previously, under the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), political parties were subjected to strict [...]

The country is continuing to reel from multiple infectious disease outbreaks in America, even as childhood vaccination rates continue to fall. Measles, cyclosporiasis, whooping cough: you don't actually need me to go on. With RFK Jr. using his position as Secretary of HHS to further muddy the waters on vaccines and their safety, some states [...]

This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article. In his White House Correspondents' Association dinner speech on July 24, 2026,President Donald Trump made his usual diatribes against the news media. He derided the failing" New York Times and reiterated his complaint that CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins doesn't smile enough. He [...]

The unpopular Paramount Warner Brothers merger should have been a perfect opportunity for Democrats to demonstrate they are finally serious about stuff like media consolidation, right wing propaganda, media reform, and antitrust after decades of policy incoherence. Instead, numerous prominent California Democrats have been buckling to Paramount demands aimed at settling a 12-state antitrust lawsuit [...]

Six years ago, when Trump first tried to force ByteDance to sell TikTok's US operations to his billionaire buddy Larry Ellison at Oracle, we wondered if this would finally get Oracle to change its tune on Section 230. While not as widely known outside of Silicon Valley, Oracle has been a driving force behind the [...]

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Flock Safety is hurting. It spent the early part of its career pitching plate reader tech to people who honestly didn't need it: HOA supervisors and gated communities. Then it realized there was far more money to be made by courting governments, rather than the richest parts of the private sector. A few years later [...]

As we've been noting, billionaire Larry Ellison's effort to dominate what's left of corporate media is facing some headwinds after 12 states filed an antitrust lawsuit against his planned $111 billion merger between Paramount and Warner Brothers. As we've also noted, this is a giant turd of a deal, the debt from which will indisputably [...]

Last year, as decades of work by RFK Jr. to undermine vaccines with false links to deaths and autism culminated in his appointment to lead HHS, America saw the largest resurgence of measles cases in something like three decades. Three people died, including two children, all unvaccinated. Kennedy mostly ignored the outbreak from the beginning [...]

By now you've almost certainly heard the news that Meta has settled with 52 state and local Attorneys General who had sued the company in some form or another over child safety on Meta's platforms. The headlines are all covering the basics: the years-long case these states filed against Meta ends, and Meta pays somewhere [...]

The thing about raiding law offices is that they tend to be filled with people who actually know the law. A bunch of opportunistic ICE officers thought they might be able to talk their way into an illegal search, but that initiative (is that the word for this?) died out almost immediately when the interloping [...]

Imagine a scenario where a documentary filmmaker, in the course of making the documentary, captures some damning footage of corporate malfeasance, which she wishes to share with an investigative reporting organization anonymously. Should we be concerned that mandates on AI watermarking might reveal who she is, even if she's not using AI at all? Last [...]

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Flock Safety has been on the wrong side of the press cycle - if not the wrong side of history - for most of the last couple of years. Flock's automated license plate readers (ALPRs) are more comprehensive than many of those previously deployed by law enforcement agencies. Not only do they capture plate/location data, [...]

Jeff Bezos' Washington Post simply isn't what it used to be. During the Trump era Bezos and his lackeys have fired all of the paper's black columnists, turned theop-ed section into pro-corporatist agitprop, censoredcartoonists that criticized Jeff, and generally shifted the paper's journalistic tone in a more right wing, corporate/autocrat-friendly direction. You know, like the [...]

To say that Donald Trump has been waging an ideological war against the American free press would be an understatement in the extreme. Even attempting to list out the many, many ways in which he has attempted to threaten, sue, undermine, stifle, chill, attack, and hamstring media outlets would be a waste of time. No [...]

With everything else going on in the world, it's been a while since we've dug into a good old-fashioned patent troll story or a bogus defamation SLAPP. Today we've got a two-for-one. Leigh Rothschild is a patent troll of some renown - his entities have been connected to over 1,300 patent lawsuits - who regularly [...]

The first attempted revenge prosecution of former FBI director James Comey has gone nowhere. Whatever the DOJ didn't botch directly was undone by Trump's persistent refusal to adhere to the rules of political appointments. The second attempted prosecution of James Comey isn't going any better. The Trump DOJ willfully pretended an Instagram photo taken by [...]

Many Trump supporters keep insisting that his immigration purges are justified because the people swept up in them came here illegally," so who cares if they get kicked out (or shipped off to some random war-torn country). When asked what people seeking asylum should do, the answer is often do it the legal way." That [...]